“It’s rare that you find an artistic opportunity to truly do something new” Reilly Brown on drawing Deadpool: The Gauntlet and the ground-breaking world of Infinite Comics
When it comes to the world of Infinite comics there are certain characters who fit the slightly quirky world of Guided View better than other. Just as there are certain artists who seem to embrace and thrive in this new digital environment. Perhaps the perfect combination of character and artist that we have seen this year has been Wade ‘Deadpool’ Wilson and Power Play artist Reilly Brown in Marvel’s Deadpool: The Gauntlet. To find out more about this perfect match we contacted Reilly to find out more about his time with The Merc With The Mouth.
How different is it working on a regularly scheduled title like Deadpool: The Gauntlet compared to one shots like Avengers vs. X-Men or Power Play? Do you work quite far in advance?
RB: Yeah, definitely! For a story like Deadpool: The Gauntlet we have to start FAR in advance! But, since it’s weekly, once it started coming out, that time caught up to us quickly.
For Power Play I just work on it whenever I have time, but that’s also the difference between working on a project like Deadpool that is funded by a big company, and working on a creator-owned passion project that’s not funded by anyone. Rent still needs to be paid!
Deadpool is packed with ironic humor how important is it for you to consider that when composing pages? Are you given more freedom for humour with a character like Deadpool compared to Avengers or X-Men?
RB: Certainly! One of the things that makes Deadpool such a great character is the fact that there’s practically nothing that you can do with him that will make the readers say “I don’t like that! That’s not something that can happen in a Deadpool story!” It gives you the chance to be much more self-indulgent, and much more impulsive.
Do you think Infinite comics give you more scope for humour as you can create sly looks and jokes in the background in a much different way to print?
RB: It definitely does. In a print comic, you always run the risk of giving a joke away by accident if the reader can see the punchline out of their periphery– especially with more visual humor. But that’s not a problem I need to worry about with Infinite Comics, because I have much more control over what the reader sees and when he sees it. There’s a lot more opportunity to surprise the audience, and that plays great both with action and with humor.
For instance, with the minotaur riding the scooter in chapter 3, or when we introduced the centaur/werewolf/symbiote in chapter 8, those were jokes that simply wouldn’t have had the same amount of punch in print, because you’d have seen the punchline out of the corner of your eye even if you weren’t trying to look. There are tons of examples like those in this series, where the reader will be able to literally say “I didn’t see that coming!”
One of my favourite scenes in the first issue is the James Bond style title sequence how did that come about?
RB: Thanks man, I’m glad you dug it, that’s one of my favorite scenes too!
That came about because this type of digital comic is so new, and I knew that Deadpool, being the popular character that he is, would bring in a lot of readers who have never read this type of comic before. I felt that it was important to the success of the series that I do something big, something cool, and something that would be IMPOSSIBLE to do in print. Something that really shows what a digital comic can do that you can’t get anywhere else.
There was a spot in that first plot breakdown where Brian and Gerry had mentioned a James Bond-esque credits sequence, and I just thought that would be the perfect place to do something fancy and show off, so I really dug into that scene and made the most of it. I think it paid off, because it’s a scene that a lot of fans have mentioned as something that stood out to them. Heh, I mean, I can’t say I’ve ever been complimented on how well I drew a page of credits, you know? That’s not something that fans talk about very often!
In later chapters the credits weren’t as extensive as that first one, obviously, but I took the space in each to do an opening credits bit in every chapter, and kind of considered that to be the signature bit of the series. Each credits sequence I tried to do something different, and they became my chance to just play around with the digital format and try some new things without having to worry about story narrative.
It’s a lot of fun to explore the new medium!
Are you creating for print and digital or just digital? What are the challenges in doing that?
RB: One of the awesome things about this series is that my editor, Jordan White, early on encouraged me to just worry about making the best digital comic that I could, and not worry about how it would translate into print. That was music to my ears, because that’s exactly how I had approached Power Play, and I really believe that when you’re showcasing something new like Power Play or the Infinite Comics, you have to go all in and not hedge your bets. You have to show people what makes this something special that they can’t get anywhere else. If we did this in a way that was easily translated into print, people would be asking why we didn’t just do it in print? So to me, one of the specific goals of this project was to show people things that can’t be shown in print. To really be true to the medium that we’re exploring, and make as much use of what works well digitally as we can.
There’s already been a print version of the first chapter, which we used to promote the series, and I believe that there are plans to do a print collection of the whole thing when it’s done. Figuring out how to do that will bring some new challenges, and there will most likely be bits that have to get trimmed down because they don’t work in print, but it’ll be interesting to see how that comes together.
How much input do the writers have in the flow of the book and do you go back and forth more for an Infinite book?
RB: Every comics project I’ve ever worked on has had a unique relationship between myself and the writer, and the digital comics are no different. With the AvX story I did with Mark Waid a year and a half ago, the script was tight, and the story was actually already storyboarded by Yves Bigerel, so I just stuck to the decisions that were already made. With Power Play, since it’s creator owned I’m involved with every step of the process, and Kurt Christenson and I will just talk about the basic plot beforehand, and then I go ahead and execute it in whatever way I want. Deadpool is somewhere in the middle. Gerry and Brian give me pretty lose plots to start from, which leave me plenty of room to do my thing, and then they go in afterwards and bring it all together with the final script. There’s plenty of phone and e-mail conversation in between all this as well, but for the most they just trust me to kick ass on my end, and I trust them to kick ass on theirs. So far it’s worked out pretty well that way!
We’re starting to see quite a few generic conventions appear in Infinite and Guided View digital comics now, how important is it for you to continue pushing boundaries and create new conventions, how do you think you’ve done that in Deadpool?
RB: That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Pushing the boundaries and finding new ways of telling stories that haven’t been done before is one of the biggest appeals of doing a comic this way! It’s rare that you find an artistic opportunity to truly do something new, and explore new ground that hasn’t already been well-trodden by other artists, so that’s one of the most fun parts of the series for me.
I think I’ve been succeeding in that pretty well with this series. I’ve taken stuff that I’d learned in the past, like the intro screens when a new character shows up that’s similar to something I did in Power Play, and I’ve also brought in some new things, like how I handled the credits sequences. I’ve also done a lot more with multi-panel screens than I had done in the past. And the great part is, every time I do something new, I immediately think of newer, better ways to do that thing next time!
How important has Power Play been in getting you involved in Infinite comics and when will we be seeing more?
RB: Power Play was essential in getting me these gigs, because it gave me a portfolio that showed that I knew how to approach this new kind of comic– not many other people have that! I was actually showing Power Play to my Marvel editors before they had even started talking about Infinite Comics, and with my past history with Deadpool, I think I was a natural fit for this project.
As for future Power Play plans? There’s definitely some stuff in the works, and some exciting opportunities for it. It’s just about figuring out where it fits into my work schedule for the rest of the year. Right now we’ve been pretty much doing a chapter a year. I’d like to do more than that, but I can’t make any promises at this point.
We’ll just have to wait and see!
Deadpool: The Gauntlet Infinite is available from ComiXology and via the Marvel Comics app for £0.69/$0.99
Reilly Brown Art
November 16, 2014 @ 8:15 pm
[…] out this interview I did with Pipedream comics about working on Deadpool and Infinite Comics, and the creative […]