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Thursday, September 2, 2010
The Salgood Sam Interview
The SEA OF RED and REVOLUTION ON THE PLANET OF THE APES penciller talks to Michael May
I first heard of Salgood Sam when his art got me to pick up a book about vampiric pirates that I was gonna pass by, and made me a Rick Remender fan in the process. When I heard that he was going to illustrate a Planet of the Apes book, I knew I had to talk to him and find out more.
 Michael May (MM): Tell me about Revolution on the Planet of the Apes. Which version does this relate to, the original stuff or Tim Burton's film? Between the movie series, a Saturday morning cartoon, and a live-action TV show, Planet of the Apes continuity is pretty crazy. Where does Revolution fall in terms of all that?
Salgood Sam (SS): Definitely the original series. We were asked by Fox to not use anything from Tim Burton’s film. Don't think anyone involved minded; we’re all old enough to have been weaned on the original series. Our story begins no more than a week or so I think after Conquest ends, and ties into the time line loop of the series heavily. The main story line will have a lot of flash backs and forwards to events from the movies. And in the back ups you’ll see bits of Caesar’s child hood at the circus, scenes from the future with his parents, we're going to be all over the place. Our main story line is about how Caesar goes from inciting apes in LA to riot in Conquest, to leading a global movement.
As for what's being considered canon from the other PotA stuff, aside from the new film, I don’t know what Joe and Ty are keeping or not. You’d have to ask them. I’m a fan but not that much of one that I'd know from the scripts what's being ignored or not. I'm more aware of what’s being added to the characters than what's being ignored.
 MM: What's your favorite thing about or moment from the franchise?
SS: It was a significant part of my childhood diet of Sci-Fi films/TV. It and Galactica were probably my favourites for a few years there, till I saw Bladerunner. Hard to pick out a favourite moment, but the one that has always stuck with me was the scene in Escape when Zira is tested by the humans; insulted by the childish peg game they ask her to do. A very short time after I saw that I found myself in a small room at the school board being tested just before I got streamed into a Special Ed program. I was asked to do a bunch of tests, the first looked a lot like that one Zira did and the first thing in my head was, “They think I'm a monkey?” That left a mark. I already felt a lot of affinity with the characters, but after that much more so.
MM: Ha! I guess so! Very cool story.
Are there more Planet of the Apes comics planned after Revolution if it does well or is it a one-time deal? If there's more, will you be involved?
SS: That's the hope, we'll see.
 MM: Tell me about the rest of the creative team. Who are they and what have they worked on before?
SS: Ty Templeton and Joe O'Brien are the authors. Ty has been around for a long time, as both artist and writer. At this point he might even have more writing credits than art! When I first met him in the late ‘80s he was mostly known as an artist. He started back in the mid-‘80s with Stig's Inferno, and has worked on a lot of big name mainstream stuff, like Justice League, Superman, Batman Aventures, etc. – long list at this point. Also he does a fair number of TV tie-in books, Ren and Stimpy and Bob Newhart are listed on his site, and currently he’s one of the people behind the Simpsons comics. Before now Joe O'Brien was a TV and Film writer, a “script doctor” for a number of indie films and he worked on the TV series RoboCop: Prime Directives. He also does genre film crits and columns for Rue Morgue.
 For the art, well, there’s me of course.
I know the most about my colourist. I'm working with my frequent colouring partner for commercial gigs, Bernie Mireault. Bernie has been a well known, but under appreciated indie comics creator for some time, he's been at it at least as long as Ty. I met them at the same time in fact. He's been doing a lot of animation for the last few years but he put out The Jam for a long time, an underground comic about a normal guy who likes to wear a superhero uniform when he goes for a walk with his dog, and the trouble that gets him into. He’s in the midst of a new graphic novel for The Jam, the character and Bernie’s work has evolved a lot since the old series. Bernie is working in flash to draw his pages which is giving his work a super tight feel, and the storyline has gotten a lot more mature. Also he's done a number of kids’ comics in the last 6 years, Dr. Robot and Bug-Eyed Monster. He also worked rather famously on Grendel: The Devil Within, and did some cool stuff connected to the Blair Witch film. Bernie is colouring the whole PotA series, I believe.
Books 3 & 4 are being penciled by Tom Fowler. He’s done a lot for work at DC and Vertigo. Not sure which when, but he has credits on Batman, Green Arrow, Grendel, Star Wars, and Caper. I think it was Caper I was looking at, but there was a book out last summer where I saw his stuff first myself, I really dug that.
Doing a back up in #1 is Gabriel Morrissette. He's worked on a lot of DC, Vertigo, and Marvel books. I don’t have an up-to-date list of his credits handy, but he's been around for as long as Ty and Bernie and works a lot. There was a book by him and an Elaine Lee called Vamps a little while ago that I liked a lot myself. He was also involved in a political Canadian series called Anglo Man. You can read the first story he's done on Revolution for free on the Mr Comics site now too now by the way, a little taster of things to come.
And we’ve got Attila Adorjany doing another backup. He’s also working on Beowulf for Speakeasy and has done a lot of art for the gaming industry.
That's all I know about right now.
 MM: Switching gears, how did you become involved with Sea of Red?
SS: I had written Rick and Kieron about Black Heart Billy a few years ago and had talked to them, mostly Rick, online in forums for a while. Rick contacted me about doing Strange Girl, which I was really into. But as I got started doing designs my personal life kind of went splat. Was too messed up to work, so I had to beg off the project. A few months later Rick, being a tenacious bastard, asked me if I had my crap together yet and if I'd like to do a pirates and vampires book.
Next thing I knew I found myself shanghaied on the high seas.
 MM: Was the unique look of the book your idea? What was the inspiration behind it?
SS: Mostly it's me. Rick said he wanted to do something that paid homage to the old EC horror comics, and we were looking for a way to do something on the cheap when it came to colouring, to keep the profits from being split up too much and save a bit on printing, and still feel like a colour book.
We talked about doing it B&W briefly even, but I had been doing a lot of 2-colour work for illustration that Rick had seen and thought looked cool. And I thought I could come up with something interesting with that.
The rest just kind of grew out of that as I developed the process we used, which is, as far as I know, technically unique. There was a lot of inventing things as we went. There have been plenty of 2-colour books in the past, but few artists to my knowledge have mixed the two colours with each other in the process the way we did. Usually it's a very graphic separation of the two plates, with not a lot of mixing.
I used Photoshop to experiment with integrating the red and black plate to give us many more subtle shades and options. I found I could actually get a few other tints by using various percentages of black or red ink. For example the black ink set against the red, at a low percentage shows up as a pale blue. Also I picked the dark red ink we ended up with for the range it gave us. It became a bit of a problem when the printer messed up the runs on 2 and 3, printed the black plate with the ink thinned out – cheaped out on the ink, I think. But when we got that ironed out we got a lot of cool effects out of it. The Trade looks really good. I'm very happy with it. I'll be back on the book in the future and look forward to seeing what else I can do with the limited pallet. I think 2-colour books are really cool to work on and look at, highly underrated way of handling things.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
