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A collage of echoes from Kabuki to Daredevil - David Mack Comicon Napoli Interview

We caught up with the acclaimed artist in Italy to talk about dreams, intimacy, and pace in Kabuki and Cover, before discussing Daredevil, Echo, and their live-action adaptations.

Audio transcription

"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is the 26th Comicon in Napoli and this is the last interview of day two, I think, for me, and it's David versus David, and it's a pleasure. I love your work, I love your art, and there's so many things we could talk about, but first I wanted to ask you about Kabuki, and I appreciate how it's slow-burned."

"It's not action-packed, so it gives room for reflection.
So what can you tell me about this approach, this slower, more reflective approach to it, and how it encourages something more intimate, perhaps? Do you think it's the finest expression in comic, to be like that?
Well, I like the idea of contrast, so when there is action in it, I don't want it to feel like the action or violence is there as entertainment. If there is some action or violence, I want it to be very matter-of-fact and happen in like a natural way, and I want it to contrast the other rhythm of it. So I like the idea of playing with rhythm and flow and time, and sometimes you can contrast something that's happening very quickly by someone's experiencing it in the moment, but at the same time they're having moments where they're thinking about something in the past, so you can have multiple timelines contrasting each other, which I kind of think is the way we experience real life, right?
Multiverse of mind. Well, yeah, you know, if you've lived a certain amount of years, you're experiencing like what's happening right now in the moment, but occasionally you're also thinking about what happened to you as a child, or what happened last week, and if you, if for realism, I like the idea that your character experiences life that way as well."

"Would you like to explore it in a modern take?
You know, currently, is that something that you think of, like going back to that and perhaps exploring, you know, dreams and this sort of reflection in the current times and context?
There, there, you mentioned Kabuki, but there's a new creator in series we've been doing called Cover that Bendis and I do, and we, we have been trying to take different, different dimensions of what the character is working on versus what they're experiencing versus a flashback to a interaction they had with another human."

"Yeah, and in Kabuki's case, you know, there was a certain amount of dreams that would intersect with that, too.
Okay, interesting. I have to ask you about Echo. Of course, you created it within the sort of the Daredevil universe. So, how do you feel, how did you feel when it became a bigger audiovisual sort of mythology to it?
Yeah, I started Marvel as a writer on Daredevil and they asked me to create a brand new character that, that became Echo, and I, I wrote that story, the first Echo story back in 1998."

"It was published in 99, and then 25 years later, there was a TV show where a real-life actress portrayed the character. It was very surreal to me.
I thought the actress did a fantastic job. Her name is Alaqua Cox, who, who portrays Echo, and first it was portrayed in the Hawkeye series."

"Yeah.
And there were sequences and even lines in the Hawkeye show that I had written 25 years ago, and it was amazing to see it brought to real life, like Echo, but also Echo and her father, and then they had the, the cousin of Alaqua Cox played her when she was a child."

"So, it still looked like her as a child, and there were scenes where the child Echo is interacting with her father, and they were all from scenes I wrote, you know, 25 years ago.
So, it was a, I haven't entirely got my head around it personally, but I enjoyed it.
Yeah, I was fascinated by it."

"Interesting, because all those years passed, and then you came back to the universe and to the character with the end titles.
So, what can you tell me about that, about sort of looking back at what you had done in the past, and then reinterpreted to, to the, for the series as the end titles?
Yeah, and lately I've been doing a lot of covers for Echo."

"I just turned in a cover for Echo this past week as well.
And speaking of titles, yeah, I worked, I worked on the, the end titles for the film Captain America the Winter Soldier, and I worked on the opening titles for the Jessica Jones Netflix show, and we got nominated, nominated for an Emmy. So, we went to the Emmys for this, yeah, this TV show based on this strange book that we did 20 years earlier."

"Yeah, so it's been very surreal. And coming from still images to moving pictures, how did you sort of evolve your technique and sort of your angle when you actually realized that the language is slightly different, and you have perhaps to learn or to try to express differently?
Yeah, that's true."

"There are differences and advantages, you know, to both, and you kind of want to lean into what the advantages are of the different mediums.
You know, even with titles, if it comes at the end or if it comes at the beginning, it's doing a different job, right?
So, if it comes at the beginning, like in Jessica Jones, it's preparing the viewer's mind for kind of like how they're gonna, what headspace they should be in when they experience it."

"You know, and you're kind of like getting them in the state and flow of the vibe and tone of what the show is.
Whereas the end titles that came at the end of the Winter Soldier film, you want people, you want it to crystallize the film.
It's kind of a punctuation mark, and you want it to give them the feeling that they have when they're walking out of the theater, you know, combined with the music of like this great feeling of something they just watched, you know."

"So, yeah, even those do different jobs, just based if it's the beginning or the end.
Okay, okay.
So, it's like a collage of techniques, and let me ask you about collage, because it's one of your painting techniques, and then last year we had Dave McKean, who also does collage, and we love it."

"How, sort of, does it shape you as an artist to be able to combine different techniques and to take stuff from here and from there and pieces and put them together, other than drawing them from scratch yourself?
I love that about the comics medium. For me, it's this wonderful hybrid medium, you know."

"It's storytelling, and it's writing, but it's also visuals, and those visuals can be color, black and white, handmade lines, they could be shapes, they could be photographs that are drawn on, or sometimes I've sculpted something and then taken a photograph of it, and then you put the photograph on the page, you know."

"So, it's this incredible hybrid medium of three-dimensional to two-dimensional, interacting with line, with color.
I feel like comics are such a fertile medium.
What I love, what I fell in love about comics is that I like so many different things, and that I could integrate all of them into the medium of comics."

"I think that's a fantastic answer to wrap this one. So, thank you so much for your time, David.
Enjoy the show. I don't know if it's your first Comic-Con in Napoli.
My first time in Napoli. Yeah, loving it.
Enjoy the city as well."

"Amazing people here, very warm, very expressive and passionate.
I'm having a fantastic time here.
Lovely to meet you.
Grazie mille."

"Thank you so much."

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