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In one of the deepest conversations our David Caballero brought back from the Italian festival, Sharp talks about being challenged, working with different writers and after inspiring legendary predecessors, the true power of Wonder Woman, and his most personal effort to date.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is my last interview of the Saturday, I think, at the Comicon in Napoli, the 26th, and I'm here joined by Liam, and we have some beautiful art of yours in the background, and I wanted to ask you about, first and foremost, the writers you've worked on in the past, Ennis, Rucka, Morrison, they are so different, so well known, so how do you deal with their different personalities and styles while keeping your impact to the art?
Well, I think, you know, if you know my art, I do change my art a lot as well, so I've always thought that, depending on the story and depending on the kind of quality of the story, you need a different approach, so definitely with GOTH, it was a pretty scary story, and also a funny story, you know what GOTH is going to be like, we talked about Arkham Asylum, because that was a big thing that inspired us both when we were young, so we thought, oh, it could be like an unofficial sequel to Arkham Asylum, and that sort of set the tone for Batman Reptilium, with Grant working on the Green Lantern, that was a whole other thing, because we both kind of thought, this would be really fun to not just see it as a journey through space and time, and the history of all of the Green Lanterns and everything, but actually to make it like a journey through comics, and the medium of comics, so we had a lot of fun with that, and we did an issue that was very much sort of an homage to Neal Adams, and there was another one that was more like Steranko, and a bit of Kirby, and by the end of it, it kind of ended up in a much more sort of painted style, again a bit like Arkham Asylum, because that was really the art that launched Grant's career, and he was saying this was going to be his last DC work at the time, I think he's done more since, but that was a nice kind of bookend for the whole thing, so we just had a brilliant time creating those issues, and every time we'd talk together, he knows my influences, and we just kind of had a great time throwing stuff around and ideas around, and he made every issue fresh and exciting for me, and I loved that, I think sometimes if you're doing the same thing over and over again, it's going to get a little bit stale, and Grant throws everything in the kitchen sink at you, and actually that was also interesting too, because I think he was testing me a bit right at the beginning, because on page two of the script, there was one panel that was four pages long, and it had so many details in it, and I looked at it, I thought how am I going to fit this in all in one page, just one panel of one page, and I did, and I put every single detail in, and then added a few more, and it turned out that actually all of those things are important, and he later told me that he's very frustrated when he puts all that stuff in a script, and some artists might decide, well it doesn't seem to be relevant to the rest of that issue, but he's already thinking three or four or five issues ahead, so if you don't put that in, it messes up the story later on, so I think that's why we had such a successful collaboration, because I didn't shortchange him on anything, and if anything I gave him more."
"You mentioned Green Lantern and Batman Reptilian, I wanted to ask you about two specific aspects of those, the psychedelic of the former, and the grotesque, monstrous Gotham of the latter, so what can you tell me about those specific aspects, and how you worked on them?
I think the Batman story was just grotesque, and that's Goth, Goth has a very grotesque sense of humour, at the heart of Goth's story there's always a romance usually, there's usually a sweetness, I'm not sure where the sweetness was in that story, and the real thing for me that I was very honoured to do that story, was the fact that it was really meant to be drawn by Steve Dillon, who was a very dear friend of both of us, and we used to get together a lot, whether it was in New York or in England, and we were friends for decades, so when we lost Steve, Goth was just like, well Steve would have loved you to draw it, so I sort of stepped into those massive shoes, but I also thought, I don't want to do it like Steve would do it, because like God, said, Steve would be standing behind you, and he'd be going, no it's great, you just do it your way son, do your thing mate."
"And about the psychedelic thing?
Yeah the psychedelic thing, well it's Grant, what do you expect?
In terms of artistic terms, how do you sort of print that?
How do you think about it?
Well, I love a challenge, and I like always to think about fresh ways to tell the story, Grant is very much the same like that, you look at some of the spreads in like We3 for instance, the way he would break a page, by doing sort of panels that flip vertically, so we both were sort of always thinking about, is there a fresh and psychedelic way we can tell a particular story, and usually they had some relevance to the story, like the issue that's entirely within the ring, I think it was issue 7, I used the green lantern symbol, as a lock up for the panels, so every panel in that story, is as if it's within part of the symbol, so the whole story happens within the ring, so that was just one idea, when we got to the ones that were more like, a Steranko type storytelling, obviously then I had to completely rethink about, more of a 60s aesthetic, the one that was Neal Adams style, that was more of a 70s aesthetic, so there's always lots of things you think about, and lots of approaches you take, that inform how you do it."
"Let's change character but not universe, let me ask you about Wonder Woman, and which would you say is the key to creating, a strong female character, your way nowadays?
Wonder Woman was fascinating for me, in that what I realised drawing her, was that of every character I've ever drawn, she's the one that touches people the most, so she has direct, lasting influence on people, so at the time I was drawing her, we lived in America, and when I toured around America, doing conventions, I would have people who were from, the LGBTQ community, who maybe lived in areas, that were very hardcore Christian, and not open to, the whole spectrum of human sexuality, and they would find themselves oppressed, or kicked out, or ostracised from their whole families, and their whole communities, and sometimes the only thing that kept them alive, madly was Wonder Woman, well understandably now, I understand it, but I didn't know that before, how strong and powerful she was, as a sort of gay icon, and a trans icon, and how much that character, gave strength to people who felt alienated, so that was, I think that's fundamental to her, I think when Greg Rucka came out, and said no she's a queer character, that was a big statement, it should be obvious, she's from the world of Amazons, anyone who has this notion, that they were waiting around for 2000 years, for men to come along, and save them from themselves, is I think missing the point of those characters, so I think that there was, deeply embedded in that, something pretty profound, that people who needed an example, needed a heroic example, they could derive it from them, I mean in a weird way, like Conan was that for me, I was a very shy kid, hard to believe, but I was once small and skinny, and bullied and shy, and I would look at the Conan comics, and they would give me strength, and make me feel like no I can get up again, I can face these troubles, and these things that feel insurmountable, and feel like they're too much, so I think comics have that power, and it's really important that people realise that, because I think that gets missed sometimes, it's not just entertainment, characters live with us for our whole lives, and affect us and continue to affect us, and continue to inspire us, and I think Wonder Woman will continue to do that, and right now it's probably more important than ever, when I was doing her, it was right in the middle of the Me Too thing, now we have a whole other set of power, which is not about love, and not about care, and not about understanding, and not about acceptance, and we need these characters to remind the world, that those things do matter, and community matters, and we're only as fast as our slowest, and we're only as strong as our weakest as communities, and we need to be together, we're all just people, and we forget that sometimes."
"Fantastic, lastly I wanted to ask you about your more personal Starhenge, it's fully yours, fully coloured, I haven't read it, I've read it's demanding from the readers, it's not that I'm scared, but I want to give it a try, tell me what you want to convey with this one, the crazy way you approached Merlin as Merlinator, and if it's demanding from readers in a way, challenging to them."
"I've read reviews that say it's challenging, and I've also read reviews saying, well it's not as clever as it thinks it is, so I think it depends on the reader honestly, I don't think it's that demanding, the basic fundamental issue, the idea behind it is that in the future, AI is wiping out all living things, and the only thing it can't fight is magic, so it's like what's the source of magic, the source of magic turns out to be earth, and it turns out to be in the past, so they send Terminator AI back into the past, to try and wipe out magic, all of its sources, and so then the humans have to respond to that, by sending humans back, of which Merlin is one, and that was actually pinched from a T.H. White book, that was very famous about Merlin, where he said Merlin was born in the future, and died in the past, and I thought that's a really interesting idea, what does that look like if you explore it, so the fundamentals of it are really quite simple, weirdly it was going to be more complicated, because initially I was going to have it told by Merlin, but that would have made it too hardcore sci-fi, that kind of language, I didn't want it to be that kind of psycho, sci-fi babble kind of thing, so that led to the creation of Amber Weaver, who is from our time, and she talks about things that everyone knows, like Doctor Who, and music references, there's music references to Rush, and all sorts of less obvious ones."
"Because that's something you love too.
Yeah, of course, I mean we all talk about the things we love, and there's even references to Mars Volta, and all sorts of crazy things, but also very common and regular things, and she's a bit of a witch, and a bit of a gothy witch, but she's present day, and she's gone through a tragedy, and she's basically gone into the past, which we find out, and I don't want to say too much more about it, but she's the heart of it."
"I loved this, I love your art, and I love your answers, thank you so much for your time, enjoy the show."
