Comics2Film: Words From Here: George Pratt

The first time I was introduced to George Pratt was way back in the 1990 by Rick Bryant, just before Enemy Ace came out. He was surrounded by pages and illustrations and a HUGE painting that graces the inside title page of Enemy Ace, the large German skeleton and Von Hammer. It was breathtaking.

We talked for quite a while about his new book, his style and my interest in painting. I was still in high school at the time, but the bug had caught me after seeing Mckean's Arkham Asylum work. I think we even talked about that, too. This was also the show where someone, by mistake, walked off with several pieces of Pratt's. They'd put down a number of comic books to get signed, on top of original paintings, and lifted them up by mistake after George was done. It was a very nerve racking few minutes before George got his work back.

The next time I met him was after Enemy Ace had come out. I remember him being very soft spoken at a table with four other brilliant artists, Jon Muth, Kent Williams, Scott Hampton and John Van Fleet. Those four were taking advantage of the new Hellraiser comic series to expand their talents through a wonderful, experimental venue.

George and the rest of those painters had worked in a number of publications before exploding onto the comic scene.

I think Moonshadow was one of the first large things the painters worked on. Written by J.M. DeMatteis and illustrated, for the most part, by Jon Muth, this ended up being a more collaborative effort with the help of Kent Williams and George Pratt. The book is epic in length, and a tome of great work by all three artists. Moonshadow would be responsible for kicking the door of the comic industry open for painters.

Enemy Ace was Pratt's big start, showing a more painterly style than anyone had in comic history. Ace is full of brilliantly constructed pages and imagery as well as wonderful characters (Pratt also wrote the book).

Enemy Ace was based on the character created by Robert Kanigher, and written and drawn by comic great Joe Kubert, who wrote the introduction for Ace. Unfortunately I was never exposed to that series, it would be interesting to compare the two, though Ace is a more modernized idea, depicting a Von Hammer in the hospital being 'interviewed' by a surviving Vietnam soldier. From the opening image of Von Hammer in his Red Tri-Wing Fokker (probably one of the best paintings ever created for a comic), the reader is taken into a fairytale both with morality and horror. We get to see the effects of war (two wars) on two men. Pratt pulls it off flawlessly.

Luckily, a few years later, we were given some of the works behind the scenes of Ace, with the collected sketches and finished works in a book called No Man's Land: A Postwar Sketchbook. This collection shows the history, the research, the details of Pratt's obsession, the time it took him to finish Ace. The book is filled with drawings, sketches, monoprints, poetry, ink washes and fully paintings. It's an absolute treat for anyone who is interested in seeing the progression of work, and anyone who is a fan of the graphic novel.

After that, Pratt seemed to drop out of comics for a while, doing small work every once in a while, including some wonderful Batman covers and an incredible Batman advertising painting that is one of my all time favorite Batman paintings, ever. (I even got George to do a small ink drawing of that painting which is still hanging on my wall)

Pratt also did some work for Andrew Vachss Hard Looks called Crippled, which he also adapted from Vachss story. It's a quick 7 page story that depicts the loose but gripping style that Pratt has held true to ever since.

See You In Hell, Blind Boy is an epic series that Pratt has been working on for some time. The comic industry has been given small hints of the work from time to time, but nothing substantial enough to satiate us. This is from George's site about Blind Boy:

See You In Hell, Blind Boy is a novel I've been working on for a number of years, since my first novel Enemy Ace: War Idyll actually. It's a text novel that incorporates comics, spot illustrations, photographs and recordings of the music and interviews.

A documentary film by the same name has also been completed by myself, Steven Budlong and James McGillion. It's been on the Film Festival circuit this last year and we won Best Feature Documentary in the New York International Independent Film Festival.

His latest work in the comic industry is the newly released Harvest Breed, a Batman graphic novel written and illustrated by Pratt. Sticking with his painterly, flowing style, Pratt has taken the Batman character into the fine arts realm, where some of the work is truly haunting and original, and beautiful.

I had the opportunity to ask George Pratt some questions about himself, his life and his work.

John Painz (JP): Could you tell me who or what influenced you the most, to decide to get into comics?

George Pratt (GP): The reason I ever picked up a pencil in the first place was because of Batman. As a child I had two open heart surgeries, the second taking place when I was five, this would be in 1965. I was in the hospital for quite awhile and my whole world was watching Batman on television. My family and relatives noted my interest and started bringing me Batman comics to read. I was hooked.

There would be too many artists and writers to mention (though Alex Toth, Milton Caniff, Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, Mike Kaluta, Neal Adams, Frazetta, Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, Will Eisner, Craig Russell, John Severin, etc immediately come to mind.) , but I loved everything about comics. And that they could tell stories that really moved me was the most inspiring thing of all.

But I got into comics in a roundabout way. After apprenticing for Marshall Rogers, laying zip-a-tone, drawing backgrounds, etc., I realized that I was never going to be cut out for regular monthly comics. I just wasn't fast enough. Also, by this time I was getting more and more into my painting. Kent Williams and J Muth and I were lucky enough to have Jeff Jones take us under his wing while landscape painting and we were all feeling a need to try and use comics as a vehicle for personal expression. We were lucky. The companies were willing at that time to experiment, and so the climate was ripe for us to get in there and play.

JP: How would you describe the direction of the industry (comic industry), as of today, and where it might be heading in the future?

GP: I don't really keep up with what's going on in comics. Not on a regular basis. I find that 99% of the comics that are coming out do not interest me. The stories that people want to tell seem to be so much rehash of what I grew up with, and the stuff I grew up with was so much better. Those guys were really struggling with ways of telling a story, and they were at the top of their game. Now comics seem less about storytelling and more about "look at me!"

Comics are literally the hardest things to do, I think. At least they are for me. Trying to find the best way to tell a story is the most difficult aspect, struggling to make the art in service to the story. To try and squeeze some true emotion out of those panels. Incredible.

I think that the bottom falling out of comics is really, in the long run, the best thing for comics. All the speculators are pretty much gone and the companies are realizing that they have to get back to telling stories, building a readership again. I've always been saddened by the death of the anthology comics. I really miss Creepy, Eerie, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, the old DC war comics that had piles of great stories and art in them. These long continuous story arcs leave me cold. I think it's hard for new readers to come in on the middle of something like that and feel welcome. I used to love picking up a Creepy with a Frank Frazetta cover and thumbing through the magazine and seeing stories by Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, Alex Toth, Richard Corben, Russ Heath, Jerry Grandenetti, etc. What a bargain! But there's nothing like that anymore.

GP: I love Mike Mignola's Hellboy. It's like the comics I grew up with, pure fun. The same with anything Frank Miller does. Pure fun. I like Teddy Christiansen's work an awful lot. Mazzuchelli. The stuff I still hunt down and dig for are mostly old stuff. I'm constantly trying to find the old Alex Toth material. Whenever I take a trip overseas I come back lugging a massive suitcase of Foreign albums by people like Hugo Pratt, Jacques Tardi, Alberto Breccia, Dino Battaglia, Nicholas DeCrecy, Atillio Micheluzzi, Hermann. Beautiful work, incredible storytelling, and stories about real people, not superheroes beating each other up and yelling cuss words back and forth to supposedly elevate the material to adulthood.

GP: Outside of comics I'm a nut for James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, John Singer Sargent, Kathe Kollwitz, Heinrich Kley, Eduard Thony, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke, Feliks Topolski, Jules Pascin, Harvey Dunn, Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth, Odd Nerdrum, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Leonard Baskin, Goya, Joseph Clement Coll, A.B. Frost, Jean Rustin, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pisarro, Rodin, Munch, Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Hiroshige, the list goes on and on.

And there's also the writers. I read constantly. I'm always buying books, fiction, non-fiction, novels, biographies, histories, you name it, new and old. I collect antiquarian books.

GP: I don't know if I have any true villains...unless we start getting political, and I don't even want to get into it. :)

GP: If I find myself stuck on something, whether it is writing or drawing, I'll usually just go and do something else for awhile. I may start a new piece, or play guitar, write or read. My mind continues to work on the problem and will usually figure it out on its own. Sometimes, though, harsher means are necessary and I may just get irritated and slap a lot of paint down and basically go nuts for awhile and then see what I'm left with. This is sort of a solution Barron Storey suggested when I had him as an instructor. He thought it was good to just obliterate the offending passage, then solve for x. X being the mess you just made. In cleaning up your mess you unhinge your mind and the problem will sort itself out. It does work sometimes.

JP: What would you say to a young'un if they were interested in entering this industry?

GP: Don't look solely at comics to learn what you need to know. Try to really look at the world around you and absorb as much as you can. Bring those experiences into the work, let them inform the work. And really learn how to draw. DRAW all the time, and not just superheroes. Draw real people, real expressions, real body language, and pull all that into the stories.

And get into comics because you love telling stories. That's the reason to want to draw a comic‹‹to move people. To take them someplace new, or to remind them that they're not alone, that others feel the same things they do. Speak to people in their own language. You're trying to communicate, right? If not, why go to the trouble of drawing all those panels if you don't want people to get it? It's not about being obtuse, or talking down to people.

Basically do it because you love it. There's no other real reason. It certainly won't be for the money. At least not if you're as slow as I am. :)

GP: I guess the closest I've come to selling out would be the Batman book I just did. But then again, I love the character and have a real nostalgic feel for him. So doing the Harvest Breed was as much for me as anything else. But I have to say I've never been one for bandwagons. If I'm into something and people suddenly start really getting into that thing that I've sort of had for my very own, then I quit whatever that was. So I don't take advantage of those situations. When I was just starting out doing a lot of my gallery work I was doing a lot of paintings of women in robes, kimonos. They sold very well. But that wasn't why I was doing them.

There was something about that subject matter that was nailing me at the time, all those Japanese Uki-oe prints, etc. that I was into. The gallery knew a good thing when they saw one and asked me do a lot more of them, they were there to sell paintings after all. But it killed it for me. I quit doing them immediately. Weird. I certainly needed the money at the time, for sure. But it suddenly became something for someone else and not for me anymore, and that's not what painting is about for me. It's for me, once I'm done, then it's anybody's.

GP: Pierre Bensusan's latest, John Renbourn's latest, the Cat Stevens Remastered material, Peirce Pettis' Everything Matters, Yusuf Islam's newest. I've actually slacked off my music buying these days. Most of my money goes to books. My music CD collection is pretty large and fairly eclectic. Lots of Acoustic Country Blues, Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Acoustic guitar music (Renbourn, Bensusan, etc.) Loudon Wainwright III, African music, Johnny Winter, Classical, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Nick Drake.......

GP: My wife, Meredith, and I have an eight month old baby boy, George V, and so have not been going to the movies much. We did just see Oh Brother Where Art Thou? and enjoyed it. I have a large DVD collection, thanks to a buddy of mine in Brooklyn, and so have been watching a lot of my favorite films: To Kill a Mockingbird, Das Boot, Mountains of the Moon, Power of One, Matrix, The Cowboys, Guns of Navaronne, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, Galipoli, Saving Private Ryan, Night of the Hunter, Pinocchio, Piano, Breaker Morant............

JP: I wonder, was it easy for you to find help in artists? Were their egos not so blown up?

GP: I found just about everyone super helpful and friendly. My feeling about comics has been that it's one industry where other creators love to get other people into it. There's an enthusiasm that is really refreshing. Everyone's sort of like big kids getting to live out there fantasies. And the more the merrier.

I've also found this to be true in the illustration field as well. When I was just starting out I would get on the phone and call up all kinds of people, pros whose work I was totally into. I cold called Mike Kaluta that way, and had the best time of my life getting to go to his apartment and hang out. I was there something like ten or twelve hours or so that first day. We ended up sitting on the floor in the middle of his studio pulling out Alphonse Mucha books and great comics, etc, just getting into it all. His enthusiasm was contagious. What a great day! But it's been that way with most everyone I called. Burt Silverman, Skip Leipke, Milt Kobayashi, Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Marshall Rogers, Marshall Arisman, Brad Holland, you name it. Everyone has always been very generous with their time, and it made all the difference to me. I try to do the same thing myself. It was so freely given to me, I feel that it should be passed on to the next guys as well.

I've only met a couple of full blown egos and when you compare them to the rest who helped, they pale in comparison.

GP: I'm working on a 4-issue Wolverine mini-series for Marvel, that I'm writing and painting called Netsuke. I've been working on, for years, a blues novel called See You In Hell, Blind Boy. The book is centered around a trip I took through the Mississippi Delta knocking on doors and interviewing old bluesmen. The book is pretty much finished (aside from the comics sections). It's a large text novel that I've written which is illustrated with photographs, spot illustrations, comics, and a CD of music and interviews with old blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta. It just lacks a publisher. Steve Budlong (Vice President Television Services for Citicorp) and I not too long ago finished a documentary film about See You In Hell, Blind Boy showing how I researched the book, etc. The film won Best Feature Documentary at the New York International Independent Film Festival. We've also begun another documentary film on the eight artists sent to the front during the First World War.

I have a book in progress for Vanguard Press of my drawings. It should be out this year, I believe. And another book in progress from Allen Spiegel Fine Arts tentatively called "Not Forgotten." It's a book of my short fiction and non-fiction writings. The book will also have some art in it as well. I'm also going to be illustrating a book on Casanova with Moebius for an Italian publisher, though I'm not sure when that will be out.

For more information, original artwork or just plain 'ole curiosity about George Pratt's artwork, visit his very cool website here - www.georgepratt.com

This interview was conducted February, 2001.

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Published by Comics2Film with permission.