Doug Holgate - April 2005
-or- Von Hellhammer Speaks
-or- An Anagram for Ghoul Ate God
By Christian Read
Doug Holgate (website) shouldn’t need much of an introduction but here’s one anyway. Doug conquered Newcastle in the early nineties, where he meet Luchador tag-team partner Scott Fraser. The two of them, realizing they’d each found the soul-mate they longed for, created Cowman and Dollboy, which saw publication locally. From there, Scott self-published the solo Dollboy title and Doug did the back up, Lusus.
Soon after, I met Doug and on a rainy, gin-filled night, at the local comic shop, tricked him into doing Dunwich: A tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. Doug followed this up with a variety of zines he and longtime partner Jen Hook wrote and illustrated such as Soda, contributed to the Diggsville anthology, then struck gold with small press work Tales
From Under Your Bed. From there, he ramped up his online presence, took a lot of tangential comic work, (flown domestically on Qantas recently? You may be one of the million or so people who read Doug’s comics for younger readers available there.) As well as working with Australian comics historian “Big” Kevin Patrick. Recently, he struck it big with his inclusion in the second Flight anthology.
After collapsing in his doorway, Doug gave me an interview in returning for leaving his home, and pets, alone.
CR - First up, lets talk about you as the artistic type.
CR - Doug, what attracts you to and keeps you working, and wanting to work in the medium?
Doug - Fortune and glory. Hookers and cocaine. And just playing in an incredibly powerful, over the top crazy medium. Comics are weird things. Speech balloons and sound effects, gutters and pacing, splash pages and time, creating tangible moments and worlds on paper. Something so unique as to be almost more effective than prose and film. There is nothing quite like them...and I think unless you actually have it in your blood...you won’t ever quite get WHY we are drawn to them and why we spend hours and hours and hours on them. Personally it’s the attraction of storytelling. Engaging an audience. Holding them with your work and taking them places. Plus, despite popular belief girls really dig it.
CR - As a creator, what do you think your strengths are?
Doug - I think I’m a pretty good visual storyteller and I’ve got a good sense of pacing. Plus I like to think I’m a relatively good draftsmen.
CR -
Where do you feel you have to improve?
Doug - Story. Art. Story. Art. Story. I’m never satisfied. I can see good bits and I know something is relatively successful as it is. But overall I finish a project I can pick 100 moments I would do differently. Obviously you can’t be too precious about these things, it would never get done and it’s all a learning curve...but I always have a hard time looking at anything more than 3 months old without wondering what the hell I was thinking.
CR -
Know how you feel. I was looking at Dunwich, the first thing I ever wrote and an early job for you and all I could see was technical error after rookie move. Do you think a time will come when you'll look at something and only see the good stuff, or will that voice always haunt the inside of your head?
Doug - HA! Yes. Funnily enough I was flicking through Dunwich #1 a month or so ago. Some nice moments, but it’s all over the place. It physically makes me cringe. 100 different artistic influences that to me are pretty obvious and seem to chop and change from panel to panel. No flow between pages. Nothing really inviting there to make you to want to turn the page. We all have to start somewhere I guess.
I can see the good stuff now. I can tell when something has just gone right to that point and there isn’t much more I could do to make it better. But I actually hope the voice will always haunt me. I devour anything to get me thinking about how things could be utilized better. A technique here and idea there that I can play around with to expand on what I’m doing. I just feel like I’m stagnating otherwise.
CR - You trained as an illustrator at university. What was your specific training there and how do you still use it today?
Doug - Heh...my training was in Plant and Wildlife illustration. A pretty redundant field. Essentially a lot of scientific work, anatomical illustration of plants and animals and just straight illustration of the same subjects. Redundant in the sense that as a fulltime working illustrator I’ve had one job in 5 years that was specifically plant and wildlife based. Unless someone dies and you manage to pry your way into a museum as a fulltime lowly paid scientific illustrator it’s an incredibly narrow field to get work in. Mostly it’s the stuff of folk art and greeting cards.
I met playboy, cartoonist and God King of the Apple Isle Scott Fraser at Uni and we were kind of notorious in our classes for doing as little plant and wildlife as possible to pass the course. Comics with a tree in the background, Dollboy wielding a cat etc.
What I DID take from it all though, was a lot of experience with different materials. I learned to paint properly, draw, photograph etc. And in hindsight basically taught me to get a bit of discipline and get serious about the whole thing of making art for a living.
Plus in my postgraduate year I got to draw Dinosaurs by choice and do a bit of Palaeontology, which is like the comics world of science.
CR - What's the tools of the trade? What specific art tools do you use?
Bright white 250 GSM smooth paper from Paperpoint, takes ink exceptionally well and only has a slight tooth. So you get a great smooth inked line and it doesn’t feel like you are drawing on plastic. A 0.5 mechanical pencil and H leads. 000 to 1 size sable brushes for inking. And then my trusty photoshop and illustrator for colouring toning and lettering. I’ve gotten a taste back recently for painting so i’m looking to play around with a fully painted comic soon. I usually use acrylics, gouache and watercolours depending on the piece.
CR - What's your greatest success in comics to date, on a personal level as well as in your career?
Doug - Being invited to contribute to Flight #2 is both a personal and career success at this stage. Definitely. On a personal level because I don’t think I’ve ever been surrounded with such passionate people devoted to making the best work they can. Inspiring beyond anything I’ve experienced in comics. I’m also overwhelmingly humbled to be involved with people whom I think are some of the best storytellers comics have yet to fully discover. And career wise because Flight has this feeling about it. That something is happening here that will be talked about as a major turning point in comic’s history for a long time and I’m a part of it.
CR - You've worked with writers but seem more comfortable as a writer-artist. What is the appeal of working for? Others? Doing it all yourself?
Doug - I don’t mind working with a writer. It’s something I enjoy, as it’s purely an opportunity to flex artistic muscles. But it’s a different discipline...and lately I think it’s a matter of having to feel really passionate about the script. There is the constraint there of working to the expectation of someone else and working to the constraint of that script, if I’m not a hundred percent into it...I find it easy to get distracted.
Usually when I write...it’s a purely visual stream of consciousness thing. I rarely write a script. If anything just major plot points so that I remember them. But usually I will have an idea and I will just draw it out until it stops talking to me. It adds a freedom to the process that I really, really enjoy. Listening to the characters tell me how to layout a page or tell the story, and letting them dictate where it will lead. It’s something that I’ve only really discovered in the last couple of years.
CR - That's an interesting phrase. Do you really interact heavily with the characters and setting as you create them?
Doug - Definitely. It’s usually where my ideas start. A character. “Right...what is this character doing? Why is he here? Why do I care?” etc. And it usually expands on that. I will do a few finished character illustrations in a scene, engaging with something in their space telling a self-contained story with one picture or two pictures just to get to know them. If it starts to expand easily from that I’ll think more about where they could go. A lot of the time I get nothing and the illustrations on their own are enough. They’re out on paper and they’re story pretty much captured immediately with nowhere else to really go. Other times it all just falls into place and all these doors open up and I’m dragged along for the ride.
CR - I think one of your great skills is actually using the comic medium to great potential. I think especially your decisions to let your characters have enough panels to move around in. How do you decide to lay out panels? Any particular rules or theories you employ?
Doug - I love the 9-panel grid. Especially in this day and age of splash pages and “dynamic” action shots. I usually try and make my comics as easy to read without words as possible. I like to let my characters act...so they basically get the room to do so. I do like to break out every now and then...but the simple panel to panel grid is the simplest and most effective way to engage an audience. Especially to those not particularly well versed in comics language.
It’s a very intuitive thing I find too. I will usually do really rough thumbnails of panel layouts for a page...and its always dictated by what the character wants to do and how each panel will most effectively communicate that. If it’s a 12-panel page or a 3-panel page or one big panel and 15 small ones...that’s what it has to be. I was for a while there trying to get some maddening art composition theory in there, Golden section kind of stuff. How to divide up a page and draw the viewers eye across it through geometry etc. Basically the kind of stuff the French poster artists of the 1920’s came to play with. But it just got too crazy and you really lose the rhythm. Better to read about this stuff and use it subconsciously than go out of your way to include it.
CR - I know lots of artists generally don't enjoy reading comics and are usually happy to look at the art. Where do you stand on that issue?
Doug - In my youth I used to be all about the art. And to an extent now...if I don’t get drawn in visually right off the bat the book will be on the back foot. But as I grow older and surlier I’m definitely more interested in the actual story of a comic now. How the story is told etc. I also think it’s a delicate balance. A lot of people say a beautifully drawn book can make up for a shit story. But not vice versa.
Which I think is utter bollocks. I’ve lost count of the comics I’ve read that would be considered “well drawn comics” that just left me cold and throwing them across the room in disappointment.
We’re meant to be STORYtellers. STORY should always be the driving force. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of nicely drawn pictures dancing around a page not doing much.
CR - What's the Flight Project all about and how did you get involved?
Doug - Flight is a group of animators and comics makers (Mostly from online communities and web comics) that got together online to create an anthology. Originally planned as a direct homage to the likes of Miyazaki and Mobieus it’s grown well beyond that into something truly original and pretty groundbreaking.
CR -
What's your particular story about?
Doug - My story is an alternate history of what might have happened to Laika, the first dog in space, launched by the Russians during the space race in the 50's and 60's. The idea hit me when I put together a painting of Laika sharing a vodka with a space god for an Outer Space exhibition about a year ago.
(Previews: 1, 2, 3)
When I had to start getting serious about putting something together for Flight, she popped up again and the rest pretty much fell into place. Her actual story is really quite sad and moved me to, I guess, explore what would happen if she just kept floating out into space.
It's a bit of rumination on politics, on how destructive and paranoid the human race can be, and how extreme advances in technology are not necessarily the answer to solving these problems. At its heart though it's a fun little doggie adventure.
CR - Can you give us a description of how you actually made Laika in pornographic and crunchy detail?
Doug - Like I mentioned it started with a painting of Laika and Azathoth The Infernal sharing vodka in space a year earlier. I’m not entirely sure what horrid part of my brain that emanated from but that’s where it started. And it was essentially the same theme. Laika didn’t die she floated away into space and saw things that the human race can only dream of.
Then she popped up again around Flight time. I false started once...and it went nowhere. Sat on it for a couple of months ridiculously intimidated by the phenomenal artists that I was being published next to and eventually bit the bullet and launched her back out into space.
One of the hardest comics I’ve ever EVER done. I think both because I wanted it to be 110% better than I could make it...and because I was wrestling with how to tell her story.
No script just the same technique of here she is...where are we going and jumped straight into rough pencils. Polished pencils were then done, re-reading it and with some help from yourself and the Flight Crew...decided we all hated the ending and that it needed to change. It sat right with me at first...but it wasn’t Laika’s ending. More Chuck Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes complete with fist shaking at the sky action. So back to the drawing board and 6 redrawn pages and two completely new pages later she was finished. Inks then colours and now she’s published running around on some crazy arse planet somewhere.
I might actually post up the alternate ending on my website once the book comes out. Just so people can compare and contrast. I would be interested to see what people think of both of them.
CR - Now, convince us to part with our cash and purchase it.
Doug - You could split galaxies with the spine it’s THAT thick. Plus it has, I believe, set an incredibly high precedent for where comics should be looking in the near future to grow as a medium. And you want to know what the future for comic’s looks like don’t you?
The Flight contributors are a strong new voice as far as comic artists and writers go. Do you feel you belong to a movement within comics?
As I mentioned before. I definitely think it’s setting a new benchmark for what comics should and can aspire to. A movement? Probably not at this stage...but definitely a bold statement. It’s success so far is I think testament to the fact that comics peers and audiences are craving something more than flashy gimmicks and film deals to take comics in a new direction.
CR - Tell us of Heidi Hyperwarp?
Doug - Heidi Hyperwarp is an ongoing project that has been picked up by Image. Written by Jai Nitz (Paper Museum, Heaven’s Devils) it’s an all ages western, crime, sci-fi adventure graphic novel. At this stage it’s slow going as freelance work has me in it’s vice like well paying grip. But hopefully we should have something out later this year or early 2006.
(Previews: 1, 2 ,3)
CR - Viewing comics in any commercial aspect is a dicey situation amongst people who view it as a hobby. You and I both have talked about it being an ambition to turn our craft into our living. And we've both worked in related industries doing bill-paying dead work. Do you feel that your professional work has affected your comics work or vice versa? And do you think other can benefit from this kind of attitude? Or, if you make it a job, do you think something is missing from your art?
Doug - A bit of both. I know that the experiences I’ve garnered from some freelance jobs have been invaluable. Other times it’s just dead work because the money is there. And sometimes my comic is what sells a client on the job. “We want what you do in THIS.”
I think though, it’s always important to put your best foot forward and try to make the most of any paying work regardless of how fulfilling (or not) it is artistically. It’s still my voice out there representing me whether it’s my grand personal masterpiece or a job for a pet store.
So I think that dead work can be of definite benefit. It’s all just another arrow in your bow and so forth. But of course there is compromise.
Time wise especially. I was just chatting to Craig Phillips this morning and we were regaling each other with the various things we were working on. We basically said at the same time “Yeah it’s great to be busy and they’re good gigs...but man I just want to go and paint and do MY work.” It’s almost like taking a walk in some fresh air or a shower on a hot day there is just something completely satisfying about it.
CR - From waking up to going to bed is a hard days slog for an illustrator. What keeps you going during those hours?
It’s hard to stay motivated sometimes...you have your good and bad days. I think as you go a long trying to attach yourself to projects you know you will enjoy working on and have a great deal of creative input into helps. Also this sounds really fruity...but since I’ve gone fulltime freelance in the last 2 years there is an almost primal buzz that comes from knowing your skills are such that people WANT to utilise them. And I’m utilising my skills to keep myself alive and the woman of the house in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. It’s a hard feeling to describe...but it definitely keeps me up till the small hours of the morning before a deadline.
CR - You used to be a con scene regular, then sorta dropped out of sight. Why?
Moving to Melbourne and the fact that the cons don’t come down here to Hobbiton it’s become even MORE of an expense to visit them as a creator and self-publisher. Travel and accommodation costs on top of printing promotion and table costs. It’s a ridiculous amount of money and it’s just not an expense I’m willing to forego twice a year for a fraction of a return. I always feel a little pang of “Ah man it looks like it was fun” homesickness through photos and post con reports...but it’s always for the social aspect rather than the sitting behind a table scowling at people aspect. Which is probably the sole reason.
CR - How useful has the Internet been to your success?
Incredibly so. In fact it’s probably the biggest promotional tool I wield. Most of the work I’m engaged in has come via promoting myself on the web or through someone seeing something I’ve done and tracing it back to my website. Plus especially with things like the Flight message boards and The Drawing Board it’s a fantastic source of inspiration and camaraderie. Working at home with two moth eating cats isn’t exactly the creative hotbed people make it out to be.
So these online communities are the closest things to emulating a studio environment without having to put up with office politics. Bouncing work off each other, getting advice tips or just scouring the web for new artists and inspiration. It’s an invaluable tool.
CR -
Australian comics. The Inevitable Australian comics questions.
CR -
You've been involved in Australian comics for nearly a decade now. What's your impression of the attitude and skills of the average Australian product?
Doug - The average Australian product? Pretty average. A few blips of brilliance here or there, the good can be really great, but overall at the moment pretty much...average. I think we certainly have incredibly talented people here that have made comics in the past, but through one reason or another (mostly that comics here is a hobby and not a bringer of food to the table.) Those few have gone onto bigger and brighter things. Either other creative endeavors or breaking into mainstream comics overseas.
CR - It's a small pond. Who are the big fish?
Doug -The usual suspects. Dillon, Trudy Cooper, Gary Chaloner, Jason Paulos, Tonia Walden, Phosphorescent. Amazingly, (bar Phos) creators who have been in it for what...almost 15 - 20 years and still creating strong bodies of work despite all the woes that Australian comics goes through. There is a reason they are the big fish. On the up and up, Jase Harper, Dean Rankine, Matt Hyunh.
CR - What's your prediction for where things are headed, for the scene as a whole?
Doug - Actually I was thinking about this the other day...and while I’m just as prone as the next person to let fly with doom prophecies...I think 2005 could be a pretty good year. Already we’ve had Deevee: Flange, Sporadic 5, A new Crumpleton Experiments, Eldritch Kid 1 and 2 and Meus Officium Est Abyssuss. I’ve had a 24 page Western printed in France (Mococo) as well as 16 pages in Flight #2. On it’s way is Pirates, Something Wicked, the Operation Funny bone project. Colin Wilson is doing a 3 issue Losers story arc for Vertigo, Ben Templesmith keeps on keeping on. Jason Rand has Small Gods (Image Comics) up to issue...8?? And a trade of the first arc released earlier this year. There are rumors always of a Hairbutt The Hippo Trade. Hopefully we will see a couple more issues of Platinum Grit. Plus crews of ridiculously talented cartoonists are gathering together and in the throes of re-entering the self-publishing arena later this year with the Toon Buggy anthology.
So...it’s not TOO bad. That’s more than a few average blips.
Obviously...in a perfect world we would all be working 24/7 on quarterly graphic albums, lavishly produced and distributed by book publishers, paid handsome up-front wages, royalties and honored with cities named after us.
But all of the work I just mentioned I believe can stand on it’s own two feet against the best any overseas market can offer (some of it already is). I think it’s just a matter of us thinking outside the square a little and making that happen. It’s a hobby sure...but taking that work and approaching publishers can’t hurt. I think if we are seriously keen to make something akin to a self-supporting “industry” here, self-publishing 50 copies and selling them at a con won’t cut it. I’m a firm believer that good work will speak for itself ALWAYS. But that work isn’t much good if it’s stuck in niche comic book shops over crowded by louder and brighter material.
It’s up to us to take the initiative. While Oztaku has its flaws...I think it’s a perfect example of what is possible for us with a bit of savvy when it comes to promotion and production.
CR - Everyone involved in the local industry has some irritations with it. What are yours?
Doug - Lots of things...but they ebb and flow. I think on a broad scale it disappoints me that we can’t keep the best people working on producing great comics, because of the nature of things. It disappoints me that the majority of creators here are pretty apathetic and not particularly interested in a bigger picture. That the same ‘ideas to save comics’ go round and round and round but always with “I’ve got an idea that someone SHOULD...” Not “I’ve got an idea and this is what I’m DOING.” It disappoints me when I see potential but no payoff and opportunities wasted. Something like 60+ people created 24 page comics in 24hrs last year...and we saw something like not even 3 or 4 of those put to good use, finished, polished up printed and sold. It disappoints me that we get caught up really quickly in stupid ‘scene’ controversy that isn’t there and dumb stacks on arguments rather than putting that energy into doing something creative. Screaming at creators, the scene and “rage” is so 2004.
CR - Where do the Australians go right?
Doug - That when we actually DO put comics out there we have no fear about telling stories that we want to tell. And being diverse within that. It’s a great point to be proud of, that each of our works is utterly different. From comedy to romance to all ages to adventure, sci-fi, horror, autobiography and even a superhero or two. And I think one of the reasons that if Australian comics took itself a bit more seriously we could really make a splash.
That’s where we’ll bring it to a close, with a fair chunk cut out of the middle, where we stop to discuss which bullet gauge wound we could survive and theories of bleed/gutter repetition beats.
…
Look, I’ll be honest, in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you all something. Doug and I had been looking forward to doing this interview for a month. A chance for the both of US to clear the air, hurl around a bit of abuse and invective. Say what we really though. When the time came, though, the two of us agreed that it was actually a great year for genuine quality books and that, for the first time in a long time, the two of us were really quite optimistic about what was happening in Australian comics.
Christian Read - April, 2005
Contents ©2004 Pulp Faction and respective authors.
Contents should not be quoted in whole without prior consent both Pulp Faction and the interviewee.