Berni Wrightson – Innerview

This interview was conducted in Berni’s studio on May 20th, 1986 in Saugerties, New York.

Todd First off, I’d like to thank you for doing this interview.

Berni Oh, my pleasure.

T As you know, this is for the CFA-APA, our fifth issue, which is dedicated to you.

B Oh great.

T You’ve seen our publication and I was wondering what you think of it?

B Oh I think it’s great. It’s wonderful for the collectors to have a forum like that. I don’t know if all the collectors ever were able to exchange information and ideas through letters or phone calls. But it’s nice to have it all in one place.

T That’s how I got involved with this. I wrote to several of these people and then Roger Hill got it all together. It was really nice.

B Yeah, you can just have an open letter in one place that everybody can see, and just kind of share information.

T Saves a lot of stamps.

B And you can send Xeroxes of work that you’ve collected and like that just to show.

T I just saw you up at Ithacon with the other Studio artists, and you seemed very happy to me. Are you content with what you are doing now?

B I’m a generally happy person, yeah.

T Are you happy with what you are doing professionally?

B Oh sure, yeah. If I wasn’t happy with it I’d find something else to do. I’ve gotten very spoiled over the years, you know, just doing exactly what I feel like doing for so long.

T Is there anything in the back of your mind that you’ve always wanted to do that you haven’t had the chance to do yet?

B Nothing that comes to mind right now, although I’m sure there’s something. I just try to concentrate on what I’m doing at the moment.

T You’ve done some collaboration work. You’ve worked with Mike Kaluta and several others. Is there any particular artist that you admire that you would like to work with someday?

B Not especially. I don’t really like to collaborate that much.

T Just with particular people?

B Yeah. I prefer jamming to collaborating, which is a little more like when we were putting together the Ethiopian Benefit book for Marvel, the X-Men book. Everybody up here who was working on things. I penciled my 3 pages and gave them to Jeff to ink. Charles Vess penciled 3 pages and gave them to Jon Muth to ink. We all got together over here with a couple other guys, George Pratt and Kent Williams one evening, and all of us worked on all the pages with the inking, and it was a lot of fun.

T Do George and Kent live in this area?

B No, they are in Brooklyn I think. I think Kent and his wife are going to move up this way somewhere, but I don’t know what George’s plans are.

T I’ve seen Kent’s stuff and it’s just beautiful.

B Yeah, Kent is just maybe the best watercolor artist I’ve ever seen.

T There’s a story in Heavy Metal of one man stalking another in the snow, and Kent makes it look real. Beautiful stuff. Do you have any idea what the reaction has been to the benefit book?

B I really don’t know. Somebody, I think it was Ann Nocenti, the editor, told me that the magazine Business Week named that comic book as one of the best small time investments of 1986, which is really …

T That’s great.

B Yeah, that’s exactly what we wanted. Kind of a collector’s item sort of thing. You know, one time only and make a lot of money. I would like to see some kind of report on this, just what kind of money this made.

T One of the things that I found that is really nice is that in a lot of the dealer’s catalogs I get, they are still selling it for cover price, as opposed to ‘$20 for a Stephen King comic’.

B Oh great.

T The DC Benefit book is coming out soon. Any idea when?

B Somebody told me it’s out. It’s pretty recent, I think it’s in the last week or two. A month or so ago I saw black & white Xeroxes of all the pages, and boy it looks real good. I think it looks even a little better than the X-Men book because we made all our mistakes on the X-Men book, so this one went a lot more smoothly.

T Was there the same type of jam session?

B No, this one was pretty much straight collaboration as far as I know. I did my 3 pages and they’re inked by Kaluta. I saw those and they look very good. Everybody did a great job.

T Great. I’ll look forward to that. Have you been exposed to Arthur Suydam’s work?

B Oh yeah, sure.

T Do you like it?

B Oh yeah.

T He seems influenced by you a little.

B Yeah, and Frazetta.

T Frazetta a lot. Have you been to the Frazetta Museum yet?

B Not yet, no. I keep threatening to go, but I never get around to it.

T I know when Frazetta redoes a piece he paints right over the original canvas. Now there is a painting you did, ‘The Abominable Snowman’, which was used on Web of Horror #3, and there is a different version on the Wrightson Treasury cover.

B That was an entirely different painting. I have kind of a reputation in the field for doing several versions of something, and then the one that ends up being used is the first one I did, after I’ve spent a month on it trying to improve it.

T You live up here in the Woodstock area. Have you done any nature drawing or painting?

B Not really. I don’t have the discipline for that. I’ve been out a couple times with Jeff (Jones), and we’ve gone out early in the morning and painted the reservoir and the mountains, things like that. I don’t know, I’m not really a painter I guess. I feel like I concentrate and I do better work sitting in here with four walls around me and a roof over my head, instead of being out where it’s maybe going to rain, and the light keeps changing, and there are bugs that get stuck in the paint. People drive by and give you funny looks.

T When you work here in the studio, do you work with music or is it pretty quiet?

B It’s usually pretty quiet. Very often I’ll have a video tape running. I have a big collection of very nasty horror movies and I just run those.

T You’ve seen John Carpenter’s remake of ‘The Thing’?

B Oh yeah.

T When you first saw that did you feel that the special effects were inspired by your type of horror, or your comic book work?

B I didn’t get that so much from ‘The Thing’. What I got it more was from ‘The Howling’. You saw that?

T Yeah. The werewolf scene in the lab was right from your splash page. (From Swamp Thing #4)

B Yeah, I kept waiting. You know how through the whole movie they kept putting in those sight gags, like the Wolfshead oil, and references to the Wolfman, and all these things. I kept waiting through kept waiting through the whole movie to maybe see an issue of Swamp Thing #4 lying on a table top or something, and the camera would just move past it. Just a little tip of the hat and it never happened, and I was a little disappointed, because I thought ‘that werewolf looks a whole lot like mine’.

T Through the whole movie, and it was beautifully done. They just reprinted Swamp Thing again in a deluxe format and they re-colored it, which was pretty bad …

B Yeah, I know about that. I don’t know if it’s the re-coloring so much, but the paper, you know, that Baxter paper or whatever that paper is. It doesn’t take the comic book color well at all. The comic book color works well on the crummy paper which tends to kind of soften it and blend the edges and everything.

T You did a black & white ad and you did a painting for a wraparound cover, and this was done for DC (for the Swamp Thing re-issue). Does this mark a return to working for DC?

B Oh, I’ll work for DC. I’ve got a drawing in the anniversary issue of Batman coming up. Kind of like the thing I did for Superman for their 400th issue. So yeah, I’ll certainly work for DC. For my work for DC I’m interested in a graphic novel for them. I’m not interested at all in doing anymore newsstand work or certainly not a series. I can’t sustain it. But a big project like a 60 page one shot, I can handle that.

T Marvel just released Hooky last week.

B Yeah, boy it really looks good. Enough time has gone by since I turned in the job that I kind of forgotten how it looked when I turned in the originals. And it came out and I looked and said, ‘Boy, this is just splendid reproduction’, and the story is just wonderful. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it yet.

T Yeah, I read it.

B It’s one of the better stories I think in the graphic novel series. I mean it really does read like a novel, instead of a big comic.

T Did you notice enough changes in it to warrant the delay they had?

B I don’t know that it was just the writing that delayed it. I think there were a lot of other factors involved with it. I wish it had come out sooner. It would have been great if it had come out for Christmas of last year. Everybody wants their stuff to come out by Christmas because that’s the big buying time. But even so without that it’s doing very well. The advance orders on this were tremendous.

T You’re working on a Hulk graphic novel.

B Yeah, Hulk – Thing.

T How far along is that?

B It’s completely penciled and about half inked.

T Are you coloring that yourself?

B Oh yeah. It will look like the Spider-Man.

T And I hear you are working on a Shadow graphic novel.

B I’m inking. I talked to Wally Harrington a few days ago and he said that Mike had 4 or 5 pages penciled, so I don’t know how that’s going to work. But I’m not going to do this in bits and pieces, as he finished a page he’s not going to send it to me. I’m going to wait until the whole thing is penciled and then ink it. I’d much rather do it that way. Then I have some feeling of continuity. I can start working in the middle somewhere and ink out. You kind of have to work out the stiffness and everything. Some days I can’t really do anything except take a big crummy brush and lay in heavy blacks. Other days I can get into really fine stuff.

T Do you ink right over the original pencils?

B Yeah.

T Is there ever a time when you do overlays?

B I’ve tried it and it flattens out so much somehow, for me anyway. I do a much better job when I can actually ink right on top of the pencils.

T I saw some of the original pages from The Shadow issue that you worked on with Mike, and he seemed upset when he showed them to me because one of the editors had taken a blue magic marker and just gone over all of the pages with it for corrections. It’s horrible if you go to buy one of those pages.

B Yeah, they used to do that a lot. There was a story, they hired somebody years ago, I don’t know how she got the job, but she did, and one of the first things she did was mark up the pages with a red magic marker, and you know that red prints black, and there’s no way around that. It had to be turned over to the production department where they had to very meticulously white this out. So she didn’t last very long. I’ve seen some of the things that they’ve done to pages, not just at DC but at Marvel too. It shows a very low respect for the artwork. You don’t see that much anymore. Back when I was just starting it was still that old school thinking that this was just crap.

T They didn’t have the respect for it. There also wasn’t a large market for the original art.

B No, it was just beginning. You could buy a Frazetta Sunday page of Johnny Comet for fifty dollars.

T And now you can’t find them.

B Right.

T You mentioned Wally Harrington earlier. You have a piece in his recent portfolio release, Night. Can you give us some idea as to the thought that was behind that painting. It’s very disturbing.

B No. That particular painting took two hours start to finish. I had no idea when I started working that morning what it was going to be. I had a blank piece of illustration board in front of me and just started to draw. The drawing itself took 15 minutes and then I started in on the paint. I had no idea it was going to go that fast, and I had even less of an idea what it’s about, where it came from.

T Will you be doing anything for Wally’s black & white series of prints?

B Actually I’m working, haven’t started working on it, hadn’t even thought about it ‘til you mentioned it. I’m going to be doing a drawing with George Pratt for Wally and Allen Spiegel. They do it together. So I’m going to draw something and George is going to ink it.

T Great. Have you seen Frank Miller’s Batman? What do you think of it?

B Yeah, I enjoy it very much, and nobody tells a story like Frank Miller. I wish he would slow down a little bit and take his time on the drawings because I think he’s getting a little sloppy with it. Klaus Janson is saving it, I think, to a large extent.

T One of the things I find is I buy books you do for the art. If you do a cover I’ll buy the book, but when I buy a Frank Miller book it’s for the visuals. It’s not so much the art, but the way his art tells the story. It’s the same with Simonson. His art fits right into his storytelling.

B Oh yeah, sure. Those guys are a little hard to pigeonhole. You can look at comic book art and say this is very cinematic, like The Spirit or Steranko’s stuff. Miller and Simonson kind of transcend that and they do something that could only appear in a comic, the kind of storytelling that really has no relationship to moving pictures. The guys are both tremendous designers.

T I think for me, Walt does the best layouts in the business, just the way he designs a page.

B Yeah. The stuff just moves and he’s in complete control of the pacing of that, and just how fast you read a page. He knows how to slow you down.

T I talked to Walt awhile ago and he told me he had gotten off of Thor for the express reason of doing the book for the movie sequel to Alien. Marvel didn’t get the contract so he won’t be doing it, but I was wondering if you heard anything about doing it?

B No. So has he gone back onto Thor?

T No. What he’s doing now is a fill in issue of Daredevil, he wants to start doing some painting, he has a graphic novel planned, and he’ll be doing a Havok mini-series with his wife Louise.

B Oh good. I’m sorry to see him off Thor, but it will be nice to see him branching out and experimenting.

T He’s still writing it, but it’s not the same.

B Right. He’s such a stylist. I don’t think anyone’s going to come up to him as far as the visual thing, even if Walt does breakdowns.

T When you were at Ithacon they had a Studio panel with Mike, Jeff, Barry and yourself. What was it like being presented again as The Studio in front of an audience?

B For me it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. It was just a moment in time. At the time it was very exciting and I was really happy to be a part of it, but now that it’s over it just seems like long ago and far away.

T Just another part of your life.

B Yeah.

T Was there a difference in the way that you worked then at the studio as opposed to the way you work now?

B Not really. Back in The Studio days I was the first guy that actually was able to work in the studio. It takes awhile to get adjusted to a new place. No problem for me. The first day I got there I was so excited I just wanted to work. I’d consistently get in at the crack of dawn. I’d come in very early and start to work and just work a full day. Then the other guys would roll in around noon or afternoon and work into the night. Kaluta was a night worker mostly. Jeff worked during the day when he worked, but he didn’t work all the time. I was a real work horse. I worked a lot harder then than I do now. I worked every single day up there. At the time none of us were really into doing comics, so having a studio was a good thing. We all wanted to paint, we all wanted to do big pictures. We wanted to take advantage of the space that we had, and kind of being on each other and feeding on each other.

T You got a lot of input from these other guys ….

B Oh yeah. We were all going through a phase. I don’t know if it’s entirely accurate that we were trying to be fine artists, but we were all trying to get out of that comic book thing of telling stories with a series of pictures. We were all interested in how much of a story could you tell with a single picture, with a single image, that if you really took the time to look at it, how much of a picture could you pull out. We were all kind of experimenting with that.

T Do you think you’ll ever do that again in the way of putting out posters?

B It’s hard to say, you know. I didn’t know we were going to do it then. It was just a thing that kind of evolved. It seemed that we had all been headed in that direction independently and the studio just made it gel and brought all this stuff to the surface. We’d get together at dinner and over beers and drinks we’d talk about what we were trying to do. It was like this great single purpose that we all had. But here we were in the studio all kind of striving for the same thing, and at the same time trying not to step on each others toes, trying not to make the influences and the inter-influences seem too obvious.

T Was there any competitiveness between the four of you?

B Not really competitiveness. I think there were some differences of opinion and there were some personality clashes, but competitiveness? We weren’t really competing. I never felt that anyway. But I felt there was some tension, but it’s just because when you get four very volatile, intense people in one place, there’s bound to be a little friction.

T I just became a father, and your son is 3 now. I was wondering if it has an effect on you when you approach a picture, because you’re basically a horror artist?

B It mellows you, I think. I kind of got out of the horror field for awhile after my son was born. I just didn’t have the interest in it because I had a baby to think about. Now that he’s getting a little older and he’s no longer helpless, and he’s becoming kind of independent and more of an entity unto himself, I feel – not that I have less responsibility to him or anything like that, but I feel I can leave him alone long enough to go back to the horror stuff. So I expect to be getting back into it.

T Can you tell us how you got into doing the Fisher Price comic covers?

B They offered me a shitload of money. Yeah, that’s essentially it. I guess I’m essentially a commercial artist, so I’m won’t turn down a high paying gig.

T The only reason I found those is I was in the toy store shopping for my daughter. Not every Berni Wrightson fan is going to see those. Have you done any other projects that wouldn’t show up in a comic related shop?

B Not that I can think of. That was kind of a fluke, and I still haven’t seen it. The few times I’ve looked they haven’t had it, and most times I just forget when we’re shopping to check the toy stores.

T I found them at K-Mart.

B Well, we were at K-Mart today, happened to be there and I didn’t even think to look. I got a call from John Romita at Marvel Comics, and he said, “You paint, right?” So I said ‘Yeah, I’ve been known to paint’. So he said we’re doing this Fisher Price blah, blah, blah, and we need somebody who can paint like N.C. Wyeth. I said, ‘Right, you’ve got the right man. I can paint just like N.C. Wyeth’. (Laughter) So they sent me the Treasure Island thing to do and I did that, and in fact I wasn’t even completely done with that. I showed them the drawing for it, you know, the pencils and the color scheme, and on the strength of that they said would you like to do Robinson Crusoe as well, and I said yeah, sure. I worked from John Romita’s layouts on those, real strong layouts. Now there’s a true commercial artist. The guy gets right to the point and he just does it completely different than the way I would do it. He told me over the phone about Robinson Crusoe with the sketch in front of him, and I hadn’t seen it yet. He said, ‘Oh, it’s Robinson Crusoe looking out to sea with a telescope’, and I said oh yeah, that sounds great, and the way I pictured it was you didn’t even see his face. He was lying on a rise of land, his back to you and slightly turned with the telescope looking out the horizon and maybe there’s a ship out there – and then I get the layout, looked at it and said, ‘that is not at all the way I saw it’. But the way he did it was much better in a commercial sense than what I had in mind. Mine would have made a classy illustration inside of a book, but as a cover, something that’s going to sell it, John’s just had a lot more punch. So yeah, I worked from that, and it was fun. The money was good, they were happy.

T Someone mentioned to me that you did a poster for the BBC of Macbeth? True? They said it looked like your witch from the coloring book.

B No. Maybe someone tried to swipe it. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.

T Good, because I can’t find one. I’ve got a few questions about the book Frankenstein. It was originally advertised through Christopher Enterprises owned in part by Chris Zavisa, now at Land of Enchantment. Was there ant consideration as to offering it to Chris when you were ready to release it?

B No, not really, because what happened was the reason I pulled out with CE is they were having troubles. Chris Zavisa and Chris Hoth had eventually filed for bankruptcy and the company dissolved. Long before this ever happened I saw which way the wind was blowing and said, ‘Listen, I like both you guys and I’ve enjoyed working for you and everything, but this means too much to me to become a ping pong ball in this table tennis match you’re having, so I’m going to pull it out, if you don’t mind’, and they were fine about that, in fact I think they were kind of relieved. And then I just worked on it myself because we hadn’t gotten to the point with CE yet where I was getting any money from them, so that made it a whole lot less complicated. So I just continued working on my own on it, and when it was finally done, Chris (Zavisa) had just started Land of Enchantment, but I think it was mostly me. I didn’t want to do a limited edition thing at that time. I wanted it to get out to the largest number of people. So what I do is take it to Marvel where it hits the direct sales shops and sells 14 or 15 thousand copies, and then stops. It never gets into the book stores and nobody knows about it. (Laughter) They’re sitting on 15 thousand copies of these things in a warehouse somewhere.

T I think they just started releasing them in book stores on the bargain tables. It’s a beautiful book.

B Yeah, I thought so.

Coming in Part II: More on Frankenstein, Stephen King, Ghostbusters, Spider-Man and more!

Berni Wrightson Innerview Part II

Todd Were you against doing color on the Frankenstein book? Chris Zavisa told me he would have wanted color plates.

Berni That was the first thing they said up at Marvel, how about doing a color cover. I said, ‘Well no, no you see – it’s supposed to be a black & white book, and I just intended it to be black & white. I’ve got this big wraparound picture that I want to do as the cover. They said, “OK, great, a wraparound. How about coloring it?” (Laughter) I said (gritting his teeth) ‘NO, you don’t understand!” So once we got around that it was ok. And with Frankenstein at the time I could write my own ticket. I just walked in off the street into Jim Shooter’s office and said, ‘Hi, do you know me? I’m Berni Wrightson – American Express card. I’ve got this Frankenstein book and would you like to do it.’ And it was, “Of course Mr. Wrightson. Yes, we didn’t know it was you Mr. Wrightson. Come right in, sit down, have a cigar.” I could do anything I wanted just so they could get me into Marvel. It was, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll do Frankenstein, great, great, great, sign the contract. Oh, by the way, we’ve got this Spider-Man script”, and it was a year or two before I looked at the Spider-Man script which became Hookey.

T You worked on ‘Cycle of the Werewolf’ for Chris’ Land of Enchantment. You’re a big Stephen King fan, and you get this novel in the mail one day to illustrate. Were you happy with the story?

B Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. Chris had gotten a hold of King through letters and sending him samples of his work, the books he published, and said he would really like to do a limited edition book with him lavishly illustrated by Berni Wrightson. He sent him ‘A Look Back’, and King really liked my stuff, and he’d seen it before from following it in the comics through Swampthing and everything. He said, “Yeah, I’d really like to do something with Berni, so ask him what sort of thing he feels like doing.” So Chris got back to me and said, “Steve wants to know what you want to do.” I said, ‘Geeze, I don’t know … how about a werewolf?’ He said, “OK, I’ll mention it to Steve.” So he went back and talked to Steve and said, “Do you want to do a werewolf story?” And Steve said, “Geeze, I don’t know … a werewolf?” There are some problems with a werewolf from a literary standpoint. I never really found out exactly what it was, but it got turned around, and around, and around, until finally we all met at a booksellers Convention in Chicago, and we came up with the idea that this should be an illustrated calendar, because I could then do 12 paintings and he could do a story in 12 chapters to accompany the pictures. We’d put this thing out and mark the date boxes on the calendar to different events in the chapter when something happened. We had this thing all worked out, and then we hit a snag with his publisher who said it was a conflict of interest for this piss ant publisher in Detroit to be competing with them on that sort of scale, which I suppose is true, because you can’t do a calendar just for the fan market. This is a mass market thing you’re talking about, The Stephen King Calendar, so they axed the idea of the calendar. By then King had already started writing it and he had gotten so into the story he was already having problems condensing it to a few paragraphs per chapter, and the thing was expanding anyway, so it turned into a novella.

T It seemed like every chapter was twice as long as the one before it.

B Yeah, it kept growing and growing so it turned into this book, and that’s pretty much what happened. I had already started some of the drawings for it so all I really had to do was change the proportions.

T Someone told me the coloring was done by someone else?

B No, it was all my coloring. I don’t know what happened with that, but something went wrong with that whole project that to this day I really can’t figure out what it was. But boy, I really lost the juice on that early on. It really shows. I look at it in the book stores now and I almost cringe. It’s a little embarrassing; it’s not my best work. I don’t really know how Steve feels about it. He says he likes it and I’ll take him at his word, but I know I can do a lot better. I think one of the things that kind of took the wind out of my sails was early on Chris kind of demanded that these things be ink and color drawings, and this was at a time when I really wanted to paint. And I really kept seeing these things as paintings. I don’t know – this sounds too much like I’m laying it in Chris’ lap which I’m not trying to do, but I think that was the initial thing that soured me a little on it.

T Sort of telling you that you can’t work in the medium of your choice.

B Sort of, but even that’s a little strong, because if I had really insisted that I wanted to do paintings, then he would have said, ok, do paintings. It’s against my better judgment, but go ahead and do the paintings. But I didn’t do that. I felt that no, I can’t do that. I don’t know, I was at a funny psychological state the time that I was doing these things. Also we were trying to have a baby and all this other stuff.

T I saw a Sal Quartuccio ad a long time ago, and I barely remember it, but it was for a watercolor portfolio of four studies of women by you. Do you remember anything about this?

B No. This isn’t the Apparitions portfolio?

T No, this was before that.

B No, doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve done two things for Sal. I did the Apparitions portfolio, and do you remember the Berni Wrightson issue of Creepy? It came out a few years ago with that dinosaur cover. Sal owns that. That was one of the stupidest deals I ever made. I did that originally for his magazine Hot Stuf’, which died somewhere along the line. Then Warren wanted a cover for this special issue and this picture popped into my mind, so I told him to call Sal and see if Sal will let you use it, because he owns the original and he hasn’t printed it as far as I know, so work out something with him. So I don’t know what they worked out, but Sal probably got paid for the use of the cover and he owns the original. It’s like – boy, I’m going to be a lot more careful in the future. That’s hopefully the last major stupid thing I’ll ever do.

T Some of the art in Apparitions was from Capt. Sternn. Was this done during the time of the story or after?

B No, the Capt. Sternn stuff went through a lot of percolating and boiling around before it actually came out the way it did in Heavy Metal.

T Yeah, some of the stuff is in A Look Back, and it’s completely different.

B Oh yeah. This went through a straight phase and a really cartoony phase, funny animal stuff, and then finally got to the point where it straddled the fence like it did in HM which I thought was probably the best direction for the character.

T It’s a great story.

B The advantage to doing all the preliminary work is that I finally settled on something that I was really happy with, where as you see a lot of stuff where somebody will start a series with a character, and you’ll watch the character change and finally become standardized by like the third or fourth issue. So this way I came out with full blown characters the first time out, and haven’t done a damn thing with it since, except for that thing in Dreadstar which was fun. I managed two of those which surprised Starlin He said, “I would have bet you were only good for one”. (Laughter)

T I’ve got a few questions about Sandy Blatt, who at one time owned most of your output for a long time. Were you surprised he sold it all?

B Yeah, it did come as a surprise. Even to this day I don’t know what happened to him. I gather he got out of comic art collecting, and got into fine art. I don’t know any of the reasons behind it. He stopped calling and it hurt a little bit.

T Had you ever talked about putting the art in a museum type thing – other than A Look Back?

B No, it was just in his collection. That’s as far as my thinking on it ever went.

T I had gone over to his house once to see his collection, and I was surprised at the way he was storing this huge collection. He had all of the comic covers in his son’s bedroom closet leaned against the wall in rows, and I just didn’t get the feeling that a whole lot of effort was put into taking care of these things.

B Yeah, I mean what happens after you put it in the closet? Do you ever look at it? Or is it just having it? I’m really not a collector. Well – I do collect and you can look around here and see the kind of stuff I collect. I’ve got a real neat looking toy from here, and some nice bones from there, neat rocks and stuff, but I don’t collect art or comic books. I only get the stuff I really like, so a lot of the collector’s mentality is a mystery to me. I can understand you want to own a piece of original artwork, but the guys who buy this stuff and lock it up somewhere and never look at it. I don’t know what there is about that, where’s the appeal. Is it just that you have it?

T I went through a phase where I had to have all the limited editions that came out, but now if there is a $6 volume that’s what I’m going to get. I mean if someone has a $2000 unpublished drawing and I can get a copy of it because I enjoy the drawing I’m happy.

B Yeah, right.

T This way I don’t have to worry about if there is a fire or something.

B (Laughing) Yeah, all of this one of a kind stuff is irreplaceable.

T When you get a contract for a piece or someone calls you and says we need this, do you always know where it’s going to end up in the way of packaging?

B No, not really. Sometimes you really do take a chance on that. It’s like the Swamp Thing cover that I did for the latest reprint series at DC. I was a little surprised in some strange way when that finally came out. After talking to them about it and everything, and they sent me a black & white stat of the logo so I could see it, it still came as kind of a shock to see it with the print on it, and kind of cropped in on. Boy, I thought, gee, this really looks kind of crowded. It doesn’t look as good as the original.

T Had you thought they might do a one volume book deal?

B No, I knew that it was just a comic, but the thing was I really felt like doing a painting.

T It looked like a Swamp Thing. The painting you did seemed very mossy to me, had that feel to it, where as the original series had the superhero effect. It’s different.

B The painting is how I wanted it to look in the comic book, but you couldn’t do it that soft. Well, Len (Wein) and I just never really agreed and settled on exactly what the character was. I thought it should be more shapeless and formless. Len wanted it more and more defined. More roots on it and I would disagree with that because it was a lot more work. Len seemed to be going more in the direction of the way the character looks now, with stuff growing out of him, which I think looks great.

T You did some production work for ‘The Ghostbusters’ movie?

B Right.

T They just put out a book titled ‘The Making Of Ghostbusters’.

B Yeah, I finally got one.

T It’s got a lot of nice Wrightson art in it, and it says in the beginning of the book that you did over 50 drawings.

B Yeah, they are property of Columbia Pictures, and I’m really happy that they printed as much as they did. They printed some of the better stuff as not all of it was that good. A lot of it was pretty poor and off the mark. They put the stuff that was a little bit closer to what they wanted at the time. This was one of the problems that we were just talking about, that I never went to Hollywood to work on this. I was here and Mike Gross, the associate producer, was in Hollywood. I would send him drawings, and he would phone me back, “Hey, we’ve got your drawings, really liked ‘em, but we’ve kind of changed the direction of this particular character, or this sequence or something”. I’d say OK and sit there and work on such and such. But the thing was we were 3000 miles apart, and the script wasn’t completed. It was going through the final re-write at this point. I think half the people hadn’t been cast yet. They hadn’t cast Rick Moranis. John Candy was going to do it and couldn’t do it at the last minute. They got Rick Moranis and had to re-write the whole part. This was after my part was done. Sigourney Weaver hadn’t been cast so this was all really disorganized. There was a lot of stuff that I worked on that eventually got written out of the script. But it was just typical confusion that happened just because I wasn’t up on what was going on. I was all the way here. If I had been there I probably wouldn’t have gotten any work done, because I just have a hard time working away from home. So I explained this to Mike the first time we met about this. If you take me to California it’s going to take me anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to get into working in a strange place. I said you’ve seen my set-up here. I’m really comfortable, I know where everything is, and I can work here. As soon as you leave I can start working, no problem, and be really productive. They were under time pressure at this point. The movie had been scheduled for filming, even though they hadn’t finished casting, they hadn’t finished writing, but they had to get started on the special effects stuff, so they could figure what part of the budget was going to go for this. Surprisingly, ‘The Ghostbusters’ was a rather low budget movie. They didn’t have a whole lot of money for this. There were a lot of effects that they just couldn’t afford to do. They had to take the cheap way out, the easy way out. The librarian sequence for instance. I did a thing with tracing paper overlays of this mousey kind of spinster, old maid, to this horrendous monster. It would have occupied maybe 4 seconds of screen time. I had maybe 12 overlays of this thing transforming. Her eyeglasses became sockets with these sunken horrible eyes. She had this lace collar that kind of melted into flesh and just kind of stretched into a really grotesque thing, and her head grew ‘til it was 5 feet high, and it’s a great roaring thing. Mike loved it, but they couldn’t do it. It was too expensive to do.

T Was it in the contract that they keep your artwork?

B Oh, yeah. He told me that in the beginning. Everything was going to become their property. Again, the money was really good, so I’ll take the money. This is what I do for a living, I’m a commercial artist. But the really gratifying thing is that the movie was such a big hit, which nobody really knew.

T I think I read somewhere it was Columbia’s biggest picture ever.

B Yeah, and it was just wonderful to be associated with something that was that popular. I’ll go to a party where somebody doesn’t know who I am and they’ll say, “Oh, you’re an artist. What do you do?” I say, you know the movie Ghostbusters? (Laughter)

T That’s great. I’d like to talk a little about foreign markets. You did Freakshow, and it was published in Spain or France first, I believe.

B I think, I’m not really sure what happened. I did Freakshow for Neal Adams for his company TransContinuity, which the deal was he would finance the project and then it would first be printed overseas, I’m not sure where, France or Spain. And then it would generate enough income to be packaged in America in English. Usually the way it works is it’s printed in America first and then sold overseas for pennies, really cheap. But this was supposed to work just the opposite. So far I haven’t really gotten any money from it except the initial advance that got me doing the work. I really don’t know what’s happening with it. It was serialized in Heavy Metal, and it came out in French or Spanish and I heard a rumor it’s coming out in English.

T Tom Vincent told me he has seen ads for a signed & numbered graphic novel.

B Did I sign something for that? This is weird. Sometimes I can’t remember if I actually did something or thought about doing it to the point where I now think I actually did it, but that kind of rings a bell. I think maybe I did sign something, I don’t know how many. Maybe I did. This kind of thing happens to me every now and then. I don’t know, I think I must have gotten kicked in the head by a horse or something. I’m losing my memory.

T I think the cover Roger is using is the presentation piece that you did for Freakshow.

B OK, I remember that.

T That’s a really nice piece.

B Yeah, that was weird. That one piece was better than the whole book. I kept trying to come back up to that level and it just wasn’t happening. I had a problem with Freakshow. It was the first time I ever did really tight thumbnails. I drew the whole story about 6 x 9 in felt tip with like a Sharpie, and a magic marker, and a razor point, varying widths of pen point and stuff, and real tight. You could have used these things and just blown them up a little bit. And then when I started doing the actual finished size pages I had completely run out of steam, because I had put all that juice into these little things, and I’ll never do that again because Freakshow was such hard work, it was chore to do after this. And it really doesn’t look good. It’s not good work at all. It’s really stiff.

T Oh, I really enjoyed it.

B I just thought it was uninspired. I tried to punch it up with blacks but I just really hated doing it after awhile because I felt like I was doing this over. It’s like the second time around.

T Do you do thumbnail sketches for everything?

B No. Since then I’ve been careful not to do it for anything.

T I’ve seen copies of the Swampthing comic page breakdowns, and these are almost completed drawings.

B At the time the fastest way I could work was to work on a lightbox. I would do those full size on tracing paper first and real loose because tracing paper is a real hard surface and I could use a real soft pencil on there and the pencil point would mush up and you could get these real rough shapes. You could be very spontaneous, loose and get gesture drawings, and good action and stuff. Then I would take those and put it underneath the finished page, and put it on a lightbox, and the light coming through the thickness of tracing paper and the thickness of drawing paper on top diffused that drawing even further so that it was almost like making a line drawing from a painting underneath. It sounds really involved like I’m doing it twice, but at the time it really worked for me, and after awhile it stopped working for me. That’s one of the reasons I quit doing the series after 10 issues.

T Someone told me that you had a lot of the work done on the Spider-Man graphic novel (Hookey), and then you got a call from Marvel telling you to switch to the new costume.

B No. What happened was people would come by and look as I was working on it. The last thing that I did in the black & white stage, in the inking stage on this, was all the gaddamn webs on Spider-Man’s costume. A friend of mine, Alex Bealey, had loaned me 6 or 7 old Spider-Man comics by Ditko from his collection, because I don’t save any of that stuff. I said I’m doing Spider-Man and I’d really like to have some Ditko reference, and he said no problem, I’ll get it for you. So I was working from that, and in the very early days Ditko, when he put the webs on the costume, would just keep drawing webs until he filled it up, and that’s great. I don’t look at Spider-Man, I don’t know what he looks like now, it all looks the same. Ditko always looked better than these guys anyway, so that’s what I did. My Spider-Man had all these webs on the costume and nobody at the office ever mentioned this to me. It was my friends. Jim Starlin would come over and look at it, or Dan Green, who inks X-Men would look at it. They’d come over and say, “Great monsters, great monsters. Say, that’s an awful lot of webs on Spider-Man’s costume, isn’t it”. I said, ‘Gee is it? I thought it looked good’. Dan said, “I had to do Spider-Man for a cover or something. You have to count the webs”. I said oh hell. So I got a few of the current issues, and sure enough, you had to count the damn webs. The whole thing was inked except for that. I had to go back and erase all the webs I penciled and re-draw them, counting. It drove me nuts. I was seriously considering hiring an assistant for a few days to come in and do this for me. That was the worst part of this job for me, and now I’m hearing rumors this might be the last story that he appears in the old costume. The new one would have been so much easier to draw in this.

T I read an interview with Bill Sienkiewicz where he said if he had to count all the bolts on Dr. Doom’s mask, he’d never do it. (Laughter)

B It’s crazy. But I had absolutely no feedback on the graphic novel from the office. I took the pencils in to show Jim Shooter. He was the original editor on this. I showed him the pencils and he said great. I was a little scared going in because I changed a lot of the story. When I first got the synopsis I really liked it, but as I started drawing it I kept getting ideas of my own. Looking at the synopsis I’m saying, gee, this is really good, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, but it reads like a little girls fantasy. And I was never a little girl, and I’ve got all these little boy ideas about where this should go. I like the setting, I like the world he’s in, but all she had was this big cockroach. I kept thinking I can do something with this monster. Bugs don’t really scare me, snakes don’t scare me. I’m not scared by these conventional things. This monster’s got to do something, and of course I’d seen the new version of ‘The Thing’, got into the idea of a mutating monster, something that would just metamorphasize throughout the story. I started doing that and of course that changed the story itself. The story became more linear, and kind of purposeful. Her original treatment tended to go off on tangents and didn’t really have a focus. So I just kind of narrowed this thing down and gave it a bit of focus.

T Did you ever get any feedback from her?

B Yeah, because I had changed it so much that I felt so guilty that I finally wrote her a letter. I said, ‘I’ve made a lot of changes in this’, and did her some sketches because the ship she indicated was completely different from the thing that I finally did. ‘I just think that this fits better in this world you’ve created than the one you had, no offense. I’m just thinking in strictly visual terms’, and she wrote back and said, “Fine. Everything you’ve done is an improvement. I really love it”. I was like whew! What a relief. Susan, if you read this, big hug. But Shooter was just great about it. I was scared because Shooter is really strong on story. In fact he’s one of the best story people in the business. I’ve never seen anyone that can come into a story conference and tie up all the loose ends like Shooter can, no problem. Just off the top of his head, he says, “I see 7 problems, I see 37 problems with this thing”. And then he’d list them right off. Just hearing him for the first time, he’s wonderful, he’s amazing. I was really kind of scared that I had taken liberties with this synopsis that he expressly singled me out to do. I’m like, ‘I’m Berni Wrightson, you want me to do Spider-Man?’ He said you’re going to like this, read it, and he was right. I liked it. I said ‘Yes, I want to do this’.

T Someone told me a story about him. He had said that he gives stories to people to do, and they can’t draw them the way he sees them, and he doesn’t like that.

B That happens to me too. I see things very often and it doesn’t come out the way I saw it, and I sit there and I get real frustrated, you know. Why is this not coming out the way I see it? And the thing is I see things exactly the way I draw them, and they don’t come out that way. If I could put down on paper a picture the way I see it in my mind, it would just be so perfect. It would make every other Berni Wrightson picture that you’ve ever seen like a pale imitation. In my mind it’s alive and no matter how alive the picture comes out to be, it’s still not a tenth of what I’ve imagined it. I don’t know if all artists are like that or what. I asked Jeff once, how does it look inside your head before you see it come out on canvas? Is it that stylized and does it have that much of your personality? He said, “Oh no, no. Inside my head it’s absolute reality”, and he said he’s just not good enough to paint it as absolute reality.

Unless I’m looking at something it’s not real. I’ll look at something for a long time and then close my eyes or turn around visualize it, and it’s the way I draw it immediately. I don’t see photographs or movies in my mind. I see pictures.

T OK. Thank you for talking with us and sharing your thoughts.

B My pleasure.