GKO: MADHOUSE
Here you will find our rambalings on all area's of Batman, interviews and speical features!
CBR News: One of the reasons I wanted to make your signing was to bring this copy of "Batman Annual" #14 I've had since I was a kid. Is this the only other time you drew Batman outside of "Return of Bruce Wayne"?
Chris Sprouse: I also did a "Legends of the Dark Knight" – I think it was #27. It was right after the second Tim Burton Batman movie came out, and they had a mad architect blowing up all the modern buildings in Gotham, and behind them were the supposedly old buildings but they were really the Tim Burton Gotham buildings. That was the storyline, and I did the first part of three in 1992. So that was the last time I drew Batman.
You've generally not been known for following characters along through your career unless it's Tom Strong or one of your own characters. Batman is someone who a lot of artists like to return to because it's such a strong visual and design.Did you want to come back and see how your version of the character evolves over the years?
With Batman for me, it's bizarre because I'm finding myself choking like I did with a lot of recent Superman covers. It's like "Oh my God, it's Batman and Superman" and I go in looking for this quality. I don't know what it is exactly, but they've got to look like Batman and Superman to me. I don't want to bring my own style to it. I want to make it not contradict my idea of what those characters are. I'm not going to give them some crazy twist and give Superman long hair or something. I don't know what I'm doing, really. It's not well thought out, but I know it when I get it. With Superman I rarely do, but with Batman I've had more luck not just getting the look but making it feel like Batman. I don't know why Superman is such a struggle. Everyone always says "You should just make him look like Tom Strong and give him and S-Curl," but to me, they're different characters so that doesn't work. Tom Strong is Tom Strong. Superman is something else.
With Batman, I have a little more of a grip, but I still feel like I fail more often than I succeed with him. It doesn't quite have that feel that it should have. I don't know what it is, but it's a quality that says "Batman" that I don't see in, say, somebody that would go extreme like a Simon Bisley or Bill Sienkiewicz Batman – not to put anyone down. There's a chance they'll have the feel of Batman, but it doesn't say "Batman" to me in the way that I grew up reading him. If anything, that's what I aim for. Somewhere between Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers and Michael Golden is the perfect-looking Batman. That's what I'm going for. But I also have ideas about the character where I like to play up the "dark" part of the Dark Knight Detective. He should be mysterious because so much a part of him was striking fear into the hearts of evil doers. He should really do that and not just be a guy in a bright blue and gray costume.
That's going through my head in a fraction of a second when I sit down to draw him. In "Return of Bruce Wayne" even though he doesn't look like Batman, that's what the story's about. It's him striking fear into the heart of people in order to stick up for the little guy and the downtrodden. He's putting fear into these Neanderthal guys, and he needed to have that feel even though he's in this other costume. I tried my best to do that where he just looks scary. I think except for maybe one or two panels I got it, but we'll see.
Well, this first Annual that you did really scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, but it was less for Batman and more for the details you brought to an already intense story. This page where the murderer nonchalantly and nakedly cleans up after the murder freaked me out.
That was the only page I kept. I just didn't want to meet the guy who wanted to own that. [Laughter] So I thought, "I'm not even going to put that one out at the conventions, so I kept it all these years, and I'm really glad because I don't have a lot of my artwork left. But I was dreading meeting the guy who would go, "That's the page for me."
This issue also has a lot of intense imagery with Two-Face and his scarring. Was making a Batman comics something that would scare the audience a bit something that was in your mind even then?
Yeah. That was my first time drawing Batman, and it was strange because that's the one book I look at now – I think I'd been in the business for two years at that point though I hadn't done a lot of jobs – and I wish I could go back and redo that story. It's a great story, and I did the best I could, but I was just too new. I made a lot of storytelling mistakes and a lot of the lighting was just a little too bright for what I see as Batman. Some of it has no lighting where I just avoided the issue altogether...cowardly. [Laughs] But I love that issue too, and I always found it a lot scarier that Two-Face was insane before [the acid attack] ever happened. Or at least he was mentally unstable, and the accident completely wrecked this ordinary guy. It's similar to Batman's origin where we've got normal people and something horrible happens to them and this is the result. It's not radiation or something out of a '60s origin story.
Read the entire interview here.
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