1. What initially drew you to comics?
I started drawing comics at age 11—the original ‘Star Wars’ came out that year (1977), and I wanted to draw my own Star Wars comics, so I had my mother buy me one of those sketchbooks with the black hardcover you see in art supply stores. It was sci-fi movies like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Alien’ that inspired me to do comics, not Marvel and DC comics (I read them sometimes and had a small collection, but I’ve never been a huge reader of superhero material). I drew my own sci-fi comics feverishly all through my adolescence. I stopped during college, where I majored in philosophy, then took it up professionally after that.
2. What do comics allow you to do as a creator?
Comics as a mode of storytelling is related to but very different from both fiction writing and film. It combines aspects of both, but you can do things with comics that you can’t do with either writing alone or film. Part of it comes down to your individual style as a writer and artist. ‘Watchmen’ was made into a pretty good movie, but there was no way the film could replicate (eg) what was done in the ‘Fearful Symmetries’ chapter of the graphic novel. You can play with the flow of time, you can emphasise things with closeups and angles, you can prompt your reader to flip back and revisit an image or a page, you can create moods with color choices, all kinds of things. If you are a graphic novelist doing the writing and the art (as I did with my graphic novel ‘The Furnace’), it’s a bit like making a film—only you’re the director, the actors, the set designer, the special effects guy, the scriptwriter, all of it at once—it’s a very daunting thing.
3. You've worked on some very notable titles and with some very popular characters -- any particularly positive experience you'd like to share about?
Denys Cowan was the closest thing I had to a mentor. We worked on ‘Hardware’ for Milestone Media in the mid-90s (around the time I first started working in the mainstream comics industry). We also did the art for ‘Batman: The Ultimate Evil’ together—I learned a tremendous amount from Denys, and it was joy working with him. I also inked about 500 pages of JLA material pencilled by Val Semeiks in the late 90s and early 2000s—also a great joy. Val and Denys are rock-solid artists and both great pros, I simultaneously learned a lot and had a great time inking them.
4. Please tell us about your book, The Making of a Graphic Novel, and any other titles you'd like to share about.
‘The Making of a Graphic Novel’ was a very interesting book published in 2005 by Watson-Guptill. It’s a flip book: oriented one way it’s a 100-page graphic novel in black and white called ‘The Resonator’; flip it over and oriented the other way it’s 100 pages of instructional comics material all about how I made the graphic novel. It’s not exactly a widely-known book. BUT, interestingly, ‘The Resonator’ really hit home with a lot of people. Every year I get a couple of e-mails from people saying it positively rocked their universe.
In 2016, Monacelli Press published my ‘How to Draw Sci-fi Utopias and Dystopias’—I’m currently finishing its sequel ‘How to Draw Sci-fi Heroes and Villains’, which will be published by Monacelli Press/Phaidon in spring of 2023. Both of these have been great fun to work on, and I’m very pleased with how both came out.
They really allowed me to stretch my wings as a creator of sci-fi imagery, and to share a lot of my insights about sci-fi and tips on how to draw.
In 2018, Tor Books published ‘The Furnace’, a sci-fi graphic novel written and drawn by myself. It was 7 years in the making, and was very well received by critics and readers.
5. Where can we find more information about your work?
My website is: www.prentisrollinsart.com. Follow me on Instagram: @prentisrollins.
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