as interviewed by Daisy Holzapfel
Igor: Blacktop came out of Shane's crazy head. That dude is for sure obsessed with cars. And it helps that he's a good writer too. Shane started to work in the studio at the beginning of this year and approached me with the idea immediately. I kinda liked it, we talked a lot, and I helped to spice it up a bit. Right now whole story is done, Shane needs to go through first draft and polish dialogues and some sequences. It will be a great story. I like to witness a process when a basic idea and obsession with hot rods start to shape up and turns into something with flesh and blood. The creative process is like giving birth to a new baby.
Igor: Well, I'm not THAT old, I was born a bit later, but the fact is, I was obsessed with American culture and that way of life when I was a child (4-6 years old). My mom's sister moved to Canada in the early fifties, and started a family. From time to time, she would send us American family magazines like �Look� or �American.� You can imagine my how my imagination would unleash looking at those beautiful pictures of gorgeous ladies - perfectly groomed, happy families driving biiiig shiny cars, chewing biiiig shiny burgers with biiig shiny perfect teeth, passing by biiiig shiny family bungalows surrounded with biiiig shiny lawns. Little did I know about retouching or how the other 99% Americans lived. For me, America remained for years the ultimate fantasyland, inhabited with perfect smiling people. Doing BLACKTOP is a challenge for me 'cause I'd like to tackle my childhood dreams and show the other side. Although it looks like the peak of the golden age, the 50�s were the beginning of decline of the empire, America's underbelly was very different than in those shiny magazines: the cold war in full swing, Korean war and Cuba as the beginning of American military expansion all over the world, McCarthy's witch hunt, massive race riots, natural resource destruction and big time pollution, chemical warfare experiments, hard drugs being largely introduced, censorship destroying the mass culture entertainment industry etc. etc....... By the way, when I was recalling the images in these magazines, I just realized there were never pictures of colored people in them...
Daisy: I know Shane, that little grease monkey, gets really detailed with automobile description. Do you, yourself, know a lot about cars or do you have to keep going, � Yo! Shane! What the fuck are you talking about here, dude?�
Igor: What I know about cars is how to drive them, but I admire cars from the fifties as awesome artifacts- for me that's the last time when you could say for the cars "they look gorgeous!" And Shane is doing a great job providing me with tons of references. So, here's an opportunity for me to draw hundreds of them.
Daisy: Since �Blacktop� is set in the 1950�s, I have to ask�in terms of pop-culture, what is you�re favorite decade or time period and why?
Igor: Well, actually, there are two periods: I was 15 in '72. So, I second hand sucked in all this hippy crap about peace, love, and freedom. There was something in it, though; I had the feeling of great freedom and happiness. We would mate like rabbits - there was no AIDS at that time, and try every possible weed or chemical we could run into. Great age of experiments with music and art. The other period I really lived was the PUNK era . I was 20 in '77, so I inhaled with full lungs the beautiful age of anarchy and the craziest fashion ever. I liked anarchy more than peace and harmony - and still do.
Daisy: What was it like being a comic book artist in Europe, in contrast to being one in North America? How did you come to break into the American market?
Igor: Being a comic artist in Europe is a more laid-back position; there is not so much pressure. There are no 22 page monthly books, there are 48 �52 page big hard cover albums. You can live with two a year. In America, the market is bigger but the competition is harder and tougher, because the only god here is money. I don't have as much room to experiment as I had in Europe. To my amusement, all the experiments I was doing over there in seventies and eighties, such as storytelling (pacing, flow of time, suspense, panels interaction etc.) became mainstream nowadays in the American comic industry, not so much because of the European, but the MANGA influence! It makes me feel like a fish in the water, because lots of the big deal inventions in American comics I felt (in Croatia we would say) like "inventing hot water" � been there, done that. So, American comics became an excellent melting pot of different comic cultures. And one more good thing- I�ve been collecting comics for ages and I noticed that I can find more good reads the last few years than before (and I'm really picky). There is a significant increase in the quality of art and writing, especially among the big publishers like Marvel or DC. I don't need to buy only Fantagraphic or Top Shelf or Vertigo books to get quality. With writers like Morrison, Bendis, Ellis,Millar, Straczinsky etc., you can buy superhero books and be pleasantly surprised. You're not doomed only with Moore and Miller anymore. I found it very significant that most of the most popular writers and artists are coming from Europe (including moi), talkin' about mainstream superhero huge runs. That's cool � it is a time of big changes and shifting...
I started to work for the U.S. market in late eighties, with some shorter stories for HEAVY METAL magazine, but my main gate entrance begun with gigs for MARVEL TALES in mid 90�s. Then I switched to DARK HORSE, WILDSTORM, and again to MARVEL 2 years ago. When I started to work on CABLE (later SOLDIER X) critics and fans all over media and Internet asked: Where the hell did this guy come from? I even got a reward for the best newcomer on a British comic website last year. And I've been around for years, being doomed to be an artist's (or an editor's artist). The problem is with readers- people who read MARVEL books don't read DC or TOP SHELF, and vice versa. They stick stubbornly to the same books and characters for years and just DON'T want to explore what's behind another hill.
Daisy: What are the American comics like as compared to European ones? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each, in general? Are there any European comic book characters that you think could be highly successful here if given half a chance, or vice-versa?
Igor: I think that US comics have more of a chance in Europe than in reverse, especially with this new breed of artists and writers coming from Scotland and Ireland, not to mention this new Latin American wave. European fans appreciate style, craft and details and all those guys like Hitch, Quitely, Risso or Rodrigues have it all. I'm not so sure about European comics being successful in US. Europeans, especially the French (France being biggest comic market over there) are so damn self content (same as Americans) and they have a problem with good stories - many times they spoil them with too much intellectualism.
Daisy: It says on you�re resume that you designed stuff for some Croatian rock groups and even Canadian bands as well. Since I�m such a music junkie, I was wondering if you could tell me a little about the Croatian and Canadian music scenes and some of the bands you did work for.
Igor: I'm a music junkie too, and actually, I spend most of my pocket money on CD's. Once upon a time, I used to play actively with the band 'RIVIERA' (check the poster in the 'graphic design' section on my website). You would be surprised with the number and diversity of performers and music in Croatia, being always into most current musical trends and events all around the world, many times being way ahead from, lets say the US music scene (Europe is amazing musical melting pot, especially talking about "world music" scene). But of course, there is language barrier; so Croatian music does not have the status in the music world, which it deserves.
Talking about Canadian music, it's the same old, same old... there are still too many bands that sound like Pearl Jam, and too many female singers spilling their guts out about bad relationships and PMS...If I want to listen such music, I still go to old Joni Mitchell records (CD's like "Hissing Of Summer Lawns"). But there are bands I really dig like one long lasting treasure called "Rheostatics" or "Tea Party"; a bit pompous, but of consistent quality. The local Winnipeg scene was always merciless with domestic bands. Thanks to the lack of local support, in the past six years I�ve witnessed so many real gems disappear into the vaults of oblivion like "Leaderhouse" or "Gardening with Alice"... What's worth of mentioning right now is the retro, B52's-electronica called Vav Jungle (vavjungle.com). But that is too weird for the conservative; slow economy agricultural swamp of Winnipeg. I've been in contact with many local bands and there is only a few of them picking music as their only choice for making a living. Many of them have, I would say, an inbuilt "fear of making it big.�
Daisy: I see that you also did some illustrations for �The Hobbit.� Did you see �The Lord of the Rings� movies? How did your vision of the Tolkien stuff compare to Peter Jackson�s or rather Alan Lee�s? What about the 70�s cartoon version?
Igor: I looove those movies! Those are closest to my vision of Tolkien universe. Talking about Alan Lee, he�s a great artist but too polished, and without raw energy. Ralph Bakshi's seventies cartoon version is not my favorite - I always imagined Hobbits differently. (You can check out my Hobbit if you search internet with name 'Kordej' - that's how they pronounce me in Croatia. Then you'll find one croatian website with Tolkien illustrations. Let me know what you think about my Hobbit version - * to all interested, visit my website: kordey.ca, and let me know your opinion about it all.)
Daisy: Have you ever drawn a female character that you found yourself strangely attracted to? I mean, I�m not gay or anything, but the Black Widow�s pretty hot�
Igor: Talking about Black Widow, my favorite character is Nikky, the bad girl. I love bad girls, they are so full of life, and what makes them very sexy is their readiness to experiment and investigate all the aspects of life and love. That's why Emma Frost is one of my favorite characters. I love �Love and Rockets,� �100 Bullets� and such books with strong female characters.
Daisy: Ok, to conclude- what other projects either inside or outside the comic books are you working on currently? What are your other upcoming and future projects looking like?
Igor: That's a good connection with the previous question. I'm just finished with complete pencils of my new book, on which I've been working for over a year, parallely with my main projects. It is called 'STORM � ARENA� and it's 144 pages long of mayhem with meanest, cleverest, and sexiest characters around - all four main roles are female. If they let me ink it, it is going to be my masterpiece. About other projects, as far as I know, they want me to continue working on X-TREME X-MEN, so that's secure for close future. For the distant future, I don't know...There is always a big dilemma, to continue to sell my soul to the devil and continue to work on super heroes for big bucks OR become a freelancer again and work just for my own pleasure...Well, as we all know money makes the world go round. I can always comfort myself with the fact that I'm making a difference with my artistic approach and comics I'm producing are not just ordinary crap. I know that I cannot change the world but if I manage to change the point of view of just a few regular geeks, I've done a great job!