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'SNIKTS' AND 'SMASHES' with RON GARNEY | | The 'Amazing Spider-Man' artist talks about his current run on 'Wolverine' and his upcoming maxi-series with Greg Pak, 'Skaar: Son of Hulk.' | | | By Kiel Phegley | | Posted 3/20/2008 | |  | | The Marvel U's got a new baby boy on its way, but this one doesn’t carry a binky...he carries a big ass sword. And come to think of it, he’s not so much a baby. He’s the son of the Incredible Hulk.
In a 12-issue maxi-series promised since the final issue of the blockbuster event World War Hulk, it has just been announced that artist Ron Garney (Amazing Spider-Man) will draw the space-faring story of Hulk’s son on the remnants of the planet Sakaar with Greg Pak on writing duties. But there’ll be more than savagery in Skaar: Son of Hulk when it debuts in June as both writer and artist can attest. But before we get to the specifics of space, it’s important to take a look at the goings on of Earth in the Marvel U with some questions for Garney on his current four-part arc on Wolverine.
| |  WIZARD: Your second issue of Wolverine recently hit stands. The style is quite different than your past few years of output. In some ways it’s much tighter, but in other ways it’s totally rough. Is this a result of you inking yourself?
GARNEY: To be perfectly honest, it’s not inks. It’s scanned from pencils. And I always wanted to do that because I’m fundamentally not a style guy. I don’t go out of my way to stylize anything as much as work on fundamentals. A lot of what happens is that no matter who’s inking me, it always manages to change it enough to where I felt like it could never fully be what I would really want it to be because I kept tailoring the pencils towards how the inker might ink it. So it would probably be over-simplified. And in no way am I saying that I didn’t enjoy the inkers I’ve worked with. It’s just that when you go from Dan Green to Sal Buscema to Mark Morales to Bob Wiack to Klaus Janson to Bill Reinhold—you get vastly different interpretations of your pencils. All great, but all different, nonetheless.
But with this stuff, knowing it’s going to be scanned from the pencils, knowing it’s going to be exactly what I wanted, I was able to do what comes out a little more naturally. And I think it’s been a good result. I really love the effect. And I don’t know if it’s the lead time so much. It’s been a great year with the birth of my son. I don’t know. Things just started clicking more. I looked at the work a little more seriously and just was having more fun with it, I guess. I think it shows. It’s a great story, too. That doesn’t hurt.
Well, your last run on Amazing Spider-Man definitely allowed a long time for you to get comfortable with the character, but there were so many crossovers and add-ins, it must be nice to draw two characters for four issues and that’s it.
GARNEY: Yeah. I’ve been doing this for 18 years now, and a large part of that has been regular titles month after month after month. And regardless of whether they’ve been long runs or not, that’s been a lot of penciling work, and it’s gone through it’s ups and downs. When I was on JLA, there were so many characters, and I’m better at sinking my teeth into one guy and really getting a feel for that character and trying to create something with that. With Wolverine, it was the perfect chance for that.
Plus, Jason Aaron’s writing—we’re both fans of Spaghetti Westerns and Clint Eastwood movies, and hearing it was going to be set in the past, that was really exciting for me. So that’s basically where it was coming from, from the beginning. It was a happy thing for me to get the one character. And I enjoyed Spider-Man, but Wolverine, this has been a lot of fun for me.
Wolverine has popped up on your pages before from time to time, but people have so many different variations for how he can be drawn, adding claw length and what not. Your take here seems very in line with the original design of a small and scrappy guy. Was that on your mind?
GARNEY: Yeah, I guess. For me it’s all about the feel, and with Wolverine his claws are like Spidey’s webs. But with Wolverine, it’s a lot harder to create something unique than it is with Spider-Man’s webs. But what I mean when I say that is that I’m thinking about the old Spider-Man webbing to the Todd McFarlane version. Everybody who gets on a character wants to put their own feel or spin on it. For me, I’m just feeling it. If it doesn’t feel right, I don’t do it. If the claws feel too large or too hokey, it just doesn’t fit with my drawing. That’s the way I approach it.
A lot of it is instinct. One of the things that’s clicked with me this year is really drawing from my own instincts without over-thinking things and doing what feels right. And plus, you get to a point where you’ve drawn long enough—a few years ago when I was doing X-Men I had a lot of other distractions. I really wasn’t focused as much on my drawing as I have been the last couple of years. That makes a big difference, too. It really does depend on your influences and your instinct and letting them flow naturally without trying to force anything.
You mentioned Jason’s script with its Spaghetti Western overtones, and in issue two you got to move the action in 1921 from the frontier and the fort more into the city. Will you continue to play with locales as the story moves along?
GARNEY: Not exactly. We’re pretty much primarily set in Kansas City. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the story kind of evolves from the second issue. You’ll see more of where the story’s directing. But it stays in Kansas City. I think that’s where Jason’s from [Editor's note: It Is! Aaron is from KC]. But there’s a reason for that. So we’re not jumping, and we’re not going to be somewhere else all of the sudden.
I would like for it to have jumped around even more. I just love that stuff. I like drawing past eras. It doesn’t matter when. They’re very distinctive in style and feel, and it’s challenging to make them believable and fun for me.
It seems as though the color is helping set the past and the present as well in this book.
GARNEY: Jason Keith’s really great, and initially in the first issue, he went with a very cold feel for Afghanistan. It was feeling a bit too wintery, so I had him warm it up a little bit. But he’s got a great sense of that, of trying to create a mood. There’s a couple pages I looked at this morning that he just knocked out of the park for that reason—setting a mood and a tone in the panels. I’m really happy with it.
Let me ask you a few questions about Skaar: Son of Hulk. It seems funny because you worked on the regular Hulk book in the ‘90s and when that last “Hulk” movie came out, the issue everyone went to was the one where you drew the “Hulk dogs.” Now you’re in that world again, and there’s a whole new movie on the way.
GARNEY: [Laughs] I know. It’s just serendipitous, I guess.
Is one of the nice things about having a long career in the industry the chance to take on, if not the same character, a very similar character with a completely different tone and setting?
GARNEY: Yeah. Well, I haven’t started any of it yet, but it’s going to be weird for me to go back to that. It’s really not in a way because it’s a different character. It’s the Hulk’s son. The challenge for me is—when you think about the Hulk, the first thing that comes to my mind is this unbelievably huge, enigmatic, monstrous, most powerful, gigantic green creature in the Marvel Universe that his name amongst all the heroes of the Marvel Universe creates a shudder. How do you create that same feeling for his son? His son was born on another planet and is sort of this Hulk/Conan hybrid, and the challenge is to make him feel as enigmatic as his father. So I’m excited about it.
And it is weird. It’s full circle. It’s been almost ten exact years, and I’ve thought about it, but I try not to place too much in the hands of fate. I try not to think about it too much.
Have you been following Greg’s stuff from Planet Hulk through the World War Hulk event?
GARNEY: Yeah. I nibbled on some of the Planet Hulk because I don’t get the Marvel comps or anything, and I hardly have a chance to get out to the comic store, so a lot of the time I haven’t been reading a lot of stuff. But I did get a chance to read the whole World War Hulk thing, and it was really phenomenal. It was wonderfully written and wonderfully illustrated, and it was very exciting. It’s always exciting when you see all those characters come together like that. And nobody does it better than JR [John Romita, Jr.], obviously. And it was a great read. I couldn’t wait to go from one page to the next, and by the end of it, I was very excited. Initially when I was offered Skaar: Son of Hulk I was a little apprehensive until I read that. Then I was really excited about it.
I know you haven’t done any pages yet, but do you have any feelings about what you’re most excited to draw in this story?
GARNEY: To be honest, I’m really most excited about the idea of the flavor of this character. Like I said, he’s a Conan-like character. On his planet, that’s their way. He’s more of a warrior-type, and it’ll be fun to remove ourselves from this planet and go to more fantasy land—add a Frazetta-type flavor to the book. I’m probably the most excited about that. It’s different.
And I hadn’t really done anything like that. I mean, I did Silver Surfer. And I wanted to do that on Silver Surfer, but when I’d first taken over that book, he’d been in outer space for so long with the Ron Lim era. But I wanted to do even more. I wanted to do sci-fi fantasy with that book and not so much comic book as fantasy illustration. I think I’ll be able to do that more with this book.
For Skaar: Son of Hulk mastermind Greg Pak’s take on the character, the world and his artist, click through to the next page.
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