Matt Kindt interview
REVOLVER is a tale of two worlds and how both test a man to his limits. Stuck in a dead-end job with a boss he can’t stand and a materialistic girlfriend, Sam rises from a late night of bar-hopping to discover his whole world has changed. Literally. An avian flu outbreak has killed millions, the nation’s infrastructure has crashed and a dirty bomb has destroyed Seattle. Forced to go on the run, Sam awakes to a normal world the next day – and to chaos again the day after that. A single constant between the two worlds will undo all the damage, if he can find it – but that seems near impossible.
Ain't It Cool News recently interviewed Revolver artist/writer Matt Kindt, and they have given us permission to reproduce an excerpt on our blog.
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HUMPHREY LEE (HL): Okay sir, first things first: Unless there is some mini-series or whatnot I’m not aware of, this is the first time you’ve done work through the Vertigo line, which seems like it’d be a perfect match for you. What finally brought this about?
MATT KINDT (MK): Well, I’d pretty much day-dreamed about doing something for Vertigo since I was in high school. That was back when the original SHADE THE CHANGING MAN was coming out (Peter Milligan) and SANDMAN just started and all of those original crazy titles. But as I broke into comics and ended up doing my own thing I just took a different path into comics through the early PISTOLWHIP books and SUPER SPY and 3 STORY. But a good friend of mine (and editor) at Top Shelf – Brett Warnock knew an editor at Vertigo (Bob Schreck) and so I got into contact with Bob who, unbeknownst to me, was aware of, and had loved my other books. So I ended up showing him my next few book ideas to see if one of them would be a good fit for Vertigo and he picked REVOLVER. My inner geek hadn’t been that excited since I found out my first books were going to be published. Getting letters on DC letterhead and their Christmas gift they send out during the holidays -- man. I completely geeked out. I usually use a pretty thick watercolor paper to do my original art on but I actually had them send me the official DC/Vertigo paper so I could work on it at least once. I’ll never do it again – only because I like the thicker, rougher stock – but I wanted to have those first pages on “official” DC paper.
HL: We’ll keep rolling with another easy one: What would be your quick pitch on REVOLVER for those who may not have known about it until now?
MK: Well, a guy wakes up, goes to his horrible day job and watches the world basically fall apart and end around him. He escapes the building and the city along with his boss (who he hates) and struggles to survive. The next day, he wakes up and everything is back to normal. Boring job, horrible boss, etc. He’s wondering what’s going on because he remembers this crazy world and now it’s normal again and nobody else remembers it. He goes to bed again that night, wakes up and he’s back in crazy end-of-the-world again. The book flips back and forth as he tries to get to the bottom of things. Wild dogs, gunfights, rockets, bum-fights, and assassination attempts are all involved.
HL: One thing I wanted to comment on, more on your work in general, is that your material always has such a deliberate progression about it. The pacing is always so meticulous as the panels and pages flow. How hard is it to maintain this? Do you find yourself rewriting sequences a lot to keep this flow?
MK: I lay out the entire book first in small thumbnails. That’s really where all the “real” writing happens. I generally know what the dialogue will be about but I don’t even fill all of that in. So yeah, I pace out the entire book first so I can go through and read it page by page in these tiny thumbnails to see how it feels. It’s really important to me that the story be “cartooned” well. I think there’s an art in graphic novels to telling the story that for lack of a better word I call cartooning. I think some artists would get offended by that term but I don’t mean it in a way that describes the style of art but more the actual story telling and how the action flows. Jeff Smith, Darwyn Cooke, and Christopher Blain are masters at this. It’s all about pacing and what action you show and the stuff between the panels that you decide not to show. It’s the trickiest part of comics I think. Every once in a while you read something and it’s like – what? What happened here? Sometimes it’s an awkward transition or just a case of maybe needing one more panel to space out some action.
Read the rest of the interview here.
