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Two Part Interview with the folks behind
DC Vertigo’s AMERICAN VAMPIRE!
Part One
Part One
Q’s by Matt Adler
@’s by Scott Snyder
Writer of Vertigo’s AMERICAN VAMPIRE
Hi everyone. Matt Adler here with a two part interview with the people behind Vertigo’s new book AMERICAN VAMPIRE. I had a chance to talk with both the writer and the artist of who collaborated with Stephen King on this project. In part one I talk with Scott Snyder about his part of the book. Then in part two, I got to chat with artist Rafael Albuquerque. Enjoy…
MATT ADLER (MA): Tell us a bit about your background as a writer.
SCOTT SNYDER (SS): Well, I always wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid, but I switched mediums a couple of times; first I wanted to be a comic book writer when I was a kid, and a comic book artist, but somewhere in high school I really fell into prose writing. And so in college I began doing fiction writing, short fiction, and I went to school for it, grad school for it, and I wrote a book in 2005, and it came out in 2006. I’ve always been a huge comic fan though on the side, so when they opportunity came to be able to write for comics as well, it was one of the best days of my life.MA: So you’ve always been a big comics fan.
SS: Oh yeah, absolutely. I used to go to those conventions over at Penn Plaza where they film the Maury show now, back in the days before Comic-Con when it was much less cool. My dad used to take me every week to Forbidden Planet when it was on 13th and Broadway. So I’ve been a pretty die-hard fanboy since I was a kid.MA: Did you have a particular favorite comic back then?
SS: Yeah, well it changes over time. When I was young, I loved Spider-Man, he was my favorite. And then I was lucky enough to come of age when all the great Batman stories came out in ’86; Frank Miller’s Year One, and Dark Knight Returns, and the Killing Joke, so Batman quickly became my favorite as I got a little older. Spider-Man became really uncool. And then the X-Men when I was a teenager, and probably back to Spider-Man now that I have a kid myself. He’s a big Spidey fan.MA: So have you stayed somewhat involved with comics? Do you still occasionally go to conventions?
SS: Oh yeah, I never took a real break from reading them ever over the years, even in college. It’s been a pretty steady diet. But for some reason it just didn’t occur to me that there would be a way to apply to write for them. I just didn’t have any access to that world, so for some reason it just didn’t dawn on me that it was something that I could try to approach. I didn’t know how to get any access to it. So I just didn’t think about it very much.MA: So having been in both worlds, in terms of prose and comics, are comics a lot harder to break into?
SS: Well, I grew up going towards prose, so I think both…the funny thing is, people think of them as these sort of mystifying fields, but they both have relatively straightforward paths in. Most people do indie comics first; self-publish, or work with smaller companies and then work their way up, and get noticed by the bigger companies. And prose, it’s the same thing, it’s just a matter of finding people who you enjoy sharing your work with and getting better at it over time, maybe going to grad school if you can. So I didn’t really find that it was incredibly hard to break into either one; they’re both, I think, equally hard fields to keep up in though. It’s hard because the bar is so high in comic writing right now; and in fiction writing as well, but all across the board right now in comics, you can’t throw a stone without hitting an awesome book.MA: So how did you become involved with this project?
SS: Well, in terms of getting involved with comics, I wrote a story for an anthology my friend was editing called “Who Can Save Us Now?”; it was sort of contemporary literary writers come up with new superheroes, and I did a story about a kid who was in the Bikini Atoll tests in the ‘50s and kind of develops these strange powers. And it caught the attention of a couple of editors, one at Marvel, one at DC. And they actually approached me after the reading for the launch, and asked if I was a real comic fan, and would I be interested if I was in maybe pitching a couple of things. So it was such a wonderful day. I wound up pitching to Marvel because they had a couple of openings in their 75th Anniversary line last year for the Timely Comics Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. So I did a Human Torch story. And that led to the opportunity to pitch to Vertigo.And this idea in particular is something I’ve been kicking around in my head for a few years, just trying to find the right medium for it. And when I had the chance to pitch it for comics, it just seemed like a natural fit, because the series itself centers on the idea of vampire evolution, where it imagines vampires as these physiological creatures that have evolved over time; every once in a while when the bloodline hits somebody new from somewhere new, it can randomly mutate, and make something new. So there’s this kind of secret genealogy of vampires that stretches all the way back to pre-modern times.
MA: So they’re not necessarily dead?
SS: Well, they’re undead.MA: But they still evolve.
SS: Yeah, but the idea is that every once in a while when they turn somebody into a vampire, that person will kind of mutate or evolve into a different kind of vampire, with different powers and abilities, a different look, like different fangs, different claws, different weaknesses, different strengths. So there’s this kind of evolutionary tree of vampires. The main character of the series is this new species of American vampire, this character who represents the first one of that kind of emerges in the Old West in the 1880s, when this sociopathic outlaw gets turned into a vampire and finds himself this new kind of vampire that is powered by sunlight.MA: Well, that’s certainly a switch from the traditional vampire.
SS: Yeah, exactly; they’re burned by the sunlight, whereas he’s powered by the sunlight. He’s got bigger fangs, bigger claws; he has this sort of rattlesnake quality to him. He’s basically sort of like a “Vampire 2.0” to them, to the old sort of “stake-through-the-heart”, nocturnal vampires that we all know from Dracula and so on. So, when I got a chance to pitch it for comics, part of the fun of the series is that each “season” (sort of the equivalent of a television season), each cycle, each 5 to 6 issues story, is going to investigate a different decade of American history at different times, and it follows the bloodline of this vampire, Skinner Sweet, this new American vampire, and follows his character as well, and it kind of moves through the decades as he infects different eras of American history.MA: How did Stephen King come on board?
SS: Well, I’d been friendly with him since he was kind enough to review my story collection, Voodoo Heart, when it came out in 2006. And he was really incredibly generous and wrote me a nice quote, and I’ve been in touch with him ever since. And when this got greenlighted at Vertigo, I sent it to him to see what he thought, just to see if he thought if there were any holes in the pitch or anything like that, and ask him if he would be willing to say a word or two about it when it finally came out. And he wrote back saying that he liked this character Skinner enough that he’d be willing to do an issue or two if we ever wanted.MA: You must have been blown away when he said that.
SS: Yeah, I was like “an issue if I wanted?! I’d love that!” And he was like, “Well, I don’t know if Vertigo will go for it, because I’ve never written a comic before.” And I was like “I’m pretty sure they’ll go for it,” and he was like “You think so?” So I went to Vertigo and told them, and obviously they were ecstatic, so I told him, and he started off just writing an issue, just to see how he felt about it, that was going to tell the origin of Skinner, and he wound up writing 5! And I’m just so grateful to him; he’s been so generous, and also just watching him work has been really inspiring. He’s a serious genius.MA: Has he told you what it’s like for him diving into comics for the first time?
SS: Yeah, we talk all the time; he’s done with his story now and we’re on to the next season, but while he was working on it, we spoke really often, emailing back and forth almost every day, with the editor and artist as well. He was just really humble and really great about taking editorial notes, and for the most part, he didn’t really need any when it came to story; it was mostly just getting the hang of like how many panels fit a page, and whether or not to use thought balloons…MA: Yeah, I read that he wrote in thought balloons, and they were like “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.”
SS: Yeah, I kind of missed it though. I was actually kind of like, “Oh, you know, maybe thought bubbles…”, because his story takes place in the Old West, and there’s something really antiquated about it in a cool way.MA: I never really understood why those have been phased out. I guess some people might find them too “comicbooky” or something like that, but I always thought it was a nice way to get inside the character’s head.
SS: Yeah, they just try and do it now in voiceover captions or whatever, so it’s more just the actual bubbly bubbles that they objected to. But he’s been great, and the only times I think that he ever needed any editorial advice beyond just formal stuff like that was when a couple of times I think he tore the head of a character before they were supposed to die. So we had to sort of protect a few of them. (laughs) But he couldn’t have been a better sport about all of it, and again, just watching him do this, he’s a serious genius. He put together a story that was just so much better than what I could have, that it was intimidating.
MA: Have you guys talked about the possibility of him making a return to the book at some point?
SS: We have actually talked about it, yeah. I told him he’s always welcome, obviously, to come back and work on it, but he mentioned a couple of decades that when we get to, he has a couple of ideas for, so we’re definitely leaving a big door and a presidential suite open for him in the series whenever he would like to return.MA: Given that it’s going to be exploring the various decades of American history, do you see it as a finite series?
SS: Well, it’s an ongoing, so we’re going to try to go backwards and forwards, and explore the secret history of vampires, and vampire relations with humans, and so on. So there’s a lot of lateral movement as well, but I know what the end of the series will be. I have an idea in my head of what the climax should be.MA: So it could be something like the series Y THE LAST MAN, where it was an ongoing, but it had an ending.
SS: Exactly like that. That’s one of my favorite series of the last few years. So yes, definitely like that, or 100 BULLETS.MA: So, can you tell us a little bit about this first arc?
SS: Well, the fun thing is I pitched it starting with Skinner’s story in the Old West, and Vertigo was a little hesitant to start there, because the Old West is sort of “give or take” for a lot of people, and it’s such a narrow sort of focus. So they asked me, because the pitch was that I was going to explore these different decades, if I would start at a different point. So I started in the ‘20s, where I had this idea for a story about a struggling actress in the old silent film studio system, and how after this bad night out on the town, she crosses paths with Skinner, and he gives her the chance to become something like him, and get revenge on the people who have wronged her in Hollywood. So I pitched them that, and that’s basically what they bought me starting with. And then when Steve came on, I gave him the original one, the Skinner one, and they were going to do sort of teasers at the end of each of my 5 issues, each of them would have some teaser about Skinner’s origin. And the Steve wrote, and it expanded, and expanded into these 5 issues, so they decided “Why don’t we just make them into these double-sized issues, and have your story and then Steve’s?” So each issue for the first cycle is like one chapter in my story about Pearl Jones this actress who crosses paths with Skinner and this coven of powerful Hollywood vampires, and then the second 16 pages are Steve’s story about Skinner in the Old West and how he comes to be the first American vampire. So the first cycle traces that trajectory; they’re totally standalone stories, where you can read them independently, but they have fun crossovers where certain characters make cameos back and forth, and there’s certain overlaps between them with things that pop up surprisingly in each cycle.MA: Have you been influenced by any other vampire stories?
SS: Well, I came up with the idea for this during the last kind of “vampire glut”, like 2006-2007, when there were the sequels to “Blade”, and “Underworld”, and “Queen of the Damned”, where all the vampires were that sort of Matrix-style, nocturnal, leather trenchcoat, sunglasses-wearing, kind of Euro-looking club-going, brooding, super-attractive breed that seems to always be walking through rainy cities and the sewers, and squatting on gargoyles and crying and so on. That whole aesthetic got me nostalgic for the vampires that I grew up on, the ones that were genuinely scary. The vampires from SALEM’S LOT, or from NEAR DARK, the Kathryn Bigelow film, or LOST BOYS, where they seem like vampires who actually are your neighbors or friends, or people that could live near you, and could actually come after you and kill you, as opposed to these sort of slick, fashion model type vampires. So the things that have influenced me really are those, the movies and books where vampires really are feral and scary, and primally frightening. Any of the stuff that tries to investigate why they are frightening, because to me they’re frightening because essentially it’s like the people that you know and love turning into an evil version of themselves and trying to murder you. Nothing gets scarier than that, like Ralphie Glick scratching at your window to be let in in the middle of the night. For me, when it comes to the things that are out now, as much as I appreciate something like Twilight where…and absolute kudos to Stephnie Meyer for doing something really original with vampires like making a vampire a Tiger Beat pinup…MA: I understand Stephen’s not too big a fan of that…
SS: (laughs) No, he’s not. And if I’m going to be completely honest, my wife is a big fan…
MA: Yeah, my aunt told me about a friend of hers who says “I know it’s terrible, but I can’t put it down.”
SS: Well, I read the first one to see what it was…it’s not a terrible book, it’s really well-done for what it is. And my feeling about it is, it’s a great idea, it’s really well-executed; it’s vampires as teen Tiger Beat pinup heartthrobs. And that’s really fresh, that’s original. And I’m glad it exists for that. And similarly, something like the VAMPPIRE DIARIES…TRUE BLOOD I actually like and I watch. And again, it’s not exactly my taste in the way that I think it’s really interesting to posit vampires as this kind of social underclass, and imagine how they would integrate themselves into human society and so on, but at the end of the day, as much as I like TRUE BLOOD and as appreciative as I am of how original TWILIGHT is, the vampires just aren’t scary in them. Everyone’s just “Oh Sooky, you’re so pretty!” And Edward twinkling in the sun like one of those stickers that the girls put in the books…that’s just not interesting to me. It’s not my taste. I definitely appreciate how original that is, it’s just not for me. I like my vampires scary, and when Skinner turns into a vampire, or Pearl vamps out, you don’t want to kiss them. You want to just run away. That’s the point, to make them frightening, give them some dignity. In our series, we’re going more traditional in that route, where there’s absolutely nothing romantic or sexy about the vampires when they’re in their vampire form.MA: Did you ever read BITE CLUB? It was a Vertigo series by Howard Chaykin from a few years ago…
SS: I didn’t read it, but I saw it. It looked really good.MA: It was pretty good. It was kind of a mix of vampires and THE SOPRANOS. But I’m not sure if that would be more on the side that you’re talking about, or more on the Twilight side. It seems like a more down-to-earth approach than something like TWILIGHT.
SS: I’m up for anything that does something new, whether or not it’s my taste. I actually just bought a shirt that says “Team Edward”, but it has a picture of Eddie Munster on it.MA: (laughs)
SS: So I was hoping to wear that to Comic-Con. But again, I’m really glad that exists, it’s a really good idea, and it’s really well done, it’s just not really for me. Steve has a little bit more…look, he’s the master of horror. So I think when they take something he loves, like a vampire, and make them cuddly, he kind of bristles against it maybe more than your average person. And that’s totally understandable. Whereas as I think I can be a little more diplomatic about it. (laughs) But at the end of the day I’m not going to run out and buy…BREAKING DAWN, or MOON, or whatever. (laughs) I’d rather go see THE CRAZIES, or DAYBREAKERS, or something like that.MA: Alright, can you tell us a little bit about the collaborative process between you, Steve, and Rafael Albuquerque?
SS: That’s the biggest difference between prose and comics; prose is just like you alone with your computer screen. The thing that’s just so refreshing about comics, and I feel like I’m just a happier person since I’ve been working in them, is that it’s just so entirely collaborative. I don’t know if it’s this way for everybody, but Rafael and I chat all day long on AIM about the stuff, and about life as well. I really feel like I’ve become friends with him, Mark Doyle, the editor, and Steve as well. The process of working was that we would each write a script; first we did a big outline where—when it became clear that Steve was going to wind up writing, he did a page breakdown first, just to show where his story was going, and I did one as well, and as it became clear that his story was going to span 5 issues I adjusted mine so that it would fit; it would be 50/50. And then we wound up scripting them, totally independently where I gave him my outline to see what he thought, if there was anything that could be better, and he showed me his outline, and I didn’t really have much to say because it was really good. And then we went off and scripted each issue, and then traded the issues to make sure that they matched up in a cool way, where there wasn’t anything incredibly repetitive or flat, like my issue wouldn’t have the same kind of sequence that his issue had, but for the most part organically it just kind of worked out well, there wasn’t a lot of editing at that point, and his scripts were really probably two or three times as detailed as mine at the end of the day, which was really exciting to read, because he goes into all the prose detail, describing everything in the room, everything in the landscape, everything about the characters; it was like reading a Stephen King novel. It was really fun to read.Anyway, after we did the actual scripts, and we traded with each other and had them in good shape, we’d show them to Mark as well, and he’d give us notes, and then we’d go to Rafael, and the thing with Rafael is that Rafael is just incredibly creative and involved, and from the beginning I told him that I’m relatively green, and Steve’s clearly green, since he’s never written a comic. Rafael isn’t green at all, and he has some amazing things under his belt, between big series like Blue Beetle and Superman/Batman, to his own creator-owned work. So I told him basically that what he should do is just tell us if there’s something that would work better a different way on the page, and as long as we can fit the story beats in there, we’ll adjust to his aesthetic. So it just sort of took off, where he seemed to really respond to having that kind of creative freedom and he wound up coming up with all these ideas for the series. For example, he suggested that he draw the stories of the first cycle in different styles. So for mine, he did these really crystal-hard inks that have this almost art-deco feel…MA: And he’s pretty much the master of shifting styles, right? He’s used a lot of different styles across his work.
SS: Yeah. What’s funny is he has all these different styles, but you always know it’s him. I think partly what it is is that he’s just such an expressive artist. That’s what really sold me on him from the beginning, because they auditioned a couple of people, but as soon as his sketches came in, it was like, “That’s the guy.” Because the expressions on the characters’ faces, on Pearl and Skinner, he just understood who they were. In the initial sketches, Skinner had this kind of mischievous grin on his face, and Pearl had this sort of bookish look to her, but she was sort of strong and determined. And it was like “That’s who the characters are.” You can see it in their eyes. So he switches up his style entirely, where Steve’s part of this cycle, he did in these washes, so it almost looks watercolor. It looks beautiful. It has this kind of antiquated, Western feel to it, where it has this watery, fluid, almost nostalgic look. And mine on the other hand, are these very hard inks. But both of them, you know immediately, are him, are Rafael, because he has such a good grasp of the characters emotionally and psychologically. You see immediately, “Yeah, that’s the guy who did the other one” even though the styles are so different.MA: If you were coming at this book as a reader rather than a writer, what would make this a book you’d want to read?
SS: Well, I always tell my students—I teach fiction and that kind of thing, and I always tell them, only write the kind of thing that you would be happy to pick up and read. So for me, it’s genuinely the comic that I would like pick up and read, and the reason for that is that it has an original concept-- in a vampire world where a lot of things have been done, I think it’s a genuinely fresh idea—this idea of vampire evolution, and on top of that, specifically dealing with this new American vampire, having a homegrown breed. But the other thing is that what it brings together for me at least is that it’s a propulsive, page-turning series, it’s a popcorn series, in a way that there’s plenty of gore, especially in Steve’s story, and scares, and twists, and all of that stuff. But on the other hand, in both Steve’s and my story, we both made an effort to have it be about the decades that the stories take place in. So Steve’s has a lot to do with fact vs. fiction in the Old West and mine has a lot to do with the hunger for fame in the 1920s (that you see nowadays as well) in the old Hollywood era. So we’re making a big effort to have it function on a lot of levels because we want it to be the book that we would like to go pick up. I know Steve does and I certainly do as well. We don’t want it to just be a page-turner; we want it to be as good a page-turner as you can get, but on top of that, to have some substance as well and to be able to investigate what makes not just Skinner and the vampires scary, or heroic in the case of Pearl, but what makes us, as Americans, each decade, scary and heroic as well. So I guess that’s the best answer I can give you for why I would pick it up myself.And also, Rafa’s art, even if I was the worst writer in the world and somehow Steve wasn’t Stephen King, he was like Stephen P. King, and we were all fooling you, and he was just some terrible guy from Long Island around the corner from me that I hired, and he’s a terrible writer and he wrote a horrible story, Rafael’s art would still be worth the price of admission, to see how he draws somebody disemboweled by a giant vampire is worth $3.99. And I just want to reiterate again, Rafael is the unsung hero of the whole thing, because I anticipated how much press, obviously, Steve was going to get with this and I couldn’t be more excited about that because I think he’s really going to shine on it, but if it was just me and Rafael, I feel like Rafael would get the lion’s share of the press, and he deserves such acclaim for contributing so creatively to the series, like I said, coming up with these two different art styles, but also he really helped develop the characters themselves, and he shaped the way the series falls in terms of the story on the page. If there’s any way to fit in another shout-out to him—and he’s become a really good friend, where we talk about everything from being married to kids, to whatever. And at the same time, I feel like he deserves a lot--just as much credit as we can possibly stuff in there, Rafael deserves.
MA: So it sounds like even when this series eventually comes to an end, that won’t be your last collaboration with him.
SS: Oh no. We talk all the time. He has some terrific ideas for his own stuff that I told him already I’d be more than happy to help him even as a story editor, put together some things that he has ideas for and I know that he’s interested in at least a couple of other things that I’ve mentioned to him that I’d love to do as series. When we joke back and forth, we always hope that we’ll be a duo that stays together. I love working with him so much. And Mark as well, the editor. You see some of the collaborative teams like Andy Diggle and Jock, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, they do so many great things together. And for me, Rafael just raises the bar for me; he makes me want to write a better story because his art is so strong. And I’d love to work with him on anything he’d be willing to work with me on.MA: Do you have time to be working on anything else these days?
SS: (laughs) Maybe not these days. Right now, what I’m really trying to do is finish up the next big season of American Vampire so that we’re up about a year ahead of ourselves, so that I can take a little bit of time off over the summer to try and finish up a novel for myself.MA: So right now, AMERICAN VAMPIRE’s your sole focus.
SS: Pretty much. I’m also doing IRON MAN NOIR for Marvel; it comes out in April and May.MA: That’s interesting; taking a technology-based hero back to an earlier decade.
SS: Well, the Noir stuff primarily has been so hard-boiled that I got a lot of jokes that it was going to be like Iron Man sneaking around in his armor, trying to solve crimes in a trenchcoat.MA: (laughs)
SS: But we’re trying to take it in a whole different direction; like David Hine’s SPIDER-MAN NOIR which was much more pulp than noir, and mysticism… basically, Spider-Man as The Shadow, or The Phantom. So what we’re trying to do is Tony Stark as a kind of men’s adventurer/pulp hero of the 1930s. So it’s not hard-boiled noir, it’s much more pulpy.MA: Sort of like a genius inventor who uses his gadgets to solve cases?
SS: Exactly. Like a cross between Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, who has a deal with the American military in the late ‘30s/early ‘40s, so the suit itself is this kind of airforce Iron Man suit that he’s developed. It’s a lot of fun in the way that it’s him kind of globe-trotting trying to find exotic treasures and so on for his collection, and going up against Nazis.MA: Who’s the artist on that?
SS: Manuel Garcia. He’s been terrific. He’s doing this kind of Bernie Wrightson, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, almost pulpy style. And it’s working really well I think.MA: And he’s come up with a whole new design for the armor?
SS: Oh absolutely. Yeah, it’s totally different. It has a couple of hints of Iron Man to it, but it’s also like a super kind of 1930s badass aviator, airforce Iron Man suit.MA: Sounds almost like the Rocketeer in some ways.
SS: Yeah, it has a couple of hints of that. But it’s a military suit, so while that’s kind of aerodynamic and fanciful, this one has a lot of machine guns, and jet engines, jet propulsion. It’s pretty cool. I’m really excited about it. He’s been amazing. And we get to reinvent certain characters like Namor. So yeah, it should be fun. Basically it’s an adventure series. A 4-issue adventure thing about how Tony is looking for a cure for his damaged heart.MA: Very cool. Well, that’s about all I’ve got for you—thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Scott.
SS: No problem.And now for part two with AMERICAN VAMPIRE ARTIST, Rafael Albuquerque!
MA: How did you become involved with this project?
RAFAEL ALBUGUERQUE (RA): I met Will Dennis last year at NYCC, and I told him how much I wanted to do something for Vertigo. After a while, Mark Doyle, who was Will´s assistant, emailed me, talking about a super secret project for 2010. After some months of curiosity and mystery, they sent me Scott´s pitch. I first thought "oh, no! One more vampire thing," but I read anyway. By page 2 or 3 I was totally caught up, imagining scenes and everything.MA: Can you tell us a bit about the creative process between yourself, Scott Snyder, and Stephen King? Do you kick ideas back and forth with them?
RA: Totally. Its an awesome collaboration. Scott, Stephen, Mark Doyle, our editor, and myself, we are always discussing ideas, changing things if necessary, always trying to bring the best possible ideas for the project. Everybody is involved in the same way and that makes the project richer than most of my other works.MA: Are you approaching the two stories very differently?
RA: Very much. For Scott´s arc, I'm doing a very graphic art, bringing as much theatricality as I can for the scenes and playing with contrasts of black and white as much as I can. The main influence for it was the old silent 20’s movies. For Stephen´s arc I tried to bring a dirty mood that those Leone Westerns have, so I used a greytoned technique, done with washes and pencils. Both of them are beautifully painted by the master Dave McCaig, who contributed a lot for the art direction of this book.MA: How does this book differ from what you've worked on in the past?
RA: It's the first time I've actually worked with horror, and it’s been really fun. I have already illustrated a zombie story, but the vein was way more comedy than horror (SAVAGE BROTHERS). Mood is a key word for AMERICAN VAMPIRE.MA: What makes this a book people will want to read?
RA: Skinner Sweet. It's the coolest character ever.MA: You're known for having a variety of different artistic styles. Is it difficult to shift gears so regularly?
RA: No, it’s actually very natural for me to adapt my style for the book. In the same way that different movies need different approaches, I believe comics work in the same way, so I just try to figure out the best way to fit my art on the project, trying to make it as unique as possible.MA: There have been a number of Brazilian artists recently making a big splash in the American comics market; do you feel coming from Brazilian culture and the Brazilian comics community allows you to bring something special/different to the American comics scene?
RA: I think Brazilian comics are finding maturity and some identity right now, in the same way Argentinean or Italian comics have found years ago. So it's natural that newcomer Brazilian artists start to break in overseas, especially in the US. Believe me, there are a bunch of awesome creators in Brazil and will be known really soon.MA: Are you working on anything else these days?
RA: Yep. I’m working in a collective owned creator GN series called MONDA URBANO that will be published in the US by Oni Press. The first book is already done and will be out in June.Thanks, Rafael and Scott. Be sure to look for AMERICAN VAMPIRE from DC Vertigo in June!
In most places, Matt Adler goes by the name his mother gave him, but occasionally uses the handle "CylverSaber", based on a character he created for the old DARK FORCES II: JEDI KNIGHT game (one hint of his overweening nerddom). He currently does IT and networking support for the government of Nassau County, NY, but his dream is to write for a living, and is in the process of figuring out how to get publishers to give his stuff a look. In the meantime, he passes the time by writing for AICN, CBR, and a few other places. He has also written for MARVEL SPOTLIGHT magazine.
