Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons

Dave Gibbons comes across like a pretty regular English bloke, apart from his manic verbal energy and his aesthetically advanced glasses. But he is, in fact, a genius — one of the major comic book artists of the 21st century, or the 20th, or really any other century you care to name. Along with writer Alan Moore, he is one half of the team that in 1986 created the seminal Watchmen, a graphic novel so painstakingly crafted and darkly radical that its publication changed the superhero genre forever. If you’re wondering where The Dark Knight got its darkness, look no further. Zack Snyder, director of 300, recently wrapped a movie adaptation of Watchmen, and this month Titan Books is publishing a new book by Gibbons called Watching the Watchmen, a gorgeous, oversized graphical history of how Watchmen came to be. TIME’s book critic Lev Grossman sat down with Gibbons to talk about it.

So how did you get into drawing comics in the first place?

I vividly remember my first Superman comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper. But I had an education which was rather hostile to that, because I was quite clever at school, and I could do other things like physics and chemistry and stuff, and so I got kind of sidetracked.

I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English. He’d done it, so I clearly remember thinking: it can be done. And once it became a possiblity that was all I pursued. I was probably about 19 or 20. That was it.

Some of the notes from Alan to you, reprinted in Watching the Watchmen, are very warm and funny.

And what you can’t see in that book, because there is no record of it, is that we would talk on the phone for hours. We’d be on the phone for three, four hours. It was just like long conversations between friends with common interests, and somehow enough came out of it to actually make it into a comic book.

I was thinking about this. We didn’t ever set out to say, all right, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to do the best f——g comic book that’s ever been done. This is going to be the Citizen Kane of comics. We are going to be famous for this for the next two and a half decades. If we’d done that we would have come up with nothing.

Another thing that comes across in the book is the sheer physical mechanics of producing comics back in the 1980’s, before everything became computerized—literally painting in the colors, noting the codes for the different dyes on the page…

It was primitive! The actual color separations were done at home by ladies working in their kitchens! Really basic. It had been unchanged since the 1930s. And of course, we didn’t even have fax machines. So Alan would have to physically send the script to me. When I started to run low on script, to keep me busy, he put the scripts in a taxi and paid $100 to get the script to me. Nowadays, script’s done, send. Art’s done, send.

See pictures of cover art by Watching the Watchmen book jacket designer Chip Kidd.

See the Cartoons of the Week.

What surprises you when you look back through your notes for Watchmen?

There’s lots of things that you look back at and think, what was I thinking of? Did I really need to map out that bottle, going against the stars, with the position of every star fixed? I must have been mad! But on the other hand, I wasn’t mad. We were so into it that it was important. And even though people might not be specifically aware of that kind of detailed thinking, you can sense it in the finished product. This didn’t just happen, it wasn’t just thrown down, it was conceived and contrived to be exactly what it is.

I’m thinking also of the things that we stubbornly stuck to even though they obviously, now, didn’t work. Like the full-body Rorschach blob. Which was a terrible idea. Why?! All you ever really want to see is his face—if every time he does his stuff he’s got to open his coat, you know, stand there with his coat open…I just can’t see it. And a nightmare to draw as well, because it would have shadows falling on it…agh, it would be awful. But we were obviously very very fond of that.

Zack Snyder treated 300, the graphic novel, very reverently when he made 300 the movie. Is he giving Watchmen the same treatment?

Absolutely. If you’ve seen the trailer, there are a couple of images in there that are exactly the composition I drew on the page. And to actually see the movie—and I’ve seen a rough cut— is bizarre, because it’s like seeing the movie that I was running in my head.

Has Snyder tried to involve you in the production of the movie?

They showed me a very early draft of the movie and solicited my notes on that. There was one sequence that’s in the movie that isn’t in the comic book, and Zack wanted me to visualize it and draw it as if it were in the comic, and I did, and I got John Higgins to color it. So it’ s like lost Watchmen pages! When we saw the rough screening of it in August this year they were almost begging me, the producers: please tell us if there’s anything wrong, if there’s anything you don’t like, please, even if you think we’ve already filmed it, we can still change it!

When you and Alan were making Watchmen, how important was it that you guys were English, and working in the UK, far away from the watchful eye of the mother ship in New York?

Actually it was a big deal. I think the whole thing of Brits working for American comics was a big deal. Because America was like this fabled foreign land. When I first came to New York City, what I was thrilled about was not the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty, it was the fireplugs in the street. These things that Jack Kirby had drawn. Or these cylindrical water towers on top of buildings that Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man fights used to happen in and around. So it’s always been this kind of exotic babylon. And that’s so for Alan as well. We used to get the American comics imported, and it wasn’t just the stories, it was the whole thing of Tootsie Rolls and Schwinn bicycles. This is the kind of thing we’d talk about for hours on the phone. All this stuff that to you Americans is everyday stuff, as boring to you as our everyday stuff is to us.

So I think that we were able to stand back from American culture, stand back from comic books, although we’d read them all our lives. I can’t imagine that we could have done Watchmen if we hadn’t had that detachment. You know? Love for the subject matter, love for the culture, but a detachment. And perhaps a slight British cynicism? Impressed, but not impressed.

Putting together Watching the Watchmen must have been quite weird for you—revisiting that period of your life, which is now, what, 25 years ago?

It was a long time ago, but when we were doing Watchmen—and not to sound too pollyanna about it—we enjoyed it so much. I mean, Alan and I had got to know each other quite well, and John who did the colors, John Higgins, was a mutual friend as well. It was this wonderful feeling of just sort of, as we would say in England, having a laugh.

When I look back at these notes, that was what came back to me—the fun that we’d had doing it. Before all the backbiting, before all the falling out, before all the commercial repercussions of what we’d done. It was just a memoir of a really good time. And I sent Alan a copy of the book a couple of weeks ago. Haven’t heard back from him. But I actually signed it “To Alan, with fond memories, best wishes, Dave.” ‘Cause that’s how I feel about it.

See pictures of cover art by Watching the Watchmen book jacket designer Chip Kidd.

See the Cartoons of the Week.