Brian Bolland

Interview by Rada Djurica

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The following interview was conducted in Belgrade in October 2004.

Could you give us a short history of Brian Bolland?

Born in 1951, which makes me very old indeed. I was born in Lincolnshire, which is part of East of England.

How about a history of your drawing experience?

When I was 10, my grandmother used to buy me comics. That was 1961, than I started collecting comics. I was hooked. To start I was doing my own version of these; I was drawing them on my own. That's how I started.

Your favorite comic book at the time?

OK. I was always a bigger fan of artists rather than characters. So when I was a kid I really liked certain artists. There was one, Gill Kane, who was my fave artist, and I just loved all his comics, stuff that he drew. He draws Atom. There was another artist, Italian, I think. He was called Bruno Premiani, whose work I loved, I also loved the author of Flash. There were mainly characters that DC Comics published.

How do you do it? Do you do draw for the story that you get, or do you first do a picture and than make up the story? What's the process?

Nowadays, I draw the covers. I had many pages and stories in my time but now, as my career goes on, people just say: "Well, can you do this story for me," and I do it, or I just say that I can't because I'm rather busy. Then they say, "Well, can you just do the covers?" So I've found out that people, a lot of them, want me doing covers. This is what usually happens. They also send me a script. And I go through it, and I try to decide what part of the story would make a really good cover. Sometimes they don't even send me the script. Sometimes I don't even know what is going to happen in the script. So I just have to make it up. So then it becomes really arty.

What sort of subjects do you do covers for? What stories, SF or other?

Well, I work for DC Comics and most of it, the stuff they publish, is the hero comics. You know, people in tight suits flying or whatever. They do Batman. I draw Batman. I drew a few Batman stories. I did one called Killing Joke in the late '80s with writer called Alan Moore. So I draw mainly DC characters. Lots of them are super heroes. But they also have another strand of comics that are fitting into alternative. It's difficult to define what sort of characters they are, except to look at them and think that some of them are quite strange. I also do my own writing and drawing, and my own stuff, I draw whatever character builds at the time. At the moment, I have a story about an actress and a bishop.