Lee Weeks is an artist that you don’t see a great many articles about. While he’s an incredibly talented artist, the way he has conducted his career–on his own terms and in a modest manner–has kept him out of the spotlight (as compared to many of his contemporaries. So months ago when I found out that Tom Field and Eric Nolen-Weathington had devoted a volume of the Modern Master series to Weeks, I was eager to interview them. And then…my disorganized nature misplaced this interview. My apologies to Field and Nolen-Weathington for the delay. (This interview was conducted in early December 2008, well before I joined Robot 6 and that’s why I am running a comics interview here for the first time in awhile.) To make it up to these fine fellows, I will be splitting this interview into two parts. Part one will be with Field and the second part, which will run tomorrow, will be with Nolen-Weathington and will delve into other projects of his.
But before jumping into this first part, in case you don’t know Weeks’ work, here is some info courtesy of TwoMorrows: “Weeks is the consummate storyteller. Over the course of his twenty-five-year-plus career, he has proven this again and again. His ability to create dynamic, interesting layouts, plus his strong draftsmanship, and wonderful sense of lighting made his runs on Daredevil, Captain America, Spider-Man: Death and Destiny (which he also wrote) and The Incredible Hulk fan favorites, and his artwork for Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet is among the most finely crafted in the character’s history.”
Tim O’Shea: Given that you and Lee Weeks are old friends, were you afraid you were too close to him to be able to create a good book?
Tom Field: Actually, I looked at it just the opposite way — that because I *did* know him well, I could do a better book because I’d know the best topics to ask him about. I could get a little deeper than ‘Which character have you always wanted to draw?,’ y’know? We did speak upfront about what we wanted to stress in the interviews — topics we did/did not want to pay much attention to — but our friendship was never a challenge. Quite the opposite. I think it was a major strength.
O’Shea: While you two are close, were there any revelations in talking with him that really took you by surprise?
Field: Absolutely! Even though I was around Lee when a lot of formative events occurred early in his adult life, I was busy with my own life then, so I missed the significance of some things, or I’d forgotten them altogether. Plus looking back nearly 30 years in some cases, a lot of “random” events suddenly don’t look so random. What I see now is a dramatic story unfolding over his lifetime, and that stuff just never was obvious when we were living through it.
I daresay that Lee got some revelations through our dialogue, too, because I remembered some things he’d forgotten. There’s just a real magic to bringing two friends together to discuss olds events that shaped their lives.
O’Shea: On page 57 of the book, discussing the mayhem of the early 1990s speculative market, Weeks recollected a colleague saying to him: “Forget about storytelling, just do the big money shot, and you can get this much for the originals.” Were you shocked to hear that anecdote? Do you think given how highly ethical Weeks is, it was harder and harder for him to work in comics–given the lack of ethics (as evidenced by this anecdote) regarding the craft?
Field: I wasn’t shocked at all. I remember when that comment was made, and Lee first told me about it. I’m not sure that his disdain for some of the stylistic fetishes has made a huge difference in work he has/hasn’t received. I do think his refined sense of story content — the types of subject matter, characters and themes he chooses to represent — makes a way bigger difference. It’s not just ethics, it’s morals, and Lee has a strong moral code — just like the comics we read when we were kids. I think this is a good thing, and it should be a benefit to Lee’s career. I feel it’s a shame that there are fewer opportunities to tell good stories w/o extreme violence and moral ambiguities.
O’Shea: In discussing his faith with him, was it hard to structure questions and steer the conversation in a manner that he was sharing the story in a manner that did not come off like he was preaching (for lack of a better term)?
Field: Lee really guided that part of the conversation, and I think he did a masterful job. Y’know, I just wanted to find out how his faith changed his life and influenced his work. It was up to Lee to decide how much he wanted to reveal, as well as to walk what can be a fine line between discussing and preaching faith. Frankly, I think he approached this part of the conversation much as he approaches his art — with sensitivity and style.
O’Shea: What was the hardest aspect of doing this book?
Field: What to leave out? When you’ve known someone since high school, you know a ton of stories that you think everybody would enjoy. But you’ve got to be sensitive to space constraints and to the fact that people are coming to this book to learn more about Lee’s pro career — not what he did before the career started. Editing was way tougher than interviewing — and I bet Lee would agree. We’ve got some great material for the “director’s cut!”
O’Shea: Care to mention some of what ended up being edited out for space?
Field: What got edited out? A lot of the fun stories from our teens and 20s. I think we did a good job keeping in the major milestones, but there were a ton of anecdotes about the people we knew, places we explored, comics ideas we cooked up. I mean, we put together a serious comics proposal once just on the comic book store where we met & the people we knew there. It was a crazy place — comic book store in the front, antiques store in the back. And we used to always see this one scene played out: Our friends would be standing around on a Saturday afternoon, enthusing about their favorite comics — which heroes they’d be and which heroines they’d be with given the opportunity. Then, inevitably, a real woman would walk into the shop looking for antiques, and all these comic book romeos would suddenly turn silent until one of them would almost whisper “There are antiques all the way through the back …” I think Lee even drew that scene at one point.
And then one thing I think we conveyed pretty well in the book is the sheer body of work Lee has published in 25 years. What we didn’t convey is his volume of unpublished work. And this was a bit of a revelation as well in our interviews, as I’d completely forgotten about some of the projects that even he and I had cooked up years ago. Y’know, we put together an entire 8-page Sub-Mariner story for Marvel back in 1981; in ’82 we cooked up a futuristic series starring a middle-aged man named Grant Alden (that’s all I remember — we thought it would be innovative to craft a series around a middle-aged man, even though we were both 19 and 20!); at Kubert’s Lee devised his own series based on galactic garbagemen; in the mid-80s we banged out a series of horror/sf proposals for the Eclipse anthos; and believe it or not we even kicked around launching our first published work, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” into an ongoing series. In the late 80s/early 90s, he and I dev ised a Hulk/Frankenstein Monster miniseries that I still think would kick, and I really wish we could have spent some more time diving into some of the Fantastic Four, Superman and other stories that Lee has created wholecloth and still may get to someday.
It’s funny. Every time we had to cut a passage we really hated to edit, we’d say “It’ll make it into Part II.” That was one thing I had to keep emphasizing in this project. Lee was initially resistant to a career retrospective because he’s still in his career. So I had to sell him on the idea that this was only Part I — we’d come back and talk about the next part of his career in another 25 years or so. That helped.
O’Shea: What was the most fun discussion you had with Weeks while doing the book?
Field: Recalling our antics at comic book shows back in the early 1980s, when we were in our late teens or early 20s and totally intimidated by all the pros we met at Boston conventions. I mean, can you imagine how much nerve we had to summon up just to ask Dave Cockrum to join us for burgers at McDonald’s? Or what it was like just to watch Lee knock on John Byrne’s hotel room door? Meeting Howard Chaykin and Al Williamson for the first time … Gil Kane … We just laughed so much remembering the adventures and how much they reshaped our appreciation of comics and creators.
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