AUTHORSHIP AND ARTISTRY: AN INTERVIEW WITH “HABITAT” CREATOR, SIMON ROY
Simon Roy is a Canadian comic artist whose art credits include “Prophet” with Brandon Graham and “The Field” with Ed Brisson. He is also a celebrated creator who has penned/drawn such exemplary works as: “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories”; “Tiger Lung”; and most recently, “Habitat”. Roy is a devoted researcher and a thoughtful world-builder; his work benefits greatly from his ability to use both of these strengths in collaboration. And though his drawing style has often been compared to some of the proudest artists known to long-form comics history, Roy continues again and again to explain to interviewers that his greatest art inspiration is good old Bill Watterson, creator of the newspaper strip classic “Calvin and Hobbes”.
I first met Simon Roy a little under a year ago at a signing/tour launch event he was doing for “Habitat” here in Los Angeles. There inside the cozy confines of Secret Headquarters he and I, along with comic creators/tour mates Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean, recommended each other films and books until the store grew completely filled with other readers. It was at that event that we both agreed we’d conduct this creator interview whenever his schedule allowed for it, and here it is at last. Over the course of our conversation we discussed his collaborative and solo creative styles, as well as talked a bit about an intriguing new creator project which he currently has in the works.
SAM GOSS: When we first met you were here in LA promoting “Habitat”, so I figured that would be the best place to start.
SIMON ROY: Sure.
SG: Well where do your ideas come from with stuff like this? Where’s your creative space and what influences it?
SR: Alright well “Habitat” specifically came out of working on “Prophet”. There’s a two page spread at the end of the third issue that shows that shows different [John] Prophet clones waking up all over the universe.
SG: Yep.
SR: And I’d just read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, which is about a giant cylindrical habitat built by aliens which just basically swings through the solar system. Some astronauts hop on it and look into and are just like “what the fuck is this?” and then leave because it’s going out of the solar system. It’s a cool story about aliens where you never get to see the aliens.
SG: So you just feel their presence. It sounds kind of like how Harlan Ellison writes.
SR: You know what? I haven’t actually read that much Harlan Ellison. So that may be so but Arthur C. Clarke is a good writer, he’s just a little dry at times but—
SG: He’s “[2001: A] Space Odyssey” isn’t he?
SR: Yeah he’s done a bunch of famous 70’s-era Sci-Fi.
SG: I’d read in one of your past interviews that there were guys like [Jean Girard] Moebius who weren’t formative influences on you, because you didn’t read them as a kid, but who showed you how to “create everything”. And that by creating everything you have the best chance of having your complete vision expressed.
SR: Yeah, well that’s a good place to go with a lot of this. So while doing “Prophet” and reading Rendezvous with Rama I had the little spark in my head and I started to look more into giant space habitats. I read different sci-fi books that were referencing these kind of utopian ideas in the 70s of mining the moon to build giant orbital cities.
SG: Like what?
SR: Well there’s a Bruce Sterling book called Schismatrix. And I was “Oh man it would be sweet if we did a ‘Prophet’ story where Prophet wakes up and he’s in a little world in a bottle in a floating tube habitat somewhere. But I didn’t really have a strong idea for “Prophet” for that and I didn’t really push Brandon about it. I also had another year of school to finish so I wasn’t super involved for awhile with “Prophet”. But in the meantime I started to draw stuff while thinking about building a barbarian adventure in one of these space habitats.
SG: Very cool!
SR: Well a lot of my favorite sci-fi at the time I was working on “Prophet” was stuff like Jack Vance.
SG: Oh I don’t know his work.
SR: He’s another 50’s author who wasn’t the best character writer, but his books drag you through this big, complicated world he’s built. He’s not interested with convincing you that all the people are real, he’s more like “look at all these cool ideas I have!” So absorbing all that stuff just taught me how to build a classic fantasy adventure but in setting that’s fully science fiction. Instead of magic, you have relic technologies.
SG: They are tribal societies who use power armor and stuff like that, but if something is unearthed and they haven’t seen it for countless generations, then yeah, it’s magical to them.
SR: Yeah, it’s like if you dug up something and you didn’t have the context to understand it, but it works and you figure out how to use it, how would you approach it? How would you feel about it? Would you just use it to beat up your neighbors? And so as that was coming together I was also reading some old anthropology books by a dude named Marvin Harris.
SG: He’s another one I don’t know. But I feel like we’re back to [2001: A] “Space Odyssey again.
SR: Well he posits explanations for weird developments in civilization: why in the Middle East is pork forbidden? Why in India is the cow holy? Why did the Aztecs kill so many people? Well he posited that the people in the control were the ones who had figured out how to monopolize the protein source.
SG: And the Aztecs?
SR: Well he said that the reason they were killing so many people was because in Mexico they had no domestic animals which could efficiently turn simpler food stuffs into meat the way a cow or a horse can. They had turkeys and dogs who convert food into flesh at a similar rate to humans. So Marvin Harris thought maybe the Aztec elite thought they could have greater access to protein by capturing large numbers of people and eating them.
SG: And you’re certainly someone who has shied away from cannibalism in your writing or in your art.
SR: No, no, but I don’t really want to show it too much because it’s pretty abhorrent shit. But conceptually it’s really potent in a lot of ways. It’s a really good symbol for man’s self-destructive tendencies.
SG: And I’m sure it’s easier for you and the reader when it’s happens in alien cultures. Especially when you’re drawing aliens that don’t look like humans at all; they look like insect or crustacean alien races.
SR: Yeah well it’s also that you can appreciate the utility of cannibalism if it’s not happening to people. Because people eating people is literally the worst!
SG: The worst!
SR: It’s pretty horrific and I didn’t want to show people chewing on an arm. All the butchery happens off-screen but you get the idea.
SG: And I think there’s something to be said for the idea it leaves without actually showing it in practice.
SR: Yeah that’s something different altogether. If your story is just all about people eating other people then it’s different feel from a story where it is symptomatic of this larger cultural crisis.
SG: The horror…
SR: The horror!
SG: And in “Habitat” even the first murder is an accident. A misfire of a firearm: I’m curious how you feel that it wasn’t an act of aggression. What does it speak for your character?
SR: The Hank Cho character in that is kind of an audience stand-in. So even though first scene is him cutting a guy’s throat and the next is him capturing an old man, I didn’t want him to be evil or irrational. I wanted to get the plot moving and I’m interested in naturalistic storytelling.
SG: Could you please elaborate on that?
SR: I wanted to establish that the main character is part of a strict hierarchy. And if you’re a teenager raised in an intense military culture, you’re not gonna purposefully kill one of your superiors. For Cho to purposefully kill someone with the phaser would make it a very different book. In “Habitat” they respect the hierarchy and they don’t want to leave what’s safe and familiar. It’s this violent accident that forces the character to leave everything he’s known and try and survive.
SG: It’s a good narrative catalyst and it’s what allows you to introduce characters from the other tribes in a setting other than just on a battleground.
SR: Exactly. If he was still on the side of his people, once again that’s a very different story. And it would be harder to make!
SG: I think you have to have to have a character from every camp just to give them all a fair shake.
SR: Well that’s kind of like how [Hayao] Miyazaki does such a good job of that kind of stuff. Think of Princess Mononoke where no one is really a villain; everyone has a reason to be doing what they’re doing.
SG: Totally! And us talking about the choices you made while writing “Habitat” makes me more curious about your writing process. Is it daily for you? Do you have a routine or a good place that you’d call your creative zone?
SR: I should probably develop a routine, but I don’t have a specific spot where I go to write. Currently I rent a desk in a studio space with some other comic guys. And it’s a great way to not work in the house, which helps a ton.
SG: Do you think that having them around you and seeing them all hard at work encourages you to work more?
SR: I think it does help! But for writing stuff, I don’t have a way to do it efficiently yet.
SG: What’s it like for you right now?
SR: I think about an idea for a long time and I dump tons and tons of notes into Google documents. And then eventually from those notes I’ll make a two or three page outline which sums all the details of the story. I’ll show that outline to Dan Bensen who was my editor on “Habitat” and also my collaborator on a current project we have. I’ll also show it my girlfriend Jess [Pollard] who is a really good editor too. And so a lot of my process now is: I think of something, I work on it, and then I show it to them. I ask “Hey guys, what do you think? Is there anything sticking out that you don’t think makes sense?” Because I think if you’ve worked on something for a long period of time, there’s a really good chance that you’ve leapt to a bunch of conclusions that don’t actually support each other. Oh and I’ll also talk with Matt Sheean too!
SG: That sounds really important, because it sounds to me like you’re a real front-end loader on your material. And when you write like that, which is how I write too, you live in those ideas for so long that sometimes it becomes difficult to express them to someone who’s foreign to them.
SR: Exactly! I think if you’re four layers deep into an idea it can be helpful to relearn what the story is about. If you’re too deep, how do you explain it to someone else? Can you even easily explain it to someone in under a half hour?
SG: I know that it first debuted in “Island” magazine, but were you asked to pitch “Habitat” in a formal setting or were you able to just run with it and then sell it?
SR: I basically just talked to Brandon and it was a pretty easy pitch compared to some other stories I’ve gotten caught up in that have not yet happened. It went like: take a utopian Star Trek-type society; they build a habitat; something goes wrong; in a few generations they’ve become a cannibal tyranny; and they find an ancient weapon and things go from there. I’ve also had to sell this at comic conventions a lot so I’ve pared it down, but I didn’t have to pitch it in the same way I’ve had to do for other stuff.
SG: That’s a great connection to have!
SR: Knowing someone whose star is on the rise is helpful!
SG: Well I read that one Multiversity article just before “[Prophet:] Earth War” where it talked about the great chemistry between you and Brandon on “Prophet”. They really felt like you all were being respectful of the source material while still doing your own thing.
SR: I actually talked to John Arcudi about that once and he made the point that you’ll never get that same expectation gap again; you’re never going to get the opportunity to take a twenty or thirty year old property that people half-remember and completely remake it. It just doesn’t happen very often. Also when people try to do it they usually just end up making more of the same thing. And I think one of the reasons for that might be that they all approach their reboot as standard comic book production systems: you have a writer, and the writer passes it off to the artist; and the artist passes it off to the colorist; and the colorist passes it off to the letterer; and you just do that as long as you can. Whereas with “Prophet” we were all working with fucked up schedules all the time and that would determine what story was going on. So it was just a little more fluid than the usual pattern for comics. It was different enough that it just kind of clicked with people.
SG: I’m curious; did you begin chiefly as an artist? Or did you begin as a writer as well?
SR: From the beginning I was trying to exert my will on it.
SG: That’s a funny way of putting it!
SR: Well for the first issue, he and I laid it out fairly collaboratively and then I think the second and third ended up mainly being laid out by him. He had so many big ideas he was trying to throw in there that just processing them into something was a whole writing process in and of itself. He was like “Alright here’s a bunch of animals and they’re all eating each other’s poo. And they’re in a caravan.”
SG: Yeah, you see in a script “Alright, we need a 16-foot anus.” And so you’re like “Alright, Brandon.”
SR: Well that’s the cool thing too, is that he didn’t do scripts!
SG: Really?
SR: Basically, Brandon would lay out stuff for the other artists and then if I had time, I didn’t always, I would lay out my sequences myself. I had like the general prompt of what was gonna happen. So I could just be like “Okay, well here’s how I’m gonna tell that sequence.”
SG: Oh I didn’t know you were doing your own layouts as well!
SR: Yeah and I got to lay out sections of one of the sequences in “Prophet: Earth War” for Giannis Milonogiannis.
SG: Sounds kind of like improvisational writing. You get your prompt and you run with it on your own.
SR: Yeah, so the way Brandon would do the outline initially, was “Okay so pages 5-7 they climb up a mountain” or something like that. And so it’s basically the Marvel method shit, it’s the Stan Lee prompt. And to be fair, Brandon laid out probably like 90%, maybe a little less, but he did straight up layouts for a ton of “Prophet”. He did that for the most of other the artists and for me a lot of the time too.
SG: Well that certainly helps you guys I’m sure.
SR: It’s much simpler as an artist if someone’s like “Hey! I’ve already figured out how the page is gonna flow!”
SG: Do they look like loose pencils?
SR: Yeah, like extremely, extremely loose, kinda symbolic pencils.
SG: Cool, I really hope that stuff sees the light of day in a deluxe edition of “Prophet”.
SR: Well I know in a lot of the single issues, Brandon put the layouts in the back. A couple of the trades too I think.
SG: I gotta go back and check those out.
SR: But it’s pretty cool because he’d make a big file and he’d kinda draw it all tiny in Photoshop. He’d throw in some reference photos to inform what it would be like. It was a good process.
SG: Were any of the “Prophet” guys ever sharing a studio space during its run?
SR: Never, no.
SG: That’s interesting that you all found your collaborative space by literally not sharing a collaborative space, nor even necessarily sharing the same schedules.
SR: Yeah, well that’s another thing too. A lot of the time Brandon would be asleep during the day and then awake at night. So we were kinda… what’s it, “Ladyhawk”?
SG: Yeah, I think so! So where did it start?
SR: The first issue of “Prophet” started up and I was visiting my hometown between semesters at art school in Calgary. I’d met Brandon in 2009 and he’d gotten me a job doing storyboarding in 2010. And then 2011 I think was when all this really kicked off; I stayed at his house for a week, and then from there it was almost entirely long-distance from there.
SG: Gotcha.
SR: One cool side thing though, is the guy who colored the first three issues of “Prophet”. We’d hang at my house, he’d bring his computer, and we’d work on “Prophet” together. It was cool.
SG: You went to art school with him didn’t you?
SR: Yeah. Richard Ballermann was of the older guys in my program. I really looked up to him and it was a real pleasure to be able to offer him a job that we could both work on.
SG: That’s awesome! So as far as your own writing, with something like “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories”, would you like to do another collection of short stories?
SR: I’d like to try and get back in that, because the way my mind has been working recently has been going down that road. And right now I’m working on a pseudo-sequel to “Habitat”.
SG: No way!
SR: I haven’t started drawing it, but I work on the story when I’m with my girlfriend, Jess. For like three or four years on and off I’ve been working on designs for a medieval planet set in the far future but kind of left alone for like two thousand years.
SG: Like in the dark ages? I’m curious of your medieval setting; is it mysticism and things like that?
SR: Less of the mysticism and more thinking of the technology and the politics. This planet has developed something akin to a Chinese or Egyptian empire, and then a variety of peripheral societies that it fights with. But they’ve reached a technological plateau or maybe are on a steep decline.
SG: How will it tie in to “Habitat”?
SR: It’s set four generations or so in the future after the Hab-Sec people have invaded this medieval planet, disrupted it, and tried to take over a large chunk of it. It’s at a time where their attempt at an empire is now declining again. Plus I have an idea for a little framing story that will go at the end of the book so that you know it’s definitely connected to “Habitat”.
SG: Well I really got a sense with “Habitat” that it was built on a rich soil. Even though one story had concluded, it felt like the universe had the potential to live on.
SR: I grew up liking that shared universe stuff.
SG: Like what?
SR: There a series called The Man-Kzin Wars based on a short story by Larry Niven. But there’s a whole bunch of authors writing stories in the context of a three hundred year war between humans and tiger people. Which was pretty dope and there’s a lot of good stories in there.
SG: Wow. I won’t lie, that sounds incredible! Well now you’ve got me wondering: you’ve got this strong interest in world-building, have you ever thought of translating your art to the film world? Kinda like what Guy Davis has been doing for Guillermo Del Toro?
SR: Well recently I’ve been working on concept art for a short film made by two guys from Toronto. And it’s an animated film and the art I’m doing for it is a lot simpler than what I’m used to doing in comics. It’s a whole different world because my designs need shapes which can be read from different angles, so yeah it’s interesting… and I haven’t had the opportunity to make a shit-load of money doing it, so for now I still think I’d rather do comics.
SG: Makes sense; plus the comic world is happy to have you! I did see that the short film “Good Business” was awarded gold for Best VFX at the Kinsale Shark Awards. I’ve always felt like it’s always been one of your stronger short stories, but how did you like seeing your art and writing as the basis for a motion picture?
SR: It’s been really cool to see how it all turned out!
SG: That’s really great, Simon! Well, I just want to thank you for sharing so much with me. It's really been a pleasure!
SR: Thanks!
Happy Inktober, everyone! Celebrate by going out and grabbing a copy of any or all of Simon’s creator-owned works: “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories”; “Tiger Lung”; or “Habitat. These books are funny and exciting, brutal and engaging. And definitely check out “Prophet” and “The Field”, Simon’s art does a wonderful job matching the tone Graham and Brisson’s writing. Oh and you should also watch Ray Sullivan's short film “Good Business” based on Simon’s short story of the same name (which can be found in “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories”); the film was made with love and is winning the awards to prove it. Lastly, seek out Simon’s new convention sketchbook “Small Arms” as well as all of Simon’s independent webpages! His pages include:
