Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The All-Stephen R. Bissette Thread

A short while ago, I posted that the only two artists that guarantee I'll buy a comic are Steve Epting and Alan Davis. Well, add a third to the list, because THE LEGENDARY STEVE BISSETTE has returned to comics, with a webcomic already in progress and a revival of several characters Bissette created for the never-completed "1963" project from the 90s.

Bissette is not only one of the most talented artists to ever work in the field of comics, he is also one of its most eloquent and conscientious.

I could go on, but Steve says it all better than I could in this CBR interview:

Link to Part 2, includes link to Part 1

Saw this too and was glad! I didn't realize part 2 was up, I'll go check out now.

Found part 1 fascinating with the insights behind the scenes. I remember collecting 1963.

Read the article and I'm glad to see Bisette is really back. I wasn't sure of the format he'd be returning in however: GNs and TPBs, or an ongoing? Anthology title? I guess only time will tell. I'll have to try to keep an eye out for "About Comics", a small press publisher I'd never heard of before.

Like most of us I suspect, I really know Bisette from his amazing work on Swamp Thing. I also remember some Ambush Bug work he did.

The industry is better for his return.

This is good news.

Almost seven years on, and it was the best of times for SRB fans, it was the worst of times.

The promised new comics never saw the light of day, at least as far I've been able to find out; I do know that even some low-key business dealings with Image failed to pan out (but if I missed a news item and something in fact *did* come out from somewhere, do please correct me on that last statement, that would make me ecstatic.)

OTOH, at my last check in on his fortunes (I've been following his life and work faithfully since reading a circa-1993 interview and a subsequent guest column for some long-defunct Wizard Magazine wannabe (name of magazine inconveniently forgotten; Gods, I really am over 40 now, aren't I? Scary!), Steve still had his health and his sanity, and a steady job teaching comic book art, and a few years ago he was rewarded with the joys of grandparenthood, so it would all seem to balance out in the end, albeit more for him personally than for his fans. That said, I'm happy for him. If anyone's paid their dues and earned the right to step under the radar for as long they want (for the rest of their lives, even, if that's what works best for them), it's Steve.

Also note that Steve's wonderful blog has all-but lain dormant going on 3 years now; in July of '15 he promised an overhaul with updates, but no further sign of that as I type this (but at least he's kept the blog in existence so that anyone may peruse the treasure-trove that is the blog's archives; thanks ever so much, Steve). A Google Search reveals that Steve *is* currently active on both Twitter and LinkedIn, but I don't do either of those (although I'll probably eventually join LinkedIn once I start focusing on selling myself as a freelance writer; in other words, quite soon.)

And it is precisely because of my renewed plans to give the big, bad world of showbiz another go, that I've been thinking a lot about Steve lately. As I briefly alluded to in my opening post, my love and admiration for Steve goes way beyond his exceptional work on Swamp Thing, 1963, Aliens: Tribes (writer only), and the tragically killed-before-it-could-even-leave-the-nest mid-90s labor-of-love Tyrant (I'm proud to say that I still own all four of the Tyrant issues that saw the light of day.) I've never met Steve (though I still hope to someday) but I've read enough of his always-candid interviews and blog posts to feel safe opining that he is one of the *very few* genuine maverick creators to have survived the rigors of the entertainment industry while still managing to reach the masses, if only through the fruits of the blood, sweat, and tears that he (and John Totleben and Alan Moore) poured into Swamp Thing all those years ago (1984-1986, mostly, except for a few pages of Moore's final ST issue and a couple of writer-only ST issues (FTR, Steve had also previously guest-written one issue during Moore's run -- Abby's reunion with her father, the Patchwork Man -- and it is superlative, as is almost everything in Bissette's high-standards-but-all-too-small body of work.)

Thus, I feel a calling to educate comic book fans on the man I consider to be not only one of the greatest talents to pass though the comics industry, but also an incredibly gifted writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and, as far as I've been able to tell, a remarkable (and highly articulate) human being. My *business* role models may be J.K. Rowling and Peter David, but my *artistic, moral, and ethical* model is Stephen R. Bissette.

Quite apropos, I plan for the first major essay in this thread to deal with the period beginning with his work on 1963 (late 1992) and ending with his epic exegesis of an interview for the Comics Journal (cover-dated March 1996), and specifically one of the tragic repercussions of that interview: The abrupt end of his friendship with his longtime off-and-on collaborator Alan Moore, and how, in 20/20 hindsight, I've come to believe that, while I still *love* many of Moore's works, perhaps he is not as much of a *genuine maverick* as Steve Bissette, and if there is even a *grain of truth* to that, then IMHO it undoubtedly played a major role in the loss of that friendship.

Stay tuned...

If this is a hint at your upcoming Swamp Thing fanfic, then I am thoroughly intrigued.

LOL

To be quite frank, Kappa, I'm *immensely* intimidated at the thought of attempting a Swamp Thing fanfic. I mean, yeah, I haven't genuinely liked any of the runs that followed Moore's (although I think Nancy A. Collins, an American Southerner, does deserve credit for bringing a great verisimilitude to the portrayal of Houma's townfolk, at least as good as Moore's, possibly even a little better, I daresay.) But even Alec's co-creator, Len Wein, dropped the ball (IMHO) when he tried to take Alec back to basics in the recent ST mini-series (although I admittedly dropped it one-third of the way through. Perhaps it improved?)

That said, I *have* entertained the thought of attempting a ST fanfic which would take place right after ST v.2 ish 64 (Moore's last), and attempt something in a similar vein to what Wein tried just recently. It would hinge on the notion that perhaps Abby's late mother secretly really *was* the black witch she had been framed as and killed for, and she had a *ton* of skeletons in her closet. Then I'd see where it would go from there.

I never say never.

I'm with you there on the post-Moore runs. I've sampled bits of the Millar and Veitch runs here and there, but none of them stuck with me particularly well.

Then again, I'm one of those weirdos who thinks that the best Swamp Thing is Martin Pasko's (and the Wein run before it), because it focused on Swampy's schlocky B-movie monster roots. The Moore run, while still phenomenal, lost some of that appeal and focused a bit too heavily on broader questions of existence and philosophy at times. I just want to see two monsters punch the shit out of each other, dammit!

LOL

Your defense of the Pasko ST run is well-taken and quite pithy, Kappa.

My own problem with the Pasko Era is that it spent, what 12, 13 issues with that interminable Rise-of-the-Anti-Chirst-Conspiracy arc, which IMO pretty much drained the book of any momentum it might have started with (and also, or so I've heard, frustrated the hell out of Steve's nature-loving predecessor as ST artist, his good friend Tom Yeates, who found himself drawing all sorts of stuff that didn't play up to his artistic passions and strengths.)

The remaining half-dozen Pasko issues show a definite upward trend in quality, concision, and coherence (and IIRC, Steve says that Pasko himself told him that he and (then-ST-editor) Wein were very conscientious about bringing the book back to creature-horror basics after that white-elephant of an opening arc). The resulting handful of Pasko/Bissette/Totleben issues are never less than solid, so who can say where it might have gone from there (or, on a more sober note, if the quality could have been sustained over the long run, given Bissette's self-admitted personal problems at the time, as well as his unwillingness to admit to himself (or DC editorial) that he needed at least five weeks rather than four to work his magic properly. Because as fine a craftsman of a writer that Pasko is, I doubt he'd have ever inspired Steve & John to the heights they reached with Moore.)

Stephen is still quite active on Facebook. I just bought an original sketch from him last month. His main writing output right now is for Monster Magazine anf forwards for friend's projects.. His Facebook has effectively replaced his blog, with the main focus these days on politics and movie reviews.

Aha, well, that's quite the bittersweet news.

I don't do Facebook, either, and, if anything, I hate it even more than Twitter.

But as long as Steve keeps the blog archives online, I'm okay with however he currently prefers to express himself.

Thanks for the heads-up, Dave.

Much appreciated!

I've actually wanted to write a Swamp Thing story in the vein of the Wein/Pasko stuff and 1982 film, but I haven't formulated a concept for it yet.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we both ended up doing our Swamp Thing fanfics at the exact same time?

Great minds do tend to think alike!

Indeed!!

THE RISE AND FALL OF 1963 (PROLOGUE)

Despite being written entirely by the esteemed Alan Moore, and drawn by a Who's-Who of notable artistic talents with one foot (or, in some cases, both feet) in comics' vanguard zone -- Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, Melinda Gebbie, Rick Veitch, Jim Valentino, Chester Brown, plus amiable industry veteran Murphy Anderson pitching in to supervise the deliberately old-fashioned coloring and printing -- it is a harsh but inescapable truth that "1963", the never-completed yet still fondly-remembered mini-series published in 1993 by Image Comics during that publisher's uncertain infancy, will most probably never be reprinted, much less collected, in any shape or form.

The reasons for this sad state of affairs will be revealed and elaborated on over the course of this essay, but let me just say that the reason I said it "most probably" will not be reprinted is that *if* it does happen -- and I do still hold out hope it will in my lifetime -- it definitely won't happen until Alan Moore is no longer among the living.

Join me now for a bittersweet behind-the-scenes saga, of great comic book writing and artistic talents rescued from penury by the most unlikely group of saviours; of bratty young millionaire comic-book artists who posed like a band of entrepreneurial brothers-in-arms, yet in reality would not hesitate to stab each other in the back for no reason other than a quick-fix boost to their inflated egos; of a speculator-driven comics industry self-immolating as it plummeted from the five-million-in-average-sales stratosphere all the way back down to Earth, like a rocket landing gone horribly wrong; of a comics fandom in the turbulent midst of what could charitably be described as an awkward transitional phase; of a badly misinterpreted so-called "love letter" to the Silver Age superheroes, which, beneath its bright surface cheeriness hid a bilious (and, in 20/20 hindsight, muddled and misguided IMHO) Anti-Marvel/Anti-Mainstream agenda from a tremendously talented and justifiably praised writer who had nevertheless lost sight of the bigger picture in the then-recent past, and would cyclically regain it only to lose it again, a cycle destined to continue into the present day; and, in its most tragic repercussion out of many, the destruction of a friendship between the aforementioned writer, Alan Moore, and another, arguably even more talented creator, Steve Bissette, in the dazed, hazy aftermath of what proved to be their final -- and inescapably anti-climactic despite its many surface delights -- collaboration.

TO BE CONTINUED

Awaiting further posts with anticipation. I wasn't aware of the 1963 project.

Yay! Welcome aboard, FC!

I'll have the 1963 essay's next installment up later today for sure.

THE RISE AND FALL OF 1963 (PART 1)

It all began sometime during the first eight months of 1992. As Steve Bissette, whose side of the story is the one I am most inclined to believe, tells it, the astute and enterprising comic book jack-of-all-trades Jim Valentino (more about whom in upcoming installments) reached out via telephone to Bissette, Bissette's friend (and fellow former Swamp Thing creator) Rick Veitch, and their mutual friend (at the time) Alan Moore, yet another Swamp Thing alum. Valentino proceeded to inquire about the possibility of them doing a project for the newly formed publisher Image Comics.

Before we proceed any further, I think some extra background on the three creators approached by Valentino -- who were, at that precise moment, simultaneously being held in tremendous esteem by their peers and disciples, while at the same time finding themselves living in debt-ridden poverty after having burned all their bridges with the comics industry's established publishers -- is in order.

Steve Bissette, born and raised in small-town Vermont, the son of a grocer, grew up into a precociously talented artist possessed of a fierce intelligence, an extensive vocabulary which he had little or no trouble articulating, and an omnivorous appetite for a variety of pop culture forms...yet always with a distinct and discriminating preference for the mass media's more left-of-center offerings. He has declared as a key formative experience his first viewing of the 1961 Italian horror film released in the US under the title "Black Sunday", Mario Bava's superb black-and-white cinematic good-twin-evil-twin/she-angel-versus-she-devil saga starring the exotically iconic Barbara Steele, she of the piercing black eyes, alabaster skin, and raven mane of hair.

From that point of entry, Bissette's tastes would evolve into a quest for the most eclectic and extreme entertainments he could find. By his early 20s, Bissette the aspiring sequential storyteller had persuaded his disapproving father to at least meet with the founder of a new cartooning school over in New Jersey. This fateful meeting of Mister Bissette and the authoritative, passionate, industrious Joe Kubert, founder of the school in question, would bring Bissette pere around to finally allowing Bissette fils to pursue his creative dreams in peace and in the company of both a group of salty, seen-it-all comics-industry veterans and a group of Bissette's like-minded peers.

Of course, with tastes as unconventional as Bissette's, it was probably inevitable that he would only find a small amount of sympathetic souls. And find him he did: John Totleben, Tom Yeates, Timothy Truman, and, most crucial of all, a fellow small-town Vermont native named Rick Veitch.

Despite the common ground shared by Bissette and Veitch resulting in a fast-developing friendship which, as far as I know, has endured to the present day, they came from radically different kinds of small Vermont towns. Rick Veitch, born into a large family led by a lumber-mill worker who, according to Rick, privately longed for some kind of creative outlet, which, had he gone public with it at any time between 1950 and 1970, would most probably have earned Veitch Senior the cruel, sneering mockery of his roughneck fellow laborers.

So it was that, when Rick was at a particularly impressionable and needy age, he was instead destined to witness his father's rapid emotional and physical deterioration; by the time Veitch Senior passed away in relatively early middle age, he was on at least six different medications, all of them extremely potent -- and all of this happened back in the far-from-enlightened early 1970s! Rick's response was to become a true hellion who looked like a hippie but acted like a proto-punk.

Luckily for Rick, his older brother and sometime role model Tom (later a successful writer, most notably for resurrecting the Star Wars franchise with the comic book mini-series "Dark Empire") offered salvation through comic books. Always possessed of an impressive and pragmatic work ethic, Rick, through Tom's guidance, floated in and out of the underground comic book scene, churning out material at a furious rate until the scene's collapse around the mid-late 70s. After seemingly having exhausted all his options (as well as having had fatherhood unexpectedly thrust upon him), the Kubert School was a true gift from the Gods to Rick!

Last but not least is the mercurial yet fascinating writer Alan Moore, born in small-town England to an impoverished working-class family surrounded by families who were even worse off than them. Alan's obvious intelligence and untiring inquisitiveness were actually more like liabilities than assets during his young adulthood. The resulting series of dreary day jobs, the worst being one in an abattoir (a slaughterhouse), ran parallel to Alan's active involvement in the local subcultural scenes. Eventually finding his way to a miniscule but ferociously vital community of young British comic book creators, Alan quickly established himself as a prodigiously talented writer, possessed of both unerring insight and crowd-pleasing instincts. After making a strong impression through his serialized works, chiefly for the anthologies "2000 AD" and "Warrior", Alan was eagerly sought out by editors from America's venerable publisher DC Comics.

Having played perennial second-best to their chief competitor Marvel Comics since the early 70s, DC was, by 1983, not only dead serious about stealing Marvel's thunder once and for all, but was also being run by a remarkable gathering of executives and editors with exquisite tastes and a shared desire to take comic books into uncharted waters which would lead them beyond the then-current plateau, climbing ever higher over the course of several years.

Len Wein, one of the best of DC's impressive stable of editors (having already shepherded New Teen Titans and All Star Squadron, and with more successes yet to come), had a special stake in one of the less renumerative books which he edited -- namely, the revival of Swamp Thing, the showcase for an intimidating yet benevolent plant-monster, who had been created by Wein himself in a writing-only capacity, and designed by fan-favorite artist Bernie Wrightson; yet the original iteration of Swamp Thing had burst out of the starting gate only to slowly be drained of its energy, as first Wrightson, then Wein, quit the book. A few years after its cancellation, Swamp Thing had been revived in 1982, initially hoping to draw in new readers thanks to cross-promotion with a live-action movie adaptation. But the movie, while eventually finding a cult following, was not an unqualified commercial success, and the comic had stumbled early on thanks to the usually reliable writer Martin Pasko's absurdly long and turgid opening arc. After little more than a year, the book's initial artist, Tom Yeates, announced he was leaving. His place was taken by two of Yeates's friends and fellow Kubert School graduates: our old friend Steve Bissette on pencils, and the briefly aforementioned John Totleben (not only an enthusiastic fan of the original Swamp Thing run, but also a one-in-a-million draftsman with the then-rare ability in a comic book artist to provide abundant detail without ever disrupting an overall sense of delicate balance in the art) on inks. A few issues later, Pasko, overburdened with work as his career in animation writing was rocketing into the stratosphere, vacated the book. His replacement was none other than Alan Moore. This newly established trio of creators would not actually work together on the first Post-Pasko issue of Swamp Thing, number 20, due to complicated and extenuating circumstances which ended up prompting Wein to bring in Canadian talent Dan Day as a guest penciler.

But once this bump in the road was overcome, and The Unholy Creative Trinity was finally able to properly work together, on Swamp Thing issue number 21, things would never be the same for the three of them, nor for Bissette & Totleben's loyal friend and frequent rescuer-from-unforgiving-deadlines Rick Veitch, nor DC Comics, nor comic book fandom, nor the comic book medium. This ground-breaking version of Swamp Thing would revolutionize sequential storytelling as well as, arguably, doing the same for the very essence of pop culture itself...but only at great personal and professional cost to those involved, none more so than Bissette and Moore.

TO BE CONTINUED

I know Bissette's work entirely from his work on Swamp Thing with Alan Moore. Looking over his Bibliography on WikiPedia, it's a pretty small body of work, with very little of it entering the mainstream or being easily accessible. But what we got in the Swamp Thing run is some of the most beautiful and detailed artwork the industry has ever seen. He has such a wonderful but loose line that was utterly perfect for the subject matter. I know I first experienced Moore's run and Bissette's line in Vertigo's black & white Essential Swamp Thing reprint series. There, without color, his line stands out even more and gives at least a sense of what his un-inked pencils might have looked like. It was some of the most beautiful colorless art I've ever seen!

Though I also love both John Totleben's and Rick Veitch's work on Moore's classic run, I'll always have a special place for Bissette's work above theirs. It's good to see that Bissette is working his way back into sequential art again. I'll have to look into his web series and hope that maybe we'll see him back in print at some point as well.

Thanks for chiming in, Lardy.

Yeah, the *reflexive* side of my mind definitely feels that Bissette had the most distinctive and vibrant line of all the Swamp Thing artists. OTOH, the *reflective* side of my mind tends to have a weakness for pure, scrupulously precise technique, and rates Totleben's line slightly higher. But either way, I still love, love, LOVE both artists' styles. And I do think Bissette is indisputably the best Swamp Thing artist when it comes to layouts and page designs.

I also highly recommend reading Aliens: Tribes. It's not a graphic novel per se, more of an illustrated prose novel (Dave Dorman, of Star Wars fame, provides the painted art), but it's still typical Bissette fiction writing -- in a word, superlative.

Great look at a slice of comic industry history! Have you read Bissette's critique of Veitch's Brat Pack?

It's interesting that all three creators came from difficult backgrounds, in terms of not getting much encouragement as children. According to Bissette's webpage, he's into all sorts of creative endeavors now. His comic book work was mostly in books that I wouldn't have read but he does draw great monsters!

Another thought on the Kubert school: I wonder how many artists they graduate and how many go into comics vs solely commercial careers.

Thank you, FC.

And I apologize for taking so long to reply to you. My current fanfic project is coming together very nicely, and I'd even say it's my best writing ever...but it's also been very slow to reach completion, which is why I haven't been around much these last couple of days. I'm hoping it'll be complete, and posted in its entirety at Archive of Our Own, by this coming weekend.



No, but I fully intend to (is it online anywhere?)

And while I have to admit that I am not a fan of Bratpack, I do intend to cover it, among other things, at some point later in this essay. I've set aside one whole installment to cover selected less-well-known works from Bissette, Moore, and Veitch. Each creator will get one-third of the space in that installment.



Agreed 100%. There is no artist better than Bissette at drawing monsters, IMO, because Bissette is one of the few who gives them the full range of emotions, and facial expressions, and body language.

As for lack of encouragement, I've noticed it always seems to come down to well-intentioned authority figures, be they relatives, teachers, counselors, what have you, who place too much emphasis on how difficult it is to make a living at it. It's like they don't realize how a lot of kids end up taking that too much to heart, and allow it to discourage them. It certainly happened to me. I'm just glad I've finally come around to that point that all potentially successful creators reach, where their self-belief is strong enough for them to take on the challenge.

Bissette's review/analysis of Brat Pack was published as a book. I haven't read it, but here's one review.

Ah, OK. I had heard about the book, but IIRC, Bissette also had a much shorter version published in a Bratpack reissue trade.

EDIT: After reading the review, I now know that said trade was never published. My mistake.

Thanks for the link, FC.

And after reading that review, I'm tempted to post a little taster of what I plan to write in a later installment of the essay about Veitch and Bratpack and more.

Eh, I'm a lapsed Catholic, so I don't really care if I give into temptation. (No offense meant to Cobie and other practicing Catholics at Legion World.)

As much as I love Bissette, there are two things that've kept me undecided about reading "Teen Angels and New Mutants", his non-fiction analysis of "Bratpack" and beyond (way beyond, getting into the larger societal and historical implications of Veitch's graphic novel.)

Firstly, I don't like "Bratpack", and I disagree with some of the reviewer's perceptions of it. I found it sophomoric rather than adult, or rather an not-yet-enlightened teenager's idea of what "adult" reading is. I'll give Veitch the benefit of the doubt that he was reaching for something more substantial than the end result. This is a recurring problem I have with Veitch's one-man-band work. IMO, his ambitions always end up exceeding his reach, because he always falls back on cheap jokes, cheaper gross-outs, and even cheaper shocks. (Bissette has admitted that some of Veitch's imagery is too much even for him!) A lot of Veitch's work is like MAD magazine if it were written and drawn by a vaguely left-wing 15-year-old off his meds, and published without passing through any kind of editorial (or like a third-rate underground comic from the 1970s or early 1980s.)

Secondly, and this is purely my own bias and personal demons, but I really don't want to know the gory details about Veitch's upbringing in the ignorant macho-reactionary small-town environment I alluded to earlier. Here I have to quote the late, great Ray Bradbury circa 1980:

"I feel fortunate that all my children and grandchildren have been girls, because I don't think I could have been able to bear watching my sons and grandsons go through the same kind of abuse I went through, and that all boys go through."

Yeah, I'll admit I have issues with a certain type of uneducated male heterosexual (not all of them, just a certain kind.) I had no brothers (or sisters, for that matter), and my dad was (and still is) a decent, kind, and generous human being. So when I started school, the experience of getting thrown into a large group of kids I'd never met, with an even ratio of boys to girls, was singularly disturbing. And I think I've said enough so that you all can draw conclusions from there...

Anyhow, on a more positive note, Part 2 of the essay is coming soon!