Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > J. H. Williams III: the artist's websites

hey there matthew
for all of the design stuff it was about 50/50 alan and myself. i started doing that sort of thing right away and he saw what i was doing and started writing ideas into the scripts soon after. some of it i would follow, other times i would change things around dramatically. so it was all very organic.
i've been doing strange design ideas in my work for a long time now, since before promethea. not always as dramatic as with promethea but still prevalent to some degree. in the work i've done since then i've scaled it back somewhat again because i only want to do it if its appropriate for the story. the other thing i've pushed on is getting that symbolic design effect more into the page or panel design as a whole, trying to make the symbolgy idea more cohesive with the integrety of the story. you can find lots of examples of this thinking in seven soldiers. i've also come to the conclusion that having design aspects being constantly present as they are with promethea isn't always a good thing. it can makes things all kind of the same after awhile and there isn't surprises anymore so i'm saving those ideas for appropriate scenes or stories. right now i'm really focused on art style as design. exploring the notions that the way something is drawn or colored stylistically can subliminally affect one's view or feelings about a shot or sequence. desolation jones really did a lot of that and was also heavily explored in seven soldiers in various ways. as an example i really wanted to attempt to capture the feeling i got from the other seven soldiers artists when looking at their issues of the series. so i explored their styles as respectfully as i could without exactly mimicing them in seven soldiers #1. this turned out to be quite important in regards to the way grant wrote that issue because it was written very much as a direct continuation of each of the other seven soldiers books so i had to take that into consideration greatly and not lose certain aspects of those other really great artists' qualities.
in the current batman work i'm trying something a little odd on this too. the characters that grant is introducing in this arc are from a bygone era of DC but grant is writing them as if they have all been having continuing adventures all along, we just haven't been privy to them. so i approached each character as if they had stepped out of their own comicbooks and therfore thought about what those comics might look like. based on that concept i drew each character in their own styles and dave stewart has followed suit in the color for each as well. very interesting results because the styles alone tell you something about each character and allows you to have certain subliminal notions about who they are as characters. which has turned out to be effective considering we are only with them for a very short time. the other thing that i was pleased with is how well all of the styles work together on the same page in the same panels. this is being done along with bits of experiemental layouts in place throughout. there are places where what i've done with the layouts are sort of commenting on whats happening in the story or commenting on the fact that it is a design oriented layout itself, making the design actually be the comment, if that makes any sense whatsover. there are attempts to have multilayered meaning within the design itself. some of it will be understood immediately and some will take a lot of thinking to see the hidden commentary. this time instead of having this sort of layout commentary, as i've experimented with elsewhere, be just for a page or a spread there are places where it runs through the issue in sequences that say something only as the issue comes to a close or near the end. and there is lot of it done purely for my own amusement. all of this is combined also with the notion of styles creating feeling so there will be places where i'm using a wash or a fully painted panel here or there or something will go graphic and flat in order to gain some sort emotional resonance. very much a surrealist perspective to telling a superhero classic murder mystery type of story. i hope this rambling makes some sort of sense. it will be intersting to see what you think.
sorry for being so long winded with these explanations.