From The Scoop: Kickback: Comics Noir by David Lloyd

From the October 6 issue of Gemstone Publishing's The Scoop:
While writer/illustrator David Lloyd is best known as the artistic creator (with writer Alan Moore) of the hit V for Vendetta graphic novel, he actually started working comics in the late 1970s and has had a varied career since.

In the more than two decades since his most famous work to date was launched, he was worked for a variety of publishers, including Eclipse, DC (and their WildStorm imprint), and Dark Horse in the United States, as well as others. At Marvel UK, he collaborated writer Steve Parkhouse and created the pulp-esque character Night Raven. He also worked on Espers with writer James D. Hudnall, Hellblazer with Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano, War Story with Garth Ennis, Global Frequency with Warren Ellis, among other projects.

It has been through V for Vendetta, though, for which most readers have become familiar with his work. When editor Dez Skinn launched Warrior 1982, Lloyd and Moore created V, which survived the demise of the publication and was later issued by DC Comics. The company subsequently collected the series into one of the most successful comic book trade paperbacks ever.

Its success and the attention brought to it by the film has not caused Lloyd to rest on his laurels. Instead, he propelled himself into noir world of the crime graphic novel Kickback, which he both wrote and illustrated for French publisher éditions Carabas. It has recently been issued by Dark Horse comics in hardcover.

The murky moody world of Kickback explores the frustration of Joe Canelli, a crooked cop in a corrupt police force, who is haunted by nightmares of powerlessness and daunted by the thought that things - and he - should be better. When his partner is murdered and he's left adrift by his shady colleagues, he's forced to do the last thing that anyone expects: the right thing.

“The first time I saw Kickback it was in the form of the completed first volume of the French edition. I thought it was cool,” said Dark Horse editor David Land, who said he saw the second half of the story page-by-page as it came in. “The last time I worked with David was in 1999 on The Territory [with writer Jamie Delano] and back then he was giving us color guides and we were doing the separations here. Now he's doing everything himself and I think his art really comes together in a way it was never able to in the past.”

“I always liked straight crime thrillers and would have done more of them in strip form if they happened to be the usual subject matter of the field I work in. But they weren't for a long while on in the US [and] UK, and, specifically, not when I was building my career,” Lloyd said. “But like every other genre of story I've worked in and been interested in, I'm not just interested in the wrapping. It's what's inside that gets my attention. Kickback is about what's inside Joe Canelli's head as much as what's outside of it. I'm an admirer of Hitchcock's thrillers, more about the people than the situation.”

Lloyd said the concept and spirit of early crime comics such as Crime Does Not Pay and its contemporaries are very attractive to him from a basic pulp appeal level. “That gutsy, no-holds-barred stuff has the kind of raw energy I like, but I wouldn't want to do stuff like that myself because it's too blunt an instrument to use for saying something subtle,” he said, and instead movies and TV might have held more sway with him in that department.

“If I had to compare Kickback to some other crime story I'd probably say it's similar to the movie Cop Land,” Land said.

“I liked the blend of crime and human drama that typified the stories in Naked City. I was a TV kid. I saw those shows as some of my first viewing. I was introduced to some great writing as a kid as well the usual stuff any kid would gravitate to,” Lloyd said. “There's a problem with TV, now: no one gets a range of things like they used to in a limited channel environment, so it's easy for Joe Public growing up to miss seeing lots of things that might do them lots of good while they pig out on the Sci-Fi Channel or some other specialist station every night,” he said. “My crime story influences as a creator are a mix of Naked City, Mickey Spillane, some early US cop shows, then movies like Point Blank, Bullit, Dirty Harry, Hustle, Prime Cut. But I admire things like Colombo, Raymond Chandler and lots of other stuff that doesn't speak to me as directly.”

He said he always wanted to do a strip like the crime movies had enjoyed.

“Then the idea for the story came from an image that lodged in my brain from a TV show about airships. Their central maintenance platform is called an “axial walkway,” and it struck me that walking along such a thing in the middle of an airship, you might be going in one direction while the airship was going in another. You might also not know which direction that was. Even in an airplane, if you can't see out of the windows, you don't know if you're going forwards or backwards. Anyway, it struck me as a good metaphor for someone who finds himself going in a direction he's not sure of, without any way of knowing if he can get back from it. And a corrupt policeman with a buried conscience seemed like an interesting model to use in the employment of that metaphor,” he said.

The thoughts behind Kickback are given their shrouded, foggy form as much by Lloyd's highly effective used of color, which infuses the atmosphere of the story with the noir sensibilities of the classic films, television shows and novels that influenced its creation and yet also simultaneously provides the piece's visual originality.

“Any story should have atmosphere, the appropriate atmosphere for that story,” he said. “I guess crime stories - and heavy dramas, generally - have a more obvious atmospheric content. I think what you might mean as atmosphere in Kickback, is varying ambiences through lighting and color, something that isn't really used a great deal in most comics. I think that's because of the splitting of tasks that goes on in the production of most of them. Colorists, inkers and pencillers. It's difficult for them to all stay on the same page, metaphorically, and so intended effects are often lost on the conveyor belt in the middle of someone's tight schedule. It's a shame they're not used more, because differences in light and shade are as valuable to pacing a story as they are to the dramatic impact of it. But shortage of time is responsible for lots of shortfalls in the art of this business. Everyone's on a treadmill.”

Lloyd wrote the rough script by hand seven years ago, then put it aside until three years later. Once he got the urge to work on it again, things really got rolling.

“I sold it to a French publisher, a great guy called Jerome Martineau, who I'd worked with a few years before. He'd given me the most trust any editor had ever given me at that time, and he did the same in buying Kickback. After he'd been convinced of the evolution of Joe's character he gave me a completely free hand. There was a kind of glitch at the beginning, though, because a misunderstanding led Jerome to believe that the book was a two volume project when I'd written it for one. He couldn't commission a one-off - so I said I'd be happy to do it as two. It's was a good accident because it gave me room to expand the story, which benefited it,” he said.

Having both illustrated in collaboration with other writers and for stories he has written for himself, he enjoys the liberty being the driving force on a project.

“Perfect freedom is the ideal for anyone who's an artist with something they want to say. Limited freedom is something you tolerate because in a professional context it has to be tolerated. That's not to say it isn't enjoyable. But there's no substitute for perfect freedom within the parameters you choose,” he said. His approach to the average workday - or lack thereof - is a logical echo of that approach.

“If I had a routine I might as well work 9 to 5. In a deadline situation I'm forced into routine behavior for the sake of efficiency, but even then I try to vary my work hours if I can. I have a low boredom threshold,” he said.

Working in an area that is not too cluttered and very light, Lloyd sits in front of two tall French windows. He prefers working in daylight and tries to do little at night unless it's in the Summer.

“I have worked faster in the past, but these days an average of two days for a black and white page is about right. I've never done this crazy stuff I hear about of pencilling three pages a day and suchlike. I'll leave that to those who enjoy that kind of production,” he said.

The financial fallout of V for Vendetta has enabled him to pick the work he's most interested in, and that resulted in Kickback, which has already received the Prometheus Award for Classic Fiction from the Libertarian Futurist Society, among other acclaim.

“It's a beautifully illustrated book about a cop struggling to find his place in an ugly world,” Dark Horse's Land said.

Available at local comic book shops, traditional booksellers and direct from Dark Horse, Kickback is a 96-page, hardcover graphic novel. It retails for $12.95.

To view all of the pictures from this article, read it at The Scoop’s website at http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=13490&si=124.

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