BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO Dean Haspiel loved classic comics like Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense that had two comic characters sharing equal time in split-books. That's part of the reason he wanted to team with Michel Fiffe and share face time for both Billy Dogma and Panorama in the pages of Image's Brawl. We already chatted up Fiffe on his contribution, but now have Haspiel on hand for a few quick punches about Billy Dogma.
THE PULSE: Who came up with the idea to do something like Brawl?
DEAN HASPIEL: I've always been a sucker for early Marvel Comics horror/noir anthologies cum superhero split-books like TALES TO ASTONISH featuring Ant-Man and The Hulk while Captain America and Iron Man dueled serials in TALES OF SUSPENSE and Nick Fury and Dr. Strange shared STRANGE TALES. Having picked up back issues of those old Lee, Kirby, & Ditko comics and growing up reading the Hernandez Bros'LOVE & ROCKETS and launching KEYHOLE, a short-lived yet critically acclaimed comic series I did in the mid-90s with my high school pal Josh Neufeld, I consider myself well versed in the virtues of the two-man anthology and I wanted to revisit that synergy with Michel Fiffe under the guise of BRAWL.
THE PULSE: Out of all the Act-i-Vate folks, what made Michel Fiffe a good fit for what you had in mind?
HASPIEL: Fiffe's been my assistant and great friend for over 4-years and I've watched him grow from grasshopper to drunken master with the tentacle flair of his crowquill rattle. Fiffe is one of the very few new cartoonists whose influences are quickly stripped away upon each page he executes and what lies in his comix wake are wholly original. Fiffe's work has the rush of the mad and macabre, as if he's accidentally hijacked a crime scene of sex and horror from another dimension where science police are building a transporter in hopes of retrieving their stolen evidence. Fiffe has the rare ability to scare and thrill me with his black and white despair and that's exactly the kind of stuff I want complimenting BILLY DOGMA.
THE PULSE: For our readers who aren't familiar with Billy Dogma, what sets him apart from some of the other comic bruisers out there?
HASPIEL: There's hardly a handful of bruiser's swaggering about the comix medium. However, for those nerds keeping track, I'd say BILLY DOGMA is cut from the same cloth as HERCULES, POPEYE, SGT. ROCK, OMAC, and THE THING. What sets BILLY DOGMA apart from those bruisers is that he's likely to debate the pros and cons of minimizing your carbon footprint and sending a cheeky chump to the moon with the business end of his knuckle sandwich while knocking sugar with his hot dame.
THE PULSE: What do you personally like the best about that character? You've created so many eclectic characters, what is it about Billy Dogma that makes him one you enjoy returning to?
HASPIEL: BILLY DOGMA is my comic book avatar. It's his broken mug and purple prose I can't help but return to drawing and writing whenever I feel the profound desire to express my emotions regarding love, loyalty, and life. I was incredibly lucky to create a protagonist elastic enough to mature as I evolve.
THE PULSE: How do you think you've grown as a comic creator since you first began working on Billy Dogma?
HASPIEL: I now have a comix sensibility that I didn't have when I created BILLY DOGMA in 1995. These days, I tend to tell less so I can show more. However, I still write dialogue better read than said and the combination of the visual with the visceral keeps my comix ghetto.
THE PULSE: What are some of the things you can do in Brawl in print that you felt you couldn't already do online?
HASPIEL: With BRAWL, Fiffe and I will reach the traditional comix readership who have yet to take the leap from print to web. And, in the case of my story, "Immortal," the narrative pacing was altered to befit the format which changed the reading experience for an effective page turner rather than a seamless scroll down. Both formats work extremely well but the challenge was to meet their differences head on.
THE PULSE: What surprised you the most about how the general comics reading public responded to Act-i-Vate?
HASPIEL: ACT-I-VATE has been an incredible experiment, thus far. What started off as an exclusive comix blog community competing for the attention of traditional print and webcomics readers has become a highly regarded example of how to control content and viral market original story ideas by comix creators.
THE PULSE: What's coming up in these three issues of Brawl? What will Billy be facing?
HASPIEL: BRAWL is equal parts BILLY DOGMA and PANORAMA. A creature romance double feature. The BILLY DOGMA side of the book features a story called "Immortal," where Billy Dogma and Jane Legit send their hearts and their town into a tail spin when their pathological war of woo unearths the chaos of a cosmic deity.
THE PULSE: Warren Ellis called you the "heir to Kirby." Who would be your "Stan Lee"? Why?
HASPIEL: Warren Ellis was hopped up on a keg of Red Bull when he typed that claim to me. Clearly, the great Walter Simonson is the true "heir to Jack Kirby." I have yet to discover my Stan Lee, if that equation is even possible anymore, but working with Jonathan Ames on THE ALCOHOLIC has been a wonderful and, dare I say, highly intuitive collaboration.
THE PULSE: How did you come up with the cover design for Brawl? What influenced you?
HASPIEL: Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's GRINDHOUSE poster art loosely inspired my cover designs for BRAWL. That, and the fact that I wanted to minimize my efforts which is why I used panels from within my story and enlarged and colored them for the cover. There's no way to properly pitch what Fiffe and I are trying to do in one single graphic, so we agreed that the title and cover designs should be simple yet compelling with a tag line that claimed what the comic was with no permissions and no apologies.
THE PULSE: Where can PULSE readers see some of your work online?
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I've read a ton of stuff by Dean Haspiel. His Thing mini-series with Evan Dorkin, his Luna Moth contribution to the (sorely missed) Escpaist anthology, his numerous pieces for Harvey Pekar, and other such stuff.
But, I haven't really gotten around to anything he wrote himself. So, I'll be giving this a shot.
If his writing is as good as his art I'm sure I'll be all set.
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