STELFREEZE BRIAN

[DJO]

 

O Brian μας έρχεται από ΗΠΑ μεριά. Brian! Είναι σχεδιαστής/ζωγράφος/μελανωτής/σεναριογράφος και επιμελητής χρώματος, ενώ έχει συνεργαστεί σχεδόν με όλες τις εκδοτικές κόμικ που υπάρχουν στις ΗΠΑ! Τα λόγια περιττεύουν για αυτό το απίστευτο χέρι, ας μιλήσουν οι εικόνες πίνακες:

 

 

Για περισσότερα:

Wiki / FB / Blog

 

[GreekComicFan]

Κοινώς, δεν υπάρχουν πολλές πληροφορίες διαθέσιμες για να παραθέσεις.  

[DJO]

Αμπλαούμπλα! Άντε και λίγο σάλτσα:

 

Συνέντευξη του Brian Stelfreeze στη Sidra Roberts

 

Brian Stelfreeze is a wonderfully talented artist who is probably best known for his work on the Batman series. Brian has worked on several comicbook titles, and has done numerous illustrations. He has been a guest at AggieCon for several years now. This was my first AggieCon and Mr. Stelfreeze was kind enough to sit down with me and let me interview him. He's a very amusing and talkative man. I hope you all enjoy this interview as much as I did.

 

 

Sidra: How did you become interested in art?

Stelfreeze: Its kind of odd. My dad was in the military, so we moved around all the time and I had to end up making a new group of friends every time I'd go to a new State. I found out that if I was drawing stuff, it would kind of be an in road to making new friends.

 

Sidra: Did you have any formal art training?

Stelfreeze: I guess. I started working at an illustration studio when I was really young, and a lot of the guys there were just masters of illustration. So, they kind of taught me a lot of stuff, and that was not a school situation, but hanging out with some massively talented guys.

 

Sidra: What's your favorite art style or medium and why?

Stelfreeze: Oh that's got to be acrylics. I love acrylics because it kind of gives you a little bit of what you can do with watercolors and a little bit of what you can do with oils. To me its one of the most versatile mediums that you can play around with. Its just perfectly suited for illustration because it reproduces really well, and it suits my attention span. I can't think about things for too long.

 

Sidra: When did you first become interested in comicbooks?

Stelfreeze: You're gonna have to ask my mom that one. I was always interested in comicbooks. Before I could read, I would pick up comicbooks and just look through them. I was interested in comics primarily when we lived in West Point, New York. After a while we had to move back to South Carolina, and there wasn't a comicbook shop there, so I kinda dropped out of comicbooks for a real long time. I got a job doing illustrations, and later on I kind of fell back into it, but comics are something I've always been in love with.

 

Sidra: Did you ever hope or think that you would end up drawing comicbooks as a kid?

Stelfreeze: It's weird. I always kind of knew that I would be drawing comicbooks, but I didn't think you could make money drawing comicbooks. I thought that everyone who worked in comicbooks worked a regular job and also worked doing comicbooks, you know, for the fun of it. So I kinda of thought I'll get a regular job and I'll do comicbooks like everyone who does comics. It wasn't really until I got into comics that I realized "Hey wait a minute, you can actually make a living doing this thing".

 

Sidra: How did you end up going from illustrations to comicbooks?

Stelfreeze: The first comicbook that I did was a comicbook called CyCops for Comics Interview. The way that that worked out was I was starting to get interested in comics again, and I was really interested in illustration, but I wanted to do a comicbook just for the fun of it. Not really get serious about it, not really change my career or anything, but just kind of do a fun comic. I did the comicbook, and I had such a good time doing it that I thought "Okay, okay just one more". It was, I guess, something similar to a crack addiction. It was something that I kept doing just a little bit, and I'd do less and less illustrations and more comics. There wasn't a day I decided "I'm going to change my career". It was one day I looked up and said, "Man, I haven't done an illustration in a couple of years now". It was just kind of something that took over.

 

Sidra: How did get your assignment on the Batman series?

Stelfreeze: That was a really tricky thing. I did some work for a comicbook shop owner, and I did some Batman drawings. Someone at DC Comics looked at the way I drew Batman, and they didn't like it. So I decided "Okay I can just forget about this whole Batman thing." I just didn't even pursue doing any Batman stuff, and I got to know Pat Bastienne, who worked at DC for a while. She asked me to send a portfolio up, and I sent her a portfolio. I thought " Okay, maybe I can get a job on Green Lantern, The Flash, or something like that but you know Batman that's just out of my reach." I remember getting home one day, and there was a message on the answering machine. I flipped it on and it was Denny O'Neil, the Batman editor at the time. I've always been a Batman fan, so I recognized the name Denny O'Neil immediately. It was almost like getting a call from God, you know. I just kind of stood there like "Oh my god, it's Denny O'Neil, and he's asking me to draw Batman." I played that message so many times and I'd call up friends and be like "Come on over, you'd go to hear this." I got everyone over to play the answering machine message of Denny O'Neil asking me to draw Batman. So that's kind of how things got started. I got a good relationship going with Denny, and I've been kind of associated with Batman ever since.

 

Sidra: I know you drew a few covers for Legion of Superheroes. What did you think of having to draw so many characters?

Stelfreeze: I'm just obsessed with drawing. I just love drawing stuff, and I love any challenge that could be put in front of me the more difficult the better. Something like Legion of Superheroes is kinda neat, because to me every character is an individual, and I don't want to give just them that ideal look. I want to really think of what type of person they are, and put a personality with it. So, doing stuff like Legion of Superheroes is a lot of fun, because it challenges you to think about the person you're doing a portrait of.

 

Sidra: What title has been your favorite comicbook, that you've read or that you've drawn?

Stelfreeze: My favorite book that I've worked on has been the times that I've done Oracle. Oracle is a Batman character, but she used to be Batgirl. She got injured, and now, she's in a wheelchair, but trying to get by as someone who helps superheroes. I think that Oracle is just a really interesting character, because it's kind of a Phoenix situation. She was just this great dynamic character and got taken down so far, and she's built her way back up. I think it's just an interesting story, and of the characters I've done she is the character that feels most like a real person to me. So, it's really fun to draw her, because it's like I'm working on an old friend, and I know exactly what she'd do and exactly what she thinks. That's just so much fun. Just the whole thing of me doing comics is really trying to make it real. When I grew up, I was a retarded little kid. Comicbooks were real to me. When I heard Superman wasn't a real guy that was like finding out that Santa Claus isn't real. So what I try to do is take those feelings that I had of "This is real," and I try to put that into the comics that I do. So anything that feels real to me, that's the stuff that I like to work on and that the stuff that I really like to read. Stuff like 100 Bullets or Crime Stories just so long as it feels real.

 

Sidra: If you could work with anyone in the comicbook industry, who would it be and why?

Stelfreeze: Oh man, there's just so many canons of comics that I'd love to work with and I've got like a hit list that I'm trying to go through and take them all out one at a time. You know, I'd like to work with Denny again on a story. Denny O'Neil, he's just, I think, a brilliant guy. Scott Peterson, who was a Batman editor, he's now doing Gotham Adventures. There are just so many people that I would love to work with, and what's really nice is I will work with them. Whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not, I WILL indeed work with them.

 

Sidra: I hear from my fellow Cepheids that you come to AggieCon a lot. I was wondering when did you first come to Aggiecon and what is it about Aggiecon that keeps you coming back?

Stelfreeze: The thing that I love about Aggiecon is that I actually get to talk to people. Some of the larger conventions, there are just so many people there that you never get a chance to talk to them. The only thing you can do is "Hi", " Thanks," sign the book, and go onto the next person. And you never really make any connections. One of the things I like about going to conventions is finding out what people think of what you do, and you don't find anything out when you're signing books in kind of a shooting gallery where you just try to get rid of as many people as possible. Coming to Aggiecon, it's quiet, and all of the people are really in love with comics and really in love with fantasy. It's just nice hanging out with these people. I'm one of these people. You know there wasn't a time where I changed over from being a comicbook geek to a "professional comicbook artist". I'm still a comicbook geek. So, these are people that I'd hang out with, people that I'd hang out with a comicbook shops. It's nice to actually sit down and talk to them, go to parties with them and just be there.

 

Sidra: One more question, what do you want to work on next?

Stelfreeze: Right now I'm interested in working on some of the smaller characters. I'm really not interested in working on bigger characters. I mean I've done Batman so that dream is out of the way now. Now I'm more interested in the characters that felt personal to me, that a lot of times I was the only person who liked that character and that was my character. So I'm trying to go through and hit some of those character and I'm also interested in doing more creator owned stuff. That's something that I think is a lot of fun. I think that anyone who's into comics, if you go to a comicbooks shop and stand in there for a few minutes you hear some of the greatest stories. And it's not stories that were printed in comics. It's people going "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if Batman did dot dot dot", and it's just cool stuff. Every comicbook reader and every comicbook artist loves doing that stuff. Right now I'm kind of at a point in my career, where I can do that. I can take that self-expression one more step further. Not doing it with characters that exist, but actually creating characters, and trying to say something. That's the stuff that I would really like to get into.

 

 

 

[stardust]

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