By Robin Jones featuring Paul Holden
So Thought Bubble came and went. Myself, Charlotte my fiancee, Captain Inter-Comics, Dan Cole and our good friend Sean Favager descended upon Leeds like a group of alcohol deprived ghouls and drank our way through the whole thing. So as the cobwebs, hangovers and various drink related injuries were wearing themselves off, my good friend Michael Sambrook got in contact with me, imploring me to get hold of Paul Holden, the comic book artist well known for his work on 2000AD, Judge Dredd, Battlefields, The 86ers and Terminator/Robocop: Kill Human. You see, Holden is the artist on a new creator owned comic book called The Dept. of Monstrology and boy is it a good one! Distributed by Renegade Arts Entertainment and written with Holden’s long time co-hort Gordon Rennie, it is set among the unofficial the Department Of Monsterology, otherwise known as Dunsany College’s Department Of Cryptozoology, Mythological Studies, Parapsychology and Fortean Phenomena, we follow a pair of teams, known as Challenger and Carnacki, as they search the world for the macabre, the horrifying, the mystical and sometimes, downright weird.
Whilst team Challenger are exploring some wreckage on the ocean floor in the South Pacific they uncover something fishy…and scaly…and with HUGE DAMN TEETH! Cue harpoons being fired and a professor in full diving suit laying waste to large swathes of sharp fanged beasties!
Team Carnacki however are chasing up some missing Chinese artifacts and have to deal with Jiangshi, or Chinese vampires! There’s astral projection, acrobatics over the rooftops of Budapest reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and an Oxford and Stamford professor, who also happens to be a veteran of the revered Ghurkha Rifles (so he could definitely hold his own in a fight!) There’s also psychic named Belasco who bears a striking resemblance in manners and stature to a certain flamboyant comedian famous now for his sensible political musings and sleeping with anything with a pulse! It seems Rennie is more than happy to inject some humor into what could be seen as an otherwise quite straight up horror book!
Issue two focuses more on introducing a villainous counterpart to our intrepid heroes. What we have at the very beginning is a massacre of peaceful monsters in Slovenia by a paramilitary response group, after nothing but their diamond eyes. These are revealed to work for a group known as the Lamont Institute, who unlike the benign Dunsany College group, will use force to get their hands on any and all specimens they can! This ruthlessness is a lovely juxtaposition to Challenger and Carnacki’s approach and could be seen as a metaphor for many government/corporate approaches to most situations. Shoot first, ask questions later.
We have team Carnacki heading out to China after their encounter in Budapest, whilst team Challenger are having to deal with something straight out of Jules Verne novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, as they have to track and tag a dinosaur, all the while Professor Wilmington is investigating a huge, underwater Cluthulu statue. Cue a standoff with more Jiangshi, and this is where Holden’s art really shines through. The fight scene is frantic, gory and humorous and could easily have been lifted from any of Guillermo Del Toro’s film scripts!
I whole heatedly implore you to check this book out! Buy it and support Rennie and Holden’s work.
Holden’s art is beautifully tight, his monsters are genuinely creepy and unnerving! Rennie’s writing is witty, fun, well aware of influences and likes to play to them! He takes a seeming love of Lovecraft, Mingnola, Verne and Conan Doyle and mixes it up, plays around with it and makes it his own. All supported by Holden’s brilliant art. What they also do is break the norm, which is risky for a new book, but also sets it apart wonderfully. You don’t just get one main narrative with DoM, we have two separate narratives with many sub plots delicately weaved together. Then comes the brilliant characterization. Each member of the Dept has their own unique style, prose, grace and personality. This is very difficult to do in such a short space of time, but Rennie and Holden manage to. The characters are captivating, genuinely interesting and have a lot of depth left to explore!
What we have on our hands here is a British challenger to the American domination of monster books. Dept of Monsterology more than stands on it’s own feet and could duke it out with BRDP, Hellboy or Locke and Key. Still unconvinced? Well I was very luck to get to speak with Paul Holden about Department of Monsterology and he even answered a couple of your questions!
Me: Paul, you’ve worked on some big name books, such as Judge Dredd, the 86ers and most recently Terminator/Robocop: Kill Human, now you’re working on a creator owned comic, Dept. of Monsterology. Does the creative process differ between the two? Do you find you have much more freedom of expression with Dept of Monsterology than you had on previous works?
Paul: I feel much more involved in Dept of Monsterology - Gordon and I have been talking about some of the ideas in DoM for years – in particular, the Jiangshi (or Chinese hopping vampires), one of the big villains of the piece, is a monster we’ve wanted to do something with for over a decade. It’s nice to be able to finally get them out of our heads and on to paper. Gordon writes great, exciting stuff laced with humor, so his scripts are always enormous fun to work on. But it’s been lovely to be able to suggest stuff that can be wrapped in to the Monsterology universe, and, because it’s creator owned, for as long as Gordon and I are interested (and we can find sterling support from Alex Finbow at Renegade Arts, Jim Campbell on letters and Steven Denton on colours) we’ll be able to return to and do more and more with.
Me: You said yourself and Gordon Rennie have wanted to do this project for some time but have only just got round to it, was that because of a contractual thing, a lack of time or was it something to do with wanting a longer gestation period for all your ideas to form together?
Paul: More a question of other projects, finding the right publisher and personal lives – we pitched the original prologue strip to a number of publishers, and renegade felt most like the one that would support us and the book. Then it was a matter of working through other commitments.
Me: What do you think sets Dept of Monsterology apart from other monster or paranormal based books that are out there, such as Hellboy or Constantine as people are bound to draw comparisons between them?
Paul: I think there’ll always be a difference in terms of sensibilities – Gordon and I both enjoy humor in our stories, so even if we were doing BPRD, it would be very different. But also, I think, DoM is a much broader base of monsters – while we’re probably likely to touch on some of the same sorts of creatures as BPRD (especially if they’re part of the wider cultural landscape), we’ll be coming at them from a different angle, usually a much more pulpy and possibly over the top angle. (Which isn’t to say I don’t love BPRD - because I do, I really really do!) And we haven’t even hit on the space stuff yet, which is the remit of Team Carter – one of the three field expedition teams, who’ve vanished and are an ongoing mystery.
Me: When you see the huge school of “ichthoid- humanoid hybrids” drawing up from the deep near the beginning of issue 1, it’s a fantastic spectacle, and the use of Bell diving equipment gives off a slight Ray Harryhausen and H.P Lovecraft vibe. Did Harryhausen’s and Lovecraft’s work influence you at all in your art or did you draw inspiration from other sources?
Paul: Well, Gordon is the smart, well read one, so he’s coming at it from a HP Lovecraft angle, and I love Harryhausen. But mostly, I get the script, read it and figure out what these things will look like based on the description Gordon has written. I’ll google around for some images to help (angler fish in particular in this instance) and Harry Wilmington (Me: Who is normally seen in a diving suit) I reference turn of the century diving suits to get some notion of what to go for. Though, ironically, they were so outlandish and out there I felt I’d better tone it down a bit so he didn’t look silly!
Me: We’ve already discussed your inspiration for your monstrous artwork (sorry for the pun), but when sitting down to get into the “groove”, so to speak of creating your beasties, is there a process you follow or do you draw on anything that’s to hand like napkins, envelopes etc?
Paul: I pretty much go at the pages full bore. Unless there’s some specific description that I’ve got to adhere to. It means we’re sadly lacking in sketch back,after though!
Me: As an artist, do you get a large input in the direction of the stories you illustrate, or do you receive a script and just draw away?
Paul: I’m both a slave to the script and totally in charge of how a reader sees it. I’ll rarely contribute much to a script beyond the odd visual idea (or I’ll suggest a certain type of monster that might be fun). And Gordon runs with it. Once I have the script, the onus is on me to make it understandable to a reader. To take the words “awesome giant underwater Cthulhu Statue” and turn it into an image that makes the reader think “that’s AWESOME”.
Which is a cool job.
Me: If you had to sell Dept of Monsterology in one sentence, what would you say?
Paul: It’s called “Dept of Monsterology” - do I need to sell it harder than that? (this is why I’m not a writer!)
LOOK AT THE ART! JUST LOOK AT IT!
Me: Can we expect bigger, badder, meaner and more slatheringly terrifying monsters as the series goes along, or should we look out for more eerie monsters, such as the Jiangshi?
Paul: I think Gordon and I both get bored easily (as evidenced by the rapid pace in this first mini) so it’s fair to say we’ll keep mixing it up. I mean, I’ve seen the outline for the next mini and there’s a great mix of pulp, horror and sci fi…
Me: What can we expect to see in the future for Amelia, Professor Trondheim, Professor Wilmington, Team Carnaki and the rest of the Department of Cryptozoology, Mythological Studies, Parapsychology and Fortean Phenomena? Should we expect more run-ins with the Lamont Institute?
Paul: To be honest, Gordon poured so much into the first miniseries I thought – well, that’s it. There’s nothing left to do. But oh, no. OH NO! There is SO MUCH MORE! And he’d kill me if I told you. Let’s just say our teams, hoping for some R&R after the adventures in this first miniseries, don’t quite get the rest they’d hoped for.
(And if the current miniseries didn’t kill me, the next one might do…)
Me: I asked my followers on Facebook and Twitter if they had any questions for you, and Ian Hanmore-Farrugia on Twitter asked: As a comic creator, do you still read comics, and if so, what comics do you still get excited about?
Paul: I rarely have the time, though that’s as much to do with the fact that I have two young kids. I like anything that’s fun and funny and over the top. I’ve recently subscribed to the Marvel Unlimited comics app, so I’ve been catching up on some of the Marvel stuff – I’ve particularly enjoyed Superior Spider-Man.
Me: There were several questions about the Murderdrome and Apple incident, most notably from Reece Jones, who wondered what it was like to have a comic banned from the app store? From what I can see, you covered that a lot at the time and I don’t want you to feel as if you’re retreading over old ground. Do you mind commenting, if it’s not uncomfortable?
Paul: Not uncomfortable at all! Though, you’re right, it’s well covered ground!
Murderdrome was to be one of the first comic reader apps on the iPhone, but by a strange quirk of fate, it was found to be too violent for Apple’s sensibilities, and was subsequently “banned” (though actually all they did was asked us to remove the violence – but all it was was over the top violence, so we were stuck between a rock and a hard place). It hit world wide notoriety, because of the perceived banning (google it! we were EVERYWHERE!) and I moved on to draw comics.
Me: This one comes from Michael Patrick Kane on Facebook: How did you conceptualize the story? Is it a set arc that develops specifically each issue, or a more varied type with a solid beginning, middle, and end?
Paul: Well, that’s more a question for Gordon. But Gordon’s introducing a whole universe in Dept of Monsterology, and there are lots of little threads we’ve thrown out there and mysteries that, even when the first arc is finished will leave us others avenues to explore. Each character has a background and a reason for doing what they do, and that’s a fertile ground for new ideas.
Me: Finally, just for fun. If you could pick one comic book artist who has most influenced your style, who would that be and why was their work so influential to you?
Paul: Oh just one… Argh! Too … Hard … Early 80′s Steve Dillon. Maybe.
So there you go! You should check out Paul’s other work and bear in mind, he is also the artist on the creator owned book Numbercruncher with Si Spurrier, the collected edition of which is available on the 31st of December 2013 and you can order Dept of Monsterology here!
Check back next week, when we shall be looking into the awesome world of indoctrinating your kids into the ever increasing comic book fandom…or kids comics as they’re known in this house!
Until next time…
For more comic views and reviews follow Robin on Twitter at @Hulksmash1985
Posted on November 29th, 2013
Category: PAPERCUTS AND INKSTAINS VOL. 2, REVIEWS
Tags: Comics Reviews, Department of Monstrology, Paul Holden, Robin Jones