Interviewee: Graham Miller
Interviewer: Anthony Andujar Jr
Q1 You’ve been working on a ton of comics since the previous interview a few years ago. One of the many projects that caught my attention is your book, C.Y.M.K Ultra. It’s a book about Andy Warhol facing the challenges of inspiration, icons of 60s and 80s comics, and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul the 2nd. How did the idea for this zany book of humor and action come to be?
GM: C.Y.M.K Ultra was a title I’d been sitting on for a little over a year by the time I really started putting this book together. I don’t want to get ahead of myself and claim that there’s an ‘Ultraverse’ in the works, pending my actual working schedule and the lawsuit that would come from Marvel Comics given that I think they’re the current owners of the long-defunct ‘Ultraverse’ comics; but there is a broader timeline of events I had in mind to publish with this title. I got the idea thinking about Operation Midnight Climax, a subdivision of MK Ultra where CIA agents were scooping just about any hippie off the streets of Haight-Ashbury, dousing them full of chemicals, and recording their responses. At the time this operation would have been going on, the counterculture movement was at its height in the late 60’s, and by extension so was the underground comix movement.
We don’t have any hard records (yet) but there’s a non-zero chance that Crumb or S. Clay Wilson got doused by government acid. Combine that with the printer color codes CMYK, and I was off to the proverbial races. A few months after I began stewing on this idea, my sister took me to see the Andy Warhol piece, ‘Guns, Knives, and Crosses‘. Being the Miller-head that I am, the title immediately sounded like the missing book in the ‘Sin City‘ series. Right between ‘Bullets, Booze, and Broads‘ and ‘Hell and Back‘. The way the piece displayed the titular guns, knives, and crosses, was even reminiscent of Marv’s checklist when he goes to hunt down Kevin. You know the scene where he lists off, ‘Handcuffs, gasoline, razor wire, gloves for handling razor wire, hack saw, tubing, Gladys (his gun), and my mitts’. Great moment.
Andy’s ‘Guns, Knives, and Crosses’, was a piece about his near-death experience at the hands of Valerie Solanos. When it was up at the Brooklyn Museum, it was displayed alongside the photo of him meeting Pope John Paul II. I can’t really explain how quickly my brain bridged the gap, but I had a near-immediate train of thought that made me think, in ‘Guns, Knives, and Crosses’ Frank Miller will try to assassinate the Pope. It just made sense. ‘Elektra: Assassin” is about an attempt on the president’s life, the first Sin City comic was about assassinating the bishop. It really fits well. Beyond that, “Elektra: Assassin” is a book that’s critical of the CIA’s involvement in coups that took place in Latin American countries, and features a good bit of ambiguous-hallucinogen-induced espionage.
Q2 What was the writing process like working on C.Y.M.K Ultra compared to previous projects?
GM: I started C.Y.M.K Ultra the same way I do everything, with thumbnails. I got maybe 6 pages into it with thumbnails and then I started making a really loose outline for myself. I would write maybe a paragraph per page of comics. I didn’t note what my panel shapes or sizes would be, I let the length of the sentence determine the importance of the information and the real estate it would take up on the page. Then I thumbnailed again and got down to the drawing. Like everything I did, save for a few lines, I wanted worded exactly as I wrote them in my head, I primarily typed up the dialogue after the comic was completed. One-Man-Marvel-Method. I don’t know if I’ve ever made a brief outline before, but the previous comics I did were roughly similar. I had a beginning and an ending, and I figured out how to bridge those through my thumbnails.
Q3 When developing C.Y.M.K Ultra, was there any research on Warhol that you didn’t know prior? If so, what were some ideas that you were interested in toying with that made it to the cutting room floor?
GM: I never met my great-great uncle, Joseph Fitzpatrick, but I knew since childhood that he was one of Andy’s childhood art teachers in Pittsburgh. I was happy I managed to sneak him into one panel when Andy is having a flashback. I didn’t do a lot of research on Andy, as a result of that distant familia tie, I learned a lot about him over my life. My cousin Sarah used to work at the Warhol Museum. I would have liked to put in a little bit more of Daredevil vs Dracula, a movie that doesn’t exist, but was inspired by a movie that used to exist, Andy Warhol’s ‘Batman-Dracula’. Or maybe done more to contrast that with Miller’s Batman work? I don’t know. It was hard to say what to do with that and still skirt around copyright law.
Q4 Was Andy Warhol always the protagonist of C.Y.M.K Ultra? Given that the book is focused on iconic figures of the 80s, were there other characters you had in mind before settling on Warhol?
GM: I briefly considered making Geof Darrow, Frank’s partner in crime given he’s the visual model for Kevin in Sin City. Ultimately it made more sense for it to be Bill Sienkiewicz, by way of my parody, Will Inkiewicz. I’m happier with that decision. Bill Sienkiewicz seemed to be the perfect partner in crime for Frank, given his involvement in Elektra Assassin, and his photo manipulation in that book, which is Warholesque. Warhol produced ‘Nine Jackie’s’, 3 repeated images of the former first lady. Bill, on the other hand, reproduced a slightly edited picture of John F. Kennedy as the face of Democratic President-Elect, Ken Wind in Elektra Assassin. Beyond that, Sienkiewicz clearly modeled Perry, one of the villains in Elektra Assassin after himself, but the result always kinda looked like me, to me. So I made Inkiewicz, the Sienkiewicz stand-in, look like a combination of me, Bill, and Perry.
As I explained when answering the first question, I definitely toyed with using some of the underground guys as Manchurian candidate cartoonists as well, but they never would have appeared as major characters in THIS comic. Kirby makes a cameo in a file in the CIA offices as a reference to his unknowing involvement in the ARGO operation during the Iranian Hostage crisis. ‘Junkman’ also appears in this file, as a reference to Spain Rodriguez’s Trash Man. I want to do more with my Steranko pastiche character, given his work on Nick Fury made him THE Iconic with a capital ‘I’ spy artist. He served his purpose in this comic as a background character. If I fulfill my promise of doing some books in the 60’s he’ll show up, Junkman will show up and Kirby will show up. Dan’s gotta be in the whole thing. Stan Lee wore a disguise every day of his life with those sunglasses and that hairpiece. You can’t do a spy comic about spy comics without the guy that was always hiding himself in plain sight.
Q5 In regards to illustration, this particular project is full of color compared to earlier projects. What was it about the color process that appealed to you when illustrating and coloring C.Y.M.K Ultra?
GM: I draw everything digitally. There was part of me that tried to go form a more chiaroscuro look like Frank’s work on Sin City. The photo-repeat of JP II was essentially lifted from Ken Wind’s portrayal in Elektra: Assassin. I think the influence of Tom Scioli and Fiffe still shines through, but I wasn’t directly cribbing any of their work for this comic. I colored it digitally, I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to say about that process. I built a pallet with standard CMYK mixes. I like doing flat colors with just a little extra lighting. I think that suits my art well. I’m really happy with how the new prints came out. The uncoated paper stock makes the vibrant colors a little less harsh than the glossy stock while retaining a lot of life. There’s a few pages where I try to designate the top panel to cyan, the middle to just yellow, and the bottom to just magenta. I don’t know how apparent it is, but it was a fun cross-cutting technique to play with. At one point Will thinks about Steve Ditko and Jim Shooter and their faces are half red and half white.
Q6 Was there a particular playlist made when you were crafting this comic? If so, what tracks served as inspiration during your illustration process?
GM: The only song I can directly say that inspired this was ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane. I know it existed long before ‘The Matrix Resurrections‘ used it in the trailer, but I kinda can’t separate it from that movie in my head. Color-coded pills, martial arts, and Geof Darrow (almost), are all things that made this comic what it is, and I have ‘The Matrix‘ to thank for that.
Q7. As for illustration, what has been different compared to previous projects? Were there any pieces of illustration that inspired your direction for C.M.Y.K Ultra?
GM: Steranko’s inclusion of OP Art in his Nick Fury comics was definitely something I wanted to play with. The brainwashing cards that Dan flashes in front of his freelancers was my way of playing with those techniques. The joke being that Steranko (or Sterango in my story) didn’t create Op Art comics but ‘Psy-Op Art’. The heavy blacks as I said were me drawing more from Miller’s Sin City comics, and the repeated Pope photo was inspired by Bill’s Kennedy photostats in Elektra: Assassin. My layouts were very Miller-Daredevil inspired. Death of Elektra comes to mind. I think that comic has some of the best fight choreography in Marvel’s history. I really wanted to focus on doing good fight choreography. Fast-paced, but thorough. Every strike has a follow through, every block has a counterattack. Establish good geography of characters so that even when the panel is from a different viewpoint the combat is consistent. Every bullet hits someone and if it misses, we see it miss. To add onto another photostatted element, washed-out images of Lee Harvey Oswald appear in the Lev Gleason Daredevil comic Miller and Sienkiewicz are working on in the bullpen sequences. Just more of me playing with the techniques that Bill and Andy were fond of I guess, and contrasting that with the way they depicted the Kennedys.
The crass panel of Basquiat and Andy pissing with the splashes kind of covering their faces were references to the oxidation paintings that Andy did where he would cover the canvas in reactive metal paints and expose it to chemicals, by means of his bodily fluids, to elicit a sort of rusting effect. There’s one of Basqiat’s face that’s pretty iconic. The Marilyn print that supposedly got hit by the bullet that also hit Andy when Valerie Solanas shot him appears in the background of the first flashback sequence. I heavily referenced Saint Peter’s Basilica for the page of Pope JP II addressing the crowd, that was a pain in the neck, but it was worth it. I’m not great with perspective or architecture, but I feel like you have to go all out with a splash page, and to me, the best usage of that seemed to be a true architectural and artistic marvel.
The comic opens with a plastic insert, that’s supposed to mimic the type of projector slide Andy would have put down on his projector before tracing off a panel of comics. I knew I had to include this page in the book. That’s what made this comic ‘Guns, Knives, and Crosses’ instead of a Silver Age vs Underground Comix comic. I know one of the covers of Raw Magazine had an acetate overlay that separates the linework from the colorwork like the old-school comic printing methods of the day. Art Spiegelman mentions it in the Comic Book Confidential documentary. I must have been subconsciously aware of that when I made this comic, but it wasn’t at the top of my head when I put this book together.
Q8 So, there’s also a bootleg comic you worked on featuring a certain Skull-wearing vigilante and a particular underground villain. What was the inspiration for that mini-project? And how fun was it to create it as a creative exercise for projects that you have down the line?
GM: P*nisher vs M*leman was a comic I thought about doing when people were arguing what to do with Frank. ‘Frank’s too political nowadays’, ‘his symbol is used by domestic terrorists, we have to reclaim it’. I hear that a lot. I don’t have the answer. I was never a big Frank guy myself. I like him as a villain for Spidey and Daredevil. Keep him as that, I guess, maybe don’t give him his own series. What I never dug about him was that the times he gets to actually fight super crime are actually pretty rare. I don’t want to see him shoot a bunch of regular guys, I want to see how a crazy guy with an Uzi would take on the Juggernaut. I think Jim Rugg talked about pitching a comic one time where he wanted to have the Punisher scale Galactus over the course of several days like climbing a mountain. That was probably in my head to some degree.
Moleman is the perfect Punisher villain in my eyes. The idea was kind of video gamey in my head I guess. I was thinking about the graveyard fight in Half-Life 2 where you don’t have a lot of ammo and you need to use the Grav-gun to kill the headcrab zombies.
If Punisher tried to take on all the moloids he’d start running out of ammo. What happens when he gets down to his last bullet? Moleman is a real threat to Frank. That’s all there really was to that idea. It was a gas to draw. I wanted to get better at drawing gunfights. I used to way over-panel my shootouts. It made them feel slow. I think I did a way better job here. I’ve never owned a gun, never really planned to, but my dad worked in a gun manufacturing plant when he first came to America. I remember always asking him about the guns my action figures had when I was a kid. I don’t really know if he ever ‘got’ GI Joe, he didn’t grow up with it, but yeah it’s a weird aspect of father-son bonding that influenced where I am now. I like drawing them mid-fire with the shell casing flying out. I feel like that’s something ‘The Matrix‘ also really made me dig the look of.
Q9 What should readers keep an eye out for, and where can they follow your work?
GM: I’ve got KRY THUNDER! on the horizon, or maybe it just came out? It’s printed. I can say that much. I wanted to merge the aesthetics of Kirby’s Eternals and New Gods, you know, his 70’s stuff, my favorite era of his, with the breezy pace and aesthetics of Dragon Ball Z. I put the print file together the day I read Toriyama died. That was a gut punch and a recharge moment for me simultaneously. I don’t expect to catch his torch, there’s people far more influenced by him with a far larger footprint in the world of comics than me that will be his true successor, but it was a real moment of like, “Oh, I have to do this.” I never met him, he was never my mentor, but I drew Piccolo probably a hundred times in 6th and 7th grade. You don’t forget that influence. It felt like the world mourned his death for the longest week of my life. To me, honoring his life means saying “Hey, this is the thing you made me want to do, and here I am doing it, not just like you, my own way, but I couldn’t have done it without you”. I’m on Instagram as @insta_graham_millar. My work is on Etsy at Brain Gramage Comix. That’s where I’ll stay primarily.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher