When the zombie apocalypse comes, the man you'll want by your side is Charlie
Adlard. The comic artist has put down more walking corpses than George A.
Romero has had hot dinners. He can mash undead heads with sticks and stones
and broken bones with Terminator-like efficiency and speed. But he's also
inventive. No two zombies are dispatched the same way, or at least from the
same angle.
Adlard is responsible for drawing the armies of the undead that stagger
through the pages of The Walking Dead, the award-winning comic written and
created by Robert Kirkman. The comic, which has been running since 2003, has
been compared to The Wire and Lost, such is its quality and breadth of
scope.
Although it does adhere loosely to the staples of the genre - the story
follows a small band of survivors in small-town America after a mysterious
epidemic sweeps the world and causes the dead to rise and feast on the
living - it is no mere exploitation horror comic. The drama is not in the
scenes of zombie extermination but in the pain of normal people struggling
to keep alive in a world where civilisation has crumbled and died. "I
don't think the comic would have lasted as long as it has if were just a
zombie comic and I certainly wouldn’t be drawing it," says
Adlard. "I’m not interested in exploitation and I don’t want to appeal
to the people that are to be honest. I like horror movies but the ones I
prefer tend to be more psychological horrors, like The Shining or The
Haunting."
Unusually for a comic, The Walking Dead is in black and white, partially to
make the gore and violence easier to stomach and partially because it is
Kirkman's homage to the black and white movie Night of the Living Dead, but
the monochrome colour scheme is a perfect fit for Adlard's style. His heavy
use of black ink and fondness for strong contrasts add not only to the
creepiness of Kirkman's world but also to its starkness. His work on The
Walking Dead earned him an Eisner nomination, the comics equivalent of an
Oscar, and has made him one of the industry's most in-demand artists. "It
was extremely flattering and a complete surprise. I couldn’t believe that my
work had been noticed. Apart from a brief time when I was doing the X-Files
comic, I was a jobbing artist, a kind of no one just getting by on whatever
came my way. I was known within the industry as being quick, which was a
helpful tool to have in my arsenal, but apart from that I wouldn’t be the
first person on anybody’s list until the Walking Dead came along."
Adlard was born and still lives in Shrewsbury, England, a fact that would
astonish most Walking Dead readers; from the amount of detail he puts into
the comic, most would expect he has lived in America all his life. "Where
I grew up access to comics was very limited. I remember my dad bringing home
the first issue of Marvel UK, the black-and-white reprint of Marvel's US
stuff for the British maket, in 1972, when I was about six years old, and it
cemented what I was going to do in my life. The other thing I remember
reading at that age was Asterix. A garage my dad used to visit gave out free
Asterix books as part of a petrol promotion. So at the same time, unbeknown
to myself, I was being introduced to European comics. Asterix and Marvel -
you couldn't have two different types of storytelling and styles. I loved
Asterix for the fact that it wasn’t just a funny comic book, it was packed
with amazing historical and cultural references. I recognised the stories as
looking more like the strip cartoons that newspapers published - but they
were in a big format and in full colour. I don’t think there was any
specific characters that I drew while growing up. Of the few times in my
career when I have drawn an established comic character, I have never sort
of sat back and thought, 'My God, I’m drawing Spider-man or Batman or
whoever.' I just wanted to draw comics I think, simple as that.
"I was in my late twenties when I got my first job in comics. After
finishing art college I spent a while in London trying to make it in a band.
That didn’t work out so I started hawking my portfolio around publishing
houses until editors were completely cheesed off with seeing me. One of them
eventually caved in and gave me a job on Judge Dredd the Megazine. You can’t
beat learning on the job and there’s nothing like a proper deadline bearing
down on you to bring out the best in you. God knows what they thought of me
because, looking back at my work from that period, I wouldn’t have given me
a job at that age. They must have seen some sort of potential.
"At the time – this was the early Nineties – the fashion was to paint
strips rather than do them in inks. My first few comic strips I had to
paint, which was just mad. This was before computer colouring, so everything
I did was acrylic on paper. When I started out my portfolio comprised mostly
black and white artwork. I only took up painting because everyone else was
doing it and I thought it would be the best way to get a job. Ironically I
got really interested in painting when I started getting offered black and
white work. When I started working for American comics I never got the
opportunity to do colouring again and I’ve sort of fallen out of that loop.
There is one thing about colouring I didn’t enjoy and that was the fact that
I'd spend so long on a page, concentrating on the smallest details, I never
really got the chance to step back and look at the whole, to get a full
sense of the story.
"One of the advantages of being fast is that I get a real sense of the
stories I'm drawing. Hurtling through panel after panel, I can see the comic
almost evolving in front of my eyes. Ironically, a lot of my favourite
artists aren't the greatest storytellers but I just love the way they draw."
Adlard was not The Walking Dead's original artist - the first six issues were
drawn by Tony Moore - but he has more than made the comic his own over the
subsequent 60 issues. Infact, most of the orginal cast members have met with
grissly deaths while those that have survived are unrecognisable from how
they first appeared. "Robert Kirkman e-mailed me one day and said, 'Do
you want to earn money?' I had never heard of The Walking Dead but did know
of Robert's work and had enjoyed it. My only regret is that I wasn't there
at the start but I can’t risk unpaid work for a number of months on the
vague chance that I might get something out of it at the end. At the time I
was offered The Walking Dead I had one child and another on the way. If I
didn’t have children, I may have taken more gambles with new comics, but I
can’t do that. Robert wasn’t offering much money at the beginning but the
comic was selling, so it was enough.
"It was more of a challenge taking over on something like this, a comic
which had only just got started, than it would be taking over something that
was more established, such as Batman. There is a risk involved changing the
artist early on. The Walking Dead's fanbase, albeit not very big at the
time, was not used to change and didn’t like the idea that somebody else was
going to take over and change all their favourite characters. Many of the
readers said that they didn't like the book anymore because of the change.
But I’d like to think now that the book is mine now. Drawing my own
characters, I think, helps a lot. I didn’t want copy Tony's style and Robert
didn't even suggest it."
Although Kirkman lives in the US, both he and Adlard talk via email almost
every day. Adlard says: "I get the scripts, I do the scripts. In fact I
don't really discuss with Robert upcoming storylines. I like to read the
scripts fresh and a couple of times he has shocked me." One instance
was a graphic torture scene in issue 33 in which one of the main characters,
Michonne, takes her revenge on a man who has raped her repeatedly. She
subjects him to a series of atrocities involving pliers, a power drill, a
blowtorch, and a spoon. "That issue made me uneasy and I had to force
Robert to convince me to do it. That saying, I think the torture scene works
because of the savage assaults Michonne has been subjected to in previous
issues and, although we could have just cut away from the violence, I think
it would have lessened the scene and made it almost unnecessary. The
violence that we do show feels real and has a lasting emotional impact."
Surprisingly, the book's brutal moments are not the ones with which Adlard has
the most problems. "The zombies are the easiest thing to draw in the
book. I make them up as I go along! The hardest thing I find is doing pages
and pages of people just talking to each other. The Walking Dead has lots of
that but the challenge is to make it look interesting. If it’s close up on
Y, close up on X, close up on Y for several pages, you’ve got to think
right, okay, I’m gonna try and not just do close up of heads, I’m gonna pull
back a bit, zoom in a bit, go for a longer shot here.
"My rule is that if you have two people talking in a panel, there should
be no more than two speech bubbles. You need to show the reactions of
characters when they are talking to one another. If a character has several
speech bubbles in the same panel, you don’t read it. Some writers get so
fixated on dialogue that they forget that 50 per cent of a comic is the art.
There’s never a happy medium but comics do seem writer led at the moment. If
they were artist led, and the story was neglected, that would be just as
bad. But in any comic you’ve got to have good artwork."
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