Interview: Bernie Wrightson
Bernie Wrightson looks like a mad scientist. He wouldn’t look totally out of place in a laboratory, surrounded by jars of brains and two-headed snakes. He would holler “SCIENCE!” as lighting struck the laboratory tower, bringing life to his experiment. It’s all in the eyebrows.
I had the chance to talk with him for a couple minutes after a signing event at Fantasy Comics in Tucson.
PRG: Do you ever get tired of seeing the word “legendary” attached to the front of your name?
BW: I don’t think it’s a question of being tired of it, its more like puzzled. I tend to equate the word “legendary” with old. I’ve just been around for a long time. And my theory is if you manage to keep doing the same thing for forty or forty-five years, you get to that status after a while because it’s not polite to call somebody old!
PRG: I was going to ask what scared you, but I saw that you already answered that question recently for Comic Book Resources, and your answer was “everything.” Really everything? Puppies?
BW: Yeah! [laughs]
PRG: I’m afraid of babies and vacuum cleaners. I can see the scariness of puppies.
BW: It’s OK. When I was a little kid I was afraid of flowers and I think sometimes it was because of Alice in Wonderland, the Disney movie with all the talking and singing flowers. But, yeah to this day I still get the creeps with flowers like lilies and daffodils. You know, those deep flowers with the things poking out of them.
PRG: You exited comics for a while and did work in film as a conceptual artist and creature designer. Why come back to comics at this point in your career?
BW: You know, it [City of Others] was just too good of a project and too good of an opportunity to pass up. And I love working with Steve [Niles]. I hope it never ends.
[nms:Bernie Wrightson,6,0]
PRG: I understand you did the conceptual design for the Reavers in Serenity. How did that come about?
BW: Rick Nicotero at KNB Effects called me as said “I’ve got some designs I want you to do. They’re essentially cannibals that mutilate themselves and have bones and things stuck in their faces, they scar themselves and cut their lips off and file their teeth down. Can you do some drawings?” I said sure, did the drawings and got paid. He never gave me script and if he told me the title of this, I had forgotten it. So I did it, got paid, did the next job. And then again and again, people came up and said “I love your stuff in Serenity!” And I’d say “I didn’t do anything for Serenity! What is that?” My wife finally said, “No, dummy! It’s those cannibal guys you did!”
PRG: My favorite works are your Frankenstein illustrations. Is that something you chose to do on your own or was that a job commission?
BW: I did it totally on my own. I’ve just been obsessed with Frankenstein since I was a kid, and watching the old Universal movies on TV. I just devoured anything about Frankenstein ever since. The illustrations were completely my idea. I just wanted to illustrate the book.
It took between six and seven years to do all of the illustrations because I would do a paying job which would catch me up for a couple of weeks I could then take off to do another Frankenstein illustration. Anytime I had a free moment and things weren’t so dire that I had to work for money, I would work on Frankenstein. So, I had no publishers, no editors and finished all of the illustrated before I presented them to a publisher.
PRG: So it was really a labor of love, then.
BW: Absolutely a labor of love. It’s the best work I ever did. If I’m not remembered for anything else, I would like it to be that. I just like to think that long, long, long after I’m dead and buried, those illustrations will continue and will be out there. Hopefully, drawing people into this book. But it a difficult book. Its hard to get through because of the language and the concepts. It’s not what anyone expects after seeing the movies.
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