The Big Question with MICHAEL AVON OEMING
Interview with: Troy Brownfield

Our guest this time in The Big Question currently draws one of the most talked about series in comics: Powers. Working with Brian Michael Bendis on that series, our guest has garnered piles of accolades for his fantastic storytelling ability. He just unleashed his own series, Hammer of the Gods, through Insight Studios Group. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the incredibly talented Michael Avon Oeming!

THE BIG Q&A

Q1. Your name has gotten quite well-known from your work on “Powers”. Could you clue our readers in as to some of your earlier work?

A1. My first big break was back in 93 doing Judge Dredd for DC. I did the first few issues, but wasn’t quite up to the job. I was still pretty new, and my first big gig was Pencilling and Inking for a major DC book; it was too much for me at the time. After that, I kept busy until Foot Soldiers came along from Dark Horse. Man, that was a great job! After Foot, I did year long inking gig over pal Neil Vokes on Ninjak, and then my first creator owned series, Ship of Fools. After Fools, I did Bullet Proof Monk for Image, which I’m still very proud of to this day.

Q2. What influences drew you into the field of comics art?

A2. I love the medium. It’s like being an actor and a director at the same time. It’s a great form of expression.

Q3. What kind of work regimen do you typically follow?

A3. Well, I’m a full-time dad, so I don’t start work until night. I work all night, steal some moments of work during the day. I don’t take much time off, I usually work at least half of the weekend too. I’m my own slave driver. I whip myself reguarly in fact…

Q4. How did you become in involved in Powers?

A4. Penance for years of wanting to draw super heroes! Brian and I met at a show, we clicked right away, we wanted to work together, because we had the same tastes and our talents counter each other well.

Q5. Please tell us how Hammer of the Gods came about.

A5. After Ship of Fools and before Bullet Proof Monk, I had trouble getting work- the industry was dying hard and work was getting more rare too. I was tired of dealing with editors, with what other people wanted, so it was an outlet to do something for myself. I started it with no deadline, no plans to publish. Just did it for the sake of doing it. That’s how I will approach all my creator-owned stuff now. I will work on it when I want to and let the body build up untill it’s ready. Hammer will soon be followed by other side projects as well, but I’ll be concentrating on Powers. Hammer is doing well enough; we have plans on doing a Hammer sequel.

Q6. What kinds of projects would you like to do in the future?

A6. Either strictly creator-owned work, or work I have control over. I want to do Batman, and Daredevil and other characters, but only if I’m not an art monkey. I want a say in the story and some control over the content. Powers has spoiled me that way!

Q7. How much fun is it to work on a coloring book? [Note: Image is releasing a coloring book based on Powers.]

A7. Tons. But it was hard, because I had to over simplify to the point I was in new territory, but that was also exciting. Pat Garrahy did a lot to put it all together.

Q8. Do you have a message for any aspiring artists out there?

A8. Yep, just keep centered on your work, not getting it. Get a real job if you have to, but keep your art as the centerpeice to your life, success on some level will follow.

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Team Shotgun would like to thank Mr. Oeming for taking the time to be our guest here in the Big Question! Obviously, you should check out Powers and Hammer of the Gods, not to mention his previous fare. And don’t forget that coloring book! As always, if you have a suggestion for a Big Question guest, or if you’re a pro yourself and would like to drop by, contact Troy at psikotyk@aol.com. He’ll do what he can.

 Enormously influential product of the post-WWI Expressionist movement in Germany: an asylum inmate tells a bizarre tale about a charlatan who preys on unsuspecting villages with a murderous “somnambulist” he keeps locked in a coffin.

Time has not dulled the edge on this early cinematic experiment in portraying subjective states of mind, the vanguard work of film Expressionism, which became one of the most influential visual styles of the medium in the 20^th century. Made in the cultural vacuum of Weimar Germany, which had declared a moratorium on film product from outside its borders, Caligari’s makers had very little money and they knew virtually nothing of American developments in film editing that were taking place at the time, and so the film may look static to modern eyes. But they knew plenty about production design and they used their skills in perspective and composition (a.k.a. mise-en-scene) to fashion a striking journey into madness, making a claustrophobic world of twisted settings and chiaroscuro slashes of light and shadow, where human perception itself is called into question and made nonsense. The tendency of filmmakers, and audiences, the world over has always been to take the inherent realism of the photographic image for granted, but director Weine and his crew understood the absolute illusion of all motion pictures and exploited it beautifully. More than eighty years later, Caligari retains the power to undercut our basic assumptions about what a movie can and/or should be, the grandfather of psychological horror films.

Originally a scathing critique of the authoritarian impulse, Weine hastily attached the framing story about an insane asylum, largely to “explain” the incredible visual style he had chosen, and in the process, totally subverting the intentions of his source material. Like many a filmmaker before and after him, Weine showed a callous disregard for his literary collaborators. But his movie became more important to film history than it ever would have as a straight thriller with polemical undertones. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an international box-office hit for the German film industry, the dynamic beginning of an artistic wave that influenced such diverse greats as Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Most of the unsettling look and attitudes of film noir can be traced to Expressionism, and much of Expressionism had its cinematic beginnings in Caligari.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari; 1919, German)

directed by Robert Weine; screenplay by Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz; director of photography, Willy Hameister

with: Werner Krauss (Dr. Caligari), Conrad Veidt (Cesare), Lil Dagover (Jane)

1 hr., 9 m.; studio

NOTES:

Caligari is a great general introduction to the art of silent films, a medium that flourished without sound for two decades, both as a purely visual language and as big business. Many elements of present day moviegoing that we take for granted — the star system, the blockbuster hit, sex and violence as promotional tools, even the town of Hollywood as the locus of production — all developed rapidly during the early silent era.

BOOK: The Haunted Screen by Lotte Eisner (1974, University of California Press) is a seminal work in film studies about the cultural forces at work in German Expressionism.

Cf: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), M (1930), and others; Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Sunrise (1927).