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After our extensive conversation with writer Greg Rucka about the Whiteout series of graphic novels, we also got to chat with American artist Steve Lieber on the phone about his work on the Eisner Award winning comic book. And indeed, just like Greg Rucka told us, Lieber turns out to be not just an excellent visual storyteller, but also a true student of the medium. Read on for some fascinating insights into his work progress and artistic philosophy. Jochen Ecke: I think what is immediately striking about your work in Whiteout is the enormous sense of solidity you manage to convey. You give us a wonderful grip on the geography of the stations, a clear sense of space, and your characters actually move through the spaces you have created for them. How much time do you spend on working out your geography, your choreographies? Do you have any particular method in doing so?
Steve Lieber: I wish I did. I’m a very undisciplined artist. Some things are worked out panel by panel, and sometimes I draw an overhead map of the scene and figure out where my characters are in each panel. It depends on what the requirements of the scene are. If I know that the key concept is just two characters talking to each other, then I can improvise their placement from panel to panel, and put my energy into thinking about body language and expression, and keeping the page looking lively. If it’s an action scene and the placement of the characters is vital to understanding what’s actually going on, I work it out much more carefully.
Jochen Ecke: Would you say that the mise-en-scène is your doing or is that already in Greg’s scripts?
Steve Lieber: I think that’s mostly mine. Greg works out a lot of things in the script, but the more visual the matter is, the more likely it is he’ll leave it in my hands. Greg is very specific about the feeling that he wants in a given panel, what the characters are thinking about or what they’re showing on their faces.
Jochen Ecke: There are quite a few instances in both Whiteouts, which a lot of people tend to think of as very “cinematic” books, where you do stuff that would be altogether impossible in a movie. I’m thinking, for example, of a bit in the first Whiteout where Lily’s waking up after she’s been knocked unconscious by the murderer, and you get a sort of long shot of the room, which you’ve divided into three panels, and it functions as both a cinematic pan and a static kind of panorama. Do you spend a lot of time thinking of the medium’s unique properties?
Steve Lieber: Oh yes. Comics are my first language, with English a distant second, so if I know what the writer is trying to communicate, I have an easier time putting it across in comics than I would explaining it to someone in words. As for that particular use of the comics language, I knew we wanted to move through that space slowly - like you said, Lily’s waking up and the truth of what’s happened around her is just sinking in. I think of it in beats or in musical terms a lot. I don’t consciously try to plan it; it just works out in my head that way. That aspect of it almost never takes any effort. There are only so many hours you get to work on a given page, and you have to pick your battles carefully, deciding which aspect will get extra time and attention, and which won’t. For me, the general grammar of comics almost never requires special attention.
Jochen Ecke: Does this kind of intuition also extend to lighting? Does that come just as naturally to you or does it require a little more thinking?
Steve Lieber: Not thinking, just more work. That comes from a couple of things. Sometimes a change in the lighting situation in the panel creates a rhythmic beat. When you change the lighting situation in the story, it adds a moment's pause for the reader, and you can use that to your advantage. Other times, the use of light is just to harmonise the page. There’s any number of places in both Whiteouts where I use some extra black in a panel just because of the way it was used elsewhere on the page, to not make the panel stand out.
Jochen Ecke: Did you study photography and / or painting then?
Steve Lieber: Well, I went to art school. I think a lot of what I do in comics comes from the life drawing I do, sitting in front of a model in a dark room with a single spotlight to see how light and shadow fall there. I also keep sketchbooks. And the museum where I grew up, in my hometown of Pittsburgh, had some nice Rembrandt pieces, and I would sketch from those. I also had a book of what I now realise were terrible reproductions of Rembrandt paintings from which I used to sketch. I think I learned a lot from that. But in the end where it really just comes from is doing a whole lot of drawings.  
Jochen Ecke: Whiteout is a noir tale, but with a great emphasis on surface reality; visual expressionism and allegory are constantly hidden below the surface. How do you go about weighing expressionist lighting “effects”? Is it still effective in this very particular, very subtle context if you recognise it as an “effect”?
Steve Lieber: I’m just trying to express the moment that I’m illustrating as truly as possible. Greg’s scripts have very, very specific feelings and he’s very clear about the story’s emotional content. I'll look at the panel and if the moment isn’t angry enough, my approach in drawing will switch to try to make it angrier. At a certain point, it becomes a lot like music, where a purely abstract arrangement of marks is communicating one emotion or another. And it’s that way both with the literal choices, with the more realistic choices of lighting and with the more expressionist manners of rendering. It’s all about trying to get the moment of the story as truly as possible.
Jochen Ecke: You talk about “visual music”, texture, rhythm, and all of this in a black and white context, which you have repeatedly said is your preferred way of working – how much does the monochromatic black and white contribute to your artistic satisfaction?
Steve Lieber: That’s an enormous part of it for me. I don’t have much of a visual vocabulary working in colour. Colour isn’t native to me. I mean, I can produce colour paintings and drawings, but it’s mostly technical work there, whereas in black and white, I’m speaking in my native language. When working in black and white, I know what every mark I’m putting down is for, both technically and expressively, and that was one of the things that really attracted me about the project, the chance to control the impact of every single panel.
Jochen Ecke: I understand that you worked for a rather long time on both Whiteouts.
Steve Lieber: Oh yeah, both took a year. They were a remarkably unprofitable thing to do, oh boy. That was a rough couple of years right there. But in both cases I got to do the sort of storytelling I really wanted to do. For a professional cartoonist working in the US, that’s not very common.
Jochen Ecke: Was that time spent largely at the drawing board? How much research was involved?
Steve Lieber: There was a lot of research involved, particularly for the first one. The second one, a lot of it did take place in the snow. There were a lot of places there that weren’t terribly demanding in terms of research. The flashbacks actually took the longest. For example, Greg had a bit in there where he mentioned that the Luftwaffe dropped little swastikas in Antarctica during the Second World War. And he told me to draw a picture of that. But then I had to go and see what model of plane they would have been using. That took three days in the library.
Jochen Ecke: Greg Rucka seems to have developed a sort of ethos of restraint, an extremely elegant self-effacement as an author, having the story and its thematic undercurrents come first. He can mostly be identified by theme, by that often particularly female perspective, by the very Howard Hawks- or Anthony Mann-like no-nonsense attitude, and also by his unflinchingly moral attitude. Can you identify with that as an artist?
Steve Lieber: It’s something that I particularly like as a reader, not just of comics. I like authors who trust that their material is of interest and just present it. Of course, to do that, you actually have to produce interesting material. I didn’t set out to be that kind of artist, it was just the kind of artist I’ve turned out to be. One of my favourite illustrators is Howard Pyle. His short description of the job of an illustrator is: “The author’s work, communicated in pictures”. Very simple, but it always seemed the right way to go for me. Stay out of the writer's way and just communicate their story as clearly as possible. As much as possible I want to work with good stories and tell them as simply as possible. I’d rather be a window than a frame.
Jochen Ecke: You as the artist are the one who gets to emote, and you portray a wonderfully broad spectrum of emotion through your characters’ facial expressions, much broader than most of your colleagues ever attempt to. I realise you used your wife as the basis for some of your work, but still: how much of an actor do you have to be as a comics artist?
Steve Lieber: I wouldn’t say actor, I’d say ham. I share a studio with a lot of other cartoonists, and when I look around the room I can see what expression everyone is drawing at the moment because they’re making it on their own face. You can’t draw a proper smile without smiling yourself. If you’re drawing the expression and feeling it, in order to draw it well, you’re going to make that expression yourself. I try not to be too broad in my stuff because, for one thing, I have a fairly realistic approach to proportion and lighting. If I did extremely broad gestures, I think I would come across a little hammy. But there’s always the danger of drawing a bunch of sleepwalkers, so I try to stay between those poles.  
Jochen Ecke: That would also suggest that a slavish imitation of reality will almost certainly kill a comic book narrative. How do you achieve the right balance between realism and cartooning?
Steve Lieber: It’s a constant battle. One thing that helps a lot is laying down the figures, you know, doing your initial sketch as a cartoonist, not as an illustrator. When you’re first drawing a gesture, you’re drawing Daffy Duck. And then upon that very loose frame, you build realistic detail. That’s something that comes with practice. If you’re working too much from photographs, it can stiffen up the work tremendously. People rarely fall into the sorts of gestures that look good on the comic page. Although if I want to use a model, I’m lucky to be sharing a studio with cartoonists who know how to pose in a comics position. But for the first two Whiteouts, I don’t think that I used any photography for the people at all. I looked at a lot of photos for the vehicles and the setting. The way Whiteout: Night is shaping up, I haven’t used any photos of people yet. I still might, but so far it hasn’t been necessary. It helps that when I’m drawing Carrie, I know this character so well I might as well be drawing her from a model.
Jochen Ecke: You seem to have known her intimately from the first panel you drew her – there’s not a single panel in Whiteout where she wouldn’t be instantly recognisable.
Steve Lieber: A lot of this comes from the way she is written. When the characters are already alive in the script, it’s a lot easier to bring them alive on the page. You’re not trying to animate a corpse. Everything else is just draftsmanship. I studied under some terrific artists, including Joe Kubert at his school, and I just learned a lot from them.
Jochen Ecke: Greg told me that turning genre fiction, which is usually told from a male perspective, on its head, finding a female perspective on, say, the murder mystery, yields exceptionally rich rewards for him as a storyteller. Does “the female perspective” have equally rewarding aspects for you as the one in the partnership creating the visuals?
Steve Lieber: In terms of the story, absolutely. But to me it’s rewarding because it’s good writing, not because it’s a female character.
Jochen Ecke: Greg also said that you emphasised the sexual tension between Carrie and Lily a little more than he had suggested in his scripts. What was your motivation behind this foregrounding of the story’s sexual undercurrents?
Steve Lieber: I don’t think there was any conscious motivation. I think that was just me looking for the juiciest moments to get across. It may have been me reading too closely into Greg’s script. You read the script through three or four times, you get a sense for who these characters are, then you play the part. I think that was just what he seemed to be getting at in the script. It’s funny, I haven’t thought of it as foregrounding, I had just thought of it as telling the story as it was. That’s me looking for the essence of what’s going on in a scene. David Mamet says that every character has a reason why they say every single line in the story. And so when you’re doing a comic, you ask yourself what these reasons are and you put them on the page. David Mamet’s On Directing Film had a big influence on my storytelling.
Jochen Ecke: Can you talk a little about that influence of Mamet’s on you?
Steve Lieber: It’s actually very similar to the influence of Howard Pyle’s, that is, getting out of the way of the material. If your material is clever, you don’t have to be. If your characters’ motivations are well understood, then you don’t have to do anything clever with the pictures. I hope that most of the choices I make as a storyteller come from that motivation.
Jochen Ecke: But you would agree that form, a particular manner of expression, can also carry content?
Steve Lieber: There’s a funny thing: I was just writing something online today about Lynda Barry. Her stuff wouldn’t work if she drew like Stan Drake or Hergé. A lot of the impact of her stories comes from the way that her naïve line turns her pictures into the visual equivalent of a child speaking. When reading her stories, you’re constantly making this leap from this childish voice to this very adult material and a lot of the mystery and the power of the story takes place in that leap. I don’t think much good would come of an artist choosing to work that way. In other words, if an artist’s natural inclination was to draw like a photorealist, and he chose to draw like a child, I don’t think it would come across as honest, it wouldn’t work very well. I wrote a sort of textbook on how to do comics, and one thing that I said in there, something I believe very strongly, is that an artist doesn’t choose a style, your style chooses you. And all the choices you make in your storytelling come after that.  
Jochen Ecke: Greg said that he and you had a lot of discussions about which direction to take the characters when you were preparing Melt. What kind of an influence do you have in the preliminary stages of these things, before even a page of script is written?
Steve Lieber: Casual conversations over coffee, that’s how I would describe it. Greg would talk about what he’s interested in at the moment, something he read in the newspaper, something that struck him as a theme worth exploring, and I’d throw in my two cents. My biggest contribution was probably outing Carrie too much. You know, that was my dumb little joke on the coffee cup. Early in Whiteout, there’s a shot of Carrie drinking from a coffee mug, and I put the main character from the strip Dykes to Watch Out For on it. It was about four in the morning, and I drew it with the smallest pen that I have. On the original page, it’s the size of a fingernail clipping. And about fifty people saw it and posted about it online. I never thought anybody would notice…
Jochen Ecke: What would you say were the major new opportunities Whiteout: Melt gave you when you and Greg decided to open up the scale of the story?
Steve Lieber: The main thing was that it gave me a chance to draw physically bigger pictures. In Whiteout, the average page had seven or eight or nine panels with a lot of dialogue in them. And a lot of the time that meant that the physical space I had to illustrate the characters wasn’t much bigger than a postage stamp. I was hunched up over the board doing my best to keep feeling in there while still serving the basic facts of the story that I had to get across. On the one hand, the picture has to serve as a diagram: this is who’s speaking first, this is who’s speaking second, and this is where everybody is located. But for the most part people don’t actually want to look at diagrams. And when you have to draw very small, you have to bury the expressive part of the pictures in favour of the diagrammatic parts. Working on a story like Melt gave me an opportunity to do big pictures that were enjoyable to draw. It’s a chance to take pleasure in the actual depiction of form.
Jochen Ecke: Would you say that your artistic approach changed in the ten years since the first Whiteout?
Steve Lieber: Oh, yes. I’m a much more confident artist. I’m much better at catching errors before they go to print than I used to be. I have gotten better at making a picture look solid and complete without having to cover it up with trickery to make the reader look somewhere else. But if I talk too much about mistakes people will worry too much that they bought a lousy comic. (laughs) Also, the technology has changed a lot, which is why I can do atmospheric effects in Night that wouldn’t have been possible in the first Whiteout. It’s a combination of digital and hand-drawn work. Ideally the reader will have no idea which is digital and which is done by hand. There’s still tons of brushwork and white paint and razor blades. Ideally, though, I won’t be using as much zip tones as I did previously because as much as I love the look of it, it ruined my life for the better part of a year. I made the tones myself. I had existing sheets of zip tone I bought in the late 80s. They were no longer sticky on the back. I xeroxed them and then I printed the patterns with all their weird warpings onto other sheets of sticky paper and made my own stuff. And the stuff would just get everywhere in my house. So I’m going to do most of these effects digitally this time.
Jochen Ecke: Is that the one major change for Night?
Steve Lieber: Visually yes. Also, we’re going to do a whole lot more with light. There wasn’t much of a market for black and white comics when the first Whiteout book came out, but now, thanks to manga, that’s the growth area in American comics publishing. We’re hoping that we’ll find an audience there. And of course, we’ve got the advantage of a forty million dollar commercial coming out from Warner Brothers, so there’ll be a lot more people aware of the characters.
Jochen Ecke: Were you involved in the movie in any way?
Steve Lieber: Not at all. I got to make a courtesy visit to the set, which was very cool. They had 200 pages of my drawings, that is all they got from me. Greg had a lot more to do with it. He actually got his writing on the film and I believe he has a small role in there somewhere. I’ve seen a couple of days of rushes, and a couple of days of actual filming. How it all winds up is impossible to say, because if any one of a hundred people makes a bad choice you wind up with a bad movie. But everything I saw I liked. I liked the script I read, I liked the acting I saw, and the sets were magnificent. And all the choices the director made when I was there I agreed with.
Jochen Ecke: Are the film people actually going for the no-nonsense approach of the graphic novels? After all, director Dominic Sena is known for his penchant for flashy, highly polished visuals.
Steve Lieber: I think so. I didn’t see a whole lot of flashy business in any of the stuff I saw. It’s a movie shot with a sombre, limited colour palette. And it helps that the place is already tremendously atmospheric. It’s not like an office building that they have to make look exciting. It’s already an extremely visual place. Also, it’s not a big exploding thing movie. They really seem to be making a smart movie.
Jochen Ecke: Thank you very much for taking the time! Related Articles: Interview with Greg Rucka
Interview with David Lloyd
Interview with Charlie Adlard
Interview with Colleen Coover
Review: Whiteout (German) Text Copyright Jochen Ecke 2007
Pictures Copyright Crosscult / Oni Press, Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber |
