Who are you & what do you do?

My name is Kody Chamberlain. I’m currently working on SWEETS, my first fully-creator owned book published by Image Comics. I’m originally from Thibodaux, Louisiana, just south-west of New Orleans. It’s a small Cajun town surrounded by swamps and bayous. It’s one of those historic towns guys like Hank Williams, Jimmy Buffett, and Jerry Reed like to mention in their songs. This is also the area where Swamp Thing is known to live, although I’ve never actually seen him in the wild. I now live in Lafayette, Louisiana, about two and a half hours west of New Orleans.

I started drawing late in high school and decided almost instantly that I wanted to draw for a living. Sadly, I got a very late start and I just wasn’t ready so I went to college to earn a practical degree, something to fall back on if needed. I wanted to pick a degree that would lend itself fairly well to comics, so I went with graphic design and advertising. After college, I worked for several large advertising agencies before starting my own advertising and design studio in 1999. I was the Don Draper of Lafayette, Louisiana, but without the drinking and smoking. I got my first paid comic job in 2004 on 30 DAYS OF NIGHT: BLOODSUCKER TALES, and I finally made the jump to comics full time around 2006. Recent credits include LUKE McBAIN, SHANG-CHI, PUNKS: THE COMIC, concept art for WATCHMEN: TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER at Warner Bros, and a young reader BEOWULF adaptation for HarperCollins.

You can find me online here:
www.KodyChamberlain.com
www.kodychamberlain.blogspot.com
www.facebook.com/kodychamberlain
www.twitter.com/kodychamberlain

Who influenced you creatively to get you to this point?

Since Sweets is mostly a crime book, I’ll stick with those influences specifically, but my creative influences are pretty vast and cover a lot of territory. However, on the creative side of things, my ideas do tend to lean toward the crime and horror genres.

I never read comics as a kid, so most of my influences were mostly from TV, movies, and novels. I did pick up Mad Magazine now and then, but I didn’t start buying comics until my last few years of high school. This is probably a wild card, but the earliest creative influence I can think of is Encyclopedia Brown. I remember reading those little mysteries and I’d refuse to flip to the back of the book until I was certain I figured it out. That was a lot of fun. I think it’d be great to do an Encyclopedia Brown graphic novel some day.

I eventually fell in love with cop shows like Columbo, Starsky & Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, and a handful of others. That eventually branched out to the grittier shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, and In the Heat of the Night. I was also into some of the single episode black and white anthology shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, and even a bit of Sherlock Holmes when they’d air on LPB. More recently I’ve been a fan of The Wire, The Shield, Breaking Bad, and Dexter. At some point I started picking up crime novels, jumping around between authors with no clear favorites until late in high school. That’s around the time I started going through the Matt Scudder series by Lawrence Block and ended up reading a fair amount of Elmore Leonard, Richard Stark, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and a few others. There’s still a massive amount of books on the “must read” list that hard core crime fans insist I read, so I’m making my way through them as the years move forward. The few books in the Hard Case Crime series I’ve read have been fantastic. Honestly, it’s been tough finding time to read lately with so many heavy deadlines and a million side projects to get to.

As I started to branch out and read comics, that was around the time Hellboy and Sin City were getting started at Dark Horse. I also picked up a few Image books, a few of my favorites came in the second wave of creators, books like Trencher and The Maxx. I dabbled in all sorts of things and to this day I still pick up random comics, short runs, and odd back issues. I rarely collect long runs of any title, I just read something until I’m ready for something different, then I move on.

What books are in your pull-list?

It’s really a problem for me because I want to pick up more books than I could ever afford or have time to read. I’m still a big comic book fan, so I’m interested in way too much stuff. The books I’m reading or have on my pull list include Criminal, Hellboy, Joe the Barbarian, Chew, Creepy and Eerie archives, and the Darwyn Cooke’s Parker adaptations. I do try and keep up with what all my friends are working on, but that’s getting harder every year as I make more and more friends. Since I only got into comics in the 90’s, I’m also picking up a lot of older material and back-issues. It’s a bit like being an archeologist, you discover a particular creator and you start digging to find more material.

What would you change about your industry and why?

I’m not sure how it happened, but the term “art” in comics has limited itself to an extremely narrow definition. If I could change one thing it would be to encourage people to experiment with the form and start trying to expand our audience. Just think about the style differences between Southpark, Robot Chicken, Afro Samurai, Team America, MirrorMask, Red vs. Blue, Wallace and Gromit, and Toy Story. Respectively, you’ve got construction paper cut-outs, stop-motion action figures, animation, marionettes, analog/digital collage, videogame footage, claymation, and CGI. Film and television seem to be doing more visual experimentation than we are, and that needs to change. I think we’ve fallen behind and settled into a tradition that limits us artistically. I hear a lot of writers writers say they can’t make their own comics without an artist because they can’t DRAW. Who says comics need to be drawn? Lets start using collage, photography, sculpture, scrapbooking, miniatures, clay, etc. At the moment, there are still 2D print and digital limitations to how those comics can be presented, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves when it comes to creating those 2D images. None of this experimentation will make a bad story any better, but it might be the solution we need to open the door to new types of stories and to help us tell those stories in a different way. I’m absolutely certain it will help us expand our audience. I did a book called PUNKS with my good friend Josh Fialkov (Tumor, Elk’s Run) and the artwork for that project was done entirely in photo collage. It’s literally made with a digital camera, old photocopier, x-acto blade, and a roll of scotch tape. There was no drawing anywhere in the book. I’ve also got a story idea in my notebook right now that I’m planning to do as a printed scrapbook. The story itself is sequential, but the art will be done entirely as a visual scrapbook with artifacts like, photos, subway passes, sticky notes, stamps, postcards, a few sketches, store receipts, etc. The story is a bit abstract so it should match up very well with this type of artwork. I’ve still got a few more projects in the queue ahead of that one, but it’s on the horizon.

There’s a whole world of classical and modern art techniques out there worth exploring, and I’d love to see us expand beyond just drawing and a bit of painting. Lets get our hands dirty and rethink our concept of art in comics. I think we’ll greatly expand our appeal and our audience. But more importantly, we’ll expand our self-imposed creative limitations and that’s always healthy.

What is your dream gig?

My dream gig is to just write and draw my own comics. Since I didn’t read comics as a kid, I don’t have nostalgia for any particular publisher or character. I do plan to weave in a few freelance gigs here and there, but I mostly just want to tell my own stories and do it in my own way. As long as I can find an audience I’ll keep doing just that.