D’Israeli D’emon Draughtsman

Sublime: For the benefit of our readership who don’t know you in your secret identity, why D’Israeli? How did that come about?

D’Israeli: Not a hugely interesting story, but it is to do with me actually getting interested in drawing comics. I'd always liked reading and drawing comics. When I was about eleven I discovered that I could actually draw properly as opposed to just drawing very badly with lots of enthusiasm. I also discovered that I could copy things from comics. The first comic artist I can remember being hooked on and wanting to imitate and be like was Neil Adams. I had a lot of Marvel UK reprint titles and there was something called The Titans which I had a lot of. I remember looking back over them, and I don't know if there comes some point where you suddenly become able to differentiate between the good stuff and the bad stuff, but it had all seemed quite samey when I originally got it, but when I came back to it a couple of years later, suddenly some of it seemed really feeble and some of it seemed to stand out. I remember being fascinated by Neil Adams' stuff. I think the reason a lot of people are is because anatomically, the way the he drew human beings seemed to be that much better than anybody else's. Interestingly, I then had a period from about 13 onwards when I didn't read any American comics at all, and when I got back to them at about 18 or 20, there seemed again to be no difference between what Neil Adams was doing and what everybody else was doing in American comics. It would be interesting to find out why the mind works like that.

Anyway, I became interested in drawing comics again. I was always interested in copying ideas, but I always used to try and change them a bit. They'd seem like feeble rip-offs at the time, but I was to some extent trying to do my own thing. But the point where it really took off was when I was about 15, I got into a history class at school with a lad called J.D. Porter, oddly enough, on whom one of my characters, J.D. was loosely based. We had this history teacher who was a real personality. He wasn't all that great at conveying history, but he was great to be around, you could laugh at him a lot, and I got interested in the idea of parodying the things I saw around me. I started doing comic strips which were actually little adventures, but they also contained caricatures of the other kids in the school, and particularly the teachers, and with these things circulating, it seemed like a good idea not to have my own name on them, and that was the point where I decided to start using a pen-name. The business about D’Israeli, using that particular name, was because for some reason it had become an in-joke with me and this best friend of mine while we were studying history, that was the period of English history we were studying, and the name kind of stuck. But originally, it wasn't like a pen-name or a character, it was the name of an imaginary company, like the Acme Corporation in Warner Bros. cartoons. Eventually in 1982, I went down to London for about a week or so and went to Forbidden Planet for the first time. There was loads of stuff in there I'd never imagined could be possible. I couldn't afford any of it which in a way turned out to be a good thing. I spent as long as I could just poring through this stuff, and then had to go away and just try and hold it all in my mind. With it not being there on the page, I think in a way it's a better influence. If you've got something in front of you, you just try and copy it, but if you've just got something you've seen, in remembering it you often actually change the emphasis and start creating something which is quite different. If was about this time I discovered the work of Moliere and Jean-Giraud, which really gave me the idea about having the pseudonym. With this Disraeli joke going on, D’Israeli seemed the obvious one to use, and I just stuck with it from then on. The reason I kept with it when I went into professional comics was I suppose just to impose my own silliness on the world.

One of the reasons I went into comics was revenge. When I'd been at school, I still lived in the same area where I was brought up, a very down to earth working-class area. When you're a kid, everyone just wants to fit in, there was a kind of way of looking at the world that's like "that's the way it is" and there's no other way of looking at it. And then there was this other kind of orthodoxy coming down from the teachers, the "it's all right mucking about with all this drawing stuff but one day you're going to have to settle down in the real world, young man, and do a proper job and earn a real living". It was kind of a backlash against all that to say "well no, actually I can be as silly as I like, and it'll still work" and bugger me, it did to an extent. I got into comics and I managed to make a living, and I managed to do it using this stupid name. In a way it was almost like a dare with me; do I dare to do something this silly? Well yes, I do. They laughed at me for it, but then they laughed at Benny Hill, and look what happened to him.

Sublime: So how did you make the transition from school to big success in commercial art?

D’Israeli: Well, I was drawing my own comics in my spare time, largely when I should have been doing my homework when I was at school. When I went to college, and I was always very upfront about what I wanted to do, which was either be an illustrator, or draw comics. Luckily, my family and teachers took me seriously enough to suggest that I study graphic design, because it's a good grounding for these two areas. But their idea was that at some point I would probably give up this silly idea, and there would be plenty of decent jobs in graphic design or printing. So I did two years in college, and during that time I did very little in the way of comics. I planned out a couple of comics which never came to anything. It taught me quite a few useful lessons in just basically planning things out, a lot of handy stuff about the techniques of printing, which is very useful to know when you're drawing professional comics. It's saved me from making a lot of silly and time-consuming mistakes. The one thing this course did persuade me of is that I never wanted to be a graphic designer. I just decided that was it; I wanted to get into comics. Now about the time I went to college, I went to a signing at a comic shop in Sheffield called Media Scene, which folded not long thereafter. Brian Talbot was there, and I showed him some of my work. This was about the time that he had done the first book of Luther Arkwright and he was starting to do Nemesis for 2000 AD. He introduced me to a group called the Society for Strip Illustration, who are now called the Comic Creators Guild. They've always been a sort of professional body for comic artists in this country. So I joined them, and that gave me a kind of link into professional comics. I was in for a couple of years without going to the meetings, but you got these newsletters and it gave you a feel for what the industry was like to work in . That was the thing that really started pushing me towards comics. During the time I was at college, I definitely went from the stage of saying I'll be an illustrator or a comic artist, more and more to being a comic artist. So when I left college, I'd go down to London from Sheffield where I lived and go to meetings. I got involved, not only with a few professional comic artists, but also with the London comic scene. This was just about the time that Dark Knight and Elektra: Assassin came out, and Watchmen was coming out as well. Comics were sort of picking up from being very flat and there was a whole load of people getting interested in it. In London there was a kind of comic social scene. So I got to know a lot of people and that turned out to be very useful 2 or 3 years later; if you met someone in 1987 who was stacking shelves in Forbidden Planet, by 1991 some of these people would be running Tundra or second in command at the DC office. So the way I broke into comics wasn't by lugging a portfolio around and showing it to people, it was just by getting to know people. Neil Gaiman actually started breaking into comics the same time as I did. Admittedly, it took him 10 minutes, and it took me another 3 years! But knowing Neil socially helped. Over a period of time it went from what everyone trying to break into comics experiences, something a friend of mine nicknamed the 'albatross phase'. It’s like, everybody knows you're just about good enough to do a comic, and so you keep getting asked to do things, but you keep getting asked to do things which nobody making money from comics will touch because they know it's probably going to fall through. So you keep doing loads of character sketches and sample pages, and then it falls through. With me, it lasted about a year and a half, and then I started doing things which were actually being published. Then I started doing things which were being published which were actually paying some money. Then I started getting work which actually paid enough money to live on! I did hit a flat patch at the end of 1988. In October I got a job doing a fill-in on a thing called Third World War, which was one of the strips in Crisis when it was first launched. When I first started, it was Carlos Esquerra who was actually given the strip, and they were saying to me, look work it out, he's going to need a fill-in artist every so often, so we can give you, about four strips a year. I was looking at what they were paying me, and knew I could live on that. Because it was my first job, and it was in colour, which I'd never done before, and it was really quick, I screwed it up and got fired. And then I got another job doing inking at DC, and I screwed that up and I got fired. So January 1989 was a bit of a low point, because I'd always had this idea my rise in my career would be steady, and in five years, I'd be working at Marvel.

So I'd been fired by these two big companies, and I had a month where I was feeling pretty down. Then I picked up some work on a comic called Mr X which a friend of mine called Shane Oakley had been drawing. Initially picked up just to fill in on that, and I actually ended up taking the strip over and doing that for a couple of years. The company that produced that were called Vortex and they'd done a series by Howard Chaykin called Black Kiss, which made them loads and loads of money. But it was very noticeable that when Black Kiss finished, at that point I started having trouble getting paid. So, there's always this thing of being a professional comic artist, when people look at your products and the things you've done, and you start talking about the amount of work you've done, it seems like, oh, great, this bloke's well established and so on, but in practice you have periods where you find it is all coming in, you're getting loads of work and you're really busy, and then sometimes the work really starts to thin out. There seems to be this thing where if you're getting work, it seems to attract more work again. So, you'll go from being not at all busy to having a couple of things, to having a couple of things more, to the point where you can hardly breathe for the amount of work, and you're having to turn things down. And then suddenly, you'll lose one thing, and then another thing will go, and in a period of a couple of months, you can find yourself with no work at all. Although it's a really great life and I wouldn't swap it for anything, something a lot of people don't realise is, no matter how well established you may think of yourself, it's a very unstable life. You surrender financial security in order to have all the other advantages of the life.

Sublime: You seem to have an a large number of strings to your bow; penciller, inker, colourist. Is there anyone you particularly enjoy working with?

D’Israeli: Well, let's see.... recently I've done quite a lot of collaborating as inker on a number of projects, and I've been very lucky in that I've worked with some extremely good artists. I worked with Philip Bond on Kill your Boyfriend and Mark Hempel on Sandman. When you're working as an inker, in some ways it's a little bit dissatisfying. For me, inking is a wholly technical discipline. When I'm brought in as an inker on something, I've never been brought in with the idea that they wanted D’Israeli finishes on someone else's artwork. The idea was that they wanted artwork to look the same as it had before, but they just needed it quicker than one person could do it. So I approach that as a kind of purely technical challenge. There is however a lot of satisfaction when you're working with a really great comic artist, I mean this Philip Bond, he can bloody well draw! You can see it in the pencil drawings that he does, it just sort of falls off the end of his pencil. Mark Hempel is the same, you look at his pencils, they look like they've been done by machine, they're pristine, there's no sense of hesitation about them at all, they're beautiful. So if you're doing something like Sandman, or whatever, at the end of the day, if you're working on something like that, and you get this thing back that you can hold in your hand and you look at it and it is beautiful, there's a great deal of satisfaction in working on that. I feel better looking at that sort of artwork than I do looking at my own, because when I look at my own artwork, I just see a series of mistakes where I didn't get it right. If I'm actually talking about getting the most satisfaction from drawing, though, I'd have to say it's just pencilling and inking myself, and to be really selfish, I'd have to say colouring as well. There are a number of colourists I know whom I respect, but I have a very peculiar colour sense. Peculiar in the sense of particular, and I have my own way of doing things and I know exactly what I want. When I'm using colour, I'm trying to achieve particular things, and I know very few colourists who think the way I do, and the ones who do don't use the same effects to get those ends, so in the end, I'm afraid I'm dead selfish, and I like to keep all that to myself. Working with people inking me, I suppose , I've not had it happen that much, the person I'd say I found the most interesting results from was a chap called Nigel Kitching, who inked an episode of Fatal Charm when I was working for Deadline. And I also collaborated with him on a comic strip for Deadline which was never seen, called Fly in the Ointment. That was very interesting because we have quite similar sensibilities, but it's just different enough to produce a slightly different effect. Although I did, to be honest, find with that, with his permission I did end up changing things when I got the inks back, because I'm a maniac about that kind of thing. The best collaborations I've ever had with writers, probably the two people I've done the largest chunks of work with are Warren Ellis and Ian Edgington, and both of them are very different to work with. Warren's got a very kind of sharp, nasty sense of humour that I warm to very deeply, and Ian Edgington is very good at making you believe in characters. I have to say though, probably the best experience or working with a writer was when I did one 10-page strip for A1 which was written by Archie Goodwin. The only analogy I can give to working with this script is that it reminded me of an old tap-dancer, someone like Gene Kelly when they're in their sixties, in that everything's become so natural to them. I mean Archie Goodwin's been doing comics for so long, he had a complete grasp of the medium, that he could just convey everything effortlessly and seamlessly, and it was just wonderful to work on this script because there was never at any point any feeling that there was anything missed out, or even another way of looking at it, it was just straight through from beginning to end, this perfect seamless storytelling, and that was probably the greatest pleasure. Apart from anything, knowing that you're working with Archie Goodwin!!!

One thing that's really mystified me about the kind of work I've been able to get in comics is there are comic artists whom you can see are going for the commercial approach. There are people who fall in love with adventure comics, superhero comics and want to do those sort of comics, and are very good at them. One example of that is Mark Buckingham. He's always wanted to be an ace superhero artist, and he's become an ace superhero artist. You can see from quite early on that that was the direction he was heading in. There are other people like Bob Lynch, or a number of British artists, who produce beautiful work, but you can see that they're never going to fit into the mainstream, and most of them are not really aiming to do that. They go their own way; often they self-publish, or they work for people like Fantagraphics, for very low returns. They probably do what you might consider more interesting and challenging work , but you know that it's probably never going to reach the mainstream, and they're never going to work with large companies. When I started working in comics, I never realised how strange my ideas were. The person I often contrast myself with is Nigel Kitching, who is an artist who started at almost exactly the same time I did. In the early years, we worked for many of the same publications, Trident, for example. And yet people have always sidelined Nigel, and I've managed to get work from the same people, and to me, I don't see any significant difference.

Sublime: Isn't he stuck in Sonic the Comic or some other unlikely thing?

D’Israeli: The last time I talked to him, he was making an extremely good living from that sort of licensed work, and pretty happy doing it. They were giving him quite a free rein. One of the things where.....I say where I went wrong, jokingly, but one of the things which I wish I could get back to is, in the first couple of years where things really took off for me, I'd had a while working for fairly obscure companies, and working for Deadline, which was great fun, but it paid very little. First of all, I was taken on by John Brown to draw Lazarus Churchyard for Blast magazine and that got me, when Blast folded, into working for Tundra, doing Lazarus Churchyard, and there I was doing full colour artwork. On the basis of that, I actually did some work for Epic Illustrated. Ever since I've done work...I mean I've done inking work for DC, I've done colouring work for Marvel, I've really moved up into working for these big publishers. In the first year or so, although I was terribly busy, I did manage to hang on to producing my own work and writing my own stuff.

I don't feel all that comfortable that I can actually carry a comic book, working from other people's ideas, and what I would like to get back to, the thing I made the mistake of losing, was the time when, even though it was only a small amount, was writing my own stuff. Because when I write my own stuff, there's a feeling even now when I look back at comics I've done, although I can see the faults, there's a D’Israeli comic strip, and it's not like any other comic strip. Good or bad, it's a completely individual thing. I had hoped to move up and end up writing for the larger companies, I'd seen that as a progression. But with the way that things are going at the moment, it looks like being quite difficult to do. I came very close to writing a story for Marvel about two years ago, and then the whole line that they were working on was scaled down in size. At the moment I'm seriously considering the possibility of self-publishing. I think a lot of people are. Largely in my case because of the example of probably the best comic artist who comes from Sheffield, Paul Grist, who self-publishes a comic called Kane. One thing I have found is that just sitting down every couple of days, noting down the ideas and drawings and so on, and the things that come up, related to this potential project of mine has actually given me back a lot of my enthusiasm for comics, and it actually improves a lot of the work I do generally, so perhaps I'll never produce the damn thing, perhaps I'll just keep filling sketch books, and benefiting from it that way.

D’Israeli D’emon Draughtsman, thank you very much.