Flashback February

Flashback February: Frank Quitely Part Three

Published

10 years ago

February 21, 2016

Admin

♦2016 is an anniversary for Tripwire. It marks the 24th anniversary of the magazine, which began back in February 1992. So for the rest of February, we shall be representing some of our classic moments over the past 23 years. Tripwire has had an association with Frank Quitely since 1995 and so today’s Flashback February is the third and final part of an interview we did with Quitely which ran in Tripwire Volume 1 #9 back in May 1995…

QUITE FRANKLY

JM: Tell me about Flex Mentallo and the Lobo one-shot you are doing.

FQ: Flex is this ludicrous strongman sort of character who wears leather wristbands, leopard-skin trunks and wrestling boots and a trenchcoat for modesty. He’s a gentleman and he looks kind of old-fashioned. There’s this burnt-out singer who’s looking through the mess in his house to find something and he keeps finding comic strips he made up when he was wee and they’ve got scenes drawn in them which are actually scenes in this comic that seem to be happening at the same time as the parts with the singer who’s OD’ing. They’ve got Flex in them because Flex was a figment of this guy’s imagination but Flex’s world is apocalyptic and I don’t know whether that’s because he’s in the singer’s head and the singer’s dying or if the two are quite separate and exist simultaneously. It’s a four-issue miniseries and I’ve only got the first script and the synopsis so far and although I love it, I don’t really know what’s going on.

The Lobo thing’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Alan (Grant) asked me what I wanted to draw and I told him to write anything but I wanted to do some punch-up fight scenes instead of big guns, hand-to-hand combat stuff. So this script comes and it’s about a skud-mag publisher who’s been kidnapped by Hominists (the male equivalent of feminists) and without his hook or hardware, Lobo has to get him back. It’s called ‘The Hand-to-Hand Job’ which pretty much sums up the tone of the whole thing. It was immensely enjoyable to draw but I haven’t inked it yet. It’ll also be the first time my work’ll have been computer-coloured so I’m looking forward to seeing that.

JM: Would you like to eventually be writing your own work?

FQ: I think I’ll do more humour at some point but I couldn’t write a normal story. I don’t know anything about plots and pacing.

JM: What else have you got planned in the future, in terms of projects?

FQ: I’ve contributed to Andy Helfer’s Big Books (published by DC imprint Paradox). Only Urban Legends and Weirdos are out so far. I really like the stuff he’s bringing out so I’d like to do something more for him. I did a couple of things for those Marvels: Portraits for Marc McLaurin and we both want me to do a fully-painted book – perhaps featuring Daredevil or Wolverine. Shug McKenna (Electric Soup) and I co-wrote a short over-the-top action-comedy using two of his characters called Tom and Rex for the Big Issue comic but I haven’t drawn it yet because things seem to have ground to a halt with the organisation of that.

Blackheart (that finished last issue in Dark Horse Presents) that I did with Robbie Morrison went down well over at Dark Horse and they phoned Robbie and said we could do as much as we liked. So we’ve already got together to plan what’s coming next.

Alan Grant’s still waiting to do a Batman story for me, which would be brilliant, and I’ve spoken to Grant [Morrison] about doing an issue or story arc on The Invisibles.

Another definite is a one-off black and white story for The Megazine with Robbie again. It’s a Shimura spin-off called Inaba which should be great fun – it’s about supermodels Cruising it. But between Lobo and Flex I’ve got about 8 months work left so I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be doing after that.