MSth08
02-07-2005, 01:11 AM
http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC04/DC/Vertigo/Loveless.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless01.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless02.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless03.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless04.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless05.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless06.jpg
DC Comics has provided Newsarama with a six page preview of Brian Azarello and Marcello Fruisin's Loveless, a Western coming out under the Vertigo imprinting begining in October. The preview is in black and white, but the series will be in full color, courtesy of colorist Patricia Mulvihill.
Announced last year at San Diego, we're re-presenting our interview with Azzarello from last August about the series.
Warning: Loveless is a title that will be recommended for mature/adult readers, and contains many un-PC terms of the times. In other words, the text on the pages is not work safe.
From our earlier interview:
Set during the Reconstruction, Loveless stars husband and wife, Wes and Ruth Carter, as two…well, as Azzarello gave the soundbyte version, “Bonnie and Clyde on horseback.”
The project had been simmering in the writer’s head for a couple of years, but was helped along by a couple of recent developments, one, scheduling, and the other, a television drama.
“When I was finishing up my run on Hellblazer, Marcello and I were talking about wanting to continue working together,” Azzarello told Newsarama. “He was getting sick of Hellblazer after a few years, and we were both huge Spaghetti Western fans – we go pretty deep into it – way beyond Sergio Leone. I suppose if I I’m a geek about anything, its operatic violence that’s a hallmark of these kinds of Western films.
“So I’d been wanting to do another Western since El Diablo, so we figured we’d try to get a Western off the ground. But you know what they say about Westerns – they’re washed up, and nobody wants them.”
And that was what they told him. But that was a few months back…specifically a few months prior to the debut of HBO’s Deadwood.
“It didn’t hurt when that came on and turned out to be really well received,” Azzarello said, chuckling. “We got our approval around that time.
“The original idea I had was let’s do a book about an outlaw, partly because, if you ask a person to name three real-life people from the West, you’re going to get Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and they’ll probably throw Wyatt Earp in there, but his hat wasn’t exactly white for a good while there. So, there’s the recognition – it’s a Western, it’s going to have outlaws in it.”
As for the time period, as the writer explained in San Diego, the present day and Reconstruction (the period immediately following the American Civil War) strike similar chords. “At that particular point in the country’s history, half of it was an occupied nation,” Azarello said. “That’s something that I think is very relevant right now – essentially a foreign government was occupying the land, invading houses and looking for troublemakers – pulling people out of their homes in the middle of the night. It’s also some pretty fertile ground that hasn’t been mined.”
As for the husband and wife, Wes and Ruth Cutter, their story begins when Wes, a former Confederate solider, comes home from the Civil War. “Wes comes home to being pretty much, a criminal in the eyes of the law at the time – that was what happened with a lot of those men,” Azzarello said. “They came back home, and while some of their homes were gone because the US government was doing land acquisition and just taking stuff.
“Wes and Ruth get pushed by circumstances beyond their control, and they become very bad people. With Loveless, we’re going to be taking two people who are good, and turning them bad. Its a little counter-intuitive to the way Westerns are constructed, where you get the bad guy trying to turn good. My goal is to make two very sympathetic bad people. I want the reader to understand why they’re acting this way, and sort of believe in their reasons to a point. It’s kind of tough. I’m setting up a mountain for myself, I think.”
As for that title? “They’re husband and wife, so there’s a lot of love for each other, but the title – that’s about the life they’re living.”
On the art side of things, Azzarello can’t say enough about his collaborator. “This is Marcello’s dream project. He’s bringing so much more to this than he was to Hellblazer. There are certain parameters you have to work within when you’re working with a company-owned character - we don’t have those here, so we’re both really, really excited to get this thing off the ground.”
Like 100 Bullets, Loveless is a series with an ending. “I think it’s going to run about four years, unless they’re right and Westerns don’t sell,” Azzarello joked. “I’m at the point where I don’t have to do a series – I could do a miniseries, and then another, and create a bunch of different properties, but I’m committed to the serialized form of comics, and this is how I’m going to show that commitment, but doing something that’s long form like this. But, like 100 Bullets, I know the end, so yeah – it’s a finite story.”
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless01.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless02.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless03.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless04.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless05.jpg
http://www.newsarama.com/Vertigo/Loveless/Loveless06.jpg
DC Comics has provided Newsarama with a six page preview of Brian Azarello and Marcello Fruisin's Loveless, a Western coming out under the Vertigo imprinting begining in October. The preview is in black and white, but the series will be in full color, courtesy of colorist Patricia Mulvihill.
Announced last year at San Diego, we're re-presenting our interview with Azzarello from last August about the series.
Warning: Loveless is a title that will be recommended for mature/adult readers, and contains many un-PC terms of the times. In other words, the text on the pages is not work safe.
From our earlier interview:
Set during the Reconstruction, Loveless stars husband and wife, Wes and Ruth Carter, as two…well, as Azzarello gave the soundbyte version, “Bonnie and Clyde on horseback.”
The project had been simmering in the writer’s head for a couple of years, but was helped along by a couple of recent developments, one, scheduling, and the other, a television drama.
“When I was finishing up my run on Hellblazer, Marcello and I were talking about wanting to continue working together,” Azzarello told Newsarama. “He was getting sick of Hellblazer after a few years, and we were both huge Spaghetti Western fans – we go pretty deep into it – way beyond Sergio Leone. I suppose if I I’m a geek about anything, its operatic violence that’s a hallmark of these kinds of Western films.
“So I’d been wanting to do another Western since El Diablo, so we figured we’d try to get a Western off the ground. But you know what they say about Westerns – they’re washed up, and nobody wants them.”
And that was what they told him. But that was a few months back…specifically a few months prior to the debut of HBO’s Deadwood.
“It didn’t hurt when that came on and turned out to be really well received,” Azzarello said, chuckling. “We got our approval around that time.
“The original idea I had was let’s do a book about an outlaw, partly because, if you ask a person to name three real-life people from the West, you’re going to get Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and they’ll probably throw Wyatt Earp in there, but his hat wasn’t exactly white for a good while there. So, there’s the recognition – it’s a Western, it’s going to have outlaws in it.”
As for the time period, as the writer explained in San Diego, the present day and Reconstruction (the period immediately following the American Civil War) strike similar chords. “At that particular point in the country’s history, half of it was an occupied nation,” Azarello said. “That’s something that I think is very relevant right now – essentially a foreign government was occupying the land, invading houses and looking for troublemakers – pulling people out of their homes in the middle of the night. It’s also some pretty fertile ground that hasn’t been mined.”
As for the husband and wife, Wes and Ruth Cutter, their story begins when Wes, a former Confederate solider, comes home from the Civil War. “Wes comes home to being pretty much, a criminal in the eyes of the law at the time – that was what happened with a lot of those men,” Azzarello said. “They came back home, and while some of their homes were gone because the US government was doing land acquisition and just taking stuff.
“Wes and Ruth get pushed by circumstances beyond their control, and they become very bad people. With Loveless, we’re going to be taking two people who are good, and turning them bad. Its a little counter-intuitive to the way Westerns are constructed, where you get the bad guy trying to turn good. My goal is to make two very sympathetic bad people. I want the reader to understand why they’re acting this way, and sort of believe in their reasons to a point. It’s kind of tough. I’m setting up a mountain for myself, I think.”
As for that title? “They’re husband and wife, so there’s a lot of love for each other, but the title – that’s about the life they’re living.”
On the art side of things, Azzarello can’t say enough about his collaborator. “This is Marcello’s dream project. He’s bringing so much more to this than he was to Hellblazer. There are certain parameters you have to work within when you’re working with a company-owned character - we don’t have those here, so we’re both really, really excited to get this thing off the ground.”
Like 100 Bullets, Loveless is a series with an ending. “I think it’s going to run about four years, unless they’re right and Westerns don’t sell,” Azzarello joked. “I’m at the point where I don’t have to do a series – I could do a miniseries, and then another, and create a bunch of different properties, but I’m committed to the serialized form of comics, and this is how I’m going to show that commitment, but doing something that’s long form like this. But, like 100 Bullets, I know the end, so yeah – it’s a finite story.”