NAME WITHHELD, OPINIONS NEVER!
Outspoken and unashamed of it, Erik got a head start on controversy.  He refuses to restrain himself in this candid interview...

Erik Larsen...

...on bell-bottoms.

    Hey, I bought bell-bottoms until they stopped making them.  I went in to buy some new pants and they'd stopped producing them.  I was hopelessly distraught.  I know, pathetic, hopelessly behind the times.

...on his beginnings.

    I started doing fanzines.  Me and a couple other pals produced our own comic book.  We sent it to a lot of places, actually, and a lot of places ran blurbs on it, and a lot of places actually ran reviews of it.  One of the guys who read those reviews was a guy named Gary Carlson.  Gary Carlson was an avid fanzine collector who was wanting to start up his own comic book, so he contacted me through that fine publication which I'd put out, and asked if I wanted to do some work for him on this comic that he was putting out called Megaton.  I jumped at the chance, and the rest, as they say, is kind of history.  One thing kind of led to another.

...on his first Marvel work.

    I met [Jim] Shooter at the Chicago Con, I'm not sure how many years ago.  I'd sent him submissions over the years, and he'd always send back a polite "close, but no cigar, keep at it."  I met him at Chicago and we hit it off all right.  We talked about me doing a story for him.  He said, "Would you like to do a story for Marvel Fanfare?"  Which to me was like, "Oh, wow, Marvel Fanfare!  An upscale publication!"  What I didn't know was that meant "Would you like to do an inventory story?"  We actually sat down at the show and plotted it out together.  I sent it in to them, and eventually it saw print, but it sat around for a long time.  The good thing about it was that it was a great sample to show people because it was actual Marvel characters in actual battle and stuff like that.  It was Hulk versus Thor.  It ended up seeing print years later as an issue of Thor.  It ended up being scripted by Stan Lee and inked by Vinnie Colletta.  I was pretty much filling in for old Jack Kirby there.

...on Doom Patrol, his first regular series.
 
    I enjoyed working on the book.  I got flex my muscles creatively a lot more than I probably should have been allowed to.  They just sort of said, "Well, it doesn't seem to be working, so just go nuts, kid."  I mean, [today] I would yell at people for doing the stuff that I'd been doing then.  I would re-write the scripts and the plots and re-work them.  There were issues that barely resembled what was put down there, and they just let me get away with it.  I was shocked.  I didn't know any better!  I didn't know that's not how it worked.  Then, of course, when I went over to work at Marvel and tried those kinds of shenanigans... It didn't happen, let's put it that way.

...on creative restrictions at Marvel.

    It's the way that the company is organized.  But now I'm doing The Dragon, and I can do whatever I want to with the Dragon.  When I was doing Spider-Man, I was one of five people doing Spider-Man.  There were so many things I couldn't do with Spider-Man just because there were four or five toher people doing Spider-Man.  You can't just go and do your little fun thing that you think would be cool.

...on forming Image.

    Rob [Liefeld], Todd [McFarlane], and I had talked about doing our own crossover for a long time.  Rob was going to do a book for Malibu called Youngblood, and he had asked me if I was interested in doing a miniseries or something at the same time.  At the time, we weren't even talking about it being Image Comics, we were just going to be doing a couple of miniseries at the same time we were doing work for Marvel.  We weren't talking about leaving or doing much of anything.  This was just me and Rob hanging out, being buds.  Then I guess he talked to Valentino about the same time, a little later maybe, about doing the same.  Shortly thereafter, Todd got involved and we decided to make a clean break, actually go away from marvel and do an on-our-own sort of thing.  That's when we actually split off and did it.  I think the last guys on board were Jim [Lee] and Marc [Silvestri].  I know sometimes when all this stuff gets reported it seems like Todd, Rob, and Jim got together and talked about this stuff, and decided to form their own company, and they decided to invite along a couple buds.  It wasn't that way at all.
     When you say, "When were you asked to join Image?"  there wasn't really an Image to be asked to join.  It evolved into that.  It was just Rob saying, "Do you want to do a miniseries for Malibu?"  At the time, we had even talked about doing a book together.  Rob and Todd and I have always been really close, hanging out at conventions and being pals and stuff like that.  It was a very natural evolution to suddenly decide to become a comic book company.

...on the risks involved in breaking from Marvel.

    We could always go home again, so it never seemed like it was that big of a deal.  As long as you can sell comic books with your talent, people will give you work to do that.  So it was like, "Let's go try this out."  If it doesn't work, we could always go back to doing Marvel and DC.  At the time, I didn't have a regular book.  It wasn't like I was leaving a regular assignment to go do this stuff.  A lot of it was that we hadn't intended to be exclusively Image from then on.  Some of it was that Marvel's reaction to us was very strong.  They'd assumed that we were gone.  OK, if you guys want to cut us off of your comp list and call us names, I guess we are gone.  It's very strange how it all came about.

...on choosing his project for Image.

    Actually, I was going to do Superpatriot.  The Dragon was always one of those things that I wanted to do.  When i started thinking about what I wanted to do with this Superpatriot guy, I just got to thinking I should do the Dragon.  I'd been wanting to do this character forever, but my first inclinatin was not to do The Dragon.  Then I ended up doing both.

...on the "writers vs. artists" debate.

    The problem with comics in general is that there are a lot of very, very marginal writers writing comic books that are just kind of bland and uninteresting, repeating the same schtick again, and again, and again.  These people who are just untalented in their actual ability to do something are jealous when someone else who is fairly untalented at being able to do something wants to do the same thing, but also has the ability to draw.  There is a group of people who may not be better writers than the people who have been doing it for 20 or 30 years, but they're at least bringing to it a different approach and coming at it from a different angle.  Their craft may not be as high in terms of their ability to string words together into a coherent sentence.  I mean, Todd's got an energy to his work that I don't read in Mike W. Barr.  Maybe the actual construction of sentences and the way that he puts things together is not the same as these other guys, but he's bringing to the page a different perspective and a different energy that I find highly enjoyable.  I get more enjoyment out of reading that stuff than I get out of reading a lot of the guys that have been toiling in this field for 10 or 20 years.

...on his complaints with comic book writers.

    The main problem with comic book writers is that they're coming from prose and they're not thinking visually.  Comic books are different from any other medium, in that it is very difficult to pull off a surprise.  When you're watching TV, you don't see the rest of the scene at the same time.  When they turn the page, they're not only seeing the panel you want them to see, but they have also seen the next six panels, eight panel, however many panels are on that two-page spread.  In order to pull off a surprise, it's difficult.  It's not an easy thing to pull that off.  They're forgetting the medium that they're involved in.  You can't have a surprise on panel three, because you've already seen the surprise when you see panel one.  You can't do it that way.  A lot of times I've heard this complaint from editors:  "Don't have a character's hand come out of a panel border.  You don't see Mel Gibson's hand coming out of a movie screen."  That's a physical limitation of a movie.  You don't show his hand coming out of the screen because you can't show his hand coming out of the screen.  We don't have that limitation.  There are a lot of things we can do in this medium.  Don't limit us to the limitations of another medium.  We've got enough limitations in that we can't show movement.  The thing that I don't understand is the people who are writing this stuff aren't used to working in a static mode.  We've got ways of trying to fake a movement, but there are things you can't do.  The people who are writing and drawing their own stuff are at least coming at it from an artistic stance.  They're not going to do those kind of mistakes.  A lot of times they're going to be taking a different approach than the one that they've been used to working on.

...on writers he likes.

    People get this impression after the "Name Withheld" thing taht I hate writers and that all my experiences working with writers were bad.  That's not the case at all.  I love good comic books!  I love nothing more than a good comic book.
 I think Frank Miller's a great writer.  Chris Claremont can be a very good writer;  he's varied from time to time.  I think Alan Moore is a great writer.  Dave Sim kind of bounces around from being pretty good to pretty damn boring.  I like Keith [Giffen's] stuff.  I liked when [J.M.] DeMatteis worked with Keith, but I haven't really like anything DeMatteis has done on his own.  When I was growing up, I really liked Marv [Wolfman] and Len [Wein], not so much now.  There's not really anything that's coming out these days that really has got me all worked up.  That's too bad.  I like what Frank's doing, but I've always liked when Frank does stuff.  But there are few people writing comics now that I go, 'Wow, that's a real good read.'  Even the stuff that people recommend and say I've got to read it because it's brilliant, I don't get it.  What's so damn interesting about this?

...on being a writer himself.
 
    Makes my life a hell of a lot easier, a lot more enjoyable.  Right now I'd say I'm having more fun doing the writing end of things and the inking end of things than doing the penciling stuff, because it's newer.  I've been drawing comics for myself or for publication for a good 20 years.  It's nice to be able to be in the driver's seat and take things in a direction that I want to take them in.  I'm having a hell of a time doing it.

...on his ability as a writer.

    I think I'm OK.  My strongest point is that I've got natural sounding, believable dialogue.  Down from there a little bit is that I can keep different subplots dovetailing in and out of the story.  Down from there is my ability to actually write a coherent plot.  (laugh) My weakest point is my plot.  It's just from the approach that I take to writing.  A lot of times I would be reading along and going, 'That character's really acting contrary to what I think of that character as doing.'  They're acting this way because if they didn't, it wouldn't facilitate the plot.  I''m coming at it from a different approach, which is, these are the characters, and I'm keeping the characters consistent, so it's not necessarily pushing those same plot points or making things go in a coherent direction.  Generally, a person's life doesn't have much in the way of a plot.  When there is a plot, they make a movie out of it.  I find that using my strengths, doing decent dialogue, and keeping the subplots there,that I can keep things going and keep it entertaining.  The fan mail that I get really seems to [indicate that people] enjoy what I'm doing, but I'm taking a different approach from what's traditional in comic books.

...on being an editor.

    I do maintain a lot of control.  I'll come to Tom [and Mary Bierbaum] or I'll come to keith Giffen and say what I want to do.  You can have free reing to do waht you want to, but somehow within the context of the that story, this is what must happen.  I'm a fairly active editor.  I'm not just sitting back and saying "bring me a story."  All of these things that are coming out from me are fairly calculated.  They're not put out for the sake of doing more stuff.  It's really with a plan in mind for where these things will be going. A lot of things in the book are fairly calculated;  they were set up a lon time ago, some of the stuff even from the beginning.

...on his Savage Dragon artwork.

    I think this is the kind of book I should have been drawing.  Knowing my own strengths,  I never would have assigned myself to Spider-Man.  That's not the kind of character that I naturally draw well.  I'd be more natural on a book like Hulk or Thor, something where there are big guys with big shoulders and big action.  That's the kind of stuff that I've always loved to do and wanted to do.  I also think there's a big change in my work when I started inking myself.  There are things I can do in the inks that I can't do in the pencils, and vice versa.  That changed my artwork a lot just going from on to another.

...on his childhood drawings.

    I really wanted to print a drawing I did of The Dragon as a kid.  I haven't been able to find one that's old enough.  There are some drawings that I did when he had the funky fin prior to Megaton, but I was looking  for one that was the Speed Racer-meets-Captain Marvel-meets-Batman one.  I don't have any anywhere, and I haven't run across anybody who's got any.  I guess they don't embarrass me, because I keep trotting them out.  If I thought they were that horrible, I'd bury them in the backyard.

...on the contrast between light-hearted and dark in Savage Dragon.

    I think that the book is somewhat light, but I also think there's some heavy shit that goes on in this comic.  I mean, the first issue of the Dragon's book as a regular series that's not really boffo yocks!  There is some pretty rude stuff in there, and every now and then  I'll go and I'll step way over the bounds of what I think is good taste.  I'll usually do the stuff and then see it in pring and go, oh man!  [Like some] of the gory stuff in the first issue, where people are going at it too much and there's a lot of blood flying around.  There was a scene in issue three where somebody's face got shot in half, and i was like, that seems a little bit excessive.  But then I'll keep doing it.

...on the language and violence in the book.

    I don't think I'm introducing any words to any kids.  I don't say anything in my comic that you can't say on television.  Probably a little bloodier than you see in [other] comics, but no more so than a lot of movies that kids get into.  I don't really think I've stepped over... well, maybe once or twice. (cackle) I did a scene with Jimbo the Lobster and I had him swearing in signs because I was actually uncomfortable having him say the words.

...on upcoming events in Savage Dragon.

    I'm doing my first real continued story, which is something I haven't done before.  All of the things I've done so far have been kind of episodic.  I've got these little leech deals that attach themselves to people's necks, and one of them attaches themself to The Dragon, of all people.  In the midst of it we get him going after the police force.  Suddenly, he is the evil entity that needs to be stopped.  Guest-stars galore and all that fun stuff.  I don't know who they are yet... I would like to do a Dragon versus Pitt somewhere along the line.  I would also like to do Dragon meeting Spawn, which Todd would like to do, too.  We're probably going to do this as a crossover deal.  I've kind of not been doing that in The Dragon book.  The first ten issues, I don't think I even mentioned the other coimics.  I mentioned Youngblood in issue #10.  None of them have been seen on-panel in the entire regular series yet.  I'm definitely wanting to get a little more play in with the other Image characters, because I haven't really been doing that.  I'm too busy playing with Megaton Man and all those other guys.  Teaming up with Bombast, I couldn't be bothered to run across Spawn.

...on why The Dragon makes so many guest appearances.

    Because I can be talked into anything!

...on The Dragon as a studmuffin.

    I don't know if I pulled it off, but he's supposed to be a really good looking guy.  He's big as hell, he's in something of a position of power, and he's looked at as being a hero.  He's always saving people's lives.  You've got this big, handsome, heroic guy.  I mean, there are people in the book who don't react to him that way.  It wasn't supposed to be one of those things like a power.  It's sort of like I'd imagine if you were Mel Gibson walking around.

...on why he releases so little product compared to Homage or Extreme.

    I'm one guy working out of my room!  I don't have a big studio.  I have an assistant who comes and types in letters and fills in blacks and erases pages, and that's it.  The rest of is me.

...on the Savage Dragon animated series.

    Don't hold your breath.

...on licenced products.

    It's pretty small because I'm a one-man outfit.  I haven't pursued it that much.  I don't really know yet.  Todd has been bugging me about wanting to do a Dragon toy.  It's just a matter of being able to secure the rights for him to do that.  I would like him to do it because he does the coolest toys.  If they can do a Dragon that looks like I drew him, let's go!  There's a lot of stuff that will happen.  It's just a matter signing the papers and getting things done.

...on enjoying Savage Dragon.

    I'm having tremendous fun with it.  [Yet] I can take it seriously at the same time.  I think it's important that you have a character with a certain amount of flexibility to it.

...on the criticism of Image.

    [John Byrne] will write about us, and he lumps the whole Image company together as though we've all got this group mind-think.  If anybody ever bothered to sit in a room with us when we were having a meeting, they would automatically know.  "These guys, what are they doing together?"  We actually do like each other, but we get into these heated debates on all this different stuff.  Then [Byrne] will make some blanket statement that may cover one guy in the group.  Because there are six different things, it'll be like Rob said this, then Todd said this, then Jim said this--these guys can't make up their minds.  Yeah, they can, but they've all got different minds.  he went on with this list of what is good comics and what is bad comics, and it happened that things he had on his list of bad comics were things he routinely does.  You mean you're intentionally doing bad comics?  The rest of us weren't aware of this list, but we weren't aware that we were doing bad comics.  But you're intentionally making bad comics for people to buy.  That takes a lot of gall!
    He says what's good is heroes, what's bad is vigilantes.  That's wrong.  That's confusing quality with subject matter.  That's like saying funny animals are better than romance comics.  They don't have anything to do with each other.  There can be good of one, and there can be bad of one.  A lot of his arguments are along that vein, where you just go, "Huh?"  For someone who comes across as an intelligent person, that's a stupid thing to say.
    If we were talking about someone who is a really good fuckin' writer, and they were going and sounding off, that would be one thing.  They're going, "Damn it, I am an average writer, and my average opinion is..." and they're going, "Wow, that guy's great!"  John Byrne is a good artist.  Period.  There are artists in the comic book community who kick his ass artistically, yet John is presenting himself as some sort of artistic authority, and his is judging Image comics and saying Image comics are bad.  Sorry, John, but until you can draw as well as Marc Silvestri, I'm not buying that.  You're telling me Image comics suck, and Legend comics, that's a stamp of quality.  How the hell do you reconcile those things?
    Peter [David] has gone to great lengths to point out [that] Rob Liefeld swiping a couple of poses, yet Peter rips off more dialogue than anyone on the planet.  He's just copping little bits of commercials, and little bits of this and that.  That's not writing.  It does take a certain amount of creative talent to be able to pull something like that off, but that's not writing.  You certainly don't go claiming that somebody else swiping when you're doing even worse on your own.

...on whose opinions matter to him.

    Anybody.  Absolutely everybody.  The letters, I pay attention to those.  I pay attention to fans I meet in person.  I pay attention to fellow comic book professionals, whoever they may be.  I will gladly listen to anybody, even artists who I think are terrible who have a different perspective on what I'm doing, like it or hate it.  I'm very receptive to that.  I want to learn to do what I'm doing better.  These comic books are produced at such a frantic pace, and with so few checkpoints along the way, that sometimes things come out without anybody seeing it.  I've had a few things wrecked.  I've screwed up a few things.
    What we need is for somebody occasionally to get together with all the freelancers that work for a comic company.  Marvel's loaded, they can fly out a bunch of guys.  They're going to teach you how to do what you're doing better.  We should set up more classes for people who are already into comics on how to do comics.  It will help out.  It will make your comics better.
    You don't get a lot of that.  It's an ego thing.  Nobody wants to admit they don't know what the hell they're doing.  I'm constantly trying to figure out ways of improving my own artwork.  I'm always experimenting with things, trying to make them better.