Gerimi Burleigh of Optichouse Dot Com!

Hey folks! You wouldn't know it unless you were following Infinite Longbox on Tumblr at the time, but I covered Phoenix Comic Con for them this year and you can find my interviews I did for them with some very exciting people over there.

Unfortunately for personal reasons I was no longer able to commit at the website itself, and now I will be posting my last two interviews here on my personal blog as they would be if I had presented them on the website itself, sans reviews of content.

the man himself! 

Now I know most of you wont be familiar with Gerimi Burleigh which is unfortunate but I present this interview as a means to rectify that. He's a brilliant guy who's been working on some awesome independent comics for the last few years now and I really want to share his work and dedication to comics here. It's taken me much to long to get this out here and after deliberating, I've decided to run it here.


SK:Hi I'm Sam Kittreland I am with-

GB: Gerimi Burleigh from Optichouse.com

SK: And what's your most recent title?

GB:Morningstar, it's a western about Lucifer's fall from heaven...as a western!

SK: How did you come up with the idea for Morningstar? Is it something you've been thinking of doing for a long time?

GB: I've been sitting on this idea for probably like fifteen years, maybe even longer then that. I was at San-Diego Comiccon years ago and inbetween going to panels, I was just sitting around doing some sketches in my sketch book. I just drew some cowboys with the shotguns and the trenchcoats and for some reason it occurred to me to put angel wings on them. After I did that, I thought 'there's a story here'. And after that it just took a little while to massage it and build the pieces around it, realizing it was going to be about Lucifer and his fall.

GB: It's an eight issue series, and I have issues one through four published now, and I'm busy writing issue five.

SK: Would you say Morningstar is the longest series you've worked on so far?

GB:Yeah definitely, the other book I published in 2009 was a self contained graphic novel called Eye of the Gods that one is a psychological thriller that was a one-hundred and forty-four page book so it's equivalent to like a four to six issue miniseries. Morningstar is gonna be a little bit longer than that.

SK:After Morningstar, what do you have planned?

GB: Well y'know I have sort of a young adult fantasy story that involves a bunch of teenage girls that are like barbarian princesses. Either that or a vampire gladiator epic I have planned to do.


SK: That sounds really cool. So I noticed last night while I was reading it that Morningstar draws a lot of references to old western movies, so what were some of the artistic influences you had? Did you draw a lot from other comics or cinema?

GB:It was definitely cinema. I can remember as a kid watching a lot of the Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, The Outlaw Josie Wales and obviously The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Even if I necessarily didn't understand what was going on as a little kid-

SK: It left an impact -

GB:Yeah, the imagery of those stories is so powerful. Of these gunfights and lonesome cowboys. They were an equivalent to samurai warriors, except on horses with pistols instead of swords. That mystique of the tone that they carry is what I tried to go for in the comic.

SK: Even artistically going to the whole samurai thing - the cowboy is one of the most famous silhouettes in the world. It's very iconic imagery and i'm surprised I don't see more western comics. Could you see yourself doing another western?

GB: I'm not neccesarily concerned with what genre I work in because I love all genre, I love fantasy and western and horror, when I come up with a story it's more about the journey the characters are going on first. Whatever that emotional arc is I may decide that "oh this is a good horror story or a good western." I can take a different type of story that I was originally planning on doing as horror and shift it into a western. I try to be fluid about it and let the project tell me what genre it wants to fit into.

SK: What was it like growing up in Los Angeles as someone who wanted to do comics, or was it something that came to you later in life?

GB: Well you know it was a really great environment! You have art center out there of course, I didn't go to school there but I have friends who went there, a lot of the animation industry is based there too. In fact in college I was an animation intern at Nickolodeon. It's great to be around people who can show you - it's one thing to go to art school it's another thing to go to work at a job where people are doing creative work professionally. Some of the things you learn in school are theoretical and people do things different just out of the necessity of work - producing creativity on demand, on a schedule is very difficult and very challenging, and to learn a lot from people who do it they show you...not necessarily a shortcut, but ways to do it and be efficient.

SK: Would you ever consider setting a comic book in the area that you grew up in? or something autobiographical about growing up in Los Angeles?

GB:Well I do actually have a book that I plan to do. My fiance works in educational psychology and she does a lot with special needs kids that are emotionally disturbed. I had an idea for a horror story that kind of revolved around emotionally disturbed children, and in that one I realized it was based on stuff I heard from her that in general the kids had to deal with and how the trauma effects the family. When you can add a little bit of supernatural horror to something that is real horror that people have to do in their life, that's really powerful. I realize it made sense since I know the area that we live, why not just base it around our real lives? Why not just inject fiction into an environment that I was familiar with?

Morningstar

SK: What kind of stuff did you grow up reading?

GB: Well I was always a big nerd, I loved Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and I ran tables as a DM. I read a lot of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms stuff, R.A Salvatore. In terms of comic books I grew up on G.I Joe and X-Men, I was kind of a Marvel Comics kid. I read a lot of indies, I tricked my parents early on as a little kid into getting me a subscription to Heavy Metal Magazine. My local newsstand - they didn't care about selling it to kids, it's just another magazine. I showed it to my parents the first couple of pages that it was a comic magazine that I could be reading. I definitely didn't show them any of the T&A or violence [laughs] I was definitely reading stuff that wasn't age appropriate for me. My taste in art has always been skewed to darker and more mature stuff anyway.

SK: Was it...I kind of want to ask, have you been drawing since you were a little kid? Or did you get exposed to comics first?

GB: Well I was always drawing throughout all of my life. I think the turn of it in comics for me was...I was reading G.I Joe and Transformers because of the cartoons. I had a friend take me to a local comic shop. There was a time where I would miss things and think it was gone forever, and my friend was all "Naw there's this place you can go if you miss something."

SK: [laughs] Yeah, a comic shop.

GB: Yeah, and the thing that really blew the doors off of my mind was that my local shop had raffles every weekend and they would give away some comics, and I got the very first trade of Walt Simonson's Starslammers. That book was as impactful to me as Star-Wars. I had seen it by then, and I know even the Star-Wars comics that like Archie Goodwin wrote and Howard Chaykin drew were very influential, but for me Starslammers felt like it took all of the things in sci-fi and fantasy in cinema and made it that exciting in comics. That's when I became addicted to the medium and wanting to read stuff beyond the cartoons that I knew. That's what led me to wanting to check out superhero stuff and be open to all kinds of genres within comics. It wasn't that long after that I started wanting to draw my own comics.

SK: I've been avoiding asking people while I talk to people I kind of try to avoid asking any of the indie artists which character for Marvel or Dc do you want to work on, I don't really believe that the endgame for the industry should be working on someone else stories...so maybe is there something that during Morningstar has been burning to get out of you?

GB: Well with Morningstar...hm, honestly the first graphic novel I did, Eye of the Gods the reason why I did that was because I didn't feel like my writing chops were up to the challenge of doing Morningstar. Which has seven main characters plus others whereas Eye of the Gods is a little more intimate. Morningstar is kind of the book that I said if I only ever did one comic in my life, Morningstar was that story.  I figured y'know life is short, who knows what's going to happen to you? Once I felt I was ready to tackle it I took it on. That said  everyday I may come up with an idea here and there for a story. Sometimes it's just one line of inspiration, sometimes it's just a paragraph. Sometimes I'll sit there and write a five page document and be like alright I've got it all plotted out. I've got more stories planned for my life than I could ever do before I die, and they're all over in different genres. Fantasy, horror, not so much so many superhero comics. Not because I have a distaste for superhero comics! I grew up reading so many of them and I feel like so much has been said in American comics that I don't know what I could bring to it that's different, so I felt like going and exploring other genre that aren't done as often in superhero comics.

SK: Is there anything you want to say to people that are going to hear about you today? Should people check out Morningstar first or Eye of the Gods?

GB: The main thing I would say is to check out my website, optichouse.com! I have the first whole chapter of Morningstar and the first 30 pages of Eye of the Gods and usually the first 12 pages of each issue. Just check out the website and see if it's a flavor you like.

-sk