 |
| Marley Davidson |
 |
| Artemis Brown |
On Sunday you met
Marley Davidson: Bronx Exorcist. Today, meet his maker, Sandy Jimenez. Sandy's graciously agreed to The Maderer Inquisition.
Do you remember when you began drawing?
I actually don't remember a specific age, it's as early as I can remember. My mother and relatives say it was from when I was a toddler, but although I had a compulsion to draw, I can distinctly remember not thinking I was good at it, or not being able to do it as well as I wanted to. I was frustrated by not being able to draw hands for example, and like most other kids my age in those early years (6-8 or so) I drew pictures that were pretty unremarkable, barely better than stick figures. One summer, in 1977 to be exact, I had a breakthrough, I was doing about 10-12 drawings a day and something came together in my mind.
When did you became interested in comics?
That was love at first sight I'm sure, but whenever that was, I'm not sure I can pin it down to a year. My first comics were Popeye reprints, and some weird adult photo-comics that I don't think are made anymore.
In drawing comics?
 |
| Kenneth Brown |
The first movie I was ever taken to see was a sequel: 'Dr. Phibes Rises Again.' I must have been about 4 or 5. I couldn't get the images in that movie out of my mind, and I started creating picture books, just long single-page/image iterated illustrated stories based on what I had seen, so my mother bought an anthology of Popeye comic strips for me. It was early Elzie Segar stuff and after a while I started cutting up the individual panels and reordering them to create different stories. I started writing my own stories, mostly stuff about Pirates, Astronauts and Frogmen in early childhood.
Who were your childhood favs? How about now?
 |
| Sisters Graye |
Jack Kirby is the first artist I can remember recognizing at 100 paces. I really loved him and still do. It was years before I knew the names of people like Alex Toth, John Buscema, Curt Swan, Neal Adams, Joe Sinnott, Joe Orlando, Moebius and others whose work I could recognize no matter the material, but whose names I just never knew until later when I was in my teens. The writers and artists whose work I learned from is long, but if I have to boil it down and give you a list of people I was knocked out by back in my childhood and teens, (and am still learning from today) it would be: Michael Golden, Bill Mantlo (writer), Jim Aparo, John Romita Sr., Marv Wolfman (writer), Gene Colan, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, John Byrne, George Perez, Chris Claremont and of course Stan Lee (writer) -- who I got to meet and hang out with a couple of years ago -- a dream come true.
How did Marley Davidson originate?
 |
| Don Lajarita |
Marley Davidson's birth is kind of a funny, strange story. Initially I had intended to do a comic book called
"Vladek, Vampire Detective," a series of stories trailing the life of a vampire charged with eliminating the Undead. The Vladek series was intended to recount events across several decades in which Vladek kept outliving his sidekicks (most of whom were benevolent descendants of Frankenstein's monster) culminating in the late 1970s, when his last sidekick,
"Marley Davidson" would finally take over the mission and the series would end. Marley was originally just a joke character, a lighthearted way to end a very heavy series. Well the funny thing is as I started writing all the scripts, mapping out all the pages, I started to generate a lot more material for Marley and his world. He turned out not to be such a joke for me after all, and really took over my writing desk for a couple of years while I developed his universe. Now, Vladek is a minor character in his story, not the other way around.
How has he evolved over time?
My plan for Marley has always been that he would evolve from a bloodthirsty zealot and mature into someone more humane as the stories went on. I wrote Marley Davidson at a time when violence in mainstream comic books (this is the late 1980s and mid 1990s I'm talking about) had reached a comically irresponsible nadir. It wasn't that I was opposed to portrayals of violence, I just can't stand it presented as a thing without consequences or costs. Anybody who's ever been assaulted, or even punched in the face will acknowledge it's in no way fun or entertaining. It also seems like the current popular fascination with Zombie fiction centering largely around people fantasizing about dismembering, and battering people (again without any consequences because they're already dead, right?) As much as I love the Walking Dead movie and TV series adapted from it, the vast majority of independent horror movies, particularly zombie, and "maniac slasher" movies, don't do much to address anything other than the many ways a person can be brutalized. With the Marley Davidson: Bronx Exorcist series I wanted to answer questions about power, exploitation, racism and class as it pertains to the fantasy world of monsters and monster hunters. I have always wondered for example, what happened to all the Orcs at the end of Lord of Rings after the fall of Mordor. Did they just drop their weapons and go look for odd jobs around the countryside? What about the goblins? The trolls? They had to get on with life too didn't they?
Again, you can see more of our hero here at
Vampryotechnic Studios. What other series and art has Mister Jimenez done and
where can we see more of his fab work?
GREAT questions! I'll be sure to ask these and more for the next installment of Sandy Jimenez: Bronx Artist.
