Undercurrent Investigates...

Ross Lawhead is part of a creative team that put together a graphic novel called !Hero. Perhaps better known in the States than in the UK, !Hero involved not just a comic, but a rock opera, novels and a lot of showbiz!

Originally signed up as penciller for the comic, Ross soon took on a co-writing role with his father, eminent Christian novelist Stephen Lawhead. Together with a creative team that included Jeff Anderson and Jonathon Koelsch the Lawheads put together the !Hero graphic novel. Having finished with the comic, the father and son team then went on to write a series of three further novels based on the !Hero story.

At the ripe old age of 26 Ross has already stepped away from involvement in comics, to concentrate on writing books, and I wanted to know why… But to soften him up, I began by asking how he first came to be interested in comics.

“My involvement in comic books started about twenty years ago when a friend of our family gave my brother and me our first Asterix book.

“From Goscinny and Uderzo, we proceeded to Hergé, and then at the age of thirteen one of my cousins got me hooked on the American stuff.

“Ever since then I’ve been a junkie for it – always nervously worrying about where my next fix will come from!”

So how did the transition from fan-boy to creator come about?

“A few years ago I was asked to pencil promotional comics for the !Hero Rock Opera, and that remains my only professional work in the field.

“Ever since the age of six I knew I wanted to be a ‘writer and a drawer’ when I grew up, and nothing’s changed much since then.

“I find that I always have to be doing both and comics is a great way to balance.”

So… why no further comic book offerings?

“I do what I can with comics here and there, but at the plain fact is that the writing pays the bills and I have to stick with that… I’m always looking for ways back into ‘the biz’ though!”

I guess that’s a fair answer, but lets see if I can get you on the tricky stuff, what about the vexed question of whether one should set out to express one’s beliefs through artistic media?

“My answer on this keeps changing. It’s a hot topic, which is good as it’s something that every artist should consider.

“I’ll give a short answer which is ‘no’, qualify it by saying ‘not necessarily’, and then expand on it by explaining that it actually depends on what you mean by ‘express your beliefs’.

“If you mean simply to scratch whatever itch or rash you have to thump people with Bible verses or cram what you think is ‘the answer’ down people’s throats, then no, I don’t think it’s important to do that – I think it’s important not to do that.

“‘Soapbox art’ or propaganda art is very shallow, unpalatable, and makes the art and artist unworthy of their titles. The artistic field should not be a place for people to vent their toxic spleens or vomit up whatever’s making them sick.

“Personally, since I believe in truth and beauty, which in turn feeds my faith in God and Christ which are perfect realisations of those qualities, then my artistic expression manifests itself, on my better days, as simply portraying truth and beauty (even ugly beauty, which you find in a mature artist like Dostoevsky), as, when, and where I find it.

“With positive motivation like that artistic expression becomes truly creative, and not merely reactive.

“I think that an artist’s strength comes from the truthful display of his or her emotions - that’s how they connect with the reader, audience, viewer, or whoever they’re trying to communicate with. Which means not being ashamed to admit when we don’t have ‘the answer’, which a lot of times we don’t. I think we as modern Christians are afraid to embrace the truth of uncertainty and the beauty of ineffability.”

So if that’s the case – well how on earth did you get into the !Hero project?

“My father and I were approached by the brains and heart of the operation, Eddie DeGarmo, who’s an old friend and business acquaintance - my father managed the DeGarmo & Key band ‘back in the day’ before I was born.

“We both knew he was working on the project but it was a surprise when he emailed saying that he wanted to make some promotional comics and that he was looking for a ‘father/son team to write and draw them,’ and did we have ‘any suggestions?’

“We racked our brains for a few seconds and then told him that we could only think of one father and son team who fit the bill. So we started that around 2001, when I was still in University.

“I took on a co-writing position and pencilled it with the legendary Jeff Anderson providing the inks and the unsung genius of Jonathan Koelsch doing the rest.

“It was a lot of work but really fun. I had to drop out of my final year in order to meet the deadlines, but I don’t regret it for an instant – portfolios are so much more important than qualifications in the artistic world.

“Discussions with various marketing consultants led to the question of whether a novelisation series would be created so I ended up being hired to co-write the three novels with my dad, which was a blast, and which we finished about this time last year.

“Meanwhile, the Opera’s been touring and selling out across the country and is now trying to make a more permanent appearance either as a continuing tour or in New York.

“The books and graphic novel, sadly, are no longer in print, but there’s hope that when the opera is revived, then those will be too.”
 
And how do you feel about how it turned out?

“I think the comics turned out great, considering that there was only one guy on the project who had done that sort of thing before.

“It’s a wonderfully collaborative process. There a lot of flux from what starts in my head as I’m reading the script to how the last guy in the chain finishes it off, but that’s the beauty of it.

“Ultimately, the others made me look good as I was by far the least experienced guy on the team. When I flick through it now there are about fifteen things on every page that I wished I’d changed but in the end, given what we set out to accomplish, I think we turned in a pretty solid bit of work, and one of the best overtly Christian comics out there (and you can take that how you like).”

I will take it how I like. Thanks. So how about comics in general then – any current favourites or pet hates?

“I think that at the moment the industry is very strong, in terms of sheer quality of what gets produced every week. The rise and fall of the ‘chrome age’ of the nineties woke the big publishers up to the essentials of the industry, which are good writing and solid (not necessarily flashy) art.

“I always appraise things from a writing standpoint initially, and I think that you would have to go a long way to find better writers than Bendis, Millar, Azzarello, Vaughan, Johns or any one of twenty others working in the field.

“At the moment I think that Warren Ellis is the most dazzling creative force in the industry. If you look at what he’s producing, on a monthly basis, it’s magnificent in its breadth – or at least the narrow breadth that he’s allowed.

“My one frustration, and I think Ellis’s as well, is that the industry is still too reliant on superheroes.

“I don’t know on whose side the blame falls, either the readers’ or the publishers’, or both, but I’d like to see more non-super stuff out there. There should be as many genres represented as there are for movies or books.”
 
And what about the Christian publishing and entertainment industry? Honesty preferred!!

“I’ve actually signed legal documentation stating that I can not be honest (no, I’m not kidding).

“Broadly, I think that the Christian publishing and entertainment industry, through it’s own fault, has fallen on hard times and is lying on its own messy bed.

“There are two prongs to this dilemma, the first is that there’s a sense with many naive Christian artists that if you do anything ‘for God’, then that should be a good enough reason for expecting people to accept whatever mindless pile of putrid filth you manage to crap out of your brain.”

Language Timothy!! Don’t you know impressionable young people read this column?! Actually if they’ve got this far down the interview then fair play to them – preach it brother!!

“I think that excuse ‘God gave me this idea’ is such a virulent heresy that the forming of a special Inquisition would be justified in order to find these people, and… give them a good talking to.

“That’s what’s happening on an artistic level. The second prong is at a managerial level, and is the more noxious evil of ‘playing it safe’.

“There’s a sense that anything dangerous or risqué should not belong in a Christian environment. I would suggest that a (true and open) Christian environment is perhaps the only place it does belong in.

“The Church, as a worldwide entity, should be the bastion and guard-dog of everything that is holy and pure, but over the course of the last twenty years the American Christian entertainment industry has succeeded in yanking out so many of its teeth that it’s now no good to anyone.

“They’ve done this for maybe several reasons, but the ones that are apparent to me are fear and greed, which are bad artistic motivators.

“Fear that you will upset people by rocking the boat too much, and that if you do they might have walked out of your safe little Christian bookstore without having bought so much as a ‘Jesus loves you’ eraser.

“The industry as it stands now is too ghettoised to do anyone inside or outside of it any good, and a ghetto is what they, the publishers and the store owners, deliberately set out to create.

“But not to be too damning, I think that there is reason for hope that the situation is changing. I’ve talked to publishers and editors recently and it seems to be sinking in that you can’t dig yourself out of a hole and they are starting to offer more latitude to their artists, of whatever stripe, to be more challenging and true to their art.

“After twenty years my dad has been lured back in to the industry by Westbow which is an imprint of Thomas Nelson, once notoriously the biggest and baddest fish in the water. They’ve been absolutely wonderful leading up to the publication of his next book Hood, as well as the republication of The Song of Albion Trilogy.

“There’s been only minimal and reasonable censorship. But will it last? Time will tell. I think it’s interesting to compare this industry as it is now and the comics industry as it was ten years ago. It’s in pretty much the same position, and it needs the same help to get out.”
 
Don’t hold back on your views now Ross, say what you think! How about this one – what’s your view on the debate over whether Christianity should be implicit or explicit in artistic expression?

“It depends completely on the work of art – the story, the painting, the comic, whatever. Different works have different requirements, some need to be explicit, some need to be implicit.

“I think to claim that Narnia would be better if it was less explicit is as hard to defend as the claim that Lord of the Rings would be better if it was less implicit – or that Crime and Punishment or Les Miserables shouldn’t have attempted both at the same time.

“I don’t think you can value explicitness or implicitness artistically, or that they’re mutually exclusive. But you can value how well you do each one, and once again I think that the top criterion should be honesty. What makes the books I’ve just listed ‘greater’ is that they are essentially honest about the world – quite apart from their technical merits, which is admittedly rather low.

“So to say art should be either more explicit or implicit is equivalent to saying that art should be either ‘more blue’ or ‘more red’. It depends on the picture you’re painting. The real question should be how honest is its implicitness or explicitness.

“The danger in any kind of art with a message is getting that message wrong. For Christians, that lies in giving the impression that we have it all sorted out and that we are going to bestow this wisdom on our fellow man for their own good and enlightenment.

“We’re all on a journey, we’re all sinners. None of us have ‘arrived’ yet. After walking a fair distance in what I am assured is the right direction, I’ve found far more questions than answers, but they’ve been wonderfully satisfying questions.

“To quote G K Chesterton, ‘the riddles of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.’ Bring on the questions and we might really get somewhere.”
 
That’s a great way to approach things isn’t it.

By the way – what’s this I hear about you saying the Matrix films are a better representation of the gospel than the Narnia stories... ?

“There’s nothing a Christian artist loves more than a spot of Matrix Apologetics – Apologetrix, if you will.

“All I was saying is that, from a theological standpoint, The Matrix Trilogy did a better job of summing up the crucifixion than The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe did; which would probably be more disparaging to Lewis if that was all he meant for the Narnia series.

“The first book only deals with Godly sacrifice, the other books deal with aspects of the Christian walk or the universe in general and then ends with a glorious picture of the afterlife. It is important to realise that the crucifixion is not the whole story of mankind, which is tempting, but it is the heart of the story of mankind.

“Anyway, the crucifixion as portrayed in Wardrobe, is basically God, Aslan, getting one guy, Edmond, out of an unfortunate situation. Aslan is sacrificed to redeem one person, but through that act he is able to break the power of the White Witch, which can seem a little sneaky if viewed from a certain angle.

“In The Matrix evil, in the form of Agent Smith, has invaded the world so completely that it has gone to the extent of making everyone in it an Agent Smith clone – so saying that all evil is the same, implying diversity in freedom, which I think is true.

“Neo as the (small ‘m’) messiah eventually realises that the only way to defeat that evil is not to fight it on its own terms, but to let it inside of himself, the only person that doesn’t have it, and sacrificing his own life and power for that of others (it’s unclear exactly how). This is more of the ‘eucatastrophe’ found in scripture that Tolkien tried to express, but Lewis didn’t quite get right until The Last Battle.

“I’m not knocking Lewis. The Matrix only takes us up to a point and is very disjointed in what it is trying to say, to be charitable. Lewis was writing children’s books in which – and if you read what he said about Narnia in interviews, he was very clear on this point – were made primarily to amuse children. He was not making a piece of psycho-philosophic science-fiction... he did that in his Space Trilogy.”

Oh I love controversy. But we’re running out of space for all this stuff, so quickly – who are your major artistic influences?

“My father is ahead by a mile. I grew up in a household where word meanings, sentence structure, and the artistic process were constantly debated – often heatedly. Also, we were working together on the !Hero novels so closely that we were changing each other’s sentences and arguing characters and plots. All that definitely influences an impressionable young writer.

“Apart from him, it’s really hard to say. The writers that I love and will read anything by are G. K. Chesterton, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, and John Grisham, in that order.

“In art, I think Norman Rockwell and Caspar David Friedrich above others like Carravagio and John Singer Sargent. I love the late renaissance and the Raphaelites. Also William Blake, who I think should be honoured as one of the first comic creators. In the field of comics I would say the standard list: Scott McCloud, Will Eisner, and those that I mentioned before.”

Succinct enough for me. Thanks Ross.

Ross Lawhead is writer-in-residence at Schloss Mittersill in Austria, where he is working on a series of novels. Read more about !Hero at www.herouniverse.com.