Thursday, May 7, 2009

5 Quick Questions with Cameron Stewart

Cameron Stewart is an Eisner Award-nominated Canadian comic book artist who has worked for DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse Comics.

Stewart is best known for his work on Catwoman with writer Ed Brubaker, and Seaguy and Seven Soldiers: The Manhattan Guardian with writer Grant Morrison.

October 2006 saw the release of The Other Side, a miniseres about the Vietnam war illustrated by Stewart (and written by Jason Aaron), for which he travelled to Vietnam for research. The Other Side was nominated for an Eisner Award in the Best Limited Series category of 2007.

In 2007, Stewart created drawings which appeared in a comic book-style animation sequence at the end of the music video for Canadian pop singer Skye Sweetnam's song "Human", the first single off of her sophomore album Sound Soldier. Stewart also created the drawings that appear on Sweetnam's relaunched official website.

Recent projects include The Apocalipstix a series of digest comic books for Oni Press, written by Ray Fawkes.

He agreed to answer 5 Quick Questions

1) What would you say is your greatest achievement in comics?

Jason Aaron, writer of The Other Side, let me know of a letter he received from the son of a Vietnam vet. The son said that his father was wounded in the war and since then had difficulty standing for long periods of time without great discomfort. He then related a story of how his father had noticed a copy of The Other Side sitting on a table and asked what it was about. Told that it was a comic about the Vietnam war, the father flipped it open and started reading it, and apparently became so engrossed in it that he read the whole thing, standing at the table the whole time.

That's only one of the stories we heard, we had a lot of positive response from vets of the war who felt that we did a very good job with the details of the story, that it felt authentic, convincing, effective and respectful. As two guys who didn't fight in the war, this was extremely important to us and we were very pleased to know that we'd achieved it.


2) Who was your favorite writer or artist that you worked with & why?

It's difficult to choose one, as Jason's script is one of the very best I've read and I've been fortunate enough to work with many other fantastic writers, but I'll have to go with Grant Morrison, for the simple fact that I've been a fan of his since I was quite young, and at age 13 stood in line to get his autograph. So now, as an adult, to be sharing cover credits with him is extremely exciting and gratifying.

3) What character you have never worked on ... would you like to do & why?

I'm assuming that you mean Marvel or DC characters, and to be frank there's none that really hold much interest for me....I have a lot of love for many of those characters but I don't really feel the need to work with them. The only characters I haven't yet worked on that create any kind of real enthusiasm are ones of my own that I haven't created yet.

4) Who are your influences?

Will Eisner, Frank Quitely, Mort Drucker, Jack Kirby, Bruce Timm, Darwyn Cooke, Alex Toth, Pierre Alary, Katsuhiro Otomo, Didier Conrad, David Mazzuchelli, Daniel Clowes ...too many more to mention, and those are just the comics artists. We'd be here all day if I went into my filmic influences.

5) What hero or villain would you like to change if you could and why?

Again, not really invested enough in them to care to change them. I'm far less interested in superhero comics these days than I am in other genres and so I'll leave the changes to others.

You can check out Cameron's blog at
http://cameronstewart.blogspot.com/

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