Comic Con is coming: We chat to a Musgrave comic artist
Award-winning comic artist Luke Molver, aka Billy Pineapples, looks back on his experience as a regular vendor at Comic Con.
COMIC Con Africa is a four-day pop culture and gaming festival held in Johannesburg. As the festival approaches on September 22, Musgrave resident and award-winning comic artist, Luke Molver, aka Billy Pineapples, looks back on his experience as a regular vendor at Comic Con in the years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic.
He participated in several panel discussions at the event, in-between meeting international artists and writers that influenced his work. This week, Berea Mail’s Danica Hansen sat down to chat with Molver about the ‘rise of the nerd’, how a good imagination brings a comic book to life and why doodling in class isn’t always a bad thing.
What did you think of Comic Con?
Comic Con Africa is great! It’s a fantastic event worth attending for anybody interested in any aspect of pop culture: comics, movies, board games, anime or cosplay. You can chat with local creators in the Artist’s Alley and mingle with international guests. There are dozens of discussions and panels and workshops every day. Your jaw will hit the floor seeing some of the amazing costumes and cosplay that parade around the convention. Whatever your vibe, Comic Con Africa has it, and everyone is so passionate about their niche of pop culture that the excitement is contagious. Nerd culture used to be a fringe pursuit, often misunderstood and even scorned, but no longer. The nerds have inherited the Earth.
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How do you define your style at the moment? Has it evolved since you started out?
I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil, and for a while, my preschool teachers were a little concerned about me – because while the other kids were all running around playing kissing catchers, I was sitting on my own behind on the jungle gym drawing monsters. Come to think of it, not much has changed since then. Professionally, I’ve been working as an illustrator for almost 20 years. My illustration techniques are inspired predominantly by comic art, although I have a few variations to my style depending on the job or projects that I’m working on. From an early age, I was far more inspired by the darker, grittier art and the writing in the science fiction comic anthologies of 2000 AD and Heavy Metal than I ever was by the colourful superheroes of Marvel and DC. Actually, I find their current creatively bankrupt corporatisation of popular culture quite alarming, but that’s a rant for another day.
On your website, you write, ‘Reality was a poor substitute for imagination.’ Tell us more.
Well, unfortunately, reality remains reality, unpleasant as it often is, but imagination has always been a place I escaped to – another, better world where I have control, where I am content. To wax philosophical for a moment, my imagination is the closest I’ll ever get to God.
Comics differ from television – they require an imaginative reader. Do you agree?
Comics differ from television and cinema and literature because of ‘the spaces in-between’. What makes the medium of comics truly unique are the unseen events, actions and conversations that take place in the gutters between the panels. This is where the story germinates and grows, fertile in the readers’ imagination. Having said that, comics do share a lot in common with film, arguably more than they do with literature. Every movie you’ve ever seen started out as a storyboard – a frame-by-frame breakdown of every shot – essentially, a comic.
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Would you like to touch on the different worlds you create with Nero, Sunday’s Slave and Shaka Rising?
Nero, Sunday’s Slave and Shaka Rising are the three main comic book series I’ve worked on over the last several years. The first two are self-published, and the third is produced by local publisher StoryPress Africa and distributed worldwide. Shaka Rising even got nominated for a few awards. The cool thing about these comics is that they all fit into quite diverse genres, each with unique storytelling possibilities. Nero is a cyberpunk noir set right here in Durban in the not-too-distant future; Sunday’s Slave is a Southern gothic horror based loosely on the tale of legendary Blues musician Robert Johnson, and Shaka Rising traces the life and reign of the eponymous Zulu king. Ultimately, I find the key to a good story is writing believable characters. If you can do that successfully and respectfully, their story falls into place around them. Regardless of genre, people are people. We are motivated by the same base drives and desires: love, fear, anger, joy, sadness and everything in-between. As a writer, I try to figure out these motivations and the dynamics they create between the characters. Once I’m able to do that, it doesn’t matter if those characters exist in the rolling hills of 18th century South Africa, or a futuristic cyberpunk metropolis – they become real.
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