Break Bones While Breaking Your Heart — Jeffrey Alan Love Discusses ‘News From The Fallout’

Jeffrey Alan Love’s artwork has graced many comic book covers as well as his own books, but the creator hasn’t been a regular interior artist until now. He is teaming up with writer Chris Condon to bring News From the Fallout to life this June – fresh on the heels of a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign for his latest graphic novel, The Thousand Demon Tree. During an exclusive interview with Comicon.com, Love discussed why he finally is drawing interiors as well as his own unique artistic style.

Tom Smithyman: While you’ve done your own stories as well as a slew of covers, News From the Fallout represents your direct market comic book debut as a series artist. Was that a distinct choice you made or just the way things worked out?

Jeffrey Alan Love: A bit of both, probably. When I decided to start transitioning my career towards comics, I wanted to find a writer to work with, whose work I respected and loved, that would push me out of my comfort zone, beyond the stories that I would write for myself. I talked with a few writers, and there was some movement towards a few projects, but the stars never quite aligned until now.

Smithyman: What attracted you to this project in particular?

Love: Without a doubt it was Chris’s writing. I’m a lover of genre, of crime and sci-fi and horror, and the best kind of genre does what I like to think of as break bones while breaking your heart. There’s action and excitement and spectacle, but at the core there are characters with real emotions, real problems, making hard choices and living with the consequences – their lives forever changed. Chris writes the kind of stories I love to read. Rips your heart out both literally and figuratively.

Smithyman: Chris Condon has made quite a name for himself over the past few years. I know you did a variant cover for his series That Texas Blood, but this is your opportunity to work more closely with him. What is that collaboration like?

Love: Working with Chris has been fantastic. I feel privileged to get to see him work, to see how he builds each issue, shapes the arc of scenes. It’s like I’m getting a private masterclass on how to write comics. Chris has also been very vocal about championing my art and embracing how this book will look like nothing else on the stands. But the best part has been that I think of Chris as a friend now, and really just enjoy having him be a part of my life, talking about comics and film and life.

Smithyman: It would be easy to call your illustrations black and white, but they aren’t really, are they? There’s an ashy quality to a lot of what you do. How do you describe it, and can you ever imagine a heavy use of color with your drawings?

Love: I think of what I do as painting with light. I really embraced black and white when I was working as an illustrator because most of what I was being inspired by was black/white comic book art, and in the age of Photoshop, not using color was a way to stand out from the candy-colored crowd. But mostly it is just a deep love of black/white art, of Dino Battaglia, Sergio Toppi, Alberto and Enrique Breccia, Jose Munoz, Jorge Zaffino, Paul Pope.

And within black/white the fun is in trying to find ways to make greys, to have midtones and soft edges – Battaglia is a huge influence there. Zaffino too. He draws with ink as though he’s painting like a Flemish master, like Rembrandt, who is one of my favorite artists.

As for adding color to my own work in the future, in traditional paintings it is often the beautiful greys that allow the saturated colors to sing. Even in nature – think of a grey and cloudy day during autumn and how the color of the changing leaves just sings out against that desaturated background. That inspires me. I can definitely see color coming into my work at some point, it would be fun to see how I (or a colorist) could make it work.

Smithyman: You recently wrapped a tremendously successful crowdfunding campaign for The Thousand Demon Tree that hit its goal in just a few hours. Can you talk a little about this wordless graphic novel and also discuss how surprised you might have been by the reaction from your fans?

Love: I am incredibly grateful to have both a publisher and audience for books like The Last Battle at the End of the World, The Thousand Demon Tree, and my others through Flesk Publications. I think of them as my art films or ambient drone music, books that are meant to induce a mood in the reader, a shared emotion through simple stories and evocative imagery, as compared with the rock and roll of three-act structure, verse/chorus/bridge of classical storytelling.

Smithyman: The first of six issues of News From the Fallout comes out in June, so you have a lot on your plate right now. But do you have other projects lined up that you can share with us?

Love: Nothing that I can share, but Chris and I have talked about what our next collaboration might be, and I’m putting together pitches for my own comics that I would write and draw myself. At first, I couldn’t believe how much work comics were, but I’ve caught the bug. The lifelong love is real.

Smithyman: The creatures in News From the Fallout are turned into zombie-like monsters after getting too close to an atomic bomb. Exposure to radiation gave a lot of comic book superheroes got their powers. If you ever got exposed to a crazy high dose, what would you want your powers to be?

Love: I’m an old dad with two young kids, so I would like my power to be getting eight hours of sleep a night.

Smithyman: That may be the greatest superpower of all! Thanks for taking the time to talk to Comicon.com.