Newsarama just published [a long interview with artist Ethan Van Scriver][1], who drew Green Lantern: Rebirth last year. The interview’s pretty long, but here’s the exciting part, where he talks about Green Lantern:
NRAMA: You did some DC work with books like Impulse and Flash: Iron Heights, as well as a few gigs at Marvel, including New X-Men with Grant Morrison. At what point did you feel like you had really made it as a comic book artist?
EVS: That still hasn’t really… well, maybe that happened recently with Rebirth, but up until then, I always felt like a very small fish in a big pond. I still do feel like that. I feel like I’ve been very, very lucky. But I still don’t feel like I’ve made it. I haven’t achieved everything that I wanted to achieve yet. And I’m still very much in awe of my peers. So I’ve got a little ways to go yet.
NRAMA: What is your favorite thing you’ve done? Is it Rebirth?
EVS: Yeah, I think so. So far. It’s something that I can read over and over again and still enjoy. You know, most of the work that I’ve done is hard for me to look at now, with some time gone by. But Rebirth is really just good. It’s a fun read. I recommend it.
NRAMA: What’s your favorite issue?
EVS: Of Rebirth?
NRAMA: Well, your favorite issue of anything you’ve done.
EVS: I would say the first issue of Rebirth is my favorite, because I think it’s Geoff’s writing at his best. Geoff tells me he thinks the fourth issue is the best because there’s so much cool stuff going on. And there is. I mean, there’s Green Arrow with the Green Lantern ring, there’s Hal rising up out of his coffin, there’s all this great stuff. But Issue #1, I think, is the best thing he’s ever written because it just hooks you right away. It’s so full of mystery, and so strange. And you just feel a rainy breeze, like something’s happening, something’s coming — it’s on the wind.
NRAMA: And you created Parallax for that. It must have been really fun to come up with the design for that freaky looking thing.
EVS: Parallax — Geoff just said he’s this ancient fear entity. Obviously, if he is fear, he’s older than anything. I think Geoff just described him as a big, huge monster. I guess I thought primitive, and I was thinking, let’s mix insects and dinosaurs and try to maintain some of the design for the Parallax costume — try to incorporate that into his biology. And I ended up with that thing, which was good enough.
NRAMA: Do you think you’ll be drawing Parallax again?
EVS: That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?
NRAMA: Well, if someone was trying to find out if you’re doing a project with a lot of yellow rings in it, then yeah, I guess it’s fairly loaded.
EVS: Chances are, I will be drawing Parallax again, yeah.
NRAMA: Besides Parallax, another thing you added to the Green Lantern mythos is the ring signature.
EVS: Yeah. All the little glowing effects and things are a new addition to the Green Lanterns and the way they look now. You know, it started with Geoff because he initially said he thought it would be great if each one of the individual Lanterns had their own sort of beam that came out of their ring.
NRAMA: And didn’t he describe that in the narrative of Rebirth? There was a scene where Kyle and John and Hal were working together to take down Parallax, but each was doing it with a different style. John’s had the look of an architect, Kyle’s an artist, and then Hal with his straightforward fearlessness. Geoff actually spelled out why they looked that way and your art illustrated it.
EVS: Yeah! Yeah! It was amazing! He had it all worked out. And as soon as he just described it to me — I think what he originally said was that John’s ring would make a rigid, kind of squared beam, constructed.
NRAMA: Because as an architect, he would use rulers and straight edges.
EVS: Right. And from there, I remember we had these conversations where I would say, “Dude! John should be covered by this architectural bitmap wherever he goes.” I mean, the way he thinks and the way he solves problems in his work — he should actually wear that on his sleeve, literally. It should be all over him. And let’s do the same with everybody else. They’re all so unique and individual. And so I started to kind of flirt with it in the first issue of Rebirth, where I would give John these sort of light, architectural lines. And by the fourth issue, it was just, “Let’s play with this. Let’s go full force.”
NRAMA: They wear it now like part of their costume.
EVS: Well, from there, something happened where, you know, Geoff and I were talking about how the Green Lantern costumes are made of energy, instead of fabric or spandex. I think they’ve always been made of energy. I think everyone’s always agreed with that. And yet, people always draw them so that they look like spandex. It annoys me, because it seems like a lie. It seems like something an artist could fix very easily, and nobody has really done it, because we have this certain idea of what a superhero looks like. And so, I said the first thing that needs to go are the highlights in the black part of Green Lantern’s costume. It shouldn’t have those gray highlights anymore.
NRAMA: Because it’s energy?
EVS: Because if it’s energy, and if it’s black energy, it’s the absence of light. It should not be able to reflect light back. They should always be a black silhouette. And then I did a couple of sketches and showed them to Geoff, and Geoff liked them.
And then I thought, that symbol on their chest should be kind of like, since they’re this intergalactic police force, those are the badges. They should also perhaps work like sirens, so that they can jump off a Green Lantern’s chest and be three-dimensional like a hologram, and be seen from any angle and by any alien that’s around so they know what they’re dealing with. They’re about to deal with the Green Lanterns. And maybe it would flash and make noise when the Green Lanterns were racing to the scene. And it just opened up this whole new look, this whole new way of thinking about the Green Lanterns visually. And it’s way different. I mean, it’s different than what people have seen in the past. I think it helped to propel the book to a new audience.
NRAMA: Because it was so unique looking…
EVS: It just suddenly seemed so fresh. And the more you think about that, the more excited you can get about working on a Green Lantern book. The possibilities don’t just lie within, you know, “My ring can make anything. It can make a herd of green elephants.” A herd of green elephants? That’s actually boring. You know, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with that at the end of the day — it’s still just a green elephant. When you really think of the idea that these guys are an intergalactic police force and they’re just full of energy and individuality, and they abide by this code, this oath. I get goosebumps. I get excited about it. It’s so fun.
NRAMA: You’ve got it bad for these Green Lanterns, Ethan.
EVS: I’ve never been so motivated by any comic book property before. I really haven’t.
I have to say, I hated the thing where the lantern logos shoot out of their chests now, until I read his explanation of it.