Veteran of the Australian comics industry, Tim McEwen, stops in for a chat with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, regarding the return of his long-running title, Greener Pastures.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Welcome to the Yeti Cave, Tim! It’s been a little while in the making, but I’m glad to have you here. How are things going in Sydney?
TIM MCEWEN: It HAS been a while coming. Thanks for your tenacity and interest Andrew. Sydney's doing just fine! Nice in the Spring time with the sun going down later and the chill gone from the air. I'm busy busy here with a number of Greener Pastures projects on the go at all times.
CBY: So you’ve just concluded the campaign for Greener Pastures #8 - congratulations on the successful funding of the new book! #7 and a half was released in 1998, so what precipitated the return to Greener Pastures after all these years?
TM: That's a bit of a long story, but I'll give you the short version. Basically it took a long time for Michael Michalandos (Greener Pastures co-creator) and I to 'get past' having kids, careers, mortgages, etc., and to also get our individual lives to sync up with each other so we could collaborate again.
And thanks for the congrats. I can't tell you how gratifying it was to see so many people either still interested in our lovable bull, or willing to take him on for the first time. The same thing has been happening at all the comic conventions, fairs, and signings I've done over the last two years as well. I'm very humbled by it all.
CBY: I'm sure it's encouraging to see such a resurgence in continued interest for the comic. The original 1990s run was illustrated by you, and written by Michael Michalandos. I see #8 came out of the gate with Louis Purdy and the esteemed Darren Close on the team - can you relate for us the change in the line-up, how it came about, and what it means for the title (particularly for those who don’t have a frame of reference from the original run)?
TM: Haha! Well, Purdy is an enigma shrouded in a paradox, wrapped in a crocheted blanket. Be content knowing that he'll probably never be heard from again. Darren came on board as the Kickstarter coordinator, not actually as a creative on the comic itself. Michael and I are the main creative forces behind the comic at all times, with some help and some guests for special projects every now and then.
CBY: For #8, you were able to collaborate with a roster of 30 artists, including some well-known veterans of both the indie circuit and the big two alike. The line-up includes folks like Dave Sim, Nicola Scott, Gary Chaloner, and Chris Wahl, to name a few. How did you end up herding everyone into this project and getting a cohesive comic out of all the different, disparate influences at work?
TM: Let me tell you, it wasn't easy! But I wanted a 'welcome home party' for Trevor and gang, and the idea of a jam issue seemed like the best way to have that happen in print. The story itself was first written by Michael in 1997, thumbnailed by me also back then, but never moved to the next stage of production. Purdy updated the script for us and I did new thumbnails. I took those (quite small) thumbnails and sketched them up roughly to A4 size so that each contributing artist (who had a single page each) knew exactly how much story content they needed to get through on their page. I made it very clear that the layouts were a guide only and they didn't need to be adhered to closely, as long as the story that needed to get told on that page got told on that page. What a huge treat it was seeing how some of the artists took some of my pedestrian layouts and made them wonderful and exciting! Then, to keep just a modicum of visual consistency to the whole thing (because the styles vary incredibly, from cartoony big-eyed stuff to quite realistic, and everything in between!) I lettered and inked the whole thing. The trick there was to add that consistency without overpowering the amazing pencils I was given. The feedback I've received is that it works! Somehow it works!
CBY: It's always a delight to have a finished product match the expectations you lay out at the start in your mind's eye. So Greener Pastures entered the scene at a time when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been out for the better part of a decade, so anthropomorphic characters were not unheard of, but the interaction between Trevor and regular humans was a novel approach for the time. It’s since been employed by shows like Bojack Horseman. What sort of development trends and trajectories have you seen in the animal-human interaction across comics over the decades?
TM: Good question! But not one I'm really equipped to answer well! I'm not a 'furry' artist, as such. Anthropomorphic comics make up a large portion of my collection, but only based on the fact that I love the character and/or writing and art, not because I'm a dedicated anthro fan in the way you might think.
It's funny that you bring up the anthro-character in an otherwise human world… I asked a bunch of my peers recently what sort of other comics they might compare Greener Pastures too… what else it reminds them of or it's reminiscent of… and they all said they couldn't really think of any. That it's totally unique! There are comics that might seem similar, or be put in a similar basket, but no "if you like XYZComic you'll love Greener Pastures" kind of direct comparison. Names like Cerebus, Bone, Strangers in Paradise and Sweet Tooth were bandied about often, but always with the caveat that they were grasping at straws to try and find direct comparisons. Great company to be put in! And great to hear that we really have hit on something very much unique!
CBY: I was thinking back to bovine-themed cartoons from my childhood, and there was an episode of The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh with a Lone Ranger analogue episode called, “The Masked Bear,” where the antagonist was a bull. Then, while writing this interview I just saw a Dinosaur Dracula post about possibly some of the most outlandish TMNT-derivative titling achieved at the peak of the early 90’s anthropomorphic cartoon boom, Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (really, taking it a step beyond Street Sharks or Biker Mice From Mars with unnecessary punctuation, huh?)
How much of this sort of media was making it down to Australia, and if this stuff wasn’t hitting Australia at the time it came out, what were the influences that fed into the theme, look, and tone of Greener Pastures?
TM: None of that influenced the creation of Greener Pastures in the slightest. Either at the inception of the idea, or in the creation of the comic going forward. I'm pretty sure most of those shows were making it to Australian television at the time, but not much of it interested me. It was definitely indie comics that were the biggest influences on my art and story telling style. Cerebus, Bone, Hepcats, Love and Rockets, Concrete, many others.
CBY: It certainly has more in common with the themes and plots of those titles than its contemporaneous bovine-centric cartoon analogs, but I figured I should ask while I had the opportunity. To that point more broadly, what have been your influences as a comic creator beyond your contemporaries? I know talking with friends in Fiji, the most pervasive and influential comic in the market there used to be The Phantom (since it received a short run of translations into iTaukei for the local market). What comics available in Australia shaped your experience in your formative years more broadly, and what other interests informed your approach to the medium when you first picked it up, and what sort of projects preceded Greener Pastures?
TM: Let's start at the end of that question. Trevor — the start of Greener Pastures – sprang as a fully formed, though empty vessel into my head. The first four pages of the first issue coming to me in a flash when holidaying on a farm and being informed by the farmer just how boring the existence of the cattle was. Michael took that concept and filled that vessel to the brim! I can pinpoint two sources of most influence on my work as a comics creator: Canadian Dave Sim with his Cerebus comics, and Australian Gary Chaloner with his 80s and 90s action adventure comics. Then there's a huge list of other influences: Barry Windsor-Smith, Will Eisner, Jim Steranko, Paul Gulacy, Frank Miller, Michael Golden, George Pérez, John Byrne, Paul Chadwick, Mark Schultz, Paul Grist, Bill Willingham… the list goes on and on! I read a lot of early Marvel stuff that was being reprinted here in black & white, so I had a great helping of Kirby and Ditko and the gang there too.
CBY: A wide and deep pool of inspiration, including some of the greatest the medium has been graced with over the years. I’m always curious about the reaction to sentient non-humans in media by other characters (I touched on this with Seraji over his protagonist in Fourth Dimensional) - when Trevor stands up and asks his farmer to leave, he’s treated a bit like an ungrateful son. A lot of other characters do not seem to initially recognize him for what he is immediately. What sort of rules or logic do you adhere to around this?
TM: Ah! That would be telling! Haha! The great thing, in those early issues, is that the conceit that most people simply think Trevor is a big, hairy, smelly university student, is so readily taken on board by, and really loved by, the readers! But we're currently moving into new territory with Trevor and the wider story, and it's not simply a throw-away conceit. It is about to become an integral and important part of the plot and themes. Very exciting to be moving into more complex elements of the story soon! Elements that were there from the very first time Michael put together a synopsis of Trevor's life from beginning to end. Very exciting indeed!
CBY: Now I'm intrigued to see how Trevor's place in the Greener Pastures universe unfolds! I’m also curious, with the big hiatus in production on Greener Pastures, what else have you been up to? What pursuits and experiences have shaped the intervening period, and what brought you back to this title for another spin?
TM: I mentioned the word 'career' earlier. I always say that laughingly when referring to myself! I've done many things but never really had much of a 'career' as such. The highlights include doing storyboards on some feature films (Happy Feet Two, Blinky Bill the Movie, and Wolf Creek 2) as well as co-designing the two krill, Will & Bill, from Happy Feet Two. I've done a heap of graphic design and magazine layout, managed studios, helped create and run Australia's largest pop culture convention, helped reinstate the Comic Arts Awards of Australia (with Gary Chaloner), and I lecture and teach animation students at tertiary level. But comics are the main love, and always have been, and I'm adamant that we're going to get to the end of this great story that is Greener Pastures.
CBY: Now, I know beyond Greener Pastures, you’ve been engaged with the Australian comics community for decades. Since getting involved with Comic Book Yeti, I’ve really appreciated learning more about the breadth and depth of the comics culture and industry here. Can you tell us a bit about the Ledger Awards, the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, and give our readers around the globe a better understanding of the value you see at the core of Aussie comics?
TM: Ever since I first started to get involved in the Australian comics community (in the late 1980s?!?) the thing that always struck me about the work was just how unique and individual it is. We were all influenced by the US and UK, and yes, there's always those who simply want to emulate exactly what they saw there, but the vast majority of comics, from the mini-comics through to the pro-level publications, were absolutely and undeniably Australian. We were making comics for ourselves primarily. For ourselves as creators and ourselves as Australians. The market was primarily here, not internationally, so we were making the stuff we were making with a very strong Australian voice, but not the jingoistic or parochial one that you might see in Crocodile Dundee, or 'Australian' characters in American comics like Captain Boomerang. It all had a unique, Australian flavour.
The new inception of The Ledger Awards (now the Comics Arts Awards of Australia, or the CAAAs) needed to reflect a kind of diversity that is integral to our scene. And by that, I mean that if you were to visit one of the large zine fairs and buy some of the more personal, low-print run mini comics, you would find work there that is totally world class. And then we have some of the most successful writers and artists on the world stage living here as well. The CAAAs needed to be able to celebrate both of those extremes, and everything in between. I think we (Chaloner and I) hit upon the perfect way to do that in the CAAAs. After running the awards for seven years Gary and I have stepped down and it's all in the hands of Daniel Rathbone now.
The Australian Cartoonists Society is another bottle of ink entirely. It's the oldest club of it's kind in the world, turning 100 this year. When I joined, in the 1990s, it was still called the Australian Black & White Artists Club because cartooning, up until that point, was pretty much only ever reproduced in black & white! I served on the board there for a few years, trying to aid Australian comics specifically, not only cartooning.
Other than that, I've championed Australian by being the only indie comics distributor in the country for a while, writing heaps of reviews both on my own Blog (remember those?) and on the now defunct Australian Comics Journal website, organising a monthly pub catch-up, and all sorts of things!
CBY: From what I gather talking to other artists in Australia, your efforts in building up the community and industry mechanisms at country-wide level are much appreciated! So beyond the scope of your ongoing creative work what other comics and media (film, art, literature, music, etc.) would you recommend our readers check out? What’s been inspiring you lately?
TM: Let's start in the mainstream, which I don't really dip my toe in terribly often. (Australian) Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo's Nightwing, which I've been buying in trades, is such a delightful and compelling read. Highly recommended. Barry Windsor-Smith's Monsters, which I read a while ago now, is possibly the best comic I've ever read in my life. I read the first volume of (Australian) Mike Barry's Action Tank and can't wait to get my hands on 2 and 3! I loved (Australian) Chris Gooch's Under-Earth and have his In Utero on my Next-To-Read pile with great excitement. I helped out Gary Chaloner with some flatting on a new (Will Eisner's) John Law story to be coming out soon. Such great work! Serialised tele: I currently can't get enough of The Bear and Nobody Want This (that last one was a complete surprise to me: it's a rom-com!) Loved Wednesday too! Cinema: I'm glad I brought tissues to watch The Wild Robot — beautiful and full of heart! I've seen a lot of live music lately, but mostly old bands (The Allniters, The Whitlams) but also seeing heaps of plays, which I really love doing. The stage adaption of (Australian) Shaun Tan's Cicada was magic. Lovely! That'll do for now!
CBY: Tim, thanks for the recommendations, reaching out, and stepping into the Yeti Cave for a chat! If you’ve got any portfolio, publication, and social media links you’d like to share with our readers, please feel free to include details below before we close things off.
TM: The big news right now is that I'm about to launch the Kickstarter campaign for the first ever Greener Pastures trade paperback collection. Issues 2 and 4 our practically sold out and I'm retiring them in favour of TPB printings. This particular edition is the only time we'll be branding a TPB with the 30th Anniversary logos, so there's that too. It covers issues 1 to 4 and is being printed from lovingly remastered scans of the original art.
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