[ DRAWN & QUARTERED ]
Graphic Arts As Literature
‘The Goon’ plows forth
with nods to comic past
A boy from Lebanon -- Lebanon, Tenn., that is -- had a dream. Or more like a nightmare. Fevered dreams born from way too much comic book reading and TV watching. A hellacious combination of afternoon reruns of "The Twilight Zone" and Andy Griffith, plus such horror classics as "The Evil Dead" and BOTH "Frankenstein" and "Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein." Plus, don't forget to throw in the work of such comic book legends as Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Wally Wood and Mad magazine's Jack Davis.
All of this was brewing and seething in the impressionable mind of Eric Powell until, to relieve the unrelenting pressure, he created, around the tender age of 22, his signature character, a brute of a man that has lead him to what he calls "the pinnacle of semiobscurity." The Goon is a street thug with a heart of gold who regularly does battle with the zombie hordes that infect some unnamed backwater town -- and the occasional monster.
"The Goon" started off as a title under Powell's Albatross Exploding Funny Books imprimatur back in August 2002, with the help of a business loan taken out by Powell and his supportive wife, Robin. Through the comic book grapevine, his book got fans a-buzzing for its lively, tongue-in-cheek take on those hoary horror tales.
Before that, the Goon made an appearance in the anthology "Dark Horse Presents," and after the initial success of the book, Dark Horse Comics signed him up. Three issues later, with his new publisher and laudatory mentions in Entertainment Weekly, Powell's comic book is a bona fide independent hit.
But don't look for the rather reclusive 28-year-old to be moving out of his family's rural home any time soon. Surrounded by his wife (a bookkeeper who's his high school sweetheart) and two young children, Gage and Cade, he finds comfort working out of his cluttered studio.
It's the family house that he later bought from his parents, a place where "I've always drawn, ever since I was a kid," the soft-spoken Powell said by long-distance phone Wednesday. "I can't remember not drawing.
"I always gravitated toward fantasy, horror, sci-fi, anything surrealistic," he said. "Because of that, there are so many things lumped into 'The Goon.' It's not based on just one genre."
Powell also favors the stuff from an earlier time. "Even though I read comics when I was younger -- 'Hulk,' 'Spider-Man' -- I only got back into them when I was in junior high when a friend showed me (horror veteran) Bernie Wrightson's work in 'Batman: The Cult.' I liked it because it was a lot darker than the comics I knew about before.
"I'm more drawn to the older guys than a lot of the new material that's out there. ... I like that look, and I feel 'The Goon' is a throwback to that stuff."
BUT THAT DOESN'T mean the look of the Goon himself should be stuck in a time warp. "The look of the character has been evolving a little bit, ever since the first drawing in '97. Both his look and my art style has evolved together. My art is more stylized and cleaner, and with the Goon's look, his jaw is more square and the angles more round and clean. When I first drew him, I thought he looked like a bucket of mud filled with jagged teeth. So there is a certain design element to the book."
And he's done this with no formal art training, short of some basic high school classes.
"It's been a gradual process, stuff I picked up here and there, learning what materials to use," he said. "Out of high school, I actually applied at an art school here. They liked my portfolio, but when I was taken on a tour of the school, I soon thought this was going to be useless and wasn't going to help me develop any skill."
To continue his art, Powell took on an assortment of odd jobs, like airbrushing motorcycle helmets, and "tried teaching art lessons," of which the less said, the better.
But that's all behind him. Now, whenever Powell hits the road for Dark Horse to promote "The Goon" at various comic-book conventions around the country, he finds that people who approach him are "a mix of older guys who appreciate the references to Davis, Eisner and Wood, and younger fans who enjoy the crude and violent humor."
All of Powell's earlier Goon work has been compiled by Dark Horse into a rip-roaring, fun time of a book titled "Nothin' but Misery." His fourth issue with Dark Horse is just out, featuring "2 EPIC THRILLERS!! ... HORROR ADVENTURE AS YOU LIKE IT!"
In the first, the Goon has an underwater run-in with the Sea Hag that takes an unexpected romantic turn, and guest illustrator Kyle Hotz takes on the second story, "The Abominable Boggy," about a killer ape with a fierce hankering -- nay, an unbridled lust -- for ... PIE! (There'll be more guest artists in the future, such as kindred spirit Mike Mignola, whose Hellboy character will appear on the big screen in April.)
Powell thinks that stand-alone issues are "what most comic books are missing nowadays -- you can't pick up comic and get the whole story. I think it's ridiculous to buy a 22-page magazine and try to remember an ongoing story line. A lot of guys are so late that it sometimes takes two to three months to get the next part of a story. My goal, from the very beginning, is that each story is a self-contained story. You don't have to buy back issues to find out what's happening."
So you're guaranteed that each and every issue of "The Goon" will fulfill your daily requirement of hard-boiled dialogue, mind-boggling monsters, two-fisted action and yuks galore.
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