Luck of the draw: How nice guy Will Sliney found success in the comic book world
Will Sliney
The first thing my editor told me, when she gave me the assignment of interviewing Will Sliney, was that he is a very nice man, and that in interviews he is never less than kind and generous. I’d never met him, and even after this interview I still haven’t met him, but I have now formed my own opinion about his reputation for kindness.
The 38-year-old Ballycotton native and Marvel Comics artist is friendly and enthusiastic during our chat on the phone – not always the most satisfactory way to conduct an interview – and he apologises that we can’t meet in person because he’s busy putting the finishing touches to his new RTÉ2 series, Will Sliney’s Storytellers.
“It’s basically a new type of how-to-draw show where we teach kids how to draw and also how to tell stories, and the characters that we create will come to life throughout the episodes, and they all kind of join together to tell one big long story as we go through the whole series,” he says.
“We have a pretty star-studded cast. We have Aisling Bea playing a character called Ogham. We have WWE superstar Stephen Farley playing Erik the Brave. We have Laura Whitmore playing Freya. We have Dawn O’Porter playing Lilly. We have Dermot Whelan playing the Chronicle. And a few other little surprises will be in there as well.
“And we have Demi Isaac Oviawe from The Young Offenders as Shay.” The series, which consists of twenty ten-minute episodes, launches on RTÉ2 this coming Monday, and features Sliney giving an artist’s masterclass as his characters interact with him.
“Every character that we create comes to life, and starts to join the story and progress the story on. We start off with Freya, and Aisling’s character Ogham is going to be in the story throughout, and she helps me with the drawings.” He gives a delighted laugh at the thought.
“She’s a mystical stone, that’s alive, and comes in and starts messing with me, and changes my drawings and ends up teaming up with me and finishing a lot of the drawings and drawing herself into the story as well.
“The story itself, then, is essentially a team of time-traveling artists that go all around the world to all different periods of art, to kind of recruit different artists to stop the evil Chronicle.”
He says the show’s target audience is aged eight-to-12, but he thinks older kids will get a lot from it too, and he feels that, regardless of age, it might help to spark creativity.
“Hopefully the most important thing is that, if kids see this, not only will they be trying to draw our characters, it’ll inspire them to go on and create their own characters.”
I ask if he always drawing as a kid, and, if so, whether he created his own characters or drew established characters? He replied that he drew incessantly, and for him it was always a combination of both.
“If I played a game or watched a cartoon, I would draw their characters but then create my own ones to either play within those worlds or they would spin out to be their own heroes.”
American comics were an obvious influence, but he says there wasn’t a steady supply of them when he was young, and mostly he got his superheroes through British reprints. He remembers fondly the opening of the comic shop Other Realms in Cork when he was in college, and he still visits it in the Paul Street shopping centre.
“Spider-Man was always my favourite character, but I guess anything superhero-wise, like Star Wars, all that stuff, I just adored it all, and it’s not like I knew you could do it as a job.
"It’s amazing to me now that they’re so mainstream and everybody knows all the characters from the movies, you know. It certainly wasn’t like that back when I was younger. But yeah, it’s great to see.”
I remind him that he had previously commented that everybody’s granny now knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man. It’s not even 15 years since that was a really niche, arcane piece of knowledge, but now the geeks have inherited the Earth. That first Iron Man film debuted in 2008, the same year the then 25-year-old Sliney did his first work as a professional comic artist.
“Ah look, when I started my job,” he says, “nobody knew what it was, and they certainly wouldn’t have known what Marvel was. It’s amazing now.”
He says he mainly works these days on Star Wars comics, and he mentions that he has a great new Marvel project coming out soon, but when I ask about it, he becomes suddenly cagey, and gives a slightly nervous laugh.
“I can’t say,” he says apologetically. “It’s top secret.” (A week later, Marvel’s famously rigid security will have relaxed. More on that in a bit.) I ask if he works at a literal drawing board, and he says he uses a digital tool called Cintiq, which is essentially the digital equivalent of using a pencil to draw on a sheet of paper.
“I work digitally, and it’s really important for me that kids know that it’s not like a tool that helps you, I just use it because it’s easier to save the pages and to send them in, but it doesn’t have anything to do with your drawing.
“A thing I always try to get across is that drawing is a skill and not a talent, and what that means, I think, is that everybody can do it, and the people who get good at it are the people who practice the most.”
He says that what he loves most about his job is that the more difficult he finds something, the more he knows that he can overcome that difficulty through sheer hard work. “Drawing is the best example of something that is all about the practice, and the skill that you learn.
“Everybody has the ability to be able to become a really great artist,” he contends, “they just need to put the practice in.” For Will Sliney, Marvel Comics star, he says he has to pinch himself at his good fortune to be a professional comic artist, and to now have his own television show teaching kids how to tell stories and how to draw.
“There’s been nothing like this on TV before, like, the way that the story kind of comes together with the drawing. Storytellers is probably the hardest I’ve ever had to work on any project all the way through my career but it’s lovely to see it all come together in its final state.”
He says everything has changed in his life over the last year-and-a-half, and while Spider- Man and Star Wars would always would have been the biggest things for him, now that he is getting to create his own characters for the RTÉ show, he feels he is seeing the world anew.
“The dream now is just to hopefully tell stories that inspire kids to create their own characters,” he says. “That’s everything that this show is about. It’s to help inspire kids to draw and create stories, and to create their own characters, and to give them all of the skills and techniques to be able to do that, not just in terms of drawing but also in terms of storytelling.”
Warming to his theme, he talks about the creative impulse to create new characters, and how one would go about telling the stories of those characters. “It’s about how you can use your imagination to go anywhere you want the story to go, to draw the things that you enjoy drawing, and really to jump all over […] in terms of the places that we draw, and the kinds of characters that we create.
“So, you know, the dream now is to help more kids to stay drawing and to be able to tell their own stories.
I tell him that he sounds like someone who has discovered a passion for teaching.
“Yes,” he agrees, “this is it. I remember hearing, years and years and years ago, that that’s what artists tend to do. You draw the things that you want to draw, and that’s your life and your job, and then, all of a sudden, you want to kind of pass on that knowledge.”
As we finish our telephone conversation, I can’t resist the urge to ask a nerdy Marvel question, so I ask if the movies have influenced the Marvel Comics universe which inspired them. He considers the question, and says it’s obviously more often the other way around.
“The Marvel movies are so good because they have so many comics stories to be able to find the characters and stories that they like and turn them into movies.
“That’s not to say that if the movies do something that looks great, or feels great, that that doesn't then influence us, the writers and the artists, but it’s definitely more the other way around.” I ask whether Tony Stark in the comics has started resembling Robert Downey Jr, and he replies that artists are “not allowed to do that”. I mention the case of Nick Fury, originally a grizzled white World War II veteran, being “recast” as Samuel L Jackson in Marvel’s Ultimates comic, years before the actor was in real life cast in that very role.
“Yeah, that was a little bit of a strange one, and it probably shouldn’t have happened, I believe, but that’s the reason why Sam got the job, so it worked out okay, but that we haven’t really been allowed to do anything like that since.”
On the subject of movies taking inspiration from comics, he adds with some pride that only last week a character he created featured in a new Star Wars show. “Ren is his name, and he’s the original leader of the Knights of Ren, and he’s in the brand-new Star Wars Terrifying Tales animated movie, voiced by Christian Slater, which is so cool to see.”
A week after our interview, when I mail some follow-on questions, Sliney reveals that the top-secret Marvel project he mentioned has just been unveiled as a new five-issue comic series, Star Wars: Halcyon Legacy. As a life-long fan, he expresses his delight to be back in a galaxy far, far away.
He says if he has a bucket list, he would love to get a run at Superman, and the Masters of the Universe would be high on that list, too. He says he has written more books in the style of his superb Cú Chulainn graphic novel, although he feels he may perhaps now get a chance to do them on television rather than in comics.
As we chat, I mention that I’m due to talk with six-year-old Eoghan Freeman from Kiltimagh, Co Mayo. Eoghan is profoundly deaf, and his parents are campaigning for the government to provide in-classroom Irish Sign Language interpreters and teachers for Irish children as deaf as Eoghan. Eoghan is a huge Spider-Man fan and he loves drawing Spidey with his brother, Darragh, so I ask if it’s okay to tell Eoghan that the man who draws Peter Parker’s adventures in the comics says hello.
Sliney immediately replies that it is of course, and, without prompting, he promises to draw a sketch of Spidey for Eoghan.
Not that I ever doubted her, but clearly my editor was right. Will Sliney really is a very nice man.
- Will Sliney’s Storytellers comes to RTÉ2 and the RTÉ Player at 12.05pm on Monday 25 October. Star Wars: Halcyon Legacy will be published by Marvel Comics in 2022.
