Culture That Made Me: Cork comic-book artist Will Sliney picks his touchstones
Will Sliney will publish a new book in March, entitled Draw With Will.
Born in 1982, Will Sliney, grew up in Ballycotton, Co Cork. He studied multimedia at Cork Institute of Technology, now MCU. In 2012, he joined Marvel Comics as a comic book artist, where he’s acclaimed for his work on the Fearless Defenders series and Spider-Man 2099, and also as a Star Wars illustrator. He has also created several popular live art class TV shows, including Will Sliney’s Storytellers series on RTÉ. Simon & Schuster will publish his book Draw With Will in March.
I still have from my childhood annuals from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters, which had comic books in them. I can find in them little scribbles I drew beside the illustrations. I was clearly inspired by them.
Spider-Man was my favourite character when it came to comics. I always loved the character. He was the nerdy kid at school. It was very different to, say, the billionaire Bruce Wayne or the alien Superman. He was going through all of these teenage things. You can gain an understanding of life from consuming soap operas and movies and comic books. I've got a lot of my morality from comics. Thankfully, I followed one of the good guys.
I was drawn to the X-Men because of the artist drawing them – Joe Madureira. His stuff is so energetic and dynamic, like I'd never seen before. When I was reading the X-Men comics, I was redrawing the pages that he did. He was one of the first artists that when he would jump to a different book, I would follow over with him. He brought his own book called Battle Chasers. He has since ended up in video games and I will always check out the art.
One of the biggest artists when I was 17-18 was Jim Lee, who is now chief creative officer at DC Comics. He drew the biggest-selling comic of the ’90s, which was X-Men # 1. He was much revered in the industry so not only could you get comics that he drew, but you could get books with all of his sketches, layouts and designs. It was an amazing way to study. You can see around that time a bunch of artists were strongly influenced by Jim, drawing in his style. For a good few years, that’s all I wanted to do is learn that kind of superhero drawing – real big, strong, bombastic-type stuff.
I love watching behind-the-scenes documentaries for animated movies, anything that shows what a creative person goes through and what inspired them to create their own characters. The Jim Henson documentary that came out last year is a stunning one. You get to see his struggles and inspirations and the things he went through to create what he did. It’s a fascinating insight into him.
Video games are the biggest type of media storytelling at the moment in what they're able to do. It’s not just a passive three-hour movie. You're playing and engaging with the story for 50 hours. The Legend of Zelda series has been a famous Nintendo game since I was a child. The ones they're releasing now are known as the greatest games of all time. I get massively inspired by its art. The creative stuff behind it – the people who create its environments, the 3D modellers, those writing the stories, setting the atmosphere of these games – is all amazing to me. My kids are now falling in love with them in the same way I did.
I love the Super Mario series of games – the fun and the creativity of them. Their gameplay is really enjoyable to play. It’s as simple as that. They’ve grown and evolved over the years. They keep reinventing and improving.
They’re not too focused on, “Oh, we can do amazing graphics that you'll never believe are real.” They always keep the core of gameplay at the front of everything they do. If a new Super Mario game comes out, either me or my son will want it from Santa Claus.
There’s a fab new series called Arcane, which is beautifully done in 3D. It's based on a video game. How they made this show has been revolutionary in its techniques of painting, modelling and rendering. It has the best art I've ever seen in anything that's animated. They’ve huge budgets because it's such a successful video game. They're making a fortune, but it’s like a labour of love.
The Wild Robot is Oscar-shortlisted for best movie this year even though it's an animated movie. Every frame of it is a work of art. It's a DreamWorks movie, an adaptation of a book. It looks so beautiful. I have an animated short that I've directed coming out soon and it’s certainly influenced by it.
Battlestar Galactica is the TV series I've rewatched the most. Not the one from the ’80s, but the remake in the 2000s. I love its powerful storytelling. TV before that was always made episodically, where a story had to start and finish per episode.
With this, it planned much longer storylines. They did it so well. A beautiful show, beautiful music, created by a great composer called Bear McCreary, who teamed up with Hozier recently. Everything in it was so strong.
I love the lore of Star Wars. They’re fantasy stories, told in what was then – in the late 1970s, early ’80s – a modern way. When I was a young kid in Ballycotton, a van would drive into the village and my mom would rent a video off the back of the van. She came down one day with a video and I said, “Ah, Mum, I've already seen Star Wars.”
I didn't realise there was such a thing as a sequel. It was The Emperor Strikes Back. I started drawing and writing my own little Star Wars stories with its characters. I didn’t feel like that with movies like The Goonies or Gremlins, but for some reason Star Wars was like this open book that welcomed you to create your own stories in that world. That bit of magic was the biggest thing for me.
My favourite comic book is Batman: Year One. There was a real thing in the ’80s and early ’90s when comics were kind of reclaimed. In the ’60s, there had been the campy Adam West Batman show. Whereas the Frank Miller work on Batman: Year One really darkened it all up. It’s well-drawn, well-written. Pure storytelling, and a down-to-earth Batman, which inspired the successful movie Batman Begins.
