James Devlin @ Comic Con

James Devlin is a well-known artist around Glasgow - his work is currently being exhibited in bar and venue Bloc, just down the road from the CCA. He's up for two SICBA's this year: best artist and best cover.

What books got you into the lists?

I'm nominated in the categories of Best Artist and Best Cover for Vietnam Zombie Holocaust #1. VZH is a grindhouse style, balls out action-horror story detailing a misguided attempt by the U.S. Government to reign in the chaos of the Vietnam conflict by introducing a platoon of scientifically engineered super soldiers to the battlefield. The only problem is, the procedure has also turned them into homicidal, cannibalistic monsters.

And when did you first get excited by the possibilities of comics?

I got into comics by being lucky enough to be a kid when comics were still readily available in cornershop news agents. They were part of the furniture of my childhood and it seemed the most natural thing to me to just keep reading them into adulthood.

Anything in particular?

I could rhyme off a long list of artists who's work I respect, admire and love to look at, and my inspirations change day-to-day. But I guess, in the formative years, the first artists I noticed were Mike Zeck, John Byrne and John and Sal Buscema. I also loved loads of the Marvel UK art in Transformers and Action Force by guys like Geoff Senior, Jeff Anderson and Kev Hopgood.

I was very much into Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee when it first dawned on me that people draw comics for a living. Frank Miller, Eduardo Risso and Dave Gibbons took me in a different direction and got me away from that scratchy, over-hatched thing, and I learned a lot of lessons there which I still adhere by to this day. Burne Hogarth's anatomy work is something I still refer back to regularly.

How far is your work a collaborative process?

VZH is very much a collaborative process in that the writer, George Lennox, gives me great leeway when it comes to creating the look of characters and also in tweaking the script slightly for dramatic visual effect.

He's a great guy to work with. As an artist I have the perfect balance of direction where needed but freedom to improvise when it suits the story.

Is your work especially Scottish?

Yes, in so much as Scotland has an indisputably important part in Comics' history and Glasgow itself has a great tradition of spawning many a great creator and having it's own flourishing indie scene. No, in that I don't think there's any such thing as a 'Glasgow Look' that any of us artists follow.