Geof Darrow almost needs no introduction. He is the legendary comics creator and illustrator behind Hard Boiled, The Matrix, and Shaolin Cowboy. His body of work over the last 40 years continues to be some of the most distinct to hit comics shelves. Someone influenced in equal parts by American, European, and Japanese comics. Every page of his holds some surprise or inventive use of the comics medium that feels fresh and inventive. Darrow might be the only person to have worked alongside by both Jack Kirby and Mœbius.
I had the opportunity to discuss with Darrow the new collection The Shaolin Cowboy: Beginning of the End Results — 21 Years of Blood, Sweat, and Chainsaws. American fans of Darrow’s work should be excited that this represents the first time much of his early body of work will see print here. Darrow and I talked about revisiting that earlier work, working on Shaolin Cowboy, Asian cinema, and the future of Shaolin Cowboy. It’s a far-reaching conversation that provides insight into his unique set of influences and Darrow’s creative process.
D. Morris: I want to start off talking about how excited I am for this new collection of Shaolin Cowboy to come out because, I think, that for the first time the Bourbon Thret material will be published in the U.S. correct?
Geof Darrow: Well, one of the stories was printed in Heavy Metal in 1984. But this is pretty much all the material because there’s stuff that wasn’t printed [correctly]. And there’s little odds and ends of stuff. Some of the stuff that I forgot to put in there, but most of it’s there.
Morris: What was it like revisiting this material for this new edition? Because it’s interesting that it’s 20 years removed from when Shaolin Cowboy came out, and now this book is 21 years removed from Shaolin Cowboy.
Darrow: Yeah. It’s funny, looking back on it, because sometimes I think, well, “God, I wish I…” or “Maybe I should have….” I feel like I’ve lost a step.
I thought, well, maybe this is [okay], because this looks a lot more interesting than I thought it would. There’s storytelling stuff I think I’ve made a certain amount of progress on, and I think drawing and perspective as well, but there was a certain…
…At that time, when I did it in European comics, you could just do anything crazy because it was originally printed in Métal Hurlant in France first, because of my association with Mœbius. He would do stuff that I knew; I’d read this stuff. I had no idea what was going on, and I thought, “I guess it doesn’t really matter because I like looking at the pictures.”
The first thing I did was…I remember I submitted it — I showed it to Archie Goodwin, and he was kind of like, ”I don’t know what I’d do with it.” So I said, “Well, you can print it.” But this was in the 80s, so if you weren’t drawing Marvel style, you weren’t getting hired.
It wasn’t until the Image guys, while they were still working at Marvel, that [publishers] started opening up to it. It didn’t have to be either Jack Kirby or John Buscema. I love all those guys, but I think Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor Smith and Michael Kaluta brought a whole different look.
Morris: It was interesting reading that stuff and seeing that direct line to Mœbius in your earlier stuff. And I would even say, Hergé, the creator of Tintin.
Darrow: Oh, yeah. I learned about Tintin from the movies, these live action movies. I saw them when I was a kid, and I couldn’t figure them out. Those things were strange to me, because I couldn’t tell if he was supposed to be a kid or out of an adult. I remember when Pee-wee Herman came out, I thought, “wow, it’s kind of that same kind of vibe,” except Pee-wee Herman was really funny. And then I found out that they had done the comics, and you could find some of those. A lot of those have been printed in English. I remember at the time, I was a real Marvel guy, and I looked at [Tintin], and I go, “Wow, they look okay, but there’s nothing going on. There’s no action.”
Morris: There’s no people exploding like Kirby.
Darrow: People would talk about the action, you know? “Oh, that plane crashed.” And is it different? It’s a different style. A lot of the European comics were like that, but I really like the artwork, and when I actually started working, I looked at him a lot in that whole school, the line-clear school.
And Mœbius was a big [influence]. He could do that Milton Caniff thing, right? The shadows and everything. I never went that way, because I was always trying to figure out how to draw things, and I thought if I put shadows on them, then I would just…I was more interested in actually drawing a car or a telephone that looked exactly like a car or a telephone.
Morris: A lot of the joy of looking at your comics is just like “Oh, that is a car that you could actually, you know, take out of a panel.” Your work has such a weight and a physicality to it.
Darrow: I would think about that. A lot of that, too, came from working at Hanna-Barbera. My job there was mostly doing what they call props. The drawing that saved my job at Hanna-Barbera was I had to draw Scooby-Doo in a sombrero. It’s basically just taking a stock picture and tracing it.
He had to put a sombrero on his head, and they said, “Well, do you like doing this?” I said yeah, so they would give me that stuff and I’d have to do things like cars, and they had to work in animation. It has to be three-dimensional, because they have to be able to turn it, as limited as it was. So I had to learn. I found out how little I understood about perspective, and it was through perspective I figured out…well, it’s in everything. It’s in all forms.
Morris: You talked a little bit earlier about how you could pretty much get away with anything in French comics when you started out. So can you talk a little bit about what went into the creation of Bourbon Thret when you were starting out with those stories? Like, what was the inspiration?
Darrow: It was Japanese films — it was samurai films. I started buying Japanese manga in the ’70s in Japanese, because I worked in advertising and occasionally get to go on these business trips. I’d get into New York, look up — we used to have the Yellow Pages, which I don’t think exist anymore — and I would look up bookstores, and then they’d have foreign ones. There was a Japanese one, and I went there and I bought manga. One of the ones I bought turned out to be by Goseki Kojima, the Lone Wolf and Cub artist. I still have it to this day. And I was like, wow. I like samurai films, especially like Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman. [Kojima is] an inspiration for me.
Morris: Once you said that, I was like, “Oh, Shaolin Cowboy is Zatoichi!”
Darrow: I mean, as quickly as they made them, they’re really beautiful compositions. The stories are really sweet because people are always trying to take advantage of him, and I like the idea, as a kid who was bullied in school, of “they picked on the wrong guy” kind of stuff. That appeals to me. And because he didn’t look very heroic to me, when he was something fantastic, I thought it was even more fantastic than when it’s Sylvester Stallone is walking around or Schwarzenegger, and you know, “he can do whatever he wants.”
Instead you get this guy that is kind of…to my Western eyes, I never thought he was really handsome. He wasn’t ugly or anything, but he wasn’t muscular. But man, that guy was so quick. He was really good. I think he and his brother, who played Lone Wolf, they learned swords. Aido, which is fast sword stuff, and they were really good at it. You can see it in those films.
I love that it was always one guy, and it there was like 50 guys that are trying to get him, and he kills them. In every episode, they’ll talk about, “Oh, you know, I heard he killed like 10 people.” I go, “Jesus Christ, at this point, he’s killed like 300 people.” Maybe they’re only wounded, I don’t know. The body count was always different in every film.
Morris: So the game becomes, take a shot every time he kills somebody. And then you have alcohol poisoning.
Darrow: Yeah. You’d be dead before the movie was over.
Morris: I will say it was a little shock reading these Bourbon Thret stories, knowing your later work and seeing how they’re not as bloody. Blood and body parts aren’t quite as abundant as your later work.
Darrow: When I did Hard Boiled — at that point I’d been exposed to John Woo.
I was young when the Wild Bunch came out, but I’d seen Bonnie and Clyde when I was very young, and the ending was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. They just get riddled by bullets, and they’re dancing around as these bullets hit them and that slow motion blood is spraying out of them. I was terrified. The Wild Bunch came out, and I saw the trailer. I didn’t want to see it. I was scared to see it.
I got over that in the ’80s, with John Woo and especially in Sam Raimi. It’s so cartoony.
There was [an Italian] comic here called Squeak the Mouse. And it’s like Itchy and Scratchy, I swear to God, but this was done in like the early ’80s. It was like what if those Tex Avery cartoons when the mouse and the cat were hitting each other, they had actual injuries? So, just a mouse a cat cutting each other in pieces all the time. And then like I said, by the time I did Hard Boiled in it, I’d seen the John Woo movies and I just thought, “Well, this is just goofy,” right? Putting the glass in his face, and the license plate sticking out of his nick, all that stuff. I said, “Well, this is so over the top that it won’t offend people because it’s just too crazy.”
Morris: Right. I’ve been watching those movies over here for the first time, and watching them even now, it’s nuts.
Darrow: Well, that was my whole thing was after seeing John Woo. Unless you get a bullet in the head in a Chinese action film, you can survive.
The [cinematic] language was, if someone got shot anywhere but the shoulder, or you got shot in the chest during the stomach or something, I knew that the character would be dead by the end of the movie, and it really bothered me. John Woo films are different. I mean, A Better Tomorrow. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one, but at the end of the second one, there’s so much lead inside of these guys. Oh, my God. They put probably 20 pounds of lead in them, and they go, “okay, let’s go home.” Nobody dies. There were no headshots, so I guess they just go home and put Band-Aids on themselves and they’re fine.
I saw those, and I saw films like A Chinese Ghost Story. And I always liked the Asian films because they never stop to say they couldn’t do something. They don’t question things; they’ll try anything. I think a lot of American films in that time period were like, “No, that doesn’t make any sense.” Well, it’s a movie. It doesn’t have to make sense as long as you set up the parameters of your world.
I think it was Guillermo del Toro who put it best. He goes, “If you say in your film at the beginning that people bleed chocolate, some people will buy it and some won’t.” So either you do or you don’t. If you’ve bought into it, then okay. But everybody has a different level of disbelief.
Morris: That makes me think of, have you ever watched the movies of Seijun Suzuki — Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter?
Darrow: Oh, sure. I was thinking with the actor who, he had cheek implants in place.
Morris: Yeah. Joe Shishodo!
GD: Yeah, that was his deal. He worked way up into the 2000s. For some reason he thought that’s what was going to do it for him. He’s just the weirdest looking guy.
Morris: But it’s such a distinct look. It works for those movies. I forget which one it was — I think it’s Youth of the Beast — where the guy has an office, and there’s just movies on a massive screen in the background, playing for no reason. Having come into his movies in the last few years, and reading your comics again, some of that in there. Like, “I’m just gonna throw something in there for fun.”
Darrow: Yeah. And I mean, it’s a comic book, for God’s sake.
I read one time the last year, someone on Facebook, said, “You know, Darrow needs to learn a little bit about physics.” Which really cracked me up, because I thought, I bet the same guy probably reads Batman and Superman and Thor. And you’re worried I’m gonna let physics get in the way of [story].
Morris: I don’t think Kirby cared about how physics worked!
It feels like every time you do a Shaolin Cowboy story, it’s like you give yourself a problem to solve, or maybe an idea that you want to work through. Like the series that became Shemp Buffet feels like, “Let me just tell a whole story where there’s no dialogue whatsoever,” so it’s just four issues of a single action scene. Do you set out to do that?
Darrow: Well, you know, that one Shemp Buffet — the one with the big zombie fight — was because I really like The Walking Dead. I love the George Romero films, and I watch The Walking Dead, and I’m like, “Okay, come on. When are we gonna have some more zombie killing?” Because for me, the Evil Dead movies are just perfect.
And I thought, “Well, I’m going to do a comic where — let me see how far I can push people before they get annoyed.” It’s just him killing zombies. That’s what I wanted to see. So that one was just that one. After that, I thought maybe I should do something with a little more of a story, but that one and the next one and the one after it are kind of just one story. It all kind of takes place within a couple days. Then the one with the Komodo dragon, then a little more time passes. But those from Shemp, right until halfway through Cruel to be Kin, it’s just a few days.
Morris: That’s interesting because until you said something I hadn’t thought about how little time passes in these comics.
Darrow: They’re like generally two hours out of somebody’s life, in terms of what’s going on in the world. The one that I’m doing now, basically once it gets going, it’s about two hours going by. Not that it matters, but that’s what I’m thinking.
Morris: Because reading Shemp Buffet, then you go into Who’ll Stop the Reign? and I’m like, how is he going to get him out of this? He killed the Shaolin Cowboy at the end of Shemp Buffet!
Darrow: Well, he wasn’t! Once again, it’s the John Woo thing. He didn’t get shot, or it kind of hit him in the shoulder. If you’ve seen any of the Wuxia films, the thing is, you do this thing and you can pull off those. You stop the bleeding — and he did that himself. And, you know, it’s a comic book.
Morris: It’s so much fun. It’s like, “I have a problem here. I put him in this place. How do I get him to the next place?”
Darrow: Fun is like getting him out of a room. Like, how do I get him out of this room? I just could just show him leaving, and then next panel would be him outside, but then I think people go, “Well, how did he get out of the building?” It’s crazy stuff. And it took me a long time, like with Shemp Buffet. I wanted to get him out of the desert.
I finally did. And he stayed in town for a while. And the next, he’s back out in the desert. But it doesn’t last too long, much to my chagrin, because drawing the city stuff takes so much time for me.
I just think cities have a life to themselves a lot of times. And I’m not going to be putting everybody down, but I see the city scenes — and a lot of comics take place in New York, but it always looks like it’s empty. But they’re doing a monthly comic book, and I do these things every couple years. It’s easy for me to say, but I’ve got that European rhythm because that’s the way they do it.
Mœbius was considered almost a Jack Kirby of France, and he would do two or three books a year, sometimes two. But that was a lot, because a lot of guys here do one book a year, if that, and it’s like 40-some pages. But they did everything. The color and everything.
Morris: Your books are so funny. I like both the wordplay and how like sometimes you’ll throw in — like in Cruel to be Kin. Like, there’s the action sequence, and then you’ll punctuate it in the middle with the expression of the baby Komodo dragon, like he’s super excited to see what’s going on. Is that more for your benefit, or just because you like comedy in your work?
Darrow: Yeah. It’s hard for me to take things seriously. Even I’m drawing this, it looks so goofy. And from watching movies and stuff, they always cut to someone having a reaction to things.
Also, it’s a quick drawing. Sometimes I just feel like, “God, I’ve worked all day and I haven’t finished anything.” So the idea of actually finishing something in one day, to me, is just really amazing. It doesn’t happen that often. I’m just undisciplined, I guess. I get sidetracked, like, “Well, I’ll draw these guys over here smoking cigarettes, or eating a pizza, and a dog pooping in the corner. I think this drawing isn’t very interesting. I’ll put some little things in here that if they don’t like the drawing, at least they can read some goofy sign for some weird product.”
Morris: There’s always something new looking at your comics every time.
Darrow: Yeah. I grew up in the ’60s and so many of the commercials were so funny, especially cigarette commercials. I was really sad when they took them off the air, because I liked the jingles and because they generally came up pretty good campaigns. They were just so funny, that they would push cigarettes as being healthy. They’d have ads with guys after they played a game of tennis — “Nothing makes me feel refreshed after working out like a, like a Camel or a Kool cigarette. 9 out of 10 doctors recommend Kools.“
Morris: You talked a little earlier, but I have to ask, what is the future of Shaolin Cowboy?
Darrow: Well, I’m doing another one. And the reason I had them print the Bourbon Thret stuff is it ties into this one. You’ll see when it comes out. Somebody returns from it, so…!
Morris: So will he finally save Baloo the whale?
Darrow: No, but somebody that did something to Baloo the whale gets his comeuppance. But you don’t have to get this book to understand that.
But it was also because I’d done this character in that book, and I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. When I was in Japan, I realized, “Wow, there’s a lot of these things here. Hey, I remember I had that character back then, and maybe I can bring him back.” So I have kind of a universe thing going on.
The Shaolin Cowboy: Beginning of the End Results — 21 years of Blood Sweat, and Chainsaws is available for pre-order through Dark Horse. A new Shaolin Cowboy series will see print later next year.
