FRANK QUITELY
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Morrison on his breakthrough strips for the Judge Dredd Megazine in the early 90s, and Mark Millar on the groundbreaking The Authority as well as more recently for the ongoing Jupiter’s Legacy. That’s a strong, unbroken thread of national comics culture for an artist who grew up on DC Thomson’s Beano and The Beezer, and rightly idolises Dudley D Watkins, the creator of The Broons and Oor Wullie.
‘Like many kids, I drifted away from comics in my teens,’ says Quitely, who was born in 1968. ‘Then when I was on holiday in Spain with my family, I found this comic called Cimoc which had lovely, fully painted fantasy artwork, but it was all topless women l ying about on pterodactyls and heads getting cut off. It was an eye-opener! Aside from that I read Mad magazine and reprints of old horror comics from the spinner rack when I was on holiday in Millport.’ Raised in Rutherglen, Vincent Deighan – as Quitely was born – went to high school in East Kilbride. He studied at Glasgow School of Art, where he learned of a new comic magazine named Electric Soup, a Scottish Viz analogue.
‘I studied drawing and painting to hone my skills for when I i gured out what I eventually wanted to do,’ he says. ‘I had an interest in graphic design and thought it might be good to design posters and album covers. And I loved illustration, so I considered creating children’s books. I hadn’t even ruled out teaching, but it was when I started working on Electric Soup, even just single-page strips I was writing myself, I clicked with creating comics. Unlike animation or storyboarding a movie, I had complete control.’ At i rst, Deighan called himself Frank Quitely (it’s a spoonerism of ‘Quite Frankly’) as a joke in keeping with the Electric Soup style, and because this ‘PC art student’ wasn’t sure if his family would have liked seeing his name appear near some of the work in that title. Yet when his i rst professional comics work came, he kept it because he’d
already started getting good reviews. After a couple of years on the Judge Dredd Megazine, he quickly graduated to the big leagues: DC and Marvel. It was Morrison, already a cult star in the US, who recruited Quitely for the spin-off to his experimental ‘Dadaist comic’ Doom Patrol for DC. The artist and writer were introduced at a regular get-together for Glasgow’s comic creators at Blackfriars Bar in the city. ‘I met him socially and we hit it off,’ says Quitely. ‘We get on well and have the same sense of humour, but I think work-wise we have the same hunger to make sure we get it as right as possible. We don’t coast along and knock off at i ve o’clock; we know that you only get better by doing the best you can.’
Since that i rst series, Quitely’s work (whether with Morrison, Millar or Grant with whom he teamed up for 1998’s Batman: The Scottish Connection) has been the kind that devoted fans follow from title to title, where his incredibly clean lines and expressive faces carry a rich sense of drama and action. Ask him to pick a favourite from that time, and surprisingly he can. ‘All-Star Superman struck such a chord,’ he says. ‘A number of people have said to me that it’s their favourite book ever. I put that down to the stories by Grant [Morrison], 12 standalone issues about Superman putting his house in order before he dies. It’s a very human story and I did my best with the art.’ There’s more than a touch of modesty here. As visitors to the exhibition will see, doing his best with the art has helped create some of the i nest comics of recent times.
Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics is at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Sat 1 Apr–Sun 1 Oct.
48 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2017