Artist Patric Reynolds is known for his work on high profile comic books like Hellboy, Serenity, and Abe Sapien. His latest project was illustrating an online three-part digital comic series as a prequel to the upcoming “The Thing” film. I had an opportunity to interview Reynolds about his work on “The Thing: The Northman Nightmare.”
How was it working with Steve Niles on “The Thing: The Northern Nightmare”?
When I found out he’d be writing this story I was so excited that I actually asked Dark Horse if I could brag about working with Steve Niles on Facebook. It’s tough not to think about all the great things he has done when I was working on it (“30 Days of Night,” etc.). After the initial excitement wore off, the pressure was on.
I put a lot of stress on myself because I wanted my work to be worthy of Steve Niles’s canon and “belong” with those other titles. Steve trusted me, and he just turned me loose, let me work my magic, add adjustments, and other storytelling elements to embellish the narrative. As I turned in pages, he was nothing but complimentary and supportive.
Did he leave a lot of room for you as an artist to come up with your own visuals for the story?
One of the elements I like about “The Thing” is that the monster is basically the personification of chaos … possibilities are endless in designing the creature (although I used quite a bit of reference from the film provided by the licensors). However, I wanted to keep a very human element to the monster. I showed an initial concept sketch of a Viking transforming into a “Thing” to Steve and he told me that it worked pretty well. He even worked that image into the story, which was an incredible honor for me.
Steve described the characters, the monster, the setting, and the environment with general narrative strokes. All the details were left up to me to figure out, which I appreciated. I watched “The 13th Warrior” movie and read the Northlanders series by Brian Vaughn and David Gianfelice for reference, just to get me a sense of the “tone” of the Viking world. As far as the characters, I didn’t want to be too elaborate because I had to be drawing these guys repeatedly, and I wanted the focus to be on them and their expressions, not their outfits. I didn’t want to use the reference as a crutch so much as a starting point.
Did you feel intimidated by the fact that the Thing was such an iconic piece of film history?
Oh my yes. My only hope was that I would not embarrass myself and contribute something positive to it … maybe even something memorable. I’ve only seen the 1982 John Carpenter film, but that was so good at showing us how poorly humanity reacts under pressure or to things we do not understand. [It shows] how easily we can go from suspicion to mistrust to outright paranoia. This causes us to make desperate decisions.
Now I had to sprinkle Vikings into those concepts. Keeping those same [ideas] in my head as I drew was a challenge. Thankfully, Steve set all that up pretty well from a narrative standpoint. All I had to do was run with it.
For more articles by Eric Shirey, check out:
A Look at ‘The Thing’ in Films
John Carpenter’s Sci-Fi Thriller ‘The Thing’ Still Holds Up 29 Years Later
Steve Niles Takes ‘The Thing’ to Greenland in Comic Book Prequel to Upcoming Movie
Eric Shirey is the founder and editor of Rondo Award nominated movie and comic book news websites MovieGeekFeed.com and TheSpectralRealm.com. He also served as a news reporter for the award winning movie website GordonandtheWhale.com. His work has been featured on Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! TV, Associated Content from Yahoo!, DC Comics, StarWars.com, and other national entertainment websites. Besides his three decades long obsession with everything sci-fi, horror, and fantasy related in TV and movies, Eric has what some would call an unhealthy love for comic books. This has led him to interviewing and covering legendary writers and artists in the medium like Scott Snyder, Steve Niles, Tony S. Daniel, Bernie Wrightson, Geoff Johns, and Howard Chaykin. His personal website is www.ersink.com.