By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Fall 2018

Drawing a monthly Batman comic book disabused Chris Burnham of the fantasy that drawing a monthly Batman comic book would be a dream job.

“I was easily working 14 hours a day, 16 hours a day, or something like that,” he says by phone from his Los Angeles home. “I’d gotten into some horrible, horrible habits. I would drink all sorts of coffee in the morning to wake myself up, but then I’d be jittery, so then I’d drink a beer to calm myself down. And then I’d have to drink another cup of coffee to wake myself up. I was drinking a pot or two of coffee a day and three beers a day to keep myself awake and level. That’s no way to live.”

Burnham first got paid to draw the cowled-and-venerable vigilante in Batman and Robin No. 16, published in January 2011. Burnham drew seven pages, serving as second alternate after two artists whiffed the deadline on the Grant Morrison-written book.

Those seven pages led to a full-time gig on another, subsequent Batman series, Batman Incorporated, also written by Morrison, an industry superstar responsible for some of the most definitive Batman and Superman stories.

He wrote Arkham Asylum in 1989, All-Star Superman from 2005 to 2008, and in 2006, created the fifth and current Robin, Damian Wayne, who is Batman’s son. Batman Incorporated—a series in which Batman franchises himself—ran for 21 issues (Burnham drew 16) and employed four artists.

Monthly comic book series frequently necessitate rotating artists. Artists, at best, average a page a day. The typical comic is 24 pages, months are 30 or 31 days long, and math is unforgiving.

“I’m averagely slow,” says Burnham, who describes a good day for him as a half or two-thirds of a page. “But then there are guys like Chris Samnee who have absolutely no problem doing a page a day, those bastards. I also think he is so good. He just has to draw something once and it’ll be right. I seem to have to draw something four times to get it right. So maybe I’m drawing four pages a day but you only see one of them.”

Burnham is 41 years old, usually laughing and as endearingly irreverent as he is endearingly self-effacing. He draws—he’s mostly analog, pencil and paper, going digital only to clean up line work—with a strange, detailed style that’s B-movie-flavored in the most affectionate way and he’s endorsed by some of the industry’s most august talent: Morrison, Frank Quitely (he drew All-Star Superman) and Walking Dead comic book and TV show creator Robert Kirkman.

“There’s just a grittiness to it and a realism to what he does,” Kirkman says. “I could see that some people might not consider his characters to be the most realistic-looking, but there is a level of detail to them that makes their existence believable in a way that you identify with the characters a little more.”

Burnham approaches his job with the enthusiasm of a child giving his younger brother a wedgie on Christmas morning. Drawing Batman Incorporated for two years made him the younger brother.

Created in 1939, Batman has become DC Comics’ most popular character as well as one of the most valuable intellectual properties owned by Warner Bros., DC’s parent company. Batman movies have grossed $2.4 billion, according to Box Office Mojo, more than double that of Superman movies ($1.1 billion). Drawing Batman means abiding, or suffering, decades of sacred tradition and inviolable canon while staving bouts of inadequacy. The greatest comic artists have drawn Batman, and pantheons, historically, are gated communities.

“I definitely felt the weight of history,” Burnham says. “I definitely realized that Batman’s been around for 75 years—all the amazing artists that have worked on him and, now, me. … I was, really, super nervous about being mentioned in the same sentence as those guys and hoping everyone wouldn’t think I was the worst.”

Burnham amalgamated his Batman from iterations drawn by Frank Miller (square, beefy, bludgeon-like in The Dark Knight Returns comic) and Bruce Timm (sleek, agile and Fleischer Bros.-inspired in Batman: The Animated Series cartoon). Among Burnham’s personal touches: imagining Batman as a gymnast.

“Batman should be able to do 500 pullups,” he says.

Then there was the Batcave and its giant penny, a mainstay of Batcave décor introduced in 1947 after a fight with an obscure villain named the Penny Plunderer.

“This was the end of Grant [Morrison]’s run,” Burnham says, “and he’d been writing Batman for five or six years at that point, so I wanted to be very faithful to the Batcaves of everyone who had been working on his run. … So that was where all my anxiety was based. On those first couple of pages, I was trying to figure out how the Batcave actually looked and how I was going to handle it. To a certain extent, I didn’t even notice that I was drawing Batman because I was so worried about where the penny went.”

Over Burnham’s two years on Batman Incorporated, the famously sedentary lifestyle of the comic book artist became infamously sedentary for Burnham. A wiry man of 6 feet, 3 inches, he gained 30 pounds and smudged the line dividing studio and tomb. He was as famous as he’d ever been and he couldn’t enjoy it. Sixteen-hour work days leave little time for adulation. That’s what he thought, anyway.

Turns out, drawing a monthly Batman comic book led to Chris Burnham’s dream job: drawing a spy series co-created by Robert Kirkman and former Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple.

Published by Image Comics, Die! Die! Die! debuted in July. It’s about three assassin brothers who are triplets—and the under-workings of murder cabals and world governments. Bloody violence, sex and naughty language abound. It’s the comic every 13-year-old boy’s mom wishes they wouldn’t read and a concept seemingly born of Burnham’s manic, splatter-film-loving heart.

“This is a high-action comic, but for the most part, it’s people in plainclothes,” Kirkman says. “It’s people having conversations. It’s, potentially, very dull visually. I wanted somebody who had an energy to their work—a quirkiness that can make those kinds of scenes entertaining even though, visually, they may not be. Chris is somebody who draws extremely interesting people, does very expressive faces.”

Image Comics operates differently than DC and Marvel, the “Big Two.” Founded in 1992 by seven hotshot artists who expatriated from Marvel, Image lets artists and writers own their creations, and this arrangement is helping Image increasingly make it a “Big Three.”

Conversely, DC or Marvel own any character their artists and writers invent. Not only is Image’s model potentially more lucrative—thanks to The Walking Dead franchise, Kirkman, reportedly, now is worth millions—it affords infinite creative latitude. No holy corporate edicts; coffee is for pleasure, beer for recreation.

Kirkman pitched Burnham on Die! Die! Die! in fall 2015. They convened at the Vivienne Restaurant in the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, not far from Kirkman’s office, and confabulated for an hour. Burnham was wooed easily.

“It was like, Yeah, whatever Kirkman says, that’s what I’m doing,” Burnham says. “This is the safest bet in comics. I’ve got to do something to keep this kid alive”—he’s referring to his first-born, 3-year-old Dashiell; Burnham’s second child, Parker, was born in 2018—“and this is it, for sure. And then he describes it. Superspies killing each other? International intrigue? Yeah, great, I’m in.”

Burnham and Kirkman nursed a mild acquaintance for a few years before that. They met at the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle around 2010, their tables somewhat adjacent. It was around the time Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic had been adapted for television, on its way to becoming AMC’s biggest show. Burnham was pushing his latest comic, an Image book called Nixon’s Pals (2008) about a parole officer for supervillains. He detected opportunity.

“There was a big, long line for Kirkman and it was right in front of my table—people trying to get their Walking Deads signed,” Burnham says. “Nixon’s Pals is aesthetically very similar to [Kirkman’s superhero comic] Invincible. Very similar sort of world—goofy and violent—and I had a captive audience and I was just picking them off one by one.

“‘Oh, you like Invincible? You should read this—parole officers for supervillains.’ And they’re like, ‘All right!’ I think I sold out of all the copies I brought to the show, purely based on people being stuck in front of my table. I probably gave Kirkman a copy.”

Kirkman knew of Burnham through his friend Joe Casey, who wrote Nixon’s Pals, as well as the comic that directly led to Burnham getting hired to draw Batman, Officer Downe, which came out in 2011 and is about an unkillable L.A. cop. Both are esoteric, over-the-top action comics, similar in tone and content to Die! Die! Die!.

“I snuck into DC [Comics] based on Grant [Morrison] wanting to work with me—and he kept wanting to work with me,” Burnham says. “So they’re just like, ‘I guess this guy’s here,’ and I think they got used to it. I tried to get work with DC a year before and they said, ‘Yeah, your stuff is great but we don’t see you as a superhero guy.’ They saw me as a quirky sci-fi guy and a horror guy or whatever, and, fair enough. But after working on Batman for three years because Grant wanted me there, I think they got used to it.”

Kirkman followed Burnham’s run on Batman Incorporated—adulation works in mysterious ways—and in 2014 they had their first conversation that exceeded three sentences, while carpooling to and from an Image convention.

“We got along very well right off the bat,” Burnham says. “... We were very, very comfortable talking to each other even though he was, obviously, maybe the most successful guy in the history of comics and I was just a guy who drew Batman for two years.”

By now, Kirkman and Scott Gimple had been for five or so years devising in the weirder nethers of their brains the comic that became Die! Die! Die!.

“The spy genre is somewhat sanitary, between James Bond and Mission: Impossible,” Kirkman says. “They’re doing dangerous things, and bad things are happening to people, but oftentimes you don’t see it because they’re very slick. They’re very polished and we wanted this to be different in that respect.”

They wanted “messy” and they wanted an artist adept at depicting brutal, bloody, ridiculous, fun and detailed action. They wanted an artist who thinks Evil Dead 2 is just about the best movie ever made.

“I think Evil Dead 2 is just about the best movie ever made,” Chris Burnham says.

Burnham didn’t major in art. He decided he could refine his drawing on the side while at GW and got an electronic media degree, reasoning that it would be more useful if his comic book career bombed.

But he took art classes as electives, doing four semesters of life drawing, and he taught himself what he could, copying hands from Burne Hogarth books and trying to be “one of those guys who carries a sketchbook and draws people in the park.”

After college, Burnham hit the comic convention circuit to get his art reviewed/crushed by the pros and hope one of them liked his work enough to vouch to someone important. This is how comic artists are often discovered, and the experience steeled Burnham’s humility.

He did this for about two and a half years while spending his nights drawing four-page demo comics. He paid bills by drawing technical manuals and slogging at a photo lab.

“You’d go to a convention and it’d be your storytelling that was good but your faces are screwy,” Burnham says. “So you’d go back home and work on your faces and then they’d go, ‘Your faces are good but your backgrounds are crummy.’ So you’d work on backgrounds for the next four months and then at the next show, they go, ‘Oh, your backgrounds are great but your faces are crummy.’ God damn it. And my faces, they’re not as crummy as they used to be, but now my backgrounds are so much better than my faces that my faces look crummy, relatively speaking. It’s constantly trying to make everything of even quality.”

Burnham broke into comics in 2003 and did his first book for one of the Big Two in 2008, drawing two short X-Men stories. Then there was Officer Downe in 2011, which he drew off the posthumous largesse of his Grandma Priscilla. She willed him $5,000, and that paid his bills for a few months.

“I was able to focus all my efforts on Officer Downe,” Burnham says, “just making it the most hyper-detailed, disgusting comic I could—it is the B-movie of comics. It is halfway between the Toxic Avenger and Robocop. It’s great. My grandmother would be absolutely appalled by it.

“But that’s the book that when it came out—it was a mild critical success but the other pros I knew who saw it, everyone was like, ‘Oh man, this is awesome!’ It’s very much the sort of comic that artists wish they were making, but most of the time we get stuck drawing dialogue scenes and heartfelt emotions and couches and whatnot. But Officer Downe is just mayhem the whole way through.”

Burnham says he still battles consistency and that his artistic powers shrivel when he’s drawing people that are too small or too large. The extremes undermine the strength of his style (all that great detail) and skew proportions.

He finds drawing handsome people irritating.

“The only thing I’ve ever been hammered at by editorial was on my first X-Men story—a Forge story,” Burnham says. Forge is an X-Man whose superpower is building machines. It’s cooler than it sounds. “They kept saying, ‘Oh, Forge isn’t attractive enough. You’re making him look like a 40-year-old guy. We want him to be a 27-year-old Hollywood hunk.’ I was just adding too many wrinkles. He just looked old and haggard when he should be a beautiful Brad Pitt of a guy.”

It annoyed him, but Burnham made Forge a dreamboat.

“I’m much more comfortable drawing someone tired and haggard than bright-eyed and handsome,” Burnham says. “I think the core of that is if you’re drawing an ugly monster, if you draw that ugly monster’s head 10 degrees too wide or his eyes 10 percent too big, it’s still going to look like an ugly monster. But if you’re drawing a handsome guy and you draw his face just a little bit too wide, he looks like a completely different person now and goes from perfectly handsome to a schlubby office worker with just a little bit of difference. Sometimes you nail a great drawing that just doesn’t happen to be a perfect drawing of that character. That is super frustrating. I did a perfect drawing of that guy who looks nothing like Bruce Wayne.

“I remember there was an issue of Batman Incorporated that’s the life story of Talia al Ghul, so I had to draw her at multiple ages on the same page. So she’s 8 years old, 10 years old and 14 years old all on the same page, and my girlfriend says, ‘Uh, are those supposed to be the same people?’ That’s the worst thing you could say to someone. She was right, but, man, it was dispiriting.”

The mood of Die! Die! Die! is nuanced. There is a lot of violence and some kitschy gore, but in the third issue, there’s a moment of pathos for a character who had shown no previous moral proclivity. This moment unfolds across four boldly paneled pages.

“You can feel the frenetic sort of energy,” says Die! Die! Die! co-creator Scott Gimple, the Walking Dead showrunner for seasons four through eight. Season nine premiered in October. Gimple also wrote some Simpsons comics a long time ago. “He really does get the humor in there with the way that he composes the panels, the character’s expression. It’s a very tricky tone. I mean, it’s a crazy book. A character’s nose is cut off in the very first issue, and I think it was really critical that that not be done in a way that is so traumatically horrific that an audience is turned off or doesn’t quite get the tone that we’re after.”

Gimple and Kirkman co-compose story arcs. Kirkman writes the scripts.

“When I write stage direction for The Walking Dead,” Gimple says, “it is for a line producer and a director and a costumer and a prop person and an actor and a locations person. But for these scripts, Robert is writing to Chris, so there’s a conversational shorthand in the stage direction. There’s that thing he knows that he knows Chris knows. … I don’t want to betray a trust and say too much, but it can be a little insult comic-y between them.”

Kirkman really considers the action choreography. In Die! Die! Die! No. 1—issue 6 will be out in December—there’s a sequence that involves a guy backflipping off a crashing motorcycle to death-battle three goons in a river.

Kirkman says he plotted that fight in detail. He could’ve left it to Burnham but he feels it presumptuous to so burden an artist. But there are times, Kirkman concedes, that he just doesn’t have it.

There’s a fight in issue No. 3 involving one character stabbing other characters, and Kirkman forgot to introduce the knife. The stabber also has a briefcase she’s trying to keep those she’s stabbing from stealing. Burnham saved him by drawing a secret knife-holder on the briefcase.

Burnham belongs to a school of comic art largely defined by European illustrators (notably Moebius) and artists Geof Darrow, an American, and Frank Quitely, a Scotsman to whom Burnham’s work is often compared.

Both, for example, draw clothing so that it has weight and it’s obvious how the clothing fits and how the character put it on. It’s not just the usual spray-on, muscle-rubbing superhero spandex, a level of detail Kirkman says elevates Burnham to Quitely’s class.

Burnham also sweats the physics required to make action followable panel to panel. He’ll go as deep as to figure out how a foot pivots and how body weight transfers.

Quitely says that the first time he met Burnham—it was about six years ago at New York Comic Con—Burnham jokingly apologized for stealing his style.

“He has a very obvious voice,” Quitely says. “When I first saw his work, I was impressed by the balance between the realistic and the cartoony. I like the fact that it doesn’t rely heavily at all on photo reference and it’s very much coming from an internal place—and of course, he’s got a great attention to detail. He’s got a sense of a humor and he’s a good storyteller. … Even looking at some individual pages and not knowing what’s happening in the story, I could tell what’s going on.”

Burnham says Batman Incorporated sated any and whatever urge he had to draw superheroes who tote mega-dollar multimedia franchises. Drawing creator-owned books on charitable deadlines is really nice. He can indulge his discrete, bizarre and bloody influences—everything from the very metal Marvel comics of the early 1990s to an obscure indie book like Plasma Baby, which he discovered at a 1980s comics convention in a Ramada Inn conference room, an event with all the gravitas of a county fair.

“This is a pretty cool place to be right now,” Burnham says. “At some point, I’ll probably work with Grant Morrison again. We’re supposed to be getting around to Arkham Asylum 2, which is a totally insane thing to say. That’ll probably happen at some point.

“Honestly, creating a book with Robert Kirkman and doing Batman with Grant Morrison for years and then creating [2016’s sci-fi horror comic] Nameless with him—my bingo card is basically filled up with dream projects.”

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