Equal parts Understanding Comics and From Hell, The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is a head-on collision of ink drawing and spiritual intrigue, pulp comics and movies, history and fiction. The story traces the lives and techniques of Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby), Stan Drake (Juliet Jones), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and more, dissecting their techniques through recreations of their artwork, and highlighting the metatextual resonances that bind them together.
In this interview, co-author and -illustrator Carson Grubaugh discusses working on The Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
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DIAMOND: For those who aren’t familiar, can you tell us what readers can expect from The Strange Death of Alex Raymond?
CARSON GRUBAUGH: It is a very difficult project to formulate an elevator pitch for. The best I have heard so far comes from our publisher, Sean Robinson, “Understanding Comics meets From Hell.” Or perhaps “Jodorowsky’s Dune, if his actual film had been half completed, then worked fully and seamlessly into the narrative and themes of the documentary.”
It is a gorgeously illustrated masterpiece from one of the great living masters of the medium (Dave Sim, not me!).
The book is a meta-textual account of Dave Sim’s evolving obsession with the car-crash-death of one of the greatest comic illustrators of all time, Flash Gordon creator, Alex Raymond.
While exploring the suspiciously inconsistent accounts of the crash, Dave begins to piece together a speculative narrative that ties together professional rivalries, adulteries, the possible blackmailing of Gone With The Wind author, Margaret Mitchell, by Raymond’s writing partner, Ward Greene, Crowleyian occultism, etc.
We also spend a lot of time covering the technical aspects of Raymond’s photorealistic illustration style, the challenges of reproducing such work in print, and the history of Raymond’s influence on the field.
How did this project come about?
That story is actually a very large part of the book itself.
What I can answer more clearly is how the project came to me.
I have been a fan of Dave’s work since I first read the Cerebus graphic novels in the early 2000s. His follow up work, glamourpuss, blew my mind. The art in it was a real lesson in how to do everything I am prone to doing but way better. That book also introduced me to the genius of Alex Raymond, Stan Drake, and all of the other illustrators that are so important to The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (SDOAR).
When glamourpuss morphed into SDOAR I was absolutely on edge waiting for the book to come out. I would search the internet from time to time for news on the progress of the work and eventually read that Dave’s drawing hand had failed him. I saw he was looking at having other artists potentially finish the art for him in a post on the A Moment of Cerebus fan blog, which was run by Tim Webber, at the time. Through the blog I was able to contact Dave, send samples of my work, and do try-out pages for a “bridging sequence” Dave was planning for SDOAR. Those trial pages became the first four pages of the book as it exists now.
As our collaborative relationship grew, I moved on to finishing the art for the main portion of the book as well.
In 2020, Dave publicly walked away from the project and gave me permission to publish all his work, all of my work, and signed off on me writing my own ending. That is the book we are releasing.
A very convoluted story, but thematically important to the work itself.
Can you tell us more about the writing and art process behind this book?
SIMilarly convoluted; pun very much intended.
At first Dave did everything himself, when I came on board it depended on what part of the book we were working on.
For the bridging sequences Dave would give me a Marvel-Style script: “A comic book shop manager closes up the store.” I used that prompt to direct a photoshoot of our model for those sequences, real-life comic-store manager – now former – of Local Heroes in Norfolk, Virginia, Jack VanDyke. (We liked Jack so much we actually gave them their own forty-eight-page spin-off, You Don’t Know Jack: Two-Fisted Comic-Store Manager, which was successfully Kickstarted and released in 2020.)
All of those photos and my 12-page mock-up of how I thought the story should unfold were sent to Dave. He reworked the whole thing, which was a treat of a learning experience for me. From there I faithfully illustrated the pages based on his photo mock-ups.
For the main content of the book I would get to-scale photo mock-ups of each page along with a folder full of the highest resolution images of each element on the page as possible. Some of those high-resolution images came from Dave, most of them came from our research guy, Eddie Khanna, some I tracked down myself on the net. All these images were collaged together in Photoshop to match Dave’s layouts. Those digital collages we traced in Photoshop to capture the bare essential structural information then printed out in pure cyan ink. Over the blue-line print I could go straight to inks, and when scanned back in, it is easy to drop out the blue-line and have only inks left.
Dave’s photo layouts often came with lengthy annotations that would beat the pants off any Alan Moore panel description in a contest of length and depth of information. These were not “scripts” in any standard sense – as the mock-ups conveyed exactly what I needed to know about the visuals – but captured what I needed to know about Dave’s meta-textual intent for each page. Hopefully those, and all of Dave’s research notes/annotations, will soon be available at Eddie’s SDOAR.com. I suspect there are thousands upon thousands of pages of annotations.
When Dave quit the book, I took over everything from writing to layout to the final art. I still feel like a clown, trying to fill those gigantic shoes.
What kind of obstacles did you face while putting this title together?
The methods Dave uses to communicate are trying for someone my age. He is all about faxes and phone calls. He won’t make decisions about art on a screen, so he requires a printed copy of anything before he can form an opinion about it. I just wanted to email everything back and forth. Receiving a fax of an 11” x 17” photo mock-up in my inbox wasn’t particularly helpful. These faxes could get forwarded to me from any of three different intermediaries, which often led to confusion and breakdowns in communication.
One of the three intermediaries was a hired employee of Dave’s, who would send digital files through e-mail, but that was a one-way street. I could get things from the employee but was not supposed to send anything back through that channel. Anything I wanted Dave to look at had to be sent to Alfonso Espinosa at Studio Com.IX Press, a print shop in Dave’s hometown. Dave would go in every Monday to get anything that had been sent so he could review it.
This process delayed revisions by weeks. Things that could have been solved in less than an hour through email could take two to three weeks, or more, using this process. Extremely frustrating for me, but the opposite would have been frustrating for Dave. So, his book, his rules.
There were also restrictions on when I could call or fax Dave. Sunday’s, and many hours every day were off limits for religious observations – Dave follows a daily Islamic prayer schedule – and a period from like…Wednesday evening through Friday morning, that he had set aside to work on another project, so he asked that no communication about SDAOR happen during whatever those particular hours were. Sadly, given my profession as a college educator those were often the best times for me, so that caused issues and delayed decisions being made.
The largest obstacle was Dave’s own reluctance to publish the book. This delayed the project for many years. We were supposed to do four separate volumes. The art for Volume One had been completed by the end of 2016. Dave delayed publication until he walked away in the summer of 2020. There was always one more thing that needed to be done before the book got published.
You would think Dave walking away would have been the biggest obstacle, but actually it cleared the way for Sean and me to control the future of the project, which is why the work is finally seeing publication. And thank goodness Dave has been so gracious about letting us do this and letting me end the book the way I see fit.
What would you say is the most rewarding part of having Strange Death of Alex Raymond published?
The fact that it is going to be on sales shelf means everything to me. I was an anxiously awaiting fan of this work for many years before I got involved. I offered my services, for free, because I wanted to see the work finished so badly.
This is all about making sure the world gets to see the amazing work Dave created. SDOAR is the work of an apex-level-creator doing the best work he has ever done, an absolute masterclass in the potential of the medium. The thought that it might never see the light of day tortured me. That I somehow get to be the guy to wrap it up and bring it to the market is totally baffling.
In terms of audience, who is this book for?
I think there will be multiple audiences who value the work for different reasons. Some possibilities:
Anyone who loves comics as a medium should love it. Dave’s mastery of the form is more powerful than it has ever been in these pages.
Anyone who loves occult horror stories should love it. The clear connection between Ward Greene, Aleister Crowley and William Seabrook, combined with the voodoo Dave thinks Greene was doing in his scripts for Raymond’s comics is chilling. I am scared to have even worked on the book!
Anyone who loves the history of comics, or historical comics, will love it. Dave brings back to light the stunning accomplishments of a long-neglected generation of comic masters and forms the ground floor for further historical research into the topic of photorealistic illustration in comics. He also unearths some bombshell information about the possible blackmailing of Margaret Mitchell by Ward Greene, which should appeal to historians of literature.
Anyone who enjoys autobiographical comics should love it as it is ultimately the account of a creator who got so deep into a work that he could not find his way out.
Any academic who loves post-modern meta-textual literary analysis should love it. The layers, and layers, and layers of visual and textual metaphor Dave builds are endlessly rich sources for study.
Lovers of black-and-white ink illustrations will be able to appreciate this book without ever reading a single word. Just flipping through it is a true joy. If you enjoy beautiful art, you will love this book. If you enjoy insanely detailed art, you will love this book.
If you like beautiful book production, you will love this book. Our publisher, Sean Robinson, is the absolute best when it comes to preparing line-work for press. The quality of the printing on this thing is going to raise the bar several levels. See any of Sean’s restoration work on the Cerebus trades for a good indication of what the man can do. So many artists deserve better reproduction than they get. The entire industry should study what Sean does on this book and aim for the caliber of production he delivers.
It is not an easy work, but it is a great work, so anyone who loves great works of art should own this book.
What are you hoping readers take away from Strange Death of Alex Raymond?
We could have easily Kickstarted this work, made a pretty penny, and avoided the work of a public release. There is enough of a built-in fan base for that. I insisted we must bring to the shelves, especially bookstore shelves. I personally love walking through a good comic shop or bookstore, seeing a big, thick, beautiful looking book I have never heard of picking it up, and having my mind blown open.
This book is one of those books. My greatest hope is that a good number of budding artists who have never heard of it stumble upon it, are shook to the core, exposed to the great legacy of photorealistic pen and ink art Alex Raymond sired, which Dave and I are feebly tried to carry the torch for, and go on to produce the first great piece of photorealistic graphic literature.
Please, come kick the pants off all of us, future-art-legend. I want to read your book so bad!!!
As an academic, it would thrill me to see some academic writing both about the book and building on the floor that Dave lays. If anyone does such work, PLEASE pass it on!
Personally, I learned that devoting one’s life entirely to big-A Art is a damned pursuit that one should weigh very carefully. So, as much as I want to read that photorealistic graphic masterpiece by the next generation master of this style, please don’t create it at the expense of healthy relationships with friends and family. Your graphic novels aren’t going to be there for you when it matters most.
Realistically, the work is densely packed with multiple possible interpretations, so please make your own sense of it.
About the Creator • Carson GRUBAUGH earned an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art as well as BFAs in Fine Art and Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He was named the Mercedes Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist of 2011, was a keynote speaker at the 2013 Difference That Makes a Difference Conference at the Open University, placed 3rd in the 15th Art Renewal Center Salon portraiture category, and has shown work in the US, Germany, England at venues such as The Cranbrook Museum of Art, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, ABTART, Virginia Beach Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chrysler Museum, Museum of New Art, Sotheby’s NY and the European Museum of Modern Art among many others.
Carson is currently a full-time Instructor of Art at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.