Georges Jeanty is an Eisner Award-winning artist who has been working on the comic book scene since the early 1990s. He has provided art for a run of Marvel’s Bishop and worked on DC’s Batwoman, Green Lantern, and Superman. His art is featured in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight and Season Nine, as well as Serenity: Leaves on the Wind and the miniseries The American Way. Scoop talked to him about these titles as well as his interest in art in the days before his comics career.

Scoop: When did you get bitten by the drawing bug?
Georges Jeanty (GJ): When you’re a kid you draw because that’s your state of expression and I never left. I was pretty good at it, I kept on, and I just never stopped. I got the bug early on and it kept biting me – hopefully for another 20 or 30 years.

Scoop: Did you pursue art in high school or college?
GJ: I did, yeah. Almost to my detriment, because I didn’t really want to do anything else other than draw. And of course if you find somebody else who likes to draw you guys are like the best of friends ever, because you obviously both have your priorities very well intact. So, yes, I did it in high school. I was part of the newspaper, the yearbook, everything you could be part of that included artwork, I was in. The same with college, I was part of the newspaper and I took fine art classes. I was pretty focused and determined.

Scoop: Did you have art sketches in the yearbook or school newspapers?
GJ: Yeah, all the time. I was the staff artist on all of that. I designed the yearbook for the year after I graduated because they needed art for that. I loved graphic design, I love art. I love the idea of putting things together like a magazine or a periodical. I love periodicals, which is funny I say that because they are really going by the way of the Dodo bird, because nobody really reads newspapers anymore. That sort of thing I really got into, their formats.

Scoop: Were you a fan of comics before becoming a comic book artist?
GJ: I was, yes. In addition to drawing, I needed something to draw. I had the comic books for wonderful inspiration of new worlds of monsters and superheroes and science fiction and horror and all that stuff. It just opened up a whole new world for me. And I never left, strangely enough. I do it and I love doing it, but I also collect it, as well. So I’m very into movies and paraphernalia and promotions and all the stereotypical things.

Scoop: Which comic books and characters were your favorites?
GJ: I was huge into the Fantastic Four. I was a Marvel fan, a big Marvel fan. I was aware of DC but, never really ventured onto that side of the fence until later. I loved the Fantastic Four. The Thing, I thought, was the coolest character ever. Which is funny, because he’s one of the simplest characters ever created. I mean, you could say Superman is a very simple character. But I guess now with a mature eye looking back to it, this guy is just covered in rocks but he’s really strong. That’s all he really does.

Scoop: What about favorite artists? Is there anybody that inspired you?
GJ: Oh yes, I don’t think we have enough time to really go into that. [laughs] I though John Byrne was the second coming, because he was so good. And at that time that I was really into comics he started Fantastic Four and I just totally fell in love with what he did and how his work was. It was almost as if he was reinventing the characters the way I thought they should look. So John Byrne was huge. And Alan Davis at the time and Michael Golden was coming out.

Funny enough, growing up I was never into Jack Kirby, until I was a lot older. Then I could properly look at his stuff and not just see a certain style but see exactly how he approached his work. As a result, obviously, I understand why he’s regarded so I highly. I find it funny that back then I couldn’t have thought that. I honestly thought, “This guy can’t draw.” I find that a lot of people say that when they were young, they looked as his work and thought that “I don’t think this guy can draw.” And it’s just the opposite. He draws so well that he’s a Van Gogh – he’ll take it to another extreme and you just don’t know where he came from in order to see where he’s going. So it was very humbling to me when I found out that Jack Kirby was an amazing artist. [Laughs]

Scoop: It’s interesting the way you describe the transition in how you see Kirby’s art.
GJ: It is. If you do interview a lot of artists of a seasonable age, ask them what their thoughts are about Jack Kirby when they were a kid and then subsequently what their thoughts are of Jack Kirby as an adult. You see it as a kid and you just put it together as “eh…whatever” next to John Byrne or Gil Kane or John Romita you don’t appreciate it that much. But as you mature and you know a little more about the art and the field you really do look at his work and go, “Wow, how could I have been so wrong on that assumption?”

Scoop: How did you get into drawing for comics?
GJ: I drew, I’m sure as a lot of kids, I just kind of drew comics for myself. I remember drawing to have adventures. It’s funny, I was reading a Love and Rockets compendium by Jaime Hernandez and it included a lot of his old drawings before he actually started to draw professionally. It’s funny how, I’m sure a lot of us did do that and now are in the business. How a lot of our stuff, in a weird way, revolved around us. We made ourselves heroes or whatever. That’s what I did. I made myself whatever superhero at the time, I thought was really nice. I started that way and kept on. After a while, when you get to junior high or high school you start to understand whether or not you have talent. People around you can see if you have talent and it looked like I had talent, so I just never stopped drawing. I kept doing little comic books here and there. My goal was to do a 22-page comic book in a year or maybe six months. I have all of these old stapled together comic books that I did as a kid that I was always very into. After you reach a certain age you realize, “Maybe I can do this professionally.” And that’s what I did once I got into my 20s. You start looking at the business of comics as opposed to just drawing comics. That’s what led me down that path.

Scoop: Your work on Bishop gave him a larger than life quality. What went into developing his look?
GJ: The look was established before I ever got to it. They were looking for an artist at the time and I actually had to try out for that comic book. Funny enough, that look at that time was based on a rapper named Busta Rhymes, who was huge. And that was kind of what they wanted him to look like. The dreadlock-look tied up in the back and all that. It was already there.

Joe Harris was the writer. I believe his objective was to have Bishop back in the future and just sort of be a Lord of the Rings. This was around 2000, so all of the movies hadn’t come out yet. He wanted it to be like Lord of the Rings travel story with this Bishop being the center focus in a future. If I’m not mistaken at that time we had to explore the mutants, what their lives were like and see glimpses of it.

His look was very piecemeal. He didn’t go to a store and buy any of this. All of it was put together haphazardly, so his look was formed out of that. You’ll see on the character he’ll have the X-Men uniform, but he also has all of these other little things that he kind of put together.

Scoop: What was your favorite Bishop issue or story arc to draw?
GJ: I love collaborating. I never wrote an issue of Bishop, but after a while I got to know the writer pretty well and he had mentioned a story about Bishop finding one of the sentinels. At this point the sentinels were all decommissioned and buried and he tries to turn it back on. I thought it was a great story, but he didn’t really have anything past that. I told him he should have a whole issue about that, that he actually does turn on the sentinel and the sentinel gives him the story of what was going on, or some sort of a recap. I think it was a two-issue arc and I thought it came out very well. It was very unconventional because essentially everything was new and we sort of backtracked in the second issue. To go back and find out what the specifics were that led to what happened.

Scoop: What did you think of the Bishop interpretation in the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past?
GJ: I thought it was really cool. I felt a sense of pride that they went for his comic book look with the dreadlocks and all of that. The only thing I found wanting a little bit – and I know it was a huge film and they had a lot to do – was that they never explained his powers. I don’t think people really got that he’s a conduit, he can take power and re-channel it, but he can’t necessarily create it. As a whole, I liked it. It was flattering enough just to see the character there, in that form.

Scoop: Let’s talk about The American Way, a story about America’s first black superhero, set in the early ’60s. Did you and John Ridley create the comic together?
GJ: John Ridley actually created the concept, the idea. When I came in, I created the look. He had these heroes and he suggested what they looked like. He’d say, “This guy is a Sean Connery-looking guy, so when you create the look, make it like that.” So he had these preferences for what they were, but I visually put them together. I’d say, “Here, this is what this guy could look like.”

He approached Wildstorm at the time, then Wildstorm started to fish around for an artist. At the time I was working for them doing a character called the Majestic. The editor, Ben Abernathy, was also going to be the editor on The American Way, approached me and asked what I was doing after the Majestic stuff. He said they had this concept of an eight-issue story from this screenwriter. At the time the concept of writers from Hollywood doing comics wasn’t in fashion. So they were telling me this guy John Ridley had written a couple of movies – he did The Three Kings and a few other films. I thought it was cool but wondered how he approached comic books, because that’s a very different animal. I asked if I could read it and then give them an answer. I read it and thought, “Oh my God, this is great.” It reminded me of the Watchmen, because it was so good and very well done not just on a hero level but on a human level. I knew it was a book I’d want to pick up and read.

Interestingly enough, I heard years later when I was offered Buffy that Joss Whedon had been reading The American Way and thought I would be good for the new Buffy comic he wanted to do.

Scoop: Why was it important to do the unmasking reveal of the New American three issues in?
GJ: We were really trying to jump the gun on a lot of things or suggest that because of this fictional world a lot of things happen. One of those was that we still hadn’t gone to the moon yet, so that space suit was sort of a prototype of the suits that they would later wear years down the line. A big component of that was that whoever this guy became we had to cover his face, was what John theorized. At that time in our history it was decided that white America was never going to accept a black man as a superhero. He theorized that we had to bring him in through the backdoor so that he was there for a while before he would unmask, so that when he did people would be more reticent to accept him. But of course, good drama never works that way, so he had to be found out early. I think it was more controversial to have a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the team. We all knew there would be definite static here. That was a very big thing that was planned very well on John’s part.

Scoop: You provided the art for Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight and Nine based on the TV show. Tell me about how that came to fruition.
GJ: Dark Horse had been publishing Buffy comics since the show was on. The show started running in ’97 and went off the air in 2004. I think Dark Horse came in 2001 or so and started publishing comics. But, funny enough, those stories were never considered canon to the TV show. Joss was never a part of those stories. Season Eight, Nine, and Ten basically all came about because Joss approached Dark Horse and asked if they’d be interested in him doing some more stories because since the show had been off the air he wanted to revisit it. If I remember correctly, he had the first arc done, so when Dark Horse said they’d do it, he handed them a story. He said, “Maybe we can call it Season Eight because it takes place after the TV show and it shows Buffy where she is these days.” He threw that out there and everyone agreed that that’s exactly what it should be called.

Originally, I thought it was just going to be Joss’ arc in five issues of Season Eight, but it just became this juggernaut. It went from 4 to 12 to 25 – and these were where I thought the milestones were, so I thought, “I can do this.” Then it went to 40 issues and at that point I was so invested that I knew I had to see it through to the end.

I think Season Eight was a good proving ground for this kind of concept, because at that time in 2007 nobody really had a continuation of a TV show. They may have had independent stories but nobody was running a continuation series. Of course, now it’s being done all of the time. But back then no one was picking up a TV show story a few years later to keep going. It was a very edgy thing to do. As soon as that happened others did too. I remember Smallville, Greatest American Hero, The Six Million Dollar Man, Supernatural, and all of these other books started coming out with new seasons. It just shows you the genius of Joss Whedon. He threw something out there and now it’s becoming a standard of comics.

He approached everybody who wrote Buffy and the people who didn’t come back to write the comic only didn’t because they were doing something else. Everybody who was involved with Buffy was more than happy to come back and write the comic. Trust me, for the amount of money they were getting for the comic, I can’t imagine it was more than what they were making on television and in film. So they were coming back for love of it all. Most everybody who was available came back to write a story or arc or stayed around for a while. I think that really shows a testament for the love of this series. It was popular and embraced, not just by the fans, but by the writers and creators.

Scoop: Your art on Buffy combines good character likenesses with enough comic book style to draw distinction between the show and the comic. How were you able to achieve this?
GJ: In terms of likeness, I never thought I was very good at that. Coming into Buffy, there’s this whole other cavalcade of characters. Everybody knows Willow, everybody knows Angel, even Riley, you know Andrew. Joss set me straight early on, and I was eternally grateful, because I really did feel pressure. I told him I didn’t know if I could do it because I’m not very good at likenesses and he said, “I’m not as interested in Buffy looking like Sarah Michelle Gellar. I want Buffy to look like Buffy. You don’t necessarily have to make them look like the actors. If you just come across with the subtleties of those characters everyone can pick them up.” So I focused on that, the way Willow is sort of a wallflower, very meek and Xander talks with his hands, and Buffy is a loveable clown sometimes, Angel is very brooding. Those things really helped me when I was drawing those characters. So whereas I may not have done the likeness, I like to think I got their essence.

Scoop: Season Eight of Buffy had a more fantastical, bigger storyline than Season Nine. Did you have a preference of one season over the other?
GJ: I like them both, probably for their individuality. I look at Season Eight as more of an experiment, it really got bigger and bigger and bigger. Joss didn’t really come in at the beginning and say, “Here, this is the way it begins and this is the way it ends.” It was more like, “This is the idea of have.” It was more like whoever was writing that particular story could do what he thought was best and Joss was definitely willing to listen. So Season Eight was more like that.

Whereas, Season Nine was very structured because it was only 25 issues – it was much shorter. We had the opportunity to say, “This fits into this, that fits into this.” We knew where we were going. But in Season Eight, I have to admit, I don’t think a lot of time we strayed from where we were going. For example, there were a couple of issues with Harmony. I think if Dark Horse were to do that today they’d still have the season go as it is and have that as a miniseries. They’d have whatever was happening with Harmony be in conjunction with the ongoing series. The more time you take away from the focus, the more time it’s going to take to get back to it. Since the book came out once a month, a lot of people complained that Season Eight was too long. And yes, it was because you had to wait to get back to whatever we were talking about instead of showing Willow’s adventure over here. Now we do that – Willow had her own limited series. I think Season Eight suffered from that, whereas Season Nine had more of a focus. I think they were both good and I liked drawing both of them. I would have to say I have a preference for Season Nine because of the structure, but I love Season Eight because of what we were exploring.

Scoop: How did working on Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, another Joss Whedon project, compare?
GJ: It compared in that I had the same set of difficulties. Likeness and the surroundings. Serenity was a little harder. With Buffy I was charged with doing all of the characters, but at the very least Sunnydale was gone, so I didn’t have to draw any of the backgrounds that were previously established. I never had to draw the Bronze or Buffy’s house or any of those place. With Serenity, that ship has always been considered the tenth character. So I knew that fans were really going to scrutinize it. So when I read the script, for example, it’d say “Mal comes in through the cargo hold and he’s talking to Jayne as he’s walking to the cockpit.” As their talking or whatever, I have to draw that in a sequence that a reader who watched the show will recognize. I had to show people a logical progression to where he was going. So I actually had to go through and look at the mess hall, the alleyway, and then figure out what’s in that little space between the cockpit and the stairs. So I really had to figure out what the logistics were for the ship, and that just took more time. You can’t just sit down and draw it, you kind of need a map guiding you to draw in sequence.

Scoop: Your art on Batwoman was gorgeous. Did you want to continue working on that?
GJ: A lot of what DC is doing is trial and error. I think with their New 52 stuff they were trying to figure out what works, what can they trim. I knew that Batwoman had a very big fan base, so her getting canceled was very surprising to everybody involved. Nobody saw it coming. I think it was really more of a pragmatic decision that sales weren’t as big as they wanted them to be. So they wanted to eliminate that book to put a new book in its place that will hopefully have more sales.

Scoop: What are you working on now?
GJ: I did a Superman fill-in issue 47, Man of Steel, if I’m not mistaken. I am actually working on another Serenity series that will come out in October, hopefully. It’s a sequel to Leaves on the Wind. I believe it’s called No Power in the Verse and it’s a six-issue series. Spearheaded by Joss, of course.

Scoop: Can you give us any tidbits about the story?
GJ: It does take place maybe a year or so after the last series and it further delves into the events that happened at the end of the movie, so the Alliance is still after them. There are things in place now that makes them realize the threat to them is a lot closer than they thought.

Scoop: Anything else you’d like to add?
GJ: Yeah, if there’s anything you need to know, my website is always there and hopefully up to the minute. It’s kabalounge.com. I’ll be doing a lot of shows. I’m going to Denver Comic Con, Motor City Comic Con, Dragon Con, Charlotte, and many other shows. Working on Serenity should take me through to the end of the summer.

Scoop: Well, thanks for talking to me and I look forward to the new Serenity book.
GJ: Thanks, have a good day!