During New York Comic Con, Paul Azaceta had a chat with Paste Magazine about OUTCAST BY KIRKMAN & AZACETA. Below is an excerpt from the interview, but if you’re a completionist, you can read the full interview here. Paste also has 2 pages exclusive preview pages from OUTCAST #5, so make sure you check those out as well!
Paste: It seems that as readers, we’re trained to look for action, but you mentioned that Outcast relies a lot on quiet moments. How do you navigate that?
Paul Azaceta: It’s definitely more of a challenge. It’s easy to make it exciting when you have somebody punching somebody in the face. But with the quiet moments, there’s a tone. I try to get into that, and work with character poses, their body language.
Paste: How do you go about developing the body language?
Azaceta: I actually have a mirror right next to my desk at home, so it’s a lot of looking at the mirror and making silly faces. It’d probably be funny to film me drawing. I think I approach it a lot like acting. I picture these as real people, or at least like an actor trying to do a scene. Sometimes I act it out myself. I love watching actors and the choices they make. I try to keep that in mind, like if the mother dies, how would someone actually react? Would they get weak in the knees, maybe have to hold the wall? A lot of times when you get into the feeling yourself, that kind of energy goes into the art.
Paste: Do you get sad when you’re drawing a sad scene?
Azaceta: Yeah. I won’t start crying, but I’ll get in the headspace when I draw it. Hopefully the reader will get that kind of energy I put into it.
Paste: Outcast is being developed as a TV show. Do you think that aspect of your style and the realistic body language lends itself to this adaptation?
Azaceta: Just in the sense of getting the characters to feel alive. I hate to say I think of it as a movie, because I have a real deep love of comic books and comic book art, and I actually don’t like when comic books try to be like movies. There are things that comic books can do that movies can’t. I try to take advantage of that.
