The Unknown (c) Bernie Wrightson (used with permission). Image provided by Chimera.

...the full book illustrated. They were done with a combination of brush and pen.

I remember having a hard time getting into the illustrations, how to visualize them. For some reason, I just stalled. I didn't get into them and start to cook until I started to think of them in terms of comic book covers. Once I was able to think of each illustration in terms of a single cover, the composition and actual visualization began to come together.

Crescent Blues: Do you ever work in other media besides color wash and ink?

Bernie Wrightson: I've worked in just about every medium. I would say my favorite is working with pencil, drawing with a pencil. My least favorite is painting with oil. And everything else falls in between them.

Crescent Blues: What is it that you like so much about working with pencil?

Bernie Wrightson: I like the way the lines appear on the paper and images just seem to appear almost magically. To this day I can't walk through a shopping mall or the boardwalk at the beach without stopping if there's a person doing caricatures or portraits. I will just stop and watch. I have to be physically pulled away. I just love watching pictures happen.

I love making the pictures. I feel sometimes that I'm two people. There's that person there with the hand that's making the picture, and the person standing back, watching, saying: "Wow, look at that!"

Crescent Blues: When you've got an idea in your head, whether for a single image picture, or a full page lay-out for a comic book, how do you approach the page? What's important to you?

Bernie Wrightson: I'll crib a line from Georgia O'Keeffe: the most important thing to me when I'm doing a picture is to fill a space in a beautiful way. It's arguable whether a lot of my images are beautiful. But I think there's beauty in form and composition and color and tone and light and shadow. The image that is actually being depicted is secondary to that.

Which now having heard myself say that, I can say it's actually bull.

It's hard for me to say. I always start with a picture in my head that I want to transfer to paper. The problem is somewhere on the highway between my head to my fingertips, the transmission breaks down. What I'm drawing on paper is never as good as the picture I see in my head. Which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. It keeps me trying to do better each time.

Crescent Blues: On a completely different track, you worked on Ghostbusters I and II.

Bernie Wrightston: I did some monster designs for them.

Crescent Blues: As a graphic artist or did you get into the modeling?

Bernie Wrightson: Just on paper. Not everything I did was used -- I think 90 percent was not. Partly because I was working from a first draft screenplay, a lot of which was changed and never made it into the movie. They turned over a lot of the designs I did to other artists for refinement and tweaking. All that's really left in the movie of mine is some of the proportions of the dogs and the librarian at the beginning -- the first ghost.

Crescent Blues: Have you done other movie work?

Bernie Wrightson: I worked on several movies that haven't been produced. I did over a hundred drawings and character designs for "Shadows over Innsmouth," an H. P. Lovecraft story that was never made into a movie.

Most recently, I did some monster designs for a movie called The Faculty, which is coming out around Christmas time. It's directed by Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, El Marachi, From Dusk Til Dawn) and has a screenplay by Kevin Williamson who wrote Scream. In a few words, it's basically The Thing meets Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in high school.

Crescent Blues: What's next for you?

Bernie Wrightson: Currently I'm finishing up a Punisher project for Marvel Knights that will be appearing, starting this month and running through December. After that, I don't have any plans for working in comics for a while. What I'd really like to do is break out and work more in movies and film-related projects, just because I'm pretty much burned-out on comics for right now. This happens periodically. I've been working exclusively in comics for several years and would really like to put that aside and try something else. I feel like I'm really stale.

Crescent Blues: You can't stay in one spot.

Bernie Wrightson: You have to stimulate yourself. You have to as the Jefferson Airplane said, "Feed your head."

Crescent Blues: Or feed your soul as the case may be.

Bernie Wrightson: Or just grow. You have to have the capacity to grow. A lot of people don't have the opportunity or capacity. Those who do are the lucky ones.