Above: Ryan Thomason, aged 396 months, approx.
Ryan Thomason is a bookseller by day, a father, and a freelance illustrator. He is the creator of Zombie Kitty and Pizza Ninja (coming soon), two comic strips exclusive to the Edinburgh Geekzine newsletter and the Geekzine website.
How long have you been an illustrator? Being pretty much completely self-taught, I suppose I should date that from when I started my art blog which can be found at tezoarillustration.com, (discreet plug!) which would be three years now.
What inspires you as an artist? Deep sea animals fascinate me. I think it’s the stretching of something you know and recognise, like a fish or a crab, into a slightly disturbing new shape that appeals. That’s probably what I like about the steampunk aesthetic as well – once you get past the people glueing clockwork gears onto their hats it turns into a great game of what-if, where you can take something normal and twist it into something unexpected. Which is what I like doing best.
Which illustrators/artists do you admire? I probably got into illustration because of 2000AD and indie graphic novels, hence my inspirations are people like Jamie Smart, Frazer Irvine, d’Israeli and Nicholas Gurewitch. More recently I can’t get enough of Kate Beaton, who might well be the funniest cartoonist on the internet.
What are your ambitions as an illustrator? I’m intrigued by the possibility of working in comics (hah! one more plug!). I think what keeps me going and fuels my work is a desire to make the world a slightly dafter, slightly weirder place.
What are you reading at the moment? Just now I’m going back through the Game of Thrones series, and I’ve got my eye on Charlie Stross’ Rule 34 to follow – I loved Halting State and the Laundry novels.
Favourite things? I think the books and comics that have really stuck with me would have to be…
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – I first read this when I was seventeen, and for somebody who had subsisted till then on a diet of Stephen King and the like, Billy Pilgrim kicked my brain on to some genuinely subversive tracks.
Bear by Jamie Smart is wonderfully insane, featuring stories of an incredibly sarcastic stuffed bear and my favourite psychotic cat. Jamie’s done some amazing work since as well, but Bear holds a fuzzy little place in my heart.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein will take the blood out of you and replace it with bile and rage, this little book is completely terrifying and I’ve been throwing it at everyone in range since I realised that it was written in 2007 but describes completely and without fail everything bad that’s happened to this country since the election.
In film terms, well I had a look at my Lovefilm list just there and I’ve given about a hundred five-star ratings, so it would seem I’m not too hard to please. To keep it brief then, there are two that have really grabbed me in the last few months. The first is RED, from the Warren Ellis comic, and I really loved just everything about it – the script is a crackly excited thing, the cast look like they’re having a brilliant time and it finishes far too quickly for my liking. Very much on the other hand is Inside Job, which takes a good hard rummage through the reasons why the banks lost all our money but none of their own, and inspires unheard-of heights of disgust. I know, it’s a documentary, but trust me, it’s a work of art carved out of bile and anger.
Zombie Kitty and Pizza Ninja are quite unusual ideas but work so well as comic strips. How did the ideas come around for each project? Zombie Kitty came from the wreckage of a completely deranged conversation at work, the details of which are probably best forgotten, and Pizza Ninja… I honestly can’t remember. The character had been bouncing around the back of my head for a while and then one day I was sitting on the bus and the idea for the strip just crawled out of its cave and hit me over
the head. I’ve had some fairly strange characters crawl out of my brain over the years, and a good example of this would be the set of gig posters I did for a friend that chronicled the story of a badger and the giant squid he grew to hate. The stimulus for that was me demanding he name me an animal at about 4am at a festival, and then a few days later when the idea had time to slop about for a bit the whole concept just crawled out into the daylight.
What else are you working on at the moment? My current project is a kid’s picture book, which is a big departure for me as it features neither swearing or entrails. Yet.
Interview with Andy Jamieson, Geekzine Editor
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