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 COMIC BOOK TATTOO is a collection of comics inspired by TORI AMOS songs, but thankfully none of them involve a girl being bitten by a radioactive cornflake, gaining the proportionate strength and speed of a cornflake and dubbing herself Cornflake Girl. JODY MACGREGOR talks to editor RANTZ HOSELEY and creators DAVID MACK, JONATHAN HICKMAN, LEAH MOORE and JOHN REPPION.
“She didn’t want to be a comic character, or write a comic,” Hoseley says of explaining the idea to Amos, “but as we talked about it, and I explained what my vision of the book was, she immediately saw the strength of it, especially since one of the goals of it was to reflect how one form of art can inspire a different form of art, as comics had inspired her, in ways that are both obvious and inexplicable.”
The comics that had inspired Amos were Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories. Hoseley introduced Amos to the comics – while crashing in her living room he left copies lying around where she would find them.
By arranging this project, in a way Hoseley is paying back a favour he owes her from those days. “Tori rang me up and I was feeling pretty defeated and down,” he explains. “She asked me ‘what character from mythology, ANY mythology, do you relate to?’ I told her I was the Flying Dutchman, and explained the story for her, since she wasn’t aware of it at the time. We talked awhile longer then got off the phone.
“A couple days later, she called me back and asked if I had a moment, then proceeded to play Flying Dutchman for me, live, just her and the piano, over the phone. It was so touching, so sweet, and so powerful that I had a friend that would do that for me, that I really can’t ever thank her enough for that.”
That song was chosen by artist David Mack (creator of Kabuki) for his section of the book. “I related to the story in the song,” says Mack. “I could see it there, and I had the added benefit of Rantz giving the backstory of the circumstances and stage in life that the song was written about. And I identified with that story very much, because I had been there.
“So I tried to find a way to do a double narrative of that – the stages of a person’s life, on the outside, and their internal life of the art and dreams inside their mind and the attempt for those to intersect. I tried to show the visuals of that and join it to some of the key words and ideas of the song. Even the title lyric of the book – Comic Book Tattoo – I was able to use that as a main visual.”
Jonathan Hickman (creator of The Nightly News) chose 1,000 Oceans from the album To Venus And Back. “I’m getting older, so my music taste have settled in a bit and I find myself listening [to] my library of music as opposed to trying lots of new things – I wanted to do a song of Tori’s I hadn’t heard before and that therefore ruled out all of the early albums. So I looked at lyrics and something resonated in 1,000 Oceans.”
Leah Moore and John Reppion (creators of Raise The Dead) worked together on a strip inspired by the song Hey Jupiter.
“Initially it was just a track that we both really liked. I now realise that it’s actually the re-mixed/re-recorded version of the song – known as the Dakota version – that was released as a single which we both had in mind rather than the album version. It’s got this really phasey, slowed down beat driving it along and it makes the track very druggy and dreamy with these spikes of lucidity provided by the traditional instrumentation and Tori’s voice,” says Reppion, who may have missed his calling as a music critic.
Moore explains how they avoided the temptation to do a literal retelling of the song. “The images are right there in your head already so your reaction is usually to try and use them in the story. I found it easier to listen to the words and imagine what place they came from, what mood they were written in, and then add to that until it resembles a solid little tale. I found it very interesting working this way actually, I could easily see myself doing this again maybe as a way of generating ideas for stories.”
The songs were all chosen by the artists and writers, and Hoseley was pleasantly surprised by the variety of choices. “The surprising thing was how many people chose songs that were obscure B sides, or songs from soundtracks. I would have expected a much greater percentage to ask to do the ‘big hits’... the iconic songs that the average person equates with Tori, but instead a large number of them went the opposite way, which I think speaks volumes to how Tori’s music touches each person in a different way.”
COMIC BOOK TATTOO is published by Image Comics and contains the work of over 80 comic book creators. Check your local comics & book retailers or www.amazon.com
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