Where the lines of art, illustration and narrative meet, there you'll find Bernie Wrightson. Co-creator of DC Comics' Swamp Thing, and celebrated interpreter of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Steven King's The Stand, Wrightson has carved a unique reputation for himself as a visual storyteller. Last month in Atlanta, Crescent Blues persuaded him to share some of those stories with us.

Crescent Blues: Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and how you got your start as an artist?

Bernie Wrightson: I was born in Baltimore and grew up there. My first job in commercial art was with the Baltimore Sun. I worked there less than a year - nine, 10 months. Then I moved to New York and started drawing comic books -- and stayed in New York. I never went back to Baltimore.

Crescent Blues: Did you always want to draw comics?

Bernie Wrightson: Comics were one of the things that I always wanted to do. I grew up with EC Horror Comics. But it wasn't just comics. I wanted to do comics and illustrations and movies -- all different sorts of things. Comics were just a part of it.

Crescent Blues: But narrative art, telling a story graphically, speaks to you in a special way.

Bernie Wrightson: Absolutely. I love the whole process of storytelling. That's one of the things I really love about comics. One of the things I really love about movies; it's a storytelling medium. Very often in a lot of my single image pictures, I try to have the picture tell a story, or at least suggest some kind of narrative.

Crescent Blues: Do you prefer telling the story with a group of pictures or in a single image?

Bernie Wrightson: It depends on the story that I'm trying to tell. Some stories can be told very simply, and they can be told better in a single picture. Other stories really need the space and the scope of page after page of many images.

Crescent Blues: How do you make that determination? Is it because someone hands you a story and says illustrate this, or is this something you choose to do?

Bernie Wrightson: Sometimes I'm given an assignment where I'm given a script or a story outline. In that case, it's usually pre-determined -- this is given to me by a comic book company to do, so of course I'll do a comic book. A lot of the single image things that I've done have been my own ideas.

Female Frankenstein Poster (c) Bernie Wrightson (used with permission). Image provided by Chimera.

Crescent Blues: What about the Frankenstein illustrations? Was that a project you developed from the beginning?

Bernie Wrightson: That was completely my own. Frankenstein was always very deep in my consciousness. My mother took me to see a Frankenstein movie when I was really young, and it affected me very deeply. It really scared me. It really fascinated me. That led to seeing all the other Frankenstein movies, led to reading the book, and I developed a life-long love affair with Frankenstein and anything associated with it. Illustrating the book had always been a dream of mine. I always wanted to see that story -- Mary Shelley's book -- illustrated faithfully.

Crescent Blues: It's a fascinating book, and the story's seldom told in its entirety.

Bernie Wrightson: There's so much more to it than what we've seen in the movies.

Crescent Blues: The book created the resonance that created the myth that created the movies.

Bernie Wrightson: Exactly. When you think it was written almost 200 years ago, and it's still as popular as ever. I think, aside from the Bible, there's no other book that's not been out of print since it was first published. I might be wrong there or maybe overstating this.

Crescent Blues: Copies were always for sale, and some version of the book was always being made into a play, movie or television show.

Bernie Wrightson: It still is. It's a pretty wonderful thing -- it's a pretty extraordinary thing -- to think that this book, originally published in 1818, has never been out of public eye. Each generation that comes along is introduced to this.

Crescent Blues: Other than movies, Frankenstein and Alphonse Mucha, what or who were your principal influences?

Bernie Wrightson: Probably my biggest influences were Frank Frazetta, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Franklin Booth, J. C. Colle. A lot of comic book artists: Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, Roy Krenkel. Just on and on and on. I hate to start naming them, because there are so many I know I'm forgetting.

Crescent Blues: In the Frankenstein illustrations, you use a lot of cross-hatching and very intricate detail not found in some of your other images. Is that a question of medium or is it a matter of preference?

Bernie Wrightson: It's a little of both: medium and preference. The Frankenstein drawings are the only body of work I've done with a pen. Most everything else I've done with a brush.

Crescent Blues: Sable brush versus airbrush versus?

Bernie Wrightson: Sable brush -- like a watercolor brush. The brush doesn't lend itself to the detail you can get with a pen. I chose working with a pen on the Frankenstein drawings, because I wanted them to have the pretense of looking like woodcuts or steel engravings. Something that would echo a little more closely the printing techniques of the time that Frankenstein was first published.

Crescent Blues: So the drawings could be bound, and a person could look at it and say this is how they should've been done.

Bernie Wrightson: Right.

Crescent Blues: You also illustrated The Stand. Was that an assignment or something you initiated?

Bernie Wrightson: The illustrations for the unabridged edition of The Stand were commissioned by Steven King himself. He wanted to see...

Bernie Wrightson (continued)