They're the Spielberg and Lucas, no, more like the Butch and Sundance of today's comics. With a five-year-plus run on Preacher ending and a 12-issue Punisher limited series just getting under way, the duo's popularity continues to climb, as does the quality of their work. Mania had a chance to catch up with penciler Steve Dillon for a few minutes this week to get his opinions on the end of Preacher, dealing with the Punisher, and life without a monthly Vertigo title. 

Ask Dillon how long he and Ennis have been working together, and his eyes begin to glaze over. "We did a few bits and pieces before Hellblazer in Britain," Dillon says. "We worked on some Judge Dredd stuff - a few short series here and there. It's so long ago; I've forgotten how long we have been working together, actually. Garth and I have done so much stuff together, it's easier for me to say who else I've worked with rather than how much I've done with Garth. There's been loads. Roughly, we started working together about three years before we came on to Hellblazer. 

One groundbreaking Hellblazer run, and five and a half years on Preacher later, Dillon has found himself in terra incognita - penciling The Punisher for the Marvel Knights imprint. Like Ennis, Dillon found the offer from Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti too good to pass up. 

"Considering that my work on Preacher would be finishing up in June, it was one of those things where it was too good to turn down," Dillon says. "In a perfect world, I'd have been able to start work on Punisher then, but even with that, it was still too good to turn down, so I thought I'd take the pain of doubling up on the work and putting in some later nights rather than to turn around and say no, and it seems to be working out quite well at the moment." 

Double Down 

Dillon's point regarding doubling up on the work is well made. For Ennis, adding another regular monthly title increased his workload for only a short time (according to rumors that he wrote The Punisher limited series in a little over a month). For Dillon, adding The Punisher meant doubling his output every month until June, when he'll finish Preacher #66, the final issue of the series. 

However, it's not a stress Dillon's unable to handle. As one of the few pencilers in the industry who can pencil two books a month with no decrease in quality, Dillon's been building towards two books a month for the past few years. 

"During my regular gig on Preacher, I'd also be working on the Preacher specials like the Cassidy special or Tall in the Saddle, which John McCrea inked," Dillon says. "I'd also done a few other projects here and there, such as the Gen13s, so I wasn't just moving from one single book to two all of a sudden. I was used to taking on some extra work. 


"But for the next couple of months, I won't have any time to do any extra little jobs. A lot of artists will tell you the same - for a writer, they can do two to three or maybe four books a month, so a change from one book to the next is as good as having a rest at times. An artist can find that a lot more difficult. Often an artist can only handle one book, so it's nice if you can slide some different projects in to change the pace and allow you to get your head out of doing one thing for a while. That's while I always tried to get a few extra projects here and there." 

Once Dillon is done with Preacher and moves back to penciling The Punisher each month, he says he'll be back to hunting down extra gigs here and there. 

Why Punish? 

As with Ennis, one of Dillon's reasons for coming on board The Punisher was his longtime love of the character.

"I was a Marvel reader as a kid, and while the Punisher wasn't a regular character while I was growing up, he'd pop up in some of the other Marvel books I'd be reading, and would catch my attention," Dillon says. "He's a more realistic character in the sense that he doesn't have any superpowers and has a very straightforward motivation. If I was going to go straight from the Vertigo style stuff into heroes, Thor, for example, would have been too much of a jump for me and the readers. This way, I'm easing into doing more superhero style stuff." 

And of course, once again working with Ennis was just icing on the cake. 

"I thought Garth's take on the Punisher would be interesting and funny," Dillon says. "Working with Garth in an established superhero universe combined with the fact that I got to draw one of my favorite old characters, Daredevil, in the series as well just did it for me. I love the old Frank Miller Daredevil stuff, and at the moment, I'm penciling pages with Daredevil on them, which is quite a thrill for the old fanboy in me." 

Penciling a more mainstream superhero book does require a little adaptation from what Dillon's used to, though.

"Superhero, or stuff close to superheroes like the Punisher, lends itself to the flashy design - it's a more visual thing than what we've done before," Dillon says. "With Preacher, and a lot of Vertigo material, it's very story and dialogue driven. My catchphrase on Preacher is that if people notice my art, I haven't done as good a job as I should. Unless it demanded a big visual in Preacher, I would put my work into the faces of the characters that would be used to tell the story, rather than the actual page design side of things. 

"On Punisher?  It's hard getting your mind out of the Vertigo mindset into a superhero again, and I hope I've done a good enough job, and maybe as time goes on, it'll show a little more. I'm working on giving Punisher more of a visual impact than I would on Preacher. For Preacher, the art has to take a back seat, because most of the time, it's all about what the characters are saying to each other. I don't want a big, flashy close-up of Jesse if he's just asking for a cup of coffee. It just doesn't work. This is different, and hopefully, my approach has worked." What's On Sale Now 
In Punisher 

Heads and Faces 

Ask any fan of Preacher what they notice most about Dillon's art, and nine times out of ten, you'll hear "the faces." With a few pen strokes, Dillon can give Jesse or Tulip a look that puts a lump in readers' throats, or brings forth a quick chuckle. While Dillon admits he works hard on his characters' expressions, he's quick to credit the source material. 

"Garth comes up with such good characters in general, so that when you read them in the script, it's easy to get an idea in your head of what they look like and how they would act," Dillon says. "His dialogue is so good that it's quite easy to come up with facial expressions for them Really, it's something that I do almost instinctively at this point. I don't actually sit down and think about it too much. If you've got a good writer writing good dialogue, it's pretty easy to do the 'acting' side of it. 

"With the Punisher himself, he's a bit Judge Dreddish in that you're not going to find him wildly laughing one minute or crying his eyes out the next. He's got a pretty straightforward, Clint Eastwood style, with not too much expression. What expression he does have has to come across - it has to be subtle, but it has to be there, otherwise, he's a blank-faced killing machine. For example, there has to be a difference between whether or not he's about to shoot you or whether he feels a bit of pity for you. I try and get that across, but again, I'm not really the one to judge on that - readers will have to judge that as they read the book." 

Twisted Minds 

Despite the fact that The Punisher is aimed to come in under the Comics Code, it won't be without its share of gory visuals, something Dillon has made a trademark of in Preacher. That said, it's important to point out that the gore and occasional horrific imagery in Ennis and Dillon's stories isn't gratuitous. It serves to move along the story, even though, if you listen to the page closely, you're sometimes sure you can hear Ennis' mirthful laughter at the fact he's broken yet another comic book taboo. 

So, whose mind does the nastiness ultimately come from? 

"Generally, it's Garth who does come up with the gross ideas," Dillon says. "That leaves me to visualize it in some way unless he has some idea of how it's definitely supposed to look. It varies from disgusting situation to disgusting situation, but in general it's Garth with the more disgusting imagination. It's my job to keep up and have just as a disgusting imagination to keep up with him so I can draw it." 

And no, Dillon doesn't hang out at crime scenes or morgues to peek under the sheets to see just what an exit wound from a Glock looks like. Or does he? 

"It's part of my job!" Dillon says with a mix of laughter and mock defensiveness. "It's purely professional. That's the lucky position I'm in, you see, because most people wouldn't have seen the stuff that I'm drawing to know if I've got it all wrong." 

Teaming on The Punisher presents Ennis and Dillon with a few new challenges when it comes to delivering a story complete with the violence and occasional gore that their fans expect.

"We're both professional enough to know that you can't do the same things in The Punisher that we can do in Preacher," Dillon says. "We'd rather not have a list of dos and don'ts thrown at us before we do it, because that just tends to make you want to show it. So far we've had no complaints about the first two issues." 

To accurately depict the world of Frank Castle, some of the violence inherent to his life had to be adjusted slightly - moved "off camera" or implied. Ultimately, according to Dillon, off-camera violence can be just as or more effective than on-camera violence. While fans may gasp in mock horror at the violence in say, Preacher, when they themselves are given the visual ingredients for a violent scene together with the impression that it has occurred, their imaginations are often much more shocking than anything that could be shown on paper, resulting in a very effective violent act that was never actually shown. 

Preacher's End 

While his work on two monthly titles keeps his nose to the grindstone late into the night, Dillon is becoming aware that Preacher is slowly but surely coming to an end, and the fictional characters he's known better than some of his real-life friends are headed into their final sunset.

"Once it's finally over, I'm sure it will be strange to not have them around anymore," Dillon says. "I haven't really had time to think about it that much, because it's been pretty all-consuming over the past five years. I don't think that there will be that many opportunities for spinoff characters or Preacher specials afterwards, because I think we've done the ones that we can do. We're not ruling them out, because inspiration may hit, but it's a close-ended story, and I think it's probably best left at that.


"At first, though, there will probably be relief at first to actually have the whole thing done, because it is one big whole story that I've drawn without any fill-ins for five-and-half years without anyone else drawing an issue or missing a shipment. If I can get through all of that, then there will be champagne poured and a raging drunken night to celebrate, hopefully, a job well done and the fact that it's over. But yes, after I calm down, I think I will miss it. But I'll be working regularly on The Punisher after that, so that will be a new routine that will help to carry me through, so it won't be a sudden stop to working. That will soften the blow." 

Preacher's New Beginning? 

While Dillon may be thinking of a short rest from working with Ennis, there is one large project that will keep them together over the next few years - trying to get a film version of Preacher made. While rumors of a Preacher movie bubble up about once a month with the Internet rumormongers, Dillon's up for a slow and steady pace to making the film. 

"The script that Garth and I worked out, and he wrote, is based very much on the stuff that's been in the comic," Dillon says. "Garth's inspiration for Preacher was mostly filmic rather than anything he's seen in comics, so I don't see why it couldn't be made into a movie; the only thing I see that would stop it would be the subject matter." 

"If it's going to get done, it has to be done faithfully to the way the comic was done, otherwise it's not worth doing. The people we have spoken to about it like the comic, they want to do it like the comic, and they want to stay true to the spirit of the comic. If we get it made that way, that's the best way to do it. We're not in the business really of flogging it off as an option to a big studio, not that I think a big studio would touch it with a barge pole - and get on with doing what they want with it, because they would turn it into something completely different than what we created. It would take a hell of a lot of money for us to do it that way. Whether or not it ever gets made is another question. We'd rather have no movie at all than a bad version of it." 

Life After Jesse & Company 

With the end of the series looming, Dillon has found himself besieged with questions about what he's doing after Preacher wraps for good. Naturally, many of the future plans he's considering involve Ennis, but some would take Dillon into some new territory. 

"Garth and I may want to rest a bit from each other for a little, so we'll have to see," Dillon says. "I've worked on nothing but Garth's stuff except for a couple of times I worked with Warren [Ellis] on Gen13, for years, so it may be interesting to do a couple of little projects with someone else first, before a next major project with Garth." 

"Looking at if from the purely fanboy perspective, I'd like to do Batman, Superman and Spider-Man all at least once. They're the big guys - in England, they're the ones that people tend to know, and they're the ones that I knew as I was growing up. 

"Also, deep down, there's also the professional part of me that's willing to work on anything as long as it pays my bills and feeds my family. In a perfect world, I'd like to have a go at those characters of my youth and have another go at a big project with Garth." 

And as for those future projects with Ennis? Yeah, like Dillon's gonna talk ...

"We've always had a number of projects that we'd like to do at some point," Dillon says. "Whether any of them would find the right time at that time, I don't know. Some of what we're talking about would be much more contemporary and much more realistic in the sense that no one is walking around with Word of God in them or anything like that. We've got a few projects we're considering like that as well as projects that are more along the lines of the topics we went into with Preacher." 

"A lot of this is the question of time and the circumstances and judging the market to see which publisher is up for what at a given time. That does have a bearing on what project we choose next, but we will explore some of the same things in whatever we do because that's the sort of stuff that we're interested in. We're not about to start to do funny animal books unless they're really disgusting funny animal books that people are willing to pay lot of money to see."

by Matt Brady
February 11, 2000