By Zack Quaintance — It’s been a busy year with much tumult, but within everything happening, Dave Chisholm has been making some fantastic comics. In February, Chisholm released the excellent Canopus #1 (read our review!). Written and drawn by Chisholm, the sci-fi book from publisher Scout Comics was a critical hit, soaring to strong critical reviews via a number of outlets.

Throughout the crisis, Chisholm has stayed busy, creating a steady stream of commissions that depict a wide range of subject matter, from classic films like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Jaws, to individual song lyrics from bands like Radiohead and singers like Sturgill Simpson. And if all that still wasn’t enough, Chisholm has a new graphic novel from publisher Z2 about jazz musician Charlie Parker, due out in September.

All of this is why we’ve tabbed Chisholm as the first creator for our new monthly interview series — Rising Stars, which is exactly what it sounds like! Today we have a conversation with Chisholm about his background, his newest project, and more…plus, on this page you can find a gallery of some recent commissions. Enjoy!

Dave Chisholm Interview

Q: First things first, can I ask you to talk a little bit about your background, how long you’ve been making comics, and where the desire to work in the medium came from?

To this day, my mom claims my first word was ‘Spider-Man.’ It’s always been part of my life. My parents would always get my brother and me comics, and I was always interested in drawing. The first comic page I drew, I was like four years old and it was called World of the Robots. It was a Transformers rip-off.

I ping-ponged back and forth between music and comics as a teenager, in college, and as an adult. It’s always been a huge part of my life and my kind of default for my preferred media for stories has been comics and graphic novels. I had a couple quote-unquote comic series I did just for myself and friends in high school. My first attempt at trying to make a comic as an adult was in 2007. It was called Let’s Go To Utah, and I posted it on DeviantArt. It managed to gain enough traction that I could self-publish on-demand style a 9-issue series and a trade paperback that I still sell at comic cons. 

That led to a tiny bit of work for Dark Horse in 2009. I wrote and drew a short story for Myspace Dark Horse Presents, and by then I was back in school to get my masters degree and my doctorate in music. While I was doing that, I planned to make another big comic when I was done because I knew I was going to be under-employed at that time. That’s when I did my book Instrumental. I thought it would be cool to have a book with music to go with it, because I do music as well. I wrote and drew that book in 2013, and it didn’t come out until 2017. During that time I didn’t make any new comics, but I had a few seeds of ideas that are still there in my head, waiting for the right soil.

After Instrumental came out, it was pretty well-received for a very left-of-center book. So, I thought to myself, I should do another one! I was on a flight to Boston, and I had the basic idea for the conceit of Canopus. I worked that idea a lot, bounced it around to every person who would listen to me. I was trying to find the right plot points and beats for four or five months before I started drawing it. When I was drawing it, I was also pitching it to publishers. I pitched it to Scout, and they took me up on it.

Right at the tail end of working on that, Z2 contacted me. Z2 sent this very cryptic email, “Hey Dave, I’ve got a dream project for you. Are you available in 2020?” It was for a graphic novel about famous jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. I got more details on the project, concocted a structure for the book, and I pitched it to the Charlie Parker Estate. It got approved. 

I’m lucky enough to teach music, and it’s lucrative enough that I don’t have to work 40 hours per week to pay my bills. I can put a little bit more time into my comic work than most people who have a split schedule like mine. Knock on wood, but there’s no way I could do a 40-hour-per-week job. Those people who do that and make any sort of comic output? Bravo to them. They’re amazing to me. 

Q: With the Charlie Parker book, can you talk a little bit about your experience with Charlie Parker before that idea was pitched to you? I’m sure with you having a doctorate in music, you were well-verse in Charlie Parker, but what was your experience with him and his work like before working on the book?

Something that’s touched on at one point in the book is that when you go to school for jazz music, the foundation of modern jazz improvisation is Charlie Parker’s music and Charlie Parker’s improvising and his real particular use of harmonic language and rhythmic language in particular. The jazz vocabulary, the jazz language really grew up I think because of him. When you go to school to study this stuff — it’s hard to put a number — but maybe 80 percent of what you practice and study can be traced back to him.

In terms of the music side of it, I was very familiar with Charlie Parker. In terms of his story, most people who go to school for this are fairly familiar with Charlie’s incredibly dramatic and tragic life story. He died at a very young age in his mid-30s. The story is the coroner thought he was in his 60s when he saw his body, and he had big appetites for everything. I knew he was from Kansas City, he moved to New York, and so on. I would say it didn’t take as much research. I wasn’t starting at zero with him. If someone asked me to do a graphic novel about Alice Cooper or someone like that, I’d be starting at zero. With Charlie Parker, I was familiar with it and with the music and the overall trajectory — who his influences were musically and these details.

The process of researching that was that I ordered a bunch of Charlie Parker biographies. The good thing about this is that Chasin' the Bird is focused on a really particular period of time in his life, so with the biographies I could go to the index and look up keywords that were only applicable during that time. The book is about his time in California, which is 1945 to 1947, and then a few random events in the early ‘50s. I wasn’t going through and reading the entirety of every biography. I could target my research in that way.

This isn’t a spoiler because there’s an article in Publisher’s Weekly that says this, but the book is six big chapters and each chapter is narrated by a different person whose life intersects with Charlie Parker’s life in that time. Each chapter is drawn in a different style. The style is intended to reflect the point of view of the person who’s narrating it. The research became about the events, and about what story each of these people were going to tell about Charlie Parker.

Obviously, you can go read about Charlie Parker and find anything in there, but I think the delivery method of the information in Chasin' the BIrd is pretty novel. Everyone involved encouraged me to take risks with storytelling. Part of Charlie Parker’s legacy is there are a lot of tall tales about him, a lot of legend around Charlie Parker that is literally unbelievable. It’s obviously not rooted in fact. I knew that had to be part of the story, weaving in the tall tale aspect to make it so the whole story is covered with what’s real and what’s self-aggrandizement by the narrator or what’s misremembered or is Charlie messing with the person who’s narrating or is the person who’s narrating not realizing Charlie is messing with them.

Q: That sounds great. I really love unreliable narrators, both in prose and comics, and I think it’s something comics doesn’t use enough. How did you arrive at that approach to the story, and did you try to organize at first to be straight forward?

All involved parties were on the same page from the start — we didn’t want it to be a documentary style presentation. This allowed me to set up a unique structure for the story. The thing that gets me the most excited about comics is form and formalism — the way that form can reflect content. 

It’s like music production. Some music producers, their whole goal is to disappear and capture a band exactly as the band is. This is the general ethos of Steve Albini, who recorded those Nirvana albums that are so amazing. Those albums just sound like Nirvana. There’s not a lot of bells and whistles, and that’s great. But the other mentality is to be someone like Nigel Godrich, who produces Radiohead albums, a couple Beck albums, and whatever else. Nigel albums sound like Nigel albums. He’s not a transparent force on the music; his presence is very much heard.

For me in comics, I am more interested in artists whose influence is apparent on the pages. What I mean is the influence of thinking about how can the page as a container and the container itself mirror the shape of the story content. A really simple example is All-Star Superman. There’s the issue where a Kryptonian comes back, and when he punches Superman, the whole panel is askew. The whole panel is tilted at the angle he’s getting punched. Most of the panels in that series are rectangular panels 90 degrees to the page, just like panels are, but in this part he’s punching Superman so hard, the panel shifts. It’s a real superficial example. Or the symmetry issue in Watchmen, or in Mister Miracle where the glitchy stuff is happening. It’s all over the art of J.H. Williams, and I love that stuff.

The cool thing about this book is that each of the people telling their story about Charlie Parker have their own unique point of view, their own world view, and those views change the ways I’m drawing it and telling the story. The whole project is a big love letter to comics and to Charlie Parker’s music as well. It’s the form element. I had a very clear vision of that very early on. 

Q: Shifting gears, let’s talk about your commissions a bit and how you approach a commission in general. You’ve done some killer commissions of late and I feel like there’s a growing buzz around them online.

Thanks, and happy to. Last year leading up to Heroes Con — which is really the only big convention I go to — I needed to get some commissions lined up, but I thought if I just put a cattle call out for commissions, it wouldn’t make any sort of impact. So, I thought it would be helpful if I narrowed the scope of what I’d draw, which seems counter-intuitive, but it’s like telling people what they want instead of asking what they want. 

So, I said give me your favorite musician or song, and I’ll turn it into a commission. It ended up being really great, and this current run of commissions started that same way and ballooned. My approach to commissions — I’m not going to lie — I have a hard time drawing any picture unless there’s a story being told in the picture. For me, it’s always a story angle that gives me the content to draw. It could be a song lyric or it could be a drawing of Miles Morales, but there has to be a story element that’s an anchor for me. I don’t quite understand why this is a hiccup I have in my head, but I have to make a little story out of it. Sometimes it turns into a comics page, like my recent Jaws commission. The One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest piece is also sort of like a comics page.

It’s also like the Charlie Parker book. I’m not concerned with having a set style. Depending on what fits the content best, I’ll freely do some with one brush, some with no brush, or micron pens or copic liner pens. It just depends on what the best way to get the content across is, what’s the best way to tell this story. I also have so many ridiculous reference pictures of myself. 

Q: Well, it’s been fun. Let’s wrap by talking about what you’re going to be up to the rest of the year creatively…

I’m having a real blast doing these commissions. I do have another project that’s in the very very early stages, but I do feel a good tailwind for this project. It’s another music-related thing. We’ll see. It seems like this will be a fruitful project. I have a good feeling about it, I just have to dive into getting some proof of concept stuff on paper. But I have to know the story all the way first. It’s all spinning plates a little bit, but I think I’ll have quite a bit of time this summer to really work on this stuff. 

Who knows, man! That’s where I'm at right now.

Click here to pre-order Chasin’ the Bird: Charlie Parker and California by Dave Chisholm.

If your’e interested in a commission, Dave can be reached at davechisholmcomics@gmail.com.

Also, checkout the Best Comics on ComiXology Unlimited!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.