With the release of Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1 this last month, I fell into a dark world of nightmares and visions that had been created in front of me for Peter Parker to experience.
Written by B. Earl, it crafts a story of reality and dark dimensions, a fight for what’s real in Peter’s mind, all while finding himself away from home in Los Angeles.
The art was so beautifully well-crafted that I had to sit down and chat with the artist himself, Juan Ferreyra, on his time with this project and how he crafted such intricate displays of Peter Parker’s psyche.
DISCLAIMER: THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED FOR EASIER FLOW OF READING
Interview with Juan Ferreyra
How has it been working on Deadly Neighbourhood Spider-Man?
J: So far, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been really interesting to try to come up with a different take on Spider-Man, and because of the setting and the other world, or the dream world sequences, on top of moving (Peter) to LA. It makes it more interesting and different, at least. Drawing him in a different way, trying to come up with a new foe, some new monsters and a different world. It’s been fun. It’s been really good.
Dark Peter Parker stories always end up being the best. What would you say makes your art differ from previous ‘dark takes’ on the iconic character?
J: Firstly, my art, and when I do it, I color it myself, and for this story, for the dark parts or the regular parts, where Spidey is in the real world, I try to do it more traditionally, like inks and digital color like every comic.
But when he goes to the nightmare world, I paint all the stuff by myself. I use gray paper and whites and blacks and watercolors, stuff like that, and maybe more.
What’s your process for creating the creepy imagery we see in issue #1?
J: Sometimes you grab! There it is! Then sometimes the writer tells you and gives you hints of what they want. He wanted it to be like the spiral press in a scene, so I came up with doing it with the clouds. There’ clouds all in a spiral, and the water and everything in a spiral, and you just start drawing until something sticks with a new approach. Then you do it again, you do it again until you are satisfied.
Sometimes you have time to do it, and sometimes you don’t have to.
Sometimes you have a deadline, so you just do whatever feels good. I try to come up with new ideas all the time until the right one comes into play, but sometimes you don’t have enough time, so just you just do whatever idea that comes first. You try to make it look beautiful and cool, and people don’t realize you did it fast.
Taking it back a little bit, what were the comics you read when you were younger that made you fall in love with comic book artistry?
J: When I was a kid, I read a superhero comic when I was 10 years old, in my country you couldn’t get them. I’m from Argentina and at the time you couldn’t. You could buy comics but it was more Argentina comics. So I travel to Brazil for a summer, and I bought my first Action Comics, Superman against the Teen Titans, and then I fell in love with like right away with comics. I saw myself as kid doing comics.
When I read Superman for the first time, I thought how I want to draw superhero comics in the future or from now on. Then I started drawing.
I read a lot of Superman, he’s my favorite character. Also Batman, Justice League, all the DC stuff, because I couldn’t find any Marvel stuff. After growing up, I started to read more and more stuff, but I started with Superman.
To cap it all off, is there any upcoming projects you’re working on that you want to spread word about?
J: I’m finishing working on the last issue of Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man and then after that I’m doing a creator owned comic with Matthew Rosenberg, it’s going to be a worldwide story, and it’s going to come out maybe next year, maybe we’ll do 5 issues with that.
I’m really eager to start working on it because this is creator owned and we can do whatever we want, and we have a lot of time to do it, so it’ll be a lot of fun to draw that.
And after that maybe I’ll jump back into doing some Spider-Man or more Spider-Man stories, more stuff.
The full interview with Juan can be watched below
