Stumptown is a brand new ongoing crime series from Oni Press. The series is written and created by Greg Rucka, and marks his first creator-owned comic series since the Eisner award-winning Queen & Country. If you’ve not yet checked out Stumptown #1 yet, make sure you check out my review (see here) of the series debut, then run down to your comic store and grab a copy!

If you are one of the many people who picked up a copy of Stumptown #1, you no doubt found yourself thumbing through pages and pages of gorgeous artwork, and wondering to yourself, “who is this guy, and where did he come from!”… or words to that effect.

You could be forgiven for thinking this, because while Matthew Southworth isn’t a complete new comer to the comic industry, this is the first major comic project that he has penciled, inked and lettered. I think most comic fans will agree with me when I say that Southworth has produced some incredibly strong artwork here, made all the more impressive by the fact that this is his first full comic release.

As there isn’t a heck of a lo of information about Matthew Southworth on the internet, I decided to go to the person who knows him best… Matthew Southworth! Matthew was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to talk to me about Stumptown, his early comics career, his musical career, and what else he has in the works.

• How did you become involved with Stumptown?

MS: I met Stefano Gaudiano at a convention, and Stefano invited me to his house and let me assist him inking Daredevil and some other projects. At some point, Greg (Rucka) and James Lucas Jones from Oni asked Stefano if he’d be interested in doing Stumptown, but he didn’t have the room in his schedule. However, we’d become a pretty reliable team, and he agreed to do it with me at his side. Then his schedule became even more compressed and he stepped aside before we did anything together, and I took on the job myself.

• Is this your first major comic project? And when did you start drawing comics?

I did a lot of assistant things on Daredevil, but the first work I did myself was inking three issues of Infinity Inc. at DC. I also penciled some backups in those same issues. This is the first book I’ve penciled and inked (and lettered).

I started drawing comics when I was a very small kid, pretty much from the moment I started drawing (around three years old). Somewhere in my teens I stopped drawing as I got more and more into music, and though I’d pick at a drawing here and there, I really didn’t start drawing again with any regularity until about four years ago.

• What did you do before becoming a comic artist? I heard that went to Theater school, and used to be in a band. What can you tell us about that?

MS: I’ve gone in a lot of directions in my adult life. Uncharitably you’d call it flailing, and that’s what I call it sometimes, but I know that in each of these phases, I didn’t know it was a phase. I had found my direction each time. I saw an arrow pointing me in a direction, and I went that way, and when I reached the arrow, I picked it up and carried it a while, and when I looked back, I had lost track of how I got there. But each thing moved into the next thing.

I nearly went to art college in Tennessee, but I became fascinated by Orson Welles, and I was particularly entranced by his period in the live theatre. So instead I went to theatre school, which was great because it forced me to socialize and learn to control myself. From there I wound up going to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and studying playwriting and directing, which led me to move to Los Angeles and work at Paramount Pictures for a while. I made an independent feature film that was an alternately exhilarating and devastating experience, so I started a band, The Capillaries, as an outlet.

Eventually I moved to Seattle and kept the band going until just the past few months. Now I’m writing songs and prepping a new, different kind of band called RKO.

• How long has Stumptown been in development?

MS: I don’t know how long Greg has had Stumptown in his head or his notebooks, but I signed on about two years ago. There was a long delay in an effort to get things on track so that we’re not making promises we can’t keep in the schedule. This gave me an opportunity to draw, and redraw, and redraw pages ,and generally fritter away my lead time.

• How much of a hand did you have in designing the characters and settings?

MS: The design of the characters and settings was just about completely mine. Stefano Gaudiano really designed Whale, one of the main bad guy’s henchmen, but I was able to be very selective and specific about everything.

Some of the settings are very personal; I used to lease apartments in the building we used as Charlotte’s in the first issue. I spent a week building a 3D model of Dex’s home/office after driving around the neighborhood specified in the script and deciding the street she lives on. And her car, a Phoenician Yellow 1965 Mustang, I chose because I knew a guy in high school who had that car. He was the first person I ever knew who went to rehab.

• What sort of research did you to while putting this series together?

MS: I’m researching everything I can. Greg said Dex lived in a Craftsman home, so I got a bunch of Gustav Stickley books on Craftsman homes and studied those. I went to all the Portland neighborhoods in the script and took lots of photographs. However, there is always something that slips past you. Today I heard from a friend that someone pointed out to him that I’d drawn a character knitting with her needles upside down, and thus far no one had caught it. Least of all me.

• Did you use a lot of references for local Portland landmarks etc?

MS: Yes. I took loads of photos, and actually visiting the St John’s area and walking around in a rainstorm under the bridge is what led me to notice all these Canada Geese in the area. So I put those in the opening scene.

• Are you a big fan of of the crime/noir genre? If so, what comics, novels or movies are your favourites? And were these an inspiration for you while drawing this book?

MS: I love crime novels and good crime comics. Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 and Nothing More than Murder are two of my favorite books. I love Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal, too. And when you get into movies, there’s a pile of great crime films, from the Tarantino stuff to Dog Day Afternoon, to Rififi, to The Ladykillers, to Zodiac… and of course, Touch of Evil, and all the Hitchcock films.

• Artistically, who would you say your greatest influence is?

MS: I don’t quite know. If we’re talking art in general, there’s Orson Welles and Elliott Smith, who have had a big effect on me and on the way I approach art. And David Lynch and David Mamet, too—they’re sort of opposite poles of technique, one being wholly intuitive and the other being distinctly deliberative.

If we’re talking about who influenced the way I draw, I think about Alex Toth a lot, Bernie Krigstein, Darwyn Cooke, Chris Ware. Frank Miller, for sure. And certainly working with Stefano (Gaudiano) and learning so much from him had a huge effect.

• What was your favorite thing to draw (spoiler free of course)?

MS: I like drawing Dex and her leather jacket. I love the graphic sensibility of the scrubby black and the shiny white of the jacket, and the spiky black shape of her hair against her pale skin. Sometimes when I look at my favorite drawings in the book, they’re really just a few ragged drybrush strokes forming her jacket.

• What is it like working with a high caliber writer like Greg Rucka? Are you a fan of Rucka’s other work?

MS: Working with Greg is like playing. One of the unfortunate things about the way comics operates is that often collaborators never meet; sometimes they don’t even talk on the phone. But with Greg this has been a very personal collaboration, and we see each other often, and he’s very trusting and supportive, and has shown me such generosity despite my being so new to this whole thing. I’m not just a fan of his other work, I’m a really big fan of Greg as a person.

And Detective Comics, the Batwoman story he’s doing with JH Williams III, is the most exciting comic book on the stands right now. I think there’s nothing that even competes with it.

• What sort of publishing schedule does Stumptown have?

MS: Stumptown is designed to be an ongoing series where each case Dex takes on will last four issues. Then we’ll take approximately four months to get the next arc going and publish again. So it’s ongoing but set up like little miniseries. I’m curious how we’re planning to number it, actually.

• How long do you both see Stumptown going on for?

As long as we have good ideas to put into it. Right now we’ve got a slew of them, and we’re really excited that people are interested in it. So as long as we have good stories to tell, I hope we’ll keep going. We’ve never discussed an ending.

• What can fans look forward to in upcoming issues of Stumptown?

MS: Greg has designed a pretty dense family story for Dex, and we’ll see that develop over time. And we have a very special issue coming up that I’m personally dying to draw. When that script comes in, I’m going to shut off my cellphone and cable TV and I’m going to get in my car and disappear for a month so I can just draw that to the best of my ability.

• Is there anything else that you would like readers to know about?

MS: I’m working on a story of my own called Day for Night about a child thief in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, and I’m really excited to get the time to draw that and show it to people. It’s a story that just keeps growing, and I’m going to have to put it on paper before it gets the best of me.

The other thing I want to say for sure is that I’m thrilled by how people have responded to the first issue of Stumptown. It has been exactly a week since the first issue came out and it has apparently already sold out, which was a real surprise. You spend most of the time in seclusion, obsessing over the folds in shirts or whether an elbow bends in a certain way, or “line quality”, and you don’t know if anyone will care when you’re done. I hope everyone will stick with it, because it’s a story that deepens as it unfolds, and it will reward you if you keep up with it.

Thanks to Matthew Southworth for taking the time out of his schedule to do this interview!

Remember that Stumptown #1 has sold out at the distribute level now, so get to your local comic store and grab yours while you still can!

Check below to see the inked first page of Stumptown #2, along with all the preliminary cover sketches found in this interview!

Also, click here to see a five-page preview of Stumptown #1

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