Cary Nord interview – On Mutant X, Conan and creator owned work

At Heroes Dutch Comic Con Winter Edition 2024 at Jaarbeurs Utrecht there was a great line-up of comic book artists. One of them was Canadian artist Cary Nord. Having worked for DC Comics and Marvel, Cary is perhaps most famous for his Eisner Award work on Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics. At the moment, Cary is focusing on his creator owned work such as FOL’KLOR. Jeroen took the opportunity to talk to Cary Nord at HDCC about his work and influences. Read our Cary Nord interview! 

Also read our interview with Senior Editor of DC Comics Brittany Holzherr. 

Canadian comic book artist Cary Nord has been working in comics for over 32 years. Ever since he discovered you could draw comics for a living, Cary has been drawing. After sending in his portfolio, Cary got hired to do three ten page stories in DC Showcase ’93. Later he worked on Wonder Woman. 

At Marvel, Cary worked on Mutant X, a multiverse story before the multiverse was everywhere and Daredevil. In 2004, Cary won an Eisner Award for his work on Conan. This year he returned to Hyboria to illustrate a Conan story by Frank Tieri in Titan Comic’s The Savage Sword of Conan. He also completed his first creator-owned fantasy series FOL’KLOR, which was crowd-funded through Kickstarter. Owning many comics which are drawn by Cary Nord – with Mutant X being a personal favourite – Jeroen jumped at the chance to talk to Cary (and get his comics signed). Read our Cary Nord interview to learn what makes this multitalented artist tick!

Cary Nord interview 

• What comics did you read growing up in Canada?

• Where comics readily available where you lived?

Yes, you could buy them at comic book stores or in corner stores and gas stations.

• Reading X-Men, were you interested in the appearances of Alpha Flight?

I liked all comics, I wanted to read them all. But I had a small allowance, so I had to choose. I was always collecting X-Men, but I did have a few Alpha Flight comics here and there. But mostly anything X, like Wolverine, that kind of stuff.

• Wolverine is from Canada too! Did you think Alpha Flight and Wolverine are representative of Canada? Did they get it right?

Well, John Byrne is Canadian. He was writing X-Men in the eighties. He understood. Other Americans maybe not so much.

• How did you break into comics yourself?

I was about fourteen when I realised people did this for a living. From that point on I was drawing all the time. I went to art college in Calgary, where I’m from, and there I started meeting people who where mailing portfolios. That’s when you could still mail portfolios to Marvel and DC. So I started sending packages to them and they gave me a job right away. It was a little ten page story in 1993. And that was it. It’s been 32 years now.

• What was your first work?

It was a book called DC Showcase. It consisted of little ten page stories they would hand out to new talent to see how they would handle it. I did ten pages in three different issues.

• Do you have any advice for people showing their portfolios in regard to storytelling? It’s easy to do one page illustrations or covers, but how do you train for the storytelling aspect of comics?

That’s a good question! Work from scripts which are available online. You can find sample scripts easily. Marvel and DC won’t hire you nowadays if you haven’t been published somewhere, so you have to have something published. You can self-publish and make up your own story.

• Has it changed, the way in which you tell stories in comics? Is the approach to camera angles and such influenced by movies and streaming series which are now everywhere?

I’m sure it is. There is more of an awareness now there’s so much of it out there. I have studied both, you can learn from both media on how to pose pictures.

• How did you develop your own style? When did you feel comfortable with your art?

Oh gosh, I’m still working at it! I always tell people to not worry about style. That will come. You can’t sit down and decide your style. It is a collection of your influences. If you’re a big fan of certain artists, if you like the way that artist draws hands and that artist draws faces, you start putting them together. Not even in a conscious way, just naturally it will happen. Then you’ll have your own style.

• Do you draw with pen and paper, or also in digital?

My professional philosophy in the last years has been digital. I’m actually trying to get back into drawing with pencil and paper again. It’s becoming a lost art. Kids have no idea, they’ve only ever done digital. I noticed that the more I use digital, the more I lose the skill of pen and paper. It’s hard to put down a line and that’s it. You’re so used to erase and fix it. Especially with ink, you have to put down a line and that’s your line. You need to make it right. It’s a different instinct.

• How do you approach the different books you do? You’ve done Conan, which is different from the world of superheroes. How did you approach Conan after doing superheroes?

Conan was really easy. I was a big Frank Frazetta fan. And Marc Silvestri was the first artist I fell in love with. He was doing X-Men and Wolverine at the time. His style was very much like Frazetta. Somehow, through him; he used to do King Conan in the day. So I got into that world through back issues.

And that whole world, like Savage Sword of Conan back in the day, was expensive for a teenage kid with no job. I couldn’t buy them too often, but I did have one or two and loved them. So when I got the chance to do Conan, all that influence that I grew up on, came pouring out. I didn’t really think about it too much, I just found it really easy to grab onto.

• You could enter the Hyborian age without difficulty? You didn’t have to do research?

I did research and started reading the books of Robert E. Howard for the first time. This was all before Google, I had to go to bookstores and libraries. I tried to find books on medieval architecture and costumes. It was tough to find that information before the internet. You just had to get lucky.

And I lived in Canada of course. Western Canada is very new. Our cities are around one hundred years old. I didn’t get to Europe until after I finished Conan. When I did, I understood his world better. The small streets, the alleys. All the stuff is everywhere you look in Europe. That changed my mind a lot.

• Is there a lot of Canada in The Savage Sword of Conan #3 from Titan Comics you did recently? There is a lot of snow and wilderness in that story.

There’s snow for sure. I know snow, absolutely!

• How do you differentiate between Hyboria and say Middle-Earth? It’s both fantasy, but Conan is more Sword & Sorcery. How do you keep the boundary between high fantasy and Sword & Sorcery?

I think there are some tropes in high fantasy, both story wise and visually, I wouldn’t use in Conan. His world is much more savage. There is artistry, but if you think about Elves, you think about art nouveau and The Lord of the Rings version of the Elves. You don’t see that world in Conan at all.

You stay away from those design elements and go for a more rugged style. If you think of a medieval village, then you have to think about that, but 10.000 years earlier. It has the same kind of ideas – a house, a shack, a medieval castle – but devolved to 10.000 years earlier. Imagine how that would look. That’s the Conan world.

• More towards horror instead of fairy tales?

Exactly!

• Conan is very popular at the moment again because of Titan Comics and before that Marvel. What is the enduring quality of Conan? Why do we keep reading this same story over and over?

I think Conan is a guy that is easy to admire. He has his own code that he sticks to. I’m not even quite sure what it is, but we know what Conan’s going to do. If you say the wrong thing to Conan, he is either going to smack you and you’re getting off lucky, or he’s going to split your skull. He is a guy you got to be careful with. We all know that, we all respect that. Somewhere in us, I think, we all have a little bit of Conan we want to unleash. Engage the world on our own terms.

• I think if the outside world is coming at us, either through politics or war like at the moment, Conan will become popular again. You want someone to fight back against that.

Yes, he makes his own rules, he’s not afraid of anything. He’s up for any challenge. I think people can grab onto that.

• So what makes Conan as a character “Conan”? You can put him in all kinds of different situations, all kinds of settings. He’s been an Avenger even.

Was he?

• Yes, in Savage Avengers, with Wolverine, Punisher, Venom, Elektra and Doctor Voodoo. It was by Gerry Duggan and Mike Deodato Jr. Even there, he’s still Conan. How do you approach that as an artist? Keeping Conan true to himself?

I don’t know if you can put him in modern clothes, but I suppose you could. It’s his attitude. He has that scowl and the imposing figure. It’s his attitude which keeps him Conan. I haven’t seen him next to a superhero, but I can imagine what that would look like. He’s a guy that, even when he’s outmatched, he’ll fight you. If you say the wrong thing, he’s going to stand up for himself. That’s what makes him Conan.

• You’ve worked on Mutant X, which was a multiverse story before the multiverse was everywhere. How did you approach the world of mutants in that series? I loved the series, because it was new and you didn’t have the multiverse every day everywhere back then.

I came in after artist Tom Raney. He did the first books, so I followed up. It was really fun, because it was my first real arena where I could draw the X-Men. It wasn’t quite the same, but they where the characters that I loved as a kid. I understood them all very well. I understood what writer Howard Mackie was doing with them. Making them the same, but different.

It was very easy for me to go into that world. I don’t know how conscious I was of doing it, it was mostly instinct. They asked to draw Madelyne Pryor, so I put my spin on it. All the concept work was already done I think, so I didn’t have to think too much. But it was a fun world.

• Was it the same for Ultimate Human? There you did a version of the Hulk in the Ultimate Universe. Was it the same process? Did you just dive into it and see what would happen?

Hulk was hard to draw. He’s such a big character. I tend to draw – I won’t say realistic – but more normal proportions? For my brain to understand Hulk was a bit tricky. I remember I was at a bar with some friends at the time I was thinking about the Hulk, doing some sketches. I was standing there and got shoved from behind while holding my drink. After kind of pushing back, I turned around and saw this giant, steroid man who was mad at me for pushing back. I thought: ‘oh my, this guy is going to kill me’. But I was also thinking ‘this is the Hulk’! He was the size of this table all the way around, with a tiny head and enormous shoulders. I was scared, but I was also taking some mental snapshots. That’s how I arrived at my Hulk.

• You should meet Olivier Richters who’s a guest here at the comic con! He’s a giant of a man.

I will keep an eye out for him.

• What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I’m waiting for some creator owned stuff to get the green light, which will probably be in January. It’s some concepts I came up with years ago together with James Robinson (Starman, Superman: New Krypton). Then COVID happened and it got shelved. We’re now talking about bringing it to new companies and see what happens.

• Are you reading comics if you have the time?

I haven’t been reading comics at the moment at all, I don’t know what’s going on (laughs).

• You’re concentrating on your own work?

Yeah! I’m invested in creator owned work at the moment. I like being able to have a say in the concept and what characters would look like. It’s very different compared to being handed a character that everyone’s drawn a million times. It’s a lot of fun creating a new character and thinking about his backstory.

• Can you tell anything about your new project? Is it science fiction, is it superheroes or a detective?

The story is science fiction. It’s set in the future, based on the concept of soldiers who are modified for cyberworks. They have a bunch of cyber parts and they can be resurrected from the dead. These soldiers can go in and you can blow the hell out them. They’ll get revived with these parts and the science of that age. Instead of needing new soldiers, you sent the same soldiers in.

• And the story will be about what that does to their minds?

That’s exactly it! What happens when these guys keep waking up over and over? They start deteriorating and going crazy.

• That’s a good story for this day and age.

Yes, with Elon Musk it is. With cyber wars, robots, neurolinks, all that stuff. We’re on the cusp of that becoming possible. Which is the first time in history.

• We’ll keep an eye out for your creator owned work!

Yes. Also check out FOL’KLOR, which was a Kickstarter and is out now. It’s one I did all by myself, all the writing, the art, the colouring.

• I will, thank you so much.

My pleasure!

Where to find Cary

Want to know more about Cary Nord after reading this Cary Nord interview? Go to his website Cary Nord comics and look for him on Twitter at @carynordCOMICS and Instagram at @carynord. You can find Cary Nord’s work at Marvel, DC, Valiant Comics, Titan Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Lethal Comics and more. Cary was present at Heroes Dutch Comic Con 2024 Winter Edition.

Want to read more interviews such as our Cary Nord interview? Go to our Interviews section!

Cary Nord interview: © 2024-2024 Modern Myths – Images: © Marvel, DC Comics, Lethal Comics, Titan Comics, Dark Horse Comics