The insanely cool Ash Wood

Who’d want to put down Australia’s gift to Metal Gear Solid? Nobody we’d want to know.

The phone call with internationally-acclaimed, Perth-based artist Ash Wood has been going for almost two hours, and the conversation has become more of a chat than an interview. My feet are up on my desk and the audio cassette in my recorder ran out a good 10 minutes ago.
    Somehow, the topic of elitism has come up and Ash starts to tell me about a few instances where Australian designers have put down his work. I quickly slip my feet off the desk and lean in towards the speaker phone.

‘WHAT? Why would they want to do that?’ I ask. ‘Why would anyone want to say that Ashley Wood isn’t cool?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Ash. His typically laconic tone, slightly English in accent, carries for the first time the barest hint of wounded indignation. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘that’s how you should start your article: why would anyone want to say that Ash Wood’s not cool?’
    We take a moment to laugh uncontrollably, and I jokingly agree to his suggestion. But inwardly I’m already dismissing the idea, certain that I’ll begin this piece with some uber-sharp reference to Ash’s emotionally charged Metal Gear Solid art, his obsession with drawing women and robots, or his grand plan for reclaiming the videogame industry from corporate bean counters and committees.
    Only now, looking back over the transcripts and revisiting his art, do I realise the importance of ‘cool’ to Ash Wood.
    For many Australians, cool is something we’re marketed; something engineered; something we see in trashy magazines draped around the actor/singer/sporting hero that’s promoting it.
    Cool is why we have on-display DVD collections in our lounge rooms, and why we shell out a hundred bucks for a game such as Sports Manager 2005, when it has about 10 dollars worth of extra features over the 2004 edition.
    Cool is beating a 3D model to a pulp with a lamp post in the latest licensed game of whatever.
    For 35-year-old Ash, however, cool is something else; something much more personal. It’s an internal monologue, a motivation, an outlook, a moral and creative code. It’s who you are and what you do when you’re being true to yourself.
    But cool is also what makes Ash dangerous.
    You hear it in the conversations at comic shops, where his name takes on mythical proportions. Twenty-somethings, standing behind the counter, speak of him in conspiratorial tones. They talk of his art—his work on titles such as Popbot, Lore and Automatic Kafka—as if it contains secret messages. As if the very lines and textures contain the trapped souls of the characters they portray.
    Perhaps they do. Perhaps that’s why Ash’s art whispers to you when no-one is looking. Why it contains such an intangible depth—an ambiguity and emotional complexity that lets readers think for themselves; that lets them supplant their own emotions, live their own fears and fantasies.
    More likely, though, the soul trapped there is Ash’s. A symbiotic cross between an underground revolutionary and Sniper Wolf, the deadly, but conflicted, female assassin that graces the pages of the Metal Gear Solid comic Ash works on. A soul forged from the fires of criticism and self-doubt, beautiful in its vulnerability and honesty.
    ‘I wear my life on my sleeve,’ admits Ash, when asked. ‘With my art, I’m not pretending. Everything I draw is special to me, which is why I don’t do a lot of jobs. I don’t want to do stuff I’m not interested in, I want to do art that matters to me. Whether it’s naked girls riding robots or portraits of cats, it’s got to mean something.

    ‘When you see really good art, your initial reaction is, “Wow. That’s really great.” But then it seems like an automatic self-doubt will cut in and you’ll start to judge yourself. I’ve felt pretty ill over some people’s art in the past, and it can sometimes take me one or two days of looking at my own stuff thinking, “What pedestrian crap”, before I can see the value in it.
    ‘It’s hard. But I think that’s what drives creative people—the knowledge that we do today is going to be better in a year anyway. That’s a talent we all have to develop: to do what we do and move on.’ For Ash, that wasn’t an easy lesson to learn.
    ‘For a long time I was always overly critical. I hated everything I did and I didn’t see any value in it. I was too overly influenced by other artists, and when I thought I had done something good, people would say, “Oh, that just looks like so and so.”. That deflates you.’
    Not as deflating, of course, as Ash’s first experience of the world-renowned San Diego comic convention—a story he tells with great relish.
    ‘I was getting on a small plane from L. A. to San Diego,’ says Ash, ‘and I was pretty excited. I noticed another guy who was obviously a comic fan—you can just see them! And he said, “You going to the comic conference?” I don’t know why I said this, but I said, “Yeah. Hey what about that guy; that Ashley Wood?” And he said, “Yeah, he sucks!” ‘I thought, “No way! Out of the whole country I’m sitting next to the guy who thinks Ash Wood sucks!”
    ‘I sat there for a bit and nodded like an idiot. Then I said, “I’m Ashley Wood.” It was his turn to look sick!
    ‘Back then it wasn’t priceless; I wasn’t a hardened old bastard. But time rolls on and soon enough you’ve got editors telling you you’re crap to your face. Luckily, my wife would say, “They’re wrong. You’ve got to move on.”
    ‘So now I’m the jellyfish of art. I drift along and do stuff I enjoy. I don’t really care about having a consistent style to please cult fans or a group of people. In the end I want to be remembered as somebody who did something cool and heartfelt, not somebody who made a lot of money.
    ‘Maybe that’s what makes artists different from each other. McDonald’s tastes nice, but it isn’t great food. I think art’s like that. There’s a lot of art that you like, but when you dig deeper it’s really shallow. It doesn’t have any longevity.
    ‘I really care about what I’m doing; I’ve always cared about it. And I’ve been doing it for a long time.’
    Almost half his life, in fact; since Ash was 19. But the influences on Ash’s style can be traced back much further.
    As an eight-year-old, Ash and his brother began reading 2000AD—a mature age, sci-fi comic-slash-magazine—while those around him were buying Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Richie Rich. It was Ash’s first taste of comics, but by no means his last.
    From school, Ash went to art and design college, but after a couple of years realised the old methods he was being taught were irrelevant, due to the desktop publishing revolution.
    ‘I just sort of quit,’ says Ash. ‘And one day I woke up and thought, “I’ll go on the dole and figure this out myself”.’
    By that stage, Ash had started up his own fanzine that dealt with comics and English music from the late 80s Manchester scene. But it was meeting his wife of today, Paula, that would see Ash make a career out of art.
    ‘This may sound corny and cliché,’ Ash admits, ‘but Paula’s really the woman behind the man. I’m good at what I do, but I have someone who’s very business savvy, and a good cheer team for when things go bad. She and I were able to get these magazines rolling with no experience and no idea. It sounds crazy, but we were dealing with bands all around the world; interviewing bands like The Cure. We had the record labels eating out of our hands with just bullshit.
    ‘Early on, I was able to land on my feet and we just never stopped. We did some magazines, then I got a job working for 2000AD, which was very cool. And from there I got some work in America.’

    While Ash initially refers to his move and career in America as ‘blah, blah, blah’, the list of people Ash has worked with reads like a mini Who’s Who of the comic book and videogame worlds. Companies such as DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Konami, IDW, DC Comics and Todd McFarlane Productions.
    Perhaps, the most influential of these, though, was Todd McFarlane Productions, where he worked directly with one of the comic book industry’s modern luminaries, Todd McFarlane.
    ‘That was the point where everything changed for me,’ says Ash. ‘Everything I’m doing today harks back to Todd; he was like a subtle mentor; a very candid, super-intelligent guy.
    ‘We had arguments all day at some stages, but the fact that you could argue with him over art is great. You could sit there in your office and debate these things and he’d put up with it. Thanks to him, my confidence was built up. He believed in me enough to let me pretty well do anything I wanted to within his company. And he’s also the guy who gave me the cahones—the balls—to say, “I’ll do whatever I want”.
    ‘Unfortunately, like all great myths, eventually I had to move on from him because what he taught me about being an individual, about being in command of your own destiny, went against working for him.
    ‘It sucked,’ admits Ash, ‘because I had a sweet job and a big house, and I put it all out on a limb. And everything went to shit for six months. I couldn’t figure out any sort of self-identity and people assumed I was still working for Todd, so it was very hard to get work.’
    Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Ash returned to Australia with Paula and their two children. But working from Perth proved difficult. Ash had gone from the very international hubs of American cities, where he had been surrounded by the best in his field, to a city that even Australian’s consider isolated.
    Fortunately, says Ash, there were people who were ‘willing to take a chance’ on someone who ‘happened to be doing some different-looking stuff to the normal art they were getting’. And, before long, Ash started to secure a number of highly sought-after clients and commissions.
    One such title is the Metal Gear Solid comic. Based on the Metal Gear Solid videogame series, which follows the action of an ex-deep cover operative who’s been called back into service, the comic completely reinvents the franchise in a way few could have imagined.
    Marrying up with an intelligent storyline by Kris Oprisko, Ash’s mature images are compelling with their psychologically dense digital graphic art and traditional media-styling. Panels clash powerfully with the reader’s perception; and one wonders what the pages would be like without words, if the art was to speak all on its own.

    Once again I’m left with difficult task of reconciling the fast-talking, easy-going person I chatted to on the phone, and an artist whose work is undeniably gifted.
    Not that the Metal Gear Solid series started with anything less than its own brilliance. Conceived by Japanese designers Hideo Kajima and Yoji Shinkawa, the original Metal Gear Solid game garnered as much critical acclaim for its design and conception as it did for its unique style of gameplay. As such, getting the license to make a comic book series wasn’t easy.
    ‘Back when I worked for McFarlane, there was a guy there by the name of Ted Adams,’ explains Ash. ‘One of the things he always wanted to get was the license for Todd to do the comic. But Kajima was very protective of his work; about every facet of MGS. He’s the auteur. He’s a fantastic guy; he’s got a cool mind and he really cares about what he does. But I guess he didn’t want McFarlane to publish it.
    ‘So, when Adams started up his own company IDW, back in ’98 or ’97, and were looking for ideas, the joke was, “Let’s try and get MGS. We couldn’t get it back then, let’s try now.”
    ‘The word from Konami was, “He’s not going to want to do it.” But they put in a proposal and he loved it. It’s just one of those things.
    ‘At the time, the proposal was to do original stories, not to adapt the videogame. But due to people wanting to take small steps, it was, “Well, let’s adapt the first games so we can all figure out how we work together as a team.”
    ‘When I initially started working on the comic, I followed the game very closely. I was looking at screen shots and I was playing the Twin Snakes version of the game. But they were saying, “That’s fine, but we want you to really push it. Be as abstract as you like and change the way it looks.”
    ‘In truth, I’m almost disbelieving of that. You get emails with their feedback and they love what I’m doing. Kajima says, ‘Go further and don’t worry about following the game. Do what you want. You make it Ashley Wood’s MGS; it’s not mine.’
    ‘I don’t believe comics should be someone standing out the front of the class telling you everything,’ adds Ash. ‘I find it great that I can bring my own imagination to the story, and that some things can be ambiguous. It’s more of a European style, where the art can set the mood and propel the story, but a lot of it is left open for the reader to fill in the gaps. A lot of the people who don’t like my art seem to think there’s a laziness or a lack of interest in what I’m doing. But what I’m trying to do is choreograph a page of art.
    ‘I’ve just finished issue 12 of the MGS comic and it’s the most graphic and stark one yet. This is going to sound pompous and up myself, but to me it’s a sort of zenith; it’s how my Dark Knight (a stylised Batman comic) would be. There’s a lot of silhouettes. It’s very gestural.
    ‘That said, it’s taken all 12 issues for me to get to that point and to have the nerve to do it exactly how I want to. Have I drawn the Metal Gear Rex blowing up the right way? I don’t know. Some fans might want to see the rivets or the Metal Gear the right way round. But I’ve been striving for an aesthetic, and I’m proud of it. I think I’ve done something really cool with it.
    While Ash jokes that one day it’s ‘just going to snap, and [they’re] going to say, “This is shit. What have you been doing?”, the level of artistic freedom he’s enjoyed on the project contributed to his founding of 7174, a collective of artists determined to have full creative control over their own videogame, film and comic book development.
    ‘7174 is like my grand plan,’ says Ash.
    ‘Over the years I’ve made a lot of friends and met a lot of influential people and you end up having the same conversations about how things should be created.’ Ash adds, ‘but nothing ever changes, especially in videogames.
    ‘I know enough about the industry and how games are made to know that there aren’t that many ways of doing them. It doesn’t matter what engine you’re using or what application, most people should be able to create great looking games. But some companies, they don’t get it. I want to break that veil. In the past I’ve done a lot of consulting with Microsoft and I’ve worked with Konami, and sometimes these people can’t see the trees for the forest.

    ‘A lot smarter people than me realise that things could be cooler if they weren’t run by committees; if they didn’t get public opinion groups in; if they didn’t have people in suits counting how much a producer or art director is spending.
    ‘I grew up on computer games, right back to the Vic 20s, Commodore 64s and Amigas. That was back in the day when two or three people made a game. Now, the standard line is, “Oh, that’s dead. You need 20 to 30 people to make a game these days. Yada, yada, yada.”
    ‘I don’t believe that. I still believe a great game could be made by five people in someone’s bedroom. To make a summer blockbuster movie you can spend $200 million, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be a good movie. So, maybe the games won’t have voiceovers by some famous actor, or the score won’t be done by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, but they can still be a good game.
    ‘I guess I want to get back to games as art, with more freedom, more self-expression. I want more people producing what they want, not what they need to in order to keep their job, or to keep other people happy.
    ‘That’s what 7174 is all about. And that model can still make money, still satisfy real world objectives and still make great books, great games, great movies.
    Ash is not naïve about the process. In the past he’s seen people try and do it, and has been involved himself, but he says they’ve always jumped in too quickly and made too many mistakes. It’s a lesson Ash is determined not to repeat.
    ‘At the moment, 7174 is like a consultancy where I’m working with some videogame companies, helping them to develop stuff and work with a network of other artists. I bring them all together and hope to make things better.
    ‘Down the line—maybe some time late in 2006—I want to start creating stuff. Almost like a record label. Then I’m going to put out some books, some toys; pretty well anything that’s fun and cool.
    ‘I think people 25 and up are one of the first generations that haven’t shrugged off their childhood. We were never told to grow up. We were never told it’s wrong to like toys in your 30s. I think it’s why the creativity of the world has never been better.
    ‘Anyone who believes any medium is dead—whether that be music, books, comics or videogames—is out of touch; it’s never been better. The people running the show now, the generation I’m talking about, they have no inhibitions. You don’t have to lie and say you don’t like comics or toys anymore. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to pretend. You can go to a party and you don’t have to lie about what you do.
    ‘We’ve seen geeks become cool. In fact, anyone can become cool as long as they’re being themselves and trying to do something different.
    ‘It doesn’t matter who you are anymore, just as long as you’re following your own thing. I think people can appreciate that.’

Update: True to Ash’s words, since concluding this interview, Ash has been involved in a revolutionary blending of games and comics, with the release of the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel for the PSP. In the words of Konami, “The story of the first Metal Gear Solid videogame comes alive with incredible animations, realistic sound effects and a unique scan and search gameplay mechanic that lets players build their own virtual Metal Gear encyclopedia.”

To find out more about Ashley Wood, be sure to visit his art site or his blog. More information on the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel is available here.

Words: Drew Taylor