Nuno Pereira de Sousa: Light Brigade was published in Portugal on November. How did you get involved in the project, originally published by DC Comics?
Peter Snejbjerg: It started as it usually does – with a phone call or an email. I had been working with Peter Tomasi as my editor at DC Comics for a while, and one day he mentioned that he had this script he wanted to show me. I got the scene where the graveyard is being bombarded and the corpses are flying through the air and I thought, “oh yeah!”
NPS: Tell us more about your work in Light Brigade.
PS: Making comics is enormously rewarding, but to tell of the process is incredibly dull. I sat at my drawing table for one thousand five hundred hours, or thereabout. The best part was that I got to see a lot of classical WW2 movies and read a lot of the EC combat comics and call it work. And play Medal of Honor.
NPS: How was to work with Peter Tomasi?
PS: Smooth as a baby’s bum. We had a really good relationship.
NPS: Ten years later, Dark Horse published an hard cover edition. How did that happen?
PS: Well, DC didn’t want to renew the contract, and Tomasi is very good at keeping track of these things. We thought it would be too bad if it went of print, so he managed to get us in at Dark Horse.
NPS: If you could chose only one of your North American comics to be published in Portugal, besides Light Brigade, which one would you choose and why?
PS: Oh boy. All of them! But seriously, you should have a Portuguese version of A God Somewhere.
NPS: What about a non-American work?
PS: I have done a bit of work for French publishers, but what I am most excited about now is a project I am making for a German publisher, Cross Cult. It’s a fantasy series called The Orks. I hope that it really gets the wide international audience it will undoubtedly deserve.
NPS: Which comics genres do you think are the most read in Denmark?
PS: These days, I’d say modern Graphic Novels. But then, I’m not a publisher.
NPS: How is the comics market/industry in Denmark? The comics artists that would like to work only in comics have that possibility in Denmark or their internationalization is mandatory?
PS: Denmark is a country of five and a half million people, so very few comic book artist can support themselves on that market alone. Most either work in other genres too, or seek work abroad.
NPS: Tell us about your work for Disney comics.
PS: It’s a little sideline job. I only write them, I can’t draw in that style. It’s fun to something that someone else has to draw. I put in lots of horses and crowd scenes and laugh.
NPS: What are the major differences between the Disney comics produced in Denmark and in Italy?
PS: Not much, I think? Most of them are published in the same magazines, I believe.
NPS: Do you have any idea of the Disney comics readers age in Denmark?
PS: Kids, I’d say. 5 to 12 years old, maybe? That’s the group I have in mind when I write, anyway.
NPS: In which comics are you working now? Tells us something about each one of them.
PS: Just the Orks book. It’s a wonderful job, an adaption of a German book series written by a guy called Michael Peinkofer. It’s about two dimwitted Ork brothers, Balbok and Rammer, who get mixed up in a plot involving dwarves, wizards, elf princesses and a presumed treasure. It’s sort of like Laurel and Hardy meets Lord of the Rings with a lot of violence and low humor. Just my thing.
NPS: How do you imagine comics will be 20 years from now?
PS: Hopefully more or less where they are now – as a vital if minor sub-genre of popular culture.
NPS: What’s the importance of comics? What’s its value?
PS: Keeping the noble arts of storytelling and drawing alive in our world. And the fact that you can do it all by yourself, provided you have one thousand five hundred hours.
nota: imagens gentilmente cedidas pelo autor.
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