Comics Legend Geof Darrow Talks Big Guy's 20th Anniversary

This fall marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most revered cult comics of the 1990s. Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, written by Frank Miller (300, Sin City) and drawn by Geof Darrow, tells the story a giant monster destroying Japan. Rusty the Boy Robot and metal-man Big Guy are sent in to save the world and stop the threat. Though the premise sounds straightforward, the artwork and storytelling is anything but. The comic is filled with digs on American interventionism, the attention span of the masses, and the overreach of science… and it’s a damn fun read, too. As a new hardcover edition of the two-issue comic releases, The Creators Project spoke to artist Geof Darrow about his experiences and influences working on the comic.

“I’d done a book previously with Frank Miller called Hard Boiled,” Darrow explains, “and we wanted to do something else together. I always wanted to do a superhero robot thing, and he said ‘well then let’s just do one.’” The traditional writer/artist process is thrown out the window for Big Guy, “[Frank Miller] wrote the script for Hard Boiled and I’d often go off on a tangent with it. It drove him crazy.” Darrow explains that when it came time to create Big Guy, “he just gave me three or four paragraphs and I drew the whole thing. Almost in the way that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee did Marvel comics, where they’d just add the dialogue.”

The monster in the comic constantly taunts the humans it terrorizes, which may be a result of the way Darrow illustrated the work. “I didn’t think there would be any dialogue in it. I said, ‘There won’t be much dialogue unless you have the monster talk,’ so Frank had the monster talk. [Laughs]”

Darrow’s known for his sharp style, and near-pointillist approach to detail in his illustrations. As influences on his work, Darrow cites Otomo’s Akira, Jack Kirby, Mike Mignola, Sam Raimi movies, François Boucq, and, naturally, “those old Godzilla movies, which I always found funny.” When we ask him to talk about his iconic style, he answers, “I like to think I’m creating a specific world that I hope doesn’t look like anything anyone else is doing. I worked closely with an artist called Jean Giraud, Mœbius, and he had his own world, his own universe. I hope I’m doing that. I never wanted to create a generic world. While there’s a lot of generic stuff in it, it’s my own universe. And I just try to draw things correctly… I might not succeed, but I try.”

As for the cultural criticism, the comic’s full of people who don’t seem to notice all the terror going on around them. There’s a guy smoking a cigarette on the corner as people run in terror. There’s a woman clutching a toy cow while running away. “We’re so oblivious to what is going on around us,” Darrow says, “until it’s too late. Then we become very protective of what we have. [In the comic] people just aren’t paying attention, and there’s a lot of that going on today, too.”

The Shaolin Cowboy traversing the wilds. Panels from Shaolin Cowboy. Written and Illustrated by Geof Darrow, Colors by Dave Stewart. Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.

These days Darrow works on his comic Shaolin Cowboy. When we ask if he even wants to go back to the world of Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot in an ongoing series, he answers, “A little bit, I don’t enjoy it as much as I enjoy what I’m drawing now because it’s just so crazy.” If Darrow’s current work is crazier than a giant lizard-monster getting missiles shoved up its nose, we’re all on board.

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