James Burton, independent comic artist

In 2007, local comic-book artist James Burton was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma. Now in remission, Burton is using that experience to fuel and inspire his stories. By day, Burton works at Pride Industries, but together with co-creator James D. Schumacher III, is working on a comic series called Inheritance. The comic has sold out at the last three Sac-Cons, with a nine-issue series in the works. The first issue, Inheritance: Binding of Three, Part 1, saw a release through Outpouring Comics on April 15. Burton, also an illustration intern for SN&R back in 1996, got heavy with us about the supernatural, cancer and, well, nudity and motorcycles.

Where did the idea for Inheritance come from?

My co-creator’s family has kind of like a supernatural family background, where his mom was a writer and whatnot. When she died, there were a bunch of conversations between he and she, and a lot of the story comes from that interaction between the two of them.

How did you meet James?

[Schumacher] and I met right after I got in remission. He had put a thing up on Craigslist about storyboarding and we worked on a couple of projects in Nevada on an independent film.

What’s the basic story of Inheritance?

Inheritance is about a family dealing with a curse from their great-great-grandfather across multiple generations. He’s basically trying to extinguish them for disobeying him. And so there’s two generations trying to deal with that curse. … Part of the story, the main character is dealing with the fact that he’s put his mom in a mental institution and she’s dying of chemo, as all this stuff is going on. We’re bringing in aspects of my experience along with it, where I’m the one showing what it’s like to be in chemotherapy.

Why are comics a good medium for a story like this?

Well, we’re not limited by anything but busting our ass. Which we have to do, comics is a labor intensive process. But that’s our limit. We don’t have to worry about special effects budgets, we just have to worry about how much work it’s going to take once we figure out how to do it. And that’s it. The rest of it just comes down to us.

How long does it take you to draw and ink an issue?

Inheritance is extremely labor intensive, and I’m doing all the visuals myself, except for the lettering, so I wouldn’t use it as the best example. To give you an idea of what it normally takes, it usually takes about eight hours to pencil a page, it takes about eight hours to ink a page and then it takes about eight hours to color a page. So each person takes about a day. Because I’m doing it, I can use certain techniques to shore up some of that time.

How did you get involved in making comics?

I wanted to do comics since I was like 8 years old; I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. My dad got me started into it, he worked in another town and one day he just dropped off this chalkboard for me before he left Sunday night and said “Draw me naked ladies and motorcycles,” because he was an old-school biker. And so pretty much from then on I’ve just been spending all my time drawing. … It connected with who I was and it connected with me wanting to do something for him … as far as the comics, I just kind of grew up as a storyteller, it was my niche, it was the only thing that ever made sense to me, was making stories and honestly drawing them out. It was the center of my chaos, for me.

What’s your favorite comic-book based movie?

Even though I love the stuff that Marvel’s doing now—it’s not Iron Man or Captain America or any of that other stuff. My favorites [are] still the original Crow and the original Turtles movie.

What do you hope people take away most from Inheritance?

People lose something as they’re growing up. They lose the belief that things are going to be OK. The news media and how we treat each other strips that away from us. One of the points of Inheritance is for people to understand that yeah, the horrible crap is going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t survive it. And that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to get through it. For me, that’s a big part of anything that I do. Anything that somebody reads or gets out of my work, it should always be that there’s always going to be a way to make it through the darkness no matter how dark it gets.