One major role of the comic book artist is to bring a world that would otherwise exist only in the imagination to visual, almost tangible, life.  When countless fans have a very fixed preconceived idea of what that world consists of, based largely on the hundreds of books of literature that have documented it in the past, the artist’s task becomes that much more daunting.

Doug Wheatley, who has been a professional comic book illustrator for fifteen years, faces that task on a regular basis. The Winnipeg-based artist, who has in the past done work on such titles as Superman: Last Son of Earth and Blade: The Vampire Hunter, has spent the last six years working heavily on one of the most well-known franchises in the world – Star Wars.

“Dark Horse first contacted me to do a Star Wars cover,” says Wheatley of his beginnings on the legendary franchise, “then about a year and a half later they got back in touch with me and I talked to them about doing more Star Wars work. I had already done some work for Dark Horse on Aliens, and a while before that on a comic series they put out based on the videogame Mist.”

In the time since then, Wheatley’s Star Wars credits have included work on the titles Star Wars: Empire, Star Wars: Republic, Star Wars: Dark Times, Star Wars: Legacy, and an official comic book adaptation of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. This is in addition to several other one-shots and covers he has done within the franchise.

Though Wheatley didn’t get into the Star Wars novels growing up, he credits the movies as having a significant impact on him when he was a kid.

“Just like there’s a Y generation and an X generation, I think there’s a generation that should rightfully be called the Star Wars generation,” says Wheatley, “Since I’ve been working on Star Wars, I’ve ran into a lot of people that saw the original movie at the same time I did, which was around age eight. Seeing it at that age has a profound effect on the rest of your life. If you can imagine something so new and fresh that captures the excitement of Flash Gordon and the sci-fi trends of the day in film form – it’s huge.”

If indeed there is a Star Wars generation, they have never been found wanting for more content.  There has been more Star Wars media – be it in books, comics, cartoons,  etc. – than almost any other franchise in history.

“By nature, I research what I do,” explains Wheatley, “If I’m working on Superman, I research Superman. When I did Aliens, I was working on a title that had its own fan base that would cite you if you didn’t do the right thing at the right time. But none of that was like working on Star Wars. The reality of what happened to me with the Star Wars gig, is that I found out really quick that I had a lot of catching up to do.”

According to Wheatley, working on the Star Wars titles for Dark Horse has been like a crash course in how to effectively illustrate what is, essentially, historical fiction.

“Almost every time I got a new script, the writer would lift this rare alien race that was used in some minor novel way, way back when. There’s no real visual reference for something like that, so I’d have to get on the net and look for somebody who did some sort of drawing based on that alien, or somebody who had a more detailed description about it. Just something that would give me a clearer path to getting it right, so that I didn’t have to hear from the fans later saying, ‘you got it wrong’.”

Wheatley says that the biggest baptism for him (working in the Star Wars universe) came when he did the Episode III comic book adaptation. He was involved in the project from a very early stage, and became immersed in the creative process as long as a year and a half before the movie actually hit theatres.

“Having the privilege to see it develop, and to be in the middle of drawing something and get a call from someone saying, ‘this character has changed, we’re sending you the new design’ – you learn a lot about how it’s all put together.”

On the flipside of this coin, Wheatley says that it was occasionally intimidating to pencil characters that had yet to be even seen in a film. At one point he was actually instructed to illustrate General Grievous, before he had seen any point of reference. This would have required him to literally make up an image of one of the main villains that would be in Episode III. Fortunately for Wheatley, he was able to push for some solid visual cues before committing to a drawn character design.

Skipping forward to his current work, the latest book that Wheatley has been working on is Star Wars: Dark Times. Dark Times is an ongoing series that has been written by Mick Harrison since its debut in 2006. The series, now in its fourth plot arc titled Blue Harvest, has received steady critical acclaim since its inception – thanks both to Harrison’s creativity and Wheatley’s incredibly detailed art.

“I honestly think Mick is a brilliant writer,” says Wheatley, “Every time I get one of his scripts, he breathes so much life into these characters that I feel very challenged attempting to even come close to interpreting everything. Time is not on my side, and I often think to myself that in order to capture everything he’s got in there I would need at least two years per arc.”

Wheatley isn’t exaggerating when he says that time is a luxury he doesn’t have. Between his work on Dark Times, his work on a few other projects that he can’t speak about yet, and time set aside for his kids, he often finds himself stretched pretty thin.

“I have two kids that I absolutely love, and any free time that I can pull out of every week goes to them,” says Wheatley, “and it is a challenge. One thing that I’m working very hard on is resolving some deadline issues I’ve had with Dark Times. I am frantically and very intently working on ironing those out, and I’m very close to doing that – it all comes down to the fact that I want to draw so much from the material, and it being Star Wars means it’s already labour intensive.”

Wheatley is of course referring to the high level of detail and research that goes into a Star Wars comic as opposed to, he gives as an example, a Superman comic.  To do Superman, Wheatley says he would go through two or three seminal Superman books, pull some images central to Metropolis for reference, and, to be thorough, look at some photos of the New York skyline to help with realism.

To do Star Wars, Wheatley often goes through books upon books for reference, pouring through novels and fan illustration, checking and double-checking his sources for detail and accuracy. Tedious? Some might think so, but it’s clear that Wheatley loves what he does.

One thing that Wheatley would like to change in the future, is to break out of the pigeonhole he sees himself as having been put in as an exclusively science fiction artist. With a career that has been spent largely illustrating aliens, space emperors, vampires, and interterrestrial civilizations, Wheatley says that he’d like to have the opportunity to get involved with more superhero fare.

“I grew up on Chris Claremont’s X-Men, on Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Marc Silvestri,” says Wheatley, “That’s what I learned to draw from. I would love to do a run on one of the X-Men books, just because that’s what I grew up on. I’ve also been a huge Batman fan, ever since I read Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was the first Batman I ever actually read. I would absolutely love to have the chance to do more than just a pinup for that character, for Gotham City.”

Being a Batman fan myself, I feel compelled to say that I’d love to see a Doug Wheatley run on the caped crusader.

For those of you interested in following what Wheatley’s up to in the meantime, you can check out his blog, or Myspace page.