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Creator Interview – Chris Evenhuis

19th August 2021

Introduction Hey folks and welcome to the first ever written BGCP creator interview. We are lucky enough to be chatting today with Chris Evenhuis. Chris Evenhuis is an incredibly talented artist from the Netherlands. He has worked in the comic book industry since the late 1990s. His credits include: Darkness: Resurrection Wynonna Earp Monstro Mechanica GI Joe And concept art for Overlord 2 As well as multiple other cool titles that you can find over on his socials: Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chris_evenhuis/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.evenhuis Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisEvenhuis?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Interview BGCP: Hi Chris, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Would you mind starting off by telling us a bit about yourself, your educational background and your career? Chris Evenhuis: Hi there, I’m Chris Evenhuis and I’m a comic artist and illustrator based in The Netherlands. My education wasn’t art-related (I started out as an Environmental Scientist), so as an artist I’m self-taught. BGCP: How did you go from studying Environmental Art to becoming a full time illustrator? CE: I’ve been drawing comics ever since I was a kid and had some indie shorts published by age seventeen. However, teachers convinced me to also pursue a ‘real job’, something with better career prospects. So, I ended up graduating as an Environmental Scientist instead. But by that time, the social climate in The Netherlands had shifted and jobs in that field kinda dried up. This meant that I ended up mostly jobless anyway. Thankfully I was able to move on to video games, where I worked as a concept artist for several years. Until I moved on again to Franco/Belgian comics, and eventually US comics as well. BGCP: Who are your main influences when it comes to your art? CE: This one’s difficult to answer because for a large part it depends on what type of project I’m working on. I do tend to see influences from Alphonse Mucha and Steve Dillon in my own work, but I’m not sure others would agree? BGCP: You have a really distinct art style in all of your work. Did you intentionally hone this style or is that how you have always drawn? CE: Thank you so much, that’s one of the nicest things I could hope for as an artist. It’s a combination of gradually developing a style that all at once feels natural, tells a clear story and helps making deadlines. Over the years I’ve found myself mostly looking for things to remove from my rendering, trying to find a style that has the least amount of ‘distraction’. It used to have a lot more details and cross-hatching, things like that. Lately my focus has shifted more to bold lines and shapes, and clear movements and emotions. It’s an ongoing process which I really enjoy. BGCP: Do you have a favourite part of the illustration process? CE: My favourite parts are coming up with ideas and then at the end, finishing them. Everything in between is usually a terrible struggle and oftentimes almost like solving math problems. BGCP: I have always been amazed at how talented comic artists like yourself are able to capture detailed expressions and convey complex emotions in a still frame. How do you go about tackling this? CE: Thank you! This is possibly my favourite aspect of drawing comics. First of all, I’ll ask the writers I work with as many questions as feels appropriate about what their characters are like other than what the scripts says about them. Anything could be helpful: favourite breakfast, pet peeves, weird habits, taste in music, type of friends etc. Everything else I will then make up on my own. So I’ll just imagine how each individual character would move and react to different situations. Sometimes, I’ll physically act out scenes on their behalf to figure out the expressions, gestures, movements across a sequence of panels and such. What I’m hoping to achieve by this is to create characters that – just from the way they look, move and express themselves – reveal parts of their personal stories on top of the one that’s in the script. BGCP: Out of the multiple different comics that you have worked on, which was your favourite? CE: I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of my favourite writers in the industry. I’ve gotten the chance to work on some of the most fun books I can imagine. I have loved every single one of them, and also did some of my proudest work in each of them. Especially Wynonna Earp and GI Joe, but overall my favourite is probably still Monstro Mechanica. This is my creator-owned series with G.I. Joe writer Paul Allor and colour artist Sjan Weijers. The series is about Leonardo da Vinci, his female apprentice and their wooden robot bodyguard. There’s something special about getting to create every single thing from the ground up. BGCP: When it comes to working on a licenced comic such as GI Joe, do you have to stick to a certain art style, or is your own unique art style embraced? CE: The art style can be pretty flexible; GI Joe had already seen quite a diverse range of styles throughout its different runs at IDW before I came on board. The most important thing is how well the art and writing style mesh together and I think Paul and I make a pretty great team in that regard. BGCP: Are there any comic book titles that you would like to work on in the future? CE: I’ve always felt Paul and I would do a killer Rocketeer run. Another dream project I can think of would be a licensed comic series based on the 2001 video game ‘Clive Barker’s Undying.’ BGCP: You have also worked as a concept artists on a couple of videogames, how did that come about? CE: I had made a few friends in comics who later started a game developing studio and were looking for artists. Both the comics and games

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Review – Fallout 4

Review – Fallout 4 Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Genre: Open World RPG Director: Todd Howard Release Date: November 10th 2015 Almost six years on from its initial release, I decided to go back and revisit Fallout 4 for review. This is also the first time that I have played the game in over half a decade. It was an interesting experience to see how the game has aged in that time and how different my modern perspective on it to the hype-ridden thoughts that I had at the time. When Fallout 4 dropped back in late 2015, it was a pretty huge deal for me. I love Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so the idea of an updated experience from a Bethesda who were riding particularly high at the time, was an exciting one. Ultimately, I was largely let down, not because the game wasn’t any good, but because the game couldn’t possibly live up to all of the hype it had garnered prior to its release. Fallout 4 was exactly what we had been waiting years for, but that’s just it. This game was exactly what fans were hoping for and nothing more, which felt fairly underwhelming at the time. A great deal has happened since Fallout 4 dropped six years ago. Bethesda released one of the worst received games of all time when they dropped Fallout 76 in late 2018, and in late 2020, Microsoft acquired Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax in a move that is set to shift the entire paradigm of the videogame market. Therefore, playing Fallout 4 in 2021, it actually feels like you are getting to step back to a simpler time. Playing this game for the first time in years feels like slipping on an old pair of comfortable slippers. The controls all come back to you immediately, the charm of a Fallout game is immediately present and it feels like you are right back at home. The world is vast, beautiful in parts and grotesque in others and I’m not just talking about the intentional aesthetic ugliness of the game’s world. Stretched textures, dated character models, stiff animation loops, clipping, short draw distance and technical glitches are just some of the problems that come with Bethesda using the dated Creation Engine to create their open world games. The best thing graphically in this game are undoubtedly the lighting effects and the more vibrant colour pallet that was chosen. When the rays of sunshine hit the trees of Sanctuary Hills at the right moment this game can actually look quite beautiful, but that is immediately lost when you turn around and see the eerie face of Mama Murphy. So the presentation could be better, but I feel that’s to be expected from a Bethesda game and that is still a problem to this day. This standard of quality shouldn’t have been acceptable even from a game in 2015. If CD Projekt Red and Kojima Productions could put out large scale open world games in the same year that didn’t look like they were developed for early PS3, then there is no real reason that Bethesda couldn’t. The fact that we had to continually endure these flaws right up until as late as November 2018 is frankly ridiculous. The shooting still feels just as clunky as it did at the time, but I am a big fan of the VATS system and it feels really good to re-experience the feature after it was butchered in Fallout 76. The crafting system in this game is also a great addition. It obviously has its flaws and it is far from the smoothest crafting system I have ever used, but in a game like Fallout it just makes so much sense and it is truly astonishing that Fallout 4 was the first game in the series to feature this mechanic. I’ve never really been into the weapon, armour, chemistry or cooking crafting stations, but the ability to build your own settlements is still awesome. The companions in the game are all quite interesting, even if there is a strange lack of female options for companions. The worst companion though by far, is Dogmeat. He is the worst programmed and therefore the most broken. Constantly blocking corridors and doorways, not fetching items for you when they are within reaching distance and just being a general annoyance. He goes from being cute to extremely irritating in a couple of short hours. The voice acting in the game is also something that varies vastly in quality. Both the male and female protagonists are voiced excellently, (even if it is a Caucasian man and woman doing the voices, which means if your character is any other ethnicity, they will still strangely sound white.) However, the other voices of NPC’s etc are wooden and downright awful in places. Certain areas in the game are really cool, helping add to the tone and the immersion of the overall experience. The sound effects and score help with this too, but there is a level of polish that is clearly absent here. It lets the game down as a whole and is clearly the thing that stopped reviewers from giving the game a perfect 10 score at the time. People on the internet have given the game’s dialogue system a lot of hate over the years and while I can see where that is coming from, I’ve always personally thought that it functions perfectly fine. Fallout 4 was never going to break any major ground, it was never going to change the gaming landscape on any grand scale and it does feel like a 10+ year old game rather than just a six year old game. In hindsight, I’m okay with all of that, because at the end of the day, it is more Fallout and that was all that I needed it to be. Sure, it would have been nicer if the game had looked a bit prettier and some of