John Pearson is an illustrator who has worked with DC, Image, Vault Comics, Z2, Heavy Metal magazine, Netflix, WWE, Rue Morgue magazine, and the Ray Harryhausen Foundation. He is known for In Bloom, The Infernals, and winning an Eisner for Blue in Green. While he was at Baltimore Comic-Con, Pearson took a break to chat with Scoop.

Scoop: Are you having fun this weekend?
John Pearson (JP): I’m having a great time at the convention.

Scoop: What do you think about Baltimore Comic-Con?
JP: It’s really comics focused. And I think all of the people that have come to the booth so far have just been so friendly and welcoming and genuinely interested in comics and art. And it’s, yeah, it’s reinvigorating.

Scoop: What’s it like to meet fans at conventions?
JP: Well, the fans are who gives me my career, so they’re the ones that buy the work. So, I always love going to conventions and meeting people that have either read my stuff beforehand or are fans of my artwork or meeting new people and just getting to know them and then introducing them to what I do.

Scoop: What inspires your work?
JP: It’s a mixture of things. I trained as a fine artist, so I have a lot of painting influences. But one of the main things is film and cinema. I love horror especially. So, a lot of the visual storytelling from horror, especially Italian horror, influences me in the way the color is used for emotion and just how you can communicate interesting emotions through the visual medium.

Scoop: What titles are people gravitating towards this weekend?
JP: People are really enjoying Infernals. That’s a series I’ve worked on with Ryan Parrott and Noah Gardner. People have been picking that up a lot. I also had a new sketchbook that came out last weekend that people have been grabbing. That’s a selection of my work over the last five years, both comics and illustrations.

Scoop: Tell me a little more about the sketchbook.
JP: Oh, so I’ve got bits of all the different comic series I’ve done over the last five years. I’ve got some of my cover artwork in there, and then some of my illustration commissions. I do a lot of licensed film work. So, there’s posters for Suspiria, there’s posters for The Thing, there’s covers I’ve done for Arrow Video, and there’s commissions in there. All sorts of stuff. It’s a real mixed bag of who I am as an artist over the last five years.

Scoop: You mentioned that you love horror. Are there titles, like movies or characters from horror, that you would like to adapt into a comic book? And if so, which ones?
JP: That’s an interesting question. I feel like a lot of adaptations are a little bit harder to do across mediums, just because something that works so well in film would be difficult to move into comics and it to be something new. I think if I was going to do something, it would be a new story in an existing world. So, it might be something like The Thing, for example. I love The Thing, it’s amazing. So, it might be a comic around another story in that universe, of maybe the alien that comes down and something else that happens within that. I think for me, it’s not necessarily a straight adaptation of existing property. It’s creating something new in those interesting worlds that have been already established.

Scoop: What are you working on now?
JP: I’ve got three new series that are coming out next summer, none of which I can mention at the minute. [laughs] After this convention, I’m going back to the UK. I’m going to be burying my head, working, and then I’ll be back in the US next summer to promote those. So yeah, follow me on social media if you want to find out more, but at the minute, my lips are sealed.

Scoop: Are you attending any more cons this year?
JP: I’m going to be back in the UK. I’ve got a convention next weekend that is for Vice Press, that’s who I do all the posters through. That’s in Sheffield, England, and then I’ll be doing Thought Bubble in Harrogate, which is one of the big UK shows.

Scoop: Thank you so much.
JP: No, thank you very much.