Halt and Catch Fire's Chris Cantwell Talks Out of Alcatraz - Creator Owned Art

Chris Cantwell has worn many hats as a writer and director, from co-creating AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, directing the film The Parts You Lose, and writing the comics The Blue Flame, She Could Fly, Everything, Doctor Doom, The Mask, Iron Man, and Out of Alcatraz.

I spoke with Cantwell about an important piece of art from his collection as part of a series called “Creator Owned Art.” Here’s what he said:

This piece is from OUT OF ALCATRAZ, the book I did for Oni this year with Tyler Crook. 

I’ve been fortunate to work on many comic books with incredibly talented artists. It is always a humbling experience but certainly so in Tyler’s case.

OUT OF ALCATRAZ is perhaps the book I’m most proud of in my comics career, rivaling maybe only my very first book SHE COULD FLY, which I did with Martin Morazzo and Karen Berger, the book that opened the door to a new world in terms of my professional and personal life.

But ALCATRAZ is no different. It’s a years-long story I’ve pursued, beginning as a TV pilot script in 2019. Oni agreed to put out a comic book version of it in 2023 and somehow Tyler agreed to do the art. It took him over a year to draw and paint the book because he works entirely by hand.

He offered me a page from the book when he was finished, which is always an incredible gift from an artist, because these pages can be sold for a good amount of money. I said I would take the test page from Tyler, the page he painted not based on any script, but to test out style and format, characters, etc.

He mailed it to me and I kept it sealed in a box for over a month because I wanted to immediately have it framed as soon as I opened it. But my oldest son came to me one day a couple weeks ago and asked how comic art was done and so I decided to show him Tyler’s page. When I opened the box I realized Tyler had given me the iconic double-page spread from the first issue as a surprise. I was speechless.

It was an amazing gesture of friendship and partnership that I’ll never forget. What’s also masterful about all of Tyler’s work, this page in particular, is the top-tier level of hand craftsmanship. We live in a world that is more reliant on machines and automation by the day, more craven in its attempts to turn art into content.

This page stands against that. It’s an emblem and lodestar for me that one must put in the work and care to create. And in terms of the story, it’s a moment of isolation and disconnection, a moment of individuals who are bound together. The whole page is this dialectic; a lonesome bond in a vast world.

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