Michael Falotico is an illustrator and musician born and raised in New York City. Striking a balance between hyper minimalism and intricate detail, Falotico presents unsettling scenarios and strange characters we can all relate to. When he isn't drawing, Michael can be found playing the bass guitar or staring deeply into the wall.
GI: What are your favorite Horror stories, in comics, fiction, film? And why?
MF: When I was seven or eight, my mom, knowing that I enjoyed a good monster or
alien cartoon or comic, picked up a movie for us to watch at Blockbuster. It was Alien...
and unbeknownst to her, a brutal, bloody horror movie. The chestburster scene threw me
into a shocked panic and I refused to keep watching.
That being said, I woke up the next morning and begged to finish it.
In terms of horror stories that have directly affected my personal style: Korean thrillers like I Met the Devil
or Thirst aren't necessarily about gore and blood [so much as] brooding uneasiness or an overarching,
unsettling feeling that I find addictive. Ari Aster confessed that Asian horror is a massive influence for him,
and Hereditary is one of the most unsettling and horrifying films I've ever seen.
My only regret is never seeing it in theaters.
I can't leave out 28 Days Later, which I saw in theaters three times in high school.
My wife and I have been blowing through Junji Ito and Shintaro Kago's entire libraries lately, and that has
most definitely been influencing my drawing style.
GI: You seem fluent in a wide swath of artistic mediums. Do you have formal
training/schooling? Preferred tools?
MF: Besides high school art and a couple random classes I took as a child, I have no
formal training. I dropped out of art school because I was more concerned with watching movies,
smoking weed, and playing guitar.
Drawing came back into my life as a way of coping with five-hour-long mixing sessions with my old band Monogold.
I would draw in my drummer’s notebooks to pass the time. Eventually the drawing kind of took over in my brain.
As for changing styles/mediums: that's more a sign of boredom then it is actual ability. I'm glad it translates, though!
GI: Tell me about Wide Dark! And any other hobbies/personal anecdotes that keep
you occupied when you're not creating Weird comics.
MF: When I quit Monogold a few years back, I was totally burned out on the whole scene. We had been
plugging away for nine years and I needed something new. I didn't touch a guitar for about a year and a half
after I quit; then one day, randomly, I bought myself a brand new acoustic bass guitar. It was an instrument
I'd always wanted, since I grew up listening to the Violent Femmes and Alice in Chains’ Unplugged,
and buying one exploded open a part of my brain I thought had completely burned out.
That's where Wide Dark came from.
Since then, I've enlisted a couple old high school friends and former bandmates to help me flesh out certain songs,
and my wife has even lended her excellent ear for harmony to most of the tracks.
It feels more like a fun recording project than a band right now. That might be a product of quarantine.
I guess we'll see as things start to open up.
That being said: almost all the lyrics are sci-fi or horror concepts that were sitting in a page of a book
that I didn't know what to do with. One song, “Extraterrestrial", about being a human who has lived their
entire life on a ship, is based on my horror/sci-fi comic, "The Hum of Henosis".
GI: What has Life Under Quarantine been like for you?
MF: My wife and I were lucky enough to escape our railroad apartment and hide out in my childhood home
in Staten Island. We sublet our apartment in Brooklyn and even took a camping road trip out to Colorado
in August to visit her family.
Quarantine had its ups and downs. The big valleys were some of the most unproductive times of my life,
but the peaks were some of my most productive. I wrote and played a lot of guitar and even started
adapting "A Confederacy of Dunces" into a TV show! I learned how to draw on an iPad, which is crazy fun.
Always love a pencil and some ink though.
GI: You co-created a rad Alien fan comic; I have a Sectaurs fan fiction in my head, where the heroic
Sectaurs succumb to addiction to their tele-bonded Insectoid counterparts' "good vibes" and devolve into
despair and destitution, making them ripe for conquering by the Dark Domain.
...Having written that sentence, I realize it's basically Naked Lunch with 80s action figures,
which just makes me want to do it that much more.
This isn't, in fact, a question, unless the question is, "you want in on this action?"
MF: Ha!! I'm not sure what any of that means, but I’M IN! If there's one thing I love as much as making my own art,
it’s helping other people make theirs. Collaboration with a like-minded person is so damn gratifying to me.
The sub-Reddit "comicbook collabs" is the reason I drew my third short sci-fi comic, "Dire Choices", which was written
by a guy named JR Woodland (I think). A really fun story that needed an artist. I felt compelled,
even though there was no pay, and we wound up winning a prize in a competition!
GI: You heard it here first. Unauthorized drugged-out Sectaurs comics, coming your way. Sometime.
More from Michael Falotico here.