Lucca Comics & Games is known for bringing incredible artists to the walled-in Italian city from all over. Whether it’s comics, movie props, and more, the creativity on full display at the festival is unmatched. This year, the festival brought Stephen Bliss, an artist most well known for creating the iconic look of the Grand Theft Auto posters and character art. He crafted posters for GTA III, GTA Vice City, and so much more, including his own comics, writing, and commissioned pieces throughout the years.
At Lucca Comics & Games, we were lucky enough to sit down with Bliss to discuss his career beyond just Rockstar Games. His work with Rockstar lasted 15 years, and he definitely credits much of his success to it. He created an art style for GTA that is unmistakable and is clearly carried on through the series, including GTA VI, nearly 25 years later. We were able to pick his brain about his inspirations, some of his favourite work and what he has coming down the pipeline now. Stephen Bliss’ passion for art is infectious, and he is one of the most interesting people I have had the pleasure of speaking to.
Thank you for being here at Lucca Comics & Games! How did you get involved with the festival?
Stephen Bliss: The organizers asked me to be involved, and I’m very happy that they angled it not so much about my Rockstar career, but my full career over the past 40-odd years. And I was very chuffed. I sent a text immediately to my ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law to say, “Look, I reached the pinnacle of my career.”
And what do you think of Lucca so far? Have you been able to see anything? Do anything?
Stephen Bliss: I’ve looked around. I’ve looked around a lot of the city, and I went to the torture museum, which was shocking and typical of me to try and find the dark side in something.
You talked about the pinnacle of your career. You had quite the career. So what is the highlight of it for you? What has been the part that you think personally was the best thing you’ve done?
Stephen Bliss: Well, I have to be very grateful to Rockstar. The 15 years I had there kind of set me up for success because there’s a reference point that may not have existed if I hadn’t worked there. But I did some covers for DC Comics this year, or last year. That again was as good because I grew up with DC and Marvel Comics, and that’s where I kind of started drawing, just copying the comics. So to get a few covers, to do a Batman cover, was incredible, and I was really shocked about that.
Do you have a favourite comic, then? A favourite comic character? I guess you have to say Team DC now after the covers.
Stephen Bliss: Yeah. No, I probably shouldn’t share my preference, but I do prefer the DC movies because they’re darker. I love most of the Marvel movies, but DC, like the Batman series, the new ones with Robert Pattinson, I was really pleasantly surprised. They were amazing.
Gritty.
Stephen Bliss: Right. And The Joker was an incredible movie.
Absolutely. So at the beginning, how did you fall in love with art? How did you end up with a career in it?
Stephen Bliss: Well, back in the day when I was growing up, you had to entertain yourself. And I wasn’t a gang member, so I was playing football, I was writing, and I was drawing. I won a prize at the age of five for designing a chocolate bar wrapper for an Animals chocolate bar. So I think that must have set me up for wanting to replicate that adrenaline.
You started on a high, and you just had to keep it going.
Stephen Bliss: Right. And then I won another competition about ten, a painting of Margaret Thatcher, which I’m not even sure why I did that. [Laughs] But it was entertainment, and it still pretty much is. There’s nothing else I prefer more than the buzz of creating something, a piece of artwork.
I have a lot of freedom now. My son’s moved out, and I don’t date because it’s really annoying. So I create. My brain is always thinking about writing or making images, and it’s kind of a luxury to have that. It’s a bit of a weird bubble to live in, but when I’m actually writing—like I’m trying to write a novel at the moment—when it’s going well, and it sounds great, and I read it, and I’m like, “Wow, did I write that?” There’s nothing better than that feeling.
You’ve worked with video games like Grand Theft Auto, writing, drawing for DC Comics, all of this, and a lot of people strive their whole lives to do that. But do you have an area you prefer to create in, whether it is games, comics, murals or maybe writing now?
Stephen Bliss: I think even though I no longer aspire to make it in the fine art world, which is what I intended to do when I left Rockstar, was to get gallery work, what I’m trying to do is bring all my IPs together. Steroid is a company I had before I joined Rockstar. There’s Looby, a character I have that I’m trying to get a publisher for. I have nine pages finished of that comic. And also Fair City. I already had a comic published with a vigilante rabbit Teenage Killer that was published by Sky a few years ago.
Also sounding dark.
Stephen Bliss: Yeah, but there’s a lot of humour in darkness. Absolutely. Maybe not so much Batman, but even Batman makes you laugh because he’s so serious. I love him. What do I prefer most? I guess fine art. I gave up visuals in January this year. This is why I started writing. I didn’t want anything more to do with making visuals. I think it might have been because of AI, and it kind of made me feel a bit like, “Well, this is futile, because how am I going to beat this?” So I started writing, and that has been a really good exercise.
And I’ve always written. I wrote a book when I was ten that was probably crap. Definitely crap. But I had it in me to do that. Then I don’t know why I gave it up, but I’ve started doing it again. I’ve written comic strips, but it’s not the same as a real book. That’s a lot of fun. Recently, people asked me to do collectors’ cards, fine art collectors’ cards, and it got me back into thinking about doing visuals. So I’ve been experimenting recently with visuals and really enjoying that because it’s not for anybody else. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone else. It’s just for me.
What does your process look like when you get involved in a project, whether it is something like GTA or Fear City? How do you decide that that’s the project for you?
Stephen Bliss: Well, freelance jobs I have to do because I have to finance my writing and fine art stuff. I’ll do it because I have to. We all need money. But with my fine art, it will be experiments and accidents. The visuals I got into recently, it was kind of an experiment. It all came together, and it was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” I’d taken pieces of stuff I was going to throw in the garbage, actually, and I put it all together and made something that was really, really cool. I’m going to go back to that when I get back to Brooklyn.
What was the question again?
How do you choose what you want to do, like what projects you want to get involved in?
Stephen Bliss: Whatever interests me that day. Even if I’m doing a freelance job, I’ll find a bit that is fun for me to do. I recently finished a book on UFOs and conspiracies for a publisher, and if I felt like drawing that day, I’d do a new page. If I felt like doing the colouring, I’d do colouring, which again is a luxury that a lot of people might not have. I’m always chasing some kind of dopamine hit with my work, which is not a great place to be because you have to do a lot of boring stuff.
Your art style with Grand Theft Auto is pretty distinct. Do you think that you have a style that’s unique to you?
Stephen Bliss: I think I’m really versatile. Unlike a lot of artists, I find it boring when artists replicate the same style their whole career. I’m always inspired by the history of art and the history of design, and I see something that a designer may be doing and think, “Okay, I want to do that.” So I’ll do my version of it.
When I was at Rockstar, I had to be versatile because every different game had a different style, but it had to look recognizable. I set up a lifestyle branding department there. They basically let me create any kind of non-game image, which was a lot of fun. I don’t know if you’ve seen that work, but it’s on my website. I made a Rockstar logo out of old 18th-century etchings, and I built a whole music machine out of these parts.
There’s a little girl playing piano here, and the music’s going through the machine, and it’s a huge machine, and it’s powered by dinosaur bones. There’s a dinosaur over here on a treadmill, and then there’s someone being whipped on the top as one of the workers, probably. And then at the end, the Rockstar logo has hammers hitting the heads of cats that are making the noises, the musical notes. There’s no other company that would have let me create something like that.
Do you strive to do something like that again?
Stephen Bliss: No, no. That’s just animal abuse. [Laughs]
Maybe not. Maybe not in 2026.
Stephen Bliss: Definitely not. But it was cartoonish. We’ve all seen Tom and Jerry.
Exactly. But something that eccentric and unique?
Stephen Bliss: Yeah. One of my biggest influences was Monty Python and those cartoons growing up. The surreal, humorous nature of those cartoons was a really big influence on the tiny me. I’m always trying to create humour with my work, but it does involve a lot of darkness. That’s…I’m English.
And why did I go to the torture museum yesterday when I could have been walking around seeing flowers? Well, I did that too, kind of.
On the way to the torture museum, as you do.
Stephen Bliss: I just stumbled across it, although I was looking for it and gave up looking, then stumbled on it. So that’s my excuse.
That’s meant to be, I think.
Stephen Bliss: Why go into that? Because I went in and it was really amazing and interesting, but it was horrific. And I’m walking out of there going, “Why do I do that?” It was inspiring, though.
That works because my next question was going to be about what inspires you, because a lot of your work does look comic-book based, like GTA, but you’re also talking about Monty Python, the torture museum even. Where does your inspiration come from, whether that’s now or when you were starting?
Stephen Bliss: It still comes from old comics. When I walk around anywhere, I photograph close-ups of graffiti and where someone scratched the graffiti or drawn over something. I did a lot of work in New York. I did a TED Talk based on that and the fine art I did from close-up photographs of graffiti and textures.
I would rip down huge chunks of posters from the hoardings around New York and put them onto canvas and then cut into them or spray on them. I always look out for that. I don’t like taking landscapes because they’re never as good as a professional photographer’s. But yesterday I saw a close-up of a comic panel, like a Marvel or DC character shouting into the panel, but the other side of the panel was blank and scratched out. I thought, that’s a really good idea.
I’m going to do a poster with a series of panels where people are shouting into just whiteness or a person scratched out or crossed out or something, based on comic strip dialogue like “Your opinion is bullshit” or “I’m not listening,” or a Steroid poster, which is my current project. Before I joined Rockstar, a big poster of a guy shouting into a scratched-out partner or something. Again, like Steroid: you’re talking crap. I don’t know, something like that.
That’s the basis of an idea. It comes from seeing accidents. It doesn’t come from galleries. It mainly comes from seeing stuff in the street, accidents, and the collaboration between people I don’t know and me.
I call them palimpsests. In the TED Talk, I talked about this communication in a city where the weather has made the glue faulty on these thick advertising posters, and they’re starting to fall off. Someone’s ripped a huge chunk. Someone’s sprayed a tag. Someone’s written a really weird slogan on it. They change every couple of days. They’re ripped down or sprayed over. Companies paint green paint over them to deter advertisers from doing it.
So there’s this whole organic growth and death in the city, in New York, that I wanted to own and put onto canvases. That was a huge inspiration for me. I would see those every day on the walk to Rockstar and have so much fun photographing them. In the end, I kind of left to get on with that, and I don’t think my parents were very pleased.
I think you’re doing art right. I think you’re doing all right.
Stephen Bliss: Doing all right.
Do you have any projects that you want to shout out right now? My last one, I promise.
Stephen Bliss: Yeah. I’d like to get a publisher for my Looby character. I have nine pages finished of that comic and another script written for a follow-up comic, so I want to get that done. And first, I want someone with money to finance Fair City, my project I’ve been doing for about five years, which is inspired by Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, and Scorsese movies and all that good stuff, in comic form. Very cool. Have a look on my website and you’ll see what I did.
You can find Stephen Bliss and check out all of his art at his official website here.
