Later this year, comiXology and Scott Synder’s Best Jackett Press will release three new digital-first series exclusively on their platform. There’s the Dan Panosian illustrated “Canary,” a Western with a horror edge, Tula Lotay’s 1920s aviation story “Barnstormers,” and a sci-fi all-ages story drawn by Jamal Igle, “Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine. All three represent new ideas and genres for Snyder to play around in, and he was very game to chat with us about all three, why they are so special to him, and to heap praise on his co-creators.
The last time we spoke, it was when you were launching the first of the comiXology books. At that time there was a lot of excitement, but there was also a lot of unknown about it. You weren’t sure how the process was gonna go, just the physical act of making these digital comics was something that was new to you. So now that you’re a year in, how has this been in terms of your expectations?
Scott Snyder: Well, it’s definitely exceeded my expectations in terms of the way the books have turned out creatively and sales wise for us. I feel almost sort of overwhelmed by how well it’s gone. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. We were given a lot of creative latitude to make books that were personal to us, and then the fan response really sort of took us aback, [we’re] really thrilled that people enjoyed them as much as we enjoyed making them. And then, you know, we’ve only had one book come out in print so far, the, the next are coming out in the fall, they’re all scheduled, but “We Have Demons” wound up selling almost 90,000 after being out digitally for six months. I never expected that. I mean, I thought it would do maybe a third of that. And then I thought digitally, you know, it, it, I didn’t expect the kind of response that we got both in terms of attention from comic readers and also from comiXology itself.
I mean, and also readers that don’t necessarily read comics. I mean, I think one of the things that’s sort of outside the realm of most just comic discussion day to day is the way that those algorithms work on comiXology and that stuff to sort of draw people that aren’t necessarily always comic readers are using comiXology itself towards comics.
Now that there’s an integration between Amazon and the comiXology app, and I know there’s some frustrating bugs to work out with the reading experience and with the sort of organization between Kindle and comiXology, and I totally sympathize, but for those of us making books there and for those of us sort of involved in trying to draw in audiences, outside of comics to a comic sphere, it’s been really good. So more people are finding comics than before through the sort of portal of, of Kindle and Amazon. So I know that for, you know, dyed in the wool comic readers there are bumps and, and issues to work out so that it’s as seamless as it used to be in some ways. But for people that weren’t introduced to comics or didn’t have them on their radar as much before, it’s bringing in a lot of people. And even my old DC books I’m seeing have been going up because of all of it.
So. It’s been a completely fascinating and wild experience the last year. But it’s something that like I would easily do it all over again. And I’m, I’m really hoping to continue the relationship past these books that will take us through 2023 into doing more projects together, down the line.
You mentioned traditional comic book readers, and I know you and I are about the same age, and so we grew up going to comic shops and and buying comics and reading comics in print. And so you grew up writing comics for that audience. Nw that you’ve had a little bit more time doing stuff that is digital first, has that impacted the way you’re writing it all, or are you still thinking about comics the same way?
Continued belowSS: I think about digital comics slightly differently, but the eventuality of them coming out in print means I’m not trying things that are wildly different. Whereas if I was doing something for WebTOON or something that was really more, more digital in a digital space exclusively, I might. What I love about working digitally honestly, is that there’s a fluidity to it, and there’s less pressure like dealing with the direct market, having the books, cannibalize each other, having the books kind of compete with each other. Sometimes if you’re doing multiple books in print, people’s budget is limited, which is completely understandable, and they really only have room for one or two of your books. So digitally the thing that I believe in and I only believe in it more after being at comiXology for so long, is that we’re gonna have to find a model that sort of has a subscription first thinking so that we can allow new readers to browse and to borrow and to fall in love with comics so that what they buy in print is special to them.
In some regard, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t continue to buy ongoing series monthly, but to differentiate print and digital to me is the key and making digital something that’s experiential and making print something that feels special and collectible or even just that feels, you know, like a, has it has extra material that you don’t get in the digital.
Finding some math of that is the future for me, of the comic reading experience. So it’s another reason why we really believed in being part of comiXology. I want the industry to find a way forward that isn’t so reliant on the speculator aspect of it, on variants. There has to be a healthier way.
And I think that’s part of what the pandemic showed us is that we need to, we need to sort of strengthen the readership, expand the readership, and have print and digital, not be competitive, but instead be I think symbiotic.
There are other models out there that are maybe pathways for that, you know, something like the record industry. Where vinyl has never been bigger than it is right now, at least since, you know, since the advent of CDs, because people treat vinyl as special; maybe you buy your favorite records on vinyl, you wanna support your friend, you buy their vinyl, but you’re listening to music on Spotify, Apple Music, whatever it is every day.
SS: Well, and that that’s the model across film and TV, too. Everything is subscription based. You have a subscriptions, Netflix, but if you really love Stranger Things, you’re getting the merch, you’re getting the collections, you’re getting the extras.
Comics is just a little bit more glacial and it’s movements towards that. But I think that ultimately that’s going to benefit retailers in a big way. And I know that stores that are adjusting to that model, like mine here, Fourth World, for example, by making sure that they’re heavier on trades. They’re heavier on new indie books that people wanna get the number ones of and that stuff. It’s not just the monthly grind of DC and Marvel and that it’s understanding that this audience wants new series that feel like theirs. So they’re big on the number ones and the new indie creators.
They’re big on the idea of somebody finds something digitally and then wants to have the whole thing on their shelf. You know, some version of that I think is the kind of evolution we’re going for, or we’re hoping for in comics so that it’s not reliant on such volatile market systems, you know?
So I got our chance to read all three of the number one issues of this next line, and I wanted to talk about your inspiration for those. When I met you, you were doing “American Vampire” and you were just dipping your toe into the com the superhero comic world, but then your career took a path towards superhero books for a long time. And when reading these books, only one of them really feels like I could see it living in a DC or a Marvel or some sort of shared universe. The other two feel really singular and unique.
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SS: Wat I wanted to do with “Canary,” it comes from a desire to go back to quintessential American genres. And to me, the one that sort of the one that sort of addresses American identity the most thoroughly is westerns. Westerns are something that tell us our own mythos or mythologize is the way we mythologize our good and bad. And, you know, we cast people and in all kinds of roles that are looking back in history, sort of horrifying at times, and also, you know, exploratory at times. Western is a lens through which we can examine ourselves and all the kind of terrible things about our past, good things about our past.
It’s a very powerful kind of prism to see the moment through. So I wanted to use that genre in a way to look at this moment. And for me, the only way I could kind of approach it was almost to make it so dark, a dark reinvention of kind of the tropes of a Western. So it’s a horror Western but it’s [also] a classic kind of Western with a Marshall that comes to investigate murders happening around this town that he has a history with. So it has kind of a Western template, but it, it has things in a level of violence and a level of horror that to me feels modern and resonant. There are random killings happening. Nobody understands why. It’s the period right after Reconstruction and the west is kind of closed, but people feel in while they’re supposed to feel like things are fixed, you know, after the Civil War and things feel even more broken and even more scary and precipitous with the coming of the turn of the century.
Dan [Panosian] loves Westerns, and so I went to him and I said, “what do you think about something that does this, that sort of rebuilds the Western from the ground up, but does it with a sense of foreboding and horror and sort of portent that feels like it’s contemporary and not sort of behind the glass of genre or behind the glass of history in some way. It’s not nostalgic; it’s much more disturbing.
Dan’s art is really beautiful and jarring and jumps off the page just comes to live when you’re looking at it. He’s doing great work here.
SS: Yeah, I couldn’t ask for better co-creators, honestly, I feel like I could write the phone book and people would would love them anyway. I feel very spoiled.
Well, speaking of art that spoils you, “Barnstormers” looks absolutely incredible. I’ve been a Tula [Lotay] fan for a very, very long time and I get very excited when I see that name on a book. There were two different turns in this book that took me to unexpected places. And I really appreciate when I don’t know what something’s going to do for me. But I wanna talk about the time period for this. Tbeginning of aviation, the beginning of world travel, feels like it’s the beginning of the modern era in a certain way. What was it about that time period that appeals to you?
And I think it was more the sense of the privilege sort of partying while a lot of the world felt more like there was a bigger fire coming in some way. So that’s the, the bent of this book. Barnstorming was a way that people took decommissioned war planes and flew around the country. Most of them died doing stunts that were incredible, like jumping from the wings of one plane to another. [They did this] all for money at a moment when the government was regulating against all of this and sort of taking it away from them.
And so it’s a strange rebellious and almost punk rock thing to do, in my opinion. To take this war machine and then be able to fly around and make something beautiful and death defying, and where you’re trusting other young people with your life, like, “hold the plane steady while I go out and pose on the wing.”
So the story is about those things and it’s got a darkness to it too that I’m really proud of. It’s one of the richest books I’ve worked on.
I actually thought of the story quite a few years ago, five or six years ago, and was thinking about this time period as something that felt potent and I was gonna get Jock [to draw] me a tattoo that I was gonna get of this wwingwalker for my arm, and then the pandemic hit and I couldn’t get it, but that’s how key this book is to me
In regards to “Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine,” I am a real sucker for father/son storiesand I’m also a sucker for technology stories. So this one hits me in, in a real special place. I love the idea of invention being the key to this story. Is there a particular inventor that you have an affinity for that you were, you know, looking at with this? Or do you just like the idea of invention in general?
SS: Well, what I loved was the idea of invention as a genealogy, like not a literal one, but a kind of symbolic one. The secret of the book is in the title card. I’ve always loved secret histories and I especially love, like, imagining connections between the past and the present. And so creating a whole kind of secret society between inventors dating all the way back to ancient mythological times to the present felt like something that I just was dying to do.
And Jamal [Igle] has such a love of the same things. I mean, he’s one of those co-creators and artists who does intense research, if you just point him in any direction. So he came up with, for example, like the perpetual motion machine [in the book], he did all this research on sort of water wheels and things in ancient Greece that would be used to make such a thing. He used a model of one of the first roller coasters to be the crazy ramp that takes Dudley inside of the base itself. So we wanted to do something that was kind of a celebration of inventors and the history of invention as a way of connecting all of us both through, through time and space and also make a book that had this big cosmic, all ages feel. I’ve never tried anything that was designed for adults to enjoy, but also really focused on kind of my younger son’s age group. He is loves graphic novels right now. So trying to do something that was inviting and welcoming to, to younger readers was a challenge.
So the whole goal, honestly, with all three of these books was to build something organically with co-creators that inspire me and elevate my work, but also push me into areas that I haven’t tried before. So to do a Western that sort of isn’t necessarily monsters and supernatural in the way “American Vampire” is felt new, doing all ages book has this fun, cosmic adventure bent, again, something that was, you know, off the beaten path for me. And obviously I haven’t done historical fiction before in comics without, you know, without giant Kaju or monsters coming to eat you. So for me, the idea of being able to push myself as a writer because of the talents of my co-creators and make books with comiXology that I might not be able to make elsewhere was a real thrill.
