Angel can be a tough character to get right. Of the wider Buffy ensemble, he’s not necessarily the one who makes most sense as the star of a solo series. That’s what makes the new “Angel” comic from Bryan Edward Hill and BOOM! Studios so impressive. With a confident voice, a masterful command of tone, and big philosophical ideas to back it all up, Hill has created a series that is instantly unique and recognizable. He was kind enough to tell me a little bit about his writing process.
I re-read the trade of Angel last night, I had read it when it was coming out in issues, but this was my first time reading it all at once. Something that struck me was the antagonist that you wrote, a demon that lives on the internet. It made me think of the season one episode of Buffy with the internet demon, which is one of the most dated and hard to watch episode of Buffy for modern audiences. Were you considering that episode when you were writing this series? How do you approach adapting some of the more dated elements of the show?
Bryan Edward Hill: Well you know, not particularly. Where it all came from me thinking about sentient people, and where sentient people lie. If you look at history, books were technology at one point in time. They were perceived as stuff. Literally wasn’t something assumed. To be able to literally have the words of people and to be able to carry that with you- that was astounding technology. So I thought about social media and its role in society and it seemed like fertile ground for nefarious evil to take root. A lot of my work in Angel is about the externalization of the internal things that we struggle with. A sort of “as within, as without” thing.
So that’s what spoke to me about it. The strangeness of how we put so many details about ourselves on this screen, and what could be out there harnessing this information to use against us. It seemed like a very Joss Whedon-esque idea.
Yeah, I was just about to say! He was always talking about the teenage or young adult struggle and making that literal with demons and the occult.
BEH: Well you know, that’s storyteller. That goes back to Wes Craven and Freddy Kruger and the idea that the sins of the parents falling onto the children. The instability of dream logic. I think that these kinds of stories need to address something nascent and primordial within us. One of the pulls of Angel as a character is that he’s a monster that fights other monsters. It’s a very primordial idea. Darkness against darkness. Those things, they speak to me, they’ve always spoken to me. That’s why when Jeanine Schaefer over at Boom reached out to me about working on Angel, I was pretty excited about it. Horror is a very important genre to me. I think horror is the most honest of all genres. It forces us to deal with our own fears.
That’s cool, that’s something I noticed as well. That all comes across on the page. I was thinking about Angel and some of my favorite episodes weren’t horror at all. They had that whole Beastmaster arc, and there was the one with the puppets. Do you think “Angel” works best when it’s a horror story?
BEH: Well, I think it’s a combination of things. The magic of Whedons mind is his ability to blend genres into a meta genre, and it’s hard to nail down the work into one genre or another. But in any horror story you’re going to have to balance it out. You have to balance it out with comedy, and with love, romance, sexuality, all of these things. It’s all part of the process. In many ways horror is more of an affect than a genre. It is what you are creating for the reader, but it takes a lot of different elements. The humanity in the story has to be strong, otherwise the fear won’t work. That’s what we tried to do in this book, try to balance it out. We tried to bring baroque elements and imagery into this world. There’s a touch of Clive Barker in my Angel story There’s a touch of Mike Mignola in my Angel story. Those are all strong influences on me, but ultimately these stories have to be about how we figure ourselves out in this world, and how we keep the candle lit of our own personal issues while we deal with a world that might have its own growing darkness.
Continued belowYou mentioned imagery, and I wanted to talk a little bit about your relationship with artist Gleb Melnikov. One of the most striking images in these early issues was the labyrinth in issue #4.
BEH: Hmmm, yeah. There’s a lot of Barker in that.
Yeah, when you said Barker I immediately thought that was the part you were thinking of. It’s not just a simple labyrinth, not just a stone maze. There are pipes, there’s a wetness to it, it’s really textured. So I wanted to ask you about your scripting process. Is that the sort of thing you’d throw over to your artist, is that something that you would have including in your first pass at the script? How does that imagery emerge?
BEH: Well, when I first got the images that Gleb was doing for “Angel” I could see how strong an artist Gleb is. And when I got the first pages for the issue, it just affirmed that he’s a brilliant visual storyteller. When you’re working with someone who’s that talented you don’t want to give them too many notes. It allows me to put more white on the page. That’s part of my screenwriting nature. When I”m working as a screenwriter it’s not my job to direct the movie, it’s my job to write the script. I don’t give Gleb a great deal of visual instruction. I panel it all out, and of course I give him all the information he needs to tell the story, but when it comes to those fine point design choices, that’s really all Gleb. One of my goals as a writer is to be a collaborator. It’s a collaborative process. I want to allow people to tell the story with me. Gleb reaches in and grabs the script with both hands. Lilith is largely a vision from Gleb’s mind. I might have given him a few adjectives, but I didn’t give him a lot of reference. That may be because I’m a filmmaker as well, and I know I’d like to have the space to do that sort of thing. So I know that I should give other people the space to visualize.
Boom has been very good at reaching out and finding collaborators. Once I saw his work, I knew it was going to be really really good. I’m a visual person, I’m driven by images, so being able to work with someone who you know is going to generate such good images is fantastic. Just last night I was working on a character for an issue of “Angel” and I needed a character, I needed to see the character. So I reached out to Gleb via email, and asked him to sketch it up real quick, so I could see his version of the person, so I could write them according to how I know they’re gonna look. And twenty minutes later there he was.
That’s wonderful, that’s the best kind of comics collaboration. Since I can see we’re almost out of time though, there was something I really wanted to ask you. I cover two things mainly for the site, I cover Buffy and I cover “X-Men.” I’m really excited for your upcoming “Fallen Angels” which is about Psylocke, Cable, and my favorite X-Man, Laura Kinney. But I know we’re here to talk about “Angel.” So I wanted to ask: Angel and those X-Men, what do you see as the through-line? Is it the search for redemption? What draws you to those sorts of characters?
BEH: Well, I tend to be drawn to warriors in fiction. People who have a mission and a purpose. And that’s usually how I get in with these characters. You look at a lot of the characters that I write, and it’s a lot of trying to figure out how to use what you are, what you’ve known, your mistakes, your successes, and harness it into something positive for the world. And through that, finding your purpose. Where you belong. What you need to do. Because when I was growing up, comics helped me figure myself out. They helped me decide who I wanted to be in philosophical terms, if not in actual terms. So, you’re going to see that through-line in a lot of my work. A lot of writers deal with that theme over and over again. And the theme that I tend to deal with these days is: when you dedicate yourself to fighting evil, how do you do that without being corrupted by the battle. If you’re really dedicated to fighting evil, then you’re also dedicated to being obsolete at some point. I think dealing with that is really interesting I like digging into the philosophy of it. Angel has this backstory because he has a philosophy, he’s experienced a lot of things, he’s been a lot of things. He’s been a person, he’s been a terror, he’s working on becoming a hero. All of those things are relevant to me, because I think we’re living in an age now when it’s difficult to figure out who we are. What we want to do. What we want to dedicate ourselves to. And mythology has always been a lighthouse to those who are asking those questions of themselves.
