If you’re anything like me — a human with two eyes, a noggin behind and a heart below — then you undoubtedly fell in love with Image’s “Shutter,” written by Joe Keatinge and illustrated by Leila Del Duca. The story of Kate Kristopher as her adventurous past with her father catches up to her, the series was characterized with transportive artwork, incredibly emotive characters and pages that you could get lost in just as much as you could read. As Dale Cooper might say, it’s damn good comics.
And while the first arc has wrapped up, the second arc looms knowingly in the distance with a release date this December. As such, we sat down to talk (rather extensively) with Leila and Joe about their series, their work together, the future and more.
(As a note, this interview does contain slight spoilers for the first arc of the book. That being said, it’s nothing that would inherently take away from your enjoyment of the book — and, really, if you haven’t read “Shutter,” then bookmark this interview and run to your local shop, because you need to get on that.)
So, I think the best place to start is not what the book is about, but: how have you guys found the reaction to the book? It was a big Image Expo announcement, and Leila, you’re pretty new to the comic scene so it was a nice coming out party. From what I’ve seen, the reaction to the book has been pretty universally positive.
Joe Keatinge: Its been a huge relief. “Shutter” was the first big creator owned comic I did after a good while concentrating on corporate books and it was entirely liberating, yet absolutely frightening at the same time, because we’re putting everything on the line to make these strange comics completely against the norm of what’s out there. With Shutter in specific we said, among other things, “well, everyone’s trying to make comics look like movies, so lets make this the exact opposite; lets make this the most impossible-to-adapt comic we can!” Not exactly the best business model, but after being tasked with maintaining intellectual properties for so long, it was nice to solely concentrate on telling a story, taking full advantage of the medium as a unique thing, throwing our all into it.
Leila Del Duca: And we throw in different comic styles into our comic. That’s something I really adore doing. It’s a playground to do anything, and Joe’s really good at writing whatever I wanna draw basically.
I think the response to it has been awesome, and far better than I could’ve ever hoped.
JK: It’s nice that, knock on wood, there seems to be this audience that seems to like it. We didn’t just put out a comic where a cat makes cookies and then Eric Stephenson is out of a job, because Todd McFarlane looks over the numbers and is like, “What are you doing?!” [Laughs]
The people who read our book are amazing. We get all these letters, not just saying the book is cool or whatever but… We started putting our recommendations in the book because, when I was younger and reading “Madman,” Mike would talk about what he was really excited about. I discovered so much stuff through that; I discovered “Love and Rockets,” both the comic and the band, the Dandy Warhols, Daniel Clowes — all this stuff. So whenever I have a comic, I wanna make a big thing of it since it meant so much to me when I was younger. And it has been awesome; we’ve created this little community in the back of the book when have enough space — there’s a bunch of other weirdos just as odd as us!
It’s comforting to have our little community of weirdos is what I’m trying to say. [Laughs]
You mention the weird aspects of the book, but I feel like we’re very much in that cultural climate — especially in comics — where weird is totally in. It’s totally great that it’s weird because that’s who we are, that’s the type of stuff we want to read.
JK: A buddy of mine put it really well. He said, basically, that the books people are doing at Image these days are the books you would dream about in a bar, but know it’d never happen. Say we’re all at a con — you, me and Leila, we’re all at a con and I’m like, “Man, if I could do one type of comic, this is what I would wanna do,” and Leila says, “Yeah, I wanna draw this!” and we talk all night about it, but no one would ever publish it. Now Image is publishing those comics, and they’re successful! I love working in an industry where something like “Pretty Deadly” — this weird supernatural Western with a philosophical bent – is not just published by Image, but is one of their major successes. And I just read “Wytches” —
Continued belowLdD: Oooh, how was it?
JK: Awesome! It’s so awesome! It’s by two guys whose work I really admire, Scott Snyder and Jock, great guys — and while its set in a genre I’ve read a lot in the past, at no time did I think, “well, I’d read this before.” It’s such a cool, unique take that would never exist without those two guys. Even still, it’s such a weird comic coming from Scott, and I’m sorry this is such a huge tangent, but he’s the #1 selling writer in comics today, right? “Batman” is the #1 selling comic, and yet he has this book in him that’s not like anything else he does. It’s not like “American Vampire,” it’s not “The Wake,” it’s obviously not “Batman,” but Image is a place where he can do a book like this and no one tells him, “eh, Scott, this doesn’t fit in with your work. Sorry, Jock, why don’t you just do “Losers 3″ or whatever,” you know?
It’s exciting to be some small part of the company making something so against the norm happen.
That’s the cool thing about Image Expo, and we’ve talked about this a little bit, but we felt like we’re part of something larger than ourselves. It wasn’t just a press event, we felt like we were part of this larger movement.
LdD: Yeah, I can’t believe we’re in this line-up of awesome creators.
One thing that I’ve heard kind of consistently is, and I hesitate to use the word ‘new’ because it has been at least a five year build-up to this plateau, but you hear that it’s a very empowering movement. Have you felt like that’s true?
LdD: Absolutely.
JK: I have had a good time for the most part working at Marvel and even DC — it’s been fun and paid a lot of bills. But Image has changed my life. I don’t just mean in terms of money or whatever, because that’s not important in the long run, but helping me figure out what I want to do with my writing, helping me find collaborators who we can create these things that wouldn’t exist without us, being blessed with the freedom to do anything we wanted. There’s nowhere else this could happen. Leila and I were talking with someone at Rose City Comic Con about talking to colorists on their book, and how at their publisher he wasn’t able to talk to the colorist. But you know who brought on Owen Gieni onto “Shutter?” Leila and me. You know who talks to Owen on a regular basis? Leila and me.
For instance: Ed Brisson had to go, because he’s going to be writing mostly full time now, and he couldn’t letter the book anymore. So, I was talking with Eric Stephenson and I was like, “man, if I could get any letterer on “Shutter” it would be John Workman.” He’s just my ideal guy. I think he’s probably one of the greatest letterers — if not the greatest letterer — that we’ve ever seen. And Eric said, “well, why don’t you just e-mail John?” And I was like… “Oh! I guess I can do that!”
At Marvel I was lucky because they had Clayton Cowles lettering all my stuff for the most part, which was pretty rad and I really love working with him, but that was the editor’s decision even if it was a decision I would’ve made as well. But here at Image, well, I just go ahead and e-mail John Workman, and I send him an e-mail saying, “Here’s my weird comic, will you please read it? Leila and I love your stuff!” And John wrote back, “Alright. Lets do it.” Just today we got the first lettered pages John’s turned in.
LdD: That was really exciting to see.
JK: And really weird to have John Workman’s work on Leila’s art. Words I wrote! And I don’t think we could’ve done that anywhere else. I’m not saying other publishers do it worse or anything–
LdD: We just have more control over our project.
JK: Yeah. And there’s just no disputing that. Image empowers you to have full control of what you want to do. We spent a lot of time with Tim Leong of “SuperGraphic” and Monica Garcia from Image to figure out the look of the cover design, and we just said what we wanted and they worked with us to get it. It was awesome to collaborate with them, and you know what? There’s never going to be an ad for some ABC show cluttered at the top part of the book unless we want it there — it’ll always be our thing. [Laughs] We were talking about this recently, and we take it for granted but you kind of forget about that sometimes, because it’s empowering to the point it becomes so inherent.
Continued belowI don’t know what you think about this, Leila, but I don’t think Shutter could exist at any other publisher.
LdD: I have no idea. I’m a noob, so a lot of the stuff you’re saying… I don’t know what to add! [Laughs]
JK: So, yes. [Laughs]
But it’s interesting because – well, one of the guys I got really close to over the years, and Leila has recently befriended, is Jim Valentino. And he talks a lot about how, yes, it’s great Image is seeing so much success lately, but the whole idea of Image being a place to do whatever the hell you want, the way you want to do it, well, isn’t. I mean, they asked everybody — anyone who was making comics they were excited about — if they wanted to be part of their movement. Even later, when Valentino took over as publisher he made a big effort to make it much more diverse. He was the guy who brought in people like Bendis; he brought in “Fire” and “Torso,” all that stuff, and a lot of Caliber guys.
In my past life I worked at the company, and it’s interesting to see a lot of these seeds that are really blossoming now is stuff that has been worked on for years. One thing among many that I admire about Eric Stephenson is – okay, so, the thing I see hurt comics over the decades is all these shortsighted decisions made for blatant greed, with long term ramifications doing more harm than good. Eric has always thought, “what is the long term gain? What sustains success instead of gorges the quickest buck now?”
Image naysayers say this is a fad, but it’s not; what he has done is, ever since he was Executive Director much less Publisher, he’s planted seeds for how to make this a sustainable thing — and look what happened.
I don’t know if “Shutter” would’ve done well in the market that existed four, five years ago. But it’s not a random thing that all these books are doing well now. It was a methodical plan, and it is amazing to see it play out. You have a publisher that can give Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan a better deal than they could get anywhere else, as well as a couple of noobs like us and our really weird cat robot comic.
Actually, interestingly enough, one of the notes I had jotted down was to ask about what you both thought about Image’s influence on the book, if there was one. Rather, just the fact that Image now is what it is in terms of stature, and we talk about how it is empowering and gives you this opportunity that you might not have at any other publisher. If Image hadn’t changed the market, how do you think that would influence what you try and do with this book, the risks that you take or the chances?
LdD: We basically take every risk that we want to. I don’t think we make reckless decisions with our book, but because we have that freedom we just do whatever we want to and Image trusts us every step of the way. The confidence just builds off itself.
JK: I don’t think we’re playing the game differently in terms of the creative side of things. The person for me that I’m dependent on for “Shutter” is Leila and I think I can say it’s vice versa. Image gives us the perfect place to do that at. Without Image, we’d have to self publish to do it remotely the way we’re doing it now and it’d be such a harder, likely impossible task. That said, the way Image is staffed now, it really does create a home for you.
So let’s get into the nitty gritty of the book. One thing I’m very curious about is, Joe, you and I had talked very briefly about “Shutter” just about a year ago at New York Comic Con 2013. As you guys have worked on the first arc of the book and collaborated with one another, as you’ve become more used to one another’s habits, when you look at the first issue and the last issue of the arc how do you feel about how the process has evolved in making the book?
Continued belowLdD: Oh, wow. What a great question. I’ll answer this one first! [Laughs] I think on issue #1, I still didn’t know what I was doing. My confidence level was all over the place with that book. It was the first time that I got to incorporate storytelling elements and page layouts and inking styles the way that I really wanted to; at this point, I was really honestly only making the book for me, Joe, the colorist and the letterer. I didn’t have this weird pressure where… How do I even put this? I guess I didn’t feel the pressure of being a bad-ass pro. I’m not sure how to word this right, but Joe had absolute confidence in me so every time I sent him something he’d be like, “Wow, this is so amazing!” So I just kept on doing what I wanted to do finally, instead of trying to please a larger, fictional audience. I shut out the fact… Oh god, I need to stop, I’m going to rant. [Laughs]
JK: Shut..tered out? [Laughs]
LdD: [Laughs] Joe, you answer this.
JK: I think you’re actually doing a better job than you give yourself credit for answering that question, talking about how now we have our community of weirdos. Is that what you’re getting at?
LdD: I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, I think. I feel like that now, maybe, but the first issue was me feeling things out, for sure, and just trying to do a really, really great job at impressing Joe with my skills. I thought I really needed to do a great job, but at the same time I guess that was finally the point where, even at my skill level, I let go of this huge immense fear that I had as an artist. Instead of trying to please everyone in the whole world and prove to everyone that I’m a great artist, I just wanted to prove to Joe that I could do this book. And I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, that no matter what I wanted to try and do with my style, that someone would appreciate it. That person was Joe! And he’s being so super supportive, the whole way through, and gradually as the issue went by, my trust in my skill level just sky-rocketed — and now that we have an audience, now that I have an audience and they dig it? It’s just become even better; the positive, comic energy just keeps building on itself exponentially. So I guess that’s the main difference between issue #1 and issue #6 for me.
JK: Same. … [Laughs] You know, it’s true! It feels like we’re part of something larger now. I don’t want to be too self-reflective, but as a writer I think the part I suck the most at is starting things up? Getting to the point we’re at now, where we know who Kate is and we have a general idea what our situation is in terms of the story — that’s my happy place.
First issues, man. I look forward to and dread them the most, in this weird, contradictory way. I’m working on a first issue of something else right now, and it’s completely the opposite of “Shutter” in every way possible. It’s frightening, but it’s also really exciting. And I don’t mean to say that we’ve become used to “Shutter,” because one of the things I like about “Shutter” is, by its nature, we can do things we’ve never done before. Issue #8, for example; Leila killed on it. But it’s always interesting to come up with these things, and now it’s set and ready to go, and we’ve established this world we can experiment in and travel around in.
LdD: And even though the world is established now, I still feel like every issue is really fresh when I draw it. Each issue feels distinct in my brain, feeling a certain way, you know? So even though I’m more comfortable with the world and the characters I’m drawing, it’s still a very fresh and cool experience.
JK: Right. I don’t want to suggest that, when we say comfortability we mean stagnation. Not by any means. More like the exact opposite. I feel free to experiment; we have this amazing readership and this amazing publisher backing us up, and we’ve proven six issues in that people are liking us enough to play along and not get us cancelled, so now, phew, let’s just do whatever, such as in issues #9-11. I don’t want to say exactly why, but it’s easily the weirdest thing we’ve done yet.
Continued belowLdD: So weird.
JK: I’m always excited about what we’re doing next, which is what I’m trying to get to: it’s nice to know there is a next. It’s nice to know that we’re past the point where we’re not sure if there’s going to be a book or not.
LdD: And every time I finish an issue, I’m not like, “Oh, that was such a fun issue, I’ll never draw as cool as that again.” I always know the next one is going to be just as fun, if not more fun.
One thing that you both mentioned that I’d like to pick up on is the aspect of world building in parallel with the character work. One thing I personally found rather unexpected in “Shutter” was how in-depth of an experience we got towards this wide cast of characters, and obviously we’d get to learn about the Kristopher family quite a good deal but still in a way that you feel personally connected to Kate by the end of the sixth issue. Since this is an adventure comic, a travel comic, it has these giant worldly aspects to it, did you find it a challenge at all to balance the development of both pretty tremendous tasks in conjunction with one another?
JK: Well, originally, and I think I’ve told you this before but just for sake of context, but the original version of “Shutter” pre-Leila, the outline I had was going to be much more in the vein of Tintin or Corto Maltese. An adventure comic, but in a real-ish world. That’s one thing Leila brought into it; she did this comic called “The Traveller,” and I saw that and it was a real world that had these magical elements to it, some ghosts and stuff, and I thought she was the one for Shutter as it was and even more so what it became.
That said, we were talking about what we could do together for a while before we settled on Shutter, but when I was talking to you about what you want to draw and you said “anything” and usually when you hear that from someone it means that they don’t know what they want to do — but talking to Leila, you know what you want to do and it really is anything.
The thing that I realized, beyond her strengths conveying the international or supernatural elements, is Leila drew you into these characters, with the double-meaning of that term. No matter how over-the-top the supernatural stuff was, you cared so much about her main characters. I think “Shutter” works because, well, if you just put a bunch of crazy shit in a comic and there’s no emotional core, then who gives a crap? You see a bazillion comics like that, but I feel what Leila enabled me to do as a writer through her art is have all this crazy shit where you still really care about Kate, you care about Chris, you care about… other characters who have not appeared in the comic yet. [Laughs]
I’m really bad talking about the comic because I always forget where we’re at and where reality is at. We did another interview, I think I almost spoiled everything.
LdD: [Laughs] Yeah, you kept having to quiet yourself.
JK: But, this is why it works! This is why we can have a minotaur on a subway and your main concentration is still on this woman whose life is… You know she’s been through some shit even without a bunch of word balloons.
LdD: I don’t think it was difficult to make the world as convincing as it is. Really, it’s just a matter of not drawing people and creatures surprised at their surroundings. So I asked, what do I want to see in this world, and I drew that with everyone acting normal like they would in real life. It wasn’t too difficult; I’ve dreamt a lot about putting various elements in a comic book; I’ve wanted to draw dinosaurs for a while, so in the double-page New York spread I put a pterodactyl nesting! And I like drawing lizard people, so finally, my chance to draw lizard people has arrived! It was super easy and so fun, it wasn’t hard or begrudging or anything.
Continued belowjK: That’s funny, because thinking about what’s changed from the first issue, I remember when I was writing Alain going to the hospital, when I first wrote the script there were two things I thought, “Ok, this is where she leaves the book.” [Laughs] “There’s a cop, but it’s a bear! It’s a grizzly bear. There’s a nurse but she has a pumpkinhead!”
LdD: “But you don’t have to draw the pumpkinhead if you don’t want to.” [Laughs] But I was like, of course I’m going to draw the pumpkinhead!
JK: Now it’s just second nature. Now the stuff I’m most worried about is like, OK, so we’re in a vinyl record store looking for a copy of Aimee Man’s “Lost in Space”… [Laughs]
LdD: And I’m like, “Joe, why that particular album?” And you said…
JK: I want it! It’s super rare!
LdD: I thought that was hilarious.
JK: Comics are magic. Ask Grant Morrison about how that works. I have no idea. But, hey, it’s a great album, and I was listening to that album when that issue came out. Have you listened to it lately? It’s a good soundtrack for “Shutter.”
LdD: Really? I find it one of the more depressing of Aimee Mann’s albums.
JK: Have you not read “Shutter” #1-6?! The dad’s been dead, then he’s seemingly not dead, and there’s a bunch of siblings!
LdD: Yeah, but at the same time I can’t listen to sad folk while making “Shutter,” I need something more upbeat.
JK: Well, no, I don’t mean like that. I can just see Kate listening to Aimee Mann.
LdD: Yeah, you’re right. She’s really sad in that issue. She’s traumatized at that point.
JK: So, anyways. Sorry. Hi, Matt. [Laughs]
Hey, I think this is great! I am loving this personally. And it also allows me to skip over a few questions and ask, well, I was going to ask about the record. I feel like both of your personalities are so deeply embedded in the book, you know? It’s one of those things where you can feel it in the art, you can read it in the text, but putting yourself into this weird environment that’s kind of real but mostly not that real, is that a hard process to walk the line of not doing the Grant Morrison thing and putting you directly in the book yet still having all these visible pieces of you there?
JK: Well, I’ll say to start this that “Shutter” is the most brutally personal thing I’ve ever done. It’s not a 1:1 ratio or correlation; my dad is awesome, he doesn’t have a bunch of secret kids. I didn’t go on swashbuckling adventures like Kate did, but… God, how do I say this without turning this into WTF with Marc Maron on you? There’s a lot of personal stuff in there, I think from both of us. It’s not 1:1 for me, it’ll never be something like that, but, there’s this interview with Tarantino where he says something along the lines of, “your work that you do should be home movies in a way.” When most people see it they see it just as a story, but when your friends read it and your family sees it, they’re surprised you put all that up there. When my mom read “Shutter” — she’s awesome too, for that matter — she was able to pick up on a lot of stuff that absolutely no one has picked up on period, not even you, Leila.
LdD: Oh?
JK: Yeah. She outright said, “Oh, wow, I can’t believe you wrote about that in your book.”
But anyway, the point is you should put your all into your work, whether it’s something entirely original or a character existing from long before your born.
LdD: I can answer that question a little bit differently. This is kind of a two-part answer in terms of how personal it is for me, but reason #1 is that this is the first chance that I’ve 100% been able to put my personality into a project. Joe made it very clear from the beginning that I was 50% co-creator no matter what, and he was always encouraging it and me, so that right there is me being able to do whatever I want. I always try to draw my stuff as ridiculous and beautiful, so I put my humor into the expressions and personality and backgrounds, but I also like inking and creating these beautiful things and places. For the first time those two elements really came together for this comic, and so it means a lot to me personally that I was able to do that with this comic.
Continued belowBut then the second part to this is that, and Joe didn’t know anything about my family background when he wrote this, but my father has eight children between three different women. That’s kind of the gist of Kate’s dad, right? He’s had a lot of children with various people, and so it was very interesting to play that out in the book. I said this elsewhere too, but because I didn’t have my father growing up, drawing the scenes between Kate and her father were really fulfilling. It was like, “Oh, what would I want a relationship to be like between me and my dad?” I got to draw that, and it was weirdly fulfilling to do. So that’s why this comic is personal to me.
JK: Yeah, and it was really weird because I think we were working on the book for a while before you told me about any of that stuff.
LdD: Yeah… and I think, I remember you said something funny like, “Woah, that would be like Ross Campbell telling me that he was an alien born to rule our world.” [Laughs]
JK: Weird thing is? That’s true.
LdD: Ross Campbell is an alien?!
JK: Piotr Kowalski is also actually the Incredible Hulk.
LdD: Oh my god. I just don’t know anything about the world anymore.
You pick your collaborators very specifically, Joe. [Laughs]
LdD: (Impersonating Joe’s voice) Yeah, I get a private detective to look into everyone’s past and I hire them from that point.
JK: [Laughs] Yeah, I just hand him my plots, these pitches and tell him to find people that this stuff actually happened to.
LdD: Lucky me!
So, looking into the future of “Shutter,” the second arc starts in December. One of the things that was mentioned is how you guys built up confidence with the book, so how are you taking that newfound confidence and transcribing that into what you have planned in the second arc? I know you don’t want to be spoiler-riffic, so you can be as esoteric as you want.
JK: Kate’s world as she knows it, or didn’t know it with the revelations with her dad, has been established. Now the book gets to get going, and it gets going internationally. It becomes very much a global book. So far we’ve seen New York City, some flashbacks in other places, and New England. The next arc, she goes to Cambodia and confronts the sister she never knew of before. What we begin to see, though, is that even stuff she’s done has an underbelly she never realized. With this book, and it’s something that I had a natural interest in, but I researched a lot of different explorers and the germ of this story came out of my reading of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” when I was 20, and I was like, “Oh, whoa, everything we’re taught in school is super fucked up and distorted.” You learn that Christopher Columbus was a piece of shit; we celebrate Columbus Day for this guy who committed genocide essentially – at the very least, instigated genocide.
That got me thinking, well, what if you could apply that kind of thinking to… What sort of negative effects could Indiana Jones have? In this case it’s Kate Kristopher and her dad, but it’s more than just going on swashbuckling adventures and stealing treasure; people are affected by that. Beginning of the first Indiana Jones movie, right? He steals this totem from this cave in a jungle. Well, someone’s worshipping that totem. So, did he disrupt this entire religion? What effect did he have on those people? There’re all these things that could be hurt by him, but that’s not something you really see elsewhere. So ,that’s kind of what you’ll be seeing in the second arc, is Kate coming directly face to face with those things that she’s done and the ramifications she didn’t even know about.
And also, there’s a lot more with her dad and her ancestors. In “Shutter” #1, you see these glimpses of all these ancestors, and in “Shutter” #9 or #10, I might change it but we’ll see one of the ancestors you see on those pages, and you’ll find out a whole different perspective from what they were doing. In the frame it looks like this cool adventure, it looks like fun, but no, it’s super fucked up. [Laughs] Part of it is, well, getting older and stuff like that, you grow up looking at your parents and your aunts or uncles as infallible, like gods, that they’re more than you are. But you eventually realize, no, they’re just as messed up as you are. Conversely, when you’re a kid — you remember in “Understanding Comics” where Scott McCloud has that part talking about the kid’s view of reality where it goes blank behind them? It just doesn’t exist behind them? Where you don’t realize things you do have long term effects on people for the rest of their lives, and vice versa. So for Kate, what her dad actually had real world effects and they hurt someone, in some cases a lot of someones.
Continued belowLdD: Artistically, I feel like I gain stride in every issue I draw. I feel really happy with how I’m drawing things in this arc so far. I’m really excited to be getting into issues #9, 10 and 11 where the page layouts are going to get really crazy for reasons we can’t divulge yet. It’s going to be a really, great, fun experimentation with this, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a really long time and just haven’t had a place to do it yet.
This is kind of emphasized in the solicit a little bit, but going international — with this book, you’re very much making the world your own, even if there are shades of our reality in it. It’s very much “Shutter’s” world. As you go into the international version of that, is there any kind of research that goes into this for you, in creating these sort of somewhat parallel environments?
LdD: Definitely.
JK: Oh, yeah. On both our ends. It’ll be in solicits so I’m comfortable saying it, that the second arc starts off in Cambodia. I think it’s odd to just do our make-believe version of Cambodia. There’s a culture there, a history there; it’s much more interesting if you actually integrate that.
LdD: Plus visually, Cambodian art and architecture is phenomenal, so why wouldn’t I want to highly reference that?
JK: I do a lot of research to the point that I don’t even know how much of it makes it into the book. I’m reading this book about a city in issue #12 and the beginning of #13, and I’m sure 99% of what I’m reading right now will not be used in the book. But it’s still good to have that in your head, you know? One of the things that really inspired “Shutter” in terms of setting was, Earth is fucking amazing. When I first travelled overseas, you can read about stuff in National Geographic or see them on documentaries like Planet Earth, but being confronted with it right in front of me is beyond anything you can imagine or see on a screen.
For instance, even though New York is very fantastical in issue #1, and Leila drew the High Line Park, and it’s beautiful without need to exaggerate a thing. You don’t need to make up Metropolis; New York actually exists on Earth. So a lot of the second arc, it takes place in these fantastic places but you don’t need to fake it.
But a lot of it has been inspired by when I was doing research for the second arc and I was at Powell’s — I really want to emphasize, it’s one of the greatest bookstores on Earth, one of the greatest independent bookstores in Portland, Oregon — and they had a travelogue series I bought from the late 1800’s by John Stoddard. At the time, travel for the everyday person was only then becoming something you could semi-regularly do to the point Stoddard talks about coming to Norway with an awe akin to discovering King Kong ‘s Skull Island, and I wanted to bring some of that into “Shutter” where Cambodia isn’t just a place you see or glimpse in some documentary, it’s a beautiful, magic place that exists on Earth. And, yeah, of course we incorporate some of our own weird stuff in it, but yeah, the research is a big part of it, and really part of the huge fun for me.
LdD: Same. I like that I get to draw a lot of new and different places and things. There’ve been some pages where I didn’t have to reference anything, but overall I feel like most every page is referenced.
One thing that you mentioned that I’d like to ask further about, but your travel experience — how have you worked that into the book?
LdD: My answer’s going to be really short, because I’ve only travelled to various places in the United States. I’ve been to Canada twice, and they were very short visits. But! Traveling in the United States for whatever I do, it’s just so phenomenal. I’m really glad that I can have this appreciation for our planet, that we get to see these different cultures just in our country, and I try to incorporate that same wonder that I feel in the real world into “Shutter.” I want people to read “Shutter” and be like, “Wow, what a cool world!” I hope everyone feels about reality like I do.
Continued belowJK: I’ve been very lucky to travel quite a bit. Mostly to Europe, but in 2010, one of the first times I took one of these trips, it inspired me to, you know, shit or get off the pot when it comes to writing. Now it’s all I’m doing.
Directly related to “Shutter” — this year I went to Rome for the first time, and when you see stuff like St. Peters Cathedral, for instance, seeing these man-made things that’s astonishing to the point of disbelief. I’m a huge movie nerd, but there’s no way that you could create such awe in something computer generated. Trying to capture that magic – no matter how Sisyphean – greatly informs what makes the book work for me.
Even beyond that, the stuff that’s really affected Shutter on are the people I meet along the way, the differing perspectives. When I first went on a trip overseas, you see stuff like McDonalds everywhere now and there’s probably an Urban Outfitters in Florence, but people still have way different perspectives than you do. That’s awesome. That gets me charged. That’s what I get more out of a trip than anything else. That’s really informed “Shutter” a lot.
Looking into the second arc, one of the things that you were talking about was in what way we’re going to be expanding on the Kristophers and the family mythology. I know this might be verging into spoiler territory, so feel free to talk around me, but can you give us a clue as to what sort of things we’re going to be seeing? Kate’s going to confront her sister, we’ll see this flashback that you mentioned; the first arc was great about letting us see what the Kristophers were like and what Kate was like when she was younger, but as this gets bigger and we develop more of their history in the second arc, what sort of things should we be expecting to see?
JK: I don’t want to repeat my answer too much, but the effects of all that. The flashbacks, the present with Kate and her sister, those aren’t separate things even though they’re technically separated by hundreds of years of ramifications. Those ramifications are very real, though. Kate has been trying to escape her past in a way for the last ten years of her life, but now she can’t. She has to deal with it. The second arc and really beyond really gets into Kate dealing with shit and saying, no, I’m not going to run anymore. Kate’s attitude, especially in issue #8, it kicks up; “You wanna go? Let’s go.” Kate isn’t going to run away, she’s not going to let other people dictate what she’s going to do. She’s going to fight for the reality she wants.
Veering towards my last two questions, the first thing that I would like to ask is in terms of influence. “Shutter” #1, we’ve mentioned Corto Maltese and Indiana Jones and Tintin, there’s those opening shorts that run a few pages at a time that show different styles that you like to play around with; what kind of things are we looking at in terms of influence on the second arc?
LdD: I don’t know… Joe, is it OK to give it away?
JK: You told me not to, but if you want to that’s fine. I’ll say this on the record, but Multiversity has been supporting me since Day Zero when no one gave a crap, so if you wanna spoil anything, now’s the time. [Laughs]
LdD: Well, I’ll keep it as vague as we can, but something most all of us in America have grown up reading one time a week… We’re going to use that in issue #8 as a definite influence, for sure. And it’s going to be the backstory of Alarm Cat, so we get to kind of see his past and where he came from. It was a cool style, super challenging but ridiculously fun.
JK: And going forward, of course the book had initial inspirations, and you get inspired as you go along with whatever in life, but the book is less about those inspirations as we go on and more just about the book.
Continued belowLdD: Yeah, what we’re doing in the beginning of issue #8 with Alarm Cat, it serves the story so perfectly that I can’t even imagine how else we would’ve done it.
JK: Where “Shutter” is by issue #8 and where it was at issue #1 is so exponentially far away from the initial kernels of the ideas that inspired us both to do the book that now it’s about the book, it’s about Kate as opposed to… whatever. Whatever inspired that stuff.
That point where the book inspires itself.
JK: Right. And it’s boring if you don’t let stuff inspire you at all, that’d be ridiculous, but now it’s more about the book.
And, just as a clarification question I guess, but I was curious: one of the things I like about “Shutter,” Joe, you’ve often spoken to this idea that you like being able to use your book to highlight other things. There’s Ryan Ferrier’s “Tiger Lawyer” back-up strips, the most recent issue had this short from my buddy Curt Pires, and in “Shutter” #7 you make note that there will be a “comprehensive career retrospective from Shea Hennum,” and I wanted to ask about how that has come about, about putting that stuff together for the backmatter of the book.
JK: The backmatter is just full of stuff we’re both stoked about. Shea is a guy whose articles I’ve been reading, and selfishly or self-involvedly (if that’s a word), I read his articles and think this dude is writing for me. “Here’s how Akira has effected this!” “Here’s how Dan O’Bannon and Moebius have effected this!” I loved everything he was writing so I hit him up and said, “Dude, you’re amazing, if you ever wanna write stuff about comics and need a place for it that’s not online, I’d love to run it in “Shutter.”” So the first thing he wrote, which is actually in “Shutter” #8, is about Paul Pope’s “Heavy Liquid.” He wanted to write about “Heavy Liquid,” and Brandon Graham is doing an illustration for it, and awesome, we get to put this cool thing together. With #7, we knew John Workman was coming on like we talked about earlier, and I feel that…
Well, I hope that comics are getting out of this habit, but the way they’ve largely been discussed in recent has been so writer-focused. It seems fucked up and weird and gross to me. I feel that everyone should be appreciated, and I don’t take for granted that John Workman is lettering our book. He is a legend, so I really wanted to make it clear to everybody why he is so important and why we’re so grateful he made time in his schedule to letter the book. So, in addition to him doing a variant cover, because he’s also a great illustrator, Shea is doing this fantastic piece on John that he really dug into John’s whole career. Here is who John Workman is, here’s stuff about lettering and what that is and how it affects the storytelling, all this stuff.
Comics aren’t just written. I see Marvel doing these trades like “Uncanny X-Force by Rick Remender,” and I know there’s no way someone like Rick – who tirelessly promotes and very publicly sings the praises of artists he works with and is excited about – is thrilled with it. I have to imagine he hates it. So, how does it happen? Why doesn’t Marvel mention Jerome Opena, Dean White? What’s the justification there? Its such an odd thing.
I want to make it very clear that Workman is not just some hired hand; he is a master craftsman who is part of the team with me and Leila and Owen, who is a storyteller in his own right. And the stuff that Shea is doing beyond that, he’s got such a great voice for writing about comics.
Ryan and “Tiger Lawyer” came together because, I think I’ve said this to you, but I was bitching on Twitter (something that I’ve done too often) about how I was reading “Captain Marvel Adventures” and thought there wasn’t enough talking tigers in comics, and I wasn’t even joking. I was dead serious. And I think it was Fiona Staples who passed along “Tiger Lawyer,” and that was exactly what I was talking about! We need more talking tigers in comics! So, I hit up Ryan at the time when I was putting together “Hell Yeah” and was like, “Dude, I will run whatever you want to do, I like it so much.” So we did “Tiger Lawyer” in “Hell Yeah,” and when “Shutter” was coming up I said “Let’s do it in “Shutter” now!” and he said “Alright.”
Continued belowThat’s what the backmatter is: whatever Leila and I are excited about, whether it’s a pin-up or an essay or a comic or whatever. Image is great about letting us do whatever want in the back of the book, so we might as well run a comic by some new creator or an established creator that wants somewhere to mess around, or let someone like Shea write about whatever he wants to write about.
It’s a place to share what we’re excited about. It’s an extension of the letters column, in a way. The last story, I liked what Curt and Artyom were doing in comics and people should know more about them, so here’s a thing. Read it.
LdD: I don’t usually read single issue comics because one of the things I despise about them is that they will have, depending which company publishes them, they’ll have ads placed in the worst places. It makes for an inconsistent story, and I’m just so tired of seeing ads every day anyway. I really appreciated Joe’s idea of having a letters column and really cool comics and pin-ups in the back, stuff that I could get behind for sure.
JK: Brandon pointed out to me that the new “Sandman” series starts off, the inside front cover is an ad for Combos. [Laughs] Those little pizza bite snackfoods. Why not just put some JH Williams art there? That dude is awesome. So, with “Shutter,” what’s on the inside front cover? Leila art, because Leila art is totally rad. And yes, we have ads — the first issue had an ad for Michel Fiffe’s “Copra”, and you know why? Because I love that book and I want people to read it. The third issue has an ad for “Wicked + Divine.” You know why that’s in there? Because I read the first issue right before we went to press and thought this was amazing. McKelvie and Gillen, as a fan of their work at Image or Marvel or wherever, it was the best thing they’d ever done — which is saying a lot because they’re amazing — and I needed to promote that. We needed to put that in there. I was so hyped for that book. And Image… lets us do it!
LdD: They fully support it.
Sure, but I think the real question is, when is Leila’s Combos ad coming?
JK: Oh, dude. If Combos hits us up and says we can do whatever we want with these? Fuck it, I’m down.
LdD: What? [Laughs] This is the first I’ve ever heard of Combos. I don’t even know if I like these things or not.
JK: Oh, Leila. We’ve got a lot to talk about after this. [Laughs]
I’m not dissing Combos, either. If Combos wants to send a palette of Combos my way, the letters column has an address for us.
LdD: Oh god. [Laughs]
JK: I want to do an ad for Combos our way.
Let me sneak one more quick question, then, just to tie things together. For both of you, what do you think is the thing you’re most excited about for “Shutter’s” second arc?
LdD: Issue #9 goes in a different direction where we can totally play with the page layouts, so I am really super excited about that.
JK: 100% for me too. The thing is, so, one thing we talked about was that we established this world and we established what “Shutter” is, but in #9-11, it’s something we’ve never done before. I’m really stoked for that.
LdD: We’re going to have to sit down next to each other to do our jobs because there’ll be so much back-and-forth input from between the writing and the art. He can’t just write a script and have me draw it. It’s going to be this weird… It’s going to be confusing for both of us.
JK: But that’s exciting to me. We’ve established that we have a book where we can fucking scare the shit out of ourselves doing something new, and that excites me.
LdD: Totes, fo reals, yo.
