“Fearscape” is one of those comics that, after seeing the preview of the first issue, I knew I had to devour the whole thing. Opening with Henry Henry, a curmudgeonly plagiarist who believes himself literature’s next best thing (except, you know, without the work to prove it), being nominated as the avatar of all Earthly fiction to defeat the darkness of the Fearscape, a world in which imagination is reality, and I knew this was comic that ticked all right boxes for me.
And, even better, I got the chance to sit down with the book’s creative team, Ryan O’Sullivan and Andrea Mutti, to chat about putting the book together, using classical inspiration and fighting one’s greatest fears!
First of all, Ryan and Andrea, thanks for taking the time to talk with me! “Fearscape” feels like a story tired of the works of its peers. Your narrator, Henry Henry, repeatedly pokes fun at nine panel grids, cliche-ridden genre novels and the insistence of ending on a cliffhanger. Is that a tiredness you share? Where did that come from?
Ryan: “Fearscape” has an unreliable narrator. This means that his narration doesn’t reflect the ‘meaning’ of “Fearscape” and that HH has no narrative authority on his side. HH’s critical discourse towards storytelling convention in his narrative is a means to establish his character, not the moral/meaning/statement/Great Idea of “Fearscape.” Anyone who conflates these two (admittedly interwoven, but ultimately separate) story elements fundamentally doesn’t understand how unreliable narrators work.
Now, with that said, there may be occasions where HH and I align in our thinking; where the unreliable narrator and reliable author are indistinguishable. This blurring of the lines is by design. I want readers to have to work to discover the truth of “Fearscape.” The best unreliable narrators, villains the lot of them, are those who we find ourselves agreeing with initially, as they seduce us down a dark path we never thought we’d tread…
This is one of the benefits of sequential fiction. Readers and critics draw conclusions about an entire work from a single chapter. It is fun to try and misdirect. Not everyone falls for it. Those that don’t, I treasure. And those that realise misdirection is not the purpose of “Fearscape,” merely one of its many parts, I treasure even more.
Where did the idea of “Fearscape” come from? Comics is a symbiosis of words and pictures. I thought it would be interesting to create a comic where the words and pictures fought each other. There is more to “Fearscape” than this, but I won’t say more for spoiling it for new readers.
Andrea: Ah! Good point!
I think that this is pretty cool! A writer Ryan, my pal and bro, that talk about a writer, in fiction this time, and his mood and frustrations with his “no way to have a good new ideas” is not a super new idea. The writer with a frustration. We’ve seen that in some movies, but this time, wow. All is really different, a kind of renew, where we mixed up the real life, concrete story with a great and magic world where all the ideas was born! Amazing! The figure of the MUSE, damned interesting and deep. At the end this project is a great metaphor for life.
I’m thrilled!
Andrea, one of the aspects of “Fearscape” that most stood out to me where the moments where the narrator holds back information from the reader. How did you go about effectively structuring such a page knowing that part of it will be obfuscated from the reader?
Andrea: Look… at the beginning, I was a bit afraid. This was a very original and cool project and during the first art’s project I was not convinced about the “graphic style.” The pages were… particular, with a strange and cool vibe so it was important to catch something different and the greatness in watercolors was the answer here!
In that way, we have a kind of delicacy and energy in the same time and in that way I could add some empathy with the storytelling and the reade. There is lots to read here. Pretty full, and not in the classic way… again not classic! So, at my end I think that the readers, like my pal Ryan, will be my direct partner… a kind of one soul around and into the story… and in the FEARSCAPE mood! It’s a kind of great cooperation… at the end, I am a reader before!!
Continued belowRyan, you’ve mentioned before that you take most of your influence from classical writing because you can see the whole context of history around it. Henry Henry, “Fearscape”’s narrator, seems fairly critical of the way writers use the trappings of classical style, like the aforementioned nine panel grid, without context or meaning. Would you say that’s a criticism you share?
Ryan: I’d say that comics, as we currently know them, are too young as a medium to really have any “classical” styles. The nine-panel grid, for example, has only really been popular since the 1980s, and most of the artists and writers who popularised it are still alive and making comics. I would say that anything we think of, in comics, as “classic”, is just contemporary, and should therefore be ignored. (Or, at the very least, not be treated with any sort of authority.) HH takes this line of thinking a step further, believing that we should ignore classical authors too, striving to create something free from the Anxiety of Influence. An obvious impossibility, and something indicative of the hubris that will drive his inevitable downfall.
As to my own love of classical literature. This is because it is, (to butcher Calvino) comprised of books that have not stopped having something new to say. Classic authors touched the gods, and we, through them, experienced euphoria. I don’t think ~60 years later that the bridge to heaven is now closed due to western culture developing an abhorrence towards adverbs, the passive voice, and verbosity. I think the modern writer has a duty to ignore his contemporaries, for they are drenched in the mindset of the now. It’s like, I mean, nothing will date like, your work and stuff, if you, like, make it sound kinda current or whatever and junk, you know?
We cannot see the truth of contemporary fiction for we gaze upon it against the blinders of the zeitgeist. Our children will make sense of it, but it is beyond the remit of our senses and our cognition. All that is left to us is the classics. We know the historical stylings of the modernists or the romantics or the beat generation. We can read them and comprehend them fully because we are able to strip away their lit history milieu until only the timeless truth remains. That timeless truth at the core of them that still talks to us today, and that is forever “new”.
With that said, the classics are not a roadmap to good writing. So much of modern writing is informed by creative writing courses, How to Write books, youtube tutorials, etc. Everyone is looking for the One True Way of writing. That’s not how this works. The classics aren’t a guide. Classics are an inspiration. One which, if we are to create original work, we must keep forever at arm’s length, but not let go of completely.
Comics, as a medium, seems pretty well known for the use of metanarrative and deconstruction in its biggest and most influential stories. I’m thinking of touchstones like “Watchmen” and “The Sandman” and “The Invisibles” here. Fearscape, the world of literary horrors presented in the comic, seems to take a healthy dose of inspiration from stories like those, but I’m fascinated by the choice to place such a self-centered, grandiose character the center of it all. Why throw a petty, elitist, literary curmudgeon like Henry Henry into a world of pure imaginative fantasy?
Ryan: Plain characters that the audience can imprint upon are too rote for my tastes. What first drew me to comics was the Vertigo imprint at DC Comics in the 80s and 90s. That counter-culture subversion within a fringe medium from writers and artists who took their inspiration from outside of comics. You had characters like Spider Jerusalem, Enigma, and V. Now, some twenty-five years on, you have a readership familiar with obscure ideas, locations, and characters. We can afford to try new things. Frodo Baggins no longer needs to carry the torch for us. Let him lest his tiny feet. Irreverent characters like Deadpool are happy to carry the torch.
“Fearscape” is a comic that comes out swinging. As I mentioned, you open the comic by pointing at the modern use of the nine panel grid while stripping it of the meaning in its use. What were you hoping to achieve in having Henry Henry take those swipes?
Continued belowRyan: Bait.
Ah, you got me. Okay, that was really heavy so let’s end on a generic interview closer that secretly exposes something weirdly personal. What biggest fear would you face should you enter Fearscape?
Ryan: Alzheimer’s. The one thing that keeps me going through the dark times is the whole “Make Good Art” mantra; that no matter how bad things are going, you can always create good work. (Often by putting into it the very same things that are making your life hell.) If I had Alzheimer’s then that coping mechanism would be taken away from me, and I’d end up taking a one-way trip to the Netherlands. The fact that there’s a history of it in my family and that I lost my grandmother to it at a young age only heightens this fear. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing someone lose their mind.
There’s a character in “Fearscape” with Alzheimer’s, actually. His name is Arthur Proctor. And he’s a homage to an author I met at a young age who had a tremendous impact on me, but who also suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Andrea: Wow… discovering that all my ideas for a book are simply lazy bullshits!
“Fearscape” #1, from Ryan O’Sullivan, Andrea Mutti and Vault Comics, will hit stores shelves on September 26, more information can be found here!
