Writer Jacob Semahn partners with artist Jorge Corona to create “No. 1 with a Bullet,” a thrilling Image series whose collection releases June 6, 2018. With colorist Jen Hickman and letterer Steve Wands, the team has created a visually captivating and thoroughly contemporary story. The “No. 1 with a Bullet” is about Nash Huang, an assistant to a TV variety show personality, whose private life has been exposed to the cruel public of our social media world, and who must also survive still darker threats.
We spoke in depth with “No. 1 with a Bullet” writer Jacob Semahn about the book, the social issues that birthed it, the creative team and the craft within it, and the ways they made space for stories that needed to be told in the #MeToo era. “No. 1 with a Bullet” comes out in trade paperback on June 6, 2018.
This interview has been abridged and edited for readability. But catch the full interview on the Comics Syllabus podcast on Tuesday, 6/5/2018, here at Multiversitycomics.com
Let’s start by talking about the book. It’s the story of Nash Huang, who is surviving just an unimaginable situation of being targeted for harassment online and her past exploding on social media. She’s a public figure because she’s an assistant to Jad Davies, who’s a talk show host. So I think the subject is very prescient, of our times. It’s also horrifying, because this is a reality that people are living. Did you come to this story wanting to say something about harassment and social media first? Or was it that the characters and the story situations came to you first?
Jacob Semahn: It’s actually kind of both. I was coming up with several storylines that me and [artist] Jorge [Corona] could work on next when I talked to Image Comics. Jorge blew up after the Russ Manning [Award] win for “Goners,” went to DC, and did “We are Robin.” We were talking about our next volume of “Goners,” but it was about a year and a half, two years later. Image was like, you should think about rebooting it or trying to get new readers. So we came up with five ideas each to try to talk about.
And this was also months before the election, so 2016 was kind of nuts. It really gave a very particular insight into how we treat each other online. Even for me, I was getting really upset. I quit Facebook the day after the election. It’s weird, because I inherently knew that something was wrong. I just knew that because of the way that we were treating each other, all the news stories we were getting. And when [the US election results] turned out that day… the day after, I’ve never seen or heard from so many people who were just so in despair.
And that night, I needed to do something. So I wrote the story for “No. 1 with the Bullet” One of the ideas was about these new contact lenses that could record footage with the blink of an eye. And like with all technology that we don’t think all the implications through, people can use it as a weapon. And so, that was a crux of a story I wanted to do. After the election, seeing how we treat each other online, how we demonize the other without even knowing who they are, just because we want to believe a certain perspective given to us because it might be more entertaining to believe, or it might be just kind of fuel for the fire.
That’s powerful that you’re channeling that, because that apocalyptic feeling of doom that the worst of our fears came true, when the election confirmed that we ARE this world that somehow tolerates this and worse… to channel that towards your art, towards your storytelling.
JS: Definitely. And tribalism is super real, as we’re all discovering. And we’re also discovering that racism is super real. We’ve been hit with a lot of things that I think we all thought were done, and they’re not. And it’s interesting to see how we’re responding now, which is great. I’m glad that we’re taking action instead of sitting back and saying, “woe is me.” But yeah, the day after the election, kind of comparing the idea of this one guy who has never held office and who was on tape talking about assaulting women, and multiple lawsuits about women who claim that he assaulted them, or had extramarital affairs, etc.
Continued belowThe idea that we could pick a reality show host–of a trash reality show!– it wasn’t even like a substantive reality show, it was like… it just made me cringe. You know, life is too real, this is fake. And now, we’re just living in this weird idiocracy.
The cover image of “No. 1 with a Bullet” is such a striking image for that exact fear of our reality. Nash is on the cover, her eyes are being covered by these creepy green hands. It’s a brilliant distillation of these Iris Shutter Contacts that are, in a horrifying way, altering her perception. And what we’re talking now is this sense that people’s perceptions are just being frighteningly altered so that a kind of unreality becomes their reality.
JS: Definitely. Jorge got nominated for an Eisner for Best Cover Artist, which I think is so well deserved. He’s up against some stiff competition, the other artists are great, and their covers are awesome. [But] with Jorge, we were talking about it, and I was like, “Jorge, your covers actually play into a psychological aspect of what the story’s all about.”
Jorge’s definitely on a different level when it comes to how he structures and panels things. There are very rigid and grid-locked panels that are very uniform when it comes to basic story, and then when it gets to anything that could be heightened or crumbling, he starts taking the panels and moving the skew and making them more interesting. So he’s definitely on another level.
So you [and Jorge Corona] formed the idea after “Goners” (Image Comics), after that collaboration, and in conversation landed on this premise of “No. 1 with the Bullet”?
JS: Yes, we had these two ideas. One was this idea about contact lenses, and one was this new idea that I had after the election, that I ran by Jorge with the outline I wrote in the heat of the night, where I was just like, “I can’t sleep.” I wrote all six issues in outline form. I sent it to him and I was like, “this takes the idea of that contact thing. This also takes the idea of what we’re all going through right now.”
And Jorge and I were both from a female-led household. So we’re both drawn to these ideas of these powerful women and the struggles they go through on a day-to-day basis, whether they’re small micro-aggressions or whether they’re in-your-face and crazy. So that was something that we definitely felt passionate about telling. And so we grasped onto other creatives as well…
To come back to the story. The contact lenses are our way in, because in the first pages we see the way they can alter perceptions. It’s crazy that we bring so close to our eyes, our main centers of perception, these things that have the possibility to distort. But right away, we can see that there’s perception and whether that’s reliable, that sort of takes center stage in the story.
JS: Ultimately, the book takes place in a tomorrow world. Literally, a future that could be just around the corner. Actually these contacts have already been patented by Sony, so it’s not even that far of a fetch.
Wow. That’s crazy.
JS: Yeah, so we’re in this new future. And it’s a future where these contact lenses can play video right in your eye, and augment reality. And they can also record footage. Which kind of makes privacy become a thing of the past. Like were in a world now where privacy has already been degraded to a point where we now kind of are trying to master our second lives online, more than we are trying to manage our current lives. Our current lives are only in direct result of living it the way that we do so that we can enhance our secondary lives.
So we have this social media darling Nash Huang. She’s got a huge following. She’s an assistant to a variety show host, sometimes does segments with him. And she’s become kind of life a celebrity-adjacent type. So when we open up the first issue, we open up on her using these contact lenses, and the new firmware update is the augmented reality aspect. So she’s in kind of a horrific, trying to find a dead body in the studio type of game in front of the studio audience.
Continued belowSo living in this world and having all these things that are playing about, we go through her life and we see how she functions in this world where she’s celebrity adjacent, everybody knows her, everything’s great, her girlfiend’s just moved in. And… she even has a number one fan! So everything seems to be up and up about everything, with regards to her life. But however, there’s a sex tape that gets released, unbeknownst (to her), taken without her knowledge. And her life and all that social media stuff that she used to jump in on has now come under fire, and she’s the subject of it.
And so she’s taken all this heat, this flak, for all these things that she didn’t even sign on for, she didn’t even know this was happening. She’s kind of coming under fire by the public, and everyone’s weighing in. Troll-like comments. And some people are rushing to her defense, because I don’t want to make it like the internet’s this horrible place all the way.
Mostly.
Yeah… But while this is happening, her number one fan has taken this as an invitation to be with her. And so, he starts inserting himself into her life, people are kind of slowing dying all around her while he gets every closer, and he gets more threatening. Not threatening, but there’re vaguely insinuating direct messages sent to her. Every issue starts with a direct message talking about what happened in the last issue, where he’s at. And soon we find out that all of it comes to a head in the way that Nash definitely has to use– not her sight, not her hearing, but her brain and her heart— on how to figure out the next course of action on how to survive.
So that’s kind of what we wanted to do. That was kind of the message we were going through Thematically, we were going for the abusive online nature. How male gaze-y things are. Harassment. The #MeToo movement comes into play so hard in this, in a way that we didn’t expect because we wrote this a year before it happened. And the book just happened to be released on the same month it came out with Harvey Weinstein.
And so ultimately, I think it’s ultimately a book about using your brain, using your heart, and realizing that what’s in front of you right now isn’t the full story.
It’s clear that you guys have a lot to say, but you’re not heavy handed about it at all. It actually is in that very compelling story, a very propulsive story about what is going to happen to Nash. But through it, you see that thin membrane between reality and unreality. I mean, a contact lens is a perfect representation of that. We know the Google Glass is out there, we know when somebody has that goofy thing on. When it starts to get so close to the eye, to our perception that we can’t separate, that starts to be what it feels like when our second life starts to invade and touch into what we thought was our first.
JS: When you start not being able to trust people just because their eyes are open, that’s going to be a problem.
There are writing challenges in this, because the thing that you’re setting up, there is her immediate personal world: her friends, her place of work. And then you have this layer of the broader media, the social media chatter. As a writer, especially in comics, where you have to make it visual… what kind of choices or decisions did you and your team have to make about how to represent that ephemeral social media sphere?
What a lot of people point to, whenever we showcase it, is this cacophony of images and things from TV shows and variety shows, say a Jay Leno type variety show, or we have this Infowars type show called “Fact Wars.” And regular news anchors, and also people in real life. And we have some people who are younger, and older, and, you know, so we play this cacophony of images where everyone weighs in on what’s happening, whether it’s good or bad.
Continued belowAnd again, it comes down to trusting your artist and trusting your colorist. But I basically wrote down, what I wanted to see: an Infowars guy, a late night host, a family that has kids, let’s say. I want to show all these things, and then, at the center image, I want the person they’re talking about to be at the center. Jorge, being so ridiculously good at this, started overlaying images and making it his own.
And then Jen [Hickman, colorist] would come in, and she does this emotional color palette– it’s not really grounded in real world colors, but it conveys a subconscious, psychological sense of what’s happening in the story.
Sure. Like, say, varieties of purples, or like basically an all-orange palette but with enough shades to convey that emotion.
Yeah. So when someone’s talking about Jad, and people are weighing in, it’s got this really nice light red, like love, the heart color. It’s almost like enamoring, and all the images that are there, even if people are upset or think it’s funny or whatever, there’s kind of a jokiness to it all. And we have Nash, and it’s dark blue, melancholy, when her page comes up.
[In pages like this,] we wanted to touch upon how we’re barraged. I don’t really know if I’m an outlier on this, but I listen to all the podcasts, read all the articles, look on Twitter at what’s happening. So I wanted to play this out, where you’re being bombarded by so many things. And that’s kind of how our life is right now, our life is about constant bombardment.So that’s what we’re doing with those pages, that cacophony of images.
One thing you do really well is to alternate pacing between times when that kind of visual chaos is in the storytelling, language, dynamic paneling. But You there’s a sense of that world of many voices, all at once, and you convey that so well on the page. But then you’ll have a moment, like when Sarah is checking in on Nash after the revelations, this quiet moment. It’s a reminder of the humanity each of us has behind the noise, behind the sturm and drung and stuff. You pace that so well to keep us cored and anchored in these characters.
JS: Thank you. It was important to come back to the private moments with friends because it’s not just celebrities. Nash is not really even a celebrity, she’s celebrity-adjacent. But at the end of the day, she’s an assistant. And so, I wanted to ground it in a way that, this isn’t a person used to being in front of the spotlight.
It’s such a horrifying place to be put into without any reason for being put into, except someone just got a kick or thrill doing it. And ultimately, you can destroy people’s lives with just a click of a button.
Your team chose to create a space at the end of each issue for article-length pieces, where various women writers tackled some of these issues…
JS: The “Here for the Comments” section is the most important aspect of the book. It’s a little jarring for some people. When we were coming up with the book, me and Jorge had a very frank discussion about whether this was something that we had the emotional clarity to write in a way that was respectful. So we wanted to talk about these things. But we’re… two men. And social media… we haven’t been harassed. I mean, sure, we’ve had people write mean comments to us, but we’ve never felt threatened, we’ve never felt any of these things.
And so, having that insight was important to us. So we talked to Casey Gilly, who is a writer we talked to because we wanted to look into showcasing women in entertainment or adjacent. Like we have one woman who was a patent attorney for Silicon Valley, and she has a background in the sexual harassment sector, and she’s able to give these conferences and meetings with companies to talk about [these] things.
And we have Tini Howard there, who’s a comic book creator of “Hack/Slash” and “Magdalena” and “Assassinistas.” So we have her talking about her days before she was a comic book creator, she did cosplay, and she loved it. And then, there was a Four Chan incident where she kind of lost love for it, because this public display of creepiness that was promoted a bunch of strange men on the internet. So that love of something she didn’t see as this creepy thing now took a context of something she could never not see that way.
Continued belowI love that column, and I’m glad it’s going to be in the trade. It’s just one reason “No. 1 with a Bullet” feels like both powerful storytelling and important commentary. Thanks for talking with us about it!
For more of our conversation with Jacob Semahn, tune in to the Comics Syllabus podcast. And be sure to pick up “No. 1 with a Bullet,” coming out from Image Comics on June 6, 2018.
The trade paperback of the critically acclaimed, Eisner Nominated Image Comics series, NO. 1 WITH A BULLET from writer Jacob Semahn (GONERS, Marvel’s Spider-Man) and artist Jorge Corona (GONERS, Feathers, Big Trouble in China: Old Man Jack) will launch on June 6th.
Her social media: strong. Her variety show segments: a hit. Nash Huang is at the top of her game. But when the iRis Shutter contact lens hits the market, Nash’s personal life is invaded. The latest leap forward in ‘technological progress,’ these contacts not only play video or augment reality… they also record footage. Fighting to keep her life together after a sex tape goes viral, a
clingy super fan is the last thing on Nash’s mind. But then the bodies start to pile up… and the
terror begins.NO. 1 WITH A BULLET takes a critical and highly relevant look into today’s social media status quo. A world where technology has integrated itself so completely into everyday life that nothing is safe from online scrutiny and, by effect, the dark depths that our digital lives can bring.
