If steampunk is where technology never progresses beyond steam power, then it’s possible to classify “Gutter Magic” as “magepunk”, with magic replacing technology in a post-WWII world. These are the sort of stories I’m a sucker for, ones that take the familiar and twist it in unexpected ways. In a world where magic has replaced technology, those with magical abilities are the upper class. But what happens if you’re part of the one of the most prominent magical families, but can’t actually cast a spell? Cinder Byrnes must find out how to make magic work for him, or die in the process.
Read on as we chat with writer Rich Douek about “Gutter Magic”, a magical caste system, balancing the familiar and the fantastical, and much more. “Gutter Magic” is still able to be pre-ordered with the code NOV150341.
“Gutter Magic” is your comic with Brett Barkley that’s coming out through Comics Experience/IDW. What’s the book all about?
Rich Douek: “Gutter Magic” is about a man named Cinder Byrnes. In a world where magic had replaced technology, he’s a member of a powerful family of mages. He’s also the only one of them that can’t cast a spell to save his life. With his partner in crime, a goblin named Blacktooth, he’s been stealing the scraps of a spell that can cure his condition – he just needs to figure out how to cast it before the necromancer crime boss he stole it from kills him.
If I’m not mistaken, “Gutter Magic” goes back a few years, back to when you were self-publishing at least the first issue. How did the comic come to land at Comics Experience?
RD: Yes, I developed “Gutter Magic” as a novel at first, and then as a short comic when I took the Comics Experience Intro to Writing course. Producing that 5-pager really gave me the comics writing bug, and I started to develop the miniseries while I was a member of the workshop. Brett and I produced the first issue and self-published it to try and get some interest from publishers. As it turned out, at the same time, Andy Schmidt was developing the Comics Experience Publishing Program, and he wanted “Gutter Magic” to be one of the first round of titles, along with “Tet”, “Creature Cops”, and “Drones”- which are all great titles.
One of the great things about being with CE has been being part of a community that’s building a reputation for putting out quality books. The response has been fantastic, and growing with each release, which is a trend I humbly hope “Gutter Magic” will continue.
“Gutter Magic” is set in what is mostly our world, but with a big twist: magic is commonplace and played a big part in WWII. It’s not a fantasy world, really, but it’s got plenty of magic. You combine the real world, like bustling marketplaces, with the fantastic, like that marketplace turning into an MC Escher design. How did you and Brett go about balancing those two aspects and deciding what needed to be familiar and what need to be fantastic?
It took a lot of discussion – I had reams and reams of notes about why things in that world are the way they are – why there are no cars, for example, even though the auto industry was thriving before WWII. Also, the ideas behind the various fantasy races that appear in the background, the architecture, and many other topics. When it came time to translate those notes into visual designs, Brett and I would either email, or get on the phone and just talk about various aspects – what we were looking to achieve was a setting that felt like a character in and of itself, full of interesting things that may or may not be a part of the big story, but still say something about the world – the best example I can think of is Mega City One – we were definitely going for that kind of feel.
I like that you mention Mega City One because the world of “Gutter Magic”, like Mega City One often does, does feel like there are dozens of stories happening all through the city, but Cinder’s is just the one we know about right now.
Continued belowThanks! That was definitely the goal. Brett and I wanted it to feel like, if the focus shifted suddenly onto one of the background characters, we could follow them on a completely different adventure through the city.
The magic in “Gutter Magic” seem almost like a caste system. You have the families like Cinder’s that are wealthy and powerful and have great control over magic, then you have the poor who can’t use it near as well. I have to assume this was an intentional parallel to various things in our own world, right?
Yes, there’s definitely an intentional parallel. I mean, it’s not a one to one comparison where I’m saying magic stands for wealth, or anything like that, but one of the themes I am exploring is how the concentration of any kind of power affects a society, and what someone trying to break through those obstacles has to deal with.
On that same note, Cinder, though he can’t cast magic, uses some magically modified items, like a magic gun. These are things that those outside the magical elite would use, with a powerful wizard even calling Cinder’s pistol “gutter magic”. How do the lower classes view the magical elite and vice versa?
I’d say that the lower classes view the mages kind of how we are used to viewing celebrities, and our own elite – a mixture of admiration, and jealousy, aspiration, and contempt. It’s undeniable that the mages could be making a better world for everyone, but they’re not – and I’m sure that in the society of “Gutter Magic”, there are those that just see that as how things are, and there are those that feel it’s a grave injustice.
As for the mages, I feel most of them aren’t very concerned with the lower classes beyond their immediate needs – like their servants, other people they need to deal with, and such. Of course, they’re not a homogenous block either, there are philanthropists and misanthropes among them.
So again, there are definitely parallels to the real world, and the situations we find ourselves in today.
I’m the sort of person who loves backstory and the introduction of magic into WWII is a great idea. How much more about that do we find out in the course of the series, or is that largely left in the past?
You’ll definitely find out more about WWII, and how and why things turned out as they did. I won’t say you’ll get the full picture of how everything in history fits together – because I am saving some of that for potential future stories, but you will get a sense of the backstory and how WWII fits into it, especially in the later issues of the series.
We’ve already touched on Cinder not being able to cast magic. What does that mean for him, especially in context of his powerful family, and society in a broader sense?
I think that for Cinder, it feels like a loss of opportunity – it’s something that he feels is not only his birthright, but something that he could be doing a lot better with than many of the wizards in the city.
As far as society goes, it’s something that definitely means more to Cinder than to most of the people around him – which is something that we’ll see come up in later issues – just what is Cinder willing to risk to get this power, and how it affects the relationships in his life – both with his family, and his allies.
