The Mysteries of Unland is a different kind of Witchfinder story in many ways. Most notably, two new writers came aboard, Maura McHugh (author of Jennifer Wilde) and Kim Newman (author of Anno Dracula, one of Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola’s favourite books). With the trade collection of the book coming out next week, it seemed a good time to talk to them about their experience on the book.
He told me that the series had a new writer, a writer with a prose background, one of his favourite authors. He said he had had a particular writer in mind for Witchfinder, someone he felt was perfect for the character… but he never thought he’d get him. So when his editor, Scott Allie, asked who he wanted to write Witchfinder, Mignola gave him a list three other writers that could possibly fill the role. Allie immediately asked who he really wanted, got in contact, and the author said yes.
Mignola couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t even believe it while he was telling me about it. “I’ll believe it when it’s finished,” he said.
Well, it’s finished. In fact, Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland comes out in trade paperback later this month. So Kim, what’s your side of how this story came about?
Kim Newman: A couple of years ago, Chris Roberson – whose Monkeybrain Books published my three Diogenes Club collections – mentioned that Mike would be interested in me working on the Witchfinder/Edward Grey title. I have a long-in-gestation comics project with Chris and artist Matthew Dow Smith that none of have quite got round to (it’s called Ghost Lantern Girl) thanks to pressure of work, so Chris knew I’d be open to a comics writing offer. I have a lot of friends in the comics industry and have occasionally been approached to write in the field, but it’s never quite come together with the right property and the right time. I told Chris I’d certainly be willing to consider Witchfinder, though at that time I only knew the character from Hellboy (I’d missed the two earlier miniseries) …but it took several years, and me forgetting the whole thing, for any concrete proposal to come along. I know Mike’s work, of course, and I’d met him at a Necon in Rhode Island somewhere around the turn of the century.
Maura McHugh: Quite simple, Kim asked me to come on board, and it took me about a nanosecond to say yes!
We’ve been friends a long time, and we had previously worked together on an anthology play that Kim and the director Sean Hogan produced in London, so we were pretty sure we could cross into writing together without too much bloodshed.
We did work far more closely for this project. Luckily, we got on well and it was an enjoyable collaboration.
KN: I thought Maura would be a good fit for the project too. We’ve been friends for a long time (she maintains my very lovely website at johnnyalucard.com) and I’ve followed her work in comics. We had a great time on the play (The Hallowe’en Sessions) – though our working method there was different and other writers were involved – and I knew it’d be fun to build something together.
The Mysteries of Unland is somewhat of an anomaly in the Hellboy Universe. Usually Mike Mignola is involved in the writing process, but in this case, he trusted it completely to the pair of you.
Continued belowMM: That trust meant a lot to me, and I didn’t take it lightly. It’s a privilege to work with someone’s else character, and I was mindful of that while I was writing. Sir Edward has a long character arc, and readers will have seen him in quite a different aspect in the Hellboy in Hell series. So, we tried to move him along a little in that arc, but in a manner that seemed true to what Mike envisioned.
Luckily, Mike and Scott Allie, our editor, enjoyed what we did.
KN: I assume we’d have heard pretty soon if we diverged too far from Mike’s expanding universe. We had a few suggestions that tied our book in with what was established or developing elsewhere. The coda, which most obviously feeds back into the larger Mignolaverse, was – however – a spur of the moment idea. It wasn’t in the original outline, but just seemed to fit the Unland is Rising theme.
What was your writing process working together on this book?
MM: We discussed broad strokes when we came up with the concept during one of my trips to London, and after that we created a treatment with the action broken down across the five issues. We batted that between us until we got it into a good shape, and sent it to Mike and Scott for their input.
Once we got the green light I wrote the first draft, and then Kim would come in and start editing/adding/finessing each script. We each had several passes at the scripts before we’d send them on for approval. After that there was usually at least another edit round after we got notes.
Then Tyler came on board, and we saw his amazing work, and made suggestions. There wasn’t too much to add, because the art was generally excellent.
Finally, there were a few changes in the dialogue once we saw the lettering.
KN: We were lucky enough to have a long lead time on the project, so there was no panic to get the issues done. The whole thing was written and drawn before the first issue came out.
What was the starting point of this story? Were you simply told to write a Witchfinder story and from there you were free to explore any avenues you wished, or were there specific character or world-building beats you had to hit?
MM: We were given free reign, but obviously we knew we had to do something memorable. So we went with the occult detective angle and focused on an environment in England that doesn’t get a lot of focus in horror comics. Moors and bogs are an unsettling landscape and can work quite well to create an eerie atmosphere, and Tyler and Dave Stewart did a fantastic job evoking them.
KN: Given that the previous series had been a city-set monster adventure and a western, we thought we should do something different. I’m from London but grew up in Somerset (I sent Tyler lots of image references of bridges and tors and the like) and was interested in using the wetlands as a setting. It’s not a region often visited in comics (I suspect this is the first mainstream American comic to use the expression “gurt wazzock”) compared to, say, the swamps of the Deep South or ghoul-haunted Lovecrafty New England. The notion of using a Victorian planned community was an early idea that took off – it gave us a lot of thematic meat as well as an interesting, unfamiliar setting.
MM: Yes, Sir Edward is an English character and we wanted that forefronted. Kim is particularly good at this kind of period detail, and he’s got a playful element to his writing.
Continued belowKN: It’s a longstanding joke in the UK that American comics have a strange view of Britain so I tried to exploit some of that (funny policeman helmets) while getting a little more realism (especially in the class distinctions). Earlier Witchfinder comics didn’t seem to know that you call a knight Sir Edward not Sir Grey, for instance. We can rationalise it a bit by saying Grey has brought some expressions and habits back from America.
This book was also a departure in terms of its visuals. The pages of this book are yellowed, and Tyler Crook’s B.P.R.D. work is markedly different from his approach in Witchfinder… Was this something that you specifically asked for, something Tyler pitched, or something that evolved through the collaboration?
KN: Before starting, we sent Tyler some reference sources for the “”Suspicions of Constable George Lawless” sequence – Victorian pulp illustrations from novels and periodicals (some Jack the Ripper things and a few Dickensian illustrations) – and I think that influence seeped into the rest of the book. I know we stuck Tyler with drawing a lot of wet people… it rains more and more throughout the story.
In the case of Sir Edward, you were writing a character with an established history. There have been two prior Witchfinder volumes, and we’ve seen him in other books during the middle of his career as an agent of the queen, as an old man dragged into Hell and torn apart, and as a masked and cloaked sorcerer in the realm of the fairies.
I think it’s fair to say that by the time we see him in Hellboy in Hell, his perspective has been broadened considerably. With that in mind, how did you find it trying to tap in to the mindset of a twenty-five-year-old Sir Edward, a man in the early stages of his career, somewhat closed-minded and impatient, with a considerable blind spot in regards to magic and those that use it?
KN: In his earlier series, he was a bit stiff… but the ghost we see in Hellboy is fairly sardonic. So we tried to show him unbending a bit – I also liked the idea of forcing him to be a detective on the grounds that even in a fantastical world a high proportion of his cases would involve hoaxes or smugglers in bedsheets or just misunderstood natural phenomena so he ought to have a bit of scientific rigour. He suffered quite a bit in the earlier books, so – though this trip isn’t exactly fun – it’s nice to see him in a case where he sometimes gets a chance to be witty (my thought was that he would be dry among wet people).
The highlight of this book for me was issue four, with all the flashback material in the swamp. It came to life vividly. I’m curious what your favourite moments were, what you had the most fun writing, or what surprised you when you saw Tyler’s pages.
MM: I’d agree that issue four is particularly impressive: Tyler and Dave brought an almost three-dimensional quality to the flashback scenes in the foggy marsh, which is quite a feat! It’s also the scene of a terrible tragedy, and that’s handled very well. Julian’s cover is also incredible for this issue – poignant and beautiful at the same time.
I love writing action scenes – they zip along, but it’s interesting to judge how successfully that translates onto the page. This is all to down to the artist’s talents. The first battle with the giant eels at the beginning of issue one is terrific: dynamic and entertaining, and I was so pleased at how well it was brought to life by Tyler.
Continued belowIt’s fun to get a couple of “splat” scenes in, such as Diggory Fenn’s dissolution at the end of issue two (brilliant art and colouring again). Plus, I enjoy adding a bit of sly humour, such as the end of Ada’s conversation with Sir Edward in issue four.
The five comics are chock-full of little moments and observations I adore. It was such a fun comic to write.
KN: my favourite sequence are the pages where we find out what happened to Hallam. For me, a comics newbie, it was cool to have an absolutely key plot point over visually and never be referred to in the dialogue.
I enjoyed the expanded cast in this book. The residents of Hallam were a delightfully odd bunch. I find Sir Edward works best when he has someone to play off… especially someone that exasperates him as much as Constable Lawless.
MM: Oh yes, Sir Edward needs a foil and sparring with Lawless brought out a few lighter moments (as well as some gory ones!). We enjoyed adding a range of characters to give him a diverse set of situations.
KN: Sir Edward had been through two miniseries without picking up a supporting cast – he had a sort of love interest, but she died. We picked up a couple of unnamed characters and added a new one, to give his work a kind of official structure – he’s by royal appointment, but needed a liaison to give him cases to solve and perhaps manipulate him a bit (it’s in his future that he breaks with his official job). I was also aware that it might be useful to add some bits to his world that could be passed on to whoever picks up the character – hence, Silk and Goad. And we concentrated on eels because frogs and squid were already well-served in his universe, but the fishiness ties in with other elements in the saga without being overly tied to them. We deliberately left Ada and the mcguffin around in case they are needed in any future ichthypocalypse situation.
MM: Personally, I loved writing Ada. We need more engaging older women characters in comics.
I agree.
KN: I like Anna too – I thought of her like Jacqueline Pearce in the Hammer films Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile. That period of British horror offers a lot of cool stuff – to help envision the new characters, I sent Tyler a bunch of images of British character actors from the mid-60s who were the sorts who’d play them.
The Mysteries of Unland was my favourite Witchfinder story to date. This collaboration really worked. Will you be returning for more Witchfinder in the future?
MM: I certainly would be up for another adventure with Sir Edward!
KN: I’d be open to returning, eventually – though I’ve now got my own universe to tend, with Ghost Lantern Girl for MonkeyBrain on my writing plate.
Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland will come out April 22. And if you’re in London tomorrow, Kim Newman and Maura McHugh will be signing copies of the book at Forbidden Planet.
