Do you remember what it was like to be young? To see every dark corner as an adventure and every empty vista as a portal to lands anew? Jorge Corona, artist on “No. 1 With a Bullet” and “We Are Robin,” does and he graciously sat down with us to discuss his newest series with Skottie Young, “Middlewest,” the wonders and terrors of childhood in the Midwest, the collaborative process as well as the under-utilization of Americana in fantasy comics.
Tell us a little bit about your background.
Jorge Corona: Okay. So, I’ve worked in comics for around 5 to 6 years. I started with “Teen Titans Go.” Then I did my own book that I wrote, “Feathers,” [published by] Archaea. I worked on “Goners” for Image, then I worked for DC with “We Are Robin” for a year. I’ve working mostly for BOOM! and Image since. I did “No. 1 With A Bullet,” “Big Trouble with Little China,” another short story in the meantime. And now the upcoming one is “Middlewest,” with Image.
So, tonally, how different is “Middlewest” from your previous books? I guess, specifically, “No. 1 With A Bullet” and “We are Robin.”
JC: Specifically with those, it’s a drastic shift in the sense of like, it’s more of a coming of age story. It’s more fantastical and it has a lot of influences from, like, Don Bluth movies and Miyazaki movies. Like, specifically, with “No. 1 With A Bullet,” where we wanted to make more of a social commentary and take in the thriller. . .the horrible side of technology, and “We Are Robin” was also about, you know, it was also a social commentary to, you know, the teenage movement that was especially relevant when the book was coming out and it kept being relevant. This one is a more personal story. The environment plays a big part into telling the story of the character but the story of the character is a main thing.
So you just described it as Don Bluth and Miyazaki and so it’s aimed at all ages? It’s aimed for adults describing their own?
JC: It has a little bit of both. I think it’s definitely teenagers and older but it has an all-age aspect in the sense of like, this is the journey of this kid and trying to find who he is, trying to break the cycle a dysfunctional family dynamics. And that’s the thing that you can relate no matter what age you are.
It’s not afraid to get dark, but it’s always restrained relative to. . .
JC: In a way. We’re not going to be terribly crude in some things. It definitely has some edges. We want to take that dark aspect of fantasy and use it to tell a better story for our character.
What is it specifically about working with Skottie that has been working really well? Like, what’s the dynamic between you two been like?
JC: It’s been really nice. Knowing Skottie and knowing Skottie’s works for so long and knowing him as an illustrator, that was definitely an aspect that I was kind of nervous about at the beginning because I didn’t know what to expect. But he was great in terms of letting me take the reels into what we wanted the book to look like. He only, you know, got back with a few notes, maybe at the beginning, when we were still trying to go back and forward to setting the mood of the book. But other than that, he was just super welcoming about forming ideas and the way I wanted to approach things visually.
The good thing is also, we’ve been trying to work on it for about 2 years and like. . .he read one of my books. He was super complimentary about it, and that’s kind of how we started keeping in touch, a few years back. Then when we started talking about a book, we realized that a lot of our influences come from the same places. So, like, it was very nice to work with him because we were already kind of like. . .We have a similar mindset into what we wanted the book to look like. And again, it was just great. He had a great story already, mapped out when he came and asked, and the visual aspects, he just let it be my decision and that has been working out really great.
Continued belowAre there any small teasers you can give to those fans at the moment?
JC: Well. . .It’s going to be a journey. It’s going to take you to, especially if you’re familiar with the American Midwest, it’s going to take you to places that you feel like you’re accustomed to seeing or are common ground but the beautiful thing is that this a fantasy Midwest. Everything that you think you know has this other side that is more magical and is going to surprise you, and it’s going to be a journey about discovery, not only about the self-discovery of our main character, but also the discovery of this land.
You don’t tend to see a lot of stories that deal with Americana in fantasy. We have “Jack of Fables.” I guess it’s the only thing I can think of. What is it that drew both you and Skottie to that as the grounding point for the story?
JC: Well, this is a very personal story for Skottie. When he was writing, he was taking a lot from his life. He grew up in the Mid-West, so when we started talking about it, he told me stories about his childhood like, how he saw barge, an abandoned barge or a silo or like all these things that through the eyes of a kid, they turned into this magical playground kind of situation. So, that’s a lot of the feel that we wanted bring to the book.
To take in all these things, like the Americana, like things that you’re super familiar with and then — not twisting them, but like turning them in a way that they will feel like more and since we have have basically created our own world, the aesthetic was heavily influenced by that Americana aesthetic and style but also with a little bit more of an edge and a little bit more of the fantasies.
So how many issues have you drawn so far?
JC: I’m about to start issue 5.
Obviously you can’t necessarily go into details, but are there any scenes that you have drawn so far that you think are really powerful, that you’ve really connected to?
JC: I would say Issue 1 and 2 have two of the most emotional scenes for our character. Once the issue comes out and people, I don’t want to spoil it but, like, it’s around the end of issue 1, there’s a lot of emotion, there’s a lot of like drama coming from the character that I thought it was very intense. There’s a family conversation that was very powerful to read, and then tried to convey that with the linework.
And then issue 2 has a little bit more of those ramifications of that situation from issue 1. I think in terms of fantasy; I think you’re going to see a lot of things from the get-go. Each issue has at least one or two moments where it’s like, this is the world that were presented to you and this is the world that our character’s going to try to sail through. In those terms, you’re going to see it through the whole arc and there’s definitely moments coming up and issues that I know are coming that are going to be really powerful, hopefully for the reader.
Are there long term plans or is it more of a smaller series?
JC: No, no. We currently have plans for at least 3 volumes, 6 issues each and our plan is just to keep going. We already had discussed like, okay, so if we get to those 3, what will be the next step and we already know what we want to do. So hopefully, this will just keep going until we tell the whole story that we want to tell.
Has the collaborative process for “Middlewest” been different than for “No. 1 With A Bullet” or “We are Robin?”
JC: With “No. 1 With A Bullet,” that was my second book with Jacob Sehmahn, who was the writer; our first book was years before and he’s more used to script writing for television and animation. Because we knew each other, we knew the experience that we had for the first book, when we worked on the second book, “No. 1 With A Bullet,” we knew our downfalls and our strengths. So, mostly, I just got a script that read almost like television script and so I set the pace, I set the layout, I set the pages and all that. Like, we were both playing to our strengths in that sense.
Continued belowWith Skottie, this is obviously our first book together and it didn’t take long to actually find each other’s groove, each other’s rhythm. It’s been a more hands on approach into creating the world along with Skottie, who already had the idea of the story and the character art. So, it’s always different when you have a new collaborator to work with but it has been smooth for whole ride. That’s something that I hope comes through in the story, like we’re having a lot of fun and we’re having a lot of respect to the story that we’re working on together.
The preview pages have already been very, very beautiful
JC: Thank you. John who’s doing the colors, he’s killing it. He’s been doing like — I can give him stick figures and he can turn that into magic. It’s been great working with him and Nate, who’s doing the lettering, also brought his A-game and has been doing something really interesting with the lettering that I think is going to look really good.
Because this is the Midwest, do you plan on playing with space and distance and, like the characteristics of the plains?
JC: Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, like I said, the environment is going to be here, and the book is called “Middlewest,” so the environment is going to be here to reflect a lot of journey of the character. And it’s going to almost work as a blank canvas for this character because of this openness, because of this sense of like, you know, considering yourselves so small, by this large environment. We’re playing with that sense of journey and that sense of. . .almost threat that you don’t know that something’s Hidden and looking back at you. That sense of void, even though you’re like in the middle of something. It’s so open, and it’s so huge that you feel like floating on something that you don’t know exactly what’s going to be on the horizon. So, that sense like you said, like vastness, it’s going to come across most of the journey of the character.
Terrifying sense of openness.
JC: Yup. Exactly.
Issue #1 of “Middlewest” comes out from Image Comics on November 21st.
