Last month, Image Comics announced “Our Bones Dust,” a four-issue miniseries coming out this December from Ben Stenbeck. He’s already had a pretty great year, absolutely wowing us in the Mignolaversity team with “Koshchei in Hell.” But “Our Bones Dust” will be new territory for him as he’s both writing and drawing the series. This project has been in the works for a while now, and though I’ve enjoyed the occasionally teasing glimpse on Instagram, I had to take the opportunity to dig deeper and get a closer look.
“Our Bones Dust” is your first time both writing and drawing a project of this scale. And you’ve been working on the series for a while now, over a year at least. In that time you’ve been busy with other things too, like “Koshchei in Hell,” so I’m curious about your process working on “Our Bones Dust,” because it seems like something you did in between other projects, and you’d occasionally have to set it aside for a while and return to it later. Would that be accurate?
Ben Stenbeck: Yes, but it’s worse than that. I took my first shot at it in 2012. It was just meant to be a twenty page thing for fun. I got a few pages done and didn’t think it was fun anymore. So I shelved it. But there were always parts of the story rolling around in my head. I talked to a few people about it and got encouraged to try again. I made my first big push on the work in 2020. Starting in lock-down. It’s been mostly finished since the start of 2021, I’ve just had some inking to do since then.
How does that affect the work for you? When you’ve been away from it for an extended period, do you view the pages you’ve finished differently? Did sitting with the story and characters change how it evolved?
Ben: Here’s the same page, drawn eight years apart. I can see everything I was struggling with in 2012, but what really made the 2020 page work for me was Dave’s colors. I sat with this thing long enough to lose interest, but once I started getting Dave’s colors in, it all came alive for me. It was like day and night.
The story originally was supposed to be much darker. Much less hopeful. But then who wants to read that? I didn’t want to read that. So I found a way to combine this other stuff I’d been thinking about and suddenly it was something I really wanted to draw. Imagine Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But with a massive robot fight.
Also I found the human villains of the story slowly started to turn into people with feelings and desires. In spite of how I wanted them to function in the story. That really surprised me, but I think it’s sort of the best thing about this story now.
The biggest problem with finishing the story almost two years ago is that AI has turned into a real thing we all need to think about. That wasn’t the case when I wrote this. The thinking then was AI was going to be an issue to deal with in the 2040s. Even then no one was really predicting the weird way it’s creeping into everyday life now.
I wasn’t expecting the weird way it crept into “Our Bones Dust” either, but I’ll save that discussion for another time—I’d like readers to discover that element themselves.
I did want to talk about Attis, the curious alien exploring the Earth. There’s a great visual when she’s first introduced and she’s looking through Earth’s geological history—they’re surrounded by cubes of earth, almost like Tetris pieces.
It immediately communicates the character’s curiosity, but also her detachment. Was this character in the 2012 version too?
Ben: She wasn’t in the 2012 version. But she’s the thing that made it into something I wanted to draw again. Attis is a sentient self aware AI. At one point half the book was going to be her back story, explaining who the AIs are and where they came from, but ultimately I felt like I didn’t need that. Here’s the first design I did, but I really wanted the AI to look more like gods than robots.
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And there’s another type of AI in this story that isn’t as sentient and self aware.
It’s interesting to see Attis’s design evolve, what elements have stayed the same and what have changed. The aspects that stuck in my head when I first saw her are largely present in this version.
Ben: Oh, good. I think that was the character I spent the most time on. I always wanted to have those long weebly wobbly arms.
A character that seems to be present even in your 2012 version of the story is the kid living alone in the wild. In the first issue they don’t have any dialogue, so they’re largely defined through their actions. Was that always the plan for this character?
Ben: The kid was always the main character to me. But as “Our Bones Dust” evolved it became about Attis and the kid. But the kid was the driving force behind the whole thing. I loved the idea of a sort of “kid Conan” born into this world where all there is is survival. There’s a hint at its origins in issue #2. But this is a child that’s been fighting and killing since it was old enough to stand. And that’s all it really understands.
This first issue is a little longer than usual, which I feel really benefits the silent moments with the kid. It gives the images space to breathe and communicate. Is this the plan for future issues too or was this just for the first while you were establishing the world and characters?
Ben: It was really important to me to have a lot of space to breathe in this. The silent moments say so much more to me than having some character explain to the reader how they feel about everything. But it was also important to me to give people value for money. So issue #1 is twenty-eight story pages. Issue #2 is thirty, #3 is twenty-eight and #4 is thirty-one story pages. I wasn’t very good at keeping the page count consistent.
Oh, wow. So it’s five issues worth of material told over four.
Ben: Yeah, five issues worth.
I’m glad to hear that breathing space carries through the series as the pacing is such a distinctive element of what I’ve read so far, especially in the scenes with the kid.
The other humans in this story are much more chatty and it’s really through them that we understand what life for the average person is like. They’re not just characters—they establish this world for the reader. What was it like for you writing this element? How did it evolve over the different drafts?
Ben: The other characters were pretty consistent through different drafts (other than the cannibal family all becoming less black and white characters). The tough part was the way they talk. I tried to give everyone a stunted pigeon English. It’s part of the idea of this world regressing back down to its most primitive state. At the same time I didn’t want to alienate readers with some indecipherable nonsense talk. Hopefully it works.
It does. It also helps that the environments do a lot of talking too. We see a bit of that in the first issue, but you take it further in the second. Without being too direct, you’re able to imply that kind of world existed before the Earth became a wasteland.
And it makes me curious about the early stages of your writing. Did you start with a script, or did “Our Bones Dust” begin with thumbnails?
It was trying to find the best way to tell the story that I had trouble with. I had a collection of scenes and moments in my head and just put them in order, then thumbnailed and lastly wrote a script. Then I did two or three rewrites of that. Then second guessed every choice I ever made in my life until I saw Dave’s colors and Rus’s lettering and suddenly it all seemed to work (to me at least).
They’ve both very good at seeing what the art is already doing and building on it. Since this is your book, what conversations did you have with Dave and Rus before they started work?
Ben: I had a bit of back and forth with Rus, settling on a font we both liked. There’re a few spots in the art where I specifically left room for lettering, it was nice to finally see them get filled in.
Yes, I feel like he was very attentive in finding a look for the lettering that sat harmoniously with your art. The line width of the bubbles doesn’t make them pop off the art so they look separate, and the balloon shapes are a little asymmetrical so they look organic.
Ben: Yeah, we played with some more organic looking lettering for the cannibal gang, but I thought it was a bit too much. We managed to find a balance there with the balloons.
Knowing what’s ahead, I think that was a smart choice. It means their speech looks like Attis’s, which visually says something about how “human” (for lack of a better word) Attis is. And it emphasizes contrast with something else in issue #2.
Ben: Poor old Dave, I sent him an entire document outlining the world and I tossed in every idea I had and added a rough gray tone shadow layer to every page. So his first shot at coloring didn’t really work. Which was all my fault. I’d sat with it so long, I had over thought it and just got in Dave’s way. I sort of had to say “Ignore everything I said and just do you,” and then the work was beautiful. He kept the ideas I had that worked and ignored the rest. It looks very different to anything we’ve done before. I’m still sending him the odd gray tone panel if I have something very specific in mind.
I really liked how graffiti was used to build the world. That aspect actually reminded me a little of visiting Christchurch, which has fantastic graffiti throughout the city. What drove you to include this aspect in the story?
Ben: It just seemed natural that graffiti would be everywhere. Maybe some of it is left over from before civilization collapsed, some of it will be from the new residents of the world. It’s a way for people to leave their mark and say “I was here.”
Before we wrap up, I’m curious, what element of “Our Bones Dust” are you most proud of? In what ways do you feel like the book pushed you as a storyteller?
Ben: I don’t know if I have an answer to that. I think it’s an entertaining story; there’s lots of action and interesting visuals. But I think there’s also pathos and depth to it. Some of the positive responses I’ve had from my peers and people I really look up to has meant a lot. It’s hard working on something under your own steam, not knowing how it’s going to be received. So to get some of the enthusiastic responses I’ve had from other pros has been huge. I think it’s been a step towards being better at writing my own thing. I’m sure it will make the next thing I write go a lot easier.
“Our Bones Dust” comes out December 6. Don’t miss it. You can keep up with Ben Stenback’s latest works by following him on Instagram.
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with colors by Dave Stewart
Written and illustrated by Ben Stenbeck
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Rus WootonOn sale December 6, 2023
Lunar Code: 1023IM266
Full color, 32 pages
$3.99
OngoingA feral child equal parts predator and prey, navigates a nightmare landscape of brutality and blood inhabited by scattered cannibal tribes. An interesting place to poke around for a curious Artificial Intelligence.
A four issue mini-series by long time Mike Mignola collaborator Ben Stenbeck (Baltimore, Frankenstein Underground, Koshchei)
