One thing a great book can do is inspire the reader with hope. With the ever growing threats our world faces it can be tough to a positive outlook on the situation. It is at that point turning to a story that reflects the direness of situation but forges through with the message of hope that makes it so important.
Cecil Castellucci, Flavia Biondi, and Fabiana Mascolo set out to do just that with their new graphic novel, “Shifting Earth” from Dark Horse Comics’s Berger Books imprint. “In a not-so-distant future, a freak particle storm has landed botanist Dr. Maeve Lindholm on an idyllic yet strange parallel Earth, with no way back home. But just like her own climate-ravaged planet, this verdant Earth has a sinister side . . . which astronomer Zuzi battles every day. Both women are fighters, and both face a choice: forge new paths, or save the worlds they’ve always known?”
To learn more about “Shifting Earth,” writing during a pandemic, tackling important stories in the comic medium and more we were luckily enough to be able to speak to co-creator and writer Cecil Castellucci. You can find our discussion below and you can find “Shifting Earth” online and in your local comic book/book store right now!
I know you have answered it previously, but the story has I think a clever hook, so how did the story manifest for you?
Cecil Castellucci: Right before the lockdown, I had lunch with the fabulous Karen Berger. We had talked about some stories and the possibility of working together and then throughout lockdown kept sort of batting ideas around for this one Parallel Earth story I had. It started off a bit differently, but through conversation and the desire to sort of escape the world, I finally landed on Maeve’s story. I’d heard about the Svalbard Seed Bank and attended some lunchtime pandemic lectures about botanists who were trying to reclaim wild seeds to help make flora and fauna more robust. I was interested in that because one of my pandemic hobbies was trying to reclaim seeds from my kitchen scraps and regrow them in my garden. One thing I was thinking about was the climate crisis and seeds and how important biodiversity is for our future. We’re really struggling with that. I find that just fascinating and knew that a person who dedicated their life to finding wild seeds would make a compelling character, you know, seeds and growth and thinking about time and our planet in a longer way than just the day to day.
Has it evolved since its inception and working with Flavia?
CC: I think it changed more with conversations with Karen. When Flavia came on board, it more or less baked. But Flavia and I had conversations about the importance of actions that impact a more sustainable way of life and what sustainable cities and the world would look like. Our work was really rooted more in asking each other how do we build a believable parallel world that evolved society, technology and humanly different than ours. I made a lot of Pinterest’s to spark those great conversations!
This is your first time working with Flavia Biondi, who did the amazing art for the story. While there are sci-fi elements it is a story with many quiet moments, characters in conversation and in personal struggles. Flavia I feel did an amazing job bringing readers into those moments. What do you think she brought to the story that you couldn’t as a writer?
CC: Artists always bring so much to the story in comics. That’s comics! I think what Flavia is so amazing at doing is really breathing life into the intimate moments of a grand story. The character work that she does so sublimely evokes the drama and makes the story feel personal and also really pressing. She’s got a brilliant sense of drama. This book is short, and packs a lot of world building in it and skips along at a quick clip and has a lot of big ideas and Flavia managed to make it seem huge and intimate at the same time. As we know in comics, it’s fully a collaboration, and you can only tell the story well (or at all) if both creators are in the flow. I think she brought life into Maeve and Zuzi and Ben and the whole crew. And then I also want to give a shout out to Fabiana Mascolo whose colors really kicked up a notch and really helped to show the differences between the two Earths.
Continued belowMore and more thankfully we have seen comics used as the medium to tackle all sorts of serious topics. For the most part I think comics has always done that, but the mainstream audience has come to expect it more as a viable medium to tell those stories. Why do you think comics is a good medium not only for your story but many of the other personal stories that are now the norm. Would “Shifting Earth” be as effective in another medium for you?
CC: I think we’re in such a golden age of comics hitting its stride as being taken seriously in the grander literary world. Hurrah, I say and I agree because I think comics have always, always been game to take on serious topics. I love that mainstream audiences are expecting it and demanding that comics tackle it all. In my opinion, comics are a good way to tell these kinds of stories because with sequential art you can really pause on the page when engaging in a reading experience. And that ability to really take in a panel and rest on the page and sit with the story and the art and the ideas that are being presented really has a way of being visceral and allowing the reader to ruminate on things. Comics bring so many things alive and really allow for a reader to engage in a kind of three-dimensional way with the story, but also have their own conversation with it because it’s contemplative and intimate. As for “Shifting Earth” being effective in another medium, yes it could be. But I know that comics were the best way for me to tell the story. Ultimately, I think that all stories are really flexible and can be translated to be told in many forms. It’s more a matter of are you using the form to best express the story in the best way that it can be told. With “Shifting Earth” being a big scale world building thing that seeks to show you the possibilities of sustainable cities, or the damage that we’ve done to our own planet, comics worked great because it had to be visual. There’s a lot of scope and imagination that can be conveyed on the pages of a comic.
I think one the most clever and insightful elements of the story is the way both earths are presented in the story and how the problems of both almost mirror each other despite almost opposite situations and what conclusions that can leader the reader too. What can you tell readers about both settings and maybe how for you that plays into the larger message/narrative of the story?
CC: One thing that I wanted to convey with the two different Earths is that they both grew to adapt to their own set of planetary circumstances but that humans continue to be human no matter where they are. So while Earth 2 might have evolved technologically differently, and in a much more sustainable way than we did, due to their Earth having two moons and less land, they still tried to use their ingenuity to come up with solutions to survive in conjunction with the parameters that they were given. But they also fell into some pitfalls, just like we have. The idea is that those solutions can be both innovative and also damaging, just like we’ve done here on our own planet. We as humans have this incredible gift of adaptability but that can also cause us problems. We have a tendency to self sabotage. I also really wanted Maeve to land on Earth 2 and see all of the things that feel familiar but slightly off, so it was recognizable to her, and the actions of the people, no matter how utopic they were in one way, still had that way of moving through the world that we know so well. She is both at home and on an alien planet.
Many of the stories we are seeing this year in comics have come about during the lockdown of the past 2 years. Had working in that time changed your writing approach at all? Do you think there was a different version of this story before what we and the earth experienced during the lockdown?
Continued belowCC: I don’t know that I would have come up with this particular story pre lockdown in exactly the same way that I did because it was so born from that conversation with Karen a week before lockdown and then me being stuck in my house and puttering around in my kitchen trying to scrap seeds from my salad to grow in my garden! Another thing that really influenced it was that while writing it, there were terrible heatwaves and those awful fires where you couldn’t leave the house at all because the smoke made it look like we were living on Mars. So maybe I think the pandemic accelerated the idea of story of being pulled over to another world from our Earth going through a real trauma and thinking that the solution is elsewhere. But the truth is, this book is about doing the work and taking the actions where you are and doing something to make the world you live in better moving forward. And that’s something I’m interested in bringing to my stories pre pandemic, currently, and forever moving forward.
Reading this story it’s clear a lot of care and research went into its creation and I have seen in other interviews you talk about the research you did in talking to experts in the field. When marrying the research and the story telling is there a line for you where too much research hurts the storytelling process? Is that an easy thing to balance?
CC: One can for sure get lost in research! It’s so easy to feel like you’re working on your project when you’re going down rabbit holes and discovering cool things and excellent details to jam on in your story. Let’s face it, science is amazing and talking to experts is always interesting and fuels the imagination. A lot of times what I do to try to avoid that is just write the story as I want first without worrying about those details and then talk to a scientist or expert or look at a history book and adjust after that. Then I go back in during my revisions and course correct for whatever I’ve learned and decide what to add in. The research should enhance the piece. That way it’s a happy balance between it getting in my way and it being helpful. And even though I talked to scientists for this project, I’m not doing hard science fiction per se, there’s a lot of wiggle room! And hand waving! I like to think of my stories as heavily inspired by real science that I can point to as the source, but firmly in the fiction.
Like the dual earths narrative, the story splits focus on two characters, Maeve and Dr. Zuzi Reed. What do you think both characters bring to the story? Did you find you had a preference for writing one versus the other, or one voice was easier to capture for you as a writer?
CC: To me, Maeve and Zuzi are both scientists who are sounding an alarm and not being listened to. So they are very similar and have a lot in common. I think that they both feel really alone in their world and long to have a person who understands their frustrations at the limits of imagination that their societies each have. So I feel like they are complementary characters who mirror each other. They both felt really great to write, and I loved them, Maeve and her curmudgeonous nature and Zuzi and her exasperation at the awareness gaps of those around her, but I wanted this to be the story focused on a person coming from our planet and who is forced to deal with another world and their ways and thinks that they have found all the answers to their problems there. So in the end it was natural to stick with Maeve as the main character.
When making a comic like this tackling issues mixed with some hard sci-fi wrapped in a larger character study of the two leads, do you think about who will be reading this and how or if you approach making it work on a broader audience. I guess is there a way to have your cake and eat it too with a story like this if that makes sense?
Continued belowCC: I mean, one always hopes that large stories with compelling characters will find a broad audience. That’s the dream. But when I sit down to write, I write the kinds of books that I would want to read. I like to think about it more in the sense of flavor. I hope that there is a real taste for books that marry the intimate stories between a few characters that touch big ideas. I know that I have a longing for them. So I guess that is cake.
Additionally, what do you hope readers take away from “Shifting Earth” when they turn that final page?
CC: My big goal and wish would be that people would start thinking about bigger issues that are affecting us and our planet and that it would spark conversation. And that just because things seem dire, that there is hope. I’ve always said that I want folks to leave the story thinking about what actions they can do today to help make the world a more livable place moving forward. That we have work to do, and that there is hope. Plant a garden, rip out your lawn, diminish your food waste, think about water, take public transportation, eat less meat, etc. etc. etc.
