The World Knows No Hope in “Spread,” with Justin Jordan and Kyle Strahm [Interview]

Making its somewhat debut at last year’s New York Comic Con, “Spread” was one of those things that was the definite talk of the con. Handed out in ashcan copies, the little comic by Justin Jordan and Kyle Strahm promised big things and teased even more. And now, here we are: on the cusp of the release of the first issue for what appears to be a grand horror adventure.

Blending “Lone Wolf and Cub” with The Thing, the series follows the character of No along on an icy landscape full of death of treachery — and a giant, spreading virus-like monster that infects all it comes in contact with in imaginative ways. No carries with him a young infant, Hope, and the two of them traverse this unknown world, attempting to find something better throughout all the carnage and misery wrought upon the world.

Having had the opportunity to speak with Justin and Kyle about the book as well as having read the first issue, I can confirm for you that it is pretty damn great. Today is the final order cut off day, so if you’re excited for the book make sure to let your retailer know.

In the meantime, read on as we chat with Justin Jordan and Kyle Strahm about their upcoming series.

So when I first saw Spread, it was being shopped around at NYCC. Can you tell me about how you two initially came together for the series?

Justin Jordan: Well, we were smuggling emu out of Mexico…

Oh, you mean comics. I met Kyle a couple of years ago at NYCC – I think it was the year when Luther Strode had just come out, so 2011?

We got introduced at a bar by Tim Seely. I think. But I was aware of Kyle’s stuff from We Will Bury You. The next year at NYCC I saw Kyle again, and he mentioned he’d love to work together, and I had just come up with the idea for Spread. So when I got home I emailed him the pitch.

Well, a pitch. For reasons that are stupid verging on hilarious I sent him the pitch for another project, and we went a confused emails before I figured out what the fuck I had done. Sometimes I have the deep stupid.

By the time this last NYCC rolled around, we had an ashcan that sort of served as proof of concept for it.

Kyle Strahm: I’d just finished working on some fill-in issues and was eager to do something creator owned. I’d read “Luther Strode” and had been sad when that kid was pinned to the wall. I liked that little guy, so I sought out Justin.

We took 250 copies of the preview book we were calling the “Spread Convention Teaser” and showed it to everyone we could. I walked around the con and gave it to a lot of my artist and writer friends and Justin gave it to a lot of his. The reaction was very encouraging. When we finally started pitching the book around, a lot of those creators spoke up about “Spread” online.

What’s changed between then and now? How has the book evolved from that ashcan pitch?

JJ: Not a lot, actually. I think we’ve gotten more used to work together and how each other do things, but the story I had planned is still the same story we’re telling. I feel like I should have a more interesting answer.

Uh… we dropped the smellovision. They kept smelling like Emu.

KS: I think I’ve found the tone of the world, which I was still searching for in the first 9 pages you saw in the teaser. Many of the major elements that show up in “Spread” have since been fleshed out.

There’s a cool character who shows up in issue four who spawned from some of my sketchbook pages. In a lot of collaborations, artists plant the seeds for things that writers might latch onto and expand later. We’ve had that happen a few times already.

It does take me some time to get to know any character I’m drawing. The more I draw someone, the more consistent that character’s design becomes. I think it’s that way for a lot of artists. I’ll be interested to see how the main characters look in issue six compared to issue one. It might be like looking at those old, jagged drawings of The Simpsons.

The book is described as “Lone Wolf and Cub” meets the Thing, and what we’ve seen so far certainly fits that description. Can you guys talk a bit about your influence on the series so far?

JJ: Whenever I read or watch zombie fiction, I find that what I’m interested in is what happens after the apocalypse? How does humanity adapt to it? So I’m always less interested in the zombie apocalypse and more in what it will be like ten years on.

That’s one of the things I like about the Mad Max films is that aspect. Beyond Thunderdome is probably the weakest of those films, but the kids and Bartertown are really interesting in showing us how societies come back.

So there’s a lot of eighties in there. I don’t think the book FEELS like an eighties movie, but the roots of the DNA are back there.

KS: I was crazy for all the living costumes worn by comic book characters in the late 80s and early 90s. In an old issue of “Spawn” I looked at recently, K-7 Leetha absorbs a bunch of evil and turns into what is almost a living landscape. It was cool to realize that had been bouncing around in my head for twenty years and it shows a little in Spread.

Old imagery we never think about affects any artist’s work. Some friends and I recently looked at several pages from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and a few of us were surprised that, as kids, those Stephen Gammell illustrations had been burned into our brains to the degree that we pull from them without even thinking about it.

I know Justin’s heart belongs to horror, but when you look at this series what do you see as the most prevalent angle: the unmitigated horror of it all, or the father/daughter relationship?

JJ: Honestly, probably the father/daughter relationship between No and Hope. No is genuine badass, but he’s spent ten years in this hellscape, where the Spread is a constant threat, other people are a constant threat, and no one if there’s even a world out there, and whether they’re going to help. So he’s got a lot of calluses, both physical and mental. I mean, the guy is called No because it’s most of his dialogue. Not a warm guy.

But that changes. Hope (both the character and the concept) change him, and he warms up to the supporting cast.

I think and hope it’s like “Strode” in that regard; that book was hyperviolent, but I think what people connected with and why the book was so popular is the characters. I know I fell in love with Luther and Petra, that’s books central relationship, and I think readers did too. I hope that proves true for “Spread” as well.

But, you know, it is a horror book. Both the horror of the Spread, which is pretty pure body horror, and the horror of what people do when the world falls apart.

Kyle, I’ve spoken to Justin many times so I’m going to lob a couple questions at you: your art is pretty visceral and evocative from what I’ve seen. Where did you get your start in art?

KS: As a wee babe I would watch cartoons, design action figures and make up comic book characters. I was into Ghostbusters and He-Man. I liked the Ninja Turtles, but mostly the characters who were made of trash or who were disfigured people. There were a lot of guys in my notebooks with hammers or buzz saws where their arms and legs should be.

I broke into comics working on a book called “We Will Bury You” with Brea Grant and Zane Grant. It was about zombies in the 1920s and there was a lot of room to have fun. After that, I did odds and ends including guest spots on “Hack/Slash” and “Haunt” at Image. It was very cool working along-side Nathan Fox and Tim Seeley.

In terms of the look of the book, what are you looking at for inspiration when bringing this madness to life?

KS: Stylistically, much of the work I did in the time leading up to “Spread” was splattery and relied heavily on spray paint. It had a very sketchy, ambiguous quality to it. I wanted to try something else. With “Spread,” I made a conscious decision to draw everything with clean lines and to limit the splatter considerably. Everything in the book has been considered and drawn and I’m very proud of the way it looks.

As far as creature design, I’ve built a photo catalog of parasites, insects, microscopic landscapes and other weird stuff. There are a lot of very gross things in the world and if I get stuck while drawing or something feels like it’s beginning to become a repeat of something else, I can usually open that folder and find inspiration.

Felipe Sobreiro, who is coloring the book, did a lot of work with Justin and me to figure out how the Spread should finally look. It definitely has an anatomy. We didn’t want it to be homogeneous.

Bringing in Felipe Sobreiro is a pretty genius move considering his evocative and layered work with all the reds used in Luther Strode, but guys, be honest: to what extent are you just trying to break him and his color palette?

JJ: We already broke his computer. That last spread in “Spread” pretty much did it in. Felipe is great – it took a couple of back and forths to get the palette down, but the book looks incredible.

KS: Felipe has been vital in defining the look of “Spread”. His name on the cover is well-deserved.

He also drew a cover for us that looks fantastic.

Alongside No and Hope, what sort of characters do we find as part of the supporting cast? And, given the perilous nature of the scenario, how are you guys approaching the additional characters’ involvement with the ongoing saga of No and Hope’s story?

JJ: There are two other characters you’ll meet in the forthcoming issues (eagle eyed readers will notice they’re mentioned in this one) that round out the main cast- Fat Jack and Crazy Molly. Fat Jack is a well connected and extremely useful guy in this world, but you’d be a fool to trust him. I mean, how does a person even get fat after the end of the world?

Molly is… interesting. No and Jack both had lives before the Spread happened. They were already adults with lives when the quarantine went up, but Molly was a little kid. So she’s largely grown up in this madness. Which is part of the reason she’s a little off. The other part is the really awful thing that happened to her just before we met her.

But no one is safe. Okay, that’s a lie. Hope is safe enough until she’s old enough to actually narrate the book. Everyone else? Could go either way.

Other characters will definitely come and go in the series, although not all of them will join the group. You’ve met one in the first issue and heard about another, who you’ll meet in the next issue, and who may be the biggest asshole I’ve ever written.

Obviously a fair amount of world building is involved in a book like this, but how have you guys approached the challenge of assembling this new world? What are some of the things you’re endeavoring to make sure this devastated landscape evokes?

JJ: It needs to feel natural. I was tempted to say real, but that’s not quite it; this is a fantastic situation. But I tried to look at the scenario we’ve got and extrapolate fairly reasonably about what the world would be like.

So, for instance, you’ll notice that the raiders are riding horses and pulling a car that used to be part of a car. That’s for the simple reason that in the QZ, ten years on, there’s no gas. Despite what post apocalyptic movies have shown, gas doesn’t actually store well, and ten years in it would be GONE.

Likewise, there are occasionally guns around, but the means to get the raw materials to make bullets are not being replaced, so bullets are valuable and not used when they can be avoided. So lots of arrows and melee weapons.

So I want the world to feel like something that COULD exist, you know? You should have some idea how people are surviving and what life is like.

KS: There’s a lot of room for melodrama in comics. Much of what happens on a comic book page might seem over-the-top if it were adapted 1:1 to a more restrictive visual medium, but we can get away with a lot. For example, a background colored solid red can inform the mood of a comic panel, but the same color change in a film might seem like an extreme stylistic effect. We’ve had to decide where to draw the line.

We had to consider things like how far we want to stretch physics. When it comes to the amount of trauma a human body can take, we’re not Tiny Toon Adventures. I think we’re somewhere between Die Hard and Kill Bill.

And in approaching some of the monsters and the nightmares that are in the books, what’s the collaborative process like for that? Because what we’ve seen in this book so far is pretty colossal.

JJ: A lot of that is Kyle. A LOT of that. The eye thing was me, and the general idea of flyers and spreadworms and such was me, but the runners, sirens and the overall look is mostly Kyle. He keeps collecting pictures of horrible things.

But there are lots more coming. The sirens are pretty awesome, and you will eventually get to see a flyer that hasn’t been smacked with a plane, and so, so many other beasties.

KS: Justin and I both have a lot of ideas for creatures and we’ll bounce them off one another to push them to their fullest potential. The original idea for the flyer was a winged monster, but after creating the anatomy of the Spread, it made more sense for it to fly by means of several internal gas sacks.

A lot of the larger creatures are formed by a fusion of several smaller creatures. A large Spread runner has a head, but did it happen to enter metamorphosis with a smaller toothy orifice creature filling that roll or was a mini tentacled blob in place instead? Spread runners all do one thing; they run. But the collection of creatures that form them is a roll of the dice.

Post-apocalyptic scenarios are certainly prevalent in today’s culture as we’ve all gotten a good taste of it, so in what ways are you hoping to have “Spread” stand out against the masses? It looks fairly unique already, but what do you see yourselves doing that you hope to push the genre?

JJ: Monsters? And, uh, stuff.

I think one of the bigger differences, aside from the aforementioned monsters, is that we’re looking at an apocalypse from a fair distance afterwards. The Mad Max movies did that, and I always liked that.

But the other thing is: IS this post apocalyptic? Because the people in QZ don’t KNOW. They think the world has ended, most of them, but then where did that plane come from? The lack of communication and the effect it has is a major theme.

Also monsters.

KS: In “Spread,” nature has taken back the Earth. It’s not the nature we know, but the world wasn’t turned into a wasteland by war, zombies or a virus. There’s actually life everywhere, often right where you’re walking. The nice thing about being The Road Warrior is that the road won’t consume your meat and wear your skin like a suit.

So looking at the book, with its influences and characters named “No” and “Hope,” the book sort of feels like you guys are wearing your hearts on your sleeves for this one. Is that a fairly accurate comment? The book seems sort of like the apex of your combined interests, yeah?

JJ: Absolutely. Cool wandering badasses. Body horror. Regular horror. Paranoia. Cannibals. Post apocalyptic punks. I mean, it’s a pretty good fucking cross section of every B movie I wasn’t supposed to watch but did back in the eighties.

So yeah, I’m not hiding anything. Full Tarantino.

KS: Definitely. There’s chemistry happening between those ingredients and out own sensibilities. At the end of the day, the yield is “Spread”.