Interviews 

Spurrier and Holden Account for Everything in “Numbercruncher” [Interview]

By | April 30th, 2013
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

On July 10, Titan Comics will release the first issue of “Numbercruncher,” a new creator owned series by Si Spurrier (“X-Men: Legacy”) and PJ Holden (“2000 AD”). The comic, which was partially serialized earlier in “Judge Dredd Magazine,” is a story about death, bargains, love and the afterlife. We spoke to Holden and Spurrier last week in an instant message setting, and so the interview you see below attempts to keep the cadence and lightheartedness of that conversation intact. We hope that the following is as informative, fun and, frequently, hilarious as the initial chat was.

Ok, boys, let’s start at the beginning: Where did the first seeds of “Numbercruncher” take hold? Si, was this an idea that you’ve been working on for awhile?

PJ Holden: Si asked me if I wanted to draw a creator owned series for 2000AD that was being paid a page rate and I took, like 1 second to mull it over and then said yes. Then he pitched the series to me.

Si Spurrier: Y’know, it’s disconcerting when Brian’s asked me a question – PJ – and I can see the little Skype pencil of enthusiasm scuttling about next to your name.

“Numbercruncher”’s… well, it’s remarkable to me in that it’s the only idea which has ever struck me in a fully-formed state. Mostly ideas are kinda piecemeal – the odd bit of fluff, a neat spot of backstory, a cool little twist – which you assemble like puzzles, then forcibly squeeze-out more to fill the gaps. With Numbercruncher it arrived more or less complete. I was cycling down a stretch of Mediterranean coastline at the time. Gave me quite a shock.

But then, it’s one of those ideas where it probably couldn’t have arisen any other way. It’s so internally-tight, so self-reflective – one of those “everything matters” stories – that it probably couldn’t have come together cumulatively.

…aaand now I sound like a fucking creationist.

Anyway, that’s how it began. Some of the tonal stuff was added, but the structure was there from the start. This elaborately twisty-turny tale of romance and reincarnation, but all told from the point of view of the metaphysical bastard sent to stop it in its tracks.

PJH: I feel like I’m being rude if I type anything while Si’s little icon is whirring away to itself.

SS: You should.
THIS IS MY SCENE.
THE INTERNET CAMERA LOVES ME.
All right, I’m done.
I’M NOT DONE.
Ha.

PJH: Man this waiting for the icon to stop whirring isn’t good my my tendancy to fill awkward silences with horrifying self confessional moments.

PJ – when you first got the pitch from Si, what was your first take? Did character designs pop up in your head naturally, or did Si put you through the ringer, making sure his vision was clearly coming through?

PJH: You know, I honestly can’t remember the descriptions too well, I do know – bar one tiny detail, of which more in a second – the initial sketches were pretty much spot on. One thing that was a little difficult is that while Si had a full idea of the script in his head, I didn’t – so some of the design work would come back to haunt me a little much further down the line.

Oh, when I say Spot on – I mean, bar the usual morphing that happens over time in a story, they pretty much stayed the same from the first drawing to the last page.

That tiny detail [Si didn’t like]: I wanted to give Bastard Zane a little toothbrush mustache – a la Hitler, Charlie Chaplain and Oliver Hardy. Si did NOT like [that].

SS: I feel the mythology of the moustache has become exaggerated. I recall being not-a-fan. Rumours of an anti-‘stache tantrum on my part are horribly overrated.

Part of the problem is, I can’t grow a moustache. Okay? There. You made me say it. Now I’m embarrassed AND a monster.

Continued below

As someone who would grow a moustache if his wife would let him, all this moustache chat is fascinating. But that is a tough ‘stache to sell the general public.

PJH: This is true.

SS: There’s a joke about “it’s just my personal ‘stache” in here somewhere. Thank god none of us are writers and feel obligated to find it.

PJH: The mathematician himself, Richard Thyme, was a lot trickier – because, in my reading, I mistakenly assumed he would appear in a couple of pages, so didn’t put a great deal of thought into his look. Though he already looked different enough from Zane that it was largely ok. It turned out, the little bugger kept turning up again and again and again…

Si – since the story came to you whole hog, was the process of scripting this different than projects you’ve worked on in the past?

SS: Yeah, very much so. In fact, the whole-hog-idea part was the one and only easy thing. The problem after that was to try and explain to people – to PJ, to publishers, etc – what the fuck it was about. Which is no easy feat, let me tell you.

At every stage of the process – pitching, plotting, dialoguing – we’ve basically sweated blood. It’s such a tight little package there was no way we could just give everything room to breath and frolic.

PJ, was there similar hematidrosis on your part? Did you find the process of drawing the story arduous? (Yeah, i looked up the term for sweating blood – what of it?)

PJH: It’s helped a lot that I’m so breasy and easy going that every time Si’s description read “Now, I have no idea what this will look like, but I want everything to exude chaotic energy and numbers and the smell of fear” I just thought “well, sod it, I’ll just draw lots of bits of paper”. I think it’s one of the cartoonier things I’ve drawn, and so anything with Zane and the afterlife was enormously fun. It’s the normal, day to day real world stuff that I found really hard, as I couldn’t just bury stuff in crazy details – it had to be tonally very different.

SS: See, that’s what you get for being a reliably inventive artist, Peej: writers let you make decisions for yourself.

[pats pencil-monkey on head]

PJH: Also: glad you explained what that meant, Brian, I was checking my breath for a good minute

That was actually one of the things that really jumped out at me when reading the book, was the huge tonal shift between the afterlife and the real world. The afterlife, in the best possible way, felt like it could’ve come from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

PJH: It was certainly one of my touchstones.

SS: Interesting note about cartooniness, by the way. It’s absolutely not how I envisaged the story when it first came to me on that shoreline in the sun – I had it down as all grimness and grit – but I fell in love with it the second PJ started sketching. There’s something rather pernicious – a little bit sly, even – about telling a grownup, thematically-heavy story with a very iconic, hyperbolic style.

PJH: Really? Wowser! It seemed to fit a cartoony treatment so well, I just sort of assumed that’s what you wanted!

SS: Yeah. It’s the Tintin effect, I think. The more iconised the players, the easier the reader finds it to absorb themselves in the world. All on subconscious level.

PJH: Man, I can’t even picture Zane’s misadventures in anything other than the glorious Tex Avery style.

Mind you, I absolutely didn’t think I could do the real world stuff in the same cartoony way – it was always a crunching gear shift for me.

SS: Well, see, that’s why you’re the artist. My one and only yardstick of how good an artist I’m working with is, is whether I can remember how I imagined the page whilst writing it, after I’ve seen the art. With “Numbercruncher,” PJ’s version has eclipsed all memory of mine.

Continued below

Worth adding: all the art/writing expectation stuff was only ever true of the first couple of episodes. Art was coming in already while I was writing the remainder, I think.

PJH: Oh yes, the original schedule was 8 pages per month. I think Si was about 3 episodes ahead of me on the script?

The real world stuff has, forgive the crudeness of the term, a transparency to it that felt like it was purposely being set in a simple, real place. That is, of course, until we encounter the Truemother.

SS: The Truemother. Heh. Yeah, she’s a bit of a crazy old bird, ain’t she? She fulfils various functions in the story. Some tonal/stylistic (she kind of sets the tone for the larger-than-life version of the future we visit), some thematic (there’s a whole earth/chaos/nature/female/fertility Vs. numbers/abstraction/rules/maleness vibe going on. And some plot-related, which I’m not at liberty to discuss. Like I said before, NC is the sort of story where everything matters. Not a single detail is accidental or unconsidered.

Now, you mentioned earlier, PJ, that this was initially done with 2000 AD in mind. Did the shift to Titan change anything about the way the story was being presented?

PJH: Mostly in terms of page counts – a four issue mini series rather than a 10 issue 8 pages per episode, meant things had to be moved around. Though, what we did, was largely take the chance to expand certain bits – so page 1 in the first episode is a great inclusion that sets the scene for the entire thing.

And the other nice thing, is we have reader feedback already so we’re able to take that and hammer down points that maybe weren’t as clear first time round; things that sort of got lost a little in the extended time it took to tell the tale. If I remember rightly, Richard Thymes name wasn’t set in stone for episode 1, in the original run.

SS: Yeah, it’s just a chance to clarify, retool, expand, etc. And get it coloured, of course.
PJH: Oh god, yeah. Lovely, lovely colour!

Ah, the great Jordie Bellaire – how that woman sleeps, I’ll never know. And how she didn’t get an Eisner nod, I will forever fume over.

PJH: For the eisner’s to not nominate Jordie for something takes some doing, she colours about 90% of all comics everywhere.

Exactly.

PJH: I suspect there are several Jordie’s from various time streams going back through time and colouring all the comics Jordie hasn’t coloured. Just so she can have coloured all of them. This would be terrible if she didn’t seem to be so consistently good all the time.

SS: The whole 2000AD part of the adventure (actually, technically it was the Judge Dredd Megazine – the monthly sister title) was a bit of a coup. Matt Smith (editor) came to me asking if he could put Gutsville, my Image series, into the reprint-slot in the magazine. Buuuut Gutsville’s never been finished – go pester Frazer Irving about that, Gutfans – so that was no good. And Matt wondered if I had anything else we could stick into that slot. It occurred to me that what he was basically offering was a paid (not very much, but still) creator-owned slot — which is something 2000AD has historically been reluctant to offer. So huge kudos to him. “Numbercruncher” was that project.

SS: But still, but still. We always intended to use the Megazine exposure as a means of getting it out to the US too, in a monthly coloured version. We were still scratching our heads about that when Titan launched its new line of global books, and approached us to be part of the first wave. Their enthusiasm and energy has been amazing.

PJH: Yeah, that was pretty unique and great.

One of the elements that I was really drawn to was this idea of order and logic, yet set in the world of the afterlife, someplace typically depicted as laconic and idyllic – was there a challenge in finding a balance between the lofty concept and the gritty execution?
Continued below




SS: For my part, it was just a cheeky pop at the sorts of ontological silliness that abounds. It fascinates me that our human experience of the Universe is this glorious, colourful, vivid thing, but everyone’s constantly trying to divine higher powers, more esoteric mysteries. It feels like a funny punishment for fuzzy-thinking if the machinery of metaphysics turns out to be packed full of petty-minded form-stampers, anally-retentive accountants and a ratlike numbercrunching God.

PJH: It’s strange, I’m used to the idea of the afterlife as an overbusy often-bungling beurocracy – I suspect films from my childhood, the oft-mentioned A Matter of Life and Death, but also Carousel and, even It’s a Wonderful Life (and, latterly, Beetlejuice) all feature that sort of after-life as office theme.

SS: Yeah, PJ’s right. It’s an idea with long legs. I think it’s probably all a matter of juxtaposition: get your head out of the fucking clouds and enjoy the technicolour miracle of *now*, y’know?

PJH: In fact, Carousel features a “Starkeeper” who resembles nothing more than a slightly more avuncular Divine Calculator

SS: Plus the whole thing about everything in the Universe moving towards a point of ultimate complexity is a fascinating idea. I won’t waffle too much about that because it’s so deeply embedded in the nature of the story, but it’s all there for a reason.

I’m an American, and so I’m used to my media being dragged out beyond all imagination, so whenever I read a mini that engrosses me, I want to know – will there be more Numbercruncher in the future?

PJH: Well, I’d’ve said: unlikely. When you read it, you’ll understand why. That said, if Si ever came up with something new for Zane to do (what with him being, theoretically, around for an almost indefinite period of time, owing to the nature of the afterlife in our tale). Well, then, I’d be up for it.

SS: Yeah, what PJ said. It’s built into the nature of a story like this – one where everything informs everything else – that you can’t just keepo indefinitely strapping new bits onto it. But, yeah. Time and space being as they are, never say never.

Keepo? Keepo. That’s a type of anally-retentive hippo.

Make sure to pre-order “Numbercruncher” with the Diamond Code MAR131298


Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

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