If you’re like me and lived in a big city, you’re familiar with gentrification. It can ruin a city in a lot of ways and it always ignores the issues present. Zac Thompson, Lonnie Nadler and Eric Zawadzki’s new series “The Dregs”, takes a look at this through the eyes of a homeless man but with a brutal twist. Black Mask is known for bold and innovative comic books and this one is no different. We had the chance to talk to the creative team about the upcoming series, the real life inspirations behind the story and more.
“The Dregs” is your new creator owned series at Black Mask. Could you talk about the premise of this series and how you got together with your collaborators?
Zac Thompson: “The Dregs” uses the backdrop of gentrification to tell a story about a homeless detective. It’s a story that demythologizes the private detective archetype and examines how gentrification literally consumes the homeless. It’s a romantic deconstruction of the stories we tell ourselves in an effort to give our lives meaning. A pursuit against the odds to do something meaningful even if nobody seems to care.
I’m from an incredibly small city in Canada and when I moved to Vancouver five years ago I was floored with the homeless population here. The downtown eastside, the East Hastings area, was unlike anything I had ever seen. I started thinking about that community of homeless people and how they must look out for one another. I had just watched Rian Johnson’s Brick for the third time and ended up writing a screenplay about a homeless detective trying to solve a disappearance. After that script sat on the shelf for a year, I approached Lonnie about turning it into a comic. We gutted the script down the theme and started rewriting from the ground up.
Lonnie Nadler: Yeah, we really took the initial premise of a homeless man trying to solve a crime and built it from the ground up again. I have a huge affinity for film noir and crime fiction so we tried to build more of those elements into the story and really explore the idea of genre as both content and style.
We’d spoken to Eric about doing a book together a couple months earlier, and when Zac and I felt the story was in a good enough place, we pitched it to him. Lucky for us he was on board and brought a lot of his own influences. We emailed Dee because we loved his work and he came on as colorist.
What were some influences that may have helped this series come together?
LN: One of the nice parts of co-writing with Zac is that we a lot of the same influences, but also a lot of our own and we were really able to bring it all to the table in The Dregs because it’s such a strange book. As I mentioned I have a deep fondness for classic crime fiction like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane. There’s a lot of reference to those guys throughout the book because those are the writers our protagonist connects with as well. I also love a lot of post-modern writers like Italo Calvino and Paul Auster, their self-referential absurdity, and the idea of questioning our relationship to a text.
We also took elements from crime films, both classic noir and neo noir, like Sunset Boulevard, The Third Man, Chinatown, and Blade Runner. Altman’s adaptation of “The Long Goodbye” is all over The Dregs as well. We put a lot of effort into breaking down the tropes of the genre, which allowed us to either abide by or subvert specific tropes and overturn audience expectation to create a, hopefully, novel experience.
ZT: David Mazzucchelli’s comic adaption of Auster’s “City of Glass” was hugely influential for this project and it only becomes more evident as the series continues. We’ve also made an effort to draw on crime comics and work with the ways that they’re using paneling and storytelling to influence our own decisions. We both consumed Brubaker and Phillips’ “The Fade Out”, we dug into early issues of “Criminal” as well.
Continued belowOutside of that, we’re both huge fans of Tom King’s run on “Vision”. We look to that as a way to seed good character driven storytelling. Admittedly we’re also big fans of the nine panel grid. We’ve spent hours pouring over moments from “Watchmen”, and David Mack’s “Kabuki”. We created an eclectic mix of influence because this is a strange and surreal story. Nothing was out of bounds.
The series features the classic struggle between the rich and the poor but with a violent twist. Is there a point, as a writer, that you feel you’ve gone too dark? How do you tow the line between creating a compelling plot with horrific shocks and twists?
ZT: I don’t think anything we’ve done on these pages is overly horrific. If you ask any beat cop working the downtown eastside of Vancouver, they’ve seen much worse. It was important to us that we communicate authenticity of the world homeless people live in. We begin the book with a dark moment. There’s a point to that, it’s a moment where you understand everything about what is being done to the homeless in this city. It’s an intimate exploration of how we treat our delicacies. We want readers to understand how the sausage is made, so to speak, so they what they’re fighting against for the next four issues.
LN: A lot of the dark elements are informed by the newspaper articles we read every day in Vancouver, which are often more chilling than anything in fiction. Just the other day Zac showed me an article about morgues in Vancouver reaching capacity because there have been so many overdose deaths. We’d never make something shocking just for the sake of it. That’s the worst kind of storytelling, to me. However, I do believe fiction should be provocative and burrow into people, to bring them to new places. I love what Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” and we try to adhere to that as much as possible.
Arnold, the lead, is probably the kind of guy you wouldn’t expect to be the “hero” of a story. Could you talk about him and how his story will develop?
LN: That’s exactly right. We wanted Arnold to be the furthest thing from a private investigator, yet someone who romanticized them as myths. P.I.s tend to have cynical attitudes toward the world because they’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer. They were a created to criticize American culture. Arnold is similar in a sense because after being homeless for so long he knows the underbelly of society better than anyone, yet he looks up to the fictional detectives with a certain sense of wonder and affection. While he’s not what we know as the private detective, in some ways he’s the epitome of what they represent. He’s cynical, down on his luck, perhaps a bit delusional, and yet hopes for the best despite the hand he’s been dealt.
Zac and I also wanted to make sure he wasn’t one of those really awful “homeless savants” that you see so often. We put a lot of research into what it’s actually like being homeless. So he’s not the type of protagonist who is amazing at his job. He’s actually a pretty terrible detective, but he’s resolute. You’ll see him continue to stumble his way through the case, often getting lost, and often being beaten down by the trials of homelessness and addiction. We modelled him after Don Quixote in this way, as a man in love with fictional heroes, and trying to become one despite the odds.
ZT: That’s what’s most interesting to me. We wanted to tell this story from the most unlikely perspective possible. As a writer that pushes you to stay on your toes. Lonnie and I wanted to ensure that we used Arnold’s character as way into discussing how we romanticize fiction and how we relate to the homeless. At first glance he may seem unrelatable but he’s not. He’s just a different type of hero.
Most of our research around homelessness and addiction came back to purpose. Often addiction replaces purpose. We wanted to explore what happened when an addiction to drugs was replaced by an addiction to story. Both of these addictions cannibalize Arnold’s mind in different ways. He’s the down and out hard boiled detective you know but he’s in much worse shape than you remember him.
Continued belowI find it interesting when comic books tackle real issues especially when the villains aren’t so different than real life people. “The Dregs” features some of the worst kind of super wealthy people. In your opinion, what makes them the perfect villains compared to some alien space guy that just wants power?
ZT: They’re grounded. The reality of any metropolis is that there are people doing these sorts of things every day. Lonnie and I did a lot of research to ensure that the villains of this book believe they’re acting for the greater good. It’s all about the rationalization behind the actions. The reality of Vancouver right now is that this isn’t far off from the truth. We have fine dining across the street from absolute squalor. We have a city where the overdose rate is out of control because of Fentanyl. We have tent cities popping up in our downtown eastside that the city clears out because they don’t know what to do with the homeless.
We’re communicating real problems, like the housing crisis and the opioid epidemic, going on in our city and the scary thing is that when we listen to affluent people talk about this stuff, their words are eerily similar the ones in our book. Over the course of the last few months what felt like the fiction in the pages of The Dregs is becoming reality in Vancouver.
LN: Like Zac said, we wanted to make sure our villains were acting out of legitimate motivations. Their ideologies make sense, but the way in which they put them into action is where the problem lies. When the villain is justified and authentic, I think it’s far more effective because you can show that the line between good and evil isn’t quite as clear as everyone likes to believe. This is especially important in the noir genre, existing in that space between, and something we took to heart. That said, there are some real bizarre unexpected villains…
The art in this book strikes a very specific noir tone. Could you talk a bit about what we can expect to see in Zawadzki and Cunniffe’s work?
Eric Zawadzki: I’m going to be leaning more heavily into shadows and harsh lighting in the coming issues. The next 3 issues will gradually get darker as Arnold gets deeper into the mystery.
LN: We try to offer Eric a lot of direction in our panel descriptions because the noir look is so essential to the story. We’ll do a pass of the script where all we’re allowed to consider is scene lighting and angles, and see how we can use those to communicate story or character elements. That said, we also told Eric from the start that he’s the visual expert here and we want him to have the creative freedom to deviate from our script so long as it serves the story. He’s been so amazing at adding to scenes and communicating mood and tone.
ZT: Obviously Eric is in control of the final look and we completely trust him to deliver, but we try to communicate every last bit of detail we can. The result has been phenomenal. Eric’s able to grab that excess of detail and really make it work in developing the world beyond our wildest expectations. We’ve gone to great lengths to write the scripts for the series like you would a film. We indicate lighting and mood every chance we get, Dee takes those lighting notes and really leverages it into a unique look on the page. We couldn’t have better collaborators.
Black Mask has had a fantastic year due to the launch of so many new series. What has the experience been like, for you as a creator, working with this publisher?
ZT: Intimidating but also freeing. Black Mask fully trusts their creative teams to deliver. We couldn’t do The Dregs at any other publisher. Being part of the Black Mask family is legitimately a dream come true for us as young creators. We treated this like our first and only opportunity to make a creator owned comic and we put everything we had into it. I think that’s just the expectation that’s set at Black Mask: do your crazy shit and do it well. I hope we delivered.
Continued belowLN: They have had an amazing year, and it’s a bit daunting to be honest since ours is the first of 2017. Every book last year got great critical reception and most of them sold really well considering they’re only a few years old. So, we’re excited to be part of such an amazing family of comic creators and hoping we don’t blow it.
Working with Black Mask has been a pretty great experience. It really is absolute freedom when it comes to the comic. We’re telling the story we want to tell without reservation. But working in creator owned comics is a lot more work than just writing scripts, so you have to be comfortable flying by the seat of your pants.
“The Dregs” goes on sale January 25th and you can pre-order it at your local comic shop with the code NOV161210.
