It might not have been obvious in the direct aftermath of our “31 Days of Abe” celebration, but we were exhausted. 80+ pro pieces, over 200 fan submissions to our “Evolution of Abe Sapien” contest, book reviews, interviews with all sorts of Dark Horse folks, as well as Multiversity-created content talking all about the Mignola books. It was a pretty crazy month – and as soon as it was over we did exactly what we did to kick off the month – we sat down and spent 90 minutes talking all things Mignolaverse with one of its architects, Dark Horse Editor in Chief and “Abe Sapien” co-writer Scott Allie.
We talked about all sorts of stuff, but a good chunk of it was about “B.P.R.D.” #107, the first part of the ‘Wasteland’ arc. We didn’t want to talk so much about something that was elusive to our loyal readers, so we held off posting this until the book was released and had a little time to sink in. Well, now is the time.
A special thanks to Multiversity’s own Zach Wilkerson for helping us transcribe this interview.
This is one of the busiest times ever for the Mignolaverse, as every week in March has a release, and obviously there is a lot coming up. What’s pushing this overdrive of releases right now?
SA: There are two things. What’s pushing it is story and art. We have artists that we’re dying to work with. We have artists backlogged that we want to do more stuff with, but it might seem like we’re clogging the airwaves too much. We’re just so excited to work with these artists, so there are a lot of things we want to do.
And there are so many stories we wanted to tell. As I said before to you guys, originally the Abe story was just going to be something that happened inside of “B.P.R.D.” He would wake up, take off, go to The Salton Sea, some stuff would happen and he’d come back. As we talked about it, the story just grew and grew and grew. We were like, “oh no, we have a mini-series here.” Then we said, “we have an ongoing series here.” We had an ongoing series we wanted to do in part because there were particular things we wanted to do with Abe, and because we wanted to keep Sebastian and Max [Fiumara] busy. Because we’re in love with those guys.
That’s how all this stuff happened.
With “Sledgehammer ’44,” how it originally came about was John Severin was wrapping up ‘Lost and Gone Forever,’ and after that, we asked John what he wanted to do next, and he said he wanted to do a World War II comic. And we were like, “aw crap” because all of our stuff really starts after World War II. But then we started thinking about it and realized the Vril suit from “Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus” was kicking around, and Mike had an idea about what it was up to. Then also some characters we revealed clear back in “B.P.R.D.” story ‘The Dead,’ characters who were active in World War II, we thought we could get some of those characters involved and make it something John would be interested in.
Arcudi and Mignola wrote “Sledgehammer” for Sev, and then that wasn’t meant to be. So the script was lying around for a quite a while, and then we got excited about Jason Latour. We did ‘Pickens County [Horror],’ we got psyched about Jason Latour, he thought he could do a World War II thing, and he did and he knocked it out of the park. And the story juices were flowing for “Sledgehammer,” and we got more ideas for Sledgehammer so there is more coming eventually.
It’s really genuinely all driven by that there are more stories we want to tell and artists we want to keep busy. There are artists we want to see contribute to this world. We love these characters and these stories, and to see them drawn by guys like James Harren and Tyler Crook. That keeps us excited all of the time. If anything, we get carried away with that, and have two “B.P.R.D.” books coming out a month.
Continued belowWhen “Vampire” ends, after that point, there will only be one “B.P.R.D.” book a month. Plus, “Abe” pretty much every month and other books as they come up, like “Lobster Johnson,” “Baltimore” and “Hellboy in Hell.” They’ll all be coming out when the time is right.
The cool thing about the way we’re thinking about the story is we have it all mapped. Dan Chabon has this spreadsheet of releases that goes all the way through 2014 of when each mini and each arc and each artist kicks in.
That must be one hell of a spreadsheet.
SA: It really is. It’s nice to keep it organized, because mostly it’s just frantic phone calls of us gushing and being excited, but it’s good to have a spreadsheet too.
It’s funny, because one of the questions we had was “how big of a secret weapon is Daniel Chabon?”
SA: He is an incredibly important part of the mix. He’s definitely one of the secret weapons. He keeps a lot of it straight. All of the artists on task. Sometimes I come in to do the heavy burden as far as keeping the communication going and everything clear and straight. Daniel just manages a ton of stuff.
He generally reads scripts before I get to them because I am caught up in all sorts of other editor-in-chief business every day. So he’s reading those before I am and looking at stuff before I get the chance. He’s a huge help in that way.
You mentioned before that you guys sort of have through the beginning of 2014 in terms of arcs and who is doing art on what. That sort of begs the question of when you’re putting that stuff together is there one person who is sort of the narrative story driver who says to the gang, here are the four or five ideas I want to go with this year and then everyone else works to fit that into together, or is that you Mike and John all have ideas to put into the mix and more collaborative?
SA: No, it’s more collaborative. There are certain parts of it that Mike is more clearly in charge of in terms of the big mythological hoops. It’s extremely collaborative. One of the things I am so happy about in my job and my creative life right now is just being a part of some really awesome writing teams. Whether I’m actually doing the writing like on Abe or just the editor, it’s just these really wonderful collaborative groups I’m part of. Where no one really drives. Sometimes you need someone to drive, but nobody’s the boss.
We recently just had the Season 10 writers summit for “Buffy [The Vampire Slayer],” and it was pretty remarkable. We had a couple of new faces join us for this thing, and they were really shocked at how collaborative everyone was. How ultimately everyone is answering to Joss, but it doesn’t feel like that. He doesn’t want it like that. When he says something, it certainly comes with more authority than when I say something, but the collaborative nature and lack of ego in these groups is just amazing and so rewarding for me.
With “Hellboy,” ultimately we know who is the boss, but we never really act like it. The three of us are shaping this world together. We contribute in different ways. We listen to each other, we respect each other and we’re psyched about what one another is doing, and there’s a lot of blurry lines. There’s a lot of blurriness between who does what. It’s awesome with Mignola and the “Buffy” group, it’s hard to remember who came up with exactly what. That’s really fun and speaks to the truth of the collaboration and that no one is keeping score. No one really remembers if it was his idea or someone else’s idea, because it’s not about that. It’s about how do you find the best idea. It’s just exhilarating really.
As a person who often cowrites B.P.R.D. stories and in the Buffy universe, how do you balance your co-writer hats and as the Editor in Chief of the Dark Horse line?
Continued belowSA: Yeah, it’s weird. I probably couldn’t have done it if I was ten years younger. It’d be hard not to abuse it. It’d be hard to keep a clean sight of where the line ends. And the line is blurry. One of the things I’ve said before in interviews is for me as a writer to co-writer to editor, there’s this spectrum of involvement for me in telling a story. What I care about every day is telling a story with pictures. And I get to do that with a lot of different people in a lot of different ways.
But there are some of the books I’ve done, like when I work with Sergio Aragones where he turns it in and it’s perfect. Maybe you proofread it, you get it to production, you get it out in the world. My collaborative involvement is nil.
Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have something like “Exurbia” which was all mine.
Everything else falls somewhere in the middle. I’m comfortable in a lot of spots I guess, in that way. Including books where I sort of cowrite without getting credit. Books that I cowrite that I kind of did more or less of the work depending on what it is. Again, it comes from working with this barrier of ego. Where we respect each other enough to listen to each other enough, and give each other room to do their thing. A lot of the books I edit are creator-owned books, and the general rule of Dark Horse is the creator has the final say on creator-owned books.
If it came down to a pissing contest, all Dark Horse has a right to do is not to publish it if we don’t like it. It never comes down to that. Or, I don’t know, I don’t think it has in my experience. But if you have a good relationship with the writer, you can work more sort of seamlessly, and they want your feedback, and if you give them feedback in a way that they want to take.
Again, it’s from that to co-writing “Abe” with Mignola or being Mike’s long time editor on “Hellboy” and having Mike telling me the Hellboy stories of the film, and I respond and give feedback on that. They are all really interrelated. That role is all sort of the same, and I just have to know how much to put my foot on the pedal depending on how much I am expected to do on a given book.
Now, speaking of the division of labor and the different books coming out at a different time, but once “Vampire” is done, there will be pretty much one “B.P.R.D.” book coming out a month. In addition to that you have the one “Abe” book coming out a month and, although it’s not every month, there will be some months with a “Hellboy” book. When it comes to your role in the universe, does one of those books take up the majority of your time? I know you co-write “Abe,” so there’s the inclination to say that, but is there one of those books you say as the main driving force?
SA: You know, I’d say it’s “B.P.R.D.,” the flagship book. Maybe that changes with “Abe” coming out monthly, but maybe it doesn’t. The reason “B.P.R.D.” is the driving force is because it’s been coming out regularly. Big changes in the world take place in that book. We really think of that as the place the biggest story changes happen. Where the world changes the most.
Abe’s series is going to take place on a different scale, with one character having a personal, private journey. “B.P.R.D.” still feels like the main thing. It will still in many more hours in my day, for a variety of reasons. The rotating artist thing is a little more complicated on it than on Abe. So yeah, I feel in many ways “B.P.R.D.” will take up more time and mental space in the Mignola world.
But each book really serves a different purpose.
Then there’s books that take place on their separate continuities. “Lobster Johnson” will take place on a regular basis and “Baltimore”…to give you insight into the mythic spreadsheet that Dan made us, there’s a trade paperback channel, and we try to only have one book in that channel a month. Sometimes there’s two, but really we try to only have one book a month.
Continued belowThere’s one column that “Baltimore” and “Lobster Johnson” share, and it goes back and forth. There’s a “B.P.R.D.” column and an “Abe” column – that’s pretty much full pretty much every month. “Abe” is going to be an ongoing, 10 or 11 issues a year, not necessarily 12. “Hellboy in Hell” will also sort of pop into that column.
The goal is to have a Mignola book a week. Not to ever necessarily have more than that.
Earlier on Twitter, I think you saw that I tweeted about if anyone had questions for you. A lot of the responses were people curious about what’s going on with the publishing of omnibi for “B.P.R.D.” and other parts of the Mignolaverse. Are there plans for filling things out for ‘Hell on Earth?’
SA: Not at this time. The way the hardcovers came about is this. John, Mike, Guy Davis and I were having dinner in Baltimore, and we were talking about where the story was going next, and we realized a few things. We had this big story coming, the climax to everything we had ever done, and we realized with that story it was going to be three volumes long. This nice little book trilogy. Then we looked back over what we had done, and we realized everything we had done so far was three sets of three trade paperbacks, and we realized we were in a great spot to collect this as a three volume hardcover. We would do these fat omnibuses with three trade paperbacks full of material, and it would end with the climactic trilogy.
We thought, “oh that’s great.” We were waiting until we put out the ‘King of Fear’ trade, and then let it sell for a bit as a trade for the people who were just buying trades, and then let’s reduce it down to this set. The plan was all about finishing ‘Plague of Frogs.’ Finishing the series that continued through ‘King of Fear.’ Finish that story off, hang a sign on it, call it ‘Plague of Frogs,’ and get this complete set of books. This four volume hardcover set.
So I’m sure that ‘Hell on Earth’ hardcovers are somewhere in the future. But we’re not thinking of it at all right now, and I don’t think we’ll think about it til ‘Hell on Earth’ is done. And we don’t know how many books that is. The way it works for us is that we see a lot of targets down the road, and we know a lot of the steps to get there. In the writing of it, getting closer to it, we don’t have it blocked out that far off. We do have it blocked out through the end of 2014, but that only gets us so far in terms of the overall ‘Hell on Earth’ story. We know how it ends. We know what happens and how to get there. If sales plummeted tomorrow, we could accelerate things and end it sooner, but right now we don’t know when it ends or how many hardcovers we would have.
Having been able to read ‘Wasteland’ – the first two issues – before this interview, I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that the world is really going to hell now. That book really underlines it, especially with Laurence Campbell’s art handles it. What direction are you going to keep pushing the book, and are there going to be any rays of shining light coming, as it seems like it’s just getting darker and darker?
SA: Yeah, that’s the thing. One of the things that Mike has said many times that we all just love is that we’ll break the things that can’t be fixed. That’s a really fun way of saying what it is that we’re doing, I love that a lot. But we are breaking things that can’t be fixed, a clean-up crew’s not going to come in and suddenly rebuild Chicago. We have talked about this, we do want there to be some rays of light. Maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s something else, but there needs to be some light in all of this, because it could get malevolently bleak. I think our passion and our compassion for the characters is going to keep it from getting too over the top in that direction. This is the end of the world, things are collapsing, and our guys are fighting a really tough fight. The definition of victory for them…nobody is really pausing for the thought of victory, and probably if they did, that’s when shit would get really dark you know? They wouldn’t come up with anything inspiring.
Continued belowActually the scene I mentioned to you guys, I guess I mentioned on Twitter, that I was writing “Abe” #7 tonight, there’s a conversation in here between Abe and this Mexican guy down in Arizona, where they kind of talk about the topic of what winning would be and what the possibilities of winning actually are. I think for all of these guys, any human dignity, any human life is worth fighting for, but there’s not much hope of restoring what the world used to be. Right now, because we’re very much in the thick of the moment of the world falling apart, they don’t even know even know what it’s like from one state to another, one country to another. There’s a lot to be discovered for them.
As you see in ‘Wasteland,’ these guys got the word Chicago, they’re just not sure what they’re going to find, and they find signs of somewhat normal life. There are some characters they encounter that are like “life’s always been hard, life’s always terrible.” I don’t know, it seems worse with these 90-foot monsters, but to each his own.
I think both David and I are more of “B.P.R.D.” fans, in terms of what we’re thinking about and actively reading, than Hellboy fans at this point, but I think “Hellboy in Hell” has done a really great job reinvigorating what I love about Hellboy and what a lot of people love about Hellboy, so I want to talk a little about “Hellboy in Hell.”
What is the general gameplan going forward? Does “Hellboy and Hell,” from an editorial standpoint, have an arc that you’re looking to follow, or is it just purely a wide open book that can go any place? What’s exciting about it to me as a fan is that it seems like literally anything that could happen in that book, but I’m wondering if there is more of an underlying story that we haven’t really been privy to yet.
SA: I don’t want to speak too much for that, but I will say that there are places that Mike is going to that are deliberate. The biggest thing is that “Hellboy in Hell” is kind of Mike’s reward to himself. When Mike made up Hellboy, when he first created that book, he didn’t have a lot of interesting guns, or helicopters, or jeeps, or working for the government, or having to interact with a lot of regular humans. I don’t think he knew exactly what he wanted, but what he really wanted was to be able to draw wild, interesting characters walking through a mythic landscape, dealing with deeply meaningful, poetic, and weird imagery.
Over the years, some Hellboy stories have done that more than others. ‘The Corpse’ was an early favorite, it was just an amazing book, and in a lot of ways is just “how can a book always be like that?” One of the reasons while Hellboy left the BPRD, one of the sort of “meta” reasons left the BPRD, is so Mike would never have to put him in a helicopter again. There were good story reasons too, but part of it was being part of this government agency, that’s not the story Mike wants to write. He wanted to write the stories that would bring Hellboy to the bottom of the ocean and do all the crazy shit we did with him in ‘Strange Places,’ and every that happened with Duncan.
But even with Duncan, we wound up with this Lord of the Rings style saga that’s not exactly what Mike wants to do. So with “Hellboy in Hell” he’s able to exactly the stuff that he wants to draw, the kind of stories he wants to tell. He’s bound only by the kind of pictures that he wants to have coming up in his head. Sometimes he’ll say things like “the world that Hellboy is looking at now in “Hellboy in Hell,” that’s the world he wants to live in.” Well, it’s where you want your imagination to live, not really where you want to live, all that shit is kind of broken down in there. He loves drawing those kinds of things, he loves drawing that kind of architecture. For the first time ever “Hellboy” is really, purely, what Mike wants to draw and the kind of stories he wants to tell, and that’s the point of it.
Continued belowIt’s a reward to him, but it’s a reward for all of us too, because the only reason any of us are in this thing is because we’re turned on by Mike’s imagination. Finally, Mike’s imagination is totally unfettered and his vision is all he has to deal with.
Recently Brian, myself, and another guy from Multiversity, Mike, did a podcast and we were speculating what could be next for “Hellboy in Hell.” We came to realize that it could be anything from them immediately getting to the tasks that Edward Grey talked about, to him spending the next fifty issues just hanging out in Hell, doing Hellboy like things. It’s pretty incredible to think, Mike could do literally anything and it would be incredible. This world is as open as I’ve seen in any comic.
SA: That’s very true. Mike’s take on mythology is very sort of Joseph Cambell. He has this comparative mythology approach to the whole thing, where he’s able to mash things together, different interpretations, and suggest that all the world’s mythologies are really just humanity viewing the cosmos through their individual national lenses, when really what they’re seeing is a bunch of Ogdru Jahad crystals lording over worlds with Ogdru Hem hidden underneath the crust. He mashes the stuff together really well and he’s going to be able to combine his hellish mythology with his Lovecraftian mythology with world mythology, and all of folklore. He can do all of it. He doesn’t have to send Hellboy to Asia in order to deal with that kind of mythology; it can be right around the corner.
One thing that really rang true with what you were saying earlier, talking about how Mike is just doing what he wants to draw, maybe less with so with “B.P.R.D.,” but would you say these are art driven books?
SA: Yeah, absolutely, they are art driven books in just about every way. When we’re writing any of it, we really try to do our best to give the artist stuff that they’re going to be excited to draw, and at the same time stuff that we’re excited to see them draw. The relationship between Hellboy and Alice Monaghan may never have happened if Duncan wasn’t the guy on that book. He draws cuter girls, as in cute girls, not sex pots. Duncan can do really sexy stuff too, but he can make characters so charming, so warm, and so wonderful.
I think it’s a hard thing in a work of fiction to show characters falling in love, to show that kind of level of connection between characters, but Duncan has a particular skill that creates this incredibly warm space between characters, so we took advantage of that and did a lot with it, the same thing with all these other guys. You were saying something before along the lines of this end of the world is looking particularly grim, especially seeing Laurence draw it. We were shocked about Laurence; we knew a lot of what Laurence was going to be able to do and were like “Yes! This is going to be fantastic!”
What he’s done that we didn’t really expect is that he introduced this incredible mood and atmosphere and creepiness to his stuff and when we had him design Ogdru Hem, with input from Mike, and revealed that towering, terrible Ogdru Hem at the beginning of Wasteland, he designed that thing, he pulled it off, he made it so nasty looking and so real looking. I feel like we were very fortunate to have him doing ‘Wasteland,’ because we’re taking a real city and we’re showing it just crumbling to crap, and Laurence was able to make that real, because he’s maybe the most realistic artist we’ve had on these books. Normally we haven’t really gravitated toward realism, but we gravitated toward Laurence and it’s totally paying off.
The stuff that sometimes that makes a realistic artist dull, Laurence is not guilty of any of that. Now we know exactly what he can do. The next big art after Laurence leaves is by Tyler Crook, it’ll be very character oriented and really focused on some character terms that John writes beautifully and Tyler pulls off beautifully. The next big one after that is Herren, and that guy does action, and devastation, and terribleness on such a huge, wonderful, great, visceral scale. He’s got an arc that’s just perfect for him, and he’s knocking it out of the park from what we’ve seen so far.
Continued belowThe books and stories are art driven, the stories are very much built around what we think the artists are going to be able to do best and what we thing is going to motivate the artist best. Right now Mike, John and I just feel so lucky to be working with each one of these artists. We’re just so damn lucky to have them and we just want to motivate them. We just want to give them every reason to stay right where they are, because we love their work and we just want to keep them going. It’s a challenge to us as writers to give them the stuff that’s going to keep them inspired and keep them motivated.
I have two quick things to say before Brian jumps into his question. Somehow, I think it was because I became so excited about him it just became infectious, but I think every time we reference James Herren we have to have an exclamation point after his name at this point, just because we love him so much! The other thing, I think there was that one page in ‘Wasteland’ #2 when they just get to Chicago, that was Laurence and Dave Stewart, and holy crap! That was probably the most haunting image I’ve ever seen in any Mignolaverse book. Just the devastation and have that creepy Ogdru Hem hanging out over the city and the red sky, that’s one of the most haunting images I’ve probably ever seen in any comic period.
SA: Yeah, he evokes a mood that everybody who draws like that, guys in that school, can’t evoke any of what that guy can evoke. There’s a bit at the very end of ‘Wasteland’ #1 where Johann is standing guard at the end of the night and you see some creepy shit. That was the first time that we were like “Oh my God! This comic is giving me chills; I did not know this artist could do it.” At that moment we were like, we need to keep this guy busy full time, as long as he’ll have us.
Certainly! One of the things David and I were talking about earlier today was how there are some incredibly, incredibly dedicated, knowledgeable, and invested fans in the Mignolaverse. We have one on our staff right now, Mark Tweedale, who did that amazing Vril article today, which was really great. His research is incredible and his mind, he’s like our walking encyclopedia. When we can’t remember something we just e-mail him and he has an answer in four seconds for us. So, as the editor of the line and as one of the creators of these books, what’s your relationship with that part of the fandom and is that different than with your relationship with the average “B.P.R.D.” reader? Is there a higher standard that you hold yourselves to, knowing there are guys out there who live and die with every word that you write?
SA: No, I don’t think they live and die [laughs] but, you I know what you mean. You can’t think about that – I think we hold ourselves to a fairly high standard. I used to think about that segment of the fanbase, but I came to a philosophical place with that, and it comes also from working on the Whedon books, which have a very dedicated fanbase of their own. We can either focus on that incredibly devoted fan base or the lesser fan base. It is great that they are there, we are thankful that they are there. It is validating to have a guy like Mark, who dedicates so much brain space to what we’re doing, but we’ve just got to do the books right, the way we think they should be done.
Mike and I used to read the Hellboy messageboard at Comic Book Resources – we don’t anymore. We realized that the fans have their communities and their spaces to occupy together, and that’s for them. It’s good to check in on the Hellboy message boards, to say hi, to get some information out, to answer some questions, but you can’t think that your job is making stories for those guys and then checking in and seeing if they liked them. I’ve talked about how lucky I feel to be a part of a very collaborative group of writers between the Whedon stuff and the Mignola stuff, and I am. Part of what makes it so good, besides the lack of ego, is that it starts with this amazing vision that starts with Mike and Joss. It is that vision that we have to be true to. I’m lucky that Mike has let Arcudi and myself in to be the co-architects of that vision, and that Joss has let this group of creators be carrying the torch for Buffy. We have to be loyal to that vision, more than to the audience.
Continued belowAnd if we are loyal to that vision, and we do a really good job, if we cross our t’s and dot our i’s, then hopefully the audience sticks around and stays motivated. If you work too much toward that passionate fan base, and it is sort of crazy making. I watch guys like Dan Slott engage so deeply with the fan base its a poor use of energy. Their fan community is for them, not for us, and if we go in there, we’re sort of engaging.
I don’t remember what book it was, but you got a letter in ‘Hellmail’ [the letters column in the back of Mignolaverse books] last year, and the person was saying that they were fed up with “Hell on Earth” and that you guys had no direction and were just spinning your wheels. I remember reading your response, which basically said “We are telling our story, you have to be patient. It’s going to move along, but it will be at the pace we want it to be and we’re going to tell the story that we want to tell.” As good as it is to have creators that listen to fans and say “we hear you” or “we understand,” I read stories so I can experience the stories that people like you and Mike and John are telling, and it is refreshing to hear you reiterate that.
SA: Yeah, I remember I was on a panel with Joe Quesada years ago at New York Comic Con and the subject had something to do with MySpace, back when MySpace was the thing. We were doing “Dark Horse MySpace Presents,” and nobody else was doing anything like that, digitally. The conversation was about interacting directly with fans, and Joe was saying that with the internet age, it is awesome because we can find out today how you feel about the story immediately, and we can change the story in the very next issue to fit exactly what you want. And I thought, really? That’s the way to do it?
Yeah, that’s awful.
SA: I don’t really know if that is what Joe meant but, you know, you can’t let the story be driven by that. You can’t take a vote, because not everyone is going to show up for the vote, you’re only going to hear from the very passionate vocal minority. You tell the story the best you can.
Sometimes we’ve been surprised by how vague we’ve been without meaning to; we’d do something that we thought was pretty clear and the audience would pick it up but missed it completely. I can think of an example with Whedon where we had to very specifically had to go in and explain something because we did something sort of subtle, and thought for sure they’d get it, but they didn’t, and if they didn’t get that then they wouldn’t get a lot of other things, so we had to lay it out for everyone.
I remember when the Black Flame came back in ‘Return of the Master,’ we had interviewed you guys [Mignola, Arcudi and Allie] right after that came out, and Mike was commenting how he was so surprised by people saying “it has to be Rasputin!” even though it was obviously the Black Flame. It’s funny how that works out.
SA: With that we were just crapping our pants we were so excited with what we were doing; I mean, we were purposely misleading people into thinking that it would be Rasputin – we even had Ryan [Sook] do two versions of the cover of issue #5 – we wanted to have the Black Flame on the cover to #5, but we didn’t want to spoil the end of #4, so we had Ryan do a fake cover for solicitations.
We were so psyched about the misdirect and about the way it was going to pay off, and we love how Tyler [Crook] drew the Black Flame on the last page. That is the one thing we will say about the message board and that whole crew, is that when we do something that we know is a little subtle or under the radar, we know that a guy like Mark will read it and know exactly what is going on and go on the message board. We like telling the story loose and open to interpretation, but we do know that for the audience that needs it spells out can go to the message board.
Continued belowLike even the stuff you guys posted about Vril today, because we’ve got some other stuff going on with Vril right now – Mark didn’t get everything 100% right – he didn’t blow it in any big ways – but it is better that he did it that way. He put a lot of stuff out there, he put it in one place, and hopefully people can find it and people can go there to look at this stuff. Maybe you guys can compile enough of that stuff to have your own version of the Companion, when we don’t do a good enough job of spelling stuff out, since that’s not really our business, guys like Mark are there. And we take that only the least little bit for granted.
For instance, in “Hellboy in Hell,” in #3 or 4, things finally came together for Edward Grey. Readers have been reading various things and not seeing how it entirely fit together, and finally with “Hellboy in Hell” we put more of the Edward Grey stuff on the table than we ever had before. We knew that some readers might not quite get what we were doing in how we’re pulling those pieces together, but we knew enough people on the message boards would get it that they’d pull it together for everybody. So for someone who is really motivated, really cares about the book, but doesn’t quite get it, they’ll go to the message board, and they’ll get it.
We just go to Mark. We have our Mark Tweedale resource.
You talked about how, for the most part, the arcs are planned out until the end of 2014 and, stepping back for a second – the first time we spoke to you in an official interview capacity was well over a year ago now, and if you had told us over a year ago the way things are shaping up now, we’d be pretty surprised. The universe has sort of blown out in a number of ways, with “Vampire,” and Abe being back, and we don’t want you to spoil anything. But, what is something that fans should be looking out for but, maybe, you haven’t seen people talking about.
SA: Well, you’re going to see – I’m trying to do this without spoilers – you’re going to see some of the characters that you’ve been missing, their stories are continuing, and those stories will be told. The way these characters interact and talk with each other will be very important. As we speak (early April 2013), the latest issue of “B.P.R.D.” is the one where Abe gets out of the tank, and then he just disappears and no one knows where he is, and that is where the first issue of the new Abe ongoing starts off.
For the most part, these characters’ stories will be told in “B.P.R.D.” and you’ll see characters resurfacing. It is also important to keep track of the characters that you’ve seen now a few times, like Carla and Nichols, Devon is clearly important, Johann is clearly important. John is doing a really beautiful job of balancing the various supporting characters and I think some readers were turned off at first when we turned our attention to the “regular human” characters in “B.P.R.D.” but I think in time those characters are growing less humans, or are being so clearly and iconically defined by John that these aren’t just grunts in military uniforms running around, but that they are becoming something really unique. So keeping and eye on them, including Iosif and Kate, that is the stuff to watch. And also keep an eye on the Zinco characters, because what Zinco just did changed the world – the world is changing considerably arc by arc, so those guys remain really important.
I just want to say I’m really enjoying those human characters. Like, in ‘Wasteland,’ I thought Nichols and Gervish were really fantastic characters right off the bat, and Giarocco is perpetually badass. As much as I love my Johanns and my Abes, it is nice to see the human side, because there is more palpable fear there. Like, when they’re coming up to Chicago, it is one thing to see Johann react, but to see Nichols, or the kid, react, it is something different.
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SA: I love that kid character. He’s cute and, yeah, Carla Giarocco has been kicking around for quite a while now, and she’s starting to emerge, actually she did already emerge as a really great character. She was created mainly by John, with a little help from Mike, and she has a lot more to come.
People are going to be getting back into the Abe story for the first time in a little while. One of the things I love about the Abe book is that – “B.P.R.D.” looks at the world from a marco level, and “Abe Sapien” is looking at the world on a very micro level. Will that book continue to be this sort of travelogue through this fucked up world, or is there going to be a shift to something new?
SA: What “Abe” is going to continue to do is be Abe’s personal road trip to the end of the world. Abe is on this road trip, and people will respond to him differently. People will respond to him differently than they respond to the B.P.R.D., this big military organization that shows up in a big way. They respond to him differently because he is one guy, and looks like a monster and, specifically, because he looks like some of the monsters that are causing this trouble.
Mike was always very vague about whether or not the general populace knew about the B.P.R.D. or even knew about Abe’s existence. But when the B.P.R.D. went global, with the UN, Abe definitely went public so, at this point, people know about Abe; he looks different right now, but people will recognize him. Not everyone will, and not everyone will react to him the same way – we get to have a lot of variety with how people will respond to him, and how they respond to him is going to be the whole story [of an issue], sometimes it is only part of the story. It would be pretty boring if every story was people saying “Oh my God, you’re a fucking fish man.”
[Laughs]
SA: But some of the time, that is going to be what we’re talking about. But mainly, we’ve got a guy who doesn’t know himself right now, because he has changed. He has a lot to discover about himself, but he’s discovering himself and discovering a world that is way more fucked up than when he went into the coma.
That’s one of the things to remember, when Abe went into the coma, a lot of this crazy stuff had started, but it didn’t look like the world was ending. It looked like “oh crap, we’ve got a couple of these Ogdru Hems and we’ve got some problems,” but England wasn’t gone yet, and we weren’t losing entire American cities. At the point that Abe went into the coma, I think Houston had just been destroyed, but that’s about it.
When we were prepping all of our material for the Abe month, we asked Tyler Crook about what his opinion of Abe was, and we didn’t even realize that he’s never even drawn Abe except for in a tank.
SA: [Laughs]
It is crazy to think about how long he’s been gone.
SA: For me, it was like, as I was initially preparing and trying to keep my brain sharp on Abe, I thought “well, I’ve got to read his most recent appearances,” and I was like “oh shit, we were still working with Guy [Davis] back then!” Going back and re-reading Guy’s last two stories in order to get real current with who Abe was before he passed out, that feels a little like ancient history. We’ve done a lot of work since Abe has gone out of action.
Our final question is this – is there anything that you want people to know, or should be aware of when going into the Abe series that maybe hasn’t already been out there yet?
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SA: We always try and do this with comics, I think Dark Horse does a good job, and I think the Mignolaverse does a good job, while these books are intertwined, they very much stand alone. I spent a certain amount of time in the first two issues catching the new reader up, in case they haven’t been reading “B.P.R.D.” or any of this stuff, I think you can read these first few issues of “Abe” and be caught up. And then you have a story this really dynamic, cool action/horror character setting off on a mission all on his own. It is very much a stand alone story, even though it is a companion to “B.P.R.D.” with a lot of parallels, but it is a story you can read without reading the other books.
If God forbid you’re not reading “Hellboy in Hell,” there are certain things in (“Abe Sapien”) issue #1 that connect with “Hell,” but you don’t need to read “Hell” to understand it. Same with “B.P.R.D.” John and I talk all the time, Mike and I talk literally every day, and we plan out these books in such a way that makes the book all work very well together, but we don’t want to do a thing, that turns me off to other publishers, where if you want to read one book you damn well better read all our books. If I have a favorite writer doing something over at Marvel, I want to be able to pick up their book and understand what is going on, and sometimes that is downright impossible without reading other books. We’re not going to do that with these. The Abe story is the story of one guy having these crazy, weird adventures at the end of the world.
At one point, Mike said to me that we’re trying to do Alan Moore’s ‘American Gothic’ storyline in “Swamp Thing,” but in a world that is really ending, and I was like “Man, you just gave me the best marching orders I could ever ask for.”
