Writer Ryan O’Sullivan (“Turncoat,” “The Evil Within,” “Warhammer 40,000”) is set to embark on his first creator-owned series with Image Comics, “Void Trip,” which hits local comic shops this Wednesday. In the run up to the book’s release, O’Sullivan found some time to chat with us about the infamous relationship between mind-altering drugs and the open road, “painfully male” solutions and how you need to be your own worst critic.
Recreational chemicals, great writing and the lure of the open road are famously intertwined. Did any particularly memorable road trips of your own inspire “Void Trip”?
Ryan O’Sullivan: The origin of any concept is hard to nail down definitively. Lots of different things led to “Void Trip” forming in my mind. American literature was a huge influence. Counter-culture writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. Gnostic/Calvinist writers like Melville, Hawthorne, and Cormac McCarthy. As an Englishman, I felt these novels showed me two opposing sides to America. The first was the “American Dream” side, the Wild West, the land of opportunity, a place where anyone could make it if they had the desire to. It was pure individualism. The second was the religious/cultural controlling Calvinist/Old Testament side that put America First. It was pure collectivism. This inherent contradiction at the heart of American society, that of desiring to live freely within a system built upon the principles of control. That fascinated me. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized it didn’t just define America, it defined human existence as a whole.
So novels were a big influence. Travel? Not so much. I’m very much a homebody. I rarely leave the house and, when I do, it’s even rarer I leave the country. I attended New York Comicon back in October and that was my first time out of England for over five years. Maybe “Void Trip” is a power fantasy, but in my case it’s the desire to be on the road, rather than the typical comics fantasy of having superpowers.
Bukowski was another big influence. He almost seemed like he existed side-by-side with the world around him. He never really paid attention to the constraints placed upon him. He did what he wanted in the gaps he was able to carve out for himself. He wasn’t interested in working to live. The idea that existing is survival was abhorrent to him. He just lived for the road that is life: you start at point A, you end at point B.
Did drugs influence me? No. I don’t do drugs. I am drugs. (Dali said that. #artcred.)
The only two humans left alive in the universe seem to have no interest in procreating – making more humans – or even searching for other humans. That seems simultaneously fatalistic and liberating. Are they driven more by selfishness or self-care? Is it pure hedonism or ice-cold practicality?
RO: Ana and Gabe don’t really have much of a sexual identity in “Void Trip.” I like the idea that needing to procreate to help the human race survive isn’t a question that’s even on their radar. It’s as if their quest for freedom has completely transcended such base human concerns. They’re operating at a higher level. They’re free from the limits of society and our collective need for procreation. They’re free from the desire for procreation, from it defining a man-as-phallus and a woman-as-womb, from it not considering the homosexual, trans, or the infertile, from it pretty much reducing all of us to reproduction machines, and from it removing personhood from those of us who aren’t. All of this is why procreation is dismissed by our leads. Not as something bad, but as something lacking inherent positive value.
This concern always pops up in sci-fi, doesn’t it? The idea of reproduction being important. Such an approach is bad for storytelling – there’s no conflict! Rather than start a story with a question, it starts with an answer. That answer being: “humanity must survive.” (Must it?) It’s also a painfully male solution, isn’t it? The idea that we can just penetrate enough things and the problem of the human race being irreversibly doomed is somehow solved. As if the question, “Have you tried fucking?” might not have been the thing that lead to our downfall in the first place.
Continued belowNo. Ana and Gabe are better than us. They’re forces of nature. Forces of nature don’t have sexytime.
I know that we can expect a fair amount of dark humor and existential angst. After all, these are the last two surviving members of an entire species. I feel like a lot of readers (myself included) won’t entirely be able to shake the notion that Gabe and Ana are stand-ins or analogs for Adam and Eve. Forgive the obvious pun, but were you ever tempted to go down that road?
RO: I wish I had. The idea of finishing the story of the human race with analogs of the two that started it does have a nice circular feel to it. But no, Adam and Eve weren’t a conscious consideration. Sure, Ana and Gabe eat psychedelic froot that gives them knowledge. Sure, they’re being chased by a nameless demi-god who is pretty much Satan. Sure, they’re returning to the promised land which is essentially Eden…
Now we talk about it, I think that’s exactly what I’ve done. Shit.
Switching a bit to the craft side. You’ve worked on some licensed properties before where, presumably, you only get so much input into the characters and story arcs. There’s a bit of a structure or road map that you have to adhere to. With “Void Trip” it’s a blank slate. How does it feel to cut loose and not have to “color within the lines”?
RO: Working with licensed properties, such as “Warhammer 40,000” or “The Evil Within” for Titan Comics, has taught me a great deal of discipline as a writer, which is something I may not have developed if I’d focused entirely on creator owned work. When you’re playing with someone else’s toys there’s a limit on what you can and can’t do in your stories. I like having limitations, it forces me to be “adaptively creative.” You learn to play in the small spaces given to you. You learn to develop nuance.
With Void Trip the sky was the…um…well it’s in space so the sky wasn’t the limit, but you get the point. We could do anything we wanted. That was terrifying and also exciting. With licensed work you’re writing for a specific fanbase. If people like “Warhammer 40,000” they’re going to read it because of the universe, not really because you’ve written it. But with “Void Trip,” we didn’t have that backup. There wasn’t an expanded shared universe to pull from, nor are there hordes of “Void Trip” fans waiting for the next instalment. It’s brand new. And it is entirely down to Klaus, Aditya, and myself as to whether it’s good or not.
Immensely freeing. Immensely terrifying.
Different creative teams have different processes. I have to believe, working on a story about two interstellar hippies on a drug-fueled quest to find Euphoria, that it’s a pretty wide open process. How do you balance the inevitable flood of wild ideas with honing it down and keeping the story manageable?
RO: I outline everything before sitting down to write. It’s one thing to be inspired by Kerouac, it’s another thing to write like him. When I first came up with the story idea for “Void Trip,” I sent Klaus a rough outline about the sort of story I wanted to tell. We bounced it back between us a few times. He’d always give a huge amount of feedback. He took on the role that a co-writer or an editor would at the concepting stage. I’d be driving it, because I’m writing it, but he’s very much a collaborator involved in the creation of the concept from the very early stages. (He even came up with the name. Bastard.)
Ultimately, it was a combination of outlining heavily and having Klaus as a sounding board that helped avoid the story get too off-the-rails when it came to the scripting. But then, much like many writers I imagine, I like to rebel against myself. Characters, scenes, and even themes might not appear until the scripting stage arrives. This is the dangerous bit. This is the bit when the story starts to fight you. A weird semi-sentient entity that wants to take over and rubbish all your best laid plans.
Continued belowWhen this happens, the trick I’ve found, and this was something I learnt from the poet Don Paterson, is to distrust inspiration. He put it best (I may be paraphrasing here):
“Despite appearances, humanity is a coral reef, and we’re mostly having the same thought. Question the lines given to you out of the blue by the gods. Inspiration has given spontaneity an undeservedly good name.”
Were all influenced by the same literature, TV shows, and video games. If I trust every inspired thought I have, all I’ll be doing is regurgitating the zeitgeist. Comics doesn’t need any more of that. You need to be your own worst critic I think. As you can tell from the overall tone of this interview, such an approach leads to a happy fulfilling life.
The drug scenes have an amazing look. In fact, the colors throughout the book are fantastic. As a script writer, how much of the visual content are you actually spelling out versus offering suggestions and ideas? Conversely, when you’re kicking around story ideas and plot points, how much does Plaid Klaus throw in?
RO: My scripts are very detailed. To the point where I’m describing angles, character positions, and background detail. This is because when I write, I’m always thinking of the juxtaposition of images, and what they means from a storytelling perspective. Klaus will usually tweak it though, he’s got a strong eye for visual narrative and he’s great at worldbuilding through background detail.
That said, when it comes to the coloring of “Void Trip” that’s pretty much all Klaus. He’ll use me as a soundboard for it, much in the same way I use him as a soundboard when plotting, but those colors are all him. And what great colors! One of the reasons I love working with Klaus is that he really gets into it with narrative. Every scene will have its own color palette, and that will tie into the mood of the characters, as well as the overall mood of the issue, and the overall color scheme of the book. Nothing is colored because it “looks cool.” Everything has narrative purpose.
Klaus puts a hell of a lot of thought into his work. He’s a complete control freak. I love it. I’m lucky to work with him. I’ve said before that I couldn’t have done this book with a different artist. Well, obviously that’s true, we came up with the idea together, it wouldn’t exist without Klaus. But supposing I had come up with the concept by myself, I’m not sure I could find an artist with that mixture of darkness and comedy that Klaus has. He’s a perfect fit for the tone of the story.
Also, Aditya Bidikar, the letterer of “Void Trip,” throws in his fair share of ideas. Again, much like Klaus, all of them are tied into the visual narrative. It was Aditya’s idea to go with borderless word balloons. The idea of not having borders on the word balloons gives the story this feeling of freedom and being counter-cultural. The idea that the ideas expressed by our characters were not penned in and could vanish into the ether at any moment. Conversely, the word balloons of our villain, The Great White, do have borders, and are also inverted color-wise. (White text on black backgrounds.) This makes sense – he is the darkness closing in on our heroes, he is their opposite, he is all about control. Aditya really understands what lettering can bring to a comic. All that talk of the best lettering being invisible is utter nonsense. Klaus and I are lucky to have him on board.
The twist in this story, for me, is that while Ana and Gabe are out traversing the stars, pursuing their dreams of Froot, they are also pursued. It’s not purely a happy-go-lucky road trip. Someone or some thing is closing in. I love that creeping, understated tension. No spoilers, obviously, but can you tease where things are headed over the next few issues…?
RO: Isn’t something always closing in? The “Void Trip” #1 release date, is a good example. November 22nd. That’s not far away at all!
But yes, Great White, the nameless all-white gunman chasing our heroes was a fun character to write. Ana and Gabe are full-on counter culture hippies, accenting all conversations with “man,” “dude” and other similar spaced-out phrases. Great White, though, he’s the opposite. He is fire and brimstone, he is Old Testament rage and fury. He’s a Cormac McCarthy villain lost in a Hunter S. Thompson world. I can’t say what role he plays in the story, as that would spoil it too much. But I can say that Issue #1 of “Void Trip” is out on November 22nd and is only $3.99.
