The webcomic creator is never far from their audience. Be it through social media, public email addresses, Discord servers, or simply the comments section beneath a page, there is a rapport and a conversation that is developed that is unique to the medium. We’re continuing those conversations here, albeit a little more formally, by interviewing webcomics creators to pick their brains about craft, storytelling, and their personal experiences with the medium.
For the past decade “Kill Six Billions” has loomed large across the geography of webcomics, with the final book marching towards its finish line right now, we caught up with the mind behind the madness, Tom Parkinson-Morgan, better known as Abaddon.
Be warned that spoilers follow and a bit of familiarity with the series before reading wouldn’t hurt.
Allison has a really dynamic character design, as does her supporting cast, what do you think are the advantages of progressive designs, compared to the monolith ‘definitive look’ approach you usually see in comics.
Tom Parkinson-Morgan: I’m like any author who does any kind of comic odyssey, or does a long running series, right? You have to keep yourself interested. So I think partly it’s for the author. If you ever read any manga, they’re always changing the character designs because they just get sick of drawing the same thing over and over again. But yeah, no, I think it’s important that the characters change a lot.
Actually, I heard earlier in an interview with Toriyama, the guy who did “Dragon Ball” and all that, one of the OG’s back then. He had a big belief that characters should express their humanity in some way, that they should cry and puke and hug each other and have all kinds of emotions, not just these weird, cardboard cut-out kinds of characters. You see a lot of them in Western comics, not a lot of earthiness about them. But it was important to me that characters changed haircuts and outfits, and cried and threw up and stuff.
I also think it’s important that a character’s appearance reflects their internal thing that’s going on. So like, Allison has gone all scarred at some points, and then been super beefy. Now she’s super thin and, you know, people’s bodies change in real life, too. So it’s a fun visual metaphor you can use, But it’s also like reflecting these human characters. So it was important to me that I had a character who went through some changes. It wasn’t just a fixed character.
So I’ve spoken to Hambonous and Ben Fleuter in the past, who are two really great cartoonists who cite your work as an influence. How do you think your book has been influenced by the wave of artists who grew from your work and are now your contemporaries?
TPM: It’s pretty funny, man. So I actually play role playing games with Ben Fleuter every Wednesday, like we played “Blades in the Dark” together and other games. It’s quite fun. So I love the guy. He’s a good friend of mine. I’ve only seen him a few times in real life but I’ve talked to him a lot.
But yeah, I don’t know. I think I have a certain visual style, and I think there’s a certain generation, or a certain niche that I sit in with a few other people; like James Stokoe, or Simon Roy and Co. It’s very similar with our aesthetic choices and the things we like. I used to read a lot of them. I really look up to guys like James. I read a little Moebius stuff, and I saw a lot of work from Geoff Darrow when I was in high school and that really blew my fucking brains out. Like it blew my mind a lot, how intricate and detailed and visually rich it was. That really influenced me.
But I guess there are a lot of people who have been influenced by anime, by Moebius, by European comics. [European comics] tend to pay more attention to the craft of things, they take forever to produce because they tend to be more focused on the art of comics, like being really fucking good looking.
Continued belowBut yeah, I definitely feel like there’s a niche for me. I don’t think it’s a very big one, and it is weird when I see people that get influenced by my work. I mean it must be influential to a lot of people, but it’s not like the style, the du jour style, that’s around nowadays, even for webcomics. I think the generation of people that I’ve grown up reading for webcomics stuff has kind of passed already. The people that will be influenced by that have already been influenced by that, and made their own work. I think the stuff that’s really in vogue now is stuff more like “Lore Olympus”-style, more WEBTOON-y in tone, those are the comics people are looking to make nowadays rather than big-ass 700-page fantasy epics.
During those different eras of webcomics how have you approached scale? What drew you to intricate landscapes when you were beginning KSBD, and how do you go about plotting out or anchoring some of your most sprawling pages?
TPM: I kind of moved towards those pages… Actually I haven’t done one of those in a while. It’s kind of a bummer, but I’ve been trying to do a lot of action and putting out a lot of pages recently. So I haven’t been able to do a really big detailed landscape piece in a bit, which kind of bums me out. I’ve had to kind of move past doing some things for the sake of pacing, and whenever I have anything in my comic it’s because I have a really strong feeling it needs to be in there, right? I can’t really explain it.
I do plot out stuff ahead of time, and some of my pages are quite far ahead. But sometimes I just go like, “oh man there needs to be a big cool spread of something here.” It’s like a feeling of mine that sort of bubbles up. But I’ve always loved that kind of stuff and growing up, like I said, I used to love really huge, intricate and detailed landscape stuff, and I just wanted to do some of my own. You see a lot of it all over the place, so it’ll come back for sure
To me those landscapes are meant to be there to invoke wonder or scale. Right? And I haven’t really needed that specific feeling for a while. They do serve a pretty important purpose, and I always find myself returning to them when we’re back in an area. We’re going to go back to the city again [in the sixth book of “Kill Six Billion Demons,” ‘Wheel Smashing Lord’] and I’m sure there’ll be tons of weird landscapes in there I’ll be drawing. Because, you know, it’s a whole vibe. But I really needed them for a while to evoke a tone.
Yeah it has to be a bit dark and claustrophobic for a while, then it can open up again later.
TPM: Right? Everything’s kind of contracted. It’s gone from this big action sequence, which was quite intensive. And now, if you’re following the comic it’s in a really dark and small place. So we’ll expand from there.
We’re seeing a really influential generation of comics and animation growing out of Dungeons and Dragons, and the wider wave of modern RPGs, how do you think that’s impacted those comics the most?
TPM: Oh, good question. I have the curse of the indie comic artist where I mostly read other indie comics stuff. And I guess, I don’t really read a lot of new webcomics because I tend to be backlogged on stuff and don’t check in on the same ones for years. But recently I discovered that the scene has actually moved past me, like I said, and that the people are doing other shit now compared to what they used to. Even like four or five years ago, when WEBTOON wasn’t this big. So I haven’t really been in touch with it, so I can’t say I have a really strong opinion on it because like I don’t really have a basis to go off.
But yeah, I have no idea. What I read is I read titles that come out and I really like them and keep reading them, or I look for obscure manga stuff, like right now I’m reading “One Piece” because now’s a good time to finish it. I’m reading “Head Lopper,” and I just got the collected editions of “Hellboy” the other day. It’s pretty cool. But I can go back to stuff, I just read all of “Battle Angel Alita” because I just liked it and I kept going with it like, I’m not really following what’s being made nowadays. Especially when it comes to webcomics, I don’t really follow the scene. My wife makes fun of me because I don’t read a lot of stuff in my field. I just kind of make my thing.
Continued belowHow did you go about reframing religious iconography and the hero’s journey for a book with this kind of length and fidelity?
TPM: Well for the religious iconography stuff, I just like that as a vibe, as an aesthetic. I think that the entire world of the comic kind of sprung out of weird musings about religious apocrypha. I was thinking about “what if when God made the universe, he went absent, but the place where God sat while making the universe was still there?”
I’m into sociology and I studied International Studies in university, actually. I did philosophy for a long time, still like I love all that shit and it had a big influence on me. I remember reading for an entire quarter of school about voodoo, which is really interesting because it’s like the syncretic tradition drawing from a lot of West African religions. Not the same thing as Hollywood Voodoo and has an almost J.R.R. Tolkien-esque division of gods in it, which I took for my comics. That’s why there’s this Capital-G God who has fucked off and is absent and then there are the lesser gods who are left to interact with everything, and that was really interesting to me.
As far as the whole hero’s journey thing, I think the entire comic exists because I have problems with it as a constant problem in fantasies. Actually I think I have a lot of problems with fantasy, and the older I get, the more I realize I’m just doubling down on that. “KSBD” isn’t a critique of fantasy, but I want people to take a good, hard look at it. I think some people read the comic in a way where they’re expecting certain things out of it and get frustrated when they’re not there. So I’m running into that right now.
There’s an arc in [‘Breaker of Infinities’] where the main character has had a huge loss and has lost a shit ton and has failed again and normally in a lot of of fantasy media like this there would be that idea that it’s the time to bounce back and reconnect with yourself and get revenge. But instead it’s like “no, she’s just depressed and she just wants to lay in bed, you know?” And look, that’s what you would do. It’s hard to cope with in the same way that just because you can swing a sword doesn’t give you the right to rule the country. I read Lord of the Rings when I was younger, and I remember I really chafed at the ending because it was this very end of day, Judeo-Christian kind of thing. You know, evil is defeated and it’s gone forever. Time is over and nothing interesting will ever happen again. I was like, “Oh, that’s fucking disappointing.” A lot of stories follow that structure, they have a classic happy ending in exactly the wrong way.
Yeah, you even have the rapture in that book. Where half of them disappear and ride off into the sunset.
TPM: Yeah, exactly. People don’t examine those narratives, they’ve been so inundated with media that follows this narrative that they don’t sometimes stop to question. There are many others that do different things that are much more interesting to me. Like, can I explain the plot of a Haruki Murakami book? Fuck no. But Murakami is one of my favorite authors because his books capture something that is indescribable and captures the human condition so well. But can I describe a part of his books as something that makes sense or logic or anything? Fuck no. Can I describe David Lynch? No, but the vibes are immaculate.
Some people get so fucking caught up in the plot and they’re so kind of like conditioned to accept this like Hollywood style of storytelling that they get weirded out when it doesn’t get fed in the same way.
What themes were you trying to explore when the book began, and do you think those are still your guiding principles today?
TPM: No, I think I’ve stuck close to it because it’s always been laser focused on the end of the book, which is the point of the entire thing, a good ending. So I’ve always had that in mind and I’ve always been working towards it. Thematically, I think I’ve tried to keep everything really consistent and I think I’ve been very successful. I think that’s why the work resonates for people. I think all these years later, I’m still making the same thing, based on my own experiences.
Continued belowIt talks about fate and the power fantasy, but that existentialism, really, is about life and hitting your mid-twenties. I wrote it from that place when I was 23 and was having a weird existential crisis as a lot of people go through at that time of like where I had the whole rest of my life ahead of me and my whole life I’ve been in school. I hit this weird point where my girlfriend broke up with me, I was sleeping on people’s couches and I was just like, “what the fuck am I doing?” Because there’s no one but you that’s going to fix that problem. It’s like a scary thing to realize. So [“Kill Six Billion Demons”] is kind of about getting your shit together and learning to be a human being, which is a difficult project.
You bounce regularly between comics and RPG work, what do you think those two mindsets lend each other as a creator?
TPM: I think they’re different brains, actually. But I do think vibe is very important to both. I think people discard or undervalue the value of vibes and stuff. You need an aesthetic you’re going for, you need to be able to touch your work and immediately understand what the hell is going on, right?
It’s probably too early to talk in many specifics about what you want your next comic project to be. But following your well deserved break, are there lessons you want to apply to the format or style of your next book?
TPM: I actually do! I have very, very clear plans for the next thing we’re going to do, because I’m now in sight of the end. I’m going to do a short comic because I want to finish a story that’s less than 700 pages, and I might even start working on that before “KSBD’s” finished, just on the side if I have time.
Do you write a full script for yourself or Marvel style? And at what stage do you start bringing color and letters into your layouts?
TPM: So I’m a solo creative, so I don’t have to really do anything detailed. What I do usually is I have a rough outline and then I do thumbs for the next 8 to 10 pages. Then I draw those and then I do thumbs for the next two pages and I draw that. That’s really it. I actually don’t write anything for those pages until I do those thumbs. I just know roughly what happens, and then I go write the dialog going through the whole thing.
Who’s your favorite demiurge to draw, and your favorite setting to explore?
TPM: I like drawing Solomon a lot, but I also like Gog-Agog because you can put her in fun outfits. But I like Solomon, that guy’s awesome. For setting, I really enjoy drawing Throne. I’m excited to go back to drawing it again. I’m just pumped to be back doing it.
You’ve spoken about how, if your work were ever to be adapted, you would want it to be as an animated short. Do you think there’s something in this book that would benefit from moving to another medium, or does it stand better as a singular work?
TPM: Well, I don’t think I don’t think animation or film is the end state of all media. I think some things should just be comics, one of the most influential comics of all time, “Watchmen,” only works as a comic because there is a metanarrative in the middle of it through the different characters’ stories. That requires a level of detail and attention that you couldn’t get in a film, which was proven when Zack Snyder made that movie. There’s a whole thing about the kid reading the Black Freighter comic in there, which seems like a weird interlude. But when you read that, it actually lampshades the ending of the comic because if you read the comic and you didn’t read the Black Freighter stuff, you would think that, “oh, yeah, Adrian is right. Everything’s going to work out fine.” But if you read the Black Freighter stuff, it’s literally about Ozymandias, right? So it’s necessary, but of course it’s a weird side thing. So for TV or film you have to cut it and it can only exist in comics. It’s the same thing for KSBD, it operates on a level of scale and detail that is hard to adapt to animation or to television or whatever. So I think it’s the best in comics. Personally, it’s pretty hard to address, but I won’t say that I haven’t had an interest in that.
