Sunday, August 4, 2024
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
1 Same question – what’s your elevator pitch for AVATAR?
A beloved hero’s “best friend” (ala Jimmy Olsen)/youthful sidekick,
crippled during a brutal supervillain battle, is given a chance to become that hero, oblivious to the
sinister machinations going on behind the scenes of his very own “origin”
story.
2 At this point in time, you’d already written Horus (and maybe Bathala?) – what was your approach to writing another guy with a cape? What was the impetus that got you excited to tell the story of Avatar?
One of the many things I’ve learned over the years is to never question
the inspiration.
If an idea presents itself, and I’ve kicked all the tires and deemed it
sound enough to take out on the road, on a journey that appears worthwhile,
headed towards an intriguing and interesting destination, then I just slam
those keys home, rev the engine, and head out on that highway…
So when AVATAR popped into my head, I didn’t really stop to think,
“Well, it has to be different from those other Superman archetype characters
I’ve written”; that consideration comes later, in the molding of the material.
Trust the process is another thing I’ve learned, so you drive down that
highway the inspiration has presented to you, and you trust that the journey
will be different from those you’ve taken before.
Plus, AVATAR (one of whose core ideas is: what if someone whose ability
to move freely had been taken away from him, was suddenly given a chance to
fly*) came around after a significant amount of time in which I wrote nothing, a sustained period where no
idea seemed potent enough to pursue. It was a creative wasteland I was tired of
inhabiting, and AVATAR was the rescuing hand that took me out of it.
So, really, there was no second guessing about me writing “another guy
in a cape”. It was actually me leaning in and embracing all of that, an
attitude that I’ve adopted time and again since then.
* In retrospect, given the creative rut I was in at the time, that
metaphor is definitely not lost on me.
3 If AVATAR reached up to issue 100, what would he be doing? How would you make that milestone issue super special?
I imagine issue 100 would be the culmination of the whole “Terra Armada”
subplot, when the fact that Tiercel is really a manipulative SOB who’s
positioned all these heroes as pawns and expendable pieces on his chessboard
has become common knowledge to Avatar and Horus.
The war they’ve been unwittingly trained for should reach its end at
that point, and, well, it really isn’t actually a happy ending, honestly…
Saturday, July 27, 2024
1 Same [first] question – what’s your elevator pitch to get people to read HORUS?
You’re a gifted college athlete, and you wake up one morning with a
tattoo on your arm, a tattoo that allows you to change into a freaking SUPERHERO!
Crazy-awesome insanity ensues!
2 What inspired you to have twins as your main characters? And what kind of tension did you have in mind by having only one of them get the powers?
I’ve long been fascinated by the Beloved Executioner motif; the idea of
betrayal coming from a loved one, like a brother, or more pointedly, a twin.
It’s an idea I revisited in BATHALA, where I took it to some dark conclusions.
My end point for the Daly twins in HORUS is certainly not as dark as
what we see unfold in BATHALA, but it would have hopefully been a torturous
emotional wringer for both brothers to undergo before emerging on the other
side.
Some of the bones of contention between the brothers begin to rear their
ugly heads in the published HORUS stories, one seed in particular foregrounded
in the story reprinted [in ALAMAT: ORIGINS], while the static of growing up unable to escape
the shadow of a more popular sibling (a twin! So why aren’t we exactly alike?!) plays constantly
through the narrative background.
3 Which version of Superman inspired you in your writing of HORUS?
Definitely Superman: The Animated
Series, from the second half of the ‘90’s. (I’m also really enjoying My Adventures
with Superman, BTW.)
The fact that I gave the main character the last name Daly (after STAS Superman voice actor Tim Daly) is a
dead giveaway.
For those of you who were with Alamat from the early days, you may note
that HORUS is really TATTOOED, but filtered through an Egyptian myth/STAS lens.
I loved the foundational idea of TATTOOED so much that I thought it
would be interesting to take that core concept and apply it to a more all-ages
title, and thus, we have HORUS.
Given the STAS influence,
definitely Superman, who has become, over the decades, the comic book/spandex archetype
of the Solar Hero (among many other things, of course).
They’d settle into a mentor/mentee set-up (one of the many things I
frequently return to in my comic writing) and battle some
darkness/shadow-themed villain, probably Set…
Friday, July 26, 2024
1 For new readers, what’s your pitch that would get them interested In DHAMPYR?
You’re a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, who’s become quite adept at
hunting down those blood-sucking freaks.
But you’re really looking for one freak in particular: your father…
Family reunions can be such a pain in the neck.
2 Aside from Vampire: The Masquerade, what inspired you to create these characters and that world of vampires?
As you’ve noted, Vampire: The Masquerade
(and by extension, White Wolf’s World of Darkness RPG universe) was the main
inspiration for DHAMPYR.
A key inspirational element here was the Vampire campaign I ran with a group of players that included none
other than Carlo Vergara himself. DHAMPYR’s setting (that very particular
Goth-drenched San Francisco spectacularly brought to (un)life by Oliver) was
also influenced by that Vampire
campaign.
Beyond that RPG inspiration, I also wanted to write about family
dysfunction, and I felt that if I could write something fantastic, where you
could actually strip away all the genre markers (the vampire/occult stuff) and
still have a functional narrative (a son trying to come to terms with an
absentee father and the wreckage of his family caused by that person), then I
could possibly have a story worth telling.
3 If you created Dhampyr today in 2024, do you think you would end up with a different set of characters, a different layout for the world?
Interesting question.
Two ways to answer that.
One: if, for whatever reason, the specific
idea for what eventually turned out to be DHAMPYR came to me today, it would
then be a period piece, in that, there’s something very particular about the
Goth scene in the ‘90’s, when the ‘80’s (and Goth’s “birth” in the late 70’s)
were still a recent memory, before the drift of certain elements of the
subculture towards the mainstream (see: emo).
So I can’t quite see that DHAMPYR narrative set in the present day,
without having its, ahem, fangs filed down, certainly from a visual/aesthetic
standpoint.
So the story we told in DHAMPYR, characters and all, would still
probably be set in that time frame.
The other way to answer your question: if a general idea came to me to write about a half-human, half-vampire
hybrid in the year 2024, that story would definitely not be the story we told in DHAMPYR, but another beast entirely…
I highly doubt that it would have that Goth aesthetic, either… so, at
the very least, the characters wouldn’t look
the same…
4 What do you remember from the night the book was launched in Synergy, during Halloween?
That sea of PDBs (People Dressed in Black).
So awesome.
:D
Thursday, July 25, 2024
So I got my compli copies of ALAMAT: ORIGINS (thanx so much to Rome for the coordinating) and wanted to note a few things.