Questions by "Superhero"!
@’s by Robert Tinnell & Neil Vokes
from MONSTERVERSE’s FLESH & BLOOD !!!
Hello out there is comic-land! It is I, superhero
here with a special Halloween treat for you! If you’re a comic fan and a
horror fan you should be checking out all of the comic book goodness
that is spilling out from a company called MONSTERVERSE. MONSTERVERSE is currently putting out some of the best horror comics out there with BELA LUGOSI’S TALES FROM THE GRAVE and now FLESH AND BLOOD by Robert Tinnell and Neil Vokes.
You can check out my reviews for FLESH AND BLOOD both here and here. I
had a chance to Skype with Mr. Tinnell and Mr. Vokes about FLESH AND
BLOOD as well as horror as a genre in general. It was a great little
chat and I hope everyone out there enjoys reading it as much as I
enjoyed participating in it.
This interview is a transcription of an actual audio interview that I’ll be posting on my own podcast at www.parttimefanboy.com. But for now, you can enjoy it here, in all its glory!
SUPERHERO:
Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your backgrounds? Because I
know that some people might not exactly know who you are. If you want to
start with Robert, what about your comic book background, your film
background if you could start with that? ROBERT TINNELL
(RT): Sure, I ‘ve had a very eclectic film career and it continues to be
eclectic. From being a kid and producing SURF NAZIS MUST DIE to
directing a lot of features through the 90’s with… mainly for kids type
films, things like KIDS OF THE ROUND TABLE and FRANKENSTEIN AND ME and
getting to work with some cool people like Ryan Gosling, Elisha
Cuthbert, Burt Reynolds. I relocated back to the East coast, just
wanted to raise my kids back here and I like it back here, but still
work in Hollywood mostly writing although I do a lot of… I’m actually…
I’m just finishing up a feature length documentary called, we’ll just
say, THAT STUFF WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN which is about how… in fact, you
guys ran some coverage on it, about how the… when they released the
classic horror movies to TV in the 50’s and 60’s how it kind of
transformed popular culture. So it’s a very, very varied career. Comic
wise, Neil Vokes and I were friends and it was funny, I thought I
would’ve found it easier, logically easier, to raise money to make a
movie than I would’ve thought that anybody would let me do comics. I was
just a comic fanatic, I loved comics. And
Todd Livingston
and I had come up with the idea for what eventually became our second
book, not our first one, was called the WICKED WEST. And Neil, you just
finished up I think SUPERMAN ADVENTURES. Right?
NEIL VOKES (NV): Yeah, I think I’d just ended the series.
RT: And it was before you did part one of Justice (
PARLIAMENT OF JUSTICE)
and we were at a convention, actually, a film convention just friends
hanging out drinking at the bar and Neil said, “What are you guys
working on?” And we told him and he goes, “I wanna draw that.” We were
just sort of blown away that anybody… and it just kinda went from there
and just… I just love comics. I love the medium and I’m just really
grateful that I get to work in it with so many good people.
SUPERHERO:
Oh, that’s great. So allow me to geek out for a second because Neil, I
actually was a big fan of that Superman Adventures book. I really,
really liked it, I’m a big Superman fan in general and I thought that
those were some of the better Superman stories told. Even though it was
kind of considered a kiddie book I guess by most people, I really
thought that the stories and the art in that book were some of the
better Superman stories in maybe, what, the past… I don’t know how long
has it been? I would say 10 years? NV: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was… I heard that a lot when I was doing SUPERMAN ADVENTURES along
with the various other people that worked on it, like Terry Austin on
the inks and such, everybody that came up and talked to us said, “These
stories and the animated book are just so much better than so much of
the present day Superman.”
RT: Kristian, do you remember the
one… I remember the one he did about Krypto. I have a page from, the
original page. That story was just wonderful.
NV: Ty Tempelton wrote that.
RT: Oh my gosh, that was such a great story.
NV:
That was also, in fact, I recently just three days ago before I came to
the show I had a fan write me and say, “Do you have any pages left from
that one with Krypto?” Long gone, but some of the stories were just
fantastic. I really enjoyed the ones with that Mark Evanier wrote,
because he included Mister Miracle.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. NV: I loved working on those because Kirby.
SUPERHERO:
Yeah, of course. Kirby’s absolutely fantastic. I mean, I don’t have to
say that to anybody out there. What about a little bit more of your
history Neil? Can you go a little bit more into depth besides the
Superman stuff? NV: Well, I started comic wise back in around ’84. So I’ve been doing this now about 28 years.
SUPERHERO: Wow. NV: And I started with a small company called Comico Comics in Pennsylvania.
SUPERHERO: Oh yeah. 
NV:
Yeah, they had just started. That was Matt Wagner and those fellas.
They had just come out of college and they started their own company and
I had sent out my samples to many, many different people with a friend
of mine who was an inker … Rich Rankin. And he and I weren’t getting any
response because, again, our stuff really wasn’t that great
illustration wise. The other problem was if you send any samples to DC
or Marvel and you don’t do their character, they won’t look at it. They
basically feel that if you don’t draw our characters, you just can’t
draw. So I was very, very disappointed about that. But the smaller
companies responded nicely. Joe Staton was art director at, I think it
was, Capital… no, Pacific Comics. And he sent back a lovely response. He
gave me notes, made little sketches and things for me. And it helped me
a lot. And we met people like Marshall Rogers at conventions and they
gave us all sorts of pointers. This small company, Comico, liked this
one short story we did. They took it and put it in their little primer,
Comico Primer Comic, this vehicle for new talent, which virtually the
whole company was new talent. And one thing led to another, we became
friends with the guys, they assigned us a book they were going to do, I
did about three months worth, about 90 total pages. They ended up not
doing the book but it gave me three months of work that I got paid for
and I needed that on the job training anyway. And then they got the
ROBOTECH license and we got a choice of one of the three books they were
doing. Then after about two years, my buddy Rich and I decided to self
publish a book called
EAGLE,
which was kind of a martial arts magical kind of thing. He’s like
Doctor Strange with a sword. And we did that as a black and white book
because The Turtles had come out and everybody was doing black and white
books at that point and they were selling like hotcakes. Our first
issue of EAGLE sold over 40,000 copies.
SUPERHERO: Wow. NV:
Yeah, exactly. We did that for a few issues. Of course, it went
steadily down from there, but on the average we were selling about
10-15,000 copies. And then the black and white thing, as all these
things in the industry go, everybody just overdid it so it just fizzled
except for guys like The Turtles. And we had to cancel a book, but I
moved on and did all sorts of other work for hire things in those years.
I worked at DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, we did stuff at Image later, and
lots and lots of different things. TARZAN, CONGIRILLA, JURIASSIC PARK, I
worked on all sorts of kinds of books and it was fun, it was a great
experience, I learned a lot. And the most recent, at that time which
would’ve been some years ago… now, about 10 years ago, was the SUPERMAN
ADVENTURES book. And I had gone in to get the BATMAN ADVENTURES book, I
really wanted to draw Batman real bad. And my agent tried to get it for
me but they said, “You know, we’re starting the Superman animated one
too. Would you be interested?” And I said, “I’m not as interested, but
sure, what the hell?” And it turned out I had a great time drawing it. I
think literally the first comic I remember reading was a Superman
comic, I was probably about 4 maybe 5 and I probably read it in a
barbershop. Tony’s Barbershop. So it was like destiny, eventually I even
got around to drawing Superman and then that book got cancelled.
SUPERHERO: Yes. NV:
So I was kind of floundering a little bit and Mike Oeming came to me
and said… because he was a young guy that I had kind of mentored at the
beginning of his career. And he had this idea called PARLIAMENT OF
JUSTICE and it was this kind of… starts out like an animated thing and
gets really dark and really violent. And I didn’t want to do it, I
turned him down. I said, “No, this isn’t me.” I’d just come off of
SUPERMAN ADVENTURES, so it was a whole different kind of book. But he
changed my mind, I sat down, I did it, and I suddenly got notice by
people. It’s one thing to draw ,say, Superman, it’s really a geeky,
wonderful thing, but you’re one of 500 guys that drew Superman.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. NV:
And this guy came along and he said, “Here’s this project, let’s do
this.” And now it’s like this is Neil Vokes’s project. Guys like Mark
Wheatley, whose work I respect, came up and said, “You found your voice.
After 20 years, you found your voice.”
SUPERHERO: Wow, so is that in trade? PARLIAMENT OF JUSTICE? NV: Yes. It was a one shot.
RT: It was a standalone…Image Comics.
NV: It’s awesome. It’s just beginning, middle, and an end, and that’s it.
SUPERHERO: Oh, that sounds great. NV:
That was around the time also that Bob and I started talking about
these things. I was introduced to Bob as, I told somebody this this
weekend, at this convention we met at which, I believe, was the ’93
Famous Monsters Con.
RT: No.
NV: No? It wasn’t that one? It was ninety…
RT: I think it was ninety.
NV:
It was in that area. And he was introduced to me as a filmmaker who
loved comics and I was introduced to him as a comic book maker who loved
films. And we just kind of meshed and we were like fast friends within
one day of that weekend I think.
SUPERHERO: Oh, that’s great. NV: And we started… he showed me the script for
BLACK FOREST, we talked about
WICKED WEST,
this other idea they had, and I said, “BLACK FOREST would make a hell
of a comic book. Would you like to do it?” And Bob said, “I never did
any comic books before. What do we do?” So we just worked out all the
little details, I sat down and drew that thing, and I loved every second
of it, and did it kind of the same style as I did Parliament in the
black and white inkwash style. And one thing led to another and we’ve
been doing projects ever since.
RT: It sounds like there was
totally a plan. You always hear from people they go, “Do you do comics
to get movies made?” Man, if I do comics to get movies made, somebody
needs to hit me upside the head. It’s a lot easier just to go get movies
made in my experience.
SUPERHERO: Really? Because that’s the
question I had for you, Robert, because you had just mentioned saying
that it was really hard for you to get people to let you do comics. I
mean, why is that? What’s the difference? RT: I didn’t ask. I
mean, I was too stupid to ask. You know? And the oddest thing about it
is, and Neil will back me up and I swear, you know, let me preface this
by saying I loved Pink Floyd when I was a kid. And it always seemed so
brilliant and smart to me and I thought that they had this really
elaborate plan and then I read a book about them and discovered there
was no plan at all, they were kind of just banging around in the
universe and things worked out. If you look back at the comic thing,
you’ll think that there was this plan where there was none. But funny
enough, I had, for a few years, I had become really enamored of things
like… I wasn’t reading comics so much anymore. I was still reading books
like HELL BLAZER, things that I really liked, or PREACHER or something.
But I was… and ASTRO CITY, I was a nut for ASTRO CITY and I was a big
fan of Kurt’s (Kurt Busiek). But I was… I had started… I had discovered
Comic Book Artist Magazine, and I started becoming sort of obsessed with
how comics were made and the history of them. So when we… Neil actually
kinda had to yank my chain pretty early on because he’s like, “Look, I
appreciate what you’re trying to do. You don’t have to do that with me.”
Because I was like, “Look, do we need to plan this for this? Or do we
have to plan that for that?” Almost really full script kind of like
you’re writing for British artists or something where you have to get so
meticulous.
SUPERHERO: Like Alan Moore. RT:
Yeah, because… but I wasn’t doing it because I… I wasn’t trying to be a
control freak, I had just so absorbed all of this information about how
things were done that I did have a sense. And I think ultimately it
served me well, just not initially. It wasn’t… I did a book that’s not
horror at all, it was actually fortunate enough to be nominated for an
Eisner called
FEAST OF THE SEVEN FISHES.
It was a daily online comic strip and it’s a romantic comedy about
Italians cooking fish on Christmas Eve. That strip really was a
tremendous learning experience for me because you had to do everything
in three and four panels and it started with a great young artist named
Ed Piskor and then about halfway through Ed had to leave and Alex Saviuk
came on. And Alex just took me to school, he started really… and I do
think when I came back and did things with you there was a difference.
NV: Oh yeah.
RT:
Because you have to be so tightly controlled when you’re… because you
have and… I had a bigger story in mind, but I was having to parse it out
three andfour panels a day and it was…
NV: That’s really hard to do.
RT:
It really is, and I’ll tell ya, I would recommend it to anyone
especially if they were trying to get into comics. Just sit down and do
them as exercises, it’s… it really made me a better comic and made me a
better screenwriter.
NV: Alex had experience with that doing the Spider-Man strip for years.
RT: Oh yeah.
SUPERHERO:
So you’re saying that breaking down the writing and the whole process
was harder for you than it was making a film? I mean, I live in LA. I
know different people who are involved in different aspects of film and,
you know, Hollywood is murder. You’re saying the comic thing was harder
for you to nail down in a way? RT: I’ll put it this way, I’ve never not been able to make a decent living from film.
SUPERHERO: Wow. RT:
I’m not saying that, you know, listen, you wake up one day and you’re
that guy. You always hear about people who they make a living writing
scripts that never get made and I used to say, “Oh yeah, right.” That
really happens.
SUPERHERO: Oh wow. RT: It really happens.
SUPERHERO:
That’s great. That’s good that you’re able to do that, that’s
fantastic. So what do we… let me ask you just how you got into horror…
how did you develop a passion for horror? Where did that start off? NV: I think we both developed it the exact same way, growing up.
RT:
Yeah, it’s what I’m making that documentary about. It’s… it was this
imagery, particularly in the early 60’s through the late 70’s, you can
look at all these different events that, you know, the horror hosts were
a big part of our life. DARK SHADOWS, I think that… I did a roundtable
interview with
Video Watch Dog
for Tim Lucas with a bunch of people talking about the old DARK SHADOWS
TV show. And it is extraordinary in hindsight after coming out of that
panel, out of that collaborative article at the end, and realizing I
think it’s underestimated how much that show affected young people. You
know? It was a great time to sort of come of age. When I was a kid, not
quite a teenager yet, all the big Marvel black and white horror books
hit and TOMB OF DRACULA had hit and WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, which was
freaking awesome.
NV: GHOST RIDER, all that stuff.
RT:
Oh my gosh, it was… there was just so much wonderful stuff. A lot of
times people will go, “Well, don’t you wanna mention EC? Or don’t you
wanna mention CREEPY and EERIE?” And I wanna go, “Listen, that’s like me
pretending the Jean-Luc Godard affected me.” That’s like Tarantino when
people are talking about Orson Wells this and Tarantino is like, “THE
DIRTY DOZEN and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, man! GONE WITH THE WIND!” Those are
the things that affected us as kids. PLANET OF THE APES was a huge
influence, I think, on a generation of kids. There was all this imagery
and stuff. It was a great time to be a kid.
NV: Yeah. I’m a little older than Bob, so actually, say for example, DARK SHADOWS was ‘66, wasn’t it?
RT: Yeah, I was too young for that.
NV:
I was twelve years old then. So that ten year old to twelve year old
time I, looking back on it through the years, I’ve realized how much has
influenced me and affected me in that little time period. The first
Hammer film, which I love Hammer films, the first Hammer films I ever
saw were HORROR OF DRACULA and CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, they were at the
drive-in in 1964.
SUPERHERO: Oh wow. NV: And it
was a double feature because they had just been rereleased in America as
a double feature. And my family took us in the station wagon, my
brother and I in our jammies, and I’m ten years old and we go to this…
it was four films. It was HORROR OF DRACULA, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,
GILIATH VS THE VAMPIRES, and GODZILLA VS THE THING. So I guarantee you,
all three of those major film genres affected the hell out of me for
life.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. 
NV:
And the thing about Hammer was, was I had seen, on TV of course, I had
seen the Universal stuff and I loved them. But those Hammer films just, I
mean, literally hammered me in the head.
RT: It’s funny, see, I
got exposed to Hammer actually pretty much before Universal. That stuff
came out, I remember my brother and I stumbled upon HORROR OF DRACULA
one stormy day, it’s like a total… honest to God, it’s like such a
stereotype, and I just flipped out! Seven years old and you’re like… I
just remember my brother crying, so scared.
SUPERHERO: That’s
really interesting because, I mean, do you remember specifically maybe
what your first horror film or experience would’ve been? And it sounds
like they started really young. Because I know kids today are not… well,
I guess it depends, are not necessarily exposed to that stuff as easily
or as readily as maybe you and I were growing up. NV: I
think they’re actually more exposed to it because of video and computers
and such. When we were kids, especially I think in my case, many cases,
is that television, you had maybe three channels if you were lucky. And
the movies you wanted to see came on occasionally sometimes late at
night. There were always commercials; they were cut up. You had to go
out of your way to catch a movie back then or go to the theatre to see
them. And you didn’t get re-releases all that often, and there was of
course no video. But nowadays kids can grab virtually any movie there is
off of the internet, much less at a video store. And I think it’s
easier now to be affected by those things, but I think because I think
as… which might get a little pretentious, but as humans we’re
hunters-gatherers, you know? And back then, you had to hunt and gather
to get the movies or get the books…
RT: No, there were multiple Holy Grails. I remember the one Holy Grail for me was
MONSTER TIMES
had this thing about this film that it was called COUNT DRACULA by
Jesus Franko, with Christopher Lee. It was like this is the film. And
they did this thing like Neil Adams did the promotional artwork,
stunning. I think heavily penciled.
NV: It was all pencil.
RT:
It was all pencil. And they did this poster, it was Christopher Lee
behind bars and it said, “Free Count Dracula!” And I just wanted to see
this movie and I wanted to see it so bad. And for five years or six
years I couldn’t see it, and it finally came on, they on Chiller Theater
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania they ran it. And it didn’t come on until
two o’clock in the morning and it was dreadful. I get motion sickness,
like with BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and stuff, it’s all these awful zooms. You
know?
NV: Oh yeah, horrid music.
RT: And it’s not… but man, it was like you just had to see that movie.
NV:
And nowadays with video, I mean, even that, I mean, I’ve got this
beautiful print of it now on DVD of that movie. The main reason to want
it, of course, is because I’m a Christopher Lee geek and he’s playing
Dracula. But there was all that stuff that wasn’t available. Now it’s
almost too easy in some ways to get a hold of something.
RT: Yeah, yeah. You miss the chase.
NV:
Yeah, I think you actually… the harder it is… it’s like anything,
anticipation. The harder it is to get something you really want, the
more you want it.
SUPERHERO: That’s true. NV: And the easier it is to get, it kinda takes a little of the passion out of it I think.
RT:
But the funny thing is, is there is an echo to that and I’m gonna… it’s
like the bad segue, but I have to say it because it popped in my head.
That’s part of the reason that we’re doing FLESH AND BLOOD is there were
things that we wanted that didn’t happen. And so we’re trying to make
them happen.
SUPERHERO: Sure. NV: With FLESH AND
BLOOD, of course, Hammer being one of the primary influences, Hammer
never did a crossover movie. They never had Frankenstein meet Count
Dracula or something like that.
RT: Yeah.
NV:
And whether or not they ever thought… who knows if they ever thought of
it, but they just never went ahead and did it. And we just, literally,
we just said, “Duh, what the heck?” We did it with…
RT: Yeah,
with Todd Livingston we did it with… when Todd and I wrote THE BLACK
FOREST, that was… we did the thing we wanted to see happen. Although the
funny thing is, is that you start to get a little frustrated. I mean,
for sure you feel the influences of Hammer films. We’d be lying if we
said we didn’t, in particularly Terrence Fisher who was a huge influence
on both of us, the director. But there are influences on this strip,
honestly, as much as anything, DRACULA LIVES, that sensibility even more
from DRACULA LIVES than from TOMB OF DRACULA. TOMB OF DRACULA is hugely
important to both of us, but other things like, I mean, Neil is working
on drawing volume three right now and, you know, PICNIC AT HANGING
ROCK.
SUPERHERO: Oh yeah. RT: It’s there. And
it’s not there… again, and Tim Lucas has kind of helped me see this,
although Tim didn’t even think I realized it at first, DARK SHADOWS was a
giant monster rally and it was a tremendous influence on a lot of us.
Not so much Neil than it was me, but for sure and let’s be, you know,
let’s just be honest. First of all, we put down soaps but soaps are a
pretty rigorous medium. They work pretty well, soap operas, and the best
of comics function as soap operas. That’s… that was the genius of
Spider-Man, that teen angst…that who’s she gonna go out with, will she
go out with me, all that sort of stuff. The other stuff is cool and it’s
around the edges, but… I always think about it, remember the moment it
sort of became clear to me was I was… I think I was in… I might’ve been
in junior high, and there was a DEFENDERS comic book where I think it
was like Egghead blew up his niece and she lost her arm and she broke up
with Kyle Richmond, with Night Hawk, and they weren’t gonna date
anymore because she didn’t feel like a complete person because she’d
lost her arm. Man, I felt horrible.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. RT: This is really cooler than when they fight!
SUPERHERO:
Yes. Yeah, well, that’s the whole aspect that draws you in. And
actually that’s what I really like about Flesh and Blood is that it’s
not just sort of monsters, it’s… there’s a story behind it, there’s that
whole heroes trying to track down the monsters and all the angst that
kind of surrounds that a bit. 
NV:
The whole thing about character and such where it’s like the FRIDAY THE
13th movies, which are basically just killing teenager movies. You’d
probably like them a lot more if you cared about the teenagers they were
killing, and you don’t. Recently Joss Whedon’s CABIN IN THE WOODS is a
beautiful example of that where you actually care for each individual.
When the first girl gets killed in the movie, I won’t give anything else
away, but…
SUPERHERO: Oh, I saw it. NV: It’s
painful. It literally is painful because you’ve gotten to like her in
the story. And FLESH AND BLOOD, it’s the same thing. It would be one
thing, we could do four issues of monsters fighting monsters easily.
But, first of all, we’d be bored and secondly I think really the
audience would be bored. You want… you need those moments of the
characters… getting into the characters, into the story line, and then
you have these flashes of violence or flashes of action, and then you
get back into… you have to have that up and down kind of feeling to it,
otherwise you don’t care.
RT: And you know what else, Kristian,
that’s going on? And, again, you always… when you talk about this stuff,
you can overanalyze or you start to over intellectualize or whatever. I
mean, we wanna have fun and it is fun, it’s fun for us and it seems to
be fun for our audience. But also, I think that we are tapping back into
the kind of roots of gothic literature and what’s interesting… the
Universal horror movies, they tapped into like German expressionism in a
lot of ways. Much more that than the true gothic prototype. Whereas
Hammer, you know, and those companies, and not just Hammer at that time,
but they kinda went back, they were more literary and in a sense less
visual if you know what I mean, because they didn’t use the visual
symbolism and whatnot. But what’s great about that gothic literature,
there’s all this stuff that Mary Shelley was afraid of, that Braham
Stoker was afraid of. If you look at just DRACULA, which I love the
novel DRACULA, and you look at all the different anxieties that are
present there from very simply biological ones like fluids and sort of
parallels for STDs. And you think about Braham Stoker being in the city
and suddenly it’s opening up and when you’re going to the docks in
London you’re hearing all these different languages and voices and music
and sounds and foods and smells. And it must’ve been very threatening
especially to an island nation. And then you’ve got women starting to,
oh my God, they wanna have jobs? Next thing you know, they’re gonna
demand an orgasm! And, you know, so all of those elements, it’s funny.
If you look at FLESH AND BLOOD on the surface, it’s like, “Oh man,
they’ve got a lot of really hot girls without very many clothes on.” But
the truth is, for both of us, it’s looking at these women who are
struggling to be empowered and how much it threatens the men. A lot of
the things that happen in these books happen not for supernatural
reasons, but because the men can’t deal with the women exercising power
or control.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. 
NV:
One thing that I’ve noticed, especially now on the third issue, is
though Baron Frankenstein is in essence the star of the series, there’s a
huge feminine element to the entire series that Bob has put in there
with the characters. Aside from the obvious, like he’s saying, it opens
with naked lesbian vampires on top of each other. It develops into a
whole other thing. This third issue is primarily about a young girl
who’s kind of, I won’t give anything away other than that, but she’s a
young girl who has lost her memory, Frankenstein has experimented on her
for some reason, and she meets all these other young girls who are in
the finishing school, which is where the kind of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
thing comes in, and there is some interesting, fascinating, emotional
stuff that develops during the course of the story that naturally leads
to some horrible, tragic things in the book. But it’s very much a… it’s
almost a breather in the series and it’s, you know, we’ve had two issues
of vampires and Dracula and werewolves fighting each other, and now we
have this kind of poignant character tale about this young woman and how
she’s all screwed up because of what Frankenstein has done. And it’s
very much… there’s a lot of feminine stuff going on in this series.
SUPERHERO:
Yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to ask you guys about.
Because in this book, you don’t… at least the first two issues, it
doesn’t seem like you guys are holding back at all. You are doing things
that, I mean, although Hammer tended to be a bit salacious in some of
their productions and, I mean, you guys go all out in certain aspects of
this book. And so what did… when was the decision made to say like,
“We’re just gonna go even further than the films probably even could.
We’re just gonna go all the way with it.” NV: I don’t think
we actually have gone farther than the films. I think… the way I always
refer to it is it’s kind of a soft R from like the early 70s, the way
Hammer was going. They did vampire lovers and lust for a vampire and we
haven’t really done anything beyond what they actually did in those
movies. I mean, it might seem that way because, again, you’re looking at
drawings in a book.
RT: I think what it is, Kristian, I think
it’s because contextually now it’s every element of what made gothic
horror great is sort of coming together. I tell you, a strong influence
on me, and I go back again I just saw someone else did another version
of it, is WITHERING HEIGHTS, the great love story. It’s not a great love
story, that’s a sick story.
SUPERHERO: Yeah, it’s depressing. RT: It’s awesome, it’s depressing, it’s all kinds of weird sexual shit going on. I’m sorry, can I say that in the interview?
SUPERHERO: Yeah, you can say it. RT:
Underneath, right? You know what I mean? There’s implied incest and
that is really informing, I think, what we’re doing a lot too. Not just
Wuthering Heights, I mean… but I think… I will say this, sometimes early
on Neil would, I gotta say this, he would flip me a page and I’d go,
“Wow, that’s not exactly what I thought was gonna happen. I didn’t know
you were gonna go for it.” And he’s like, “You know what? If we’re gonna
do this, we’re gonna do this.” And the more we thought about it,
because we had a terrible title, I won’t even say what it originally was
because we couldn’t think of…
SUPERHERO: Come on…RT:
And then my friend Ted had done the Hammer documentary FLESH AND BLOOD
and I’d helped him with that and I was like… I kept thinking about it,
and that’s really what this book is about. It’s about the flesh and it’s
about the blood.
NV: Very much.
RT: And it’s kind of
about all the sort of mingling of the two in every aspect. I mean, one
of the things that I’m really proud of in the second book is when
Frankenstein… because, you know, Frankenstein all he has is his
curiosity really, and the occasional bout of lust. I mean, beyond that
he really doesn’t have anything else. And, you know, and he, as you
know, he ends up becoming sexually active with the vampire.
SUPERHERO: Yes. RT: And it’s so interesting.
NV: But, again, it’s not about he’s just horny. It’s because he is curious how do vampires do it? You know?
SUPERHERO: Well, that’s something we’re all curious about, really. 
RT:
Because here’s the deal, if you really start thinking about it and
really wanna have fun doing this stuff, then you start to think about
what motivates them. And I will go back to one of the things I will
credit, when you write screenplays you’re developing things with
different companies in Hollywood. People are always talking about
raising the stakes and character in the movies…when you’re writing
screenplays, they can’t just be evil. They have to want something,
that’s what Hollywood says, you gotta want something. And I used to
really resent that. I’m really glad that people pushed me to do that
because then it becomes, “what do they want?” And, as you know, Erzsebet
in FLESH AND BLOOD Vol. 2, she kinda talks about it. Basically she
doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s like, “What do you think I’m a
cockroach?” These aren’t zombies, these aren’t flesh eating zombies or
something like this or reanimated corpses. I mean, they’re dead people
who are reanimated but they’re cognizant of their reanimation. And it
goes back, first, I had written a thing that eventually we’re gonna
fold… I’d written something called ONLY AT NIGHT which will actually
eventually be folded into the FLESH AND BLOOD storyline far down the
road. But there was a moment in it that I realized that what sort of
Terry Fisher was exploring which was the kind of duality, this white,
black, good, evil, Christ, Antichrist, all these sort of opposites. And
one of the things I thought, I was like, “Well, if suicide is a mortal
sin, if a vampire commits suicide, is that in fact a holy act?” Right?
You know what I mean? You start thinking about that. If they consciously
would choose death, true death, over the… and it starts getting into
all this really neat theological philosophical whatever stuff. It’s just
flat out fun to think about.
SUPERHERO: Yeah, I mean, that’s
the interesting… but the thing that’s kinda never been made clear to me
except for maybe on something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Joss
Whedon…what actually does happen to someone when they become a vampire? I
mean, you’re talking about a cognizant creature, but how different are
you than what you were before you got turned? Right? 
RT:
There’s an inherent sort of problem with it because of free will. If
you buy into the Judeo Christian thing of, you know, you’ve removed free
will. It actually is counterintuitive to what, you know, it’s like
punishing someone because they have an STD or AIDS or something. You
know what I mean? As if there was some reason… some sort of inherent
moral failing if you were attacked and something bad happened to you and
you got sick from it. I mean, it’s… like I said, it’s illogical.
NV:
He (Joss Whedon) made the point at the beginning that a vampire loses
its soul, it doesn’t have its soul anymore, and that’s what makes them
evil creatures in a way. And then he introduced that character of Angel
as a character who is a vampire whose soul had been returned to him so
he would suffer eternally for all the horrible things he’s done. And
then the only… and the worse tragedy would be that if he ever had total
happiness, which is what he accomplishes with Buffy, that he would turn
back to his evil self again. So he… it was a lose/lose situation for
him. He was suffering from all the memories of killing or he became his
evil self again. And what is he… he’s gonna go through eternity that
way.
SUPERHERO: Yeah, which I thought was kind of a brilliant
take on that sort of little universe. So, I guess, just one last thing.
How did you guys end up hooking up with Monsterverse? How did you guys
get involved working all together? I mean, I know you guys said how you
guys met, but how did you meet up with the guys behind Monsterverse? NV:
Well, we’re friends. Bob is actually better friends with Kerry Gamil,
who is a well known comic book artist himself. And it’s essentially his
company, he’s behind a lot of this. He’s one of the few people that
actually works at the company, and Sam Park who does a lot of the PR and
such. And I think Bob had probably been in touch with Kerry.
RT:
No, it was you. I told Neil, I said, “Don’t bother because they’re busy
with Lugosi and I don’t think they’re gonna wanna deal with this.”
NV: They had started… they wanted to do an anthology book called Bella Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave.
SUPERHERO: Yeah, which is fantastic. NV:
They had gotten the rights from Legosi Jr. to do that, to use Lugosi as
kind of an Uncle Creepy kind of character in the book. And I had seen
that and I’d only known Kerry through online, I’ve never actually met
the guy. And I had written him an email, I just said, “Kerry, I’d love
to do a story in that sometime. Maybe Bob and I could do a story there
for one of the issues.” And he said, “Sure, we’d love it.” And just one
thing led to another, Bob and I didn’t get to do a story together, I did
do a story in the second issue, but we started talking about other
stuff and at the time we had already been working in some fashion on
FLESH AND BLOOD. Probably at the time it still wasn’t even called FLESH
AND BLOOD. And I had done a lot of pages on it at that point. At that
point it was one book, we were gonna do just one graphic novel at the
time. And I started showing some of the pages on Facebook and Kerry
started seeing these pages and said, “Oh, I love these pages. These are
great. What is this?” One thing led to another, I explained it to him,
and he said, “You know, guys, this is the kind of book we wanna do.” And
that’s kind of how it started.
SUPERHERO: Oh wow. RT:
I think… you can’t, I mean, Kerry and Sam are fantastic but you can’t…
and I can’t minimize what they’ve done. For example, early on Kerry
just, he designed the logo, but he was like, “We want Dan Brereton do
the covers.” And Neil and I, we didn’t really… we had another idea to be
blunt, another way that we thought the covers were gonna be. But when I
saw what, which we were involved with the design of the cover, I mean,
there was a team effort, don’t get me wrong. Because Dan’s like, “Just
tell me what you want.” When I saw that first cover I went, “Oh my God.
You know what? From now on when Kerry says just do something, I’m pretty
much just gonna do it.”
SUPERHERO: Yeah. 
RT:
And the other thing I would say too is that we’re… I think that comics
given the costs need to deliver more than their competition. And we
really strive for a few things. We wanna pack that book cover to cover
with entertainment and we also wanna do things the way that comics and
monster magazines and fanzines and things in the 60’s and 70’s did. You
felt like you were in a clubhouse. And we’re really trying to create
that sense of community, that’s why we have our friends come in like
Michael Price is writing something for the third volume, it’s gonna be
great. Tom Savini’s doing something for the third volume.
SUPERHERO: Oh wow. RT:
Tim Lucas. But also, we’re lucky on our backups. I mean, Bob Hall, I’m
writing something for Bob Hall. I’m ecstatic doing that Operation Satan
thing, which will eventually feed into the main FLESH AND BLOOD
storyline.
SUPERHERO: Really? RT: Yes.
SUPERHERO: How? Obviously you can’t tell me. NV: It’s kind of what… basically we were just creating our own FLESH AND BLOOD universe.
SUPERHERO: Oh, that’s great because I like Operation Satan a lot! NV:
And Bob is a… he’s a neglected artist. I mean, he’s one of those
fellows that’s been in the industry for ages and his work is amazing.
And he’s older than I… he’s a good ten years, maybe ten years older than
me. And he’s in his sixties and he just draws beautifully, but he’s
just not… it’s an age thing with comic industry.
RT: Well, but he also went off and wanted to do other things.
NV: Well, he does theatre and he directs.
RT: I mean, this guy’s a renaissance man but he’s taken me to graduate school, that’s what I keep saying.
NV:
And we also we had our old British buddy, Ade Salmon, was doing a
Frankenstein thing for us. And we’ve got wonderful artists doing pinups
and we’ve got a lot of friends of ours doing text pieces, which are…
they kind of fill in the gaps of a lot of this stuff. It’s like we call
them DVD extras sometimes.
RT: But, you know, it is that we just
want there to be conversation and I do think, like when Bruce
Hallenbeck did in the first book he did that little backstory and then
Curt Purcell did one in the last one. And I’m hearing from younger
readers, we’re getting some girls reading now for example, and some
girls in their early twenties told me that they really appreciated that
they would read the story and then they read the extras and they’d go,
“I gotta go back and read the story again because now that I have some
context or I have a deeper understanding, a deeper appreciation for it.”
I love that. You remember when Tony Isabella would write articles for
DRACULA LIVES or something back in the day? Those things, they just made
you feel more, I don’t know, aware and it just… any time you can
increase appreciation and understanding, I think that it becomes a
richer reading experience.
NV: Eventually Tony gave us a great review on the book too.
RT: Yeah.
NV: So we got a nice geek moment out of that.
SUPERHERO:
That’s great. Well, I gotta say, I mean, I do love this book and I
think it’s quality all the way through. I mean, it’s just fantastic. I
picked up the first two at Comic-Con and I can’t say enough about it. So
I think you guys are doing a great job. When does the third one come
out? 
RT:
I just yelled across the convention today, we worked at the West
Virginia Pop Culture Con today and I said, “Yeah, when is number three
coming out?”
NV: I said, “As soon as the artist is done with it.”
SUPERHERO: Gotcha. RT:
I’m writing… and you know what we did? We were idiots. I gotta say
this. We… Neil and I both fully consider Matt Webb to be a… he is…
SUPERHERO: Oh yeah. RT: He is a storyteller on this book and to suggest otherwise or to ignore his contributions would just be criminal.
NV:
And he’s got two big things going against him at the beginning because
first of all, he’s doing it for nothing. He’s not getting paid, he’s
doing it for the passion of doing it. And secondly, as are the rest of
us for that matter, but he’s also… he didn’t really know the source
material that well that we were kind of referencing. So I had to give
him a lot of movies and stills and things to get him going, and he just
fell right into it. As he put it, he said after that first half of the
first issue, he just fell right into it. And everybody that reviews the
book comments on his colors.
SUPERHERO: Yeah, no. I mean, and
they’re unsung heroes, especially these days with everything being sort
of digital and stuff like that. The colorists are really the unsung
heroes of the comic book industry in my opinion. RT: What I
like is that he and Neil both have been sort of shifting some things as
they go on and… hey, Kristian, you don’t have to put this in the
interview but I’ve got to ask you because I was… what we both decided is
we’re gonna play with things. We’re gonna do what we wanna do, have
fun, and push the form a little bit. And I keep getting these private
messages from people going, “Did you really just jump that book 50 years
into the future?”
SUPERHERO: Yeah, yeah. RT: And by the way, it will happen again.
NV:
And the thing is, it’s really, if you’re paying attention, you… it’s
easy. It’s a smooth transition. Even though it’s 50 years, it’s a smooth
transition.
SUPERHERO: Yeah I, definitely, when I was
reading that, I had to go back and forth and I was like, “Wait, what
just happened here? Hold on.” And then, you know, because it wasn’t
really… I have the book here and I can flip to it, but I don’t remember
if there was anything that… yeah… I just had to go back and forth and
say, “Wait a minute. What just happened here? Did they just jump ahead?”
So… but, yeah. Either way…RT: And, honestly, we wanted that
reaction because it made people stop and go, holy cow! It was that Jump
the Shark m oment…that you can’t do that! And so that was why we wanted
to do it. And for me particularly writing screenplays where you just
kind of have so many rules, the opportunity here to actually be a comic
book and break some rules and have some fun, it’s just wonderful.
NV: And that’s the primary thing, we’re having a lot of fun doing it.
SUPERHERO:
Well, you can tell that you guys are having fun. I think that, I mean,
every page is just full of passion and especially your art. I think it’s
absolutely fantastic and, like I said, I loved it from the moment I
picked it up. So there’s no firm release date on three? Are these just…
there’s no set deadline or schedule? Or three just comes out when it
comes out? NV: That was a fault of ours when we started. We
really should’ve, looking back on it, we should’ve started the book, I
mean, started putting the book out after having at least finished 2
issues, which we did not do. We kind of jumped into publishing the book
right in the middle of doing the first issue.
SUPERHERO: Yeah. 
NV:
Then we had to rearrange our idea, like I said, it was a one book book.
And then we had this banging of heads at Pittsburgh one year and we
said, “We can’t do it. It’s not gonna work.” Matt was busy on something
else, we’re never gonna get it done by the schedule we wanted. So we
said, “Well, maybe we need to expand it.” “No, no. We can’t do that.”
And then he thought about it more and he said, “Let’s expand it to a
four book series.” And then not only could we make it work that way, but
he could add that much more to the story line.
RT: And then it got crazy.
NV:
And then it got crazy because once the book started coming out it was
like, “Oh God, now we gotta catch up. Now I gotta catch up.”
SUPERHERO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. NV: I’m still trying to catch up.
RT:
The other thing that we realized is that people are not content. They
don’t want this all squeezed in, the readership isn’t enormous yet but
they’re passionate, they’re vociferous, and they want what they want and
they don’t want this rushed. And when we realized that it’s like you
get that pat on the head and you’re like, “Well, fine. Then we won’t
rush it. And we’ll do things that we wanna do.” And we have a lot of
plans, I mean, I hope and pray that ten years from now we’re doing this
book. And you can say… and believe me, where we’re planning on going,
will probably really surprise you. And I don’t wanna really get into it,
but the only change we’re talking about making is possibly after book
four and maybe we don’t even wait until then…we’re talking about maybe
so we could come out more often dropping it to be in like a forty eight
or fifty six page book that could come out every two or three months so
we could keep conversation going. And we’re having some talks about that
and we can do that.
NV: Assuming we actually get to continue
the book for the foreseeable future, the ideal thing is that even though
we’ve jumped around a lot in time, we’ve got all that story that we
could still return to down the line. We could go into that fifty year
period and examine that more closely if we ever got around to that
point. So it’s just so much, I mean, once Bob gets going on an idea,
he’s done this before with BLACK FOREST and with WICKED WEST, once he
gets an idea going, suddenly he’s finding this avenue to go to and that
path to take and this door to go through. And it’s just… it starts
leading to hundreds of stories that you could do potentially.
SUPERHERO:
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, it seems like… did you have any challenges
releasing it in this format? $14.99 for very good quality book, but did
anyone push back on that and say, “No, it should be 22 pages.” You know?
RT: I mean, there’s certainly some retailer apathy in
certain regions of the country, not on the coast. I mean, on the coast
we got a lot of support. But I get it. If I’m a small retailer in a
little town, but where I live in West Virginia, my friend and retailer, a
tiny little comic shop in a small town, he’s pushed dozens of copies
because he gets out and he sells it. But these guys have to… I get it.
We’re not gonna complain about them. We keep saying we’re gonna sell it
one person at a time and it hasn’t been so much push back as it is
people are saying, “Please come out more often. Please come out more
often.”
NV: Yeah, and ideally we would love to do that.
RT: We’re gonna get to that point, but we have to do what we have to do.
NV: But Neil’s an old guy and it takes him a long time.
SUPERHERO:
Well, that’s great. And I appreciate your time and thanks for doing
this. And I know you guys have had a full weekend of a con, so you must
be exhausted. NV: This is fun though. We enjoy this.
SUPERHERO:
Well, that’s it! Be sure to check out FLESH AND BLOOD as well as BELA
LUGOSI’S TALES FROM THE GRAVE from MONSTERVERSE! I’ll be back in a while
with an interview with the masterminds behind the MONSTERVERSE Kerry
Gammil and Sam Park! In the meantime I hope you’re all having a
fantastic Halloween season!Discovered as a babe in an
abandoned comic book storage box and bitten by a radioactive comic fan
when he was a teenager, superhero is actually not-so mild mannered
sometime designer & cartoonist, Kristian Horn of Los Angeles,
California. Some of his work can be seen at www.kristianhorn.com and check out his blog at www.parttimefanboy.com. You can check also out his webcomics at www.babybadass.com and thediplomatics.com, which is currently in development.
Editing, compiling, imaging, coding, logos & cat-wrangling by Ambush Bug
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
Check out AICN COMICS on Facebook and Comixpedia.org!
