♪ [heroic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guests today are Drew Edwards and Nicola Scott.

Drew, Nicola, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Hi, Terence.

Thanks for having us.

- We are-- well, Drew, you've been on Comic Culture a couple of times now, a few more, and you qualify for the free set of luggage.

But we're here to talk about the 25th anniversary of "Halloween Man."

And I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about how the two of you got together to work on this book.

- Nicola and I were both very active on Miller World, Mark Miller's fan forum, which was a thing back during the Bush administration years.

And there was quite a-- shall we say a smattering-- smattering feels like a word-- of comic book creators that have gone on now to do a lot of great things in the industry on there.

I was always looking for somebody that had a very classic comic book style.

That's always kind of how I envisioned the characters looking.

I wanted something that was evocative of either bronze or silver age art style.

And Nicola at the time had this beautiful piece of Wonder Woman artwork.

It feels silly to even call it fan art, because she's now actually worked on the character quite amazingly.

But she had this great piece of Wonder Woman artwork that looked so much like George Perez could have drawn it.

And so I was like, I want to work with her.

And it was-- I don't remember.

It's now been so long, unfortunately.

I don't remember exactly how I approached her-- - It was the Christmas jam piece.

- Because I mean-- There you go.

- You wrote a Christmas jam story with Halloween Man fighting robot Santa.

And I got allocated a page.

I can't remember what the page number was.

And I think I was probably just the first to deliver.

So you were like, hey, do you want to do a second one?

Because everyone else was going a little slow.

And so I did a second one.

And that was my introduction to working with you and to Solomon.

- At the time, Terence, Halloween Man was a web comic.

And web comics were still very much in kind of their infancy.

Nowadays, digital comics are quite a bit of a big part of the comic book industry.

But back then, it was very much the Wild West.

And so a lot of the stuff that I was doing then, I just was publishing on a .com website.

And now that you got me thinking about it, man, that was a crazy, crazy story.

And yes, you were the first person to deliver, which as a comic book author, an artist that can hit a deadline and the pages look good on top of that, that's just a beautiful thing there.

I don't know that my writing at that time would have really matched up to your general level of skill.

Because yeah, it was Halloween Man fighting a cyborg Santa Claus.

But I do remember now-- with the pages, I don't want to come across like too much of a-- like I'm kissing your butt here.

But everybody already knew you were something special.

Like that was the general chatter of everybody on the forum.

And I remember when we started working together, there was actually, I think, a little bit of envy that I was getting you to draw my sort of asinine scripts that were very much Monster of the Week format.

- Well, this is kind of part of the reason why I keep coming back to working with you.

It's because your stories are a hoot.

You've created this cast of characters.

Because immediately after that job, you asked me to do a three chapter, 10 pages a chapter story.

And that sort of was my first time of drawing the greater world of Halloween Man, not just Solomon.

And I ended up using many pages from those 30 pages as part of my portfolio when I was shopping myself around.

Because I was kind of really pleased with how they came out.

And it was so unusual, but instantly recognizable as the style of the sort of retro futuristic rockabilly look that you were going for.

Was sort of so present in the stories that you were telling.

And that I was sort of getting to draw.

That it was a great sort of portfolio filler.

- You mentioned that it's a retro, futuristic, rockabilly aesthetic.

So I'm wondering, how do you create that?

Is this something that you're like researching?

What would it be like if there were a sci-fi Elvis?

Or how do you kind of come up with this look for this world that you are tasked with creating?

- Well, I asked Drew.

[LAUGHTER] - I mean, look at me.

This isn't a passive interest for me.

I've always been interested in rockabilly as a culture.

I was a punk rock kid in high school.

Everybody always jokes that rockabilly is the punk rock retirement program.

And pretty much as soon as I stopped wearing a mohawk, I started growing out my sideburns.

So I always was very much interested in that aesthetic.

And actually, I remember one of the email conversations about the universe and talking about sort of the style of clothing and everything.

And one of the conversations we had was that you already had a big reference point of 1950s gowns and dresses and things that we could put on the Lucy character.

And that was another thing that was really appealing to me about working with you, because either you had done your research or you just had a massive amount of reference already on hand, but you knew the aesthetic.

You could draw the way the heels would work, the way the clothing would fit.

And a lot of people that I work with-- and this is not meant to be disparaging of other artists, because I've worked and I've been very, very blessed over a period of 25 years to work with some very, very talented people.

But not necessarily does everybody bring this sort of fashionista background to it, where they can really understand that this is not just meant to be like a horror comic or a superhero adventure comic, but that it has this aesthetic permeating it.

Because I really wanted it to look almost like rock art come to life.

And if a flyer for a Reverend Horton Heat show could sort of just vomited itself out and created this entire universe around it.

And Nicola nailed that pretty much right off the bat.

There was never really a point where she didn't get the characters.

It's also kind of a romance comic.

And yet, when Nicola drew Solomon, when Nicola drew Halloween Man, there were suddenly all these people were like, oh, he's kind of hot.

And I was like, well, he was always supposed to be kind of hot.

Because it's this juxtaposition of ugly and sexy at the same time.

That's what we're going for.

And Nicola, the master of sexy, beefy dudes, she just really-- can I say that, sexy, beefy dudes?

She just really-- she got the tight cowboy jeans down in a way that suddenly everybody stood up and noticed.

And we're like, oh, I see you there, sailor.

- He's also got a bit of a swagger.

He walks like a cowboy.

So I was always trying to give him that kind of body language.

But you referenced very early on to me that it's kind of like mid-century Hammer Horror slash sci-fi, RKO sci-fi references.

And I'm like, yeah, I grew up on "Rocky Horror."

I know exactly what you're talking about.

It's got to have swagger.

It's got to be cool.

And it's got to have retro vibes.

And the way you were describing the various characters as you were introducing them to me as I was getting ready to draw a new character was simple but evocative.

And on top of that, you started sending me CD playlists of music to be inspired by.

That first one that you sent me got played forever.

I wish I still had it now.

My mom and I would jam out to that.

And I'd be like-- she'd say, where did this come from?

I'd say, this guy Drew that I'm working with, he sent me this so I had something to play while I was drawing these characters.

And it absolutely put me in the zone.

- Nicola, you are not from the United States.

And I'm wondering, "Halloween Man" is kind of built into the American culture, the horror, the rockabilly.

So is this something that you were familiar with beforehand just because American culture is permeating every corner of the universe?

Or is this something where you have to kind of say, what exactly does he mean by this?

And I've never heard this type of song before.

- A little bit of both.

Like, certainly we have a lot of American culture here.

And growing up in the '70s and '80s, yeah, a lot of it.

And I was consuming a lot of it.

You know, I'm very much a sort of TV kid.

And occasionally, I'd sort of be like, OK, that reference is lost on me.

What does this mean?

And Drew would sort of give me some kind of clarification, whether it was a direct reference to a particular Hammer Horror film or a particular Universal sci-fi film, usually from somewhere in the '50s.

And I'd be like, right, OK, I get it.

You know, that it just sort of was enough to sort of knock the visual memory of what he's going for into place.

Because, you know, I know all of the references.

It was just sort of getting re-familiar with the combination that Drew was sort of hoping for.

- And as you are, I guess, starting your collaboration, this is the early days of the internet.

So I'm guessing with the time difference and the fact that you're still mailing CDs rather than, you know, here's a link to YouTube, you know, how is this process working?

Because I'm assuming with the time difference, it might not be easy for you to say, I'm working on this page, I really would like this answer, but Drew's asleep.

So how do you kind of balance this whole scheduling issue?

- Back in those early days, I spent a bit of time living in New York and London.

And so I was sort of much closer to the timeframe that Drew was in.

And he could email me the script easy as pie, but I would have to go to like a local internet cafe place to print it out.

And then once I'd drawn the art, I'd have to go back to that local internet cafe place to scan it in and I couldn't Photoshop anything.

So I just had to scan and send raw scans that weren't cleaned up, that weren't sort of doing, I didn't have any control over anything other than drawing, you know, my pencil on the page.

And so it was a pretty ridiculous sort of roundabout way for us to sort of long form ways for us to sort of get to work together.

But when I started sort of the top of the market professional side of my career, a couple of years later, I was doing exactly the same thing.

I still had to go to a local internet cafe, unless it was a company that was big enough for me to FedEx the boxes and they had a FedEx account because I was doing that for years, FedExing boxes of art.

And if they needed it fast, I would be up to the local thing, especially once I got back to Australia because a domestic A3 scanner or a scanner big enough for a piece of original comic art just didn't exist.

It was not until like the early 2010s when we could finally buy them here to have at home.

And DC Comics actually bought one for me 'cause they were like, this is ridiculous.

Get a scanner.

- It's interesting because the two of you work together and at some point it's got to go from being, I'm explaining what we're doing, to we both get it.

So what was that moment for the two of you when you realized, Drew, you could rely on Nicola to come up with something even better than what you were expecting.

And that conversation was less one-sided and was more back and forth.

- For me, there is, and it's one of my favorite images in the comic still to this day.

There was a splash page of Lucy with what I described as a big Rob Liefeld laser gun in her hand.

She's got this sort of Doc Savage-esque outfit on and she's got her hip cocked.

And I think she's saying something very pulp.

I think it's like, let's go bust some heads or something.

It was something very comic booky.

And I remember when I saw that, 'cause up at that point, I don't think I really, I was just doing the comic because it was something that gave me focus because that was a difficult time in my life.

And when I saw that character looking like that, I was like, oh, oh, this could be a thing.

What I described, my scripts are not what you would call, like I'm not Alan Moore.

Like you hear stories about how Alan Moore writes these novel-length scripts.

I don't do that.

I like to collaborate.

I want the back, the sort of thing that Nicola is describing, I still basically do that.

I send music.

I have a lot of email conversations.

I like the back.

If I didn't like that, I would be a novelist.

And so that was an example of something that was a rather simply described sequence that she had elevated.

Something that I could see as like a poster or a T-shirt, or it just was like an iconic image to me.

I always obviously liked these characters because I was writing them.

But at that point, I think it was like, well, I love this.

This is all I ever wanted to do.

Like I said, I hope Nicola isn't going, oh gosh, Drew, don't lay it on so thick.

But that's really how I felt the first time I saw that because the idea is of course you make each other better.

But in that was an instance of her taking something and making me a hundred percent better because it was just a thousand times more evocative than what I had written.

- And Nicola, was there a moment for you where you looked at the script and you said to yourself, you know what, I see what he's going for, but I can fine tune this.

I can make this even better.

Or I can add an element that he didn't think of.

- I don't know that I really got what we were doing when I was working on the Christmas Jam 'cause I was only doing those two particular pages.

But when I started work on the first 10 pages of the 30 page story, there was a scene with Solomon standing, talking to, I've forgotten what is -- wizard character.

- Oh, Morlach.

- Morlach, yeah.

So they're standing, just talking to each other.

And there was something about the body language, sort of finding the body language of Solomon that made him click for me.

And I remember thinking, oh, this is who he is.

He's a cowboy.

You know, it was that moment where I was sort of drawing him just standing for the first time, talking to someone shorter than him.

And it just sort of changed his posture.

And that was kind of where the sort of cowboy genes kind of came into place for me.

I was already sort of a little inspired by one of the other Halloween artists at the time.

Terry Parr had sort of drawn the logo on Solomon's T-shirt in a way that seemed really sort of proper iconography, as opposed to the idea of a Jack-o'-lantern.

It was like, okay, that's the right logo.

That's the right logo.

So I'm just gonna draw that.

And I think I put him, and I've done this ever since.

I made the Halloween man T-shirt a baseball T-shirt, which I do in comics nonstop.

I was just drawing one yesterday, because it's not a, we don't associate it in Australia with baseball, 'cause we don't really play baseball over here.

But that sort of look gave it just a grounded kind of cool aesthetic to me.

And it got more black on the page in a sort of bold, blocky way.

That was the moment where I felt like, oh, I feel like I get who this character is now, and the tone that this book is meant to be.

'Cause it just sort of suddenly felt cool in a way that I hadn't quite clicked into gear visually yet, hadn't found the right visual language for yet.

But it just sort of cascaded from there.

- We're 25 years into "Halloween Man," this epic anniversary.

Is there something that you're working on together that is going to maybe be a new chapter for the two of you and for the character?

- The thing that we most recently worked on is the thing that you have in your hands right now, which is that cover.

I wanted it to sort of have the same vibes as some Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, "Fantastic Four" covers.

And Nicola took that and put her own sauce on it.

And that cover is gorgeous.

And I love that I'm seeing it all over the place right now.

But that to me is, you know, it's funny, we're going back to the beginning to hit this next chapter because, you know, with this collection, you know, for years, because I've been so focused on doing digital comics, for years, you know, I would go to conventions and I would have people say, "I want this stuff, but I want it easy to get ahold of.

You know, I don't want to have to find you.

I don't want to have to hunt down a comic book store that just happens to have it."

So here is something that is mass market.

It has all of Nicola's stuff in it.

And it's really, like, all you have to do is go to a bookstore, comic book shop, hell, you can go to Target and order this thing.

And, you know, so, you know, what I'm hoping is outside of the sort of diehard trick-or-treaters that have been here for all 25 years.

And, you know, what I'm hoping is this is a nice hello, like I'm hoping that, you know, maybe the people who are vaguely aware that Nicola had worked on this book, maybe they'll check it out, you know, like they'll come over from her DC work and possibly want to see where she, you know, her indie roots, I guess, for lack of a better term.

And, you know, I'm just hoping that this can be a good, broader introduction, because like, I'm even 25 years on, I'm far from finished, you know, I'm still putting out new digital comics through Global Comics, but I really want to continue this relationship with Redd5 and do a Halloween Man volume two, volume three, volume four, you know, et cetera, et cetera, because, you know, first of all, I want to continue to reach out to Nicola and go, hey, can you do a cover for this?

No pressure, but also I just, I love these characters and I still love them 25, I imagine even when I'm 80 years old, I'll still love writing about them because they're, they just, the universe is just so much fun to me.

- And to me, you know, it's the reason why I keep coming back, I haven't gone back to any project I've ever worked on before, other than Wonder Woman, when the opportunity arises, but, you know, I've wanted to keep this relationship with Drew going because I love the world that he's created.

It sort of is so charming and fun and so different from a lot of the other work that I end up doing and it sort of, it facilitates a need in me, it keeps me sort of grounded and fascinated in what's happening outside of that sort of big two bubble.

And I love working with Drew, you know, anytime he comes to me, you know, it depends on what my schedule is like, but I always try to fit something in because I love this world too.

I can see myself continuing to want to draw these characters for as long as I can hold a pencil.

- Well, you're going to make me blush, geez.

Like that's so kind of you and I feel the same way about you.

Like, I'm, you know, like this is one of the most longstanding, you know, you mentioned Terry, Terry might be the only creative relationship that has been longer than, you know, work.

Like, you know, that is one of the beautiful things about comics is, you know, outside of having these collaborations with people, you develop these relationships, these friendships that crisscross the globe.

And that is amazing.

And, you know, and time and it's, I don't know.

It's just, it's wonderful.

It's the magic of comics.

- And that's a great place for us to end our conversation because we've run out of time.

Drew, Nicola, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

The half hour has flown by and it's been a lot of fun.

- Thanks, Terence.

- Thank you.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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