Writer David Hine of the current comic book from Todd McFarlane Productions Spawn stops by the Septagon News Blog to talk about his upcoming and current comic book projects. Fans of Spawn and Hine’s earlier work with Marvel’s X-Men and Strange Embrace should be prepared for another ride of great twisted storytelling.

NICKD: Thanks for doing this interview David. We greatly appreciate it. So let’s get things rolling over here…tell us about yourself? Where did you grow up?

DH: I was born in the south-west of England. I had a very rural upbringing, very provincial. My parents didn’t have a car so the boundaries of my world were limited to a day’s cycling. Books and comics were my escape. I spent most of my time reading and making up my own stories. I wrote my first science-fiction novel when I was eight, (though it was a very short novel).

NICKD: How long have you worked in the comic book industry and what got you started? Who were your influences as a kid? And what inspires you?

DH: My inspiration is a burning need to tell stories. That’s it, pure and simple. Influences were science-fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Brian Aldiss, horror writers, particularly Poe and Lovecraft. Stephen King is one writer I absolutely devoured. Later on I got into nineteenth century novelists: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes and Thomas Hardy. Then Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I liked anything with a gothic edge. In the field of comics, I read The Trigan Empire, Dan Dare, Heros the Spartan, that ran in The Eagle and Look and Learn. All our British comics were weeklies, with episodic adventures of anything between 2-4 ages, so I was used to getting my comics in short, compressed doses.

When I was in my teens I started picking up the American comics that you could find on the spinner racks in the newsagents. It was like growing up with TV and then being taken to the movies. These were the comics that got me totally hooked on comics, to the extent that I wanted to write and draw them for a living. The Lee/Kirby/Ditko books and then Steranko, Adams, Wrightson. Every few years something came along that totally blew my mind. The underground comics really opened up the possibilities. Nobody had ever done anything like Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Greg Irons. This was the equivalent of what the surrealists did for painting. Next was the discovery of European comics, Metal Hurlant, A Suivre, Pilote and Charlie. In Britain and the USA we’re still playing catch-up to the true masters of comics like Hugo Pratt, Jaques Tardi, Jose Munoz, Jacques de Loustal, Jean Giraud and Paul Gillon.

I don’t think there has been anything truly ground-breaking since the first appearance of Metal Hurlant and A Suivre in France, except maybe in Japanese comics. There’s a very different kind of storytelling, pacing and characterization in Manga. In the English-speaking world the recent innovations have been mostly in the way comics have made it into traditional bookshops through publishers like First Second. They have an amazing line-up of books that are truly mainstream, in the sense that they aren’t genre books. These are the books that will take comics out of the ghetto. The biggest breakthrough book in recent years is “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel. It has been a New York Times best seller and won loads of awards, yet most of my acquaintances in the comic book industry haven’t heard of it. How crazy is that?

But I’m digressing. Back before the term ‘graphic novel’ had been invented, I was getting into self-publishing. I used to print fanzines with friends at school and I carried that on at art college, where I produced and printed Primal Scream, Joe Public Comics and Spit in the Sky. My first professional work was for 2000AD, the underground Knockabout Comics and then a long period inking other people’s work, first on Dez Skinn’s Warrior and later for Marvel UK. I occasionally wrote and drew strips as well. There were a couple things for 2000AD, but the major breakthrough was Strange Embrace for Kevin Eastman’s Tundra.

NICKD: Your work really does speak for itself. Could you tell us about your current and past comic books such as Strange Embrace, Spawn, and your upcoming work such as Poison Candy,The Darkness and Spiderman Noir? How did you come up with the concepts for these titles?

DH: Strange Embrace came out of my fascination with horror and those 19th century novels I was talking about. It distilled all the influences into this obsessive little story of alienation and self-loathing. It was originally printed as four 48-page issues in black-and-white. It came out in the mid-nineties, when the black-and-white independent scene had just gone through the boom period and was descending into a black hole. Strange Embrace suffered from the falling sales as many comic shops went bust and the rest cut back on their orders. I figured that there wasn’t a market for what I wanted to do and I was fed up with inking and the occasional job for 2000AD, so I gave up comics and went into commercial illustration. That lasted about nine years. I worked less and got paid a lot more but I really missed the wacky world of comics. There really isn’t anything quite like the social scene of comics professionals and fans in any other walk of life. One of the great pleasures of getting back into comics was to start going to conventions again and realizing that most of my old friends were still there!

It was one of those friends from my Marvel UK days, Richard Starkings, who pulled me back into comics by reprinting Strange Embrace. It seems like it was a book whose time has come. This time round it has proven very popular and opened lots of doors for me. It was Strange Embrace that got me the work at Marvel and also convinced Todd McFarlane to give me a shot at Spawn. I’ve gotten to work on a very disparate set of projects over the past few years. Strange Embrace is a psychological horror with gothic overtones. I’m still not sure how that got me the Marvel work, where I ended up writing X-Men books. Very weird. The upcoming Spider-Man Noir is actually closer to the way I like to write superheroes – dark, realistic and with an undercurrent of horror.

It’s a book that came about through Fabrice Sopolsky, who’s the editor of the French magazine Comic Box. He does a lot of other stuff too, including creating comic book concepts. He pitched me an idea for a pulp version of Spider-Man, set in the nineteen-thirties and that evolved into the story we ended up pitching to Marvel. It landed on Joe Quesada’s desk at the perfect time because he was looking for Pulp/Noir ideas. Spider-Man Noir is now part of a group of books coming out at the end of this year, that re-imagine Marvel heroes as film noir. I really got into the research for the book. It’s a part of the work I really enjoy, reading up on the period and tracking down photo reference, so that the setting for the story is very convincing. The events are pretty weird but they are grounded in a rock-solid historical context.

Poison Candy is totally different again. It’s a science-fiction manga about a kid who has mutated genes that give him paranormal abilities but also trigger a disease that will kill him in a few months. Like most manga it has elements of soap opera. The fact that each volume runs to around 180 pages gives a lot of scope to develop relationships between characters and also allowed me to write expansive action scenes. Lots of comics have gone cinematic recently but in the context of 22-page comics that often means you read an issue in about five minutes. I tend to feel a bit ripped off when that happens. With a full volume of manga you can balance those action scenes with extended dialogue too. I guess you’re playing out scenes in real time instead of the compressed comic-book time of the traditional American comic. The bad news with Poison Candy is that Tokypop are having serious troubles and the originated English Language books are all but cancelled. Volume 2 of the trilogy is only scheduled to appear online now, which is a big disappointment. I’m hoping that we can generate enough interest to eventually get the book into print and then finish the trilogy at a later date. Hans Steinbach is currently completing the last few pages of the art, so that second volume should be online soon.

Meanwhile, coming off Spawn I’m writing a mini-series of The Darkness for Top Cow. This is another of the key characters created by the founding fathers of Image comics, Marc Silvestri. I originally came up with the concept for a Spawn/Darkness crossover that never happened. The basic idea was good, so I’ve adapted it to a pure Darkness story. I’ve got a couple of things coming up from Top Cow in the near future. I’ll be working with some terrific artists but these books haven’t been scheduled yet, so it’s too early to talk details.

NICKD: There is speculation going around that you will be writing a comic book for Radical Comics that involves Zombies can you comment on this?

DH: Zombies and Vampires! The book is The FVZA – that’s The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. The setting is an alternative world history where vampires and zombies were part of everyday life in America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The vampire and zombie viruses entered America along with the influx of immigrants from Europe and spread like wildfire. Early outbreaks were dealt with by local militias or bounty hunters but as the diseases spread and the numbers of infected reached the hundreds of thousands, the government set up a dedicated agency of trained operatives. The agency was divided into scientific research facilities and search and destroy units. Vaccines were eventually developed against the diseases and by the nineteen-seventies, both vampires and zombies were officially eradicated, so the Agency was shut down. Our story takes up when a major outbreak of the zombie virus signals the return of the Undead and the US government is forced to revive the FVZA. This time round the vampires have an agenda that is more like a terrorist group. They’re out to destroy our way of life and The FVZA is operating in tandem with Homeland Security. It’s a more sophisticated approach to the Undead mythologies but in the end there will still be plenty of blood-sucking and brain-eating.

NICKD: Spawn has been really chaotic, why have there been so many twists and turns in the current Spawn Mythos? What can we expect in the final issues of your run does it tie in with Spawn Book of the Dead that you are writing?

DH: Hopefully not too chaotic. It has all been carefully planned. There were a lot of plot threads that had been introduced but not followed through. I had a lot of fun pulling it all together with the fifteen issues of Armageddon with Phil Tan on the art. The challenge was to bring God and Satan into the book and actually play out the Final Battle, destroy the world and the entire human race, without terminating the series and without turning round at the end and saying “It was all a dream”. The new reality has God and Satan still duking it out on a dead Earth, completely unaware that Spawn has rebuilt the Earth and every living thing on it. The underlying question is whether these are the real people. It’s like the concept of the matter transmitter in The Fly. If you break down a human being into sub-atomic particles, transmit the particles into another location and reconstitute the human being, is it still the same person? The new world is Spawn’s world and everything is slightly out of wack. Brian Haberlin took over the art on Spawn from issue 166 and we started to explore that. We’ve taken a detour recently to explore the backstory of Mammon and how he manipulated Spawn’s family for generations in order to breed the perfect Hellspawn. Todd gave us the space to bring that to a conclusion before we leave the book. Now the new team of Todd, Brian Holguin and Whilce Portacio is going back to look at that skewed version of Planet Earth. It will be interesting to see how that develops.

NICKD: I have to ask you this and I know you probably won’t answer but I have to at least attempt it, does Spawn really die?

DH: I guess I can avoid that by pointing out that Spawn is already dead.

NICKD: For the fans that don’t already know where to find you, could you give us your website and Myspace? Will there be any promotional imagery or preview pages coming soon that we can look forward to?

DH: I have a four-issue run on The Brave and The Bold, with Doug Braithwaite due starting in November. Spiderman-Noir is also four issues and launches in December. I’m hoping there will be some preview pages available for those.

I check in regularly to my message board at Image. That’s: http://www.imagecomics.com/messageboard/

There’s an interactive site for Strange Embrace with art, biographies at: http://www.strangeembrace.com/

The the best place to check for news on Strange Embrace is the Myspace site. There are art samples and you can also check out some of my influences with lots of cool music, movie and TV samples. That’s at: http://www.myspace.com/strangeembrace

NICKD: So what’s next on the David Hine agenda? What upcoming material do you have planned?

DH: Beyond the Radical and Top Cow projects I have a few creator-owned projects I’d like to get off the ground. I’m planning to do more with Frazer Irving and maybe with Rufus Dayglo. Rufus has done some excellent work on Snaked and Tank Girl at IDW. He’s got a brilliant in-your-face style that we haven’t seen in British comics since Jamie Hewlett. I don’t know if it will happen but if we both get the time and I can come up with something that appeals to him, that would be really cool. It’s a bonus to work with people you know personally and get along with. That’s when you get a genuine collaboration. One project I’m really fired up about is a thing I’m working on with the enfant terrible of British Comics, Shaky Kane. I guess he’s kinda middle-aged now, but he’s still an enfant terrible to me. It’s in the early stages of development but I can give you the Hollywood pitch logline: “William Burroughs meets Kafka, meets Warhol, meets Kirby in a world of mysterious pop culture artifacts and dead super heroes.” I’m pretty damned sure we’ll work some insects in there too.

NICKD: Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview here at Septagon Studios David. Do you have any final comments that you would like to share or add?

DH: Hmm, I guess I’d like to point out that, although the demise of the comics medium has frequently been announced, it continues to be the freshest, most resilient and accessible of mediums. I tend to agree with the maxim that 99% of everything is shit, but there’s still a helluva lot of fantastic books out there. In fact there’s probably more quality material and a greater diversity than ever before. The biggest problem is that often the best material gets the least publicity. So I’ll end with a plug for a terrific book by Woodrow Phoenix, published by Myriad Editions, that you probably haven’t heard of, but exemplifies the best of non-genre graphic fiction. “Rumble Strip” is a diatribe against the car and the way it affects out lives. It’s a 175 page graphic novel and is all the more remarkable because there isn’t a single appearance by a human being. Or a car.

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