@’s by A.D. AFTER DEATH writer Scott Snyder & artist Jeff Lemire!
Hey all, Rob Patey, the former Optimous Douche here with a true treat. I had the honor to chit chat recently with comic greats Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire about their newest Sci-Fi prose/comic of passion from Image; A.D. AFTER DEATH.
I knew love went into this book, but I didn’t realize just how much until I hung up the phone after talking to two of the sincerest guys in comics. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed transcribing.
ROB PATEY (RP): Right now, DC wise, you’re just rolling with All Star Batman right now?
SCOTT SNYDER (SS): Loving ALL STAR dude, it’s like my dream series. I get to work with all the artists I’ve never had a chance to and always admired and I’m friendly with. Then coming this summer, Capullo and I are going to be doing a big event together.
ALL STAR is a great place for me to be able do my own thing for a bit. The fact it has sold competitively, and the fact I can do work in-continuity with James Tynion and Tom King is the best of all worlds for me right now.
And it gives me room to do work on a book like AD (which is so different), and work on WYTCHES and some of my other indie stuff before gearing up for a bigger DC event (which I’ve never really tried before) with Capullo.
RP: Ohhhh, when does WYTCHES come back?
SS: We just started working on it. Image has a policy of about 3 issues in the can before they will publically talk about schedule. So, we’re working on first issue of it right now. I’d imagine we’ll be ready in a few months to announce it in the schedule line-up.
RP: Can you say anything about the big event coming up with Capullo, or is that still on hush-hush?
SS: Well, I can’t give away details. I can say it is Bat-Centric and our big rock n’ roll cap to what we’ve done before and it brings in a bigger cast of characters than we’ve ever used. I’m working with Geoff Johns to coordinate what he’s doing. It’s a whole new arena of superhero goodness for me, I’ve never been able to try.
RP: Is Geoff still working with the comics these days? It seems he’s mainly show running for the CW stuff and of course working the movies.
SS: Well, he’s still really involved with the line. He’s there in the offices right on the lot with DC comics. He talks to all of us about what we’re doing. He’s still very involved in making sure the books have the tone of Rebirth and the storytelling is strong. He’s been a very big help with lots of the artists and writers in the line right now.
With this event with Capullo, I’m going out there soon to hang and talk with him to get his input.
RP: I had to ask. With the move to the West Coast, and the oligarchy of power that was established, it’s all still mildly confusing to the average reader.
SS: Haha. Well, I’m east coast born and bred , third generation NY city boy. So the west coast has always been confusing to me. Every time I fly out there I can’t sleep in that time zone and I wonder where my weather has gone. But it’s good to get out there and get face time with everyone.
RP: No, I hate Los Angeles. Somehow it achieved the impossibility of being more artificial than Las Vegas. I was looking for more politics, but no need to indict yourself. So let’s talk AD. Say that no one has ever heard of Scott Snyder. What’s the 30 second pitch if you find yourself in an elevator with Robert Kirkman?
SS: Well, it’s the anti-elevator pitch kind of book. Jeff and I do so many of that kind. WYTCHES, it’s a new type of witches. AMERICAN VAMPIRE, it’s vampires through history with different powers. BATMAN, it’s the return of the Joker.
This was something where we wanted to flex muscles we never have before.
If I had to give a 30 second pitch: A man who is a common thief right now, and has gad a life where he felt crippled by a fear of death wins the gold ticket for a drug trial that would cure death forever.
So part of the story takes place now and how he mysteriously gets picked for this cure. Then the other part takes place in comics, 800 years in the future, after the cure has changed the world. It then becomes the story of how he desperately tries to escape the community of people that have lived for many many years, to see if there’s anything beyond this world he now knows.
So that’s my 15 second pitch to Robert Kirkman, who is a friend, and knows how nervous I get during elevator pitches. He would most likely tease me and make me do it faster. That’s the high concept of AD.
RP: Well, that’s why I wanted to stipulate in the question no one has heard of you before. An elevator pitch at this point in your career would be kind of ridiculous, but it gives good slug lines for PR.
SS: No it’s important to have a clear sense of compass.
The way I would describe it more openly to you and less selling it; Jeff (Lemire) has been one of my best friends for about 8 years now. Over the years, we had very different families when we met each other. We didn’t have kids the way we do now, and we were just starting out.
He’s seen me struggle at times as I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression, the topic it always circles back to (which you see consistently in my BATMAN work), the fear of how fast everything goes. And I think when I’m not well, or I feel down about things, I get concerned about the pointlessness of it all and it becomes obsessive worry.
So I gave Jeff an elevator pitch. I said let’s do this big bombastic story, it’ll be 40 pages long, it’ll be a quick thing about a thief who steals the wrong thing and it’ll be this big mystery. And Jeff said, “Scott, this speaks to a lot of the stuff I know you have trouble with. Why not open it up and try to do something more personal?” So I thought about it some more and then Jeff pushed me further and said, “Why don’t you do some prose for it and I’ll do some art, and we’ll mix it. Something we’ve never done before. Because it’s a topic you’re already nervous about, let’s channel that to a format that’s exploratory in its visual structure and priorities.”
So AD became an incredible project to work on with him because it is so intensely personal, and embarrassingly conceptual at times in certain ways. Yet having your friend on it with the inventive form makes me feel braver about trying those things. So I’m really really proud of it in that regard.
It stands outside the work I’ve done so far. My favorite creators from guys like Jeff to Grant Morrison and Jason Aaron are always trying new formats and genres, pushing beyond the wheelhouses they usually traffic in. I’m really trying to that hard here, the fact that Jeff was such an supportive partner and Image was such an incredible place to be really meant a lot.
RP: Well, I think Jeff chimed in right before you gave that beautiful speech. So how would you like to follow up on that?
LEFF LEMIRE (JL): Like Scott said, it really just came out of our friendship and wanting to work with Scott. I found the story really compelling and at this point in my career I had already done a couple ongoing series and several graphic novels myself. I thought it would be challenging to draw something someone else wrote. I thought it would push me in a lot of directions.
It speaks to Scott’s fears, but also a lot of mine as a parent. One of the hardest things is watching your kids grow up in front of you. It’s beautiful, but heart breaking when you realize that childhood is so fleeting. It haunts me and troubles me, and this book in a weird way speaks to that. So the book is creatively challenging, but emotionally relevant to me as well. RP: One of the coping mechanisms for coping with depression and futility of life is to live in the now and the present. In the world of AD, the now is fucking boring. Care to comment?
SS: It depends. Our hero finds it that way because he’s unwilling to let go of the world as it was before. In the next book you see t8he development of the community and how others react to this new immortality.
I see something in the zeitgeist right now is the desire to escape the more frightening aspects of modern life. We all feel more connected all of sudden and fragile.
In the second book the character responsible for the development of the cure itself, the antagonist of the series, talks about how we’re a species in old age. How we’re so aware of our own fragility. So that’s the impetus, the quick desire to create something that extends life and live beyond the smallness of things.
I think those twin impulses are very palpable for me right now; you see how small you are and fear inspired you are in light of global machinations. You either find comfort with that small place and be brave. Or the opposite, you cling to the things you have and retreat from those fears. So a place that allows you to live forever and not be concerned about the world below because you move at a different pace in time is hugely appealing to some characters. And then other characters, like Jonah, it feels like a cyclical repetitive hell.
RP: So, is the setting in the mountains in book one Valhalla, and below the cloud cover is the same old shit as usual?
SS: No, the world has been really transformed below. Essentially no one is really alive anymore. Countries retreat after the cure, resource depletion since no one dies, but then there’s a cataclysm called the dying that’s a post-apocalyptic disaster that takes place. So no one is sure if it’s safe to go down. They aren’t in the mountains because of business as usual. At first they were trapped up there.
RP: I believe the malaise of our modern age and fear of ending is because of the waning of religion in our lives with all the eternal rewards that come with it. Does religion play any part in AD?
SS: It comes in a little bit. You see referred to in the third book through the antagonist that created the cure. He’s a sympathetic guy, not some evil villain. He talks about how these characters in the community have become versions of Gods from different cultures mythologies. How they evolve over long periods of time, how they retain what they’ve learned over past lives and let go of other things to live totally in the present.
JL: For me, when you’re no longer scared of dying there’s no real need to worry about God or dying. Religion, has become religion of the self where humans evolve into their own God like creatures.
RP: Jeff, your name is on almost every comic companies’ books right now. Was part of the prose/comic format decision because you’re the hardest working main in comics at the moment and it saved time?
JL: Oh no, we would never conceive such an important creative decision off of schedule. We wanted a project where we both could do everything we love to do. Before Scott started comics he was writing prose short stories and novels, and he wanted to flex those muscles again. The flexibility of Image let us experiment however we wanted. So he was allowed to do that and work it into a story we already conceived.
RP: I was in awe at the beauty of the lettering in the prose section. Was that just your letterer or did you collaborate on the innovative layout of some sections.
JL: That was Steve Wands the letterer. We’ve worked together for years, on UNDERWATER WELDER and my other books, and he worked with Scott on Batman...
SS: And AMERICAN VAMPIRE.
JL: Yeah both of us for years. The prose section could have been very boring, but he took it on himself to make the lettering part of the art and design.
RP: Jeff, I really discovered your work with SWEET TOOTH. Since you usually fly solo on both writing and art is your process script first and then art? In tandem? And how is it divvying up tasks these days, more or less difficult?
JL: My process has evolved over the years. When I started out with ESSEX COUNTY I was stumbling around in the dark, figuring out what I was doing. Back then I didn’t separate the two disciplines at all. I’d jot down some dialog and then draw it scene by scene.
As I got better at what I was doing, I’d separate a little more. I’d write a whole script and then draw it. But when you’re cartooning and doing it all yourself, it’s all encompassed.
For AD, it took us a little bit to figure out how to make it work. Since Scott was doing all the time intensive prose, the comic stuff was a little loser. We did it more Marvel style, we’d discuss the plot on the phone and then I’d break down the panels. It gave me freedom to do what I do, and Scott could get back to the prose.
RP: So is this just three issues and done, or is there potential to revisit this universe?
JL: We’ve been having this conversation the past few days for the first time. Now, that we’re coming to the end of working on the book we see potential for how big the world could be.
SS: Yeah, there’s an easy world of stories. As it stands right now though, just a graphic novel in three parts.
RP: Is Jonah, the lead, you Scott?
SS: Well there’s a lot of me in the DNA. His anxieites and stuff. My Mother was an optometrist, and I had a similar of nervous ticks that came from death. I also had an obsession with recording my family like Jonah does. There’s a lot of me in it, but the fun is also doing an illogical extension of your own fears. Which again I could do with Jeff as partner and the freedom of Image.
In the third book, I’m horrified and yet really inspired by Jonah’s choices. First book is more reflective.
RP: So you won’t fess up to being a raging kleptomaniac?
SS: Well, it was a habit I had as a kid too. I had a fixation with stealing in little ways. So the explanation Jonah gives about spiriting stuff out of the system to define himself came from within. And there is a fixation that magicians have with death.
RP: Isaac Asimov did a series of short stories for Playboy in the mid-70’s. One was about a couple that lived for hundreds of years and we saw how they drifted back and forth from one another over the centuries. We see a waft of that with Jonah and Inez in issue one when he takes over for her at the listening station. Will we see more of that eternal unrequited back and forth later?
SS: They represent two different approaches of how to cope with immortality. She plays a big part as the book moves forward.
RP: Any final words?
SS: I’d just like to mention that as appreciation for Image being so different than licensed work and supportive through the AD’s growth, we’re going to give a bunch of the proceeds back to their program Creators for Creators for up and coming comic talent.
RP: My secret, I hate transcribing interviews so I usually turn them down. When I interviewed you in person though at NY Comic Con, I saw the pride in your eyes at shepherding young talent, so I really wanted to help out with this in the way you’ve helped others.
So, I think we lost Jeff, and I’m getting misty eyed so this is a good place to end.
SS: I hope you enjoyed the book man.
RP: I just volunteered for clerical work I hate, so you can guarantee I’m on board with AD.
Rob works for IBM when he puts down comic books. IBM.com if you want to see his other world.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
Finally, if the text is running over the pics in the body of the article, refresh the screen and that should fix it. I still have no idea why this is happening lately…
