Scott Allie: Secrets to Reveal

By Mike Jozic

If the name Scott Allie sounds familiar to you, it might be because fellow Bulleteer, Brandon Thomas, interviewed him about a month ago over in his corner of SBC, Ambidextrous. They talked at length about Scott’s new horror mini-series, The Devil’s Footprints, and Dark Horse’s upcoming Rocket Comics launch. It’s also possible that you’re familiar with Scott for his work on popular DHC titles like Hellboy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A small select number of you might even know Scott from his days in the small press industry of Portland, before any of this stuff was even a twinkle in the man’s eye.

I’ve known Scott professionally for a little while now. He’s been behind many a good interview appearing right here on this site, either contributing his two cents during the Q&A, or having a part in setting the thing up in the first place. I’ve also enjoyed his dedication and skill in assembling amazing creative teams on the books he edits, and making sure the books look fabulous when they hit the stands. I defy anyone to tell me that books like the aforementioned Hellboy and Buffy aren’t top-notch products!

When I recently picked up a copy of Reveal, one of the first things I noticed was that Scott was the editor behind the quirky anthology. Usually a good sign. The second thing I noticed was Pablo Picasso credited in the pages of a comic book, and not as an influence, mind you, but as a contributor - hey, in this industry, that’s the ultimate “Made you look!” It wasn’t long after that I decided to drop Scott a line and see if he wanted to another interview with us. I wanted to talk to the guy that got Pablo and Buffy Summers to share the same shelf space, and get the skinny on the behind the scenes production of Reveal.


MIKE JOZIC: Can you give some background on the genesis of Reveal? Why another anthology, where did the name come from, that sort of thing?

SCOTT ALLIE: I love anthologies, and try to do one whenever I get a chance. Scatterbrain and the old Hellboy Christmas Special were highlights of my career so far. I wanted to revamp Dark Horse Presents as a semi-annual, but people here thought it would be better to start something new. I wanted to represent a broad cross-section of what Dark Horse does, with the idea that for all our diversity, we actually do have a fairly unified vision. We try to do fun action adventure stuff with some artfulness, superhero stories without the tights. And on the side we also do these bizarre, eccentric things, like printing Picasso and weird spoofs and such.

When we decided not to call it DHP, I asked everyone in the company for ideas about the name, but I never got anything I liked. We went through a lot of really forced ideas, like Shadows and Light. I decided what I really wanted was something that reflected an approach to craft, and so I ran through technical terms. Reveal had layers of meaning, so it appealed to me immediately.

JOZIC: Is the basic format of the first issue going to be pretty constant with future issues? Creator-owned and licensed material rounded out with a creator interview?

ALLIE: If and when we do another one, it'll be the exact same thing. A mixture of material - regardless of ownership - some funny stuff, and an interview. I don't want to say anything about possible contents, because nothing is definite, and I don't know when we'll do a second one. Right now I'm working on a haunted house anthology. After Reveal it was suggested I do something more focused, with a theme, so Mike Mignola and I came up with this idea. Hauntings will come out in the fall, and it will have the only new Hellboy story Mike puts out this year, as well as contributions from Gary Gianni, P. Craig Russell, Paul Chadwick, Jill Thompson, Evan Dorkin, and other people. It'll be bigger than Reveal.

JOZIC: So there currently aren't any plans to publish Reveal on a regular schedule?

ALLIE: Sadly, no.

JOZIC: Was the decision by Dark Horse to not publish Reveal on a regular basis an economic one, or is it just, logistically, a really difficult thing to pull off?

ALLIE: It's both. The truth is, the things that I was trying to line up for an issue two were going to take a lot longer, and be a lot harder to get going. How do you follow up Picasso? Well, I had an idea, but it would take a lot of work. I had some fantastic guys that were talking about contributing, but there were so many variables, and we were looking at an even more expensive book, when the first one had been daunting enough. So when the horror line started taking all my attention, it was easy to shift focus to the Hauntings book.


JOZIC: The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings sounds like it has an amazing line-up of contributors. Will it be in the same format as Reveal, only with horror themed content?

ALLIE: It's longer, shorter, and harder. That is, 96 pages instead of 64, it's 6x9, the format of some of our manga trades, as opposed to the standard comics size of Reveal, and it's hardcover. Format wise it's really geared for the bookstores, while the creators involved should appeal to comic readers. Like Reveal, there's a mix of dramatic stories that you'd expect in a book like this, and some humor. It does have an interview, it's full color, and it also has an illustrated prose story, by an old dead Victorian writer and illustrated by Gary Gianni.

JOZIC: Who will the interview in Hauntings be with?

ALLIE: L.L. Dreller, a seance medium who's written a couple books on experiences with spirits and haunted houses.

JOZIC: You said Hauntings will be coming out in the fall. Are you aiming for a Hallowe'en release?

ALLIE: Actually a little earlier than that specific date, because the bookstores want their Hallowe’en product in hand well before the holiday itself. I think it's coming the last week of August.

JOZIC: Hauntings is only one of several new horror projects that DHC is going to be publishing this year. Why the big push on the creepy crawly books?

ALLIE: When I was a self-publisher in the mid nineties, I did a line of horror comics. When I got to Dark Horse, I was lucky enough to get assigned to Hellboy, and that's been the best part of this job for nine years. My own series, The Devil's Footprints, was finally getting off the ground, right when we negotiated the deal to do Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's new series, Criminal Macabre. I had a few other horror comics I wanted to do, so I started pushing those forward. We've always done the occasional horror comic, but we never got as much attention as a horror publisher as, say, Chaos!, which did a much different kind of horror . I think the reason we were mostly overlooked by horror press like Rue Morgue was because they didn't know to look to us month in and month out. So I thought I'd give them a reason to. And with the Hellboy movie coming, and a lot of people working on side projects based around that character, it seemed like we had critical mass. Since then, things like Eric Powell's The Goon have just fallen in to place, right where they belong.

JOZIC: Will the Devil’s Footprints story in Hauntings be a self-contained tale, or will it follow the events of the mini-series coming out in March?

ALLIE: It's totally self-contained. It takes place years after the fourth issue of the mini-series.

JOZIC: Was there ever the temptation to go to a full-size magazine format, a-la Heavy Metal?

ALLIE: No, never thought of that.

JOZIC: Would you ever consider going to a full-size magazine format with Reveal? It could tap a bigger market sitting in the magazine and bookstores that way.

ALLIE: You really like magazine format, huh? I've gone the other way, hoping that the more book-like format for Hauntings will look good on the bookstore racks. I'd go any format on Reveal or anything else, if it were the smart thing to do. I like experimenting with format, but it's not a real priority for me.

JOZIC: The press-release said that Reveal was going to be an anthology for featuring DHC's action-adventure properties, but the content itself shows more variety than that. Sure there's a SpyBoy story, and Buffy makes an appearance, but stories like “The Call”, “Waiting to Go” and “Autopilot” don't really fit the bill all that well. Was this a happy accident, or was the press release just limited in its description of the book?

ALLIE: Actually, it's just a reflection of my loose definition of action-adventure. When I got the idea to put Picasso in there, I knew I didn't want it to just come out of nowhere, so there should be some other weirdo material. I'd been talking to R. Sikoryak about doing something since we worked on the 911 book together, and he'd been working on the Beavis and Beckett story already, so I said I wanted it. With “Autopilot”, I originally asked Joe Casey to do a regular action adventure strip. We were working on Kiss at the time -this was before Automatic Kafka had come out - and I was not aware yet of his inclinations beyond superhero comics. So when he pitched “Autopilot” it was a surprise, but it sort of rounded out the material in the book. I thought it balanced the interview with Mignola and del Toro, and it also reflected in an interesting way upon action adventure stuff, dealing, as it did, with the job of making mainstream action-adventure comics. But I think moreso than the Picasso strip, it was the most surprising thing in the book.

JOZIC: How is the project being viewed by the public at large? Have you gotten really good feedback on the book?

ALLIE: Feedback has been great from professionals, and the reviews were good. But with a book with no letter column, we don't typically get mail from readers. So while I've heard from some Buffy fans and Hellboy fans, there hasn't been that much of a reply to the book in that regard.

JOZIC: What criteria did you use when selecting what stories would be included in Reveal?

ALLIE: Distinctive artists and writers, working in their unique styles. That was the main thing. I was very picky about the coloring, wanted the very best in coloring in the book, since originally it was conceived as the first ever color issue of DHP. I wanted to get some big name guys I really respect, balanced with some small press or alternative types. Francisco Ruiz Velasco was in there because I think he's a big part of the new look of Dark Horse, so I wanted him represented for that.

JOZIC: Why was the decision made to not publish the first colour DHP? Why was the name change necessary?

ALLIE: Mike [Richardson] had had specific ideas about how we might bring DHP back. Rather than try to alter the contents that were shaping up to be Reveal, we decided to just do something new.

JOZIC: Including Pablo Picasso in the first issue was a stroke of genius. How did you guys get a hold of “The Dream and the Lie of Franco”?

ALLIE: I was in Venice on my honeymoon and saw that piece at the Guggenheim. I got home, sort of forgot about it, and then got this fantasy of printing it. Most people I talked to had never heard of the piece, so I realized it would really be a coup to present it. I had to get the rights from the Guggenheim and from the Picasso estate, but in the end it was neither all that hard or even terribly expensive, all things considered.

JOZIC: Was Picasso's family excited to have Franco published in comic book format?

ALLIE: Um…Probably not. Maybe.

JOZIC: Were there any creators you wanted for Reveal or Hauntings that couldn''t contribute?

ALLIE: Oh yeah. J. Scott Campbell and Jeph Loeb had a Buffy story we were talking about doing, but the timing wouldn't work. Mignola was going to do a Hellboy story in Reveal, but now that's gonna wind up in Hauntings. And I asked JG Jones to do something in the Hauntings book, but he was too busy.

JOZIC: Have you started putting together a second issue of Reveal yet, or is it still too early to be thinking about that?

ALLIE: Too early. Doing Hauntings for now - one anthology of this sort, on top of my usual workload, is enough.

JOZIC: Are there any other projects you're involved in that you want to draw attention to before we bring this thing to a close?

ALLIE: Devil's Footprints is all I'm writing for the time being. I really want to focus on that, and me and the artists do minor rewrites as we're completing the artwork, so it hasn't allowed me to get my head into anything else. Thanks for asking, though.

JOZIC: And that's a wrap. Thanks for the interview, Scott. Always a pleasure talking with you.

ALLIE: Thanks, Mike.

Have a question of your own you'd like to ask Scott? Head over to the Feature Fiends Forum and post a query or two in the Questions for the Scott Allie Feature/Forum Project thread.

	Mike Jozic has spent the last several years interviewing comic book creators and other entertainment related personalities for various publications. He has been published both online and in print, with his work appearing in The Comics Journal, FearsMag.com and Silver Bullet Comicbooks. He maintains his own website at www.meanwhile.net and currently serves as the Features Editor for SBC.

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