Dark Horse Horror: Walking In Devil's Footprints

By Craig Lemon

Dark Horse’s new horror line of comics has kicked off with a trio of titles – Hellboy: Weird Tales (a bi-monthly containing non-canonical non-Mignola tales from a variety of top creators), The Blackburne Covenant by Fabian Nicieza and Stefano Raffaele (interview and preview art available by clicking here. and The Devil’s Footprints, by Scott Allie, Paul Lee and Brian Horton.

SBC Editor Craig Lemon sat down with writer and line-creator/editor Scott Allie, and editor Shawna Ervin-Gore to find out more about this latter book, look ahead to the rest, and find out the answers to a few questions bugging him about the Dark Horse Horror line…

Dark Horse Vertigo Or Not Dark Horse Vertigo?

Craig Lemon: My biggest bugbear about the DH horror line is that there is no set dress for the horror line books, a la the Vertigo logo, On The Shelf features page, and so on. I appreciate you don't want to ape them too closely, but their approach works, can generate cross-line sales, and readily identify their books on the shelves...how did the current DH approach come about?

Scott Allie: Yeah, this is definitely a unique approach. The way it evolved was that we had a bunch of new horror books coming down the pike. I was already working on them, and I wanted to see a way to cross-promote them real strongly. With Rocket, or Maverick, or Vertigo, or any other line, you need a bit of explanation to know why the books belong together. The imprint names do that. With these books, they're just all horror. Everyone understands that. They can see it from the covers. So it didn't seem necessary to launch a new imprint. Also, by not having a strictly defined imprint, we can use this grouping to cross-promote any books we want.

We're doing a Buffy series that will be a lot more horror-oriented than previous Buffy books, called Tales of the Vampires. We can cross promote that with Devil's Footprints and Hellboy and Cal, without having to stamp a new logo on the cover, making people ask if Buffy's now part of a line--and on the other hand, they won't be confused when the next Buffy story, if it's more light-hearted, is NOT grouped with the horror books. I want people who like horror comics to know that Dark Horse is the place to go for fun, sophisticated horror, and I want them to be able to see ads that group those books together. I think our relatively subtle grouping accomplishes that, without marrying these series together too much.

Shawna Ervin-Gore: There are already a few sort-of implied imprints that we contend with, just in terms of the internal logic of running the company. The Star Wars line isn't its own imprint per-se, but it would be hard to think of it any other way...same with the Manga books. And even though Maverick isn't an official imprint here anymore, a lot of the readers still consider the creator-owned books to be a part of that. We launched the Rocket imprint this month, which is our new home for fun, cutting-edge adventure comics ...this is a specific enough category, and the books have enough in common, in terms of subject and style, that officially recognizing them as part of one line makes sense. Another reason it makes sense is that there is more of a target audience in mind for the Rocket titles.

With Dark Horse's horror books, we're really just looking to nail that one particular emotion -- fear. These books are all over the map in terms of the stories, the art, the specific approaches the creators take to the concept of "horror."

CL: OK, I can see the point vis-à-vis the Buffy books (although I still think all the books could be linked, even if just by the cool tagline “drawing on your nightmares” which links the books in Previews and in the ads), so what support has been given to retailers as regards this? For instance, I’d quite like the see the books racked with Vertigo – I think the audience is similar, rather than the “typical” Dark Horse reader (if such a being exists!), and the stealth cross-promotion could only help sales…but how do you expect retailers to treat these books?

SEG: Dark Horse has done a lot of outreach with the retailers on this line—everything from producing a really cool looking poster for the line—which was done by 30 Days of Night artist Ben Templesmith— to visiting with retailers during what would normally be only convention trips to talk with them about the books and gauge their reactions. Scott went on three of these trips in the last three months, and while we’re not able to reach everyone this way, we’re doing our best to dig in and spend as much time with the retailers who are interested whenever an opportunity presents itself.

Another thing to consider is that every retailer presents wares in a different way…not everyone racks DC with DC and Dark Horse with Dark Horse. Some rack by genre, some alphabetically…so it would be really difficult for a publisher to come up with one definitive way to “help” retailers sell books. In the last year, Dark Horse has also added a couple of staff to our marketing department whose sole purpose is retailer outreach. So, while it may be difficult to impose on retailers our best ideas for how to sell these books, we literally have people standing by to help retailers with anything they can think of to bolster sales—contests, give-aways, signings, whatever. And hopefully, the excellent creative line-ups, and the overall quality of these books will do the rest.

The Genesis Of The Line

CL: Is this the Scott Allie line of comics - he seems to be writing or editing almost all of them!

SA: I got the ball rolling on all of this, and it was really my baby at the beginning, but when Shawna came back to work here, I knew that some of the books would wind up in her hands—she has enough of the same sensibilities and interests as I do that it's an easy transition. My assistant, Matt Dryer, is also stepping up. And there's actually one really great book in the line that I had nothing to do with--Scarlet Traces by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli was something Dave Land brought in, and when I heard about it, I asked him to put it in the line. Ideally more of that will happen as time goes by.

CL: Are you (or someone else at DH) actively looking for these sorts of book to publish? I seem to remember Scarlet Traces originally saw a limited European release…

SEG: We’re always actively looking for good books to publish. On the more business-y side of things, we have a licensing department that’s fairly aggressive in pursuing new licenses that might fit the Dark Horse aesthetic. It’s also part of the job of each editor on staff to talk with creators and develop new projects. Scott is definitely pursuing new projects for the horror line with some great writers and artists, and I’m easing into that myself. Since I’m still relatively new to the editorial side of things, I’m working as Scott’s associate editor on many of these books, basically following his lead and taking up the slack when his plate gets too full.

The Launch Title

CL: I very much feel that The Devil's Footprints #1 is a slow burner, and as such, seems a curious choice for launch book. Was this deliberate? Was this book just ready first?

SA: It wasn't deliberate ...the series was just the first of the horror line that was ready to launch. More than that, when Devil's Footprints and Criminal Macabre were put on the schedule, there was no line yet. You see, like Vertigo, the line only came about when we looked at what we were publishing and thought it would make sense to group it. If you go back and look at the Previews that first offered DF, there wasn't really a line yet. It evolved, it just evolved quickly.

SEG: I don't think we're looking at The Devil's Footprints as any sort of "flagship" horror title ... again, I think the horror line is a little too diverse title-to-title to try to define something like that. We want to impart to readers that horror fans will definitely find a crop of great horror reads every month from Dark Horse, but they should also expect to be pleasantly surprised by how many different takes on horror we're dealing with.

The Devil’s Footprints #1

CL: Issue #1 - I found this issue read much better on a third read some two weeks after the first. The first read through had led to a second almost immediately, and I wasn't sure I'd grasped who the characters were, why I should care about them, or what was actually going on. Then I remembered the preview story in Reveal #1 and that helped immeasurably...if you could go back and do it again, would you change anything about issue one?

SEG: I'd been reading Scott's different drafts of the series and the various short stories for almost three years at that point, so I "got" the characters and the overall story instinctively by then. But one of the keys to being a decent editor is stepping away from what YOU know and evaluating your books from a reader's perspective.

From the previously published short stories, I knew there was enough background material that some readers would come to the miniseries with a decent idea of what to expect in terms of tone and the nature of the conflict in the story. And to me, it's the atmosphere of The Devil's Footprints that makes the book, and I think that's what readers will click with. Issue #1 is subtle, to be sure, but a lot is established in just those first 10 pages.

CL: How would you recap the events of issue one succinctly, such that someone could go straight for #2 and not worry about missing #1?

SEG: You know that magic or witchcraft is key, you know that a young man and his entire family are having problems that stem from a supernatural source, you know that something in the past of his now-dead father is the likely reason, and you know that it's all centered in a small town where nobody's private life is private. I love that the rest of that issue simply introduces the characters in a very natural (i.e. not overly explanatory) way and sets the atmosphere (melancholy and intimate, but with a heady dose of that classic New-England-style horror) for the series perfectly.

CL: The cover of #1 sort of gives away the ending, although I liked the skeletal take on (what Dexter calls) William Waite - is the skeleton or the ghost-like figure closer to your intention?

SA: We intentionally distracted the reader with that, so they wouldn't think they knew too much about that thing. As Brandon points out in issue two, Dexter saw that thing from pretty far away, so who knows WHAT exactly he saw.

SEG: One thing I really love about that first cover is that it harkens back to more classic horror comics I got my hands on a lot as a little kid ... what's shown isn't EXACTLY what happens in the story, but it captures that exaggerated rush of thinking something is going to be good and scary, even if you don't yet know why ... which I think is something that's shared among fans of all kinds of horror.

The Devil’s Footprints – The Future

CL: How far ahead are you working on this book? Is it all written/drawn already? If so did you get to #4 and make changes to #1 based on how it had gone?

SA: Issue four was written before they started drawing issue one. It was all written as one enormous story, with lots of feedback from Paul, Brian, and Shawna.

SEG: But Scott did have an alternate ending written for The Devil's Footprints, and we only recently decided which of the endings to use. I think we had to see the first couple of issues in their fully realized form to truly understand how the respective endings would play. It's very clear now that Paul and Brian can convey the really intense, soul-destroying sort of emotion that we needed to pull off the ending we're going with ... it's not the sort of scene that you'd want to risk falling flat if you didn't have faith that the artists could do it justice. I had a hard enough time reading the script for that scene ... it's a tough one. I'll probably get a little torn up emotionally when Paul and Brian finally get it on paper.

SA: I knew I wouldn't really understand Brandon's relationship with his girlfriend until I saw Paul and Brian draw it. Until I saw how effectively they conveyed the idea of the two of them being in love, and how high those stakes are. They gave me everything I was hoping for, so we went with the more ballsy ending.

CL: The trade collection would seem almost inevitable, any chance of seeing the script for the alternate ending as a DVD-style extra in the book?

SEG: That’s an interesting concept, but it’s not part of our current plan. As it stands, I’m happy that we’re spending a few pages on a sketchbook section, so we can pay a little better homage to Brian and Paul. It’s funny—we’ve sort of gone behind-the-scenes with Scott’s take on the book in the letter column a few times, but when I sought to do the same with Brian and Paul, they were always too terribly busy to indulge this. Brian has a really busy full-time job, and Paul is working on a bunch of other comics in addition to their work on The Devil’s Footprints. They’re both so busy they’ve simply never really been able to take the time to chat with me about their work, especially given that we’ve been moving full-speed ahead to get it out since I moved into Editorial. And I know if Scott had a choice between putting his writing more in the spotlight and putting Brian and Paul’s work more in the spotlight, Brian and Paul would win, hands down.

CL: Speaking of the trade (which I'm hoping will be in the same format as Fort and Lone Wolf 2100), was any consideration given to releasing the whole story as a "graphic novel" only?

SA: Yeah, it will likely be the same format as Lone Wolf 2100. We never really considered straight-to-book for this one, but that idea is gaining ground in general, so I have thought about doing the second one as an original graphic novel. It would really work for the next one quite well. Mignola and I always talk about releasing Hellboy stories that way, but he can't bear to be off the shelves for as long as it would take to get the whole thing done at once.

Dark Horse Horror – The Next Step

CL: On the Horror line itself, what books have we got to look forward to?

SA: Well, really, first came Hellboy: Weird Tales, which is a bimonthly anthology series that started in February. Then we have Devil's Footprints from me, Paul, Brian, and Dave Stewart. Then came Blackburne Covenant from Fabian Nicieza and Stefano Raffaele. Then Cal McDonald from Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith (the 30 Days of Night team), this May. Also in May, the first of a series of BPRD one-shots, spun off from Hellboy. The first of those is by Mike Avon Oeming and Miles Gunter, who did Bastard Samurai together. After them comes Brian Augustyn (Gotham by Gaslight and Battle Chasers) and Guy Davis (FF: Unstable Molecules), then Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins (the team from The Flash), and finally Joe Harris (screenwriter of Darkness Falls) and Adam Pollina (Big Daddy Danger). In June, Eric Powell's The Goon comes to Dark Horse, as a bimonthly series. In August, Scarlet Traces and The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, an anthology with a new Hellboy story from Mignola, art from Paul Chadwick, P Craig Russell, Gary Gianni, Jill Thompson, and a new Devil's Footprints story. That kinda takes us through the summer ... more to come.

CL: Does the recent Fort collection by Lenkov and Irving fit into the Horror line, it would seem to be a perfect fit but I can't recall seeing it mentioned that it was linked in any way?

SA: Fort was ahead of its time ... if we were to publish it now, yeah, it would be part of the line. We have another book from Peter on tap which will be in the line. But again, the line is flexible, not really being a line, so you will see Fort in the backlists in the backs of our collections listing other trades. We'll be picking any book like that out of our back stock and listing it in collections of our new horror stuff. See how that works?

SEG: And along those same lines, I wouldn't be surprised to see titles like Grendel and a few other familiar names sneaking onto the horror lists.

CL: Shawna and Scott, thanks very much for your time and best wishes for the books – more details on these and other Dark Horse books can be found at their website: http://www.darkhorse.com