Welcome to Dark Horse Unleashed, a new special feature here at CraveOnline that focuses exclusively on Dark Horse Comics!
For almost thirty years, Dark Horse Comics has published a diverse array of creator owned comics including Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Frank Miller’s Sin City & 300, and Eric Powell’s The Goon alongside licensed comics featuring Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Aliens, Predator, Prometheus, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Halo, Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
To kick off our very first installment of Dark Horse Unleashed, Dark Horse Comics Editor-in-Chief Scott Allie answered a few questions about several new and upcoming comic book projects. Michael Avon Oeming provided the artwork seen above that features Allie surrounded by some of Dark Horse’s most memorable characters. Dave Stewart colored the piece over Oeming’s linework.
CraveOnline: Let’s start with Fight Club 2. The first pages by Cameron Stewart were recently released and the response has been really positive. How did you originally start talking to Chuck Palahniuk about doing the comic book sequel?
Scott Allie: Maybe a year and a half ago Chuck said in an interview that he was working on Fight Club 2 as a comic, and he was “talking to people at Marvel, Dark Horse, and Image.” So I asked around the office, who. No one. I knew he was local, and I found he was talking to Brian Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Matt Fraction — writers with work at Image, Dark Horse, and Marvel.
That’s what he meant. I got in touch with him through mutual friends. The first time we met, he handed me the completed script, which at that point had undergone some revision with input from Matt. Since that first version I read it’s evolved a lot, but it was a pretty wild moment, getting back to the office and dropping everything to read that script that day …
Do you remember your first exposure to the original Fight Club?
I saw the movie at a shitty little theater in Portland, which has since evolved into a fancy brew theater. Saw it on a hard textured plastic screen. Walking out it was clear half the people hated it and half of us loved it. We knew we’d seen something significant.
I saw the movie before I read the book, and I was surprised by how close they were. I think if I’d read it first, I would have been shocked by how close they were, because the book seems unfilmable, till you see what Fincher did. I’d been in college when Iron John and Robert Bly happened, the late eighties men’s movement. Thanks to my college professors I fell for some of that. Thanks to Fight Club, and I guess getting clear of my teens, I’ve known to laugh at every men’s movement since then.
Similar as the book and movie are, the ending is the most different part. I asked Chuck to adapt the end of the novel into comics, so we could put it out for Free Comic Book Day, to refresh people’s memories about the difference in the endings. What Chuck has done, with FCBD, is show a different perspective on the end of the book, which adds this whole other dimension to it. My head was spinning when I read that script.
Can you tease your favorite moment from Fight Club 2?
No, my favorite moment is a massive spoiler, so you have to wait a while for that. But my favorite moment in the first issue is the first time the narrator from the original novel, who we now call Sebastian, gets in a fight — only because it’s so funny the way Chuck and Cameron deliver it. Sebastian is not having a good time … why start now, right?
My second favorite moment in issue one is the line “The unforeseen consequence of sport fucking,” which is in the preview, and struck me as the worst Family Circle comic of all time. In issue #5 there’s something in a museum that might test some people’s capacity for irreverence.
I’ve been hearing rumors about an endgame for Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. from Mike Mignola’s books. Is there anything to that? Are we nearing the end?
Oh yeah. A few years ago Mike and [John] Arcudi and I realized how close we were to the end, that we had to lean into it or we’d fall over backward. It was time to move directly toward the finale without detour. We’d known for a long time how it’d end, maybe Mike knew since the beginning, or probably since Wake the Devil. But it always felt like forever away.
There was so much to get done first. And there are still a number of beats to hit, there’s still more than three years of stories, but the path is clearer than ever. A couple years ago in an interview Mike said, “We’re breaking things that can’t be fixed.” What he meant, in simplest terms, was that when Galactus destroys New York, Marvel rebuilds it next month. Well, we’ve ruined New York — but it’s not getting undone. I’d say as soon as we killed Roger, we were on that path, although it didn’t feel that way to us until a little later. Now we can really feel the pull, since Hellboy died and Liz torched the center of the world in King of Fear. After that this couldn’t be stopped.
Most recently, Mike and I were talking over some stuff in Abe, about how much to reveal about a particular long-standing mystery, and we realized that there’s no sense in holding stuff back, in forcing info to be held. The answers are coming, and the end is near.
Does Frankenstein Underground tie into the Hellboy universe? Or is it a completely standalone title?
It ties in in a very big way. Initially it only tied in in that this version of the Frankenstein monster appeared first in Hellboy: House of the Living Dead. And it was going to be a monster romp that the monster starred in. But the story evolved, and now this guy is uncovering the hidden past of the Hellboy universe, and some of its future. Like I said … there’s no time to hold it back anymore. Every gun is going on the table.
Among everything else you do, you also co-write the Abe Sapien book. Can you tell us what’s coming up next in that title?
Abe’s been running from the truth about himself, but as the current arc wraps up, someone throws that in his face in a way that causes him to go at things head on. He’s confronting the big questions about his connection to the monsters that are overrunning the world. In doing that, Abe will find out what he really is.
Your upcoming Archie vs. Predator miniseries may be the craziest crossover since Archie Meets The Punisher . I’m curious, do you guys have the greenlight to do some really horrible things to the Archies?
Oh yeah. The crossover was their idea. They came to us, and we jumped at it, threw together the basic approach. We wanted the art and the writing to feel entirely like an Archie comic. As the Predator elements come into the story, the look and the characters themselves stay true to the Archie style, but the events go insane. We asked Alex Segura and Roberto for an artist who could really do classic Archie, while embracing the subject matter we’re going into. They gave us Fernando Ruiz. It was great watching him work out how to draw a Predator in classic Riverdale style.
We brought in our own writer, Alex de Campi, because we knew she can do the cute, fun, light stuff, full of personality, charm, and melodrama, but also really go over the top with the Grindhouse stuff, naturally. Some writers might have felt their work was done just throwing the concepts together, but Alex embraced the wild nature of this thing, took it all the way. And the Archie guys have been great to work with, stayed true to their word to let this thing go wild, unflinching. A number of times Brendan Wright, the editor, has sent a cover image or some interior pencils around our offices, and someone here has said, Is Archie gonna let us do that? And over on the east coast, Alex Segura and Mike Pellerito are laughing their asses off …
Regarding Rebels by Brian Wood and Andrea Mutti, I’ve seen that listed as both an ongoing and a limited run series. Which is it?
We’re committed to ten issues, and Brian has a complete story to tell in those ten issues — a complex, novel-size story. I’ve only read the first two issues so far, but this is classic Brian Wood, big, personal, passionate, and really about something. Some folks have assumed because DMZ Brian is gonna do a hatchet job on the Revolutionary War, that this will be anti-American. It absolutely is not… Brian has real reverence of the subject matter. These are stories that spoke to him as a kid growing up in Vermont. He has a lot to say about this, and there’s the potential for a lot more if he wants to take it past ten.
Tell us more about Shaper by Eric Heisserer and Ace Continuado. What’s this book about? And how did it end up at Dark Horse?
Eric came to Dark Horse wanting to do a comic on the scale of Star Wars, and we had an opening in the schedule for that sort of thing. Mike put long-time Star Wars editor Randy Stradley on the job. The thing I love about Shaper is that it presents a really bold, big adventure interstellar story, clear in its focus and strong on character. It has a mythology that brings bigger meaning to the sci fi realm, in my opinion, but it’s not so complex that you need big info dumps to get into it, so there’s lots of room for the personality that’s sometimes missing in this sort of thing.
Last question, what can you tease for Dark Horse’s next big announcement?
We’ve kicked off the year with some great launches like Lady Killer and EI8HT, and we have some more original series to announce in the coming months — but we redefined media tie-in comics when we did Star Wars, Aliens, Buffy, and Mass Effect, and we have some more of those to talk about in the coming months. We’ve emphasized the creator-owned stuff lately, because people sort of forgot the huge role we had in building that part of the industry, but as the year rolls out you’ll see the balance that’s defined Dark Horse for almost thirty years.
That’s all for this installment of Dark Horse Unleashed here at CraveOnline! But if you want to send us questions for the next Dark Horse Unleashed, you can tweet your questions to @BlairMarnell!
