So here I come just under the wire of Tuesday. We continue our examination of the content of Dark Horse Presents #8. This $7.99 gift from an array of creators arrives at your local comic shop or digital shop tomorrow!
Brian Wood is a creator I’ve admired since I discovered his work in 2005 with Local. This book helped change the way I looked at comics. It featured realistic people who I could have very well met walking down the street. No powers, no tights, just tangible fiction. This quality has led me to read everything I could get my hands on by Wood. His works include a very underrated run on Generation X, the 72 issue epic that is DMZ, Demo, Supermarket, Fight for Tomorrow, and a new series debuting in June titled The Massive. A warm up to the series starts, which features art by Kristian Donaldson, in DHP #8 and will run through #10. Brian talks with me about The Massive and I try not to freak him out by squealing like a Beliber.
Adam Messinger: The Massive runs through DHP 8-10 and then goes off into its own series. Why start the series in DHP instead of making an issue out of these 24 pages?
Brian Wood: Purely practical reasons, really. The existence of DHP gave us a place to run some preview stories, to try and build up some demand in a place where readers who may be new to my work can see it. Actually, there is also a creative reason… writing these stories was great warm-up for the main series. I was able to get comfortable with the voice of the characters, experiment a bit with different types of narration, and otherwise sort out how I was going to be telling the stories. I imagine both the artist and the colorist, Kristian Donaldson and Dave Stewart, felt the same way. These prequel stories are not really prequels… its an easy term to use but its not perfectly accurate. They don’t connect narratively with the story in the main series, and they aren’t “must reads” to know what’s going on. But they do add to the overall experience.
Messinger: Since the series deals a lot with the ocean, will we see a lot of your opinions about the environment expressed here?
Wood: Sort of. Yes and no. This is not a preachy book, or a partisan book. It’s certainly socially-conscious, like a lot of what I’ve done, and if readers walk away with any prevailing opinion that I, as the writer, hold, its that I respect the ocean and recognize its importance to the continued existence of planet earth. Much like the prevailing opinion I expressed in DMZ that ‘war is bad’, these are hardly political statements. The main characters in The Massive are environmentalists… conservationists, really, direct action types who sort of take the fight to the enemy. They’re very proactive. But the world as we’re introduced to it in The Massive #1 is a world where environmental collapse has happened. Or is happening right now, so the time to protest and fight is pretty much past them. This is more about a “what do we do now?” sort of thing, and again, partisan fighting doesn’t really apply. If anything, that sort of thing is made irrelevant. It’s a story about survival, not prevention.
Messinger: Anyone who’s followed your work knows you thrive in copious amounts of violence or slice of life stories. Where does The Massive fit in there?
Wood: It doesn’t! It’s not a slice of life. It’s firmly in the Channel Zero/DMZ realm of my work, socially-aware action. But after a combined 122 issues of war and violence (DMZ + Northlanders), I am ready to dial back the overt violence. The Massive doesn’t have a lot of gunplay, or gratuitous deaths. It’s actually much more realistic in that sense. People pull out guns as a last resort, and if anyone does die, its treated as it would be in real life, an almost unimaginable tragedy.
Messinger: What compels you most about The Massive and why? Is it the story, the characters, the setting?
Wood: The world. I’ve built up a reputation as a world-builder, and its how I earn my living outside of comics – I’ve done a lot of writing for videogames, coming in in the early stages and fleshing out the world and a lot of the environments. DMZ is pure world-building, and even Northlanders, which is set in real-life history, required quite a bit of fleshing out because those times are relatively poorly documented. So in The Massive, I get to create this future world, written on a global scale, with a hefty dose of sci-fi and futurism thrown in. I’m also enjoying writing about environmentalists, and working against perception with that.
Messinger: Does this chapter of The Massive have a sound track? If so, what is it?
Wood: That’s a good question. I have no idea. Taiko drums shot through Trent Reznor’s recent film soundtrack filters? Either that or early Massive Attack (no pun intended).
Messinger: Is there anything that wasn’t covered that you’d like to mention…like a Conan/The Massive crossover?
Wood: Impossible on a dozen different levels. But if it were legally possible, I’d totally have Matty Roth appear in The Massive.
A gracious thank you to Brian Wood. You can find more from Brain Wood in his current titles: Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha and Omega, Northlanders, Dark Horse Presents, and Conan the Barbarian. You can also follow him on twitter: @BrianWood. Come back tomorrow as we wrap up our DHP feature with the legendary Howard Chaykin!
