
@@@@ What the #$%! is AICN COMICS: Q&@? @@@@
@’s by DETECTIVE COMICS /
AMERICAN VAMPIRE writer Scott Snyder!
AMBUSH BUG (BUG): So I’m here with Scott Snyder of AMERICAN VAMPIRE and DECTECTIVE COMICS. You’ve got a couple of other projects coming out. Do want to talk about those first?
BUG: Cool.
SS: So fans of that character, as I am, I think hopefully will be happy. We are really thrilled about having her in our series.
SS: Yeah. That I am so excited about. The thing with AMERICAN VAMPIRE #13 is the start of our big World War II epic. Me and Raphael who is coming back on the book… I’m so excited, it’s his best work so far… He’s my co-creator from now on. He’s listed as that, because nobody deserves it more than him. Anyway, it’s the beginning of our big World War II epic and stars Henry, Pearl, Skinner… It’s about Henry feeling older, he gets older, Pearl doesn’t, and so he decides he wants to enlist in the war effort and they reject him because of his injuries and so on. What happens is he gets the offer from that secret organization we’ve been using, The Vassals, this sort of enemy of vampires that dates back and is sort of like a black ops groups that operates in the shadows and kills vampires all over the world. They offer him a place on a secret mission to an island off the coast of Japan that’s about to be invaded where they think there might be a nest of vampires. So it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s a big war epic and has Skinner, Pearl, Henry with different species, new species of vampires and more secrets about the past of a sort of vampire evolution.
SS: Well this one is really dear to my heart. My grandfather was actually in the Navy for War World II. He was at Pearl Harbor and he was at Midway and so it’s fun to be able to do a story that kind of incorporates some of the details and some of the emotional details I think that he’s… I’m very close with him and that he’s told me about like what it was like to be part of the war and not here for a while. So I did do a lot of research. I’ve read a lot about it with books that he has given me, but I watched all of the VICTORY AT SEA again and all of those documentaries on Iwo Jima and you know ISLES OF BLACK SAND, RED BLOOD, and all of the kind of news reel stuff from then, so it’s been a lot of fun and Raphael has done a lot of research too, so we really wanted to make it feel like it’s the 1940’s. It’s a war epic. We wanted to bring that era to life and he’s using this really cool wash style. It’s different again, out of his arsenal of style so we cannot wait for people to see it.
SS: Now I feel like that pressure is gone. The pressure is just to do justice to the character’s cycle after cycle. The challenge was to get people as excited about it as we were and now I feel like the challenge is to write stories that don’t make it feel like “Oh, I shoehorned in Pearl or Henry, just so I could get them in, because they are popular.” We really wanted to make the series about following the bloodlines, but deep down it’s really a series about following the bloodlines in the characters, like the emotional bloodlines. That’s why we tried to set up the two issues with Mathais, #10 and #11, this theme… This idea of Pearl and Henry having this kind of distance between them, because she is immortal and he isn’t and this question of “Will she ever turn him” and that’s something that’s really front and center.
SS: I can tell you… I’ll tell you a couple of spoilers. I’m really, really excited. So the secret really is that this is one big story we have been planning for a long time and it comes to a head over the summer, so it will end with issue #81, which will be a big 30 page finale. I just found out I got approved for that yesterday, so I’m really excited and a double ship in July. So it’s going to be like a big, big finish to our story.
What’s coming up in the immediate future with #875, it’s a really good jumping on point if you hadn’t been reading us, because it’s actually part of the jumping on point’s initiative just like AMERICAN VAMPIRE #13. They both have two pages at the beginning of story that also sum up what has happened so far. So in DETECTIVE it’s Harvey Bullock talking about everything that’s happened in Gotham so far in our run and so #875 is all Francesco; it’s a story I’ve been waiting to tell for a long time that explains why maybe everybody is so scared of this scrawny guy with glasses, James Jr. So it really goes into our absolute creepiest, scariest issue I think so far. I’m very, very proud of it. And then #876 begins sort of the big ramping up of the story with Jock.
SS: He teases it. He’s doing a little piece, a foreword, for us in prose for the volume two which is out in May, which we are really excited about which collects issues six through eleven. But he always has an open door man. I talk to him a lot. We send him every issue and he’s always chiming in about where he’d like to be, so my hope is we are really, really thrilled about what we have planned for the fifties. I have a big, big twist and a new character I want to bring in that is sort of our version of a Punisher. He’s a character who has actually been tucked into the series earlier in a hidden way and my feeling is that if he comes back at any point, it will probably be there. I think that he can’t really resist hot rods and vampires.
BUG: Well thanks a lot for talking the time to talk with me, I appreciate it. I know you are a really busy man here at the Con. It was great talking to you again.
BUG: I chose AMERICAN VAMPIRE as “Best Ongoing Series of the Year” for the last year’s @$$ies and it totally is and continues getting better with every issue.
SS: I can’t thank you enough. Thanks to everybody reading us and thanks to you guys at the site. You and everyone there have been so nice to us.
BUG: Thanks a lot.
SS: All right, sure.
BUG: See you later, Scott.
You can read Scott Snyder’s awesome work monthly on DETECTIVE COMICS and AMERICAN VAMPIRE and look for BATMAN: GATES OF GOTHAM starting in May and AMERICAN VAMPIRE: SIRVIVAL OF THE FITTEST in June!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole / wordslinger / reviewer / co-editor of AICN Comics for over nine years. Support a Bug by checking out his comics (click on the covers to purchase)!
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Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G