MURDER: An Interview with Sean T. Collins

1. Where did the different pieces for this anthology come from and how did they come together in the final arrangement?

These are all short comics I wrote over the past few years and was fortunate enough to find talented artists--Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton--willing to draw them for me. The oldest, "Destructor Comes to Croc Town," dates back to 2004, I believe, while the most recent, "Destructor in: Prison Break," was finished the week before the book went on sale at the MoCCA Art Festival in NYC early this June. Several of them had appeared online on the website for the great comics publisher Top Shelf or on my own site, and "Croc Town" was included in the very very cool indie-fantasy anthology Elfworld, but I'd wanted to put together a hard-copy collection to showcase them for some time. Fortunately Matt Wiegle, an old college chum of mine who drew four of the stories in the book, is a highly and rightfully acclaimed handmaker of minicomics and was kind enough to design and put together the collection for me so that we could sell it alongside the comics of his collective, Partyka.

In terms of which comics went in, it was basically just whatever I could fit! I had to rule out a comic I'd written about Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, "It Brought Me Some Peace of Mind," because its one-panel-per-page format was just too long for such an anthology. Meanwhile, an adult comics I'd written, "1995," just wasn't printing well enough quality-wise, so we left that one out too. Overall I'm pretty pleased that despite the variety of the subject matter and artists, there's a sort of tonal unity to the whole shebang. Or at least I like to think so.

2. The two Destructor pieces are the most intriguing to me, for a number of reasons. First, are they or will they be part of something larger? Do Destructor, the Crocs, any of the other rogues in the gallery, or any other part of this world appear elsewhere? What further plans might you have for them?

They're definitely part of something larger. Like a lot of nerdy kids, I came up with my own Star Wars and He-Man-inflected sci-fi-fantasy universe when I was little, and Destructor was and is the star. I've been developing him, his friends and enemies, and their worlds since I was in the third grade. I have his whole saga mapped out from beginning to end and could tell stories about him for years and years to come. At this point, I'm sort of plucking out chapters at random and telling them, though right now they're mostly concentrated during one particularly quest-like phase of his illustrious career as an interstellar scoundrel.

3. Next, as simple as the Destructor pieces seem, I find them quite a bit more confounding than any of the others. What I mean is, I don't really feel like I have a good sense of where they're coming from or going. They remind me a bit of the original (i.e. Liquid Television) Aeon Flux, oddly enough, in the sense that there's a lot going on that seems to call for some emotional response, but the context is so foreign and incomplete that it's hard to decide what emotional response is appropriate. I'm not sure how to pose this as a question, so I'll just invite you to respond.

That's an interesting and flattering take, Curt, thanks. There's certainly an incomplete context narratively speaking, since like I said, these are just chapters from an epic as large and unwieldy as a schoolkid's imagination. Emotionally, maybe what you're picking up on stems from my original idea way back when: I realized that the bad guys in a story had a lot more freedom to do whatever they wanted. Luke Skywalker couldn't walk around in a scary suit of black armor and blow up a whole planet, you know? So I decided to make the bad guys the heroes of my adventures. As I've grown older I've grown attached to the characters, and I've also hopefully gained a more nuanced view of "good guys" and "bad guys"--yet at the same time I've also learned a lot more about what the consequences of the kinds of action-movie violence they perpetrate would be like in real life. So I try to get all of that across in these little vignettes, and I suppose it does come across as hard to get a read on. I hope that's because it's complicated rather than self-contradictory or incoherent.

4. How closely do your creative impulses (when it comes to writing comics) track your tastes in comics (as a reader)? How have both evolved over the long term? On your blog ADDTF, you've spent a lot of time recently immersed in more indie and "literary" comics--how do you think what you're reading now might influence your future writing projects?

Well, it isn't just recently! Back before I took a job in the comics industry and became a horror blogger out of non-compete necessity, I blogged about comics back then as well, and was probably mainly interested in art/lit/alt comics then, too. But at the same time I am an unrepentant and unapologetic fan of genre art. Right now, I read a lot of superhero comics--Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Ed Brubaker--alongside the avant-garde material--Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, John Hankiewicz. I guess the main thing I take away from all of that is that it's tough for me to imagine deliberately making comics, or writing anything on a for-pleasure basis, to please a perceived audience. The thing that the Destructor strips and the more esoteric strips have in common is that I had an idea I really liked and wanted to see it finished and brought to life as a comic.

5. From other media or even other facets of your life and experience, what are the chief influences on your comics writing? What single influence do you think would most surprise your readers?

This is sort of a chicken-and-egg thing--I don't know if it's because I'm working in the short story format that I feel a strong influence from music, or if it's because I'm strongly influenced by music that I'm working in the short story format, but yeah, music is a huge influence. Not any one genre or style per se, just thinking of art in terms of rhythm, repetition, and emotion at least as much as plot, and doing things in discrete units like songs and then gathering them together in a collection like an album.

I guess it's also no secret to anyone who reads my blog that Clive Barker is my favorite writer. I consider his Books of Blood to be absolute masterpieces--totally uncompromising, daring, frightening art. I'd love to pull off something that good.

In terms of my life and experience, I'm really haunted by the idea that you can make a mistake that you can never fix and never atone for, and that certainly informs a lot of my work. If you remember my zombie-blogging project The Outbreak, that was a big part of that as well.

And this may or may not be surprising to my readers--haha, I've never used that phrase before!--but I really do spend a lot of time reading about and watching TV specials about serial killers. I don't think I'm all that full of surprises, unfortunately!

6. What kind of feedback are you getting?

Pretty good feedback, I suppose! I never expected to be interviewed about it, for one thing. I also have always been really chuffed that Top Shelf, who publish Alan Moore, Craig Thompson, and Jeffrey Brown--three of my favorite comics creators--publish my stuff. To me, the greatest vote of confidence of all is that Matt W., Matt R., and Josiah deigned to draw my work after reading my ideas--multiple times! Their willingness to hitch their stars to my wagon is an enormous compliment.

One thing I'm sort of idly waiting for is to hear from a significant number of people who came across my work before coming across me, if you will--getting more feedback from people who I'm not already friendly with either in real life or online. To be fair to myself, a lot of those online folks only know me through my blog, which I guess means one facet of my work and ideas already won them over on a qualitative basis as opposed to just my rugged good looks and charming personality.

I'm not sure if this is 100% germane to your question, but the toughest thing so far has been when people ask me to explain what a particular comic is "about," or what it "means." That's been really, really hard for me, because I feel like it's unbelievably presumptuous of me to tell you what it means or what it's about! Your experience of it as a reader is your experience of it as a reader, and it really doesn't matter what I think about the story or how I intended it to function. Heck, in some cases I don't even really know what it means--I understand the FEEL of it, but not the meaning. Does that make any sense or is that just horribly pretentious? I don't mean it to be. Quite the opposite in fact. But I guess I just argued that what I mean doesn't matter. :)

7. What next?

Well, I should have another couple of strips popping up on Top Shelf's site soon, which is always awesome. Theoretically I have another pair of scripts in the hands of artists for their drawing pleasure, though I frequently, and totally understandably, take a back seat to their own projects and IRL concerns. Meanwhile, I'm working on a series of strips based on the concept at the heart of the strip "Kitchen Sink" from Murder, which will be called "Cage Variations"--it's an idea I've had in my head since college, when I was a film studies major and worked on some of them as short videos. Matt Rota's going to be collaborating with me on them once again. And of course I have a neverending supply of Destructor ideas! All told, I'd very much like to have enough new material to put together a second anthology come this time next year, along with a stand-alone minicomic or two for those strips that won't fit into the format.

I've said this for a long time, but as long as I can find the time to write a couple of new strips every year and find someone to draw them, I'll be really content, creatively. If people want to read them, that's rad, and if some real publisher wanted to publish them, double rad, but I am just about as un-careerist in terms of writing them as I could be, I hope!

8. Anything else you'd like to add?

Simply that if people would like to check out the comic for themselves, they can do so by plunking down three bucks plus shipping at the Partyka shop. And everyone should feel free to swing by my blog and chat.)