Today I am lucky to be able to share a short interview I did with Ibrahim Mustafa, who just signed a 3 book deal with Humanoids. His first offer is a re-imagined version of The Count Of Monte Christo which will be release on March 16th.
What sort of inspiration brought you to the idea of taking a classic adventure story and updating it to sci fi?
Funnily enough, a big part of the inspiration was that the original isn’t really all that adventurous. It’s an incredible and intricate story that was serialized, and so it was much more of a long form drama. In an era of revenge stories like John Wick, I thought how cool it would be to take the seeds of the Dumas story and replant them in a different world to grow something new and more action-heavy out of them.
What made you choose this particular classic?
I love stories about justice and revenge, and I’ve really loved the story of Edmond Dantes for a long time. It’s the ultimate story of comeuppance, and I realized it was incredibly fertile ground for a re-imagining of this scale.
How hard was it to take a classic story and turn it into a more modern comic?
It was difficult in all of the ways that making comics is difficult, but in terms of creating my take on it, it was more fun than anything. If I had been making a straight-up comic adaptation of it, I think it would be incredibly difficult. But aside from the broad strokes, this is pretty much a whole new thing, so I got to have fun making it my own.
Can you give us any hint at what the other two books will be?
They will be books! Haha. It’s probably too early to say anything too specific, but I am currently halfway through the next one, and I’m taking two genres that I love and mixing them together in a way that I think is pretty fun and unique to comics.
