I always love when I get a chance to come up with some questions for a comic creator I’ve not met yet. And I really love anything to do with Ahoy Comics as they’ve been making me laugh with their releases in the past few years. So I jumped at the chance to chat with Eric Palicki about his upcoming release, Black’s Myth.
Where did the story idea for Black’s Myth come from?
Like most of my stories, Black’s Myth resulted from several stray ideas percolating in my brain over time. None of those ideas was quite a story on its own, but once they started to cohere together, a narrative started to emerge. For this book, I’d long since wanted to do a werewolves-as-good guys story in the model of the supposedly true account of Theiss of Kaltenbrun (a man who claimed he and others in his village would transform into wolves in order to battle the Devil and protect the harvest. Seriously).
I’d also been toying with the idea of bullets made out of the silver given to Judas, and, well, werewolves and silver bullets just fit together naturally. Once I had the “What if?” I just needed to figure out the “What then?”
How important were the creative choices to you? Making it sorta punky? And having a cool female lead?
These choices mostly revealed themselves as I started writing, but I generally try to avoid writing straight white dudes as story leads unless a story absolutely demands it. Comics are already full of straight white dudes.
How was the collaborative process with you and Wendall Cavalcanti? It’s not the first time, right?
Our working relationship is great and has been going strong for 15 years now, most recently with Atlantis Wasn’t Built for Tourists, from Scout Comics. I think after all this time we understand each other fairly intimately as creators, and I sincerely hope we can work together forever. A lifelong Brubaker/Phillips type partnership would make me very happy.
What’s coming next?
I am currently curating Dead Beats 2, a sequel to the Ringo-nominated music horror comics anthology from A Wave Blue World, and I’m working on Manticore, an upcoming graphic novella with artist Chris Peterson. Kickstarter campaigns for both will launch in June.
Black’s Myth releases July 7th.
