Interview: Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson Discuss Upcoming Body Horror Comic Come Into Me
Recently, the folk over at Paste Magazine revealed a new body horror comic series titled Come Into Me. Written by The Dregs‘ Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson, the new mini-series will feature art from Piotr Kowalski (SEX) and will be published by Black Mask Studios in early 2018. Described as The Fly meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Come Into Me is a comic that immediately jumped to the top of our most anticipated titles of 2018, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to reach out to both Nadler and Thompson to discuss their upcoming project.
So, join me below to learn more about Come Into Me, the duo’s obsession with body horror, and what else they’ve got brewing their minds!
Also, you can follow Lonnie on Twitter here and Zac on Twitter here.
Dread Central: You and Zac Thompson burst onto the scene with The Dregs. What were some lessons you learned during that creation process that helped you with Come Into Me?
Lonnie Nadler: We actually conceived of Come Into Me before The Dregs. I’m really glad we got to do the latter first though because in many ways it’s a more self-contained story that follows a single character, and as such we learned a lot about how the medium works, both creatively and from a business perspective. Come Into Me is a far more ambitious story so I think if we’d done it first it would have been a horrible failure. It still might be, but I’m somewhat more prepared for that now. With The Dregs, the most important thing I learned was to trust my instincts as a storyteller. If something doesn’t feel right, even if it’s hard to pinpoint why, chances are it needs to change. The second most important thing was learning to play with tropes. Zac and I never want to be writers that rely on convention, but rather we want to be writers that break them to offer something new, to push storytelling in novel directions. We took a lot of risks with The Dregs to tell a story we wanted to tell, and for us at least, it paid off because we’re so proud of the final outcome. So we’re taking even more risks this time around and really trying to experiment with the unique format of the comic book medium. We’re still coming at this from the perspective of, “What do we want to see in a book?”, and trying to tread new ground while still paying homage to the works that inspired us.
Zac Thompson: As Lonnie said, Come Into Me was something we came with about a year before we even started working on The Dregs. This was the story we came together to tell. As we continued to toy with the concept we realized it was a lot more complex than we initially thought and most places we pitched it couldn’t get behind the concept. However, now that we’ve released The Dregs there seems to be a lot more trust in our abilities as storytellers.
The Dregs was a really interesting experiment in terms of taking a core idea and leaning into (or away from) genre conventions. In a lot of ways this taught me to take risks on every single page and to focus on storytelling from a visual perspective. Lonnie and I went out of our way to ensure we didn’t take any narrative shortcuts. The Dregs taught us to be economic in our approach but to also take risks. Every time we put out an issue and thought “what the fuck are we doing?” we had the best response. It led to the realization that we’re not here to hold people’s hands. Come Into Me is the culmination of that.
DC: What can you tell us about Come Into Me and what readers should expect from it?
ZT: Come Into Me is our love letter to the works of David Cronenberg and body horror in general. From the comic’s inception we set out to blend some of the conventions of the genre with a more “current” twist. That is to say, we’re trying to bring body horror to the social media generation. Exploring the concept of “how much sharing is too much sharing?” That idea is something that Lonnie and I kept coming back to as we started talking about the series. We want to really explore the harmful effects of sharing without really showing social media in its most conventional sense. You’re not going to see people on Facebook or Twitter. Instead you’re going to see people become literally entwined within one another’s memories, identities, and lives. We’re more interested in twisting and tangling our characters in a situation that slowly becomes more complicated and haunting before unraveling it all in an insane finale.
LN: Yeah, we’re really looking to explore contemporary American culture and the things that so many people around us seem infatuated by on a daily basis, but without being so on-the-nose about it all. Nobody wants a morality lesson, so we’re not trying to go down that path so much as one that asks a lot of questions. We want to explore the way we engage with technology, its effect on us and our minds, and what it means to cross the line between flesh and media. It’s also a lot about how our memories define us and our experiences, and trying to find the horror in that aspect of human life. It’s a slow burn to start, but we promise it gets crazy by the end of the series.
DC: Your love of body horror is abundantly clear to anyone who follows you on Twitter! What is it about that particular breed of horror that holds such a strong appeal for you?
LN: There’s a number of things as it relates to the body horror as a subgenre first of all, and second of all is the appeal of David Cronenberg’s work in particular. Horror at large, to me, is a genre that functions best when its employed as a means to question human existence, the very essence of it, and to unearth hidden truths by going through our most primal of emotions – fear. Body horror is specifically appealing to me because it boils that philosophy down to our most human aspects – that we exist in an inescapable physical form, and that said form is intimately linked with the mind or consciousness or whatever label you care to apply. It explores the unique and mysterious connection between mind and body, but also how bodies, and thus how we, relate to one another. It’s about trying to understand who we are and how we inhabit this world. It’s about how bizarre our bodies are and the idea that we sometimes feel like stranger in our own skin. To me, those have always been worthy subjects because they help me to understand myself and these vessels that carry us through life. This probably all sounds pretty lofty and metaphysical, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s about more than just making monsters out of our bodies and having a gore fest. It’s about the fear being something we cannot escape because it is inherent within all of us.
David Cronenberg is the master of body horror, and aside from the fact that he’s a fellow Canadian, his work is so inspiring because he was always so ahead of his time. Videodrome is more relevant now than ever. ExistenZ as well. That movie pre-dates Nintendo 64 and he’s predicted our obsession with virtual reality and started the “are videogames art?” debate. He used body horror as way to explore the physical relationship between humans and technology, and the implications of progress, and he did so in a very cerebral and completely original way. That’s what I strive for in my work, particularly with Come Into Me, to have horrors that are intimately connected to a socially relevant theme so that the fear lingers long after the experience of watching/reading is over.
ZT: For me body horror is about taking the central ideas of horror and turning them inward. Growing up I always felt a little divided from the idea of a slasher running through the woods with a machete. It didn’t do anything for me. When I saw David Cronenberg’s Videodrome for the first time I think my mind was irreparably damaged. The film took all these strange themes of violence in media and put them in a narrative where a man pulls a videotape from a vagina lodged inside his chest. I know that sounds like a strange way to have a revelation but for me body horror has always been about the ability to make horror physically manifest in the one place its inescapable: our our body, our own sense of identity. It’s about a fate that’s worse than death. It’s about losing your sense of self, your relationship to your own mind, and becoming alien in your own skin. It’s something that I explored in my novel, Weaponized and will continue to explore in Come Into Me.
Take Clive Barker’s Hellraiser for example. The film explores the dangerous intersection between being and non-being but most people just see it as a vehicle for the cenobites. It’s actually a really beautiful analysis of the delicate line between pleasure and pain. About the things we’re willing to do to our bodies in order to achieve pleasure. The delicate line is what I strive for every time we sit down to write Come Into Me. The intimate relationship between our remembered selves and our perceived selves seems like the perfect line to explore next.
DC: Tell me a bit about working with Piotr and what that’s done for your creative process.
ZT: We’re incredibly fortunate to be working with Piotr Kowalski on this series. We’ve been big fans of his since we spotted his work on the Nightbreed comic series. Piotr loves horror and is a phenomenal sequential storyteller. He’s brought a level of detail and craft to every single page and seems to really enjoy our incredibly dense scripts. Every time he turns in a new page he’s approaches it in a way that elevates our descriptions and brings his years of experience to really craft the narrative in new and interesting ways. Honestly, we’re learning things from Piotr on a daily basis. We’re still pretty new to this process and having an industry vet like Piotr is a huge asset.
LN: Like Zac said we feel so lucky to be working with a veteran like Piotr. He’s the kind of artist we love because he puts so much detail in every single panel, and a lot of other artists leave that stuff out. It’s a dream come true, really. We’re also working with Niko Guardia who is coloring Piotr’s art and Niko is a tremendous artist in his own right and his work on Come Into Me is really essential for the tone and mood we’re trying to set. He’s just a gem to work with as well.
DC: Horror has been evolving across mediums for a while now. Video games are entering VR, movies attempted a return to 3D, TV shows are being released en masse for people to binge, etc… What are ways that you think horror comics can evolve into something new and interesting?
LN: Yeah, it’s a really exciting time for horror. Just this year we had massive hits like IT and hugely important films like Get Out that are paving the way for bigger and more intelligent genre movies. But like you said, there are so many avenues out there and the potential is almost limitless. I think that’s what it comes down to for us, with Come Into Me, is understanding that there are many ways to tell a story, but trying to figure out how to tell it within the comic book medium. I mean, how can we use sequential art to tell this story in a way that film or VR never could? Horror comics come with a disadvantage because you don’t have the tools you can rely on in film or VR like audio queues, soundtrack, forcing tension through time manipulation, and all of those things are what really go toward creating scares and atmosphere in audio-visual storytelling. So to us it’s about trying to create unique page layouts and utilizing page design in a way people haven’t seen before to evoke certain moods. It’s about figuring out how the words and images work in tandem rather than seeing them as separate. There are plenty of things out there like soundtracks you’re supposed to listen to while reading a comic, or motion comics, but to me those are different mediums, not very effective, and at that point you might as well just make a movie. I think a lot of people working in comics don’t try hard enough to experiment and I’d like to see more of that. I don’t want to see something that really wants to be a movie or a novel. I want something that does its best to be a comic first and foremost.
ZT: Lonnie and I always treat our comics like comics first. We’re not worried about how “adaptable” they are. So in keeping with that we try to experiment with visual storytelling on every page. I think horror comics are incredibly unique because they are the one medium in which the reader controls the pacing. If they don’t want to turn a page they can pause and catch their breath before getting the reveal on the next page. They can really hold the thing in their hands and move it around as the experience the page. So we try to ensure that the actual process of reading Come Into Me is engaging and keeps the reader active as they descend into madness with us.
DC: Again, anyone who follows you on Twitter knows that you’re always keeping busy. Even though Come Into Me hasn’t released its first issue, I have a sneaking suspicion that you already have ideas for what’s to come after that story ends its run. Is this true and, if so, can you tell us what’s going through your mind?
ZT: Lonnie and I have a lot of projects we’re developing at the moment. Most of the stuff we can’t talk about. After you see how Come Into Me ends, you’ll understand why I’ll downplay the idea of anything continuing out of this story. I think we’re pretty dead set on exploring genre right now and want to continue to experiment in new arenas. I imagine we’ll dabble in body horror again, eventually, but next I think we’re setting our eyes on a weird literary fiction like The Dregs. Following that we’ve got a strange revisionist Western we’re pretty eager to start and a few other things that I’ll let Lonnie speak to.
LN: I mean, we’re always looking to tell more stories and to explore different genres. It’s what we grew up with and where we feel most at home. Zac and I are big genre nerds at the end of the day so I think it’s an arena we will always be part of. Other than the Western we’ve got a weird Kafkaesque book about office life we’re dying to write, but it will be a while before we get to that. Expect more announcements from us soon though!
DC: Last question for you: who are the artists and writers in the comic book world these days that inspire you?
LN: To this day my biggest influence in comics is, and always will be, Alan Moore. It’s kind of trite and cliche, but there really isn’t anyone who comes close to his understanding and command over the medium as far as writers go. Even his most recent work in books like Providence is unprecedented and his dedication to the craft is so admirable. In terms of more contemporary people in the industry I think David Mack does wonderful with with his Kabuki series. Tom King is doing very admirable work with superhero books at the moment. I really admire his strict use of page layouts. Curt Pires is always pushing himself to new places. Eric Zawadzki, our artist on The Dregs, is always looking to experiment and his next projects look killer. Vita Ayala has some amazing stuff coming out from Black Mask. I’m also a dedicated Charles Burns fanatic. His Last Look trilogy was just the kind of thing for me that while reading it I wished I’d made it. There’s so many more, but I’ll save some for Zac.
ZT: Lately I’ve been learning a lot from the work of Warren Ellis. That man has a really unique approach to comic book storytelling that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. His work routinely experiments with the conventions of the medium and really pushes to exist on its own. His run on Moon Knight with Declan Shalvey is a masterwork and Planetary completely changed the way I look at superhero books. As for others in the medium, I think Matthew Rosenberg brings a particular heart and sincerity to comics that is missing from most books on the shelves. He loves the medium with everything he has and you can feel it in his work for Marvel and his creator owned books. Eric Zawadzki holds a special place for me because he was our first creative partner and The Dregs would have not been what is was without him on the book. His new work at Black Mask, Eternal, is going to blow people’s minds. He’s doing that with an Australian writer, Ryan Lindsay who is one of the best writers in the business. Ram V and Devmalya Pramanik are doing insane things on Paradiso at Image. Everyone should be reading that book. I could go on… but we’d be here all day.
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