A long time ago, I gave up my dream of making a living writing comics, mainly because I decided it'd be a nightmare. To make a living writing comics, I'd have to write the kinds of comics that paid well—actually, that paid, period. And I probably wouldn't get to start on Hellblazer. An eye-opening moment came when I was about twenty-three, and a friend of mine, another aspiring writer, called to tell me that he'd gotten his big break. "They're gonna let me write a spec script for X-Man!" He'd never been so excited. He was being allowed to write a story about a character named X-Man—not an issue of X-Men, but some spinoff I'd never even heard of—that the editor in question wasn't even suggesting that they'd publish, just that they'd read. This was cause for excitement? This was where I was supposed to devote my energy? Sure, there were established characters out there that I liked, that I could shoot for writing, but mostly I looked around in dread at the idea of writing Robin comics.
Of course, at that time, no one was publishing Solomon Kane.
This is the sort of book that I might have created for myself were I smart enough to have come up with it. Just the sort of book I want to write. Unlike Hellblazer, I'm not preceded on Solomon Kane by stellar runs by the likes of Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, and Steve Dillon, runs that shook my concept of what comics could do. Here was the perfect character for me to explore my ideas about good comics, and aside from an inconsistent stack of stories done in the seventies and eighties, Kane's comics legacy was open to invention. This is the opportunity that would have kept the twenty-three-year-old me hungry for a career as a writer. New ground to break, and a paycheck to boot. Of course, I still look at the comics landscape, with its dearth of interesting, paying gigs, its intricate tapestry of continuity and X-titles, and am grateful that I have the opportunity to do things like The Devil's Footprints and Solomon Kane, while making a pretty good living working with the likes of Mike Mignola, John Severin, Gerard Way, Eric Powell, Dave Stewart, Randy Stradley, Guy Davis, Arvid Nelson, Gabriel Bá, Sierra Hahn, and Joss Whedon, among so many others. Through my work with all these people, my ideas about what makes a good comic evolve daily.
When I created The Devil's Footprints, I had a very clear idea of what I was going for—there were certain things I didn't see happening in comics, a balance between what Mike does in Hellboy, what Garth Ennis did in Hellblazer, and some more traditional supernatural fiction dealing with magic. I described it at the time as Carson McCullers meets H.P. Lovecraft, with a little more Jack Kirby. Frankly, when I wrote that first one, I didn't get as much of the Kirby in there as I wanted. It didn't fit the plot, didn't fit the characters. In a way, Brandon, my protagonist, just wasn't enough like Hellboy. He wasn't fit for action; he was a brooder, working in the shadows of magic. In the second Devil's Footprints, which is written and about half drawn, I struck that balance a little better, got a bit more Kirby in there, combined this time with Martin Scorsese and Dennis Wheatley, if I can pull two references out of thin air.
When Solomon Kane came to Dark Horse, I read through all the original Robert E. Howard material, and I realized that this was the book I wanted to write—that in bringing Howard's work to comics, I could get that mix of traditional occult fiction and Kirby action, Kirby visuals. Howard had perhaps been the first to combine those elements, in an always-mythic setting, with that feeling of grand stakes that lends so much fuel to genre fiction. Howard had set the model that I'd been trying to come up with in that first Devil's Footprints, something I can now recognize in part because of my own attempts to create it on my own.
Today I finished the script for the fifth issue of Solomon Kane, the end of the first miniseries. Violence has never been something I really reveled in, in my writing. In the first issue, Mario, my artist on the book, had amplified the violence in ways that went outside my own aesthetics, but felt right for Howard. Conan fans do not shrink from blood. Seeing how much Mario enjoyed drawing the violence, I've embraced it more and more, leading to a bit of a bloodbath in the last issue. There's a level of sadism at work that makes the book feel like a gothic western. I think it's done creatively, and that Mario can do something unusual with it. Seeing monsters, and a pretty grim hero, beat the tar out of each other gives me the explosive color of a Kirby comic—although Kirby never would have done what we're doing in this book. Will I do the same thing next time? No, because I'm already looking toward all the things I want to do differently next time. If I was a full-time comics writer, maybe I'd have more opportunity to try different things. Or maybe I'd have less time for navel gazing, and the demands of a full-time schedule would force me to stick to what I've done in the past. But as an editor, I should remember to not pigeonhole writers that way, to not ask them to repeat themselves, if only because it would bore me to death.
Solomon Kane 3
Writer: Scott Allie
Penciller: Mario Guevara
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Cover Artist: John Cassaday
Genre: Horror, Action/Adventure
With more dead bodies discovered around the fabled Castle of the Devil, the determined Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane and his new ally John Silent look for answers in a pile of ancient bones buried deep in the abbey beneath Baron von Staler's fortress. The Baroness is missing, and the Baron accuses Solomon Kane. Tempers flare, and blades are drawn-but the real monster remains unseen.
* Expanding upon Robert E. Howard's unfinished "Castle of the Devil" story.
"Solomon Kane is one of the toughest Robert E. Howard heroes to adapt to the comics page, but Scott Allie and Mario Guevara have done a stunning job. Unsettling, moody and eerily beautiful, their Kane is absolutely worthy of his creator." -Kurt Busiek
Publication Date: December 03, 2008
Format: FC, 32 pages
Price: $2.99
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