Alex Kane has been a writing friend for quite some time. His work is sharp and colorful, and I have no doubt ASPHODEL will continue his high standards. I’m glad to have him here for an interview.
1. What is Asphodel?
Asphodel’s an underworld myth for fans of space opera: things like Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, the videogame Destiny, or the Expanse books. It’s a 22-page, standalone comic book that I’m hoping will gain enough traction with readers to grow into something bigger, like a limited series or graphic novel. It’s the kind of blockbuster story we’ve never really seen in visual science fiction before, and I’m so thrilled to be working with an amazing artist like Gale Galligan, who’s done all the illustration in watercolor and also hand-lettered the book. I have pretty high hopes for the Kickstarter campaign. Gale and I would love to keep this going for a second issue, a third issue, and see what the future might hold.
2. How did you come up with the name?
In my story, Asphodel is a beat-up old starship in the tradition of the Millennium Falcon or Serenity, but it’s also an everyday flower that—in Greek mythology—is associated with a specific meadow in the underworld. So it’s also this almost beautiful symbol of death and the possibility of an afterlife. The first issue takes place mostly in orbit around Pluto, so the whole setting lends itself pretty naturally to a sort of boatman-on-the-river-Styx vibe.
3. You’ve mentioned before that Joe Hill was an influence on Asphodel. Can you expand on that?
Joe was one of my weekly instructors at the Clarion West Writers Workshop back in summer 2013, and he really left his mark on me. While the manuscripts I turned in for class didn’t always measure up to my expectations or what I’m capable of when I have more than a week to really develop a universe like the one in Asphodel, he taught me confidence to go with the persistence I’d already spent years developing. And he recommended I read The Goon, which he insisted must be my spirit animal, and those books would make anyone want to break into the comics biz.
His own comic series Locke & Key was already a big influence on me creatively, and his novels Horns and NOS4A2 are some of my all-time favorites, so to have this really fun, avuncular dude who just wanted to hang out and play arcade games, drink milkshakes, and grab a pizza with us beginners was a breath of fresh air. When you love somebody’s writing—books that really speak to you and make you want to work hard and be a better storyteller—the idea of them enjoying and praising your writing sounds like a daydream, but I got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience that two years ago, and I’ve spent my time since developing the worldbuilding for this comic and finding the right collaborator.
4. How do you approach comic writing as opposed to short stories?
It feels like this much larger, more cinematic experience to me. There’s not as much of a need to tie everything up with a nice, bright-colored bow at the end, because ideally you want the story to continue going someplace beyond the first one or two issues. You want it to be an adventure with epic scope and the opportunity to explore this galaxy-sized world.
I’d say comics force you to consider issues of plot movement and action in a way that short stories don’t, too, because of the lack of interiority. You’re not usually spending those 22 pages just living inside some character’s head—and even when I think about the exceptions to that rule, the times a Batman story arc or even an issue of something like Locke & Key digresses into a character’s headspace, it’s really a reflection of some greater story that’s taking place around that person. And comics are great at telling those kinds of Homeric myth–sized stories on paper. The best of them outdo a lot of films and novels, in terms of the drama and the romance of it all.
With Asphodel, the goal is to do more than just describe a universe in prose: I want to actually build this place for the reader. Gale’s art does a pretty great job of that.
5. What sort of rewards are you offering for those who contribute to the Kickstarter campaign?
Just four dollars gets you a digital copy of the comic delivered right to your email, and it’s a backer-exclusive project until 2016, so folks who support the Kickstarter will get to read the story long before the rest of the world does. Fifteen dollars will get you a signed, personalized print copy—that’s a limited edition run we’ll be doing, and probably the only time Asphodel #1 will ever see print, unless Image Comics sees the book and falls in love sometime in the future.
And at higher pledge tiers, we’ll be giving away cool rewards like sketches and Gale’s original, full-color artwork for the issue. Folks who pledge twenty-five bucks or more will get things like bookmarks featuring the cover art, backer-exclusive desktop wallpaper, things like that. We have a stretch goal for a second issue, so if we manage to raise at least $12,000, we’ll be giving everybody who contributes a digital copy of Asphodel #2, meaning folks who pledged as little as a dollar toward helping us get this thing made and out into the world.
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Alex Kane is the managing editor of The Critical Press, a publisher of books on film and culture, as well as an executive producer of the Star Wars documentary The Prequels Strike Back. He also serves as a first reader for Uncanny Magazine and works full-time as a freelance copyeditor. A graduate of the 2013 Clarion West Writers Workshop, his fiction has appeared in more than a dozen venues, including the Exigencies anthology from Curbside Splendor’s Dark House imprint, edited by Richard Thomas. His reviews and criticism have been published in Foundation, The New York Review of Science Fiction, SF Signal, and Omni, among other places. He lives in west-central Illinois.
alexkanefiction.com • Twitter: @alexjkane
