William Harms has some demons to exorcise. The writer behind such popular video game titles as inFamous and Mafia III, Harms returns to comics with a different sort of tale in Dark Deep Down, a comic designed specifically to be read scrolling down on a phone.
Click through the slideshow below to read a preview of the first issue from publisher Stela. The synopsis for the story reads, "After losing his wife in a plane crash, Paul journeys beyond our reality, down into the underworld, to see her once more."
IGN conducted an email interview with Harms discussing story, the challenges and advantages of working in an app based structure, and the differences in writing for comics and games.
IGN Comics: Tell us a little about Dark Deep Down. The premise alludes to certain supernatural, or even spiritual, elements. How would you describe it?
William Harms: I’d classify Dark Deep Down as dark fantasy. It’s the story of a man named Paul Dailey whose wife Jennifer dies in a plane crash. Overcome by grief, Paul decides to kill himself. Before he can, though, a baby talks to him and tells Paul that he can journey to the Underworld and say goodbye to Jennifer. He’s accompanied by a homeless man and pursued by a couple of entities who don’t think Paul should be going where he’s going. It’s an updated version of the Orpheus myth.
Thematically, Dark Deep Down is really about grief, not only how it directly impacts someone like Paul, but how it radiates out from him and affects the other people in his life.
IGN: There’s a strong sense of realism to the read. If not for the synopsis, this first look would tease a very different title. Was that important in setting the tone for things to come?
Harms: I think it’s really important to ground a story like this in the “real world”. It not only helps the reader understand Paul and his situation, but it also provides a nice on-ramp for the story as a whole. Things get really weird and bizarre, but if you ease the reader into it, they’re more likely to buy into it.
At the same time, we wanted to hint that there’s a supernatural angle to the story, which is why the story opens the way it does, and why we use the text-only panels. Both of those are recurring elements throughout the story.
IGN: You’re working with Alejandro Aragon, who provides the art for the title. Considering the unique format of the read, has the way in which you collaborate differed from what you’ve done in the past?
Harms: By and large, I approached this as I would any other comic, with one big exception -- there’s no ability to go “wide”. The maximum width of every panel is what can fit onto the screen. On the flip side, when it comes to the vertical, you can go as big as you want. There are a few panels over the course of Dark Deep Down that are probably two or three splash pages stacked on top of each other.
So the thing Ale and I had to figure out was how to take big moments in the story and present them in a way that not only fit with the format but were also easy for the reader to follow and understand. That really fell on Ale, but if anything came up over the course of him laying out the panels, we’d discuss and I’d adjust the script as necessary. He was really the gatekeeper when it came to that side of things.
IGN: In addition to your work writing for games such as Mafia III and inFamous, you’ve also written a number of print comics through various publishers, including the inFamous spin-off for DC. Beyond the obvious scale, what’s unique in your approach to writing for one medium versus the other?
Harms: There are a lot less constraints when it comes to comic books. There’s a scene in Dark Deep Down, for example, where Paul is on a school bus that’s under attack. Ale still needed to draw the scene, obviously, and that’s no small amount of work, but at its core it’s just the two of us constructing this moment, along with our colorist Mike Spicer.
If Dark Deep Down was a video game, it’d be totally different. Art would have to create all of the visual assets, design would have to put the scene together as a level or mission and make sure it’s fun to play, engineering would have to ensure everything works, and audio would add all of the dialogue and sound effects. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just very different, and you need to be aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of each going in.
IGN: You’ve done a lot of work in the gaming industry. What games, if any, would compare to the experience you created with Dark Deep Down?
Harms: Dark Deep Down is pretty different from everything else I’ve written because it stems from my wife being diagnosed with cancer several years ago. She’s fully recovered, but it had a pretty profound impact on our lives and after a certain amount of time had passed, it’s something I wanted to explore in a story as a way of (maybe) exorcising some of those emotions.
IGN: Stela, the app for which Dark Deep Down is written, adheres to what is essentially a single page, single panel format. Has that limited structure changed your own storytelling process? How so?
Harms: You have to think of the panels being read from “top to bottom” versus “left to right”, which can be a little bit of a challenge. But there’s also some really cool stuff you can do in terms of moving the reader down a panel.
There’s a scene in Dark Deep Down where Paul’s crawling out of an old vent, and he kicks out a grate. We follow the grate down, across a very large panel and each time it ricochets off of something, we’re able to show the reader something cool. So if you plan ahead, you can really take advantage of the format and present the story in a way that’s not possible with traditional comic books.
Jeff is a writer for IGN. He can make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, probably. Follow him on Twitter and IGN.
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