Gail Simone and Jon-Davis Hunt want to scare you silly. In Clean Room, from Vertigo Comics, the demented duo have treated readers to member dismembering monkeys, deranged entities, and enough psychological baggage to fill a Dr. Phil special.
To coincide with the first trade's June 21 release, IGN conducted an email interview with the creators to talk creative collaboration, how to use humor in horror, and the trick to getting sick on the page.
IGN: Clean Room marks your first work with Vertigo. With your first trade collected, how has the experience been looking back?
Gail Simone: It's my first ongoing with Vertigo. I'd done a couple shorter pieces, and they seemed to want me to do a book for them, and I WANTED to do a book for them, but in nearly a decade of being a DC exclusive, it just never seemed to come together.
But it really clicked with Clean Room, somehow, and Shelly Bond loved it the concept so much she insisted on editing it herself, and it was a real passion project for her. I miss her very much, but fortunately, circumstances were such that my OTHER favorite editor, Molly Mahan, whom I adored while working on Red Sonja, has taken over the book. So editorially, I couldn't be more fortunate.
Vertigo's been amazing to me and to our book. They care so much about every issue. And they've made it very clear that they want me to tell the story I want to tell.
Beyond that, they got me the best artist, the best cover artist, and the best colorist. Many writers go their entire career without that confluence of wonderfulness. So, I am pretty much a Vertigo adorer.
IGN: Many of your past titles share a unique balance between humor and horror. Does the freedom allowed in Clean Room change the way you utilize those two elements? Is the challenge more in how you push those limits, or in how you keep them reigned in?
Simone: I love mixing humor and terror, or humor and exhaustion, or even humor and despair. I'm dealing right now with a loved one with cancer, and she's of course sad, but also telling the most disturbingly morbid jokes and puns. I love that, there's so much humanity in being able to mock fate and hardship.
That said, Clean Room is, I think, more unsettling. There's humor in it, actually quite a lot, but it's not guys in tights throwing catchphrases, it's more the humor of the autopsy table.
Some of the stuff makes me laugh, but a lot of that laughter is the nervous titter when you know the guy with the chainsaw is still out there, somewhere.
IGN: Astrid Mueller began as a very clear antagonist, but over the course of the first volume her character becomes much harder to define. Given the revelations recently come to light it's fair to wonder; is she the villain of this piece? Or the hero?
Simone: It is perfectly fair to wonder.
I write about heroes all the time, and I'm struck by how much of what fills us with wonder in the man-made world was the brainchild of a monster. I mean, slaves built most of the ancient wonders, our city skylines are dominated by the product of sometimes very ruthless capitalist ideals. There's a horrifying thought that I often wonder, which is, are monsters sometimes necessary?
Clean Room is about that thought. What if we sometimes NEED someone awful, someone with no conscience? Is that ever truly advisable? Do we even want to know that answer?
IGN: Turning to Jon. He draws some pretty twisted, nightmare inducing stuff, but he also excels at making even the most normal of situations look slightly off. Has that dexterity changed your writing process?
Simone: Yeah, absolutely. Here's the thing, trust changes everything. Once you know what an artist can do, and you know their commitment level, it opens up the playbook hugely. I have worked with artists I really love, but they may have some small aspect that they hate drawing, or that they don't excel at, and that effectively takes that option off the table.
Jon is the wildman opposite of that. He wants MORE. He draws MORE than what I ask for. He adds panels, he adds choreography, he checks the fashion and the facial expressions. And if I ask for horror, he puts the blood spatter so brutally on the page that you feel a bit like you got stabbed yourself.
So I have that total trust, I know I can give him an idea or emotion, and it's just going to be there, BAM, on the page, better than I could have hoped for. If we soar sometimes, it's because Jon puts rocket fuel in his pencils.
I've been lucky to have a few artists like this; Nicola Scott and Walter Geovani and a few others. It's the great joy of what I do, working with someone like Jon.
Plus, he knows how to put the sick on the page!
IGN: Much of Chloe's character comes from her need for answers, and at times it feels that the more she learns the less she knows. In telling a story such as this, how do you balance the addition of new elements while still maintaining the integrity of the initial premise?
Simone: Part of Clean Room is definitely in reaction to narratives that I felt cheated the audience, things like LOST. You watch dozens of hours, at the end, you have a ton of questions, few answers, and a gigantic asspain.
There's been a tremendous amount revealed since issue one, and every question has an answer. I think a rereading shows a lot of things were there in that first issue that now have much greater context. I like the peeling-an-onion storytelling approach, it's just that when you've peeled back all the layers, I don't want you to just have more damn onion, you know?
Let's peel back the layers and have naked aliens having sex. Or the fall of civilization. Or a talking marmoset. Anything's better than just an empty promise.
Damn, that's probably a big onion, now that I think about it.
IGN: Clean Room is host to some disturbing visuals. Is there a clear deliberation in regards to what to include, or do you just take an idea and run with it?
Jon Davis-Hunt: In most cases, Gail will write a really good, detailed description of the kind of image she wants. What’s great about Gail’s descriptions though is that they won’t just include physical or visual details, but quite often, they’ll also describe a particular feeling, or mood that she wants to convey to the reader. In quite a few cases, I’ll rely on that more than necessarily the specific description of the visuals. I think we’ve been lucky that we pretty much visualize stuff in the same way and Gail’s writing makes the scenes pop into my mind. It’s probably one of the most fun parts of getting a new script (aside from finding out what happens next), when I get to those little moments where Gail will say ‘Okay Jon, on this page, we really want to scare the hell out of the reader. This is what we’re gonna do...’
IGN: There's a difference between graphic and unsettling. How do you balance the presentation of certain material in a way that's frightening but not gratuitous?
Davis-Hunt: That’s a good question. I think it’s massively helped by the pacing of the script and the way Gail writes. This isn’t an overtly gratuitous book, in the sense that its not one constant stream of gross images. The horror is nested, very much, inside the every day. Most of the book is about building character and (most importantly for horror) tension, so that when the scares come, they have context and balance. You get that great sense of impending doom and you actually care about who is getting his/her head ripped off when it finally happens. Although in the case of this book, it’s never as simple as someone just getting their head ripped off.
In terms of actually depicting stuff, like the Entities and some of the full on horror moments, that mostly comes from me wanting the book to really have it’s own visual style. There are so many great horror books out there, I wanted Clean Room to standout and my very first reaction to reading Gail’s first scripts were – I’m gonna make this bright. This is going to be horror, with the lights on. Bright, shiny and clinical. Because of that, we do show a lot of very detailed, pretty horrific stuff.
When that happens, I do my best to try and fascinate and horrify at the same time. I’m a sucker for detail and I have a pretty clean inking style, so I tend to do a lot of research and depict stuff that on the one hand, is really gross, but on the other hand, makes you, as the reader, study the image.
Again, a lot has to do with Gail. She gets really creative with the specific big, bold moments of horror. Most of the time, I’m just trying my best to scare her.
IGN: Fans of the series know Clean Room's second arc started with a literal bang. What would you like to say to new readers looking to get on board?
Davis-Hunt: Gail and I have done our level best to create a really distinct horror book with Clean Room, which in the first volume, posits a very simple question.
In a world filled, with quasi-neoreligious cult leaders and YouTube conspiracy fanatics peddling various crazy theories – what if one of those theories was actually completely, 100% correct.
If you want to see what dark and shiny horrors that brings forth, then please buy our book. And we’ll do our very best to scare you silly!
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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