By Zack Quaintance — Since The Blue Flame from Vault Comics launched earlier this year, it’s been one of my personal favorite books, scoring one of only four perfect 10 scores awarded to new comics in 2021. It’s a hazy trauma fever dream of a book, melding a stark and dramatic real world tragedy narrative with pulpy sci-fi adventuring of the highest order. There’s a lot going on in this book, particularly in the way the two narratives sort of dance with each other, blurring the lines between narratives in ways that lend both more meaning.

It is, succinctly-put, good comics. And today we are honored to have a wide-spanning interview with two of the book’s creators, writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Adam Gorham, who have brought this book to us along with colorist Kurt Michael Russell and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. The Blue Flame #5 is out today, marking the halfway point in this very intriguing story…

…check out our full chat below, and enjoy!

INTERVIEW: Christopher Cantwell and Adam Gorham talk THE BLUE FLAME #5

ZACK QUAINTANCE: We’re talking now ahead of issue #5, and what the reader knows about the trajectory of the story is almost entirely changed from issue #1...feels like you’d have to account for that in any conversation about The Blue Flame. So, I wanted to ask you both...how has it been generally to talk about and/or promote this comic?

CHRISTOPHER CANTWELL: I have to admit, it’s funny when people ask where the idea came from for it, because honestly the answer is it came from totally feeling like powerless shit in the face of the spirit-breaking tsunami onslaught that is contemporary civilization, culture, and society. I find myself trying to dress that up a bit for polite conversation when people ask, but that’s the honest truth. I do wish we got to talk about it more. I still hold out hope that this book will inspire more real conversation. But at the same time, I feel out on a limb when trying to articulate what the book is about, and how it functions as a story. There is analytical logic to everything I’m doing, but I also feel like I’m writing from a vast well of visceral feeling with this book, perhaps more so than any other title I’m doing right now. I think it’s important to note that the book isn’t a puzzle box waiting to be solved. There are two bifurcated storylines that are also inextricably linked. There is no big JJ Abrams twist coming to provide an answer to the question mark. I’ve seen so many people write about this that it makes me scratch my head. I thought by and large audiences were savvy enough to be beyond this basic mode of thought. A lot of people seem to be getting what we’re doing, though, and simply appreciating it. But there’s been enough “what’s going on” that it’s even made me consider providing clearer answers in later issues. But each of these ideas I have feels diminishing to the work. So it’s simply not coming. I’ve tried to lay in vectors and threads that might point to an explanation, if someone is so desperate to grasp for one. But it’s beside the point. Also the “I like this story more than the other story” is a funny line of critique the book’s gotten. I don’t care which one people like more. I like the Death Star scenes in Star Wars more than the Tatooine scenes. But one doesn’t exist without the other. I wish the Ghostbusters had done more missions in those long gray coats they wear in their TV commercial. I mean, not really. But my preference has no bearing on the actual empirical story.

ADAM GORHAM: I have the easier task of promoting our book on social media by sharing art that Kurt and I are producing. The story we are telling isn’t something I have the ability to break down into digestible bites within a hundred and whatever characters. My hope is always that my pretty pictures bring attention to what we’re doing in The Blue Flame. The feedback I receive from fans and readers has been really terrific and it means more than I can express online to know that we are striking a chord with people.

ZACK QUAINTANCE: How has each of your work on the scenes set in Wisconsin informed your work on those set in outer space? It may be in my head, but I’ve felt almost an increase in severity for the sci-fi storyline as we’ve seen more of our characters on earth in the aftermath of the shooting…

CANTWELL: Yeah, everything is building to a head. Things in Milwaukee will intensify as will things on Exilos. But there’s an ebb and flow to both and they mirror each other. Both go up, both go down. And then sometimes the rhythm is syncopated. Playing with that pacing has been a really valuable tool in the storytelling for me. Blue Flame is a book where I also can actually write against the idea of page flips, and towards the idea of peripheral vision. Big scene changes might happen typically in page flips. But as our story progresses, I want the corner of your right eye to be telling you that we’re going to be in space in a matter of seconds, even as you’re looking at something taking place in Milwaukee. It’s like sending a signal to the brain biologically that both stories are happening at once and informing each other.

ZACK: Chris, I’m curious about the inception of this comic. Did the entire concept come to you at once, or did working from one of the tracts in this story and give rise to the other? 

CANTWELL: Well, like I said earlier, the first thing that hit me was the emotional weight. And that came late 2019, even before the pandemic. That weight made me examine the creative work I was doing, which at that point was heavily Marvel work. And I had this gut punch feeling of “what is the fucking point of this super hero stuff in the face of the reality we are all living in?” But I chose to answer that question in a productive, creative way with this story. And yeah, there were always going to be two sides of it. And in things like David Lynch movies, I knew I never really wanted to answer the mystery. I just wanted to continue to hit the emotional notes of profound duality, which is something I feel we all experience as people on a more nuanced level. It’s like Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty, Dougie and evil Dale Cooper, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. It doesn’t matter which one is “real” or not. Both are. And also neither are. It’s all about the character’s perception of themselves, and how others are seeing them in a particular moment. Both experiences are 100% legitimate, concrete, and have real stakes.

ZACK: Adam, I wanted to ask about your process. How has your work been ordered in illustrating The Blue Flame? Are you working in the sequence we see when it’s finished, or have you been separating the two worlds in the story? And what’s the benefit for you to work this way?

GORHAM: I draw everything in the order it is written. Skipping ahead to pages has always been jarring for me. I have a personal journey while I work on a project. I will construct pages in blocks and concentrate on 4-5 pages at a time, or however long the beat may be, and in that window I take this mental journey that’s one part digesting what is going on in my life and another part what is happening in the story. Often I find something I can relate to and the experience of working through that with art can be therapeutic. 

ZACK: Finally, apologies for the incredibly heavy ending question but it feels appropriate given this book — how are each of you feeling about humanity today, and how could you mount your own defense for saving it in front of a cosmic tribunal?

CANTWELL: I want to give you a measured response but honestly? TERRIBLE. Maybe I read the news too much. I’m fucking terrified, to be honest. I try to keep a level head about it. I remember my Zen training when I can. I worry about my sons’ futures. The pandemic rages. The polarization rages and erupts often into violence, reported or not. Climate change looms. Something I think that is certainly not helping is that the pandemic has siloed all of us into very limited solitary experiences of our daily lives. We see people, sure, and some see people way more than maybe they should, but I think that alone is doing a lot to assault my spirit. If and when the pandemic lifts, I really will probably feel better. So many more experiences will be accessible. Of course, some people are just going on about their normal lives as if there is no pandemic whatsoever. I think that level of selfishness has really thrown me for a loop. I have been fairly pragmatic for much of my adult life out of necessity, but I’ve been blown away by the conflation of individuality and “freedom” with “fuck everyone else who isn’t me.” It’s scary, and it informs and feeds all these different crises we’re currently facing. But that’s the thing, I know a better life and a better world is out there. I think someone like Sam knows that, too, in our book, even if he can never precisely articulate it. Perhaps that better life is just out of reach forever. A lot of Sam’s pain comes from that. Mine, too. It is a tricky and strange thing that human beings have developed this concept of perfection, or betterment. I understand it evolutionarily, but it’s also become a kind of pathology, an impossible task we can never complete. And we burn out from exhaustion and we fall away from it or actively turn away from it. I’m not promoting some kind of Ben Franklin improvement of the self bullshit, either. I think real happiness and gratitude can come instead from radical acceptance. But I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Not for want of trying. I’m just saying… it’s hard. I hope that when someone picks up the full volume of our book, all ten issues together, and reads it cover to cover, they’ll get what Adam, Kurt, Hass, Adrian, and I have been trying to say. It’s not a message. It’s not instructional. It’s really us just trying to convey to someone viscerally this idea of “Hey, guys, this is really fucking hard, isn’t it?” Beauty is fleeting, which makes it all the more potent and valuable. Kindness is often the same. Suffering exists. If someone reads our book, feels those truths, sees them in their own lives, then puts the book down and appreciates an errant blue sky, or a temperate breeze, or the sound of the birds, or the smile on one of their kids’ faces for a moment, even if fifteen minutes later they fall back into the buzzsaw, then we did our jobs. 

 And if I were going to mount a defense of humanity before a galactic court, I would be sure to get good and thoroughly shitfaced beforehand.

GORHAM: Working on this book is helping me answer such a question. Truthfully, I often feel pessimistic about the future of our species, and it sucks to feel that way because I really like humans. I’m in my mid-30’s now and there are more funerals and divorces going on around me than there are births and weddings. World news is almost always heartbreaking in some way. However, I also remind myself that as an adult I don’t have the luxury of ignoring the bad and ugly things about our world. There’s no going back to When Things Were Good (which is laughable because growing up in the 90’s we were warned about what we’re experiencing now with climate change). I need to look the devil in the eye and put my best foot forward every day because any good I put out in the world can inspire goodness in others, and I like to think that’s what will save us. The only time I have is now and all we have is each other. When I forget that the world becomes a dark and lonely place. So I exercise in remembering what life is all about. 

THE BLUE FLAME #5 is out now

Read more great interviews with comics creators!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.