By Zack Quaintance — Today we have a new installment in what has so far been a 2021 series here at Comics Bookcase, an interview with the creator(s) of publisher Vault Comics newest series. Today, we talked to writer Matthew Erman about the new book Witchblood, and we were lucky enough for the book’s artist, Lisa Sterle, to pop in and answer one of our questions too. It’s a great chat about what stands to be one of the most stylish comics of the year.

Enjoy!

Matthew Erman Interview - WITCHBLOOD

ZACK QUAINTANCE: I’ve been patiently waiting for your next collaboration since you finished Long Lost, so I want to start by asking, what were some of the main ways that your creative process differed between the two books?

MATTHEW ERMAN: That’s so wonderfully kind of you to say. Long Lost really was this behemoth of learning. I learned how to write comics and Lisa learned how to draw a monthly comic series. That whole story is really us from beginning to end, learning what it means to make a “good” comic book. Luckily for the both of us, it actually turned out pretty good and well received. We’re very lucky that it managed out that way. Since Long Lost though, both of us really have had the opportunity to w-o-r-k in the industry. I’ve done I think six or seven different projects since Long Lost and Lisa has done even more things since then, so I feel like we’ve both grown an incredible amount. Witchblood really is a level up for us as creators and artists, and I’m really proud of that.

The creative process, honestly, was about the same though. We spent so long thinking and talking and working out the details of this story one on one, and then when Vault and Adrian [Wassel] came in, it was such a breath of fresh air. For Long Lost, we didn’t have an “editor” in the traditional sense. That’s all sweet-and-condensed Matthew & Lisa, if you know what I mean. It’s very unrefined in a sense. Not that that is a bad thing, it’s just different. With Witchblood, working with Adrian and an entire team of people have really let us spread our wings and do what we do best, individually. I could focus on writing the story I wanted to tell and Lisa can really focus on delivering the best inks she’s ever done. With the support of a team like Vault, it opens up so much creative bandwidth, and we both really love that.

As far as writing the story, I’ve also put a bigger emphasis on making sure I’m writing things that Lisa wants to draw, which has also changed the process for us a bit. Plot and story can serve Lisa’s work in a way that is more deliberate than in Long Lost.

ZACK: I spotted some common themes between Long Lost and Witchblood, namely small-town America, fish-out-of-water heroes, and going on a journey. What draws you to these themes?

MATTHEW: I’m not sure! That’s a great question. I don’t like writing certain things, and so these other things kind of come to the forefront. I also like writing from, I guess, a kind of personal experience — not that I’m a witch on a motorcycle or have I been traipsing through the American Southwest, but there is a feeling that I relate to in Yonna, in feeling that the people I come from or the family I “belong” to, I no longer identify with — whether that’s the town I grew up in or some people in my family that I don’t really feel connected to anymore. That’s a big part of Yonna, happy isolation, away from the things she has deemed toxic or unpleasant. I think that’s a healthy mindset, for Yonna though, I think there’s a lot she doesn’t know about herself still, and these decisions she makes, while on the surface seem healthy and serve her well — can be made for the wrong reasons.

To me, there is something beautiful in realizing there is more to connection or love or happiness than blood. Many people don’t have positive relationships with “family” and a lot of media depicts this as a kind of brokenness that I don’t agree with — finding the people you belong with, finding the people that make you better and finding the places in the world that serve your lifestyle is a journey, and in my experience these things lead you away from environments that may be toxic.

I don’t know if this has anything to do with Witchblood, but people should feel that they belong and deserve to be happy. Sometimes blood gets in the way of that I guess.

ZACK: I absolutely loved the fashion in this comic. How closely did you work together on making clothing choices, and where did the inspiration for some of the looks come from? The characters look uniformly amazing.

MATTHEW: Lisa is a curation wizard, a research fiend — really the fashion in this comic is 90% Lisa and 10% me going, “What about a fancier hat or something.” My job is to give the characters life with what they do and what they say, and Lisa can read this and really understand how to visualize these characters. Yonna went through a bunch of iterations, and so did Paxton — those two characters took the most tinkering to get right because we wanted something immediately us, immediately recognizable but also hits some of those obscure things we love in character design. I think just looking at Yonna, you can tell where Lisa was and her headspace and what kind of character she wanted to draw and her designs really influenced the writing. Same with Paxton, I think I had the most input on his design, through development. He was originally this big, burly beefy cowboy and then his designed changed into Samson's once some Paxton's personality traits got drilled down.

For the styles of the story, we really love anachronistic fashion — things that work but maybe don’t make the most amount of sense sometimes. Yonna is this mix of 80s punk and grunge and 90s riot girl stuff and then another character is like ‘70s Catholic-Chic, and another character wears lots of red leather. It’s all over the place. We want to keep visually exciting, a new character means a new vibe or a new type of fashion and that’s really exciting for us, so it feels really exciting for the reader too, at least we hope.

We also really try and find the things that make the most amount of sense for the character rather than the world. Lisa is really, really good at It and I am always pushing for it because I think it deepens world-building. Whatever that is.

ZACK: I actually found Long Lost way back when someone from Vault (one of the Wassels!) recommended it to me, and I though, oh, that team would be great doing a Vault book. I know Lisa worked with Vault on the excellent series Submerged, but I was curious — what made Vault the ideal publisher for this book?

MATTHEW: Lisa and I had both worked with Adrian prior to Witchblood. She did SUBMERGED with the incredible Vita Ayala and Stella Dia, and I’ve got BONDING still in production with Emily Pearson, Kaylee Pinecone and Jim Campbell. When we sat down and thought about the publishers that would give us the kind of freedom to tell this story how we wanted — more than five issues, really big ideas, really big risks when it comes to genre and tone — Vault was at the top of the list based on our past experiences with them. Talking with Adrian, he immediately understood what kind of story this was, and what it wasn’t and that was super exciting to me. When you show this thing that borrows all of these ideas from horror and western and tell your editor “it’s not actually a horror or a western and we don’t want it to be” and they get it and understand what you’re trying to do, it’s so liberating.

I think the other thing to was the potential to work with some of Vault’s stable of creators as well, the variant covers we’ve seen so far are unbelievable, working with Gab and Jim is a dream and the Wassel brothers and the company they keep are good people. They made us tacos once.

ZACK: I really enjoyed the color work in this comic. How closely did you all work with Gab Contreras on what I might call “neon old west,” which is absolutely a perfect set of shades for this book?

LISA: It is such a healthy collaboration. Gab’s colors are so beautiful and when we saw her work we immediately felt like the palettes she chose really, really could work for this comic. When I was doing concept art for the book, I had this idea of neon, and really bright, harsh colors and my early designs featured some of these color palettes that we wanted to find in a colorist. We’d met Gab at Emerald City Comic Con a couple years ago and we went to a Hibachi Grill. Matthew was really excited about the onion mountain that got set on fire, because it was his first time. Anyway, cut to two years later and we’re working with her on this. Gab has really expanded the color scope of the book in such a beautiful way, she really gets how to create an otherworldly palette and her colors just complete my artwork perfectly. She really takes the concept for what we wanted and blows it up to this really, really bright exciting unique thing.

One of the best parts of working on this book is getting to collaborate and find new ways to showcase the story. Working with Gab to bring this comic to life is everything that makes working in comics a joy.

ZACK: Finally, do you both have a moment or moments of creative work on this book that you are especially proud of, and can you talk about why they worked so well?

MATTHEW AND LISA: There’s a scene in the second issue that we weren't sure was going to be actually legal to print, and it got the green light by Vault and now it’s the craziest thing we’ve ever done. In the first issue as well, getting Missy from Mannequin Pussy to sign off on using her lyrics on the second page was absolute serendipity . We’re both very lucky that this book has come together the way that it has, we’re so proud and can’t wait for everyone to really get deep into it.

It’s a wild ride.

Witchblood #1 is due out March 31. You can pre-order Witchblood #1 digitally via comiXology or physically via Amazon.

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