By Zack Quaintance — Next week marks the release of Kane and Able from Image Comics, which sees two of the most interesting cartoonists in all of comics — Shaky Kane and Krent Able — teaming up. The book is a treasury edition, and it sees the madcap visions of each cartoonist coalescing into one volume. It may sound cliche, but my experience with reading Kane and Able made me think this is book for comics readers who truly love comics, who appreciate references to the mediums sacred cows within stories that just wouldn’t work in any other format.

I read and loved the book a few weeks back, and I was thrilled when Shaky Kane was game to answer a few questions about it. Questions that you, dear reader, can find in full below…enjoy! Kane and Able is out next Wednesday from publisher Image Comics, available in all local comic book stores of good standing at a price point of $12.99.

Check out the Shaky Kane interview now…

INTERVIEW: Shaky Kane talks new collaboration, KANE AND ABLE

ZACK QUAINTANCE: While your names as well as your aesthetics make it seem inevitable, I was wondering if you could talk about the impetus for teaming with Krent Able on this book right now?

SHAKY KANE: You know, the collaboration came from a chance remark by Jane (Kane) about how Krent and myself should do a book “Kane and Able”. It sounded so right that it had to happen. I’d met Krent at signings for books we had both contributed to. And I knew his work. I was a big fan. So we made a pact (with The Devil) and over the course of the lock-down year worked on our strips as a side-project to other work we had made commitments to.

ZACK: How did you and Krent work together to assemble the joint pieces and the unifying design of this book? And did you exchange input on your individual work in here too?

SHAKY: We worked independent of each other after agreeing we would split the book 50/50. There does seem to be unifying themes in our work. Specifically masked men and Insects. Krent was always big on insects.

ZACK: Related, is Exquisite Corpse a real thing people did/maybe still do? It's a fantastic name...

SHAKY: Yes, it’s the name of a parlor game, sometimes called Picture Consequences . I used to play it as a kid. Two of us would take turns drawing a figure, folding back the paper as they went, so that the other player couldn’t see what had already been drawn. You’d throw in peg-legs, hooks for hands, anything you could think of. When the final drawing was revealed It was always a lot of fun. Is this game familiar to American readers? It was only later that I found out that it had such a macabre name. Exquisite Corpse, I’ve no idea how that name came about.

ZACK: Mischief and mayhem (words I took from the promo material) definitely feels like a through line. I was wondering...were there any other unifying ideas you all laid out to bring the book together? As madcap as it got, it still felt cohesive…

SHAKY: Well, we’d send each other pages as we drew them up. I was blown away by Creepzone, it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen in comics. There is a similar aesthetic to my Dustmites strip. Do you remember those old Ditko mystery stories? They had a real impact on me. I wanted to do something both creepy and perplexing but with a logical chain of events, something truly “What the Heck!”, and of course it references events from Bulletproof Coffin, returning to the mysterious house where the events of the first book were set into motion. I think there are still a lot of ideas in Bulletproof to explore.

ZACK: Speaking of the promo material, I also noticed it says over-sized...is that about the page count or is the book in a larger format?

SHAKY: I wasn’t sure if it was clear from the press release. The book is 12 inches tall, similar to the Charles Burns books. Like X’ed Out. It’s quite a treasury edition.

ZACK: Finally, I love the Astonishing Shield Bug, both in terms of design and the way you use it to send up/homage sacred cows in comics. What are the chances we see more ASB comics at some point?

SHAKY: It’s too early to know. But if this book is even a moderate success, I’d like Kane and Able to be a regular summer event. There are plenty more Shield Bug stories. I like to think of the character as a narrator, along the lines of the Phantom Stranger. I always work right off the bat. I sort of make things up as I go along, but yes I’d love to see a second edition - Son of Kane and Able.

KANE AND ABLE is out in comic shops June 30

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.