Writer Ryan O'Sullivan talks A DARK INTERLUDE #1, more
By Zack Quaintance — I remember when Fearscape #1 hit in September 2018, and how it felt like a comic that someone had culled from my own subconscious and dressed up with some truly bold storytelling risks topped with excellent command of comics craft.
Fearscape is a Vault Comics release from writer Ryan O’Sullivan, artist Andrea Mutti, and colorist Vladimir Popov. What reeled me in so thoroughly (and, indeed, drew me in deeper and deeper throughout all five issues) was the narrative voice of protagonist Henry Henry, a talented but darkly flawed writer who essentially embodies pretentious writerly bravado while sacrificing very little to achieve the high accolades he believes he is owed. Henry Henry is all of us who have ever picked up a comic, read a novel, watched a movie, listened to a song, and thought — I must do that, or rather he’s the darkside of all our artistic ambitions.
The narrative voice alone, however, would not have sustained five excellent comics. No, what really made Fearscape work was how the contrast of that voice from the action on the page. It was a dark and delightful interplay, and when it ended, I wanted more. Well, guess what? More is coming this fall with the not-quite-a-sequel, A Dark Interlude, which has a first issue set to drop on November 11.
And in advance, I found time to speak with writer Ryan O’Sullivan about Fearscape, A Dark Interlude, his own relationship with literary pursuits, and more. You can check out our conversation below…
ZACK QUAINTANCE: Looking back at FEARSCAPE — the narrative voice was incredible — so I wanted to ask you about the creation of that voice and how you landed on using an unreliable narrator to drive the book?
RYAN O’SULLIVAN: There’s a lot of what you might call prescriptivism in the current comics discussion. X should always do X, or art should never contradict the text, or the text should never say what’s already shown in the art. Often, if you dare go against this maxim you are vilified as being an amateur. I thought, why don’t I take it to its most ridiculous lengths to show how farcical that rule is. What if the text and the art never agree with what’s being shown? The text is so faraway in its own separate story that it could never possibly show what’s in the art, it’s so busy trying to literally hide it behind narration boxes.
Once I had that playful idea, that gave me a basis on which to craft a story. The story of Fearscape is definitely second to the voice of it, as we learned when we were marketing the book. When we set out to market issue one, it was: there’s a world of our own filled with sentient fears and once in a generation — well, it sounds like Buffy. Then when readers read the first issue, they asked, ‘Well, why didn’t we know the main character was like this. He’s such a douche and it’s so fun to read?’ So we changed our focus.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the trade, but it’s Henry Henry critiquing how back cover blurbs work. It says nothing about the interior of the book, which is a bit of a risk, but it works because it gives readers the ideas that this is a tone-led book. There’s all the basics of the story, but if you like the voice of Henry Henry, you’ll like the book; if you don’t like the voice of him, you won’t. It’s that binary.
QUAINTANCE: Sure yeah, I know that was the case for me as a reader…
O’SULLIVAN: What I liked about the reaction to the book was that it varied from reader to reader or reviewer to reviewer, but each one had a moment of time in the book where they stopped sympathizing with Henry Henry.
QUAINTANCE: With A DARK INTERLUDE, which is not-quite-a-sequel, I don’t want to know too much about it in advance, but I did want to ask where are returning readers like myself going to find Henry Henry when we enter this thing?
O’SULLIVAN: Since Fearscape, Henry Henry has been placed in a mental health hospital to help with some of the issues we see at the end of Fearscape, and the second book teases the idea of him having a redemption story. The idea of someone who behaved as horrendously as he did and someone who has no sense of morality like him and is essentially a psychopathic — the idea of having a redemption arc after an entire book of him being an unreliable narrator: the reader is going to think, is he actually trying to redeem himself? Or is it just more of his nonsense? He might be going full David Foster Wallace earnest trying to get the reader onside.
But is he trying to get the reader inside? Or is he just a smart man who is good at manipulating people. The idea he might be trying to be good, he might not, maybe he doesn’t even know — I don’t want to keep the next book that binary. I want it to be this flexible malleable thing. Henry is a human being, and we are like that.
QUAINTANCE: One of the most powerful things to me about FEARSCAPE — having creative aspirations — is it really turned the mirror on me and made me examine my relationship with my own ego. That was one of the things I thought really worked about it…
O’SULLIVAN: It helped me realize all of the things that perhaps I did that were irritating as a writer and a reader. Henry was very cathartic in that respect. I did find it funny that I wrote this about writers and sent it out to all of these other writers and critics such as yourself, and everyone liked it. I thought, great everyone liked it…but I just sent it out to writers. What are readers going to think? Fortunately, there was a lot of buzz when it first came out.
When you make a book like Fearscape, you think who’s going to get this? Henry hates casual readers. So will casual readers think, Ryan O’Sullivan is a dick, he hates casual readers? No. Casual readers are pretty smart, and that was a lightbulb moment for me that made me realize I could do a lot more than perhaps I had in my early work.
QUAINTANCE: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is working in comics versus working prose. As soon as I read FEARSCAPE, I knew you couldn’t have written that without also having a heavy interest in literary fiction. So, what drew you to work in comics versus telling stories in prose?
O’SULLIVAN: I saw comics as more of a fringe medium. Prose is a fringe medium too, obviously, but I saw comics as a medium where new ideas could be explored relatively quickly. Growing up, I read comics, and they always seemed to be a couple of years ahead of the zeitgeist. It had always been instilled in me that comics is a place to do that.
There’s also an ego side of it, too. You see comics as the playground filled with lots of stories of escapists, and you think — I should do literature there! And then you end up doing something like FEARSCAPE where you’re almost capturing your own motives for getting involved in the first place. I saw a lot of potential in the medium and a lot of things that haven’t been done it. Wheres it’s such a mammoth task to write a novel and to do it well and to do it outside the current best practice. That would be incredibly difficult. With comics, there was more room to grow as I went. I’ve never actually thought, why comics and why not prose.
But in terms of the actual medium, I love the mixture of comics and text, and because comics has traditionally been stories for young readers — I know in the last 20, 30 years it’s shifted to more adults, but that’s not a long time — there’s still a lot of ground to explore. There is a lot of ground to cover, a lot of exciting new things to be done as we continue to find the language of it.
I’m seeing it more and more with the movement into the bookstore market — startup graphic novel publishers whose books are being well received. That’s the direction I find fascinating, and also the superhero creators. They’re doing very experimental stuff, too. I see it all moving toward complex narratives in comics, the idea that comics doesn’t have to handhold, that it doesn’t have to be straightforward, that it can challenge the reader. It may be a challenge to find that reader, because so many readers come to comics not for challenge but for escapism. But I think that audience is growing.
QUAINTANCE: Speaking of risk-taking, was there a moment that it kind of clicked that Fearscape had worked and that readers had gotten it?
O’SULLIVAN: Not really, no. I don’t know. I don’t know if there was a moment it ever clicked. If you’re doing challenging stuff, I’m not sure you’ll ever have that moment. When in the first round of reviews and emails, there were loads of people finding things in it and saying they’d liked this, that or the other — that moment for me was like, okay, I’ve found my people.
I don’t think there was ever a moment in the creation of it. Creation is always insecure. It’s a strange sort of pendulum. On the one hand you’ve got extreme egotism that you could make something like this, put it out in the world, and people will read it; and on the other hand you have almost crippling self-doubt that no one’s going to get it. You carry on regardless.
QUAINTANCE: It seems like there’s a useful system of checks and balances between them…
O’SULLIVAN: Yes, and his name is Adrian Wassel (laughs), and the White Noise guys as well. Between those four.
Ryan O’Sullivan.
QUAINTANCE: What a great set of collaborators to come up with. All four of you are doing such excellence work…
O’SULLIVAN: It’s competitive as well, in terms of the quality of the work. When one of us shares an idea they’ve got that’s good or work they’ve done that’s good, it compels the rest of us to do the same. It keeps us on our toes, as well as having friends to share the good memories with, the good times with, to commiserate the losses with — it’s also good to have a group of people around you who push you to do your best work. I’d recommend anyone in comics to do the same. Find a bunch of friends at a similar level with you in their career, and spend your time chatting about what you’re going through. That helps more than anything else.
You can read Fearscape #1 online now for free, and you can purchase the book online here.
Fearscape’s not-quite-a-sequel A Dark Interlude is set to launch in November, with A Dark Interlude #1.
Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.