By Jacob Cordas — Witchblood: Hounds of Love is available for pre-order from Vault Comics right now, and we had a chance recently to talk with writer Matthew Erman about everything that went into the making of this comic. The book is due out April 27, and you can read all about the making of these comics from Erman himself below…

Enjoy!

INTERVIEW: Matthew Erman

JACOB CORDAS: To start I just want to say how much I enjoyed Witchblood and most notably because of the way it pulls from punk movements, most notably queercore and riot grrrl. Was that punk core always a part of the pitch for Witchblood or did it just organically evolve to include it? Where did the idea for this comic come from?

MATTHEW ERMAN: Hey! Thank you so much and stoked you dug Witchblood. Music is a huge part of my creative process. One of the first things Lisa and I do for any project we’re working on together is build kind of an inspiration board that goes across a bunch of mediums and my part is curating the music that I identify with and hope becomes an inspirational to Lisa when she starts designing. Punk and the music most people attribute to that kind of energy or lifestyle, I think is a pretty open-ended thing, so much so that I don’t think there’s a single unifying belief other than those that embody “punk” do so on their own terms. They are not bound by really anything and stay true to who they are or what they aspire to be — the first handful of songs on the Witchblood playlist and some of those songs featured in the comic I don’t think most people would qualify as “punk” music except for Mannequin Pussy. Alan Jackson and Blue Oyster Cult, typically tend to be pretty faraway from any list of “punk” musicians, but I think that’s maybe part of the aesthetic appeal of punk — it is being yourself, not being ashamed that you like Alan Jackson and dad rock and Mannequin Pussy. I think its about being accepting of everything, finding some merit artistically or personally in most things you come without being judgmental. It all comes from somewhere, even the commercial stuff comes from someone’s heart. Punk is maybe about mass empathy to me. So yeah I think the tone of the music and the vibe organically lead to being baked into the design of the comic. Lisa knows where I’m coming from because I talk to her through so much of this, it gets left out of the script with her because we can just talk about it so much that it becomes part of the DNA.

Witchblood itself as an idea came from our love of the American Southwest, the landscape and the history there is so rooted in turmoil and change and roaming that it just felt so perfect for a story that we wanted to be antithetical to LONG LOST, our first comic. Movement is such a part of the story and everything in Texas is so far apart compared to Ohio (where we’re from) that places and cities and landmarks become their own events. Lisa has a huge personal connection to the esoteric — her tarot deck and just her love for all of that has bled over to me and on the flip side I’ve always loved the uhh, “lore” of western religious mythology. I’m a pretty apathetic atheist but using Christianity as a foundation to help build out a new fantasy world was a huge interest in writing this comic and I think we only scratched the surface of what that can mean in these ten issues.

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JACOB: Your use of music throughout the comic is so much fun. Whether it be just casual references, songs I was told to play while I listened to or just Mannequin Pussy lyrics (which thank you for including), it made the comic so dynamic and grounded. What led to the implementation of cultural referencing? Were there reference points you meant to include but weren’t able to?

MATTHEW: The pretentious answer is I think finding ways to implement touchstones of popular culture into what you’re writing really grounds it in modernity. People who know will know, and that will give the one person a unique and personal context to the story that maybe someone else won’t have. I am so grateful that Missy and Mannequin Pussy were into letting us her lyrics in the opening pages. Without that I don’t know if I would have been so bold with directing the readers to do specific music queues for scenes and stuff.

The not pretentious answer is that Hirohiko Araki has done it for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure for the last 30 years and so I wanted to do it for Witchblood.

JACOB: I saw the trade coming out in April is going to be subtitled Hounds of Love, one of the best Kate Bush albums and one of the Editor-In-Chief’s favorite albums. There’s a running through line in the comic involving Hounds of Love I won’t go into here to avoid spoilers. What about that album stood out to you so much and made it such a perfect match for this project?

MATTHEW: God. Kate Bush is just perfection, isn’t she? Personally I just love the album and I think there are so many beautiful and poignant moments and themes and ideas in that album that it would be a disservice to claim I did it for any other reason as pure, straight homage to this thing that Lisa and I love to death. That album feels to me like a battlecry for ethereal, abstract things like love and power and belief and the enormity of existence but also personal longing and romance. It’s perfect. I’m also a huge aesthetic fan of anachronisms that Kate Bush and Vampire Biker Gangs and Blood Magic all feel very connected to me. I can’t say why but it feels connected to me, and sometimes that’s all I need to make that leap.

JACOB: The world the comic takes place in is so distinctly vivid while still being clearly Southwestern - a sharp distinction from the normally faded out browns, reds and purples we are used to seeing. Where did this arresting aesthetic come from?

MATTHEW: Lisa! Our last comic Long Lost was more or less monochromatic up until the last couple chapters. Lisa has always had this very intense relationship with color in her work and I think when we knew settled on a visual style and working through preliminary color palettes, Lisa wanted it to be explosive and big and bright and hot warm. There’s so much life bursting from the sepia of the desert that it again felt like we’d be doing that locale a disservice if we didn’t present it how we see it. When we’re there in the Southwest its just so big and beautiful and vast — the sky is enormous and the landscape never ends. It felt right to use color as a way to tell that story of the place and Gab Contreras when she came onboard as our colorist really, really expanded our language there. I also think that the music we loved and listened to for this project helped us see the bigger picture. Music from that area is so colorful whether it's honky tonk or norteño or folk, it all has its own different palette of sound and instruments and purpose that we wanted to take that idea across everything in this book. The colors, the dialogue, the covers — it needed to be as loud and as vibrant as the music that originates from that area.

I’m by no means an expert on any of this stuff, really just a passionate fan and we learned so much doing this book.

JACOB: The characters in Witchblood hit a real diverse range, yet they all feel organic and natural to the story. It ends up feeling like a goth punk night at a local club that I went to by myself with the natural clashes that will occur in those spaces. Were you pulling at all from people you know, you’ve met or were they all natural extensions of the themes and world you were building?

MATTHEW: A little of both! I definitely have known people like Samson or Paxton. I think there’s a bit of me and Lisa in Yonna, Atlacoya and Texas Red. The diversity in character felt like a natural extension of the fantasy world we were building. You want people to wonder why Hunger Child is how they are or why Monkberry has that name and how it plays into the larger world. We tried referencing the interconnected web of culture that most people in modernity deal with — Paxton sounds familiar. Samson sounds familiar. If you get the references or know what we’re pulling from it helps accentuate the world — it makes the creation of the book feel communal. We like Near Dark, this reader likes Near Dark and knows Bill Paxton played a vampire in that movie and that knowledge maybe helps you understand our headspace when we’re creating this. I don’t think there is magic to creativity, it’s maybe just something you get more comfortable playing with and finding ways to be creative that make you feel like you’re expressing what you want to express. I like Bill Paxton in that movie so that’s why a handful of decisions were made. Working in American History and Alternative world history helped us build something that looks like our world, sounds like things people are familiar with and we wanted to use that as a tool to help color the characters. I think there is a line maybe in Issue 8 or something where Yonna explicitly says that Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love exists as an album in this world and that knowledge in turn gives you a smidge more into the kind of person Paxton, who would name his vampire biker gang after a esoteric pop album from our 1980s.

JACOB: The use of occultism and vampirism in the story adds such a delightful quality to Witchblood making it feel almost like a Studio Ghibli film got produced by W.I.T.C.H.. Were these elements a natural extension of the queer-feminism you were interested in writing about? Did you toy with other gothic-horror elements before settling on those?

MATTHEW: Wow thank you. I’ve never heard of W.I.T.C.H. before so I’ll have to definitely check that out. I appreciate you saying the story works in the queer/feminism space. I never intend to do work that talks about those things or preaches or anything, I try to really just write a good story that respects the characters and what the creative team builds. So much of what I do when I’m working with Lisa is writing for her designs. Seeing what she comes up and trying to respect that so I’m happy that people can see that in this, I try really hard to make sure that whatever my voice is as a writer isn’t louder than the the other artists on the book. So yeah, thank you.

As to the question, occultism and vampirism are cool. People have an opinion on them typically, even when they don’t really know much about it or don’t prefer those worlds over others. I think that’s great, it helps me as a writer think about what the expectations for these things are and not necessarily subvert them because if you like Vampires you want to see them drink blood and if you like occult shit you want to see demons and monsters and devils and have that mythology explored, but subvert in the sense that I can show and do new things, build on what people already enjoy about those things.

I would say that there is nothing off limits in Witchblood if it continues past these 10 issues. That’s really exciting for and getting to play with more gothic horror elements and mold them to fit our world is something that I just hope I get to do.

JACOB: I loved the tarot inspired variant covers as well as the more subtle tarot imagery throughout. What was the process that led to involving that tarot imagery? Have you ever had your tarot cards read?

MATTHEW: Thank you! Lisa really loved them doing. Lisa wouldn’t admit it but she’s a low-key tarot master. Her deck “The Modern Witch Tarot” has really changed both of our lives and she wanted to do more tarot designs. And yeah! I love getting my cards read — really beautiful way to recontextualize things in your life. Lisa has read mine and I’ve done readings for myself and others. Its fun and between people that trust each other to maybe give some hard advice or work through sometimes really personal stuff it can be a wonderful thing to become closer. I love it.

JACOB: Can we expect more from coming up from this world? If so, can I request a G.L.O.S.S. lyric be included in the next series? What projects can we expect coming from you in the future?

MATTHEW: You’ll have to ask Adrian at Vault about more Witchblood! I definitely wouldn’t say no to another arc.

For upcoming projects, I’ve got a graphic novel coming out with Vault, Bonding, that is coming out later this year with Emily Pearson on interiors, Kaylee Pinecone on colors with Andworld doing our letters. I’ve got unannounced books coming from Dark Horse, ONI, IDW and Mad Cave in the future, so I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to consistently get work the last two years. They’re all really diverse in terms of genre and what they’re doing so I’m excited to see what people think.

And you got it, consider “Masculine Artifice” to be at the top of the list for songs to put into the next arc.

JACOB: Finally, one of the things I love about your comic and the punk music it pulls from is the way it makes people feel seen. What is the album that first got you into this scene?

MATTHEW: Thank you again for such kind words. I hope people that read my comics and my stories feel like they aren’t alone in whatever it is. No one is alone. We’re all here and we’re not alone. Sometimes it just takes searching to find the people that are out there already loving you.

As far as albums helped me feel seen here are five in no particular order.

Thursday - War All the Time
The Blood Brothers - Burn Piano Island Burn
Cat Power - What Would the Community Think
Godspeed You! Black Emperors - Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven
At The Drive-in - VAYA

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My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am starting to think I may in fact be qualified to write this.