By Zack Quaintance — On Wednesday, Hollow Heart #1 will hit shops, bringing readers the newest project from the creative team of Paul Allor and Paul Tucker, who have previously collaborated on the Vietnam War love story, Tet. This new book stands to be something different, a jaunt into a personal sort of body horror and sci-fi. Today, we have an in-depth interview with both Pauls, talking about the comic, the personal overlap, and their frequent collaborations.

Enjoy!

INTERVIEW: Paul Allor and Paul Tucker talk HOLLOW HEART #1

ZACK QUAINTANCE: I want to start by asking about a phrase in the preview copy that I found to be poignant — “...about the choices we make between giving our loved one what they want and what we think they need…” — can I dive right in and ask how personal this is for you both?

PAUL ALLOR: ... ten? Ten out of ten personal? I think everything I write, and especially the creator-owned stuff, gets very personal, even if it doesn't seem that way. A good friend of mine once said he'd like to see me put more of myself in my comics, and I did that blinking-guy meme before realizing he felt that way because of a perceived lack of overtly autobiographical elements in them. But yeah, with most of my comics, if you sit down and read them you'll get to know me a lot better than you will from having a one-hour conversation with me, and Hollow Heart is no exception. 

 PAUL TUCKER: This was Paul's seed for our story, and I've enjoyed exploring it. I don't know if I can graft this message on to any personal experience. On some level, I hope that I have avoided the pitfalls that Matteo experiences as his relationship with EL develops. That said, I'm sure at some point in my life I've pushed my agenda on someone subconsciously. I know I've been met with some blank stares when I've told people they need to make a comic.

QUAINTANCE: I’ll just keep the very personal questions going (sorry! the book lends itself to that in such a nice way) and ask, one of the protagonists here suffers from what sounds like chronic pain, how do you each relate to that sort of condition?

TUCKER: I can't claim to have suffered in any persistent way. I've been witness to it, I've gone through some tough spats like we all do, but generally I have things really good. I think I fall in the category of being a happy-go-lucky guy day-to-day, while being attracted to despair and torment in the art I make and consume.

ALLOR: My Dad lived with chronic pain resulting from an injury he sustained in the Air Force. By the time I was in elementary school, his back already looked like an urban roadmap from all of his surgeries, and near the end of his life he had a spinal cord stimulator implanted, so we're talking 40-plus years spent trying unsuccessfully to live a life free from pain.

 When I picture my Dad, I picture him with a cane, because he had one by his side for probably the last 30 years of his life. I think of his cane as being a part of him, but it wasn't. It was just a thing, and if he could read the words "I think of his cane as being a part of him," I think that would fucking horrify him. But pain shapes you. For my dad, his pain and his mobility issues shaped where he could live, what he could do, how long he could sit in one place (which severely limited how he could travel) and on and on. And of course, living in pain affected his personality and his outlook on life as well. Near the end of his life, he told me that for years he had forgiven the people who had caused his injury, but that as he grew older and lived with it for so long, his feelings shifted, and he now wished that he could go back and kill them. I doubt he always felt that way — he was having a spectacularly bad day when he said that, and was going through chemotherapy treatments at the time we had this conversation — but still. 

Looking back at the timeline, we started working on Hollow Heart a couple months after he was diagnosed with cancer and then submitted it to Vault a couple months after he had passed away, and I'm only just now, this second as I sit here at home typing this, realizing how big an impact his illness and death had on this project, both in this aspect and in others. 

QUAINTANCE: With all the personal ideas and concepts, I also found the storytelling to be really kinetic and excellently-paced. How much was the balance between introspection and action beats something you were each aware of as you worked?

ALLOR: Hey, thank you so much! That's great to hear, because the short answer is that I was painfully, acutely aware of it while writing this book, haha. This is definitely not a book that comes out of the gate with wild and fast-paced action. Well, I guess technically it does open with a brief action scene, but then it's quickly interrupted by our monster stopping to help out his injured tormentor, and that's kind of the book in a nutshell, haha. Hollow Heart is the story of a man trying to save a monster, and inadvertently teaching him to BE monstrous.

Damn, that's good, I wish I'd thought of that much earlier in our marketing efforts!

But yes, early on while writing this I decided that the best strategy was to just let the book be the moody slow-burn that it was going to be, rather than trying to force a faster pace or more action scenes upon it. 

TUCKER: Paul has really been pulling off a magic act with the pacing of this book. We get these lovely vignettes that round out our characters while also having a monster on-the-loose running through the center of it. I'm really just reacting on my end and hoping that I make the big moments pop and the quiet ones poetic.

ALLOR: I think Paul is downplaying the effect he’s having on the pacing as well. He’s fantastic at it, and allows me to struggle with it a bit knowing it’ll be amazing on the page.

QUAINTANCE: I really enjoyed the look of EL, especially the neon pink color choice. Can I ask whose idea it was to go with such a striking shade of neon pink there, or how you all settled on that aesthetic? 

ALLOR: That was all Paul! Tucker. I'm not talking about myself in the first person.

TUCKER: EL went through quite a few incarnations as we developed the book, and I'll give credit to Adrian [Wasse] at Vault for helping push the character design to be (hopefully) memorable. It was a tricky balance where he needs to both be menacing and vulnerable. The pink perhaps ties to that while also contrasting the cool antiseptic facility he lives in. 

QUAINTANCE: Finally, It’s been a few years since you worked on TET together. How did your work or working relationship on that project lead to select this one as your next collaboration?

 TUCKER: Paul and I have tried to get a few things off the ground since Tet, but it's never easy to make a creator-owned book happen. I really loved working on Tet with him so I knew we'd work together again and we already have more ideas cooking for our next thing!

ALLOR: We've actually put together a few pitches since Tet, in a few different genres (including a Western!), but Hollow Heart came together after we started talking about our mutual desire to do a stripped-down, psychological science fiction story. I do think Tet led directly to Hollow Heart in the sense that Paul and I developed a shorthand while working on that book, and a sense of selfless collaboration, that allowed us to do something this weird, this quiet, this emotionally daring — something that really required us to trust one another as creators in the same way we learned to while making Tet.

I'm also not sure there's any other publisher besides Vault who would have greenlit this book. Hollow Heart exists because Vault exists, and because they looked at our pitch and said, "a formally daring queer monster love story packed with way more introspection and quiet character moments than horror conventions and jump scares? Count us in!"

Hollow Heart #1 is out everywhere February 17.

Hollow Heart
Writer: Paul Allor
Artist: Paul Tucker
Publisher: Vault Comics
Price: $3.99
EL used to be human. Now he’s a jumble of organs in a bio-suit. El is also in tremendous pain and has been for a very long time. Hope arrives in the form of Mateo, a mechanic brought in to work on EL’s suit. Mateo sees EL in a way no one else ever has. And what’s more: Mateo offers EL an escape. Hollow Heart reunites Tet creators Paul Allor and Paul Tucker for a queer monster love story about the choices we make between giving our loved ones what they want and giving them what we think they need.
Buy It Digitally: Hollow Heart #1

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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.