By Zack Quaintance — Today we talk to the fantastic creative team from Write It In Blood — writer Rory McConville and artist Joe Palmer — about their new sci-collaboration, Time Before Time, due to launch this coming Wednesday. Write It In Blood — a grounded noir crime comic — was a breakout hit for the duo. This new project sees them adding Declan Shalvey to the writing team, as well as Chris O’Halloran as colorist and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou as letterer.

Check out our conversation below!

INTERVIEW: Rory McConville and Joe Palmer talk TIME BEFORE TIME

ZACK QUAINTANCE: The first thing I wanted to ask you both was how you settled on this story — both in terms of genre and theme — as a followup to your excellent first collaboration, Write It In Blood?

RORY McCONVILLE: Funnily enough, work actually started on Time Before Time before Write It In Blood, but the way things played out meant it had a much longer gestational period. We had a different artist attached originally but they ended up not being able to stick with the book due to other commitments. It was quite fortuitous timing in some ways as Joe was just finishing up WIIB around the time we were looking for a new artist.

I think there's a fair amount of crossover with WIIB from a genre point of view. We definitely wanted to foreground the crime element of this book. Equally, having worked on several 2000AD stories with him, I knew Joe had an incredible sci-fi sensibility, so I was really interested to see what he'd come up with on this.

JOE PALMER: The story itself was all decided by Rory and [Declan Shalvey] before I came on board the book. Originally there was another artist attached, but they ended up having to leave the project. Having recently finished up Write It In Blood, I was open for work. Rory and Dec got in touch to see if I was interested, which I was, and we went from there! I’m a huge science fiction fan, and after drawing in the ‘real world’ style of book that Write It In Blood was, I was chomping at the bit to do more imaginative stuff.

ZACK: How did Declan Shalvey come aboard, and how did it change the creative process having him involved as well?

RORY: Dec and I had known each other for a long time just through cons and the indie comic scene. He'd suggested co-writing something at Thoughtbubble a few years back so that was really the starting point. From there we just started talking about ideas and trying to figure out something that both of us would be interested in.

From the writing side, it was definitely a big shift. Neither of us had ever co-written anything so there was a bit of work involved in figuring out how to develop a process that worked for us, as well as managing the give and take that comes with co-writing versus writing solo. We tend to figure out the bigger picture stuff together and then I'll break everything down into a scene-by-scene outline, write my pages and assign Dec his. Once all the pages are in, I'll stitch the whole thing together. Concurrently, Heather Antos, our editor on the book, will be offering notes and feedback at each stage.

I'd be curious to see how other co-writing teams work but I think inevitably there does need to be someone who takes the lead on things a bit more, and once we figured that out it helped us speed things up a lot.

JOE: In terms of it changing the creative process, having Dec on board is another mind to bounce stuff off of. I hadn’t worked with Dec before and had no idea what to expect really, but he’s been incredibly supportive. Being an artist himself, he’s likely got a good idea of what he’d do with stuff visually, so I’ve got to give him credit for stepping back and just letting me do my thing. I can see that it’d be tempting when you’re writing for another artist to guide the visuals towards what you have in mind, but I’ve been given a lot of freedom to go my own way.

ZACK: Rory, one thing I always want to ask writers who tackle time travel is whether you established a set of rules for how that tech works in your book, and if so, what can you tell us about them?

RORY: Absolutely - I think with any high concept story you need to understand how your world "works", but even more so with time travel. In our story, time is fixed so everything that's happened has already happened, which means there's no handwaving away consequences. There's plenty of examples of time travel stories where time being alterable has worked well but a lot of the time I feel it robs a story of stakes.

We also treat different time periods like geographic locations with different gangs controlling different decades/centuries etc. It's intended to be a very stripped back type of time travel so that we're not tying ourselves up in paradox knots every issue.

ZACK: Joe, I thought your work was (unsurprisingly excellent) here, really grounded yet imaginative. I also really liked how the coloring in the book changed based on time periods, and I wanted to ask if you could tell us about how you collaborated with Chris O’Halloran to make that happen?

JOE: Thanks! Not a huge amount of collaboration needed with a colorist as talented as Chris. The only notes I’ve really had to give are when he’s missed something, which doesn’t happen often, and is almost always due to my shapes not being clear enough. Because his choices are totally different to what I would do, I just stay out of the way and let myself be knocked out by what he does come back with.

ZACK: Finally, if you both could pick another time period in which to live, which would it be and why?

JOE: Well, I wouldn’t want to go backwards in time, so I’d travel a few hundred years into the future and see how we’re getting on as a species.

RORY: Yes, probably one thousand years in the future just to see how things end up.

TIME BEFORE TIME #1 is out May 12!

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.