Si Spurrier and Charlie Adlard have never worked together before but still share some especially vital career DNA. They did some fundamental work in Britain’s 2000 AD; they contributed to Judge Dredd stories; and some of their best work has involved ensembles (The Walking Dead for Adlard, and The Dreaming for Spurrier). All of this sounds sort of like the crash course for how Britain births so much A-list comics talent.
But they have more in common still — a similar outlook on comics and storytelling in general and some integral sensibilities. At last, we’ll get to see this connection on display as the pair come together for the first time with a brand-new book from BOOM! Studios.
Damn Them All follows Ellie “Bloody El” Hawthorne, a London thug and so-called “occultist for hire.” When her famous occult detective uncle dies abruptly, Ellie is forced to track down the 72 escaped demons from the Ars Goetia using only her wits and a supposedly magical hammer. If it sounds a little Hellblazer-esque, it certainly is — to a point. It becomes apparent fairly early on, though, that this book is so much more, as it tackles the supernatural in some compelling new ways while emphasizing those gritty slice-of-life elements. In short, it’s a dark, powerful tale exploring humanity’s weird little core from two established talents.
Before issue #1 debuts October 26, we caught up with both Spurrier and Adlard recently via Zoom. There, we tackled everything from those John Constantine connections and the world-building to the duo’s collaboration/shared sensibilities and how this book engages readers (read: head on).
Caution: Spoilers ahead for the first issue and possibly subsequent story bits.
AIPT: What’s the elevator pitch for Damn Them All?
Si Spurrier: The lazy elevator pitch we’ve been using is, “Get Carter meets The Exorcist.”
We’ve got London-based organized crime in a sort of very grimy but also slightly Guy Ritchie pie-and-chips kind of way, but intersected by all the things that I love most in the storytelling stuff I’ve tended to do, which is supernatural, magical realism, and occultism.
We hit upon this particular element of the paranormal, which is sort of medieval and renaissance ideas about demons and the lists of demons and the way that they are organized into hierarchies. In particular, in kind of magical grimoires and deploying them with quite an unusual spin
That’s kind of how you recognize what you’re getting into. There’s clearly a Hellblazer vibe. But what we love is that at every step, there’s like a slight twist on that, and you realize quite quickly that the demons aren’t quite what you think they are. And then you realize that the way they’re being used isn’t quite what you thought. And then you sort of gradually realize that the baddies of the story — in as much as there are baddies at the story — aren’t the demons at all? They’re not the most evil characters in this thing, and so it’s that kind of gradual subversive slink through something that I think works quite nicely, which is crime meets supernatural.
AIPT: I certainly wanted to touch on those John Constantine connections. I like that book, but I think there’s a tendency in supernatural books to not explain much and say it’s all magic. But here, you take a really layered approach to magic and the world its in. What’s the point or significance of having this structure?
SS: I mean, the answer is in the question — it’s bad storytelling. If you have a character who can wave a wand and stuff happens, it costs the character nothing. You’re not going to learn anything about the world from this story.
Charlie Adlard: It’s like the “reversing the polarity” excuse, isn’t it?
SS: Yeah, it’s cheap.
We sort of like this idea that you start in a world where any character who is sensible recognizes that you get nothing for free, and there is always a cost. And if something seems easy, it’s because you haven’t noticed yet what the cost is. And then, very quickly, we propose that something has broken in this world, and it would appear as a result of a breakdown of the rules that suddenly people do appear to be able to use magic (for want of a better word) in a way that seems cheap and plentiful and easy. And of course, it isn’t. They just haven’t worked out the cost yet.
But as is pure, wretched human nature, the first instinct is to treat this stuff like a resource to be exploited. So we’re talking about magic and demons and all these things, and as you say, there’s
lots of fiddly law that you can get excited about if you want to. But ultimately, it’s a story about an arms race. It’s about powerful assholes, discovering new toys that give them more power, and then trying to cling to it and trying to build their resources in a very sort of icky, collector-y sort of way. Which I suspect is the ultimate core of any expression of power; it’s the desire to control everything.
AIPT: If only any of that had any actual bearing on our world and reality.
SS: Right? It’s almost like fantasy.
AIPT: So weird.
But moving on, what was the collaborative process like for you? Does both of you being British help in terms of having shared sensibilities?
CA: It helps that the book is set in the UK, at least on a very basic level. And it helps that we’re in the same time zone. Simple things like that, where we’re not worrying if it’s 4 p.m. where I am and 12 o’clock where he is, certainly helps.
But I’ve known Si a long time through the convention circuit and the comic industry as a whole. We’ve probably made it to more cons than I’ve met some other American writers. So all of that melds together into a great big bit of happenstance, where suddenly you get talking and go, “It’d be really good to work together.” And bish bash bosh, here we are.
SS: It’s ghastly to generalize, isn’t it, but there is something about the sort of toxic and cynical, “We used to be important, and we’re not any more” British national character that speaks so perfectly to sleazy, grimy, occult-y, especially-cynical worlds and stories.
I think that’s why Hellblazer is as wonderful and important as it is. It’s funny because when people see this, they are of course, going to be like, Oh, well, this is a Hellblazer. So it isn’t. It starts out feeling a little bit like that. But the one-to-one-ness quickly breaks down. But I do think that is part and parcel of it. We’re on the same wavelength in the sense that we’re both grumpy English men who enjoy bursting bubbles, and starting with something that seems quite wonderful and then revealing that it’s actually quite poisonous.
CA: I think we’re probably similar. I’ve always taken aboard the dynamism of American comic books, but in terms of attitude, I think it’s 2000 AD and the British side of comics.
AIPT: It’s funny you mention 2000 AD — I told someone this was if Hellblazer was written by someone from the mag, if they got confused about 10 minutes in and kept right going.
SS: It’s funny, even stylistically as a writer — and I’m pretty sure this is true of an artist, too — if you can do 2000 AD, you can do anything. Because you’re being asked to compress into very short, episodic chunks stuff that in a mainstream superhero comic in particular would need 20 pages to explore, with lots of silent panels and slow motion punch-ups and stuff.
In fact, I remember when I first started working for 2000 AD, one of the exercises that then editor gave me was to take my favorite 22-page American comic and rewrite it as a five-page script.
AIPT: Wow, that sounds impossible.
SS: Actually not as difficult as it sounds.
CA: I was going to so, that’s probably quite easy.
SS: So I guess the approach it’s not quite as simple because it would be unreasonably dense. But this is very clearly a dense book. Charlie and I both like that in our comics. We both like a book that doesn’t take you three minutes but 20 minutes to read. There’s lots of story and voice and movement and still a lot of stillness in every page. It’s probably the British comics of it all speaking.
AIPT: Not to badmouth American comics, but there’s a tendency for leniency. They give the reader a lot of space to think and breath.
CA: There’s been many times I’ve read an American book, and you get to page 22, and you think, “Oh, was that really worth it?” Then you’ve got to wait a month for another 22 page thing just to go, “Oh, was that really worth it?” If you can’t tell a movie in 120 pages of comic book, I think you’re in trouble. I’m already halfway through finished inking issue #4, and I feel like we’re a good two hours into the movie here.
SS: It’s season one of a TV show.
CA: Exactly. But there’s so many books you go through and think, “It was less than 10 minutes worth of a film.” And you’d be really unsatisfied.
SS: In American comics, you don’t have to go that far back to find the sorts of density we’re describing, which is fairly normal here. And it’s absolutely normal in the continent and was also quite normal in early superhero comics, like even the early Bronze Age stuff.
I think that there has been this gradual drift, and there is nothing wrong per se with decompression. I could I could name lots of really great decompressed comics that use it extremely well. The problem is that it has become such a ubiquitous vernacular that it has become synonymous with… like, the adjective I keep reading is “confident.” Like, “It’s such a confident issue.:
And what that means is that the writer has not involved any sort of neuroses or any doubling back or any fussy detail. I would far rather read a neurotic comic than a confident comic because it has a voice, it has a soul, it isn’t just this sort of running on rails narratives that, as Charlie says, takes you half a second.
Anyway, that’s all just to give you the idea that we are making a comic that we want to make and we would like to read rather than do something to make life difficult for American readers.
AIPT: I like books like that, too. Not to further bash American comics, but I like when that imperfect, neurotic sensibility prevails. The first issue of Damn Them All, at least, makes things feel imperfect, as if nobody knows what’s going to happen. Why is that a thing and why’s it so entertaining?
SS: I think that, funnily enough, there’s a little bit of the meta going on there, too. Because, as you know, the first issue, one of the things we’re quite interested in, is this idea that if, as a regular human being, you encountered unequivocal proof of the supernatural, or some realm beyond our own experience, it would be shattering.
AIPT: You’d pull your eyes out and run into the forest.
SS: The issue itself sort of reflects that experience.
We didn’t want this to feel like a bunch of London people striding around taking it as read that there are demons wafting through walls and shooting thunderbolts. That’s the sort of stuff that you need to pause in order for it to really have a value and meaning.
CA: I think visually as well, what we discussed was when the demons do appear, or something weird happens is it’s not just there in the room. It’s this sort of zig-zagging, migraine sort of approach that really gets you in their head. So I tried to visually try to portray that. You’ve got the figures breaking up and multi-layered, almost blurred figures. Then you’ve got the background almost jagged, sort of breaking up around them as they progress through a room or whatever. So everything everything is shattering around them.
I’ve always been a big fan of stuff you don’t see as being much more scary than the stuff you do see. I always prefer my horror off-screen. But we have to have these demons appear in their full glory, but make it in a way that they’re not just a big splashy image because that’s not scary. As soon as the demon appears, that’s it — the fear is kind of gone because the monster has been revealed. So you’ve got to have that other element playing into it. So, to portray that this as just completely shattering reality, and making everything kind of almost surreal, we play a lot with with that.
AIPT: It definitely had that visceral intent. It reminds of the show Supernatural. Anytime something happens, like an angel appears, there’s a big reaction to it.
From a design point, was there anything in particular you were inspired by or pulling from?
CA: I’d rather avoid any specific beliefs, to be honest It’s always a weird thing when you’re doing a book like this, which is focused on demons, because then you’re sort of saying, “Oh, if there’s demons, therefore hell exists. And therefore, heaven exists.” I don’t speak for Si, but I’m pretty atheist. It’s kind of an uncomfortable scenario you you could get yourself into. Like, you could sort of put it in to a completely fantastical realm where you say God is literally an alien being as much as these demons are or whatever. But then you kind of put yourself in a slightly more safe zone, don’t you?
SS: We sort of very deliberately sidestep all of these questions, because it is my view that all magic is religion and all religion is magic.
I’m not even going to get into what I believe and what I don’t believe — that’s not the point. The point is we very quickly recontextualize everything that is happening. So that it is not about biblical verisimilitude. It is not about the primacy of any one faith over any other. It is about the fact that at some point in the past, learned people wrote lists of these entities which they took to be fallen angels, according to the context that they viewed the world at the time. But which we gradually discover are, in fact, reflections of lower realities, reflections of our thoughts, and reflections of mathematical principles.
These things which we have been taught thanks to eons of shit movies and shit texts and ghastly magical ceremony to be evil spawns of Satan, whose only task and desire is to corrupt and damn the souls of men, are, in fact, just these pitiful, abandoned wisps of reality, folded away into the dark so that they could be forgotten. And now somebody has brought them all onto the world and realize that they can be used. They’re just tools and they don’t want to be used. They’re slaves — they’re gladiators. And that’s that’s the sort of a metaphor that we gradually homed in on — this idea of sending these new tools out to do your dirty work, irrespective of the fact that they are tormented and tortured and being wounded.
There’s a phrase, “Bread and circuses.” If you want the masses to be on your side, all you need to give them as bread and entertainment and the rest of it looks after itself. And that’s it. That’s sort of where we’re getting at: it speaks to social realities that transcend religion, because, you know, that’s just not what this book is about. And I think it is worth mentioning that the very first thing our main character, Ellie, says when we meet her face-to-face is that “she’s ordained in five different religions,” because you either believe all superstitions or you don’t believe any of them.
AIPT: I do want to pick on some of that demon stuff, though.
We talked about the “morality” of the book, and maybe people are really the bad guys and maybe demons aren’t. But also the demons may not be that innocent. I feel like there’s so much here, and you’re trying to get people to explore their own spiritual backgrounds and faith and see why it matters and what it all means.
SS: That’s sort of getting into spoiler territory a little bit.
But it’s obviously not as simple as it looks. I guess the sort of tease to present you with is something that I think we can get into. At the top of issue #3, where one of these demons sits down and explains that the shape he is obliged to take is the shape that he was recorded in by some medieval demonologist in a book long ago. The idea being that these things are precisely as we expect them and need them to be. So I’m saying no more than that.
Other than that, you know, they are clearly enslaved to the people involved. And it is a story about human greed and human manipulation and just the awful things that people do.
AIPT: You already mentioned Ellie, the protagonist of Damn Them All. I get a sense from her pretty early she’s very sure of herself in an uncertain situation. How important is she as the beating hear of this book?
SS: I think the smart answer is to ask Charlie what went into her visual design, because that will tell you some of how we perceive her as a real person in this world.
CA: Well, she was probably one of the hardest things I’d say to design that I’ve ever done.
Because how do I design something that’s actually original?
SS: I remember that you were quite keen that she not be cheesecake. And she not be some sort of T&A, badass chick.
CA: What I didn’t want to do was just have her with multiple tattoos because she’s a demonologist. Like, “Oh, of course she’d have tattoos and loads of rings.”
The one thing initially I said was I didn’t want to draw a dusty, comic booky virtual superhero. I’m not even known for that stuff. I don’t draw busty women, and 16 years on The Walking Dead has proven that.
I’ve always wanted to try and draw, as much as you ca, within the confines of comic books, in the confines of doing a monthly series of whatever it is… a face that’s as
recognizable and realistic as possible. So I was always trying to get away from that kind of image. But keeping her young, you know. I think we had a bit of a problem with the angular face that I was drawing, where it was looking slightly too old for her age.
But it was great to have that interaction, to be honest, and not work in a kind of vacuum. Where everyone’s just going, “Yeah, that’s fine.” I’ve had that as well. It’s great to have this interaction that we have been having inside and the guys with BOOM! as well.
SS: This is one of the one of the reasons that I was so keen to bring this to BOOM! is because the specific editor with whom I always work to go, Eric Harburn — he is the personification of exactly what Charlie just described. Which is that he is fucking infuriating, but he is always right. It drives me made when I start a new project and he’ll give me these notes. And, like, “No, it was perfect when I wrote it.” And then I’ll go away and think about it. And little by little, I’ll painfully come to realize that he was actually right from the beginning. And that’s maddening, but also priceless.
But to harp a little more, it was so important to us that she felt live lived in, if that makes sense. She’s not he’s not the sort of shiny glossy, dropped out of nowhere bubblegum, chick. She’s complicated and emotionally bruised and a person who, up to a certain point in her life, defined herself completely according to her uncle, who has died at the beginning of our story. So we sort of find her slightly adrift, trying to work out whether she is the person that he was — not that he was a particularly good person, by the way. She’s just sort of getting by she and she claims to be a kind of occultist for hire. But really, she’s just a thug. And most of most of her time is spent breaking kneecaps and doing door jobs.
But to go back to something you said very early, we are not in the business of making this easy for our readers. We’re not here to say, “Here’s a cliché, and here’s a bunch of cliched shit that she’s going to do. And this is all very comfortable. And hey, it’s confident.” We’re here to say, “Here’s a fascinating character who is not like any character you’ve met before, in a scenario that nobody is equipped to deal with in a calm confident way.”
AIPT: I love that most characters have a mystical sword and she’s just got a hammer. Like, it’s the coolest thing in the world but also so logistically stupid.
SS: So it’s a it’s a blunt instrument. It’s about the deliberate, conscious creation of mythology. Like she goes around telling everybody it’s a cursed hammer and if it hits you die. So, they’re like, “OK, it’s just a fucking hammer if it hits you, you’re dead.”
It’s about the relationship between reality and myth and magic. And often people get so hung up on the magic and the myth that they stop looking at reality. And she’s very much about the reality more than the myth. That’s why I’m so keen to sort of steer away from the obvious Hellblazer relationship, but the thing that I think speaks to the very best John Constantine stories is that that character is more interesting the less magic he does. And that’s sort of where we’re at.
CA: I think, personally speaking, I’ve always been drawn, whether as a reader or a contributor, to character base books, I mean, it sounds like a very simple thing. But if you haven’t got character, your book’s not going to succeed.
AIPT: What can we expect from Damn Them All issue #2 and beyond — and feel free to be as spoiler-heavy as possible.
SS: If you imagine the sort overarching, top-level tonal idea is what happens when the normal world and a completely impossible, ineffable supernatural reality collide? And so it starts small and then does it build to insanity and chaos and societal meltdown and anarchy? Are there ways that you can impose order upon that? Is it a good thing to do?
All these questions we’re sort of interested in while Ellie is trying to navigate the fact that everybody around her seems to have an agenda and most of those agendas are selfish and awful. So, there’s a general increase in the level of madness, but it’s not just this ghastly action; it sort of stops and starts. We have horror moments. We have thoughtful moments. We have sad moments. We have lots of character.
There’s a bit in issue #4 — and this is best spoiler I can give is — at bottom of the pencils, Charlie wrote, “I am never doing a scene like this again.” Imagine that. We have moments of epic grandeur, which take me 30 seconds to write and take poor old Charlie years. That’s comics — it’s a little bit of everything.
CA: It’s not going to be this sort of apocalyptic [book]; that’s kind of the cliched way to go. It sort of builds and builds and builds and builds to this massive thing, but then where do you go from there? I like the fact that this book is sort of confined to its own constraints. I think if the the demons and everything break out into mass reality, that’s not the point of it all. The whole point is, it stays in this sort of a very slightly confined area, and not everybody knows what’s going on. It might be that people have apocalyptical aspirations, but whether that happens is another point.
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