Charles Soule and Will Sliney discuss horror and hell in ‘Shrouded College’ universe

What started as a story has now become a full-blown universe.

Way back in December 2020, artist Will Sliney, alongside colorist Rachelle Rosenberg, took their talents to Twitch to share the live creation of their new series Hell to Pay, written by Charles Soule. Now, all this time later, not only is the miniseries at least about to hit shelves, but it’s actually the start of multi-series mythology and universe.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview both Soule and Sliney about the new series, which is due out on November 2 (with a final order cutoff for retailers this Monday, October 10). Hell to Pay, or as Soule tells us, Shrouded College Book 1: Hell to Pay, is a horror adventure that leans heavily into that hugely relatable idea that money and capitalism are the scariest thing in most people’s lives. (They’re not wrong, though, with the economy seemingly teetering on a recession and inflation raising the price of everything.) Using this root as their horror base, Soule and Sliney are delving into world-building that will offer new themes and protagonists in every chapter and an incredibly robust visual design.

(Plus, for what it’s worth, creating worlds is nothing new for Soule, who helped kick off The High Republic universe. This time around, though, he’s co-developed an action-adventure horror universe he compares to Hellraiser, Hellboy, and Indiana Jones.)

It’s an exciting concept that both Soule and Sliney detail at great length below, among other topics and tidbits. Plus, as you scroll, enjoy some never-before-seen variant covers by Dave Johnson and Sliney alongside with interior pages for the debut issue.

Courtesy of Image.

AIPT: What’s the mission statement for Hell to Pay, what’s it about?

Charles Soule: Hell to Pay is a horror adventure. So you have a married couple, Sebastian and Maia Stone, who are trying to execute this task, and it’s pretty clear they’ve been trying to do it for a while. They’re trying to locate every single one of 666 cursed hell coins, that is, money from hell that has found its way up to Earth. Once they find all 666, they can be free of their obligations to this weird organization called the Shrouded College. The six-issue mini that is Hell to Pay tells the story of this couple and their effort to try to free themselves of the debt that they’ve incurred to the Shrouded College.

So they have college debt almost because the Shrouded College taught them how to be magical and gave them magical gifts they used in their missions. But there’s a much bigger story that’s connected to this.

Regarding the mission statement of this particular six-issue story, we wanted to look at cursed coins, cursed money, people getting into debt, and having to work the rest of their lives to pay it off. That sounds likely to be like the financial situation the real world is in for many people. It’s to look at the way money and late-stage capitalism and all those things people talk and think about to a degree and made life kind of hellish for many people.

AIPT: What were the motivations behind money and capitalism being an essential part of Hell to Pay?

CS: Will and I wanted to tell some horror stories. We wanted to dig into that in a way that neither of us has been able to do much in our careers to the degree we’d like to. People tend to work out their anxieties over the stories they tell if they’re creative people. And so, in that time, at that point in the pandemic, I think money was on a lot of people’s minds for sure. How is this gonna work?

The industry is teetering, and I think many of us had and still have anxieties based on financial things. And so good horror stories take something you were already anxious about already, already frightened of maybe, and heighten it to a place where you can look at it through the distance that the crazy supernatural elements provide. Because the supernatural stuff in Hell to Pay is not real, as far as we know, but the underlying themes and ideas about money and how capitalism can hit people in ways they’re not expecting are real. The way that we’re bound to this big machine we don’t really wanna be in and can’t escape, that’s all very real.

When you’re reading Hell to Pay, that’s gonna resonate with you.

Will Sliney: Do you know what’s funny about that? Anytime I see a movie, and there’s a scary cabin in the woods, that’s never a thing that I’ve been afraid of because we don’t do cabins in the woods here in Ireland<laugh>. So there are a lot of things that don’t necessarily translate in the typical kind of horror movie that you see, which is why the element of horror in these books is something that’s very, very relatable to everyone.

Variant cover by Mahmud Asrar. Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: Hell to Pay has been in the works for almost two years now, since it was first announced in December 2020. Why the delay?

CS: I think that speaks to how long the process is to get a comic book finished and get it out into the world. We have most of it in the can, which is kind of a nice thing. It’ll be coming out monthly, for sure, there is zero doubt about it.

Twitch streaming the creation of the book was a way for people to jump into a new story. We wanted to do something interesting that would give people a way to get into the process in a way they might not ordinarily be able to do. So I think it was really fun. It was really successful.

AIPT: The creature design in this book is fantastic. There are demons that I’ve never seen before, which is so cool because how many times have we seen hell across media, comics, movies, everything? Will, what went into designing these creatures?

WS: This has always been the great thing about working with Charles, and this goes back to the things that you’re not necessarily expecting the way things to go when and you’re designing things. Like, I remember when we were working on the Rise of Kylo Ren together. We redesigned Snoke and how Charles was pushing me in a certain way that I never would’ve expected but worked so well for the book. Snoke ironically is easier because there’s only one version of Snoke beforehand. You get to do something a little bit different. Whereas Hell and devils and everything like that has been seen so many times.

The whole point behind Hell and the whole foundations upon which Hell is built ties exactly into the fears that are there in this book, which is essentially a marketplace, and it has all these different levels of people on different types of scales, and the money or the whole economic system that’s there. The way they’re dressed, how they look, everything that they do is kind of built upon those foundations. And it puts you off at a different point of starting Hell straight away than what you would normally typically do when it comes to things like demons. And as the story progresses, you’ll certainly see a lot of those demons doing many different things for their different reasons. It all leads up to one single line in the final issue, which I loved, which obviously won’t spoil, and it explains exactly everything that those demons and the whole lot of ’em are doing together.

CS: The central idea of Hell in this story’s version of Hell is very much tied into the idea of, like, what if late stage capitalism becomes like final stage capitalism, you know? So everything that happens in Hell is deeply transactional. There’s no love down there. It’s all about money.

One of the things that Will did that I felt was so inspired was a lot of the demon designs have tentacles. There are octopus tentacles, squid tentacles, and that kind of thing. If you think about money and capitalism and all that stuff, it kind of gets everywhere without thinking about it, just like tentacles reaching in all these different places. It’s one of these subtleties of the design, which maybe doesn’t register the first time you look at it. The more you think about it, of course, that’s why they look that way.

Hell to Pay #1 Cover by Dave Johnson. Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: What goes into designing the hellish backgrounds and buildings?

WS: The ones in Hell again, kind of came from that idea that you get about like the real start of capitalism and a show of wealth, of almost royalty, like Royal Wealth shall we say. Lavish buildings that they would have, but in Hell. I’ll do a lot of stuff using 3D elements and 3D buildings. So I’m able to kind of push that architecture a little bit more and twist and turn and create some kind of unique kind of building design. So here, we’re making it even more difficult to reach the top. It’s almost like they’re wealthier and they’re better dressed the higher they are up in the architecture looking down upon the markets and the people trying to sell things.

AIPT: Will Hell to Pay explore the history of the coins from Hell and how they got to Earth?

CS: The idea is that these Hell coins made it to earth several centuries ago. This coincidentally is right around the time sophisticated capitalism started to show up, on Earth in Holland and places like that in Europe and different parts of the world. Throughout the story, we show a lot of the many different times coins were spent because every time you have a coin, you can spend it on hiring a demon, and then you can ask the demon to do something, and then the Demon tries to complete the task to earn the coin. Very transactional. Through the story, we illustrate some of those moments when, when demons were hired using these coins and the things that happened as a result of them. And so, you know, not only did will get to design some cool demons down in hell, but he got to design what they look like in 1635? What did they look like in 1772? Stuff like that.

AIPT: So Will is like an expert on Hell and demon fashion throughout the centuries.

WS: I’ve been learning as fast as I can. <laugh>.

Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: Hell to Pay is the start of a larger world and many miniseries, can you tell us more about this mythology and your plans?

CS: What we decided to do was to create not just one story but basically a line of stories. I guess the best way to think of it would be like, seven movies, each of which is a comic of five or six issues that build up to a larger story. The larger story is called the Shrouded College. There are a lot of elements that are building up to the larger story, even in this first one. Technically this is the Shrouded College Book One: Hell to Pay. We have all of the rest planned out and set. We know everything that’s gonna happen. We know the character that is in them. We know where it’s gonna go.

The real way to think about this is basically an ongoing series that’s going run about probably about 36 to 40 issues that will kind of reset itself and have a new number one and a new subtitle with each one of those chunks. You got Shrouded College book two, book three before book five, et cetera.

We wanted to create our own big mythology with all that deep and intense world-building. That’s something I love, I did it with the High Republic for Star Wars and lots of other stuff. Building something gigantic like that has been an absolute blast so far. Each story in the Shrouded College series takes on a different horror trope and plays with it. The second book is a vampire outline. The way that Hell is kind of fresh and like deals with the devil are done in a new way in Hell to Pay. We’re doing the same thing with vampires in the next one.

The trade paperback cover by Will Sliney. Courtesy of Image Comics.

WS: When you go back to that mission statement, each one of those has that kind of a different type of a horror story going through it. I really is just our chance to build our whole world, starting off with Hell to Pay.

CS: What we really want to do is suggest that each one of these things stands on its own and has a really, really strong high concept. If the only one that appeals to you is like the fourth one, then you’ll get a very cohesive stand on its own story. That’s gonna be a great horror story about a cool concept that you’ll dig. There are also people out there who like the idea of big mythology being built.

We’re trying to counterprogram against expectations a little bit. Instead of just saying, this is an ongoing series with Hell stuff, it’s a different thing. It’s not the first time somebody’s tried to do something like this. Like basically, you know, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are kind of doing that, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino are doing something similar with their Bone Orchard Mythos.

Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: What can we expect about stories in the next series after Hell to Pay?

CS: It’s a way for us to keep it fresh ourselves. So every six issues or so, we flip the script, and we do something that’s different. We’ve been dealing with devils and demons now for six issues. The next one again is gonna be the vampire. The next one after that will be something else. We’re gonna bring in different creative people too. It won’t always be me writing. It won’t always be Will drawing. There are different ways to build out a world. A lot of this comes from the experience that I had with the High Republic, which is that big Star Wars initiative to show the real joy in building a gigantic interconnected story were like little bits and pieces that you don’t even know are gonna pay off or connect all of a sudden they do later on.

Every single one of these minis, every single one of these stories, these tales, these books of the Shrouded College is an entry point. You might check out the vampire story, and all of a sudden, you’re like, I love the larger world, and there’s a whole other story that these guys did. I wanna check that out too. It’s always a new jumping-on point.

AIPT: Is there any desire to research every aspect of Hell in human history and fiction?

WS: One of the biggest discussions we’ve been having around is the design of the devil himself and in what way we’re gonna do that. The devil has been seen so many times before in so many different ways. So how do you do something that’s not necessarily the same as what’s been seen in other projects? It has been more of a case of staying away, Hell is so iconic in many ways. It’s impossible to escape certain elements of it. Like just by the variation, the notion of like, there’s going to be fire, and it’s going to be painful if you step and walk around there and things like that. That kind of has to be there. But other than that, it was trying to keep it to our own version of it.

Variant cover by Mike del Mundo. Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: Can you talk a little bit more about the main protagonists in Hell to Pay?

CS: Maia and Sebastian Stone have been married for quite a while now. They were dating in college in Britain, and they were both very skilled athletes they got in a terrible car accident and were like maimed and disfigured, and their lives had gone to a terrible place. The Shroud of College shows up and says, “Hey, we will heal you, and we will give you magical abilities if you will basically sign our contract.”

So they made a deal. Their lives will return to them, but they weren’t actually fully returned to them because now they have to do this work for the Shrouded College to find these coins, which they didn’t really know about. The deal with the college has many, many, many layers of fine print. Just like many people, when you’re in desperation, sign on the dotted line, and you don’t really think about what it’s gonna mean for the rest of your life. And so these are people who really, really want to be free of this obligation that they run into, but they can’t do it until they get all these coins. And which again feels kind of familiar. That is the way the world works. You incur debts, and you can’t just walk away from them unless you wanna face some very severe penalties.

Sebastian is fun. He makes jokes. His magical ability involves weapons. He can pull mythological weapons from basically nowhere. He’ll work with Excalibur and different mythological weapons of history. It’s been fun to look those weapons up and think about them and find some weird ones. Whereas Maia, his wife, who’s also super awesome, is more of a traditional witch kind of person. She’s good with spells, good with potions, that kind of stuff. And so the two of them work together as a team in this really neat way. The fact that they’re married I think, is also really interesting too because you just don’t see it that much. These people have made a little family between the two of them and are trying to make that family into something new, something better. Yet they have real consideration that, again, I think many people reading this book are gonna be able to connect to.

As we continue in the Shrouded College series, there are all kinds of different relationships. We find out that these two are far from the only two people who have taken the Shrouded College’s deal. Each one of these stories has, as its center, the main characters are different people who have taken the Shroud College’s deal. And so the powers they get are different. The tasks they’re set to accomplish are different. The obligations and things they’re sacrificing are different. The relationships between them are different. So like in the second one, the main group of these people, they’re called Targets, Targets of the Shrouded College are a father, a daughter and then a granddaughter. How that family relationship plays out, the multi-generational thing is really cool.

Will Sliney’s previews variant cover. Courtesy of Image Comics.

AIPT: If you could sum up Hell to Pay in three words or less as far as what you want the emotional response from readers to be, what would they be?

WS: I would say relatable, anxiety, and fears. I don’t know what it’s like in America, but people are desperately afraid of their next energy bill and how this will affect them. I’m not afraid of a monster in my closet anymore, but everyone is afraid of this kind of fear. And every kind of story in Shrouded College has something that tries to be relatable.

CS: I would say what I am hoping people get out of this book is resonance. Everybody has used money if they’re reading this comment, they understand what money is. This is about looking at it in a way that goes a little deeper. I would say hope, as weird as that sounds. It’s one thing to talk about, like the system is broken, all valid concerns. Still, I also think there’s a lot to be said for not giving into that and always continuing to fight the good fight no matter how bad things might get and how systemic you think the problems might be, change is always possible. For a third word, I would say excitement because we’ve been talking a lot about like how this is a book about intense themes and Hell and deals with the devil and all that stuff. But really, when you’re reading it, it’s a great thrilling adventure story. It’s about cool people doing cool things and doing flips and stuff.

WS: <laughs> Yeah! That expands in each issue. Like the second one, Sebastian gets to take out a giant massive hammer and do a lot of damage with it. So there are certainly a lot of fun things to draw, and there are challenging things, but definitely fun things.

CS: The action style is very like great horror action movies, like think of like Blade 2. The real rollercoaster rides where people are having incredibly cool adventures. The Mummy may be, there are lots of them. That’s what it feels like on the page. It’s Hellboy meets Indiana Jones, or Hellraiser meets Indiana Jones meets Hellboy. All the things that we had a great time talking about on a deep level are all there. You’ll get it, you’ll get that resonance, but you’ll also get tons of excitement. This book’s just a blast to read as they’re all the Shrouded College books.

Courtesy of Image Comics.

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