In the mighty triumvirate of comics genres, fantasy is just as prevalent as sci-fi and horror. The interest in that one, though, makes heaps of sense nowadays: in a chaotic world, there’s certain ideals and archetypes that foster an almost ancient warmth and familiarity. But not all such series are all as effective or important, and some titles only explore trolls and hammers and not the genre’s subtext. The Hunger and the Dusk, however, is one such title that feels like an exemplary offering amid the veritable fanta-sea. See what I did there?
The brain-child of writer G. Willow Wilson, artist Chris Wildgoose, colorists Dian Sousa and Michele “M.Sassy.K” Assarasakorn, and letterer Simon Bowland, The Hunger and the Dusk is very much in the World of Warcraft meets Lord of the Rings territory. In it, overlord Troth Iceman marries Faran Stoneback to unite two great orc houses. At the same time, Troth sends his cousin, Tara, to live with human commander Callum Battlechild as the “two struggling civilizations [humans and orcs] are forced into a fragile alliance” against the savage Vangol.
Issue #3 (which arrives October 11 from IDW) sees everyone reeling from a grand battle, with a focus on the burgeoning Tara-Callum dynamic as a new threat from the Vangol heats up the relationship between Troth and Faran. If you’ve already read our advance review, you’ll know it’s a impactful issue in already compelling young series, and a novel and evocative spin on a lot of deep-seated fantasy storytelling.
And so given the value of issue #3 of The Hunger and the Dusk, we went ahead and gathered up Wilson, Wildgoose, and M.Sassy.K to talk about this issue and the series at-large. Topics included the main points in issue #3, the development and threat of the Vangol, some insights into Mr. Battlechild, and even what all might come next.
Main cover by Chris Wildgoose. Courtesy of IDW.
AIPT: Issue #3 is dropping in mid-October. Can you provide any eager newbies a brief synopsis of #1 and #2 to catch them up/sell the book?
G. Willow Wilson: In a shrinking world, orcs and humans have been battling for centuries over the last remaining inhabitable land – until one day, a bunch of giants long believed to be extinct reappear, in horribly altered form. Now one young orc aristocrat named Tara is sent as an ambassador to a scrappy human mercenary company as the two sides forge a fragile peace in order to unite against their common enemy. There’s romantic tension, there’s drama, there’s politics, there’s bloody fight scenes. It’s just a big sweeping high fantasy you can really sink your tusks into.
Chris Wildgoose: Come for the head chopping, stay for the love saga of Orcs and men.
Love lost, love found and some perilous adventuring set in a decaying fantasy realm in between. Though it plays with some of the typical aspects of fantasy this isn’t your average fantasy tale and we’ve only just gotten started.
AIPT: What can you tease about issue #3? There’s some real key moments where relationships seem to coalesce.
GWW: In issue #3, we get up close and personal with the Vangol – the giants terrorizing this shrinking landscape. We learn things about them we didn’t know before. A couple of the relationships we’ve set up between main characters start to blossom. And we start to understand what’s at stake for both orckind and humankind.
AIPT: And speaking of #3, we get more insight into the book’s “big bad,” the Vangol. Can you break them down? They feel compelling, and not just some indiscriminate evil force.
GWW: That’s right – they’re giants who sailed away from this nameless world several centuries earlier to try to discover new lands that were still habitable. Everyone thinks they’ve either gone extinct, been lost at sea or something. But now they’re back, and they’ve undergone some kind of hideous transformation. So something happened to them on their travels, but we don’t yet know what.
AIPT: Fantasy is, I think, experiencing a marked resurgence across the media spectrum. What’s appealing about the genre from a storytelling and visual perspective?
GWW: Telling a high fantasy story in a 22 pages comics format is a compelling challenge. You don’t have the same room for digression that you would in prose. Prose fantasy is famously full of side-notes and backstories and stories-within-stories, and in a comic book you have to make the story as taut and efficient as possible. So a lot more is communicated visually. Chris has done an incredible job packing every page with details about this world. We don’t have to waste real estate with captions saying “drought stalks the land, and the great beasts that once lived here are dying out” because Chris has put this massive leviathan skeleton in the background. As a result, you can really live in these pages – it’s pure escapism.
CW: Visually, I think we all often get a lot of comfort from the fantasy genre because it draws from our childhoods growing up with fairy tales and ancient folk stories.
Also, when a fantasy tale is at its darkest moment or the setting can be grim and oppressive for the characters, visually for the reader those moments can still be beautiful.
We have a setting later in a swamp which in the character’s perspective must be a horrible, damp, stinky, trudge through the mirk. But with the art I think we still manage to make it look and feel beautiful, with over-elaborate ruins half submerged speckled with colourful fungus, often lit by background wildfires or hazy sunsets. I don’t think that ability is exclusive to fantasy, but fantasy just has this underlying fairy tale, folk romance behind it all that is so easy to draw from and relate to.
A page from issue #3. Courtesy of IDW.
M.Sassy.K: I love the broad spectrum of realities I can cover in fantasy. I love fantasy that’s grounded in nature with a twist. It gives me a chance to push palettes and really use colour and texture to enhance the story when needed.
AIPT: I’ve commented in a few pieces just how robust and rich this story is — it’s truly among the most personal fantasy tales I’ve read. Is there a secret to that? Are other genre stories focused on other things beyond organic displays of humanity?
GWW: First, thank you! We’ve all worked very hard to make this the best book we possibly can. If it feels personal, it’s probably because this was a story born during quarantine…in Seattle, there was a period when we were trapped inside by both forest fires and lockdown and it really felt like the literal, non-metaphorical end of the world. You couldn’t breathe the air, you couldn’t go anywhere. This book came out of that. We’ve all read “the world is coming to an end unless one plucky gang of heroes can do XYZ” books. This book asks, what happens after the end of the world? And that probably resonates with a lot of people right now.
AIPT: Where does this series fall on the “fantasy spectrum” (I’m imaging the “wholesome” LOTR on one end and Game of Thrones on the other)?
GWW: Ooh, good question. I’d say it’s similar to what you’d get if GoT had been adapted by Studio Ghibli instead of by Benioff and Weiss. The long night is here, but people are still joking with each other and complaining about how hard it is to write poems and thinking about food. I think as a fan of the genre, and now having rewatched Miyazaki’s entire opus with my kids, I’ve internalized his very gentle pragmatic approach to the apocalypse, not as an artistic choice but as a survival skill.
M.Sassy.K: I love Willow’s answer and think her and Chris have done an amazing job of that delicate balance. Miyazaki uses nature as a rather beautiful yet unforgiving character in his stories, and I love that H&D incorporates the environments in a big way as another obstacle the characters have to contend with.
CW: Ha! I’d already had my answer written down before reading Willow’s and Michele’s and I had ranked it on the Ghibli side of Lord Of the Rings. I love it when we’re all on the same page.
So yes, A colourful fantasy even in its darkest moments, we have humour and cosy, good feel moments amongst the drama but we don’t shy from how brutal a clash of swords can be.
AIPT: Visually, there’s so much fantasy stuff out there. How do you decide what to explore and reference and still make this book feel so fresh and vivid?
GWW: Well, Chris deserves most of the credit for that, as does Michele. The amount of thought Chris put into every single design detail is mind-blowing. And then Michele layers on these color palettes that subtly differentiate between cultures and environments. The art carries everything in this story.
CW: I’ve certainly come at this wanting to make it our own fantasy. Yes, we do play in the genre with some of the typical tropes of fantasy but I like to think we have given it our own spin, both in story and visually as much as possible. I think Willow and I both went into this thinking we don’t want to make this a standard western feeling fantasy and I’ve made sure of that with my own pool of references and influences on this
Recently, I’ve been working on pages set in the Elven city of The Silent Shores and I don’t think that setting is going to be what readers will think of as a typical Elven city. It’s not going to be a Rivendell spin off. It’ll be interesting to see if I can manage to keep this our own thing as we go but I do want this to look like a sword and sorcery fantasy too, so with that comes some traditional aesthetics too.
Variant cover by Jessica Fong. Courtesy of IDW.
Also, Michele’s eye on this project is absolutely key to how good this thing looks, I can’t overstate that enough. I remember when we first got started, Michele and I talked a bit about how vibrant we wanted it to be. We didn’t want this story to be muddy in its colour, like I mentioned in an earlier answer. There are undeniably dark and gruesome moments in this story but we always want that to have an edge of beauty.
M.Sassy.K: Ah thank you, Willow! I get a great sense of how the world is through the scripting process so that’s the initial step. Chris puts a lot of love and thought into art direction and making sense of the world, so I do my best to work within those visions. It’s like the cooking show Chopped. I’m given a theme and ingredients to cook with. In terms of references, a lot of them are based on real life observations from when I used to spend a lot of time outdoors. It’s been an invaluable part of my toolkit and I love that I get to relive those scenic moments through coloring fantasy.
AIPT: Also touching on the visual aspect, I pick up on a real sense of openness and diversity and even a kind of timeless quality. Is there some larger feel or emotion visual that you’re going for that pushes this beyond standard fantasy fare?
GWW: Yes, absolutely. It should feel timeless. The world we’re working in is quite small–at one time in the past there may have been many different human cultures, but now civilization has collapsed. There’s only one city left. No one even remembers the names of their gods, if they ever had any. So we’ve got people of many different ethnicities and backgrounds all living and working together as a matter of survival. The same is true of the orcs, though since there are far more orcs, their various cultures are a bit more defined.
CW: Personally, I don’t think there’s any excuse for not making a fantasy world diverse, unless it’s part of a plot point being a reason it should be. Thankfully, I think most fantasy based works have steadily made a better effort to diversify their worlds and characters. Our real world is diverse so our fantasy worlds should be too, if not more so Timeless-wise, I hope so! We might look back on this project in 10 years and feel differently? But I’m glad it’s giving off that vibe right now!
AIPT: How much world-building was involved before starting the story proper? How much will we see, and do you need all of that in-depth history and context to enjoy this poignant human-orc drama?
GWW: Well, I’ve got two generations of this story gamed out. That’s the characters we see now, and then their children after that. So if you like this story, there’s plenty more where that came from. I had a lot of time to think about this world during lockdown, when several other projects were on hold, so I’ve probably put more effort into world-building for this than I have for anything else I’ve ever written.
CW: Thankfully the editors, Maggie, Mark and Jake carved out a lot of time for me to concept out a lot of what we see in the first 6 issues. Willow gave me this beautiful worldbuilding lore document to work from before I’d even started and Willow has been open to me adding to it too when I’ve had ideas. I maybe had around nearly six months before even starting pages where I worked on character sketches, settings and (because I’m an idiot) even tried to work out a couple of written languages and rune alphabets for Orcs and men! I utterly love the world building prep side of working on a book like this. I could happily plan a whole book out without ever having drawn an interior page. That kind of time allowance is really rare, especially in comics but I would go that route for nearly any project if I could.
Variant cover by Cliff Chiang. Courtesy of IDW.
AIPT: I love the dynamic of Tara Icemane-Callum Battlechild-the Last Men Standing as well as Troth Icemane and Faran Stoneback. Why is that specific configuration so important, and can we expect these groups to come together again/more soon-ish?
GWW: I love a nice messy domestic drama. Someone is in love with someone, who is in love with someone else, who for political reasons is betrothed to the first person, and on and on. You get the tension of will-they won’t-they, you get passion, you get heartbreak, you get the full human catastrophe. Right now these characters are kind of on parallel tracks as the orcs head north to protect their cattle and the Last Men fight the Vangol along the coast, but they’re going to come together again in spectacular fashion.
AIPT: Speaking of Mr. Battlechild, issue #2 has a solid bit of info about his background. What can we expect from him? And am I wrong in saying, amid some truly great characters, he feels like a compelling and multifaceted lead?
GWW: You’re not wrong. Cal is so much fun…he’s got this hair-raising backstory, he can’t read or write, but he’s cheerful and good natured and just has this dogged belief that things will turn out okay. I think he’s a real challenge to Tara’s ideas about what a good leader looks like. He gets some very good scenes.
AIPT: Does everyone have a favorite moment scene (that’s happened or will happen to tease about) that speaks to something larger about the book?
GWW: There’s a battle scene coming up during which some crucial things happen to alter the fates of several characters–I’ve been waiting a year to write it. So yes, but it’ll be a minute before anyone sees it. It speaks to the way we try to use big set pieces to advance these quieter and more intimate relationships and character beats. Everything has to fit together, no loose ends.
CW: I can’t wait to show readers the Silent Shores setting. That setting was one of the main things I wanted to concept and draw when I was pitched Willow’s idea and we have some cool gatherings of the Orcs in there. Also, we have an issue I just love that explores Tara and her backstory and shows you a little more of what she’s really capable of.
M.Sassy.K: Oh gosh, there’s a handful but I can’t really say any more without spoiling things. It’s been a hot orc summer for me though, that is all.
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