A few weeks back, Vault Comics announced a rather novel new project: Slash, the guitar god from the iconic Guns N’ Roses, was working on a comic book adaptation of uber weird, kinda nicha ’80s sword-and-sorcery film Deathstalker. And while we all perhaps had a hearty chuckle, two of Slash’s collaborators, writer Tim Seeley and artist Jim Terry, are deadly serious about bringing this weird and cheesy slice of film history to the magical realm of comics.
At least that was the vibe I got when I spoke with the pair this week as Deathstalker continued crowdfunding via Kickstarter. (The book has already achieved some $43,000 of its original $25,000 goal, with the campaign ending in full on Friday, November 10.) This would actually be the fifth installment for the Deathstalker comics, and this latest tale finds the famed warrior “once again caught between forces larger than himself — a virgin worshiping cult, a sorcerer hell-bent on saving the world through mad science, and the pissed-off army of the Abraxeon kingdom.” But no matter the odds, you can expect “monsters, magic, and mayhem abound” as this OGN delves earnestly into the real man behind the land’s bloodiest sword.
In addition to focusing on the “seriousness” of this Deathstalker project, Seeley and Terry (who collaborated on the awesome West of Sundown) had even more to share during our chat. That includes working with director/FX wizard Steven Kostanski; the magic of this era of ’80s film series; their favorite pages/moments; and event the future of Deathstalker comics.
If you’d like to contribute to the Deathstalker campaign, head here. Incentives for backers include hardcover editions, bookplates, a t-shirt, and even a replica sword.
AIPT: What was it like working with Slash? Was he there just in name or did he add anything to the whole process?
Tim Seeley: He was involved in every Zoom meeting. He was a fan dating back to working at a video store in the ‘80s as a teen. He’s the one who owns the rights to the [Roger] Corman film. He’s literally the producer.
For Jim and I, it’s weird to work with a guy that’s a rock legend. Every video he’s done for Kickstarter, and he says our names, there’s a weird disconnect with your brain — like, I can’t believe this is occuring.
AIPT: You’d mentioned in other places the importance of Deathstalker. What’s your relationship or history with the movies?
Jim Terry: I’d seen Deathstalker. I don’t know if I’d ever seen the second one — they’re hard to find… But I have a huge emotional connection to that era of movie making, and those types of genre films, specifically from that era. The magic of watching the movie in your own home, going to the video store and renting it and seeing something that maybe you’re not supposed to see. Maybe you’re not old enough to see it, or there’s no other way in hell you would have seen it if you didn’t see your store and take a chance on it. That sort of garage band mentality of just making a movie because you can and doing what you can with what you have is super appealing to me. And the creativity that comes out of that was very specific to that era.
TS: My dad was a huge proponent of the VHS. I remember my dad had saved up a bunch of paychecks and went to buy a VCR and it cost $900, which was probably three paychecks for my dad. And one of the first movies we ever rented was Conan the Barbarian. And Conan really caused a rush of homages or knock-offs. I had seen the first two a bunch of times, I saw the third one in Mystery Science Theater, and I had not seen the fourth one until recently. The appeal has always been that they’re like the mainstream ones, but dirtier and more violent and they feel sleazy. And that is something I appreciate and I think it’s something I’ve incorporated into my own work as well.
AIPT: My dad let me see Toxic Avenger when I was, like, 6 or 7 years old.
But one of the things I connect with both of those films is, like you said Tim, that willingness to accept its own weirdness and filth. Other fantasies put on an air of importance, and not Deathstalker. Is that a power for the series, that kind of embrace?
TS: I’m a huge Troma fan as well. So I think there was an era of that sort of filmmaking, which was, ‘We just want you to rent this because it has a great cover. But there will be violence and boobs in it.’ And there like no attempt to to put any other face on it — it is what it was.
Seeley (L) and Terry (R). Courtesy of Vault’s Kickstarter.
Deathstalker was one one of the most prime examples of that. It is wall to wall boobs and sexual inappropriateness and violence and horrible stuff going on. But there’s a lot of heart in it, too. I mean, they filmed it in Argentina at the end of a war. They were making stuff by the seat of their pants and somehow nothing feels like those movies.
That’s one of the things Jim and I came into this to try and do — can we make it feel like that stuff? Obviously there’s a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want to do anymore because it makes us uncomfortable. And so we have to imagine it makes the audience uncomfortable as well. But there’s also stuff in there that we can embrace and things we can make fun of. And I think the vibe that anything goes — it’s fun, but it’s also kind of gross and disturbing. And it’s a little sexy. All that sort of stuff we thought we could capture and put back into the comic version.
AIPT: The other thing that I think is important about this is that you had Steven Kostanski involved. What was his sort of place in the creative process and what does that kind of experience, that insight bring into a comic?
TS: The things he’s done [are] Manborg and Psycho Gorman…and so the only thing he hasn’t done in the homage to weird, cheap ’80s movies is a sword-and-sorcery film. But he’s also sort of our creative lead. We try to match the voice of something that Steven would do.
JT: Yeah, I think he very much contributed to setting the tone of what this book was gonna feel like.
AIPT: You mentioned it just a second ago, Tim, but can you talk a little bit more about sort of bringing this kind of story into a different medium and into a different kind of era where I think people’s sensibilities have shifted?
TS: I think that’s the thread that we had to sort of get…the thing we had to figure out was that, what is the through line of the films? Is there a continuity? Is there stuff that we can use as a character development? So the thing we came down upon with Steven and Slash was that this will be an older Deathstalker; he’s in his early 50s. So the other movies occurred, but it’s almost as if they were told by different people.
One of the things that’s notable about the movies is that they are wildly different. The first one is kind of serious, but it’s also sort of the sleaziest one. And then the second one is kind of a send up of comedy; it’s good-natured most of the time. And the third one is a weird swashbuckler movie. And then the fourth one comes back to the first one. So, the take we wanted to do on it, and this is a big guiding thing of Steven, is that there is a through line and there is a character arc, but it’s also about how this is a story that seems to have changed over time. Is it the same guy? Is it not the same guy? And so we kind of play around with that. It’s a way to reflect his character arc. He’s a different guy by the time we catch him in our comic. He’s clearly tried to be better, but it’s hard for him to be a better person because the world he lives in is a rough place.
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
One of the early threads that we picked up on is that it’s very much like Road Warrior, right? He’s a man reduced to one impulse, and that’s to survive. But he keeps getting thrown into these hero stories. People keep coming to him and asking him for help and his impulse at first is always just to exploit it and take advantage of it. But then there’s something in him that sort of pushes him towards doing, if not the right thing, something close to the right thing. And that’s the arc of the character. Even when he’s doing the right thing, sometimes he’s doing it for the wrong reason. Although there’s also the side of him in our stories, you’ll see him do the wrong thing, but kind of for the right reason. So it gives a character that I think has a lot more depth than you might expect.
The first issue kind of sets up our world and our story for Deathstalker and where he’s been. And then by the time you get to the second chapter, you kind of get this plot for him and what he wants and how really it’s kind of the story about a guy who’s so lonely that he drags all these people into his world, and ultimately often gets them killed, making him even more alone.
JT: And like the Road Warrior, the Max Max films, he’s the constant in those movies. But his character changes a little bit from each movie, but there’s no super logic connecting them in one way to the next. It’s as George Miller put it, he’s a myth now, you know, and the story is told about him. So that’s the way I’ve been approaching
AIPT: I’m curious, Jim, how much do you reference those films specifically from a visual perspective? How do you toe that line?
TS: We’re not restrained to Argentina.
JT: And we don’t have the same budget restaurants, either. But tonally, I’m a person who enjoys unironic representation of things. So I’m trying to bring as much as I can of that old school Heavy Metal feel to it. And not particularly playing it for jokes, but acknowledging the humor in it. I’m trying to make it an organic part of things and not playing it just for jokes, but I want it to look cool, too. I want it to be badass.
TS: And we did expand the world a bit. There’s ,entions in the films about other places, but they can’t go because they would be too high budget to film. So we were able to do that. The first issue, we run through a couple of different realms and lands and we expand upon the world. You find out what’s wrong with this place and why it’s so sleazy and why everyone’s so terrible. And we were allowed a little bit more world-building than the films could do because they were such individualized stories. So there’s an attempt made to connect the whole place; we even go to Evie’s castle from the second film. Then in future stories, we’ll definitely play around with stuff that we saw in places and put them into a big map instead of feeling like we’re just hiking through a set behind some warehouse.
AIPT: And on that idea of world-building, these films come from a time when no one’s writing a 40-page bible of this universe. Is it fun and exciting or mostly challenging to have to build it after the fact?
TS: The original screenwriter, Howard Cohen, must have known some stuff, right? He knew his Conan. And I think he was going for the vibe more than anything. But yeah, you’re exactly right. This isn’t a world in which we have Tolkien-esque language developed. It’s just not part of it. I think he was going for a vibe more than anything else. Our job, then, was to create more sort of connection between other stories in it. But the thing that we came down upon was that clearly this is a fantasy-esque world. It’s kind of our world in the same way that Conan’s world is sort of ours, right? It takes place here, I guess, but in a forgotten age, or in a lost time.
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
It’s going through some bad times. So maybe in the past there was some progress and there were places that you could go where it was safe and there was development and it’s clearly fallen on some hard times and may have been that way for a long time. And so it’s a low fantasy world in that way. There aren’t, like, dragons flying around in the sky, but there are these fantastical creatures and they do interact with people and there are these other sort of fantasy tropes. But we roll them out slowly in the way that I thought the films did. In every movie, there’s a bunch of weird cats or whatever, and we want to play with that. Still, I think keeping it as this broken fantasy world is the most interesting part to me.
One of the things we show in our story, and it’s a part of the Deathstalker world, is that every time a wizard shows up, they’re terrible and they mess everything up. And so Deathstalker has to keep having to kill these wizard dudes. That’s just one thing he is known for. And in our story, he meets someone who practices a new thing, and that’s called science. And so we’ve have Deathstalker meet this scientist, a guy who doesn’t believe in gods and magic and everything, and he’s trying to do something with progress and engineering. That’s mostly the big conflict in our story, someone trying to fix the world and someone who thrives in it when it’s broken, mashing into each other.
AIPT: I do want to talk about that idea of low fantasy, because I think that there’s been like a renaissance of late, with these stories where you have that brooding lone wanderer moving through this realm of varying degrees of fantasy. Why do you think that maybe this kind of story speaks to people more recently?
TS: There’s a reason that there was a big burst of barbarian hero movies in the ’80s and now we’re here in 2023, right? Anytime there’s sort of a social regression, and there’s a pushback against progress, you see these sort of stories become popular. They are the fight for progress against the forces of conservatism, really.
But I also think it’s that fantasy of, ‘I could survive. I could be this hero, I could be Deathstalker.’ And that’s why make fun of it a bit; Deathstalker can’t even survive by himself. He gets lonely, and he needs people. He brings them into his world and then they’re not as adept or morally flexible as he is. And so they don’t tend to last. I know Jim and I talked about that being something that we found appealing about Conan stories that we could pull from and add to our world.
JT: None of you got my joke.
TS: No, please, repeat it.
JT: You’re going to die of ‘dissing Terry.’
AIPT: Nailed it.
Just a few more questions for y’all before time’s up. First, is there a page, panel, or moment that stands out for either of you?
JT: One that has been fun for me has been creating the environment. Tim will loosely write, ‘It’s lave and it’s kind of hardened,’ and I get to figure out what that looks like. And it’s not always fun, but in this book, it’s been pretty fun just creating environments for these characters to walk through, and to experience. To have some kind of input to the world itself and how barren or how elaborate or how built up it is. Sometimes it’s difficult to do that, but other times it’s just a lot of fun to just, ‘OK, what is a lava-strewn, smoky, barren area look like? That’s the kind of stuff I would want to draw anyways.
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
TS: So there’s, there’s a lot of fun with that for me. Yeah. And there’s a double spread page Jim does in the first issue, which really takes advantage of all that and you just get your big hero hacking up the bad guys scene.
I think for me, the most fun in the first issue is that we have [Deathstalker] reconnect with his ex-wife, who was a princess in the second film and w she’s a queen. She was in a Jim Wynorski movie in the first one, so obviously she was half naked most of the time, but in a good natured way. But we see what’s happened to her in the years since. It’s very clear that she doesn’t need him and that he was sort of keeping her down. And he is of the impression that she’ll be so glad to see him. He’s clearly just a bad influence on everyone. And the way he reacts to that — especially when he meets her seer, who is the scientist character — he’s angry and jealous that she’s moved on and that she’s figured out a world without him. I felt like that was a way to show that our vibe is just slightly different and that we’re kind of acknowledging some of the stuff and having fun with it while also being in full appreciation of some of the moments in the movie which we really like.
AIPT: Tim, you alluded to it earlier, but can we talk more about those future stories? Could this become a kind of “dynasty” for comics?
TS: I told Jim this on our Slack meeting: it’s hilarious that the comic that Jim was made to do is Deathstalker. Because he probably wouldn’t have guessed it, but just seeing this come together, it looks so good. And it looks something like you’ve kind of seen, but also looks like something you haven’t. The films did touch a lot of people, but they’re all older now, and so I feel like it’s something that you could still have a really good time with and it would show you something that, if you’re younger, you haven’t seen before. If you’re older, it’s something that feels familiar but kind of new.
And I think that maybe the most fun part of it is that, you’ve seen big budget films get turned into comics…it’s a reduction of scope and everything. Whereas here, it feels like we’re widening the scope. We’re getting to show you more than even if they [the filmmakers] wanted to do it, they couldn’t have. And so we’re using little elements that appear in a low budget film to do a giant, budget comic book. And it feels like that’s a great place for comics. Like. let’s expand upon things that you couldn’t do. Let’s make and have comics justify themselves, and the art really justifies making it into a comic.
AIPT: Jim, anything to add? Is this the book you were born to have made?
JT: I don’t want to say that I agree with that, but I might agree with that.
It has been an absolute blast to draw. And everybody so far has been just really easy and fun to work with. The notes that I’ve gotten have all been super helpful. And for an IP where you’re trying to dot the I’s and cross the T’s, it’s really been a creative thing. And I do love this world and I enjoy playing around in it.
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
AIPT: Last question: there’s maybe a week or so left of the Deathstalker Kickstarter — what’s your final sales pitch?
TS: At the moment, there’s nothing being made like this book. There are obviously Conan comics all the time, and as well there should be. But I feel like this specifically is going to feel different. Jim mentioned that it’s very metal in its way, and I feel like it’s very distinct in its vibe. And that vibe, the Heavy Metal, sorcery-fantasy thing, never goes away. And I know this because I teach at college, and I still have crusty metal heads sitting in the corner in jean jackets and black t-shirts. It’s an evergreen idea to do these kinds of stories, and to have a really good time with them and make them both fantastical but sort of honest and tell you something about yourself. And, you know, lots of swords and butts and boobs and skulls and stuff, too.
JT: I think the appeal for me is the fact that this book, it will go there. Like, some stuff won’t go there, but this book is going there. And I think there’s something fun and exciting about a book that will surprise you when you flip the page. I’m so used to being kind of vaguely underwhelmed by things that just are afraid to take that extra step. And this book will take it a couple extra steps. And we’re fully committed to it. I think that that is one of the appealing aspects of anything that I enjoy: the people are committed and they’re having fun and they believe in it and they’re just saying, ‘OK, yeah, screw it, let’s do this.’
AIPT: Yeah, I’ve seen conversations on Twitter and the like where people muse about, “Can we have this overt sexuality and violence in films?” And I think, “Yeah, if it’s done well.”
TS: It’s all about the approach. And the hope is you do the weird shit here in the comics. Do it in the comics, where it’s completely safe to be a weirdo.
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