If you don’t know what to make of Golgotha Motor Mountain, you’re not exactly alone.
“Candidly, I go into every book with a background buzz of apprehension and anxiety that no one will understand what I’m trying to do or if I know what I’m trying to do,” said co-writer Matthew Erman. “I’m not worried, but I wonder what people are going to think.”
But that “uncertainty” seems especially high for this project, and perhaps rightly so. Golgotha Motor Mountain is described as a “hillbilly cosmic sludge southern gothic nightmare,” in which the lives of brothers Elwood and Vernon Damnage are irrevocably changed when a “passing interstellar rock rains down on [their] meth lab in Golgotha Knob, Kentucky.”
Yet being unsure doesn’t mean Erman and his collaborators don’t believe completley in this title. If anything, that kind of apprehension is one of the reasons why this book might be so special.
“Over my career, it’s always the books that I’m scared to put out and that I’m uncertain of that end up being the ones that I find the most gratifying,” said co-writer Lonnie Nadler. “Because when you’re doing that, it means you’re taking risks. It means you’re pushing yourself. It means you’re trying to push the medium, whatever that means to you, into those places of discomfort.”
And taking risks is the one thing that Golgotha Motor Mountain does extraordinarily well. The book excels as this deeply unsettling, confoundingly heartfelt book about the oddities that define modern America. It’s a book that both leans into and defies expectations at almost every turn. For a story about two brothers selling alien meth, it’s a decidedly deliberate, almost nuanced affair (and not, as I’d expected in my advance review, basically redneck Beavis and Butthead).
“I find that with comics — maybe not all of them but most — the ones I like are slow,” said Nadler. “And it’s done in an effort to create a sense of mystery and create a sense of tone that hopefully it’s not just something the reader reads as a disposable thing in five minutes, which a lot of comics are. Yes, that’s the origins of the medium, so there’s no fault to that. But that’s not the kind of comics I’m interested in creating. I’ve also found that the way the industry has gone in the last decade or so, so much of it is these really quick, almost disposable pieces of art. It’s not the creator’s fault. It’s a lot of publishers who come out and say, ‘You need to do to this to capture the reader’s attention on page one.’
Erman added to this idea, explaining that they almost force the reader to engage via these dense historical explanations and extended use of footnotes.
“We literally don’t let you slow down,” said Erman. “You have to engage the whole time. We wrote so much that for you to speed through this book would mean you’re literally not reading a good third of it. That was one of those very deliberate intentional decisions that Lonnie and I made even before we had art and before we had scripting — we sat down and we wanted to have narration. I’ve heard throughout my comic career all of these rules about how and when to use narration and when you use too much narration. All this good advice from really well-respected writers that made several lists last year have told me, ‘You write too much monologue. Or, your captions are too much.’ This book is a middle finger to that idea.”
Courtesy of IDW.
That emphasis on slow-burning mystery, then, is worthy of additional dissection. In some ways, it was born out of a shared interest in the films of the Coen Brothers, two other creators with a similar love of grappling with audiences and creating things that both undeniably dark as well as firmly asinine.
“There’s a great Coen Brothers quote from A Serious Man,” said Erman. “And it’s simply, ‘Embrace the mystery.’ I really think that embracing the mysterious nature of art, and why it is something aggravates you or why it bothers you or why it sticks to you, is an indication of quality.”
Nadler, meanwhile, takes that sentiment even further still.
“Not like I’m saying we’re the Coen brothers; I would never make that comparison,” said Nadler. “But just this idea, this willingness, to ask questions and to be curious and to say, ‘Yeah, what’s up with this?’ There are these large questions about ourselves and the universe, our place in the universe, and the way we present ourselves. Being able to explore that and see what [conclusion] the characters in the book come to, but it’s maybe not our conclusion. Still, having creativity in comics and writing as a space to explore these things; it’s really the reason anyone creates anything. And just trying to be a little bit more deliberate and open about that in Golgotha is what allowed us to end up with the product that we ended up with.”
Of course, in the conversation about the Coens’ influence, you can’t forget certain shared lineages and how history shapes the creative approach.
“Matthew and I are both Jewish,” said Nadler. “I think we feel a lot of kinship with the Coen Brothers’ work, and we see it specifically as Jewish cinema (specifically A Serious Man). There’s this notion in their work, but also in the history of Jewish literature and in Judaism itself, that asking questions is part of life, and asking questions without expecting an answer is a tenant of what it means to be Jewish and faithful. I’m not a faithful person. I’m a complete atheist religiously. But that sense bleeds into our work in a similar way that it does into the Coen Brothers’ work.”
But they’re not the Comics Coen Brothers; that comparison diminishes something essential (even as it’s still quite handy). Nadler and Erman have been friends for some time, and they leaned into that connection to help navigate this intricate, rather involved book.
“I don’t know if I could have made this book with anyone else five years ago,” said Erman. “I think that there’s a level of confidence that both Lonnie and I have. Lonnie’s got more comics under his belt, but we’ve been in the business for about the same time. And we’ve been putting books out for our careers that are weirdly synchronistic.”
Part of that, as Erman further explained, is that the pair approach writing with the same reverence and intensity.
“The thing that Lonnie and I share is that we take the craft very seriously,” said Erman. “This book is very weird and fun and ridiculous and deals with very heady things. And there’s a lot of cursing and there might be some big jokes in there. But we take the craft of writing seriously. I think when you take the craft of writing anything seriously, you come out with something that can hopefully be seriously looked at.”
They also have a kind of shared “language” that shaped their approach.
“Firstly, the Ghost in the Shell manga has these little asides that are between the gutters, and it’s these long bits explaining the technology of the world,” said Nadler. “We also talked about old-school CRPGs, like Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium. How you’re forced to engage with the text, and those things only enrich the experience.”
Issue #1 variant cover from Nikola Čižmešija. Courtesy of IDW.
At the same time, though, the pair are also quite different in the way they operate as creators.
“And just in terms of our writing style, I think very reductively summarizing it…Matthew writes very emotionally and very from the gut, and I write very logically and from the mind,” said Nadler.
Added Erman, “I think Lonnie is much more articulate, both in his writing and in how he explains the differences. And one of the things I pride myself on being is a really flexible collaborator. But I think the thing that we have is a really good understanding of the kinds of stories that work for us and the kind of stories that we want to tell and the kinds of stories that excite us.”
Rather than their approaches causing tension, it helped define the working parameters and led this rag-tag group to new insights and confidence.
“I hesitate to use words like ‘disagreements’ and ‘arguments’ because there’s such a negative connotation to those words,” said Nadler. “But to me, that’s just collaboration, and everything about collaboration and creating something collaboratively is a net positive. And the attempt, like Matthew said, is as long as you have faith and trust in the other person that they have the best intentions for the story, then any disagreement can be overcome. It’s almost enjoyable to a certain extent. I like when I disagree with Matthew and we fight for something and I’m so certain something is right. And then Matthew says something and it just clicks like, ‘Oh no, I’m wrong.’ You know, it’s nice to be challenged in that way.”
In fact, as Nadler further explained, this whole creative process has been almost transformative in how he thinks about his own efforts.
“I tend to write longer scripts, and the scripts for Golgotha are probably longer than the average script,” said Nadler. “I don’t do it to be masturbatory; I do it because I try to think of every detail that I need to and even to the extent of laying out a page for the artist. Not to say this is the layout you have to do, but to show I am thinking of the layout as a part of the story. This book, I think, has been eye-opening in terms of letting go of that a little bit, especially on a book that’s as chaotic as this one, because it needs to be.”
Even Erman has had a kind of change of heart, as it were.
“I’m an absolute carpet, and people walk right over me when it comes to stuff like that,” said Erman of making notes on art and other editing minutiae. “I have no backbone. If it looks good, it gets the thumbs up from me. I’ve started to care more. That seems like a really huge damning statement to say about myself, but I’m putting in the effort.”
This self-awareness even extends to the pair’s “relationships” with the Damnage brothers. Erman feels a connection with Vernon, the brash, bolder brother who concocts their half-cocked scheme to sell the alien object as meth.
“I’m a bridge burner, and I think Vernon is also a bridge burner. We burn bridges,” said Erman.
Nadler, meanwhile, resonates with the more reserved Elwood, who once again gets dragged into an especially harebrained scheme.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, I feel a kinship with Elwood just because he’s introspective and hesitant to do a lot of things,” said Nadler. “But inside, you can just tell the wheels are always turning. It’s almost a coming-of-age story for him. He just happens to be in his 20s and this arc he should have been when he was 12.”
Courtesy of IDW.
A further extension of that idea can be seen in the work of the remaining creative team: artist Robbi Rodriguez and colorist Marissa Louise (as well as letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou). It’s their contributions that helped Nadler and Erman not only create something truly novel and inventive but to do so in a way that felt especially revelatory and in line with this core theme of transformation.
“It’s so interesting to see how Robbie interprets the scripts,” said Erman. “It’s not at all what I initially imagined for the art, but now having seen it, nothing else would have worked the same way. It’s truly one of those magic things where Lonnie and I both went into this with ideas and notions about what the book should look like. I think one of the things that is so exciting about comics is the filtering. When you write a script, you’re really only writing it for maybe three or four people. To see Robbie and Marissa and [Hassan] take everything that is in those scripts and really just filter it through their own sensibilities in a way that you can’t literally imagine.”
Like their own collaboration between each other, Nadler and Erman celebrate this new understanding. It’s made all the more intriguing when you see just how personal this book is for both writers.
Golgotha Motor Mountain takes place in this fictional Kentucky holler, a place where Erman is mostly familiar. Through that connection, we can really begin to understand less about the “minutiae” of design choices, pacing, setting, etc. and more about the book’s interest in horror, existential darkness, and social rot.
“I half grew up in the area that we’re fictionalizing right now, and so I have a lot of personal experience with the area,” said Erman. “One of the things that I think separates us is that I think that we looked at the characters really empathetically. There’s a version of this story where it’s two bumbling idiots and they just fart and drink beer and they don’t do anything of substance and they’re just screaming and there’s nothing there. I’m sure that’s a fun comic.”
For Nadler, it’s here that he can emphasize the clear influences of Southern gothic literature. Perhaps even more than the Coen Brothers, it’s folks like Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor who informed the scope and feel of Golgotha.
“I don’t mean to mansplain, but the tenants are that it takes the depraved, the grotesque and it uses those things to explore things that are at the base nature of all of humanity traditionally within the U.S.,” said Nadler. “And for us it was, ‘OK, what is a science fiction version of a Southern Gothic story?’ So we take these hillbilly brothers that are meth cooks, and they have this ridiculous experience at the beginning of the issue. But it’s really a story about the disenfranchised. It’s a story about race. It’s a story about history. And it’s a story about how all of those things have led up to a completely grotesque contemporary version of America that is stretched to the extreme. It is all of these genres. It’s cosmic horror, it’s science fiction, it’s fantasy, it’s a Western, it’s a drama, but really at its core, it’s just a Southern Gothic contemporary.”
Added Nadler, “I think even the original pitch document we sent was these crazy descriptions that made it feel like Slipknot meets Mad Max. But then at the start of every chapter heading was this really profound quote from different Southern Gothic writers. It was that tone clash of, ‘What the fuck — this is like a Slipknot concert but here’s a quote from Flannery O’Connor about an easy truth.’ It’s like if William Faulkner did an open mic night before a Slipknot show. That’s kind of how it feels.”
“It’s a story about how all of those things have led up to a completely grotesque contemporary version of America that is stretched to the extreme.”
Anyone else linking Slipknot and O’Connor might be a little bonkers, but this team understood that it’s an easier connection to make than you might assume. There’s already heaps of great projects that are both stupid and gory and decidedly insightful (bordering on the brilliant).
“I’m a huge fan of Troma and B-movies,” said Erman. “One of the things that I’ve always wanted for this is that it looks like something like Redneck Zombies. It looks like Redneck Zombies when you get into it, but when you open it up, it’s Cormac McCarthy. It reads like Cormac McCarthy and David Lynch had a baby.”
It just takes a slightly novel approach. Take, for instance, the masks that the brothers wear for cooking — deeply alien head pieces that broadcast a very specific message to readers.
“Those mask colors are super deliberate,” said Erman. “We wanted the color and the setting and the actual landscape to be its own character. So when you see there are two main characters wearing masks that don’t look anything like anything that they’re surrounded by, that’s absolutely intentional.”
The masks, then, have a few important uses (aside from protecting one’s self from alien meth fumes). At perhaps the most “basic” level, it’s about the role masks play and their value — even if the concept has some slightly embarrassing connotations.
“This might perhaps ruin the romance of it, or our perceived intellect — and now it’s going to sound like we’re huge Slipknot fans — something that inspired this…was Corey Taylor, the lead singer of Slipknot,” said Nadler. (Editor’s Note: Erman and Nadler are not Slipknot super-fans and much of this connection is seemingly a twisted cosmic joke.)
Nadler added, “Whatever you think of [Taylor] and his ideologies now, he had this idea that the masks at a certain point became their faces, and it was easier for them as these uncomfortable people to perform on stage and they feel like their masks are their true personas. From the very beginning, that was what Matthew and I wanted to explore — this idea of masks. The idea of the masks we put on in different situations in front of different people, both literally and metaphorically, and to see what it really means to wear a mask and what it means to wear your inner self on the outside. Without talking about the theme too much and ruining the book or sounding too pretentious, that’s something that continues to develop over the course of the series.”
“We wanted the color and the setting and the actual landscape to be its own character.”
The use and concept of masks, though, can also be important in talking about specific communities. This book deals with an often stereotyped segment of the U.S. population, and the creative team wanted to see how these masks could inform notions of identity and community.
“There’s a big part of the book that is solely focused on the racism and the hatefulness that comes from living in this impoverished, kind of forgotten place,” said Erman. “It bubbles up from the surface whether you like it or not. That’s just what happens when you isolate people from the rest of society, or they isolate themselves.”
Because, as Erman added, it would be easy to dismiss certain people, and that leads to lazy, half-cocked storytelling.
“So I think that dehumanizing anyone, or looking at any instance without empathy, is a quick way to write a bad thing,” said Erman. “And, again, that’s also just a basic tenet of the Southern Gothic, right? It’s looking at people who are on the periphery, and who aren’t usually given this sense of sympathy or empathy, and allowing us to feel that. Even the worst people; Southern Gothic is full of racists that you end up feeling sort of bad for, but not in a way that makes you accept their racism, but accept their pity.”
Because liking your protagonists is overrated.
“It’s good to write and to have your thing be helmed by a little bit of a shit-bag,” said Nadler. “There’s this Daniel Clowes quote that I’ve become fond of…he said, ‘Likable protagonists are for weak-minded narcissists.’ Not just comics, but Hollywood movies too…[these are] industries that are full of likable protagonists.”
Courtesy of IDW.
He pointed specifically to Tanner Howard, one of two brothers (played by Ben Foster) from the excellent 2016 film Hell or High Water.
“He is a real piece of shit in the movie,” said Nadler. “But you still get him and you still love him and you can’t really fault him for the way he is. And it’s the same on the other side with Jeff Bridges’ character [Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton], who makes all these weird off-handed racist comments. But then in the end, you understand that that’s like sadly the only way that he knows to express his love for his partner.”
Added Nadler, “I think about that kind of stuff all the time, where you can have these characters who are despicable in one way but really relatable in another. I think the world in the last few years has been so full of binaries, which is important in its own right, but also understanding how we can relate to people that we don’t think we can relate to is also something I find important. Storytelling really is you getting to know new people that aren’t real.”
There’s a reason why they don’t want to pass moral judgments. Nadler said it’s a great way to “expand your humanity, which is an important human thing that everyone should do.” That might also explain why this book implements a very specific kind of horror.
Yes, the concept of alien meth does result in some rather unsettling and unnerving manipulation of the human form. While those scenes are unbelievably satisfying for true horror fans, they play a larger role.
“Trying to use it, as you say, in a deliberate way to explore ideas that are part of the book elsewhere and to not just go crazy with gore just for the sake of it,” said Nadler. “We’re always trying to do it in a way where it hopefully means something and ultimately makes the book feel larger than it is.”
For Nadler, the use of body horror may be the way to best explore this book’s humanity.
“My impression of body horror — and talking about everyone from David Cronenberg to John Carpenter to Brian Yuzna — but body horror to me is actually the most cerebral of all horror subgenres,” said Nadler. “It is the one that allows us to ask deep questions about what it means to exist as a human because you’re literally pulling apart the body, pointing at it like, ‘Isn’t it weird that we’re these beings that have this sense of self that we identify as in the mind?’ We don’t think about all of our organs and everything that makes us run every day. And if you cut us open, that’s what falls out. It’s what happens to the sense of self when you confront that, and when you confront it in a visceral, very intentional way.”
Erman, meanwhile, agreed to that assessment but added that it also ties back into other ideas central to this book.
“I think body horror is a way for people to discuss in art these really uncomfortable subjects of body dysmorphia and the way that people perceive themselves,” said Erman. “Like, the literal aspect of the perception of your physical and what that is and how that’s reflective of who you are. That that ties in really close with the idea of masks and how the body itself can be a mask for something horrible underneath. This something that’s been buried so deep into the recesses of your being that it’s no longer accessible. Part of the fun of writing this was creating all of these characters and getting to do the work of what’s happening and opening them up and exploring them and seeing what it is that got them to this point in the first place.”
Courtesy of IDW.
Ultimately, it’s about this idea that every one of these story elements — the masks, the alien stuff, the rural setting, the stomach-churning horror, etc. — are focused on one big idea.
“It’s always horror to me, regardless of what subgenre of horror we’re talking about. It’s a genre of confrontation,” said Nadler. “And it’s a confrontation between what’s being presented and the audience. Because if you go into something and they’re expecting horror and you’re not met with that thing that’s going to challenge you, it’s not really horror. That’s the idea on the page — to disarm people and to confront them with these images and these ideas in the hopes that it makes them confront something within themselves.”
If you’re somehow still confused and/or uncertain about this book, that’s quite alright. It’s about playing with, and maybe even subverting, your understanding and expectations.
“One of the other key tenets of Southern Gothic literature is the simplicity of the story,” said Erman. “As I Lay Dying is about a family that’s just dragging their dead mom 20 or 30 miles down the road. It’s such a simple premise. Through the structure of the way that [William] Faulkner writes it, and through the structure of the book, you learn that this story is not about that. It’s something so much bigger. That is one of the things that I love about Southern Gothic as a genre — our story is really simple at heart. It’s just two brothers that have to sell off the rest of this ‘meth.’ There’s not a whole lot to that. So you use structure and the genre to lift all that simplicity up and create complex, heady moments that disarm you.”
It’s not about knowing or not knowing things. Heck, even the creators will admit that they’re not only uncertain of the book’s reaction but also what it just might ultimately mean from a philosophical perspective.
“I should be clear: it’s not like Matthew and I have answers to any of this,” said Nadler. “It’s just something we wanted to explore and see where it took us.”
Added Erman, “I truly think if a piece of work can inspire you to say, ‘I don’t get it,’ I think there’s something there. And even that is a singular experience of looking at something and it being lost on you. I love exploring that as a writer and as an artist.”
There is at least one thing, however, that they do know and are certain of: not only is this book “really fucking good,” said Erman,” but it has already achieved the only goal that seems to matter.
“It almost doesn’t matter how it’s received because Matthew and I and Robbie and Marissa, we’ve achieved what we’ve wanted to in the sense of making something that is wholly original,” said Nadler. “Whether or not it’s good is almost irrelevant at this point.”
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