Paul Pope returns to Mars: The legendary creator on the 30-year journey to ‘Total THB’

Paul Pope draws like he talks — in constant motion.

Even over Zoom, you can experience that kinetic process. Ideas snap to history, history snaps to process, process snaps to philosophy, and it all loops back to the page. Which, in the case of Total THB, Volume 1 (out November 11 from 23rd Street Books / First Second / Macmillan), means the return of one of the most important indie sci-fi comics of the last three decades. At last, the book is remastered, reordered, and presented the way Pope always wanted it to live.

“THB feels great because it’s a return to the beginning,” Pope said. “I’m very proud of the work.”

He originally started THB in the mid-’90s and last published new material in 2012–2013. However, this isn’t just another archival release — he’s still in it.

“Right now, in fact, we’re doing the final edits on the third volume,” Pope said. “I think by the end of everything, there’s going to be five volumes.”

Between published and unpublished pages, he’s sitting on around 1,000 pages of this world. And he’s still not done.

For anyone new: Total THB is set on a divided Mars. Up north, Plutonium City is wild and creative, loud with music and art. Down south, Velo City is buttoned-down, ruled by an increasingly suffocating bureaucracy. Somewhere in the middle of that tension is HR Watson, the sheltered daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and THB — her bodyguard. THB is a sentient, shape-shifting, water-activated protector who can go from a rubber ball to a towering nine-foot guardian in an instant. At first, he’s a toy, a novelty. Then HR becomes a target, and THB becomes the key survival.

It’s a premise that felt ambitious and strange in 1994. In 2025, it feels uncomfortably current.

“A lot of the themes I was trying to address in THB are very current now,” Pope said. “AI, planetary exploration, terraforming Mars, concerns about property rights, government control.” He was thinking about artificial intelligence and privatized colonization of off-world resources at 24. We’re all thinking about them now because that’s the world we live in today.

Pope doesn’t shy away from the politics baked into THB, either. Velo City’s authoritarian machine isn’t coded as left or right, red or blue. It’s coded as control.

“I deliberately didn’t make the bureaucracy in THB like modern American left wing or right wing,” Pope said. “Because totalitarianism is pretty much the same thing if you go too far in any of the spectrums. The metaphor is insects.”

He points to a real text — Maurice Maeterlinck’s study The Life of the Bee — and this idea of the “perfect,” efficient hive.

“Totalitarians want people to be organized the way insects are organized,” Pope said. Perfect. Durable. Obedient. Replaceable.

That tension — freedom versus control, organic versus engineered, human versus machine — runs through everything in THB, right down to its core relationship. At the heart of the story is Watson and THB: One is a lonely rich kid raised in a controlled environment; the other is an ultra-capable, deeply resourceful AI whose full consciousness has literally been restricted.

“The story is really about HR Watson growing up,” Pope said. “Her father makes THB for the daughter so that she has a surrogate guardian. She’s young, very sheltered, very opinionated, and hasn’t really seen a lot of life. THB has lots of wisdom. But he’s not able to say everything he knows. He’s programmed not to say or do everything he can do.”

That limitation — a protector who can’t fully speak — becomes emotional fuel.

“Some of the charm of the story is this girl bonding with this hyper-sentient AI superhero,” Pope said.

Pope’s excited — honestly thrilled — at the idea of teens meeting HR for the first time in this new edition.

“We’re going to get 12- and 13-year-olds reading this for the first time,” Pope said. “They’re going to identify with her because she’s the same age as them. And I’m like, wow, I’m really glad that this hasn’t dated or aged badly.”

It’s wild how much of this book is about right now, even though it was built across the ‘90s and 2000s. Surveillance culture. Corporate militarization. AI drifting from “tool” to “weapon.” The numbing distance of remote warfare.

“We’re probably already in SkyNet,” Pope said, half joking but fully not. He talks about drone programs recruiting gamers because piloting a killing machine from a bunker “is the same thing.” He talks about a robot dog with a missile launcher. He talks about how fast technology moves, how slow public oversight is made to be, and how that gap creates damage we only see after it’s permanent.

That’s the other thing about talking to Paul Pope: you’ll be discussing page layout and, two beats later, he’s breaking down militarized automation and Greek democracy.

But craft is always the spine. Total THB is also deeply about Pope’s evolution as an artist.

Volume 1 captures Pope in his early 20s, obsessed with anatomy and painting, studying at Ohio State, working odd jobs (“landscaping,” he says with a laugh, “they leave you alone”), and in a print shop to learn production and pay for self-publishing.

“I’d work and then do my homework, and then I’d go to work at the print shop and work till 2 am,” Pope said. “Step, rinse, repeat.” He calls that era “art time,” where you stay up all night because you’re too wired by the work to sleep.

The first volume was mostly drawn in 1994 and 1995. Then comes Volume 2 — and for Pope, that’s where people will see something snap into place.

“In Volume 2, there’s a five-year gap,” he says. “I got a contract to start working in Japan making manga, and I learned a lot. About 45 pages into Book Two, it’s almost like the jalopy turns into a Ferrari. Suddenly, it’s 400 miles an hour in the left lane.”

You can watch him level up, panel by panel, influenced by manga storytelling discipline, by European pacing, by classic newspaper strip clarity, and by the work of the iconic Moebius. By the time we get into the later material, you’re watching a career fully crystallize.

If nothing else, he’s super honest about that early art.

“I was really mortified to look at the first volume,” Pope said. “I’m like, ‘Oh God, this art’s not that good. Is this even professional level?’”

Now, decades and multiple Eisner awards later, he can see the teenager in there.

“Back then, it was early growing pains,” Pope said. “It’s like the teenage version. The only thing you can’t do is quit. Because if you quit, you’re never going to get better.”

That resistance to quitting — to taking “no” as an answer — is threaded through Pope’s whole career. He talks about self-publishing THB, then intentionally breaking through what he calls the “glass ceiling” of being seen as “just indie.” He went on to work on Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America. He built a clothing line with DKNY, collaborated with Diesel, developed Battling Boy for Paramount and later Netflix, served as an executive producer, and now has multiple New York Times bestsellers on his shelf, including Battling Boy Vol. 1. He’s won a Reuben Award, a Harvey, and four Eisners, and his work’s been translated all over the world.

But even with all of that, he still talks like a guy at the drawing board — because that’s who he’ll always be. He still draws traditionally (“ink and paper, man — those are my weapons”) at a big physical scale, sometimes on 19″ x 24″ boards, because he likes the discipline of it.

“When you put a line down, you have to have the confidence of the line,” Pope said. “If you make a mistake, there’s no edit/delete. You either start over or you pull out your white acrylic and cover it up.”

He loves the “zen” of that state — silence or ambient music, eight hours gone in a blink. He’s pretty open that it’s slower than digital workflows, and he’s also fine with that. “

When I’m done with this, it’s not just a job,” Pope said. “This book has to be the best book. It can’t be functional. It has to be great.”

That hunger to make something great — not just publishable, not just “content,” but true greatness — feels like the real core of Total THB. The book is not just a sci-fi epic about a girl and her living weapon on a dangerous Mars. It’s also the document of a cartoonist breaking himself down and rebuilding, over and over, for 30 years.

Pope says that’s very much on purpose. He traces it back to experimental music and radical art theory, and this idea of collapse and expansion. Destroy what you know, rebuild it, destroy it again, rebuild it better.

“That’s what I was trying to do with THB,” Pope said.

Even the character embodies that — THB is literally two things at once: a tiny little ball and a giant superhero. Compression and explosion. Latency and impact. And with this new edition, the work itself gets to do the same thing.

For Pope, collecting Total THB in definitive volumes, in stark black-and-white to spotlight the ink, is more than archival. It’s an act of finishing a thought.

“I need completion,” Pope said. “I’m sitting on hundreds of pages of unpublished work. I have to finish these and get them out.”

That includes THB, and more Battling Boy. And that even includes two public appearances this November to kick off promotion: one at Desert Island in Brooklyn, and one at Forbidden Planet in Manhattan — “Me and Frank Miller,” Pope said, grinning, like he still can’t quite believe he gets to say that out loud.

If Total THB started as a fearless, DIY, post-punk sci-fi comic drawn by a 24-year-old who was doing landscaping by day and sneaking into the painting studio at night, it’s now something else. It’s a career-length map of a cartoonist who refused to hear “no” — only “on.”

And for the first time, everyone gets to read it in one place.

The Total THB, Volume 1 paperback heads to bookstores and comic shops on November 11.