‘The Great Escape but there’s a vampire in the camp’. That was the hook for OUT, the five-issue creator-owned horror series that Will Conrad and I recently released via AWA Studios (the same publisher of my Old Haunts). And the trade paperback collection was just released on March 16th. Here’s some rather beautiful, cinematic pages. Colours here by Marco Lesko.
It has words too, honest. I swear. And a terrifying monster. This is, in effect, Carpenter’s The Thing or Alien, but in a World War 2 Prisoner of War camp. One big tension build with scares to follow when you, hopefully, least expect them.
OUT was always intended to be movie on the page. Its influences are clear – John Sturges’ character piece classic, starring the likes of Steve McQueen, Donald Pleasance, James Garner, James Coburn and pretty much everyone else in Hollywood at the time. Billy Wilder’s brilliant Stalag 17. Escape from Colditz was a big thing when I was a kid – both the BBC drama and the board game. Cool Hand Luke was an influence. Prisoners in huts. No war. Where Eagles Dare too, which might not be a Prisoner of War drama, but it kind of leant us our ‘impossible to escape from/get into’ castle for OUT.
So, writing an ensemble comic with a cast of predominantly white male characters in identical outfits. You can do that far more easily in film. Actors stand out from each other. With comics, you need an artist who can sell acting performances – who’s good with faces and not just action. Will Conrad did that extremely well for us. And the potential problem with uniformity of look probably pushed our protagonist to the fore – we needed someone ‘different’. Hence Nocona – a Comanche Code-Talker. A man of languages, or communication, in a situation where that has failed. As a favourite line states – “war is the death of communication.”
The Code-Talkers were sent in to Normandy with the Allied assault at D-Day, because the German code-breakers couldn’t understand their language. I believe – research tells me – 17 Native Americans landed. Nocona, our hero, is a savant with languages, and he is gay. Something that makes his position in the camp even more difficult. He is already an outsider due to the colour of his skin, some of the men in his hut want him dead because they heard him talking to the guards in German. They think he’s a spy. He’s the victim of racism. If they find out about his sexuality too…
Meanwhile, the Nazi Commandant Ludin has found an ancient supernatural force that he feels can help him turn the tide of the war. This is the winter of ’44. Germany will be defeated – soon. The Allied forces are nearly here. Ludin is desperate. He feeds the creature he has unearthed, strengthening it. But he needs to communicate with it. Which is where Nocona comes in.
A deal is offered. A deal with the devil…
Yeah, that’ll sting a bit.
As this is creator-owned, I thought people might be interested in reading my script for issue one.
You can buy the OUT TPB from your fine local comic and bookstores. If you want to mail order, Bookshop.org puts money in the pockets of indy bookstores. Link below.
https://uk.bookshop.org/books/out-9781953165275/9781953165275Also in comic shops at the moment – Issue Three just came out a few weeks back – is THE SWORD OF HYPERBOREA, published by Dark Horse Comics. This beautiful-looking series is me getting to collaborate with the great Mike Mignola in the Hellboy world, and, pleasingly, work with Laurence Campbell again. Laurence is a good friend and a brilliant artist – in the past we’ve co-created Old Haunts (along with Ollie Masters), worked on The Punisher, Wolverine, Strontium Dog and Judge Dredd together – but this might just be Laurence’s best work, I think.
It’s an era-spanning story following the mythical sword we see Howards holding in the image above, as we follow it through thousands of years of time, where we meet the different people who have brandished it along the way. Howards and Gall Dennar in issue one are fan-favourite BPRD characters already, but – excitingly for Laurence and I – in issues two to four we get to introduce three brand new heroes to the Hellboy world. One is a German spy with a dark secret in World War 1, one is an egocentric deep sea diver in World War 2, and the other is a Mississippi bluesman who has travelled north to Chicago and the time of the electric blues, and he has a ghostly voice who whispers in his ear and tells him the future.
And it has this line. If you absolutely are going to bite off someone’s ear in a fight and tell them to not come back this way again…
You can pre-order the trade paperback collection here (out in August).
Here’s the Trade Paperback cover.
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