Way back when the Earth’s crust was beginning to cool, I was a Vertigo associate editor who had just inherited the editing reins of Jeff Lemire’s first ongoing comic, Sweet Tooth. I had already become a fan after reading his tremendous Essex County Trilogy, but Sweet Tooth would quickly become one of my most-rewarding professional experiences, leading to a friendship with Jeff that extended far past that book.

From there, every comics fan knows what happened to Jeff: He’s become one of comics’ hottest writers, whether it’s mainstream superheroes (DC Comics' Animal Man and Green Arrow, Marvel’s Hawkeye and Moon Knight); the comics he cartoons himself (Top Shelf’s The Underwater Welder, Image Comics' Royal City); or his white-hot creator-owned collaborations (Image’s Descender, Dark Horse’s Black Hammer). Meanwhile, my time editing Vertigo books like Sweet Tooth, The Unwritten and Daytripper earned me an invitation to join DC’s at-the-time Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns ushering DC properties to film and TV, eventually leading Geoff and I to start DC’s TV department with shows like Arrow, The Flash and Gotham, and then with me overseeing that department before finally leaving to pursue my own writing.

RELATED: Lemire & Sorrentino Explore Horror in Gideon Falls

But March 2018 proves a homecoming for both Jeff and I. His new Image ongoing Gideon Falls reunites him with one of his most frequent and talented collaborators, Andrea Sorrentino, on a concept he began conceiving before his career even started -- following a young man obsessed with a conspiracy in the city’s trash, the washed-up Catholic priest arriving in a small town full of dark secrets, and their ties to the mysterious Black Barn. My new Image comic Infidel with artist Aaron Campbell marks my first major comic as writer, with a story about an American Muslim woman and her multiracial neighbors living in a building haunted by creatures that seemingly feed off xenophobia.

That Jeff and I were both now working on Image horror books was too big a coincidence for me not to reach out. I was dying to talk comics with him -- not just about our new books, but craft and what originally inspired us as I tried to learn more about the process of one of comics’ most prolific and popular writers, to selfishly mine lessons for myself.

FIRST COMICS

Pornsak Pichetshote: OK, so the first comic I ever got was Amazing Spider-Man #230, the back half of “Nobody Stops the Juggernaut.” The first runs I remember buying was Marvel Tales, which reprinted all the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-Man, and Adventures of Superboy that I only bought for the Dial H for Hero backup strips. What’s interesting to me when I look back at Spider-Man, is that I remember how much I responded to that outsider/one-man-against-the-world feeling. While in Dial H for Hero, it was its pure imagination; those two themes carrying over into everything I do now. What were your first comics, and has any of it carried over into your work?

Jeff Lemire: Well the first one I can remember is… DC used to do these DC Blue Ribbon Digests. They’d reprint the Silver Age stuff in the same format as those Archie digests. This would have been 1981/1982, I guess. I would have been five, and I remember getting one of those in a grocery store, and it was reprinting the Justice Society comics Paul Levitz had done with Joe Staton in the ‘70s.

As for runs… I kind of got everything. I would just buy anything I could find, because I lived in a really small place, so you couldn't always get the same things every month. It was just whatever they had, which was Marvel and DC. The first time I ever really remember getting into a run or following a creative team would have been the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans, and then Crisis on Infinite Earths. But I think my biggest influence might have been DC's Who's Who because I just got obsessed with how each character was drawn, and I started recognizing different art styles through that book. I started remembering the names of the artists, copying them and looking at how they were drawing those characters.

How old were you then?

I would have been about 9 or 10. That wasn't the first stuff I was getting, but that's when I started to really draw a lot and recognize different art styles --

It’s impressive you even knew George Perez's name at 10, though.

Is it?

I feel like when I was that age, I might have liked this art or that, but I don't know if I necessarily would have remembered the artist who drew it.

I think that’s when I started to. I read everything, but with Who's Who and stuff like that, I started recognizing names of artists and writers. It was a little more art-driven back when we were kids. Now it's more writer-driven. It's funny. When I was a little kid, a lot of the artists whose art at the time I thought was ugly are now my favorite artists, people like Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. The classic guys. [Laughs] I didn’t get it.

You know, I had the exact same thing happen to me with Steve Ditko. I loved the first 50 issues of Spider-Man, but for the first 36, I loved the stories but wished I liked the art more, because Steve Ditko’s art… I just didn’t get it. And then it went over to John Romita, and I’m like, “Oh this is so much prettier. I like this style more.” But then something was missing from the stories. At that age, I didn't know that something was Ditko. Now, he’s one of my favorite artists.

Going back to your question about the storylines that imprinted on me, I think if you went back, the two big books for me were always Titans (the Perez stuff) and then Legion -- and this might be a stretch, but -- they both had real family dynamics. Relationships between the characters, especially in the Titans stuff, and you really got a sense of family with those characters. If I see myself carrying anything forward, it might be that.

I kind of wonder about people who were getting into comics in the mid-'90s [Laughs] They were so bad... You look at that stuff now. It’s just such trash. I know that’s unfair…

It’s a good question, though: What were the things that people connected to at that time, that kept them in comics, because you’re right, it wasn’t the stories.

I think in the ‘90s, it seemed to be that visceral in-your-face art style, right? No one cared about the stories so much. At the same time, you had the complete opposite of that happening at Vertigo. It was the other end of the spectrum. I guess comics really weren’t that bad. It was more the superhero stuff kind of took a dip there for a while.

You and me, we’re about the same age, so I’d love to ask someone a generation behind us and see what got them hooked on comics in the ‘90s.

Yeah, the one book I have talked about with creators who are maybe a generation younger than us, who talk about it in the way we talk about Legion or Titans, is Grant Morrison’s JLA. That seems to be a real touchstone for a lot of those people, and I could see that. I kind of missed that. That was the era where I got out of superheroes and was only reading Vertigo stuff. I didn’t get into that stuff until later and re-read it. So I guess there was stuff, you just had to look to find it.

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Andrea Sorrentino, Aaron Campbell and Homecomings

Moving along to Gideon Falls, at this point, has Andrea Sorrentino been your longest collaborator?

I don’t know. We’ve done about two years of Green Arrow, and it was almost two years of Old Man Logan, but that was double-ship... But yeah, if you add it all up, it’s close. I mean, Dustin [Nguyen, artist of Descender] and I have done Descender for two or three years now, but yeah, he’s the only partner I’ve done multiple properties with.

It's really interesting how long you guys have worked together, and now with Gideon Falls, you’ll have done a book with three major publishers. I’m curious how your relationship has evolved.

I think all three projects were kind of unique. I took over Green Arrow, and I wanted to do something really different with it. I really wanted to bring it back to being a harder-edged book that stood out from the other superhero stuff, so I kind of looked around for an artist who had an edgier style you wouldn't expect in the Justice League family of books. This was during the New 52 time, and Andrea had just done I, Vampire. I just had a vision of him drawing a superhero book and how it would look nothing like a superhero book and could really stand out. We found our voice there doing that, and then with Old Man Logan, it was almost the opposite, where he was already doing it with Bendis, and they were going to do an ongoing series. He asked me to do it, and I only did it because I wanted to work with him again.

So I did that, and then after that, I started doing Descender and started to live the good life, [Laughs], and I realized we had to do something at Image, because he's always pushing boundaries with his layouts and storytelling, and I just thought, if he could just go and create something himself, I wanted to see that. I wanted to read a book where he was creating his own world.

So Gideon Falls started with the impulse of, “Oh I want to work with Andrea, let me look through my catalogue of ideas for something that will work”?

Yeah. Pretty much. I’ll tell you about the evolution of Gideon Falls, because it really probably has the most unique genesis of any book I've ever done in that it goes right back to where I first started in comics.

So when I was in film school in 1996, I was in my third year, and after the first two years of doing all the little assignments, that was the first year where we actually got to make our own little short films. You could do whatever you wanted for the first time, and I was living in the city for the first time after growing up on a farm. I really got into the urban decay of Toronto and drawing all this crazy stuff in my sketchbooks, so I came up with this character back in ‘96. This Norton character who's in Gideon Falls. This guy who was picking through the city's trash and finding these weird clues and some kind of conspiracy, and his apartment had turned into this laboratory, and he was studying all these pieces of garbage and finding these weird creatures living within the garbage, like microscopic things. So that was actually this film I made in ‘96 --

Oh wow, this wasn’t just a script or a proposal, you actually made it --

Oh no. I made it. A five-minute film. I don’t know if I have it, but if I do, it’s probably on S-VHS. [Laughs] So I made this film, and my friend starred in it as Norton. I have stills of it. Probably when the book comes out, I’ll publish them online. So I did that, and I had this character from ‘96, which was now 22 years ago. When I finished film school in 1999/2000, I was really disillusioned with the idea of doing film. I had rediscovered comics, and I was drawing all the time, and I was trying to do my own comic before I even graduated. A lot of Gideon Falls was the comic I was trying to do back then on my own. So between 1999 and 2003, I tried to work on this huge graphic novel which was basically Gideon Falls. It wasn't called that then, but I had all these characters and concepts, and I tried drawing this huge 300-page graphic novel, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I think I did three versions of it. [Laughs] I started, and then my art style would evolve so much over that time because I was just learning everything, so I’d get 50 pages into it, and I would start over again and redo it. I think I did it four times. Four drafts of this incomplete graphic novel featuring some of these characters, and I just burnt myself out on it and put it away.

And then a couple years later, I did Essex County and all this other stuff and everything went in a different direction. By the way, the version of this book I was working on was not very good. [Laughs] It was the shittiest wannabe horror comic. Anyway, these ideas are all swimming around, and I just forgot about them, but then when Andrea -- to get back to your question -- I knew he wanted to do horror or something darker and more supernatural, and these ideas from that old film started to resurface. Just the core idea. I stripped away all the stuff I had done with it and just re-envisioned it into this. So it's been this thing that's been around forever, and it just feels like it’s been waiting 20 years for me to figure out what I was doing and then meeting Andrea to do it properly. It's kind of cool.

One of the things you mentioned is he wanted to do horror. Was that a formal conversation you two had? He told you, “I want my next book to be horror?”

I can't remember for sure, but he must have said something, and it probably just seemed natural since his style is so dark. He drew Green Arrow and Old Man Logan, so he can do everything, but he does have a dark sensibility, and he wanted to embrace it fully, and I hadn’t really done horror. I'd done a lot of sci-fi and superheroes, but I hadn't really done so much pure horror. I'm not a real horror fan, but I'm really into things like Twin Peaks and the first season of True Detective, that kind of stuff where it's this feeling of dread and real psychological horror and looming sense of threatening things in the shadows. I don’t really like gore and stuff like that. I've always wanted to do my own sort of Twin Peaks-y dark mystery book, and it just seemed like the perfect fit for him.

Was it just the 22 years that made you feel confident you could approach it again? I'm curious, since the last project I worked on was something that wasn't working even after a lot of time and energy, so I put it down, and I've always wondered what it takes to come back to that. Was there anything specifically different, or was it just a case of being a more mature writer that gives you the confidence to go back to an old thing that kind of… beat you at a certain point?

Yeah, yeah, it totally beat me, and when something beats you after four or five years of working on it, you feel, for your own sanity, you can never go back to it, because it just torments you. It was only the fact that it had been 20 years, and I was no longer emotionally engaged in it at all, so I can just look at it objectively and say, “Oh, this is a cool idea, and I’ll take that idea too…” But also because I didn't have to draw it. That was the other thing. A lot of what beat me was just drawing it over and over again and just learning my craft. And through the process of doing that, it was this formative thing that was ingrained in me that I couldn't go back to. But if I didn't have to draw it, I had distance. I didn’t feel the same emotional drain I used to feel when I thought about it. And I had just done Moon Knight at Marvel, and I felt like I had really tapped into something good there, the sense of weirdness and worlds overlapping, and identity and other things I really loved. And as much as I loved doing Moon Knight, sometimes when you tap into those things, it's like, OK, now I want to go do my version of what that is. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to do, and this all fit perfectly into it.

What about you? How did you find Aaron? Was that through Jose [Villarrubia; editor of Infidel, and legendary comics colorist]?

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Yeah, Jose was amazing. I had a couple guys in mind, and Jose was like, I don't like any of your guys.

[Laughs]

And we went looking around, and he was the one that brought me to Aaron, because he was once a student at the university where Jose teaches. The thing I really love about the team is that we really are a team in how we give each other feedback. So Jose was upfront and said, if I’m coloring this book, I can't edit my colors myself, so I need you to edit me there, so I’ll give him notes. And because of the way my brain is wired from editing, I weigh in on the layouts and art, sending my thoughts to Jose, and if Jose agrees with them, he’ll send it through to Aaron. But if I'm going to do that, then I have to take what I give, and that means if Aaron has problems with the scripts, I want him to tell me, and there's stuff in the story he came up with the fixes for. And I like to kid Aaron how he's knowledgeable in the occult in a way that only someone who has a body shackled in his basement should be…

[Laughs]

He just knows all this stuff about the occult and can name occult texts off the top of his head, so that was really great to have, because that Necronomicon aspect of horror was never my favorite part of it. So he shores up that knowledge for me. I don't know if you felt this when you started working with Andrea or Dustin, but it's so typical in comics to hear, oh I met a partner who complemented me in every way -- and even as an editor I brought some of those teams together -- but when it happens to you, you’re just like, Jesus, how is this even possible? That this guy I never met before, with our life experiences being so completely different, and yet it feels we see eye to eye on these things, and he fills the gaps I don’t see? It just feels like such a lucky experience.

Yeah, that’s cool. I find it happens a lot too in comics. There’s times it doesn’t happen, and people don't really click, but I've been lucky, I guess. There’s a lot of people where that seems to happen, and you bring more out of each other. You become something together you couldn’t have done alone. That’s the joy of collaborating in comics, for sure.

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The Other Writers Will Kill Me When They Hear That

When you work with Andrea as opposed to other artists, how organic is it? For example, at this point, you and Andrea do the best double-page spreads in comics, period --

No, Andrea does the best double page spreads in comics.

But that’s what I mean, what's it like writing those? Do you write them the same way you do with anyone else, and he interprets it --

No, no, I don’t. I’ve gotten to the point with Andrea -- and Dustin on Descender -- They’re so easy to write for, because I know it doesn't really matter what I describe, they're going to do something much cooler. With Andrea especially, he's so imaginative there's not really any point in me putting any kind of art direction over it.

All I say is, this is the idea we’re conveying in this spread, because I know he's going to just take that and do something nuts with it that I would never be able to script. He really is the co-writer at this point. He’s putting as much into it as me. I just say, this is what needs to be communicated here, but however you want to visualize that, you go for it, because there's no point in me wasting my time. I'm not drawing it. He is, and he'll come up with something different -- which is what I like.

Him especially, because he improvises so much, there's a real trust factor. I know what needs to be communicated -- what emotion, what plot -- and that's all I give him in terms of art direction. It’s all him.

When I look at your early stuff on Green Arrow, a lot of what Andrea was doing fed into the script in a very specific way. Like there this, let’s call it “target vision” thing you did, and that was the first time I saw Andrea pulling out those little details like he likes to do. Did that start with you?

Yeah, back then, that stuff was me, because I hadn't worked with him yet, so a lot of that early language we developed in Green Arrow was in the scripts. There was that “target vision” -- isolating those moments and details -- and it was a lot more explicit in those early scripts, and I think he and I together kind of developed that language together. Then he took it and started embracing it and going crazier and crazier with it. So he grew past my original ideas and went to other places so then I just started following him. So it's kind of a cool back and forth, but that's a rare thing. I've worked with dozens and dozens of artists now in the last however many years, and this doesn't happen all the time. He's a very special case, that sort of communication you have between each other which is unspoken and the work keeps evolving and you're feeding off of each other and coming up with new things. Especially with someone you haven't worked with before or someone newer to the industry or whatever. If you have something you want to convey, you have to put a little more into the scripts and help them. But not with Andrea.

Do you talk to him often?

Not really. The best collaborations I've had with Andrea or Dustin or Dean [Ormston; artist on Lemire’s Black Hammer from Dark Horse] are where I just give them the scripts, and we don't really talk. There's no back and forth. They just do their thing, and they trust me, and I trust them, and there's not a lot of back and forth once the scripts are done.

I’m fascinated by the way things change after the art comes in. For example, sometimes when I get the art back, I worry I make it harder on myself than I have to, because I find it so much fun to come up with just the right dialogue to this new expression the artist drew, because it gives me this fun challenge to find an even more appropriate line than what I was originally envisioning.

Yeah, I know guys who spend a lot of time at the lettering stage when they have the art and are basically rewriting everything, because of the way the emotions are drawn, and I don't do that much. I try to do it all in the script, and then the only time I really change things in the lettering stage is if a panel’s been added or removed, and it no longer makes sense. Where you have to change balloons or whatever, but I don't rewrite dialogue a lot.

My whole writing style is mostly very spontaneous, or I write stuff really fast and just get really, really immersed into the world and the characters. So I'll write a number of scripts in a row -- I don't just write one -- and then once I'm out of it, I'm out of it.

I’m so curious about your process, because you’re writing, what? Nine books right now? Ten? How many books are you literally writing right now?

[Laughs] Not that much, to be honest with you. It looks like a lot, but a lot of the stuff’s been written a long time ago. Right now, the only books I'm really working on are Descender and Gideon Falls and a little bit of Black Hammer, so just three books really, because [DC’s] The Terrifics I’ve written so far ahead. I've already done 10 of them, and the book hasn't even started shipping yet, so I'm just going to wait a while to get back into that. And then the whole Black Hammer series was written two years ago.

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Really? The whole series?

Yeah, basically. Dean got sick, so I just kept writing. So now, I'm so far ahead of him. I'm working on little miniseries and stuff, but those are for four issues or whatever, and I've already written them, so there's not really anything new on a month-to-month basis.

So when you work on a miniseries, you just write it all in one shot?

Oh yeah, you write it like you’re writing a movie. Even Gideon Falls, I write an arc all at once. The first arc of Gideon Falls is six issues, and I wrote that all over a two-week span last winter, and then I just wrote the next arc -- which is the next five issues -- over this past Christmas. Over five days, I wrote five scripts, and I just get completely immersed in the world, and it's all you're thinking about. I like that, because I always feels like it’s more of a cohesive piece of work. The only drawback of doing it that way is that there was literally almost a year between writing those arcs, and I had forgotten what I wrote. [Laughs] I had to actually a hire an assistant to reread all my scripts, and make a point-by-point refresh for myself. But it's funny, as soon as you start reading the first one, it just all floods back.

But what about Royal City? That must be an ongoing…

Yeah, but that's different. I don't sit down and write that the way I write other books. I'm drawing that every day, so you're just writing it as you draw. You use an outline, and you figure out what scene you're drawing, and as you're drawing, you figure out the dialogue. It's a completely different process, a totally different way of working, so to me, that's separate.

Do you split up your days, like this part of the day I write and this part I draw?

No, I draw all day. I don't write at work. [Laughs] Writing is my hobby.

[Laughs] Wait, wait, I'm so excited to get this in print. The nine books you're writing at once, those are all technically your side-hustle?

Well, my drawing takes a long time, so it just takes longer to draw than to write a script, so I need to put in the hours. So when I draw, it’s Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. That’s drawing, and then I try to write one script a week if I have to, so I write an hour at night throughout the week and finish it over the weekend for another few hours.

That's so fascinating. Basically, all this stuff you're writing, you're writing on the side. That's so cool.

The other writers will kill me when they hear that. But you're always thinking about it. That's part of it too, even when I'm drawing, I might be thinking about some of my other books. You're working things out all the time. You’re just not actually sitting down and writing the script. Once it's all worked out, it doesn't take me that long.

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Scares and Bad Advice

So you were my editor on Sweet Tooth, and when I got my first writing assignment for the DC Universe writing those Atom 8-page back-up strips, I didn't know what I was doing. I’d never written for another artist before, and I’d only ever drawn my own comics, so I don't know what I’m doing. So I kept asking you for advice. I don’t know if you remember this, because I didn't know if this Atom stuff was any good, and I didn’t know how to make these things good, and I remember your advice -- and I’m going to throw it back in your face. [Laughs] You said, “Ah, these superhero comics, I think as long as you have one cool thing happen an issue, you’re good.” I remember you telling me that. [Both laugh]

My cynical Vertigo view of superhero comics.

Now 10 years later, you’re writing comics, and it is a little more than having one cool thing happen every issue, isn’t it, Pornsak?

Yes, yes, it absolutely is. You got me. [Laughs] I love how you came to me for actual sincere advice, and I was so useless about it. Although I will say if you can have one cool thing happen in every 8-page backup, that’s still a pretty cool 8-page backup.

[Laughs]

But I’m glad you brought that up, because there is something from my dismissive comment that actually did reflect a very real part of my editing process that I’ve carried over to writing. When I was editing, I used to always try to boil down the appeal of any book I was working on to three basic things, and then every issue the team had to hit at least two of those three things. A great issue was when you hit three of the three, but every issue always had to hit at least hit two of the three. And this was something I would never tell the writers or artists I was working with, because it's a little too formulaic, and it never helps a creator to think that way. So, for example, on Sweet Tooth, what I never told you was that, to me, a good issue of Sweet Tooth at the minimum has to hit two beats. A great issue of Sweet Tooth hits three beats, and for me those beats were --

Antlers.

[Laughs] Yeah, antlers, antlers, longer antlers... Actually, it was 1) a coming-of-age story, so we had to honor that in Gus or Jepperd’s journey for the issue and show them changing and learning, which to me is why the emotion of that book hit so hard; 2) We had to explore the mythology of this world that you had set up and 3) The pure formal experimentation you brought to the book. And when I look at those issues we worked on, I'm really proud that we did hit all three of those things in a lot of the issues.

It’s funny. I never stepped back and thought about it like that, but I think, without having a checklist, I think I always tried to remember every month I had to find some spot to do something kind of experimental; I knew I had to have that one quiet character moment which is what you mean by the coming-of-age aspect -- the heart -- you have to get back to the core of the story; and then there’s some really cool action thing or something tied into the mysteries of the world building. So yeah, I could see that.

So now, what are your three things for Infidel?

By the way, even talking about it like this, I do wonder if I over-intellectualize, and that's why I’m delighted to finish one series when you've apparently written one while you’re on the can. [Laughs]

I don’t intellectualize anything… I never second guess or think about anything. I just write it.

For me, I think one of the three things is: I've definitely got to get one good scare beat in there, and scares in comics are tricky, right?

Yeah, it’s hard. So much of the scare moments in film comes from a combination of music, sound design, and timing, and it’s really hard to get that in comics in the same way. The things that are scary in a movie, when you try to do them in a comic…

It doesn’t work.

Yeah, it doesn’t work in the same way, does it? It’s interesting.

One of the things I find is that live-action is all about timing and choreography, and we just don't have that in the same way in comics. So when I started doing Infidel, I went through all the horror comics I liked, the ones that “got” me. I mean, what does being scared in comics even mean? Because it's not like you turn a page, scream, jump in your seat, and drop the comic. That's not what happens when you read a scary comic. It just sits with you, and you recoil internally in a weird way. So when we started, I would go back to all the stuff that hit those beats for me, and one of the things I realized that comics can do in horror that's better than live-action is that there's a specificity that comics can depict visually that live-action can't even approach.

The easiest way I think about it is probably something that I don't actually like too much in horror movies, but I think works great in comics: body horror. I look at guys like Junji Ito who to me is the best horror cartoonist ever, and so much of what he does is very specific, clearly rendered horrific imagery that, if you saw in live-action would just look fake no matter how hard they tried, but there's something about the comics page. The way your mind animates comics helps these images hold up in a way it wouldn’t in live action. If I look at Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer where there's that panel of Nergal sitting on Constantine's bed, and his snaking tongue is covered in boils, and it’s about to enter Constantine's mouth… Those are the kind of images that stick with me, and that's the stuff I think we can do in comics that they can't in live-action, because there’s no way they can make it look realistic enough. So to me, those are the kind of horror beats I think comics can do better than live action.

That’s really interesting. I don’t know if I’ve ever been scared of anything I’ve ever seen in a comic, not like in a film. I can’t think of a moment that I’ve been creeped out or been terrified in a comic, and that’s kind of disappointing, because when I do it myself, I have a hard time coming up with something that’s scary. I can come up with things that are scary to the characters in the story but not so much to me, so it's tough. I don't know why that is, but I can get grossed out by something in a comic, but it's not the same as being scared.

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There's a certain type of gross out and again, to me, the bible is Junji Ito’s Uzumaki or Gyo where a part of it is being grossed out but it's not just a gore gross out. There's something else to it.

Yeah, I hear you. That’s definitely the creepy part of Infidel. Those moments where these twisted creepy figures happen, and it's definitely -- I wouldn't say it scares me, but I do find it unsettling and kind of revolting, not in the same way I do when I see slasher stuff or gore, but on a deeper level. There is something you can do in comics there, but I don’t see that so much in film. That's interesting.

Yeah, so then it’s finding those beats, and finding ways to be imaginative about them, so it's not just this messed up body and that other messed up body--

Yeah, because you can do it once, but then it starts, and you have to one up it or start to change it. When I was doing Animal Man, I had the same problem, because there was a lot of body horror in that, so it was trying to find new ways to show that, because it would get repetitive after the first couple times, and you needed to enhance the trick or change it or put it in a different context. That’s interesting.

So for Infidel, one of the things is, it should have a horror beat to it, and the other is getting into the intersectionality of different people and faiths that I don’t feel like I see enough of—

Yeah, the best horror is when you can take the genre element of horror -- whatever it is, the fantastic element -- to always have it be symbolic or metaphorical for something psychological. I think Animal Man worked because all these horror elements are threatening a man's family. And I think it works in Infidel, because it's all about race and religion and identity and bigotry and the creatures represents all these different things, so it takes on this whole sense of dread that we all can relate to, and I find that’s interesting.

Then the third thing for me is -- because it’s so much about different types of people being brought together -- where are the honest moments of connection or loss that result from that? But I think that’s something I’m interested in anything I do. Now having said all that, when I’m writing, I try to push it all aside and make decisions intuitively. I only go back over it with the editor side of my brain and those three things when I’m done.

Man, I could keep talking about this stuff forever, but we’re already almost out of time, so in the tradition of good comics, we’ll leave the reader wanting more. But you gave me the first three issues of Gideon Falls in preparation for this, and I have to say, it’s fantastic. Andrea’s art is almost hypnotic it’s so good, and Dave Stewart’s coloring is so fantastic on him. And there’s something about it that actually reminds me of Essex County.

Really?

Yeah, maybe it’s the steady pacing and the really strong sense of place. It really does feel like it melds the raw energy of a creator’s early work with all the craft and character sophistication you’re capable of now. I really loved it.

On the surface, Gideon may seem like I am revisiting old themes again, but this book doesn’t really feel like anything else I’ve done, at least not to me. But I guess you can’t get totally away from those initial things that excited you when you started finding your voice as a writer. The trick is trying to find new ways of exploring them, so you don’t repeat yourself, and by doing that, you can also find whole new things to explore too.

Gideon Falls #1, written by Jeff Lemire with art by Andrea Sorrentino, colors by Dave Stewart and letters by Steve Wands hits stands March 7. Infidel #1 written by Pornsak Pichetshote with art by Aaron Campbell, colors by Jose Villarrubia, and letters by Jeff Powell arrives in stores March 14.