Throughout his eclectic career, writer and artist Ho Che Anderson has explored numerous genres and mediums to tell poignant, expressive stories. Marvel fans might remember him as the author of Wakanda #3 or his short story in Amazing Fantasy #1000. Others might remember him from Fantagraphics' iconic 1993 King, the critically acclaimed biography of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., or his sci-fi epic Godhead, which throws readers into a world where corporate scientists try to contact god and design killer robots. No matter where readers encounter Anderson's work, it's sure to stick with them.

As part of our Indie Spotlight, CBR spoke with Anderson to learn more about his new book, Godhead Volume 2, and discuss his impressive career in comics. The cartoonist explored his creative process and looked back on his work with Milestone, his experience creating King, and the unceremonious cancellation of Marvel's Luke Cage: City of Fire. He also gave fans insight into his prose writing and discussed some of his upcoming projects.

Godhead 2-cover

CBR: Congratulations on Godhead Volume 2! You mentioned in the afterword that you started working on the story in 2002. How does it feel to finally have a second volume out in the world after all that time working on it?

Ho Che Anderson: It feels incredible because, for a long time, the struggle was just finding a publisher for the thing. For whatever reason, there's a lot of resistance to this story. I pitched it to Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, [and] a bunch of people. There was always interest at first, and then for whatever reason, it was always the same thing -- "We like it, but we're not sure that there's a market for science fiction right now. We're not sure if there's a market for science fiction from you right now." So I shelved the thing and then changed my mind to go to it after many years. Then the fear became, "Am I going to live long enough to actually finish all these pages?" I don't know how common a fear this is. But some storytellers I know share this with me which is a fear that you're not going to survive, you're not going to live long enough to see the thing that you're putting all this effort into. You're going to have a heart attack or get hit by a bus or whatever. So I was always afraid, "Oh, my god, am I gonna live long enough to finish this thing?" So to finally have all that behind me with the finished book in hand feels awesome.

How has it changed as you've worked on it? Is the new Volume comparable to what you've been planning all along, or did you surprise yourself?

Pretty much. The story definitely evolved over the years. When I first came up with this idea, I had as the ultimate villain at the end of the story these death robots that show up. That was sort of the genesis of the idea. One of the original ideas was the idea of men not being able to create life in the way that women have and compensating for it by creating this artificial life. So robots were the big threat for a long time. Then at a certain point, they fell away. If you're familiar with the story, you'll know that there's a whole group of what they call volunteers to help calibrate this god machine in the center of the story. At a certain point, they took over as the major threat at the end of the story. For some reason, after a lot of rewriting [and] a lot of like thinking about it, it's evolved back to the robots being the primary threat at the end, which is how it was originally conceived and how it should have always ended.

It's always fascinating, the way stories change based on new input you're getting from the universe, editors, or whatever new inspirations come along. You think you've found a way to improve a concept, but sometimes, in thinking about it too much or almost overthinking it, you can think yourself out of the best earliest solutions. It's been an evolution in terms of the specifics of the plot. But in terms of the base ideas and themes, they were pretty consistent right from the start. It was always about men's need to create their own version of life and an examination of the need for God in society as an equalizing force.

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I love the way you draw the robots.

Yeah, they were the thing that I wanted to get to the most, so finally getting to do them was was was a lot of fun. They're a pain in the ass. They're hard to draw. I'm not gonna lie. At a certain point, I considered actually using 3d models, so I didn't have to draw them all the time, but that felt like cheating.

How much of your work do you do by hand, and how much do you work digitally?

I haven't had the patience to sit down and actually learn the technology. If I were to just sit down and spend a couple of weeks, I'm sure I could figure it out. But I've never chosen to set aside those two weeks to learn. When I was in film school, a guy took me aside a couple of times after class, and there was a program that was popular at the time called Maya. He tried to show me how to use that, but there was a barrier. I was like, "I'd rather let somebody else, who's already competent, do that for me."

Most of [my] stuff is analog, but there's always a digital component. I do some drawings these days and some finished pieces in Procreate, but I also use Photoshop a lot. It's been an incredible tool for cartoonists since it came out. I'm very much like 50/50. I don't think I'd ever want to go fully digital, but ignoring the benefits of digital technology in our profession is ridiculous.

Can you tell us anything about Godhead Volume Three?

It's going to be a Mars adventure. I've always had this Mars fascination. Stories about Mars, for some reason, don't tend to do so well. Other than Total Recall, every Mars movie I can think of was kind of a bomb. But I'm just fascinated by the planet [and] its history. It was an Earth-like planet and then it lost its atmosphere over time, which is fascinating. Mars is just a fascinating place to contemplate and set a story. So this next one is going to be a TerraForm adventure on Mars that goes wrong. More robots. Robots are going to be the main characters in this next story. Very [few] human beings. But at the same time, there's going to be a lot of overlap between Godhead Two and Godhead Three. It's tough for me to say without giving away the whole plot, but it's teased in the last few pages of the comic. If you go into the last sequence [with] the big revelation about the story, you can see where things are going. If you're an attentive reader, I've set it up for you. So I will say no more, but it's going to be a cool, kick-ass space opera.

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The color in that last sequence is amazing. I love the way you use color in Godhead Volume 2 and King. It's so sparse, but when it's there, it really pops. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach color?

I've always wanted to do a full-color book. For whatever reason, circumstances have not worked out that way. Black and white is always more economical to do than color. But I've always loved color in comics. When I was doing the third volume of my King biography, I stepped away from it. I'd done the first two volumes in black and white, and I was burned out. I wanted to do other stuff, [and] there was a lot going on in my life back then. I had decided to step away from drawing the comic, and I had given it to a guy named Wilfred Santiago, [who] I was collaborating with back in the day.

It's hard to describe, but one night, I had this really intense inspiration -- this sort of hours-long inspiration bombarded me. I couldn't sleep that night. I suddenly envisioned how to do King Volume Three in full color. Adding all that color was the thing that got me excited enough to want to tackle that third volume, which is the way it should have been because I'd started that journey. It made more sense to finish that journey on my own. But it took a while for me to put my mind back on that path, and it was the color that did it. Specifically, it was learning Photoshop, and realizing that I didn't have to rely on this whole other apparatus to get it done. I could do all the color efficiently in this one program right on my computer at home. So it was really exciting. Then color just became a playground. I didn't really think about it other than what kind of emotional impact I could get from this technique or that technique.

It was a similar thing with Godhead. I had originally wanted to do the book in full color. One of my big artistic inspirations is the artist Rob McQueary, who was one of the production designers on the original Star Wars films. I love McQueary and Bill Sienkiewiczone, who is one of the greatest full-color artists in comics. I thought, "I want to do a production-art-inspired full-color comic." I started to do that with Godhead. But that extra application of color is a whole other commitment, and it requires cash, plain and simple. It [also] requires a huge time commitment. It was taking forever to get those initial full-color pages done in Godhead. So I had to make a harsh choice at a certain point. I want to get this book done within my lifetime. I've got to switch it to black and white. That was the right choice, but that desire to see certain sequences in full color was still there -- specifically stuff related to robots. I always saw them as these glorious paintings. That's always how I saw them.

The stuff in the ocean was so inspiring to me because of the environment and because of all those colors that you get to play with -- all those blues and greens. Oceanic colors are very vivid and exciting. I wanted to see those ocean sequences in the fourth chapter in full color. So I just said, "Screw it, I'm gonna kind of go back to the same philosophy I had on King," which was essentially black and white but with color bursts to accentuate certain sequences. Anything that had the ocean or a robot, I executed in full color. It would have been great to do the whole thing that way, but it is what it is. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of 2000 AD, the British science fiction comic. They would [often] start whatever story with two pages in full color, and then you'd flip the page, and the story would be in black and white again. There was something about that mix of technique and style that I found very pleasing and energizing to the eye and the soul. So it's cool for me to flip back and forth between black and white and full color. But that said, I think Godhead 3 is going to be full color from start to finish.

King cover

To backtrack a little, since we mentioned King, what was the writing and research process like for that project?

Extensive. It took me six months to do the research on it, and that was a full-time job. I would get up every morning and just hit the books. I gathered a ton of research material. And for six months [that was] all I did every day. It got tedious. After a while, you're chomping at the bit to actually do the work instead of continuing to stoke the fire, but you've got to stoke the fire before you can set the fire. So I sat there for six months and read and read and watched tons of documentaries and absorbed as much as I could. It was fascinating because I had some base understanding of the civil rights movement, but I didn't know any of the nuances. I certainly wasn't familiar with the major players outside of King. So that was great as an education -- as a life education. I've hung on to a great deal of that knowledge, and it's informed how I've seen the world since then. It really opened my eyes to a lot of how the world works in general [and] how the United States works specifically. It's an education I've continued to value.

So six months of that, and then it was three months of getting up and cranking out the script. It took me a month per script. It was exhausting, but at the end of that process, I felt smarter. I felt like I'd gone through a crucible, and I felt ready to tell this man's story in a way that I had never seen it told before. The closest I had seen to what I was trying to do was this two-part documentary. There's a great kind of dark Docu-drama filmmaker named Abby man. I don't think he's still alive any longer, but he did a lot of work [that] talked about historical subject matter and socio-political subject matter.

He had done a two-part miniseries about Martin Luther King starring Paul [Winfield]. [But] even that was not quite what I was trying to do. [It] told his story in a similar fashion, but the attitude was different. It was more of a hagiography as opposed to the kind of critical, warts-and-all examination that I was interested in exploring. That had not been done, to my knowledge, in comics up to that point. So we were kind of trailblazers in that particular regard, and that felt good to be charting somewhat virgin territory in comic books. I was really chuffed about that.

Yeah. I think King was one of the first major nonfiction comics of that scale. It's incredible to see how that's become a whole genre now.

It's a genre unto itself, but at the time, I didn't have any precedents to refer to in comics. The closest I can think of in comics at that time was Brought to Light, the Allan Moore-scripted graphic novel. It was a flipbook. On one side, it was Sienkiewicz talking about the secret history of the CIA, which is horrifying. They are not good people. Then the other side was illustrated by Thomas Yeates, and Joyce Brabner was the editor of that piece. It's just fascinating stuff, man. That was the closest I could think of, but even that was not what King was. It was a different beast. That was more comics reportage, which was a very underused genre at the time, and probably remains somewhat underused. Pioneering days back in the early '90s.

Would you consider returning to nonfiction at any point?

Absolutely. I've been dying to do another project like that. I've had many that had been on the books over the years. None of them have come to fruition for one reason or another, but I would love to. I was in Baton Rouge about two months ago, and somebody asked me if I were to do another one, what it would be, and I had to give that some thought. I've had thoughts over the years, but if I were to do that right now, I'm not sure what I would do. But I would love to take another big historical subject and give it that kind of examination again. It feels very much in my wheelhouse. I could wrangle those energies again and create something good. [It's] just finding the right subject matter.

What's been going on in the States for the last several years has been really horrifying. So it might be interesting in a few years to look back on the events of this era to try to figure out, "What the fuck?" Maybe some outsider Cannuck can get a broader perspective on the country.

So did you start Young Hoods in Love and Wise Son: White Wolf right after King, or were there other projects?

Young Hoods came about because... There was supposed to be a foreword in that comic that explained its genesis. Then when I picked up the comic, it was not there. I was like, "Guys, what the hell?" I'd written something explaining that these are the journeyman stories I did when I was first starting out. Even before I did I Want to be Your Dog, my first comic, I had done a bunch of these shorts. I did a couple for Dark Horse. I did one for this notorious figure, who took over Comico right after they went out of business -- a guy named Andrew Rev, who's a fascinating guy. He's a notorious figure. He had taken over Comico, and I'd done some work for him before I realized he was kind of a sleazy dude. There [were] a couple of other publishers. These were all stories that I'd gathered from hither and yon. They're my student comics, essentially. I have a weird relationship with that book because it came out mid-career, but the work was old at that point, and I never got to explain to anybody that [it] was older stuff. It's my student work exposed to the world.

Wise Son came about right after I finished the first volume of King. I had a good time working on King. It had made me a few bucks, but not a lot. I think I got more money out of Fantagraphics Books than any other cartoonist had ever gotten from them. So that was nice, but it still wasn't enough to really pay the bills. My girlfriend was pregnant. We were about to have a family, so I needed money. And I got this call out of the blue. It was either Dwayne McDuffie or Denys Cowan. It might have been Denys Cowan. We'd all participated in a series of interviews for the Comics Journal, talking about the emerging presence of Black cartoonists in the industry, which was a new phenomenon at that time.

They read my interview, and I was a cocky little son of a bitch. They were like, "Let's see if this guy's skills are as big as his mouth." They called me out of the blue, and they were like, "Do you want to write and draw a thing for us?" I said, Yes. I was excited to get to do some mainstream work. I was excited to get some money in my pocket. I was excited to get an offer from somebody with more eyeballs on their product. So it was kind of a no-brainer to say yes. I had a lot of fun working on that, but not my best work by any means. I was Figuring out what I was doing as a writer, and I was trying some stuff as an artist that I wasn't quite ready to handle. But at the same time, I always feel like it's good to push beyond your abilities and try to expand your skills. You know, not so good if you're doing in public and everybody can kind of see how you've fallen short, but whatever. [Laughs]

Not long after you were working on those books, your novel, No Boys Club, came out. Were you working on prose at the same time as comics, or were they separate endeavors?

I was working on them all at the same time, but they were definitely separate endeavors. For a long time, I had a really strong desire to be a novelist. I was into Stephen King, and I really love Chester Himes. There are a bunch of writers who are inspiring to me. When you write a script, it's never a finished document. It's always in service of a part that's going to be created or shots that are going to be filmed or whatever. A script is never a document unto itself. Whereas, when you write prose, that's its own thing. That's the finished product, and that was very inspiring to me as somebody who wanted to be a serious writer.

So for about five years, I was staking this other path of becoming a novelist. I wrote this long novel called All Are Doomed Romances, which was terrible. Then I wrote a collection of short stories called Ghost Town, which I still kind of like, but they're of their era. They're from my early to mid-90s hipster period in Toronto. They're so specific to that era that they belong back then. I've written a whole bunch of stuff. I was trying to become a novelist, but it wasn't working out.

Then I got involved with a company called Groundwood Books. They were a children's book publisher. I illustrated a book called Steel Drums and Ice Skates, and while I was working with them, I was like, "Hey, guys, I've got ideas for books. Here's one. Any interest?" And I finally got to write that book. It was such a good feeling to finally be doing the thing. Even though it wasn't adult fiction, I was still committed to making this the best novel I could. But funnily enough, after that, I never really pursued it again. I went in other directions... I realized I was a visual storyteller -- either in comics or in film and TV, so I'm gonna stick with movies or stick with telling stories through pictures. That's my wheelhouse.

How do your different arts practices inform each other? Do you find that your time writing prose has changed the way you approach comics or film, or vice versa?

Yeah. They all feed off each other. I found that my skills as a storyteller were improved through writing prose. I was a newspaper reporter for a few years, and [that] had nothing to do with script writing or comic storytelling in any way. But they expanded my understanding of storytelling structure. Being a reporter is all about interviewing people, gathering information, and then forming your story based on what you gather. I found that approaching storytelling from outside of the normal practices that I had helped me understand how this whole apparatus works. I was always pretty good with dialogue. But after meeting so many people, transcribing so many interviews, and having to really drill down on how people talk -- that made my dialogue writing better. I was able to create more diverse characters because I've had so much more experience meeting all these other weirdos through my profession.

Same thing as an illustrator. I wanted to be an illustrator and commercial artist for a long time. I did that for a while. I've always had a broad appreciation for various art styles, but I was honed in on practicing more traditional comics-style art. Being an illustrator opened me up to practicing different art styles [and] stuff that had nothing to do with comics storytelling, comics, art, [or] comics aesthetics in any way. Once you've had these other experiences, you bring them back into the work you're doing as a cartoonist. It can't help but enrich it. King Three looks as different as it does from the preceding volumes because it had so many more influences, and I was much more willing to engage with them and practice them because the barriers had been taken off my illustration work.

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Stone cover

To circle back to your prose work, can you talk about Stone and Rizzo? It sounds like you've got a couple more novellas on the way.

Yeah, I just signed a deal with a company called Dundurn. I got involved with a company called NeoText through Ben Marra, the great cartoonist, [in] 2018. Me and Ben met. We were both Fantagraphics cartoonists and were seated next to each other at Toronto comic Arts Festival. We were sitting seated next to each other randomly at the Fantagraphics table. We became instant friends... He told me that his stuff had been optioned by this company called NeoText... The guy who started the company -- I'll just call him John... [Ben was] like, "You and John would really get along. You should get in touch with each other." That's what we did, and we instantly had a creative synergy.

He [was] like, "I've got this series of books. I've created this character. Would you be interested in fleshing it out and turning it into an actual thing?" I said, "Absolutely." He sent me the bits of notes that he had. They were fantastic. They talked about this character, Gracie O'Leary. It's basically, had January 6 been successful and this major coup had taken over and the right-wing had become de facto dictators of the United States with Trump as their forever leader, which is a horrifying world. That was the premise of the story -- this ultra-right-wing party calling themselves, "The Merit Party," swoop in and cancel the elections, making themselves dictators. [They] cancel female sports. Anything even vaguely "woke" has now been outlawed in this world. It spoke to me, and I knew I could flesh this world out and turn it into something even more scary than John's initial pitch because I was looking out the window.

I was seeing what was going on in the States [and] was slowly starting to filter down into Canada. It scared the shit out of me. I was like, "Yes, I can do something with this." So I dove in, and I wrote these two novellas. Stone is Stone's origin story. She's this gifted, intelligent student and basketball player who is on her way to becoming the first female all-star in a world [where] there are only male sports. The people in power recognize her skills and her potential value to them in propagating their right-wing message, and they destroy her life and try to get her to become their puppet. She says no and stands up against them. It's a story of somebody who's oppressed, who rises to become a freedom fighter, and ultimately will become a revolutionary.

This is super fun. I got to write these kick-ass adventures that are also cautionary tales about where the United States is going. But again, fascism is on the rise throughout the globe. So this is a story that has, unfortunately, global relevance right now. That's how we got started, and it's bloomed. NeoText was founded because John is a film producer. He wanted to start a company that would create IP that could be sold to the movies. That's something I wanted to be involved with. [It] hit a number of boxes for me because I got to indulge that latent desire to be a novelist, I got to create some IP for cinema, potentially, I got to work with a bunch of cool people, and I got to explore a subject matter that was really resonant for me.

My whole thing was, even though we were creating something that could potentially be sold to a Movie Studio, it still had to live and breathe on the page. Even if it never migrated beyond the page, it needed to work as a literary property. John was successful in farming it out to a movie studio, so I got hired to write a screenplay version. [It's an] adaptation of the first two novellas, and I'm having such a ball. I'm having the most fun. I love this world [and] I love these characters. Getting paid movie money is fantastic, and the people I'm working with are excited about this. They're excited about the material in the same way I'm excited about it. To have your collaborators be as invested in what you're creating as you are is phenomenal.

That led to this deal with Dundurn Press to write three more novellas in that world. So at the end of this contract, there'll be five Stone stories that will take them deeper into their journey and expose them to a lot of danger, but they're gonna kick ass and prevail. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So stay tuned for that.

Stone illustration 2

How is adapting the screenplay going?

It's going great. I was able to take certain elements from the two books that I felt needed to be there just to set the story in motion, but at a certain point, it deviates from the first two novellas and morphs into its own thing. The back half of it is entirely new material. So it's fun to kill my babies, honestly. It's fun to not be precious about this stuff. Some novelists get all bent out of shape if something has changed in their books. I can be anti-precious when it comes to adapting stuff. I figure I wrote it once in the book. It exists there. Now I'm afforded the opportunity to throw it aside, improve upon it, refine it, tweak it, and do whatever. It's liberating to have that structure and see where you can do something different. You don't have to do what's already been done. You shouldn't make it a straight adaptation. You should make it something that is native to this new format. I'm having the most fun. It's not even work, it's just play.

Back in 2021, I think a lot of us were excited about Luke Cage: City of Fire. Unfortunately, the series was canceled before the first issue was scheduled to be released. Can you talk at all about that?

Yeah. I'm continuing to work with Marvel. I'm enjoying working with them. My editor Will Moss is a really cool guy. We're very creatively in sync. So, just on a personal level, it's been a lot of fun working with them. As somebody who grew up with these, I had a conversation with the editor-in-chief, CB Cebulski, and I thanked him profusely. I was like, "Dude, thank you so much for inviting me in and letting me play with the toys because I grew up with these, and they're fun." They're fun toys to play with. Even as an adult, they retain their ability to charm, excite, and titillate. So I was looking forward to doing more work, and I think we're gonna continue working together. I'm about to do a Blade project for them, which is gonna be a cool short story. We did a Killmonger story and Spider-Man recently, so some cool stuff.

But Luke Cage was painful, man. I was so excited and cautious because Marvel's got a history. I think we're all aware. You know, poke the bear, and it could be dangerous. But at the same time, I was still excited to be working with them. They approached me and were like, "Do you want to write a short story for us?" I had just done an interview with the [Cartoonist] Kayfabe guys, and I'd asked Ed Piskor to hook me up, which he had done very graciously. So they approached me about doing this short story, and I came up with a Luke Cage story. Five pages. [It was] essentially what would happen if the mother of George Floyd hired Luke Cage to protect Derek Chauvin, her son's murder. That was where the premise sprang from.

I wrote this story. There was a little bit of back and forth, but we finally got it to a good place, and I was very excited to see it come out. [It was] my first work for Marvel after being in the business for 28 years, or however long it's been. Then one day, I got an email saying, "We'd love to have a chat with you." I was like, "Oh, shit. Am I in trouble already?" But instead, the subject of the call was, "Listen, there's a lot going on in this five-page story. How do you feel about expanding it into a one-shot or a miniseries? "I didn't even let them finish the sentence before I agreed. I wrote them this pitch -- same story -- what would happen if the mother of George Floyd hired Luke Cage to protect Derek Chauvin? That premise writ large over three issues. It involved corrupt cops, police unions, and a lot of stuff. But the thing is, it talks about issues with the police -- police brutality, excessive use of force, and their ability and great willingness to murder people at the drop of the hat -- but it did so in a very... I don't want to say gentle manner, but it wasn't like, "In your face, cops or shit. That's the beginning and end of the story." I was trying to explore that subject matter with some nuance.

I knew I was dealing with a major corporation like Marvel. I didn't choose to push it as far as I could have. But apparently, I still pushed it too far. So I wrote them this pitch, they knew what was coming, they signed off on the pitch, and I wrote the three scripts. No issues. Artwork for the first issue was finished. I think about 13 pages of Issue three were completed. And I think about 10 pages of Issue two are completed. So there's a significant amount of work done on the book. I was so excited. I love the story. I had been handed Elektra as Daredevil. I had originally written the pitch with Daredevil because I've always loved Daredevil. [I'm] a big Frank Miller fan and some great stuff has been done with Daredevil over the last 30 years. I was excited to get my hands on Daredevil, and they were like, "Well, Daredevil is now Elektra. How will that affect the story? Is that cool?" I was like, "No problem."

They sent me some trades by Chip Zdarsky and [Marco] Cecchetto. I love his art. I love that character. I fell in love with her instantly. I got to work with that character, Luke Cage, some of my own characters, and Kingpin. I was having the time of my life. Then they contacted me about two weeks before the book was due to come out. They asked me to do some lettering notes, to do some notes on the color art, which was beautiful, and to write a trigger warning because some of the subject matter could be a little painful for people. The opening pages feature this cop shooting an unarmed dude. So I knew it was going to push some buttons, but I felt like they were on board. They were behind it. So when I got a request for a zoom call, like a week later, I was like, "Something doesn't feel right."

Long story short, they sat me down and said, "We're canceling this book. We're afraid that the subject matter is going to be damaging for you. We don't want you to be attacked by right-wing nuts." I was like, "Fellas, I can handle myself. Let them come at me. I have no fear about that. You don't have to do this." I don't know that that's precisely what was going down. I think there were probably some other issues with their higher-ups who just said, "No, this is going to affect our bottom line. We don't want the story out there." That's my suspicion. Nobody's ever come out and said that to me. Also, this was right around the time [of] the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and the decision that had come down, and they were really worried that there was going to be some blowback with the Kyle Rittenhouse lovers of the world or whatever. So they chose to take the cautious route.

That was devastating because I worked with three other artists as collaborators. Sean Damian Hill was illustrating Issue #3, Ray-Anthony Height was illustrating Issue #2, and Farid Karami illustrated Issue #1 and did a phenomenal job. I read the PDF of the completed first issue, and I couldn't believe that I'd written this comic. It didn't feel like one of my comics. It felt like an official comic as opposed to one of my weird-ass comics. It felt cool. I was like, "Damn, whatever the creative team was on this book, they nailed it." There was a buzz, man. I could feel it. People were coming at me on the regular to let me know how excited they were to read this comic. It felt like we had a hit. It felt like we legitimately had a hit, and then I get this call saying we're not doing it. It was so shocking and out of the blue and just sort of Cavalier.

It really threw me off. I had a couple of really dark nights of the soul, where I thought, "Why am I involved in work which can be summarily thrown away at the drop of a hat?" I thought, "Why am I doing this? I don't need to do this in my life. I could do something else." I came around to reality because I can't do jack shit. So I kind of have to do this. It made me question my involvement in comics and storytelling in general. It was dark. I've gotten over it now. Like I said, I'm continuing to work with them. I'm still enjoying myself, and I managed to figure out a way to repurpose City of Fire for its own creation, which I'm super excited about. But I will never do work for Marvel that is about anything other than "The villain of the week wants to take over the world."

I felt like we had an opportunity to tell a story that had some real-world relevance. The fact that it got shut down so quickly told me unequivocally that that is not what they want. They don't want that at all. They just want safe material. So if they hire me again, that's what I'll give them. I'll give them safe material. But it's a shame because I feel like we had an opportunity to tell a story that had some relevance, and they would have been on the right side of history for being strong enough to tell the story. So it's a missed opportunity.

Luke Cage City of Fire

It sounds like it would have been an incredible series.

It was pretty good. I have to admit it was. I think it was pretty good.

I'm so glad and relieved that you're able to repurpose some of the work, and hopefully, we'll get to see some version of it in the future. It is still fun to see you do like the villain of the week stuff with Marvel.

I don't want to disparage villain of the week stories. Those are fun. I wish that the opportunity to tell a story that is a little more hard-hitting was on the table. But I think you've got to be one of the superstars or proven moneymakers inside that organization before they give you that kind of leeway, and I'm not there yet.

Can you talk a little bit about you and Jeremy Love's Resurrectionists?

I'm so excited about that comic. At the same TCAF in 2018 [where] I met Ben Marra, who's a collaborator on Stone, I also met a guy named John Jennings. He is a phenomenal professor, artist, writer, and great guy all around. He contacted me and said, "I'm starting up a new company. It's called Megascope. It's going to be an imprint of Abrams Comic Arts. Any interest in contributing a story to this new line?" I said what I always say, "Of course." I was going to pitch him about five or six different things, and I thought about it the morning of this pitch meeting. I thought, "Which one of these do you want to do the most? And it was The Resurrectionists. He almost bought it on the spot.

I used to listen to a podcast called Stuff You Should Know, and they did an episode about grave robbers. It was the first time I had really thought about grave robbers in a narrative sense. These were folks in the 1800s who would go around and dig up bodies for medical science so they could study anatomy to figure out how to save our lives. They needed cadavers to do this work, so they relied on what they called "Resurrection men," Resurrectionists, or grave robbers. These were people who would go out in the middle of the night, [and] dig up freshly dug graves at risk to their lives because a lot of times the families who were onto them would set booby traps for them or be patrolling their recently departed to make sure that these as they call them, "ghouls" would not take their loved ones away.

This was a very dangerous profession. It was also highly lucrative, and I never thought about them. I knew they existed, but I didn't know the ins and outs of their lives. I thought, "There's a story in here." I started researching them and came up with a story about a woman who's down on her luck [in] like 1865. It's after the Civil War. Soldiers are coming back home, and society is trying to rebuild itself. So it's set in the late 1860s in Manhattan, and there's been a real renaissance in medical science. We've had the introduction of the ambulance and an understanding of human anatomy that went beyond what they used to call "The four humors." It's a really rich time in history. I came up with a story about this woman who's seriously down on her luck. [She] tries to rob somebody unsuccessfully, who turns out to be one of these resurrectionists, and to pay off her debt, they recruit her into their fold. It becomes a grave-robbing drama. Only to find out halfway through that not only is this woman a resurrectionist in a theoretical sense, [but she's also] a resurrectionist in a real-world sense.

It's a bit of a spiritual prequel to Godhead because it talks about a lot of the same thematics. It's about the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It's a class struggle story, but it's also about the spiritual world. I can't say too much, but there's some thematic overlap in terms of the god machine in Godhead to what goes on in the Resurrectionists. I was going to make the relationship between them explicit, and then at a certain point, I thought, "Let's make it more implicit." But if you read the two stories back to back, you will see that they're almost the same story but set in different eras. It's going to be a 218-Page graphic novel written by me and illustrated by Jeremy Love. I'm just stoked.

Godhead vol 1 cityscape

Do you think about stuff differently when you're writing for another artist than when you're doing something you're going to draw? Or is the writing process pretty comparable?

Yes and no. I write scripts for myself, as well. I like to sit at a computer and write a script. That's a fun pastime for me. So that process [of] the day-to-day of sitting there and composing words, that's pretty standard overall. But where it changes is when I write a sentence for myself, I know how I'm going to illustrate it. I know what I'm going for. I know what motivated the ideas in the first place. So there's going to be more of an intimacy to it. Whereas, when you write for somebody else, it's always best to write to an artist's strengths. When I approached Jeremy, I was like, "Dude, I know what I want to write, but tell me what you want to draw. Tell me what you're interested in. I will tailor the script as much as possible to you." He said, "You know what? It's all good. I want you to be you. Write what you're going to write, and let me take it and interpret it." I said, "Great."

Usually, I will tailor it for a writer. I like a lot of dialogue. I like people in a room talking. Those are my favorite scenes, and other artists may not want that. They may want hero shots and a lot of action. So you may tailor the story more toward them. But in this case, this was almost like writing for myself because I did what I wanted. I would put in lots of description, not to overwhelm Jeremy or make it too prescriptive, but just so that he had support. If he needed support, he had it. If he wanted to throw it aside, he could.

We have a scene in a nightclub called The Black and Tanner somewhere in Harlem near the five points in Manhattan. I went to town describing the interior of that and all the activities going on because it was such a showstopper of a scene. But I also said to him, "Dude, if you don't want to draw any of this junk, don't worry about it. Just draw faces and a bare background. It doesn't matter to me. It's your story."

Just to wrap up, are there any other projects on the horizon that fans can be excited about?

I have this new Blade piece I'm about to start for Marvel, which I'm super thrilled about. I finally get to draw a thing for them, which is gonna be fun. I've got the stone script I'm in the second draft of, which is big fun, and the novellas coming up. That's it for now. There are a couple of other things.

Godhead Volume 2 is available now from Fantagraphics.