Step aside, Disneyland, there's a new most magical place on Earth. Writer Jackie Ball (Goldie Vance) and artist Maddi Gonzalez have teamed for an all-new four issue miniseries, Welcome To Wanderland, under BOOM! Studios' BOOM! Box imprint. CBR has the first details.

The series follows Bellamy Muñoz, a young girl with a passion for her local theme park, Wanderland -- that is, until she accidentally stumbles through a magic portal and winds up in the real Wanderland, a place that might not be quite as innocent and fun as the theme park she loves. Inspired by Ball's career in theme park design, Welcome to Wanderland is "a hilarious, gleeful exploration into creativity and what happens when you let something you love define your identity instead of illuminating and informing it," according to senior editor Shannon Watters.

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CBR sat down with both Ball and Gonzalez to get the inside scoop on the new story -- as well as a closer look at the personal details that inspired the book.

CBR: Now, I'm a bit of a theme park fan myself so I've got to know before we even get started -- what sort of park are we dealing with here? A full-on Disneyland affair or something more like a Six Flags or a Knott's? Or is it a special blend?

Jackie Ball: Wanderland Park is definitely heavily themed. It takes a lot of cues from places like Disneyland, and small European parks like Efteling, with deeply immersive environments, and story-based rides. Disneyland is unique even among Disney parks in its connection to Walt and a very specific time period of time in American history. There’s a kitschy, rose-colored historical side to Wanderland and its relationship with its creator that allows us to explore some mystery in the connection between Wanderland Park and the Kingdom of Wander.

Maddi Gonzalez: Wanderland is huge! Vast, sweeping lands stretching numerous themes, styles, and genres -- I’d liken it to an old platformer game. Y’know, one of those where there’s the ice level, the fire level, the water level, the city level, the cowboy level -- it’s like you can hop from place to place and see all kinds of wonderful nonsense all under that Wander umbrella, which, in my opinion, translates wonderfully to a real magic world.

And of course, the obvious follow up: Are you both theme park fans yourselves? Can you share your earliest or your favorite park memories?

Ball: [Laughs] I guess you could say that! I’ve been working for various theme park design firms for the past decade. But before I started working in the industry, I was a much more casual fan. I was mesmerized by the rich theming, and the feeling of stepping so completely into another world, but I had no idea that there was so much that went into the conception and realization of a park, or that there was such a rabid fanbase. We didn’t have any big parks near us growing up, so on my first trip to California at age 9, I just about lost my mind. My strongest memories are of walking into Toontown, and being just blown away that there was a place where I could step into a Disney Afternoon cartoon. E.T. was also a big one for me, because not only was there a forest inside (and it was just the line! WHAAAT???), but flying over a miniature Los Angeles on our bikes remains to this day the memory I return to when I need to evoke wonder.

Gonzalez: Jackie’s deeper in the trenches of theme-park-ery than I am just by nature of her being behind the curtain, but I love being a tourist. Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, the closest park to us was a waterpark at South Padre Island: Schlitterbahn. I very fondly recall being a child and having a grand old time on one of those lazy river dealies, chillin’ in a big inner tube, not a care in the world -- then suddenly getting trapped under a gigantic waterfall! I thought I was going to drown right there. But I lived.

My second favorite memory was a moment when I went to Disney World with my family. I had this lanyard with these beautiful official pins of the characters from the Hercules movie. I got them in the '90s when the movie opened, so they were fairly rare for a kid to have. A very well-dressed man saw me, stopped me right in the middle of the park, got down on one knee, and wordlessly opened a huge specialty briefcase stuffed with tons and tons of the most beautiful Disney pins! His intention was clear: he was looking to do a pin trade, which is a common Disney park thing. I politely turned him down, because the Herc pins rule. If you’re out there, Pin Trader Briefcase Guy, bless your hustle.

When it comes to big theme parks and fandom, things can get pretty intense here in the real world, even for adults. There are a lot of people who take their parks very, very seriously. In this world you've created, is that something Bel has to deal with? Does she have a community in her love of the park, or is it something more personal to her?

Ball: I think it’s a bit of both, In the beginning, the Wanderland Fandom (the Wanderlandom? No.) is Bel’s only non-familial social outlet. She spends much of her time on The Forums discussing the park with people she’s never met before, often roundly criticizing the park for changes and flaws, but she is still struggling to connect. Even though the fandom shares her passion, she still hasn’t found her people, and that’s a big part of her journey once she starts walking through portals and whatnot.

Gonzalez: In my research for Wanderland, I’ve discovered the wild and wacky subculture of theme park bloggers that go to parks 50,000 times a month and know the minutiae of every single speck of dust on park grounds. Bel is absolutely one of these people! Unlike a lot of these bloggers that have get-togethers and online friend groups and meet-ups and such, though, she’s a little shy about it. She prefers to stick to a general forum rather than go out of her way to make any personal connections through it.

Once she is thrust outside of her comfort zone, though, the world starts to open up for her and she starts to really “get” why everything about the parks means so much to her, deep down.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Building Wanderland, exploring the complicated world of theme park fandom']

Speaking of world-building, can you detail the process for me of essentially designing your very own theme park from the ground up? How was that collaborative process?

Ball: Oh golly, we’re still figuring that out, to be honest. I actually started how I would start organizing an actual park: with a bubble diagram, which is literally a bunch of circles that just give a very general placement of lands in the park and how they relate to each other, and hand it off to Maddi with a bunch of reference imagery of what I’m envisioning that space to look like. It’s important that the lands in the park be fleshed out to an extent, because they will definitely impact things like background characters and styles of dress, etc., but I have to reign myself in a lot. A typical Blue Sky design effort for a theme park (the very first phase of development) takes longer than the entire four issue run of this comic book will, and there’s an entire team of artists working on it, whereas for this effort Maddi is carrying the entire artistic load.

Gonzalez: Our design process so far pretty much works like this: Jackie will give me a general written description of what she’s looking for in a design, along with a beautifully compiled mood board of her favorite visual reference for the subject. I take all of that into consideration, do a little bit of visual research on my own, then try to blend that up in my brain and sketch pages and pages of concepts for what I think would a) look and feel the best for the story’s purpose and b) be the most fun for me to draw 10 billion times. We volley that back and forth and make tweaks here and there until we get something we’re both satisfied with. I feel like I get to draw a lot of stuff I really like to draw with this book, so I’m having a great time. It is a very speedy process -- I’m essentially designing on-the-go while I’m drawing the book -- but it’s been awesome.

Fandom is always complicated, but speaking from experience I've found that theme park fandom can be even more so, just with all the logical loops you have to jump when it comes to loving something that is literally designed to be a giant profit engine for some mega corporation -- was maintaining a level of earnestness in Bel's passion a challenge? How did you deal with it on the creative end?

Ball: Yeah, that has been a balancing act because that’s one of the many things Bel is still learning about and wrestling with. Coming to terms with the idea that something can be deeply flawed and problematic and it’s OK to still love it, is a weird and difficult lesson to learn, and I think it’s one that teenagers are constantly learning across a wide spectrum of things they care about.

Gonzalez: Bel is very defensive about the “core” of the park. She goes on about how the park was in the good old days, when it actually meant something, and so on -- part of that is, I think, because she does enjoy the creativity and fun of the parks and sometimes forgets that it is essentially a money machine. If anything, she gets grumpy when the park tries to make any profitable changes because it messes with what she views as the “true integrity” of the thing. I think deep down she does twist herself into knots trying to justify that love for herself, but at the end of the day it still brings her a lot of that deep joy that only a megafan can have. Like Jackie said, it’s a weird learning process!

I'm really interested in the idea of this theme park portal being both a blessing and a curse -- you describe Bel's powers on the other side of the portal being something that means a "lifetime of servitude," can you elaborate on that? What sort of challenges are on the horizon for her?

Ball: When she first gets through the portal, Bel finds that apparently her passion ties into some magical powers she doesn’t know how to use yet. But magic users are actually pretty rare even in the Kingdom of Wander, so that makes her a sought after commodity, despite being a novice. So right from the beginning she finds she’s the target of unscrupulous royals looking to exploit her powers, and that drives a lot of the major plot.

Gonzalez: Bel’s going to essentially find out what it’s like to be on the other side of the rabid fandom. That’s all I’ll say about that.

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What do you hope readers take away when they put down the first issue of Welcome to Wanderland? What is your ideal reaction -- beyond immediately wanting issue #2, of course -- and how do you hope to see this story resonate?

Ball: I definitely want people to love Wanderland, and to get excited about space-making, but more than that I want the characters to resonate with people. I hope readers can see themselves in Bel and Riot. They both have very down-to-Earth emotional journeys to go on, despite their magical surroundings, and I hope that resonates with readers who are going on their own emotional journeys.

Gonzalez: I want everyone to really like Riot’s costume. And then make real life versions of her costume. And then give me the costumes. And then I will live in them for the rest of my days.

Welcome to Wanderland #1 is scheduled for release in Sept. 2018 from BOOM! Studios.