Zane Austin Grant | 03.03.2010 | View comments
Brea Grant (sister and co-writer) and I grew up in a small Texas town with not much for self-identified nerds to do. I wasn't into rodeo, was pretty bad at the sports activities offered, so that pretty much left the library and the comic store. I guess it makes sense that we would get into comics, sci-fi, and horror because at some level they allow for an escape. I think the first step in making comics is reading comics. You have to look at a book panel by panel and try to figure out why your brain fills in the gaps between each one in a way that allows the story to flow, and why the way that works today is different from other times in history.
At some point though, escapism isn’t enough and I feel like we started making stuff. There was a lot of music, Brea actually played drums in a few punk and hardcore bands (like ‘Vicki Lawrence Fanclub’), that toured around Texas and Louisiana, and I made weird noise tapes, and we played together on a few projects. There were also public disruptions, like spontaneous parades, and writing projects that carried us through the dark and boring times.
In a sense, ‘
We Will Bury You’ is a product of that desire to create, share ideas, and, to a minor degree, disrupt. Once we figured out what we wanted to do thematically, we studied up on the 1920’s. We read Fitzgerald novels, popular histories like ‘Only Yesterday’, and watched period films (one of my favorites from 1927 is Tod Browning’s “
The Unknown”). Once we started getting an idea about what was going on in people’s lives in 1927, we started outlining stories. We asked what would have happened if the zombie outbreak happened in the prison where Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and made a whole story around that. There is a small view into that story in one panel of issue #2. All the first issues actually start out with single panels showing glimpses of other stories we came up with. We wrote up some of the scripts up and our friend Orion Peter (who sings for a thrash metal band called ‘Ilsa’) illustrated some of them, and we started to get a better idea of what worked and what failed.
On different continents, during the same month, I met Steve Niles who showed me some script formatting examples at a signing in Washington, D.C., and Brea met Ben Templesmith at a convention in London, and he gave us a lot of advice. A lot of people don’t know that comic scripts look a lot like movie scripts, but are formatted by panel. Once we had around 50 pages of script written, we wrote up our pitch. We ended up trashing 40 of those original pages before we even gave it to friends for editing, let alone Denton Tipton, our editor at IDW.
Even though we live across the country from each other, and Kyle Strahm and Zac Atkinson (artist and colorist on
We Will Bury You, respectively) live in the vast middle, we collaborate over email to work out the kinks in our scripts. They do the art and somewhere someone digitizes it for PSP and someone else prints it. In the end, we hope people have fun reading it. If people don’t find joy in the historical aspects, well… we put the sexual zombie confusion and gore in there for a reason.
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