Deconstructing Destructor with Sean T. Collins pt. 2

(All art provided by Matt Wiegle)

When we last left our heroes...

Kiel: One thing I find compelling about this entire endeavor is the fact that it's one of the few times I recall there being a real collaborative effort between folks who still fall very firmly in the alt comics camp. I'm sure someone will show up to point to 12 examples of this, but it's still pretty rare. How difficult has it been for you to enter that part of the comics community as a writer only, and what do you think the response has been or might be from the "pure cartooning" folks?

Sean: I don't have 12 examples of it! Haha, I wish I did. The touchstones for writer-artist collaborations in bona fide alternative comics are really few and far between. There's Harvey Pekar and Dennis Eichhorn, but they were doing autobiography. There's Alan Moore's body of alternative work, but he's Alan Moore! There's Gilbert Hernandez drawing stuff for Peter Bagge or Mario Hernandez, but he's Gilbert Hernandez! They're not really germane comparisons. I think that for more direct, and more recent, comparisons…hmm. Rob Vollmar's comics, mostly for NBM, are done in collaboration with artists. Top Shelf has been publishing more collaborations -- the Immonens, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, Jason Hall and Matt Kindt, and of course Chris Staros's comics themselves. My friends from the old horror blogosphere Matt Maxwell and Sam Costello have written very independent horror comics for other people to draw. There are the Cold Heat comics, which involve Frank Santoro either drawing stuff he co-writes with Ben Jones or other artists drawing stuff Frank co-wrote. MOME is publishing couple of collaborative comics right now, drawn by Josh Simmons and Derek Van Gieson, and I think Fantagraphics is a publisher where the disinclination toward collaborative comics in the contemporary alternative idiom is perhaps strongest. So hey, maybe I do have 12 examples! But I think that very, very few of those examples really involve a situation where one person is a fully functioning solo cartoonist who normally writes and draws their own stuff (like Matt) and the other is a person who literally can't draw at all (like me). And I think that maybe only half of them could you get bona fide altcomix cartoonists to even classify as doing the same kind of thing they do, really.

How difficult has it been for me to enter it? Not very, I guess! All it took was a decade of low- and non-paying gigs writing incessantly about untold hundreds and thousands of comics day in and day out. [Laughs] Early on, like 2001, 2002, when I told people I wanted to write comics, cartoonists I mean, they would inevitably say "you should just draw them yourself." But I can't draw! I really can't. And what I want to do in comics requires craft. I could bang out stick figures or shitty little scribble people with no perspective, but that doesn't work for any of the kinds of comics I want to do. I like to think that my criticism work has convinced people that I'm serious about these kinds of comics, and know enough about them to talk about them intelligently, and love them very much. Whether or not that translates into good comics of my own, who can say, but I think it at least gets my foot in the door. And of course, people take Matt seriously no matter what he does, as well they should.

The response has been bizarrely, gratifyingly good from "pure cartooning" folks. I mean, I'm still waiting on my congratulatory phone call from Robert Crumb's villa -- maybe he called Matt -- but many real-live cartoonists have been very complimentary and supportive in comments, over email, and on Twitter. It means a great deal to me. In the end, I want Destructor to feel like the product of one cartoonist, like Matt and I are really working hand in glove. That support is a sign that it's working, I hope.

Ben: Brief publication history of Destructor from Elfworld to the current site--GO!
Sean: Elfworld was the idea of Jeffrey Brown, with whom my wife and I are friendly. He wanted to put together an anthology of fantasy comics by alternative comics creators -- I don't know if he had Chris Pitzer's alt-SF anthology Project: Telstar in mind when he came up with it, but something in that vein. When I heard about this, I realized that maybe here was my opportunity to finally write and publish a comic on the one hand, and do something with these Destructor ideas I'd had for almost two decades at that point on the other. In my mind I envisioned whatever I'd end up doing with it as akin to Brian Ralph's mostly silent all-ages adventure comics for Highwater Books, like Cave-In. All I needed was to pick a story from Destructor's life that was more fantasy than science fiction, and there was a period in his life, a time when the Mob was not a going concern, that I realized I could flesh out with the aforementioned Conan-style wanderings and battlings. So I quickly came up with the idea of "Destructor Comes to Croc-Town." I can't recall if I approached other artists to work with me on it before Matt -- I was friendly with the great cartoonists Jordan Crane and Nick Bertozzi at the time because I'd been hiring them to do illustration work for the magazine I was an editor at, and I'd be surprised if I didn't reach out to them in some way just to see if they had the time or inclination to collaborate, even if I didn't end up actually pitching them on this particular script. But I think I'd also seen Matt around at the then-young MoCCA festivals and knew he was still making comics, many of which were about myths and legends that involved monsters and fighting -- pretty much perfect for Destructor. I approached him, he said yes, and we did the strip Marvel Method. I wish I still had the written description, but it's lost to the ether. Matt did his thing, I suggested some tweaks, and voila, finished product.

It took a long time to see print, because Jeff's other commitments prevented him from running point on it anymore; eventually an enterprising young cartoonist and publisher named François Vigneult realized the project was M.I.A., got in touch with Jeff, got his blessing to run with all the submissions that Jeff had received so far, and published it through his Family Style imprint. The book went over well, and François naturally started talking about Volume Two. It's with that in mind that we produced "Prison Break." I think François has since published another Elfworld book, though not a full-length sequel, but "Prison Break" never made it in.

At some point, and I don't remember when exactly, I think I showed Brett Warnock and Chris Staros at Top Shelf, with whom I'd become friendly through my work as a magazine writer and editor and comics blogger, the strips I had. At the time, they were looking to relaunch the webcomics component of the Top Shelf website, and they offered to publish the Destructor strips on it. We couldn't have been more pleased -- Top Shelf's the real deal, and it felt really good to be published, in whatever fashion, by the guys responsible for Craig Thompson, Jeffrey Brown, Alan Moore, and Eddie Campbell.

Anyway, in the years since we completed "Prison Break," I kept sending new stories and scripts to Matt, and we also made a couple of other non-Destructor comics together, and he helped me put together a collection of my comics that he published through the Partyka collective, and of course he kept doing his own stuff. But there finally came a time this past fall when I was really hungry to be working regularly on comics, Destructor in particular, so I pitched Matt on doing a Destructor webcomic. Turns out he himself was looking to do something along those lines, as he'd just wrapped up some major freelance and personal work and was looking to do something that would see him putting out new work on a regular basis while he prepped for his next major personal project. And this happened to coincide with me relaunching my own blog at the new seantcollins.com domain. It just all came together.

So we've started out by recoloring the original black and white "Croc-Town" and "Prison Break" per Matt's idea, and we'll start rolling out brand-new, full-color material after that.

Ben: What prompted you to "start in the middle" when it came to publishing Destructor as far as beginning with "Destructor Comes to Croc-Town," a story that picks up in a random period during his life?

Sean: Well, as I said, it had to do with me needing a fantasy-type story to fit Elfworld's parameters; this time period in his life worked much better for than did the points that would have made for a good start if I wanted to do it all chronologically. As it turns out, I think it works really well. The sense of mystery, of not knowing exactly who Destructor is or what he wants, is what helps get that strip over, or so I've been told by a bunch of people who've read it. And once we'd finished it, Matt encouraged me to continue telling the stories out-of-order -- it gives us a lot of freedom, and I think it's fun for people to try to put the pieces together. This, of course, is exactly what Robert E. Howard did with Conan, though I didn't really know that at the time.

Ben: What is "Prison Break" about?

Sean: Three Spanish landowners on a weekend in Manhattan. [Laughs] No, it's about a prison break, and if you haven't already read the original black-and-white version, you will soon see who's leading it and who that person is trying to rescue, or at least one of the people that person's trying to rescue. Much more than that, I'd rather not say.

Kiel: This may just be me, but I'm really interested in the larger plan for how you're rolling out Destructor's story. That is to say, I'm curious to see how you plan on creating a cohesive whole for this character with stories randomly plucked from his life and told in the "There is nothing but what's physically happening"/Brian Ralph style of storytelling. Are you looking to introduce a timeline of his life as this goes along, or will the ways in which these pieces fit together reveal themselves once we're five or six stories in?

Sean: Well, not all of the stories will be so firmly in that all-action, very little dialogue mode, first of all. I’ve got a couple of real yakfests in the can. So you’ll learn a bit more about Destructor from that, both in terms of what he’s like as a person and some actual backstory. So that’s one way to address this issue.

With regards to timelines and suchlike, it’s still so early in the game that I haven’t given that much thought beyond “Yes, at some point I think it might be good to write out a timeline.” But I would probably do that after the vast majority of events on the timeline have already been revealed through actual comics, rather than peppering the timeline with cryptic, as-yet-unseen things. I want the stories to be the story, if you follow me.

Frankly, I also don’t want to lock myself into doing this or that simply because I wrote it down publicly at one point. A good deal of the fun of Destructor for me so far has been – I don’t want to say improvising, but it’s something like that. Like, for example, as I said earlier I’d never really thought much about the period of Destructor’s life during which “Croc-Town” and “Prison Break” take place, but simply conceiving of the “Croc-Town” story instantly created an entire storyline to fill that gap. If I’d hashed out some elaborate timeline and were in one way or another forced to stick to it, I might not have had that freedom.

Meanwhile, Matt will occasionally add elements that give me a whole new path to go down. For example, he invented the whole sequence in “Croc-Town” where Destructor’s arm armor gets torn off. Once I saw it, I had to think of why that might have happened, and what the consequences might be, and how he might get it fixed, and so on and so forth. This all led directly to a story I probably never would have thought of otherwise, but one that just so happened to perfectly tie into all sorts of ideas and plot points I already “knew” about Destructor from years back.

So yeah, I’d much rather a sense of the whole of his life emerge from the readers putting the stories together on their own rather than by me creating some kind of concordance or what have you. It’s more fun for me, and I think it’s more fun for the readers, too.

Kiel: That said, it hit me when you'd referred to "Prison Break" on your blog by saying "It's time to meet the Mob." Even though I'd read it in black and white, I hadn't thought of "Prison Break" as a kind of cast introduction until then. Are there specific elements you need to get on stage before a lot of the synchs up, or will we be jumping into a story much later in the character's life soon?

Sean: This actually ties into your previous question somewhat. I have two relatively firm ideas to keep things from getting too sprawling or confusing, and making it feel like it really is “synching up” as you say. The first is that at some point, when enough stories have been posted, I’d like to set something up on the website where the stories are archived in in-story chronological order, not just in the order we did them. I won’t really specify dates for them, and one might have taken place years before the next one but just days after the one before it, but yeah, some loose ordering.

The other, and this could easily change just depending on what Matt and I feel like doing, is that my initial plan is to do stories that all take place within one sort of grand era of Destructor’s life, even if they bounce back and forth a lot within that era. I’ve toyed with jumping waaaaaay ahead in the timeline and writing a script that takes place right near the end of the story, but I really don’t think it worked, not right now. My rough idea is that when the first however many stories are completed, you’ll have a picture of one “volume” of Destructor’s life. Then I can move on to the next “volume” and bounce around a lot within that.

But again, none of that’s set in stone. Matt has specifically asked me to keep bouncing around in time rather than telling all the pre- and post-“Croc-Town” stories in order, and he made the right call there. Also, I have a standing invitation to him to tell me basically anything he’d like to draw, because I can virtually guarantee it’s in Destructor’s saga somewhere. Urban warfare, abominable snowmen, space dogfights, swordplay, I don’t give a hoot, Matt, whatever you want. He hasn’t taken me up on this yet – the only thing he’s ever really requested came after he did the Sparknotes Romeo & Juliet, which is for me to not do a story set in Renaissance Italy – but if he ever does, and if that requires skipping way forward or way backward in time to deliver what he wants, so be it.

Ben: Do you have Destructor's entire existence roughly--or painstakingly--mapped out chronologically in your head or do you just come up with adventures and you'll figure out where it all fits later?

Sean: The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it's painstaking in places, rough in others. I know exactly how his story begins. I know almost exactly where I intended the main arc of my telling of it to end. I know where it really does end, although as I told Tim O'Shea, that's a recent development -- I think I only learned it this December. And I have various periods in between totally mapped out and acted out and thought through and so on. That said, the wonderful thing about all this, as a writer, is that none of it is set in stone, because I'm the only person who knows any of it, really. Matt has actually asked to be kept in the dark about where everything is headed, preferring to learn only what he needs to know to get a given strip done. I've dropped hints in scripts about things that will be a big deal in other strips at some point down the line, but that's it. So if I want to change things, I can. If I want to explore areas I'd never really thought out before -- like I'm doing in the time period in which both "Croc-Town" and "Prison Break" take place -- I can. There's no Handbook fans can turn to and write to me complaining about continuity errors. I am the continuity. [Laughs] There's a master plan in place, but lots of room for improvisation on the way to the final destination.

Ben: What's upcoming for you, Matt and Destructor?

Sean: Matt has fully 100 undrawn script pages in front of him right now, waiting for him to work his magic. I've got two other short-ish Destructor stories in various stages of development, and I'm plotting out a pretty huge and ambitious one as well. I've got ideas for a bunch more jotted down, and a reservoir of 24 years' worth of stories to draw from beyond that. Meanwhile Matt continues to work as a freelance illustrator, mostly drawing awesome illos for classic books for Sparknotes, and doing his own comics, which of course is how he won his Ignatz Award at SPX this past fall. I've also got a book-length project in the works with Matt Rota -- we're in the revision stage of that now -- and of course I write about comics for my own blog, Robot 6, Comic Book Resources, Maxim, Marvel, DC, and just about anyone who'll have me. And Destructor himself has a very long journey ahead of him, which I hope will continue to excite people. The feedback we've gotten so far has been enormously gratifying, and I can only hope that it keeps up.

Be sure to DestructorComics.com and Sean T. Collins' own site for more! And thanks to Sean for taking the time!

Deconstructing Destructor with Sean T. Collins pt. 1

(All art by Matt Wiegle, except the sketches, which are Sean's)

If you’ve read this blog with any regularity over the past few years, you surely know of the collective love, admiration and respect we have for Sean T. Collins. He’s our buddy first and foremost, but he’s also one of the very best writers there is on the Internet when it comes to pop culture and a range of other subjects. He’s probably the only guy I know who can bring equal passion and insight to underground comix, Gossip Girl, Lord of the Rings, politicis and David Bowie in rapid fire succession. On my best day as a writer, I strive to be a fraction as good as Sean is seemingly effortlessly.

For most of his life in one form or another, Sean has been slowly but surely building an opus called Destructor. The project’s most recent iteration is in web comic form from Sean and his longtime collaborator Matt Wiegle. Kiel and I put our heads together to get all the info we could about Destructor and ended up with a spoil of riches.

Enjoy this extended interview (part one today, part two tomorrow) which by the end of we do believe you will know more about Destructor and perhaps Sean than you ever realized you needed to and fall in love with both.

Ben: To start, hit us with the Cliff Notes version of who Destructor and his crew are, where they live, what their situation is, all that jazz.

Sean: Aw, but that would be telling! [Laughs] Alright, fine. To answer this question, I went through the "About Destructor" blank verse poem I wrote and the press release I put together to see what I've revealed, because I don't want to go much further than that if I can help it. But basically, Destructor is a person in a biomechanical suit of armor who traveled to a group of planets called the Alpha System, where he became a criminal, then a crimelord, then a warlord, then a conqueror, at the helm of a group simply called the Mob. His closest friends and allies in these endeavors are a rogue Army officer, General Grunt, and an extremely powerful robot, the Wall. The world they live in is a science-fictional one -- there's routine space travel, multiple sentient species, sophisticated self-aware robots, cyborgs, laser guns, and so on -- but depending on where you are, there are levels of technology and varieties of wildlife that are more reminiscent of fantasy. And there might be other fantasy elements down the line. We'll see.

Ben: I know the secret origin of Destructor is that you came up with him, his cast and his world as a kid, but I wanna know more--can you remember vividly how you created Destructor? If not, give me your closest approximation.

Sean: I actually remember this quite clearly. I was standing at the head of our big white kitchen table, flipping through this illustrated SilverHawks storybook. I wasn't even into SilverHawks, I didn't have any toys of theirs, so I don't know how I got it -- maybe a friend loaned it to me? Anyway, it had a page where you could see the various members of the main bad guy Mon*Star's mob of villains, illustrated basically from the waist up, which I interpreted as mugshots. I loved the image of all these bad guys one after the other -- they were certainly more interesting designs than the SilverHawks themselves -- so I took three big, attached sheets of computer paper from our old-fashioned printer and started making up and drawing my own. Destructor, an armored warlord in the vein of Darth Vader and Cobra Commander (and Mon*Star in non-hair-metal-barbarian mode, now that I think about it), was the first character I drew. Right underneath each drawing I would write the characters names and specialties, just like a G.I. Joe filecard.

As for Destructor's in-story origin, I honestly can't remember a time when I didn't know how and why he got his armor. There's a phrase to describe it that I'm sure I'll introduce into the comics long before I actually "tell his origin story," if you will, and that phrase has been in my head since I was a kid. But the full origin story I didn't flesh out until I was in high school -- a junior, I think.

Ben: A lot of kids who dig comics and the like come up with their own creations, but few stick with them quite as you've stuck with Destructor. Why do you think you never "grew out" of wanting to tell the story of this character?

Sean: Because I'm immature? Seriously, I was "playing" the Mob probably well into college. But the fact of the matter is I really can't separate Destructor and company's story from my creative and imaginative life at all. I couldn't grow out of it any more than I could grow out of having an imagination. It's just always been there at the core of everything. It's a stew into which new ingredients were introduced as I grew older and got into different things and had different influences. He-Man is in there, Star Wars is in there, Clive Barker is in there, Twin Peaks is in there, The Illuminatus! Trilogy is in there, World War II and serial-killer and mafia books and documentaries are in there. Everything that makes me me is in there. I can't grow out of me.

Kiel: Aside from what Ben's been after in terms of what's continued to attract you to this world of characters, in what ways are you creatively being challenged to present the things so personally familiar to other readers? In other words, do you have a sense for how this piece of fiction works in terms of being engaging to a perceived audience or in terms of responding to what you see in typical adventure comics, or is this still very much you just making up stories without worrying about all that?

Sean: I can tell you right off the bat that Destructor is not a response to typical adventure comics. It’s not a critique or a salute or a homage or a satire or anything of typical adventure comics. It’s simply my adventure comic. I guess that…well, if you’ve read my writing on action and adventure comics you know that I have pretty concrete and passionately held ideas about how to make good action sequences on the page, so I’m certainly trying to apply that; to the extent that those ideas arose from reading a lot of not very good action sequences, I guess that’s a way in which this is a response to them. Fortunately Matt is just really good at action, which as I said is one of the reasons I wanted to work with him in the first place, so that kind of makes it a moot point. They were gonna be good action sequences regardless of what I was bringing to the table.

But anyway, speaking to the main thrust of your question…You know, before Matt built the webcomic site and started posting the pages as a webcomic, this would have been much easier to answer. I think it’s probably still really easy to answer: In all the ways that really matter, yeah, it’s just me making up stories without worrying what an audience would think. I don’t understand making art in any other way, to be honest. I mean, I understand, but I don’t think I could do it. I’ve tried in the past and it’s been a failure, albeit a learning-experience-type failure. When I said that Destructor is simply my adventure comic, I meant that I wasn’t reacting to other adventure comics directly, but I also meant that it’s my adventure comic. It’s the adventure comic I want to write and read. The only other consideration is that it’s also the adventure comic I want Matt to draw and read and enjoy. So I have an audience of two. And all I can do is hope that what that two-person audience enjoys, a larger audience might enjoy as well. But that’s out of my hands.

Now, the reason I hesitated a little bit is because putting it up on the web, and seeing people react to each individual page, has me thinking about individual pages and what they do and don’t deliver. Not in a pandering way, or in an attempt to be a crowd-pleaser, mind you. But when someone tells you “Wow, you guys really understand the webcomics medium,” which someone did the other day, it makes you go, "Uhhh, do I?" [Laughs] And then you start thinking "Okay, so, every page needs to deliver." But that's more a concession to the demands of the form than it is to the audience, I think. You worry about the former and hopefully the latter takes care of itself. Or not. It's up to them. I really feel like once I've written something and Matt's drawn it, it's out of my hands and I have no right to tell people what they should think about it or how they should react to it.

Ben: Why is Destructor a bad guy? Is this deeply reflective of who you were then and are now or are villains just fun? Or little of column A, little of column B?

Sean: Well, for one thing, as I said above, the image that sparked me first putting pencil to paper was of bad guys, and bad guys were just a lot more fun to draw. They could be much more individuated in terms of outfits and even species than the good guys, in my experience at that time. Whether you're talking about He-Man, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, or The Lord of the Rings, which were my childhood favorites, the main good guys were mostly human (or human-looking) and mostly dressed in relatively normal-looking clothing. The bad guys, on the other hand, were robots and skeletons and monsters and shrouded sorcerers and ghosts and werewolves and dudes with awesome giant weapons and swords and guns and armor and stuff. They're just cooler-looking -- Chewbacca, Man-E-Faces, and Snake Eyes notwithstanding.

I also knew right away that making bad guys like Destructor and the Mob my main characters would give me freedom to do more stuff. Luke Skywalker couldn't use a giant space station to blow up a planet. He couldn't wear awesome giant scary armor. He couldn't boss people around with the Force. He couldn't preside over a palace full of creepy creatures with a giant monster in a pit in the basement he could feed people to when they pissed him off, or make people walk the plank into a giant mouth in the middle of the desert. Bad guys just got to do cooler, radder stuff!

So those are the two fun answers to that question. There are also two more serious answers. The first is that maybe making these guys bad guys was one of the beginnings of my interest in dark material, which became a lot more prevalent as I grew up. Now, as a kid I was scared to death of anything "scary" -- I had no interest in heavy metal, I was terrified of seeing a modern horror movie, I was totally freaked out by the posters and video covers in the horror section of the local mom-and-pop video store. I did however like the villains in the shows and movies I watched and the books I read; I also really liked old monster movies, both Godzilla, which I watched on Channel 11 on weekend afternoons, and the Universal Studios stable, which I really only knew from those wonderful orange Crestwood House hardcovers about them, which I got from the library. But by the end of high school I self-identified as a horror fan -- first via Stanley Kubrick's darker movies, then via Clive Barker's films and books. I also was a budding serial-killer buff. And probably most importantly of all, the rise of alternative music meant I was listening to things like Ministry's Psalm 69, which meant I was wearing a lot of black. And none of this has really gone away. I think that in person I'm very friendly and jovial and polite, and online I'm very garrulous and upbeat in the tone of most of my writing, which if anything probably tilts over into being overbearing or arrogant at times. But inside me…I don't know how to put it. I'm not an optimist about life, human life and life in general, I guess. I wish I were! I wish I wasn't stuck with the kinds of thoughts I have about how life works. I'm better than I was a few years ago, when I was really struggling with these thoughts, but they're still there. And maybe Destructor was a way to give voice to them even then.

The second serious answer, which I'm hesitant to even bring up because I'm not really sure if it holds water, is that I was very briefly a victim of relatively mild but still at-the-time disturbing abuse as a youngster. Don't worry, I'm fine, and I was fine at the time too! I still feel anger at the people involved, of course, but I remember at the time that I never had any hesitation about telling my parents, never had any doubt that this was anything but an aberration from the way I was supposed to be treated and that it would be brought to an end and I would be safe and happy again. It didn't impact my long-term sense of security and self-worth, is what I'm saying. And indeed, once I was able to inform my folks what had happened, that was all she wrote. I really never thought about it being a serious incident in any way. But when I was in high school or college, I was going through some files in my parents' house and discovered some IQ and personality/psychological test I'd taken that I didn't remember, along with the psychologist's report. I wish I could remember what my IQ was on that report! But anyway, there was a bit in the summary where the shrink talks about how I was given some toy animals to play with, and I did some scenario where some predators were menacing some prey until some other big animals came and rescued the animals who were being menaced. This seems perfectly normal to me -- I mean, people rescuing people from other people is basically the plot of all heroic fiction ever! -- but the shrink suggested it had something to do with what had happened to me. Maybe Destructor, who no one will ever boss around ever again, had something to do with it too.

Ben: One thing I've always loved about you is that you're a guy whose appreciation of and tastes for art in all its form goes all over the place from Clive Barker to Gossip Girl and back again. What of your many influences would you say played most into the creation of Destructor and have worked their way in over time?

Sean: Ha! I gave a brief list above -- it's hard for me to talk about Destructor without talking about its influences, I guess. But the big ones, roughly in order: Star Wars, Tolkien, He-Man, G.I. Joe, classic monster movies, "enigmas" (Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs), Julius Caesar, young-adult fantasy series (Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, a bit of Ursula K. LeGuin, a bit of Robert Asprin), Batman, Marvel trading cards, the Gulf War, Stephen King, war documentaries (especially World War II), superhero comics, Frank Miller, serial killer documentaries, mafia documentaries, Clive Barker, 1984, Nu-Marvel, Fort Thunder, Scott Pilgrim, Los Bros Hernandez, Boards of Canada, Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin.

(The interesting thing is that the influence of Howard and Conan crept in second- and third-hand: "Destructor Comes to Croc-Town" was conceived as a Conan-style wandering-warrior story long before I'd actually ever read or seen any Conan story or comic or movie. Since then, I've read all of Howard's Conan stories, so that influence is probably even more pronounced.)

Ben: You and Matt Wiegle are both Yale graduates--do you think your professors were prepping you guys for something like Destructor? Also, do you think anybody from Harvard could make something so kick ass? What would a Harvard version of Destructor be like?

Sean: I really can't speak for Matt since we had very different majors. I think he studied sculpture, and I was a "film studies" major. I don't know if he was making comics in class, as opposed to the student newspaper, which is where I first saw his stuff. But we had a mutual friend, Josiah Leighton, who did try to make comics in art classes, which went over like a fart in an elevator at the time. This was ten, fifteen years ago now -- really a different world from how comics are treated in academia today. But I think the professors whose classes really meant something to me -- film, English, and photography, mainly -- would have said hell yeah, go for it. They were already fighting against a weird anti-film bias at the university. "Yale is not a trade school" was the catchphrase used to explain why we didn't have the actual filmmaking equipment and facilities, and classroom emphasis on making films as coursework, that you'd see at NYU and USC and what have you. So I can't imagine they'd have rained on the comics parade if it were something I was pursuing at the time, though it wasn't. And though he didn't teach there, the film scholar and critic David Bordwell, who has written very intelligently about comics as well, was quite influential on the film studies department via department head Charlie Musser. So I think my professors, at least, would have been fine with it. And of course, the whole point of film is to tell a story visually. I chafe at the notion that comics shouldn't use film techniques and terminology when it suits them, any more than film shouldn't use theater or photographic or literary techniques and terminology when it suits film.

That was probably a more serious answer then you were looking for, huh? [Laughs] As for Harvard, they're too busy making Facebook and napalm over there. Boola boola!

Ben: How did you and Matt meet and what attracts you to his work as an artist?

Sean: I was familiar with Matt's work in the Yale Herald before I knew Matt himself. I imagine we actually met through Josiah, who also was an artist for the paper and was in some of Matt's classes, but we really got to know each other better when we were both inducted into the same secret society at the end of junior year. The bonds formed by shouting secret slogans in an underground lair and tailgating nude in the back of a rented truck at a Havard-Yale football game are never severed.

Matt's comics have always impressed me. I love how imaginatively and solidly constructed his characters are, and when you're doing a sci-fi/fantasy strip, it's so important to have the characters look individuated and appealing on first glance. He's also very good at pacing, which in his student-newspaper strips and most of his minicomics he uses to be funny, but which I've learned is totally germane to action sequences as well. And I think the combination of his cartoony style and rough-hewn line reflects on a very basic level the way that Destructor started, literally, as child's play, but has grown up with me. The moment I mentally abandoned the idea of making Destructor comics in a "mainstream" way and realized the idiom of alternative comics suited it better, what was in my head ended up being pretty much exactly what Matt wound up putting on paper.

To be continued...