Interview | Christian Sager & Kelly Williams

During C2E2, Kara and Matt sat down with (stood up, wrangled, it’s all the same) with some great COMIXOLOGY SUBMIT creators to talk about their books, their process, and what they read themselves. Since these interviews were done on the fly and in the heat of the con, we also transcribed these interviews. Some parts of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity. Enjoy our interview with The Cabinet’s Christian Sager & Kelly Williams!

C2E2 ‑ comiXology interviews Christian Sager and Kelly Williams

Kara:  While I was reading the book, every page that I flipped past I was just like, “It’s more intense. How did it get more intense??

Christian:  That’s good. I feel like we accomplished something there. That was what we were going for, for sure.

Matt:  Anytime you have a hand exploding in a vice… It’s like, "OK. We just hit a next level now. This is real.”

Kelly Williams:  That’s one of my personal favorite parts.

Kara:  What’s your elevator pitch to someone who hasn’t read this book yet?

Christian:  “The Cabinet” is a historical fiction look at America at the turn of the century, 1900s. Specifically, it’s set 1901. It’s also an Arctic horror story. It has a lot of influences from “The Thing” in it, but it’s also more old‑timey historical. I did a lot of research for getting all the history as right as I could while also putting monsters in the ice.

Kara:  Is that to make sure that you didn’t make a reference that would be out of date?

Christian:  It was obsessive more than anything. I was really particularly interested in the Franklin expedition, and then the HMS Resolute which are both featured in the story. I wanted to make sure that all the facts on that stuff were correct before we started making up our own lost Arctic expedition.

Kara:  The Arctic actually feels a major character almost in this story. Why did you pick that location, or what drew you to that?

Christian:  I was specifically really influenced by reading about the Franklin expedition, and all the real life horrors those people went through. We still haven’t found their remains, or the ship’s remains. That alone, I was like, “This would be a perfect horror story.” Then when we started working together, one of the things that drew me to Kelly’s work was that he was already working on something set in the Arctic. We jelled together on that.

Kara:  What serendipity! How did you both collaborate to make the look for the look for the characters? Is there anything specific that you both gave each other direction on?

Kelly:  I don’t really know. Kind of normal stuff I guess. He gave me a breakdown of what he was going for with the characters, and ethnicity, and stuff. Because we wanted it to be varied, and inclusive of…to look like it would be, and something like that. To have the characters represent something beyond just being these characters that are pushing a story forward.

Christian:  One thing that was really important to us was to use the nature of comics and the coloring in the comic to sort of delineate between when they were in the Arctic and when they’re weren’t, and also flashbacks and flash‑forwards. There’s like black gutters, I forget, when we use black gutters for flashbacks…

Kelly:  Black gutters are our present.

Christian:  Black gutters are our present throughout and white gutters are for flashbacks. Then like there’s a blue wash for everything that’s in the Arctic, and red wash for everything that’s kind set below main.

Matt:  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of effect in coloring. It’s like a black and white book, but there is that reddish hue wash. That like drew me in more than a regularly colored book. I’ve never seen anything like that. What was the genesis of that idea?

Kelly:  Really, it was just the way I was doing everything at the time. I was pretty much just doing like black and white, gray washes with like spot color and wash over it.

As we talked about this and realized we were going to have like two major locations that it took part of, kind of just over time, we decided blue is cold and red is warm. It works pretty well.

Christian:  I mean it is because the thing that’s great about washes, you really looking at a full‑colored book on a RGB or CMYK spectrum. That’s a full‑colored print job ‑‑ when it’s print. It’s just really nice. It looks like a bunch of different reds, but it’s a whole spectrum of hues, really.

Kelly:  Totally.

Matt:  Who were your like inspirations when you decided to become an artist? Is there anybody that you grew up with and like, “Yeah, you know, I’m going to do this.”

Kelly:  I like so much. I can never really narrow it down. I mean I think just for comics in general, I was always a huge Bernie Wrightson fan. Bernie Wrightson was the first person that I stopped and it was like, “Hey wait, this is like an actual person making this, and it’s not like just a comic that magically appears and I go buy it.” Just a lot of the older guys are a big influence.

Kara:  On this book, did you guys have a favorite character or someone that you just really wanted to punch all the time while you were writing or drawing them?

Matt:  Or want his hand destroyed by page 12.

Christian:  Your favorite character was Clench, right?

Kelly:  Yeah. It changed depending over time, I just think she’s still probably my favorite. By the end of the book, still…

Christian:  For these people who haven’t read the book, Clench with Clintock is based on Annie Oakley. She’s a sharp shooter, or had been a sharp shooter from old Wild West shows. She’s now a recovering alcoholic that’s working on shit that goes up there. Yeah, she just, slowly over the course of the story, became more and more fun to write, and to draw, I think.

There is a little bit of a Calamity Jane in there too working on her. She was a comic relief for us while we’re working on this incredibly grim story.

Matt:  Was there a character, or both characters that you attach to when you were growing up, and starting to write? What drew you to that era? Did you grow up on books like that as well?

Christian:  No. I had been doing a lot of research on that era. In particular, what I was attracted to is the idea that the shifts of industrialization, between the 19th century, and the 20th century are very similar to the same societal conflicts that we’re going through right now.

I thought that part was fascinating. I specifically designed all of the characters to be outcasts from that era. That was one of the reasons why I chose her. She was a woman, but she was a strong woman that was represented in these shows. Then in other instances, she wasn’t treated with the same respect that you’d be treated when she was shooting glass balls over the air. That was something that was fascinating to me, whereas the other female character in the book is Asafa Jane, and there’s a freed slave. That’s one of the characters as well. It was almost like an all old timing suicide squad.

Matt:  It’s a good pitch for anybody, really.

Kara:  Tell us about your take on Teddy Roosevelt.

Christian:  Ha! OK.

Kelly:  He actually became one of my favorite things to draw by the end.

Christian:  Yeah. I had also done a lot of research on Teddy Roosevelt. My graduate degree is rhetoric. My mentor is specifically a presidential rhetorician. She had done a lot of work on Teddy Roosevelt. I got into the idea of having him be part of the story, but when he was the Vice President before he became the President. When you read the real life accounts of his life, they are stranger than fiction. I mean they’re completely insane. I was doing all the research. I mean I have a whole huge notebook full of the notes just for Teddy. He wrote himself, because he was so almost maniacal in his pursuit for power that he fit as a character for this story line. We took fictional license and had him do some things that probably didn’t happen to the real President Roosevelt. But it was fun giving him a voice.

Matt:  Maybe the next submit book could be “Teddy Roosevelt’s Adventures.”

Kelly:  I’d do it.

Kara:  You touched on the research that you were doing. But, from your description of your Teddy Roosevelt research, it sounds like you did a lot.

Christian:  Yeah, the book itself actually has a bibliography in the back, because I wanted to represent all the research I did. Most of the books and articles that I looked at were recited in the back there. That was an idea that I got from both, there were two other comics that were really influential to this. The first was “Petrograd,” I don’t know if you guys have read it, by Tyler. It was one of Tyler Crook’s first books. Then the guy who wrote that did a lot of research as well. It showed. They also used a very interesting red wash in that storyline. Then Alan Moore’s work in “From Hell” and all the research that he did in the annotations that are in the back of that. I wanted to have something that was historically strong like that. I went a little overboard with it, but I was just coming out of graduate school, so I was probably in that…

Kara:  You were still in that zone. How did it feel to be in the headspace of these characters in this time period that you immersed yourself in?

Christian:  It was strange. Because as a writer, you write down these ideas for characters. I don’t know how it is maybe for other writers, but for me, the glory of writing, the fun part of writing is when you really get into the meat of it, you start hearing their voices just come out. Some of it was kind of scary. Some of it was interesting. I didn’t think that I was going to sympathize with the main character Silas as much as I ended up sympathizing with him by the end of the story. I don’t know if that shows in the story or not. His perverted hero’s journey that goes on in this story was sad in a way. Then, there were other characters, that I think I sort of considered as secondary characters that became much more alive as we started writing. Like Clench.

Kara:  When you were drawing the story, was there a scene that came naturally to you and you knew exactly where you wanted everything? Or was there a scene that was just really difficult, and you were really struggling with trying to represent everything?

Kelly:  Probably the one crazy…

Christian:  Transition spread.

Kelly:  Yeah. It just took a little planning.

Christian:  There’s a spread where we tried to show time passing over the course of three months of them traveling up to the Arctic ‑‑ in the course of two pages. It’s very subtle but Kelly moves from the red wash slowly into the blue wash as the two pages progress. We worked for a while on that spread and making sure that the lettering fit just right and everything.

Kelly:  Then, again, there’s another two page spread towards the end with the crazy stuff that…

Christian:  Yeah. They kind of look Lovecraft’s monster stuff.

Kara:  Spoilers.

Christian:  That’s OK. If you flip through it, you’ll see it.

Kelly:  Honestly, I don’t feel like that one was quite as difficult to nail down just because it’s just a bunch of crazy stuff.

Christian:  It became far more of a horror story than I originally imagined when Kelly became a part of it. We realized that we had so many similar interests than we’ve…We’ve been partners in comics now for three or four years. We’ve done other projects since this one. We’re actually working on a new book right now. But because we both had heavy metal aesthetic in our backgrounds and horror, the book took on a much darker tone than I think I was originally going to have.

Kara:  It definitely felt when we were reading it like it was this slow creep. Something was going on. Then when you got towards the third act, you were like, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh my God!”

Christian:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was on purpose.

Matt:  When you were starting out reading, what did you start out reading, Kelly? What brought you into the genre? What do you read now?

Kelly:  Wow. I don’t know. I started out reading “Tales From the Crypt” when I was kid, like DC reprints and stuff. I just really got into that. As far as reading right now, I don’t have a lot of time to read much right now. I get tons but..

Matt:  They just accumulate.

Kelly:  Really, the main thing I always read as soon as I get home is “Southern Bastards.” I stay on top of. That’s the only thing off the top of my head. I’ve got a stacks of stuff from just the last couple of weeks. I’m like, “I’ll get to it!”

Matt:  Southern Bastards I cannot wait until that character comes to that town. It’s going to be like the greatest moment in comics history.

Kelly:  Southern Bastards is so interesting to me.

Christian:  Because we both live in the south. I’m not from there originally. I’m from New England originally, but I’ve lived there for years now. Reading Southern Bastards, it’s so…Both Jason and Jason live in the south. They get it. It’s just yeah. That twist is so amazing. You think it’s going one way. It goes another. Yeah, I love it. Rico does some really amazing color work in that too with a lot of heavy reds.

Matt:  What about you? What did you start out? What are you reading now?

Christian: I started off reading probably the traditional 80s stuff. Claremont and Byrne’s “X‑Men” and then moving on to Alan Moore stuff. But right now, I read a lot of everything.

Let’s see. Just this week, I’m reading a lot of old DC and Creepy reprints. I love going through those archives of the stuff that was put out then. I actually did a book…that sort of an homage to DC Comics with a different artist before we worked together. I just love going back and getting that old feeling from those. Then, I’m reading Carla Speed McNeil’s “Finder” right now and just plowing through that. There’s just hundred and hundred of pages of that stuff. Really like it. Then because of the “Daredevil” show, I’ve gone back and started reading the Ann Nocenti run on “Daredevil,” which is totally awesome.

Matt:  With JR JR?

Christian:  He draws it. I don’t she gets enough credit compared to Frank Miller for how much real world social stuff she brought to the Daredevil table. It’s really good.

Kelly:  Everything about that run is fantastic.

Matt:  Really, JR JR is some of my favorite stuff.

Christian:  Yeah, I think those books were coming out probably when I was young teenager. I just didn’t appreciate the intellectual value she was putting into it at the time as much as I was just like, “Oh, it’s cool. He’s drawing Daredevil. This boxy muscular Daredevil.”

Kelly:  But there’s other things added.

Kara:  You guys mentioned that you got something new coming up. What’s that about?

Christian:  Yeah. We just finished an anthology that I wrote pretty much all of. It’s all of stories about exorcisms and demons possession called “Canaan Cult Revival.” Kelly did one of the stories in that. We’ve decided to take that anthology as a starting point for a new series that we’re going to do that’s also called Canaan Cult Revival. We have a pitch with us here at the show. We’re going to be talking to some publishers and editors while we’re here. The idea is is that we want to do like a really gritty demon possession story that is more graphic than you usually get out of horror comics. That’s something that we’re trying to push with this. Also, working on the color of it and having that be a strong component. Kelly’s doing it all in watercolors. It’s not like a red and blue hue like we had before, but it’s very lush and colorful. Yeah. Sort of like a mix of Jack Kirby, “Death Metal” and “The Exorcist.”

Matt:  Oh my god.

Christian:  That’s what we’re trying to do.

Kelly:  That’s exactly what I’m thinking about the entire time. Lots of black metal records going on the turntable.

Christian:  Yeah me too.

Matt:  ComiXology Submit, “The Cabinet.” You can get it now. I really do appreciate you guys coming on. We love putting a spotlight on great Submit books.

Christian:  Yeah! Thanks for having us. We love comiXology Submit. I’m so glad that it’s out there for creators like us to have a venue to get things out digitally.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)