Interview: Dan Abnett on BOOM! Studios’ Wild’s End
Writer Dan Abnett has worked on such comics as Guardians of the Galaxy, Dark Ages, The Hypernaturals, Infinite Crisis: Fight For The Multiverse, and many others. Now he tells a tale of alien invasion in BOOM! Studio’s Wild’s End, but this is like no alien invasion you’ve seen before. Westfield’s Roger Ash contacted Abnett to learn more about this upcoming series.
Westfield: How did Wild’s End come about?
Dan Abnett: Ian (I.N.J. Culbard) and I had worked together before on Vertigo’s The New Deadwardians. We clicked, I guess, and realized we could match our imaginations. Wild’s End came out of one of our crazy brainstorms on the phone.
Westfield: Why did you decide to do this as an anthropomorphic series?
Abnett: Right from the start. We realized this wouldn’t work without anthropomorphic characters. It just made it “right”, because it emphasized the clash of genres: the science fiction feel of, say, War of the Worlds intruding upon the comfortable rural world of, say, Wind in the Willows. I don’t think the reader will think of them as ‘talking animals’ for very long.
<Westfield: What can you tell us about the story and who are some of the characters we’ll be meeting?
Abnett: Initially, you’ll meet Gilbert (a hare) who is a fastidious lawyer, Peter (a mink), a journalist for the local paper, Fawkes (a fox) the reprobate local poacher, and the mysterious Clive (a dog), who is an ex Navy man with a dark past in the foreign wars who has just retired to the little village to find peace and quiet.
Westfield: Why set the story in the 1930s?
Abnett: Again, it was part of the effort to create that comfortable, reassuring rural idyll of classic children’s books…. the last place in the world (or the imagination) where you would expect to find danger and menace.
Westfield: You’re working with I.N.J. Culbard on Wild’s End. What can you say about your collaboration with him?
Abnett: I love what Ian does, and how he puts such thought and concept into the visuals… the settings, the locations, the characters. We have great brainstorming sessions, and are really good at incorporating each other’s ideas. It’s a good blend, I think.
Westfield: How much world building did do when developing the series?
Abnett: A huge amount, for both of us. The world is mapped, the ‘laws and rules’ of our world are established (at least for us so we know what works and what doesn’t). A lot of the world building isn’t necessarily ‘forward facing’. It’s set up so we understand the workings of our world and present it clearly.
Westfield: Any closing comments?
Abnett: We’re having immense fun creating this book, and we’re getting great support from BOOM! who are really behind it. I’m very proud of it. I hope readers will get a kick out of it and be really drawn into the characters and their plight.
Purchase
USER COMMENTS
We'd love to hear from you, feel free to add to the discussion!