It's an exciting time to be a Man of Action fan. The consistently innovative and impressively productive studio / writers' collective has intriguing upcoming projects on the printed page and onscreen, and at San Diego Comic-Con, Daily Dead caught up with Joe Kelly, Joe Casey, Steven T. Seagle, and Duncan Rouleau, who discussed the Camp Midnight graphic novel, the respective feature films for Officer Downe and I Kill Giants, as well as Big Hero 6 and more.
As per usual with you guys, it's been another busy year for the Man of Action team. Your Comic-Con exclusive comic book from last year, THE BUS: A Camp Midnight Mini, is being expanded into a 256-page graphic novel that will be released in time for Halloween. Steven, how did Camp Midnight make the transition from mini comic to full-length graphic novel?
Steven T. Seagle: The mini comic was actually a bit of a ruse. We had about a hundred and fifty pages done last year and wanted to do something with it. The mini strangely was a bunch of pages we took out of sequence. We ordered them, left out some, and kind of wrote new dialogue to make it a mini, but it's actually part of this bigger work that's now gonna come out in October.
I didn't want it to be an excerpt, so it's its own thing, but it's not going to be the same in the book. The book's full color.
The mini was about this girl Sky who gets on the wrong bus to summer camp and winds up on a bus full of monsters. The story is actually that Sky lives with her mom. Her mom is a doctor without borders, so she is going overseas. Sky goes to stay with her dad and step-mom and assumes they're sending her to summer camp to get her out of their lives. She vows not to fit in, not to have a good time. When she winds up on the wrong bus and goes to monster camp where at midnight every kid turns into a monster but she is just a human, she has to put on an air that she is holding a bigger, deeper, darker secret than all the kids there and doesn't want to scare them. Then she is just holding on for dear life through the summer and trying not let anyone know she is a human. The question is who is the bigger monster? The monsters or the person?
Joe, Image Comics has collected and re-released Bang!Tango with new cover art. What's it like to see that unique story released again to hopefully be discovered by new readers?
Joe Kelly: I hope they discover it. Bang!Tango is a book that I did at Vertigo. It's a mini-series with Adrian Sibar. It's a crime noir book. I wanted to try something different and it was my first crack at Vertigo. We were very happy with the story and very happy with what we did, but then when we had an opportunity to get it back and do a re-release, Adrian really wanted to dive back in and tweak some stuff that we were not allowed to do over there at Vertigo. It was an opportunity to kind of revamp and do new color treatment and all that stuff.
I loved the story. I'm really proud of it. Hopefully it is going to find a new audience. So much cool stuff is coming out of Image right now. People are looking to them as a place for new types of genre stories. New types of voices. Certainly ours is a weird story. Hopefully the right audience will find it.
I'm super proud of it and then we also just did a remaster of Four Eyes that just came out the other day. The first volume came out with a new color treatment for different reasons, but Max Fiumara wanted to do it because of the second volume we are starting in the fall that will also be shipping in the fall, so I'm very excited about that.
Jaws will definitely drop. There are dragons and blood, and the Great Depression versus gangsters and blood, and transsexuals in the modern day.
Joe, a feature film is coming out based on your comic book Officer Downe, with Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) in the titular role. What's your experience been writing the screenplay for the adaptation and seeing that story come to life?
Joe Casey: [Chris] Burnham and I did the graphic novel as a goof, really, just to make each other laugh, to see how weird and how extreme and how nutty we could get with this character and this world. The next thing we know, it's gonna be a movie, so I wrote the screenplay. I adapted the graphic novel and then I realized I needed to add more shit to this thing. The movie is all of the graphic novel and about fifty percent more stuff. We financed it independently. We weren't answering to any studio. We were basically doing it in the same way we did the comic book, which is how far can we take it? How weird can we get? How extreme can we get?
I was a producer on the movie, so I was there every day watching it all go down. We're editing right now so hopefully it will be out next year and it's very cool. It was a very cool experience. Except for the constraints of budget and time, it was just as much freedom as we had on the comic. Nobody is saying "no" in terms of content, in terms of standards and practices. If we had time to do it, we did it. Hopefully it will be one of those films that will find its audience. It's definitely a very specific kind of film, but we are really proud of it.
Can fans expect the Officer Downe film to have visceral violence in the same fashion as Dredd?
Joe Casey: I went to the set one day and all I saw were bloody, dead bodies all day long. Dredd's got nothing on Officer Downe.
Big Hero 6 was a huge success and is now available on home media. What's it been like to see your creation get that huge film adaptation from Disney?
Duncan Rouleau: It's fantastic to have an idea turned into a big, giant Disney movie. I don't think I really fully grasped how powerful of a marketing arm Disney has. You know, everybody thinks they know, but then it really is a wonder of the world. Two weeks of having your name attached to a Disney movie is about the same as having your name attached to a hit cartoon show that you created for Cartoon Network for ten years. It's about the same.
Joe, what's your experience been prepping for the upcoming feature film adaptation of your graphic novel I Kill Giants?
Joe Kelly: It's been a great ride, very similar to Joe's experience. I Kill Giants was a complete story. It's a complete graphic novel, but in translation to the screen, I'm working with Chris Columbus and we want to make sure that it's a big enough feeling film. Actually in my head, originally, it was always just kind of a raw, indie thing. They had a vision to do it a little bit bigger with a sweeping E.T. kind of feel. It's a little bigger, but everything still feeds the themes and characters that's true to the book, which was obviously very important to me. Like Joe, I'm completely involved. There's nobody trying to push us out or box me out of the process. Nobody touches the script but me. It's really been a great experience. Everybody who is working on it has been extremely cool.
What projects do you guys have on deck that you can tease for our readers?
Steven T. Seagle: Daily Dead readers should keep an eye on the Man of Action website because we are going to make an announcement soon about the bloodiest TV project we will ever be associated with. It's based on one of our projects. Body parts all over the place. Literally.
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Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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