Interview: Ben Blacker Talks DC Vertigo’s New Series HEX WIVES

Hex Wives is part of DC's Vertigo relaunch and it couldn't be coming at a better time. Aside from the fact that the first issue will be available on Halloween, witches in pop culture also seem to be at an all-time high with recent releases like The House with a Clock in Its Walls, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Hereditary, and Suspiria. I recently caught up with series creator and writer Ben Blacker to learn all about the origins of Hex Wives and where he plans to take the series:

Can you talk about your inspiration for Hex Wives and your pitch to Vertigo?

Ben Blacker: Hex Wives is the confluence of two ideas I'd been tinkering with in the back of my brain for years while my writing partner and I were working on a few other projects. Maybe five years ago, I caught an episode of “Bewitched” on TV. I loved that series when I was a kid, when I'd see it in syndication when I stayed home sick from school. It was a typical episode—Samantha worries about getting dinner on the table for her husband who is bringing his boss home from work. Samantha's mother, Endora, swings by to tell Samantha that she's married below her. But this was the first time it struck me that Endora was right! Samantha is this super powerful witch who is “not allowed” by her husband to practice magic! That's bonkers. Darren didn't want his wife to be her complete self.

So, this was something chugging along in the back of my head. Meanwhile, I was having more frequent and honest conversations with my wife and my women friends about the way they were really treated at work, in relationships, etc. There were a lot more insidious and ingrained attempts to control women than I had realized. Ways of subjugating or minimizing women and their accomplishments seemed inherent to our patriarchal society.

It really came to a head leading up to the 2016 election when I saw both how people talked about Hillary Clinton and how others talked about the way Clinton was talked about. Never has someone so qualified run for this position and never has someone so unqualified won it. At its base, this came down to a question of the way women are considered and treated.

I learned so much about writing TV from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” One of the lessons from Buffy is about having a central metaphor. When I put these ideas together—an exploration of witch tropes and a desire to write about gender politics—Hex Wives really took shape.

The pitch itself was just a casual mention to Jamie Rich and Mark Doyle and was initially based on a DC property—a reimagining of the Mod Witch, who'd been in The Unexpected, a book I loved as a kid (my intro to comics was through my dad's old collection), and who had appeared in Gaiman's Sandman stuff too. I didn't know Vertigo was being relaunched; after I sent the pitch, Jamie and Mark said they wanted to get rid of the IP, make it an original character, and include it in the first group of books for DC Vertigo. I was really lucky. Also, I think I outlined about 25 issues I knew I wanted to do and I mentioned to them about 75 more after that!

What kind of research did you do into actual witchcraft and the events that took place in Salem (and elsewhere)?

Ben Blacker: I'm from Massachusetts and I'm pretty familiar with the Witch Trials in Salem. It's hard not to be. That state is drowning in history, some of it shameful! Also, when I was a high school English teacher, I taught The Crucible a number of times, and having to boil down a lot of that play's themes for 10^th graders really helped me internalize them.

The most research I wound up doing was into myth and folklore of witches, which are a really unusual trope of the horror genre. Unlike, say, Frankenstein or vampires, there's no urtext for witches. What tropes we know—the broomsticks, the pointy hats, cauldrons; as well as earth-magic, blood-magic, etc—is from a collection of stories, both real and fictional, over thousands of years. If we consider “Macbeth” to be the starting point of the “pop culture witch” (though a case could be made for Circe's appearance in Greek myth and in “The Odyssey”), then that still leaves us with hundreds of years of versions of these characters.

The most helpful books to me were: “No Go The Boogeyman” by Marina Warner, an academic treatise on “the forms we put on our fears... boogeymen, ogres,” and yes, witches. There was a wealth of material in here about the depictions of, especially, female monsters. There's also great stuff about how so many monsters are cannibals—I was thrilled to learn the phrase “child-guzzler” (ie, Hansel and Gretel's witch)—and that's something I'll be terrified of and will explore in both Hex Wives and elsewhere.

Another great book was “Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art” by Lewis Hyde. It's a scholarly book about the trickster trope—Coyote, Krishna, Ananzi—and why he (trickster is usually male) exists, how we use him to explain and cope with the unexplained. There isn't a direct influence on Hex Wives as there is with “No Go The Boogeyman,” but so much Hyde's ideas were inspiring to me.

But, honestly, the most inspiring and useful input for Hex Wives came from conversations I had with women (and a few men) who played or write pop culture witches. I got both factual and emotional material to work with every time I spoke with these writers and actors and a couple of practicing witches as well. For my podcast, The Writers Panel, I did 10ish minute phone calls with everyone from Buffy's Amber Benson to Winnie Holzman (who not only created “My So-Called Life” but wrote the book for “Wicked!”), to Madeline Miller, who wrote a terrific novel called “Circe” which tells The Odyssey from the witch's point of view. I also did a couple of panels at cons, SDCC and NYCC, both of which had writers (like the creators of the new “Charmed” and the old Sabrina; Tomi Adeyemi who wrote the excellent “Children of Blood and Stone”), actors (Supernatural's Ruth Connell), illustrators (“Scary Godmother” creator Jill Thompson), and actual practicing witches (Juliana Crouch and actor Valorie Curry, who was also in the latest Blair Witch). All of these are available on the Writers Panel podcast feed. And everything from them really created the ongoing fabric of Hex Wives.

I love how you fleshed out the rules for reincarnation in your world so easily and quickly in the first issue. Will exploring the past lives of these witches be a recurring theme of the series or will it mostly focus on modern day?

Ben Blacker: Thanks! Refining the rules for reincarnation was SO hard. Rules of magic are kind of the least interesting thing for me in this kind of story—I'm way more interested in the present tense stories of the characters and their feelings. So, there was a lot of refining of the rules with Molly and Maggie (as well as with my wife, for whom that could not have been much fun). But, yeah, once I landed on a simple process of rebirth, I couldn't wait to dig in on the histories of this coven. I think it'll be illuminating to the characters too. So, between longer arcs, we're going to do one-off stories that tell the origin of each witch.

I knew from the beginning that the way a woman “became” witch was to “commune with The Devil.” Basically, her innate powers got activated by making that choice to do something incredibly dark and destructive. So, these single-issue origin stories will be an opportunity to visit that decision for each of them. And I gave myself the fun exercise of reframing a classic horror movie from the villain's point of view as the jumping off point for each origin. So, for the first one, I do a take on The Exorcist, presuming that Regan wanted to be possessed. What would drive someone to that extreme measure?

These one-offs are also a great chance to work with some guest artists and give Mirka a well-deserved break. But I'm really interested in getting more underrepresented artists in to do these single issues or even covers over what I hope will be a VERY LONG RUN.

What's your creative process like with Mirka Andolfo and Marissa Louise? What did they bring to the table creatively that maybe wasn't in the original script?

Ben Blacker: Oh, they bring every single thing that makes the series great. Mirka was only the ever choice of artist. We had a number conversations at the beginning of the process about designing the witches. It was important to us that they be very real women, that they have different silhouettes and shapes and faces. And Mirka is an incredible clothing designer too. We knew we wanted the outfits of the women to be practical—we really want people to cosplay as our coven! And Mirka designed all of the costumes to not only be redolent of the pop culture witches on which the characters are based but to create them as if made out of objects the women would readily have. So Izzy's “cape” is a torn up men's sportscoat, because in Desert Canyon, she's kept in dresses and more “classically” sixties women's attire.

More importantly, though, Mirka pushed me to go further in the storytelling. As she told me when we first talked, she likes to draw “sexy ladies.” And I was really hesitant to address the issue of sex in this book. That the men are keeping the women brainwashed as housewives makes it “icky” at the VERY least. But Mirka wanting to get into the issue really forced me to dig deeper and make the discovery that the men would never even entertain having sex with the witches—the women aren't even human to them. That told me a lot about the men and I'm glad Mirka pushed me to get there.

And I cannot say enough good things about Marissa Louise. She's elevating every page, but, more importantly, doing so much to sell both the tone and emotion of every scene. Someone remarked to me recently that they found so much of the first issue to have a sadness about it. I totally attribute that to Marissa. There's a scene in which the women look out at the fires that are raging around their suburb, it's what keeps them contained, and that scene has so much melancholy and resignation to it, and I think it (literally) colors the rest of the issue. That's all Marissa's work.

Do you see this as a limited series with a definitive end or is this planned as more of an ongoing series? How many issues do you have mapped out?

Ben Blacker: From the very beginning, I told the editors that I wasn't going to write with an ending in sight. (Which is not to say I don't have one in mind, just that I'm not heading there for some time). I came in knowing what the first 25 issues are—the first four or so arcs, plus three single origin stories—and if the book gets canceled at issue twelve, well, it'll just be in the middle of an arc!

My real job is writing TV, and I've learned that the best TV shows tend to give a satisfying story while leaving the door open to future stories. I'm a big fan of long runs of comics by single writers—Starman, Fables, Y: The Last Man—and that's my goal with Hex Wives. I'm not really interested in “world building” so much as I am in character-building. Once I'm writing characters I love, I just want to put them through their paces.

And, selfishly, I love working with this creative team—editors Molly Mahan and Maggie Howell, Mirka and Marissa—and I want to keep us all together for as long as the readers will let us keep telling these stories.

Can you give our readers a little tease of what they'll see over the course of the first issues?

Ben Blacker: I think, after the first issue, most readers will see where we're going, though I think we'll surprise them about how we get there (and what happens when we do). The Architects are trying to control these powerful women. It's only a matter of time until Izzy, Nadiya and the others remember what and who they are and tear down the patriarchy.

This series seems to be coming out at the perfect time with witch movies back in full swing this year with Hereditary and Suspiria. What are some of your favorite witch movies?

Ben Blacker: I am a huge horror movie fan, and it's so refreshing to work on a story that is just straight horror. Witch movies are tough—there aren't a lot of them that take witches seriously or treat them as both powerful and aspirational but also scary monsters (which is my ideal combo). The Witch is definitely the high bar of witch movies. Hereditary scared the hell out of me, but I found it more upsetting than horrific; it's not one I want to revisit. I can't wait to see the new Suspiria. The old one is SO weird and Argento-y that it's hard to be too affectionate about it. The Witches of Eastwick, The Craft, The Conjuring and Drag Me to Hell all had great witch stuff in them. Some of my favorite witches in movies aren't necessarily from my favorite witch movies. All time is Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid! She's so nasty but also so damned charismatic. Same with Angelica Huston in The Witches. And The Wicked Witch of the West, of course!

Honestly, my favorite witch movie is only partially a witch movie, but it's also one of my favorite horror movies and maybe even one of my favorite movies, period: Rosemary's Baby.

On TV, I loved the Coven season of “American Horror Story.” And the new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina with Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina is really, really good. It's playing with a lot of the tropes I am in Hex Wives, but in different ways.

I understand you'll be appearing at some Golden Apple on Halloween. Can you let our readers know about that appearance and any other upcoming events where they can meet up with you to talk Hex Wives?

Ben Blacker: I'll be at Golden Apple in Los Angeles on Halloween when Hex Wives comes out! Starting at 10am, I'll be drinking coffee and signing whatever anyone brings me!

I don't imagine too many people will come, and, honestly, I'd love it were just a small group who wants to talk about horror, comics, witches and writing. Nothing would make me happier. Unless someone brought donuts.

---------

Hex Wives #1 will be available everywhere on October 31st from DC Vertigo. Take a look at our preview pages below and we'll keep readers posted on future issues.