Gary Reed

Yeah I teach biology courses at the community college.

Yeah, it took me a while. I got my degree and didn’t use it for 15, 20 years, what the hell. I spend most of my time teaching and enjoy it quite a bit.

With a patient wife. The thing is that I don’t waste any time. You just get down to it and do it. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I don’t have too many distractions, I stay pretty focused. When you’re always busy you get a lot more done because you don’t have time to think about how you do or you don’t want to do something, you just do it.

That’s actually way back from the first series of Deadworld in issues 19, 20 and 21. It appeared as a backup and then we compiled it into a one-shot and then after a little while we did a little miniseries out of it, so that was probably done in the mid to late 90’s.

Yeah, he makes an appearance in number six, which should be out now. So he’ll be in a trade paperback that collects one through six and then for the new series starting with number seven, he’ll play much more of a major role. The new series actually starts with number seven but I didn’t want to start the numbering over with another number one. We’ve had too many Deadworld number ones.

I think that’s not as true as it used to be. It used to be an automatic given that you were going to get so many orders of number one. Maybe it might be a slight blip in sales but overall I think that longevity helps a lot, more so in the long run than having that minor blip for a number one. We’ll try to gear it up to be an introductory issue so if somebody’s never read Deadworld they can come right in on that and understand everything that’s going on.

Yeah and Deadworld itself started 85 or 86.

In volume two the Dead Killer played a role, not that major of a role, he came with an attitude of the wise old mentor that knew what was going on when nobody else did. I wanted to get away from that part of it where he’s just this sage and deal with more how he sees the world because he sees it as very black and white. You’re either for him or against him and there’s nothing in between.

Yeah and he prefers it that way. He, of course, doesn’t trust the zombies and he’s following through his past experience, which we’ll reveal some of. He doesn’t trust humans either. That’s how I look at Deadworld and that’s what [the comic] Slaughterhouse is dealing with, what’s going on with the humans. You just have to look at Darfur, Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia to see that what do humans do to each other might be worse than what the zombies do.

I don’t know if it’s just modern politics. Humans killing each other goes back quite a ways. But it is modern politics in the sense that it is part of us as a race in the past, the present and unfortunately it’s going to be the future.

No idea, haven’t got a clue.

It depends on how long it goes on. I really don’t know. I don’t think I would kill the Dead Killer off unless it seems like the natural progression. My only superhero comic book was Seeker and by the fifth issue, I felt she had to go so I killed her off which essentially ended the series.

That was actually in the very first issue that was put together by Arrow Comics [with creators Stuart Kerr and Ralph Griffith]. They introduced a group of intelligent zombies at the end of the first issue. I don’t think they meant for King Zombie to become so big but people were responding to it. So King Zombie became this more vocal character and became the focal point of representing the plan of the zombies.

I think the Arrow guys were heavily influenced by Night of the Living Dead. I don’t know about timeframes because I wasn’t really ever into zombie movies.

I loved Night of the Living Dead because that was a classic.

But for Deadword they departed from that pretty quickly with the intelligent zombies and developing different types of creatures. They were a little bit derivative but I think a lot of books are when they first come out. But people get enthused and pull away from that pretty quick. Then when I took over I pulled away even more because I don’t watch any zombie movies, I don’t read any zombie books or comics. I don’t want to get influenced by anything I’m doing with zombies.

What happened was that I closed up Caliber, which went out with a whimper. One day I said, “Ah, I don’t want to do this anymore.” It was a losing battle. The market had changed dramatically. There were so many of the publishers and it got to the point where I could keep it going but it’s like “What’s the point? What am I trying to accomplish here?” I didn’t see much point in it so I just closed it up and Joe Pruett started Desperado Publishing and he used to work for me so we talked a lot about what strategies to do. Then he decided to go with Image and he asked me about Deadworld. At the time I really wasn’t interested in doing much with comics but I came back with Byron Preiss because he wanted to reprint Baker Street. So we did that with Simon and Schuster and then Byron asked me about writing some more books. I wrote a couple graphic novels for Penguin. I said “Ok, well, I’m certainly enjoying writing and not publishing. Then Joe asked “Why don’t you bring back Deadworld? A lot of people would like to see that.” I had my doubts about that but he was pretty persistent so I said, “Ok, we’ll bring back Deadworld.” The first issue of Deadworld with Desperado came out in September of 2005. We had a long delay in the shipping between issues one and two and two and three but since then it’s caught up quite well.

I think it’s just doing ok. There’s another book from Image called The Walking Dead [created by Robert Kirkman]. The thing that really bothered me was that people said, “Oh you’re just jumping on the zombie bandwagon.” I say, “Deadworld had 50 issues before there was ever a Walking Dead.” But I don’t blame the writer. He’s doing what he wants to do and this is a separate entity. I don’t know how similar they are. I’ve never read an issue. I don’t want to read an issue. Maybe once I’m done with Deadworld I’ll go back and read them but I never read anything that’s similar to what I’m doing. I’d kill myself if I ever found out I accidentally took something. Most people don’t plan to do that but it just gets into your subconscious so I don’t want to get to that point.

I’m bringing back a few Caliber titles like Raven Chronicles and The Realm is supposed to be coming back as a whole new series. So I guess we’ll be jumping on the fantasy bandwagon when we do that.

Yeah, that’s my feeling but it just surprised me. But it just shows that most of the fans aren’t aware of the long history of it.

We lasted a little bit longer than the rest but we didn’t make it. We had some problems that were outside of all that. There were a number of different problems and they all came at the same time but cthe major one was the Power Cardz game we did. It was a collectible card game like Magic and we invested everything we had because we had guaranteed purchase orders from Target, Toys R Us, K-Mart, Wal-Mart for millions of dollars. So we put everything we had into it. We had two guys, Joe Martin and Tim Parsons, who were working 20 hours a day, every single day, so we got the game done. It looked great. It played great. We tested it and retested it and retested it. We sent it off to the printer and we flew around the country, talked to a lot of different printers, but the printer we chose outsourced it without telling us and the new printers that took over had no idea that you had to allocate the cards in a random fashion so you’d buy a deck of 50 and have 50 of the same cards.

So all the purchase orders were canceled. The things that we did ship earlier, including the direct comic market which was quite a bit of money, all came back so that’s what killed us. I sued the printer. It took about six years but I won the lawsuit but by that time they had been bankrupt for a couple years. They had nothing.

It was a pretty depressing time so if it wasn’t for that, Caliber would have been a monster because that would have made more profit than we made in ten years. Not only was there the initial purchase orders but we had three additional games ready to roll out.

Yeah, I’m actually probably going to venture more into prose. My wife says to forget the comics, just go into prose. I did a young adult prose book with Actionopolis called Spirit of the Samurai. It’s part of a series of books all dealing with mythology. Each story deals with a different type and I’m dealing with Japanese mythology. I really enjoy doing the young adult novels and they’re getting a real good response at libraries and bookstores. I am writing a Deadworld novel with Gary Francis. He’s done the bulk of the work so far and now I’ve got to go back through and rewrite a lot of it and change the focus in certain areas but it’s a good collaboration. I have a couple other prose stories coming up in Negative Burn then I have a couple things I really want to get into in the prose. The Plague was a comic I did with [A History of Violence co-creator] Vince Locke and it was stories of people who lived and died during the plague. Vince did the full page illustrations that accompanied each narration so each page was a narration of somebody who either lived or died during a plague.

Also with my science background I’m going to do some more science stuff like a book with Chuck Bordell who is an anthropologist. We’re going to do something about evolution and looks like I already have it set up as a textbook for some colleges. I’m in the position where I can write what I want to write not what I have to.

Well that was my first comic. When I read the first issue now, I just cringe. Guy just has got a lot on his plate just like I do and it is just chasing something if you try to bring back Baker Street. I think maybe a one shot would do it but I think Guy’s passion has turned towards [his creator owned book] The Marquis.

No. But it is an influence on the new storyline. I think a lot about the biological aspects of zombies and Slaughterhouse is a biological testing facility. Basically they’re injecting people with AIDS, leprosy and some other diseases to see what happens when the zombies eat them.

It was floundering. Vince [Locke] wanted off the book. Guy [Davis] and Vince were like 18 when they first started Deadworld for Arrow but by the time I took over publishing they both wanted to get out. They wanted to do something else. Vince wanted to do something besides zombies. Guy wanted to do something besides The Realm. Vince did a lot of short stories and then he got hired by DC for Sandman. So we were trying to figure out who was going to do it. At that time I really wasn’t interested in writing that much. I took up Baker Street because Guy wanted to do some Sherlock Holmes and I knew Sherlock Holmes pretty well. I was dabbling and I started plotting out some issues of Deadworld. I said we should take the story here and here and here and it ended up that I was just faster and cheaper than anybody else. I wanted to wrap the first volume because it was a mess of deadline problems. So I ended it and then in volume two I wanted it to look fresh and bring everything into focus and then go from there. But one of the hardest things as an independent publisher is that unless you can pay a lot of rates you have this influx of talent coming in and out all the time. Most people are going to spend two or three issues then move on.

I wrote Doctor Syn with Tom Mandrake. Tom has the script and as soon as he finishes drawing it we’ll release it. I think he’s got 12 pages fully done and it just looks fantastic.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck