Scott Snyder: American Vampire

Thanks. We worked really hard on that. It’s definitely been like, I feel like the luckiest guy on Long Island right now. It’s been a great ride so far.

It was several years ago when, I mean there’s always a vampire glut, but there was another glut of vampire works out there. I think it was when there a sequel to Blade and Underworld. It just seemed like all of the vampires were too cool to give you the time of day, looking like they were on their way to some neo-gothic club that happens to exists in the sewer with a chandelier overhead. The leather trenchcoats and sunglasses. That aesthetic was so boring by that point. It made me nostalgic for vampires that I grew up on. My favorite vampire movies and books are things like Salem’s Lot and Lost Boys and Near Dark and the works where vampires are not so much scary because they’re exotic and romanticized but scary because they’re your loved ones come back to kill you from the dead. They’re not scary because they’re so foreign and beautiful and so on. What’s scary about Salem’s Lot to me is that penultimate scene of Danny Glick, that little boy, scratching at his brother’s window to be let in in the middle of the night. What’s scary about Lost Boys is Michael changing into a vampire in front of his brother and his brother’s worried that his own brother is going is going to kill him. Similarly in Near Dark, the girl you fall for, who seems to be your dream girl, turns out to be a serial killing vampire.

I was in a model shops getting a Doctor Who model for a friend of mine and they had a series of busts. One of them was a zombie Confederate soldier. I had been thinking about vampires and it occurred to me, why not have a vampire that walks the kinds of landscapes you enjoy writing about? Why not make a new kind of vampire that’s indigenous to this place? From there it just took off. If I’m going to make a new kind of vampire, what’s he going to be and when’s he going to appear. Wouldn’t that mean then, as a logical extension, that there had been other species before that had branched out as well. I thought about doing it as a book for a while. I worked on it as a screenplay with my best friend for a bit. When I started working in comics, I was biding my time, thinking this was the perfect format for it.

It’s not. The cycle we’re working on next also takes place in the West, but the one that I’m plotting now after that takes place on the East coast. There’s one we’re thinking about that’s going to take place in Middle America. There’s an overseas one we have in mind. The west just seemed like both a mythological place and [a place] of optimism and endless sunshine. That seemed like such an inhospitable place to the vampires we’ve seen. The perfect place to begin another species that can walk in the sun and has a kind of more muscular character to it than what came before. Plus there are certain desert qualities that really characterize the American vampire.

Our editor, Mark Doyle, who’s been amazing, we went back and forth thinking maybe we should include some teaser where it shows what the American vampire looks like. I’m really excited for people to see issue #2 where the actual new species makes it’s first appearance. It’s not some incredibly radical different thing where it doesn’t look like a vampire, but there are some notable differences. It has much more desert qualities to it. Rattlesnake fangs and an unhinging jaw and so on. We’re really trying to have it be something where we make something that’s new, not just as a gimmick, but something that’s new that’s in some way allows us to really get into inter-species relations and conflict later on in the series. Each vampire species has its own set of weaknesses and strengths and that means that the European vampires have sort of are eager to find some way to kill off this new bloodline.

That was an editorial decision. Originally I pitched the series as starting with Skinner in the West and Vertigo essentially rejected the pitch on the idea that if it was going to start in the West, it would be too narrow of a focus and too literal. In the pitch I had included other ideas for where it was going to go. The second cycle was going to be the 1920s it was going to be Pearl so I wrote that up as a lot more elaborate pitch for them saying, I agreed with what they said and what if we started here. They immediately jumped at that. We were actually going to save Skinner’s story for later in the series.

They knew that I knew Stephen King and could I contact him and anyone else I knew to just give a line of press for when the announcement was made. I had given him the pitch to see if he could make any suggestions and he’d been really helpful about giving me a couple tips. He was really excited for me. He said you know I really love that character Skinner and when you get to him I’ll write an issue if you want. I was like, if I tell them you’re going to write an issue or two they’re going to jump at that. I don’t want it to be something you do because you feel like it’s some favor or something and he was really adamant. He liked the character and thought it would be fun.

I went back to Vertigo and told them. It was a Friday afternoon when the office is closed and I got this Monday morning call, basically, did you say Stephen King said he would write an issue? Immediately it became, how do we do that. Steve wrote him with such exuberance and made up so many interesting things about the character. The character was developed and designed and had a history, but some of the nuances and his long standing grudges Steve elaborated on and made so much richer. He brought in this whole theme about legend versus fact and history versus folklore. Issue one was the closet thing to the outline that I had set up for him. He really takes off in issue two. You start to see the epic scope of what he wants to do.

That’s exactly what the proposed format was actually. Rafael [Albuquerque] was just the first person that auditioned for the series. Editor Will Dennis, who’s been terrific, he does Northlanders and does Scalped and he suggested Rafael. Rafael sent some sketches based on my descriptions of the characters and it was just immediate, this guy understands who they are. We actually wound up using his sketches in a couple of the promos. These are sketches before he ever saw the script.

He’s in Brazil and I contacted him on instant messenger and I talk to him literally every day. We’ve become really close friends. It was his idea to the two cycles in two different looks, one in washes to give Steve’s an antiquated feel and do the Pearl one in these real hard inks to give it an art deco 20s look. Rafael will always be our artist on the big forward moving cycles. In between what we’re going to try and do is explore a little bit of the history between different vampire species and human-vampire relations. Explore why the species we’re all so familiar with from folklore and Dracula has become the dominant species and where are all the other ones are. I just feel so lucky to get to work with him.

I do have an endgame, but it’s far far in the future. I know in mind how I want the series to end, but we have so many ideas to go forward and backward and sideways with it. We’re hoping to get a good long run like some of my favorite Vertigo series. In terms of the format, we are going to explore different decades and we’ll return to different decades as well to show different perspectives on things. We are absolutely going to pick up on the characters decade to decade. It’s Skinner’s blood that we’re following, essentially. He’ll pop up in fun and surprising ways, sometimes featured centrally as an antagonist or protagonist and other times he’ll make cameos. Pearl the same. I can promise that we’re following both the bloodline and the characters that are established in this cycle so they won’t disappear after this at all.

In terms of working in comics, all of it did. I think all the time, what if I hadn’t written that story? It’s crazy. It caught the eye of Mark [Doyle] and my editor at Marvel, Jeanine [Schaefer]. The chance to pitch for the Marvel Timely series two years ago. Then I got Iron Man: Noir, which they’re waiting to release so it coincides with the movie, and Nation X. That led to a chance to pitch a creator owned thing to Vertigo.

There’s nowhere I’d be more thrilled to be than Vertigo. I get intimidated all the time by the bar that’s set. It won’t be for lack of trying if it sucks. There’s no phoning it in. I understand how fortunate I am to be able to do this at Vertigo and to be able to have my own series as a relatively green writer. And I want to know what people think. People think I’m just saying that, but I really do want to know. Comics fans are so astute and so generous and so vicious. I want to know. I want it to be a series that people feel a part of and respond to. I’ve been on that side as a fanboy for a long time so I want people to feel like they have access to the story as well.

I’m really not going to finish my next draft of it until at least the summer. I’m hoping 2011, but it’s a ways away. It’s actually about somebody who works in comics. It’s about a guy who’s struggling with his son who’s in an accident and he is caught in this place, psychologically, where he’s having a lot of trouble reconciling the limitations of medical science and the more fantastic possibilities that he writes about everyday. It’s called The Goodbye Suit. I want to let it sit until the summer and look it over and really rewrite it and tinker with it and then hopefully have it done before the end of the year. I love it to death and it’s very personal. I’ll definitely do it but I’m just having a lot of fun with comics right now and I like to step away from it for a while so I can be more objective when I look at it again.

My plan is to get a few cycles of Vampire done. I like to finish the whole cycle at once, so I write all the issues of a cycle together. I’m finishing cycle two and I’m going to finish cycle three hopefully and really get into four by the summer and be a good full year ahead and then take a few months over the summer to really work on the novel more and come back to Vampire in the fall. That’s the hope, that I can buy some some months to work on it without having to do both, but we’ll see.

If you wanted to know what it’s like to work with Stephen King, he’s the most generous guy in the world. I’ve been wracking my brain, why is he writing so much. Is he doing this as a favor to me because we’re friendly. I loved it but I don’t want to be burdening him with this, doing it because its an obligation. What you realize quickly from talking to him, when you see the intensity of his scripts, is that he acts like a hungry exuberant young writer when he likes a story. The writing is just so fun. It’s inspiring to watch because he has no reason to be that enthusiastic about it from a pragmatic standpoint. He doesn’t need to go to the mat for five issues of this thing. He does it that way because he’s a story guy, and when he gets into something he likes he lives there entirely. For a young writer, someone like me, it was incredibly inspiring to watch. To see somebody who’s so established, it doesn’t get more established, act like somebody who’s right out of the gate and getting their first job. That was great.

He’s also the most gracious guy in the world. I keep thanking him and he’s like, I should be thanking you, this is so much fun. I’m like no no no. I’m thanking you. Mark and I got him a fun gift. We got him an Elvis Day of the Dead bust. He and I are both big Elvis fans. The funny thing is, yesterday I came home from dropping my son off and I had this big package. I opened it up and it’s this big bottle of Dom Perignon from Steve. I’ve never drank Dom Perignon. “Thanks for the wild ride. Congrats. TCB. Steve.” TCB is Elvis’ personal logo which we both use. That’s Steve King. That’s who he is and I just can’t say enough good things about him as a writer, as a person, as a mentor, as a genius storyteller. I can’t throw enough love his way.