Alan Robert: Crawl to Me

It is a psychological thriller leaning more towards horror just because of some of the traumatic events that occur in the book. It basically focuses on this one character and his experiences which lead him to believe that he’s losing his mind. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but what you think is happening, is not actually happening.

I always wanted to do that kind of thing. I’m new to comic creating, professionally anyway. I always wanted to create comics long before I ever got into music. I went to school to become an artist. I actually wanted to be a Marvel penciler in my twenties. Right upon graduation I ended up going on tour with Life of Agony because we had just locked down our first record deal. So I got sidetracked, but I always loved comics. I always wanted to see that dream come true.

When I finally had some time I pitched Wire Hangers to IDW and they loved it and really supported me with that project. Along the way, I guess I wanted more and more control over the process. Not that they did a bad job at all with the lettering. With Wire Hangers, I handed in all the art and the script and had the production artist do the lettering for it. With Crawl To Me, I learned a lot from Wire Hangers and I was like, I can handle the lettering too. It actually made it a lot easier to me to submit the final piece to IDW because part of my process was creating the dialogue once the art was finished. I would know in my head what the panel should look like, what’s seen and who’s talking to who, but I didn’t write any of the dialogue until the art was done. That made it a lot easier to do the lettering for it.

Well I grew up reading my dad’s silver age books. He had all the original Spider-man comics, Fantastic Four, all that stuff. I had always been drawing from a young age so I would draw those superheroes. Then later on [I was] creating my own books just for my own personal satisfaction, that never went anywhere. In my teenage years I would go to the New York Comic-cons and meet people like Mike Zeck, who did the Punisher limited series and worked on Spider-man for a while. Somewhere along the line I found a book called Arkham Asylum. Dave McKean had done all the artwork and it was something that I had never seen before. It was chaotic beauty and it changed my perspective on what comics could be. Once I saw that it really inspired me to want to create a comic in that kind of visual chaos. I got into more nontraditional artists from that point, people like Ashley Wood, Bill Sienkiewicz, Alex Maleev, Ben Templesmith. I started picking up comics mostly because of the artists not so much the story.

There are some similarities but it’s definitely matured and especially even from last year’s Wire Hangers to Crawl To Me, I purposefully wanted it to look different. Wire Hangers had more of a cartoony exaggerated type of feel because that was the nature of the book and Crawl To Me, I really focused on making it look a little more mature. I introduced a lot of hard lines, the color palate’s different, even the grids of the page layouts are drastically different. I was purposefully trying to make it look different and more mature, I guess.

It’s tricky because I visualize this stuff, mostly because I’m so influenced by film. I picture them as screen shots of a film so they almost act like storyboards in my mind of what these camera angles look like. The thing that you don’t get in this medium is the sound effects and suspenseful music that film lends itself to. When you take the audio away from some of these horror scenes, it’s really tricky to create that in 2-D. Building suspense is one of the biggest challenges, I think, in the medium.

Last winter. I think I came up with it in November and I pitched it to IDW by December. We had a deal by January and I was already starting to draw it in February, so it was pretty fast.

I learned so much with Wire Hangers. IDW had faith that I could deliver another completely different horror story and they liked the premise right away. I don’t think that I even submitted interior pages to them when I pitched it. I just did a couple of covers and gave them the premise and of course the twist ending and they jumped at it.

He’s the best. I’m a rookie when it come to comics, but he was the one person that I reached out to when I first had Wire Hangers together. We hit it off right from the get go and he’s given me all the freedom to see my visions come to life. He basically helped me launch this second career and I owe him a lot. I always tell him that and he’s like, oh, come on. [laughs] But he really did. He gave me a lifelong dream come true and IDW’s been completely supportive of all these stories. They took a chance on me and hopefully I can deliver.

[laughs] That’s part of the freedom that they give me. The comic’s got to be 22 pages, but in the back is any kind of content that I want to put in. I chose to add these kind of question and answer pages that I always used to love reading in the back of comics growing up, to hear more of the inside thoughts of the creators. I thought that would be a nice touch.

It’s actually just picked up momentum the past couple of weeks. We’re in really serious talks with some fantastic visual effects houses in LA. The work that they do is just phenomenal, so I’m super excited about that. As soon as I can announce something, I will. There’s also been talks about bringing Crawl To Me to the big screen, too, and hopefully we’ll have some news on that pretty soon.

Yeah. Every time I look at my twitter feed I get jealous. [laughs]

I really want to see this Captain America movie. I know it comes out this weekend, but I was hoping to get some inside scoop on that. The Avengers is cool. There’s just a lot of artist friends of mine out there right now. I was there last year for the first time and it was just great. Plus it’s my wife’s birthday. It always falls on my wife’s birthday. She gave me the golden pass last year.

No, that’s not going to happen two years in a row.

Well I have a couple of different ideas that I wrote short stories for that I want to bring to comics. They’re not necessarily horror. I’m not sure if that’s the right move for me to do next year being that I’m building this horror story fanbase recently, so I’m not sure what the right thing to do is next. Being that it takes such a commitment to get these series out, I’m literally just drawing and coloring nonstop to make the deadlines on these, I really have to be a hundred percent about it. It might be a continuation of Wire Hangers. I already wrote a sequel to Crawl To Me. Or something completely different. It all depends on the film development too because whichever one goes first, the timing might be right to do the sequel.