Scott Snyder first spoke to Suicidegirls back in 2010. At the time he was a short story writer about to launch his first comic series, American Vampire, from DC’s Vertigo imprint with the help of his friend Stephen King. Since then he’s become one of the prominent writers in comics and one of the primary creators at DC Comics. In recent years he’s worked on “Detective Comics,” “Talon,” “Batman Eternal” and “Superman Unchained.” He launched “Batman” and “Swamp Thing” when the DC Universe was rebooted and has been on “Batman” for years in addition to creator owned miniseries like the miniseries “The Wake” and “Severed.”
Last year Snyder and the artist Jock, an acclaimed comics artist (“The Losers,” “Green Arrow: Year One”) and film designer (“Dredd,” “Ex Machina”), and colorist Matt Hollingsworth launched a new series, “Wytches,” the first volume of which has just been released by Image Comics. He spoke recently about the series, where they're going next and what scares him.
ALEX DUEBEN: When it was first announced I wondered this and now that I have you I have to ask: why did you spell wytches with a Y?
SCOTT SNYDER: We wanted to do something that basically would announce that we were trying to make the classic monster our own. For me, it separated the witches that you knew from what we were going to do in our book. It was an aesthetic thing and it made it look a little more ancient. I like the aesthetic of it.
AD: Where did the book start for you?
SS: My folks have this place in Pennsylvania that we have been going to since I was a little kid. I’ve always grown up in the city and the woods were always terrifying to me. A buddy of mine and I used to go into the woods when we were kids and we would go exploring and make up stories about monsters that lived in the woods. We always returned to this idea of witches. Not monstrous witches, but Satan-worshiping warlocks and madmen that sacrificed people in the woods and that sort of thing. Recently I’ve started going back to the house with my kid. I was going for a run a couple years ago and I saw that the path that led us back into the woods was still there. The path that I had gone down when I was young and. As I was looking down this path I saw this tree shift behind another tree and it gave me the chills. I had this idea, what if something had waited all this time for me to come back to this spot. It was kind of born out of that moment. This sense, what if there was a monster that wouldn’t come after you but waited for you to come to it because it knew that you wanted something and knew that you would return eventually out of your own secret desires. In doing so it would be even scarier than something that would come creeping out of the trees.
AD: Talk a little about this opening sequence which is set about a century ago and is really chilling. Were you trying to dare the reader not to turn the page?
SS: It was, but I also wanted to show the brutality of the book. For me it’s a book that goes places emotionally that I hadn’t gone before. That would be more confessional. That would, I think, be more embarrassing, closer to the bone. I wanted the brutality of the story to be clear up front. Something horrific that wasn’t sensational or gory, but psychologically or emotionally terrorizing at the beginning. The opening is meant to announce the perimeters and stakes of the book basically.
AD: So much of the book is in those opening pages. It’s about history and time and parent-child relationships.
SS: Exactly. A lot of the themes are set up there. Obviously it comes back plot wise at the end, but it’s really meant more as a precursor the thematic underpinnings of the book and also the psychological and emotional material of the book. We wanted to get you as a reader right from the beginning and say, if this book is for you, great, if not, we understand, but this is the territory we’re going into.
AD: At what stage in this process did Jock come on board?
SS: Jock was there from the beginning. He was the first person I called about it. There was never any other artist. After I had the initial idea, I thought about who would be perfect on the book and he was immediately my choice. I called him up. We were good friends from doing Detective Comics together. He was the first artist who took a big chance on me when I was no one. I remember calling him up and telling him the idea and he really liked it. I also remember just telling him that this is a book that’s probably not going to do very well. [laughs] But I was very proud of it and he was completely on board just as he was with Detective where I remember telling him, I’m not sure people are going to like this. It was just very gratifying that he was such a great friend all over again. I’m very happy that the book did a lot better than we thought it would initially and to be able to give him that was a surprise. It’s been a terrific ride with him.
AD: As you said, the two of you have worked together before, but is there something he’s done here that really surprised you?
SS: Completely. When you’re doing Batman together I think the language of that book is so bombastic that toning it down is part of the fun with Jock. Jock really is great at creating a world that looks extremely realistic except for its mood, except for its angles, except for the things that the begin to creep into the edges and then turn into something horrifying. Or wondrous. The baseline that he works with is one of extreme realism. With Batman it was always taking something that’s larger than life and making it very human and intimate. With this story it’s an inverted process where you start with something that’s very human, very grounded, very down to earth, and then you’re getting bigger and bigger and bigger as you reveal more about the mythology and the monsters themselves and the horrors of the book. To watch him do that was fascinating. To see how good he was at conveying tenderness between characters and the creeping suspense was great to see.
AD: There’s a line in the book about how being a parent is like having a vital organ outside of your own body. Does the book represent a lot of your thoughts and fears about being a parent?
SS: Yeah. As a parent the thing that’s most terrifying is how vulnerable you suddenly become to the world. When you’re just you, if you get hurt, you get hurt. You have control over what you do with yourself and have culpability for that. But when you’re a parent you have no control over how much you care about these things that are out there in the world and susceptible to terrors. That can be infuriating. I think that’s part of what we’re trying to explore in the book. The wonder and terror of parenting. You love these kids to a degree that is one of the great joys of life, but at the same time, there are moments of extreme anger and frustration and at how much you fear for them.
AD: I remember that when we first spoke when American Vampire came out, you were working on a novel, but for the moment, have you left prose behind?
SS: I have. I love prose. I love reading prose. I’m just having so much doing comics, I haven’t had much of a chance to go back to it. I’ve tried in little ways. In American Vampire there’s an issue that’s largely prose. The book I’m working on with Jeff Lemire, After Death, has a prose section. Honestly, it’s just a matter of enjoying the collaborative process in comics so much that it makes me hesitant to go back to that.
AD: I don’t want to spoil Wytches for anyone, but it ends in a way where it’s uncertain what will happen next and what direction you might chose to go in. If these were the only six issues, it’s a great ending. Where are you thinking about going next?
SS: We’re definitely continuing with these characters. This arc was meant to set Sailor up as the hero of the book. It’s really her origin story. The next arc takes place with her having involved herself with the group that Clara was a part of, The Iron. She’s living in the Southwest in an area where there’s basically no trees whatsoever. It’s just cactus and desert and what she realizes is there’s one of the deepest burrows in the world there and a new breed of wytches that live deep in the sand. If this one is about the terrors of parenting, the next one is about the terrors of growing up, of letting go of your parents in one way or another. Whether that’s people my age whose parents are getting older and maybe less capable or whether you’re a teenager and breaking away form your parents and forming your own sense of self.
AD: The deserts in American Southwest was also the setting for American Vampire where a new kind of vampire was born. You like to remake these monsters and use the desert to transform them.
SS: I do. What fascinates me about these classic monsters is how enduring they are because they’re frightening. I think a lot of people love them for reasons of adaptability and I love them for that too. Meaning you can have vampires that are romantic or you can have witches that are exotic or enticing. But at the core, I think the reason that these creatures endure in legends and folklore and literature and film is that they’re frightening. I’m fascinated on a personal level on what makes them scary. Creating the wytches that exist beneath the desert and grab you as you walk by, that to me is a really fun project. I like to see if I can stay close to the core of what I think makes those creatures scary, something mythological but at the same time make them something that’s new and personal.
AD: Have you spent a lot of time in the desert? It seems like a landscape you’re really interested in.
SS: Not a lot of time. I’ve never lived there but I’ve hiked there a lot. I’m taking my older son, he’s eight, there in August for the first time. We’re going to Colorado and Utah on the kind of trip I used to make with my father and mother. Going to Moab and the Grand Canyon and seeing that kind of landscape–so barren and so stark. I just love that landscape whether it’s in westerns or in American Vampire just because I feel there’s a sense of terror to it that’s hard to find in a lot of places.
I feel like so many things in American landscapes–in cities and suburbs in particular–are made to feel like they’re built and rebuilt for you or for your generation. Where we lived up until recently, in a suburb in Long Island, all the houses and stores are so new that it feels like the landscape you walk through is built entirely for your needs. Growing up in New York City, that always made me queasy. Nothing against it. It’s just me. In the city I felt it comforting knowing that many people had lived in the apartment you had lived in before you and would live there after you. There’s a sense of weird comfort to that, for me at least. It always made me feel less anxious about the importance of my own life somehow. With the grand landscapes, the deserts that we have in this country, there’s something so wonderfully scary about them. They’re so old and so unforgiving it counteracts for me a lot of the stuff I can get caught up in when I’m feeling very myopic about my own life.
AD: Besides worrying about your kids and your parents, what scares you?
SS: Honestly, I almost feel like a one note song in my writing. Ever since I was a little kid–I remember the moment it began–is just a fear of mortality. I’m always concerned in some way that there’s nothing beyond. This is just what it seems to be and it’s a mechanical design that’s bigger than we can understand. Ultimately you have a speck of time and there isn’t any grand hand behind it. My grandmother passed away, my father’s mother, when I was a teenager and it’s when that anxiety sprung up. I think the thing that counteracts that for me is having kids and realizing when your kids are one or two or three how incredibly dumb they are. [laughs] You can’t explain the planets to a three years old. I have a three year old so I can tell you he will not understand no matter what you say. Strangely, I found a comfort in that. It reminded me that it would be hubris to think that you as an adult person was outside the chain of reality that you see in every other living being. For me there was a kind of absurdity to think that anything I could perceive as the state of being on the other side of life was understandable. You have to give yourself up to the idea that you can’t understand–the same way that children cant understand things you find basic. In that way I found comfort.
That might be way too much information or way too pretentious sounding. I don’t mean it to be. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had this fear. If you look at Batman or any of the stuff I write, I think it’s pretty obvious. Batman is constantly challenged by things that say you exist for a moment and then you’re gone whether it’s the Court of Owls or Joker saying you should be immortal with me instead of being this thing that’s going to die.
AD: You’re in the midst of a lot. Besides Wytches, you’re writing Batman and American Vampire and some other projects.
SS: I’m staying on Batman and American Vampire. I’ll be on Batman for at least another year. American Vampire has about three arcs after this arc that we’re on so another twenty-something or thirtysomething issues. I’m doing a book with Jeff Lemire called After Death in the winter of this year into next year that I’m really excited about. I fear I’m a one note guy. [laughs] It imagines a world where death has been cured and it depicts a world stratified by that achievement. It starts in the present and it shows you how that happens and it spans almost a thousand years. It’s a lot of fun.
AD: Is there something you want to do in comics that you haven’t done yet?
SS: There’s a lot. I’d love to try something that’s more comedic or bright. I’d love to try something smaller. I always tell DC that I want to do things that are smaller on Batman and they’re okay with that but there’s a pressure you put on yourself when you’re on that character to only do the stories that you’d do if you had one chance to write the character. He’s Batman and he deserves the best you’ve got. It’s not that there are other characters I feel like you play it safe with, but I feel like there are other characters and other books that allow for smaller stories. I would like to do that. I would like to write a character that allowed me a different level of stakes. Stakes that are still important but character important and intimate. To try something a little different. It’s not that I don’t think you can go onto a book like Martian Manhunter and write something less. That’s not what I’m saying, but there are characters like Constantine or Ghost Rider where you can explore big mythologies, but in a way that’s quieter and more intimate while still bringing a level of bombast to it. Whereas Batman as a tent pole book demands, for me at least, this idea of, you write this as though this is the only book you will ever get to write.
AD: I’m sure that taking over Batman and launching the book with the New 52, that doesn’t scream small story. It almost requires you to think big.
SS: I try not to think about that stuff. They’ve been good about letting me do what I want. It’s more me at this point, honestly. Batman just demands a level of intensity when you see what Grant Morrison or Frank Miller did with the character. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t bring fire to other books. Look at what Matt Fraction brought to Hawkeye, for example. It’s moving away from the bombast and conventional mechanisms that you would assume are part of a major superhero. That’s the kind of stuff that I would love to try on a character. I think taking a side book or sister book to Batman would allow me to do that. On Batman itself, DC would let me, but I get very tough on myself. Is this the story you would tell if you only had one chance on this character? There are a thousand people that would slit your throat to have your job, so what is your ultimate Batman story each time. That doesn’t mean commercial. That doesn’t mean villains. It means nothing except what’s personal to me. What is the one thing you want to say about Batman that you haven’t said. I think that demands a certain intensity and bombast that sometimes backfires, but that’s what it is for me.