David Hine speaks about his work in Comics

8/21/2019
By Alex Ness

I have been blessed to know David Hine through email and social media, but, perhaps more deeply blessed by the enjoyment of his work.  I sought after an interview with him and this is the result.  Thank you David.

(All images can be made larger by clicking upon them. All rights reserved the publishers or creative artists owning the images.  No infringement intended.)

First, off, regarding your personal “secret origin”, you are from the UK, and obviously have a life that is centered around the UK and Europe. How do you think having a cultural life formed in the UK affects your overall creative life? And, since the US is a great market for comic books, do you experience any extreme disconnects between the audience of the US and yourself?

Dave: When I was a kid I was cut off from most of the world outside of about a ten-mile radius. I lived in a small country village in Somerset and my parents never had a car. So if I couldn’t walk or ride my bicycle there, it was outside of my universe. We also had no television until I was seven years old. One of the first TV shows I saw was the first Dr Who in November of 1963 and that was my first introduction to science fiction. It literally blew my mind. Before TV entered the scene I listened to the radio and read anything I could get my hands on, particularly comics. In the UK the comics were weekly and featured lots of characters in short stories, usually only a couple of pages for each weekly episode. So the storytelling was very compressed.

I don’t think there was a great separation between British and American culture in my mind. Once we had TV I was watching all the American shows, like The Munsters and The Addams Family, The Lucy Show, Bewitched, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel. Probably the same shows that American kids were seeing back then. By the time I was ten I was also starting to see American comics. We had deliveries every Thursday to our newsagents. The circulation was erratic so we would get Marvel and DC comics from any time from the previous couple of years. I loved those comics because they had a much longer form than those two or three page strips I was used to. And the stories were insane, particularly the DC stuff – Bizzarro Superman and all that crazy shit. I also loved Marvel comics because there was a direct communication between Stan Lee and the fans. He talked about all the people making the comics. That was incredibly important for me. It made me realize that these things were made by real live people and by extension that I could also write and draw comics.

There’s a bigger disconnect with European comics. It was a lot later when I discovered comics like Metal Hurlant and À Suivre, the work of Moebius and Tardi and all those other artists and writers. They really opened my eyes to the possibilities of making comics that were as sophisticated as adult literature and movies. No matter how much I loved Marvel and DC comics they were never much more than comics for kids. By the time I was about 15 I mostly read underground comics and imported French stuff. I still followed a few artists like Steranko, Adams, Wrightson but I was more excited by Vaugn Bodé, Robert Crumb and Richard Corben.

Weirdly I think I’m now regarded mostly as an American comic book creator. In France I’m better known for the Marvel comics and Spawn than I am for my home-grown product like The Man Who Laughs and Lip Hook.

Over almost twenty years of doing interviews, reviews and all sorts of commentary about/for comics, I’ve found that I like many comic book professionals. Having said that, I think that most of the creative people I’ve met are deeply introverted. While some people suggest that art and writing are public centered, obviously they need an audience, and I get that, but would you say your younger years were fed as a creative by public life or your mental inner life? Are you an introvert? How does that play out in the practice of your creative work?

Dave: I’m very much an introvert. I observe rather than become directly involved. Even when I was at punk concerts I preferred to stand on the margins and watch rather than leap into the mosh pit. I liked to be where the action was but not really take part, so, for instance, when the Brixton riots were going on I would go out and wander around, watching the buses and buildings burn but I wouldn’t be throwing rocks myself.

You are right that being involved in comics does mean having to be part of the social network, both online and at conventions. I’m very ambivalent about it. It’s good to meet fans and fellow professionals but I was painfully shy as a kid and still am sometimes. The first few times I was on stage at comic conventions I totally froze up. I hated it. My mind would go blank and I would mumble gibberish. I did persist though and it does get easier. I’m told that I’m quite natural in front of an audience now, though I would still rather be anywhere else but the center of attention. I’m happiest when I’m by myself, reading, thinking or writing. I’ve never worked in a group studio – always alone in a room in my own home.

In the past few years I’ve become even more of a stay-at-home. I like to spend entire days without seeing anyone but my partner, Vikki or my son if he’s at home. I like to spend time with close friends but big noisy crowds of people make me feel claustrophobic and I often have to leave when I feel the walls closing in. I don’t panic. It’s not that extreme but when I stop enjoying myself I exercise my right to go home to bed early.

At what age did you realize you were going to pursue a career as a writer? What works inspired you to love reading and eventually writing as a kid? How important is it, do you think, to read a wide array of works, or do you think that it isn’t about kind of works to read, just read?

Dave: I wrote my first novel when I was 8. It was called The Adventurers Go To The Moon. This was five years before the first manned landing. In my version, when they landed the crew found a mad professor already there making an army of robots to invade earth. I did start on a sequel where the robot invasion began but I ran out of steam and abandoned it. By that time I was pretty much decided that writing was the only thing I really wanted to do. I wrote a western, started on a spy novel, wrote several kids adventure serials in daily episodes in my diary. I also wrote and drew my first comic when I was eight. The first panel had the bad guy in prison. He escaped, was caught by the cops and the last panel was identical to the first. I thought that was really clever stuff.

The books that inspired me were mostly science fiction. I was into Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard as well as the classics like 1984, Jules Verne, HG Welles, John Wyndham, Michael Moorcock. William Burroughs was a revelation when I was sixteen. I didn’t fully understand Naked Lunch but I knew I liked it. His cut-up technique continues to inspire me, as you will see from the cut-up issue of The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred. My reading broadened later but there was always a fantasy element. Some of the important books are: The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, Perfume by Patrick Susskind and the short stories of Edogawa Ranpo. In comics the team of Munoz and Sampayo on Alack Sinner was a big inspiration for the style of my breakout graphic novel Strange Embrace.

It’s important to read whatever you feel drawn to, but I do feel that I missed out on a lot by only reading fantasy. In my dotage I’m finally getting around to reading more factual stuff: science, philosophy, history and biographies. So if it’s worth anything, I would advise anyone and everyone to read as diversely as possible, but of course you have to enjoy the reading experience so if you’re getting bored, put it down and read something else.

I am aware of your life as an artist as well, but, is it a talent that you were born with, or, as a writer, you chose to hone skills as an artist to be able to tell the stories you imagine into being? What artists or art movements moved you or inspired you the most over time?

Dave: My drawing skills are average at best. I really wanted to make comics so I forced myself to learn to draw them because writers were barely noticed in comics before the 1980s. A lot of the comics I really liked were works of auteurs so that was where I intended to go. I did win the prize for art at my school for our ‘O’ level exams (taken at 16) so I guess I was making progress, but when I announced my intention to go to Art College and ultimately to be a comics artist my headmaster wrote in my school report “He is unrealistic about his career”. Privately he told me that no one had gone on to Art College from that school since 1960 and that was something he was proud of. What a jerk! Unfortunately when I arrived at Art School I found the tutors were equally contemptuous of comics as an art form. I learned what I could about drawing from the course but mostly it was self-taught. I did use the college printing press to print a couple of comics of my own though, and one of those featured a strip by Shaky Kane, which was his first published comic strip.

When I was at school it was Pop Art and Surrealism that inspired me though I’ve had second thoughts about Pop Art and people like Roy Lichtenstein appropriating the imagery with no real respect or recognition given to comics as anything more than throwaway trash culture. Comics had no greater cultural significance to Warhol and Lichtenstein than the packaging of a soup can. Surrealism and Dada, on the other hand, continue to inspire me. Stylistically I was most influenced by Expressionism, particularly the German Expressionists and above all the Austrian Egon Schiele.

I’ve interviewed numerous writers over the last two decades. I know that there is no common template for all writers, I think that I found a general theme. Many if not all had written poetry, but never thought it an area to work and make a living in. All seemed to write prose. And, of all the writers only a few wrote sequential stories or worked as comic book writers. Do you think most writers are able to write in different forms, or, do you think some are skill centered in ways that make them prose, poetic or comic book writers? How do you think comic book themed movies moved some prose and screen play writers into the comic book industry?

Dave: Hmmm, I certainly think that comics is a very specialized area that many writers from other disciplines do struggle with. You have to have a very strong visual sense. Recently a lot of screenwriters seem to be trying to get into comics and their motivation often seems to be to actually get their work in front of an audience. Most screenwriters have little if any of their work making it through the various production stages and onto the screen and when it’s there it is often in a bastardized form because they have so little control over the final movie. So they often see comics as the easy way to get the work finished in a form that they have control over. There is also perceived to be more recognition for the writer in comics and that is true to a degree. This is a medium that is relatively cheap and easy to put into production. However, most of those screenwriters don’t really know how tough it is to write comics. Screenplays are setting plus dialogue. Everything else is left to the director, cinematographer, actors and so on. In comics there is so much more to writing than just putting the words in the mouths of the actors. There are a few screenwriters who have made the jump, notably Joss Whedon, but they are pretty rare.

There is another group of writers who observe how many big budget movies are based on comics and see a comic book as a way into movies and that does piss me off a bit. The comic should be an end in itself, not just a jumping off point to getting a movie into a theatre and making money. If you don’t love comics for themselves you you shouldn’t be writing comics.

Incidentally there are a few comics writers who have written screenplays and teleplays and they are often godawful at it, so it seems that the skill set is tough to acquire that way round too. Writing good comics isn’t like writing good TV or movies. I’ve recently been working on a screenplay or two, so we’ll see how that goes…

Poetry isn’t something I have done to any extent and, by the way, is probably the toughest of the arts to make a living in. I’ve written a few songs for comics like Poison Candy and I wrote some rap for District X. The songs in Poison Candy were serious attempts at lyrics – the rap not so much. I covered myself by pointing up the rapper character as being rubbish. Poetry at its best can be sublime. It’s the written form where every word has absolute significance – meaning, cadence and rhythm. I did on a few occasions do a bit of translation when I used quotations from Baudelaire. I found at least a half-dozen completely different translations from the French and didn’t like any of them so I wrote my own. I was frankly astonished at how wide an interpretation could be made from the original. I guess the lesson is that you have to read poetry in the original language.

Did you initially think, however much you knew you were good enough to do so, did you believe in yourself enough to think you could succeed as a creative artist? Why do you think that is or isn’t so?

Dave: I was never sure that I was good enough to be considered a professional artist, even after making a living at it for 20 years. I’m more sure of myself as a writer, though I have often felt like a fraud when I describe myself as either an artist or a writer. Apparently that’s very common. It’s called ‘imposter syndrome’. Yes, there is a term for it!

What is your common practice regarding writing? Do you have a certain time of day you find the fire to create, or can you work at any normal time you are awake? Do you need to be “inspired” to write, or are skills and talents so great that you are able to call upon them even if the assigned task is less than inspiring? Do you write or draw every day? How regular is your schedule regarding creative activity?

Having scanned a comic book data base entry of your work, the number of comics done is impressive, but it isn’t the numbers that I found impressive. You’ve written and drawn manga, comics, and other, you write strong villains, heroes and common people, you don’t seem, to me at least, to focus upon a single sort of story, character or even format. Is that a function of aim/purpose, happenstance, or desperate attempts to make money? (I don’t mean to disparage the need to make money, I am known for selling very little of what I write).

Dave: Okay, there are a number of questions there. I’ll take the question of diversity first. I have indeed written or drawn in any number of styles over the years. Partly that’s because I’m reluctant to turn down a job, even when I’m ridiculously busy. I like a very wide range of comics so I’m happy to have a go at all kinds of styles and genres, including the weekly strip, which I did for Record Mirror and for a Woman’s Health magazine; I made educational comics for Oxford University Press among others, illustrated children’s books, inked Care Bears, illustrated Myra Hancock’s soap opera Sticky Fingers for Crisis and then worked with comedian Tony Allen on the documentary style China in Crisis which told the story of the Tiananmen Square massacre one year after the event itself. I have done superhero, horror, and science-fiction comics. I see each project as a challenge and throw myself into each one with all the enthusiasm I have. Sometimes the result isn’t great and there have been a couple of times when I actually tried to withdraw from books, notably at Marvel when I was working on Civil War X-Men, where the story ended up out of my control because of the requirement of fitting in with other books in a crossover series. But mostly I am relatively pleased with the result and the more unlikely the project the greater the satisfaction of successfully getting to grips with it.

Some of those are just jobbing professional writing tasks though. I am, of course, happiest when I’m working on my creator-owned books and that’s when you’ll see my best work. So the books I am most happy with are: Strange Embrace, The Bulletproof Coffin books and Cowboys and Insects with Shaky Kane, Lip Hook, The Bad, Bad Place and The Man Who Laughs with Mark Stafford (and a couple of short strips I have also done with Mark), Storm Dogs with Doug Braithwaite, Poison Candy with Hanzo Steinbach and Second Sight with Alberto Ponticelli. I was also very happy with the Spider-Man Noir series and Daredevil: Redemption, both books that had minimal editorial input and didn’t really relate to closely to the Spider-Man and Daredevil canons. Ironically most of the creator-owned work doesn’t pay well, while the returns for Civil War X-Men were the highest I ever made, page for page. If you want to make a life-long living in comics, you really need to have a balance of work-for-hire and creator-owned work that you can put your heart and soul into.

My writing habits are incredibly varied to the extent that I can hardly call them habits. I write most days but it could be at any time. It’s currently 21:44pm for instance but most days I’ll be done by now and watching TV or reading in bed. I can work in any room in the house, or in the garden when the sun’s out. I once wrote for 3 months in a coffee shop when the neighbours were having building work done and the noise got too much for me. That was very productive as there were no distractions. The gentle buzz of activity in a coffee shop is very conducive to work. I like trains, planes and airports and when I’m on holiday I usually spend a few hours in my hotel room working on scripts.

I don’t have to be inspired to work. I always have projects that are at a stage where there is donkey work to be done, so even if I’m not feeling too bright I can be working on breakdowns or polishing dialogue. The inspiration is when elements of a story spring ready-formed from my imagination and that can happen when I’m walking along in the street or in the shower or staring out of the window. I’ve even dreamed some scenes that were causing me problems when I was awake. That was true of Strange Embrace.

My first encounter with your work was Strange Embrace. Trust me, it made an impact with me. I couldn’t detect certain common tropes, it told a story in a way that I found rather new. It was during a time that I received a number of comps for review from various companies. It struck me as being dark, disturbing and yet, not vulgar, just straight forward dark and odd. What inspired the story, do you look upon it as a successful work, and would you return to such a story/subject, if not this one in particular?

Dave: Strange Embrace was the purest work I did. It wasn’t made with any audience or publisher in mind. It was purely for myself. The story grew over a period of years, beginning when I was a student and living in a house very similar to the one in the story. There was an old man who owned the house but rarely spoke. I would catch glimpses of him but I only spoke with his housekeeper. I rented the attic room with another student. One day the housekeeper told me the old man’s wife had committed suicide. There were some odd events in the house – very odd – involving an axe attack and the smearing of feces on the walls, and originally those events were in the story but the narrative changed over the years and became more about the old guy’s imagined history. The African art became an important element too.

I originally tried showing an outline and a few pages from the book to a couple of editors but they immediately began making suggestion about making the characters more sympathetic and the style more commercial. I realized very quickly that I had to avoid editorial input. I had saved enough money from my inking work for Marvel UK and a few strips for 2000AD to take a year off to concentrate on Strange Embrace. In the end it took 18 months – six solid months of writing and re-writing to get the script right and a year on the art. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process because no one was looking over my shoulder or putting deadline pressure on me. I remember the writing was mostly done at night. I would begin around 9 or 10 pm (about the time I’m writing this) and I would drink Jack Daniels and coke and smoke while I wrote. I don’t exactly recommend drinking and writing but it worked for me on that book. I used to carry on writing until I was too drunk to keep going and collapse into bed, getting up in the afternoon when I would go through the pages from the night before to make changes and corrections with a clear head. No doubt though, the writing was inspired by booze.

It has been more than 25 years since I completed Strange Embrace. It has faults and some things I would change now, but it’s still the work that feels the most original and honest. I don’t know if I could do anything similar again. It’s hard to get the focus now – too many demands on my time. Happily it was before internet and social media, so it was a lot easier to cut myself off from all the outside influences and distractions and just let the creativity flow. There are a couple of things I would like to get into that would require shutting myself away for a year so. Maybe I will do that one day. I don’t have too many financial demands any more so it could be possible. I wouldn’t do the JD and cokes though.

My next encounter with you was your long run of writing for Spawn. As I mentioned in my commentary regarding the run, it was high quality, consistent over the time with no duds. How did you get the opportunity, what were the limits placed upon you, and how was the experience?

Dave: I had some contact with Brian Haberlin when I worked on District X at Marvel. He was an agent for a number of artists, including David Yardin who was the amazing artist on my first run on that book. Another of his professional hats was that of editor-in-chief at McFarlane Productions. Todd needed a new writer to follow Brian Holguin on the monthly Spawn book, starting with issue #150. Brian had been reading my Marvel scripts and liked what he saw so he suggested me. We had a one-hour conference call where Todd did most of the talking. He was really intense about wanting to make the book more gritty, realistic and horror-based rather than the fantasy, borderline superhero book that it had been - basically darker. After an hour, he still hadn’t mentioned giving me the job. I had been expecting him to ask me some questions about my ideas for the character or the direction for the book but when I said “So, have I got the job?” he said “Sure. Make me look like an asshole.” Those were his exact words. I assume he meant to make the book even better than when he was writing and drawing, rather than to literally make him look like an asshole. He was very hands-off with the book for two-and-a-half years.

My first task was to catch up on the entire run. A box arrived with the first 148 issues, which I read twice – once as a straight run-through, then a second time taking notes and marking key pages with post-its. Even allowing 20 minutes to read each issue, that made a grand total of 100 hours of reading. That was immersive to say the least. What I figured out was that Todd had spent 150 issues building to the Apocalypse but then avoided it. He was vaguely planning it some time in the future, but I felt that Armageddon was coming due. I asked Brian if I could do that. He checked with Todd and he gave the okay so we went ahead with the epic Armageddon storyline, drawn by Philip Tan.

I had a lot of fun with the book and after Armageddon, Brian took over on the art. We had a very close working relationship. I even did layouts on some of the pages. It really was a very good experience and I think we did some pretty classic issues. Some of my favourite issues were the self-contained stories based on previous iterations of the Spawn character: Mandarin Spawn was a one-shot, then Gunslinger Spawn ran over two issues. I did that one after seeing the action figure in a shop. That was the coolest of the action figures and the story was one of the most popular. The First World War Spawn was another successful one and we got to show the Battle of the Somme very realistically. Lots of research went into all three of those historical settings.

Eventually Todd started to have reservations about the stories once we had destroyed the Universe and rebuilt in Spawn’s image. He came back to work on the scripts for the last six months. By then he had essentially sacked me off the book but he graciously allowed me a final six months to wind up the storylines.

As I mentioned in the article about the Spawn run, it was the best of runs, in my mind, due to the solid writing, and the adding of solid hierarchies to the politics of Hell and Heaven, as well giving each character motives that are solid and moving. Does that quality of presentation come from an interest in celestial and hellish characters, or religious beliefs or, simply, having magnificent clay in which to mold?

Dave: Spawn’s longevity is definitely down to the quality of Todd’s character building. Spawn, Sam and Twitch, the Clown – all are really strong characters with huge potential.

I’m an atheist but I do have a lot of interest in religious mythology. God and the Devil had ‘gone missing’ but I planned for a while to reveal them as Cyan’s siblings, the evil twins. It was a lot of fun building to that and we did a lot of foreshadowing. I thought I might have given it away when I had the twins appear with T-shirts labeled “The Boss Man” and “ L’il Devil” with an image of baby Satan, but literally no one guessed until the final reveal.

You’ve written both Batman and Daredevil stories. Does the concept of a lone vigilante move you? How would you argue your conception of the characters differ? Would you say Batman is a bringer of order versus Daredevil one who seeks justice? As the writer of both characters is there a commonality more than simply dudes wearing costumes and going about in the night time hours?

Dave: I actually disapprove strongly of vigilantism and the idea of an individual dispensing violent judgment from behind a mask strikes me as fascistic. So you’ll see that I always portray vigilante ‘heroes’ in a negative light. Batman is actually an instigator of chaos. He becomes a center of violence and that was the key element of the Batman Imposters story. In my stories he is never the solution to the problem. Rather, he is a catalyst for violence and disorder.

In Daredevil: Redemption, the hero is Matt Murdock, when he stands up in a courtroom and tries to achieve justice, rather than retribution. He fails because the American justice system is deeply flawed. He turns to the Daredevil costume out of frustration when the legal system fails.

It has always felt weird that I have written so much in the superhero genre when I dislike so many of the tropes. I always try my best to subvert the concept and point up the absurdities and flaws of the genre. I guess I have been lucky to be given a free hand with most of my books for Marvel and DC. When Joe Quesada first approached me to write for Marvel I did actually say that I didn’t feel like I was the right choice for costumed hero books and he was very generous in suggesting I wrote books like District X and Daredevil: Redemption where I could mostly avoid spandex and superheroes. Gradually though, I was drawn more and more towards the more conventional books and I felt increasingly unable to conform to the kind of stories that were wanted.

I don’t read a lot of mainstream books now but it does look like Marvel and DC are getting a lot more diverse in approach in recent years. That’s reflected in the movies too. The Spider-Verse movie was an absolute triumph.

Is law more important than justice, can there be justice if there is no greater order?

Dave: Justice is universal and unchanging. Laws are made by the current politicians and reflect their interests. My ideas of justice for a civilized society were spelled out in the short Storm Dogs story I wrote for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Annual of 2012. In the words of the character Masika Zenda: “The irrefutable equality of all people, regardless of ethnicity, place and circumstance of birth, gender, religion, ability, intelligence or health, and the freedom to travel and seek employment without let or hindrance. No state shall take the life of any person unless that person threatens the life of others and when all alternative methods of restraint have been exhausted. In no circumstances shall the state take the life of any person, whether its own citizen or the citizen of any other state, for perceived crimes. Imprisonment shall be used as a last resort and only when allowing an individual free movement would endanger the lives and wellbeing of others. One doctrine stands above all others – the freedom of expression, whether political, aesthetic, religious, spiritual or scientific, even when the ideas expressed may be objectionable to others. From this basic right all other freedoms grow.”

I am, however, considering the limits of freedom of expression, for example in the light of armed Nazis walking the streets of Detroit with police protection. I am gradually being persuaded by the growth of extreme right movements across the world that while the freedom to express your views must be protected there should be parameters of context and provocation.

I’d argue that these two characters have a great deal of potential for the concepts and quality of previous stories, is it daunting to approach such characters with new ideas? Or does the high level of quality make that all the more interesting?

Dave: It is daunting and I think there are diminishing returns because these characters, particularly Batman, have been treated so many times by writers of a very high caliber. There are still a lot of great Batman and Daredevil stories to be told but they are going to be fewer and farther between. I think I’m done with most existing characters. I’m currently writing some Dark Judges stories for Rebellion (The Judge Dredd Megazine), featuring Judge Death but everything else on the horizon is all about new characters.

I know you did a substantial run on various x-books. To what extent were you able to tell new stories on the Marvel mutant stage, or, despite your freedom, is it harder to create brand new different works that challenge various orthodox settings and characters? When working on such wrought universes, do editors influence more of what is going on, or, due to the known factors being known, do they have only a proofer and overall quality of effect?

Dave: I’ve covered a lot of that in my answers above. The X-books were most effective when I was working in new territory with brand new characters. District X featured just one existing character – Bishop – and he never put on the spandex. Joe Quesada and my X-book editor Mike Marts were both very generous in allowing me a lot of creative freedom but I was gradually pushed more towards the mainstream of the Marvel Universe. I wasn’t happy working on crossover books where the editorial influence became greater. They wanted to give me bigger-selling and more popular books and I am grateful for that but in the end I literally asked to work on the less popular books and characters so I could go my own way with them. That didn’t really work out. Mike Marts moved to DC and once again offered me work on his titles. At one point I was offered an exclusive contract, which I turned down because I wanted to pursue creator-owned work at Image. My last work for DC was on their two lowest-selling titles - Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Azrael. I had a lot of freedom on both those titles for the very reason that they weren’t big sellers.

Which thematic aspect of the Marvel comics stories work most for you personally? Is it the racism versus the mutants and overcoming? Or is it the impact of how people with powers would affect the world around them? Or even, does your work on the Inhumans have a bit of both and it moves you to delve into that?

Dave: I am most interested in how mutant or super powers would affect individuals in the real world, to what extent it would be a temptation to acquire personal power, how it would impact on you to make you feel like an outsider, those kinds of issues. The Inhumans books were really interesting for me. Son of M and Silent War were intended to be the first two parts of a trilogy. That exemplifies the problem with working for Marvel. I outlined the third series, which was greenlit and I wrote the first issue. Then a writers’ retreat happened and the series was taken away from me. My stories were basically annulled by stating that the characters, including Black Bolt were actually Skrulls. That was deeply disappointing and spelled the beginning of the end for me and Marvel. I did go on to write a couple of series of Spider-Man Noir, which I loved, but I was already on my way out by then.

Do you prefer working on your solely owned characters, or, does writing stories in the sandboxes of others demonstrate your ability enough, and financially reward enough that you enjoy both for different reasons?

Dave: I’ve certainly enjoyed working on all the Marvel and DC characters but always with some reservations. I wouldn’t have a career as a writer without those opportunities and they were financially rewarding but I think I’m done with working on existing characters. There are just too many frustrations.

What established character from some large publisher or talent would you most like a crack at writing, and why? Would that character be your favorite, or do you prefer to let any favorite character you have be the work of others?

Dave: See above. Having said that, there were two characters I always did want to write – Silver Surfer and Dr Strange. I’m interested in cosmic and transcendent settings and narratives. I think I could do something with them.

I confess, SONATA looks a great deal like the comics I find to move me most, Miyazaki’s Nausicaa, Moebius’s Arzach, and more, the visuals look both beautiful and feature lead characters who are smart fascinating women. Is this work going to tell fantasy, steampunk, science fiction ? Tell me more about it?

Dave: Brian came up with the original concept for the book, the idea that two sets of people from two planets come as settlers or conquerors of what appears to be an idyllic world. Sonata is from the Rans who are ecologically responsible and respectful of the indigenous peoples, while the Tayans are a warrior race who are all about conquest and the selfish exploitation of resources. You can read all kinds of links to real-world events into that basic setup, but I won’t be making this a direct commentary on current events. No Trump stand-ins or Brexit-style situations.

Sonata falls for Pau, who is the son of the Tayan leader. So it’s your basic Romeo and Juliette situation. Both of these young people have absent mothers, and fathers who struggle to empathize with their offspring. Together they get into a lot of trouble as they explore the planet of Perdita. There are two sets of indigenous peoples, The Lumani, who seem to be barely civilized, and the mysterious Sleeping Giants who spend most of the time comatose and when they wake behave like dangerously belligerent children – 50 foot tall children, with deadly psychic powers.

Legend has it that these giants are the gods of the Rans and Tayans, though each have a different story of what they represent. We gradually come to realize that nothing is quite what it seems and that also applies to the Rans and Tayans themselves. We are going to be playing a lot of games with people’s expectations. I’ve never liked characters who are all good or all evil. It’s about grey areas and dark secret corners of the soul.

There are elements of fantasy, science-fiction and steampunk. Brian is a huge fan of Moebius so you are right to see elements of Arzach in there and probably Nausicaa too. For me there is some of Dune and Robert Silverberg’s novels. I’m currently about to start reading The Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe for the first time, so elements of that may well feed into the scripts for later arcs of the story. Just about everything I absorb from reading books and watching movies and TV seeps into my work one way or another.

The way we work together is very organic. At the start I had a lot of Brian’s character designs and world-building landscapes and hardware to look at. That kickstarted the story. I would then come up with new characters, send descriptions to Brian and he would turn them into visuals. Seeing the visuals then fed back in to how I understood the characters. So it’s a constant two-way flow of creativity and we make sure to touch base on Skype a couple of times a week so we have some face time, which we never had when we worked on Spawn. It was just emails back then.

What works do you have in development beyond SONATA that you can discuss? What more can the world expect from David Hine?

Dave: I’m working on a number of projects with Brian. There’s a second series from Jim Valentino’s Shadowline books at Image, which will come out in October and we are also developing several other fantasy and science-fiction series for comics and other media. I have a trade paperback collection of The Bad, Bad Place out from Soaring Penguin later this year. That collects the ten episodes from the Meanwhile anthology, with art by Mark Stafford. That’s a kind of mirror publication to Lip Hook, following up on some similar themes. It’s horror in a very dark humorous vein. I’ve just wound up The Torture Garden in the Judge Dredd Megazine, with art from Nick Percival. That will also be collected in a hardback edition from Rebellion. Nick and I are planning a follow-up to that one... further tales of the Dark Judges.