INTERVIEW WEEK: Comic Book Artist Josh Howard Writes a Prose Novel

 
Interviewing Josh Howard is not a difficult thing.  I've known him for nearly 20 years, and I love his art, and the concepts he addresses in his writing.  I was, however, surprised as heck to learn he had completed writing a prose novel based upon the characters and settings of his work Dead@17.

Now that you've created TBird and Throttle, finished the comic book saga of Dead@17, you wrote a prose book about D@17?  I am not questioning the validity of doing that, but why did you decide to do it?
 
If I’m being honest, it wasn’t my idea! A few years ago, Jack Heller, my partner in getting Dead@17 into other media (and director of the Dead@17 short film) came to me with the idea of turning Dead@17 into a young adult novel since the comic had ended in 2015. I think the idea was to find someone else to write it, and I would just sign off on it. Unbeknownst to him, I had been looking to expand beyond comics and into novels and had already begun work on an original fantasy series. But the idea of breaking into that world seemed daunting, especially knowing how hard navigating the comics industry had been for me.
 
So, in some sense, it felt like divine providence. Here’s something my heart’s been set on doing, and then an opportunity presents itself. Granted, the idea of retelling my comic Dead@17 into novel form wouldn’t have been my first or even tenth choice. But it was an opportunity that I wasn’t going to pass up. So I asked Jack and the then head of his new publishing division Brendan Deneen if I could take a crack at it. If they decided I wasn’t any good, then I would be happy to let them find someone else. But I had to take a shot. After ironing out some kinks and deciding on a general direction, they loved what they were seeing and I was given their blessing to proceed.
 
So I just embraced it. I saw it as a chance to 1) flex my writing muscles to see if I was really cut out for this and 2) to flesh out the world and characters in a way I was never really able to in the comics. Much of the story will have echoes of familiarity, but in many ways this is a whole new version. This is Dead@17 as if it was created by me today.


As a person perceived as an artist, likely, more often than as a writer, does it feel more difficult to tell a story from the perceptions of a writer without the additional help from visuals? What is the mental outlook doing prose/words versus art/story

Writing a novel is definitely a whole different beast than writing a comic, but I would say that my 15+ years of writing comics certainly helped prepare me. I wasn’t coming into this green. I knew my way around a story. It’s funny - many times while creating comics, I would think to myself, “Man, it would be so much easier if I could just write this out instead of having to draw it.” And writing the novel, I found myself with the opposite dilemma. Having no pictures to rely on forces you to flex all new muscles. So it was definitely a challenge. It took me a while to find my voice and what style worked best for me. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, but once I finished, one of the most rewarding.


I've been told that I must be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan to like Dead@17, but I confess, I am really not. I've been told I must like anime, and a variety of other things to like it so much.  But again, I try to read or view whatever I do for its own purpose.  I like the story found in Dead@17, and it isn't from other sources being 'homaged".  Were there themes and homage in your work, consciously done, or do people just see whatever they see as a quick label?
 
There was a time when I found those comparisons really frustrating. I had never (and still haven’t) seen Buffy. I was a new creator trying to find my way in the industry and it seemed I couldn’t escape that label. It was also a time when a female led horror comic was almost unheard of, so I think people had the need to categorize or label it because it didn’t fit anywhere else. Now, I realize most weren’t necessarily doing it maliciously, in fact, many saw it as a plus! But I knew what my influences were, and what I was trying to accomplish in my work, so I was confident that what I was creating was light years apart from Buffy, whatever the surface level similarities might have been.

I've seen people refer to Nara as being a zombie, but then again, at a convention I helped invite guests to, I was asked by a writer"Do you really believe all that Zombie Jesus stuff?"Are people really that dead to allegory and metaphor that everything becomes so laden with
 symbols that a straight forward story can't be told?

I don’t know. People are always going to imprint their own meanings onto the stories they read, but for me - for Dead@17 in particular - the story has always been pretty straightforward. My perspective in writing it then and now was to treat it as a matter of fact that the Bible is true and we/my characters exist in the world God created. No metaphor or symbolism. It all is what it is. People can read whatever they want into it, but that was always my intention. 


Where can people buy your book, what is up next for you?
 
You can pre-order my book wherever books are sold like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, and even comic shops.
 
As for what’s next, I’m currently writing the next chapter of my superhero comic T-BIrd & Throttle, I and hope to begin on the next Dead@17 novel very soon.