A DISCUSSION WITH ERIK LARSEN
By Alex Ness
July 17, 2026
BALTIMORE CON 2026 Features Erik Larsen and his prolific creations. Holy shizzle dude, that is very cool! Is it about your 280 plus issues, and all the events therein, or is it beginning a sort of count down to 300? When you reach 300 will the comic world be doing a happy dance?
Erik Larsen: I don't know about the comic world but I'll be pretty happy to have that one behind me.
How does one become the featured creative guest at conventions of note? Is there a process, do you enter your name hoping to be chosen, or do they choose someone for a specific reason?
Erik: That's more of a question for the convention organizers--not me. I don't generally seek out conventions at all-- I just respond to requests. NYCC is my only regular show that I'll attend on my own dime and that's because it's been so rewarding in every respect.
I'd like to ask some specific Savage Dragon questions, and about the making of Savage Dragon. How much work does it take to create in 300 issues the life of a feature character? For instance, how many hours does each issue require, and outside of doing it, and creating for an audience, is the product for the creator equal to the reward?
Erik: Clearly it's taken me a number of years to get where I am. I haven't tracked the hours but it's a lot. Even with a full head of steam and cranking away like a man possessed it's a lot of man hours. And that's not counting the letterers and colorists that help me get each issue out the door. Some issues have taken me several months to complete and the anniversary issues in particular take an extraordinary amount of time.
Some creatives in the comic world cannot maintain their focus for 6 issues, while you've done other work WHILE doing Savage Dragon, and mostly alone. Do the fans in the comic book buying/reading world understand all the labors, and determination it requires?
Erik: Until you've actually made a comic book you really don't have much understanding of what goes into it. But it's been incredibly rewarding creatively. In many ways it's been one huge conceptual experiment--to see if a comic book could be set in real time, and have characters age as we do. Throughout the series we've seen births, deaths, weddings and funerals.
Malcolm Dragon inherited the title from his father but he hadn't been conceived when the series began. Now he's 30-years-old with a wife and four kids. Readers have hung in there as the book went from being about a superpower cop to the leader of a government super-team to a single father raising his adopted daughter to the adventures of a high school kid to a family adventure and so much else. We've been to space and under the ocean and to other dimensions. The characters have really been through the wringer.
And I am eternally grateful to have had a loyal and supportive audience along the way.
I enjoy aspects of Savage Dragon that might violate unwritten rules. Your characters age. They procreate. They are different than most "heroes" and yet every giant alien creature gets the shit kicked out of it by the green skin fin head gang. Why would an alien defend the world he adopts? Is there a red and blue strong guy at a different publisher who first considered that?
Erik: The book can be a pastiche at times and touch on themes from various places in pop culture. Savage Dragon has been described as my love letter to the comic book field. I've done romance stories and science fiction, even post-apocalyptic stories and comic strip parodies.
And the Dragon teamed up with that strange visitor from another planet a couple times along the way, as well as Spawn, the Maxx, Invincible, Hellboy, WildStar, WitchBlade and ShadowHawk. More recently the book has included characters from the public domain--like the original Daredevil, Captain Tootsie, Mickey Mouse, Popeye and even Dagwood Bumstead!
Is there such a thing as a preexistent perception of good, that aliens and humans would recognize as being an obvious value?
Erik: I think so. I think there's obvious good and evil, even if some seem to celebrate a bad boy who gets away with things--for the most part we know what we're looking at. We recognize greed and cruelty and I think that's universal.
Of all of your works that are cross overs which were the most difficult. Of the cross overs, which were so fun/result was so good that you'd be happy to do more?
Erik: The most difficult was the Superman crossovers just because of the contractual hoops that needed to be jumped through. The others have largely been handshake deals. People can be awesome--and those are the ones I seek out. If you're in the business and you're not working on your favorite comic book--you're doing it wrong.
How is the energy different working on a comic or run of your own character, versus that of some other creator or publisher? Does that reinvent yourself when returning to your own book?
Erik: It's a completely different experience. On my own I can impulsively decide to do anything that I want. Working at a company--everything needs to be run past an editor who can approve or reject anything that I propose. Whenever I do a project elsewhere, whether it's writing or drawing, or both--it can't help but make me appreciate what I have on Savage Dragon that much more.
Left to my own devices I wouldn't do anything as extreme as I have on my own book, certainly, but there are definitely things that I've wanted to do that I just couldn't do and even little dialogue tweaks can't help but grind my gears to some extent. Then I step back on Savage Dragon and there's nothing in the way. Literally nobody that can say no. And it's incredibly liberating.
Thanks Erik!
Find Erik at
https://www.savagedragon.com/
https://www.facebook.com/erik.larsen.75
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