For fans of the Elk's Run comics series, the release of all eight issues in one volume for the first time is a long-awaited prize. Elk's Run is the story of a utopian community gone awry. Founded by a group of Vietnam vets and their wives, Elk's Ridge, W.Va., was intended to be a place free of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the modern world. But the teenage children of the town's founders want nothing more than to get back to the world their parents left behind. In the power struggle that follows, it becomes clear that what started as an idealistic escape from the world has turned into tyranny.
Created by Joshua Hale Fialkov, the writer first known for Western Tales of Terror, and artist Noel Tuazon, Elk's Run was nominated for seven Harvey Awards and has gained a loyal following on its way to publication asthe war is go a trade paperback by Villard. Joshua Hale Fialkov talked with PWCW about the roots of the story and where he and Tuazon are going next.
PW Comics Week: I know this book has already had a long publishing history. How did it end up with Villard?
Joshua Hale Fialkov: We self-published the book first about two or three years ago and had huge critical success right away, but, unfortunately, that didn't translate into sales. We were approached by the fledgling indie company Speakeasy, which saw us as a sort of flagship book to show that they cared about quality. Caring about quality, it seemed, had nothing to do with caring about marketing and promotion. Our book, like the other dozen or so under their banner, got ignored, and while the sales improved considerably, it wasn't enough to make up for their constant mistakes. Luckily, Dallas Middaugh and the gang over at Random House/Villard were big fans of the book, and they moved to scoop it up almost right away.
PWCW: What was the first germ of the story idea?
JHF: I've been fascinated by the idea of community for a long time. Your community is such a highly personal thing. Your experiences in and around the place you grow up are wholly unique from your siblings, your parents, your friends. Yet it's all so universal, because no matter how popular or unpopular, smart or not, everything at the end is the same.
PWCW: The father and son in Elk's Run, both named John, are each motivated by a desperate need to create a new life. The father has escaped from modern society and his position as a Vietnam vet, and the son wants to get back to the modern world. What got you interested in that idea of starting over?
JHF: When I was a kid my parents picked up and moved us to a small town on the Pennsylvania/Ohio border. How it affected each of us was so radically different—it's always stayed with me. I also grew up surrounded by kids with Vietnam vets for fathers. Just spending time with these poor guys who were sent off before they were old enough to know any better was a real eye-opener about the results of war. While each of them handled it differently, the one thing that seemed to tie them altogether was this mantra of "Never again." That's what I wanted to capture in the book, that basic desire to make things right for your family, even when you're not sure what you're doing is the right thing.
PWCW: John Jr. and John Sr. have such striking similarities in the way they handle situations even though they're each entirely opposed to what the other is doing. In your mind, is John Jr. destined to carry out his father's mania whatever path he takes?
JHF: I think we all suffer from being our parents in some way for good or ill. It's just the cycle of life, I guess. For me, the idea that John Jr. takes his father's ethos and applies it and comes up with the exact opposite solution is sort of the key to it all.
PWCW: Do you see them as opposite sides of a coin? Good and evil?
JHF: One of the big goals with the book for me was to do away with the idea of good and bad. Nobody in the book is a cackling supervillain because each character is just trying to do what's right. Whenever anybody does that, there are consequences. We live in this strange world today where people want a nice pat solution to everything. That was the mentality that got us screwed in Vietnam and now today in Iraq. When you deal in absolutes, no good ever comes.
PWCW: The relationship between John and Sara, John Jr.'s parents, is great. You get a real sense of their closeness and love for one another, however twisted they are.
JHF: Everybody is just trying to do what's right, and for Sara, as a character, what's right is standing by her husband's decisions. It's this classic 1950s relationship. In fact, in an earlier version of the story there was a long flashback issue of Sara as a teen dealing with her desire for a knight on a white horse. And realistically, in a world where every character is living by this ideal, her ideal is that Leave It to Beaver mentality, and she uses it to her advantage.
PWCW: Sara is presented as an archetypal queen bee figure. Do you think of your characters as archetypes that might be found in any community?
JHF: I'd say each of the focal-point characters represent a different side of the question. Every character in the book is a reflection of all of the others. In John Jr.'s much needed callousness, we see the emotion and heart of his friends. Through the pomp and circumstance of Sara, we see how much the rest of the women want to leave, and so on. Our relationships to the world around us, I think, do tend to slot us into archetypes, although most of us live in a world where we're constantly changing who we're around.
PWCW: The voices of your characters are each so original and interesting that I wasn't surprised to find out that you'd studied playwriting. How do you bring that to your comics writing?
JHF: My degree in college was in both screen and playwriting. And I had a few plays produced in high school and college. The thing I really learned from my playwriting time was economy. Every piece of dialogue, every action absolutely has to contribute to the overall story and character development. You also learn that pacing is everything. I think that's one of Noel's real strengths as an artist. He has such a sense of pacing, of when to add an extra panel to either slow or speed things up.
PWCW: How did the two of you meet and decide to work together?
JHF: I'd been looking for an artist for Elk's Run for a long time. Finding somebody with the chops to bring an entire town to life and do it quickly and expressively is a huge challenge. When I saw Noel's art for the first time, it wasn't what was there that did it, it was what wasn't there. He manages to use negative space to tell a story—just look at the impact of the simple character beats where the backgrounds dissolve or how effective just a few brush strokes are in making a whole scene seem real. Of everybody I've worked with, Noel does the best job of actualizing exactly what's in my head, and that's something that every writer should look for in an artist.
PWCW: Tell us about your new project, Three Rivers, and how it relates to Elk's Run? You've referred to it as a sequel, though the characters and locations are all different.
JHF:Three Rivers is definitely a thematic sequel to Elk's Run in a couple of ways. Thematically, it's dealing with the same ideas of community and isolation, and it's through the prism of teenage eyes. But stylistically, while it still has the semi—self-contained stories, it's much more in the style of, say, a Robert Altman film. I'm trying to build something that stands almost in the mold of an anthology series, while still telling one single story. As you hear these almost anecdotal stories of the relationship of these two characters, you start to see a bigger picture that talks to what each of us goes through growing up.
