Following the success of its Conan the Barbarian comic books, Dark Horse is now bringing back two other Robert E. Howard creations from the pages of the pulps to the pages of the contemporary comics world with Solomon Kane this month and Kull in November. Longtime Conan editor Scott Allie is trying his hand at writing a Howard character for a change with Kane. The five-issue miniseries, with art by Mario Guevara and covers by John Cassaday and Joe Kubert, (re)introduces readers to the enigmatic Kane, a 17th century vengeance-obsessed loner who must solve a supernatural mystery in Germany’s Black Forest. We spoke with Allie about the differences between Kane and Conan, and what it’s like writing a comic instead of editing one.
PW Comics Week: What were you and Dark Horse looking for when you were picking the artist for Solomon Kane?
Scott Allie: We wanted art that was real vivid; something that didn’t look like every other comic; something that would maybe be as distinctive as [artist] Cary Nord was when we launched Conan. We also had [colorist] Dave Stewart, who had launched Conan with Cary, wanting to try to reinvent himself again on Kane. And Mario’s art had really weird monsters, really weird expressive characters, a great sense of action, and a lot of atmosphere; he just hit a bunch of different things we wanted to try to accomplish with the book.
PWCW: I know you’ve been writing for years, but what’s it like being on the writing side of things instead of the editing side, especially at Dark Horse, where you’re one of their main editors? Is it strange?
SA: Yeah, it’s strange, but y’know, it’s also really good. I’m working with an editor [Philip Simon] that I have a really good relationship with, so there’s an extent to which it’s kind of a partnership. We’re working on a lot of it together—he’s making the editorial calls ultimately, but we’re able to talk that stuff through quite a bit. Being a writer and an editor here gives me a great opportunity to stay totally involved with the process, whereas if I was a freelance writer who wasn’t in the office, who was just off in Ohio emailing my scripts in, I’d have less of a chance to be real hands-on about it. And that would drive me nuts.
PWCW: Is there a separate mindset when you’re doing one versus the other? Can you take one hat off and put the other on? Or is it all just “making comics” to you?
SA: It’s more like there’s a spectrum and you adjust your dial a little bit. Because there are some books that I edit where the writer hat is totally in the closet, hung up. And then there are some books where, yeah I’m the editor, but I’m very engaged with the script in ways. For instance, for a while I was Sergio Aragones’ editor, and working with Sergio was amazing, but what was amazing about it was that I got to put my name on the book. Seeing Sergio’s pages come in, talking with him about what he wanted to do for his next project—that was amazing, that was really rewarding; but I had not one iota of influence over what happened in the book. I was really just shepherding it through production. When you work with someone that talented, that’s important, but it’s just not that creatively engaging.
Rather than take you through the whole spectrum, there’s Sergio on one end and then there’s doing it yourself on other end, and all my books fall somewhere between. With a book like Hellboy where I worked so closely with Mike [Mignola] for so long, we talk about the story, and there’s a certain influence that I have, although there’s a boundary that I put in place where I’m not trying to help him write the book; that’s not my job at all. I’m there to be a sounding board, and I’m there to really be his story editor, but not to be his co-writer. There are some books, and I’m not going to say which, where I am more engaged in the writing, where maybe I’m a more heavy-handed script editor; and that’s where the spectrum gets closer to Solomon Kane, where I actually get to write it and supervise some of the other aspects of it.
PWCW: So back to Solomon Kane—for people who are familiar with Conan and Howard but maybe not Kane, what can you tell them about the character? How is he different from Conan, for example?
SA: He’s real different from Conan, more so than a lot of Howard’s characters. Normally Howard’s characters are relatively similar to Conan. Like with Kull [a Conan-like barbarian character]l—I’m not the editor of that, but I had my hand in helping shape the book—we had to really be sure to spell out the differences between them. With Solomon Kane, the book takes place in a real historical time—that makes Solomon much different from Conan. It’s limited in a way because you can’t just have a dragon eat England.
I like that instead of Crom [the entity Conan worships], Solomon Kane worships God. And he worships him in a really weird way. Solomon Kane is a Puritan, he thinks he’s on this vengeance kick decreed by God; but his version of God is real different from what I think the Puritan version of God was. So that gives me a weird angle to play with. Instead of playing with some made-up mythology or a mythology that’s distant to us the way Egyptian gods are, I’m playing with these philosophical ideas that are near and dear to a lot of readers. Conan is indifferent to his god—he’s vaguely afraid of him, but he knows that he doesn’t care about him at all. Kane has a different relationship with God, like any Christian would. So that’s interesting. Not that the book is all about Christianity or anything, but Christianity is a big part of Kane’s motivation.
PWCW: Speaking of Howard—how closely will these comics be based on his writings? I know he didn’t write that many Solomon Kane stories. Are you following them pretty closely, or are you going off on your own?
SA: Well, as a writer that’s one of the reasons I was interested in adapting Kane as opposed to the other characters because there are only 17 or so stories that Howard wrote, but even that includes a bunch of fragments. So the story that I chose to do first is actually only three or four pages by Howard, it’s a fragment called “The Castle of the Devil,” and Howard starts it and introduces the concepts, but he only gets so far. So it’s great ‘cause Howard gave you the first 15 minutes of the movie and no indication of where it goes from there. So having studied his Kane stuff backwards and forwards, and having read a lot of the other stuff and having lived inside of Conan for a long time, I get to take this fragment and blow it out. Subsequent stories will be much more rigorously structured to what Howard gave us. But I wanted to start off defining the world of Kane with more liberty, with more time to develop for readers a good sense of who he is right off the bat.
PWCW: That’s interesting. I would have thought it’d have been the other way around—starting off by following an established Kane story pretty closely, and then branching off.
SA: One of the reasons I felt it was important is this: With Howard, he was writing a lot of fiction and placing it wherever he could. The word continuity probably didn’t exist for a guy like that. He wasn’t worried about which Solomon Kane story came first, second or third. Ditto with Conan. He didn’t think about that sort of stuff. He certainly wasn’t trying to come up with a serialized story for Kane, he was just coming up with Kane stories. So there’s no main story that Howard wrote where he thought, “This is the first one that happens, and this is the one that really sets everything in motion.” He wasn’t thinking like that. It makes sense for me to think like that ‘cause I am trying to write an ongoing series of miniseries like Hellboy that’ll hopefully be coming out for a long time to come. This is the one that’s going to set the whole thing in motion. I’m also updating it—I’m not changing anything about the character, but I am trying to make it accessible and interesting to a certain kind of modern reader..
PWCW: Are you planning on a miniseries a year? Is it all kind of dependent on how this first one does?
SA: I think probably a miniseries a year, although I’m hoping to start the next one fast because there’s supposed to be a Solomon Kane movie next year. While I don’t want to be doing the comics just because there’s a movie, I do think the fact that there’s a movie out will create a bigger demand for the comic. I think we’d be suckers not to take advantage of that and get a couple stories out quicker than we might have otherwise.
PWCW: It seems like there has been a bit of a resurgence recently with some of the pulp or pulp-like characters—you guys with Conan and Kull, Dynamite’s got The Lone Ranger, now you’re doing Solomon Kane. These characters are pretty old— why do you think today’s readers find them appealing?
SA: I think everything’s cyclical, and I also think with these characters Howard really tapped into something amazing. More than any of the other pulps, Howard’s stuff survives really well because it has an aesthetic that’s driven, it’s really accessible, it’s really personal, and I think that means that Conan in particular will always appeal to people. I think Conan represents a kind of archetypal masculine energy. And right now, in the last 10 years we’ve had a resurgence of fantasy, and it’s continuing to grow. Fantasy has gone a little bit more mainstream again, and that’s great for characters like Conan and Kull and Kane.
As for Kane himself, he’s a really weird character. Kane isn’t as accessible as Conan. With Conan you have a character that a lot of guys, and probably a lot of women, would like to be or they’d like to be around him. With Kane, it’s not really like that. You wouldn’t really want to hang around Kane, and I really don’t think you’d want to be Kane. He’s not happy, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying this; he’s off-putting to most of the supporting cast in the book. Kane goes in and rescues the girl every time, but the girl doesn’t fall into his arms—the girl is kind of not into it. So it doesn’t have that adolescent male fulfillment fantasy that Conan and a lot of those characters have. Kane is really severe. That’s one of the things I like about Kane, and it’s one of the things that I feel makes it more true to the aesthetic of horror fiction. Because with horror fiction, if you do have a main character that’s just super-admirable and unbeatable and really romantic, it undermines the darkness. And Kane doesn’t undermine the darkness; Kane reinforces the darkness. That makes it more intense in a way that I like my fiction to be.
PWCW: What you just described sounds like an uphill battle! You’re up to the challenge, huh?
SA: Yeah, and it’s just more interesting to me. Yeah, I’m totally up for the challenge. I’ll never be a guy who could write Superman.. Give me the guy who’s just a mess, that seems more like a hero to me.
