Nothing Is Off Limits: Scaring Up Some Dirty Fun In ‘Diabolik Double Feature’

Publisher Diabolik is known for its retro genre storytelling, but with a modern twist. The company us following up on the success of its Diabolik Double Feature with an oversized second issue, which is currently being crowdfunded. Phil Mucci writes and colors the two stories in the old-style flip book. In a Comicon.com exclusive, Mucci discusses why he chose to make the two stories – Orgy of the Blood Freaks and Gringo Loco: The Buzzard King’s Bounty – second acts and whether any topic is taboo in modern storytelling.

Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in interviews are those of the speaker, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Comicon or its staff.

Tom Smithyman: F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “There are no second acts in American lives.” But these two stories represent the second acts in these stories. What are the challenges in developing a follow-up act to a story you’ve previously established?

Phil Mucci: Most of the creative development work on the stories themselves was done by the time we embarked on the first book in the series, so the main challenge on book 2 is growing the audience. We know where we’re going, we know what types of fans dug book 1, so we’re more focused on outreach and meeting potential new readers.

As a writer, it’s tempting to try and gauge what readers liked and shift in that direction, but that’s always a losing proposition, because you can never really know, and everyone is different. You just have to stick to your guns and hope readers will follow you on the journey!

Smithyman: Why is crowdfunding the best way to get these stories to your audience?

Mucci: I think comic cons and horror cons (for us) might actually be the best, since we’re connecting with our audience directly, but crowdfunding is the best way to reach a broader audience that doesn’t live in our area. We’re indie, with no real distribution other than the shops that have reached out to us and supported our books. At this stage, we need to stay pretty local in terms of doing events — no real budget for overnight stays etc.

Crowdfunding enables us to get the stories out to those places we can’t travel to at the moment. Kickstarter, especially, has accumulated a massive global comic book audience, and many of them are just as happy to order every issue digitally. This campaign has been a real eye opener in that regard.

Smithyman: In these stories you touch on a lot of subjects that once upon a time would be viewed as taboo, including religion, sex and violence. Do you think that anything is off-limits any more? Should it be?

Mucci: No. This is America. The Republican front-runner for president is a con man, charity and education fraud, trust fund baby real estate crook, with four new criminal trials underway, half of which are for [allegedly] attempting a coup when he was voted out of office.

Nothing is off limits!

Smithyman: Why was it important to you that these stories be printed on oversized paper? Does it leave that much more space for blood and gore? And why the flip format, other than the fact that it’s crazy cool?

Mucci: The size comes from my love of the oversized graphic novels and collections I picked up as a kid. The Richard Corben books really appealed to me, especially The Last Voyage of Sinbad, which became our main size reference. They allowed so much more room for wide panels and montage style splash pages. Not splash in terms of gore — although that’s fun too — just for art and storytelling without the panel frames. It’s also easier to add visual variety to exposition or dialogue heavy pages as well.

The flip book idea came from my love of double features and drive-in monster movies, but it also served a few practical purposes as well. For one, it allowed us to produce a larger book and divide the work between two teams, so in the time it takes for one story to get done, we get two. It also was a fun way to introduce a new story to the fans of Professor Dario Bava a character we made from our first graphic novel, Murder Vibes From the Monster Dimension. We had no idea how well it would go over, but now that we’ve done a bunch of events with book 1, it’s remarkable how much people get a kick out of it. We sold out of it in less than a year!

Smithyman: You’ve already put out the first issue, but do you ever have time believing that illustration legend Vicente Alcázar is working on your book?

Mucci: This is the best question ever… and the only way I can answer it is that I’m still shocked he said yes! I grew up on a lot of his work, and it wasn’t until our producer Dan Simpson suggested him for Gringo Loco that the possibility even occurred to me. I thought he was retired, but there’s no retirement for the maestro. I was actually a little nervous when I sent him the script! Besides being an incredible visual storyteller, he’s a total pro and such a joy to work with. Just sucks he’s in Spain and I’m in the US. It would be great to have him join us at a comic con so he could meet all the new fans he’s made with Gringo Loco.

Smithyman: Talk about your creative process. Is it linear, where the writer works in isolation and then sends a script to the artist or is there more back and forth?

Mucci: Mostly linear. These stories were worked out before we started the series, so on that level, there isn’t a lot of back and forth. On the art there is, which can affect the script in small ways, for sure. Of the two stories, Orgy of the Blood Freaks requires the most back and forth between Mike Dubisch and me. It’s a much bigger “world” with more characters and locations, a lot of which has been developed in advance, but it’s always a challenge to maximize on the page. It’s tough sometimes, but we end up getting to a great place in the end. His work is really spectacular in both books, but there’s some jaw-droppingly awesome stuff in book 2. Can’t wait for everyone to see it!

For Gringo Loco, the process is: give the script to Vicente and leave him alone. And that’s not a slight to anyone, Vicente just knows this world, having worked on Jonah Hex, Vampirella, Eerie, Creepy, all the great `70’s titles back in the day — which is what made him perfect for a “supernatural spaghetti western.”

It’s in his blood. He gets the script and fires off rough pages less than a week later. When we get his finals emailed to us, we start sending expletive-laced texts of astonishment to each other, “Holy sh$t, did you see the new pages?! Vicente is on effing FIRE!” that kind of thing. It’s really exciting to have a legend bringing your stories to life like that. I feel incredibly lucky!

Smithyman: One of your crowdfunding reward tiers includes an ESP tester kit. But in this case, ESP stands for extra sexy perception. How did your ESP rank?

Mucci: My publicist has advised me not to answer this question 🙂

Smithyman: Your publicist is very smart! Good luck with the campaign and the stories.