An Interview With The Creative Team Behind ‘Bad Karma’
by Rachel Bellwoar
For some people the holidays are about family. For others, commercialism. For Ethan and Sully, this year Christmas is about getting a guy off death row in writer Alex De Campi and artist Ryan Howe‘s webcomic Bad Karma. In celebration of the series getting a hardcover edition last month from Image Comics, check out this interview with De Campi, Howe, and colorist, Dee Cunniffe, below:
Rachel Bellwoar: I’m not sure who’s idea it was to set Bad Karma at Christmastime, but I love that readers are never allowed to forget that these events are taking place during what’s supposed to be the happiest time of the year. Was it fun, getting to sprinkle references to the holiday season throughout the series?
Alex De Campi: I do love a Christmas action film, so this one is all my fault. We also needed a reason for Sully to be home from his current mercenary gig, and the Christmas holidays were an obvious solution for that—and for Cheryl to be really, really mad when they essentially desert her for their road trip. Plus I’m kind of obsessed with terrible institutional Christmas decorations, the “you tried” school of holiday cheer — Walmart tinsel garlands from the bottom of the sale bin, and cardboard Christmas images crookedly cellotaped up here and there.
Bellwoar: There’s a messiness to the way Ethan and Sully operate that’s extremely endearing yet also makes it understandable, when people have trouble taking them seriously. Was that a fun story challenge to write around?
De Campi: Hollywood has sold us a load of hogwash for years about special ops people being hypercompetent in all aspects of their lives. As someone who’s been friends with a lot of soldiers, some of whom were special ops and went on to do mercenary work, I am here to tell you they are pretty much like Sully and Ethan: very good at certain things, but otherwise utterly shambolic nerds. I love the fact that Sully and Ethan are walking disasters. They’re so much more fun that way than if they had all the answers, and it feels like a genuine victory when they pull a win out of the bag.
Bellwoar: One of my favorite panels is in issue three during an action sequence, where one of the characters is wearing sweats. How did you decide on the wardrobe for the characters?
De Campi: Wardrobe was almost all Ryan, but we did want everyone to be wearing everyday clothes. Cheryl’s not going to be taking the first flight out of Boston to kick their ass in heels. She’s wearing tennis shoes and yoga pants like a normal person. Ethan has a lot of mobility issues, so clothes with difficult fastenings or which are hard to get over his prosthetic are a no-go (his sneakers are the velcro strap ones, for example). And Sully just really likes that navy-blue hoodie.
Ryan Howe: Wardrobe was really fun on this. Like Alex said, these are pretty much all functional everyday clothes, and they hopefully reflect each character’s personality. Alex would suggest key traits to keep in mind for the design a lot of the time and then I’d work up three or four different options for looks we could build out from. For Ethan, he’s got the sweats and velcro shoes for his mobility issues, but he also doesn’t really have any fasteners more complicated than a zipper. He’s in a dark place, so he’s really just functioning at bare minimum, zero effort with what he wears. Sully’s a bit more put together, but it’s still super casual and comfy, rolled up sleeves and hoodies. Taneka got nice warm boots right from the outset since she’d be tromping all over the place in the winter. Cheryl’s not sleeping in anything skimpy for fan service, she’s got an old t-shirt and sweats. Everybody is dressing for themselves, not the audience.
Bellwoar: Ethan’s ex-wife, Cheryl, is such a fierce, protective person. She’s also someone who knows how to make an entrance. You literally hear her coming before you see her in issue three. How challenging was it to come up with an entrance worthy of her ferociousness?
De Campi: Cheryl is an exhausted working-class mom from Southie and she is absolutely DONE with taking care of the men as well as her actual children. Her loud mouth preceding her is just… par for the course. Plus I wanted to sit with that sheriff for a bit before she comes in, because otherwise you have to establish the peaceful morning before you can destroy it.
Howe: Cheryl was easily one of the most fun characters to draw. Alex set her up with such a strong personality, and such great nuance, that I really tried to always be conscious of her body language and expressions in relation to everyone else so that when we get to those big moments of ferociousness, or quiet, they really popped. There’s a real tiredness underneath it all that I really like.
Bellwoar: All of the locations in this series are so specific and have their own color scheme. Is there one you’re especially fond of?
Dee Cunniffe: It was great having all the scenes set in real locations, so I could google them and see what they looked like in reality, and then play around with the mood and lighting. The hardest ones to get right were the interiors of the George Bush Center for Intelligence – they are not googleable as one would think! Most of the scenes were in pretty mundane places – houses (which were fun in their own way to give a lived in feel) motel rooms, cars, fields and municipal buildings etc – so it was a blast to have that real hit of vibrant color right in the middle of the book in the Rawhide Bar & Grill. The full page splash showing the huge cast of background characters was a fun one – each of them has their own unique look and you can imagine each one’s backstory.
Howe: I had a ton of reference material for this on just the b&w side of this, Dee blows my mind with how he balanced all that reference plus the stylistic unity of everything. All of the intelligence agency stuff was tricky as, like Dee said, it’s really hard to find reference images. Alex is amazing for providing reference, and with places like Cheryl’s house she would have photos for the house as well as the location of the neighbourhood so it was relatively easy to figure out how everything looked and could fit together. I ended up finding some images from older sources that would have little slivers of offices, or security gates, that sort of thing, but most of the look for the George Bush Center for Intelligence was just knowing government stuff tends to be super drab and boring bureaucracy, and just running with that. Like Dee, I’m also fond of that Rawhide Bar & Grill section, it pops out against everything so nicely.
To Alex’s comment about virtual location scouting, it was such a boon to be able to virtually drive around backroads and highways to see how the landscape was distinct in each location as opposed to just winging it. Even with Cheryl’s neighbourhood, just virtually walking around and seeing how the neighbourhood was put together was really beneficial.
Bellwoar: One of the reasons all of the spaces in this series feel so lived in is the amount of attention that’s paid to the background characters. From the Waffle House employees to the patrons at a gay bar, why was it important to you to give them a spotlight?
De Campi: Action films and action comics tend to treat everyone but the primary protagonists and antagonists as just paper-thin fodder. It’s important to me to remember that the peripheral characters all had lives before Sully and Ethan crashed into their day, and will have lives afterwards. So you get the Waffle House waitress who’s just trying to get through her shift (and that whole scene is based on one my friend Jess actually witnessed), and we sit with her for a sec, and we get the folks at the gay bar, who are just there to have fun and flirt and be themselves, and we sit with them.
Howe: You kind of hit the nail on the head right in the question. When all the characters, both background and main, are distinct, everything feels that much more real and lived in. I love drawing people, so it was a blast trying to keep everyone in denser scenes like the bar and convenience store unique. It goes back to the question about the clothing, the characters are all just living their lives, what would that person in this particular scene look like?
Bellwoar: As a fan of many of your series, Alex, I’ve always admired how you’ve incorporated sound and music into your comics. Why did you choose Jonathan Richman’s “New England” for the epilogue?
De Campi: Uhh because it slaps? It’s also a perfect encapsulation of both the characters and their journey—goofy, catchy, and a tune that always leaves you happier than you started.
Bellwoar: It’s very obvious that a lot of research went into this series. Can you give an example of a scene or detail that was greatly enhanced or changed after getting input from actual veterans and service people?
De Campi: Sully’s TBI stuff was consulted on by a friend who’s an Iraq war veteran and has a TBI. The taxidermied woodpecker in the Colonel’s office is a gag about how for a long time every exercise out of Ft Bragg had to make sure it didn’t impact red cockaded woodpecker nesting sites. All the drone stuff was consulted on by a friend’s spouse, who was a drone SME and who helped me find plausible reasons why a UAV would be flying so low as well as the correct base to have it leave from. The missing AT4 was a whole conversation with a cavalry officer friend. So many serving army and veteran friends cheerfully answered my dumb DMs and emails for this book, I owe them a ton.
Howe: Being Canadian, the intricacies of the US military is one I really leaned on Alex for, but one of the (many) fun things about working with Alex is all the knowledge and detail she brings to the process. The first time we see the boys in their Ranger uniforms, the script didn’t just mention “Sully and Ethan are in their Ranger uniforms,” it expanded to the differences between different iterations, the patches, links to videos of Ranger humour, and some songs.
De Campi: Okay so after Ryan’s comments I’m now obligated to link to the Rip-It Ranger story (here) . Enjoy.
Bellwoar: I love that Sully’s stuffed unicorn present made it onto Tony Stella’s cover for the hardback edition. Was the idea to design a stuffed animal to rival John McClane’s teddy bear in Die Hard?
De Campi: Oh, I forgot all about McClane’s teddy bear until you mentioned it! I deliberately don’t re-watch stories that are thematically or tonally similar to whatever I’m writing, before or during writing it. That unicorn is an exact copy of one that my own child bamboozled me into buying at a Maine rest stop a few years ago. We still have it, and Ryan has reference pics of my kid holding it. It’s HUGE. And I wanted something to undercut the whole masculinity of this entire endeavor, and what better than a giant pink stuffed unicorn? (It’s a gift for one of Ethan’s kids, and also becomes a pretty important metaphor in the book.)
Bellwoar: Bad Karma evolved out of a webcomic you all worked on called Hell’s Kitchen Movie Club. What film would you have Ethan and Sully watch together in a Boston-set edition of Hell’s Kitchen Movie Club?
De Campi: Wow. Hmm. They’d watch Kelly’s Heroes (a super fun Clint Eastwood/Donald Sutherland WW2 heist movie) and reminisce about the time they watched a stoned tank crew accidentally load a sabot round instead of a HEAT round and nobody ever admitted knowing where the round landed. Or they’d watch the 2001 Buffalo Soldiers film, which is the Animal House of military movies.
Bellwoar: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Alex, Ryan, and Dee!
Bad Karma is available in hardcover from Image Comics and digitally from Panel Syndicate.
