Talking 2000 AD’s ‘Intestinauts’ With Arthur Wyatt And Pye Parr

2000 AD is full of heroes but there’s only one team that can help with your tummy troubles. The Intestinauts are back courtesy of writer Arthur Wyatt and artist/letterer Pye Parr and you can learn more about their strip in the following interview:

Rachel Bellwoar: The last time we saw the Intestinauts they got detained in the sewers. This time around will they be back on familiar turf, inside someone’s digestive system?

Arthur Wyatt: When used as directed Intestinauts pass through the human bowels, eradicating all disease and parasites, and emerge to meet their reward in the “big flush”. Then they are uploaded, remixed, repackaged and sent out again in new bodies.

Most of the Intestinauts stories have come from situations where this process has gone astray, and we’ve gotten to explore locals like the terrifyingly large macroverse, fatberg  blocked sewers and tardigrade infested human skin. But I can say that in the new story we will see an Intestinaut mission inside the human gut! Many, many missions inside the human gut, in fact¦

Just not in a way that would be expected.

And we’ll be exploring some new locations in our little Intestinauts universe again. Possibly the ultimate and most fearsome destination of all for our intrepid crew.

Bellwoar: Dissolving so they could be replicated was the whole goal of the Intestinauts’ last mission, but will there be any grappling with the Intestinauts’ short lifespans or is that an existential crisis for another strip?

Wyatt: The sentience and personality  of the Intestinauts is a bit of an unintended byproduct of the uploading and re-embodying process, where — as well as learning new bug busting skills — each time they also become a little bit more complex and unpredictable. And because they go around and around again they are a little bit immortal, the main time one of them actually “dies” being when one fails to upload, and even then that’s just a loss of one branch of experience from the main instance.

Their perspective and understanding of what is going on is a little limited as a result of this, and while they are not quite in the same boat as the Tummy Pals (who formed a religion around the corporate branding) they are pretty gung ho for the Intestolabs mission and rarely think of anything beyond it

(Except for I-R-404, who got lost in the wider world one time and has never quite been the same)

This time around, though, they may be facing something unlike anything they’ve experienced before, and it comes with the possibility of a very real, and very true and final, and very cruel death.

Bellwoar: While technology tends to err toward mass production, the beauty of the Intestinauts is they’re not identical. Did you always want to give them such distinct roles and, on the flip side, was it difficult creating attachment for characters who go by numbers, not names?

Wyatt: I-R-101 and I-R-102, from the original story, came out of my mind pretty well formed and pretty personable — they’re basically doing a rom-com in the human gut so that shaped them a lot. The others have tended to be puns based on three digit numbers. 360 has the all around view, 747 is big, etc.

How many bad semi-puns can you actually get out of three digit numbers? A lot more than you would think, it turns out. Do I kick myself every time I have to keep track of which one is which when writing the script? Yes, yes I do.

(I think I-R-101 and I-R-102 swapped serial numbers at some point. That’ll probably be fixed if this ever gets collected! Or maybe it won’t and it just happened as part of the Intestolabs remixing process at some point)

Pye Parr: Well they’re not identical, but I’m sure Arthur and I have chatted before about how they’d actually work in real life. And whilst the individual members in a squad aren’t the same, they might be millions of squads around, all with their own I-R-01…

As far as their roles go we just kind of make it up as we go along: there’s the main two characters, and then normally some special new bot with a pun-based numerical name (I-R-242 is a Sgt major type, and I-R-404 gets lost for example…) but before I drew the last story i made a cheat sheet for myself and started trying to standardise the backup dudes a bit, so now there’s an ‘official’ cast of about 10 of them…

Bellwoar: Unlike their adversaries, the Bowlbot Impactors, the Intestinauts have digital screens for faces. Was that a key factor in humanizing them? Can you tell us more about your design process for them?

Parr: My starting point was a pill shape, which is cool as both a base shape for the robots and a design element to hang all the branding from. We added jets and arms and stuff for swimming around in all the goop, but they’re a very simple silhouette.

I can’t remember when we chose the faces, but I always wanted them to look like cheeky scrappers, so the dot matrix faces are fun cos I can suggest black eyes and missing teeth and stuff just by losing a few squares. They don’t really have heads that move either, so I think they do need faces to ‘act’ as I can’t convey everything we need to with body language alone.

Bellwoar: Besides the Bowlbot Impactors, will the Intestinauts be running into any other rival brand robots?

Wyatt: Spoilers ahoy, but they’ll be running into their toughest adversary yet, and it’ll be a familiar form, but very different.

Bellwoar: In addition to the art, you’re also responsible for the lettering, Pye. Where did the idea to give the Tummy Pals such globular speech bubbles come from and did you enjoy designing the educational brochures?

Wyatt: Leaving this to Pye, but I will note that it’s a joy working with an artist who also has a flare for graphic design, a passion you might say, and can bring all these incorporated brochures, maps, diagrams and other visual elements to life. It’s an integral part of the Intestinauts experience.

Parr: The brochures, infographics, logos etc are always a joy to do, and it’s really good getting scripts from Arthur where he’s integrated all that kind of stuff into the storytelling — one of my favourite things about Intestinauts.

In this series we’ve pushed that further than we have before, so there’s in-world artefacts, maps, cutaways, puzzles, stupid corporate logos(™), and all sorts of other fun things embedded into the story.

Bellwoar: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Arthur and Pye!

Intestinauts will be returning in 2000 AD Prog 2382, which goes on sale May 15th from 2000 AD.