Talking The Final Stretch Of ‘Full Tilt Boogie’ With Writer Alex De Campi

When the Luxine Empire declares you a fugitive, there are only two options: run or fight. In Book 3 of writer Alex de Campi and artist Eduardo Ocana‘s Full Tilt Boogie, Tee is choosing “fight.” All she needs is a way to get herself and her team into Luxos first. With colors by Giulia Brusco and letters by Simon Bowland, here’s what De Campi had to share about bringing Full Tilt Boogie to a close:

Rachel Bellwoar: I love when a strip gets creative with a recap. Where did the idea to use click bait headlines to catch readers up on what happened in book 2 come from?

Alex de Campi: Even for our most faithful readers, it’s been a hot minute since Book 2 came out. We definitely needed recaps… but as I was writing them I was boring myself. If I’m bored, you’re bored. So I got silly with it. I was googling things like “10 most effective clickbait headlines” and figuring out how I could make the tropes suit my characters. And suddenly, it got way more fun for everyone involved. Getting trashy is under-appreciated, imo.

Bellwoar: In the last book Tee had to make it through the Anubite ship alone. A big moment in part one of this book is when Lilac reminds her she doesn’t have to shoulder the risks alone anymore. How do you feel Tee has changed over the course of the series?

De Campi: She started off as an antihero and ends up as a hero. That’s a big journey — in Part One she’s exhausted, suspicious, and doesn’t really want to get involved with anything that doesn’t directly benefit her/her family, because she’s been burned so many times before. And along comes this whole “save the universe” thing and she’s like “you really expect me to work for *exposure*?”

But over the course of the whole series, she kinda starts… expanding her view of who her family is, and making friends, and wanting those friends to be okay. She ends up less isolated, in a way, and that forces her moral compass more to the fore.

Bellwoar: What was it like getting to write for a larger team this time around?

De Campi: A bit like Tee found out, the more people on the team, the more complicated everything gets. And I introduced a lot of characters throughout this story, and balancing them so they all have screen time (panel time?), actual emotional arcs, and definitive endings to their stories was a real juggling act, I’m not going to lie. But also sometimes when you have a lot of strands to weave at the same time you can pull one in from earlier in the story, and old characters come back in surprising and impactful ways.

Bellwoar: Speaking of larger team, at the end of book 2 we saw the Black Dog and Achilles split off to return to the Anubite ship. Will we be checking in on them?

De Campi: Yes, of course. I wanted Achilles to have more of a plot line in 3, or at least more of a checkback, but my 10-11 episode arc became a 7-episode arc — I begged for an extra-long 8th episode to end on and got it, but still. He gets his resolution but I just wanted to have a little more of it.

Bellwoar: With the spacecraft in general, am I right in detecting a body horror element to them, especially in the way they attach to each other?

De Campi: That’s all Ed Ocaña’s genius! We definitely wanted the ships to feel different from other space operas and be visually exciting, and that’s the direction he went in and I am so glad he did. We can keep this book all-ages while making it actually scary in places, and that’s something that was important to me.

Bellwoar: Knowing what Tee and her friends know, the Empress’ treachery seems obvious. Did you always want to include a moment where Tee and her friends get to hear from a civilian about how the Luxine Knights come across to them?

De Campi: Yes, it’s very important to have civilian/bystander points of view. It’s like that wonderful Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux-Arts”: “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Things never feel real to me unless you occasionally step out of the hero/villain conflict and be like, what’s going on with the rest of the world? We do that in a quieter way with the trash-pickers you see in the foreground when we show the Luxine palace.

There’s a galactic conflict going on but people still have to go to their jobs, to eat. And civilians/bystanders think things about the heroes and the bad guys that might be totally out of whack, but they’re mostly following the narrative that’s been spun to them – unless we ask them, we won’t know what that narrative is.

Bellwoar: This arc has been advertised as the final book of Full Tilt Boogie. Has that changed how you’ve approached writing this book, knowing the end is approaching?

De Campi: Suddenly I have eight trillion dangling plot threads to tie up in a nice pretty know and the final page is approaching at train-wrecking speed.  But! I did it. I pulled it off (and it really did feel like sleight-of-hand, as the best writing always does.) It all works. And I even left it a little open if we’re able to do more.

Bellwoar: That would be amazing, and thanks for agreeing to this interview, Alex!

The third and final arc of Full Tilt Boogie started in 2000 AD Prog 2418. Part 2 drops February 12th in Prog 2419.