Matthew Sturges talks "House of Mystery"
For a guy who only entered the comics field a few years ago, Matthew Sturges is incredibly busy.
Just a few years ago, Matthew Sturges joined up with Bill Willingham, author of DC Comics/Vertigo title “Fables,” for a new spinoff, “Jack of Fables,” starring the ubiquitous Jack of countless fairytales. Since then, Sturges has branched off to a slew of other comics for DC, like “Shadowpack” and “Salvation Run.” He’s about to start “Justice Society of America” with Willingham, and he recently revived another property, “House of Mystery,” beautiful drawn by Luca Rossi, which just had a collection of the first five issues published.
The book centers on the mythic House of Mystery from DC Comics lore, and stars a group of people who are trapped in the house. While there, they are often hanging out in the bar, where strange travelers stop by for a drink, paid for with a story. These stories – some written by Sturges, some by Willingham” – are given a guest artist and fit in well with the creepy nature of the book.
amNewYork spoke with Sturges about the comic.
Where did the idea to resurrect “House of Mystery” come from?
It was, appropriately, a conversation in a bar that got the thing rolling, which is probably the primary reason why the thing is set in one. Oft times the ideas that you come up with after an evening of drinking don’t turn out to be your best ones – but in this case I think we picked a winner. DC is always looking for ways to reinvigorate old properties, and I think we came up with a fresh enough twist on an old idea, and the time was right, and everything just gelled.
We've seen Cain and Abel in the book — how does this tie into the history of the Houses of Mystery and Secrets and the greater DC/Vertigo mythos?
The notion of dragging Cain and Abel and their houses out of obscurity was Neil Gaiman’s. When Neil was creating “Sandman” (itself a new twist on an old DC property), he dug deep into the cookie jar of the DC Universe and found these characters languishing at the bottom. He then worked them into "Sandman" in such a way that they were actually true to their origins in a clever metafictive way. So when it came to be my turn to play with those toys, I wanted to make sure that we honored what had come before, but turned it once more on its head. Thus, it is the same exact house that was featured in the old horror anthologies, as well as in "Sandman."
What can we look forward to seeing in “House of Mystery”?
Well, we’ve spent a good portion of the first year of the book setting things up. It’s taken a little more time than you’d normally get in a standard 22-page comic, because we devote a significant chunk of each issue to the separate short story that’s embedded in it. But now I think we’ve reached a critical mass of setup – all the current dominoes are in place, and in the scripts I’m currently writing I’m having all kinds of fun knocking them over and revealing some of the surprises that I’ve been keeping to myself for two years now. So you’ll see the pace of the book increase rather quickly as all sorts of things start to come to a head, and you begin to see how all of these disparate elements begin to tie together.
Who goes about choosing the artists for the stories inside the book? How do you and Bill Willingham divvy up the stories?
It’s a very organic process. Bill and I each have lists of artists that we’d like to work with, and our editors have their own ideas, and so we essentially go around peppering these artists with requests to do stories. In some cases we want to showcase new and up-and-coming talent, as with Ross Campbell and Zachary Baldus, and in others we want to give established (and sometimes legendary) artists opportunities to do something a little different, like Jill Thompson, Kyle Baker and Berni Wrightson. So basically we find out which artists we’ve snared and figure out stories that would be great for those artists. Bill is a busy guy, and contributes a story when he can, but mostly I’m the one writing the stories.
How is it working with Luca Rossi, as well as the great guest artists? Is there an artist you're dying to work with on one of the inside stories?
Working with Luca is a dream, especially considering that he lives in Italy, he doesn’t speak English, and I’ve never spoken to him. He gets the scripts translated into English, draws them beautifully, and then about a month after I turn in a script, I get these amazing pages. Somehow – either because of the language barrier or in spite of it – Luca manages to do things that can only be described as magical. What he draws is always better than the script he drew it from.
Working with the guest artists is always a mixed bag, since you never know quite what you’re going to get from an artist you’ve never worked with before. Fortunately I’ve been very lucky with the artists I’ve worked with and have yet to be disappointed. There have been a few that came out quite differently from what I’d expected, but that’s not the same as being disappointed. Sometimes being surprised is a wonderful thing.
I certainly have my wish list of artists, but the one that I’m really dying to work with is Jon J Muth. Every couple of weeks I ask my editor Angela Rufino, “Do we have Muth yet?” and every time she puts me off with some excuse. My fear is that they’ve already contacted Muth and he wants nothing whatsoever to do with me. Jon, if you’re out there, I promise to bring my A-game to any story you’re willing to draw.
You've just been announced as the co-writer on “Justice Society of America” — how did that come about and any hints on your plans for the book?
The way that it came about is that the gods of comics reached down and zapped me with amazing good fortune. I’ve been a great fan of Geoff Johns’s run on the book for quite a while and I was surprised and thrilled to be asked to work on the book. I’m just guessing here, but I think the rationale was that Bill Willingham and I have worked together in the past, the book has a million characters in it, so maybe between the two of us we can keep up with everybody. We definitely have big plans for the book – you can’t go into a book with a pedigree like the JSA with small plans. Of course, I can’t get into any specifics, but there’s an egg involved. And an interesting legacy of a Golden Age character. And lots and lots of bad guys. Lots of bad guys.
There's a big crossover in the Fables universe coming up — can you explain what's going on and what you'll be doing?
Well, there have been some developments in the “Jack of Fables” over the past couple of years that could potentially have dire consequences to all of Fabledom. We’d kind of been wondering how we could address these godlike beings called the Literals in the main Fables book and since Fables is all Bill’s bailiwick, there wasn’t much I could contribute to that conversation. So at some point we hit on the idea of having the books actually do a good old fashioned crossover, including a three-issue mini called “The Literals.” But truth be told, it’s really just one big story in nine parts that’s told over the space of three months in “Fables,” “Jack of Fables” and the “Literals” mini. Fortunately, each issue is clearly numbered for your reading convenience. It’s impossible to get lost. But you do have to read all of it or it won’t make any sense. See, some other crossovers will insist that you don’t have to read everything in order to understand the big event, but we won’t lie to you. We owe it to you to admit candidly that you have to read all three books or you’re done for. But we promise to make it worth your while.
You have a new novel coming out — how did that come about, what is the book about and how does the process of writing a novel compare to comics?
The novel is called “Midwinter,” and I actually wrote the original draft of it several years ago, where it languished in a drawer gathering dust. But then my friend, novelist Chris Roberson, sent a copy of it to Lou Anders at Pyr Books without mentioning to me that he’d done so. So imagine my surprise when Lou called to buy the book.
“Midwinter” is a fantasy novel set in the Seelie Kingdom of Faerie – Publisher’s Weekly described it as “low fantasy”, which I don’t really know what that means, but it was given as a compliment, so I’ll take it. When cornered, I’ll describe the book as “The Dirty Dozen in fairyland,” which is actually a pretty accurate description. A group of prisoners, led by the disgraced former Guard Captain Mauritane, is sent by Queen Titania on a suicide mission across the breadth of the kingdom. If they survive, they’ll be pardoned; if they fail, they could inadvertently destroy a kingdom. Meanwhile, however, the forces of the Unseelie armies, led by Empress Mab, are approaching the Seelie borders, and war seems imminent. Ultimately, Mauritane is forced to choose between completing his mission, and leading his former soldiers into battle against the Unseelie. In some ways it’s a straight-ahead fantasy novel, but it’s a little more muscular of a story than you might expect for something starring elves. There are elements of horror, romance, and even a little bit of humor. It’s also a bit subversive; at times it deconstructs the high fantasy genre while still taking it seriously. I don’t know – I’m probably the wrong person to ask about the book because once I start talking about it I can’t shut up.
There are two big differences between writing prose and writing comics. The first is that in prose you actually have to narrate the story – you’ve got to describe the characters and the situations that they’re in. In comics, of course, all of that stuff goes in your script, but the artist is the one that actually does the heavy lifting of describing things. Your only words on the page are your dialog. But when you’re writing prose, every word you type ends up on the page – you don’t have an artist to turn your awkward descriptions into good storytelling.
The other main difference is that in prose, you have very few limits in terms of length. You can make a chapter two pages long. Or you can make it 40 pages long. You can write a novel that’s a 180 pages long or you can make it 1,100 pages. But when you’re writing mainstream comics, each installment of the story is 22 pages. So you have to attune your storytelling to accommodate that. Comics is a much more rigid medium in that respect. In some ways that inherent structure makes it easier to tell stories, because the terrain starts to seem very familiar after a while, but that’s offset by the worry that such comfort will make you start repeating yourself.
I wouldn’t say that I prefer one over the other. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Any new projects coming up down the line?
Usually there’s something brewing that I can’t talk about, but right now just about everything that I’m working on has been announced. One project that we didn’t discuss is the miniseries "RUN!" That I’m doing with Freddie Williams. That should start coming out sometime in the Spring, and it’s a very aggressive, violent, and wicked story about a complete loser who somehow manages to become one of the most dangerous supervillains that humanity has ever produced. It’s not your standard superhero fare, that’s for certain. There’s also a sequel to “Midwinter” that I’ve just started writing which, if everything goes as planned, should be released early next year.
Pages from "House of Mystery," written by Matthew Sturges, drawn by Luca Rossi
