Chris Schweizer's 'Vengeance': A Q&A with the creator of 'Crogan's Vengeance'
There’s regular ambition, then there’s Chris Schweizer’s ambition.
Schweizer first graphic novel, “Crogan’s Vengeance,” has recently been published in a beautiful hardcover edition by Oni Press. The story divulges a portion of the Crogan family history – in this case a swashbuckling pirate adventure starring Catfoot Crogan.
After this book, Schweizer has 15 more genre-spanning adventures he’s planning on telling, featuring members of the Crogan family throughout the ages.
So, needless to say, Schweizer, 28, has a lot of work ahead of him.
amNewYork spoke with Schweizer about his graphic novel.
How did the idea for “Crogan” come about?
I’ve been a historical adventure fan for a while. I really enjoyed books like “Horatio Hornblower” and “The Flashman Papers” and I would find myself doing sketches of different characters in different time periods and not really having any one that I have a huge affinity for over any other. And I noticed that a lot of these characters look a lot alike. The idea that they could be related came to me one day while I was working and so I started using a calculator, figuring out how they would be related, saying if this character was born in this year then 20 years earlier is probably roughly when his would have conceived him. What would his father have been doing in 1875? That would put him in around the right time to be in a Western. So basically, I used it to tie this into specific genres that I wanted to do and also making sure that it line up chronologically.
Will future stories stay in the distant past, or will they be contemporary?
Most of the future stories will probably be past stories where I’ll probably go back farther to the Musketeer era or the Elizabethan era or even the Crusades or something like that. There’s always the chance that something later may happen. The main thing is just to make sure that there is enough distance between our time and the time when things occur. More than anything else, that there won’t be a lot of left over political connotations. I wouldn’t do something now sort of set in the Vietnam era or post, because most readers over 50 have a personal stake in that and to some degree, there children do as well. There’s always a chance, but it would be significantly down the line.
Are there any genres you’re really excited to tackle?
There are a few. I’m holding off on doing the noir mystery, which is the private eye character post World War II because most of the people that I know, when they turn about 40, they get into those Raymond Chandler style mysteries. But the one thing that I’m most looking forward to is the lion tamer/escape artist, most because the way I tailored that plot, it’s going to be very pulp adventure and I’m very excited about doing that type of style.
How did you get into comics?
I got into comics a couple of years ago. I’m from Kentucky. And before the graphic novel market hit big, it was basically impossible for me to find any comics aside from “X-Men,” “Spawn” and “Star Wars.” They didn’t really capture my interest all that much. It wasn’t until graphic novels started appearing in book stories with more regularity – Top Shelf stuff, Fantagraphic stuff, Oni stuff – that I got really excited for the prospect of doing comics. I knew that I loved drawing comics and I loved telling stories, but I didn’t know that there was any possibility that there was a market for the types of stories that I wanted to tell. Especially once I saw “Northwest Passage,” which is an Oni Book with similarly cartoony style to mine that is also historical adventure that I realized that there are publishers out there who will do the sorts of comics that I want to do.
What are you doing to make sure that “Crogan” is a good all-ages adventure story?
Basically, what I want to do with each book is make sure that it’s something I’d be allowed to read if I were 8. My parents were strict in regard to subject matter, with rare exception for cultural taste. In popular literature, I was pretty restricted in what I was allowed to read in terms of violence, language [and] things like that. And so I’m very careful that even though the books are pretty violent in that they’re historical adventures in history are generally pretty bloody, I try to do the violence tastefully, in a way that is not going to be problematic for young kids to read. Conversely, I try to write it in a level that is going to be engaging and interesting for adults. My presumption is that, kids, based on the exciting subject matter and also the context between words and pictures, even if they’re unfamiliar with the sentence structure of the vocabulary, they’ll be able to glean the meaning based on its context. And so, I think that writing for adults and making it safe for kids is my goal.
Here's a preview of the first five pages of the book:
