Steve Ellis: It’s interesting. I find that the text and the pictures for me when we’re doing the best work they are working together almost musically where the words fail to convey the pictures pick it up and vice versa.

David Gallaher: And we look at how these simple characters which are just really composed of a few lines are able to move us in such a powerful way. You know, and I think that speaks a lot about the power and the impact that comics have to tell stories both short and simple or beautiful and profound.

<Musical Interlude>

Jo Reed: That’s Steve Ellis and David Gallaher—they are co-creators of the graphic novel series High Moon and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

When High Moon came out in 2007—it created a sensation—winning multiple awards, including the Harvey Award for Best Online Series. And why not—it’s like a mash-up of Sergio Leone and George Romero. The brainchild of visual artist Steve Ellis and writer David Gallaher, High Moon tells the story of a bounty hunter in the late 19^th-century town of Blest Texas….but this is the wild west with a supernatural twist. Blest is a town plagued by werewolves, and our bounty hunter himself has haunting secrets to conceal. Fast-forward ten years; and Papercutz recently reissued High Moon vol 1: Bullet Holes and Bite Marks has just come out with volumes 2 and 3 to follow. And Paercutz has done it in style—remastering the art and presenting High Moon it in both hardcover and paperback simultaneously—giving the reader—according to David Gallaher—the full cinematic experience. Steve Ellis and David Gallaher have been collaborators for ten years. Among the comics, they’ve co-created are The Only Living Boy and Box Thirteen as well as bringing the High Moon Series to an end with new material in Volume 3. Comic book fans have been thrilled by this unlikely combination of werewolves and the west. It certainly piqued my interest.

Who thinks of these things? How do you come up with that idea? Was that you David or did you talk about it together? How did you hatch this?

David Gallaher: So I came up with the initial concept of the series and …

Jo Reed: And this is David speaking?

David Gallaher: Yeah, this is David speaking. I came up with the initial concept for the series back in 2004. I had grown up in an old Civil War town, and I was always struck by the idea of this idea of maybe doing a werewolf/vampire Civil War story where like the north would be vampires and the south would be werewolves. It was just sort of those ideas you have like driving to work. But as I got to thinking about the series more and more and that idea more and more I was really struck with some of the ideas that Steve had mentioned previously which are those ideas of savagery versus civilization. And I had this vision of this awesome O.K. Corral kind of gunfight where at midnight people would start firing, and one of the people would end up being a werewolf. And I thought oh, wow, that’s so cool. And so the idea of “High Moon” came up just toying around with ideas. But as I really got into thinking about the mythology of the werewolf I also thought about real-life historical events that might drive werewolves to be really interested in the Old West. So I looked up the secret history of Jim Bowie’s silver mines, and old boom towns, and took real history and used it as an opportunity to tell a compelling story about werewolves, human savagery, and civilization.

Jo Reed: Steve, this was so successful. It was an award-winning comic book. Ten years later it’s being re-released in this gorgeous form. Why do you think it resonated the way it did?

Steve Ellis: Well, it’s a good question. I think the-- for me the idea of werewolves and the Old West, I guess, is immediately when I heard that and David threw that at me it immediately resonated with me just because I like monsters and stuff like that. But also because the werewolf is an idea of the inner beast of the person coming out uncontrollably once a month or however the myth you’re following works. And that myth resonates, I think, historically because of the idea of that kind of inner conflict with the civilizing aspects of humanity. It’s very Jekyll and Hyde versus the beast within. And I think the Old West is also kind of a conflict between the civilizing aspects of the late 1890s. The kind of savage version of the gunslingers that were there after the Civil War. So you have this conflict between kind of a beast and a civilizing aspect. I think those two concepts smashing into each other, civilization and the inner monster is a long-standing conflict. We all deal with that psychologically a little bit.

Jo Reed: And so when you combine them together in a graphic novel it just explodes.

Steve Ellis: I think so. Yeah.

David Gallaher: Absolutely.

Jo Reed: Now, was this the first collaboration between you two?

Steve Ellis: Yeah. Actually, at New York Comic Con in 2007, we started talking about this. And so it was pretty soon after meeting there and kind of reigniting a friendship we started to talk about the project. And then very soon after we were in with the DC Comics group where they were publishing a book. So it’s within a few months of just getting together.

David Gallaher: Yeah, like seven months in February. In February, Steve and I had started talking. And then we started working on High Moon in July of 2007. And then it debuted October 30 of that year.

Jo Reed: The process of you two working together. David, you’re the author. Steve, you draw and ink. How does it work? Do image and text come together at the same time? Does the image follow the text? How does this go?

David Gallaher: So usually what will happen is Steve and I will-- one of us will come up with an idea. So it will be something. And we’ll call the other on the phone, hey I’ve got this crazy idea how about we do this or we do that? And then the other person is like yeah, yeah, yeah, what about adding this or this or that. Did you think about adding flying monsters with three eyes as opposed to four eyes? Or whatever. And then when we’re done all of that brainstormed morass of information is funneled into an outline which I usually type. I send that Steve for review. He’ll kick in a few notes. And then we’ll break out into groups. So we’ll do character design. Steve will do some character designs. I’ll take Steve’s notes and make a pitch or a more fully fleshed out line. And then we just collaborate every step of the way to make sure that it’s working properly. So what do you think of this design? Or what do you think of this story idea? So there’s a lot of collaboration back and forth.

Steve Ellis: Yeah, not to interrupt, but what we ended up doing is David will often have an outline of a page or a scene. And then together we’ll kind of back forth, I’ll be sketching. He’ll be writing, especially if we’re in the same room together. It works our great. We’ll be changing the story or at least altering the story as we go kind of finessing the story boards for each page. And then once we kind of get the storyboards written out and David is concurrently working on text for the panels, dialog and things like that, then we kind of go into our own corners, and I do finished art work. I take it to finished pencil and then ink and then color, while David is kind of finessing the script. I get him the pages, and sometimes the script changes a little bit. Sometimes the artwork has to change a little bit to fit the final idea. And then we move on to the next page.

David Gallaher: It was very convenient when Steve lived like two blocks from house.

Steve Ellis: <laughs> I had to move far away.

David Gallaher: Yeah. Now, he lives far away.

Jo Reed: Now, he’s in Ithaca.

David Gallaher: Now, he’s in Ithaca.

Steve Ellis: That’s right. My fault.

David Gallaher: Yeah, so we used to live two blocks away from one another. And so it made it very easy like every day or every other day I’d come over to his studio, and we’d collaborate. So it’s a little different now with Steve living in Ithaca, but we use things like Skype and Dropbox and Slack and other programs to sort of help ease the collaboration along. And it’s been great. I mean we’ve worked on High Moon and numerous other projects since then. And it’s just been great. And going back and doing new High Moon stories is a lot of fun because it’s like learning to ride a bike, we haven’t forgotten.

Jo Reed: So explain to all of us what’s going on with this reissue? Because you’re writing new High Moon stories as well.

David Gallaher: Right.

Steve Ellis: Yeah. The first two volumes are going to be previously seen material, not necessarily previously printed material. And then the third volume is going to wrap up the entire series. When we did it for DC originally the imprint that High Moon was a part of ended. So because of that, the story had to stop for a while. So we’re basically starting off where we left off with the story with the next couple of story arcs.

Jo Reed: Ah, I see. So you didn't necessarily come to an organic conclusion. It was sort of forced on you. And now you get to pick it up again.

Steve Ellis: Yeah. We were expecting to do the whole thing. But in a way it’s great because we’re going to be able to do it in this much more beautiful format.

Jo Reed: First, why do you think there’s been such an explosion in comics? I’d say within the past two decades it has moved from being on the fringes of publishing to really occupying not just a center space, but a place where there’s just so innovative work happening?

David Gallaher: This is going to sound weird but the answer to that question is “Pokémon”.

Steve Ellis: “Pokémon?”

David Gallaher: Yes. So I’m going to explain.

Jo Reed: Okay.

David Gallaher: So in the late nineties, I was interning at Marvel Comics. And the comic industry wasn’t in a really, really profound place-- I mean it was in a profound place. But it was profoundly bad.

<group laughter>

Steve Ellis: Yes.

David Gallaher: So the industry was profoundly bad. So you had a lot of leaders, thought leaders working at Marvel and DC and other companies predicting the death of the American comics market within a year-and-a-half. This is ’98, so they didn’t think it was going to live -- the industry, as a whole, in America was going to live beyond the year 2000. So in 1999 Pokémon broke big. And all of this “Pokémon Manga” flooded the book market. And it became so wildly popular that other comic companies learned how to follow suit developing more and more of their titles for the bookstore markets, and for the libraries and schools. And so what you had happen was these kids were younger and younger and younger, and they’re getting access to more and more stories that weren’t just confined to comic book shops. So on any given day you could walk into a Barnes & Noble in the early 2000s and see kids littered all over the floor just with “Manga” in their hands just reading on the floor reading in the graphic novel section of Barnes & Noble.

Jo Reed: And “Manga” is Japanese comic books as well as a style of comic books.

Steve Ellis: Yeah.

David Gallaher: Right. And in that time you also are saw sort of a correlation of the rise in superhero movies, and so exposure to superhero related and comic related content also happened to rise. So people became more aware of things like The Avengers and Spider-Man and the X-Men. And so that created gates of entry into allowing kids to find and access more material whether it was cartoons or comics or accessories and create better brand awareness of these characters and these icons.

Jo Reed: What do you think, Steve?

Steve Ellis: Well, it’s funny, I think there’s a lot of what David is right. I think also from the standpoint of the Hollywood aspect of it I think a lot of the people who are deciding on ideas for films and TV shows for the last 20 years have really used comics as a springboard for using and getting ideas and in a way testing ground for new projects, new ideas. Things like The Walking Dead came out of comic. It’s not just relegated to superheroes. So it’s the actual medium of comics itself you can read it pretty easily. The other side of it, too, I think is from the educational standpoint more and more librarians, I think, and teachers as well in the late nineties and early 2000s started saying that comics were a really great way to get kids who had trouble or were resistant to reading into reading. In the early nineties, I was brought in on a project for scholastic books at one point to do a bunch of classics illustrated books to try to get reluctant readers interested in reading again using comic books as a bridge. And so I think a lot of libraries and bookstores opened that door for that reason. And I think you had teachers in schools and librarians all saying, “This is great material for reluctant readers.” So they stopped saying to kids, “Don’t read comic books. They’re garbage.” They started saying, “Hey, actually comic books can be pretty good.” So I think that also changed the perception of what a comic book or a graphic novel could be.

Jo Reed: Yes, because it isn’t just for kids, also. I mean what happened I think in the past couple of decades is its adults now read graphic novels. And there’s no sense of them being dumbed down for adults. It’s simply another very, very vital form of communication.

David Gallaher: When the Watchmen movie trailer debuted a few years ago, I want to say that was 2009, 2010, when that Watchmen movie trailer debuted, DC Comics sold, because of that trailer, a million copies of Watchmen. And so the desire to go back and just be exposed to great stories, I think, is definitely prevalent. And I think people just want these really great explosive powerful dramatic stories, whether it’s Persepolis or Mouse or the X-Men or Watchmen. I think that there’s a real desire to be lost in that story.

Jo Reed: Yeah

Steve Ellis: I’m sorry. I think the idea of mixing text and image is a powerful medium for any story. And we do it in our advertising. And we’ve done it throughout history. And for a while, I think, comics had a bad rap because basically in the fifties that were trying to kind of condemn comics for being a problem for children and for other people. And the dumbing down of comics for a long time. And I think as a medium it’s been slowly dragging itself out of the muck and artists have been using it as a medium to try to say more important things with it more and more as time goes on.

David Gallaher: Right. Scott McCloud who wrote Understanding Comics has a really great piece about this in his book where he talks about how by creating a more simplified form we’re better able to identify with the characters that are in the stories. We look at things like “Calvin and Hobbs” which are immensely popular or “The Peanuts” which were immensely popular. And we look at how these simple characters, which are composed of a few lines are able to move us in such a powerful way. You know, I think that speaks a lot about the power and the impact that comics have to tell stories both short and simple or beautiful and profound. And I think that that ultimately is why I love working the medium.

Jo Reed: Well, yeah. And now to really put you on the spot, I wonder with both of you, what comics enable you to do that you might not be able to do in another medium? David, in your case, if you were just using text?

David Gallaher: That’s a good question. So if I were just using text I think ultimately is I love thinking visually. And we live in such a visual world. I mean we’re always looking at our phones. We’re looking at TV. We’re looking at movies. We’re surrounded by all of these great visual powerful images. And I think that text is important and I think it pairs well with images. But I think ultimately the thing you lose with text is you aren’t always able to convey something so simply. You know, they always say a picture says a thousand words. I think what you’re able to do with comics is sort of convey very simply the line, the shape, the tone, the shadow, the light, the color and the image of something in a way that you’re not always able to convey in text.

Jo Reed: And what about for you, Steve, tell me how the text serves in way that perhaps just pictures don’t?

Steve Ellis: Well, it’s interesting. I find that the text and the pictures for me when we’re doing the best work they are working together almost musically where the words fail to convey the pictures pick it up and vice versa. So as the story is being told, and being a visual artist I’ve done gallery work. I’ve done illustration. And I’ve done comics. And what I’ve found is that I prefer using the juxtaposition of multiple images to tell a story, as opposed to a single image. I feel like I can get a longer, bigger, more robust story out of it. And so then using text with it allows for a balance. There’s only so much the image can tell, and the text just fills in that ever so slightly that additional part. And then vice versa where the text is great as dialog sometimes or the visuals can convey an emotion, a sensibility, a texture, a color, a mood that would, like David said, take 1000 words to describe. But it’s an immediate visceral reaction to a picture that’s different than reading say a paragraph of text.

Jo Reed: Let me start with Steve, how did you get in the comic biz?

Steve Ellis: <laughs> Well, you know, it’s funny. I went to college for fine art and illustration. But I think it was the second day of actually going to school I met this guy named Matt who was kind of a crazy man. And he’s like “You have to join our comics group.” And I was like “uh, okay.” And I had read comics before and was kind of interested, but I wasn’t really that involved in it. Bu then from there I met some pretty amazing people who have all gone on to professional work since in our little comics group. And I started doing a comic strip for a daily newspaper strip- The Daily Orange up in Syracuse. And basically, it was a great way to kind of practice writing, telling stories and kind of build a language of how I create stories with pictures. And then when I got out of school I had immediately thought I’m going to be doing illustration or gallery work because that’s what I had gone to school for. But I had spent all of this time developing this language, this visual language of my own on these strips. So my friends were like, “Oh Steve, you should send your stuff to Marvel Comics or DC Comics.” And I was like “well, sure, what the heck.” So I sent them- this was literally this was in the days before I would have had email to do it. So I sent them photocopies in an envelope. I mailed them out. And literally within the week, I got a call to do work on “Iron Man” which was mindboggling. And I kind of had to figure out what I was doing on the fly at that moment because to jump from nothing to working on “Iron Man” was a pretty big deal.

Jo Reed: That was a week.

Steve Ellis: It was quite a week. Yeah and so I kind of had to learn trial by fire. And I found that I really enjoyed the process. What was nice about it is as an artist the writer really trusted me to tell the story with visuals. And then the dialog would fill in from there, or whatever the text was needed would fill in from here. So it really gave me the opportunity to learn on the job. And from there, I basically just kept banging my head against the door trying to get into different companies and get work and eventually continued just working along in the process of doing comics. And part of it was the excitement of having your work be published and out and stories you were working on being read by other people and that kind of drove me to keep doing it.

Jo Reed: And what about you, David? How did you get in the business?

David Gallaher: So I kind of went at it a little bit differently. So my undergraduate degree was in neurology with a minor in education. I taught special ed for a couple of years. And when I went to graduate school I had the opportunity to do whatever I wanted. And so I thought well I already did neurology and education, let’s study comics. So I went and studied comics for my MFA at Goddard College. And then during my last semester there one of my advisors and I were talking about well, what are you going to do with your master's thesis, which was using comics to help kids with developmental disabilities learn how to read? And I was like you know what I don’t know And so thinking about it a little bit more during that Thanksgiving holiday I sat down, and I drew my résumé very badly I might add. But I drew my résumé as a six-panel comic strip. And I faxed it to Marvel Comics on a whim to be one of their interns. And then the next business day afterwards I got a call from Marvel Comics asking me to intern there. And so I moved from Maryland to New York the next day and started working at Marvel Comics in the winter of 1998. And then worked there for four years in their interactive department making digital comics, and building stories in like Flash and Illustrator and Photoshop very interactive almost like animation. And it was a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed it. And then I ended up working freelance for years afterwards. But yeah, I drew my résumé and that’s how it got in.

Jo Reed: You know one thing that I’m always struck by readers of comics are some of the most passionate fans I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’m sure you have found this to be true. This just can’t be my casual observation.

David Gallaher: No. I think sports fans and Grateful Dead fans may be on par.

Jo Reed: Ah, they could equal them. That is true. Point well taken. But boy they’re up the with the Grateful Dead fans. On one hand when people like your work, my God they love your work. But I would imagine there is a kind of inverse of that? You know, if there’s a passionate like there can be an equally passionate dislike. Do you find that? And why do you think there is this passionate involvement?

Steve Ellis: When you have people, who are that passionate about the comics that they’re reading. I mean it’s really exciting. If you have someone who is that passionate about your stuff, it’s amazing. But what you’ll find is that a lot of the people who are the most passionate tend to be the people who are kind of involved with the characters over many, many years. So I mean it does happen to the projects we work on, but I think it, even more, happens when you have characters who are like long-standing, have been around for 75 years. And I think they become almost family to the readers to the degree that the readers get a sense of like who this character is, what they would do and also what they wouldn’t do. So the backlash can be very harsh if you take a character that is beloved like say Batman, and you change something because you’re looking to create a compelling story. And compelling stories are all about change. You have to change things. But sometimes they don’t like it when you change their characters even if’s in the purpose of telling a good story because they’ve invested almost a familial relationship with the characters to the point where that character would never do that. Why would you ever imagine that character would do that? And so you’ll see that kind of backlash against certain stories and against writers and creators when they do things that seem to go against what the fan conception is of that character would or wouldn’t do.

Jo Reed: Cause it’s almost like a violation of the character. I mean, in that way of thinking.

David Gallaher: It’s similar in some regards to Star War fans or Star Trek fans. But specifically on like that violation. You know, “what did you do to Kirk or Spock” or whatever. But you know we read comics as solitary human beings in a solitary space. The voice that I have when I’m reading Batman in my head is very different than the voice that Steve had when he’s reading Batman in his head. You know, and so we’re all adding these sound tracks and creating our own narratives for how these characters live in our brains. So when other people start to take on these characters and their voices don’t match it might chafe us a little bit. But also keeping in mind that when we generally read these characters, we’re coming into these stories and looking at these characters and generally, we model our behavior or our interests based on what we’re finding in these stories; like positive values are reinforced in comic books, you know? I was raised on Superman movies, and a lot of what I think of Superman has defined who I’ve become as an adult. So when Superman does something horrible, I get a little chafed. I get a little upset.

Steve Ellis: Yeah.

David Gallaher: Because that was like the first movie, my parents ever took me to see. So the ideas of truth, justice and the American way, they have some resonance with me as an adult. And I was raised on super friends and all of these other things that created a moral compass for me like a secular religion in a way. And so, you know, what my values mirrored the values of these characters that I read. And so whenever people feel that that stuff is violated they get upset. People dress up as these characters.

Jo Reed: Oh yeah.

David Gallaher: They dress up as Batman. They have their own version of what Batman is. They dress up as Superman or Wonder woman or whatever. They go to the movies. They wear the shirts. They emblazon their living rooms or their bedrooms or whatever with all of this merchandise that reinforces this iconic-- I don’t want to say idolatry, but that’s the word I’m going to use. But there’s a lot of idolatry in terms of what Wonder Woman represents to women or what Batman represents in terms of rugged individualist or Superman aspirational values. And so when we see things portrayed it’s definitely a problem, and it definitely creates this negative reaction.

Steve Ellis: And what’s interesting there’s a lot of also individual readers devote a lot of time to creating almost their own adventures of the characters in their heads. And frequently they want to become writers or creators themselves, or they feel they’re part of the creative process. They have a stake in it.

David Gallaher: And like I said, you see that in Star Trek fandom and you see that in Star Wars fandom. But I think comics are sort of the barrier between fan and creator are very, very, very thin. There’s a lot of intimacy especially when you go to a comic book convention. Fans have access to creators in unprecedented ways, in ways I don’t think you find in like music or film or television or theater. There’s almost public-- not quite public access but, you know, creators are available for fans on Facebook and Twitter and whatever in a way that you don’t really see in any other type of medium.

Jo Reed: Now, let me ask you this, do you see a connection between gaming and comics.

David Gallaher: Like role playing games?

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Steve Ellis: Oh yeah.

David Gallaher: Yes.

Steve Ellis: You know, it’s funny, I’ve also done a ton of artwork for games, and I’ve designed games. And David’s also designed games. And I think the interesting thing for me about games especially roleplaying games is the creative aspect of sitting in a room and brainstorming a story together.

David Gallaher: Yeah, it’s that shared narrative, I think, is really, really powerful.

Steve Ellis: You know, maybe when I was fifteen it was let’s walk into a room, and you’d fight an Orc. But as time went on you we started getting into much more deep stories and much more involved stories that ended up having influence on being able to tell involved narratives in other mediums.

David Gallaher: Well, I think there’s an aspect of world building as well. And it’s something that you and I do a lot Steve which is the idea of you’re not just characters in this adventure world, like just adventuring together. You’re characters who are part of a much larger tapestry. And so what we’ve done with our stories like High Moon and to a degree The Only Living Boy is that we’ve taken our characters and every story they’re, every chapter almost they’re going to another aspect of this world whether it’s going to Ragged Rock, Oklahoma or London, England or going to like the underwater palace of Mermadonia or the flying high city Sectuarius. So we always want to make sure that the characters are exploring their world and being a part of it in a really immersive way. And I think that roleplaying games really gave us that sense that the sky is the limit. You know, like in roleplaying games there’s an unlimited budget for special effects, and it’s the same thing for comic books.

Steve Ellis: Yeah, if you can imagine it, you have it.

David Gallaher: Yeah. We’re not beholden to what Lucas Films can provide or any sort of budget that Warner Brothers might dictate. We have the budget of our imaginations which is boundless.

Jo Reed: And that is a lovely place to end this. This has been a great conversation. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

David Gallaher: Thank you, Jo.

Steve Ellis: Thank you very much.

Jo Reed: It was fabulous. That was David Gallaher and Steve Ellis—they are the co-creators of High Moon. Now, volume 1 of High Moon, Bullet Holes and Bite Marks it has just been reissued. When can we expect to see volume 2 and 3?

David Gallaher: High Moon volume 2 will be out May of 2018; it’s called Wicked Ways, and the conclusions for that trilogy High Moon volume 3 Dead Reckoning comes out October 2018 in time for Halloween.

Jo Reed: Gentlemen, thank you so much.

David Gallaher: Thank you, Jo.

Steve Ellis: Thank you very much, Jo.

Jo Reed: You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. And the Art Works podcast is now available on iTunes. Please subscribe and if you like us—leave us a rating—it really does help people to find us.

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.