INTERVIEW: New comic ‘Delver’ finds teen character navigating uncertain world

ComiXology has cornered the market on digital comics, with the company pumping out originals left and right. Their newest release is Delver, co-written by C. Spike Trotman and MK Reed, with art by Clive Hawken.

The comic book is billed as a fantasy, but there are many current-day issues that arise within these electronic pages. The premise involves a dungeon door that appears in the village of Oddgoat and the many new residents who move into the community. At the center of the action is teenager Temerity Aster, who must make a difficult decision to stay in the village or leave through the dungeon hole.

Issues such as gentrification and the economy take center focus, allowing Reed and Trotman to add an allegorical touch to the proceedings.

Issue #2 of Delver is available March 20. Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Reed about the new project. She is the author of the graphic novels Americus, The Cute Girl Network, Palefire and Science Comics: Dinosaurs.Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

When crafting a story like this, did you settle on the issues you wanted to address first, or did the characters come first?

Well, the whole story came to me all at once, because Spike came up with it. She had been sitting on this for years, but too busy with her other projects to get to it, and a mutual friend was lamenting how she probably wouldn’t get to it for a decade if ever.

When I came on, Spike had some very specific ideas about the scope of the story, and rougher ideas of what the main characters should be like, and I worked with her to flesh out more solid parts of the story, or connecting the things she’d left out. We had to narrow it down to the beginning of the story and what could be told in 200 pages. Then we had to cut out another 70 pages for our budget to cover the art once comiXology came on.

So there’s a lot of working around a multi-issue structure and connecting things on my end, and then making sure we stay consistent after Spike does her pass on the script. 

How do you strike a balance between commentary on social issues and character-based storytelling?

You craft characters who have needs that are affected by the issues you’re writing about, and incorporate those issues into their emotional reactions. Ideally, neither one should overshadow the other by the final draft, or it starts to feel too ‘after school special.’

Do you like world building from the ground up? Is that a fun or tedious job?

It’s fun! You can justify so much staring into space! I like doing it collaboratively, because the other person throws out a couple ideas, and then I can start asking what those effects have on the rest of the world. Spike and I both have caffeine for our drug of choice, and we’re both people who get motor-mouthed about history and extrapolating data and logistics.

You have found success with your graphic novels. What is it about this marriage of visuals and words that you like so much as a storyteller?

I just compose in visual mediums. When I was in college, I wanted to go to film school, but I got sidetracked when I discovered comics. And they share a lot of visual techniques, but comics also has its own magic to it. Between the budgets for books being more affordable to do with a small team of one or two people than film, and the stats on films written or directed by women in the 2000s, it was easier to make what I wanted in comics.

What was it like to work with C. Spike Trotman and Clive Hawken?

Spike brings an incredible enthusiasm to everything, especially history, as any of her Twitter followers know. There definitely have been nights where I’ve signed off group chats with ‘Spike, I learned about the Tudors in seventh grade. I’m going to bed,’ and heard her continuing to talk about Henry VIII to everyone else as I hung up. On actual Delver work, when someone has a ton of passion for the story they want to tell, it’s infectious, and it’s awesome to finally see the story take shape.

Clive is insanely talented, and super enthusiastic about drawing magic and monsters. Since we’re both in Portland, we’ve been playing a series of one shot TTRPG’s with some friends where we alternate GMing. I can say he’s also a master of at least three distinct accents.

Is having the comic available only online still as satisfying as hard copies?

This is the first book I’ve done that I’ve had people’s first response not be ‘Oh, neat, I’ll pick it up at my store!’ but instead be ‘I just read it, and it was awesome!’ What it lacks in tangibility, it makes up for by being immediately accessible theoretically anywhere you can access the internet.

Like it’s possible someone’s read it on Antarctica now? I’m not familiar with their specific internet infrastructure, but that’s completely plausible. And there will be print copies available when it’s collected. Single issues don’t look great on a shelf anyway; you want tomes with spines to show off your work.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Delver, written by C. Spike Trotman and MK Reed, is now available from ComiXology. Click here for more information.