Ray Fawkes and Inaki Miranda on Bringing 'Ragman' to a New Generation of Readers

After being missing from comics since around the time of Flashpoint, DC will reintroduce Ragman, a supernatural hero with a thirst for justice and vengeance whose stories feature some of the coolest and oddest visuals this side of Swamp Thing and The Spectre in next week's new releases.

The new series is written by Ray Fawkes and features art by Inaki Miranda and Eva De La Cruz, and amounts in some ways to a passion project where Fawkes tries to convert the audience to his passionate belief that Ragman is an amazing character who can stand shoulder to shoulder with DC's best heroes.

"I am an unashamed fan of weird characters of DC especially the supernatural ones, and when Gotham by Midnight came to a close I was talking to Dan DiDio about pitching and he kind of listed a couple of names of characters," Fawkes told ComicBook.com. "And as soon as he said Ragman, I just basically jumped out of my chair and said that 'I'm going to pitch Ragman, can I pitch on Ragman?'...I think I got a little too excited actually."

That isn't to say there was nothing tempering that excitement; as a big fan of the character, Fawkes knew better than most how important it was to get the new take right.

"Obviously there's pressure," Fawkes said. "I want to live up to a story that came before but there is kind of like a feeling like here is a chance to represent this fantastic character to a new audience and show them why we love him so much and what's so great about him. So there's a bit of the thrill of freedom, knowing we can boil him back down to his essence, draw something new out of that, and style him in a new way a bit."

"What I felt from the start was total creative freedom and that's the best thing that you can give to an artist," Miranda added. "Do whatever comes to your mind from the script that you have, and I just saw so many possibilities that I can expand from what [Fawkes] had in mind."

That creative freedom gave the pair the opportunity to build a spooky, sometimes violent book that has a strong emotional hook and what amounts to a family curse that has come home to roost, complete with villains picking the wrong guy to mess with.

"For someone coming into this having never read about Ragman, we want to give characters the feeling, Ragman deserves to be in the top tier of superheroes," Fawkes said. "That he is incredible and the things that he can do are incredible and the world he is in is awesome and weird and cool, not like anything else that people tend to be reading in superhero comics. For someone approaching this who may not know the history of Ragman, we lay it all out in the first issue to give them an idea of who he is, and then we sort of tell them "everything is going to explode: everything's going to be crazy dark and cool and this is gonna be a totally top tier experience."

You can get Ragman #1 at your local comic shop next Wednesday, October 11th, or pre-order a digital copy on ComiXology.