Kieron Dwyer Talks West Portal

07/09/2015 11:41 pm EDT

Comics industry veteran Kieron Dwyer has returned with a genre-hopping new series, West Portal.

He's funding the project via Kickstarter, and it centers on "The cosmic odyssey of Dexter Allen, whose journeys to fantastical fictional realms seem real…because they are."

You can check out the trailer below, or the Kickstarter campaign here.

Dwyer joined ComicBook.com to discuss the project.

First off, what's the elevator pitch for West Portal for those who haven't for whatever reason checked out the video above?

Dexter Allen is a man whose journeys into realms based on pop culture and fantasy fiction seem all too real...because they are. Imagine that Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes grew up to be a paunchy middle-aged man who still found himself transported into the world of Spaceman Spiff but could not control when or where it would happen. Now imagine that the boundaries between reality and fiction are getting blurrier, and that spells SHITSTORM for the entire planet.

From Superman to LCD, you have one of the broadest ranges of any comic creator I can think of. What's the appeal of something like West Portal?

Well, exactly that breadth you mention. Before Todd and I developed this into what it is now, it

began as a simple premise to allow me flexibility to draw any number of genre stories in a wide range of art styles, yet all contained within one single ongoing storyline. I have something I call Creative ADD, which means I get bored quickly doing the same kind of thing for too long.

In mainstream comics, I've generally been able to last about a year on a monthly book for that reason, the only exception being my first real gig on Captain America, which went for two years. Anyone who's watched my career has seen me change up my art to suit the project, be it on Black Heart Billy, Night Mary, XXXombies, LCD, Last of the Independents, or in some of the Vertigo stuff I did, like Garth Ennis' "Satanic" story from Flinch, or any of the Paradox Press Big Book series books.

It's in my nature to explore and try new stuff, and West Portal was designed to be the kind of project where I could get my ya-yas out all in the same place while building a larger, ongoing story.

I think a lot of people will think of The Wizard of Oz, but what went into the decision to make the "primary world" sequences monochrome and brown?

It's a device I used to good effect, I think, in the closest analog to this project, my IDW series Night Mary, co-created with Rick Remender. In Night Mary, I drew the reality stuff in pen on this toned paper and used china marker to add highlights. Then I colored it digitally, using a bluer palette, to make it dreary and cold, since the book was set in Seattle. I wanted the dream sequences in that story to 'pop' in contrast to the reality pages.

With West Portal, I was trying a bunch of different ideas for the reality stuff, but I ultimately came back to the pen on toned paper style, for numerous reasons, but chief among them is the simplicity, and the fact that the fantasy worlds really stand out well in contrast. It also hearkens back to the sepia tones of the Last of the Independents graphic novel, which a lot of people seemed to groove on.

It isn't often that people turn to Kickstarter for ongoing series, is it? is the idea to do a Kickstarter every so often or that the series will start to sustain itself?

Our goal is to help us get a few more issues done to pad us out before we solicit the series to retailers. We don't know yet if we're going to have a publisher pick this up or if we're going to release it ourselves, but either way we don't want to start the book already playing catch up. I've been on that ride before and it's no good.

Retailers and readers want and expect books to ship on time, every month. With a new, creator-owned book in particular, building momentum and goodwill with the audience and the store owners is crucial to the book's survival in today's marketplace. Todd and I are serious about this book.

We're giving it our best and won't settle for anything but a solid story coming out every 30 days. But it's hard to pull off as a side gig. It's taken us the better part of the last year to finish issue 1, write scripts for 3 more issues, and plot out the first 16 issues. We don't want it taking years to get this series into people's hands.

Thus the Kickstarter campaign to help nudge things along more quickly. That's the boost our backers will be giving us, so they can get the finished product in their hands all the sooner.

Obviously you've got a kind of bouncing through the multiverse vibe going on. Are there other riffs you've got planned already that we haven't seen on the Kickstarter page?

There are many more in the first arc, and definitely more in the first 16 issue saga, as well as many more which we have barely even begun to scratch the surface of, going beyond issue 16. There's really no limit to what worlds we can explore through this book. It sounds cliche to say our only limit is our imagination, but it is really true here. This entire series is about imagination, and creativity, and creation.

We're exploring what it means to be a creative person, what it means to be fully invested in your creative spirit. Dex is a man at a crossroads in his life, and his journeys into these fantasy realms from his own pop culture exposure is the key to him unleashing his own creative passion. The premise may sound a bit cheeky to some, but our story is one with a lot more depth than folks might expect.

What made you decide to do this right before Comic Con? It tends to be an all-or-nothing time for Kickstarters, since fans' attentions are so divided.

In hindsight, that was a misstep on my part and it came from having been out of comics now for quite some time. They've changed the dates on Comic Con as the years go by and I haven't been to San Diego since 2005, when my son was 1. Prior to that, I had been for 17 years in a row, always exhibiting in Artists Alley, or at a table with Dan Brereton and John Estes. So I wasn't really thinking of the fact that we'd be right dead center in the middle of the busiest convention period, right between Heroes and SDCC. Oopsie! ;)

There are a number of things we would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight, but now that we're up and running and inside our final 10 day window, there's not much point in second-guessing. We'll move forward to the end of this and hope for the best. We've worked things as hard as we could conceive of doing, honestly. It feels like we're fighting and scraping for every dollar we get, but I will say that the people who've responded so far to what we've put out for this are very supportive. People definitely seem to be connecting to this idea. That's encouraging, as far as the book finding its audience when we get it out.

On that note, do you have a contingency plan for this project should the Kickstarter not work?

Yep, for sure. We've come too far to turn back, so one way or another this series will reach people. It's just a matter of how slow or how fast that happens. If this Kickstarter fails to fund, we may come back in September and relaunch it as a smaller campaign to release the finished issue 1 as a Kickstarter exclusive.

With a lower "ask" and smaller print run than we might otherwise do, we'll at least get copies into people's hands and start building some awareness of the story and so forth.

How important is Garletts to the success of the project, considering that both the art and the colors require different approaches in each new "world?"

Keith is a really talented guy who has worked on my advertising storyboards and comp illustrations for many years, so we have a really good process for working together. He's very capable of matching the different styles I'll be tackling and I'm looking forward to getting his name and work out to the comic buying public. Keith is an integral part of the art on this series.

For those who have been following your work for years, what would you compare this to, if anything?

Like I said, I think Night Mary is the closest thing, in terms of there being a main "reality" style consistent throughout the series, offset by these different worlds (dreamscapes in NM) which are more vivid and colorful and exploratory. Night Mary felt like a high watermark for me in many ways, and although it didn't sell as well as Rick and I might have liked, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from folks over the years who really responded to it, and to what I was doing in it.

Here's a kind of stock question I like to ask people: Why do this as a comic? What does the medium offer that others cannot?

Like any story with this much range, it kind of comes down to budget. As much as I can actually see this as a film, or a TV series, especially now that special effects are cheaper and easier and more accessible than ever, the fact is that there's just no such limitation with comics.

You conceive of it, you draw it, it's out there. No team of production designers and stagehands and actors, etc. Just one or two artists with some basic digital tools, and boom: MAGIC!

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