When artist Vassilis Gogtzilas e-mailed Amelia Cole co-creators Adam P. Knave and DJ Kirkbride with an image of a superhero and basically no context, Kirkbride was immediately struck by the potential inherent in the shot.
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A few e-mail exchanges back and forth, and The Bigger Bang was born. A four-issue miniseries published by IDW earlier this year and recently collected into a trade paperback, Kirkbride and Gogtzilas created a strange, trippy take on superheroes, pitting a single cosmically-powerful being against a gamut of alien threats including King Thulu — a bizarre-looking being that blended Lovecraft (obviously), alien invasion stories and fairy tales into a floating castle of awesome.
Kirkbride joined ComicBook.com months ago to talk about the project, and today being his birthday, we decided it was time to finally run the piece.
You can pick up the trade collection at your local comic shop, or here at comiXology.
So the first thing I ask with a title like this: What’s your elevator pitch for the series? How do you hook into somebody who’s just standing next to you at the comic shop?
You know, I will say I usually tend to see what people are looking at, and say “If you like that, you’re gonna like this.” But sometimes I’m an idiot and I just say it about anything: “If you like Archie, you’re gonna like The Bigger Bang.” [Laughs]
But my elevator pitch for the series is the same as it’s always been since Vassilis Gogtzilas e-mailed us and said “Here’s a drawing of a superhero in space. I want to do a book.” And then Adam [P. Knave] was like, “I’m too busy to work on this,” and I thought, “I’ll do it,” but all I had was this image of what would be Cosmos — and I was trying to figure out, what could his origin be?
I was thinking, “What would be the logline? What would it be to sell Vass on this book first of all, and of my take on his drawing?”
So, basically: The Big Bang created all life as we know it, and The Bigger Bang created just this one being, at the expense of all life as we know it.
For me, I’ve only co-written or written three actual series so far: Amelia Cole with Adam and Never Ending with Adam and now this. And no matter how ridiculous and fantastical the stories get, they all come from a very personal place. And unresolved guilt is a big part of my life and how I function.
So I liked this idea of this superheroic, truly in his heart of hearts good character who just wants to help, carrying in his heart this guilt that his birth caused so much destruction — and the type of destruction that could only happen in a comic book or in a ridiculous $200 million movie that would flop and become a cult classic, I think. It’s the ultimate guilt.
I’ve heard him compared to Superman a lot — and I could see Superman having some survivor’s guilt, although he doesn’t seem to. But again, this is different because it’s literally his birth that caused so many deaths. It’s like when a child’s born and a mother dies in childbirth on a cosmic scale in a big, silly superhero book. That’s what got me really excited.
Vass’ art reminds me of a Bill Sienkiewicz kind of look.
Yeah, he’s definitely a fan.
It’s a very different look from when he was doing Augusta Wind, but they’re both identifiably the same guy.
Yeah, very much.
He came to you with this character design: how much did you interact with him as you were coming up with stuff along the way? You look at some of these characters like King Thulu that are very Mignola-inspired, and I’m not sure they would work on screen.
Right, unless it was like Farscape-era Henson. I wouldn’t mind seeing it done that way.
Yeah. Cosmos was a black and white drawing at first, and then he sent the colors and I loved that he was orange with the blue cape. He had the hair blonde, and I asked him to turn it white for some reason. That was my visual contribution to Cosmos. And if I had thought of it, I’d ask him to change the skin color to something not caucasion, too. Something alien. Everything else is very alien in the book, although he’s so overly muscled he looks alien anyway.
For King Thulu, what started happening was that at first I was writing something a little clearly darker and introspective, but written in a third-person narrative voice because there’s such an exuberance and cartoonishness to Vass’ art that I couldn’t get too dark.
And Vass just draws all the time. So he had this image and I’m not sure if he was just drawing or if he really meant for me to incorporate this, but he drew him with this little crown and he’s on his throne, and as soon as I was okay with that, he said, “What if his ship was a castle,” and he started really pushing a fairy tale aspect. So a lot of that came from the art.
When I work with an artist, I want the artist to enjoy what they’re drawing. So I think my initial vision was a little different from what Vass wanted to draw and what he was drawing, so I ended up rewriting issues #1 and #2 a little bit. It ended up being something that I didn’t expect.
And with our third main character, Wyan, I wanted Thulu’s right-hand warrior to be female, and it was like “She’ll be green and have three eyes!” And then everybody else kind of came out of the script.
So since you didn’t come at this with a concept so much as a figure, did you know going in what you wanted the ending to be?
With this one, there were some moments where if I knew where we were going to end up in issue #4, I would have done something in issue #1 or issue #2 a little differently. I wanted to allow it to grow organically and I kind of had a basic idea for the ending, but I wanted to give us space to go everywhere and do whatever. So what actually ended up happening, the original ending for issue #3 was actually a couple of pages shorter. I was like, “The first couple of pages in #4 would be a great ending for #3.” And it would also give us more space to play with #4, which I still wish we’d had a few more pages of battle.
Stuff like that is really funny and it’s really crazy and I don’t know how many people do it that way, but our whole team was like “If it’s going to make it better, let’s do it.”
Is the miniseries format kind of restrictive? Since nobody makes a lot of money off it, it seems like you’re pretty much down to about 100 pages of story to do whatever you want to do.
Every book’s been very different. Even with Amelia Cole, we thought it was going to be a series of miniseries instead of an ongoing. Especially with that first arc, we went the Star Wars and Matrix route where we wanted to make it satisfying in and of itself in case we didn’t get to do more, and now that we’ve got to do more, it’s just kind of one giant block of story.
Never Ending was meant to be finite. I just wanted to tell a story about immortality not being hundreds of years or thousands of years, but just dealing with it as just longer than a human should be alive, and outliving your loved ones. And we definitely wanted it to end, which is why we always joked that the title was a lie right from the start. I think it works on its own and at least for me, at conventions, that’s the easiest sell because it’s just a $10 book that’s an entire story. And I kind of feel that way as a reader: I like miniseries, I like endings, but I know the ongoing is the way most people like to digest comics.
I love the Hellboy model of doing a trade a year, or a story arc. For The Bigger Bang, initially I liked how Never-Ending felt complete and I love the impossible odds ending of that book. In general, I like impossible odds and not giving up, even if you know you’re going to lose.
I don’t think IDW would give Vass and me an ongoing series, to be honest, and this book is so weird, from the idea, from the title even, which I didn’t know there was a Rolling Stones album with a similar title until I started searching for it.
And then Vass’s art, which I love. There’s such love and care that goes into everything. He’s not on a production line, but he’s making fine art for art’s sake. We were thrilled to get four weird issues of a weird book by pretty unknown creators, and I think we did the most we possibly could in four issues.
