With the release this week of a broad, varied line of titles from Bill Jemas’s Double Take Comics spinning out of the events of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, ComicBook.com got the lot of them, flipped through the issues, and then sat down to talk with Jeff McComsey, one of the writers on the initiative.
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McComsey writes Z-Men, which follows operatives working at the behest of Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the zombie outbreak in Pennsylvania, and Rise, which follows up with members from the original film’s cast.
You can check out Double Take’s offerings at your local comic shop or GoHastings.com. You can see solicitation text and get more details here.
This is a really ambitious project. Obviously comics are the home of the shared universe, but usually that universe doesn’t launch all at once. What was your first reaction?
Well, definitely I knew it was going to be huge and sweeping. I think that having the fact that Bill Jemas was involved and that obviously he had done some similar things during his time at Marvel made me feel better about it.
And at first there were some hiccups as far as everybody getting on the same page, but after a few conference calls and a few big meetings that we all had, I think just about everybody got off on the right foot.
How has it been working with Jemas?
It’s funny: When he was doing The Ultimates was probably toward the very end of when I was reading superhero comicsalot. I didn’t know who he was at the time because I was just interested in reading the comics. And I didn’t know about Bill Jemas when I started working for him; all I knew is that he’d been heavily involved with Marvel. Since I’ve been, obviously I’ve read lots of things. But Bill’s awesome. He’s a super-cool guy, he’s down to Earth.
We do monthly story meetings, so I get to sit down with him and all the other guys working over stuff. I’ve had a lot of fun working with him. It’s cool, because since this is such a huge universe and like you said it’s all launching at the same time, I thin kit’s important to have a honcho, somebody who knows what they want and can kind of direct people to get there. You’re not just making a shared universe; you’re coming up with a storytelling style and what kind of stories you want to make here, all the things you deal with when you’re starting a new press, even if its’ just one or two titles.
With both Bill’s involvement and and size and scope, do you think that all of those other things have made the idea of sequellizing one of the most well-known properties in entertainment more or less intimidating?
For me, I do small press stuff where we fight tooth and nail for eyes, just getting people to read it in the first place is the hardest part. So coming in with all this other stuff is just a boon as far as I’m concerned. You can’t buy this kind of stuff. People pretty much, whether they come in with their own ideas off the bat, they’ve still heard about it. I’m just glad that we have it. We’ll sink or swim based on the quality of the wor, but it’s just nice to have eyes on it.
With Z-Men in particular, what is the most interesting aspect of trying to get your head around working with Presidents and larger-than-life agencies and the like?
Personally as a writer and as a reader, I love historical fiction. The trick was that you have these larger than life characters — you’ve got Lyndon Johnson, you’ve got McNamara — and you’re using them to frame everything that’s going on. That’s a little easier, actually, than these two guys who are on the ground in Pennslyvania. My challenge actually was making their stuff as interesting as the stuff we’re getting from kind of inside Washington, D.C. So the trick was not to overdo it with D.C. but to use it to give you a little bit of the big picture.
One of my favorite things about the original Night of the Living Dead is that towards the end, we get all this different info and conflicting reports and I love how you can see the spread of disinformation. So part of the Z-Men is that they’re there to gather facts and then go up the chain and see how that kind of whisper down the lane develops into, pretty much, chaos.
Rise, on the other hand, actually uses a scene straight out of Night of the Living Dead, and yet the look and feel of the art is a little different from the rest of the books in the line. It almost looks a bit like Mike Allred’s iZombie or something. Was that planned, or was that kind of a luck of the draw thing?
Yeah, it really was a luck of the draw thing. I can’t speak for everyone, but we have a layout artist, and then we have a penciler-slash-finisher. [The look of Rise] really was a happy accident; I really dug the artwork.
I don’t know how technical you are; I’m a writer, but I’m also an artist as well, and the coloring of the line, traditionally in comics, you have a dark black line, whereas the coloring in Rise is dependent on what color the art is.
You’re right; I hadn’t thought about it but now that you connect it to Allred’s stuff, I can totally see that. Those are both styles that I dig and I think it helps set it apart from all the other books they’ve got coming out right now.
