Dave Baker on the Dark (and Too-Real) World of Alex Ziritt’s Night Hunters

Next month, Action Hospital and F–k Off Squad writer Dave Baker has a lot going on. The writer, artist, and podcaster has a licensed IDW series — Star Trek Voyager: Seven’s Reckoning — as well as another creator owned series, Night Hunters, with artist Alex Ziritt, who was key to driving the series’ creation and development. Ziritt lives in Venezuela, where the book is set (although the comic takes place a century from now), and Baker says that part of the concept behind the book was just to make “the absolute best Alexis Ziritt comic ever made.” Ziritt is best known for his work on books like Head Lopper and Space Riders.

A dark and ambitious story, Baker notes in an afterword published in the first issue that Ziritt and he had no idea when they started creating the book that so many of its dystopian themes would be urgently relevant to the real world when the book was published. The story centers on a pair of brothers, one of whom is a cop and one of whom is a drug dealer, who stumble across each other after years apart.

As Baker describes it, “Night Hunters is a dystopian crime thriller, that takes place in Venezuela 100 years in the future. We follow two brothers as they most navigate the seedy underworld and negotiate a new law. If you want to run for public office, have a baby in a hospital, or rent an apartment, you have to have been or currently be a police officer. The two central characters end up on opposite sides of this law and the high stakes action goes from there.”

Baker gave the lion’s share of the credit to Ziritt, saying that he was, essentially, there to help the artist do his best work, and that while he helped ot “sculpt” the world with Ziritt, the characters and tone of the book all flowed from Ziritt.

“I just wanted to tell a story that served as a backbone for Alexis to make a career high point level work,” Baker told ComicBook.com.

In addition to his own work and his corporate work, Baker contributed to the Sh-tty Watchmen and Sh-tty Dark Knight anthologies — formalist exercises in which a number of cartoonists including familiar names like Jim Mahfood recreated comics masterworks with minimal effort, in an effort to demonstrate the power of their page composition, flow, and visual storytelling. That interest in form helps to inform Baker’s work, and was key to some of the surprising creative choices that came along during the writing of Night Hunters.

“Even just the question of telling a ‘straightforward story’ is like… what does that really mean?” Baker explained. “The question you’re really asking is ‘Why Aren’t You Just Interested In Using Narrative Mechanics Like The Filmic Ones We’re All Used To?’ The answer to which is: I want to push boundaries. I’m an artist, right? I wish there was an army of people who were as invested in furthering The Medium as me and some of my friends are. But the money isn’t here. It’s in film. So that causes all these really ambitionless stories to be created using the language of another medium. I get it, comics and film are kissing cousins. They share loads of similar storytelling ability. But you’d never ask a novelist ‘why are you interested in semi-colons? Can’t you just make clean sentences that ends with a period?’ Comics is the medium that chose me. It’s infinitely complex. And the surface of that potential has only just barely been scratched.”

Something else that has just been scratched — the depth of the world in which Night Hunters exists. Ziritt and Baker have built a complex and textured world that, per Baker, they’re going to keep at least partially to themselves for now, in case they want to follow up the series.

“We talked at length about what the world would be like, how things needed to evolve and just exactly what our intentions were. We also have some additional ideas of what we could do with sequels or prequels, so I don’t want to say too much. But we’ve discussed some cool things.”

The world of Night Hunters is violent, surreal…and more than a little familiar these days. It’s something that Baker and Ziritt could not possibly have predicted, and they’re hoping that reading a story that takes the chaos of the world to an absurd extreme helps people compartmentalize some of what’s going on in 2020.

“When we started this project we were really constructing a 2000AD genre piece of science fiction,” Baker said. “We were making something that was 15 minutes into the future. A nightmare scenario, but now… it’s like we’re literally living it. Like I can absolutely see some of the aspects of our book coming to fruition. In fact, some of the stuff in the book makes MORE sense than the shit that’s actually happened. I have no fucking idea why wearing a mask is a political act. It’s bare bones common sense to listen to scientists. I don’t know when a visual representation of empathy and solidarity with our fellow humans evolved into a sign of weakness for some people.”

He added, “It was all written before Alexis even started, and he’s in the middle of drawing issue four currently. In many ways that makes it EVEN weirder because there are so many strange synchronicities that literally weren’t planned at all. It’s almost like the universe heard Alexis and I plugging away on our strange little book and was like “Oh, hell no, Hold my beer.”

You can get Night Hunters on November 25 at your local comic shop.