Today’s issue of Savage Dragon saw Malcolm teaming up with Captain Tootsie to fend off…
…well, Maxine and a bunch of college girls in a snowball fight.
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To be fair, they had Angel Dragon on their side, and she made a snowball as big as a car.
Anyway, the issue delved into some character beats that will reshape the relationships between the key members of the Dragon family, from Kevin to Angel to Malcolm and Maxine…and then left off on a cliffhanger that sets up an action-packed next issue.
Along the way, the issue brought Ant back to the forefront, teeing up more stories for her eventual comic.
Creator Erik Larsen joined ComicBook.com to discuss the issue, which hit the stands today. Spoilers follow, so if you have not read the issue yet, grab a copy and curl up with us to go through it.
This issue we see Ant back and delving into Ant mythology. Is this setting up for the long-promised Ant stand-alone series or have you decided to bring her story into Dragon more fully?
It’s more fodder for her eventual book. I’m not going to fold Ant’s story into Savage Dragon. I have enough going on and the two really don’t belong in one title (unless I go the Tales of Suspense Captain America/Iron Man route and do two separate features in one title). I think telling both characters’ story in one could get too complicated.
Angel’s behavior this issue feels like something that could have far-reaching implications. All Frank’s daughter needs to do is repeat any of what she has been told in school and things could get complicated. Is that something you want to play with or is this more about finally just getting things out in the open so it isn’t hanging over you?
I like complicating these characters’ lives and watching the fur fly. Angel wants to feel connected to Jackson the more time she spends with him. She does feel some ownership there. He’s her son. I also imagine the wheels are turning to some degree. She’s establishing a bond between Laila Darling and Tyrone and that can lead to more visits and possibly more than that. I would think all kinds of thoughts are crossing her mind at this point.
Malcolm and Maxine have cut them out of their sex lives — hell, Malcolm himself is on ice in that department and Angel’s got to be hatching all kinds of hair-brained schemes to get Malcolm back into her life.
Obviously for Malcolm and Maxine, they have been fighitng and strained for quite a while, even if their resolution feels to the reader like it didn’t take too long. Are you done exploring that or will it keep coming back?
There’ll be more to it than just that. What Maxine went through was traumatic and like any Survivor this doesn’t just go away with a snap of your fingers. This is a long, dark, uphill slop toward the light. Healing can come but the scars will be with her always. It’s like PTSD.
Frank mentions being out of vacation days, and he wants Angel to come back with him…but she is part of Freak Force, who are all now decked out in Canadian colors. Are we finally reaching a point where Malcolm and Maxine being in Canada is going to put real strains on the people around them, who seem to have just kind of relocated along with them in a lot of cases?
Angel fought alongside Freak Force but she’s not with them as a team member any more than Malcolm is. Freak Force hasn’t relocated to Canada. They’ll continue to be somewhat mobile and in and out of the book. Angel is free to come and go as she pleases. If she decides to follow Frank it could complicate matters but it’s not the end of the world and she can always go back to her old Battle Girl outfit.
It seems like Captain Tootsie knows how to make tech stuff work. Might he step into the Rex Dexter role a little bit and start helping Malcolm and Maxine?
It’s a possibility. Captain Tootsie is something of a blank slate. In some of the old Tootsie Roll ads he appeared to have superpowers while in others he just seemed to be a regular man in top physical condition. In his own short-lived title he casually mentioned that he had created a space ship called the Rocketeer as though it was no big deal and I kind of expanded on that.
I don’t want to necessarily change the character but there are a lot of gaps that can be filled in. Almost nothing was really established about him. He had no origin story and his only supporting cast was the Secret Legion — a bunch of kids. So there’s a lot I can play with here and having him take on that kind of role seems almost natural.
Is there a possibility that this cliffhanger is actually a PTSD manifestation of some kind and not literally true? Or has the solicitation for next issue pretty much already shown that to be impossible?
I don’t ever want to head down the “imaginary story” path. I have so few pages to play with and real time ticks by unrelentingly. If I don’t use that space to tell their story those moments are lost forever. But not every event stretches out for an entire issue.
I’ve been reading a lot of old comics, and they were not big on padding out stories the way many modern writers do. It wasn’t uncommon to get characters in and out of trouble in a six-page epic and tackle other problems in numerous other stories. The thought here was to open up the next issue with a bang and then work toward the cover story following its resolution. Amy Dragon will fight alone, as promised, but it won’t be her alone against the Monster Cock!
What made you decide to go with the flat coloring in the Ant story in the back?
I enjoy that kind of coloring technique. I fell in love with the coloring of the first two issue of the Incredible Hulk and Feature Book #51, which collected a bunch of Rip Kirby strips in color. Both utilized color knockouts extensively and I’ve taken that further still.
When I colored Herculian some years back I really had a ball making things huge blocks of random color and I found it a lot of fun to do and it gave it a very distinct look which nobody was doing. Others had traditional flat color here and there but color knockouts are almost unheard of. I also wanted to make it visually different from the lead story and using faux-newsprint and old school color limitations seemed an effective way to do that.
What was the story in the backup all about?
I’d written and drawn Spawn for about a year and one of the frustrations of that experience was Todd rewriting my dialogue. Now — I get that it’s his character and that was fine when it came to Spawn himself but my last issue featured not only Ant but Malcolm and Maxine Dragon as well — and he rewrote their dialogue! And this was after promising not to! I’d say that this was the final straw but that straw had occurred long before and I had already told him that I was leaving the title. The only reason I’d stuck it through was because we’d solicited a crossover and I didn’t want to disappoint readers who were looking forward to that.
In any case, I liked some of the back-and-forth exchanges with Malcolm and Maxine that I’d written and I wanted to see those in print as I’d intended and decided to run it with my original script, my initial ink pass (Todd added digital inks when it saw print in the pages of Spawn) and new colors.
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