Interview: Ben Blacker Talks the Witchcraft and Gender Politics of 'Hex Wives'

In the new Vertigo Comics title Hex Wives, witchcraft and gender politics collide in a story about [...]

In the new Vertigo Comics title Hex Wives, witchcraft and gender politics collide in a story about a powerful coven of witches who are trapped by an all-male group called the Architects -- a group that look to end a centuries-old war with the men coming out on top.

If the comic, which hits stores today, October 31st, sounds a bit like a horror take on real-life issues of gender equality, you're not wrong. Written by Ben Blacker with art by Mirka Andolfo, Hex Wives is part of the Vertigo imprint's relaunch and reinvention of the 25-year-old DC imprint that is focusing on new voices in comics with new characters and new worlds to explore. And with gender inequality, oppression, and gender politics at its center, Hex Wives certainly fits the bill. ComicBook.com recently spoke with Blacker about the feminist tone of Hex Wives, his challenges writing the story as a man, how he approached the witchcraft of the title, and his hopes for what readers take away from the book.

ComicBook.com: How would you describe Hex Wives?

Ben Blacker: It is Bewitched plus the Stepford Wives. It's the story of a powerful coven of witches who are being held against their will and knowledge by a cabal of men who use them and therefore try to control them. It's a documentary about gender politics.

hex wives 2
(Photo: Vertigo Comics)

I'm glad you mentioned that, because the gender politics is such a central kind of functioning feature of Hex Wives, and this is a story of female witches being imprisoned by these powerful, and I'm going to call them evil men, who are masquerading as their "husbands." There are probably going to be some readers group going to be like, "hey, isn't this a story that should have been written by a woman?" Did you have any concerns about the real-life gender politics of going into writing this title?

Oh, absolutely. I still do even as we move forward, it's, well a couple things. It's a topic that's important to me and that feels very personal to me. It's something I've wanted to talk about for a while as I saw, or really as I started to become more acutely aware of the way that my wife and my women friends were treated in the workplace, in relationships, wherever. It is a personal subject. It's something I really wanted to tackle. Yeah, I am a writer because I'm not a very good actor, and I want to play other parts. I can have as much empathy as possible as a writer and I'm still never going to get to the truth of any particular experience that isn't my own.

I took that responsibility very seriously and hopefully we covered some of it. By very early on in the process I asked that I have as many women's voices on this book as possible. I was put with Molly Mahan and Maggie Howell as my editors who are unbelievable collaborators. I feel like so many of the good ideas in this book came from them, including the title which came from Molly. Then we found Mirka Andolfo, who is the artist on the book who brought so much, she made these characters very real to me. As much as I was excited to write them before now I really felt -- after seeing her initial designs and getting the first issue -- I felt a real responsibility to these characters.

hex wives
(Photo: Vertigo Comics)

When it comes to the actual story itself for Hex Wives, where did that come from? What was the inspiration, or is there any specific idea or incident that really is kind of driving story, at least in terms of your creative process?

The impetus for the book was a couple of different things coming together in a way I didn't realize they were going to come together. The first was I was just watching TV and I caught an episode of Bewitched, which was a show that I absolutely loved when I was a kid. I would stay home sick from school and watch it in syndication. I was watching this episode, which was a pretty typical episode where Samantha Stephens had to get dinner on the table for her husband who was bringing his boss home at the end of the day. She was so worried about this thing and her mother Endora would come and tell her that she married beneath her and that dinner could be ready in a minute if you would just use magic, but she was not allowed to use magic. That struck me as being so bonkers that she was this crazy powerful witch who was so worried about what her husband wanted, and gave up so much of herself to be in this role. I'm was like, Endora was totally right. She did marry beneath her.

These witches are superior to humans. That was sort of kicking around in my head and this was five years ago or so. That was sort of kicking around in the back of my brain. Then I think I started having more frequent conversations with my wife, and with some friends, and then people I was working with about what it was to be a woman in the workplace, or in a relationship that wasn't working, or that kind of thing. They really got through the minutia of the reality of how women are treated very differently to men. I really started becoming aware of not the big things but a lot of the small things. These sort of ingrained ways that men behave that minimize or subjugate women, especially in the workplace.

In seeing that stuff and getting to talk about it more it made me angry. This book comes from a lot of anger. I think I learned a lot about writing from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a show I absolutely loved and have watched many times through. I think something struck me where I could take the lesson of Buffy of like, "oh, you can use metaphor to talk about issues that are important to you." I put these ideas together and that was sort of the beginning of the book. It was fairly well formed by the time I started having conversations with Vertigo about it. I knew pretty much what 25 issues of it would be, and it was always a comic. Even though my job is writing TV and movies, it just always felt like a comic to me. It felt like the best way to have the most control to tell the story, to have the fewest hands in it, to have the best collaborators for it, and to sort of sneak in the social messages through genre, through metaphor.

Witchcraft in general is kind of having a moment in entertainment again and it's oftentimes depicted as kind of the religious aspect or as a belief system. What was your research and your process like in coming to making witchcraft of Hex Wives different or in some ways possibly even similar to other portrayals of the craft?

I did this show, this stage show and podcast with my writing partner called The Thrilling Adventure Hour for over 10 years, and one of the pieces of that was the sort of horror-comedy thing where we would take the tropes of various stories, vampires, or Frankenstein, or whatever and find our turn on those tropes. The first step in approaching the witchcraft stuff was really to do that and look at what are the tropes of witches, which are a weird horror character in that there's no basis text for it. There's no Frankenstein. There's no Dracula for witches. What they are is an accumulation of myth, and folklore, and fictions, and nonfiction, from thousands of years going back to the Greeks. I started culling through all that stuff and looking at what makes for pop culture witches and the pointy hats and broomsticks and what are those things that keep coming back, and how do I find my take on those and make them intrinsic to the world of witchcraft in this specific story?

Broomsticks were a fun one, and it was a thing I've thought about a lot because it seems so silly that someone would ride on a broomstick, but when you start to take it apart there's something really interesting about the gender politics of it in that this is a domestic item that is being given to a woman of power but who is being called a monster, right? Witches basically fall under the monster trope. The ones doing the naming are the men, so it's this really loaded imagery, and so getting to sort of take that apart and then put it back together in a way that made sense for these witches was a lot of fun. There was a lot of that.

What are you hoping that readers will take away from Hex Wives?

Honestly, the answer kind of is first and foremost in my mind, it's not good to try to shove a message down someone's throat. Some of my favorite books, my favorite comics from when I was really into comics as a young person were Fables, and Star Man, and stories that were very much about the characters. They were interested in world building, but they were more interested in character building. The first thing I really hope that people walk away with is a love of these characters because I love these characters. After that, what I hope is that people get angry. I hope that they see, I can't imagine that no one is thinking about the way that, the terrible ways that men and women, and mostly men to women, treat each other. I don't think I'm saying anything new here. I think I'm just trying to be part of that conversation.

I hope that people can read it and say this isn't fair. Maybe I need to change. Maybe there's something I do that can change. First and foremost, I hope people just get a good horror story about characters that they grew up to love.

*****

Hex Wives #1 is on sale now.

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