Tom Taylor and Jon Sommariva Put a Dark Spin on Peter Pan in Neverlanders

Comic book fans are probably familiar with the works of Tom Taylor. The prolific writer has penned stories featuring some of the biggest names at Marvel and DC, including Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the Justice League, the X-Men, and Avengers. Instead of only focusing solely on work-for-hire projects, Taylor also dabbles in creator-owned stories. One of his newest collaborations is Neverlanders with artist Jon Sommariva, which is described as “a gritty modern fantasy tale set in the world of Peter Pan” that is scheduled to be a series of young adult graphic novels.

ComicBook.com spoke to Tom Taylor about reinventing the Peter Pan story for Neverlanders, pitching the series to Jon Sommariva, the Lost Ones replacing the Lost Boys, and plans for future volumes. Neverlanders comes from Penguin Random House’s Razorbill imprint and is available now.

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Reimagining Peter Pan

ComicBook.com: To start things off, can you discuss what led you to choose Peter Pan as a story you wanted to reimagine?

Tom Taylor: I grew up with Peter Pan. It was one of those stories. It was the boy who could fly and the boy who didn’t have to grow up. And I think for every child, there’s something very, very appealing about that. Lots of kids really want to grow up, and want to be adults, want responsibility, and want to be able to do what adults can do, but a big part of them really does not want any of that. That idea of forever young, there’s something really enticing about that. To bring that to a modern world and not have a group of Lost Boys, but have a group of Lost Ones, I think it was just this idea that started coming to me. I’m like, “Oh yeah, there’s definitely something here.”

I read that when you pitched Neverlanders to artist Jon Sommariva, you were on vacation with your family. Were there any specific ideas that he brought to the project that you were both workshopping out in the early stages?

So I was in Fiji with my wife. It was just the two of us, actually. It was our anniversary and I was not supposed to be working. It was, I don’t know, 1:00 AM or 3:00 AM. I’m on a tropical island. I’m basically in Neverland. And so I started writing this idea down and by the end of it, I think I’d filled two or three hotel notepads with these ideas and I was messaging them and it suddenly came to me. Jon Sommariva, who I’d wanted to work with for years, and I just knew he’d turn this into something incredible. And I started messaging him in the middle of the night in Fiji, and he was just instantly excited. And I was sort of teasing him out. I was doing this thing where… I used to be a professional juggler and fire eater, so I know how to sort of hold an audience.

And so I’d hit him with the twists. He’d be like, “Oh my God.” We’re going back and forth, and he was sending me sketches by the time I woke up the next morning. And so as soon as he started coming up with characters, that was when they started coming alive for me. For Bee and Justin and Gracie and Luz and Felix, like Paco, they were there and they’re alive, and they’re much easier to write. Often you are writing and by yourself when you’re starting to get an idea, but to have Jon Sommariva literally sending me art and sending me images of Neverland and stuff within hours of me coming up with this idea, it lit a fire under me.

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Neverlanders Cast

When you were creating the cast, was there a character whose part took on a life of their own and grew as you were working on the script?

Gracie, who is the youngest member of the Lost Ones, and the funniest, and the sort of wackiest, and the cutest, and the one you want to fall in love with. She’s just instantly that character that I love. That character just wants to be friends with everybody, but she doesn’t put up with anything, and she’s very loyal. And she’s that kind of character, like Harley Quinn, who owns every single scene she’s in. She steals every scene she’s in really, but in a great way.

I guess if Neverland was created for one person, I feel like Gracie would be the person that Neverland was specifically made for. She just eats it all up and takes it all in, and doesn’t question anything. She’s definitely a character that at least I definitely enjoy reading. I’m sure other readers will as well.

Oh, that’s really nice to hear man. She’s the excitement and the enthusiasm. And there’s actually a section right at the start of the book before they get anywhere near Neverland, where something sort of nasty happens in our world, and Bee kind of pretends it hasn’t happened because she doesn’t want Gracie to have to grow up. And so that’s a little precursor to what’s coming. Gracie’s relationship with Tinker Bell and with Ashera the mermaid… Gracie says she had a doll and she bought a fish from the market. She cut the doll’s legs off and stuck on the fishtail. And then she gets to be friends with a mermaid. It’s great.

Justin and Bee’s characters seem ripe for exploration. What should readers look forward to when it comes to those two, specifically, as the story continues?

So Bee and Justin, obviously, I think a lot of people felt that this book was going to be all about Bee. Obviously, she’s central, and it is really a large part of her story, but it’s actually Justin who seems to have more of the mentor here with Rob. He is the guy who is there and he is reluctantly there.

He’s the guy who has something really quite traumatic happen in his life at one stage, and feels fiercely protective of his found family of all the children that he lives with in the junkyard. Justin knows going into a different place, into a different world that he can’t control, he feels like he really has to step in. Obviously, Bee, what we find out with her, I don’t want to spoil too much, but some big things happen for her and Neverland that nobody really saw coming, which is great. And every time someone reads it, they’re like, “Oh my God.” I’m like, “Yeah, right?” So Bee has a lot to come, but both… Certainly with book two, there’s going to be a lot of character growth for both of those characters. There’s going to be a lot more Bee in book two, but big things are coming for Justin as well.

I like how you mentioned Bee is front and center, at least in the cover art and whatnot, but you and Jon do a good job of spreading the page width to all the different characters, making sure everyone gets a chance to shine, and not one person seems to overshadow the others. So you definitely do a great job of spreading the wealth around.

I’m really glad you think so, man. It was one of those things that we had discussed characters, and we all love them. We like all these characters, we’ve been with these guys for, I don’t know how long we’ve been working on this book… two and a half years, maybe longer. So we’ve worked on this book for years. We wanted Felix and Luz and Tink and all these characters to have big moments for themselves, Rob, and even the crocodile, Agatha. The crocodile, she gets awesome moments. It was really important to us that they all got these moments to shine and weren’t just a cast of characters. We wanted all of them to have stories, and we want that to continue in the next book as well.

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Abernathy and Robb’s History, Future Volumes

And again, not to spoil too much, but there’s obviously a twist at a certain point in the story. How much backstory will readers get to see between Abernathy and Robb in the future volumes?

Well, it all depends. Certainly, I know what’s happened. So this book is very twisty, and there’s another twist coming in book two. There’s something else which people will hopefully be like, “Oh, that’s so cool,” and cheering on the sidelines for. And just in that reveal, we’ll actually reveal some of the backstory of what’s happened between Robb and Abernathy, these other characters in Neverland that we meet in book one. So yes, for any readers out there going, “Oh my God, what?” Yeah, don’t worry. We are planning to exploit that.

How many books are you hoping to release in this universe?

Look, we signed a two-book deal with Penguin. Whether that continues on will depend entirely on readers and how they react to this. And if we get the sales that we hope we will, and certainly if we get the readership we hope we will. We really hope this resonates with a lot of people. I think so far, everybody who’s read it has loved it, which is a great thing. We haven’t had a lot of criticism yet. It’s just been really, really well received, which we couldn’t be happier about, but it all depends.

Jon and I are playing in a different space. I’m used to working in the comics world, and with DC, and at Marvel. Working with traditional publishing, we’re sort of out of our element, in a way, in this situation cause we’re completely lost. So we’re like, “I don’t know, who buys this? I guess we’ll find out soon.”

But hopefully, it finds a great audience and a great readership. And if it does, then the sky’s the limit. Our plan is not just to stick with Neverland. We’ve already introduced Otherland. But we have an idea for this series that this magical world that they go to, first started left, and straight on is wider than we can possibly understand, and it’s larger. And so we want to explore a universe and build a universe right there.

I like how you brought up Otherland because I see that being a sister spinoff series of just how Otherland came to be and how people, the adults ended up there.

See, now we need spinoff books. Yeah. I like the idea of Otherland, this place where adults run away to avoid responsibility. And it’s a place of greed and selfishness. I mean obviously Otherland, the entire story is an allegory for climate change. It’s about the gritty adults taking the heart and the future from the next generation. And so Otherland was a really big part of that. And how Jon drew it, how he came up with it to be literally the opposite in every way. There’s nothing alive there. It’s all industrial. It’s all polluting and dirty and dark and full of people looking lazy and scratching themselves in the streets. He really went for it.

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Working at Different Publishers

You mentioned some of your other work at the different publishers, and I love how you’re writing just a wide range of different genres from your work-for-hire stuff and your creator-owned. What’s a typical work day or a work week like for you? Are you splitting your days up between multiple projects? Or do you focus on, or at least try to focus on, one a day?

So what I do is I wake up at a certain point in time. Sometimes that will be 9, sometimes that’ll be midday. And then it’s just blind panic. That’s how I work. Just panic, just, “Oh my God, this needs to be done now.” I do try to concentrate on one thing a week. Obviously, when you’re working in comics, lettering comes in, they’ll be like, “Tom, this needs to be in the printers in an hour and a half.” And you’re in Australia and we’re in LA…

So things can derail, and obviously, because I’ve got so many projects, you need eyes on different things, at different times of the day. But I do try to work on one script a week, if I can. And actually, I’m really lucky. I work with a bunch of friends in different settings.

So I work with a guy called Gary Edwards who’s a publisher and a writer. He and I work in a cafe every Monday, and then I work at C.S. Pacat’s house every Wednesday, she’s a New York times Bestselling Fantasy Author. And so we work together. We just sit at her table and we get lunch, and we write as long as we need to in a day. And that could be all day and all night sort of thing.

And because she’s a great storyteller, we help each other out as we go. I’ve helped her with her book, she’s helped with comics, now she’s coming to write some comics for us at DC now, which is fantastic. And then on Thursdays, I work with Jay Kristoff and Pacat who are both uber-successful, fantasy authors, international bests sellers, and we just sit there and we catch up and we chat for too long. And then eventually we stick our headphones in and we all write our own things, and help each other out if we need it. So I think without that, I’d be a lot less productive.

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