Ben Blacker and Mirka Andolfo Talk Vertigo's 'Hex Wives'

Hex Wives from writer Ben Blacker and artist Mirka Andolfo launched today, bringing another strong [...]

Hex Wives from writer Ben Blacker and artist Mirka Andolfo launched today, bringing another strong voice to Vertigo's revitalized publishing line.

The series, which centers on Isadora, a suburban housewife who has no recollection of being a powerful witch at the center of a global struggle for dominance. Part The Stepford Wives, part Rosemary's Baby, the new project from the writer of Thrilling Adventure Hour is a potent metaphor for important discussions being had in America today.

Blacker and Andolfo joined ComicBook.com to discuss the series, which debuts today.

You're coming in at a time where it seems like everything at DC is getting essentially, not rebooted in the continuity sense, but everybody's getting a fresh face. How is it to be kind of part of that big influx of talent?

Ben Blacker: It's intimidating. I think if I had known that Hex Wives was going to be part of the Vertigo reboot I would have been so much more afraid to do it. Luckily Mark Doyle and Maggie and Molly, our editors, are such great collaborators, so easy to work with, that they really eased me into this.

This is the first thing I've written without a partner in 15 years. Now I have these amazing partners in Mirka and the editors and the colorists and everyone. It's intimidating.

Do you feel like there's more of you in a book like this than there is in something like Harley Quinn?

Mirka Andolfo: Probably a little bit because characters are built from zero. I can imagine them in a particular way. Obviously he gives me the ideas of the characters; it's more experimental, in some ways, and this is also the darkest thing I have done, so it's very interesting to draw.

Now, "dark" is a good word to kind to touch on, because I think of a lot of your work as being kind of very character-driven, and not necessarily light, but there's humor in it. I mean, you're doing stuff where the subject matter is dark. Do you had to adjust for that a little bit?

Blacker: No, that was actually part of why I wanted to do this one is, I've been in comedy a long time, and I've written for Marvel and for Dynamite and we've written Thrilling Adventure Hour comics, and I love writing superheroes, I love writing these big books, but I wanted to write something for grown-ups. And I wanted to write something that was about something.

I think Hex Wives accomplishes that. Still, it's important to me that nothing is ever so grim. Characters crack jokes because they're human, right? I mean, they have to be very human, they have to be real people.

I think that starts with the art, that you love them when you look at them. Like, you know that they're people. And then part of that is humans have a sense of humor, even in the darkest times, they can say something funny, for whatever reason, whether it's a defense or whether it's how they cope, or whatever it is. So while it is dark, and while it is weird, and while it is violent, and sexy and strange and upsetting, there is humor in it, because nobody is just one thing.

And from your perspective, when you're working on a book with a lot of high concept and almost mythology that comes implicit in it, how do you build the small moments to make them feel as big as the big moments?

Andolfo: I try to play with the dark in the sense of inking, try to make that panels resemble more horror. I try to tell the reader with the expressions, also. If a scene is very, very, very dark, I try to do with their hearts.

Blacker: We looked at movies like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and a little bit The Stepford Wives, but sort of the horror of the everyday. Especially in the first issue, you'll see these sort of very innocuous-seeming suburban scenes. But the hollowness of it and the emptiness of it, and the way that Mirka has the characters acting tells you there's something sinister going on. I'm so impressed with how the book looks.

Do you feel like the general sense of anxiety that everybody has right now makes a book like that feel particularly resonant?

Blacker: I think it's no mistake that horror as a genre is having its moment. I've always been a horror fan, and those movies that I mentioned early on were really big ones. Even Buffy was a huge influence on me, in that is showed me how to play horror as metaphor. I think people are finally cottoning to that. You know, I think we're finally getting to see that. Get Out is obviously a huge influence.

Yeah, we're anxious as a people right now. And I think all of the new Vertigo books show that, in one way or another. I think that's part of what's so impressive about the line, and this re-launch, is everybody's telling story that they're passionate about. Not just that they are passionate about telling a story with monsters, which I know, like Eric Esquivel is. But he's also passionate about telling a story about living on a border camp. So, everybody's telling something that's important to them both in genre and in theme.

Depending on how they are done, witches can be very feminist or very antifeminist. How do you balance it so that you are sure you're delivering what you set out to?

Blacker: Both in Thrilling Adventure Hour and now in Hex Wives, we always did a lot of research into sort of the tropes of horror. And, like, we know what Frankenstein is. We know what Dracula is, and we know sort of Dracula set the template for vampires, right? For witches, there's no template-setter. Witches as a horror trope, it's sort of a grab bag. And there's like, pointy hats and there's cauldrons and broomsticks, but a witch is not one thing. And that was really a fun way to find a way into it and sort of define who these women are, as women and as witches.

So I looked at some of my favorite pop-culture witches. We started with Samantha from Bewitched, which was sort of the jumping-off point for this. You know, what if she didn't know she was a powerful witch? What if she was being suburban housewife not by her own choice? But then we looked at Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and we looked at some of the American Horror Story coven witches, which I think did a lot of interesting things with witch tropes. And finding the pieces that could be turned, right?

Like, a broomstick is dumb trope. So how do we use a broomstick, or what does it signify to either make it part of the magic or to make it part of the thematic element, about like, it's a domestic implement that's been given to a woman. And she uses it as tool for magic. So taking the trope apart and sort of re-configuring it to empower the characters has been a really fun puzzle.

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