Dead by Daylight’s first comic book hits shelves in May, but comics are far from the only thing developer Behaviour Interactive wants to do with Dead by Daylight’s universe. Players already have near-endless wishlists of licensed DLC characters and original ideas they’d like to see added to the game, and developers at Behaviour themselves have crossovers they’d like to pursue, too.
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The game’s a “museum of horror” of sorts, according to Dead by Daylight game director and Behaviour’s head of partnerships Mathieu Côté who spoke to ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview regarding this new Legion comic, and Côté and the rest of Behaviour have ambitions to expand that museum further still. From comics and possible TV adaptions to community pushes for Friday the 13th and Terrifier 2 collabs, we caught up with Côté to cover our most pressing questions.
ComicBook.com: I thought it was interesting that you decided to go with The Legion for the Killer in this first comic. Why The Legion?
Mathieu Côté: It’s a good question, but it’s also a question that really baffled us for a bit. We could have gone so many ways with that. We wanted to make sure that the first comic – because there will very likely be more, it’s such a cool medium, it’s such a great way to tell stories. Unless nobody wants to read it, which I can’t believe for a second, we’re going to do more. So, we thought we’d start with something that is self-contained and something that does not have necessarily ramifications throughout the whole of the Dead by Daylight universe. We wanted to really focus on a story that’s a little more intimate, a story that’s a little more relatable. And obviously, it’s got touches of supernatural and things that are bigger than you can comprehend, but it’s still very much teen angst. It’s a very relatable story. Hopefully not too relatable, but at least a little bit relatable.
And The Legion obviously is one of our original characters, but it’s also one of the very iconic ones. You can make arguments, and there are Clown mains who will argue for hours that the clown is the most iconic. Fair enough. There are a few that stand out. It could have been The Trapper or The Huntress. They probably are some of the biggest, loudest characters that we have. But The Legion is a really interesting one. And because of the way it’s built out of four different characters, we thought it would make for a really great origin story.
You also started with a Killer as opposed to a Survivor.
Absolutely. The Killers are, in a sense, the stars. They’re very much usually the most visually striking, but also in their storyline, it’s oftentimes a lot more thrilling. It’s a much more cinematic story as a general rule. I’m not saying that some of our Survivors do not have very, very interesting backstories, but again, they tend to be much more human and people that you have empathy for. I wouldn’t say that they’re victims because not all of them are just absolute. Some were just plucked and are now confused about why they’re there and they’re very much victims, like Dwight, for instance. But some have – especially the ones that were released in the last couple of years – much more of an agency in why they are part of the world of the entity and everything like that.
So those two could have been interesting choices. But we thought a Killer origin story was a great way to blend both narratives, because that’s the thing; once they’re in the world of the entity, they are devoid of humanity or whatever brought them to where they are. So The Trapper is no longer Evan Tanner, he is a different thing once he’s in the world of the entity. No matter how that person that he was got corrupted or transformed or forged into whatever he became, once he’s in there, that whole thing is gone now. Survivors are different. They keep quite a lot of what made them who they are, and they’re still very much human and relatable. That’s why even the Killers almost never talk because they’re done with that. So being able to talk about the Killers in a way of what they were, it was also a really interesting narrative space that we hadn’t explored before.
You mentioned the story of The Legion, and we know the story of The Legion through Tomes, through text, things like that. And this is a prequel comic. Is this going to be a retelling of the story we already know, or do you hope to expand on that?
We’re not changing the story. This is very much canon. You are going to see and read things that you’ve read or seen in some of the cinematics and some of the deep lore that we’ve provided. But it’s going to be expanded on. There’s going to be a lot more context and background, and a few key elements that were not mentioned before.
Will there be Survivors in this comic?
Pass.
Pass. Okay, we’ll pass on that.
That’s a very telling pass, but yeah.
You said Killers don’t talk very much. And I noticed some of the preview pages didn’t happen to have any dialogue in them. So is that something that’s indicative of the full book?
No, it’s not. They are moody teenagers and tend to grumble more than they talk, but still. There’s dialogue in there.
Were there any difficulties associated with that? Because when you play as Legion, they’re not chatting in the game.
Even when they get to a moment when they wear the masks and they do all these horrible things, they are not yet in the world of the entity. This is mostly happening in our world, if you will. And therefore, at that point, they are still very much just terrible, terrible humans. And so talking and all these things, they’re still very much a part of why they do what they do because they’re still four different people. There’s still sort of a group and there’s a dynamic in there, which is very interesting to tell the story of. Because that dynamic is certainly not fair, and it’s certainly not smooth all around.
What is your hope for The Legion as a character? How does this elevate that particular character?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I can’t say that we had set ourselves a great big objective of transcending how people perceive that character. But maybe a deeper understanding. For anybody who’s even slightly a fan, I expect that this will come with a lot more common ground for players to play with and share with these characters. I think that maybe for a lot of people out there, The Legion’s story, not everybody reads the backstory. Not everybody reads the lore and the tones and things like that, and therefore they might not be aware of who each of those characters are and how they got roped into the story. I expect that it’ll give people a lot more context and a lot more backstories to play with and share and really enjoy the minor points of that character.
What role do you feel the medium of a comic book plays in that? Why choose a comic book as opposed to something like longer animation?
There’s a couple of different reasons for that. One of them – which is again, a way of not saying things – is comic books can be talked about and produced rather quickly as opposed to other mediums which take a lot more time to come to fruition and therefore be announce-able. Every single medium that you ingest comes with a different way to portray emotions and a different way to bring the reader or the consumer into a different place. Personally, there’s stories that I love reading in comic book form. There’s some that I think a novel works better, and some games work better, and sometimes it’s a TV show that needs to be stretched over a long period. And sometimes it’s a short little movie and sometimes it’s anime. Depending on the stories, different mediums work better for this.
And so, we had an opportunity; we met with the really fine people at Titan Comics. They were excited about it. Then it sparked this idea of the origin story of The Legion as a standalone four-issue run. We just started with the perfect medium to tell that story. As you know, there’s a ton of other stories that we want to tell in Dead by Daylight, and there’s quite a few other mediums at our disposal for that. This is not the last one, but it’s not the last comic, either.
You send out surveys quite often to ask about players’ sentiments, things like that. Is this something that players have particularly expressed that they want?
It’s funny because when you look at those CSAT surveys, we see, for instance, there’s the now famous Hooked on You that came out of that because people requested it, which was a bit of a surprise for us. In this case, I can’t say that it was driven by the fact that people overwhelmingly requested comic books. I think that people would be as excited to see, like I said, TV shows or movies or animated series or a novel. All of these things are equally exciting for different reasons and for different people. This one came out just because we’re all nerds and we all like comic books, and for us, it was a dream come true to do a comic.
How would you measure this comic as a success? What is most important about it to be successful to you?
There are two responses to that. The official Behaviour employee response would be “if it’s a wide appeal and it sells out everywhere and people claim that it’s the best comic and they want more.” That’s a part of the response. Me, personally, in 30 years, when I’ll be sitting on my porch thinking back on this and wondering if it was a success, if I grab that comic from my shelf and read it and go, “Wow, this is just so cool.” And frankly, I’ve seen the pages, I’ve seen the script, I’ve seen the cover art that’s been done, and everything so far has been blowing me away. Already, I know that, for me, I’ll always put that in the huge success column because it’s just a labor of love.
We were lucky enough to find Nadia [Shammas], the writer, and she is a huge fan of Dead by Daylight. It showed from day one. We did not have to explain anything. Obviously, we would not have entered into this with a writer who had no idea what the world was. We could have probably gone with a very, very talented writer who knew a little bit and then helped them dig and do their research, blah, blah, blah. We had none of that to do with Nadia. She was already well-versed in everything, which was great.
Dead by Daylight can be a very tense and sometimes stressful experience. Is that something you wanted to translate to the comics, or did you want to translate a different kind of tone here?
I think it’s the right word to use because you’re right, the experience of playing Dead by Daylight is a stressful one. And obviously we’re not recreating a trial in this. That’s not what we’re doing. But the tone of the game as a whole – there’s a little bit of humor in there. There’s a little bit of quiet reflection, there’s a little bit of “what if?” and there’s a bit of different types of things. There’s horror for sure, there’s tension, but it’s a very specific kind of horror. It’s not explicit gore, it’s not a visceral painful one. It is more on the anticipation of the violence and seeing something terrible is about to happen and building up on that. And I think that in that respect, the comic is really, really close to that.
I noticed from the announcement about it that you are planning on giving away an in-game code that grants something. Can you tell me a little bit more about that decision?
It’s because we could. Literally, it’s because we own the game. Because we publish the game, it allows us to do whatever we want with that. We’ve always tried to be as generous as we can. And in this case, we’re like, “Oh, if you’re a fan of the game and you buy the comic book, why can’t we put a code in there? Can’t we just print a code?” It’s a book with words in it. It’s not going to be really hard. And in-game, we had to produce an asset for it, but it’s really cool.
For us, it was just a no-brainer. It has to come with a little something. It’s the full experience. If you’re just a fan of the comic, that’s fine. You don’t need to play the game. We’re okay, we love you still. But if you’re a fan of the game and you bought the comic because you think it’s cool, now you can showcase that in the game.
And The Legion is one of the DLC Killers – did you consider giving away The Legion? People would read the comic, love The Legion, now they play as them.
No. Honestly, it’s not something that was discussed or really occurred to us. It’s a bit much. We need to continue to make money to keep this game. And hopefully the comic book might even generate a little renewed interest in The Legion. And some people might get the character when they didn’t have it, but the character can be bought with Auric or with Shards anyway.
You mentioned a couple of other mediums, and I know you’re not going to sit here and tell me everything that you guys have planned.
Not at all.
But it seems like everything needs a universe these days. Everyone wants to turn their property into a universe. And in Dead by Daylight there’s the in-game lore from the Tomes, you have the dating sim spinoff, and now these comics. Does Dead by Daylight need its own universe?
Well, I put it the other way around. We already have a universe. Now, the question I guess is related to things like the MCU or the DCU or something like that where people decide to build an array of different mediums telling a common story. And if that’s the question, then yes, 100% percent. We already have built a universe. We already have built a lore that allows us to expand in many different ways. The beauty of the lore that we’ve created is that there are so many facets that are unknown. There are so many big questions in there, so many places where you look and you can’t see what’s in there. And that’s on purpose. It’s meant to be mysterious. It’s meant to have a lot of things that are incomprehensible. And so that allows us to tell the story by just showing you different facets of this thing from different angles, from different perspectives.
Therefore, that comic book, it fits really, really well within that. And yes, you could say that right now, Dead by Daylight has a couple of different windows that allow you to peer into our universe – Hooked on You and the comic and the game. And there will be other things that we create that allow you to glimpse more of that story, more of that universe. So, in that sense, we’ve already got that. It’s not on the scale of the Marvel universe, but I guess the pattern or whatever the process is, is something that is reminiscent, for sure.
Do you already have the next comic series in mind that you want to do?
I have one. I’d say we haven’t decided.
We’ve danced around these different mediums. When are we getting our Dead by Daylight TV show or anime? When is that going to be here? Because we have enough characters, we’ve got the story.
I know, I know. I wish I could tell you. I really wish I could give you a date or a timetable. I’ve got the popcorn ready, it’s over there. You’re absolutely right. I would love to be able to do that. Let’s say if I just scroll out and zoom out from this for a little bit. Like me, I’m sure you’ve seen more and more adaptations of video game universes being done as movies or series – especially series, like with The Witcher and Arcane, and now The Last of Us that’s playing – there’s a hunger for that. And fortunately for us, there is more and more of an understanding of the value and an understanding of the form in the people who are the TV and whatever, the movie industry. These people are getting a bigger understanding of that. There’s a bit more of a sensibility to the stories that we tell, what a good adaptation can look like. But yeah, that’s all I can say at this point.
You’ve overseen so many different Killers coming in the game. Do you still have a bucket list of something you’d like to see in Dead by Daylight?
Oh yeah. There are a couple in my list that I’ve been naming for the last seven years that are still not in the game.
Pennywise?
Yeah. Pennywise is still not in the game, and he’s still one of my favorite [ones] ever. We just released a really cool cosmetic pack where the Trapper has a really nice hockey mask done, because we’re Canadian, so hockey is very near and dear to us. But it’s not the right hockey mask, if I can be so blunt. Yeah, there’s a couple. I’m not going to say much, but I can tell you that there are a few coming that will blow your socks off. The list is getting shorter and shorter every day.
This is a bit of a curve ball for you, but I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of months. Steve Barton, he’s a producer on a movie called Terrifier 2, and he’s been very, very, very vocal about putting Art the Clown in Dead by Daylight.
I’ve noticed the noise. Yes.
What do you think about the noise? Have you seen Terrifier 2?
I have not, but I’ve familiarized myself with the character because I pay attention. I hear people. I don’t comment. I try to stay as quiet, and I don’t want to commit to anything. But yeah, I’ve seen it. I think it’s a really interesting character. I will leave it at that.
Am I wrong in assuming, that that character would have your vote to get into Dead by Daylight?
I haven’t seen Terrifier 2 in full. I like to see people get what people want to see in the game, and people like Art the Clown.
Fair enough, fair enough. I’d say that there’s a lot of fandom, especially in the horror world. There’s a lot of really intense fandom. And it’s interesting, because sometimes the more niche and unknown something is, the more fiery and passionate people are about it. Because they can make it their own, because there’s not that many people that love it. And for us, it’s always a bit of a conundrum because there’s a white-hot fiery passion for something. But at the same time, it’s because it’s so niche and unknown and cult, and therefore it doesn’t have the wide appeal that we want most of our things to do because we want them to be recognizable. Like when you do Resident Evil, everybody pays attention, and everybody knows what you’re talking about. If you do a really small, little unknown character … I’m not going to name one, but with these niche little things that have been done in horror that are so cool, it’s harder to get that big splash. So it’s tough.
But it is part of horror, and it is part of the love letter that we want to do for horror. Dead by Daylight, like I say all the time, is a museum built to horror to showcase all those different things. And it’s a mantle that we took on, and now we feel responsible for showcasing all these things. So, we need to have smaller things among them. We’ve done collaborations with Crypt TV at some point, which is arguably a much smaller thing, but they have such cool characters, and there’s really a strong cult following around. We’re going to continue to do this, but we really have this view. We really want to showcase all the different things that deserve to be in the museum of horror.
You mentioned Resident Evil, and you have worked with Resident Evil properties several times now. Resident Evil 4‘s remake is coming up. Is that something that’s on your radar?
It’s really cool. Yeah, it is. It’s a great game.
Is that something you’d like to incorporate, add to the game anymore?
The answer is, if anything has been announced publicly, I can be publicly enthusiastic about it. If it hasn’t been announced publicly, then I can’t say anything. So yeah, there you have it.
Dead by Daylight #1 will be available digitally and in comic shops on May 24th. Ahead of that release, you can check out our exclusive preview of the comic’s inside pages.
