Monkeybrain's Adam P. Knave on Artful Daggers [Exclusive]

Last night, ComicBook.com spoke with comics writer Adam P. Knave, whose two series Amelia Cole and the Hidden War and Artful Daggers comprise the entirety of Monkeybrain Comics's output today. In celebration of Adam P. Knave Day, we discussed the new arc of his remarkably fun Amelia Cole magic-and-adventure series this morning, and now we'll dig into Artful Daggers. The series has garnered critical acclaim and was the source of much enthusiasm at Monkeybrain around the time of its release, but this writer hadn't actually read any of the series yet before speaking to Knave. As such, there's not much need for an introduction, as our conversation comes in at the ground floor... To see preview pages or buy copies of Artful Daggers, click here. ComicBook.com: Tell me a little bit about Artful Daggers - I haven't read any of it yet. Adam P. Knave: Artful Daggers started as a joke on Twitter. I had met Sean E. Williams about a year before and we really got along--we had the same kind of sense of story.

I joked on Twitter, "Dear Universe, at some point Sean and I will write a medieval assassin comic book." And Sean just hit me back and said, "Okay, let's do it!" And we started talking--we looped in Andrew Losq, who Sean knows, and we started to figure out this idea. What should this actually look like? Early on, we hit on the idea of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It really was Sean who found that key and I just kind of grabbed on for dear life. The book is an unofficial sequel in a certain sense of Connecticut Yankee, as in it takes place in a world where Connecticut Yankee has happened. So you have this time in England that suddenly has advanced technology and how does that warp everything? What we follow is a group called the Tricksters who are essentially corporate raiders because in the world--and you start to see this in Twain's novel--corporations start to replace fiefdoms. And obviously once you have corporations going, you have intellectual property and you start wanting to steal things just to get ahead...and you hire the Tricksters to do that. ComicBook.com: Let me just say before we go any further that Twitter is just a fantastic water cooler for Monkeybrain, because Code Monkey Save World happened almost exactly the same way.

Knave: There are a lot of creators on Twitter and a lot of us make jokes and sometimes they're taken seriously. I have a novel that I have to start work on, that will probably show up as a Kickstarter thing soon, that came about because I made a joke on Twitter and then I took it seriously. I was like, "You know? I could actually do that!" Twitter is a great place for people to be able to think out loud, and to be honest a lot of your creative ideas are silly little things that you're just like, "You know what? That works." ComicBook.com: Is it a little bit easier to pitch Artful Daggers to new readers than something like Amelia Cole because of new readers because of the Twain connection? Knave: It totally is. To use Amelia Cole as a perfect example, you try to pitch Amelia Cole and you get kind of lost in this--"Well there's magic but it's like an old pulp serial but it's also a female lead who always keeps her clothes on." And all of these things are important, but trying to sum that up very quickly can be hard. Artful Daggers has a built-in cultural shorthand. "This takes place fifty years after Connecticut Yankee." And it's fifty years so that we could start to get away from being a direct sequel and see how it affects the world but not so far that it's completely myth. It's just starting to become myth.

ComicBook.com: That sounds a lot like Brian K. Vaughan's The Escapists, which is kind of a semi-sequel to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Knave: Using Twain is--I don't want to say easy, but Twain single-handedly invented what we think of as American literature. He's one of the best writers to ever have lived, hands-down. So when you start by basing stuff off of Twain, you have a huge leg up because you know that the base that you're working from is sound. So there was still a ton of work--we had to sit there and go through the entire book and every bit of technology that was introduced and then do a whole bunch of weird research about what could have been developed from that in fifty years given the tools that they had, both in terms of society and technology. So there's still a lot of legwork to do and sometimes Twain, who was not an engineer, was sort of wrong. And that's okay--we'll take his version of things, but it gives you a nice starting place and again, Twain is so well-known that it gives you a really easy pitch. ComicBook.com: One of the things that's been nagging at me as a non-reader was that I had wondered why the title sounded so much like "Artful Dodger." The connection to 1800s literature kind of makes sense of that.

Knave: Right--and of course the joke is that we have a title that launches off something that is not Twain. But it was the right title. It has a sense of style inherent in the title somehow; it just gives us that little twist. Now, to be fair--while Amelia Cole is what we consider an all-ages book--it's rated 12+ on ComiXology but I know that we have at least one fan who is seven; I can't speak to whether that's appropriate or not, parents should check this out first but there you go. Artful Daggers is 15 and up. It is a  darker story by its own design. It's a book about assassins--you can't really go too cuddly.