We spoke with cjwardart, patric_reynolds, and Heather Moore about their new ImageComics vampire series Blood-Stained Teeth. Check out our talk and preview below!
Blood-Stained Teeth is a brand new series from Image Comics that will explore the seedy world of vampires, the class battles between them, and the lengths they'll go to make money. The unique spin on the genre from Christian Ward, Patric Reynolds, and Heather Moore is a fang-filled crime book with plenty of twists along the way.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. And, obviously, good horror comes from anger. When I realized that the story would work better as a mirror to our world, that was when I realized that it wouldn't necessarily work with my art, which is more about escapism and fantasy. That's when I started to keep my eyes open for an artist that would bring a sense of reality to the story and help sell those themes and that discussion to the readers.
I knew that Christian was a pretty good writer and was awesome, so I knew that if the concept was cool, I'd be totally fine with it. I would be totally cool letting him roll with it, because he's also a lot smarter than I am, and I'm kind of illiterate. So, I knew that if he has a great seed of an idea, we could do anything with it. And when he said,"Vampires, but billionaires," I was like,"Yeah!" Because that's kind of what they are.
Heather, what was it like to work on this book? Patric's art style is very unique, and the colors and textures you use are goregous. What was that experience like? I really wanted to just explore that hierarchy of snobbery; an almost kind of interspecies racism, which I thought would be quite an interesting way of looking at it. And without giving too much away, readers will see most of our First Borns are old white men strangely enough. Then the SIPs are a little bit more ethnically diverse, and obviously the humans are just us.
Our main character, Atticus Sloane, doesn't really belong anywhere. He's not really a First Born, he's not really a SIP; he's on his own and going rogue. But he doesn't really fit; he doesn't belong in the high society of vampires even though he has a lot of money. So, there's a conflict within him because all that he really has is his best friend, Joey. It's that character dynamic, that carries the emotional arc of the series.
Heather Moore: I definitely try to bring that into the color work as well. One of the things that I was doing was exploring the hierarchy of the color wheel, and then seeing how that could operate as a visual representation of economic exploitation. I was thinking about primary colors and our First Borns, and like Christian and Patric have said about Sloane, he transitions through the hierarchy of the color wheel for me.
And Joey, his familiar, is almost like his pimp in many ways. He's there to help him facilitate this transaction, and it's what he needs to do just to survive and stay afloat. He has to constantly do it, because the money he goes through runs out really quickly. He has this weird push-pull with human culture, because he hates humans - he has to. He's a vampire, and you're supposed to hate humans as a vampire. But there's this little bit of him that is kind of in love with the culture. One of the first times we see him in the book, he's putting on some vinyl. He's almost like an accidental hipster, which he can't kind of quite help.
Through the course of the series, he actually does figure out that's what a person would do, and that's what a person would feel. And that's why I think he becomes a really cool and compelling character, because he sloughs up all the cosplay and all the cool stuff to actually be a person and make human decisions instead of just make money.
I wanted to honor all of that. And as we go through the issues, there's definitely going to be winks to specific things that we're going to be playing at. That'll be a link to this, this will be a link for that. I've always believed that world-building is really important. but world-building is not a story. The story is when you break the world that you've built, so that's kind of the approach. You're building the world and breaking it, and that's where the story comes from.
But in regards to the your question about trust, it comes down to the initial choice and the initial selection. Once I've chosen - in this case, Patric and Heather - that's the hard part done. That's it, then; we go. Because I know at that point that I've chosen the right people for the job, who will do their best work, and I can just trust them to do their best work.
Heather Moore: It's been incredible. Just to echo what Christian said, he is an artist so he has an understanding of the collaborative process. And he's been in the industry for so long already. He is wonderful to work with, giving us the space to explore and telling us to get experimental. He's really not putting any reins on the expectation.
Heather's colors do that, but they also add another layer of reality and meaning to it. They're literally breaking the picture plane with patterns to denote an emotional moment or character, or they're literally tearing through the visual space. The colors become a personality in and of themselves, and they exist not only with the world that that I drew, but also on their own.
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