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Inside Dark Horse's Astral Noir Dead Vengeance With Bill Morrison And Stephane Roux – A Preview With Process Art

Published Thu, 21 Aug 2014 16:00:00 -0500

by Hannah Means Shannon

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Dead Vengeance, a Dark Horse book long in the making by Bill Morrison and Stephane Roux, is arriving in January, but we are getting an extra-early look at some process art from Roux and some insight into the creative process from Morrison.

Now, Dead Vengeance is a noir supernatural comic steeped in genre tradition focusing on the return of a supposedly dead guy to take on his archenemy mobsters in 1930's through 1940's Detroit.

Dark Horse describe the book thus:

It's 1940 and a phony body on exhibit in a carnival sideshow suddenly springs to life and shambles away. Not so phony after all, he is John Doe, radio commentator and archenemy of Detroit's notorious Purple Gang. But why did he disappear in 1930, and why did the mayor, the mob, and the cops all want him dead?

Bill Morrison, a Detroit native, is a writer and artist best known as the co-founder of Bongo Comics, and work on their Simpsons comics, but his wife-ranging interest in the history and development of comic characters and the comics medium can be seen in his work.

Regarding his background in relationship to his work at Dark Horse, Morrison says:

I know that if people think of me at all, they usually also think of The Simpsons, so I'm really known more for writing humor than horror. But Dark Horse has always been very open minded with me. They've had me drawing Tex Avery comics, writing and drawing a Beatles Yellow Submarine adaptation, and yes, even writing horror comics for Creepy.

When we asked Morrison about the origin of Dead Vengeance as a concept, he said:

The idea for Dead Vengeance came from my desire to create a pulp-style hero with a macabre theme. As the story developed in my mind, it sort of wandered away from the idea of him being a crime-fighting adventurer though.

I also asked Morrison how he came up with character concepts for the comic, and he replied:

I had a visual in mind of a guy like The Shadow with features like a zombie. But I didn't want him to actually be a zombie. He had to be intelligent.

So I eventually hit on the idea that he's a guy who learns to time travel by way of sending his astral form into the future to take control of his own future body. He needs to go ten years into the future, but what he doesn't realize is that a decade in the future his body is dead. His astral form arrives at it's destination and he reanimates his own corpse.

So, basically, this is a comic with some very unusual ideas, but also some rather grand fusions of the horror and detective genres. Artist Stephane Roux was also willing to provide us with a window onto his creative development for the series in the form of some early artwork for issue #1.

Here is cover #2 for Dead Vengeance #1:

Here are some inks from the issue:

And for the page just above, we have the completed colors:

In addition, we have one more page showing the first stage of color processing: You've seen it first here–the coming together of the foundational elements of what will be Dead Vengeance. A big thanks to Bill Morrison and Stephane Roux for taking us on this mysterious tour.