Cape and Cowl Interview With Fantasy Writer Hal Johnson

Cape and Cowl Interview With Fantasy Writer Hal Johnson

Join Us as We Wax Lyrical on Fearsome Creatures, Superheroes, Comic-Con and More

By Alex Burns

Hal Johnson is a witty, charming and as it turns out, incredibly talented dude. I'm thrilled to share an extended interview with this swashbuckling creative writer and I'm incredibly thankful our paths crossed. On a recent visit to the Big Apple I exchanged emails with Johnson after a neat meeting in Midtown Comics. I held onto the bookmark Hal threw my way and his email address whilst also checking out his latest novel - 'Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods' a selection of nightmarish tales that I found perfect for freaking out my nephew and niece.

Once I'd settled back home, I made sure to get in touch with Hal and was rewarded greatly with a humorous email exchange and as a bonus, a really insightful interview. This is a Cape and Cowl first which is exciting for me but also I can't recommend Hal's work enough. I'm sure you'll enjoy reading but please make sure to check out all the info at the bottom of the article to keep up to date with all things Hal Johnson, including his first novel 'Immortal Lycanthropes' which, unsurprisingly, is also a winner.

So let's begin with the obvious, this is a new direction so after your previous work on Immortal Lycanthropes what made you want to change things up with Fearsome Creatures?

I’m not sure if I wanted to so much, it just ended up that way. Most decisions in my life are less “decisions” and more tripping over something and falling into a situation that seems, in retrospect, inevitable. I’ve always loved monsters and folklore, and the opportunity to write about folklore monsters, specifically the monsters of American lumberjacks, was too good to pass up.

But I have a lot of books in me, some of them in various states of being extruded. If anyone out there runs a publishing company and is interested in publishing an 800-page Pynchonian novel about insomnia, please contact my agent!
 
What's your favourite pick from the stories in this collection? 

I have a real soft spot for the snow wasset. The idea of a musteline creature that sheds its legs seasonally (I didn’t make that up, that’s a traditional wasset feature) is both so cute and so terrifying, and the basic story—I barely made that up, either, I just took the arctic fear from John Franklin’s explorer’s journals and added a Twilight-Zonish twist ending that’s traditionally told about several different particularly “tough” fearsome creatures, but which works well with the wasset, I think.

Ask me tomorrow, though, and I’ll end up picking a different story and a different creature. I’m flaky that way.

Immortal Lycanthropes and Fearsome Creatures share a similar tone would you say you've got a connected Hal Johnson universe going on, all events taking place in the same realm? 

You know, I do think it’s neat when authors do this, and minor characters pop up in book after book (Daniel Pinkwater is a particular favourite). But probably the two books have a consistent feel because I have a consistent worldview—a paranoid and despairing, but consistent, worldview—and I find it difficult to write about anything else. 

Who would you say are your main influences as a writer?

When I wrote Fearsome Creatures I was trying to channel both Edgar Allen Poe and Douglas Adams, at least in part because I consider Poe to be a funnier writer than he usually gets credit for, and Adams is scarier, and the mix I thought would work well together. But in general my main influences are Jorge Luis Borges, Saki, and maybe (comic books are such a big part of my life I can’t leave them out) Daniel Clowes.

...and as an artist?

I learned to draw by copying comics, especially Berke Breathed’s Bloom County and ’80s-era John Byrne. Actually, actually I learned to draw by practising in my youth six hours a day for twelve years, because that's what I did in school all day. But I should stress that I’m not a professional artist—the art in my books has always been by someone much more talented than I am (Teagan White in the first book and now Tom Mead). I just like to doodle, and this propensity lets me sketch in people’s books whenever I sign them. 

What inspired these ideas and where do you get your best work done? 

Fearsome Creatures is inspired by—some would say swiped from—a 1910 book of the same name by William T. Cox. I took the creatures from that book and made up stories about them, but I tried to use traditional folklore motifs in composing them. So these ideas are half swiped from American frontier tall tales or old fairy stories, and half just the most ridiculous and gothically terrifying thing I could think of at the moment. 

I do all my work, good and bad, sitting on the couch.

You recently appeared at NYC Comic-Con, how did you rate that experience?

ComicCon is like 30% great, and 30% stressful, and 40% crowded. I had fun looking through the back issues and watching the artists draw in artist’s alley, but I didn’t end up taking home very much, just some 1960s Superboy comics and a bronze Age series I’d never seen before, with the great title of Vengeance Squad.

What are your feelings on the argument that Comic Con has suffered since comic book properties have exerted such a dominance over cinema and television?

In the earlier days of Comic Con, all my friends used to go and it was a big social occasion for all the comic nerds of New York. Now, almost none of my friends go, either because just getting tickets has become such a difficult enterprise or because half the things you’d want to do at the con—such as seeing a panel or walking across the show floor—involve fighting a sea of people. It’s great that the industry is so popular and so healthy, and it’s exciting to see so many people so in love with comics or superheroes, but I can’t help but be nostalgic for the days when we were a smaller, closer-knit family.

I remember when the cast of the second Fantastic Four movie did a signing at a comic store nearby. Fans lined up for hours waiting for the signing to start, and then the cast showed up briefly, signed very few autographs, and then got hustled away by the handlers. People were furious! I could feel at that moment the wheel of power turning away from us. Usually a signing at a comic store is with an artist who needs the store as much as the store needs him. But Jessica Alba and her crew have no need for a local comic shop. They will do what they want, and there will be no one in the whole of the comics industry who can control them. Not the entire might of Marvel could compel Kevin Smith to write Daredevil: Bullseye #2.
 

Since we're on the subject, who's your pick for best superhero and why? 

Spider-man was the first super-hero I read in earnest — it was the mass-market paperback reprints of the Ditko era — and he’s still a favourite under Dan Slott’s pen. Spider-man is pretty much the perfect superhero: I won’t be the first person who points this out, but Spider-man doesn’t have a fake secret identity, like milquetoast Clark Kent or dissolute Bruce Wayne; he has a fake superhero identity. Peter Parker was a boy when he decided to pretend to be a man, a Spider-man. A lot of comic book characters have traditionally cracked wise (“Holy surfboards, Batman!”), but Spider-man is the one whose smart mouth is clearly compensating for a the terror of adolescence, for a grim and joyless life. Spider-man isn’t just stronger than Peter Parker: he’s more confidant and more responsible and more fun.And they managed to make a plausible explanation (amazing agility plus spider-sense—it’s plausible in comic book terms) for why he can dodge bullets.

Daredevil and Batman and Captain America have had great comic runs, but there’s an awful lot of suspension of disbelief when people are firing automatic weapons at them. Like you see Cyborg charging into gunfire, and the bullets always hit his metal parts, and never the skin. Lucky day, Cyborg!

I should also mention Supergirl, on whom I have a crush, and Ambush Bug, who has the most consistent run in comics: he’s never appeared in a bad comic! (At least until this year’s Covergence event.)

But what makes the cut as your all-time favourite comic book?

My favourite comic book is Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, as it has been since I first read it in junior high. It’s one of those unfortunate works that is influential enough that a glut of imitators risk making it seem irrelevant, but to me it’s still fresh, and still the most intelligent celebration of and condemnation of superheroes as a genre, with beautiful art, enormous stakes, and great fight scenes.

In the years since I read that, though, I’ve gravitated more towards alternative comics (such as Eightball and Love & Rockets) and classic comic strips.

The comic books I like reading now include The Fade Out, Saga, and Giant Days.

Which big superhero movie are you looking forward to next? If any!

Anything not by Zack Snyder.

It was great heading back to Midtown comics, comic shops aren't as ubiquitous here in the UK so it's always a real treat to browse a store like that, are these havens safe in a time of digital downloads?

Everyone knows digital comics cause leprosy. That’s just science.

I don’t want to say something facile like “People will always want their print comics.” When we’re all wire-heads in pods blissing through a virtual universe, it’s not like the printing presses will still be rolling. But for the near future, at least, comics have enough value to collectors, or are pleasant enough to read physically as opposed to digitally, that they’re not going anywhere. Sometimes this surprises me, but I can’t deny the evidence of my senses.

I had a small market stall to procure comics from when I was younger, What was your go to comic store growing up?
 
I’ve had several, because we moved around a lot, with the spinner rack at the grocery store filling in when necessary.

The first, and in my memories the best, of my comics stores was Comics Carnival in Indianapolis. They had a bargain box, where you could get 100 comics for $10, a small fortune to me at the time (I was like 6) – ostensibly these were trash comics, but they were the comics I loved: Archies, Harveys, and Gold Keys. They had some Dell comics going back to the 1950s! I saved up like a fiend, and the 100 comics I bought there one summer were the basis not only of my collection but also of all my knowledge of comics history. Even the way the comics format has changed over the years I picked up from sorting those 100 comics out by price, the older ten centers and twelve centers, all the way up to the modern age.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a translation of a novel from 1499, the Hypnerotomachia. I’m like 100 pages in, and so far about 98 of those pages are nothing but descriptions of architecture in minute detail. So it’s a little boring, to be honest. It’s also too big to fit in my pocket, so I’ve also been reading an 1800 collection of filthy—excuse me, bawdy—songs and poems by Robert Burns, The Merry Muses of Caledonia.

I realise these are pretty ridiculous answers, but the truth is I will read almost anything, no matter how bad, or good it is. I try to read more good than bad, but I have a weakness for stupid books and for weird books. Earlier this year I read Fifty Shades of Gray and also Huna: The Ancient Religion of Self-Improvement and also Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and each was terrible in its own way.

It's so interesting reading into how American folklore was shaped by a lot European concepts that crossed over and morphed into new ideas, the US is still relatively a very young country in terms of a documented history, does that help in terms of creative freedom? I mean for example, Dracula and Zombies have such an established world of set rules, it can be limiting, with Fearsome Creatures I was reminded of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a chance to explore some less familiar monsters, how do you feel about the Gothic genre?
 

This is a really interesting question. I remember, when I read Dracula, feeling like the book had been ruined. Dracula’s powers in the book make no sense, and I had grown used to thinking of vampires in Dungeons and Dragons terms—as having 8+3 Hit Dice and a fixed roster of powers. Whenever we encounter a vampire in a story now, we expect to learn its limitations and abilities: Does it sparkle? Can it cross running water? But this is probably a mistake, because Dracula is much scarier when he doesn’t make any sense. You can’t just figure Dracula out. You can’t plan how many days you have before his victims come back from the dead—it could be anything! Our post-Enlightenment rationality means nothing to a fifteenth century Transylvanian!

Traditional folklore is a lot more like Dracula than it is like a Dungeons and Dragons game. Giants and dragons have daughters that can pass as human. Dragons can be poisonous or fire breathing and winged or not, and sometimes fight with swords. Tom Thumb spends most of his time battling giants, which is absurd—his whole point is that next to Tom Thumb, anyone is a giant.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think any view of folktales that expects rules to be followed is a pretty modern view. The particular aspect of American folklore I was writing about—lumberjack monsters—is undocumented enough that I could pretty much get away with anything, but there’s plenty of Europe (and the rest of the world as well) that is similarly obscure, at least to English-speakers. Who’s going to call you out on messing with Albanian mythology, no matter what you say? (The dragon fighting with a sword I mentioned earlier is, incidentally, from one of Robert Elsie’s books on Albanian myth.) Similarly, any freedom I felt has less to do with the relative newness of lumberjack folklore than with the relative obscurity of lumberjacks.
 
These are some gothic writers I love—Edgar Allen Poe, Jan Potocki, and William Beckford, for example—but the genre was popular enough at its height that it produced its fair share of snoozers as well. I think I like the high-romantic Gothic trappings—windswept moors and paintings with eyes that move—more than Gothic texts. I blame a childhood spent watching Scooby-Doo.

...and finally, do you enjoy scarring little kids?

When I hunch my way down the street, strong men blanch and women make the sign of the cross. Children creep up, seeking to tease me, but as I whip my misshapen head around and fix my single, red-veined batrachian eye upon them, they turn and run screaming.

So I wouldn’t say I enjoy it, exactly, but I’ll take my pleasure where I can.

Not all of this answer may be literally true, but I thought my original response (“Yeah, sure I guess”) was boring.

For More on Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods check out the Official Site

These Chilling Tales are available on Amazon as well as Immortal Lycanthropes 

I'd like to personally thank Hal for his incredible patience during this very first Cape and Cowl interview and can't wait to see what else is in store for this uber-talented author.