INTERVIEW: Outsiders, Star Trek Writers Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly Unpack Their Horror Series, Principles of Necromancy

Creative writing super-team, Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, deep dive into their Magma Comix creator-owned series, Principles of Necromancy, as well as their many, many, many other projects for IDW, Marvel, and DC Comics.

After attending the Magma Comix panel at WonderCon 2024 and seeing Lanzing and Kelly passionately speak about their project for the new publisher, I sat down with them to chat about Principles of Necromancy, the panel, and the tremendously busy schedule they currently have.

(Interview edited for clarity.)

Creator-Owned Comics with Magma Comix

Multiverse of Color: You guys brought up really awesome points that I want to talk about from the panel. “Ethics in comic book making and making stories with this new publisher. Can you talk a little more about the decision to create this story with Magma?

Jackson Lanzing: This was an interesting example of a nice confluence of events. Sometimes, you do hold on to a comic for a while and really try to make sure that it feels like it’s going to the right publisher, because you have this special idea and it can only be in one place. Principles of Necromancy developed over our relationship with Magma in the early days as Denton had been asking us for a project. We had been so inundated in the Marvel and DC and Star Trek worlds, which is really where we live. 

We do, at any given time, between five and six, sometimes even seven superhero comics a month, it’s crazy. So it means you don’t have a lot of time to be doing creator-owned work and to be thinking about what to do when I’m finally free of my obligations, great obligations. Don’t get me wrong. They’re the things you want, but at the same time you miss doing that creator-owned work. So Denton came our way and said, “Hey, what do you want to do? You can do any book, Magma wants you guys come over, play creator-owned with us. Let’s do something fun.”

Truthfully, we didn’t really have the book that was ready for them right away. We had some things, but nothing was perfect. So as Magma built itself up, and as we got a sense of what they were doing, Collin and I looked at ourselves and used that as time to have these sort of ongoing conversations about what does this look like? What would be interesting?

Collin Kelly: The main thing there is as we’re working with Magma, though, you see in terms of “ethics”, and we’re putting air quotes on that, they’re a business. A lot of young publishers want to get something out the door to prove to their stockholders. To Magma’s immense credit, we were like, “Hey, guys, before we even do anything with you, we need to know that this business is real. We need to know that you guys aren’t trying to like you know, flim-flam your way into more investor VC.” 

To Denton’s [Denton Black] incredible credit, gave us the time to build the story while he in turn was getting all the contracts in place. So by the time we were able to finally sit down to actually do something, we knew that their company was rock solid, and we knew because they had been willing to wait. They wanted the best possible story, not a story to then pop up to their shareholders in order to try and encourage more financing. 

Lanzing: That’s what was really exciting about it, though, is that when we got to that place of “Hey, let’s talk about the story.” We had almost a year to kick around a narrative and start talking about what it would look like for us to do something in the horror space, something that played a counter-tune to a book that we also have coming out in April called, WIFWULF. A sort of like feminist folk horror, werewolf story. We wanted to do something that was almost like the masculine bend on that. Very kind of like Dark Souls, a gritty medical Frankenstein book and being able to say, “Okay, we’re going to do both WIFWULF and Principles at the same time, that really balances each other nicely.

We were able to just come directly to Magma at the end of that year, when they said, “Alright, guys, here’s the contract, we’re ready. What’s the book?” We’re able to turn around and send them just a single page. Here’s what the book is. We’ve been thinking a lot about it. Here’s the top lines, this work for you? They were like, Yes, this is great. The only thing they did was change the title of the book. When we first pitched, it was called ‘Necromancer’ and their one note was we call it something a little more medical like Principles of Necromancy. We’re like you geniuses, you mad geniuses.

MoC: Also, great for SEO. There’s other stuff called “necromancer.”

Lanzing: (laughs) In that particular case, they were thinking like a business.

MoC: You mentioned when you got your contract, you were surprised at how much you guys were receiving or owning. Can you guys elaborate more on that?

Kelly: You know, you don’t get into comics, first and foremost, you don’t get into comics to make money. 

Lanzing: No one does.

Kelly: Nor should you. You get into comics, because you love the craft. At the same time, we gotta eat and, more importantly, our artists need to eat right? As writers, as Jack says, we can do six, (I mean we shouldn’t) but we can do many scripts in the course of a month, artists can only do one. So when you find a publisher who is willing to put the money up front and say, “Look, we are willing to invest in this, we’re going to make sure that the entire team is taken care of.” So you don’t need to be drawing two books at once or having side hustles. Eamon can just focus on Principles and that was our entire conversation with Eamon. Like how much do you need in order to make this your job?

Lanzing: Eamon Winkle is the series artist on Principles of Necromancy. This is his first comic, in terms of his first ongoing, narrative series, it’s his first interior work. This book was going to, by its very nature, have to take a big swing on Eamon. We wanted to make sure that he had the amount of time that was necessary for him to make that worthwhile. So as a result, that really made for a great process for us, we went to Magma and we said, this is what we need. Magma  said, Great, let’s go and that was the end of that conversation. It was really just a beautiful confluence of their willingness and Eamon’s situation. 

We don’t really make a lot on a creator-owned book. That’s really not the point. The point is to pay that money out to our collaborators, have the book out and then have our rights that allow us to monetize that thing down the line. If and when that’s the right thing. None of us are doing this, again, for money. The point of this is to make a book, the book is done, which is incredible, and then you hope that you have some ownership over that thing when it comes out. A lot of creator-owned isn’t actually creator-owned; it’s what they call a creator-participated, right? It’s like, “Oh, you have your copyright, but we’ve taken the ownership of the rights. We are going to represent it in Hollywood. We are going to do our own thing. Our lawyers are going to handle it.”

Collin and I don’t- We don’t like to play like that. We already operate in Hollywood. We have lawyers, we have people who do this already for us. We have our own ecosystem. We have our own corporation, like there’s no real need for us to have to skirt behind another company, in order to make these inroads, we can make them ourselves. So instead, what we look to do [is see] where can we grab that part of the process, make sure that’s controlled three ways by us and by Eamon, and the creators are coming out on top. 

For most companies, that’s an ongoing conversation and you normally lose that, at least at some point in your build out. That isn’t the case with Magma. Magma didn’t want that stuff, straight from the very beginning. They were like, “We’re not interested in being a media company. We just want to make comics, so take your media rights,” and that was brilliant. Some things you’ve never seen, which was really, really cool to see. It’s a beautiful marriage of what they were looking for: talent that hadn’t been doing creator-owned in a bit, broken out in Marvel and DC, had some success. We were able to bring something to them, and then they were really able to bring that freedom and, frankly, that financing, to make something that we all want to make, without having to stress about how we were going to live while we were making it.

“Writers are the navigators. The artist is the whole starship.”

MoC: I actually was going to bring that up. You guys said these are Eamon’s first sequential interior pages and you guys have obviously worked with some huge artists. He’s a great artist and I want to talk about his art in a second, but what is the difference between working with an established artist versus someone who’s green like Eamon?

Lanzing: It’s a new adventure with every artist. I don’t think it actually depends on whether or not they’re more established or whether they’ve been doing this for five minutes, right? I think it’s about how that artist likes to work. Star Trek is a really great example of this; where we work with a lot of different artists in that book and the process kind of changes depending on the artist. How we work with Ramon Rosanas on this is different than how we work with Rachel Stott is different than how we work with Marcus To, who we have a decade-long plus friendship with. Versus like an artist who barely speaks English and is coming in and just trying to make this thing work. Sometimes you have a lot of correspondence, sometimes you have a little correspondence and then you see layouts. Sometimes you only see final pages, like everything’s different. 

The experience with Eamon has been wonderful, because unlike a lot of more established artists, and especially the artists who end up working with Marvel, DC, and Star Trek where you’re going through your editor; a lot of the time there’s a direct, constant line of communication between Eamon and Collin and myself. Every week, we all get on a phone call together and we just talk about the book. Eamon shows design, Eamon shows covers, Eamon shows pages. We tell him what’s coming up in the next issue. We brainstorm, we talk about what could be there, we look for places that he’ll get excited about when making a collaborative effort with him. While we do the same things that we do with every artist, because he is as much an owner of this project as either of us, it really behooves us all to constantly be on the same page and treat it like he just joined the band, which is something we really haven’t done since Marcus To, over on Joyride.

Kelly: Or Dailen [Ogden] on WIFWULF. We are Dailen’s backup dancers on WIFWULF and we shake it beautifully. 

That got a chuckle out of all of us.

Kelly: No, I mean, I know coming in to work with Eamon, because obviously he hadn’t done the sequentials, we took a swing on him. He was like, “Guys, I really think I can do this.” We said, “You know what? Prove it.” We kind of started with some hand-holding a little bit, let’s explore these ideas, but really quickly, it was clear that he was just one shot, one kill. His instincts are so dang good. Pretty soon we’re just like, this is not JV. There’s no training wheels needed. This guy’s fucking ready. So he’s just a pure collaborator and at this point getting to be much closer to a partner or a good bro. 

“Principles of Necromancy is the story of a dark fantasy world, where there is no magic, there are no wizards.”

MoC: When you guys first saw Eamon’s concepts for Principles did your writing change based on his art from seeing it?

Kelly: Our vision of Eyes was pretty specific. He did come at us with a few different kinds of takes; a little more square-jawed, a little more rugged, just different vibes. So dialing that into the gangly, lank-haired weirdo that he became, was really more us helping Eamon find where our vision was coming from. Then once he was on that page, we then we were off to the races. 

What I don’t think we expected was in issue two, Eloise. We didn’t really expect his ability to make these incredibly lovely, big-eyed, empathetic, softer characters. That really did influence the amount of weight we were able to take on and give to some of our supporting characters, who are so vital to how this story is told. It’s not just that he does gore, he breaks your heart and that is something, once we realized his power there, we were like oh my god yeah, man. Let’s not just tell a haunting story, let’s get some tears.

Lanzing: What’s cool about working with a new artist is that you’re figuring out how best to enable them. A lot of people have a misunderstanding of what comics writers do. Which is to say we get a lot of credit for choices that aren’t ours. I used this metaphor the other day and I think I might just stick to it. This might become a thing I say a lot. Writers are the navigators. The artist is the whole starship. It’s the whole thing. The art team is the actual product, without the product, without the thing, the engine and the hull and the life support and everything that’s gonna get you to that planet. You’re not gonna get there. That’s our job. Our job is to write a document that says in the coolest, possible way, here’s how we get to the planet. Here’s how it’s gonna go. Here’s the whole journey, then the starship actually has to do the work. 

So the premise of what we do is, you always have to learn how the starship works, what it does well, what it doesn’t do well, what its capabilities are, how to push it, how to do that Han Solo thing, where you hit the drive and then suddenly the Millennium Falcon is doing things that it couldn’t do previously? That’s what we do. We get in there and we try to inspire the best possible work out of a cavalcade of incredible artists and hope that the machine runs. That means that every single time it’s a learning experience. 

Learning with Eamon has been this cool process, because Eamon is also learning. Eamon isn’t a 40-year veteran who’s been doing this forever and has a way to do it. We worked with Kelley Jones on Batman several times now. Kelley Jones is like one of the reasons we got into comics, right? Sandman: Seasons of Mists started my comics life. Truly, I picked it up off my mom’s bookshelf and it changed my life. I will forever be indebted to Kelley. When you come into Kelly Jones, you’re just amazed that the starship is going where you told it to go. 

Kelly: It has an A.I. core. You can give it some directions. But that ship knows exactly how to get to where it wants. You can just say “space” and it’s like, oh, yeah, I know. 

Lanzing: It’s incredible, because he does actually go where you want it to go. He works with you and he sends you nice things that say, “I love the script” or whatever, which is insane. But he knows what he’s doing. You’re not gonna get in with Kelley and be like, okay, can we just change this panel or whatever? That’s really not normally the process. He just goes on autopilot, gets a script and he goes. 

With Eamon,  he does his layouts. We talked about his layouts. We talked about storytelling. The other day, he hit us up and he’s like, are you thinking this for this panel? Because we’ve been having some discussions. We’re like, no, so I got Collin and we took a photograph and sent him that photograph. Then the panel looks perfect, beautiful, great. He said back, thank you so much for sending that photograph. It helped me understand where you guys were going. He won’t need that in a few years, but we’re early enough in the process that we kind of get a front row seat to Eamon figuring out his own powers. That’s been really really cool. It’s a wonderful experience.

MoC: Collin, you mentioned that it was important for you guys to tell a full story in a single contained issue. Why is it important for you to tell a complete story within the 24 or 30 pages?

Kelly: Oh, for sure. That is kind of core to a lot of our storytelling in comics. Obviously, we love the serialized, deeper form stories. The truth of the matter is, you really don’t ever know when your story is going to end. So trying to tell a longer serialized story might end up either having to rush your ending or not getting an ending at all. The other extreme of that is making sure that every issue is its own contained story. As you know, everyone has heard this advice. This might be someone’s first comic and it’s a little frustrating, sometimes, when you need to encapsulate all of your everything into a single issue. At the same time, that challenge really forces you to look at where your emotions are gonna be landing. 

You can’t rely on someone to come back for a cliffhanger. We barely ever write cliffhanger comics. We want people to be able to get that full, emotional journey through every single issue. As for Principles itself, we’re doing this first arc, this first mini-series is four issues. We’ve known four issues from the start, which lets us tailor the story to four issues. Each issue takes the perspective of a different character looking in on Dr. Eyes’ life and over the course of these four issues. You will be able to make your own decisions and have observations about whether or not this is a good man. But we have been looking at this a lot like Hellboy, you can always do more Hellboy stories. They don’t need to happen one after the other, you can come back three years later and get another Hellboy story. I’d like to say the first four issues of Principles of Necromancy, it most likely will not be the last, but we’re gonna let the character breathe and exist in the space that he wants to. 

Lanzing: Yeah, a large part of what we try to do in comics is just make sure that we’re always exciting ourselves. There’s no reason to do this, unless we’re trying something new or something exciting or something breathtaking to ourselves, right? We really only want to do something when we can look at it and be like, “Damn, that’s good.” If we feel like we’re doing something and we’re just writing professional wrestling, not to diss professional wrestling, but we feel it’s the easy thing to go to in comics. Everybody’s superpowered, everybody looks awesome. You just want to see them fight. If you’re just going to that well a lot, maybe that’s really rewarding. If it hasn’t been for us. We need something more. By the time we get to script,  it’s like there’s nothing to write. What do we really do with this? It’s just a bunch of whiz-bang.

Kelly: And I love reading whiz-bang; give me that superhero comics. Hell yeah, man. Exactly, Jack. When it comes to writing it, you’re like, I know he punches bitchingly. Panel two: he gets punched, it’s bitchin’. To the starship of it all,  “Starship. Make bitchin’ go straight and fast”. We prefer to hit some gravity wells. You know, let’s do the Kessel Run and in 1.5 parsecs, which is not a matter of speed, but a matter of piloting. Because, fun fact, the Kessel Run involves diving and bending around a lot of black holes.

MoC: I’m not a big horror genre person but I enjoyed and read the first issue a few times, because it’s really haunting the way Kairn went from one man’s son to another in this mutated fashion, in a really gross way. I enjoyed the difference in the perspectives in the first issue, he’s very creepy, but in the second issue, he comes off as almost caring about Eloise. I’m curious as to why you guys chose to write it from random people’s perspectives versus from his perspective, which is the obvious choice.

Lanzing: Of course, yeah. So it’s interesting to frame it as “random people,” because they might appear that way. They pretty much are not, they’re built on a thematic basis for the story. But yes, within the world they are. So the reason we structured Principles the way that we did not only gives us a great opportunity to do these single issue comics that we’re talking about. By taking on a new point of view means that it’s going to take on a new tone. It’s gonna take on a new vibe, all that stuff that you want to make a single issue comic great. What this also does is it feeds into the very point of the book, which is that the Principles of Necromancy are being written by this man, this first necromancer in this world, in this era that we haven’t defined. 

We haven’t described what this book is yet in this interview. So for anybody who’s wondering: the Principles of Necromancy is the story of a dark fantasy world, where there is no magic, there are no wizards. There’s none of that genre stuff you imagine. It’s pretty much just like a straight medieval fantasy world with one sort of tangible; they have doctors like modern, medical doctors in place of what you would imagine as wizards. So the twenty doctors of the great City Hospital are these quote unquote magicians in this world, who use science to achieve magical means. There are horror stories about the youngest of them, Dr. Jakob Eyes, who is developing the Principles of Necromancy. He’s the world’s first necromancer meaning that he is going to medically cure death. He’s gonna do that with all kinds of horrible, crazy, insane, body horror stuff over the course of the book. But the question the book is asking you throughout is these Principles: this world-changing frontier of medicine and science, being developed by one man who you don’t know, who you don’t understand, whose backstory you are not given and whose intentions you only see from the outside. 

The only way that you as the audience as the reader are going to actually understand who he is, is by looking at how he affects the people around him, is looking at the ways in which Kairn and Eloise see behind those lenses on his eyes, but in a very different way. In issue three, you’ll see him from the perspective of the doctors at the City Hospital, you see him from the perspective of his mentors, and see what they think of him and what he means to them, which is very different than what he means to say, a barbarian test subject like Kairn or a protégé like Eloise. Every issue is going to ask you to reevaluate your opinion of Dr. Eyes. Is he a monster? Is he a madman? Is he a visionary? Is he a good person? Is he a bad person? Does it matter? All of these things are questions that we want to be digging into. 

While that might seem esoteric, for people who aren’t in the genre to people who are just looking for a story that speaks to the world outside, I really recommend checking this out and looking at it as a lens on billionaire culture and all the ways that we empower individuals to take on enormous amounts of power in our own world. And we don’t ask who these people are or why on earth we should give them this kind of power, or why they seek this power and who they are on the other side of that. This book isn’t just about smashing the toys together. This book is about something very real. We’re just couching it with a lot of fantasy framework, so that it can be both universal and specific.

MoC: We are going to see a perspective from other medical doctors in issue three. Can you talk a little bit more about that because I am curious about them, they’re ignoring people in need, so are they actually better than Eyes? 

Kelly: Yeah, we’d love to. You hear that there are twenty doctors of the City Hospital, you’ve seen how weird Dr. Eyes is. We know that you want to ask this question, “Who are these people?” You’re hungry for that information. We needed that answer to be as robust as the fans desired. So when we first started working with Eamon, we said we have twenty doctors, you do not need to design twenty doctors, you can give us five doctors and then a bunch of shadows and that’s going to be totally cool. Eamon gave us twenty doctors, we went through and we gave him a huge list of who they were and he, in turn, put together these absolutely incredible designs. 

It should be warned. These are not just normal men in white coats. Each of them has different approaches  to their specialty, because each of them are specialists. That’s the entire point of the twenty doctors. Each of them are attending physicians in their field and each of them have approached their field in their own twisted, macabre way, that is really about exploring that concept. There’s a lot of subtext here about subtext. It’s a frickin’ text about how, especially in our modern American medical climate, sometimes, yes, you’re helping people, but mostly, you are underlining and supporting your own medical practices. We spent a lot of time in hospitals recently. I know a lot of doctors are doing the best they can, but a lot of times they can’t actually do anything, because it is not medically proficient. It is not the right thing to do medically, and they absolutely need to cover their asses. So that is some of the toxicity that you find in our City Hospital and our doctors, this mentality that they are eating their own tail, in a lot of ways.

Lanzing: The other way that we wanted to approach that, because it’s important not to demonize doctors or demonize the medical profession. That’s not what we’re trying to do, even though we are showing you twenty demonic doctors, but what we wanted to do is showcase the long history of medical choices that are made for the purposes of the medical profession, not necessarily for the purposes of the people who are being treated. Especially the way that systemic aspects of outward society become systemic problems in medical practices. A great example of this is the way that midwife culture was supplanted by doctors who would deliver babies. When, in the early days, doctors knew very little about that. Male doctors had shockingly little amounts of training in regards to women’s health care. In fact, they still do in many respects. So here you have a whole profession, a female-oriented profession, in midwives, who have straight up just been pushed to the side. They tried to eliminate them in the Victorian era, literally replaced them entirely with men, because that was the medical profession bullying their way into the space. It was better for the profession to own that space, than it was for them to see people who were already there and have been doing it for thousands of years. 

The thing that we’re really excited about in this is there’s a lot of weird, small, implicit storytelling. We only have 24 pages, but I encourage you to look at the makeup of the doctors and realize that there is only one female doctor and one who’s a midwife. Very specifically, you start to wonder, okay, how did she get in? What bodies did she have to walk over? How many women did she leave behind in order to get herself this table? Is it worth it to have gotten to this table? Those are not stories we’re going to get into a lot. it’s going to be in the background there. It’s gonna be there for you to see there are a lot of worlds to explore.

Kelly: We will just go ahead and say it, because why the heck not? A doctor that you will get a good view of and get a really good perspective on is the leader of this conclave, Dr. Mind, and he ostensibly is the most normcore of all of them. But I guarantee you he is far far from it.

MoC: It’s like Dr. Mind, Dr. Eyes, Dr. Lips, Dr. Nose…

Lanzing: Dr. Blood, Dr. Face. Yeah. Every doctor is named after their discipline, which incidentally tells you something interesting about Dr. Eyes.

MoC: There were a couple things he said, when she’s like, “Oh, I see,” and he was like, “That’s too bad.” Very interesting. Sometimes I think I read too deeply into stuff and you guys mentioned the parallels and how there have been a lot of medical advances that have been made at the expense of human beings. That’s interesting, he’s a doctor in pursuit of defeating death and making antibiotics obsolete. Is there someone you have in mind or is he based on the general aspect of big medicine? 

Lanzing: It’s a wider premise of the medical profession in general because I don’t want to say we have this doctor or  this particular medicine, because Eyes is like a reverse panopticon. We’re only seeing one aspect of him from every place you’re at. The idea is to be able to assemble those aspects by the end of the book into your personal views on Eyes. So when you say you tend to read too much into things, man is this book for you! That’s the point of Principles of Necromancy; it should invite deep reading. It should invite subtextual reading. Sometimes, we certainly tried to make our Captain America run or Guardians of the Galaxy run live in a really subtextual place and have something very human underneath it. But you’re really looking to have Captain America throw his mighty shield and for that to be the vibe. For Eyes, the very goal of the book is to invite deep reading. So I think ideally, you’re exactly the kind of person we would want to read this book.

Kelly: Yeah, we very specifically covered his eyes. Eyes are the windows to the soul. As you point out with Kairn in issue one, there’s nothing more haunting,  there’s nothing more horrifying than that single panel as he realizes what his future holds. And Eyes, when you look into his lenses, all you see is yourself. That’s all he will ever show you. That is very important to who he is and how he approaches the world.

_{Art by Eamon Winkle.}

Traveling and Their Many Other Projects

MoC: Are you guys going to [San Diego] Comic-Con?

Kelly: We will be. We will be at San Diego Comic-Con. I believe Magma is also going to have a presence, they’re still figuring things out. But we are absolutely going to be supporting the book. I don’t know if we will be tabling at any specific location, but that’s primarily to keep us free to sign all over the place, to give out high fives, and to do any panels that people want us to do. Send that into the ether. We will also be at Fan Expo Canada up in Toronto.

MoC: [joking] Do you guys ever travel separately? 

Lanzing: Every once in a while. 

Kelly: Part of the value of being a team is that one of us can cover when the other one can’t make it. Last year at New York Comic-Con. Jack had to take care of some personal responsibilities. So I had to go to the big scary city alone. You know, I had an emergency up at Calgary though, I had to leave early. We try to do everything together, but we mix it up. Then the fans have an opportunity. Yes, they got one signature, but now they have a quest to find the other.

Lanzing: It’s actually really fun every once in a while someone comes up to me and I’m like, Oh you just missed Collin and they’re like no, I got him last year. The shows that we do go to we’ve made a recent habit of, which makes me very happy, because I was doing this alone before, but roped Collin into my terrible habit of finding the coolest restaurant we can find in a given city. Whatever they’re doing that’s special or interesting or only happens there, we go out and have ourselves a nice dinner and enjoy a little bit of travel. 

When you’re as attached to your desk as we are, when you’re outputting as many comics as we do on a regular basis, it can be easy to forget that you have to take care of yourself as well. Then it’s not just ourselves that needs the watering, but our friendship as well. We need to remind ourselves that this is fun. Again, it’s similar in a lot of ways to the way the Principles of Necromancy works, which is to say we’re doing this, because we wanted to do it, because we love it and not because the money needed to flow into our accounts.

Kelly: It’s because I’ve been slowly taking apart your organs and replacing them with my own concepts into a Jack-Gollum, who will do everything that I will.

Lanzing: I hate to say it, I think I’m-  am I Kairn?

Kelly: You are the perfect being that audiences will meet later on in this series. You are not an experiment. You are the final product. 

Lanzing: Oh, thanks, bud.

MoC: Beautiful. On that note, one last question, what else are you guys working on aside from Principles and WIFWULF?

Lanzing: WIFWULF is effectively a self-published book that we then partnered with Vault [Comics] after the Kickstarter. It’s gorgeous, we’re so happy it’s finally out there. You can find it at your local comic shop. That’s a trade, not a single issue. It’s lie a full trade out on its own.

Kelly: Yeah, beautifully painted by Dailen Ogden, who’s a longtime friend of ours.

Lanzing: And created by Dailen, like we came in there to help Dailen build that thing.

Kelly: It’s incredibly personal to them. It has a lot of heart in it, it has a lot of tragedy. It’s a very different book than Principles, but if  Principles, as Eamon likes to say, puts the “gore in gorgeous,” I think WIFWULF puts the 

Lanzing: Oh man, I was really hoping he would land this.

Kelly: “Wolf in Wolfterful” 

We all laughed at the effort.

Kelly: But I highly recommend if people are liking what we do, they should absolutely go check out WIFWULF. Obviously we’ve got a whole slew of things coming out for Marvel and DC. 

Lanzing: Batman Beyond: Neo-Gothic [Volume 1] hardcover out on June 11. Every given month where people can find from us right now: our Guardians of the Galaxy run just ended. Both Guardians runs, Groot Fall and Groot Rise, which are the two sides of our Western Guardians of the Galaxy maxi-series,it was a blast of a run, sort of a dark Western deconstruction and reconstruction of the Guardians. So go ahead and take a look at that. 

Our whole Captain America run is out on trade now. We just announced a new book at Marvel called NYX. NYX is gonna be part of the new X-Men line. It’s going to be, for fans of Krakoa and that era that has passed on, as it is heading into the Great White North, what we’re going to try to do is provide a space that talks about what that book meant, what that era meant, and how we’re going to drive the culture into the future. It’s a book about mutants, it’s not a book about X-Men. I think that’s a really interesting book for fans of Kamala Khan, that’s where she’s going to be showing up. The Stepford Cuckoo, they’re all going to be over here in this book, Anole, Prodigy, and many others. Like Principles of Necromancy, every issue of NYX is going to be a deconstruction of one given character, and we’re gonna move perspective around each time. So issue one is Kamala, issue two is Laura, issue three is another’, so on and so forth. You’re always going to be getting a new vibe, but very similar in structure to what we’re doing in Principles. 

Also, Star Trek is just blazing toward our now-announced second event. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s going to be teased out in Star Trek #500, the 500th issue of Star Trek comics, which we’re also writing an A story in alongside Chris Cantwell. There’s a bunch of great stories in that. Patton Oswalt has a story in that, Mo Hampton has got a story in that, it’s gonna be a heck of a time, really, really excited for that book. 

Outsiders, it’s our current ongoing series at DC, which is effectively a spiritual successor to a book called Planetary. That meant a lot to us. It was a really beautiful archaeological breakdown of fiction from the 20th century. We’re doing the same thing in the DC universe. But as of issue seven, we’re allowed to now reveal that it is an actual, literal sequel to Planetary as well, which is kind of an insane thing to be able to say. Issue seven comes out today [Interview occurred Tuesday, May 14]. I’ve already seen some people on the internet freaking out about it, which makes me very happy, because I think it might be the best single issue of comics we’ve ever written. But I say that about every issue of Outsiders so maybe you should just check out Outsiders, that book absolutely rips. I’m really, really proud of it. We’re super happy to have it out there for people to read.

Enjoy the next couple months catching up on all the Lanzing and Kelly super-team have to offer before San Diego Comic-Con this year.