Super Creepshow is back for its fourth issue, and so too are we with our series of interviews with the masterminds behind these creepy tales of superpowers and super-terrors. In this article, we interview writers Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly, who penned a brilliant tale about a superhero with the ability to grant life (although it’s now as good as it sounds).
Creepshow spinoff series Super Creepshow takes everything we love about the original series and weaves together new standalone stories, told from a superhero genre viewpoint. So far we’ve seen excellent tales from a number of top tier writers, from comics legend Marv Wolfman to esteemed creators Ryan North and Kieron Gillen.
In issue #4, creators Sam Humphries and Jackson Lanzing/Collin Kelly deliver tales of a superhero with the ability to grant life (which naturally doesn’t end well) and a retired super criminal whose past isn’t quite done with him. In this interview, we chat with writers Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly about their story about a hero with a seemingly purposeful power.
The Healer – Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Excellent Super Creepshow tale! As I ask all the Super Creepshow writers, when you first found out about Super Creepshow, what made you want to pen a tale?
Lanzing: Truthfully, it was all about getting to once again team up with one of our favorite editors, Ben Abernathy, and do something out of the ordinary. Ben was our guardian angel on the strangest Big Two book we ever did, our DC Universe-set Planetary sequel Outsiders, and he genuinely gets what we do and has always been an incredible partner in pushing beyond the comfortable. So when he called and told us to get properly dark with some superhero concepts, we took the prompt and hit the ground running. Ben’ll never have to ask us twice.
Kelly: As for Creepshow, it exists in this nebulous space of late night movies you watched when you were too young, that creates the kind of deep-set horror that gets baked into your brain; for nearly a decade after I secretly saw it a friend’s sleep-over, I was afraid of the Creep’s cackling, charming, disgusting face. Consistent zombie nightmares for years, all laughing while I was consumed. When you couple that with the fact that Jack and I actually began our careers in Hollywood as horror writers – recently returning to that gruesome origin in both ONE BAD DAY: CLAYFACE and our creator owned book, THE PRINCIPLES OF NECROMANCY – the chance to come back and in turn terrify a new generation was too tempting to deny.
In your own words, tell us about your story? What’s it about? Because the writers themselves are always better at selling your stories than we are!
Kelly: THE HEALER is the tragic tale of Calvin Cross, a “real good guy”… who discovers that he possesses an incredible ability, one that will allow him to help everyone who has ever needed it: his blood can cure everything. Any physical ailment you have, any disease chronic or otherwise – one dose, and you’re healed. For Calvin, now known to the world as the hero “The Healer”, it seems like his years of good work have finally paid off. High on money, fame, women and drugs – lots of women and drugs – Calvin is about to learn that there is no power, without price. And the price Calvin must pay… well, that’s why the Creep is telling you the tale.
What drew you to the ‘selfless’ angle? I find it fascinating and you implemented it really well!
Lanzing: Collin and I are infinitely fascinated and horrified by the way the human ego interacts with the structures of human society. A person can convince themself of nearly anything as long as it serves their interest – especially inside capitalist societies, where self-interest is celebrated and encouraged. So in trying to tackle the dark underbelly of superheroism, we found a lot of inspiration in looking at the least outwardly egotistical powerset, but the one most vulnerable to the corruption of self-interest: the Healer. If you had the ability to cure any disease, to heal any injury, to be an answer to so many people’s prayers – in today’s society, that would make you a wildly valuable asset to any large pharmaceutical corporation. It would funnel money into your pocket from every direction. No matter how good a person you might think you’d be, that would be one hell of a temptation to live down.
Kelly: And if it was all threatened, it would provide one hell of a chance to fall from grace.
Lanzing: So we just went about making that fall from grace as grotesque and awful as possible, so our poor hero has to really confront exactly what he’s become, again and again. And by the end of our story, he’s doing it quite literally.
Were there any specific superhero stories or tropes that you wanted to play on? Throughout this series so far, we’ve seen ‘creepified’ takes on The Flash, etc.
Lanzing: We had a crazy Doctor Strange-esque idea that we’ll likely do somewhere.
Kelly: And a bonkers take on Aquaman.
Lanzing: Ugh, that Aquaman story would be so rad. But it’s also, like, horrifically dark.
Kelly: You know that book, Whalefall? It was like that. But with Aquaman.
Lanzing: Poor Ocean Boy. We hardly knew ye.
Having written anthology stories before, what does that format offer (or challenge) you as writers that a longer series cannot?
Lanzing: It’s just like making a short film, a short story, or even a poem: the challenge is to encapsulate a riveting idea and an interesting character in a very limited amount of space. One of the coolest opportunities these stories give you is to leave the reader haunted – to give them just enough information to inspire them and then just enough plot to leave them heartbroken. Longer stories get to luxuriate, dig into the nooks and crannies, all that fun stuff. It’s like working with an infinite multitool. But doing a short is like forging a knife. It’s gotta do one thing: cut the %&$% out of the reader.
Super Creepshow #4 is out now from Skybound/Image Comics.
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