Danny Djeljosevic is both the founder of loser-city.com and the writer of multiple comic book projects including Kids Rule!!!!! and Final Derby. His latest foray into comics is the webcomic Big Fucking Hammer with artist Diana Naneva. The book is a passion project that deals with a young woman discovering that her town lies at the center of a supervillain conspiracy when she gains the ability to turn the food she’s digested into a ludicrously large hammer. Danny and I talk the importance of titles, the tricky nature of navigating eating disorders in fiction, and what it’s like being an up-and-coming writer.
Mark Stack for Comics Bulletin: Your new comic is called Big Fucking Hammer. Were you worried about including the expletive?
Danny Djeljosevic: Naw. Although, I will admit, in a moment of creative insecurity, I recently took a half hour to list every potential title I could think of and none of them were as good as Big Fucking Hammer. The only one I liked was Hammer Girl 64. So, yeah. Couldn’t do any better than the title I ultimately went with. I think the swear gets more attention than it would if I just called it something wack like Hammer or Smash.
Titles are a big deal to me. Mononymic titles drive me nuts. Guys like Ellis, Bendis, and Millar started this trend in the ‘00s, but they did it to stand out and be punchy. Now everybody does it, and most don’t do it all that well. Basically, a title is a creator’s chance to make a first impression, yet everybody these days just names their comic with some un-evocative word like Spread or Find or Here and it’s supposed to be a vague pseudo double-entendre, because writers gotta intellectually amuse themselves, I guess. I wanted to do the exact opposite of that — a literal title that actually conveys something about the content of the comic. So, Big Fucking Hammer, a somewhat flippant comic that involves a large, Galligherian smashing implement that has a title to match.
Reading the first pages of Big Fucking Hammer, it feels more beholden to the realm of manga and anime rather than traditional American comics (there’s certainly elements of FLCL and Kamen Rider). Can you describe the book and some of the influences that shaped the writing and the direction of the art by Diana Naneva?
The comic began as my attempt to cope with running out of Veronica Mars DVDs in 2008. Back then it was conceived as more of a Joss Whedon/Rob Thomas thing than what you see today, but it was a really good calling card for me at the time, in terms of proving myself to artists and getting some meager writing employment.
Big Fucking Hammer character sheet
Anime and manga are a big deal to me these days. That’s the new wave — all the up-and-comers and alternative cartoonists these days are showing off an obvious manga influence in various ways, which is dope. You got Andre Lima Araujo doing a clear Otomo-meets-Moebius style in Avengers AI and folks like Giannis Milonogiannis showing off Shirow Masamune influence. Mickey Zachilli and Corey Lewis and Bryan Lee O’Malley and Ryan Cecil Smith and a bazillion other people. Everybody my age grew up with Sailor Moon and Akira Toriyama and I’m stoked to see those sources are no longer considered anathema. Everyone who told us that manga and comics are different and made fun of speed lines, big eyes, and bubble bursts — all those wannabe Brodies from Mallrats are currently skeletons with the wind blowing sand over their bones. Fuck them, I’m glad they’re dead. Alan Moore’s reach only goes so far, y’know?
FLCL and most of the stuff the Trigger guys were involved in (Dead Leaves, Gurren Lagann, Inferno Cop, Kill La Kill, even Kamen Rider Fourze) were a huge influence on me in making Big Fucking Hammer — both in terms of what you see on the page and my overall approach to making action comics. One Punch Man, too. That’s a comic that puts all other cape books to shame in terms of how ONE and Yusuke Murata illustrate action. Beneath the surface, I’m really into the josei stuff that Vertical’s been putting out from Kyoko Okazaki and Moyoko Anno. You’ll see some of that stuff pop up as it goes on. Diana’s down, too — she got super excited when I told her I wanted to channel FLCL. She totally gets it — if she didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be making this comic.
This might be a bit of a touchy subject so feel free to disregard this if it makes you uncomfortable, but what went into the decision to portray your protagonist, Madison Tiger, as having an eating disorder and turning that into somewhat of a superpower? Clearly, female body issues can be a difficult subject to navigate and, in the interest of disclosure, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it at this early stage in the story.
Yo, that’s dope — you’re the first person to call me on that angle. You have no idea how much I appreciate that. It’s something I want to keep exploring in future chapters so I’m glad to try to talk about it a little bit.
Page 1 of Big Fucking Hammer
So, Madison is totally bulimic and receives the power to channel her binging into a “strength” by turning her food into the titular Big Fucking Hammer and puking it up. I have… let’s say, “certain body image issues.” I want to be thinner and hotter than I currently am. Food is bullshit and I don’t believe I need as much of it as I ingest (and I don’t ingest a LOT by American standards). But it’s also delicious and I love it. Madison exemplifies that. We’ll soon find out about Madison’s chubbier backstory, a past that I share with her. Did you know that it turns out that you lose weight when you eat less? I know that “abnormal” eating habits can destroy you, but what if you NEED to do it now that circumstances have turned it into something you’re uncomfortable with? This is a comic that’s adjacent to the superpower genre, but it’s also a story where abilities don’t necessarily work in a way that is beneficial to the character’s actual physiology. I want to do the concept justice in a way that feels true to me.
Even if it goes astray and I look like a stupid person. I want to take risks with Big Fucking Hammer, for better or worse. I don’t want to play it safe. It would be easier to avoid that subject by making Madison a more “idealized” character, but that seems cheap to me. It’s an ongoing comic, so there’s a lot of room to explore and evolve as we continue making it.
You’re very quickly building a universe in these early pages that have been released. There’s a secret conspiracy headed by a big bad and there’s already a lone hero fighting against it. What interests you about this set-up?
I like the idea of the vast dystopian conspiracy. It’s scary to find out how little power you really have, and how institutionalized wrongdoing can be. “The mundanity of evil.” Adults are bullshit and don’t believe kids, and even when it comes to our peers, when something bad happens, we tend to work to discredit the victim. I have vivid memories of incompetent school administrators suspending my friends when THEY got the shit beaten out of them, or being blamed for being in the wrong place when I got punched in the head for reasons I still don’t understand as a 29-year old with credit cards and dentist’s appointments.
We’re all afraid of doing something — in our personal lives, in the self-serving masturbatorium known as “the comics industry,” whatever. We’re secretly taught that speaking out creates the risk of losing jobs or opportunities. People give out advice that you should “keep your head down.” So, people suffer because we’re scared. It’s horseshit and I don’t know what to do about it. But what I want to do is smash every dickhead I see with a huge blunt object.
And, related to the previous question, how quickly can we expect to see this set-up expand? What sort of pace are you looking to set with this book?
We’re going to be updating Big Fucking Hammer in 10-15 page chapters, and I’m hoping to take a manga-style pace to it. I want my battles to take place at the length they require. Comics are way too often about thinking over feeling, so I want to feel my way through this thing. The battle is over when I feel it’s over. It’s an easy trap to fall into, getting wrapped up in “the plot” and forgetting to explore your world, so I want to do that as much as I can.
Can you tell me a bit about your working relationship with Diana Naneva?
Diana and I first met in 2012. She contacted me on DeviantArt when I was looking for an artist to draw a script I wrote for the as-yet-unreleased comics anthology Sci-Fi San Francisco. I instantly fell in love with her style and so we’ve worked on a few other things since — a one-page sci-fi comic, a futuristic roller derby manga, and now Big Fucking Hammer. She’s an amazing artist and gets better every time.
As far as process, I want to blow up the idea of the “comic book writer” as some dude who crafts a bunch of wordy descriptions of six-panel pages, so I always include detailed thumbnail sketches with all my scripts to better illustrate what I want — I can draw a bit, and comics scripting is superfluous in a lot of ways, so why not just draw to convey what I want on a page? I’m not so much of an egomaniac that I demand Diana follow it to a T, though — she interprets my thumbnails through her own abilities, creating a page that best reflects the both of us. I’ve always drawn thumbnails to help with scripting, but this is the first time I’ve really made my sketches an essential part of the script. I guess you could compare it to the difference between storyboards and cinematography. It’s a process that works for me. I’m really happy with how Big Fucking Hammer is turning out so far.
You’re currently paying for the production of this book out of pocket but you’re also seeking to support the book through crowdfunding with Patreon. What made you decide on this path for producing the book?
Being an up-and-coming comics writer is the worst. There is a surplus of us and mainstream comics is a two-headed beast where one head says “Work hard! Get published! Gain experience!” while the other is “Sorry, we only publish people who are experienced.” So what’s the answer there? To me, it’s “Put your money where your mouth is.” Otherwise, Big Fucking Hammer wouldn’t exist. I wanted to put out a comic on my own terms. It’s a sink-or-swim thing but it’s been going pretty well so far. It’s what I’ve been doing since Loser City started, but Big Fucking Hammer is so far the most ambitious work I’ve done yet due to it being an ongoing affair. The Patreon exists in the hopes that people will be into it enough to help shoulder the costs of the art, but if not I’m going to keep it going as long as I can.
You can read Big Fucking Hammer here.
And you can support Danny and his comic through Patreon.