“We know exactly what the end will be. And what’s coming before the end. And it’s all outlined and waiting. I just have to finish writing it.”
That’s what Alex de Campi, the force behind some of the best fantasy and sci-fi graphic novels out today, told me about the inevitable conclusion to one of her most popular series, Valentine. Noted for pioneering comics into the digital age but renowned for its storytelling, Valentine is a fantasy epic that is all about embracing the unknown: A soldier of Napoleon’s forces during the harsh winter of 1812 finds himself at the center of a conflict between his world and the world of magic.
“And that’s another thing I love about Thrillbent. They’re not snippy about their platform,” she says enthusiastically about her publishers. “They just want people to read comics. So they’re like, okay, we’re on Thrillbent, and we’re also on Comixology. And even though they’re just ‘a distributor,’ they were incredibly, incredibly supportive of Valentine all through our early days. And so I really wanted to get back on there where we also have fans.”
And appreciative of those fans she is. Thrillbent has unleashed Valentine Volume Two, and I talk to de Campi about everything Valentine, ’80s sci-fi, Point Blank, and her love of military history.
Valentine is often cited as the work that proved comics can live in the digital medium. Its very storytelling is unique to digital webpages, tension unfolds in the art and transitions in ways even the human eye can’t replicate on paper. Did you intend to make Valentine prove the digital format? What led you to choose its distribution method?
Alex: We weren’t really out to prove anything. I’m a great believer in serialized, visualized fiction. And I wanted to do a book that people could just, you know not everyone sits in front of their laptop. There come times when you’re in the doctor’s waiting room, on the subway, on the bus, just between something. On break from work. On the balcony. And you don’t want to be sitting in front of a large screen. But you’ve got a phone in your pocket at almost all times. So, you pull it out and you can read a little bit of Valentine. And that’s what I was really trying to create. Something that could fill up ten really good minutes of your life between other things on your phone.
And, [in terms of] working visually, some people have trouble reading comics on a page. Especially people who are coming to them later in life. Whereas looking at Valentine on your phone — you know, even if you find comics on a page a little difficult, or you don’t like going to comic stores, or you’re just confused by the amount of titles out there — here is something that you can just enjoy. And that’s all we intended to. There’s no one way to do comics. I do comics on the printed page that I love, I do some digital work that I love, so it’s fun to try new things. But I’m not saying that everything should be like Valentine.
Our hero Valentine is a soldier of Napoleon suffering the Russian winter of 1812. It’s not a setting even movies visit often. What was it about that time and place that attracts you that other eras don’t?
Alex: I love history. I’m a voracious reader and researcher. And I absolutely love history. And I think that more writers should be into history.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Alex: And I especially love military history. Which admittedly it’s not something that you think of when you think a female comics writer, you know we tend to get pigeon-hold into doing things with talking cats and stuff, but actually there’s a hugely wide variety of female talent and we write all sorts of things. A lot of my work coming out in the next year or two is actually set in specific time periods… [But] there are reasons Valentine is set in that time period mostly because they allow me to do a nice twist later on, which I can’t reveal because, spoilers!
But there is a long, thought-out reason. And it’s ultimately, incredibly visually arresting: the white of the snow, red of the blood. There is the blue of the frozen bodies. It’s a very visual spectacle. And you automatically throw your characters in there, and you know that they’re in peril. Blizzards are terrifying. Being alone in blizzards is terrifying, and cold. And it was one of the great military tragedies of all time. One of the great disasters. Half a million men marched in and fifty-thousand marched out.
Wow.
Alex: And it wasn’t really the Russians that killed them. It was the winter. It was sickness. It was lack of supplies. They didn’t bring coats. They marched into Moscow in the summer. And no one really did anything in the winter. They got tied up in negotiating with the Russians until too late in the year and didn’t get out in time. They had these paper-thin boots and people were just dying by the score. I could write an entire series on just the Russian campaign.
I would love to read that.
Alex: Maybe some day I will. [laughs]
Genre fiction today has plenty of stories that blend the modern with the supernatural, bizarre fantasy. But you’ve decided instead on early 19th century. Exactly what inspired the story of Valentine? To put mythical monsters in 1812?
Alex: Valentine is an epic story. We need to be careful with telling people it’s a work of historical fantasy, because it’s very much not. So, all I can say is that part of it is being suitable for the digital serialized storytelling, there are tons of twists that come at you when you don’t expect it. And that’s one of the great joys for me, keeping the reader on their toes. I will say that if you are expecting it to be entirely set in 1812, you are shit out of luck.
The idea of Valentine came from a very simple phrase that kept echoing through my mind. Which is, all the fairy tales are true. Which has inspired a number of famous stories, but my concept was more… if you read books that you’ll probably never read unless you’re nuts, like Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, or Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, which more people have read, those are both very flawed works for reasons I won’t get into here, because that’s a whole literary/anthropological, people-make-assumptions conversation that doesn’t necessarily have a place here, but there is a a lot commonality in a lot of the tales we tell around the world. Not necessarily for the reasons that Campbell or Frazer draw, but we all tale stories. There are always dragons. There are always bad, undead spirits. There are good spirits.
Partially us confronting our fears of nature, of the unknown, or weather, or death and dying, or sickness. Of leaving things unfinished. And so all these fears coalesce into these stories. And my rather simple explanation of that is, there’s a reason, not just our commonality of these fears across all cultures, that cause these. There is a belief in magic everywhere. You could say, in some ways, that magic is what we call things we don’t understand. Much of technology for us right now is magic. Back in the old days, someone recovering too quickly or falling too in love, or suddenly falling dead, that’s magic. There is obviously no magic now, but what if there was? What if something changed as the Earth “grew up”?
Admittedly humans have only been on Earth for like 1% of the Earth’s total lifespan. But what if at some point, very early on, the barriers between our world and other worlds were softer and there was magic? And as Earth grew into “young adulthood” and it all hardened, creatures couldn’t pass back and forth. Magic kind of drained away, because science and physics. And then what would happen to the creatures that got stuck here? Because, obviously if you’re an immortal, supernatural being, fucking with humans is a shit load of fun. Because we’re soft, we’re squishy, we’re great fun to manipulate, and all you have to do is a little bit of magic and we give you all our money.
But then the magic gets drained away. And then you’re no longer really super magical. Hunting humans has gotten pretty dull. And they’re stuck in their human forms. That’s not cool, like when you used to be a dragon or a unicorn and now you’re a f*cking cart horse.
There’s a little more humor in Thrillbent’s release of Volume 2. What allowed you to relax a little bit that you couldn’t before?
Alex: There’s always humor in my works. There’s some pretty funny moments in part one, but also in part one you’re dealing with, as I said, one of the greatest military tragedies of all time. I didn’t really want to yuck it up. But the humor is mostly at the expense of Valentine, and I think that is an accurate perception that the way the characters live in a place where the humor is taking place. It’s supposed to be the world of your dreams, and this is what happens when the characters turn out to be quite petty. Valentine must feel like a very out of place, very insignificant, almost slightly abused person in there, but that’s how these people always treat humans. They needed him, and now they don’t need him, and they’re bored with him, and they’re increasingly bored with him, and they’re just gonna be nasty to him. And that’s partially where the humor comes in! That’s why it’s a little bit lighter, because it’s a trivial society.
You’re going from a great military tragedy and the destruction of everything Valentine understands and loves, to this hyperficial, set society. And also I’m poking fun at the tropes of fantasy [but] in ways that make sense. I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, and I always say that every bad fantasy novel written in the 80’s, most of the ones in the 70’s and a couple in the 90’s — before they all became ten-volume, 900-page epics — I’ve read them all. If you go to goodshowsir.com and other bad sci-fi/fantasy cover blogs, I’ve read all of them. So I know these tropes and I love them, and I love tweaking them a little bit.
This is such an epic world you’ve built, but there’s only so much you can put in. Were there any particular ideas you wanted to explore in Valentine but couldn’t?
Alex: The pacing is quite fast, as is the pacing in a lot of my works, and yeah, I could have done story after story just in the world they’re in in the next few chapters. I could have done Valentine: The Early Years, in fact in the paperback of Valentine that Image put out, we did a 40-page story on Valentine. You can still buy the paperback on my website. www.alexdecampi.com. Buy my stuff! [laughs]
What were some of your influences specifically on Valentine?
Alex: One specific influence for the stuff in the World of the Dawn in the chapters we’re getting into, was Michael Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time, I grew up reading a ton of Michael Moorcock. [laughs] As any self-respecting sci-fi/fantasy nerd has. And Dancers at the End of Time is probably my favorite of his, which is an unusual choice.
I wanted to give props to your artist Christine Larsen for her phenomenal work. What influenced the look and the aesthetic of Valentine?
Alex: It’s all Christine. It’s all her. I’m rather specific about color, and so I was really pleased when Christine and the colorist on the episodes you’re seeing with Tim Durning, Christine herself has gone back to doing colors in the new episodes, but Tim was coloring from about chapter 4 onwards in the old stuff. We talked very specifically about the language of color. We definitely made a choice the opening sequences should be extremely desaturated, except for the red. And when Valentine goes through the gate, everything is extremely saturated and bright and shiny. Each scene has a color, a bit like the John Boorman film Point Blank in that respect, but we play with saturation a lot more than he does. And if you haven’t seen the original Point Blank, go see it.
You said the big idea behind Valentine is to sort of embrace the unknown. Why is that such an attractive theme to you? Why does it speak to you so much?
Alex: We have to do things that scare us to grow as humans. If we stay in a safe area the whole time, we’ll be safe, but nothing interesting will happen. Things will happen to us and we will not happen to things. And I believe in going out there and happening. And that comes from embracing the unknown. Like, doing a comic for a phone. I pitched it to Vertigo in 2005 and they asked, “Why would anyone read a comic on their phone? That’s stupid, go away.” And I was like, “OK. That’s fine.” Valentine is embracing and learning about the unknown and the dark edges and the fringes of our universe. It goes hand in hand with the way Valentine is presented as a digital comic. And it was embraced! We were downloaded half a million times on Comixology. That’s a LOT. [laughs] I stopped paying attention after a quarter million.
What can we look forward to in the future of the story?
Alex: The climactic battle between good and evil. Basically. [laughs] Roland and company come back, lots of people come back. It’s Valentine vs. the world. The stakes continue to rise. The love affair gets more complicated. It all gets very difficult for poor Valentine.
Your previous works have run the gamut of genre categories. You’ve done tween mystery in manga, French noir, political thrillers, and now fantasy. What other genres do you intend to tackle next? Are there any you’ve always wanted to explore?
Alex: I’ve always said I’ve wanted to do a western. A lot of my stories are western, even though they’re not marketed as such. In some ways, next year is my year of coming home to the story types I truly love. Which tend to be spy thrillers. I’m doing a five-issue spy thriller with Matt Southworth who did the first volume of Stumptown. Wonderful artist and fantastic writer in his own right. I’m doing a story with Perez that’s an eight-issue noir, sort of mafia noir set in Cuba starting at the end of next year. And these are all pretty much written. I was writing issue two of the spy thing with Matt, and I said to him, “I think I’ve accidentally written a western.” There are no cowboys in it, but it has a showdown at the OK Corrall type of feel to it.
I have an ongoing theme in my work of the people out of time or the way of life is changing, or have changed, by people outside of their own culture. And that presents itself as exploring what it’s like to be an ex-patriot, because I’ve lived outside of the United States for a long time. Both in Hong Kong and then London, with short stints in Manila and South America. So that’s something I’m very knowledgable about from first-hand life experiences. Some of the stories that we love are in some ways becoming redundant or irrelevant because of technology. The spy story, what is one man with a gun when there are cameras everywhere? So westerns are always love stories about the passing of an era. The great cattle farms are being broken up. The railroad is coming. There is some sort of weather: drought, fire, whatever. It’s about the end to a way of life. And I write that a lot.
Valentine Volume 2 is now available on Thrillbent and Comixology. You can keep up with Alex de Campi at her website here.