![]() ![]() ![]() I am always thinking about the political climate and not just for its own sake or just to make a political point–I think any good story is going to take the time and place that it is set in and interpret what it means for people and how people relate to each other. At the same time, while I’m a fantasy writer and an adventure kind of writer–I always try to tell a fun story about magic, monsters, and superheroes. I like monsters, I like magic and those are the things that work really well in comics. Jones: Was it difficult to integrate so many different genres together?Īhmed: For me, I’m a fantasy writer by nature and every story I tell whether it’s superheroes, westerns, or even a novel usually has a magical or unexplainable quality about it and it would have been pretty unlikely for me to tell a straight historical story. I think the series has a different tone than superhero comics where you are just talking about punching a monster–you have to approach the storytelling from a pretty different place. While Abbott has its noir edges, it is also a dark fantasy book. Jones: Did you have any difficulty approaching such a different genre of comics by grounding the story in a different time period and setting then you may have encountered in some of your previous comics-focused work?Īhmed: There’s a whole different set of challenges when you are trying to establish suspense or unravel a mystery you see in superhero comics. I start to think ‘what if we had a character like this hailing from a different demographic or different profile than what we usually see and what kind of challenges she encounters.’ I have been thinking about Detroit a lot recently and currently write comics set in outer space, I’m writing a dimension-hopping comic right now and my fiction is often set in fantasy worlds–I wanted to set an adventure in a city that I grew up with and put all these threads to come together which is where that idea came from. It is a central idea in my work to take those stories that I enjoyed and put other people at the center of them rather than the people that are usually at the center of them. I have been watching, reading and thinking about adventures of this type starring a dogged investigator who uncovers a glimpse of something unnatural. The real inspiration is a type of paranormal investigator that we have seen in movies, comics and television in various eras spanning from the X-Files to Hellblazer–going back further, the main inspiration for Abbott is Kolchak: The Night Stalker which was an inspiration from back in the ‘70s. This is my first creator-owned comic and I’m sort of drawing on stuff that I have been thinking about for a long time. Saladin Ahmed: When you write a story, you have the ideas of the story or some pieces of the narrative floating around in the back of your head for years. We had a chance to talk the writer just ahead of the series’ debut!Īlexander Jones: What was the inspiration behind Abbott? Now Ahmed is venturing into the world of creator-owned comics for the first time with a supernaturally-tinged horror, noir period piece Abbott published by Boom Studios with art from Sami Kivelä. Writer Saladin Ahmed has been making waves from his critically acclaimed ongoing Black Bolt with Christian Ward at Marvel and with his background in fiction through the Crescent Moon series. ![]()
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