WK: SPARKS is kind of the underbelly. It’s like walking down the dark valley of your life and picking up rocks to see what’s under them.
superhero: So what’s it about?
WK: Chris?
CF: SPARKS is a superhero noir story.
WK: It’s set in 1938.
CF: Bill said it’s CASABLANCA meets LOST because there’s a twist to it. Honestly it’s taking the superhero myth a bit and twisting it a bit. Going up against Batman. Here’s a guy who starts off just like Batman but doesn’t have the success of it at all. At all. Everything goes terribly wrong for this guy. And it just gets worse and worse. What it comes down to is taking an everyday guy who wants to make a difference and just has horrible luck. We don’t find out what his powers are until the sixth book. We want you to get onto the ride. It’s going to be dark. It’s dark. Every book, as it gets deeper and deeper into it…it’s a very hellish world. As dark as Batman’s world is, there are still some lines you just never cross. They do that obviously because they want to keep the franchise going. But the one thing we’ve talked about is we want to tell the story and do the best you can and we’ll finish it. That’s what we’ll do. Because right now in our lives, and we’ve talked about this, and what was really, really important to us is that…if you can do something you truly love and put it all into that then you can have something that you can leave behind that you’re really proud of. With SPARKS it’s an incredible opportunity. Bill’s been really supportive. We basically came up with the idea together with me writing it. It’s been absolutely invigorating. This story, it’s your good old fashioned film noir but it goes a little deeper and a little darker. It’s been fun to discover where you’re going to go with it. It’s your baby. _blank">
SPARKS is very personal. It’s a very personal sense of just what can we do to try to write the darkest comic book that we possibly can and try to touch some cord in people’s lives. It’s the opposite of THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO because we had the suit and everything kind of worked itself out. It didn’t happen that way with SPARKS. SOARKS is a lot of tragedy. It’s kind of like that poor TV show, with the family, on FOX, Matthew Fox was on it…
superhero: PART OF FIVE?
CF: Yeah. But there’s redemption at the end.
WK: Who are we talking about?
superhero: He’s on LOST.
WK: Oh!
CF: No, the whole show is…everybody gets cancer…
superhero: It was like LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE of the 90’s. Everyone died, everyone got sick…
CF: But there’s a purpose for everything. That’s the one thing trying to tie everything back together. So you pick up book six and it’s like…hopefully you can evoke that emotion from somebody. JM (JM Ringuet, the artist) brought the world to life. We joke around that you could literally take out the words in the panels and that people would be able to provide their own insight to the story. It’s just…I talk too much…
WK: That’s what you should be doing!
superhero: How did you find the artist?
WK: I didn’t really have anything to do with finding JM. That was actually you (Chris). We looked around at a lot of different artists.
CF: We were doing MYTHOLOGY WARS.
WK: Yeah, were doing MYTHOLOGY WARS. We started MYTHOLOGY WARS months ahead of this. It was a long time with nothing but complications with different artists.
CF: We basically found him because Derek McCaw had interviewed him because he had done colors on a WARHAMMER comic book. It was funny because we were looking for a colorist on MYTHOLOGY WARS and we got a hold of JM on a message board. He wrote back, “You know I can draw, too.” I looked at his website.There’s a couple of things on his website that were real gritty and dark. You should go check it out. He’s a French guy living in China. It was just like, “Man, you know what? That’ll totally work out.”
WK: He has a really interesting style that I haven’t seen before. When I saw it I said, “Oh, man. That’s cool!” It was unique and it’s hard to find someone that’s unique in this world. Everybody aspires to draw like Top Cow, the artists there, but this is different.
superhero: It is pretty dark. Is that where you would say your tastes lie as far as comics or entertainment in general?
WK: It’s an aspect of it. I’ve said I’m a great fan of DMZ so I like going there. I love the gritty side. I love to see that. What was cool about JM is that his artwork is very expressive…it’s his skew on life. It’s an interpretation of life. It’s not Top Cow, it’s not DC. It’s different.
superhero: So that’s where your tastes go?
WK: One of them. I’m an actor. I’ve done some pretty dark pieces as an actor and I’ve written some dark pieces and I’ve done some very fun, fanciful light comedy as an actor. So I’m all over the board. This is where we took Sparks because that’s where the storylines were going. So the form had to follow the function. That was the storyline.
CF: And JM has done a great job. He’s got unique colors and it just makes me write darker and darker as we go into it. It’s not just to be dark. It’s just to tell a good story. Really, at the end of the day, can you do a hardboiled detective story? Can you do that? Can you make it make sense? Even with the superhero thing? It’s been a fun challenge. It really has. It’s been an amazing opportunity that you just don’t get again in life. That’s the way I look at it.
WK: You know I always love…one of my favorite rides at Disneyland was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. This is very much like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The look of it. It has that kind of off skew everything is kind of melting feel. That’s what this book is.
superhero: So as far as Catastrophic Comics goes, I mean Chris is the writer. There’s another writer working on THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO?
WK: He’s one of the writers. I’m always in on everything.
superhero: One of your credits is Executive Producer so you’re the head man?
WK: Just on SPARKS.
CF: (Pointing to Mr. Katt.) MYTHOLOGY WARS, main writer. THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO, main writer.
superhero: Anything else that you’d like people to know about SPARKS, THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO, or MYTHOLOGY WARS before we wrap this up?
CF: We always joke that the main thing that we want to do is just not suck. He (Katt) told us one time he wanted us to be the Pixar of the comic book industry. We’ve got a ways to go to get there but at least we have a direction. We’re going to try to release stuff that has the highest quality.
WK: The fans out there are helping us to achieve a large part of what we want to achieve. We couldn’t do it without the fans.
Before I sign off I do have to send off an extra special thank you to William Katt. At the end of the interview he was nice enough to sign the base of my GREATEST AMERICAN HERO maquette and that made me a very happy camper. Thanks Mr. Katt. You are a prince.
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