Buffy : Season 9

Scott Allie is an editor and writer working for Dark Horse Comics, currently overseeing both the Buffy books and the Mignolaverse books. He was kind enough to sit down with the Mignolaversity boys and answer questions about both sets of books, in addition to talking about fandom, horror comics, and robot pregnancy scares! Be warned that there are minor spoilers for both "B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Pickens County Horror" and "Buffy Season 9" discussed, but nothing more than you would know if you’re caught up reading both series.

Brian: Can you explain to our readership a little bit about what an editor does, both in regards to a single issue and shepherding a larger grouping, like the Mignolaverse books?

Scott: One of the most complicated things with doing the Mignola books or the Whedon books is we’ve got this really dynamic story going on where it’s not just a story being told across one book. In the case of both lines, both Whedon and Mignola, we have multiple books and multiple writers and twice as many artists, if not three times as many.

So you’re juggling all these schedules on the Mignola books. Yesterday, I pretty much finalized the yellow slip. It’s a certain stage in the approval process. I pretty much finalized the lettering and coloring for a B.P.R.D. issue coming out in November. But the five issues preceding that aren’t done yet…I think it’s November…but that just works with the artist. The guy doing this particular story that starts in November, we just needed to be way out in front with him. He’s busy, he’s got other stuff to do, we could have waited longer for him to do it, but he’ll be on another job at that point so he jumped in on this one here.

It’s funny, finalizing that lettered comic and the dialogue refers to stuff that hasn’t even been scripted yet because the artist on the preceding arc is on such a different schedule. So there’s just…reading that I was like “wait a minute, what?!” but then I thought “oh yeah, John will get to writing that eventually.” There’s a specific line where one character says to another character “oh poor, poor (this guy).” Fill in the name of a guy who got wiped out. “But that guy is fine right now. What’s he talking about? Oh yeah, this comic doesn’t come out for 8 months.”

With all that stuff, there’s juggling the timelines, making sure the guy who is slower who comes out way off in the distance has already started, and keeping track. Another thing that came up recently is we had two cover sketches come out on the same day that were really similar. Really, really similar. “Oh wait, they come out five months apart. Eh. It’s not going to be that big of a deal.” They were similar in composition, not in content. But the composition was strangely similar. And if you had both of those out at the same time, probably racked next to each other, it’d look kind of lame.

But again, they’re coming out five months apart; nobody’s going to say they look similar. So it’s a lot of juggling and keeping your mind in a lot of time zones. Thinking about different months and different quarters and making sure this character is progressing here and that character is progressing there, and that in the November issue the character is acting consistent with what has happened to him over the past few months, even if those scripts aren’t written yet.

So a lot of juggling, a lot of timelines to watch. I remember when Alan Moore was working on Big Numbers, this aborted series he worked on a while ago, he was talking about this chart he maintained to keep track of where all the characters were at different times. And something like that would be handy, but my wall space is already all plugged up with other stuff.

David: On the BPRD books you co-write with Mike and on the Buffy books you co-write with Andrew Chambliss. How exactly does that process work, and do you have a specific breakdown of operations with each of those writers, or do you develop the plot and script together?

Scott: It’s always different. It’s always different. With different co-writing gigs I’ve been doing the past couple of years, it varies a lot. Like when I did Dead Remembered, the BPRD series that Mike and I did with Liz Sherman, the story was my idea, the basic gist of it was all my idea, and every step of the way I would bounce stuff off of Mike and he’d insert stuff and tweak my dialogue and stuff like that. The weight of that was much more on me.

Whereas Pickens County, the initial idea was Mike’s, Mike did put things on paper before I did anything. And that was the case also with O’Donnell, the upcoming one, and a two-parter we’re doing later this year, me and Mike, where he had a story he wanted to do, and it didn’t feel like an Arcudi story. It didn’t feel like something for him to do with John. So Mike and I talked about wanting to do these more classic horror stories with some of the side characters, and it started with him writing up notes.

Basically, for all of these things that we’re co-writing this year, he pretty much wrote a plot, he wrote all the major beats of a story, and I fleshed it out in the script stage. He’d come in and say “no, I think the page break should be here and the issue break should be here,” and he’d tweak some dialogue. So the overall story is his, the script is more kind of mine, but the final dialogue has his fingerprints on a lot of it.

And with Andrew, on the Buffy arc we co-wrote, that was one where his schedule just sort of got in the way. There was no plan for me to co-write any of season 9. I wrote the end of season 8 with Joss, but there were no plans for me to write any of season 9. |

But Andrew just got so jammed up on the TV show he was working on, he was having a tough time with the schedule. He had plotted a five issue arc with Georges drawing 2 and Cliff drawing 3, he plotted the arc and scripted the first two, but as he got into scripting of those, his schedule was looking rough and I was just like “why don’t I just jump in and I’ll script off your outlines.” The stories are ever changing and evolving, so I think the scripts I wound up writing were fairly different than the outlines that he wrote, but the outlines were definitely the bones of the thing. With that, the basic shape of that is mostly what the script is. Is mostly mine. But there are a lot of different ways of co-writing. I used to be baffled by the idea of co-writing a comic, but now I feel there are so many different ways to make it work.

Brian: One of the things that makes BPRD such a special series is the mosaic-like structure – while the story is still moving forward, we get a flashback issue, like the upcoming JH O’Donnell one-shot, or we get a look at a remote corner of the world, like Pickens County. When the BPRD team is putting everything together, what are you looking to accomplish with those little asides? Are they ideas you had in the past and you want to come back to, or when you’re writing, do these new ideas pop up and you decide they are a good idea for a one-shot? How does the yearlong arc all come together?

Scott: Well, specifically, just looking at Pickens County and O’Donnell, you know, one of the things is we used to make sure there was a BPRD comic every month, and now sometimes you are getting two a month. That’s really just because there are so many stories we need to tell to get to where we are going.

There’s such a cast of characters and John has so many moving parts with the regular cast, we have to get this going with O’Donnell, with Devon we have to get here with Fenix. All these characters are inching forward, and Mike and I are like “we want to do a vampire comic.” John was like, “yeah, I don’t see how that fits with what we’re doing in the main book.” And doing a vampire comic wasn’t entirely interesting to John, and Mike and I had been thinking we really loved horror comics, and as BPRD gets more global, more apocalyptic, and a little more militaristic, it gets away from that horror comic thing we like. So we were looking for opportunities to do horror comics.

At the same time, if you guys read BPRD: 1946, 1947 and Hellboy The Sleeping and the Dead by Mignola and Scott Hampton, if you read those, there’s something going on with vampires. There’s a reason why vampires haven’t been a big part of the Hellboy universe. There’s Varkalak and a couple of other vampire stories, but for a guy whose favorite book is Dracula, Mike just hasn’t done much with vampires. And there’s a really good reason for that.

There’s all of these storylines at any given time in Mike’s turbulent little head, and the vampire thing was something he’s always meant to get to. But there’s always something else going on.

So he wanted to share something going on with the vampires behind…the secret history of vampires. But he wanted to do it in his oblique little way. He doesn’t want to have Dracula walk out and announce, “here’s my big plan!” (laughs) So Pickens County was a really weird way for us to say, “okay, we get to do a horror comic, we get to reveal that is going on with the vampires,” but the other thing we need to show, that we really felt we needed to show, to tell the full story of the BPRD, the current title of the book is BPRD: Hell on Earth, and the world is really going down the drain.

It’s not like when Galactus shows up and messes up New York and in a week, everything is rebuilt. We are breaking things that can’t be fixed, and it’s happening on a global scale.

If we only show you what Johann and Kate and those guys are doing, then it looks like only our superheroes are running around and fighting monsters. We want to show you in stories that this is happening everywhere and it’s way too much for just Abe Sapien to handle, especially because he’s shot and swimming around in a tank right now.

So we wanted to do some things where you see some regular soldiers. BPRD grunts if you will, dealing with this crap. And it’s nasty. So in Pickens County, you get to see two characters, one of which you’ve seen before but no one remembers him, Vaughn, one of the characters in Pickens County was in a short story Guy and I did last year. Now, Vaughn pops back up here. Peters is a new character, and the two of them go on this little mission and it seems like a little bit of nothing, just checking out this small town in the Carolinas, and it goes really, really badly awry. And they find out a little bit about what the vampires are up to, but they don’t really find out. Their secrets are still out there.

There were a bunch of different agenda points to cover in a manner of speaking. We wanted to show what was up with the vampires, show that the BPRD is fighting a war on numerous fronts, and tell a little horror story. The Transformation of J.H. O’Donnell

Brian: What about the JH O’Donnell one-shot? What’s the inspiration for going back to that character?

Scott: Well, he’s a character that sort of emerged in the background as a fun guy to have around. A crazy little Lovecraft scholar in a world where Lovecraft is actually real. I know a lot of Lovecraft scholars, and they’re all kind of wacky like O’Donnell. (laughs)

What is one of those guys like where this stuff is actually happening and he’s actually had some first hand contact? And Mike always had some idea as to how he became to be the way he is. But with the world going quickly to hell the way that it is, the stakes are rising for O’Donnell, so when you see O’Donnell, the one-shot, there’s actually a framing sequence that places it in modern day, because just doing a flashback story set in the 80’s when he first lost his mind, wouldn’t have totally served the purposes of the current BPRD series. We wanted to show O’Donnell’s crisis in the context of where things are at right now. So there’s a minor framing sequence where we see O’Donnell in the present day, and that leads to flashing back and sharing the story about how he ended up this way, and it was on an adventure with Hellboy, which is cool because I got to write a comic that has Hellboy in it quite a bit. It’s weird one, it’s a very H.P. Lovecraft kind of story. It’s mostly a story about a guy who losing his mind. There’s a fair amount of superhero antics in there because Hellboy is in there breaking stuff. So that was fun.

We get to do a Hellboy story in a way that feels like it has integrity. We don’t want to just jam out a lot of BPRD comics where we just stick Hellboy in there to boost sales. This is one where it’s a BPRD comic set in the past and makes perfect sense that, given the time where O’Donnell lost his mind, that he could have been on that trip with Hellboy.

And the artist on that, both of the artists, all of the artists we’re dealng with right now are blowing are mind. Max Fiumara on O’Donnell is so much fun. The way he draws Hellboy, the way he draws O’Donnell, it’s just so gorgeous. And Jason Latour on Pickens County…there’s a sequence in Pickens County #2 that when I was writing it, I was thinking, “this is crazy…I don’t know how this is going to read.” It’s like a frenzy that lasts for five pages that has snot and blood and crap flying around in this little cabin…completely crazy. The way Jason drew it, you feel…it’s the perfect balance of disorienting but clear storytelling. You’re in it, you’re following it the whole time, but what’s happening to the characters is so disorienting that your brain begins to swim for the last few pages before it starts to calm down. Jason just did a great job of telling a really gross, weird tale.

David: That’s one of my favorite things about the book. Starting on BPRD, you had Guy Davis who had just an all-time run on the comic, but since he’s left you’ve brought more and more exciting artists. Like, you mentioned Jason Latour, who I first experienced on DMZ and just killed it on Pickens County, and I love Max Fiumara’s art, like on Four Eyes.

But combine that with people like James Harren and Tyler Crook and you have a lot of really exciting young artists working on the book. What’s the process for recruiting artists for the series, and is there a specific style Team B.P.R.D. looks for in their artists?

Scott: The most important thing is there isn’t a style we are looking for. That’s a defining characteristic of what I’ve always done with Mignola. It was funny, when we worked Guy into the family quite a long time ago, his stuff is so different than Mike’s in such huge ways, but similar in a way that it has classical elements, and is amazing with monsters and great storytelling and mood.

But I like that the first guy that was a big addition to the team was such a contrast to Mike. It kind of said that we were not just looking for Mignola clones. And then for so many years, Guy was everything. We did a comic a month and guy pretty much drew all of them. If there was ever another artist jumping in, it felt weird for it to not be Guy.

Then you had Corben doing some stuff and Duncan doing what he was doing, but for the most part everything we did was either drawn by Guy or Mike, and then you had Duncan and Corben with the occasional Kevin Nowlan or Scott Hampton.

When Guy left the book, our first thought was we needed a guy to fill Guy’s shoes. We needed an artist to be our everything. That just wasn’t the way to go. It would have been impossible to find someone to shoulder the burden that Guy did for so long, so Tyler is the main artist on BPRD and will remain so, but it’s great juggling all of these different artists.

The process for finding them has a lot to do with Mike being on Facebook, me being on conventions, John Arcudi looking all over the Internet, and we just find them wherever we find them, and we talk about them for a while, and then we open up the dialogue. Usually me, but not always.

It’s important to find out if we can click with somebody. When we hired Tyler, we were so sure of Tyler we just made a huge commitment to him right off the bat. But generally what we do is we invite someone to come in for something short and see how it clicks. Generally we do pretty good. Generally we pick someone who we become lifelong friends with. Sometimes we pick someone where it doesn’t quite click and who knows whose fault it is, but they do one arc or one mini-series and they are probably on their way.

Generally we’ve had a pretty good track record. I think it was Arcudi who wrangled Harren, and James did those two issues of Abe but they didn’t blow us away. But then, the very next thing he did was this three-issue Long Death thing, which everybody is just finding this staggering work from James Harren.

Tyler and Mignola had lunch recently, and Tyler, who is the regular artist on the book and it is his steady gig, was like “so, James Harren? Pretty scary.” (laughs) Yeah, yeah, pretty scary, but he’s got all of the job security in the world.

But James is doing some Conan stuff for Dark Horse now, he’s going to come back for some more BPRD stuff, and the process there, you asked about the process of running the books, with James, because the guy is so perfect for Conan, me and the Conan editor are working out the timelines. Bouncing around ideas with the goal of keeping him busy because we love working with him and sharing him back and forth between BPRD and Conan because both books are really good for him.

But yeah, the work he did on Long Death…nobody could have made a Jaguar versus Moose fight look so amazing as James did.

David: Oh yeah, I might be the biggest James Harren fanboy on the planet. I just think his stuff is incredible. That last issue was out of this world. The Wendigo and WereJaguar fight was just crazy.

Brian: It was heartbreaking, action packed and just awesome.

Scott: Yeah, thanks. You can’t overlook what Arcudi did. But what James did really took us all by surprise.

David: Yeah…one other question about the art I had was…so you’re talking about Tyler Crook and how he’s the de facto regular artist. When he’s on the book, is it going to be the main story thread, so to speak?

Scott: You know, to some degree, yeah. That’s how we kind of talk about it. But that would suggest any of what we are doing is ancillary. It’s kind of not. The two-parter I was mentioning before that doesn’t come out ‘til the end of the year, I’ve got the first issue done now but doesn’t come out until November, I was looking at that and that is what we’d consider one of the more ancillary things because it’s not Tyler and it’s not so much the main cast, but this two-parter, called A Cold Day in Hell, puts a piece on the table that is so significant that we can’t really say the stuff Tyler draws is the main story because there are so many important things happening elsewhere.

And also, one of the cool things about BPRD is we are so far away from having a main character that we can’t say “Tyler tells the story of the main character” because who the hell is that? The closest you could come right now is maybe Kate and Johann are the main characters, and maybe it’s true that Tyler tells more of their story, but then again James just told the big story with Johann in the Long Death.

It’s kind of all over the place. There is one particular arc where we were like, “this one’s big. This is the turning point probably for two or three years, this is the most significant arc. So Tyler has to draw that one.” But it’s all a matter of juggling schedules and getting the best guy to do the best art. The next time we have a really, really epic moose fight we’re going to make sure James is the guy for that arc. But other than that, Tyler will tend to be on the biggest turning point stuff.

We really, I think, John, Mike and me try to make sure every story is pretty significant. There’s no fill-ins. If you look at Devil’s Engine and Long Death, I can’t remember if Devil’s Engine is out yet (it’s not), and that’s Tyler’s three-parter that balances out the trade paperback with The Long Death. It’s mostly focused on Devon and Fenix, and it’s also got some stuff going on with Kate back at headquarters. But it’s mostly about Devon and Fenix, and also reintroduces some characters that are pretty significant. Tyler did that one mainly because it was the right spot in his schedule. Tyler is the one guy we are dedicated to keeping busy 24/7, he’s always got a gig drawing BPRD as the main guy. We feel like he’s got an especially nice touch with Fenix who is an increasingly significant character, so having a turning point spot for her makes it a really good fit for him.

A lot of talk between me, Mike and John goes on as far as who is going to draw each arc and what not.

David: There are these…you don’t want to say ancillary, but these titles that are kind of off the main story thread. Like a couple years ago, you had Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain, which, at first, kind of read like a two-issue story that didn’t do a whole lot, and then you read this year’s Russia and it had huge ramifications.

Scott: Yeah! Amazing, right? That’s the thing that is so fun about this stuff. There’s so much weird, behind-the-scenes figuring and conniving between us. Like, yeah, Iosif turns out to be a hugely important character, and there’s another character that everyone probably thought was a little bit of nothing that is going to be popping back up. It’s fun stuff. Characters that…like I said, in Pickens County, it’s about Peters and Vaughn. Well, Vaughn was in an 8-pager a year ago that no one thought mattered, and he’ll be important in the future again.

David: When you have these interludes, do they often have bigger ties than we realize, or are they sometimes just little character pieces that kind of expand on the universe?

Scott: You know it’s a mix, I think one of the things I recognized from the very beginning, from Seed of Destruction, and when I came onboard and was editing Wake the Devil, what I noticed was that Mike drops all these little things, and some of them wind up being hugely important later. And some of them he’s planting them knowing they’re going to be important later, and some of them he’s not. He doesn’t necessarily know how important they’ll be later.

In the case of Vaughn, for instance, when I introduced him in the 8-pager last year and brought him back in Pickens County, I know exactly what is going on with him. With some of this stuff, we’re introducing it subtly. There’s another thing going on right now that I won’t reveal or spoil, but a character we didn’t think was going to be important, it turns out the character is so much fun to draw and to write that we have to do more with the character.

So big decisions are being made about the future of the series just because something that we didn’t think was going to be important turned out to be fun. And this stuff should be fun. If we’re not having fun with it, what’s the point? When something surprises you and the creative team on the book, you have to grasp it and hope that the readers like it as much as you.

Panya David: If I had to guess as to who that would be, it would be Panya. I’ve always wondered, when are we going to get a one-shot of Panya? Are we ever going to get a side view of what her life was like before Abe discovered her on the island of misfit 18th century philosophers?

Scott: (laughs) It’s funny that you called it that because that’s what we called it but I can’t remember if we called it that in the comic.

David: I don’t remember. I just couldn’t think of what to call it and that just came out.

Scott: That’s funny. I don’t think we’ll get a one-shot flashback for Panya because if you go back to Garden of Souls, she did get the chance to tell her story and she wasn’t lying that much. I think a big ol’ flashback story about Panya was mostly stuff you’ve kind of seen with more detail.

All sorts of stuff could come up. There’s a Lobster Johnson comic coming up where there is a little bit of Egyptian occultism going on, and who knows, a year from now we could decide that ties into Panya’s origin or something. That’s the kind of connection we might make. I doubt we’ll make that particular one.

But yeah, right now, Panya has a trajectory ahead of her, but one thing we’re trying to do with a couple of exceptions is to keep things moving forward. One thing I can tell you is that the next time you get an Abe Sapien comic, it will be set in the present. We’ve done two trade paperbacks worth of Abe Sapien flashback comics in-between the time he was kicked out of the jar and the present, we’ve decided we don’t want to do any more of that any time soon at least. We want to keep the story moving forward.

Except for 1948, which we’ll eventually do, and Lobster Johnson, we’re not going to be doing any flashback stuff with the exception of Hellboy. There’s Hellboy in Hell, which we’ll get to later in the coming months, but any other Hellboy comic to do with Corben or Duncan will have to be set in the past so that Mike can keep Hell all to himself for now.

But as far as BPRD is concerned, we’re moving the story forward. You’ll get 1948, you’ll get Lobster Johnson, those are obviously set in the past, but for the most part the story goes forward from here. Even with the O’Donnell thing, in order to make the O’Donnell thing work with what we’re doing now, we gave it a framing sequence that makes it work right now today.

Brian: You mentioned the story going forward, Hell on Earth has been a pretty bleak time for everyone in the BPRD world, both those in the Bureau itself and the world. It seems like things are getting worse and worse. It begs the question, what happens next? Is the world just going to get worse and worse, or is there going to be something that could change the course again in the future?

Scott: There is going to be stuff that changes the course again, but it’s not going to get a whole lot better. We’re doing these hardcover books collecting all of the old stuff, called Plague of Frogs. We’re basically looking at all of the Guy Davis stuff, that entire group, everything we did from the first series Hollow Earth to Liz torching the center of the Earth, is called Plague of Frogs. That was the frog army thing, the whole Plague of Frogs thing is being collected in these four hardcovers.

So what you’re seeing right now in the comics we’re putting out now and the paperbacks is we’re slowly building the second set of hardcovers, which will someday be called BPRD Hell on Earth volume one through whatever, and it will probably be more than four because the arc of this story is deep and its wide and it’s nasty as all hell. It continues to be pretty bleak, and the world is headed in one direction and I don’t know what the team can do to reverse it. If you look at the scope of it we have Lovecraft monsters taking root on the surface of the Earth. The Ogdru Hem, which used to lie in space and under the sea, they’re popping up and hanging out, and there’s really nothing anyone can do about it so far. So it’s definitely going to keep getting worse, at least for a while.

And this Hell on Earth megastory that we’re doing, it really is just that. Things are going to keep getting more awful in a really fun, epic comic book sort of way.

David: I loved that both Agent Vaughn and Agent Peters, both B.P.R.D. agents who are fully aware of how odd and dangerous the world really is, both sort of scoff at the idea of vampires and evil fog. Are Agents Vaughn and Peters, are they providing the layman’s view to all these oddities? Is that their role?

Scott: That’s a good question –Hellboy provides the layman’s view. The whole BPRD approach/the whole Mignola approach to occultism – something Mike always used to say (I haven’t heard him say this in a while)but talking about Hellboy, talking about Abe, these guys are plumbers. These guys are just dudes who show up to do a job. And one of them happens to be red, and one of them happens to be green, but for the most part it’s just like “we have a job to do and it mostly involves fighting things that look kind of like us.” One one of our old marketing VPs came up with the phrase “the world’s greatest paranormal investigator” for Hellboy which, is a useful phrase, but is also kind of funny because Hellboy is a shitty investigator [laughs]. Hellboy mainly goes in, punches stuff, falls through the floor and lights things on fire. He is not Sherlock Holmes, and he is not the Sherlock Holmes of occultism. Bruttenholm kind of was, Hellboy isn’t, Abe isn’t, Kate a little bit is, but that’s only because she’s a Folklore PHD. None of these guys are Mulder [Fox Mulder, from The X-Files – Brian], you know?

As the BPRD expanded its charter, it mostly filled in the gaps with military and some police, so these guys are nuts and bolts problem solvers, more than they are Van Helsings. So yeah, your observation Peters and Vaughn are correct, but I would argue that is pretty consistent with the whole thing.

You have some characters like Devon and Kate who come from a scholarly occult background. But even Devon wasn’t an occultist, he was a book scholar, who wound up learning a lot about occult books, wound up in the BPRD, and now has to run around with a gun on his back. But for the most part, that’s what these guys are, guys that run around with guns on their backs, trying to solve problems.

You comment that they kind of scoff at the notion of vampires, that’s because they’ve never seen a vampire, they’ve never dealt with vampires. Even though they’ve been with the BPRD all this time, vampires haven’t been much of a problem. Hellboy, considering all the monsters he’s seen, considering how ubiquitous vampires are in supernatural literature, Hellboy has seen very few of them in 60 years of doing this, and Vaughn and Peters have never seen any. So, yeah, most people in the BPRD are more Scully [Dana Scully, also from The X-Files – Brian] than Mulder in their opinion of the supernatural.

Brian: Moving over to the Buffy books, what can you tell us about the arc you’re co-writing?

Scott: Buffy Season 9 #8-10 is an arc that I did with Andrew [Chambliss] from his outline, where I did most of the writing. Buffy recently had a pregnancy scare, but it turns out she’s not pregnant, she’s a robot. In issue 8, she figured out that it was Andrew Wells, one of her sidekicks that she’s not very fond of, decided that to protect her, her put her real body in hiding in suburbia and has a robot walking around. Buffy’s not too happy about that.

So Buffy, Spike, and Andrew have to go find out what happened to her real body, which has gone missing, and they trace it to this abandoned warehouse on Angel Island, south of San Francisco. They encounter one of the disgruntled slayers.

At the end of Season 8, Buffy destroys the seed that connects the Earth to all the magical realms, and when she destroyed that, she pretty much bans all magic from the Earth, and everybody is mad at her for it, no one more so than Willow. But also all the slayers, who used to be a part of her army, are really angry with her, especially one named Simone. Simone has hatched a plan that will continue to spread out across Season 9, but we get our first real glance at it in these issues.

My favorite part of the issues is that there is some pretty great interaction between Buffy and Spike. Buffy has just gone through this insanely personal thing, and now she has to run around dealing with robot bodies and all sorts of genre contrivances, while her mind is completely screwed up because of the personal experience she just went through. And so, the thing I liked most writing this, was putting her with a character with whom she has a really complex relationship with, Spike, and having her really not on her A game. And I like that idea of characters existing in genre fiction doing action/adventure kind of crap, but have their actions deeply affected by the personal stuff going on in their lives.

Brian: With both Buffy and BPRD, you have a very dedicated audience that loves your books, without the overbearing DC or Marvel “you need to have an X character book out every month” mandate, so your story structure isn’t so strictly tied in to the monthly release cycle. That said, because of that freedom, have you guys discussed an end game for either of these properties?

Scott: Well, in different ways, yes. With Hell on Earth, we know how things are going to be at the end of the road, and we know the path to get there, but we don’t know exactly when we’re going to get there, because things are in flux and evolving, but we do have an end game we are working towards. We don’t think too much about what life is going to be like after that, because we feel like it will be a lot different.

With the Buffy-verse, Season 9 will be 25 issues long, which wraps up in June of 2013, after which we will take a break, and then start Season 10. So, we do know pretty much how Season 9 ends for all of our characters (with details still to be worked out), but the endpoint was handed to us, pretty much, by Joss. It’s a smaller end point, since it is just ending a season, and then we start up again 6 months or a year later.

With Hell on Earth, the end is much bigger and what don’t know what, if anything, happens next, but this will keep us going for a while. With Buffy, it is a little different, because we have to be very mindful of where it leaves us, because we have to be thinking about how we pick it up next. We haven’t had a lot of talk about Season 10 yet, but we know how to leave everything at the end of this season, to have enough threads to pick up again.

David: Gil, our resident Buffyologist, gave us some more specific questions that look into the Buffyverse. Simone has become a very important villain; is there someone pulling her strings, or is she the sole shooter on the grassy knoll, so to speak?

Scott: She is calling her own shots – Simone is highly motivated and is much more puppet master than puppet, that’s for sure.

David: His other question was about Xander and Dawn. They have turned into the stable couple in the book, and knowing the way that Joss and his books have worked in the past, does that mean that one of them is going to die soon?

Scott: (Long pause) You know, that would be entirely consistent with the way Joss does business. (Laughs) But, Joss dearly loves any of his characters and would NEVER kill any of them off, right? Oh wait, I was thinking someone else.

Things have been relatively stable and hanging out in the background, and Xander fans in particular have been frustrated that he hasn’t had more to do, but so far, Xander hanging out in the background, being relatively happy, has been his story. Xander isn’t the star of Season 9, but he does have a distinct arc that he is on, and in issue #8 we start to see his path a little more.

Brian: Does the extreme popularity and intense relationships readers have with the Buffy characters come into play when you’re editing the books? Do you feel added pressure due to the fandom?

Scott: Yeah, it definitely comes into play. Since we announced the Spike miniseries for later this summer, I’ve been getting a ton of emails about it, and the irony is that a lot of Spike fans are mad that there is a Spike series, because that means he won’t be with Buffy. And I get that; they are more interested in seeing the Buffy/Spike relationship than they are in just seeing what they fear might be the frivolous adventures of Spike. But I can assure you, it isn’t frivolous, it is a crucial Spike story. I wanted to write it myself, but we have this great guy, Victor Gischler, who really gets the character and is doing some great stuff.

I get that the fans are passionate, but sometimes I will get an email that will say “All the fans want this – this is what you have to do to make the fans happy.” And then, ten minutes later I will get an email saying the exact opposite thing. We tend to think that they are more monolithic than they are – there are a million different strong opinions.

David: In closing, this goes a little off topic from the books that you are writing, but goes to the bigger picture of Dark Horse right now. With BPRD and the year of monsters, even Buffy to a certain degree, Creepy Quarterly, Ragemoor and Colder, it seems like Dark Horse is making a concerted effort to bring back horror and monster comics. Is that something that you’ve been trying to do, and something that Dark Horse in general is trying to do?

Scott: It’s my mission in life. When I said, “Hey, let me edit Buffy” back in 1997 or 1998, I had never seen the show, I just heard the word “vampire” in the title, and said “Jesus Christ, let me give me a monster comic!” And Buffy is not really a monster comic, but yeah, I love horror comics. I’ve always loved them. The first comics I got into were horror comics, and then when I was 13 and they were everywhere I got into superhero comics and I still love some of those, but I got into comics because of the artform, not the superheroes.

The genre I’ve always loved is horror, and I think comics are an especially great way to tell horror stories. I also tend to be friends with people who love horror comics – I met Tim Seeley at Cryptocon in Seattle a few years ago, and we hit it off ever since, and now we’re doing a lot of work together. I was loving working with Paul Tobin and Juan Ferreyra on Falling Skies, this TV spinoff thing that we’ve been doing, and I asked them to do something that was their thing, something that is totally theirs, and Paul gave me a few pitches and its no big surprise that the most horrific of the bunch was the one I gravitated towards.

Yeah, I think horror comics is a place where we distinguish ourselves the most, and they’ve been doing it since before I got here, and lots of editors are working on horror comics, not just me. But I think because we have Hellboy and Goon, we should be recognized for being a horror-friendly company for those two alone. There is a strong effort to do horror comics, and wait until you see some of the announcements we have coming later this year, horror wise.