Magic Phil Qe2

[Nadia Summerhill]

Aswe enter into this weird world on the other side of the Viral/Trumpist/Nationalistic Collapse/Aesthetic/Opportunity Shock Portal (or, uh, whatever you want to call it), we find ourselves mapless and confused.

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?

AEWCH 148 with anthropologist Stuart McLean expresses the ways that the magical bursts through into the world to contour reality.

Phil Hester and John McCrea's Mythic is the platonic ideal of a rip-roaring working class supernatural adventure, focused on a group of specialists who help keep the world running by troubleshooting the problems of various gods, monsters, and other magical beings --- all while hoping that they can get overtime pay. They've faced down renegade deities, averted a potential apocalypse, put down a robot uprising, and figured out how to kill candy, and that's just in the first eight issues.

Now, with the book's first arc completed, ComicsAlliance spoke to Hester and McCrea about their approach to magic, their reactions to the absurdity of the world around them, and why McCrea demanded more swearing --- both in the comic and in this interview.

ComicsAlliance: When I first sat down to read the first issue of Mythic, the thing that hooked me about it was that you don't usually see a "working-class" approach to magic. The book obviously turns into something a little different over the course of that first arc, but is that how it all got started?

Phil Hester: Yeah. I think anybody that follows my work knows I tend to do a lot of weird stuff, and I tend to deal with a lot of far-out concepts and cosmic magic garbage. One of my favorite things to do is to make all of that stuff relatable by humanizing it somehow, and making it the subject of someone's nine-to-five workday seemed like a great way to do that.

On top of that, just jumping in and giving all of these deities and demigods actual human personalities and modern ways of speaking furthered that goal of humanizing the inhuman. And by the same token, I'm also always trying to do the opposite, and make the everyday seem magical, as well. That was my goal with all of that.

John McCrea: I just drew the pretty pictures that Phil asked for. Nate was a well-rounded individual when I came to it, so I just had to stick him in a phone shop. I guess there's a bit of through-and-through with Phil and I, where I have a little bit of input, but with that aspect of things, that's all Phil bringing that to the table. I just had to draw it a bit grimey.

PH: Yeah, but you sell it that way. Everything's fantastical, and you do cut loose when you draw the crazy, larger-than-life stuff, but the fact that you ground all the real-world stuff so well sells that contrast.

JM: Possibly. There's a lot of great writers and artists about, and a lot of good teams. I think possibly they would've approached things differently, maybe, but I guess the approach we took is a little unusual. I don't know. I think it's a bit strong to say somebody else might not have been able to do it as well as we did.

JM: That's between me and my psychotherapist, Phil! My obsession with giant wangs. If you go and read a little comic that I did with Garth [Ennis] with a funny little title that I'm not going to mention, you can see that obsession right there, painted large. Sorry, Phil!

CA: Was there a particular monster you've drawn in the book, or a particular scene, that you feel really captured that? I mean, by the end of it, you have a giant, on-fire baby skeleton wrestling a giant wolf.

JM: A giant cyborg wolf as well! I guess the thing that I think encapsulates that is Wewe Gombe, with the very large, extendable Mr. Fantastic tits. That one image in particular, I thought, "Where can I go with this?" The images that I found online, she had droopy breasts, and I thought, "There's something in this," so I just ran with it, and so did her breasts.

JM: That's what I mean. I researched her and looked her up, and there were other artists' interpretations of the figure, but the one uniting thing was that she had the sort of longish breasts. But I took it another stage of four. That would be my moment of taking it to the limit, as it were.

CA: That raises another question, because you get into a lot of mythology that's a little off the beaten path. Obviously, the Midgard Serpent, the Fenris Wolf, those are pretty well-known to comics readers.

The whole thing about the elephant bringing the sun over his back in Burma is completely made up. Nobody believes that, even 5,000 years ago. So I guess my goal going into the book was to treat every possible myth, story, fairy tale, folklore, religion and world view in the way that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby treated the Norse people's myths: Using it as fodder for a comic book.

PH: No, the real joy of this comic is that we sketch out a general plan, but we leave a lot of it up to what John feels like drawing every issue. We've been doing this so long that we never feel like we've written or drawn ourselves into a corner that we can't get out of in a funny or entertaining way. That was a sequence like that --- we got ourselves into this weird place, but we trust in, if not our talent, our instincts to find a workable solution.

PH: I think the main idea behind the book is that there is no cohesive cosmology behind everything. That's why Mythic exists, to make sure that all of these sometimes-competing, chaotic systems function smoothly at the same time for humanity. Also, to get kind of meta, the theme of the book is --- not to spoil the ending --- that's Nate's point in the final confrontation. Nate's point is that there may be no ultimate truth behind that stuff, but as human beings, you have to face up to that and either learn to live with that or stand up in defiance of that or reject it or something. That there's no one final truth to be revealed from all that stuff is the theme of the book.

PH: Right. I didn't want to do that in a nasty way. Everything I do in the book, no matter how irreverent it is, I feel like we do the irreverence in a loving and understanding way. We're trying to humanize these characters, not make fun of them or the world-views that they have. We're trying to humanize these things. To me, that was an endearing aspect of her, it wasn't a mean-spirited jab at skepticism, it's just an endearing aspect of her character that she was able to hold onto it despite everything telling her she was wrong.

CA: You see a lot of stories that have a similar structure to this that are rooted in the idea of Atheism vs. Belief, in a way that one way or the other is presented as being true. In your book, it's not Atheism vs. Belief, it comes off as being about how whether something happened doesn't change whether or not it matters. The idea of Reality being less important than Truth, if that makes sense.

PH: Everyone's got to deal with those big, unanswerable questions on their own, and as long as your solution doesn't lead you to burning babies, it's a good solution. The bottom line for the story is that when you're faced with the absurdity of, not only the craziness that we present in the book of gods and monsters using Big Ben as a baseball bat, the absurdity of everyday life, everyone's got to wake up and decide, "How am I going to face that absurdity today?" You can either reject it, or you can embrace it and see it as something beautiful. I'm about to be 50, and that's the approach I've taken in my life. Even the things that I find frustrating and bewildering are kind of neat.

I had an idea of what I wanted the covers to look like, I had the idea of the logo running down the middle of the cover and the artwork working around it, and I also wanted my covers to be very minimalist, just stealing something from inside the comic and making it almost a pop-art sort of image in relation to the logo. I gave Rian a little bit of an idea of what I was after, and he ran with it, and what he came up with was brilliant. I think it's brilliant in the fact that it's almost a heiroglyphic, it's like Prince's symbol. You can't really decipher it at first glance, it requires a bit of effort.

PH: We should also mention that Mike Spicer does a great job coloring John's work, and he works closely with John to get it the way John wants it to look. And Willie Schubert's contribution, as well.

JM: I definitely wanted Willie on the book, because again, he worked with me on The Demon, and very briefly on Hitman as well, and I always thought his logo designs in comics and his sound effects were just the best in the business.

You know, before Mythic, I had no idea how much a good editor was worth. Thank you, Rob Levin! Honestly, a good editor puts up with so much. I, by default, was sort of editing the book for the first little while, and it was just a bloody nightmare. I realized after the first issue that I was the de facto editor and I said "Phil, we've got to get someone to edit this book or I'm going to die." Phil had worked with Rob before.

PH: He's the person who sold me on that counterintuitive logo. I come from that old school idea that you have to be able to read a logo from across the room, that Erik Larsen aesthetic. Rob did this little experiment where he did a mock-up of the first issue's cover and Photoshopped it onto the New Comics wall of a comic shop, so that we would see what it looked like among the sea of new releases that were out every week, and it really stood out. That was the final little push over the hill that made us go with that look.

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