'Clean Room': Simone's horror cult of personality

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

A very powerful and mysterious self-help organization is at the center of writer Gail Simone’s Vertigo Comics horror series Clean Room.

As it turns out, she didn’t have to go far for research. The Oregon resident happens to live in one of the states with the highest number of cults and cult-like communities in the USA.

“I’ve spoken with a great many of these adherents, and what you find is that they are not particularly unintelligent or gullible, though that is comforting to believe,” Simone explains. “And the logic that allows them to believe seemingly ridiculous things is not that different from how the average person looks at the world, really. We are skeptical of scientists, and actively search for junk answers to difficult questions.

“That’s frightening. I’m not afraid of vampires, I’m afraid of a doomsday believer with his finger on the button.”

She feels every fad diet and bizarre conspiracy theory is the same kind of thinking as cultish beliefs, and in Clean Room (debuting Wednesday), there is a huge and unsettling following around the secretive Astrid Mueller, a former gothic horror novelist whose book An Honest World: Unlocking the Explosive Potential Inside is said to either enlighten a person or leave them completely crazypants.

Chloe Pierce is a journalist determined to interview Mueller about her “church” yet there are personal reasons for her as well: Three months after her fiancé Philip picked up the self-help tome, he blew his brains out on their new kitchen floor, and now Chloe wants to find out what’s in the author's mysterious Clean Room.

The origins of the organization are in the first violent pages of the first issue, with an opening sequence featuring a horrible tragedy and crime in Germany decades prior that changed many lives forever, according to Simone.

“A ‘normal man,’ a ‘nice neighbor,’ decides for reasons unknown to commit an horrific act upon an innocent child,” she says. “The ripples from that lead outward across the entire world.”

Several cults and churches inspired aspects of Astrid’s empire in Simone and artist Jon Davis-Hunt’s series, although the writer insists she didn’t want the organization to be a cheap stand-in for any group in particular. With Astrid, Simone points out there’s as much self-help guru and motivational speaker as fiery brimstone preacher.

“If you look at history, it’s very rare anyone accomplishes anything tremendous with a completely pure heart and spotlessly clean hands,” she says. “Astrid Mueller is willing to spill blood, your blood, to protect her organization and its seemingly arcane goals.

“She’s a master manipulator, rumor has it she can break a person in the time it takes for a long elevator ride, using just observation. Good or evil, she’s no one you want to mess with.”

People are terrified of her because of the lawyers who will sue critics into oblivion at the slightest hint of libel and the investigators at the ready to hound them. Because of all that, Astrid has a stranglehold on politicians and the media.

Well, except for Chloe, a small-time reporter for a dying Florida newspaper who’s never covered anything bigger than a car crash, according to Simone. Because her beloved’s killed himself after becoming obsessed with Astrid’s teachings, “she has nothing to lose,” Simone says. “She doesn’t care if she’s sued, she has no money. She doesn’t fear investigators, she doesn’t feel she has a life to disrupt. And that makes her Astrid’s worst fear.”

Another issue for Chloe is her nightmares and day horrors: She is seemingly the only one who sees frightening pink demons, and whether they’re real or just an illusion caused by the trauma of seeing her dead lover will be explored in the first issues, according to Simone. But Chloe will also get another obstacle in the form of Killian Reed, Astrid’s hyper-competent and dangerous second-in-command.

A figure known as a Rook in their organization, she would jump on a grenade in a heartbeat to save her boss, Simone says. “She has been granted license, by Astrid herself, to do anything necessary to protect the organization, including, perhaps, murder.”

Readers who want to get a look inside the spooky Clean Room don’t have to wait for long. In issue 2, Simone is opening the place buried deep below Astrid’s opulent Chicago headquarters.

“To even get inside, you have to be completely free of outside grit and contaminants,” the writer says, “and once there, Astrid gets to ask you the questions that reveal every secret you don’t want exposed. She illuminates every shadow of your soul.”

The search for identity has long been a constant theme in Simone’s comics — including notable runs on Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Birds of Prey — as well as “the lust to know who we are under a sky of uncaring stars,” she says.

What she hopes people take away from Clean Room is to question authority. “That’s a credo that pays dividends your entire life through, because authority is not always benign. Authority has teeth.”

The new series also marks Simone’s first Vertigo project, and it’s a big deal for her because for a time, when the DC Comics imprint was the tastemaker in comics, literature, music and fashion, those were the only comics she wanted to read.

So doing a Vertigo series now is “like doing an album for Sun Records, or recording at Abby Road,” Simone says. “That history, that wellspring of creation, is energizing. I wanted to do a Vertigo book that had that unsettling, alarming quality. They listen to your oddball, horrifying vision and then they do everything they can to help you realize it.

“And I wanted to scare the (expletive) out of people, to be honest.”