'Manifest Destiny' maps Lewis and Clark vs. monsters

USATODAY

This fall, Chris Dingess ventures from Being Human to being Lewis and Clark.

The TV screenwriter tackles two of America's greatest explorers and sends them on a much different journey — with a lot more weirdness — than history books would have you believe in Manifest Destiny, a new ongoing Image Comics/Skybound title announced today that launches in November.

Dingess takes the legend of Meriwether Lewis and William's Clark's famous three-year expedition in the early 19th century and posits it as America's first black-ops mission.

"The reason we got the Louisiana Purchase for so cheap from Napoleon was because the land west of the Mississippi was full of dangerous creatures and monsters," says Dingess, who wrote much of the series while on hiatus for the Syfy series Being Human.

"I always see them like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and maybe a little Starsky and Hutch. Lewis is a little more of the scientific mind and wide-eyed and open, and Clark is more tight-lipped, colder and more of the muscle and killer of the two of them. They balance each other out, but I try to let Clark get a few zingers in there as well."

Paired on the book with artist Matthew Roberts (Battle Pope), Dingess talks with USA TODAY about the weird alternate history he's cooked up, how Bigfoot may or may not play a role and how complaining sometimes is a good thing.

Q: Are you such a history buff you zeroed in on these two guys immediately?

I was on vacation with friends, I was drinking and complaining about how there's this new trend in pop culture of taking historical figures — real ones like Abraham Lincoln or fake ones like the characters in Sense & Sensibility or Pride & Prejudice — and throwing them into this monster-killing fictional universe. I was like, "God, you can just take anything. You could just take Lewis and Clark, and instead of exploring America, they were really killing monsters!" And then suddenly, I was like, "Wait that could actually be fun." I stopped complaining about it and started trying to find a way to make money off of it, like any good American.

Like almost everything I do, it came from complaining. I used to complain about why does the U.S. always have to take really great British shows and try to adapt them and it's always horrible, and then once I got a job on Being Human, I was like, "Actually, it's not that bad."

I'm spineless, actually, when it comes to that.

Q: So how does this fictional take fit into actual history?

Lewis and Clark are put together by Thomas Jefferson, and they assemble a rag-tag group of soldiers and convicts to go west and just destroy monsters and eventually make a deal with the devil to allow the expansion of the United States.

The whole time Lewis is keeping two journals. There's the journal you're forced to read in eighth grade, and there's the real journal depicting all this horrible, bloody chaos, which I would have rather read in eighth grade as opposed to how much fruit stock they were loading on the boat.

Q: How are you approaching the tone?

Just because of the way I write, there is a lot of comedy in it, but there's also a lot of human drama that I'm trying to interject. I went into this thinking, oh, we'll be able to do this, this, this and this, and then when you learn you have 22 pages an issue to tell a story, you have to learn to find that balance of when you're doing the personal drama and the adventure and fun of these two guys and this crew going into the woods not knowing at all what they're going to find and seeing all these weird creatures.

I drew inspirations from a lot of places. I always remember Jonny Quest but also Venture Bros. – it's nowhere near as funny as Venture Bros., but I was always fascinated with the weird creatures and stuff when I was a kid, and I wondered about setting that in a post-colonial period.

Q: Are you having them face familiar monsters or inventing some for the series?

We're inventing some. Some of them tap into familiar themes, and fans of old EC horror comics could recognize some stuff in there. I looked at American mythological creatures and we put our own spin on it and combined them with other mythological creatures. It's really a mish-mash.

Coming up with the monsters is the most fun and the hardest part because you don't want to repeat yourself. And you're trying not to throw stuff at people that they've seen too much. I started doing research into American monsters and it's so hard to try and avoid Bigfoot, even though I myself am drawn to Bigfoot. I'm trying to figure out my spot to drop Bigfoot in there.

It seems like back in the day when we were coming up with our monsters, we really phoned it in. It's always like a lake creature or some sort of giant dog. We're going to make up a lot of our own stuff a lot of the time, but I would like to eventually weave in some of the mythology for whatever area of the states Lewis and Clark happen to be passing through in a particular arc. We're just going to let our imagination take us somewhere for a lot of it.

Q: Will the first arc introduce them and their mission to readers?

We're going to catch them at the start where things get hairy on the mission. We'll meet a lot of the crew. We'll get to know some members of the crew better than others, and we'll get a sense of what their mission is.

When I pitched this book, I had this whole idea of flashbacks to before the mission, and I quickly realized you're not going to be able to tell your story that's moving forward in the present with flashbacks. I hope to get that stuff in sooner than later.

Q: Which of their crew is your favorite so far?

I really enjoy writing Lewis and Clark together, because they are our eyes for this thing, but we meet Sacagawea. In their real journals, the young Native American woman is their guide — we've reimagined her here and she's a really fun character.

She's not just a passive woman showing them and communicating with other Indians for them. She's the one who gets her hands dirty – if this were G.I Joe, she would be Snake Eyes. She's a badass.

Lewis and Clark are strong, but a lot of times they're going to have to rely on Sacagawea's cunning and skill and strength to get them out of the big jams they're in. They're slowly going to realize just how important she is to them.

Q: Do we get to see Napoleon or is he offscreen rolling in cash?

The deal's already been closed, Napoleon's taken his briefcase full of giant weird old American money, and he's back in France counting it and sending people to the guillotine.

Q: Any other historical figures to look out for?

No, not really. Going back to the flashbacks, I would love to show President Thomas Jefferson because Lewis worked for him and that's how he got the job, and then he brought Clark in on it. He used to work with Clark back in the day when they were both in the army.

That would be one I've already thought about, and I've had to cut it out for the issues we've done so far. I'd like to show Jefferson enticing Lewis into taking this job on. But that's a dream scenario so we'll see what happens.