Joe Hill hopes to 'stick the landing' for 'Locke & Key'

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Joe Hill's lips are sealed — or locked, as the case may be — about a couple important aspects regarding his award-winning comic-book series Locke & Key.

There are reports of Hollywood interest — specifically Universal Studios wanting to create a trilogy of Locke & Key movies — that Hill says he can neither confirm or deny, albeit with an "I know something you know don't know" lilt in his voice. And there is the little matter of his and artist Gabriel Rodriguez's Locke & Key coming to an end, the climax of which Hill is also keeping top secret.

Even a Head Key couldn't pry it from his noggin — it turns out Hill's not quite sure himself of the final fates of the Locke children and the demonic villain Dodge as the first issue of Locke & Key: Omega is released Wednesday from IDW.

"Because I don't outline, I don't know how it ends," says the comic-book scribe and novelist. "You worry that you're not going to stick the landing and everyone who had all this fun is going to get to the final issues and be like, 'Ugh. What a huge pile of suck.' But I'm having a lot of fun with it, though.

"Having killed all of the heroes in issue 2, it's really tough to figure out how to fill space in the last five issues. There's only so much you can do showing Dodge spreading his evil influence to dominate the world, but I'll play it out somehow," he jokes — maybe.

What's for sure in Hill's mind is the seven-part Omega miniseries — the sixth and final chapter in the epic and heartfelt tale — is the final curtain call for Tyler, Kinsey and Bode Locke, the young denizens of the mysterious Keyhouse in Lovecraft, Mass., as well as for all of the many magical keys hidden within it.

There's also one last stand to be made before Dodge, in possession of Bode's body, uses the Omega Key to unlock a giant black door and unleash a horde of demons from another dimension.

With such otherworldly goings-on, Hill has always been sure to anchor the supernatural story in strong characters, and he gives his cast a chance to step on stage in the first Omega issue to deliver a monologue of sorts about of who they are and what they care about, using the device of Kinsey's friend's documentary camera.

"You can't have a satisfying, tense, scary ending if you don't care about your heroes," Hill says.

In a sense, he sees Locke & Key as a large-scale, long-form slasher movie, although usually films in that genre feature one-dimensional heroes — the geek, the jock, the promiscuous girl, etc. — who "are just ten-pins to be knocked down by the bowling ball of the villain," the writer says.

"They're so thin and so transparent that you never really care about them and you actually wind up cheering when they get knocked off. I find that vaguely unsavory. I don't want to root for the bad guy — I want to root for the good guys."

Hill had a full cheering section for the Locke & Key TV pilot, with fans wanting to see his characters on screen on a weekly basis. It wasn't picked up for series by Fox, but the book could see new life as a series of movies produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

Orci seemed to confirm it last week on Twitter, although Hill is erring on the side of cautious optimism.

"I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to say those reports are false," he says, laughing. "We've got a potential to do something really nice, in this movie series that I can't confirm is happening."

Initially, Hill thought Locke & Key was perfect for the small screen because of the comic's episodic nature. However, he's seen the serial storytelling that Hollywood's been using of late with the Twilight and Harry Potter franchises and with the Marvel superhero movies, including Joss Whedon's The Avengers.

Whedon is actually a big influence on Omega. He's only ever seen two episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Hill became a Whedonite after reading his run writing Marvel's Astonishing X-Men, the first comics in years that made Hill care about superheroes.

"What I loved was he found a chance to give each character their moment. You really felt like he was emotionally invested in each of those characters being real people," says Hill, who takes a similar tact with Locke & Key.

"I feel like as I'm writing the scripts, they're each getting their moment. They're each getting the chance to either succeed or fail, but no one is being relegated to a back bin and that's sort of satisfying."

One of the big ideas of Locke & Key has always been a kid's search for one's identity, especially in their teen years. "The real subject that everyone studies in high school is themselves," Hill says. "You figure out what you care about and what you won't stand for and what you want and what regrets you can live with.

In turn, the keys have acted as metaphors in that struggle — for example, Kinsey used the Head Key to literally remove her fear and her desire to cry. The Tyler readers see in Omega, however, is ready to leave those magic keys behind and with them his own childhood.

"He has some self understanding, and he's very close to becoming a pretty fully developed adult with a sense of perspective," Hill says.

"The only unfortunate thing is because he dies in the second issue, all that self-understanding came too late."

Hill's kidding, but he admits that he had a revelation about 10 years ago writing short stories, and even before selling his first novel Heart-Shaped Box, that if a main character did something believable in their nature and it didn't work out, it's OK if they die.

"Things don't have to work out," Hill says. "I'd much rather see one of my heroes decapitated than play unfairly with the reader and make up some kind of nonsense to keep them alive."

Whether the Locke kids make it to the last page of Omega in one piece after 37 issues or meet a gruesome end, Locke & Key will live on. Hill and Rodriguez plan on four more one-shots, which be collected with the past stories of Keyhouse such as "Open the Moon" and "Grindhouse" for a book called Locke & Key: The Golden Age.

In four or five years — "if people still care," Hill quips — he wants to do one more miniseries set during World War II called Battleground. That, however, will come after the duo does another creator-owned series plus a planned five or six issues of a "cape comic" for one of the big superhero houses, Marvel or DC.

(In addition, in April Hill releases his new horror novel, the vampire tale NOS4A2, and he's scripting an IDW companion series called Wraith coming out at the same time.)

While he may not be a believer in outlining, Hill does have a complete backstory he hatched with Rodriguez to help finish up Omega, which has already been emotional at times for the writer.

He scripted a moment between Kinsey and her mother Nina in the third issue "that I didn't see coming. It had a pretty intense impact on me," Hill says, but mainly he's enjoyed watching the dominoes crash as he works toward unlocking his finale.

"It's great to see it all fall together," he adds. "When someone does drop dead, I think, 'Well, not going to have to write them anymore. Cross them off the list.'

"I'm hoping for a happy ending myself but no promises."