Sunday Geekersation: The many keys to Joe Hill's kingdom

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

In the New Hampshire store Jetpack Comics, Joe Hill is as well known for his signature beard as he is for his award-winning comic book Locke & Key, best-selling novels and iconic father.

"I expect it's how the fans know he is in the store — the beard is the giveaway," says Jetpack owner Ralph DiBernardo. "It's always so weird when he comes in without the beard, though. I expect it takes less than a week for him to grow it back."

Hill's a regular at the store and so is his facial hair. In fact, the only time DiBernardo has heard a person mention his famous dad was in reference to the beard at a comic-book show in Portsmouth, N.H.: "A customer says to me, 'Who's the Stephen King wannabe?' "

Since 2005, when the then-unknown writer had his first published story in an issue of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man Unlimited, Hill, 41, has created a name and fan following all of his own.

After a productive summer full of writing and hanging with his sons — "With three boys, thing can occasionally get pretty savage but we had a blast," Hill says — the author and comic scribe has a busy fall. Locke & Key: Alpha No. 2, due out later this fall, puts the finishing touches on Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez's long-running IDW series about the Locke children and their manor's slew of magical keys. (Alpha issue 1 was released this past week.)

And November brings the seven-issue miniseries Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland, coming in November and featuring art by C.P. Wilson III. The spinoff of Hill's hit 2013 novel NOS4A2 features the ghoulish Charlie Talent Manx and his equally creepy 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith.

Instead of chatting about the ongoing Miley Cyrus saga — "I don't even really know what twerking is," Hill quips, laughing — the writer talks about his writing idiosyncrasies, the end of Locke & Key, and what it's like seeing Daniel Radcliffe as the first Hill creation to hit the big screen, a young man with horns and strange powers.

Q. Is there one time of the day when you like to write — maybe a sweet spot of creativity?

A. At this point, I try to sit down at about 9:30 a.m. with a notebook and a pen, and I write longhand until about 1 in the afternoon. It was something my girlfriend had encouraged me to try, and also a couple of friends of mine including Neil Gaiman said it was a great way to work.

There's a whole bunch of reasons I've really taken to it. On one level, I like not being online. It's become increasingly difficult to find any device that you can turn on that isn't connected to the Internet. And the temptation when the words aren't coming easily to jump on Twitter or Tumblr is very, very strong, and if you can't think of what happens next in the story, you can almost always think of a funny tweet. But that's not really what you want to be doing. You don't really want to be taking your attention from the story that way.

Writing longhand, the work feels very clean and satisfying to me. I don't know how to explain it and I keep poking around online to see if I can find some scientific backing for why writing longhand would feel like it's connecting to the creative impulse more directly.

There is some argument that the self-critical part of your brain turns all its focus onto the matter of handwriting itself — shaping letters and sentences — and it doesn't have time or space to criticize what you're doing creatively. There just seems to be a lot less second-guessing while writing longhand and that is awesome.

Q. Fans saw the introduction of the Alpha Key and its significance in Locke & Key: Alpha No. 1, although the Omega Key spent most of the series as the be-all, end-all object coveted by the villainous Dodge.

A. In some ways, the Omega Key is a little bit of a MacGuffin, isn't it? It does register, it does matter, and there's a nice surprise about the Omega Key in issue 1 of Alpha. I read an essay by Robert Warshow about Westerns when I was in college, and he said whatever they're fighting for, if it's a stagecoach full of money or whatever it is, it's just a moral quantity.

It doesn't really matter what they're battling over — it's just an excuse for conflict and for people to be morally defined. And in that way the Omega Key is a little bit of a MacGuffin, a moral quantity. It's been something for them to challenge each other and becomes a tool for us to explore the characters and what they're willing to do to protect or destroy one another.

Q. Describe the ending of this Locke & Key story.

A. Decency has a price. I do feel hopeful that people will like the wrap-up and the final two issues. I really had fun writing them and they seem to fall together very naturally.

Over and over again when you get the long-running series, you get a certain level of dissatisfaction because a lot of questions get raised that never get answered, subplots are introduced but never resolved, characters appear and show promise but seem to vanish from the final conclusion, and this is especially common in ongoing TV series. It may be that the pressures of doing an ongoing TV series are so great that it deforms the storytelling process.

I do feel like Gabe and I made good use of pretty much every important character we introduced, and I do feel like all of the various mysteries and questions we raise are answered. The characters we're emotionally invested in have closure of one sort or another that feels right even if it isn't what we were hoping for or what we expected.

It's probably not the ending Gotham wanted but it's the ending Gotham deserves.

Q. We've talked before about you having other Locke & Key tales beyond the kids. Will you give this finale some time to breathe before resuming?

A. I'm just finishing Wraith issue 7, which I'm doing with Charles Wilson. After that Gabe and I are doing a one-issue stand-alone thing for DC Comics and zooming right into that. When I finish that, I'm taking at least a year off from comics, with one exception — I've got a novel I'm working on, and when I finish the first draft of the novel, I'm going to celebrate by writing a stand-alone issue of Locke & Key that will fit in.

There have already been a couple stand-alone issues — Open the Moon and Grindhouse — and they were both stories set in Keyhouse's past, before Kinsey, Tyler and Bode and at the beginning of the 20th century. We're working on a whole book of these stand-alone stories that will be a book like Sandman: Endless Nights. I have some more ideas for that family and for other keys and other stand-alone stories.

And when I finish the second draft of the new novel, I'll write another Locke & Key story. There'll probably be another three or four Locke & Key stories — we might have a stand-alone issue in the middle of 2014 and then another one at the end of 2014.

IDW has talked about doing a Locke & Key annual that would come out next summer and maybe have two stories in it — maybe a 20-page story that would be serious and 10-page story that would be silly.

There is another six-issue story that Gabe and I would love to do that would be called Locke & Key: Battleground, which would be about World War II. But Gabe and I also want to do another original series. We've got an idea and when I get done with my comic-book sabbatical, that is going to be my primary focus.

Q. Why the need for a sabbatical right now?

A. Not only do I want to get another novel written to follow NOS4A2, but I have some novellas I'm writing. I've got a novel called Gunpowder that's been sitting on the back burner for years, and the first part of that was published as a novella as a limited-edition thing and I feel like that's more than waited its turn.

I've been having some fun with long work — prose work, novels and short stories — and I want to do some more of that. There's only been three novels in seven years, and I'd like to see if I could get a little bit faster.

I still think of myself largely as a comic-book writer. There will be more comics, it's still something I love and enjoy, but I feel like it's time to try some different things.

When I write this superhero story for DC Comics, that will be my 50th comic script. Which isn't very many compared to some guys. Some really great writers have written hundreds of scripts. But 50 scripts feels like a nice stopping point for a little while.

Q. A movie adaptation of your novel Horns just had its world premiere last week at the Toronto International Film Festival. What's that been like seeing that on screen during the filmmaking process?

A. I thought it was wonderful. It's really wrenching. It's a bit of a strange duck — when I think about films it's like, the closest I can come is Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead. Of course those are both zombie pictures and there's no zombies in it, but it does have this mix of comedy, horror and tragedy.

Daniel Radcliffe gives this amazingly naked, emotionally vulnerable performance and does things emotionally no one's ever seen him do before. He plays kindness and gentleness and decency really well, and the film reveals a sense of humor that we haven't seen too much of because the Harry Potter films required him to play most things straight.

At the center is this tragic love story, and you have a chance to see some scenes where Radcliffe is horribly wounded and confused, and I found those moments extremely powerful and what I was going for in the book. It was terrific to see that on the screen.

Q. Where are we at with the Locke & Key movies at this point?

That's hard to say. I know (producers) Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman would love to do a Locke & Key film with Universal. There was a time when that looked like something likely to happen. I'm not so sure. If it was just up to me and Gabe and Ted Adams at IDW and Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, they'd already be filming the first movie. But the guys in the suits have to haggle things out, and sometimes in the process of haggling it doesn't work out.

Q. I'd like to see Charlie Talent Manx on screen one day, too. What made you want to take him from NOS4A2 and give him his own comic?

A. In the book there's this evil place called Christmasland, and we get some of it in NOS4A2 but only some, and that place has been around for a century. I wanted to explore Christmasland at greater length.

Wraith tells a story about how some escaped prisoners wound up coming to Christmasland with Charlie Max and what happened to them once they got trapped there.

You remember in Pinocchio there's an island of lost boys and the boys go there and they smoke and drink and gamble and turn into donkeys? Christmasland is a lot like that place only the kids aren't turning into donkeys, the kids are these frozen ghouls. They have this whole amusement park — a petting zoo and a maze and a roller coaster — and everything they do is fun.

Every morning is Christmas morning, every evening is Christmas Eve and they're having fun whether they're on the roller coaster or playing tag or stabbing a homeless man to death with a pair of scissors. It's all a good time.

The thing that really drew me to doing it, too, was C.P. Wilson III. He draws these kids and they're a little like Charles Schulz kids or Bill Watterson kids but they're doing the most horrible things and their mouths are these holes lined with fangs.

There is nothing kid-friendly about this comic book. In a lot of ways it's like my sleazy '80s horror film I always wanted to do. If you can imagine Charlie Brown biting his own mother's throat out, you have an idea of the kind of sick stuff that C.P. Wilson is putting on the stage and I just love that. C.P. III's sense of humor in some ways is a really great ghoulish match to Charlie Manx's.

Q. What do comics bring out of you more than prose does?

A. I'm not sure how to explain that except that I've always loved the form and so many of the writers I really love worked in comics. The writers who really inspired me when I was a kid were Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller before he went all crazy on Islam and had some unsettling right-wing fixations. I love "Batman: Year One" and Swamp Thing and Sandman and all the things that Vertigo published — that was my candy. That was my great pleasure.

One of the things which is great about working in comics that you don't get when you're working in novels is when you work in comics, it feels like being part of a band. Every morning when I get a page from Gabe or C.P. Wilson, it pumps me up so much. It's so satisfying, and you hope that your scripts do the same for them and they'll get excited for all the stuff they have to draw. On that level comics provide a creative experience you can't get from prose work. Prose work has a different set of thrills.

Q. You label yourself a comic writer but because your novels are arguably better known, those fans probably have no idea about your comics work. It's a perception of community a little bit.

A. It is about community in a lot of ways. When I think about my peer group, they're all comic-book dudes. It's people like Brian K. Vaughan and Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron and Gail Simone and Lauren Beukes, although she's much better known as a novelist than a comic-book writer.

The people who share my frame of reference and have the same set of enthusiasms, passion and interests, most of them work in comic books. It's a little bit harder for me to point at this writer or that writer who just works in prose and say, "I feel like I'm this guy's peer group. I'm connected."

Q. So where are you at with your next novel, The Fireman?

A. It's about two-thirds written in first draft. I still have to write the ending.

It's different. It's still a little too early for me to start repeating myself. Give me another three or four years. This is much less of a horror story than anything I've written but it's still a thriller. I'm very wary of stories that lack a strong element of suspense.

Q. What's on your recommended reading list for this fall?

A. I think people need to go read (Beukes') The Shining Girls as quickly as possible. I can't recommend it enough — an incredibly delightful book. Kelly Braffet's Save Yourself — same thing, a very dark, very wonderful book kind of like if David Lynch directed an S.E. Hinton novel. Kelly is my sister-in-law but I'm not logrolling for her. It's one of the best things I've read this year.

For the more casual comic-book reader, and especially for someone who doesn't usually read cape comics, I think Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye is fun because it's so not like other superhero comics.

Q. Your brother Owen King released his debut novel Double Feature earlier this year. Was it nice to see him come into his own?

A. It's a hysterically funny book. And I loved that it's got these two stories of filmmaking, one in the '70s and one essentially set right now, that say something about films and creative personalities and the times — the historical moments they were made in. I don't think I could ever stage something where the comic set pieces are so funny.

I'm terrifically proud of him and I can't wait for his next thing. He's got something in the pipeline that's coming along pretty quickly.

Q. Writing is definitely the family business. Have any of your boys shown any interest yet?

A. All three of my boys are terrifically creative and inventive, which I am glad to see. That takes my family's plan of total entertainment domination one step closer to fruition. We won't be satisfied until we're Viacom.

My oldest boy is a little bit of a musical freak — he plays drums and guitar, piano, bass. He's got a band he pulled together that sounds like a college band and the oldest kid's 14. That's really impressive.

The middle boy is probably the biggest reader in the family. I told him not to start reading Lord of the Rings, that he was too young for it and he'd just be bored. He didn't pay attention to me and he's plowed most of the way through the first book now. That shows what my advice is worth.

The youngest boy wants to be a game designer and is constantly working out ideas for steampunk-y games. He has a typewriter and he also does a fair amount of writing.

We're poised to conquer music, game design and fiction going forward. I probably should have had a fourth kid — we don't have anyone working in film. That's just a missed opportunity.