As often as I can, I will try to bring you interviews with people who are creating comics and doing everything they can to show their work to the world.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the great pleasure to have an email correspondence with Zander Cannon, of Big Time Attic and Double Barrel Magazine. We talked about his most recent work, Heck, his life and career, the state of comics today, and everything in between.

Interview below. This is a long one.

I recently finished Heck and loved it. What inspired that story? Where did it come from?

The concept was just a character sketch I had done a few years before, basically a sort of Doc Savage or Indiana Jones-type character, who would explore Hell. I had always wanted to make a character who was a kind of blue-collar sorcerer, who would treat magic like you might treat plumbing or carpentry. He had a bunch of sidekicks, one of which was the mummy character that became Elliot. The others were a Nosferatu-like vampire and a bat-creature. All of this was meant to be a very light, silly series of stories – if I ever even got around to them – called The Infernal Adventures of Heck Hammarskjold. So that was all a couple of sketches and a few descriptions, but I always had a little trouble coming up with the right tone for the stories. I wanted to make them funny, I wanted to make them action-y, but I got kind of overly ambitious and wanted to include concepts of hell from all religions, and the mythology of this world got a little unwieldy, so I set it aside.

I doubt I ever would have gotten to it except that Kevin [Cannon, my studiomate and not-brother] and our friend Steve Stwalley and I decided to do a project we called the 144-Hour Graphic Novel Project. We were going to take one day a month and each write and draw a 12 page chapter in 12 hours. After a year, we would have a 144-page graphic novel, supposedly. So since we were going to be working that fast, and being that casual and spontaneous about the art and the story, I just needed to grab an idea. Heck seemed the most high-concept-y of the ones that came to mind, and if I eliminated a lot of the overly-ambitious world-building I was doing, it was also the most open in terms of actual story.

I knew I had to hit the ground running, so to have something to crib ideas from, I printed out a map of Dante’s Inferno, as well as the Wikipedia page on theInferno part of the Divine Comedy. Then I winged it. I didn’t have anything planned out, I just kind of introduced characters that I thought might come in handy later, and a glance at the map gave me some thoughts on what their character flaws might be. The rush of creating on a tight deadline and the stressful, boots-on-the-ground feel of drawing a scene while I was writing it forced me to give these characters – which were little more than archetypes when I sat down that morning – a little more depth in order to make the scenes flow. Even little throwaway jokes like Elliot and Amy saying that they hate each other created an entire subplot about their mutual antagonism.

There is an uncountable number of interpretations of the Christian Hell alone. What made you decide to go with Dante?

As much of a cliché as it is to set it in Dante’s Inferno (and it truly is a terrible, terrible cliché), the nice thing about it is that it’s so wonderfully varied. Instead of having every part of Hell essentially be the lake of fire, like it typically is, there can be parts that are gloomy, parts that are cold, parts that are forests, and even some parts that aren’t even that bad. It also allowed me as the writer to distance myself from the implied judgment of all the characters. The crimes that Dante sentences people to an eternity of torture for are hopelessly out of step with the world today, so having something established and fairly well-known like the Inferno let me keep the interesting and colorful aspects, discard or ignore the biases of 14th century super-Catholics, and allow people to chalk the general moral structure up to mythology, while keeping my own thoughts on the morality of the world out of it as much as possible.

One thing that I specifically tried not to do – and it was kind of hard – was do the sort of things I did in Top Ten and other pop-culture savvy books I’ve worked on, like cramming in little Easter eggs for people who knew a thing or two about Dante. There are a few, but I really wanted to avoid that sense of trying to be so clever with semi-obscure bits of trivia that I just so happen to have studied this week. I intentionally didn’t read the Inferno for this reason, but rather just printed out the Wikipedia page for it; I really wanted the story to be about the ideas, rather than a deconstruction of a 600-some year old poem. But if you look, you’ll see Judas, hear someone talk about Sisyphus, see some background stuff in certain areas that talks about each part of Hell. I really couldn’t resist completely, as much as I tried.

Once I was a little ways into the book, I really tried to avoid looking at anything to do with the Inferno, particularly any visual representation of the characters, especially the demon Geryon, who is in most depictions of Dante, but is absent from the public consciousness. After finishing the book, it was interesting to then go back and see how other creations dealt with him. I like that my approach – which was taken just from the description – is completely different from anything else I saw; it was fun to see that a character that only gets a fleeting bit of attention everywhere else becomes one of my main villains.

You said before you had a very different idea in mind for Heck originally, how did you decide what to change and how to change it? Do you think you’ll ever go back to those ideas and create a Heck serial?

The changes came entirely from the act of simplifying the story in order to tell it quickly. When I started making the book, I hadn’t plotted anything out, I just started writing and drawing the prologue, which is Heck’s father’s funeral. In that scene I started laying the groundwork for the other characters and the hints of what was going to happen, and all of a sudden, the fantastical stuff that I had originally envisioned for this story (vampires, bat-people) didn’t really fit. Also, the melancholy and wistfulness and regret that went into Heck’s character in order to make this pretty talky and undynamic scene interesting to me steered the story into a gloomier place.

I was learning a lot about narrative structure on the fly while making this book, and I realized just after I had finished Chapter 3 – where Heck and Elliot get to the river – that I had finished the first act of the story. I’d established the catalyst for the plot, the main character had taken a step he couldn’t take back, and all ideas and characters had been introduced. At that point, I couldn’t create any more important main characters or concepts or the story would stop moving. I knew by then that the book was turning into something different; it was less a slam-bang adventure than a meditation on punishment and unhappiness, but I also wanted to make sure I fulfilled the implied promise that the story put across to readers. I mean, you’re starting to read a story about a guy with a shotgun slung to his back heading into Hell; if there isn’t some kind of action, you’re going to feel let down, no matter how good the book is. So I really wanted to focus on making sure that it was still a big action adventure in terms of what happened, even if the tone was now fairly gloomy.

I also intentionally made the story very episodic – implying further adventures – for a couple reasons. One, sure, it might be fun to do another one or two. Using the structure of the Divine Comedy, after all, implies that there would be two more stories. Two, I liked the idea that this story wasn’t important to anyone but Heck and Elliot. Everyone else goes about their business afterwards; rewards and injuries notwithstanding, and it’s only what has stuck in the back of their minds that really hangs on. That sort of return to the status quo in terms of the plot but not the characters really appeals to me; Star Trek: The Next Generation always did that really well.

So I like that there’s the implication that Heck and Elliot go on adventures like this all the time, and it might be fun to do one or two short stories showing typical adventures, but I feel like I’d have to be fairly careful to respect the tone of this first story.



Heck is indeed a very gloomy book, which I thought was very clever. Hell is normally depicted as a whole lot of fire and full of action, a sad and gray Hell is much more interesting. What were your favorite parts of Hell to create? What were your favorite parts of the story?

I have two favorite chapters. The first is the one in which Heck and Elliot go through the wood of suicides as we see Amy contemplate suicide in high school. It was a nice quiet moment in the book, but the thing I liked about it as a writer was that it was nice and tidy. So much of the time you have to bash out a story and nothing is working, so you have to seemingly move heaven and earth to get your characters where they’re supposed to be. But once in a great while you have a story (or a chapter, in this case), where it all falls together very easily. Lines just come to you, transitions are easy, nothing is repeated or seems too pat; it just works nicely. On the other hand, my other favorite chapter is the following one, in which Heck and Elliot meet Geryon. This was the complete opposite. This was a chapter that was a case of constant revisions; an endless series of creative dead ends. I wrote and rewrote and drew and redrew the end of the chapter multiple times, sometimes with a lighter tone, sometimes with a flashback, or a more complete hypnosis, or something. Choosing what to make Heck do that simultaneously helps and does not help Elliot was obvious, I think, in retrospect, but I went through a ton of variations before I stumbled across it. Similarly, I drew and redrew and redrew Heck’s face on the next to last page to get that grief and fury right (and I still don’t like it 100%). But I liked that the chapter ended with a bang, and I liked Heck’s grim quip right before he does the deed. Little things like that can save a scene I’m feeling a little bit so-so about.

Along the lines of creating a different kind of Hell: there’s something about one of the panels in the early part of chapter 10 that I kind of like, albeit in kind of a perverse way. Heck is describing the upcoming circles of Hell, and we’re looking over his shoulder as he points down into the pit. But where that style of panel suggests there should be something right there that he’s pointing at, there’s not; there’s just blackness. I will admit I really just did that because I’m lazy, and it would be hard to put anything in that little panel that would communicate anything meaningful to the story. So I just shrugged and thought, yeah, he’s just pointing into the blackness ahead of them. Use your imagination, I guess.

Creating Hell seems like it can be a difficult thing, especially the dark and sad underworld in Heck. Did you use Heck to express your own personal Hell?

Originally, Heck was to be just what it looks like from the cover: a hero-type goes into hell with a shotgun and a mummy sidekick and adventures ensue. But while working quickly, and on chapters that were pretty talky in the beginning, I started making the characters – particularly Heck – a little more depressive in nature, and people’s back stories became darker and more unhappy. This was due to the facts that, at the time, I was deeply unsatisfied with most of the professional work I was doing – hence wanting to make a work for just myself – and the fact that my wife and I were going through some very difficult times in terms of trying to have a family. In particular, we had multiple miscarriages, which over time essentially divides your life into either mourning a terrible event or dreading a new one. You can see this influence in a fairly overt way when Heck runs into the funeral director and he is upset about the angels taking all of the babies away from Limbo, but also in the general mood of dread that begins to spread over the whole book. As the story progressed, so did our life, and we adopted our son, and so in the story you can see that Heck spends the rest of the book trying to protect the helpless and fragile Elliot. It’s not terribly subtle, I will admit. But with all our leftover fear, combined with the anxiety of early parenthood, plus the awareness of all of the innate tragedies that surround the process of adoption, there were a lot of dark feelings that went into the story.

Certain chapters in the book were fairly gruesome and cathartic to write and draw; I found myself completely emotionally exhausted by the process, and writing the final epilogue was a tremendous relief. Even now, I look back on some of the chapters and see how they do very little but express a deep despair, and I wonder at what my mindset must have been at the time.

I feel like I’ve always tried to grab onto a true emotional experience to wrap even the most bizarre genre stories around, not as a puzzle for a reader to decode, but as a tool to make it interesting for me. Every writer knows the feeling that comes when a scene you’re writing goes off the emotional rails and starts just being people recapping the plot or filling in details. It’s terrifically boring, and it’s why we always seem to need such clichés as an antagonistic superior or a conspiracy or sexual tension to drive what would otherwise be really dull scenes.

Taking the experiences that made up my mid-thirties and putting them down onto paper had a very positive effect on me. While I normally think that it is a tragedy that art only manages to capture 25% of an author’s emotion or ideas, in this case it was a blessing; what it did was take a wild cloud of terrible feelings and put them down in a certain kind of order. It’s not necessarily the right order, but it broadly represents the way I was feeling then. When I look back on it and read it, I get a sense for those feelings, but it is a progressively fainter and fainter echo. Similarly, as I was making the book and I was continually accessing and re-accessing those feelings, they became almost boring, as if they themselves had become a cliché to me. It was like exposure therapy; it wears down the rough edges of a feeling so that it becomes more manageable.

Coincidentally, I’m now working with a team to create a system that helps veterans create comics to help process trauma after coming home, using the same basic techniques, and hopefully we will experience some of the same success.

Can you speak further about your work with veterans? How did that get started? What do you do?

I’m working on an initiative called SAGA that is working with DARPA, and funded by the Department of Defense, that essentially aims to be an intermediate step in PTSD treatment for veterans who don’t have ready access to a therapist at the VA, or are resistant to traditional one-on-one therapy. These are going to be a series of online tools that variously help veterans (and hopefully others in the future, if the project is expanded to civilian application) learn the basics of comic creation, write and draw their own comics that process traumatic events, and create fictional stories using the emotions from their lives. There are three main branches of this process: therapeutic, technological, and artistic. I’m the artistic branch, so I help with making tools that teach people things like establishing shots, how to use word balloons, how to write dialogue, story templates, etc.

It’s an interesting process, and I’m looking forward to it being out in the world. I know that nothing dulls pain like having to process it and express it to others.

That’s really cool. Between that project, Heck, and working with Alan Moore on Top Ten, you’ve have a very interesting career. What have been the best and worst moments in working in comics for you?

It would be hard to pin down any particular moment as my favorite, but I find that little things like seeing work in print for the first time, or in a certain store, or a certain review, are always my favorite. The goal is always to be heard, so seeing things pop up in places you didn’t know they were going to be, or having a person come up to me and tell me that something was meaningful to them always resonates with me.

I still think sometimes about the first couple months of working on Top Ten with Gene; that was probably the most exciting time of my career in terms of just being in the moment and working fast, scrambling to learn as quickly as I could, and all the while having these incredible scripts to read. And on sort of a related note, while I was writing Top Ten for Season 2, working with friends on ideas and plotlines, drawing layouts and creating pages; that was a very intense, creative time as well. There is something I really love about a time where I’m all in on a project. I love the intensity of working on something I love, and the moment that an idea sparks another idea, and another, and you’ve just got too many to choose from. I’ve gotten that feeling from all of the 24-hour comics I’ve done, as well as the first few chapters of Heck; working full speed ahead, improvising as I go.

The worst parts of my career have been just certain times in which I had to do something and the situation was terrible – not being listened to, being overridden by someone who thinks they can do your job, etc. – and not having the ability to walk away due to other people being involved, or needing the money just a little too much. After a number of those I had to come to the realization about myself that I’m not nearly as flexible as I thought. I always assumed that I could just make it work, get the job done. But I realized I have too much pride to just do what other people tell me to do when I don’t agree. I don’t think this is my best attribute, and it certainly is not an asset when I’m doing commercial artwork, but there you go.

What has influenced you the most? What books have had the biggest impact on your work?

When I was younger, the comics I really liked to read had a very strong sense of place. I loved a well-rendered world, with little details in the ‘sets’ and 'costumes’ that hinted at back story. I wasn’t a big fan of having to KNOW that back story, but I always loved the idea that there was a bigger world there that I was seeing little parts of. A good example of that sort of thing was Groo the Wanderer. Sergio Aragones would put in the most peculiar details without really ever mentioning them in the stories, like armored lizard women sitting around the title of the story, and I like that my mind just sort of assigned them a vague place in the world of Groo, making the world that much richer, somehow.

I had a great love for a comic called Zooniverse by Fil Barlow in the mid 80s, published by Eclipse. It was a space fantasy set in an incredible sci-fi universe reminiscent of Star Wars or Flash Gordon. That was another comic where the details were just bewildering. Fil has since done a great deal of character design for animation, and it shows in this insane comic. Every alien in this story is completely new and original, being both a different direction on how an organism might look – it goes far beyond green skin and funny foreheads – and a viable character that represents its purpose in the story – e.g. an ominous floating head as an authority figure.

I was also really into humor comics like Ralph Snart Adventures by Marc Hansen and Flaming Carrot by Bob Burden. The economic reality of having to have virtually every comic be a genre adventure on some level made what might otherwise be just gag comics into funny parodies of both individual works and the whole genre. I always loved that as a kid; I wanted comics to be boy’s adventure stories, but I always hated it when they were too serious. Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire’s Justice League was another. I loved every issue of that.

I was also into the usual fan favorite books, and the mainstream cartoonists, but my two favorites were Alan Davis and David Mazzucchellli. I could, and did, read nearly everything by either of those guys.

But probably the biggest influence I had on making me want to make comics was Matt Feazell. My local comic store in Cleveland (B&L Comics) had a random bunch of Cynicalman comics, and I bought every one I could. I sent away for more, I read them and reread them. I think Matt was the only creator I sent a letter to as a kid. I started making my own minicomics and convincing my friends to do the same (I did five issues of The Ninja Garbageman in middle school). Here was someone whose art style and printing process was simple enough that you could see how it was done, but still made a fun, engaging comic. The sense that something so great was achievable made me completely inspired.

Were there any particular influences on Heck? Besides Dante’s Inferno and your own personal life, of course.

When I first designed the character, I was thinking a lot about classic pulp heroes – and their descendants, the ones I’d grown up with – and how I liked that the tired old heroes could have a subversive, slightly blasphemous side if I did it in just such a way (my initial concept for Heck was that it was going to be more serialized and that he would venture into all religions’ conceptions of Hell. But that sort of stuff starts getting pretty unwieldy pretty fast). I was pretty obviously thinking about Indiana Jones in terms of the structure of the stories, and I was thinking a little about Hellboy when it came to the conception of Hell – that is, it was stark and quiet in places – and the sort of rough-hewn, blue-collar sorcery that he had was based on a concept I had had for a BPRD pitch that never got going. I had also thought a little about the video game DOOM, as far as the idea of a guy who just goes charging into Hell with a shotgun. I loved the idea of someone who travels light, and relies on his own resourcefulness, in the face of an infinite amount of obstacles.

Obviously, this isn’t an influence per se, but I had been doing a lot of writing very quickly around this time and I was just starting to get a sense for the simple, classic, unadorned 3-act structure. Despite the fact that this story was becoming very personal and inward-looking, I was still determined to hit the beats and deliver the goods as if it were a straight-ahead thriller: fight the minotaur, shoot the demon, get betrayed in a plot twist, have a massive bloody sword battle at the climax. I’d felt like I’d made some implicit promises with the style and structure of the story, and I didn’t want to just drag people through something that would just be a thinly-veiled mini-autobiography. I love autobiography, so I feel like if you’re going to get that close, you may as well just tell the story as it happened. Otherwise, I like to stick to the structure and the beats of genre stories.

When Kevin and I launched Double Barrel, we declared the theme of the magazine to be “indie pulp”, though it was clearly whatever we were drawing at the time that went in. I liked that idea because it gave a sense that the art style – for Crater XV as well as Heck – was going to be idiosyncratic and individual, but in the service of stories that were, at least on the surface, treading a pretty well-worn path.

How did you and your non-brother partner, Kevin Cannon, start working together? How did Double Barrel come about?

They both have similar origins. I met Kevin in 2001, when he was a junior in college and I was in my late 20s, He and I went to the same college (Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in Iowa), were both cartoonists for the newspaper there, and obviously have the same last name, so naturally everyone there assumed we must be brothers. He contacted me that spring when he was going to be home in Minnesota – another similarity – for the summer. He asked if he could be my intern, and so it came to be that he experienced the least helpful internship in the history of mankind. That was the summer I got married, and was far too distracted to do anything worthwhile. But his amazing skills were of course not lost on me.

A year later, my wife and I left to go live in Japan for a couple years, and during that time I grew very nervous about the comics freelancing game, feeling that I was not really equipped or organized enough to make it as a cartoonist/illustrator. So in the months leading up to when I came home, I communicated with Kevin and Shadi Petosky and a few others about the possibility of forming a studio. What came of that was Big Time Attic, wherein Kevin, Shadi, and I all brought our connections and skills together to do …everything. We designed a family fun center, did magazine illustrations, did character animation for Flash games, designed rock posters, ghost-inked comic book pages, made a logo for a meat market, did high-resolution photo touch-up, etc. Over the course of this period, we were hiring more and more animators, since animation jobs were the most lucrative for us, and eventually the animation division got to be big enough that it separated into its own company. Kevin and I were left as the only comics guys, and we continued doing educational comics together, as well as other illustration and comics gigs, one of which was Kevin’s book Far Arden.

I was inspired by Far Arden to make my own creator-owned novel, and it so happened that I finished Heck at the same time that Kevin finished Far Arden’s sequel, Crater XV. We both sent the books off to Top Shelf (where Far Arden was published) and were told that they would love to print them, but that it would take over a year to fit them into the schedule. We were both excited to get our books out in front of people’s eyes, and we had had some thoughts about the economics of digital comics, so we had an idea. If we had to get out 800 pages of material (our two books combined) in one year, we could put out big, 50-75 page issues with hardly any extra work. Leigh Walton at Top Shelf came up with the name Double Barrel, and Chris Ross helped us put it together, and of course, with all the extra material we had, nearly every issue ended up being over 100 pages. Now, the 'hardly any extra work’ turned out to be a ton of extra work in reality, but we were really pleased that we could create a home for all our narrative work that was feeling less and less like it fit in elsewhere. It was sort of like a joint Eightball or Peepshow for us in the digital age.

What do you think is the future of comics?

I do think that the future of comics is going to be more digital, but I don’t think that print will ever go away. I mean, like a lot of people, I like individual comics. I also like newspapers, but that doesn’t mean that there’s really any reason for them to be around once the information in them can be available to everyone.

It makes me think of a story I heard about when Disney was making the movie Tron in the late 70s/early 80s. There were some effects that they asked their feature character animators to do for the movie, and at least some of them refused, feeling like computer animation was going to put them out of a job. They were absolutely right, but not for another 20 years. I think the situation with comics and digital comics is a little like that. So I think print comics as the predominant driving force behind the industry have many years left, but I also think the writing’s on the wall. There’s too much material out there, and the books are too expensive, for people to buy it all. I’m a middle class guy, and every time I go to the comic store, I spend half my time picking up cool comics that I want to buy, and the other half putting back the ones I want the least, because I just don’t have enough money.

What I think is that digital comics has hastened a change in the current thinking about comics formats. Where there used to be only individual comics and graphic novels (which were always collections of individual comics), there are now OGNs, big graphic albums, collections, individual issues, digital individual issues, webcomics, digital graphic novels, digital graphic novel add-ons to the print graphic novel, etc, etc. I think this new, legitimate alternative to monthly four-color magazines has really made people think about all the formats they COULD use, and really think about where each individual project belongs. There will always be certain comics that are far superior in print, some you don’t care either way, and some that are superior in digital. I like to think a greater number of options will mean that we’ll have better comics in every format.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on another graphic novel – or series of novellas – that will be in the same format as Heck called Golden Wing. Basically it’s going to be all the superhero comic proposals that I sent around over the last decade which got rejected that I’m mashing together all into one world. Essentially my own private DC Silver Age. It will be more or less in the artistic style of Heck but brightly colored, high energy, and fun (with, of course, a melancholy streak running throughout). These will be serialized in a new season of Double Barrel which will come out when Kevin and I get around to it – say, before mid-2015. I was also going to say that I am doing a lot of piecemeal bits of layouts for DC titles and freelance illustration, but I’ve been talking with some publishers and may be doing more creator-owned small press comic series if I can make it work money-wise!

What’s your favorite dinosaur?

My favorite dinosaur has always been Stegosaurus, because there was a massive metal and fiberglass one outside the Cleveland Museum of Natural History near where I grew up, and I would climb on it for an hour every time we went. I also liked the (now discredited) idea that it had an extra brain at the base of its tail for some reason. I also have a plastic Triceratops sitting on my desk at the moment, so I guess that’s a big one too.

Since 1993, Zander Cannon has written and drawn comics about gods, robots, astronauts, police officers, paleontologists, aliens, feng shui masters, superheroes, philosophers, and monsters. He lives in Minnesota with his strong wife Julie and above-average son Jin.



Visit him on the web at barrelmag.com the official Double Barrel magazine site, friend him on Facebook, or follow him @zander_cannon on Twitter.