Confession: I’ve never read a comic book.
Sure, I housed volumes of Calvin & Hobbes as a child, but I always took the snooty literary view of comics. They were fine for teenage boys and any woman inexplicably drawn to gratuitous violence and triple-D boobs, but I reserved my highbrow tastes for Roald Dahl and Michael Crichton, thank-you-very-much.
To the uninitiated, the Slate & Ashe comic created by local artist Ethan Murphy seems to fulfill such stereotypes. But the four book series, which begins when a big mouth cop partners with an Oxford-educated zombie to save a young girl from a hoard of undead monsters, is as much art as entertainment, and its production requires a cast of characters as varied as the medium itself.
“You spend hours upon hours of brainstorming ideas before you do an outline,” said Murphy. “Then I’ll draft the script and send it to Susan [Holland, Murphy’s writing partner] for edits, just so it’s presentable. Then we send it off to a penciler, the guy who puts the penciled sketches down, does the layout and storyboarding, and gets started on character design.”
The series follows Marion Ashe, a smack-talking zombie-slaying cop, and Vickrum Slate, his dry-witted, unlikely-yet-undead partner, as they fight the world, try to save a little girl from zombies and try not to kill each other. “So often in comics the main characters are outsiders or less worthy, which is easy to relate to if you are a struggling teenager,” said Murphy, who started reading comics after seeing the 1989 Batman movie but has been attracted to the underdog trope since he was a child.
Once the writers confirm that the visuals make sense, the draft traditionally goes to the inker. “Then it goes to a colorist [who use dyes or watercolors to fill in the black-and-white sketches], and then it comes back to me,” Murphy said. He acts as the letterer as well as the writer, composing and hand drawing all the prose.
He described the divergent roles of writer and artist as a way to tell stories more effectively. “The writer determines what people see and the artist determines how they see it,” he said. “You’re trying to express and convey so much emotion and action through a still image, you have to find an artist who is capable of bringing all that together.”
From concept to completion, a single comic book takes Murphy’s team between six months and a year to complete. It’s a process of creative collaboration familiar to almost everyone in the industry, though smaller operations in indie circles do include one-man bands.
If the production of sounds pro, that’s because it is. Murphy, who worked with a comic book industry mentor for a few years after college, explained that both Marvel and DC Comics have multi-person teams work on every project.
Murphy cut his writing teeth with a film degree from James Madison University. He wrote screenplays, short stories and eventually comics, connecting with a global network of peers at his first comic book convention. He did take a break from book writing, but not before someone at Marvel suggested he work on a comic about a cop and a zombie.
The idea simmered for several years, but “it wasn’t until I met up with Susan that I got back into comics,” he said. “At [Martha Jefferson Hospital, where they both worked], she was known for being meticulous, so I asked her to edit a short story I was submitting to an NPR contest. She turned it from a D- to B- in minutes.”
It didn’t take long for their collaboration to turn to comics. “Ethan introduced me to the whole background of storytelling,” Holland said. “I grew up reading, especially science fiction, but I didn’t read comics. My mom was a school teacher, so sometimes she’d confiscate comics from her students, and that’s how I’d get them.”
Turns out that no one (yours truly included) is above inaccurate stereotypes. In the case of the creation of Slate & Ashe, literary tradition plays to comic creation a bit like the good cop/bad cop dynamic between the characters themselves.
“Ethan and I are opposites in a lot of ways,” Holland said. “He’s the idea man and comes to me with questions. We’ll have disagreements with plot points, but he’s always able to tell me why.”
“I see things visually and Susan prefers to do them physically,” Murphy said. “She’s also a woman, so sometimes she’ll say, ‘This seems a bit misogynistic.’ I’m not deliberately obtuse, I just won’t recognize it because I’m used to comic books objectifying women and men. But I trust that she’ll notice them and have a frank discussion with me.”
That’s the truth behind the art of comic books like Slate & Ashe: Blood and gore actually punctuate emotional and social intelligence. “This is really about two unlikely allies that work together to try to redeem themselves in extreme circumstances,” Murphy said. “You hope anyone with angst who reads it will think, ‘If these two can look past themselves to work together, then hopefully I can do the same thing.’”
To explore Murphy’s work a free app offers issue No.1 as a free download, and print copies are available at local outlets and on IndyPlanet.com.