Wicked Horror speaks with The 99 Legs creators Michael W. Conrad and Noah Bailey!
Two acclaimed comics creators have re-teamed to serve upThe 99 Legs,a horror graphic novel that pays tribute to Italian giallo films, which blend familiar elements from horror and thrillers plus many iconic touches.
Nightwing and Batgirls writer Michael W. Conrad and artist Noah Bailey (Diabolical) are the minds behind The 99 Legs.
The tale follows a crime fiction writer who stumbles upon a series of brutal murders. The 99 Legs will digitally debut with Comixology Originals on November 17th and publish in print next year from Mad Cave Studios.
Wicked Horror tossed a few questions to Michael and Noah.
WH: First tell us a little about what’s in store for readers in The 99 Legs. Michael, you’re the writer, what’s in the mix as we follow true crime writer Dashiell Spears through a series of grisly murders?
MC: Dash hasn’t had a hit in a long time and has been deeply wounded by the fact that his career is on the skids. He’s drinking too much, his marriage is in peril, and his new manuscript is late. When he finally gets his book in the hands of his agent, bodies begin to pop up around the city, murder victims who have been killed in ways that mirror those in the book. Naturally Dash has only one suspect, but no real proof, and his memory is a little shot from all the booze. Concerned that the murders will get pinned on him, Spears begins his own investigation.
WH: How much do you want to reveal about the killer and the killer’s makeup?
MC: I’ll share what we learn early in the story, which may or may not be reliable information. The killer in Doveland seems to be the killer from the book Dash has written. We get glimpses of this interspersed with excerpts from the novel, which provides some insight into this fictional character that seems to have entered our world. How much is truth and how much is fiction will be revealed in the story.
WH: Noah, can you talk to us about planning the visuals for the graphic novel? It’s a grim setting, and you do a lot to set the visual mood as well as to bring the characters to life.
NB: I always have a lot of fun in the research and design phase. I like to imagine people I’ve known or actors I admire in these roles and then I draw them until they kind of become themselves naturally. And the environments are often built around places I’ve been (sometimes lived in), or places I’ve seen in books or films. I love to hide little things in backgrounds as references or even memorials. I always want each environment to feel like real places that speak about the characters that inhabit them. A lot of the mood in this book comes from the lighting and color, of course, and I had an immense amount of fun playing with light and textures to capture different feelings and moods. Sometimes the shadows, angles, and depth of focus become their own characters and convey just as much about what is taking place as the actual actions of the characters do!
WH: The 99 Legs is inspired by Italian giallo films. Can each of you pinpoint some of the inspirations? Favorites.
MC: Deep Red and Don’t Torture a Duckling along with Torso and Black Belly of the Tarantula were pretty influential on me, along with Peeping Tom which isn’t Giallo, but it hits a lot of the same notes.
NB: Tenebrae, Opera, Blood and Black Lace, A Bay of Blood, The Fifth Cord, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Girl Who Knew Too Much are some of my absolute favorites! And also a lot of American Giallo-inspired films like Blow Out, Cruising, Road Games, Dressed to Kill. I also drew a lot of inspiration from some of my favorite noirs, like—Touch of Evil, Night and the City, The Third Man, Out of the Past, M, Leave Her to Heaven. And then some other genre films, like—I, Madman, The Conformist, Black Sabbath, Maniac.
WH: Many giallo films have reporters or writers as their leads. Were you reflecting on any particular protagonists with Dashiell? He certainly has a familiar first namesake. Is there a touch of a Tony Musante or a James Franciscus in the inspirational mix?
MC: Dash being a writer is 100% due to the Giallo influence. I named him after Dashiell Hammett, but shifted the last name to Spears, which is the last name of the protagonist of In Bloom, a mini-series I did with John J. Pearson at BOOM! over a year ago. That character’s name got changed to Spears at the last minute (long story) and it didn’t even register that I had already used that name in The 99 Legs. I found this amusing, so I kept it. In my head cannon the two characters are related.
NB: Oh wow! Great names! James Franciscus was among the actors I used as inspiration for a certain character—as well as a young Kirk Douglas and George C. Scott. For Dashiell I modeled him after my grandfather, Robert Mitchum and Harry Dean Stanton!
WH: Are there any homages slipped into the pages or did you strive to weave in iconic elements?
MC: Giallo is so trope heavy that there are a million homages in there, the genre feels defined by operating within certain confines and finding novel ways to subvert them. The 99 Legs is as much a pushing back against those standards as it is a celebration of them. I’ll leave that element of discovery up to the readers.
NB: I hid a lot of things in the backgrounds, some of which were subsequently covered by text, but many are still visible and ready to be found! Hahaha. I hide film and literature references, references to people I know, references to our past books and I think I even put my phone number in there somewhere. Hahahaha.
WH: Dashiell is following a series of murders. How did you decide how far to push the envelope in the reveals?
MC: So much of what gets shown is left for Noah to decide. My panel descriptions were graphic, I put it all out there. Giallo is bloody, it’s raw, it presents gore in a beautiful way. If we’ve done it right the reader should feel uncomfortable by what they’re looking at.
NB: I think Michael did a really masterful job at knowing when to leave the actual killing to the imagination and when to show it graphically. I was imagining certain songs playing during a lot of the kills and reveals. One particular sequence seemed so operatic, I could hear a Dvorak symphony in my head so strongly that I suggested we remove most of the sound effects. It appears to be in slow motion to me. Michael asked me very early in the process if there were any settings I could suggest for interesting murder scenes, and the first thing that came to mind was a carousel murder. And then, BAM! the opening is a slow creep toward a murder victim on a carousel, accompanied by GORGEOUS prose that gets under your skin and crawls around. I was so thrilled.
WH: Can we say there may be surprises at the end? Do you think you’ll do more in the 99 Legs universe?
MC: I don’t know if The 99 Legs is built to surprise people in a twist ending kind of way, but I’ve had early readers say that we took the story to a place they didn’t see coming on first read, but in review they noticed some of the hints we seeded in along the way. While surprising readers is nice, and I love stuff like The Twilight Zone, this book shoots pretty straight, and I think by the end folks will get it, even if we don’t spell it all out for them. Mostly we want people to take it for what it is, a story about desperation, and to what extremes desperation can take us.
NB: I am so close to this thing—I really wish I could just experience it as an objective third party and give a solid answer about whether or not it is surprising. I would like to think that the reveal is a surprise, and hopefully a welcome one! But, I do think that the way it unfolds is very matter-of-fact and almost Hemingway-esque. It has a kind of classic feeling to it that makes you feel like you knew it all along. Michael did a really remarkable thing, I believe. I think it’s the best work we’ve done together. I don’t know that there will necessarily be more to add to the universe. We are always pretty keen to move in different directions and continue the progression elsewhere, but I also wouldn’t be opposed to someday returning to Doveland and seeing what the remaining characters have been up to!
Thank you so much for having us!
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