The Quarter Bin

As a huge fan of the Apocalipstix, getting the chance to talk to writer/co-creator Ray Fawkes helped make my weekend at the NYCC. Hey, it didn’t win our 2008 Best Original Graphic Novel for nothing. I spoke briefly with Ray at the Oni Press booth about a what we could expect from him, and our favorite new girl band, in the future. Hit the jump to see just what he had to say.

So I have to ask, when’s Apocalipstix 2 coming?

You should see that coming sometime around the end of this year, hopefully. Cameron Stewart would really be the person to ask. The book is written, so it’s ready to go as soon as he’s done doing Seaguy for Vertigo.

How did the collaboration on Apocalipstix come about? I know you two had wanted to do a project together, but how did it end up being the Apocalipstix?

We decided we wanted to collaborate before we knew what we were going to do. We just started banging around ideas. Cameron asked me what I wanted to write, and I asked what he liked to draw. You know, he likes to draw girls and as little background as possible, and I like to write about all the crazy B-movie stuff that I grew up with. It came together as girls touring together at the end of the world, and that was it.

What a better way to have your artist draw girls and have no backgrounds than to have an apocalypse and follow a girl band around, right?

[Laughs]

Those B-movie elements, like the whole second chapter where the girls are fighting giant ants, which was probably one of my favorite parts, seemingly came out of nowhere, but still fit so perfectly within the style of the book. Did you want to put even more wild stuff in this volume, or were you holding back some things for possible future stories?

We’re running through a bunch of the stuff I love in that sort of… if you take every movie about the post-apocalyptic world, you get ones that have these crazy, out of nowhere beasts or aliens, and you have stuff like the Road Warrior… so we wanted to hit on a little bit of that in the first volume, and you’ll be seeing more if it in subsequent volumes. You know, the further the girls go, the weirder things get. If you imagine one single world where all these kinds of things really happen, that’s the Apocalipstix world. You’re going to see robots. You’re going to see bizarre vampiric zombie creatures. They’re all in there.

Sounds awesome. So aside from Apocalipstix, do you have anything in the works that you’re hoping to put out soon?

I have a horror book coming out soon from Top Shelf soon. The book is Junction True, and Vince Locke is painting it. It’s due out later this year.

What’s the story behind that?

It’s about a sub-culture that performs plastic surgery on themselves, and it’s a love story set in that milieu. You can find out more about it on the TopShelfComix.com.

How has the reception been for you here at the NYCC since Apocalipstix came out?

It’s really wonderful to see how hungry people are for books, and how happy they are when they come across stuff that they like. People have been fantastic, you know, coming up and shaking my hand, and telling me how much they appreciated the Apocalipstix, and I love it. It’s great.

Thanks to Ray for taking the time to do this interview with us. Look for more NYCC 09 interviews with some of Oni’s other creators later this week.