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Next town Over Vol. 1
Erin Mehlos is an Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist and developer of the web comics Hell’s corners and next town Over. next town Over is now available in print and Westfield’s Roger Ash contacted Mehlos to learn much more about it.
Westfield: What was the genesis of next town Over?
Erin Mehlos: It actually started as a joke with my sister. I was kind of jerkily criticizing a story she’d written where the action was just moving for no obvious reason from place to place as her protagonists destroyed town after town, just incidentally. These places were never developed or even named; her characters would just refer to them as the “next town over”. just to be a snot I said “I’m gonna do an entire story just called next town Over where there’s essentially nothing happening but two people wrecking town after town as they fight each other, completely blind to the collateral damage they’re causing which is essentially destroying all these faceless townsfolk’s lives”.
… and so I did it, except I couldn’t completely make good on the guarantee to have that be all it’s about; it spun out into a pretty tangled story.
Westfield: Why did you decide to do a Western?
Mehlos: I’ve always liked Westerns. Sergio Leone’s movies, Silverado … even the awful ones like two mules for sister Sara are great. The western is sci-fi’s low tech cousin; they have the same kinds of themes, really: civilizations spreading out into frontiers and coming into conflict with native life and cultures, trying to impose their own ideas of law and order, technology exploding and changing the way people live in pretty dramatic ways. But, see, I’m a awful draftsman, and all the clean lines called for by a really techy setting scare me! So westerns it is: horses are so much simpler to draw than spaceships.
Vane Black and John Henry hunter battle in next town Over.
Westfield: What can you tell us about next town Over? What can readers look forward to in the story and who are some of the characters they’ll encounter?
Mehlos: next town Over is kind of like Aeon Flux or, probably much more aptly, Spy vs. Spy set in the strange west: instead of Black Spy you get Vane Black, this mechanically- and medically-inclined woman who may or may not be undead, and she’s doggedly after our White Spy, John Henry Hunter, a dapper, spellslinging rogue who’s as chatty as Vane is silent. many of the story centers on these two, but their shared past is pretty mysterious, and that mystery is kind of the core interest of the comic. All the action is broken up by flashbacks that slowly reveal their strange history and shed some light on why Black is after Hunter, why they’re so inhumanly powerful, etc.. but if all that’s not enough for you, there’s also an ensemble of wronged parties — what my friend calls the “Screwed Overs” — snowballing in the wake of Black and Hunter. These are all the hapless bystanders impacted by all the collateral damage I was talking about — except they’re not faceless. They’re their own distinct characters whose stories sadly intersected with the protagonists’ … if you can even call them protagonists.
Westfield: Why did you do this as a web series and what has that experience been like for you?
Mehlos: I actually started NTO with print in mind, but the publishers that were interested in it (and there weren’t many; the comic is pretty different in looks and tone and whatnot and very few outfits wanted to bother with the expense of a full color comic they weren’t sure what to do with) wanted me to output it at a rate that was off the table at a time when we were contemplating having our first kid, or they’d want 50% IP ownership, or other things that turned me off of trying to go that route. I’d done a webcomic in the past, but it was before the introduction of Kickstarter, and project Wonderful, and social media, and tablets, and a thousand other things that have just made it so much simpler to get a comic in front of the best reader. Not to mention simpler to see your readership growing through tweets and blogs and pingbacks. It’s been very cool.
More action from next town Over.
Westfield: A portion of your funding for printing the comic was offered through a Kickstarter campaign. how was that experience?
Mehlos: It was great! I asked for $6500 and got $11500, allowing me to print a much snazzier book as well as a limited edition clothbound hardcover with a neato slipcase and a bunch of extras. The comic’s fans really came through, and I’d like to think they really got their money’s worth, too. I plan on printing the second volume the same way … except not while having a baby. I actually went into labor with our child a few weeks after the Kickstarter campaign commenced, which implied putting the book together and shipping rewards and whatnot with a new baby. some of the longest,hardest days of my life, hands down! but I’ve also never felt so lucky.
Westfield: any closing comments?
Mehlos: Yeah. despite what you see in next town Over, horse murder is never okay.
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Next town Over Vol. 1: maybe next Time SC