STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo 2006

Alex Cahill Interview

Alex Cahill and Jad Ziade made the trip down from Portland for STAPLE! '06, and took part in our panel on Xeric-winning comics and the Xeric grant. This year, the Xeric-award winners are headed back to Austin, where they'll debut their ambitious new science-fiction story Poison the Cure.

STAPLE!: So pretend I'm a martian who just landed on Earth, loves comics but doesn't know you guys or your projects. Who are you and what is Poison the Cure?

Alex: Haha. We're The New Radio. We're Alex and Jad. We're from Portland, Oregon. We've released two books so far, both of them silent one-shot stories that I (Alex) have written and drawn. The first was called Something So Familiar and the second was The Last Island. They were what they were. Now we have our sights set on a big project, a four-part, looks-to-be-four-hundred-page sci-fi story called Poison the Cure that looks back on the end of a world and on a handful of companions facing everything differently but together.

STAPLE!: Doing the math, that sounds like four 100-page issues... you guys are self-publishing, yes? So what's the format, and has something that size presented any new challenges on the publishing side?

Alex: We are self-publishing, yes. It's been nice to receive attention and interest from other publishers, but Jad and I have wanted from the start to do this as our own book and to use the entire project as our best attempt at "making it" in self-publishing comics. The format will be ordinary with this book, though. No funny sizes or orientations, but the design on this book is gonna be hot. And so far the larger-sized book doesn't appear to present any publishing challenges, other than the capital-B Boredom of getting 100 pages print-ready. Ugh.

STAPLE!: When did you and Jad come up with this idea and start working on it?

Alex: Dude, Jad and I were working on this a while ago. We started brainstorming when I hadn't even finished Something So Familiar. I was in San Diego for Thanksgiving in 2004 and Jad and I had agreed to share our two separate ideas for a story to do together and try to meld them into one. It could've been lame, but our separate ides became the two different timelines that Poison the Cure addresses. It worked out great. I took a small break from drawing Something So Familiar over that holiday and we sat down at a tea house and hammered out the main characters, their names and their looks in one sitting. I was completely pumped by how well Jad and I worked together. I felt like he trusted me and I knew right away that he was going to write a story I wanted to read. Jad's the real deal.

STAPLE!: Well, the obvious question here seems to be: Who are the main characters, in a nutshell?

Alex: The main characters form a group in this first part. They're all friends, but they've been living in different countries. There are three brothers, Pedro (the oldest, by far), Miguel, who's returned home because of bad news, and Loquito, the little one. The brothers have recently lost someone and are visited by Pedro's old friends, Deuce and Charlie, as well as Deuce's daughter, Mugshot. They're there to comfort him and to help out with a very real danger.

The world these characters live in is dangerous and corrupt, to an extent not totally visible inside of this first chapter. So these characters range from ignorant and apathetic to very hardened. They have their own ways of coping and some of them haven't given up. But the course of Poison the Cure puts them all together and runs them through some serious business.

STAPLE!: Your previous efforts have been one-shot stories, mostly (if not entirely) silent and very much driven by thematic elements rather than plot. As a big 4-issue sci-fi epic, Poison the Cure looks like a departure in some ways, is that the case?

Alex: Absolutely. I will plainly admit that I was unprepared for the scope and the demands of doing Poison the Cure, having only done two short, wordless and, as you say, theme-driven comics. I had so much learning to do as I was going. I'd barely ever even drawn a word balloon! But departure is good. It's nice working with someone else, especially with someone who has a similar attitude about storytelling--and most especially with someone who's Jad. It's nice giving the many characters all the room they need to develop. It's nice having a big story to develop patiently and to have big, loud moments as well as slow, quiet moments. It's nice to see the challenge of this big story improve my drawing almost page-by-page. It's nice to work on a story that has some real issues on the table. Every departure from our previous material is welcome to me.

STAPLE!: What has been the biggest challenge in this departure? Is it the leaving space for word balloons, or the pacing, or...?

Alex: Well those things are definitely big challenges, no doubt, and the whole project was a challenge in every way, but the biggest deal for me has been adjusting to the role of illustrator for this project and dealing with drawing the whole world around these characters.

My two books before this had a severely restricted storytelling mode. There were no words in them and the worlds surrounding the main characters, built mostly by repeating visual motifs, were very, very simple. For those projects I thought it was important to reduce things like that, and I felt as if it worked. But Poison has needs more than that. It's not a quick, silent parable. It's a 400-page sci-fi epic, and the characters aren't symbolic or simplistic. They need to be real. They need to inhabit real places. I'm the one charged with describing these people and these places and it's been an adjustment being so much more specific with the drawing. On the plus side, though, just drawing this first part has improved my drawing by leaps and bounds, and I do love seeing that.

STAPLE!: What are some of your favorite sci-fi stories, and did any of them have an influence on Poison the Cure?

Alex: I have to say I'm poorly read in all genres, including sci-fi. I was really into Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga, but I can't say that those affected my drawing much. Watching the original Star Wars trilogy a billion times probably had a big influence on my sci-fi visuals, though. And any junky old-school sci-fi comic I've ever looked at probably comes out in this project a little.

STAPLE!: Sci-fi can mean everything from Blade Runner to Battlestar Galactica to Planet of the Apes... what's the general vibe of Poison the Cure? Dystopic future vision of Earth, galaxy-spanning adventure, etc.?

Alex: You can definitely call this a dystopic future vision of Earth--if Earth is indeed the planet featured in this comic. The book starts off with a trio of goofy aliens coming across an uninhabited planet and piecing things together through residual telepathic energies, and it's clear that things didn't end well on this world. But from there, the narrative is handed off in a clever way and Jad takes you for a unique ride.

Poison the Cure

Poison the Cure will debut at STAPLE! in Austin, Texas in the first weekend of March 2007 and will be in comic shops shortly thereafter. There's a preview of the book available at newradiocomics.com, as well as features on previous comics by Jad & Alex.