DF Interview: Skottie Young & Jorge Corona reteam for dark Western fantasy series ‘Ain’t No Grave’

 

By Byron Brewer

 

Ryder put her violent past behind her when she fell in love and became a mother. But that was before she learned it was all going to be taken away. Now she'll have to pick up her guns once again and ride to kill the one who's behind the threat. Which just happens to be Death.

 

Eisner Award-winning writer Skottie Young and Eisner Award-nominated artist Jorge Corona, the team behind Middlewest and The Me You Love in the Dark, are back together with an all-new miniseries, Ain’t No Grave! This Unforgiven-style journey is an original macabre Western/fantasy tale for mature readers, told through a Guillermo Del Toro-esque lens. How could I NOT want to chat with its creators?

 

Byron Brewer: Skottie and Jorge, you fellows have teamed on quite a number of works in the last few years. Talk a little about your collaboration as a whole and how you now bring readers Ain’t No Grave. What was the inspiration?

 

Skottie Young: As soon as we started building Middlewest, it became clear that we are a seamless team. I can’t quite explain exactly why other than we became friends instantly. Our interests and tastes in story, art and comics were so similar so it was never hard to find common ground. Collaboration is really all about trust. After the first issue of Middlewest #1, I think we both knew that we could trust the other to plus up every idea and story point. And that includes Jean and Nate on colors and letters as well.

 

We knew we wanted to try another project after Middlewest and after The Me You Love in the Dark, and there was no question that we’d be making comics together for a long time to come… So we pulled from some of our ideas we had on a  list and Ain’t No Grave came from that.

 

Jorge Corona: Middlewest was a book that perfectly encapsulated what Skottie and I love about stories and, as we kept working on it, we started realizing just that. It is probably to this day the most seamless project I’ve ever worked on. The whole team was just firing on all cylinders.

 

As for Ain’t No Grave, Skottie and I have a list of ideas that we keep going to and checking if that’s going to be the next project or not. Once we finished The Me You Love in the Dark, we kept circling back to some variation of a Western story but with a different setting. It kind of hit us later that we didn’t need to complicate things for the kind of story we wanted to tell.

 

Byron: What can you tell us about the world you will drop us into come May? Describe the atmosphere and background of where we will witness your story, and how you both used your writer’s or artist’s toolbox to bring it to life.

 

Skottie Young: It’s a darker, fantastical version of the landscapes we’ve all a come to love in classic Westerns. In Middlewest, we took 70 percent Midwest praises, farmland and forests and sprinkled 30 percent magic and fantasy. It’s similar here but with a haunting, sometimes grotesque afterlife vibe. We like you to feel familiar and surprised at the same time.

 

The most powerful setting in the story is the city at the end of the world, Cypress. It’s like if you took Deadwood and turned it into Manhattan. Wooden skyscrapers and stacked layers of buildings. It’s a true labyrinth of not good stuff!

 

Jorge Corona: Once we made the decision of going with a classic Western setting, we needed to figure out what were the elements that were going to separate this Western from others. Skottie and I love world building, we gravitate to it. This story was about death and the environment needed to reflect it. Luckily there is a lot of that imagery in Westerns already so what we needed to do was to exaggerate it and give it our personal twist.

 

Another great thing is that the story keeps moving and we get to explore different locations on each issue. Each has a very unique approach and it reflects the stage in which our character is at the moment.

 

Byron: Introduce readers to Ryder. Who was she, who is she when we first meet her, what challenges will she face (without spoilers)? How does her relationship with her family define what occurs in Ain’t No Grave?

 

Skottie Young: These questions are always hard to answer when talking about a miniseries. It’s kind of what the whole book is about. Getting to know who she is and how her family defines her goals. Let’s just say that Ryder was not a great person for most of her life, but she turned it around when family became a reality for her. When that’s threatened to be taken away, she leans a bit on her old ways.

 

Byron: Extra points for not saying “Read the book!” Haha! … Give readers an overview of this unique and original macabre Western fantasy, of how Ryder’s violent past has set her on a collision course with… Death? Can you spotlight any characters who we meet here, especially in the first issue?

 

Skottie Young: Ryder has always been someone that takes what she wants. She’s the same even when it comes to her fate. She will attempt to take back her own mortality from Death itself. To do that, she’ll need to find her way to an unreachable place, dodge every bullet in a never-ending city of gunmen, play the highest stakes game of poker, face the music of an undying song, and… well, we’ll save that for the book.

 

Byron: Talk about working on the character designs for this limited series. That is endlessly interesting to me – especially with everything ramped up in a Western-esque style!

 

Jorge Corona: Characters are key for our story, If you don’t feel for Ryder by the end of the first issue, then the rest of her journey becomes trivial for the reader. For that, I needed to show both sides of our main character: the family woman and the ruthless gunslinger. When we meet Ryder, she is in that second mode, and for that I wanted to show someone who shields themselves from the rest of the world, this is the cold Ryder, the battle torn one. The big duster and the scarf, along with her hat, helped with that. She literally has to lift her head and reveal her face to open up to the world and the reader.

 

As we move forward, we get to meet some more of the macabre characters of this world. This was a very fun exercise of taking stereotypes and twisting them in a way that they still felt human but with an underlying menace.

 

Byron: What elements about Ain’t No Grave really excite you? Any scenes especially fun/difficult to draw? Are there any favorites for you among the cast?

 

Jorge Corona: Honestly the environments have been my favorite thing! I always love to think of settings as the biggest characters that will define the story and the book for you. Like I said, we keep moving the settings and locations on each issue and it was a lot of fun to make sure they looked distinct but real in a way. Funny enough, I think they were both the most fun AND difficult to draw! Haha!

 

As for the cast, I have a soft spot for Ryder. It’s probably the first book working with Skottie that I wanted to have the archetypical “hero” look for our main character and I pulled a lot from the pulp era to come up with her design. Also, there is probably my favorite character in issue #3, but I’ll wait until we can show her to talk more about it.

 

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Skottie Young & Jorge Corona for taking time out of their busy schedules to answer our questions. Ain’t No Grave #1 from Image Comics is slated to be on sale May 8!