DF Interview: Sabir Pirzada looks at the horror genre through an Islamic lens in ‘The Horizon Experiment: The Sacred Damned’ one-shot

By Byron Brewer

Meet Inayah Jibril, Professor of Ethnography and the Occult. Oh, she’s also a demon hunter. In expanding our viewing of the horror realm through an Islamic lens, “Muslim John Constantine” Inayah attempts to cast a new interpretation on the tropes horror fans know and love to surprising effect.

From celebrated TV writer Sabir Pirzada (Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight) and Eisner-winning creator Michael Walsh (The Silver Coin) comes The Sacred Damned, a one-shot which is a part of the ongoing five-issue “Horizon Experiment” overseen by comics creator Pornsak Pichetshote. It was my honor to interview this issue’s fabled scribe, Sabir Pirzada.

Byron Brewer: Sabir, before we deep dive into your contribution to this very unique experiment writer and project overseer Pornsak Pichetshote has dubbed “The Horizon Experiment,” your comic The Sacred Damned, tell readers a bit about how you became a writer, probably long before you entered upon Marvel Studios’ cinematic universe with the Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight TV franchises and your current activities in comics and graphic novels. Tell us about your love for writing.

Sabir Pirzada: I became a writer through a combination of the two most traditional paths: 1) getting promoted from within through the assistant ladder and 2) getting into one the studios’ writing programs that have a good track record of staffing their writers onto shows at their studios. A lifelong comic collector and reader, I was always interested in writing comics, even before I thought of pursuing television. The snag I hit in comics was that they required paying an artist and I had no money, so I slow-played that pursuit (paying an artist to draw one page per month on my meager writers assistant salary) while focusing on climbing the TV ladder. My first breakthrough was as a writers assistant on the CBS show Person of Interest, which was the perfect intersection of all the genres I love to play in: science fiction, action, crime, mystery and drama. I was lucky enough to keep finding employment with television shows while trying to make comics in my spare time, though there were long gaps where I sat on the bench looking for TV work, and that was hard. Comics were even more difficult; so much so that I found an easier time adapting Marvel Comics for the MCU before I got a foot in the door with Marvel Comics! But either way, it’s been an absolute blast.

Byron: How did you become involved with Marvel Studios and their Disney+ franchises?

Sabir Pirzada: I was writing on a Disney+ show that was outside Marvel -- one of the really early shows that Disney+ had greenlit, prior to meeting any of the Marvel folks. When that show was canceled, the timing was fortuitous in that Marvel Studios was looking for writers for their Ms. Marvel TV series. As a Pakistani American Muslim who had collected Marvel Comics my whole life, I think I fit the bill nicely, and I was already recommended by the Disney+ folks for my work on that canceled project. I then met with the executives and Head Writer Bisha K. Ali and an hour later I had walked out of the room with a job that would change my life. It was through my experience on Ms. Marvel that I was able to get opportunities writing on other Marvel projects like Moon Knight.

Byron: If I am correct, your first comic book work was the Ms. Marvel comic book in partnership with the TV portrayer of Ms. Marvel, star Iman Vellani. And in July, your first Image graphic novel Dandelion was released. What brings you – and maybe fascinates you – about working in comic books as a medium?

Sabir Pirzada: Actually, my earliest comic book work goes back to independent work I either published with now-defunct publishers, or self-published on ComiXology’s “submit” platform -- work that then got bumped off ComiXology when it was folded into the Kindle apparatus. After that, my first comics writing gig were a couple of short stories in the Marvel’s Voices: Identity one shots in 2021 and 2022. So I already had a few credits under my belt when Iman Vellani was looking for a co-writer. Even though I primarily earn my living through writing television, I’m not shy to declare that comics is my favorite medium. I consider sequential art to be the sweet spot of having the perfect level of interactivity with its audience. The artwork and lettering is there to guide you, but as a reader you control the pacing just as much as the storytellers, and you have to imagine the voices and bring the still images to life in your mind. It’s an incredible medium and I’m still finding new ways to tell stories within it.

Byron: Back to The Sacred Damned: What can you tell readers about Inayah Jibril, who is being called a “Muslim John Constantine”? What can you say about her creation by you as a professor of ethnography and the occult – but instead of Christian iconography, she and her realm of horror are seen through an Islamic lens? Oh! And she is a demon hunter as well!

Sabir Pirzada: She’s also got a bit of Buffy Summers in her, and Fox Mulder as well. I can say that she’s unlike any other character I’ve written. With Ms. Marvel, a Disney-owned Muslim heroine that appealed to young children, we had to be careful to ensure that every attitude and shading of that character would retain a hopeful and aspirational personality, which was all in line with how G. Willow Wilson wrote the character in the comics, anyway. I mention that because Inayah Jibril is sort of the opposite -- she’s the first Muslim character I’ve written where I didn’t have to consider the massive weight of representation within a corporate apparatus. We could make her edgy and mysterious. Tortured from a childhood encounter with the supernatural that is still having ripple effects on her to this day, as you’ll see in this issue. Inayah approaches supernatural beings with greater compassion than she has for humanity -- it’s almost like she feels more at home among the monsters than her fellow humans, and that colors the way she approaches conflict between mankind and the supernatural.

Byron: Without spoilers, can you tell us what occurs in this first issue of your intriguing twist on comic book mysticism? A new interpretation on the horror tropes we have come to know and love?

Sabir Pirzada: It explores a universal fear that we all have at some point in our lives: that we are not fully in control of our own bodies. I think we found a new spin within the possession / exorcism genre that will surprise people.

Byron: How is the creation of Inayah and her world(s) reflective of you as a Pakistani-American writer? As a fan yourself of horror, was there any specific goals you had and tried to get across in The Sacred Damned?

Sabir Pirzada: Oh, it’s primarily inspired by Pakistani ghost stories. Islam recognizes certain elements of the supernatural and treats them as fact. Muslims generally consider the world of the Unseen to be treasured and sacred -- interacting with it is a privilege that humanity rarely gets. That’s sort of the opposite attitude to how the supernatural realm is treated in traditional horror, and was fun to incorporate in this story. There’s a conscious contrast between how the west and east approach mysticism -- in the case of the west, it’s either skepticism or a mental health diagnosis, whereas in the east, it’s seen as a conflict that may require some kind of mediation from an even more powerful third party that governs us both. It all felt like rich new territory to explore the horror genre. If I could expand some of these classic horror subgenres like exorcisms a little bit further to show that the iconic stories we know and love are just one specific cultural lens and that many more exist, hopefully that’ll open the door for all kinds of future stories.

Byron: Talk about working with amazing artist and storyteller in his own right, Michael Walsh.

Sabir Pirzada: It has been a career highlight for me to get to collaborate with the brilliant Michael Walsh! I was a big fan of his horror series The Silver Coin prior to working with him, so I already knew I was going to get something special when he agreed to join this project. Because he’s a writer, too, and because we overlap in the stuff we’re big fans of, we quickly developed a short-hand for character designs and what the atmosphere of the series would be. Michael often cranked up the brutality of the violence and the gross factor of the scares in his artwork in a way that surprised me, because some of the details he drew were not in the script! But they fit the intention of the story so perfectly. Sometimes I would be happy with a page that he drew, and Michael himself would not be, so he’d go back and draw something even crazier. He’s a perfectionist in that way. I can’t wait for people to see what he’s done here.

Byron: Sabir, what upcoming projects of your own, inside or outside comics, can you tell readers about?

Sabir Pirzada: I’m currently writing two series for Marvel. Venom War: Lethal Protectors features Silver Sable leading a whole new team. Marvel let me get away with a surprising amount of big status quo changes in it! I’m also writing Ghost Rider in the new Spirits of Vengeance series, which is the most violent thing I’ve ever written. I’ve got several things percolating on the TV front that are too early to talk about, but the one TV announcement I can make here for the first time publicly is that I have joined the writing staff of the CBS show FBI. Season 7 premieres one week before The Sacred Damned is released.

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Sabir Pirzada for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. The Horizon Experiment: The Sacred Damned one-shot from Image Comics is slated to be on sale October 23!

For my DF interview with Pornsak Pichetshote on The Horizon Experiment: The Manchurian one-shot, click here: https://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/interviews.html?showinterview=IN08192464724

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