DF Interview: Dan Watters reflects a classic horror tale – with a twist – in ‘The Picture of Everything Else’

By Byron Brewer

As the 20th century dawns, art promises to change the world… and steep it in blood. A rash of impossible killings sweep through Paris, tearing the rich and beautiful apart in their beds. When two art thieves stumble upon the portraits of the victims damaged in the exact same manner they died, it appears the man who once painted the immortal portrait of Dorian Gray has returned – with darker plans for future works.

From the minds of Dan Watters (Coffin Bound, Lucifer, Deep Roots) and Kishore Mohan comes a haunting balance of depravity and beauty in The Picture of Everything Else. DF was intrigued by this series, so we caught up with scribe Dan Watters.

Dynamic Forces: Dan, they often say that art makes the world, but this book takes that to a whole other level! Tell us how you took the mystique of Dorian Gray and are putting that forth in The Picture of Everything Else.

Dan Watters: Ha! I definitely wanted to capture the spirit of that book to some extent. The idea isn’t to create something that necessarily tags on to it – the intention isn’t to make you go read Dorian Gray first – but I think what’s at the heart of that book is an idea worth expanding on, and a period setting which really resonates with what we’re going through now. Part of what I love about The Picture of Dorian Gray is that it’s simultaneously a very simple yet very shadowy story. A man creates a painting of a subject which renders the subject immortal, which ages instead of him. The subject uses that freedom to live a life of cruelty and debauchery, and ends up destroying the artist and the painting, and therefore himself.

Whereas underneath that, there’s so much rich philosophy and repression. We never actually hear much about the sins of Dorian Gray, they’re left to our imagination. Oscar Wilde probably imagined that if he wrote them down he’d land in prison. He might as well have, he ended up there anyway. But he left so much unsaid. I don’t think it’s our place to try and fill in those gaps. It’s more that we can look back at the same time period, knowing what it was destined to become, and without being beholden to the same repression Wilde was in his work.

DF: In all the iterations of the Dorian Gray character throughout story-dom, I had never stopped to think about the artist or the power. Will we be delving into that individual in this new series?

Dan Watters: We certainly will. I’ve always thought it strange that I’ve not seen anyone really narrow in on Basil Hallward and what he achieved by painting that Picture of Dorian Gray. That said, it’s possible that the fixation with the artist reveals a little bit of my own narcissism. I’ve always believed that fiction done well can talk about literally anything, but artists and writers fall into a trap of talking an awful lot about writing and art itself because, frankly, that’s what we tend to be interested in. It can turn into a strange sort of feedback loop, where we have this tool which could be a balm to soothe the whole world, but a lot of the time we end up using it to talk about the tool itself.

I guess with this book I’m kind of trying to have my cake and eat it. We’re talking about art and artists, sure, but we’re also using that as a filter to try and look at the entire 20^th century, or at least as much of it as we can see from its roots.

DF: What can you tell readers about your protagonists? Can you introduce the mainstays here?

Dan Watters: Our main characters are Marcel and Alphonse, two aspiring young painters who make ends meet by moonlighting as art thieves. They have different approaches to living an artistic life, which is kind of what we’re exploring with them. One wishes to put everything on the canvas, while the other thinks the world itself is an artist’s true canvas, on which work of subversion and shock can be wrought. Which is all going to become very important when, all of a sudden, the stakes of art are life and death, and the very future.

DF: Tell us what you can about the storyline of the book (no spoilers).

Dan Watters: A killer is on the loose in Paris, a decade after one terrorized London. But unlike Jack, it is rich and beautiful young men who are being targeted. Their deaths are savage and seemingly impossible – as though they are being torn apart, often in their own beds with no sign of an intruder. The wealthy huddle together in opulent lounges, but do not seem safe. When Alphonse and Marcel plan to steal the works of the artist all know as only the Englishman, they stumble upon his paintings... of beautiful young men, torn and broken. We might start to put two and two together from there.

DF: Can you discuss in general some of the more horrific elements of the series in respect to the characters?

Dan Watters: Well, I’m a bit of a pessimist when it comes to the march of progress. I think we get a little complacent when we assume things generally get better as we move forward through time. When DaNi and I started Coffin Bound at Image, we had a lot of imagery of burned-out cars and rusting gas stations, and people immediately started referring to the book as post-apocalyptic. I hadn’t thought of it that way at all. In my experience, a lot of the world – and a lot of America – looks like that.

The Picture of Everything Else contains people being torn in half and mutated through paintings and all that good stuff, but really the horror is kind of rooted in that terror of the backslide, of progress giving way to chaos and death, and what we might be willing to do to prevent that – whether it involves sacrifice and bloodshed or even the fossilization of an entire culture.

DF: This takes place “as the 20^th century dawns.” Did you or artist Kishore Mohan do any specific research on the period for The Picture of Everything Else? (Love that title!)

Dan Watters: Yes, a lot of it. The setting and period of the book are certainly not window dressing – we’re looking at the end of a century, the birth of a new one, and the sort of expectations that tends to bring. The year 1900 brought the World Fair to Paris, a showcase of the future, which the Eiffel Tower was constructed for. The decade that followed saw the birth of modern art, also centralized around the city. This was a time of change, as Romantic ideals died to make way for a progress which was to end in all the tears and horrors of the World Wars. The anxieties of that – of feeling on the cusp of something terrible – well, I probably don’t need to elaborate too much on how that might resonate in 2020.

DF: Talk about your collaboration with Kishore.

Dan Watters: Kishore and I have been trying to figure out the right project to work on together for a while now. I discovered his work through Ram V’s Black Mumba, and Ram introduced us a good while back. When I landed on the initial idea for The Picture of Everything Else, Kishore was the first person I spoke to about it. He’s an outrageously versatile artist, but I immediately imagined this book in his watercolor style, which I knew he did so beautifully. He’s bringing so many exciting ideas to the table on this book, playing with mediums, acrylics and pencil and whatever the page needs. He’s exactly the kind of artist you want on a book that’s actually about art.

DF: Dan, any other projects in which you are involved that you can tell readers about?

Dan Watters: December is a pretty big month for me.

The second volume of Coffin Bound comes out on the 2^nd from Image Comics. It’s a book I’m exceedingly proud of. DaNi and I always wanted Coffin Bound to feel like a series of standalone novels. Our first book was the story of a woman who found out an unstoppable assassin is put on her tail, and what she chose to do with the time left to her. Our second book is the story of a woman who sets a horde of unstoppable assassins on her own tail – and her faith that God will see her through, even if He won’t save her life. We’re approaching the idea of death from different angles, and the last two issues are my favorites we’ve ever done. DaNi, colorist Brad Simpson, and letter Aditya Bidikar really pushed things to the next level, and I think their love and care really shows in the work.

I also have Home Sick Pilots, also through Image, which is my new ongoing series with Caspar Wijngaard, issue #1 out December 9^th. I’m really excited for this one, it’s about being a wretched delinquent punk rock teenager and how a haunted house might end up turning into a mecha. They say write what you know, and I have a lot of experience with at least half of that. Caspar and I started our careers in comics together with Limbo, so this really feels like a coming home in a certain way. It’s the kind of book I think Caspar and I could only make together.

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Dan Watters for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. The Picture of Everything Else #1 from Vault Comics is slated to hit stores Dec. 16^th!

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