Knave of Krypton: Your series is one of many Zuda competitors this month that are less traditionally narrative. Why are you presenting your story in this way?
Seth Sherwood: As soon as Zuda released their format guide I was exited by the possibilities. It looked like a Sunday comic strip, and yet I couldn’t shake the notion that this was DC, and that they might be wanting what boiled down to an online comic book. If these panels were going to be one-a-day though, I’d hate to break up the narrative. To me, each panel would have to stand on its own in some way. The traditional word bubbles and runs of dialog wouldn’t work. Of course, since I initially thought that, a ton of Zuda strips have done it just fine. What I did though, was to come up with a few different formats and styles that would work one-a-day. My favorite was a stream of consciousness confessional of sorts. That struck me as perfect—so the form came first. From there I came up with a character who might think like that—and the broken Eden just came to life from there.
Diego Tripodi: Once we decided where we wanted to go with Eden's story, our working process for this comic went something like this: Seth would send me the text of what Eden is thinking about. Based on that, I would draw what I thought was fitting to Eden's words. Being a character whose point of view and reality are broken, it just seemed fitting to be as fragmented as possible. The cue to all of this is on page 3, where we see Eden in a fractured mirror.
KofK: Your artwork is very engaging. Care to tell us about the process at all?DT: I usually start by drawing very rough layouts of what I have in mind for each page. Once I arrange the panels in a way that I thought would tell Eden's story while also allowing me to doing cool graphic stuff, I started penciling. Due to the tone of the story, I wanted the inking to be grittiest thing I had ever done in terms of texture. Once I was finished with the first round of pages, I sent them to Seth, who tried a color approach that was different to things we had tried on projects in the past. Early on he came up with the color style that the pages now have. It was a collaborative process.
SS: VERY collaborative! When Diego sent me the inked panels I had been planning to do low key, matte colors. The inking though… it was SO moody and had his controlled chaos to it that coloring it traditionally, even in muted colors, killed it. It took a bit of experimentation, but eventually I settled on this red palette, with the occasional spot colors that really looked cool. When I made it all noisy though, that’s when it seemed to really match the art. It’s funny, Diego’s art made me color as grainy as I could—and yet when I sent them back to him, he responded by making his inks even noisier. We were trying to out grit each other I think. I also felt like this time out our roles intermingled. Diego certainly directed the story by working based on Eden’s words alone and not a script, and I had some influence on the art with the color. It’s like we handed it back and forth until it came out nicely sculpted.
KofK: How did you guys meet up and decide to collaborate on this series?
DT: I first contacted Seth in mid/late 2006. He had placed an ad on Digital Webbing and was looking for an artist interested in working on a "Jack Kirby meets Ed Wood" type of project. I thought that sounded interesting, so I emailed him with a link to some comic pages that I had recently finished working.
(http://diegotripodi.deviantart.com/art/SMA-Chapter-I-Page-1-of-6-37482730),
The pages starred a Mexican luchador called Diávolo. Later that same day, Seth e-mailed me back telling me about the project he had in mind. It turned out his story shared some of the elements that I had drawn in my pages (a wrestler, a car, the desert, etc.). So we took it from there, pretty much mixing what we had done on our own and added new stuff. Looking back, it could be seen more like an experiment than anything else, really, but it was a good learning experience. After that, we worked on some other comic projects, and we've tried different approaches every time, doing what we thought was the best for each of the stories we were creating. When we learned about Zuda, we already knew that we worked well together so we started talking about creating a new series for the format.
SS: I used to really abuse Digital Webbing’s classifieds. Sometimes I get an idea, and throw an ad up before I really know what I am doing. Diego responded to more than one of them. Not because he was just he was one of those people who respond to any ad—but because we have the same taste. Midgets, luchadores, zombies, dirty clowns, Ed Wood, demons, one-armed hookers… really the weirdest stuff I can come up with Diego has already doodled. That first project which he mentioned—I was so excited. He was literally drawing stuff I thought I just made up. From there, we had an open dialog.
KofK: Why did you choose to submit to Zuda?SS: It’s run by DC. There’s an open submissions policy. They pay. It’s really the best of multiple worlds. I was excited for it from the first press release. I know Zuda has some serious detractors, who tell me I could put a webcomic up on my own site, and maintain the IP rights. That may be true, but we’re newcomers here—and it’s not that easy to get people to know my website even exists. Even if we lose, it’s great exposure considering that the top 3 slots in both competitions thus far have tens of thousands of views.
KofK: Is this series something you developed for Zuda or something that you'd already been working on?
DT: We started developing this series right after we learned about Zuda, purely to submit it to them.
KofK: Who are some of the influences you're looking to as you develop this series?
DT: That's hard to say. Our working method usually begins by building up a story by talking about the things we'd like to do, and discussing why they would or would not work. I guess the readers are probably more able than ourselves to detect influences. I think anything-- comics, movies, music, books, etc., can become an influence and show up in our work even if we don't realize it. That said, some of the things Seth and I talked about while working on Pieces of Eden included Jack the Ripper and David Lynch's movie Blue Velvet. I remember having mentioned to Seth a video by Guns N' Roses for "The Garden", which I thought that, visually, was something that could be part of Eden's world.
SS: Visually I took a step back on this one. In the past I have ideas of how things should look, but this time I let Diego do it all. I wanted to just write her thoughts, and let him imagine the world. Tonally, we talked about things like Lynch films, noir classics and a lot of trashy 70s and 80s heavy metal, Hollywood hooker stuff. I suppose you also can’t really do anything about serial killers without invoking Seven in some way… no mater how hard you try not to. Narratively, I looked to some of my favorite books from the fragmented, stream of consciousness field. Kathy Acker in particular. Then I filtered that through the lens of the horror genre.
KofK: Thanks for the interview, guys, anything else you'd like to say?
DT: We really enjoy reading the comments that people leave. We appreciate that somebody would take the time to write about what they like and don't like about Pieces of Eden. We have many ideas about where Eden's story is heading to, and are looking forward to developing this project. Last, but not least, a BIG thank you to all the people that voted for us!
SS: Definitely a big thanks to everyone who voted for us. I know that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but we really hope we get to continue developing the tale. It’s been a fun experiment for us.
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