DARKNESS AND FUNGUS: AN INTERVIEW WITH “LUMEN” CREATOR, TONY MCMILLEN
Tony McMillen is a novelist, artist, and comic author based out of Massachusetts. Tony’s written two wonderfully dark novels, “Nefarious Twit” and “An Augmented Fourth”, both of which he also served as the interior artist. “Lumen” however marks the first step into comics for his career and it frankly it feels more like a leap. Touching on the unpretentious, communicative storytelling styles of the most celebrated adventure video games in history, McMillen cleverly drops his reader into his world with a simple rule: never lose your light. Ever.
You will do whatever you must to defend your supply of Lumen. And understand that you must, because in the eternal dark of Nocterra it is most precious; quite literally it will save your life. Lumen is a battery; a currency; a weapon; a catalyst for growth; and most importantly, a candle burning forever in a never-ending night. It is a vital resource, but also with the legendary vaquero Rubus Bramble long gone, it has become a place where survivors may place their remaining belief.
Our hero, Esteban Vela is one of these lonely survivors. We know that he is an orphan, but whether he was part of pre-dark civilization is unknown to us. No older than a teen he wanders the endless shroud of Nocterra alone in search of resource deposits. He is content enough just to scrape by and survive, but his fate is meant to change after he stumbles across something far rarer than the glow of Lumen orbs: a way to fight back…
Against angler-men and mechazoids, fungi foes and mushroom monsters; danger abounds in the never-ending night!
Over four issues, McMillen successfully ignites interest for a world entirely dominated by shadows and it was my absolute pleasure to discuss with him the creative process behind it.
SAM GOSS: I remember way back first reading about “Lumen” as a very different type of project: an illustrated video game manual.
TONY McMILLEN: Right, and I still want to do that original concept of a video game manual as the narrative device for a story. I don’t know, it might be “Lumen” later on as a version of it or it might be something separate, I don’t know yet.
SG: Well it’s really cool! So what was the seed idea? I know Green Lantern played a big part, but what else?
TM: Yeah, I think it was sort of two ideas, the first idea was that I really loved the Zelda video game manual as a kid, the old Nintendo game. The artwork was beautiful and there’s storytelling just in the manual itself… I was seven or eight and hadn’t heard of “The Hobbit” yet so this is my first entry into fantasy. And as I look back at it and other illustrated video game manuals, they had this really cool element of immersing you in the story. And after thinking about it for years and years and years I wanted to marry telling a story through an illustrated video game manual with the element of it’s for a game that doesn’t exist. And then I was thinking about the whole Mandala Effect that’s been going around lately that it’s not for a fake game system, it’s for a game system that no one remembers. Then it’s a story within a story within a story and it’s layered and fun.
SG: The Alucinari, right? And “Lumen” was the game?
TM: Well a lot of my favorite comic book creators like Frank Miller took on characters like Daredevil that weren’t selling well, Alan Moore took on Swamp Thing because it wasn’t selling well. And I thought “what book would be a challenge?” Well I sort of hate Green Lantern… I just don’t get the space cop element. But what would I keep? A guy with a lantern, that’s very elemental.
SG: It’s super Led Zeppelin.
TM: Oh yeah I think I included in a blog post one time a still from “The Song Remains the Same” when Jimmy Page climbs the mountain and the vision of him as the old guy with the lantern. That’s a visual inspiration for “Lumen”.
SG: And it feels like “Lumen” has some other tarot card elements to it as well.
TM: Oh yeah like The Fool is one of those cards where even if you’re not super into tarot, it’s really impactful. Just the symbolism of it means a lot to me. So if I would do Green Lantern I would start all over and it’s just a guy with a lantern in a world of eternal darkness. It’s a world where it’s always night time and you’re not sure if it’s explained scientifically or supernaturally.
SG: And you illustrate as well.
TM: Oh yeah I love to draw, I love to spot blacks, I love covering a page in dark, black ink. So these things all came together: a fake game that did exist but for some reason reality’s changed and it’s called “Lumen”.
SG: At what point did the project change?
TM: Eventually the story for “Lumen” was strong enough that it didn’t need a meta-packaging. It could be its own thing and be pure, you didn’t need to know Star Wars or referential material to get it.
SG: Well that’s something I’ve always liked in writers is the ability to walk past something big. Maybe they return to it later and maybe they don’t. I think about you mentioning Tolkein and “The Hobbit” and I think about how he writes their journey. I’m paraphrasing but it’s like “they didn’t go to the North because there was evil and they didn’t go to the South because there was a warlock”. And whether he fleshes those things out or not? It’s not essential to that core story at the moment but it makes the reader curious of this larger world.
TM: I agree, like it’s hard to go back and watch Star Wars with fresh eyes, but they don’t explain anything. They say something like “The Clone Wars” and you’re just like “Well I guess there were some wars his dad was in that were like World War II or something.” It doesn’t matter… it just enriches the world. And a really weird comparison is Bob Dylan, his lyrics imply a bunch of stuff, they don’t really spell it out. And it’s kind of richer that way; I like to do that where I can.
SG: Well I think that two examples of that I think of are: when he’s walking past the Southern City, and it’s this land that in some ways is able to ignore the night just by being electrically powered. They don’t let outsiders in so I’m sure there’s this totally insular quality to the city that’s never discussed. And the other is The Night House where he says “you just don’t want to go in there”.
TM: Right.
SG: We explore really frightening places that you don’t want to go into as readers, so the fact that it’s a place we don’t actually go into made me even more curious about it.
TM: Oh that’s awesome! I really enjoyed The Night House, I was randomly drawing and it just came up on the page. I thought it looked cool and I feel like more and more stories feel like they have to explain things so I didn’t. And with the city I’ll probably come back to it a little bit later but for now you know the walls are really big and there are other people and other stories happening inside. I wanted to get the reader thinking about that.
SG: That’s awesome! I’m also curious about the great potential of all the villains because it feels like you’ve built this huge ecosystem for the fungi. It all has a very zoological quality to it that leaves much to be explored.
TM: I think one of the things that really opened it up for me was finding out that all these mushrooms have these really great common names that are really colorful and poetic. Like there’s ones called stinkhorns, herald of winter, the destroying angel, lattice stinkhorn. So I wrote down a list of like 400 of these names that common people called them which I really liked. And when I was doing “Lumen” I thought “you know what really grows great in the darkness?” So not only did I have 400 different species, I could even have families within some species.
SG: Plus they’re weird!
TM: They’re really strange! I think the largest organism on the planet is a giant fungus system underground. I think they can even survive in space.
SG: And what I get from your writing is that you’ve lived in this space and really imagined these other realities. Sometimes research will lend itself to the narrative, but other times the narrative will lend itself to the research.
TM: Well thank you! I’ve written novels so I’ve done world-building before, but this was a fun exercise. If everything is all dark, then what is there? Mushrooms can grow out of decaying matter and it’s kind of alien. So if someone dies and a bunch of these fungi grow out of their body, what if they are in some ways those people with their old memories? And they can talk so it becomes like a zombie thing. It’s like, “Who is this guy? Is he the amalgam of two people who died and were joined by a mushroom? Does this guy have both their memories and personality traits?”
SG: These villains can tap into the memory system for the fungi! It really feels like it gives them an advantage over the hero.
TM: And the point is that the collective memory may know more about the planet than Esteban or anyone else knows. It allows readers to get hints about why the world is the way it is today. I think hive-mind stuff is interesting but it also scares me a lot. In issue three I had him eat that little mushroom and he had that mind-meld. I thought it was interesting for the hero to have his mind invaded and he and the villain can go through each other’s memories. With action books you want heroes to have a conversation and not just kill each other, so you have to think of new ways for that to happen and why. Because I think that conversation can often be better than the action itself. Look at Kill Bill or The Dark Knight; those conversations to me are the real clash.
SG: I think you’d really dig the screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited. It’s an amazing exercise in putting two characters with opposing goals in one room together and carrying out their conflict through a single conversation. To me it’s like an experiment under a microscope of what I think you’re talking about.
TM: I’ll have to check that out. I’m always wondering how to really ride that line with a dark viewpoint and not make it boring. How can you drag someone along on a nightmare and make them enjoy it?
SG: And there’s got to be meaning and not just feel like one increasingly unfortunate event follows yet another.
TM: “Lumen” of all the things I’ve ever made feels like it has a lot of youthful energy and is a lot of fun even though it’s got some dark stuff. Some of my other stuff is way darker and more contemplative.
SG: Well in talking with you about the story, I also want to talk with you about your art style. Because I do think that those two things are so wonderfully tied together in “Lumen”. I feel like there’s an edgy, deliberate messiness inside it.
TM: Thank you, I play music too. I thought about it after and when I get really crazy with my art and getting a little looser it’s kind of like playing an electric guitar. It’s really embracing distortion. So when I’m going a little crazier with my style it feels electric; it feels like it has more life.
SG: Do you have any reservations about going so crazy with your style?
TM: Definitely, because I can see the limitations to it already. It doesn’t lend itself to a story in the suburbs or even to a whimsical comedy. But it does lend itself to “Lumen” which is filled with dark imagery and adventure. And I think that’s how it came out organically as the “Lumen” style.
SG: Do you think there are styles that can do both?
TM: Sam Kieth is somebody who on one page can be dark and surrealistic and on the next page be really funny. And he’s not really changing what he does, he just figures out how in that style he makes his approach. It makes me wonder if I can do that.
SG: I’ve been keeping my eye on David Rubin for that exact reason.
TM: Oh I agree! When he came on “Rumble” I was worried because they were changing artists, but he’s perfect! He can draw such humorous expressions but he’s also good at monsters and cool imagery and action too. I’m sure at times it feels like trying to make the punk kids and the metal kids happy at the same time. Plus he was very polite and supportive when I showed him pages of “Lumen” online.
SG: That’s great! One thing I personally appreciate about your style is no matter how much narrative you need to convey, you always make space for a boss fight sequence of some kind.
TM: Oh man that just comes from growing up on Image comics. I’ve written novels, so if I’m doing a comic book, I want to do the most comic book thing possible. And to me that’s big action scenes. It also gets back to the video game roots like Legend of Zelda and Metroid. In fact I’d put on the original Legend of Zelda soundtrack for like two hours while I was drawing. Honestly I’d love if someone made a little 8-bit game of “Lumen”.
SG: That’s totally within the realm of possibility. Video game design feels like it’s gotten more user friendly.
TM: It’s more DIY now, more punk rock.
SG: Totally. So listen, I’m going to list three artists and I’m curious if any are conscious influences for you. First is Ralph Steadman.
TM: Oh yeah, I definitely read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a kid. I remember trying to parallel him trying to draw crazy scratchy lettering and blood spatters. Another is Bill Sienkiewicz. He also does those harsh lines and I remember first seeing his stuff and being like “Whoa, you can do X-Men like that?” He also did the cover for RZA’s album as Bobby Digital.
SG: So cool. He was someone I considered asking you about, but for my second artist it’s Jeffrey Alan Love.
TM: Oh definitely! I went through a two month phase where I was just straight up ripping him off! He’s nice enough to post videos of how he creates his style. I tried it a few times and hit him up on Facebook and he was always nice. I think I was just seeking his approval or something but after a while I was like “Ehh, I dunno.” It’s kind of like that old adage: “You can be a second rate whoever or you can be a first rate you.” So even if I’d become the best Jeffrey Alan Love clone in the world, he’d always be better and the original. Though one thing I love so much about his work that I’ve tried to keep in my own is his use of texture.
SG: He does have such a strong, distinct style, doesn’t he?
TM: And he’s only getting better! I also really like Frank Miller’s art and I know some people think it’s ugly, but I think he’s really good at posing the human form. So if you think of it as a silhouette, and Jeffrey Alan Love has really strong silhouettes, you’ll still see it as a Frank Miller drawing. So with the two of them, they figured out posing, and it’s something I’ve learned from both of them.
SG: I agree! Okay and the third artist is Stephen Gammell.
TM: Oh shit! I do know him and love his work. I still have a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I think he is an influence for sure. You’ve got a good eye.
SG: Thanks! It helps that you have an evocative style that conjures up memories of childhood greats like Gammell and Steadman and those I learned about in adulthood like J.A. Love. Those were the three who came to mind for me, but who are the people that you follow and you’d mention?
TM: I think Frank Miller has to be #1 because “The Dark Knight Returns” was one of the first comic books I got as a kid. I was too young and didn’t understand any of it but I liked the art and really got into it.
SG: Who else?
TM: I really liked angular drawings, so old John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson. And I grew up with all the old Image creators who are still inside me. Todd MacFarlane as a kid was easily my favorite artist. One thing he does that I still admire is to make a big scene feel really three-dimensional and everything has such depth. I remember when Greg Capullo took over for Spawn and it felt very jarring. It wasn’t until later that I realized he didn’t draw those big, thick characters the way Todd did.
SG: I’m trying to think of more of the old Image artists.
TM: Well Erik Larsen and Walt Simonson are both really great and I really enjoy clean line work. He’s more like Image 2.0, but the biggest guy for me is Sam Kieth. He’s a guy who is really good at really bulky, bent over poses. For some reason everyone he draws has bad posture and he always draws someone a little weird. There’s a little flavor to them, they have crooked elbows or big potbellies and as a kid I loved that! Even my landscapes in “Lumen” have a Kiethy vibe to them.
SG: Are there any newer artists who have caught your eye?
TM: I think Sean Murphy’s done great work as far as an artist goes. I like his texturing and how sharp his line is. Barry Windsor Smith is another where I go through his stuff and I find myself loving it. With a character like Storm he can do a really beautiful face with wounded eyes and full lips. His version of Wolverine is feral and majestic. And he can draw sideburns which I can’t really do yet!
SG: Alright, so you’ll have to work your way up to an arc about Esteban growing sideburns. I actually think that’s a very funny goal! I really appreciate you talking about your artistic influences as well as your own style, Tony. Thank you so much for you time!
TM: Thanks man!
Very kind of you to read my newest article… Though even kinder would be to show your support for Tony McMillen’s comics and novels! Visit Tony’s author site or Etsy page to grab copies for yourself of “Lumen” as well as his newest series “Serious Creatures”. Fans of practical horror effects and Hollywood rising star stories will agree that this new comic is one worthy of your subscription!
And also be sure to preorder the upcoming trade paperback collected edition for Lumen and rejoice knowing Tony’s already got much more in mind for Nocterra’s inhabitants. Maybe even some stories about folks who have never even met Esteban! Check out Tony’s sites and pages here:
“Serious Creatures” Subscription
Pages from the Illustrated Instruction Manual
What Is Lumen? Fake Video Game Manuals and the Dorks Who Love Them.
Writing Comics vs. Writing Novels
