Broken Frontier

After previously seeing shelf-life through Atomeka Press and Active Images, David Hine’s Strange Embrace is being republished at Image this May, this time in color. We caught up…

BROKEN FRONTIER: To the larger comics audience, you’re probably best-known as the writer of Spawn and an assortment of Marvel mini-series, Silent War being the most recent example. Where does Strange Embrace fit into your larger oeuvre?

DAVID HINE: There are elements of Strange Embrace in everything I do. I’m always returning to the themes of transformation, decay and the beast that lurks beneath the human exterior. All that is in Silent War and Spawn and you’ll see it in District X, Daredevil Redemption and most of my other books.

I think all writers have their obsessions that drive them and those obsessions will always come out in the work. Strange Embrace is the place where you see it at its rawest.

BF: Would you say it’s your biggest accomplishment as an artist?

DH: Yes. It’s a book I worked long and hard on and when I began it, there was no guarantee that it would ever be published. I took a year off from work, living on savings (and my girlfriend). In the end it took eighteen months of solid work and I found a publisher when Dave Elliott at Atomeka Press read it and liked it. But it was done for love and a stubborn determination to prove that I could actually write and draw two hundred pages of comics.

BF: In related, what made you move to writing full time?

DH: Quite simply, the offer was made. I spent most of my professional life as an illustrator, either in comics or editorial illustration, but I loved the process of writing Strange Embrace. Its initial lack of commercial success left me with no confidence that I could make a living through my writing, so I went back to illustration.

I have Joe Quesada to thank for offering me the job at Marvel writing District X. I enjoyed that so much that I took the plunge and resolved not to accept any more illustration work. It was sink or swim. With a mortgage to pay and a family to support I couldn’t afford to screw up. In retrospect it could have gone horribly wrong. Three years ago I didn’t realise just how tough it is to make a living writing comics.

BF: How did the Image Comics reprint come about? Was it suggested by Rich Starkings and Comicraft, or did Image seek this project out on its own?

DH: Rich has a very close relationship with Image. He letters and designs a lot of their books and publishes Elephantmen through them. Rich approached them to do the book and it turned out Strange Embrace had a few fans there already, so they jumped at the chance to publish it.

BF: What is new for this release is Rob Steen is coloring your artwork. How hands-on are you when it comes to mixing your creativity with Rob’s?

DH: I trust Rob completely. He sent me sample pages a couple of years back when Rich first talked about reprinting the book in colour and I loved what he did. It looks more like a European bande dessinee than the typical airbrushed American comic book colours. And that’s perfect for Strange Embrace because it’s a very European book.

We also have brand new covers and design and there will be some back-up features with short strips, unpublished art, sketches and script pages. A nice package all round.

BF: How difficult is it to color a story that uses a lot of blacks, both because it’s conceived as such as an independent book and because it relies on the blacks to help set the dark, depressing tone?

DH: I can promise you that the colours retain all the grim, depressing gloom and doom of the original. If anything the book looks even more moody now. Rob has employed a limited palette using colours tonally. Every now and them he uses reds symbolically for added impact but mostly the colours are very reserved. If you look at the samples you’ll see how much the colour enhances the book. I was sceptical at first about the idea of adding colour to what was conceived as a black and white book, but having seen the result I’m totally converted.

BF: From a storytelling-technique point of view, the biggest enjoyment one gets out of Strange Embrace is probably the fact that it so effortlessly shifts from reality to dreams and from present to past and back. When you first conceived the story, was that the one quality you wanted to explore the fullest?

DH: Yes. I’ve always been fascinated by the way the past influences and infects the present. I live in a Victorian house and I’m very aware of its history. I also have a lot of African sculptures, fetishes and masks. I love the smell of wood smoke that still seeps out of them. I wanted to get that sense of past lives continuing to physically inhabit our own lives.

The sense of dreamlike unreality is very important too. Parts of the story actually came to me in dreams. Most of the script was written late at night under the influence of a fair amount of Jack Daniels finest sour mash whiskey. There was a period when I was up against a brick wall with the character of Anthony Corbeau’s wife, Sarah.

I collapsed into bed in the small hours and Sarah herself came to me in a dream and led me upstairs to the attic of the Corbeau house where there was an old chest of drawers. She pointed to the bottom drawer and I opened it up to find the plot element that I’d been looking for. That scene ends up in the book almost verbatim.

BF: Not to overlook the other characters, but the real core of the story is by, or around, Sukumar, Alex and Anthony. Since this is a really multi-layered book, what do these three personas represent, both to their environment in the story and to the reader?

DH: Strange Embrace is about alienation. An inability to fully connect to the rest of human society. Sukumar is a young innocent who is by nature a loner, the geeky outsider who is ridiculed by other kids. There was originally more of that in the script. I cut a couple of scenes featuring Sukumar because it was slowing the plot development but that’s his background.

Anthony is an outsider by nature. He wanders the city streets by night, he spends his time reading and eventually becomes obsessed with African art because it represents a purity of spirit and a detachment from the banality of human life. As the story progresses we discover the abuse in his past that made him incapable of feeling any emotional attachment to other people.

Alex is the force that brings all the elements of the story together. He is a psychic, constantly bombarded by the emotional fallout from the minds of the people around him. He is constantly trying to make sense of the world by imposing a narrative structure to people’s lives. He picks on individuals and pursues them like a detective, uncovering their secrets and by knowing their history, he comes to possess them physically as well as mentally. He keeps his collection of human ‘stories’ in a derelict building  and this is where Sukumar encounters him and where Alex recounts the story of Anthony Corbeau.

So, Sukumar, Alex and Corbeau are three lost souls, brought together by the tragic story of the death of Corbeau’s wife, Sarah. The mystery of her suicide is what drives Strange Embrace. Ultimately it also becomes a horror story and a murder mystery but it is how these three characters interpret the story that gives it meaning.

BF: Strange Embrace has been released twice before, first as a mini-series by Atomic Press in 1993 and then as a collected edition through Active Images in 2003. I haven’t seen the Atomeka Press editions—was the story released as 8 issues as well, or as four larger 50-something page installments, reflected in the way Active Images collected the story?

DH: The original series was released as four 48-page issues. It’s essentially a story of four acts but I’m lucky in that each of those breaks fairly naturally at 24 pages. There is one issue that will run to 23 and one to 25 pages. And the backup material will flesh the book out into a good solid monthly read.

BF: Why were you eager to put the book out a third time? What do you hope it will accomplish for the material?

DH: The first outing for Strange Embrace was from Atomeka and it came at a time when the independent market was imploding. The last issue came in one of the worst months for black and white comics. Atomeka’s American parent company, Tundra, shut down the UK office and Strange Embrace #4 was literally the last book to be printed. The stores weren’t ordering the books – all the black and white independents were suffering and sales were appallingly low.

The Active Images reprint was very welcome to me, but it was still only reaching a small audience who were willing to risk the price of a graphic novel on a virtually unknown writer/artist. This time around with an affordable monthly colour edition and my track record on Spawn and various Marvel titles, I’m hoping the book will reach a bigger audience.

BF: Do you think that the very reason why Strange Embrace is released again is because there’s a very timeless quality to it? Or is it just that everybody who touches it gets possessed by this incredibly strong, horrific psychological force?

DH: Both the above.

Strange Embrace #1 goes on sale from Image Comics in May. And don’t forget to check out David’s weekly Waiting for Trade  column each Friday, right here on BF!