Broken Frontier

The duo behind Red 5’s We Kill Monsters mini-series chats with BF about their new tale of brothers hunting beasts.

Partners Christopher Leone and Laura Harkcom are the pair behind Red 5’s new 6 issue mini-series, appropriately titled We Kill Monsters. Centred on two brothers in a small town who discover mysterious, blue beasts rampaging across their quite suburb, they buddy up and decide to take on the menacing creatures head on. Teaming with artist Brian Churilla (Archaia’s The Engineer, BOOM!’s new The Anchor) WKM is an ode to good old-fashioned monster hunting, with some family dynamics, A-Team style vehicle renovations, and ugly eggs thrown in for good measure.

BROKEN FRONTIER: How do you describe We Kill Monsters to curious readers?

LAURA HARKCOM & CHRISTOPHER LEONE: It's an action-comedy about two brothers, Jake and Andrew Basher, auto mechanics who discover that monsters have begun to infest their small town.  One fatal night, they're attacked by a vicious, 3-eyed monster.  The brothers manage to kill it, but not before it infects Jake with its DNA, leaving him with one super-strong monster arm.  It also makes him dependent on "monster juice," the glowing fluid from a monster's brain, to stay alive. This means, of course, the Bashers must kill more monsters. During the course of the series, they team with Vanessa, a tough-as-nails bartender and Andrew's sexy ex-girlfriend, to defeat the monsters and unravel the mystery of where they're coming from.

BF: An influence of 1980s films seems obvious, with elements of buddy films, and monster flicks in the series. Were there any particular films in your youth that really hooked you, and what do you think of similar films today?

CL: 1980s films is exactly right.  Ghostbusters is definitely the biggest influence.  I can see some Evil Dead 2 and a little Back to the Future in there also. We Kill Monsters is almost like a comic book or a movie I wish someone had made for me when I was a kid.

LH: Strangely, there don't seem to be many movies made in this genre made anymore.  Men In Black is maybe the most recent example I can think of, and even that is more than 10 years old now...

BF: How did the signing at Golden Apple go and what were people saying to you?

LH & CL: It was great!  Ryan Liebowitz invited us to join the Golden Apple booth at the Long Beach Comic Con in October -- so look for us there!  And we got to meet Blair Butler from G4's Attack of the Show/Fresh Ink.  We've been fans of hers for a while, so that was very cool.

BF: Do you both have WKM on your own iPhones?

LH: Yep.  It's being carried by Comixology and Iverse right now.  Both apps are pretty amazing. It's kind of surreal to be able to carry around your comics in your pocket like that.

CL: Yeah, it's funny, digital comics never took off on the web, even though everyone expected them to 10 years ago.  It's just boring reading a long PDF on your monitor.  On your iPhone, comics are a completely different story.  It's tactile, the way a comic book is, because you can scan through panel by panel.  It seems to me like a nice compliment to print books without replacing them.

BF: How did you begin your careers as professional writers?

LH: We sold our first pitch to Columbia Pictures, who then hired us to write a screenplay based on that pitch.  From there, we went on to write scripts for Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company, and we created, wrote and produced a miniseries for the (then)  Sci Fi Channel/Lionsgate Television called The Lost Room.  Before writing, I had a totally different career as a studio exec for Warner Bros. Feature Animation.

CL: Prior to writing I was a visual effects artist & 3D animator.  I also work as a commercial director for spots that have a heavy mix of live action and CG animation.

BF: Do your experiences in film and TV help you as comics’ scribes?

LH: To a degree. TV writing is episodic, which is similar to writing a monthly comic. However, comic writing is far more visual because you're calling the shots in every single panel.  So in that respect, it's almost more like directing, at least to my mind.

CL: I read a few thousand comic books growing up so it was less of a leap to me.  There was still a bit of a learning curve though.

BF: Did you base Drew and Jake’s dialogue on your own experiences with your siblings or friends?

LH & CL: I think more the emotion behind the relationship, than the actual dialogue, was based on real life-relationships with our siblings.

BF: Brian Churilla seems to be going places.

LH & CL: Yeah, Brian is on fire right now.

BF: How did he come on to the series?

LH & CL: We went to comic book shops and just started looking around, trying to find an artist whose sensibilities matched the story we wanted to tell.  When we found Brian's book The Engineer, we knew we had our man. To compliment ourselves, we couldn't have picked better. To compliment Brian, the designs he came up with for the monsters were beyond our wildest dreams.

BF: What’s the aim of your new venture, Monstrosity?

LH & CL: Monstrosity is developing ideas that can cross multiple platforms -- so We Kill Monsters, for example, is a comic book that could also be a video game, a TV show, etc.

BF: What’s up next for the both of you?

LH & CL: We've got a few other comic projects in the queue, an independent film that should be shooting early next year, and we've created a new TV show that we'll be pitching to the networks soon.

We Kill Monsters # 3 (of 6) from Red 5 is out now, and # 4 smacks shelves on October 21.