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Following its launch this past summer, DC Comics’ publishing imprint DC Horror is releasing a new title just in time for Halloween: Soul Plumber. Created by The Last Podcast on the Left creators Henry Zebrowski, Marcus Parks and Ben Kissel with fan-favorite artist John McCrea, the six-issue miniseries follows a disgraced seminary student named Edgar Wiggins who develops a device he believes can clean demons from souls, before he accidentally unleashes an inter-dimensional alien that could threaten all of existence.
In an interview with CBR, Zebrowski and Parks explained how the new horror story plays upon and subverts Christian tropes. They praised McCrea for delivering grimy grindhouse beauty in the artwork and revealed their own personal inspirations in crafting the comic book story. Also included are preview pages penciled and inked by McCrea, colored by Mike Spicer and lettered by Becca Carey, as well as Issue #1’s standard cover by McCrea and Spicer and a variant cover by Riley Rossmo and Ivan Plascencia.
CBR: How did the idea for Soul Plumber come about?
Marcus Parks: When DC approached us about doing a comic book, they said to pitch [them] something and I started looking through old Last Podcast on the Left episode scripts to look at some of the episodes and topics we covered that I found really fascinating but, for some reason, didn’t catch on.
The two that were brought together for Soul Plumber was the Michael Taylor possession story, where a guy essentially convinced himself he was possessed by a demon. After a woman who had done a four-day exorcism course tried to bring a demon out of him, he ripped his wife to shreds with his bare hands. The other one was “The Andreasson Affair,” which was an alien episode where a woman was abducted by aliens and brought to a different reality but this woman was very Christian so this reality that the aliens showed her was full of Christian symbolism but very old Christian symbolism, stuff she couldn’t know about.
Henry Zebrowski: Marcus and I both love esoteria and we love to punish our audience with esoteria as much as humanly possible on Last Podcast on the Left because some people love it and some people love it. I am of the mind that people get confused by aliens being angels or demons because a lot of the time with this kind of phenomena, we find that it’s half-psychic anyway, stuff you bring in that fills these psychedelic scenarios that people find themselves in when dealing with ultra-terrestrials. I was Roman Catholic — now I’m a Satanist because that’s what fucking happens — and I legitimately think that’s what fuels a part of this book, a fear that God is a hateful alien. [laughs]
Parks: The kind of feeling that I wanted for this comic book is the same feeling I had when I went to go look for an issue of Preacher when I was fourteen, when Preacher was still on the shelves. I grew up in rural Texas and the nearest comic book store was in Lubbock, so I went to this comic book store in the mall — this is during the great boom of the ’90s, so there was seven comic book stores in a town of 150,000.
I go into Sports Cards Plus after reading about Preacher in Wizard, thinking this sounded like the coolest comic book ever, and asking the person there if they had Preacher and the look he gave me was a look that a pastor would give to a demon. He looked at me so offended that I would even ask for something as blasphemous and naughty as Preacher, especially some child asking for Preacher. I wanted this book to have that same feeling, that people like that might as well look at it like it was a Satanic bible, something evil that you must keep away from the innocence of the world.
You’ve got John McCrea and PJ Holden on this book. How is it seeing pages come in from the guy that did Hitman and Dead Eyes, and has that informed your storytelling process?
Zebrowski: Is it weird that I’ve had Hitman on my desk since I’ve been reading it? It is nice to know that you can kick the ball artistically because, when we worked on The Last Book on the Left, we worked with this fantastic artist Tom Neely and I got to create a rapport with him where you understand that you take an idea and let somebody run with it. Somebody like John McCrea, what a series of abilities he has! He does action and storytelling in a way that is so creative and yet so intuitive. There is one sequence in the second issue that I was writing out basically explaining the history of these ancient aliens in our civilization and I gave him all these bullet points and what he came back with was absolutely insane.
Parks: And he’s funny, too. He knows how to do comedy, which is a big part of the book. How we ended up getting McCrea, we were looking for artists after we had written the first issue and the script was going around the DC offices being described as “very [Garth] Ennis” and someone said to just get McCrea. Thankfully, he was available, and he’s been an absolute joy to work with. The pages come back and I check my inbox multiple times a day to see if there’s a new page in, and every single page that has come in has just been fantastic. I can’t wait for people to see the art and the chicken fat that McCrea has put throughout the book. It’s just been so cool. There’s such great, little details.
There is this grimy, grindhouse lived-in feeling to the artwork and the world that Edgar exists in.
Zebrowski: That was one of our main notes to McCrea because, when it comes down to it, The Last Podcast on the Left is named after a grindhouse film from back in the day. The idea of having something a little bit naughty, especially when it comes to involving God, the idea of what exists underneath the rock of God is where Edgar lives because, while Edgar is pure, Edgar is very gross.
Parks: Yeah, and in this book, we do draw from some cinematic influences that are grimy, specifically like Frank Hennenlotter movies.
Zebrowski: Yeah, we talk a lot about Frank Hennenlotter, that’s very important and Basket Case is very important to the comic book.
What was it about Edgar Wiggins that you wanted to have him serve as the point-of-view character into this grimy world?
Parks: With the character of Edgar, I liked the idea of a good Christian, somebody that actually follows all the tenets of Jesus Christ and actually listens to the words and lives a true Christian life, but the reason why he lives that true Christian life is he is essentially a fanboy; he’s more of a Jesus fan. He is a practicing Christian but at the core of him is this fanboy nature and I liked that idea of showing somebody who actually lives their life by the tenets of Christianity and doesn’t just give it lip service.
Zebrowski: As somebody that grew up really religious, I admit that as a boy, I was viscerally afraid of God and afraid of the power of God.
Parks: Same here!
Zebrowski: I think that Edgar really symbolizes that literally God-fearing. While he is somebody that loves Jesus, if he met the ultra-creator God that sent “His Son” to be sacrificed here to pop open the door for everybody else, he would be very afraid. Edgar operates more out of the fear of consequences if he did stop out-of-line under such a powerful god, which is why someone like Elk is such a good counterpoint character to Edgar. As Elk is walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death as a veteran who has seen a lot of action and done a lot of shit, he’s in this fearless place where him and Edgar balance each other.
As two guys intimately involved in horror, what keeps you coming back for more to the genre and keeps you inspired. What is it about horror comics that you can’t quite do in any other medium?
Zebrowski: Not to harp on this, but I do think horror came to me from my religious background. Catholicism is the most horror-based of the religions because you’re worshipping a screaming, bleeding, dying man with a crown of thorns. [laughs]
I was a very scared little boy and something about embracing as a boy — because my mother was very into horror and true crime and got me into it — you get ownership over something you’re very scared of by immersing yourself into it. I still get scared and check the perimeter of my house at 4 in the morning sometimes, but there’s something about the horror genre that lets you play in the world of all of your fears and, in a way, it alleviates them.
Parks: My very first comic was a horror comic. The first comic that picked up when I was five years-old was Swamp Thing #32, which is a great issue for a kid to pick up for horror because it’s the Pogo issue, where these cute little creatures come down to Earth and one of them ends up getting eaten by an alligator at the end. It had this great mixture of cuteness for kids and also this extreme horror.
I think one of the things with horror comics that we’ve been having so much fun is we don’t have to worry about budget or how to make a special effect work or a creature that’s made up of the body parts of five different people controlled by an alien. We don’t have to worry about any of the practicalities. We can do anything. Our imaginations are limited by nothing and you can do really insane shit and get into cosmic horror without worrying if it’s going to look goofy or too expensive. We can go whole hog.
Zebrowski: We are also very lucky to have John McCrea because he can do the things correctly. We can say a bunch of outlandish shit and he can make it legit and do all of these things.
Parks: Horror comics are extraordinarily difficult, but there are great horror comics out right now — like Nice House on the Lake is fantastic and spooky as shit and very scary. It creates this wonderful world and you don’t have to worry about a budget, so James Tynion can go as crazy as he wants to. The concepts you can play with in a horror comic, you’re not limited by anything, you can go big.
Zebrowski: I loved Locke & Key and you watch the Netflix show and it feels like they drained every single scary thing out of it. The comic book ended up being so much more successful because you can get away with quite a bit.
Parks: They managed to drain the scary, joy and wonder out of it. It was so dour and I couldn’t understand what happened. I think you can have that in horror comics more, that balance of horror, wonder and joy that I think is a lot harder to do in a TV show. The Haunting of Hill House is great. We’re big fans, but you have to wrap that up in a pretty short period of time. In horror comics, you can get into the characters a little bit more, get to know them better and what scares them so you can use that to scare the audience.
What are you most proud of getting to add to the DC Horror line with Soul Plumber?
Zebrowski: It’s great. They’re DC Comics! Ever since I was little, I wanted to write comic books and DC has been super-cooperative and helpful. They got us John McCrea! The resources are incredible.
Parks: It’s so cool to be writing for DC! Writing comic books was always a dream and a thing that when I was a creative writing major in college that I always wanted to do. I graduated and had no fucking clue how to do it and did my actual career in radio and to be now in the comic book realm, especially writing for DC, it’s beyond what I thought I would ever accomplish.
Zebrowski: I’ve always been a DC guy and we’ve gotten into many fights about the cinematic universes, so I’m happy to be in Batman’s world.
Created by Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, Ben Kissel, John McCrea and PJ Holden, Soul Plumber #1 is on sale Oct. 5 from DC Comics.
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