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In recent years, Christopher Sebela has written an impressive variety of comics ranging from Evolution, Shanghai Red, and Crowded for Image Comics to Oni Press’ Dirtbag Rapture. The prolific author is now teaming up with artist Cara McGee to release .Self. A five-issue ComiXology Originals series, .Self explores a near-future world where a technology called Postscript gives people the chance to technically live again. Postscript archives memories and personality traits, which others can later download — post-death — to receive one last goodbye from their loved ones. Natalie Winters takes solace in this new device. But once her identity is stolen, her whole world — and that of others’ — changes, with plenty of Natalie’s emerging.
CBR spoke with Sebela about the themes of .Self and to learn more about his creative process behind the series. He discussed his world-building philosophy as well as his appreciation for McGee’s artwork and some of the ideas he hopes to explore in this new series.
CBR: How did knowing that this project was going to be in the digital format impact your writing process?
Christopher Sebela: It didn’t really. We all tried to make it like a regular book. You have to adjust a little because ComiXology has some requirements, so we just followed their rules, but otherwise, we’re just trying to make a cool comic. So if you like it digitally, awesome. If you want to wait for it to come out in print, it will still work that way.
How does working on a project for ComiXology compare to working with more traditional publishers like Image and Oni?
It’s pretty similar. They’re probably a little more hands-off. I went and got an editor for the book, so a little more responsibility was given to me in terms of managing the book. There’s not like editors or anything. It’s pretty similar to Image in that regard. They say, “We want to do your book. Here’s when you should get us the issues. Good luck and let us know if there are any problems.” They put a lot of trust in creators and are like, “Ok, here you go, here’s some money to make your comic. We trust that you’re professional enough to go make your comic.”
How did you begin collaborating with Cara McGee?
I’ve known Cara for a bit, and I always liked her stuff a lot. I read the book she did with Josh Trujillo called Dodge City, which is all about dodge ball. I certainly didn’t think I was going to read a whole book about doge ball. But, I just loved Cara’s art in that everything she’s done since then — the Black Canary book and the Over the Garden Wall stuff. Her stuff looks really good and I always thought, “Man, I’d love to work with her, but there’s no way I can afford to pay her and she’s probably booked to hell and back.”
So when Comixology said they liked .Self, I thought this would be an interesting match and I reached out and luckily she had the room and she was interested. I had no idea what the book would be like with Cara on it and that made me really excited about it. I really wanted to see what combining me and Cara together resulted in, and luckily it worked out.
Did seeing her work impact your plans for the series?
Yeah. All that stuff is so nebulous when you write your first script. You have certain visuals in your head, but getting it in an actual style and actually seeing the world built out in front of me definitely influenced a lot of the four scripts that came after that. It’s subtle stuff. It wasn’t like, “Oh my god, I have to rewrite everything.” It was more like, “Oh, this is super cool. she does this really well. I’m going to try to play to this a little more.” Or, “I think it would be neat to see how she would handle a weird fight with car antennas.” So, a little playing towards what she does really well and a little, “I have no idea what this will look like, and I really want to see it.”
Collaborating with an artist is like getting commissions, almost. Little tiny commissions.
You’re credited as both the author and the designer of the first issue of .Self. Could you talk a bit about your role in the series’ art direction?
This one was more hands-on. I designed the interior front cover with the credits, and I did the trade dress on the covers. But, I also did a bunch of back matter that explains how everything in .Self works, so I spent a long time putting together a visual of what the Postscript unit that she has in her house looks like and all the accessories, and I designed it so that it looked similar to an Apple instruction manual. So, I was a little more hands-on than usual, but for anything in terms of actual comics pages, I tried to stay out of Cara’s way. But all the stuff surrounding it, I get really nerdy about that stuff. I like doing it for fun, so comics are a good excuse for me to spend a couple of hours wallowing in Photoshop.
The “Exposition Mode” Postscript user’s manual is a really fun way to build the world. What made you want to tell the story this way?
There’s a certain level of exposition that feels like death to me. Nobody wants everything to grind to a halt. It’d be like stopping a comic to explain how an iPhone works or something. I wanted to address it enough in the book that it makes a casual sense. A lot of that was for me to figure out exactly how it all works together. If anybody is unclear or wants a deeper dive, that stuff is available for them. but I tried to make it so that you don’t need to read the back matter and the story should still flow as is. It’s a deeper cut for people who want to go further with it.
With the exception of the ‘postscript technology,’ the world of .Self feels like it could take place in 2021. How important was it for you to make this series feel contemporary rather than especially futuristic?
It feels natural to me, especially working on Crowded, which is another book that takes place in the future but is still pretty contemporary. I guess it is a little bit of laziness, so I don’t have to figure out what the world is going to be like in forty years and all the repercussions of that. That’s hard sci-fi fantasy levels of world-building. You could do it if you wanted to, but I didn’t want to and it didn’t feel necessary to the heart of the story we were telling. I didn’t want to get into hover cars. Once you push one domino down, then you have to explain all the other dominoes. I still wanted it to feel relatable to somebody who wasn’t into reading some hardboiled sci-fi epic.
While this first issue definitely tells a unique story, the idea of using technology to upload and preserve consciousness is a classic sci-fi concept. What stories inspired you as you worked on .Self?
I went in blind. There are certain stories that I do that there are movies or comics that feel adjacent to it. The closest I could come is Orphan Black. there’s a similarity on a surface level, so I made sure not to watch Orphan Black. There wasn’t a lot of influence. It’s this weird idea that sunk its teeth into me and I chased it down until it became .Self, but there wasn’t a lot of outside influence that I could point to.
Loneliness and isolation appear to be major themes in this series, or at least defining traits for Natalie. How has the past year of social distancing impacted your view of isolation?
I’ve become very familiar with isolation and distance. This was one of my pandemic books. I think we started working on it in July of last year, so we were right in the thick of it, so inevitably a lot of that wormed its way in. There are certain books that I know what they’re about, and there are other books that I don’t figure out until I’m a couple of issues in and, .Self was the latter. I didn’t realize that it’s a book that is about depression and dealing with it until issue four.
That’s my favorite part of writing — where subconscious me is sending conscious me this manifesto, but I don’t realize it until I’m in the thick of it. The whole atmosphere of the last few years definitely informed a good amount of Natalie. This weird dissatisfaction of like, “If the world is ending, is this it?” And, “If I’ve achieved my dreams, why aren’t I happy?” The whole last two years have been a big emotional soup, so it is inevitable that it bled into .Self.
What are you most excited for readers to discover as .Self goes forward?
I hope they can relate to some degree to the idea at the heart of Natalie. She spent her whole life trying to get to a place where she’s comfortable, where she didn’t have to worry anymore, and now that she is it doesn’t mean that she’s happy. It’s a book about all the stuff that you cast aside in order to get where you are and trying to cope with that and trying to realign who you used to be with who you are now. I hope people can relate to that on an intrinsic level.
Beyond that, it’s a team book. A whacky A-Team, X-Men, throw a bunch of random people together to see what chaos ensues, except all the people are one person basically. We have a bunch of different versions of Nat who are going to be showing up. I hope people are excited about. I know what I love about my books, but I never know what other people are going to love about my books.
The first issue of .Self is available now on ComiXology.
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