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Ever since the dawn of the New 52 in 2011, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo have collaborated on comic book projects with great success. Starting with a celebrated run on the main Batman ongoing series, the pair has received widespread critical acclaim. In 2021, Snyder launched creator-owned publishing imprint Best Jackett Press in association with ComiXology and Dark Horse Comics, orchestrating the release of a new line of Best Jackett titles digitally before publishing them in print. Snyder and Capullo’s We Have Demons led the charge, following a woman named Lam, who learns she is part of a war between the forces of light and darkness powered by primordially supernatural materials known as the Halo and Horn.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Snyder and Capullo explained the themes behind We Have Demons and praised the rest of the creative team in crafting a thrilling launch for Best Jackett’s line. The duo also teased what fans can expect with the upcoming print editions of the series, slated for publication this March by Dark Horse Comics. The creative team also unveiled a line of retailer-exclusive variant covers for We Have Demons #1 illustrated by Tony S. Daniel, Tula Lotay with Dee Cunniffe, Rafael Albuquerque, and Dan Panosian.
While you two have been working together for over a decade now, this is your first creator-owned project together. With We Have Demons‘ first story arc in the can, how has this experience been?
Greg Capullo: I have fun no matter what I’m doing with Scott, but doing your own thing where nobody can look over your shoulder and telling you whether it’s right or wrong, who doesn’t love not having a boss [laughs]! It’s great just to follow our own path and you can’t do anything wrong because it’s yours… That doesn’t mean it can’t suck [laughs]!
Scott Snyder: Nothing he does ever sucks, and I feel like this is the best work I’ve seen from him.
For me, it’s easily the most fun I’ve ever had working in comics with him just because it’s ours. We can do whatever we want with it, and with the story, we have less pressure and deadlines and think it’s led to the best stuff we’ve done. For me, it was like the gateway towards feeling like all of this was the right choice, doing stuff ourselves, taking control of our own careers, and that we can do this if we want. If we want to do more of this series, we’ll do another one after [Greg] does Creech and all that stuff. All of the things I hoped would come true getting to work on our own stuff came true. It was more fun and I got more personal with it and his stuff is just out of this world. The process was fun.
The thing people need to understand too is I loved working on Batman, Metal, Death Metal, and Last Knight on Earth with Greg and it’s a huge honor and joy but there’s so much pressure and such a grind because so much depends on it all the time because it’s all plugged into this circuitry of companywide sales and promotion and all the internal politics of having a boss. Being away from that system, being your own boss, and making your own creative decisions, I realized how much energy that took up. That’s not a slight on anybody there because we worked with some great people, but it’s really not having that whole system above you frees you creatively, emotionally, and psychologically so much. We can make toys and shirts if we want, as we come out in print which is stuff we’re exploring right now. Something we can invite people in too to feel immersed and that it’s theirs as much as ours and really go crazy as much as we can.
Greg, you’ve drawn monsters for Spawn, Creech, and Reborn. What did you want to do visually and uniquely with the monsters and demonfolk in We Have Demons?
Capullo: That was one of the things that Scott wanted me to do from the get-go. He would say that he wanted these to be recognizable as our demons. He had a few suggestions, which I tried and would show him some stuff that really wasn’t clicking. All of a sudden, I started to think of the conceptual drawings I had seen of dinosaurs and things that exist in the wild like creatures that have a false set of eyes to scare off predators. So I figured I’d add a tall, Klingon-type thing with an extension to the forehead where I can put some additional eyes on there and that became the signature look of the way we do demons. I added some twisted horns that had spikes coming off of them. The breakthrough was the false set of eyes: that was our demons.
At the core of We Have Demons, there’s Lam and Gus, who represent the godfolk and demonfolk — light and darkness. What do these two characters represent in the story other than these photonic elements?
Snyder: The story, for me, we say it on the first page in a lighthearted way: it’s about faith, and it really is. It’s written with my kids in mind in a way that they’re inheriting a world that I think doesn’t lend itself to a lot of hope and faith. I wanted to write something that was about — even though we’ve revealed ourselves to be made more of Horn than Halo and it seems right now that we’re more of dark than light — what makes us special. It’s our ability to overcome that nature, even somebody like Gus, who is so full of the dark element can be the hero of this story. With Lam, it was her finding her own version of faith, not her father’s, which is that people are more good than they’re bad, but that people are more bad than good, but what makes us special and divine is our ability to reach past that, that’s key.
It’s a really, deeply personal book as much as it is batshit/Saturday morning cartoon crazy, in that regard. As a parent, I want my kids to be reading things that speak to their adolescence more than mine. I don’t want to be making things that I loved as a kid so much as using the things that I loved as a kid to make something I think he’ll love at this age because it’s tailored to the things I see him going through. That is really the core and heart of their relationship, why they work so well as a team, and why I love them as characters both separately and together.
Greg, as these scripts were coming in, from demons bursting out of humans to emotional moments with Lam and Gus, what sequence were you personally looking forward to drawing the most?
Capullo: They’re all fun because of the different elements of it. The joy of doing all cut-loose action, that’s one of the things that attracted me as a young person to want to get into comics at all. But as you get older and experience more of life, the emotional aspects become equally joyous. I remember trying to break into Marvel as a young kid and one editor turned to another editor after looking at my stuff and went, “This one can act!” I guess I have a knack for pulling that emotion but the thing that makes it better is, the more you live your life and the more situations you’ve experienced, you get a broader and broader palette.
When Scott gives me these emotional scenes, it gives me a lot of joy in bringing that to life, whether it’s a father-daughter thing — I would’ve had no clue about a parent-child thing until I married my wife ten years ago and raised her kid. That made it more accessible to me. It’s all fun! I can’t pick one scene over another. They all have something that appeals to me to do… Except when there’s some technical shit he throws at me [laughs]!
Snyder: I tried, with this one, to give the least amount of technical shit [laughs]. We have such a great team on this, with Jonathan Glapion, who has been with us for so much of our career and partnership, and Dave McCaig, who is new to the team but worked with me on American Vampire for the past decade and brought a whole level of magic with the coloring. Tom Napolitano does the lettering, and he’s been such a huge staple in our DC stuff and is terrific, and we’ve got Will Dennis, who is editing.
We’re grateful and when I was reading over this book to see if I wanted to change anything before it went to print. It was literally one of the things I’m the most proud of [because] there was nothing I wanted to change — I did notice one typo and that’s it. Usually, I go back and I’m pretty hands-on about polishing, and this one, I love it and can’t wait to get back to it sometime soon.
How did you want to differentiate the effects of the Halo and Horn visually and in the writing?
Snyder: One of the things clear to me at this point in my career is that working with Greg is inspiring because he also stretches my imagination because I know what he’s capable of. There are things I wouldn’t have thought of because I know he’s going to do something with it that’s so great and different than I would’ve imagined. It’ll elevate it in some way and make my imagination more elastic. With the Halo and Horn, the only guide I gave to him for that was that they’re literal divine and hellish elements, so whatever they do to you, you want to feel that way. With the glow of the Halo’s blades, you should feel special and magical as there’s barely any left. The inversion of that is the Horn and what it does to your body should be horrific so go crazy with the body horror everywhere.
Capullo: I’ve got to give a shoutout to our new boy on the team, Dave McCaig, because he asked for the script and for any suggestions artistically from me. He really made sure to make it consistent because colors should be something a reader subconsciously identifies with without having to think about it. He made sure to tie and anchor those color elements to both these things, and we worked out how it would look when a blade got through, and what it does to the guts. He really deserves a bit of credit for making it as cohesive as it is.
To elaborate on that, how was it working with Jonathan and Dave on this, especially adapting to having a new colorist in the mix?
Capullo: Jonathan and I have been working together for so long. I trust him and he’s one of the most unique inkers. I don’t want just anybody inking me. He’s got a flair. There’s a lot of great, technical guys but he’s got a special [thing] that I think is cool: we’re just a good, solid team. Losing FCO [Plascencia] to me, after working with him for such a long time, was a bit nerve-wracking at the time. I got a list of fifty colorists and I went through them and there were three people that I figured maybe [compatible to work with] but Dave really stuck out to me as the closest that I envision for my work.
There’s a lot of great colorists and they all know how to use magical effects but you really have to pair the right colorist with the right art, and the more detailed, the less of that you want and need because of the hatching and all that stuff already provides a certain layer. Dave understands that and doesn’t step over any of that. He complements that. I couldn’t have found a better new guy for the team, and I’ve told Dave that he’s my guy until one of us dies because he’s a great complement to the team and always open for suggestions. He’ll look at things, and if I give him a suggestion, he’s so open and receptive and has a lot of great instincts. He really puts a lot of thought into what he lays down. For him, to do this work right out the gate with us, I see nothing but a bigger and brighter future for the team.
The big news, of course, is We Have Demons is coming to print through Dark Horse Comics. What are you excited about getting to share a tangible version of the book with fans and what incentives can they expect?
Capullo: First thing they can look forward to is an actual signature on their book because we can’t sign their iPad [laughs]!
Snyder: We can’t wait to get out there and sign physical copies. We’re talking about doing bookplates for some stuff and a bunch of incentives that we’ll talk about over the course of the month. You have one month from now to order this book and we encourage you to do it early. Dark Horse is already taking orders. We have a good track record of selling out first issues in the direct market, so if you can order, please do because we don’t want you to miss out. The thing I’m super-excited about is the whole deal that we did: everybody at Best Jackett, with ComiXology, the only reason we were so excited about it is that it was a bridge between digital and print.
Digital is designed to be an incredibly fun, immersive, and immediate read. It’s experiential. When it comes out in print, there are extras because we wanted it to feel special. The book is big: it has the script and designs in the back. There are variant and [retailer] variant covers by other artists in the Best Jackett line. We’re thrilled that you can get a subscription to ComiXology Unlimited and read all of them for the price of one comic and hopefully, you’ll go out and get the comic because it has all of these cool extras and it’s a physical copy that we can sign.
The whole nature of the deal was to say that digital and print aren’t competitive. Digital should be an on-ramp to comics in all kinds of fun ways and make you fall back in love with comics through a subscription-based browsing experience. Then you can go to your store and order it and support your local shop and have something collectible and special for the shelf.
Capullo: And you can’t discount the purists who reject digital. They grew up with [print comics]. They want this and they’ve been waiting for this. When they found out this was coming out [in print], they were excited, and now we’ve got a whole other layer of fans that are going to be able to see it and have fun with it.
Snyder: We really want to show how special print and digital are in their own right so the print version. We’ve got a variant cover by Tony Daniel from Best Jackett’s Nocterra doing it for DCBS. We’ve got Tula Lotay, who’s doing Barnstormers with me, doing a variant for Comics Conspiracy in California. From Midtown Comics, we’ve got one from Rafael Albuquerque, and from Things from Another World, we’ve got one from Dan Panosian, who’s doing Canary with me. We’ve also got a variant cover from Greg [Capullo] coming.
The fun is in doing something that also supports the direct market, and even though the deal with Dark Horse and ComiXology is new, they’ve just done trades and that’s it. For us, being able to be the first book putting out single issues means a lot because we’re heavy direct market sellers. The idea of doing single issues so stores have something to sell monthly with different covers feels much more natural and organic to the comic shops rather than just giving them a trade. I feel great about it and can’t wait to see it in print. Greg’s art shines in both mediums but when you see it on that page, it’s really going to blow you away and the extras are really fun too!
Written by Scott Snyder and with artwork by Greg Capullo, the first three issues of We Have Demons are available of ComiXology. We Have Demons #1 goes on sale in print on March 23 from Dark Horse Comics.
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