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In March, award-winning comic book creator Scott Snyder launched his creator-owned publishing imprint Best Jackett Press. Snyder’s new line kicked off with his and co-creator Tony S. Daniel’s original comic series Nocterra. Snyder is now at the helm of a new wave of Best Jackett titles he’s launching through ComiXology in what has been dubbed by the digital comic book platform as “Scottober.” Available with a ComiXology Unlimited subscription before eventually coming to print through Dark Horse Comics, October sees Snyder’s launch of We Have Demons, Clear, and Night of the Ghoul. Snyder reunites with past, fan-favorite collaborators Greg Capullo, Francis Manapul, and Francesco Francavilla, respectively.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Snyder teased what readers can expect from We Have Demons and Clear. He also revealed the personal inspirations behind them. Also included with this interview are standard covers for We Have Demons #1, penciled by Capullo, inked by Jonathan Glapion, colored by Dave McCaig, and lettered by Tom Napolitano, and Clear #1 with artwork by Manapul and letters by AndWorld Design.
You previously launched Best Jackett Press with Nocterra as an unapologetically high-octane story, with Tony S. Daniel, and you’re now kicking off Scottober with We Have Demons, reuniting with Greg Capullo. What made you want to start this new wave of Best Jackett books with this title?
Scott Snyder: It was sort of the same thing, leaning into the kinds of stories that I love.
Greg and I have been working together for eleven years and we never got to do a creator-owned together and the fun in trying to launch a new line of books was trying to show range and trying to say that we’re trying to do things that embrace the priorities that I love in storytelling and lean into things that are wildly different and outside of my comfort zone. I felt that starting with a book that would say everything we wanted to do for ourselves but also while at DC — the bombast, mayhem and gore, all of that — we wanted a book we could put all that into and say let’s all have some incredible fun with this line: let’s open this line with a giant blast. This is a story that me and Greg have been thinking about for years and we want you to enter this whole universe we’ve created and enjoy it.
It’s fun because the next book, Clear, is something I’ve never tried. It’s speculative science fiction and noir and way outside my comfort zone. Even though I’ve worked with Francis a lot, he hasn’t really done this either. Night of the Ghoul is going the other direction with an intimate, claustrophobic horror story. We wanted to start out the home base and say, “Come on in, this is a book we’ve wanted to do, and here’s something different that you maybe didn’t think we’d try but it’s special to us.”
While you’ve done horror before, you’ve really leaned into the theological before, which can walk hand-in-hand with supernatural horror. What made We Have Demons the right title to explore that?
The reason is, Batman was very personal to me, but Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal, as strange as it sounds, had a lot of spiritualism and science married into it for me — the idea of a Dark Multiverse, based on theoretical science and the idea of metals with different properties that we can’t quite define yet. All this stuff at the edges of science and the spiritual aspect that they were written for my kids with hope that — if they believe that things can get better if we all work together — that collectivism comes back. And [we] believe in our better angels in our basest nature. Maybe we’ll make it through to someplace better. We have to not be in these camps where science and faith are different but it’s actually one big, wondrous and terrifying story.
With We Have Demons, the idea was to do that and marry all that big story stuff together. The mythology of the book imagines that there are these two competing elements: The Lightest is the very first element created after the Big Bang with an atomic number of zero and subatomic particles as its nucleus, and the Heaviest, the most superheavy material forged in the universe naturally in the outermost regions of space. That and the light material are present here on Earth secretly and the main character’s father calls them Halo and Horn as nicknames. Horn is obviously the dark one and it seems to seek out high evolved, dominant species and infect them and turn them into these terrible, mutated demons that hide among us and tear out with claws and fangs that are total body horror when you see them as they curse a lot, which is one of the funny things about them.
The story is about a young woman named Lam, which is short for Lamassu, whose father is a pastor in this small town in Florida. After he passes away, she discovers he was sort of the Indiana Jones of this organization that has been hunting down the remnants of this material for a long time around the Earth, along with the people that it’s infected. She becomes part of this whole mythology she never knew existed and it’s a really character-driven book. It’s more voice work than I’ve done in a long time. I want you to love Lam and the partner her father worked with before he died — who’s kind of a big surprise in the book named Gus. We want [readers] to love the mythology. We put a lot of work into it and it’s an intimate and robust book but it also has all the Spawn, Batman, Heavy Metal craziness that you expect from us and us working at our peak, I hope.
You mentioned Clear and, while you’ve touched on elements of cyberpunk before, you’re going on an unapologetic deep dive into the genre here. What made you want to get into that genre and what made Francis Manapul the right collaborator for this?
Every one of the books is personal in a different way and it was less about the genre than it was the seed of the story. Francis and I were talking about the way our kids were growing up in a world where everyone is able to isolate themselves from each other. When we came up with the idea for the story — all the way back in 2017 when we were working on Justice League — we were tinkering away on it. We’ve had actual pages and visual material for it for years and every time we got a moment, we’d keep pushing. What it’s about is this fear that we’re headed for this strange, siloed experience where everything is subjective, and instead of coming together to find a communal goal and see past our differences, we’d rather slide into these isolated bunkers.
We created this science fiction future where, after Big Tech makes a few innovations, everybody is able to link into the internet neurologically. There are no more computers. Your eyes are the screen. The big thing everyone uses are these things called Veils, like skins where the structures of the world stay the same but you can cosmetically filter it to look however you want. For example, if you want everything to look like a 1930s cartoon, everything will have an old Disney aesthetic. Or, if you want everything to look like a zombie apocalypse, everyone will look like a zombie, and so on. Everyone lives in their own bubble of reality and this all begins after a period of rapid decline for the U.S. where we fight this war that’s really short, only three days long, called the Red War, against the Soviet Union with all these cyber bugs in our weaponry and it ends before it begins. Instead of people wanting to band together and excel and find a better future for the country, everybody slides into their own isolation. It came from the fear of a future where there’s almost no hope for people to agree on a collective reality, or communal truth, or even want to find it; everyone would just prefer to live in their own subjective bubble.
The story is a murder mystery that takes place in this world and Detective Sam Dunes — who Francis really created as much as me with his background reflecting a lot of Francis’ cultural heritage. Sam keeps his setting on “clear” all the time. He is one of the few people that doesn’t use his Veils and sees the world as it really is but it’s becoming more expensive every year to do that. It’s a really fun book but also, for us, pretty resonant and urgent. We Have Demons, as you get to the end, you see it’s about this moment too but Clear is more piercingly immediate.
And in addition to being prescient, it gives Francis a huge variety visually in the different way people see the world.
Oh yeah, it’s a visual buffet and that’s the thing that excited Francis.
At one point in the first issue, Sam gets injected with something Zad that lets you see everything that everyone else around is seeing, filtering through all these different Veils that you didn’t set your own eyes to. It’s this amazing series of pages that Francis did and, when you read the book digitally, you’ll be able to see different filters and he did multiple versions of some of the pages. You see the world as it as and all of a sudden it’s the Old West and then medieval dragons and then cartoons. It’s amazing. He’s working in all these different styles and he’d say it’s his best work.
That’s one of the best things about this whole Best Jackett Press line is being able to do these books in a way where everybody gets to shine and do work that isn’t under the pressure that some of the work I’ve done in the past with them has been because it’s been at DC.
Written by Scot Snyder and with artwork by Greg Capullo, We Have Demons #1 launches Oct. 5. Clear #1, written by Snyder and with artwork by Francis Manapul, launches Oct. 12.
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