I grew up reading old monster comics and watching the classic black-and-white Universal monster movies, and loving all of them. But it always bugged me a little that they seemed to exist in a world in which there were so many different WAYS to become a monster. Bitten by a werewolf under a full moon, or bitten by a vampire, or cobbled together from a bunch of dead bodies… there was a completely different set of rules at work for every monster, a completely different rationale. But why SHOULD a vampire’s bite turn you into a vampire, and why do vampires crave blood? And, perhaps even more germane for the heroine of iZombie, why do zombies crave brains (which they have at least for the last thirty years or so)?

iZombie began with a brief paragraph-long pitch, that centered entirely on the main character and her personal issues. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time worrying about how her world worked, or the rules of zombies. But when Vertigo editor extraordinaire Shelly Bond asked me to flesh that one paragraph out into a full proposal, I knew I was going to have to work out how that world worked, and how the various monsters worked within it.

I was heading off to a convention that weekend, and so spent the whole flight out furiously scribbling down notes in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook. And when I got to the convention, I used every second I wasn’t on panels or doing signings transferring those scribbled notes over to my laptop, and gradually fleshing them out. And when I was done, I had worked out who each of the supporting characters and antagonists in the series would be, at least in general terms (it wasn’t until Mike Allred signed onboard a few weeks later that many of them came into focus). And more importantly, I worked HOW monsters worked in this world.

I won’t go into TOO much detail about the metaphysics of iZombie, since it would spoil some of the later chapters in the first collection, iZombie Vol. 1: Dead To The World, but the basics are these: everyone has more than one soul, and they don’t always depart with the death of the body. The basic notion is lifted from the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, but filtered here through the bicameral structure of 20th century psychology, with one soul associated with the conscious mind, and the other with the unconscious. And once I’d worked THAT out, I suddenly knew why vampires craved blood, why zombies craved brains, and why some ghosts seemed charming and personable and others were seemingly mindless shrieking phantoms.

I always like to work out the rules of a world before I get too deep into writing about it, because I find it helps me to know what is and isn’t possible. And the nice thing about working out my own personal “unified theory of monsters” is that it suddenly occurred to me that we could make use of many MORE monsters than we had originally intended. Someday, lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I hope to get a giant mutated kaiju monster into the book (don’t tell Mike and Shelly, though, I’m keeping it a secret). I don’t know why or when we’ll use it, but now that I know the rules of the world, I know exactly HOW we’ll be able to pull it off!

--Chris Roberson

iZombie began with two simple ideas.

The first had to do with zombies themselves. Unlike their other monster brethren, zombies had become a bit limited in scope in recent decades, it seemed to me. We’ve seen vampire stories set in different historical epochs, werewolf stories set in the modern day, Frankenstein’s monster stories set in the future, and on and on. But unlike other monsters, who could be easily used in any historical or cultural setting, zombies had by and large been relegated to the “post-apocalyptic/societal collapse” scenario, typically in a world reduced to chaos and even savagery by the emergence of the zombies themselves. (There HAVE been zombie stories set in the past, most notably in the Old West and in Victorian England, but these always seemed to me to be the first steps to some alternate history post-apocalypse, rather than a glimpse of “our” own past.) Zombies were seldom seen lurking in the shadows of OUR world, in the modern day. Well, why not?

The second thought had to do with one of the standard tropes of monster fiction: namely, that a normal person when turned into a monster becomes, well, MONSTROUS. A regular Joe or Jane Q. Public when bitten by a vampire or werewolf inevitably becomes dark and brooding, if not all out EVIL. But why? If I was bitten by a werewolf, I wouldn’t suddenly abandon my wife and child to live a dark and maudlin existence at the edges of society. I’d just lock the door once a month, and otherwise get on with business.

So what if we had a zombie in the modern world, I thought, who DIDN’T immediately go all dark and depressing. What if it were a zombie who retained enough of their memories and personality to know they didn’t want to hurt anyone, but just wanted to get along. What would they be like? What would they do for fun? And more importantly, how would they get the BRAINS they needed? (As for why zombies need brains, that’s a whole OTHER story…)

Gwen Dylan was the result of that line of thinking, and iZombie is her story.

-Chris Roberson

In Cinderella: Fables Are Forever, the second miniseries featuring Fabletown’s number one spy, we learn how Cinderella travelled to the Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War, investigating rumors of a “Shadow Fabletown” of Soviet Fables. There, she met another secret agent Fable, who would go on to be her greatest nemesis (and if you haven’t read Cinderella: Fables Are Forever #1, I won’t spoil the identity of the nemesis here!).

So why a Shadow Fabletown in the Soviet Union? I guess it’s because I grew up in the last decades of the Cold War, and I miss having the Soviets as antagonists in spy stories. Not as “villains,” mind you, but “antagonists.”

Stories set in WWII and in the years leading up to the war have nature’s perfect villains already built in: the Nazis. Those guys make for GREAT villains, because they did such despicable things. If you’re dealing with a member of the Gestapo, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to make them entirely one dimensional as characters, not to simply portray them as cartoonish EVIL GUY.

But with the Soviets, things weren’t always so cut and dry. They’d been our allies during WWII, after all, and it was really only after the end of the war that they started cropping up as the enemy in spy stories. But growing up on those stories, I never got the sense that the Soviets were “evil,” but more that they were simply pursuing a different agenda. And so it was much easier for writers to cast Soviet agents in a sympathetic light, or even to use them as love interests for heroes from western powers.

In thinking about a community of Fables with different aims and agendas than those in Fabletown, it seemed only natural to use some of that same friction that I found in stories about American or British agents going up against their Soviet counterparts. And so what we have in the Shadow Fabletown isn’t a collection of “evil Fables,” so much as it is a group of Fables who see the world in a different way.

That said, Cinderella’s nemesis ISN’T a Soviet Fable, but is a western one who has gone to work for them as an assassin. And the same rules don’t apply. What does that mean? Well, you’ll have to check out Cinderella: Fables Are Forever and see for yourself!

C

Now for the cover of issue #5 by Chrissie Zullo:

In the first issue of the new mini-series CINDERELLA: FABLES ARE FOREVER by the amazing team who brought you CINDERELLA: FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE, Chris Roberson and artist Shawn McManus, Cindy heads to freezing cold Russia and she’s wearing a bikini. (Awesome cover by Chrissie Zullo, right?) There she encounters her nemesis who goes by the codename Silverslipper and you’re never gonna believe who it is.

So pick up issue one this Wednesday and let me know what you think of this character leaving her past behind and becoming an evil, you know, rhymes with witch.

In the meantime, here are a few preview pages. Enjoy!

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