A Chat With Shane Davis and Michelle Delecki About AXCEND
AXCEND #1
Written By: Shane Davis
Art By: Michelle Delecki
Colors By: Morry Hollowell
Earlier this week, I got to chat with Shane Davis and Michelle Delecki, part of the creative team on their new Image Comics project, Axcend. We talk some about how the married couple balance their professional and personal lives, as well as how Axcend came to be, and how in its own way the book is tackling subjects like depression and video game violence. Let's get this show started, shall we?
Matt Mueller: Now I know if my wife and I worked together, it would probably be awesome, but with us being two very headstrong people, we might butt heads — enough so where some of the after work home drives might be a bit unpleasant (i.e. she will get to choose the drive home music station). Have you guys worked together before, and how was this experience?
Shane Davis: We’ve actually worked together on a lot of covers for Marvel and DC, but those things are kind of like, you get it, work on it for a few days, turn it in, and then you move on to something else, so this is the first time that it's a constant repetition of art back to back to back. It’s been different for us working together this way. She can probably speak about it more, but to me it's pretty cool to have somebody that you can constantly talk to about something, and not just talk on the phone with or email to, but you are literally working on it every day. It's really nice. Personal-wise, we make sure we have nights where we push ourselves out of the studio, and definitely I personally have to go the gym at least once a day, just to make sure I get a fresh perspective and the blood moving around and active so I’m not stagnant. We constantly push each other too, so she is good at the like “Hey, it's been a few days since we’ve gone to the gym, we should go tonight” type of thing.
Michelle Delecki: Yeah, as far as working together it's really nice. Shane usually gives me a lot of constructive criticism. Well, not quite so much anymore, but when I first started inking him on covers he would say "Hey, tweak this one spot" or "Try to fix this one feathering spot over here" and I would try and improve upon it every time I would do something else with him. So I was constantly trying to get better and better and get closer and closer to his lines, so he sort of tailored me a little bit as far as the inking goes, but when it comes to this project I’ve been editing it a lot, and it's my first time doing that. It's really neat, we get to work together and it's a constant critique, but it's an honest type of critique, because if I see something that I don’t like too much, I can tell him and he takes it and runs with it. Same thing goes with me. If I feel like something needs to be reevaluated, he will look at it and tell me his honest opinion, and I know my feelings shouldn’t be hurt because he wants it to look as good as it can. We mesh really well together.
MM: It's funny you mention that, because I am a graphic designer on the side, and one of the few people who can say "I don’t like how that looks, maybe you should change it to this," is my wife, without me ever taking it defensively or the giving the dreaded “seriously?” look.
SD & MD: [Laughs]
SD: That actually happens, I know exactly what you are talking about. With other projects sometimes you get notes, more so editorially, you’ll sometimes wonder are they looking at the script, because something that was specifically for this thing is now being asked specifically for another, and then the writer gets mad and says well I don’t want it like that, and then I get in between the writer and editor, and try to navigate that, and so on. At least with working with her, like there was something the other day that I thought was a little on the edge, and she read it in script, and I had drawn it, and then we all looked at it together. It's a scene in issue 2, and it just came out a bit too edgy once everything was put together, the graphics and the lettering, and the decision we had to make was to take that edge off a little bit. It wasn’t offensive, just a bit on the provocative side too much, and it was a decision that was made more from what is best for you and you can still get that across, but you need to back off somewhat. And coming from my wife it made me feel like it was in my best interest, and not just an opinion or random assessment.
MM: Exactly, I completely understand. As for the theme of the book, you had stated that it wasn’t about video games per se, but that was more the sandbox you decided to play in while discussing a different theme. Where did the idea come from? Had you been thinking about it for a while, or where did that originate?
SD: Well, and sometimes it's hard to go into this without going into the end of it, but I think a lot of it comes from violence and pulling triggers and buttons, and I see that and acknowledge that it's there, and has been there for years. It's not a new development. This has been there since, I don’t want to say the dawn of man taking up a stick and hitting another man with it, but to some degree with weapons I guess, maybe guns, I don’t know where exactly it began, but I think to some degree that crossing of a real life-or-death situation versus what is being perceived as something cool in your hand where you can push a button or pull a trigger and it takes a life. There is also something about video games where you are constantly dying and respawning, and doing something where I thought there was a weird juxtaposition in real life, and it kind of sorta stemmed from there.
I wanted to play on the bigger scale. The tagline is “are you playing the game or is the game playing you?”, and that is going to be a big theme in this story as to who the player is here. The character DOG is the one that a lot of people seem to look past as a bigger character, but the fact that something was able to give these kids abilities, and the fact that they are coming into the real world, there is something really supernatural going on that they aren’t talking about and a lot of people don’t aren't catching on to. There is always the game and the players, and I think that the same could be said in social circles: there is always the game and the people playing the game, and I kind of wanted to play with that.
As far as it not being about gaming per se and more about the gaming mentality, I am dealing with a lot of MMO-type things, like farming and going for XP, especially the character Ruin. That is the big threat, that they are worried about him coming over to the real world like Eric and Rayne (Rayne comes over in issue two), but the first three issues focuses on those three characters: Eric in issue one, Rayne in issue two, and Ruin in issue three. The farming aspect and killing for XP and stuff and trying to grow, again that is Ruin, where that feeling of "I want to be more and more powerful" and all that stuff, I definitely wanted to show that darker side of gaming, and just the stuff that people will do to each other in video games.
I mean, even just playing games today, playing an online fighting game for example, where people will play the worst cheap combo characters or whatever just because you aren’t standing next to them, something they wouldn’t do if they were in a real arcade. The mentality of people in video games and in the real world, I thought there was some interesting things there to dive into. To some extent the book will have a few things that, I don’t want to say school shootings or anything, but there are a few violent things that is sort of social commentary where someone becomes very disillusioned, and loses their sense of reality to an extent, to grieve, and they really aren’t thinking about other people. Truthfully I’m not even sure they are thinking about themselves.
I really wanted to kind of nudge it that way a little bit with this, because I really think there is a very serious subject here with video game violence that has always been talked about, and is more and more out there. Nobody likes to hear it, but I think even as just a gamer that video game violence is at an all-time high.
MM: Because we are dealing with those issues of violence in video games, and with all the talk about it over the last 5 to 10 years, it would have been very easy for Eric to be a walking gamer trope, complete with Cheetos and Mountain Dew in hand, but he isn’t that at all. Two scenes stick out in particular. The one where he is in Doc Johnson’s (his therapist) office, and the other is towards the beginning of the book when he is in class. Let's talk about that one specifically, where he makes the sarcastic yet mostly correct statement about the R.U.N., pointing out that it isn’t necessarily a coalition of peace, as the seven countries all just went to the extreme first and pointed nukes at everybody to make them comply. He’s played as intelligent, and there is something deeper there. He isn’t a caricature here, and I appreciated that.
SD: I definitely wanted a socially awkward character for that reason, but not just to be awkward, or an awkward gaming guy. He is very awkward around Rayne, not trying to ruin anything in issue two, but Rayne will ask things, and she is a famous pop star gaming queen, kind of like if Twitch and YouTube had a baby, but she is deactivated and pulls Dog into the real world, and Dog is leading her to try and get to Ruin, and they end up at Eric’s doorstep. I get to play a lot with his awkwardness around her. The thing with Eric though is that I really wanted him to be, especially being a surviving twin, I really wanted to play with his social skills. I really wanted a broken character where there is never resolution to his problem. There never will be, and he can’t get past that.
I find a lot of characters, people want to give them these moments with that smiling face at the end of the last 15 minutes of the movie where they find a deeper meaning to life, and the resolution is there and they got past a hardship or honored the dead or saved the day. I understand that everyone wants a resolution to things, but with Eric I wanted to give the character a problem that he won’t ever get past, whether it be through his therapist or the bully in the school sort of trying to get him past his problem. At the same time, that also opens the door for him to be a lot more, able to be influenced and needing to latch on to others for emotions, especially when it comes to Rayne. It is kind of setting him up for their relationship in a way where, you know, he’s got a void in him that he tries to fill with things, especially like in issue two when he is in the real world, and he’s stealing awesome cars he wishes he could own, basically doing like a Grand Theft Auto thing where he’s stealing a fighter jet and a tank, thinking "Oh, wouldn’t that be cool, let me make portals and steal this stuff. People will think 'oh, that’s cool and that’s funny,'" but one of the quotes from that part is that these things really aren't that important when you can just reach out and grab them. I will be dealing with his depression and that he can’t fill the void no matter what he takes or has. The same problems he’s facing are still there.
For him a lot of it comes back to “I was the one that should’ve died, and not my brother,” and "Was my brother a better person than I was?" There are things like that that are going to be dealt with in him, and I think that is what makes him an interesting fully developed character, which is really hard to do sometimes with a Marvel or DC character.
MM: Stepping outside of Eric here, once you actually get into the game of Axend, the art really kicks into high gear. The whole book looks great, but it seems both of you really got to flex some creative muscles, especially in the combat sequences. For example, the gutters being extensions of Rayne's chains when she and Eric are throwing down. Stuff like that really pops off the page. How was the design process between the two of you when it came to those aspects of the art?
SD: I bounce all that off of Michelle, and I also played with something like that with the gutters when Rayne comes over in issue two. This is the first time I’ve tried to do more with gutters, and Michelle weighed in on some of that.
MD: Oh yeah, as far as the designed look goes, we both collaborated on the overall look of the project. I was trying to stay really close to Shane’s lines but at the same time try to keep them super polished and super clean. We have Morry [Hollowell] doing colors on the book and he does a really awesome job. The book is very vibrant and alive almost with this color palette.
SD: We really wanted to juxtaposition the real world and the game world. They will never go back into the game after the first issue, but more about their avatars or betas being in the real world and the contrast there.
MM: And you can definitely tell that difference to great effect on the last page. Well, Shane and Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. I really appreciate it!
SD & MD: No problem at all, glad to!
Axcend #1 Releases today, October 7th, 2015.