Mike Mignola: "We need more zombie comics!" That's what I told Scott [Allie, Dark Horse Editor]. From that comment ZombieWorld was born. The entire premise was, "Wouldn't it be fun to create a series where the world is overrun with zombies?" The entire world is full of zombies. I thought about it some more and asked myself why the world would be overrun with zombies and came up with the story for The Champion of the Worms. Incidentally, I didn't think Dark Horse would actually want to do this series; I made it up in two minutes on the phone. But they came back to me a few days later and said, "Yeah! We want to do this!" So then I put together the rest of this story. And I had the good sense to get Pat McEown to draw it.
Tom Fassbender: How did you manage that?
Mignola: I'd seen his work, both sketchbook stuff and the pencils for Grendel: Warchild. They were absolutely gorgeous, and, even though his Warchild stuff is nice, it got very covered up in the inking. So I wanted to give him a chance to do a book completely in his style.
Fassbender: He's got a very European style, reminiscent of Blake & Mortimer.
Mignola: Actually, the stuff I'd seen in the past was a bit more like R. Crumb, so I was a bit surprised when he did this sort of TinTin-esque style. Not really what I expected, but it looks great. I'm really proud of the art on this series. I think people would have expected a horror-looking kind of thing; a lot of shadows, slime-stuff coming out of peoples' mouths all the time -- drawn either by someone who drew like me or one of those pseudo Bernie Wrightson guys. This is such a refreshing, fun approach to horror.
Fassbender: Is that why you didn't draw it?
Mignola: No, I never had any interest in drawing it. I've got too much other stuff going on. I didn't even think about what the thing would look like. I knew I liked Pat's stuff a lot, so he was the first name that popped into my mind. He was available and he wanted to do it.
Fassbender: It turned out to be a good collaboration, then?
Mignola: Oh, yeah. Pat came up with the designs for all the characters, he came up with the names for the characters; I was basically along for the ride on this. I tried to press him to see what he wanted to draw and things like that, but he pretty much left all the plot to me. So I wanted to leave a lot of room for Pat to run with his ideas. This is really his baby. In fact, he ended up providing half the dialog.
Fassbender: How so?
Mignola: I wrote a very short plot with some dialog in it and when he sent back the first issue he'd put quite a bit of dialog in there. Most of it was joke dialog but it fit in very well, so we ended up using it. Some of the best gags in the book are his.
Fassbender: The four characters, the principal zombie-fightin' team, are vastly different. How did these folks get together?
Mignola: I have no idea.
Fassbender: So there's no story behind them?
Mignola: I don't imagine there will ever be a story behind them. Actually, I had almost nothing to do with the characters. I think my descriptions were "big guy with a hammer", "professor kind of guy", "ectoplasm guy" and "tough girl". That's all I gave to Pat. He gave them nationalities, names, wonderful physical characteristics. Eustace is blind ... that wasn't my idea.
Fassbender: Eustace St. John is the most fleshed-out of all the characters.
Mignola: Yeah, he has a few fun quirks. But the whole idea with ZombieWorld was not to do a book about a team of characters fighting zombies. It just seemed like a natural thing to do in order to get the ball rolling. The characters aren't really that important other than they set all this stuff in motion. Should ZombieWorld continue beyond this miniseries, the stories won't necessarily involve these characters.
Fassbender: So there are plans to continue the series?
Mignola: Yes, ZombieWorld is the entire world overrun by zombies.
Fassbender: And this is just the beginning ...
Mignola: Right. The screw-up that started it all.
Fassbender: Where are you going to take it from here?
Mignola: I don't plan to have that much involvement in ZombieWorld. I'm going to write this initial miniseries and, unless Pat wants to do more stuff with these characters, ZombieWorld's being turned over to other people.
Fassbender: A shared universe of sorts?
Mignola: Of sorts ... It would be kind of fun to set up an evolving world like H.P. Lovecraft did with the Cthulhu mythos where he made up all this stuff and said, "If anybody else wants to play with this, go ahead." Now I haven't made up even half as much as Lovecraft did, but I have mentioned a bunch of stuff in the first series. If people want to pick over the things I wrote about and expand them into something else, that would be great.
Fassbender: So you have no plans to set Hellboy aside while you concentrate on ZombieWorld?
Mignola: I enjoyed coming up with the premise for the book and writing this initial miniseries, but it's not something I'd quit Hellboy for.
Fassbender: Was this always your intention with the series?
Mignola: Yeah. I thought that if ZombieWorld could be turned over to whoever wanted to do it, there could be Night of the Living Dead-style survivors fighting zombies, zombies fighting zombies, and stories just about zombies. I added an H.P. Lovecraft angle to it so there could be zombies versus other monsters; there could be zombie armies. Plus I figure anyone who's ever been alive can be in this book; Abraham Lincoln could have a meeting with Nero on the steps of the White House. There could be Zombie love stories ... you could do anything with it.
Fassbender: You've said in the past that you basically got into comics because you wanted to draw monsters.
Mignola: Yep.
Fassbender: How long have you been interested in the horror genre?
Mignola: Since I read Dracula, which was about in sixth grade. If not before that. When I read Dracula I not only became interested in monsters, but I became interested in monsters to the exclusion of all else. Pretty sad, but that's what happened.
Fassbender: Earlier you mentioned H.P. Lovecraft. In your quest for horror have you read many of his stories?
Mignola: Yes. One of my favorite literary periods is the "pulp magazine" period of the 1920s/1930s. Weird Tales especially. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Aston Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Bloch -- a wonderful slew of guys -- all came out of this one magazine. I love that whole era.
Fassbender: What is it about the horror genre that you find so appealing?
Mignola: I have no idea. Not a clue. I just love monsters. I'm sure there's psychological tests I could take that would tell me why, but all I can say is that I just think they're just so much fun.
Fassbender: So do you have any plans to do "vampireworld" or "mummyworld"?
Mignola: No. At this point I've got so many ideas that I just want to dig in and do my stuff.
Fassbender: And hand this over to someone else.
Mignola: ZombieWorld is a book I'd love to pick up off the stands just to see what other people were doing. It's the kind of comic I wish there were more of.