Allie's latest writing project is the comics prequel to Universal Studios'upcoming film The Scorpion King, which stars super-celebrity and wrestler The Rock® as Mathayus, the mighty warrior who battles on the hot desert sands of ancient Egypt against evil plots, mythical creatures, and eventually his destiny. The Scorpion King, which is the third film in Universal's extremely popular Mummy series, is slated for release in April.
Dark Horse's two-issue miniseries, The Scorpion King: The Akkadian Prophecy, starts in March, so Dark Horse reporter Ivana Fanboy spent a fewminutes discussing this exciting new project with Allie. Here's what she found out:
Ivana Fanboy:
For readers who haven't seen the film, could you pleasedescribe the general setting for The Scorpion King, and who the important characters are?
Scott Allie: The Scorpion King is set back before the rise of Egypt, so not only is it set way before The Mummy, it's set before the flashbacks from The Mummy. There are no great civilizations yet, as we think of them. There are some cities, including Gomorrah, which pops up in the comic and the movie. But a lot of the people are nomadic, wandering across the desert.The main character is Mathayus - he's the guy The Rock plays in the movie, the one in Mummy Returns who we saw getting involved with Anubis, the Egyptian guardian of the dead. Brendan Fraser fought him at the end of the movie.
But in this film and this comic, he's a young guy, an up-and-coming hero. There's nothing villainous about him, no real hint of villainy. That's gonna< come in the subsequent movies. One of the producers of The Scorpion King is a guy named Kevin Misher. He's no B.S. producer type, he really thinks about story and character, and pushed me in a really good direction. He's the one who wanted a comic done, as he's a fan of the medium. We talked about how The Scorpion King, the film, shows a sort of ruthless and hardened Mathayus, who's watched his people die. Over the course of the film, he's transformed into something better, something more heroic. So in the comic we wanted to show how his people were wiped out, and also show how he became this bad-ass mercenary. I start out with him as an innocent, idealistic kid, off on his first big adventure. Things go from bad to worse -- and Mathayus sort of sees it all coming, but can never quite do enough to prevent the worst things from happening. By the end of the comic he's not quite so idealistic. Initially I was thinking the comic would be set maybe a couple years before the film. After talking to Misher, I realized what I was doing really happens maybe a couple months before the movie.
IF: Your story, "The Akkadian Prophecy," isn't a direct adaptation of The Scorpion King film. How would you describe it? And who from the film is included in this story?
SA: The comic's definitely a prequel. It sets up a lot of what happens in the film. In the film, some people have some very definite feelings about one another, and about Mathayus's tribe. The comic helps to create a background for all that. The main character of the movie and comic is obviously Mathayus. Besides him the comic features have two guys from his tribe, Jesup and Rama. The leader of the adversaries, Memnon, features prominently in both stories, as well as one or two of his people who I can't really talk about yet. The leader of another tribe, Queen Isis, has a small role in the comic, a big role in the movie. Also, Mathayus's camel, Hanna, gets a lot of screen time and page time.
IF : What are your storytelling influences, both written and in terms of visual storytelling? And how do you put these to use when you're writing an adaptation of a film or adapting someone else's story?
SA: Writing movie adaptations is the worst job in the world. The only one of those I did was Planet of the Apes. When you adapt a book to film, it's assumed that you'll change whatever doesn't work cinematically, really adapt it to the medium. But when a movie studio wants a movie adapted to comics, they want it to be as perfectly matched to the film as possible. If there are three punches thrown in this fight scene in the movie, then in the comic your options are to do the same number of punches, or cut the scene. They'll always understand if you need to leave something out, but if you want to change it just a little bit, it's a problem. And it's a really different medium, so you should really be changing things a lot. I don't think I'll ever do that again. Scorpion King, being a prequel, gives me a chance to play off what I like about the Mummy franchise, and introduce some stuff that I'll enjoy, and do it in my style. Like the monster in the first issue. I'm always disappointed in Hollywood and mainstream-comics monsters, because they all look the same. I like the old monsters, the stuff you find in Victorian literature and grimoires. I've got a six-headed angel in this thing that I don't think you're likely to see on X-Files. I'm not saying this sort of thing is better; most people would probably rather see a vampire who predictably turns to dust whenever in the vicinity of a sharp stick. In terms of story, those can be a lot more convenient. But in the attempt to come up with a monster no one's seen before, I got the artist, Cliff Richards, to try something a little weird. The main influence going into this comic for me is Conan. I wanted to do Scorpion King because I wanted to do Conan. One of the things I really loved about the very first Mummy movie was that Brendan Fraser's character was a sort of mix of Indiana Jones and Conan. So I figured this character -- before I really knew much about him -- would be a good Conan type. He's a little more complex than Conan, but I tried to bring a sense of Robert E. Howard to the thing. With the Conan influence firmly in my head, I wanted to bring some Frazetta into it, too. He 's not just the ultimate Conan artist, but the ultimate adventure artist.
Cliff Richards and I work together really closely, so we talked about this, and I showed him some Frazetta pieces. The second cover is Cliff doing a Frazetta riff. You can't miss it. Since I had a great painter on the brain while writing the thing, I wanted to do something a little different with the storytelling. There a number of panels in the first issue -- and there'll probably be more in the second one -- where I give Cliff some room and ask him to do a panel that looks more like a painting. Comics panels generally lead your eye into the next panel, move you around the page. What we're trying here is to freeze your eye, the way a painting does, on a still, powerful image.
There's a bit where a guy kills a lion from horse back. It made me think of some old Tarzan paintings, some old Western paintings. The movement of the action becomes exaggerated specifically by the way it's frozen on the canvas. Cliff did a great job of making that come across, and I know the colorist, Dave Stewart, who I also work pretty closely with, will be able to really pull those off. In a lot of ways, I tried to get away from my traditional comics influences, because a lot of them don't really lend themselves to what I wanted to do here. Mignola, who of course I also work with quite a lot as his editor, is an ever-present influence, and I think that probably comes across in the fight scene at the end of issue one. The fight's all big panels, big impact moments, rather than following every punch of the fight, which can be dull as hell. Now, the second issue involves a big war between these primitive armies. For that, I watched Spartacus to get in the mood, to get an idea of how to handle that. I don't know that I really got any good ideas from it, though.
IF: Including Scorpion King, you've written a handful of film adaptations and film tie-in stories are there any techniques you've developed for studying a film script and retelling that story in a sequential art format? And for film-related stories that aren't direct adaptations -- what do you look for in a story as being a potential jumping-off point for further development of the story?
SA: Twice now I've done prequels. What I wanted to do was tell something that seemed missing. In Titan A.E., I thought it conspicuous that you had this savior character whose father literally gives him the key to man's salvation, but no mother is even mentioned in passing. So I did a story about the mother and father meeting, with the emphasis on the mother, who I decided to make a lot more heroic than the bookish dad.
With Scorpion King, I just thought a prequel would have more possibilities than a sequel, since Hollywood is bound to do a sequel themselves. I got out of the way of that, and messed with some pre-Egyptian hoodoo, of which I know a little something. Actually, most of what I wanted to do in that regard ended up not fitting, but we've got this big weird monster. I thought showing how Mathayus became a man without a tribe sounded good, and then in talking to Kevin Misher I saw some other, deeper possibilities. The whole loss of innocence thing, which again sets the film up nicely. Ultimately, that's a lot more interesting to me than the Conan angle which initially attracted me. In something like this, you get to explore the character in a way he probably won't be explored in the films.
Another thing I've learned to do on anything derivative of a movie, or another property where the characters are established, is to really pay extra attention to getting voices right. When I'm done with a first draft, I go back over the screenplay or whatever primary material I'm working from, and I reread, say, all Mathayus's lines. Get his voice in my head. Then I go over my script, and tweak all his lines to make sure they sound like him. Then pick out another character, do the same thing, character by character. Finally, one more pass to make sure none of my "fixes" have ruined the flow of the conversations, and then I turn it in.
Now that Mr Allie has turned in his work on The Scorpion King, it won't be long before you get to see the first issue of The Scorpion King: The Akkadian Prophecy. Each 22-issue comic in this two-issue miniseries features art by Buffy artist extraordinaire Cliff Richards, and coloring by Dave Stewart and retails for $2.99. Look for the first issue starting February 15.
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