Shawna Ervin-Gore: Hi Sergio. How are you doing?
Sergio Aragonés: Very well, thanks.
SE: We've been hearing so much about flooding down where you live -- have you been hit at all by that?
SA: No, but it has been very wet -- it rained today, in fact. But we didn't have any flooding. We did keep an eye on our trees, though. We have a lot of old oaks on the property, and we didn't want to lose any. But everything was fine. Not even one tree fell. And now it's very pleasant.
SE: That's good. I'm glad you managed to escape the bad weather.
SA: Yes, me too.
SE: Anyway, Sergio, I have a few questions about your new series Boogeyman. Details up to this point have been kept fairly hush hush, so I was hoping you could give me an idea of what you want to do with the series.
SA: Well what we are doing is horror stories -- old narrative of tales about cemeteries, and all of them are going to be based on the Boogeyman. The stories are narrated by this old-timer cemetery keeper, and, of course, they are humorous, and they're silly, and they're also written in poetry by Mark Evanier. This time around, I'm working with Mark more closely, and some of the stories are based on his plots. And as usual, we have a great time kicking ideas back and forth. I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery many years ago. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it. After spending so many years on Groo, I saw this as an opportunity to go back to doing something I really loved, and I'm glad I took the chance.
SE: When you were writing for House of Mystery, was your take on horror silly back then as well?
SA: No, I wrote all those stories seriously. It could be said that they were a little tongue in cheek because the bad guys always got their due in a very appropriate way. The endings sometimes seemed very humorous, at least to me when I wrote them.
SE: And since you didn't illustrate them, they probably weren't very silly.
SA: That's right.
SE: Boogeyman is a bunch of short stories, right? Various short stories.
SA: Yes.
SE: And is your Boogey Man the Boogeyman we generally associate with childhood fears?
SA: No he's actually what adults would think of the Boogeyman. He what's left over from childhood fears, but the Boogeyman doesn't get you as a child. He gets you as an adult.
SE: So the Boogeyman isn't a random phantom? He's specific in his purpose of finding you.
SA: Yes. He finds you through the evil that you do to others.
SE: Ooh.
SA: He would be onto you so quickly if you've done something wrong. It's probably one of the oldest stories ever told. It's about getting your just deserts for behaving badly. You get your reward, or your punishment, in hell.
SE: You're scaring me now.
SA: The Boogeyman is your conscience. The Boogeyman is the result of your own bad behavior. I love this Boogeyman.
SE: So did you have a whole bunch of bad characters lined up for the Boogeyman to get or is he getting unsuspecting people?
SA: No. The most important thing to remember is that these are not innocent people. They have done something wrong to another person, or to many people. They may be unsuspecting, as you say, but they should be expecting something in return for having been so bad.
SE: So your characters know that they really, probably deserve exactly what they're getting?
SA: Oh yes. I have always been very much against the scary movies where the innocent person just gets slashed because he's in the wrong place. That is very easy to do, and anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. . . It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.
SE: I agree.
SA: So I have never believed in that approach to horror. I don't enjoy the "boo" scare when you're watching a movie and then suddenly there's a big shark on the screen. The only thing that they're doing to scare you is catching you off guard. I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.
SE: So you like scares that kind of eat their way into you.
SA: That's correct.
SE: Build suspense.
SA: That's correct. The suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
SE: I expect you'll make it work very well.
SA: Well, I hope so. Sometimes you have a lot of intentions and then you put it on paper and say wait a minute, this isn't how I've been thinking about it. But I think my ideas will work this time around.
SE: Well, you have a history of making things work for you. You said in a quote I read previously and you just said it now, too, that you've been doing Groo for so long, you're kind of eager to get into telling other types of stories. Besides horror, what would you like to do?
SA: Oh, eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western because I wrote one called Bat Lash for DC some years back. Of course, I would want to do humorous Westerns. I'd love to do a whole series of stories that would be Westerns, and science fiction, and dectective stories, and horror stories, and have them collected into books.
SE: Will any of these projects include Mark?
SA: I hope so.
SE: I'm sure that would be just fine with your fans. I'm curious what you would do with science fiction.
SA: I don't know. I'm curious, too (laughs). I know they'd be short stories. And the Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.
SE: How will any of this effect Groo? Do you still want to keep doing Groo for awhile?
SA: Oh yes, of course. With Groo, all the stories come naturally. I can't see quitting Groo. We have so many stories to tell about him, and the reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening, that not very many things can happen in a certain number of pages. Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.
SE: It gives you a chance to do so much in such a little bit of space, and it gives readers an opportunity to read so much more, too.
SA: Yes. And the difference, for instance, with American comics and European comics is that we almost synopsize the stories. In Europe they are lengthier because the tradition has been that the stories come out in installments, and they were weeklies, so they would need four pages every week, five pages every week, and the whole story went as long as they could hold it. And usually they end up having the story being over 40 to 50, sometimes 100 pages because they made a book out of it, and they end up bringing the stories about in a more lengthy way. They spend more time on dialogue and on pantomime panels. Americans want the story to be told in one comic because they are not weeklies, they are monthlies, so they come out once a month. It would be very cruel to the reader who would have to buy so many comics to get the full story. And if you read more than one title, it would be hard to keep the stories straight in so many chapters.
SE: You certainly have a point.
SA: So with Groo, I try to do one story every book. Sometimes the stories are better if they go a little longer, and I choose to do it in four issues. But if I did that all the time, people would probably wait until they have all four of them to read them.
SE: And you're avoiding this with Boogeyman as well by having lots of shorter stories in each issue?
SA: That's right. I think it's more fun for everybody that way.