Dark Horse Reveals Shaun Simon,Tyler Jenkins, Kelly Fitzpatrick On Neverboy For SDCC – Simon And Jenkins Talk Realities Run Wild
by Hannah Means Shannon
Bleeding Cool Exclusive: Dark Horse Reveals Shaun Simon,Tyler Jenkins, Kelly Fitzpatrick On Neverboy For SDCC – Simon And Jenkins Talk Realities Run Wild
by Hannah Means Shannon
Bleeding Cool’s SDCC 2014 announcement from Dark Horse is the impending March 2015 series Neverboy written by Shaun Simon of The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys and recent Vertigo Quarterly anthologies and drawn by Tyler Jenkins of Peter Panzerfaust and Snow Angel, with colors by Kelly Fitzpatrick of Dark Horse Presents, Peter Panzerfaust, and more.
The series is going to be one of those storylines that sticks in your mind and makes you reevaluate how you view reality and fantasy from what I’ve learned so far, featuring the collision of lives between the “real world” struggling and self-doubting artist Julian Drag and his once imaginary childhood friend Neverboy.
Dark Horse hints at the coming series thus:
In what world do you belong?
Neverboy, a former imaginary friend, wants the real world. Julian Drag, a struggling artist, wants the imaginary.
When Neverboy’s drugs wear off, the surreal hangover he’s been running from sets in. And a trip down the rabbit hole is just what Julian has been dying for. When these two meet, the real and imaginary worlds collide in absolute chaos. Neverboy and Julian, the dreamer and the dream, will have to face who they are in order to put things right again.
Neverboy, a former imaginary friend, wants the real world. Julian Drag, a struggling artist, wants the imaginary.
When Neverboy’s drugs wear off, the surreal hangover he’s been running from sets in. And a trip down the rabbit hole is just what Julian has been dying for. When these two meet, the real and imaginary worlds collide in absolute chaos. Neverboy and Julian, the dreamer and the dream, will have to face who they are in order to put things right again.
The plot and themes alone mean that the comic is going to need to play with the division between what’s “real” and what’s not and Tyler Jenkins’ angular, emotive style seems like an excellent match for Shaun Simon’s psychologically questioning narrative thread. The story is destined to be “character driven” as Jenkins teases below, in Bleeding Cool’s interview with Simon and Jenkins on Neverboy.
Hannah Means-Shannon: My first impression of this story description is that this is some extremely heavy psychological stuff. I recently read a quote that we want “stuff that hasn’t happened yet” in our fiction. Is that the kind of “imaginary” that Julian is looking for? What motivates his desire to exist in the imaginary?
Shaun Simon: It’s not existing in the imaginary world that Julian Drag wants, it’s being able to tap into it and pull stuff out. His is the story of a creator losing his inspiration. He’s an artist who’s first work opened to critical acclaim and has never been able to get the right colors on the canvas for his second. Now, whether this is just a case of not being able to live up to his first work or that he has, in fact, lost the ability that all creators hold so dear, to dive into the imaginary world for the sake of their art, is to be seen.
HMS: How do you go about rendering an “imaginary” character like Neverboy real to the reader? What sort of rules of existence does he abide by that are similar or different to our own?
SS: Neverboy may be imaginary but his plight is very real. The stories I love and that resonate the most with me are ones that give very real problems to very strange characters in strange worlds. Neverboy has been breaking the rules for a long time by using drugs to keep him in the real world and giving him the life he’s dreamed of. But when those drugs wear off and reality sets in, the life he’s created for himself begins to crumble.
See the full interview at Bleeding Cool. Neverboy hits stores in March of 2015!
