[DISPATCH] Deniz Camp Talks HEIR MEDICINE
The writer talks about his new 3W/3M story with Stipan Morian and the dangerous game played on Heir.
Welcome to the latest edition of the [DISPATCH], a weekly direct report from us to you, with news, recaps, exclusive content and more.
A brand new comic is headed your way this week, written by Deniz Camp and painted by Stipan Morian. It’s like nothing else we’ve released thus far, and you’re definitely in for a treat. It will be available to read exclusively for our paid subscribers. If you haven’t yet:
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Thursday, we’ll be releasing HEIR MEDICINE. Ahead of its release, we sat down with the writer, Deniz Camp, to discuss the story, re-teaming with 20th Century Men artist Stipan Morian, and how he’s quickly becoming a Free Comic Book Day mainstay. Enjoy today’s interview, then head back here Thursday for the debut of HEIR MEDICINE.
3W/3M: Deniz, thanks for joining us. How did you get involved with 3 Worlds / 3 Moons?
Deniz Camp: Stephen Wacker reached out last year and asked if I might be interested in writing a story in the 3W/3M Universe. I jumped at the chance – both to work with the 3W/3M crew, and to work with my good friend and artistic life partner, Stipan Morian.
We’ll get to Stipan’s role in this in a bit, but I want to stay focused on you for a minute. Outside of Tini Howard and Al Ewing, who have both written stories and contributed to the Magic and Religion systems of this universe, you’re the first writer to get to play in this sandbox. Did that add any extra pressure to get it right? Did you feel like the canary in the coal mine for whoever may come next?
I always feel a lot of pressure to make good comics. There’s so much that competes for our attention these days, it’s very humbling that people spend time (and sometimes money!) to read my work. I don’t take that for granted. I want people to feel like their time was well spent.
3W/3M has such a distinctive voice and world already, it was going to be a new and unique challenge to try to create something that felt continuous with that, while delivering something new and something personal to me, with a bit of my own voice. It’s a new kind of challenge, and that appealed to me.
As “well drawn” as the world is, there’s also still a lot of space and freedom to tell stories, since it is all quite new. Hopefully we were able to create something that’s both surprising and feels of a piece with what has come before, and maybe deepens your understanding of life (and death) on Heir.
Everyone will be able to check out HEIR MEDICINE later this week, but how would you pitch it and why should they give it a read?
Everybody knows that doctors on Heir have very short life expectancies. Find why.
Very succinct, I dig it.
Heir is controlled by crime bosses and the warring aristocracy, so it would be very easy – and maybe obvious – to tell a story about one of those factions. And while your story takes full advantage of the setting, you’re focusing on a doctor. How did you land on both this story and this particular lens through which you look at Heir?
The 3W/3M crew does such a great job at the “big picture” stuff, I just didn’t think I could compete with that. Instead, I thought I could contribute something a little smaller and more personal, that gives a sense of what it’s like for people peripheral to the action.
I have a background in medicine and I thought it would be a fertile, funny premise. What is it like saving lives on a world where murder is common, professionalized, and de facto legal? Doctors are sort of the opposite of assassins, aren’t they? They have conflicting goals. Since Heir is so defined by the Game, it made sense to flip the camera a bit, to the assassins’ natural opponent.
You mentioned him earlier, but HEIR MEDICINE is drawn by Stipan Morian, who also co-created and drew 20th Century Men with you. That was one of the most acclaimed books of 2023, and it’s clear you two work really well together. What’s the secret to that partnership, and was there anything he did that surprised you on a story set in a universe with previously established rules and aesthetics before either of you arrived?
Stipan isn’t just a collaborator, he’s a close friend and kind of a creative soulmate. He’s also a genius.
Our collaboration is intense and full of joy and swearing. There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of figuring stuff out together. It is not me writing a script and handing it off to him and then waiting for him to draw the script to the letter, etc. We are communicating constantly, with a ton of back and forth. At every stage we are giving feedback and having little arguments and trying to make the work better and clearer.
We complement each other well – I’m always pushing for density, he always wants more space, but at the core we’re both obsessed with storytelling, and so there’s no ego about who “wins” an argument. We both just want to do the best job possible. We just “get” each other.
The pages of this story he actually painted, so it looks like no other comic you’ve seen – by him or anyone. It’s beautiful, I am so over the moon (hah!) with the results.
Obviously the team here really enjoyed the book, but it’s still possible that not everyone checking this out has read 20th Century Men. Why would fans of 3W/3M in particular?
Well, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever been a part of. In one sentence, 20th Century Men is: “Apocalypse Now” with Superheroes. But I hope it’s more than that.
It’s dense and intricate and angry and, I believe, full of humanity.
One review had this to say about it:
20th Century Men is a work that changes the fundamental landscape of comics in a way that I’m not eloquent enough to explain. It’s one of the only times in my life I have been able to look at a thing and say “I don’t think I understand this fully, but what I’ve taken away from it is nothing short of transformative and needs to be preserved and shown to generations to come.”
If humanity has a future, I hope they are able to read this work, because in many ways it is all that we have become laid bare on the page.
That’s a pretty good review! You should get that person on your marketing team.
You’ve mentioned before that you always like to write for your artist. Was anyone else ever considered for this, or was it Stipan from the jump?
It was Stipan from jump! Before I started brainstorming, we had Stipan on board, and we were talking all through the writing process. I think the best comics come when everyone on the team is in sync and working closely.
Shifting back to you for a second, what’s the major difference in approach – or maybe mindset is the right word – for you when working on something original vs. playing in someone else’s sandbox like you did here, on Children of the Vault for Marvel, Harley Quinn: Black + White + Redder for DC, or Bloodshot Unleashed for Valiant?
Voice is very important. When I’m doing a creator-owned book, I’m making up the character voices myself. When I’m taking on an already existing character, I’m trying to do my own version of an already existing voice.
Voice extends to more than just “how the character sounds.” It’s about the decisions they make, how they react to things, and even the world they exist in and the kinds of threats they face. In one case, I’m making it all up whole cloth. In another, I’m trying to continue on from what’s come before.
Part of that, in the long running universes, is continuity. I think continuity is one of the things makes these long running characters and universes unique, and it can be a wonderful tool. If you use it right, it can push you to places you might otherwise not think to go. So my starting point with long running characters is always: everything that happened, happened. All this stuff happened to these characters, and let’s try to imagine a psychology from that.
3W/3M is an interesting beast, because it’s more the setting than the characters that we’re dealing with. So for this story, I wanted to make sure that the characters were interacting with the systems and culture of Heir, that all of that was well-drawn and consistent with what came before, but everything else we came up with ourselves, including the characters.
Speaking of Marvel, you wrote the Ultimate half of Marvel’s Free Comic Book Day 2024: Spider-Man & The Ultimate Universe. Is there anything you want to say about that story? Can you maybe share what it is that’s going to make your take on the Ultimate Universe different than what came before?
Well, I’m sort of making a habit of this, but I’m following on the work that Jonathan Hickman did establishing the Ultimate Universe in Ultimate Invasion and Ultimate Universe #1. The Free Comic Book Day story is a direct continuation of that stuff, though it’s accessible to anyone who hasn’t read that.
What I think worked about the original Ultimate Marvel U was the freshness of the storytelling and the way that it channeled and reflected a lot of the post-9/11 American culture of the time. A lot has changed since then, though. I guess I’d hope any future Ultimates work would do the same, but grounded in today.
This year’s FCBD issue marks your third Free Comic Book Day release, following The Year of Valiant FCBD Special in 2022 and Maxwell’s Demons in 2018. Is there a reason publishers keep trying to give your work away for free?
I ask myself that very question! I said before I find it kind of amazing that anyone is willing to put down hard-earned dollars for my work – I guess editors feel the same way!
But seriously, do you think the exposure of FCBD, which brings in both the Wednesday warriors and a much broader fanbase to local comic shops, has played a part in raising your profile with readers, editors, or both?
I take it as a huge responsibility, first and foremost. You have this opportunity with Free Comic Book Day to reach people who might not be regular readers, and so I think you have to make the stories really accessible and really exciting; you have to make them simultaneously satisfying and intriguing, in hopes they’ll want more. Usually you’re working with fewer than 20 pages, so it’s a little puzzle to solve to make it do all of those things, and I really enjoy it.
I don’t know how much it raises one’s profile, to be honest. I don’t know if the people that go in to pick up those books are paying attention to the names on the cover. When I was a new reader, I know I didn’t. I remember, as a kid, I’d go to Barnes & Noble and pick up trades, and I thought the ones with Justice League on the cover were just naturally better than others. It was only later, when I got further into it, that I realized the unifying theme of the comics I liked was not Justice League but “written by Grant Morrison.”
I don’t think editors are paying much attention to who has FCBD issues out, but you’d know better than me! I do think it has the potential to get your book new readers, though, and it’s an amazing tool to get people excited about comics in general. There’s always such an energy on FCBD, it’s lovely and invigorating. I think it’s less about individual creators and more about the medium, the industry, and maybe individual stories/titles.
Working with established characters has its perks, like a built-in fanbase and plenty of that continuity you mentioned to mine, but the flipside of that is that any new story can be met with scorn and derision for not doing exactly what’s been done before. How do you navigate that as a writer? Are you trying to sort of walk between the rain drops of the past while telling a new story and adding to the mythos, or do you try to tug at a thread and deconstruct a character? I have a guess based on your Bloodshot run, but I’d love to hear how you think about it.
My experience has been that if you’re true to the characters, you can do new things with them without too much backlash. When we took over Bloodshot, we did some pretty new things with him – gave him PTSD; made him suicidal; gave him his first mature readers book; gave him a totally new mission; and all-new villains every issue. We opened the first issue with him repeatedly killing himself! But (I think) it worked because all that stuff “fits” the character and the setup. We didn’t suddenly make him non-violent, or turn the book into a humor publication. We took the things that made the character work and pushed them further (and combined them with my interests and obsessions).
I have no interest in telling the same kinds of stories again and again. If I’m on a book, I want to do something that has never been done before, I want deepen the characters and widen their world. But I want to do that in a way that makes sense with what came before.
When you’re taking over an existing character, I think that’s the job: take the things that make them work, made them enduring, and push them further, adding your own voice all along. The best runs all did that: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Doom Patrol and Batman and X-Men, etc.
Of course, some people are going to hate your work either way, and that’s alright. I don’t think too much about the audience response when I write. I think that would hurt the work.
Other than more collaborations with Stipan, what can readers expect to see from you next?
In addition to Marvel’s The Ultimates (first issue in-stores June 5th!), I have a couple of creator-owned things that are in the works, though still unannounced! Stipan and I have something very substantial coming that will be taking up most of our year. I’m excited for all of it!
Thanks to Deniz Camp for answering our questions. HEIR MEDICINE will be released later this week for all paid subscribers.
Looking forward to this. 20th Century Men was one of my favorite comics of last year: https://jonathanhansen.substack.com/p/my-favorite-comic-books-of-2023