[DISPATCH] Rich Douek Talks THE CHARLATAN
The scribe of DRIVE LIKE HELL, SEA OF SORROWS and the upcoming HEARTPIERCER tells us about diving into 3W/3M with collaborator Alex Cormack
Welcome to another installment of the [DISPATCH], a (mostly) weekly direct report from us to you, with news, recaps, exclusive content and more.
Thursday, a new comic arrives, written by Rich Douek and drawn by Alex Cormack. It’s the first of a three-part story called THE CHARLATAN, and will be made available exclusively to our paid subscribers. So, if you haven’t yet, you should:
A reminder that 3 Worlds / 3 Moons is a reader-supported initiative. If you like what we’re doing and want to get access to great comics, events, exclusive merch and discounts from EMPORIA, and want more from us, please:
To get even more, you can also:
Before this week’s release, we spoke with writer Rich Douek about his story set on Heir about a (you guessed it!) charlatan posing as a miracle worker for Voda-In-Glory, as well as his frequent collaborations with Alex Cormack, and what’s next on his horizon.
Enjoy today’s interview, then come back Thursday for the debut of THE CHARLATAN: PART 1.
3W/3M: Rich, thanks for sitting down with us. We always love to start off with the hard-hitting questions. With that in mind… How did you end up connecting with the 3 Worlds / 3 Moons team?
Rich Douek: When 3W/3M launched, I was pretty excited, having been a longtime fan of Jonathan Hickman’s work -- so when I saw there would be a booth and signings at SDCC 2022, I made sure to stop by. Jonathan and I had a nice chat, and I mentioned that I’d seen him do a panel years ago with Grant Morrison and Brian K Vaughan that really inspired me as a writer, and he graciously accepted a copy of Sea of Sorrows, the horror book I was at the con to promote. Later that year, at NYCC, I came up to his table again, not really expecting him to remember me, or the book -- but to my surprise, he not only remembered, but loved the book! We talked a bit about his plans for 3W/3M in the coming months, and a little while after that, I got to meet the rest of the team and get involved firsthand.
Did you immediately know what concept, or maybe what world / moon you wanted to focus on, or did it take a little time to find your way into the universe?
I’ve always been drawn to the seedy underbellies of the universes I love -- so I think I was naturally drawn to the intrigue and criminal element active on Heir. I loved the idea of how the whole society ran on wagers, and how the politics of succession on Fayrii played out as a deadly game there. To me, Heir felt like a place where the stakes were always high, and where all the various power players in the universe were on somewhat equal footing -- so it felt like the perfect place to set a story where those factions would come into conflict.
How did you land on the idea of centering this story on Leyesh Kartha, a faith healer?
One of the things I thought was really interesting about the 3W/3M universe was how the entire universe is on the precipice of a great change -- the age of Khor as technology is coming to an end, and the age of magic and mysticism is returning. I think one of the telltale signs that an age is coming to an end is when the institutions that are supposed to be the pillars of society are failing -- in 3W/3M, you have the two priesthoods on Akva consumed by petty dogmatic feuds, the royal family of Fayrii locked into an intergenerational game of death, and you have the Institute over it all, becoming more and more suppressive of anything out of the ordinary. That’s a ripe space for people to take advantage of the needs left unfulfilled by these institutions, and I felt that a faith healer would be exactly the type of person who could flourish in a society where the old order was collapsing, even if nobody realizes the full extent of it yet.
You’ve worked with artist Alex Cormack on Road of Bones, Sea of Sorrows, Breath of Shadows, and Drive Like Hell. Clearly, the two of you really like working together, but was Alex involved from the start?
Alex was involved almost from the very beginning -- basically the only conversation he wasn’t a part of was the one where 3W/3M asked me who I’d like to work with. As always, Alex is on the top of my list. It’s a very rare thing to find a collaborator you vibe so well with, and Alex is one of a handful of people that I hope to be working with consistently for as long as I’m making comics.
What is it about his work that fits so well with your own? Or maybe the better question is, is he your muse, or are you his?
We definitely inspire each other -- he’s always encouraging me to really go for it visually with my scripts, and when he turns in the art it just makes me want to write that much better. But I think the thing that makes us work so well is that we really trust each other to give our best. On my end, I know there’s nothing I could ask Alex to draw that he would balk at, or do a bad job on -- and not to speak for him, but I know he trusts me enough not to micromanage his storytelling or second-guess the choices he makes. It’s not that we don’t go back and forth about stuff or have differences of opinion -- we do -- but we do it with the goal of making the project the best it can be, not to satisfy our egos. I think very early on in our collaboration, we vibed in a lot of ways, from work ethic, to storytelling, to influences, and we’ve rolled with it ever since.
After this story, and following your recent Drive Like Hell miniseries, is there another Douek/Cormack jam on the way? Anything you can tell us about that?
When Alex finished THE CHARLATAN, he texted me to say, “That was fun, we should do more sci-fi.” And hey, conveniently, I had a sci-fi story I was in the early stages of developing. One short conversation later, and we’ve got our next project! It’s still in the early stages, we haven’t even started design work or found a publisher, but it is in the works for sure.
Knowing that THE CHARLATAN was going to be a digital release at first, like all 3W/3M stories, was there anything you learned from your work on the Strange Tales: Ghost Rider or Who is… Kang Infinity Comics for Marvel?
The really interesting thing that working on the infinity comics taught me was how great an impact format can have on storytelling, because in addition to what the actual content of the story is, how it’s being read is going to have an effect as well. In print comics, you have certain techniques you can use -- like putting a suspenseful moment on the bottom of a page before a page turn -- it makes the reader want to turn the page to find out what happens. Or, showing a huge, expansive view of a city across two pages to really drive home how big it is. You kind of lose access to those tricks of the trade in digital, but I learned there are other ones that work very well for reading on a screen! What you always want to keep in mind, to me, is the idea that a phone screen is like your frame, so to speak -- that frame can be in different positions across any given page, but it’s the maximum amount of story a reader will be able to view at any given moment -- so as much as you can, you want to keep things coherent and readable in smaller chunks than you can with a full print comic. Of course with this story, we planned to make it work for print eventually, too -- so it was interesting to try and balance both things out.
I’m curious, is the majority of your comics reading in print, digital, or an even split? Do you read different types of material in different formats?
I do like reading in different formats, but to be honest I’m very biased towards print. I just love having a big bookshelf full of cherished works that I can take down and reread, or even just flip through. I still buy monthly comics at my local shop but I don’t really collect them the way I did when I was younger. I do like reading things digitally, because I’ve found a lot of great stories that way -- and added them to my print library once they got a real world edition!
Assuming our readers enjoy THE CHARLATAN and want to check out more of your work, what do you think best represents the kinds of stories you want to tell? (This can be with Alex, or in general.)
I think a great place to start would be Drive Like Hell, from Dark Horse Comics -- it’s a wild and crazy road adventure that represents everything I love about making comics. I’d also recommend the horror trilogy Alex and I did at IDW -- Road of Bones, Sea of Sorrows, and Breath of Shadows -- three thematically linked stories where the horrors of history, the supernatural, and the human psyche collide. And, if all that hasn’t scared you away, I’d recommend Wailing Blade, an earlier fantasy/SF work I did with artist Joe Mulvey that really encapsulates the type of world building and storytelling I most enjoy.
Finally, you have a new book, Heartpiercer, coming out in May from Dark Horse. What can you tell us about that story, and is there much difference in the way you work with artist Gavin Smith compared to your working process with Alex?
Heartpiercer is an epic, dark fantasy book about a warrior who believed she was saving humankind from these dangerous magical beasts, only to learn that they were the last thing holding back the tide of a great evil. She’s betrayed by her compatriots, and wakes up in a world overrun with the creatures of the night, like werewolves, vampires, and worse -- and while she sets out for revenge, she also needs to come to terms with the fact that she was a willing participant in the world’s destruction. It’s been a lot of fun to create this world with artist Gavin Smith, who I’ve known and admired the work of for a long time. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of difference between how I work with Gavin and how I work with Alex, because they both bring their A-game to the projects we work on -- I like to give the artists I work with a lot of room, so to speak, to bring their own ideas to the table and let their skill and talent shine, and when I find someone who takes advantage of that, and really brings it, they become an artist I want as a long term collaborator -- both Gavin and Alex fit the bill perfectly.
