Interview: Thomas Jane on Creating a Love Letter To Horror With THE LYCAN
A brand-new tale of horror has been unleashed on the world, and Thomas Jane is ready to take readers into a dark and dreary world. After years in development, Jane's new comic series, The Lycan, is finally being released.
The Lycan follows a stalwart crew of big game hunters in the 1700s who return from travel afar and wind up shipwrecked on a small British island. The small, but capable crew discovers the island isn't what it seems and there's a bloodthirsty werewolf stalking and preying on innocent people. Thomas Jane sat down with Screen Rant to discuss finally bringing his passion project to life.
Screen Rant: Thomas, you’ve said in interviews that you’re a big comic book fan, tell us a bit about your history with comic books and what their appeal is to you as someone whose been in the entertainment industry for years.
Thomas Jane: I love that it's an American art form. I'm also a big fan of jazz. But the blank canvas of the artist, you know, you can tell a story and create a world in just about as many different ways as there are human beings on the planet. And that really is my huge interest in the storytelling format of the frozen image in a sequence on a page that can take you into an imaginative world that's always surprising, you know. So I lean away from the Marvel and the DC stuff, and I always have, and I lean into the independent realm, where artists feel free they're not shackled to a corporate mandate. Never got into the superheroes, although I certainly admire the art. I mean, it's absolutely stunning, and I'll always end up flipping through some of those books just to see what the kids are up to and how comic book art is evolving. You know, over the years, what's popular, what's not.
I remember when I started my first comic book company, Raw Studios. I hooked up with Steve Niles, who had just created 30 Days of Night. And Ben, his artist, had created this style that nobody had really seen before, and it took off. And every other comic book had suddenly that 30 Days of Night style. But for me I'm a detail-oriented guy, so I've been attracted to people who put the time in to create something that's that's like a visual feast. It's not a snack, it's a five-course meal. You know, one of my favorite artists is Wally Wood from the EC Comics days, and talk about detail. I mean, that guy basically invented the word. His science-fiction stuff with the complicated spaceships, interiors, and the gorgeous women and these, these good-looking American men. I'd love to see someone do an animated movie in that style. And I feel like the reason you couldn't do that is because it took too long, but you'd have to draw every damn cell. But now it seems like you could actually do some pretty detailed and complicated animation. I was a huge fan of Heavy Metal. Oh, boy. I think I saw that three times in the theater. You know, just every weekend I have my mom drop me off at the cinema, and Heavy Metal just rocked my world. They did a pretty damn good job.
Well, speaking of detailed, you have a big creative team attached to this story. You're working with David James Kelly and Mike Carey for the story. And on art you've got Diego Yapur with Tim Bradstreet providing the cover. Talk about the creative team when it came to building The Lycan.
Thomas Jane: So this is the second go around for The Lycan. I had this book up and running when I was doing Raw Studios, and that's when I got Mike to write it. We're talking a long time ago, over 10 years. And if you talk to Mike, he says it might be closer to 15, but I like 10. It sounds better. So I'd sent him the story and me and David James Kelly had created the outline, and thought it was pretty cool, but it needed life. It was luck, Mike just so happened to be in-between gigs, and he told me later that he never takes jobs where he's adapting another person's piece of work, but he loved the story, so that's how that came about. We got lucky, you know, he happened to have a window and he cranked it. He actually wrote it pretty darn quickly. But if it weren't for Mike, we wouldn't have a script. All the characters, the dialog. I mean, that's what really kind of grabbed me when Mike started turning in his drafts. Turns out that he was a big fan of Classics Illustrated, where they would adapt these brilliant old books, and he was a fan of the old literature. So he just has this way with the language, you just fall right into the characters. But when Mike turned in the script, I was like "They can't sound any other way. This is it."
So now we need a new artist, and independent books, you're always battling the studios. So, when you get a really talented guy, they're going to be snapped up by Marvel and DC pretty quickly, and good for them. And thank God those jobs are available for artists so they can make a living. Once they do get snapped up, they're under an exclusive contract, and they can't do any work for anyone else. And there's exceptions to that. And now comic artists are able to kind of branch out a lot more than they used to, and do their own independent stuff, but you're always battling the big boys. You know, they pay more money and they usually get an exclusive. So you're looking for an artist that's experienced enough and talented enough, they could work for one of those guys, but they just haven't yet. So there's a slim window to find these kind of guys. And the way I do it is go to the comic book shop and start flipping through the independent books. And I found Diego in an issue of Heavy Metal. I was like, "This guy can do the job.". And as the creator, editor, overseer, director of the piece, my job is to find the right guy for the job. Find the guy that that's like, your cinematographer, and you need a guy that can hit the notes that are essential to that story, right?
Let’s dive into the meat of The Lycan. What is it, and why is it the story that you’ve been so eager to tell?
Thomas Jane: Well, I'm a huge fan of the Gothic love story. You know, Nosferatu is the best movie I've seen in 10 years. I mean, I really responded to that film. And anybody that feels the same way is going to get a kick out of The Lycan. And I hear Eggers is going to do a werewolf movie, which is super exciting to me. And somehow The Lycan, which has been sitting in a drawer for years and years, is coming out at a time when werewolves are actually having a little bit of a comeback. We're hitting another werewolf wave, which is fantastic. Very little substance really comes out of the werewolf genre, you know. So you can list on one hand the classic werewolf movies, unfortunately. Certainly not for lack of trying. There's a lot of stuff out there, but my goal was to elevate the genre, take it seriously, create stories and characters that would work on its own without werewolves and tell a Gothic love story. It's the kind of thing that I feel like I can personally never get enough of.
I totally got that Eggers vibe when I was reading, and I was like, "Oh man, this is right up my alley." One of the things that works so well, specifically with issue one, is the atmosphere, because it has this great sense of dread throughout it, the characters, the way they talk. Because I will admit, sometimes I struggle with period pieces.
Thomas Jane: I struggle with period stuff too. Absolutely. And that's not how I describe the book. You know, there's something sexy about the old costumes, you know, the red coats. We've got the red coats that have taken over this fort on a small British Island. And, you know, personally, I get a kick out of nuns. I think they're sexy. And so we've got plenty of those. And then we've got this band of hunters, which really feels like they could have their own book series. This band of hunters. They're kind of an international group. We got a guy from Africa, we got a Frenchman, we've got a Spaniard. We've got a guy from the colonies who runs the thing, his name is coffin. And they represent the freedom of being your own man, being your own boss, being highly skilled at a dangerous job. And they go to Africa or anywhere around the world. They're sailors. So they're always zipping around on their ship, and they'll go kill the biggest beasts that they can, and they'll take them back to England and sell them to the Lords and the Dukes who maybe they want to have a tiger running around in their garden or create a bear skin rug in front of their fireplace. I get a real kick out of our merry band. They're not so merry, but our hard-bitten sailors who are just doing jobs that nobody else can do. That turns me on.
You’ve worked in a lot of horror films and you’re obviously a huge fan of horror comics. What do you feel horror comics can bring to a reader that they won’t get from a film?
Thomas Jane: Horror is a tough genre. I've been wanting to do a good horror movie for a long time, and I just haven't been able to find something that really resonates with me. They're few and far between. The advantages of the book is that you have one tool in your arsenal, and that's the turning of the page, right? So designing your book so that that page turn brings a surprise, brings a gut punch, and that's pure graphic novel, comic book like. I am always aware of how the page is laid out and how you're putting the information into the mind of the reader. And with horror, that page turn, it's one of our best weapons.
No doubt, horror comics are kind of experiencing a real resurgence right now. And I'm sure, as a huge EC fan, you're probably familiar with the current revival of that imprint, Creepshow, and all these horror books out right now. What do you think helps separate The Lycan from the pack?
Thomas Jane: I don't pay attention to the horror pack. I couldn't tell you what's out there. I'm a huge fan of EC, and I've got all of Russ Cochran reprints, and I've got some really nice Gailes File copies. I worship at the altar of the EC period in New York City. You know, they actually made comic books illegal. Horror became illegal in New York's state because of EC Comics. That alone tells you that these guys were doing something right. They were writing for adults, and of course, the books were geared towards 13-year-old boys, but they never talked down to the 13-year-olds. They always expected him to be able to understand the adult situations that their stories explored. And they have some of the best morality tales that have, in my opinion, ever been written in comics. So that's the bar. The next wave was in the '80s with Pacific, and they had a run with Bruce Jones. They did Twisted Tales and Alien Worlds. Those runs are short, but every one of those books is valuable and some of them are brilliant...In my opinion, the horror comic became basically the horror film. You know, you're basically watching a horror movie frozen in time on the pages of the book, and I have less affection for that kind of stuff. But we're telling a long-form story. It might be a great exercise to take The Lycan story and turn it into a seven-page EC segment. You know, they had four stories in every book, right? And each story was anywhere from five to eight pages, and they would tell a whole story in that time. And you could do the same with The Lycan, you could create a seven-page EC horror story out of The Lycan. That'd be really fun.
What do you want readers to take away from after they’ve read your story?
Thomas Jane: Well, I want it to be a great yarn. If you can take a reader and you could drop them into a time and a place that they're unfamiliar with and make it exciting and sexy, you've done your job right. Just taking people into another dimension, another world, another time, the way people talk, the way they look. You know, I love what Diego has done with the characters, because they don't look like modern humans. If you look at the history of old photographs, people look different. It's really hard to put your finger on exactly how, but they look of the times. And then some people, if you put a baseball cap on them, you'd never be able to tell that they were from the 1880s...But Diego did a great job at creating faces that you feel like they were from a different time. And that's my job, to take people down a rabbit hole and we'll tell a tale, and then at the end of it, you'll have a little place in your heart for this, for these two love-struck characters.
The Lycan #1 is available now from Comixology Originals.
