No Gutsville, No Glory

by Wil Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/29/2007

In the midst of a hurricane of event-driven superhero comics, writer Simon Spurrier and artist Frazer Irving have decided to take cover in the belly of a whale.

Gutsville, a six-issue series that recently saw its first issue debut from Image Comics, follows the descendants of the HMS Daphne, an ocean liner swallowed by a whale some 150 years ago. A whole society has developed inside the whale since then, but as the series opens, killers, corrupt priests and fervent revolutionaries threaten to make everything go belly up. A confused and insecure rat catcher may be the town’s only salvation as he searches for an exit from Gutsville.

The book’s two like-minded British creators—Spurrier, a rising comics writer with a novel called Contract on the way, and Irving, the talented artist behind Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witch Boy and Silent War—have created a colorful yet disturbing world in Gutsville, and they hope you’ll join them. Just watch your step.

PW Comics Week: So where did the idea for Gutsville come from in the first place? And how did you two wind up working on it together?

Frazer Irving: Well, Si and I had been chewing over the idea of pitching a creator-owned series to one of the big publishers for a while, so the trick was to come up with something that we were both happy to do and that we could spin out longer than the original pitch if we needed to. Si is the ideas man—seeing as he has loads—and I just went along with whatever he wanted to pitch. Ultimately, it was Eric Stephenson at Image who decided on Gutsville over the other pitches we sent in.

Simon Spurrier: As for the idea itself, boringly, it’s just one of those ones that came out of nowhere. No slow evolution process, no cunning system of visual or literary cues that led me up to it... just blam. “Holy s—! A town in a beast’s belly! Ha, ha!”

Originally, I envisaged the artwork to go with it being sort of wacky—even “cartoony” (though I hatethat word). When Fraze came on board, that went out the window: he’s one of the best out there right now at freaky horror, psychedelic action and slow-burning atmosphere, so we decided to play it far “straighter.” I think that’s worked totally in our favor. There’s just something about taking a really insane concept and making it seem incidental to the hardcore, serious (or at least far less goofily funny) story itself [that] makes the material sing.

PWCW: Frazer, were you aiming to do anything different with your art this time around to create a specific look or tone for this book? The séance page in particular looks like it’s a bit of a departure from what we’ve seen from you before.

FI: Well, I try to make each job have its own distinctive look, but that usually comes from the text in the script. If the story is dark, then that makes the art dark, and any variation in the script is reflected in the art. I wanted to go digital with this project as I knew it would allow me to experiment more, and I knew that some later chapters would be increasingly psychedelic. So when the time came to do the first dreamtime scene, I just tried to make it look as different from the regular scenes as possible. The art mutates as I go along with it, so there’s every chance that the later chapters will be even stranger than part one, but this is all part of the plan...

PWCW: It looks like y’all have spent quite a bit of time fleshing out the world of Gutsville—how much of that was to help you with the story versus helping the reader buy into this new world?

SS: It’s absolutely about both. The story of Gutsville isn’t the same thing as the concept: the former has to fit neatly into the latter whilst also being strong enough not to rely upon it. In order for the story to work—with integrity and flow—the concept has to be incredibly well realized. Fraze and I have to know as much as possible about how Gutsville looks, sounds, smells and most importantly works, so that the story can flow neatly through it without any clunky exposition. In fact, we’re totally against anything that remotely patronizes the audience, so mostly we just get on with telling the story and assume that our readers are bright enough to keep up without us stopping every five minutes to explain how Digestive Methane Lamps work, how Boarhounds have mutated, how psychedelic intestinal secretions have entered general use and how the crazy quasi-Victorian patois has developed.

In other words: Gutsville’s a story, not a travelogue. We deal with a lot of the “just in case you were interested and wanted to know more...” stuff in the backup material.

FI: I think this is the kind of story that needs a bit of flesh on it, because otherwise the readers will have too many unanswered questions. We have a lot more backup material that we could use to flesh it out further, but at the moment we’re restricted by the page count. It’s my hope that the readers will digest the extra material and feel more at home with the setting of the main narrative so that we can just get on with telling the story.

PWCW: What can readers expect from this series following the first issue?

FI: Much weirdness, more drama, more mystery and some grisly revelations. Plus lots of Gutspeak.

SS: I’ll do the writerly thing and also mention the developing romances, the shattered friendships, the stunning psychedelic revelations and—ooh, ooh—the descent into the spooky “Second Gut”…

PWCW: Simon, the backup material, particularly the short story—will extra material like that be in each issue?

SS: Yeah, the short story will be there in them all. It’s another opportunity for us to explore everyday life in Gutsville, which is always fun.... Also, we’re totally against filling up the back of the comic with irritating adverts, so it’s kind of a nice way to reward readers: value for money and all that. It’s a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery, which just happens to be set in the colossal intestinal tract of a hallucinogenic creature and we’re getting a different guest artist to illustrate each part. It rocks like Gibraltar.

We’ll also get all sort of juicy extras along the way, like the freaky Darwin-style “wildlife of the gut” report in part one.

PWCW: There aren’t very many books like Gutsville out there right now. Does that worry you guys at all?

FI: Nope, in fact I welcome it.

SS: Ditto. That’s sort of the whole point.