If yuh bin worried about Jonah Hex bein’ gone, well lament no more, pardner. Here comes ABBADON!
Jimmy “Doc” Palmiotti and the rest of the PaperFilms crew — including Justin “Hoss” Gray and Fabrizio “Leone” Fiorintino — are back with ‘nuther crowdfunded crowdpleaser. This ol’ yarn goes by the name uh Abbadon …
OK, I’ll stop now.
Abbadon‘s a graphic novel for grown-ups based on a screenplay by Spencer Marstiller. As the PaperFilms folks put it in their Kickstarter pitch, it’s an “unconventional Western set in a town where illicit sex, gambling and even murder are legal under the right conditions.”
Sounds like a place I wanna visit! So I talked to Doc — I mean, Jimmy — about it. And he was downright hospitable enough to share this here fancy EXCLUSIVE art
Sorry, I can’t help it.
Anyway, check out the Kickstarter and read on for our MIGHTY Q&A:
Dan Greenfield: I dug Jonah Hex. A lot. Is this a way to scratch that Western itch?
Jimmy Palmiotti: Justin and I have loved Westerns from Day One and having this very long run on Jonah Hex showed us there are still so many stories to tell about the time period and with Abbadon we get to tell a story about a specific town and do some world building with that and have no editorial restrictions and make this something aimed at mature audiences, as well, with the sex and violence featured.
OK, so what are some of your influences on this one?
We have a love of cinema that is obvious in our work and with Abbadon we took the actual story points and ran a bit wild with them, pushing the envelope as would, let’s say, a film made during the ’70s would. We also did a lot of research about the lawless times in the Old West and applied some of what we learned to the story.
Alright, so tell me about your collaboration with your co-creators. Who’s handling which aspects?
As always, Justin and I are writing the graphic novel specifically for Fabrizio. We picked him as the artist out of the gate and know what he can bring to the project visually. We wanted to step out and do our own thing in style and having him and Alessia on colors became the dream team for us.
Rounding out the project we have an amazing cover by my good friend Tim Bradstreet. We have been working together since the days at Marvel Knights on the Punisher book and when the project came along from our partners at Adaptive Studios, we all agreed that we were going to go after Tim to do the main inspiration cover piece.
After that we recruited master designer John J. Hill, on board for design and lettering. John is one of the finest in the business and his design work is always stretching boundaries. For the Kickstarter, we got a few extra pieces done by my wife, Amanda Conner and one of my closest friends Darwyn Cooke. Two people that always are willing to lend us a hand on our projects and two of the finest storytellers in the business.
So name some of your own fave Westerns then.
I am a huge fan of Once Upon a Time in the West and The Outlaw Josey Wales. I saw these two films when I was very young and they have always stuck with me. The bigger stories about the war and the expansion of the West have always been fascinating to me and I think these two character-driven pieces also show the romantic side of life back then and how it could be destroyed by man’s greed.
I still watch each and every Western that comes out these days. I am always fascinated when people tell me they don’t like Westerns, since to me they have every single genre within them.
Again, if you like what you see, check out the Kickstarter here!
