We chat with Marco Finnegan about his new noir and why he injected a little spooky into it.
Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the coolest and most thought-provoking creators in the industry. In this entry, we're conversing with Marco Finnegan about Calavera PI. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
We take notice whenever a comic pops on the stands that's written, drawn, and colored by a single individual. Marco Finnegan, the artist behind Morning Star and Night People, is playing triple duty with his latest comic, Calavera PI. And, friends, this book looks sharp.
It's a hardboiled riff on all the noir classics that come to mind, but injected with a supernatural twist and told from a perspective frequently ignored in those classics you were just thinking about. In the first issue, the titular detective solves his last living case, but in the final moments, he comes back as a skull-faced bruiser in a trenchcoat. His work is simply not done.
We spoke with Marco Finnegan about a whole host of subjects, and what you'll find below is merely a taste of that much longer conversation (hit that link in the introductory paragraph for the rest). We discuss how his original hardboiled story transformed into something a little spookier and why it allowed him to explore the Mexican culture that built the Hollywoodland industry. We also consider why he took on all the comic-making duties minus the lettering and the editing and how he hopes there will be more from Calavera PI.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Marco Finnegan, Calavera PI, and The Skull Face
Brad: You take a noir and inject a supernatural element into it. Also, noir is, generally, cinematically anyway, a very white male space, and Calavera P.I. is not that. Can you talk about this collision?
Marco Finnegan: Well, to take point by point, what I like about what we're doing with this book is that so much of what makes Los Angeles is founded in Mexican American culture. At the time of noir, that's where one of the highest populations of Mexican Americans was in Los Angeles. Outside of Mexico City, that was one of the highest populations.
And if you go back and you watch movies and you read books - we're all but erased from there. I didn't really start with that, but I knew I wanted to do a noir, and I would do just a straight detective thing. And then, the more I started digging with it, the more I wanted to give myself a little room to make it not scary, but something... I didn't want to just do like, it's Bogart, but he's Mexican. You know what I mean?
So, I had to find some way to bring some culture into it, but, still, make it interesting. That's when the Dia de Los Muertos stuff came to me, and it all just lined up. Okay, so now, I have the ticking time bomb of - he's got two days on the planet, and then, he's got to solve this case.
It gives you a lot of structure to play within the genres. And the thing with supernatural stuff, and I think we were talking about Hellboy earlier, is what Mike [Mignola] does so well with Hellboy, which is that this demon guy is not his identifying characteristic.
Brad: Yeah.
Marco Finnegan: Like he's just this blue-collar guy that happens to be a demon. And I think with Calavera, I wanted to do something similar in that, here's this working class guy, his skillset is solving crimes, but he also happened to have gotten killed and resurrected.
There are people that I know that are teachers and police officers and construction workers, and if they came back as a ghost, or if they went to another world or another planet, that's what they would still be. They take so much pride in their work that it's fun to imagine that that's how they identify. The way they pay back the world is through their work. It's a very blue-collar, very Mexican American trait as well. Like you don't romanticize your work, you just do your work. You know what I mean?
Brad: Mm-hmm.
Marco Finnegan: Also, it's an excuse to draw skeletons and monsters. When you're writing and drawing, you get to go, "Well, do I want to draw this guy with a square jaw for 80 pages, or do I want to figure out cool ways to draw a skeleton?"
Brad: Yeah. It's a heck of a profile, right?
Marco Finnegan: Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, because I just saw Mike's new book, [Bowling With Corpses], that short stories and his main guy is a skeleton in a trench coat, and I was like, "Damn it."
Brad: He's got a few skeletons in trench coats in Hellboy.
Marco Finnegan: Yeah. He does it so well.
Marco Finnegan, Calavera PI, and the Twenties
Brad: When I think of noir, I tend to think of noir as post World War II, and Calavera P.I. begins in 1925. Why that moment in LA?
Marco Finnegan: I think for this one in particular, I was more influenced by [Dashiell] Hammett's books.
Brad: The Heartboiled stuff. They're the origins of what would become FIlm Noir.
Marco Finnegan: Yeah. Right. So, I was really into his Continental Op, and then, his Black Mask stories, and they all were around 1925, 1930s. It makes sense, because the stories are so popular in 1925, 1930, that by the time the movies get them, it's 1940 and they update them all. So, that's where it was more influenced by the pulps of the time. But if I do have the opportunity to do more, we're going to lean heavy in the '50s because I really do think that that's where noir hits its stride and becomes what it is now. But I think it started there.
And again, it's one of those things where I'm like, if they're going to let me keep doing this, and if I can keep coming up with stuff, and if everything works out for this character in this mini-series, then it'll be fun to trace crime fiction along with the history of LA.
Brad: I had not anticipated the possibility of where this character could go along the noir timeline. I mean, like Hellboy, you could pop in and out of anywhere.
Marco Finnegan: Exactly.
Brad: At least, post-1925 at this point.
Marco Finnegan: And that's the rule. Yeah, I think the noir character is timeless, and you can get like the Elliott Gould playing-
Brad: Oh, yeah, The Long Goodbye!
Marco Finnegan: Playing Marlowe in the '70s, and it still works. There are some slight tweaks, but he works really well with what would be a '70s antihero. And if you redid Marlowe in 1990, you could just put him in that timeframe, and it would still work. I think it was Edward Norton; I heard him talking about that movie that he did. What is that one? The one based on-
Brad: Motherless Brooklyn?
Marco Finnegan: Yes. And he was talking about how the best noirs are when the hero takes you on a tour to a part of a world you've never seen, but it's right under the surface of the one you're at. That was the anchor, where it's like, okay, I'm going to take it literal. I'm going to have this guy really take us to these parts of LA that, A, are not seen very often like the La Placita Park and Bunker Hill, and how much the Mexican American community was there. But also, literally, under the surface is some underworld, supernatural stuff.
Marco Finnegan, Calavera PI, and Four Full Issues
Brad: The series is four issues. It's an in-and-out structure. Can you talk a little bit about making the most of the page count that you have?
Marco Finnegan: When I started off, I was like, "Now, I got to be a writer." And I hadn't written anything since The Lizard in a Zoot Suit book, which was 10 years ago. And I wrote a really detailed script, and I went to draw it, and I was like, "Oh, I didn't think about what this was going to look like." My first pass is just thumbnails.
Because I have an idea of what I want to happen in the issue that's already outlined, I do really quick thumbnails and lettering over the thumbnails. I know how it will look because when I was thinking in terms of words, that part of my brain turned off. Probably, because of insecurity, I became so insecure about how the writing was, because I didn't realize that it's still a visual medium. I got to lean into where my strengths are.
I'm not Alan Moore, and I won't write 12 pages for every panel. But that's what I was doing. The first page was very - it had hyperlinks! I'm like, "Who am I hyperlinking this, too? I'm drawing it." Much of it was because I was working with the editor - with Gabriel [Granillo] at Oni. I wanted him to have an idea, I was like, "Well, let me just show him, rather than tell him."
I think that's something I really like now, because I'm drawing, writing, and coloring it. The first couple months of working on it, I was thinking in those parts individually. I was only thinking about writing, then, I was only thinking about drawing, then, I was only thinking about color. Now, I'm thinking about all of it at once, which is pretty awesome.
Brad: It's super rare. I mean, as a fan and reader of comics, I think we all need to take notice when, suddenly, there is a book that is written, drawn, and colored by a single person.
Marco Finnegan: There's no ego involved; I just don't think I could communicate what I wanted well in it. We did a couple of passes on the colors the first time. I'm leaning into the old EC Comics, and I'm leaning into the old Jack Cole Midnight comics from Smash Comics.
There's so much stuff in there that I'm surrounded with, that it would be more difficult for me to articulate to somebody - "Now, go back and look at Smash Comics number 27, there's a panel there that Jack Cole does that we're doing that." I'll just do it myself. Even if, I know there's colorers out there that would do such a great job, like Jason Wordie on Morning Star just blew me away.
I could never have come up with that, but I didn't have an idea for what that was going to look like. I was only thinking about the line art. And now, that I have to think about the color, it's changed the way I approach everything now. Like I'm not afraid of coloring. Still afraid of lettering, though.
Brad: Well, yeah, bless the letterers out there.
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