We chat with Brent Fisher and Marcus Jimenez about their new science fiction anthology series.
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 Brent Fisher and Marcus Jimenez about Tell Them of Us. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
How do you want to be remembered? How do you want humanity to be remembered? These questions sit sturdily at the core of the new comics anthology Tell Them of Us. Brent Fisher and Marcus Jimenez, the duo behind Dauntless Stories, assemble a cadre of rad creators, tasking them with telling humanity's final stories. Tell Them of Us begins with an alien civilization discovering our last record, processing our last words, and hopefully finding meaning in them.
Fisher and Jimenez are carving an exciting place for themselves in the industry, creating bold, bright narratives in a crowded landscape. Their passion for the medium is infectious, and it's easy to back a Kickstarter project like Tell Them of Us (we've already done so, and it was the quickest click we've made all year). As of this writing, eleven days are left to join the party. Don't miss out; make your CLICK HERE.
Via Zoom, we spoke with Brent Fisher and Marcus Jimenez about how Tell Them of Us came together, why they gathered the talent they did, and the tantalizing tension that exists between preciousness and destruction.
This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
How Tell Them of Us Assembled
Brad: Tell Them Of Us has such an interesting structure as an anthology. How did we come to this structure, and how are you going to manage it?
Brent Fisher: One begets the other because I came up with the core conceit first. There's a ubiquity to post-apocalyptic stories, it's almost its own genre, and then there are sub-genres of that, but especially in comics lately, there's a horror, there's subversion horror, and I wanted to take a more broad approach to what the term post-apocalyptic really means. Invariably, some semblance of humanity survives, presumably to learn from a lesson garnered from the calamity.
You know, I'm not a big horror fan. I'm a big proponent of message horror, like the Romero films where there's an allegory and that kind of a thing, and I just don't think we're getting much from it anymore because of that ubiquity. I wanted to create a collection of stories based on the presumption of, what if we all just didn't make it? What if it really was a post-apocalyptic event? It was cataclysmic. We do not exist anymore.
I want a series of stories. Let's say you jacked into that archive. You don't know how it works, you're an alien culture, you don't know how to use the filter, maybe it's degraded, and you just get a smattering of different preserved recollections of what people thought was worth leaving in mnemonic storage, and that's basically where it went.
In terms of how do you categorize it? How do you organize it, how do you lay it? We winged it a little bit in terms of what we were going to get, but we were selective in who we'd elicited to join the project. We had people in mind that we felt would bring something different to the table in terms of who they are, what they value, and what they feel would be what they would leave behind if they were to tell a story.
We didn't want to guide them to it. We just wanted to give them the core premise and see what they devised, and sure enough, we got a collection of stories that has a demonstrative beginning, middle, and end in our opinion. We were very fortunate because we deliberated upfront with who we chose to work with.
Lisa: I love hearing about your enthusiasm about this amazing stable of creators that you guys have harvested, but who are your consumers?
Marcus Jimenez: Our consumers are people who crave the European comic, even if they have never actually read it. It's like they want a one-and-done story, or even if it's a series, it's like 40, 50 pages that they can crack open on a Sunday afternoon, enjoy it while they're in a coffee shop, or in their backyard or something like that. We've taken that approach since the dawn of Dauntless.
Deadly Living was our first book. It comes in around 60 to 70 pages, and that is one that we still get reviews for to this day, four years later. It's something that people can have on their shelf, and that's the other aspect that we want to be - we want to be the coffee table book. We want to be the on-the-shelf kind of book, where quality comes before everything else, quality of our books, but also quality of experience when working with us, whether you're on the creator's side or the vendor's side.
Brent Fisher: We're the A24 of comic creators.
Tell Them Of Us, Our Precious
Lisa: What I love what you've done with Tell Them Of Us, from a Kickstarter angle, is you've pulled together a real varied group of folks where there are names on there where I've gone like, "I want to support this person, but they haven't done their thing yet." Or you have more accomplished writers, and then you have writers who have done one or two projects, and I say, "Oh, man, Carol Anne Brennaman is writing on a book, I'm going to support that book no matter what."
Marcus Jimenez: It's definitely a balancing act. We had a few more creators on the list that ultimately didn't work out. One of the mandates that we had for ourselves was connecting people that have a similar mindset, but may not interact in their social media life. Sometimes it was a wish fulfillment, but not just for me as someone who spends way too much time online, but also for the other people we're working with. I remember Damien [Becton]. I've been friends with Damien for years. I was like, "We got to work together on something. I think this is the first chance we can do this. Who is your dream artist?" I was already circling Paris for the pitch, and Damien's like, "Paris Alleyne is my dream get." I was like, "All right," and I shot him the email, and that was really the kind of aspect to it.
Brad: I'm also curious about the spectrum of tone that the anthology will ultimately have. The way you've been talking about it so far, it seems like it will be addressing a lot of societal ills, but it's coming from a place of hope and-
Lisa: Preciousness - like humanity is precious, and it is only here for a short time.
Brad: Right, and that tension between hope, putting our stories out there, and also humanity is over.
Lisa: Yeah. Humanity is over, and whoever takes over better do a better job than us.
Brad: The tension between those two things I find very exciting.
Brent Fisher: It's very bittersweet. It's obviously sad. You're right though, there is a veneer of preciousness to it, and that's exactly the word I was going for, is that life is precious, life is tenuous. I think that we don't allow ourselves to be emotionally present and authentic unless we're faced with the absolute brink of everything. I don't care if it's something as mundane as a day that's gone south, or a choice that has to be made that you can't avoid, or an asteroid towards the Earth. It could be anything. The nice thing about all the stories is that I welcomed the creators to immerse the stories in the collapse.
It could be anywhere along that timeline, but at the end of the day, a majority of them - it was always on the periphery, and that was almost like an experiment to see what would happen. When you are truly honest and present about telling a story you would want to leave behind during this calamity, how much of a role does the calamity play? In almost every single story, it's either in the background chronologically or it's in the background narratively, it's never in the foreground, and I think that's the most beautifully human thing about most of those stories.
Marcus Jimenez: My take was, kind of going back to the experiment kind of thing, it's we let everybody run with the stories in their way. There's eight stories in total, including Brent's intro and outro, but if you look at them, there's almost stories that gravitate towards each other. They play into the same themes and genres like Sower's Requiem and Weather Balloon, you have these stories of youth and relationships, and stuff like that. Whereas you pick something like Bury Me In Gold or Epilogue, which are really sci-fi-esque.
Stick To Your Guns and Seeing Is Believing focus on realistic stories that affect our real world day-to-day kind of things, and the, The Last Goodbye is a mixture of all of them. I think that when it comes to the tones of these stories, you'll see almost, I don't want to say mirror-esque of ideals, but you'll see them reflected in each other, even though you're jumping from a sci-fi dystopian to a 50s style best friend drama thing. It's really fun to just jump around and see what these creators want to focus on as the core in this collapse of society kind of thing.
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