By Zack Quaintance — Today’s small press interview is with writer Jacob Dean Murray, whose first creator-owned comic — The Eighth Immortal — is due out in January from Source Point Press. Jacob is collaborating on this book with artist Alice Li Barnes and letterer Letter Squids. Today, Jacob has taken time out to talk to us about this series…enjoy!

Jacob Dean Murray Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: So, one turn of phrase in the previews solicit for this comic jumped right out at me ...a scandalous fantasy… without giving too much away, what makes this book so scandalous?

JACOB DEAN MURRAY: There are many kinds of scandals in this series; scandals of the heart, of the body, of morality, and lies with consequences that ring through the ages. Curipan was given access to the divine, but the price of it was to deny herself some of the most fundamental things that make life beautiful. She’s in a bind, she has an incredibly important power, and is the linchpin in a fight between good and evil, but great trauma has vastly reduced the good in her life. In fact, exercising her responsibility deepens her trauma. So, what’s she fighting for, why carry on? Why care? Her journey to answer those questions drive the scandal in this series. Fantasy stories typically present a clear delineation between good and evil, but we are going to muddy those waters, and by the end it will be up to the reader to decide what is good and what is evil, or if those concepts even mean anything in the context of eternity. This book refuses to separate the beautiful from the ugly.

ZACK: The next thing I noticed right away about your book was the aesthetic of the artwork. Alice Li Barnes does an incredible job with a style that straddles manga and North American comics, using colors in really fascinating ways. How was the aesthetic developed, and how did you work together to develop it?

JACOB: When I wrote the original scripts for The Eighth Immortal, I wasn’t thinking about who would draw it; it was just a story I had to get out of my head. Once I wanted to produce the book, I realized I actually had no idea what it should look like. I searched for a while with no clarity, until I was walking artist alley at Long Beach Comic Con and I happened upon Alice’s table. I took one look at her art and it quickly dawned on me, “it looks like that.”

Luckily Alice was open to working with me and liked the story, and we went off to the races putting a pitch together. Alice’s art and designs for the book helped narrow my own conception of the characters, and I ended up rewriting the scripts based on the life Alice imbued in the book. She brought a playfulness to it, which I hadn’t realized is exactly what the book was missing. The script took itself way too seriously, and Alice helped bring that down to earth. Manga has such an appreciation for the dramatic, and an earnestness about it, while never allowing you to forget that this is supposed to be a fun medium, as dire as the content may get. That was all Alice.

Now, when it came to coloring the book, Alice was too busy to do both the line art and full colors. We discussed bringing on a colorist, but at the time we were just experimenting, so we kicked that can down the road. When we were looking at Alice’s first test pages, I was struck by the stark, powerful quality of her tonal work and inking, and I didn’t want to lose that. But I also didn’t want it to be a black and white book. The book necessitated at least some color, as people’s eyes turning green is a recurring visual theme and story-telling device. So, it started there, with us saying “let’s just color the eyes.”

As you said, it’s a blend of North American and manga comics, and as a North American reader who loves anime, but never really got into manga, I’m honestly always a bit disappointed flipping through a straight black and white book. Once I get into a black and white book, it stops mattering, but I’m talking about that first time you pick up a book and leaf through it to get a sense of its aesthetic. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and black and white art makes that a little less gratifying. The quickest way to impart a feeling is with color. I wanted The Eighth Immortal to do that for people. So, I posed the idea to Alice that she try minimal color. One to two on each page, to highlight a story point, a big moment, or just impart a feeling. The result is beautiful. Alice has such a delicate touch, and instead of replacing the stark black and white art, it elevates and highlights it.

ZACK: There’s a lot teenage hormones and coming-of-age in this book. How did you return to that point in life to write that material?

JACOB: I’m not sure we ever leave it. I think we are always evolving, but that our core personality really begins to congeal in adolescence and your teens. It’s when you really start to form your outlook on the world and negotiate how you fit into it. Hormones are raging, and as a society we have a strange mismatch where we frown upon teen sex, but we also accept that teenagers are completely preoccupied with it in a way we find to be slightly perverse in adults.

There’s a lot about being a teen like that. Things we accept as innate to that time of life, but that we seem to want to discard once we enter society as a proper adult. But I don’t think we ever really escape those qualities and are fooling ourselves when we pretend to be above and beyond them. One of those qualities is narcissism. The immortals in this book have been alive so long that they are really just trying to be OK in any given moment.

What measure of purpose or pleasure is enough to drive you through eternity? Maybe nothing. Our immortals have the profundity of eternity on their shoulders, and take responsibility for maintaining the balance of life and death for all of humanity, but really, none of that matters if you can’t enjoy the moment you’re in, or hope to enjoy the one that comes next. Everyone deals with that differently, and I think setting that up through the eyes of teenagers allows us to grant a compassion for narcissism that we don’t afford adults.

ZACK: Super sexy Highlander might be a good way to describe the book, although it’s way more stylish than all that...what would you say were some of the influences for this series?

JACOB: I know I need to revoke my fantasy nerd card for saying this, but I’ve never seen Highlander… string me up, toss the tomatoes. I deserve it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of immortality. Two of my favorite depictions are Tolkien’s elves and Anne Rice’s vampires. With Tolkien, immortality put the elves above momentary desires. They are ethereal beings who see the world in sweeping, grandiose terms. Anne Rice’s vampires, however, were just the opposite; hedonistic narcissists. But even they began to calcify as the years dragged on, but in a different way, where they become inured to the terms of a civilization that will simply pass them by in the end. But what connects both these depictions is a sense of detachment.

On a more personal note, I was inspired by the long talks I’ve had with my wife, where we will break down our behavior, and try to discover why we are the way we are. Why do we hold the assumptions, desires and resentments that we do? We so often come back to key events from our childhood and adolescence, and perhaps this is retroactive reasoning, but it can become annoyingly obvious where a line suddenly appears between a thing that happened to you when you were young, something you may have even forgotten about, and every consequential choice you’ve made since. So, I wanted to run with that and throw the timeline way out of whack.

Another influence I had was Mirka Andolfo’s Unnatural, which came out right around when I met Alice and began rewriting my original scripts. She threaded together a sense of consequential sensuality mixed with prophecy in that book. It was beautifully done. Those had always been present in The Eighth Immortal, but reading her book inspired me, showing me that it can be achieved artfully and that there was an audience for it.

ZACK: Finally, without spoiling anything, can you tease some of what we can expect to find throughout this series?

JACOB: We have four issues planned, and each one gets successively zanier. The first issue is pretty tame. Readers can expect all things to ramp up quickly. We’ll meet primordial entities, we’ll deal with the consequences of ruinous trauma, and together we’ll search for a way back to acknowledging the beauty of life. We’ll explore purpose, sexuality, love and hatred. We’ll break down the desire to procreate, and we’ll blur the line between what is selfish and what is moral. Oh, and magic and demons. Can’t have a fantasy book without some magic and demons.

The Eighth Immortal

The Eighth Immortal
Writer: Jacob Dean Murray
Artist: Alice Li Barnes
Letterer: Letter Squids
Publisher: Source Point Press
Curipan has spent her immortality protecting humanity from the threat of an ancient
prophecy. But time and a secret trauma have worn her down, forcing her to choose between her duty and her sanity. The Eighth Immortal is a scandalous fantasy that asks the question, should anything last forever?
Release Date: January 27, 2021