Interviews
[Interview] Artist Christopher Shy Discusses ‘Dead Space: Liberation’ And The Evolution Of The Necromorph
Back in 2010, just a month before the release of Dead Space 2, Blackwatch Comics released a graphic novel that bridged the gap between the first and second game — or more specifically, the gap between Dead Space and the animated film Aftermath, which took place before Dead Space 2. It was horrifying, and for me, one of the things that really stuck with me even two years later is the gorgeous illustrations of Christopher Shy. His work took Salvage to a whole new level, and thankfully, he’s returned to lend his talents to Dead Space: Liberation, a second graphic novel that acts as an interquel between the second game and Dead Space 3 (which is out now!). Christopher was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the new graphic novel (also available now), the art of the Necromorphs, and much more. Read what he had to say after the break!
BD: The Dead Space franchise has a rich fiction as well as a very recognizable look. What’s it like adding to that visual style in Salvage and Liberation?
I was a fan of Dead Space before getting a chance to work on it, so I had actually spent some time thinking about what I would do, if given the chance.
BD: What’s your process for creating one of these graphic novels? Which comes first, the art or the story?
Always the story first, I read through a script, first for pleasure, then my second and third pass with a pencil. I usually have an idea of how I want to approach a book within a few hours of the first read, and after that I start making sketches and notes. Sometimes I will have a sequence that will develop between panels that I will expand on. In Liberation, I felt that the tension between Carver and Ellie needed more room, so I added that. In Salvage, Malyech’s Madness, and his time with the Marker was something from the very beginning I wanted to explore, as it would set the tone for the entire book.
BD: Did you study concept art or gameplay from Dead Space 3 for inspiration, or can seeing too much of that get in the way?
Certainly there are times when you have to stay fairly tight with a certain concept, and you have to use a certain design. The problem with Dead Space was not using it, because it was so damn good. I think at one point I almost gave up on the Necromorph designs, because they were so stunning, that it took me awhile to find my own path out of the previous work. EA has always been supportive of my need to make each book my own, and for that, I am eternally grateful. The artists at EA are incredible, so it is very hard to compete with those designs, but I always try and find a way into it, and then through that window, into my own version of the universe, Having said that, on Dead Space Liberation, I did try and stay closer to the game on this one, simply because Liberation is a sort of direct prequel to the events of Dead Space three.
BD: Liberation is a prequel to Dead Space 3 that follows series newcomer John Carver. He’s an interesting character, more of a rough, order-following military-type. What was it like fleshing out his character a bit more? Is he a person players can empathize with?
I like Carver a lot, and for me, he certainly is the bookend of Stefan Schneider, of Dead Space Salvage. John Carver is not secure of his place in the universe, he has blood on his hands, and he is good at what he does, he is a soldier at his core, but it does not come easy to him. He is best described in my mind, as a man who is best when the action starts, and his instincts take over, but terrible at real life. His marriage is not going well, and he feels deep in his core he has missed some calling. He hasn’t refused it, in a Joseph Campbell’s monomyth sort of way, only to embrace it later, he has just somehow missed it. Stefan Schneider, on the other hand refused it, but has no problems taking it up, because he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. In fact, Schneider is more the classic rogue hero archetype, to Carver’s soulful soldier. Carver has everything to lose, and nothing to gain. How they both relate to women is very similar, their respect, they just show those emotions in different ways. I never saw Carver spitting out tough guy lines, and yet Schneider’s character practically demands it.
BD: In Liberation, Carver meets up with Ellie, a survivor of the events in Dead Space 2. Ellie’s tough, but perhaps not at the same level of roughness as Carver. Is there ever any tension between the two?
In my mind they are almost exactly the same type person, and why Ellie pines away for Norton is beyond me. Ellie’s loss is mirrored by carvers, and they do share a deep connection in the story. I actually argued that a deeper relationship between Carver and Ellie should be there, or at least seeded, as we see with the moment they share talking about what had happened in both of their lives. Ian wrote some terrific dialogue between the two, and I think me and Ian both felt the relationship was there, but there was little time and space to pull it off. We also knew that the events of the novel needed to lead into Dead Space three, so it was one of those rare circumstances where the plot of the game took logical control over where we felt the characters in the novel should have went. In my opinion Carver and Ellie should have hooked up by page 50. I say rare, because usually I don’t work on a novel that so tightly connects with a franchise and its opening sequence. I enjoyed it, and as you can tell, we were very passionate about it.
BD: Liberation is a collaborative effort between you and author Ian Edgington. What was it like working with him?
Fantastic, in the time we had on the book, which was a very tight schedule. His script was very good, and I would call my work with him, collaboration, in the truest sense. I would work with Ian again in a second. Ian has very good instincts.
BD: Dead Space is an intensely gory series. Blood, dismemberment, Necromorphs, the works. How did you prepare yourself for the gore and translating that carnage to paper? The team behind the original game visited a morgue to study cadavers; did you do anything like that?
I think I took a slightly different approach. I did study quite a bit of images to decide how I wanted the look and feel of the Necromorphs to be, but in the end, I looked at it as a sort of hybrid between the EA artists and where I wanted to go. I always saw the Necromorphs to be an invading cancer of sorts, and I studied it from that point of view, of having Necromorph A, the more primitive Necro, effecting and informing the look of Necromorph B, recombining, and evolving. I started looking at reorganizing tissue, and followed what the EA artists had done, but then extrapolated it as if the Necromorphs had already eaten their human hosts, and moved on to each other, and then became sometime new. That gave me a fresh window to explore, and allowed me to paint different shapes that still honored the elements from the game. There were a lot of medical books on my desk. I will say that in my opinion, the artists at EA will always kick my ass when it comes to creature design. It’s their world; I am just trying to have a very well received, diplomatic visit.
BD: Would you like to work on another Dead Space comic in the future? If so, do you have any stories you’d really like to tell within the game’s fiction?
Yes, I would love to go back to Dead Space Salvage and finish that story. We left Schneider’s story a bit open at the end of that one, and it would be interesting to bring that back full circle, and bring all three novels together.
For more on Christopher Shy’s work, check out his studio’s website. For more on Dead Space: Liberation, feel free to head on over to Blackwatch Comics.
Have a question? Feel free to ever-so-gently toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
You must be logged in to post a comment.