Next Month sees the release of a brand new horror book I couldn’t be more excited about. ‘Plunder’ from BOOM! Studios, written by Swifty Lang (Feeding Ground) and drawn by Skuds Mckinley reinvents the pirate genre. Seriously this isn’t the swashbuckling Pirates from the Caribbean, these are the pirates of Captain Phillips. They are cut throat, dangerous, and fearless until they find a research vessel harboring some unknown horror. We caught up with writer, Swifty Lang to talk all things horror, inspiration, and John Carpenter.

Bloody-Disgusting: Horror at its best seems to boil down to a loss of control and a degradation of the human form into something based solely on survival. Already, “Plunder” has self-serving pirates, with no rules, and no respect so how else did you work these themes into the book?

Swifty Lang: When the pirates board The Seeker, even though they are a lawless bunch, there is certainly a hierarchical structure. Pirates operate within this book in a very similar way to street gangs, with a very clear leader. What distinguishes the internal cohesion is these aren’t just random people who have joined up, they’re family. Clan is incredibly important, and not just a metaphorical tribe, but literally cousins and extended family. This makes ties run incredibly deep, but also brings up all the internal jealousy and history that family members have. If there is respect, and there is, it is closer to allegiance.

What horror also does is breakdown, or invert the social order. What happens when all bets are off? As in a war situation, what happens when leadership begins to make bad decisions, or is not seeing things accurately? From the outset, our crew is confronted not only with absolute carnage, but a previously successful leader who they have trusted many times before who is showing terrible judgment. This is very frightening because when one has already surrendered their autonomy to a group, a dose of chaos makes one ask questions. The move towards self-preservation is its own kind of violence. It’s a cleaving of identity.

They are both literally trapped because of circumstance and psychologically trapped because of their loyalty to the clan. There is always safety in numbers, or at least the illusion of it. The decision to move forward, to march towards the grave, is where control begins to slip. Being bullied by leadership to take foolish actions is a loss of control. It’s a little bit terrifying to see a parent cry, to realize they are making it up as they go along, too.

BD: Bahdoon finds himself stuck in this debut issue. At 14 years old he’s experiencing real horror for the first time, thanks to the actions of his fellow pirates, and what they find on the ship. What motivated you to make the protagonist that young? And how old were you when you really experienced something horrific for the first time?

SL: Bahdoon’s age is very important because his illusion being shattered is horror. Firstly, that age has a real hunger for adventure, yet they are old enough to begin to understand adult need. Think of a movie like The Goonies. Bahdoon is driven by both.  Bahdoon wants more opportunity than his peers. He’s incredibly ambitious, but he’s not beyond influence. His moral compass is still being shaped by experience. He will listen to adults. He may think he knows better, he may have stopped listening to his parents, but he is definitely still seeking mentorship. This is why gangs are able to recruit people that young. They seem to have it all figured out and they have all the trappings of conspicuous consumption that a young person might hunger for. Having a cool car is pretty impressive. Someone more set in their ways who is not tied by family would have the self-preservation instinct to blow up group cohesion, especially if they’re rebellious.

When I first started working on the book, Bahdoon was even a bit younger. Through conversation with Rebecca Taylor and Chris Rosa (two INCREDIBLY talented editors) it became clear that Bahdoon had to be older in order to be able to do the things he must to survive. Someone a bit younger may have buckled. I think that idea of ‘playing pirate’ and ‘being pirate’ are kind of two ideas someone that age holds in their head simultaneously. Once one learns about the ramifications of their decisions, their actions, playtime is over, and it’s terrifying.

The first-time I experienced true horror, which I define as having a set of expectations horribly inverted, was when I was six years old. I wrote a story about the experience with my co-creator on FEEDING GROUND, Michael Lapinski, in The Gathering called Sparkler. One 4^th of July, my father, who is a neurosurgeon found out I was playing with sparklers. Instead of a happy father/son hospital visit to make rounds, he took me to the burn unit and introduced me to a kid burned over 95% of his body. I never really played with fireworks after that. I was afraid of turning on the oven until I was married.

BD: I was surprised by just how relentless this first issue is. You don’t waste any time getting to the gore, but in doing so you raise a lot of questions. What is your approach to storytelling? And why abandon the slow build of tension that is so well known in horror?

SL: That is something I actually discussed with my studio mate Dean Haspiel recently. Originally, there was a slower build, almost a prologue, of a craft sinking into the water. In Skuds’ and my pitch packet we enter Somalia in media res. A member of the clan has been shot and they’re on the run looking for a place to hide. It’s amazing how ideas come back around. Chris Rosa made the suggestion of really trapping them and it felt really organic, it fit. It was a fantastic idea.

I have used the technique of disorientation in other work, most recently a short film I made with my wife called The Showing. Much like in cult indoctrination, disorientation makes one susceptible. Loud music, bright lights, distractions, they open up the mind to seek some kind of order. And then a leader emerges, whose capable hands one is more than willing to step into. In storytelling, that leader is both the storyteller and the protagonist. On a subconscious level as a viewer/reader you ask, “please help me make sense of this.” Your loyalty is instantly aligned with the protagonist.

Though we get the prologue scroll in Star Wars, we still start out with enough of a disorienting chase scene to ask, ‘what’s going on here?’ Even The Thing uses this technique, a mysterious wolf running in the snow being fired at, such an AMAZING, I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-is-going-on, opening.  In PLUNDER, beyond the action, instantly one has to figure out the language cues, and who is talking, and you’re involved in the narrative. It’s a risk to make a viewer do the work from the outset, but when things move from that sense of heightened tension to a crawl, it’s a relief. And when you club them next, it hurts even more.

BD: I couldn’t shake the connection to John Carpenter’s The Thing, but your storytelling is noticeably different than that film. What is your biggest influence coming into Plunder? What motivated you to tell this story and better yet, why modern day Somalian pirates?

SL: Now The Thing really establishes a group that knows each other as much as a group of men working together can, but they still don’t completely trust each other. They live with each other in tight quarters. If you watch the dissolution of that group, it all comes down to how they swig their alcohol. When they do and don’t share their bottles. With PLUNDER there is more trust because you are dealing with family or close connections. You really want to believe the person to your left has your best interest in mind. I guess I wanted to explore what does it feel like when the people you trust most can’t actually be trusted. They’re still selfish, and you know this, but you do the dance out of fear or habit.

I was also hugely influenced by Jay Bahador’s: The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World. That was my primary source as far as research was concerned. It did an excellent job of not only giving some background into the root of piracy, but also how gangs operate in many ways similar to street gangs: leadership at the top, foot soldiers at the bottom. Now I’ve definitely taken liberties in terms of technology (cell phones, geo-tracking), but all of that was an effort to keep this somewhat timeless. Nothing roots something more to its era than technology.

I chose Somali Pirates because I am always interested in Robert Merton’s Strain Theory – the idea that criminals want the same things that most of us do, but they don’t have the opportunity to get it. The idea that society creates criminals due to the distribution of wealth or blocked access. Most criminals want the same things we do, the ability to feed family or themselves, but those opportunities are not there. They are driven by need more than want. I am fascinated by deviance, people who abandon a conventional sense of morality. To paraphrase Nas, “I root for the villain,” but I don’t identify with him. I try to understand their motivation.

Outside of The Thing, which is nearly a perfect film about group dynamics, I had recently read Doctrow’s Billy Bathgate for another project I was working on. It was a shared reference (and her initial recommendation) between Rebecca Taylor and me.  The young initiate who is in over his head is the essence of Billy Bathgate. Bahdoon, at a certain level always watched the pirates being big shots in the market, and he wants a piece of that action. He sees men who have taken what they want and admires it. So this idea was definitely there. There is something aspirational about their wrongdoing. They won’t be suckers in a world that cares less about them. They are the disenfranchised that have the courage to not feed on the scraps, to take more than the world gives them. The reality is Bahdoon may not be tough enough for that adult world, until he has to evolve to survive.

Most pirates never had to resort to the kind of violence this task requires. Many were fisherman who picked up a gun because of blocked opportunity. Their seas were illegally overfished; there was toxic dumping in their water. While I am not advocating their violence, I abhor real violence (I don’t even watch MMA), I always try to understand the root. It’s fascinating to me what drives someone to hurt another. A real pain is usually at the source. It’s much easier to punish and respond to the reaction than question and heal the source of violence. We couldn’t have a privatized prison industry without it. What the hell would the news look like if we weren’t told to be afraid? Nothing cements the current power structure like fear.

BD: As I reached the halfway point of issue #1 the isolation of the group really got to men. Horror on the highseas doesn’t happen often, but the remote location really makes the situation desperate, what for you is the scariest part about setting a book on an abandoned boat?

SL: Getting to play on that boat is the ultimate set piece. It’s by no means a realistic boat. It’s part submarine, part eccentric’s mansion, and part research vessel. If something like The Seeker exists, I haven’t seen it, and if it does, I am sure an eccentric billionaire is at the helm. Boats are really scary because there is nowhere to run if shit goes down. There’s no one to call to help. The best you can do is float and hope the sharks don’t get you. There’s a painting by Winslow Homer called Gulf Stream that influenced me. It shows a man in a small boat alone with a broken sail. Sharks circle around, and he simply awaits his fate. The man’s face is amazing. He’s resigned to his death. He has moved past fear to that moment when you shift from fight or flight to a sleepy, narcotized acceptance.

Boats also offer no cues other than themselves. There’s no neighborhood to determine, no geography to make sense of. They just are, and we have no idea about their port of origin. As for hope, all one can do is look off into the horizon and pray. If you are going to put characters in dire circumstances, you can’t do much better. 

BD: Is it important to you that the horror comes through the characters rather than the situations or both?

SL: I don’t think you can really distinguish the two. If one is not invested in the characters it’s pure spectacle. There’s a place for that kind of horror, but I find it really dull, numbing. It’s almost like pornography in the sensations must become greater and greater to get a reaction. Culturally, that’s where we’re heading. I mean, the Saw series is essentially clever kills, and they are clever, but they work as kind of Rube Goldberg Machines of murder. I grew up when we used to rent Faces of Death at slumber parties and tried to gross each other out. Some of the stuff I am putting into PLUNDER is freaking me out. I’ve definitely asked myself where the hell that came from, or showed my wife a script sheepishly. That’s how I know I am hitting the right notes. There are more situations and set ups than I had in FEEDING GROUND, but part of that is having more experience writing for this medium. 

BD: The last five pages are just relentless in terms of gore, scares, and incredible set pieces. What kind of discussions did you and Skuds have to develop these intense scenes and what are you most excited to unleash upon people in the future?

SL: Thanks for that. The truth is, much of that is Skuds’ genius. Where I have laid out the story beats, dialogue, images, and the emotional moments, he made sense of that visually. The geography and making sure it hits at the right time is what Skuds was able to do. He is so talented and one of the true pleasures of working with him is how he is constantly surprising me with how he elevates a script. Though his work ethic is next level, it seems to be effortless for him.

Editorial also played a big role in helping create the tension through parallel action. All the essentials were there, but I rewrote this bad boy MANY times. I am really fortunate to be working with such a talented team. I am not working in a bubble. For me, comics are as collaborative a medium as film. I’m not sure how other writers work, but I live on notes. I just happen to be getting some really great ones.

As far as the next issue, without revealing too much, I can’t wait to see some of the hallucination sequences. Again, I wanted to push this as far as it can go, but it is rooted thematically, and in character. I don’t want ‘strange for strange’s sake.’ I just want to give you some honest nightmares.

‘Plunder’ #1 hits comic shops Feb 18th.