Maneuvering the end of the world ain’t easy, but it’s where Jeffrey Alan Love is really stepping up.
“It’s so intense that I wonder why I’m doing it because I should be closer to retiring than embarking on the hardest work of my career,” Love said in a recent Zoom chat.
The “it” in question is the forthcoming miniseries News From The Fallout alongside writer Chris Condon (Ultimate Wolverine). Set in 1962, the Image Comics title follows Private Otis Fallows, who is the lone survivor after a “nuclear bomb test goes horribly awry and unleashes a contaminant into the atmosphere that turns people rotten.” Otis then sets off on a journey across the Nevada desert looking for “safe haven — but does such a place exist?”
It’s not just that Love (best known for books like The Thousand Demon Tree and Notes from the Shadowed City) is embarking on an emotionally and creatively taxing book. It’s also his first foray into comics’ direct market.
“I’ve had a lot of near misses,” Love said. “There’s some big writers and people that I really love that I would talk to. And it just seemed at some point they got cold feet, or another project came along and it went a different way. I’d been looking for a writer that could push me out of my comfort zone, but still respect what I do and be excited about it. I feel like I found that with Chris in a lot of ways and it’s been great so far.”
Similarly, Condon is glad he could be the one to help Love “break in,” as it were, after the pair connected following Love’s variant cover for the Condon-penned That Texas Blood #20.
“I really wanted to do something that was going to highlight his work and highlight the very unique style that he has,” Condon said. “I think bringing that into the direct (market) will open people’s eyes. We don’t have to have one set style of what comic book can be. And so in terms of collaboration, I just want to let Jeff be Jeff as much as possible.”
Main cover by Jeffrey Alan Love. Courtesy of Image Comics.
“I wanted to play some rock ‘n’ roll.”
But even as News From The Fallout is intended for a much wider audience, the creators never once tried to make this book “easy” — for themselves or potential readers.
“I felt like I could go into a bar with Chris, and within five minutes, we’d be talking about our favorite films and our favorite books and things like that,” Love said. “And it just felt like there was a simpatico; maybe we’re both subscribers to (The Criterion Collection).”
Love added, “That’s kind of what I want the comic to be — sure there’s room for Netflix and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I love those things, but there’s also room for the Criterion stuff and things that look different. A lot of my influences are South American or European. And in those places, your art style is like your handwriting. It’s not all funneling towards perfection like the American market. But it’s this branching out…this explosion of very unique personal points of view.”
To really set News From The Fallout apart, Love and Condon made some important decisions. Perhaps the most “basic” of these rules is the exclusively black-and-white color palette.
“I come from a background of really being an advocate for black and white film,” Condon said. “Especially in film; it’s one of those things that helps differentiate a film from reality. I think that no matter what you’re showing, whether it’s Citizen Kane or Invasion of the Body Snatchers…all of them have a fantasy element to them because they are black and white, because our reality is not black and white.”
That choice wasn’t just about hearkening back to old movies. (Condon lists the aforementioned Invasion as well as Night of the Living Dead as inspirations). It was also about letting Love hone in on what makes his art so powerful (albeit in a decidedly new way).
“My previous books that I’ve written and drawn for myself, I always think of them as European art film or ambient drone music,” Love said. “They’re not verse, chorus, bridge sort of songs. They’re very repetitive imagery, and very repetitive in feeling. It’s all about instilling the viewer with a deep sense of mood — just getting this emotion across and going deep rather than wide with the story.”
Love added, “And while I love doing them…I wanted to play some rock ‘n’ roll. I wanted to do the three-act thing and tell a good story with characters that affect you and that you care about and that you have your heart ripped out by.”
Variant cover by Jacob Phillips. Courtesy of Image Comics.
“The environment is a character.”
News From The Fallout also does a lot to both lean into and thrash against its inherent genre trappings.
“I think that something that I loved about Chris’ stuff is that love of genre,” Love said. “I hate when people say things should live and die on their own merits. But I think that Chris tells these great genre stories, but they’re about people instead of the genre. There could monsters or explosions or devil worshipers, but it’s more about how it affects the characters. And it’s a little slower, I guess, than some of the more bombastic comics.”
To an extent, genre can be a great way to establish connectivity and assign parameters to a story. But it can also be somewhat limiting. For Condon, it’s about having a roadmap and building onto it for the sake of the story itself.
“For me personally, I do view (Fallout) in, some ways, as a zombie story,” Condon said. “In the scripts, I refer to them as the rotten, not as zombies. But at the end of the day, we differentiate ourselves enough that it’s not just another zombie story. That this is a unique approach using trappings that are familiar. Whatever I do, I try not to have it confined to one particular genre. It’s genre under a vast umbrella; it’s a little bit of everything.”
Perhaps to counter some of those genre “issues,” the creators have another tool at their disposal: setting.
“With Chris, I’m seeing how he’s building the characters and building the scene,” Love said. “And so it’s a way to go back to setting. It’s a way to take this primordial, timeless setting that I would do in my previous books and then figure out how to put people going through horrible things within it.”
In many ways, the dusty, unyielding deserts of Nevada are just as much of a character as our dear Private Fallows.
“In That Texas Blood, the environment is very important,” Condon said. “The environment is a character. And I would say that’s true as well in News From the Fallout. It’s a very sparse landscape, and I really love the idea of people isolated. What do people isolated do, especially in a time where there was no cell phones? And if your phone’s not working, you’re just cut off from humanity. You’re miles and miles and miles away from humanity.”
That notion of humanity feeling distant or disconnected also translates visually. In trying to capture the paranoia and uncertainty inherent to Otis’ journey across this irradiated hellscape, how humanity is depicted becomes another vital storytelling device.
“Jeff obviously has this very unique style in which he uses silhouettes a lot,” Condon said. “There’s one page in particular that I wrote in a certain way that I didn’t ‘t even think about approaching it the way that Jeff actually approached it. I originally had reactions from every single person in this diner (which is in issue #2). The way that Jeff did it was that each character has a moment where you see their silhouette and how each person has a distinct silhouette. So one person has a pipe, one person has glasses, one person looks this way. It’s all really unique. I think that it gives you that chance, visually, to connect to those characters and understand, ‘OK, this is this person and this person,’ and then you just go through the rest of the issue and it all just makes sense. It all just clicks.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
Regarding scenes like that one, Love took inspiration from another comic to add these rich layers to individual moments.
“In 100 Bullets, Eduardo Risso does this great thing where…Brian Azzarello will write the script and it’s two secret agents talking,” Love said. “Then Risso will do this crazy thing about two drug dealers getting in a fight in the background. That was not in the script at all, but it’s a way to make the conversation have more feeling.”
“The answer is never detail.”
It’s never just about making some neat callback. The use of silhouettes, for instance, also helps this book stand out further from its “competition.” Part of that’s in addressing issues inherent to many direct market stories that are often easy and relatable above all else.
“I think to go to the silhouettes…there’s a reason that a lot of superheroes have masks and costumes: it makes it easy to say who it is,” Love said. “It makes it easy to draw. It makes it easy for the viewer to identify. If you really look at an X-Men or an Avengers book, they all look the same. The only thing that’s different is the costume or maybe the color of their hair.”
Love added, “I painted myself into a corner because I took what I do for covers for so long and was like, ‘I’m going to do that for panels.’ It’s like I’m painting a cover for every single panel, and there are hundreds of panels (here), and so I’m trying to push it in an iconographic way. Like, that’s the guy with the gas mask. So it comes down to storytelling and identification, but it’s also the ease of the art.”
For Condon, there’s even more still. It’s very much this profoundly human process of connecting and sorting through relationships with things and people.
“Jeff’s style gets into this primitive thing, where you are looking at shapes and you’re coming away with an impression of what that shape means in whatever panel you’re looking at,” Condon said. “Or if it’s a cover, you’re intuiting that from the cover. That’s something that is probably ingrained from us from way back and looking at cave paintings. You’re really seeing these people as the guy with the pipe and the guy with the glasses and the lady with the hoop earrings. I think that it just works on this fundamental level.”
That focus on fundamentality is also rather interesting. As the creators continued to find ways to make News From The Fallout feel novel, the iconographic approach was also a way to counter a “trend” among modern American comics.
“In the U.S., because of Norman Rockwell’s influence, everyone thinks it needs to be photo-realistic,” Love said. “It’s like a stage play — how many things do you need on the stage to tell the story that you’re telling? It’s not about throwing as much detail as you can in there. The answer is never detail, unless you’re Geof Darrow. The answer is never throwing a bunch of details to fix whatever the problem is. The problem is readability and clarity. What do you need to take something away?”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
In some ways, that very line of thinking reminded Love of why he had problems entering the direct market in the first place. Luckily, he leaned into past advice from another artist to encapsulate the visual tone and messaging across News From The Fallout.
“I was at this science fiction-fantasy convention, and I just felt out of place because everything was so highly rendered and so realistic,” Love said. “But there was an artist there called John Harris, who’s this fantastic fiction book cover artist. He does these giant paintings that are very abstract but still tell a story. And we just started talking about painting, and he said, ‘What most of these people don’t realize is that you don’t have to just paint the figure; you can paint the air around the object and that will describe the object just as well.’”
“Some of the best horror is funny.”
Little style bits and other tricks might be cool, but they only work so much. They’re not so much a crutch, but they don’t let News From The Fallout fully truly click and tell a hugely meaningful story amid a crowded market.
For the creators, this series has to be about one thing and one thing only.
“No matter the genre trappings, or whatever that we’re pulling from and using, I think the thing that sets our story apart is that it is about humanity and humanity’s struggle with itself,” Condon said. “That’s something I try to interrogate in whatever I’m doing. At the end of the day, that’s something we all experience: what it’s like to be alive.”
Condon added, “What we’re really doing is telling a story about people trying to survive in a insane circumstance. Why is Otis doing the things that he’s doing? Why is he not following orders that he should be following? It’s all about, for me, humanity and what people’s character says about them when they’re in a situation like that.”
As such, the book isn’t just terrifying and gory, but there’s also very much a certain spark of warmth and joy. (Well, as warm and joyous as you can get with irradiated ghouls.)
“I think humor is really important in horror,” Love said. “There’s a literary genre called grimdark. And there’s nothing more descriptive of that than it hits real grim and real fast; it’s just nothing but dark stuff all the time. And some of the best horror is funny.”
Case in point: Across News From The Fallout, there’s a recurring gag where Otis is constantly shooing away different animals.
“I spent a good five minutes laughing,” Love said.
Courtesy of Image Comics.
But there’s a bigger reason for this kind of “gimmick” beyond entertaining the creators.
“There’s a book by Keith Johnstone called Impro,” Love said. “That’s a really great storytelling book. It’s all about how you set up your story. And then when you keep going…you’re not going to keep adding new stuff; you’re just going to reincorporate the things that you introduced at the beginning.”
This humor, though, is just another tool in News From The Fallout‘s mighty bag. Ultimately, it’s about making this book practically crackle with familiarity and depth to bring in readers.
“The main thing for me is readability; does the comic read? Is it a flowing experience? That’s above style,” Love said. “I want people to just move through the story and get sucked into it and be part of the experience and then maybe be like, ‘How the hell did he make that mark?’”
It’s, obviously, a sentiment shared by Love’s own collaborator.
“I want people to get lost in the book,” Condon said. “At the end of the day, I think that that’s going to be the thing that we want them to do. Like Jeff was saying, we want them to be absorbed into it and not really even be thinking about it…and have it flow from panel to panel.”
“Why isn’t everybody putting on masks?”
Even as News From The Fallout is funny enough and invites readers into its hellscape with true gusto, the book never shies away from having a pointed message or big themes to address. If anything, it’s all of that sharp style and huge textures and deep personality that makes Fallout‘s larger ideas more terrifying and more relatable than comparable tales/titles.
“There’s something creepy about something happening to the human body that you can’t control,” Condon said, referencing the book’s cinematic inspirations a la Body Snatchers. “There’s something infecting people, and you want to protect the people that you care about, but you can’t from this ideological threat. What do you do in this impossible situation? Anytime there’s a disaster — 9/11 or someone attacking with a bomb or Oklahoma City — there’s a fine line between sanity and insanity. And once normalcy is ripped away, you see the animalistic nature of people come out.”
To some extent, this degradation of humanity is meant to be translated for the here and now, and the duo are very much interested in how this loss of control has dominated our shared psyche in recent years.
“I really wanted to dive into that because I think that at the end of the day, again, we’re in a lot of ways going through a similar thing situation now, but from within,” Condon said. “Whereas before the fear was that it was coming from outside with the threat of communism or whatever. Now the threat is here and it’s from within. We’ve seen that quite literally in the last four years — whether you want to say that it was the infection itself or whether it was the strain and stress of being put through an intense situation. Something changed people.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
As such, Otis becomes a kind of avatar for our own fears and doubts. He is a man unprepared for these massive shifts, and he must fight his way through a world that’s become more dark and intense and downright weird than he could have ever expected.
“We get to explore who these people are a little bit more because when you’re in these intense situations, obviously, people act differently,” Condon said. “Stress makes people act differently. Anxiety makes people act differently. And it’s just really interesting to see Otis be put in charge and also come up against authority time and again to see how he reacts to that. The things that are developing with Otis…he’s a troubled person. I think that he’s a really interesting character and I’m looking forward to developing him further.”
For his perspective, Love said that he feels a “kindred” bond with Otis. The man is just doing the only thing he can in this new world: Make a little noise in the name of survival.
“The way I view Otis is that he’s kind of like us — he’s me right now,” Love said. “I don’t really go on social media that much, but every now and then I’ll check in on something. And I’ll just be like, ‘I’m the only sane person in an insane world.’ And that’s how I think about Otis is — ‘I’m the only person that’s sane in this insane world because what the f**k are all you guys thinking? Like, what is wrong with you? Why do you not see what is happening? Why have we not imprisoned this person?’ Otis is the anchor of the story. Like, ‘Why isn’t everybody putting on masks? Why is the bunker so close?’ He’s the voice of reason in a world that’s gone insane.”
“Things that you wouldn’t expect to happen in a zombie comic.”
Of course, Otis isn’t the only person with a a story to tell in News From The Fallout. Condon is just as excited to tell other especially personal narratives across this book.
“In issue #2, we explore this character, Rob, and his girlfriend, Irene,” Condon said. “And then, in issue #3, we explore these characters of the waitress and the cook. They have an opening in issue #3 as they talk about where their lives are at in this particular moment.”
As to what we can expect from these other characters, Love said that it won’t be anything you’d ever expected.
“And, actually in the second issue too, the opening scenes that Chris is doing are not the things that you wouldn’t expect to happen in a zombie comic,” Love said. “It’s these sort of quiet moments again. The type of storytelling that would not be in a Marvel book.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
Given how many voices emerge in News From The Fallout, it positions this story as operating beyond our time or even the not-so-distant past. It’s not just about events and trends but, once again, something elemental.
Love shared his own connections as a “child growing up on an Air Force base.” There were Cold War drills while living in Germany; moving to South Korea “when Kim Jong-il was dying”; and even his dad’s work “underground at strategic air command. I could call him and he would have no idea what the weather was like in Nebraska, but he could tell me what it was like in Iraq.” These experiences all crystalized one very important idea at the heart of this story.
“Growing up with that fear as a kid, I didn’t realize it at the time, but there are things in the world out of my control that could kill me,” Love said. “And, right now, there are so many people in the world doing things that could end humanity as we know it at any moment.”
Loved added, “So much of art is trying to integrate what we feel as children with who we are as adults — those defining moments of being scared of the woods or whatever, and then bringing what we know as adults into that and to try to tell a story to deal with that. So, for me, it’s making this a timeless thing and not just a fun retro look at atomic weapons. It’s a human story about people suffering and what they’re going through. And the genre part of it is a vehicle to deliver the emotion of it.”
“It’s only in moments of great pain that we change.”
So, sure, both our world and the world of News From The Fallout are contending with monsters, apocalyptic vibes, and general disarray and disconnect. But as he did in actually co-crafting this book, and trying new ideas and approaches to grow as an artist, Love is also trying to grow as a person. As it turns out, it’s these “tough times” that really do make the most out of all of us.
“I was homeless briefly when I was younger. It seemed like it happened in an instant,” Love said. “Then, when Hurricane Elaine hit, it went from normal life to post-apocalyptic immediately, where people were roaming with shotguns. It only takes one instant for the world to change for any of us.”
Love added, “It’s only in moments of great pain that we change, or that we have the opportunity to change. It’s not when we’re going through our daily life and everything’s wonderful and you’re like, ‘One day I’ll quit drinking.’ The actions tell you who the character truly is, and in a moment of great pain, do (these people) take the action that you would hope you would actually take yourself to be the better person? Or, do you allow fear or greed or whatever to allow you to not take those actions?”
