Si Spurrier knows exactly what we expect of his comics.
“The standard line is I’m very well known for doing these big, crazy high concept books,” Spurrier said during a recent Zoom call. “And here I am, with a relatively straightforward hard-boiled crime thriller, albeit with a psychedelic twist.”
The thriller in question is The Voice Said Kill, with art from Vanesa R. Del Rey. In the four-issue Image Comics miniseries, we meet Marie, a pregnant park ranger operating in the swamps of Louisiana. When she’s forced into conflict with “one deadly sonuvabitch, out of his mind on shrooms and retribution,” Marie will be pushed to new extremes as she battles for her life (in more ways than one…) It is, as described in press, true “fever-dream Cajun crime.”
Admittedly, The Voice Said Kill isn’t as “complex” or intricate as other Spurrier-penned tales. Instead, it’s much more of a visceral gut-punch, a sweaty, slightly scary journey into a world on the periphery of our own. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still involved in its own right. Because as he explains, Spurrier doesn’t make the kind of distinctions to position The Voice Said Kill as being somehow “safer” or less demanding.
“I see as much distinction between this book and, say, Coda, as I see between Coda and X-Men or any book unless you’re doing two very similar books,” Spurrier said. “And by similar, I’m talking about not just genre…The shape of a story, the nature of your characters, the drives that propel both your protagonist and antagonist, but also the themes that underlie it. Unless you’re doing the same damn thing over and over again, every project feels like a palate cleanser from the one before. So it seems I am doing what amounts to a relatively straightforward crime thriller. For me, it’s as challenging and as delightful and as fun.”
The Truest Crime
In a way, this book is actually a kind of homecoming for Spurrier, as he previously wrote crime novels like Contract and A Serpent Uncoiled. And, sure, he knows how to, for instance, turn the Flash into this robust exploration of identity and marriage. But when it comes to these crime tales, Spurrier knows how to maximize grit and intensity to make something truly engaging and textured. (See the continually underrated comics project Damn Them All.)
Variant cover by Christian Ward. Courtesy of Image Comics.
But The Voice Said Kill has earned a certain attention/distinction before the first issue’s debut, and it’s got Spurrier thinking about all the stuff that isn’t writing/storytelling. You know, the endless context that shapes a book’s trajectory and makes us digest it one way as opposed to another for a myriad of reasons. Politics, if you’re so inclined.
“The really interesting thing is if I could release this as an original graphic novel, then the way that we would go about marketing would be quite different because it is a very self-contained story,” Spurrier said. “Because we have gone down the route of releasing it in four monthly chapters for completely utilitarian economical reasons, that’s just how the direct market works. You have to dip in that pond if you’re going to make your money back, frankly.”
Spurrier added, “We are required to rely upon some of the things you talked about – our brand as creators, the sort of genre tags that, as I said before, I have a bit of trouble with. But if you’re able to describe it as a Cajun crime thriller with a psychedelic edge, then people know what they’re getting and that’s intriguing enough that they’ll check it out.”
Breaking Outta Boxes
Let’s circle back, then, to those comments about genre. That decidedly simple classification, it would seem, is much more of a burden than you’d expect.
“It’s a semantic objection, mostly,” Spurrier said. “I totally recognize that from the perspective of branding and selling any story, it’s very useful to have a ready-made series or a system of classification. The problem I have with it is that it’s not a very good system of classification. Not at all.”
It’s not all semantics, though. Spurrier raises some interesting ideas about the “burden” of genre, and as a creator readying a new release, it’s clearly something that he’s aware will undoubtedly shape the book’s sales, critical prospects, and even just how we perceive of such a simple-but-not-simple book like The Voice Said Kill.
“If I choose western, crime, horror, fantasy, and comedy – five allegedly different genres,” Spurrier said. “What you’ve actually got there is one emotional response, one time period, and one nature of the writing. They don’t even describe the same sorts of things, is my point. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story or seen a movie that doesn’t satisfy, like, eight different genres.”
Ultimately, he and Del Rey just have to play the cards they’re dealt, and hope that people can connect to the story through the genre but not let it shape their experience.
“This is a period Western crime with magical fantasy horror elements; everybody just switched off,” Spurrier said. “Nobody gives a fuck after that point. So we are required when categorizing our stories to lean in the heaviest way onto the most viable genre. In the case of The Voice Said Kill, it’s crime, and that’s probably about as close as you could come. But it’s not like there is a central crime in this story. There’s just a ton of stuff that happens in a swamp.”
Spurrier added, “The whole language of genre doesn’t tell you anything about the one thing that matters to me, which is what’s the shape of the story? What’s the feeling that I’m going to walk away from this with? What is the theme? What is the most elegant controlling idea at the heart of all this stuff? There’s a dozen different things that people look for in a story.”
Variant cover by Tula Lotay. Courtesy of Image Comics.
Like any truly effective collaborator, Del Rey also has similar beliefs.
“It’s more like the atmosphere, the feeling and the energy of the scene, what’s happening in the moment,” Del Rey said. “Like, I can go really, really dark in one scene, but then very light in the next one. And it’ll still feel unsettling and scary. So, no, I don’t think (genre) matters.”
Still, if you’re wondering, Spurrier does, indeed, have a solution for the “problem” of genre.
“If I had my way, I would be putting comics in bookstores amongst novels, and I’d be putting movies in DVD boxes next to them and it would be in some categorization that meant something to me,” Spurrier said. “But, of course, it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else. I suspect there is a better way of talking about how we organize stories and it shouldn’t rely on where they’re told and what timeframe they’re in and ‘Are there laser guns in it?’”
Stories That Soar
Still, this larger issue and resulting conversation isn’t just about creators hating some box they’re arbitrarily thrown into with each new book. (OK, it’s definitely about that.) Rather, it’s the root of a larger conversation about the kinds of stories we let folks tell, and how we can do more to abandon these boxes for more dazzling works.
“All of those things are totally valid because they tell you something about it without trying to cloud your expectations in a way that is purely reductive,” Spurrier said. “That’s what bugs me about it. We’re robbing all stories of the chance to be more than these little pigeon boxes that we put in. And, hey, there’s a far broader conversation there to be had about the comics industry in general.”
Spurrier added, “In my world, if you start from a position of, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there were a far broader variety of truly visionary, truly outside-the-box comics on our shelves, then maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.’ The problem is, we can’t just immediately snap our fingers and make that happen, because after decades of being exploited by a mendacious distribution system, retailers are the one who carry all the risk. They can’t make a couple of bad choices in a row without losing their business. So what do they do? They rely on the same shit that’s happened before. It’s the easiest thing to sell.”
Spurrier knows why the comics industry maintains this status quo: it’s pressure from corporate shareholders, where “every time we have a big success, within three weeks of that big success, everybody in the building is freaking out about how they’re going to beat it next year.” It’s just as much about a lack of long-term planning, with neither of the Big Two “investing fuck tons of money in crime and romance and comedy and history and all the beautiful other genres (there’s that word again) that are so popular in other parts of the world because that would be madness. That might not work.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
So, Spurrier is driving the change he wants to see , and he (alongside Del Rey) made sure to make difficult and interesting choices to push the very confines of The Voice Said Kill.
“I could have done this story with a right down the middle, Marvel-style artist who draws everything very nice and clean and tidy and everybody would read it and say, ‘Yeah, that’s a really good story,’ Spurrier said. “It would feel like a pitch to make this thing into a movie, to adapt it for Hollywood. The great beauty of comics…if we lived in a world where people expected their comics to be avant garde, and to make their eyes water with the beauty and the strangeness of the world, then think how much richer all these experiences would be.”
Totally Trippy
Almost everything about The Voice Said Kill leans fully and utterly into exactly what Spurrier has described. It’s a seemingly direct tale – the hook is “Fargo meets Deliverance,” even if Spurrier said “it’s not” – that doesn’t remain so simple for long.
“By the time you get to issue #2, it’s not what you think it’s going to be. That doesn’t sell any comics, but it’s part of the experience,” Spurrier said. “So it’s really tricky because I’m desperate to talk about it and imagine it as a unit of narrative.”
Spurrier added, “With something like this, it’s this very self-referential, recursive tale with a series of twists and a beautiful finale sequence that ties it all together. You have to rely on the vernacular of familiarity in order to sell that first issue. You can’t say to people, ‘By the way, the ending is going to blow you away’ because, like, so the fuck what – I want to know why I should buy it. That bothers me a little bit, and is one of the necessary evils of the direct market that I could do without.”
Perhaps the best, most compelling manifestation of this whole “that, but sooo much more” dynamic is Del Rey’s art. In a story about a madman and a park ranger entangled in the Louisiana bayou, it’s the look of this book that primes the mind for something truly disarming and affective.
“Vanesa does this thing where her lines, her rigidity when drawing, reflects the environment and reflects the tension of a moment,” Spurrier said. “So there are pages where it’s almost scribbly. It’s almost an impressionistic scribble because that’s OK in those moments. You’re taking a break and you’re letting your mind wander. And then things go bad, or the stakes rise, and everything becomes much more dense and detailed.”
Of her efforts, Del Rey said, “It’s more in the mark making…the style of the inking that I’m using is a little frantic, this double exposure kind of thing. The swamp is a little weird, mysterious looking. It’s dark, shadowy, and trippy. The light, when it passes through the leaves, it gets a little strange while also reflecting from the water. It’s trippy to be in there just as it is.”
That feeling, then, speaks to the free-wheeling approach Del Rey took in crafting the world of The Voice Said Kill.
“I’ve already drawn the swamp in Redlands,” Del Rey said. “I relied on memory and my own experiences of living near swamp areas in Cuba and Louisiana and Florida. Drawing anything is challenging. But I think for trees, it’s more natural for me. I can just take the brush and stamp it like that and make trees that way. I go very intuitive with it. I don’t prepare much.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
It’s not just the line work, either – Del Rey also masterfully plays with our emotions with even a few key changes across the page.
“In movies, we have this dumb thing called pathetic fallacy – ‘Oh, it’s raining, so now everybody feels sad, and something bad’s going to happen.’ The environment gives you the emotional cue that allows you to recognize the way that the story is going to go. In comics, we have so much more of a visual vernacular that we can rely upon to achieve the same effect. And it’s not just, ‘Oh, things are a bit black. The background’s gone blue, so everybody’s feeling sad.’ It’s to do with the line, the simple composition of a bit of inking, and the density of the inking. All these things make you feel stuff when you’re reading it. And we very rarely actually use those tools to make readers feel the way we want them to feel. Vanesa does it instinctively, and it’s beautiful.”
The Bounty of Reality
That sense of magic facilitated by Del Rey comes with a caveat. As Spurrier is quick to explain, the book never goes “full magic or full sci-fi or anything.” Instead, the visuals facilitate something “in between,” and that dynamic is perfectly suited for The Voice Said Kill and its mission to push reality as far as it can go.
“Part of the beauty of working specifically with Vanesa, and specifically in this part of the world, is the fever-like mix of reality and dream,” Spurrier said. “And look, we know from the first issue straight away that somebody’s running around with psychedelics and the whole of Marie’s team has been sent home because somebody put something in the punch at their team barbecue.” Spurrier adds that people assume things “as soon as you start talking about mind expanding substances and the numinous sacredness of some of the places where she’s going to go.”
However, reality itself can be plenty weird for one story.
“There’s a thing that happens very rarely in the deep forest, where as the vegetation rots, it forms a layer of oil on the surface of the pond,” Spurrier said. “It almost never happens because, to quote one of our characters, there’s always some asshole making ripples. But if you’re lucky enough to visit a pond where this has been happening, where the water hasn’t moved in days, you get whole swamps with a rainbow on the surface of them. It’s mind-blowing. And I defy anybody to see that without being transported to some sort of metaphysical state of awe and wonder.”
Pure reality, yes, but only with the slightest forms of assistance.
“The trips I’ve taken before – past LSD experiences and sessions – has inspired a lot of the work for this,” Del Rey said. “The fractal things you see, the wormholes with colors…were very inspiring. It’s this whole mind-body weird melding thing that happens. So after you’ve done (shrooms) a few times, you know that there is a voice there, right? It’s, like, teaching you things.”
Luckily, it’s not just Del Rey and the art that gets to have some fun subverting our expectations and sensibilities. For as much piss and vinegar as Spurrier maintains for dismantling genre lines and pushing boundaries in a serious way, The Voice Said Kill is effective because of smaller, strategic editorial decisions.
For instance, there’s a “gimmick” on the first page: A disembodied voice says, “You can’t be here.” (See the art above.) It’s a small but mighty device, and one with a fun but strange origin.
“Did you ever read the first Aliens Vs. Predator comic? The first sequence, and this is a very patchy memory, is aboard the Predator ship and there’s eggs being loaded,” Spurrier said. “And the whole way through, there’s a conversation taking place between two people who you never see (until, I think, the second issue). And the conversation tells you a lot – it’s simultaneously disconnected from what you’re seeing; they’re pilots aboard a spaceship flying somewhere. But the things they say also resonate with the stuff you’re seeing. And that’s really clever use of simultaneously showing and telling two different things. I was really impressed by that. That was my little tribute to that.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
‘Nibbling Around the Edges’
Predator homages, however, are mere child’s play when it comes to Spurrier’s larger authorial presence across The Voice Said Kill. The book’s core theme, for one, is another instance where things may seem obvious enough, but there’s so much background and texture worth delving into/exploring outright.
“The Voice Said Kill is ultimately, and this will be clear for those who read all four issues, about motherhood,” Spurrier said. “It’s about what it is to have a responsibility to somebody in your life, born or not yet born, which is or should be greater than the responsibility you have to yourself.”
If you’re picking up on a certain primal energy, you’re in the right direction. The choice of scenery isn’t just for presenting another sweaty, Southern-tinged crime caper. The Voice Said Kill marries the personal with the natural in a way that is both cutting and also quite intuitive for this story’s specific goals/themes.
“That paradigm, that drama is explored in this environment, which to me…I visited the Bayou, and it is a place where you might feel like you’re imposing some sort of order upon the chaos, but it doesn’t last very long,” Spurrier said. “And you’re really just nibbling around the edges. The only true rubric in an environment like that is that life succeeds at the expense of other life. All life feeds on life. Everything is constantly living as a consequence of something else dying. And somewhere in that beautiful, horrific natural cycle is an approach to parenthood which speaks to the savage certainty that you would do anything to anybody, including to yourself, in order to allow your child to prosper.”
That seems to emphasize a certain coalescence of ideas and visuals – a flattening (or instead maybe a simplification?) of the human experience within the natural world. But it’s one that makes sense as true stakes (like parenthood) clarify things so instantly and thoroughly. It’s even impacted how Spurrier writes or approaches his cross-medium interests – a solid continuation with his genre “obsession,” if you will.
“So for whatever reason, I’ve always associated my crime ideas with prose and my more world building-esque ideas with comics,” Spurrier said. “The beauty of this particular example being that the environment that Vanesa is drawing is so alien and so capable of transformation and her style anyway is so transformative that she draws the real world as if it were a psychedelic alien planet anyway. So everybody gets their cake and eats it in this case.”
Toxic Heroes
However, there’s no cake for the actual characters of The Voice Said Kill. Without revealing too much, Spurrier said the book “resolves itself into a three-way power struggle between three women: one of whom is heavily pregnant, one of whom is a mother who is missing her child, and one of whom has been, well, I can’t say, but one of whom is not.” He adds that those “different dynamics (crash) into each other and they have to decide what matters most to them in the world. And there’s a hell of a twist halfway through issue #3 that flips the whole thing on its head.”
It’s at this point in our chat that I made a simple observation: How does Spurrier reconcile being a dude specifically writing/talking about motherhood?
“I would never claim the experience of motherhood, because certainly the experience of carrying a child is not something I’m capable of,” Spurrier said. “I have way too much experience of the terrifying, joyous potential of becoming a parent and the tragedy and joy along that path. I think that gives me some, if not expertise, then a standpoint as opposed to a point of view that allows me to weigh in on this.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
Which is a totally valid response to said question. Because it also gets to another central idea of The Voice Said Kill: Asking questions. Much, much less vaguely, the book’s not only interested in pushing ideas about genre and storytelling, but also getting us all to think about these gender roles and who can do what and why that’s all so dang important.
“I have conversations with my male friends every time we go to the pub about what it is that makes a good male good and what is it that makes a good female good,” Spurrier said. “What are the role models we should be showing to our little boys? And we can all rattle off a list of absolute shimmering assholes who are out there at the moment presenting themselves as role models.” Spurrier then made reference to the “Rogans and Logans and all the rest of them.”
Given that total lack of decent role models, then, it makes sense to think about things as operating less on a binary. Instead, we’re all more capable than we seem, even a very pregnant park ranger tracking a swamp psycho.
“The idea I have is that there is no quality anybody has told me that makes a good man, a good boy, a good girl, a good woman that isn’t basically making a good human into a good human,” Spurrier said. “They’ll say, ‘Well, men are strong, aren’t they?’ Fuck that; I’ve watched my wife give birth twice. I am not strong compared. Or, ‘Men are protective, aren’t they?’ They don’t have to be. A lot of men are actually monsters who use protection as a form of domineering power. Maybe, ‘Women are nurturing and caring.’ They can be, but I think I can be those things, too. And I know a few women who absolutely are.”
On The Cusp
If any of that sounds at all like Spurrier’s genre “rant,” you’re damn right.
“The point being, as soon as you start trying to assign…it’s like genre again. We’re back to the conversation about genre,” Spurrier said. “We’re fitting people into these little boxes which are not very useful about telling us who a person actually is…The point is, I feel as a dad and as a person who is navigating a complicated world for which I feel a piece of responsibility, for which I feel my children have to feel some responsibility, I’m constantly thinking about what are the responsibilities we have as people? What are the responsibilities we want our children to grow up thinking about?”
Del Rey also connects to these same notions albeit from a visual perspective. It’s all about finding the heart and soul of a character regardless of their specific situation/circumstances.
“It was challenging but intriguing to me to try to portray a person in this state,” Del Rey said of Marie. “I treat all characters the same pretty much. They’re all people, just Marie has an extra challenge and worries and different concerns.”
Still, Marie’s pregnancy is an especially great source of emotion, tension, and even humor within the larger story.
“It’s the part where she finds Buck in the middle of the swamp and he cuts her cheek and she’s trying to escape but it’s hard because she’s pregnant,” Del Rey said of her favorite scene in issue #1. “It’s a lot of bushes and branches and stuff and she’s trying to get out with a wound on her face. But at the same time, she’s thinking of how bad she needs to pee.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
Given that focus on dismantling social boundaries and barriers, Marie is an especially interesting lead for The Voice Said Kill. For a woman who looks deeply, deeply uncomfortable in almost every panel, she’s capable of truly amazing feats.
“And all of that somehow just allowed itself to settle quite naturally into this story about a woman in a place that is wild and that people are pretending isn’t wild anymore,” Spurrier said. “She’s on the cusp of motherhood and she’s terrified about it. She’s clearly a deep thinker. There’s all these wonderful moments when she worries about the power that she holds. She’s been given a gun because she’s a law enforcement person, but she’s not a police woman. Why the fuck would they give guns to normal people so that they can then stand in judgment over other normal people? That’s the sort of self-interrogatory, self knowledge conversation that I think I would have if I found myself in her position.”
‘Pissy, Brave, Anxious’
At the same time, however, Marie isn’t perfect, and she manages through flaws and struggles across the four issues. It’s a lesson Spurrier gleaned from the aforementioned Fargo (even if that flick still isn’t a totally accurate comparison).
“I don’t think there is any scene in it that doesn’t thrill me,” Spurrier said of Fargo. “The only criticism I have of that movie, and it’s only something that really occurred to me once I had had the idea for The Voice Said Kill and I was starting to write it – Marge is perfect. There’s nothing wrong. She’s never cowardly, and she doesn’t shirk her duties. I may be misremembering as it’s been a wee while.”
No, Spurrier created Marie to be just like some of his other characters: deeply imperfect because that’s the true human experience.
“I just don’t believe in perfect characters,” Spurrier said. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve always struggled to get my teeth into a superhero character. You know, they’ll never ask me to write Avengers because they would all be drug-addled trauma victims.”
Spurrier added, “There’s something so much more interesting in somebody who is like all of us, just human. And in Marie’s case, the whole inciting event that sends her off on this awful adventure is a moment when she’s trying really hard to shirk her duties, and to shirk her responsibility, because she’s scared. She wants to protect her baby. She shouldn’t be out on her own in the field having to confront this crazy fucker who’s waving around a gun and then things happen because things happen and she has to deal with the consequences.”
And through presenting Marie as “snarky, tired, fragile, pissy, brave, and anxious,” Spurrier hopes that readers can connect with her in a way that feels both organic and decidedly challenging.
“And her first instinct, because she knows that the consequences will be so much worse if this comes to light, her first instinct is to hide her tracks, to conceal what has happened,” Spurrier said. “I think I would do the same in her shoes. So I can’t condemn. But, automatically, you the reader are like, ‘OK, I made a choice there. I’ve seen enough movies and read enough stories that this is going to make things worse in the long run.’ And yet she’s doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. I think that’s so much more dramatically compelling and hopefully satisfying when you go through that journey with her. Compared to somebody who either always does the right thing or consistently does the wrong thing.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
As mentioned, Marie will experience “downsides” to her actions. Because it’s not just about making your characters squirm, but doing something to make her journey feel deserved and engaging.
“There’s things that happen in issue #2, you could argue thematically or symbolically, are a kind of punishment that she has to endure in order to redeem herself for the choices she made in the first issue,” Spurrier said. “But that’s getting into sort of wanky, myth-making territory, which is where I live. But let’s not go there right now.”
Follow Your Brain
Marie’s arc across The Voice Said Kill, then, speaks to a larger thread/idea that’s often interested Spurrier. Namely, in the long run of life, things don’t really work out the way you’d thought or intended.
“As we navigate this extraordinary world we live in, so many of the experiences that we have as we get older come down to things that you thought were very complicated are actually very simple,” Spurrier said. “And often the thing that is simple about them is that you’re not the hero of the story, and that’s OK.”
Not only is it OK, but maybe it’s genuinely a good thing. Why try and lead the charge when you can just take the ride and see what happens?
“What a gift to be able to live your life without feeling like it has to be about you,” Spurrier said. “Isn’t that wonderful? Doesn’t that mean that we’re going to be so much happier on our deathbeds than people who think, ‘Fuck, I thought I was the hero. I was a good guy.’ No, you weren’t. There’s plenty of people who do live like that and they’re not very happy.”
It’s generally a solid life lesson that also happens to be perfect for encapsulating the multi-armed The Voice Said Kill. It’s a book about creators skirting their own artistic boundaries; the power of motherhood; the way nature informs and shapes our lives; the tenuousness of our own personal narratives; and even why you shouldn’t mess with gators. Don’t get too bogged down in all that, though, and just let Spurrier and Del Rey help you get lost in the sheer magic of it all.
“(This book is) dealing with a version of reality which is always on the verge of straying out of recognizable, hard-boiled crime thriller and into something much more confusing and much more frightening or wondrous and awe-inspiring,” Spurrier said. “And in a couple of places that transition occurs and we lose ourselves. Marie loses herself, or the story loses itself. There’s always going to be some stray into altered realms, because that’s kind of where I go. It’s where my brain takes me.”
