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Why I Love... FVZA!

Welcome to another edition of the Why I Love column, where I, Eric Ratcliffe, pick something I've read, played, listened to or watched to discuss with you fair readers. This week's column has the return of good friend David Hine as he and I talk about FVZA from the beginning to the end. He also teases a few new projects down the horizon and talks about his take on vampires and zombies. FVZA follows the story of a grandfather and his grandkids who join up with the FVZA to take down a threat that only he knows how to handle. We did the interview in parts as each issue came out so it may seem disjointed in a few places. Without further ado I present the interview!

Eric Ratcliffe: The first question I really want to ask you Dave is that it seems that most writers who take on characters or creatures or myth's with pre-established bases try to completely change them from what they originally were (myself I look at twilight as the example of it being done wrong, 28 Days Later being done right) do you feel that it's easier to respect things that have come before it with the basic "rulebook" and modify it from there?

David Hine: Actually I'm fascinated by the existing vampire mythologies. I used the Vrykolakas of Greek legends in Spawn and I'm currently working on another, so far unannounced project where I'm researching traditional vampire myths going back centuries. The vampires we've gotten used to have grown from Polidori's story "The Vampyre", written in the early 19th century, which in turn influenced Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and then the "Nosferatu" and "Dracula" films. There are lots of other myths that depart from the images we're used to. In medieval times, vampires were traditionally fat and ruddy-faced from all the blood they drank.

"Twilight" is a particularly anemic version of the vampire myth but I have the advantage of building on the FVZA web site where a very detailed background has been created. I try to keep to the history and science that have been established there and to build on and develop that. It's a two-way process because the web site has recently created a public service movie for Youtube that incorporates material from the comic.

Eric: Will we be delving into the process of how vampires are sired at all?

DH: Vampires can't literally be sired because all vampires are sterile and the males impotent - so no vampire sex I'm afraid. Vampires are created by a virus in the traditional way - exchange of body fluids - usually through a bite. 90% of those infected die from the disease, the remaining 10% turn vampire within 24 hours.

Eric: In creating the back-story for the book, reading the holocaust moments were interesting to me with how dark it went...were you at all concerned with how people would react to those scenes?

DH: I knew we'd have some complaints about bad taste for using the Holocaust. No subject should be taboo for a creator though and good or bad taste isn't really a criterion for me. Hugo's biography on the web site had already established that he had been deeply affected by his experience of entering a concentration camp to find the inmates had been deliberately infected by the Nazis. I saw no reason not to include that. What I've done is to reflect on that scene in Part 2 of FVZA. I don't want to reveal too much about that yet, but the link to concentration camps and the Holocaust does raise questions about the way the FVZA dehumanize zombies in order to be able to take away their human and civil rights.

There have been a few negative comments about our referencing the Holocaust, one questioning my integrity. I think our treatment of the scenes was entirely in keeping with the way the Nazis operated. In our alternative history the Nazis would certainly have felt no compunction about using the Undead virus on Jewish prisoners. I know there is an argument that the Holocaust is such a unique and barbarous event that it has a special place in history. There is this concept of "Holocaust integrity" which suggests that no fictionalized version should be created, that any mention of the Holocaust should adhere strictly to the historic facts. Personally I believe that when you are clearly dealing in fiction there are no taboo subjects. This isn't Holocaust denial and we are making some serious points about humanity and the violation of human rights by the state. I'm sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the concentration camp scenes but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Eric: Something I'm extremely curious about is the family aspect of the book, will we be seeing this play heavily throughout the book?

DH: You're right and it's something I often try to put into my books. I like to explore personal relationships and family does come first after all. If you read District X and Spawn you'll see that the family relationships are very up front. And in FVZA family becomes even more important as the series progresses, including of course, our zombie family.

Eric: In the book you are treating the vampire situation as a virus which I think adds something interesting to the classic mythology which to me always seemed like more of a curse then a virus. This connects to something that I found interesting where the teenage/young adults treated vampirism as something cool like the "goth phase" which I've always found kind of weird. Do you think for that generation in this world it's more of a rebelling thing or do they really know the terrible disease they are emulating like we see towards the very end of the book?

DH: It's been over thirty years since the last vampire was sighted. Thirty years is ancient history for a teenager. It's like when I was a kid and my parents would talk about the war, rationing, the Blitz, all that stuff. You know about it but it's unreal. As kids we would play war games and romanticize the war without being too concerned with the reality. It's like that with these Vamps. They were taught about the history of vampires but they've created their own fantasy in their heads. It's definitely a form of rebellion too. I remember early British punks like Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux wearing swastikas, not because they were Nazis, but as a misguided gesture of confrontation and defiance to their parents' generation. You just do anything to get up the noses of boring old farts.

As for Goths, I had a bit of a Goth phase myself, wore black clothes and eye-shadow and hung out in clubs like the Batcave in London. In fact I recently saw the reformed band Bauhaus. I still think their song 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' is a classic.

Eric: Did I read that right? Zombies seem to be evolving similar to what George Romero did with zombies getting a little smarter.

DH: The zombie and vampire viruses are continually evolving. In issue 2 we saw that sunlight doesn't necessarily kill vampires. That has been mankind's one sure defense. Vampires only come out at night. The day that is no longer true, we really will have reason to be very afraid. Similarly zombies are relatively easy to deal with because they're slow and stupid. Some of our zombies are clearly retaining some of their faculties for longer. What is most disturbing about that is that it's harder to kill something that is no longer perceived as inhuman. Zombies are traditionally the ultimate cannon-fodder. You can hack them to pieces and blow their brains out with no real sense of guilt. But if they still have their humanity it's going to be a lot harder to justify slaughtering them. I'm interested by the idea that vampires and zombies could have the same basic civil rights as the rest of us. Something I'd like to explore in the future.

Eric: Landra seems to have trust issues with those trying to get close to her; do you think this is because of the way she was brought up?

DH: Absolutely. Hugo deliberately isolated the kids and instilled them with his own sense of paranoia. Landra and Vidal had very little contact with other kids, and their education was a combination of intellectual rigor and almost military-style physical training. That doesn't make it easy to relate to other people, particularly when you throw sex into the mix.

Eric: So with issue 2 now out it seems to me one of the underlining themes to the story is about humanity and raising questions about what makes something human to a certain extent. Am I way off here Dave or have I picked up on something?

DH: That was always the core of the story for me. I'm very interested in what defines the boundaries between human and monster, human and mutant, human and alien. And is our humanity bound up with our sense of purpose and morality? If so, then when the behavior of certain characters becomes exceptionally cruel and self-serving, are they in some sense less human than the 'decent' vampires or the zombies? When the federal agents mock the zombies, their laughing faces become dehumanized masks. The agents hide behind masks and costumes when they carry out their slaughter, something that reaches its Apex with the torturer, Mr. Mouse.

Eric: So I'm curious, the ending of the book ends on a sentence that just trails off, there is no "the end" was that kind of intentional? To revisit the story down the line or was that just having a little fun with the scripting?

DH: I wanted a poignant ending to the story. Throughout the series we've seen Hugo Pecos as this obsessive guy who has put the pursuit of the Undead before everything, even being willing to put his own grandchildren's live on the line. I wanted to show that there was a time when he was just a young guy in love with a beautiful woman and they had their whole lives ahead of them. It underlines how appallingly corrosive to human happiness the vampire virus can be.

The story is certainly open-ended in the sense that we now there are still vampires out there and we can assume the zombie virus has not been totally eradicated. I hope to be able to continue the story in the future. I have a story loosely plotted that will be set a few years down the line. I want to take a look at the European Vampires and how they manage to survive and integrate into European society. I also want to explore how the ever-present threat of the Undead affects everyday life in the USA - I envisage a more extreme version of the anti-terrorist/Homeland Security laws, where civil rights take a backseat to safety and security.

Eric: Hugo kept a huge secret from his grandchildren, is there a possibility that things would have gone differently if he had told them the full truth?

DH: That's impossible to know. But the whole story is full of "What Ifs?" What if Hugo had killed Yaelis when she was first infected? He acted out of love and that had terrible consequences in the long term. This is a guy who was constantly wrestling with moral dilemmas and seemed to make all the wrong choices for all the right reasons.

Eric: do you think Vidal's death would have been prevented if he didn't try pulling the hero move?

DH: This is another example of characters struggling to make the right choice. If Casey and Vidal hadn't been so abrasive and confrontational they would have stuck together. Casey provoked Vidal by insinuating that he was abandoning his sister to die. Casey is nothing but heroic throughout, yet he indirectly caused Vidal's death. He has that on his own conscience now and Landra is going to find that hard to forgive.

Eric: So Casey and Landra probably won't have a happy ending? I'd think after all this the poor girl deserves it.

DH: If we get to a second series, I'll explore Casey and Landra's relationship further. It will be difficult for them but there's a strong attachment there, so they may work it through. Not all relationships are easy.

Eric: Are there still vampires loose out there that the FVZA still has to handle or was this like a last hurrah for them as a species?

DH: Europe is still crawling with vampires - remember the Mafia-style meeting headed by Nephilis. These guys have set up a whole network across Europe, using all kinds of corrupt influence to maintain positions of power. They have survived by keeping a low profile, but the FVZA know they exist and they will want to pursue them. Kind of like the USA pursuing terrorists across the world. They may not always get the cooperation they want from foreign governments.

Eric: With FVZA wrapped up you move on to Detective Comics and the long awaited bulletproof coffin, any other projects on the horizon?

DH: A couple of ongoing series from DC, yet to be announced. A mini-series from Top Cow, yet to be announced, [and] Ryder on the Storm from Radical. Ryder is more or less written, Wayne Nichols is starting on the art. I'm just starting on a new unannounced project from Radical and there are a couple of other projects bubbling under. Most of this stuff I can't talk about yet, but it's all greenlit and should all be out later this year.

Poison Candy Volume 2 has also been finished for a while. We're hoping to make an announcement about publication fairly soon (that's 'soon' in comic book time).


Well that's it for this column folks, join us next edition as we talk about a show that's about to hit its milestone 100th episode!

Eric Ratcliffe is a young writer/pop culture journalist/interviewer currently working on pitching a project named the Hunter chronicles. When not reading his weekly stack Eric can be found watching DVDs, playing on his 360 (gamertag: Zack Hunter) or just surfing online trying to find a scoop or two. Brand new to the Comic Related family, Eric is a fun new voice. Eric shops at TJ's Collectibles. Visit them on the web at www.tjcollect.com!