From The Cold Dead Hands of Briggs Land

by Vince Brusio

Stories rooted in everyday life can be the most gripping because they remind us that danger can lurk across the street, and we’d be utterly clueless until the first shots are fired. Brian Wood brings that sort of real world violence into this latest series for Dark Horse Comics, and in the ongoing tale that's now collected in Briggs Land Volume 1:  State of Grace TP (NOV160062) he gives us enough detail in this exclusive interview to help us understand why the story was picked up for TV by AMC. And they did it in a heartbeat.

Briggs Land Volume 1:  State of Grace TP (NOV160062) is now available to pre-order from the November PREVIEWS catalog!

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PREVIEWSworld: Tell us why you decided to develop Briggs Land into an ongoing series instead of a mini-series.

Brian Wood: Like some of my other books — DMZ and The Massive — for example, the more I thought about Briggs Land and started to think up ideas, the more ideas I got, and I realized it was one of those bottomless story pits, where the world is set up in a way to supply itself with years and years of material.  We did 72 issues of DMZ, and that was a grind at times, and when it was over I told myself I didn't want to do another series that runs that long.  I've changed my mind: I see the same potential in Briggs Land. As does AMC TV, hence the TV show.

PREVIEWSworld: Did David Koresch and the incident in Waco, Texas have anything to do with inspiration for this story?

Brian Wood: Absolutely, but really I got more inspiration from Ruby Ridge and from Tim McVeigh.  Ruby Ridge is/was an absolutely terrible tragedy that really puts the FBI and the federal government in the hot seat.  Oklahoma, by contrast, is another tragedy, but one that grew and festered without anyone in law enforcement seeing it coming.  Briggs Land fits neatly between these two real-world examples, the homegrown extremist elements in a culture that, by and large, is simply looking to live separate and free from the world.

PREVIEWSworld: Is the plight of your characters similar in any way to what's going on with reports of cattle ranchers' disputes with the federal government today?

Brian Wood: Similar in terms of ideology of the people involved, but obviously the Oregon wildlife refuge takeover was small potatoes, the butt of Internet jokes more than an actual terrorist threat.  I think the earlier Bundy standoff in 2014 was far more alarming, and you can google up images of sovereigns and patriots aiming sniper rifles at law enforcement.  It’s a chilling sight.  But one thing that's pretty evident in my research is that 95% of these types of groups really don't accomplish much at all, there's not a lot of organization of resources they can bring to bear.  But the remaining 5%, it can get scary and bad.  That's when bombs start going off, mosques get burned, churchgoers get shot, and huge amounts of weapons get stockpiled.  The Briggs family is definitely within that 5%.

PREVIEWSworld: How did you create references for your characters? Who were the models for Grace Briggs, for instance?

The Briggs family is modeled after the classic sort of mafioso thing we've seen in media plenty of times, the crime family.  I started with that and then tweaked each character to fit the culture and the setting of Briggs Land.  But it never really came together until Grace came along... the early versions had a man in that main role, a tough Tony Soprano type, and while it worked ok, once I swapped him out with Grace, man, it really came alive.  That suddenly created all sorts of interesting conflicts and relationships within the family that weren't there before, and Briggs Land transcended that mod family stereotype.

PREVIEWSworld: The solicitation for the book says this story has been optioned already for an AMC series. Tell us how that came to be, and what input will you have for the show?

Brian Wood: So years and years ago I met with AMC when they wanted to take a shot at making a DMZ television show.  That never came to pass for a bunch of boring reasons, but I now had this contact at AMC who I kept in touch with.  We'd have coffee a couple times a year and I would unofficially show him pitches and early scripts for everything I was working on, on the extreme off-chance they'd be interested.  It took about 8 years but it finally paid off when they read the Briggs Land pitch and wanted to make a deal immediately.  

This is notable for two reasons:  all I had was a pitch, I hadn't written anything yet, there was no artist, and I hadn't even shown it to Dark Horse yet!  So now I'm in this crazy situation where I'm adapting the source material at the exact same time I'm writing the source material.  I'm simultaneously writing two versions of Briggs Land, which sounds like sort of a nightmare, but I see it as an opportunity.  Because I'm writing both, I can do it in a way where the two versions complement each other.  The TV show can expand on details and show things the comic can't, and vice versa.  So once both versions of Briggs Land are out there, they paint a fuller picture.

And my input is very significant.  I'm creating the show, I'm writing the pilot, and I'm executive producing.  Once we get past the pilot stage and into series (fingers crossed), I'll actually be on set.  I'll be walking around Briggs Land, the world you'll be introduced to in the comic.  Pretty cool.