Your Heaven Is My Hell When Darkness Goes Visible

by Vince Brusio

Long term repercussions from societal upheavals do not always play out in 15-second sound bites for the night’s evening news. Outside of radiation fallout from a detonated atomic bomb, change comes slow for society. Meaning what looks like a good idea at the time can become an airborne cancer without prior warning. Now imagine something like this comes to pass, and it means you have to live side-by-side with demons from Hell. You’re first instinct will be to move out of town. But what if there’s nowhere to go? Writer Mike Carey and Arvind Ethan David address living next door to Hell in IDW Publishing’s Darkness Visible #1 (DEC160427). It’s a demonic thriller. It’s a story about acceptance. You may even see parallels in today’s current events.

Darkness Visible #1 (DEC160427) is in comic shops February 22.

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Vince Brusio: The premise for this series is that demons have now set up a permanent vacation on Earth. That’s biblical in scope! What made you settle on this idea as the backdrop for Darkness Visible #1 (DEC160427)? Were you a big fan of the ‘V’ TV series?

Arvind Ethan David: We are both fans of alternative history, of doodling magic and mystery into the margins of what we think we know about the world.  Mike’s original idea — way back when we started developing it — was the idea of a London with multiple magical races in it (as well as humans), and over time that evolved to this version.

I loved the original ‘V’, one of the seminal shows from my childhood. Remembering Jane Balder’s Diana eating that mouse haunts and arouses me still.

Mike Carey: Yeah, ‘V’ probably is in the DNA of the show somewhere, although as Arvind said it had a long and fairly convoluted genesis. The core idea always had humans being forced to co-exist with another entirely non-human race – not just on the level of individuals, but on the broader stage of politics and actual race relations. In that sense ‘V’ is a really good reference point. We wanted there to be social tensions and political complications in back of the action and informing it. Most great horror is about meeting the other, but that meeting has to be constantly reinvented in ways that make it strange and yet – to put it crudely – topical. Immigration has become the hot button issue of our times, especially in Europe but all around the world. Our Shaitan seem to be the scary immigrants that right-wingers foam and fulminate against, but like all immigrants they have their own story which looks very different from the inside.

Vince Brusio: A “terrorist conflict” has emerged over the last 80 years since Joe and Jane Doe had to co-exist with the former slaves of Satan. So the question we have is, why did it take this long? What were the conditions on the ground that allowed for a previous peaceful co-existence? Do you review that history, and diagram where things eventually (pardon the pun) go to Hell?

Arvind Ethan David: The mill-wheels of history grind slow. Big societal upheavals can take decades or longer to play out. We’ve had free immigration in the EU for 25 years before the Brexit back-lash.  The reverberations of the 9-11 attacks are still being felt across the world, and the “Arab-Spring” grew out of the long slow ticking time-bomb of demographic and unemployment trends in the Arab world.

Darkness Visible is a very grounded demonic thriller, it takes place in the real world at the intersection of politics, culture, race and the man on the street.

We have a sense of our historical time-line, but it continues to get elaborated and detailed as we write, and the format of the series — with every third issue being a “historical” one — allows us to do that organically and bring the reader into the world. 

Mike Carey: Yeah, we start at the point where the fuse has burned all the way to the powder keg, and then we step back to show the stages by which that has happened.

But these are not demons in any strict Judaeo-Christian sense. They’re a lifeform like any other. Their interactions with humanity over the millennia have helped to form our ideas of demons, but there’s no religious or even moral dimension to what they do. They’re all about survival, as individuals and as a species.

Vince Brusio: Detective Daniel Aston is our main character for the story. What makes him so special that he’s the guy who knows how to take on the redskins? Or is he actually in way over his head, and he’s going to find out that playing with fire gets you burned?

Arvind Ethan David: First, saw what you did with “redskins” there, nice! 

Aston’s our guy for two key reasons: first, he’s the cop charged with keeping the peace, with being the thin blue line between full humans and the skin-walkers, and like any good policeman, the challenge is having the trust of the communities you police. Something which is a challenge for Aston. Which leads us to the second reason: Aston HATES the demons, for reasons both personal and generic, he’s very prejudiced and suspicious against them. And that’s about to get complicated for him.

Vince Brusio: From looking at the ashcan, within the first few pages, we see imagery that’s completely over the top. A woman opens her coat to reveal that her torso is actually that of an enlarged demon’s face with a wide grin and long forked tongue. Is this a prelude for how Darkness Visible is going gonzo, and not holding back on the shock factor?

Mike Carey: Well I guess it doesn’t hurt to open on a strong visual – and Brendan made that a spectacular moment. It wasn’t just to shock, though, it was to introduce a theme that’s going to become more and more prominent in the series. The Shaitan aren’t made of flesh. Humans are. When a Shaitan inhabits a human they have a tendency to redecorate. Sometimes that’s deliberate, as with that opening image. The woman in question is making what you might call a vulgar display of power – showing how much control she has over her flesh-and-blood vehicle. But it’s not always something the Shaitan can control. Compatibility is an issue, and so is competence. Some Shaitan involuntarily default to shapes that aren’t fit for purpose or pretty to look at.

Vince Brusio: What made working on this book with artist Brendan Cahill so much fun? Was he given a lot of liberty in coming up with the creatures? How much rope was he given to hang himself? And what are your parting thoughts on how he gave flesh to your fantasy?

Vince Brusio: Brendan’s been tremendous, and a true partner in creating this world. Long before the scripts were written, he worked with us on a rigorous character design phase and helped build out the look and feel of the world, down to the iconography and uniforms. We’re having lots of fun and you’re going to see more and more weird demons coming out of our collective ids, definitely. One of the fun things about the series, though, is that we actually get to work with multiple artists. Livio Ramondelli is doing the “history” issues, bringing his own beautiful backdrops and painted environments to the party.

Mike Carey: It’s a really cool template for a monthly book – to have two art teams, in effect, one for the main storyline and one for the digressions. Which aren’t digressions at all, of course, but different segments of the story introduced out of sequence and from unusual perspectives. By the time we’ve finished there won’t be any gaps, but by closing in on the climax from two directions we get a lot of control over when and how some of the key reveals come in.

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Vince Brusio writes about comics, and writes comics. He is the long-serving Editor of PREVIEWSworld.com, the creator of PUSSYCATS, and encourages everyone to keep the faith...and keep reading comics.