I Don’t Fucking Sparkle: Interview with Scott Snyder, Creator of American Vampire

With few exceptions, vampires in pop culture have largely gone from devouring humans to loving them. Twilight. True Blood. Angel. And even Blade had a little romance during his adventures. I won’t go too far into this rant because The Faster Times has an entire section devoted to vampires.

The new comic book series American Vampire, to debut March 17 under DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint, will soon offer a counterpoint to that domestication. “What always appealed to me about vampires was what made them terrifying,” says series creator Scott Snyder before reeling off a list of his favorites: Near Dark (directed by Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow) and Lost Boys defined the genre as he came of age. The Swedish film Let the Right One In is a recent favorite. And Snyder is particularly interested to get to the theaters to see Daybreakers. “It’s got an interesting concept,” he says, “but more than that, I want to see some scary vampires on film.”

The idea behind American Vampire enables Snyder to explore everything that makes vampires the nightmare creatures they are. Co-written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King (who apparently is a famous writer or something) and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, American Vampire is an epic about the evolution of the bloodsuckers. In Snyder’s series, steeped in Americana and taking place in different time periods and locales, not all vampires are alike or have the same demeanors, anatomies, or weaknesses.

Snyder talks rapidly about his creation, as if he’s coming up with new information faster than he can speak. He’ll check himself occasionally, anxious to discuss every facet of his project, but wary of giving away too much detail.

Faster Times: I would expect DC/Vertigo to be really secretive about one of their superhero properties and less so about a creator-owned title.

Scott Snyder: They are being secretive, which I see now is a really good thing. At first, I didn’t get why it was so important to tease things out, and I think publicity was a little worried about me as a loose cannon or something, like I’d give away way too much – and admittedly, they were probably right. So they coached me a bit for the first couple interviews, but now they give me a long leash. I just get excited about talking about what’s coming, because we’re about 6 months ahead of schedule, and I forget that no one has seen the previous issues yet.

FT: The project seems pretty epic. What was its genesis?

SS: I came up with it a few years ago in the most mundane way. I was in a hobby shop in the West Village and I was looking at the statuettes and figurines for a present for my friend who’s a big Dr. Who fan. And there was this statue of an undead Confederate soldier, and I started thinking how I’m a big vampire fan. And other than certain films like Near Dark, which is my favorite vampire movie of all time, there haven’t been things that explored vampires in settings that aren’t gloomy, rainy, gargoyle, urban, and nocturnal.

The aesthetic of everything, from Underworld, Twilight, Blade, it always has that same greenlit leather-and-velvet thing going on. I thought it would be fun to see vampires with a different character to them, something more animalistic and feral. Not so sophisticated and snobby. They’re always in the same kind of settings, speak with that same aristocratic flair. I wanted something more down-and-dirty, more American.

FT: And that led to the core idea driving American Vampire?

SS: I started thinking about (vampires) that way and the real idea hit me: instead of having just one vampire type, what if the vampires themselves were a different species or a different breed? From there it exploded in my head to have a genealogical tree of vampires from different time periods and locations around the world. I wanted a secret history where the bloodline, every once in a while, hits someone new. Not just a new population in a new country—but something that will randomly mutate and create a new species.

I started developing it around this character named Skinner that I thought would be the penultimate vampire. If there was a new species born in this country before the 20th century, where should that bloodline start? What’s the best context for exploring both the heroic and monstrous in American culture? And the Old West came to mind.

From there, Skinner quickly became the heart and soul of the series. He’s a vicious, sociopathic, fun character—kind of the seed of this whole thing. The series itself follows his bloodline and the ways it changes based on the people he turns.

FT: Skinner originates in the American West. Why that time period?

I’m a huge Western fan, so I started thinking back to this Confederate soldier thing. What if it were someone in the old West? What if it was somebody who embodied these characteristics when America was defining itself against certain Eurocentric elements? The idea of the American West is emblematic of what makes us us.

FT: When did you start writing American Vampire? Did you do it immediately or after you started talking to DC/Vertigo and they wanted you to pitch them?

I did it right away. It was a few years ago. I wrote it down and first thought about doing it as a screenplay with a film buddy friend of mine. We talked it through but it was too big to contain. It was a story that needed more chapters than that form would really allow. As fun as it was to try develop it that way, it was all about Skinner and didn’t feel broad enough. Then I started working on it as a book while I was working on finishing my story collection (ed note: that’s the excellent Voodoo Heart) for Dial Press. I started thinking about it in terms of a series of short stories, and that seemed like the best form at the time, even though I’ve been a die hard comic guy.

FT: So strangely, your initial instinct wasn’t to present the story as a comic book series.

SS: I didn’t have any access to that world. Now looking back, it seems silly. I don’t know why I didn’t try to approach any one about that before. The world just seemed locked off and it never occurred to me how to approach somebody in comics.

FT: How did that eventually happen?

SS: I wrote a couple of stories with supernatural elements and one was a superhero story for an anthology a friend of mine did called Who Can Save Us Now? It’s an anthology where writers come up with new superheroes with new origins. Some are really funny and comedic. There’s one that’s about a support group for superheroes who have terrible powers. The lead in that has this power where he never has to go the bathroom and stuff, and he’s just crying, being like Well where does it go?

There were funny stories and straight-ahead stories. And I did a very straight-ahead one about a character in the forties who comes back from the War in the Pacific where he’s been part of the Bikini tests. He develops these powers as a teenager, sort of becomes the super-villain. Anyway, there were some people in the industry who read the book. We did a promotional reading for the book and Mark Doyle, the editor from Vertigo, came to the reading. This was a while ago now—he came to the reading the summer before last summer. Strange. It feels like it was yesterday.

He came to me after the reading and said he liked the story. He asked if I was a comic fan and I said I was. And then he kind of gave me a pop quiz. What are you reading, who do you like, who are your favorite artists? I just told him. At that time it was the start of Secret Invasion.

FT: That’s a Marvel book.

SS: Yeah, but I didn’t know he was from DC at the time. I had been reading frenetically DMZ, 100 Bullets, Fables. I’d heard they were going to redo House of Mystery. But it was sort of “What are you reading at this moment?” and at the time I had Secret Invasion in my bag. So he asked if I’d be interested in coming into Vertigo to pitch ideas, and I was over the moon.

I met with him for lunch the summer before last. They were doing a series of literary graphic novels like Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic. He gave me a whole collection of literary graphic novels that they’d done over the last few years.

But I hadn’t been really thinking of that sort of thing – which I think surprised him a little. I think he expected me to pitch something less high-concept. But I’d been chomping at the bit for (vampires). It’s not just popcorn stuff, but it was a real passion project. So I pitched it to them and he loved it right away. He helped me develop a pitch for his bosses.

FT: Did it immediately take off from there?

It went back and forth quite a bit. It took a good six months. I pitched it a certain way, with the series beginning with Skinner and the old west. And at that time, there were some Westerns coming out like Lone Ranger. There were certain elements that made them feel uncomfortable starting with the Western.

So they said they didn’t know if they could do it if I wanted to open with the Western part. But there were all these other decades I was interested in exploring with the (Skinner) character. So I decided it’d be fun to start in the 1920s and have a female protagonist named Pearl, a struggling actress from the silent film era. I love that whole environment with the twenties Studio System, the glamor and the Jazz Age, and what’s coming at the end of the decade, with the crash on the horizon.

I came up with a story that would be five or six issues. It’d introduce Skinner but he’d be a more mysterious figure. It went back and forth for a few weeks: how did I envision it, and what would the process be for each cycle? And they took it. It was about a year ago now.

FT: So let’s talk about Stephen King. How exactly did he get involved?

SS: (Vertigo) asked if I knew anybody who would blurb the series, and I know Stephen King—he was incredibly kind to give me a quote for my short story collection. But I didn’t know if he’d have a time to read the proposal, which outlined the first couple of seasons and contained a long description of Skinner. And he wrote back saying he loved Skinner, and that he’d love to blurb it. But if I wanted it, he’d be up for writing a couple of issues, because he loved Skinner so much.

FT: Stephen King volunteered on his own?

SS: Oh absolutely. I didn’t even expect him to even be able to do a quote for it. I asked if he was sure, because if I told (Vertigo), they’d jump at it. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never done a comic so I don’t know if they’ll be that excited.”

So I called Vertigo on a Friday afternoon after the studios closed. I left a message and said that Steve—he makes you call him Steve—said he’d be willing to do a couple of issues. On Monday morning, at 8:30, I got a call from the whole Vertigo office saying, “Did you say Stephen King would be willing to do an issue or two’? So I told them that he was.

FT: What was the extent of his involvement?

SS: Originally he was only going to do a couple of issues. I gave him the original Western proposal for Skinner, which Vertigo didn’t want to start with, and asked if he wanted to pick a couple of moments to write. I knew he had (the novel) Under the Dome coming out, he was working on a musical on the West Coast, and I couldn’t imagine he’d have a lot of time for this. I wanted to make it as easy as possible so I gave him a very clear, almost a paint-by-numbers couple of short issues with Skinner. The majority of it was already written, but there was no dialogue. Just general outline, almost like page breakdowns. Then a couple of weeks in, he was going to do two sixteen-page issues, and he was going to cut them up so there was a teaser at the end of each issue. And he emailed me a couple of weeks after he started. He said he was having fun and wanted to know if he could go off the res a little bit. I was like, ‘Sure, do whatever you want.’

The next thing I got was a third issue with a cliff-hanger. And then he wrote a forth issue, then a fifth issue. And he wound up doing five full sixteen-page issues about Skinner and about his relationship with his adversary, a Pinkerton who caught him when he was alive. And it was just so good. I mean the series as a whole, not just his part of it, is exponentially better for his involvement. I couldn’t be more grateful.

FT: Of course, you weren’t expecting that much story from Stephen King. How did that affect your plans for the series?

SS: We went back to the drawing board and gave him more breathing room, which is what he wanted. He’d felt kind of cramped. We adjusted my story (which took place during the 1920s) and we’d each do five issues: each issue with sixteen pages of my story, sixteen with his, back-and-forth like a double creature-feature, and it’d be a total of 32 pages. The issues themselves have a lot of overlap because his character Skinner is the catalyst for my character (Pearl) turning into the same vampire as him. There are some fun hidden things that cross over from cycle-to-cycle. But (Stephen King’s cycle) takes place in the 1880s and the early 1900s and mine takes place in the 1920s.

FT: How did you make sure that King’s vision stayed consistent with yours? To what extent was that an issue?

SS: It was an issue only because the characters are very close to my heart. Their stories were set in my mind. So admittedly, when he sent that email asking “Would you mind if I go off the res?” I was nervous because I didn’t know what he was going to do. I’ve read almost everything he’s ever written and I wasn’t expecting him to do something bad, that wasn’t my worry at all. My worry was more about what if he came up with something that was great, but that wasn’t in tune with the bible of the characters? How much should we adjust the blueprint?

It was stupid to worry about at all, though, because what he did right away was breathe extra life into the story the way it had been. He wasn’t about making huge plot changes (though he did actually add a lot of terrific twists) so much as enriching the story, extending it and deepening the characters, adding more layers to them, and adding this layer to the whole story about legend versus history.

FT: What else did he add?

SS: He brought Skinner up to the present and gave him a whole history we didn’t ultimately include. He broadened why Skinner is the way he is—things we don’t quite want to deal with now. But it was amazing to watch once I saw what he was doing, there was no question that he was going to do a better job than I would have been capable of. I feel I’d done ten or 11 drafts just to approximate how good he’s been with his stuff. And that was inspiring, because I had to bring my A+ game to this. It’s been a great process and he was very gracious about taking notes.

FT: Did Stephen King ever go too far off the res?

SS: There were a couple of times where he’d kill a character or have some vampire history come out before it should have, but when we mentioned that, he was cool with taking it out. Overall, he didn’t need extensive notes. I give Mark Doyle a lot of credit for handling that. It’s very intimidating to give (King) even the tiniest notes because so much of what he does is so good on the page. He’s honestly a storytelling genius. And at the end of the day, what he needed notes on at all was stuff where he’d jump the gun on certain things. There were characters we wanted to survive for the cycle and he’d tear their heads off.

FT: How did you get paired with artist Rafael Albuquerque?

SS: (Vertigo) gave me a roster of people they were thinking about beforehand. Rafa was on the list, and I was aware of Rafa’s work from Blue Beetle. I went to his site and saw his creator-owned stuff. There were a couple of images where I thought it was really right.

So we approached him, asked if he wanted to do a few sketches of Pearl and Skinner to see what he thought based on the descriptions from me and Steve. And he just nailed it. He got it. Those sketches are actually used for publicity.

If you see Pearl, images of her dressed in this twenties stuff smoking with a cigarette holder. That’s his audition sketch. And the one with Skinner from different eras where in one he’s a ragged Western character and in another he’s wearing a 1920s swing suit with boots. Those he drew just to say that’s how he saw them.

FT: How do you write for an artist? Do you give him explicit instructions?

SS: My relationship with Rafa is very collaborative. From the start I said I wasn’t going to pretend to know what works best on the page as well as him. If you look at the stuff he’s done on his own, his layouts, his compositions, expressiveness – it’s incredible. He’s the kind of guy who thrives when given some room to breathe. So our deal is that I know what needs to happen with the story. I know what beats, what information, what dialogue and action has to happen on each page, and I write a detailed script, but Rafa can always change it up if he has a better way of conveying things. And same with Steve. The series is a hundred times better for Rafael’s creative input, not just his art.

FT: So Rafael Albuquerque is contributing quite a bit to American Vampire.

SS: Not only did he help design the characters and tweaked them in ways that were different than I thought, he designed the whole look of the series – and each cycle. My cycle is more art deco, whereas Steve’s has a more antiquated feel. He did my cycle with crystal-hard inks, very hard panels, then did Steve’s in washes, so it looks old-timey.

FT: The American Vampire narrative isn’t linear. How are you structuring this thing?

SS: Each arc will be relatively self-contained. We have these stories built out in our minds that are five-six issues or eight-nine issues. It’s not the plot twists, but the mystery of the whole world. Each arc is an exploration of a particular decade and reveals secrets of the history of the vampire genealogy, and the relationships between different breeds and humans.

Part of what’s really enticing to us is that it’s not just a forward-moving narrative. It’s an exploration of a whole world and a mythology. Part of the lure of each arc, of each cycle, is that you’ll see characters that you love because they’ll return sometimes in big ways or sometimes as cameos.

We’re doing a lot of work just so each cycle can be broad and have a huge cast of characters to explore certain aspects of that time period. You’ll have characters at different ends of the socio-economic spectrum and they’ll be ethnically different. We really are hoping for it to be a little about American history, as much as it is a popcorn series.

FT: How much research do you do? How much do you have to know about each decade in order to feel comfortable writing it?

SS: We do a good amount. It’s important that the series feel genuinely invested in the decade that the cycle is exploring. Steve is a tome of Western knowledge. He always keeps things very faithful. He just inhabits whatever decade he’s writing about. He uses that language that gets lost in translation to Rafa. He might write ‘Okay cowboys and cowgirls, in this panel…’ and Rafa might ask, ‘Where’s the cowboy and cowgirl?’

Steve has such attention to physical detail. Yesterday, I got an email from Rafa asking what’s a hooked rug. Steve had this one character fall onto a hooked rug and the wine from her glass, which is purple because the sun makes glass purple at that time, all falls onto a hooked rug.

FT: Do you ever get overwhelmed by the research?

SS: In one of the cycles we’ve been planning for the thirties, I wanted it to be a murder mystery and to take place in a city that wasn’t really developed yet. I started doing research on Las Vegas, places in the west that Skinner might visit that were being built but that were suffering because of the economy. I looked into which cities got stimulus money for which projects. That was probably a bit too much. But the fun of it is that just to get a sense (of the decade), we absolutely do a lot of research. We want to know what’s happening in each decade to find things that are hopefully relevant now.

FT: Such as?

SS: The 1920s cycle (in the Hollywood Studio System) I’m working on now has a touch of that desire for fame, rivalry, the studio system that fosters these crazy dreams. The 1930s similarly we’re going to explore the hardships people face in tough times and the things they do when they’re desperate. We have a lot of ideas for the forties and the fifties. What about this overseas? What about this country? And why does this vampire species exist?

For instance, the classic vampire species, the Dracula-mode species, we have a scientific name for them: phylum, genus, species. Why is that species almost the only one left when the 1900s roll around?

FT: On that note, what can you tell me about vampire taxonomy? Skinner, for instance, isn’t weakened by sunlight; in fact, he’s strengthened by it. Does he make fun of the vampires that are harmed by the sun?

SS: Yeah, in a less comedic way. We’ve tried to think through a secret history dating back to pre-modern times with vampire species that are primitive and look completely different than what you’d expect a vampire to look. And there are vampire species that are totally contemporary new offshoots that will surprise even Skinner. Once we start to get into the second and third cycle, we want to create a web site and offer a peek behind the curtain of that genealogical tree, with certain things blacked out.

FT: How about human-vampire relations?

SS: Vampires don’t go unnoticed by humans. We’ll touch on what humans know about vampires. Are they tracing this bloodline, are they aware of it in any way? Are they hunting them? We have a big board we’ve been playing with, a big chart. It’s not a provincial mode of storytelling where we’re completely wrapped up in our own cycle and we’re done and it’s like, What do we do next? My hope is to keep it going for ten years. We want to go backwards, forwards, sideways, everything. I want to explore humans, the original history: I mean, who was the first one? We’ve been playing with ideas for these things. But I wish it could come out quicker.

FT: Are there a lot of social tensions between vampires and humans?

SS: It’s not True Blood where they’re trying to integrate into society and have civil rights, as much as I love True Blood. Admittedly, and Vertigo hates when you say anything negative, but Twilight—I’ve read the book and it’s a great YA book, a great teen book—it’s just not the way I like my vampires. To me, vampires are one of the scariest creations of all time. A classic monster. Like zombies and Frankenstein, werewolves too, which I hope get a good treatment sometime soon. These guys have stuck around because they’re primally frightening monsters.

And each series, like Twilight, brings something brand new to the table. Vampires as approachable, romantic heroes is a new thing. And it’s inspiring to see someone do something new, whether or not that’s within your taste. For all my teasing, I’m very glad Twilight exists. It’s a fresh take on vampires, and it’s very well done.

FT: So you want a darker take?

SS: Twilight is appealing because it re-imagines vampires, but they’re not scary. True Blood does that too – re-imagining them as this under-class- but again, they’re not really scary. They’re always like, “Sook-ay, you’re so purty.” And the whle Bill versus Erik thing – that sort of romantic sex symbol pinup direction… I’m just not into that.

So part of the point of American Vampire is to make (vampires) scary again. In the original ads for the series, we wanted to do pictures of Skinner standing on a heap of dead old-fashioned vampire bodies, grinning, all bloody with smoking guns in his hands. And the tagline was “I don’t fucking sparkle.” We thought about using another that said: “This ain’t your little sister’s vampire.” The idea was that American Vampire is not a pin-up. When (Skinner) changes into a vampire, he’s fucking scary. You don’t want to kiss him.

American Vampire is meant to be completely badass. It’s not just, Well he can go out in the sun. He looks different, he’s a different breed. He’s got different claws, different fangs, different musculature. He’s vampire 2.0 in some ways, compared to the European vampires he’s facing off with. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we really are hoping for each cycle to get deeper into that.

FT: To what extent has writing for comics affected your prose?

SS: I don’t know if it’s affected my actual writing that much. The stuff I write about as literature uses a lot of Americana, some of it historical and some contemporary.

The book I’m working on now has a lot of elements that tie into some of the stuff I’m working on in comics. It’s a literary book, but the main character is involved in the comics industry. There’s tie-in in that way. But in terms of the actual writing, the biggest difference is that comics are so collaborative. To see (your writing) come as a sketch, and to have that immediate response and to be able to joke around and play with ideas is what’s so startlingly different than working in the literary world. I knew that would be the case, but when that happens, it feels like a completely different mode of writing. Writing literary stuff as prose is more isolating.

FT: Do you have a preference?

SS: I love the idea of finishing my book and sending it to an editor, but having stuff that you’re working on as a team—well it’s made me a happier person and it’s made my life better for having that input all the time.

FT: Is one harder than the other?

SS: They’re really different. The thing is, with comics, you have such a sounding board. I don’t know how other writers are—you hear different things. I kind of wish I had that sounding board all the time for literary stuff. There are some writers who write the scripts and send them in, who are good enough that they don’t want (the sounding board), but I’m at the other end of the spectrum.

In that respect, I won’t say comics are easier. You have a support system. Whereas with literary stuff, you have the book and maybe it’s good and maybe it’s not but you don’t know until you’re done. It’s scarier. There’s so much alone time not knowing if it’s going to come out well. With comics, there’s someone who can give you a hand.

But in terms of making it good, I don’t think it’s harder to write a literary short story than it is to write a comic. It’s certainly been challenging to go anywhere near the bar set by some of the people I admire.

FT: You illustrated your short stories in Voodoo Heart. Any interest in more drawing work?

SS: I would like to. I had this delusional idea when I sold (American Vampire) that maybe at some point, if I really practiced, I’d be good enough to try to draw a few issues myself later on. Then I started getting drawings from Rafa, and (my drawings) were nowhere near the level where…it would just be a disservice to (American Vampire).

Because the (novel) I’m working on has comic book elements in it, I was going to draw some stuff for that. I still might do a little, but I mentioned it to Rafa and some other comic artists I’ve been in touch with and they were like “Hey, we’ll do it.” The drawings are supposed to be by different characters in the book. So I don’t know, as long as they’re doing this great stuff, it’s definitely on the back burners.

FT: Did you initially want to be an artist?

SS: I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist. That was my dream through high school. I went to college in Providence because RISD was there and I wanted to take art courses and really try to be both a writer and an illustrator. But there just wasn’t enough access to the type of illustrative art that would help me be a better comic artist. I misunderstood, and it was much more conceptual and abstract art. Modern art and theory. There weren’t a lot of avenues for narrative art, so it sort of whithered for me. But I do have secret hopes of becoming good at it again. If Vampire does well, whch knock on wood it will, and I can get time to myself—because I still teach college—if I can get a couple of semesters where I can afford to stay home and write full time, I’d love to take some classes and get better for myself. Maybe at least I can do a variant cover or something issues and issues down the line.

FT: Do you draw every day?

SS: I don’t really, no. I do it for myself on the weekends when I have a moment. But things have been so busy over the last year to devote time to it. I have a whole closet full of everything though, from charcoal pencils and all different sized pens. Everything my parents and my wife have gotten me for birthdays and Christmases. A whole host of art supplies waiting to be used more than they are.

But the comics that made me love the form as a kid were mostly creator-drawn. Everything from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. And Mike Mignola: I mean, Hellboy is one of my favorites of all time. When you get something that’s such a complete vision of somebody’s, it’s really inspiring. I’d love to do that, but I’m not any where near good enough. Working with these guys has given me a whole new respect and terror for doing that.

American Vampire will be released March 17 by Vertigo. Scott Snyder is also writing Iron Man Noir for Marvel Comics, which will debut in April.

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