ECCC 09: Wacky Hi-Jinks With Brandon Jerwa And Eric Trautmann - With Exclusive Art!

Brandon Jerwa and Eric S. Trautmann are no strangers to critically acclaimed comics, as each has written well-received titles at two major publishers. Brandon has crafted the stories for Dynamite Entertainment’s Battlestar Galactica - Season Zero and Highlander and Eric has co-written DC Comics’ Checkmate and goes solo for the upcoming JSA vs. Kobra mini-series. I had the pleasure of speaking to both at this year’s Emerald City ComiCon and, as the title implies, it was a lively conversation!
PCZ: As Brandon told me earlier, you guys are working on something together, is that correct?

Eric: Yes.

PCZ: …and what is that?

Eric: All we are currently authorized to say is that we are working on a book for DC/Vertigo. It’s a stand-alone graphic novel. We can’t tell you who the artist is yet, but he’s awesome. It’s a name you will recognize. We don’t know when it’s coming out and we can’t tell you anything about what it’s about.

Brandon: It will have a front cover, a back cover and several pages.

Eric: They may be in sequential order.

PCZ: Some words, some pictures…?

Eric: Right! We don’t want to over sell it.

Brandon: Yeah, before Eric can completely make you feel like this interview is a total bust, I was actually referring to Wide Awake, which is our new webcomic.

Eric: Yes, that we can talk about!

PCZ: Excellent, do you have a website for it already?

Brandon: We do, it is www.wideawakeonline.com.

PCZ: And what is this webcomic about?

Eric: It began as sort of a nine-page teaser that we did for the second volume of Image’s Popgun series, which is also available online at Brandon’s wonderful “Anything Goes” column at Comics Waiting Room, complete with Director’s Commentary. It’s a supernatural adventure story, for lack of a better term, about a young woman who has the ability in her dreams to encounter various monsters, supernatural horrors, awful things. If she doesn’t defeat them in her dreams, she wakes up and they’re in the room with her and she no longer has fantastic powers. That’s the general high concept. Sinister demonic forces from the other world are trying to manipulate her power in such a way to bring about the end of the world. If she dreams Armageddon, it will happen.

“It’s a supernatural adventure story…about a young woman who has the ability in her dreams to encounter various monsters, supernatural horrors, awful things.” - Eric Trautmann on “Wide Awake”
PCZ: Is this a full-page comic or a four panel strip?

Brandon: Basically, we are approaching it very much in honor of the greatness that is FreakAngels and we’re going to have a new six-page installment each new chapter. And we are actually trying to keep it strip-like in the layout. It will read like a comic book page, but keeping the panel count low and letting it just serve as a nice little strip piece. We have three issues worth of material plotted out for the first installment, so it’ll essentially be like a big mini-series when it’s done. We’re intending to launch a “zero chapter” on Free Comic Book Day as a free comic book online.

Eric: [The free comic] will be indicative of the format that we’re going to use, six pages. Poor Brandon had written a chapter before we’d had a lot of time to sit down and talk about the format and the first script was perfect for a traditional floppy comic and I said “Yeah, I don’t think we should do that, we should totally do it this other way. Everything you’ve done is great except we gotta do it all over.” And then once he’d stopped hitting me and I’d stopped crying we worked it out. We spent a lot of time looking at FreakAngels and Watchmen.

Watchmen is fascinating to me because it’s constructed almost exclusively on a nine panel grid, which is a deceptively simple layout, but allows you to do some rather surprisingly cinematic effects. Most of Watchmen consists of pans and zooms and, really, camera movement. It’s also really easy for someone who’s never ever picked up a comic book to decode those pages. If you look at a conventional comic book as layouts get more sophisticated readers who’ve been reading comics for twenty to thirty years get it, but if you hand it to someone like my mom, she’d be lost. It’s a webcomic, we’re not just selling the product to comic readers, but to anyone on the Internet. We have the same shelf-space as anyone in that regard. A lot of work went into the page layout and the methodology.

PCZ: Is this something you’re going to collect in a trade eventually?

Brandon: That is the end result that we’d like to get to. Right now we just want the story to be told and get it into the hands of as many people as possible and sort of let their reaction dictate what format to present it in after that. We don’t have any publishers lined up for a trade deal or anything. We figure that will come in time.

Eric: Story first.