What inspired you to write Lord of Thundertown?
When I started living on my own I moved into an old warehouse, and started working with my roommates to re-zone it as residential. The work on our end was pretty easy, but our landlords refused to make any changes. The building was bought and sold three times when I lived there and we suffered through all kinds of slumlord behavior designed to get us out. Heat, water, and electricity habitually went out. Counters and cabinets collapsed. Once, the ceiling in the kitchen fell in.
Each landlord tried to claim they had no responsibility to us. The first one didn’t want to be part of the rezoning process at all, the second one argued the rezoning was illegal, and the third one argued that they never signed a lease with us. In order to keep a roof over our heads, we all had to follow exact rules of protocol.
The whole scenario felt very surreal, and some of the things we had to do felt like superstition. For example, if we wanted to fix anything ourselves, we had to write to the landlord three times. At one court appearance our lawyer instructed us to say nothing, except for one four-word phrase he’d underlined from New York State’s Tenants Rights Constitution. Being instructed in such a static way, in the face of agents of the state who had no emotional connection to our situation, was like doing a quest in a fantasy novel. Pick these mushrooms, throw them in the well, knock on this green door but only speak to the man in blue.
The characters existed since I was in high-school. My friends and I used to pass notes to each other with our characters interacting on them. Initially, my characters were supposed to populate a slice-of-life story written because I felt like my experiences growing up in New York weren’t represented anywhere in media, but I could never create a plot. Just little scenes, long enough for a four-panel comic.
When I started toying around with the idea of State Government being run by ancient monsters with just a grasp on humanity, Alex and Nails were the obvious protagonists to cast in the role, and Sam was added when I was reading early @nothwell drafts and he mentioned feeling weird about not having any women in his books.
I’m gonna try to find some of the doodles I used to draw with Alex and Nails. I think Charlie still has some of our notes.
