The upcoming project from Legendary Comics called Shadow Walk – which poses the question ‘what if the Biblical Valley of Death was a real place?’ – may have been written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Shane Davis, but the story was crafted with help from Legendary’s Thomas Tull and World War Z creator Max Brooks. The latter went about the process of building a world and creating the bible of facts from which Waid was able to draw from. Crave Online spoke with Waid earlier about this project (and more), and now we get to get Brooks’ input on the whole process, including what he loved about what Waid has done with his springboard, and another big project from Brooks and Über artist Canaan White called The Harlem Hellfighters, about a black regiment in World War I that was set up to fail and did everything but.
Check out Crave Online’s exclusive interview with Brooks about these projects right here.
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CRAVE ONLINE: How does it feel to be known as “one of the founders of the zombie renaissance?”
MAX BROOKS: I am?
CRAVE ONLINE: Many of the descriptions of The Zombie Survival Guide seem to call you that.
BROOKS: Well, that’s very flattering, but I don’t know how accurate that is. The truth is I’m in no position to judge my impact on the public at large. That’s for other people to decide. I just do what I do and I hope people like it.
CRAVE ONLINE: How did you like World War Z, by the way?
BROOKS: I thought the book was great! I worked very hard on it.
CRAVE ONLINE: How about the film?
BROOKS: I thought the film was a big, exciting Hollywood movie that just happened to have the same title as a book I once wrote.
CRAVE ONLINE: Fair enough! How did the Shadow Walk project coalesce around you? It seems to be an interesting approach, having you write the ‘bible’ for it, so to speak, then Mark Waid scripts it from that.
BROOKS: That’s all Thomas Tull. It all started with Thomas, and he has a business model where he wants people to be in as comfortable a creative environment as possible in order to get the best product possible. So he called me into his office and said ‘hey, I’ve got this idea – what if the Valley of Death from the Bible was a real place? What would be the science behind it? What would the geography be? Where would it be and how would that affect the politics of the region? So he tasked me with the making of a world. That’s what I do for him a lot, I build worlds for him. He always asks me ‘how are you most comfortable working? Do you want to collaborate on this, do you want to step away?’ And I said ‘you know, I’m kind of a novelist, and I don’t want to step on another writer’s toes, so I’ll build the world and then I’ll pass it to the next guy.’ And the next guy was the awesome, awesome Mark Waid. I think he and Shane Davis are the heroes of this story. They are the ones who did all the hard work. I just got to be inspired.
CRAVE ONLINE: Some people would say doing all the detailed research you did would be considered ‘the hard work.’ You don’t agree with that?
BROOKS: I don’t agree with that at all, no. For me, it’s doing what I love already. I already love the research and trying to figure all this stuff out. The challenge is the rewriting. The challenge is the crafting of the story and then having to go back and revise and revise, and getting notes, and then to work with an artist. Comic books are a visual, collaborative medium, so to have to make sure that the script matches the images, and to make sure you’re in sync – I think that is an extremely hard job. I think credit for the ultimate success of this project would go to those guys.
CRAVE ONLINE: How many other worlds have you built for Thomas Tull?
BROOKS: That’s a good question and I’d really have to think about it. You know, a lot of stuff sits on shelves, a lot of stuff is in development, but yeah, I’ve done a few for him, and those have always been really fun, exciting experiences.
CRAVE ONLINE: So how did you become the go-to world-building guy for him?
BROOKS: I don’t know if I’m THE go-to world-building guy, but I think maybe I became one of them for Thomas. I don’t know if there are any others, you’d have to ask him. But he came to me because he read World War Z, and he said ‘I love that you took something like zombies, a fantastical idea, and grounded it in reality, and if possible, I’d like you to do be able to do that for me.’ I’ve always been a fan of Legendary’s stuff. They do great stuff, so I was honored to be asked to work for them.
CRAVE ONLINE: How detailed did your building process get? Was it more just the geography of it and general biblical research, or did you help design the monsters that Shane Davis brought to life so impressively?
BROOKS: The visuals come from the artist. If you think the monsters look cool, you’ve got to thank Shane. My research came from using common sense and trying to answer basic questions. It’s all about answering questions. You start off by saying ‘well, if there is such a place that is sort of the nexus for all evil, it would have to be in a geographical area where A.) there are very old civilizations, and B.) it would have affected other civilizations, where people would have passed through. For example, you couldn’t put it in the Yucatan Peninsula, because it’s simply too isolated. You couldn’t put it on the Tibetan Plateau. So the Fertile Crescent is the perfect place. It’s one of the oldest places of human civilization and, unlike China, it’s a crossroads of civilizations. Peoples have passed through it over millennia. Once I established that, the rest was easy, because that was the compass needle. Then I just had to study the history of the region and pull from that.
CRAVE ONLINE: I don’t know if this was you or Mark, but if it was you, what inspired the notion that the region expanded and contracted based on the general amount of warfare in human society?
BROOKS: You know, that’s a really good question. To be totally honest, I don’t remember, it was so long ago. Look, I’m going to be honest – once I passed the torch, I stepped away. I did not read the finished project until last night, and I was blown away by what I read.
CRAVE ONLINE: Did it bring back any memories you’d forgotten, or surprise you with the directions it took?
BROOKS: Yeah, and what I was shocked about was the sheer cojones of Thomas to let some of the stuff from my original proposal make it into the final cut. I would have bet you anything that certain things never would have made it in.
CRAVE ONLINE: Like what?
BROOKS: Like our character, our good ol’ Southern boy, pissing on the Confederate flag.
CRAVE ONLINE: Wow, that was you, huh?
BROOKS: That was me, because I studied the Civil War as a kid, and what always struck me as such an unspeakable tragedy was that the bulk of the dying on the Southern side was done by dirt-poor Southern boys who, by the way, never would have benefited from a Southern victory, anyway. Had the South won the Civil War, their lives would not have been helped. They would have gone right back to their dirt-poor shacks. So they were fighting and dying and taking Yankee bullets for the sheer benefit of the original 1%. The tiny elite slave-holder class who, by the way, thought those people were worth less than spit. They valued their slaves more than these guys, because at least their slaves, in their minds, were valuable property. These guys had no worth until the Civil War came, and then their worth became cannon fodder. I was always shocked by that, so I thought ‘what if there was a character from the South – good ol’ boy, redneck as they come – who understood that?’ He’d say ‘you know what, I love the South with every fiber of my being, and therefore I despise the Confederacy.’ That sounds great in theory, but I thought ‘ain’t no way they’re going to let that in the final cut. You’re asking for hate mail and you’re asking for a huge backlash.’ Lo and behold, I open up the book and there it is. Wow, Thomas. He’s like one of those old British tank commanders who leads his tank riding up top through the hatch, taking all the bullets.
CRAVE ONLINE: Speaking of that kind of dynamic, you’ve got The Harlem Hellfighters coming out next year, which is a fictionalized account of a black regiment during World War I. You don’t hear a lot about The War To End All Wars these days – World War II gets all the press.
BROOKS: Yeah, no kidding.
CRAVE ONLINE: So what inspired you to research this, and how fictionalized is it?
BROOKS: The first question is, I’ve been interested in it for 30 years. I heard about it when I was ten or eleven years old, and I’ve been researching the hell out of it. As far as how fictionalized, it’s actually not that – the only reason I call it fictionalized is because a couple of the characters are fictional, and a couple of events have been fictionalized. For example, some of the fictional characters have events happen to them that really happened. But I would say we’re almost right on the money, because I really wanted to keep it as realistic as possible. Even the fictional characters are based on real facts about the Harlem Hellfighters. For example, I have a full-blooded Zulu sergeant. I didn’t make that up because I thought it was cool – the truth is the Harlem Hellfighters did once have a soldier who was a full-blooded Zulu. So I tried to ground everything in reality, because I think that is more interesting than anything I could make up.
CRAVE ONLINE: Right. That would seem to be the real point of doing the project in the first place, to get this story out there as truthfully as possible. What’s the work been like with Canaan White?
BROOKS: Canaan is a frickin’ genius. I think the hardest drawing ever is doing historical fiction, or fictionalized history, because you have to make that all real. There are actual pictures. You have to do your homework. You can’t just be creative and make stuff up. There’s a tremendous amount of research and a tremendous amount of discipline involved in that. I think Canaan is just phenomenal when it comes to that kind of discipline. You see it in Über – his ability to pull that off.
CRAVE ONLINE: What were some of the major accomplishments of the Harlem Hellfighters, outside of the fact that they were able to exist in a time when they were considered subhuman by many of the people they were fighting with?
BROOKS: I think that is an excellent question, thank you for asking that. The thing is, as I researched them, I realized that there was more to this story than just their blackness. If you put the color aside, their combat record is unbelievable. They spent more time in combat than any other American unit. They never lost a trench, they never lost a man to capture. They became the first unit, black or white, to reach the Rhine River. The first American to win the French Croix de Guerre, black or white, was one of them. The entire unit ended up winning the Croix de Guerre. When Kaiser Wilhelm launched his final assault to win the war, in their sector, there was nothing standing between Paris and the German army but these guys, and they stopped them cold. If you took the color away, what you would have is an amazing regiment with a stellar combat record, and the fact that they did this in the face of prejudice, I think, makes it even more fascinating.
CRAVE ONLINE: What was their response to all that prejudice they faced?
BROOKS: It was unbelievable, the restraint. They were actually sent by the army to train in the deep South – and by the way, the town of Spartanburg wrote the army a letter and said ‘do not send them here. If you send them here, there will be trouble.’ The army sent them there two weeks after one of the worst race riots in army history in Houston, where black soldiers rose up, and it was a massacre and black soldiers were hung. Why do you think the army would send them to the deep South right after that, especially when the town said if you send them there, there’s going to be trouble? Clearly, these guys were set up to fail, they were set up to be sabotaged. You know, this is like Jackie Robinson in 42, a Legendary picture – ‘the strength not to fight back.’ That was a whole regiment that had that kind of restraint.
So then, when they were not allowed to fight for the U.S. army – the U.S. army finally said ‘we’re sending you to France, but you’re going to dig ditches, you’re not going to fight’ – they were given to the French army, because the French army said ‘we’re bled white, we’ll take anything, and we’ve had good luck with our African troops, so in our reverse racism, maybe we think all black guys can fight well.’ They just fought like lions for the French army, and they have a monument in France.
CRAVE ONLINE: I imagine they fought that hard in part because they were glad the French actually gave them a shot.
BROOKS: Yeah. First of all, they were given a shot to fight, and they were greeted as equals! They were treated like soldiers, and they acted like soldiers. They were there for a very specific reason. The reason they joined was the very reason that their own army tried to sabotage them. They joined to be examples to their own people. This was a very specific time in history called The Great Migration, when millions of black people moved from Southern plantations to Northern factories, and that caused a huge racial backlash. So this was the very time when this new black Northern urban community needed examples of what they were capable of. It was also one of the first times that black soldiers were led by black officers, and that’s really critical, because even in racism, you can say ‘well, black soldiers are good workers, but to have the mental capacity to lead men in combat, no, that’s beyond them.’ And they proved them wrong.
CRAVE ONLINE: Very much looking forward to reading about them doing just that. One more thing, getting back to Shadow Walk – after passing the torch to Mark after your work was finished, leaving the project for a long time, and then coming back to read the final product, what was the biggest surprise inclusion that you didn’t even expect to see?
BROOKS: Other than the cojones, I think the biggest surprise the level of psychological insight that Mark Waid had. He had two little nuggets that, if you don’t look for them, they pass in the blink of an eye, but they knocked my socks off. They’re kind of psychological insights that you can take for the rest of your life. One of them is the notion – and it’s a theory – that people in the pre-science world, the ancient world, would be less impressed by miracles because, to them, everything was a miracle. We live in a scientific society, so if we see a guy turn water into wine, we’re like ‘what the-? How’d you do that?” Whereas, in those days, yeah, water into wine is a pretty impressive miracle, but then again, so is lightning! I think that’s a really fascinating insight. And then he had something so basic, I think you could take that anywhere for the rest of your life, which is the difference between a cynic and a skeptic. A cynic is trying to disprove a theory, and a skeptic is looking for evidence to back it up. That’s a tiny little psychological distinction which borders on the brilliant.
CRAVE ONLINE: Yes, that was one of my favorite bits as well, and that’s a fantastic differentiation can help people be skeptics rather than cynics, because the two get conflated so often.
BROOKS: Yeah, isn’t it amazing? Nice job, Mark!
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