Writer Tom Pinchuk teamed up with illustrator Kate Glasheen to create Hybrid Bastards, a mini-series published by Archaia that centers on ancient mythology with a modern, weird twist that fits the hidden eccentricities of its groundwork. We talked with Pinchuk about his interest in comics and Greco-Roman culture, how Hybrid Bastards came to be, and what else he’s been busy with on the comics scene.
Girls Entertainment Network: How did you begin working in comics? Did you always have an interest in the medium, or were you led there unexpectedly?
Tom Pinchuk: I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember, and specifically wanted to write for comics since I was thirteen. Before Hybrid Bastards, I put a few comics projects together that never never went anywhere. I actually had a comic picked up by a publisher in 2005 that we had to cancel because the artist flaked out. So I’ll always make a point to say that I’m glad to be working with Kate, who’s one of the most reliable and hard-working people I’ve collaborated with.
GEN: What is Hybrid Bastards about?
Pinchuk: I’ll go with our official line … Zeus has a reputation for lechery, and it’s driving his wife Hera nuts. She places a spell on Zeus that makes him fall in lust with every inanimate object in sight! Though Zeus doesn’t remember, his godly seed took root. Eighteen years later, his unnatural hybrid bastards wander the world. And because Zeus has a reputation to protect, these freaks have to go. But this motley crew refuses to go lightly!
GEN: How much did you rely on research versus creating your own modern approach?
Pinchuk: I’d had pretty much four of five years of “research” already under my belt from taking Latin in high school. I admire anybody who can make heads or tails of that language, because I was terrible at it. I couldn’t conjugate to save my life. Luckily for me though, Roman culture and mythology were other components of the grade, so I invested a lot of time in that to compensate for my lacking in the language itself. When it came to actually writing this story, I didn’t need to do much research aside from occasionally going back to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to make sure I got a detail right.
GEN: What inspired you to write a comic like this? Have you always enjoyed this kind of mythology, or was it just something that struck you as an interesting spin on the old?
Between Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and the old Jason and the Argonauts movie, I’d always had an interest in the Greco-Roman myths as a kid. However, they were all sanitized versions. It wasn’t until I took Latin in high school that I got exposed to the uncensored stories and found some shockingly twisted sexuality (incest, bestiality and some truly bizarre conceptions abound). Shocking and, quite often, silly. Zeus would always be having affairs with mortal maidens and assuming magical guises to hide what he was doing from Hera. He was a swan in one story and a “golden shower” in another. I couldn’t stop snickering reading that when I was fourteen, and I bet most people can’t either. I always tell people that we’re not really taking that much artistic license with the myths in this comic.
All that aside, I’d chalk up the inspiration behind this book to wanting to do something surreal that really defies categorization. Frank Miller had this great quote in his interview book with Will Eisner. Something along the lines of, “Most American comics are so constipated.” It was something I thought about while writing this—trying to make something that had a sense of freedom. I admire a lot of work from the golden ages of comics and cartoons that had this real free-wheeling surrealism. The cartoonists were making it up as they went along and you’d have these stories with a great dreamy quality to them. Anything and everything could happen, but it always followed its own internal logic. I hope readers will get that sort of experience when they read Hybrid Bastards.
GEN: There are other hybrid bastards than the ones who are main characters in the story. What made you choose those over the others, and why did you decide to bastardize those objects?
Pinchuk: Full admission—it all starts with the pun. I made a list of names that could work as puns for objects (Walter—wall, Carmine—car, get it?) After I came up with the first batch, I figured I’d exhausted the limits of such punning, but as we went along, more bastards revealed themselves to me. We’ve got plenty of ideas for those “rejects” if we get to do another story.
GEN: I found it interesting how you showed the ruination of Zeus, but that you showed how he had already fallen from power. The HBs don’t get a happy ending either, except maybe Hera, Hypnos, and Cotton. Why, out of all the HBs, does Cotton end up succeeding?
Pinchuk: He’s the only one who doesn’t care about revenge! If there’s any moral or message to the story, it’s that the guys who want to get revenge, who have something they need to prove, get stuck in jail, while the one guy who doesn’t want to be bothered with any of that, who wants to advance his own life, is the one who prospers.
It’s no accident that ruination abounds in the story, though. I was reading the Oresteia trilogy (this time for a college class, actually) while writing this and became tickled with the idea of putting such a ridiculous story in the frame of a classical tragedy. So it’s got a lot of the tropes of a tragedy—the horrible realization of a years-long secret, pride causing characters’ undoing, a once-regaled person being reduced to a humiliated state … mixed with manic-depressive apples and pregnant inanimate objects. Actually, if we get to do another story, the revenge cycle would spin further and Cotton would be getting his own comeuppance.
GEN: Do you have any new projects in-the-works? What can we expect to see from you next?
Pinchuk: We’ve done a short that’s set to be featured in the next volume of Image’s Popgun anthology. It’s about a research lab getting revenge on the common cold. I have another surrealist mini-series called Unimaginable, with artist Kurt Belcher, that’s lined up with a publisher. It’s almost done, and there will probably be more announcements about it coming soon.
You can find Hybrid Bastards in this week’s Previews, page 192 (ordering code Sept 09 0596), and at your local comic shop.
