"Fast, Wired, and Sexy": James Tynion IV & Elsa Charretier on The City Beneath Her Feet
DSTLRY founding creators James Tynion IV (Spectregraph, Something is Killing the Children) and Elsa Charretier (November, Love Everlasting) have cooked up an intense romance that leaves both parties reeling, showing how one steamy chance encounter can forever change lives and beg the question: how well do you really know someone?
Zara is a sad and struggling writer, trying to prove to her publisher that she’s not a one-hit wonder. Jasper is an assassin who's impossible to wrangle. In no way should these two have ever met, but that’s the beauty of the New York City subway system. Told with the boroughs of the Empire City as the backdrop, The City Beneath Her Feet #1 (out 12/11) promises to be a fun and feisty flirtation, introducing characters that you will instantly be drawn to and yearning for more.
The City Beneath Her Feet #1 Cover A by Elsa Charretier
Known for his mastery of genre storytelling, Tynion IV shows that he can tackle a love story steeped in his adoration of Tarantino films and rom-coms. As for Charretier, she is one of the most exciting artists in comics today; her style has proven robust enough to reinvent the romance genre for comics with each passing project. Ernie Estrella spoke with the CBHF creators about their collaboration, while Tynion shares what his next decade of work will draw upon, and Charretier gives us a fascinating peek into her creative process.
This is the first time you've collaborated with each other, right? Which of each other's projects made you an immediate fan of the other?
Elsa Charretier: CBHF isn’t our first collaboration, but it is our first time doing a full series together. We first worked together on The Department of Truth #6, which is, to this date, one of my favorite things I’ve ever drawn. At that time, I knew of James the person, but hadn’t read any of his work. By the end of the script, I thought, boy, this can’t be the only thing we do together. Most of James’ comics are born out of what I can imagine must be thousands and thousand of hours of research, an incredible ability to leave out the boring parts and gift each character with the right amount of knowledge that moves their storyline—no more, no less. That is a very rare thing. Add to that deep character dynamics, and you’ve got one hell of a writer.
James Tynion IV: We followed up The Department of Truth working on a short film and comic project we Kickstarted together, called Room Service with PK Colinet, which also had the benefit of flying me out to spend a week in France on the film shoot late last year. It was there, sitting quietly on a stairwell while bloody scenes were being filmed in front of us, that we started jamming together on the central ideas and cast members of The City Beneath Her Feet, and decided to bring the project to DSTLRY where we were both Founding Creators.
What I love about Elsa is the two of us approach both the industry and the work very similarly. There’s a lot of thought and effort that goes into every decision, but there’s still a lot of play and discovery. More than that, I love her character work and I think of stories character-first. The moment we were both excited about this story, I knew we had something special.
The City Beneath Her Feet #1 Cover B by Anwita Citriya
When you start off any series and you do a metaphorical rorschach of what this series is going to be, what you wanted to work on together, what brought you to the roots of The City Beneath Her Feet?
James Tynion IV: I had assassins on the brain. More than that, it had been two years since my last Superhero project, and I was itching to get back to something that had a flair of action to it, while still rooted deeply in character. And I love, specifically, how Elsa draws women. All of these elements started pooling together, along with some developments in my personal life that I’ll leave to the readers' imaginations, and I began to feel the central premise of the story. A Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Assassin comic, where an extremely dangerous person stumbles into a sad writer’s life and upends the whole thing. It started with the key central characters and I remember being so nervous that Elsa wasn’t going to like them when I pitched them out. Thankfully she saw the power in Jasper Jayne as quickly as I did.
Elsa Charretier: I’m like most artists: I need a change of pace after each project. I had been working on Love Everlasting with Tom King for over two years before diving into CBHF. Love Everlasting had some of the most incredible character moments I’ve ever been gifted with. A slow pace that allowed me to put the best of my art in these sequences. Little to no action, pure, mundane, powerful gut-wrenching emotions.
So it was time for some blood and violence! I wanted this book to feel fast, wired, and sexy. I wanted exciting character designs and iconic faces, and James delivered the perfect script to go wild.
Tell me more about Zara and Jasper. They're New York women, clearly know how to accessorize, and they're ex-lovers. One's an assassin, the other is not. What pulled these two together and what pulled them apart from each other?
Elsa Charretier: I think we’ve all been there: falling for someone who's everything you aren’t. No matter how open-minded and willing to get past your boundaries, it almost always fails, doesn’t it?
James Tynion IV: I think that’s exactly right. There’s a strange kind of magnetism that you can find in the wild that’s absolutely intoxicating. You start to want to change everything about yourself to be the sort of person who would attract that kind of person again. But there’s a cost to that.
What or who is at the heart of this series?
Elsa Charretier: Some people enter your life and shape it forever. Alive or gone, their pull, their influence never really goes away. You’re inextricably linked, for better or for worse. I think that’s a terrifying thought. Zara’s life does a 180 the moment she locks eyes with Jasper. And it’s nothing, really, it’s not some big event, some big incident that you’re sure to remember. It’s just waiting for the subway at the same time as Jasper enters the station. There’s one version of this moment in which Jasper is just some normal, slightly eccentric sexy pixie girl and they both have a one-night stand and never see each other again. And there’s another, the one you’ll read, in which the sexy girl is an actual assassin and Zara’s life is forever haunted by the consequence of spending the night with her.
James Tynion IV: The character of Zara is a novelist, and she approaches the world very much the way I do. Writers like to tell the stories of themselves, and use their fiction to make sense of themselves. People can become these catalysts for self-definition and send your story in a whole new direction. Jasper Jayne is that to Zara… But the flip of that is Zara is much more enamored with the idea of Jasper than the brutal reality of her, and when that brutal reality comes crashing down on her life, she has to rewrite the story she’s been writing in her head, and find new definition for herself.
The City Beneath Her Feet #1 Cover C by Annie Wu
With stories set in New York, it's inevitable that the city becomes one of the characters of the story. James, you live there and Elsa, you've mentioned how this is such a contrast to your French country living. How big of a part does New York City play in this story? It is technically in the title of the series. Elsa, how much is James feeding you about the city, or have you been to NYC enough to capture its essence?
James Tynion IV: So, readers of my work know that I do a lot of stories set in Wisconsin, where I grew up from age six through high school, but I was born in New York City, and have now spent over half of my life in the city. If the first decade of my work was me processing a lot of the emotions I had growing up, I feel like the next decade will be me processing the emotions of my young adult life and the only setting for that, that makes sense to me, is New York. I knew I wanted to tell a kind of urban love story that didn’t feel like a pastiche of the city’s past, but still felt a vibrant part of it. It’s not about nostalgia for how New York was, it’s about capturing the ups and downs about what New York is.
Elsa Charretier: When James mentioned New York as our setting, I thought, ugh, so many windows. Cities are daunting. My personal nightmare. You absolutely want to translate the feel without having to pencil buildings for 16 hours a day and ultimately drown your characters in details. However, if I start viewing New York as a character, like you mentioned, then I’m interested. Like all characters, it needs nuances and design choices. Now I’m very interested. I have been to New York enough to get its feel, but the real work lay in how to interpret it, and what to show. In my style, the interpretation part is mostly cartooning—taking the most defining features, like a sticker-covered lamp post or a taco stand, and amplifying them. As to what to show, it’s generally a process of elimination. I take out one element after another: a building in the distance, a detailed facade, until we start losing the essence of the location. It’s a pretty time-consuming process, but it’s very creative and makes the pages feel so much lighter.
James, you've mentioned previously that Quentin Tarantino and rom-coms are a major influence for The City Beneath Her Feet, what films specifically were the ones more mesmerizing and influential for bits and pieces of this comic? And visually, how much has Tarantino, if at all, been an influence for you, Elsa?
James Tynion IV: On the Tarantino front, Kill Bill is probably one of the most important works in shaping my thoughts on genre world building, character, and aesthetic. I used to watch the VHS tapes on this shitty little twelve inch plug-in television/vcr combo in my bedroom in high school. It’s just fully in the fabric of who I am. On the Rom/Com front, I’m a disciple of Nora Ephron who I think does some of the best dialogue in the business, and captures a much fuller breadth of humanity in her work than it often gets written off as. When Harry Met Sally is one of the great New York Movies. There’s also films like Hannah And Her Sisters and Metropolitan—stories that aren’t exactly romantic comedies but are funny adult dramas about people who live in the city. And these are all vibes I don’t really get to tap into in my horror work (though Ephron sneaks into my dialogue every day), so it felt like the moment I tapped into it it all started flowing out mercilessly.
Elsa Charretier: Kill Bill’s beautiful violence has permeated our culture to the extent that, when I think hand-to-hand combat, I think of The Bride. Kinetic, precise, Bruce Lee-inspired choreographies, characters not subject to gravity, profusion of blood and gorgeous. So, really, Hong-Kong cinema.
Could you both talk about your other team members, colorist Jordie Bellaire and letterer Aditya Bidikar, why they are so reliable and maybe things they've done that have surprised you on The City Beneath Her Feet?
James Tynion IV: I think it all starts with the cover for me, which was the first bit of color work Jordie did on the series. Elsa and I guided her toward taking it in an electric, eclectic direction. We wanted the series to grab your attention from the stands.
The City Beneath Her Feet #1 Cover D by Marley Zarcone
The level of wardrobe detail in the character designs alone, show the thought that's been put into this series. It is really exciting, especially for those who love to pore over the art to see how much storytelling is going on here. Talk about taking the storytelling to that level, not only to give readers all of that information but creatively telling a bigger story than what's at the center of each panel or what's in word balloons and captions.
Elsa Charretier: Environment storytelling is such a huge part of the input artists can have on a story. Take Jasper’s place. If this girl—crazy high heels, cropped leopard print jacket and a double-split long purple skirt held by a big safety pin—has some plants in her apartment, of course it’s going to be cacti. And because she’s a pretty intense lady, it’s going to be ALL cacti. The rarest she can find, and lots of them.
Then, with super high ceilings, you’re thinking, one big chandelier, right? Again, pretty intense lady. She’s got dozens of them. All shapes and styles. When you look at that wide shot of her apartment, you’re wondering, who does that?! That's exactly it, WHO does that? And that’s one more little block in Jasper’s personality that needn’t be in a dialogue.
That’s very empowering for readers. It gives them a chance to be more active in the storytelling rather than being force-fed character information. You feel like you’re piecing things together, that you start to understand who that character is rather than solely being told about it.
The City Beneath Her Feet #1 Cover E by Elsa Charretier
Speaking of a bigger story, something I like to ask creators is about DSTLRY's format. James, you're already familiar with it working on Spectregraph, but what is it with the bigger canvas that lends to a premium story to tell? How did the expanded canvas (Especially on splash pages) help or challenge you creatively, Elsa, whereas the standard US size of comic page is more limiting?
James Tynion IV: I love the scale of it. It feels weighty in your hands. It commands your attention, and when it’s done it makes this big beautiful book you can pore over forever. I’d spent years envious of the French bandes dessinées format, and when Chip and David told me that they were creating an avenue for creator-owned comics in the US in that style, I couldn’t help but jump at it. I very, very badly wanted to play in the format. More than anything though, it’s a showcase for the artwork. My challenge for myself with City is that even though I had room for 12-panel pages and my usual bag of density tricks, I paneled this out five panels a page for the full piece and let Elsa do what she thought best with it all. And the result was simply stunning.
Elsa Charretier: I went from no breaking panels, ever, to, how about no panels? That’s how much the DSTLRY format has expanded my creativity. I’m glad I got to test it out with my story in The Devil’s Cut, though. It was great practice that informed what I should and shouldn’t do with it. This may sound counter-intuitive but I realized I needed to make the pages breathe with panels with no background, and plenty of negative space. With that much space, it’s tempting to add panels and cram as much drawing as possible.
Fill in the blank: The City Beneath Her Feet will take you _______________.
James Tynion IV: To NEW YAWK CITY! Ahahaha! Look, this book is a fun book, but it’s also a book about very real adult emotions. I think people are going to show up for the vibrancy, and stay for how the series makes them feel. I’m very excited.
Elsa Charretier: Are you trying to give me nightmares? I don’t know, Ernie, I DON’T KNOW!
