The following is an interview with award-winning writer Charles Ardai regarding the recent release of the new series, Heat Seeker: Combustion, through Titan Comics’ Hard Case Crime imprint. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Ardai about his shared creative process in working with artist Ace Continuado to bring the Gun Honey world and characters to life on the page, what excites him for the future of the crime noir genre, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Last week saw the release of your new series. As part of the Gun Honey universe, where will readers find themselves in this new spinoff series?
Charles Ardai: Gun Honey tells the continuing story of Joanna Tan, a weapons expert who will get you the weapon you need, when you need it, where you need it, no matter how impossible. Heat Seeker tells the story of Joanna’s ex-girlfriend, Dahlia Racers, who has a very different criminal specialty: If you’ve been marked for death, she’ll help you disappear, using various techniques of disguise, illusion, and misdirection. In the new series, Dahlia is hired by a scientist to help his 12-year-old daughter disappear – but what he doesn’t mention is that the girl is in fact secretly carrying a biological weapon that could kill millions. So, for the first time, Dahlia finds herself doing Joanna’s job – only it’s a living weapon she has to smuggle, one who doesn’t even know how dangerous she is.
BD: What can you tell us about your shared creative process in working with artist Ace Continuado to bring the story and characters to life on the page?
CA: Ace is fantastic – working with him feels like working with the best storyboard artist in Hollywood. I dream up these big action sequences full of impossible stunts and insane reversals, and he figures out how to show it on the page, so it all works even better than I originally imagined. There is literally nothing he can’t draw, and he finds ways to put the pages together so they’re exciting and dramatic, with tons of movement and dynamic angles and figures breaking out of the panel borders and so on. I keep trying to stump him – what if Dahlia has to escape on horseback? What if she has to leap from a high hotel window onto the outstretched arm of a giant billboard shaped like a beautiful woman? And he just nails it every time. I like to think we push each other to ever-higher peaks of imagination, since we want to top ourselves with each new storyline, sort of like the Mission Impossible folks dreaming up some insane new stunt for each movie.
BD: With each new installment within the Gun Honey universe, do you find that it becomes second nature to give voice to these characters and their respective journeys?
CA: Joanna and Dahlia definitely live in my head at this point, and I can hear their voices – I know how each of them would react to given situation. Dahlia is more reckless, wilder, a risk-taker – she gets turned on by fooling people, outsmarting them, and winning against impossible odds. Joanna is darker, more inclined to brood; she’s suffered more losses in her life (Her whole family was murdered when she was a teenager.), and she’s a bit more of a nihilist. She knows she’s the best in the world at what she does, and if what she does involves making it possible for people to kill each other, well, that’s just the way of the world. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think of Dahlia as more of a Tom Cruise type and Joanna as more like Christian Bale. You wouldn’t think those two would make an ideal couple, but there you go. Maybe that’s why they’re exes.
BD: You have created a plethora of crime noir content for today’s readers, as both an award-winning writer and a publisher. In looking at the current landscape of crime noir and what lies ahead for the genre, are there any new directions that have been most interesting for you?
CA: I love reading what other writers come up with – people like Christa Faust, who has a new traditional novel coming out from Hard Case Crime next March (The Get OFf), but also recently did a terrific comic called Hit Me for AWA Studios, or Jason Starr, who wrote The Next Time I Die for us and Silicon Bandits for Magma Comix. I’m excited to see so many new crime-themed comics making it out to readers, since crime as a genre has not always been as well represented in the comic book world as, say, science fiction or horror (or superhero stories, obviously). But the fact is that crime fiction can be amazing in comic form – for heaven’s sake, Batman is a detective, the original Flash was a police scientist, Catwoman is a jewel thief, all the classic superheroes fought crime. Why wouldn’t you tell crime stories in comic form? But for years you didn’t see too many, and I’m thrilled that, bit by bit, that seems to be changing.
BD: Are there any other projects – past or current – that you would like to highlight for our readers?
CA: Well, anyone who enjoys Heat Seeker: Combustion should certainly check out Dahlia Racers’ first series, just called Heat Seeker, and there have been three series about Joanna Tan: Gun Honey, Gun Honey: Blood for Bloody, and Gun Honey: Collision Course. But if you’ve read all those, you might try the 6-volume collected Ms. Tree by Road to Perdition author Max Allan Collins – he’s the OG crime comics guy, and the Ms. Tree stories still hold up as some of the best crime comics ever.
BD: Lastly, what would you like to tell fans who want to learn more about Heat Seeker: Combustion #1?
CA: Oh, man – just pick the thing up and read it! It drops you right into the action, literally from the first panel on page 1. And you really don’t need to know anything about the character in advance to enjoy it. If the sight of a beautiful woman leaping from gondola to gondola across the Grand Canal in Venice to get away from gunmen who are blazing away at her doesn’t make your heart beat at least a little faster…? Check yourself into the ER, my friend – you might just not have a pulse. 🙂
