Jim Hardison wrote a great comic series called the Helm in 2008. I’m pleased to say that the stars finally aligned and Mr. Hardison was able to answer a few questions for our readers.
Crave Online: Tell us a little bit about The Helm?
Jim Hardison: The Helm is about Matt Blurdy, an average, or maybe even below average, fantasy-addicted schlub who lives in his mom’s basement and stumbles across an ancient, magical, talking Norse helmet that gives him superpowers. It wants him to be the next Valhalladrim—the warrior of light who protects the world from evil. But it’s kind of surprised by the fact that he’s an overweight, out of work, lovelorn loser. Once it realizes that, it tries to reject Matt, but by then it’s too late. The two of them are connected for life as there can be only one living Valhalladrim at any time. The result is a comical fantasy/adventure/horror story about a superhero whose superpower hates his guts.
Crave Online: What inspired you to create such a unique character in the first place?
Jim Hardison: I was playing around with different ways to complicate a superhero’s life. I’ve always been drawn to superhero characters and I wanted to create a story that dealt with the absurdities and the realities that would be involved. The goal was to make a kind of light-hearted statement about why being heroic might be difficult—apart from the obvious you-could-get-killed kind of stuff. In a lot of ways, I modeled Matt Blurdy after my own short comings—so he sprang out of my personal reflections about why I wasn’t a better person—why I wasn’t in better shape, why I couldn’t be more focused about the things I wanted to achieve in life, why I have such a hard time doing the things that I consider admirable in others.
Crave Online: Where is the story going?
Jim Hardison: Well, ideally the current mini-series (collected in a trade paperback as of April 2009) will serve as the beginning of a longer exploration of Matt’s adventures as the newest, least likely Valhalladrim. I don’t want to give anything away, but this first story ends on a bit of an ambiguous note, hopefully leaving readers satisfied, but with some real question as to the extent of Matt’s powers and the nature of the evil he’s facing. I’ve got quite a lengthy arc mapped out to explore those issues in more depth while continuing to deepen and evolve the relationship between Matt and the Helm and Matt and his own sense of self worth. That sounds kind of serious when I re-read it—but a sense of humor about the absurdity of Matt’s situation will always be a key part of any Helm adventure.
Crave Online: How did you get hooked up with Bart Sears?
Jim Hardison: My editor at Dark Horse, Dave Land, suggested Bart. We were discussing the art style I was interested in for the book and I said I wanted a really Conan like, muscle-bound superhero kind of style to serve as an ironic commentary on the shape Matt is in. Dave thought of Bart right away and I loved his work as soon as I saw it. At the time, I was completely new to comics, so I had no idea who Bart was—otherwise I probably would have been afraid to show him the idea. I went home after the meeting and googled him to see if he’d done anything else and got back ten million hits. By then, Dave had already sent him the story treatment and fortunately, he liked it and agreed to do the art.
Crave Online: What books are you reading right now?
Jim Hardison: I’ve been reading The Goon, Hellboy, Simon Dark, The Dresden Files, the Foxwood Falcons, Fear Agent, Umbrella Academy, Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, Dog Eaters…a bunch of things. I’m new to comics, so it’s like a big huge party for me right now—there’s so much to explore and so many cool books available in so many different genres. Of course, buying them all is threatening to deplete the vast fortune I’ve accumulated by writing the Helm.
Crave Online: What is your dream project?
Jim Hardison: Ah, if only there was one single dream, I might be able to achieve it! I’ve got about five “front burner” ideas I’m actively working on and way too many back burner concepts. The thing I’m most excited about at the moment is that I’ve just finished writing the manuscript for a comedy/horror/adventure novel that is being looked at by a publisher. It’s kind of like The Hardy Boys meets The X Files.
Apart from that, there’s a supernatural horror comic book concept I’m developing that I’m pretty excited about.
Crave Online: How hard was it to break into the industry?
Jim Hardison: I feel kind of guilty saying it, but the whole thing was remarkably smooth and painless. I’ve only recently begun to appreciate how that’s not normally standard operating procedure. I sure wish it was though. What happened in my case was that a friend of mine wrote a graphic novel (Will Vinton who wrote Jack Hightower) and I went to buy a copy at a local comic shop. I hadn’t been in a comic shop in years, and I was totally blown away by where comics have gone since I was a kid. It got me started thinking about how fun it might be to work on a comic. As it turned out, one of my co-workers at my company, Character, used to work at Dark Horse Comics and was still in touch with a lot of the folks there. She was kind enough to offer to set up a meeting for me with one of their senior editors. So, I went through my file of story ideas with an eye toward any that might work particularly well as comic books. I had previously written the Helm as a treatment for a film, but it seemed like it might make a good comic. I worked up pitches for the Helm and a handful of other ideas. Dave Land, the editor, liked the Helm and agreed to pitch it internally. He got a green light and we got started making the book.
Crave Online: Do you have any advice for those looking to follow in your footsteps?
Jim Hardison: I’m probably the last person to ask, as my experience is so limited, but I’d suggest that you write things you’d like to read—create stories that you find interesting and build them around characters who are as conflicted internally as they are challenged externally.
Getting a little more concrete and practical, once you’ve got a good concept, work hard to define the hook that will make the idea compelling for your audience and your potential publisher. Ideally, you should be able to express what makes your story exciting in a line or two—a line that gives the reader some sense of the tone and essence of your book. In the case of the Helm, the hook line was “What if you had a magical superpower…and it hated your guts?”
Crave Online: How do you feel about the number of comics that are being made into films?
Jim Hardison: I guess I feel pretty good about it—although there are some drawbacks. It’s nice to see comics getting more attention and being recognized for their storytelling and art. And, I think that the earning potential of movies is valuable—because the bulk of the comics industry isn’t all that lucrative. If movies based on comic books wind up funding or enabling the creation of more comics, then that’s a really good thing.
In general, I wish that more good films were being made from comics—because the bad ones do the comics they’re based on a disservice and give people the impression that the comics weren’t very good. The fact is, a comic has to be pretty good to be made into a movie—and it would be nice if the movies lived up to the books.
Crave Online: Is that the future of comics?
Jim Hardison: I don’t know enough to answer that question, except to say that if I were a comics publisher, I’d actively pursue movie adaptations of my books because of the financial resources movies make available. Comics aren’t making the money they were in the 80’s, which is sad because it means that comic book publishers can’t always take the risks they might want to. If a comic-based movie made revenues available for a comic publisher to take a gamble on a new writer or an oddball series idea, or even to keep an established but niche property going, then it seems like a good idea.
I think a lot of folks out there may suspect that people write and publish comics trying to get them made into movies—I know this charge was leveled at me in some of the less charitable revues of the Helm—but I wonder if, in some cases, it isn’t the other way around. Comics writers and publishers are making movie deals in order to keep making comics. That’s how it seems to be at Dark Horse. The impression I get is that they make movies—great ones often enough, to finance their love affair withcomics. Wherever that’s the case, I’d say, more power to you.
