Felines and Phantasms abound in THOMAS F. ZAHLER's THE GHOST WHISKERERS

Andrew Irvin, Interviews Editor, welcomes Thomas F. Zahler into the Yeti Cave to discuss The Ghost Whiskerers, a Storm Kids graphic novel out now from Storm King Productions.

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COMIC BOOK YETI: Thomas, after taking a look at The Ghost Whiskerers in previews, I’m glad I finally have a chance to chat further about this all-ages entry into the Storm King catalogue. I know you’ve got a depth of experience across genres, writing both graphic novels and narrative fiction. Can you share a bit about where your interest in writing for young readers first arose?

THOMAS F. ZAHLER: There’s a quote Mark Evanier had about Jack Kirby, I think, saying that Kirby just did comics. If mob comics were more popular than superhero books, Kirby would have figured out how to do amazing mob books. I try to be the same way. I just want to write good things well. And I like doing the problem solving to figure out how to tell a story that resonates with me and with those parameters.

Working on My Little Pony certainly honed that and made me more interested in younger readers’ work, too. MLP has that sweet spot of being something written for a younger audience but with enough hooks for an older audience. Looney Tunes, the original Star Wars trilogy, Batman the Animated Series all did that. I’m walking in their footsteps.

I don’t have children, but I’m lucky enough to have godkids and a five-year old nephew. He in particular was my main audience when I wrote this.

CBY:  I hope the consideration you've put into this story settles in as he grows into a reader that can appreciate it! I know you’re also from my home state, with Long Distance set in part on my home turf in Columbus. Fellow Ohioan author, R.L. Stine, infused my second grade experience with horror, and my fondness for the genre hasn't abated since. What inspirations made you want to tackle a horror tale with young readers in mind? 

TFZ: Being able to work with Sandy King Carpenter was the big thing. She’s amazing and I wanted to make something with her.

Honestly, I’m not a huge horror guy. I’m definitely not a gore guy. But the more intense, situational stuff resonated with me more. The Thing, Misery, Love Actually… (well, just kidding about that last one). I think the more stuff that happens in my head, the better. And while I didn’t rush to horror movies, some of the TV stuff did draw me in. I remember seeing Darkroom and not being able to turn away. And The Twilight Zone’s “Monsters on Maple Street” remains one of the scariest things young Thom ever saw. 

My remit was to do something spooky but not so scary. Something to get young readers to see this genre and get interested and not drop them in the deep end of the bloody pool.

CBY: It fell neatly into that sweet spot, so the intention was well-met. I don’t think I’m giving anything away in mentioning the supernatural cats at the center of this story accompanying Daniel, our protagonist. Perhaps my all-time favorite Ohioan cartoonist, Bill Watterson, took great inspiration from his cat, Sprite, for the appearance and personality of Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes. Knowing you’ve also worked on the 2012 cat-themed title, Biscuit and Lefty: A Cat’s Tale, were there any cats in your life that gave you the frame of reference you needed to give character to Mal and Halloween, your feline duo in The Ghost Whiskerers?

TFZ: You can’t go wrong with Watterson. He is amazing and was a big influence on me, too.

So, there are very much cats in my life. I have two, Mal and Halloween, and they’re the name and personality inspirations for the cats in this story. I never thought I’d be a cat guy, or even a pet guy for that matter, but these two came into my life and bonded with me in an amazing way during a difficult time.

For the story, having two cats made it dramatically interesting. The cats could play against each other or against Daniel. There was always some amount of conflict or just friction to play against. My cat Mal is amazingly sweet, but takes a long time to be comfortable with new people and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Halloween is a lot more nonchalant, and she likes the people she likes. She’s become surprisingly affectionate in the last few years. So I took those personalities up a notch and made them the cats in my story.

I do not know if they actually see ghosts.

CBY: I also don’t think I’m spoiling anything, as “Ghost” is in the title, but there are a variety of spirits that show up over the course of the story. Daniel’s role in their respective journeys brought to mind M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. What do you think differs in telling a scary story between film as a medium and comics, where you don’t have the benefit of temporal pacing and sound effects to emotionally prime your audience?

TFZ: I’m a big fan of writing your medium. Anything; TV, plays, movies, they’ve all got things that can only happen in their worlds. Comics can do amazing things with time, but there’s a fixed page count. TV and movies can do movement and music, but you’re limited by budget. Here, because of the spooky-not-scary vibe, I was looking for visual ways to show the ethereal. I wound up doing a lot with color. There’s a very uniform look to how the spirits present, and the dark and nighttime scenes are very monochrome for effect. I was setting a mood with color. 

I lose speed and jump scares, but I can also slow things down and let some moments resonate a little differently. Being able to work in a comic book format with cartoony characters let me sand off some of the scarier edges. Then, come the ending, I could add some new things to push it and add drama. So, all the “rules” become standardized in your head and then when things change up in the end, it becomes a bigger deal.

Leonard Nimoy mentions this in his I Am Not Spock autobiography, when he says how Harry Bellafonte inspired his Spock performance. Bellafonte did a concert and didn’t move for almost the entire thing until he raised his arm at the end and that simple movement became the biggest thing. That’s how Spock, always stoic, got that eyebrow arch. And it’s why I like establishing a pattern over and over and then breaking it at the right minute. I think people pick up on that.

CBY: In speaking of the visual structure of comics as a medium, I’d like to recognize this graphic novel was entirely written and illustrated by your hand, which is always laudable given the enormity of the undertaking involved. Can you tell us a bit about your illustration process? What mixture of tools and techniques do you generally employ in your artwork, and did you try anything new or different for The Ghost Whiskerers to obtain the look you were after?

TFZ: Well first, there’s coffee. So much coffee. Except during Lent.

I work mostly digitally these days, at least on production work. I’m glad to work traditionally and I never want to lose that skill. There’s a visceral connection that comes with working with those tools like that. I just did a giant commission for someone and inking it by hand was really special. For every project I have, I try to add something new to the process. Long Distance had the location-based palette, Warning Label had the limited warning label colors and uniform panel grid. Here, I wanted to get into paper and texture, So, if you look, the backgrounds are all on a textured paper and the shadows have a chalky edge different than what I’ve done before.

I wrote a full script on this to start, and then I do my roughs on my iPad. It’s the most direct digital format I have, and it also travels well with me which tends to be when I do my breakdowns. Then I export those files to my desktop computer and draw on my Cintiq in Clip Studio. I’ve worked hard to figure out how to duplicate my traditional ink line in that process, and I think I’ve done well with that. Then I color in Photoshop. That’s where I added the paper textures and shading, too. Also, working digitally makes doing things like the transparent ghost characters a lot easier than drawing it traditionally. I try to find those opportunities where I can, to use the material or the process at the maximum point of its uniqueness.

CBY: Not everyone works across multiple software platforms or devices, so I appreciate you laying out the steps of your process for our readers. As you wrote this story, did you have an idea of where you wanted it to end up being published? How did the relationship with Storm King as publisher come about, and why did this end up being the right home for the book over various other indie publishers with a predilection towards releasing horror titles? 

TFZ: I’d been pitching Sandy for a while, and at a slower convention I got to have a long discussion with her and really listened to what she was looking for. I had the rest of the show to come up with ideas, and sadly lots of quiet time to come up with it. But you never let time go to waste.

So The Ghost Whiskerers was always going to be for Storm King. Basically, we were looking for a Thom Zahler project that I could do for her. And once we hit it, she green lit it immediately.

CBY:  Now, I always try to do as much reading as I can beyond the comic about the creator who pops into the Yeti Cave. I saw you’d worked on The Sky’s the Limit, a Star Trek: The Next Generation anthology, writing a short story called “Til Death” with Bob Ingersoll. Coincidentally, I used to live with Bob’s son, Robbie, as an undergrad in 2006-2007, and I remember Robbie (whom I haven’t seen in over 15 years) mentioning his dad’s ongoing writing in the Star Trek fandom at the time. Can you talk a bit about your relationship to Star Trek (as you’ve done additional writing in support of the intellectual property) and how you ended up working with Bob on the project?

TFZ: Oh, that’s cool to know about Robbie! So, I’ve known Bob Ingersoll for going on 30 years now. He was one of the first professionals I met, and he’s local to Cleveland, too. We did conventions together for a long time, He’s actually responsible for my first paying lettering work on Hero Alliance for Innovation Comics. I’d done research help and was a sounding board for some of the Trek stuff he (and Tony Isabella) had written. My Trek Fu is pretty formidable, and I was a good resource. When he had another opportunity to pitch some Trek short stories, we came up with some together and wrote ’Til Death.

With IDW having the Trek license, working on MLP, and doing my creator-owned projects with them, I kept lobbying to work on Star Trek. There were some almosts and some missteps, but eventually I landed a story for Waypoint about Dax and Worf meeting after the events of Deep Space Nine, and then they asked me to pitch on a Picard comic to go in the blu-ray set they did to tie in with launch of the Picard series. I haven’t had the opportunity to do any more, but I’d really love to work in that universe again. Star Trek is one of my favorite things.

CBY: To that end, I’m curious about some of your other collaborations - what got you involved in the expansive contributions you’ve made to the My Little Pony comics catalogue with IDW? My daughters have certainly gotten me acquainted with the cartoon a bit over the years, so I’m keen to hear about your experiences with that narrative world and the audience, which extends well beyond girls of my daughters’ demographic, from what I’ve heard of “bronies” and their fervent fandom.

TFZ: I got involved with My Little Pony for the same reason most men do most things: to impress a woman. The person I was with at the time was a big fan, and right at the launch, I knew IDW would do more and I asked if I could do a variant cover. Bobby Curnow, the editor, asked me if I wanted to pitch the book, and not being an idiot, I said yes. I went home, mainlined the show, and came up with some ideas. But like I mentioned earlier, the show was a lot deeper and more intentional than I expected. The messages were more complex, but also still age-appropriate. It was a show that could be funny or go on adventures or undertake musicals, and the Mane Six all have a reasons to like each other or get on each other’s nerves. There’s instant conflict and drama there. It’s so much fun to work on and I hope I get to do some more.

The fans are amazing, too. I like to say that as a Star Trek fan I’m very familiar with socially awkward people who like something a little too much. But that’s also just fandoms in general. And getting to spend time with the MLP fans, bronies and pegasisters has been amazing. They’re some of the most kind and generous fans out there. My affiliation with the show has led me on some amazing adventures, and still does. I went out to Germany for a show a couple years ago and got to go to Oktoberfest. I got my picture taken with a bald eagle and got a tour of Houston Space Center. And this year, I’ll be in Italy for EponaFest - all because I wrote and drew some pastel ponies. I’ll always be grateful for that.

CBY: A good lesson about seizing opportunities and not taking them for granted, to be sure. So Thomas, you’ve also found repeated success with stories of romance, such as the aforementioned Long Distance and other titles such as Love and Capes and Cupid’s Arrows, or your Webtoon, Warning Label. What projects do you have coming up next, and do you anticipate any return to the world of The Ghost Whiskerers?

TFZ: Romance has been very good to me, in fiction at least. I started there because it interested me and because almost no one else was doing it. I wanted to write banter more than anything else. That allowed me to carve out a niche. These days, I try to write things that make people who follow me say “Oh, I think he’d do something interesting with that.” So it’s not just romance, but character-based stories with clever dialogue and the kind of emotional story that resonate. Along those lines, I have an unannounced spy-based project that should be a lot of fun, and it’s taking me back to the old Raider rays, which I don’t think anyone remembers. It was my very first self-published project. I can’t say more about that yet, though.

I’m the artist for Rocketship’s upcoming Angry Birds series. I just laid out two more sets of covers for the next two volumes, and I continue to slowly work on a new Love and Capes. I’ve taken that to a Patreon/Kickstarter model, but it’s my goal to just keep doing those as long as I have ideas. I’m absolutely up for a return to The Ghost Whiskerers, and I had a couple ideas for a sequel when I started this one. I’ve also pitched a separate kids’ horror book to them with an entirely different concept that I think would be a lot of fun and touch on some current concerns.

CBY: It sounds like you've got plenty to keep yourself busy and readers engaged into the immediate future. We always conclude by offering our guests an opportunity to highlight some creative work unrelated to their own projects. What other comics, or films, music, art, and literature have been inspiring you lately? 

TFZ: My time is stretched pretty thin these days, for lots of reasons. I’m trying to make sure to carve time for more reading, though. I recently read the first Let’s Play by Leeanne Krecic and am starting another volume of Steve Conley’s The Middle Age. I also find myself going back to classic comics runs I missed, so I’ve been alternating between Rom and Micronauts omnibii. I miss those days of monthly storytelling and throwing things at the wall to keep going. There was a jazz-like improvisation that really makes things sparkle.

I just finished watching the last season of What We Do In The Shadows, which was excellent. I’m all in on Suits LA, being a big fan of the original. I think they’re frontloading a little too much in that show, but it definitely feels like more stories in that world and that’s not easy to accomplish. And I just started Paradise, which had an awesome pilot. I hope it holds up.

I saw the Picasso on Paper exhibition here at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was really interesting. There’s actually a first person video of Picasso painting that was just so interesting. And I’ve got several museums picked out for my trip to Italy!

CBY:  Thomas, thanks for stepping into the Yeti Cave today. It’s a pleasure to have you! Please let us know any social media, portfolio, and publication links you’d like our readers to check out.

TFZ: You can find me at thomz.com which is my main site. My portfolio is up there as well as my store. And you can sign up for my very sporadic mailing list.

I’m @thomzahler on X, Instagram and Patreon. I post new stuff first on Patreon, so if you were there, you would have been able to see The Ghost Whiskerers as it happened, plus new pages of Love and Capes and anything else I’m working on that I can share.

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