The inimitable Jim Zub pops by to chat with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, about Skullkickers: The Digest Edition, available through Zoop until March 28th!
COMIC BOOK YETI: Welcome to the Yeti Cave, Jim! How’s everything going so far this year up in Toronto?
JIM ZUB: Other than piles of snow I’ve had to shovel, I’m doing well. I’m excited to break through winter and get to some warmer weather!
CBY: Summer is hanging on here down under, so hopefully we both smoothly make it to the next season! We’re here today to discuss Skullkickers: The Digest Edition, which you’ve partnered with Zoop to crowdfund. The original comic was released through Image and ran for 34 issues, but this is the first time the entirety of the run has been available in one package (of three volumes). The comic concluded a decade ago in 2015, so how long has this collection been in the making?
JZ: Yes, this is the first time readers have been able to snag Skullkickers all in one package instead of separate published volumes. With so much fantasy entertainment out there and so many fantasy comics I’ve written over the past ten years, it feels great to have my ‘breakout’ creator-owned series available again for old fans to remember and new readers to discover.
Once the original Image Skullkickers volumes started to go out of print, I knew we’d have to repackage it at some point, and with the current book market wisely leaning into the manga-sized form factor, I felt like it would be perfect for reintroducing readers to Skullkickers.
CBY: I know Edwin Huang and Misty Coats comprised your creative team throughout the initial run, and Chris Stevens is listed on the Zoop campaign as a collaborator. Can you share with us the breadth and extent of your collaborators on putting together this publication? What unsung heroes in drafting, designing, editing, and publishing Skullkickers would you like to highlight as this campaign builds toward a successful conclusion?
JZ: Chris Stevens and I came up with the original idea for Skullkickers in a pair of short stories that appeared in Popgun, an Image anthology book, and he designed the look of the heroes and their world. When we were putting together the full Image comic series, Chris wasn’t able to draw a monthly book so that’s when line artist Edwin Huang and colorist Misty Coats came on board the team.
As with most creator-owned books, a lot gets delegated to a small team. Marshall Dillon was our amazing letterer and I did a lot of the back matter and other graphic design. As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, designer/letterer Tim Daniel stepped in to create a brand new Skullkickers logo, playing upon the badass over-the-top vibe that has always exemplified the series.
CBY: Tim’s logo is a nice addition, for sure. Reflecting on the start of your career, you launched the beautiful Makeshift Miracle in 2001, with Shun Hong Chan illustrating and lettering by your longtime collaborator, Marshall Dillon for the archives now online. Unlike the pitfall many contemporaneous webcomics fell into, you avoided meandering plots and scope creep and concluded the run after 13 chapters of regular updates. What did this early experience in the webcomic world teach you that translated to your print comic career, and how do the two formats most significantly differ?
JZ:Â Thanks for the high compliments on Makeshift! Not many people remember my webcomic roots these days. The original version was all done by me from 2001-2003, and when I was at Udon we re-released the series in 2012 with Shun Hong Chan illustrating it.
Makeshift taught me so much about how to make a comic; plotting, pacing, dialogue, drama, and what makes comics different from prose or film. While a lot of webcomics at that time were doing humor strips about pop culture or video games I just wanted to use the internet platform as a way to get a surreal little personal story out to the widest audience possible.Â
CBY: It seems like that gambit paid off with your subsequent opportunities in the print comic industry. Makeshift Miracle clearly drew inspiration from the Japanese manga, animation and gaming culture that had been trickling into the West through the 90’s. You went on to work at Udon Entertainment, renowned in part for its adaptation of Capcom IP such as Street Fighter and Mega Man. While Skullkickers very much takes inspiration from Western conventions of the fantasy genre, how would you reflect upon the influence of the Japanese media industry on your work within an English-language narrative space?
JZ: When my older brother went to university in the early 90’s, many of the Japanese students in his computer program brought their comics and animation with them and it really took root with the sci-fi/fantasy fandom, and the early internet propelled it outward quite quickly. In turn, my brother got me hooked on anime and manga while I was still in high school. I was absolutely amazed at the depth and breadth of animation and comics in Japan in terms of genre and mood.Â
Skullkickers was a cartoony version of both the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns my brother and I played and Conan the Barbarian comics I was reading when I was young. Makeshift Miracle was my attempt to take some of the fantastic and rom-com elements from manga I’d been enjoying (most notably Kimagure Orange Road and Video Girl Ai) as a teenager and do my own thing with it. They’re different parts of me, my influences and taste reflected in different ways at different ages.
Although I’m now known for sword & sorcery work with a North American or European flare (D&D and Conan in particular), my manga inspiration still bubbles up from time to time and I still think about ways to use that as fuel for future stories. It might be fun to fuse it all together at some point and do a sword & sorcery manga-esque story.
CBY: I think that would be welcomed by a broad audience, based upon the success of recent work in that crossover space such as Delicious in Dungeon. From Skullkickers, which provides some meta-narrative reflection on the fantasy genre, you’ve gone on to work on comics for both Dungeons & Dragons and Conan the Barbarian, which both played enormous roles in typifying the conventions of the genre itself, and you’ve mentioned as earlier influences on your work. What sort of room has Skullkickers carved out for you to inhabit these other narrative worlds that, in part, informed its creation? From everything I’ve read of your work (including some very useful guidance as a new writer in the medium), bucking conventions doesn’t seem to frighten you as a writer. You’ve been very generous sharing your writing process on your website, including some phenomenally informative Comics School video lessons, but are there any guidelines or rules you’ve learned over the years that, once internalized, you allow yourself to bend or break for specific purposes?
JZ: First and foremost, I’ve never thought about the books I do as ‘bucking trends’ as much as just leaning into making stories I would love to read and enjoy at the time I’m able to make them. If you chase trends you’ll usually end up coming in too late to capitalize on them anyways and still do anything high quality, so it’s better just to make a story you yourself would love and hope that readers with the same tastes find it and share it with others. Work that comes from a genuine love of the genre or material being covered can cut through a lot of media ‘noise’ we’ve got going on right now - the dearth of ‘content’ for content’s sake.
Skullkickers was a big ridiculous love letter to old school D&D chaos at the gaming table, playing with genre tropes in a way that both ridiculed and celebrated them.
I taught art and storytelling courses at Seneca College in Ontario for many years, so the ‘teacher’ part of me constantly wants to break things into manageable pieces and show the process. I want to encourage other people to make their own comics, whether as a hobby or possible career, and for readers to better understand how much works goes into their favorite series.
Our job is communication and entertainment, and that applies to every part of the process - engaging and entertaining the editor/publisher, making sure the creative team is on board and knows the bigger goals in terms of story and execution, and then of course letting readers know what we’re doing and that it’s going to be worth their time and hard-earned dollars. We have to communicate our ideas clearly and make it as entertaining as possible along the way.
CBY: On the topic of lessons learned, you mentioned you also teach at Seneca Polytechnic in the School of Creative Arts & Animation. As someone in the thick of a PhD. program alternating between creative endeavors and research outputs, I’m curious; how do you manage to partition your roles and ongoing responsibilities across both your private sector work as a creative writer and the (certainly non-trivial) teaching load? What does your schedule in an average week look like?
JZ: For twenty years I juggled my teaching and writing full-time careers simultaneously and it was wonderful and exhausting but, as of just over a month ago I’ve finally stepped away from teaching to be a full-time writer, which feels surreal and amazing. This shift was a long time coming, and I know I’ll still get pangs of needing to teach and visit friends on campus, but the timing was right and I’m incredibly excited for this focused future.
That said, I did the juggle for twenty years so I can talk about how that worked.
On most weekdays I would head to campus in the morning, teach and do school admin all day, then head home and have dinner with my wife before heading to my home studio, shutting the door and digging into comic-related emails I missed and writing work that needed to get done. Almost every weekday, that was the sprint - teaching, a tiny window of personal time for dinner, and then writing all evening. Social time with friends and family was fleeting, and jamming conventions into weekends meant that I was rarely off the clock. All of it was exciting, especially once my writing career started taking off around 2013-2014, but I was also careening toward burnout. I originally planned to take a teaching sabbatical in early 2020, but then the unexpected lockdowns slowed down creative work enough that I had a moment to step back, reevaluate my life, and start planning to eventually leave teaching so I could concentrate more fully on my creative career. Now, in 2025, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
CBY: Congratulations on finally finding space to make the transition in your career - that's a massive shift to successfully undertake. This past year, I spoke with your Glitterbomb collaborator, Djibril Morissette-Phan, about the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural conventions in his recent, brilliant, poignant graphic novel with his sister about the women in their family, Khiem. Having had the opportunity to work cross-culturally on a variety of stories, both of your own creation and within the space provided by other intellectual property, are there any collaborators or titles you’ve not yet had a chance to work with that are still on your professional wishlist?
JZ: Man, working with Djibril was such a thrill and I really hope we get to team up again, whether that’s for a possible third volume of Glitterbomb or some other project. He is so amazing.
There are so many incredible artists out there that I would love to team up with. Filipe Andrade illustrated the first Figment mini-series I did at Marvel, and he did a wonderful job, but the work he recently did on Rare Flavours with Ram V reminded me how incredible he would be to team up with on a creator-owned project.
Gabriel Rodriguez of Locke & Key fame always blows my mind with his elaborate illustrative storytelling. Same goes for Nick Bradshaw. Becky Cloonan is a complete storyteller who does her own thing top to bottom, but I’d be over the moon if we could collaborate on a story at some point. Artists whose work I grew up with like Paul Smith, Arthur Adams, Michael Golden, Chris Bachalo, or Charles Vess; those kind of collabs seem impossibly out of reach but it’s fun to dream.
CBY: Reality often starts first as a dream, so it certainly doesn't hurt to put the idea out there. Since Skullkickers: The Digest Edition serves as a bit of a retrospective consolidation of work you’ve completed, can you share with our readers a bit about forthcoming projects you’re excited to discuss? It looks like you’ve got plenty of convention appearances on your schedule - what else can we expect from you this year?
JZ: Obviously, Conan the Barbarian is the lion’s share of what I have on tap right now. Between the monthly flagship series, Scourge of the Serpent mini-series event coming this Fall, and stories for Savage Sword of Conan magazine, it is taking up a lot of my brainspace in the best way possible. Our whole team is amazing; art, lettering, and design, editorial, you name it. Everyone in the crew is giving it their all, and I am ecstatic.
I have another mini-series spinning up at the Big Two I can’t talk about just yet and a new creator-owned concept slowly coming to fruition. Between that and convention travel, it’s a full slate, even with finally stepping away from teaching.
CBY: We look forward to hearing what you've got under wraps when the time comes! To close, we always offer our guests an opportunity to highlight - unrelated to the work they’ve come to promote - any creations across both comics and other art (film, literature, music, etc.) that has been inspiring them lately. Once our readers check out Skullkickers, what should they make sure they give some of their attention?
JZ: Recently I’ve been watching Severance and Shogun on TV, playing Returnal and Solasta on video game screens, and jamming with Thunder Road: Vendetta and the Conan: The Hyborian Age TTRPG at my gaming table.
CBY: I've just been catching up on Severance Season 2, so I'm with you there. Jim, it is an honor to have you with us in the Yeti Cave today! Before we finish up, for our readers at home, can you share any portfolio, publication, and social media links you’d like everyone to check out?
JZ: Everything about my work can be found at www.jimzub.com - social media links, free writing tutorials, sign-up links for my Zubstack newsletter, Patreon archives where people can see how comics are written and compare scripts to published books, my convention schedule, my bibliography - it’s all at that one URL and easy to find.
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