An Interview with Jay Smith, Creator and Writer of "Eidolon"
Smith talks about Ghosts, the Blues, Haunted Houses in Delaware, Dark Cults, Slavery and how they all combine as elements in his new graphic novel, "Eidolon."
First let me ask, what is "Eidolon" about?
"It is the story of a family, but not a traditional one. Eidolon is about a man who has been isolated and insulated from a great deal of horror in his life, his journey to uncover the truth, and the hard choices he makes about how to deal with it and, in some cases, make it right again. The story involves elements of the supernatural, dark religion, and a chain of attrocities dating back more than two centuries."
What do you mean "dark religion"?
"Well, organized religion - all faith, really - has a dark side. I like to think most people use religion to mold and shape their lives for the better. But some people use religion to justify their selfish, sometimes evil lives. The VanAucken family believed itself to be "chosen" or exceptions to the laws of Heaven. In their case, young VanAucken is learning that his father, grandfather and generations of fathers before him have been using black magic and tapping into powers they felt were granted them by God. Their control over supernatural forces is something that perverts them and, as you'll read in the book, leads to their undoing."
So it's a morality tale, then?
"Well, all stories are morality tales in some sense. But I'm the last guy to point a finger or shine a light and say 'THIS is what God wants.' I don't know what God wants. I think of it as a story of a guy with his own list of problems and he has to go through a period of adjustment and then deal with it in order to finally grow up. Along the way, he's got this guardian angel character in his dreams and this looming old house that he inherits contains an entire sordid and vile history that he needs to confront physically as well as emotionally."
The House you refer to...owned by his mother after his father died?
"Yeah. Van's mom holds everything and controls the family assets with the help of handlers; lawyers and bankers. Those guys play a big role in this story, too. There's a reason a house this horrible isn't just burned to its foundation and it's only after Mother VanAucken dies that this reason can be revealed. But the house represents the sum of what Van doesn't know about his past. It scares him more than anything since, as far as he knows, his dad was hit by a bus on his way home from the shoe store."
Van thinks his father was a shoe salesman?
"Well, a senior marketing VP for a shoe company, which isn't far from the truth. After all, not all practitioners of the black arts are full time rich folk who live in castles or downtown brownstones. Most have to pay for those black candles and old, musty books with the paychecks from their day jobs, right?"
I, um, wouldn't know. We get an idea of how Van's father met his end from the sketches you made of the dream. It also seems quite surreal. How much of that should we take literally?
"The events in the dressing room are typical for Van's father, except that last part with the suicide. You can call that an isolated, spirit-of-the-moment decision on his part. That scene is just one piece of the VanAucken story. As with all dreams, some things are deeply symbolic and others you take at face value."
Let's talk about the title character, the Eidolon. The publicity art shows a ghostly woman behind a microphone. What's her story?
"Eidolon is a spirit of sorts, though I can't get into what she is, specifically. She represents different things to VanAucken. She appears to him in dreams throughout life so, as a writer she is a Muse; a source of inspiration. In the story she appears as a young blues singer in VanAucken's dreams. She is youthful, beautiful, elegant, yet carries a great burden as evident in her singing."
We'll touch on that in a minute, but first: What, exactly, is an "Eidolon"?
"An Eidolon is an Ideal, an image of something as it should be. It also means Ghost or Spirit. But different from spooky, white sheets and rattling chains in the attic, it is a spirit not unlike Liberty or Justice in that it is a symbol."
And what does she symbolize?
"That's something the reader will have to discover. To VanAucken, she means different things at different points of the story. What she represents at the end is totally different from the beginning. She starts as just a kind of fantasy girl."
A Blues Singer in the style of Billie Holiday?
"...and others. Certainly I drew a lot from Billie, especially in the image. I was watching the Ken Burns documentary on Jazz and it touched on the blues and some of the more notable singers of the 30s and 40s. One of the things that struck me was that here were these women, belting out songs clear from their soul about the struggles of life, the pain and the anguish, taping into their own heartbreak and pain...and they're dressed in expensive gowns with liberally applied make up standing in front of rich suits and gowns around tables full of excess. I don't know if the Maya Angelou reference is appropriate in this context, but it was like drawing out a caged bird and listening to it sing. Very pretty, very moving, but ultimately sad, perhaps outrageous if you couldn't put it in a historical frame. I don't know if that makes sense."
"Singing the blues in hundred-dollar shoes?" Where'd I hear that?
"Page 36. (laughs) I heard that a long time ago in some music-appreciation course. 'Ya cain't sing da blues in hunn'erd-dollah shoes.' When you listen to Billie sing 'Solitude' in front of an orchestra and the strains come out fast and upbeat you can't help but wonder, 'do they even know the words to this song? Do they even care this song is one of the most desperately lonely pieces to be sung?" But Billie was a big influence. There was no shortage of women who could belt it out, rattle the windows and put your armhair upright by just belting out a note to a concert hall, but Billie was the one that stood out to me as the one who could reach into your body and pull out your soul with her music because you knew she'd lived it all.
So the image on the site and in the trades also refers to a person in the story with whom VanAucken's father had dealings. Lerna Mayfair was a small town Billie Holiday, an innocent girl with a miraculous voice taken from a choir and put into gin and juke joints by her father, then essentially 'bought' by an agent who shuffled her around the half dozen nightclubs he owned. Within a few years she'd lived a few lifetimes of trouble and that was before she met VanAucken's father..."
...which as you implied earlier isn't a good thing...
"Right. VanAucken's dad was probably the worst of the lot. The Prologue talks about that deadly relationship as it sets up this story."
So what kind of man is this newest VanAucken?
"He's the first son of a VanAucken who wasn't witness to the sins and attrocities of his father. Van's mother sacrificed a great deal to try and spare her son that kind of future. When we meet him, he is a young man who's failed at a number of ventures, dropped out of school, suffered a bad marriage and has a son he rarely sees. Life doesn't make a lot of sense to him in the traditional sense. The harder he tries to succeed in something, the more opposition he sees against him. He's generally a decent guy, but he's selfish and a little naive - the result of having been protected all his life. His greatest advantage is having a wealth of recordings of late jazz and blues musicians he recorded growing up while on the run with his mother. He's compiled this into a popular book on the subject and - he thinks - life is about to get much better. He is just getting getting started on an account of his mother's days in the USO and in nightclubs just as his mother's health begins to fail and her death is imminent."
VanAucken's mother was a club singer, too? Any connection to the Eidolon?
"Yes and no. Anatol VanAucken met Lerna Mayfair at a club while dating Van's mother. There is a connection there, definitely, but not directly."
You set the house and much of the action in Delaware. I wouldn't call it the spookiest location for a haunted house. Why not some place like Transylvania or rural Maine...or someplace entirely fictitious like Lovecraft's Arkham?
"I lived in Delaware for a year and, for all its wonderful traits, it is full of contradictions. Dover is a small town that hosts a NASCAR track and an Air Force Base. It also has a large Amish community. It thrives on the revenue of outsiders, yet keeps a very local profile. If you drive straight through on the main highway, you see a lot of tourist traps. Drive five miles east or west and you'll swear you've strayed into Mayberry or some rural village where they've never heard of McDonald's or WaWa convenience stores. Mainly, I was fascinated by the idea that Delaware was a state that, during the Civil War, had its sons fight for the Union while many of its landowners owned slaves. Yeah...up until the end of the war, Delaware upheld slavery despite the fact that historically most of the population had been anti-slavery for decades. The other strange element is that, in many cases, slaves were treated like family and employees. While it doesn't excuse the cold fact that someone was "owned" by another person, many slaves in Delaware were held to terms of a contract, freed with severence and even inherited wealth upon the death of their masters. Also keep in mind that, since many slaves lived up in the Wilmington area, all anyone had to do sprint north a few miles and they'd be in Pennsylvania and free as the next white man, yet there are few records to this effect."
Sorry, did I miss part of the conversation? We're now talking about slavery?
"Well, yeah. Remember that the VanAucken line of terror goes back generations. Delaware was a slave state. One of the reasons it remained a slave state was that the power to abolish slavery was in the hands of legislators who also owned businesses dependent upon slave labor. And I will amend what I said earlier about the "kindness" of masters in Delaware. There were some mean landowners who kept close watch on their property and treated them as such. That's another part of the VanAucken legacy. So, when you look at the Eidolon, you will see Lerna Mayfair and Natty Sunrise and a few others who crossed paths with the VanAuckens over the years."
What was the inspiration for this story?
"Two things - one is an interest in how people idealise and objectify others. I am amazed at how easily people are converted to marketable idols and how we adore them. The Britany Spears of today and legends like John Lennon...both of whom are flawed, natural human beings but have taken on some otherworldly status as representing some ideal. I take that idea to one extreme in terms of how a man can want that idol so bad he forgets it has a nature of its own. It also deals with how we label and dehumanize people we don't understand, touching on slavery and racism, sexism and exploitation. Don't get me wrong: Its not some dissertation on social justice. I just bring the issues out for discussion and inject my own humble point of view into the story.
"The other is an idea of individuality vs. society and a discussion of how we determine what is Right, Good and True from a moral, social and spiritual point of view."
And you also introduce some strange elements touched on in the story breakdown. Van's best friend owns a strip club, his ex-girlfriend is his therapist, three guys who give haunting tours of...of all places...Delaware, and a second Eidolon?
"There are a lot of strange characters Van meets along the way. He's not one to open up easily, so his two closest friends are the ones he's had the longest. Darnell is a kid from his old neighborhood he met at the bus stop in fourth grade. They have a long history together. Darnell is owner of a...um, Gentleman's Club featuring expensive drinks and topless dancers. Van and Darnell have a debate on the morality of such a place which is pretty interesting. Liv, on the other hand, is a reformed troublemaker Van used to date. She is, really, the only woman Van has ever loved - despite being married at one time - and would do anything for her. Liv is married to another psychologist and the two share a practice. Liv agrees to help Van through the stress by exploring the dreams he keeps having about a woman on a train and that, somehow, triggers more vivid and dramatic dreams under hypnosis...those are his two allies. Everyone else you'll just have to read about to understand."
I understand this project used to be intended for a film. What happened to that?
"Eidolon is a story I want to tell properly, on my terms. A few years back, my friends and I organized a plan to produce a screenplay on our own, shoot it in Delaware on video and show it around regional film festivals. The problem is that all eight of us involved could only commit part time to a project that deserved full attention. Beyond that, we're not very good filmmakers. I submitted the idea to a studio and it was rejected, though I was encouraged by the personal feedback I received. In the end I decided to change media on the project to maintain the story and be able to include some of the elements a small-budget film could never support."
But why a graphic novel? Why not just write a book?
"The story would make a good book, but there is a visual element to the story that I think lends itself to this particular format. Some elements, subtle details in the frame would best be shown rather than explained in the narration. There's a page where Van is walking through the Abbey toward the bandstand and he passes several famous faces. Their interaction with one another is something that can be better shown on the page than explained in words that distract from the pace. I've always been a big fan of rich, detailed pictures with little artistic Easter eggs. Alex Ross is notorious for the detail in books like Kingdom Come. I just love going over the book a fifth time and finding little things, unexplained, but just as important or revealing or amusing."
Who do you see illustrating the book? If you had an "A" List of artists on speed-dial, who would you call first?
"There are a few artists I'd love to work with just on general principle. I am attracted to sharp pen-and-inks of artists who give distinct looks to their characters. A lot of comic artists distinguish between characters by their costumes. It's like they all could swap threads because they have the same chest, waist and leg sizes. Lucky they all have different hair stylists because the eyes, mouth and face all look the same. There are a few who transcend kinetic images on a page and give comics a sharp, mature look that gives you the impression these characters are drawn off real people. I look at the work of people like Adam Hughes (king of the pin-up) and George Perez, Bryan Hitch, Terry Dodson, Frank Cho, and - of course - Matt Haley."
Is that why you have Matt Haley doing the first cover?
"Matt Haley was a stroke of luck. I went to his web site, sent the man an email and he was kind enough to respond, answer my questions and entertain a few email exchanges. At the time I think he was making a big move and getting involved with the San Diego comicon to introduce his new book GI SPY. I was just lucky enough to get his attention and hold it. I'm a fan of his work, especially the Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl book from DC and his work on Dark Horse's Ghost. Those two books show off a dark gothic landscape I want to capture for this type of story."
When do you expect to find someone of that calibre?
"When the stars are right. As I tell everyone else helping put it all together, it seems kind of strange setting out to build a temple without an engineer or laborers, but we have the blueprints and a wealth of material. Once the word is out there, we'll find the right artist for the job. Eidolon is a story that could be told today, next year or five years from now. While I hope it's not that long a wait, it is important enough to wait for the right touch to realize the story properly. "
Characters
I'll name a character, you give me a brief description.Right...
VanAucken
A troubled kid turned confused, angry adult. He lost his dad early and was drug around by a paranoid, hysterical mother whose idea of safety was inside smokey, dirty nightclubs and "gentleman" clubs. He has few friends, one of whom is the son of a club owner and the other the only "normal" person he knows is the love of his life. The ironic thing is that he longs for the positive, nurturing father he lost and blames his protective mother for his shortcomings. When he learns the truth, it only makes his perspective on life worse.Liv
Van's anchor to reality. She is beautiful in an unconventional, exotic way. She seems to belong in the 1940s, devoted to her husband and the home they built, but struggles with her affection and, um, loyalty, to Van. When you look at her, you think Sandra Dee and wonder when she's going to shed the business suit for the leather and hot pants. She is, point for point an equal to Van and is his strength. Van wouldn't survive without her...or so he thinks.Darnell
He's the reality guy. Supernatural, psychological, spiritual...all that is bullshit. All he knows is what he can quantify and measure in his mind and heart. He's the mirror that Van uses to measure what is sane, insane or just plain stupid. His father passed along the family business - a strip club - which Darnell took as a legitimate business and instituted things like profit sharing, day care vouchers... things that just don't make a hell of a lot of sense to his contemporaries. On the other hand, he is the first to admit he loves spending the off-day in fantasy. Van's oldest friend, they met at a bus stop when the two of them were in grade school. They share a love of comic books, Sid & Marty Krofft shows and, more recently, homebrewed beer. As a result of his choen profession, he is also keenly suspicious and takes pride in his understanding of modern weapondry.Eben Pratt
Pratt is the one guy in this whole story who could just come out, sit down with Van and explain what's going on. But he can't because he is loyal to Mother VanAucken. He's a lawyer who has spent his career hiding Van and his mother and covering their tracks, protecting them from whatever it is out there Mother Van feared. He's tried to keep them apart from the legal implications of Anatol's life and keep the family "curse" a secret. Van is not immediately understanding or respectful of Pratt's role.Mother VanAucken
A USO singer and talented performer, she shed her identity to protect Van after the death of Anatol. The reasons for this are not immediately clear, but she is portrayed as a woman who is drained by her efforts to spare Van from a dark fate. Her passing means that Van no longer has protection from the knowledge of his past, but hopes he is old enough and wise enough to know how to cope with it all. What matters to her are her son and grandchild and she would die to protect them.Dr. John Dodson
If Pratt could explain it, Dodson could make it right. He's the guy who took a dive, left the fold and hid away fromt he people who were involved in the badness of Van's past. He survives under the radar, but finds himself coping with the results of decades of reasearch into the work fo Wilhelm Reich. It ain't pretty.The DelaGhost Busters; Terry, Eric & Graham
Pure distraction, some levity and much-needed firepower. They are a trio of enterprising kids who get to explain the whole back-story of haunted VanAucken from an objective point of view and help out in the exploration of the mansion.The Sabbatrix
A little trickier to explain. When you talk about an Eidolon, you're talking about an entire world of minds operating in a collective. When you put two of them together, you have two great civilizations really in the space of a pair of humanoid forms. Sabbatrix is a warlike collective that was sent out in the 1930s to recover the original Eidolon. After 75 years of being trapped, it's a little angier than it was and the collective has gone a little mad. It not only wants to recover the Eidolon, but kill everyone that trapped it and her. She's taken the form of a female Terminator-like being based on oddpictures it sees hanging on the wall of a shack near the mansion.Anatol VanAucken
Van's father died trying to do something strange, dangerous and evil. What, specifically, I cannot say yet. He was an abusive, angry man who saw his son as the next step in the VanAucken tradition and his own wife as just the vessel to deliver that to the world. After the birth of his son, Anatol abandoned his marriage emotionally, taking up with women, using them for his own pleasure and to further his research. He took up with Lerna Mayfair shortly before he died, but not before destroying the young woman's life. During an experiment, Anatol was killed, though his son was told it was a traffic accident that took him.Lerna Mayfair
A sweet angel and a voice that could cleanse your soul. Her parents were as vile as she was pure, selling her talent young and putting her in nightclubs before the age of 12. As she grew older, her parents fell deeper into debt and turned her over to a club manager in Baltimore who hired her out as an escort as often as a singer. By 17, she was a broken girl, a caged bird singing and then found Anatol VanAucken at her door promising to deliver her from it all. She took to him, escaped Baltimore, but soon found herself pregnant. Anatol beat her savagely, drugged her and performed an abortion. All this the Eidolon witnessed from its cell and managed to give enough of itself to her so she would recover and escape. Lerna boarded a train and disappear. A few more years later, Lerna had recovered somewhat, built a career singing the blues and was wealthy enough to surround herself with protection. All this enraged Anatol who was already on the edge of madness. While his wife was overseas singing for troops in Korea,Claire
Tyler
Jerry
The Eidolon