Comic Creator Spotlight on Zach Chapman: "When I Get That Art Back, It's Instant Gratification"

Zach Chapman (Photo by John Anderson)

Essential bibliography: House of Blood (self-published)

First Comic: “A really old Superboy, or maybe just Superman. There was an old box of something that my parents bought, and I dug into those. Those would have been really old Otto Bender, post-Golden Age – the really wacky stuff. I love that, but it’s almost impossible to read now.”

Currently working on: A Haunting on Mars (Scout Comics). “That’s my two loves, science fiction and horror. It’s like Neuromancer written by Shirley Jackson – a cybernetic ghost tearing a human apart.”

”I started with prose, short stories, mostly science fiction, [but] I realized the type of stories I’m more interested in telling are more at home in the comics format. … [House of Blood] is like a more modern take on EC Comics, so I just started pounding out scripts. I would have a specific artist that I would follow on Twitter or Instagram, and I would reach out to them and see if they were busy. It’s a lot easier to get an anthology done because I’m working with so many artists. I have projects where I’m working on one title for four years, because it’s a 150-page graphic novel and they have a day job. It takes a couple of months to pound out a script, but it takes a couple of years to finish.

“I’ll do a full script and give that to the artists, and I’ll typically just revise dialogue and captions on the fly, because I don’t need to go back and forth. I’m building off of what art is delivered to me, and the artists I’m working with know what they’re doing. But when I get that art back, it’s instant gratification for me. … When it’s really beautiful and really good, it’s immediate. ‘Oh, that’s sick, I wanna buy that.’”