Owen King gets graphic with 'Alien Invasion'
There’s a new King of comic books.
Novelist Owen King (Double Feature) breaks from the prose to unleash extra-terrestrials on a college campus alongside co-writer Mark Jude Poirier and artist Nancy Ahn with the new graphic novel Intro to Alien Invasion.
It’s not the first project in the comic medium for Poirier and publisher Scribner but also a debut for King, a longtime fan of the form.
“To some extent, it’s a little bit of a lark but it’s also something we took really seriously,” says King.
It’s a tale that, for the writer, is all about busting expectations. For example, an audience might think they’re going to be awful beasts from the beginning, King says, but instead the invaders are little blue ladybug creatures where “initially it’s like, ‘Oh they’re cute,’ but then they turn into these hideous space bug things with human faces.”
They also saw a way to make an unlikely heroine out of bespectacled nerdy girl Stacey. A hurricane knocks out the power at Fenton College, and she, her roommate Charlotte, jock doofus Mason and others have to survive an increasingly dangerous — and often hilarious — dorm life when the aliens make their creepy move.
In any other big adventure vehicle or sci-fi epic like Intro, Stacey would be around solely to provide a caustic comment or two, King says. “But in real life a person like Stacey is better equipped to deal wit a crisis because she’s super smart. She has gone through a lot in her life — she’s absorbed quite a lot of bullying and so she’s super tough as well in a way you don’t expect her to be.
“This was a hero we hadn’t seen before, and it was a person who we really liked.”
The screenwriter of the indie drama Hateship, Loveship, Poirier adds that they thought a lot more about characters, especially Stacey, than plot, set pieces or visuals. “But when we were finished, we were left with exploding sorority girls and egg-filled bros, repulsive aliens, and lots of action, all of which are perfect for the graphic-novel medium.”
Because the writers created “a really great, diverse cast of unlikely superheroes,” Ahn says she wanted her art to “enable readers to project themselves onto these characters, and maybe even recognize their own good qualities in them.”
In turn, her cartoonish style brought humor and humanity to the cast not seen in a usual mainstream comic book, King adds. “They’re so adorable sometimes but something so sad about the way that Stacey’s eyes are sitting behind her glasses. And something so human about the way the different cliques have styled themselves in what they’re wearing.”
The creators have worked various knowing easter eggs and references into the work as well. Busted tools and alien limbs form a heart near where Stacey and Charlotte stand on campus in one scene, a little nod to there being something special between the two girls. A page where the wheelchair-bound Gina is lying in the grass is influenced by the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World — a popular poster in dorms rooms all over — and there is a shoutout to the infamous prom scene in Carrie, written by King’s world-renowned father Stephen.
Both his dad and brother Joe Hill have dabbled in comics — the former with American Vampire, the latter with the acclaimed Locke & Key. Owen King studied comic scripts given to him by his sibling and Batman scribe Scott Snyder to learn the format, but admits there was a learning curve.
The best piece of advice King received was something comic artist Chris Burnham said to him years ago when he did spot illustrations for the writer's superhero-story collection Who Can Save Us Now?: When a novelist works in comics, it often feels very static, so they need to focus on keeping the plot moving.
“That made sense to me because when you write a book, the inner monologue or the perspective of a character is so important,” King says. “But in a comic book, you have to be thinking of it more like a film and the illustrator is your actor. You’ve got to rely a lot more on them to put forth the emotional content.
“You can’t slow the pace way, way, way down and beat it to death inside a series of panels,” he adds. “Then you end up with a very stagnant story.”
Intro to Alien Invasion was originally envisioned as a movie screenplay, yet King and Poirier found it naturally fit the graphic medium and the way cinema influences a lot of King's stuff.
“Comic books and films have a lot more in common than say comics and books or films and books,” he says. “The two art forms to me seem like pretty close siblings.”
