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Memorial
Chris Roberson is the writer of such comics as iZombie, Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, Elric: The balance Lost, and the upcoming star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes. His latest project, Memorial from IDW, is now available for pre-order. Westfield’s Roger Ash contacted Roberson to learn more about the book.
Westfield: What can you tell me about the genesis of the series?
Chris Roberson: It’s an idea that I first started working on about eight years ago. I had the central idea of this late-teens girl who inherits a magic wandering shop, the kind where you would go in a door at the end of a dark alley and buy a gremlin or a monkey’s paw or something like that, but when you go to return this thing, the shop is no longer there. It was an attempt to try and capture what I liked about doctor who and things like that, but to build it from the ground up. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work for the longest time. Over the course of eight years, I finally figured it out. Memorial is the result.
Westfield: What can you say about the story of Memorial?
Roberson: It’s like doctor who meets Sandman by way of Miyazaki in terms of the tone I’m trying to capture. The story itself concerns a girl who arrives one day at a hospital with no memory whatsoever of her past. She doesn’t know who she is, where she comes from, or how she came to be there. She’s diagnosed with having something called a dissociative fugue, a medical condition where essentially severe psychological or emotion trauma causes someone to forget everything. She spends a year rebuilding her life. She gets a job working in a book store and tries to find clues to her previous life and fails. one day she wanders down an alley that she has walked past a million times before and there’s a door she’s never noticed. When she goes in it’s this kind of curios shop. It’s a store that sells antiques of all kinds of weird things. through a misadventure, she ends up inheriting this store. When she goes out the door the next time, the store is somewhere else. She’s being pursued by any number of strange creatures including statues that come to life, an evil living puppet, living shadows, and things like that. The story involves her trying to figure out what this thing is that she’s inherited, why these things are after her, and who she is.
Westfield: What is the girl’s name?
Roberson: Em. When she’s found in the hospital, she has a necklace with just the letter “M” engraved on it. So that’s the name she’s given.
Westfield: aside from Em, who are some of the other characters readers will meet in the book?
Roberson: The two main members of her supporting cast are an old man named Peter and a talking cat named Schrodinger. The villains – the big bad is a reveal that comes a few issues in but the ground level kind of henchmen that are pursuing her are a man that’s mostly metal named Hook and an evil sentient puppet named Bellow. There’s also a cast of living shadows, animated statues, griffins, things like that.
Westfield: how did artist rich Ellis get involved with you on the project?
Roberson: That was through the good graces of my friend Paul Tobin. He’s one of the Periscope Studios guys. We’d been talking to Ted Adams at IDW for just a little while about the project – this is back in the spring – and they were very keen on going ahead with it, but I didn’t have an artist attached. So I called up Paul because he knows so many artists, has been around for a while, and has been working in Periscope Studios with lots and lots of talented artists. I asked if he had any suggestions. rich was one of the first two people who he suggested I check out as a possibility. While I was on the phone with Paul I pulled up Rich’s web site and immediately decided that he was the guy to do the book. I think we had his name on a contract within 24 – 48 hours maybe. It was a very short amount of time.
Westfield: how much of the look of the book did you have planned out before getting together with rich and how much did he add once he came onboard?
Roberson: I’ve been very lucky with artistic collaborations starting with Shawn McManus on Cinderella and Mike Allred on iZombie. rich Ellis on Memorial is right in that camp. In all those cases I’ve come to the project with visuals in mind – I have an idea in my mind of what I think it’s going to look like. Those have been worked out in my head before an artist is attached. but when I describe it to the artist, they go off and come back giving me something that’s exactly what I asked for but so much better than what I could have imagined. rich has taken the descriptions I’ve given him, completely fulfilled the letter of the law with them, but made them so much more awesome that what I had anticipated.
Westfield: Why the name Memorial?
Roberson: That gets explained in the course ofthe first storyline. The main thing is that the series is about memory – the loss of memory, the recovery of memory. and the store, Memorial, is filled with curios and mementos and things that are each associated with some memory or other. It very quickly makes sense.
Westfield: Is this an ongoing series?
Roberson: It’s an ongoing series of miniseries, much like the way they’ve structured Locke and Key. Each story arc will be a self-contained 5-issue miniseries but it will be followed immediately by another.
Westfield: and you’re having Mike Kaluta do the covers for the books?
Roberson: Mike Kaluta is doing the covers, yes. They’re pretty amazing.
Westfield: how did he become involved with the project?
Roberson: I like to think that it’s good karma from all the hardships I’ve endured and not that I’m building up a karmic debit that I’ll have to pay off some day. That was entirely IDW’s doing. At one point, we talked about different people doing the covers and I wasn’t really sanguine about any of them. At that point, I was happy to have rich do the covers. We got this very apologetic email a while back from IDW that said sorry. looks like rich won’t be able to do the covers. Instead, we’ve lined up Mike Kaluta to do them. Neither rich nor I had our feelings hurt in the slightest. Certainly, just the idea of Kaluta doing the covers was enough, but then we got the first cover in. It is just gorgeous.
Westfield: Is there anything you’d like to say about other projects you’re working on?
Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes #3
Roberson: iZombie continues apace. I’ve got Elric: The balance Lost, which is the Elric miniseries that BOOM! is doing. It has another eight or nine months to go. and with IDW, the publishers of Memorial, in another month or two the first issue of the star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes crossover that I’m doing with Jeff and Philip Moy comes out. I’m pretty excited about that.
Purchase
Memorial #1