Rebekah McKendry is a jack of all horror trades, writing, directing, and producing horror films while also teaching about horror. Now, she and her husband, David Ian McKendry, are adding comic book writers under their belt. While they dipped their toes in that pool with the Hellraiser: Anthology graphic novels, they’ve now written an original series, Barstow, which is out now from Dark Horse Comics! This desert-set cosmic horror neo-noir is a trippy (and gnarly) journey into a town full of fascinating characters (to say the least)…
In Barstow:
Agent Miranda Diaz is in this godforsaken land on the trail of a missing agent. He’s a man she’s never met, and yet her name was the only clue he left behind. Something dark, something demonic, lurks beneath this oddball town, but can Miranda unravel the mystery before all hell breaks loose?
We spoke with Rebekah McKendry about tackling comics in the face of the pandemic, how road trips shaped this unique piece of cosmic horror, and a man who loves conspiracy theories.
Dread Central: You’re working on so many different things all the time, but now you’re writing your own comics! What inspired you to add comic book writing to your amazing resume?
Rebekah McKendry: Well, thank you for that. It came about during the pandemic and then we kind of just doubled down on it during the strike. In times of hardship, I’m always like, “What can I do?” So it came about during the pandemic. I did Glorious during the pandemic and right after that we had all this other stuff lined up to go, but because of the pandemic, it was really hard to get things moving. It was just hard in general to get anything going. I was supposed to direct a TV show, and that fell apart during the pandemic. So it was this situation where we were thinking, “Well, what can we do?”
So my husband and I started thinking about that. Did we have any TV projects that we could repurpose? What could we repurpose into other things? If the world can’t make movies right now, what can we make? We were talking about a TV project that we had and we were going to turn it into a podcast.
Then we realized that making one of those is just as much work as making a film. We still had to cast it, and it still had crazy production values. We were trying to budget it out and I was like, “We’re at $70,000 for four episodes, honey.” Then we had this project, Barstow, but [our comics journey] didn’t start with Barstow. It started with one that we have coming from Simon & Schuster called Pretty Evil.
Pretty Evil is a horror story. It had been optioned by a TV network and they did nothing with it. Then it came back to us three years later. So it was just sitting there and we were kind of like, “Well, what can we do?” So we started shopping it around as a graphic novel and it sold to Simon & Schuster.
That just opened our eyes and made us say, “Why are we always thinking in terms of films?” It’s so hard to get films off the ground. It’s just crazy how many projects you think are going somewhere and they just die on the vine. As a director, my job is to keep them alive and it’s just so impossible sometimes. And suddenly it was like, “If we were able to do that book, well what else could we do?”
So we started looking at other ideas that we’d had that we had never really fleshed out or that we had never really taken out. And we had this one Barstow, which was—in short—about an FBI agent who goes to the middle of the Mojave Desert, and thinks she’s investigating human trafficking. But what she quickly finds out is that it’s actually demons being traded on the black market. But, they have to have a human vessel to trade a demon. It has to exist in a corporeal form.
Dave and I are such huge comic book readers that we were immediately like, “We want this as a monthly.” So we wrote the first issue and started shopping it around, and that all went down. That was during the pandemic, and then we just kept going during the strike last year.
DC: Wait, that’s so cool though, and also so inspiring. If you like to write, it doesn’t just have to be in these traditional forms or the expected formats. These were your first comic books, right?
RM: Pretty much but not quite. We wrote the Hellraiser comics from a couple of years ago.
DC: Oh, that’s right
RM: So we had definitely dabbled in the comic book space and we read enough comics that we felt pretty comfortable moving to that. And it translated. We were able to take the way that we would usually write films and translate even just our workflow as co-writers over to graphic novels and comics. Relatively easier than it has been for us to, say, tackle a novel, which is what we’re hoping to do next. The comics and graphic novels came naturally to us just because we were such avid comic and graphic novel readers.
DC: So you write a script for a comic or graphic novel. Is it a similar script to what you do for a film?
RM: I actually liked what I got to do in the graphic novel and comic space a little bit more. You get to describe the frame. If I’m writing a script, I always view a script as if I’m the screenwriter of the script and I am not slated to be the director. If I’m just a writer for hire, it’s rare that I would describe what the frame looks like or how the camera is moving—unless it’s pertinent to the plot. The camera moving in some way to reveal something is the only time I would ever include that at the script level. Otherwise, it’s kind of a skeletal view of the story. Eventually, the director will do their director pass, and that’s when it becomes a blueprint on how to shoot it.
But with a graphic novel, when you write it, you describe exactly what the frame looks like. That said, it’s going to be a conversation later between you and the artist, and that might change heavily. The artist might have great ideas that you want to incorporate. But basically, at that [early] point, we were describing the frame, which I don’t always get to do when I’m writing the screenplay. Then you put your dialogue down.
But that said, one of our biggest learning curves came in that when you’re looking at a single frame of a comic book, you can’t have a monologue. Instead, you get one sentence. More than that, it becomes way wordy. So we had to really think about economizing the dialogue. It can’t just be endless banter. You want it to be very visual.
So we were still learning as we got started, but I have to give a shout-out to Tim Seeley, our artist on Pretty Evil. On our very first call with him, we asked how does this work. He explained a lot of what helps [him as an artist while working with writers]. So we were able to find out firsthand from the start, what will really help the artists do their job to the best of their advantage from a writing perspective. It was just a beautiful collaboration.
DC: I’m always curious about the collaboration on a comic or graphic novel series between artists and writers. I know a lot of the time the artist is illustrating the words, but it’s still a collaboration. I mean, it’s like working with the DP in a way.
RM: There’s a lot that’s assumed in a comic. In a film, I’m thinking about coverage. If somebody’s leaving a room, I flip off the light switch or I show them opening the door or walking into a door at a different location just so that you can feel that geography. You don’t do that in a comic. They can teleport. It’s just perfectly acceptable.
My favorite parts of the collaboration were when I would write four panels on a page and then I’d get a text from the artist and he’d be like, “Hey, if I did these as one, but it’s kind of one interconnected panel?” I loved breaking down the page so it isn’t just all panels. And because Barstow is really weird and trippy and cosmic, we wanted to mix it up.
DC: Well, and the artist, Tyler Jenkins, his style reminds me of the iconic Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas poster.
RM: That’s exactly it.
DC: It’s almost sketchy in a way. And I love that it’s not super realistic, but it’s got that dirty vibe. It feels dusty. I can almost taste it in my mouth.
RM: That’s what we were going for. Tyler presented us with a few different art styles, all still very much him. He has a very specific style. But when we first pitched Barstow, we pitched and I think we listed four artists in our original pitch that we were interested in. I had Tyler on that list. So when they green-lit us, they were like, “Who do you want to go out to?” And I was like, “I want to go out to Tyler first” because I loved his style. It did remind me of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, a chunk of which is actually set in the Mojave Desert. That’s bat country.
DC: That’s so cool. On the back of the first issue is your and your husband’s author’s note. I love that this is based on driving across the country in your RV. When you get into Barstow and you see where the sheriff lives, you can tell that you all have experienced driving through the desert and finding the weird little places that pop up in the desert. Those details are so cool.
RM: Thank you. Yeah, this is not set in the actual town of Barstow specifically. We have people asking, “Oh my gosh, did you include this particular restaurant?” Instead, it was just a general idea of Barstow being one of the biggest cities in that part of the Mojave Desert. But yeah, that’s exactly what this was. The whole idea of structuring it around Barstow came [to use when] we were driving back from a horror convention in Vegas. My husband and I got stuck in Barstow at 2:00 AM on a Sunday night while we were driving back from the convention. My car overheated and we were trying to figure out what to do. So we were in a Denny’s at 2:00 AM on a Sunday night in Barstow…
DC: Oh boy, no better way to understand a town’s heart than to go to its Denny’s at 2 AM.
RM: That’s where you get the pulse right there. But that said, what we’ve really gravitated to above all else is just those wild desert towns that sheriff, we’ve passed towns where the sheriff is the Kwanza Hut. We did not make up the sheriff’s department being run out of Kwanza Hut.
We always go down to the Phoenix Fan Fusion Convention, and I love doing that drive. It’s five or six hours straight through the desert from California to Phoenix, and you just drive through these wild little desert bergs, stopping by the Salton Sea on the way, which has these crazy artist communities.
That’s really what we wanted to embrace, all of these different kinds of groups of life, including the people who are just there. But I love desert horror and I love noir and cosmic horror. So this is a merge of all three of those genres.
DC: So I’ve read the first issue. How far out have y’all written and planned for Barstow?
RM: We’ve gone through the end of issue four. We’ve probably idealized, I don’t even know if that’s a word, through issue eight. So we’re twice as far as what’s actually been written out. And with comics, they always will have a shelf life. It’s hard unless it’s Preacher to keep it rolling for 36 years. So we are aware of that. But that said, we have a lot more story that we’re excited to tell.
It was fascinating to see, even coming from the film and book world, how quickly the comics were turned around. We spent less than a year from signing to “Here’s your comic coming out”, which was really cool because books take just as long as a film does, and films take a year and a half or more. So yeah, the comics, it was amazing to see how quickly they came together.
DC: I just love the little details you have in the motel run by a conspiracy theorist. Was that Tyler’s doing or yours or a combo?
RM: Oh, we wrote that in. We met that guy in Arizona. That was actually someplace we stopped, and I think he ran a crystal shop in Arizona. And we had stopped at the place next door to get ice cream. And I had been like, I want to go in the rock shop is something that you don’t say often, but when in Arizona next to a rock shop, you’re like, I want to go in the rock shop. The entire wall was covered with conspiracy theories and newspaper clippings. He was wearing a shirt with an alien on it, and we were like, “This guy is awesome.”
So I know that the rock shop, Sadly we tried to stop at that rock shop two years ago when we were driving back through and it has since closed down. So I hope that man is doing well. And I hope he knows that he inspired us with his wall of conspiracy theories. But yeah, everything that we put in Barstow is something we’ve seen during our travels. I love traveling, so we will continue to do so because it’s how I find the most amazing characters who I love dearly and want to bring to life.
DC: No, I feel the same way. I’ve been traveling a lot this year and it’s much more creatively stimulating to have such a big change of scenery. Also, it’s got to be so great to take all of those memories and put them into something artistic. I think there’s something so beautiful when we take a memory like this and make something so cool and weird. There’s something cool and so personal about that.
RM: I was never a huge traveler. I mean, I traveled to horror conventions. I usually had to do a horror convention each month, but the pandemic hit. We were maybe four months into lockdown and I was going out of my mind. I called it my mid-pandemic crisis where I was like, “I’m either going to buy an RV and travel without having to be around people, or I’m going to end up moving to Joshua Tree just to get the fuck out of LA.” I was just going insane here. And it was so hot. That’s all I remember is that summer was so hot and we couldn’t leave our house.
So we bought a very gently used RV and just started traveling the country. It really changed a lot of our stories for the better. It just gave us other glimpses outside of the Los Angeles bubble.
DC: I do want to know how you chose the cover because it’s so gross and weird. It’s eye-catching, to say the least.
RM: All of our covers for those first four issues I absolutely love and want to tattoo them onto my body. It was a lot of brainstorming with Tyler. That first cover, much like a movie poster, has to sell the subgenre. So we talked about what subgenre are we trying to sell the most. Do we go detective? But then it doesn’t feel very hard. Do we go super horror? But then people are going to come in expecting crazy vampires and it’s not—it’s a lot of detective stuff. So we were trying to think of a happy medium and decided to lean heavily on cosmic horror more than anything. That’s why we ended up with the one that we did.
DC: Would you adapt Barstow into a show or a movie if someone asked you?
RM: 100%. So it started as a TV show and then we said, “You know what, let’s strip this down and make it a comic.” So yeah, we always saw this as world-building. It is creating a world and environment, a group of people in this one little eclectic desert town. We would 100% take it back to the TV if needed or wanted. I would love to do it.
Barstow #1 is available now from Dark Horse Comics.
Categorized:Interviews
