INTERVIEW: Changers Creator Ezra Claytan Daniels
Interview Conducted By François Peneaud

Changers Book 1

Ezra Claytan Daniels is the author of THE CHANGERS, one of the most original and challenging science-fiction graphic novels of recent times. If I were to compare it to a film, it would be more akin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris than to Star Wars. In his own words, Ezra describes THE CHANGERS graphic novels as a story of “Two young men (Bisso and Geaza) from an apexed Human society in the distant future are sent back in time to the 21st century catalyze a leap in Human evolution. When a mutated ‘visitor’ from this Altered Future is sent back on behalf of his people to formally thank them, the events that follow and the things they learn about this new future of ‘higher cultural potential’ convince one of the men that their Mission will be a success, and the other that it will be a failure.”

Delving deeply in the philosophical consequences of the characters’ actions, THE CHANGERS is a thinking man’s parable full of darkly funny sci-fi concepts.

François: Tell us a few things about yourself, your personal development and studies, if you want.

Ezra: I was born and raised in Sioux City, Iowa. At 19, I moved to Portland, Oregon to study film. After a series of disenchantments, I dropped out of college, abandoned my filmic aspirations, and decided to re-acquaint myself with my first love: Comics.

Did you read comics as a kid? And if so, what were you interested in?

When I was 8 years old or so, I got into my Uncle Bobby’s old stash of seventies-era Marvel comics. ‘Iron Man’, ‘Power Man’, ‘Spider-Man’. My favourite, which I still have somewhere, was AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #124’, the first appearance of Man-Wolf. But I must admit, I don’t really remember the actual stories in those comics; I was pretty much just interested in the art. In high school though, I got into SIN CITY, which in Iowa, was about as alternative a book as you were going to find at the local comic shop.

Do you read comics nowadays? And if you do, do you follow some authors?

Currently, I’m really into Junji Ito. UZUMAKI, TOMIE, and FLESH COLOURED HORROR (best book title EVER, by the way). I haven’t read GYO yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it. I’m really interested right now in comics as a means to tell horror stories.

I’ve read only UZUMAKI (the other ones haven’t been published in France, yet). I must say I was extremely impressed. What did you find interesting in Ito’s work? The art? The stories? Both?

Of course the art, and the stories are dually incredible. But the way they combine to create this atmosphere of immensely bizarre tension, where literally anything can happen - it’s almost just the horrifically outlandish nature of that inevitable money-shot that truly disturbs you. You just have to stop for a minute to ask yourself: “What the fuck?” I just love that. ‘Horror of the Bizarre’ is what I like to call it. Anybody can come up with a fanged, clawed, roaring monster that eats and/or mangles people without provocation, but in TOMIE, when the girl gets a kidney transplant only to discover soon after that the reason she has been subsequently losing weight is because that kidney has inexplicably grown a head that has burrowed into her stomach and is eating all the food she ingests - that’s the sort of thing you just don’t forget.

And is there any other author… ?

Charles Burns’ BLACK HOLE is another great horror book. While I was doing THE CHANGERS I think I was pretty influenced by the comics I was reading then. I had a copy of an American reprint of Moebius/Charlier’s BLUEBERRY: CONFEDERATE GOLD. This version was printed in black and white and the size was reduced considerably from the original’s serialized format, but the way it turned out - just these incredibly dense, stark pages where the art was reduced to little more than a texture - I just really liked that, and I think you can see that effect in some of the later pages of THE CHANGERS.

Changers Book 2

They certainly are dense.

The art of Enki Bilal was also an inspiration, and I read the entire Akira story-arc just before I started work on the book. I was really into stuff where you could just lose yourself in the complexity of each panel; these guys who were creating fully realized physical worlds that were just as much a visual focus as the characters inhabiting them.

Of your previous work, I’ve read DISPOSABLE BOY #2 (all the DISPOSABLE BOY stuff is now up on Ezra’s website). Why did you decide to do this autobio comic?

DISPOSABLE BOY was my practice series. I’d never really done an entire comic before that, and I just wasn’t sure if I had the discipline to put out even a ten-page mini. I went with autobio simply because I felt it was something I could do episodically, which wouldn’t require additional issues to get my point across if it became too much of a burden. Plus, at that time (even still, I guess) there wasn’t much I knew about other than what it was like to be me.

Why did you stop doing that? Was it specifically to work on CHANGERS, or because you just wanted to work on something completely different?

I think DISPOSABLE BOY just served its purpose, and it was time to move on. The series lasted three issues - each one more ambitious than the last - during which time, I was writing THE CHANGERS. DISPOSABLE BOY #3 was a 44 page interactive CD-ROM with original music and two written essays, and I think I just took it as far as I was willing to go. By this time, I’d become fairly comfortable with the storytelling format, and I knew then that I had enough discipline to complete an entire full-length comic by myself. I did THE CHANGERS next, not so much because it was completely different (because I don’t really feel it is that different at all), but because it’s the thing I’d been wishing I could’ve been working on through all three issues of DISPOSABLE BOY. THE CHANGERS was the story I really wanted to tell, I just wanted to do it justice by running a few warm-up laps on something a little less consequential.

What attracted you initially to such a story?

I guess, basically, THE CHANGERS was just the comic I wanted to read. I just decided to do a book that would satisfy me, personally, as a reader. I made a conscious decision to disregard whatever naïve notions I had of marketability and industry expectation and put out a book that would‘ve excited ME if I saw it on the shelf at a bookstore, a book that I felt was missing from that shelf.

Do you read science fiction, or were the sci-fi elements just a means to an end to tell the story?

I was pretty much raised on science fiction, and as far as storytelling genres, it is the one I feel most comfortable and unrestrained in. I also felt that pure science fiction, not action sci-fi or sci-fi horror, was something that was unfortunately under-represented in modern comics, especially independent comics. While I was working on THE CHANGERS I was reading a lot of old pulp sci-fi anthology magazines from the 50’s and 60’s. Most notably ‘Galaxy Magazine’. A lot of those stories were also adapted into radio dramas on old shows like ‘X Minus One’ and ‘Dimension X’, and I listened to cassette tapes of those old serials while I drew. To me, those stories represent the pinnacle of science fiction - just true speculative futurism in the form of cautionary tales Utopian templates.

When you were building the story, did you have a clear ending early, or not? I’m asking because the story is obviously carefully built, and there are elements early in the story, which are important far later.

I think so, yes. I certainly had a clear idea of certain plot elements and how they would affect, and be affected by, the events of the story.

Oscar linking to Geaza and Bisso to show them his people.

Speaking of building the story, did you write a script and break down the pages there (as if you were a writer working for another artist), or did you use something like a dialogued continuity?

I don’t even know what a Dialogued Continuity is… THE CHANGERS was originally written as a movie script, not only because that was how I initially intended to tell the story, but because that was the only script-writing format I was familiar with. When I decided to adapt the story to comic book form, the translation was straight from that script. So the story and dialogue (even though there were rewrites all the way up to press) were pretty tight. What I did not have, however, was an idea of page layout or panel breakdown. I just converted the script, page by page, as I went along, visually interpreting each line and action as I went. About halfway through I realized definitively I probably would have been better off if I’d started with actual layouts. It was a learning experience.

Why did you work with such irregular layouts? It gives the storytelling a kind of fractured quality, a mosaic semblance to the page, that I found unsettling, but in a good way.

I did that initially because I didn’t want to be confined by any sort of predetermined grid. I wanted to have the freedom to change the shape of each panel to fit the tone of the shot. Also, I thought it would be easier for me, this being my first narrative comic, if I set up a precedent with the panel structure early on that would sort of excuse later inconsistencies. But you’re right, as far as a device, the ‘broken glass’ effect of the page layouts was also meant to lend a sense of unpredictability and unease to the story.

You chose to explain the set-up of your story right in the first pages. That makes me think that you were more interested in the moral implications of your characters’ actions than in anything else. Am I off the mark?

No, not at all. An additional motivation for getting a lot of that exposition out of the way was just because I was afraid the story set-up might be a little too complicated to digest at the same time as the more character-driven drama aspects of the story.

You used another way of conveying information to the reader with the written interludes between the chapters, where you explain a bit about the important periods in future history. It seemed to me most of those texts were darkly funny, which I wouldn’t say of the rest of the book. Maybe I just have a weird sense of humour. They also seemed to take current or past events of our history and twist them to new levels.

No, I don’t think it’s just your sense of humour. I think there is a sort of darkly comic current running through a lot of the book, maybe a little more disguised, however, by the generally deadpan delivery of the characters.

Did you see those interludes as playing the same role as, say, the text pieces in WATCHMEN?

Kind of… I think a major motivation for including the ‘Report Entries’ was to clarify some aspects of the story that were left a little muddy in the story itself, without having to resort to explaining them in spoken exposition. But, though they certainly endeavor to enhance the dramatic flow of the story, it was also important to me that the reports were tangential enough that you didn’t HAVE to read them to understand what was going on - or you could read the comic and then go back and read the reports once you were finished. Primarily though, I think they just serve to flesh out the world I’ve created, or implied, for this story to take place. I think they lend a sense of realism or possibility by implying that this story extends far, far beyond what you are seeing in the comic itself. The tone I was trying to set with the story was like a very intimate epic. There are only a few characters, and they all interact in a very informal way, and yet the implications of their actions will go on to directly affect millions of years worth of future history.

About the first interlude: when I saw you were writing about the remedies to a future overpopulation, one of the obvious ways seemed to me to push everybody toward same-sex relationships (and no, I’m not trying to promote my ‘cause’). What made you choose much, much more awful means?

I don’t really think the means I suggested were particularly AWFUL. I admit, it didn’t even occur to me to push people toward same-sex relationships, but while that may look good in theory, I don’t really think anyone (especially any form of government) could push people toward a specific type of relationship, at least not in such a capacity that it could over-rule something like overpopulation. Was this a trick question? Are you trying to get me in trouble by making me imply that sexual preference is a choice, or that it can be governed by outside influences? Because I’m not going to do it.

I was just thinking of another sci-fi book I read years ago, I think it was The Forever War, and in the comics version, there was this period in history where everybody was supposed to be homosexual (or at least, I remember it like that), and the guys were all painted like some cheap drag-queens, and I found that really, really stupid when I read it. So, it wasn’t a trick question. I wasn’t trying to get us into a discussion about the origin of sexual preferences – although I do have on opinion on that, of course.

Frankly, I don’t really know enough about it to have a confident opinion. One could then say to me: “Well, what do you think based on your own sexual experiences?” To which I would reply: “What sexual experiences?”

Alright, fair point. Not having any experience in heterosexuality, I’d say we should change the subject.

Geaza and Shelley, his 21st-century friend.

So, on to chapter 2. Many things happen there. Let’s begin with the advance in plot. We’ll talk about philosophy later. This chapter sees the meeting of Geaza and Bisso with the third (or maybe fourth with Shelley, the young woman they befriend) main character, Oscar, the man-fish from the altered future. Can you tell us a bit about his role in the story?

I guess Oscar would be defined as the story’s antagonist, at least in the first part (and one notable instance in the second part). He is the one who presents the information that initially cripples Geaza’s confidence. But in addition to that, his presence, just as a ‘person’, or specifically a FRIEND to Geaza, becomes a source of resentment for Bisso, and also serves to further isolate the Changers themselves from the outside world as well as each other.

Why did you choose to make him look like a runt, instead of, say, a demigod? Playing with Geaza and Bisso’s expectations?

Well, if he DID appear as a demigod, there certainly wouldn’t be quite the argument as to whether the Altered Future was worthy of the sacrifice they made for it. But yeah, I think a large part of THE CHANGERS for me was about playing with expectations. I took a lot of common story themes and setups and tried to skew them a bit. The Oscar character plays a role I thought was sort of similar to the T-1000 in the ‘Terminator’ movies, just in the sense that he comes here with limited social faculties from a very different and decidedly more harsh future to complete a very specific task. But I thought: ‘Why is it particularly necessary for this character to look like a giant bad-ass? Wouldn’t it be more logical, as far as body mass transport and stealth, to use a smaller, less conspicuous frame?’ And then there are things like burgeoning love, fistfights, a climactic confrontation, but none of these things are played out in a way that makes them really recognizable as the devices I’m mucking with. I don’t think.

I must admit I never thought of any reference to Terminator in your book. I hope we won’t have an indestructible bitch from hell in the second sequel to THE CHANGERS… But seriously, it’s always interesting how one work can give someone else ideas, which are then transformed to the point where they’re unrecognizable.

The telepathic link between Oscar and the two men is an interesting storytelling device. How did you choose the style of drawing for those ‘visions’? To me, they look like prehistoric cave art.

AH! Great observation. Yes, I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a visual style for his visions that I thought would make sense. Basically I tried to imagine what ART would look like if it were created by a post-industrial, neo-primitive culture, as informed by a history of ‘civilized’ artistic expression. I tried to imagine what forms of our current art repertoire would survive for three million years. If ANYTHING, it would be the corporate logos and iconic signage chiseled into stone and bent out of metal and glass - the purified representations of form created solely for function: Don’t Walk signs, Electric Shock Hazard plates, etc. I tried to imagine what cave drawings would look like if they were etched into the sides of ancient, rotting airplanes and office buildings. Primitive, yet recognizably graphic.

I hadn’t thought of that. It’s probably the scratchy style, and the rough background you used that made me think of that.

The first part of the chapter takes place in church. Geaza goes with Shelley, and the sermon is about choice and responsibility. A theme which will be very important throughout the book. It seems to me you were careful to let each character state his/her point of view, especially about the problem of the belief in god, which they find themselves discussing. And it didn’t feel like you were using your own position on that question.

Yeah, I mean, some of my views or thoughts are expressed, but I always make sure to fairly counter them with opposing positions. I generally find it irritating when an author decides it’s his/her place to blatantly preach their own personal philosophies under the veil of fiction. It just doesn’t seem fair to the reader to not be able to interactively counter that stance with questions or opposition of their own. In much of THE CHANGERS, I kind of felt like I was writing arguments between not only two equally matched characters, but between myself and the reader. It was especially important to me that the reader not be coerced to take sides. Every character has a perfectly valid and reasonable position, and even though certain character types often fall into certain GOOD or BAD roles in a story, I didn’t want to ever get into such concrete, finite terms as good or bad, right or wrong. My hope is that, at the end of the book, some people are going to feel a sense of vindication and some will feel a sense of hopelessness, depending on the character they most identified with. It is a choice, and it kind of follows with the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ theme that recurs throughout the book.

Changers Book 1 Page 23.

You tackled another very serious question in the second interlude, with an ‘essay’ about racism. It was, contrary to my expectations, rather hopeful. I gather that subject is close to your heart?

Close to me, yes, but it would hardly be relevant in the book unless it were also close to the characters in the story. The two main characters, Bisso and Geaza, come from a distant future in which the entire habitable world bakes in a semi-synthetic tropical climate. As a result, almost all Humans have developed an extremely dark skin complexion. In the future of three million years, the term ‘African American’ has no validity outside of academia. And yet, when these characters arrive here in this time, they are classified and treated as though they were this thing, this TERM, and suddenly they must bear the weight of all the history and culture of subjugation that go along with that. So this essay takes a look at racism from a sort of pseudo-academic outsider standpoint, which I admit is potentially inflammatory, as I disregarded the taboos placed on the subject that I, as a 21st Century American, have been indoctrinated with since as far back as I can remember.

How would disregarding taboos be inflammatory? Have you received negative feedback regarding this essay?

How could disregarding taboos be anything BUT inflammatory? It has been brought up, not in a critical context, but just people sort of warning me that I might get myself into trouble by saying some of these things, especially if my audience doesn’t realize where I’m coming from. My own background is one of mixed heritage: I am half Black and half White. So yes, this is a subject very important to me, and also one that I feel I have a very unique view of, being so closely connected to both polarities. Also, going back, I think this lack of definitive personal association with one race or another has greatly influenced my tendency to look at all arguments sincerely from both sides, and to accept that in almost every case, each side will genuinely believe in the righteousness of their own justifications.

Speaking of justifications and validation, chapter 3 shows Oscar telling Geaza and Bisso about his people’s history… and it’s not pretty. Your man-engineered future is definitely not a utopia. How did you decide on the kind of altered future you wanted to build, and why?

For me, this wasn’t really a creative process. I just took the setup of the Evolutionary Catalyst and played out the effects in my head, bit by bit, the way I thought they might happen in real life - or at least in my interpretation of real life. Some of the concepts might seem outlandish, but it’s just the way I saw things happening, logically, given this catalyst. I mean, real life can certainly seem outlandish, especially if you look at it over the course of three million years.

Did you read books about evolutionary process, or did you just let your imagination run free? The “three million” years gap you use doesn’t really have any scientific background, does it?

I did do a little research on evolutionary process, just to learn feasibly how long it would take for a dramatic evolutionary change to take place naturally. It wouldn’t make sense for the Changers to come back to jump-start our evolutionary stagnation if they only came from, say ten thousand years into the future. I wanted the time difference to seem completely incomprehensible, to really magnify the fact that no significant evolutionary advancements have taken place between our present and their future. Plus I really like the number three.

One little sci-fi question: you obviously took great pains to imagine a believable future (well, two in fact, Geaza and Bisso’s and then Oscar’s). Which gives your speculative elements a lot of realism. On the other had, you never touched the problem of time paradox – if their mission succeeds, Geaza and Bisso’s won’t be born to go back in time, so that altered future won’t happen, so they’ll be born and on and on… Do you care to say something about that?

This is touched on, albeit in a very oblique way, in the last few lines of Book Two, where Geaza mentions something about alternate realities and dimensional shifts. By catalyzing the Altered Future, the Changers aren’t necessarily directly eliminating their own future (in terms of infinite realities), but rather, creating a new branch from their common past. But let me reiterate: This is a science FICTION story; the ‘science’ I’m employing is hardly based in fact. I didn’t go out and do any extraneous research on the physics and paradox of Time Travel. Partly because such specifics were impertinent to the story I already knew I was going to tell, and partly because I didn’t want to find myself knee-deep in techno-babble-laden exposition. But the point you bring up is definitely one I considered. Basically, I just played it out in my head: “What would happen to a person if they went back in time and somehow prevented their own birth?” Would it be like in ‘Back to the Future’, where all traces of the person just gradually fade away in this really clean, dramatic way? Or would it be something more cataclysmic, like with lightning and heavy winds? Essentially, I just thought the possibility of some well-produced, visually spectacular consequence to this paradox seemed less likely than just having nothing happen at all. These characters came back in time, and they are HERE, NOW. What happened in (or happens to) their past then becomes irrelevant to their present. Like, you could go and destroy the hospital in which I was born, but it wouldn’t have any physical effect on me, because I’m already here, now. Isn’t there a term for what I’m doing? ‘Fuzzy Logic’?

I’d say it’s not logic at all, but just a creative decision you made, and it seems to me that it works well within your story.

The realism I strived for in this story comes from the characters, and how they interact. I wanted to take these people coming from remarkable circumstances, put them into these totally bizarre scenarios, and yet have it feel completely rational and sensible just by the way they respond to it.

Changers Book 1 Page 24.

Yes, it’s obvious that, as entertaining as the sci-fi elements are in this book, the human interaction is far more important and consequential. Which is why your book is much more than another entertaining Time Travel story.

Thanks.

Another storytelling question: on pages 90-92, our protagonists are in a club, and you chose to put sound effects in the margin, leaving the panels onomatopoeia-free. Any specific reason why?

This was just, to me, visually how I interpreted the blaring sounds of a bar/club atmosphere, and how they wash out all else to create this blanket of white noise. That’s my reaction, anyway. I hate bars/clubs. And I hate loud noises.

Same for me. We’re not equipped to deal with modern urban life, I guess.

By blocking out a good third of the page with an overbearing WALL of repetitive sound effects, I was trying to recreate in comic book form that sense of constriction, or claustrophobia that I - er, the characters - feel in such places.

The third interlude/essay is about culture and identity. I must say I really liked the relativism the writer (that is, Geaza) showed. Another ‘outsider standpoint’, as you said. Do you personally have the feeling that all the modern talk about cultural identity is mostly a rather limited view of mankind’s unity?

This report was sort of me working through some of my own conflicting thoughts on the subject. Culture is certainly a superficial term, in that you are not born WITH, but rather born INTO your respective social association. The internal debate began, or was aggravated by an argument I got into with a gal who was raised in Sweden before moving back to the U.S. and she just had this really pretentious, self-righteous attitude about having grown up abroad. I guess part of my stance was based in defensive resentment, since I’ve never been outside the U.S. (due in part to a slightly prohibitive complication with my birth certificate), but it just seemed absurd to assert that people are fundamentally different internally or emotionally because of what part of the world they live in. Again, I’m not talking about race or ethnicity, which is something totally different.

Another thing I liked in your book, the fact that you’re talking about the future of the human species as a whole, a problem which makes the cultural differences fade away and become totally insignificant. Standing back from our current difficulties can be refreshing.

Yeah, but I kind of think ‘Inevitable’ is a better word to describe the Changers’ future than ‘Utopian’. Barring any unforeseen calamities, or the advent of some previously unimagined technology that alters the course of our path, I think this is clearly where we’re headed.

We’re now at the end of the first volume of CHANGERS, which brings me to my next question: Why did you choose to publish your story in this format and size, but not in, say, a comics format?

A combination of financial and aesthetic reasons. Financially, it was cheaper for me to go with a smaller size, just because I could fit more pages on each press sheet. Aesthetically, to me, the art looked better the more it was reduced from the original 12 x 18 in format I did the drawings in. And the reason I printed the books as two graphic novels as opposed to six issues of a standard comic book or one TPB was largely timing. I did the first chapter as a single 32-page comic book and had fifty prototype copies printed so I could submit the series to publishers. But by the time I started getting my rejection letters, I was already finished with the next two chapters and I was at the halfway point. By this time, frankly, I was just getting anxious to get something out, and I just wanted people to be able to see what I’d been doing all this time. So I decided to break the story in half and take the first GN with me to debut at February’s Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. Another factor in my choice to publish GN’s as opposed to standard comic books was cross-industry accessibility. I read and buy a lot of comics, but even I rarely buy single issues of a series. To me, there just seems to be something more palpable, or sanctioned about a GN or collection with a complete, self-contained story-arch. And I just don’t seem to have the dedication or attention span to remember to keep up with something over a long course of time.

Changers Book 1 Page 25.

The design of the covers is quite striking. Can you tell us something about the thoughts that went into that?

This also kind of goes back to the size issue. With the covers, I was going for a sort of Technical Training Manual feel. I wanted the books to look like instruction pamphlets, or blueprints - just really industrial. I wanted the covers to feel really cold, to kind of galvanize the ideally detached nature of their mission. I felt the smaller size worked better to convey that, like a handy reference manual you could just keep in your pocket.

So, onto the first chapter of volume two, where something gruesome happens. You’d been building up doubts about their mission between Geaza and Bisso in the previous chapters, and now it all comes to a head. Did you think you needed such a violent and bloody scene to show the moral ambiguity of the two men’s endeavor?

I guess I have a high tolerance for stylized violence, but I certainly don’t want to perpetuate the use of it gratuitously. The scene you refer to was an attempt to indefensibly exhibit the true bestial nature of that character, and to show just what that meant, in terms of how that relates to those around him.

Another theme also appears: is anyone entitled to judge another being’s actions, when that being is extremely different, morally speaking? It seems to me that this is another problem of our so-called global society.

It really is. Morality is such a subjective thing, and based so much on culture. But the further you move from attempting to impose a global moral code, the closer you move toward separatism. Honestly, I don’t know where I stand on this issue. I still have a lot of thinking to do on that one.

And then there is the fourth essay, this time about the man-made evolution of animals, especially pets. This one is even more obviously than the other ones a kind of satire/parody of our times, but more interestingly, it raised the problem of the rights of minorities (in that case, of an intelligent but intellectually limited race of animals). Can you tell us more your views regarding that question?

Again, just working through the physical and social evolutionary process in my head, this was the way it played out logically. Strangely, this concept was partly inspired by ‘Pokémon’, where you have Humans interacting with all sorts of ‘Animals’ of varying sentience - some almost as intelligent as the Humans themselves. But if you took that dynamic and put it into the ‘real world’ it certainly wouldn’t be as clean as all that. Animal rights would take on an entirely more profound significance if the animals were in a position to represent themselves intellectually. The things people legally get away with doing to animals, in the ‘entertainment’, breeding and meat industries is just tragically appalling. If those same animals gradually developed the intellectual capacity to defend themselves, there would be a brand new issue of civil rights to be dealt with. On a side note, the reference in this report to the Dog who was sentenced to death for the murder of twelve Humans was a direct reverse of an incident that happened here in Portland at around the same time I was writing this report. There is a park near my house called Laurelhurst Park where sixteen dogs were poisoned, twelve of which died. It was amazing to me to see the news coverage of the event shift almost immediately from the crime itself to the issue of dog-owners who don’t follow leash laws. I don’t think the authorities ever found who did it, and I don’t think it was ever even in their list of priorities.

An evolved cat sulking.

By the way, I found the drawing of the cat sulking extremely funny, with his arms folded, maybe because I work with teenagers. I’ll put it somewhere on this page.

In this future history you wrote, you posited that there would be a lasting taboo against man/advanced animal marriage. I found extremely telling that you linked it to the taboo of pedophilia. As if you wanted to show the permanence of the latter. Or am I reading too much into that?

No, in an earlier draft of that report, I actually went more into that. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems shocking how blatantly pedophilia, or the sexualization of minors, seems to be creeping into the mainstream, at least in American pop culture. I mean, how much further can they go with this? But at the same time, with the inadvertent mass consumption of livestock growth hormones by children and adolescents, the legal term: ‘Minor’ might have to be reevaluated to accommodate the rapidly shortening prepubescent stage of American youth. But this is another sci-fi setup altogether.

In the fifth chapter, we see Geaza beating up racists. I was wondering whether this was showing that he was internalizing racism as a personal problem. And is there some wish fulfillment on your part? Because honestly, sometimes I’d like to see more headlines about gay-bashers having been bashed.

This was a scene where I wanted to show how much Geaza was breaking down. I mean, his motivation must have had to do somewhat with his internalization of the effects of racism, but for him to lash out like that was really intended to be more indicative of his decaying self-control and growing sense of inconsequentiality. But yes, I admit, there was also an element of fantasy role-playing involved for me. Those skinheads could have just as easily been common ruffians or something. Actually, in an earlier draft of the script, they were just plain old suburban jocks.

There’s also a rather interesting discussion about the use of time travel, that of knowing history for what it is and not what has been written about it – in the course of the book, you disassemble most of what makes people sure of themselves: religion, culture, history… what is left that makes us human? The will to better ourselves?

This is the Ultimate Disenchantment. I mean, there are certainly achievements that have been ‘properly’ documented and have measurably affected Human history, but if we use our technological abilities to debunk a lot of those just mystifying, mythical accomplishments that just make you think: “God, the Human race is really a remarkable thing” - I think we would collectively lose a great deal of our pride, or at least confidence - but this is not to say that we SHOULDN’T try to debunk these things. This goes back to another point brought up in the book and that is: “If you are living a lie that makes you happy, can that still be true happiness?” I think the answer is ‘no’. As far as the question: “What is left that makes us Human”, I think that was ultimately the question that eventually forced the people of the 30,000th Century to do something that would make their race remarkable again. I think they found they could not define Humanity by ‘Its Will To Better Itself’, but instead, only by ‘Its Will To Live’, which was nothing more profound than any other animal or organism. To them, it just wasn’t enough. Not enough of a distinction, or a reward for their diligence and effort.

Changers Book 1 Page 26.

During the rest of the chapter and the following, fourth, essay, you make explicit something that underlined a good part of the actions of those future people: the wish for immortality, the fear not of death, but of oblivion. Which is rather paradoxical, since they come from a culture which has decided to erase itself without a trace. I must admit that their wish to change history is for me a kind of hubris.

You are largely correct. Let me clarify though, that the report you are talking about refers to the human race of the 405th Century, which is decidedly different than that of the 30,000th. But let me try to defend the notion of paradox you bring up. I agree that by sending someone back to improve the Human race, the people of the 30,000th Century were striving for a sort of immortality. But I think their notion of Immortality would differ greatly from ours. To them, to be immortal does not mean for themselves to live forever, or even to indefinitely elongate the lifespan of the entire race. I think, for them, being immortal means achieving something so great that it will resonate forever, in the cosmic sense. So even by sacrificing themselves and their own history, they are still vying for immortality in a purely selfless, truly enlightened sense.

So, you agree with that future humanity’s decisions? I must say that for me, changing the course of their evolution like that is a logical follow-up to man’s willful influence on nature - we’ve always wanted to bend it to our perceived needs. That’s why I was calling it ‘hubris’: not against any invented god, but against nature.

I don’t know if I would agree with their decision or not. I mean, I can try to imagine myself in that position, but I can’t think with the same clarity and insight I’ve assigned the Human race of the 30,000th Century. I think the way they felt was that the millions of years spent, as you said, bending nature to their needs, was the true ‘hubris’, and by doing something that would in a sense retroactively disable that tendency, they were potentially making amends. They were trying to plant the seed for an evolutionary trajectory in which the development of the Human race was based more on their active physical adaptations than advancements in ‘nature-subverting’ technology.

As fascinating as I find THE CHANGERS, I can’t say I agree with the reasoning behind the characters’ mission. That being said, evolution is largely the product of a series of accidents, so the humanly-induced change could be seen as another accident, just not one caused by chance.

Yeah, that’s another good point. What defines NATURAL? You could argue that anything done by an organic creature should be defined as natural. I mean, you can’t really draw the line for labeling our milestones as natural at, say, the use of tools. But in that case, even the creation of robotics and artificial intelligence would be defined as natural, since they are created by naturally occurring organisms in a natural progression of their technological skills. Actually, not to digress, but this is a theme I plan to explore in depth in an upcoming project.

The ending of the book has a certain inevitability, but also, it seems to me, a large moral ambiguity. You’ve stated your own views in this interview, but you obviously wanted to let the readers make up their own minds about the whole story. What do you think this ambiguity (or at least, what I perceive as such) brings to the story?

Realism. Like I said earlier, in almost every argument, both sides stake their positions on fully self-justified grounds. These characters aren’t GOOD or BAD. And even though they are remarkable in terms of where they come from and what they represent, they are still driven by personal motivations that may only seem valid to them. With that as a fundamental axiom of the story, it wouldn’t seem fair to really clearly favor one character over the other. I think when a reader is left to make their own decisions as to how they feel about a story and its conclusion, there’s more potential for a connection. I think people can relate to a story more when the author respects them enough to just sort of back off a bit - present the story as a document, rather than something calculated to manipulate their emotions.

Changers Book 1 Page 27.

We’ll now leave Geaza, Bisso, Oscar and the others to their fates (if such a thing has any meaning in a time travel story), but before we turn off the lights, please tell us what you can about your future projects.

The next project on the immediate docket is going to be handling layout and design chores for David (PRIVATE BEACH) Hahn’s new creator-owned miniseries for Image called BULLET ROYALE. It’s my first real job in the Industry, and the first time I’ll actually make a financial profit for my comic work. In the meantime, I’m starting to write the new project I mentioned earlier, which is going to be a sci-fi/horror story, with leanings toward the sci-fi. It’s called UPGRADE SOUL and it’s actually one of the stories I was thinking about doing after DISPOSABLE BOY, but decided not to because it was, frankly, too ambitious for me at the time. But now that I’ve got the CHANGERS books behind me, I kind of feel confident enough to take it on.

Well, we’ve covered the questions I wanted to ask you, so it only remains for me to thank you for agreeing to do this interview.

Not at all. Thanks for approaching me, and for coming up with such great questions. I think they may have taught me as much about my own books as anyone reading this interview will glean from my rambling answers. Thanks again, François.

François Peneaud is a math teacher and translator who lives in the south west of France with his partner. He runs a fan-site about P. Craig Russell and The Gay Comics List


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