by Mike Favila, Editor and Emil Favila, Reporter

ComicsOnline.com: Spread is amazing. How did that come about?

Justin Jordan: Thank you. Basically I had this idea that I kinda want to do, there were kinda two ideas that kinda went into them.  One of them was it would be cool to do Lone Wolf and Cub with zombies. But I also didn’t really want to do zombies just because that market is kinda cornered, and there’s so much zombie stuff out there that I didn’t want to retread all that.

So I kinda had that idea, but then I had read about, I read a scientific article (that I’m going to mangle when I explain it).  But the basic gist of it was our cellular machinery, the way we produce energy, like the Kreb cycle, the ATP and all that stuff is not the only way biochemically that could happen. There are several other chemical processes that at least, hypothetically, could do that and the article was theorizing that billions of years ago when we were still at the unicellular life stage, those other systems existed and ours is just the one that won, because the environment changed.

So that’s worth the thought of “What if this supervirulent alternate ecosystem existed and we accidentally dug it up and its just able to radically outcompete us?”  Which is what happens in Spread. And so those two things combined together became it.

And then, I met Kyle (Strahm) a few years ago at New York Comic Con through Tim Seeley (Hack & Slash) actually. When I had the idea, I wanted Kyle for it.  Like, he was the artist I had in mind when I was thinking of the idea.  When I ran into him again at New York Comic Con 2 or 3 years ago again, he was like “Hey if you want to do something together…”.  I’m like “It’s funny you should ask because..I do”.  And they we had Spread.

CO: Between the genesis of when you guys got together and when Spread‘s first issue came out, how long did that process take?

JJ: Less than a year. That would’ve been New York Comic Con back in 2013, I think. There’s sometimes bigger intervals. Like it took a while when Tradd and got together about Luthor Strode and it took till 2011 till that came out, so sometimes stuff takes a while.  But Spread was a faster process.

CO: So do you have an over arching plan for the book like 30 issues,50 issues?

JJ: I do, but that’s wrong. It must have been 2012 because we did a teaser of it in 2013.  Then the actual first issue came out in 2014, so yeah it was longer than what I was saying.

Obviously it’s contingent on sales, but when I pitched it, I had an arcs roughed out to like issue 60.  And it does have an end.  There’s a thing we’re striving towards. How long we take to get there is dependent upon sales.  Because I have a road map of where I want to go, but there are like detours I can take.  By way for instance, the second arc, which is something that I thought of and wanted to do and Kyle was cool with, but it’s not in the plan we had.  It is not the second arc. It didn’t exist at all. What actually was the the second arc is now the third arc.  So there’s a plan.   And I’d like to get to that 60 issue mark, but if sales don’t hold I can end it faster than that. But it needs to get to like 30.

CO: At least a bulk of the story. I like that new preacher story you had and I didn’t know why it didn’t come to me but I didn’t immediately pick it up that that guy was going to be the preacher…

JJ: You know, it’s funny like nobody did, and I liked the fact that he’s on the cover would have been the clue!  But I thought that issue worked really well.  That’s part of our plan from the beginning, was that we were going to do, in between each arc we were gonna do one fill in issue and there will be a month where the trade replaces the regular issue.  So we have a two month gap for Kyle to get ahead on stuff, rather than trying to do the monthly grind month in to month out.

So we did that, and we got another one coming out with issue 12, which is Molly’s story. So you’ll get to find out what the deal with Molly is in issue 12.  And that’s already written.  The whole series is written through issue 12.  I start issue 13 probably next week.

And it’s nice because those issues can add a lot of depth to the stuff.   I don’t think you need to have read the preacher story to get what he’s about, but I think hopefully it adds depth to what you did read.  And that’s what we’re trying to do is give that little extra added dimension to it.

CO: And it didn’t feel like its a throw away.

JJ: No, and we got a whole world to play with, so I want to fill it out. You know what I mean?  Expand and see how people made it between the ten years when the Spread happened and when the book starts.  There’s a nice long interval, so we’ll eventually get around to telling No’s story and Jack’s story and some other things, as we go on.

And it’s not impossible that we might do an entire arc that’s just one shot issues, just to kind of fill it out.  You know, and add more depth to the world.  That’s the nice part of doing an ongoing.  And it’s a fairly successful ongoing.   We are making money on it, so we can kind of afford to do stuff now.

CO: Now I read in the letters page to Luther Strode that this was gonna be the last arc?

JJ: It is.

CO: Now what made you decide that?  It felt like a good place?

JJ: It felt like the right place.  Basically, the first one was written, they’re all written that if the series didn’t do well, we could end it there.  So the first one was written with the intention that if it didn’t sell well, and it’s a complete story and it ends.  So the second was designed the same way.

But when I did the second one, in between pitching it and writing the first issue, I came up with this whole kind of longer story, this arc we can do, that is the arc we’ve done, that would be about 18 issues.  And that way always the right amount of story.  

It’s not impossible that we might tell more stories in the world, but Luthor’s story is told over those 18 things.  The thing is, there is a mythology there that we could do other stuff with.  We could go back in history and show other things. And we may.  Right now we don’t have any plans to, and certainly Luther Strode’s story ends with that 18th issue.

CO: Yeah and you very feel satisfied…

JJ: Yeah and I’m a believer in having an ending, you know what I mean?  Like with Spread, it’s a bigger world and it’s more flexible, but there is a progression of story. There is a plan and an arc for it that will eventually end.  And there are other stories we could tell with that kind of stuff. Luthor’s though is a much more intimate story.  So there really isn’t, if we added more issues to it,  even going to that same end point, it would be just kind of be padding.  You know what I mean?  And I try to keep as much as I can, I try to keep my stories as lean as I can.  But I’m also a believer that stuff should end.  I think a lot of television shows…

CO: Like a BBC, Japanese thing…

JJ: Yeah, very much so.  And its why like, I wasn’t so happy to see it go, but I like that, say Justified, just ended after doing like 70 episodes, or however many they ended up doing.  It’s the same thing, like a lot of television shows.  Like they’ll do fine for like five seasons, right? And for after like five seasons, it’s really hard to keep continuing a story.

Like Supernatural is that way. And Supernatural is still an enjoyable show, but like the main story that was kind of those first five seasons ends in season 5. And everything after that you can kind of see that they’re sort of floundering to have more story.  So I’m a believer in telling a story…

CO: And you don’t want to be like that…

JJ: No, the British model is what we like to go for, which is tell a story in the length that it needs to be told.

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