We Chat with 'The Black Forest' Writer Robert Tinnell
Filmmaker Robert Tinnell has had a damn interesting career, ever since he first served as an assistant to George Romero on Creepshow (for which he wrangled all those bugs in the film’s last horrific short tale). He's been an actor and producer on films like the infamous Surf Nazis Must Die. And he's directed movies like Frankenstein and Me. But these days Tinnell's also working in comics, and his graphic novel The Black Forest – a tale of vintage monsters battling the allied troops in World War I – done in collaboration with artist Neil Vokes, has garnered quite a bit of applause in recent years. We chatted with Tinnell at last week’s Baltimore Comic-Con about his next project with Vokes, which delves even deeper into his love of classic screen horror...
So you and Neil Vokes, you've done Black Forest together, but now you're working on a new horror project…
Right. What we decided to do is, we wanted to approach the sensibilities of the '60s gothic horror and '70s gothic horror that Hammer were putting out. So we’re doing kind of a massive… In the way we did Black Forest, as if a studio like Hammer sat down and did a huge monster rally. So the story's born out of Carmilla. It starts with some lovely lesbian vampire scenes and it explodes from there to include Frankenstein, Count Dracula, a werewolf, a mummy… I mean it really – I’ve never had so much fun writing.
Okay and what kind of format do you envision for it?
We want it monthly, twenty-two pages of color.
And will it be an ongoing series?
No, I’d actually like to leave it open-ended. And one of the things I’m kind of trying to do is write it so that if you only picked up any one given issue it’d kind of be entertaining in and of itself and have kind of a beginning, middle and end. But it’d also be part of a larger arc. And I’m also doing a back-up story called A Study in Fear with Adrian Salmon [Doctor Who, Judge Dredd] which is kind of a '60s British psychological thriller or something like that. Like Paranoiac and Die, Die My Darling – kind of like the films being done in the '60s, with that kind of vibe.
Well, the art looks beautiful on it. Have you given it a title?
I had a working title that I don't like, but I'm trying to figure out what the best title for it is. I’ve been going all over the place. But the working title is terrible. It's called Through a Glass Darkly – but that won't be what it ultimately is. I’ll know it when I see it.
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