An interview with Dan Watters
Comic-book writer known for his work on Lucifer (DC), Home Sick Pilots, Coffin Bound, and Limbo.
Originally published 14 March 2020.
This week I’m excited to share my interview with London-based comic-book writer Dan Watters, co-creator of the breathtakingly-good Coffin Bound at Image Comics, also currently writing Lucifer for DC Vertigo's Sandman Universe.
I first met Dan years ago when he was working for T Pub comics with Caspar Wijngaard. Later, when Eric Stephenson was holding pitching sessions at Thought Bubble comic festival, Caspar and I pitched one of our ideas in the slot before Dan and Caspar pitched Limbo, which went on to become their first Image Comics series!
Dan’s writing abilities have grown exponentially in the time since, to the point where the first volume of Coffin Bound pretty much represents everything that’s good about the medium of comics. I always enjoy catching up with Dan and hope you’ll enjoy this interview.
1/ What or who was it that originally inspired you to write and have your inspirations changed over the course of your career?
Writing was always just a thing I did when I was younger. I was always writing scraps of things, and then when I discovered girls and punk rock and other assorted pimply-aged pastimes, I was warned that if I didn’t flex those muscles, I’d lose them. Which I probably did for a few years, but I pretty much just transferred them over to music. I’ve always played in punk bands, and still do. Then when I decided to take things seriously, I started on a film uni course, but was too impatient for film. I wanted to start making things, rather than faffing about.
So I returned to comics and prose, and here I am. It was mostly the old Vertigo stuff that put the idea in my head to write comics. Specifically, I picked up a copy of Morrison/McKean’s Arkham Asylum, which had Morrison’s annotated script in the back. He goes on at length about how he was utilizing tarot and Jungian archetypes and the intertext with Alice in Wonderland and all that good stuff. Having not read any other comic scripts at the time, I presumed this was the depth of knowledge and care that every comic writer put into every comic, so I set out to learn enough to be able to do that too.
I still ascribe to the idea, even having realised that Arkham Asylum is probably an outlier when it comes to density. As for how my inspirations have changed, a lot of it’s been a case of exorcising those initial influences from my writing and looking far outside of comics for influence. I find a lot of it in theatre. I’m a big fan of Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, that whole lineage.
2/ What do you feel that comic-books offer that can’t be found in other media?
I think there’s probably still a lot to be done in the medium that hasn’t been done yet. Comics do juxtaposition better than possibly any other medium. Film does it well, but it’s one thing to be able to play classical music over a fight scene, another to juxtapose scenes of cruelty or poverty with a sonnet, or with a soliloquy. It’s a way to show both interiority and exteriority all at once, with an immediacy that doesn’t exist elsewhere. I’m still really excited each time I sit down to write a script. There are always new voyages to undergo.
There’s also an element, which I don’t find gets spoken about so much, of how comics have built their own shorthands and tropes that don’t really exist in other mediums. There are the superhero tropes, sure, but so many other styles and languages that have been developed from Eisner onwards. Part of the joy of the medium is engaging with them. They’re another tool in the box.
3/ If the completed comic is only the tip of the iceberg, tell me about the parts of your creative process that we don’t see – what would be a typical journey from inception to completion of an idea?
Oh boy.
Most things explode outwards from a kernel. A what-if. Or taking an existing concept - a trope or a cliché - and turning it on its head. Though that only really works if turning it on its head means it now rings true with some other part of the human experience. Otherwise what you have is a neat trick, not really a story. Coffin Bound was very much a what-if: ‘what if you tried to erase all evidence of yourself from the world, and leave it as though you’d never been born?’
“Comics do juxtaposition better than possibly any other medium. Film does it well, but it’s one thing to be able to play classical music over a fight scene, another to juxtapose scenes of cruelty or poverty with a sonnet, or with a soliloquy.” – Dan Watters
Character tends to be born out of that. Plot, in turn, is born out of character. I spend a lot of time with A4 notebooks, scribbling out ideas and scenes and then joining the dots before I start scripting.
4/ If you woke tomorrow and were no longer constrained by time, budgets or even skills that you haven’t learned yet, what would you make?
If I had time, I would like to make all the half-simmered things I have sitting in my notebooks. These are for the most part comics, prose, and plays. Those are the mediums I’m really interested in working in for the moment. Film and TV appeal but aren’t where my heart is for the moment.
I don’t really feel like lack of skill in an area is a thing I really worry about as a barrier to entry - in learning the outside-ins of a medium is where you find the interesting things to play with, so I think if I wanted to work on something I’d probably go ahead and do it. If I had the time. God, I wish I had the time to do everything.