The Burning Black
A Conversation With Mark Allard-Will
Mark Allard-Will is a writer born and raised in Suffolk who lived in the St. Edmundsbury district of the county until age twenty-six. He left to start anew in Canada, and is there turning his focus back to his home county with his latest project, a graphic novel entitled The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck. I got the chance to talk to him as he is kicking off this epic project:
James Curcio: I’m sure many of our readers aren’t familiar with the beast that’s at the center of your story. Can you introduce it, to get us started?
Mark Allard-Will: Absolutely! At the centre of the story I’m crafting with The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck is the eponymous Black Shuck, a jet-black Demon Dog said to have terrorised two small villages in the deeply rural English county of Suffolk on the night of August 4th, 1577. These villages are now towns, but still rural, Bungay and Blythburgh.
On the night in-question, a dry, hot August night, it’s said a dry thunderstorm rolled in, and Black Shuck himself appeared in Bungay, his approach hidden by the dark and the crashes of the storm. Here he attacked the local St. Mary’s Church. Having killed four worshippers, it’s said that the Hell Hound vanished in a flash, and reappeared in Blythburgh, where he once again attacked the village’s Church, the Holy Trinity Church. As the tale goes, the burned-in marks you can see in the decrepit, aged doors of the Holy Trinity Church are the claw marks left by Black Shuck himself.
With a myth like this in a deeply rural area, you can easily see how it’s remained deeply entrenched in local lore; especially given the professed claw marks. They really are a sight to behold if you get the chance to visit.
JC: That detail reminds me a little of the scoring on Devil’s Tower, which are said to be left by a bear chasing the seven sisters of the Pleiades, in Lakota myth. It’s always fascinating, the ways our stories claim the land around us, or rather the ways the land around us is a story, within the realm of human imagination.
An idea really needs to take hold of us, to get the kind of commitment that a graphic novel requires, though sometimes the process of creation involves figuring out for ourselves why we find it so immersive. How did the Hellhound sink its teeth into you, as it were?
M A-W: There are several reason this piece of regional folklore really stuck with me.
Firstly, he’s become more than folklore in some sense, even though people wouldn’t necessarily know it until you point it out to them. For example, if you point out to people that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is known to have used the myth of Black Shuck as his inspirational ‘jumping-off-point’ for The Hound of the Baskervilles, then the common reader starts to get an idea of just far-reaching it has become in pop culture lore, but under different names. So, I became obsessed by this idea of taking people back to origin and show them where the story trope of the Hellhound really began.
JC: Maybe Gore Vidal was right, about the perspective gained by writing about the myths and culture of a homeland in which one no longer lives. And this story is certainly deeply rooted in British myth…
M A-W: Yes. I grew up in Suffolk, so I grew up at the epicentre of where this Hound lives in rumour and lore. The more I studied Norse mythology and Norse stories, such as The Saga of the Völsungs, where a beast such as Fafnir is the antagonist and folkloric magnet of the story, the more I began to think to myself “I should really tackle this Black Shuck figure in a story”.
JC: In your Kickstarter video, you mention that the historic scale of this is vast — it’s not just a creature feature…
M A-W: Yeah, in the script for The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck, I’ve not just stuck to a retelling of the events of August 4th, 1577. Instead, I’ve decided to do something quite bold by attempting to give Black Shuck a backstory.
Without giving too much away, I thought about British history at the plot development stage, about the key motivators of the time in which Black Shuck attacked (1577, of course, being the late Tudor period, reign of Queen Elizabeth I), and the main motivator of all of England at that time could only have been one thing: Christianity.
So, then I thought, “well, if Black Shuck is attacking these people, he must be an enemy of Christianity”. Clearly, I love ancient Pagan mythology: from the Norse to the Egyptians to the Greeks to what little we know of Maya.
Then, I remembered my history from school and it hit me: the Saxons had a brutal war with the invading Vikings in England in the 9th century and most of these conflicts (mostly, but not always) came down to a war of competing mythologies: “I’m Christian and you’re Pagan.”
I’m beginning The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck in the Dark Ages, in the Battle of Edington to be specific; the decisive conflict that brought the Danelaw, Viking territory, under a treaty with Wessex. Without spoiling the story before anyone’s read it, I’m focusing on a real Viking figure, said to have lived and reigned in Suffolk, who is — let’s say — cursed to live forever in the form of the Hellhound for the shame of forgoing his paganism in defeat.
From here, of course, I shoot the readers in to Tudor era Suffolk, an almost 700-year leap across English history. Mayhem and panic ensues.
JC: Creative nonfiction is incredibly demanding, in terms of research, and somewhat intimidating, in terms of remaining consistent with your source material, while letting that material breathe and come to life. You know — I’m not sure if it was part of what inspired you to reach out to me initially or not, but I’m working on an intensive illustrated novel project, myself. So I definitely know what you’re in for, in terms of the work ahead.
I noticed an interesting parallel between our projects, or rather, sort of an opposite approach: we’ve opted to use history and myth as a stepping off point in Tales From When I Had A Face — our source materials are mostly panasian and Siberian, Tengerism, the Turks, even some elements from Scandinavian myth that may have flowed down the Volga river — but I’ve been very careful to actually avoid blurring the lines between the mythical elements of this story, which are based in these histories, and the real world the characters live within.
So there is a fantasy tale contained within the story that occurs in the real world: we bracketed all instances of the so-called supernatural within stories that are being told, grandmother to granddaughter. In the ‘real world’ there are dreams, portents, visions. Sure. But it’s all psychological when you get down to it.
It seems to me you’re doing precisely the opposite with your project: including the supernatural within the lived experience of your characters, in a magical realism sense: it’s ‘the real world’, but there’s a flaming dog in it. Is that accurate?
M A-W: Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head. So, the history that does exist is down pat: After researching for months, I not only allowed that research to guide the historical framing of the story, but I likewise handed over a visual research package over to Ryan (the artist). This package was everything from the best representations of the historical figures that exist in the story through to how Vikings and Saxons were armed and clothed, and how the different classes of people dressed, what their housing looked like, and even a layout of how Bungay is believed to have looked in 1577 .
By that same token, the historical accuracy is mostly framing, after all a graphic novel is a story told in a visual medium like a movie, for a very supernaturally profound piece of regional folklore that just happened to have taken place in that time. Or so the story goes, right?
For the opening act of the book — that Dark Ages part — I embrace the history of the Battle of Edington as recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and retold in various history books, but then, after the Viking’s somewhat surprise defeat, it’s then essentially me, as a writer, playing with a historical figure, and making something supernatural happen to him with this curse.
Fast-forward to that main Tudor era bulk of the story and it’s a very supernatural thing, mostly accurately framed around the supposed accounts of Black Shuck’s attack, that happens to and around fictional characters of my making. Does that make sense?
JC: It does to me, and I think it’s an interesting way to approach the material.
I really like the style of the artist you’ve found for The Burning Black. Looks a precise, clean ink style. What’s his story?
M A-W: Ryan Howe. Ryan is the Canadian Artist responsible for an amazing Adventure series of graphic novels called Daisy Blackwood: Pilot for Hire. Imagine Indiana Jones, but instead of a bull whip-wielding professor on a mad sabbatical, it’s a female boat pilot called Daisy. She winds up inadvertently at the epicentre of 1940s, Indie-esque adventures.
The reason I chose Ryan to be the artist on this project is because I wrote the script for The Burning Black partly as a horror story, with heavy lean on dramatic lighting effects and, in short, Ryan does the most intense dramatic shading I’ve ever seen a comic book artist create… I’d go as far as to call it filmic.
JC: How did you get into the mad business of writing graphic novels?
M A-W: Meeting my now-Wife, Elaine M. Will, in early 2015. I was a writer for a number of years prior to his, having a lengthy educational history in screenwriting and creative prose. I’d grown up with comic books in the UK, with the now-defunct British version of the Sonic Comics, called Sonic the Comic, but in my teens and early twenties I’d drifted away from the medium completely.
When I met Elaine, who is also creator of Look Straight Ahead — Renegade Arts Entertainment, it blew my mind seeing comic books from the creative end. I saw the scope of how similar the writing process was to screenwriting, yet it somehow felt like a more expressive medium to write for, there seemed to be more ‘play’ and expression in what you can write. From that moment on, I was hooked and I’d decided that I didn’t want to try and tell stories through no-budget filmmaking ever again.
JC: That’s a big appeal of comics over film, from the writer’s perspective at any rate. I got sick of sinking years into things that never got made because of money or corporate decisions — which of course exists in comics too but the production costs are usually considerably less. Of course, it’s hard to break into writing comics, but for somewhat different reasons.
M A-W: Yes. Since then, I’ve released a comic book, a feature-length graphic novel, written many other works that are either in bids for funding or with the artists as we speak and debuted works at the prestigious Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
JC: It all connects. As an artist, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wrestling with what motivates the creative process, and how our lives are embroiled in the work we do — it is the chief subject of our forthcoming anthology Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, which incidentally is what has led me back to doing interviews again: to find out that motivates other artist’s creative processes, and continue what I started there. I think it’s especially notable with art because it’s so hard to get anywhere with it. You have to really want it. Do you know what interested you initially in writing — and why you’ve kept with it?
M-AW: You’re absolutely correct! Art and storytelling is something you have to really want, if you’re looking for quick successes, then writing most likely isn’t for you.
In terms of what interested me about writing, I couldn’t pinpoint one exact thing, one exact moment that lead me to have that hunger to do nothing but tell stories, what I do remember is that when it first hit me that I wanted to just that. Nothing else. The passion had its grip on me and wasn’t going to let go.
I wrote short form prose as a young child and I was passionate about writing fiction as a hobby both in and out of school, so my passion for writing is something that’s been with me for as long as I can remember. I loved movies in my late childhood and early teens, I couldn’t get enough of them, and it was this love of movies that spurred me to, in my mid-teens, to pursue my education in screenwriting. From here, I went to College at sixteen to study video production and then at eighteen to University for film and TV production.
As for why I’ve stuck at it, kept writing and kept publishing harks back to what I said earlier in my answer: I can’t imagine not doing this, for me that’s a nightmare scenario.
JC: ‘I’m not sure why I do it, but I know that I have to.’ I think that’s often it. And it’s probably more honest than the times we think we know The Reason. It changes.
Something else I was wondering… My attention was drawn when you mentioned in your kickstarter video that one of your past projects was metafiction. Which was that, and how did you mean “metafiction”, sort of post modern proscenium breaking, or…?
M A-W: My released metafiction work is the graphic novel Årkade (2017). It’s a story in the Adventure genre and features a handful of metafiction techniques, some of which are send-ups of what was my favourite movie in my childhood, The Never Ending Story. No proscenium or fourth wall breaks here, but plenty of fun bending the storytelling convention, nonetheless.
Årkade is a story set inside a early ’90s video gaming cartridge for the fictional video game, AxeMan: The Raiders’ Chronicles for the equally fictional MegaCube games console. It is present day, years have passed since the singular cartridge we focus on has been played with, and now it sits collecting dust in the dollar bin of a thrift store. AxeMan, the protagonist, hammed up video game viking and namesake of the game cartridge, is stuck in a funk; he’s living a life of boredom, aimlessly seeking out any modicum of adventure he can find anywhere in his digital world. However, he gets more adventure than he bargained for when a storm of pixels begins to eat his world.
We’re aware throughout the story that “the selectable characters” can hear nearby discussions inside the thrift store echoing through “thy Cartridge Wall”, but it’s as AxeMan realises that his only chance of salvation for him and his fellow selectable characters whom depend upon him lies in getting the attention of someone in the thrift store to buy their cartridge, that the real boundary of the two story worlds is elasticized to their fullest degree.
It was a fun story to write, and Elaine did a stellar job as the Artist on it, really working immensely hard to make the visual element work cohesively with the story. The pixelation and digitising of drawn artwork that she created is mind-blowing, just insanely good.
Speaking of childhood, Årkade is all-ages-appropriate (or at least most ages) and, in-fact, the 8-year-old daughter of one of my favourite authors and a very dear friend of mine, Arthur Slade (The Hunchback Assignments, Flickers — Harper-Collins) professes that it’s (currently) one of her favourite books. And I think kids identify with, and have so much fun with, metafiction because it’s so playful with its storytelling devices. In part it allows them to see how the structures of three-act storytelling works in a straightforward way, but mostly I think it speaks to them in the same way it does adults for the fact that it identifies itself to them as a story they’re participating in. So, I really do think metafiction is the only storytelling function that completely breaks down the great age divide of audience, and is as relevant to the youngest child through to the oldest adult.
Speaking of Årkade, it is available with The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck (which is definitely not all-ages-appropriate) in The Flashback Pack on the current Kickstarter. As part of The Flashback Pack, Årkade comes in at only 50% of its regular cover price and this is an offer only available through the Kickstarter, it won’t happen again.
The Burning Black: Legend of Black Shuck is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, where readers can purchase advanced copies and exclusives from the creative team behind the Book, until August 31st, 2018.
