Ram V talks The One Hand

[00:00:00] Your ears do not deceive you. You've just entered the cryptid creator corner brought to you by your friends at Comic Book Yeti.

[00:00:07] So without further ado, let's get on to the interview.

[00:00:11] Hey Yeti, what's shaking?

[00:00:12] Of course I do.

[00:00:14] Yeah, boy.

[00:00:15] Yeah, boy.

[00:00:16] Yeah, boy.

[00:00:17] Yeah, boy.

[00:00:18] Yeah, I did see that Mecha-Tel was crown-filling on Kickstarter now. I love that book.

[00:00:23] I was in back here for the single issues myself. That whole creative cover is awesome. He's doing Spider-Man stuff now. Did you just we're in an age of big bomb dust and not necessarily quite slow burn.

[00:03:05] But yeah, no, it's great to see people itself. Now that the issue is out, I feel like I can talk about spoilers, but yeah, there's a

[00:04:20] page with a doomsayer, the kind of crazy person on the street with a message from God yelling presented as a utopian idea. And in my head, putting Sunset Limited and that together created this extremely bleak and dark outcome, which I don't think I had seen discussed anywhere. So I was like, ah, there's a story there, because I should tell the story.

[00:05:41] And I'd always been obsessed with trying you're around now? Do you want to call now? So I called him at like four in the morning or something like that, poured ourselves some coffee, and we chatted it out. I mean, we kind of discussed what it needed to be. I knew that I wanted to write the detective side of the story, but, and I knew, and therefore Dan was going to take the killer side of it, but I didn't know what the killer side

[00:07:03] needed to be specifically. So, and I didn't want to know. So we got a letter or a colorist designer, all of them working across both books so that that visual language was maintained even if the writing and the art were changing. Okay, I'll just two titles. And then the sort of Bible element of the visual chicaneary that we were going to do

[00:08:23] was each issue has one scene that is in common

[00:08:26] to both that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily trying to recreate sunset limited, but I'm taking the thematic sort of philosophical argument and lessons from it and trying to present a world where we say, what if everything that was discussed in sunset limited

[00:09:41] was indeed true?

[00:09:42] And if we applied it to this, because a lot of people

[00:09:45] have come up with like, wait, this is set in the future,

[00:09:47] 28, 7, this okay, that's cool. Then someone read issue one of the other book. And then you could see in their eyes the moment where they just went, wait, what? Yeah, that was cool. And so, yeah, that's, that's what you want. That's what you're looking for as a creator. You know, people keep asking,

[00:11:02] like, Oh, what's success for you? Success is seeing that moment in somebody's eyes and go like, would weave together? No, I think we offset each other by about half an issue. So by the time I had finished half my issue one, Dan would start writing his. And so he had an outline for me for what I was doing in my issue one. And then by the time he had finished his issue one, I'd be starting issue two.

[00:12:22] And so I would have an outline and some details from him,

[00:12:25] what he had done in his issue one. his sense of structure and reality again is I think reflected both in dance writing and in sumits more open, more free form art if you will. And so yeah, I think that's going to be, it's of the issue. And so it's a question of having faith in yourself to be like, okay, whatever comes my way, I will play with and I will turn it into.

[00:15:02] But the pitfall, of course, is it is many load-bearing tropes if you will that are embedded into it as a genre. Yeah, and I pointed out to them, there's no actual crime in there. None of the stories have any crime in the music off now? Thank you. No more surprises, minstrels or anything like that or I'll rent you out to the Renfaire as a children's ride. Let's get back to the show. You alluded to earlier about some this, that as part of the truth that you must contend with when you're reading the entire thing. When this was pitched, and even in the Solicit, it says it's crime no art, but it's also sci-fi. And really, there hasn't been any sci-fi elements outside of,

[00:20:21] okay, there are sex worker robots.

[00:20:25] But outside of that,

[00:20:26] there haven't been too many sci-fi elements in the story yet. is the nature of what they leave behind, which is sort of always the case. My own artwork taps into universal symbolism, drawing these parallels between written characters. Okay, and those links, you have cave paintings to present modern day expressions like graffiti. So I naturally got a little hooked on all those symbols.

[00:21:40] To try to describe it for people who haven't seen it,

[00:21:43] you can see it on the cover,

[00:21:44] but the killer leaves a bunch of cubes shaped symbols

[00:21:46] on the walls written on the victim's blood had come across it. They've had this thing with them for years and I imagine it was left at every murder and again I don't know if this came across in the first issue but there's always a new bit that's added with each murder so it's grown over time. And so you would imagine given cryptology departments someone would have caught on to something that they

[00:23:03] haven't and almost to a point where Ari thinks this point was trying to decide for this So, yeah. Well, I love the symbols as an artistic expression. There's a frame on it for God's sakes. I had that personal time as a flat circle moment, you know, we start leaving handprints and ochre on cave walls. And here basically our killer is doing the same. It's a signature, right? Yeah. That's a hope of being recognized in terms of the clue.

[00:24:23] So and also very interesting because it's a real mind fuck for people like me who are always looking for Easter eggs and sometimes far more meeting even than the writer may have intended. This is my paneling question, right? So there are quite a few pages where the paneling

[00:25:40] and the comic itself mimics that the killer's bloodscrawled

[00:25:44] were admissive.

[00:25:45] So I'm curious in ingrained into the narrative that most of that has come from me. But again, it doesn't matter if it comes from me, if it doesn't translate well on the page. So I imagine that's been a challenge for Lawrence to then go, okay, I still have to do good organic storytelling to where I'm not taking's mimicking those the structure of the killer's symbols yet again. So really really nice touches like that throughout. One of the things that was a notable absence was a lack of sound. In an doing that. Otherwise, in general, I like to keep panels quiet. Like the sound, a good artist will insinuate sound

[00:29:40] in their own work.

[00:29:41] They don't need sound effects to do it.

[00:29:45] But let's say I want to insinuate the dread that exists, if you will. I mean, this is a guy who sat down with a briefcase and clicked one number at a time for hours. Those, in my experience, people who are like that and to be people who tend to zone out everything else in their periphery. And so, because we're so close to everything

[00:31:02] that doesn't matter is zoned out in a lot of ways.

[00:31:05] And I think that's evident a couple of times and I'd wanted to work with him. I didn't tell him this at the time, but Will's like one of my favorite comic book people, even before I knew him, when I had learned,

[00:32:20] just after I had learned to follow creative teams across books both you're in dance tremendously busy schedule. Yeah, I mean, this is what you really get into it. This is why you do what you do. People

[00:33:43] come and ask me all the time, like, would you like to write a hundred issues of detective? chance to brag on their puppies before before I sign off. So brag on your puppies. Yeah, I've got a seven and a half year old Jack Russell Terrier. Ziggy, we got him when we moved here. I live in Brixton in London. It's it's Bowie, David Bowie's sort of spiritual birthplace.

[00:36:04] for nine hours because of all the horror stories I hear about transporting dogs and commercial flights. So we had to leave him with my wife's parents with my in-laws. This got him, he's still

[00:36:12] there. Every time I go back to India, I'm kind of attacked by just, I don't know, 50 kilogram

[00:36:18] giant Labrador. So yeah, I love, I love very excited to get into. Another one of these, I know this exists as a genre and has its cliches and I'm going to use them to subvert what you think of that or what you make of it.

[00:37:41] So kind of excited for people to see that. that it honestly put me off. In the three years I've known and I've never seen this much of what I mistakenly perceived as like fanboy from him. So I was like, man, what? And now that I've got a chance to get to read it myself, although we had very different reads on it, I came to the realization that its impression was dead on.

[00:39:00] It's really one of the most impressive things

[00:39:02] I've seen done in comics in a long time.

[00:39:04] I'm now totally fascinated by the Cormac McCarthy angle.

[00:39:07] So I'm gonna have to go back and check that out.