Over the course of more than thirty years, Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon has had a number of different eras. Sometimes, it’s a fairly typical superhero comic book; other times, it’s incredibly bloody and violent; and, of course, for the last 100 issues or so, the series’ star has been Malcolm Dragon, the son of the original series lead.
Over the next few months, starting with the latest issue, in stores now, Larsen will share adventures featuring Malcolm’s kids — a set of triplets born way back in 2016’s Savage Dragon #213.
First up is Amy Dragon, the daughter of Malcolm and Maxine, along with her unofficial sidekick, the tiger-man Walter. The two take to the streets of San Francisco to find some fun, get tired out by all the hills, and finally face off with a dangerous new super-freak dubbed The Atomic Bum.
Larsen joined Comic Book Club to discuss Savage Dragon #276, which hit stores last week.
This is a spoiler-filled interview, so if you haven’t read Savage Dragon #276, you can pick it up at your local comic shop or buy a digital copy on ComiXology.
Comic Book Club: Was there a particular reason you chose now to dig into solo stories featuring the kids?
Erik Larsen: Yeah, now because I wanted a series of covers following #275 that didn’t feature Malcolm or Paul prominently on the covers. I wanted the thought that those guys might not make it past #275. I did the same with Malcolm following #100, 150 and 175. The goal is to have readers wonder, “What’s going on here?”
Is “Momma just sleeps all the time” just Amy’s perspective, or is Maxine dealing with some depression or something?
That was left intentionally vague. Anything could be going on behind that closed door. Maxine could be in a deep funk. She could be doing any number of things.
Angel looks pretty happy to be killing robo-baddies there. Is she pleased to see something that looks like Dragon back in action?
She’s just trying to see the bright side of a bad situation. She was semi-smiling before Paul’s resurrection. I would expect seeing him back in fighting form cheered her up a bit.
You had that Trump’s election threw your plans a little bit. Does that change Malcolm’s “day job” and the way the family exists in terms of the law enforcement piece?
Yeah, very much so. Malcolm’s another casualty of those unconscionable budget cuts. He’s essentially out of work at this time. How they make it through this disaster is the story unfolding now.
Was the homeless guy always kind of narrating his life before he got powers? That was a creative way of telling this story, but how did you land on it? It almost feels like it could have started with “empty jingoistic slogan” and moved backwards from there.
I don’t take any of that to be the actual words these characters are saying. I take it that the homeless individual is genuinely incoherent whereas the red hats were spouting their usual hateful bullshit.
When it came time to script the issue, page five was a real challenge. I had considered having captions fill in the information that we needed to have but it always seems weird to me when caption boxes appear for a sequence and then disappear, but I didn’t want to have there be caption boxes on every page either. Having him talk to himself was another option but, again, it seemed a clumsy solution.
I thought this was kind of a fun way to go and it’s not something I’d recalled seeing before, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve done a fair number of art experiments in the past and this seemed like a writing one—so I decided to go that direction. Once I had the homeless guy use that device it seemed natural enough to do the same elsewhere. I’d actually gone farther in my first draft by having the crowd saying similar descriptive text but I thought it’d be better not to overdo it.
When you decided to bring Walter into the book, when did you decide he would walk on all fours rather than two legs like most comics tiger-men?
Walter is off and on. He’s certainly capable of walking upright but he’s steadier on all four. When he’s running—he’s faster on four. He picks his moments. The way his body is built, walking on four is more comfortable. It really just depends on the situation.
Given how much attention to detail you put into the Toronto move, it’s kind of fun to see Amy expressing love for the Bay area. Will we be exploring the city with you this time, too?
With reason. The reality is that I can’t draw the real city. It needs to be stripped down and simplified. There are far too many details. It would be a mess. But I do go in with a location in mind and sometimes I’ll even go shoot a few photos to use as reference but real locations are often hard to work with. Like, Amy was going up stairs on Taylor Street but if you go to the actual stairs there’s no good angle to shoot it from. There are driveways and parked cars and handrails and trees that make it hard to see from a lot of angles. I went to the location and it was just unworkable.
Same with looking down California Street toward the America First rally. The street was far too wide and if the rally was a few blocks away it became so small that it was impossible to make out. I ended up shooting down a different street that also had a cable car on it in order to make it work. This kind of thing can be fun but it’s enormously time-consuming and frustrating—as I find that much of the time there simply isn’t a workable place to use as a location. Nine times of ten I’ll just make something up.
Is it safe to assume that our Nazi-saluting side character wasn’t meant to be anyone specific? Obviously if it was Musk, that would represent a huge change between the Dragon world and ours.
I had a Musk-type named Elrod Merch that Malcolm saved from the Night-Dwellers in #272. He seemed like a suitable Musk stand-in. I didn’t want to start killing off actual living humans—that seemed like a bridge too far.
Was the homeless guy’s attack on that guy politically motivated or as random as everything else he was doing?
It was politically motivated as much as Luigi Mangione’s alleged actions were politically motivated. Rich, powerful men are destroying people’s lives and when they do that — there is occasionally some pushback.
I was thinking initially that the target would have had a connection to the Atomic Bum — like the banker who took his home or the CEO that fired him — something like that — but adding that explanation seemed awkward. There really wasn’t a good place to dump that. He wouldn’t think he’d tell Amy that. I guess I could have done the old “remember me? Remember what you did to me?” But that seemed a bit much. I preferred the abruptness of him blasting the crap out of the guy.
I updated the target to Elrod Merch after Elon’s Nazi salute incident. I didn’t think that needed as much backstory. Most of us understand that the Nazis are the bad guys. We don’t need an explanation.
Given how powerful the Dragon kids are, does it buy you a lot of leeway in terms of the learning curve on their powers?
Certainly they don’t know the extent of it. Whenever they just into action—I would imagine—there’s some hesitancy because they don’t really know how much damage they can take or how much anything might hurt.
Often, I feel like kid superheroes get weaker villains to push around. I assume Atomic Bum won’t be recurring too often, but he was a real threat. What went into his creation?
The initial inspiration for the Atomic Bum was Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. I liked the idea of the Atomic Bum being something of a homeless folk hero–out there righting the world’s wrongs.
Will Mr. Queen’s concoction continue to be a problem going forward in the book?
His creation worked—so that’s likely to lead somewhere but the initial canister of goo was consumed, so it’s no longer an issue.
So – if Walter DID feast on Amy’s bloody remains, would ingesting Dragon blood make him go “sput?”
Possibly. That may not be the best idea on his part. Though it should be noted that Mako chewed on Malcolm in Savage Dragon #256 and didn’t explode. It was only after his blood mixed with Amy’s following an attack on her in #263 that he transformed and then exploded. So, possibly Dragon blood needs to be injected somehow not ingested.
I love the name Atomic Bum so much. He could team up with Neutron Bob!
I’m not likely to go there. With few exceptions it seems a bit too contrived to pair characters simply because they have similar names. Similarly, I’m unlikely to have Doubleheader date Double-Paige.
Amy seems to be the obvious choice for solo stories because she has Walter as a sidekick, and her personality has been really well-developed. With the other kids’ stories, how do you differentiate them to make sure each character’s personality stands on its own?
By writing and drawing stories about them.
Savage Dragon #276 is now in stores from Image Comics.
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