You’ve heard of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court… Now get ready for a Yankee’s fan in King Arthur’s court, with Medieval, a hilariously violent new Comixology series from Neil Kleid and Alex Cormack which is available starting today. In the series, a sports fan named Danny Landau gets conked with a baseball, and finds himself back in time. His first tasks? Working plumbing, and of course, lots of baseball.
“Our time-lost protagonist (like me and sports, like me and Arthurian mythology) knows just enough to be dangerous,” Kleid told Comic Book Club over email. “There are things he can absolutely know and do and make and teach…and there are things he absolutely cannot. And because of that, he is frustrated, alone, isolated, and desperate to find some sense of home…and a sense of who he is.”
For plenty more on this home run of a series? Read on.
Comic Book Club: I’m not a sports guy, so quick question: are all sports fans as strong and violent as you depict in the book?
Neil Kleid: Well, I wouldn’t call Danny Landau, our hero, “violent” as much as he is “passionate.” And he isn’t “strong”, but rather “scrappy.” I will say that he gets as much as he gives throughout Medieval. As a lifelong Detroit sports fan (I’m an intermediate “sports guy”; I know just enough to be dangerous), and after twenty years living in the New York/New Jersey area, it is definitely my estimation that there’s a bit of adrenaline-induced, restrained violence simmering just beneath the surface of many a passionate, sports fan (it’s short for “fanatic!”)—men, women, children, grandmothers—simply waiting for the wrong play call, the right victory, and the bitterest of rivalries to bring it to the surface. Sure, Danny may release his righteous indignation and loyalty for his New York baseball team in the form of a bat to the teeth (or nose, or groin, or any other vulnerable, breakable extremity or body part)…but most sports fans I know (unless they’re in a sports bar; when you’re in a sports bar, all bets are off) settle for trash talk (online or IRL), some well-chosen insults, or the odd, rare fist fight.
To be fair, though…Danny is from the Bronx. So there’s a natural undercurrent of fuck-youism to nearly everything he says or does. You get me, chief? Do I gotta come over there with my baseball bat? Yeah, you get me.
Alex Cormack: In my experience, like Neil said it’s mostly trash talk. I’ve seen a fight or two but nothing you can’t walk away from. But like I said, that’s my experience, other members of my family who are more hardcore fans may disagree.
More to the point, as you note in the back-matter this is a fun riff on A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court… How much was internalizing that plot, and then ditching it?
Kleid: Yeah, so I read Connecticut Yankee as a dare to myself. I’ve had teachers and mentors and agents who’ve encouraged me to read more of the classics…and I think I had just finished watching the movie A Kid In King Arthur’s Court. I turned to my nine year old and said: “it is time.” Which confused the heck out of him, because I never told him what it was time for. Anyway, I read the thing and enjoyed it.
What struck me about Connecticut Yankee — the story of Hank Morgan, a capitalist who ends up in Camelot and introduces all sorts of nineteenth-century modern innovations (newspapers, soap, firearms, military tactics) to sixth-century England — was how knowledgeable and well-informed Morgan is in the narrative. Like, I know a lot of stuff but not a LOT of stuff. For instance, if I was stuck back in sixth-century England, I could definitely invent the comic book…but definitely could not invent a smart phone. Or even just a telephone. I could popularize fast food—burgers, fries, hot dogs, shakes—and maybe even invent a flat-top grill…but wouldn’t possess the knowhow to create the world’s first electric oven. I could introduce the world to organized sports, merchandising and endorsements…but how would we televise it?
So yeah, what I wanted to do was start with Twain’s key conceit—modern-day American male gets stuck in Ye Auld Camelot—and ground it even further from a realist’s eye. Our time-lost protagonist (like me and sports, like me and Arthurian mythology) knows just enough to be dangerous. There are things he can absolutely know and do and make and teach…and there are things he absolutely cannot. And because of that, he is frustrated, alone, isolated, and desperate to find some sense of home…and a sense of who he is. That, I think, makes Medieval far more relatable than Connecticut Yankee. I do not believe we are all necessarily the infallible, learned Hank Morgan. We are all, for the most part, Danny Landau; learned in some areas….flawed in others, though capable of bettering ourselves, adapting and changing.
So, you could say Medieval was inspired by Connecticut Yankee as a starting point. There are a few nods to it throughout. But this is definitely—and I’m not just referring to the smart phone, baseball, visceral gore, and f-bombs—it’s own thing.
Cormack: For my sake, I did put Mark Twain in the background.
Obviously you know the sports and modern world well, but how much research from the writing and art end was put into the Medieval world? Or was that not a concern?
Kleid: I’ve said it elsewhere, but for those who don’t know me personally, let me assure you here once and for all: I am not an Arthurian scholar. I do not have a secret wealth of mythological knowledge regarding the Vulgate Cycle nor do I have a burning desire to heavily research sixth-century England. Look, I’ve definitely done that for other books and graphic novels. It took me nearly two years to research Brownsville, my first graphic novel about the Prohibition-era Jewish mob. For other books, the breadth and duration of my research efforts varied depending on the subject, and I do enjoy knowing enough about a time, setting or historical period in order to properly give it my own spin.
But, for Medieval…well, I’d just finished up two emotionally-heavy, dramatic comic book series for Comixology Originals—The Panic with Andrea Mutti and Nice Jewish Boys with John Broglia and Ellie Wright—and also an X-Men prose novel (The Phoenix Chase) which did require a lot of continuity research (I mean, I read a lot of X-Men comics, yo.) So, I was looking to write something that didn’t require a whole of historical accuracy or level of faithfulness to characters, canon or place that I’ve demanded of myself in the past. To that end, the one big rule I gave myself and Alex with Medieval was, essentially, a Danny-esque “f—k research.” The both of us know (like me and sports) just enough about Camelot, Excalibur, King Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Gawain, etcetera to be dangerous. We wink in passing to it, drape our narrative with enough of it so that the story feels accurate, but…yeah, I’m sure anyone who knows a lot about the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and the Arthurian myths will be horrified. We’re taking a baseball bat to King Arthur here, yo—both literally and figuratively. If that sounds like fun, come run with us around the bases. If that feels like sacrilege to you, well, Bunky, sometimes a little sacrilege can be a hell of a guilty pleasure, no?
Cormack: Yeah! The research I did was more pop culture than actual historic fact. I looked at NC Wyeth illustrations mostly along with the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie and of course Monty Python. I figured they knew what they were doing.
At least in the first two issues, there doesn’t seem to be too much of a concern of time travel mechanics. Was the worry there bogging it down, so you can get to the fun stuff?
Kleid: I really had to hold myself back from making a shitload of Back to The Future jokes, to be honest. Tell me: is everyone’s favorite part of Avengers: Endgame that sequence where the Hulk explains time travel to Don Cheadle? Hell, no—it’s the bit with Jarvis from the Agent Carter TV show, right? Or it’s the huge fight at the end, or it’s the part where…well, you get what I’m trying to say.
Medieval is a comic book about a guy from the Bronx who loves a girl and his baseball team (in that order) trying to get back home from Camelot after getting hit on the head with a line drive while sitting in the bleachers. It’s loud, it’s violent, it’s got eighteen different ways to refer to male genitalia, and also a love story. There’s no time for hard science, Doctor Jones. Gimme the Who’s The Boss references and a wooden baseball bat smashing out the teeth of some handsy knights.
Cormack: This is one of the things I love about this. We know as much as the characters, no time to waste let’s get into it!
There’s some pretty grody violence throughout here… How do you modulate that so it’s fun rather than disgusting?
Kleid: One of the key influences for Medieval was DC Comics’ hyper-violent Lobo comics that came out in the nineties from the late, great Keith Giffen and the fantastically brilliant Simon Bisley. When I first typed up the pitch for the book, I knew I wanted this thing to feel viscerally cathartic—like I said, I had just spent years on two very dark, intimate, emotionally-charged comic books; I was ready to break things. That’s what led me to our talented friend, Mister Alex Cormack.
Alex’s art—and I first encountered it in the series The Devil Wears My Face (with Dave Pepose from Mad Cave Studios) and more specifically, a high-octane thrill ride race against the devil, Drive Like Hell, with Rich Douek from Dark Horse. Alex’s art, to me, is everything Bisley’s is but better. Sure, it’s colorful and gory and brutal and bloody…but it’s also quaint and calming and disquieting and often emotionally lonely. You get lost in his blacks, and can dive right into the reds. Alex’s art is worth the price of admission…and what he manages to do is take my worst urges, and my calls for decapitation and dismemberment, and presents them in a crimson ballet…but also, at times, serves to progress the narrative, and balances it so that the art bleeds and hurts the characters, sure, but also does it because—dammit—it just makes sense. Eery sword through the skull or bat to the head is choreographed in the story for a reason. Sure, it may be difficult to look at (or fascinating, like those old Lobo comics) but they also help set Medieval apart from Connecticut Yankee in that regards; even if ol’ Sam Clemens could’ve pitched his yarn to a comics publisher, I doubt his sequential presentation would have included a panel that gleefully pokes fun at the Comic Book Code Authority and Dr. Fredric Wertham’s diabolical witch hunt right in the middle of it’s second issue (issue #2, page sixteen, panel two!)
Is Medieval a mature-readers comic book? Damn skippy. Is it disgusting? Parts of it probably are. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t fun. It’s a story that leads first with a baseball bat and then with its gut. And though most of it may be covered with blood, once you look beneath the hairy, gross, brutal, broken exterior…you’ll find emotion, sorrow, sadness, and hope at its heart.
Cormack: Thanks Neil! With violence and gore here, most if not all characters here who get messed up have it coming, and I go with the Tarantino school, the crazier and bloodier the better!
To wrap it back around, how are you feeling about the Yankees right now?
Kleid: Look, because of licensing and rights concerns, we don’t use the “Y-word” around these parts, okay?
That being said: as a Detroit Tigers fan, I’m pretty ambivalent. As a human being, well…I think it’s pretty telling that I just typed “why do people hate” into a Google search and it auto-populated “the yankees.” My feelings, as a fan, are that they’re historically a great team with a strong dynasty that engenders heavy dislike—like The New England Patriots, or at one time, the Chicago Bulls. More recently, I believe their management has made some poor public decisions that have increased that dislike in regards to a public person those believes I absolutely do not agree with and find one hundred percent dangerous. I won’t elaborate, but I would not have made those choices. But then, I didn’t have to. Am I glad New York isn’t in the World Series? Sure. (By the time this interview comes out, the Series will probably be over and the Dodgers will have won—they’re 2-1 right now, as of Game Three and Game Four is tonight. Let’s see if I am right!) But am I angry the Tigers aren’t? Also sure. The difference between me and Danny is that I’m not gonna walk around taking out my frustration by drinking heavily (well, maybe…) and sticking my baseball bat into peoples’ eyes.
Now, if the Detroit LIONS don’t make it to the Super Bowl, then all bets are off…
…but if you really want to ask a member of the Medieval creative team how they’re feeling about the Y-Words, why don’cha ask avowed Boston Red Sox enthusiast and part-time Carl Yastrzemski cosplayer Alex Cormack how he’s feeling right now?!
Cormack: Go Sox, Yankees suck!
Medieval is on Comixology now.
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