Comic Creator Spotlight on Gene Selassie: "It Took Stuff Like The Walking Dead"

Gene Selassie (Photo by John Anderson)

Essential bibliography: Puerto Rico Strong (LionForge); The Ghoul Agency (Action Lab)

First Comic: Iron Man No. 225. “Remember the three-packs and four-packs they used to sell? I got one off the spinner racks, and that was the very first one I read, and it was off to the races.”

Currently working on: Web3 comic VoxoDeus. “Think The Matrix by way of Jack Kirby’s New Gods.”

“I had many attempts in the early 2000s, but projects went awry, I just got busy and life got in the way. I got close on several occasions – 11 attempts at launching series – and all of them somehow, some way, went belly-up. It wasn’t until I got my first shot in an anthology (Terminal, 2016), with a crime noir set in Renaissance Harlem mixed with the supernatural. That led to a wrestling anthology named Kayfabe, and I had a story about an FBI agent who volunteered for an experiment that would mutate her to go undercover in a monster wrestling league. That then spiraled into the Elsewhere anthology where I’ve had a couple of short stories, a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland where Alice is a Native American gunslinger in the Old West. That led to a cyberpunk story for the Puerto Rico Strong anthology, and that got eyes on me – through, I’m sure, everyone else’s work – and that lad to my ongoing series with Action Lab, The Ghoul Agency.

“There’s been progress in comics. The first step, I believe, is audiences clamoring for something outside of the traditional spandex and beat-’em-up stories. It took stuff like The Walking Dead, stuff like Saga, things of that nature. The interest was always there, if you look at titles like Love and Rockets and Hellboy, but there’s more interest in independent books now than there has been in a very long time.”