Writer Rafael Scavone returns to the world of Hailstone with Devil’s Luck: A Hailstone Story, a five-issue horror thriller now available on Comixology Originals.
Set during the Great Depression, the series follows Tim Beacon, a desperate dentist who becomes entangled in a sinister plot involving a mysterious patient’s golden teeth. Teaming up with artist Eduardo Ferigato, Scavone weaves a tale of greed, betrayal and the supernatural that takes the Hailstone universe into darker territory than ever before.
I spoke with Scavone about his journey into comics, revisiting the world of Hailstone and crafting this chilling new story.
I thought I’d start by asking about your secret origin — when did you first discover comics, and when did you decide you wanted to make them?
I have had comic books around me since I can remember. In my childhood, in the 1980’s in the South of Brazil, comics were quite popular and cunningly advertised for children’s hungry eyes. The first stories I read when I could properly do it for myself were comics, I think it was some Disney title, like Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck or Duck Tales. Soon I started with superheroes and read them till my teens, and with the creation of Image Comics, in the early 1990s, I also hung around with a bunch of friends creating zines and dreaming about doing something similar. Then, at the end of the 1990s I left it all behind, because I wanted to go to university and also make some money. I then graduated with a degree in History, worked a bit with Archaeology at the same time as I worked as a graphic and web-designer. It was cool and allowed me to travel around.
In 2013 I moved back to my hometown, Porto Alegre, where I met an old friend from the zines. That friend was Rafael Albuquerque, one of the most talented comic book artists I’ve ever met. He was working professionally with comics for almost a decade. And as we talked about those good old times when we were creating stories together, he invited me to work as his art assistant. It felt like fate to me — I accepted right away, and I think that was the moment I really decided I wanted to make comics. I left a ten-year career in design and jumped into this new adventure. It was a complete experience, I learned to make comics from editing, to scripting, layouts, translating and so on. And I also started to write my own comics and ended up falling in love with it — which was a surprise to me, as in my teens I was really into drawing instead. In 2016 I had my debut as a professional writer, collaborating with Rafael Albuquerque on a seven-page story for the Wonder Woman 75th Anniversary Special (DC Comics). And it came out beautifully, opening the anthology! I wrote a few more comics for DC, but I always wanted to create my own characters and tell their stories and, fortunately, nowadays this is what I do most of the time.
What drew you back to the world of Hailstone after the first series, and how does Devil’s Luck expand the world you’ve created? And how closely are the two stories tied together?
Since Hailstone volume 1 the plan was always to return. That first volume was named after a fictional snowbound town I came up with to be my “personal horror sandbox”, a place to set self-contained horror stories. I used this format because I wanted to create intriguing short stories in different time periods, keeping only the place, the isolation and the horror as permanent. I think this helps expand this universe in terms of characters, stories and a certain lore, as if each volume was a spin-off story. In Devil’s Luck, the only element you can tie with the Volume 1, is a character’s surname that appears in a commercial establishment and the mining activity in that town, which is also mentioned in Volume 1.
You’ve set this story during the worst year of the Great Depression and focused on the skyrocketed price of gold. How did these historical elements shape Tim Beacon’s character and his moral descent?
Tim is a frustrated young man that dreamed big but was run over by the Crash and its consequences. But he didn’t suffer like most of his neighbours, he didn’t starve or have to sleep in the streets. He just couldn’t get over his dream of making big money as the only dentist in an eight mile range not coming true. For me, Tim is a man well shaped to be very successful amidst all that crisis and inequality, he just doesn’t know that yet. He’ll need a moral tweaking, and this is what Auberon and the miners will shine to him during the story.
With this series you’ve incorporated the supernatural into real historical events. How do you balance historical accuracy with the horror elements in your storytelling?
The real historical events of 1935 serve only as a background for the story of Tim Beacon, who’s a fictional character in a fictional town. I picked the Great Depression to set Devil’s Luck for a series of reasons: mostly the social and economic crisis, price of gold skyrocketing, but also for the aesthetics — which I think fits very well with the “dealings with the Devil”. I love mixing the supernatural in horror narratives, especially because the way you present things, leaving mixed understandings: is it really a supernatural phenomena or just humans being very evil?
You’re working with artist Eduardo Ferigato on this new series. What does he bring to this story? And what can you tell us about the “new inking and color style” that he’s created for it?
Ferigato brought a lot for this series, not only visually, but also storywise. When I presented him the full story, he loved it and had a super cool idea for the ending that improved it a lot. Visually, he also did the coloring and he came up with an art style that looks like a noir comic with a special color palette, a perfect match for the story’s tone.
Do you have plans to return to the Hailstone world again in the future?
Yes. I have a bunch of stories already outlined for Hailstone. They’re very diverse, from a spy horror thriller set in the XVIII century, to an environmental horror tale, set in the 2020s, among others. I don’t know yet which of them I will put out first, but I hope I can start scripting them pretty soon.
