Mark Russell’s new book with artist Russ Braun is about how ordinary people fall into cults. The Forgotten Divine follows Rodney Coleman, an unhoused veteran and former bomb disposal expert whose dreams of a faraway planet draw him toward others who’ve had the same visions, and the group that forms around their shared experience.
The book arrives via AHOY Comics’ first-ever Kickstarter, which gave the team the freedom to tell the story they wanted to in the format they thought fit it best. I spoke with Russell about the project, the Kickstarter campaign, why he takes his “kiss of death” ideas to AHOY and more.
Thanks for chatting with us about The Forgotten Divine, Mark. You said the book is about why people join cults and find comfort in their own persecution. That’s an empathetic way to frame what could be played as pure satire. How do you write cult members with compassion without letting them off the hook?
I don’t really think of this story as satire. I think of it more as a story about people who find something that seems to fix their life and then make the mistake of not looking too hard at it. But I think that’s something we’re all capable of. I’m not interested in holding them accountable or letting them off the hook. I just wanted to tell a story about how it happens. It’s not a morality tale by any means.
Rodney Coleman is an unhoused veteran whose dreams may or may not be real. Can you share more about his background? Why did you want your entry point into this story to be someone that society has discarded?
Rodney is somebody who used to defuse bombs for a living and now, having returned to civilian life, doesn’t find a lot of demand for that. As a result of that, and the PTSD the war left him with, his life has fallen apart. I chose him as the center of this story because I wanted it to be told from the perspective of someone to whom a cult would not seem any crazier than the world they had come from.
The press release describes the group’s journey as going from “heartfelt” to “paranoia, violence, and conceivably… revelation.” How much of that arc did you have mapped out before you started writing, and how much did it find its own shape?
I always think the challenge in writing is to be willing to turn a story over to itself. To let the ideas you have while you’re writing the story overturn your plans of how you thought it was going to go. In the case of The Forgotten Divine, the general beats of the story unfolded much as I had planned them to, but it got so much more expansive as I started writing it. Characters started changing. Characters started coming out of nowhere. Rodney’s internal monologue, which I think is the soul of the story, was all written mid-flight.
You’ve written several satires with theological and philosophical weight, including Second Coming, The Flintstones and Snagglepuss, among others. Where does The Forgotten Divine fit in that body of work for you?
I think it’s a more serious story, maybe more of a downer, but at the same time, one which grapples more with reality and people like the ones you might actually know.
Russ Braun mentions the storytelling required a lot of subtlety and that you both took visual risks. Can you talk about what that looked like in practice? What were you asking him to do that was genuinely difficult?
The hardest part, I think, was asking him to draw a surreal fantastic alien world side-by-side with a gritty tale unfolding in suburban Arizona. But he nailed it and I think the juxtaposition makes The Forgotten Divine a very unique and striking comic, visually speaking.
You’ve done numerous books with AHOY at this point. What does your relationship with AHOY give you creatively that you might not get elsewhere?
It helps that they know what they’re getting into with me right off the bat. They know my sensibility, my obsessions, and the divisiveness that sometimes accompanies my work. And, for whatever reason, that does not deter them. As a result, my work with AHOY is some of my edgiest and most high-concept. My “kiss of death ideas,” as I call them.
They are also launching their first-ever Kickstarter with this book. Does that change anything about how the book gets made or what you’re able to put in it?
It allowed the book to be a weird length. Sixty-four pages. Which I think is not one page too few or one too many. It would be hard to publish a comic that was too short for a series and too long for a single issue any other way.
Editor-in-Chief Tom Peyer talks about Kickstarter giving them freedom to be “utterly excessive.” Is there something in The Forgotten Divine that only exists because of that freedom?
I think The Forgotten Divine itself only exists because of that freedom. But I do think it is a story that lends itself well to samples and extras and add-ons because there are so many crazy visuals and plot turns. And it allows me to design one of the variant covers!