How would you plan the perfect crime? Just in case you need a little inspiration, Iron Circus Comics new Perfect Crime Party graphic novel anthology gives you 25 answers courtesy of over 40 writers and artists.
We spoke to a number of creators who contributed stories to Perfect Crime Party (currently available to support on Backerkit) in this fun jam-style interview with Amy Chase, Bevan Thomas, Chuck Harp, David Brothers, Erin Roseberry, Henry Barajas, Illuminated, John Konrad, Nick Mamatas, Rodrigo Vargas, and Tayson Martindale.
How did you select the crime for your story?
Amy Chase: When Tango first approached me to collaborate, we knew we wanted to do something with a vampire. Murder would seem like an obvious choice, but I had also recently done a heist story with a fantasy twist as a backup for Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips’ Newburn for Image Comics. There are lots of ways to twist heists and robberies, so when Tango and I dialed in on the idea of “a vampire stealing his old property back from a museum” it blossomed naturally there.
Bevan Thomas: To me, the term “light-hearted crime story” instantly suggested some sort of con – no violence, no malice, just some guy who likes proving how clever he is by convincing foolish people to part with their money. I’ve always been fascinated by religion and spirituality, so once I figured out that my crime was going to be some sort of con, it was an obvious choice to make it specifically a religion con, a guy selling some snake oil that he claims has Biblical significance.
Chuck Harp: I wanted to choose something more relatable. Whether that was something you may have done as a kid, or you knew/know someone who is doing that crime still today. So that allowed me to bring some focus into what I wanted to do and what subculture I wanted to put my focus on.
David Brothers: I don’t want to say the exact crime we depict, but it naturally came about as a result of getting to know my friend & collaborator Alissa Sallah over the years. I’ve had the pleasure of asking her a bunch of questions about her interest in cars here and there, and I know that we’re both very much into certain kinds of storytelling and manga. While thinking about what we’d work on together, I thought something that played with our shared manga roots could be something cool, and “Polyphonic Funk: My Outlaw Melody” was the result!
Erin Roseberry: I like doing fantasy stories, and when I heard the theme of the anthology was crime I started thinking of ways to combine these two genres. I was wondering: what’s a crime that could only happen in a fantasy setting? I have a large collection of images I keep for inspiration, and as I was browsing them I came across an old etching of a witch summoning a storm. So that made me consider telling a story about a magic user that steals something intangible like the weather, which ultimately became my Perfect Crime Party comic about a witch who steals a cloud to cover up her inability to summon her own rain storm.
Henry Barajas: The story I’m telling with Kit Mills is about a guy who can’t cut it as a joke writer, so he has to groom and glean from up-and-coming open mixers. I wrote “Joke Theft” because I’m fascinated with the different kinds of jokes that can be told. There are “dad jokes” that you can tell casually and not have to attribute where you heard it from–and there are jokes by specific comedians that other comedians can’t retell without being labeled as a thief. I performed stand-up comedy for years and it was important to write your own material.
Illuminated: The crime itself wasn’t really the important part I’d say, it was the party, meaning the people involved. The crime being committed in my little tale is just an excuse to have over the top character clash and challenge each other.
John Konrad: My story, Darling Doesn’t Know, is about a clueless celebrity couple plotting each other’s murders to inherit a (nonexistent) fortune. Plotting to kill your spouse for money is a classic criminal motivation and a trope in a lot of classic noir films. Choosing a crime and a motivation readers were familiar with allowed me to establish expectations, which I could then subvert for comedic effect.
Nick Mamatas: Way back, many years ago, I wrote a story in the hope of getting it into an anthology dedicated to stories of crimes that took place at home. I was inspired by sibling rivalries to come up with some kind of duel. I’m a very occasional anti-police brutality activist and also interested in martial arts and self-defense, so was familiar with the so-called “twenty-one foot rule”, which is basically the belief that someone with a hidden knife will beat a police officer who has to draw their sidearm to the first strike if the knife-wielder is within twenty-one feet. This is the excuse given after a number of police shootings of individuals who turn out to be unarmed. It’s also suggestive of a duel, so we were off to the races.
Rodrigo Vargas: It’s actually inspired by something that happened to me when I was in school. A classmate tried to trade one of my pokemon cards for one that he drew himself. I didn’t do the trade, but he raised some very valid points about his fake card.
Tayson Martindale: I’ve always loved locked-room-whodunnit mysteries, so I had to try to make one of my own. So much fun!
Since the focus is on light-hearted stories in the anthology, was it more difficult to tell?
Chase: Not at all! I think lighthearted crime is a lot of fun. The stakes are lower in a setting like this, meaning the logic doesn’t have to be airtight. This anthology’s theme gave a lot of flexibility to the types of characters and settings that could be incorporated into each short without having to be forensically, physically, realistically accurate.
Thomas: I don’t think so. At the time, the idea of writing a light-hearted con seemed a lot more appealing to me than writing some violent thriller or murder mystery. I think the focused nature of the anthology’s premise actually helped spark ideas, because it guided my mind down a particular path. Also, my story, “The Good Word,” is illustrated by my wife Reetta Linjama, and she generally prefers more light-hearted, funnier stories, and so this was right up her alley.
Harp: Light-hearted is definitely something I don’t normally write so it was indeed a challenge for me. But that brought me to view a story in a different way. Almost like setting rules for myself I couldn’t break. It made it a lot of fun and I now realize I want to try expanding in that fashion going forward.
Brothers: No way! Crime stories can be as funny or breezy as anything, and the setting of “Polyphonic Funk” is playing off a few classic tropes from manga, like juvenile delinquents who think they can run a town. Fun crimes can be as interesting to read about as serious ones, and are frequently even more interesting.
Roseberry: I haven’t done any serious crime comics previously so I don’t have anything to compare it to! I do make a lot of fairly sad and melancholy comics (see my previous Iron Circus publication: “The Second Extinction of the Pyrenean Ibex” in Failure to Launch for an example) so when working on this comic I really had to shift gears and focus. Now was not the time to be sad. I had to be SILLY.
Barajas: No, in fact, it was liberating. I inherently gravitate towards the opposite of light-hearted stories. I think I thrive on boundaries when it comes to writing. Just because it’s light-hearted doesn’t mean it can’t invoke an emotion.
Illuminated: Not really—basically every single story I’ve wrote or drawn for myself in the past few years has had a comedy element to it. Some of them were definitely darker or bloodier forms of humor, but that’s easily my comfort zone. Sometimes I actually worry I’m writing myself into a corner, typecasting myself as the guy that draws funny comics, but the people that keep up with my work seem to like them, so for now it’s ok.
Konrad: I didn’t have trouble maintaining the tone, because I think there is naturally a lot of dark humor in crime. Crime has very high stakes which ramp up tension, and humor comes from releasing that tension. I think it was just a matter of choosing the right moments to stop being serious.
Mamatas: I self-adapted “The Twenty-One Foot Rule”, which as a prose story was finally published in the magazine Dark Yonder. (If a story is rejected, as mine was from that anthology, keep sending it to the next possibility, and the one after that…) This story may be the darkest in Perfect Crime Party, but did need to be lighter than the prose original. I amped up the dark humor and playful ironies of the text in the script, to make it easier to draw, and here we are.
Vargas: Haha, I ONLY do light-hearted stories. The challenge would be to take something serious.
Martindale: My cast of characters are pretty ridiculous, and my art style is definitely more cartoony, so I think those two things helped make the story fit the tone of this anthology.
How did you inject humor into your story?
Chase: For Tango and I, both being creators influenced greatly by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the answer here was puns! “Play It Again” is packed with them — from the song titles on the vinyl record to references to famous vampire quotes in fiction, we were laughing to ourselves as we added each nod into our script and panels. Please, please read the vinyl record song titles.
Thomas: I’m not as good at telling distinct jokes with specific punchlines. When I include humor, it’s usually taking some weird situation, and then cranking up the weirdness to epic levels despite all the characters in the story taking the events very seriously, oblivious to its wacky side. My story starts with a weird premise, that a con artist is trying to convince people that his elixir is what the prophets of the Old Testament drank to stay healthy and spry. Soon, cracks form in his story, and things spiral out of control. By the end, my anti-hero is trying to escape mayhem that has almost a Looney Tunes-level slapstick quality to it, but to him it’s no laughing matter.
Harp: A group of young graffiti writers running around the city causing trouble almost adds in the humor all on its own. But I think it is the interactions amongst the friends that really drive the humor. Just how harsh young people can be with one another.
David Brothers: Alissa’s good with expressions and acting, so I knew we could get away with some dialogue and slapstick humor, something with noodle bodies. I think that Lupin the Third-esque hijinks are a good mode for this kind of story, with humor threaded throughout, a heightened sense of reality, and a quick pace. So there are a few pop culture references in “Polyphonic Funk,” a little romantic comedy, and more besides
Roseberry: I really focused on how I drew my character’s expressions, and pushed them to look exaggerated and silly to up the comedy. I would be drawing things and thinking “that’s nice…but how do I make it look MORE ridiculous?” I also hand-letter my comics, and looked for places to have fun with my lettering like having words literally dripping with contempt or in BIG, SHOUTY CAPS to match a character’s over-the-top emotions.
Barajas: I love to write jokes. There’s an art to writing jokes that will be spoken and read in your head. There’s a panel where one of the characters uses a vacuum to steal the material, so the lettering is warped and sucked from the page. I love the medium for moments like that.
Illuminated: I wish I knew the answer to this question, I wouldn’t be struggling for weeks every time I need to put together a new script. It just happens at one point—when the first joke finally lands, the others come rushing out from it.
Konrad: I wanted this story to be farcical and to pull from classic screwball comedies. A lot of the humor comes from all the errors and near-misses that come from a poorly planned murder plot. The kinds of characters who would carry out such a plot naturally have to be audacious and arrogant, and those big personalities create some humor too.
Mamatas: The artist, Jules Valera, did the heavy lifting! The art is just a pleasure to look at, and the cartoony look is intrinsically funny. I added a few things, such as a tale of the tape for the two sisters, and kept the noir action to a “ribbon” panel stretching across all the panels, while the lead up is lighter and full of little taunting jokes between the characters.
Vargas: Kurisquare and I are very big fans of having fun. We wrote the overall story together while doing layouts and injecting all kinds of silly thoughts we got while working on it. Mostly it meant going hard on the spokon genre and trying to mix it with high school jokes.
Martindale: By amplifying the personalities of the character to 100, hahah! Everyone is quite a bit extra.
Did any of you take inspiration from real life bumbling criminals?
Chase: Not necessarily, no. But the collector who owns a monster museum was definitely inspired by a real life filmmaker whose love of creatures inspires our own. I’ll leave it to readers to figure out who it is, but we couldn’t get away without giving a nod to a true maestro of monsters.
Thomas: Not really, no. I drew on fictional characters – the con-artist protagonists of the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels movie and the Great Brain children’s novels. And, even then, they’re not bumbling so much as people too clever for their own good, who bite off more than they can chew.
Harp: The situation and subculture were definitely something I took from real life in the sense it is a world and artform I very much enjoy. I did not however bring this from any real experience.
Brothers: For various reasons, I went to four different middle schools and three different high schools across two states, and we may have borrowed a little of this and that from people I’ve known growing up. “Polyphonic Funk” is a world of criminal geniuses, however, so the skill ceiling is a bit higher than I’ve experienced in real life! Now, if you’re talking about the attitudes…
Roseberry: My main character, Koronis the witch, has a flock of crow familiars. In real life, we might call crows “bumbling criminals”—they like to steal all kinds of random objects, bother other animals by pulling on their tails, and certainly don’t look the most graceful when they’re walking around on the ground. Not to give away too much about my comic, but when Koronis has her crow familiars cause a distraction during her cloud heist I took a lot of inspiration from real life crow behaviors when it came to the type of hijinks the familiars get up to.
Barajas: Famous joke thieves like Dane Cook, Robin Williams, and Carlos Mencia. I love Robin Williams, but he was notorious for swiping material in the mix of his improv comedy.
Illuminated: My story is a pastiche of Italian 60s crime comics, and those definitely did not feature bumbling criminals; some of them were actually extremely bleak, gruesome, starring fundamentally awful characters. I’m the one that turned up the bumbling on them.
Konrad: My story was partially inspired by Dr. Dante, a hypnotist con man who was briefly married to Lana Turner and scammed her out of thousands of dollars. I liked the idea that all the fantasy and glamor of Hollywood could be a smokescreen for crime. I took the 1950s Hollywood setting of that real-life case and transplanted it into my story.
Mamatas: Just inappropriately violent police, and their apologists!
Vargas: Not really, I’m not a fan of most crimes and criminals. There are victims?
Martindale: Nothing specifically, though there are quite a few bumbling characters in my story.
How do you tell a funny crime story in only a few pages?
Chase: Like our punk rock vampire’s robbery, the key to short comics is to get in and out quickly, leaving just enough clues for readers to pick up on the trail without having everything explained to them. In our case, having a generally established vampire lore allowed us to create challenges and solutions to the heist plan without needing an excessive amount of realism or backstory. As for the humor, we hope readers enjoy the jokes as much as we enjoyed writing them — we told the story we wanted to see, filled with misunderstanding and music and monsters!
Thomas: You give the crime a weird spin, and you end on a twist that makes it even weirder. Most crime stories, especially shorter ones, are based around some startling revelation that reverses the reader’s expectations. If the revelation is weird or goofy, then you’ve got something funny on your hands. I must confess that I’m very proud of the twist that I cooked-up for “The Good Word.”
Harp: With a drink, a computer, and a few late nights. But really, it comes down to just choosing the right story. There are plenty of examples of crime stories that are just so damn funny. You’re going to tell me you don’t laugh at Goodfellas or Reservoir Dogs?
Brothers: If you think about it, creating “Polyphonic Funk” was a little similar to the way we’d take a score under a tight time limit. Consider the setting, your budget, your team, and your tools. Figure out the pros and cons of the situation. Play to your strengths and trust your teammate to do the same. Don’t spend more than you plan to make, get out alive, divide the money, and high five the homie when you’re done.
Roseberry: There’s a classic piece of writing advice from Kurt Vonnegut that says you should start your story as close to the end as possible. I think that’s a great way to handle short comics like these. So my comic starts with the main character dropped right in the thick of her predicament, having a conniption, and it only escalates from there. Constant escalation is great for comedy, great for crime, and great for getting your story told quickly!
Barajas: You break it down by panels. Pages become irrelevant. You have to learn how to operate within the confines that you’re given. I love telling more stories with pages, but I will juice what I can by using all the real estate I’m afforded.
Illuminated: Short stories are lessons in restraint and cutting fat: you write a script, then you crush and crunch it down until you’re left with the least amount of pages possible. Anything can be improved by not indulging yourself in it.
Konrad: Comic art is often an exercise in communicating as much as possible with as little as possible. I started with the punchline—this couple is plotting to kill one another for money but they don’t realize they’re both broke—and worked backwards from there. It also helped to use some tricks of the comics trade to make storytelling more efficient, like narration boxes and visual exaggeration.
Mamatas: A crime is an event; what makes one a criminal is an event. Thankfully, the comic page has infinite power to fold time, that is, fold processes around events, around one another. It may well be easier to tell a funny crime story as a comic in a few pages as compared to prose or cinema.
Vargas: I don’t know. I think we did good. But you’d have to back it and read to figure it out! AW YEAH!!!! GET SOME COMICS!!!!!
Martindale: I got 19 pages for my story, so there was quite a bit of runway to play with, but I adapted it from a graphic novel idea I was playing around with so I definitely had to be intentional with every panel to keep the story bouncing. It was a fun restraint!
Perfect Crime Party is currently available to back until September 27.
Check out the cover and the complete list of stories below.
- Bluedolph the Dead Nose Reindeer by Tayson Martindale – Someone has murdered one of Santa’s Reindeer and there is only one detective who can find out which perp belongs on the naughty list!
- By The Horns by Malcolm Derikx & Brenna Baines – Teens in ancient Greece plan to save their favorite bull for a sacrificial alter.
- Darling Doesn’t Know by John Konrad – Two celebrities think murder is an easier solution to their problems than divorce.
- Grand Theft Octo by Kate Ashwin & Claude TC – This set of thieves is gonna rob the most expensive casino in the galaxy!
- Joke Theft by Henry Barajas & Kit Mills – A joke thief makes the perfect set.
- Play It Again by Tango, Amy Chase, Xenon Honchar, & Noah Stephens – A vampire wants to recover memorabilia of his old band for a music collection.
- Polyphonic Funk: My Outlaw Melody by David Brothers & Alissa Sallah – A delinquent plans a car heist with the help of her dead father’s ghost.
- Prym and Burn by Mariah McCourt & Jules Rivera – Without easy access to divorce, women in Victorian London need to find other ways to free themselves from abusive husbands.
- Psikotika Will Strike At Midnight by Illuminated – A detective tries their best to stop a grand theft they were warned was coming.
- Racked by Chuck Harp, Luis Santamarina, & Rob Jones – When your crimes need art supplies, the answer is more crime.
- Reap What You Sow by Ale Green & Fanny Rodriguez – Gorilla gardening is the best solution to beautify the neighborhood and help native plants.
- Sideswiped by Chris Sebela & Kendall Goode – A sap finds out his first date was a set up.
- Sincerely A Lady by Molly Muldoon & Caitlin Like – A new wardrobe reveals a history of sneaking, spying, and gossip.
- Smugglers Abroad by Michelle Gruppetta & Fleur Sciortino – A family tries to get the best chocolate over the border.
- Spirit Duplicator by Rodrigo Vargas & Coni Yovaniniz – Fraud and theft are the only ways to stop this card-playing bully.
- The Cloud Thief by Erin Roseberry – A witch needs to steal some clouds to make it rain.
- The Crime Beat by Van Jensen & Neal Obermeyer – An underpaid journalist takes revenge on their boss.
- The Good Word by Bevan Thomas & Reetta Linjama – A snake oil salesman meets his match in a small town.
- The Heist by Amy Chu & Anderson Cabral – In a world where paper is rarer than gold, a thief must break into the most heavily guarded building in town: the library.
- The Ninth Life of Tabitha Tuxedo by James F Wright & Jackie Crofts – Tabitha Tuxedo conducts an elaborate jailbreak for their partner in crime.
- The Plague of the Living Rest Benches by Nathaniel Wilson – Scientist and unethical experiments have led to the sidewalks of the world being deadly.
- The Swinevald Pearl by Ben Coleman & Cat Farris – All the security in the world won’t stop this otter from getting his pearl.
- The Twenty-One Foot Rule by Nick Mamatas & Jules Valera – A fake and deadly duel turns out to be not so fake after all.
- Trevor n Derrick Le Debacle de Fromage by Matylda McCormack-Sharp – A mouse is determined to get its favorite cheese all to itself.
- Written Off by Ryan Estrada & Axur Eneas – A movie crew aims to steal the rights back from the corporation that is ruining their movie.