Bitter Root remains one of the most vital horror books in comics — a Harlem Renaissance-era saga of the Sangerye family, monster hunters fighting both supernatural evil and the real-world evil of racism.

At this year’s Dragon Con, I sat down with co-writers Chuck Brown and David F. Walker to talk about how their collaboration works, where the mythology of the monsters comes from, why trauma creates a different kind of monster, and what they’re both working on next, including Walker’s retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Big Jim and the White Boy which tells the story from Jim’s point of view.

Super Powered Fancast: First of all, thank you both for taking the time. I’m a huge fan of your work, especially Bitter Root. When I started reviewing comics, as soon as that title came up from Image, I knew I had to read it. There’s so many great cultural elements to it. I love it.

My first question is about collaboration. How did you come together to create the story, and how does that collaboration continue as you move through different arcs and even different time periods?

Chuck Brown: It was a different experience because David was in Portland, and I’m in South Carolina. So it was a lot through email and text and phone calls and eventual Zooms. But we ended up coming together and making it work, passing scripts back and forth, bouncing ideas back and forth. Really exciting moments just building this world, building this universe, seeing art come in from Sanford [Greene]. It was really rewarding and really cool.

David F. Walker: To give it a little bit more context, Sanford and I had been working on Power Man and Iron Fist at Marvel. That book got canceled and he started talking to Image about doing something, and him and Chuck had already been slowly putting together Bitter Root.

Sanford kind of approached me without talking to Chuck first and said, “Hey, why don’t you come work on Bitter Root with us?” And I was like, “How does Chuck feel about that?” At that point Chuck and I had only met each other like once at New York Comic Con.

I remember Sanford was like, “Oh, Chuck’s cool with it.” [laughs]

It was sort of how it came together — the cancellation of Power Man and Iron Fist, Sanford talking to Eric Stephenson over at Image, and then just us bouncing ideas around. There was already a cast that Chuck had put together and a lot of the key elements were there — the family business, Harlem during the backdrop of the Renaissance.

One of my questions at the time was, “Well, let’s talk about the monsters.” At that point the monsters were… monsters. And I think I was twisting their arms when I was like, “Let’s do something real different so this thing stands out.”

It’s been this really… I’m going to say it’s almost like organized chaos. It’s very chaotic. Our schedules never line up. Chuck and I will talk about something and Sanford will draw whatever the hell he wants to draw. And it goes back and forth. I can be a bully sometimes.

But when I think about what we’ve been able to create as a team, I’m ridiculously proud of Bitter Root. They’re my family.

Chuck Brown: I remember when Sanford approached me about bringing David on board, and I’m thinking, “For what, the back matter or something?” Then he kind of broke it down from what they were doing on Power Man and Iron Fist, he had a lot of ideas he wanted to bring into the concept. Slowly over time, we warmed up and got cool and didn’t kill each other.

Super Powered Fancast: Regarding the mythology behind the monsters, was that something that came out of whole cloth, or was it something you wanted to research first?

David F Walker: It’s a work in progress. Sanford always says we’re building the plane while we’re flying it. Sometimes I’ll write something, Chuck will write something, and then two issues later we’re like, “What did we just write? We got to figure out how this thing works.”

But this idea that the monsters are born out of these souls that are infected by hatred and racism — once we locked into that, my attitude is like, that’s all that matters. Nobody knows why the zombies came back in The Walking Dead. But we’ve been developing it over time.

Chuck Brown: I think the biggest part of the Bitter Root monsters is that the ugliness on the inside comes out on the outside. And that’s the real reality we’re living in right now.

I think maybe a few issues in, or even on the second arc, we realized that Black people have trauma too. And the monsters can come out of us too. Your monster is born from trauma, which is where Dr. Sylvester’s power came from and his transformation came from.

Super Powered Fancast: That’s one of the things I love about the series — this isn’t just something that affects white people. It can affect Black people, and it manifests differently, based on trauma. It’s not just saying white people are bad and Black people are good. There’s so many different facets to it.

Chuck Brown: It affects us as Black people differently because if you constantly got your knee on my neck, hatred’s going to burn in my heart. Your hatred may be coming from a place of complete ignorance and lack of knowledge and maliciousness. But sometimes, you constantly bully me, you constantly hurt me, I want to hurt you back. And sometimes the monster can grow inside of you from that.

David F Walker: That idea that there’s two types of monsters really became… I didn’t realize how important it was in the beginning, but then I realized, “Oh, we need to show what this other illness does to us, and the monsters that we become.”

Chuck has got this idea for a storyline that we’re going to get to eventually that takes place in the 80s. For me, growing up, I was in high school in the 80s during the crack epidemic, Reagan administration, the AIDS epidemic. All of these things turned various groups of people into monsters. I’m really looking forward to getting into the 80s. I don’t know what the hell he’s got in mind, but it’ll be… Chuck’s very disturbed and he’s very angry.

Chuck Brown: I want us to do something where hate’s on the spectrum. There’s misogyny. There’s homophobia. There’s self-hate. And I kind of want to really explore all of that and how it affects all of us.

David F Walker: A lot of that speaks to the 80s. Especially the homophobia, the self-hate because of everything about consumption and material and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Brown: Self-hate made it to the Supreme Court. And it’s hurting us all.

Walker: Absolutely.

Super Powered Fancast: Outside of Bitter Root, I wanted to ask about Big Jim and the White Boy. I bought it for my 12-year-old son. He’s not a huge reader, but he is a comic book reader. How did those initial conversations go where you were trying to say, “Hey, I want to retell Huckleberry Finn?”

Walker: About 15 years ago, maybe more, I had started writing a book. It was prose and it was going to be a retelling of Huckleberry Finn. But it was straight up super, super violent, very blaxploitation in its execution and it didn’t get very far.

Marcus [Kwame Anderson] and I were wrapping up The Black Panther Party and our publisher reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing reinterpretations of classic literature. What do you think of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” And I sent him this thing that I had written that had really been collecting dust for years. So it kind of revived something that would have been dead otherwise.

At the time, it was prose. I didn’t think about doing it as a graphic novel until someone else mentioned it. They were like, “Is there an artist you want to work with?” And I was like, “I’d like to work with Marcus again.” They were like, “Marcus’s style might be too cartoony.” And I was like, “Don’t worry about it.”

Then the decision had to be made — how close are we going to stick to Twain’s original narrative? And how much am I going to take the story in another direction? Really early on I made the decision: after page 10 or something, it’s going to be a very different story.

There’s a character in it who is the college professor, and a very different character in the first drafts of the book. Things just weren’t working and I was like, “What’s not working?” Marcus and I talk a lot — we probably talk more than the average writer-artist team talks. We talk about everything from the visual component to the dialogue. This is a book that is really by the two of us.

I’m glad your son’s enjoying it.

Super Powered Fancast: Just to wrap things up, beyond the next arc of Bitter Root, what are you guys working on either separately or together that you’d like people to check out?

Brown: I just finished on Vampirella vs. Red Sonja for Dynamite. Next up I’m working on Supernatural with Dean Winchester. And I plan on doing some Kickstarters next year with David and Sanford.

Walker: I’ve got a book coming out from 23rd Street Books called Shogun Run, and it’s drawn by Ben Bishop. It started out as a film idea by Damon Wayans Jr. and King Bach, and they decided they wanted to do it as a graphic novel, but they didn’t really know how to write graphic novels, so I got called in. That book’s going to be amazing. It’s kind of like Friday meets Big Trouble in Little China.

And I’ve been doing a lot of self-publishing in part because publishers aren’t offering particularly good deals, both from a standpoint of how much they want to control the IP, how much they want to pay you to create it. So I have a project called The Monster of Blackenstein — not to be confused with Blackenstein. It’s a dark satire about monsters and race and really just me taking my kid gloves off.

Chuck and I are talking about doing some stuff together, where it’s Chuck writing stuff, me writing stuff, and then us putting out a thing that we can each take to conventions and not only promote ourselves, but promote the team.

Things come to me all the time. I’m just trying to keep from going crazy.

Super Powered Fancast: Thank you guys. Thank you so much.

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