Summary
- David Dastmalchian's comic book series, Count Crowley, explores the life of a late-night horror show host who secretly fights real monsters.
- Dastmalchian collaborates with artist Lukas Ketner and emphasizes the importance of dialogue and emotion in his scripts.
- The evolution of the lead character, Jerri Bartman, involves her struggles with depression, anxiety, and alcoholism while taking on the responsibility of being a monster hunter.
David Dastmalchian has combined his love of horror and comics to create his own comic book series, Count Crowley, which is distributed through Dark Horse Comics. Count Crowley follows Jerri Bartman, a journalist turned late-night horror show host in the style of Svengoolie or Elvira. However, she discovers this job is more than it seems when she learns the former host was also one of the world's last monster hunters, which now falls on her. As she struggles with her own inner demons, she'll have to secretly fight real monsters as well.
Dastmalchian is also working with Todd McFarlane and Federico Mele on a new comic book, Knights vs. Samurai. An acclaimed actor, Dastmalchian is best known for his roles in The Suicide Squad, The Boogeyman, Dune, and Oppenheimer. Dastmalchian is also starring in the new independent horror movie Late Night with The Devil.
David Dastmalchian stopped by the Screen Rant media suite at San Diego Comic-Con to talk about his comic book series, Count Crowley. He shared SAG-AFTRA strikes.
David Dastmalchian Talks Count Crowley
Screen Rant: What inspired the idea of Count Crowley, and what did you want to explore with this character?
David Dastmalchian: I always thought about how cool [Crematia] was and what a cool life that she must have, and what does she do when she's not dressed up as Crematia? Crematia — like Elvira, like Svengoolie, like Sammy Terry, like any of the history of incredible horror host before her — I was always obsessed with. And then as the years went on, I started to wonder, "What if that was just a cover? What if that was just like the way that she can hide and her alter ego is the horror host, but truly she's hunting and fighting monsters that exist in the world?"
That was the premise, and then we built a world around that and I have been able to work for many years now on the book with one of the best comic book artists I think in the business right now, a guy named Lukas Ketner. I have an incredible team that we've been the same team all the way through, and I am working as we speak on where I am taking the story next, and I can't wait for people to see that.
Let's talk about the collaboration process working with Lukas, because his artwork is incredible.
David Dastmalchian: I tried to put as much emotion and as much character development into the script as possible. I love writing and really expressing my characters' personalities, points of view, emotional journeys through their dialogue. Dialogue to me is so important when I'm working on a comic book, and then just describing sometimes things. Like Jerri, because she is such a conflicted character, is facing down this monster, there may be power and presence in her stance, but her eyes may betray the fear that she's feeling.
I give [notes like] that to Lukas, he goes away with it, he starts working in his pencils and he starts doing his initial sketches and we've just got this incredible communication flow. It's such a gift as a collaborator to be able to communicate with somebody in such a level. He knocks it out of the park every single time, from the very first sketch he did of what Jerri would look like as Count Crowley, all the way to some of the most new stuff that he's been sending me as we band around some ideas. It's a gift, man. It's crazy.
Let's talk about Jerri Bartman, aka Count Crowley. Can you talk about the evolution of the character over the course of the comics?
David Dastmalchian: Jerri enters the story in the beginning, as the audience is introduced to her, wanting nothing more than to be a legitimate news broadcaster. She wanted to be the first female Walter Cronkite. She wanted to be Barbara Walters. She is from a small town where her parents ran a small town TV station and network , goes off to the big time, she goes to the big city, she goes to Cleveland and it's 1983, she gets a desk, she's going to actually deliver the news, and the male star anchor of this news network assaults her. When she tries to bring it to the attention of the producers in the network, she is completely disbelieved. No one wants to hear her. This guy is loved. He is a cash cow for them. Her career has basically ended, and Jerri struggles with not only depression, anxiety, but she's an alcoholic.
She goes home with her tail between her legs, devastated, not willing to talk about what happened to her because she just feels so unsafe everywhere she goes, and all she's got at this point, because her parents have ed on, is her brother who's running this small station. He tries to put her on the news, she's embarrassed, he finally gets her to be the host of the late night horror show. She thinks this is as low as it gets and then it turns out the guy she replaced, the guy who used to be the horror host, was actually one of the world's last appointed monster hunters. Now that responsibility has fallen upon her shoulders. Not only is she going to have to figure out how to defeat monsters, how to protect people she loves, but to do so, she's going to have to figure out how to stop drinking.
That's the monster and the battle within while she's fighting the monster and the battle without. I love the character so much. She is my heart. I always imagined her as Jerri with a Y. I thought it was a dude and then as I was really building the character and talking to some of the really important women in my life and continuing to hear the story over and over again of not being believed or not being taken seriously for the experiences that they had been having in workplace, school, social settings, and I was like, this person who to me thematically would be so dramatically compelling if no one believed her because she's trying to talk about werewolves and vampires, what about a even more terrifying monster? What about a guy who in plain sight is beloved by people and yet is predatory?
So that's where we're at, man. She's growing. I love her more every time I write a new script and she's not even mine anymore. She's her own being and I feel like she's like her own living, breathing person now. It's really amazing.
That's incredible. One thing that I absolutely love about you is that you are a true fan of comics. Can you tell me what you find the most surprising about making comics now through this journey?
David Dastmalchian: For me, each project is a totally different journey and a totally different approach. If you're going to have the best collaboration with the artists that you're paired with and the colors and every member of the team, you have to be willing, in my opinion, to scrap everything you think you know about how to build story together and start over. For example, the way that I write Count Crowley and the way that I've worked with Lucas has been I write fairly specific how many s per page. I try not to give too much in the descriptive as far as shots except for a couple an issue because I like to give Lucas the freedom to explore that. But I write really detailed what's going on as far as each . Dialogue, again, like I said earlier, is really crucial to me in the way that I feel like I can express my characters.
But then we just announced yesterday, I'm working with Todd McFarlane on a brand new comic book that's being drawn by Federico Mele — who's in Rome, and one of the best new rising stars in comics — called Knight vs. Samurai. To give Fede the runway that he needs for the process that he has, I scrapped the notion of writing numbers on pages, and I just wrote the descriptive of what I need to take place and then just my dialogue. I worked really hard on just trying to get the dialogue for each character because you've got English knights, Japanese Samurai meeting, clashing, finding out that maybe they aren't enemies, maybe they are. There's dragons, there's wizards. I needed the dialogue for each character because it's a pretty dense population of characters in this world to be so specific.
Then I just recently wrote a one-shot for Dark Horse. They're doing a headless horseman Halloween special, and I had never done this before. I co-wrote my comic with a really dear collaborator to me, Leah Kilpatrick, who is really talented and also brought a lot of humor ideas that I was seeking in this particular piece that we did. We had the immense gift of ... anyone who is watching, I'm sure, is a fan, of getting to work with Tyler Crook, who people may know from Harold County and so many of the other incredible things that he's drawn, painted. For that, man, there was a lot of dialogue between us as the two writers figuring out how we were going to execute the story we wanted to tell, and then our artist who had a lot of thoughts and input on things tonally, thematically.
I keep learning, man. I guess the point, it's a very long answer to say, I just keep trying to show up with the work done, being prepared as possible, but being prepared to throw out the script, figure out how do you and I communicate the best way possible to get these ideas going, and then how would he and I and how would this other person and I ... you can't look at it like it's a assembly line, you can't look at it's just a machine. It's not.
Knight versus Samurai sounds amazing. Talk to me about the world-building process, because you said it's a dense book.
David Dastmalchian: Dude, I was like, "Okay, I know where I'm going in this. I know what I need to get to. I got to see the katanas clashing with the broad swords. I've got to see knights in full battle array and full armor clashing with Samurai in their full armor." I know that's where we're going. That is the framing device, that's hopefully the big exciting entrance that gets everyone into the amusement park to go like, "What the hell is going on here?" Then to make it count, to make it matter and to make people care about wanting to keep turning the pages and keep getting the books, I knew that I needed a compelling story.
My frustration and a lot of our frustration with I think the way that power structures and power systems and paradigms have operated for millennia is so corrupt in the way that people in great power, especially the elitist, can manipulate and utilize misinformation to convince people who maybe look different from one another, speak differently from one another, come from different places from one another, to convince them that person's the reason why things aren't great in your life or that person is the enemy when really they're pulling the strings from above, that's really what's going on in this world. Whether we're dealing with dragon battles, wizards, oni, trolls, giants, knights, samurai, all on the battlefield.
I did give myself a really great tool early on. I said, "I'm going to still ... even though this is a fantastical fictional story, I'm going to set it in a timeline of real human history." So it takes place in late 1500s, Queen Elizabeth would be been the queen of England. Then, what was going on in Japan with a major battle and power shift in who was trying to rule the country and emperor versus all the different shogunate, I use that timeline, even though I'm creating a fictional reality with created fictional dukes and fictional lords, and that helped me so much to just look at the world and the geography and what was going on at that time with war, weaponry, et cetera.
Then, man, if you love the characters, which I do, you just start writing stories about them, and you just start writing their backstories, and you start writing, "Why are they here at this moment in their journey? What do they need from this?" When Charles Ward, who's the Dragon Slayer, who is the leader of the Knights, comes face to face for the very first time with Sonata Musashi, the Tiger Lord, who's the leader of the Samurai, hopefully by the time my readers get to that moment, they'll have a real strong sense of who these people are and I don't know, hopefully relate to them and love them and want to watch them kick the shit out of each other.
You're such a creative genius and artist. Have you ever started thinking about possibly taking something like Count Crowley and making that for another medium, like animation?
David Dastmalchian: I would love that so much. I was just talking to my assistant/producing partner, Jen, on the walk over to the interview about the power of animation. Some of the stories that I'm working on I think would do really well in the animated space. Live-action, I think, is a perfect format for some of the stories that I'm telling. What's beautiful and wonderful about being a comic book creator and writer is that you have this luxury and opportunity to work with a small amount of collaborators to create a world and really lay it out for people to look at the potential because your imagination is your limit and there is no limit to the imagination with the comic book as opposed to the budgets of, say, a TV show or a movie or something like that. What I hope and dream for each of these characters I've created is that they'll live on in different medias.
I've started a production company this year called Good Fiend Films. One of the first movies we co-produced is a little indie called Late Night with the Devil that I'm very proud of. But with the comic books, I hope and believe and sit up at night dreaming about the day when I could come to Comic-Con and you could be like, "I when we were talking about the first trade paperback of Count Crowley, and now you've got blah, blah, blah starring as Count Crowley." That's a big dream for me, and if you'd told me that I'd be where I am in my life right now 20 years ago, I would've said, "No, that's impossible." Now, I just choose to believe that anything is possible.
I do want to talk about Late Night with The Devil because that film sounds incredible. It's an indie film, so we can talk about this.
David Dastmalchian: Yes, we can. SAG gave us permission. It's an independent film, it's not produced by a studio, it doesn't have distribution, and so with Late Night with the Devil is a small but mighty film, and I'm so proud to be a part of it. I got to co-produce it with my company, Good Fiend Films, which meant really that I got to just give my opinion and thoughts on some of the way that the film was executed itself, although it really didn't need any help from me. The writer/directors are brothers from Australia named Colin and Cameron Karens, and they are legitimately brilliant dudes who I love and they made this world that reflects a story about a late night talk show host from 1970s. His name was Jack Delroy.
He had a show called Night Owls. He lived in New York City and it was very popular for a moment, but unfortunately he was always falling second to Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show and his ratings just continued to plummet over time, and he also tragically lost his wife who died of cancer after her diagnosis very rapidly.
So Jack was struggling mentally and trying to put together a way to save his show and one night in October of 1977, he pushed all the limits of not only good taste, but ethics and morality in the hopes that he could save his show and things didn't go great. I had the honor of getting to bring that character to life and we're going to actually ... we're screening it at San Diego Comic-Con for fans. I'm really excited about that. But we debuted it at South by Southwest. It was one of the coolest nights of my life sitting in a packed theater and watching people watch this movie unfold, because you just don't know what's happening next in that movie. It's bonkers.
This film also has the endorsement of the master himself, Stephen King.
David Dastmalchian: Yeah.
What does that feel like?
David Dastmalchian: That's nuts. That's so crazy, man. It's so wild to look ... I'm not on Twitter, but one of the producers of the film sent me a screenshot of Stephen King's post after he got to watch an early screener cut of the movie and you're just like, "Holy, are you kidding me? The King endorsed our film."
He loved Late Night with the Devil. Since then, received some rousing endorsements. Today Jim Lee posted a really nice thing about it. He got to see it early. Kevin Smith got an opportunity to see it. Mark Bernardin. Been so thrilled and pleased with the way that critics have responded, but most importantly, it's just been audiences. When we were at Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans and I got to sit there and watch a crowd full of people scream and hoot and holler, that's what it's all about, man. I love it. I love it.
This is obviously a different type of Comic-Con. It feels different because it feels more intimate, back to being comics again, and I know that you are a fan. What were you most excited to see on the floor?
David Dastmalchian: Well, interestingly for me, I'm always excited to see variants and cool toy discoveries because I love toys and I collect toys, especially in the monster space. There was a really cool Comic-Con exclusive this year of Creature from the Black Lagoon [from Neca]. That one was really special. Glow in the Dark even. Got our hands on one of those.
Always wanting to see what Funko is up to because I love Funko and going to go over to Funkoville as soon as I'm done talking to you. Then interestingly, for the first time, my six-year-old daughter, my nine-year-old son came with me to San Diego Comic-Con and as they're walking the floor, watching them make the discoveries of the stuff that they're fascinated by, like squid kitties, which I didn't know about, and watching them love them squid kitties is pretty rad. I was like, "Oh, that's a cool concept. It's cat with tentacles," and there's all different variations of them. Man, my kids were obsessed. They blew their entire Comic-Con budget on squid kitties. I was like, "Go for it."
About Count Crowley
That bump you heard is nothing to fear. It's just a werewolf. Oh, they're real. Monsters are real. But fear not, horror hounds, for there is a new huntress battling the creatures of evil and she may just save humanity . . . if we can keep her sober long enough. She's none other than the local TV station's late-night horror host . . . Jerri Bartman, Count Crowley, the Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter.
