Last week saw the release of the first collection of Days of Hate, Ales Kot and Danijel Zezelj’s contemporary political thriller about a white supremacist police state. Now, Kot and artist Tradd Moore are offering a different view of a police state in the new comic book series The New World.
Launching Wednesday digitally and in comic book stores, The New World takes place in New California after the Second Civil War, and centers around two lovers on different sides of an ideological divide — one an anarchist wanting to take down the state, the other a cop whose adventures are broadcast live as reality TV. Heat Vision has a preview of the oversized first issue, below. We caught up with Kot about Days of Hate and saved this part of the conversation, focusing on The New World, until now. (Read the first part here.)
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I’m reminded very much about what you were saying before about letting the project dictate how you work in regards to The New World, because what you’re doing with Tradd Moore on The New World — it’s just an entirely different book on on every single level. Were you writing both of these at the same time?
I feel like I started writing Days of Hate sometime in 2016. I think I started writing it in maybe September, and I started writing The New World a year before. With The New World, I wrote the first chapter, and then me and Tradd split it into two chapters, and then we realized that it might work better as one chapter, so we put it back together again and ended up with a 60-page first issue, which is ridiculous and I’m glad he didn’t murder me for it. [The first issue is actually 72 pages, when you factor in a second story by comics newcomers Aaron Stewart-An and Sunando C.] I know that we’re intensely proud of it.
Then I wrote the second and third issue, and we were working on it and Tradd was working on it through 2017 — then, there was a break because I was ahead of it and Tradd, obviously, had to draw 100 pages, if you put together the first three issues; that takes a while, especially considering this is the best art of his career so far. I have not seen any artist make the leaps that he’s making since, maybe, Frank Quitely.
So, I kind of sat on the last two issues. We were talking about how to go about them, because I started realizing that having that break in between sort of made me rethink how I was thinking about them — as you change as a person, sometimes you might feel disconnected from your previous work. It wasn’t that I was disconnected as in I was displeased; it was that I started seeing connections where I didn’t see them before, and at the same time, certain other connections became less interesting.
So I struggled with how to write it, and me and Tradd talked about that. I’m fairly certain that I was really hard to work with for a few months, because nothing worked. Not on Tradd’s part, but on mine. I didn’t feel like the writing was doing the right thing, and then I wrote the fourth issue, and that worked, and I knew what I was doing. We really liked it, and then we took another break because I realized that there was something internal from my youth that I needed to work through in order to be actually able to figure out the shape of the final chapter, which is Chapter 5.
Finally, I came back from the mountains where I was writing and I was like, “Okay, I’m sending it to you tonight. I just wrote through this. I was sweating this.” And then, my laptop died. I had sent Tradd a picture of page 16 [as it was being scripted], and I was like, “Fuck, yeah! I’m sending this to you and I’m not going to sleep before this happens!” And then, like, two hours later, I’m like, “Hey, so I have a message, and you might want to see this.” So I just showed him my screen: “Does this screen tell you this is going to be okay?” And it’s not okay. I had to rewrite the issue almost from scratch. But it ended up working really well! It was such a stressful thing. And I felt so guilty about it, because it was one of the hardest things to ever write. The hardest thing about is, I really wanted it to feel breezy, you know? It’s a heavy book, but it’s also very breezy.
I feel like The New World shares a sensibility with Secret Avengers, which I did at Marvel. I’m finding that tone, and finding the tone really lovely to work with. I needed to recover parts of myself that will allow for it and then tell a story that ends in a place that feels honest to where I am now, as opposed to 2015. So that was tricky; as far as timeline, it’s very complex.
I’ve got to say, one of the things that The New World reminds me of — and I have no idea your relationship with this at all — is Judge Dredd. One of the things I like about Judge Dredd as a property is that it simultaneously can do high comedy and political satire. Now, by simultaneously, I mean literally on the same page you can have something that is blatantly ridiculous, but there is also a much deeper darker point going on. There is simultaneously a world between Days of Hate and The New World, and also not; there are elements of the police state, of authoritarian rule, of people trying to find human connection despite what the rest of the world wants. But The New World came across as, “Oh, this is the version that people who were grown up with Judge Dredd will understand.”
I read 2000AD comic books sometimes, when they were translated into Czech, because when I was a kid it really wasn’t any other access. So I had cursory knowledge [of Dredd]. I was very amused by them, but I’m not sure that is something that I really thought of much when coming up with The New World itself. I can trace some things — I think that, in a general sense, being affected by 2000AD comics as a whole is something that you can sort of see through my work. I’m trying to think of the best examples, like, you know, if you will get something like MODOK in Secret Avengers, I feel like it becomes quite obvious.
The thing is, so much of that specific influence that you’re pointing out is just living in the moment right now — looking at the way violent policing happens in the world, and the way videos of people of color being brutalized become these processes of re-traumatization of the larger public, and the way law can be blatantly disrespected directly in front of us. Those are all things that, when those processes are not stopped, can become the fabric of daily society and they become normalized, and the concern for that is something that would be a thing driving some of the key parts of The New World, more than anything else.
But also, if we’re talking satire, Mad Max: Fury Road would be a definite influence, and Romeo and Juliet, too, you know? All these things meld and do things with my brain, but unless I filter them through your world experience, they’re really going to be just sort of empty reference points. I feel like that just creates this incestuous culture, this ouroboros of shit where everyone pats everyone on the back for recognizing another reference.
I think it’s wonderful that we can create this library of fiction and see connections, and I am into it in so many different ways, but it can only be a part of the larger whole — which again really boils back to, who are these people, and what is this story really about at its core? And at the core, The New World more than anything else is really about — actually, no, I don’t want to tell you! I want people to tell me. What do you think The New World is about, you know?
