Dark Horse Comics is about to tickle readers' action-horror sensibilities with a new miniseries about post-apocalyptic mayhem. Written by Robert Venditti and Brockton McKinney, drawn by Dalts Dalton, colored by Geraldo Filho, and lettered by Micah Myers, Savage Squad 6 assembles a ragtag all-female mercenary team in a lethal and explosive adventure. These soldiers will need to work together and watch their six to survive this dangerous, somewhat impossible mission.
CBR caught up with Venditti and McKinney to find out more about their collaboration for this new title and what fans can expect from the series. The writers unpacked how they conceptualized the idea and established a specific process to get the creative juices flowing while tapping into their individual strengths. Venditti and McKinney also discussed which movies they watched to get into the right head space to write Savage Squad 6.
CBR: There's certainly a strong action-horror tone to Savage Squad 6 that evokes some comparisons to Alien. What are some of the big influences you pulled from for the story?
Robert Venditti: I would say Predator is probably one of the biggest ones for Brock and I. We're huge fans of those '80s, early '90s action films. Whenever we get together, we watch [those] kinds of movies. We love them. So we wanted to sit down and do a version of that with more of a modern aesthetic and pull on those influences. Alien is probably something that Brock has mentioned, but he knows that kind of stuff better than me. I have more of an action background. I'm really squeamish with horror, as Brock knows, so I'm not as steeped in those things as he is. But I think that's part of what makes our collaboration work so well. We're able to bring different influences to the table.
Brockton McKinney: Oh, yeah, definitely Aliens is a huge one. Escape from New York. Like Robert said, Predator. That was our North Star starting out. We wanted to make sure that we were doing this action movie about a group of people that are thrown into a situation that you think you know what's going on. But then all of a sudden, there's this other evil presence that will hopefully be a surprise to the audience and carry us through the rest of the story. As Robert was saying, we get together, we'll spend a week at his place, and we have a stack of action movies that we go through. It can be stuff that you know, like Predator, or it could be stuff that maybe you're not as familiar with, like GETEVEN -- it's another action movie we love. We went from the B-movies to the highest A-movie thing, got the creative tanks filled up, and started pinning it out.
From a comic book point-of-view, there's also an element of Y: The Last Man in the sense that all the men are done for. What was the reasoning behind focusing on an all-female action team here?
Venditti: The thought that Brock and I talked about in the beginning: We both have daughters. My daughter is 18. I believe Brock's is 19. So daughters of the same age. We really wanted to do a story that was for them. So many of those action movies that we liked when we were younger [were] very hypermasculine, so we wanted to do something action-oriented and had all those things we liked but with a female cast. That was an impetus for us to sit down and start talking about what we wanted to do in terms of story. But I don't want to forget about Jake, the pilot, as he has a huge impact on the narrative.
McKinney: The female mercenaries were the second part of the idea. The first thing was the creature. So after we had the idea, we thought it'd be cool if we made it an all-female mercenary squad because we could do some different stuff with it. I mean, my house is all female: my daughter, my wife, my dogs, my friends, everybody. So it was easy to draw from that and find those voices. That helped shape the world where not the entire world has been wiped out of men but certainly their colonies.
I'm interested in finding out more about your collaboration process. How do you manage the workflow of who tackles which pages?
McKinney: That's a great question.
Venditti: When it comes to managing workflow and things like that, Brock takes point, so I'll let him go ahead and lead with the response.
McKinney: That is an absolute lie. [Laughs]. I did not manage the workflow. But what we did was we came up with the initial story over the phone. I remember he texted me one thing. He said, "What do you think about this?" I was like, "Oh, shit, what do you think about this?" And we started putting it together. Then we realized this is something we need to be sitting down together for, so I drove to his place, and we holed up for like seven days. We wrote everything out on note cards and moved stuff around to figure out our story and hit the beats. We worked on it, man -- we worked on that thing 9 or 10 hours a day. We were just so excited. Once we were done, we had our little treatment set in place. We would each take 5 or 10 pages, knowing what the outline was in the roadmap, and just jam those pages out and send it to the next person. I'd send it to him, he'd go through and polish and he'd send me his. Back and forth.
Venditti: It was the first time we ever worked together. I would say it was the first time we ever hung out significantly. We'd seen each other at the conventions, where we would get a drink at the bar, but this was the first time we were in the same place for seven days, working real early until real late. Long days breaking the story, thinking about the characters, arcs, plot, themes, and what we wanted to try to say with the story -- really drilling down on a lot of those. And again, just bringing different backgrounds and different influences. I've done a lot of stuff in comics working for DC, and it trains you to be very plot-oriented in terms of the storyline, the order of the scenes, and making sure there's a logic to everything that happens within the rules of the universe. Brock is a very big-picture guy who excels at big moments, action beats, heightening the intensity of things, and doing something in a visual way that's gonna translate well for the page.
We leaned in on those separate aspects for each other. Normally, if you do a collaboration, maybe one person would write one character, and the other person would write another character's scenes. But here, the whole team is always together. It was just finding breakpoints in the story that were natural conclusions to what you're working on and then passing it off. It didn't always end up being 50/50. Sometimes, it's 60/40, 70/30, or the other way around. But it was more about the natural breakpoint to pass it off to the other person.
How did you assemble the rest of the creative team for Savage Squad 6?
McKinney: The artist on it, Dalts Dalton, was a recommendation from another artist Magenta King, who I worked with on Dave Dwonch's Jenny Zero for Dark Horse. I asked him, "Hey, man, do you know anybody? We're looking for somebody who has this kind of style and can handle the horror and action?" He was like, "I got a studio mate. You got to see this guy's stuff." He sent it to me and Rob, and we fell in love with it. And we're like, "Hey, did we get our guy right off the bat?" We didn't even try anybody else out. He was the guy. He sent in some designs of the characters, and we were like, "Wow, this is our dude."
Venditti: He's really good at communicating the action and also really good at communicating the acting and faces of the characters. You get that emotion, too, which is not easy to do. A lot of artists are good at one and not the other, and vice versa. Dalts excels at both. You can feel him finding his footing as he's going throughout the story and building up to the final reveal of the first issue and then where we go from there. It's just bonkers. He's managing a lot of stuff on each page in terms of the size of the cast, the number of adversaries that they're fighting, and all that kind of stuff. It's great work.
How did you work to give all six main characters space to grow in each issue? If you are working on a team book like Justice League, those characters have all been pre-established before, but here, you have six brand-new characters to introduce.
McKinney: I learned a lot about writing in general from this because it was such a huge cast, and Venditti just wants to get in there, figure it out, and make sure that everything makes sense. We spent a lot of time on each character. We wrote out these bios that no one will ever see but us, so we knew who these characters were. I might be remembering it wrong, but it feels like as we wrote it and the characters already had these backgrounds, we knew who was going to speak next or who was going to do this action. So each character came to life when we were writing. It seemed pretty easy after we did the homework that Rob insisted on.
Venditti: I agree. I think the greatest moments when you're being a writer are when characters write themselves. That's the most fun because sometimes your characters can even surprise you. But to introduce all those characters, have them be different from each other, and feel like fully fleshed-out people is not easy to do in just 24 pages. So a lot of it comes down to the dialogue. And again, the acting -- how Dalts is able to communicate with a facial expression, gesture, or posture -- something about personality that goes unspoken. He's able to do that in the art.
With the dialogue, Brock is good at coming up with a succinct five or ten-word sentence from a character that encapsulates who they are. You hope that when it comes across on the page, people get to know and feel like they are attached to these characters so that when you put them through the wringer, they have that emotional connection to the story.
Savage Squad 6 is solicited as a miniseries, but are there more stories in this world that you two would like to tell?
McKinney: Yes, 100%. Before we had even talked to Dark Horse or got this whole thing together, we were already planning the second and third volumes and how to keep going with this idea. So absolutely, we do. Rob specifically knows some of the fun stuff.
Venditti: Three volumes, at least. There are definitely more places we can go with the story. Everything comes down to hoping it resonates with audiences and hoping that the book does well enough to justify those things. We would love to do more with characters and keep working with Dalts. But this is just one of a number of projects that Brock and I are collaborating on together. One way or another, you'll be seeing more stuff from us -- whether it's more Savage Squad 6 or something else.
McKinney: The whole team would be ready. I don't want to discount the colorist Geraldo [Filho] and our letterer, Micah Myers. Both are amazing and came on and have been killing it. They're asking the same questions if we are doing more. We're gonna see, but we got it. We're ready to go.
Dark Horse's Savage Squad 6 #1 arrives in comic book stores on June 28.