Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.
My pleasure. Before I start, thank you so much for inviting me to complete this interview with you; I had no idea Saskatchewan had a Tolkien society and to be invited by said society to an interview is truly a privilege.
My name is Mark Allard-Will, I'm a published author in the comic book medium based out of Saskatoon. I was born and raised in the deeply rural county of Suffolk in England, UK and I moved to Canada at age 26, I'm 36 now and became a Canadian citizen in 2019. Beyond writing, I'm a jack of all trades, I'm an amatuer athlete who rides road bikes for sport and provides professional commentary on the live broadcast races from virtual cycling platform CADEsport, I'm a degree-trained filmmaker, an avid wristwatch collector and self-trained in amatuer watch repair, a freelance copywriter, and probably half a dozen other things I'm forgetting.
But, we're here to talk about my work as a writer. I've been writing my whole life, but only knew what to do with it when I met my wife, Elaine M. Will, in 2015. Elaine was already a published comic book illustrator at this time and she showed me that I could write for comics. I had been into comics as a young child through to my late teens in the UK, fell out of love with them in my late teens as many do and I never would've thought at that time that I'd end up writing for comics; if anything, I honestly didn't realise that blue collar, regular folk could - I thought that it was a select few individuals were hired to work in publisher offices like the early days of the comics industry. Elaine showed me that anybody can do this and that, really, like published prose writers, we're invariably creating from home too.
I wrote screenplays in university, as my minor was a Creative Writing class for stage and screen and that training translated very well into the skill set needed for formatting a comic book script; both being heavily framed by formatting.
I published my first comic, a Canadiana comedy comic called Saskatch-A-Man, in 2015. I found my voice as an author there, which is a sardonic dark comedy tone for comedy work and for my Fantasy work, it was very much a sardonic tone too; but one that's void of overt comedy and more of weighted tragedy, characters who are doomed to their ways and all of that.
Who would you say your biggest literary influences are?
Fantasy is always present in my literary influences and even how I think about character development. Invariably, Tolkien comes up a lot as an influence. Beyond Tolkien, however, I have to say Barry Hughart, Bridge Of Birds changed my life when I read it, as did the rest of The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox series of books; it really made me think about how you can bring comedy into Fantasy without jarring the tone and how you can link dramatic to development to environments and comedy to others (like how everything in the Peking scenes in Bridge of Birds is this really funny introduction to Master Li and we return to dramatic tension after leaving Peking).
How has the history of the middle ages impacted/influenced your work?
Oh, man, the Dark Ages come up a lot in my work. Before Siegfried: Dragon Slayer (2022), I wrote a horror graphic novel called The Burning Black: The Legend of Black Shuck (2019), it was a horror graphic novel that re-imagines the folklore of Black Shuck from back home in Suffolk in England with a cinematic, atmospheric tone to the book. I imagined a backstory for the hellhound and, because the folklore typed by Abraham Flemming has such a devoutly Christian bent to it, I decided that he could have been a figure from Suffolk's long pagan history and one that was betrayed by the Christian establishment.
Boudica was a very important figure in Suffolk's pagan history, but the establishment that betrayed her was also pagan, in the form of the pre-Christian Romans. Then I landed on my favourite part of Britain's very chaotic history, the Dark Ages, where the pagan Vikings went to toe-to-toe with the very devout Saxons. King Guthrum who settled in Suffolk was the man who had King Alfred the Great scared enough that he and his men fled Wessex and hid the forest (the origin of the fable about King Alfred burning the cakes), before ultimately surrendering to a united force of the Saxon fiefdoms who were previously warring with each other and signing a peace treaty which saw him be Christened as one of its clauses. He abided by the treaty and became a farmer after laying down his weapons, but was ultimately betrayed by both his own people and the Saxons. So, I imagined that what if Black Shuck is a werewolf that has lived for centuries, wishes to die a natural death yet can't, and is ultimately Guthrum after the act of being christened "infected" him.
And then Siegfried: Dragon Slayer is my re-imagining of The Völsunga Saga, coming from the height of the Viking Age (presumably either the 8th or 9th century) before finally being transcribed to the written word by Snorri Sturluson in the 12th century. So, much like Tolkien the Middle Ages, and the Vikings place therein, has had a huge impact on my work.
Do you feel like your writing has been impacted/influenced by Tolkien? If so, in what way(s)?
Absolutely! When I was imagining how to make the character arcs of the likes of Sigurd, Regin, Fafnir, Odin, et al more relatable to a visual medium and a traditional modern three-act story for my graphic novel re-imagining of The Völsunga Saga in Siegfried: Dragon Slayer, I ultimately chose to look at how characters in The Hobbit are handled. Why? Because, when everything is said and done, Tolkien's The Hobbit took a large inspiration from The Völsunga Saga and other things the Saga inspired like the late German Medieval myth, Das Nibelungenlied, and, of course, Der Ring Das Nibelung (The Ring Cycle) by Richard Wagner. I mixed this with both a desire to stay as faithful as I could to the Saga and my sardonic, tragic tone.
Tolkien's work also inspires how I think of how characters who seem doomed by their own flaws can ultimately right themselves, something that readers will get to experience for themselves in the second, and final, book in the Siegfried: Dragon Slayer series soon.
What do you think the current innovations in your genre(s) are?
Comics are a tough medium to gauge re innovation, but I think the innovations have largely been in pushing the envelope of the genres and storytelling styles that are possible in comics.
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see more of?
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see less of?
I'd really like to see less variant covers in comics and less of other such manufactured scarcities from the publishers. It's nice every once in a while as a one-off, but with the way it is today, it's become a gimmick to boost sales and it's centering the readers' money only on the major publishing houses in the comics industry and killing the smaller players.
Where online can our readers find you and your work?
Readers can find me and all of my socials on https://markallardwill.com
Mark, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts and experiences on Post-Tolkien and Post-Middle Ages influence!
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