INTERVIEW: Travel 150 years into the future with ‘Breaklands’
Image courtesy of comiXology / Provided by Super Fan Promotions with permission.
Justin Jordan’s comic creation, Breaklands, features an intricately woven plot set 150 years in the future. The first of a planned five issues was released today, Sept. 4, by comiXology, the online comics giant that is dedicated to bringing creator-owned titles to fans.
Joining Jordan for the project are artist Tyassetta, Sarah Stern (colors) and Rachel Deering (lettering).
In Breaklands, readers will follow the adventures of Kasa Fain, a young woman who is searching for her kidnapped brother. She faces many uphill battles and doesn’t have any superpowers to help her out.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Jordan, who is best known as the co-creator and writer of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired you to create Breaklands?
Akira.
Specifically, the movie adaptation from the ’80s. Basically, a kid accidentally unleashes a government project that had created nearly god-like psychics and turns into one himself. That’s a really reductive version of the story, but the interesting bit was having psychics around like Akira, who could basically reshape reality.
And things spun out from there. Basically, if they could reshape reality, they probably would. And if there was more than one, then they’d probably fight, and that’d be the end of the world.
Or at least, the end of the world as it was.
So I got to thinking, what would a world look like a long time after that? Especially if the only people who survived were people who also had powers, albeit not as strong.
And eventually, Breaklands is what came out of that.
The story is set 150 years in the future. Was it fun envisioning what the world looks like then?
It is. World building is always fun. The Breaklands future is one where people (mostly) don’t have any tech past the steam engine, because the means to really process fuel have never been restored. But …
Everyone has powers. And this has replaced a lot of the tech we would use. So, for instance, one of the characters is a woman named Toy who has a fairly awesome giant truck/tank/house thing. And it’s powered by her. She’s pyrokinetic, so she can heat things, and she uses that to provide steam to run it.
That’s how the world works. People who can remove heat go into business as, essentially, selling refrigeration. If you’re telekinetic you can build things. Finding ways to develop that concept was super fun.
Does the story offer commentary on today’s day and age?
I think that’s probably unavoidable, especially when you’re doing post-apocalyptic fiction. Right now we’re in a position where a relative handful of people really have consolidated a massive amount of power. Not psychic power, but wealth and political power. And they reshaped the world to their benefit, and, you know, in the real world, have put us on the edge of destruction. So there’s a message in there about the concentration of power in the hands of the few, and it’s a future where everyone has some power. And the big driver of the plot is people seeking to get even more power so they can ‘fix’ the world, which I hope resonates with people.
How would you describe your central character of Kasa Fain?
Kasa is very smart, very determined and very weird … because she’s normal. Or rather, she’s normal by our standards, since she doesn’t have any powers. By all appearances, she’s just a plain vanilla human, which is fun, because it’s the exact opposite of most superhero stuff, where the heroes are exceptional. Kasa is exceptional, but in a bad way. So she’s got to rely on her brain and her bow if she wants to get her brother back.
Was having five issues the right number? Did you feel constrained? Could the story be longer?
In Breaklands, we tried to tell a complete story with the potential for more, which is usually how I try to structure my stuff these days. I don’t want a reader to get invested in half a story, you know, in case five is all we get.
But I’ve actually gravitated towards five issues for an arc in most of my work. It’s a hundred(ish) pages, which feels like a good chunk of story for the reader without risking wearing out our welcome.
If Breaklands does well, we’d all like to do a bunch more. So, uh, buy our comic?
What was it like working with artist Tyasseta?
It’s been awesome. He actually emailed me a couple of years ago asking if I would look at his art, because he knew some people who knew me. I’ve been working through working with, apparently, everyone who ever graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and Tyasseta went there.
But he’s brought a tremendous level of skill and creativity to the book, along with Sarah Stern, who colors it. I wanted to create a world that didn’t look like anything readers had seen before, and I think they nailed [it].
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Breaklands, by Justin Jordan, is a five-part comic series from comiXology. Issue #1 is now available. Click here for more information.
