Interview With Christopher Mills

By Joe Hilliard

Today we’re going to spend a little time with Christopher Mills. We reviewed his book Femme Noir here not that long ago. Mills has a lot of coals in the furnace, as you will see – both with his own creator-owned projects, and with several media tie-ins. His work is phenomenal, and so without further ado, here he is…

First, tell us a little about the origins of your current book, Femme Noir. I love the mix of 30s gangster (ala Paul Cain) with the 50s hardboiled melodrama. How did the book first come about?

MILLS: Back in 2000, I had been away from comics for a few years. Previously to that, I had worked for a couple of independent publishers as an editor and writer, and self-published my own comic, which had not been particularly successful. At that time, I had pretty much given up on comics as both as a hobby and a career. Well, on an impulse, I decided to attend MegaCon in Orlando, Florida, that year, mostly just to meet up with and see some old friends.

At the convention, I picked up a couple of Kitchen Sink trade editions of Will Eisner’s Spirit comics. I’d read a fair number of Spirit stories before, but this time, reading those marvelously well-crafted stories inspired me, and re-ignited my passion for the medium.

On the three-hour drive back to my home, I started thinking how cool it would be to do a bunch of short comic stories about a “female Spirit.” During the drive, I started to flesh out the idea a bit, and came up with the name, “Femme Noir.”

Originally, I intended to do short 8-page stories, drawn by different artists I knew and had worked with in the past, which I hoped to place in some comics anthologies. Of course, the fatal flaw in my plan was that there weren’t really any anthologies around at the time.

But before I realized that, I had called Joe Staton and asked him to draw a Femme Noir story. I had worked with him before, and I knew that he was a big fan of the detective and film noir genres, and as I was still thinking Eisner at the time, I wanted someone with great storytelling skills, experience and a somewhat – for lack of a better term – cartoony art style. As he was the first artist I approached, he got the task of working up the character designs while I developed the concept.

Somewhere in there, I discovered online comics, specifically Steve Conley’s Astounding Space Thrills. It slowly came to me that doing Femme Noir as a webcomic might be viable, especially as my then-new bride knew something about HTML (which I did not and still don’t). Joe was enthusiastic about the idea, and in March of 2001, the Femme Noir webcomic premiered – quite coincidentally, exactly one year after I came up with the idea, to the very day. Those strips are now archived at www.femme-noir.com.

The strip never had a huge following, but it had a loyal audience, and eventually ran not only on my own website, but on Kevin Smith’s Movie Poop Shoot site and on the Thrilling Detective website (which, interestingly enough, is run by yet another, different Kevin Smith), as well.

Early on, we got some interest from a major Hollywood production company. This required that I get an agent. He felt that we’d have a better chance of selling the property if we had a print version to place in producers’ hands. So we started work on a miniseries… and six years later, it’s finally seeing print!

And then, you've got the amazing Joe Staton on pencils. How did the two of you get together?

MILLS: My first (semi-)professional comics job was as an editor for a small, independent comics publisher in the early 90’s. We met Joe at a convention or something, and ended up doing a couple of E-Man books together. I was the editor on those books, and got to know Joe then.

What were your first interests as child? Were you a big comic book reader? As I understand, you actually published your own comic books when you were in high school.

MILLS: I was a comics reader early on, but mostly Harvey stuff and lots of DC comics, mostly Superman. I loved those DC 100-pagers and the tabloid-sized Treasury Editions. Around fifth grade, I discovered Star Trek and science fiction paperbacks, and that became my big obsession.

In Junior High I single-handedly published a bunch of amateur sci-fi fanzines and comic books on an old-fashioned photocopy machine that I had access to. Man, those pages stunk! But I had the compulsion to create and distribute my own stuff, even then, and I never outgrew it.

And from there, you went to the Kubert School. How did that affect your work? How you approached your work?

MILLS: The only way I knew to tell my stories was visually, so I figured that I should be a comic book artist. After two years at the school, I gradually came to the conclusion that I really didn’t have the talent to make a go of it professionally, but everything I learned there about sequential art and visual storytelling I held onto, and I believe that it’s informed my comics writing and editing.

I'm really interested in your brief tenure as editor of Noir Magazine. How did that come about? And would you ever resurrect it?

MILLS: In High School, I discovered hardboiled crime and adventure fiction, and that quickly supplanted sci-fi as my primary literary obsession. Noir was my attempt to create a new outlet for short crime fiction in the hardboiled style. The digests remaining – Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen – were too “soft” for my tastes. Because of my equally-great interest in comics storytelling, I thought it would be interesting to get comics artists to provide illustrations for the fiction, and have some original crime comics in there, too.

It took me about three years, three publishers and a ton of money to produce three issues... and it pretty much bombed. I had some great contributors from both the hardboiled fiction field (Max Allan Collins, Ron Goulart, William F. Nolan, Ed Gorman, and others) and from comic books (Brian Michael Bendis, Brian Stelfreeze, Rick Burchett, Mike W. Barr, Rick Magyar, and Joe Staton, of course), but it just didn’t sell very well. I think the format just didn’t work. The comics content scared off the crime fiction readers and there was too much prose for the comic fans. Oh, there were some folks who absolutely and vocally loved it, but not enough to make it worth continuing. I had a fourth issue nearly completed, but just couldn’t justify putting it out

I don’t think it would be feasible to do it as a print publication today. Hell, it wasn’t feasible when I did it! At one point, I thought about reviving it as a webzine, but without being able to pay writers, I didn’t think I could maintain a high enough level of quality to justify the time and effort of doing it.

Can you tell us a bit about your media tie-in projects? You've worked with several long-standing characters: the Spider and the upcoming Captain Midnight. And with the Kolchak comic book as well. How did you get involved in writing these?

MILLS: I’ve always been interested in the properties that Moonstone Books publish, and I pestered Joe Gentile with pitches and ideas for about seven years. Finally, he gave me the opportunity to pitch a Kolchak miniseries idea, which became the three-issue miniseries, Kolchak Tales: Night Stalker of the Living Dead, and that led to my doing other work for the company.

Writing The Spider was a great thrill and an honor; I’ve been a fan of the character for a number of years, and it looks like I may soon be able to contribute another adventure to the canon. We’re still working on Captain Midnight. It should have been done long ago, but unfortunately, over the last three years, my health got really bad – it turned out I had kidney cancer, among other ailments – and I had considerable difficulty working. This caused several projects, including Captain Midnight, to slow to a crawl. Fortunately, I’m much healthier now and have been working very hard to make up for lost time.

How much of your own style are you allowed to inject into these books?

MILLS: Well, when I work with other people’s characters, I always try to be as faithful to the original conception as possible. With my Spider story, I tried to emulate the purple prose style of the classic Norvell Page pulps, while with Kolchak, I tried to harken back to the original 1970’s TV movies. But still, I’m me, and I’m sure my own style comes through.

I know you have a great love for hardboiled fiction and science fiction. What books, what authors, do you think are essential reads?

MILLS: In terms of hardboiled fiction, Donald Hamilton’s “Matt Helm” spy novels. Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer” and “Tiger Mann” novels. Anything by Max Allan Collins, Lawrence Block, Robert Randisi, Bill Pronzini, Robert Crais. Stuart Kaminsky’s “Toby Peters” and “Lew Fonesca” mysteries. Anything by Jim Thompson, Paul Cain, Charles Willeford, Dan J. Marlowe, and John Trinian. Everything by Donald Westlake and his alter-ego, Richard Stark. Pretty much everything from Hard Case Books.

For science fiction, pretty much anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Alan Dean Foster. I like sword & sorcery, too. Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Gardner F. Fox, Karl Edward Wagner. I think Lin Carter is underrated and under-appreciated, and love his stuff.

And of course, everything by Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury.

And, following with that, what book needs to be reprinted?

MILLS: All of Donald Hamilton’s “Matt Helm” books. I need new copies. Mine are falling apart.

Were your parents were encouraging in regards to your writing? What advice would you give to the parents of a creative child?

MILLS: They tried, I think, but they don’t understand the compulsion. Mostly, they just wish I’d devoted my life to something more traditional and kept the creative stuff as a hobby. Frankly, I don’t make enough money to suit them. They’re very big on financial security. And, they’re right – I’m broke, in debt, and don’t know if I’ll ever be able to own my own home. But I can’t give up on my dream.

As for advice? Be patient. The arts – even the commercial ones – are tough, and it can take a long, long time to achieve any measure of success. Try not to discourage them. Art – in any form – is vital to the mental and emotional health of our species, and artists need special nurturing. A kid with imagination and the creative spark is a good thing; encourage it.

I've been enjoying your DVD Late Show blog. It helps keep me up to date with dvds I've missed. And to answer one of your questions, my eight year old daughter loved The Real Ghostbusters. How did the blog get started?

MILLS: It originated as a semi-regular column for filmmaker Kevin Smith’s Movie Poop Shoot site about four years ago, and continued when the site was re-branded as Quick Stop Entertainment. Unfortunately, the health issues I mentioned above really took their toll on my ability to keep up with it, so I’ve had to put the column on an indefinite hiatus.

I do hope to re-launch the column in the Fall, probably on a new website. I’m talking to some people about it now. I’ll also be revamping and re-organizing the current archive site (or blog) at that time. The current site’s a bit screwed up, but I haven’t had the time to go in and fix it (or rather, my wife hasn’t).

I love reviewing movies, especially truly escapist fare like genre and exploitation films, and am eager to get back to it.

And, what film essential needs to be released on dvd?

MILLS: Godzilla Vs. Megalon, in widescreen, uncut and subtitled.

So, what can we look for from Christopher Mills for the rest of 2008?

MILLS: The remaining issues of Femme Noir: The Dark City Diaries and Kolchak Tales: Night Stalker of the Living Dead.

Beyond those, I’m working on a double-sized Femme Noir “Annual” with Joe Staton, tentatively titled “Supernatural Crime,” which we hope to have out before the end of ’08. I have a three-issue miniseries with artist Gene Gonzales in the works, called Perils On Planet X. It’s an interplanetary swashbuckler along the lines of Flash Gordon or John Carter of Mars. I also have an original crime graphic novel called Gravedigger: The Predators, drawn by Rick Burchett and inked by Fred Harper. All of these are coming from Ape Entertainment.

I still have the long-incubating Captain Midnight project, and will be writing some more short fiction for Moonstone Books, though you probably won’t see any of that stuff ‘til next year.

I'd like to thank Christopher Mills for his time in doing this interview. I much appreciate it. I can only recommend again his Femme Noir to any and all noir fans. His various websites are: http://www.atomicpulp.com ; http://atomic-pulp.blogspot.com ; http://gunsinthegutter.blogspot.com ; and http://www.dvdlateshow.com . Check them all out.

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