ILYA on Romo the WolfBoy

On February 19th at Gosh! Comics, we celebrated the UK release of Victorian-era tale of mystery and mysticism Romo the WolfBoy. Our master of ceremonies was none other than Romo's creator: Ed "ILYA" Hillyer. To further celebrate this new adventure, here's an exclusive Q&A with ILYA on all things Romo!

ILYA is a comic book writer and artist whose work has been published by Marvel, DC and Dark Horse in the US, Kodansha in Japan and numerous independent companies worldwide. His previous books include the Manga Drawing Kit, the award-winning graphic novel series The End of the Century Club and the kitchen sink drama Skidmarks. His illustration clients have included the BBC, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Times and Guardian newspapers and most recently East End Life, for whom he crafts a regular strip. ILYA edits the Mammoth Book of Best New Manga series. His first prose novel, The Clay Dreaming, is published by Myriad Editions.

SelfMadeHero: You documented many aspects of the creation of Romo the WolfBoy on your Substack, including behind-the-scenes details and its Kickstarter journey. What inspired you to take this approach for this specific book?

Ed Hillyer, working in comics under the pen name of “ILYA”: I knew going in that completing this book would keep me busy for more than a year, and I didn’t want to disappear from the worldmind (public awareness) for that length of time. I wanted to avoid any platforms that might unexpectedly shut down, and have seen more blogs than I can count start in a blaze of activity before devolving into a moody silence. Substack, a site started by and for frustrated journalists, seemed to fit the bill – something that I could update at my own pace, with basic enough tools for someone not-so-tech-savvy. I’m happy to report that more comics folk have since started to adopt it as well, and on a broader scale, so now there’s a sizeable and regular comics community there.

I posted pages as I went along, aiming for a median 4-6 per week. The most popular posts proved to be the process. So now that I am on to Book Two, and about 10 weeks of this next year’s work in, the whole shebang is about process: behind-the-scenes, previews, insider hints and tips, that sort of thing. I’m still sharing quite a bit of art – the aim is for more images to less words – but fewer finished pages will be shared this time around. With Book One now out for the world to see (and purchase!), that feels counter-productive.

SMH: Romo is a Victorian-era story that takes place in rural England, when Victorian-era stories are often imagined to be set in smoky cities or foreign wildernesses. What can you tell us about that choice of location? Why introduce a “wild child” character like Romo in the (typically) peaceful countryside?

ILYA: We all know the tropes and clichés when it comes to Victorian settings, but the Victorian Age was a global era, one that lasted for over sixty years, and there was so much more to it than just Jack the Ripper and London fogs. Steven Knight’s TV series may expand on that a little but not by much. So, for my opening storyline, the tale of how my two central protagonists meet, I wanted to show a lesser seen side of that era by setting it deep in the English countryside. I was curious about it myself.

A travelling circus company seemed a fun way to achieve that, as well as being a credible means for picking up two strays – wayside tagalongs with no better place to go. I hunted down vintage graphics and photographic images across a whole library’s worth of books, paper ephemera, and online sources to inform my research and help furnish my depictions. A lot else I made up. We all of us have a consensual set of images in our heads of what ye olden dayes might have looked like, and often that’s the best way to go: anchor it in what reality one can find evidence for (truth always being stranger than fiction), then embroider and embellish the rest from the individual and collective imagination. That counts as much for the circus as for the Victorian Age. Traditional nursery years’ education, at least back when I was growing up, included such depictions alongside dinosaurs, Ancient Egyptians, cowboys, astronauts, myths and legends. Being expected to move on from this early, fun stuff is probably where it’s all gone horribly wrong!

I don’t think the countryside was ever peaceful. When farming was much more common in the UK it was basically an awful lot of hard work, all year round and from dawn ‘til dusk. Plus, anybody who lives there can tell you how noisy it can be. Cock-a-doodle-do!

As for the wild child, I do think I’m most interested by agents of chaos: characters that you can drop into almost any scenario and let them off the leash / have them blow it apart. A circus is chaotic by default, but as the series goes on you're going to see a lot more anarchy and disruption from Romo, plus plenty of real stranger-in-strange-land type stuff. He’s not sufficiently house-trained and quite rightly never will be. My heart glows a little when I see kids kung-fu kicking in the carparks while their parents tut and try to silence and shoo them on, especially now that the girls are doing it too.

SMH: SelfMadeHero readers may remember two other graphic novels of yours that we have published: Manga Shakespeare: King Lear (2009) and Room for Love (2013). Obviously you’ve had other projects since those as well, but Romo is markedly different in terms of genre and setting. What artistic challenges arose from that?

ILYA: None for me, really. I’m story-led and can turn my hand to pretty much anything. You’d think that versatility would give me an advantage, but in truth it has proven more of a liability. When I do stuff in so many different idioms – some more cartoony, some mangaesque, and in such variety, both in style and venue – these cater to very separate audiences in our atomised culture. Only I can track my variegated output and see how it all somehow ties together. I mean, it’s all comics to me.

With Romo, it’s easy because it all lives rent free in my head anyway. I’m riffing on stuff I make up, and I would guess that comes from whatever I most like, as well as WANT to draw (no cars, no mobile phones, etc. YEAH!). I’m creating and writing and drawing my own set of characters; a semi-regular cast that will only grow from the next book onwards, a bit like happens with Tintin and Asterix. Hairy Potter too, if you like (sic). I can’t wait to have you meet them.

SMH: Going back to the wilder inspirations behind the eponymous Romo – characters like Tarzan and Mowgli who originated in or near the Victorian period – how did you go about iterating on this archetype in the present day? Whether as tribute to or in defiance of older Tarzanesque characters, what do you aim for Romo to be?

ILYA: I’m not sure that I consciously considered such archetypes. I had and have awareness of the real instances in both history and fiction – Truffaut’s L’enfant Sauvage was based on a well-documented true-life case, the Wild Boy of Aveyron. There were ‘circus freaks’ like John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. More modern times have brought us others, like that pair of wild girls found in India. All of these and more will inform where I take things. Mowgli hadn’t really occurred to me, but of course the Kipling version of England, empire, and colonialism has had a big cultural influence.

You mention Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I did read many of those pulpish literature books when I was about 12, following on from that character’s appearances in comics (Joe Kubert’s adaptations are peerless, those by Russ Manning solid too). However, I think it was ERB’s Barsoom cycle of stories (John Carter of Mars, et al.) that excited me more, with their outlandish alien creatures and landscapes. They all date back to the early twentieth century and so in their prose style was very archaic even by the standards of the 1970s. But I’d been primed for them by the premier wordsmith in comics, Stan Lee – whatever else people think of the credit-stealing old showman, a wellspring and primogenitor of fancy language (‘Excelsior!’).

Also at around age 12 I was reading series penned by Don McGregor. Without him, I don’t think there’d even be the more verbose comic-book coterie led up by Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont, and with Morrison et al following on behind. It’s queasy to reflect that modern audiences couldn’t cope with most of that now.

So, my partial aim with Romo is to attempt a corrective, to save the child-friendly end of the medium from a morass of simple fart jokes or, worse, no-one reading at all. That’s why we have and desperately need to have a dedicated National Year of Reading this year – #GoAllIn – to remind people that reading and knowing stuff is not only good for you, it can also be FUN too! There’s a whole world to explore here and I want to take as many readers, including NEW readers, along with me as I possibly can. That’s just one reason among many that Romo’s wordier than the average comic. I’m meeting some resistance to that from within my own community, but I remain resolute.

What works best for this story and these characters in any given scene, I’ll go with that.

SMH: Circuses have a complicated history to say the least. While there are many circus traditions that proudly persevere to this day, there’s also a long shadow cast in the shape of things like ableism and animal abuse. What went into your presentation of Blimey O’Riley’s Traveling Circus and the characters that comprise it?

ILYA: I’m political and progressive by nature but didn’t want to shy away from certain elements of reality. I’ve seen horrors committed in both circuses and zoos while growing up and I do see them trying to update themselves, to make the necessary changes. But I come into this with no agenda at all. We’ve abused our fellow humans as badly as we have animals, especially those who are/were different or from other cultures.

Romo is a book for all ages and one theme for this first one is ‘all the fun of the circus’ – fun with the collective idea of the carnival or travelling circus within the bounds of the period, and so pretty much made up whole cloth. My troupe is a standard one, similar to that with the Circus of Crime from 1960s Marvel Comics – ringmaster, snake lady, strongman, acrobats, clowns – precisely because that’s founded in the historical verité. With an additional ‘Gypsy’ (Romany) edge, because ditto. Circus folk were itinerant wanderers and often outcasts, with charlatans sharing room with truly skilled performers. All of that informs my portrayal. Circuses tended to keep moving on as the result, since their presence on the outskirts of any settlement soon became unwelcome. I reinforce throughout how theirs is a closed loop, a secret society of sorts, that also operates like every ‘found family’ – a societal concept and indeed stubborn refutation of commonality that I’ve always been drawn to.

I don’t at all shy away from this ‘dark side’ – both to the circus folk, but also to the wider society’s treatment of them. Romo himself and Francis will always be textbook outsiders to every situation they find themselves in, and that’s my fundamental story engine.

SMH: Mysteries, paranormal or otherwise, are also closely tied into the Victorian era. That’s plain to see both in the art and culture of the time and in the works of Victoriana that have come since. What are some of your favourite Victorian-era / Victorian-inspired mystery stories? Which ones were most inspiring for the creation of Romo?

ILYA: Not through any deliberate aim or thought but I do find myself steeped in Victoriana. That perhaps suggests I’ve not only been born in the wrong country (Japan or France might have worked out better for me given my chosen profession), but also the wrong century. I don’t much fancy modern times, and that feeling only gets worse with every passing day. Maybe I’ll stay for the dentistry.

The Victorian era, long as it was, is threaded through my output like the word ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of rock. This is almost certainly by osmosis rather than consciously intended. There’s the aforementioned Time Traveller from 2020, harkening back to 1895. Then a whole bunch of stuff from circa 2011/2012 concerning Dickens, for his centenary or something (Portsmouth and City Reads London), plus Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock, same. I even wrote a whole prose fiction novel, an Aboriginal Australian POV of Victorian London in 1868 based on real people and real events (The Clay Dreaming, Myriad Editions 2010). Going back in time even further I helped out my old mucker Eddie Campbell very early on with picture research for what became From Hell, his collaboration with Alan Moore, about (yes) Jack the Ripper (and thankfully SO much more). Did you know there was a popular print newsheet for the semi-literate that ran for decades called Police News? The front cover of every issue featured what is basically prototypical comic strip: headline and strapline words, heavily illustrated with usually gruesome or lurid pictures – not least including lavish and plentiful coverage of the Ripper murders.

So, you could say I’ve done my research. Ten years part time writing Clay Dreaming got me more than passing familiar with mid-Victorian idiom, but also earlier trends going right back to Georgian times. There’s a brand of big-R Romanticism in the literature and culture, a lot of it identifying with the rogue or underdog (cf Dick Turpin) that by the latter decades of the nineteenth century had curdled into Gothic, hence Frankenstein, Dracula, et al. Now, Romo is set loosely in the 1890s, so of course that prefigures.

I’ve read much more reportage (newspapers and the Henries James and Mayhew), and the Bible (because everyone back then would know it), much more than any contemporary mystery stories (Poe, Edwin Drood, and the like), so I can’t really comment (knowledgeably) on those. Give me Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) and I’m much happier – and yes, that author and character’s distaste for the affects of civilization, I’m riddled with that. It’s my ‘Blackpool’.

Time being the ongoing curve that it is, so much of modern culture and society has its roots in the Victorian era. We have become what that time fashioned us to be. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, we’re still murderous and competitive cavemen who lay waste to everyone we meet and everything we touch (cf Capitalism. Hey, I have a book out. Buy my book, everybody! Buy it, go on.)What I don’t and won’t entertain is ‘steampunk’. Unless you want that in which case yes.

SMH: Finally, this is set to be the first of Romo’s adventures; just one of many paranormal mysteries that he and his unlikely partner Francis are set to tackle. Without giving too much away, what manner of supernatural schemes might lie in store?

ILYA: Think of what’s coming as being like an ersatz Universal Monsters because, as we have seen, those too have their roots in Victorian popular fiction. You’ve already had Jekyll & Hyde meet Der Golum in Book One. In Books Two through Eight (if I’m ever allowed to get that far ahead – go BUY BUY BUY your copies NOW!), you’re going to see my particular and peculiar versions of demonic imps, mummies, various ghosts, vampires, zombies, were-people and much more, all refracted through a distinctly late-Victorian and somewhat eccentric lens that is mine alone. You may see a preview of some of this somewhere in Book One, if you read with care… Romo and his partner and guardian Francis X are destined to become Investigators of the Paranormal, and so that’s where it’s going and what they will do… I’ve said enough for now. So, start reading. Then keep on reading! It is the National Year of Reading after all! Thank you.

And thank you all for reading this Q&A! Romo the WolfBoy is out now in the UK, and bound for North America later this year. Keep an eye out for any travelling circuses, and if you're bound for Portsmouth Comic Con this weekend, you can catch ILYA there!