If you look at his acting résumé, then it will really come as absolutely no surprise to know that David Dastmalchian is a huge, lifelong fan of comic books. Over the last couple of years, he has shared his own comic book idea with the world under the title of Count Crowley, which sees news anchor Jerri Bartman reluctantly descend into the graphic life of a monster hunter. Count Crowley is a vibrantly gruesome and emotionally intense read that will lay its fangs on you from the very first page. STARBURST reflects on the story so far with David, whilst trying to uncover what you can expect from the highly anticipated second volume!

STARBURST: It’s well established that you are a huge fan of comic books, so could you elaborate on just how rewarding it has been to make this dream idea happen, to actually have the story of Count Crowley out there in the world, and now be at this great point where you are about to unleash a second volume?

David Dastmalchian: It is really hard for me to still wrap my head around the reality of the fact that I am now a published comic book creator who has a book that is on shelves in comic book shops that I would have devoured if I would have stumbled across it when I was younger or now that I am a grown-up. I often think back to myself in the third grade in Kansas, and bugging my dad to spare a couple of coins so that I could get my first comic book which was off of a spinner rack, at a convenient shop. That comic book was The Avengers #249, Demon-Storm vs The Avengers, and my life was changed forever. It’s so surreal that this is what I get to do now as a grown-up.

Going back a little bit, how did you initially meet Lukas Ketner, Lauren Affe, Megan Walker, and can you tell us about what they’ve been like to work with on Count Crowley?

Megan Walker is one of the most important people in my journey with the Count. Megan is the editor that I was paired with when Dark Horse agreed to produce Count Crowley. So Megan and I sat down, and she had a very thorough conversation with me pretty early on about the vision that I had for the way that I wanted the art to look and feel, and I had a lot of references to a kind of contemporary exploration of the world’s we’ve seen, ranging from the mid-century universal horror, renaissance, through to comic illustrators like Bernie Wrightson, and Megan came to me with the suggestion that we have Lukas Ketner read the comic book, so we did. Lukas responded immediately, and he started sending us sketches, and I was blown away! If you can imagine, I’d been thinking about this character, and writing this character, and developing this idea for my whole life it seemed like. Then all of a sudden, one day I get an email, I open it and there’s a PDF, and it’s Lukas Ketner’s ideas of what Count Crowley would look like. It was staring right back at me, there’s Jerri in full make up. I was really blown away. Lauren was also connected to me by Megan, and I know that Megan was a fan of Lauren’s work. When I saw Lauren’s samples, I was super impressed. I think she brings a really beautiful colour palette that is super consistent to the books. They look and feel like Count Crowley books when you turn the pages, and they really evoke a haunting, kind of pastille, autumn vibe that feels right to me. We can’t discount the importance of Frank Cvetkovic, who is our letterer, who has brought a real specific personal flare to the work. I am just so over the moon with the team that I get to have. I have the exact same team on board as we move into volume two. In fact, Megan Walker is a film and TV executive. She’s now not editing comics as much, as she’s developing projects for film and television with Dark Horse Studios. So I’m really lucky that I get to still have her as my editor.

There are some pretty emotional ideas going on, especially with Jerri. What elements from real life did you originally want to establish and push within her story arc, and how did you approach making that happen?

So here’s the thing, since I was a kid I loved – I don’t know if you remember in The Lost Boys, there’s the Frog brothers, and they have their comic shop where they talk about the lore of vampires and monsters. Then Roddy McDowall in Fright Night with the horror host who didn’t really know anything about monsters, but tried to help these kids defeat a vampire. That mashed up with my love of late night horror hosts, growing up in Kansas City, I had my own home town horror host, and she was called Crematia Mortem, and I was her biggest fan. Pretty early on, I started thinking about my love of Van Helsing-type characters and how I wanted to make a comic book or a movie about someone who is a horror host, who knows everything you can know about monsters, and then secretly is helping to protect people from monsters at night. That idea of itself is really fun, and it’s a really great exploration of genre and heroism, and monsters. But that’s not enough for me to be able to create anything compelling, or that anyone is going to find interesting. As I progressed through my journey, I’ve come to accept that I have a lifelong treatment of mental illness, and my own struggles with depression and anxiety, and other issues that have really haunted me. One of the ways that I used to treat it dangerously was through drugs and alcohol, so in my journey of getting drugs and alcohol out of my life, and then finding a path towards mental wellness, I begun to start to go through a process of what I think is self-actualisation, self-realisation, where I feel like I’m starting to become the person that I am meant to be. That to me made perfect sense when I thought about what this character Count Crowley needed to be battling, because the monsters without are terrifying, but the monsters within, they’re the ones that I think can break us.

Going on from this, how did the awesome look for Count Crowley initially come together, and what were the main influences and inspirations behind it?

1000% of the credit goes to Lukas for the development of the look of the book. Now when I wrote the comic I wrote in the panels that included classic crypt keeper frames. I definitely wanted to pay a lot of homage to early DC comics. I did a lot of vision boards, tone documents that included classic panels from books like Creepy, or Eerie. I would put together documents about that and think about how Sanjulián or John Severin or Walt Simonson, Pablo Marcos, Fred Carillo, Bernie Wrightson, all these incredible artists who shaped that look. I wanted our book to feel in line with that. Almost like a vintage vibe. If you picked up Count Crowley you might be like “Oh, is that a vintage book? No, it’s totally new” So that was kind of how we did it.

Going back to the story, we really liked the idea of monsters trying to control the world’s news and information. How did you come up with this idea, and also, how fun was it for you to work on as a writer?

It was so much fun. I’m a massive fan of horror and monsters. That ranges from Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley through to Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe. I love a good scary story, and I love monster mythology. I love what monsters represent for us. I think that H.P. Lovecraft obviously really tapped into a lot of fears of ourselves, and mental illness when writing his books. Something that was really freaking me out in the last five years was how these powerful people would come up with this whole concept of alternative facts, and changing what truth meant in especially the news and media. You could say “You lost an election” and they could say “No I didn’t, someone cheated” then all of a sudden because they have a platform for that, people believe it. They could say “Immigrants are actually proven to not cause increases in crime” and they would say “Oh no, that’s not true, they absolutely do” and then people would believe it. It’s terrifying to me, to be living in the modern era, and seeing how people with powerful platforms were able to manipulate news and media so easily. So easily they prey upon people’s fears of one another, and their fears of themselves, and then all of a sudden, they can kind of get whatever they want. So for me, it was the perfect opportunity to explore this notion that monsters have been influencing and nudging media news mythology, stories for generations. All that we think we know about them, is a lie. So if you read Count Crowley, you’ll come to learn that a silver bullet is just a bullet to a werewolf, it doesn’t do shit. If you stab a vampire in the heart with a wooden stake, it’s not going to do much because a vampire’s heart is immortal. If you hold up a cross at a vampire, he might wear it as a necklace if he thinks it’s fashionable because sometimes those things are in. It’s just so fun for me, to get to explore all of those tropes, and then turn them on their head because it’s going to be a journey for Jerri and everybody else that wants to help her fight monsters. To learn how do we actually defeat monsters? Finally, one last thing that I think is really important. As an addict, as somebody who is twenty years into my journey of fighting my addiction. May is when we will release the fourth issue of volume two, 2.4 and that’s the conclusion of this Count Crowley story. That’ll be my twentieth sobriety birthday, which is such a full-circle moment for me. I wanted to explore in Count Crowley this idea that if there’s a monster that you and I are trying to defeat, but that monster is someone that transforms from their human form, like say a werewolf, what is to say that there isn’t a cure, that there isn’t a way to help them. Like with alcoholics or addicts, we could easily just dispose of all of them and say that there’s no redemptive journey possible. We could just kill them off, throw them away. Or we could go, well, yeah sure they’re behaving monstrously and they’re acting out of control because they’re in the throes of addiction, mental illness, alcoholism, you name it. However, is there a way we can help people? I really want to explore those themes in the book, and that’s something that’s really important to me.

Looking back on volume one, what was the most rewarding part of the story for you to work on, and why?

The most rewarding part of the story was, I wrote these books in a way that Jerri, in particular, could be as complicated as I think life really is. Where sometimes you’re a hero, sometimes you drop the ball, sometimes you hurt the people you love, even when you don’t mean to. Sometimes you beat the bad guy, and sometimes the bad guy beats you. But the complexity of all of that while facing the insecurity of Jerri’s battle with both her trauma, her alcoholism, and the way she’s let her family down, I needed to make sure that even though we were going to go on these fun adventures battling zombies and werewolves, that the audience was going to get to be cued into the complexity of her emotional journey. I tried in my scripts to give note about the way that maybe her eyes were carrying more weight than the expression on her face would. Or that the expression on her face was more complicated than a simple happy, sad, indifferent, or depressed. When I started looking through the pages of Lukas’ illustrations, and the way that he captured that. To me, I couldn’t ask for a more satisfying experience as a writer. One more, going to Clint’s Comics, in Kansas City, Clint’s Books is the institution of Kansas City comic books, it’s the oldest comic shop in Kansas City, and it’s where I went as a kid. Going to Clint’s Comics and seeing that they had covered an entire wall with issues of Count Crowley, and standing behind the counter, while people from my home town lined up to get their copies signed. That to me was it. It’s like, wow.

Let’s get on to volume two! How would you say that you’ve grown/progressed as a writer since the first volume was completed?

I think the pandemic, and the rise of fascism and intolerance have been really challenging to observe. I think that the landscape of the human experience over the last two years, really pushed my understanding, and my thoughts about what matters in this life, in a way that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for this global health crisis that we faced, and the way that people faced it. The way that people rose to the occasion, and the incredible way that many people bound together, and tried to do their best to help, and the way that so many did not. All of that was like, really, it shaped all of us, and it created a great heaviness on all of our psyches, and our hearts. So I was forced to sit with my thoughts more than I ever would have had to if it hadn’t been for that. In that process, I hope, I was able to dig deeper into my fears, as a human, my fears as a man, a parent, a citizen, a friend, as an artist. The values that I hold dear, were really forged over these last couple of years, and I hope that it made me put even more blood on the page. I don’t know. These kinds of things that we’ve all been through can have such lasting effects on us. They can force us to retreat more, or they can force us out of our shells more. I hope that I can write with courage and still think about these big ideas.

When you got the go ahead for volume two, how much of the plot did you have ready? Did you know how the story was going to go say years in advance, or did you have to change content right up until the last minute?

Writing Count Crowley was part of the way that I survived. So I just kept writing, whether or not I was going to get to have them be published with Dark Horse, which was beyond my control. If I had the green light to write the next three or four years of Count Crowley on a monthly basis, I could tell you where we would go. Not to say that that won’t change with things, and partners, collaborators. I do have in my mind, a pretty strong map for where I think it should all go.

The name of the first issue in volume two clearly says ‘amateur’ instead of ‘reluctant’ monster hunter. A simple change, but a pretty important one. When did this title change idea come together, and is it fair to say that fans can expect Jerri to be fully embracing this new lifestyle now?

Hell yes! The idea came from Megan, and it was not my idea. I think she had the idea of well “We’re going to do a new volume, do you want to try a new title”, and then I was like “How great would it be, if every new volume she is a different brand of monster hunter” so she was reluctant, but now she’s an amateur, but just because she’s an amateur doesn’t mean that she’s not going to kick serious ass. She’s realised that the thing that she cares about the most which is her family, her brother Ben, and his wife and kids, her family are now living in a world that’s threatened by monsters. So, she’s not doing this for herself, she’s doing it to protect the people that she loves, which is always a worthy cause. She’s going to have to – like what I said earlier – not only have to figure out how to fight the monsters without, the creatures, and the creepy crawlies that are lurking in the shadows but there are looming, damning, painful shadows ripping around in her insides, like barbed wire in the wind. I hope she is going to be able to learn how to care about herself enough to be the monster hunter we need her to be.

In this next volume, other than Jerri taking on this new life, was there maybe another element to the story that you really loved working on in volume one that you were excited to push even further, or make more established within volume two?

The monsters! In volume one we got to see a Billy, a Bilatombia, you know that it’s kind of a zombie who is like a physic slave to his masters. He is a servant. There are werewolves, which we experienced in volume one, and coming at us in volume two, you’re going to get to see what vampires look like, and how they behave in the world of Count Crowley. I’m very excited to get into what vampires are like in this world, and what makes them so terrifying.

Great! Without giving away too many spoilers, what else would you say that fans can expect from volume two?

I would say that with each of the issues, going forward, hold on to your hats, make sure to put your seatbelts on, stay up late, get your flashlight, and your milk and cookies because this is best read in bed when you think you might hear a bump downstairs. Don’t worry, if it is a werewolf, Jerri is out there, and she will help keep you safe. These issues are going to scare the pants off of you, and with every single issue, we’re pushing the limit of what we can do, with the violence, and the gore without getting banned by the censors. Lukas has really taken this in a direction that I think is going to flip your lid.

We read that while you were working on The Suicide Squad, you received huge support from the cast and crew! What was it like to receive that kind of praise, from creative people who are just so well-loved in the comic book world?

It’s a dream. James Gunn has the best taste of anyone when it comes to comic books and sci-fi. He is somebody who I really look up to and admire when it comes to his opinion about the story, and the fact that he loves Count Crowley, you can’t ask for better praise than that. I was blown away, at one point my wife and I were out for dinner, then all of a sudden my phone was lit up with all of these notifications, and I realised that Margot had read Count Crowley, and she had tweeted about it. I was so touched and moved. I hosted a signing at a comic shop in Atlanta, and when I did the Count Crowley signing, Peter Capaldi showed up and supported me. It’s called Oxford Comics, they are an awesome comic shop. My best friend, Steve Agee, who is one of the stars of Peacemaker, he is a huge Count Crowley fan. In fact, I based the character Steven on Steve Agee. So Steve was there taking pictures, then all of a sudden Peter was there. You should have seen all of the comic geeks in Oxford freak out when Capaldi started walking around shopping for comics, with Steve and I. It was awesome.

There have been some really great comic book adaptations to TV recently, The Umbrella Academy being just one of them. If a TV version of Count Crowley did happen, what would you want to see from it, and also, who would you really want to see play Jerri?

My dream would be to find an incredible woman showrunner/writer who could help take my comics and adapt them into the best television series possible. I think that would be really important because I think we need a really strong, visionary woman who understands genre to bring this to the screen. Then incredible directors, I would want the best of the best. I’m talking the best. For Jerri, you’ve got that Margot, kind of fearless energy. I really loved what Krysten Ritter did with Jessica Jones and Nightbooks, in these roles where she’s got all of the attitude, but the vulnerability. I love the idea of it being an open casting, who knows what Jerri will look like. I just want the best actor, the actor that falls in love with this role, and understands how many layers there are to her onion.

Finally, why should STARBURST readers check out Count Crowley if they haven’t already done so?

You’re putting me on the spot! I don’t want to sound arrogant here, STARBURST readers need to get their hands on Count Crowley as soon as possible, because they have never seen a comic book scratch, bite, live, bleed, and cry the way that Count Crowley does. Every page is dripping with the magical manifestations of Lukas Ketner’s otherworldly art. There is a character unlike any you’ve seen before in Jerri Bartman, and you will not only get scared so bad you are going to leave the lights on, you will laugh so hard, you’re going to need a tissue because you’ll be crying. When I come to the UK, bring a copy of Count Crowley to me and I’ll sign it for you. I want to meet all of the Count Crowley fans that are there.

David Dastmalchian’s Count Crowley is available in all good comic stores.