All in Black & White Interview with Chris Ryall - 2007

Welcome to our first interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents! I've been doing them for a while over at The Aquaman Shrine and Treasury Comics.com, and getting to talk to people whose work I really admire is one of the greatest thrills of doing these blogs, if not my life!

So after I discovered the wonder that is--was(*sniff*) IDW's Doomed, I quickly went and found the previous two issues I had missed and by the end of the week I had read all three. I was thrilled that somebody out there had the idea and the drive(and the money!) to do a 21st century take on the classic Warren-type b/w horror magazine.

I was very sad to hear that Doomed was, in fact, doomed, sales-wise, and ended with its fourth issue, with host Ms.Doomed bidding us a not-so-fond adieu. Not too long afterwards, I emailed IDW's Chris Ryall--who not only is the editor-in-chief, but also wrote a lot of material in Doomed--and pleaded for an interview. Chris treated me better than Ms.Doomed would, and agreed to answer my questions:

All In Black and White: Did you grow up reading the Warrens and Marvel's b/w line?

Chris Ryall: I did, yeah. I didn't buy any of those mags every week, since I was a bit young and had to sneak them (Fantastic Four and X-Men were okay in my house, but Savage Sword of Conan and Eerie were harder sells on my parents). But whenever I did, I really loved reading them, even if I had to hide them inside Mad magazines to do so.
B/W: I love the idea of Mad being the magazine used to hide something else! Whose idea was Doomed?

CR: It started with Ted Adams, IDW's co-owner and President. He'd been trying to make a deal for the old Warren material for a while, and it just never came together. He and I both loved those mags before, so we worked on developing our own take on it as a tribute to that material.

B/W: Did retailers or Diamond have any concerns about it being in the magazine format?

CR: Any time there's a non-standard format, yeah, it can throw people a bit. But if we were going to do this, we wanted to make sure we did it right and not a watered-down (or sized down) version.

B/W: I think Doomed would've sold well at bookstores, indy record stores, and the like. Is it difficult to get comics and related publications into places like that?

CR: It really is, yeah. Difficult and expensive. And one thing we ran into when looking at that, which we really wanted, was the fact that we would've had to polybag the magazines for the newstands due to the adult content. For a new magazine like this, polybagging it would've been death. It needed the "flip-through" factor for people to see what we were doing.

B/W: Did you have any long range plans for Doomed, like certain creators or famous stories you wanted to go after?

CR: We intended to do the first four with the writers we had (David Schow, F. Paul Wilson, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch), but beyond that, yeah, I had a long list of other names I would've loved to work with on this.

B/W: Would Doomed's failure(sales-wise only!) keep IDW from trying the format again? Can you tell how much was the format, how much was the material?

CR: From what we heard, the format and the b&w thing made it difficult for some retailers to justify ordering. We're doing Transformers material in magazines right now(in full color), so we're definitely not put off of using the format. And we may yet try it again with Doomed, too. Ms. Doomed is hard to keep quiet forever.

B/W: Overall, how proud are you of Doomed?

CR: Honestly, it's one of the best things I ever worked on here. Makes me proud to have done a magazine like this that hopefully exposed people to some great short horror writing (I had no idea Robert Bloch was so diverse and amazing a writer before this, for example). It also got me my only Eisner nomination for "Best Short Story," too, so that's an added honor.

But in a market that pushes for so much similar material, I think we're all most proud of trying our best to produce something different and worthwhile. We'll keep doing that and see what happens with the next effort.

Doomed certainly was different and worthwhile. Thanks Chris!