What it Means to Be Human: Emma Ríos and Hwei Lim on Mirror: The Mountain

It’s a bit like The Island of Dr. Moreau, but with the beasts driving the story forward. The Mage-scientists of The Synchronia created the hybrid animals, but they’ve long since stopped being content to serve humanity. A series of uprisings has lead to a very uneasy truce before the two groups are brought together by an external threat.
On a fantasy level, the story is interested in the idea of humanity, and who gets to join that club along with the attendant rights and privileges. On a deeper level, though, it’s about how we define ourselves and meditates on our reluctance to allow ‘outsiders’ the right to choose how to live. We recently chatted with Emma Ríos and Hwei Lim about how these themes play into the book.
Can you talk a little about the 8House universe, and how this does or doesn’t tie in? Which came first: the story, or that particular publishing venture?

Emma Ríos: It was my friend Brandon Graham who came up with the idea of 8house first when we started talking about Island, the magazine I’m co-editing with him at Image Comics. This happened about two years ago.
Island and 8House were both created as places where people who could inspire each other, and have some connection in terms of understanding the medium, could work with total freedom and avoiding nightmarish deadlines and regular traumas of monthly releases.
All the 8House books are independent stories sharing only influences and hazy elements. They are not set in the same timeline, or the same world, and they are definitely not part of the same narrative. Some of the stories are more connected than others, but the real link would be the general feeling of them.
Just a question I always like to ask of a book’s creators: how do you describe the story; what’s the book about in your minds?
Emma: To me, Mirror intends to be an existential sci-fi story in which people try their best to help others and miscalculate the consequences of their actions.
Hwei: I think it started out as a story about about figuring out and proving what it means to be human, and as we worked on it it also became about why we need to be considered human by others and ourselves, and why we feel this need.

Emma, you’re probably best known as an artist. Is writing a big change in your mind, or do the two skills go together?
Emma: I love writing, and I used to do a lot of small press as a full creator before starting to work professionally in comics, just like I did in I.D.
But working in a second tongue is not easy and I can’t help being self conscious about the language barrier most of the time so, it took me a while to feel confident enough to do it. Instead, communication through art is universal so starting as an artist made things easier for me in terms of trying to get in.
But it’s true that Mirror is my first book trying to write for somebody else, and as you suggest, in my case it is very difficult to separate drawing from writing. So, working with Hwei, being close friends and having collaborated together both as full creators in the past, is how I cheat. She always reads my mind and our collaboration as writer/co-writer and artist/co-artist is tight and truly organic.
Mirror is not hers neither mine, it comes from a two-brained mixed persona that comes to life while we try to surprise one another. It’s an amazing feeling.
Hwei, what’s it like doing art with another skilled artist? I’m curious how that process has been. I’d imagine it might be easier than working with someone without an artistic background, but perhaps not as easy as illustrating your own stories.
It’s terrifying! I’m always wondering if this scene looks as epic as Emma imagined it, as she would have drawn it—I love her detailed, swirling layouts, the sense of space and movement in her panels and drawing, and I think we definitely focus on different aspects of a scene when visualizing it.
I’m very happy (and relieved!) that Emma gives me complete freedom with the art and even the story, and we end up kind of shaping it together. It’s also really great switching roles for the short stories where I write (sometimes just the outline of a scene even) and Emma draws—I’ll often see a completely different side of a character, an environment, a relationship, etc, in her interpretation of it, and I think that helps me do my job better for the next issue.
Your art styles are, at least to my eye, pretty different. Do those unique styles carry over into the creative process on the book? Is it a case of each of you bringing something very different to the table, or do you find yourselves largely in sync?
Emma: Even if our styles look different at first sight, we are always on the same page when it comes to narrative and priorities like, for example, the approach to character work.
And I have to admit that I’m enjoying quite a lot how both of us are blending together stylistically for Mirror, as well as this uncertainty about who did this or that in the book. It makes it feel more solid to me.
For an animal lover, the opening scenes in particular carry a lot of emotion. Can you talk a little bit about the use of animals in the story? It’s a fantasy convention, but it feels like the something deeper here.
Emma: On one hand, having animals in the story works as a metaphor of how cruel humans can be to each other, to me. And on the other, turning domesticated animals — like the little dog—into humans, creatures that we believe need us, and that we assume will love us unconditionally, brings a rather despicable feeling of patronization.

In the Xenogenesis trilogy, for example, Octavia Butler depicts how humans are basically made into pets by another species to protect them from extinction. And this doesn’t differ much to how I behave when I take my cats to the vet, or make decisions about what would be better for their health.
In Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito, the main character slowly starts to look like an animal and people stops treating him as a human.
Our relationship with animals is rather complex, we humanize them all the time but we can never look back at them in equal terms. Not only this can be extrapolated to how humans mistreat each other within the same specie, it could also be easily translated to how other species could see us, or to how we would interact with them.
Hwei: The premise of the story is that the Professor, Kazbek, discovers that this asteroid can somehow make animals sentient—intelligent, self-aware—and he decides he needs to figure out how. But the sentient animals that he creates, the hybrids, are nothing like what Kazbek saw the asteroid create—they act and feel like humans, and for all that some of them resent and hate humans, even their rebellion against Kazbek is driven by need for human acknowledgement.

The Guardians, created by the asteroid, remain closer to animal than human, in form and in reasoning—and they seem much more at peace with themselves than the hybrids, or the humans, in the story.
I guess it feels like we started trying to figure out what it means to be human, but at the end we are left wondering what it means to be an animal.
The characters are beautifully designed and nuanced. Can you tell me a bit about your collaboration in creating the creatures and people of the story?
Emma: I only gave Hwei very brief notes about the characters at the beginning like: sad magician, dog lady, lab rat hero… So the beautiful designs are all due to her magic.
In terms of story, the characterization comes up naturally because we share a lot of emails talking precisely about that; about how these people would feel, or act, facing this or that situation, as if they were truly alive.

Elena’s development was the most interesting, I think. At the beginning she was pretty abstract, not having a role as clear as the rest of the crew in terms of plot; but she ended up growing so much each issue at a time until becoming a key part for the origin of the story, and basically the protagonist of the second arc.
The story deals with ideas of self-awareness. What are some of the big themes that you both wanted to discuss in the story?
Emma: Acceptance and freedom of choice are two concepts that are always present when we talk about the book, as well as having every conflict mirroring one another: between humans, between animals, between human and animals, between everybody and the asteroid…
I also think that the idea of enduring failure is very important in the book. None of these characters intends to harm the others; they all try to help and are led to make mistakes guided by their own beliefs.
Mirror: The Mountain is available on September 20.