Something is Different Now: JH and Wendy Wright-Williams on Where We Live, an Anthology to Benefit the Survivors of the Las Vegas Shooting

By Ross Johnson / June 4, 2018 at 4:00 pm

The deadliest mass shootings in United States history occurred in October of 2017, when a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers on the Las Vegas Strip. Fifty-eight people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded. The incident and its aftermath inspired Las Vegas residents and artists JH Williams III (Sandman) and Wendy Wright-Williams to assemble an anthology book to benefit survivors with medical needs. Where We Live: The Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology offers a variety of personal perspectives on the Las Vegas shootings and other recent incidents of gun violence.

Aside from benefitting a good cause, the anthology is a veritable who’s who of comics talent, with dozens of contributors, all of them volunteering their services, donating their usual fees in support of the book’s mission. Even just a list of the marquee names would run way too long, but Kelly Sue DeConnick, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Lemire, Gail Simone, Tess Fowler, Cliff Chiang, and Brian Michael Bendis are among them.

We JH Williams and Wendy Wright-Williams were kind enough to chat about the forthcoming book.

Where We Live: Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology

Paperback $19.99

Where We Live: Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology

By J. H. Williams III , Wendy Wright-Williams , Neil Gaiman , Kieron Gillen , Brian Michael Bendis , Kelly Sue DeConnick
Artist Jamie Mckelvie , Jeff Lemire , Cliff Chiang , Bill Sienkiewicz

In Stock Online

Paperback $19.99

Thank you in advance for your work on this book.

Wendy: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. It’s amazing what we’re encountering on a regular basis now. It seems like everybody’s going to have an incident at one point or another.

So what inspired you to put this book together?

JH: We have been living in Las Vegas for just over two years, but we’ve always considered it sort of like our home. We have friends here that we consider close family. But what motivated us, besides just general care for what’s happening out there is, we were away in California for a friend’s wedding on the weekend that this incident happened and we ended up being on the phone with a dear friend of ours who works on the Strip and was under lockdown, and of course was extremely terrified. I remember being haunted by hearing my wife have to tell her friend that she’s going to be OK, when at the time we didn’t really know if she was going to be OK. She’s being told that the shooter’s in their building and so on, and having to hang up the phone with her so she could call other people. And after we got home, I kept thinking about it, and a lot of times you see the comics industry dream stuff up in these kinds of things. And so just randomly in the middle of the night, I start tweeting about putting something like this together. And by the next morning I had people reaching out saying, hey, you know, you can count on us to help.

Wendy: I think we would probably feel compelled to help regardless because of our feelings about the city that’s always felt like home to us. Which is weird sounding to some, I’m sure, but they really don’t know Las Vegas. The media coverage, and sometimes rightly so, is “debauchery incorporated”. But they don’t understand that people live here. That families live here. With the outlying areas it’s two million people. It’s not just that small part of the city which is the Strip. The coverage never addresses that this is actually full of families.

I’m a Las Vegas native myself.

Wendy: Really? Yeah. This can happen in your backyard, and this is our backyard. People will talk about there being no culture here, no community here, and that’s not true at all. That’s why we wanted to do a book like this. Often there’s a book of pin-ups and it’s purely to raise money. We wanted to do something more meaningful and to do something that actually has some shelf life. That you could pick up years from now and maybe get something from. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but it just seems that even with the polarization that’s out there now, that we can have a conversation. We thought maybe through our medium that we could get people to just pause for a minute before their objections come up, and maybe think a little bit. I grew up on a farm in rural California and we always had guns, but it wasn’t this AR-15 thing that we’re experiencing now. So there is room in the middle that we can talk about.

JH: Of course there’s also the need that the book represents financially. Most of the time the media just focuses on the number of people that were killed. And of course their families are severely affected. But there’s the number of injured being well over 500 people. I can’t imagine how many of them are going to have long-term consequences either physically, psychologically, or both that possibly could affect them for their whole lives. And that creates a financial need. The burden of the medical costs of that has to be exorbitant.

Even if it’s just a small percentage of that group, you’re still talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical costs.

JH: Correct. And if we can help in some way to answer that need as best as we can, that’s a huge motivator as well. Besides trying to have the book speak about the importance of the problem.

Let me ask you to expand on a couple things. You talked about doing something that was more than just pin-up art. What types of stories and what types of perspectives are you seeing? What are contributors talking about in the book?

Wendy: We put out a list of topics that we wanted covered, but we left it to the individual creator to come up with what they wanted to talk about. The only mandate that we had was that it was not a knee jerk reaction, that it was thoughtful. If you are going to cite facts that you annotate those, so that we’re coming from a rational point of view and a thoughtful point of view. We didn’t want to attack anyone. We put out a list of the obvious things that surround gun violence…talking about ideas for a better handling of how we distribute guns or gun control or whether you think that’s a good idea or not, mental health issues, and the aftermaths. A lot of them are personal experiences that the creators may have. Some of them are talking to you about how that affected them.

JH: And then we have personal perspectives from people that were affected directly by the incident that night. So we have some eyewitness accounts or accounts from other people who live around the area who were impacted in a different way than actually being there at the event. There’s also a wide range of styles and content. There’s plenty of fictional content, or personal point-of-view content like Wendy suggested, and then there’s some allegorical type of stuff, but, stylistically, the book is wide ranging. Of course comics is the bulk of it. There’ll also be essays and poetry as well.

Wendy: We have also contacted some local journalists. One of them did a sequential story. Another wrote a journalistic essay. We’ve tried to include as many local creatives as possible. As many local witnesses of course. And so we felt like it was a community project.

JH: That combined with some of the best that the industry has to offer. It’s a profoundly varied book. Because each person that contributed has their own perspective on the issue or their own relationship in their past.

Wendy: We just kind of gave them the freedom to be creative and do what they wanted.

JH: There’s actually a couple of stories where the creators are actually trying to understand their own feelings about it. The story that they’re telling involves expressing their own confusion.

There’s so much anger. You’ve touched on this, but has that been tough in overseeing this and trying to put together something that’s reasonable?

JH: Yeah, in some ways it has been, but for the most part I think everyone that decided to contribute really understood to not just react angrily. There’s still some animosity or anger coming across in some of the stories, but it’s been presented in a focused way.

Wendy: We put out a mission statement as we invited people to participate and I think that nipped a lot of it in the bud. It’s so charged, but we’re trying to create something constructive.

JH: A friend of ours wanted to contribute, and ended up coming back to me saying she just didn’t know what to do. She had all these mixed-up feelings about it. I said, well, make that the story. And the result is fantastic. It speaks to a lot of people’s feelings about it. They don’t know what to say or how to start going forward.

So it sounds like you had no problem assembling artists and creators for this.

JH: We had people wanting to commit right away, but then there were others that needed to think about it. A lot has to do with the timing. It was happening around the holidays, and people’s schedules get really frantic. The comics industry itself is very deadline driven.

Wendy: We knew it was going to be a lot of work, and it was not going to be easy. That was the hardest: trying to wrangle people with all these different schedules and needs. There are so many moving parts…we have over 150 contributors and they all have their own other things.

JH: Ultimately that’s probably pretty regular for the comics industry. And the end result…everyone who said that they were going to come through has pretty much done that and I’m happy with what they’ve done, and I’m really proud of what they’ve done.

It’s stressing me out, just kind of thinking about it.

JH: At first we were getting a decent, but not huge response. But a couple months went by and people were thinking about what they could do. Now we’re going to be just over 300 pages. Which is amazing.

Wendy: It’s been overwhelming. In a good way!

The nature of almost any discussion in 2018 tends toward being…not terribly reasonable. What kind of response are you anticipating? Aside from the very real, very positive contribution to survivors, what do you hope for the book to accomplish?

Wendy: Our intention is not to start an argument, but the way things are right now, I’m not sure if this avoidable. We’re trying to not attach an outcome as far as the success of the book or what we hope to change. Just trying to get a reasonable conversation started and, and make people aware through these stories. Some of these personal accounts are so harrowing. I hope that maybe it humanizes some of the people that this has effected.

JH: And not just with the eyewitness accounts. Because of the other personal perspectives in this mix, the book speaks to how the country is hurting, I guess you could say, concerning this issue. It’s hard to predict what kind of impact it’s really going to have or what people’s reactions are going to be, because ultimately this is trying to humanize the subject and show and speak to the problem at hand. The problem cannot continue to be ignored. It has to be dealt with somehow and we have to ask ourselves…what do we accept into our lives. What do we accept where we live?

Wendy: People watch stuff on the news and they’re separated from it somehow. It’s just numbers. And this is going to be your town before too long. If we keep continuing on this road, it’s going to be everybody, directly or indirectly. We didn’t want to shy away from trying to tackle the issue, and inevitably that’s probably going to ruffle some feathers, but we have to be able to have some conversation.

JH: I just want people to think about the real lives behind those numbers.

Wendy: Someone is involved in a car crash and that family has a terrible time recovering. You can relate to that. That’s what these people are going through. Our whole community is reeling from it. We’ve had 58 people killed, 500 other people that were injured. Plus all the people that witnessed what happened. We have witnesses that are in the book that are never going to be the same. We have a 14-year-old girl, and the things that she witnessed…I can’t even imagine. She’s a policeman’s, daughter, but nothing’s going to prepare you for that. How are you ever going to feel safe again?

JH: Something like this happens in a community, and that community is forever changed from it. Everyone gets on with their lives and does what they need to do, but something is different now.

Thank you both so much for giving us your time, and thank you for giving time to this project. I don’t know what the answers are, in terms of getting people thinking and discussing, but this certainly sounds like a good step in a good direction.

Where We Live: Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology is available June 5.