Ryan O’Sullivan and Plaid Klaus Go on a Froot-Laced, Psychedelic Journey of Void Trip

In Void Trip, writer Ryan O’Sullivan, artist Plaid Klaus, and letterer Aditya Bidikar have taken the template of the all-American, ’60s-era hippy road-trip, launched it into space and used it to dive into some impressively dark and philosophical territory. Ryan and Klaus were good enough to talk to us about the just-out book, published by Image Comics, as well as about Bukowski, Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales, and Grand Admiral Thrawn.

What was the initial idea or image that sparked this book?

You can’t really get lost in the Wild West anymore, because of satnav, big brother surveillance, and all that. But in space you can. So if we were to tell a story that captured what it means to be American, but the soul of America, we’d have to do a space story. So that that was the genesis of the idea, and then all of the authors I was reading influenced it. People like Herman Melville or Cormac McCarthy: the sort of full-on existential dread, American manifest destiny kind of stuff. But on the other side we have the beat generation people like the Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson and all that sort. So we had the American Dream and the idea of American oppression punching each other in this story. All that was in my head when I saw this picture of a space hobo, which was originally the name of the book. Space Hobos. It is like a pastiche on Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. But we decided that no one would buy a book with the word “Hobo” in the title, and Klaus came up with the brilliant name “Void Trip.”

I try to go in blind, so I didn’t know if this was going to be a complete story, a miniseries, or part of an ongoing. What was behind the decision to keep it contained? There is the sense that there’s more of a universe to be explored.

Klaus: Ryan and I tent to have a little bit of a trickster vibe. We’re always trying to kind of like pull the rug out from the [reader]. When Ryan is plotting out the story, I knew there were going to be these two big flips in the script, where the reader isn’t expecting things that happen very dramatically and very quickly. I love that. I love when you get something unexpected, [that] takes you somewhere new.

Ryan: Plus, five issues is all we needed to tell the story we were telling. We could’ve told a longer story, but it would’ve been a different one.

Klaus: We cut out even the story behind why they’re the last two humans—[we] get right to the meat of the story, make it feel like there’s a longer adventure that’s happened. For the most part we implied the longer journey, which I think worked well, as we focused more on just what the story needed.

Ryan, I’m interested in what you said about Bukowski and Kerouac and the American inspirations. With you being a Brit, I’m curious where that came from. Was it just an interest in that literature? Was it a desire to say something about the modern America?

Ryan: This is the weird thing with England: that we’re almost like the 51st state. You grow up massively influenced by American films, American music, American everything. You have this quasi-identity where yes, you’re British, but you’re also a bit American. I think I wanted to figure out that side of myself. As an outsider, sometimes you’re in a beneficial position, because things that Americans take for granted, I can look [at from] a different angle. The more I read American literature, the more I realized, oh, there’s something going here.

Does Britain have that type of road trip literature?

Ryan: Well, we’ve got The Canterbury Tales. But that was a while ago! I’m not sure. The thing with American road trip stories is that they tend to happen in either mid-America or the South, and England is too small to really have that, unless you count Yorkshire. I don’t think there are many stories of traveling around Yorkshire. There’re stories that celebrate the Dales, like Wuthering Heights. The gothic stories of the North are becoming popular. I was joking, but I think The Canterbury Tales is the closest we’ve got.

Klaus: Collaborating with Ryan’s cool because we have a soft hands approach with each other. I know the story is Ryan’s solid work. And I can throw things at the wall for him, and some things stick, some don’t. But I trust in his hands it’s going to be something that’s unique and interesting and really good, and he does the same thing with the art.

One thing I knew when we talked about the story that it needed to be a little less cartoony than Turncoat, just because the subject matter needed to feel a little more real. Because we’re talking about the last two humans alive. The world itself could feel cartoony and bizarre and strange and alien, because it’s out there in the universe and it’s meant to look foreign. But we wanted our characters to look pretty solid as far as looking like humans, [though] they definitely always have a bit of a cartoon caricature edge, no matter what I’m drawing. It’s just kind of the way my hand works, the way my eye works.

As far as the styles within the comic, I wanted to start off with the footing of making it feel like a ’50s/’60s road trip. I put essences of those decades into the first few pages, but then we pull the rug out. There’s the big turn when Hitch gets high…or sorry, when he eats too much froot. He starts to get even more cartoony and bizarre and twisted, and that’s to show the reader this is kind of a psychedelic moment. I always try to craft the art to the story.

You’ve mentioned liking to pull the rug out from under people. The story definitely started out as this fun road trip, and then it becomes very ambitious and explores some fairly heady questions. Was it always that way? Or did it start out as something more contained?

Ryan: So, was it a conceived as a dreadful, heavy thing that implies life is inherently suffering, or was it a funny comic that we allowed to go its own way?

The truth is, it started out wanting to be existentially dreadful in the storytelling, and that is why we had the humor at the start, because the two play up each other nicely. You can’t say it’s just funny, and you can’t read it and say it’s just existential dread. It’s a blend of the two, and our hope is that each makes the other palatable.

I think [comic artist and writer] Jason Latour once said that if you’re going to have a character say something deep and profound, throw “y’all” at the end and it suddenly becomes a lot easier to read. That principle was something that stuck with us, because we do get into it. The problem with preachy comics is that sometimes the message is so preachy, you just don’t listen. You automatically rebel against it. Our hope is that, because we are encasing it in humor, that perhaps it might hit home.

But, yes, I fully outlined all five issues and bounced it back and forth with Klaus before writing the first. We had the whole plan. I’m a big believer in the Shakespearean plot formula, with the crisis in the middle rather than at the end. The whole point of the story is to build toward the ending.

Ryan: I think we wanted to lure in people with the promise of comedy and then stick a knife in them when they weren’t ready.

Reading it, I don’t know how much I like Anna and Gabe as people, and I don’t know how much I’m supposed to.

Ryan: Comics often give so much to the reader that the reader doesn’t really have to contribute much in return. It’s not even like a novel, where you would have to imagine what they look like. With Anna and Gabe, and the Great White as well, we wanted readers to have their own interpretation—including whether they liked them or not, because I think it’s quite easy to make characters likable. You make them suffer a lot, you make them open up about their inner emotions turmoil. We make them very simple, and similar to the reader. We didn’t really want to do that.

We wanted to create characters who felt real and have flaws, and perhaps not just endearing flaws. We really didn’t want to make the lead a manic pixie girl who is sort of infallible. She’s a flawed human, the same as a male character would be in this story. I’ve wondered: would people say Anna is unlikeable if she were a male? Is their reaction to her because they’re so used to seeing a man in that role being the Han Solo, uncaring Bukowski type? I believe we made a real character with a real inner life.

Klaus: I’ve met people like her before. She’s pure Scorpio, she’s going to do things her way. Doesn’t matter how many times she has to learn a lesson, she’s not going to take anyone else’s direction. She needs to understand the world for herself and make her choices. That’s that’s the crux of the book. I think there are elements that make her a redeemable character, and there’re elements that we probably don’t like to see ourselves or in other people close to us. But I think, at the end of the day, you need to make characters that feel real with all their blemishes.

Is this a world or a set of characters that you would ever return to?

Klaus: I think we kind of put the nail in the coffin.

You kind of did.

Ryan: I’m curious to see what the Great White does next.

Klaus: Because you’re talking about Great White: it’s like at the end of the Bible, the Armageddon story that’s supposed to close off that character for eternity. I think he would still come back, because he’s such an interesting character. He’ll probably want to manifest [again] in some way, in some narrative.

Ryan: In another book we make, he may reappear. Reincarnation on a fictional level.

Void Trip is available now.