The Adventure Zone’s Clint McElroy and Carey Pietsch Talk Fantasy, Spies, and Onomatopoeia

Your favorite comic-fantasy-roleplaying-audio-serial is coming soon to a bookstore near you.
Although the McElroy family’s fan-favorite podcast The Adventure Zone, in which three adult brothers play a crazily creative game of Dungeons & Dragons with their dad, recently concluded its first epic story arc, the hit saga is getting a new graphic adaptation from First Second Books next year.
The first volume, Here There Be Gerblins, scripted by Clint McElroy with art by rising indie comics star Carey Pietsch, is available for preorder now. The duo sat down with B&N to discuss their influences, how The Adventure Zone differs from their past work, and Clint’s hidden talent for sound effects.
Carey, you’ve previously done an Adventure Time book, Marceline Gone Adrift. So you’re sort of enmeshed in these passionate fandoms. What would you say is the biggest difference between going from Adventure Time to TAZ?

Carey Pietsch: That’s a good question. I think the ways that the fans interact with the creators in those two spaces are very different. And I think I was really lucky to be drawing fanart for TAZ at a time when all the fans I got to interact with were enthusiastic and really just wanted to share their love for a thing they loved. I didn’t have as much interaction with fans of Adventure Time while working on Marceline Gone Adrift with Meredith Gran, who is a delight to work with.
Honestly, most of my understanding of it is secondhand. It’s still a giant fandom but it’s maybe more—people tend to make the canon their own and work on these projects that are offshoots of Adventure Time, as opposed to directly engaging with [The Adventure Zone]—”we love this podcast so much, we want to create a scene from it, or write a piece of music the directly describes how I felt when I was listening to this show.” So this is one person, and I’m not a fandom scholar. That’s the coolest job on the planet, and I want to meet and talk to people who are. But it seems like a difference of degrees and of fans claiming ownership of the work itself.
Clint, this is far from your first comic. This is not your first comics adaptation either.
Clint McElroy: [laughs] You did your research!
I did a little bit of research! Among your bibliography is, I think most significantly, the adaptation for that iconic film Freejack, the Mick Jagger-Emilio Estevez vehicle.
CM: I did Freejack. I did Universal Soldier.
The Van Damme film.
CM: Yeah. And I did The Three Ninjas Kick Back. So I was the king of that. I got involved with Freejack through Chuck Dixon, because Chuck is a friend and we actually wrote a couple things together. We co-wrote an issue of Green Hornet. My first gigs were adapting those fine, unforgettable motion pictures. Yeah, that was interesting.
What’s the experience like—first and foremost, of adapting something that you were directly involved in and personally invested in, and also something that is…TAZ is [in] an audio medium, and radio is your home medium. How has the experience of adapting this been different?
CM: It’s like 180 degrees. When I wrote the movie adaptations [coughs loudly] years ago, they wanted the comic to come out rapidly after the movie came out. So I was working off script pages and photographs. Stills from the movie. I had no idea even what had made it on the cutting room floor, what had been changed. [With] Universal Soldier, there were some big changes by the time the movie actually came out. So that was just more or less looking and kind of editing. Of course it was a Van Damme movie so there wasn’t a lot of dialogue to struggle through. [laughter] Lot of grunts, lot of “hee-yahs.”
CP: Is that when you became so expert in onomatopoeia? Because your sound effects are consistently really—
CM: She loves the fact that my sound effects—
CP: They’re really good! That’s hard to do.
CM: “Splorch” was my favorite.
Did you peak too soon with “splorch”?
CM: Yeah, that may have been it for me. But…the biggest job for me was figuring out what not to put in. And I really, truly—Calista [Brill, Senior Editor at First Second Books] and Carey and all three boys were just invaluable in that.
I kind of worked on two different levels: one level of the story itself, we want to make sure the story is moving along. But at the same time, to be true to the characters. [We were also] very selective about the jokes…but the third level of it, for me at least, was I wanted to make sure that we kept the spirit of the characters. I can only explain that by example. There’s a moment towards the end of the book, and I had to make a little bit of a case for it. It’s when they’re going down in an elevator—the final big scene. They don’t know, but they’re about to meet the Voidfish and the Director and learn all these important things. We’ve been building this pace, building pace and Fandolin and all this other stuff happens, and then they’re in this elevator ride and they start singing “Girl from Ipanema.” It’s one of the most meta references in the whole book. But I said “this is what they’re all about. This is what the characters are all about, doing the most unexpected things at the most unexpected times.”
I had the great benefit of an actual recording of what was being said that listened to. But also the fact that a lot of the big story decisions, a lot of the background, I ran by Griffin. Because we still had a year ago. And he helped me there, and the boys had a lot of input too. Everybody did. Carey is awesome. Carey’s a great collaborator. So the translation of it was really only the big difference.
Speaking of characters, you mentioned [at your New York Comic-Con panel] that Griffin in the comic is a character unto himself. Is it still strange—Clint, to be writing a character who is your son but not? And Carey, is it weird to be drawing a likeness of Griffin all the time?
CP: Yeah, I joke about it but that’s—cartooning real people is very hard. So I have to put up a mental wall of, “this isn’t really the real human, this is a cartoon version of this character.” So I don’t know, I’d be interested to hear how you manage it.
CM: I never lost sight of the fact that they were—here’s how I approached it. I made this analogy earlier, I’ll stick with it. Like a director directing a play. I really approached it like a director directing a play, in the fact that I know the actors. I know the actors inside and out. I know them so well. And I also trust them that they’re playing a character and they’re doing a good job of acting. And so the only difficulty was trying to figure out how much dialogue was them speaking as their character, and yet still not lose Travis, Justin, and Clint speaking as well. That was a lot of the issues dealing with it.
We decided very early on that if we kept Merle, Magnus, and Taako just in their world and we didn’t have the cultural references—we funneled a lot of them into Griffin. But at the same time, instead of including Justin, Travis, and Clint as characters, we let them make references occasionally in dialogue that Justin, Travis, and Clint made, but in character. So for me it was after—at that point how many episodes have we done? 40, 50? By that time I knew the characters pretty well.
CP: And I think we’ve also had the great benefit of all of you weighing in on specific lines of dialogue—if they ever feel like something comes up where it’s not the way their character would have said it.
CM: Yeah, and that was a great resource to have. To be able to go back and forth with that to plug storytelling holes that had to come out because they were audio. To plug some of those holes, to create some new things. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s their sense of humor. So I really tried to write in their voice whenever I had to create anything for them, but then ran it by them to make sure they were cool with that. Just because it’s a print medium, and it’s different than audio, obviously. But I tried really hard to keep it in their voice.
CP: It’s good. I mean I’m biased, but it works.
I’m wondering what both of your fantasy influences are that you either bring directly to the table in this project, or just got you enthusiastic about fantasy in the first place.
CM: You go first, because I can tell you’re excited.

CP: Yeah, I run a book club so I can geek out with people about fantasy and genre fiction all the time. I think what drew me to The Adventure Zone in the first place is that it’s a kindhearted comic fantasy. You [Clint] and the rest of your team and all the McElroys talk a lot about the joy and the heart, and that comes through so clearly and doing something that is both a smart, witty show that’s also charming and also kind and funny is a rare treat. And the books that I think about when I think about that particular balance are a lot of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Men At Arms is a book that’s going to stick with me forever. And Kage Baker’s The Anvil of the World. I haven’t read any of her Company novels but she has a series of comic fantasy books that do a very similar thing. There are a lot of other good fantasy books I’ve read lately which are not related to The Adventure Zone—The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez; The Fifth Season, which I just finished the third book of and was brilliant and I need it to Triple Crown the Hugos immediately; and A Taste of Honey are my three recent top favorites in fantasy. Thank you for letting me just do that, I needed to get it out of my system apparently–I didn’t realize how badly!
CM: When it comes to fantasy I follow pretty much the standard arc. Tolkien—of course when I read them, they were like first editions.
CP: Oh please.

CM: But I read a lot of fantasy, the Shannara books. When Steven R. Donaldson came out with the Thomas Covenant books, that to me was a big revelation about how realistic fantasy could go. And that kind of shaped—I was reading George R.R. Martin before it was cool to real George R.R. Martin. Glen Cook books. But [a] big influence on me in the last ten, twelve years has been Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont’s books. [Erikson] wrote this incredible ten book cycle [Malazan Book of the Fallen], all, you know, the size of the Manhattan phone book. Very intricate, about big issues and big magic. And yet when he writes dialogue—at the very center of it is the Bridgeburners, which is an army group that has been fighting together for decades. And the dialogue is so real and so funny and so down to earth, and spoken in such a contemporary voice. When it comes to fantasy, I love Joe Abercrombie and people like that, that write in that kind of voice.
Usually when I read something that in an influence on me, it’s usually not all that humorous. Hitchhiker’s Guide and the Pratchett books, but I like high adventure, I like big adventure…I love the things are on a grand scale. And the cool thing about The Adventure Zone was, we got to have those big epic scenes about one every seven episodes, we had some massive—and usually we destroyed everything. But still, you know, it was a big thing that happened.
CP: And it’s also grounded by these moments of the four of you just sitting down and talking to each other, which is a really good balance.
CM: Just sitting around being goons. Which is an accurate reflection of what we were doing.

Was there one comic in particular that got you into making comics?
CM: I’ve been comic collecting since I was eight or nine years old. But I can still remember to this day going down to a dime store and buying a series of comic books from Tower Comics. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents was a huge influence on me. Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko. I mean, Dick Ayers. All of these amazing artists. I was very much, when I was a kid, very much into the spy stuff, spy heroes: James Bond, Man from U.N.C.L.E. And yet here they took superheroes and infused them into an espionage—spy organization. And that to me was just amazing. And I think that’s probably the first time when I saw those stories—and they weren’t the best written stories, I mean this wasn’t Alan Moore or anything like that. They were just fun adventure stories. But that was when I was a kid, and I’d start doodling stick figures and writing word balloons over them. So that was a big influence on me.

CP: If I’m really being honest, as one always strives to be, I feel like Fullmetal Alchemist was a comic I read that really showcased the different ways you can blend a bunch of different genres in a way that made me excited about storytelling on the page, in a way that was distinct from stories in general. So it blends action and comedy and thoughtful quiet moments incredibly, and it hit me right in my teen heart at a very formative time. I grew up loving Calvin and Hobbes and Moomin to some degree, but those didn’t stick around [like] things I devoured on the floor of Barnes & Noble as a horrible thirteen-year-old.
CM: Hey, it ain’t a library, lady! [laughter]
The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins will be published in July 2018.