"Beasts of Burden" Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson Interview

The characters in "Beasts of Burden" were first introduced through your Eisner Award-winning short story in The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, Witchcraft, the Dead, and Monsters – what inspired the initial idea, and how did you end up working together on this project?

Evan: In 2003, editor Scott Allie at Dark Horse Comics was putting together the first of the anthologies, The Book of Hauntings. He asked me to contribute an eight-page story, and I was game, but I didn't have an idea right off the bat, or anything I could adapt or alter from my files. I batted ideas around for various haunted house stories, because I'm a sucker for haunted house stories like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson's Hell House and thought it would be fun to try my hand at one.

Eventually the idea of a haunted doghouse came to me, which Scott gave me the go-ahead on. I built the story up from the basic concept, throwing in some allusions to the world of the animals, their beliefs and cultural differences, trying to make it a little less straightforward even though we only had eight pages. The story obviously called for dogs as the protagonists, I added a cat for variety and someone for the dogs to play off of, and tossed in a shamanistic "Wise Dog", a character with corollaries to the priest in "The Exorcist" and the medium from "Poltergeist."

When I wrote the story I did so with Jill's artwork in mind, she was who I wanted to illustrate the piece. Scott wanted me to draw it, but I'm more of a basic, humor cartoonist, my style isn't so broad or effective in putting across something like this. I saw it as having a storybook feel, and I saw it in Jill's style. If she didn't agree to work with me on this I don't know what I would have done. As it turned out, the first story went over nicely, Dark Horse was happy with it, and we ended up doing three more short stories with the characters before doing this mini-series.

Can you tell us a little bit about the new story?

Evan: The series is about a group of neighborhood dogs and a stray cat that come together to protect their town from the supernatural. The town is apparently cursed, and the people living there aren't attentive enough to notice anything is wrong, at least not yet. So it's up to these pets to do what they can, with the help of two wise dogs who are training them in the occult. So far they've dealt with a haunted doghouse, a coven of witches and their black cat familiars, a pack of zombie dogs, and a werewolf. The series picks a few months after the werewolf story, which was published in The Dark Horse Book of Monsters, the fourth and last of the anthology series. We pick up that following spring, as the town of Burden Hill and the dogs and cats come out of a quiet winter. The mini-series will consist of four self-contained stories, with an overall storyline about the cause of the supernatural occurrences continuing throughout them. Readers can follow what's going on without having read the original stories, but Dark Horse has posted the first three anthology stories to their website to help folks familiarize themselves with the concept and characters.