This is full-length version of Austin English's roundtable interview with the creators of Orchid, an anthology of Victorian horror adaptations that is the first release from Ben Catmull's Sparkplug Comics.

AUSTIN ENGLISH: So first, let's just have everyone say who they are and what projects, besides Orchid, they do.

JESSE REKLAW: (Imitating) I'm Dylan Williams. I'm really into porn. Gay porn.

BEN CATMULL: Aren't you glad you came?

ENGLISH: Well, this was about what I expected.

REKLAW: (Continuing) This is Dylan Williams, and he has been in comics longer than God. He started out doing Horse (Williams laughs). Hey, Grandpa. He lately publishes Reporter, and he's the man behind Sparkplug Comics. The wondrous Sparkplug Comics, with so many new titles coming out, all the time (all laugh). And also, he's wonderful.

ENGLISH: Do you want to introduce Jesse now, Dylan?

DYLAN WILLIAMS: Hi, I'm Jesse Reklaw. Actually, my real name's Jesse Walker (all laugh).

REKLAW: But I got hit in the head with a brick --

WILLIAMS: -- Right, and now everything's backwards. And I do Slow Wave, which is a weekly dream-adaptation comic. And I've been doing comics almost as long as God. And I was in a band with Adrian Tomine in high school. Called The Pissants.

REKLAW: That's what they were called.

WILLIAMS: And Adrian sang.

REKLAW: He did a rap about the Hulk.

ENGLISH: Let's go over to Lark --

LARK PIEN: My names Lark Pien. I do Stories from the Ward, Long Tail Kitty and Mister Boombha.

CATMULL: My name is Ben Catmuulp -- (all laugh). Sorry. I was burping. My name is Ben Catmull. I did a comic called Paper Theater. I'm about to do an online comic called Monster Parade, I think. Serializer.net.

TODD EDWARD BAK: Um -- hello. (Hoarse voice) My name is Gabrielle Bell (all laugh). OK, no, my name is T Edward Bak. The T stands for Todd. I'm currently mayor of Athens, Clark County, Georgia. I work as a dishwasher on the side. And I work in a computer lab at the Athens Clark County Public Library, when I'm not changing policy regarding bicycle lanes in Athens. I also do a novelty comic project called Firefly Waltz. We'll see what happens with that. I think there's going to be an auto-bio project I'm working on that should be published sometime in the next -- seven years.

KEVIN HUIZENGA: I'm Kevin Huizenga, and I used to do a comic called Supermonster.

ALL: Used to?

CATMULL: Is it Super-duper Monster now? (All laugh.)

GABRIELLE BELL: Hi, I'm Gabrielle, and I just debuted my new book When I'm Old, which is a collection of my short stories, which I've been working on in the past five years. And that's all, folks.

TED MAY: Hi, I'm Ted May. I just put out a mini-comic called It Lives, and I did the back cover for Orchid.

ENGLISH: So, now could we go around the room and have people talk about how they got involved with Orchid, and what your story in Orchid is about?

CATMULL: I got involved with Orchid through the starting of it. It almost started with the Slave Labor Toxic Paradise anthology that Dylan and I did. It was zombie-themed. Landry Walker and Eric Jones edited it. And then Dylan and I, mostly Dylan I guess, got the idea of doing our own anthology, with just the two of us. He wanted it to be H.P. Lovecraft stories. We'd both do H.P. Lovecraft stories. But then Dylan decided he didn't want to do H.P. Lovecraft; he wanted to do Algernon Blackwood. Then he decided that he should let other people in it, too. Then, we just started compiling a list of artists to be in it.

WILLIAMS: And we wanted to keep it small and more personal, so that it wasn't all over the place like most anthologies.

CATMULL: We had an idea, and basically, Dylan just got more and more ambitious.

ENGLISH: How did you decide on a line-up?

WILLIAMS: Just basically all the people we really, really like. The only person that turned us down was Zak Sally. He's one of my favorite cartoonists.

ENGLISH: Now can everyone just go around and talk about their piece in Orchid?

PIEN: Jesse and I did a story together, called "The Demoniac Pacheco" and it's a story written by a Polish dude named Yan Pacheco and it's -- I'm so brain-dead right now I can't deal with -- I honestly can't.

REKLAW: (Laughs) It was in an anthology of old horror stories.

PIEN: There was an old collection of horror stories from all over Europe. But the story that we chose specifically dealt with ghosts and --

REKLAW: Sex.

PIEN: Ghosts and sex, and what happens to you when you have sex --

REKLAW: With ghosts (laughs).

ENGLISH: Did you get to pick the story you adapted, or did Dylan make suggestions?

PIEN: Dylan was totally nice about it. We said, "We want to do this story," and he said, "Great."

REKLAW: And we said, "It's about sex with ghosts" and he said "Yeahhh!" (all laugh).

WILLIAMS: I said, "That'll be a chestnut."

BAK: I'll go next -- My story is "The Tomb of Sarah," which is by F.G. Lawring. F.G. Lawring -- I don't know anything about the author. I know that if you read the original version of the story -- I took many liberties with this story. And when I met Dylan, I was living in Portland, and I'd gone back there to work, and to hang out, and to stay for a few months. I was in the middle of a breakup with a girl named Sarah, and I found this story, and it was a coincidental thing (laughs). I found "The Tomb of Sarah," and I decided just on the title alone. And when I read it, it was just a basic, really dry vampire thing. It was just like, they kill her with the stake and stuff. I was like, "Well, I could add a little more of a psychological element to this." So, it ended up being kind of this examination of this guy who had lost his wife recently, and became obsessed with this woman who was supposedly was a vampire. There's a myth about it. So, he ended up becoming obsessed and, in a dream, he ended up killing himself along with her. So I just wanted to examine the psychological aspects of that original story. That was the idea behind mine, and it was not as cleansing as I'd hoped. (Laughs).

HUIZENGA: I just read a lot of Victorian ghost stories. I picked "Green Tea" which is one of the all-time classics, I guess. It's by Sheridan Le Fanu. All his stories are great, but "Green Tea" was really great. I wanted to do a story by Elizabeth Gaskell. A lot of her stories are really melodramatic and creepy and stuff, but they're all really long. That was a problem that I had, that the stories I was reading, the good ones were really long. It's hard to adapt something into a short little comic when it's long. It's hard for me. There were so many good little details in the story and you want to keep all the good little details. Because they all sort of add up -- in a good story they all add up to the all-important. Anyway--. "Green Tea." It had a monkey in it.

BELL: I did a story called "Tobermory" by Saki. I don't know -- I don't actually have a story. Dylan actually suggested Saki to me. And he was one of my favorite writers at the time. I just thought it would look really cool in a comic to have a talking cat. Saki has these long sentences. Like one sentence will be a paragraph. So it was very hard to edit it. To cut it all down. And that's all.

MAY: I did the back cover illustration.

HUIZENGA: It's called "Give it Up." (All laugh.)

MAY: The title of the picture refers to giving up life, which I thought was kind of good for a horror anthology. But it also has a double-entendre meaning "Give it up," as in a round of applause for the people who did the book.

CATMULL: I'd never read any Victorian horror, except for some H.P. Lovecraft when I was a kid. So, Dylan just basically recommended a whole bunch of writers. And I just plowed through a bunch of Victorian horror, which was probably the wrong way, because I was just frantically looking for something that would be fun to draw, and not really enjoying the stories for what they were. But then I found a story I really liked called "Lost Hearts" and I planned it out, and it would have been something like 30 to 50 pages. And that's when I realized that most of the stories I found I would have to really edit down, and if you really edit something down, there's no creepiness in it. So, I picked the absolute shortest story I could find. (Laughs). So that I could expand it. The one I found was "The Little Red Man" by Le Fanu. Is that how you say it? Le Fauuu? And that was the only really short story that I found that I liked. And then I found out that Kevin was also doing Loou Fluu. And I felt really dumb, but I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I did it anyway.

WILLIAMS: But, he's one of the most important Victorian horror writers.

REKLAW: (Sarcastically). Wow.

CATMULL: And I really wanted to take something short and expand it, because you can put in long, quiet, creepy silences. But, that's why my story is so embarrassingly short. We should also talk about Mats!?, who did the front cover. Everybody loves Mats!? Matso Stromburg.

WILLIAMS: (Laughs) He's outed.

ENGLISH: We can't print that.

CATMULL: (Laughs) So, we found out later that he'd just quit smoking, and he'd been rolling in his bed in complete pain for six weeks. And he finally called again and said he wanted to do it. So, the cover is the first painting he did while not smoking.

ENGLISH: What kind of feedback did you get debuting the book at SPX? What was the benefit of debuting it here?

REKLAW: I got sex.

WILLIAMS: Basically it was coincidence. It timed out perfectly to get it here. It just got a lot more exposure in general, because there was a concrete date and event associated with having it debut.

ENGLISH: Since most of you usually self-publish your work, what is it like with a thing like Orchid where you yourself are actually publishing the work?

CATMULL: Once the pages were done, I just scanned it and e-mailed it to Dylan, and then I didn't have to think about it any more.

PIEN: There were certain format rules and stuff that he gave us.

REKLAW: I feel like I'm being repetitive, but I thought the sex requirement was kind of weird.

WILLIAMS: Nobody else has that Jesse. It's just you.

ENGLISH: Dylan, how did you decide to start doing Sparkplug? Why did you decide to start doing your own line of books?

REKLAW: Where'd you come up with that dumb name, too?

WILLIAMS: That's a great name! Great name. Basically, the goal of Sparkplug is to publish stuff that other publishers aren't looking at yet that they don't think is ready to be exposed to everybody. But, basically, there are a lot of comic artists right now who are doing work that needs to get seen that is as valid as anything that's being published by Fantagraphics. And it's just not getting out there. So, my goal is to get other publishers to see it and go "Oh, this is actually good, and I should publish it."

ENGLISH: What are your long-term plans for Sparkplug? Do you want to publish an amount of books on par with Highwater?

WILLIAMS: No, I want it to be like a small indy music label. To just do things that don't fit in with other -- Like, the next book I'm doing is by Eric Haven, and it's called Tales to Demolish, and it's something that a lot of other publishers looked at but they weren't interested in. I'm actually a big fan of his, and I just figure other people need to see it in a format where it can get into comic stores. And then, hopefully, they'll see that there's some validity to it.

REKLAW: So, do you have an aesthetic?

WILLIAMS: I have my own aesthetic worked out, but I don't want to impose too much on the artist. I feel like people should do what they want to do, and not be forced to do something that isn't them. Me only publishing things that I like isn't the best way to do things either. I guess for me, the aesthetic is to do things that are more story-oriented, and not gimmicks or format or novelty items. (Bak laughs.)

WILLIAMS: But at the same time, I really like Todd Bak's Loteria cards.

ENGLISH: It transcends gimmicks.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, exactly. You can order those from Top Shelf books. They carry it.

BAK: Can I say something, actually? I don't know if everyone has the same room, but this is where I got baked with Danny Hellman. Oh, wait, who else was there? Valium was there, and he was sitting right where Lark is sitting, and it's freaking me out. But, no, OK, seriously (all laugh) -- when I went to Portland, I was working and living in Portland, Dylan had been talking about this idea with Ben, and throwing out some of the names of people that they were thinking about getting involved in this. And I was just dumbfounded. I was like, "You can't ask me to be in this thing with these people." I was like, "No -- you want me to be in this? OK, yeah, of course." So for me, it's really an honor to be in this book. I think everyone did a phenomenal job. I had not read any kind of Victorian horror stuff, previous to this.

PIEN: Before I forget, I just wanted to say that I really appreciated the Orchid Web page being put up. Because then I could see what the other people were working on, and that was really inspiring. You could see the anthology forming.

CATMULL: Whenever I looked at that website, I'd feel really happy with my stuff, and then I'd see Kevin Huizenga's story and I'd feel like a severe underachiever. Like I brought Metroplex to Show and Tell, and that Huizenga kid brought Fortress Maximus. (All laugh). I fucking hate that Huizenga kid.

ENGLISH: What future books do you plan on publishing?

REKLAW: What kind of savings do you have?

WILLIAMS: I don't have much savings, but I do have a day job at an engineering company that's financing all this. After the Eric Haven book, I'm gonna publish an issue of Ten Foot Rule by Shawon Granton. Those are the only two things I really have planned out. And there is gonna be a second Orchid.

BAK: It's gonna be called Pansy.

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