INTERVIEW: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou on The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber

Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is a writer, letterer, editor and filmmaker who fans may know from his comics analysis series “Strip Panel Naked”, where he dissects popular comics and explores their themes, writing, art, colours and more. He recently answered a few questions about his (and artist Juni Ba’s) new graphic novel, “The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber”, which is currently funding over on Unbound.

Could you give us a quick rundown of Felix + Macabber? What is the GN about?
The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber is all about those two titular monsters, Felix and Macabber. In a world of monster wrestlers, Macabber was one of the true legends. He’d been all over the world, fought all the biggest and scariest monsters, and cemented a real legacy. While doing that though, he gave up a lot of opportunities to grow a family, to settle down, in some ways to be happy on a personal level. He sacrificed a lot, but in return he will be remembered in the history books. Felix is a little monster who’s in a different place entirely. Bullied, with a troubled home life. He’s struggling day to day to find something that matters to him. Until the day he runs into Macabber, and for the first time he sees a man. A tough man, a strong man… Someone who you’d actually want to be. And so their journey begins, each finding something in each other they’d been missing in their lives.

What fascinates you about wrestling/fighting? What did you want to convey about the sports?
It’s not so much the fighting or wrestling but it’s the culture around it. I did a documentary in 2012 called Supermen: A Story of British Wrestlers, that focused on young up and comers in the scene, and old veterans that had been all around the world. What came out from the film was that a lot of the young wrestlers had got into it because they’d seen the wrestlers as men, specifically. Like they looked at these big strong men and thought that’s what men were. Big and tough, strong, ready to fight at any moment. You beat your problems away. That’s really what we wanted to look at in the graphic novel, that idea of masculinity and how truly fragile it all can actually be. A lot of the time it can come from a place of weakness, or hiding weakness, very much in Felix’s case at least.

You’re obviously well-known for comics analysis: how has this affected your own creative processes?
It means I try and look for the reason why we’re presenting information the way we do in this book. Like we’ve got an extended sequence in the first chapter of the story that details one of Macabber’s early fights, and I try and look at what the point of the scene is before we craft it. So for that, there’s an element of distancing the reader from that fight, making it seem more like a relic than something happening now to be wowed and excited by. Maybe it means I just end up overthinking everything, but doing things like Strip Panel Naked for the past year and a half has given me opportunity to get some insight into what works in the comics I like.

How did you start collaborating with Juni? What’s it like working together–are you very separate in your tasks, or do you tend to discuss everything together?
So Juni got in touch with me through my YouTube channel initially, back over a year ago. I loved his work immediately, and knew I needed to write something for him, and I knew it just needed to be monsters! So we chatted for awhile and I brought him this basic pitch of Felix and Macabber, and we then just worked together on making it into the book we’re asking for pledges for now. So much of it is really about that collaboration aspect, which is one of my favourite things about comics generally. Juni ended up putting a lot of who he is into Felix, and that’s coming through in the writing and the plotting for where the book ends up, and I probably ended up putting more of myself into Macabber! But the book is very personal to both of us. In terms of actually making it, there’s a lot of back and forth there in every aspect, even down to the writing. We talk a lot about where the book will go before we get down to having any pages written.

Why did you choose Unbound as your publishing platform? Have you utilised crowdfunding sites before?
We wanted to work with Unbound because it gave us the freedom to do the book how we wanted to do it, but still be working with an actual publisher. The difference I think in something like Kickstarter is that once you’ve raised whatever money you need, you’re printing the book yourself and sorting all that out, but what we wanted was to actually have distribution channels and ways to get the book into the hands of our wide range of target age groups without compromising on how we made it. Unbound offered a good balance for us in that regard.

Anything else you’d like to add/talk about?
In terms of the campaign itself, we’re hoping there’s a lot of fun stuff to be had in there. While you’re pledging ahead of time for the book (like with most Kickstarter’s and other crowdfunding platforms), the first chapter will be sent to you digitally as soon as you pledge, so you can start reading the first 30-odd pages of the comic straight away. We’ve also got some fun tiers and rewards, like scriptbooks and sketchbooks, and even some Top Trumps style trading cards of the different monsters in the book. The other thing though is I want to keep detailing the process of our collaboration through the Unbound platform for people who pledge, so there’ll just be tonnes and tonnes of content through there.

Thanks to Hassan for taking the time to talk to us! You can check out the Unbound page here.