'Golgotha Motor Mountain': "Strap in, It's Going to F*ck You Up!"
Jul 11, 2024
Interview by Troy-Jeffrey Allen
Join superstar artist Robbi Rodriguez (Spider-Gwen) and the dynamic writing duo of Matthew Erman (Witchblood) & Lonnie Nadler (Age of X-Man) on a high-octane redneck motor massacre! When a derelict chunk of a passing interstellar rock rains down on Elwood and Vernon Damnage's meth lab in Golgotha Knob, Kentucky, their lives are turned into a redneck body horror nightmare.
In the following interview, the writer duo do their best to prepare you for Golgotha Motor Mountain from IDW. Watch your step...
Let’s just get into it! What is Golgotha Motor Mountain?
Lonnie Nadler: This book is genuinely unhinged, bizarre, and unlike anything I've ever written, or co-written, before. As you can imagine, that makes it a little bit hard to describe in any succinct way that will do the story justice. At its heart, though, Golgotha Motor Mountain tells the story of two dimwitted, meth-cooking brothers who make the asinine decision to package up the space rock that crashes into their barn and try to sell it off as drugs to all the locals they can in an effort to make enough money to escape their destitute life. But the brothers are also at odds from the very start. They don’t see eye to eye and yet have to find a way to trust one another in the face of the absolute bedlam that they end up creating as a result of their brainless plan. There is no easy straightforward comparison to make in terms of genre or similar titles, but I’ve been calling it Mad Max by way of Cormac McCarthy because it’s a concoction of Southern Gothic, action, sci-fi, and drug-fueled body horror.
Matthew Erman: I think it would be easier to tell you what Golgotha Motor Mountain isn’t. It isn’t a compromise in any way between the creative and the publisher. Mark Doyle heard our pitch and almost instantly lit up in a way I rarely see publishers do — he has a real love of comics and his excitement at the thought of reading this book was palpable. Our vision and the story that Lonnie and I have dreamt up along with Robbie, Hasan, Marisa, and Nikola couldn’t exist in any other medium but comics and Mark understood that, as did all of IDW. This story isn’t going to hold your hand or talk down to you — it isn’t breezy or light and it doesn’t pull any of its punches. It’s a low-brow full-throttle, fucked up cosmic nightmare about the descent of Western civilization. Human trafficking, racist cops, white nationalists, veterans dealing with trauma anyway they can — it is a nihilistic romp into the dark cosmic woods of America from the point of view of two shitty meth cooks. GMM marries Lonnie and I’s the love of literature, poetry, history, lore, and gore into a single (sorta) story about two brothers struggling to find a new life. It has themes from my other comics told in a new way; about place and home and belonging and wanting to be part of a community as well as racist institutions of power that have festered in the mountains and woods of this country since its inception. It’s also very fun and ridiculous.
What can you tell us about the Damnage Brothers?
Lonnie Nadler: Vernon and Elwood have a similar relationship to a lot of brothers and so, despite the wild stuff going on around them, the hope is that most people with siblings can still relate to them. They know one another inside and out, they love one another, but at the same time they don’t agree on so many things and this has led them to keep secrets. This dangerous mix of gestating tension and familial love has been bubbling for years and years by the time the story begins, so it’s only natural that their qualms finally come to a head when they are faced with an absurd cosmic threat. Something that was important to us was that the Damnage Brothers were not quite good, but not quite bad either. They’re not typical brooding antiheroes, and they certainly aren’t heroes. I’m a big fan of unlikely protagonists and tend to use writing as a way to put the spotlight on characters who might normally be background characters in other stories. In some ways they are dissimilar to the protagonists you might see in a Coen Brothers movie, someone like H. I. McDunnough, Nic Cage’s character, in Raising Arizona. Having these kinds of off-kilter protagonists offers us a unique lens through which to examine the world of the story, and a unique way to approach all the genres we are trying to play with. There’s this notion of “sympathetic pity” in Southern Gothic literature, and that’s something Matthew and I have tried to capture with Vernon and Elwood. These stupid boys who are victims of circumstance, who see the world in narrow ways, who don’t act morally, and despite all this they feel deeply human. We see the parts of ourselves that we pity in their struggle.
Matthew Erman: Vernon’s got that dog in him and Elwood is barely holding the leash.
Is this a road trip story? A body horror story? An action story…?
Lonnie Nadler: It’s… all of the above! Most of my career has been built off the idea of smashing together genres and influences and seeing where it takes the story. While this is a lot to try to combine into one book, it’s also what makes the whole thing feel singular. There are no other comics I can think of that married all these genres together, and maybe for good reason. But for us, even if it’s a fool’s errand, the aim is to try to deliver something nobody has seen before. At the same time, this approach to storytelling isn’t novel or something we’ve made up. If you look at stories outside of North America, genre-shifting is quite common. I think about Korean and Scandinavian cinema a lot, and how they cross so fluidly between comedy, action, and thriller. While I understand that such storytelling is rooted in cultural tradition, it’s enthralling as a viewer, and exciting to me as a writer. I think North American storytelling is very safe for the most part. We’ve been told our entire lives through the media we consume, and I was taught in writing school, that mixing tones is bad because it can lead to a lack of cohesion and ruin immersion. As movies like Parasite and Border show us, that’s a lie. Matthew and I tried to embrace this and play with it by moving the proverbial speedometer from 1 to 100 and back to 1 in the space of a few pages. There are scenes that are deadly serious, counterpointed by horrible imagery, while others are counterpointed by comedy. The same goes for genre. One second it’s a road movie, the next it’s a body horror nightmare. It’s important to say that we’re not doing this out of any sense of irony or as pastiche, but rather trying to do so in a way that feels authentic. I think if readers are willing to come along for the ride, and accept the constant shifts, Golgotha will be the kind of story that always keeps them guessing.
Matthew Erman: Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a Southern Gothic the same way that Golgotha Motor Mountain is a Southern Gothic. So I reject all other genres in relation to this story, it’s a Southern gothic.
What are the Damnage Bros. up against?
Lonnie Nadler: I don’t want to give away too much because I think seeing who they come across is a big part of the book’s mystery and its allure. What I will say is that Golgotha is a fictional location in Kentucky, and we’ve tried to jam it packed with all kinds of people, the ones who are often hidden in communities that we try to ignore: weirdos, radical nationalists, addicts, the destitute, the poor, veterans, drug dealers, farmers, and small-time criminals. And so many of them will… turn into something else over the course of the book. Insides will be shown, but not always in the way the reader will expect.
Matthew Erman: I think The Damnage Brothers are up against all of the ugliness in America concentrated in a single place.
This project is being written by both of you. What is your process like with that?
Lonnie Nadler: It’s chaotic, but for the best. We shoot ideas back and forth by email or text, then we have calls to really get aligned. One of us will go off and do a first pass of half the issue, then the other writes the second half while editing the first half, and then we pinball it until we are both stoked about what’s on the pages. I think Matthew and I complement one another well in that our solo writing styles are so different. Matthew is much more free-flowing and willing to just see what comes out and lets the story take him for a ride. It’s a skill I wish I had, but I am a lot more of a formalist, someone who likes to heavily plan each page and scene before I write it. It’s created a fun dynamic where I can go in after Matthew’s poured a bunch of ideas down, and give shape to it. On the other hand, Matthew can take scenes that I do which might feel rigid, and breathe some more life into them.
Matthew Erman: That’s actually pretty spot on. Lonnie is so much smarter and more well-read than I am — I really like that about him (among other things) and I think his understanding and skill in the articulation of complexity is unparalleled. I am the toxic sludge of unformed ideas and Lonnie is the powerful hydraulic press that takes all my shit and goo and compresses it and changes it into a — well I don’t know what it becomes because it’s not a diamond but it’s a lot better than shit and goo I’ll say that.
I’ll also say that Lonnie’s work and contributions to the backmatter material should be nominated for an award.
What made you team up with artist Robbi Rodriguez?
Lonnie Nadler: Robbi has been doing mostly superhero work for the last several years. He’s grown a lot as an artist and was itching to do something that was both more mature but also reminded him of why he got into comics in the first place. Matthew and I were looking for someone who could do action, drama, comedy, horror, and was also willing to make the pages feel dirty while still being readable. Robbi had all that, so when IDW presented Robbi, it seemed like a serendipitous, fortuitous match. Robbi was ready to return to independent comics, and we had a story that suited his sensibilities. It’s been a real treat to see the pages come in. Robbi has been pretty unhinged on the page, and some of the sequences veer into being surreal, which works perfectly for the story.
Tell us about the rest of the collaborators on the book.
Lonnie Nadler: Marissa is one of those colorists whose work I’ve been admiring for years, and we just never had a chance to collaborate until now. It’s really quite hard to overstate just how much of an impact Marissa’s color has on the book. She complements Robbi’s lines while adding a griminess that’s broken with big pops of color. Nothing should work and yet Marissa has consistently found a way to make the pages shine. Hassan, on the other hand, is pretty much the only letterer I work with at this point. I’ve made the comparison before, but to me, he’s like the Hanz Zimmer of lettering. His impact on the work is unmistakable. I remember when he was about to letter the first issue, Dave Wielgosz, our editor, asked if we had any special notes or requests for Hass that were not in the script. I was like, “Nope. Hassan will get what we are going for.” And sure enough, he did. The off-beat fonts, the caption boxes that look like they are placed on tire skid marks, the squiggly tails on bubbles. All of it adds to the tone of the book. If these were just traditional captions and bubbles, Golgotha would not feel like Golgotha.
Matthew Erman: I agree with everything Lonnie said and I’ll take a moment to speak about the generational talent that is Nikola Čižmešija, who we are very lucky to be working with on this book for the backmatter and variant covers, which will remain a surprise until IDW decides to announce or spoil exactly what is happening.
He is doing work that is going to really surprise everyone, and the story that’s being told in the backmatter of the book I think is going to be this wonderful mystery.
In terms of audience, who is Golgotha Motor Mountain for?
Lonnie Nadler: It’s for us. First and foremost, Matthew and I tried to conceive of a book that would excite the two of us if we saw it on stands. I think creating something with that sense of authenticity will always be felt by people who pick it up, and in the end, it will resonate with more people. I’ve tried writing for a specific target audience, but that never seems to feel good. You can’t predict it. You can only make what you love, and if you do that with real dedication, others will find it and love it as well. At least, I have to believe this to be true for my own sanity. Very generally speaking, though, it’s for people who are looking for something a little different, a little challenging, and with lots and lots of deranged horror action that has no grounding in reality whatsoever.
Matthew Erman: Everyone. Buy the first issue and strap in, it’s going to fuck you up.
Golgotha Motor Mountain is available March 6, 2023 at your local comic shop. Reserve your copy with PREVIEWSworld Pullbox.
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Still needing to make their deliveries to the buyers, mutations or not, they set off down Golgotha Knob only to be beset on all sides by crazed addicts, cannibal police, and mutated Neo-Nazis. It doesn't matter what waits at the bottom of Golgotha Knob for the Damnage brothers because they must ride through a cosmic hell that they're unlikely to survive... But if these brothers do survive, they'll finally have made enough money to start over in the beautiful utopia that is Cincinnati.
Still needing to make their deliveries to the buyers, mutations or not, they set off down Golgotha Knob only to be beset on all sides by crazed addicts, cannibal police, and mutated Neo-Nazis. It doesn't matter what waits at the bottom of Golgotha Knob for the Damnage brothers because they must ride through a cosmic hell that they're unlikely to survive... But if these brothers do survive, they'll finally have made enough money to start over in the beautiful utopia that is Cincinnati.
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Troy-Jeffrey Allen is the Consumer Marketing Manager for Diamond Comics Distributors and PREVIEWSworld.com. He is also the Consumer Marketing Manager for Geppi Family Enterprises. Troy's work includes MF DOOM: All Caps, Public Enemy's Apocalypse '91: Revolution Never Sleeps, O.D.B.: Lyrical Ruckus in the City, and the Glyph Award-nominated Fight of the Century.
