A sneak peek into the new baseball/vampire comic and a chat with the minds behind it
Can’t wait until this Wednesday to read Past Time? You can check out a few pages here now.
Adam Pollina/Mad Cave
1920s baseball, barnstorming, and… vampires? Past Time is a new thriller comic from Mad Cave Studios, following a baseball player who (for some odd reason) can’t play under daylight. Ahead of the first issue’s release tomorrow, I got to interview the creators of the comic, Joe Harris and Russell Olson, about their interest in 1920s baseball and why they’re bringing vampires into the mix.
At the end of the chat, you can take a look at an excerpt from the first issue of Past Lives, available in comic shops and online starting Wednesday.
What's your personal history/relationship with baseball?
Joe Harris: I grew up in a deeply Yankees fan household. My dad played instructional league ball with the Yankees after he got out of school, and he maintained some relationships with the club. He also instilled a sense of collecting and autograph-seeking by maintaining what amounted to a sports museum in our house while I was growing up. Lots of autographs (including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig), game used equipment and jerseys, and, of course, a massive baseball card collection. Some of his items were later acquired by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Being a baseball fan gave my dad and I something to share throughout my life until the day he passed.
Russell Olson: I grew up about a half-an-hour south of St. Louis. It was the 80s, which, for my neck of the woods, meant little league, Big League Chew, and the Cards. Whitey Herzog, Willie McGee, and Ozzie Smith were infinitely more important to my friends and I than your Hollywood Stallones or Washington Reagans. For us, The Hierarchy was probably something like Cards baseball, baseball cards, Transformers, Star Wars, and then everything else (comics would come along when I got sick of melting in right field during the sweltering Missouri summers). My dad taught me the rules, and in-season Saturday afternoons were spent on the couch watching that magical era of Whiteyball. Even as I drifted away from sports and found my home in the arts, baseball had established an immutable niche in the assemblage of my identity.
I've been living in the UK for nearly 20 years, and the two anchors to my life in the US are family and baseball. My family is doing great. Shame about the Cards. There's always next season, though.
What vampire traditions/stories are you drawing on?
Joe: We’re borrowing many of the tropes you’d expect to see: drinking blood, staying out of the daylight, etc, while eschewing some of the more fantastical aspects like turning into bats and sleeping in coffins. Past Time is a very grounded story and we wanted to be authentic, with regard to the vampire element in the book, while not being too out there and hard to believe.
Russell: Joe mentioned in the early stages of laying out the first book that he wasn't sure the word "vampire" would even be mentioned throughout the entirety of the series. I was conscious to keep things ambiguous and not to draw on too many tropes or traditional iconography. My approach to the horror elements of the book has been to draw on the subtler side of things. I thought a lot about the treatment of magic in The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Magic, in the Rivers series, is a precious commodity with more potential to harm the user than the target. It has varying effects on people and unless used by someone with immense experience is predictably unpredictable.
The central vampire of Past Time isn't really sure what he is, or what power he possesses. A bit like a toddler playing with an app on a phone: the kid can figure out the ins and outs of the app over time, but probably won't be aware that sitting on the screen behind that app are a hundred other apps, each with their own set of rules and controls. Like, maybe the vampires in Past Time could be immortal like a Dracula or Lestat, but no one has ever taught them how to commune with themselves on a cellular level (excuse the pun) so that ability lays dormant and unknown. Just like baseball. As a kid, I lived for grand slams, Ozzie's insane reflexes, and killer strike-outs. But the infield fly rule? Woof. Go ask someone else.
What interests you about this era of baseball?
Joe: I love the formative state of the game. The 1920s were where baseball really took off. After the ruinous “Black Sox Scandal,” which roiled the 1919 World Series with rampant gambling, and saw great ballplayers blacklisted from the game for life, the game was at a crossroads. I’ve always believed the standard line, that Babe Ruth saved the game and his trade from the Red Sox to the Yankees was the most important transaction in sports history. But there was so much more going on. The country loved baseball. It led underserved markets to seek out semi-pro ball, barnstorming teams, the old Negro Leagues, etc. It was an era of innovation in which baseball graduated from a daytime pastoral experience to an event under the lights for the first time.
Russell: I'm fascinated by the 20s. If you pull in the latter half of the 1910s, 1914 to 1930 is when the horse-powered old world smashes violently into modernity. And the same is true of baseball. Bigger stadiums, more press coverage, celebrity and stardom. The bat of Babe Ruth carried him and other players beyond the confines of the foul lines. Lights meant more options for games, which meant wider audiences, making it the American sport.
There's also something lyrical about the uniforms. Those big, billowy jerseys and crumply trousers. Every line of the uniform following the movement of a pitcher's wind-up, every ounce of heft in a slugger's swing. The humility of the simple outfielder's glove. Aesthetically, baseball in the 20s is unrivalled. If ever there was an era you could crystallize in amber to explain the poetry and majesty of BASEBALL to an alien race, the 1920s would be it.
Read an excerpt from Past Time Issue 1 below.
