Interview: G. Willow Wilson on Orcs, Ivy, & more!

Fresh off a Best Writer Eisner nomination for her work on The Hunger and The Dusk and Poison Ivy, award-winning writer G. Willow Wilson joined Derby Comics for a conversation to talk about her nominated work and how she juggles so many amazing projects at once.

Don’t forget to pick up The Hunger and The Dusk Volume #1 when it hits shelves June 11th & pre-order The Hunger and The Dusk Book Two #1 ahead of it’s July release. You can follow G. Willow Wilson on Instagram, Threads, & Bluesky.

DERBY COMICS: Welcome! Before getting into questions I just wanted to say congratulations on your Eisner nomination for Best Writer for your work on The Hunger and The Dusk and Poison Ivy!

G. WILLOW WILSON: Yes, thank you! I'm really, really flattered and pleased. I think it's been not just a strong year, but several strong years with a lot of really great books coming out, and some wonderful creators, so I feel immensely honored to be included in that list.

DERBY COMICS: So we have The Hunger and The Dusk Vol. 1, which collects Issues #1-6, coming out next week [June 11th]. Can you give new readers, or anybody who might be orc-curious [laughs], a summary of where we are and what the story is about?

WILSON: So The Hunger and The Dusk is high fantasy, containing elements that will be familiar to anybody who's been a long time high fantasy fan, but arranged in different ways than what you're probably used to. It centers on a world that is undergoing a climate crisis, very nonspecific, but eerily similar to our own. And in this world, human beings and orcs are kind of battling for the shrinking landscape as more and more of the planet becomes uninhabitable.

But into this comes another group of people who were believed to be extinct. They left decades or even millennia earlier and have not been seen, but now they're back, and they're changed, and they've become something very scary and this forces these kinds of very separate bands of orcs and humans to work together to counter this new threat.

We come in after an ‘attack on Lindisfarne’ type of event where we see these strange creatures for the first time. We're coming into an uneasy truce in which the disgraced daughter of a large orc family is being sent as an ambassador to work with this small, ragtag band of human mercenaries. So it's all about their adventures. There's tension, there's romance, there's politics. there's sweeping action scenes. It's a really good, meaty, high fantasy that should be satisfying to people who are fans of anything from original D&D to World of Warcraft to Lord of the Rings to the Elder Scrolls series. The ingredients are familiar, but the taste is somewhat new.

DERBY COMICS: In some of your previous interviews, I saw you reference that this story was a child of the dual lockdown threats that you faced between the pandemic and the wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, and that you also have an affinity for MMOs and the high fantasy genre itself. What was the “aha” moment when you combined them together to get The Hunger and The Dusk?

WILSON: You know, it was sort of escapism driven by fear and by isolation. It came to me during a summer when the kids were still out of school [due to the pandemic]. Nothing had started up yet, especially in Seattle. We sort of hung on to lockdown for quite a long time. And as climate change accelerates, the Pacific Northwest has had yearly horrific fire seasons when these formerly temperate rainforests have gotten so dry that they've caught on fire and burned so badly that where we live in Seattle, you can walk outside and not see a block down the street. You are breathing ash and there are all these warnings about not going outside, blocking up your windows, if you don't have a filter, make a filter out of cardboard and a box fan.

And so outside there is horrific wildfire and unbreathable air and inside there is a pandemic. You can't gather inside and you can't go outside. And I had panic attacks of a sort that I have never had before in my life. You know, especially when you're raising kids and you're sort of faced with these twin realities of the outside becoming unlivable and the inside becoming unlivable, you start to really think differently about the kinds of stories that you were told growing up. You start to think about if I were to tell them, how would I tell them differently? That's really the question that got me to an orc book, to The Hunger and The Dusk. 

During that time, I was reading a lot of high fantasy of my youth that deals with very similar types of characters and high fantasy tropes but I was imagining them in a landscape similar to the one that we were living in that was becoming unlivable. And, of course, as we're learning now unfortunately, your first instinct when resources are shrinking and things are burning is not to go help people and pool your resources. It's to fight each other. And that's what we kind of start with. The characters really have to sort of battle their way through this instinct to hoard everything for yourself because now, you know, there's no law. Religion has broken down. Everything's broken down. It's every man for himself. In order to survive, they have to fight through that and find something better because they do need each other to survive. Nobody can survive in isolation.

So yeah, it came out of an apocalypse. It's about an apocalypse. But it's about an apocalypse that is maybe 100 years more advanced than ours if we do nothing now. If we learn the lessons that the characters are learning in the books as we read them, then maybe we can avoid their fate. But if we don't, if we continue on the path that we're on now, then it's about what we'll be like in maybe 100 years.

DERBY COMICS: Unfortunately it feels like we're hell-bent on doing absolutely nothing until it's too late. 

You mentioned some of these titles already but, outside of licensed material from universes like D&D and Critical Role, there aren't a lot of high fantasy comics out on the market right now. Readers who aren’t into the genre often have the notion that you need these giant tomes to read before you dive in to get familiarized with, but one of the aspects I love the most about The Hunger and The Dusk is just how much world-building happens within these first six issues. It's not just your written story, it's the visuals as well. How much of the book’s “bible” did you and the creative team have planned before you started compared to how much was built on as the story progressed?

WILSON: We did a lot of legwork right out of the gate. I think the reason you don't see more high fantasy comics is because the world-building is often so complex, there's nothing that can be used as shorthand. When you pick up a superhero book that's typically set in our world, the powers and the backstory of the hero may not be something familiar to you, but there are cell phones, there are cars, there are subways, people have jobs. You know, there are artifacts of a daily life that we live and we recognize that you can hold on to. And that makes the weird, interesting, wonderful, unusual elements easier to assimilate.

In high fantasy, you don't have any of that to hide behind. You sort of have to come up with a completely new way of being every time you start a new story. You have to come up with a completely new shorthand that the audience hasn't learned yet. And to do that in the kind of very, very efficient storytelling that is demanded by a monthly comic book, as it turns out, is really difficult. [Laughs]

It was not easy. You have to think about things like pacing. How much info can we dump in here before it slows you down? And there are practical limitations, like how many words can you fit on a page before you start intruding into the art or covering up the art, which really breaks the fourth wall and also kind of does a disservice to the type of story that you're telling. So I feel like I had to reach deep into my toolbox and use skills that I don't usually use for superhero comics to get the pacing to feel right, to give just enough information. 

And a lot of it is stuff that you pick up, as you said, from the art. This is stuff that Chris Wildgoose [series artist] and I talk about all the time, what to put in the background imagery that will tell you a little bit, without using words, about what type of culture this is, what type of world we're in. How old is this tent that we're in? Is this something that we put up yesterday or is this something that's taken a beating and has been patched a bunch of times? So we had to be very clever about leaving those sorts of clues to give the reader a sense of time, a sense of space, a sense of what is normal, and what is unusual.

There's a series of manhwa [Korean comics and print-cartoons] that I really love, Color of Earth, Color of Water, and Color of Heaven, which are about a little girl living in turn of the 20th century Korea. Her father has died, her mother's a widow, and it's just sort of about her growing up, but it is so spare. And I go back to it again and again, because the way that the writer [Kim Dong Hwa] shows the passage of time is so clever that it's stuck in my brain whenever I've tried to do something similar. 

There's a character [in the series], a painter who comes by the house every six months or so. Every time he does, he leaves a paintbrush. So we see this and a few pages later, we see the wall with maybe five or six paintbrushes hanging on it. And that's the only thing that tells us the time has passed, but it really, really drives home what is special about this medium and about the old cliche “a picture is worth a thousand words” because you don't need any real estate to show that passage of time. It's done so efficiently. 

We tried to use a lot of similar techniques in this story to do similar things, to make a visual shorthand for the reader that does not require 10 appendices and chapter-long digressions about the history of this city. All of which I love in prose, but you simply don't have the room to do in comics. A lot of this will be invisible to the reader, and that's good. If it's invisible, we've done our job.

DERBY COMICS: Well if there's ever a Kickstarter collecting all of the background information published, I will definitely be your first backer! [Laughs]

WILSON: That's awesome! I will say that there are at least a few extras in the collected edition. So, if you've been reading the series and single issues, it's still worth it to take a pick at the collected edition because you do get a little bit of background, especially into Chris's process. There are development sketches where he'll show not just a character in their armor, but what they're wearing underneath the armor and here's why that is. So you can envision not just what they're wearing on the outside, but this is what's under the armor. 

Although, you know, there's more where that came from. There's also this pile of stuff that I'm hoping we'll do an oversized [collected edition] one day over the whole thing.

DERBY COMICS: That would be amazing! You alluded to the limited space [of comics], but for so much dense world-building that happens, there's shockingly little exposition or words outside of conversations and dialogue within the book. But when there is, it reads like it's somebody's journal. Is that intentional? Are we supposed to know who those are yet?

WILSON: Not at the beginning, but an attentive reader may be able to guess. In the back half [Book Two, which stars in July], you'll find out. But yes, that's exactly right. Someone has been chronicling the story of this truce, this alliance, and we see their sort of notes as if they're creating a chronicle or a history of this time, wanting to preserve it for posterity.

DERBY COMICS: Tara was a character who really stuck with me. We got to see a lot more of her backstory in Issue #6, are we meant to view her as the main character?

WILSON: This is definitely an ensemble piece. We don't get the same breadth of point of view characters that you would get in Game of Thrones where, literally everybody and their mother has a chapter at some point and you have to kind of remind yourself like, wait, who is this guy again? [Laughs]

So we don't take it quite that far, but we do get to see there's another character coming [in Book Two] who people have noticed in the solicits. And there's some interesting stuff that kind of goes down. We don't shift as much as one of the really big ensemble fantasies that people might be accustomed to reading might do, but we do get little snippets where we're following different characters around. But I think the real core of the story is certainly Cal and Tara and their relationship. The way that kind of gets torn apart and comes back together.

Although, with it being a hot orc saga, they kind of have a double in the orc encampment in Troth & Faran, where we've got this marital alliance that's based on kind of shaky ground and a kind of a love triangle going on. So yes, it really is an ensemble piece, although I feel it is very much anchored by Cal and by Tara.

DERBY COMICS: As someone who has been open about your own cultural journeys, especially as it relates to religion, did you feel additional pressure when creating these new cultures?

WILLOW: I mean, I did in terms of the history of the fantasy genre, for sure. I think historically, we've had a lot of scenarios in which humans are white people and all of these fantasy creatures are everybody else. Humans are a metaphor for white and the fantasy creatures are a metaphor for human cultures that we are implicitly saying are less like a baseline humanity. In spite of how elegantly you think you may have arranged things, I think the history of the genre will try to corral you into those tropes where the default human is white and non-white cultures are portrayed as non-human cultures.

In this [The Hunger and The Dusk], we wanted to avoid that entirely by making wide ranges of skin tones for all of the fantasy creatures. So when we say human, we have every type and color and size and shape of human that you could possibly imagine, and they're all human. And you get the sense that there were separate cultures in the past, but as this world has shrunk to essentially nothing, there's been kind of a context collapse. Now there are so few humans left that they are not as distinct culturally as they probably were before.

Then with the orcs, who are used to ranging over wider swathes of territory and seem to be in a better position to survive in this new landscape, you get a little bit more differentiation between the different houses and where they live and how their culture has kind of developed separately depending on the landscape that they've traditionally lived in. But among the orcs you have different skin tones, you have different hair colors, different eye colors so that we avoid this, “here are some white humans and here are some inhuman creatures that just happen to have characteristics of actual living human societies.” You really have to do that consciously I think because the traditions of the genre will try to pull your thoughts into those directions if you're not careful about it.

DERBY COMICS: That’s so fascinating to think about. Including, but not limited to the four main characters that you talked about, did you feel a deeper personal connection to any or were there any characters that were more difficult to write?

WILSON: You know, no actually. I'm drawn to big, unwieldy ensemble pieces. I find myself defaulting to that a lot in all of my writing. Not just in comics, but also in prose. I like a big chorus of voices where you feel like you're getting different perspectives and some of them are funny, some of them are quite serious, and some of them have something to say and some of them are just nonsense because that feels like a more perfect reflection of life.

I try not to fall in love with characters when I'm writing them, especially in comics, because the situation may demand at any time that you kill somebody off. But I really have a deep abiding affection for all of these characters. In particular, those central four characters because of their relationships. I think there's such a potential to develop them in these very complex ways and that's a lot of fun as a writer to be able to do that. If pressed, I could do a three issue mini series about any of them. [Laughs]

DERBY COMICS: Give them to me! [Laughs] I think it really shows that you love all of these characters.

In addition to Volume One coming out, The Hunger and The Dusk Book Two #1 hits shelves in July. IDW Publishing shared a few preview pages already, but is there anything that you can share on what we can expect in this next arc?

WILSON: Well, we get to find out what happens after a conflict between Tara and Cal from Book One, and Tara has to make a decision. We see the fallout of that. We get some new characters coming in to cause more trouble and to make it more difficult. There's some amazing big battle set pieces. We get to find more about where these creepy creatures from across the sea have come from and why and where they're hiding. 

We get a really great moment when finally this uneasy truce that's been almost broken so many times and is so on the ropes really bears fruit. Each group has done something that the other can't and it's only by their combined powers that they're able to confront this common threat. There's some really great payoff and some really pretty art and new environments that we haven't seen yet.

DERBY COMICS: I’m so looking forward to it! If you found out tomorrow that there would be either a film or television adaptation of The Hunger and The Dusk, would you want it to be live action or animated?

WILSON: Oh man, what a great question! I think if you had asked me a year or two ago, I would have said live action, but there's been so much great, epic animated stuff coming out the past couple of years that my personal inclination might be toward something animated now. So yeah, if anybody's listening, yes do an animated series and hire Chris [WIldgoose] to do your development work please! [Laughs]

DERBY COMICS: Yes, please! [Laughs] I’ve asked a lot about The Hunger and The Dusk so far, but I also wanted to ask about the other book for which you were nominated for an Eisner, Poison Ivy. It just kicked off its final arc of year two, I believe this was originally only meant to be a short story?

WILSON: That's correct. Originally, I was asked by Ariana Turturro, the editor, to come in and do an eight-page short story for a [DC Comics] villain's anthology. And it went so well that she and I guess others at DC were like, “hey, why don't we do a miniseries because this is a really cool point of view for this character!” And I was like, “yeah, that's great!” I've always loved the characters in the DC Universe who are in some way connected to The Green. Not just Ivy, but your Swamp Things, your Solomon Grundy, all of those. And that went so well, the miniseries, it became, “why don't we do a 12-issue miniseries?”

I was like, “okay, great!” I have to change the ending now because I'd sort of written it to end at that point, assuming that it would, and I had to expand. Then that went so well that they made it into an ongoing, which has never happened to me before. I've never seen anything like that occur, where you start out with an eight-page miniseries and by the end of the year, it's your full-time job. I am not complaining, I am not complaining at all. [Laughs]

It's just amazing that we are going into year three of this series, which was supposed to be an eight-page short story in an anthology. So it's incredible.

DEBRY COMICS: That is absolutely incredible and so well-deserved because this story is one of the best books out there, not just at DC. How much of year three do you have mapped out?

WILSON: The whole thing!

DERBY COMICS: Oh, wow. Okay, that was an easy answer. [Laughs]

WILSON I think there's less spitballing in monthly comics than I think there used to be because a lot of different people's schedules depend on the story. If a character is going to be available for this other book, then you get to do one thing. If they’re not available, then you have to do something else. So I think you have to have a pretty good general idea of where you want to go so that everybody else who works in the Bat-Office, or the X-Men Office, or what have you can make their plans accordingly. So we've got year three all planned out. 

I'm deep into it now. It's very surreal. We see more characters who are The Green-adjacent coming into play. It gets more mystical, which is a lot of fun! I think that’s all I can say without giving stuff away. [Laughs]

I don't know what's been solicited yet, but everybody's in for a treat. I just wrote possibly one of my favorite [issues]. I keep saying this one is one of my favorite issues and then I'll be like, “oh, no, this one.” But I just wrote one where I'm like, “no, this is definitely one of my favorite issues of the series.”

DERBY COMICS: You could be a fan of your own work! I would not say no to that.

WILSON: It's less that than you're like, “wow, I wrote a banger,” which doesn't always happen. Sometimes you write something and then you'll fiddle with it and fiddle with it and you feel like it's only ever just okay. It's always somebody's favorite. That's the magic of reading. It's always somebody's favorite, but oftentimes it's not your favorite.

DERBY COMICS: One of the things I love so much about this run, especially with the ‘Secret Origin of Pamela Isley’ arc that just ended, is that you're adding a lot of depth and complexity to Ivy, but you're not necessarily giving her what some would call a redemption arc. It's a lot of context to her worldview, her decisions. Did you go into the project thinking that some people, whether they be fans, readers, or even past writers or people at DC, had a misunderstanding of who Ivy was?

WILSON: You know, not exactly. What I really wanted to do was reconcile the very different depictions of her that have existed over the past 50 years. Sometimes she's a very sort of cheesecake-y, pin-up-y, you know, femme fatale, which is great. I'm not knocking it at all. Sometimes she's kind of an eco-terrorist supervillain. Sometimes she's so lost in The Green that she barely talks in complete sentences. Those are all very different iterations of that character and what I really wanted to do was kind of reconcile them in a way so that we get a closer look at her motivations. Why does she do the things that she does? Make it make sense that she's had these different stages of her career and her personality that she's always growing.

We think of the hero's journey as being something that only good guys do because “hero” is right there in the name. We don't think of villains necessarily as experiencing character growth.

And with her, what I wanted to do was give her a voice that could work in any of those iterations of that character, and would sort of make sense, and that showed growth. Not necessarily that she was becoming a hero, but that she has a better sense of what works, what doesn't, what her ultimate goals are, how she's going to get there, what sacrifices she's willing to make, what she's not willing to sacrifice, etc. so that we feel she's a more complete character. Not necessarily a better person, but a more complete character and hopefully we've gotten her there.

Her big priority is to save what remains of the Earth. There should be a sense of urgency, I think, if I've done my job, in her need to protect what remains of The Green before everything goes into a mass extinction and the planet cooks alive. But she's found out that human beings being part of The Green and part of this ecosystem cannot be eliminated wholesale without also damaging those things that she loves so much. 

She's reached a point where I think simply eliminating human beings so that plants can flourish is no longer her goal. She's got a more nuanced way of thinking. But at the same time, she's by no means a good guy at all. Her priority is still that we have to save this planet and she doesn't understand why not everybody is on board with this and, if not, we're gonna have to use methods besides talking. Wholesale murder is no longer something that she does right no. In another year who knows.

DERBY COMICS: In some weird multiverse, we didn't listen to Poison Ivy and we ended up with the world of The Hunger and The Dusk.

WILSON: That is exactly right! Yes, we need to listen to Poison Ivy now so that we do not become The Hunger and The Dusk later. That is exactly correct.

DERBY COMICS: Speaking of those two together, how do you balance writing two very complex ongoing series at the same time?

WILSON: The answer is my brain is leaking out my ears at all times.[Laughs]

It's just complete madness. I like to stay close to the metal, close to the storytelling. I don't know, I just really never wanted to do anything else. I know a lot of people will have one writing project and then they'll edit or they'll teach or work in film or theater in some way. I just don't seem to have the chops for any of that, so I just write a lot. To make it work I do have to kind of dump certain storylines out of my brain once I've written them. So if I get asked a question about a book I wrote more than like two years ago in an interview or on stage, I'll have to really pause and think what happened there and what was the ending

Sometimes after a certain period of time has passed, you have to free up some RAM in your brain to make room for the new storylines. So that's how I do it. Every couple of years I intentionally forget a huge chunk of what I wrote several years prior to make room for the new stuff.

DERBY COMICS: One question I like to ask everyone I interview is, what's a question that you've never been asked but that you've always wanted to answer?

WILSON: Oh, my God. That is a good question. Maybe the question is the answer.

You know, it's funny how few people will ask, “what are you reading right now?” You'd think that would be a common question, but it's not necessarily.

DERBY COMICS: [Laughs] Well then, what are you reading?

WILSON: I'm reading Kelly Link's novel which just came out, The Book of Love. I adore her. I read so many comics for work that what I read for pleasure tends to be prose. It's not that I don't take pleasure in reading comics, I love reading comics. But I have to read so many for work that I can't turn off the work brain while I'm reading them, so I read a lot of prose and Kelly Link is probably one of our greatest surreal/fantasy/experimental novelist/short story writers going right now. Every time I read something of hers, I learn and I see holes in the plot armor that I didn't see before. And I see ways to take different genre elements that I didn't see before. So she's always great.

In terms of comics, there's so much good stuff coming out right now. The Tamakis always manage, like every single thing they do is a banger. I love Jillian and Mariko both. I would love to know what they put in their coffee because, oh my God, it's rare that you get that many complete thoughts in a book. A lot of people, I think, will start writing and think they have a story, but they only have about 50% of a story and there's no symmetry. And with both of them, the stories always have this very pleasing symmetry, this rhyming, stylistically and in terms of pacing that I've always really admired.

My kids are also always bringing me the new thing that the kids are reading. I'm always finding new and interesting things through them, like Lore Olympus. I had not been familiar with that, but my kids love it. Now I'm reading it and I love it. I didn't read it when it was a webcomic, but now you can buy it in anthologized editions.

DERBY COMICS: Alright, last question. As a big soccer fan, who's going to win gold at the Olympics this summer?

WILSON: That was going to be my next thing! I was like, “somebody ask me about soccer, please!” That is a good question. Well, it's not going to be the USA. [Laughs]

You know, interestingly enough, maybe three or four years ago I would have said that Belgium had a shot. I don't think that's true anymore. I might've said Germany, but I also don't think that's true anymore. I wonder if this is the year for a dark horse. This year feels like it could be a lot of people. It's really, really interesting. You get sort of a preview of the Olympics in the World Cup because you sort of know what the national teams are going to look like. So maybe it's Brazil or Argentina, maybe it's a dark horse like Japan.

DERBY COMICS: That would be amazing. I would not be sad about that.

WILSON: So we will, but I don't think it's going to be any of the usual suspects. That's how it would make for a more exciting tournament. I’m hyped!'

DERBY COMICS: It really would be! Alright, thank you again for taking the time to chat with me & congrats again on your Eisner nomination!