From his humble beginnings in 2017 with the launch of Spencer & Locke to Space Ghost to Scout’s Honor to The O.Z. and many others along the way, David Pepose has definitely racked up quite a catalog! And with his current Kickstarter happening currently for all 3 issues of the O.Z., now is the time to sit down and pick his mind on a few things! So with that said… Let’s get to it!
1. Hello there! And welcome to Mind to Mind here at Comics & Chill! For those who may not be aware of you and what it is you do, could you tell us a bit about yourself?
Its David!
I’m David Pepose, writer of comics like Savage Avengers, Moon Knight: City of the Dead, Cable: Love & Chrome and Punisher at Marvel, Space Ghost and Captain Planet at Dynamite, Speed Racer at Mad Cave Studios, as well as original series such as Spencer & Locke, Scout’s Honor and The Devil That Wears My Face.
I’m a third-generation comics fan who’s been very fortunate to have the exciting and crazy career I’ve had, but I’m even more excited to finally get to reveal the giant-sized finale for my Ringo Award-winning fantasy series The O.Z., now live on Kickstarter. The series is like Mad Max meets The Wizard of Oz, following Dorothy Gale’s Iraq War Veteran Granddaughter as she’s caught up in a tornado and stranded in the war-torn land of Oz.
2. Since 2017 with the release of Spencer & Locke, you’ve been giving us all manner of awesome material to read and enjoy with The O.Z. (congrats on a quick funder by the way!) currently on Kickstarter for all 3 issues. What has been the driving force behind everything you’ve done?
I tried all the stable jobs, and writing comics was the only thing I was ever good at. (Laughs) But in all seriousness, I love comics as a medium — that synthesis of concept and metaphor and morality play, all wrapped up in such a breathtaking variety of artistic styles — and so I love playing around with different genres and working with such an eclectic group of collaborators.
It’s always such a blast to really dig inside a character’s head and find an engaging hook that gets you invested in them emotionally — and if I can subvert your expectations along the way, then that adds a special thrill to the mix. Whenever I meet with readers who say our work has resonated with them, there’s no greater reaction.
3. While doing some research on you, I learned that Spencer & Locke had been optioned for a movie adaptation, is this still to come?
Like countless other Hollywood projects, those particular plans shifted in a post-covid, post-strike environment. But as we’re nearing the finish line in finally regaining the rights back to Spencer & Locke, I anticipate we’ll have more news to share on that series’ future sooner versus later. I consider the third volume of that series my great unfinished business, so I’m hoping to start digging into writing that in 2027 or so.
4. Speaking of The O.Z., which is a take on the ever popular Wizard of Oz but set at a later time in its history, what led to you wanting to throw your hat into the ring on WoZ?
The O.Z. came about less from a burning desire to adapt The Wizard of Oz at all costs, and more that it was a happy accident that the story came from the original text of that specific source material.
When I first started developing this series, I’d been looking for some kind of genre mashup for a fantasy series, so I’d been writing down seminal fantasy titles to see if I could find any inspiration — my computer froze when I’d written down “The Wizard of Oz,” specifically in the middle of the word “Oz.” While I waited, seeing the cursor stuck where it was made me look at Oz as a potential acronym — and as I played around with combinations, “Occupied Zone” struck me, which opened up the entire series as a war book for me.
Looking back at the original L. Frank Baum novels, the rationale behind the story felt immediately apparent to me — Dorothy kills two Wicked Witches and exposes the Wizard of Oz, and then abruptly vanishes after destabilizing three-quarters of the power structure of the whole country. To me, that really justified that high-concept to me — because as we’ve seen in the real world, something like that doesn’t result in a happy ending, it just results in a power vacuum not unlike Baghdad. So it really just came down to the source material having a certain kind of unexplained inconsistency that turned into a fully-fledged new story.
5. The first issue came out back in 2020, was it intentional to end up being 5 to 6 years later on getting the rest of the story out? Or was it something that just happened that way?
Honestly, we’ve been hard at work on this third issue since the end of the previous Kickstarter — The O.Z. was already fully written before our first Kickstarter launched, so it’s just been a matter of getting all the artwork together. Our incredible artist Ruben Rojas had a few curveballs in his life towards end of our last campaign — he got married, had a baby, and was in Spain during the worst of COVID, which really did a number on the economy. He had a lot to juggle on top of a day job and raising a kid, so he had to Shawshank his way through our double-sized finale at a very incremental pace.
That said, my thinking was that I didn’t want to launch this campaign until the issue was 100% complete — and I also wanted this book to be as consistent and cohesive as it could be from start to finish. But even more importantly, I felt like I owed that to Ruben, as the heart and soul of our series, to stand by him until he could see us across the finish line. At the same time, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot more eyes on my work since the last campaign thanks to my work at Marvel, Dynamite, and Mad Cave, so I think this Kickstarter is also the perfect chance for newcomers to catch up on the entire series, as well as to check out my other work.
6. The O.Z. is only 3 issues in total, what led to you choosing to only do a 3 issue run?
I’d written The O.Z. originally as six standard-sized issues, but given the price points of Kickstarter, I thought that releasing our series as three double-sized issues instead made the most sense to me. The more issues you have available, the easier it is for potential readers to forget what they’ve already got, which can result in them just throwing up their hands and not buying the series at all — so this felt like the most user-friendly way to get the book out.
7. The impact of COVID is still being felt to this day sadly. What made you decide to go with 3 double sized issues over a trade for the Kickstarter?
There’s a lot of reasons behind that, but it all ultimately boils down to being pragmatic, and making sure we didn’t bite off more than we could chew. It’s easy to look back now, but when I first launched The O.Z., we had no idea if it would take off, so releasing the series on an issue-to-issue basis felt like the best way to get the book out in the fastest and least-risky way possible.
Beyond that, if we’d gone the trade route instead, it would’ve been a lose-lose situation — it would’ve taken far longer to produce, been more expensive to print, and would’ve kept us from building word-of-mouth from campaign to campaign.
Finally, another important reason why we haven’t made any plans to do a trade collection is because I wanted fans of The O.Z. to consider every Kickstarter a must-back event — I didn’t want readers to think they could trade-wait on this series, because every Kickstarter is vitally important to keeping The O.Z. a financially viable enterprise.
8. You mentioned earlier about nearing the finish line to getting the rights back to Spencer & Locke, how difficult has that been? I remember it’d been difficult for Jarred Lujan a ways back before he ultimately succeeded.
One of The O.Z.’s stretch goals!
There’s only so much I can say publicly at this juncture, but it’s been a long road for getting the rights back to Spencer & Locke. It’s taken a lot of effort, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have the support of my fellow creators and my hard-working representatives to get us to this stage. It’s definitely been a challenging process, but Spencer & Locke is perhaps the most important book of my entire catalog, and it’s something I’ve been determined to see through to the end.
9. What’s the future for S & L once all is said and done? A new home with a Publisher like Mad Cave? Or Self-Published?
Honestly, I haven’t really allowed myself to speculate too much on where we might release Spencer & Locke’s next volume yet, just between my current workload and all the painstaking work we’ve had to do in terms of getting the rights back. There’s plenty of solid, reputable publishers that I think would make for a great home for Spencer & Locke, or it might be a great project to bring to the Kickstarter community — or both! But ultimately, I’ve gotta write Spencer & Locke 3 first. (Laughs)
10. Did you ever think when first starting out that you’d get to write books like Space Ghost and Captain Planet?
Space Ghost, no. Captain Planet was a book I pitched to every publisher in the Comics Industry, basically from the moment that Spencer & Locke wrapped. (Laughs) But to answer the question a little more broadly, I certainly never expected to carve out this niche as the licensed cartoon guy, but I’ve been really happy with the books I’ve been working on lately. Space Ghost, Captain Planet, and Speed Racer have had some truly wonderful licensors behind them, that have given me and my amazing collaborators (Jonathan Lau, Eman Casallos, and Davide Tinto) an enormous amount of freedom to relaunch these characters with the most dynamic and forward-thinking stories we could come up with.
Daniel Warren Johnson really set the standard with his Transformers run, but I’ve come to realize that licensed books don’t have to be soulless cash-grabs — we’ve really been able to turn them into just as enjoyable and artistic of a run as any superhero or creator-owned book on the stands.
11. What’s next for you once the Kickstarter is over?
It’s going to be a busy 2026 and 2027 for yours truly after the Kickstarter wraps. Beyond coordinating getting all of the books sent to our amazing fulfillment team at Laguna Studios, I’m still working on Space Ghost — we’ve got our big fall event with the Herculoids kicking off in September, leading us to Space Ghost Volume 3 in 2027 — and I’m also neck-deep in the third arc of Speed Racer. Beyond that, I’m about to start work on another creator-owned project with my Devil That Wears My Face artist Alex Cormack, and I’m also tooling an outline for another big action project that might be my next big swing of 2027.
And I’ve got a baby on the way right after the Kickstarter wraps, so I’ll be embarking on the adventure of my life soon enough. (Laughs) They say “busy” is a freelancer’s favorite four-letter word, and I’m saying it a lot these days!
12. Hey, congratulations on the baby! If there’s anything you could go back and redo, would you?
Redo, like… in terms of the baby? I’d go back and invest in Intel — or maybe buy a sports almanac and pull a Back to the Future Part 2. (Laughs) Beyond that, no. Everything happens in its own time, so if I went back and changed anything, this ultimately wouldn’t happen.
13. Print vs Digital?
Why not both? One of the biggest reasons we launched THE O.Z. on Kickstarter was to appeal to a demographic that didn’t always overlap with the diehard Wednesday Warriors — there are people who are scouring online to find their new favorite stories on Kindle, Kickstarter, Webtoon, Marvel Unlimited and more. Some people opt for digital because of price point and convenience, others want physical for the reading experience or the collectability — I don’t think there’s any wrong approach for people supporting the books either way.
Panel from The O.Z.
So with that in mind, we’re finding all sorts of ways to leverage both print and digital formats for THE O.Z., to offer a variety of different rewards — for example, every print issue of THE O.Z. comes with a DRM-free digital PDF as well, along with digital behind-the-scenes materials. But we’re also incentivizing our physical backers by offering plenty of variant covers and physical rewards, such as our printed map of the Occupied Zone by artist Kenneth Wagnon, which is our current stretch goal at $25,000, as well as offering my other trade paperbacks as add-ons.
14. Who’s a publisher/title you have yet to work with/write?
There’s a few I haven’t worked with yet! As somebody who got his start as a DC intern, I’d love to do something with them someday, maybe after my whole work-family schedule settles down a bit. IDW is doing some great stuff right now, so I’d love to do something in the TMNT office one of these days. Or what Skybound is doing with their Energon line! But that all said, I’m positively neck-deep in projects at the moment, so it’ll be a little while before I can think about any of that — it’s definitely a champagne problem for a freelancer to have!
15. What advice would you give for those new to using Kickstarter for their books?
Be relentless with promotion. Contact as many outlets as you can for interviews and reviews, get a Buffer account and front-load your social media posts and graphics across multiple platforms, post and share as much as you can. And offer to do cross-promotion with other campaigns running, too. Ultimately, there’s only so much that can be done — if your book isn’t of professional quality, no amount of promotion will change that fact — and you can’t control the timing of your launch, but you can’t afford to be shy if you want your Kickstarter to fund. You’ve gotta be loud about it.
16. Stance on AI?
AI sucks. (Laughs) But I also don’t feel exactly threatened by it — comics are such a specialized creative medium in an extremely personality-driven industry, and unlike Hollywood, no two comics scripts seem to follow the same format whatsoever. So I think it’s much harder for these AI systems to even attempt to do what we do, let alone accomplish it at the level of quality that human creators are already pulling off. Between that and the AI companies burning through insane amounts of money that they’ll never be able to recoup, I feel pretty confident that we’ll see the AI bubble burst before we see it take over comics in any meaningful way.
17. And as for my last question, what advice would you give to those looking to get into comics creation?
It’s a marathon run at the speed of a sprint, so you need to condition yourself if you want to play in this sport. Get your reps with short scripts before you start thinking about miniseries, or even publishing anything at all — you’ve got to perfect your form and learn to think on your feet quickly before you can even start thinking about pitching a book for the public.
Beyond that, don’t chase after trends, write the thing that evokes an emotional response in you — and by “emotional response,” I mean you still need more than just “that’s cool,” you need to feel something about your characters, your concept, your theme. Finding that emotional hook is critical, that’s the fuel you need to keep pushing through the hurdles of making a book.
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And finally, be honest with yourself and your work — you’ve only got one shot at making a good first impression, so if the work isn’t ready for primetime, you need to recognize that. There’s no monopoly on growth as a storyteller, so keep improving your skills until the work is undeniable.
Editor’s Note: Huge thanks to David for taking part in this interview! Currently, the Kickstarter for The O.Z. is at 22,041 dollars of its 6,000 dollar goal with 8 days left to go. Meaning there’s still plenty of time to get your pledge in!
Interview by: Rob Wrecks
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