Interview with Michael Alan Nelson
Brian Eison;)
For followers of Boom! Studios (as the Dollar Bin tends to be), the names of a few creators start to become very familiar both for the amount of work they produce for the growing publisher as well as the quality of it. One of those names is Michael Alan Nelson, writer of DB staff favorites like HEXED, DINGO, 28 DAYS LATER and numerous others. Despite this very hectic writing schedule, Michael was recently able to carve out some time for this Dollar Bin e-mail Q&A session.
DB: Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer a few questions for us. If you don’t mind, can you start with telling us how you first got interested in comics and how you got started in the industry?
MAN: It’s quite funny since I never really read many comics growing up. I lived in a small rural town in the middle of nowhere and the closest thing we had to a comics shop was the local public library. So I only had access to a couple of Elf Quest books and a graphic adaptation of the movie Alien. It wasn’t until I graduated from college that I really started getting into comics. My brother colored comics for years, so I began by reading the books he worked on.
As for how I came to write comics, my path was a bit unconventional. After several years of trying to break into the world of fiction, I wrote a novel titled DINGO. I published it online under a Creative Commons license, posting a chapter a week. Fortunately, Ross Richie had read it and really enjoyed it. So he approached me and said he was starting a new comic book company and if I’d like to try my hand at writing comics. So I sat down and wrote a short story for Zombie Tales. Ross like it and has been asking me to write for him ever since.