Don’t Go Back To Nahant: Boston Comic Con 2013’s Locke & Key Panel Full Report

Editor’s Note: If this writeup of Sunday’s Locke & Key panel sounds fun, you can see a bunch of video from the panel, with a lot of additional information that didn’t make this report, right here.

If Boston Comic Con had a single event that no other convention, regardless of size or location, could reproduce in 2013, it was the Locke & Key panel, because it featured all the main players in the production of the book: writer Joe Hill, artist Gabriel Rodriguez, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall. And considering that the book is coming to a conclusion in just a few months, and therefore all of these guys will be moving on to other projects, if you ever wanted to see these three guys interact and talk about Locke & Key while it’s an ongoing concern, the only place to be was the Waterfront Room at the Seaport World Trade Center at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

The one thing that that panel didn’t have was a hell of a lot in the way of actual news, but who the hell expected that? We all know the comic is closing up shop (minus the odd rumored one-shot, which wasn’t something that was addressed at the panel), we all know that the Fox pilot for a TV series is two years dead, and the Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of Star Trek reboot fame)-produced Locke & Key movie is only a month and a half into its existence, and there’s no way in hell that they would allow any hard information to be released in a function room full of people wearing t-shirts reading, “Yankees Suck!”

So these guys were not facing a crowd that was rabid for any new information (beyond maybe how, and who will make, Dodge eventually suck the pipe, but even that was a low-key questions; after all, the final issue is just about on its way), which meant that tensions were low for the panel, and it showed. The panel unofficially started with Hill looking at his phone at the stroke of 2 p.m., grabbing a microphone, and saying, “Guys, this just in: the BBC just announced that the next Doctor will be Jason Statham!”

And when the crowd groaned, Hill said, “It would be awesome, and you know it!”

Yeah, this panel looked to just be a good time. And it was.

Since the comic book is pretty much finished and in the can, Ryall, who moderated the panel, announced that they were willing to pretty much throw the entire panel over to questions. And one of the first subjects to come up was how Locke & Key landed at IDW in the first place. Hill said that, back in 2007 or so, IDW was running a program to seek out short fiction writers and have them adapt one of their stories for the comics medium.

“They were doing this experiment where they were finding some of these weird authors… and adapting [their stories] for comics,” Hill said. However, Hill had the idea for Locke & Key already bubbling in his head – he said that, by the time IDW contacted him, he actually had already pitched the story to Marvel, who turned it down – and tried to convince IDW to accept an original story. “I said, ‘Don’t adapt my work,'” Hill said, “‘I have this story about a haunted house… I can do it in six issues…’ and they bought it.”

With regards to the series coming in for a landing with the Alpha story (to immediately follow the last issue of the current Omega storyline), Hill seemed optimistic. “I could not possibly have had more fun,” Hill said. “I just hope we stick the landing.” When Ryall and hill discussed serialized stories that didn’t end in a satisfying way, like Lost and The X-Files, Hill joked, “Tyler gets wiped out on page one of Alpha. Then we bring in Doggett.”

Hill made it clear that Locke & Key was always meant to be a story with a clear and decisive ending. “One of the first things we discussed was whether there would be an ending,” Hill said. “We wanted… a sense of structure.” Hill, again, pointed out TV shows like Lost, where the pressure to keep coming out with stories on a tight and dictated schedule can mess up the tightness of the story. “You create problems you can’t solve,” Hill said, asserting that IDW’s flexibility with the publishing schedule kept anything like that from happening. “[IDW] never rushed us,” Hill said.

But still, Hill asserted that it was important that the Locke & Key story have a solid ending and final ending (making it a little more obvious by Marvel, who is currently making billions of dollars on movies about comics that have been running non-stop for 50 years, might have passed on such a good comic story while still greenlighting Age of Ultron), because it makes the stakes feel real, unlike in, say, Spider-Man comics, where “it goes on and on and on… and eventually nothing means anything,” Hill said.

A question was posed to the panel about the Locke & Key movie and TV pilot (and frankly, I ain’t writing about much of that. Because there’s decent video I took of the answer that you can view at your leisure), but an interesting side effect of the shooting of that pilot was that it gave us the comic as we have it today. Because both Hill and Rodriguez were at the shooting of the pilot, and would plan the book while they happened to be together. “Gabe and I would go back to the hotel bar and work on the comic,” Hill said. According to Hill and Rodriguez, the last two books of Locke & Key were roughly plotted out over drinks during the shooting of that pilot.

“It has been a planning and discovery every step of the way,” Rodriguez said.

But all journeys end, and both Hill and Rodriguez are getting ready to wrap up work on Locke & Key, and unless they hit Powerball on Saturday (but they wont! That 400 million’s all mine, motherfuckers!), they need other things to do, and those things are already lined up. Rodriguez announced that he will be doing the art on the upcoming IDW series Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland, a sequel to the Little Nemo In Slumberland comic strip by Winsor McCay that was published in newspapers at the turn of the 20th Century. “We want the challenge to revisit it with fresh eyes,” Rodriguez said.

Hill, however, will be revisiting his own recent novel, NOS4A2, with a miniseries called Wraith, about that novel’s antagonist, Charlie Manx’s, car. “NOS4A2 is a story about a bad man with a bad car,” Hill said. “I wanted to tell another story about Christmasland,” the supernatural trap into which Manx drops the children he kidnaps. Hill said that the story won’t spoil the novel if you haven’t yet read it, and will feature art by Charles Paul Wilson.

So that’s it, right? Locke & Key: Alpha will drop soon, and that’s the end of stories about Keyhouse, right? Yeah, not so much… at least, maybe. “We’ve got about five books worth of stuff we could do,” Hill said. And one of the potential followup prequels we could see include Battleground, a story about Keyhouse in the Revolutionary War, and how the magic of the keys could have been used in that war… and more importantly, it could explain why some adults can see the magic of the Keys.

Which is exciting… but even more exciting is that Hill told us how we can stay the fuck away from Dodge and Keyhouse… or at least is was exciting and pertinent news for those of us who live in the greater Boston area. “Lovecraft, Massachusetts is very closely based on Nahant, Massachusetts,” Hill said.

And thank God Hill finally let that tidbit slide. So remember, Bostonians: if you find yourself in Lynn heading north toward Swampscott, don’t turn right on the causeway and find your life ruined by magic keys. You turn left, and you get yourself to Neptune Boulevard, where you can get your life ruined by heroin and questionable hired handjobs the way God intended!