Summary

• Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special is a horror comic set in the fading world of Hollywood pulp serials and explores themes of repression, guilt, and shame.
• The main character, Vivian Drake, is a mother and former serial star dealing with a declining career and hostile environment in Hollywood.
• The story takes place on a luxury train that stops in a coal mining town, where Vivian confronts her past and encounters the Mismatch Man, a mysterious monster.

Among New York Comic Con 2023, writer Jeremy Lambert spoke about the book's connections to Veronica Lake, his own family's past, and more.

Dark Space: The Hollywood Special #1 by Lambert, Claire Roe, Jordie Bellaire, and Becca Carey follows '40s-era Hollywood stars Vivian Drake and Lou Gaines as they take a train journey across America on the so-called Hollywood Special. Though their purpose is to the war effort, it's clear Viv and Lou are also struggling with their personal lives, and each problem — global and personal — is made all the more tangible when they stop in Minersville, Pennsylvania, where a mysterious monster known as the Mismatch Man awaits them.

The first two issues are available now, and The Hollywood Special #3 is on sale November 8th from IDW. Lambert spoke about his family's personal history in Minersville, the fraught personal lives of classic Hollywood starlets, the joy of working with a team, and more in this exclusive interview.

Jeremy Lambert Explores the Major Themes of Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special

Screen Rant: Before we really dig into things, why don't you tell us a little bit about the conceit of Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special?

Jeremy Lambert: So the Hollywood Special is a luxury train touring the United States to the war effort in 1942, and on board that train is fading star Vivian Drake, who is doing her part to boost morale but is really trying to give the tabloids something other than her nose-diving career and shambles of the family life to chat about. And when the Special pulls into the coal mining town of Minersville, Pennsylvania, Vivian is forced to confront all of those bottled-up bad memories and the worst feelings that she's ever felt and repressed in the form of what the miners found in the dark, which they call the Mismatch Man, who feeds on pain and regret. These are things that Vivian has in spades.

That's the quick pitch of it. But it's really a way for me to talk about repression and guilt and shame. [Laughs] So it's all of that bundled up into one [story].

I love that. [Laughs] To say that I love that feels wrong, but I—

No, I know what you're talking about!

Yeah, because it’s this huge genre thing, but underneath it is all of these real human emotions. Personally, I was really struck by having Viv as the main character, because we so rarely get mothers — who are very concerned about their own motherhood — as the main characters of comics. Can you say a little bit more about Viv, her relationship to her daughter and her family?

It just unlocked a lot of different things for me when I was thinking about it. It naturally came about because I just had this idea of— so many serial stars, which is essentially like, if you're talking about Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or a lot of that stuff, and all of the people that came before them, many of them women, leading these pulp serials. And then their careers just leveling off and not happening beyond that. Obviously they're still around, [but] there's this massive mystery as to what happened to them afterwards, what happened to their careers.

I think it was the kernels of those things that led me to Viv. Because Viv, I had her move and progress through the ranks of a serial — like a pulp star, pulp serial — and we call it The Adventures of Sally Steel in the book, which is essentially a Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers rip-off, but [with] a twist. But basically her career continues, and then she turns 40, 42, 43, and then all of a sudden she's dealing with a very different and very hostile environment.

All of that comes from when I was in film school. I kept reading a bunch of biographies and sometimes autobiographies of all types of individuals, but a lot of them actresses. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that Vivian Drake is kind of a one-for-one of Veronica Lake. [Laughs]

I figured. [Laughs] You got to the question before I could ask it!

[Laughs] So there's a relationship there, and Ingrid Bergman and what Ingrid Bergman went through in the papers with things like, you know — shocking — a divorce, a woman with feelings. It's just like all of this stuff where obviously it's not all gone now — at all — but back then it was this pressure cooker. People were dealing with that in a very public way at that level. Not for the first time, but with media developing and that sort of stuff, I feel like so much of that all coalesced into [Viv], her family, her daughter, the relationship with her daughter.

The kids in this book, Ava being one of them — her daughter — are all kind of— there’s this— Hollywood Special— I'm trying to, like, dance around spoilers. [Laughs]

The perennial problem!

But basically, so much of it is from Viv’s point of view, and so much of the heart of it is how kids see and experience stories and heroes, and how that changes who you are and emotionally alters you in a lot of ways. It's the most backhanded way of me trying to say thank you to the people that helped carry me through my childhood. Who are, you know, the people that were on the screen, the people that were in the books, that kind of stuff. Hopefully that comes across.

[Laughs] But it's such a weird, like— in a horror story about, you know— so much of it might not make sense, but Vivian and Ava are central to that, and Vivian and Molly are central to that, that's all.

I feel like this is a good time to bring up Molly and the mining town. One of the memorable moments in the first issue is when they open the train doors and it's just the little girl standing there. It's so interesting to have this Golden Age Hollywood setting alongside the mining town setting, which is another kind of specter of American history that feels so iconic and tragic at the same time. Can you say a little bit more about, you know— why the mining town, and what that has to do with the Mismatch Man?

The quick, gruesome, and weird way that [idea for] this book came about was — my dad's family is from Minersville, the actual town in Pennsylvania, and everything in that town revolves around the mine. Well, maybe not so much anymore, but it has for such a long time. The mine was life, you know?

My grandfather grew up there, and before he died, he wrote a memoir — like a personal Word document, not something to be published. But he'd written about his childhood in Minersville, and I was about 12 or 13 when I started reading this for the first time, which was probably still too young. But the opening pages were about breaker boys in the mines, these young 8 and 9 year old boys who would work on the breaker, which is this massive, very dangerous piece of machinery, to sort all of the coal. Their hands were so small that they could get into the crevices and get things where they needed to go — which is terrifying that you're hiring 8 and 9 year old children for this!

But anyway, [my grandfather] was talking about this, and then occasionally there would be a mine collapse. There would be a tragedy. And these kids, these young kids, are sorting through the coal, and they're sorting and they're finding rocks and debris, but they're also finding fingers and hands. And I'm like 12 years old reading this and I'm losing my mind, I'm just like, You have to be kidding me! [Laughs]

When you're experiencing that at such a young age — and so that stuck with me. [My grandfather] was born in ‘27, I believe it was, so around the time that I was reading that, it was about 1940 [or] 1942. But all of that got brought together for me when I was— you know, I've been such a fan of comics, but also of film. And I went to film school and all of that, and so I had just gone to some family reunions in Minersville, Pennsylvania, and I was going from that to Los Angeles, and then a Q&A with some famous person.

I don't know — I feel like that kind of brought it all together for me, because they were sort of these two separate ideas of this relationship that I really wanted to explore and talk about with my own — we don't need to dive too far into it — my own thoughts of guilt and shame and repression and “could I have done things differently” and “did I make the wrong choices” and just — fusing all of that together with these two very different worlds colliding with each other.

I hope that answers the question. [Laugh]

No, it definitely does! And, you know, I'm really interested — I know before The Hollywood Special you worked a lot on licensed work for comics. So I wanted to ask you, thinking about the personal and taking our personal stories and putting them on the page: what's it been like moving from the licensed work to your own original work?

So I absolutely love the books. The licensed books that I've been able to do, I would never have thought — like it's literally ticking things off at the very top of the list. There is no world in which I [would turn down] Goosebumps and Buffy and Doom Patrol. Those would be like, in a Holy Trinity for me. So it's kind of crazy that that was the case. So I'm so thrilled with that, and so lucky to be a part of those books.

But working on originals has always been the goal for me and what I wanted to do the most. This has been the most fun and the most wonderful experience in comics that I've had to date. Just because of how personal the story is — but also because it's such a great example of what comics does best, and what I love most about comics, which is a small team of people working very closely together. The fact that those people are [artist] Claire Roe and [colorist] Jordie Bellaire and [letterer] Becca Carey has me completely losing my mind, because I've been such a huge fan of Claire’s for a long, long time, and a fan of Jordie’s, too. But Jordie and I are friends, and I wouldn't be in comics without Jordie, so I know that I'm biased in that regard, but I consider Jordie one of the greatest people in the world and comics.

Having those two individuals in particular — and also Becca Carey, who is doing incredible work and I absolutely love working with Becca — working with Claire and Jordie has been such a highlight for me. As much as I've loved so much of what's come before and the ridiculous talent that I've been able to be around or sort of circling around, it's just — working with those two has been such a fulfilling creative experience for me that I've had the most fun working on this terrifying, [laughs] ridiculous book about the Mismatch Man!

So, long-winded way of me saying — I knew comics could be so much fun to work in, because I had done it, but this is on a different level, I think. So much of that is that it is my first original that’s seeing the light of day, it is working with these people who I would work with any day of the week. I would pay so much money — publishers, don't listen [laughs] — pay so much money to work with them every day! It's awesome.

It's really interesting hearing you talk about your collaborators after talking about how movies have influenced this [story]. Because when I think about comics and movies, they feel like the two great collaborative art forms — and collaborative American art forms in particular.

Yeah, totally! I feel like that's why I'm chasing after that! Because I've done some work in film, and with comics, too, like — it's my favorite part of both of those mediums. The people, and working with people — a lot of them you don't know yet, of course, but building those relationships and finding your people. People you love to work with and get to have a lot of fun in life with. [Laughs] Guy’s writing a horror book and he's like, We only live for so long! Let's have fun in the world!

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah!

[Laughs] That's kind of what I'm saying, I guess.

Make art with your friends!

Yeah, make art with your friends!

What else is living for?

Exactly.

So this is original work, but it's also under [IDW’s] Dark Spaces line, and, you know, Wildfire [by Scott Snyder and Hayden Sherman] is a great book as well. So how do you feel The Hollywood Special fits into the larger themes of the Dark Spaces anthology?

Short answer is that its emotional core lines up with what Scott Snyder and [editor] Mark Doyle had wanted to do with the line, Scott in specific. The pitch, originally, for Hollywood Special — it hit Mark's desk first, and then Mark showed it to Scott, and Scott was like, Yeah, let's do this for Dark Spaces.

I was first off completely elated as such a huge fan of Scott's work, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful way to bring that book into life. But I feel like across the spectrum of the Dark Spaces books, there's a lot of scary stuff. Thrillers? Absolutely. But I also feel like, for me, viewing a lot of them through the horror lens is what ties them together. The spirit of what each of the books covers is all very different, but there is that core to all of them that I think ties them together.

I think what drew Scott to this one, to Hollywood Special, for the Dark Spaces line was that repression and was that study in literally burying something in the earth to try and avoid it — and then not being able to escape it when it comes back up and it comes back up wrong. [Laughs] Because it always will. So I feel like that is a big part of what Scott was interested in and sort of piecing it — of the puzzle, but also being a separate piece in the Dark Spaces puzzle and tapestry. That, I think, is what helps relate it to everything.

One last question, and then I'll let you go. I wanted to end on a fun one, and you've already brought up Veronica Lake, obviously, Ingrid Bergman — you stole my question from me! But I really wanted to ask you — I'm also a huge fan of Golden Age Hollywood, and reading this book makes me feel like I'm watching a twisted version of TCM [Turner Classic Movies] in, like, the best way.

Oh, that's the best thing I've ever heard! Oh, you just made my whole con. I can just — I'm going to go home now. That's it.

That's how I would pitch to my friends. [Laughs]

I love this so much — thank you for giving me that. I'm just gonna, like, credit you and just put that in there. The best!

So I wanted to ask if there are any other movies in particular that influence the way you think about the aesthetics of The Hollywood Special?

Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny, because I feel like I overloaded Claire and Jordie in particular with look-book references and titles to watch and all that stuff. A lot of them were Veronica Lake movies for certain looks and things like that. Honestly, there have been so many that I was sending over. Specifically, if we're talking about issue 1 so that I can avoid spoilers, too, is that intro and how characters and how stars are introduced in films. Films that are entirely their own — they're not, you know, the sequel or the seventh entry in a series.

Notorious — Hitchcock's Notorious, and how you introduce Cary Grant, how you introduce Ingrid Bergman, how you introduce these characters. How do you bring that star power to a character nobody knows about within the first five pages? And emotionally hook them? That was the spirit of all my recommendations in of movies to them. There were a lot of different ones that I was throwing out there. Another one of them was Cat People — [prodeced by] Val Lewton — a horror movie, which I love.

There's a good bit of David Lynch movies that are in there as well. [Laughs] I was just like, Alright, so I know this isn't 1940s, 1950s, but hear me out! Check out Eraserhead, or check out, you know, this — just for little visual cues. [I was] going a little overboard with those. It was kind of all over the place, because a lot of them would be horror, like I had mentioned Cat People. Bringing Up Baby I threw in there for something, and I don't know why, that is like, diametrically opposed to The Hollywood Special. [Laughs]

It was also an introduction thing, because, like, introducing Cary Grant at the top of the tower, whatever it was — just, truncated space, and doing a lot with a little, and thinking about comics, and the opening five pages to explain so much about who these people are. Most importantly emotionally, but also their stature in the world of film, where they currently are. One of my favorite things is [Hollywood Special character] Lou Gaines and his introduction on page four or five, where you get that poster.

Another thing that I had thrown at [the team] was a lot of proper US war propaganda films from the ‘40s. Again, I say I threw all this stuff as reference, but they took half of it, rejected the other half, and then doubled it into whatever it became by making it so much better. But I really liked that very beautiful thing that they both did. That Claire did with the mirror images of Lou looking at the poster. I put in the script [that] most importantly was just his reaction.

Then Jordie took the color from the poster and put it in the background of Lou’s reaction shot , and nothing else is in the background. I was like, You are doing so much work with one color! I could never. You can't script it. It's the brilliance of comics and the brilliance of Jordie and the brilliance of Claire. I love that stuff.

I'm going on a tangent about comics when you asked me about movies, but I'll follow up. I'll send you an e-mail with like—

[Laughs] Here's some homework!

[Laughs] No, no, no, so we can talk about movies! You saying anything about TCM is now my favorite.

Yes! I've succeeded, and it's the first two hours of the con!

You did it! You did it. Look, I think one of the best things in the world is — like a Saturday or Sunday or something — turning on TCM, whether you're sitting on the couch watching it or cooking in the kitchen and it's on in the background and you're hearing like, Katharine Hepburn, with some whip crack dialogue and like, ugh!

It's just so fun because I feel like that's bleeding into Hollywood Special. A lot of that stuff, certain dialogue moments. I think issue 2 in particular has some as well, but it's so influential in how that comes together. And viewing something so emotional through something that's so gilded and beautiful and staged and has this sheen to it. [It] helps to show the shield that is built over what's lying beneath it and is very sort of tender and painful. But [still] having this upper layer of protection of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Check out Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special #3, available November 8th from IDW Publishing!