Jude Ellison S. Doyle Talks Clayface: Celebrity Dirt - DC Comics

Jude Ellison S. Doyle is an American author and journalist whose works include Maw, The Neighbours, Be Not Afraid, Dead Teeneagers, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power, and more acclaimed works across a handful of different mediums. Today, Doyle’s Clayface: Celebrity Dirt with Fran Galán, Patricio Delpeche, and Tom Napolitano arrives in comic book stores. I caught up with Doyle about what readers can expect from Clayface: Celebrity Dirt.

AHEAD OF DC STUDIOS' CLAYFACE MOVIE, WITNESS BASIL KARLO BRING THE MUD AND THE PAIN BACK TO DC COMICS!

Before he was Clayface, Basil Karlo was one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. As he breaks out of Arkham once again, he's ready to stage his comeback, but there's just one problem: Someone already beat him to it, and Basil Karlo is already a massive star. But if that's true, what's next for the real Basil? And what does his predicament have to do with young women disappearing in Los Angeles and a new supplement causing hideous transformations in its users? Acclaimed horror writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle and rising star artist Fran Galán join forces for a bold new miniseries that's equal parts body horror and Hollywood glamour.

How did this project come to be? I assume your background in horror was a big interest for DC Comics? What was it like to work with Fran and Patricio? The book looks great.

DC has been doing a lot of original Batman villain series and miniseries — the James Tynion Joker, the Christian Ward Two-Face — and Clayface was definitely one of the characters on the table, especially with the movie coming out. I did not think I was going to be the one to get the job, but I really fell in love with the character during my research, and I did have a background in writing, up to that point, pretty much exclusively horror comics. I had scripted a ton of melting people and bodies being horribly mutated, and impostors and sinister doppelgangers and all of that leads you right to Clayface. So that helped.

Fran and Patricio have both been dreams to work with. I knew Patricio’s work beforehand, and really loved it. Tom Napolitano, the letterer, is also a genius, which matters when you have a character who has to speak in a drippy mud voice and still be legible.

Fran, though, is the artist I’ve gone back-and-forth with the most, and I came to admire and respect him tremendously. Not only is his actual work beautiful — this story has to be very pretty and very disgusting, in different places, and he never stumbled — he has a ton of intentionality and thought behind every choice he makes. I write a fairly tight and specific script, because that helps me visualize it, but Fran would always add to it in ways that were very smart, and he would always have a reason for the addition. When you really care about a script, it’s scary to hand it over to someone who might not care as much as you do, but I could trust Fran completely — he was always putting everything he had behind the work.

What makes Basil such an interesting character? His shape-shifting and transformative nature creates such a conflict with identity, which you explore quite a bit in this issue.

Basil Karlo interests me because he is just achingly human. He had his life’s dream in his hands, and fucked it up beyond repair, and that failure and the shame of it haunts him constantly. He’s not inherently a monster, and he’s not a monster by choice — he had an accident that messed up his face, and would have prevented him from finding work, and he got addicted to this extremely dangerous substance because it allowed him to work again. He’s essentially in the same position as someone who got addicted to prescription painkillers after an injury. (He was, at least a little, modeled on Montgomery Clift, who had this same exact story — rising actor, next big thing, face messed up in a car accident, and a slide into addiction that was called “the longest suicide in Hollywood history.”)

So it’s really not his fault that he became Clayface. He never chose to be an addict. No one does. But it fried his brain, and it made him into someone he deeply regrets being, and now, he’s in this continual cycle, where he almost gets it together, and almost recovers, and almost becomes his best self again, but inevitably, there’s a backslide. And when he backslides, there are more bodies on the floor, and more shame, and more reasons to give up and let the monster take over.

To write someone like that — someone who can be purely selfish and violent and narcissistic, but who also has a real human soul in there that can be appalled by the things he’s done — was really important to me. Clayface is always in a fight with himself, and you never know which version of him will win. That’s true for all of us, to some degree. It’s just that with a superhero story, you can depict it in a very literal way, where there’s a second Basil running around causing trouble for the first one.

The scene where Clayface breaks out and injures the guards is pure body horror. It's a twisted moment filled with dread. Were you surprised at all of how gnarly you and Fran got to get with this book? Were there many notes about toning things down ever?

DC does have a lot of rules about ratings and what you can show, which was new for me — like, you can show someone being stabbed, but the implement can’t be shown coming out of the other side of their body — but I actually never felt hemmed in by it. If anything, having to edit around something can make it grislier, because your mind fills in for what you can’t see — at one point, I couldn’t show someone being impaled through the chest, so I made it clear that they were being stabbed through the eye off-panel. What makes violence scary is the meanness of it, the helplessness we feel when someone is clearly trying and failing to avoid being hurt, and you can be very mean
without being graphic.

Still: Body horror, as a genre, requires a bit of visible splatter. You have to be willing to go really grotesque, and everyone involved understood that. Standards & Practices reviewed the scripts, and the note I got back, which is my favorite note ever, is that I couldn’t show blood or organs, but I could show as much goo as I wanted. So,
yeah, someone’s face melts off in the first two pages, but it’s goo. Clayface turns himself into a million little worms and crawls into every orifice of a man’s body and swims around inside his eyeballs, but no blood is shown. Just goo. Totally fine, family comic, bring the kids.

The opening page revisits Clayface's first appearance in Detective Comics #40. This version of Lorna Dane's death is much more graphic. What made you want to revisit that moment and show a much darker version?

I’m so psyched you got the Lorna Dane reference! This isn’t the same Lorna, because the other Lorna’s death is canon already, but I wanted the parallel to be there.

So: Lorna Dane was a casualty in the first-ever Clayface story, in which Basil’s most famous movie is being rebooted, and he wasn’t cast, so he’s lurking around on set and killing all the cast members. The idea of these young women, specifically, being harmed on set, felt very relevant. There are so many instances of young women, just starting their careers, being absolutely put through the wood chipper by their coworkers in the entertainment industry. I wanted to show the actual violence of that — to not just have a more or less intact dead body, but to have an absolutely horrific death in front of us.
Starting there, with the first thing you ever saw Basil Karlo and/or Clayface do, and reminding you of how truly monstrous that act was and is, felt like a good way to open a story that’s about the role monsters play in the Hollywood ecosystem.

How does this impostor version of Basil represent the real world? He appears to be someone whom the public is aware is a horrible monster, but his entertainment value seems to dwarf any concerns. He presents himself as an ally in some of the most condescending ways - all while claiming he's changed. What did you want the readers to think about this guy?

I think the version of the story in which Clayface became violent, and therefore lost his fan base and his career as an actor, reflects a much more hopeful time. We know by now that no one ever really gets cancelled. They just get a special on Netflix where they complain about how they were cancelled. Roman Polanski pled guilty to raping a
13-year-old and was on the lam for decades and he still got a standing ovation at the Oscars. There have been God knows how many credible reports about Michael Jackson abusing children and he just got a sympathetic biopic. If I actually named every guy who’s faced horrible allegations and is still a huge star, we’d be here all night, and
someone would probably sue me.

So the idea that Clayface, of all people, is just uniquely unable to make a comeback doesn’t feel reasonable. One guy who turned into a kaiju and stomped Gotham is not that big of a deal, if you look at all the other stuff we’ve been able to forgive. The really interesting part, to me at least, is whether Basil can forgive it. When he looks at this guy, this notorious multiple murderer, and sees how much the world loves him, does he think “yay for me, I’m getting my life back,” or does he start wondering why this is okay? How does he reconcile that lifelong, deeply felt dream of being an actor with the reality of
who he is and what he’s done?

I can't do this interview without talking about the Clayface film. Did you work at all with DC to align the book to the upcoming film at all? And what are your thoughts about the movie (assuming you've seen the trailer). Are you just as excited as I am to see a full-blown rated-R horror Clayface?

I wish I had seen the film. I’ve seen the trailer, and it looks great. I was given one or two bits of information, just to help me steer clear of duplicating any beats — like, I knew the movie would be an origin story, and I knew that it would be the Matt Hagen version of
Clayface. Other than that, the comic canon and the movie canon diverged such a long time ago that I was free to make my own decisions. I think the origin story version of Clayface is going to rock, because everyone wants to see a movie about a guy whose face melts off in the bathtub, or at least I do. Our Clayface is further down the road. He’s been a goo-monster for a long time, and he knows what he is, and now, he has to decide what to do with that knowledge. Who is he, who does he want to be, and how much would he have to change in order to be that person? When you’re a shapeshifter, all those questions carry a lot of weight.

Thank you to Jude Ellison S. Doyle for taking the time to speak with us! Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #1 is in comic book stores now!