By Kilian Melloy

I first met London-based graphic novelist ILYA in the late 1990s, when he was bringing out the second volume of his well-regarded, pre-millennium The End of the Century Club, a spirited story titled after a club set up by a group of young people — some queer, some ethnic minorities — in anticipation of whatever the year 2000 might ring in. The graphic novels — individually titled Countdown and Time Warp — were a distillation of three separate comics that ILYA had created, and included his most popular character, Bic, a young bisexual man. This unlikely crew created what we in American would call found family (or, in British parlance, “pretend family”).

In the quarter-century plus that has passed since our previous interview, ILYA has embarked on a number of projects, including comics-based biographies, the BBC-commissioned online motion comic Jean Genii, work with major publishers like DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse, and a prose novel, The Clay Dreaming, published in 2010 under his regular name, Ed Hillyer. That novel, ILYA tells me in a long and enjoyable Zoom call, grew out of a pitch he made to DC’s Vertigo line. The editor at the time was not keen on the story’s Victorian setting, dismissing him, in ILYA’s telling, with the words, “History doesn’t sell.”

It’s not a line ILYA believed then — or now. His new work, a sprawling 200+ page graphic novel titled Romo the WolfBoy Investigates… Strange Case of Cackle and Hide, is set in the 1890s and chronicles the meeting of the titular Romo (suitably feral, with pointed ears, a habit of running on all fours, and capable only of growls when it comes to spoken language) and Francis, a newcomer to the circus with which Romo travels. When the circus comes to a particular English village where a sorceress known as The Dentist lives, Romo and Francis and their colleagues find themselves the targets of a magical, and murderous, plot in which a possessed doll plays a demonic role in The Dentist’s deadly quest for revenge.

As with ILYA’s earlier projects, Romo is itself possessed — by a certain snap of humor, a crackle of electric dialogue, and artwork that pops with the artist’s signature dynamism and charm.

QulturVultur: As with ILYA’s earlier projects, Romo is itself possessed — by a certain snap of humor, a crackle of electric dialogue, and artwork that pops with the artist’s signature dynamism and charm. hat’s really interesting is you don’t stick Romo in a cage and make him an attraction; you take a different route with this story. What took you in that direction?

ILYA: I think it’s to do with the nature of the traveling circus troupe. We’re talking about Late Victorian era, so this is the 1890s and it was my chance to show off the countryside of Victoriana, which is not all smoky cities and Jack the Ripper, which I think is the cliche of the representation of the era. [Romo] is a foundling, a stray found by the side of the road, probably lying in a ditch or something, so he’s taken in by the circus. Francis is another person like that, and the [two of them] are grunt workers for the circus — again, this is a Victorian thing. Children were [regarded as] small adults who were useful to fit into smaller places, so they are young workers and roustabouts for the circus. It’s Francis who’s the engine of, “Hey, this kid can do things.” There’s an equivalency with superpowers, in a way, [with Romo] being brought up by wolves, which is a storyline that Francis introduces onto him. In a sense, Romo is my central character and Francis is the sidekick, but in Francis’ head it’s the other way around: He’s the guardian, he’s the spokesperson.

QulturVultur: There is a bit of a queer vibe present in this story, as there was in The End of the Century Club.

ILYA: Yeah, yeah, it’s all there. Anybody who has any concept of this kind of thing will know what they’re looking at, but yeah, it’s playing with gender roles. [It’s] referencing back to the earlier work, The End of the Century Club. And again, it’s kind of runaways, it’s people who don’t fit in, misfits. That’s my thing, for all sorts of reasons, and one of one of the criticisms [of The End of the Century Club] at the time was it was a PC fantasy in that it was one Black, one Indian, one Irish, at least one queer, one half queer, as Bic likes to [refer to] himself, being bisexual. This group was polyglot, multi-sexual, multi-gender, multiracial, all of that stuff was mixed. I was living in Brixton, South London, and that is normal daily life for me. It’s normal daily life in my family. It’s the world I know. That’s the common thread in nearly in all my work, is giving a voice to those who don’t have a voice. People don’t live in strict categories, and queerness is certainly part of that. It’s like, you’re not this, you’re not that, you’re somewhere non-definable in between. I think that’s reality.

QulturVultur: That also fits with the overall genre of the book. There are supernatural happenings that are taking place, and Romo and Francis are in the middle of that. It’s a bit as if The X-Files were dropped into a circus tent in the 1890s.

ILYA: I like that. It’s a good touch point. I call it mild spooky horror, because this is an intended all-ages title, which means you can read it from about eight up if you’re smart, like I was reading Planet of the Apes comics by Doug Moench and Mike Ploog, and I was about that age, and Panther’s Rage by Don McGregor. I don’t want adults to be scared of this either, hence some of it is trying to appeal to anybody of any age that’s got an open mind, but that has been quite a difficult fight because everything’s so categorized. This whole thing of dividing up shops into eight-to-12 and boy and girl, it’s a mess. Marketing convenience has nothing to do with how people actually are.

QulturVultur: Have you got the whole story for the eight volumes already charted out, or have you got a broad strokes approach and you’re filling in the details as you get inspired?

ILYA: Yeah, I could comfortably say eight books because that’s the material I’ve got in my head and on paper. The first book I developed is Book Three. They go to Egypt, and there’s a mummy involved. That was the first book developed, and it’s probably the most complete in terms of prep, and then I realized I needed an intro book for the characters, and that will be Book Two. [I created Book One] because I hadn’t shown how they met, so this was basically a “how they meet” thing, and it was my chance to do the countryside and circus. Book Four is America, and that’s pretty developed already, if I can get that far. I can only earn my way forward, so Book One has to succeed for me to get to do Book Two, which I’m working on now. My goal is to get at least as far as Book Three.

The paperback comes out September 1 in America; it will come out November 26 in the UK. I will be at SPX [ https://www.smallpressexpo.com/ ] in Bethesda, September 13 and 14th. I’m in America for a month, mid-August to mid-September, and I’m doing my best to make something of that while having a vacation of sorts as well and attending a wedding.

QulturVultur: How do you go about designing the look of a character?

ILYA: I think anybody worth their salt, when they’re inventing characters, they do it in a way that is a discipline — they do the head portrait, they know what the profile is. You’re gonna have to draw the same character up to 200 pages [for a graphic novel], so you’re gonna need to have them recognizable every single panel. There’s another discipline that comes from animation, [to be specific with] the silhouette of the character. Even if they’re 100 feet in the distance, you know who that is because the silhouette is very distinctive, and that’s where animation and cartooning skills come in.

[Holding up the cover of Romo] That is the very first sketch I ever did of Romo, and it’s the cover of the hardback edition. That [drawing] dates back to about 1999. He came to me in a dream, he told me his name, and the next day in the studio I did a whole sheet of drawings. He came fully formed. People look at this and they say, “Oh, Gorillaz,” because he’s got the overbite. They might as well say “Simpsons,” but I know what they mean.

QulturVultur: So, even when we were talking 27 or 28 years ago, you already had the idea for Romo. Are there ideas and images that you have now that you think might come to fruition in times to come?

ILYA: I’m going to try and stick with Romo, because, basically, if I can’t make this work, it almost doesn’t really matter what I do. I have had a career of pitching like crazy. I have ideas every time I go to sleep. I wake up with ideas. I have probably 60, 70 more fully realized concepts. If this works, I’m on this for 10 years. I have to accept that [time imposes limits], as we have seen with even the older masters. Even [comics great Jack] Kirby got very shaky. Your eyes aren’t as good, your hand gets a bit creaky and stiff. I’m trying to be practical and realistic about this, but I think I have developed a style that I can go with as it evolves. It’s wild child, so if it gets a bit [rough] I can make a virtue out of it.

I will draw until I drop. I will have that comedy thing of the last line dropping off the drawing board as I die. What else am I going to do?

Romo the WolfBoy, Book One: Strange Case of Cackle and Hide is available now.