Jamie Lee Curtis Calls ‘Mother Nature’ « Very Bloody » & « Viscerally Angry »


The Big Picture

  • Jamie Lee Curtis’s graphic novel « Mother Nature » is a visceral depiction of the dangers of the climate crisis, focusing on a young woman seeking vengeance against a harmful company.
  • The story explores the truth behind Cobalt Electric’s clean-water project and the horrors it has unleashed, set in Catch Creek, New Mexico, an indigenous population heavily impacted by environmental issues.
  • Curtis and co-writer Russell Goldman discuss how the original concept evolved and how illustrator Karl Stevens brought a stunning painterly quality to the gory and dark visuals of the story.

Jamie Lee Curtis‘s graphic novel Mother Nature is due out on August 8th, and it’s a brutally visceral and unflinching depiction of the dangers of the climate crisis.

The story puts the spotlight on a young woman named Nova Terrell who’s out for vengeance after she watches her father die at the hands of Cobalt Electric. Her quest leads her to learn the truth about the company, their clean-water-providing « Mother Nature Project, » and the untold horrors it has awakened.

While at San Diego Comic-Con, Curtis, co-writer Russell Goldman​​​​​​, and illustrator Karl Stevens all sat down with Crumpa’s Perri Nemiroff to talk about what inspired them to explore these dire real-world concerns via the graphic novel format. Curtis recalls first coming up with the idea at just 19 years old, Goldman explains how he helped evolve that original concept, and Stevens teases how his ink and watercolor approach gave some especially gory frames a stunning painterly quality.

Hear all about it straight from the Mother Nature team for yourself in the video above, or you can read the conversation in transcript form below:

PERRI NEMIROFF: Jamie, I was reading that you first started thinking about this idea when you were 19. What sparked the idea at 19 and now that it’s finished, what is the biggest difference between how you envisioned it back then and the finished product now?

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: Such a good question. See? I told you! That’s why Crumpa’s so good. I was 19 years old and I don’t remember the exact thing that happened, but I knew that we were blowing it. I knew that the environment was telling us something. I knew at 19, a girl raised in LA, that somehow we were on the wrong track. And I had this story in my head, but I didn’t really do anything with it, and then after I finished the 2018 Halloween movie, I got my mojo back for independent filmmaking, storytelling. I saw how creative David Gordon Green was. I started to write out the story. I started working with Russell, my young Padawan co-writer, who then really took the story in a different way, really reminded me that the story is called Mother Nature. I had made it more like a “father knows best” kind of story, and we turned it into Mother Nature together.

[It’s] about two mothers, two daughters in Catch Creek, New Mexico where Cobalt Electric is coming up with a bullshit way of water purification, taking fracking water and making it drinkable, greening the environment. It was a story that we were working on and Karl Stevens is an artist who I collect the work of, and I sent him this story and he wrote back and said it’s a graphic novel. So where it is today is it’s a much more graphic story. It’s much more visual than it ever would have been in my original idea. It’s very dark. The opening image that I am showing you is what happens in Catch Creek, New Mexico when an oil derrick breaks and slaughters the father of one of our protagonists — well, she’s not really a protagonist, she’s an antagonist, one of our characters in the book. So it has gotten very deep, very dirty, very bloody, viscerally angry, and it is now fully realized in this gorgeous book by Karl.

Image via Titan Comics

Many follow-up questions. Jamie and Russell, one of my absolute favorite things to talk about in this industry is when two creators find the ideal collaborator in each other. Can you tell me a little bit about when you first met on Halloween, and also maybe something specific you saw in the other that signaled to you, “Yes, this is a good partner in this business for me?”

CURTIS: My story as I said was « father knows best. » It was very “father’s the worker, mom’s not the worker, blah, blah, blah,” and Russell, who I had started working with, came to me and said, « Let me have a crack at it. » And what he understood was that I had missed this inherently important part of it, Mother Nature. He made this what it is because it would not have been in my version.

RUSSELL GOLDMAN: With a story that deals with environmental themes, there are 20 different parts of my brain that are being pulled in different directions about the possibilities of what this can be. And I think that collaborating with Jamie, and the thing that I love about it as an artist, is that Jamie always reminded me of what her original conception was, that this is a ride with vicious gory kills, and that we can put a bunch of ideas in it, but it has to all be focalized around that kind of righteous anger, that very emotional perspective and that excited the hell out of me.

CURTIS: Also, what Russell did is that it takes place in an indigenous population, and I acknowledged it in my original version, but Russell literally came to me and said, “We cannot do this. We cannot make this book with Karl unless we honor …” [To Russell] And just explain a little of what you did with that aspect of it, because it’s all Russell.

GOLDMAN: Absolutely. We started on-the-ground research for this book four years ago, or for this project four years ago in New Mexico. That’s when we learned that this takes place, it’s nicknamed Four Corners because every major form of energy that has been harvested in America, the remnants, the skeletons, it’s all still here, and a lot of it is on Navajo land. We had collaborated with several Navajo artists including Brian Lee Young who wrote the afterword to this book, and they saw what we wanted to do and they saw the emotional perspective that we were speaking from, and they helped vocalize that and helped tell that with their creation myths respectfully, and helped make sure that we were serious and we understood their culture and we understood the culture that we were also representing because it’s a very multicultural story.

You guys are doing a great job teeing up so many different details I want to get into!

But first, Karl, I want to come your way with a broader question because, correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, I believe Jamie and Russell wrote a script first and then you saw the graphic novel potential in that script. What was it about that material that you thought would best be brought to life in the graphic novel format?

KARL STEVENS: Well, the way that the script is written was just so visual, I mean, all the descriptions just really painted this incredible portrait of this place and this time. I was immediately getting ideas about how it would look, and that really alone is what did it for me. And of course the message, I mean, I’ve always wanted to do a book that did address the problems of climate change because since I’ve been very young, I’ve been hearing about it and I just haven’t had an opportunity to really express those concerns with my work.

mother-nature-comic-page-1
Image via Titan Comics

Here’s where I get hyper-specific. Of everything you read in that script, is there any particular visual that you were most excited to bring to life via your work? But then I also want to know something that wound up being more creatively fulfilling than you ever could have imagined to draw.

STEVENS: Yeah, there are several. I like the opening scene with the oil rig collapsing on the father’s head. The hailstorm, too. That alone was just an incredible set piece to me. I work in ink and watercolor so I thought that I could make it very painterly, and that excited me.

CURTIS: You’re gonna laugh, but I put on a wall “natural ways to kill people, » and then I put on a wall “characters,” and I did it with index cards. And do you remember those assignments as children where they would put colors down a line and then fruits, and you had to draw the line that corresponded to the fruit? I did that on my wall with string! I was like, “Oh, Bud is gonna get a pickax through his head in a black ice accident. » « The father of the football player is gonna get his head blown off by hailstorms. »

Speaking of hailstorms, I don’t know about all y’all, but if you just go on YouTube or Instagram and you just Google “hailstorms,” recently the weather, the climate crisis has created these insane hailstorms. In ours, for instance, a football player is playing football with his father. The hail begins. The father gets it. The son gets it, and then this is the result of what happens.

We have to pay attention. And the beautiful part of a graphic novel is that it forces you to pay attention because it’s graphic. It’s a graphic interpretation of ideas. And I think Karl does also these gorgeous vistas of what the world should look like, the way the world looked and can look again if we pay attention, and the grim reality of what in fact is happening.

Mother Nature goes on sale on August 8th.

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