I thought this would be incredibly fun to develop in both graphic and storytelling terms. The way Joe was handling magic combined with human drama immediately caught my attention. I was reading it in a bus on my way home and wasn't able to believe how this was exactly the kind of story I wanted to do, but even better. I wanted to do a creator-owned project in the vein of the stories that got me back into comics, which were the books Vertigo was publishing under Karen Berger: Sandman, Swamp Thing.
RODRIGUEZ: Thinking about back then, I had already been working with IDW for a few years adapting books and movies into comic form. I'm working on a new Locke & Key story now, and when we were talking about Gabe said, what if we did this? And I was like 'oh my god, that's going right in.' We trade a lot of ideas back and forth. We sort of wound up like this old married couple. I learned as much about the characters from the way Gabe drew them as he ever learned from anything I wrote. And then once we started going, it was no longer just this story I had come up with, it was our story. I wanted to work with Gabe because I thought his art was vivid and compassionate.
Good stories of fantasy and dark wonder work well when you're invested in the characters, so that when they're in trouble you care about them. You could see what they were feeling in their body language and how they related to each other. There's a place for that in some visceral horror fiction, but what I liked about Gabe's characters was their luminous eyes and expressive faces. We looked at different artists and some of them were good at drawing, like, intestines.
When I was first carrying the pitch around, that's basically what I wanted to do: A story where the house would be kind of a character, and there would be all these keys that would let me play with all kinds of portal magic. I actually think books themselves are like magic cupboards, containing a whole tiny little universe for you to fall into. Like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The idea of turning a key and opening a door and stepping out of your world. HILL: I've always loved stories of portal magic.
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