Last week, Ben Aaronovitch was interviewed for Amazon’s Kindle Blog about his new comic series, RIVERS OF LONDON: BODY WORK. Co-authored by Andrew Cartmel, the comics are set between books four and five of Ben’s Peter Grant urban fantasy series. Here are a couple of snippets from the interview…
Amazon: Have the comics enabled you to explore anything that the books didn’t allow, and is there anything that you’d like to explore in future series?
BEN: The books are written in a very strict first-person narrative style and the comics are much looser – you can follow other characters, do quick one panel flashbacks, memories and other omniscient narrator stuff – which opens up a wide array of possibilities of expanding the world beyond the books.
There are also jokes and action sequences that wouldn’t work within the prose style of the books. Surprise splash pages, rapid chronological intercutting and ironic caption/image counterpoints are tools that aren’t available to me in the books allowing me to expand the story in new ways…
Amazon: Both the comics and the books include rich detail about local history, myths, and legends. What do you enjoy most about the research process?
BEN: The best thing about research is that it’s not actually work in any way or form. Actually that’s not the best thing; the best thing is finding out stuff that you never knew – like the existence of a coffee shop on the Thames in the 18th Century that was called ‘The Folly’. Things like that just drop into your lap and seamlessly integrate into your story as if you’d planned them from the start – it makes you look good.
The first four issues of the comic, published by Titan Comics, are out now. Issue 5 is out next month. The series is illustrated by Lee Sullivan and coloured by Luis Guerrero. Here’s the synopsis…
Peter Grant is one of only two members of a very special branch of London’s Metropolitan Police. He is, in fact, pretty much a wizard and it’s his job to investigate those shadowy crimes that involve urban vampires, weird folk in the underground and, in this case, why cars are suddenly taking on lives of their own and killing innocent folk
The Peter Grant series is published in the UK by Gollancz; in the US by Del Rey and DAW Books; in Germany by DTV; in France by J’ai Lu; and in multiple other territories and languages.
