Making the leap from comic fans to comic creators, the minds behind The Last Podcast on the Left have delivered a twisted tale of faith, possession, and 'exorcism made easy.' But no matter what fans believe they will find in DC Horror Presents: Soul Plumber, there is no guessing what darkness the series will pull forth from the sewers of the human soul.
Given their choice of characters and storylines, writers Marcus Parks and Henry Zebrowski have created a wholly original tale. Starring Edgar Wiggins, a disgraced former seminary student, Soul Plumber is the collision of faith healing, exorcism, and airport-hotel-hustling that the Last Podcast fandom might expect. But whether or not comic readers are familiar with the team beforehand, the twisted tale from Parks, Zebrowski, and artist John McCrea (Hitman, Judge Dredd) is going to be an unforgettable one. So to find out what inspired Edgar's mission, Screen Rant got the chance to speak with Parks and Zebrowski directly. Enjoy our full interview, and a preview of Soul Plumber #1, below.
Screen Rant: First off, can you set the stage a bit by explaining how you all came to make a comic book with DC?
Henry Zebrowski: You try to do things actively for most of your career as an artist. You attempt to do things - like, you go and you pitch; you try to sell yourself. That's why we started Last Podcast on The Left to begin with, because in the very beginning you didn't need anybody's permission to start a podcast. Even now, you still don't need anybody's permission - but it's getting more and more show business-y every friggin' year. But we started it because we didn't have anybody who would tell us no to starting it.
For a long time, we've pitched many different projects, and it was very difficult to get anything through. You spend years doing shit, and then DC just calls us and says, "Do you want to make a comic book?" And honestly I thought it was a prank. I thought that this was some kind of phishing scam
Marcus Parks: Yeah, I did too. When I heard, I did a little bit of a, "Yeah, yeah, yeah... Uh huh. Sure, whatever, set up a meeting." And then when we met with DC, they were fans of us. They'd heard us on the show mentioning comic books a lot - we use The Invisibles as a touchstone when we talk about magic a ton, and we just have these little references.
Henry Zebrowski: I think Transmetropolitan is technically still the most accurate view of the future that we will end up in.
Marcus Parks: If you listen to Last Podcast, we're obviously comic book fans. So, DC got ahold of us and asked us to make a pitch. We made a pitch and surprisingly they said, "Great! that sounds awesome. Let's do it."
Henry Zebrowski: And you're like, "What?!" and then they're like, "Where's our pages?"
SR: Was it immediately apparent what they were asking for in terms of a comic, or was the conversation as open as that sounds?
Henry Zebrowski: We knew it was for DC Horror, so we were supposed to be working to create a horror comic. Then they were like, "Do you want to write Batman gets haunted by a ghost? You can. Do you want to use our catalog? Do you want to use all these things?" We're all like, "This is a lot of options. We could do whatever we want." And they're like, "Just dazzle us with those little brains of yours."
Marcus Parks: Out of the three of us, I'm more of the comics guy. Henry, of course, knows comics and reads comics - but I'm the comic book guy out of the three of us.
Henry Zebrowski: You didn't say nerd. Interesting.
Marcus Parks: Because that's the thing. I'm not a collector; I'm just a reader, so there's a there's a big difference.
Henry Zebrowski: So, you're saying you're above the collectors? Is that what this is?
Marcus Parks: Not even close, but I have the knowledge. I've been reading comics since I was five years old, and I've never stopped, so I have a very deep knowledge of DC Comics superheroes. I knew that trying to explain Wildcat to Henry or trying to explain Deadman - trying to explain every character that we could choose would be this gigantic history. And that's the other thing too. Do we use like pre-Crisis superheroes? Do we use post-Crisis? Do we use New 52?
Henry Zebrowski: "We'll just move on. We'll do something original and create our own world."
Marcus Parks: Yeah, and that's what we ended up doing. Because from the beginning, we've always done our own thing anyway. We pitched our own story using characters that we created, and they thankfully took it. They said, "It sounds amazing. Let's go for it."
SR: With an idea like Soul Plumber, is it even possible to look back and think of where this idea actually began?
Henry Zebrowski: It's just steeped in esoterica, which is what Marcus and I have used to punish our audiences on Last Podcast for the last several years. We refuse to stop doing things about ultraterrestrials and ceremonial magic, because we ain't gonna stop even if you complain.
Marcus Parks: But that's the fun thing about. Me and Henry are fascinated with this stuff, but to people who don't have a base knowledge of it, it can be pretty dry. But when you take all of this knowledge that we have, and you apply it to a story, then it suddenly becomes a lot more fun. And you can trick people into learning about ultraterrestrials and old Catholic esoteric rituals and shit like that. It's spoonful of sugar with the medicine.
Henry Zebrowski: I forget that, outside of my world, Soul Plumbers is an unusual idea. But in my mind, I think a lot about the idea of UFOs and how some people believe them to be either messengers of deception sent by the devil - or the opposite, like angels here to save us. And I love that confusion. Because most of the time with this type of anomalous phenomena, it's 50% psychic. You are arriving with a set of baggage that helps formulate it.
Marcus Parks: One of the inspirations for this series was an episode that we did a long time ago, and I absolutely loved this topic. I loved this story; it was called The Andreasson Affair. It was an alien episode that we did, where this woman was abducted by aliens - and this woman was a devout Christian. Everything about her life always went back to Jesus.
The psychic experience that she had when she was abducted by these aliens, and they took her to a different world or different dimension, whatever, was filtered through a Christian lens. But it was filtered through the collective unconscious version of Christianity, where there was all this Christian symbolism throughout her visitation, but it was stuff that she had no way of knowing. It was this old Christian symbolism, using phoenixes and things like that, which were essential to first and second century AD Christians - but who somebody who just went to church every week in 1982 was going to have no knowledge of whatsoever.
Henry Zebrowski: It was like Wizard of Oz, but with Jesus and aliens.
SR Okay, so that's a perfect way to frame Soul Plumber, and its protagonist Edgar. The story begins with his religious mission, and it instantly reads as... an idea thought up by people who know a LOT about this specifically weird thing.
Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, we talk on Last Podcast on The Left all the time about how it's all just information that makes you a more difficult person to love; a more difficult person to be friends with and have bonds with. So, thank you. He's a weirdo, but he loves Jesus Christ. It seems to go hand in hand a lot.
Marcus Parks: Yeah, he's like a Catholic fanboy. He's a Jesus fanboy.
SR: So at what point did you realize you needed a flunked-out seminary student gas station preacher as the hero of this story?
Marcus Parks: That's where the idea started, with that character. Because the other half of the inspiration for the story was the Michael Taylor possession story. And it wasn't necessarily Michael Taylor himself, who came to believe that he was possessed by a demon, then killed his wife and his dog. He ripped his wife and his dog to shreds with his bare hands. What we were really inspired by was that the woman who performed the exorcism on Michael Taylor did so after going to a four-day weekend exorcism course.
Henry Zebrowski: Exorcism classes are real, and it's a lot of fun.
Marcus Parks: But this idea that someone could take an exorcism course and then decide, "I'm an exorcist now," combined with the Andreasson affair of somebody who has this idea and is like, "I'm just gonna do this." And then they completely mess up.
Me and Henry are both big believers in the collective unconsciousness, and personally I think one of the things that possession might be is that there's a crack in someone's brain, and they plug in to this collective unconsciousness
Henry Zebrowski: It's a free-flow river of thought, and some of it is not good.
Marcus Parks: Yeah, a lot of it is not good. That's how some people who are possessed might speak different languages, because they've plugged into something awful, and they just get the negative side of the river. If that's true, then it's very possible that in an exorcism or something like that, if you reach in then you can pull out something that's not a demon. You can pull out something that's an alien, or something that's entirely strange.
Like Henry said earlier, that confusion between what's an alien and what's a demon, and what are interdimensional beings, was so much fun to play with. Once I brought that idea to Henry, he was the one that brought in all of these other much larger ideas of Catholicism and other societies and things like that - having it be a machine.
Henry Zebrowski: Well, I love the Knights Templar. I love that ragtag group of fake soldiers. I love them so much. I love the Rosicrucians, and esoteric Christian groups are so much fun.
Marcus Parks: Honestly, it's been so much fun to do this with Henry. This has been the most fun I've ever had my life on a project. It's so cool.
Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, we get to laugh a lot.
SR: Well I'm personally excited to see where this goes, because you end Soul Plumber #1 on one hell of a cliffhanger.
Henry Zebrowski: I really hope that we take people for a spin in this comic. We just wrote Issue #3, and each issue is very different. Issue #3 has just turned into an action movie, and it goes back and forth. Each issue has like a fun tone, and I really hope people like it.
Marcus Parks: I hope so too. Issue #4 is going to get real, real dark. But every issue is something different, and every issue is a different experience when writing.
Soul Plumber #1 is available now wherever comic books are physically and digitally sold.