FROM THE VAULT: SWEET TOOTH PART 1

When the Sweet Tooth TV show was released on Netflix last year, I did a huge round of press, and most of the interviews asked me where I came up with the idea for Gus and Sweet Tooth. My answer was always some version of “this little boy with antlers started popping up in my sketchbooks around 2008, and eventually, a story began to grow around him.”

This is what I believed to be the case. But memory is a funny thing, and looking back at my sketchbooks from this period for the first time in over a decade, I now see that there really aren’t many drawings of “a little boy with antlers” like I remember. There are a few weird drawings of an antlered guy, but he is hardly a prototype of Gus.

So, where is the missing link between these goofy sketches and my little boy with antlers? I’m not quite sure, and my only real guess is that the sketchbook that has the next step of drawings that started to shape things towards Sweet Tooth has been lost somewhere along the way. Of course, this is possible; I have moved houses four times and studios three times since 2008, so things have slipped through the cracks. So, while I don’t have many of these early Gus sketches, I do remember the rest of his origin story quite clearly.

Around the time I was working on The Nobody at Vertigo (2008), I began to look forward to what projects I would do next. As I outlined in my last From The Vault installment, I had several ideas and projects percolating, including an earlier iteration of Black Hammer and Snow Angels and the lost graphic novel Minnow. And the initial ideas for Sweet Tooth were also forming around this time. Looking at some old notebooks and sketches for Black Hammer, I see a note and schedule I had made when I was thinking of submitting Sweet Tooth to Top Shelf as a series of graphic novels. I don’t remember this, to be honest, but I guess that, at the time, I figured The Nobody would be a one-off experience for me with DC/Vertigo, and I would go back to working for smaller indie publishers. Obviously, that is not what happened. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. So, first, here is what I remember about the origins of Gus and his world…

As I said, I did have this kid with antlers popping up in sketchbooks (even if I can’t find all of those now).  I specifically remember around 2007, biking home from work at the restaurant at night and thinking about this possible dark noir story about a murder at a hunting camp. I remember thinking a bit about these men who went deer hunting, and things went terribly wrong.  Of course, this idea was nothing like Sweet Tooth, but I think little seeds of a secluded hunting camp in the woods and deer were circling in my subconscious.

At this same time, I got really into Richard Corben’s work. I hadn’t really given Corben’s art a lot of thought before. Still, I stumbled upon the mini-series “Punisher: The End” that he drew and Garth Ennis’ wrote (and not coincidentally colored by Jose Villaurubia, who would go on to color Sweet Tooth). I really loved this story and was especially taken with the grim, older, white-haired, post-apocalyptic version of The Punisher that Corben drew.

I always loved post-apocalyptic stories. But, back in 2007/2008, they weren’t as omnipresent in pop culture as they have been since.  I mean, there was still a tonne of them, but The Walking Dead TV show and other huge mainstream hits had not arrived yet. So, somewhere these influences started to form the basic idea for Sweet Tooth; a deer boy hiding in the woods with his father and this hulking, grim older scavenger finding them.

The name Sweet Tooth came courtesy of one of my co-workers at La Hacienda restaurant, Ryan Oakley. Ryan was an aspiring sci-fi writer himself, and we often shared ideas overnight during long shifts at work. So I started riffing with him about what the biology of actual human/animal hybrid children would be like if they were real, and I remember him postulating, for some pseudo-scientific reason that I can’t remember now, that they would likely need lots of refined sugar in their diet. So naturally, this stuck in my head, and the nickname Sweet Tooth followed soon after.

So, these are the basic ingredients that would become Sweet Tooth. But how did it end up as a monthly comic series at DC/Vertigo? As I said, I thought The Nobody would be a one-off with DC. My art style was so different from the stuff DC and Marvel publish that I never thought I would work for them in a million years. So, when Bob Schreck and Karen Berger launched their short-lived initiative to do some “indie” feeling graphic novels at Vertigo, I imagined this would be my one and only shot at the big leagues. But I was wrong.

Bob and Karen really liked working with me. The Nobody came together really quickly, and I proved to be reliable with deadlines, and Bob and Karen and I just really seemed to like each other. So, Bob, and his assistant Brandon Montclaire, called one day as I was close to finishing Nobody and told me that Karen needed to fill a couple of monthly series slots at Vertigo. I guess a few regular series were winding down, and they had openings. So he asked me to pitch him something like a monthly book. He tempered my expectations, saying it would be a long shot but a shot worth taking. This was a Friday afternoon. That weekend I had laser-focus and took all these disparate ideas floating around and formed them into a pitch for Sweet Tooth, complete with this early drawing of Gus.

Right around this same time, my wife and I learned she was pregnant, and we had been excitedly discussing possible baby names. Gus was one of the candidates. So, as I was furiously writing up this pitch, I just threw that name down as my deer-boy’s name. I sent this pitch off to Bob on Monday morning. He tempered my expectations, saying it would be a long shot for the big wigs at DC to approve a series with my unique sensibilities, to begin with and that normally the review process for new series can drag out for months.  So, I really didn’t think anything would happen with my pitch, and certainly not for a long while. I pushed it out of my head and moved on with other things that week, including pithing an early version of Black Hammer to Dark Horse. But, that Friday, only four days later, I got a call from Bob and Brandon. He was clearly surprised as he told me that Karen Berger was so taken with the drawing of Gus I attached to my pitch that she had already read the pitch and fallen in love with it, and she had greenlit it for a series on the spot! “Seriously,’ he said, “this never happens this quickly.”

I was floored. How the hell did a weirdo indie artist like me get a monthly comic book series approved at Vertigo?! VERTIGO! The same imprint that had published all the most formative books of my teenage years? Sandman, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Preacher and ….Sweet Tooth?! Honestly, this had to be the most surreal moment of my life. I still have a hard time believing it happened.

But it did happen, so I got to work immediately, and the floodgates opened. I never dreamed I would get to draw an actual monthly comic book. So, ideas for covers and cliffhangers and subplots started pouring in. In the weeks and months that followed, I began sketching and designing all the characters and working on the plot for the ongoing story. Even though I had been greenlit, I still had realistic expectations for the book. I knew that my art style would not be everyone’s cup of tea. And, while people think of iconic, long-running series like Y The Last Man or Preacher when they think of Vertigo now, they forget that for every Y The Last Man, there were a dozen series that never made it past the first dozen issues before being canceled for low sales.  So, I honestly thought I had about 9-10 issues before Sweet Tooth would be canceled. But that was okay. I was still excited and intended to make the most of those 9-10 issues.

What was important to me was that no matter how it sold, I would get to at least tell a complete story with however many issues I had.  So, I developed multiple versions of the plot. There was a 9-issue version, a 15-issue version, and a 24-issue version. The story ended pretty much at the exact same place in all these different versions, but the journey to get there would expand accordingly depending on how many issues I was lucky enough to get. (And that ending was almost the same ending as the 40-issue version of Sweet Tooth that was published would have).

Obviously, Sweet Tooth did not get canceled after nine issues. I ended up doing the book for almost four years, 40 issues, and I got to end it on my terms. And Sweet Tooth would go on to open many doors for me in the industry and help me build the kind of career as both a cartoonist and writer that I could never have dreamed of.

But, I’m going to pause the Sweet Tooth story here for now and pick it up again in my next From The Vault installment.  In “Part 2,” I’ll share all the pencils for issue #1, which I have never shown anyone before, and talk about the joy, and the grind, of writing and drawing a monthly comic book and how I teamed up with Jose Villarrubia.

Below are my earliest designs for the characters and some early ideas for logos, cover designs, etc. Some were published in the Sweet Tooth deluxe hardcovers, and others have never been seen before. See you back here soon for From The Vault: Sweet Tooth Part 2!

-Jeff