Jeff Lemire & Gabriel Walta’s New Comic ‘Phantom Road’ Is Stephen King Meets John Carpenter

What do you get when you cross Stephen King’s The Langoliers with John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China? You’d probably get something close to Phantom Road, the latest comic book collaboration from the acclaimed duo of writer Jeff Lemire (Black Hammer) and illustrator Gabriel Hernandez Walta (Vision).

The debut issue, which goes on sale from Image Comics this Wednesday, introduces readers to Dom, a grizzled truck driver trying, with great difficulty, to outrun a traumatic past. One night, he pulls over to assist Birdie, the victim of a serious car crash. They pull a strange artifact from the wreckage and suddenly find themselves transported to a bizarre, purgatory-like dimension inhabited by monsters. What follows is a thrilling and mystery-filled battle of survival.

“[Gabriel] and I had done a science fiction series called Sentient, which was well-received. And more importantly, he and I really worked well together,” Lemire tells me over email. “So, I was sort of fishing for ideas that may suit Gabriel. Around this time, I also started rereading a lot of the Vertigo comics I grew up loving in the ’90s — like Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer — and had a longing to do my own longer, sprawling sci-fi/horror/fantasy mash-up book that was a bit of a love letter to those series.”

In addition, Lemire was deep into the script-writing process for the small screen adaptation of his Top Shelf Productions comic Essex County (premiering on CBC Television next month), whose cast of characters includes a long-haul truck driver.

“I was thinking a lot about that profession,” the writer admits. “All this stuff sort of swirled together and Phantom Road began to grow out of that.”

In terms of the artwork, Walta states that he “wanted to achieve a very clear and readable storytelling without loosing the chance of conjuring the atmosphere that the story needed. In some way, when I interiorize the right vibe for a story, the drawing style comes naturally.”

To that end, he adopted a vastly different approach on Phantom Road when compared to his work on Sentient. Rather than hand-paint every single page on this project, Walta drew each spread in black in white before handing them over to digital colorist Jordie Bellaire (The Manhattan Projects).

“Unconsciously, I felt that the painted style was better-suited for a short, almost fable-like story like Sentient, while a long-format one like Phantom Road [called for] this ‘typical’ black and white, inky style of classic comic books,” the artist explains.

“The key thing with Gabriel is his unbelievable natural storytelling ability,” Lemire continues. “When he sends layouts and finished pages, they are so clear and strong, that they can be read without any words. On top of that, his character work is wonderful and emotional and really matches what I try to do.”

Head below for an exclusive look behind Walta’s illustrative process:

While King and Carpenter sprang to my mind while reading the first issue, Lemire cites The X-Files, Lost, Mad Max, and The Walking Dead as the main sources of inspiration on this book.

“These stories certainly influenced our approach, but it’s now become something totally our own,” he notes. “Nothing in Phantom Road is how it seems. This is far more than just a monster story. We really spent a lot of time developing the book before we announced it or launched it and there are layers upon layers of story waiting to be revealed. It’s a huge, sprawling mythology that touches on so many things I love to explore in both science fiction and horror.”

“When I was doing the first layouts for Phantom Road #1, I felt that I needed to show a strong contrast between the two worlds in which the action takes place, so I decided to use different inks in my final art, depending on where the characters were in every moment,” Walta concludes. “From the very start of this project, Jeff asked me about the things I like to draw and I remember sending him a list of the elements that I liked the most in the stories I had drawn [as well as] comic books, films, and books that I like the most. In that sense, Jeff had a very clear idea of the kind of narration that I could enjoy most — both visually and storytelling-wise.”

Issue #1 of Phantom Road goes on sale this Wednesday — March 1.