Kill or be Killed, Vol. 2 by Ed Brubaker

The work she's done on colors has added so much to the impact and feel of the series, especially in these final issues. I'd also like to talk about your other collaborator on Kill Or Be Killed, Elizabeth Breitweiser. I can see from their work that Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz have those books too! They're useful for different faces, but I have to change all their '70s hairstyles.

Mason, Kira and Sharpe are based on photos from an artist's reference book series from Fairburn published in the '70s. Phillips: I shoot photo ref of myself for most of the characters, and Dylan looks a little like me. How important was it to you guys to have that perspective on what's going on as a counterpoint to Dylan's sort of matter-of-fact narration to what's happening? I found Detective Sharpe's reactions to the violence in issue #19 to be especially compelling. Is that something you're interested in definitively answering? Or ultimately will it be up to us readers to decide?īrubaker: No spoilers. One of the major running elements of Dylan's journey in Kill or Be Killed is that we're unsure if the demon that compelled Dylan to kill was real or a symptom of his mental illness. I'm not sure that his body language changes much. All he's been through takes a toll on his face. He's purposely drawn more tired looking and unshaven though. I find it hard to keep on-model for characters, so Dylan ends up looking more like me by the end. Sean Phillips: How I draw every character slowly evolves throughout a book, some of it even intentionally. It was about taking that structure that all of us who grew up going to the shop every week on new comics day have imprinted in our brains, and using it to do something different and familiar at the same time. It became much more about Dylan's voice and his struggles and his history than I expected it to.īut the structure, at least at first, was very simple, a guy in a mask who has to go out once a month (monthly, see?) and be a vigilante.

So was Kill or Be Killed always going to end at this point and in this way? What can you tell us about the structure of your story and how it's evolved?īrubaker: Yeah, I always intended it to end the way it's ending, but I didn't know how long it would take to tell the story, and it opened up and did some different things than I thought about at first. And a big difference between this book and monthly superhero comics from the major publishers is that they tend to keep going, while this is ending. You've mentioned in the past that that you wanted Kill or Be Killed to have some of the feel of monthly superhero comics, but also be completely different. I don't want to spoil it or reveal whether he actually did die, obviously. Ed Brubaker: It takes place after that and is the weirdest comic I've ever written, probably.

Kill or be Killed, Vol. 2 by Ed Brubaker