Stranger Comics founder Sebastian A. Jones is living pretty much every creator’s wildest dreams. His beloved and critically lauded graphic novel The Untamed: A Sinner’s Prayer spawned an entire universe, giving fans the gift of Niobe. She’s a Black heroine with a powerful story that’s attracted the attention of Hollywood heavyweights like Amandla Stenberg, who co-wrote Niobe: She Is Life #1 with Jones, and Viola Davis, who is bringing The Untamed to life in an upcoming film adaptation. And the world of Niobe will expand in an upcoming anime, which is a delight to dedicated readers of his work. We sat down with Jones to talk about his long journey with Untamed, maintaining creative control, and more.
Nerdist: How did you come up with The Untamed’s concept and storyline?
Sebastian A. Jones: I’ve been creating this fantasy world since I was a young chap in England. When I was about 13, I spent a lot of time in the boarding house and I was picked on for being mixed or different or whatever. And I think I started creating this world to hide within it. Niobe took on my vulnerabilities and my insecurities, but also my wrath. And as I grew, she grew with me and the world I was creating continued to grow around her. I moved to America at 18 and I ran a record label for a lot of years and I started shopping around this idea for this big fantasy world.
I was always very inspired by the Kurosawa movies like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, as well as the spaghetti Westerns like the Fistful of Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West… I didn’t put the weight of the world already on [Niobe]’s shoulders, but instead on the shoulders of this man looking for redemption. What would a man do to save his family? Would you damn your family to save the world? That became the premise for The Untamed.
It is a story of a man called the Stranger who was stuck in purgatory. And after ten years, the Devil comes along and he says, “I will give you seven days to reap the seven souls that murdered you and your family.” Of course, this man says, “Well, sign me up.” He goes to a one horse town in a huge world. And as his memory comes back, he realizes when he was alive that maybe he was a bad man and maybe he deserved to die. But now he’s on a path to save his family. Along his path of vengeance, he meets a little elven girl called Niobe. And she reminds him of how old his murdered daughter would’ve been had she lived.
The Stranger passes the baton to Niobe to become the face of the franchise… Niobe is this man’s conscience, is our conscience, but it’s also a lot to ask of her. We get to explore the world of Asunda through her eyes.
That sounds like quite the long journey with this story and these characters, one that started far before we knew them and continues to grow. Now, you’re partnering with Viola Davis and her husband through their company, JuVee Productions, for a film adaptation. How did you end up partnering with them and what was it about this story that resonated with them?
Jones: I met with them nine years or so ago. I did a comic book called Niobe: She Is Life that came on the heels of The Untamed and I co-wrote it with Amandla Stenberg. It became the first nationally distributed comic book with a Black female author, artist, and hero in entertainment. It was a pretty big deal.
We didn’t know that when we were making it, it was just a story we wanted to put in the world. I was talking with JuVee at the time to potentially team up with them on a Niobe project, and they had a deal at ABC at the time. But, I wasn’t super jazzed about what that deal looked like at ABC.
Viola blessed us with the most beautiful forward in the Niobe: She is Life hardcover. And she wrote a tagline saying, “We all have a Niobe inside ourselves, and it’s time to let her roar.”
I kept in touch with JuVee and specifically Viola’s husband, Julius, who’s been such a gem and such a good man in this landscape. So then we went to HBO. We were in development at HBO for, I don’t know, a few years, where I partnered with Prentice Penny, the showrunner of Insecure. He was lovely, but I left HBO, and then I just ducked back into the lab to tell more stories.
I reached back out to JuVee and I said, “Hi, I’ve always felt like a kindred spirit with Julius and the team at JuVee, and of course, Viola. She is so pivotal in this moment in history where we’re at and one of our modern day prophets. She’s the one to protect Niobe on her next journey.”
I love that you continued to cultivate a relationship with Viola, Julius, and the JuVee team. Did you find yourself fielding other offers along the way? If so, why did you turn those down?
Jones: When I get offers from studios or producers, I turn down a lot, which is not easy because it’s not easy to make money in comic books, especially as an independent creator. It’s not easy because you struggle with a concept of morality. Your family says “Your morals are going to starve us, so how moral can you be if you’re not putting your family first to pay the bills?” When you hear some offers on the table, you can take the quick cash grab and we can pay you the bills.
But there’s something about Niobe and something about this project. I see the impact that she has at conventions on a small one-to-one intimate level when we meet folks. I knew if Stranger Comics could partner with the right people, it would work better. When I first started back in 2006 with offers from producers saying, “If you make Niobe a white boy, I’ll make your movie.”
This is way before the boom of the Black Panther. And I had people offering me like, “I’m going to bring you $100,000 in cash right now.” Crazy stuff.
That’s nuts and also is a lot of money, even by today’s standards, for an indie creator.
Jones: Yes, but it didn’t feel right. When I started Stranger Comics, I was going through a hard time with a separation then a divorce, at times sleeping in my car and living off credit cards. My mother, god rest her soul, gave us the first little bit of money to print the very first ever single issue of The Untamed that we shared at San Diego Comic Con. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we shopped it around to different comic companies, and a lot of them were like, “We can’t do this because black comics don’t sell, and neither do female-led comics.”
People were trying to steal my ideas. It was just a messy time. So to get to where we’re at, to protect Niobe and have Viola and Julius as my fellow shepherds that will protect her in the next phase of her existence and be a good guardian of this girl and this world, means so much.
What a journey to go through. Now, as a creative who is partnering with someone else to bring your project to life in a different way, how do you strike a balance between what elements of your story that you absolutely will not change and what you’re amendable to adjusting?
Jones: That’s a great question. Niobe must remain Black and she has to have dreadlocks. She has dreadlocks because it reminds her of the last memory she had of her mother as she’s holding her mom’s hair. It is also rooted in her culture… I have to remain in creative control and that’s in every agreement, but I am always of the mind that whomever’s idea is best wins.
I like a Democratic process with a team, whether it’s at my comic company Stranger Comics, or at a studio or with fellow producers. I think the greatest asset that we can have as creators or actors or directors is to listen and to be patient and have enough confidence to feel strong in your vision, but not let ego get in the way of it. I think I’m amenable to pretty much most things if it improves the story and the quality of the experience that a reader or reviewer will get without compromising who these characters are and their core beliefs.
That’s more than fair! At Nerdist, we celebrate all things nerdy, whether it’s comic books, horror, or even gardening, basically anything that’s considered to be kind of niche. Outside of comics, what do you nerd out about and why?
Jones: Music, music, all day music. When I get up in the morning and go to bed, it’s Alice Coltrane to keep me grounded and connected. I am still rocking ’90s hip hop, that’s my jam. Yeah, just anything that sets the mood for me. If I want to fight, f**k, or fall in love, music is there for me. And speaking of nerdy, I should say D&D because I also want to say I’ve been playing D&D since I was a kid.
Oh yes, that is absolutely nerdy!
Jones: We launched our Kickstarter at StrangerCon, and you can now actually play D&D in our fantasy world because we have D&D material. So gamers, you’d be able to read The Untamed books, play the game, and watch the movie soon! I also love live action role playing. I was always LARPing in the woods. Stranger Comics absolutely gets down in the nerd space, in more ways than one.
Editor’s Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.