locke & key: the covers of gabriel rodriguez preview

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LOCKE & KEY: THE COVERS OF GABRIEL RODRIGUEZ. MAY 2014. FIRST PRINTING. © 2014 Idea and Design Works, LLC. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IDW Publishing, a divisionof Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe St., San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none ofthe contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork. Printed in Korea.

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ISBN: 978-1-61377-970-5 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4

Locke & Key created by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez Follow Joe Hill on Twitter @joe_hill • Follow Gabriel Rodriguez on Twitter @GR_comics



Ever have a dream so disturbing, so overpowering, you wake up from it with your pulse running

at heart attack speeds... only to have the nightmare melt away in the first moment of consciousness,

leaving you with no idea what the hell you were dreaming?

Yeah, sure you have. Everyone’s had that.

You shove aside the blankets and drift, clammy with sweat and half-awake, through the rest of

your morning, going back over the tiny little bit you can remember: a wolf walking through the

backyard, a red froth running from his jaws; a beloved teacher, drowned in his bathtub; and wasn't

there something about your Mom making out with your best friend?

You may ache half the day to know what those ridiculous, horrifying, baffling visions meant . It all

made sense while you were asleep. The fragments are just a tease, details of a tapestry that has

been rolled up and tucked away behind the impenetrable black door of your unconscious.

And that door is locked. There is no key.

2.

I can’t tell you much about what it was like to write the scripts for Locke & Key, for a very good

reason: I don’t remember writing them. Not for the most part.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written notably about the state of flow , a kind of

meditative trance that will come over a person when they are entirely consumed with a demanding

but exhilarating task. In Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation, flow is what possesses the mountain climber

when he switches off his anxieties and begins, effortlessly, to find the handholds in an apparently

sheer rock face. A painter will slip into a state of flow, playing her brush across the canvas with a kindof empty-headed ardor, then look up and find three hours have passed while she wasn’t paying

attention. Flow erases time and thought alike.

For me—for any artist—I’m always hoping to find my way into that state where I don’t have to

think anymore... that state of certainty and peace that Csikszentmihalyi is talking about. On the very

good days, the next scene, the next sentence, the next idea is just there , coming out of the pen

as if it had been bottled up in there along with the ink. The writing is as easy and thoughtless as

breathing, as relaxing as an afternoon nap. And on Locke & Key , they were almost always good

days.

I’m not sure what it says about me, that two of the things I like to do best—sleep and write—both

involve entering a state of unconsciousness. Reading, too, helps me to stop thinking my own thoughts

and start thinking someone else’s. Why is that? Why exactly do I find my conscious mind such a

fucking bore?

I couldn’t tell you. All I can say is there is contentment and pleasure in the altered mental states

that come with flow, rest, and the waking-dream of fiction. Whereas ordinary consciousness is roughly

as exciting as a dentist’s waiting room.

When I do try to remember the experience of composing the scripts that became Locke & Key ,

I remember it in much the same way you remember those dreams we were talking about. All I have

left is a scattering of vivid, often delightfully gruesome moments that lingered with me after the work

was done. Moments like:

• Keyhouse, under a tormented red sky. It appears as a forbidding crimson shadow, a tragic past

reimagined as architecture.

• A sparrow in the snow with its head bitten off.

• A grinning 18th-century lunatic brandishing a blood-drenched bayonet in one hand, and a

barbaric black key in the other.

• A leering, naked homunculus, peering out from inside an empty bottle of pop.

• And Keyhouse again, now a blackened wreck, roof caved in, walls punched full of holes, the

door gaping into desolate darkness.

Don t Dream It’s Over

An Introduction

by

Joe Hill



Those are all I’ve got, the remnants of the work-dream.

Basically: the covers.

3.

I think what I am saying is that for roughly six years—the time it took to complete Locke & Key —

Gabriel Rodriguez dreamed my dreams for me.

4.

We are told that whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but in Keyhouse, anyway, I always

had Gabriel Rodriguez to light the passageways and show me wherever we needed to go next.

Neurologists have discovered that when a beloved fictional character dies, a part of the brain thatcorresponds to grief lights up in the mind of the reader, as if one of her friends had died. Inner

experiences can have all the force of anything experienced in the skin-and-bone world, at least to

the person imagining them. In that sense, for Gabe, Keyhouse is a true and actual place even if it

isn’t a real place. It may only exist as an imaginary construct, but Gabe has looked into every room,

and has spent almost as much time there as he has in his own house.

He knows Keyhouse in the way any architect or builder knows any place he’s hammered together.

I am in no way exaggerating or playing lyrical games with language here: Gabriel is an architect by

training, as is his gifted and internationally honored wife Catalina, and I have no doubt either one of

them could tell you exactly what the afternoon light is like when it hits the kitchen, or how deep the

pool is in the backyard. Even though there is no pool, no kitchen.I don’t remember writing the scripts, not mostly (just the difficult ones: issue 2 of Welcome to

Lovecraft , issues 2 - 5 of Head Games. Not much flow there, I’m afraid, just a lot of frantic scrabbling).

But I do recall what it felt like to get a new page of art every day. Seeing those pages, I always felt like

a ten-year-old stepping into a hot air balloon and feeling the ground drop away. Total vertiginous

delight. This was never more true than when I saw one of Gabe’s masterful covers, which would

always, somehow, condense the whole emotional power of the issue into a single ruthlessly forceful

image.

For me, those covers always came with the shock of a vision hauled straight up from a dream to

the conscious world. As if Gabe had unlocked my head, turned me upside down, and dumped out

every bad, unsettling thing that was in there.

5.

A series of shadows: a centurion, a goblin, Peter Pan, a wicked witch wearing a terrifying crown.

A series of broken and ruined objects: a smashed mirror, a shattered action figure, an ornate

music box, a bloodied ice skate dropped in the snow.

A series of linked locales, each bringing us a step closer to the dreadful place at the thumping

black heart of a nightmare: the old house, the well house, the garden, the cave, the door.

Gabe’s cover images almost seem to reside, one inside the other, like a set of unnerving Russian

nesting dolls, each more disturbing than the one that came before. One revelation leads to the next,

with the final reveal going the deepest, shocking the hardest. They are the part of the dream thatrefuses to fade, even in the strong light of morning.

And that’s enough out of me. You came to be shown, not told. Turn the page. Go to Keyhouse

now. Gabe will meet you there. Take his hand. He’ll guide you through those old dim corridors, along

those steep, ancient stairs. He’ll take you everywhere you want to go.

Sweet dreams.

Joe Hill

Exeter, NH May 2014

locke & key: the covers of gabriel rodriguez preview

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