Interview With Gerardo Preciado of Moonhead Press

Welcome back to another round of interviews with the Geeky Godfathers of the internet. You should be well familiar with our new interview series by now, but in case you’ve stepped away from the internet for the past few weeks, allow me to remind you.

I was lounging about one day, roaming around the great geeky blogs in pursuit of some hot stories, when a pretty awesome thought crossed my mind. I wonder how these guys got started? UTF’s had some great success over the past few years, but we’re definitely not the oldest site on the web, and we owe quite a bit to the nerds who came before, so I wanted to pay our respects. And find out how they started, cuz this geek news game is rough, and I need some inspiration!

We first talked to Bill Ramey of Batman-On-Film.com, then Chris Piccard of Scified.com, and most recently Jim Littler of ComicBookMovie.com.

Well, today we had the opportunity to talk to writer Gerardo Preciado of Moonhead Press. He’s half the team (Daniel Bayliss is his partner) behind the best Batman and Superman comics I’ve ever read. And guess what? They’re fan made.  So DC, get out the notepad, and take some lessons.  (But I don’t want to sell Daniel short, they’re original titles are equally amazing.)

UTF: Can you tell us a bit about yourselves. Who are you guys? Life long comic fans scratching their geeky itch? Design guys who are smitten with comics? How did Moonhead Press start?

Gerardo: Yes, we are lifelong fans, one of my earliest memories is holding a comic and cutting out the characters with some scissors, I may have been 3 o 4 years old, I’m lucky I have an older brother who was into comics, later on, when I was 7-8, they started reprinting the Claremont/Byrne X-men stories in Mexico, and at that time I decided that I wanted to draw comics for a living, that is until I met Bayliss 15 years ago, then I changed that to “I want to write comics”, we immediately became best friends and started doing our own comics for fun. About 2 years ago we decided to give it our best shot, I’ve had an idea for a graphic novel but we decided to do some short stories first to get into rythym, these are the stories we are publishing on our blog. We hope to get started on the graphic novel on 2014.

UTF: Is this all ‘fan art’? Do you have any license for some of the stuff you’ve created?

Gerardo: We consider The Deal and Daredevil stories ‘fan art’ because we did them just for fun, we’ll be publishing our own characters but maybe down the line we´ll take a stab at another established character just for the heck of it.

UTF: And on that same point, how have the big wigs like Marvel and DC responded?

We haven’t heard anything from Marvel or DC, that’s a good thing, I think.

UTF: Your Batman “The Deal” is one of the best Batman stories I’ve ever read. How did that idea come about? What influenced you? And at the same time, which Batman writers influenced you? Did any of these writers approach this idea that you’ve manifested in “The Deal”?

I never had any interest on writing a Batman story, but I came up with a story that could only work if it was a Batman story. The idea was to have a story that worked on several levels, what it means depends on the reader, for instance we’ve had some websites claiming “it’s a story about a suicide pact”, or “what happens when the Joker pushes Batman too far”, we’ve had comments about how the story it’s about a romantic love beetween Batman and the Joker, and how that’s been done before, or that they’re “ying and yang, good and evil”, that’s not the story I wrote at all, except it does mean that if you want to. I’m really intrigued by the idea of cognitive development, how we perceive reality, how these realities intersect or mirror themselves, those type of subjects, and I think we will explore more of that in our graphic novel. I guess you can see the influence of The Killing Joke and Dark Knight Returns, but I honesty think that we made a Batman story that had never been done before, I’m not saying that it’s a great story or even a good one, but the idea was to have a different approach, especially with The Joker.

UTF: You’ve got some really intense stories (El Cid, The Deal) and some humorous ones, like your Daredevil comic. What dictates that? Is it a spur of the moment thing? Do you guys brainstorm for a while, or does one of you come up with a brilliant idea and immediately confer with the other?

We just want to do things that we would like to read, my job is to come up with stories that will inspire Daniel, we really just hang out, talk about this or that idea, and choose which one to work on. Sometimes Daniel will have an idea and my job is to come up with a story about that idea. Everything we do has a lot of input from both of us, every story I come up with Daniel takes it to another level.

UTF: What are your plans for Moonpress? Will you continue producing comics as you do now? Are you going to find a home on a proper .com site?

We’ll keep publishing our finished stories on our blog until we run out of them, we would like to compile them in an anthology book down the line. we just uploaded a horror story based on a dream I had, and we’ll post more stories, some are more like 50’s sci fi, some are more adventure type. We think of Moonhead Press more like a Heavy Metal type of publication, were we can tell all different kind of stories. We’re actually talking to a couple of incredible artists who happen to be friends of ours about the posibility of working with them so we can have more content while at the same time being able to work on the graphic novel, one of them, Sergio Osuna, is already an established artist at Zenescope. Eventually we might have a fancier website, but for now the blog thing is working for us.

UTF: How has the fan reaction been? Everything you’ve expected? I’ve seen nothing but praise everytime I talk about The Deal

We did not have any expectations whatsoever, we could not have planned the reach the comic had, being translated to different languages around the globe, the interviews, it’s crazy. We’ve had some amazing reactions, from people being moved to tears by the story and art, to (a lot) of people hating it completely ; the only critic which I thought was a bit odd was having the artist from, I think, Batman Inc. calling it “the worst thing ever”, that’s like U2 hearing an unsigned band’s demo and trashing it on the internet, but other than that, we’ll take the good with the bad, we really never thought anyone would see it. But in the end we have moved on, I’m always most excited about the comic we are making at the moment, and there is no shortage of ideas, we have stuff that could keep us busy for years.

UTF: I haven’t read too many comic where the writing perfectly compliments the art, and vice versa. Usually one outshines the other, but in your comics, they’re a perfect partnership. Is that luck? Or did you have your fair share of rough times with less than ideal partners?

We’ve been best friends for over 15 years, we just complement each other, we like a lot of the same things, and specially in comics, we have a unified vision of what we want, and I think it also helps that Bayliss is an amazing artist.

UTF: What are your plans for the future? Will you publish anything for the big companies? Or is this truly a passion project?

I think we’ve warmed up and we are ready to tackle our graphic novel. It would be nice to work for anybody making comics, let alone Marvel or DC, I hope that happens someday, but I can’t control that, so we’ll just keep telling our own stories. We do this because we love making comics, if anything else happens because of that, great.

UTF: What other properties can we look forward to you covering? I’d love to see a Galactus/Silver Surfer tale. Or even a Thor one. Although, I think you’d create a pretty spectacular Superman story, as Batman’s a natural foil for Supes, and you did wonders for him.

We do have a Superman “archetype” story coming up in early 2014, actually it might be my favorite of what we’ve done so far. Honestly I’m never thinking about characters others than our own, but I do have Daredevil/Dr Strange story that I would love to do, Silver Surfer for sure, he’s one of my favorites.

Since we’ve talked, Gerardo and Daniel have published a brand new Superman-themed comic called God’s End. It’s amazing.

Make sure you give their other titles a read, because they’re some of the best comics I’ve ever read.