Mad Cave Studios’ marketing manager, Maya Lopez, sat down with writer Zac Thompson of the upcoming horror series Nature’s Labyrinth, where a group of ex-cons become unwilling participants in a live-streamed fight to the death in a giant man-made maze on a deserted island. Plus, your sneak peek awaits! Check out the official Nature’s Labyrinth Trailer below!
Hi! I’m Zac Thompson. A writer from a tiny island in Canada. I often write about nature, the horrors of the human condition, and everything in between. You might know my other work like Ka-Zar Lord of the Savage Land at Marvel, I Breathed A Body and Lonely Receiver at Aftershock, or The Dregs at Black Mask Studios.
Q: What was the first comic you read?
Zac: The first comic I can remember reading is The Dark Knight Returns. A friend’s mom was going to throw out his copies, and he gave them to me. I poured over those issues until the staples fell out.
Q: What initially got you into writing comics?
Zac: Honestly, it was studying film, which seems like a roundabout way, but that kind of conditioned my brain to start deconstructing visual storytelling in every medium. I was going to film school when I started to see comics in a radically different way. I started looking into the people who made the comics I had been reading for years and thinking about the craft of comics storytelling as a visual and narratively-driven medium. At this time, I was writing a lot of prose short stories and working on screenplays, but I started seeing comics as not only the best way to tell the stories I wanted to tell but the only way.
Q: When writing Nature’s Labyrinth, where did you draw inspiration from?
Zac: I think the biggest point of inspiration was Battle Royale. I love the “death game” subgenre so much. It’s the perfect engine to explore the relationships of normal people under extreme conditions. So I really wanted to blend that idea with the wilderness struggle of The Revenant. And finally, thread the entire thing with fight scenes that feel choreographed, cleanly shot, and incredibly violent, like Kill Bill.
Q: How do you connect with the characters in this story?
Zac: The underlying thread of the whole story is this overwhelming feeling of being punished. And whether or not that’s justified. Everyone in the story is faced with the same insane conditions of survival, and they’re thrown into this situation that will force them to embrace the worst aspects of themselves. Given the last few years, it feels like we’re all just barely surviving in a very hostile world. So it wasn’t difficult to take that feeling and amplify it by about…a thousand percent.
Q: What do you hope for readers to take from Nature’s Labyrinth?
Zac: I hope they think about what kinds of rules exist to keep people in line and if those rules are equally applied to everyone. There’s so much of Nature’s Labyrinth that’s brutal and unfair, but those in this situation are just expected to play along or die.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your writing process?
Zac: For this series, it was all about building strong mood boards that evoked a clear mood for the type of environment of the issue. Then I’ll build a purely instrumental playlist of music that matches the tone of that issue. At that point, I’m ready to write and throw myself into the script–promising myself I won’t revise anything until I’m finished with a draft.
Q: Who/what are your biggest influences as a writer?
Zac: These change pretty frequently, but right now, I think it’s probably the writing of Clive Barker and the film work of Andrei Tarkovksy.
Q: What are your favorite stories/artists/genres?
Zac: I’m a sucker for horror. Pretty much any kind of it. I’ll watch pretty much any horror movie I can get my hands on. I’ll read just about every horror comic on the shelves. I can’t get enough of it.
Q: Do you have any favorite titles we should be catching up on?
Zac: Everyone should read Taiyō Matsumoto’s No.5.
Q: Any upcoming projects we should know about?
Zac: My new horror/noir series, The Brother of All Men, launched in July from Aftershock Comics. It’s a 1920s period piece about a man who tries to rescue his brother from the clutches of a (real) cult.
Zac Thompson is a writer from a tiny island in Canada. Zac often writes about nature, the horrors of the human condition, and everything in between, to be discovered in this upcoming series from Mad Cave Studios, Nature’s Labyrinth. You may know Zac from his other works like Ka-Zar Lord of the Savage Land at Marvel, I Breathed A Body and Lonely Receiver at Aftershock, or The Dregs at Black Mask Studios.
Instagram: @zacbethompson | Twitter: @ZacBeThompson
Nature’s Labyrinth #1 is currently available for preorder on our website here, and will be available on Comixology, Drive-thru comics, and your favorite local comic book shop on November 2nd, 2022!
Mad Cave Studios is a comic book and graphic novel publisher founded by Mark London in 2014 driven by madness and committed to quality. For additional information, visit madcavestudios.com.
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