Pull It Together: An Interview With the Creators of Capture Creatures!

Welcome to Pull It Together, where the goal is to narrow the massive field of comic book titles to the ones you shouldn’t overlook. It isn’t about what’s on my pull list, it’s about what could be on yours!

Hello and welcome to a bit of a treat for Pull It Together. Seeing as how there’s not a lot going on in comics releases this week (you’ll see for yourself when you get down to the gallery), I thought we’d try something different in the pre-gallery part of the post. An interview! Writer Frank Gibson and artist Becky Dreistadt have been collaborating for years, and they’re about to embark upon their first ongoing series, Boom! Studios Capture Creatures. Based on a Pokémon-inspired art project, the book tells the story of two teenagers investigating the sudden appearance of more than a hundred strange, cute, dangerous, and supernaturally powered animals. The first issue will be out very soon, and so I asked Gibson and Dreistadt a few questions about the series. Here are their answers!

The Mary Sue: Comparisons with Pokémon are sort of unavoidable, given the project’s inspiration, but the two young protagonists who discover the Capture Creatures aren’t exactly using them to battle each other, are they?

Becky Dreistadt: That’s right! We don’t want to give away too much, but there will be creature battles, but not in the jovial competitive way that it happens in Pokemon.

Frank Gibson: I know personally if my pet and companion was in knock down, drag out brawls all the time I’d probably be pretty upset. Who wants their cat or dog to get hurt? Creatures will be fighting though!

TMS: The removal of competition as the characters’ central focus seems like it has a lot of potential for stories that diverge from the dominant themes of Pokémon. Can you give us any hints as to the dominant themes in Capture Creatures?

Gibson: I’m really interested in sharing a world that is effected by seemingly magical creatures. The world of Capture Creatures is really fun to write and it’s a blast to see how these creatures will effect the world they inhabit.

TMS: Pokémon are all vastly different and the games span decades of design work, yet it’s always easy to spot one “in the wild” so to speak. Were there any design guidelines that you kept to say “this is a Capture Creature” and “this isn’t?”

Dreistadt: I didn’t think too much about any guidelines when I was designing them. My main sort of formula was to take an already existing animal and then add an element to it, so that kind of unifies them.

Gibson: In the original Capture Creatures encyclopedia there is a little bit at the back called Unconfirmed Sightings, there are a few sketches that hit the floor and a couple of completed creatures that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of them. Most are inspired, like Becky said, by an animal or a piece of folklore or by the place a creature would occupy in the ecosystem.

TMS: Is Capture Creatures the kind of story that you hope grown-up Pokémon fans will read to their little Pokémon fans?

Dreistadt: I do hope those fans will give Capture Creatures a shot and they’ll share it with their kids. But I also want to be inclusive of people who aren’t in the fandom.

Gibson: I’d love that too! I feel like there’s a lot of contemporary animation influence, there’s some survival story elements and pieces of YA fiction in there. I hope fans of the other stuff we’ve worked on like the Bee & Puppycat show, or the Adventure Time and Gumball comics, come along for the ride.

TMS: What’s your favorite Capture Creature or evolution group?

Dreistadt: My favorite evolution group is Kidage, Villoat, Markipolitan. I just love goats and German villages!

Gibson: I’m pretty into Alpezgau, who’s inspired by Tyrolean folk lore, but I love our main character Bon Bon Fire.

Capture Creatures #1 will hit shelves in early November, so be sure to check back with Pull It Together in the coming weeks! And now: this week’s comics. Each comic in the following gallery is listed with its official teaser summary (in italics) and my own commentary (below that) where applicable.

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Are you looking forward to picking up a title this week that isn’t in Pull It Together? Mention it in the comments and I’ll take a look! Just remember: PIT only covers one week at a time, not one month! If it’s not coming out this week, it won’t be on the list.

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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