Kyle Starks is an Eisner nominated cartoonist behind such titles as Sexcastle, Rock Candy Mountain, Assassination and The Legend Of Ricky Thunder. He might be the funniest writer in comics. His new book with artist Chris Schweizer, The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, comes out this June from Skybound Entertainment. He sat down with us to answer six questions about six sidekicks.
Zachary Jenkins: What is The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton?
Kyle Starks: The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton is like a comedy action mystery where a bunch of sort of lovable doofuses try to solve this murder. So Trigger Keaton is like Jackie Chan; he’s a legit martial arts tough guy. He’s basically like the greatest fighter on earth, but he’s gone into Hollywood and because he’s such a great fighter, he’s a real piece of shit, because he fears nothing, and he’s selfish, and he only acts on his own impulses. So he’s kind of like the fucking worst.
And the six sidekicks are characters who played the sidekicks in different shows and he traumatized each of them in different ways, and now he’s dead. And a couple have decided to solve this mystery, and of course they’re all suspects. And there’s a lot of action.
I’ve been pitching it as Knives Out meets Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. If you can imagine that gestalt, it’s a good description because it sort of travels through Hollywood in a fun way. It’s also sort of like these non-traditional, kind of dumb, detectives who aren’t detectives at all, trying to do this thing. Trigger, since he was a martial arts type guy, he was really hard on stunt men. The stunt men hated him. So them trying to solve this mystery also causes what we call a “Stunt Man War”. Where all the stunt men in Hollywood are now also trying to kill these guys as they solve. It’s a lot of fun.
ZJ: So is a Stunt Man War more dangerous than an assassin war? And/Or is it more visually engaging?
KS: Obviously, the assassins are better suited to hunt someone down and murder you. But if you’re just kind of a dumb former kid actor, it’s all bad news, it’s all sort of bad news, just by the massive numbers. ‘Cause there’s only six of these guys but there are hundreds of stunt men.
I think they’re both visually interesting in their own ways. I love hitmen so much. My wife is always like, “When will you do a book that’s not a hitmen?”
“Listen wife, here’s one right now, I’m doing it right now. It’s about, it’s about kung-fu Hollywood action stars.”
I made a joke yesterday to some of my patrons about how, “Oh, I’m doing this action comedy mystery, and I don’t think it’s ever been done.” And someone immediately said, Hot Fuzz, and they are correct. It has been done. And probably better, ’cause it’s Edgar Wright. It’s really interesting tonally to me, because I feel like it’s fresh. It’s something that people haven’t seen before, but it’s all these elements of things that one would like. I think there’s familiarity in like, “Oh, this Hollywood thing.” Each issue opens up with a flashback to one of the six shows, basically. So yeah, I think there’s maybe aesthetically more pleasing, unless you love grenade launcher explosions, which I do. So both are equal to me.
ZJ: You are working with Chris Schweizer on this book. Is Chris Schweizer your sidekick, or are you his?
KS: He knows what I would say and he won’t like it. I would say we are an equal partnership. He’s my best friend in the whole world. He is my peer. This is the second book I’ve worked with on him. He’s literally my virtual studio mate. He lives like 45 minutes away, but he’s the only person I talk to all day, that’s not my wife or my children. So I would say because I’m the loudest and most obnoxious, by that sort of pairing, it makes me seem like I might be the main character, but he’s far more interesting than I am and can do far more interesting things that I can do. He does woodworking, and he did martial arts as a kid. He was a pirate, he was on a pirate ship for several weeks. He’s a super interesting guy, and I’m not. So probably realistically, I would be the sidekick. So maybe it’s like a deception, but I don’t think of him as a sidekick. He’s my best friend. He’s great. Have you ever read Mars Attack? Check that out too, that’s a good one.
ZJ: Trigger Keaton had six large shows. Which of those shows would have a second life in streaming as an underrated gem?
KS: Some of that’s built into the comic. When we originally pitched this, we went and set in the ’70s, ’80s. And we would be doing shows that were sort of riffs on the old, the old westerns, like Land of the Lost, Land of the Giants, those weird sci-fi shows. And Skybound was like, “We wanna modernize it.” So we moved everything up, so there was a show that’s a bad Star Trek, and they’re still kind of a western, but it’s more like Walker Texas Ranger. And so he did all these shows and they were all like, the first one is called “Marshal Art”, where he plays a martial arts cowboy named Marshal Art, haha. And that was his breakthrough beloved show. But it was also when he inevitably was found out to sort of be toxic, because he kicked one of the kids off the show who’s sort of the main character, though there isn’t really one, and is replaced by another character who I think will sort of be… Everyone’s love to hate character.
That was the beginning of the end of his career, but he has this insane contract. So the next show he did was a bad Knight Rider called “Sidecar.” And “Sidecar” ended when Trigger was in a drunken car wreck, so he could no longer be the star of a car show, right? ‘Cause he’s just the worst.
He did “Space Boat”, which was Star Trek. His most recent one is like a bad modern procedural. But through the course of the comic, whenever they had mentioned his fourth show, everyone’s like, “Oh, that was my favorite.” And that was called “Frankenstein and Frankenstein.” And so “Frankenstein and Frankenstein” would be everybody’s favorite. It’s Miami Vice, basically, but with an unfrozen Frankenstein and Frankenstein.
ZJ: Now speaking of Skybound, this book is coming through there. So with that in mind, which of the six sidekicks of Trigger Keaton would be most likely to purchase and savor Robert Kirkman’s Spirits of the Apocalypse: The Walking Dead (Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey)? Which I believe is the only whiskey Skybound Entertainment has published.
KS: That’s interesting. Terry Komodo is definitely the most powerful drinker in the group. But Allison St.Marie, who was a karate child prodigy, I feel like most likely to be the one who would be stoked. She doesn’t drink though, but I feel like she’d be most likely stoked about a sort of collector’s item, a beloved collectors item. Komodo would just drink it, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything.
ZJ: Now, going off of this last thing, if you could make one collectible item from The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, what would you want?
KS: Schweizer, in the background of issue one, there are some movie posters he loosely designed of each of these shows, and my heart goes probably that… That’s the smart one, right? But we named all the beers, any beer that shows up, or is mentioned in this book, is a reference to some kind of bear, and there’s no reason for that except for I thought it was funny. So, my actual answers is probably one of those cans of bear beer, like Old Baloo or some dumb joke we put in like that. But also, Alison, she’s an alien character on “Space Boat”, so maybe her costume or something. We joke… We should do stickers of these beers, it’s like no one would care if it. Beers that are bears is really funny to me, and no one will know, it’s like that’s something we put in our books that no one will notice, even though I did say it. So I guess maybe some people will now. There’s multiple brands of them too. I can’t remember how many. We talked about it at length for no good reason.
Zachary Jenkins runs ComicsXF and is a co-host on the podcast “Battle of the Atom.” Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside of all this.
