Alex Paknadel is irritated by writers who think they are too good for “genre fiction.”
“No one wants to be Ian McEwan, who absolutely insisted what he was doing wasn’t science fiction,” he tells me over Zoom, and he would know.
Paknadel holds a Ph.D. in English literature. His master’s thesis was titled, “‘They’re Nuts Up There: We’re Nuts Down Here’: Philip K. Dick’s Gnostic-Inflected Theologico-Political Messianism and the Commodity.” The man is smart, he likes sci-fi, and is acutely aware of the baggage the genre carries from both the erudite and the plebian. He holds back when trying to describe All Against All, his new Image Comics book with artist Caspar Wijngaard, out this December, saying, “I don’t even want to use ‘elevated’ because it’s freighted with certain expectations.”
All Against All is an elevated sci-fi action story. It can be boiled down to the elevator pitch, “What if Tarzan were the Xenomorph from Alien?” For his part, Paknadel holds no pretensions about its origin: “The germ of the idea, I just thought was cool.” He recalls a vignette, the idea of a wild man jumping out of air ducts on a spaceship to take out his alien captors. A Ridley Scott movie in reverse. “I try to make it sound like some sort of divine inspiration, but it really isn’t. It’s generally me doing laundry or sitting on the toilet and I’ll get a mental image. That was where this started out from.”
What makes Paknadel special in the comics space is his ability to build out that simple idea into a book that goes beyond humble origins.
He is “hyper aware” of the colonialist baggage that comes with Tarzan. He’s also aware that the cultural shorthand makes for some great storytelling in a five-issue miniseries. In All Against All, Paknadel has flipped this all on its head. Body-snatching aliens have destroyed the Earth, stripping it of all natural resources to keep a war machine churning. But these bureaucrats aren’t heartless, they have a ship filled with biomes preserving a selection of flora and fauna from the blue planet, including a “helpless” human. But as things go awry and a beast stalks the aliens, questions are asked. Who is the monster? Who is in control?
“Caspar and I have given you protagonists, but not necessarily sympathetic characters,” he says of the alien the story is centered on. He’s an academic, and a bureaucrat; a cog in the larger wheel of war. He tries to be disengaged emotionally, but he’s all too human. Paknadel has thought a lot about the bureaucracy of war. We talk about the benefits of checks and balances with nuclear protocols and the challenges with policies like Obama and Biden’s Disposition Matrix. “If you have a lot of people working towards a very bad goal, no one gets to go home at night thinking they’ve done a really bad thing.”
In reality, men like Henry Kissinger live long lives free of repercussions. In All Against All, there is a very angry wild man watching them.
The monster, in narrative role if not morality, stays hidden for most of this first issue. It’s a common visual storytelling tool, but a hammer is a common carpentry tool and no one complains about that. Paknadel is less interested in making morality judgments here, and more interested in exploring the ramifications of these stories. Using the archetypal shorthand of Tarzan allows readers to grok the story implications quickly, while allowing the team to deliver intense, brutal action sequences where you’re never sure whom to root for. The monsters are more human than the human, and the man is more alien than the monster.
But no matter how human their actions, Paknadel and Wijngaard have made it their mission to have their creatures be wholly alien. “I came to [Caspar] with an impossible quandary, I was very insistent on the aliens being aliens. The initial designs, which I signed off on very enthusiastically, were deeply inhuman.” Paknadel struggles with the humanoid characters ever present in science fiction. Comparing the men-in-makeup look of Avatar’s Na’vi to the eyeless, identification-repelling Xenomorphs from Alien. His friend Dan Watters challenged this choice, reminding Alex that his readers needed the bare minimum of eyes and a mouth to relate to the protagonists.
“A lot of that landed on Caspar’s doorstep,” he says about his collaborator, praising the artist for imbuing the aliens with both identification and otherness.
“I say this in all humility, I didn’t pick him, he picked me,” Paknadel muses about his partner on this title. Wijngaard has been on a hot streak, garnering praise from titles like Home Sick Pilots and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, and Paknadel recognizes how privileged he is to be working with the artist. Wijngaard, who has been known for tight lines and detailed drawings, has switched up his style for this book. The art is looser, dirtier, while still dense; retaining his recognizable style and neon color scheme while adapting it for a different type of story. Alex had considered folks who were, frankly, at a more realistic point in their career for the project, though he had bounced some ideas off Caspar in development. Eventually Caspar said, “If you can make the deal aspect work, I’ll do it.” Paknadel sees it as a responsibility to provide a story that allows Wijngaard to shine. He succeeded.
“I didn’t want it to be so recondite that it repelled readers,” Paknadel says as we wind down the interview. There’s an idea that, to be a hit in this pop culture landscape, you have to dumb down your story to the lowest common denominator. The biggest movies today are big, dumb action flicks that, at best, remind you of better films. As we talk, Alex mentions the recent Hulu success Prey, a razor-sharp entry into the Predator franchise that didn’t treat its audience like children. Maybe when you have creatives firing on all cylinders, and a crackling energy behind the product, audiences will be open to art that tries to elevate itself.
“We left nothing on the table.”
All Against All #1 will be released December 7th, 2022. Pre-Order it at your local comic shop and take a look at the preview below.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
