The Cownt: An Interview with Writer Michael May

Michael May has written about comics, read comics and written comics for more than a decade; he is one of my best friends, he is a wonderful person, and has an anthology coming out of his character The Cownt. Enjoy this interview, order his book. Please note, all creative work, images and writings are copyright the respective creative talents...

Alex Ness: Who is The Cownt, how was he born, who created him, and Got Milk?

Michael May: I'm actually not a big fan of milk unless there's lots of chocolate in it or it's covering a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles. Which I guess is really the same thing.

The Cownt is a vampire cow. There's a longish story to his creation that I talk about on a text page in the book, but the short version is that my brother-in-law and I were bored one night and started coming up with goofy characters for an imaginary comic. The Cownt was always our favorite of them. We never seriously thought there'd ever be a real comic about him (and at the time neither of us knew about Howard the Duck's Hellcow), but he's sort of the idea that wouldn't die. Which is appropriate, I guess.


What happened to bring The Cownt to the fore? Why now, what publisher is doing this?

I've played with the idea of a Cownt comic a couple of times over the last few years, but never all that seriously. Gavin Spence and I contributed a Cownt story to the Steve Niles fan anthology Tales from the Inner Sanctum, but that's as far as we got. Mostly because I was never sure what tone to take with him. The Inner Sanctum story was a parody, but I get bored by parody pretty quickly, so Gav and I let the Cownt sit for a while as I tried to figure it out.

Then last year Jessica Hickman and I were sitting next to each other at FallCon, the bigger of the two Twin Cities comics conventions, and I was passing out free Cownt prints that Gav had made. Jess has always been a big fan of The Cownt, so we started making cow jokes and talking about how there really did need to be a comic. By the end of the show, we had a plan.

The first printing of the first issue is a small, self-published run. There's another, smaller Twin Cities convention in the Spring and at that show fans started asking me when the comic would be ready. Without thinking hard about it I blurted out, "FallCon!" Not even considering that -- even if we got the comic done by then - there would be no time to find a publisher for it. But I made the promise and I'm sticking to it. The book's ready for FallCon. What happens after that, I'm not sure yet. We'd love to find a real publisher for this first issue, but if that's not possible then it'll go POD and we'll pitch the second issue.

Tell us a synopsis of the stories you tell in your latest book?

There are three stories, each written by me and drawn by a different artist. The first one is The Cownt's origin. The second answers the question everyone always asks: If The Cownt's a boy, why does he have an udder? The third story introduces The Cownt to his first vampire hunter: a farm girl named Penny.

Who are the artists on the book?

Gav was the first real artist to ever draw The Cownt, so having him do the origin story was an easy decision. There was no way I was going to do the book without Jess though, because it truly wouldn't exist without her encouragement. So she's doing the vampire hunter story.

The third artist is Paul Taylor who does an amazing webcomic called Wapsi Square. One of the recurring themes in Wapsi Square is body-image, so once Paul came on board I knew that he was the guy to answer the question about The Cownt's udder and how The Cownt feels about it.



I have written many things, but I cannot even conceive of writing comedy. How do you write comedy?


With a lot of help. A bunch of the humor is visual, so Gav, Jess, and Paul carry that load. But coming up with the other gags was collaborative too. A lot of great ideas came out of just sitting around with friends and making each other laugh with horrible puns and awkward scenarios that we could put The Cownt in. There's stuff in there that I came up with all on my lonesome, but even when I was writing that I'd be thinking about the brainstorming sessions and trying to recapture that fun in whatever I was writing.

What ages is this book for, and, is it dark humor, silly, ...?

That's what I had such a hard time figuring out for a few years. I knew I didn't want to do parody, so I thought about doing almost a straight horror book, but starring this silly cow. Then I thought about making it super kid-friendly with a lot of inspiration from the old Harvey comics I grew up with. Ultimately, it was Jess who pointed out to me that 95% of the The Cownt's fans are grown-ups, so I scrapped that idea and suddenly the book was easy to write.

It's certainly not dark humor, but it's not over-the-top silly either. If pressed, I'd have to define it as "clandestinely naughty." There's nothing overtly offensive in it - there's not even any swearing - but depending on how deeply you want to read it and how dirty your mind is already, there's some possibly squirm-worthy subtext. That all goes over my seven-year-old's head though, so he loves it purely for the visual humor.

Where can we get this book?

We're debuting our EXTREMELY limited first printing at FallCon. If we don't sell out there, I'll fill orders through my site while we figure out where to go next. A lot will depend on how the pitching goes, but folks can tune in to either my site or THE COWNT'S Facebook page to keep up with that progress.