Self-portrait
Credit: Stephen Franck
Return to the age of the urban cowboy in Stephen Franck’s upcoming OGN Palomino.
Currently raising funds on Kickstarter, Palomino is a return to comics for Franck after his award-winning work on the Silver series of books. But Dracula is out here, replaced with 1980s neo-noir in L.A.’s then-thriving country music subculture. It’s Mulholland Drive, with a country twang.
Newsarama spoke with Franck about his upcoming series, which he’s balancing with his work as Head of Animation on Marvel Studios’ What If…? for Disney+. The writer/artist delves deep into the subculture he’s exploring here, and shows a familiarity that’s far beyond some cowboy boots and some ‘y’alls’ thrown in.
Newsarama: Stephan, you’re back after the great Silver with this new OGN titled Palomino. I’ve read it’s about the country music clubs that popped up in LA. in the 1980s, but that leaves me with more questions than answers. What’s going on?
Stephen Franck: Palomino is first and foremost a neo-noir L.A. crime story. It has all the grittiness, the dry-humor and the tragedy that make us love that genre. It has characters running on fumes, hopeless romantics who hide their true nature behind a mask of cynicism, all trying to get out of some sort of hell before the devil knows they’re there. And because these characters have a wicked sense of humor, the tone is super fun – until something goes and breaks your heart.
Meanwhile, unlike other L.A. noir stories you’ve seen before, Palomino takes place in a unique and now forgotten subculture – the California honkytonks of the early 1980’s. It is a real subculture that started in the 1930’s with the Okie migrations of the Dust Bowl, when displaced Appalachian field workers brought their music to California’s Central Valley. Then their children and grandchildren came to the L.A. basin and San Fernando Valley as union workers for the aerospace industry – which was a huge part of L.A.’s economy from the War Effort to the height of the Cold War – and filled up the L.A. country and western clubs for 50 years, every single night of the week.
The Palomino was such a place, and because of its location in North Hollywood, it was a hub where not only country music, but also the B-side of Hollywood – stuntmen, TV actors, world-famous rockstars coming through town, OG Memphis rockabilly artists of the 1950’s, and more – intersected and intermingled with the local power structure. From that local subculture, sprang out most of the global pop culture of that time.
What better milieu for a noir story? As the series develops, all the “crimes” that you will see in Palomino are inspired by true stories from weird-LA lore. Most of the mysteries remain unsolved to this day.
At the story’s center is Eddie Lang, a former Burbank police detective. To pay the bills, Eddie works as a PI by day. And at night he performs as the resident pedal steel guitar player at the Palomino. The Palomino is where Eddie finds release, and in equal measure, where troubles find him.
Eddie’s relationship with his rebellious teenage daughter, Lisette, is at the heart of Palomino. Although they’re united by an unbreakable bond, they’re existing under the weight of an unsolved tragedy that befell their family. They both need to find a way to reconnect and start to live again – and because those two are cut from the same cloth, they will do it the only way that comes natural: by kicking ass and taking names.
Nrama: You’re coming into this off a hot streak with your work on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and comics fans still remember you for the aforementioned Silver, and you’e hard at work now on Marvel Studios’ What If…?. A person like you would seem to be full of ideas but short on the time to do them all – how’d you decide to do this one?
Franck: It’s true that time is the biggest challenge. I always have a big slate of projects that are based on my own fascinations with certain genres and subjects. Some of those projects have been turning in my head for years and I may have a clever idea or a basic angle on them, but I don’t necessarily know what the projects really mean, or what’s really relevant or true to life about them.
Then, once in a while something happens, either in the world or in my personal point of view on life, and suddenly I understand what a specific project is really trying to be about. At that point, it’s no longer a rational decision. I become obsessed with it and I have to brute force it through no matter what.
That’s what happened with Palomino.
First, I’ve always known that behind the crime story and the music, it was somehow going to be a tale of the end of the American Century – a genre from Watchmen to Forrest Gump – that I always find fascinating. Because of when they were created, those stories always use the Reagan era as the end of their cycle. But from our vantage point in 2020, I believe that 2016 was the end of a cycle that started then, in the early 1980s. The seeds of the reality we’re inhabiting now were planted back then.
On a personal level, as a musician myself, I had a chance to work in what was left of those clubs in the 2000’s, and many of the actual former Palomino musicians are friends of mine, and people I had the great honor to work with, so hopefully that real-life familiarity gives a lived-in quality to the story.
But beyond the coolness of the setting, back then, the people involved had a sense that the party would go on forever, but little did they know that the economic underpinning of that entire scene was soon to die when the Cold War ended and the aerospace jobs left L.A. And that pretty much ended that way of life. Being on the brink of major tectonic shifts that you’re not seeing coming is something that I find particularly compelling and relatable.
My most important breakthrough, however, was understanding that this had to be a father/daughter story. As all my children have just now graduated to becoming well adjusted and wonderful adults, I am looking back at timeless questions on the black art of parenting, and found a chance to explore it through Eddie and Lisette’s relationship. Also, in keeping with the larger themes of the book, Lisette’s character represents that for every older person who feels like they’re living through the end of history, there is a young person coming up and asking “I don’t know, man. I have a life to live so what are we going to do about this shit you’re leaving me?”
Nrama: We spoke earlier this week about your work on the animated series What If…?, but we’re back here talking about comics – comics you’re writing, drawing, and self-publishing. What do you love about comics that keeps you coming back even when so busy in animation?
Franck: Comics are my home. I mean that literally, because when I was very young, my parents had a shop on the outskirts of Paris, that sold books, comics, toys, as well as back-to-school supplies – which, in those days, included art supplies. So I literally lived there, devouring any comic or novel that I could read and trying to emulate them. Meanwhile, my dad had his photography studio in the basement of the store, and I had access to unlimited supplies of super 8 film.
So to me, it was all one thing, and I grew up doing all of it. I just never stopped. Then, once you start doing this work professionally, you quickly bump into fragmentations and limitations that are based on what the powers-that-be believe the market is ready to accept at any given time, so for a while, comics let me work on a type of story that animation wasn’t really dealing with. But thankfully that has changed also.
At the end of the day, in animation, I get to work on incredibly iconic characters that I have loved since childhood, with a group of super talented artists from whom I learn every day.
In comics, I enjoy authorship, and the freedom to explore what my gut tells me needs exploring at the time.