Exclusive: Brea and Zane Grant on their upcoming projects

Zane and Brea Grant

You may remember Brea Grant as Daphne the speedster, Hiro Nakamura's frenemy from Heroes. Our Heroes-related section of the interview is on our sister site, House Petrelli, but UFN asked some more general questions about Brea and Zane's upcoming comic book projects, which are both entertaining and very diverse.

UFN: We Will Bury You... I was going to say that launched at Comic-Con '09? Am I right on that?

BG: We started promoting it in '09, but it actually didn't come out until a year ago, and then the trade came out this past fall.

UFN: And who's the publisher on that?

BG: It's IDW.

UFN: Ah, okay. And what's the premise?

ZG: It's the story of a zombie apocalypse that begins in New York in 1927 and follows a sex worker and her girlfriend as they try to survive, the people they meet and so on.

UFN: Okay, interesting angle on it. So we see the underside, and they see these things happen in the corners where most people don't?

ZG: Yeah, it's basically a survival story set in the 20s.

BG: There's a lot of comic books and zombie comic books specifically that look at people with power, with money, who are cops, who have skills... and we wanted to look at people whose survival skills are more street skills. Street smart rather than having money to buy your way out, or get on a boat, or do whatever you would do to survive.

UFN: Are there other projects you guys are moving into? Other titles, other...

ZG: Yeah, we're still working on comics together, we're pitching out a few things right now. We're pitching out a slasher book with Eric J who does some really amazing art. He was the co-creator of Rex Mundi and he's doing a book called Fly right now. So that's a really fun one, and we're working on a comic about a graffiti crew that learns to do magic. It's really an urban fantasy thing. The tentative title is Dead City Kids.

BG: And we have a Suicide Girls comic book coming out in April with IDW as well.

UFN: I think of them as pictures... what are they going to be doing?

BG: Well, we wrote a story for them. It's sort of a Charlie's Angels-esque group of elite fighters fighting against a giant religious corporation in a sort of dystopian future.

UFN: I did not see that coming.

ZG: It's sort of a science fiction spy story kind of thing with espionage. It's fun. I think we did a good job! And we have Cameron Stewart who does some amazing art, and David Hahn who also does some amazing art, and Steve Niles is writing a back-of-issue story. I think it'll be a fun project. It's coming out in a few weeks.

UFN: And is that with IDW?

ZG: That one's with IDW, the other ones we're still pitching out and we're talking to some people about them. I'm doing a web comic with a friend called Detective Warlock, Warlock Detective. It's kind of a horror-comedy about a small town warlock detective. He does things like he fights a graveyard hag at a skating rink, things like that.

UFN: Is that set in the present-day?

ZG: Yeah, it's set in the present-day. It's pretty cool. I think that'll be up next month.

UFN: Do you have a website?

ZG: I do, it's ZaneGrant.org.

UFN: Dot org?

ZG: Yes, I'm an organization.

UFN: Or you're very organized. Or both. Do you have any parting thoughts or other work you're doing?

BG: I co-wrote a screenplay that's going to shoot in September that's one of the big projects I'm working on on my own besides other acting ventures. It's independent and still in the early stages, it's called Best Friends Forever and it's an apocalyptic road trip movie.

UFN: The horror genre, pardon the pun, just will not die. Zombies and vampires and the apocalypse... do you think there's still a lot of audience? Do you think it's played out at all?

BG: I don't think horror will ever play out. I think people are drawn to it for whatever reason they have. I never wake up and think, "No, I don't really want to watch a horror movie or read a sci-fi book. I consistently want to be in those genres, whereas I do sometimes feel like I don't want to watch a depressing drama or something like that. I think it's here to stay. I think certain things will probably go out of style. I have this theory that werewolves are the next big thing. So I think zombies will go out of style, other things will go out of style, vampires will go out style, but I think at some point it's still gonna cycle through.

UFN: Horror as a genre, obviously, has been around forever, since Mary Shelley, since before that, scaring people, things that go bump in the night... it's kind of blown up recently, but you don't think it's going to shrink any time in the near future?

ZG: I don't think so. I think as a genre there's a lot of room to find new stories, especially now that so much money is going into remakes, or even just rehashing the same stories from the same authors. And those monsters do have specific meaning to our society. In international horror, over the last ten years people there have been some really interesting new kinds of stories that people are telling, or telling in a different style. Even vampire stories, like Let the Right One In, that movie's amazing. It's so different than anything.

UFN: Well, like Priest is coming out, and the interesting thing about the vampires on that is that they're actually some kind of non-human alien infection kind of thing, and the people are light-sensitive instead of... it's a twist on it that's really interesting.

ZG: Yeah, I think there's a lot of room for tweaking things and playing with what's there, but definitely the genre is getting maybe a little bit stale involving the mainstream-ization of it, but hopefully some money will go into some great projects.

BG: I think the true fans will keep it alive.