MEDIEVAL PLAYLIST REVEAL (COMIXOLOGY ORIGINALS)
The saga of Danny Landau has been one for the ages.
Neil Kleid & Alex Cormack’s fun and unapologetic tale stands out from the pack. Danny’s unabashed ways was a huge crowd pleaser (unless you’re a fan of the Red Sox). Who would have thought a Bleacher Creature would bring such a fight to King Arthur!
The digital collected series is now released on Comixology Originals. To celebrate the release, Neil Kleid has put together a playlist perfect for cranking to 11 while following Danny’s adventure!
Fanlight Zone was granted the exclusive first look at the playlist. I also had the opportunity to catch up with Kleid about this series and what went into the process of making the playlist.
Art Credit: Comixology Originals
FLZ: How did Medieval come to be?
Kleid: After writing two emotionally-heavy, dark, grounded series for Comixology, I was looking to write something from my gut versus my head—visceral and fun. At first, I thought about writing a superhero or a horror story…but then I read Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and accidentally transposed “Connecticut” with “New York,” and well…I realized that what I was after was actually a fun, over-the-top sports comic with a twist.
In Twain’s novel, he displaces Hank Morgan—a “yankee” man of all trades, who introduces a variety of modern conveniences and nineteenth-century philosophies and military tactics into sixth-century England, specifically into Camelot. My gripe with the book was: How did Hank know how to do all of that, and do it perfectly? Look, I can do a lot of things, but there is quite a gap between being able to effectively use a cell phone and being able to invent or build one. To me, that’s the flaw in Twain’s story and what I was hoping to do with mine is present a regular New Yorker with real world limitation—brash, passionate, opinionated…but also who only knows the things he knows. He knows a lot about construction and baseball, and can drink and curse with the rest of them. But he can’t build an electrical grid or even a car. He doesn’t know how to do a lot, and that finds him out of time having lost a great deal—his girl, his team, his job, the modern conveniences we take for granted. So, when you’ve got a guy who’s lost everything he loved, what is he left with? Who does he become? What can he become…and what can he change?
It’s brutal, and there’s blood and cussing and baseball and drinking…but there’s also a grounded emotional soul-searching story in there that folks have come to expect from me. Oh, and it’s a love story. I hope people dig it.
FLZ: Looking back at the series, which character surprised you the most during the creative process?
Kleid: Galehaut is one of my favorites. I wrote a very large, brash, Herculean character in a previous fantasy book who acts as kind of the foil to the lead — more comedic and alt of the earth than the lead, boisterous and rambunctious. Well…for Medieval, I already had that all of that in Danny, so I flipped it and had the large, brash, Herculean character act as the straight man and found that some of his dialogue is some of my favorite.
But then, I was also surprised by Danny, our lead, who could have very easily been a one-note character—fighting, drinking, cursing—and ended up becoming deeper and more in touch with his feelings than I could have believed…
FLZ: What was your favorite single moment of the series?
Kleid: Oh, this is always the hardest thing to answer. Every moment is my favorite for one specific reason or another, and I wouldn’t want to color a reader’s impressions with my own.
What I will say is that I really enjoyed writing a lot of the dialogue and applying a medieval phrasing to contemporary idioms. Being able to write something like “yeah, boy, that’s how it’s done” as coming from King Arthur? That was a blast.
FLZ: With the series now in digital collection, you've now created an incredible playlist to go along with the story. What prompted the idea for this, and how impactful is music to your creative process?
Kleid: So you asked this as two separate questions but I combined them into one…because, truthfully? I cannot write with music or TV or noise in the background. I have a very hard time writing with ancillary noise, and rarely have anything else playing because I’ll just get distracted and focus on that other thing. So, for Medieval — like all my other books — I wrote it in silence at first…but I realized that for the first fight scene in issue one, I could not get Pink’s “So What” out of my head (“na na na NA na na na I want to start a fight”) so…I turned it on while I wrote the scene. And that was kind of that. For the rest of the series, I started thinking about what the soundtrack for that scene or moment might be if adapted to a movie or TV show, and that helped me really hone the pacing or beats for both the panel descriptions and dialogue.
Ultimately, I knew Alex was going to translate all of that into fantastic artwork…so I gave him the playlists with the scripts and explained those were the songs I was thinking about or listening to when writing, so he could use them too, to help inform how he might bring those scenes to life.
FLZ: Looking at the list, how did you go about selecting the songs for this?
Kleid: It was mostly a gut feeling — this scene requires a slow, moving song about heartbreak; this other one needs something brutal and violent, something that expresses brutality. Others were about a time or place — songs about New York and Boston, for example — and even further, songs that lent themselves to farewells or introductions. It’s like creating a soundtrack for a movie, you know? Which songs pair best with this scene or moment right now?
FLZ: Out of the list what one song (in your opinion) defines Danny and which one for Gina?
Kleid: Well, Danny is definitely a man for all seasons and I don’t think one song can define him — he’s a lover, a fighter, a warrior and protector…so it kind of depends on where you find him in the story. At the start, when he’s alone and pining for what he’s lost, Guns N’ Roses “Patience” (“sometimes, I get so tense but I can't speed up the time”) is the perfect song to explain the dichotomy between his yearning and violent tendencies. Later, when he’s fighting for his life and girl against all of Camelot, it’s “Come Out and Play” by Offspring or “I’ll Fight Hell to Hold You” by KISS (“Ooh, the jealous and the lonely, they try to keep us apart / But let 'em come between us, that's when the trouble starts”) is spot on.
I will say that the playlist was definitely selected from Danny’s POV — all songs that follow his journey from New York to Camelot —but the one song on there that’s very much Gina Rabinowitz is “The Boy is Mine”, but instead of it being Brandy and Monica going head to head, it’s Gina going head to head with herself…trying to decide between Danny and Arthur.
FLZ: What was the biggest surprise choice for you that made the list?
Kleid: Actually, the biggest surprise was the song that did NOT make the list — and is now in the playlist for the complete collection, as a secret add-on we didn’t include in the issues — which was “Beat on The Brat” by The Ramones. I mean, Danny is from the Bronx, not Queens where the Ramones are from, but Alex posted a Medieval promo right when one of the later issues came out and selected “Beat” as his audio track and I was like “holy crap how did I miss that one?!” I mean, between the driving guitar, the aggressive nature of the song, and the bare bones lyric—“Beat on the brat with a baseball bat”—it really is the song I hope we use when and if we ever get a movie trailer.
FLZ: Do you have a go-to artist you listen to when you start writing? Who and why?
Kleid: As I mentioned, I don’t really listen to music when I write, but I’m a big fan of Bruce Springsteen. His music tells the stories of a blue-collar working lifestyle that isn’t always pretty, is filled with heartbreak and pain, and can both lift you up and immerse you in loss at the very same time. Listening to Bruce always makes me want to write, makes me went to tell stories that move a reader’s heart.
FLZ: A fun question to close on - out of all the artists on the playlist, (likeness rights waived - completely fair game to use), who would you cameo in the Medieval story universe and why?
Kleid: Ha ha The Ramones? Maybe KISS — I’d love to do a medieval version of that band, and stick ‘em in there as demons or something. There are a few Medieval sequels we have in mind (whether or not we get a chance to do them, who could say?) based on the rest of the Vulgate cycle and those stories do have some magic and demons in them, so we could maybe make that happen. Otherwise, I’d have to choose between Bowie and the Beastie Boys — the Starman vs Ad-Rock. I mean, there are so many good options, how can you make me choose?
LINKS TO KEN’S MEDIEVAL REVIEWS (OVERAL GRADE: 8.6)
Thanks again to Neil Kleid for taking the time out to talk with FLZ. Hit us up on social media and let the team know what you thought of “Medieval”! what was your favorite song on the playlist! Till next time, thanks for reading!
