Snake Bite
Christopher Sebela takes Snake back to the future
Proving that a great concept never goes out of date, this December John Carpenter’s cycloptic anti- hero Snake Plissken returns in Escape From New York from Boom! Studios, a mere three decades after Kurt Russell first donned his iconic eye- patch. Christopher Sebela is the man steering Snake’s destiny.
“America was raised on Westerns, the lone man in the wilderness who rides into town to make things right,” Sebela tells Red Alert. “He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t give away anything. He adheres to a personal code. And when he’s done, he rides out of town. That’s basically what the movie was, except instead of the old west that no one remembers; it’s the impending urban dystopia that everyone fears will come to pass.”
The comic starts where the film ends and takes Snake beyond Manhattan’s mean streets. “As soon as I started thinking about the book, I immediately wondered what the rest of America was like,” says Christopher. “If the crime rate has risen 400% and the country has gotten to the point where everyone goes along with Manhattan being turned into a prison, there’s a lot of bad things going around. So we jump in with both feet trying to find out what it’s like. Like a travelogue. Our first arc is entitled Escape From Florida. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Florida has gotten even more insane than the weird stories we see coming out of it every day in 2014.”
Boom! scored a bulls- eye with their all new Big Trouble In Little China series and Carpenter reads the scripts. “I’d love to sit down with him and co- plot or co- write an arc down the road, but I know he’s John freaking Carpenter, so his plate is plenty full,” says Sebela. “And yeah, I hear Kurt Russell in my head all the time when I’m writing.”
Escape From New York begins on 3 December.