What happens when social media meets the dark side of human nature?
In Vertigo's Unfollow, a dying social media magnate decides to leave his fortune to 140 random people, who will split the money among themselves.
However, there's a catch: if someone dies, the money gets re-divided and split between however many people remain. This leads to what essentially what becomes the social media version of The Hunger Games or Battle Royale.
In an interview, Unfollow writer Rob Williams and artist Mike Dowling spoke about the concept of this story, as well as how they decided to approach it.
What originally inspired the story behind Unfollow?
WILLIAMS: Mike and I worked together on 2000 A.D. in the UK and we were talking about wanting to do something else together. We talked about the sort of themes we wanted to explore. And I wanted to do something about social media. I had a rough idea of a story about someone using it to attract people, but Mike talked about how he wanted to do something with themes of privacy and things like this.
DOWLING: I think I'd not long read Robinson Crusoe, and I was kind of into doing a survival story, kind of like a back to nature story. But then, you kind of add this idea of mixing that with social media and it's as far away from nature as you can get, really. But of course, perversely, we've come all the way back around the food chain and this sort of food chain on Twitter.
WiLLIAMS: You see some food chain behavior on Twitter every day. Groups coming together, you see witch hunts, you see rock stars with lots of followers and all these types. One of the themes that we're dealing with in the book thematically: we have great technology, but we're still the same animals in the jungle we always were.
When you're telling a story that is this dark, how do you reflect the tone in the artwork?
DOWLING: What I'm trying to get across in the art is the complexities of the characters. I tend to see my job as to sell the emotion and push the drama. It's just about being honest to what Rob has written and bring that out as best as possible. I think Rob's work is great: he thinks very carefully about these characters and their situations. It's pretty easy for me to figure out, "Okay, this is how I'm going to sell this thing." I don't think it's really that dark, but I suppose it does have its brutal moments.
Also, the art in this books is relatable: this looks like our real world. How did that play into how you drew these settings and characters?
DOWLING: Again, I think it's about selling it as best as I can and giving it some weight, making it seem like our world and not a generic kind of comic book world. But again, that's more of a personal preference.
Because we're only on the first volume of this story, do you have it worked out who will live and who will survive? How do you make those decisions from volume to volume?
WILLIAMS: From a writer's point of view, your job is just hope that you made these people care about the characters. You either put them through hell or kill them. It's a cruel job, in that respect. I think with any kind of story, we have certain things planned out and we know where we're going with certain things and certain things are a surprise to us as much as it is to the readers along the way. And that's just the nature of writing. I know in the second half of the series, there's one character that I'm kind of reaching towards to be killed off. I feel sad about it myself because I love writing the character.
One thing I found really interesting is the use of tweets throughout the story, which incorporates more of that social media element into everything. How did you decide on how to incorporate that, both with the writing and the artwork?
WILLIAMS: That was something we talked about early on in the planning stages. We wanted it to be part of — Mike sort of raised some good examples of how this type of thing is used in movies. We wanted to incorporate tweets in the pages and the front covers of every issue. It looks like a tablet: we framed it so it looks like you're reading it on an iPad, even though you might be buying the paper copy.
DOWLING: We have in cinema, with incorporating technology, when you cut to a phone screen or a computer screen. It's kind of instinct to ask, "Oh, dear, am I supposed to read this text?" When you're reading a comic, you're already in that world of visuals and text, so when the characters look at their phone, it just reacts quite naturally. It fits quite well with the medium. It turns out that it was a pretty easy thing to do.
I just read that Unfollow is getting a TV adaptation, is that true?
WILLIAMS: It's in progress. That's all we can say about it at this point.
What story elements does an adaptation need to retain its impact?
WILLIAMS: I think with any creator — whether it's a book or comic — when they see their work on TV or movies, you have to realize that whatever ends up on the screen is not necessarily going to be your story. It's going into the hands of others. But you also like to think that if people like our story enough to buy it for TV or movies or whatever, then they like the story: they like the themes and they like the characters and the tone. I think for me, anyway, with the nature of the book, the theme is the heart of Unfollow. As long as it retained that, then I think it would be an interesting thing to watch.
