INSIDE THE MATRON: DAVID BOWLES ON HORROR, CRAFT, AND THE ART OF BUILDING WORLDS

David Bowles, Drew Edwards, Monica Gallagher, and Harry Saxon The Matron

David Bowles doesn't build stories. He builds worlds, and then the mythologies, bloodlines, and buried histories underneath them. The Rio Grand Valley Latine writer moves across prose, verse, and comics with restless range: the Mesoamerican steampunk of Clockwork Curandera, the borderlands cosmology of Tales of the Feathered Serpent, the superheroics of The Thirteen series, and his charge into the tales of Black Demon. He writes fast and he writes deep. And because he's also an editor and publisher who has shaped a lot of our scripts, he thinks about comics from every side of the table at once.

His latest is The Matron (IPI Comics). Co-created with Drew Edwards, drawn by Monica Gallagher, and colored by Harry Saxon, this six-issue slasher miniseries is heir to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but rooted hard in the Czech-Mex-Anglo braid of the Texas Hill Country, and it's carrying a lot more than blood.

I had the pleasure of talking shop with David, and we covered a lot of ground: how to innovate storyworld-building in comics, why choose a genre like horror as the envelope for a story, and what separates a script that sings from one that collapses under its own weight.

FLA: As an editor, a writer, and a publisher, how do you evaluate a comic script? What makes a good one, and what makes one that falls in on itself?

DB: I learned this the hard way. My first comic script was the Clockwork Curandera graphic novel, a 200-page monster acquired by Lee & Low's Tu Books back in 2016. About a year in, my editor sent me a note that ripped my heart out. She loved the ideas and the world-building, but told me to streamline the storytelling, lean into the visuals, and stop treating it like a prose novel.

So now the first thing I do is flip through a script and see whether the writer has a feel for how much text a page can hold. That's the number one mistake. Some books get away with being text-heavy, Watchmen, Shakespeare adaptations where the words really matter. But for a fast-paced, adventure-driven story, you have to stay nimble and punchy.

Then I look at how the writer handles panels, because panels give you power over time. You can collapse time, let minutes elapse in the gutter, or accordion it out and stretch an action across a whole page. I want that balance: pages driven by visuals with little text, and pages carrying the dialogue the reader needs. If it's all visuals, I get lost. I also look at whether they understand that each panel is a frozen moment. People coming out of prose often describe movement happening inside a single panel. It doesn't work. A panel is one instant.

 “Comic books are not about the beauty of language. They are about the power of story.”

FLA: So even at the script level you're thinking visually, and writing those prompts to the illustrator forces us to stay on our toes.

DB: It sure does. Comics are collaborative. It's dangerous to think of yourself as the sole creator, because your script is just a script nobody reads if the illustrator isn't there.

When I started, working with Raúl the Third on Clockwork Curandera, I over-explained everything. He'd say, dude, do I have to do what you wrote? And I'd say, no. That's good advice when you don't know who you'll be working with. Give them plenty, but once they come aboard, give them permission to interpret, to ignore what they want to ignore.

With The Matron, working with Monica on issues one and two let Drew and me go back and tweak three through six once we saw how she handled things. And working with my daughter Charlene on Tales of the Feathered Serpent, she'll walk over to my place and say, Dad, I can't do this, what if we do this instead? And she's right. You have to deposit your trust. Raúl got a co-creator credit on Clockwork Curandera because his fingerprints were all over that world. It just seemed right.

FLA: At the end of issue one, your editor calls your pitch one of the best-written, most professional he'd ever seen. What makes a top-notch pitch?

DB: A top-notch pitch shows a real, burning need to tell that story. Like it matters to you. And that need has to be translatable to a market need, so somebody reads it and goes, I can see this person's passion, and that passion can be converted into a fandom. There's an audience hungry for it.

For Drew and me, the idea was a true Texas horror story. Take something like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, supposedly set in Texas but filmed elsewhere, and root it elementally in Texas identity. The Hill Country has a very particular makeup: German in the west, Czech in the east, gradations in between, the mixture of Mexican and Anglo culture. We wanted the hallmarks of the traditional slasher but grounded in the folklore, the actual geography and politics, the gentrification of small towns, the tech-bro capitalism sweeping in and eating up parts of the state with no regard for roots.

The other thing I look for is vision down the road. Is this a one-shot, or is there world-building that lets the story continue? Are the characters developed? Is the antagonist compelling? And does it feel like it's saying something that matters? There's room for stories that are just fun, but I'm more enamored of stories that have something to say. And if it works with tropes, does it do it in a novel way, putting a bow on the trope and perfecting it, the way Hereditary does? I love projects that reward rereading.

"We wanted the hallmarks of the traditional slasher but grounded in the folklore, the actual geography and politics of the people who settled Texas.”

FLA: Let's go to genre. Why horror for this story, and what does the slasher tradition let you do with Latinidad, class, and the Czech-Mex makeup of the Hill Country that another genre couldn't?

DB: Horror, more than any genre, lets you put people in extreme situations and watch their humanity shine through under danger. It also lets us exorcise the horrific things in our own minds, feel those emotions without being in danger.

Drew came to me from a scrapped Texas Chain Saw sequel he'd been hired to write, one that asked what happens when gentrification hits the town where the cannibal family lives. There's a Starbucks down the street from the murder house. I suggested we file off the serial numbers and do our own thing, and gender-swap it. In the original, Leatherface has almost no agency, he's the attack dog the family sends out. What if it were the matriarch? There haven't been many women slashers. The big ones are all men.

So, picture a working-class woman in her fifties trying to keep her family alive through all this gentrification. She loses her job, loses her home to eminent domain, and takes up the mantle of a previous serial killer to survive and shield the people she loves. It's no longer about mental illness or birth defects. It's a conscious choice to give in to the darkness because the darkness is the only way forward. At its core, The Matron is a feminist story. Not that it's admirable for women to take up axes and start murdering people. But the idea of taking the reins, of no longer letting society force you into a life you don't want, when it's cutting off every option women have, that's fascinating. What happens when a woman is backed into a corner and has no other option than to kill a few motherfuckers?

"At its core, The Matron is a feminist story. It's about no longer letting society force you into a life you don't want.” “The Matron isn't a superhero. She plays a role the way a forest fire does, clearing dead weight so things can prepare for renewal.”

FLA: In my The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez I talk about how he uses genre to build the familiar and then flip the world upside down once the audience is inside. Where's the flip in The Matron?

DB: In issue one you get the original Matron's backstory, how she was brought down, alongside the present day, 2021, with Texas about to get hit by a massive ice storm. You feel what it's like to be this woman's granddaughter, a waitress watching these horrors replayed on the TV. The flip is that in the flashbacks you see a little girl doing strange things, poking a dead cat, quietly facilitating her grandmother's killings. By the end you realize that little girl is the woman in the present. If the original Matron is dead, the story is about something else.

The identity of the Matron, the mask, passes from person to person, but here it's intergenerational, grandmother to granddaughter, woman to woman. The town is called Ascuas, Spanish for both embers and suspense. En ascuas means you left me hanging. There's a reason for that name. Starting in issue three you see the supernatural and cultural underpinnings, Rozina being Mexican and Czech, the Matron as an identity outside any single individual but connected by bloodline.

Over six or seven miniseries we have a real story to tell about the role death plays in human existence, the cyclical nature of life and death, winter and spring, things our ancestors cared deeply about and that we've become divorced from. The Matron isn't a superhero. She plays a role the way a forest fire does, clearing dead weight so things can prepare for renewal. That's very different from how slashers usually work, as a reactionary tool that punishes kids for smoking or having sex. Our protagonists are a queer couple, the granddaughter and her girlfriend, who happens to be the granddaughter of the police chief who killed the first Matron. There's a whole tangle of small-town feuds, corruption, and history surfacing through the slasher. By that litmus test, you could almost say the Matron isn't a slasher at all.

“The Matron isn't a superhero. She plays a role the way a forest fire does, clearing dead weight so things can prepare for renewal.”

FLA: Nothing sells a character like action. Rozina barely speaks, "I am winter, I am death" is almost the whole of her interiority, yet she's completely legible. And the robbers get characterized fast: Zeke's "ripping off an old lady seems kinda..." does a lot of work in one line. How do you make minor characters feel like they're on the make without exposition?

DB: It starts with knowing their motivation. I understand things about those three robbers that never appear on the page. Zeke survives, he's the final boy instead of the final girl, and comes back later as a seventy-year-old FBI profiler who wrote a bestselling book about the Matron that got turned into a bloodless Lifetime movie, an amusing in-joke. Because I know all of that, I can give each of them a line the reader has no context for yet, but that encodes their identity in a short, rich way. Later, on a reread or in the prequel novel we're writing, people will come back to that scene and go, oh, snap.

I'm a planner. I don't write off the cuff. I need to know who my characters are so I can write that dialogue. This is why a lot of B-movie scripts fall flat, everyone sounds like one voice, because nobody thought about those three dudes as individuals. Rozina is economical because she's an immigrant and English isn't her first language. Zina, once she becomes the Matron, quotes other serial killers, Drew's genius touch. She's spent decades reading true crime to sublimate her urge to kill, and all it's given her is a toolkit of serial-killer quotes to throw out at a moment's notice. And you have to listen to real people. Get your nose out of the book, sit in a coffee shop or your local taquería, and jot down how people actually talk.

“This is why a lot of B-movie scripts fall flat. Everyone sounds like one voice, because nobody thought about those three dudes as individuals.”

FLA: The issue closes with an FBI file that recasts Rozina as something closer to an avenging figure than a monster. Is that a way to innovate through structure rather than through the events themselves?

DB: Yes. You can understand The Matron purely from the comics. But the back-matter gives you a fuller sense of how the world reacts to her, and details you'd miss since Rozina dies in the first issue. I love that character, and where she comes from matters to the series, so I wanted to deepen her without undercutting the story. Fans want backstory. As a kid I read every word of the Lord of the Rings appendices. Others just watch the movies, and that's fine too. I want to provide the stuff that makes the story more rewarding without being necessary to enjoy it.

FLA: With a six-issue miniseries, do you plot the whole arc before scripting, or build issue to issue? What's locked, what stays open?

DB: Drew and I are big believers in breaking out the issues first. We know the arc, we know broadly what happens issue to issue, that's the very first thing we do. Then we write the first and last issues together, usually in person at Drew's apartment. Drew is a much more kinetic storyteller, he'll get up, grab a bat, mimic the Matron's movements, while I sit and think. Then we split the middle. I wrote two and three, the character-driven issues, Zina accepting the mantle, the queer romance, the university material. Drew wrote four and five, the matron arriving in town and Zeke Gavin getting caught up in it, since Zeke is his character.

When you write with someone else, you have an editor right there. We're hard on each other, we push each other, and we don't let each other get away with less than our best. By the time it reached Jason Franks for his editorial pass and then Monica, it was in solid shape. There's a follow-up coming, The Matron: Feud, and we'll be presenting at San Diego Comic-Con, so a lot of our downtime there will go to breaking out those six issues, maybe even starting to write. Which, honestly, will be a nice way to survive Comic-Con.