Witch Hunts co-author Rocky Wood has discussed his work on the Witch Hunts graphic novel and his commitment to the Horror Writers Association and Stephen King research, despite being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2010.
Here’s a sample from the interview…
“There is so much that happened in the whole sorry story of the witch persecution craze that the hardest part was what to leave out! In the end, we settled on an arc of tales that illustrate what happened and why – from the time when the Church condemned those who believed that witches existed (because such a belief was deemed ‘pagan’) through to the so-called ‘Burning Times’ (although just as many were executed by hanging, decapitation and so on) through to the Enlightenment. The motivations were complex and a lot had to do with misogyny, greed, religious intolerance (especially towards reformist and deeply conventional forms) and possibly the worst thing was the evil power a few men had that lead to hundreds, if not thousands of innocents dying wretched deaths. We deal with some of these evil men – including the self-appointed Witch-Finder General of England, and the execrable Heinrich Kramer.
So, a lot of the research was about ensuring we had a solid factual basis for our scenes, many of which are ‘fictionalized’ because, of course, no-one recorded exactly what happened. The awful truth is you can’t make this stuff up – the tortures were horrendous, the greed spectacular, the misogyny on a scale almost unimaginable.”
Read the rest of the interview HERE
