You likely know Chris Yost’s work from his Marvel X work, where with co-writer Craig Kyle, he blew the on the doors on the House of Mutants wide open– hell, they even blew up the House…
Chris started at Marvel back in 2002 as an intern at the West Coast office, but quickly rose up the ranks after impressing a few execs with his spec scripts. It wasn’t long before they’d hired him to write on the animated series, X-men: Evolution…from there you can chart a rising line of awesome comic book work with a career that looks like it’s just getting started.
In 2009, Chris and Atomic Robo co-creator, Scott Wegener published a three-issue, Image mini-series called Killer of Demons.
…and it’s awesome.
I had been tracking Killer of Demons fairly early in its development, when Yost popped by a message board I frequent with some pre-release artwork– being a fan of Scott’s work, I was instantly hooked.
Killer of Demons is one half Army of Darkness/Constantine and one half Office Space– with a lot of decapitations in between.
YOST: ‘Killer of Demons’ is the heartwarming story of junior account executive Dave Sloan, who wakes up to see that there are actual literal demons from hell among us and a heavenly cherub angel is telling him to kill them all. Which he does, with swords, axes, guns and even a pen. But Dave starts to realize that things aren’t necessarily as they seem.
“As Satan points out to him, pretty much all the good serial killers think they’re doing God’s work. And given that everyone Dave sees as a demon is someone he works with–he works in advertising, about 10 to 1 hellspawn–or people that annoy him–gardeners with leaf blowers, the drive-thru window guy–it doesn’t look good for Dave’s sanity.
“So the question is ‘Dave… insane? Or hand of God on Earth?’ The answer may or may not surprise you.”
Killer of Demons was quite well received amongst the audience that picked it up, but like many great Image books, it got a bit lost in the shuffle of the monthly rack. Still, I’m a big champion of the book and a when I do run across people that have read it, I’ve yet to hear a negative review.
Recently, (up really late one night on Twitter) Yost mentioned that he’d started thinking about Killer of Demons 2– which, I instantly (and perhaps over-excitedly) responded to…ultimately, that led to a quick email in which I asked Chris if he’d be willing to shoot over a KOD script– and being the awesome guy he is, he didn’t give us one. He gave us all three!
This is a really good script for you writers out there- take note of the page space of Yost’s script– I don’t think that any one page of final comic goes over two pages of script. That’s important. You don’t want to overload your artist– unless you’re Alan Moore…but you’re not, so don’t.
I also think this is a really good script for you artists to practice on. Scott is a stylized artist, so it would probably be neat to see how you might interpret the script and then go back to look over his artwork to see how he did it.
You can pick up the first Killer of Demons trade at Amazon for about ten bucks– It’s a fun read! Highly recommended!
For those who do, here’s a quick message from Letterer extraordinaire, Thomas Mauer:
(Keep an eye out for) the joke on Creationism on the double page spread in issue 3 where Dave stands before the building and you can read when the ad company was created. I threw that in there but no reader’s ever mentioned anything about it to me afterward.
– and indeed, we can consult the script and see that Thomas put that in there himself! Just a little amusing flourish that even I overlooked on my first read. That just goes to illustrate the power of having an awesome letterer on your side!
Wrapping up, let’s have a big round of applause for Mr. Chris Yost for kindly donating his Killer of Demons scripts for us to read and study! You can find Chris on twitter @Yost, where you too can let him know that you’d love to see Killer of Demons 2!