Buggin' Out with Caleb Palmquist!

Can you find the hidden Easter egg?!

Jul 25, 2024

Hey Friends!

Brand new Buggin’ Out! See if you can find the hidden Easter egg!

SCOTT WILKE: What’s up, Caleb! I gotta say, I’m a big fan of your work! Before I fanboy too hard, why don’t you go over your comic career for those who may not have had a chance to check out your stuff yet?

CALEB PALMQUIST: I’ve been writing comics for about nine years. I started with a sci-fi book called A Small Favor, but things really took off in 2020 when I launched Unicorn: Vampire Hunter. Since then I’ve launched a few other titles including Vampire Detective in Space, The Knight and the Lion, Modern Mythology, Dragon Grit, and more. Every year I seem to create more and more, but I’m doing what I love: telling stories.

SCOTT: And you tell them so well! So, this might be hard given your Substack, podcasts, and many interviews…but, tell us something you’ve never mentioned anywhere else.

CALEB: I always make loud, obnoxious sounds when I yawn. Various people in my life including my wife insist that these sounds are not, in fact, yawns, but they just don’t know what yawning is.

SCOTT: The guys at Bad Bug make loud, obnoxious sounds when they talk…so I get it. Alright, let’s hop in our Delorean, hit 88 mph, and head back to see young Caleb. What was he like? What was he into? What did he want to be when he grew up? Would he be horribly disappointed in you? :P

CALEB: Young Caleb was going to be the next Spielberg. In middle school I was obsessed with animation and spent all my free time tinkering with Macromedia Flash. I had a whole series of stick-figure animations. In high school, I took as many video production classes as I was allowed to take, and obsessively made short films. I’ve always had an “all-or-nothing” approach to my interests, and nearly everything else fell by the wayside in pursuit of my filmmaking goals. I even dropped out of track and field halfway through one season because it was getting in the way of my filmmaking.

I ended up going to film school at Montana State University before I switched schools and majors to study English instead. I think young me would be disappointed that I’m not in the film industry, but I think he would be pretty stoked about what I have achieved in comics.

SCOTT: I have no doubt! So, speaking of achievements, where did all of yours start? What was your first script?

CALEB: Well I first wrote Unicorn: Vampire Hunter on a yellow legal pad in 2011. Back then I didn’t know it was a comic book. I wrote it because I wanted to tell a fairy tale about a beautiful marsh. At the time I was dating a woman, and I told her that her green eyes were beautiful, like a marsh. She took this as a great insult, so I decided to write a fairy tale about a beautiful marsh just to prove her wrong. The unicorns and vampires came later.

I let that story sit for a long time before finally adapting it to a comic book script in 2019. I was originally going to draw it myself, but then I thought better of it and hired the talented Daryl Toh.

SCOTT: Daryl’s the GOAT, solid choice there! So, you and Allen had a podcast where you talked about crowdfunding fails (Crowdblunder). I loved that concept so I stole it for this question. Tell us about one of your failures (crowdfunding or otherwise) and how did you recover?

CALEB: Thanks! My first big failure in crowdfunding was my first failed Kickstarter, back in 2019. The campaign was for the third installment of my A Small Favor series. Back then I was still working out what worked and what didn’t on Kickstarter. I hadn’t yet fully adapted the “kill your darlings” mindset. After that campaign failed, a lot of people told me I should relaunch. Instead, I started work on Unicorn: Vampire Hunter, which changed the whole game for me.

I ended up returning to the well of A Small Favor with Vampire Detective in Space, which shares a lot of characters and themes with A Small Favor, but I think it’s a lot better.

SCOTT: So awesome to see creators rebound so beautifully! Now, I love what you’re doing with your Modern Mythology series. I also like taking mythological characters and putting modern spins on them. (Mostly holiday characters :P) Tell us a bit about what inspired you for your Modern Mythology and what else can we look forward to from that series.

CALEB: I have always loved mythology, and I’ve wanted to do comics involving mythology since I started doing comics. In 2019 anthologies were very popular on Kickstarter, so I decided to put one of my own together. Every story saw classic myths reinterpreted through a modern lens. It was very fun, but it was also a lot of work. After the first one I swore I would never do another one, and then I did two more (with one more on the way).

I recently successfully funded Medusa, which is a one-shot comic that imagines Medusa as a modern-day tomb raider type. Next year I will launch the third (and final) volume of the Modern Mythology anthology series.

SCOTT: Can’t wait for that one! So, one of my favorite series of yours is Vampire Detective in Space. It’s such an outlandish concept, yet you somehow are able to ground it and give it gravity (pun very much intended). What goes into achieving that?

CALEB: As I mentioned, Vampire Detective in Space is actually a re-imagining of my first comic book series A Small Favor. The two main characters are carried over from that series, but I also made some significant changes. The biggest change is that I centered the story around the relationship between James and his long-lost wife, Elizabeth.

I wanted to tell a story about what happens when we create idols, or false versions of people in our own minds. When you love an idea of a person, instead of who that person really is, you’re setting yourself up for failure. That’s something I’ve experienced in my own life (from both sides of that equation), and I wanted to portray it in the comic. I think most of my best stories start like that, with a theme I want to get across, and then the story grows around that.

SCOTT: A powerful theme to explore always makes a great seed for a story! Let’s talk about Unicorn: Vampire Hunter real quick. What draws you to tell vampire narratives? What are your favorite and least favorite vampire “rules”? What are some challenges you’ve found with writing this series and vampires in general?

CALEB: Ha! Well, the biggest source of inspiration for me was always Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think that show changed my brain chemistry in a big way, so vampires have always been on my mind. When it comes to rules, there are a million vampire rules. I’ve had people tell me they won’t read my books because I don’t follow some particular rule of vampirism that is important to them.

While I think the classics are fun, I pretty much ignore rules about ancestral soil, garlic, and turning into a bat. I like that vampires can’t go in the sun, a stake to the heart kills them (I mean a stake to the heart kills anyone but it especially kills vampires), and that vampires, when slain, go straight to hell.

Of course, in my stories the rules work however the hell I say they work, so if you’re nitpicking the vampire rules in my book, go write your own book! Yes, unicorn horns can kill vampires. Unicorns are magical. Deal!

SCOTT: Vampire purists are the worst! Okay, so love ‘em or hate ‘em, cons are the lifeBLOOD of indie comics. (Tying it back to vampires, see what I did there?) Anyhoo, tell us your favorite con experience and your least favorite con experience.

CALEB: That joke sucks. :p

The first con I ever tabled at was Florida Supercon, and I sold my ass off. That remains one of my most successful cons ever, even though all I had was one volume of A Small Favor. That said, when I first started doing cons I left exhausted every time. Now I relax a lot more when I go (and I think my books sell themselves a lot more now), and I have a better time. I’d rather have fun and meet interesting new people than hustle all weekend to make money, you know?

That said, I have been to cons where barely anyone showed up and I sold next to nothing. That’s always a bad feeling no matter how you frame it.

SCOTT: You have a truly unique voice in indie comics. I can’t say I’ve seen anyone else doing what you’re doing. So, I gotta know, what inspired you? What do you nerd out on?

CALEB: I appreciate that! I like to think I’m doing something special with my comics. The first book that inspired me to make comics on my own was Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. That was the first non-superhero comic book (not counting strip collections like Calvin and Hobbes) I ever read, and it made me realize that there was so much more potential to comics than I ever thought. Other big inspirations for me were Stardust by Neil Gaiman and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

SCOTT: Solid inspirations! So, our good friend, Editor John (John MacLeod) likes for me to ask this question with every guest. What is the Palmquist Vampire Hunter/Detective Session Soundtrack?

CALEB: Lo-fi medieval tracks to chill/study to. That’s a joke but also not a joke. I can’t listen to anything with words while I write, but I often find inspiration in vaguely fantasy/medieval tracks with a chill ambiance. If I need to write a fight scene I have a playlist with particularly epic tracks from Lord of the Rings.

SCOTT: Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to chat! Why don’t you take this time to tell everyone what you got going on right now? What’s in the pipeline for Caleb Palmquist?

CALEB: Right now I have a book called Hedgehog: Fear Trials live on Kickstarter, which is a spin-off of Unicorn: Vampire Hunter about a hedgehog warrior taking the final test to become a paladin of the marshland clan. If you like Unicorn: Vampire Hunter and you like anthropomorphic animal adventures, you’ll like this. It’s illustrated by Kit Wallis and lettered, of course, by Dave Lentz.