9 “Dragons and Dragon Slayers” — An Interview with Von Allan

Von Allan is a self-taught Canadian comic book artist, who self-published the indie graphic novels ‘The Road to God Knows’ (2009) and ‘Stargazer’ (2010-2011), the comic book series ‘Wolf’s Head’ (2017- ) and several short story collections.

Allan spent four years developing his debut graphic novel, ‘The Road to God Knows’ – a semi-autobiographical tale about a teenager’s trying to cope with her mother’s schizophrenia – which he self-published in 2009 under the Von Allan Studios imprint. Kelly and Marie – the graphic novel’s main characters – reappeared in Von Allan’s subsequent short stories ‘Brawl’, ‘Fast Friends’ and ‘The Old Crow’, that were collected in the book ‘Li’l Kids’ (2008). Because of his openhearted graphic novel, Von Allan was contacted in April 2015 by filmmaker Megan Durnford, who worked on a documentary about the impact of parental mental illness, called ‘I Am Still Your Child’. The cartoonist was interviewed for the film giving an honest account of his mother’s story. For the occasion, Von Allan remade several pages and panels from his graphic novel to be shown in the film. ‘I Am Still Your Child’ was released in 2017.

After ‘The Road to God Knows’, Von Allan continued to work on his own comic projects.

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What is your story with wrestling?

Once upon a time I was a very big fan. And my first graphic novel “the road to god knows…” actually ends with Marie, the protagonist, and her friends going to a wrestling show. That was actually based on a real-life event; the WWF came to Ottawa in 1988 and 1989 and I attended both of those shows.^[1] Due to the nature of the story in “road,” having Marie attend a wrestling event was a perfect way to end the book.

I have a great deal of affection for that era, though oddly not the WWF (though it’s hard not to love their production values at the time compared to Jim Crockett Promotions (what I thought at the time was the NWA) as well as the AWA, WCCW, Stampede, and so on. That all said, I haven’t watched regularly for a long time. There are a few reasons for that. In no particular order:

I like tag teams. A lot. I like the logic of tag team wrestling. A lot. I do not particularly enjoy singles matches, with some exceptions. To me, when tag team wrestling is structured properly (and hell yeah there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it!), it is one of the most beautiful things to watch. What do I mean? Well, the logic here is key: each corner of the ring has a tag rope. One corner for one team and the opposite corner for another. The non-legal wrestler holds that damn rope and doesn’t let it go. Both feet are on the ring apron while they hold that ol’ rope. The length of the rope is how far they can legally move away, while on the ring apron, from their corner. And the tag itself is key; tags are the legal wrestler slapping the hand of their tag team partner. To sum up: hand to hand tags, while the non-lega wrestler is standing on the apron (both feet!) holding their side’s tag
rope. That’s how you do it.

This opens a world of possibilities. The legal baby face, getting clobbered, stretches out to their partner, desperate to make a legal tag. Their partner, holding the rope, stretches out as far as they legally can to try and make the tag. And then the heel(s) stop it, either with good wrestling or cheating. And then vice-versa; baby face makes a comeback and the legal heel is desperate to get out. So racing over to their corner, they try and make the tag to their heel partner. That partner doesn’t do it right, either trying to tag a body part (not hand to hand), lifting a foot to stretch even further, letting go of the rope for an otherwise legal hand to hand tag, or just coming in illegally. Notice what I’m saying? Legal and illegal? Who enforces that? The referee. So the other key element is that the referee has to be on top of things, in control, and enforcing the rules. The best in the business to my mind was Tommy Young. That man had authority in a match. His reactions were believable without taking anything away from the wrestlers in the ring. He had control and he wouldn’t allow nonsense that made both the wrestlers and wrestling itself look weak, even if it “looked cool” to the fans or whatever. “Looking cool,” by the by, is one of the problems with wrestling of any era; if it looks cool, but breaks the logic of the rules and psychology of the storytelling, it’s actually doing a lot of harm.

The WWF/WWE really started crapping on tag team wrestling, beginning in the early 1990s. I found that exceptionally frustrating. Breaking up the Midnight Rockers (Michaels and Jannetty will ALWAYS be the Midnight Rockers to me!), having guys who rarely tagged winning titles over established teams, the constant betrayals and breakups, and on and on. I think it was Bill Watts, back in his Mid-South days, who structured tag team wrestling so that an established tag team would always defeat two single superstars who have tagged up for a one-off match. Why? Because the established guys, even if they were “just” midcarders, have worked together. Worked together for a long time. They have a history. A second sense about each other. A flow. The two superstars don’t, so they lose. Awesome. There have been decent teams since the 1980s, of course, but give me the Midnight Rockers, the Midnight Express (Bobby Eaton and Stan Lane or Eaton and Dennis Condrey, both with Jim Cornette), the “Original” Midnight Express (Dennis Condrey and Randy Rose with Paul E. Dangerously), the Hart Foundation, the Rock ’n Roll Express, Demolition, Tully Blanchard and Arn Anderson (with J.J. Dillon or Bobby “The Brain” Heenan), the Fantastics, the Can-Am Connection, “Playboy” Buddy Rose and “Pretty Boy” Doug Somers (with Sheri Martell), and so on over anything being done today.

Deaths. A lot of the guys I watched growing up are dead. Curt Hennig, Davey Boy Smith, Randy Savage, Bad News Allen/Brown,
Bam Bam Bigelow, Andre the Giant, Owen Hart, Big John Studd, Hawk from the Road Warriors, the various Von Erichs, Biff Wellington, Jumbo Tsuruta, Buzz Sawyer, and so on. Not to mention the horrible circumstances around Chris Benoit. I watched Stampede Wrestling growing up, so I saw Owen Hart and Chris Benoit when they were very young. Seeing what happened to them was just awful.

Body Wreckage. For those who didn’t die… whew, boy, the cost to their bodies. The Dynamite Kid being a great example. I’ve really
soured on contact sports like football, wrestling, and whatnot. The cost is far too high.

The End of the Territories: I really liked the territories. I watched AWA, Crockett (when I could; it was hard to get here), WWF,
wrestling out of Montreal (Grand Prix), and so on. When Vince McMahon took over and killed the territories, I was pretty much done. I came back a bit with the WCW, since I liked their tag teams, but I had stopped watching regularly prior to WrestleMania VII. I would kinda keep a watch on things and I still do that from time to time to this day, reading dirtsheets and the like. The aforementioned deaths really did it for me, but the loss of the territories hurt, too. And I didn’t like AT ALL the WWF style of wrestling, especially getting into the Attitude-Era that so many people seem to like. I didn’t like the gimmicks, I didn’t like the focus on personality… I like hard-hitting “realistic” (but relatively safe) wrestling that Crockett used. Seriously, the Starrcade ’88 match between Bam Bam Bigelow and Barry Windham? Give me THAT. Even despite the crappy finish. Even better when its tag teams! So more Tito Santana, not El Matador. More Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, not the Roy Orbison version. More Smash from Demolition, not the Repo Man. More Terry Taylor, not the Red Rooster.

The lack of respect for Referees and the “rules” of the ring. This might be an “inside-my-head” thing, but I hate how impotent referees have become. Somebody’s cheating and the ref will start their 5 count. The heel exceeds the count. And… nothing happens. They just start counting again. Or constant interference with no “legal” consequences. The Young Bucks are awful with this, but it’s certainly not just them. It feels to me, rightly or wrongly, that there’s such a desire to get “spots” in that the logic and storytelling take a backseat. If that’s true, what an absolute shame.

So yeah, that’s my story.

Wrestling has been called the “most popular form of American theater.”  Wrestling is storytelling, in many ways, within and across the individual matches.  How might wrestling, as a storytelling art, have impacted your own work as a storyteller?

Actually, though comics and graphic novels would seem a pretty far cry from wrestling, it has impacted my own work in a big way. I don’t even know if I can summarize it, but I’ll try.

Episodic Closure: This is a fancy way of saying that each issue of a comic or graphic novel needs to have a definitive ending. Not THE ending, but the main action of the issue needs to be resolved. Comics are generally a serialized medium, but even within that episodic closure is key. I would argue that one of the worst things that has happened to actual saddle- stitched comics in North America is that episodic closure rarely occurs. The common phrase is that writers “write for the trade [paperback].” From that point of view, each issue is just a segment in a larger story.  Okay, okay, in a sense that was always true, but that’s not what I mean. So many contemporary comics don’t use episodic closure. So one purchases an issue and discovers that it has started in the middle of a story. And when the issue comes to it’s physical end (i.e.: there ain’t no more pages in the actual comic to read), there isn’t an actual ending. Just what amounts to a “to be continued.”

That is a quantum shift with how comics used to be.

Now, I need to add that we’re talking about an art form here, so there are no hard and fast rules. Okay. But there are tools that have historically worked. And given how most periodical saddle-stitched comics sell these days, I would again argue that the lack of episodic closure is one clue to why this is.

How does this apply to wrestling? Well, a match has an ending. Even if it’s not a clean finish, it has an ending: a winner and a loser or a draw of some sort. Either way, there is closure. And then, either immediately or some time down the road, a rematch. With more closure. Rinse and repeat. I’d argue that the best wrestling has a clean finish (see below), but it still has “a” finish. Not true for too many comics.

Clarity: Good wrestling, when it works, has clear baby faces and heels. Dragons and Dragon Slayers. When these roles are clear, the stakes tend to be clear.

So-called ‘tweeners are interesting, mainly because their role tends to reflect the role of their opponent. A ‘tweener facing a Dragon? Well, they’re a Dragon Slayer. A ‘tweener facing a Dragon Slayer? Well, their a Dragon. Really good wrestlers will “read” the crowd and adapt to how the crowd is reacting, regardless of what was “scripted” ahead of time. As Larry Matysik noted in his book Wrestling at the Chase,

“Fans always needed to understand what was going on—we owed them that… There was a reason for every match [Sam Muchnick] made, and it was spelled out for the fans.”

This notion of Dragons and Dragon Slayers is really helpful for Action/Adventure stories and the like. Adapting it to my own storytelling, the protagonists are Dragon Slayers. Antagonists are Dragons. As Gary Hart said in GUEST BOOKER—GARY HART, “Good guys must win. My theory is, build a dragon and then let the good guys slay him. That’s the way you keep a guy hot.” Not every story needs to have this; “the road to god knows…”, for example, doesn’t. My current project, “Wolf’s Head” definitely does.

There was a great piece on Skandor Akbar years ago and he had a great take^[2] on this:

“Wrestling, Skandor says, comes down to this: There are dragons and dragon slayers. Skandor was a dragon, the archetypal villain, who must be vanquished by the dragon slayer so order can be restored to the world. Later in his career, as a manager, it was his job to find dragons to feed the dragon slayers. ‘That’s how I explain my world to people: dragons and dragon slayers.’”

What this taught me is that building a protagonist is not enough. One has to build the antagonist, too. And the antagonist, the Dragon, needs to have clear goals that they are trying to reach. In many ways it’s the antagonist’s goals that will drive part of the narrative, especially if the reader clearly understands what they want. However, one also has to be careful; the protagonist also must have clear goals. If they’re just sitting around, waiting for whatever the antagonist has planned, they lose agency. As a writer, I’m almost creating a web of conflict as these goals and then obstacles to those goals conflict. And I should add here: conflict is what happens when someone can’t achieve their goals. How the characters then act to try and resolve the conflict, be they antagonist or protagonist, is key. And all of this should be clear, clear as glass.

Clean Finishes: This is something that wrestling has struggled with, but so have many fictional narratives, including comics. Screwjob finishes, when instead of a clear winner and a loser we see some “schmoz” — when there’s interference and/or disqualifications — hurts wrestling. Hurts storytelling. WCW, for example, apparently could not figure out how to
keep wrestlers strong if they lost. So we often saw, especially in the NWO
days, screwjob finish after screwjob finish.

Some seem to believe that this creates heat and is the way “out,” keeping all wrestlers strong despite the screwjob finish. I don’t. I think it creates frustration in the viewer, not when it’s used sparingly but when it’s used
repeatedly. Quoting Larry Matysik’s Wrestling at the Chase again,

“… Sam [Muchnick] came from a pure sports background and operated accordingly. Everything needed to be logical and legit, just like a race for the National League pennant. A led to B —which resulted in C. Respect for the wrestlers’ skill and the finish were paramount. In St. Louis, the ‘way out’ was to have a winner and a loser. It was that simple.”

Do fans of the New York Yankees or your sports team of choice stop being
fans when their team has a bad season? Nope. Why is it so hard
sometimes for wrestling and other storytelling? Beats me.

Tell me about your genres and media in this book and other work you’ve done — how you developed your strengths in these genres (and what, if any, connection your strengths in genres may have with wrestling).

As I noted above, Episodic Closure, Clarity, and Clean Finishes have been a huge influence on me and my work. I believe that it has made me
stronger, partially because I started to seek out why I liked certain things I liked and why I didn’t like other things. Wrestling was really interesting for that. I can watch matches I liked a lot years ago and see how I feel about them now. And try to figure out why I feel that way, whether or not I’ve changed my mind.

A great example of a match I adore is the Hart Foundation versus Tully Blanchard and Arn Anderson (the Brain Busters) at SummerSlam ‘89. Loved it as a kid and I love it now. Part of my affection for that match was the anticipation; I had watched bo

th teams when they were in rival promotions (the Hart Foundation in the WWF and Blanchard and Anderson in the Crockett “NWA”) and I couldn’t wait to see them lock horns. And the match itself is great, respecting much of what I outlined above with strong tag team wrestling. Even though the finish is so-so (not clean), the match itself is still strong. I understand better why I loved it then and why it worked for me. And why it still works for me.

Being able to analyze storytelling, trying to figure out why I think something works or doesn’t work, has made me a stronger storyteller.
And I think it’s important to try not to have biases. Is wrestling like comics? Superficially no. Is its storytelling like the storytelling in comics,broadly speaking? Yup!

Learning to become a visual artist and the struggle to do so was not connected with wrestling. So that’s a very separate situation. Learning to draw, especially because I started so late, was one helluva struggle. Each project that I’ve done has been a learning experience as I learn and grow. Prior to “Wolf’s Head,” I had done graphic novels. With “Wolf’s Head,” I really had to learn how to do serialized storytelling in a way that I never had before. A lot of thinking about why and how to properly execute certain things. And then getting my visual art skills to a point that I can successfully do that. Since I wear “all the hats,” so to speak, that’s not easy. Writer-Me will sometimes conflict with Artist-Me. Learning to harmonize that has taken time, but it’s been one helluva fun ride, too!

And that’s where a definite link to wrestling does exist, because we go right back to storytelling.

What will be next for you?
It’s “Wolf’s Head,” plain and simple. I’m in for the long haul and I’m having a blast doing it. It’s challenging, but it has taught me a lot about storytelling. And it’s endlessly fascinating what lessons one can take from all kinds of mediums, including wrestling, and how to apply them to comics.

For more information about Von Allan, visit https://www.vonallan.com/