What happens when horror icon, and recent Oscar-winner, Jamie Lee Curtis has an epic idea for a comic book? You get Mother Nature, a new blood-soaked graphic novel about a teen girl possessed by an eco-demon bent on righteous revenge.
Co-writing the story with filmmaker Russell Goldman, and with art by graphic novelist and painter Karl Stevens, Curtis hopes to influence important topics, and bring about possible change through horror – just as the genre’s always reflected reality through a dark prism.
The story of Mother Nature is a force in its own right, following Nova Terrell, a teen girl who’s grown up to despise her town’s company, oil giant the Cobalt Corporation. Seeing through their lies, Nova wages a campaign of sabotage against them until one night she accidentally makes a terrifying discovery about the true nature of their “Mother Nature” project.
With the current SAG-AFTRA strike not causing any restrictions on her promoting a comic book, Curtis, alongside Goldman and Stevens, spoke to Fandom at San Diego Comic-Con about the graphic novel, from the origins of the idea, to the lessons it can teach generations.
The Nature of the Story
“I was 19-years-old and I knew that we were messing up the world. I just knew it,” Curtis recalled, about the long genesis of Mother Nature. “I don’t know… I wasn’t particularly an environmental kid. I could barely crawl my way out of high school. It wasn’t like I was smart. I just was aware and it had been in my head.”
“And then I made the Halloween movie in 2018 with David Gordon Green, and the way he made movies was so exciting and it just reinvigorated my mojo and I started to write this story.”
“I met Russell through a mutual friend,” Curtis continued, “and Russell and I started collaborating on the story. Russell took my very Father Knows Best – sort of my childhood part of the story – and said ‘Let me have a crack at it’ and basically reimagined the story as [one about] mothers and daughters, not the father. I remember I read the first version of his version and I was like, ‘Where’s the father?’”
She added, “His name was Track Denton, by the way – love the name – and I was like ‘where’s Track?’’ He goes ‘Just read…’ And he turned it into a story of mothers and daughters, one of whom is a Native American woman. An indigenous woman from New Mexico whose land is being leased by Cobalt Energy, this big conglomerate energy company whose engineer Nancy Denton has come up with a way to purify fracking water, which is to re-green the environment. And it’s total bulls**t.”
Nancy doesn’t think it’s BS, though, and has fallen for Cobalt’s ruse. And this is where Nova comes in, the daughter of the woman whose land is being leased who decides to take apart this “Mother Nature” project. In doing so, as Curtis explains, “Nova is struck by lightning and the demon is anthropomorphized into her, or she anthropomorphizes into the demon and then wreaks havoc on them. And then s**t starts happening that is really gnarly.”
Goldman was instantly drawn to how Mother Nature resonated emotionally for him, which the creative team acknowledged is something climate change stories can have a difficult time doing. “It’s such an existential thing that everyone has their own relationship with,” Goldman remarked. “How can you emotionally focalize it into a narrative, into a story, something that you can read? And the thing that Jamie and I both really responded to was the world that our parents are leaving behind for my generation, and the generation after mine, and that’s how we vocalize it into two mothers, two daughters.”
“The mothers have different backgrounds, but form an uneasy alliance that we see at the beginning, both of them working or involved in this Mother Nature project in different ways. And both of them love their daughters so much, almost blindingly so, and cannot necessarily see what they want or what’s actually best for them.”
Horror as an Agent of Change
Said Curtis, “In order for true large-scale change to work, it can’t be forced on people, but instead filtered into the populace through the art and stories. We recently did a podcast together in Boston and we were talking about what is the purpose of horror. Horror is a way of explaining how we’re feeling often after catastrophic events. It’s a way for artists to metabolize dangers and the fears that have accumulated throughout history.”
“There are all sorts of examples of it,” she added. “The biggest one we talked about was Godzilla coming after Hiroshima. And so for me, this is just another extension of it. If this is somehow an interpretation of where we are as people. We’re all scared. We’re all terrified. All of us can walk around and pretend that we’re not. We are, because it’s real. Numbers don’t lie. Heat indexes don’t lie. Art is to then interpret that, bring it farther into the masses, into the consciousness and hopefully make change.”
This has been a passion project, with Curtis and Goldman having developed it for five years, and Stevens spending two years at an artist’s draft table working on the images. Said Stevens, “I studied a lot of fine art paintings from the 19th century. A lot of Western painters like Thomas Moran. People who have done these great vistas, like the Southwest. I wanted to have that vibe because I thought having that sublime beauty mixed with all the gory violence would really key into the larger themes of the story itself.”
One particular character in Mother Nature was notably made to look like Curtis herself, and given a movie adaptation is already in development, it’s not that hard to ponder Curtis’ potential role in a film version. “What Karl was able to do with a pen and ink and some beautiful watercolors and capturing expressions is incredible,” Curtis beamed.
“If we ever make it into a movie, maybe I’ll play the part of the villain,” she added with a grin.
Environmental change is possible, Curtis noted, though it will take a lot to overcome humanity’s selfishness. “We know that there’s a way to do it, but people just are greedy and stupid, and that’s it,” Curtis observed.
She added, with her trademark wit and blunt nature, “You’re greedy and you’re stupid. So buy our books and change the world, would you please!?”
