Dirk Gently has been a long passion (my career started with Douglas Adams and my stage adaptation of Dirk Gently) .
I think it crucial to recognize that you can't straightforwardly "adapt" Douglas Adams. Douglas's genius was uniquely his own. What I've tried to do here, and in every other version, is to be true to the character and the Adams' tone and approach to narrative, his unique brand of word-play and "idea-play" humor.
I've always wanted to write comic books, my earliest memories are of waiting for Dad to come home from work, and, secreted in his lawyer's leather briefcase, would be comics from the store.
Growing up in Malaysia and England, there wasn't an obvious route into the comics world, so my creative energy went into theatre and prose and then movies and TV.
It is of course daunting to make ones public debut in a new format, particularly with a well loved character, and in a medium as much scrutinized by the web-o-sphere as comics... But I had the comfort of having great editors at IDW (Chris Ryall and Denton Tipton) and I knew whatever I wrote, Ilias would make me look good.
For better or worse, I've become the person the Adams Estate has entrusted to guide Dirk Gently into new mediums and to new audiences. I take that responsibility pretty seriously, which is, I'm guessing, where Ilias's comment about me being a "hands-on collaborator" (code for control freak) comment comes from.
I wanted wherever possible to lean into the comic form and do things in the story telling that could only be done in comics and which pay homage to the many strands of comic and visual storytelling tradition.
There is more sexy-stuff a coming in this book, though.... This ain't your grandmother's Dirk Gently.
In my head, the 5 issues of A Spoon Too Short comprise one novel: a 100 page graphic novel sequel to Douglas' two Dirk books, taking some of the ideas he was working on before he died, and a whole bunch of new stuff from me and a little from Max Landis (who is the Executive Producer on the book as well as writing the forthcoming TV series).
