It was part of the line they published in Finnish along with Lobo, and the new coming of Batman as his own magazine had canceled a few years earlier. The first comic I read from Lansdale was the horror Western Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo, a collaboration with the great Timothy Truman. There were some short stories published in horror anthologies, and I instantly fell in love with them: They were scary, extremely bloody and very well written. Lansdale’s work came at the same time as my DYI comics in the mid and late ’90s. Piironen recently spoke to RUE MORGUE about his gorehound youth, inspirations and working relationship with the man who gave us Bubba Ho-Tep, Incident on and Off a Mountain Road and other classics.Ĭan you tell me a little bit about how you first encountered Lansdale’s work?ĭiscovering Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard tale MUCHO MOJO, aptly summed up in press materials as an “incredible, mad-dash thriller, loaded with crack addicts, a serial killer, and a body count.”

These two loves come together spectacularly with the release of his wild and vital graphic novel interpretation of genre fiction legend Joe R. The bloodier, the better! Nothing was good without gallons of blood!” “I had discovered import horror movies a bit earlier, and that was a time I was a full-on gorehound. “When I took the train to the big city nearby there were second-hand bookstores that carried Fangoria and Gorezone along with comics from smaller publishers,” he says. “Even as a kid, I took making comics quite seriously, spending evenings and summer holidays getting the next issue ready.” “Quite early on I started making my own comics, printing them and selling the magazines to my friends and family,” Piironen tells RUE MORGUE. Which is to say, though Jussi Piironen grew up in a small Finnish town of around 7000 residents, he could nevertheless find a slew of Marvel, DC and Image comics in his native language at the local supermarket as well as Bande Dessinées (i.e., legendary Franco-Belgian comics) at the library. Culture is like water flowing down a mountain: It finds a way to where it needs to be.

Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale