Locke & Key creators Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez reveal the length of the Sandman crossover and where it falls in Locke & Key’s overarching story.
The popular horror comic book series Locke & Key is about to crossover with the landmark DC title Sandman, and creators Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez reveal where the crossover fits in their expanding narrative.
While Locke & Key/The Sandman Universe: Hell & Gone will run for two issues, the crossover takes place within what will become the seventh volume of Locke & Key. For Rodriguez and Hill, the story — including the crossover — became much longer than they originally anticipated.
“Joe said ‘We’ve got the plot and I think we’re going to do a single issue for ‘…In Pale Battalions Go…’ and two 20-page issues to do the crossover so it’ll be about 60 pages of work.’ And I remember immediately thinking there was no way he was going to set this such a small amount of pages so we ended up doing 140 pages of story,” Rodriguez tells CBR. “‘Pale Battalions’ ended up being a three-issue series. Even though we stuck to two issues for the Sandman crossover, it grew from 20 pages to 32 to 40 so it’s basically a four-issue miniseries set in two single issues. It’s going to become the seventh volume of Locke & Key, the largest we’ve done so far, I think over 200 pages.”
“The Golden Age” collects a set of single-issue stories and short miniseries that explores the past of Keyhouse and the various keys forged with the mythical Whispering Iron. The three-issue miniseries “…In Pale Battalions Go…” reveals the role of the keys during World War I, with the Sandman crossover having Mary Locke descend to Hell to save her brother Jack’s soul close to a decade after the war. Hill reveals this larger story will all be compiled together.
“Eventually it’ll all be collected as Locke & Key: The Golden Age and the first chapter of that will be ‘Small World’ and then into ‘Open the Moon,’ ‘…In Pale Battalions Go…’ and then a secret story no one knows about that’s part of ‘The Golden Age’ that’s called ‘Face the Music’ and then there’s the Sandman crossover,” Hill elaborates. “The Sandman crossover alone is 80 pages, but then there’s almost another 80 pages of material that’s the rest of the book because ‘Pale Battalions’ is big. When it’s all done, it’s going to be about the size of one of the legacy editions of Locke & Key.”
Written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodríguez with colors by Jay Fotos, Locke & Key/The Sandman Universe: Hell & Gone #1 goes on sale April 14 from IDW Publishing and DC.
About The Author
