Interview with Reverend Wesley Sun and Brad Sun, creators of Chaplain (part 1)

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Lizzy: Chaplain really unsettled me. I have a hard time with medical horror, so well done. Ben and Wesley, it’s a pleasure to talk with both of you. Can you tell the Monster Librarian readers about yourselves and Sun Brothers Studios?

Brad: Wesley and I are brothers. Some people are like, are you guys really brothers? Is that a marketing thing? But we are indeed brothers. We started making comics professionally around 2012. Our first graphic novel, Chinatown, came out then. We’ve been working on various projects since then. Up until now, most of our creator-owned work was crowdfunded, self-published books.Chaplain is our first one working with a publisher, Storm King Comics.

Wesley: The only thing to add to that, that’s probably not obvious from reading Chaplain, is that I write. I don’t illustrate, but Brad is an artist, as well as an inker, a colorist, a painter, and all that. We both wrote the script together on this particular project. Brad is sort of like a triple threat in terms of the different roles in comic book making. This was something of a newer collaborative project in co-writing a script, getting it under contract with Storm King, and working with a separate illustrating and visual team to get the book out.

Brad: Right. Especially for our larger books, say the graphic novels, I have been the one to illustrate them. Other illustrators we worked with were people we had already known, artist friends of ours that we were like, hey, let’s collaborate on something together. This was a unique experience in that the team, of course with our input, was assembled by Storm King. It was our first time working with a creative team that we didn’t have a relationship with. The other thing in terms of credentials that we should also mention is that Wesley is indeed an actual hospital chaplain. The story is not autobiographical to him, but it is informed by a lot of his personal experiences.

Wesley: Yeah, I’m calling in from my office at the hospital right now.

Brad: It’s not quite as nice as the one in the book

Lizzy: In Sandy’s introduction to Chaplain, she mentions the conversations that led to the book. What was it about those that led you to create the story?

Wesley: I met Sandy first. We were on a panel together at a convention in Chicago about trigger warnings in horror. We hit it off and started talking. As Sandy put it in the really lovely forward that she wrote, when she met me she assumed that I would be super religious and, I don’t know if she would use this word, but have a little more piety maybe. What was delightful about the conversation that came out is that my work is not as explicitly religious as some people might think. If you’ve never called on a chaplain, especially during a time of hospitalization, I wouldn’t blame anyone for having that assumption. I’ve met people who believe that chaplains only work within their own religious tradition, or maybe they’re evangelical, or they try to proselytize. I think Sandy was quite surprised at how open I am and how not religious, and sacrilegious I am in the way that I talk about life. I would say in many ways, Sandy is a very spiritual person in a way that she often doesn’t self-describe. Those conversations around death and aging, mortality, immortality, mythology, and theology gave rise to this friendship. She met Brad and we talked. Once she became familiar with our body of work and we became more familiar with the Storm King library, we pitched Sandy a menu of different projects we had at different stages of development. One of them was a way to bring the conversations we had been having with her personally for a larger audience, and she’s like, “That’s the one I want.”

Brad: Sandy’s very keen on working with people that she has relationships with, and that she enjoys collaborating with. One of the things she liked about the idea for this book is that it was a natural outgrowth from how she was originally introduced to Wesley. Then, because of those conversations, she knew that whatever we cooked up, there was interesting meat there to be explored. So really, that’s all the motivation she needed to say, go ahead with the project.

Lizzy: Wesley, you’ve spent roughly two decades working as a chaplain in hospitals, jails, and homeless shelters. Can you talk about bringing your experience into Chaplain?

Wesley: Yeah, absolutely. Most of the clinical encounters with patients in Chaplain have some grounding in an actual patient I met or a case study a student brought me. I work in this method where I write things on Post-It notes or postcards and stick them on the wall. The walls of my apartment are color-coded with different Post-Its. There was a time when at one point of the writing process, we were generating stories without knowing exactly where they go, or we didn’t have the characters figured out yet. It was really a lovely way to go back through almost 20 years of clinical experience to find and connect themes for the book. What was great about having Brad and I as equal writing partners is having Brad’s perspective as somebody from outside of the profession for things that I might take for granted, like everybody knows this. Well, that’s not true, you know? We’re very serious as writers about doing research. I took Brad with me to the hospital, to walk down the hallways and meet some of the chaplaincy team and my students, and we even went down to the morgue and everything. I’m so pleased with how everything came out. It’s very atmospheric, and the sense of how the hospital feels, what it looks like, even how it smells. The texture of the book is important. It was a nice combination of bringing my experience, having done this work for so long, and also getting Brad’s fresh perspective on some of these corridors and rooms and hallways. One of the things I remember most is, and Brad, correct me if I’m wrong, I was showing you the room where we show dead bodies at the hospital, and I was like, oh, this is the viewing room. And you’re like, this isn’t even a room at all. It’s like a corner of a hallway where they stopped building a wall or something. And I was like, oh, yeah.

Brad: Yeah, it almost seemed like a quirk of the architecture, that there was like a door, and then another door. So they just needed a space, an interior enclosed space. But yeah, it looked like it was basically a closet. And he was like, oh yeah, this is where we bring in people.

Wesley: Yes.

Brad: I was like, don’t you think it’s not…very nice?

Wesley: It’s a certain kind of coping, I think. People in my field, we’ve become a little bit desensitized and a little bit callous, which is ironic because our job is to de-callous that part. This is a little bit of a sidebar, but I think it speaks to that piece where Brad was like, how is this even a room? Because he’s right. That room is actually called the decon, or decontamination, room. It literally has a shower. If you get sprayed with a chemical or something, you run to the decon room, hit the chain, the water comes down, and there’s a drain on the ground. I remember one of our emergency room chaplains was giving a tour to my interns, and she was going a mile a minute trying to explain the decon. I remember telling her, I think this is a little bit much. I saw my interns were all freaked out. She was like, oh, do you think this is too much? And I’m like, you’re standing in a puddle of blood right now. She looked down and there was this big stain.

Lizzy: Oh my.

Wesley: I tried to bring in some of that dry humor between the chaplain and Simone, or Maria and the chaplain. Those three have a way of interacting that I feel is really true to hospital life. I remember writing the script with Brad when we didn’t know who the artists were going to be, so we were trying to make it clear that there’s this pace where you’re not really allowed to stop and look, and you’re not allowed to stop and feel, but it is the chaplain’s job to pause and help people feel how they feel. That kind of push-pull of the hospital rhythm versus the chaplain trying to bring some humanity to it, you know? Working with Brad in that experience, writing the script, I’m really quite pleased with how it came out in the final product. A lot of my healthcare colleagues who read the book, which really makes me feel great, have said, oh, this feels real, or I feel seen, and that it does feel like someone from a hospital contributed to this book.

Lizzy:  Brad, when Wesley was bringing you into all of this, can you talk about more of your experience? Were there other areas that you found surprising or startling?

Brad: Because we’re brothers and we worked on things before, even before we had a project specifically related to his work, I hear about the different frustrations about the workplace. I think one of the things that is in a way humanizing but also horrifying for an outsider is, like, staffing issues. This job is just like every job. You have the same arguments with your manager that I have working at a movie theater or whatever. There is an assumption at this level, things were going to be a little bit better, but it’s like that everywhere. Everyone’s always talking about, we don’t have enough staffing, the budget, all those things that happen on every level of different occupations. It happens everywhere.

Wesley: Yeah.

Lizzy: Libraries get it.

Wesley: Yeah, right, yes.

Brad: That’s a way that doctors are just like everybody else. You know what I mean? It’s like, oh no, no one knows what’s going on, no one’s in charge. There are no adults in the room. That was one thing that I was already somewhat familiar with before the book. I wanted to make sure it was clear in the book that the chaplain is really there to serve the patient. It’s not about proselytizing their specific faith. The other thing was how they fit in with the medical team, and how they interact with the staff. I think a lot of people can imagine them interacting with a patient, but how they get along with their coworkers as well was something I thought was interesting. I haven’t really seen other stories that have chaplains interacting with the rest of the hospital staff.

Lizzy: Hospitals are places where people experience some of the most intense moments of their lives, good and bad. For you both, what made the hospital such an effective setting for horror?

Brad: Like you said, it is kind of ripe for drama. Everyone brings their own baggage, their own fears, anxieties, and memories about hospitals. I think it was someone related to The Pitt, the HBO show. Noah Wyle or one of the producers had a line about hospital dramas are great because you basically get a new conflict walking in the door every 10 minutes. It’s almost like it’s built into the setting, the structure of the pacing of the story and how you can keep things moving. For us, once we decided thematically what it was going to be about, the main character’s journey was him being unable to let go of his job or move on or accept the changing of the guard. It was very important to us early on that we’re not going to have any scenes outside of the hospital. We can allude to a life outside of the hospital, but it should feel to the characters and the reader that there is no escape from this place. Naturally that led to other scenes where he could parallel his experience with the people in the psychiatric part of the hospital and realize that he’s actually just like one of them, that they can’t really find their way out of this institution.

Wesley: The hospital is interesting because on the one hand, it’s sprawling and never-ending, and on the other hand, you are trapped in it. It is somehow both endless and claustrophobic at the same time. All rooms look the same. Patients end up being interchangeable. Charlie revisits patients all the time. If you try to map out the architecture of the hospital, it’s impossible. He’ll open one door and it can open to almost any other door, right? We try to start with a grounded baseline at the beginning, but as the story really gets going, you just give up entirely on trying to figure out which floor they’re on? The hospital actually does kind of feel that way. I mean, the floors that I’m on and in every hospital I’ve ever worked, most units are set up like a kind of a circle where if you walk and you weren’t paying attention, you just would never stop, but you also wouldn’t go anywhere. You’d just be going in a circle, rounding and rounding. We even call it rounding. I think it just created the right environment for this story. Also, it’s just incredible to be trapped with a bunch of people. It’s like they’re all trapped on a ship together. I really am pleased with how much we were able to portray the chaplain as, on the one hand, always surrounded, but also very alone.

Lizzy: There were so many sections that felt claustrophobic. Chaplain connects supernatural evil with the very real psychological and emotional weight carried by the chaplain, and certainly by anyone who sets foot in the hospital. There’s this weird tension between the environment and the creature, the aswang, that invades the hospital. What interested you about merging these two realms together?

Wesley: We wanted to give this story the existential horror of wanting to leave, but not being able to, wanting to stay, but needing to leave and not being able to wrap it up. We also wanted there to be a horrible, monstrous presence in the book. Early on, we wanted the story to have some heft and culture and some real history to it, some real texture to it, and not just have a random boogeyman that changes every other page. We were researching creatures, mythologies, and superstitions from different cultures. Filipino culture and language is all over my hospital, all the Filipino nurses get together, and they have adobo chicken parties, which I’m always trying to get invited to. It’s such a big part of hospital life and culture. One of our comic book colleagues and friends, who’s Filipino, we were on a road trip once and he told me about this aswang character, this creature responsible for the death of children and preying on pregnant women. I just remember thinking, that’s perfect. It’s a vampire, but of a different sort. It connected very clearly with a way that I see this role of chaplain as being vampiric in itself, that my livelihood does depend on suffering, for me to be relevant, for me to have a job. For this chaplain, as he gets into that fight with Simone in the morgue and he starts sputtering and he’s like, patients really need me. The idea that you need to be needed is a ghoulish thing, for other people to suffer to be able to contribute. Having a creature, a mythology, there to tap into was helpful. For me, we needed it to be alien to the chaplain himself, as this older, white, probably some version of Christian guy. It needed to be something Other to him. I feel like it really bridged what we were trying to do. Do you want to add anything to that, Brad?

Brad: Yeah, all of our stories tend to be horror or horror adjacent. I think in general, when it comes to telling a story, it is just fun to have monsters and fantastical things, I just find that fun to play with. I do think that there is something to the idea that, and this is true in all art, that the fantastical sometimes speaks to more of an actual truth of how people experience things than a so-called grounded reality. I feel like everyone’s had those experiences where they looked at an old photo or video, or revisited a place from their childhood and is like, this isn’t how I remembered it being. When telling a story, for it to actually resonate, at least the way that we’ve told stories in the past, bringing in those contestable elements is just a natural tool to make the story resonate in a way that connects with the readers. At least that’s how I view storytelling.

Lizzy: I love that. And I love how Maria tells the story of the aswang between that first patient, Mrs. Shaw, and then going to the second patient, and then to the group of children, and how all of it matched the chaos of the hospital. I love Maria as a character. Could you talk about the working relationship between Maria and the chaplain and how that came about?

Brad: As Wesley said, he has experience in his job of training new chaplains. We saw that as an interesting entry point into the story, to have a character that could be experiencing things along with the reader for the first time. When we decided to narrow it down to the chaplain training one intern as opposed to a team of interns, we knew that we needed that character to be the most challenging person that the chaplain would have to interact with, putting him out of his comfort zone in every single way possible in terms of generational, age, life experience, cultural experience, understanding of gender and politics, everything. She’s his opposite in every way. Then beyond that, she started growing on her own. Maria ended up being just as significant as the chaplain in terms of her experiences. I think it’s important when you have younger characters, Gen Z characters, in a story, to really do the due diligence and represent them in a fair way with the same respect that you would any other character. I feel like there is a tendency as we are aging, becoming elder millennials ourselves, to paint with a broad brush when it comes to certain stereotypes about younger people. You can still play with those stereotypes, because we do bring up those cultural clashes in the story with good humor, but at the end of the day, afford them the respect and representation that they deserve.

Wesley: I think the other piece we were intentional in developing these characters is that we didn’t want one of them to be a bad chaplain and the other one to be a good one. It was important to not present the chaplain as this washed-up, useless old man. He needs to be competent, right? But Maria also needs to be able to succeed in places that he cannot. I think we didn’t want to present Maria like a doofus who was lost without the chaplain. We tried to create enough variants in patient encounters. There were patients for which it was good that Maria, the new intern, was the one who visited. I often feel that way in my life. My students never believe me when they start. I’m like, look, I’ve been doing this for a long time. You guys just got here, but despite that, or in some ways because of that, you’re going to better serve the patient than me. I was proud of the way we let Maria take on a life of her own and not reduce her and the chaplain to exaggerated cartoonish versions of themselves.