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Interview: Lizzy Walker Interviews Brad Sun and Reverend Wesley Sun, Creators of Chaplain (part 3)

Interview with Reverend Wesley Sun and Brad Sun, creators of Chaplain, Part 3

    

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

Interviewer’s note: Part 3 contains significant spoilers. 

 

Lizzy: Working through Chaplain, were there things that you learned about each other that you didn’t know before?

Brad: I will say one thing that Wesley kind of sold me on. I’m not a particularly religious person, but one thing that Wesley told me about is that, whatever religion or lack of religion that someone has, there are important things that happen in life, and there is the sense that something needs to be done to mark the occasion. One of them would be the example of a miscarriage or a stillborn child. There are instances where it feels like, I wish we had something we could do here to commemorate this moment, regardless of your faith. We’ve been working on this for all of human civilization. We have all these different things you can do to mark this occasion. And I’m here to facilitate that.

Wesley: Yeah, you had the right.

Brad: There was one New York Comic-Con we were going to a few years ago, and there was a famous Korean artist that was going to be there, Kim Jung Gi. He died on the way to the convention. I was looking forward to meeting him, a lot of people were. I was literally on the bus on the way to the convention when I saw the news came up, this artist had died on the way to the convention. At the convention, they left his table there at the Artist Alley, and people were leaving things behind, writing notes on the table for him. I’m getting a little choked up thinking about it. It’s really nice that they did that because I’m sure everyone who went there was like, I wish we could do something to show that this was important to us. Without any directions, they created their own ritual. I think it just is one of those things where it’s a natural human inclination to want to have something to show that something mattered. I think that’s something that Chaplain can really help people with in moments of need.

Wesley: Lovely. That was so good.

Brad: There are a lot of crossover things, one of them being graphic medicine, and other areas of interest where people might stumble upon Chaplain, but they may not have been as exposed to comic books and graphic novels. If Chaplain could work to motivate people to explore this medium of storytelling that they normally wouldn’t, that would be something that I would be very happy about. If anyone is reading Chaplain, and that’s their first foray into a more mature comic book story, I would encourage them to explore, see what’s available. There are all sorts of different genres and styles of art that you may not be familiar with if you see mainstream pop culture stuff. I hope Chaplain can work as a gateway in some way to get people to see different kinds of storytelling and comics.

Lizzy: How about you, Wesley?

Wesley: This isn’t so much an answer to the question of what I want other people to know. I guess the only other thing that maybe I haven’t said so explicitly in this interview that I’ve been able to say in other conversations is that all of our work until this point had been smaller press or self-published. This is out first time working with a larger publishing company with a big distribution and big names attached to it. I thought that we would have to make some creative concessions, working with the big boys. I was fully prepared to sell a script to Storm King. They would hire some artists that weren’t really my cup of tea, we wouldn’t have any say, and then we wouldn’t see it until it came out on the shelves, and we would pick it up like everybody else. I was so happy to be wrong about every single part of that, from the jump. Like Brad said, we were used to working with artists we knew. Sandy wanted that. We met artists, she gave us portfolios of people to work with, asked us “what do you think about this guy? What do you think about this?” Sandy had a lovely comment about you being crazy, Brad. Do you remember what Sandy said?

Brad: Yeah, she said, and this shows how on the ball Sandy is as the big picture boss, she said that, because she’s familiar with our previous work in my art, “I know if you illustrated the book, it would have been even crazier”. She said, “I knew when I picked your team, when I presented the team to you, I needed to satisfy your level of madness. I knew I needed to thread the needle of making you, Brad, happy with how insane the book is and still be able to keep one foot on the ground.” And she told me this at the very end of the project. That made me realize, oh, the whole time she knew what was going on, the whole project, all the collaboration. I think all of us collectively really managed to hit that target and bring our perspectives to it from us writing the script, through the illustration process, the coloring, the editing, and really make something that’s greater than the sum of the parts.

Wesley: Even then, after they found a person that exactly like threaded the needle, I was prepared to say, okay, well then let’s turn Raúlo loose and we’ll see. But instead, he’s like, “no, no, no, every time I finish a page, I’m going to send it to you. I want to know what you think.” Brad was correct. He was working so fast. There were times we were afraid we weren’t giving him notes fast enough, and we were holding up the art because we had all these notes. And then he found one of the backstrap sandals of the Crocs that was inconsistent. So, he had to go back and re-illustrate a bunch of stuff. I don’t know if readers need to know it, but that was so unexpected. It’s incredible that we’ve worked with such a big team, but it felt as hands-on from my vantage point as it was with any of them. Because Brad is himself a visual artist, there were times where he would get a page, and he’d do a mock-up of, like, well, what do you think about doing this? It’s something I would never do because I don’t draw anything. They took it, and they were excited. I got a front-row seat to see three artists, Ryan, Raúlo, and Brad, going back and forth on how the page could look. It was incredible. I did not expect that part at all.

Lizzy: Ohh, that’s awesome.

Wesley: I think it made for an overall stronger book. There were some sequencings at the end where Raulo’s interpretation of our script had us jump on a phone call and rearrange a few panels right at the end, and we have a stronger book for it. I would say that the creative process, we couldn’t be happier with it.

Lizzy: Did Sandy ever challenge you guys to push the horror further or pull anything back?

Brad: She gave us a few keynotes. In one of the earlier outlines, she was like, make sure that the energy of the chaplain in the story isn’t all anger, isn’t all aggression, which was a tendency for us, to make the chaplain character a little bit more harsh, a little bit more grumpy and cantankerous, and make sure that the sadness of the character is in there, too. That was a simple comment, but it really helped steer the ship in the direction that the story needed to go. The other thing she said, after it was done, was that the thing that she always looks out for when she’s seeing things from writers and artists is that she wants to make sure they’re not trying to write or illustrate or whatever for her, they are actually speaking in their voice. I don’t remember a specific note she gave us in that regard, but that philosophy that she has, I could say rings true through the process. I’m here to facilitate these artists to create the best thing they can do, and I’ll take the ball and handle how it gets out to the masses. My job is to make sure they get to tell the story that I know that they are capable of telling.

Lizzy: Are there other horror-related works coming from the Sun Brothers Studios that you’d like to talk about?

Brad: We always have a few things that are still in the ether process-wise that we’re working on. There are a couple of things right now that I’m excited about exploring. We’ll see what comes to fruition first. One of them is a little bit more of a sci-fi horror, almost like a throwback to a 90s rom-com, but also crossed with existential horror and cosmic beings. The other one, again, early stages still, is about a group of young people in a post-apocalyptic world trying to put together a ska band in the apocalypse. All those stories are always going to be horror-adjacent. I think that’s just built into the way we tell stories. I have this theory that I share with anyone who’s willing to listen, that if you want to tell a relevant story in this day and age, at this time in history, it’s got to be post-apocalyptic for it to resonate with people. I feel like that’s just in the air. Maybe there’s a time in every generation where we feel like this is the end times. But I feel, whatever the reality of the situation is, the physical state that the world is in right now feels post-apocalyptic to me, and that’s where my stories are going right now.

Lizzy: Where can readers find you guys and your work?

Brad: We’re probably most active on Instagram. If you want to follow us on Instagram @thesunbors, that’s probably the place we’re best at updating about convention appearances, upcoming projects, art, and things like that.

Brad Yeah, that was great. I think that was probably the most in-depth interview we’ve done. So I really appreciated your questions, really, the specificity of them.

Wesley: This was wonderful. Yeah.

Lizzy: I appreciate you both taking time to do this. Monster Librarian is directed to librarians or library workers, and horror readers. So yeah, this will get out to more library folks. So hopefully we’ll get this in our collections.

Brad: Excellent, I’d love to see it, yeah.

Wesley: I’ll echo what Brad said. I think part of the reason this interview was so engaging is because you did read the book, it sounds like several times, and put a lot of work in it. And especially knowing that there were parts from your own experiences that were difficult to get through. I really appreciate your commitment to coming to this with some real curiosity about not just broadly, but you had some really specific scenes and images that you’re like, I want to talk about this. And I think that made for a strong conversation.

Lizzy: I didn’t know if it was too much information, but…

Wesley: No, no, not at all.

Brad: Oh, that was great. I really enjoyed that, yeah.

Wesley Yeah, no, that was that was very helpful. That was great.

Lizzy: Thank you so much!

 

 

 

 

Posted on November 14, 2026 by , Reply

Interview: Lizzy Walker Interviews Brad Sun and Reverend Wesley Sun, Creators of Chaplain (part 2)

Interview with Reverend Wesley Sun and Brad Sun, creators of Chaplain, Part 2

        

Editor’s note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity

Interviewer’s note: Part 2 contains significant spoilers. 

Lizzy: Right. The conversations [Charlie and Marie] have together feel like real conversations between a mentor and a mentee. At the end, when they’re working together, I was so happy for both of them because he’s able to go on his journey and she is just beginning hers. It was just really beautiful.

Brad: Because our stories are horror stories, we tend to go with dark endings. There was a very distinct part in the storytelling where we stopped and asked, why are we forcing such a bleak ending when we can see where there’s this other path there. There was a point in the writing process, I remember very deliberately, where we were like, maybe there’s a place for an ending that has some grace to it, that isn’t the most nihilistic thing that we can conjure. Once we were like, okay, let’s allow ourselves to not be as miserable as possible, the ending kind of just came. The line that sold it to me was when the chaplain asked her, “will you remember me?” She says, “I’ll miss you.” Because to him, he thought the best end he could get was, at least someone will remember me. The idea that someone would miss him didn’t even enter his mind. So it’s like, I’ll give you what you wanted, and I’ll give you even more than that.

Wesley:  I remember exactly the moment you’re referencing, Brad. Brad’s in Boston right now, I’m in Chicago. During the course of this writing, we’ve dealt with a good system of working at a distance, but there’s a certain kind of real-time magic of being in the same room together, bouncing ideas, reading back the lines. I remember, I think it was a time you were in Chicago, when I thought, at least I internalized it myself, can’t we give him something? Do I hate this character? What did he do to warrant this level of torture? Brad, you were the one who found the  “I’ll miss you” line. It was clear that the characters had taken on a life of their own.  I had a relationship with him, I could hate him or love him or want him to have something. To that moment you mentioned, there’s a part where she’s literally just dragging him through the hospital, he’s just become catatonic. I remember thinking, we’ve got it: we’ve got the direction.

Lizzy: That weird tension to the buildup when they’re talking in the chapel and he’s wondering about the dream, and Maria says it’s already here, and there’s the maw opening, Everything from that point, I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like the tension that builds and builds and builds, and it just explodes and boils over through the rest of the book.

Brad: I’m really glad you brought that up because that particular line came out pretty early in the writing process. It was almost like once we got that as like, okay, that’s going to be the turning point of the story.

Brad: It was almost like the story expanded out from that midpoint. We outline the endpoint and then fill in the middle. But I actually hadn’t thought about it until you just mentioned that scene. The story builds itself out both ways from that moment, as that kind of the turning point. So you were able to see the bones of that in the writing.

Lizzy: Stillborn children and the grief of their parents feature prominently in Chaplainin different scenes. Was this something that you faced in your work more than you expected?

Wesley: Oh, yes, and it is something that all of us face. At one of our book signing events, we had a moderator, herself a queer Filipino and former intern of mine. We gave her an advance copy of Chaplain because we wanted her to be able to do what you’re doing,which is to ask questions. I remember she said, “good choice on the dead kids.” She said, those are the ones that stick with you. I would say that the death of children, stillbirths, or children who do not survive birth is a very common reason why chaplains are called, and why they have a 24-7 rotation. I’m such an old dinosaur in the profession. We were trained on 24-hour and 32-hour shifts. My students now work 12-hour shifts, which is much more reasonable. I’m sad to say, chaplains were the last ones to learn what truck drivers and nurses’ unions had figured out well ahead of us, that your judgment, your ability to function after 12 hours, is pretty compromised. The idea that you’ll be up all night dealing with the death of children, then you have to function the next day, and you’re in a daze and the night is still with you. You don’t even know what time it is. And you’re like, when do I sleep? That is such a quintessential part of hospital chaplaincy that it had to be in the book somewhere. Having it as this inciting event, and again, that perfect connection of the aswang specifically linked to the death of young children or even death of children in the womb. It’s got to be that prominent. It fits into the theme of the book of passing on things to the next generation. We don’t know if the chaplain even has a personal life, but insofar as he might, I don’t assume he has children, but a stillborn child is an interruption in the natural passage of generations, right? That is part of what the book is about: it’s Maria’s time, right? I think that a night in which new life isn’t allowed to happen is the inciting tragedy, the horror. For the book, it felt right, and it is very true to the profession. The other thing, too, about the death of children from a liturgical and religious perspective, it’s often the time where the chaplain has to improv the most. When you do a funeral for an old person, old people are supposed to die. It’s natural. It’s what you hope for, right? I assume parents want their children to bury them, not the other way around, right? Your church or your religious community or your culture probably already has rituals. Families want a ritual, but there isn’t really one prepared because children are not supposed to die. Having the chaplain stumble over his own words, create an incantation, mix it up a little bit.

Lizzy: How did you approach working with the artistic team to translate the horror of the story into images?

Brad: We started with a script because we knew relatively early that we would be working with a separate team for the illustration. We had to be a little bit more structured, a little bit less cavalier. The initial step was similar to where it usually is with our projects, where we tend to break up the book into scenes. I’ll tackle this one, you tackle this one, and we’ll go back and forth with the dialogue. I went back and did a final pass where I put in some tentative panel breaks, some essential directions, those kinds of things. I think that’s where being an illustrator myself helped to leave enough room for the illustrator to be able to put his own voice into it, but give him the essential elements of what he needs to know to illustrate the scene properly. Raúlo was amazing in terms of picking up some of these little details in the hospital, even ones that we didn’t mention. We sent him some reference photos of things. He was also very generous. Some of the concept sketches that I had for the creatures and things like that, I think, helped. He integrated those into his own style when designing some of the aswang’s transformations, so that was very gratifying to see. Once we gave them those key points, Raúlo and Ryan really took it and ran, Raúlo in terms of illustrating and then Ryan with the colors. I gave him a few touchpoints of different color tones that I was looking for, referencing certain kinds of classic horror cinema, like Suspiria,and things with different psychedelic colors. Once he was on the right track, there honestly wasn’t much direction we had to give them. They took what we had and really made it their own. That was really a great process to become a part of.

Lizzy: Raúlo’s artwork is so detailed, and the color palettes were very intense. Were there particular scenes that surprised you?

Brad: I was absolutely delighted with all the ways Raúlo managed to depict the fact that the aswang is constantly shapeshifting. It’s not like film, where you can literally see a transformation. It’s from panel to panel, and you have to let the reader fill in the gaps. The way he was able to really capture the undulating mass of the creature was fantastic. Wesley received the physical copies of the book first. I remember telling him to take a picture of the page with the dream sequence, the one after the aswang is there, where it’s probably the most nightmarish part of the book. That was one where, despite what I just said earlier about giving them directions and making sure they were on track. It was like, let’s see what they come up with, because I had in my head how I would have illustrated it, but at some point the script just goes crazy here. Raúlo is some kind of mastermind, his speed is incredible in terms of turning out pages, and the level of detail, but then also just playing with the form. I’m sure you’ve seen all those pages where he breaks up the panels, or he uses things to be the panel borders and the way he’s able to integrate those. I mean, I’m sure on our end, it looks effortless. I’m sure he’s putting the work in. But the pages kept on coming in, without missing a beat, and just nailing that sequence and that final double-page spread of the aswang over the whole hospital. I don’t think we had any notes when we got it back. We were like, oh, yeah, he nailed it. That’s exactly what we were hoping for and more.

Lizzy: With that double-page spread, in particular, I was wondering if the creature had transformed itself into the hospital.

Brad: I think the implication that earlier, where things start going really crazy with all the stillborn births, is that the aswang somehow has seeped into every facet of hospital life, from the tragedies that happened with the patients, to the janitor having to mop up the leftover things in the morgue, the crying patients, the crying nurses and doctors, that somehow theaswang is all of that. That is what the aswangis. So, to come up with an abstract idea like that, we couldn’t be happier with how he managed to capture that.

Lizzy: After that two-page spread, with Charlie walking through all the rooms…it was just fleshy walls and fleshy doors and the floors.

Brad: Yes, I think there was a note there, like, from that point on, it’s all nightmare. There’s no going backwards.

Lizzy: Absolutely, and there are a lot of the visuals that stick with me after reading Chaplain, like the Mardi Gras parade with Mrs. Shaw and her children. How did the Mardi Gras theme come up?

Brad: Wesley can speak on the Mardi Gras thing because that was his contribution specifically. I know he’s quite fascinated with the ritual. I’ll just say, writing the scenes with the kids was a delight. I just tried to make those kids as awful as possible.

Wesley: Brad killed it with those kids. That was all him on that. When I got the pages from Brad, where they’re like stomping their mother into a garbage can, I’m like, oh, you got it.

Lizzy: Treating their mother like medical waste.

Wesley: I have a fascination with what I would call ecstatic religious practice. These moments of dancing and singing and wailing are very interesting to me. Like so many things in the book, it has a connection to actual practice in the hospital. We don’t have parade floats and a big band playing and stuff like that, but we do what we call an honor walk when an organ donor dies. We want to give them a good send-off. We line the hallways. Everyone stops, the whole floor stops, and we wheel the patient down. Usually a family member is playing music on their cell phone, and the janitors get involved, the nurses, everyone stops what they’re doing. We all pay our respects. So I just wanted the worst version of that, the most horrific version. And when Brad nailed the characters of the children, I was like, oh, it’s perfect. We got it. We got the most spectacle possible.

Lizzy: Another scene I was thinking about was that tense conversation between Simone and the chaplain in a very disturbing setting, the small dark room, and she’s enjoying her salad.

Wesley: Mmh. With the foot, yeah, yeah.

Lizzy: With that maggot-covered foot! The conversation, if I’m interpreting it properly, is like the calling versus career kind of conversation. What influenced that section?

Brad: There are a few things there. We wanted to have the kind of conclusion of the ongoing conversation she’s been having with the chaplain throughout the book in as dramatic a fashion as possible. We wanted to really pull out all the bells and whistles and give Simone her due, because, even though the chaplain and Maria take up more of the story, Simone is that crucial third character in the story. You could see her as the voice of the hospital, the voice of the institution, drawing him back in. Then there is the mundane eating of her meal next to this gruesome thing, that is kind of necessary for the job, that level of compartmentalization. Like you’re never going to be able to clock out at the end of the day. It’s not like there aren’t more people to help.

Wesley: I love that because it’s mundane on top of mundane. It’s not just that she has to eat her lunch, and she also has to get him a new ID badge. That’s the most mundane task of any job. A lady did eat my badge one time, and I needed a new one. Maggot Leg was an actual patient. We had to clear the maggots, which did save him. That’s all true. I think, too, the maggots are another analogy to the aswang and the field of chaplaincy, which is you have to live off the dead, you know? Maggots eat dead flesh; they are used in medical procedures. It’s amazing in modern medicine how many archaic things we use. One of my students almost fainted last unit because they brought in leeches to clean the blood on a patient. She’s like, they still do that?  Simone flat-out says, “Chaplain, you are like a maggot. You do this. Isn’t it the same with you?” We try to avoid, in a heavy-handed and uninteresting way, having characters tell you what things mean or whatever. Simone’s dialogue is probably the closest we get to spelling it out. It’s a really important scene. I agree with everything Brad said. It’s the horror of hospital life.

Lizzy: This next one ties back to the panel that you mentioned with the pregnant woman with the tube. I don’t know if you’d call it a phobia, but I have a fear of foreign tubes in my body. I have been through a major hospitalization with anaphylaxis and there were scenes like that one, specifically where Charlie and Maria see the doctor working on the ASL patient who is standing upright. 

Wesley: Oh, yeah. 

Lizzy: So that whole scene, yeah, I had to put the book down for a minute. 

Wesley: Ohh, yeah. 

Lizzy: I am terrified of catheters and other medical equipment, so I see this guy with his insides all over the place, and they’re keeping him alive with all these tubes and things in him, and it’s just like, nope. That definitely tapped into some more personal stuff for me.  

Wesley: I think your question is like, what’s wrong with you? Or like, why? Well, why do this to someone? 

Lizzy: [laughs] What influenced that? What made you write that into the story? 

Brad: One of the things that Wesley and I have talked about multiple times, not even related to this book specifically, but just about his hospital work in general, is how scary it is for a patient. There can’t be anything more intrusive and degrading than having to let yourself just be completely helpless and be like, literally, do whatever you want to me. You can be inside my body, and I don’t even know what you’re doing. That is one of the real horrors about going into a hospital and just kind of accepting it. That time between when I enter and I leave might be the worst part of my life. That feeling is something that is a very relatable fear and definitely an important thing to put in the story. 

Lizzy: The doctor’s comments about there being time, which was like what Chaplain said, as he’s taking care of the patient?

Brad: Wesley, maybe you could talk about that. Sometimes we’re watching a medical show and I’m like, yeah, that doctor could have said that better. And Wesley would be like, oh yeah, but that is how they kind of talk. One of the reasons we need a chaplain is just to comfort the patients for having to deal with the doctors.

Wesley: The doctor in our comic with the ASL patient is more compassionate than a lot of doctors. A lot is going on in that scene, right? We talked about how we didn’t want to make the chaplain really good at his job and Maria really bad, or vice versa. The time where the chaplain steps in and says, we don’t have to fill out these advance directive forms at all, when they probably should have, because if you don’t fill out advance directives, families will just decide to keep you alive forever, and it’s horrible. You really should think about when you want to pull the plug. If we didn’t have that scene, as a reader, I would have assumed like, oh yeah, that shows the chaplain’s maturity in the job and Maria’s inexperience. But honestly, if Maria kept badgering the patient a little bit more, maybe Hodges would have signed it. I mean, we’ll never know what Hodges wanted or didn’t want for his own body because they never had the advance directive conversation, right? Because the chaplain stepped in and said, we don’t have to talk about this now or ever.

Lizzy: Maybe he would have signed it. Right.

Wesley: Early on in my chaplaincy, before everyone had cameras on their phones, this is how old I am, it would have been quite novel to have a high-quality camera on your phone. Going back to the death of children, it was my job to take family photos when a baby died. Because unlike an adult, when an old person dies, you assume there’s a whole lifetime of photographs. But when a child dies, if you don’t take photos, then you have no photos of this person.

Lizzy: Ohh.

Wesley: Right? There’s no such thing as that family photo. I would be taking pictures and the family members would hold up the baby and like flop its head to one side and they’d be like, oh, he’s so beautiful, or oh, you can tell he’s got my nose or he’s got your eyes. To me, it looked horrific, but to the family, it was so beautiful. I think that kind of like extreme perspectivism is also a little bit at play. It’s more common than not that families will say, I want you to do everything you can to keep this person alive. I was like, we’ve got to show that. We need to have a scene where literally everything is being done. There are times when a family says they want everything done, but we can’t keep doing this forever. I’m not a doctor, but there are scenarios where it looks to me like we could resuscitate the patient for an indefinite number of times, but…I’ll bring the family into the ICU, and I’ll say I know you want to do everything. I want you to see what is happening. I’ll show them a patient like Hodges, and they’ll say, oh, then I think we should stop, I didn’t realize that’s what it looked like. The other thing I really like about this scene is it is a time when Maria shines a lot, where she says, “Mr. Hodges, I’m sorry this happened to you.” She’s still being a chaplain. Charlie is checked out completely at that point. He’s no longer doing anything useful. Maria is still humanizing, and she’s the only one in the scene doing it. I think that’s the time for Maria to really demonstrate that she really does deserve the coat.

Wesley: She’s doing all the work, doing like five jobs in that scene. She’s so much more competent than he is here. As a person who spends most of my time supervising interns, that is the scene where I’m really proud of Maria. She’s holding it together pretty well. She’s got the stuff. She can build a whole career out of this.

 

Posted on November 13, 2026 by , Reply

Interview: Lizzy Walker Interviews Reverend Wesley Sun and Brad Sun, Creators of Chaplain (part 1)

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.

 

Posted on November 12, 2026 by , Reply
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