I tried to dial down my enthusiasm at the idea because I’d been down those paths before. I was still working on the first cover when a TV series was mentioned. I’d taken a couple of years off to illustrate a series of children’s books, which was very enjoyable, but lacked the edge that working in comics can generate. I was just happy to be busy, gathering references and psyching myself up to be back in the game. SP: I was too focused on how to interpret the scripts to concern myself with other media requirements. We just concentrated on doing the comic, and that’s all we were dealing with. So, on a daily basis I don’t think we really gave it a second thought. PH: Well, the TV show was something we hoped might happen someday, and Mike thought we had a good chance of it actually getting off the ground, but like I say, it still took over a decade to become a reality. I asked him what he felt like working on, and he immediately said 'something with aliens.' So we talked for a good long while about the specifics – in general terms what we wanted the alien to be like, what the story should be like, and what we wanted to avoid. I wasn’t about to head into that territory alone, so I called up Steve, because we’d always worked well together in the past. I knew in any situation what those characters might do or say, but I’d never really created anything major of my own, where I’d have to find out what the characters were like as I went along, and it was time to give that a try. Up 'til then I’d always written other people’s characters, which meant following a template that had already been established by Neil Gaiman, or by Alan Moore or someone else. So you’d worked on The Dreaming together in the late '90s, but when did Resident Alien arise in your conversations prior to its initial publication in 2011, and what sort of conversations went into building the world, particularly given the previous experience both of you have as writers with your own distinct stylistic approaches? PH: By early 2010 I’d reached the point where the time had really come for me to create something original of my own. CBY: I would be derelict in my duties if I didn’t acknowledge the plethora of fantastic contributions to the industry you’ve both made over the decades.

Resident Alien Volume 1 by Peter Hogan