CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
Rob Williams and Pye Parr are burning up the rubber in Petrol Head
GROWING OUT OF some artwork of robots and futuristic cars Pye Parr had put online, the postapocalyptic automobile races of his and Rob Williams’s Petrol Head bring to mind films such as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max.
There’s an environmental theme to the creator-owned five-parter. “In the book’s world, the environment has become deadly to humans, so the survivors live in domed cities, and the city administrators run extreme sports events like the Petrol Head races to keep the population entertained,” explains Williams. “Doing this with gas-guzzling cars and robots is pretty dysfunctional, so the Petrol Heads eventually get shut down. Can the environment outside the city be saved? That’s our key MacGuffin, as Petrol Head meets a young girl called Lupa, who might just have the key to the future of the human race in her backpack.”
While Parr admires antique jalopies, Williams isn’t a motorsport fan, drawing his inspiration instead from how Katsuhiro Otomo depicts vehicle movement in his classic manga Akira.
“I figured that if we could do that – and Pye is one of the few comic artists who can do that – we’d have a thrilling, dramatic chase story,” Williams tells Red Alert. “There’s a real dramatic power to that, just making readers care about our underdog heroes and set a futuristic city after them on a deadly race through an incredible sci-fi landscape. You can feel the speed, the friction, the crunch and boom of the crashes. It’s just a senses-bashing comic.
But, of course, all that only works if you care about the characters, and I think we have that here.”
“One of the things I really wanted to capture in the race/ chase scenes is the way cars move and sound on a track,” adds Parr. “How the weight shifts into the corners and y
