COREY TAYLOR Says STONE SOUR Comic Book 'Has Been A Long Time Coming'

Bloody Disgusting recently conducted an interview with STONE SOUR and SLIPKNOT frontman Corey Taylor. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Bloody Disgusting: First let me congratulate you on having your first book hit store shelves. I'm sure you're like a very proud twisted father to have this thing out.

Corey Taylor: It's pretty exciting. It's been a long time coming and it's one of those things that I never thought I would have an opportunity to do. Now that it's happening, and the book is coming out, I still can't believe that it's real.

Bloody Disgusting: Tell us a bit about the genesis for the short story that eventually became the comic book?

Corey Taylor: I had this idea for a while, for a short story that would accompany the STONE SOUR album or just an album in general. I always had this idea, but it was just a nugget, and it was never anything fleshed out or anything extensive. It always just sat on the back burner for a really long time, until the first SLIPKNOT tour that we did after Paul [Gray, bass] died. Until then, I had kind of put creativity aside for a while, because I wasn't there yet in my head. While we were out there on the road, the idea just came to me and all the sudden I could see the beginning, the middle and the end, very vividly. I could see the characters coming together in my head, and that kind of triggered the music that I contributed to both STONE SOUR albums. In the end, things became much bigger in scope than the original idea, but when the idea came to me, I just kept feverishly writing things down in notebooks, fleshing out the characters and putting together a chain of events. By the time we finally got into the studio, this whole concept was about 98% finished, so I finalized it while we were in the studio. That was kind of where the idea to make it a comic book came from.

Bloody Disgusting: So when you knew you wanted to make it into an illustrated comic book did you just pitch it around to publishers?

Corey Taylor: It was a very strange process, to be honest. We were out on the road and there were a couple comic book companies interested, but it just seemed like it was a waiting game. One month turned into three months, and I just kind of said to myself that these people were either in or out. I wasn't going to sit around and wait for some boardroom to decide if this was something they wanted to get behind, so I ended up walking away from two rather big companies. Dark Horse was just the first company to come in and say, "We get this and we understand what you are trying to do." They were the first to get it, not only from a creative standpoint, but they were also the first to understand it as a mini-series. They were ready to go and that's what I was looking for. I wanted someone to be as excited about it as I was. It could have been an independent small publisher and I would have been all about it if the excitement was there. I just love the fact that Dark Horse were the ones to really get it because I have been a fan of their books, since I seriously started collecting comics in the early '90s.

Bloody Disgusting: Could you see yourself doing more comic book related writing after this?

Corey Taylor: Maybe. I never say never, because that is the best way to make god laugh out loud. I'm still a fan and I have so much more respect for the writers and the artists now than I did before. For me to do it again, I guess it would depend on the story and if it was something that I think would work, then maybe. I have a great relationship with the people at Dark Horse and I can only hope that they enjoyed the work that I put into this, but it would have to be the right thing. I wouldn't want to put out something that was a re-tread of something that has already been written or something that I've already done before. It would have to be something very specific, and completely different.

Read the entire interview from Bloody Disgusting.