One Life to Live star Michael Easton (John) is causing much excitement on the sci-fi/fantasy circuit with his newest graphic novel Soul Stealer: Blood and Rain. It’s a follow-up to his 2008 hit Soul Stealer, about a 3,000-year-old lovesick Etruscan warrior who retrieves souls from hell. Easton recently intro’d the sequel at Chicago’s Wizard World (it’s available at dmfcomics.com/). Next year, he’ll release Soul Stealer: Last to Die, the final installment of the trilogy, and yet another graphic novel, Tales of the Green Woman (DC/Vertigo), which he co-wrote with acclaimed horror king Peter Straub (The Talisman). I caught up with Easton at San Diego’s Comic-Con where many fans knew him from the soaps but many more knew him from his other life.

Your career is the wildest. You’ve consistently straddled the worlds of soap and sci-fi, including series roles in Mutant X, Total Recall 2070 and VR.5. And you really mixed it up on Port Charles—going from priest to vampire.
I love the whole sci-fi/fantasy/horror subculture. One time I had a guy take me down to [the vampire goth club] Coven 13, where people file down their teeth. Fascinating! You see everything at Comic-Con. Just today I met this great group of kids called the Victorian Steam Punks. They’re approaching life as if steam is still powering the world, as if the world stopped with the steam culture. Their dress is gothic, they have the pale skin, the Victorian hats, they do the whole Victorian thing. There’s great, exciting creativity here.

Your Soul Stealer saga is dark, depraved, intensely romantic, spiritually transcendent—certainly not your standard superhero fare. In fact, there’s nothing like it. What’s going on in the heart and soul of Michael Easton? What do these graphic novels say about the real you?
There’s so much disposable entertainment these days. I think we’re all looking for the same thing—something that makes us feel something. My intention with Soul Stealer is to create something that stays with you a while. I’m overly dramatic and romantic and all that silly stuff and then [Soul Stealer illustrator] Chris Shy comes in and creates these beautiful images of men and women that are powerful and brutal and operatic.

It’s a great match. Shy is a superstar in the comics world. Every illustration in your books is breathtaking and gorgeous enough to frame.
Isn’t he amazing? Chris is working as a visual consultant on the new “Conan the Barbarian” movie. How we met is the craziest story. I had taken my idea for Soul Stealer to a company that tried to pair me with various artists. They were all good but their work was very bright and colorful and happy and that’s so not Soul Stealer. It just wasn’t going to work. So then I’m walking through a Virgin Record Store in Los Angeles and find the book Studio Ronin and I knew from the cover art, which was done by Chris, that this was the artist I wanted! I bought the book and carried it with me for an entire year. I kept being told that Chris didn’t do graphic novels. I got drunk one night and expressed to my wife, Ginevra, how frustrating it was to not be able to find the right artist and how much I wanted Chris. Ginevra said “Email him.” So I did. Here’s what I wrote: “I have an idea for a graphic novel. Would you like to hear it?” And he emails me back and says yes! Chris lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin, so we started working together over the internet and by phone and we didn’t meet until a year later. We kinda did the Elton John-Bernie Taupin thing! We were 100 pages into the first book before we actually met face-to-face. He’s a fascinating, great guy, completely non-compromising. His integrity humbles me.

With your life as an author going so well, are you still happy in Llanview?
I’m very thankful for my day job. It means I don’t have to pander to anybody. Chris and I had offers to do Soul Stealer at bigger publishing companies but we chose not to because they started to have a lot of restrictions. They wanted creative involvement. One company wanted to cut out all the mythology.

That’s the guts of your story!
Exactly! In some ways I feel like I compromise myself on the soap. We all compromise to a certain extent, no matter what we do for a living. Like the Bob Dylan song says, ya gotta serve somebody. But this is the one place where Chris and I are not serving anyone—we got together with the people at DMF Comics who believed so much in Soul Stealer that they literally said, “As long as you come in with this exact page count, we’re fine with whatever you do.” That’s rare.

What’s your advice to anyone wanting to crack the comics world?
Do what you want to do and do what you think is good and you’ll find an audience. You don’t need 800 million people liking what you do. You may be at a booth at Comic-Con with only 30 people in line, but they are your audience, and that’s good. Success is a funny thing. When I started work on VR.5 there were big trailers and champagne and fruit baskets. But after a while they weren’t even fixing my plumbing, and that’s when you realize the show’s in trouble. Our producer was John Sacret Young, who did that great series China Beach, and I remember someone on the crew saying, “John, I don’t think we’re going to make it to a second season.” And John said: “The Prisoner only last 17 episodes.” That always stuck with me. When I was young, I lived in Ireland for four years where The Prisoner was revered. It still is, all over the world. The only booth at Comic-Con I absolutely had to stop at was AMC’s because they’re remaking The Prisoner [as a mini-series] and I wanted to watch the previews. Just because something doesn’t last long doesn’t mean it doesn’t last.

It seems like the whole sci-fi/fantasy genre is one of unlimited possibilities and ever-expanding popularity—quite a contrast to our shaky soap scene.
One of the problems with daytime is that the shows have become projects-by-committee. Everybody has to justify their position and have input. Everybody compromises. Everything gets a little watered down. And that can kill you in the end. You look at a terrific show like Guiding Light going off the air and you realize that none of us can afford to be complacent. You can’t wait until you get cancelled to develop a sense of urgency. You have to study and understand the marketplace long before that happens, and figure out what people want and deliver it. You can’t just be hanging on. I think that’s what the soaps have been doing for far too long. It’s like that Richard Bach book, Illusions, where all the little creatures are hanging on for dear life, afraid to let go and let the river take them somewhere new. Sometimes you just have to let go and jump in. The soap medium still has great possibilities. We just don’t realize our potential.