During San Diego Comic Con this year, Dark Horse announced that David Booher and Drew Zucker’s series, Canto, would be relaunching as an ongoing coming this fall. Previously, Canto’s story was told over multiple limited series featuring a small knight with a clockwork heart as he tries to help those in need. Canto was originally published by IDW in 2019 but moved over to Dark Horse in 2024. This new ongoing tells the continued adventures of the titular character and will be released November 18th. At Rose City Comic Con, I had the chance to sit down with Booher and discuss just what makes the clockwork heart at the center of this series tick.
ISAAC SWINDLE: So for readers that are just now coming into the Canto world, what’s your elevator pitch for the series?
BOOHER:It’s gonna be a brand new jumping on point for everybody who loves Cantoor has never heard of Canto. So he’s gonna go out in this great, big fantasy world. He’s gonna follow his heart, he’s going to have hope, courage, to find the people who need help, and he’s gonna try to help them. In this series, where you first start, he and his best friend, Mico the Malorex, will go across the mechanical sea to find a place where they’ve heard that two different races are fighting against each other. When he gets there, he finds that nobody is left. And he wonders if he’s made a mistake when Mico gets injured. His best friend gets injured, and his quest to sort of help other people turns into a quest to race against time to save his best friend from this exotic, new world that has now turned against them.
ISAAC SWINDLE: Can new readers jump in fairly easily to the new ongoing, or do they need to go back and find the original series?
DAVID BOOHER:They do not need to go back and find the originals, we would love for them to do that. But we specifically designed the ongoing so that you could jump on, knowing nothing about the character. If you just see the characters, the visuals, and you’re intrigued, you can start with the Clockwork Chronicles, the ongoing, you don’t have to have any backstory. It takes place after the last story arc, the Shrouded Man Saga, but we wanted to design a place for new readers to come in, and, if you like, when they like Canto… they can go back and see what his adventures were before this.
ISAAC SWINDLE: How did relaunching this next era as an ongoing come about? What made you decide to do ongoing versus another limited series?
DAVID BOOHER:So, the ongoing kind of came about because we wanted to expand the readership. Most everybody who reads Canto, really loves the story and loves the character. But it’s always such a push to get the word out, get more exposure… We wanted to reward the readers who were invested in the series, but we also wanted to have a place where anybody who has heard of Canto, hasn’t heard of Canto, would be able to jump on board. So that’s why the ongoing is starting. But I want to say starting fresh, because all that exists before, but this is a place where you don’t need to know anything. You don’t even have any investment, to start here, to get issue one
ISAAC SWINDLE: On your end, how does writing an ongoing versus writing as a limited series, what changes for you in that process?
BOOHER:Yeah, so the limited series is much more kind of a deliberate schedule. I like to say that once you start, especially when issue number one gets released, the train is out of the station and you’re either on it or you’re under it, as the creative team. We are at least 6 issues ahead, before even launch. So we want readers, we want shops, we want everybody to be confident that we’re gonna keep this monthly pace because we’re working so far [ahead].
ISAAC SWINDLE: Does having the open-ended moniker of “ongoing” change how you approach Canto’s story? Are there bigger things you want to do with him in an ongoing that you might not have been able to get to in a limited series?
DAVID BOOHER:Oh, yes. So with an ongoing, you’ve got to think of a base concept that’s going to push forward for, you know, hopefully 100 issues. And that’s why we step back and we try to figure out what did readers respond to in the first five volumes, the story arcs, that we did. And so creating an ongoing, I wanted it to be kind of an open-ended. Canto and his best friend are going to go out in the world. He’s helped his people, and he wants to go out there and help other people. So he’s gonna follow his heart, and that’s gonna get him into all these adventures. Rhis first story arc, it gets him into trouble saving his best friend. So if we continue to focus on what makes Canto Canto, we’re gonna be able to get to issue 100, 200.
ISAAC SWINDLE: With that in mind, do you have a definitive place you want Canto to end up when all is said and done, be it 20 or 200 issues? Do you have an idea of where his story ends?
DAVID BOOHER:So, I’ve gotten that question when we were doing the Shrouded Man saga, and we had, from the very beginning, we knew where it was going to be… We didn’t lock in exactly how it was gonna get there, until we started telling the story. But we knew it was going to end. [but] the ongoing truly is an ongoing. There’s no end point for this. This is just an adventure, we’ll wrap up that adventure that we’re on next adventure. We just keep going and keep going. It’s a lot like a lot of these established ongoings where they just have this engine. It’s gonna keep pushing forward with all these adventures.
ISAAC SWINDLE: My final question, tell me a little bit about working with Zucker on an ongoing. You’ve been longtime collaborators. Did anything change in that creator relationship or is it still going pretty well?
DAVID BOOHER:Working with Drew has always been great, and he’s been so collaborative, and we message back and forth almost every single day. Working on the ongoing eally hasn’t changed. We just came up with a story idea. I was sending scripts, and he sends me back character designs, and I come up with other character designs. I can write stories around those. We’ve been at this for seven years, since the first Canto came out, and it’s just continuing on with that routine that has made us. We’ve made beautiful comics from that routine. So we’re not going to change.
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