Variant cover by Sebastian Fiumara. Courtesy of Image Comics.
Surviving Exquisite Corpses was supposed to be the hard part.
When the first series concluded, Laura, Xavi, and Jason had made it through the nightmare in Oak Valley. Laura emerged as the Last Gunman, and the survivors seemingly earned an opportunity to leave the game behind. But what actually happens when unwilling participants survive a game built and controlled by some of the most powerful families in America? Well, spoilers, it doesn’t involve a cash prize or a trip to the Keys.
That’s where Exquisite Corpses: Lone Gunman begins.
Launching November 4, the five-issue series is art by Alberto Ponticelli, colors by Jordie Bellaire, and letters by Becca Carey. Set two years after the original series, it follows Laura and her fellow survivors as the legacy of the golden mask pulls them back into the world they desperately tried to escape
Ahead of the first issue’s October 12 FOC, I spoke with Pichetshote about turning Laura into the ultimate final girl, expanding the mythology of the 13 Families, creating a new generation of killers, and using theLone Gunman to explore American history. We also discussed what he learned from James Tynion IV while building Exquisite Corpses and how the series is helping set the stage for season two.
Main cover by Alberto Ponticelli and Jordie Bellaire. Courtesy of Image Comics.
Life Post-Exquisite Corpses?
The ending of Exquisite Corpses presented Pichetshote with an unusual problem. Laura, Xavi, and Jason survived, but they weren’t even supposed to be players in the first place. Unlike previous winners, they never volunteered for any of this madness.
That very distinction became one of the foundations of Lone Gunman.
“Everyone else who’s won before has been a willing participant,” Pichetshote said. “These people were not willing participants, but they get to survive. And so, OK, so now they’re out. And the first thing you want to do if you’re a normal person is like, ‘We need to tell everyone this horrible thing is happening.’ But the game is set up in a way that they can’t. So what starts out being like, ‘Oh, this is a happy ending,’ it actually ends up very quickly. Like, ‘Oh, this is just another problem that they’re in.’”
The game might have ended, but there isn’t a rulebook for what happens when people who never wanted to participate manage to win. Especially when the “losers” are often as sore as they can be.
“This is new for everyone involved in the game, the fact that there’s survivors who didn’t want to play the game who actually won the game,” Pichetshote said. “This means there’s a whole new set of rules, and we don’t know what they are.”
That uncertainty sends the survivors digging into the Massachusetts Family’s past when killers connected to its history begin coming after them full force. For Pichetshote, that investigation also meant building significantly more mythology around a world readers only glimpsed during the original series.
Added Pichetshote, “This is probably more world-building, mythology creation, character generation than I’ve ever done in anything I’ve written.”
The Ultimate Final Girl Story
Laura’s survival gives Lone Gunman a different genre engine than its predecessor. Instead of simply repeating the deadly game, Pichetshote began thinking about what a horror protagonist looks like after surviving something far beyond the typical slasher scenario.
“The way I look at it, this is like the ultimate final girl story,” Pichetshote said. “She didn’t just survive one serial killer, she survived 12 serial killers. And then, at the end of it, she realizes there’s this whole conspiracy behind it. So it goes from a Final Girl story into a conspiracy thriller, which are two genres I really love.”
That approach also creates a potential entry point for readers who didn’t follow all 13 issues of Exquisite Corpses. Pichetshote cited Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group while discussing how familiar horror archetypes can quickly communicate the baggage characters carry without requiring readers to witness every event that traumatized them.
And Laura, Xavi, and Jason certainly have plenty of baggage.
Laura killed Jason’s mother. Xavi lost his boyfriend while being unable to save him. Jason lost his mother and now lives alongside the person responsible for her death. Their respective relationships with the past becomes central to the new series.
Added Pichetshote, “All three of them are dealing with that trauma in different ways, and all three of them are trying not to have that trauma paralyze them.”
Variant cover by Chris Brunner. Courtesy of Image Comics.
A Much Different Halloween
Two years have passed when Lone Gunman begins, but the calendar itself makes moving on difficult.
The new story brings Laura, Xavi, and Jason to another Halloween. After everything that happened in Oak Valley, deciding where to spend the holiday becomes its own problem. Isolation carries obvious risks, but crowds don’t necessarily offer safety either.
Pichetshote found himself thinking about the mundane consequences of surviving something as extraordinary as ExquisiteCorpses.
“You think they walk off into the sunset in issue #13; their lives just got way more complicated,” Pichetshote said. “And every Halloween they’re reminded about how complicated their lives are.”
There’s a larger conspiracy, sure, but that tension gives this tie-in an emotional foundation. Laura survived the game physically, but Lone Gunman is interested in what surviving actually means once the immediate danger has passed.
The Real Lone Gunman?
The golden mask has been part of Exquisite Corpses from the very beginning, with the Lone Gunman identity passing to a new person every five years. The spinoff finally gives Pichetshote room to explore what that tradition means and where it came from. That also requires looking beyond the killer beneath the mask.
Added Pichetshote, “We’re really fleshing this out: how the 13 Families shape and control America, how the Massachusetts Family fits into that, and how the Lone Gunman fits into that.”
The mechanics of the 13 Families themselves are part of that expansion. A conspiracy of this size requires rules, relationships, and systems capable of keeping the game alive across generations. According to Pichetshote, reader interest helped convince the team that this was an area worth exploring further. And the title’s history reaches well beyond recent generations.
Added Pichetshote, “The Lone Gunman is also about the history of America through the eyes of the 13.”
Readers won’t have to wait long to see how far back that history goes. Lone Gunman #2 (due out December 9) sends Laura to Texas and puts her face-to-face with the First Gunman, a killer seemingly ripped from the distant past.
Variant cover by Kevin Tran. Courtesy of Image Comics
New Killers Are Coming
Digging through generations of Exquisite Corpses history gives Pichetshote another opportunity: creating killers. And there are plenty coming.
“Oh, yeah, there’s tons of action,” Pichetshote said. “And one of the things that was really fun for me was getting to create a bunch of new killers.”
Creating those characters also reflects something Pichetshote learned while working with Tynion IV on the original series. Before Exquisite Corpses, Pichetshote says he approached the medium partly through the lens of his screenwriting background. For this new series, then, something clearly had to change or shift.
“…Working with James, I realized I wasn’t being enough of a comics writer,” Pichetshote said. “James thinks so much about character design and iconic imagery and things that are specific to comics, and I realized there was this whole part of my brain I wasn’t using enough.”
Those lessons fed directly into Lone Gunman as Pichetshote developed killers associated with the Massachusetts Family and thought more deliberately about what would make them visually memorable on the comics page.
One Universe, Plenty of Room to Play
Despite the increasingly interconnected mythology, Pichetshote doesn’t feel boxed in by what other Exquisite Corpses creators are doing. The 13 Families provide a useful framework. Each represents another corner of the larger conspiracy, and you can develop it without stepping on someone else’s story.
Added Pichetshote, “It’s crazy how much freedom there is in something that interconnects so tightly.”
That collaborative structure is especially appropriate for Exquisite Corpses, which takes its name from the art game built around multiple participants contributing to a larger creation. For Pichetshote, there’s real joy in figuring it all out.
Added Pichetshote, “A big part of that art game was the puzzle of it all. Making the book is a little bit of that too.”
Variant cover by Rafael Albuquerque. Courtesy of Image Comics
Lending Lone Gunman a Visual Identity
Ponticelli brings Pichetshote’s expanded mythology to life, allowing the series to move between intimate character moments and bursts of horror and action. Meanwhile, Bellaire’s colors take Ponticelli’s heavily textured artwork somewhere Pichetshote wasn’t necessarily expecting upon the series’ onset.
“It doesn’t look like anything else in Exquisite Corpses,” Pichetshote said. “I don’t even think it looks like anything else Alberto is colored, but it looks awesome.”
Pichetshote described the finished pages as having an almost hand-painted quality, helping distinguish Lone Gunman while keeping it connected to the visual world established by the larger franchise.
The Road to Exquisite Corpses Season Two
Still, LoneGunman isn’t being created in isolation from what comes next. Pichetshote revealed that the Exquisite Corpses writers are preparing to return to the writers’ room to break season two. The original idea was apparently to bring in a new collection of writers each season, but the chemistry of the first group changed those plans.
That creates an unusual opportunity for Lone Gunman. At the time of the interview, all five issues had been plotted, three had been drawn, and roughly half of the series had been scripted.
With the larger writers’ room reconvening even as the miniseries is still being completed, ideas from the next chapter of ExquisiteCorpses may find their way into Laura’s story.
For now, though, Laura has more immediate concerns. The golden mask hasn’t finished with her, the Families remain in control, and surviving the game may have been the beginning of her problems, not the end.
Exquisite Corpses: Lone Gunman #1 arrives in comic shops on November 4. Issue #2 follows on December 9.
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