NERD INITIATIVE

I love that we’ve gotten to a place where the term “period piece” can refer to a specific place, such as 1990s Washington D.C. punk rock. Punk rock’s footprint on society is as impactful as other movements of resistance in history. Having grown up in this time and place, It’s here that comic writer Oliver Mertz decided to set his surreal murder mystery, A Ghost Arm Made of Angry Ghosts. Mertz has woven a story full of murder, fraud, and mistaken identity set in a D.C. suburb with a cast of characters that are as unique as its premise.

Below, Oliver talks about a lot of things, such as the story’s roots in not only the DC punk scene but also BBC procedural detective shows; pitching the book to his artist, Alex Diotto; and being one of the first Kickstarter projects. We sometimes get off-topic here, but what follows is a fantastic conversation about creativity and process. 

Nerd Initiative: We’re mystery nerds in our house. I appreciated a 1990s punk rock mystery.

Oliver Mertz: It’s a little bit of everything. I love BBC procedural detective shows. It’s fun having these teens walk through what we know and put it together.

Nerd Initiative: You watch Death in Paradise?

Oliver Mertz: Death in Paradise is great. People just keep getting killed there. It’s the same with Midsomer Murders and all these shows. They’re focused on one place, you’re just like, “Damn, that’s a lot of people getting killed.”

Nerd Initiative: You’re about worse than Gotham City at this point.

Oliver Mertz: Maybe there’s a bigger problem.

Nerd Initiative: Do you guys have a Batman? I think you guys need a Batman.

Oliver Mertz: Have you seen Ludwig with David Mitchell? He’s a known British comedian, part of Mitchell and Webb, and they had this great comedy show. It’s a fantastic, fun mystery show. He’s a crossword puzzle expert, obsessed with all these things. His twin brother, a police detective, goes missing. So, he pretends to be his brother to figure out what happened and ends up getting pulled into all these cases. He’s great at solving puzzles and also great as a detective.

Nerd Initiative: A Ghost Arm of Angry Ghosts is a murder mystery that takes place in the 1990s D.C. punk scene. Did that shape your sense of the characters or world-building at all?

Oliver Mertz: When I initially started writing the book like I had all these different pieces that I wanted to write. One of the largest pieces was I wanted to write a love letter to the D.C. punk scene. I grew up here. I’m in the D.C. area now. Going to shows is a thing that was always all-ages. You’d have the X’s (on your hands) and things like that, but it was always inviting, always inclusive, always felt very much like it was carving its own path. 

Fugazi and all these bands just started their own record label. They didn’t need to go out and work with a major label. They did their own thing. I fully believe in that spirit of “make your own art.” Don’t wait for someone to say it’s OK. Just make it and then get it out there. I can’t do that with a band, but I can do that with comics. I just loved everything about growing up here and going to shows. I really just wanted to write what I knew. Like the kids (in the book) go to a Fugazi show. I went to that particular Fugazi show in that basement, and I remember standing on some folding chairs in the back.

Nerd Initiative: Did you have Alex (Diotto) draw you in? 

Oliver Mertz: No, I mean, I would say that I’m a little bit of every single character. I’m in there enough, like all the different aspects. It’s sort of redundant, standing on some folding chairs at a Fugazi show, because if things got too wild, Fugazi was known for stopping mid-song to be like, “Knock it off!” Get meatheads to stop throwing fists and whatnot. I wanted to put those real things in there because it means a lot to me. I didn’t know that this was going to be something that anyone else was really going to read so much. I just want to write what I want to write. So there’s that piece.

Then there’s the father with pancreatic cancer who keeps dying. My dad passed away from pancreatic cancer many, many years ago. I wanted to write something about that. I didn’t know what. The superpower sort of emerged out of this idea: what if he died but was resurrected, and the longitudinal experience of grief? What does that do to you? Like, over time, what is your life like? That’s sort of like what happens when a loved one dies. You wake up two weeks later and you’ve forgotten it in that moment between when you wake up and when you’re really awake. Then you remember, they’re not here. It’s like they were alive and they died again. I hate that, but I also wanted to comment on that and have a piece there.

Once I started messing with the rules of the world, I was like, this isn’t our D.C., this isn’t our world. So, there are really specific things. There are also really wild things in there. The world started getting weirder, and I just kept letting it get weirder. Every time I added an element that seemed out of place for the world, it actually built the world out in a way that really worked. Once powers were introduced, I was like, “Well, what if Ari had powers?” If Ari has powers, what would he have, and what would it be as a reflection of who he is? His sort of reticence for engaging with people directly, he sort of grows into that over the story a little bit more.

Later on, his sort of awkwardness plays out in his melting. He doesn’t know how to control it, but scrambles to take his clothes off because he knows, “I’m going to melt my clothes. I’m going to melt my Walkman.” That type of thing. Piece by piece, all the different things came together. I’m also a firm believer in second drafts, third drafts; you put everything in and then you can go back and make yourself look a lot better. Once you start tying all the pieces, you can start seeding things early on. It seemed to come out of nowhere in the first draft, but then you start seeding it in the second draft. You’re like, “Oh, you know, that actually flows now, that fits.”

Early on, when I used to write and was really stuck on the first draft, I didn’t realize the power of the second draft. The editing that you get, you really can make a mess early on. Follow the characters where they’re going, follow the story where it feels right, then you can tighten it up. Until it’s at the printer, you can keep working on it.

Nerd Initiative: I like the little historical jumps that you do back and forth, the yesterday and today parts. Is that a reference to the record shop?

Oliver Mertz: Yeah, I grew up in the Rockville area. I don’t know how well known it is really beyond the D.C. area, but the owner, Skip Groff, produced Minor Threat. You’d go in, there be like test pressings from Jawbox or Nation of Ulysses. You’d see people in bands there. It was a really well-curated, well-stocked record shop that was just the place to go.

Nerd Initiative: I always tell my daughter all these bands were like 15, 16 years old. Most of these bands have been doing this since they were not much older than you. You can go and do this.

Oliver Mertz: There is no barrier. You can do it. It’s not like you’re trying to become big. It’s about doing it because you love making music. You’ll find an audience; you’ll find people who respond to that as long as you put out something that you believe in. There is no barrier. Same with comics. I don’t think there’s a barrier. My buddy Mike Eisenberg and I, we put together our first comic, First Law of Mad Science. We were one of the first Kickstarter comics back in 2010. They were just starting out, too. They invited us to their loft and offices before they moved to where they are now. It was this small space, and they were super kind and really great.

We made a few thousand bucks, and that was enough to get the comic going. I was just amazed. I was like, “Who the heck are we?” We just made a video saying, “Hey, we want to make a comic,” and we had some concept art. It goes back to that DC music mindset of like, “Just do it,” or whatever. I think with comics, if anyone could get some printer paper and fold it in half, you know, and staple them together, and do stick figures or whatever, the only thing that you have to do is do something and complete it.

Nerd Initiative: Yeah, just finish it. You’ll know why when you get there. You’ll know why you have to finish.

Oliver Mertz: It may not be the best thing I’ve ever done or will ever do, but it’s the thing that you’ll stand on when you do the next thing.

Nerd Initiative: Sorry for the detour. You said the powers weren’t a thing from the beginning, and they just kind of came in as you were developing the story. Do you consider them mutants, or do you just consider them powers?

Oliver Mertz: I consider them powers. I think there’s an argument that you can make about mutants and powers. I was thinking about this the other day in terms of Avengers: Doomsday is coming out and you’ve got the X-Men showing up. I’m thinking mutants versus superheroes. Is it semantics here? So, I don’t think of them as mutants. These are powers. Specifically, some of the rules do involve people gaining powers, not through natural ways. Just the way that you don’t necessarily need that. That is something that I need in order to read the story.

Nerd Initiative: Some of them are just kind of mundane. I like the mundanity of some of those powers. Some of them feel like they are more curses than they are gifts.

Oliver Mertz: A curse is sort of right, but it’s also more like a reflection. It really says something about them and illuminates something about them as a character in a way that is way more out there and pulls them out of their… Let me rephrase it. I think the powers themselves are less about just randomly happening and more something that I think hopefully fits who they are. They fit the tone, and when you see one that seems boring or something like that, I think it’s all in how you use it. It could be valuable in any particular situation. They speculate that the guy with the eggs, maybe he’s got a power that he can eat anything he wants. I put that in there just as a small piece of it. I think about that regularly when I’m eating, and I’m like, wouldn’t that be amazing?

Nerd Initiative: How did you develop the MARA program?

Oliver Mertz: I really liked this idea of Marlowe controlling the weather by vote and having that aspect to it. As I was putting that together, that is sort of where the murder mystery comes into it. Kind of like you pull up the thread, “Why would that situation exist?” So, the MARA program. I thought it’d be interesting if there was a world in which there are multiple people being asked, you know, to reuse their powers or their abilities to pay back the damage they’ve done or as like a sentence of some sort.

I also thought that would be something some people would be for and some people would be against. Some people might be for it when they’re younger, might be against it later. It might open the doors to some of the characters having different thoughts as to what that program is, you know, after many years of it existing. I’ll say that the program itself is a part of the mystery and one of the threads that people can pull at or that you’ll pull at as you read. I hope it’s worth it. I hope it’s intriguing.

Nerd Initiative: Did you initially intend to draw the comic yourself?

Oliver Mertz: I’m not a great artist. I’m better at drawing animals and things like that. I didn’t know what this comic was going to be, and thought it was too niche and too weird for anyone else to like or be interested in. I am still amazed that it seems to land and connect. That’s something that I kind of learned through the process. I was like, “I’m just going to pour myself into this thing.” Then it turns out that the specifics and things that are also general things other people also find reflected in themselves.

I was going to draw it. There were some really bad early attempts. At some point, I’ll share images, but it was very clear early on that there was a mismatch between what I wanted to say with the script and the art. It didn’t land. I’ve been a fan of Alex’s for years. I didn’t know him. I knew his work through his collaborations with Kurt Pires. He’d done the book Youth before this. Olympia was another one they did together. His stuff is fantastic. It’s classic and also really fresh. It feels very much his own, but it also feels really stylized, like a contemporary movement, almost. Throwback styles, which is why flat colors worked well with it, because it feels really timeless in a way.

I reached out online, and I had colored a couple of stories that Kurt had written for a couple of anthologies. So I was in the same sort of orbit as this guy. I feel like this isn’t outlandish for me to reach out. I’d scraped together a little money and was like, “I’m going to put together a first issue, and we’ll do a Kickstarter.” He lives in Italy and is a little younger than me. I send him this thing, and he writes back, “I grew up obsessed with Fugazi. I have to draw this.”

I just think it’s amazing that all the way around the world, it was the same love. We’ve been working together for years and worked on a bunch of different things together. We even have a new book that we’re working on. That’s a whole other thing. He’s my creative brother in arms. He’s fantastic. He is punk rock through and through. His art is phenomenal. I think he really knows how to hit the weird, but also keep it grounded enough that you buy the actual emotions of it.

Nerd Initiative: Did you always intend to color it? 

Oliver Mertz:  I’ve been coloring the comics that I’ve worked on for a while, mainly out of necessity. I couldn’t afford a colorist, and some of the other comics, you could see I was learning. I had done some books where I felt like I had done enough pages that I got to the point where I feel like I’m in control of my craft. I knew that when I approached Alex that I did want to do that. I also knew before I even asked him that I wanted to keep it flat and things like that. He sent over the character turnarounds, and I colored those because we already had the language of it. I also knew that I wanted it muted, and I knew the tone that I was going for. I find this with anything that I color.

I know how to get into the mood of the moment, and I need to feel the page to know that. I knew that I could bring something to Alex’s art that I think would complement it. I also am a big fan of standing back. Don’t try to be a lead guitarist with colors. I want to be the bass player there. I want to let the art really sing and support it, but I’m not trying to overshadow it, both figuratively and literally. I always knew that.

Nerd Initiative: Were there any visual storytelling choices that were essential to capturing the book’s weird mood?

Oliver Mertz: I want to give full credit to a friend of mine. I became friends with Shelley Bond, the legendary editor. She has done so many things. It’s a very long story how we became friends, but she is a genius. She saw Ghost Arm… early on. She saw it in script form, and she had one note: “This is weird. I suggest a couple of other weird visuals.” She didn’t specifically say what. She just said, “I think you need a few more.”

I just took that comment as like, “OK, I’m not showing the world enough.” In my head, it instantly popped in everything from a talking bowl of soup to the giants and the miniature people and all these different elements. I knew that I needed to show the world what I think comes across through the story and all those things. I really wanted to visually show that. So all thanks go to Shelley.

Nerd Initiative: What was the strangest thing you asked Alex to draw?

Oliver Mertz: A talking bowl of soup. There are a lot of weird things. I think that every time something weirder and weirder came up in the script, whatever Alex would send back, those pages always came back really realized, super weird, but also grounded in the world every time. Nothing felt like it was just thrown in there. It really felt lived in and real.

Nerd Initiative: What did coloring allow you to control or express that you couldn’t through the line work?

Oliver Mertz: I like to help the reader with locations and changes. I like to play with ambient lighting and things that signify a feeling. The purples in the basement give a more claustrophobic sense. Even though there’s clutter, the line work really does a great job. I’m trying to get that feeling of being a little ill at ease. You’re familiar with the space, but if something’s off, you’re going to jump.

I still get scared in my own home turning the lights off in the kitchen. If I’ve turned the hallway light off first and then I turn the kitchen light off, well, now I’ve got to walk through the dark, and maybe I’ll walk a little quicker. It’s that kind of feeling that I tried to put into the different tonal shifts in the different locations.

Nerd Initiative: Were there pages that changed dramatically once Alex had interpreted them from your initial drawings?

Oliver Mertz: There were times when I would do both of these, where I either wrote a bunch of dialogue that wasn’t needed because Alex conveyed it through the art, or there was something where I had left it silent. There was a chance for me to add another pop that would sharpen the dialogue. A lot of times I pull stuff out. The script that you send the artist is sort of like a letter to them. It gets them to the point where they make the art and create the art and make the page. When it comes back, I don’t think that you have to strictly adhere to how it is exactly written.

It’s another editing layer. You want to make sure the text is working, the dialogue is working with the art, and that type of thing. So it’s not that anything changed dramatically. It’s just like little things either needed to be said or didn’t need to be said because of that.

Nerd Initiative: Those historical interludes that you use, you kind of drop clues without being right on the nose. How did you approach that? Do you feel that gives enough information without spelling everything out?

Oliver Mertz: The first one is the history of the sandwich. I always like to learn something, but I don’t trust anything that I read. So, is all of that information 100% accurate, or is it something that I’ve invented as well? I’m not a historian; I get to play with that. I knew that I could say something about the world. I talk about superpowers through the history of the sandwich because I thought that if you went on that journey and came out the other side, he’s telling me that it’s not the first person to have superpowers, just the first recorded person. We know that this world is bigger than what we’re going to see. We know that this world has more in it than what we’re going to see. We know that we’re going to be taken down the wrong path, intentionally. You have to trust that you’re going to be led back to the right path and be up for the game of going along with that. There’s information that I wanted to get across.

Oh, I get bored easily. I’m saying these things. This needs to get across, but I really don’t want it to be boring for me to write. I’m doing my research, and it’s keeping me going. I felt these moments hopefully come across as fun moments. It gives you a little bit of time to breathe also with the story. It gives an intentional beat to get you to pause a second. Some of them serve as spacing between time. Some of them are just there to give you a moment.

Nerd Initiative: What’s your philosophy on mystery construction in a world that’s this surreal?

Oliver Mertz: I think you still have to have rules in order to have stakes, but you can make those rules apply to some pretty weird stuff. I don’t think you also need to convey all of those rules to the reader. I think the reader needs enough to get the story and the mystery, but they don’t need a map. They need a thread. I don’t want someone telling me; I want someone showing me. I want someone to ask me a question that I find interesting enough to turn the page and things like that. I don’t think that works if there are no stakes at all and no rules at all in a world like this. If anything can happen, then it just removes a little bit of why you care. As weird as this gets, I know exactly why I’m plotting it that way and why this happens and that happens.

Nerd Initiative: In regards to the powers, in general, how do you keep the analogies from getting too gimmicky?

Oliver Mertz: Hopefully, they’re interesting in and of themselves, right? You don’t need the analogy, necessarily. I don’t think every reader needs to come away with all of the different pieces and the different things. I think you need to get what you need to get from it. It needs to work for the story. With Ari melting, you don’t need to know all the different pieces as to why it came to be that he has these powers. You just need to know that there’s a kid who, at inappropriate times, melts and turns invisible and reforms. I find that interesting in and of itself, as well as serving the larger piece of it. How is it not gimmicky?

Nerd Initiative: Maybe “gimmicky” is the wrong word.

Oliver Mertz: I think it’s fair. How do you avoid that type of thing? I don’t actually have an answer. I only have the answer of “I know what’s right for the story.” I know if something stuck out and didn’t feel genuine within the world, then that would ruin the whole puzzle.

Nerd Initiative: It’s not like X-Men where someone flashes off with a power and someone just freaks out. They’re just like, “Oh, it’s Tuesday. Marlowe’s gonna let you vote on the weather.”

Oliver Mertz: I don’t generally care about superhero fights. I don’t care about this world ending, or this or that. I love superpowers and I love how they can be really super interesting and just really cool. They can allow a story to go in a different direction that you couldn’t go in without them. I’ve seen the “big bad is coming” a million times. I would love the side story; I don’t care about the big horrible thing. You don’t see Gamut saving the day.

Nerd Initiative: He’s watering his lawn. 

Oliver Mertz: He’s taking out the trash, and he’s up to date on Seinfeld. It just seemed more interesting to me.

Nerd Initiative: I think it pays off. It’s a quieter story. You pointed out the British mysteries; it very much has that feeling where the answer is going to be explosive, but it’s not going to be loud getting there.

Oliver Mertz: 100% percent stand by it. 

Nerd Initiative: Are you going to expand this world at all, or is this a one-and-done? 

Oliver Mertz: It depends. Do people buy it? Alex and I have a lot of stories to tell in this world. There’s a lot that opens up in the story that sets up the world, different pieces that could go further. I need to have a really solid story to tell, though. It’s one thing in one way, it’s a mystery in one way, and it’s like a family dynamic story in another way. I needed to tell some of these things.

I need to feel like I firmly have a solid idea worth my time, but it’s also worth a reader’s time. I’m very conscious of that too. I feel old, and I feel like if I’m going to do something, I don’t want to put a bunch of time into something that just feels like a sequel just to do it. If Alex and (letterer) Taylor (Esposito) and I are going to do another piece of it, it has to be worth it. I love the idea of continuing to tell stories in a world long-term. I generally write more confined things, partly because of the practicality; it’s hard to produce these things. I’ve self-published so many things. This is the first thing I’ve done with a major publisher, and that kind of changes things. For some reason, if Oni doesn’t want to publish a follow-up, I also feel like we’re just going to make it. If the story needs to be told, it will be told.

A Ghost Arm Made of Angry Ghosts was written by Oliver Mertz, drawn by Alex Diotto, and colored by Taylor Esposito. It will release on September 2nd, 2026. You can pre-order it here, but the best place to get it is at your local comic book store.

Read more of Forrest’s articles, here.