SciFiNow issue 100 (Guillermo del Toro)

Though I had moved onto Editor in Chief (the Editor was Steve Wright), I had been planning issue 100 for a few months and so took a more direct role in seeing the issue through to completion.

Guillermo del Toro, the Academy Award-winning director of Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Shape of the Water, was the only real choice for a Guest Editor - a big enough name to have a pull on the newsstand, and yet geeky enough to be a natural fit for the brand.

The original plan was to have del Toro pick subjects for us to feature inside the issue, but as he was locked in the edit suite with Pacific Rim at the time, the interview happened so close to the wire that it ended up being a fait accompli. We picked topics - Universal monster movies, Blade Runner, HP Lovecraft, Ray Harryhausen, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe and so on - that he was already on record as an enormous fan of and Senior Staff Writer (now Editor) Jonathan Hatfull coaxed him into talking about them.

The end result was a rather special issue, we got to work with one of our heroes and write about some of our favourite things. My small contribution front of house was a two page interview with Swamp Thing comic book artist Yanick Paquette, making it something of a three-way romance.

As del Toro himself said:

Swamp Thing was my favourite hero growing up. I sculpted him in clay, I tried to animate him in stop-motion. I drew him incessantly… Swamp Thing for me is almost a borderline religious fetish. I really worship that icon.

Find out more about SciFiNow at SciFiNow.co.uk