From a strictly craft perspective, Billionaire Island is incredibly exciting. It reunites Russell with his Flintstones collaborator, Steve Pugh. “Steve’s a big star now, so I have to be careful not to anger him,” says Russell. “I think we established a really good shorthand for understanding each other while working on The Flintstones, so thankfully, we were pretty much on the same page from the beginning of this project.” It’s evident in the first issue. The pages are as crammed with jokes as their first collaboration, with Pugh amplifying the inherent absurdity in setups with killer body language finishes.
Pugh’s talent for expressive characters, and Russell’s insistence in finding the humanity in even the worst people helps keep Rick Canto, the libertarian social media CEO villain of Billionaire Island, out of cartoonish stereotype territory. This is a feat, considering most of his real life analogues have the depth and intellectual verve of a construction paper diorama. ”[Canto]’s not some evil-for-the-sake-of-evil bad guy, but a guy with reasons for the things he believes and does,” Russell tells us. “He’s an amalgam of several real world figures and, as such, is the caretaker of their collective worldview which, even when viewed charitably, spells doom for the human race.”
A setting so dire and villains so inherently ridiculous makes finding the grace in the story and the characters that much more important. “Even when writing about something as dark and deeply pessimistic as the impending doom of the human race in Billionaire Island, or how we are manipulated and abused by empire and its institutions as in Second Coming, [it’s critical] to deal with these subjects with hope and humanity,” Rusell says. Because it can’t all just be a matter of fighting the darkness. There has to be light at the end of it all.” That core of hope and humanity is what helps his work transcend from funny and deft to become lasting, meaningful storytelling (that’s also funny as hell).
And it will stay funny as hell. Pugh and Russell are two of the most talented humorists working in modern comics, so funny they sometimes don’t even realize it. As Russell tells us, “…There’s a dog character in Billionaire Island. When tasked with drawing a dog, Steve came up with an exact replica of Spuds McKenzie, the dog from the Budweiser ads in the 1980s. When we pointed this out, Steve who is British and has access to good beer, had no idea who Spuds McKenzie was. He had drawn Spuds completely inadvertently. So we had him change the dog, but that still sort of creeps me out in some way.”
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