Seven Holes For AirPopular Hollywood actor Bill Paxton (currently winning plaudits for his Emmy-nominated role in western miniseries Hatfields & McCoys) is back working in the type of genre cinema with which he initially made his name.

Having recently wrapped the Mark Wahlberg/Denzel Washington-headlining big-screen version of graphic novel 2 Guns, he’s currently in the middle of shooting yet another comic adaptation All You Need Is Kill, in which he co-stars as the sergeant of Tom Cruise’s alien-battling soldier.

But Paxton’s dalliance with the graphic novel world doesn’t end there. We caught up with him briefly during his trip to Saturday’s MCM Comic Con to discuss the digital comic book which he helped develop and foster, pseudo-western action fantasy Seven Holes For Air.

HeyUGuys: Can you tell us how you got involved with the comic book?

Bill Paxton: John McLaughlin, the writer, is behind the new biopic coming out about Alfred Hitchcock with Anthony Hopkins, and he’s also written [the remake of TV show] Kung Fu for me to direct for Legendary Pictures. He’s a great screenwriter and an old friend. He also worked on Black Swan. Mick Reinman, the artist, is someone I’ve worked with for several years. He did all the previs on [golf drama] The Greatest Game Ever Played which I directed for Disney.

Seven Holes For Air was written as a spec screenplay and I got these guys together because I loved the story so much and I thought, if nothing else, we can get it out as a graphic novel and at least it will exist and people can read it. I’d eventually like to turn it into a feature film which I’d direct and produce. We’ve put it out digitally because that’s really the future now. The biggest comic book shop near to where I live is 100 miles away, so I think the ability to read about something and then to be able to download it straight away is really great.

When did you come onboard the project?

I read it about four or five years ago and I saw it as a great vehicle for me to maybe act in, and then I started thinking about it more as a director. I was doing [HBO series] Big Love at the time and I didn’t have a lot of time and I thought, I’m gonna do something James Cameron taught me, and that was to start planting some seeds for projects that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to do right away. What I learned from him is with great enterprises you have to be willing to lay siege to them, and maybe start on something which may not come to fruition for a number of years. This [comic book] took two years to draw up and another six months to edit and put together.

So you always like to juggle potential projects whilst you’re working on something else?

Yeah. I’ve got this and a movie I helped to development about the Kennedy assassination called Parkland. That will be going into production in January next year, but always looking for new things. I’d like to do more of these digital comics. ‘Seven Holes’ turned out so well and it was so satisfying for me. The feedback has been really positive that I want to start doing this type of thing on a regular basis, in an ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’-type fashion.

You could have your profile, like his, on the top of the front cover. That would be a fun bit of branding.

(Laughs) Yeah, yeah.

Have you always been a comic book/graphic novel fan?

I used to collect comic books when I was younger, but we didn’t really call them graphic novels then.

There is a prejudice which still exists towards graphic fiction. Some write it off as a kid’s medium. Have you ever found that?

I felt that with a lot of graphic novels I read, with the exception of the really great works of someone like [Frank] Miller, I found the artwork was sometimes better than the writing. I wanted to take a great piece of pre-existing writing, and then go the comic book route.

It’s such a creative medium, and to be able to put something out digitally and inexpensive opens up a whole new world and presents a lot of opportunities for young artists and writers to team up. There doesn’t need to be a marketing budget or any print costs. Seven Holes For Air cost around $500 to upload, and that was all.

It’s a real grassroots process.

It is, and the project has been done in an altruistic way. This is a labour of love and it was something I really believed in.

Just to touch on your career in film for a moment. You mentioned earlier during your stage Q&A that you were incredibly proud of A Simple Plan, but you’ve cropped up in a number of fantastic smaller features, like [1994’s] One False Move for example, which really deserve to be seen by a bigger audience.

Well, the good films always stay around. At the end of the day, the only critic you want to satisfy is time and a good film is like a good wine. It will age well.

You can purchase Seven Holes For Air at Amazon UK.