Part social commentary, part family drama, Americatown asks: What if the American Dream gave way to the American Nightmare?

After an economic collapse and other disasters in the near future, Americans are now the legal and illegal immigrants living abroad. They find work in cities like Buenos Aires, where their very own enclave known as “Americatown” has taken root. Owen, a recent arrival, begins a journey to support and save his splintered family divided between the enclave and home back in the U.S. His struggle is just a small part of the hardships and conflicting agendas in an immigrant community trying to build itself in the shadow of a once great nation.

In their inaugural comic series, screenwriters Bradford Winters and Larry Cohen have put together a series that in its first issue entertains and gets you to  think as well. I got a chance to talk to the two about the comic series, lucking out with the political climate, and what it’s like to write for television versus comics.

Graphic Policy: So where did the idea for Americatown come from?

Bradford Winters: It came from a long gestation on my part, of wanting to do a project about immigration. It began, pre-Americatown with the idea of a series set in contemporary America and looking and looking at immigration telescopically through various viewpoints. But, I realized early on that taking on the subject of immigration in America would be a bit hamstrung by the political liabilities that surround the subject. You know, where on the spectrum would the show fall? Would it be pro-immigration, anti-immigration, is it conservative, is it liberal, all that stuff. So after taking a giant step back, I thought we could treat the subject in a far more interesting way in a future scenario where Americans are now immigrants abroad, and looking at it that way.

GP: You two have tackled pretty politically charged material in the past including Oz, Kings, Borgia, and The Americans. Is there something about that sort of focus that interests you?

BW: I think primarily it’s a family drama more than a political drama. I think the politics of the issue help infuse it with a high degree of stakes for the characters and the family. We certainly didn’t come at it with any sort of political agenda. If anything I think we were trying to subvert the political agendas which fell off and attached themselves to the subject of immigration and trying to sabotage it in an imaginative way by turning Americans into immigrations both documented and undocumented… we might be able to foil the partisan divide.

Larry J. Cohen: Just looking at it outside of the political spectrum and just looking at it as what if it was a immigration story and helping people understand how those systems work. That’s not political. That’s an investigation you’d read in the New York Times or something. Getting those kind of things lined up with what’s happening today, that lined up, definitely something we paid close attention to, to try to tell a story people could connect with and maybe learn something about the immigration experience.

GP: We’ve seen stories where the Non-Americans are show as undocumented coming into America. But I can’t think of too many where Americans are undocumented going elsewhere. Do you think the fact that it’s a white main character impacts how we the reader reacts to the story?

BW: I think that’s the point. Where you’re doing the exact same stuff that matters. The same human experiences. The same dreams. The same desperations. Again, by flipping the paradigm and turning it on its head where it’s now sort of, at least at the center of the show, caucasian Americans who have fallen out of the middle with the economy and middle class who are living abroad, doing the jobs, many of the jobs that are rejected by other members of the city… Americatown isn’t an all-white enclave, because America isn’t an all-white country, but in order to play with the trope, we certainly put people like ourselves at the center of it. Because, people who look like us are driving the debate in the country on both side of the divide, so we felt we/they should be the ones featured at the center of the story.

GP: Immigration is clearly a huge topic this Presidential election season. Was this just good timing? Has that impacted how you’ve handled creating the series at all?

BW: It certainly good timing. The project existed well before the current election, so yeah, we knew going into the comic that this would time nicely with the Presidential election. It’s certainly a sore subject, and a fraught subject, for the country and hopefully it’d make the comic more relevant and reach a wider audience.

LC: Any time you tell a story that you are telling a story that connects with current events, it allows for the audiences mind to connect these characters and stories with things they’re reading every day. And we’re not pulling stories from the headlines but we are influenced by where the debate has been and where the debate is going. We’re not trying to offer answers. We’re trying to at least instigate a conversation about this type of topic. People have a hrd time seeing it beyond their own particular point of view. By questioning that, we hope that people can look at this from many different perspectives and come up with the best solution that way.

GP: I also picked up on the fact that Havana is a point these folks stopped in. There’s such history with immigration from Cuba to the US. The US relationship with Cuba has changed a lot just within the past months. Did you start writing the comic before or after recent events?

BW: That was another case of good timing. We had written the first issue before that turn of events. We keep hoping the political stars keep aligning in our narrative favor.

LC: We feel we want the people so confident as to buy all eight issues to find out what happens next.

GP: I can’t imagine Americans are just going to this country alone. Have you thought about the greater world and where different countries would be and how they may be handling things?

BW: Well we’re certainly narrowed in on this as the first Americatown out there, but not the only. I think the franchise possibilities, imaginatively, it’s impossible to not let one’s brain go to think about what an Americatown would look like in the Far East or the Middle East. We chose Buenos Aries and South America for particular reasons, but, best case scenario this would be just the first of other series and projects to come.

GP: Other than the solicit, there’s very few mentions as to what exactly is going on in the United States that is causing this emigration. How much will we find out about what’s happening in the series 8 issues?

BW: That’s a good question, this isn’t The Wire, as far as the political intricacies of the issue of immigration. We really are trying to tell a family drama. Hopefully it will reflect the realities of the immigration experience. We will not find ourselves in the hallways of DC. We hope to incorporate The Wire political complexities, how the people of Buenos Aries deal with the subject of immigration, or the enclave of Americatown in particular, but it’s not something where we’ll be getting into the legislative complexities of the subject matter. Unless characters bring it up in their own natural ways.

LC: We don’t get too wonky in our handling of the politics of it, but we do get to all of the different parts of the immigration experience in the city. You’re in the enclave. You’re in the detention center where illegals are rounded up. The natives of the city are watching their community change in a way that they’re not certain about. And through all of the different perspectives you get the full story, or as best of a full story we can offer in eight issues. And we’d like to continue that if we’re allowed to. Immigration has tremendous history, and a tremendous future, and we want to be a part of it for as long as possible.

GP: How did Daniel Irizarri join the series as artist?

BW: That was BOOM!’s doing.

LC: We were sent several artists and Daniel was the best of the bunch. From there we were able to start collaborating and creating all of the characters, bringing the enclave to life. We were able to work really closely in creating a vision in how the series would look and feel. Because when you’re creating things out of thin air, like a comic book and especially the future, you want to be careful with the decisions you make. It was an evolving process for us to collaborate in that way, especially coming from television where there’s so many different departments you’re dealing with. This it’s us as the writers and him as the illustrator. It was an experience for us that’s been fun and educational.

GP: The use of it is pretty sparse in the comic. It’s really just blue, white, black, and there’s some reds, oranges, and green, but generally each panel is a color mixed with black and white. Who came up with the idea of that color palette? I can’t help to think there’s some play on the American red, white, and blue.

LC: That was always to design, to invert the flag and make it symbolic as to where America is. But beyond that, the coloring of the issue, we pushed to keep things muted, grounded in something, even though the comic book world might demand something a bit louder. From the get go working with Brad, we worked on the iconography and the colors that make up America and bring new meaning to that.

GP: To you, what’s the difference between writing television scripts and a script for a comic? Do the differences in how they’re presented visually make a difference for how you’d tell the story?

BW: I think on the one hand, as first time comic book writers we’ve been a bit surprised by the compatibility between the two media. On the other hand not so surprised when you think about it, one uses moving pictures and the other uses still pictures. When I think about it, writing a comic book sort of feels like a haiku, where you really need to distill it down to those syllables, for a comic it’s those four or five panels. There’s a real distillation. I find it extremely helpful as a dramatic writer to engage the comic book medium. It makes you zero in on the moments that add up together in a scene.

GP: How are you enjoying writing for comics compared to television?

LC: We love comics, we wish it was a wider reaching medium. That’s what we go back and forth between. With television there’s a built in audience that allows you to do it all year round, and comics is a bit more niche. There’s a lot more freedom in comics, both imaginatively and the subject matters you can tackle. For us, it’d be tough to leave television behind and only live in comics. We want to keep telling stories. And as long as we can do that we’ll be very happy.