Ram V dishes on his comic book origins and evolution

One comic book creator that has steadily been rising up the ranks ever since 2016 is Ram V. Starting with his self-published original graphic novel Black Mumba, with artist Devmalya Pramanik, Ram has since worked on creator-owned titles at Image Comics and Boom! Studios while building up an impressive line of licensed work at major publishers, including DC and Marvel Comics. Ram’s work has garnered him well-deserved nominations for both Eisner and Harvey Awards, among the most prestigious creative honors within the comic book industry.

2022 has been a particularly impressive year for Ram, with his acclaimed creator-owned series with Filipe Andrade, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, collected by Boom!, his run on The Swamp Thing with Mike Perkins coming to a planned end, and his DC titles Aquaman: Andromeda, with Christian Ward, and T, with Rafael Albuquerque, both launching this summer. In addition to his creator-owned and DC work, Ram also helms the Venom ongoing series at Marvel after relaunching the title last year with co-writer Al Ewing and artist Bryan Hitch. And through it all, Ram still looks for ways to reinvent himself as a writer and storyteller while embracing the creative possibilities of the medium he clearly loves so deeply.

In an exclusive spotlight interview with Popverse, Ram reflects on the origins of his career as a creative writer, explains how he approaches his collaborative process with each of the teams working with him, and shares how he applies his own narrative sensibilities to established characters and worlds like Batman and Swamp Thing.

Popverse: I find it fascinating that your first career wasn’t in comics. What was it about comics that made you want to make the career shift and how did you do it?

Ram V: I had studied to be a chemical engineer and I worked as a chemical engineer for a while but, really, I had been writing since I was a kid. Writing had always been my first love, in that sense, but I didn’t know it at the time. I had gotten a few things published, won a few awards here and there but, as a kid, you don’t think too much about it. It was when I was studying engineering at [the University of Pennsylvania] in Philadelphia that a friend of mine gifted me Vol. 1 of Sandman for my birthday. That was really the first time, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I wished I could write like this.

Fast-forward to 2012 or 2013, I was seriously considering quitting my job, I wasn’t enjoying it, and frankly, I had no idea what I was going to do otherwise. The first thing that my brain leapt to was that I was going to write, because I like writing, and