Combining classic elements of the supernatural with refreshing perspective on the morality of sin, Graveweaver’s I’m the Grim Reaper is a fantastic story, an opinion shared by the millions of readers on Webtoon who subscribe to the series and the many more who’ve begun to purchase the first volume from VIZ imprint VIZ Originals. During New York Comic Con this year, we had the excellent opportunity to sit down in conversation with Grave ahead of her appearance at VIZ’s panel, where she answered more questions and did a live drawing for fans.
I’m the Grim Reaper follows Scarlet, a woman cast into Hell and tasked with the harsh role of being a reaper: bringing in one sinner per day, regardless of their sins, lest she be sent to the ninth circle of Hell herself. She begins the series having lost memories of her life and what led her to Hell in the first place. The story follows her service as a reaper, her attempts to recover her lost memory, and the variety of compelling characters (and sinners) she meets along the way.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Becoming an Artist
Grave’s career as an artist started within the last decade, but she’s been an artist for almost her entire life and the time spent putting in the effort certainly comes through with every page of I’m the Grim Reaper. Before diving into details about the work, its art style, its inspirations, and its interesting takes on relative morality and sin, it made sense to get an idea of how Grave first got her start in the industry and as an artist writ large.
“I’ve been an artist for — well I’ve been drawing since I was 10 so I’ve been doing it for 20 years at this point. I’ve been a professional for seven or eight years; this is it’s the only skill I have so hopefully I can continue it into the future or else I’m sh*t out of luck. But in terms of like what got me started with drawing comics, I think back in the day when I was a kid I would watch shows on TV. And cartoons are very like episodic — you watch an episode of the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and there’s barely any continuity from each episode.
There’s a little bit but not too much. But then one day I was watching TV, and it looks so cool and adult. The art style is more mature and the characters are more detailed — they look neat, it’s Naruto and it’s on TV. I’m watching maybe episode 7 or something and I don’t really understand what’s going on because obviously there is a plot that has already happened and this is just an episode in the plot.
“I kind of had hints of this with Pokémon before […] you could pick it up and go — it was a combination of being episodic and having continuity like when he got Butterfree and then let Butterfree go. But it was mostly you go watch an episode and get it. But when I saw that episode of Naruto I was like ‘Oh, there’s this kind of story-like thing; what is this thing I’m watching?’ And then of course it said in the commercial — I think I was watching Toonami — and it would say it was anime. I was like, ‘Okay what is this anime thing? Can I see more of this? Because I know cartoons but what is anime?’. That’s when I went on the internet and looked it up and saw it was this whole genre of stuff from Japan and it came it came with this thing called manga. And I was like ‘Oh, if I want to just see the story’ — because if I watch Naruto on TV I have to wait every single week — so I was like ‘Oh if I want to see the story I can go to the bookstore and I can just read the manga.’
“So I went there and I read a lot. I read some bits of Naruto, but what really caught me on the shelf was the BLEACH manga because it looked really cool. BLEACH was definitely the first manga I read from start to finish and I was hooked. That’s kind of where I was like ‘This storytelling thing in comics is really cool,’ but it took me many many years until I started my own. Out of nowhere I just decided to do a webcomic because I was like ‘Well, I’ve been alive many years and I haven’t started a webcomic yet. I should probably do that because I was planning to do that a long time ago.’ So that’s how I started.”
Creating I’m the Grim Reaper
As far as moving from general artistry to actually crafting the story of I’m the Grim Reaper, Grave explained that the general premise was something she thought of as a teenager, slowly finding and developing additional components of the story until it was ready to fully manifest as a full-fledged comic. She was happy to walk us through her thought process, and it displayed the incremental thinking that creates stakes and uniqueness for the story, as well as the early stages of the gray morality that’s endemic to the plot.
“As an artist you come up with different concepts here and there and then you you write it down or you draw something and then you put it out there and you forget about it. I had this idea for this girl who was a Reaper for a very long time. I came up with it when I was around 13 years old. I was like ‘Wouldn’t be cool if there was a girl and she was a Grim Reaper and she killed people?’ But it was just a one-off idea and then I moved on to the next thing I was thinking of. Ultimately I made I’m the Grim Reaper because I was like, ‘Okay I want to do a webcomic before I die, but I have to like start on it before I die so I should start on it now.’
So that night I came up with this idea of ‘What if you could see if someone committed a sin by them having an X on their chest?’ That was like the first idea I came up with and I was like ‘Okay, what do I do with this idea?’ What about if there was that girl who’s a Grim Reaper — that thing I was thinking of a long time ago — what if she had to kill people, what if that X was a mark that marked them as her target? But why would she do that — I don’t want a character who’s just a murderer for no reason. And then I was like ‘Oh, what if she had to do it because Satan forced her to? So she had to kill these people. Then it would lead to an interesting story of her deciding who to kill basically based on the sins.’ Because a sin isn’t always just somebody who’s just a bad person. Sometimes they did something bad for a reason that they thought was justified or a reason that is justified.
“The ideas come one after another. For the current iteration of I’m the Grim Reaper, I came up with the base story at the beginning — the beginning was really solid, I had an ending, and then I had a few little plot points in between. I was like ‘Okay we’re gonna get to each of these somehow but I have a roadmap.’ Then, as I’m the Grim Reaper has been going on — which has been five years at this point — I’ve expanded that roadmap. The original ending was going to be much earlier than it is now and we actually passed where the comic was supposed to end originally. I just kept going from there and I came up with a new ending.”
Creating I’m the Grim Reaper Grave was inspired by a variety of manga and anime. Some of the art, some of the abilities, and some aspects of the setting are occasionally reminiscent of some well known anime in a tasteful way — not so much that it feels like a copy and not so little that the influence is impossible to notice. I asked Grave whether there were any anime or manga that helped inspired any aspects of the story and she confirmed my number one guess.
“I’d say the number one inspiration behind I’m the Grim Reaper is probably Soul Eater. I have a Death the Kid jacket right here. Soul Eater has been probably the most influential anime and manga on me because I found the aesthetic so powerful and I also was like ‘Oh my god it’s a shonen manga but there’s a girl as the main character.’ Growing up every single action manga had a guy as a main character and I was interested in the action manga. So when I found one that had a girl as a main character I was like ‘Girls can be the main characters of this stuff, oh my God’ [ . . . ] BLEACH was a huge inspiration — like Reapers and Soul Reapers are kind of similar and the idea of having an afterlife and that you go back and forth to fight has always been a very interesting thing.
I think other than that there would be Death Note, because one of the main characters, he’s very like Light-esque in terms of how he thinks he’s committing violence for the right reason. […] There’s a lot of moral questions and when you discuss a Death Note with different people they all have a different answer which is what’s interesting. And other than that Angels of Death […] I really liked like the aesthetic that was going on in there […]. I think that is all of the really direct inspirations. I’m gonna be honest, I’m probably forgetting a couple.”
As far as format goes, I’m the Grim Reaper has been published in a variety of mediums before ultimately being published by VIZ. I’m the Grim Reaper was originally published on CANVAS, WEBTOON’s self-publishing platform, before moving to WEBTOON Originals and ultimately getting published as a VIZ Original. I asked Grave about that experience moving from platform to platform as the story came up in popularity. She explained what that experience was like and what it entailed.
“A lot of change, a lot of adaptation to like what the standard of the platform is. When I was just doing it myself it was a very scribbly black and white. I did not spend much time on art; I didn’t think about it. But then when I had to move to WEBTOON Originals I had to color it — the standard for their platform is that all the comics have to be colored. And I’m like ‘Oh I don’t want to color it, but if I’m gonna color it I’m gonna color like an anime, because I like anime right’ […] the real challenge — Canvas to WEBTOON Originals was very easy, I just had to color things. But going from this scrolling format to the manga-inspired format was very difficult. We have a reformatter and their name is Miranda and they did an excellent job.
What they did is they reformatted the scrolling into the page layout and then they would mark things for me to redraw […]. So I had to redraw quite a bit of things to fit to make to make the panels fit inside the manga format, so it was a lot of redrawing. It obviously was not as hard as just drawing the entire thing from scratch, it was very little work in comparison […]. The page format allows much more creative freedom because now you can use these two pages to like do whatever you want [ . . . ] there’s a lot of bonus art and bonus chapters inside the physical edition too because we wanted to make sure there was something really good in there for people who picked up the physical edition […]. It was an enjoyable experience the entire time even though it was a lot of work.”
When asked if she would like to see this work turned into an anime someday, Grave laughed before answering humbly.
“(laughs) I would say I don’t think it’s good enough to be turned into an anime. But if anyone’s crazy enough to do it, sure. But personally I don’t have the confidence in my work to say that.”
Gray Morality
Without question, one of the most compelling and defining aspects of I’m the Grim Reaper is its intrinsic moral questions and dilemmas that force the reader to think and try to make sense of the kinds of decisions that Scarlet herself has to make. Like Grave mentioned herself, sins come in many forms and sometimes come alongside justifications from the sinner. Nevertheless, Scarlet’s job is to reap a sinner every day irrespective of what their sin was. This foundation serves as the basis for all kinds of moral questions that are tantalizing to think through. When crafting a version of Hell, Grave kept in mind what the general conception of a sin’s severity would be when assigning them levels.
“[ . . . ] I didn’t copy Dante’s Inferno’s levels of hell because they’re…how do I say, they’re pretty dated at this point. So I made my own basically — because his are classified by what your sin was like if it’s greed you’re going to this level if it’s lust you’re going to this level. I was like let’s just do so that if you took every single person’s, every single human’s collective judgment, this is an ascending level where would you go. Like killing one person is less bad than killing two people so the one person goes to a slightly less level than the guy who killed two people. That was basically my mindset creating them.”
When asked about whether questions regarding sin and the morality of them had always been on her mind, Grave explained that the questions weren’t always there, but that another inspiration had been there for a while.
“I honestly I don’t think I think about it that often, like I don’t just sit in the shower being like ‘Oh my God what is righteousness of sin?’ and stuff but the idea of like gray morality has always been a very interesting concept in writing for me. Here’s one of the inspirations I forgot to mention — one of the characters I really like is Arthas from Warcraft 3 […] Arthas from Warcraft 3 is in my opinion a really really good character that encompasses the idea of gray morality. He’s probably my favorite character in all of fiction basically.”
Grave went on to tell the story of Arthas, the plague of undeath, and the culling of Stratholme, wherein the character decided to purge an entire city after a shipment of infected grain, which turns those infected into dangerous, contagious, undead creatures, had been distributed to them.
“Prince Arthas is trying to be a good beacon of morality for his people. And he finds out that there’s this plague of undeath that has permeated his kingdom […] once it touches you, you turn into an undead creature and you can spread this undeadness on to other people […] so he finds out that this shipment of plagued grain has been brought into this city called Stratholme and it’s already been distributed to everybody in the city […] so he makes the ultimate decision that he’s going to go in personally and kill everybody in Stratholme before they turn into undead because they’re much easier to kill when they’re just civilians. [ . . . ] There’s there’s been endless debates on if what he did was right or not. This game came out in I think the late 90s right and people debate to this day about what if what he did was good or not. Some people are like ‘He had to do it’ and some people are like ‘He just killed a bunch of civilians’ [ . . . ] that whole idea of gray morality — he did what he thought was right and you can debate to the end if it was bad or good but ultimately he stopped his kingdom from being invaded and this undead scourge from proliferating. You don’t know what would have happened if he didn’t kill everybody in there but you do know that by killing everyone in there he stopped it from spreading. That idea of ‘Is it good is it bad?’ — it’s always fascinated me […]. I would say that this whole idea is just something I’ve been very interested in because it creates a lot of discussion. It creates a lot of debates and it makes people sometimes very very engaged in a work”
“There is no right answer — and I like things I have right answer because it’s just, it’s interesting”
Closing Thoughts
After a lengthy conversation about the editorial process, the story, becoming an artist, and ample Warcraft 3 lore, I finally asked Graveweaver for any final words to fans of the series.
“Thanks for reading — I don’t deserve it, but I appreciate it. I really like everybody who takes the time to read my work and I will continue working hard just for you”
We’d like to thank Graveweaver for taking the time to speak with us as well as VIZ for helping put the conversation together and for hosting an incredible panel featuring Graveweaver during New York Comic Con. You can find more information about I’m the Grim Reaper, Vol. 1 and preorder Vol. 2 on the series’ VIZ website.
© 2023 by GRAVEWEAVER © GRAVEWEAVER/WEBTOON
