A Lovely Chat With Slipknot’s Corey Taylor About Comic Books, ‘The Boys’ TV Series, And His New Mask

Getty Image / Uproxx

Lead Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor and the rest of the band recently made a music video for their soul-shredding new single, “Solway Firth” (off their upcoming album, We Are Not Your Kind), in collaboration with Uproxx and Amazon Studios’ The Boys. The TV series, based upon Garth Ennis’ comic book series of the same name, skewers superheros in a wickedly enjoyable way. Taylor counts himself as a massive Ennis fan, so he’s thrilled to have contributed the heavy-metal anthem in lockstep with the show’s July 26 debut.

We’ve already spoken with Ennis (Preacher) about his comic and the series, which landed a second-season renewal from Amazon before it premiered. Naturally, we also wanted to talk to Taylor, who was gracious enough to oblige and geek out with us in a discussion about his intense love for comic books. Seriously, he stashes his treasured collection in a temperature-controlled room that he has lovingly referred to as “the vault,” so you know his fandom runs deep. We also chatted about the video and his newest Slipknot mask.

Corey Mother F*cking Taylor. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.

Well finally, someone’s using my full name.

I know, right? I think it should be legal at this point.

I mean, it has to be. I think the law is that if enough people believe it, it’s true. Apparently, that’s the way it is in government these days.

Yes, but you know we’re not here to talk politics.

Thank god, I’m over that shit.

Yup, we’re doing comics. You started reading them as a kid because your mom had a bunch of Marvel titles. Which were your favorites back then?

Honestly, Cap and Spidey were two of my favorites, but I also loved a lot of the horror comics like Doctor Strange, and obviously, [Tomb of] Dracula and shit like that. Those were some of my favorites just because they were dark and scary as hell. It was one of those things where you would go like into a five-and-dime, a Walgreens or something, and they would have back issues, like three for a buck in plastic. You could see what two of them were, but there was one in the middle, you usually didn’t know what that was gonna be, and it was usually a pooch. So I had a lot of Marvel, a lot of DC, there were just a bunch of them, but I gravitated more to the Marvel ones because the art was a little edgier, the stories were a little darker, more adventurous, it felt more like there was more energy to them.

It’s weird how that perception has shifted. DC has had the dark imprints, and people think of some of the recent movies as darker.

Yeah, and that’s not what the majority of people wanted when it came to DC movies. You know, it is weird because it was so off-brand, like DC had its dark characters, there was no reason to make these other characters darker. Like, who the fuck wants a dark Superman unless you’re doing an Elseworlds movie? Sure, fine, do it, but if you’re trying to put that into the canon, that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. To this day, it’s one of the biggest problems. I thought Henry Cavill was amazing: he looked the part, he was great, he was built. You could tell that there was more that he wanted to bring to it, but then he was chained to this darker version of Zack Snyder trying to prove himself again when people didn’t praise Watchmen as the greatest comic book movie ever. There was so much wrong with that. [With] DC comics, as I got older, I started to appreciate those characters more. And it was great because every character had their own shade, their own energy. Obviously, Batman, very dark, but Superman was the antithesis to that, which was why that yin-and-yang worked, and the movie did not.