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Fifteen Minutes of Your Life You Will Never Get Back

Posted December 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

There is a rumor going around that the Internet will save you time and money and make you a more productive person. That you are reading this website at all indicates that you likely realize this claim is about as true as Michael Eisner declaring he has no ill will for DreamWorks and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Just in case you have stumbled upon this page by accident — which, when you think about it is once again all the proof I need — and still cling to the notion that your Internet Service Provider is a link to higher productivity, allow me to disabuse you of it here. You’ll thank me for it.

Now, first, I must admit, I have a somewhat unusual schedule in that many days, I have no schedule at all. I am a graduate student, and thus I spend much of my time in what is referred to as ‘independent research.’ Those of you without graduate experience probably understand this phenomenon better by its more popular name, ‘goofing off until the last minute and then cramming.’ I just do this on a recurring basis, so that the last minute seems to arrive every two days or so, and I often have to combine the cramming and the goofing off into one activity. Also, I frequently check entire shelves out of the library. But we have already lost sight of our main topic, as you should expect from a student of the liberal arts like myself. (If you are frustrated by this digression, consider it direct evidence of our central thesis — the Internet wastes time.)

One thing that I will sometimes do in the course of my day is to take care of tasks that my wife, burdened as she is by a real job, is unable to handle. So on the evening of Thursday, November 15th, I attempted to purchase movie tickets for the following night via the Internet. (If, given that date, you are unaware of what film we wished to see, I must congratulate you on your recent return from Alpha Centauri.) After several aborted attempts, in which my computer informed me it could not find the page I was looking for — it had been there a minute ago, but then another computer tried to ‘put it in a safe place’ or something — I finally hit the button marked ‘finish’ and went to bed.

I woke up to discover that ‘finish’ really meant ‘give up,’ because my computer now told me that I had not, in fact, purchased any tickets. Had to do the whole thing over again. Except now the thing really was being difficult. See, I have a code which allegedly entitles me to waive the surcharge that comes from buying movie tickets online. You input this code, then hit enter, and you are taken to a page that asks for your credit card. Only the credit card page tells you that you entered no code. You can go back and enter the code again, but the credit card page will insist that there is no code. It’s like that scene in The Matrix where someone gives Keanu Reeves a piece of mind-altering, reality-expanding advice and Keanu stares back in an intent yet uncomprehending way. You know which one I mean.

Now, the thing is, the reason I was ordering tickets online in the first place is a) the AMC Theater chain does not, to my knowledge, work with the Moviefone people to let me do this over the phone and b) everyone under the age of twelve — and half those over the age of twelve — were trying to get tickets for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. So each time I did this little type-the-code-there-is-no-code dance, another flargin’ show sold out and I had to try again. I spent an hour doing this before giving up, spending the rest of my day being late for appointments, and deciding in the end to just try again the next day. (We did, and the movie’s quite nifty, but that is neither here nor there.)

Of course, part of the problem may have been that, in another window, I was trying to sort out my finances. See, one result of that whole ‘independent research’ thing is that I produce lots and lots of paper. My printer often just gives up from the strain of it all, and would unionize in a heartbeat in my little anthropomorphic dream world. So I try to keep a lot of my records online, which means I have lots of things set up by which I can send money out or (occasionally) receive it with a few keystrokes. ‘Ah ha!’ you say. ‘Surely this is a convenience that saves time and money!’

Let’s think about this for a moment, though. Pattie once discussed how credit cards make it easier for us to spend money, because we don’t actually have to give up cash at the moment of purchase. Imagine how easy it is when you don’t even have to take out the credit card. Just type in an e-mail address — say, dave@conspicuousconsumption.com — and a password — like cash4unot4me — and voila! Despite being unwilling to spend an hour at the local mall because it’s too time consuming, you’ve spent two or three browsing pages at eBay buying things you would pick up and then put down at the store. (Or, if you’re me, you would pick them up, put them down, pick them again, walk to the checkout, turn around, put them back down, walk away, come back, compare the original item with a slightly different item, pick up the second item, put it down, pick up the original item, then put it down and walk sheepishly from the store when your wife gives you a look. My point remains.)

I have not discussed e-mail, which allows me to stay in touch with friends all over the country and field numerous lucrative offers to ‘Work from HOME’ from people who don’t realize I already do that, or Instant Messaging, which allows me to engage in 30-minute-long exchanges of puns centering on meteorological themes. This is not something I would put in my planner. I would not call someone up and say, “Hey, let’s have a conversation, in which every sentence incorporates a meteorological term, whose sole point is to discuss our ability to incorporate meteorological terms into sentences.” But I do it because of the darned Internet, and then I look at the clock and it’s four in the morning and I have to get to bed because I have another day of intensive research ahead of me. Speaking of which, I should be going. But before I do, remember.

There is no code.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

You Know What I Mean

Posted December 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

There are a couple of interesting threads in our Philosophy forums right now on the nature of an individual’s relationship to society and on the nature of language; while the technicalities of these topics may make them seem like two separate issues, many philosophers have tried to show that they are, in fact, vitally connected. One such philosopher is George Herbert Mead, a colleague of John Dewey in the late nineteenth century. Mead refers to his philosophy as ‘social behaviorism,’ and emphasizes the importance of gestures and actions, not just for human beings but for other creatures in the natural world. (In this discussion, I’m drawing from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226516687/thisisnotnews, an edited version of Mead’s lectures.)
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Filed in Philosophy

Winds of Change, or More Hot Air?

Posted November 2, 2001 By Dave Thomer

“When in human history has positive change not been incredibly costly, selfless and bloody?”

Christian Gossett asked that question in an interview on this site, almost a year ago, and it’s been at the back of my mind ever since. Not News is dedicated to the idea that people can come together, talk through problems, look at evidence in a critical fashion, and come to an agreement on what should be done for the good of everyone. We sit at computers, surf the web for research, make some phone calls and post on the forums. Doesn’t sound very costly or bloody . . . or even all that selfless. The thought has entered my mind, more than once, that maybe all we’re really doing is salving some guilty consciences.

That thought hit especially hard as I read William H. Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights, an excellent book that tracks the progress — and lack thereof — of the civil rights movement in Greensboro, NC from the mid-50s through the 70s. Drawing on extensive interviews and written archival materials, the book is a tightly focused narrative that goes into great depth as it covers the community leaders and members that can get missed in larger overviews of the civil rights movement.

What is most fascinating, and most troubling, about the book is the vast disconnect it portrays between Greensboro’s image of itself and its reality. Greensboro had long considered itself a ‘progressive’ Southern city, with a more modern outlook and economy than many cities in the Deep South — and certainly with better, and fairer, relations between the city’s white and black populations. There was a black member of the city council in 1951, and also a black member of the school board. Several of the city’s philanthropists contributed significant sums to facilities in black neighborhoods, and a few major institutions were willing to work toward integration. And city leaders were almost always willing to discuss race relations in civil discourse, through official committees and informal talks.

The key word, there, is ‘civil.’ The powers that be did not want to ruffle any feathers, they did not want to provoke controversy, and they certainly did not want to suggest that conditions in Greensboro might be less than ideal. Change in Greensboro was expected to be attained through consensus, which meant that if anyone objected to change, then the status quo would be maintained in the name of civility, until the objector could be persuaded to change his mind. And rest assured, if a change would require that whites give up some of their entrenched power or privileged space in society, there would be objectors.

Greensboro was the birthplace of the student sit-in movement in February 1960, when four students and North Caroline Agricultural & Technical College grew frustrated with the slow pace of reform — lunch counters were still segregated, many jobs were off limits to blacks, and six years after Brown vs. Board of Education, black children still weren’t attending white schools. The students went to a downtown Woolworth’s, made purchases, and then st down at the lunch counter. When they were refused service, they stayed. Within days, dozens and then hundreds of students — and eventually adults — joined in the effort and brought commerce in downtown Greensboro to a standstill.

Here’s the interesting part. The powers that be of Greensboro did not respond to the students with a statement of, ‘Thank you for bringing this blatant hypocrisy and act of disrespect to our attention; we will remedy it immediately, and please accept our apologies.’ They criticized the protestors for being disruptive, threatened to enforce anti-trespass laws, and refused to believe that the protestors reflected the will of Greensboro’s black population. “It seems apparent,” said North Caroline Attorney General Malcolm Seawell, that these incidents have been promoted, encouraged, and even supervised by persons coming into North Carolina from other states” (Chafe 86).

Some white liberals did attempt to use the demonstrations as a catalyst for social change, as did a very small number of city leaders. But even those efforts showed the limits of a consensus-driven approach — a group of community leaders came together to negotiate first a moratorium on demonstrations and then an overall solution. They got the moratorium, but with the pressure off, and with the negotiating group having no official power to sanction anyone, businesses retrenched. The community leaders operated under the assumption that it was necessary to build up something close to unanimous public support for integration before anything could change. Meanwhile, the local Woolworth’s manager wrote to the governor, “We are fighting a battle for the white people who still want to eat with white people” (Chafe 93) — which pretty much sums up the chances for such a consensus. Fed up with the lack of progress, the students resumed the demonstrations, and eventually the lunch counters were integrated. But change only occurred when the oppressed made life uncomfortable for the oppressors, many of whom refused to believe they were doing anything wrong.

The civil rights movement is full of such stories. Local residents showing great courage and determination called attention to injustice, and when they tried to play within the existing system, they found their needs sacrificed in the name of political expediency. In 1964, for example, a group of Mississippi activists challenged the credentials of Mississippi’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention, on the grounds that black voters had been disfranchised — but President Johnson was unwilling to anger Southern Democrats by letting a vote on the credentials challenge go to the convention floor (where it almost certainly would have won). And when civil rights leaders began to call attention to the racial inequities of the American economic system, many of their political allies turned a deaf ear. Clearly, there are limits to working within the system, and you could make a strong case that a reform movement that relies on politely asking the system to change its ways is no reform movement at all.

So what are we left with? Is the only honest, and honorable, solution a remorseless, revolutionary struggle (to steal a phrase from Abraham Lincoln)? I’m not sure that’s the answer either — such a struggle is bound to cause resentments, and even if a revolution somehow put a just system into place, the overthrown would be more likely to nurse their grievances rather than become a part of the new society. There’s another Gossett quote that comes to mind: “No war has ever ended that did not begin another.”

The only truly lasting change will come when we change our hearts and our minds, and I don’t think that change can come at the end of a gun. It can only come slowly, and it will take a critical mass of everyday people who are willing to recognize that it is necessary. It will take people with the tools to analyze the world around them, to see where and how it could be better. One of the inspiring elements of Chafe’s book is the four students’ recollections of the role models that gave them the courage to take a stand — the teachers and leaders of their community, the people who did work within the system but weren’t afraid to tweak it where they could. When I think of what Not News can be, that’s what I like to imagine. We will always need heroes to stand up and shout, to call our intention to injustice. And it may be getting time to shout a little louder. But we also need people to talk to each other — and that’s why we’re here.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Well That Seems Fair

Posted November 2, 2001 By Dave Thomer

There is a certain sense in which this article is the intellectual equivalent of catching fish in a barrel. When liberals like me agree with conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute that people should pay more attention to government assistance to large corporations, my first inclination is to say that’s the ballgame and go home. But then again, some progressives argue that some kinds of corporate welfare aren’t so bad. And the Republican Party has determined that the best way to stimulate the economy in the wake of the September 11 disaster is to give enormous tax breaks to large corporations. So maybe the issue deserves a little more attention after all. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

History in the Making, Take Two

Posted October 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

This article is something of a change of pace; it’s an essay I wrote in 1997 to mark the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy. We’re running it here for a few reasons. The DVD version of The Phantom Menace comes out in about a week, and you’ll be hearing a lot from Kevin, Pattie and me on that subject — so we thought it might not be a bad idea to let you have a glimpse of why some of us take these movies so seriously. Plus you can decide if my writing skills have progressed or regressed since ’97. When I reread it, though, what really struck me was that the essay describes one of the many great days I had as a New Yorker . . . right now, it just feels important to share that.

Manhattan is full of impressive sights. The Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, Central Park, and dozens of others routinely attract crowds of natives and tourists alike. On one particular Friday in January, though, none of them made me happier than the marquee of the Ziegfeld Theater, which proudly announced in huge gold letters that Star Wars returned to the big screen that day. Under the marquee, a few dozen other fans had already taken up their places in the ticket-holders’ line, two hours before showtime. My ten-year-old sister and I raced down the block to join them and cement our place in line, right next to a camera crew that was setting up for a news report. The reporter stood in front of his news van holding his microphone, shaking his head and wondering out loud what would drive presumably rational people to stand in line for hours to see a movie that was almost twenty years old.

For me, it was a matter of honor. The first time I saw Star Wars was in 1982, five years after its first opening day. Since then I have seen the film dozens of times, memorized substantial portions of dialogue, driven myself deep into debt to purchase memorabilia and spin-off products, and in short devoted entirely too-large portions of my life to a fictional galaxy far, far away. But I always felt like I missed something, like I somehow wasn’t a true fan because I had never experienced that opening-day rush. So I viewed George Lucas’ decision to commemorate the film’s twentieth anniversary with a nationwide re-release as the universe’s way of saying, “Of course, we’re sorry, you should have been there the first time. Please accept our apologies.” Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

What Art Art?

Posted October 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

One of the things that drew me to philosophy was the discipline’s attempt to answer questions that seemed impossible to answer conclusively. I hope the last few articles, which have surveyed some (but by no means all) of the most significant authors in Western philosophy, have shown how this can be a satisfying and useful discipline. Now it’s time to tackle some of those questions ourselves. I’m confident that some — like “Who on Earth thought a sitcom starring Emeril Lagasse would have any artistic merit?” — will never be answered. But even that unanswered question does suggest a more fundamental, and probably more interesting, set of questions — how the devil do we determine what it means for something to have artistic merit in the first place? And what is art, anyway?
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Filed in Philosophy

Brian Bendis: All That and a Bag of Tricks – Part 9

Posted September 30, 2001 By Dave Thomer

DT: As far as the state of comics in general, who else is out there doing stuff that excites you or that is moving the medium forward?

BB: The cool thing is that more than ever there are a great many people who are moving the medium in spectacular fashion. Everyone’s got very unique sensibilities and take the medium very seriously. Everyone who’s in the comics business isn’t in it for the money. If they make money that’s great. But this isn’t the greatest way to make money that there is, so all the total money-grabbing weasels all left. So what you’re stuck with now is writers and artists that, they have to be in comics. They have to be in comics, all right? We could all be in movies and television or animation. We all could. But we have to be in comics. And so when you have people that have to do it and they don’t care about the money, you’re getting unique interpretations of a lot of characters with unique styles. And also, you’ve got Joe Quesada running Marvel Comics right now, who’s got incredible taste and varied taste in art styles and coloring that you haven’t seen before. He’s willing put someone like Grant Morrison on X-Men and see what happens. It’s taking bold chances.

One of my best friends in the world is David Mack, and I think he is pushing the medium farther artistically than almost anybody out there. He does the covers to Alias and we did Daredevil together for a few issues last year, and I am in awe of his personal growth. Honestly, I’ve surrounded myself with people that I consider to be pushing the medium because I want to be pushed by them and I want to be surrounded by that kind of flavor, and any artist that I’m working with or colorist that I’m working with, I firmly believe is offering everything that they have. They’re not hacking it out, they’re really giving it everything they’ve got.

For your readers who aren’t comics fans, I defy you to go into a comics store and not find something you might want. There’s such an amalgamation of genres and styles and ways to approach a story. When I think of people that go see these pieces of crap movies for nine dollars a pop, and for two dollars you can get a comic that you can keep and read like ten times and be in love with . . . give it a shot.

DT: How do you do that? How do you get the people that aren’t readers to get into the store, go to the bookstore, or whatever?

BB: The best thing I’ve had is mainstream press, I’ve picked up a lot of readers from articles in Spin and Entertainment Weekly’s been real nice to me this year. That’s helped a lot with the bookstores. There are people you’ll never got to go to a comic book store, just like there’s people who go into a comic stores you’ll never get to read a black and white comic. There’s nothing you can do that will turn them. But the proliferation of comics into other places like bookstores and Marvel’s also had, like, you buy a pair of shoes you get Ultimate Spider-Man #1, so we’re like marijuana brownies. “First one’s free, kid!” But not by sitting on our asses and going, “Why won’t anybody love us?”

It is sad that our most popular numbers that comics have done in the last twenty years, in the early 90s, was probably at the medium’s artistic lowest point. Everyone was just hacking stuff out to make as much money as possible, cash grabbing, and all of these people were buying these shallow pieces of crap, and they left. They go, “Why am I buying this crap?” Now, comics are great, and though the audience is there for them, and I love each and every one of them, you do wish all of those people would come back and see how great comics are right now, because they’re just amazing. There are just piles of comics every week that are worth buying. And it’s really bad for guys like me, who have really varied taste in comics. Every week I go, “oh, it’s too many I’m buying. I got into this business to get free comics, where are my free comics?”

Filed in Comics

Brian Bendis: All That and a Bag of Tricks – Part 8

Posted September 30, 2001 By Dave Thomer

DT: What do you have brewing in your head as far as different formats or different ways you can tell Powers stories?

BB: Yeah, in the Powers Annual that comes out in two weeks — it was the [revised version of the mail-away] Powers 1/2 but it got too big, so we’re making it the annual — first you get the story that happened, the villain gets caught and interrogated and arrested for murder, and then the second half of the story is a courtroom transcript of the trial with courtroom sketches. One of my many jobs, I was a courtroom sketch artist for the federal courthouse for the Fox channel in Cleveland for a couple of years. So for years, I’ve wanted to do this, because courtroom drawings are comic book drawings. So I’ve wanted to tell a story all in courtroom style drawings. And Mike pleaded with me that maybe it was a good idea to do a handful, and not a hundred of them. So that’s what we’re gonna do, in a couple of weeks, the Law & Order issue of Powers.

I got all kinds of stuff. In Daredevil, which I’m taking over, it starts in a couple of weeks, I’m doing something with an artist that I’ve done a little bit in Sam and Twitch. The story, not too dissimilar from the movies Memento and Out of Sight, is told out of order for dramatic reasons. There’s an actual purpose to it. We flash back all over the place. And we get to the moment where we find out what the story’s about, which nobody will see coming, and it took me two months of whining to get Marvel to agree to it. And it’s big, you’ve never seen this in a Marvel comic, and when you get to the moment of clarity, it’ll go straight . . . and it’s about five issues of fractured storytelling structure, which hopefully people won’t beat the crap out of me for, but again, I’m trying to do new stuff. Turn it upside down if you can, see what happens. And no one knows that, by the way. We haven’t announced it, we’re just putting it out fractured, so that’s kind of a scoop for you. (laughs)

DT: Cool. You mentioned Mike being glad to get a break from the talking heads . . . is that something you’re at all concerned about, that you have a style and approach that you actually self-parodied in the Oni Summer Special? Is that something you look at and say, “I gotta pull back, I can’t have this kind of back and forth exchange, because that’s what people are expecting?”

BB: There’s always gonna be that if you keep doing what you do that made you famous, the minute you stop doing it everybody’s mad at you for it, but if you continue to do it they go, “Oh, you’re doing that.” There’s always that, but that goes with the territory. I think you see a lot of this format breaking we’ve talked about, it builds upon whatever I’ve tried to build myself into. I do think about it, but I think I’m a step ahead of it. And you know what, I’d rather have a style than not, because there’s a lot of guys that don’t even have a style, they’re just doing something that’s the same as what they were doing twenty years ago, and they don’t have anything new to say. So I’d rather be beaned for having a style than not having one. Within that style there’s a lot to accomplish. Even the difference between Fortune and Glory and Torso, like you said before, there’s the basis of a style in there somewhere, but they couldn’t be more different. Same thing with Spider-Man and Alias. You could compare those two. I have personal goals and challenges that are far beyond what anything anyone’s expecting, from both my employers and my readers. I have personal goals that are much larger, almost unobtainable.

DT: Anything from any of your other projects that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to mention?

BB: I got a big pile of art today from the next few issues of Ultimate Team-Up, which is the sister book to Spider-Man, and it’s more like an anthology book of different art styles. These are all artists I’ve been able to pick and write specifically for them, like I told you before. And they are soo good. These issues coming out are so awesome. People are gonna get whiplash from the style difference from issue to issue. They go from crime to humor to horror to manga, issue to issue to issue. I’m just thrilled to bits, what a fun thing this turned out to be. So I’m pretty proud of that. That’ll be what I do for a while, these will be the books that I do. I have big goals for all of them.

Filed in Comics

Brian Bendis: All That and a Bag of Tricks – Part 7

Posted September 30, 2001 By Dave Thomer

DT: Now Powers is the book that to a certain extent was your big coming-out. (Congrats on the Eisner, by the way.)

BB: Thanks, yeah, it’s the first book I’ve done where we hit it out of the gate. Even with Jinx it took like six years for anyone to buy it. That’s fine too, believe me, I’m not bitching, but it’s nice to get the check the year that you made the book. Just once! I’m not asking for too much. Just one time, I’d like to get the check the same year. So, yeah, Powers started small and got real big real fast. It’s stayed in a nice comfortable place.

DT: Was the whole homicide/VH-1 Behind the Music superheroes idea what fell into your head and got the whole thing started?

BB: I am fascinated with celebrity media and that does permeate a great deal of my work. I was putting it all together, and putting together, well, where does superheroes fall into this? Like if there were superheroes, what if? Comic book writers always do this, right? With Powers, you’re putting it together and you’re looking at Mike’s sketches and you’re going, “Hey, I don’t think anyone’s done this yet!” And then it comes out and everyone says “I can’t believe no one thought of that,” I go, “Yeah, me neither. Woo hoo!” And I grew up in the era of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and I think one of the reasons I didn’t tackle superheroes for so long is that when you are faced with the greatest superhero stories ever told in the comic book medium when you’re in high school, you’re sitting there going, “Oh what am I going to do? Dark Knight Returns, what the fuck am I going to say?” You’re talking about eight years where I didn’t even think about superheroes, you know? I didn’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. And I’m not a big fan of, you know, “I’ll create a Batman-like character and call it Ratman or something.” If I get to write Spider-Man, that’s great, I love Spider-Man, but I’m not going to create a Spider-Man like character for myself to own. I’ll either do the big ones or I’ll create something totally new in a different genre. I have been lucky where I got to do both, so what do you think of them apples? (laughs) With Powers, it was fun to explore the superhero world through this way because I hadn’t seen it done, and it has endless possibilities of stories to tell. We’ve got like a pile of them. And I haven’t seen any of them done. I have never seen a superhero groupie story. These are all things I haven’t seen, and that’s kind of fun to put out there.

DT: The most recent issue, number 13, was the magazine-style issue.

BB: Yeah, boy was that hard. That was a big pain in the ass.

DT: Was that something that when you came up with the storyline you said, “This is something we ought to do,” or did you come up with the magazine idea and say, “Some time down the road we should do this?”

BB: As a writer — you know about the three act structure, right? Well everyone’s got the second act that kind of sucks. Everyone’s got the great beginning and the great ending and kind of a wonky middle, and I’m very aware of that. So I always try to create some kind of new challenge in the second act that I haven’t seen before, and I thought that this tabloid idea accomplished a great many things. It opened the world up of Powers, ’cause we’re always looking at the world from Walker and Deena’s kind of skewed, sarcastic point of view. So OK, we’re opening up the world very clearly, we’re showing how the media deals with it, not too dissimilar from how the media deals with our politicians or our movie stars, with a reverence and yet a savagery. It furthered the story in a way I hadn’t seen before. There’s actually a plot inside the magazine itself. And at the same time, it sets us up for a few stories down the line. Everything that’s in that magazine will be explored in Powers or has been explored in Powers. So, it served a lot of purposes and it was worth the hardship that it took to create it. It was three people doing the work of a staff of seventy, and the typos to show for it.

DT: So how do you put something like that together, differently than you put together a regular comic?

BB: It’s almost an exact ripoff of a British tabloid called Hello magazine. I pulled a few issues of that out and I bought multiple copies of them and I showed them to the staff and I used them as reference points. I wrote all of the text and all of the ads and I designed some of the ads and I sent them over to Mike and went over all the pieces. He was happy to get a break from the talking heads for an issue. We put it all together with the help of [colorist] Peter [Pantazis] and Ken, Ken Bruzenak is one of the greatest letterers in the history of comics, and we’re lucky to have him on the staff now for Powers. He worked with Howard Chaykin in the 80s and he’s one of the greatest letterers ever. He said I’m looking to stretch my legs, and I said wait for the next issue. Their second issue of the book was this issue, and they kicked ass. We’re pretty proud of it, and people were just thrown by it. People just want to be surprised. They want to never know what’s gonna happen. Not, “Here’s the murder, here’s the solution, here’s the murder, here’s the solution.” You throw them wrenches, you say, “Hey, look at that.” There is a perverse pleasure in that both the 13th issue of Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man were such a left turn.

Filed in Comics

Brian Bendis: All That and a Bag of Tricks – Part 6

Posted September 30, 2001 By Dave Thomer

DT: OK. Let’s stick with Marvel for a moment. You just started Alias. That’s the first “mature readers” book for Marvel, there was a lot of attention going into that one. What was it that you felt you had to say in that book that you couldn’t say in Powers or one of your self-contained crime stories?

BB: Well, Powers is a homicide detective series. The only thing that’s similar between the two books is that they’re both juxtapositions of the superhero world and the crime world. Sort of a street level look at superheroes. There’s inherent differences, the first one being that Powers is a homicide book, that treats the superheroes almost like a VH-1 Behind the Music look at celebrities. If the world really had superheroes they’d be like rock stars, they’d have their groupies and scandals and one hit wonders and such. Whereas in Alias what we’re talking about is the big iconic superheroes of the Marvel Universe, like Captain American and Spider-Man. You know, the big winners of the Marvel Universe, the successful superheroes. Then there’s a great many hundreds, if you will, of characters in the Marvel Universe who didn’t succeed, they sort came in and out or were only fashionable for a certain time, like all those really embarrassing 80s and 70s characters. What I wanted to do was tell the story of the queen of those characters. She is the queen of the unsuccessful superhero. What her world would be like. And just because you get the powers, doesn’t mean that you should put on a costume. They’re very different themes, very clearly different themes. One’s about identity, the other’s about celebrity.

I knew that for Alias, that it taking place in the Marvel Universe made it a lot more potent, because there’s a shared knowledge of the Marvel Universe that I think the exploration of makes it very interesting to people who have read comics for a long time. And for people who don’t know, it’s just an interesting take on the genre that hasn’t been accomplished yet. I’m extremely proud of it and I’m extremely happy with the response to it. It was controversial only because . . . I don’t know why, actually, because there’s nothing in that book I haven’t done in my other books as far as language or content goes. But because of where it was being published, it took on kind of a life of its own and the printer refused to print it, and it was just weird to me. But as far as the book coming out and people’s response to it, it was fun. It’s also fun to piss people off, it’s fun when people get angry. At least it’s a reaction. Ambivalence is upsetting. It’s when people go “I’m outraged!” that, you know, well, that’s funny.

And I’m in love with the character. I’m absolutely in love with her. She’s fascinating to me.

DT: What is it about the character that has you that excited?

BB: Because she’s not a loser, and she thinks she is, and she’s gonna figure it out. And that’s gonna be great. You know, you have friends, you wish they’d get their shit together because they have so much to offer. People in your life, you go, “Pull it together man, you can do this,” and they do, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re awesome,” you know what I mean? And she’s the underdog, she just doesn’t know it. She’s full of self-hatred and I am as well and I like to explore that in writing. I’m just a big fan of this kind of writing.

DT: If she’s gonna figure it out, if she’s not always gonna look at herself as being downtrodden —

BB: That’s a funny thing about comics, she’s downtrodden in the first issue and some people think it’s just gonna be a book about a downtrodden person. No, this is where she’s starting.

DT: So there’s somewhere you’re going with the character.

BB: Absolutely.

DT: What are the challenges of writing a character who is a little bit more together, doesn’t have as many obvious internal conflicts?

BB: That’s I guess why I was a Marvel kid when I was younger — see how I brought that around for you? — I liked that Spider-Man had a lot of problems, that’s why I loved him so much. The DC characters, you know Superman didn’t really have any problems. Spider-Man’s got all kinds of problems, even trying to find a way to clean his costume. Stan Lee was kind of a genius about that stuff. This is, I guess, not the next generation, but here we are a couple generations later exploring the same things in as realistic a way as we can get, just like he did. He got as realistic as he could get with Spider-Man with his problems, and in Alias we can keep going that way, and you know, here’s a person with powers and she really wasn’t good at being a superhero, so what can she do, what can she accomplish? What’s her day gonna be like? What’s a day like for someone that’s got superpowers and doesn’t really have a way to use them? It’s interesting

DT: Another thing that seems interesting is that you’re talking about these characters that have problems, but you’re also talking about at some point they’re not gonna solve all of them but they’re gonna solve some of them, they’re gonna make some kind of progress.

BB: It’s just like when you watch your friends, it’s just like . . . I hate to say, it’s just like real life. Some things get resolved quickly, other things take a lot of time, sometimes you resolve it and then fuck it up again. Sometimes you discover things about yourself that you thought were true and you find out they’re false.

DT: Because it seems like a lot of fans focus on the angst as that being the be-all and end-all of a character and character development.

BB: That’s because a lot of comics, they don’t change from issue to issue because people don’t want them to. You want the Fantastic Four to be that way every single issue. But with books like Alias, for me the challenge is to upset that norm, and it’s a challenge as a writer. These gigs that I’ve taken are all immense challenges to me as a person, that’s why I took them. The decision making process here goes along the lines of well, what can I do here that I haven’t seen done, or what can I do here that I have something to say.

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