This Is Not News

DT: There was a lot of secrecy around it, do you think that that created an expectation that was harder to fulfill?

BB: My secrecy came from the single idea that when I was a kid, and Elektra died in Daredevil — I don’t know how far back you go with comics, but if there was like a surprise big moment in comics, I didn’t know about it, I didn’t have the Internet, I didn’t have a catalogue, a Previews catalogue, telling me what the book was gonna be about. I just bought them off the stands, and when Elektra died in Daredevil, I was stunned. It shocked the crap out of me. And that is totally gone from comics, because everyone has to know everything before it comes out. Same thing with movies, if you pay attention you’ll know every single thing that happens in the Spider-Man movie, if you go online and look, because it’s all there. No one will let you have your moment. And I wanted to test the readers and folks online, some of whom get their books before other people do, and I said, “Can you control yourself and not ruin the comic?” ‘Cause it’s not news . . . you know, all these comic book news sites . . . it’s not news. You’re just ruining the book for people. I would like everyone to read it and be surprised, and if they even knew the subject matter of the book, it’s over, ’cause it’s only about one thing.

So I wanted as many people as possible to have the “Get out of here!” experience that my employer did at Marvel. They were all jazzed up about it, and I said, that’s the feeling I want people to have when they read it. Marvel totally got behind me, and we said, “Look, we gave you a good year of comics, so trust us on this one. Just buy it blindfolded, buy it blindfolded, and I will personally refund your money if you don’t like it.” (laughs) And you know, it was a blast. It was a lot of fun, ’cause it was another one of those things where, you know, the Ultimate books are supposed to break format. Of course you have to create the format before you break it. Now, as the book continues, people have no idea what we’re gonna do. We just introduced Gwen Stacy this week, and they have no idea where we’re gonna go with it, they have no idea what we’re gonna do with Doc Ock. It’s all up in the air now, all the rules are thrown out the window, and that’s what I wanted to get with people. I wanted people to pick up the book and go, “I don’t even know what’s gonna happen.”

DT: Cool. I want to talk about some of your other books, but before we do I have one more question about the whole Ultimate project. Is this something where you’re thinking, “I have to keep these books in a state where they’re always gonna be this distilled pure version that anyone can get into at any point,” or are you going to let these characters have changes and things happen to them and let them develop, for want of a better word, a continuity?

BB: They just will. As soon as you get to page four of the first issue you’ve developed a continuity. As soon as you’ve established anything you’ve established a continuity. What the book is supposed to do is stay youthful and reader-friendly, and we have that recap page, which a lot of comics never do. They do their recaps within the confines of thought balloons. We’ve also thrown out a lot of conventions of comic book storytelling. There’s no big thought balloons, there’s no captions that say “Meanwhile . . .” It’s all words and pictures. And starting with issue 14, we changed the font of the lettering. What we did was, the president of Marvel had read that dyslexic kids can’t read all caps, and the question is why are comics all caps? And everyone goes “‘Cause that’s the way they are,” and that’s not a good reason. So we’ve created this new font that’s different than other books, I think all the Ultimate books will have this font, and it’s more legible . . .it’s more what people are used to seeing, you know, capitalization and normal punctuation.

DT: So you’re not thinking that someone’s gonna have to do something like this again in ten or twenty years?

BB: If I keep this job for ten or twenty years, and that’s the worst problem I have . . . you know what I mean? My job is every month to tell a really interesting story, and that’s it. Under the confines of the Ultimate it’s to be readily available to a younger audience and just be interesting to people, you know? Not talk down to people and just be interesting. That’s what we’re doing, me and Mark Millar who does Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates, we work together on creating this world.

DT: Speaking of Ultimate Spider-Man, that’s a good chance to segue into that. You were talking about the Marvel purists not wanting anything changed or having their set expectations. That’s an interesting thing about the whole Ultimate project, ’cause one of the stated things, in a lot of the marketing, was to strip the characters down to their essence, and strip away the barnacles or whatever you want to call it. That’s gotta be a challenging thing to do, to figure out, “What is the essence of any of these characters to begin with, and how do I get a whole readership to agree with what I think is the essence?” Was that a challenge?

BB: Well that’s true and there’s a leap of faith there as far as that goes. When the first issue came out, it was a big, “Pheew!” Because if you’re gonna buy this, you’re gonna buy the series, right? It’s 40 pages, there’s no costume, obviously we’re gonna take our time telling the story. Because other than the way comics were done in the 60s, audiences are a little more sophisticated now, and you have to spend time with the characters to make us care for them. You can’t just go into the fight scenes and have a blast. That’s true with anything, you know? People expect a lot now, they don’t want to be talked down to. And also there’s that shared experience of Spider-Man that we’ve all grown up on, and an interpretation should done lovingly, it shouldn’t be done rushed. I think people saw right away that I don’t think I’m smarter than Stan Lee and I don’t think that Spider-Man was broken at all. There’s nothing wrong with it. But just like Shakespeare, it can be taken into a new context, and all of the themes remain true, and all of the characterization and the moral humanity remain true. I really do hold it up to Shakespeare. If you do this again in twenty years, it’ll still work, because the theme of the story totally works.

DT: That was an interesting thing, that a story that was originally told in one issue, you took seven issues. And that wasn’t wasted space, it was a sign of how comics have changed.

BB: Plus, you know, if you know the story of how Spider-Man was created, he had 11 pages, so he told the story in 11 pages. You know, I bet if he had a hundred pages, he would have done a hundred pages. That’s what he had, he had 11 pages. Everyone goes, “oh look.” That’s always the negative look at it, they go, “Hey, Stan Lee did this in 11 pages!” I don’t know, it’s just a funny thing to say. I could tell it on one page — would that make me a genius?

DT: Another thing with Ultimate Spider-Man, you spent a lot of time pushing issue 13 —

BB: Yeah, and I think I did so expertly, thank you, by the way.

DT: Absolutely. There was certainly a lot of attention and expectation going into that and trying to figure out exactly what would be going on. What was it that made you decide that that story should be treated in that way?

BB: Six issues in I knew that clearly . . . the characters take over the story. Starting from the base of what Stan Lee created, they become their own entities, and they write the stories themselves. They take over. Clearly, in the modern world, having a secret identity is not as easy as it was in the 60s. We live in an all permeating, all seeing society of super information, and I can’t imagine how you’d have a secret identity, and also I can’t imagine how you’d hold it back from people you care about. That was always one of the things . . . that was like a plot thing that they tried that they sort of buried themselves into, that became like a staple of comics without anyone thinking, “OK, what would happen if he did tell his girlfriend?” He’s got one friend in the world is this girl, he’s fifteen years old. He’s fifteen, he’s got one friend, it’s her, he’s gonna hurt her feelings and alienate her? Or is he gonna go, “I have to tell you this.” I remember when I was fifteen, my best friend was my girlfriend, or was the girl who became my girlfriend. Right? And there’s nothing . . . I told her stuff I didn’t even tell my friends, my guy friends. My first person I really expressed my secrets and desires to, and I do see myself as Peter Parker when I was fifteen, right? And I go, if I were fifteen, I would have told her.

I told this to Joe [Quesada] and Bill [Jemas] who run Marvel, about six issues into the story, I said, I have to build up to it, but you tell her. And we debated it back and forth, and they let me go for it, and I expressed to them, if we’re exploring modern society, the secret identity thing is what’s different now . . . . there’s two things that we’re not going to be able to do that they were able to do in the older Spider-Man. One is that a lot of the Marvel characters were created from nuclear paranoia, they were all radioactive spiders and gamma bombs and cosmic rays. And that’s not going to be the overall origin, the radioactive whatever is not going to be how we accomplish things, they have to be more about our society, because we don’t live with nuclear paranoia. But we do live with other things in our lives and we’re going to explore them. And within the confines of that, is the fact that he’s fifteen and this is what I thought he would do, and the characters wrote it themselves. Nobody who read it said, “He’d never do that!” It was all, “Oh, I can’t believe . . . of course he would do that!” It was a lot of fun to write, and it was also a lot of fun to write a one scene comic. Which I know was a little harder for some of the purists, but there was something really gratifying about being able to put out a comic that was all taking place in the bedroom and was all just a conversation and to see if I could hold someone’s interest for the whole time.

DT: Are there any of your books that you find are more successful at reaching out to that first time comics reader or that first time independent comics reader?

BB: A lot of them are crime genre material that are complete works. Torso is a very successful graphic novel, it wasn’t a successful miniseries, it was just doing enough to make the rest of them, you know? And we sold it to movies and we’ve done all right off it. But as a series it wasn’t big, but we’re already close to our third printing of the trade in like under a year, which is amazing. So that’s done very well, Jinx is in like its fifth printing. It’s 450 pages, it’s a big mammoth book, you drop your dollars and you get a whole big epic read and people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. It depends on what people’s tastes are, if they like crime ficiton they’re gonna dig it. I have another book [Fire] that’s a spy thriller that is my earliest work that I have out, that I’m still proud of, it’s a spy thriller and I can’t believe how well that does. And it’s a lower price, a smaller cover price because it’s a smaller graphic novel, but it constantly sells and it’s bizarre to me. I wish I knew why, because I’d do it again.

DT: Do you find that some first-time readers have trouble following your work, because they might not be up on the vocabulary or storytelling techniques of comics?

BB: I’ve been to the movies where people have trouble figuring out what the plot of American Pie is, so you try not to worry about too much what people will or will not get. I’ve not had anyone e-mail me and go, “What happened?” And many, many people read all of my things before anyone sees them in the public, because I’m very aware that I’m communicating to a large number of people. Even independent filmmakers go through a screening process where they show the movie to people and take notes and see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust. I’m not some genius that thinks everything I do is pure gold and everyone will love me. I remember Scorcese saying he shows his movies to a group of friends, a trusted group of friends, and he asks them questions. If there’s a scene and everyone got something different out of the scene, then the scene isn’t working. It doesn’t matter what he thinks it said, it doesn’t say it, because the people didn’t get it. So he’ll go back and he’ll do something to the scene. That’s exactly it, and the same thing with the comics.

I have my trusted group of advisors, and at Marvel you have your editors that are very in tune with what you’re trying to accomplish and the artists that you work with, and everyone comes together and discusses where we’re going, what we’re doing, and is it working. And I absolutely can’t stand myself, so I’m very happy to hear if things aren’t working if I can go back and hack the script to death. I’m really kind of good at that, and that’s why when the book comes out, you can’t control everything about a person’s reading experience, people have their tastes and people have what’s going on in their lives or what situation they’re reading the book in. But I’m pretty much sure that the work will stand up for itself and anything that you ask me about it, it’ll be there on the page. I get that even online. Someone will post on my board, you know, “I don’t understand why the cop did this,” and then before I can even answer someone else will have already gotten it, and the guy just missed it. It’s like blinking during the movie. “What happened, I missed it, what’s going on?”

DT: It’s like, you can’t always trying to write for the guy who doesn’t get anything —

BB: I personally can’t stand when I’m being talked down to or not challenged. I like being in the hands of someone, they know what they’re doing, they’ve got something to say, they’re in control, and they’re not pandering to me. I hate being pandered to, I can’t stand it. So why would I do that to people? I’d rather overshoot, and miss, than shoot underhanded, you know what I mean? I don’t have any respect for creators that pander. That’s why with Ultimate Spider-Man, I was biting my lip . . .it’s a character study more than it’s a superhero book, and that doesn’t necessarily always mean, you know, “Top 10 book.” So I’m biting a hole in my lip, going, “Oh, I hope this works!” I was proud of it, and everyone who read it was digging it, but if someone’s used to a certain kind of superhero comic and you’re handing them something else, you know, they get very angry. “Where . . . what happened to the fight scene? Where’s the costume, you son of a bitch?” And you do get that, there are Marvel purists who want what they want and don’t want you to screw around with their icons. But you know, 99% of the people are happy to be taken for a ride. In comics, just like filmgoers or people who buy CDs or when you’re watching TV, people just want to be told a story. “Here’s my couple bucks, entertain me for twenty minutes, because you know what, I had a really crappy day at work, so just tell me a story, man, just let me forget for a minute.” And I take that job pretty seriously.

DT: What’s the process of figuring out what’s the right style for a given project?

BB: You know, you see it in your head and you just try to accomplish it with your hands. That’s true with every craft or art. You see it very clearly in your head, and with a lot of the books of mine that have seen print, I saw them very clearly and I try to accomplish that, and if I can’t accomplish it, you’re not gonna see it.

DT: You working on anything in your head now? Trying to figure out any new styles?

BB: Yeah, the next thing that I draw is gonna be a semi-autobiographical, almost a romantic comedy that’s not very funny or romantic, and it’ll be something I draw in a style that’s somewhere in between the two, that’s the best I can come up with. But we’ll see where I go with it, and that’s what I’m working on now. And when the style is ready, that’s when I’ll put it out. I’m not in any hurry.

DT: So you’re still working on the drawing, even though right now you’re busy with all your writing assignments?

BB: Oh, I like to draw. It’s very clear that as soon as I stopped drawing I became very successful, but I’m gonna ignore that and continue to draw. Also, as soon as I stopped drawing, everyone’s like, “Oh, why don’t you draw?” Oh yeah, now, sure. Eight years, no one was buying the damn things. Now I have a lot more people have discovered my work through my Marvel work and a bunch of other stuff, so . . . but even with my collaborations, it’s vibrant to me to work with people who do things I can’t physically do. Like with Mike Oeming, when I work on Powers, I couldn’t do that style and it needs to be in that style. It has to be that way and that’s the way I saw it. And what he accomplished and what he accomplishes every month on that book is so great for me, and I write differently for him. You know, my bag of tricks gets put away. I’m very addicted to the collaboration, to working with artists with different styles, you know, like working with [Mark] Bagley on Spider-Man or David Mack on Daredevil and the laundry list of artists — both heroes and peers — that I work with on Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. Every month I have to concoct a writing style that matches what that person does, which forces me to come up with a new bag of tricks or alter my bag of tricks for that artist. I chose that job and created that job specifically because I’m addicted to the collaboration.

DT: You mentioned people getting exposed to your earlier work and the stuff that you’ve drawn. Is that something that people have come up to you a lot and said, you know, like “I started reading Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil, and now I’ve read Torso?”

BB: Absolutely. It started when I was working at Todd McFarlane’s company, doing a book called Sam and Twitch. I was given the job because of the strength of my graphic novels that Todd had read. Within that book people started to discover that there was other crime fiction that I did, so they started to pick that up. Then when Powers started, because that’s a color series . . . there are some people that, they need a lot of push to pick up black and white. There’s a lot of people that don’t understand what black and white comics are, or why they’re in black and white. Some people think they’re unfinished, which is kind of funny. So you’ve really gotta sort of win their trust over, to get them to buy them. And that’s happened to me a lot over the last couple of years, with people that never bought a black and white comic, because of Spider-Man or Daredevil, they’re picking it up, you know, or they go, “How bad can it be, I love Spider-Man, right?” If there’s anything I’m proud of, there’s a couple of things I’m pretty proud of over the last couple of years, but . . . there’s always that one book that’s the bridge book for people that discover comics in a new way. Like, they only bought superheroes and then they take a plunge one day and buy something that’s not superheroes and then that whole world opens for them, and I remember what those books were for me when I was a kid, and I’m very happy to have been that book for a few people. That makes me feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. Or they see the artwork in Marvel Team-Up by an artist that I yanked out of indy comics for a month to do a fun Marvel book with me, and they’re like, “Oh I didn’t know you could draw a Marvel character that way,” and then they go look for that person’s work, and that’s kind of exciting. A lot of my friends get very angry, they’re like, “Why won’t people buy black and white, why won’t people blah blah blah?” I go, “All right, we’ll go to them. I’m gonna get ’em!” One way or another. So you know, it’s kind of cool, because I’ve done all this work for eight years that’s still work I’m proud of, it’s out, it’s ready, it’s printed. And you know . . . they find it now, hey, it’s free money for me.

If you’ve been reading the Comics Forums, you know how much we love Brian Michael Bendis. He currently writes Powers for Image Comics and Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Alias and Daredevil for Marvel Comics. He’s also written and drawn a number of excellent graphic novels, including the crime fiction books Goldfish and Jinx and the true-crime story Torso (which details Eliot Ness’s efforts to track down a serial killer in Cleveland). He recounted his adventures in Hollywood working on a film version of Goldfish in the hilarious Fortune & Glory, and recently re-released one of his earliest works, the spy thriller Fire. And he just moved from Cleveland to Portland. In other words, he’s a busy, busy man. But he took some time to talk to us about his career and what excites him about the medium — and since he has plenty to say, I’m gonna shut up and get out of the way. Let the Q and A begin.

DT: How’d you get started? What made you decide you wanted to do comics?

BB: That’s just simply a childhood love of them. They were a form of escapism that I wasn’t getting anywhere else. It was pure and I discovered it as entertainment, and then discovered what the art of the entertainment was. It was one of those expressions that was . . . it’s unlimited what could be done with it. As the information I had about the medium grew, my taste for the medium grew. It’s just a medium that has an immense about of things that it can accomplish. It excited me consistently, throughout my artistic growth.

DT: What first got you to look at the art of the medium?

BB: I was a Marvel kid when I was growing up. There’s an imagination and a morality that’s just . . . it’s like a comics page has an unlimited special effects budget. There’s no cap on what can be accomplished on the page other than your imagination, and that’s an amazing thing.

DT: Were you doing anything before you got into comics?

BB: I was doing comics ever since I was a kid. I broke into the business eight years ago while I was still in college. I was lucky enough to be able to get my books published but they weren’t enough to sustain any kind of life. So, you know, I took jobs. And I made a conscious decision that I will write and I will draw for a living in whatever medium I could get into. So I did greeting cards and caricatures and worked at newspapers and magazines. And over the last couple years, I’m pretty much just doing comics, and, you know, TV and movie stuff. But up until just a couple years ago, it was anything I could do to support myself and at the same time create my comics. ‘Cause you know, I never actually thought I’d have a hit comic, I just wanted to put out comics.

DT: A big element of a lot of the comics you’ve written and drawn has been the xerography, the design work, the photographic elements. When did you first start thinking that this was something you could do?

BB: Comics are a bastard medium, which means there’s no right way to make a comic. Rock and roll is a bastard medium where there’s no thing about rock and roll that is itself. It’s a crossgeneration of a bunch of different things, right? And it always succeeds when it looks outside itself, like when someone brings country or jazz or opera into rock and roll, it thrives. And comics are the same way. And comics always thrive as a medium of self expression when someone goes outside of comics and looks at something and brings it in. For me, it’s many things, but the thing you’re talking about that I capture most is the cinematography of film noir, the harsh black and white gritty look of film noir that is a language unto itself and it drives me crazy and I love it and I can’t get enough of it and I try to express that inside the comic book page, and I use the xerography and the photography which I have a great fondness for. And again, for independent comics guys, a lot of the times it’s creating a comic book that you would buy for no other reason than that you would have it. And if anyone else buys it, then that’s cool, but I would like to see a book with a lot of xerography and photography. That would be cool, and I’d like to see that expressed, so I tried it.

DT: Were there people who said, “Hey, you can’t do this? It’s a comic, it has to be drawn?”

BB: There’s always people that say that, and it usually means I try harder to do it. Even writing Spider-Man, someone says “You can’t have him not in the costume for five issues,” I’m like “Oh yeah? Bet you can!” There’s no rules, that’s the thing. Even like last night, you see people arguing if West Wing was really drama or not, I’m like, “Who cares? It was an expression, man! Let him say whatever he wants!” We’re putting rules on art, it drives me crazy. Especially comics. You’re gonna start putting rules on that? It’s silly. Every good comic that was ever made was a rule-breaking comic. Listen, you can overdo it, and you can fall on your ass, right? But I’d rather fall on my ass by overdoing it than by not trying anything. That’s the way I see it.

DT: The film noir look that’s in your crime comics, that wasn’t as heavy an influence in stuff like Fortune and Glory. How’d you develop that approach?

BB: I try to come up with a new bag of tricks for every project I do. I have certain things I try to do that I’m constantly exploring. I knew for Fortune and Glory, there was another way to present the material, and that the film noirish look at the world would have created a tone unlike what I wanted to achieve. So even with the stuff I’m doing for Marvel, my tastes for what I want to accomplish as a writer and as a storyteller are varied, so I will jump from very dark serial killer film noir to autobiographical humor to teenage drama to all kinds of stuff.

DT: Do you think there’s one style or approach that feels more natural to you at this point, or do they all feel like things you’re equally comfortable with?

BB: Writing is the most natural thing for me, and I don’t why that is, but it is. For drawing, I think my most natural drawing style is the Fortune and Glory drawing style. That’s what I draw without any bag of tricks or photo reference or anything like that. But I try to strengthen that, not, “Oh, this is what I do the easiest, that’ll be it for me.” So you try as an artist to do new things and accomplish new things. Like, for Torso, that drawing style, that has a lot of xerography and computer work, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done by far. Nothing about that is my natural style, but that’s the way I felt that book should look, or as close as I could get without going over. [Check out art samples from Torso, and some free web comics in the same autobiographical humor style of Fortune and Glory.]