This Is Not News

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.

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.

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.

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.]

If Larry Young’s only contribution to comics were the Astronauts in Trouble series, he’d be a darned important figure in American comics. Not only does this SF series combine great fun and action with nifty characterization, Young’s decision to publish AiT in the form of original graphic novels (OGNs) rather than single-issue mini-series is a reminder that comics shouldn’t be limited to a single format. But Young is much more than the writer of AiT and the upcoming Planet of the Capes — he runs AiT/Planet Lar, a company that publishes OGNs and trade paperback collections (TPBs) in a number of genres, including the terrific Channel Zero by Brian Wood. He’s a relentless “comics evangelist,” writer of the completed TRUE FACTS series on self-publishing in Savant magazine and the ongoing LOOSE CANNON column at Comic Book Resources. He’s a frequent poster at a number of comics message boards, including his own Delphi Forum and the Warren Ellis Forum. Flat out, he’s one of the smartest guys in comics, a guy who knows what he wants and is willing to put in the work to get it.

As the name “Astronauts in Trouble” implies, Young is also a space fan of the highest order; indeed, he has been known to argue that there is no film or story that can’t be made better by sticking in a guy in a spacesuit.

“Astronauts are modern-day knights-in-shining-armor,” he says. “Putting on their specialized suits to go into such an unforgiving environment . . . I mean, if a reader doesn’t see the inherent romance in space exploration, I can’t help them.”

The first AiT story is Live from the Moon, a real treat for fans of realistic science fiction. It’s the story of the news team that is selected to accompany Ishmael Hayes, North America’s leading businessman, on a self-financed voyage back to the lunar surface to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Armstrong landing. Since the real moon landing was such a pivotal event in Young’s fascination with space, it seems only natural that it would be the subject of his first space story.

“I lived in Dallas, Texas, just down the road from Houston when I was six years old, in 1969,” he says. “When Neil and Buzz first landed on the moon and said, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed’ they weren’t just making one small step, they were walking around on the moon and talking to ME.

“I think the concatenation of effect of being an impressionable lad with a great imagination, doting parents who made sure I had a telescope to look up at the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, and the geographic nearness to Mission Control scarred me for life.”

As I mention in my review of Live from the Moon, Young doesn’t scrimp on characterization despite the abundance of space action, especially in the interactions between anchor Dave Archer, cameraman Heck, and segment producer Annie.

“I needed an audience in to the story, and it made sense that it’d be the on-air talent. In order to short-hand to the reader that Channel Seven is the premier media outlet of the story, I had our other characters archly refer to Dave as the ‘Most Trusted Man in North America.’ He’s the Walter Cronkite of his day… but he’s a shell… a suit… a goofball. If his audience knew him as Heck and Annie do… they might not be watching Channel Seven…

“I was thinking of the famous triads in literature and in Pop Culture who represent two opposing viewpoints around the guy in the middle. What Leonard Nimoy famously described as ‘The Soliloquy Structure:’ that in Star Trek, if you took Hamlet’s soliloquy and made it Star Trek dialogue, you’d have Mr. Spock saying, ‘To be,’ Doctor McCoy would say, ‘Or NOT to be,’ with Captain Kirk in the middle saying, ‘. . . that is the question.’

“So I made Dave the central figure between the no-nonsense segment producer and the wise-cracking cameraman. If you have three main characters spanning that spectrum of reaction, the story almost writes itself.”

AiT/Planet Lar publishes a lot more than Astronauts in Trouble books, however. Young has put his muscle behind a number of independent creators to establish a line of OGNs and TPBs with a high reputation for quality. The amazingly-well-designed Channel Zero is probably the best-known of these at the moment — if you haven’t read my review of it, please do, and check out Brian Wood’s website while you’re at it. Channel Zero is the story of a near-future where the US, especially New York, have been overrun by censorship, and it stretches the existing boundaries of the comic format by incorporating a number of slogans and visuals into the pages that may be distinct from the main narrative but reinforce the message and feeling of the book.

Wood has also designed a number of covers for AiT publications, helping to craft and display AiT/Planet Lar’s identity as a forward-thinking comics publisher.

“I just like Brian Wood’s design sense,” says Young. “He’s done five of our eleven books, and it’s really quite neat to have that singular vision of an extremely strong artist and designer. He’s my guy I ask first, that’s for sure. If someone else does the book design, it’s because he doesn’t have time that month in his schedule.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Wood and Channel Zero are something of the centerpiece of the publisher’s list of upcoming projects; over the next nine months AiT will release a Channel Zero follow-up, a prequel of storts, and a design book. Next up, in October, is CousCous Express — a story about a turf war between rival New York restaurants that includes some characters from the first book.

But wait, there’s more. Transmetropolitan author Warren Ellis has two projects on tap, a military space adventure called Switchblade Honey and Available Light, a collection of short stories and photographs all written on or taken with a Handspring Visor; AiT has already published a collected edition of Ellis’ COME IN ALONE essays. Young himself will tackle the superhero genre with Planet of the Capes, and several other noted creators will release new TPBs or OGNs — the full lineup is available from the AiT website. It all fits into Young’s vision for the company.

“We publish books that I characterize as science fiction and ‘action-adventure-with-a-twist’ by quality creators on top of their games. When people see a logo that says, ‘An AiT/Planet Lar publication,’ I want them to associate that with a high quality graphic novel or trade paperback.”

He’s off to a great start.

Continued from Part 2

DT: Speaking of the relationship between penciller and inker, I remember in one of the Pounding My Chest columns for Gorilla, you talked about scanning your pencil artwork into a computer and being able to zap it to the other members of the creative team. Does something like that help you say, “hold on a sec, this isn’t quite what I had in mind?”

BK: Definitely – it meant that James (Pascoe) could email me scans of the inks and if there were any areas we didn’t feel happy with I could re-draw them more clearly or he could just re-ink them after we’d talked.

DT: Would you ever consider skipping the middleman and using some kind of electronic tablet?

BK: I do actually use one, but as part of the layout process – I’ve yet to see anyone quite capture the nuances of real pencils and inks – I’m sure it’ll happen though! I use a computer a lot to mess with designs and layouts before the real penciling gets done.

DT: Now that you mention layouts and design, I was wondering if maybe you could take me through the process a little bit — what kind of choices do you make while you’re setting up a page. The example that really struck me was the spread in Empire issue 1 that introduced Xanna. The shot of the daggers almost coming out of the page toward the reader, followed up by the shift in perspective so we see the daggers around Sebirus’ head, was really striking.

BK: Well like most artists I start with a thumbnail drawing of the page – just to workout very simply what I want to tell in each panel and roughly how the design of the page will look. I really like innovative design, but I also feel that the clarity of the storytelling is paramount. I always try to lead the reader through the story in the way I want them to read it. Once the basic layout is done I do very high contrast roughs at printed size of the pages placing all the blacks to make sure the layout is clear and reads as it should . . . in fact two issues of Shadow of the Bat were printed from these – not my choice – but if anyone is interested to see what they look like!

DT: And how do you want the reader to read a spread like that?

BK: Well this would be a lot easier if I could point to the page for you, but I think there’s a kind of ‘s’ design to the first half as your eye follows the knives from Xanna’s hand to flying straight at you (the reader) there’s definite movement. Then a static pose of Sebirus . . . a sudden stop like the knives in the wall around him. The rest of the page is fairly standard left/right movement . . . Sebirus moving away from Xanna implying the lack of real contact between them . . . is that what you had in mind with your question?

DT: Pretty much, yeah. I was just struck when I looked back at it the way you took advantage of the fact that you’d been using Sebirus’ perspective for the introductions, then made the switch to a more third-person perspective.

BK: Well also Xanna was the last of the characters introduced in that segment so the transition had to be made there and it seemed a good way to do it!

DT: So what can we expect from the future of Empire? What kind of special package do you have in mind for the re-release of issues 1 and 2? And will you be sticking with the “new-reader-friendly” concept?

BK: The future of Empire will be full of more surprises! The revelations about Endymion are obviously just beginning, but there’s all sorts of things in the works that I think will continue to surprise the readers. As to the other parts of your question I’m really not sure. I guess we need to sit down with the DC folks and our editor there – Joey Cavalieri – and work that out. I know we talked briefly about a low priced double sized reissue – it would nice to add some extra new things . . . but nothing in it so anyone would feel they have to buy the story twice . . . I guess that’s the tough balance to aim for . . . it’ll take some thought I’m sure . . . so I guess the answer is . . . I don’t know yet!

DT: There’s no time frame on when we might see the rerelease and when new issues would follow?

BK: The plan is to relaunch and then have the following issues come out . . . dare I say it . . . on time and monthly . . . but no decision’s been taken as to when that will be – again we need to sit down with the marketing folks at DC and see what they think would work best. Ideally the reissue would be out a month before the new issues started appearing.

DT: You mentioned that “One day I’ll be happy with my work…. I hope!” Looking back at your career, what stands out as work you can point to and say, “Yeah, that stands up . . . I’m glad my name is on that”?

BK: Hhhmmmm – well most stuff I’m actually proud of . . . it’s just that I can always see area where I would like to improve things. I’m always proud of what I send in – or I wouldn’t send it in. I respect the readers too much for that! I just think that any artist worth his salt should always want to improve . . . my biggest disappointments in any field of art is when I feel like a creator/actor/musician is just coasting instead of putting their whole heart into it. An editor once complained that I cared too much about my work… which I took as a huge compliment . . . and hope never to change. 🙂

DT: Understandably so . . . to rephrase it then . . . what would you consider the highlights of your career so far, or your favorite pieces of work?

BK: If I had to pick a favorite single issue . . . probably the Black Canary issue of Shadow of the Bat. As a run I’m incredibly proud of LEGION as a whole. I’m still very happy with how Batman: Book of the Dead came out. I guess, though, the first two issues of Empire take top spot at the moment – though I think the Dark Knight pages I’ve been working on recently are probably my best ever art wise . . . Bet you wished you’d never asked that question. 🙂

DT: Not at all. Looking to the present and future once again — when you look at the comics industry these days, what do you see? Who’s doing good work? And how do you think we can get that good work in more people’s hands?

BK: If I knew the answer to that last part . . .

DT: It is the 64 thousand dollar question of the moment, isn’t it?

BK: Without question!

DT: Which seems like a shame . . . there seems to be so much good work out there right now, and you’d think that that would be enough.

BK: Trouble is there is also a lot which isn’t so good and if you’re not already a comic reader it must be a bewildering choice to make to take that first leap into the field . . . am I mixing metaphors now?

DT: Perhaps, but what’s a metaphor good for if not for mixing?

BK: As to who’s doing good work – so many folks I’d be shy of answering that – I am on record as being a devoted Kevin Nowlan fan!

DT: He’s always someone whose work I feel like I should have read more of.

BK: Kevin is definitely an artist’s artist I think. I’m also huge fan of all my friends . . . a list of whom would be far too long to give now . . . and I’d probably get myself in trouble by forgetting someone! 🙂