Jason Aaron It All Out II

Welcome to Part II PCS’s interview with writer, Jason Aaron. Since part I, Aaron announced three new projects: a three-issue Secret Invasion tie-in on Black Panther, a two-issue arc on Hellblazer, and a Joker’s Asylum: Penguin one-shot. Meanwhile, his creator-owned Vertigo series, Scalped received an Eisner nomination for Best New Series. This is Jason’s second Eisner nomination, his first for The Other Side last year. We’ll briefly touch on these new projects and get down beneath the marrow of both Scalped and The Other Side.

What was your childhood ritual in getting comics growing up in Jasper and Columbiana, Alabama? Was there a comics community there?

I’ve been hoarding comics since I was barely old enough to read, but I didn’t see a full-fledged comic book shop until I was probably 16 or so. Up until then, I got my fix from convenience stores, drug stores and grocery stores. These days, I love my LCS, but part of me still misses the old days. I certainly wish comics were more readily available to the average joe, like they used to be.

You’re clearly influenced by genre comics and films of the 1970’s such as westerns, exploitation films, horror films, what was it about these genres that stuck with you early on and eventually to today?

Everything, really. The rawness. The wild imagination. The gutsy storytelling. The bravado. From the late 60s on through the 70s was just such an amazing time for filmmaking, especially for genre films. And I think you can see a lot of that influence in my work. There’s a bit of a Spaghetti Western in SCALPED, a bit of Italian horror in THE OTHER SIDE, an ode to grindhouse revenge flicks in my current WOLVERINE arc and a heaping helping of schlocky exploitation in GHOST RIDER.

Did you grow up on a healthy diet of these or was this the inevitable result of working at a video store?

I was mainly into sci-fi and kung fu films when I was a kid, and I lived in a really small Southern town, so my access to movies was pretty limited. But I grew up loving movies and got my first job at a video store when I went off to college. Between that and the film history classes I took, my eyes were opened to a lot of exciting work.

Do you have a bizzare story you’re willing to share from behind the counter.

Hmm, no bizarre stories that I can think of. One of the last day jobs I had before getting into comics was as the video manager at a store in Kansas City, and if I do say so myself, I was a pretty good at it. We always had a great selection of Criterion DVDs and cult classics on hand.

On the dusty landscape of the South Dakota Prairie Rose Reservation lies the setting for Aaron’s Scalped. Dashiell Bad Horse is a son of the reservation who has come back working undercover as a cop for Red Crow, the Rez’s crime boss who is determined to open his new Crazy Horse casino. Heavy on conflicts and scarred characters, Scalped is harsh and bleak, but continues to unfold beautifully each month. It is one of the surest bets in comics; so sure that Aaron has issued an open refund to anyone who isn’t satisfied with their $10 spent on the first Scalped trade, Indian Country.

How many refund requests have you had for Indian Country so far? How long do you plan on having that open offer out there?

No refund requests yet, and I’ve had the offer out there since the end of last year. I have heard from lots of people who’ve picked up the book because of the guarantee, which is great. And I’ll keep the guarantee going as long as the book is still coming out, I suppose.

What excites me about Scalped month-to-month is that it gives the Native American Indian another voice in comics. It by no means speaks for every Native American Indian, nor should it, but seriously why should the Italian mob, the Yakuza, and British capers get all of the cool crime stories?

For real. I think we’ve created a great setting for a crime story, but no, of course we’re not trying to say that all reservations are like this and all Native Americans are like Red Crow. I’m not working on a documentary here.

Our protagonist, Dashiell is up against the odds from all directions. He seems to be symbolize some of the Native Americans struggles or any first generation immigrant in this country, fighting for survival, respect, maintaining tradition or just not be forgotten.

He’s also representative of the loss of identity and the disintegration of Native culture among the younger generations.

He’s a gold mine as far as complex characters go, talk about him as your lead and does has he begun to occupy more of your thoughts as you move him forward through the series?

SCALPED was always intended to be Dash’s story, and he will probably have the most dynamic character arc once it’s all said and done, but I’m really having a lot of fun weaving all these other characters’ lives together, so the series has felt more and more like an ensemble piece as we’ve gone along. There’s an arc coming up later this year that will hardly feature Dash at all, but the glimpses we do get of him will still be very important.

Great series are defined by their villains, and Red Crow is an ominous one. It’s so easy to be against him when we meet him. But that’s a trap, as the series unfolds, Red Crow finds himself cornered by his own faults, but sometimes it’s not without good intentions.

Red Crow is probably my favorite character to write, and I think it only makes him a stronger villain to make him more of a tragic figure. When I look at the world, I don’t see things in black and white, in pure good or pure evil. I see everything in shades of gray. And that’s why I try to create characters that are complicated and morally ambiguous and more challenging than straight-forward heroes or villains. I love those kinds of characters.

If it doesn’t reveal too much of the book, is Red Crow the biggest villain you have planned for the series?

He will remain the book’s main villain for the duration, I suppose. But if you mean, is he the most brutal and frightening character we’ll meet, then the answer is no. Just check out Mr. Brass and the members of the Hmong street gang we’ve already introduced.

I can say I’m not surprised that Scalped would have its critics, but judging Scalped even after Indian Country would be premature given the last year of stories. It’s always good for people to take a chance on something you’ve written, but it seems some people read the book looking to be offended and are justified to label it something it’s not.

I don’t write something hoping to please everyone. That way lies madness. And people have the right to interpret the series however they like. But if they don’t like it, I’m not going to spend my time trying to justify it to them. I prefer to let the work speak for itself.

Will the Crazy Horse be a silent character like say, stories set in Vegas or Atlantic City? Do you find it ironic how so much hope is weighed onto something that has a tendency to bring more negative effects than positive?

The casino will become more important over the course of the series, and we’ll also be exploring more aspects of the Indian Gaming industry, which is a fascinating subject. It’s become a gigantic industry and in some states, it’s made tribal members incredibly rich. In other states, like the ones with the highest numbers of Natives, it usually hasn’t made much of an impact. It’s also caused several different tribes to re-examine their basis for membership and thus the very definition of what it means to be Native American.

You choose to write a fictional story about an actual Lakota tribe, in this case, the Prarie Rose in South Dakota. Why the decision to pick a real tribe instead of coming up with something fictitious?

Prairie Rose is a fictional reservation, but one that’s obviously inspired by the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota. It made sense to create a fictional rez, but it just seemed ridiculous to make up a tribe.

Do you get random stories from fans from that reservation who want to be characters?

I get emails from a lot of Native fans of the series, yeah. And the Native rapper Night Shield, who lives in South Dakota, is a big fan of SCALPED and has mentioned before he’d like to be killed off in the series at some point. I did use his slogan “Rez’d Out and Famous” in issue #10 of SCALPED.

Scalped races to the fifth issue and then leaves readers breathless for over half a year to see Daishell’s reaction. Could you talk about that stretch in the series (#’s 6-13) considering the potential explosive story that rolls into Dead Mothers?

I did leave that cliffhanger just hanging out there for a good long while before coming back to it, but I figured that if people didn’t like these characters then they weren’t going to like the book, so I thought it made sense to do a big arc that was very much character driven. And those are the issues that fans seemed to have responded to the most.

Sometimes writers feel the need to have each page filled with words but this is sequential art as well. There’s such power and emotion in the pages of Scalped (the end of issue #13 comes to mind) that don’t contain any script-–some of my favorite moments in the series–-are those some of your favorites as well and do you give R.M Guerra a description and just turn him loose or do you really put a much more detailed?

Yeah, those are actually some of my favorite moments too. For some reason, I really enjoy being able to delete lines of dialogue from the script and just have silent images. And Guera’s art is so strong and so emotional that he can pull that off.

Scalped has that breath of a Crime/Western hybrid which has gotten a bit of a revival in popular culture, being that this is Pop Culture Shock, what are some of the more obscure (to a general audience) pop culture references that have influenced your work?

I don’t know how obscure any of my references are, but the 1990 crime film STATE OF GRACE was one of the most important, initial inspirations for SCALPED. That and the 80s TV series “Crime Story.” I’m also a huge fan of William Friedkin’s TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. That’s maybe my favorite crime film of all time, next to THE GODFATHER PART II. In terms of Westerns, my favorites are John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS, UNFORGIVEN and any of the Sergio Leone westerns, in particular FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE. I also love HOMBRE and VALDEZ IS COMING, both the film versions and the book’s by Elmore Leonard. And Robert Altman’s MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is a great film as well.

Dashiell plays an undercover cop so he’s armed with a pistol and a baton. It would be trite if he wielded an axe or knife, so explain his weapon of choice–the sweet and swift nunchucks:

There’s a little bit of BILLY JACK in Dash, obviously, so I wanted to make him skilled in the martial arts, and maybe it’s the 13 year old inside me, but to me nunchucks still exude coolness. If you don’t believe me, just go watch ENTER THE DRAGON and then we’ll talk.

Aaron broke onto the scene with his five-issue Vertigo mini-series, The Other Side drawn by Cameron Stewart. It was written with the spirit of Aaron’s cousin, author, Gustov Hasford (a marine and combat correspondent during the Vietnam War) looking over his shoulder. The Other Side is a powerful and gripping tale of the Vietnam War from the perspective of soldiers, one American the other Vietnamese. It re-opened wounds that have never healed and served as a haunting reminder of that tragic war and earned Aaron and Stewart an Eisner Nomination for Best Limited Series.

Emotions come out in The Other Side reading experience: confusion, anger, helplessness. What kind of emotions went through you as you conjured up this story?

Desperation. Self-doubt. Exaltation. The first issue of THE OTHER SIDE was the first full comic script I’d ever written, and the story as a whole was the culmination of years of my life. Years spent researching the war and the life of my cousin and Vietnam vet, Gustav Hasford. Years spent writing and re-writing it. Years spent pitching it all over town and having it rejected before finally getting it through the door at Vertigo.

Both main characters were at war with personal demons. It was a destiny, an almost rites of passage or coming of age for Vo Dai, whereas Everette was haunted by demons and hallucinations (which provided some much needed tension release) from the minute he was drafted. Did you have to get in a different mindset to write Private Everette vs. Vo Dai?

A little bit. I listened to different music. Read different books.

To me, war stories told from different vantage points are much more interesting. You gave such care for both sides, almost page for page, both Everette and Vo Dai were on an equal playing field. Could you breakdown the creative process you did for this story?

It all played out pretty much exactly the way I’d outlined it. I started out with the idea of the heroic hell descent, the same sort of story we’ve seen in everything from BEOWULF to APOCALYPSE NOW, and just expanded that to where we had two “heroes,” each undertaking their own quest, and I knew that at the end of those quests, one character would have to kill the other. That’s the mission. That’s the boon that the hero wins. But of course, the whole thing really throws into question the very idea of the hero. Who’s ultimately the hero of THE OTHER SIDE? It’s hard to say.

Did you ever come to a point where you had to make a decision on who was going to live? or did you always know it would be Everette?

We’re talking about a war where the Vietnamese suffered far more casualties than the U.S., but still ultimately prevailed. So I knew that at the end of THE OTHER SIDE, Vo Dai would have to die, but in death still gain some sort of victory. It seemed the only way the story could possibly end.

How different would the book had been had it gone the other way?

Very different. I don’t think it would work the other way. Not for me, at least.

Your editor at Vertigo, Will Dennis was apprehensive at first to publish The Other Side telling you, “War stories don’t sell.” (If Garth Ennis couldn’t sell war stories, who could?) but was he right?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t judge my work merely by how it sells. If I did, I’d only be working on WOLVERINE. THE OTHER SIDE didn’t exactly light up the sales chart, but it was nominated for an Eisner Award and it sparked my career. Without THE OTHER SIDE, I wouldn’t be writing SCALPED or WOLVERINE or anything else. So it’s obviously a very important book to me, even if it’s the lowest selling thing I ever do.

Knowing how well it was received once it got into the hands of people, how frustrating is it to write good comics that don’t sell enough copies to compete with superhero comics which sell three times as much or more?

It’s frustrating at times. I think the success of Vertigo in the book market shows that a lot of fans aren’t being serviced by the direct market. There are just so many comic book stores out there that never order anything but Marvel and DC superhero titles and maybe a few licensed books like STAR WARS or whatever. They wouldn’t order SCALPED even if Alan Moore was writing it, let alone little old me. That’s frustrating because it puts a very low ceiling on what you can do in terms of monthly numbers. Thank God for the stores that really love and support books like SCALPED.

On to your new work, John Constantine is one of the great British characters that multiple people want to write, almost like a notch in their belt, like how everyone wants to do their take on Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man, what is it about the Hellblazer opportunity came up, you jumped at it?

It’s the flagship title at Vertigo, and it’s a series that has showcased the most amazing collection of writers, going all the way back to Alan Moore, of course, who created the character. It’s a honor just to be associated with that list.

You are just the second American-born writer to scribe Constantine and the stories seem to reflect that change in the writing chair. Brian Azzarello took John to America, and you’re taking the states to John with American filmmakers. Talk about that approach of writing a character whose stable is England but bringing what you know best to this instead of trying to write him in his more recognized element.

Well, he’s still in his element. There are just a few more American accents around than usual.

What’s your favorite Hellblazer run?

Either Garth Ennis or Azzarello. Both were amazing. Azzarello’s run in particular was a big influence on me at the time, and continues to be really.

Black Panther is a real interesting project for you because it’s in the middle of Secret Invasion. Wakanda vs. Skrulls! And this is the first run at something that really feels like it encompasses large scale Marvel Universe, talk about the Super-Skrull you created and your Secret Invasion arc.

The Super-Skrull boasts the powers of Marvel’s baddest street fighters, including Wolverine, Iron Fist, Bullseye and Luke Cage. And the arc is basically just one big war on the plains of Africa. Man vs. alien, hand-to-hand. Sort of like Braveheart, but with green-skinned shape-changers.

Despite the great Christopher Priest run, and his legacy in the Avengers, why do you think Black Panther has never reached a broader base of readers?

Who knows. I think the average Marvel fan will dig this story though, whether or not they’ve ever read Black Panther before.

What was more exciting to you, getting another Eisner nomination, or writing the bonus back-page column in Criminal?

Writing that piece for Criminal was a big thrill, but getting the Eisner nomination for Scalped was huge. And that’s not just an honor for me, but for everyone who has worked on the series.

If you were a character in Criminal, how would you see yourself?

As being in good hands, since Ed is a helluva writer.

It’s been little over a year now on the comic book circuit, what’s your craziest fan story (convention or otherwise) in the past year.

I did have a guy at a store signing who insisted that I sign a comic I repeatedly told him I had absolutely nothing to do with. And I’ve also signed a laptop and the dashboard of a truck, which is kind of crazy. But all of the fans I’ve met so far have been really cool. And hell, it still seems to me like it was just the other day that I was the one standing in line to get somebody’s autograph, not the other way around.

I would like to thank Jason on behalf of PCS for his time and generosity. If you want to meet Jason visit http://jasoneaaron.blogspot.com/ for dates and locations so he can sign your dashboard too, and but be sure to add Scalped and Ghost Rider to your monthly pulls and check the list below to complete your Jason Aaron checklist of current and upcoming works.

DC Comics The Joker’s Asylum: Penguin One Shot (July 2009)

Marvel Comics Black Panther #39-41 (July-September 2008)
Ghost Rider #20-Current (Out Now!)
Wolverine #56, 62-65 (Out Now!)
X-Force Special #1 (June 11, 2008)

Top Cow Ripclaw: Pilot Season One-Shot (Out Now!)

Vertigo Hellblazer #245-246 (June-July 2008)
Scalped Vol. 1 Indian Country (Out Now, with free preview of #1!)
Scalped Vol. 2 Casino Boogie (Out Now!)
Scalped Vol. 3 Dead Mothers (Sept 2008)
The Other Side (Out Now!)

Wildstorm Friday the 13th: How I Spent My Summer Vacation #1-2 (Out Now!)