ON EXTRACT’S STORY AND CHARACTERS

While so many other comedies tend to shoot for these big company stories, you tend to reside in settings with small town folks as the main characters (King of the Hill, Office Space and now Extract) what draws you to these small town stories?

Mike Judge: I would say my stuff resides in suburbs of big towns also, or small towns that are near big towns. I guess that’s because I’ve mostly lived in places like that — Albuquerque NM, Richardson TX, etc. I think that a lot of writers in film and TV in the past have tended to come from NY or big east-coast cities, and there have also been great stuff written about really small hick towns, and so I feel like I can maybe bring a different perspective on things with a suburban setting.

Did you always have Jason Bateman in mind for the lead role?

MJ: I started writing this a long time ago – I think it was shortly after Office Space came out. I originally wasn’t thinking of any actor in particular, just writing it. Jason had done King of the Hill and I always liked him, but when I saw him in Arrested Development, I thought he would be perfect for this, and when I rewrote it and finished it, I was imagining him as the lead. It’s a similar character to what he did in AD, but I think Joel is a little less slick or something. Jason was the first actor I gave the script to and he said he liked it and wanted to do it, so it was him from the get go.

Even with all of the pressures Joel faces at home and at work what is it that makes him a successful boss?

MJ: I think what ultimately makes Joel a successful boss is that he genuinely likes making extract. For me, I enjoy directing movies, making animated TV shows, and in order to do that, you sometimes have to tell people to do things they don’t want to do, or make choices that people don’t agree with. And I really don’t enjoy telling people to do things they don’t want to do, but it goes with the territory. I think there are some bosses out there – and these would be bad bosses in my opinion – that are in it because they actually get off on telling people to do things they don’t want to do; they get some kind of weird pleasure out of making people do things for the sake of making them do things. They get off on the power of it all or something. I think Joel really likes making extract and seeing it get out there in stores and restaurants, and that informs all the decisions he makes, so it’s always coming from the right place. I think that’s how to be a good boss.

From the special features Jason and Ben talk about their long dialogue. How much did you let them improv or is it all from the page?

MJ: I like to let the actors feel like they can be loose with the script up to a point because I want them to feel comfortable and when they really get the character and what’s happening in the scene, then the improv wouldn’t drift too far anyway. I’m not really precious about my writing, but I usually find that in the editing room we end up pretty close to what was on the page. I think if you write good dialogue, it sounds like people spontaneously talking, so audiences think it’s improvised, which is a good thing I think. I would say in this movie, the most improv that would up in the movie came from Ben Affleck. He threw some stuff in there that I just loved and it wasn’t in the script.

Did Ben Afleck find it liberating to play a quirky supporting player for a change? He was great in the film–

MJ: You would have to ask him if he found it liberating, but it sure seemed like he did. I think he had a lot of fun doing it, and it was a blast for me to work with him on it. I really liked what he did. I had never met him before this and when I heard he wanted to do it, I was surprised at first – pleasantly so – and then when I met with him, he started telling me about a guy he knew growing up in Boston and he started imitating him and I just thought it was great. We did a read through of the script early on and I just loved watching him and Jason do these scenes and play off each other.

Was there instant chemistry when the actors began working together or did it take some time for them to gel?

MJ: For the most part it was instant. And most of them had already worked together or knew each other, so it all gelled nicely.

Was it your idea to cast rocker Gene Simmons as bench lawyer Joe Adler?

MJ: Yeah, I had originally described the character as looking like Gene Simmons with a pony tail and a suit and tie. I was kind of naive though, in that I thought no one would recognize him without the Kiss makeup on. I didn’t realize how huge the reality show was. The only time I had ever seen him without the makeup was on Politically Incorrect about 9 years ago and thought he would be great playing an agent or high-powered attorney.

One of the enjoyable performances was from Clifton Collins Jr. as Step. He’s been incredibly diverse this year, can you talk a little about him as an actor and what he brought to the film?

MJ: I love Clifton and have wanted to work with him for a while. I just never had a part that was right for him. I actually hadn’t thought of him for this part either. He usually plays a chicano gangster or a serial killer, so I hadn’t thought of him, but then he walked into the room with a trucker hat on, and suddenly he went from looking like a chicano gangster to Festus from Gunsmoke. I love him as a redneck. He also makes a great Romulan. He’s a true chameleon. And now he’s a big award-winning country music video director also, with Zack Brown Band.

Watching the special features on “Extract”, Mila Kunis mentioned that she may have been based on an actual person you know but curious, were the characters based off people you actually knew. And if so, how would you personally deal with a person so intrusive like Nathan?

MJ: No one is based specifically on one person, but I think most writers base characters on people they have known. The character of Nathan wasn’t any one specific person, but I did have a neighbor – a woman – who was a nightmare. It was in a gated community, so there was only one way out, and she would flag you down and just park herself in your window and just start talking. She would basically make it so you had a choice of either listening to her forever, or being rude and interrupting her, or even worse, pulling away while her arms were rested on your window.

There’s a dignity to the characters – and the work itself – in your film. Talk about establishing that element while at the same time finding the humor in the colorful characters.

MJ: That’s pretty important to me because I’ve worked these kinds of jobs, and I remember feeling like Hollywood was sometimes out of touch with us, and always appreciating it when it felt like a movie or TV show got something right – like there was someone out there in Hollywood who understood what most of us go through. I also used to feel like a lot of characters in movies and TV seemed to have endless cash and free time and you either didn’t know much about their job or they didn’t seem to have to have one. Finding the humor while still having some dignity to the characters is something that is also important to me. I don’t think about it that much; I’d like to think it comes naturally. To me it’s just like when I would sit around with my friends telling stories about people I work with and doing imitations of them and that sort of thing.

ON WRITING AND DIRECTING

In your previous films you’ve had a hand in directing, writing and producing. Which is your so-called labor of love out of the three?

MJ: I mostly like the writing and the editing, and I like when it’s over.

Animation or live action – which do you prefer, and why?

MJ: I think they’re more similar than you might think from the the point of a writer/director. I liked animation when I was just doing short films myself – doing everything myself. That was really satisfying work – making a film one frame at a time, getting it back from the lab and watching it for the first time. That was about as good as it gets I think.
Would you ever do a live action TV series or a another feature-length animated film?
Mike Judge: I would definitely like to do a live action TV series. I don’t know that I would do another feature-length animated film any time soon. Unless maybe it was a CG project.

How different in approach is your storytelling when it comes to animation and live action? Do you bank ideas that were too cinematic when you were working on HILL and GOODE FAMILY and save them for your feature work?

MJ: Actually they are pretty similar approaches. And you can actually get pretty cinematic in TV animation I think, as the Simpsons has done. I think I never got too cinematic with King of the Hill just because of the nature of the show and the characters, not really because it was animated.

Has the gradual embracing of your first two live-action movies made it easier to be patient for a film like “Extract” to find its audience and a fan following?

MJ: Yes. Also keeping the budget low on this has helped.

Did you shoot the film digitally? If so, how did you like/dislike the process of working in digital?

MJ: I shot it on all on film. In fact, we didn’t even do what’s called a “D.I.” which is how most films are finished nowadays. So if you saw it in the theater, you saw a print that was struck right off a negative. I actually like what happens to the look of film when you put it through that process.

What were the challenges of filming in a fully functional working factory?

MJ: Because we were on a tight budget, we had to shoot a lot of stuff while they were still working – they were really bottling. A lot of the background that you see in the movie is actually real people working – not extras. It was loud enough in there that they couldn’t hear us yelling “action” and “cut” and they just kind of got used to us being there, so I got some pretty natural acting in the background because they weren’t acting like they were working; they were really working.

I noticed in Extract that you were mostly able to stay away from pop culture references (outside of Dancing with the Stars), how difficult is it to write a story that doesn’t entail some of that dated material?

MJ: Well, when I first wrote the script, that reference was Will and Grace. That shows you how long ago I wrote it. I’m not big on pop culture references in general – probably because I’m pretty out of it lately, and I’m not great at doing that kind of comedy anyway. I also wrote it back when only a small percentage of the population had cell phones. That’s why there’s all this stuff in there with landlines, pay phones, busy signals, call waiting, etc. I was a little worried about that, but no one seems to have been bothered by it.

Have you enjoyed the resurgence of rated R comedies and has that opened up any other doors for you given that your material has a bit of an edge to it, or has it inspired you to go even edgier than what you’ve done previously?

MJ: I think there have been some great R comedies in the past couple years – The Hangover, Superbad, etc., but for me it’s not ever about edgy or not edgy. Something is either funny or interesting or it’s not, and sometimes something funny falls into the R rated territory, but not always. Some people are surprised to hear that Office Space is R rated, because it doesn’t seem that edgy I guess. I think anytime anyone has ever tried to be deliberately edgy, or to “push the envelope,” it’s usually sucked and lost money. I think there are a lot of movies that are hard-R rated that are really good and made money, but it’s because they are good, inspired movies.

Where does your fascination with groin jokes come from?

MJ: I do find it fascinating that a guy getting hit in the nuts always gets a laugh in movies – even from me – and I’m also not above using that for a cheap laugh myself. At some point, an evolutionary biologist should try to figure out why we laugh at that. I think if they figure out why a sense of humor and laughing even evolved in the first place – how that could possibly have contributed to survival of the species – then one of the first things they should figure out is why getting hit in the nuts always gets a laugh in movies and cartoons. I could go on about this for hours, but I won’t. I actually talked about this with Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond.

Would you ever consider doing a sequel to “Office Space”?

MJ: I kind of feel like this movie is sort of a follow up to Office Space. I based Office Space on my own experiences working in the cubicle world, and I based a lot of this on my experience being a boss and running what was basically an animation factory on Beavis and Butt-Head. I think when you go from complaining about the man keeping you down, to becoming the man, you realize that being the man is no picnic either. At one point a while back I considered doing a sequel to Office Space, but I wouldn’t do one now. Since that movie came out there have been two great TV shows – the British Office and the American one – and dozens of commercials set in cubicles, so I kind of feel like I wouldn’t want to go back to it at this point.

Thanks goes to Mike Judge, Miramax and Click Communications. Here is a full PCS review of the Extract Blu-Ray.

Q: What’s Terminator Salvation: Cold War about? I hear at one point a Terminator fights a bear?

A: There are two parallel plot-lines: One concerns a Russian submarine crew coping with the immediate aftermath of Judgment Day; the other concerns a band of human resistance fighters battling the Terminators in the snowy wilderness of Alaska. And, yes, at one point a Terminator fights a grizzly bear! It’s funny… I threw the grizzly into the book just for the hell of it, and that seems to be everybody’s favorite scene.

Q: How much feedback did you get from the movie’s producers when you were writing this?

Continue reading “Novelist Greg Cox Talks Explains Terminator’s New Bear of a Foe” »

Pop Culture Shock tracked Thompson down at Comic-Con International, on the day before she would win another Eisner Award, this year for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist on Magic Trixie, Magic Trixie Sleeps Over. She first caught the attention of the masses with her work in the early 90′s on Sandman, Swamp Thing, Invisibles, and Wonder Woman, then began paving the way for her own creation, Scary Godmother (1997-2000), a series of children’s books and her love of Halloween. Other highlights include Finals (1999), The Little Endless Storybook (2001), Death: At Death’s Door (2003), The Dead Boy Detectives (2005) amongst countless other works. She has branded a whimsical, cartoony art style that’s filled with emotion, drama, and most of all, fun. Ernie Estrella caught up with Jill to discuss the truth about cats and dogs, reading oversized comics, and of course, painting The Beasts of Burden.

Where did the concept of Beasts of Burden come from?

JT: The first story Evan Dorkin had proposed a story to Dark Horse editor Scott Allie about a dog that has a haunted dog past. And Scott wanted him to draw it. Evan said, “No way, I couldn’t draw this story at all. I’d ruin it.” I would’ve loved to have seen what he would have done. I’m sure it would have 72 more panels in it because he can do that really well. So Scott kept trying to convince him to do it but then asked, “Well who would you want to work with if you’re not going to do it?” So he said that he should work with me.

Eventually though, it grew from these short stories, right?

JT: It was just an eight-page story and he had come up with some archetypical characters, but he didn’t think about it past that. Everyone loved that story so much, and as Evan kept writing stories they started becoming sequential and longer rather than stand-alone stories. By the third one we had started referring to things that happened in the past. After it was done it was popular enough that they wanted to do a mini-series.

Dark Horse is so successful at launching bigger projects that come from anthologies, look at the history of Dark Horse Presents (DHP) for example. Is that what they were hoping with the Dark Book of series?

JT: I don’t know. I mean I like an anthology, which people don’t tend to do as much anymore, but you have so much talent that’s scattered all about, that it’s nice to compile everything, or compile different styles in the same book with a common theme that holds everything together. I don’t know if they were planing on launching things from (Dark Book of). They wanted to work with so and so but they’re so busy with X, Y, and Z that they can’t do anything, but maybe they can do an eight pages of this monster story. Neil Gaiman’s writing a story and Craig Russell’s going to illustrate it–

You don’t care that it’s four pages or four panels, you want it.

JT: Right! But sometimes I prefer to read a book of short stories over a novel because I like to read a bunch of different things. They don’t do this much anymore but stories in a magazine. You’d read a magazine and there’s a short story of fiction in it, but you’d probably have to ask someone who had the authority of this at Dark Horse, but I think it was more that.

This is the first time in a long time that you’re regularly working with someone else, who is also a fellow artist. Could you talk about this collaboration?

JT: Evan and I have completely different styles of storytelling. [Laughs] It’s kind of different going back and collaborating with someone, after I’ve spent years and years now, writing and illustrating for myself. Going back and working from a full script is interesting because unfortunately the first thing in my head when I read the dialogue I think, ‘I could make two pages out of that one panel, I wonder if they’d let me open this sequence up. As far as other collaboration, Evan has all the stories in his head, it’s not like I’m adding plot.’ I get a full script from Evan, and I play around with layout, expression, and sometimes a little more pacing as I’ve said that I’ll ask to open things up to slow down an emotional moment; or I’ll make one panel into two because I want to show the steps building up to something or a reaction shot. But I’m not co-plotting this at all, Evan’s writing it.

With Scary Godmother and Magic Trixie, you don’t have a problem drawing characters that are non-human, Beasts of Burden is probably 95% animals.

JT: Yes! Yeah with the rare exception of the second anthology Book of Witchcraft, that had witches’ legs in it but they’re the Dog-Peanuts equivalent where you don’t see adults very much, you see cars and you hear about them, but you don’t see them. In Scary Godmother, Harry was my preparation for drawing expressions on animals because I tried to keep Harry real doggy but keep an animated range of emotion but to keep his mannerisms doggy, in the way he’d eat things. Scary Godmother fed him peanut butter sandwich and he’d spend forever trying to get it off the roof of his mouth, so I studied a lot of dogs in my day. But dogs are lucky, they’ve got eyebrows in the first place. Sometimes it’s harder to make the Oprhan to have some expression than it is the dogs. Naturally you’re not even adding an extra human element to dogs because of the eyebrows. They manipulate you with [raising eyebrows and making sound effects], tilt the head, but I’m a cartoonist. It’s easy to anthropomorphize things, you just have to keep it in the same facial structure.

Right, with this story you have to keep the art to a more of a realistic style than being playful.

JT: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I sometimes exaggerate some their regular emotions but they’re not walking on their hind legs. They do things like dogs. Evan and I have talked about this but I can show more expression and surprise by amping up when dogs get jumpy and excited, so Whitey is forever jumping up. I know when dogs get scared or intimidated their tails goes between their legs. So I crouch everyone down and put their tail between their legs. I watch dogs play how they fake fight vs. when they really fight. If dogs are confronting someone or some creature they’ll get low to the ground, bolt and attack. You exaggerate the mouths because they do a lot of talking. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of it.

You have, as seen by the preview art and the stories from the anthologies. Despite having a more realistic look, there’s a lot of life and expression to each panel.

JT: You have to engage the reader. It’s not just a painterly book where I’m doing portraits of people’s dogs.

What is the story going to be about in the Beasts of Burden mini-series?

JT: Each issue has a different story with a bad situation or bad creature. The first issue is the dogs visiting friends and it starts raining frogs. And they race back to tell Ace, who we last saw was chained up in the yard from the last story we did in Dark Book of Monsters. Evan likes to do the human interaction off panel. For example, “What happens if there’s a crazy thing that happens in your yard and your house is destroyed?” Well the dog is now chained, there’s a new house, he has to heal because he was nearly killed, so Ace is still back there. The second issue called “Lost” and a mother dog needs help finding her pups because they are missing. The third issue is the Orphan, which the cat, goes looking for Dymphna which is the mystical black witch cat in the Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft. He doesn’t think she died at the end of that story and goes on an adventure to find her. That one has a cast of a 1000 rats, and I’m not even exaggerating on the number [laughs]. And the fourth issue I don’t have yet, but I know that was tells the history of the town, and there’s a big graveyard in it but Evan’s doing some tweaks to that story but I think you learn more about why the town is haunted and is supernaturally infested and why everything happens to those poor dogs.

Comics today are so broad…

JT: What do you mean by broad?

There’s no corner that you can’t go. Or you have people say, “Oh that won’t sell.”

JT: Oh people say that a lot! [Laughs]

Okay, that’s true. I guess when I see something like We3 (DC/Vertigo 2004 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely) that came out… that starred three animals and that had as much going on in it, that took me by surprise–

JT: That series made me cry. That was super sad. I’m obviously a sucker for anything about all animals.

That series got its own cult following for various reasons

JT: Well there’s nothing out there that’s like it, that’s for sure.

And that’s what I feel about Beasts of Burden which conceptually is such a departure from the everyday story you see in comics today.

JT: I never thought about it that way, until I guess, now, [chuckles] or recently. I love comics in general. To me they don’t have to be about something specific. So this was an opportunity to work on something that I considered to be really cool project to paint with Evan, who I’ve wanted to work with, and whose work I really really admire. I didn’t think, ‘Wow, we’re doing something else that no one is doing.’ We have this cool story to tell and I’m happy to be a part of it. I didn’t realize that we are creating something that people really respond well to. It reminds me more of adventure books I would read as a kid and of course I like supernatural stuff too, but it’s something that’s not for children, but I wouldn’t target it to one specific type or group. I might say, ‘Do you like comics? Then you might like this.’

In today’s landscape of animated films, in particular Pixar for example, it matters not so much who’s playing out the story, but what and how that story is told.

JT: I want to be a good storyteller. My focus is to tell a story that’s going to touch people whatever the subject matter is, however old you are. I love this medium to tell stories. I talk about comics to groups of librarians or teachers or groups of kids, I don’t say “Here’s the best superhero comic you should read.” I bring with me a giant long box of comics that show the diversity of this medium. Because of superhero movies people think that comics have to be, ‘Biff! Bam! Pow!’ and that’s all you see in the box office headlines, but it’s just another form of media to tell stories of all genres. Whether or not it’s about anthropomorphic animals, technically it could be all humans, it’s the personalities– it’s much cuter if it’s animals. [Laughs]

Dogs do have personality.

JT: The personalities are set. The wise-cracking guy, the heroic guy, the cowardly or more reserved character; you got your everyman we can identify with [Jack the Beagle] and the outcast/rebel [the Orphan] who is fitting into a group he’s not supposed to. The female dogs are wise and elegant. Evan’s been writing the story about the mother who has lost her pups, and as a father it crushed him to write something like that, to think about what would happen if his child was missing. The story’s about relationships and how people react in extreme circumstances whether or not they’re dogs.

Since it’s a neighborhood setting, are there going to be other animals brought into the fold?

JT: There’s been a lot of dogs, in the third issue, we meet the Swifties, which is Orphan’s gang that he hangs around with, or there happens to be a lot of other stray cats. I don’t know if all these cats have a home or not. There’s the Ghettoy Kid, Johnny Whiskers, Mugsy, Sleepy Bob. I made Sleepy Bob look like my ex-roomate Cheryl’s cat Stu, because I used to think about how he’d used to lay around. Jonny Whiskers is like our ex-cat Lucian who’s no longer with us. In my neighborhood I see a lot of ginger cats and orange cats, the Oprhan’s orange, and I try to make them all look different, with different shaped faces. Mugsy is one of those tortoise shell cats, he’s a little stockier, I always have him sitting in a loaf. His personality I’d figure would be contained. And Ghettoy Kid is a tuxedo cat who goes with the Orphan to look for the witch. He’s got a rogue-ish type personality who would fit into a old fashioned, elegant guy whereas, the Orphan’s a James Dean-ish kind of cat.

I had a family cat who’s no longer with us who was an outdoor cat, never de-clawed and we’d see her in the morning and then she’d run off into the woods and would come back either at night or a few days later, we never knew what kind of adventures she was getting into and she knew where her home was–

JT: Yup.

She’d have this attitude like, ‘I was just doing my thang.’

JT: We had a family cat, the first one, he was a fluffy, cream-colored, tannish colored long hair cat, sadly named Puff, not for me, I named him that because he looked like Puff from Sally, Dick, and Jane books that’s why I wanted to name him, Puff. We got him as a kitten and he grew into this muscular tom cat with long hair and the poor cat had to suffer the indignation of calling him, “Puff! Puff!” He would come home beat up, scraped up from other fights and because he had color he showed a lot of dirt too, like oil from being under cars, and as I got older, I figured it was because I named him Puff. Other cats are making fun of him, and he’s having to defend himself and there were a lot of Puff colored kittens around, he really had to overcompensate for his name.

That sounds like my old family cat who would go missing for a week and come back looking like it was in a scuffle, and figured she was probably fighting some bees. If cats want to be out, they’ll get out. Even when it’s cold, they might come back within 10 minutes, but they’ll be back.

One time Puff was gone for a month, and my brother and I were crying about it and one day we came home from school and he was in the house. I got so scared when I was older about what teenage boys can do especially all the cruelty I saw, I was always so terrified that something bad was going to happen to him so I pulled a lot from that experience into the Orphan. Even our cat, Archie, who’s super old and makes a walk around the perimeter of our backyard in the winter, like a convict then he comes back in. “Alright, for some reason you (Archie) had to do that.” Then he’s all cold, he’ll wipe his feet off, but I figured he should get to do what he wants to do at his age.

Cover to Beasts of Burden #3

So, despite then the appearance of the cast, we can get a full sense of who they are?

They’re a really interesting cast, they’re evolving, they’re not just stereotypes. The wise-cracking pugs aren’t just the wise-cracking pugs. Things happen that affect them and their attitudes. They’re really rich characters.

If you have that experience of having pets and imagining their world away from you, that would probably be a good source of material for this series.

JT: Most definitely. I was the one who would be lured by the kitty and want to go play with it, even though I would be warned, ‘It’s wild, don’t play with that cat,’ and I would say, [In young Jill voice] “No it’s not, it has to belong to someone…” In a rough and tumble, Huck Finn type of existence I suppose. [Laughs]

What would you say is a new challenge in Beasts of Burden that you’re allowing yourself to… explore.

JT: Oh, I thought you were going to say technically… I would suppose it would be to engage the reader into their lives to show as much emotion as I can, to have them act with subtle expression, to get people to forget that they’re reading not just about dogs, but the main characters are the characters that they love. I want readers to love them, like how they get vested into human being characters, by the way I illustrate it.

What are some examples of how you tackled this?

JT: The way I paint things to set the mood and try to incorporate what I learned in working in manga, how emotion is played up and how pacing and interactive glances can build the tension or any other emotion that the characters might be feeling without the symbolic manga constraints like the lightning bolts or drip of blood coming out of their nose. I try to do that with color wash or background. When something is shocking or there’s violence I try to put red in the background. To me that’s an emotional reference for the reader that’s really intense or conveys anger. Certain scenes you’ll see where it’s done. There’s a scene where all these zombie dogs are chasing heroes and put a whole red wash and then I drew on top of that, because to me it was going to be so creepy and violent that I wanted to convey that without showing movement and motion.

You strike me as an artist that dislikes a lot of exposition cluttering up the art.

JT: What do you mean?

That you don’t need balloons that establish setting or what the character is thinking. The art is telling the story.

JT: That’s my job 100%, I feel that the only caption I want in there is, “And then…” or “Later that day.” Something expositional not explanatory.

Beasts of Burden: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (From Dark Horse Book of Dead)

From the early released Beasts of Burden art, most of what’s not art is dialogue.

JT: Evan hasn’t written very many captions. I told him, “I feel like I’m doing my job if no one has to explain again what they’re supposed to be looking at. He does a little of that just to bring people up to speed, to transition one story from the previous issue to what’s happening now, or how much time has past because they’re dogs, there’s certain things that happen that where you can tell. I tried to ask if season changed a lot, or because it’s a mini-series if we would try to hit things seasonally, spring, summer, fall and winter which we did in the first four stories. We had each season represented, but emotionally what happened, we pick up after the long winter in the Dark Book of Monsters so that might be explained. Either the dogs will talk about what happened or use quick captions because there are no people to bring people up to speed, like “Oh I haven’t seen you since Christmas,” but I guess the dogs say that too like, “He hasn’t been outside the yard since the incident with the boy…”

They could tell convene at Christmas and talk about what awful and demeaning Holiday outfits their owners make them wear.

JT: I wanted to do a Christmas story. I try to convince Evan to do one, a seasonal thing to be more light-hearted. These stories, they don’t always end on a happy note. I needed to do something where not everyone dies or scary bad things happen. So I thought, let’s just do a Christmas story. If I was writing this for another anthology, Christmas couldn’t come because Pugs, when he was a puppy trapped Santa Claus because he thought he was a burglar and now all of them have him trapped in this house. So they’re either going to have to help him deliver parents or something… but that’s the difference between me and Evan. He’s writing about supernatural and I’m writing about mythological stuff but funny, I want it to be funny.

Once this is collected, is this a series you think would be marketed to a different audience?

JT: You’d probably have to be interested in the supernatural because the stories are fantastical so it’s not just everyday interactions with dogs, although you have some of that, so I think that would depend on the taste of the dog owner. But it probably crosses over into a lot broader spectrum. I suppose that people who got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer because they loved the vampire stuff, they got hooked in on the melodrama and then accepted all the fantastical stuff that was weaved into it, the same way as any other soap opera. That’s probably why I like it. I like an intricate, multi-character story.

You were approached for Wednesday Comics, right?

JT: Yes, I was in the middle of Beasts of Burden and Mark Chiarello, he wanted me to do a Wonder Woman story. I was trying to figure out how I can do both of these things at the same time and then I realized I couldn’t. I still want to do the story because it came so easily especially in that format in big beautiful eight or twelve pages that showed a certain type of story. That one would have been really fun to illustrate.

Mark has such a great design sense and the creators he recruited were so perfect.

JT: Oh my gosh, and don’t you love comics THAT big? I looked at it thinking, ‘This is how we should all be reading our comics!’

I read it on the floor, sprawled out sitting on my stomach.

JT: I could just be immersed in it much more readily than if it were regular-sized.

In that format, certain artists can tell much more in one page than others do in 22. Some of the creators really made use of that size.

JT: It’s amazing.

Is Brian (Azzarello, her husband) happy the way Batman came out?

JT: Oh god, yeah. Eduardo (Risso) was the first one done out of all of them. I think it’s one of the most amazing versions of Batman ever. He’s rouge-ish. Bruce Wayne is very… sexual.

We’re seeing characters in ways we haven’t seen before like the Hawkman story by Kyle Baker. It’s so awesome.

JT: And that Kamandi, oh my god, each one is my favorite in there, and Super Girl? Why are Amanda Connor and Jimmy Palmiotti not doing a regular Super Girl strip or comic? Amanda is such an amazing artist. I could read her comic all day long.

When my father was young, he used to read the big Prince Valiant comics where the original art was done on this large scale. To me it takes me back to what he experienced as a child.

JT: Well, I have a Little Nemo in Slumberland compilation and I’ve only started to read it, but it’s one of those things you want to lie on the floor with a big pillow under your belly and just get lost inside this sequential landscape. I felt just like Little Nemo and dive into those pages from horizon to horizon. When I open up that book, both sides completely fill up my field of vision and that’s kinda nice.

Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland

In contrast to this concept, what do you think about digital comics?

JT: I like the portability of comics, and I’m interested now in trying to see them work on a phone, but I’ve never been able to sit up and read them really comfortably on the computer screen but if the Kindle or that type of format eventually gets comics – as long as I can curl up in a chair, on a couch or in a bed, because I like to read everything there, I just don’t want to have to sit up straight in front of a monitor, but I love a book. And the big comics there is some big nostalgia even if you didn’t grow up reading those. When I was growing up, Sunday comics didn’t look like that, but you heard about them. My grandparents would tell me, ‘When I was little, we read comics on Sunday and they were big!‘

For those who haven’t seen original art, especially an original Windsor McCay or Hal Foster, find what local comic art shows are nearby and seek them out to see how big a scale these are done at.

JT: I’ve seen them at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where there was a comic retrospective the one that was brought around the country. I was so proud to do this for a living and then see everybody’s originals, how big they were with the level of draftsmanship and design, [pauses] it just really hit me.

It is beautiful work to see and to imagine these legends working on a scale that big.

JT: I think about all of the little, tiny motions I do that would have been so much easier if they were more larger and more fluid. And I think for newspaper strip artists now, their panels aren’t even an inch by an inch it seems. They’ve been reduced even further. To go from THAT, to that. Everytime I’ve met someone who worked for a newspaper is amazed by how much space comics get. Everybody in comics say “I wish a million people read my comic,” but you’re trading off the freedom. I could never be happy to do three or four panels of something (at a time).

Magic Trixie Vol. 3: Magic Trixie and the Dragon by Jill Thompson

Anything else you’re working on?

JT: The third Magic Trixie book came out in June, I’d love for people to pick that up. Amazon’s probably the easiest way to get that, and I’m really proud of that. There are things that I pitched and that I’d love to do but I just don’t think they’re going to happen. Like I’ve always had an idea of a Wonder Woman graphic novel, that’s different than the Wednesday Comics project that I mentioned before. It would be a fairy tale that would be my take on the origin but not an origin story. It’s a stand-alone story but it wouldn’t have anything to do with the ongoing title.

Magic Trixie is being published by Harper Collins so that’s taken you on a different tour than some comic artists.

JT: I recently went to the American Librarians Association and got great responses there. Librarians have always been really supportive of graphic novels anywhere I’ve gone, but now that it’s really exploding, it seems like some librarians who are new to it, are overwhelmed because they don’t know where to start. So you wind up having great conversations with them about things that came out in the 80′s like Watchmen. They think, ‘These all go together, right?’ and I’m like, “No! Just like the way you separate books by age and genre, these have to be separated the same way. They want to put everything in the children’s section, but it doesn’t work like that. You’re going to have a smattering of comics in the children’s section. So it’s interesting to see how they incorporate them into their filing systems.

What are your future plans with Magic Trixie?

JT: I’ve done all the Magic Trixie books that Harper Collins is interested in, so I’ve got a trilogy, and that’s cool. I’d like to do more stories eventually, but right now I’m focusing on Beasts of Burden and looking forward to get Scary Godmother started back up. And when I finish Beasts of Burden, I’m going to start working on another Little Endless Book, a sequel to the other one I did with my editor, Shelly Bond. I’ll be writing and drawing that myself and will start that in the fall.

Will that be released in the summer next year?

JT: Probably in the summer. I don’t know how Dark Horse is going to put out all of the Beasts of Burden, but at some point I know they want to release the stuff previously in the anthologies and then put a big book out with the mini-series altogether. I know there are talks of us continuing Beasts of Burden after that, and I’m fine with all of that.

Magic Trixie by Jill Thompson

Remember to check out Beasts of Burden #1 at comic shops this week, and if you would like to read a few of the Beasts of Burden anthology stories go to Dark Horse eComics, Magic Trixie Vol.1, Vol. 2: Magic Trixie Sleeps Over, and Vol.3: Magic Trixie and the Dragon

Kayode: So Daren, I figured we could start with you giving us a brief history of how mSpot got started.

Daren Tsui: We started back in late 2004, and the premise of the company was to take advantage of the new crops of media phones in the U.S., having data networks that were fast enough to do some interesting stuff. We started out by experimenting with some really lo-res video, running at about four frames per second. We saw the opportunity to do streaming music because it takes up a lot less bandwidth. We focused a lot on music in terms of different genres, but we also had talk radio content, a sports channel, etc., as well as producing and programming our own streaming music station. We now have a music video service, as well as a product called Music Sync, which allows you to sync all your music and MP3s from your PC to your mobile phone through the 3G network. We also have a ringtone application called Make Your Tone, which allows you to edit your own high-quality music file to serve as your own ringtone.

Kayode: So in light of the 30th anniversary of mobile music, what are your thoughts on the evolution of mobile music, from the first Walkman up until today?

Daren: Well, even before the Walkman you had the transistor radio, which was also portable. The difference was that the Walkman was on-demand, you had a tape you could start and stop. So, it’s absolutely the case when it comes to portable devices, consumers want choices, they want to be able to listen to music passively, but they also want to have the choice of music they can play whenever they want. I think the iPod has proven that over and over again. Therefore, a successful music service needs to offer both portability and the ability to control whatever the consumer wants to listen to. When the CD Walkman came out, it was still about addressing those basic needs, only the quality of the music was higher, and you could access it quicker. Then of course, you have the iPod. But I think the game-changing piece of what’s going on now, compared to back in ’79 with the Walkman, and even the iPod, is that not only is the music listening experience on-demand and portable, it’s connected. You can share music with other users, you can comment on music, get lyrics, it makes for a very robust experience.

Kayode: With everything we can do from listening to music, sharing music, etc., do you think we’ve taken the technology as far as it can go, or can things still go further?

Daren: In addition to what’s going on with 3G, you’ve got the ability to write some very sophisticated software, now that the phone is becoming more and more like a portable PC that’s always connected to the internet. Music is so expressive, and it’s all about sharing and letting people know what you’re listening to. You even have services online where music artists can collaborate, sharing beats and lyrics, etc, over the internet without ever having to meet. I think we’ll see more of that in the future.

Kayode: I have been hearing about that more, with groups like Foreign Exchange, for example. Getting onto the recording industry in general, how do you think they’re dealing with these advancements in technology, and how it applies to how people receive, share, and create music? How are they incorporating all this into how they do business?

Daren: On the mobile side, the music industry has been somewhat protected to date, as piracy hasn’t been as rampant on the mobile side of things. The reason that’s the case today is because the carriers still have a tremendous amount of control over the handsets, over who can write applications for those handsets, etc. Furthermore, the technology is still fairly limited, so it’s not like you could have a site as complex as Napster or Kazaa available on a mobile phone. This is why, for example, ringtones is still a multi-billion dollar market worldwide, and music tracks are still be sold for mobile phones, at least in the United States. But on the open/PC/Internet side, it’s been much more difficult to try and sell digital tracks, due to piracy. So the labels are trying to milk as much as they can out of the current situation. The good and the bad here is that the mobile internet is starting to open up now, mainly due to Apple and the iPhone. And there are a lot of these open stores now, starting with iTunes, now Microsoft has their own store, and you can start writing applications onto these handsets pretty freely. In addition to more and more people being able to subscribe to the 3G Beta Plan, not because they want to listen to music and watch video, first and foremost, but more so they can text and send and receive e-mail, and it shows how mobile phones are becoming more like PCs with internet, which I think music labels are worried about. So right now, they’re doing a lot of experimentation.

Kayode: Getting back to the Sony Walkman and the anniversary, what are some of your own experiences with the Walkman over the years?

Daren: I just remember the first Walkman I had as a kid, I thought it was awesome. I was listening to music everywhere. It really changed the way people listened to music. And then the CD Walkman, or Discman, came out and it was great having higher quality audio and things like that. The only beef I had with it, of course, was that you could only carry one CD at a time, so it kind of locked you in to what you could listen to. I know I jumped onto the MP3 player bandwagon early on. I did buy one of the Diamond Rio players, which only had about 64 megs of memory, so that’s not a lot of music! But at the time it was great, I was showing off to my friends and everything! The funny thing is that as the technology advances, the basic needs of the consumer haven’t really changed. It’s still about making the music portable and giving listeners to access that music however they choose. The only really big difference you’re seeing now is the ability to share music, and overall connectivity.

Kayode: Well, it’s been great talking with you and getting a better idea of some of the changes we’ve seen in mobile music, especially where it’s heading. It’s been very insightful.

Daren: It’s been a pleasure.

Visit mSpot for more information.

As mentioned previously, I write regularly for AMC’s movie blogs, and will be periodically posting excerpts here… Though if you like me, you should always click over to the full articles. Always.

I just posted a Q&A with Bill Hader full of geekery, but the part most apt to you guys are these tidbits about Hader’s first comic book:

Q: You also have a comic book arriving in stores today. Tell us about the plot, and how you ended up writing it.

A: It’s a one-off Spider-Man story and it takes place on Halloween. It involves Spider-Man getting mistaken for Ronnie, a drunk dude dressed up as Spider-Man. Seth Meyers and I worked on it over the writers strike. We met all the Marvel guys at the Marvel Christmas party a year ago. I’m friends with Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and they got us in. We met Joe [Quesada, editor in chief of Marvel] and he was like “Write something for us!” and we said, “OK!” 

Q: Do you have any aspirations of being in a superhero movie yourself?

A: I don’t know. I don’t really have the build for it. I’d like to play a hick or something if they ever did a Scalped movie. Or a criminal in Criminal. Or a ghoul in the next Hellboy.

Q: If you could be any villain in the next Spider-Man movie, who would you choose?

A: Badger Teeth (read our book!)

Click here to check out the full interview, including why Hader is just like John Connor.

Common plays Barnes a resistance soldier and John’s right-hand man. He’s a spiritual man who sees Judgement Day as outlined in the Bible, John is a messiah and Skynet is the anti-christ. Moon Bloodgood plays Blair Williams, Connor’s pilot and is the rough and tough female character so prevalent in the Terminator films.

Working with director, McG

Bloodgood: I’m a type A personality so I love his energy, he’s really bright. He’s a hard-working, passionate and he challenges me.

Common: I see how directors treat their crew to see whether he’s a good leader. Like Moon said, “You respect and love passion,” and that man has passion. McG is a good leader and a great communicator.

The pacing of Salvation as a war film instead of the prior installments being science fiction films

Bloodgood: I feel like they cut the fat. I’m a big fan of European movies and what they do, and you’re right, if it’s a war movie you have to be careful that you don’t do that too much.

Common: They cut a scene of mine that was too fat [Laughs] But that’s good. I was just going on and on. In this film you feel an urgency even when the characters are stopping and talking, like “We’ve got to get this shit done.” When the machines are coming to attack people, there’s that urgency and I think that’s the rhythm that’s there. You still feel a certain humanity in the layers. You don’t just see action, you get a gist of the human struggle.

On the Resistance and The Military of the Future

Bloodgood: There is a command structure and there’s different points to the resistance. For instance when I came in they told me there was a radio that helps us all communicate with each other because we don’t want Skynet to know what we’re doing but we need to know what they’re up to. Their technology is obviously more advanced than ours so there are different points where communication is cut.

And we had a military advisor on-set but it’s a different time so you don’t adhere to the same codes. I had to have this whole post-apocalyptic look, we’re all expressing ourselves the way we’re dressing, but not in a superficial or corny way but as a way to prepare for war.

On her Moon’s nude scene

Bloodgood: I am a woman, I have boobs, it’s a beautiful shot, it wasn’t at all gratuitous, I’m not afraid to say no if I didn’t feel it was right and I’ve done that. But this was beautiful and about the world ending and getting naked and wanting to connect with someone.

Bryce Howard plays Kate Connor, John’s wife and is carrying their child. Her role is vital in that John’s wall of trust is nearly impossible to pass. She is the one he trusts and depends on the most and is sure to be of great importance to the resistance. Fresh off of Star Trek’s set is Anton Yelchin, who plays the resistance soldier, Kyle Reese. Yelchin looked to Michael Biehn’s character in The Terminator despite his portrayal of the younger John Connor admirer.

Bryce Howard on playing a general’s daughter

Howard: I spoke with a lot of family members who are in the military so they’re familiar with fear, and the possibility of losing everything they know at any moment. So I feel that those individuals have a very strong constitution that I wanted to bring to the character.

On the empowered women in the Terminator franchise

Howard: I feel Moon carries the torch for Linda Hamilton even though my character is strong in her own respect, she’s also seven months pregnant and it would have been irresponsible to have her *makes shotgun sound effect* [Laughing]. Know what I mean? There’s a little bit of that, but nothing too memorable. That’s Moon’s main element that she was this passionate, strong, intelligent woman leading. It identifies the franchise.

Yelchin: I also think we have a very young empowered woman, Jadagrace.

Howard: Oh my god, yes.

Yelchin: She’s plays Kyle Reese’s paternal character. The first time you meet her character she’s holding a shotgun and she’s seven years old. It carries that tradition on.

Howard: I also feel this film in particular is about how John Connor become the man and myth we had heard about. Although I think McG was mindful of the expectations were in terms of empowered femininity it was imperative to see Christian’s portrayal come to the forefront.

The mystery of Marcus Wright and his relationship with Kyle Reese

Yelchin: There’s no scene between Marcus and Kyle where he talks about what he is. But we felt there had to be a moment where they acknowledge that and it was Kyle Reese’s duty as a human being to either understand it or maybe misunderstand it. But the complexity to that emotion is huge. They’re friends but Marcus is Kyle’s own paternal figure. it’s an interesting dynamic to play.

This is McG‘s most ambitious project. The young director’s filmography highlights include the recent Charlie’s Angels and We Are Marshall but if he’s successful this weekend and the following weeks, Terminator could see another trilogy. Resurrecting a popular science fiction franchise without its biggest star presents a challenge but what Terminator: Salvation has is the future, the dark aftermath of Judgement Day and a full blown-out war of survival between humans and machines. McG also has Christian Bale.

What with the recent controversy with X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaking out to the internet unfinished, here’s what McG thinks about sharing footage with press and fans at conventions while in the middle of post-production.

McG: I love this movie, and I take it seriously that the world is waiting to see it done properly. It’s a big responsibility. There is some trepidation there but I’m taking a leap of faith that you (the fans) are the passionate ones. You are the ones that care, lets all share in the filmmaking process. I think the audience is vary savvy and understands where the CG pencil kicked in and what was done practically in a tactile capacity that I feel very confident in sharing works-in-progress. Every time I’ve been transparent and honest about what this film is, people go from, “Fuck, McG!” to a place of, “Hey, this guy is taking it very seriously. He’s out to deliver what we want him to deliver.” I’m not saying I’m making the right choice or not, but being transparent and honest seems to be the right course of action thus far.

The first Terminator having a rating below R

McG: We never once gave a thought to rating while making this film. You think Christian (Bale) would say, “I need to taylor my performance to a rating.” He doesn’t know how to do that. I don’t want to do that. Having said that, if the film is PG-13, the Dark Knight was PG-13 which I would regard it as without compromise.

What is Skynet’s role in Salvation?

McG: Skynet is indeed very tricky. They tried to kill Sarah Connor with their biggest gun, the T-800, they tried to kill John with their biggest gun T-1000. Now they’re trying to kill Kyle and lure all of them together in Skynet in the spirit of getting it done not by thinking bigger-bigger gun, but by thinking radically, differently approaching a new way to achieve the objective of Skynet which is to kill John Connor.

Inspiration for War

McG: The number one inspiration was Kubrick’s Paths of Glory which was shown with great regularity back at base camp. But of course Apocalypse Now, Platoon had a tremendous effect on me because I saw it right when I was 15 or 16 thinking, “Shit, in two years, I’m that guy.” Children of Men in a certain futuristic war movie. In a world of duress, and a world of grit. We’re at war with the machines. It’s hard to get water and we’re all living in subterranean facilities. In that respect there’s a lot to be said about the Matrix films, in particularly the first one that Andy and Larry (Wachowski) cooked up. These are all influences.

How the current climate of technology altered the script

McG: That’s funny because that’s the reason to make the movie the future war. What was once science fiction in the 1970′s and 80′s is here. I have a blackberry in my pocket that has artificial intelligence. If I spell the wrong word, if I use the wrong syntax it will correct me. By definition that’s artificial intelligence. If I have a bad heart, they’ll give me a new one made out of plastic. That is very, very interesting. And most compelling is, if I’m depressed, the days of “Tell me about your father, was he mean to you?” are over. Here’s some serotonin re-up inhibitors and you’re just going to feel better in two weeks. We don’t need to talk about a goddamn thing. That’s just very terrifying that we’ve come to live in a world where that is all real. We can deconstruct the human genetic code, clone a sheep (arguably a human) make a 70 year-old woman pregnant, where’s the limit?

Wherein does humanity lie? Christopher Reeve became paralyzed from the neck down would any of us regard him less of a man? No, probably more from the courage he exerted. My point is that it’s not in his arm, or left ankle. It exists in somewhere in this magical place of brain, which is a collection of neural firings that will one day be mapped by a computer and we’ll be able to interface with. It’s a scary commentary about the reality of having a soul and what is it that makes us human. Machines got to the place of intelligence where they were able to say for the interest of self-preservation this (humans) is no longer necessary. That’s not impossible. In a great many ways James Cameron is a survivalist who is rather convinced that moment is going to happen.

Ernie Estrella

Terminator: Salvation will open wide May 20th, at midnight screenings at a theater near you.

Brian Michael Bendis on The Sound of Young America from Jesse Thorn on Vimeo.

From Crackle: Angel of Death Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

Anytime you get a giant knife stuck in your head, it’s going to be a bad day. There’s a good chance, it will be your last, but not for one hitman, well, hitwoman named Eve in Sony’s new film Angel of Death, the inaugural serial film launching their original web entertainment site, Crackle.com. Told in 12 episodes, running 7-10 minutes each, this new film is a grindhouse child spawned from a heated romp of horror, Hong-Kong action, and modern noir. It’s rapid pace and brutal violence grabs you from the beginning as details of this complex story unfolds. It succeeds in giving genre fans a fresh take on old conventions and giving one of the baddest-ass actresses the center stage. In this hybrid period of varying ways of how we get our fill of entertainment, could this be the start of future of original programming that’s unfiltered and undiluted? Time will show, but Sony’s definitely putting their best foot forward with Angel of Death.

Comic book fans will recognize film’s creator, Eisner Award-Winning comic book writer, Ed Brubaker as the man who killed Captain America. He’s written Daredevil, Iron Fist, The Authority and Catwoman. Publishing in Marvel’s Icon imprint, Criminal, and most recently Incognito are two of Brubaker’s finest comic works revitalizing the monthly format and allowing readers to experience the world of common crooks and heroes in a believable and harsh world.

Angel of Death stars action darling, Zoe Bell whose work is very familiar to many but remains a fresh face in the Hollywood. New Zealand’s answer to Michelle Yeoh was the stuntwoman on Xena: Princess Warrior and Kill Bill. Her line of work was featured in the excellent documentary, Double Dare (2004) with fellow stuntwoman Jeannie Epper. But Bell is probably best remembered playing herself as the death-defying Kiwi in Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof strapped to the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger. Her incredible action work is once again showcased here, but so is her acting as we witness her character, Eve having one major occupational hazard and the strange effects it has in her recovery.

The following is a composite of two separate one-on-one interviews done with Brubaker and Bell at Wondercon 2009 in San Francisco.

Ed, in your writing, the femme fatale has been very prominent especially recent years.

Ed Brubaker: Yeah.

They’re sexy, but deadly too. I’m always drawn in by the sexual vibe going on but then you find out there’s a lot more to this woman.

EB: What about a gay-guy-femme-fatale? That would be so cool. [laughs]

[Laughs] Perhaps for the next webisode.

EB: The next one, right? [laughs] Man-Fatale!

What draws you to this character archetype?

EB: My uncle, John Paxton, was a noir screenwriter in the 40′s and 50′s. He wrote Murder My Sweet (1944), Crossfire (1947), The Wild One (1953) amongst others and I grew up around that. I really love those noir tropes. I like playing with those clich?s because they’re there for a reason. There’s nothing original in the world anyway so you’re just trying to have fun with the version you’re doing. Archie Goodwin told me a long time ago that there’s only five stories in the world. The trick is how to tell your’s. That’s where your originality comes in. What is your vision of that scene, how do you open, what’s your closing scene what’s your way into that scene?

Now, everything I’ve read about Angel of Death prior to this conversation was crammed in that first episode.

EB: Yeah, I’m really good at giving away everything in the beginning because that’s the hook. If you don’t want to see what happens after that first episode then we failed.

By the end though, it was a clean slate because everything I knew was now out of the way and I wanted to know more.

EB: I was just introducing the story and then, bam! Knife to the head. It was funny when we were filming the scene where Zoe gets in the car with the knife in her head. I don’t know how they ended up cutting it. There was no way we could get her into the car without the top of the car hitting the knife. Well you just killed yourself. [laughs] And the hypothalamus is gone. [laughs] It’s like, you cannot move the knife.

That was the first “Oh Shit!” moment for me and it just
kept going.

ZB: A big, “Oh Shit! Moment” [laughs] Oh Goood!

Yeah this is the type of film you watch with your buddy and your jabbing him in the shoulder throughout.

EB: Yeah. We should have used a shorter knife [laughs]. I had always had it stuck in my head — no pun intended — from like 1999, a PBS series of documentaries of an ER in Austin, Texas or something. Some guy had walked into the ER after an argument with a neighbor and had been stabbed in the head with a hunting knife. He drove to the hospital by himself and walked right in and said, “I’ve got a hunting knife in my head.” They x-rayed him, gave him an MRI, they looked at him and gave him a 50/50 chance to live or die. Basically they shaved his head, strapped him down in the ER and slowly pulled the knife out as carefully as possible and luckily it missed anything important.

Wow!

EB: Yeah, he had a complete recovery. But when we looked at it more and more we discovered that in cases like this people suffer from seizures and other stuff. I always thought that would be a cool idea. What if there was a hitman who was stabbed in the fucking brain and suddenly had a conscious?

Like when Homer got that pencil stuck up his brain?

EB: Exactly, and he’s smart! [laughs]

When I saw it, I was reminded in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Brown and is shot and is able to drive away and function for awhile until his body shuts down.

EB: Right, when he’s driving away?

Yeah.

EB: You never actually see him get shot.

True, but he was still lucid enough to be aware of the situation. So you can believe in Angel of Death that being stabbed in the skull is a possible thing once it’s in there.

EB: We found even recently two weeks ago in Scotland somewhere who got stabbed in the brain (side of the head) with a razor blade and I wanted to put it up on the website to show people that this really does happen to people. It’s not incredibly common, but common enough to have medical science behind it. When people see that shot of Zoe getting that knife pulled out, everyone’s like, [in whisper tone] “Fuck!”

ZB: I know. It makes that noise. Splecckkk!

Yeah!

ZB: The first time we all saw that sequence, we were all like, Whooaah! I think it’s because of the sound effects. Shhlckk! You’re like, “Auughh. Gag!”

In watching the early episodes, has the experience changed your own perception of how comics can be adapted to film? Films can often be too compressed and TV can be too?

EB: Expansive?

Yeah. I felt every episode at 7-10 minutes long was like a 22-page comic.

EB: That’s one of the reasons they went for me I think. They wanted to do an episodic graphic novel in film form. For me it was just an opportunity. I’ve been to Hollywood a few times on different projects, written screenplays. You know it’s almost impossible to get something made. Brian Michael Bendis has written tons of things and made tons of money in Hollywood but hasn’t had anything made yet and he’s the biggest writer in comics. When they approached me for this internet thing and Zoe was going to be involved I thought, ‘Well maybe we should come up with this concept specifically for Zoe.’ And it was greenlit before I started writing. That never happens. So to me, I get to write a feature film and it’s going to be filmed two weeks after I’m done writing it.

With the internet as an entertainment provider now. There’s a challenge going from comics which are these long episodic stories to doing the same thing where every episode had to have enough story that it made enough sense for an episode. I was thinking during writing it that there is probably more story than a typical 90 minute movie. It could easily be a 2-hour movie but it’s 90 minutes. We had to pack something cool in every episode. But it was really fun and a great challenge. It helped me write it faster because every ten to twelve pages had to be really tight before I moved onto the next one. Even though I wrote out the whole outline as Act I, II, III, Act I had to be episodes 1-4 and and so on… and figure what are the end beat. Coming from comics that was fucking easy. I do it four times a month if I’m good at my deadlines. [laughs]

Zoe, you’re starting to be in the camera more. Is this the beginning of a transition where you’ve realized physically, for your body to last, you may have to do more in front of the camera stuff.

ZB: Yeah but it’s not really for the physical reason. The acting thing’s definitely become a potential new path. It took about a year to even accept that might be what I wanted to do. I was a little hesitant about wanting to be an actor. Angel of Death kind of closed the deal for me. I gotta give this at least a really good shot because I really enjoyed the process. People are going to judge me. There’s no point in letting it affect my decisions in my life.

Well you’re never going to satisfy everybody.

ZB: No of course you’re not. Some people HATED me in Deathproof. “Zoe Bell was the most annoying thing in Deathproof. I couldn’t watch the movie, the voice was so annoying.”

Not here. While watching that scene with you strapped on the roof of that car with no safety in sigh. My friend and I whispered to each other, “Zoe Bell is fucking hot!” That scene sealed the deal.

ZB: [Laughs and claps]

In Angel of Death though, that’s some hardcore, brutal stuff that you did. The level of violence was almost startling. How did that rank with your impressive body of work?

ZB: We intended on having the fights being realistic, gritty and brutal. A couple of us felt it important to have it that way, in large because she is a female, to give credit that she’s female and legitimately kicks ass. How do I explain this without insulting female action stars? [laughs] It was important to be gritty and realistic. I did a lot of Xena and Kill Bill but the difference is when my face isn’t attached to it. You think, oh, she did some of that fight stuff, but you immediately connect it to Uma because that’s the idea. You know what I mean? So something about seeing the face of the person that’s actually doing it has an impact that’s subconsciously? it doesn’t ring true, it tweaks the audience. The fight scene though in the bathroom was one of my favorite things I’ve shot.

I’ve watched television shows where you do get in a different mindset when the action starts, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer you can tell it’s someone else doing the scenes, you’re taken out of the moment. But in Hong Kong Cinema, where many of the stars do their own stunts, or?

ZB: Can’t afford it.

As a result though, there’s something genuine about it, you’re completely sold on the character who can do these amazing things. I see that same thing in Angel of Death.

ZB: Yeah and I thought about it a bunch since Deathproof came out. That movie really had an effect where the audience had some response from watching it that even they couldn’t explain it. Obviously the sequence was scary, it was meant to be. But there was something about knowing there wasn’t a stunt double involved that on a very subconscious level the audience got it. There’s no forward rational thinking thing. On some instinctive gut reaction-level you know that person is actually in trouble. So you respond the way you do as a human not as an audience member. That’s the part I’m enjoying in Angel of Death, playing with a scene and what kind of response we can get from audiences, by letting them feel that it’s actually me. And I would love it even if it wasn’t me. I love the concept.

Catch Ed Brubaker’s latest femme fatale in live action and Zoe Bell coming into her own as an actress in Angel of Death, now showing a new episode each day at http://www.crackle.com.angelofdeath from March 1-13. It also stars Doug Jones, Lucy Lawless, Brian Poth, Ted Raimi and is directed by Paul Etheredge. The series will likely have a limited life on Sony’s Crackle.com before it is collected on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Ernie Estrella

Favorite Announcement: David Lafuente on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man with Brian Michael Bendis. Lafuente has been blowing my mind with near perfect work on Patsy Walker: Hellcat, and Ultimate Spider-Man Annual #3. Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man is, month after month, the most consistent book Marvel has (possibly ever) published. Putting them together makes me giddy with glee.

Favorite Sneak-Peek: Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s “What Ever Happened to the Caped Crusader.” Again, if I can get past these annoying tech problems, you’ll see our advanced review of it. But suffice to say, get yourself to the comic shop this week; it’s one of the best Batman stories ever written.

Favorite Picture: That one is easy, it’s tiny Wolverine:

Also, Pete was there.

Favorite Overheard Phrase: I didn’t even hear this one, it was just related to me, but on a commission some guy was getting:

“I like the way he’s grabbing her boobs, but I don’t like her eyes. She looks too surprised, and Captain America doesn’t rape people.”

Favorite Interview: That was actually Pete talking to DMC, of Run/DMC (it’s mind-blowingly good, no joke), but Joss Whedon and Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar) in the booth at the same time? I nearly threw up and died.

So, those of you who were at NYCC: what were YOUR favorite moments?

WildStorm has gone through a ton of changes over it’s short history, from Jim Lee’s pet project, to a source of the new wave of superheroes, to part of DC’s 52 Universes (#50, to be exact). Through most of that, Ben Abernathy has served as Senior Editor of WildStorm, and a major driving creative force behind the imprint.

With WildStorm going through its biggest changes in years with the recent World’s End event, we checked in with Ben over IM about what the day-to-day is like for a Senior Editor, what’s next for the WildStorm Universe, and a little tease about our favorite plucky teen detective:

CBC: Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time to chat today!

BA: Sure thing, glad to be involved! Thank YOU for taking the time to “speak” with me!

CBC: I had a tight schedule, but I found some time to work you in.

BA: I appreciate that!

CBC: No problem! In any case, let’s first talk a little bit about your role in WildStorm. For those who don’t know, what’s your role, and what’s the day to day like?

BA: Well, I’m a senior editor at WildStorm and have been part of the company for 6 1/2 years. The day-to-day can easily be described as an elaborate, long-term juggling act. We produce a wide variety of titles, from the WildStorm Universe, creator-driven, and licensed titles, as well as the occasional special project…so it makes us very unique under the DC umbrella.

I juggle the production of roughly eight titles per month and coordinate every aspect creatively–working with the writers, artists, designers, even the printer at times.

Also, in the capacity of the “senior editor” role, I am involved in the creative development of all the editorial titles under the imprint, from the reading/reviewing of proposals, potential licenses, and creator selection.

So, each day can be very different than the last, but it all makes for an interesting and creatively-fullfilling atmosphere and position.

CBC: That’s great… To jump back into your answer a little bit, as you have the Wildstorm Universe, or superhero titles; licensed titles like World of Warcraft, Heroes, and Gears of War; and more niche titles like Ex Machina or Ferryman… What would you say the “mission statement” of WildStorm is?

BA: Hmm…I’d say the mission statement would be to the effect of whatever the property WildStorm is developing–company-owned, creator-driven, or licensed–we’ll deliver a timely, top-notch project
I’d like WildStorm to by synonymous with high quality entertainment.

CBC: Sounds good to me. Let’s talk about one aspect of WildStorm that’s gone through the biggest change recently, the WildStorm Universe of super-hero titles, with the recent World’s End event. Why was this change necessary?

BA: By the first quarter of 2007, the challenges of WorldStorm indicated that we were going to need to move the Universe in a new direction…one of the challenges we had was how to compete in the super hero market with the “Big Two”. The path WildStorm had blazed in the late 90s had become standard fair for both companies, so we had to take our universe in a direction they couldn’t…ideally something drastic enough, but easy to “get” for newbie readers, that we could re-establish the Universe in a viable manner and tell unique, challenging stories that wouldn’t feel like any sort of retread.

And the real key was how to get to that point without anything as directly obvious as a total “reboot”

CBC: So talk me through the thought process of the various mini-series, leading into the current status quo of WildStorm.

BA: Wow, this’ll be a long one.

CBC: Ha, you can summarize if you want. It doesn’t need to be plot… I’m just curious about the path you took, versus, say, Superboy punching a wall.

BA: The immediate question was “Where do we go from here?” We’d tried a more conventional direction with WorldStorm and utilizing some “big name” creators and it hadn’t worked out quite like planned…so coming from probably a dark place, I thought “We should just blow up the entire planet and see where a new world would truly begin.”

From there, it went fairly quickly…we’d begun seeding what was to come as far back as StormWatch PHD #5 (a mysterious character appears people falsely thought was a Monitor) and in The Authority: Prime…meanwhile, we had Number of the Beast in development and determined that book should be the trigger for World’s End–instead of the heroes saving the day, the destruction comes so fast and furious they’re left literally watching the annihilation.

To help set everything up, we planned to do a pair of mini-series that would help bridge WorldStorm to Number of the Beast/World’s End and those were developed into WildStorm Armageddon and WildStorm Revelations–and just for fun, we decided to release all THREE mini-series on a bi-weekly shipping schedule.

The last year has been a looooong one

CBC: Well, it seems to have paid off. WildStorm has always been plagued by criticism of “lack of consistency of publishing schedule.” But the past three months or so have been like clockwork. Why is it working now, when it wasn’t before?

BA: WildStorm, like many publishers, has had their share of late books…but the last three months has clicked because we started working on the World’s End titles well over a year ago.

In most cases, by January of 08, the first 2-3 books for each title were already inked and lettered
Although, the “clockwork” delivery really goes back to October 31st, 2007–when Midnighter: Armageddon debuted. We shipped all three aforementioned series on-time (bi-weekly), with the solicited creators, and Wildcats: World’s End debuted the week after Number of the Beast ended…so really, we’re at a year of the trains running on time.

It’s all in the planning and execution…we determined a direction, the titles (and team line-ups), and then the creators…then it was just executing a plan.

And this includes the back-up stories we’re doing…the plan for them was worked out at the same time as the main, monthly titles…so everything was being put together simultaneously.

CBC: From an outside perspective, another thing that seems to be working in your favor is keeping the line small, currently four series, I think? Will this continue, or are we going to see more World’s End titles as time goes on?

BA: Yeah, it’s definitely worked in our favor–it’s definitely easier to manage and keep everything “on the same page” with fewer core titles. As for the future…who can say? Heh heh…there are more WildStorm Universe titles in the works–another Tranquility series with Gail, a conclusion of the WorldStorm Authority/Wildcats…I had even cryptically referred to a possible DV8 book at the San Diego Comicon…

CBC: That would certainly make fans happy.

BA: I sure hope so! The fan response has been overall really positive…and it’s nice to see our real die-hard fans so rabidly supportive (yes, I’m looking at you Chris Striker).

CBC: Let’s talk about the current status quo, post Armageddon (not the movie, though we could talk about that). Is this what’s happening for the foreseeable future? And if so, how much future are we talking about, as comics have a tendency to switch up “permanent” storylines with a great deal of frequency?

BA: Well, we brought Bruce Willis back…we learned he’d been in a stasis pod under the Pacific Ocean…

CBC: Spoiler!

BA: Well, the future is going to remain sad, miserable, and desolate for the WildStorm Universe for the foreseeable future, as the current story-lines on the titles go through December 2009…and from there, we have more big plans in the works…with a year planning, anything might happen. But this is the course we’ve set…and will be standing by it.

CBC: Just to throw a wrench in those works, and not to spoil anything, but there has been a little bit of an “out” introduced in recent issues with the mention of Nevada Gardens…

BA: Well, honestly, there’s always an “out.” There’s a handful of characters that could probably change the current reality on their own–Jenny Q, The Doctor, the current Void, Max Farraday (anyone remember him?), and one or two others…the Nevada Gardens could…if we were really lame, we could chalk it all up to a whiskey-induced dream of Grifters!

And there was a conscious choice to limit those number of characters in play…Jenny Q vanishes after removing the caged-baby universe that powered the Carrier in Number of the Beast, the Doctor also vanished after he managed to crash-land the Carrier over the UK and London without destroying the planet (fans might get some clarification on what happened to him in a few months), and we know Void is being help captive by Tao…

Also..who said the Nevada Gardens actually still exists? Heh heh

So we want it to be clear–these aren’t mini-series or this isn’t an arbitrary direction

CBC: Okay, then, possibly impolitic side question: any thoughts on Marvel’s similar Ultimatum storyline?

BA: Imitation IS the highest form of flattery Seriously, World’s End wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination the first look at a post-apocaptic earth with super heroes…I’d imagine their storyline’s been in the works for a while, too, I’ll be curious to see if it lasts much beyond a mini-series…we’re in this for the long-haul.

CBC: Good answer! I’ve got a viewer question for you, bit of a more general topic. Garry asks, “How does Ben feel about the role of editors in the field of comic books, and the fact that they are not as well known as the writers and artists?”

BA: Hmm…that’s a good question! It doesn’t really bother me at all and I’d think most editors would say the same thing. I’d question anyone in this position who WAS bothered by it, as that’s not the job description…we’re to facilitate the evolution and creation of wholly unique properties utilizing and developing the best and brightest talent in the world to do so and if we succeed, then it’s a job well done…should public accolades go to the editor for simply doing their job to the best of their ability? I don’t think so…

CBC: Okay, another viewer question: Rich asks, “Where’s the WildStorm Veronica Mars comic, dammit?”

BA: We get asked that an awful lot! Nothing new to report…but man, wouldn’t that be COOL!

CBC: Sure would. Let’s put it to rest for a little, then… Were there ever plans for a series, or was it really just, “Hey, this would be cool” talks?

BA: Ya know, I think the latter. If I recall correctly, VM was a WB-produced show and we had an additional “in” there…and I think further speculation was spurred when it was announced we were doing a Supernatural comic book.

And Rob Thomas made a comment, too, on-line as I recall…but it’s something we’d still love to do…and quite possibly are still poking around (can’t confirm either way, as I really have no idea where that sits).

CBC: Hm, doesn’t sound like we put that to rest at all. Well, I guess we can just say if it DID happen, there would clearly be an audience for it. In any case, last viewer question, very important, probing question: David asks, “Who would win in a fight, Ben Grimm, Uncle Ben, or Big Ben?”

BA: Hmm…good question! Big Ben, clearly. Since it’s “Ben Grimm” and not “The Thing” I can only assume it’s Grimm in human form…and no man can fight a mighty grizzly bear.

CBC: See, I thought he was talking about the clock in London, but I could be wrong. Either way, I’d tend to agree.

BA: Ah, hmm. Sorry I thought you meant the bear from “Grizzly Adams.”

CBC: Fair enough. Okay, last thing for you, and thanks for taking so much time: tease us on what’s coming up in the next year or so. What’s the big thing (or things) we should be looking for from Wildstorm?

BA: Glad to spend the time, no worries! What are the big things to come? Hmm…that’s hard, as I don’t want to reveal too much…but there’s going to be a number of faces from WildStorm’s past popping up in the books (main and back-up stories)…we’ll see more of Tao and get a sense of what his bigger plans are as well as more insight into Lynch’s re-gathering of Team 7…The Wildcats will be re-hashing a millennia-old conflict, Gen13 are going to be falling upon harder times, and StormWatch and the Authority will be finally meeting face-to-face…

And maybe…just maybe…World War 3 is coming

CBC: Well, there’s a tease for you.

“I feel like my creator-owned ideas are more interesting for me at this point in my career than being the 300th guy to draw another Batman story.”

Click here for our interview with Mark Millar.

War Heroes #1 is available now!

“The first thing I thought was that [Kirkman] had been kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, because it said, “Kirkman’s plea to the industry”… I’d hate to see Robert beheaded, because I really like him.”

Click here for our interview with Tony Harris.

War Heroes #1 is available now!