Note: third page is not sequential with first two

We asked Oeming to tell us a little more about this intriguing new addition to the Powersverse:

“Enki comes in as Deena is going through crisis. We wanted a character that people would love, but wasn’t a clone of Deena, and we didn’t want to do the obvious which is create the opposite of Deena either. Enki is her own character, her flaws may be her loyalty to the job, but you know with Bendis writing that loyatly will be tested. There wasn’t any pre-thought put into her ethnicity, Powers is a world that reflects the one we see around us, I think it was just instinctual, much like how most of Powers is developed.

I wanted to give her a keen sense of fashion; since Deena is very tom boyish, I did want Enki to be thoughtful of her dress. The type of clothes reflect a strong sense of confidence and self-respect she carries. Her scarf is like Walkers tie, it’s her ‘cape’. After the first issue I drew her, I called Brian and said “Please, please lets keep this character around!!” And he laughed, he said ‘I knew you’d love her!’ and I do.

Welcome to Powers Enki, I hope we dont kill you.”

My thoughts exactly!

Actually, Enki is not Walker’s only new (to me at least) partner if you get my drift, but let us not venture further into Spoilerville.

“THE 25 COOLEST DEAD SUPER HEROES OF ALL TIME”
Homicide detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim investigate murders specific to superhero cases, and they both have a secret: They both have powers. It’s our big 25th issue at Marvel – and to celebrate, we have a brand-new story and two covers, one each by POWERS creators Oeming and Bendis! Not only is this issue the perfect jumping-on point, but this new story will blow the roof off of everything you know about crime comics and super hero comics! Walker vs. Pilgrim! And they both have powers! From the writer of some of your favorite Marvel comics (ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, NEW AVENGERS) comes a brand-new chapter from this award-winning book. Part 1 (of 6)

32 PGS./Explicit Content …$2.95
POWERS is TM & © 2006 Jinxworld Inc. All Rights Reserved.
IN STORES: August 8, 2007

“SECRET IDENTITY”
Homicide Detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim investigate murders specific to super-hero cases, and they both have a secret: They both have powers. And in this shocking issue, Christian Walker vs. Satan! Oh, you heard us! ’Nuff said! From the writer of some of your favorite Marvel comics – including ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN and NEW AVENGERS – comes a brand-new chapter from this award-winning book.
Part 6 (of 6)
32 PGS./Explicit Content …$2.95
Powers is TM & © 2006 Jinxworld Inc., 2006. All Rights Reserved.

PRICE: 2.95
IN STORES: 2007-04-25

POWERS’ MOST EXPLOSIVE YEAR CONTINUES! Walker and Pilgrim’s lives change forever when police headquarters is attacked by Powers with a vendetta! From the writer of NEW AVENGERS! Part 3 (of 6)
32 PGS./Explicit Content …$2.95
POWERS is TM & © 2006 Jinxworld Inc. All Rights Reserved.

PRICE: 2.95
IN STORES: 2006-11-29

These interviews should be fun and informative; from the POV of one artist/writer getting into the mind of another creator, helping readers get into our mindset. I won’t be asking about specific projects, but about the process behind those projects. I will try and be as honest as possible about myself, and with whom I am interviewing, and I won’t pull any punches if I have them, while at the same time, remaining respectful.

I’d like to thank MATT WAGNER for his time…

OEMING: Hey Matt, thanks for doing this. How long have we known each other? It must have been the early 90s, I think; we met during the Con circuit through mutual friends like Rich Rankin, Neil Vokes and Bryan Glass.

WAGNER: I seem to remember first meeting you at a Con in Philadelphia. This was long after I had moved away from that area and you came over to my table show me some of your work. You were pretty young at the time and I seem to remember that we BOTH had a lot more hair in those days. Well, you did anyway. I remember that I was particularly struck with your stuff and regretted that I just didn’t have any Grendel project currently on deck that I could have offered you. I also remember that your work in those days, while tight and accomplished, looked NOTHING like what you’ve since evolved into. It was more of a standard super-hero style, but it still had a lot of flair. Had none of the brevity and boldness that exemplifies your work these days. Really nice to see someone go through such a growing process like that.

O: It’s been a long slow romance with you and I! I can’t think of a specific time I was like, “Wow, Matt’s my buddy!” — meaning most pros I become friends with, it happens at a specific show or Con; some shared experience. I think with you, it was simply showing you my work, talking with mutual pals and just slowly getting to know you over the years. I think I became most familiar with you through food, though! Baltimore has a great Con every spring, and we’ve had some really nice meals together. I was surprised to find you are as much into food as you are comics and art.

W: HA! Yeah, it might surprise people to know that, amongst my “civilian” friends, I’m far better known for my culinary prowess than for my story-telling abilities. In fact, I’ve often said that if I hadn’t learned to draw first, I might’ve become a chef instead of a comic artist. Still, my first love was comics and I guess I was just destined to go down that path. I’ve told this story before but this seems a good time to tell it again…my parents had a “School Memories” album/scrapbook for me when I was young. On the back of each page for the elementary years, it had a space to fill in “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.” One year I wrote “astronaut” but EVERY other year, I wrote “comic book writer.” I guess at that point I just assumed that whoever wrote these marvelous tales must surely draw them as well, right?

O: Now, I’ve learned through some research that your cooking goes back to when you met your wife? Did you have skills before you met?

W: Well, I had a roommate whose dad was a good cook and we took some of those initial steps towards developing those same skills together. But then, yeah, I really started to “cook”, as it were, when I realized that there are VERY few better ways to romance a woman. Guys out there, get a clue and take it from me…women fucking LOVE it when you cook for them. Even if the results aren’t so great the first several times around, they soooooo appreciate the effort. It shows you fucking care. It’s better than flowers and it’s better than a box of chocolates. The very fact that you’ve created something specifically for THEIR pleasure and enjoyment is something that, again, shows you really care about them. And don’t worry, like anything in life, if you keep at it and learn from your mistakes, you’ll only get better and better as time goes by.

O: And at this point, you were working with Diana Schutz at Comico. We’ll get more into that in a bit. At what point did you decide that comics were something you wanted to do?

W: Like I said, pretty damn young. My mother was an English teacher when she was younger and from a very young age, she’d instilled in me a need and a desire to read, read, read. She always said that if you were a good reader—if you enjoyed reading and were adept at it—then you could accomplish anything you wanted out of life. She really saw it as the key to any and all success. As a result, to this day, I’m one of the most voracious readers I know. In fact, I often feel a certain sense of loneliness over that fact. Nobody…repeat, nobody…I know reads as often or with as much relish as I do. As a result, I’m often left feeling high and dry whenever I finish a book. I just want to talk to somebody about it—somebody that’s read it as well. I suppose I could go online and find a chat room or something but, for me, that’s just not the same thing.

O: And when did you begin drawing? Was there any particular reason you began to draw? Was it a love for comics, or did that come later?

W: Well, in addition to this need to read, I was an only child and I grew up out in the country. I didn’t have a parcel of friends who lived just around the corner and I should also mention that this was in the days before there was much in the way of TV or any other video entertainment. As a result, I drew to entertain myself. The wonderful thing about comics, for me, was that they combined both reading AND drawing. What a perfect match! It’s like in the old TV ads where someone’s chocolate just HAPPENS to fall into someone else’s peanut butter…

O: What were your earliest memories? Have any of those found their way into your work? Your writing in particular?

W: Earliest memories…jeez, I suppose listening to stories. I grew up in a fairly traditional religious family. I like to describe it as being surrounded by an “active mythology”. My parents tell a tale of how a traveling bible salesman who came to our door one day (I shit you not). He was offering a lushly illustrated bible for sale and he was quite amazed that, although very young, I could look through the various pictures and identify so many of them. Jesus, Noah, Moses, Daniel in the lion’s den, etc… The funny part came when I happened upon a picture of Adam and Eve in their loinskins. “Look, Dad!”, I proclaimed. “TARZAN!” Like I said, I guess I was doomed to this life from the start…

O: How about growing up? What was your boyhood like?

W: I’d have to call it fairly happy. I surely had all the same anxieties of any kid while growing up but my home life was pretty stable. My parents had been married for nearly fourteen years before they had me. As a result, they had worked out a lot of the bugs and kinks in their relationship that often have such a devastating impact on young kids. It’s really a drag to see your parents arguing all the time (like some of my friends’ parents seemed to do) but that just wasn’t the case in our household. Like I said, they were fairly traditional in their religious beliefs but they were also fairly progressive in how they thought those beliefs applied in day-to-day living. I didn’t grow up with a lot of repression or guilt.

Here’s another funny tale…when I was in second grade, some kids on the bus had told me that “to fuck” meant “to lie”. Ergo, a “fucker” was a “liar”. Now my parents were big horseracing fans (my dad, anyway) and they used to take me to this huge county fair every year, which would always culminate in an afternoon of sulky-cart racing. So, we’re seated in these huge crowded grandstands and my mom had just finished telling me that she couldn’t deliver on something she had promised me (can’t remember what it was—only the result). Anyway, pissed off, I leapt to my feet and yelled at her, “YOU FUCKER!” Now, most parents of that time period, or even today I might add, would’ve taken their kids head off for such an infraction. Instead, she grabbed my by the arm, firmly sat me back in my seat and told me through gritted teeth, “DON’T say that again! It obviously doesn’t mean what you think it does and we will TALK about this when we get back to the car this evening.” Well, I spent the rest of the day bewildered and confused and when the day was done and we finally made it back to the car, I hopped into the back seat and promptly asked, “Okay, so what’s it mean?” My mom turned around in her seat and just told me straight out. Not angry or anything…just honestly informational. That was my birds-and-bees talk and they obviously thought it was time that I know the facts of life. So, apparently, I sat in the darkened backseat—obviously somewhat stunned—as we drove home. After twenty minutes or so, I again leaned forward and gave my parents what I thought was some darn good advice—“You know, if you guys would’ve tried that a little earlier, you wouldn’t have had to wait so long to have me!”

O: What about school? For me, it was pure torture, in every way. I knew from kindergarten that I would hate it, and I was right!

W: No, I was okay in school. Again, my mom had been a teacher so I grew up with a fairly positive image of the schooling experience. It’s the same with my wife and going to the dentist. Most people HATE going to the dentist, right? Well, my wife’s dad was a dentist so she grew up with that being a positive experience, not a negative one. She absolutely LOVES having her teeth cleaned! I was a smart kid so I always got pretty good grades and, even though I was never the most popular kid in school, I managed to get along with most of the various cliques; the jocks as well as the stoners, the “A” crowd as well as the nerds. Now, I wasn’t Ferris Bueller or anything, but I think my main conduit to fitting into those groups was the fact that I was fairly confident in myself, coupled with the (bigger) fact that I could draw. Drawing is a HUGE common denominator, I’ve found. Most everyone who can’t draw finds it to be an almost mystical ability and they get a huge kick out of watching those of us who can. Eventually, my confidence grew to the point where I even became something of a school leader. I was my senior year’s class president, in fact. Even had to deliver a graduation speech before a couple thousand people.

O: Did you go from high school into an art school or college?

W: Yeah, I actually had the best of both worlds so far as the whole collegiate experience goes, even though I ended up going to school for four and a half years and STILL never managed to graduate nor obtain a degree! I went to a big, liberal arts university in Virginia for a couple of years and so I got to experience that whole side of coin; dorm living, frat parties, beautiful tree-lined campus, the whole bit…

And then I transferred to an art college in inner-city Philadelphia and got to experience an entirely different world of academia; elite intellectualism, crazy fucking art students, urban living. Unfortunately, the art college claimed that I had “insufficient art experience” (which was utter horseshit) and made me start all over as a freshman. Now that was a decision that we definitely should have fought, but my parents (bless their hearts) really did have absolutely NO art experience and so they just went along with whatever the college asked. I now realize those fuckers were only after another two years tuition and, as a result, I was stuck taking the same classes I had already finished at my former university. In the end, I just got too fucking fed up by being in school for so long and too fucking anxious to get on with my life. I dropped out, which was a huge blow to my very supportive parents, but I actually had a unique opportunity waiting in the wings.

O: What was your first real foray into comics? Was it creator-owned or did you try your hand at other works before Mage and Grendel?

W: Well, my first experience with actual publishing came at the first University I attended. They published an on-campus newspaper twice a week that had a huge circulation—something like 15-20 thousand copies! Anyway, they regularly ran a page of student comic strips and I eventually submitted and got one in there as well. It was titled “Our Hero” and it was a super-hero spoof that starred a fat, bald little super-hero named Max whose cape was always too long and who wore something that looked like a tutu. In a bizarre precursor to the fact that I would later create one of American comics’ most enduring anti-heroes (Grendel), Max was eventually overshadowed by his main villain; a particularly garish and cruel, costumed character named Nasty Muscle. This was my first experience with meeting real deadlines and that was invaluable. Like most high-school artists, I had drawn a lot of stuff over the years but this was the first time that I absolutely HAD to draw something—on time and repeatedly, no fail and no bullshit. If you missed your deadline and your strip didn’t run for an issue, all your friends and classmates would give you total shit—a strong motivator at that age. After about a semester or so of doing that, I also became the paper’s “Graphics Editor”, which was a high-falutin’ term for “spot illustrator”. This job meant that I had to show up at the paper’s offices two nights a week (Wed and Sun) around nine o’clock in the evening—after most of the next day’s edition had already been laid out. If there was any article for which they didn’t have an accompanying photo or enough copy to fill the allotted space, I had to whip up an illo on the spot. And I had to stay there until it was all done—usually until 2 or 3 in the morning. For that, I got a one credit “A” each semester and was paid about thirty bucks a month. Believe me, at the time that seemed like heaven! I felt tested, accomplished AND I had pizza money to boot!

Anyway, several years later I found myself at the Philadelphia art school and happened to run into some guys on the elevator who were wearing comic book t-shirts. These were the guys who later formed the initial core of Comico but, at the time, they were also publishing an in-school paper called Duckwork. Although nowhere nearly as accomplished and established as the other paper I’d worked on, Duckwork had a real indy sort of vibe and, while it DID feature some cursory school news, it was mainly a venue for budding cartoonists—often, but not always, with a “duck” theme. I quickly set up a niche for myself but doing duck styled take-offs of famous movie posters; Raiders of the Lost Duck, Rollerduck, etc…

Several years later, the main guys behind Duckwork (Gerry Giovinco and Bill Cucinotta) dropped out of school to try and form an independent comic company. They named it Comico (yeah, to clear up the YEARS of controversy…it was pronounced “Co-mee-ko”) and a year or so later, I left school as well to become part of that fledgling effort.

O: I first became aware of your work through a T-Shirt that I only recently, after many holes from my cats clawing at me and such, had to throw away. It was a Mage T-Shirt that said, ” WHAT IS THE COLOR OF MAGIC?”, though everyone at school thought it said “WHAT 15 THE COLOR OF MAGIC?” So that shirt must have been close to 20 years old!

W: Almost. 2004 was Mage’s 20th anniversary and 2007 is Grendel’s 25th. Yeah, I’m an olllllld fucker!

O: It was years later that I learned about Mage through a mutual friend, Bryan Glass, whom I would team up with often as a writer on my projects. He did some photo work with you on a cover? It was you and yet another pal and Comico alumni, Bill Cucinotta.

W: Yeah, Bill, Gerry and Gerry’s high school buddy, Phil Lasorda were the initial core of Comico. I had gotten to know Gerry and “Cooch” pretty well in school and, like I said, we all worked pretty closely together in producing Duckwork. When they both dropped out of school to get Comico up and rolling, it was always understood that I would eventually, somehow, be involved. Their first publication was an anthology that basically served as a testing ground for various artistic wannabes—the old “throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks” theory. My first actual gig for them was published in the second issue of COMICO PRIMER, a ten-page story that served as the world’s (and my) first introduction to Grendel.

Soon enough, Comico decided to launch four flagship books that they saw as the basis for an eventual line that would, one day they hoped, come to dominate the freshly forming world of independent comics. Unfortunately, none of the books were very good—and, yeah, I include Grendel in that description. We all had a lot of ideas but just had nowhere near the artistic chops to back them up, production-wise. Eventually, I also dropped out of school and was hired on by the guys as the all-purpose office boy. As a result of them all having to spend more and more time involved in the actual business of running Comico, I—just by default—was the one who could spend more and more time developing as an artist. Before too long, Comico realized that to really compete in the world of commercial comic books, they’d have to move into color production (all of our initial books had been b&w, a common trait of early 80’s indy stuff). They managed to sign a deal with a fledgling writer who was all but unknown at the time, Chuck Dixon. He and his then-wife/artist collaborated on a book about a nun who was actually a covert assassin for the Vatican in the far-flung future, titled Evangeline. It had created a lot of early buzz and Comico soon realized that they’d get a lot more mileage and a much better printing rate out of “gang-printing” Evangeline with another new color book. Since they had no one else on deck, the task fell to one of we four to come up with an all-new color title to be part of Comico’s grand leap into the world of color production. Since Grendel was the only one of the initial four books that had gotten ANY sort of positive response, the job just kind of fell into my lap. I set to work and eventually came up with a story of a mythic hero reborn in modern day as an unassuming everyman. This schtick has since become somewhat commonplace in pop culture (Buffy springs to mind) but, at the time, it was perceived as fresh and unusual. That book was MAGE.

O: Come to think of it, I think it was Bryan who introduced us. He thought very highly of you, and especially of Mage. In fact, we did a book together, QUIXOTE, a sort of modern day version of the story, in which at times we had to be careful to not tread on the same ground. Now, if Mage sucked, we wouldn’t have cared, but Mage is a milestone in comics. When did you realize it would be something special to the industry?

W: Yeah, see? Even you guys had a turn at the classic-hero-in-our-times motif. The funny thing is, I’d already tried my hand at this same story at an earlier stage of my life, but ultimately shelved it for a variety of reasons—the main one being that I was just nowhere NEAR ready for the rigorous demands of producing a full length comic book series. Several years earlier, I’d tried to develop a story that would feature the return of King Arthur in the not-so-distant future. Now, I should mention here that I actually HAD produced several comic books in my life at this point, which were all pre-Grendel as well as my involvement with Comico—all very fledgling efforts, of course, and all single issues. When I was a kid I had written and drawn GRANITE MAN (about a guy who develops a pair of wristbands that make his fists hard-as-the-shit AND enabled him to fly—yeah, don’t ask me to explain THAT one now!) and then in junior high school I had done a comic book as part of a science project—CAPTAIN ECOLOGY (who had a WAY froofy 70s do and sported a…shades of Mirth…cape-like poncho). A little later my dad, via his work, had access to one of the earlier Xerox machines and so, with his help, I was able to actually produce multiple, hand-stapled copies of a book called ZACHARY STARR—VAMPIRE HUNTER. This last one actually had some early elements that eventually showed up in GRENDEL—obviously, the vampires but it was also told in a combination of traditional word balloons as well as blocks of text. Sadly, I don’t have a single remaining copy of that book and I would surely LOVE to see it again!

Anyway, back to MAGE…I’d produced two pages of something that was ostensibly gonna be about the return of an unknowing and reluctant King Arthur. Other than THAT factor, it was NOTHING like what MAGE would eventually become. It looked FAR more like a traditional super-hero/fantasy comic and, if people think my earliest published work was (kindly, at best) crude and undeveloped…well, THIS piece-of-shit made THAT stuff look like a masterpiece! Anyway, I quickly shelved the whole idea when I read that DC announced it was producing a little project they were calling CAMELOT 3000—all about the return of King Arthur in the distant future…blah, blah, blah. “Oh well,” I thought, “Fuck this. It’s being done by the big guys.” And, besides, that Brian Bolland guy could maybe draw a LITTLE bit better than me at the time! The strange thing was, though, when CAMELOT 3000 eventually hit the stands, I found it strangely unsatisfying. Sure, it looked great but I found it all just so fucking OBVIOUS. It didn’t speak to me in any way and it certainly didn’t have any of the “everyman” factor I was looking for in my own version. Aside from the twist of Tristan being reborn as a woman, I found the story was just retreading the same ground as the original legends. I felt it added nothing new to the equation and it had none of the mystery and intrigue that meant good storytelling to me. Eventually, I decided there was room in this world for more than one version of this story and that—precedent be damned—I was gonna go ahead and do my own.

You asked when I knew that MAGE was going to be important to the industry. I just don’t think like that when I’m creating. I think about whether or not it’s going to be important to ME. And that’s what I felt was missing from CAMELOT 3000—it had no sense of the personal about it and so seemed only like product, not art. I felt that, in order to make this a truly mythic story, I HAD to personalize it. I had to make this a story that related to me, that came from me, that spoke to my concerns and confusions about the world around me.

O: Okay, so when I first read Mage — and I confess, I haven’t reread it in over 15 years –but it left SUCH an impact on me. It was the first time I was introduced to the idea of setting an old story within modern times. I was also unaware of the mythological tones at the time. How aware were you of mythology really playing out in Mage at the time? I’m assuming you were already reading Joseph Campbell back then?

W: Actually, no, I had yet to really delve into much of Campbell’s writings at that point. For those who might be reading this and have no idea of what Mike’s referring to…Joseph Campbell was a scholar and author who often referred to himself as a “mythologist”. He wrote many volumes concerning the commonality of human mythology and how every culture’s stories and legends all strive to achieve the same goals but are colored differently depending on that society’s physical and environmental realities. One of his most famous books is THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES wherein he discusses what he refers to as “The Hero’s Journey”, about the surprisingly identical stages of Hero myths throughout the world. Obviously, this train of thought means a lot to the structure of MAGE but, truthfully, at the beginning there…I was working out of pure instinct which, I suppose, only goes to further defend Campbell’s theories of a common human experience expressed through myth. I had been interested in myths, legends and comparative religions for quite some time but hadn’t yet discovered this brilliant man who seemed to distill all my many opinions into a cohesive whole until just AFTER I had completed the first MAGE series. I mean, listen to this…not only does he break the Hero’s Journey up into three distinct stages (MAGE is a planned trilogy and has been from the beginning), but here’s his breakdown of the narrative steps in what he terms the INITIATION stage: The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, The Crossing of the First Threshold, The Belly of the Whale. I mean, JESUS CHRIST, that’s like reading a thesis of the plot to The Hero Discovered!! I remember reading that, again after the fact, and saying to myself, “Whew! Got THAT one right, at least!”

O: Here’s an interesting argument I get into. People say that superheroes (tm Marvel/DC, please don’t sue us) are modern day mythology. I disagree. I think only a few are, but as a whole I disagree with the idea entirely. What do you think?

W: Why do you disagree with that?

O: I’m thinking only Superman and possibly early Marvel Stan Lee/Kirby/Ditko books really qualify as modern day mythology, but even those I think have stopped qualifying. I’m sure there are a few others off the radar, but as far as mainstream characters go, I think that was it, but they no longer have that standing. This is really unpopular to say and I’m going to get shit for it, but here it goes.

I think comics say a lot about society, but that doesn’t make it mythology.

W: Well, WHY doesn’t that qualify as mythology? Because there’s no shrine to Superman? Because people don’t get baptized in the name of Professor X?

I think you’re confusing mythology with organized religion. You mentioned that the ancient Greeks believed that the stories of their gods were true and factual. I don’t know that that’s necessarily so—at least not in the sense you’re describing. The priests who served at the various temples certainly WANTED their citizenry to believe that these tales were actually true because that furthered their own power in that society. But I suspect the average man on the street or on the battlefield viewed those myth cycles as a convenient belief structure that served to both quantify and qualify their everyday lives. They may have thought to themselves, “Oh, the gods do this…” and “The gods want that…” but, really, most of them realized that they had never really MET a god or seen a titan.

By the time the ILIAD was written, I think most Greeks knew that the gods who watched, wagered and dabbled in this narrative of the Trojan War were, in fact, dramatic devices used to reflect and underscore the actions of the war’s far more human participants. I think there are religious zealots the world over and that there always have been, but I think the vast majority of people hold their religions in their hearts as a metaphor, even if they don’t actively describe it to themselves in that fashion. For instance, I mentioned that my parents are very traditional in their Christianity. Still, my mother has no trouble reconciling the fact that most of the biblical stories that mean so much to her are metaphors created by a more primitive people. Thus, even though she believes God created the heavens and the Earth, she has no problem thinking of the “six days” scenario as a metaphor—a description of stages by a human mindset that couldn’t yet conceive of, much less describe, the billions and billions of years that were actually necessary for our universe to unfold. “Days” were a time frame that they understood and the description of God accomplishing all of creation in a matter of “Days” is a metaphor to describe his omnipotence. For her, creationism and evolution AREN’T mutually exclusive. Similarly, my mom clings a little more literally to the tales of Jesus’ various miracles but, whenever I challenge her on that, she admits that what is, in fact, most important to her is Christ’s message of compassion and peace and that the litany of his “magic tricks” or “miracles” (take your pick) are most likely tall tales meant to illustrate the elevating power of his philosophy.

Y’know, I proudly describe myself as an atheist and that often scares people or just downright pisses them off. Very often, I’m met with an indignant hostility about this attitude, as if my not adhering to any specific belief structure is an outright affront to those who do. Which confuses me…if I was a different religion from those objecting to my lack of faith, they’d have no complaints. It’s the fact that I don’t cling to something that’s readily and easily described by an established myth structure that deems my opinions as unworthy to many folks. And, believe me, I am sick to death of people lumping me into the category of “Atheists don’t believe in anything.” Not so. Campbell describes it thus: “Theists (mono, poly, etc..) believe that THEIR mythology is the one universal, cosmic fact. Atheists realize that ALL mythology is merely a grouping of metaphors.” Which, of course, doesn’t preclude a deep understanding of the moral lessons and realities that all religions espouse. Just because I don’t believe that Christ is my personal savior, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his sermons and the tale of his sacrifice. Just because I don’t believe that Yahweh spoke from a burning bush and caused the Ten Commandments to be carved into living rock, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in a common code of ethics that shape and guide human interactions. So, I see mythology as something somewhat different than religion. To me, religion is the organized power structure meant to impose its views on the populace at large while mythology is the genuine expression of a culture’s core beliefs, hopes and dreams. Religion seeks to codify all of life’s mysteries into a series of concrete and dogmatic answers. Mythology seeks to pose all those eternal questions in the form of a metaphor.

O: I think my definition of Modern Mythology would fall into categories like UFOs, GHOSTS, CONSPIRACY, ESP, and Cryptozoology. To me, mythology has to be a mixture of fantasy, reality, solid facts and the intangible, and yet carry an internal truth. Comics come close, but I don’t see them approaching that level of Mythology. I think comics at best are a reflection of ourselves.

Stories like Mage, Powers, Bone, Maus, reflect our society, they make strong bold statements about who we are and what we believe, but I still don’t think that qualifies as mythology.

W: Okay, again, so your contention that a lot of superhero stuff isn’t modern mythology is based on the fact that there isn’t a group of “followers” who hold those narratives to be absolute reality.

O: That’s my contention, yes.

W: And I don’t think that’s what’s specifically necessary to make something mythic. Campbell wrote a series of four books collectively titled THE MASKS OF GOD, wherein he examined the world’s major belief systems from the beginning of time. The first volume covers PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY; the second, OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY; the third, ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY; and the last explores the future of human legendry, CREATIVE MYTHOLOGY. In the latter, Campbell maintains that codified myths structures arose as a result of many factors but that geography played one of the most significant roles. Religions developed as a way of banding the people of any particular region into a societal whole, answering their fears and lending support to their emotional needs. Different versions of religion arose because of human societies evolving in different areas of the world over years and years of history. In modern times, the bonds imposed on our sense of communication don’t really exist due to any geographical limitations. Nowadays, you can easily touch a button and instantaneously establish close contact with a person literally living on the other side of the world. So, Campbell contends, maybe the need to codify and limit the face of God in order to strengthen the cultural identity of any specific tribe is no longer a viable factor in the mythic experience. Maybe we have reached a stage wherein each and every person can paint their own particular Mask of God, describing in their own fashion the mysteries of life and what they, themselves, see as the limitless potentials of eternity. Sounds a bit Utopian, I know, but I really think we’re moving in that direction. The realities of mass communication have only existed in our world for a hundred years or so and just look at all the changes that have resulted. And, believe me, a mere century is nothing so far as societal evolution is concerned, a drop in the bucket. Now, I’d agree that most of DC and MARVEL’s various continuities don’t even come close to attaining mythic resonance. But the ones you mentioned (in addition to the more indy examples you gave) do, I feel, spring from that particular well in the human soul that cries out for expression and which finds its best and boldest release in the form of myth.

You mentioned how Siegel and Shuster’s Jewish heritage played such a significant role in their creation of Superman. This even comes out in the similarities between his origin and that of Moses, both cast adrift to escape certain death only to later deliver freedom from oppression via supernatural feats. Additionally, the names of Superman’s family are derivative of the Hebrew suffix “El”, meaning “Of God”. Thus, Jor-el and Kal-el are on a par with the mightiest archangels: Gabriel, Michael, Emmanuel, etc… Now, those are the cultural roots that influenced their seemingly timeless character, but their personal realities played a huge factor as well. Did you know that Jerry Siegel’s father was shot and killed by a burglar when the son was only sixteen? That fact explains a lot as to why the young writer would later create a bulletproof hero as his modern day messiah. So, yeah, I do think some (but certainly not all) modern comic book characters do qualify as myth. But not for the effect they have on their readers (or “followers”) but more for the reasons they sprang from their storytellers’ imaginations in the first place. Thus, SUPERMAN is an American myth while BOOSTER GOLD is just yet another bit of DC product.

O: I think that last sentence is a good middle ground, or as close as we can get to it. I spoke to Diana Schutz about how she met you in those early days of Comico. It was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1985, right? I think it was issue 6 of Mage and there was a Grendel backup story she worked on?

W: Yeah, after Comico moved into color production (and started to finally show a profit) all the original b&w books were left in the dust. The owners finally realized that they just weren’t cut out to be professional comic book artists and settled into the roles of administrators and businessmen. Over the first handful of issues of MAGE, I was still very much finding my stride, but the response was good. MAGE was garnering a readership such as GRENDEL never had. Still, I did continue to hear from various readers who wanted the rest of Grendel’s tale. Since the b&w issues had basically stopped in the middle of what was obviously a finite storyline, I thought it might be a good idea to try and revive my earlier effort in the form of a backup feature that would run, now utterly redesigned and in color, in the remaining issues of MAGE (which was also a finite series). That premiered in MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED #6 and that was when Diana first came on board as an editor at Comico so, yeah, that was indeed our first experience working together. In fact, I remember her coming over to my studio one day and me showing her the first pages for the Grendel backup feature, which would eventually become GRENDEL: DEVIL BY THE DEED. I can still remember her unabashed enthusiasm over what I was doing at the time and that was a real thrill. It’s always good to be appreciated and my exposure to Di and her opinions of my work were a major motivator in the early stages of my career.

O: Diana said she first met you when she was working for Amazing Heroes. Incidentally, this is where my work was first published as a fan in the letters pages. She was out to interview a bunch of cool cats out there doing books like Love and Rockets, but she was beat to the punch by someone called Heidi Mcdonald (where have I heard that name before? Only kidding, Heidi!) So, she interviewed you, I don’t think she knew much about your work at the time. This was way early on in your career, right?

W: Yeah, that must’ve been around the fourth issue of MAGE. She later interviewed me in much greater depth for an in-store magazine that she edited when she worked at Comics & Comix in California.

O: Diana also said she had a hard time getting in touch with you; something about the Queen version of Metropolis was playing? Does that ring a bell?

W: HA! Yeah, and she’s never let me forget it! We had lined up a time to talk and when the time came I had, indeed, forgotten about the interview and gone to see the colorized re-release of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And let’s just say I had a mighty good reason to be forgetful in those days }ahem{. Anyway, we eventually did hook up and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, my personal history, at least.

O: At the time, she had no idea that she would later not only be your editor, but your sister-in-law. What was your first impression of her; do you remember that interview at all?

W: No, I don’t remember the interview although I do remember the time we actually first met. Comico eventually became aware that they just weren’t prepared for their company to grow at the leaps and bounds that were, seemingly, just over the horizon. They knew they needed help and so they had recently hired Bob Schreck whom we had all known from his years of basically running the many shows for what was then the hottest circuit of comic Cons around, Creation Conventions. Bob was slated to start at the beginning of the new year (1985, I think) and had driven down with his girlfriend to attend Comico’s Christmas party. As most people know, that girlfriend was Diana and together they turned Comico from basically a fan press into one of the most successful and influential independent publishing houses at the time. My first impression was that Di was a gal who brooked no shit, had no fear of speaking her mind and who loved all sorts of comic books. And, over the intervening years, very little has changed. That’s still pretty much my opinion of her. I was right.

O: As Diana tells the story, it was Thanksgiving circa 86 when her sister came to Philly and needed someone to show her around the city and she volunteered you, not thinking anything more of it than someone to show her sister the city?

W: Oh, she is soooo fucking FULL of it! She had been trying to matchmake the two of us for YEARS!! YEARS, I tell ya! She was CONSTANTLY trying to convince Barb that she needed to meet this hot young comic artist she was now working with and vice versa to me. Of course, both of us resisted any such pairing just as a matter of pride. It was like, “Di, I don’t wanna meet your fucking long-haired, comic-geek buddy,” and, “Di, I don’t wanna meet your fucking weirdo, Canadian sister!” Trouble was, when we finally DID meet each other, that time you’re referring to, well…

Do you remember that scene in THE GODFATHER where Michael has gone into hiding in Sicily after having killed a cop back in the states? He’s out walking around the countryside with his two bodyguards and they happen upon a crowd of young locals. Michael locks eyes with his soon-to-be wife for the first time and–in an instant–they’re both struck mute, all but physically staggered by the immediate force of their attraction for each other. The Sicilians call it “The Thunderbolt” but it’s more commonly known in the States as “Love At First Sight”. Corny as it all sounds, that’s pretty much how it was when I finally opened the door of my apartment and there stood Diana with Barbara at her side. BOOM! Done.

O: And you’ve been married 20 years now. That’s great. How does she deal with sharing her life with an artist? Are you a workhorse; do you have trouble dividing your time between the love of your family and the love of your work?

W: Well, at this point in my career, I’m something of a well-oiled machine. Sure, there’ve been times over the years that my work has threatened to eclipse many other aspects of my life but we managed to cross those bridges unscathed. Nowadays, we share a pretty stable life together. Our kids are healthy and happy; we live in a beautiful house and each have our individual careers (Barb’s a middle school teacher). All good.

O: SO this early love of cooking started when you met your wife? You kind of took over that whole area?

W: HA! Yeah, she tried cooking for me once—and only once. We quickly decided where the division of labor lay in regards to THAT side of our relationship. Barb can literally NOT boil water. Its funny, when I used to leave town to go to Cons and such, the kids used to moan, “Daaaad! What are we gonna EAT while you’re gone?!” Now they’ve gotten old enough to realize that, when Dad’s gone, they’re most likely going OUT to dinner every night!

O: And your son, Brennan is also a “foodie”? Diana told me she took him out to see a play version of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” When he was like 8 or 9 and they had dinner; she gave him the kids menu, complete with crayons I’m sure, and he put it aside and asked if they had Chicken Marsala? Man, your kid eats better than me; I’m still all about spaghetti and meatballs. You two cook together?

W: Yeah, my son’s a foodie, but my daughter, not so much. Funny thing is, when I was a kid, I was more like my daughter–a very picky eater with a distinctly middle-American sort of palette. Eventually, I branched out and once those floodgates were open, I dove into the vast sea of culinary delights like a pig in slop (so to speak). So I have faith that she’ll come around one day. I try not to give her too much shit about it. An even funnier version of that tale about my son and his sophisticated tastes is this: when his fourteenth birthday was a few days away I asked him, “Hey, what do you want me to cook you for your birthday dinner?” Now, what would most fourteen-year old guys say? Pizza, right? Or hamburgers, etc… He thinks for a moment and then asks, “Can you make that African lamb stew? The one with the couscous, pistachios and mint?”

O: You’ve helped me a few times to order when we were out. I understand Diana would have starved to death in Hawaii if it were not for you. The thing that really impresses me about your cooking is that you cater to all tastes. I came by your place one time with Bendis, and you served the best Chicken Wings! You know, I don’t even know what Marsala is! I’m all about the Wings and or Spaghetti.

W: HA! Well, my very first job was as a short-order cook at a Howard Johnson’s. Now, while I wouldn’t exactly call that “fine-dining”, it DID give me my initial taste of cooking—how you put food to flame and let the heat do its work. Don’t worry and fuss at it so much. Additionally, it gave me, yeah, this attitude and ability to produce different things for different people all in the very same meal. I feel people oughta be able to eat whatever the fuck they want and I try to accommodate that as best I can. Admittedly, it does get to be a bit of a stretch whenever I’m with my wife’s family at holidays and such. JESUS, what a crowd! Diana won’t eat mammals while my wife does eat meat but isn’t all that crazy about it. Their dad, on the other hand, is an old-school-meat-and-potatoes sort who recently discovered he’s borderline diabetic, so he’s got to watch his starch intake. And my wife’s youngest sister and her husband USED to be super-holistic (although they have lightened up a bit in that regard). And, of course, they’ve all come to expect the absolute best outta me! Sometimes the rep of being a great cook is quite a fucking bitch to try and live up to.

And…HA…Marsala is a sweet wine that’s most often used in cooking and sometimes baking. Chicken Marsala is breast meat that’s sautéed with mushrooms and then the pan is deglazed with the Marsala wine, creating a luscious, rich brown sauce that goes over the whole shebang. Should you ever make it out here to Portland again, I PROMISE to make it for you! Believe me, you’ll love it.

O: So do you find any sort of connection between cooking and art? Cooking and writing? I mean, beyond the idea of writing or art “ingredients” and other bad puns.

W: Well, for me, its something creative I can do at the end of the workday; something to continue the energies I’ve been harnessing all day long, but something that leaves my career completely unaffected. If I fuck up dinner, no one’s gonna remember it ten or twenty years from now. But, yeah, I do think cooking is an art. It’s a highly specific medium that has many factors and appeals to many of the senses all at once. I remember Bernie Mireault used to give me shit about my love of a beautifully designed plate (Bernie gave me shit about many, many things). Anyway, his attitude was, what’s the point in food being beautiful? It’s a state that only lasts for a short period of time before being eaten. My attitude is that food is eaten with the eyes before it’s tasted by the mouth. If something LOOKS appealing on the plate, it only enhances the actual dining experience. And, besides, anyone who thinks that art has to last for any set period of time to be considered art is only kidding themselves. What’s the difference if a state of beauty lasts for five minutes or five hundred years? It’s all gonna crumble to dust in the long run. You know, Buddhist monks do these incredibly intricate paintings made of colored sand known as Mandala. They carefully pore, tap and brush these little piles of colored sand into the most beautiful designs. Then, once the (usually quite large) piece is finished, it’s consecrated by a priest and then scattered to the winds. It’s their way of acknowledging the impermanence of all worldly beauty.

O: Lets talk about stories. “Where do you get your ideas from?” Hah, only kidding, I HATE that fucking question!! Next time someone asked me that canned fucker I’m giving them a canned answer! But where do your ideas begin? At what point do you know it’s more than a passing idea, a part of something you might use one day and when you say, “I’m doing Grendel.”

W: My working experience is so instinctual at this point that it’s almost hard for me to pinpoint exactly how it happens. My entire being goes into creating comics and so I’m always gathering and distilling ideas that’ll later make their way onto the page.

O: When you are writing for yourself, what’s the first step?

W: Again, uh…I dunno. It’s all one big churn of ideation and realization. I hardly know where one ends and the other begins.

O: Do you go heavy into the pencils or are you doing more like breakdowns for yourself to go right into inks?

W: I suspect we’re much the same in this regard. I work from what most people would consider breakdowns. I feel a definite need to keep every stage of the artistic creation fresh and exciting. To do super-tight pencils and then merely, effectively, trace over them would bore the living fuck outta me.

O: What’s the most common mistake you see in your work? Both art and writing?

W: At this point, I find I’m a little less experimental than I had been earlier on in my career but I suppose that’s only natural. When you’re young, your reach should often exceed your grasp. As you get older, you realize the limits of your range and concentrate on the content of what you’re trying to express rather than how you say it.

O: The world was very different back in 1985. No Internet, and no distributor monopoly. We technically don’t have a monopoly now, but who are we kidding right? What kind of numbers did Mage sell in its first run? It was very different times, Neil Vokes and Rich Rankin had a creator owned book, Eagle, do 50k on the first issue of their black and white book. Amazing. I’m not comparing, I’m just saying it was very different times.

W: Jesus, I can’t remember those sorts of numbers that far back. I’d say MAGE probably worked its way up to that sort of circulation. If I’m remembering correctly EAGLE hit the market in the middle of the indy boom. In fact, I think MAGE had wrapped its run by that point. I will say, the cross-country tour I did to promote MAGE back in ’85 helped a lot. Me and a crew of my buds all piled into a van and hit the road to try and get the word out about this book. In the space of two months, we covered over 13,000 miles and did 26 signing appearances. Some stops were awesome and at some, the turnout was only myself, the shop owner and the crickets. Still, the effort worked and MAGE’s readership almost doubled as a result. It was certainly a hell of an experience as well, one I will never EVER forget.

O: When did you notice the Internet affecting how your work was perceived?

W: Back when the whole thing was up and running, I’d say. I used to sign in to the various AOL boards and do some chatting with fans. That’s when it was still on a smaller scale. It really is a brave new world since then!

O: When you look back on Mage and Grendel, the first runs, what comes to mind? Do you see the work objectively? Often when I look at my old work, I don’t even see the work; I see my life at the time.

W: Well, I do tend to look at my older work objectively but you’re absolutely right about seeing my own life reflected therein—especially with something like MAGE where I’m actually, consciously portraying various aspects of my life. Still, I’d say Grendel has been much the same. I created Hunter Rose when I was a too-smart snotty young brat, I moved on to Christine Spar after dating a woman who had a small child, I took on the Catholic church after marrying into a Catholic family, I conceived of Grendel-Prime after having to care and look out for my own children.

O: When I look at my Grendel story in Grendel :Red, Black and White, I see stage fright. I just tied myself up. When can I do a new Grendel story for you?

W: Oh, fuck man, relax! Your story looked great. If you wanna do another one some day, we will. But, why look back? I never do. Y’know, this ties in to the previous question a bit. There’s a popular misconception that I’ve never reprinted those early b&w issues of Grendel because I am somehow ashamed of them. No fucking way! That’d be like saying that I’m ashamed of the fact that I was once 13..or 22…or 31. I’m not. As I mentioned earlier, those issues were terminated in the middle of the story—a story that was later revamped and finished in DEVIL BY THE DEED. To me it’s all about the story and that was an incomplete story—so why reprint it? Just for the sake of a cheap buck? I’m not THAT much of a whore. I’ve always said that I have no aversion to those issues being reprinted if there was some worthy need for doing so—like a career retrospective of my stuff or something. And, actually, I AM thinking of re-issuing them in honor of Grendel’s 25th anniversary. Now, that’s a worthy milestone worth commemorating.

O: We drew Kevin Matchstick in our Powers Oni special; man that was fun! Love drawing him. When will we see more of Kevin, if ever? Will he be completely bald then? I love how he lost his hair over the years with you; it’s like some sort of revenge.

W: I gotta confess, I loved that too. And you don’t even realize what a fucking compliment that is! Now, obviously, I love to see other people’s versions of Grendel. Seeing that character reinterpreted by other artists is, to me, one of the real thrills of collaboration. But MAGE has always been more of a one-man show. Whenever I see someone else draw Kevin though, it’s just never the same. All I can think when I see another artist’s version of Kevin is, “That’s just not quite right.” All except for you. Your version nailed him. Again, I loved it. As to when we’ll see more of him…well, like I said, MAGE has always been planned as a trilogy, with the final part being subtitled THE HERO DENIED. And MAGE is a very strange creative experience for me. Very zen-like. I find I really can’t make the conscious decision about when I’ll work on MAGE. It’s almost like IT decides when I’m going to work on MAGE. Being such an allegory of my own life, its almost as if the story is sometimes writing me, rather than the other way around. And so far as the bald thing goes…Jesus, man, I’m probably the least regretful bald guy you’ll ever meet. I don’t miss having a headful of hair in the fucking least! I don’t shave my head but I’ve been sheering what hair I do have down to the nub for years and years, now—looong before it was hip and fashionable. I see all the care and fuss most people have go to with their coifs and I think to myself, “Good fucking riddance!” So, making Kevin bald…that’s not revenge. It’s just my reality…turned into myth!

O: I often think of my stories, especially Powers and Hammer, as taking place in some real world somewhere. Then I’m afraid about what I’ve done to these characters. What do you think they would say to you if they met their “God”?

W: Are you kidding? My characters speak back to me all the time!! At least the ones that are still alive…

O: Really? You should look into that. Do you think you would feel bad about what they’ve been through? I noticed in writing, I’m pretty ruthless. I objectify story to the point I can write against my own belief system. Do you write to push your world view or will you allow the story to go wherever it wants, even if it negates your own politics or beliefs?

W: Hmmm…that’s a tough one. I’d have to say I write to my belief system to a certain degree. It’s tough for me to write a character who’s a religious zealot with anything less than mockery and usually nothing less than contempt. Politically, I may be a LITTLE more flexible. Obviously, I wrote a long storyline about the world’s first worldwide dictator (Orion Assante in GRENDEL: DEVIL’S REIGN) and the approach was sympathetic. I even let him be the first Grendel to die a peaceful death (even though his life had been filled with tragedy and heartache), which is why his ripple effect in the Grendel timeline was one of the strongest.

O: I recently read your Sandman story. How did that come about?

W: Well, Neil and I had known each other for a while and he was looking for someone to do a fill-in issue of Sandman that would act as a bit of a story intermission in the SEASONS OF THE MIST storyline. It was a fun gig but I absolutely fucking HATED the ink job. It’s probably what made me swear off anyone inking my work for good. I even forget the inker’s name now…I know he passed away a few years ago. I really wanted the look of that issue to be rendered in stark blacks and whites (kinda like your stuff) to accent the ghost story nature of the tale. Passed that desire along to the inker but he just tried to ink it the way he’d inked every other issue of Sandman—lots of scratching pen hatching and shit. Trouble was, there was no place for that sort of approach in my pencils and so the results were just horrible. Ugh.

O: Clearly, you’re tight with Dark Horse and DC. How about Marvel; I don’t recall you doing much with Marvel? I would love to see you do a Daredevil Run.

W: Well, I did that first issue of ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP with Bendis and long, long ago I wrote a cute little short story for a Hulk annual. Still, I’ve just never felt appreciated over at Marvel. No one ever tries to solicit me to work for them or even says hello to me at a show. In fact, that Ultimate gig never would’ve happened without Brian. Which is fine…its not like I don’t have enough on my plate as it is.

O: We talked about doing a project together at some point. I don’t know what or where, the stars have to align and all, but lets say they do. Somehow the boards are clean and we have time, and we’re ready. You as writer, me as artist. What would we do? No boundaries, meaning no character too obscure, no project too lofty or silly. I’ll pencil it in my schedule for like 10 years from now, but lets start daydreaming…

W: Hmm… okay, you want to do an established character rather than something all new? And market potential’s not really a factor… Well, first I’d try and take you out of your Nordic comfort zone yet still try to stick to something that exemplifies your playful pacing and strong sense of shadow. And you know how I love the lone, masked vigilante sort of heroes…

Zorro.

We could do a bitchin’ Zorro together.

O: Holy shit, Batman; that would be fucking great.

W: Yeah, and to use that thought to boomerang us back to the whole “reading” thread from earlier…

There were two brand new books on the market this year that came from the pens of established, literary talents that oughta appeal to any and all comic fans. The first was written by Isabelle Allende, who’s a Spanish-American author and well known for her historical fiction. Anyway, eight or nine months ago she published a novel titled simply, ZORRO. And, yeah, there’s nothing coy or ironic about it…it’s a straight-on approach to the character, his origins and background from childhood. You could basically call it ZORRO: Year One, and its reeeeally fucking great. Very, very readable, it also has a wealth of historical accuracy. And, very similar to BATMAN BEGINS, it spends so much of its time examining the character of Don Diego de la Vega that, by the time he puts on the costume (waaay towards the end of the book) and adopts the persona of Zorro, its as a natural extension of his established history and internal motivations. She gives us strong support for his acrobatic derring-do, his sense of social justice, his mute assistant, his name, his costume, his sleight-of-hand AND his remarkable fencing skills. Again, just a great book and a really fun ride from cover to cover.

The other book is written by author Tom DeHaven, who’s best known for a series of novels set in the beginning of the 20th century and centering on the wild and wooly world of newspaper comic strip cartoonists: FUNNY PAPERS and DERBY DUGAN’S DEPRESSION FUNNIES. Anyway, DeHaven’s lastest offering is titled IT’S SUPERMAN. Officially sanctioned (and indeed copyrighted) by DC, it too is a straight-on telling of Superman’s early years and his first steps towards his later adventures in costume. The twist in this telling is that the story is firmly set in the mid 1930’s–the same time period the character originally appeared. I read this book over Xmas (in Hawaii, I might add..}ahem{) and I sucked it down like a man dying of thirst in the desert. It’s a truly awesome re-imagining of this, one of our first and most significant (yeah, I’ll say it) comic book myths. The book’s firmly set in reality so the depression is in full swing and New York is only metaphorically referred to as The Metropolis. Lois is a very spunky “modern” gal; Lex is fucking smart, evil and manipulative as shit; and Clark is, first and foremost, a total fucking farm boy. Again, this book is fun, fun, til the day is done and I especially loved where (and how) in the beginning of Clark’s career that De Haven chooses to end the book.

And, like I said, these will both appeal to any fan of comic books, the super-oriented as well as the snotty art-fucks. Now, get your asses out there and read!!

Okay, I’ll get down off the soapbox now…

O: You also do some lecturing for Diana’s class that she teaches called Understanding Comics at the Portland Community College once a year. Let’s talk a bit about that.

W: Well, I’ve done it for her class; I’ve done it for my wife’s classes AND for my kids’ classes. It’s funny, I do a bit of a lecture about my own work and then wrap it all up with a very interactive story-telling demonstration—which everybody loves. It’s a total one-size-fits-all demo that works for fifth graders as well as college-level students. But, that’s just a bit of a lark. I’m really not an educator at heart. I don’t mind speaking in front of people, which is a REAL fucking fear for some, but I just don’t have the wide-reaching patience. I think I’m too self-involved to be a very good teacher. Many creators are. Nature of the beast.

O: Nature of the beast, indeed Matt. Thanks much for your time bro.

Matt Wagner is best known for his epic creation, Grendel, and his other, more personal allegory, Mage. He has also worked on a variety of established characters, including his ground-breaking work on the character of Batman villain, Two-Face, in the graphic novel, Faces, as well as a five-year stint spent developing and generating the stories for the fan-favorite Vertigo title, Sandman Mystery Theater. His most recent effort was the recently completed mini-series, Batman and the Monster Men. For more information on him and his work, check out www.mattwagnercomics.com

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming @ aol.com

Mike: Paul, thanks for joining us this month and subjecting yourself to my whims. This isn’t a fanboy column, so I’m not going to ask you specific questions about which of the Inhumans can beat up Wolverine or how many cars Colossus can bench press… (okay, well, maybe later.) But first, for those readers who don’t know, you are a Brit who lives in the states. When did you make the move?

Paul: I have been eating your food and stealing your women since 1987. It has been a fun-packed ride. Do you know you can’t be legally deported for having sex with a mule because mules are sterile? I know… it shocked me, too.

M: And I’m sure the mule’s still recovering, too! What instigated the move and when did you become a full-on citizen?

P: I was studying drama in Southern England and one day, I just decided to get on a frigging plane and go and teach in America. It was weird… I did it just like that. I came here literally with $50 and stayed. I am still a permanent resident, not a citizen.

M: Before you began writing comics, you got a degree in English? My grammar must make you want to vomit… Anyway, did you study English because you were an aspiring writer, or did writing come out of that?

P: As a matter of fact, I went to drama school. I found that I hated the acting thing because it was so fucking fake I wanted to scream. The last thing I need to be doing is dressing up in a fucking beret, listening to poetry in a coffee shop, and calling MacBeth “The Scottish Play.” I used to whistle backstage and wish people luck just to antagonize them. Basically, then, I wanted to write and direct more than act.

M: Did you write as a kid? What kind of stories; can you remember any details about them?

P: My mum tells me she just found my first comic, Alfred and the Egg Giants. I am dying to see it again. My memory of it is that Alfred goes up into the clouds and beats the shit out of the Egg Giants for no good reason. My one issue run on Spider-Man versus Dudley Moore is pretty well documented, but I can’t talk about it much because I am thinking of bringing Dudley Moore back as a Sentry villain.

M: What was your childhood like? When I was a kid, up until my early twenties, I thought nothing happened to me. Little did I realize how much actually did, and how much of that would become the backdrop for my ambitions and psyche. The little stuff, I mean, like daydreaming. How do you find your childhood has affected your writing?

P: Just incredibly fucked up, although I remember it quite fondly. My dad was out the door and living 500 miles away when I was five and my brother was eight. Apparently, my mum just took us away one day so that when he got home there was a note. We were missing for two weeks, during which time mum didn’t even contact her parents, which was pretty bloody stupid. I remember one time, before they got divorced, my dad threw a coffee cup at her and she ducked and it went all over the wall. They never bothered to take the stain off the wall. So it was this constant reminder that our parents hated each other. I put that in Hellblazer one time.

M: Do you find much of your early past working its way into your work in specific ways?

P: Yeah, absolutely. We lived on a farm and, I swear, we didn’t have a pot to piss in. There was a timer on the electric meter — it took fifty pence pieces and when mum was out of money it just shut off. I remember these enormous storms that would come over the farm on freezing cold nights. But you have to understand… this stuff is fertile ground for me now. I lived in a magic place with fairies in the orchard and castles nearby. Lots of corn and wheat fields… farm animals. I snared rabbits with an old gypsy when I was about seven because we needed meat. I used to get up and watch the farm badger at 3AM… I mean, I have written about this before but it still amazes me to this day that any kid could be privileged with such a mad upbringing. I believed in gypsy magic and I learned seriously important things such as how to use the land around you for food when you can’t buy any. Look at it this way: my mum could never afford sweets, right? She would buy a Mars bar and put it in the fridge and cut it into slices. This would last us for a week. If you think about it, the Mars bar slices would taste better than an entire one because of the anticipation. Children would probably do well to experience a little longing for things, just to be able to appreciate things when they have them.

M: Wow, man; that is really cool, growing up like that. Take the good with the bad, but that kind of environment is really special. I teach my kid about mythology and folklore — the real magic in the world that COULD be out there. We’ll take walks in the woods and make up stories about people living under the water in the stream and such. I think that stuff is important. My mother used to tell ghost stories, stuff she experienced and one great UFO encounter she had. That stuff fueled my mind. It was also a great escape — I suspect, like you, not having the best of times around you — to lose yourself in. I know that stuff fed my imagination, the seeds of becoming an artist or writer.

I also wonder a bit about my son. He has it so much easier than I did — he certainly doesn’t have the psych trouble people like us went through; stuff that made us STRONGER. Do you think these experiences made you stronger, not just as a writer, but also as a person?

P: Absolutely. Definitely. I can easily see why hardship can help with a person’s character. On the other hand, I could have easily gone a different way. I had a few brushes with the law in my younger days… lived in shitty places; that was quite natural. But I think one day I just kind of woke up and decided not to do that.

M: What about your family; were they creative in any way, or looking back, do you see things that they did that may have pushed you in a creative direction, either by accident or on purpose?

P: God, no. My Dad was the manager of the casino where he lived. My mum became a teacher eventually, but she had to work at some funky jobs first. The weird thing is, I just always wanted to do it. I did music, art, acting, writing… I will never know why.

M: Do you think your acting, music and such might have been a reaction to your parents’ way of life? What about music; are you a musician? I find many artists/writers are frustrated musicians…

P: I am a musician, yes… Not frustrated, because I did it for a while and it was the hardest job you would ever want. I still play, record, listen a lot, etc.

M: I find a good bit of trauma creates some amazing writers and artists. Most of my creative friends come from dysfunctional homes — that doesn’t always mean unhappy, though. Do you think you had a good time growing up, and do you think those times have helped you or hindered you in your life’s direction?

P: I don’t know… sometimes I am sad to think about how messed up it was because it really affected my brother. To this day he feels terrible guilt about things that have gone wrong in his life. Our grandmother used to beat us pretty handily… she was a cruel motherfucker who used to bully us mercilessly. My brother and I are very close because of it — it’s like two guys who have gone to war together. I write about insanity a lot but I feel abuse isn’t so much physical as mental: bruises heal in a couple of days but fear stays with you a lot longer. I always dealt with it just fine, but poor old Richard still acts as though he’s scared of something that’s about to happen. Imagine sitting at a table with some vile old lady who’s yelling at you that you blink too much, and that if you don’t stop blinking you’ll get the hairbrush around your arse. You just know it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it. The best part was she used to take us to church every Sunday and bully us all the way there, act like a saint in front of the vicar and then bully us all the way home. It’s why I don’t trust people easily just because they SAY they are a certain way. Show, don’t tell.

M: Yeah, actions speak louder than words, man. Talk is cheap. I find that if you’ve had that kind of background, there’s usually two ways to react about it — you grow stronger from it, become a better person because of it; or if you can’t escape those moments, you’re lost in them forever and grow up either living in that shadow constantly or even emulating it.

I hate to sound like I’m rummaging around through your past, but I know this is the stuff that, if you can tap into it as a writer, it will enrich your writing. I hate to say it, but I love the horrible things in my past. How have you dealt with these things in your life? Do you think your writings helped you any in that way?

P: Well, I have completely dealt with any negative stuff that might have come out of those experiences. As I said, I look back fondly on my childhood. To me, the difficulty doesn’t seem all that difficult. I will give you a perfect example: Richard and I used to live in a farm cottage and because mum didn’t have a lot of money, she could only really afford for us to ride the bus HOME, so we had to walk to school. We went about two and a half miles, rain, snow or shine. In fact, a lot of times when it was snowing, we would be two of the only kids who made it to school! We saw foxes and deer and badgers… we found stoat pelts and weasel skins. We chucked mud at each other and stuff like that. None of the other kids would possibly be able to cope with walking… they just wouldn’t have been used to it. My brother and I still talk about the great little adventures we had on that walk. So while some would say not being able to afford a bus fare was a bad thing, I think it was a good thing. My mum did her very best for us. She is quite eccentric, so we grew up with this mad lady who thought so differently from others around her. And she wouldn’t conform to their expectations or take their shit, either. I get on great with my Dad and I curse my grandmother to burn in Hell every day. I feel I am healthy.

M: I had trouble reading books as a kid. I don’t think I ever read a book until my late teens — Hitchhiker’s Guide. I just didn’t have a push for reading, and no one introduced me to stuff I would have loved, like the Hobbit or whatever. Actually, it was my pal Adam Hughes (THUMP! Name drop.) who got me excited about Hitchhiker’s. What were some of the earliest books you remember reading; I mean really reading, really getting into?

P: Man, I used to read like a fiend. I was one of those psycho advanced kids and so I read, like, Treasure Island when I was six. The Hobbit, too. I loved that kind of stuff… I always wanted to read more complicated things because I wanted to be the best reader for my age in the world. This is a true story, believe it or not: When I was five, on my first day of school, I went up to my teacher and asked her what we were going to read. None of the other kids could read… remember, this is kindergarten in American terms. She asked me if I could read. I said yes, I was reading Doctor Faustus with my mum. She asked me, astonished, if I knew what it was about. I told her that as Faustus waits fearfully for Mephistopheles to take him back to Hell, he says, “O lente lente currite noctis equi!” Which means, “Oh, slowly, slowly run the horses of the night.” I think she probably requested I be transferred at that point.

M: Wow, I don’t know what to say to that… I wish I could travel back in time and beat you up… All I could quote in kindergarten was Gilligan’s Island “Lil’ BUDDY!!” My brain is just full of TV crap like The Brady Bunch and The Munsters. TV was another escape and I really wish I was pushed into books. But really, where did that come from, the reading thing; your mother?

P: First of all, I would have kicked the snot out of you. I was always the biggest jock in the school, captain of every team, etc. I was that fucked-up kid who spent equal time with nerds, geeks, jocks, girls, teachers and drug dealers. This lasted until I discovered LSD — I spent a year stoned on either acid or ‘shrooms (I am deathly allergic to marijuana). Then I just said, “Fuck this” and stopped.

M: Was your first work in comics really in Licensing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

P: Yeah, pretty much. I was actually employed to do publishing stuff but that lasted just a short while because the licensing suddenly went berserk. I don’t think it is possible to describe even in one interview just how crazy that situation was. I was twenty-two years old. It was like giving a Ferrari to a snail and expecting it to learn how to drive.

M: Are you telling me you studied English, IN England, to schlock TMNT toys in the U.S.? Surely, you came to the U.S. for other reasons, right? How old were you?

P: I came here to do music and screw American girls. I taught disabled children music and drama for one Summer in the Pocono mountains. I still dabble with music but I just don’t have enough time with all the stuff I already do. I use my studio for sound design stuff for our film work, mostly.

M: This is true — my biggest writing influence was not Film, TV, Comics or books, but singer-songwriter songs of the 70s. For some reason, in my household, we listened to music all day, and night. We would go to sleep with music on. I would sit there and make stories out of the songs I heard. I’ve had that walk with James Taylor through the desert a million times, I swear. It’s a western story about a cowboy for me. I still find half of my stories come from music and lyrics I hear. I even steal Led Zeppelin lyrics on a regular basis as dialogue. Recently, I’ve been taking from the DOORS in my ARES mini because of Jim Morrison’s love of Greek Mythology. Blood and wine and all that…

Do you find that music and your writing relate much?

P: They are completely intertwined. I CANNOT work without listening to music. Mostly soundscape stuff, because if it’s bands, I start dissecting the mix and listening to the lyrics. As I have said elsewhere, I don’t feel I get ideas from other people’s work… just watching real life. But I am totally inspired by music and creatively crippled without it.

M: What did you think about the U.S. before you came over, and how did it differ once you were here? Did your accent get you laid? If I were gay, I’d give you shot.

P: God’s honest truth: British kids have the strangest impression of America. I assumed you had cops all over the place armed with, like, AK 47s, and if you stepped out of line they would blow you away. All of your cops were either physically or mentally disabled. Kojak was bald; Ironside was in a wheelchair; Columbo was a sex freak; McCloud rode a fucking horse around San Francisco, for Pete’s sake! What a wonderland. When I got here, I found America to be even weirder than I could have imagined. Things like televangelists, lobbyists and George W. Bush are illegal outside of America. I mean Bill Clinton just pardoned all of his mates on his last day of office — these were convicted felons! I’m still amazed and delighted every day by how utterly strange this place is. My mates in Massachusetts used to beg me to go out with them to bars so that I could help them pick up women. You would not believe the power a British accent holds in this country. You know exactly where you stand when a girl narrows her eyes and proclaims that she thinks your accent is so sexy that she just orgasmed.

M: Hellblazer was when I first became aware of your work, but what did you do before that? Come on, there has to be something embarrassing in your closet. I drew some porn comics and the Child’s Play adaptations for God’s sake; come on, man up.

P: Well, Hellblazer was actually my first gig. If you look hard enough, there is an issue of TMNT in there somewhere. I haven’t seen it in years but it is probably crap.

M: Hellblazer being your first gig? How did that happen? I mean, other than the English accent. :)

P: I broke in the exact opposite way of how you should: I went to San Diego, walked up to an editor (my dearly departed mate, Lou Stathis) and said, “I hear you’re looking for a new writer for Hellblazer. How about me?” After I informed Lou that I had no experience, he took the unusual step of letting me write a tryout script. He and Karen read the script, made me rework it five times, and gave me the job. That will never happen to another living soul.

M: Tell me about your writing influences; outside of comics and in.

P: Ehh… I watch and listen. I mean I hear all the time how people should read books and watch movies and that sort of thing, but I just don’t think it works that way for me. I am moved by human emotion, so if you show me a person who has loved and lost and learned from it then I get everything from there. As a writer, I want to live life, not read about how someone else lived it and then copy that.

M: What are some things you learned from them? Things you use. I don’t mean “writers write, writers read”, I mean something useful. I need a magic button, dammit, come on!

P: I have this thing I always tell aspiring writers, which is that you need to be audacious, and that often means doing not what is expected but what is RIGHT for the moment. It is not bold to write about something exploding. It is bold to take, say, Cyclops from the X-Men and sit him down on a sofa to learn about his favorite type of sandwich. None of us has blown up a building with a laser beam… all of us have eaten a sandwich, see what I mean?

M: Yeah, I love books about eating sandwiches. Some time has passed, how do you look back at your earlier work, say pre-Marvel?

P: I don’t read it that often. It seems primitive. Still don’t understand why DC has never reprinted my Hellblazers, though.

M: Do you think it has something to do with you being a Marvel guy now? I got caught the in crossfire at one point…

That whole DC/Marvel war is so stupid.

P: God, I hope it isn’t that. Even though I have been a Marvel writer for ages I still have friends at DC. There may be a feud of some kind but I am sure as hell not a part of it.

M: Has your work process changed much since then? How you actually craft a story and such…

P: The same way since I began: I think of the story, write it down. Then I do research on aspects of it. Next come the breakdowns, drawn out in booklets panel by panel. Next come the panel descriptions and finally the dialogue, which I find easy. For what it is worth, I have no idea where stories come from. I have a theory that a lot of what I write is more intelligent than I am (apart from this sentence). I will write something and read it back and be kind of astonished because it is good, and yet I don’t know how it came to me. That ever happen to you?

M: I do a lot of my writing in the outline. It’s all about the outline first for me… Do you plot out your stories first, outline and such, or do you have it in your skull and work it out as you go along?

P: I am a preparation fiend. I love researching stuff. At the same time, I don’t enjoy reading a lot of old issues when researching comic book characters. It pays to be ignorant.

M: What about your work habits? What is your day like when you’re working?

P: I get up later, around 10AM and usually go to the gym or play golf. I play soccer still, despite my broken rag doll of a body. I sometimes type in the day, but it’s usually at night. I begin around 5-7PM and type until I am exhausted. I don’t sleep well, never have. I can only sleep with sleeping pills and even then only when I am literally dropping where I stand.

M: I have sleeping troubles, too — I find with me, ideas will run around in my mind, if I write them down, it helps, but other times, the ideas are completely random and make no sense, but keep me awake. Is that what happens to you — your body is exhausted, but your brain is keeping you awake?

P: My brain wakes me up, even. I will never lack for stories and new ideas… if I live to be a hundred I will probably not even cover all the ideas I have now. Maybe my brain thinks it cannot afford to sleep.

M: When you start working on a long-established character like the Hulk or Spidey, how do you deal with all the continuity baggage?

P: I am a sneaky bastard: I completely ignore it. A lot of people have said how reverential I am to the characters but it’s all just smoke and mirrors with me. If you don’t bring up past continuity you can’t contradict it. Besides, I don’t want to write about Hulk’s last battle with the Leader. I want to write about how Bruce Banner makes it through his day.

M: Do you do a lot of research on the characters you’re working on, or do you think of them as a blank slate?

P: They are an absolute blank slate, except for established characteristics that I can use. Spidey’s Uncle died… right. Fine. His Aunt May is old… right. Fine. That’s all I need. Leave me alone for a couple of days and I will give you a good story about it as it pertains to the character. I just see this stuff in my mind’s eye, like a movie that I am completely familiar with. I can see every camera angle, understand every emotion. I know it backwards and sideways and the typing of it is just basically a matter of if I can remember what I wanted to do and/or read my own notes.

M: One problem I have is some of these books have been around for forty years, and every time I think I’m doing something new with them, I find its been done in one form or another. How do you get around that?

P: It’s been done before, maybe, but I have never put my voice to it. So I don’t care if it has been done, I don’t worry about it. When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet it had been done. It’s just that he hadn’t done it.

M: What was the most difficult job you’ve had writing? I don’t mean with a specific company or editor, I mean story.

P: Probably the Mythos books that have just begun to come out. We took Stan Lee’s origins and matched them with the movies or TV shows, and then added our own voices and ideas to it all. That is a very hard thing to do. I think we have at least succeeded with the X-Men story.

M: Now without naming names, tell me about one of your worst working experiences. We all have those.

P: Holy shit. Well, I have a few. I have always been good about being respectful to fellow creators… even the ones I know are tanking it because they are lazy. I think I could point to some of my Tundra experiences as examples of human greed, laziness and stupidity. A favorite example is the time one asshole creator was supposed to do an intro/title page that needed to be a graveyard. This was at a time when some of these people were just raping poor Kevin Eastman and his head was spinning so fast he couldn’t work out how to react to some of the behavior. Anyway, I get the so-called “Title” page in the form of a rectangular shape with a semi circle attached to make it in the shape of a gravestone. I also receive a full-page invoice for, like, $300. When I challenge the scumbag artist who submitted it, he informs me that the construction of the graveyard is a matter for the production department and that his contract specifically states he can rip us off, etc. God, I have a million of those Tundra stories. I am so fucking bitter about it, even to this day.

M: Do you find yourself standing up for your story when there are changes to be made, or do you roll with the punches? I find the story issues I fight the hardest on, if I give in to the editor, I usually, after much painful rethinking, find I have a much better story. Have you had that kind of experience or like Warren, are editors afraid of you?

P: I am pretty sure editors are not afraid of me. I like to have my scripts remain they way I wrote them. If changes are being asked for, I want to know about it. I think it’s rude and counterproductive for an editor to write something into one of my scripts, although I do understand why it has to happen on occasion. If I stand up for something, honestly, I am usually right. I pick my battles.

M: You know who I’m afraid of? Mark Millar. He once gave me a donkey-punch so hard I almost complained. I didn’t know the Scots were like that. Speaking of true-life experiences, I read you once said, “Writing about yourself is ultimately the key to bringing your audience in.”

How do you write about yourself when you write something abstract like the Hulk or Inhumans?

P: The Hulk is about feeling angry and trying to keep that anger in check. We all do that. I also wrote about him having Lou Gehrig’s disease… how that relates to me is that after I fractured my neck I was extremely ill and fairly helpless. Inhumans is all about strangers living in a strange land… like me living in America. If it helps, by the way, I think Mark Millar is slightly afraid of me after I threatened to disembowel some dipshit internet columnist at a convention. I am pretty even-tempered but that guy was a tool and I probably would have done better just to kick his arse. Millar looked like a deer caught in headlights. His one saving grace is that he is a Celtic fan. But if you want to get a rise out of him, call him a Rangers fan. I guarantee this will make him genuinely angry.

M: When you read other comics, what is the most common mistake you see, something you see time and time again that makes you go, “Man, if he just didn’t do that, it would be so much better.” Like an ending. Too many great stories have no real endings, or worse, I find I love the characters, but the actual story lacks.

P: For me it is dialogue. I find myself cringing that a person would not speak a certain way as presented, even in an absurd situation. I think people can be quite lazy about this. Maybe it’s just that I find it easy… I dunno.

M: What about your own work needs help?

P: Action scenes, I think. I really do well with characterization and dialogue but I appreciate that in this medium, there needs to be a certain visceral display of action or power or what-have-you that some fans can just sit back and admire. I need to do better with that. I am trying. For a while I opened up the panel structure so that there were less panels on the pages with big action. I may explore doing that again.

M: For me, I love your stories — the actual story, above and beyond the character or dialogue, I think you craft great story. Not that the rest of it is so bad, you know what I mean…

What do you think you do best in your work?

P: It’s hard to assess your own work like that. I am, at best, sometimes satisfied with what I write. Occasionally, I know I have done something right; like maybe Generation M — that’s going to be a good book. I think I would say that if you gave me ten minutes and said you would like a story about table tennis, I would give you something halfway decent after ten minutes. It probably wouldn’t be about table tennis, but what can I say? I realize you can’t hit a home run every time, so fuck you, Oeming. Why must you always be critical?

M: You’ve written a screenplay or two, right? And you’ve done work for video games; do you see that as an extension of being a writer, or was that a specific move on your part?

P: A very calculated move. I am enjoying the video game work… I feel like the game industry is now the bastard child of comics and I like working for the underdog. The film stuff is great. I think I am learning screenplays pretty well. Let’s see what happens with my directing career.

M: Here’s a tricky question — do you think you can retire off of comics? I’m looking to extend myself into film and other fields because I don’t believe I can. After all, how many great artists and writers of 30 years ago are still working in comics today?

P: I can probably retire off of a combination of my three careers. I could probably retire off of video game work. And film. But not comics alone… unless they start selling more.

M: I’ve found I’ve gotten a bit too close with some of my readers. I’ve seen some breasts, had my drink spiked and have gotten the bird from people who thought they knew me and it was funny. There’s this chick, Taki, who picks me up at every show and drops me, usually on my hip, and I’m getting old, man. This one guy, Goddard, even faked being me at a show or two, so I had to push him in front of a car. Here’s a pic to prove it –

Anyway, what is your relationship with your fans like?

P: I get on great with the fans. I have a great time at conventions. I once signed a breast and the girl cheerfully informed me she was going to have my signature tattooed. That was bizarre. I think the tough thing, maybe, is that we are not trained to do this. I treat the fans with respect and expect the same. Sadly, I see some creators who treat the fans badly. I think that is extremely crappy given that they’re the people who pay our wages.

M: So, What goes on with Paul when you’re not being creative?

P: A lot of sport: soccer, golf, poker! I am always being creative, jackass.

M: What do you hope to be doing in the future, in and out of comics?

P: Got a little kid on the way — that will be different. I do a weekly column at Newsarama now, so we can all watch him gestate together. I want to do the film stuff with Good Cop/Bad Cop, obviously. I want to write a couple of novels and I want to get drunk with Neil Armstrong and talk about walking on the moon.

M: Okay, your sitting in a pub and you see some guys walk in wearing comic book shirts. They look over and think they might recognize you. Do you:

Mark Millar will answer D when I ask him, so you can be just as honest.

P: I am with Mark on that one. Free beer just tastes better; unless it is Budweiser. That stuff is shite.

M: That reminds me, who do you like better, the Irish or the Scottish?

P: I am an honorary Scottish Anglicized Welshman, having worn a kilt to Scotland matches and even been interviewed as a Scotland fan on the BBC. My Glaswegian accent, I have been informed by no less than a Glaswegian himself, is about perfect.

For extra credit.

1. What is your favorite word to hear in a convention?

I like the word Byrne, because I know something interesting is about to happen.

2. What is your least favorite word to hear in an editor’s office?

“BLOWME.”

3. What turns you on sexually?

Humungous tits. The bigger the better. My wife has some big cans. She wants a boob job after we are finished having kids. I told her that would be fine as long as she added a little extra since she was getting opened up anyway. She thinks I have a breast fetish. She is right about that.

4. What turns you off sexually?

Hmm… probably women who are completely silent in the sack. I don’t know about you, Oeming, but I need some noise. Screamers are great.

5. What is your favorite curse word your mother used?

She always used Yiddish swear words for no apparent reason. I never understood anything she said beyond the word c**t.

6. What sound or noise do you love when you’re kicking someone in a dark alley?

I love it when prostitutes beg for their lives. That is always funny.

7. What sound or noise do you hate when running from the police?

The sound of fear coursing through my veins. I cover it up by yelling, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

8. What profession, other than urine-stained coke whore, would you like to attempt?

Teacher, probably. No, check that… I would like to be in retail. I believe I could do this. Especially selling shoes or handbags. Drug dealer, maybe… is that considered retail?

9. What person would you not like to do?

So many to choose from. I would have to say the most repulsive human being alive is probably Martha Stewart, but I would do her just to hear her scream. How about Gwen Stefani. Everyone wants to do her. I think she looks like an alien.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to say to God when he rejects you at the Pearly Gates?

“Reject me, would you? Well then… I reject YOU!” Then I would pull his beard and run away.

Paul: Born March 9th, 2006 at 1.34PM. 6 Pounds, 2 ounces, if you care
about that sort of thing. Melinda is doing really well… she was
amazing.

I never thought I would enjoy it so much to have someone puke on me.
Check out the gangsta punk look — he’s coming over your house to
smash it up as soon as his legs work.

Paul Jenkins is currently writing The Sentry, Generation M, and Mythos for Marvel Comics, and the recently completed Revelations for Dark Horse Comics.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming @ aol.com.

These interviews should be fun and informative; from the POV of one artist/writer getting into the mind of another creator, helping readers get into our mindset. I won’t be asking about specific projects, but about the process behind those projects. I will try and be as honest as possible about myself, and with whom I am interviewing, and I won’t pull any punches if I have them, while at the same time, remaining respectful.

This month, we’ll get to know Jeff Smith. You can check out BONE and his other works at Midtown Comics or your local comics retailer.

Mike: Jeff Smith, what a treat to get to interview you. Every night for a few months, I’d read a few pages from the complete BONE to my son at bedtime. It’s a ritual. It’s his Lord of the Rings.

Jeff: I’ve been looking forward to this, Mike. I like this idea of one cartoonist asking another one questions. The world clamors for more beer-fueled conversations about pen tips.

M: Give us just a bit of your background. What was your childhood like? Early on, mine was kind of screwed up, so I spent a lot of time fantasizing in my skull. I think that’s where a lot of my imagination and storytelling was seeded. How about you? Do you think your earliest years affected your creativity, or did that come later?

J: I liked to sit inside and draw, but I spent a lot of time outside climbing trees and exploring ravines. My parents used to take me to Old Man’s Cave here in Hocking Hills, Ohio, where I could climb rocks and explore the different caves. My folks weren’t rich, but they spent a lot of time with my brother and me, taking us to state parks and historical sites. My mom painted and the family liked joking around and making each other laugh.

M: Wow, that actually sounds a lot like your comics… I remember trying to write a Star Blazers story when I was a kid. I never finished it, though. My ideas were too big for my little head then. What was the first real story you wrote?

J: In the ninth or tenth grade I decided to ask a teacher if I could draw my report on the Trojan War instead of writing it. I had written little stories before, mostly about the Bones chasing each other and falling off cliffs, but this was the first time I did it for real, structuring a story from beginning to end, drawing it with pencil on oversized boards and then inking it. It was the first thing I ever inked, and I smeared my hand in the wet parts, of course, and I sneezed once through the little hole in the nib. That’s what I learned: If you’re going to sneeze, stop inking!

M: Yeah, so for those of you who don’t know, the Bones have been around with Jeff most of his life. What was your introduction to comics? Do you remember the early books; whether they influenced you or not?

J: In the late sixties, it was harder to find comics, because the grocer might not bother to put them out, so hunting down your favorite books was a big job. My main memory of comic books back then was riding bikes with friends all over town trying to find the latest issue of Neal Adams’ Batman. I remember one kid, Mike Brooks, had an unbelievable comic book collection; the first I’d ever seen. His mom let him use a whole wall of shelves in her laundry room for comics. That’s where I saw Uncle Scrooge in Disney’s Comics & Stories for the first time. But the two most exciting things in my preteen years were Pogo and MAD. Pogo and MAD Magazine were the only things that told kids the truth, and they were the best-drawn comics anywhere. I used to read them over and over again.

M: I hadn’t thought of that… MAD really did say the things for kids they couldn’t or weren’t allowed to say. What about your middle years-early teens? What were those years like? Were you drawing then; were you running around with a gang, slicing tires and burning down national monuments?

J: Always drawing. Drawing was almost like breathing. I did it without thinking, especially in class. Even when I lost interest in comics, I still drew naked girls.

M: What experiences from your youth slipped into comics? Any themes you find now that Bone is finished that you realize were somehow from your childhood?

J: Well, Fone Bone seems to share my adolescent, put-‘em-on-a-pedestal fascination with women.

M: What about school? I assume by high school you were known as the kid who could draw?

J: Yeah. I had friends who could draw, and we pushed each other on. Jim Kammerud, who became my partner later when we owned an animation studio, would always discover some new drawing tool. He was the first person I knew who tried to use a Rapid-o-graph. Remember those awful things? They were always getting clogged up. But it was honest to god India ink, and it was easier to use than pen tips! Jim tried inking with a brush before I did, too.

M: Funny, I recently did some cleaning and found my Rapid-o-graph set. It was costly, and had a lot of memories; it was hard to throw out, but I hadn’t seen them in like 10 years! Get many chicks with that drawing ability?

J: Being the guy who can draw isn’t the hottest thing you can be in high school. But I got around all right.

M: After high school, did you go to art college?

J: I got some scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design, a good school with a national reputation. Unfortunately, I didn’t fit in. In the late ‘70s, there were only two kinds of artists you could study to be: a fine artist or a commercial artist. A cartoonist is neither and both. I clashed with the staff and quit before Christmas. I ended up going across town to Ohio State where they had a daily student newspaper I could draw cartoons for. The only thing I really liked about college was Art History. The history of Western Art is the history of Western Civilization. It was eye-opening. We don’t move forward without art.

M: What do you mean by that exactly?

J: Artists make art about what’s true. The real truth; not the politically twisted truths of the moment.

M: What were you doing before BONE? You studied animation, right?

J: No, I just played around with animation for the fun of it. So did my pal, Jim. We took some film classes at OSU, and we met another student named Marty Fuller who was studying animation, and the three of us thought we could pool our resources and start a company to work on commercial animation projects, which we did with varying degrees of success for years, before I left to start my comic book.

M: How did Bone first start to form in your mind, and how did you get it to paper?

J: I had been working on the idea of the Bone cousins being lost in a fairy tale land for a while. A fish out of water kind of thing, pitting the modern cousins against the quaint ways of the local people. This was a combination of my childhood loves of Uncle Scrooge and Pogo, with the late seventies fantasy stuff like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Heavy Metal Magazine. The really interesting thing about the Bone college strip was that it made me ask, what’s the point? The characters were pretty solid and the strip was funny, but why? Why were the Bones lost, and why should we care what happens to anybody in this story? I drew the Bone characters every day for four years getting by on college level humor and small bits of continuity, and by the time I finished, a story began to take shape in my mind. A story that I thought would be worth telling.

M: I know the story has been told a million times, but tell me about how Bone started out; self-publishing it and all.

J: The key was finding out that comic book stores existed… after that I just did a little research, drew a comic and there you go. Pure luck, really. I got friendly with some of the local shop owners and started tagging along with them to industry events, and because of that, most of my first contacts in the field were with comics shop retailers. I would go to the Diamond Retailer sales conference, and since I didn’t know anybody I would hang out in the lounge with Jim Hanley, Rory Root, Joe Field, Chuck Rosanski, and all those kinds of guys. My first year or so in comics was like that. Later on, I started to meet other artists like Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess, and Dave Sim. Also in the lounge, I might add.

M: Reading Bone, I loved the arc in theme as well as characters. Reading the Complete Bone was really the best way to read this. Clearly, you had all these character arcs planned out from the start. Did you have a tight outline on hand, or was it in your head?

J: Writing a story is an organic experience, no matter how carefully planned it is. With BONE, I had the main ideas written down, and I knew the Bone cousins would leave the valley and go home. I also knew Thorn would rule the Kingdom without a king, that was important to me — I didn’t want her to need a Prince Charming. But even with charts and complicated outlines, the story grew and changed as it went, just like real life does. In fact, the tale unfolded in a pretty naturalistic, living way that felt real while I was writing it, and I hope it rings true for readers as well.

M: It sure has. It’s real for my son. We go hiking in the woods and he’ll always make a comment like “Look, I’m Fone Bone!” It used to be Frodo, so pat yourself on the back about that one… What about Lord of the Rings? Is it me or was that an influence on your work as much Pogo and such?

J: The Lord of the Rings was instrumental in showing me the way a fully formed world could be brought into existence. Thinking of the world as if it had real geography and each of its people having their own culture.

M: I really dig how it starts out as a cute “funny book” and then gets so big and deep. Did you find that a problem with marketing; while your fans grew, do you think you lost a few that didn’t want the book to get so dark?

J: Some people complained, I suppose, because they thought Bone was going to be an endless comic like Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge. But in the end, I was sure readers would like the idea of a single story that had a true beginning, middle, and end. Besides, it was too late to stop. And I knew the one volume edition would drive comic book fans nuts. No one can resist a five-pound comic!

M: What about marketing the book? I can imagine Disney or some video game company coming to you early on wanting Bone, thinking it’s this cute little book; then you lay it on them how deep it is. Was that actually a problem for you?

J: Yes, but not the way you would think. It’s the opposite problem. The “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father” aspect of Thorn’s story is something Hollywood execs can see right away. The tricky part seems to be shoehorning both Thorn’s epic story in with the Bone’s seemingly smaller story. Bone’s story is ultimately the more important of the two, but Thorn’s is more conventional in many ways, and it tends to take over in an 80-minute screenplay.

M: How did you plan Bone from issue to issue? What was your writing process like on it, and how has it changed?

J: Well, in the early days, with the open road stretched out in front of you, planning was easy. You just wrote what worked and was funny without worrying if all the plot points had been made. If you didn’t have room for some idea, it could wait for the next issue, or even the one after that. Toward the end, when I was trying to bring this speeding, billion-ton tanker to a halt, the planning became a nightmare. There were so many threads to tie up, and so much information that still had to go in, the final issues took months to write. I had so many charts and complicated graphs that sometimes I would forget to look at the right one and have to start over.

M: Well it paid off, bro. You tied it up nice. I remember the shock reading Bone to my son when I saw the Giant Balloon! I often look back at those scary days; the early days of my career, when I really didn’t know if I was going to make it. Some dark days there, buddy. How about you; what do you feel when you look back on the early days of Bone, both professionally and personally?

J: Dude, I’m still worried I’m not going to make it.

M: Do you find your life finding its way into your writing?

J: Always. What else do you write about? You just have to disguise it bit, so people won’t recognize the argument you’re writing between two hairy monsters is really just a fight you had with your wife the night before.

M: I love it when I write bits of my life, or my friends into a story, and don’t realize that until much later. Has that happened to you?

J: One day someone told me that Thorn looks just like Vijaya, my wife. I hadn’t thought I was drawing her, but suddenly I could see it! The way Thorn leans forward to listen, the way she brushes her hair behind her ears; it’s Vijaya.

M: Bone had a sense of world, part of which was a spiritual world. Do you have a religious background, and did you find any of those themes working into Bone or your other works?

J: There’s religion in BONE, but no religious message. There’s obviously more to our existence than what we can see, and people are always trying to come to grips with it. People all over the globe struggle to understand the Mystery, and that is what I was trying to portray in BONE by giving the characters a belief system. It adds another level of reality to that sense of world.

M: I’m a huge mythology fan. I can tell you are, too. Have you ever read the works of Joseph Campbell?

J: I have. I read Campbell’s most famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces while writing The Great Cow Race. What Campbell does is compare the world’s religions and folk tales, looking for what they have in common. I thought, “That’s interesting!” Most people would have focused on what was different. From there, I not only read everything of his I could get my hands on, I started reading mythology on my own. Hindu, Greek, Nordic, American Indian. The Dreaming from Australia really caught my eye. The key thing for me in Campbell’s books is the discussion on symbolism. He shows that the symbols in mythology are the same as the ones Carl Jung cataloged in our dreams. In other words, some symbols are hardwired into us! I love symbolism, anyway. You can use this stuff in your art. It all dovetails nicely with the symbolism I learned in Art History. What I discovered from a storytelling perspective is that a structure, like through-lines and turning points, can give your story a horizontal line from beginning to end, but mythology gives it a vertical one; gives it depth.

M: I have several of his speeches on CD, including a great one with Bill Moyers that’s like SIX discs. I highly recommend them. Right now, I’m comparing JOB with the ODYSSEY… We’ll have to have a talk about that stuff over some beers… What kind of symbology made its way into Bone?

J: I use water a lot. Fone Bone falls off waterfalls, and meets Thorn in a hot spring. The dragon pops up out of a well. Water is important to us, and it’s a very traditional storytelling symbol. King Arthur was given his sword, Excalibur, by the Lady of the Lake, and whenever the Knights of the Roundtable come across a fountain surrounded by virgins in the middle of nowhere, you know an adventure is about to happen.

M: When you started Bone, did you have a family? Or were you a single cat about the town?

J: My cattin’ days were behind me. In fact, it was when I met Vijaya that I started to take my cartoons seriously.

M: How about now?

J: No kids. I mean, I love kids, I just prefer to visit somebody else’s, get them riled up just before bedtime, then leave. Makes you want to invite me over, doesn’t it?

M: Don’t get my boy riled up; he might put a hurting on you. Ask David Mack. I have to tell you, doing what we do and having kids is hard, at least for me, because I find my work incredibly selfish. For me, it’s very time-consuming and solitary; I’m always second-guessing how much time I’m working and how much is family time… I work at home, it’s great, I love it, but I think I work too much. Sometimes my studio becomes a weird time warp and I can’t get out; the outside world becomes my enemy. Do you work at home or have a studio?

J: Yeah, Holidays are rough. I always forget and think, “Oh, I have another week to work on this — oh no I don’t, it’s Christmas! Fuck!” Once you get wound up and the deadline clock is on, you lose proportion. Everything is big, and nothing is small. I scream and rip my hair out every time an issue goes to press. It’s ugly, and I hope nobody ever sees it. When I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I rented a separate little A-frame cottage in the middle of the Redwoods. Everything there was geared toward making comics. I had no phone, no TV. Just paper, brushes, books, and music. Now that I’m back in Ohio, I have a private studio as well as an office at Cartoon Books where Vijaya works with Steve and Kathleen. And I still go nuts when I work.

M: Tell me more about your little working family; your wife (like, how do you pronounce her name), and Steve and Kathleen.

J: It’s pronounced Vee-JAY-ah. Vijaya is my partner here at Cartoon Books. The basic breakdown is she handles the business and licensing, while I take care of promotion and creating the books. That’s too simple of course. We work together, but that’s the gist. Kathleen Glosan is our production manager. Steve Hamaker is my art assistant, working on all artwork that isn’t my actual comic. Right now Steve is coloring the BONE saga for Scholastic, and he just started coloring the mini-series I’m doing for DC.

M: Some days the work takes over my mind and anything that’s not that work grinds on me. Have you ever been overwhelmed by your work? Not how much you have, but the ideas, the force of the work; has it ever overcome you?

J: I worked on Bone for 12 or 18 hours a day, usually starting at 5 am. Deadlines used to make me insane, and I never seemed to be able to get out in front of them for even a moment. I wanted everything perfect, and it takes forever. When you’re putting that much effort — that much emotional power and energy into something, it makes it difficult to keep space available for anything else. Pay the bills, or take out the trash; how could you even ask? When I would stop working for something important, like say, Thanksgiving, it would only be because I had to. And if I’m interrupted in the middle of working, I swear, it’s like emerging from a dream or something. I can see Kathleen or Steve’s mouth moving, but it takes a second before I can hear the words.

M: Oh my God, you are my soul brother. No shit; it’s crazy if I’m broken out of my work, or if I fall into the ideas when I’m out. It’s like I’m Homer Simpson thinking about hamburgers while people are yapping at me. I love driving; stories really flow for me then, but usually I miss my exits and stuff; my son constantly mocks me for it. It’s easy enough for the life to fall apart being that deep into the work, thank god for our families to run our lives for us!

How do you see your work objectively? I find it too easy to be in my own head and I think the work can suffer for that; at least my writing. How do you know you are conveying your story clearly and that your pacing is right?

J: For some reason, I can view my own work critically. I can look at it and see right away if it’s shit or not. At each step of the process, when the panels are penciled, and then again when they’re inked, I read and reread any given sequence to feel it moving. I learned that the timing changes as the panels become more finished. Inking and background details give your eye more things to linger over and can slow you down. The trick is first to figure out what needs to be done to fix it, and then to be willing to start over if that’s what it takes. And I’ve done that. My words and drawings aren’t precious; if a sequence isn’t reading, then I need to make it work.

M: Enough of work, what do you do outside of drawing and writing? Are you involved in any covert CIA operations? Mark Millar said you do “wet works.”

J: I have a pit bull named Preston that I like to run with. I love to travel, eat good food and drink good wine. I love to visit New York and play with my cartoonist pals. And I read comics. I’m re-reading Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, one of the most perfectly constructed graphic novels of the last few years; and I’m on book three of Tezuka’s Buddha. I’m exploring web comics. Web comics are fascinating because there are no market forces. These artists do whatever their muses tell them. And they use color. My generation of do-it-yourselfers had to print booklets in black & white, but this group is free to use digital pallets of infinite complexity. There are a bunch of artists who post at the FLIGHT forum, and the links take you to sites that look like old school Disney. You know, Mike, I’m a big fan of yours. I love that booklet you have at shows with drawings of nymphs and fairies. If you ever want to do that short story we talked about, Naked Fairy Wars, let me know.

M: My son, who loves Bone, has asked me to ask you if you will ever do more Bone, and if he will ever drive a racecar?

J: The answers are Yes, and Yes.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming @ aol.com.

These interviews should be fun and informative; from the POV of one artist/writer getting into the mind of another creator, helping readers get into our mindset. I won’t be asking about specific projects, but about the process behind those projects. I will try and be as honest as possible about myself, and with whom I am interviewing, and I won’t pull any punches if I have them, while at the same time, remaining respectful.

The first interview I have for you is with Warren Ellis. You know his work from
TRANSMETROPOLITAN, PLANETARY, AUTHORITY, GLOBAL FREQUENCY, STORMWATCH, ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR, DOWN, DESOLATION JONES, FELL and many other comics and original graphic novels.

Mike: Thanks for taking time for my first creator-to-creator interview. Boredom led me into comics, what about you? Raised around them, or found them on your own?

Warren: My dad brought home a comic for me when I was around three years old. It was either COUNTDOWN or TV 21 – one became the other anyway. But I think it was COUNTDOWN. Popular SF TV shows of the time done in comics form, in 2-page episodes as I recall. DR. WHO, UFO, THUNDERBIRDS, maybe STAR TREK, that kind of thing. And that was it. Hooked. My dad liked both SF and comics, and I caught the bug off him.

M: My mother also got me hooked on SF as a kid. We used to watch DR. WHO all the time, and that led me to my later fixation with BLAKE’S 7, and why I started using my middle name, Avon, after one of the characters. My mother was an artist and early on that sparked my interest. Do you think the fact that your father loved comics and SF bonded you with the genre?

W: I think so, yeah. He was also a writer – only published the once, a crime-comedy novel called THE THURSDAY SHED – so it’s pretty clearly in my genes, I guess. But, yeah, I remember reading through all his old SF novels as a kid, the musty Theodore Sturgeon MORE THAN HUMAN hardback, and the battered old DUNE paperback and the like.

M: Has you father read your work?

W: He died a couple of years back, but he’d read a fair bit of it, yeah. I got the deal for my prose novel (out next year, with a bit of luck) shortly before he died, which pleased him immensely.

M: At what point did you realize you were going to write comics, and how long until you felt you were really on the “in”?

W: I think I realised in the early 80s, as a kid – I was involved with the small press as a teenager, what we called stripzines back then and what people call mini-comics today. The scene in the early 80s was incredibly energetic, based around the two-monthly comic marts in London and the Fast Fiction table operated by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanley that sold zines for a 10% cut. I remember getting invaluable guidance from Paul, and from people who’ve since disappeared like Chris Brasted (who produced a pro-quality anthology called MAD DOG with a guy called SMS, who later worked on 2000AD). Photocopy toner under the fingernails, new work by the likes of Eddie Campbell, Glenn Dakin and Ilya every couple of months; sitting talking with Alan Moore; Grant Morrison came down a few times; the day a little stripzine from Canada came over called YUMMY FUR by a guy called Chester Brown (I think I still have that somewhere) …yeah. This was what I was going to do.

M: Wow, Yummy Fur is an underground legend in the states. I’ve realized through talking with many artist/writer friends that broken families are a common background. I spent most of my childhood daydreaming to escape day-to-day life, making stories out of radio songs or walking through the woods. What was your childhood like? How do you think it formed your writing?

W: My parents didn’t split until I was 14 or so. I think I had a fairly ordinary childhood – times with lots of friends, times with few friends, long summers of gangs on bikes marauding the village or fucking around in the woods; standard-issue awkward adolescence. The one standout thing was that I fucked up my knee playing rugby around 13, had to learn to walk again and spent the rest of my school years on painkillers. If I was ever solitary, though, it was usually by choice. I’m happy in my own company most of the time. And a little later on, I discovered the things that would plague me for the rest of my life: drink and girls.

M: Have you had any low points in your career? I had such a dry spell I worked as a security guard – and this was after having been in the industry for several years.

W: Oh, man. 25. I’d been working with Tundra UK for a year or two. Had just moved in with Niki. And I got a phone call telling me that Tundra UK were shutting down and were not going to honour my last couple of invoices. We’d spent most of our money on the move and the rent. Niki’s dad had given us £1000, mostly I think to pay me off for taking her out of the house, but ostensibly to buy stuff for the flat. We ended up living on that, stretching it out over a few months while I tried to scratch up work. Nothing. And just as it ran out, I got a phone call from Archie Goodwin, who’d just gotten around to reading a pitch I’d sent him 18 months earlier…

M: Have you found your education to have helped you much with your writing? Other than typing class and learning basic reading and writing skills, it was pretty useless for me, to be honest. Most of my true education came after schooling.

W: I left education at 18. What I’d gotten from those two years at 6th form college was, 1) I really couldn’t draw very well, and 2) I learned how to pull apart a text properly. That was about it. Also, that the older I got the less willing I was to take orders from anyone.

M: What are some of your life experiences (or those of friends) that have made it into your work?

W: Too many. I try to cloak them, and usually people assume I made them up. I once saw someone try to bang heroin through a tear duct. An old girlfriend was sexually abused by her brother and given a teddy bear after each time – that was in TRANSMET. Killed himself when she was 15. You can find a lot of things like that in my work. I had some hard years, and a lot of people I knew had harder, and it can’t help but come out in the work because I try to talk about life as it’s lived. I want to show the exposed bone of the world, because that’s where a lot of people are.

M: I think too many comic writers never really think about the craft, they just keep writing and stumble their way out of crappiness – if ever at all. I found a little bit of studying the craft took me a long way, and I still dissect it as much as possible. What was the first “rule” or guideline you learned about writing?

W: Hm. You have to remember that a lot of us Brits learned to write comics from a single example: one page of JUDGE DREDD script reprinted in a 2000AD annual around 1980. Me and Garth Ennis still laugh about it. And we both still write scripts in something approaching that form. Around ‘88, someone told me the Stan Lee rule – 28(ish) words per panel. An average panel on an average page can’t usefully hold more than 28 words of dialogue and/or caption. I do that by eye, now – if a single balloon or caption runs into a third line on the script page, it’s starting to run too long.

I’m still learning, all the time. The thing I tell people is that you don’t learn how to write comics by reading comics. You learn how to write by reading books. You learn how to write comics by *dissecting* comics. You need to cut into the page and discover exactly what tools the creators employed to attain an effect.

M: What are some of the steps you make sure are accomplished in your writing? For example, each issue should end with a reason to pick up the next, even if it’s not a cliffhanger; that sort of thing.

W: The first page is killer. Comics aren’t movies; the audience doesn’t grant you that slack time in the first five minutes to get comfortable. Comics work like books or songs – if it doesn’t have you in the first line or the first 30 seconds of music, you’re dead. In any given episode: what do we learn about the protagonist? The protagonist is nominally the reason we’re there, and ideally I like to add to our knowledge of the character in each step of the story. Similarly, I want to learn something about the condition of the world of the story every time. If I’m working in genre, then usually I want to obey the genre – if it’s a spy story like DESOLATION JONES, then there needs to be interrogation, revelation and violence, no matter how they’re presented or hidden. This depends, of course, on your perception of the genre – I did my stint on ULTIMATE FF as young-adult SF, really, and spent more time with the people than I did the conflicts or whatever.

And I need to make the space for the artist to crank off a good guitar solo. It’s no good unless the artist has some fun, right?

M: You’ve spoken in terms of music; are you a musician at all? The fields are closely related; I have a lot of musician friends and find them to be similar to the artists I know. I find many artists/writers either are, like myself, frustrated talentless musicians; how about you?

W: Never picked up a musical instrument in my life, and I have a voice like a crow. I’ve dated singers who’ve begged me not to sing in the shower because the sound is so offensive to their ears. I have a critic’s ear – I can tell when someone’s off the note, but I can’t get within a mile of it myself. But, for me, music and writing are inextricable. I never write in silence. I’m in the pub right now with my mp3 player’s earbuds in, listening to Tom Waits croaking through “Cold Water.” I’ve always said that comics are closer to music than they are to film, and I tend to pick them apart the same way. Comics are all rhythm and stab, drums and guitars and keyboards; and they’re short, replayable experiences.

M: I’m the same way – I need music to write. It gets me in the zone like a trance.

I like to build my scripts from the ground up. Do you do anything like this, or do you find you can just jump right into it at this point?

W: I’m the most arse-backwards writer in the business. I’ve been known to start with a scene somewhere in the middle with no characters or setting and build in both directions. I usually start with a bunch of random notes, connect them up and go from there. Technically, I’m one-draft, but I edit as I go. It goes down as dialogue and brief directions, raw, and I take another pass at everything when I go back and format it into script. Most often, I go into something already knowing the themes – it begins with something I want to talk about, and everything follows from that. I tend to feel character arcs are part and parcel of the writing process – it’s not a separate step; it’s just something that happens if your story’s working. Or, sometimes, not – I don’t consider “the growth/change of a character” crucial to a good story. Sherlock Holmes maybe had two elements of character development in his entire career.

M: Do you keep the artist in mind when writing, if at all?

W: Constantly. I’m living with the script for a week. The artist is living with it for a month. It needs to be tailored to them, and it needs to show them off at their absolute best. I’ll read tons of their work beforehand, look for what they do well, look for the things they haven’t gotten to do and the unrealised potential therein, and go into it trying to make them look as good as possible. Jim Lee once said that it’s possibly my greatest strength as a writer, and it’s one I enjoy. There’s nothing quite like seeing an artist step into the space I make for them.

M: How do you deal with an artist who goes off script? Do you work around it or send someone to break fingers?

W: I don’t work with them again. Ever. I am horrible about this. I tell artists, if something doesn’t work for you, tell me, and we’ll fix it. Back in the 90s, I spent an hour on the phone telling an artist this. When the pages came back, it turned out that he didn’t like the back five pages, and drew something else. And this was full script, not a vague Marvel-style thing. I went mental. When I finally got the guy on the phone again to find out what went wrong, he said, well, this is just the start of our collaboration, you’ll learn. So I had him fired. I was really just starting out at Marvel, and could easily have been fired myself – the artist had been on the book for a couple of years. But I was prepared to take the hit. No one else is going to stand up for your work but you. Turned out the artist had done this to a lot of writers over the years, but no one had stood up and said, “Enough.” I’m told that to this day he complains that I had him blacklisted in the business. Which I didn’t, and I still don’t use his name in public. But, after that, people were a lot more careful with my scripts, and that kind of thing has only happened a couple of times since. And I don’t work with those people again.

M: Has an artist’s storytelling style actually improved your work? Either through changing something, or simply through their approach?

W: Hitch would fiddle with progressions during monologues on THE AUTHORITY every now and then, which suited me fine, and the work was better for it. Darick would always find angles and acting on TRANSMET that brought pages to life. Happens all the time. If you’re lucky, you can find the telepathic people who can see what was really in your head when you’re trying to describe something – the Colleen Dorans and Cully Hamners. Jon J Muth did a marvellous thing on his ep of GLOBAL FREQUENCY where he went off-script just a tiny bit and introduced a long walk into the story. Everything I wrote was still there, but he framed it wonderfully. Paul Gulacy would crack one panel into two or three for that staccato Gulacy effect. I’d love to write for him again.

M: I hate editorial input, and I do a lot of licensed projects that drive me crazy, but I do find by making me work harder I actually do write better work. Its a cliché, but do you find it’s true that obstacles can actually make your writing better?

W: They’ll lead you in new directions, to be sure. The most recent was not getting to use Nick Fury on NEXTWAVE, and having to create Dirk Anger in his place, which just let me loose. Dirk Anger is Nick Fury having a massive nervous breakdown, and the gags I get out of that are some of the best pages in the book.

M: I notice most of your work stems from original creations instead of established characters. I fucking love that. How do you feel about creating characters for other companies? Every time I create something for another company, I feel like I’m giving away too much. There could be a movie there that I’m getting all of, instead of some slice that’s owned and controlled by the company. Maybe I’m just greedy. :)

W: I try not to give original works away on work-for-hire. Not only is it not in the job description (see below), but it’s really just bloody stupid. The history of American comics is out there for all to see. It’s no secret that lives and careers have been destroyed by people not knowing or caring what they’re signing away. There’s no excuse now for signing over all rights to an original work in perpetuity. So I don’t do it. Unless I’m guaranteed a piece of it. And often not even then. Book publishers don’t steal all the goddamn rights to a novel and leave you some crumbs. I started out in creator-owned work, and that’s how I’ll end. And it only makes sense.

Creators who spend all their time on company-owned stuff eventually reveal themselves as having nothing of themselves to give or say, and it’s those people who disappear from the field. They become something less than creators. I know how harsh and horrible that sounds, but no one can survive as an artist by producing nothing but cover versions all the time. Taking an occasional shot at these things can get the blood moving and work some muscles, but, really, if you can’t or won’t create a story from scratch, what the hell are you doing here?

M: Do you find yourself holding back story ideas so you can use them later for yourself?

W: I actually try not to do that. I’m sure it’s happened from time to time. I will withhold original characters or settings that I feel have legs, but that’s not the job with work-for-hire anyway. It took me a while to realise it, and in retrospect it seems obvious, but the point of a work-for-hire job is to make the company’s creative properties work in and of themselves, not to inject new and original characters into the properties. That’s not what you’re hired for – you’re there to make the company-owned property make money again. And, ultimately, the audience for those books doesn’t want new stuff. Some of them have said it to my face, and not as politely as all that. They want the old things done better. That’s all.

M: What are you hoping to do in the future? IN comics and out.

W: I would really like to write some television. I mean, I did an episode of the JUSTICE LEAGUE cartoon, but I’d like to write some live-action TV sometime. It’ll never happen, of course, but I nurture the idea of it from time to time. For ten years, I’ve been wanting to write original graphic novels in what is now, I guess, the manga format, though I fell in love with it when it was the Paradox Mystery format, paperback-size and 100 pages black-and-white. I’ve tried to get something going in that format again and again, and it’s never worked out. No one wants to know. That’s long been a source of frustration for me.

M: Yeah, changing formats is a hard thing to do. It doesn’t fly. Everyone wants something new, but no one wants change. Any thoughts on the future of comics? With so many people reading trades, I’m not sure what the future of monthly comics really is…

W: I think, in one sense, their future is the present: they’re a specialist item, available only through specialist stores. The commercial end of the medium is engaged in a constant act of CPR, keeping the single alive by overheating the audience. There’s a ceiling for that kind of book, and so the way they’re raising sales is in trying to get that static audience to buy more books. What I’d like to see more of are attempts to bring new customers into comics stores, which I seem to be achieving in a small way with FELL.

To be honest, I’d be happy to see only two kinds of single in the market – serial-to-collection, for the early adopters who just have to have the story first, and self-contained-single, where each story is a standalone piece that any reader can enter at any point in the run. The former is the equivalent of “appointment television”, where you can’t help but want to catch the first run of something. The latter is TV-to-DVD, really, isn’t it? These are the only two forms I work in, personally. I’m not interested in writing open-ended stuff that runs forever, because there’s no creative risk. Look what happens when it’s done half-arsed. The Death of Superman was huge. The return of Superman did hideous damage to the state of the market.

Now, of course, waiting for the trade is considered one of the big bugbears of the medium. I was one of the bigger proponents of the trade paperback in the 90s, and people kind of squint at me now with that “see what you’ve done” thing. But I make a lot of money now from the forty or so TPBs I have in print – works that 15 years ago would not have earned a penny beyond the month of their release. Yes, the market fractured, and we don’t see a lot of the available money spent in the month of release anymore – but my DC royalties paid for the family Xmas this year. So it all worked out. For me, anyway.

I’d like to see more original graphic novels, but too many publishers are still afraid of them. If there is a future, I think it’s still in driving more people into intelligent and deserving comics stores. But there are still too few stores, of any kind. I’ve always said that if the publishers want to “save” the industry, then they should be finding ways to make it easier to open new comics stores in locations not currently served. I know someone who, if she wanted to visit a comics store, would have to drive for 12 hours – and she’s not exactly living in the swamps, you know?

M: Okay, you’re sitting in a pub and you see some guys walk in wearing comic book shirts. They look over and think they might recognize you. Do you—

Mark Millar will answer D when I ask him, so you can be just as honest.

W: A. I come to the pub to work, not to talk. A fan once tracked down the pub I work in, and came in asking questions. When I arrived, everyone was very tense. He didn’t realise there were three large blokes behind him ready to stamp on him if he moved funny. He turned out to be a very nice guy. But they’re kind of protective of me here. Most of them aren’t sure what I do, but they know I’m a writer, and a few of them have seen me on TV in the past. So they watch my back a little. Funny, really. It’s not like I’m actually famous. On the rare occasions I do conventions I can wander around without anyone approaching me. Never ever confuse this gig with real fame. That’s how some people go crazy.

M: You really work in the Pub? How does that work out? Do you have a day, then spend time working at the Pub or are you there all day?

W: I give myself a couple of hours up here, usually from noon-1 until 2-3. I suffer from a terminal allergy to common housedust, and even with the medication, I find I need to get out of the house for a couple of hours a day. So, I have this Treo handheld computer, a fold-out keyboard it plugs into, the phone and the mp3 player, and it all goes into the coat pockets – a mobile office complete with GPRS internet connection. So, for a couple of hours a day, I come up here, drink Red Bull, smoke (I don’t smoke at home), read the newspapers that I download to the handheld first thing, and write…

M: Man, that’s great. I drink a little to loosen the ID, that helps with some of the writing but I could see working at a bar getting out of hand for me. I can’t drink Guinness and enjoy it. Am I a pussy for drinking Stella?

W: Nope. I am the only British creator who doesn’t like Guinness, I think. A bunch of us went to a tiny island off the coast of Ireland for Garth Ennis’ stag do, some years back, and each round was the same – 14 pints of Guinness, and a whisky for Warren. Absolute fucking muck. Stella’s acceptable.

M: When are we going to work together? Don’t make me beg.

W: That’d be a bit of a step down for you, wouldn’t it?

M: I’ll poke Bendis’ other eye out to work with you, just say the word!

For extra credit.

1. What is your favorite word to hear in a convention?

“Drink?”

2. What is your least favorite word to hear in an editor’s office?

“Hello.” (I avoid editorial offices like the plague. I like the separation of phone and email. Familiarity breeds contempt. Most of the people I knew who would haunt editors’ offices aren’t working anymore.)

3. What turns you on sexually?

Dark-haired women. God help me.

4. What turns you off sexually?

Scabs.

5. What is your favorite curse word your mother uses?

My mother doesn’t curse. You can imagine what a disappointment I am.

6. What sound or noise do you love when you’re kicking someone in a dark alley?

The sound of someone shrieking the word, “Sorry.”

7. What sound or noise do you hate when running from the police?

Gunfire.

8. What profession other than urine-stained coke whore would you like to attempt?

Hey, that worked out pretty well for me. There was a girl who worked in the stock market, back in the 80s, who frequently covered my rent.

You think I’m joking.

9. What person would you not like to do?

Sharon Osbourne. Can you imagine that voice while you were working?

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to say to God when he rejects you at the Pearly Gates?

“You’re a piece of shit, aren’t you?”

Check out more Warren Ellis at warrenellis.com or The-Engine.net.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming@aol.com.