ZED Presents…
The Carpe Noctem Interviews: Vol. 2
Conducted by Thom Carnell
Edited by C.K. Burch
Digital edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 by Thom Carnell
ZED Presents…
Publishing
Entire contents © Thom Carnell 2011
Cover photo of Monica Richards by Clovis IV.
ZED Presents… Publishing
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Carpe Noctem Interviews Vol 1
Novels
No Flesh Shall Be Spared – by Thom Carnell
Unabridged Audiobooks:
No Flesh Shall Be Spared – Narrated by Chris Patton
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Table of Contents
Frank Miller
Clive Barker
Stuart Gordon
David Schow
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Nacho Cerda
Tom Rainone
Viggo Mortensen
The Creatures
Hajime Soryama
Monica Richards
This issue’s lineup was handpicked for Jon Edwards, a true supporter of independent thought and lover of big words.
Our never-ending thanks for your friendship.
Introduction
When I first met Thom and Catia Carnell, I had no idea the wild ride that I would be in for, nor was I aware of the depth of knowledge and experience in both publishing and horror that I would be exposed to or, thankfully, brought in to be a part of. I remember seeing Thom speak at the 2008 Bellingham ComiCon, and then a few years later was able to actually meet the man through Catia. Both of them are funny, witty, intelligent, and have a crossfire that’s both humorous and interesting to view. But it was the writing that brought me into the fold with them; a casual aside about a former graphic novel project that I was working on perked up Catia’s ears, got her talking about Carpe Noctem magazine and their history with the publication, and after what felt like the blink of an eye I was being asked to proofread Thom’s first novel, No Flesh Shall Be Spared. I enjoyed it, offered my pointers, and expected nothing more in return. But if anything, Thom and Catia remember the guys who help out, and soon I was helping out more, and more, until here I am writing the introduction to Volume 2 of The Carpe Noctem Interviews, and editing them as well. And there are some great reads on display in this volume: Clive Barker, Nacho Cerda, Frank Miller, Stuart Gordon, Tom Rainone, among others. I did some proofreading and editing work on Volume 1 as well, and while I had known of Thom and Catia’s involvement with the industry, man oh man was I unprepared for the depth of their experience, and the work that they’ve done as a part of it.
I was a peripheral student of horror a little over a year and a half ago, and since then have written my first horror novel, and I’m currently working on my second. I owe that reinvigorated sense of wonder and fanboyish glee for the genre to Thom and Catia. They’ve been mentors and teachers, and friends as well. Reading these interviews was an absolute pleasure and they are a tribute to the genre. Horror isn’t dead; it’s undead, and it’s coming for you. Seize the night!
- C.K. Burch
Frank Miller
Frank Miller was one of those interviews I was really nervous about doing. I’d heard he did not suffer fools lightly and I was worried. I’d read articles in Wizard and other comic journals that painted him as someone who gave no quarter. What I found instead was a highly intelligent man who talked slowly, carefully considering each and every word he said. As we went through my list of questions, Frank gave up insight into his characters that gave them a dimension I’d never really considered. I’m proud of this one.
Walking The Streets of SIN CITY – Volume II, Issue 2
It’s not often that a person gets to make a mark in his chosen field. It is less likely that one would have the opportunity to make such a mark that one re-defines what the field is capable of. From his first forays into the comic form, Frank Miller has brought to it a quiet sensibility and intimate knowledge of the darker and street-wise side of the super hero genre. His work on Daredevil, his introduction of the character Elektra, the ground-breaking majesty of Ronin, and the now legendary treatment of the Batman mythos have established him as a unique voice in an industry of safe and sometimes paranoid artists and writers. His characters tend to be so “real” that the readers feel that they know them on intimate terms and revel in the victories and, at times, weep at their demise. Now with his latest labor of love, Sin City, he is turning his eye to the all too real world of the crime story. In stark pages of black and white Frank Miller is again re-defining what the medium is capable of achieving, and more importantly, breathing new life into a genre long thought dormant.
Based on the reception that comic art receives in Europe and Japan, where do you think that American Comics went wrong?
I think there were two very important ways that American comics went wrong and both happened in the period, more or less, in the forties and fifties. In the forties, they established a factory system where people weren’t allowed the legal authorship of their own work, setting in motion a system where artists/cartoonists would feel ultimately punished for being generous with their talent, which created a very bad mentality. In the fifties, a deadly mistake was made in that comics allowed themselves to be classified as children’s entertainment only. This had not been the case before, we’ve all seen the photographs of World War II soldiers reading their comic books, but in the fifties the publishers allowed this misconception to become the guiding rule and we accepted stricter censorship than any other form of entertainment with the Comics Code.
How do you react when people, even today, still label comic art as “kiddie books”?
If it’s people from outside the field, I think it’s a very understandable position because that’s how we continually present ourselves. With people within the field, I think it’s a very sad self-contempt. Not that there is anything wrong with entertainment for children, but to handcuff an entire story form to one age group is absurd. Especially since everyday people open up their newspapers and read the comics or the editorial cartoons and enjoy them as adults. To say that once it’s more than three panels long it’s for children is absurd.
Could you ever see yourself going back and working under that sort of system, under the banner of say DC or Marvel?
Well, I’m a fairly cautious person in a lot of ways and I try to never say never
again, but my focus has so shifted and I’m in such a lucky position right now. I’m an artist doing exactly what he wants to do and enough people are showing up to make it worth my while to do it. So, to abandon something like Sin City in order to go back to a Daredevil or whatever, might give me some sentimental pleasure, but I don’t think it would ultimately be as satisfying as it used to be. Also I feel that I’m, at this stage of my career, contributing to the future of the field rather than continuing to mine the past.
How did your new comic line for Dark Horse Comics, Legend, come about?
Well, John Byrne and I decided that since this was an imprint happy business, imprint crazy business, and since a bunch of us all, being in good terms with each other and admiring each other’s work, wanted people to notice it, that would be a good way to turn Sin City readers onto Nextmen, Nextmen readers onto Monkey Men and so on. We’d seen what had happened with Image and how they initially established their imprint as the first imprint that represented the talent and not the bankroll and that it had worked. And we thought we’d have our bowling club to see if we could help bring more readers to each other’s books.
Is there a philosophy to Legend or is it people doing what they want to do for themselves?
Well, it’s all creator owned. There aren’t any editorial parameters. Every one of us is able to do all the primary functions of a cartoonist, in other words, all of us can draw and all of us can write. Essentially, the over-all idea… John and I felt that we were doing comics that really didn’t fit any of the convenient niches of the day. We weren’t part of the stampede of brontosaurus with the new super hero universes. We weren’t Marvel…we weren’t DC…but we weren’t doing whiny biographical comics. One feeling that John and I both share is that we are entertainers, so we wanted to do comics that were a lot of fun, but not part of the old status quo.
I know at one time you had some real concerns about censorship and a rating system. Have your fears come to a reality or have things gotten a little better?
It’s just an ongoing fight. I’m convinced that what happened in the 1950’s created a battered child syndrome in Comic Book Land. People quiver in fear every time we get a little bit popular, and are convinced that this omnipotent outside world is going to come in and crush us. It’s important to point out that the outside world never did a damn thing to us. The U.S. Senate never censored comic books, in fact, they’ve indicated to us it was the publishers themselves that instituted the Comics Code, in order to put William Gaines out of business. It’s a scandal in our history, but since comic book history has been so poorly represented, people do think that at one horrible time in the fifties Frederic Wertham showed up and shut us down. Never happened. Comics have never been censored by anyone but comic book publishers’ distributors, but every time we get any attention at all there’s a lot of fear talk running around. This is happening now, and people are under the delusion that putting little apologies in the corners of the comics are going to protect us. The cover labels…the labels…whatever. In every case where a shop gets busted they look for those ratings and nail the books with them on it. They’re a red flag for the censors. They’re the worst thing we can do to ourselves.
So, in your opinion, what is your answer to the “protect the youngun’s” quagmire? Is it cover advisories? Is it warnings? Is it self-policing?
What would you say is the solution to preventing young children from going into a bookstore and buying The Catcher In The Rye? There is no solution. There is no over-arching solution that isn’t censorious. Believe me, all of the people involved in this rating system debate… I’m the only one who has ever worked under one. I’ve worked in Hollywood and I’ve seen how it works and it is the most censorious, insidious, corrupt pile of crap you ever saw. Solutions are like any real world solutions, situation by situation. A shop on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood can’t play by the same rules as one in Waco, Texas. Shop owners are a pretty smart bunch; they know their clientele. The problems that pop up are fairly rare. I have to be responsible when I do my book to give it a title and a look that tells you what it is. Honestly…not with a little apology. Nobody picks up Sin City expecting Little Lulu. A publisher has to represent it properly to the distributor, the distributors to the retailers, the retailers to the readers. It’s tougher that way, but it works.
Do you think that it’s a case where the parents’ groups that are standing up and saying, “Look at the stuff Little Johnny came home with” is just putting off their job as parents on somebody else?
First off, which ones are saying that about comic books? I’d have to challenge that because nobody’s saying that about comic books except comic book people, except for tiny regional sites that are just part of the publishing business. Comics are not under assault by the outside world at all. It’s very important to realize that we are not under attack. We are acting as if we are, but we aren’t. If we are, I think we at least owe it to ourselves to go down in flames, but before we can get into that debate, I’ve got to point out that there is no threat. Right now the censors are eating Hollywood alive. They’re eating the video industry alive. They’re frying the biggest fish in the world and why bother with the minnows?
Speaking of censorship and films, what do you think about groups like the M.P.A.A. being able to squelch an artist’s voice or vision just because there’s one too many hip thrusts?
I think the M.P.A.A. is a capricious, corrupt organization that never should have existed in the first place and if Hollywood had any courage they wouldn’t have ever introduced a ratings system.
You also have been quoted as saying that the entire comics industry has gone “chicken shit”. Can you elaborate on that?
Referring to our history again… I don’t remember saying the whole industry had gone chicken shit. I must have been in a mood. [laughs] It just gets back to this misperceived notion that we can’t fight fights. Here we write all these stories about these heroes who go up against unbelievable odds for the greater good, and the first time some wacko tele-evangelist waves a comic book, people are talking about shutting ourselves down, even if they don’t wave the comic books, we think maybe they will. We do all these heroic stories and the history is a history of cowardice. These things could be fought. The First Amendment is a powerful tool. I honestly also believe that if they ever do come after us, that it might be the best thing that ever happened to us. It might be the best format for us to show the world that we aren’t just churning out pabulum for kids. These things can all be managed. You gotta understand that the President of the United States changes his policy if he gets enough letters. We’ve got the most devoted fans you can find in entertainment. We can mobilize, we can stand very proud and say that we love this and we’ll stand by it as a story form. These aren’t the old days where we were all split off in separate [directions] and there were only a couple of publishers and they didn’t like what they were doing to begin with. These aren’t those days. We could do much better. If there is a fight, I would hope we would approach it with energy and enthusiasm and come out of it better than we started.
Speaking of Hollywood, what was your overall impression based on your experiences with the Robocop films?
Oh man! [laughs] What a crazy town! What a crazy business. This won’t translate into print, I’m sure, but you can hear the pleasure in my voice when I say that, because it was a lot of fun. It’s a very exciting business. It also drives you out of your mind. I’ll no doubt dive back into it sometime. Right now, I’m having too much fun doing Sin City. I’m having too much fun drawing, to tell the truth, and having the freedom I have, but it’s a very, very exciting business.
What do you think of “criminal chic”? The idea of someone who is basically a criminal being portrayed in a very romantic way.
There’s a long history of that. You can go all the way back to Little Caeser and White Heat. The gangster film is a classic American genre. It doesn’t mean we are teaching people to be criminals or anything. It just
means that every once in a while we get tired of one kind of lead character and go for another. They tend to provide really juicy roles for actors. I mean, James Cagney built his career playing the most venomous villains you could find. It comes and goes. I think there is a bit of a resurgence in crime fiction in general right now, outside of comics. That is par for the course.
Moving into some of your comic work, what did the series Lone Wolf And Cub in particular and manga [Japanese term for comics] in general show you was possible in terms of storytelling?
I learned a lot from Lone Wolf And Cub. Kojima’s story telling introduced a different kind of pace that particularly intrigued me, in that he was willing to let the whole process be a lot more fluid and take up as much space as it wanted to build its mood. I think that the manga often tried too hard to be movies and ended up reading a little bit like flip books, where you’ve read thirty pages and absolutely nothing’s happened. But I think that elements have been achieved there that can be wed to American comics to create a much different, more flexible pace. That’s a lot of what I’ve been up to with Sin City. Where sometimes the text is very heavy and then sometimes the story just rockets along with action. I’d like to have a little more variety in the pace. We’re just coming out of the Dark Ages in Comic Book Land. It used to be that all the pages had to have six square panels. A lot of experimentation you see going on now, I think, is just playing with the toys, finding out what works. In my case, the Japanese stuff was a real refreshing influence.
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