Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  Bastard!

  Yeah. He originally signed on to write Kingdom Come in ninety something and when he could finally muster up the gonads to tell me, he called me and said he was bailing on the whole thing and this is just not for him and blah blah blah. He actually had the audacity to tell me that Golden Age was this big epic tale that he didn’t need to tell any other way. He actually came clean as to say that he was just telling me that to get rid of me. Since I didn’t believe him then, either. So, when I hooked up with the next writer, it was like, okay, everybody at DC likes him—great. You guys trust him—good, because I want to get this going. I think, yes, he’s a good writer. I don’t know enough about him. I didn’t know anything about his personality, which was the next lesson I learned in life: I’m not going to jump into anything without knowing the personalities of the people I might be dealing with. In this scenario, I found yet another person I didn’t know at the outset was going to be an enemy of Carlin’s. Lo and behold, it turns out, Carlin hates this guy too. I’m sure I mentioned that to the editor in the process. It’s like I’m looking to get by Carlin because Carlin is the biggest stumbling block, the biggest fearful presence within the whole stratus of DC. You don’t want to piss him off. You want to get somebody that he’s cool with and so on and so forth. That’s why I basically didn’t throw Kingdom Come to Busiek. Even though he and I worked excellently on Marvels, and I should say above all I couldn’t have been happier with how well Kurt’s scripts turned out for Marvels. I really think I lucked out because I didn’t know he had that much talent in him. I didn’t know that he could turn out something that had the quality that it did. It was just very fortunate. In the same case, well not quite the same case as Mark… I knew Mark was a talented guy, so the work he did on Kingdom Come didn’t surprise me.

  How pervasive is the ‘good ol’ boy network’ in the comics industry?

  It’s legitimate. It is there. It’s not a fantasy. It’s real. Basically, what’s larger than the good ol’ boy network is just sort of the ‘if you’re in-you’re in’ kind of network. If you’ve gotten in that door where you’re a name that people rely upon, they know that you’re good for finishing any of the particular projects they could trust you with. Being on time is more important than anything. Second to being on time is making a lot of money for the company. So, they respect more the hack artist that can get the books done or have always gotten their books done continually on time and haven’t shown to be appreciatively bad or anything like that. After that will be guys like me. People think it’s the other way around. People think the successful artist that people are all talking about that are the big catches or whatever. I’m going to get the jobs I really want to do. I’m going to get these top gigs of various covers or whatever. The opportunity to pitch particular storylines that might be completely out there. I have that, but as far as getting the company being fully behind you, it really goes first and foremost to those monthly people that they deal with all the time. There’s a loyalty network, but mostly it’s based upon if you’re in already, if you’ve been a reliable commodity, and if you don’t make any waves…

  Sometimes I even think that if you make waves it’s ok, evidence they're getting work and it’s been proven time and again that there are some problems going on there as far as hitting deadlines or whatever.

  That is a strange case though. I mean, the only reason he was a part of that Marvel / Image deal was because Jim Lee didn’t want to go into it alone, and he couldn’t talk Todd McFarlane into it. That’s the story. Basically, they did not want Rob [Liefeld]. They never asked for Rob, but Rob is who they got. It makes it look like Marvel really wanted to get back to working with Rob, and that couldn’t be further from the truth because his sales were in the dumper. His books are not anything that Marvel feels they need to be associated with.

  Although they may be getting associated with this Agent America thing…

  They have no legal leg to stand on against him with that. He’s perfectly able to re-create Captain America in that way just like anybody else is. It’s just that it’s funny that he’s doing it so direct, and it is so clearly him trying to thumb his nose at Marvel. I can appreciate that. I think that’s funny. Ultimately, I wonder if it will even come out. If it does come out, will it be more than one issue? The reason that they had to can him was the fact that he wasn’t getting his work done. They have a very strict contract with that stuff. It’s been a long time since Rob and a lot of those guys had to be monthly artists on work. You know, Jim Lee lasted, what, six issues before he bailed on everybody? Rob, basically, has this huge team of assistants that mostly does the work and he comes in and draws a head, but he’s able to sign his name first and he figures that his name is the draw. Well, whatever… Essentially, I feel that these guys (Liefeld and Lee in particular) did reach that enormous success at the time that they did because they tried to spawn off their properties to a much larger circuit of creating multitudes of characters of which there could be various spin-off books and mini-series and specials and, for the most part, having an entire studio filled with people trained to draw like them, trained to ghost them, trained to do whatever. That whole mentality they share, unlike Todd McFarlane who, whenever it was Todd, it was clearly Todd, and he only brought on a couple of other artists who he’s taken care of. He’s looked after them.

  Have you seen the HBO Spawn thing?

  Yes.

  Did you like it?

  I’m glad for him that he waited out to get a cartoon that looked like the way he wanted it to look. That’s the thing that people can always admire about Todd, he didn’t make any quick deals on anything. He waited until he was boss and he got to do the cartoon he wanted to do and he got to do it the way [he wanted]. I mean, a premiere on HBO is this big deal, launching the whole HBO Animation line, that’s great.

  It’s a sweet deal.

  It’s a phenomenal deal and a good choice. It’s much better than playing the standard route of Erik Larsen or Jim Lee where they sign up with an animation studio just to get it on mainstream TV and it lasts maybe a season or two and then it’s off. And then, so are their toy lines. The toy lines are dead before they’re even up and running. Todd started off with his toys first and he highly controlled that and he always made sure that he was closely associated with his comic books. He always kept his hand in there. He did a pretty respectful thing. He waited until he got the exact deal for the movie that he wanted. I can’t show any particular love for the character. I’m not really into it. I thought the animation was interesting. It was definitely an interesting style, but I thought the story was just as inconceivable or just as fuckin’ freaked out as I ever thought it was. I mean, it’s like a guy goes to Hell so that he can come back up and fight crime. Wait a minute… The Devil’s giving out powers instead of punishment now. Come on! The point of Hell is you go there for eternal punishment, otherwise there’s no point.

  I’d like to ask you a few questions about your involvement with Kingdom Come. How much freedom were you afforded by DC?

  In terms of what we did with their characters?

  What you did with their characters, the look of things, how you were going to plot it out…

  Well, basically, they gave complete leeway with the character designs, but, to a certain degree, I think that a lot of that leeway comes, not so much that they trust me specifically for work I’d previously done, but moreover they could get a sense of everything I did and that I had a great love and appreciation for it. Certainly that is something Mark and I both shared is that we were not going to demoralize these characters. What you might be familiar with is that Alan Moore had done a series outline called Twilight, which is so damn similar to Kingdom Come it’s scary. I had pitched James Robinson with a very tight outline of what Kingdom Come would eventually wind up being a year previous to meeting Mark, and he told me about this outline that Moore had done. He said, ‘You really should read this thing because you’re going to be quite surprised how close
you guys were to each other.’ And I was! He gave me a copy of it and it was just stunning. His was the same length as mine, about 40 pages, and he had all of this stuff worked out. It was set in same kind of time and place and whatever. Ultimately though, the difference with Moore’s work is that he went one step beyond Watchmen, in terms of how he demoralized the characters. I mean, he had turned Plastic Man into a male prostitute, Superman was killed in the story in the most unappealing way. I mean, Billy Batson was like a sexual deviant. Characters were out of character I felt, because if you approached it in a way that you were trying to do this creative idea which was a very inspired idea, but somehow involved going in this certain direction with the character that those characters never would do, I think that your approach is faulted from the get-go and that’s what another person might have done, that’s what another person did. The thing is DC had approved that story. They were going to do that series. Karen Berger (DC Vertigo’s Executive Editor) told me that was on the schedule; that was meant to be done. It was just when Alan Moore had his big falling out with DC over things related to Watchmen and all of the merchandise resulted from that. That series might well have happened and it stuns me. At least it shows the difference of the times, because, back then, DC was willing to do something like that. Today, they would never even consider it, because they’re so controlling of their characters and they will not let somebody take the same approach. I would never take the same approach. Mark would never take the same approach. We both have this love of these things as icons. We both have a belief in them. Essentially, as much as you might dirty them up in some aspects, we believe whatever they stand for or whatever they’ve always stood for. We really have that same kind of faith in them that we did as children, and the reason we wanted to do a project with them is to try and communicate that faith and that belief in the ideal of the super hero almost to the point where we just newly discovered it. As if some writer just came up with it recently and we suddenly thought, ‘My god, that’s the new messiah, that’s it. That is the most interesting concept or the most attractive ideal of heroism that one could realize.’ I guess, ultimately, again, getting back to your question, I think that DC could see that in us, in the way Mark was writing up his first outline approaches to it and, I think that one could read that in my initial outline that was handed off to Mark and certainly in the character design that I did. Nothing was intentionally demoralizing to characters with the exception of what I did to stuff like Lobo or whoever, where I turned Lobo into Krusty the Clown. There are a few characters that I hate, but for the most part, if I hate somebody, they’re not in it. Is Guy Gardner in Kingdom Come? No. Why? I hate him. If a character’s annoying to me, I didn’t have anything to do with them. The characters who appear in Kingdom Come, they’re in there because I love them. I try to treat them with a great amount of sympathy and care. I was also of the philosophy of mind that you should never do something with a character that the original creators wouldn’t have done, or would be offended by. I think that we pretty much held to that.

  Making Plastic Man a male prostitute is probably not what they had in mind…

  Not what I think the original creators really were conceiving for him. Although, I have to say that we had a very small cameo for Plastic Man in this series. Mark wrote in the script, ‘I have these guys on the dance room floor taking a stretching character and pulling him around like taffy.’ That’s when I thought, ‘Well, I don’t have any other part in the book for Plastic Man, why don’t I make that Plastic Man instead of making up some bogus stretching character?’ That, then, became his big cameo. It was funny because I do love Plastic Man and I would like to have him be featured as a main DC player. I think that he is one of the primary creative concepts that DC has control of and, basically, doesn’t make any use of to any degree. He’s the first character who truly combined humor comics and super hero comics way back when.

  I was looking through the Wizard issue which points out some of the other cameos…

  That’s why you need to get the book collection because that was one that was compiled by Wizard, and they ran a lot of color shots so that you could check with those pages and go, ‘Oh, there’s where he did that.’ There’s only like a couple of things they got wrong, but ultimately they only scratched the surface. I did adaptations that are in the Kingdom Come edition that go page-by-page, panel-by-panel and give you everything. There’s character’s names that you’ve never known before that all of a sudden you’ll read, ‘That wasn’t the Village People, that was the Village Warriors.’ [laughs] Whatta joke. Of course it was the Village People, but we had to write something in there, some kind of bullshit name.

  The genesis of my question is, you’ve obviously put so much work into that, so much referencing and so much thought…

  But, it wasn’t with the idea that it would be figured out later to that extent. It was just with the idea that it was all just to keep me awake and to keep me interested, you know?

  Are you ever concerned that some of the readers aren’t going to get those references and they’re not going to realize that, ‘Hey, that’s the Monkee Men in that panel’?

  I’m not concerned with that, no, no, not with that kind of stuff, because it is in the background. I mean, it’s not overwhelming anything of substantial narrative. If it was so distracting that you couldn’t absorb the regular story, I’d be creating a real problem, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s legitimate, but it’s just some good fun stuff in the background. You can definitely read the story without paying attention to any of that crap.