Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE!!
Now, where were we when Vroom Socko left off with his conversation with the one and only Brian Bendis?
Hello fellow comic geeks, Vroom Socko here.
Here it is, Part Two of my little conversation with comics writer Brian Michael Bendis. You’ve all read the first part of this interview, right? If not, go ahead and check that out first, then head on back here. Don’t worry, we won’t go anywhere.
This is kinda leading into the age thing again. Let’s say… Well, you’re writing Fantastic Four, so cosmic stuff… Something cosmic happens to you and your family, and your daughter suddenly turns eight tomorrow. And she wants to check out what her daddy does for a living.
HAHA!
What comics…
Ultimate Spider-Man.
Well, any comics, not just what you’re writing. What would you give to her to read?
You know what I’d do? I’d do what I do to my wife: I’d leave them laying around the house and see what she picks up on her own. I’d never… My wife loves Kane. Loves, loves, loves Kane. I just left it lying around the house. Other stuff she’s picked up and read, she didn’t like it, and I thought she’d love… I thought she’d love Sandman; she hates Sandman. ‘Cause that’s… that’s the rule of comic book readers that girls like Sandman. She didn’t like it.
I am looking forward to when my kid’s like twenty and she’s going through my stuff, and she’s reading… She will go through the first year of Alias, and a bunch of Powers stuff, and just think overall, “Wow Dad!” ‘Cause it was written over a years and years time, but reading it all in one sitting is going to make me look like a deviant lunatic.
So you’re thinking twenty is the appropriate age to introduce your daughter to the monkey fucking?
Could we not discuss my daughter and monkey fucking in the same sentence?
But my daughter being the cool chick I know she will be will say, “Dad, 2001. I get the reference!”
Speaking of the monkey fucking, Powers is one of those books I only get in the trades, for some reason or another.
That’s all right.
Which is fine, it just means I have monkey fucking to look forward to.
Yes you do! What you’re going to miss is the six weeks after the monkey fucking to sit there and go “what the fuck was he DOING? What the fuck is wrong with him?”
So anyway, your monkey fucking questions?
Well…
I would like to make a public plea for people to stop writing me monkey cum jokes though. I really… it’s been four months, I appreciate them, I published a lot of them, I’ve heard them all, let’s just wind it up. Let’s move on.
Do you have a preference as to how people read your stuff?
Nope.
Because I’m apparently missing out on a great letter column.
Don’t worry about it. People are always e-mailing me, going “I’m dropping Ultimate Spider-Man to get the trades.” And it’s usually about school, or something. And they’re worried that I’d be insulted by that, and I’m like, “I don’t care, just get ‘em. I don’t care if you shoplift ‘em.” I absolutely do not. In fact, I think most of my demographic is shoplifting.
Do you have a preference as to how YOU read comics, in trades or monthlies?
Um… I read an equal amount of both. There’s some titles I’m very interested in monthlies, and other things I’m very interested as trades. Or both: I buy them as monthlies, and then I’m so enamored by them I want them on my shelf as a trade.
Now, there’s a thing online about how monthlies are somehow pamphlets, or toilet paper, and they’re absolutely not. Every issue is crafted with a great amount of effort. …. Powers isn’t created to make a trade. Every issue is just… you pack it with stuff, and I’m very into that immediate experience. And the cliffhanger’s always there.
It’s weird that the people who read trades like to crap on the people who read monthlies, or think that we as creators are. That’s always a… like somehow we’ve got an evil agenda or something about it, and that’s absolutely nuts to me. Where does that come from?
That perception that people are pushing towards trades…
It’s absolutely a projected perception. There’s nothing going on with anyone that I work with that says, “Get to the trade. Get to the trade.” Absolutely not. The story isn’t being told for Trade, the story is being told the way it’s told.
But there is a big and growing market for trades and when its all done and told, we give that everything we got too.
Alright, now Lizzybeth (who does read the monthlies, so she’s up on the monkey fucking and all that) is wondering what’s coming up after this “Powers through the ages” thing.
We’re going to deal with the immediate ramifications of one of our superheroes destroying half the planet, and the government declaring all powers illegal, which inherently makes the book a different book now, because their jobs as cops is different.
Superheroes aren’t allowed to exist anymore, so what essentially ends up happening is the people who obey the law, the heroes, go away, and the people who don’t obey the law, the villians, who weren’t obeying the law to start with. So the world is different.
The cool thing is Deena has been out of commission for a while because of what happened to her. In issue 30 she went through a trauma, and we’ll find out she’d been gone a year or so. So when she comes back to work, it’s almost like the first issue of Powers, in the sense that she’s being taken through the world of Powers again, but it’s an entirely different world.
But we’re not going to start with a new number one, because good lord, the world will come to an END! Holy LORD, the people will scream! That’s another thing online, people get so mad when they start at a new number one. Who cares! Really, why does that bother people? I don’t do it, but it’s always weird to me.
Do you have an endpoint for Powers?
Yes. Not coming up soon, but yes. We do have a final story. Pretty much after the second arc, we had a final story nailed.
But that comes out of… when we’re done with stories we think are legitimately interesting, or fresh stories, then…
So once you’ve said everything you have to say, you’re going to reach into the drawer, pull this story out…
And wrap it up, yeah.
But on the other hand, we keep ourselves very organic with it, we’re leaving ourselves open. We’re not saying, “Fifty is it!” you know what I mean?
It could be seventy three, or one hundred and one, or…
Or if sales plummet, which I though they might have done after the monkey fucking issue, but they didn’t, thank the Lord.
I remember that guy in San Diego at the Marvel panel who said “A friend of mine told me to read Powers, and I read it and all it was was monkey fucking.”
I know, that happened a lot. What’s funny was when I wrote it and I gave it to Mike I said, “This might be the beginning of the end for us.” Because you can’t control if a book’s a hit or not. You can’t control sales.
And I was very aware that when you do stuff like this there is kinda a promise to the audience that if they buy Powers, Powers will be about homicide detectives, and that’s what you promise the audience.
So when you go out this far out, some people will go “Wahoo, we’re going for a ride!” and some people will go “You know what, I want a Goddamn homicide book. What the hell is this?” and they’ll get mad at you. And because it was the beginning of a story arc, and because we said it was the origin of Powers, sales went up like 600 copies. So I knew that for 600 people this was their first issue, which isn’t a giant leap or anything, but I knew there were 600 people, which is a roomful of people…
That’s a good amount of people.
This’ll be the first of Powers they’ve ever read. And I was just laughing at that idea. And we didn’t lose too many people, we held… so it was… I was actually so enamored with the audience of the book for being into it, or at least trusting us a bit. It was very nice.
But it’s a scary endeavor. You’re playing with fire, and I think that most people were…even the people who didn’t immediately appreciate it at least appreciated that we’re not on autopilot, and we’re not going to give you Retro Girl’s death fifty times over and over again. You never know what’s going to happen, and that’s the kind of storytelling I like. It’s the kind of stories I like to read. It’s what Grant Morrison does, it's what a lot of people have done, I like when Chaykin did it. I like when you open up a book and have no idea what you’re gonna get. Or when you think you know, and it’s something totally else.
That’s why I’ve enjoyed this… which I actually didn’t expect, with the Ultimate Six, where everyone’s so into who the sixth member is. It actually didn’t occur to me that that’d be such an online fun thing for everybody. So that’s a lot of fun, and I’m very glad to say that 98% of the people weren’t even close. So that’s fun too.
Of course, they’re all going to say they were when they find out on Wednesday. They’re all going to be “Ah, I knew it! I told you!” And I’ve been looking, and no one got it.
You know who I thought it was, and this is basically just a shout-out to the board: an Ultimate version of Speedball.
You are a genius to yourself. No. I’m never writing Speedball again.
Never?
No, that was a very dirty feeling. I felt dirty inside afterwards.
I’m sure BRTick and everyone else at your message board is going to be disappointed to hear that.
I figured between Ultimate Spider-Man and my version of Speedball that Steve Ditko was going to show up at my house with an axe…
Going from one branch of detectives to another, I’ve got some Alias stuff here from Cormorant. Both of these are from Cormorant.
Sure. His questions aren’t nearly as obnoxious as he is online, so these better get better.
Okay… One of his favorite stories from Alias was the arc featuring the Rick Jones impersonator, which seemed meandering in the middle, but really came together with a punch in those last few pages.
Yes.
The theme – the depths of credulity to which people will sink to find a sense of belonging - was explored in a way that seems particularly fresh. It seems that many of your stories operate on multiple levels, and I was wondering if you could talk for a minute about how you work up a story like that, maybe that story specifically. Was the theme inspired by an event in your life?
Not in my life particularly, but… that storyline (it’s funny) was bothersome to some people, and what it is… and I knew it going in, and I did it anyhow, even though it was early in the book’s run, is that Jessica was being taken for a ride, and she was buying into the ride even though there were fifty signs on the wall saying this guy is nuts and nothing makes sense.
But she was so into the mystery of it, and she so wanted to believe what she was being told, that she was actually being duped into what we end up as the point of the story. Which is that people do that. They believe anything they want to hear, they believe it. And what I did essentially is that I made the audience believe what Jessica believes, so when Jessica is duped the audience is duped. And audiences don’t like to be duped. Readers don’t like it. So they got angry, kinda, at me, even though I said, “no that was the point of the story.” But there was… I do know that they’re reading comics and spend three dollars, ‘don’t yank me around,’ basically.
But it was actually based on an article I read about… I forget his first name now, but his last name was Spielberg, and he’d… I actually mentioned him in the arc, this was a true story about a guy who just… He was an Indian guy, and he just showed up at this high school one day, even though he was 27 years old and drove a Porsche. He said he was a fifteen-year-old nephew of Stephen Spielberg. A very fancy private school, and he went to this school for a year and a half. And people just wanted to believe that Stephen Spielberg’s nephew was going to their school.
They didn’t charge him for tuition, and he was dating girls at the high school, and he was clearly 27! He had a car and said he was fifteen. And finally they wrote a letter to Stephen Spielberg that goes, “Listen, we’re behind on the tuition, so what can you do?” and he goes “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” And then there was a psychosis, which I wrote the name of it in the book, which is that people want the kings to come down and play with them. They want it; it’s a psychosis. They will believe anything, that’s how bad they want it.
And I said, “Boy does that ever apply to how people can perceive the Marvel Universe.” … ‘Cause I’m working at the street level of the Marvel Universe. Specifically the Marvel Universe. And when I read this I went “Oh man, that is so the point of the story,” and I did the Rick Jones thing about it.
What was hilarious about it (and I don’t mean to say hilarious like I was laughing at people), but people were really riding me about my continuity errors about Rick Jones. And I was like… and I didn’t want to ruin it, but they were just riding me about it, and I’m like, “I know, man! This guy is full of shit.” so…
But I appreciate that question though; it was nicely worded.
Well, here’s the other one then. He’s a little old school when it comes to superheroes, and while I wasn’t bothered by the language and frank sexuality of Alias, I was disturbed by the mutilation violence during the Spider-Woman story. I admit it: even though the Marvel U. has a general air of realism, I don’t like the idea of this level of sadism existing in there. It’s almost too vile to accept in a world that’s protected by the likes of Cap, Spidey, and Thor, and if that seems a little sanitized, well… that’s actually the Marvel Universe I’ve known most of my life. I wouldn’t have a problem with such stuff in a superhero world specifically created to reflect total realism, like the Powers universe, or the Wildstorm Universe, but it feels wrong for the Marvel U. Thoughts? Were you yourself ever uncomfortable with any of the more risqué elements of Alias existing in the Marvel Universe?
Um… I don’t agree with the first point. And, yeah I did… I felt a responsibility about the risqué-ness in Alias, that there was an opportunity for someone to accidentally pick this up, for a child to pick this up. So we marketed the book, and crafted the look of the book to be something not appealing for a child in any way. I mean, every cover said “for discerning comic book readers” and not for kids. And we never put Spider-Man on the cover going “Wahoo! Coming at you, kiddies!” so by accident someone would pick it up. It was very clearly defined as “this is not for kids.” And the label couldn’t have been bigger. It was bigger than my name, which I… yeah. So that said, I was very aware of that.
Also because… Listen, when I was a kid I picked up a lot of books that I was surprised to find out had adult material in them. I read a lot of Howard Chaykin stuff when I was fifteen that clearly affected my psyche in a deep, dark way that I’m now projecting onto my audience, so the legacy continues. But I remember there was a graphic novel called Void Indigo that Marvel produced, I forget who did it, but it was a fully painted graphic novel that started out as a Conan and ended up as a sci-fi, and it was just horrific. The mutilation was just… they gouged out his eyes and yanked off his dick, and it just went on and on and on. And it was the only comic book I had for a ride down to Florida with my mom. And I just… I read it in the car and I was physically nauseous from it, just really… just really repulsed by it. To this day I can remember everything exactly from the images and stuff. So I do know that I have a responsibility. So yes, I’m with you there.
But you should have been shocked by the mutilation; it was supposed to be shocking. That was the point of it. And I don’t think it was overtly grotesque, but it was almost purposefully, like a Silence of the Lambs like… in what you’re not seeing is fifty times worse then what you are.
Did you ever have the concern that some kid who’s reading Daredevil would see Jessica in DD and think, “I want to check out her title?”
No, I think we’ve labeled that book so incredibly intense that… there’s a point where you have to say “I’ve done everything I could possibly do.” And I have yet to ever have a kid come up to me with a copy of Alias. They’re just not interested in it. There’s nothing of interest to them at all. Same thing with Powers. It’s just… kids want what they want.
So Jessica’s being carried over into The Pulse. Why The Pulse? Did Newsarama not pony up enough cash?
Hah! I was going to call it @$$holes, but…
It’s actually named after the Sunday section of the New York Post, which is called The Pulse, and I just imagined in my head that in the Marvel Universe that The Pulse in the New York Post would be just wall to wall superheroes, because right now it’s wall to wall pictures of Harrison Ford and Calista Flockheart in the park yelling at each other. So I just thought that name just rang true, and it’s a great looking logo.
I did know that… I said either Heidi MacDonald’s going to just love this, or she’s going to come after us, but she was thrilled to bits. She almost applauded in San Diego when we announced it. She was in the back, and she… her head started to glow.
I actually just finished issue three of The Pulse. I’m very glad we did this, I’m very, very happy about this book.
So is Jessica going to be cleaning up her act in this book, or are you going to be having her talking like Q*Bert?
I don’t want to ruin the end of Alias for people, I really don’t. I’ll talk about it after Alias, but really… She’s leaving Alias in a different mindset and a different social status than she came into it. So she’s starting a new life with The Pulse, that was the point of the relaunch, as opposed to just getting rid of the MAX thing. It was just… this part is done.
As to the Q*Bert swearing… I do use it every once in a while. It’s funny, when people see it they see the swear word anyhow. I get more crap about what they perceive as swearing in Daredevil… They go “I can’t believe how much Daredevil swears!” and I go “He never swore once! You decided that word was fuck! It could have been poopoo. You put that word there.” I try to lean away from it as much as possible, because for me… it yanks me out of the story for a second, because I’m looking at what I know should be a swear word.
It’s funny that swear words bother people. It’s just so funny to me. I’ll never understand it. And I know it does, I mean… even when I worked at the paper, if I did Q*Bert swearing in my cartoons and people’d just see a swear word, and some old man would yank the cartoon out of the newspaper, write “potty mouth” on it and mail it back to me, which is such an angry effort. Can you imagine someone pulling it out, writing on it, addressing it, and putting a stamp on it…
That’s a lot of effort.
It is, isn’t it.
I’m forgetting his name, but that stoner kid from Alias, is he going to be showing up in The Pulse?
I don’t want to ruin The Pulse. I really don’t. He is in this arc, the Purple arc, so you will see more of him.
I have another Cormorant one, but this is from a book he really enjoyed, so…
I want the shitty questions! I came here to fence with you guys!
He liked reading the JINX: TRUE CRIME CONFESSIONS that got reprinted in Total Sell-Out.
Thanks.
And he was wondering did some of those people creep you out to interview?
Yes.
There’s that one girl who got a charge out of scaring people. I liked your adaptation of the interview, but man… that’s the kind of person I’d want to throttle in real life.
Eh, she was such a cute girl though, such a funny girl… and it did come off creepier than she told it.
But yeah, the whole time I was researching JINX… Listen, nothing creeped me out more than TORSO, that was really creepy, y’know? I had sixty years distance on it, and it was still… yeech. It was all body parts and… it was just vulgar. But it’s fascinating; when someone’s telling you a wacked out story,
All right…
C’mon, now. I’m here to face the music.
No offence…
Here we go!
But you’re a notoriously bad speller.
HAHA!
This despite the fact that you seem very well read. Is this just a lifelong bad habit?
It is, I inherited it from my mom. I absolutely blame her. My mom is a very smart woman and cannot spell my name. It is amazing… Jamie Rich was at my house, and he just looked at the… and he just said, “I can’t believe it, you can’t spell anything.” I have two editors on Powers, five on ultimate spider-man. It bothers me to no end. I joke it off, but it just bothers me, and it humiliates me in a big, big way. So I’ve done everything I could possibly do, and I think I’ve finally figured out the difference between "your" and "you’re." I’m fairly exited about that.
But I do try, boy; I try and try and try. But really I am paid to write not spell.
You know what else I can’t do that people don’t know, because it gets covered up? I can’t count the pages. Because there are so many rewrites, that I’ll… there’ll be three page 21’s. And then I’ll be so happy with what happened to the story that I won’t look back at how many pages I wrote, and then Bagley will call up and go, “There’s no page 16 and there’s three 21’s.” So that’s something I’ll cop to. I do it all the time, it’s really horrendous. Or four panel 9’s or something.
Okay, here’s a criticism one.
Lay it on me.
If you’re reading a hypothetical trade collecting five issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, how many splash pages devoted to characters going * gasp * “Peter Parker is Spider-Man!” would it have to include before you started to feel the technique was being, shall we say… overused?
Hahaha! It’s the point of the next two arcs of the story. I absolutely think in this world (and it’s something you’ve got to build to), that it’d be absolutely physically impossible to keep your secret identity. I absolutely do. I think it’s a cliché of the genre; it’s offensive that characters as smart as J. Jonah Jameson would not be able to put this together, and… I don’t think everyone should be outed like I did to Daredevil, but it should be… The identity should be a constant point of stress.
And there are people, you know, people who have secret lives. There’s people who have sexuality, or for religious purposes try to keep a secret, and it’s very, very difficult. And it consumes their whole life. Their whole life is about keeping their secret. So you’ve got to build it up a little more. It’s got to be dangerous to have a secret identity, not just a fun little thing. That’s just how I see it.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the moment when Aunt May and Gwen find out, and go totally apeshit.
I think that’s what I think is the most interesting thing about the Aunt May issue is that you see how she could never put two and two together. She sees Peter as an eight-year-old boy. She just does. People who raise kids see them as little kids. I thought it’s worth the issue just to find that out. She would never put that together.
And it’s funny, people are always giving me shit about it, but you’re always looking at the next issue, ‘cause you know something bad’s going to happen. And you know what? Maybe we will out him. You never know. That’s what’s so great about the book, is that we’re so against the grain of the clichés of the genre, y’know? The door’s wide open.
I think we proved that with issue thirteen of USM. That was the most fun, showing thirteen to people, it’s like, from now on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You think you know, but you don’t.
I have another criticism one, and this one has a visual aid.
Oh, a visual aid? Oh, lord.
It’s a question about layouts. We’re looking at Alias #25, for those of you playing along at home. You’ll know the page when you see it, it’s two pages of Luke Cage and Jessica talking. You’re reading the left page, top row, and I have to think about if I’m supposed to keep on reading the left page or carry over onto the right.
This was supposed to be shifted a little over to the right. I don’t want to blame anybody, like the printer or anybody, but it was supposed to be shifted…
So the panel overlaps the staple?
Yeah, exactly. We’re really good about that in Powers. There’s always something gliding you across. That one I’ll cop to.
You do use this quite a bit, though.
I’m fascinated by the pacing possibilities of the double page spread.
Yeah. [looks at the next page in Alias #25, showing Jewel flying through the sky.] Oh, I love this page.
Thanks. But yeah, we did something similar spread in X-Men a couple of months ago. I like that. It gives it a puzzle feel, y’know? It’s something I like to see. I do a lot of double page spreads, also for a very selfish reason. With ad placements the way they are in comics… I want to control the timing in that particular scene. I didn’t want Jessica and Luke’s conversation broken up by an ad for Hulk Underoo’s, y’know?
So I’ll make a double page spread, and then control the spread, so that when you turn the page we’ll go do something else. It’s the one thing inherent to comics that no other medium has. You don’t, right in the middle of a scene of Friends go right to a commercial right in the middle of a scene. They always go “We’ll be right back,” and then show the commercials. We never do that in comics, it’s always right in the middle of a scene. It’s not so bad on Ultimate Spider-Man, but I’ve seen some books where it really bothered me, like on a real dark book like 100 Bullets, y’know? I’m reading 100 Bullets, and you turn the page, and it’s CHIMP CHANNEL! You’re right in the middle of some dark, well-crafted scene, and you’re thrown out by an ad for Skittles, that’s always brighter than the comic art. So that’s what that is. That’s why I lean towards that. It’s about controlling the timing and the pacing.
Also, I like shapes. I like moving shapes around a page, pushing them this way and that way. You can really control an emotion, or create an uneasiness with different planes and shapes.
Okay… (I’ve asked that. I’ve asked that…)
When you’re done, I’m going to go through those and see what questions you didn’t ask me.
Oh my.
Ask me, I wanna hear them.
You write very genuine sounding teenagers. Even writers who write really good stories with kids can just stumble all over their dialogue. How do you do that, what’s the secret to your success? You’re not going undercover, like John Cryer in Hiding Out, are you?
First of all shame on you for that reference, and shame on me for understanding it.
But you know what, when you talk to kids, it’s funny how little has changed as far as… there’s always a different dialect and different slang, but the overall tone of it, and the motor mouthedness of it is very similar to when we were kids. It hasn’t changed all that much. So there’s that, so having been one, and arguably arrested my development around that age, it makes it very easy to tap into it.
But the one thing I’ll tell you, what I don’t do, is that kids swear like Marines! If I… literally, they swear fifty times worse than I did when I was a kid. I know for a fact, right.
So when people always give me the shout-out for the natural dialogue, I’m like, well, really if I was being flat-out honest the title of the book would be Ultimate Fucking Spider-Man, because kids go “fuck this, fuck that.” But knowing that I can’t do that adds a little extra effort of… all right, knowing that you can’t do that, you’ve got to be a little more clever.
And also, kids aren’t stupid, and… a lot of people write kids as dumb, or hip, and they do not talk that way. In fact, no one talks that way except for idiots. So it thankfully comes to me very naturally, in fact the arc I’m writing right now for Spider-Man is very high school. It’s very Kong and Flash and Liz and everyone’s back, and I haven’t written them for a while, so it’s nice to come back to them.
Kong is like my favorite. I gave him a front and center piece in the Ultimate Spider-Man: The Movie arc. I gave him a nice little thing. He gets a bit part in the movie, he gets a line, so it makes him the coolest kid at school. So now Kong is making more money off the movie than Peter is.
Stay tuned for part three, when we talk about Manga, European artists, the Eisner awards, Bendis and DC Comics, and Bendis comics about to become movies. And there’s also the little matter of Ultimate Spider-Man: The Movie…
Nice work on all of this so far, Vroom, and all kidding aside, I think it’s very cool of Bendis to agree to sit for the interview, considering his less than glowing comments about us in the past. He’s a huge name in comics right now, and he’s playing with some of the coolest toys out there at the moment, in terms of Marvel properties. Great stuff in both of these pieces, and I can’t wait to see the rest...
"Moriarty" out.
