Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Great work by Vroom Socko on this whole thing, and it earned the rest of the @$$Holes a week off. They’ll be back with reviews next Tuesday like normal, though, so never fear. In the meantime, here’s the big finish...
WAIT!! WHAT DID I MISS?!
Ladies and Gentlemen, Vroom Socko here.
Here it is - the dénouement, the finale, the conclusion of one lucky @$$hole's conversation with one of the biggest writers in comics, Brian Michael Bendis. Remember, there are not one, not two, but three other parts to this interview.
You seem very accessible to your fans at conventions. Do you see that as being part of your job, or do you genuinely enjoy that aspect?
I absolutely am thrilled to bits that anyone is buying anything, number one.
Number two is, I find myself… when I’m at a show I’m surrounded by people with similar tastes in music and movies and all sorts of stuff. It’s such a pleasure; they’re all like friends, you know what I mean? They’re all awesome dudes and a lot of them end up being your friends and stuff. It’s very cool.
That table between us means nothing to me. I always sound like a cornball when I say stuff like this, but I really don’t… The fuckers with the rock star attitude drive me insane. They’re fucking comic book artists! Calm the fuck down with the way you treat people! And it’s people with emotional problems that are looking for any reason to treat other people badly. Whereas I find that it’s extremely… it’s an honor and a privilege to write people’s comics for them. It’s really an honor, and when people come up and say nice stuff, I find I want to give them money or free stuff or something.
What’s funny to me is that there is the asshole character I portray in the Powers letter column; and the fact that anybody wants to come up and say anything to me at a convention is amazing. Why would you come near that guy? Or they always come up, waiting for me to hit them, or something. I’m like, “Why’d you come up if you thought I was going to be like that?”
I didn’t do any shows for two years, so I kinda missed the wave of Ultimate Spider-Man for the convention circuit, so I came back to cons with Ultimate Spider-Man doing so nicely, I was ill prepared for how nice everyone was going to be to me in Chicago. Chicago was an unbelievable experience for me. I never in a million years thought I’d have a convention experience like that.
Speaking of the Powers letter column… and you’re bringing back the letter column in Ultimate Spider-Man…
Yeah, isn’t that cool? A lot of Marvel comics are going to have the letter column back.
How important is the letter column?
Well, in Powers it’s part of… I can’t control the price of Powers; it has to be three dollars, it just has to be. I can’t control that, so what I can control is how much entertainment is in that three dollars.
The letter column unto itself is a piece of entertainment I’m trying to create… the whole comic has kind of a magazine feel to it, like it’s a whole experience. Not that I give it this much thought, but that’s what you get at the end of the day.
I do think it’s important. I did agree with Joe’s theory that the letter column was redundant because of the Internet, because the Internet’s an entirely new experience for comic readers. We had nothing like this when I was a kid. In fact, I’d have loved to have seen a message board when Frank Miller’s Daredevil was coming out. “Ninjas? Fuck you!” That’d have been great. But I’m very glad the letter column’s coming back. I just think that’s cool. I think it gives it a lot of character and a lot of flavor.
Time for a tough one.
Time for a tough one. Time for one you cannot answer.
Okay.
Can you tell me anything about the book you’re doing with Gabriele Dell’Otto?
Hahaha!
It’s not what anyone thinks it is. It’ll be out in February. It’s a fully painted book, it’s got a lot of characters in it, it’s not been reported correctly, and the reason I’m not hyping it is that it’s not ready. It’s not even near ready yet. When it comes out, I promise you you’ll see a comic book that there is not one panel that isn’t poster perfect gorgeous. It’s really stunning. So when it’s ready…
So people who are thinking Secret Wars…
Secret Wars is a big, cosmic gobblygoo pile of silly that’s… y’know. So it’s nothing like that. It really isn’t.
The only reason I’m not talking about it is that it’s way too early. This is another thing I learned from Joe; when you hype stuff too early people start to write the book in their head. They envision what they think the book’s gonna be, and by the time it comes out they’ve decided what they thought it should be that they like the version in their head better. It’s like with The Matrix, or Star Wars, they just get in their head what they think it should be, and when they see it it takes them a while to deal with it.
Everyone who’s seen the art has flipped out of their minds. They just go insane; they can’t believe it. I showed it to Millar the other day, because we were talking about what the project was (he has his secret projects too), and he goes, “What does the Dell’Otto stuff look like?” So I sent him two pages, and he goes, “Oh fuck you!” Because he’s the find of the century. He’s as big a find as any of these guys, he really is.
What’s a typical workday like for you?
I honestly get up around one or two in the afternoon. And I go on a bike ride, which… you’ve seen me at the mall, buying DVD’s, either with the kid or without the kid. The baby goes with me now, its like Lone Jew and Cub. And the bike riding is a big part of the writing process, I’m an avid daily bike rider, and it’s my problem solver. By the end of the day, I’ve got my… all the characters are talking in full sentences, and the plot is furthering. So I do that, then I spend the evening with my family. And I tuck in my kid, and I tuck in my wife, and I go to work. And I write and do whatever I’ve got to do until I pass out. Literally, I could be nine in the morning, or six, or whenever; I just pass out.
It’s a nice way to live, but it’s funny
You should see this guy flipping through these questions. I know there’s some evil questions in there, and I have this little smirk on my face, and my head’s all shiny, and he’s having trouble coming up with the strength to ask them.
Well, it’s the glaze from the sun…
It’s the glaze off my head. I look like I’m wearing a miner’s helmet.
You’re known for writing a lot of really dramatic material, but still, you’re absolutely one of the funniest people in comics.
I agree.
How do you do it?
I just like the juxtaposition of life. You’ll have the worst day, and the funniest thing that ever happened to you on the same day.
The one thing I’m actually most proud of is never letting the joke get in the way of the story. I’ve had some killer jokes that I’ve just yanked off because it’s not helping the story. And you know where I learned it from? It was the Bowfinger DVD (and this was before Frank Oz signed on for Powers). I watched this DVD, and I’ve since discovered that all of life’s problems are in the extra sections of DVD’s, the special features. And in it they have all these deleted scenes, and these aren’t just deleted, these are great deleted scenes. These are great, fully crafted Steve Martin jokes, that you can’t imagine not being in the movie. And I listened to the commentary, and Frank Oz says, “This is probably one of the best crafted Steve Martin jokes I’ve ever seen written or performed. It does not further the story we’re telling, so off it goes.” And I’m like, wow, the self-assurance, or the commitment to story… you know what I mean? And that goes through my head every time I’m working on something, does this joke help the story or stand in the way?
And Spider-Man’s supposed to be this funny guy; it’s one of his weapons. He’s like a trash talking basketball player, the way he’s in their face with the one-liners.
Another hard one from Cormorant: a pet peeve of his is the use of parenthesis…
Yeah, one of my editors hates them too. This is me, it’s 100% me.
See… at some time in the 1930’s someone decided that motion lines look like this, and the balloons look like that, and this looks like that, and that was it. No one adds anything to it, or commits more to it. I’m not of that school of thought. I’ll try new things like balloon shapes, new fonts… I think even in the way that balloons are crafted there’s new ways to express thoughts or feelings or emotion. He doesn’t like when I do parenthesis? I don’t like it when whispering is projected as gray. Like when they… you know what I’m talking about?
Yeah, where the lettering is a lighter shade.
Corm goes on to suggest the idea of using a smaller sized font…
I’ve done that too! I did that for years, now I do it this way. Go look in Jinx, it’s in there.
Some people like it some people don’t. Some people don’t even understand what it is, because it’s new and it’s not explained.
Sometimes I get the feeling with the parenthesis, it’s like the character is literally turning to the reader, and…
I think people say things in the up breath, which is… these are all things you can’t produce in a comic book, but you could produce in a movie, and I do think when people are talking (I see this all the time), they’ll be talking about their point, then go “but that’s another story all together,” but they’re talking TO you, and I want to project that idea as part of dialogue. And I hear it all the time, so…
And I say, you know what? He should make a comic, and he should do it his way.
I think he has made a comic, I’m not sure but…
See, I don’t know who he really is. It could be Neil Gaiman I’m talking to.
But see, I’m always… when someone tells you what should and shouldn’t be done, my eyes roll up in the back of my head. I don’t want to hear it. This medium, if anything, should be about pushing everything as far as it’ll go. Not to the point where the story suffers, but other than that there are no rules.
And all the comics we love are the ones that push boundaries, that went out there. The only comic I can remember from 1987 is Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants, you know? At the time, everyone was freaking out, but now I defy you to come up with another one off the top of your head. You couldn’t! Because that’s the one that was out there. And sometimes the notorious ones, the bad ones and some of the… you don’t want to be one of the disposables, it’s just not of interest. You want to try stuff.
You’d rather be remembered for something offbeat than be remembered as some Chrome Age, double embossed foil cover…
That’s absolutely right. Absolutely correct. And it’s not like you’re sitting there going, “will this be my legacy?” ‘cause that’s certainly not the case. But when you look over and you go “was that a good decision?” you go, “you know what? Yeah.”
I’ve got two more from Cormorant; they’re both on Daredevil, I think.
Okay.
I think you brought up an interesting moral conundrum when Matt Murdock locked legal horns with the newspaper publisher who was, in fact, telling the truth. Now, his methods might have been questionable, but at the end of the day he had the truth on his side, and Matt was battling him in support of a lie. Was Matt in the right?
No, I think inherently all superheroes are liars. I think Superman’s a big fat liar. You’re lying to people when you put on a secret identity, you’re telling a lie. Now, is the lie a noble lie? That’s the question. But they’re all lying. When you’re wearing a mask you’re lying. So I wanted… and yeah, I love that scene, because at one point the scene was going to be that Matt did get the money, that they settled. And while I was writing it in the dialogue stage, I realized that this newspaper guy is so pissed off… I mean, the guy knows he’s right, and so I went the other way with it, which I think is… I think the whole story elevated from it.
But Matt’s the lie is a noble lie. There’s a purpose to the lie. There’s something that’s good for people, but it’s still a lie. So we all agree that it’s a noble lie; let’s take a look at it from this angle.
The other Cormorant one… Most of your comics, while dense with dialogue, read at a smooth and enjoyable clip. BUT… when I hit one of those pages with two or three-dozen word balloons linked in a chain, it stops the flow dead in its tracks.
Or…it creates a different type of flow that is very purposeful to that part of the scene. You’d be dizzy if you knew how much thought goes into all of this. It’s an insane amount of thought, and it’s “how does this look against this? What does this feel like? What does this read like?” So I’m going to have to say that yes, you’re absolutely right. It does, and that’s on purpose. So you might not like the feeling, I can’t make you like the feeling. I can’t even make you agree with me. But it’s done on purpose. And I agree, it is a different feeling.
That’s a good question though. It’s a never-ending battle of words and pictures, it is. There’s a philosophy that Will Eisner did everything right the first time, then so did Steranko, and that we should all stop; or that it’s a constant mushing around of ideas, and… as I’ve said many times, it’s a bastard medium. There’s no one way to produce it that’s the right way. It’s not script writing, it’s not poetry, it’s not painting, it’s not photography, it’s not line art. It’s all these things mashed together.
Here’s another Cormorant one. It’s kind of a rehash of things we’ve already talked about, but… Your run on Daredevil has been defined as a talky, character-intense crime drama, punctuated by only sporadic moments of the pulp action that’s traditionally defined the character. When someone does this for just two or three issues it’s an interesting anomaly, but to continue it for several years… don’t you risk diluting the brand? Are you hoping to just keep an aging audience placated with new spins on old characters…
Hahaha!
Or do you think this is also a good strategy for bringing in a broader audience?
I think that the experience of Daredevil on the comic market right now is a totally unique experience. There’s no other comic that feels like it at all. And I’m going to go with that. There’s other dark comics, and there’s other juxtaposition of the crime and superhero genres, of which I write a couple. But it’s a very unique experience, because the hero is in a very unique experience, on top of the tone. I mean, the story itself is a very unique experience for a Marvel comic.
That being said, I find that most of the audience, because it’s such a generational experience (and I think you’ve seen this on my board), you’d be surprised at how many people haven’t read Frank Miller that have read our stuff. Some thing that’s twenty-thirty years old is old stuff. The good news is that they get to it, and I’m not saying I’m the reason they’re getting to it, but there’s always someone online saying, “You’ve got to read Man Without Fear,” or “You’ve got to read Born Again,” and I’m the first guy to say to read these things, they changed my life. But, truth is, this is their first Daredevil experience.
Now you, as an aging comic reader, who’s looking for new takes, you’re taking your personal experience as a comic book reader and projecting it on to everybody else that’s a comic book reader. And I’m telling you as someone who has many different types of comic book readers reading their books, I can tell you flat out that thought that experience might be unique to you and your friends, but that is not everyone’s experience as a comic book reader.
This is also the key to my job, that every issue is someone’s first or last issue. So that experience is a very unique one; we were talking about Powers before; for someone the first issue of Powers was monkey fucking, y’know? And were disappointed that they didn’t get that in the second issue. They were all “I thought this was the monkey fucking book!” So that said, though I am an aging comic book reader myself, that isn’t the core audience. So I don’t worry about that too much. I worry about what is this experience for them today about this? This today is their Daredevil, until we’re gone. And for some people Kevin Smith was their Daredevil, and this is some weird thing we’re doing that they’re vaguely into. So it goes either way. I mean some people thought the Cary Nord issues were the ultimate Daredevil experience.
It’s hard to express to people, we’re talking to an online audience, so we’ll get into this a little bit, but… the online experience tends… you see a lot of people projecting themselves onto the creator, or onto the other readers. If someone doesn’t like Y: The Last Man, they get very angry at that person. That person’s an idiot for buying Spider-Man and not buying Y: The Last Man. You’ve seen this…
Well, I AM that person, so…
You don’t like Y: The Last Man?
I really don’t. I’m not a big fan of it.
But see, I’m not slapping you down for it. See, people get very angry online,
And I see a lot of people projecting themselves onto creators, where they think they know better, or they think that their job is to make their specific unique experience of comic reading… it’s like my job is to find Cormorant exactly what Cormorant wants on Ultimate Spider-Man and give that to him every single month. Can’t do it. Couldn’t even if I tried. Because then two weeks later the guy decides he likes manga porn, or…
Well I think he already does like manga porn.
You get what I’m saying here?
Yeah, I get it.
It’s impossible to make everybody happy. At the end of the day you have to say to yourself… you read the script back and you go, “Will I buy this? Is this worth two dollars?” and you hand it out. It doesn’t get any deeper than that, it really doesn’t.
Do you think that the attitudes and views being shouted out by people at the top of their lungs online are a hindrance in any way to more people reading comics?
I would criticize a bit the whole @$$hole projection at Ain’t-It-Cool-News, just because it’s smartass. You have this forum of non-comics readers reading your stuff… and I’m not saying you have to say everything’s great. You can criticize anything you want, but the @$$hole stuff projects a smarminess that is fun for you guys, but may turn off some people that were really looking to see if JLA/Avengers was worth coming back for. “I haven’t been in a comics store for two years. Oh, you’re reviewing JLA/Avengers? I heard about that. Should I read it?” and you guys are going “Eh, fuck you! Fuck you!” There’s that. That’d be one way to look at it, but that’s just my opinion, it doesn’t… you guys are having a good time, and…
And to be fair, we did praise JLA/Avengers quite extensively….
No, you know what I’m talking about. There’s this level of…
An almost elitism.
Yes, that’s exactly it. You guys are all clearly intelligent. And I hate to say this to Corm, but these questions he wrote are fifty times more intelligent than he appears online. Those were well crafted, well thought out questions. I thought he was going to be a little smarty. I thought I’d have to get a little Powers Letter column on his ass.
So I actually think that overall, the Internet is an exceptionally fantastic tool for the comic book medium. I think you’re getting a lot of people who don’t… their friends who aren’t into comics, now have friends who are into comics. 'Cause when I was a kid, I was the guy in my peer group reading comics. And some of my friends read some of my comics, ‘cause they had nothing else to do, but they weren’t into them. Now you have friends that are into them. People hooking up at shows, people hooking up online… I’ve even been responsible for one or two actual hookups. I’m glad to be there for them. But I do think, by the way, if I do get you laid at a convention - seriously, you have to buy anything with my name on it forever.
Hahaha!
But also, not everyone who reads comics is online. We’ve got 150,000 people reading comics on a monthly basis. There’s… I’d say five thousand people online, which is a lot of people. I think five thousand really online, and then ten thousand just casually… that’s my estimate. I don’t have any proof… some people think it’s much lower, and I think that’s a high estimate, but that it’s a legitimate one.
You see a lot of the same people floating around, so… that said, they are definitely a nice cross-section of readers, but it isn’t ALL of the readers.
It’s a weird conundrum, but overall I think it’s a positive. I love it when people talk about comics. I love it when people say what they thought about what they bought, and I think Blankets is a huge success because of the internet. I think people were really looking for just that, and someone goes “you’ve gotta buy it,” and they go “oh yeah, I’ll buy it.” I think that’s the best part, is people taking chances on stuff they’d have never thought of prior to.
It’s also an exceptionally cheap marketing tool.
One more question. Where do you see yourself, and the comics industry in five years time?
One of us will be very healthy, and one of us won’t. Hahaha!
I actually see the comics business in a very good place. I see… there’ll probably be a lull in the comic movies around five years from now, because Hollywood is cyclic, no matter what. No matter if everything is making four billion dollars they’ll still cycle it out. And I think that the industry will be healthier for it.
As far as myself goes… If I don’t fuck up, If I don’t really just screw the pooch and pull a Byrne, and start… just really being a dickhead, I should be good to go for a while. I’ve got a contract with Marvel, and I have all the passion for it, so we’ll see.
And I will be in comics. Let me say that very clear. That drives me nuts, every time anything Hollywood happens, people go “see, the asshole is leaving.” I’m NOT LEAVING! I know some people do that; I’m not. Lifers are lifers. If you look at your history of comics you can see the guys that are sticking around. So… That sort of offends me - just because I love this medium so much.
It’s so hard to get in, and I finally got in, and I’m going to fucking leave now!?! I just got here! So I’m absolutely staying in, and if I do stuff in other mediums it will not be at the sacrifice of comics. Even when I had the choice between the Spider-Man TV show and the Spider-Man comic, I chose the comic, hands down. That’s something I wanted to get out there, because it seems that if you get any kind of success people think you’re looking for a stepping-stone. Let me tell you, comics is not a stepping stone to other mediums. It absolutely is not. Anyone who thinks it is is fooling themselves.
Thank you for your time.
I rambled a lot, didn’t I?
Don’t worry about it.
I’d like to thank the rest of the Talkback League of @$$holes for their help with coming up with questions for this interview. I’d especially like to thank the Village Idiot, who put me up in San Diego during the Con. And finally, I’d like to once again thank Brian Michael Bendis for taking time out of his schedule to sit down with me for this interview.
Excellent work, man. Hope you guys all enjoyed the interview as much as I did, and I hope the @$$holes do more of this sort of special feature in the future.
"Moriarty" out.
