Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 2

by Carnell, Thom

  I’ve noticed there is a lot of Catholic imagery in your writing of Daredevil. Was this a way of giving some character insight or was it a way of hinting at the redemption that Matt Murdock strove for?

  Yes. [laughs] I pretty early on decided that I’d declare Matt Catholic. He just seemed so prone to guilt and so full of volcanic violence that it seemed to fit him very well. It was one of my earliest decisions working on Daredevil, when I took over as writer, and, to my mind at least, it made sense out of this strange man that could somehow be a lawyer and a vigilante at the same time.

  Did you really get death threats over killing Elektra?

  Oh yeah.

  What were those like?

  That was a very strange evening. I was alone in my apartment and I took home this huge pile of mail that had come in from that issue of Daredevil, which covered just a wild range of reactions. The mail from Daredevil was always delightful to get because people who write into comics tend to be a really intelligent bunch who read the stuff very, very closely and while they call you on your mistakes, it sure is nice to see some of the little touches noticed that you didn’t think anybody would spot. That night was particularly strange because there were four death threats amidst it. People saying “you killed the woman I love, I’m coming after you” and so on. I realized I struck a nerve. I mean really, we all love to tell the stories about the death threats and about the wackos and about the people that come up and say “Sign my breast” and all that, but the fans I run into in my experiences are delightful people. The wackos are very, very few and very, very far between. I don’t want to put forth a weird images of comics readers as being these really loons. They aren’t. You couldn’t ask for better.

  When you worked with Bill Sienkiewicz on Elektra Assassin, did the way he portrayed your scripts have an influence on you after that came out and hit the market?

  Do you mean on how I drew or how I wrote them?

  C: All of the above.

  No, I’m serious. What happened was I wrote him full scripts and then I re-wrote them once he drew them, because he was a wild man and a very different book was produced. In fact one that was much more a wedding of our sensibilities. The series really came together midway through one evening when he was in my apartment in California and the two of us were up ‘til about four in the morning laughing and rolling around on the floor, both of us drawing pictures of characters and stuff, and I realized that there was a screwball humor element to the series that really should be in it. And the story outline had to be expanded to accommodate that. Bill has a touch of the absurdist in him.

  Having read Stray Toasters I would agree.

  In that sense, it resembles working with Geof Darrow. Where you give Geof a straight forward eight page story, you’ll end up with a hundred page epic that will just bring in elements that you never would have imagined and I like to collaborate in a way where both of us play off each other, so working with that kind of person is a lot of fun.

  How do you feel now about the appearance of some woman called Elektra in Daredevil lately?

  [laughs] Well I feel like when I created Elektra I was a kid. I was in my early twenties. I knew the rules and I knew that even though they promised up and down that would never happen, that it was gonna happen. All I can say is, it stings. It stings like hell. Please don’t buy it. But I can’t belly-ache too long and hard because a generation of Kirby and Ditko didn’t have the ground rules spelled out for the way I did, and they got ripped off a lot worse than I did. So Marvel can drag that corpse around the block all they want. I hope I don’t have to see it, but I still own Sin City and it’s not a mistake I’ll make again.

  Will you ever re-address that character?

  Elektra? No. They’ve made that impossible.

  I recently sat through and read through the bulk of everything that you’ve written.

  Poor guy.

  No. No. Come on. I noticed that one thing in Ronin that, I don’t know whether it was just me or the mood I was in or what, but some of it plays like a love/hate letter to the city of New York. Is that far off the mark?

  Have you ever lived in New York?

  No.

  Well, I lived there for ten or eleven years and you gotta have both sides to your relationship with a city like that. You gotta love it and hate it. Eventually it was a city that I had to leave, but sure, that was all through Daredevil too. American metropolises are ghastly wonderful things. They’re strange.

  A couple of questions on Batman. I think a lot of that’s already been covered. What do you see as a major difference between your vision of the contemporary Batman and, say Alan Moore’s or Grant Morrison’s?

  I don’t know Grant Morrison’s. I’ve been careful not to read Batman since I left the character. It’s just something I do since I tend to get so focused on my own idea. I shouldn’t dislike someone else’s idea, and why make for bad feelings? I have read some of Alan’s and Alan and I, as with everything super heroic, disagree completely because Alan has a very – the easy word is cynical, but it’s not cynical. His attitude toward the super hero is that it is in itself a corrupt idea; I don’t think I’m misstating his case. I’ve always been in love with the heroic, so my approach to the super hero, as much as I am known for the grim and gritty kind of stuff, is essentially romantic. Allan has a much more modern sensibility than mine. I mean “modern” in the broader literary sense. I believe that Superman and Batman are the extension of Odysseus and The Scarlet Pimpernel and all…the grand tradition. I once put it to Alan and we both had a big laugh, about how much we disagree about all of this. I put it to Alan saying, “Between Dark Knight and Watchmen, I provided the brass band funeral and he provided the autopsy.”

  The funny thing is, that when you say you are mostly known for the gritty and what-have-you, I would agree, but on the other hand, there were some very tender moments involved in Dark Knight.

  I loved working on that book.

  It shows.

  It was an absolute joy to work on. People are shocked when I tell them how often I would be laughing out loud while I was working on it. I would think it was funny or I would know I had a “moment,” especially once Robin entered the story. I loved doing Robin.

  It was such a stroke of genius to make her a woman.

  Well the costume seemed to make a little more sense. Bury the ghost of Wertham once and for all.

  Did Hard Boiled start out to have such a kinetic energy as it ended up with?

  Well, words aren’t as kinetic as pictures. Everything is in the hands of the artist. I knew that I had a wild man on my hands, but I had no idea what was coming. When I wrote the first issue of Hard Boiled full script, which every panel had a description, every caption and word balloon in place. Geof delivered the artwork to me; I spent two and a half days in my studio cursing his name, storming around. It was brilliant and my script was completely useless and I had to completely re-think my approach to the whole thing. So, no. I had no idea what I was in for, but I so loved working with Geof. It was great.

  When I read Hard Boiled the first time, I remember looking at it and thinking it was a fairly small book, but why is it taking me so long to get through this, because…

  There’s only six words here, why am I only on word four?

  Yeah, because it becomes almost a Where’s Waldo kind of thing. You’re looking through the panel and just looking at every little thing. It’s just fabulous.

  He holds the narrative well enough so that, in a way, he brings an absurdity to comics that is very refreshing. No wonder the guy lives in France.

  What brings you back to Martha Washington?

  Martha was always intended to be an open-ended series. The main thing that brings me back is the same thing that brings Dave back: we love her. After doing the two hundred pages of Give Me Liberty, the very last thing I wrote to Dave was a note on the cover saying “I miss her already.” When his schedule cleared up enough and there was time in mine, we did the new series.
I’ve already plotted the third series. Our plan is to chronicle her entire life. It could take thousands of pages. Who knows?

  Moving on to Sin City…

  Please!

  Can we look forward to a Sin City film directed by Frank Miller?

  It’s the only way that you’ll get a Sin City film.

  It’s the only way?

  Yeah. Whether or not that happens, or when it happens, I can’t comment on, but that’s the only way it’ll ever happen.

  That just brings a smile to my face.

  Well, that’s what’s great about owning it. I can’t say that about stuff I don’t own, that’s why it’s so important. If you like the way I do something and I own it, that means I can guarantee I’m the guy that does it.

  You create a lot of really strong characters. The three that immediately come to my mind are Elektra, Casey McKenna and, a new person I am absolutely in love with, that’s a person you refer to as “Deadly Little Miho”. Is this something you set out to do? To specifically highlight female characters or were they just the ones for the job?

  Well, it came naturally. Not only was there a real lack of that in comic books, but the women I’ve known in my life have been extraordinary.

  Will we see more and more of Miho?

  Oh yeah. See, Miho is a real scene-stealer. She was originally a background character, but she’s so fun to draw she just pops up and she’s grabbing full pages right and left and taking most of the action.

  Even though the ending of second issue of Sin City: The Big Fat Kill had been tipped to me, it was still such a surprise to see the beauty of the way it all played out.

  Well, thank you. I’m having an absolute party on this one. I’m on the last issue now and it’s a big thirty-seven page story. We’re going fatter with the last issues…an even fatter kill. It’s a wonderful feeling really. Once you get out into the spookier waters of creating something out of whole cloth, you can lose some of the fun that came from working on the old monthlies. I’ve done enough Sin City now, I mean, I’ve done more Sin City for instance than I did Batman, that I’ve got the kind of momentum that I had in my old Daredevil days. Where the story ideas just keep coming. It’s a real good time. It’s a lot of fun.

  I notice a lot of your fight scenes are very well executed. Did you ever study martial arts?

  A little bit.

  How far do you think realism should be taken in comics?

  [laughs] Well, only if it looks good. I always chuckle when people tell me that my work is realistic. I mean, comics don’t lend themselves to realism, to my mind…not often. Occasionally somebody will do something brilliant that is genuinely realistic, but for realism nothing is going to beat documentary. I think that people often feel that something is realistic when it feels emotionally true. When it inspires a gut level reaction that is vital and strong, but that’s what romance is. That’s what melodrama is. Hitchcock once remarked “melodrama is reality with the boring parts taken out”. And so, to do a realistic comic book would mean taking you through all the tedious paces of mundane life, and we all know that pretty well, that’s why I don’t do auto-biographical comics.

  Do you prefer writing and drawing solo compared to collaborating?

  I don’t prefer either. It really depends on which and where. They’re different pleasures. Right now, I’m rocketing along on Sin City and loving doing the whole thing myself. But finishing Sin City then working with Dave Gibbons or Geof Darrow is jumping into someone else’s mind. It’s like I’ve been playing a solo and I get to play with somebody else. So it tends to make me come back to drawing stronger with a little more diverse set of abilities. Also, I write very different stories for other people than I write for myself. Dave Gibbons, he has a such a particular set of remarkable strengths. He’s an excellent dramatist. He gives the best actors you could ask for. And he can also make you believe anything. I can type out “gay nazis in a laser cannon” and he’ll draw it in such a way that it’s utterly believable. So I can take that angle of Martha that much further; it’s such a spectacle that the biblical climax of the second Martha Washington series had, I don’t know many artists that could have pulled that off.

  That’s quite a testament. Let me ask you some “from the hip” opinions of certain other writers.

  Ok…[hesitantly]

  Neil Gaiman.

  You know, I haven’t read as much Neil as I’d like to. I’ve only read a few of his stories. He’s obviously a very, very skilled writer. Boy, does that guy use words well, but I can’t go into it deeper because I haven’t read enough of it. It’s sitting in a stack of things that I will read. I want to give it the time it deserves.

  John Byrne.

  Oh, I think John is a very good writer. He’s clever and his Next Men series is an unfolding science fiction epic that I don’t imagine anybody else would have either the discipline or the patience to do.

  Paul Chadwick.

  Well, you’re naming everybody I like. I love Paul’s work. Getting a Paul Chadwick comic for me means I get to sit down and make sure there’s no music on and nothing going on in the house and delve into it. He’s so contemplative. It’s amazing in these politically correct times, he brings his own conscience and his own beliefs to bear but he never preaches. And he proved with his last series that he could handle suspense with the best of us.

  Alan Moore.

  [laughs] I mean, I’ve loved Alan’s stuff since the old Warrior days. I think he’s at his best nowadays when he’s doing the stuff he really loves the most, stuff like From Hell. I’m monitoring. I am watching. I wish there was more to look at these days.

  Will Eisner.

  Oh! [laughs] Will’s like the practicing master of comic art. For me to comment too much on his stuff would be kind of dumb, because he’s teaching us all so much. Here he is with so much great work behind him, and continuing to explore. He’s an example to follow as far as how to take one’s talents and develop them into full maturity.

  And finally, any list wouldn’t be complete with the name Jack Kirby on it.

  Oh yeah, Jack was pretty good wasn’t he? [laughs] I mean Jack was our Beethoven. Beethoven, Elvis, whatever fields we want to pick.

  Wonder how Jack would feel being compared to Elvis?

  [laughs] “I’m sure he’s a great kid!” The thing about Jack, what was so extraordinary, was that if you judged an artist by his influence, then he was clearly and absolutely in a class by himself. You can mark with an absolute line before Kirby hit his prime and (the history of comics that is) before Kirby and since Kirby. And they’re two distinct eras, because Kirby re-invented the entire medium, and everybody works in the wake of what he did. I don’t think we’re likely to see anybody as brilliant as that again, anytime soon. I think that really if there were any eras or ages of comics, what just ended was The Jack Kirby Age.

  With the advent of writer and artist owned characters, do you foresee a new renaissance in the comic field?

  Well…that’s what I thought about the time I did Ronin. I thought that we were really going to see everything explode and burst open and a glorious new age was going to be upon us. I still have hopes, but not as wildly optimistic. I think that now that so much of the power has shifted to the artist, that it’s up to the artist to decide what they are going to do with this power. It used to be so easy to blame everything on the publishers, and rightly so, they were behaving like scum, but it was a fantasy to think that once the handcuffs were off all the artists would rise to it. We’ve just been through that whole embarrassing period where everything was a new super hero universe, and some of the worse comics ever created sold brilliantly.

  Do you think that once the artists found this freedom, they thought to themselves “Well, I can write!”.

  I’ll jump on that in a minute. But my main point was that we saw this embarrassing stuff, all these “Super Hero Universes Of The Week” for so long as everybody was trying to cash in on a false boom, and the artists played into that j
ust as much as anybody else. So I mean, given freedom, what did a lot of people do? The same thing they did at Marvel, only get paid better. I hope a renaissance is coming, but I’m not in quite such a hurry anymore. I think that as time goes by the artists are going to have to grow up and realize that to have the freedom that we have is a very rare thing, historically, for any art field, and to use it to find our own voices and do our best work rather than to pander. As far as artists who try to write, who maybe you think shouldn’t… God bless ‘em, I think. This is one art form and at least let them try.

  What is the present situation of Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot?

  Geof Darrow is finished and the book is about to go on the schedule. So it should be coming out late Spring.

  What character haven’t you had a crack at doing that you’d love to?

  Superman.

  I’ve read that. Why and what direction would you take him in?

  One of the reasons is pure vanity, which is to have something on my shelf with an “S” on the spine. He is the big one. He’s the final word in super heroes. The first and the best. The other thing is there’s a lot of childhood affection, (there’s a lot of that), that would make me want to do at least one book. As far as where I’d take him? Oh, that’s up to me and it’s something I would never talk about ahead of time.