Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  In fact, the first time that I read it, I did not even notice it. When I read the Wizard thing, I was amazed.

  I mean, the complaint that I have heard from a number of people about, ‘I can’t enjoy Kingdom Come because I don’t know who all of these characters are and you’ve taken this guy and reinterpreted him and I don’t know why he looks like this.’ That actually was the complaint that came from Harlan Ellison, of all people. He called up Mark Waid after the first issue of Kingdom Come was out and he bitched at him that he couldn’t enjoy the story because of all these bullshit characters in the background. It’s like, ‘Who’s this kid who looks like Star Spangled Kid with the cosmic rod and the cosmic belt? What’s goin’ on here? I don’t understand this.’ Mark was like, ‘Harlan, they’re background characters. If they look like they have any kind of recognizable elements to them, it’s simply because that was what inspired Alex to come up with that particular look. As far as what they really symbolized, they’re just new characters, that’s all that’s important. You don’t need to know anything about them.’ It’s like an average Image book. You open it up and there are a billion characters that are never going to be fully explained as to why they look a certain way that they do. They are simply nothing more than cannon fodder and what they represent is that the world of super heroes has grown the point that there is so many of them, you can’t keep track, that’s all that you’re supposed to pick up on. I know that some people let themselves be distracted by that. I can’t feel guilty about that. The fact that we didn’t explain the origins of where did Hawkman come from, where did the Green Lantern come from, the wheres and why fors of all of those characters. There was neither the time nor the point, really, because they were not the leads and as long as we, more or less, understood our main characters and had a general sense of the fact that ‘this character has god-like abilities and somehow he’s got a power connected to lightning.’ Aside from that, do you really need to know much more to be able to enjoy his participation in the story? Did you need to know how that light saber worked to be able to [get] the fact that it looked really cool in the sword fight? So, I have to argue against that, but if it really did distract people, yeah… I mean, that stuff can happen and it’s a shame, because it is a fantasy and there are plenty of other fantasy things that people absorb readily without it needing to be explained to them.

  Your father was the model for Norman McCay. How is he dealing with his new role as comic icon?

  [Laughs] Well, seeing as how comics are such a big thing in the real world, he’s being stopped on the street everywhere he goes. I mean, it doesn’t even interfere in the guy’s life. I’m going to get him to go out to Chicago [Con] here with me again, and I was wondering if it would be really cool to get him to go out to San Diego.

  He’ll be mobbed.

  [Laughs]

  Rock and Roll Dad…

  It’s too funny, because people saw the picture of him and me together in the Wizard article. I’ve gotten it mentioned to me many times how it freaked people out because there he was in reality and they just never thought they’d see Mickey Mouse come to life. There he was. I was thinking, ‘Of course,’ but wasn’t that something that I’d always maintained that he was a real person. Well, that’s what he really looks like. He gets a kick out of this whole thing. It’s fun for him. It’s certainly flattering. He wrote the introduction to the hardcover by Graffitti. I even have a little statuette I made of his likeness, a little bust of my dad.

  Is that in here? [Leafs though Kingdom Come hardcover] Here is it. Jarod Shifflet helped with it.

  Yeah, where did you get that?

  It’s the advance review copy of Kingdom Come I got from DC.

  Oh, right. I forgot you had the entire book with the photograph in there.

  Yeah, I’m cool. [Laughs] One of the things I’m curious about is what with your involvement in Kingdom Come and your heavy involvement with Uncle Sam, is writing something you want to do in the future? I mean, just you doing everything? Doin’ a Frank Miller…

  [Laughs] Doing a Frank Miller… That’s the sad thing that he is the example that everybody’s got to use. I mean, ultimately, I think Frank is a better writer than he was an artist, ever. The thing is that Frank is only doing what most comic strip artists had to do from the get-go. You look back over time and it was Alex Raymond who did all of Flash Gordon. It was Winsor McCay who did all of Little Nemo. It’s not like there needed to be all these artist people to handle every step of it. It’s just that comics is a fragmented process because of the demand of how quickly something is produced. Still, those comic strip things, which had all of one creator to do all parts of it, were coming out more frequently because they would come out every week and people would be exposed continually and they were exposed to much greater quantity of people than any other stuff where we fragmented the process to be able to get a product out quicker. If I had enough time in my schedule I could have, eventually, written Kingdom Come. It would have been different, but I could have eventually written what would have been Kingdom Come, maybe it wouldn’t have been as good or maybe it would have been better. Who knows? I certainly had the inspiration. It’s just that I didn’t want to take the time to try and figure out how to write. I thought that would take me a hell of a lot longer than just knocking it out.

  How long did it take Jae Lee with Hellshock?

  I don’t know. How long did it take him?

  What? Two years… I mean, he released the first four issue mini-series and then went back and learned his writing chops and now has the new on-going series.

  Well, good for him. I kind of fear doing the same thing because I’m so used to doing so much work and, even as much as people might say that they don’t see me that often, I’m working every month just like everybody else. It’s just that they don’t publish what I do until the entire thing is done. If somebody was willing to publish ten pages of mine a month, you’d see me every month, in addition to all of the god forsaken covers that I do. So, the problem is if I suddenly decide to take that much further step and that much more control à la writing, it’s really going to force me to disappear to a certain degree. I’m going to try and control that, but, ultimately, I, like any other artist, find fault with other people’s collaborations sometimes and it’s your vision that is the most guiding one. You fall back to wanting to have all of the words be yours eventually, not because you’re an egotistical person, but just because no one is going to be able to see what’s in your head.

  Yeah, ‘purity of vision.’

  Yeah, even my Dad said that to me at the outset. He didn’t see how I could make this thing such a great work if I was working with another person. He thought that all great works of art are done by one specific vision. I had grown to appreciate through Marvels what a good collaboration could yield. I wanted to make use of that again. I think I did, but whatever things were missing from it for me have definitely urged me on to take very seriously the idea of working on my own on a particular project. I just have to see how that will bear itself out.

  I’d like to ask you some specific questions about the changes/additions you made to the hard cover of Kingdom Come. Why did you have Wonder Woman become pregnant with Superman’s baby? I was shocked that you ended the book with that revelation. However, based upon what had transpired in the book before, you could see that there was some emotion between the two.

  Ever since George Perez and John Byrne did that one special issue of Action Comics (I can’t remember what number it was) way back in ’86, I think, where, after they had rebuilt the DC universe, after Crisis and they had Wonder Woman and Superman get together on a date or whatever and they had a big kiss and then it lead to nothing. It’s like the biggest build-up and then, all of a sudden, he decides, ‘Well, I’m just a simple farm boy. You’re a princess. We can’t possibly…’ Dude, you’re next to God. At best, she can fly. Come on, don’t give us this shit like you can’t get along. Take advantage, come on! She’ll never
even begin to understand what it’s like to be Superman.

  Besides, how many women can Superman date?

  Exactly.

  He’s a little bit rough on them.

  He’s always breakin’ them, you know. So, basically I was pissed at those guys. Here’s something that happened last year, when I was first trying to get these additional pages happening and I was trying to convince Mark to write them and the editor to get me the approval to do this whole epilogue with the revelation of her being pregnant and all of that stuff, John Byrne had heard a rumor that, at the end of Kingdom Come, that there was a Superman love child and he was pissed. He was going around trying to find out what was the story and this is all because, as I found out later, that he thought that, one, it shouldn’t happen that way, they would never be paired together or, two, if that was the case, they should be married. Superman would never have a child out of wedlock. Whatever. This infuriated me that he had the audacity to be this bent out of shape about it because it’s my project. It’s none of his fuckin’ business. He was the inspiration for the whole damn thing in the first place. If he hadn’t let me down so much with that special back then when they did pair them up for all of like two seconds, then tease the shit out of us, then taking it away, I never would have had such a big hard-on to make the whole thing happen. So, he is the creator of this entire scenario. From the outset of my proposal, I saw the ending of Kingdom Come being with everyone dead at the end of the story. It was free and clear for Wonder Woman and Superman to mellow out and, eventually, wind up together even though there’s all of this tension over various animosities between them in the story. With the human people they’d been closely connected to in their lives, that they’d basically outlived at this point, I’d very obviously widowed Superman. You could only get the two of them together if you removed Lois from the equation and Lois has been in the equation for a period of time, but even if she wasn’t murdered or accidental death or whatever, eventually Superman is going to be alone because she’s mortal, he might be mortal either way [but] he’s going to live longer. I wanted to play up that whole distance that he would have to humanity, and that would draw him closer to one of the only other people who’s like him in that factor is Wonder Woman. And of course, playing up the immortality angle with her with the fact that she didn’t age. It’s the kid fan-boy thing. It’s like you pair up the character with somebody who seems like he’d have the most in common with, which is Wonder Woman. And ultimately, Wonder Woman was created as a female Superman to begin with. So I convinced Mark that it was a great idea and, once he was behind it, we were really off and running. I just had this whole idea that they’d get together at a diner out in the middle of nowhere and it’s just filled with bunch of really old people, like you can find anywhere in the Mid-West if you travel. You’re taking a road trip to Nevada and you stop at some pitstop along the way, and let's say you’re Robert DeNiro, well there’s a chance that nobody in that diner is going to know who the fuck you are. I just thought it would be so cool to have these three icons [Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman] in some place where nobody recognized them. It was like a big thing. It was actually the editor who came up with the idea that it should take place on Planet Krypton and that made the most sense.

  Now, as I’m looking at this, the first page of the new epilogue, in the lower right, there’s a scene of Clark and Wonder Woman sitting down, is that you in the background?

  Yeah, that’s me. You can see in the next pages when you can see in the background again, there’s me yelling at the editor and the writer.

  See, you have to be having fun here.

  Too much, probably. At that point, it was sort of like, ‘Well, I’ve got this spot in here that I need to fill, so…’ I knew where I wanted to stick other people in other spots and it wasn’t like I had this big hard-on to draw myself into something either, so… It’s funny. It’s cute. It’s whatever.

  But the kids love it…

  The kids love it.

  So, I guess the big question is, ‘are Superman and Wonder Woman married at the end of Kingdom Come?’

  No.

  Good. It’s the nineties…

  The way I look at it is I don’t know why the hell her culture would lead her to some kind of idea that she has to have a western culture style marriage. Let alone the fact that Wonder Woman is a very independent kind of person, like he could probably never convince her that’s the way they have to go, but they do apparently seem to be a couple. It is endearing the idea that they would become tender to one another, that they would become like a couple to one another. Given the way that she is portrayed in the story, which was one of my favorite things about Kingdom Come that I credit Mark entirely for, she was very sketchy in my original outline, and I think the way he re-drafted her to be a much more pivotal force was one of the best things we had to offer. He did that with her. He did that with Captain Marvel. Basically, he brought a lot of depth there. I think, for [Superman], he was married to Lois and that was the woman that he was to be married to. Within the Kingdom Come universe, no human woman is able to carry the child of a boy from Krypton. The physicality didn’t work out. In the case of a mortal amazon from Greek mythology, magic is involved because that’s sort of the source point of her strength and power or myth or whatever physical aspects of her makeup there are. It gets into the realm of the imaginary. So, the rules of science can be played with. Superman is a product of science fiction. Wonder Woman is a product of myth, and considering that you have myth involved, you can make anything happen. So, she should be able to carry the child of Superman. He would just sort of adapt to this lifestyle that wasn’t exactly like married life he had with Lois. In a way, he’s never going to try to imitate that, either. They are separate kinds of people. The way in which they would raise a child together would just be weird. I couldn’t even imagine.

  And then when you throw Bruce Wayne into the mix.

  See, that was definitely Mark’s new wrinkle. I had the idea that they asked Batman to be the godfather, but I had no real concept of what that would mean. To me, that was a term, I just thought that the point of why they get [Batman] there in the spot. They say, ‘We want you to be the child’s godfather,’ and he just really freaks out at that, but Mark had this whole angle like they’re basically looking to raise the child of the three primary super hero icons which becomes this really bizarre concept then. What the hell would that be? Actually, within this god-forsaken Kingdom series which Mark is going to be writing now, which, again, as I’ve mentioned always in every interview, I came up with that title, he’s going to explore what would happen to that child.

  It’s a natural…

  Well, yeah…

  …had to happen.

  [Sighs] I just happen to have invented the child, so… In any case, I don’t know what’s going on there, but that was something that came about during the process of pulling it all together is that Batman’s involvement became a lot bigger of a deal. Now they were, all of a sudden, this Superman family for real. Oh, before I forget it… This is something I didn’t even mention in any of my copious notes for the annotations, but something that I hope people notice, and I’ll mention at least in this interview, is in addition to all of these tiny little details, and there’s a billion of them in that epilogue sequence, if you take a close look, this is the first time in the story that Bruce Wayne wears a dark suit. I played against type every other time you saw him previously, when he first shows up, he’s wearing a white tee shirt and jeans.

  Right, there’s a grey suit here later on…

  And then he wears a grey suit, and then, later at the end, he’s wearing a big white tee shirt with a big red bat on it, which is the complete opposite of anything you would expect of Batman, which is the way I wanted to play it. I didn’t want it to be playing it typical. There is a specific reason why he’s got a dark suit in this scenario. Can you imagine what it is?

  Uh…

  Does it at all look familiar? F
amiliar, at least, to anything previous in the story?

  No, I’m lost. Where is it from?

  That is the exact same suit that Luthor wore and the reason for that is it’s like the spoils of war. It’s like wearing your enemy’s skin. I just found out recently that the little loincloth that Tarzan wears is from the first man that he encountered that he defeated in battle, the tribesman who killed his ape mother. When he defeated that jungle guy… [laughs] …jungle guy…what would you call somebody like that? …That jungle native! When he killed that guy, he took the loincloth as his own; that was the first time he had his clothing. In any case, it’s the same kind of idea. It’s wearing the pelt of your prey. So, he took the nice Armani suit from Luthor. So, it’s one of those really goofy things. Did you notice Plastic Man in there?

  Yeah, that I did see. He’s peeking out from behind some glass.

  Yeah, on the last page. I finally worked in the most appropriate way to get Plastic Man into the series.

  …being a goof.

  Yeah, because, ultimately, Plastic Man does not belong in Kingdom Come. As much as I’ve loved the character and have a lot of feeling for the importance of the character, as much as I could justify Captain Marvel being turned into the kind of character he was in Kingdom Come, but Plastic Man being taken to the much more serious tone or attitude, that’s not him, that wouldn’t be right.