Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  Describe the world in which Kabuki takes place.

  I have a fascination with architecture, so I wanted to take the way things are going now and just push it twenty years into the future, that way I would be able to design everything on every level, but with a base on how it is. For that reason I put it a little bit in the future. I definitely wanted to give it very strong ties with history, so, I’ve also made a lot of historical facts deeply rooted into the character’s origin. It’s very much a character-motivated plot where it is not a contrived story, but it is sort of this woman’s journey that I divide up into different story lines, the very first one being called Kabuki: Circle of Blood. In a sense, I’ve compared it to a re-telling of Louis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland in that it is a surreal landscape where a person has sort of a hero’s journey based on a lot of mythic cultures from girl to adulthood, an adult self-consciousness. Or, as in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, from pawn to queen. It starts out where [Kabuki] is an operative for a government agency and, in Japan, there is this whole inter-dependency between the government and organized crime so I wanted to show that. I wanted to show how everything is set up, and I wanted to show the flip side of the facade we normally see in things, and especially the flip side of the caricature of the facade that we usually see in television, comics, and film that seemed really ridiculous to me. I wanted to get us past that and just say the whole thing takes place in Japan and that’s a fact. So, with her starting out as an operative with the government, I get to show the stuff from the government’s point of view and the criminal point of view. Then, there is a point where she gets out of that and sees a lot of the propaganda of the whole situation and it is the story of her journey afterwards.

  And that story will continue on as you go into your next story arc?

  The first one was Circle of Blood which, even with the titles I try to have different meanings. Much of her origin [lies] with her family ties and her bloodlines, but also her being an operative for the government, sort of a bad light of her viewing the flag, or a political symbol as a circle of blood due to some grim deeds that are done instead of looking at it as a beautiful sun, an emblem of the country. Because it touches on a lot of the things that Japan now tries to hide. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Comfort Women’s situation, a lot of other atrocities that were committed in war that are now hidden and they don’t make apologies formally to the other countries, although they have given large sums of money to many countries. So, I wanted to explore that a little bit and have a deep routed sense of history, but also a sense of future.

  Did the book’s initial inclusion in the "Bad Girl" trend bother you at all?

  Yeah, it did. An easy way to prove that the stuff came out before any of the "Bad Girl" stuff, and I would be doing it anyway, is because there was a card set. There was a company called Majestic who called me up one time and asked me just to draw a card with a character I had been working on, this is like ‘91 or ‘92. I have this card with this date and it says the whole history of the character and everything, so it came long before any of this hype that went berserk with everyone trying to capitalize on all of this nonsense. The reason it bothers me... I understand this is America and everyone has the right to make a buck no matter what kind of shit they sell, put a ribbon, and candy coat it. Yeah, that’s fine that they are allowed to do that, but it really annoys me, in a way, because they’re destroying the perceived shelf life. It narrows people’s minds and gives them pre-conceptions when they go out to pick a book up for the first time and it has a female protagonist in it. So, other women, or readers in general, who have been annoyed or disgusted by a lot of the nonsense they’ve seen, and have pre-conceptions. [I can understand how,] seeing Kabuki for the first time, [they might] think that it falls into that category. Although, everyone who reads it seems to stick with it... seems to be a reader for life. That is why I actively pursue the convention circuit trying to bring it to new people’s attention and once they read it, they write to me and tell me about it and write on a consistent basis and my sales have steadily been growing.

  How much of that whole trend was the speculators just creating a false market by telling people, "Hey, all of this stuff is going to be really hot" and the audience buying both the line and the book?

  There are three people at work here. It’s not like one group is completely at fault because you have the retailers who order the book because one book starts selling a lot for a variety of reasons, or some kind of fluke happened and they sold a lot of the first issue or something and then, what kind of annoys me is that they’ll order a lot of this thing and there’ll be a whole glut and people will think it’s popular and the magazines will tell how popular it is and everyone buys it. So, you have the retailers buying a lot of stuff and then you’ll have the fans actually eating it up until they realize how crappy it is, but then you also have the people who put out crap just for money. So, there are three parties who create a culmination of fault there. In talking about retailers, I have to be careful, because there are tons of retailers who I have met who are amazing, smart people and who are doing a lot to better this industry. You will rarely find me complaining about the stuff in the industry. I’m usually just focusing on my book and trying to get the work done or I’m trying to better it somehow. A lot of retailers work those ends as well, but some retailers, it seems like once something seems to be hot, then they will order anything that superficially looks that way, causing a glut in the market and as soon as the sales drop because they have done that, then they cut their orders on everything, which seems like a silly thing. This goes back and forth every three years.

  The first thing I noticed when I flipped open the book was the look of the Noh. They are so striking and such individuals. Tell me a bit about the development of them and their mythos.

  Well, there are different aspects I am pulling from. In the whole book, there are different layers of things that can be viewed. I don’t know if you had a chance to read Takashi Hattori’s analysis of it at the end of Circle of Blood...

  Briefly.

  He shows different versions that [Circle of Blood] can be viewed on whether it’s viewed as a mythological thing, a sci-fi thriller, a ghost story, a hero’s journey, a family tragedy, political espionage, or just as a crime story or whatever. In different terms, there were eight of the Noh which, on one layer, they’re the pawns on a chess board. On another layer, there were some mythological people in Japanese mythology called the Eight Guardians. And then, also, they, as everyone else does in this book, correlate, on a different level to all of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. For instance, Scarab would be the beetle, Tiger Lily is named after Tiger Lily in the Garden of Live Flowers in the chapter of Lewis Carroll, Siamese are Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, and Snap Dragon replaces Daisy. Everyone in the book, actually, can correlate to that as well, because what he did with that book was make a socio-political commentary on the time, but he had to veil it as a children’s book. So, I’m doing a similar thing, I guess. You don’t want to force feed anything to people. What I’m trying to do is make it palatable to them and sort of trick them into being enlightened and broadening their mind.

  The correlation between the book and Alice in Wonderland surprises me; until you mentioned it I would have never seen it, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I can see it clearly.

  You’ll probably notice that Alice in Wonderland was done with cards and Through the Looking Glass was done with chess pieces and I used both of those as a grid that they both relate to in this book.

  At one panel towards the end of the book, she says, "You’re nothing but a pack of cards!" When I read it the first time I didn’t understand the reference, but now...

  She woke up from the dream. There is something I was talking about with my friend Takashi. He grew up in Japan and he also went to school here, so he gets to see the hypocrisy from both sides. In every culture you have this facade of people telling you how things are. I
actually love to make analogies with children’s tales. I did this with The Emperor’s New Clothes also. We were talking about how everyone has to acknowledge this false reality, even though everyone knows that it’s ridiculous. [However], they can’t tell anyone else that it is ridiculous for fear of everyone viewing them as some sort of outsider who doesn’t fit in to their realm of ideology, which is how it is in Japan, and even here to a lesser extent. What Alice is also doing is, when she wakes up from the dream, she sees things for what they are.

  Was Circle of Blood a fully realized work when you presented it to Caliber or did they have a hand in its development?

  My relationship with Caliber is [such that] I send them a [book] completely finished. From cover to cover, everything in it is completely mine. I have a very good relationship with them. In fact, there have been tons of other companies, all kinds of crazy hot companies, who have [said to] me that they’d love to publish Kabuki and offered amazing amounts of money and crazy commercial campaigns. I turned it down because some of them seemed to be too hot for me. I don’t necessarily ever want to become part of the mainstream or part of the speculator market or any kind of celebrity thing. Also, I completely trust Gary Reed, the publisher of Caliber and I know exactly where he’s coming from. There’s no clash involving substance, which much of comics has become much more flash than substance nowadays. The first thing I did with Caliber was a book called Young Dracula: Diary of a Vampire and when I did that with them, it actually became their best seller of the year a couple of years ago. After that, they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. I just said, "I would like to do this book" and they said, "Sure." As much as possible, I try to market it in my own fashion every way... I try to write the solicitation copy and everything else.

  You use television as a method of driving the story's narrative. Do you think that the televised medium is a good barometer for any nation's culture?

  It’s a barometer of what the government wants you to think the culture is, many times. Media, even in comics, is just a machine. They want you to do this. They want you to buy that. So, they say, "This is popular," and they say, "It’s so great," even when it isn’t. It’s a mass media market, propaganda machine. What’s funny, and this gets back to the Noh characters, all of them are dressed in some sort of politically propagandized garb, but also, all of them are meant to be pleasing to the eye, and catering to the Japanese man’s fantasy world which makes people more susceptible to media. That’s why there is some kind of sexual content or innuendo in every single commercial. There doesn’t need to be any sexual content in a car commercial nowadays, but it just opens you up and makes you more relaxed, more interested in what they’re talking about. It just makes you want to buy things more.

  Or at least swallow the pill...

  Yeah. And that works even more so with Japan, because as racist and sexist as America seems at times, Japan often seems to be even more so, and even in a scarier way because no one mentions things in Japan there as much. Most things are not talked about, they’re just understood. For instance, if you were to try to work at a Japanese company, you would probably never get higher than the first rung of the ladder. As much as you would talk to them, and they would completely agree and smile, but everyone would just ignore you. It is a very nationalistic and much more racial and sexist-oriented [country] than America is. So, much of the media you see pushing the narrative in the book relates to that.

  Will we ever learn what ended up happening to Link Kinoshita?

  Oh yeah, without a doubt.

  He’s a great character.

  Oh, good. I’m glad you like him. He plays a large part in the future. I don’t think I should be giving away any secrets, but when I wrote this book out, obviously if you’re reading even one single issue of it, I think you get the sense that it’s all going in a very focused direction. So, with the whole thing, I knew exactly where it is going, exactly what’s happening before I began doing it. When I first put this together, I was much too ambitious and I thought I was going to tell this whole story in three issues. Basically, Circle of Blood, [is a] six issue series plus there was a book called Fear the Reaper which came before it, but relates to it. So, basically there are seven issues and they are all collected into this graphic novel which was the first fourth of this big story I was trying to tell. The rest of it is completely all written out. I realized that for the next five years I have completely written already where it is going. It’s just the physical time it takes to draw it. It’s kind of weird when you already have it written out.

  The whole idea that the level of crime Link undertakes and then his having to be home before mom and dad get mad is so great. There is such a delicate balance in Kabuki between the futuristic cyber-world of technology, the traditional aspects of Zen, and the genetic tuggings of ancestral Japan. Do you think that a balance can be struck between the three?

  I’m sure with some people, on a personal level, it probably seems to be struck, but on a whole national level, I don’t know if I can comment on that. I’ve many Japanese friends, and in talking to them, I can sense a little bit of their dissatisfaction with how things are, culturally. In this technological age, you have all of these new things, but you still have this certain way you are meant to behave, meant to appear in public with everyone. There’s a real dichotomy for them with that. There’s a lot of absurdities that are involved where there’s no reason to act a certain way, but yet, society deems that you should still do this, even though it makes no sense. A lot of them feel that way. I don’t know when it will level out.

  You've allowed some other artists such as Rick Mays, Buzz, Andrew Robinson, and Dave Johnson do the illustration in Masks of the Noh. Was this done because you were too busy with Skin Deep, or was it merely a way to see how other artists would interpret your characters?

  I guess there are [a couple of] main reasons with that. Masks of the Noh #1 basically focuses on other characters. I just wanted to give people a glimpse into their lives. I gave them sort of a glimpse in the secondary characters in the first story line, but I wanted to let them know that I do have a whole personality written out for every one of them and, in the future, I can easily do a series on all of them, much like the way I did with Kabuki, talking about their whole past and who they are exactly. I plan on doing that in the future, many of them actually are already written out. I don’t like to grab one style and beat it to death, like most people do. I enjoy creating a different atmosphere for every different scene, so, I thought it would make perfect sense if I had a different artist do each different character. What better way to give them their own personality with the writing I’m giving them, but also in a visual sense, because if I was drawing them, I would draw them in a different style any way? So, I thought it made perfect sense to do that. It was also an interesting thing because I only asked artists who I thought I wanted to work with and had something to bring to it. I worked very closely with them, doing layouts because there is a certain story telling that I’ve established that I wanted to maintain through that. There’s a certain graphic visual syntax. I’ve been trying to create my own language throughout this book. I wanted to, at least, keep a palatable semblance of that even when working with other artists. So, I always had to lay the grid of the story, the art, and the flow of it. Second, it did give me chance to get ahead on the next series. Even though I’ve had a chance to get ahead, it always seems like I’m working right there at the line. As soon as I’m done, it’s out there. The problem is that it takes a month turnaround in printing, but besides that, they’re getting completely fresh, immediate stuff from me.

  Now that you've gone to a full color format, will you be approaching the book any differently?

  Oh yeah, definitely. First off, every story line I do I’m going to approach differently from the beginning. The story line dictates what kind of format, what kind of style it is going to be. For instance, Circle of Blood, I could have easily done everything in full color. I just definitely wa
nted it to be a black and white book without a doubt because there’s too much of bringing you into this other world and having these other worlds of the past and the future. It’s sort of like looking at old black and white photos. I think David Lynch said something to this effect when deciding to do the Elephant Man in black and white. It has an instantaneous reality of its own. It brings you into another world. I definitely wanted to do the first story line in black and white. Then, with the two painted stories that come right after, the first one featured in the color special and the next one in Dreams of the Dead which I’ll compile into one book probably just called Dreams that will come right after Circle of Blood, I definitely wanted to do that completely painted. Obviously it wasn’t any line drawing with computer colors or any other kind of colors over line drawing. I wanted to create a completely surreal, new look that they haven’t even seen in any of the covers. The covers themselves, I wanted them to be completely graphic in nature. On this new series, I’ll be doing a completely new style for myself.

  You seem to be moving in a more multi-media presentation of the work. I notice there are several moments in Dreams of the Dead that have a photographic feel, like a painted over photograph look.