Category: Comics

KO: When I first read the book, the two parts that struck me specifically were Nyuki’s death in the end, and the part at the beginning of the fourth chapter where a bee from the neighboring hive tries to invade Nyuki’s hive, and is then killed by the rest of the bees.

JH: Tha’s probably the best example. The thought is, these are our heroes. These are our characters that we care about. And it’s really easy for us, it’s potentially easy when we write a story, to slap a human moral structure on this and say the bees will find a way not to kill, when in reality, this is what bees do. And I think that softening it up detracts from the truth. And ultimately I wanted to portray something that could be — and is — used in classrooms, in science classrooms. And if you have the bees negotiating with another bee — well, admittedly the bees talk, and that’s silly, but negotiating, that’s even worse. I mean, please, it’s not what happens. They come in, try to get in, and if it doesn’t escalate into a bee war, the person trying to get in is killed. And so it’s just one of those reality checks. And it demonstrates the fact that the bees aren’t bad because they do that. Not that I want to send the message to kids that it’s okay to kill people that want to hurt you, but we’re talking about insects.

KO: You mentioned the notion of using Clan Apis as a teaching tool, and in the end of the book, you even give your email address and come right out and suggest it. Was that something that was pretty strong in your mind when you were writing it?

JH: Probably not until halfway through it, to be quite honest with you. Ultimately I was motivated by wanting to tell a story, and wanting to contribute something to comics in general that was unique and good. It wasn’t until halfway through when I saw that I could really — if you work hard on building the plot points on the information, because every story has bouts of exposition. You go along, you have exposition, and that moves the plot forward. If you place those plot points, those exposition points, if you build them upon critical elements in the organism’s biology, you can actually pack in a lot of information within the context of the animal’s natural history. So that you have this great layering of information, and then you have the context, and all of that helps you to remember things. The best professors I’ve ever had were the ones that really told a story every lecture. And what they told us about, all the information that they dispensed was within a context. And that really helps you to remember things much more specifically than a laundry list of facts that are not really connected to each other.

KO: Have you gotten any calls from anyone saying they want to use the book in the classroom?

JH: No, not specifically. I’ve gotten a couple of emails from comic readers who are also educators who say, “Oh yeah, I’m using this.” But no, never anybody directly. But that said, there have been some really cool things that happened. Recently, one of the library associations reviewed Clan Apis, and I can’t recall, because my partner was taking care of this, I can’t recall if we were in the top twenty children’s books recommended for libraries across the nation or the top twenty graphic novels recommended for libraries across the nation. But at any rate, we got this really nice review written by a woman from the American Library Association, and so we’re being carried now by a couple of library book distributors. And so that’s one big step into libraries.

KO: Well, you’ve got something here that will teach children about science and about bees. And in Cow-Boy, you called attention to people who still think comics are juvenile literature that rot the mind. Since Clan Apis is such a good teaching tool, do you think it will teach people to be more open to comics in general?

JH: I’d love it if it did. The bias against comics is one that reflects a lack of, well, reflection. The most popular page in the newspaper is the comics page. People read sequential art every day. People cut it out and put it on their cubicles. This is something we admire if it’s four panels long, and something we gladly buy giant collections of at B. Dalton. And the minute you string more than four panels together, and the minute there’s a coherent plot, then it’s silly, or it’s too much to look at, or it’s children’s stuff, or it’s for kids. Yeah, it would be great to get a book into schools and have kids talk about it with their parents, and to have parents see it, and to challenge the parental notion or the teachers’ notion about what is a useful teaching tool. It remains to be seen whether that’ll happen.

KO: Well, it seems the more libraries and bookstores Apis makes it into, the more likely that is to happen.

JH: Well, I hope so, although you never put it all on one thing. Ultimately, for that to succeed — and this is why I say I hope we start seeing many more books that are attempting to take an all-ages approach in the sense I think that I have — is that one little drop in the bucket, which is ultimately what Clan Apis will be, is not enough. There have to be people out there willing to write stories that they wish they’d had to read when they were kids, to sit down and really put together something that they can be really proud of that can appeal to broad groups of people. Because if then you have not just one book, but twenty, which you can say “look at this,” then you have a situation in which you can change people’s opinions. But it’s like Sandman — this brilliant piece of work sort of stood by itself. It wasn’t enough. We didn’t change the public’s opinion of comics. Articles were still written in newspapers that started with “bam, pow, biff.” Probably even articles about Sandman were written that way. So one isn’t enough. And one 165-page book is definitely not enough. But if it can be one voice in a growing chorus — well, that sounds really corny.

KO: How old is your son?

JH: My son is two right now. But I wrote Clan Apis when I was just married and planning to have kids, so I guess I always thought in those terms. I guess — this is going to sound screwy — but as far as things like that are concerned, I’ve had my son in mind, and I’ve had my mother in mind. My mother and my father. I want to write stories that they can read.

KO: What kind of readers are your mother and father?

JH: Well, I guess it’s not in terms of necessarily the content. But I come from northern Indiana, a small midwestern town, but a lot of cursing, and sexual situations, and a lot of gratuitous, drippy, bloody violence — not that that’s my voice anyway — that’s not something I’m gonna hand to my mother, or that I want my son to read. And I can’t say for certain whether or not that’s the voice inherent in me, or whether it’s a voice that’s a reaction to a dearth of that type of material. In any event, that’s just the way I write. Because a Warner Brothers cartoon was the same way. As nasty as it got was Bugs Bunny wearing a bra.

KO: And I can enjoy them just as much now as I did when I was six.

JH: And that’s, to me, the key. It’s writing a story that I can enjoy and be proud of now, and in twenty years. That can sit on a library shelf and not be dated. The word my wife constantly accuses me of using is “classic.” There’s something that isn’t rooted in a particular time, and is accessible to anybody who wants to read it at any time. Because the minute you start doing those other things, I think you start cutting yourself off from people. It’s my desire not to cut people out. And the reason that’s important is that it comes from a second perspective from which I write, and that is as an educator. I want to teach people something. So much of the stuff that I pick up — and this is true of comics, it’s true of books, it’s true of magazines — I find myself growing very frustrated, because I read these things, and I don’t walk away with anything. My life hasn’t been enriched in any way. Now that’s not true of everything, but I think a lot of stuff out there just sort of, you know, exists, kind of goes through the motions of telling a story. It doesn’t really do anything to improve me. You know? I don’t want to cut myself off from an audience. The minute you do that, the minute you turn off potential students is the minute you fail to educate somebody, and that’s no good.

KO: You mentioned gratuitous blood and gore — do you think there’s an excess of that in comics specifically? It sounds like maybe you do.

JH: Well, to say there’s an excess is to suggest that I’ve studied the situation, and I have not. So all I can go on is anecdotal stuff. Comics are like movies, so it’s not as if it’s something that’s unique to comics. Comics are like movies — you see more now, there’s a lot less left to your imagination. And growing up, I was never a kid who liked gory movies. I liked scary movies. To this day, I still enjoy watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon, those classic Universal monster pictures. They still scare me a little bit. But I never enjoyed the Halloween, the Friday the 13ths, the hacking and chopping, that just wasn’t my style. So when I see it creeping in, and you can see people holding decapitated heads dripping on the covers of comic books. And it’s not that I think, “oh my goodness, we should censor that,” And I can’t even say that it shouldn’t be done, but invariably it’s going to affect public opinion. And people can make the argument that movies are the same way, people don’t castigate movies because of violence, but the bottom line is, movies are doing fine. There’s no fear that the movie industry is going to collapse. And so that may be true, and people are free to make whatever comics they want, because as long as there’s a market for them — and that’s the other thing. They’ll only be produced if there are people buying them. And you don’t publish books like that at a loss. And so there’s clearly a market for them, so I’m not making any sort of judgment call on them, but it would be nice to see, and I think there are — okay, so now I’ve just sort of spiraled right into mishmash, but — my gut is, when I look at the stands, that it’s a more violent place than it used to be. It’s a less noble place than it used to be, in all genres. I prefer to contribute to something that attempts to be much less violent and more hopeful.

KO: And Clan Apis is nothing if not hopeful.

JH: I hope so.

KO: Staying on that track, you’re very frank about death in Clan Apis, and its place in the cycle of life and in the universe as a whole. When you were thinking that you were going to be writing for all ages, was there ever a contrast as far as writing something for all ages yet not pulling any punches?

JH: It kind of goes back to kids being smart, and kids being able to handle things. My dad, when he was growing up, he was orphaned when he was very young. And it’s a corny story told by my father who grew up in the 40s, but he went to see “Bambi” with his aunt, within the year. And he still talks about how Bambit’s dad says, “You gotta go on. You’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that’s just the way it is.” And now people criticize that because, you know, we can’t show kids death, and blah blah blah, and it’s a violent image, but the bottom line is that kids have to potentially deal with death in some respect all through their life. I think they’re capable of dealing with a lot more than we give them credit for. We’re not talking about the death of their aunt or uncle here, or a relative. We’re talking about the death of an animal. And I think the understanding that that’s an element of an animal’s life is an important thing for them not to ignore. Because you can Disneyfy nature too much, you can make it a little too warm, a little too cuddly, and that goes back to the dangerous spiral of anthropomorphizing. These bees are my characters. These bees are my heroes. The queen I liked, Queen Hatchi. But you find out she had to kill the previous queen, and so these elements are not things — as long as you don’t have eviscerated bees lying around and stuff, then these are things that kids can deal with. The real motivation for dealing with that properly on a more important level was my own — if this came through as a fundamental part of the story, it’s because I’ve always dealt with an awful fear of death. And so Nyuki was my surrogate for a lot of things in the story. Like my fear of change, and fear of death as the biggest change there is. And this was sort of my way of dealing with that issue, and in some respects I view that as one of the more grown-up elements, and one of the things that a kid will probably just gloss over. I’m not sure I dealt with the metaphysics of that very well.

Quick. Name an Eisner-award nominated comic artist and writer who also has a Ph.D in biology and teaches college-level science classes. The answer is easy, mostly because there aren’t many people in the industry that fit anything even remotely resembling that description (It’s hard to imagine Garth Ennis giving a lecture on mitochondria).

Somehow, Jay Hosler has found the time to devote his life to both the study of life sciences and the production of great sequential art. His current big seller, Clan Apis, tells the story of Nyuki, a honeybee who takes herself — and us — on a journey through life in the hive and as part of the swarm. The six-chapter collection was nominated for two Eisners this year.

Widely discussed as a work accessible to — but not written specifically for — children, Apis is lighthearted but pulls no punches in its description of life as a bee. Its frank description of death and conflict in a world populated by wisecracking insects provides a welcome sense of balance in a medium where stories for all ages aren’t easy to come by.

Meanwhile, the first issue of The Sandwalk Adventures, Hosler’s newest work, hits shelves in December. The series chronicles conversations between Charles Darwin and a microscopic mite living in the follicles of his eyebrows.

Again, not something you’re likely to see from Garth Ennis.

Hosler lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife Lisa and son Max, who enjoys playing with mechanical pencils. Jay and Lisa are expecting a second child soon.

KO: Le’s talk about Clan Apis, since that’s kind of your opus right now. I think it’s fair to say that it’s written for younger audiences, or at least written to be fairly accessible to younger audiences.

JH: I think the latter is more what I had in mind. It sort of goes to the real concept of “all ages,” which means that it should appeal to, well, all ages. Unfortunately, it’s sort of in a market right now where “all ages” is translated as “just for kids.” And so, and I’ve said this before, I think, to people, that I sort of write these things like I imagine the old Warner Brothers cartoons, which was, you know, there’s slapstick and silly stuff for kids, but there’s another level, that kids will just skip over things they don’t get, as long as you give them enough material to keep going. And then there’s political commentary and broader thoughts that should appeal to older readers.

KO: How did you feel, then, when the Eisner nominations came through, and they addressed your work in terms of its youth orientation?

JH: Oh yeah, I have no problem with that, because ultimately, if I had to pick a market that is completely, in my opinion, unaddressed in the comics medium today, it’s kids. I mean, what book are there out there for kids? You go into comic shops now and you’ve got Akiko, and you’ve got Bone, and you’ve got Castle Waiting, which are all great books — Amy Unbounded, which is a mini-comic, is a great book — but in reality, compared to the vast content of Previews — this is not a slamming of Previews, this is a comment on the type of material they receive — is almost exclusively adult-oriented. And so to be nominated in a category for kids books, I have no problem with that. I’m excited about it.

KO: I’s interesting you’re saying this, since people outside the medium generally stick to the belief that comics themselves are pretty much just for kids.

JH: Yeah, it’s an interesting dichotomy. It is considered sort of childish literature. And I think there’s been a real concerted effort by a lot of people to make it adult, and when I say adult here, I mean what the real world means — not, like, pornographic. Something that a grown-up could read and not feel embarrassed about. And of course there are tons of books out there like that. One of my favorite books of all time is Minimum Wage. It’s not a kids’ book, but it’s not standard everyday fare either. The problem is that it almost seems like this desire to legitimize ourselves as okay for adults to read has left this dearth of material for kids to read. Companies make attempts at kids’ books, but usually that fails, because most people have no respect for kids’ intelligence.

KO: What are you thinking of specifically when you say that?

JH: I’m loath to single things out, but I’ve seen books come out from various publishers within the last two years that, in my opinion, missed the mark on what kids want, because what you’re doing is you’re thinking of it in terms of what kids want instead of just writing a book that could be read by a kid. I know that’s sort of a fuzzy distinction. I think that when you sit down and think, “I’m going to write something that a kid would like,” you’ve already started from the wrong standpoint. For example, I don’t think Linda Medley sits down with a Castle Waiting story and says, “I think a kid will like this.” I think she sits down and writes a story and does certain things, like — this is going to make me sound like an old fuddy-duddy — but you don’t have cursing in it. You don’t have gratuitous sexual content. You don’t have gratuitous violence. She tells a story without those trappings, so in that respect it’s accessible to a child, a child can pick it up and read it. Now, there are also elements to it that a seven-year-old kid won’t get. But at least there aren’t those really strange barriers to a kid reading it. I guess I’m not in Linda Medley’s mind, so I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I suspect it’s not “kids could read this,” I think it’s more along the lines of “I want to tell a good story.”

KO: So when you wrote Clan Apis, did you think that there was a void to be filled, or were you just writing it because it was a good story to write?

JH: I got the idea for Clan Apis reading a book called The Biology of the Honey Bee. I was doing that reading for my research, and so many of the elements of it seemed like the parts of a story — things you would anthropomorphize. And it struck me as very unusual, because I was anthropomorphizing something that was very alien, a very alien world. And so the starting point was that it was just a different story. And everything I write, I write with the mind that my son will read it someday.

DT: As far as the state of comics in general, who else is out there doing stuff that excites you or that is moving the medium forward?

BB: The cool thing is that more than ever there are a great many people who are moving the medium in spectacular fashion. Everyone’s got very unique sensibilities and take the medium very seriously. Everyone who’s in the comics business isn’t in it for the money. If they make money that’s great. But this isn’t the greatest way to make money that there is, so all the total money-grabbing weasels all left. So what you’re stuck with now is writers and artists that, they have to be in comics. They have to be in comics, all right? We could all be in movies and television or animation. We all could. But we have to be in comics. And so when you have people that have to do it and they don’t care about the money, you’re getting unique interpretations of a lot of characters with unique styles. And also, you’ve got Joe Quesada running Marvel Comics right now, who’s got incredible taste and varied taste in art styles and coloring that you haven’t seen before. He’s willing put someone like Grant Morrison on X-Men and see what happens. It’s taking bold chances.

One of my best friends in the world is David Mack, and I think he is pushing the medium farther artistically than almost anybody out there. He does the covers to Alias and we did Daredevil together for a few issues last year, and I am in awe of his personal growth. Honestly, I’ve surrounded myself with people that I consider to be pushing the medium because I want to be pushed by them and I want to be surrounded by that kind of flavor, and any artist that I’m working with or colorist that I’m working with, I firmly believe is offering everything that they have. They’re not hacking it out, they’re really giving it everything they’ve got.

For your readers who aren’t comics fans, I defy you to go into a comics store and not find something you might want. There’s such an amalgamation of genres and styles and ways to approach a story. When I think of people that go see these pieces of crap movies for nine dollars a pop, and for two dollars you can get a comic that you can keep and read like ten times and be in love with . . . give it a shot.

DT: How do you do that? How do you get the people that aren’t readers to get into the store, go to the bookstore, or whatever?

BB: The best thing I’ve had is mainstream press, I’ve picked up a lot of readers from articles in Spin and Entertainment Weekly’s been real nice to me this year. That’s helped a lot with the bookstores. There are people you’ll never got to go to a comic book store, just like there’s people who go into a comic stores you’ll never get to read a black and white comic. There’s nothing you can do that will turn them. But the proliferation of comics into other places like bookstores and Marvel’s also had, like, you buy a pair of shoes you get Ultimate Spider-Man #1, so we’re like marijuana brownies. “First one’s free, kid!” But not by sitting on our asses and going, “Why won’t anybody love us?”

It is sad that our most popular numbers that comics have done in the last twenty years, in the early 90s, was probably at the medium’s artistic lowest point. Everyone was just hacking stuff out to make as much money as possible, cash grabbing, and all of these people were buying these shallow pieces of crap, and they left. They go, “Why am I buying this crap?” Now, comics are great, and though the audience is there for them, and I love each and every one of them, you do wish all of those people would come back and see how great comics are right now, because they’re just amazing. There are just piles of comics every week that are worth buying. And it’s really bad for guys like me, who have really varied taste in comics. Every week I go, “oh, it’s too many I’m buying. I got into this business to get free comics, where are my free comics?”

DT: What do you have brewing in your head as far as different formats or different ways you can tell Powers stories?

BB: Yeah, in the Powers Annual that comes out in two weeks — it was the [revised version of the mail-away] Powers 1/2 but it got too big, so we’re making it the annual — first you get the story that happened, the villain gets caught and interrogated and arrested for murder, and then the second half of the story is a courtroom transcript of the trial with courtroom sketches. One of my many jobs, I was a courtroom sketch artist for the federal courthouse for the Fox channel in Cleveland for a couple of years. So for years, I’ve wanted to do this, because courtroom drawings are comic book drawings. So I’ve wanted to tell a story all in courtroom style drawings. And Mike pleaded with me that maybe it was a good idea to do a handful, and not a hundred of them. So that’s what we’re gonna do, in a couple of weeks, the Law & Order issue of Powers.

I got all kinds of stuff. In Daredevil, which I’m taking over, it starts in a couple of weeks, I’m doing something with an artist that I’ve done a little bit in Sam and Twitch. The story, not too dissimilar from the movies Memento and Out of Sight, is told out of order for dramatic reasons. There’s an actual purpose to it. We flash back all over the place. And we get to the moment where we find out what the story’s about, which nobody will see coming, and it took me two months of whining to get Marvel to agree to it. And it’s big, you’ve never seen this in a Marvel comic, and when you get to the moment of clarity, it’ll go straight . . . and it’s about five issues of fractured storytelling structure, which hopefully people won’t beat the crap out of me for, but again, I’m trying to do new stuff. Turn it upside down if you can, see what happens. And no one knows that, by the way. We haven’t announced it, we’re just putting it out fractured, so that’s kind of a scoop for you. (laughs)

DT: Cool. You mentioned Mike being glad to get a break from the talking heads . . . is that something you’re at all concerned about, that you have a style and approach that you actually self-parodied in the Oni Summer Special? Is that something you look at and say, “I gotta pull back, I can’t have this kind of back and forth exchange, because that’s what people are expecting?”

BB: There’s always gonna be that if you keep doing what you do that made you famous, the minute you stop doing it everybody’s mad at you for it, but if you continue to do it they go, “Oh, you’re doing that.” There’s always that, but that goes with the territory. I think you see a lot of this format breaking we’ve talked about, it builds upon whatever I’ve tried to build myself into. I do think about it, but I think I’m a step ahead of it. And you know what, I’d rather have a style than not, because there’s a lot of guys that don’t even have a style, they’re just doing something that’s the same as what they were doing twenty years ago, and they don’t have anything new to say. So I’d rather be beaned for having a style than not having one. Within that style there’s a lot to accomplish. Even the difference between Fortune and Glory and Torso, like you said before, there’s the basis of a style in there somewhere, but they couldn’t be more different. Same thing with Spider-Man and Alias. You could compare those two. I have personal goals and challenges that are far beyond what anything anyone’s expecting, from both my employers and my readers. I have personal goals that are much larger, almost unobtainable.

DT: Anything from any of your other projects that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to mention?

BB: I got a big pile of art today from the next few issues of Ultimate Team-Up, which is the sister book to Spider-Man, and it’s more like an anthology book of different art styles. These are all artists I’ve been able to pick and write specifically for them, like I told you before. And they are soo good. These issues coming out are so awesome. People are gonna get whiplash from the style difference from issue to issue. They go from crime to humor to horror to manga, issue to issue to issue. I’m just thrilled to bits, what a fun thing this turned out to be. So I’m pretty proud of that. That’ll be what I do for a while, these will be the books that I do. I have big goals for all of them.

DT: Now Powers is the book that to a certain extent was your big coming-out. (Congrats on the Eisner, by the way.)

BB: Thanks, yeah, it’s the first book I’ve done where we hit it out of the gate. Even with Jinx it took like six years for anyone to buy it. That’s fine too, believe me, I’m not bitching, but it’s nice to get the check the year that you made the book. Just once! I’m not asking for too much. Just one time, I’d like to get the check the same year. So, yeah, Powers started small and got real big real fast. It’s stayed in a nice comfortable place.

DT: Was the whole homicide/VH-1 Behind the Music superheroes idea what fell into your head and got the whole thing started?

BB: I am fascinated with celebrity media and that does permeate a great deal of my work. I was putting it all together, and putting together, well, where does superheroes fall into this? Like if there were superheroes, what if? Comic book writers always do this, right? With Powers, you’re putting it together and you’re looking at Mike’s sketches and you’re going, “Hey, I don’t think anyone’s done this yet!” And then it comes out and everyone says “I can’t believe no one thought of that,” I go, “Yeah, me neither. Woo hoo!” And I grew up in the era of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and I think one of the reasons I didn’t tackle superheroes for so long is that when you are faced with the greatest superhero stories ever told in the comic book medium when you’re in high school, you’re sitting there going, “Oh what am I going to do? Dark Knight Returns, what the fuck am I going to say?” You’re talking about eight years where I didn’t even think about superheroes, you know? I didn’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. And I’m not a big fan of, you know, “I’ll create a Batman-like character and call it Ratman or something.” If I get to write Spider-Man, that’s great, I love Spider-Man, but I’m not going to create a Spider-Man like character for myself to own. I’ll either do the big ones or I’ll create something totally new in a different genre. I have been lucky where I got to do both, so what do you think of them apples? (laughs) With Powers, it was fun to explore the superhero world through this way because I hadn’t seen it done, and it has endless possibilities of stories to tell. We’ve got like a pile of them. And I haven’t seen any of them done. I have never seen a superhero groupie story. These are all things I haven’t seen, and that’s kind of fun to put out there.

DT: The most recent issue, number 13, was the magazine-style issue.

BB: Yeah, boy was that hard. That was a big pain in the ass.

DT: Was that something that when you came up with the storyline you said, “This is something we ought to do,” or did you come up with the magazine idea and say, “Some time down the road we should do this?”

BB: As a writer — you know about the three act structure, right? Well everyone’s got the second act that kind of sucks. Everyone’s got the great beginning and the great ending and kind of a wonky middle, and I’m very aware of that. So I always try to create some kind of new challenge in the second act that I haven’t seen before, and I thought that this tabloid idea accomplished a great many things. It opened the world up of Powers, ’cause we’re always looking at the world from Walker and Deena’s kind of skewed, sarcastic point of view. So OK, we’re opening up the world very clearly, we’re showing how the media deals with it, not too dissimilar from how the media deals with our politicians or our movie stars, with a reverence and yet a savagery. It furthered the story in a way I hadn’t seen before. There’s actually a plot inside the magazine itself. And at the same time, it sets us up for a few stories down the line. Everything that’s in that magazine will be explored in Powers or has been explored in Powers. So, it served a lot of purposes and it was worth the hardship that it took to create it. It was three people doing the work of a staff of seventy, and the typos to show for it.

DT: So how do you put something like that together, differently than you put together a regular comic?

BB: It’s almost an exact ripoff of a British tabloid called Hello magazine. I pulled a few issues of that out and I bought multiple copies of them and I showed them to the staff and I used them as reference points. I wrote all of the text and all of the ads and I designed some of the ads and I sent them over to Mike and went over all the pieces. He was happy to get a break from the talking heads for an issue. We put it all together with the help of [colorist] Peter [Pantazis] and Ken, Ken Bruzenak is one of the greatest letterers in the history of comics, and we’re lucky to have him on the staff now for Powers. He worked with Howard Chaykin in the 80s and he’s one of the greatest letterers ever. He said I’m looking to stretch my legs, and I said wait for the next issue. Their second issue of the book was this issue, and they kicked ass. We’re pretty proud of it, and people were just thrown by it. People just want to be surprised. They want to never know what’s gonna happen. Not, “Here’s the murder, here’s the solution, here’s the murder, here’s the solution.” You throw them wrenches, you say, “Hey, look at that.” There is a perverse pleasure in that both the 13th issue of Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man were such a left turn.

DT: OK. Let’s stick with Marvel for a moment. You just started Alias. That’s the first “mature readers” book for Marvel, there was a lot of attention going into that one. What was it that you felt you had to say in that book that you couldn’t say in Powers or one of your self-contained crime stories?

BB: Well, Powers is a homicide detective series. The only thing that’s similar between the two books is that they’re both juxtapositions of the superhero world and the crime world. Sort of a street level look at superheroes. There’s inherent differences, the first one being that Powers is a homicide book, that treats the superheroes almost like a VH-1 Behind the Music look at celebrities. If the world really had superheroes they’d be like rock stars, they’d have their groupies and scandals and one hit wonders and such. Whereas in Alias what we’re talking about is the big iconic superheroes of the Marvel Universe, like Captain American and Spider-Man. You know, the big winners of the Marvel Universe, the successful superheroes. Then there’s a great many hundreds, if you will, of characters in the Marvel Universe who didn’t succeed, they sort came in and out or were only fashionable for a certain time, like all those really embarrassing 80s and 70s characters. What I wanted to do was tell the story of the queen of those characters. She is the queen of the unsuccessful superhero. What her world would be like. And just because you get the powers, doesn’t mean that you should put on a costume. They’re very different themes, very clearly different themes. One’s about identity, the other’s about celebrity.

I knew that for Alias, that it taking place in the Marvel Universe made it a lot more potent, because there’s a shared knowledge of the Marvel Universe that I think the exploration of makes it very interesting to people who have read comics for a long time. And for people who don’t know, it’s just an interesting take on the genre that hasn’t been accomplished yet. I’m extremely proud of it and I’m extremely happy with the response to it. It was controversial only because . . . I don’t know why, actually, because there’s nothing in that book I haven’t done in my other books as far as language or content goes. But because of where it was being published, it took on kind of a life of its own and the printer refused to print it, and it was just weird to me. But as far as the book coming out and people’s response to it, it was fun. It’s also fun to piss people off, it’s fun when people get angry. At least it’s a reaction. Ambivalence is upsetting. It’s when people go “I’m outraged!” that, you know, well, that’s funny.

And I’m in love with the character. I’m absolutely in love with her. She’s fascinating to me.

DT: What is it about the character that has you that excited?

BB: Because she’s not a loser, and she thinks she is, and she’s gonna figure it out. And that’s gonna be great. You know, you have friends, you wish they’d get their shit together because they have so much to offer. People in your life, you go, “Pull it together man, you can do this,” and they do, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re awesome,” you know what I mean? And she’s the underdog, she just doesn’t know it. She’s full of self-hatred and I am as well and I like to explore that in writing. I’m just a big fan of this kind of writing.

DT: If she’s gonna figure it out, if she’s not always gonna look at herself as being downtrodden —

BB: That’s a funny thing about comics, she’s downtrodden in the first issue and some people think it’s just gonna be a book about a downtrodden person. No, this is where she’s starting.

DT: So there’s somewhere you’re going with the character.

BB: Absolutely.

DT: What are the challenges of writing a character who is a little bit more together, doesn’t have as many obvious internal conflicts?

BB: That’s I guess why I was a Marvel kid when I was younger — see how I brought that around for you? — I liked that Spider-Man had a lot of problems, that’s why I loved him so much. The DC characters, you know Superman didn’t really have any problems. Spider-Man’s got all kinds of problems, even trying to find a way to clean his costume. Stan Lee was kind of a genius about that stuff. This is, I guess, not the next generation, but here we are a couple generations later exploring the same things in as realistic a way as we can get, just like he did. He got as realistic as he could get with Spider-Man with his problems, and in Alias we can keep going that way, and you know, here’s a person with powers and she really wasn’t good at being a superhero, so what can she do, what can she accomplish? What’s her day gonna be like? What’s a day like for someone that’s got superpowers and doesn’t really have a way to use them? It’s interesting

DT: Another thing that seems interesting is that you’re talking about these characters that have problems, but you’re also talking about at some point they’re not gonna solve all of them but they’re gonna solve some of them, they’re gonna make some kind of progress.

BB: It’s just like when you watch your friends, it’s just like . . . I hate to say, it’s just like real life. Some things get resolved quickly, other things take a lot of time, sometimes you resolve it and then fuck it up again. Sometimes you discover things about yourself that you thought were true and you find out they’re false.

DT: Because it seems like a lot of fans focus on the angst as that being the be-all and end-all of a character and character development.

BB: That’s because a lot of comics, they don’t change from issue to issue because people don’t want them to. You want the Fantastic Four to be that way every single issue. But with books like Alias, for me the challenge is to upset that norm, and it’s a challenge as a writer. These gigs that I’ve taken are all immense challenges to me as a person, that’s why I took them. The decision making process here goes along the lines of well, what can I do here that I haven’t seen done, or what can I do here that I have something to say.

DT: There was a lot of secrecy around it, do you think that that created an expectation that was harder to fulfill?

BB: My secrecy came from the single idea that when I was a kid, and Elektra died in Daredevil — I don’t know how far back you go with comics, but if there was like a surprise big moment in comics, I didn’t know about it, I didn’t have the Internet, I didn’t have a catalogue, a Previews catalogue, telling me what the book was gonna be about. I just bought them off the stands, and when Elektra died in Daredevil, I was stunned. It shocked the crap out of me. And that is totally gone from comics, because everyone has to know everything before it comes out. Same thing with movies, if you pay attention you’ll know every single thing that happens in the Spider-Man movie, if you go online and look, because it’s all there. No one will let you have your moment. And I wanted to test the readers and folks online, some of whom get their books before other people do, and I said, “Can you control yourself and not ruin the comic?” ‘Cause it’s not news . . . you know, all these comic book news sites . . . it’s not news. You’re just ruining the book for people. I would like everyone to read it and be surprised, and if they even knew the subject matter of the book, it’s over, ’cause it’s only about one thing.

So I wanted as many people as possible to have the “Get out of here!” experience that my employer did at Marvel. They were all jazzed up about it, and I said, that’s the feeling I want people to have when they read it. Marvel totally got behind me, and we said, “Look, we gave you a good year of comics, so trust us on this one. Just buy it blindfolded, buy it blindfolded, and I will personally refund your money if you don’t like it.” (laughs) And you know, it was a blast. It was a lot of fun, ’cause it was another one of those things where, you know, the Ultimate books are supposed to break format. Of course you have to create the format before you break it. Now, as the book continues, people have no idea what we’re gonna do. We just introduced Gwen Stacy this week, and they have no idea where we’re gonna go with it, they have no idea what we’re gonna do with Doc Ock. It’s all up in the air now, all the rules are thrown out the window, and that’s what I wanted to get with people. I wanted people to pick up the book and go, “I don’t even know what’s gonna happen.”

DT: Cool. I want to talk about some of your other books, but before we do I have one more question about the whole Ultimate project. Is this something where you’re thinking, “I have to keep these books in a state where they’re always gonna be this distilled pure version that anyone can get into at any point,” or are you going to let these characters have changes and things happen to them and let them develop, for want of a better word, a continuity?

BB: They just will. As soon as you get to page four of the first issue you’ve developed a continuity. As soon as you’ve established anything you’ve established a continuity. What the book is supposed to do is stay youthful and reader-friendly, and we have that recap page, which a lot of comics never do. They do their recaps within the confines of thought balloons. We’ve also thrown out a lot of conventions of comic book storytelling. There’s no big thought balloons, there’s no captions that say “Meanwhile . . .” It’s all words and pictures. And starting with issue 14, we changed the font of the lettering. What we did was, the president of Marvel had read that dyslexic kids can’t read all caps, and the question is why are comics all caps? And everyone goes “‘Cause that’s the way they are,” and that’s not a good reason. So we’ve created this new font that’s different than other books, I think all the Ultimate books will have this font, and it’s more legible . . .it’s more what people are used to seeing, you know, capitalization and normal punctuation.

DT: So you’re not thinking that someone’s gonna have to do something like this again in ten or twenty years?

BB: If I keep this job for ten or twenty years, and that’s the worst problem I have . . . you know what I mean? My job is every month to tell a really interesting story, and that’s it. Under the confines of the Ultimate it’s to be readily available to a younger audience and just be interesting to people, you know? Not talk down to people and just be interesting. That’s what we’re doing, me and Mark Millar who does Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates, we work together on creating this world.

DT: Speaking of Ultimate Spider-Man, that’s a good chance to segue into that. You were talking about the Marvel purists not wanting anything changed or having their set expectations. That’s an interesting thing about the whole Ultimate project, ’cause one of the stated things, in a lot of the marketing, was to strip the characters down to their essence, and strip away the barnacles or whatever you want to call it. That’s gotta be a challenging thing to do, to figure out, “What is the essence of any of these characters to begin with, and how do I get a whole readership to agree with what I think is the essence?” Was that a challenge?

BB: Well that’s true and there’s a leap of faith there as far as that goes. When the first issue came out, it was a big, “Pheew!” Because if you’re gonna buy this, you’re gonna buy the series, right? It’s 40 pages, there’s no costume, obviously we’re gonna take our time telling the story. Because other than the way comics were done in the 60s, audiences are a little more sophisticated now, and you have to spend time with the characters to make us care for them. You can’t just go into the fight scenes and have a blast. That’s true with anything, you know? People expect a lot now, they don’t want to be talked down to. And also there’s that shared experience of Spider-Man that we’ve all grown up on, and an interpretation should done lovingly, it shouldn’t be done rushed. I think people saw right away that I don’t think I’m smarter than Stan Lee and I don’t think that Spider-Man was broken at all. There’s nothing wrong with it. But just like Shakespeare, it can be taken into a new context, and all of the themes remain true, and all of the characterization and the moral humanity remain true. I really do hold it up to Shakespeare. If you do this again in twenty years, it’ll still work, because the theme of the story totally works.

DT: That was an interesting thing, that a story that was originally told in one issue, you took seven issues. And that wasn’t wasted space, it was a sign of how comics have changed.

BB: Plus, you know, if you know the story of how Spider-Man was created, he had 11 pages, so he told the story in 11 pages. You know, I bet if he had a hundred pages, he would have done a hundred pages. That’s what he had, he had 11 pages. Everyone goes, “oh look.” That’s always the negative look at it, they go, “Hey, Stan Lee did this in 11 pages!” I don’t know, it’s just a funny thing to say. I could tell it on one page — would that make me a genius?

DT: Another thing with Ultimate Spider-Man, you spent a lot of time pushing issue 13 —

BB: Yeah, and I think I did so expertly, thank you, by the way.

DT: Absolutely. There was certainly a lot of attention and expectation going into that and trying to figure out exactly what would be going on. What was it that made you decide that that story should be treated in that way?

BB: Six issues in I knew that clearly . . . the characters take over the story. Starting from the base of what Stan Lee created, they become their own entities, and they write the stories themselves. They take over. Clearly, in the modern world, having a secret identity is not as easy as it was in the 60s. We live in an all permeating, all seeing society of super information, and I can’t imagine how you’d have a secret identity, and also I can’t imagine how you’d hold it back from people you care about. That was always one of the things . . . that was like a plot thing that they tried that they sort of buried themselves into, that became like a staple of comics without anyone thinking, “OK, what would happen if he did tell his girlfriend?” He’s got one friend in the world is this girl, he’s fifteen years old. He’s fifteen, he’s got one friend, it’s her, he’s gonna hurt her feelings and alienate her? Or is he gonna go, “I have to tell you this.” I remember when I was fifteen, my best friend was my girlfriend, or was the girl who became my girlfriend. Right? And there’s nothing . . . I told her stuff I didn’t even tell my friends, my guy friends. My first person I really expressed my secrets and desires to, and I do see myself as Peter Parker when I was fifteen, right? And I go, if I were fifteen, I would have told her.

I told this to Joe [Quesada] and Bill [Jemas] who run Marvel, about six issues into the story, I said, I have to build up to it, but you tell her. And we debated it back and forth, and they let me go for it, and I expressed to them, if we’re exploring modern society, the secret identity thing is what’s different now . . . . there’s two things that we’re not going to be able to do that they were able to do in the older Spider-Man. One is that a lot of the Marvel characters were created from nuclear paranoia, they were all radioactive spiders and gamma bombs and cosmic rays. And that’s not going to be the overall origin, the radioactive whatever is not going to be how we accomplish things, they have to be more about our society, because we don’t live with nuclear paranoia. But we do live with other things in our lives and we’re going to explore them. And within the confines of that, is the fact that he’s fifteen and this is what I thought he would do, and the characters wrote it themselves. Nobody who read it said, “He’d never do that!” It was all, “Oh, I can’t believe . . . of course he would do that!” It was a lot of fun to write, and it was also a lot of fun to write a one scene comic. Which I know was a little harder for some of the purists, but there was something really gratifying about being able to put out a comic that was all taking place in the bedroom and was all just a conversation and to see if I could hold someone’s interest for the whole time.

DT: Are there any of your books that you find are more successful at reaching out to that first time comics reader or that first time independent comics reader?

BB: A lot of them are crime genre material that are complete works. Torso is a very successful graphic novel, it wasn’t a successful miniseries, it was just doing enough to make the rest of them, you know? And we sold it to movies and we’ve done all right off it. But as a series it wasn’t big, but we’re already close to our third printing of the trade in like under a year, which is amazing. So that’s done very well, Jinx is in like its fifth printing. It’s 450 pages, it’s a big mammoth book, you drop your dollars and you get a whole big epic read and people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. It depends on what people’s tastes are, if they like crime ficiton they’re gonna dig it. I have another book [Fire] that’s a spy thriller that is my earliest work that I have out, that I’m still proud of, it’s a spy thriller and I can’t believe how well that does. And it’s a lower price, a smaller cover price because it’s a smaller graphic novel, but it constantly sells and it’s bizarre to me. I wish I knew why, because I’d do it again.

DT: Do you find that some first-time readers have trouble following your work, because they might not be up on the vocabulary or storytelling techniques of comics?

BB: I’ve been to the movies where people have trouble figuring out what the plot of American Pie is, so you try not to worry about too much what people will or will not get. I’ve not had anyone e-mail me and go, “What happened?” And many, many people read all of my things before anyone sees them in the public, because I’m very aware that I’m communicating to a large number of people. Even independent filmmakers go through a screening process where they show the movie to people and take notes and see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust. I’m not some genius that thinks everything I do is pure gold and everyone will love me. I remember Scorcese saying he shows his movies to a group of friends, a trusted group of friends, and he asks them questions. If there’s a scene and everyone got something different out of the scene, then the scene isn’t working. It doesn’t matter what he thinks it said, it doesn’t say it, because the people didn’t get it. So he’ll go back and he’ll do something to the scene. That’s exactly it, and the same thing with the comics.

I have my trusted group of advisors, and at Marvel you have your editors that are very in tune with what you’re trying to accomplish and the artists that you work with, and everyone comes together and discusses where we’re going, what we’re doing, and is it working. And I absolutely can’t stand myself, so I’m very happy to hear if things aren’t working if I can go back and hack the script to death. I’m really kind of good at that, and that’s why when the book comes out, you can’t control everything about a person’s reading experience, people have their tastes and people have what’s going on in their lives or what situation they’re reading the book in. But I’m pretty much sure that the work will stand up for itself and anything that you ask me about it, it’ll be there on the page. I get that even online. Someone will post on my board, you know, “I don’t understand why the cop did this,” and then before I can even answer someone else will have already gotten it, and the guy just missed it. It’s like blinking during the movie. “What happened, I missed it, what’s going on?”

DT: It’s like, you can’t always trying to write for the guy who doesn’t get anything —

BB: I personally can’t stand when I’m being talked down to or not challenged. I like being in the hands of someone, they know what they’re doing, they’ve got something to say, they’re in control, and they’re not pandering to me. I hate being pandered to, I can’t stand it. So why would I do that to people? I’d rather overshoot, and miss, than shoot underhanded, you know what I mean? I don’t have any respect for creators that pander. That’s why with Ultimate Spider-Man, I was biting my lip . . .it’s a character study more than it’s a superhero book, and that doesn’t necessarily always mean, you know, “Top 10 book.” So I’m biting a hole in my lip, going, “Oh, I hope this works!” I was proud of it, and everyone who read it was digging it, but if someone’s used to a certain kind of superhero comic and you’re handing them something else, you know, they get very angry. “Where . . . what happened to the fight scene? Where’s the costume, you son of a bitch?” And you do get that, there are Marvel purists who want what they want and don’t want you to screw around with their icons. But you know, 99% of the people are happy to be taken for a ride. In comics, just like filmgoers or people who buy CDs or when you’re watching TV, people just want to be told a story. “Here’s my couple bucks, entertain me for twenty minutes, because you know what, I had a really crappy day at work, so just tell me a story, man, just let me forget for a minute.” And I take that job pretty seriously.