When you think of writers roundtables, you think of the salons of Paris or stuffy university panels with literary types discussing postmodernism. What you don't think of: comic book writers in Las Vegas.
But Steven Grant, Bill Willingham, James Hudnall and Steve Gerber, all professional comics writers and Vegas residents, meet more or less monthly in an impromptu salon (in this case, an Italian restaurant) to discuss writing, politics, comics and whatever else is on their minds. I sat in on what I was assured was a typical session ("Except we gossip about people a lot more," Grant notes) with four intelligent, articulate and passionate writers who just happen to work in a medium that uses a combination of pictures and words to tell its stories.
What's the best thing about the comics industry right now?
Grant: I think the best thing about it is that it's still around.
Hudnall: I call myself a cynical optimist. I believe in the industry, and even though it's been through rougher patches than this—you know, DC almost shut down in the '70s—I believe in the medium. I just don't know what form it's going to have to take. I think the traditional pamphlet comic, as they call it, might die off and we'll go to trades or something. I don't know. But I do believe that the medium is one of the last places where you can have creator-driven stories, of a certain type, especially genre material. It's one of the last places that's not too corporatized, like the music industry and those other industries. It's still possible for people, like myself for example, to put out their own personal comics, and it's not too expensive to do that ...
Willingham: I like that it's a visual medium wherein one person's vision can still dominate or tell a story. Even the most independent movie requires so many other people to get it done. You can tell a visually dynamic story by yourself if you want, or at least with few enough people to where there aren't too many cooks stirring the soup.
Grant: I'd actually amend that a little, in that, yeah, you're right that it's a visual medium, but it's also plastic enough so that it can be any kind of medium you want it to be. You can actually adjust the medium to fit the story. Steve Gerber used to do that a lot with Man-Thing. He'd do stories that were absolutely unheard-of at the time, which were basically long text pieces that run for pages and pages and pages with like one illustration. You never saw that in comics.
Gerber: It wasn't quite that much. Usually just one or two text pages within a single story.
Willingham: True, but you can get away with it. If you went to a movie, and they've got basically a radio show with occasional pictures, the audience would storm out. But that doesn't happen because it would never get made.
Gerber: Not that much money is at stake, which means you can do a lot of experimentation that you can't do in film or television or even major book publishing. That allows for a lot of different visual styles, a lot of different storytelling styles as well. More than you see in mainstream movies or television. On the other hand, mainstream comics now has become this very, very narrow, almost gully-like channel of superhero comics with very little else. And that has become very restricting. The other thing that is positive about comics is that it's still possible—or more like recently possible, within the last, say, 10, 20 years—for the creators to actually own what they create, which is something that doesn't happen in television anymore and really doesn't happen in film, but is still the case with books. It is possible now for a creator to still retain some actual control, creative and financial, over the destiny of what he creates. Those are the two main positives.
Willingham: For the first time in a long time, you can legitimately say, "I write comic books" or "I draw comic books for a living," and get more than, "Well, that must be an embarrassment." I once had a cabbie on the way to the airport, just the most vulgar cabbie ever, the stereotypical gabby cabbie, just talking about this and that and all that kind of stuff. Finally he asked me what I did. This was after talking non-stop for an hour. I said, "Well, I draw comics for a living." Total silence. He was just driving. Finally, just before pulling up to the airport, he said, "If you ever get married, you're going to have to stop doing that. No woman will ever put up with that." And just let me out.
At the same time, the reason that it's not an embarrassment is for reasons that people know nothing about. They think you're making movies, or you can sell your comics for a million dollars and buy an island, because they remember some news report where someone sold an issue of something-or-other, and they assume maybe that's the standard right now.
Hudnall: I kind of always saw comics as being similar to science fiction in the '40s and '50s when science fiction writers—Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury—didn't make hardly any money writing those stories, and they were only really appreciated by a small cadre of geeks. But now a lot of that stuff is considered classics and taught in colleges and everything. And I think the potential is there for comics. It's just a matter of whether we live up to it. We have to put out better material. … I think it's on the verge of a renaissance.
What's the worst thing about the comics industry right now?
Willingham: Everything else. [laughs]
Hudnall: We all came up from earlier times. I got in the business in the mid-'80s when, if you knew an editor, you could call them up and say, hey do you have a fill-in issue or something, and they'll give you some work. That's all gone. I think the problem with the industry was that it was too easy, and there was a lot of crap that was just cranked out by people. You have to work harder to even make a living if you can. I think that's sort of a necessity, because when the comics industry falls on hard times, that's when it sort of has this big bang, and bursts forward with fresh creativity. It did that before, and I think the potential's there for it to happen again. We're sort of seeing it.
Willingham: Comics aren't read by many people anymore. And it wouldn't be so bad if that was just the vagaries of the business cycle, but I don't think there's anything that shows people are suddenly going to become more interested in reading tomorrow than they are today.
Grant: One of the huge problems in mainstream comics is that you've got this real psychic schism going on in it right now. On the one hand, everyone is desperate for the hot new thing, for the next big, edgy, breakthrough thing. But on the other hand, everyone is desperate to keep things exactly the way they have always been. They want bold new innovations that are exactly like what they are sure has always sold, except that what has always sold isn't selling anymore. If they do do something new, like somebody does a Western, and it doesn't sell very well, they go, "See, Westerns don't sell. Let's go do more superhero books." But if somebody does a new superhero book and it doesn't sell very well, they don't go, "Superheroes aren't selling." Even though most superhero books don't do squat.
Gerber: I would have to go back to the larger picture of the culture. Comics are in a strange place right now. They have decided to grow up, in a way, at exactly a time that the culture has decided to become more infantile. Movies these days are made for morons. Comics, all of a sudden, have decided, at least in their more serious turns, to become a lot more thoughtful and demand a little bit—demand anything, really—of the readers. You have an audience now that's been trained not to expect to have to give anything to a movie, a television show, a book, anything.
Grant: But like in the '80s, that was a very specific directive in comics. They wanted everything spoon-fed to the reader so that they knew the entire setup by page two, so nobody was confused, so you raised a generation trained to, when they get to something they go, "I don't get it."
Gerber: Comics were kind of on the cutting edge of illiteracy in that decade. I missed that decade, basically. I was working in—
Grant: Animation, which is really the cutting edge of illiteracy.
Tell me about working on creator-owned material versus company-owned material.
Hudnall: Ultimately, if you don't own your own stuff, in the end you're going to walk away with nothing, so I feel it's necessary. But I also think that the mainstream comics publishers, generally speaking, are not coming up with anything new. They're just rehashing the same old stuff. Without a new Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko or Stan Lee—
Willingham: Why do you think that? I've got a theory.
Hudnall: Well, they're too entrenched in maintaining their properties. They have a large intellectual property base and they just want to keep making money off of it because they've made money off of it in the past. It's the path of least resistance: Batman and Superman have made us money. We've got to keep it alive so that we can keep making money because it makes money. We know that it sells, even though it's not selling right now as a comic, we can make another movie or whatever. I mean, those companies owe their existence to those things. But if it wasn't for creators who created those things in the first place, DC and Marvel wouldn't exist.
By contrast I would say that somebody like J.K. Rowling—she came up with Harry Potter, and she has complete control over everything, which I admire. And whenever you abrogate anything to a company, you're basically letting them have control. Therefore we have so many different variations of Superman and Batman over the years, it's almost muddled to the point of not having any real value, because the definition becomes vague after time.
Grant: I think the problem area isn't so much the control. Because past a certain point, let's face it, you've gone off of pretty much every variation on a character that you can come up with. So I can understand why they might want other things to go. But most of those characters that you're talking about, the people that created them did end up with nothing. I think in those terms, things are better now, in that if you do create something successful, at least you are going to be making money off of that as long as they're doing it.
Let's face it, you can have just as much fun writing a company-owned character as you can writing a creator-owned character. But there are always things that you can't do in company-owned books that you might feel would be a good thing. Company-owned books these days, certainly as the main franchise things, are largely created by committee. They have conferences, they sit around, they figure out all the story lines for the next six months. And then the writers are told, "Here's what you're going to do. Go home and write it."
Willingham: Especially those books where there's multiple books, like the Batman family and the Superman family and I guess Spider-Man, all the X-Men books. They all have to be coordinated with each other. My theory is this: That there are going to be bland, company-owned comics now, because the people that actually do it, the freelancers, have finally gotten hip to the fact that, like Steve with Howard the Duck—created this wonderful character, put his heart and soul into it, gets about nothing out of it. In addition to Fables, which I put pretty much everything I've got in. I own it, even though Vertigo's publishing it. There's not an idea I come up with in Fables that I will ever hold back, simply because, "Oh, this is too good an idea for this book." At the same time, I'm writing Robin, and many, many times now I've gotten to the point where, this is too good a character or this is too good an idea, I'm going to save it for something I've got a stake in. I doubt I'm unique in that. As a matter of fact, I know I'm not, because I've heard others do the same. So right now the companies are designed in such a way that they're investing in just that attitude.
Grant: And also, we're a fairly rarefied bunch here. There are a lot of comics writers who are thrilled to do nothing more than write full-fledged superhero stories for the rest of their lives. They love it. I've had conversations with these guys, and they just kind of leave my jaw hanging because I don't know what to say to them. I've got nothing against doing it, but wanting to do it exclusively forever and ever? What's that about?
Hudnall: It's sort of like the people that would kill their grandmothers to do a comic book. But they're not qualified a lot of the time. They don't have any original ideas; they're just kind of rehashing.
Grant: It's not that they don't have any original ideas that bothers me, but they don't seem to want to have any original ideas. That's the problem. And, furthermore, a lot of times companies don't really want us to have any original ideas.
Hudnall: There's a lot of people that want to write comics, but their whole goal is to be the Spider-Man writer or the Hulk writer. That's their ambition in life, is to write the Hulk. So their ambition in life is to take somebody else's idea and work with it.
Grant: And reinvent the wheel.
Willingham: Not even reinvent the wheel. Just take that old wheel and lovingly examine it. Just re-examine it.
What do you think of the power of online fandom?
Hudnall: I think the Internet is a wonderful thing, but it also is sort of a curse, because if you come up with something, it can either make you hot overnight by everyone deciding it's brilliant, or people can kill something before anyone sees it by all these people networking together and saying how terrible something is. And unfortunately fans, their bile duct is 10 times the size of normal people, because they tend to really hate stuff really easily really fast if it pushes their buttons.
Grant: Well, they don't even have to see it, really. In my experience, Internet fans, or what is commonly thought of as Internet fans—because, let's face it, there are a lot of them out there who are really just friendly guys who want to chat with people—like Jim says, they're bile-mongers. They see some book announced online, like Steve has a book now called Hard Time, which is a different sort of concept for DC and it was the first book in a new line, and before people ever saw it, they were all saying, "Oh, this book's going to stink, it's going to bomb," blah blah blah. "This'll be cancelled in three months." There was absolutely no reason for it.
Willingham: Plus we've got a phenomenon in comics that I don't think is mirrored anywhere else, which is, great marketing ploy that it was, back in the, I guess it started in the '60s with Stan Lee at Marvel, where there was this relentless pretense that we who make the comics and you who read the comics are all just one big, happy, collaborative family. And as a matter of fact, there's almost no line of demarcation. You know ... We're all in this together.
Grant: Stan's line that he repeats over and over and over again in the letters pages was, "You, True Believer, are the true editors of Marvel Comics."
Willingham: I think the readership that we have now, to a great extent, are the people that have grown up on that. Certainly the retailers and all that kind of stuff are all, "We are every bit as much of the creative process," which is patently not true. I don't think I'd want to associate with any writer that is really concerned about, "God, but will my fans like if I do this, or this, or no, they pretty much insist on this, so I better give them this." That kind of calculation just infuriates me.
Hudnall: There's also the phenomenon that almost everyone who reads comics wants to write them. So, basically, they want to take your job.
Willingham: The readership that's left is that hard-core. That used to be like a fragment of the readership, but now I think that's what's left.
Hudnall: Every fan who goes to a convention, they really want to sit where you're sitting. They want to take your job.
Willingham: And that's another one of the problems that we keep perpetuating, because we do do conventions where there is no real line between the fans and the pros ...
Grant: Another problem is, there really isn't a body of criticism that people can work from and start with. So you've got a lot of people talking about very ill-defined things.
Gerber: One of the other things about the Internet, is that some people in the business have used it in absolute genius fashion. Warren Ellis, who, through a lot of hard work and effort, managed at the same time he was writing to also run a forum and a website and all these things that basically promoted his own work, to fabulous effect for a while. People are very slow, really, to attack anything new he does, simply because he became such an online presence. Also, he's a very good writer. I don't want to take anything away from Warren as a writer. The thing that I've found interesting about the Internet, and fans on the Internet, is that the editors and publishers seem to take them very lightly, as lightly as they used to take the hard-core fans who used to write in to the comic book letters pages. Which is odd, to me, because if you've got a comic book that is selling, as most of them do these days, in the 14,000-20,000 range, you have to figure that almost all the readers are online. I don't know what that means. I'm very conflicted about it, actually.
What do you think about the place of political views in comics?
Grant: I put them in all the time. I am madly in favor of it. I don't care where you fall in the spectrum.
Willingham: One thing I think is a tired old fantasy is to think that you could keep political views out of comics, out of any kind of story. It would be the most bland, "Once upon a time there was a hero, and by hero I don't mean to imply that everyone else isn't. He did something incredible. Now when he did something incredible, a lot of people were hurt." But even that's politics, too. You're not ever going to get politics out.
Gerber: Although it is possible. You look at movies, and, really, most of the comics, too. It is possible to do stories that aren't about anything at all. They're stories about heroes fighting villains, and neither the hero nor the villain has a political point of view, or even much of a motivation for anything.
Grant: But by and large, if you take the basic superhero fight, the underlying message of that is might makes right. Whoever can beat up the other guy the best, wins. So there's a political statement right there.
Hudnall: The problem I have with politics in comics, and I'm not opposed to it, I think characters should have different political views because that's part of life, but there's two things that are problems with politics in fiction is, if you're doing the specific politics of the day, it's going to become dated and it's going to become silly over time. So I kind of avoid that. I want my work to be marketable years later. The other thing is, whenever you take a specific point of view, its almost a Newtonian law of physics, that very position you take there's going to be people with an equal and opposite response to that position.
Grant: That's fine.
Hudnall: Which is fine, you're right, but you run the risk of alienating some of your audience, and that's just your choice. I don't have a problem with that, though I kind of live by the Kingsley Amis statement that if you're not pissing somebody off, you're not a writer.
Willingham: Yeah, me too. And there's that Howard Stern phenomenon—I have no idea if it's true, I'm basing it on that movie—is that the people that hate him listen to him longer than the people that don't. Maybe you could tap into that. Every once in a while I propose to DC, they have the Hawk and Dove characters, the political opposites, that it's never been done well, because whoever's writing's politics is like, one person or the other is going to be the straw man. You should write it as almost like a point/counterpoint show. Split the book up, Hawk/Dove, get your conservative Atilla the Hun-type writer to write the Hawk and get your dyed-in-the-wool liberal to write the Dove thing. Like two points of view on the same basic event or something like that. And I even say, get people that hate each other to do it.
Grant: But in the context again, you take a character like Dove. It's always going to come out ridiculous because the basic metaphor of superheroes is the fight scene. You can't get more than one story out of it.
Willingham: I think there's a lot yet that can be done in the superhero genre. I don't think any genre's necessarily so restricting. But like Steve said on the Hawk and Dove, if you cast it as the force versus nonviolence, well you couldn't get much of a continuing story out of that, because the nonviolent guy, by virtue of the superhero genre—
Grant: He's going to be ineffectual.
Willingham: Yeah. But if it's more the conservative versus liberal, where maybe they both believe in fighting, but the difference of course is what's worth fighting for, then you've got a horse race. As long as superheroes have been around, and they've been around forever, some of the real big questions have yet to be asked. I don't imagine I could do a Superman story without someone addressing something like, "Well, you're the emperor of the world." And he's, "Well, no I'm not." You have the ability to be, so therefore you've got the job whether you choose to take it or not. And as the emperor, if you've decided to be this absentee landlord who doesn't get involved with much, except for Lois falling off of a building and Jimmy falling down the escalator, you're real watchful on them, and the others not so much. That kind of thing. There's so much that we've never even looked into.
Grant: And we're never going to because they don't want to.
Gerber: Which is another reason I enjoy working on the creator-owned. I am a flaming, pinko, commie leftist, bleeding-heart, throw me the negative Karl Rove adjective and I fit it. It's not so much that I have characters espousing those things, but the stories are written from that point of view. I'm not willing to change that, really. So I would rather work on stuff that I own, and where I can express that point of view. I think, again, as some of you guys were saying, that the blandness in the mass media and in mainstream comics right now comes from having no point of view.
Grant: The only thing that really distinguishes us as writers, outside of insignificant things like talent, is that we all have our own points of view, and that's what we bring to it. If you eliminate that, you don't really have anything.
Gerber: Agreed, except that most of the mass media, and most of comics, really, are kind of dedicated to eliminating it.
Grant: I'm still crazy enough to think about some of this stuff as actually being art. I think that's true of all of us.