Cameron Stewart is a familiar name to comics fans. He has been working in the industry for years, but it was 2004's Seaguy, a Vertigo miniseries from writer Grant Morrison, that put him on the map. Since then there have been several more of high profile projects including a sequel to Seaguy entitled... more

Cameron Stewart is a familiar name to comics fans. He has been working in the industry for years, but it was 2004's Seaguy, a Vertigo miniseries from writer Grant Morrison, that put him on the map. Since then there have been several more of high profile projects including a sequel to Seaguy entitled Seven Soldiers: Guardian, a story arc on Batman and Robin (also written by Grant Morrison), and the Vietnam War miniseries, The Other Side (with Weapon X writer Jason Aaron).

More recently Stewart's projects have included a webcomic called Sin Titulo, which won him the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic last year. He also co-wrote and co-illustrated Assassin's Creed: The Fall, a story set in Czarist Russia that ties into the video game.

His next big project is for SG. He's designing the characters, drawing the covers and inking the SuicideGirls miniseries that's coming out via IDW starting this month.

Stewart took time out from his hectic schedule to chat with us.

ALEX DUEBEN: So how did you end up involved with the SuicideGirls comic?

CAMERON STEWART: Well, I had been interested in doing something with SuicideGirls for a while. I knew a couple of the girls, who were just personal friends of mine, and was encouraged to contact Missy and see if I could do some merchandise - prints or a deck of cards or a calendar or something. I contacted her and she said, "oh my god, this is perfect timing because we’re in the planning stages of doing a comic book." This was right before the San Diego Comic Con, so I went to San Diego and met with IDW, who are the publishers. Initially I was only able to commit to doing covers and character designs because I was busy with a lot of other projects, but over time, I’ve been slowly convinced into doing more. I was asked to do these two-page backup features in each issue. Then most recently I was given the opportunity to ink the whole book as well so I took that. It’s been fun. I’m committing to more and more because I’m enjoying working on it.

AD: You haven’t done many jobs where you’re inking over other people.

CS: I actually started my career as an inker. The first few years of my career I was inking. I did a book for Vertigo called Deadenders, I inked Swamp Thing and Hellblazer. I was inking Catwoman]/I] for a while and then I graduated into being the sole artist on the book. Since then I’ve been doing my own art and not inking other people. I did a graphic novel called The Apocalipstix for Oni Press, where I wasn’t really paid all that much up front, and In order to finance that I did some inking on a book for Vertigo called Vinyl Underground. Generally speaking, I like to pencil and ink my own work, but inking’s fun. It’s a different approach because I’m embellishing what another artist has done and bringing my own thing into it rather than coming up with it all on my own, so it can lead to some interesting collaboration.

AD: What kind of instructions were you given as to the tone and mood of the story in doing the designs?

CS: I was given a document, which I believe was written by Missy, that had brief descriptions of all the characters. I wanted them to be very convincing, to be believable as real SuicideGirl models and so I spent a lot of time just breaking down the different archetypes that exist among the girls on the site. They are definitely different “types.” I wanted to kind of reflect each of those archetypes accurately and make them convincing. I picked out a bunch of girls who I thought best exemplified those types, and I just stole from them basically, I took various elements that I thought fit together. Hopefully the final result is that these girls, even though fictional, feel like they could fit in very well with the regular group of girls.

AD: Before this have you ever designed characters to hand off to someone else to draw?

CS: No, this is the first thing I’ve done where I've done design work for another artist. I had an interest in doing that, rather than only doing the covers. I could have just signed on to do covers and drawn from another artist's designs, but I was interested in doing the character designs. I thought it was an interesting challenge and volunteered to do it.

AD: Tell me about the backup stories in each issue.

CS: The concept was that they’re these historical segments that depict SuicideGirls throughout history. Each one would be a different time period featuring strong women. The first one is set during the Salem witch trials. I believe there’s going to be one with the suffragettes getting the right to vote. They're written by Steve Niles, who’s a great writer and someone I wanted to work with. It’s two pages in each issue so it seemed like a small enough commitment of time and I thought they would be fun to do.

AD: Is it a real challenge in telling a story in that short a space?

CS: I think the challenge is less in the drawing and more in the writing of it. Two pages is very, very short. Trying to try to come up with a satisfying chunk of story that has character, motivation, drama, conflict and resolution, that’s very tough. The hardest part of drawing it is then trying to cram all that visual information into only two pages and have the readers understand where it is and making sure there’s not too much action that crowds the page. Steve wrote a good little vignette that works really well in two pages.

AD: Do you enjoy historical stories?

CS: Yeah. I just finished doing the Assassin’s Creed miniseries, which is largely set in Nineteenth and early Twentieth century Russia. It’s fun but it’s certainly more of a challenge than doing modern day stuff where you’re just drawing generic buildings. It’s a challenge to make sure it’s all historically accurate because I’m a stickler for that kind of thing. I feel that if you’re going to do something that’s a period setting, it really counts for a lot to get the details right, because otherwise it just feels fake.

AD: Assassin’s Creed, which just finished is a miniseries based on the video game that you co-wrote and co-illustrated with Karl Kerschl. Would you like to write and draw more in future?

CS: Oh absolutely. I really like collaborating with writers, and I’m really fortunate to have worked with a lot of fantastic writers in my career - Steve Niles, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Ray Fawkes, Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron. I definitely enjoy it. But there's something very different about writing your own material. I started [writing comics] with my webcomic Sin Titulo and was really enjoying it, and found out that I felt comfortable doing it. I don’t think I’ll ever shut out the possibility of collaborating with people, but I definitely would love to write and draw more. Fortunately I’ve been offered some other projects. Since Sin Titulo won the Eisner Award it’s opened a lot of doors for me as a writer.

AD: I wanted to talk about Assassin’s Creed just because the book seems to have flown under the radar. How did this come together?

CS: Ubisoft came to us. They wanted to open up the Assassin’s Creed universe and explore other media, and one of the things that they wanted to do was comics based on the games. They’d done a graphic novel in France a couple years ago, but they wanted something for the English-language market. Fortunately for Karl and I, our studio is only a couple blocks away from Ubisoft. They heard that we were nearby, came over and looked at our work and thought that we were the right people to do the comic for them, particularly because we were already big fans of the video games. Karl and I are both gamers and were fans of Assassin’s Creed long before we’d ever been approached to do the comic.

AD: The comic set in Russia which is a change from the games. What was it like working with Ubisoft and were they looking for in the comic?

CS: They wanted to open up the universe. Initially they had asked for another story featuring Ezio, the character from the second and third games. We considered that and did a short three page test comic featuring Ezio. It was fun, but we quickly realized it was more creatively interesting for us to do an entirely new setting with a new character and not repeat the character from the game. One of things that I think is the pitfall of a lot of video game comics is they’re just the "further adventures of Lara Croft" or whatever, they tend to feel inconsequential. To a lot of gamers they feel like side stories that don’t have any bearing on the main storyline of the games. We had an opportunity, by creating a new storyline with a new character, and solidly tie it into the game storyline, to create something that would enrich the mythology of [the game]. To develop something that didn’t just feel like a cheap spin-off and actually be something that was almost a necessary expansion of the storyline. We wanted to make something that felt important to the games, and also was satisfying as a stand alone story. We wanted to make it a comic that could be read and enjoyed by someone who’s never played Assassin’s Creed. Obviously it’s going to be deeper and more meaningful if you’re aware of the game already and you know the backstory, but we wanted to tell a story that could be read and enjoyed by someone who’d never played the gams before, and then possibly inspire them to pick up the game.

That was our initial approach. We were given a list of possible time periods, but it wasn’t in any way a finite list. We could come up with anything we wanted. That was the great thing about working with [Ubisoft]. They gave us carte blanche, basically, and said "do whatever you want," and were really open to our ideas. They didn’t restrict us at all. When we were looking through this list of possible time periods, the one that really leapt out at us was Tsarist Russia, leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. I can’t even really say why it intrigued us so much, but it just sparked something in both of us. It was appropriate because the games are set typically during these periods of great social and political upheaval. The first game is set during the Crusades. The second game is during the Renaissance. The Russian Revolution is a similarly important time of social change, so that was something we just felt intrigued to explore. Then when we started reading about it we started finding all of these events such as the Borki train disaster, which figures into the first issue, and other real events that just seemed to form a storyline for us without us even having to try. That was one of the things Patrice [Desilets, director of the Assassin's Creed games] was telling us. He said, “just look to history and the answers are all there.” And he’s right. It was really fun to just read through actual documented history and piece this stuff together. Of course it’s our job to sew it together and write stuff that happens behind and around the established events, but it worked out really well. It was a nice setting. The interesting thing is a lot of games or comics or whatever that are set in Russia usually deal with Soviet Russia, and not a lot to do with anything that’s pre-revolution, so it was fun to do something that was at once familiar but also unexplored.

AD: What kind of research did you do for the book? Did you go to Russia?

CS: We did. One of the great benefits of working for a video game company is that they will send you on research trips. (laughs) We got to go to St. Petersburg for four and a half days. We went all over the city and looked at all the places that were of relevance to our story. We took tons of photographs and video and did sketching and drawing. The great benefit of taking a trip like that is just being in that place and getting a feel for it. I did the same thing when I drew The Other Side for Vertigo, which is my Vietnam War comic. I went over to Vietnam for three weeks. Just being there in the actual place where this happened gives you a connection to it that no amount of photographs or movies will give you, and it's invaluable. I think it really does make the final product seem a lot more authentic.

AD: Having done that for different projects, when you draw something like Seaguy that you did with Grant Morrison, where it’s fantastic and not based on a place, does this require an extra step for you when you’re planning and designing the book knowing that you need to fill that in yourself?

CS: Absolutely. Seaguy is a different challenge because you’re creating something from the ground up. That was its own set of challenges. A lot of it is just drawn from my own imagination. A lot of it is just trying to come up with familiar elements that exist in our world and bringing them into the fantasy world to ground it and make it feel somewhat real. Grant will mention in the script real world things. Like the town of New Venice where Seaguy lives - there’s a little manufactured community, called Seaport Village I think, that exists next to the San Diego Convention Center, which obviously we see every year when we go to Comic Con. It’s this weird little fake tourist seaside village and that was the feel that he wanted for New Venice. He said that he wanted it to feel like it was this kind of gaudy tourist attraction and so the last time I went to San Diego before drawing the comic, I took a bunch of photographs of Seaport Village. It’s drawing familiar elements from the real world and re-casting them in a fantasy setting.

AD: Since we’re talking about Seaguy, have you and Grant talked about a third volume?

CS: We’ve talked about it. It was always intended to be a trilogy. When the first series came out, a lot of people were baffled by the ending because they thought it didn’t make any sense. We were always trying to stress that’s only because they’ve read the first of three parts. Unfortunately the series did not sell tremendously well, and so it took quite a while to get the second volume greenlit. Really it’s a passion project for Grant. It doesn’t do that well sales-wise.

It’s just something that he wants to do, and I really like it. I think it’s something that’s really unique and not like anything else that’s out there. At the moment the third part really comes down to availability for the both of us. Since the first series, I’ve started doing a lot more and Grant’s started doing a lot more. He’s doing eighteen different things, Batman things and music videos and screenplays. It’s one of those projects where when the time is right and both of us have it in our schedules to do it, I’m sure it will get done. Unfortunately, I have no concrete answer as to when that will be.

AD: Like you said, it’s not the biggest seller and I’m sure that DC, given the option, would rather have you two collaborate on Batman for three issues than do three issues of Seaguy.

CS: Absolutely. But it would be a shame to leave it unfinished having done that much of it. It’s one of those things that we hope, maybe it doesn’t sell very well now, but once it’s complete maybe people will go back to it. They can sell it as the complete story, and they can say “from the team that did Batman and Robin.” There’s always a future life for things. And you never know, it could be one of these things that isn’t a hit right away, but maybe twenty years from now, someone will really like it and make a movie out of it.

AD: You and Grant are also working on another project together. Thunderworld.

CS: (laughs) I love Grant. I do. But sometimes he speaks out of turn. (laughs) I had people coming up to me at San Diego congratulating me and saying they were really looking forward to Thunderworld and I had never even heard of it before. (laughs) I'm slightly fibbing - he *had* mentioned to me like three years ago, or even longer. He asked, "would you be interested in doing a Captain Marvel story?" His description of it was an All-Star Superman-like approach to Captain Marvel, which sounded great. All-Star Superman is one of my favorite comics and I thought if anyone could do that for Captain Marvel, he could. So I said, "yes, that sounds great." Then I never heard anything again, until this past San Diego when he announces this project. It’s something that when it’s written, and when I have time, I’m certainly down for, but it’s not anything that exists beyond a title at the moment.

AD: Your webcomic Sin Titulo. It won the Eisner Award last year for best digital comic. It’s also been on hiatus since last year.

CS: Yeah, unfortunately. I don’t earn any money from it. There have been a small handful of readers who have very generously donated, but I look at it basically as making tips if I were playing guitar on the sidewalk. I don’t really earn any money to do it. It was something that I was doing purely for myself, in the interest of doing my own work and developing my skills as a writer. Unfortunately when you have the decision to make between doing something for free, or being able to pay your rent… (laughs) At first I was able to balance it and do the contract work through the week and on the weekend do Sin Titullo, but it just became overwhelming. I was working seven days a week and having a bit of a breakdown. This is my passion project. The last thing that I wanted was for it to become something I *have* to do, instead of *wanting* to do. If I’m forcing myself to do it, and not enjoying it, then it’s no good. I decided that I would take a break from it for a while and focus on getting the contract work finished and once that was all done then I would return to it.

After the Eisner Award a lot of publishers were interested. I’m not going to say who it is just yet, but there’s a publisher who I’m very interested in working with and they’re going to publish the book. My goal would be to update it far more frequently. I used to update it once a week, if that, and what I would like to be able to do is update it Monday through Friday until it’s finished . If it was daily it would only last for a couple more months. I estimate the story will finish around 175 or 200 pages. Not that much longer. It will be complete online and then it will be released in 2012, I believe, as a hardcover book.

AD: Is there anything else going on that you can talk about?

CS: That’s probably it. There’s the possibility of doing more Assassin’s Creed. I know that Ubisoft was very happy with what we did and there is potential for further storylines in the comics that we’ve discussed.

AD: Would the idea be to do more in different period or more with Nikolai?

CS: There are long term plans to do other timelines, but the current plan would be to expand on Nikolai Orelov. Their thinking, and they’re absolutely right, is that if they’re going to introduce a new character they want to focus on that new character and develop him thoroughly, rather than just introduce a dozen new characters and not spend any time on any of them. They want to make it a, quote, "real" character in this universe. So if it turns out that we do another series it will probably be another story about Orelov.

That’s really all I can say. There’s the potential of more Batman stuff with Grant. There’s a couple other things that are probably premature to talk about but pretty exciting and some stuff that if it all goes through I’ll be writing and drawing for a big publisher so that’s cool.

AD: What is it that you like about working with Grant Morrison?

CS: He’s one of my favorite writers. He’s probably always been my favorite comics writer. The story that I often tell is that when I was thirteen I lined up to get his autograph and now I’m working with him. (laughs) Now I have creator owned comics with him. I think he’s boundlessly creative, he constantly tries to push the envelope. When he’s doing mainstream comics with superhero characters, he has a real innate understanding of what makes these characters work and what makes them appealing, and then he takes that understanding and is able to do things with that seem so obvious, but no one’s ever done before. I’m always amazed at that ability. And when he’s doing his creator owned stuff, he does things quite unlike anyone else is doing in comics.

His scripts can be a total nightmare sometimes. I’ve read his scripts where I sit back and say, “sure, it’s easy for you to write this, but I’ve got to draw it.” (laughs) “You can write a sentence about the four dimensional structure of space-time, but I’m the guy who’s got to draw it.” At times it can be very daunting, but it’s more interesting to figure out how to crack that problem than it would be to just sit and draw safe easy stuff all the time. What it comes down to is that he makes the kind of comics I like to read.

AD: In closing, to get back to the SuicideGirls comic, what can people look forward to in the book?

CS: I think that it’s going to really appeal to the SG community, because we've really tried to capture the spirit of SuicideGirls. It’s a book about a bunch of attractive young women kicking ass and taking names. It’s an A-Team/Charlie’s Angels kind of thing with a bunch of girls with tattoos. It’s really fun to draw!

I'll start: (image) Anthea : Ladders and Hearts

MythBusters, Discovery Channel’s hit show which attempts to test popular legends, misconceptions, and tropes, is coming back on April 6th for their eighth year of bringing science with a heavy dose of explosives to television. Co-host Kari Byron started as an intern at fellow host Jamie Hyneman’s... more

MythBusters, Discovery Channel’s hit show which attempts to test popular legends, misconceptions, and tropes, is coming back on April 6th for their eighth year of bringing science with a heavy dose of explosives to television. Co-host Kari Byron started as an intern at fellow host Jamie Hyneman’s special-effects shop M5 Industries at practically the same moment the show first began filming. From her first appearance as a model for an experiment, her critical thinking, artistic sensibility, and on-screen charisma allowed her role on the show to grow until she became part of a trio of co-hosts with special-effects veterans Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci who now have their own shop, M7, and test myths for the show in parallel with the original core duo of Hyneman and Adam Savage. In 2010, Discovery Communications launched a new show on its Science Channel, Head Rush, in conjunction with President Obama’s STEM Initiative to promote science and math education. Hosted by Kari, Head Rush is a commercial free hour of MythBusters’ clips interspersed with educational segments and appearances from fellow Discovery stars aimed at getting kids interested in science. As a longtime fan of MythBusters, I was thrilled to talk to Kari recently about guns, religion, motherhood, and the upcoming season of the show.

Keith Daniels: So what are you guys working on today?

Kari Byron: Today I believe we are working on a go-cart that’s going to be an analogue for a Marlin fish to test whether a fishing reel can spin so fast it would catch on fire. So we’re going to hook a fishing line to it and then just run it as fast as the fastest ever recorded fish and see if it can catch on fire. You know how that goes, a little bit of a [inaudible], it’s probably lots faster. [Laughs] We like to live in the absurd.

KD: You guys have actually had a suicidegirl on the show. Nixon from the Bone Room in Berkeley, CA.

KB: Yeah, we’ve had her on a couple of times.

KD: Do you know her personally, outside of the show?

KB: Just from the Bone Room! I’ve gone in there a couple of times. She’s a smart girl, really interesting.

KD: You started a new show, Head Rush, as part of the “STEM initiative”. What is the STEM Initiative?

KB: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics is what the acronym is for. It’s trying to get kids interested in science and math and keep them interested. It’s part of a push to try to get the next generation into problem-solving, really.

KD: What are some of the limitations of television for depicting science?

KB: Limitations? I don’t think we’ve run into limitations, so far. The hardest part is that, something like Head Rush, we try to make it a commercial-free enterprise, make it something that we don’t have to throw commercial money into, and it makes it really difficult, because obviously television is a profit-generating method of getting information across. Doing something like Head Rush is a really ambitious project. We have to ask a lot of people to work for very little money -- just kind of do it for a good cause. I think the limitation of science on television is that you’re trying do it within an industry.

KD: Is that frustrating? I mean, here you’re doing this almost for charity, and on the other hand Discovery has a half-dozen shows about ghosts and Bigfoot.

KB: [Laughs] Well, here’s the thing. As a skeptic, I believe you’ve got to question everything, including skepticism. If people want to investigate ghosts, go ahead! Investigate ghosts! I think it’s important to have an open mind and try it all. I personally don’t believe in ghosts, and I don’t believe in Bigfoot, but I would never fault anybody for giving it a shot.

KD: But you don’t feel that the science content is in any way a token effort as far as the network is concerned?

KB: [Laughs] I would say the network is pretty wholeheartedly for science. I don’t think it’s a token effort for them. I think it’s actually something that they believe in pretty strongly. [Baby begins to cry] Hold on a second, let me hand off my daughter to my husband.

KD: Sure! Has becoming a mom with a daughter made that issue more personal for you? Do you worry about what sort of world she’s going to grow up in?

KB: Oh absolutely. I’ve got as much optimism as pessimism when it comes to [the future]. I mean, she was born into a world that had our first black President; she’ll never know a world that didn’t. In general, just watching her... a child has this sort of questioning spirit that’s enlightening to me. Sometimes, in the past, I became kind of closed off and had a lot of cynicism, but when I became a mom I started to see the world with her eyes.

KD: She has no preconceived notions.

KB: Yeah, exactly. She’s like a [inaudible]. She knows knows.

KD: You’ve referred to the science content on Head Rush and MythBusters as “hiding the broccoli in the cheese sauce”. Is that how you felt about science growing up? That it was like eating broccoli?

KB: [Laughs] You know, I have to say I did. The reason that Head Rush became a passion project for me is that I’m trying to speak to the 12 year-old girl I used to be. I can’t honestly say I was interested in science or anything like that at that age. It’s kind of sad. Somewhere around puberty things become very, very difficult for us. You start being more interested in the opposite sex and rock stars, and your role models definitely change. Before that, science is fun, and it’s just kind of part of life, you know? Then all of a sudden, it becomes part of school, and it’s hard and it’s not quite like... Like how kids are continually interested in art because you get your hands dirty, you get messy -- you get into it and it’s very experiential. For some reason, somewhere around junior high, science often becomes a list of things to memorize. What are the properties of a cell? I think I became interested in science later in life because of the fact that I started to do it in a different way, and so I’m hoping to make Head Rush... an effort to get your hands dirty, to make science more like art.

KD: You mentioned earlier that being a mom has made you less cynical. There’s a quote on your wikipedia page about your art, that it helps you explore your “cynical view of contemporary issues”. What issues were you cynical about?

KB: Art just helps me quarantine the world into smaller pieces that I can digest. What isn’t there to be cynical about? [Laughs] I actually am trying not to be cynical and just to be skeptical. Politics. The government. That’s probably going to put me on a red flag list. [Laughs] Everything you come across is just... difficult and hard to digest. It’s hard to believe there are people out in the world who want to be serial killers. I like to try to find things you can’t be cynical or skeptical about. [Laughs]

KD: You started as an intern at M5 just when MythBusters was getting off the ground. Do you ever imagine a world where it didn’t get renewed for a second season and you went into special effects and modeling instead?

KB: You know, quite honestly I’m sooooo happy that MythBusters happened and I never got to break into the field of special effects, because I was trying to get into it just as it was taking a new turn. The kind of special effects I was trying to get into is almost extinct -- you know, the model making and the actual physical creation of small objects, the sculptural side. It’s so much about computers now. I never would have really gotten into the beautiful, old-school field where they were making giant puppets. There’s still a little bit of it, but it’s really scarse.

KD: I don’t know why, no matter how good computers get... I mean, your friends have worked at ILM, and the old Star Wars movies look so much better than the new ones.

KB: I know! See, I’m not sure if that’s just because that’s how I grew up and maybe I’m just kind of clinging on to that, but I absolutely feel that way. Remember the Dark Crystal? How cool was that freaking movie? I would watch that any day over all of the digitized junk that I see now. Sure, [digital effects are] beautiful, but the [old-school effects] are so visceral and so real -- the actual puppets and models, and actors interacting with monsters that they could see instead of a green screen.

KD: It might be a puppet, but it’s actually there.

KB: Yeah. Yeah!

KD: Are you still a vegetarian?

KB: I’m a pescetarian.

KD: So you eat fish.

KB: Yeah. Somewhere in my twenties I started eating fish again. It just became such a strange category. To explain your diet all the time is just silly. It’s just a personal choice, for no particular reason other than that’s how I like to eat.

KD: But I’ve read that your husband isn’t a vegetarian. You’ve talked about cooking steak for him. How do you deal with that?

KB: You do strange things for love. [Laughs] He’s a good ol’ southern boy. He likes his meat and potatoes. We are definitely on opposing sides of the spectrum in so many ways. I just love him. [Laughs] He’ll cook tofu for me; it’s a two-way street!

KD: You did mention, though, in the ‘Wet Jeans’ episode, that you have a fascination with blood.

KB: [Laughs] My grandmother was a nurse and my grandfather was a doctor, so I have a fascination with skeletons. I just think blood is really beautiful. That sounds really creepy, I know. I’m fascinated with the human body -- the fact that [we’re] just meat wrapped around these bones, the way it’s put together, and all these electrical impulses that make it move around. It’s an amazing, amazing creation.

KD: You’ve also said that you aren’t really a gun person, but you always seem to have a lot of fun with guns on the show. Has being on the show changed your opinion about guns?

KB: Here’s the thing. I like guns as a machine. I think they’re an amazing thing. I love learning about the physics behind them, and it’s really fun to shoot at targets. I still don’t like hunting. I find it kind of silly. I don’t necessarily have any different views on whether everybody should own a gun. I don’t own one myself, but I like shooting them. So I would say I’m somewhat... I don’t know if you’d say I’m conflicted, but I’m just.. [Dramatic breath] I’m a gun-holding pacifist, how about that?

KD: That pretty much describes me as well. I’m a gun-owner, but I’m also an anti-war Democrat.

KB: Yeah! I like shooting cans. I don’t want to kill anything.

KD: You’ve said that you don’t show your personal artwork in public anymore. Why? Do you think that will ever change once MythBusters ends?

KB: I don’t know. I couldn’t have predicted what I’m doing today five years ago. Maybe it will change. It’s definitely a personal exploration for me, and I don’t really feel the need to share that part of my personality with the world at the moment. Art is something that gets with you and stays with you, so I still do it. I just keep it to myself. [Laughs] I put it in my garage. Maybe someday I’ll show it.

KD: Would you say that you’re kind of a private person in general? You mentioned in your column on geekmom that you were reluctant to get into Twitter, for example.

KB: Yeah, I really was. I like it now. I’ve kind of been having fun with it because I realized you only show what you feel like showing. I don’t live in the L.A. monster. I live in San Francisco where it’s a little different. There’s no real celebrity up here. We don’t have paparazzi and that kind of thing. You’re kind of just living your regular life, and unless we leave our little bubble you don’t even realize that you’re on a TV show that a bunch of people are watching. We’ve got this little skeleton crew of people. You see the same 15 people every day that you’re working with. It’s not quite as glamorous as I think you might expect. It’s really kind of a blue-collar job. We show up, we get dirty, it’s 8 to 6 every day. When I go home I’m with my daughter, with my husband, with my friends, and I keep it kind of private.

KD: A couple of weeks ago ago on Twitter you said that you were losing sleep worrying about how “gross and traumatic” an upcoming experiment would be. What was it?

KB: [Laughs] Well I can’t tell you exactly until it airs, but it involved a dead pig, and it was... explosive. There was a... let’s just say that pig was tenderized when we were done with it. It was really gross.

KD: MythBusters has never done many favors for the pig species...

KB: Well, here’s the thing. Science has not created a human analogue that is cheap, and the pig is cheap and it’s the closest thing we can get to testing on a cadaver -- and we’re not going to do that! So we have often turned to pig. It’s a constant battle with me. I’m always trying to get them to use something synthetic. There’s this funny turn -- now that we’ve used pig more, often the staff will, if possible, take that home, butcher it, and eat it. Jamie cooks his pigs, and we’ve got a guy on our staff who loves to take the pig home and cook it up. It feels somehow less of a waste to me, and I’m a little more OK with it if I know somebody’s going to eat it afterwards.

KD: Your co-stars are these guys with IMDB credits half-a-mile long, and I’ve seen people say, “Oh, they only put her on the show because she’s pretty.” How does that make you feel, and what’s wrong with being sexy, anyway?

KB: [Laughs] Well, it’s funny, that’s the kind of thing that in my twenties I would’ve taken as an insult, but in my thirties I take it as a compliment. Like, “Awesome! They think I’m pretty, and I don’t care about the rest of what they say, anyway.” I obviously didn’t get on the show because I’m pretty. I was working my butt off in the shop and just kind of ended up in front of the camera. I would like to think they put me on because I’m a critical thinker and I have creative ideas and they like me! I don’t really read the internet and take anything to heart. It’s just futile. If you read everything on the internet about yourself and believed it was true you would go insane.

KD: Just doing research for this interview... I can’t even... youtube comments are the worst.

KB: [Laughs]

KD: You guys have tackled some pretty controversial myths on the show, like the moon landing hoax for example. Have there ever been any myths that the network felt were too hot to touch?

KB: Ahhh... too hot to touch. You know, I don’t think there’s really been anything that we felt was too hot to touch so far. The one thing that we do try to stay away from is imitable behavior. We try not to give everyone an Anarchist Cookbook and show them how to do things that would endanger themselves. We try to stick with things that we can test and build and that are interesting without getting anybody hurt. We try to say, “Don’t try this at home,” but you can never get everyone to really not try it at home.

KD: You mentioned earlier that you consider yourself a skeptic. I know Adam in particular is really into the skeptic movement, going to TAM and all that. You’ve been in Junior Skeptic and some other skeptical publications, but you’re not as heavily involved. Do you just prefer to keep your opinions to yourself, or...?

KB: Not necessarily! If asked I will absolutely give my opinion. [Laughs] I think Adam has more hours in the day than most people. He’s like Einstein. He somehow gets so much more done. You’ll leave him in the evening and by the morning he’s all of a sudden built a scale model of his house and taken his kids to the zoo and come up with the next day’s production. He’s kind of insane. I don’t know how he does it. I think maybe he’s built some sort of time machine. [Laughs] I’m active in a lot of things but just kind of dabble in most.

KD: Well one thing I’m curious about. Do you believe in God? Are you an atheist?

KB: I am an atheist, but I don’t begrudge anyone for whatever belief systems they hold.

KD: Sure. Did you ever in believe in God? What age were you, and how did you realize that you were an atheist?

KB: I think somewhere around the second grade. I remember specifically having this conversation with my grandmother... I had a lot of little friends, and one of them was a Buddhist. I remember [my grandmother] telling me that that little girl wouldn’t go to Heaven, and I just couldn’t wrap rationalize that this little girl wouldn’t go to Heaven because she believed in something else. It got me really questioning. I just kind of quietly stopped believing, and I didn’t go to church after that with my grandmother any more unless she really asked. I didn’t believe it. I started out religious I guess. Semi-religious. I had holiday Catholics as parents. [Laughs]

KD: As a parent yourself, would you like your daughter to be a non-believer as well? Or will you present both sides and see what she comes up with?

KB: What I’d like [my daughter] to do is to be a critical thinker. I would really like her to keep that child-like critical thinking that she has. I won’t force any belief system that I have on her, but I’m not going to present a case [for her] in something that I don’t personally believe in. If she comes home someday and says she wants to believe... I will love her no matter what she does, [Laughs] but I’m not going to present a religious case to her. I’m not religious; I don’t believe in it, and I sometimes find it a little bit dangerous. But I will love her no matter what she decides.

KD: Dangerous in what way?

KB: I’m a true believer in science -- it’s subject to change and evolve. I have a hard time sometimes with the un-evolving, stern, ‘this is the way it is’ answers that religion gives you.

KD: The Build Team started off kind of informally, but it’s become a codified part of the show. You have your own shop now, M7. Do you, Tory, and Grant really work completely separately from Adam and Jamie, and does that ever make you miss the old days?

KB: You know I don’t really think about the old days so much. I think we all romanticize whatever we’ve done in the past. I really like that, in the past five years or so, have become completely autonomous and work on our own as well because it gives us more to tackle. It would be impossible if we all worked as one team to get out the volume of shows that our audience demands. So the ability to work separately and get more done is very beneficial to all of us.

KD: The work schedule on MythBusters is pretty crazy. I’ve read that you work sometimes 46 weeks out of the year. How hard is it to find time for your own life?

KB: You know, we manage. You just do what you’ve got to do. I don’t think there’s anybody out there that isn’t working their butt off these days. It’s a hard economy, and the fact is I think that most people work as hard as we do. There’s barely any such thing as a one-income family anymore. I make sure that the first thing my daughter sees in the morning is me and the last thing she sees before she goes to bed at night is me. I think she’s at least got me as a role-model of somebody who’s working very hard and loves her very much to try to create a good life for her. We just do what we can and try to make the time that we have together with our family quality.

KD: What sort of music do you listen to? Who are your favorite bands?

KB: That’s a hard one. My husband is one of those music nerds. He’s got the biggest collection you can imagine. We’ve got some diversity. My all-time favorites from when I was younger are Mazzy Star and Jane’s Addiction. These days I really like... have you heard of Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys?

KD: Nuh-uh.

KB: They’re fun. I like that guy. I’ve been listening to a lot of Jessie Mae Hemphill. Do you know who that is? He’s like an old, blues-y singer. I recently discovered Headcat, Lemmy’s new band. That’s pretty fun. Drive-by Truckers...

KD: The last interview we did was actually with Mike Cooley from Drive-By Truckers.

KB: They’re cool. I saw them at Outside Lands and I was just like, “They’re even great live!”

KD: What myths do fans have to look forward to this season? What are some of your favorites?

KB: I know that this season we are starting off April 6th with some myths about guns. We took some movie myths about guns and we started to test those. It’s hard to remember because we don’t think in terms of “seasons”; I think of what I’m doing now: can a fishing-reel catch on fire? We did some stuff from Youtube where this guy shot into a lake-bed and his bullets started to spin. A lot of people thought that was a hoax, and so we went to a frozen lake in neck-deep snow and shot guns to see if we could get a bullet to spin. We did some good car crashing myths. It’s just a lot of mayhem. [Laughs] You’re going to like it.

KD: You haven’t felt like, after eight years, that it’s become more difficult to find new subjects to tackle?

KB: Not really, because we have a really active audience. Our audience participates with us. They go on the message boards, they do research for us. They’re constantly finding new stuff for us to do, and the list that we’ve compiled alone... We just tested one of my very favorites that I think originally came from a fan. It’s a historical myth called “Paper Armor”. In Tang Dynasty China they made armor out of paper and it was comparable to steel armor. If we’ve got thousands of years to pull from, I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of myths.

MythBusters returns with an all-new episode Wednesday, April 6th at 9PM ET/PT.
Like MythBusters? Join SuicideGirls and talk about the show with fellow fans in our MythBusters discussion group! Thanks to members DevilsReject, Panther289, bendingunit23, and other members of the group for their question suggestions.

Duncan Jones's debut feature Moon (2009), a retro-1970s science-fiction/art-house epic that ingeniously managed to hit a lot of the same notes that Kubrick and Tarkovskiy hit despite a miniscule budget and having only one principal character (played by Sam Rockwell), nabbed Jones a BAFTA award for... more

Duncan Jones's debut feature Moon (2009), a retro-1970s science-fiction/art-house epic that ingeniously managed to hit a lot of the same notes that Kubrick and Tarkovskiy hit despite a miniscule budget and having only one principal character (played by Sam Rockwell), nabbed Jones a BAFTA award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer and dumptrucks full of other nominations and accolades.

His most recent feature, Source Code (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) could be pitched as "Die Hard by way of Quantum Leap served in eight-minute repeating chunks of Groundhog Day."

SuicideGirls talked to Jones (who is the son of Rock god David Bowie) in Boston in a luxury hotel that used to be a prison, while Jones was getting texts from Gyllenhaal asking how things were going and two of the three devices brought to record the interview shit the bed. Warning, minor spoilers follow.

Michael Marano: Without giving away too much of their plots, both Moon and Source Code deal with issues with identity in enclosed environments, which are artificial constructs. Is modern society by definition a construct? And how do you find authenticity, which is sort of the quest of both these main characters [in Moon and Source Code], in these artificial constructs?

Duncan Jones: I would say that you're correct, that both these films do deal with that. I would say that it wasn't a conscious choice on my half to be doing two films that covered the same ground in that way--or, at least, different aspects of the same ground. When I read the Source Code script, because it was something that had been written by Ben Ripley, it was introduced to me by Jake Gyllenhaal. I actually had a chance to meet with [Gyllenhaal] and I very much wanted to work with him. I'm a huge fan of his. And he suggested that I read this script, Source Code. He was a big fan of Moon... and I think he was the one who saw the similarities, more than I was. I think he saw Moon, read Source Code, and said, 'I think that would work well together!' When I read the script, I was immediately getting excited about the big differences [between the two movies]. The fact that it was a pace-y, sort of Hollywood-feeling film where I thought there were some interesting ideas in it. There was a little touch of romance, a little touch of mystery. I would get to work with more than one actor! After Moon, this was a big move for me! And then it wasn't until afterwards that I started to notice the similarities. So I think that on a subconscious level, the question of identity in particular was something which was appealing to me.

MM: Both Moon and Source Code have protagonists who are facing, in the classic sense of the word, glamours--the appearance of a world or reality that is based on illusion.

DJ: I haven't heard that word in a long time! That's kind of cool.

MM: You came of age in the 1970s, in the UK, and that was a world of glamour and science fiction. It was a world in which women with purple wigs could be on Gerry Anderson's Moon Base [on the ultra-rad-mod-fashioned SF show UFO]. It was also sort of the Golden Age of Doctor Who. Does this inform your storytelling? This collision of glamour and hard science-fictional constructs?

DJ: I don't know. It's true that I was born in London in the early 1970s, but we traveled so much. I have a very eclectic taste in movies and literature, not only because of the fact that I was traveling so much. But [because] my father's influences, when I was growing up, were pretty varied. And what made him enthusiastic, obviously, trickled down to me. I used to read every evening. That was sort of a house rule. I had to read an hour or two a night. And science fiction in particular was one of the things that was kind of my candy. If I was finding it difficult to get my nose--or brain, rather--into a 'For Kids' biography of Abraham Lincoln, he'd hand me George Orwell's Animal Farm or something to keep me interested and keep me reading. That sort of was my introduction to science fiction.

MM: Source Code is, in some respects, a disaster movie. And yet the very nature of this disaster movie, which deals with identity, demands very strong subjective camera and sound work. How do you balance disaster-movie spectacle and intimacy, when you've got a story like this?

DJ: Well, reading the Source Code script for the second time--the first time I read it just as the audience--reading it for the second time, I was trying to do it with my director's hat on. And that's where you really see where the problems lie, or at least the puzzles that need to be solved. One of which is: we're going to be revisiting an event multiple times. Visually, I wanted to keep that stimulating and interesting and keep the audience engaged and feeling by the end of the film that they've seen something fresh the whole way through, and not been subjected to a repeated event. But at the same time, the whole story--well, as much as possible--is told from the perspective of Colter Stevens, our main protagonist, Jake's character. And you need to find a way to move the camera in such a way that it always, as much as possible, his perspective on things. I approached it fairly strategically. I broke down those elements where there is a repetition, and tried to ensure that each time there is visual variety. Not just in the camera positions, but also if there was enough of a change in the narrative or if new characters were being introduced, that we could move events around the environment, the train that he is on, so that by the end of it, it doesn't feel like you've actually seen the same thing twice.

MM: There are two main dramatic arcs in Source Code. You have the Jake/Michelle arc [taking place repeatedly on the train] and you have the Jake/Vera arc [taking place at the same time in a different context]. These are essentially two one-act plays that are going on simultaneously. How did you structure these two dramatic arcs? These two intense dramas happening parallel to each other?

DJ: I think it's fair to say there were unique acting challenges for all of our principal actors in this film. Jake has the obvious one. He's a character who finds himself at the center of a mystery with revelations occurring throughout, that really allow him to react in dramatically different ways throughout the whole film. So, as an actor I think he has the opportunity to do many things. But there is a lot of freedom there. For Michelle Monaghan, who is a character who finds herself on a train repeating the same event, she has an arc which has to last over the course of the entire film, and she has to repeat [the same] eight minutes, and generate parts of an arc each time. So that every time, she's starting in the same place. And each time, there's a different ending. And if you look over the course of the film, there's an evolution from the start to the end of the film. That's particularly difficult. One of the things we were able to do [for her] was shoot the film in order, to try to help her. Otherwise, it would have been pure chaos. For Vera Farmiga's character, it was a very different problem. She has an arc, but she also has to perform inside a confined environment. A lot of her performance is being recorded by a camera which is sitting right in front of her [character]. And she has to be able to communicate and get across her state of mind with small nuances, knowing that the camera for most of the time is capturing her in a medium close-up.

MM: Source Code deals with quantum physics and different universes, and I couldn't help but think of a quote from Philip K. Dick which says all existences, all possible universes, are like an infinite number of suits lined up in an infinite closet. And God wears different universes and realities according to His different moods. Looking at your take on alternate realities and universes in Source Code, where does quantum physics end and philosophy begin? Or, did you just want to make a fun movie?

DJ: Well, that's an interesting question. Because Ben Ripley has written a script which I think is structurally incredibly sound. [A]s a fan of science fiction, I see that genre being split between hard scifi and soft scifi, with hard scifi being stories where you can see how the world we live in today can by a process of evolution or technological innovation wind up where the science fiction is. And soft science fiction is where you're talking about dragons and magic and crazy stuff. Now, time travel and parallel realities, for me, feels like it's in the gray area between [hard and soft scifi]. And although I think the logic is consistent and makes sense in its own right, it's difficult to know how we go from the reality we're in now, to one where we have the technology to actually be able to access that power. So, I wanted to set up some very clean rules at the start of this film that explain what it is that we're investigating, [and to] through lightening the tone of the movie, and injecting it with some humor, ask the audience to just take a leap of faith.

MM: And speaking of quantum issues, and quantum leaps--

DJ: I can see where you're going with this! [Laughs]

MM: There is a [vocal] cameo from a certain, well, it's [Quantum Leap star] Scott Bakula! Can we say it?

DJ: Yes! It is the Scott Bakula!

MM: Can we say it?

DJ: Absolutely!

MM: Do you want to address this bit of vocal casting?

DJ: It's kind of fun! And for people who read this and see the film, and know ahead of time, I'm sorry. But at the same time I think, hopefully, what is particularly effective about this cameo is that it's at a moment where I think the audience will be emotionally invested to the point that they will just buy into what's going on. And that suddenly, for those of you who are fans of Quantum Leap, you will realize that the voice is Scott Bakula, which makes a lot of sense, when you've seen the film. And that's one of those little in-jokes. For me, it's kind of fun, and I am a scifi fan, and when I was reading the script, there was a particular moment at the start of the film, where Jake sees himself in the mirror and sees someone other than who he thinks he is. And I was just thinking, 'Ah! It's Quantum Leap!' [Laughs] And to have that opportunity to make a little tip of the hat the show was important.

MM: If I could just jump back to Philip K. Dick and written science fiction. Source Code, in terms of theme and outlook, has more in common with a lot of Philip K. Dick, than do a lot of recent movies that are nominally adaptations of his work. [In Source Code] you've got the fragility of reality, scary government agencies working behind the scenes pulling the levers of reality, you have the question of 'What is human and what is construct?' Were you consciously referring to Philip K. Dick?

DJ: A great deal of my imagination stems from my love of Philip K. Dick, and also J.G. Ballard, another science fiction author I love. So, absolutely! Certainly not in a conscious way. But he was formative in my appreciation of scifi.

MM: Source Code deals with an act of terrorism on US soil. Did you feel a need to be sensitive with regard to possible raw nerves while making this movie, so that you could make it a fun ride?

DJ: There were early drafts of the script that were set in New York. And I know that the producers felt it was important to move it from New York for obvious sensitivity reasons. They were looking for a city that would work. And Chicago, being a location everyone on the East and West Coasts can relate to, seemed like a sensible idea. I think that Chicago is a great city anyway. It's very multi-cultural. And for me, in particular, there is this sculpture in [Chicago's] Millennium Park by Anish Kapoor called The Cloud Gate, which really lent itself to some of the subtexts of the story. And I wanted to use it. Fortunately, Mr. Kapoor gave us permission and we were able to. So there was extra value added by being based in Chicago.

Source Code in theaters now

Since the Girls board is overload, I've decided to start this topic here. Just to point out Synnove's hot new profile pic: (image) so hot!

Since this thread keeps getting burried in the girls board, I'll start a new one here. I really find something simillar between their smiles: (image) Twwly and (image) Taye more

Since this thread keeps getting burried in the girls board, I'll start a new one here.

I really find something simillar between their smiles:


Twwly

and


Taye

May is Zombie Awareness Month. To mark it, and help you, dear reader, prepare for what many think is an inevitable and impending invasion, we organized a round table discussion (by phone) with one of the world's leading zombie experts, Matt Mogk, the Founder & Head Researcher of the Zombie Research... more

May is Zombie Awareness Month. To mark it, and help you, dear reader, prepare for what many think is an inevitable and impending invasion, we organized a round table discussion (by phone) with one of the world's leading zombie experts, Matt Mogk, the Founder & Head Researcher of the Zombie Research Society, and one of the world's leading zombie enthusiasts, Scott Ian, of the heavy metal band Anthrax and the supergroup The Damned Things. Are you prepared for the apocalypse?

Nicole Powers: The ironic thing is that there's so many academics from so many disparate areas of research* that come together and enjoy hypothesizing about zombies, that we're probably, in some respects, better prepared for a zombie invasion than we are for other more likely emergencies.

Scott Ian: I don't know about that though, because, if it was to happen, or when it happens, it would happen so fast that we'd be so behind the eight ball. The first eight minutes of the remake of Dawn of the Dead to me was a pretty good example, I think, of really what it would be like. Because if you think about it, like I'm walking through Westport in Kansas City, right now, and it's just a small little town - bars, restaurants, all this kind of stuff - and this place, within 15 minutes it would be completely overrun and everybody would be a zombie. We could study it and know that you've got to shoot them in the head, or whatever the case may be, but I don't think there's any way we would ever be prepared and/or be able to shut it down before it got completely out of control.

Matt Mogk: The other thing is that trying to survive a zombie outbreak in many respects - and I think it's one of the reasons that they're so popular and it's fun to think about zombie survival - is that it mirrors the same kind of things that you need to do to survive any large scale natural or manmade disaster. The aftermath of a giant earthquake in Los Angeles, where there's no food and no water and there's lawlessness, potentially has the same dangers as a zombie outbreak. Now, granted there are no zombies, but you're still worried about your neighbor coming over and taking your water, and roaming gangs, and dying of dehydration. So yeah, I agree with you, I think that there's no real way to prepare.

I mean the thing about a zombie outbreak or any disaster, is that governments and emergency preparedness organizations are built around this notion of fixing what they did wrong last time. James F. Miskel said this. He was on the National Security Council for a couple presidents - the first Bush and I think Clinton also. He wrote a book about crisis preparedness and it basically said that there's no way that any government or emergency preparedness organization is going to be ready, because you can't be ready for the unknown. They're not built that way. And even though we like to think about zombies and its fun, we don't know what it's really going to be like.

SI: No, of course not. I mean, all you can do, pretty much like anything else, if it's something you're worried about, is to just be personally prepared as if you were preparing let's say for an earthquake or something like that. I mean I live in California, so I am always anyway prepared in case a big earthquake was to come. I've got water, I've got food, and I have the ability to protect myself against marauders looking to take that away from me.

MM: Exactly.

SI: Then again my house certainly isn't zombie proof, that's the one thing. I haven't taken that next step forward where I get rid of all my windows and just turn it into a bunker. It hasn't gone that far yet, and I guess if the day comes, I'll be kicking myself.

NP: From a zombie point of view, wouldn't the best place to live be a penthouse, where the only way in is one elevator that you need a pass card for to get up to your level?

SI: Yeah, the isolation though, at the same time, can also be really dangerous, because, in a sense, it's your only way out as well.

MM: Exactly. You've got to understand how much water a human being really needs to survive. And government estimates are that if 25% of the workforce doesn't show up on the job, all systems will fail. It will be complete societal shut down. So no water, no power, no anything. Would you show up at work if the dead were rising and eating the living? Who would - right? Who would go to the water company that day? You could even make the argument, what military would even be able to function? If I'm a sergeant in the Army and I know my kids are living in Nevada and I'm stationed in Alabama, I'm going to try to go home to my kids when I read on the news that Las Vegas is being eaten.

SI: It would be instant. Every single aspect of life as we know it would be over in one second. It just shows you how much power the zombie myth has. That's why, for me, I think zombies have always been my favorites over all the other types of supernatural [beings] or monsters, whether it be vampires or werewolves or Frankenstein or anything else - well I guess you could consider Frankenstein a zombie, but he just doesn't eat people.

MM: Right. And he's also not contagious.

SI: Exactly. But to me that's why the zombie myth is so much bigger in my brain, because it always seems like just in popular literature and culture, if you buy into the way these characters are depicted in fiction, vampires are never really a threat to the whole world...Certainly werewolves aren't. The Mummy, it's like this thing walking at you really slow that's trying to strangle you. I'm not really scared of The Mummy, but zombies would destroy our way of life and everything we know would be over the second the first person was bit and it started to spread. That's really the only thing you can say about, except for like contagious diseases like Ebola or things like that, which would have the same kind of effect, except people wouldn't be eating other people.

NP: So Matt, after all of your research over all of these years, you haven't really got further with regards to survivability than 'we're fucked'?

MM: Well, no, I mean I think that Scott made some really good points there. One is that, for instance, I live in Los Angeles too, and I know that you may not think that there's ever going to be a zombie outbreak here, but you ask any expert and they'll tell you there will be a giant earthquake. But that never inspired me to get an earthquake kit. I never had one. But I do have a zombie preparedness kit, and that actually also works for earthquakes, because it's sort of practical preparedness. So I think that what you can do, on an individual level, like Scott said, is just try to be prepared, the same way that you'd prepare for any other large scale disaster.

But on a societal level, no, there's no way to really be ready for it. But there's also no way to really be ready for the next great flu strain. It's like the 1919 flu that comes around and kills hundreds of millions of people, or the Black Plaque...which I think is another reason that zombies are popular, because they sort of do mirror our understanding of infectious diseases.

NP: In that case, with zombies there's got to be safer places to be. Like with the bird flu, if you were working with chickens you were more likely to be at risk.

MM: Oh yes, absolutely.

NP: So with zombies, for example, if you're in a room full of vegetarians at a Moby show, are you safer than being at a metal concert? Would zombies prefer to eat the brains of carnivores first?

SI: No. It actually doesn't matter.

MM: It's interesting, I mean you bring up a couple points there, but yeah, I agree with Scott. It doesn't matter. It's like saying you'd rather eat a cow that eats grass rather than a cow that eats corn. I mean you don't even really know, you just want to eat the steak - right?

NP: Well someone pointed out that a vegetarian brain might be the Kobe beef equivalent of human flesh, because it's been looked after better.

MM: Actually, it's funny, it's likely that zombies don't eat brains for a couple reasons. Actually Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute did a study on the bite force strength of various species of animal, humans being one of them, and found that the human jaw is not shaped properly and it's not strong enough to actually bite through the human skull. So zombies may prefer brains, but it's very unlikely that they actually eat brains. The other thing that never really made sense to me about eating brains is the idea that the way to destroy a zombie is by destroying the brain. If zombies are eating the brains of their victims, they are eliminating their reinforcements, so they're inherently making themselves less dangerous.

NP: But wouldn't zombies be like those ants, where a virus (or fungus in the case of zombie ants) takes over. With zombified ants, their brains get bypassed, and thought happens at a cellular level.

SI: Yeah, I don't think a zombie is being picky and choosy about what they're eating. It's just strict impulse, and, if anything, I think part of that impulse that they're thriving on and that they're feeding off also has anger in it. And a certain amount of mania, because it certainly is a very aggressive impulse. It's not like zombies are walking around aimlessly and bumping into things. If they smell the living near them, there's an impulse inside them that makes them want to destroy that entity, so they certainly have an anger issue thing going on in that impulse as well.

MM: You were asking before where the safest place to be; first of all, you want to be away from people. Because of all the things we don't know, we do know that a key ingredient in making a zombie is a person. So you inherently want to be away from people. If there's no people, there are no people to become zombies, and also no people to steal your stuff, so you're safer...

We actually did a study of all the states in the United States to see who would fare the best in surviving a zombie outbreak. We looked at population density, gun ownership rates, military presence, topography, climate, and sort of the whole thing. It turns out New Jersey ranks the lowest in survivability and actually the entire Northeast is in really, really bad shape, because the population density is really high, and the gun ownership is rated low. And the sustainability rate, people's ability to access food when grocery stores don't exist anymore, is just really at the bottom of the scale.

SI: Where was the best?

MM: Well, if you're talking about region, the Northwest is the best by far - especially the middle Northwest. Because if you look New Jersey, it has a gun ownership rate of around 12.5% or 13%, and they've got a population density of a thousand people per square mile. Then you look at Wyoming, and it's got a population density of about five people per square mile and a gun ownership rate of like 68% to 70%. There's a lot of farmers that are very spread out, and they all are armed. So the chance of a giant horde of zombies coming over the mountains from Colorado...

SI: Yes, there's less walkers, that's for sure.

MM: Exactly.

SI: Well let me ask this, this is something I've always wondered about and it's not touched on all the time...You see these movies, and it always gives you the idea that the zombies are here and they're never going away. It's always going to be like this. But to me, that's never been the case. Because a human body naturally once it's dead, it's going to decay. And in a certain amount of time it's not going to be able to walk anymore, it's not going to be able to come after you. Zombies don't have a very long shelf life.

That's what it always seemed like to me. I thought in 28 Days Later, although those weren't actual risen from the dead zombies, they did at the end burn themselves out. They just can't survive anymore, because they burned all their energy, and they're done. You guys must have done studies on how long a zombie can actually last.

MM: Definitely. That's a key area of research, because if they only last two weeks it's a lot different than if they last two years. And if you think they last two years and you make your survival plan for two years, and they last two years and two days, you're in trouble.

Obviously a zombie is a human, it's a human corpse, and so I agree with you, it is decaying. I don't subscribe to the notion that they're living forever. One of the things about zombies is that they are biologically based. They're not super-human, they don't fly around, they don't turn into bats, which I think is A, one the reasons they're very popular, and B, it's a way that you can actually research them. As far as I know there's no vampire research society of Ph.D.'s.

So the first thing you look at is the stages of decomposition. There are four stages; fresh, bloat, rot and putrefaction. And what you learn is that by the end of the first stage of decay, which is the fresh stage, before they even start to bloat, the bacteria in the mouth has eaten out the brain, it's sort of traveled up to the brain and eaten out so much that literally the brain oozes out of their nose like yogurt. So the brain is completely destroyed by the first stage of decay.

So in theory the zombie wouldn't live beyond the first stage of decay. Now that doesn't mean that it's only going to live the week or two weeks that the first stage takes in a human, you know depending on the climate and everything else. But we can sort of establish that theoretically you're probably not going to see a zombie that's just bones. If it's going to make any scientific sense whatsoever, you're not going to see a zombie like that.

SI: Yeah, physically it couldn't walk as just bones. It needs connective tissue.

MM: One of the people in ZRS is the Boston Medical Examiner. He's doing research on radiation as it impacts decomposition. He argues that if something is radiated, you can kill it, but it actually decomposes at a much slower rate, because what it does is it kills all the bacteria. If you have a toxic body that's radiated and it's a zombie, no bacteria can live in it. The bacteria is what makes the decomposition really speed up. So that's a potential way that you would have a very extended life span. And you know in the [George A.] Romero [film], they're radiated, in the original Night of the Living Dead, that's how it started - a radioactive satellite crashes back into the Earth...

One of the things I think is cool though about life span is you can look at potential past outbreaks and try to figure out if there is something to learn there. It's like The Lost Colony of Roanoke, I don't know if you're familiar with that event?

SI: No.

MM: In the late 1500s, 1580's there was a colony of 100 people. They were intended to be the first permanent British colony in the United States, and they settled on an island off of North Carolina called Roanoke Island. They were dropped off there by a supply ship. The supply ship left 110 people. They came back two years later and there was absolutely no sign of the colony. No bones, no people. The weird thing about it is that the Native Americans in the area were friendly, and so the [crew on the] supply ship talked to them. There was no evidence of war, there was no fighting, nothing happened. They didn't starve, there was still food there. They built these forts and everything, they were all still there. It remains the biggest mystery in early American history.

The interesting thing about that is that there's an archeologist from Harvard who just I think a year ago discovered evidence of mass cannibalism on Roanoke. So there's this question: what would cause 110 settlers to all eat each other when they're not starving and they still have supplies, and they're not fighting anybody else?

There's not much evidence there, but we sort of look at that and go okay, is there anything there that could suggest that potentially there is some sort of zombie sickness. And, if there is, what could we extrapolate from that? Well, we know the zombie life span is less than two years, because the ship came back and there's nobody there. So theoretically they died and their bones rotted back into the earth before anybody came back. Again, ultimately it's all speculation.

NP: So in that case, to be safe, you're looking for somewhere isolated, but with two years worth of supplies.

MM: Yeah, if you had two years worth of supplies - that's a lot of supplies - you'd be in pretty good shape for pretty much anything....The real problem is, again, I live in Los Angeles, if you read a lot of these apocalyptic survival books having nothing to do with zombies, you know, how to survive the end of the world, they all [say] you should get a safe house or some sort of cabin 300 miles away from anybody else, and have two years of supplies and all this stuff, 5000 rounds of ammunition.

SI: Yeah, lots of ammo.

MM: Lots of ammo - right? But, you know, I'm in LA. If something hit right now, how am I going to get out of the city? There's absolutely no way.

NP: Well, Neil Strauss, he wrote an all-purpose disaster manual called Emergency, and in it he talks about how he figured that bit out. He actually became an EMT specifically so that he could get the vests and the badges that mean you can get through police blocks and out of the city. He figured out how to get out of LA, and he actually has several stashes hidden outside of the city. He has a stash buried on Catalina Island, for instance. But I don't think that he has stashes that would last for two years, so I think he needs to up his anti for the zombie scenario.

MM: You think about hurricane Rita, which is the hurricane that came after Katrina. It turned out to be a little bit of a dud, but it was heading towards Houston, and so they recommended Houston to evacuate...The Governor of Louisiana, because it was going to hit part of Louisiana, recommended that people write their Social Security numbers in marker on their arm so when they were found dead they could identify them. Obviously this made for massive panic. The traffic jam getting out of Houston was 115 miles long. People were on the road not moving, literally their cars didn't move, for three and four days. Didn't move at all. A bus overheated with a bunch of old folks in it who were trying to be evacuated - forty of them died. They burned to death because they couldn't get out of their seats because they were old. And no emergency workers could get to them because both lanes of the roads were going the same way, and on the side of the road, on the grass, there were cars - just straight cars for 114 miles. What are you going to do? How are you going to past that?

NP: You'd want to be on a motorbike so you can weave between the cars, with your EMT vest so you could get through road blocks.

MM: Yeah, a motorcycle would be good. The one downside about a motorcycle is that if I thought it were the end of the world, literally, and people were eating each other, and I saw you on a motorcycle, I might do what I could to try to get you off of it. You don't have a lot of shelter on the motorcycle and you need balance. So if you're driving in between cars and I'm stuck in traffic for three days, and there are people getting eaten a mile behind me, I might open my door when you drive by, let you run into it.

SI: Yep.

MM: There's a down side to everything. There's no perfect answer. People think, 'I'm going to get a Hummer and I'm going to be so bad ass.' And it's like, I don't care how big your SUV is, if you're stuck in an extended traffic jam, there's nothing you can do.

NP: You'd need an off road motorcycle.

MM: Yes, totally, just don't run out of gas.

SI: Or have a monster truck.

MM: A monster truck would be good. And that's the cool thing about it, I think that's why I have so much fun with this. There is no easy answer ever, and no perfect answer. You just can keep working at it. It's sort of like of a problem that will never be solved. But you try to get as close as you can, because I'd like to live.

Unfortunately, I was talking to my wife about this stuff before, and she basically doesn't want to live. I don't know if you guys read the novel The Road, but she's like the wife in that. She's like, 'As soon as there's no more Starbucks, I'm going to freaking off myself.'

SI: It's so funny you mentioned that because I was just going to bring that up. To me that book is the best depiction of what life would be post apocalypse. We don't even really know what happened in The Road, but the description, the way the man and the boy are living, just scavenging for anything they can, and roaming gangs cannibalizing...So imagine that, but with zombies, because that's what it would be like.

MM: You literally have taken the words right out of my mouth. When The Road first came out, I wrote a review of it on our blog and I argued that it's the best zombie book ever written with no zombies in it. And just like you said, there were roaming hoards of cannibals, you didn't even need to change the plot, all you needed to do, literally, with a tiny tweak of some minor characters - that's a freaking zombie book.

SI: Exactly. So as bad as that is, and as hard as that is, then throw zombies into the mix. I can understand why people would say 'I wouldn't want to live.' I'm the opposite though, I just have a survival instinct, and just from having read so much and seen so much zombie lore over the years, I would want to see how I fared.

MM: Yep, me too. Plus my wife said I could eat her, so I got some food supplies. When she offs herself, I'm all set.

NP: Have you got that in writing, so that afterwards, when all the zombies have died and society recovers, and we're sorting out the legal ramifications of the situation, you've got something in writing that says 'my wife said I could eat her brains.'

MM: I'll just say she wandered off in the woods, and I never saw her again.

SI: That will be a little secret between us.

MM: I think that the survival stuff is really interesting...I was talking to Robert Kirkman about this actually, the creator of The Walking Dead, and I asked him the same thing - 'Do you have a zombie survival plan?' You got to ask a guy like that the question. And he said, 'Yeah, I do have a zombie survival plan. At the first sign of zombies, I'm going to find the tallest building of whatever city I'm in, and I'm going to jump off.' He's like, 'Look, I'm lazy, I like sitting on my couch, I'm out of shape, I like eating, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are trying to eat me.'

SI: That's right.

MM: Fair enough.

SI: In his book, when they find the jail, and they clear the jail out of walkers and they burn dead bodies and they make it livable, that's such a great idea. Because they've got this place that people can't get in. When you're reading the book, on a monthly basis, it can give you a sense of safety for this cast of characters. They were in an environment that was very much controllable as far as who gets in and who gets out. Of course things go awry, because it's a comic book, and, if he wants to keep you interested, these people can't be safe for four years. But that would be something that I would certainly explore. You wouldn't be able to do it yourself, but if you were with a group, and it's months down the road and you came across a state prison somewhere, if you could go in there with a bunch of vehicles and RVs and you're all loaded, you've got a bit of a militia going, it seems like that would be something that would be a smart plan.

NP: Like taking over Alcatraz or something?

SI: Yeah, though Alcatraz isn't stocked at all, because it obviously hasn't been a working jail in years and years, but yeah, something like that. Like if right now you could stock Alcatraz with 20 years worth of supplies and secretly own that island so when the shit goes down, you just fly your helicopter to Alcatraz, I think you could probably ride it out pretty well.

MM: I agree, totally. It's such a delicate balance between the ideal level of isolation and security, and the ability to find and access to food and water. Like you said, in a perfect world, if you could have an island like that, and you had it stocked with all your food, that's exactly where you want to be.

SI: Richard Branson owns a really nice island in the Caribbean somewhere, and has a private resort on it - Necker Island, right? I bet you he's got enough supplies where he could just fly off there and after the zombie apocalypse he'd be just fine. He even has his own planes to fly there. So basically the morale of the story is: if the dead start to walk, go find Richard Branson and hang with him.

NP: And he's got the ultimate escape plan because he can even get off the earth.

MM: Yeah, Virgin Galactic right?...You know, a lot of the concept of the zombie apocalypse is that it's this great equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO or if you're a ditch digger, some will survive and some will die, and all the money in the world doesn't really matter any more. I think that holds true a lot, but with somebody like Branson, maybe his money doesn't matter, but he's got islands and planes, and those help a lot.

SI: Exactly. He has the facilities.

MM: In terms of your question about the skyscraper and things like that, I think that those are definitely a good idea. People also talk about bunkers - would a bunker be a good idea? An enclosed space where no one can get in. As Scott mentioned, the escape is potentially a concern. And the second thing I always think about is if electricity and water is out, you're going to run out of water pretty quickly, unless you have a lot.

NP: So it really does depend on the decay time. If the decay time is two weeks, maybe a penthouse with a lot of bottled water would work, but if it's two years then you'd be screwed.

MM: It depends on so many things - even incubation period. Because a lot of people think that the zombie plague will start in one place, like Cleveland, and gradually spread out from there. But there is a potential that the incubation period, rather than being hours, it could be weeks, or years, or even decades. Potentially, you could have a zombie sickness lying dormant in all of us. One example of this - which is a very benign example - is chickenpox. When you get chickenpox, it stays in your system for the rest of your life. You actually have chickenpox in your spinal column for the rest of your life, and then it sometimes shows up later as shingles.

But the notion is that if you had a very long incubation period of weeks or years or decades, you could have tens of millions of people across the world infected with zombieism and they don't even know it. And then you have some sort of new strain of a virus, a flu, whatever comes along and combines with this, and causes an outbreak on a global scale almost immediately. So it's not like it just started off in one place and as long as we wall of Texas we're OK, you know.

The other question is: if it's a long incubation period, and let's say you could test for it, what are the rights of the infected? Let's say I'm infected with zombieism but I'll be totally normal, just like myself, for the next 20 years. I'm not going to get sick at all for 20 years. What do you do with me?

SI: We shoot you in the head is what we do.

NP: I think we do what the English did with criminals, we send you to Australia. It's big enough.

MM: Thanks guys, I appreciate it. But if you actually look at leprosy, the way that they used to treat lepers in the 1800s, it's kid of the problem that they thought they had. Because they thought leprosy was 100% fatal, totally incurable and very infectious. So on the island of Hawaii, if someone got leprosy and they were diagnosed, they declared them dead. They literally declared them legally dead, and they put them off on this colony on another island and they executed their will. So if I'm married, my wife gets all my stuff, and I'm legally dead. Technically, in historic terms, they were the first legally walking dead people. I mean, they were dead, they did not exist. They just put them on there to die

SI: Yeah, I'm the guy in the movies that has no emotions and no feelings. If you've got it, I don't care what the story is, you need to be put down.

MM: I agree, it's definitely not a time for sentimentality...The other thing I'm really interested in about zombies is the reaction of other people, and especially religious fanaticism...the religious fanatics will have a hay day...Certainly someone's going to think it's my fault, right, or your fault? So it will be a real problem. I think that you're much more likely to die by the hands of another human well before you see a zombie in a zombie outbreak.

NP: Yeah, you're going to die by the hand of Scott.

MM: Scott in a monster truck.

SI: Anyone in my scope is going down.

NP: So we've established the safest place to be when the zombie apocalypse happens is not near Scott.

SI: I'll tell you somewhere else to be, and someone to be with if it happens would be on Ted Nugent's ranch down in Texas. He's completely self-sustainable down there, and he's got the guns and the ammo. I've already made my plans. I know where I'm going - if I can get there.

MM: That's fantastic. Maybe I could try to squeeze in there.

NP: I saw Ted Nugent on one of those food programs and apparently he throws a really good barbeque.

SI: Oh yeah. He's cooked venison for me. It was the best I've ever had.

MM: Wow, and he's good with a bow too, which is big. Why waste the ammo when you don't have to.

SI: He sure is. He taught me how to shoot a bow.

NP: So it's you and Ted Nugent surviving the apocalypse in gourmet style, shooting zombies with crossbows.

SI: Yeah, that's a TV show.

MM: I was about to say, I would really like to see that. You guys should have a camera there, just in case the world gets back on its feet. It would be the first new hit show.

SI: It would be bigger than Jersey Shore.

MM: If that's even possible. Do you guys have any other questions?

SI: I think I'm good. I have to go in and soundcheck.

NP: I think we've got Scott surviving in fine style.

MM: Yeah, well it sounds like he's already got it taken care of, so I don't know what you need me for - other than target practice.


*The Zombie Research Society has a membership of over 60,000 academics and enthusiasts spread across six continents who are dedicated to advancing zombie scholarship in the arts and sciences. The organization's advisory board includes Dr. Steven Schlozman, the co-director of Harvard Medical School, Mike Harris, the Associate Professor of Biology (Neuroscience) at the University of Alaska, and George A. Romero, director of the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. Visit ZombieResearch.org for membership details.

The Grey Ribbon: Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day. From May 1 through May 31 concerned citizens are asked to take this small step to acknowledge the coming danger.

Talking of coming danger, Scott Ian and his band Anthrax will be playing alongside Slayer, Megadeth, and Metallica at The Big 4 Festival in Indio on April 23.

Ironiclast, the debut album from The Damned Things, a supergroup Ian formed with Rob Caggiano (of Anthrax), Keith Buckley (of Every Time I Die), and Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley (of Fall Out Boy) is out now.