Brian Wood
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

AiT/Planet Lar publishes this really cool book, The Couriers by Brian Wood. The latest trade paperback is called Couriers 03: The Ballad Of Johnny Funwrecker and is prequel to the two previous Couriers books. Moustafa and Special are bike messengers who also work for a local gangster named Johnny Funwrecker. Funwrecker is about to taken down by the law so Moustafa and Special decide to go into business for themselves.

Wood is a well known and loved member of SuicideGirls so I figured I had to talk to him about his work.

Check out the official website for Brian Wood

Daniel Robert Epstein: What made you decide to make Couriers 03 a prequel?

Brian Wood: I think prequels are a comic book thing that everyone likes to read. The Couriers is meant to be in that fun comic book realm. Our characters needed an origin and I thought it would be fun to make them young and goofy in the city.

DRE: I laughed out loud when I saw that they were watching the movie Quicksilver.

BW: I think we may have violated some kind of law by running that image in the book. But I don’t think we are on anyone’s radar.

DRE: Kevin Bacon is too busy doing pedophile movies to worry about that.

How long have you been doing the Couriers books?

BW: We do one Couriers book every year so it’s been three years. There is a previous book I did called Couscous Express which isn’t an official Couriers book but it focuses on the Couscous Express restaurant. It’s in the same universe for the lack of a better term.

DRE: How long did you live in New York City?

BW: I went to Parsons School of Design so I lived in New York for a total of 12 years. I just moved about a year ago. I used to be a bike messenger in New York so I thought it would be cool to tell stories in that world.

DRE: Do bike messengers sell drugs like they do in Couriers?

BW: I’m sure some of them do. But I realized that being a bike messenger is really boring and monotonous. So I wasn’t going to do a straight bike messenger story. There were messengers that carried drugs around and lots of them were fucked up out of their minds on drugs and alcohol all day long.

DRE: Maybe that’s why so many of them do stupid things and take idiotic risks.

BW: In New York there seems to be a couple of different kinds. There are the hardcore serious guys then these random weirdoes who do it because they think it’s easy money. The guys that are hardcore definitely know what they are doing even though they look out of control.

DRE: Was the gangster Funwrecker ever in another book?

BW: No I just made him up for this story.

DRE: He seemed like he was a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure what his illegal activities were though.

BW: He’s just this generic Mafia figure that sort of ran everything in Chinatown.

DRE: There is a serious side to Couriers. Moustafa’s mom is evil!

BW: Yeah [laughs]. He is definitely one of those kids that has it all in terms of a nice house even though his parents are assholes. It’s a contrast to the girl who is a street kid that grew up poor. The first two Couriers books give a lot of information on them as adults.

DRE: Were you Moustafa or Special, because someone had to pay for Parsons?

BW: [laughs] I’m still paying for Parsons and I think I will be paying for it for the next couple of decades. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I grew up in Vermont into a lower middle class religious household. Which probably explains some of the stuff I do in comics. I went to school fully on grants, loans and credit cards.

DRE: I read you did some mainstream comics too.

BW: I didn’t do much. I did this book called Channel Zero right out of school. Then Warren Ellis got me in at Marvel to do the book Generation X.

DRE: That’s so cool that Warren Ellis helped you out.

BW: He sends random jobs my way. He was in charge of assembling creative teams for Marvel and he was sheparding the books. He thought I would have fun doing it. It was fun and it was the first time I had ever written anything intentionally. Channel Zero I wrote because I didn’t want anyone else to write it. I was a straight artist then but I didn’t want anything to fuck up my story so I just wrote it. For Marvel I had to write a script but there is such a level of control at Marvel that it just wears you down. You want to write something but they will tell you that you can’t because six years ago in this other book the character did something. Coming from someone that wasn’t a fan of mainstream comics I was like, fuck that lets do something new. I was amazed I lasted a year on that book. It was weird mostly because I was unprepared for it but it still soured me on working on books that weren’t mine.

DRE: Was the money nice or not as big as people might think?

BW: There is definitely a range of pay and I’m sure I was at the bottom end of that. I’ve done books for Vertigo since and it’s nice getting that page rate.

DRE: How did you hook up with AiT/Planet Lar?

BW: Larry Young sent me an email once as a fan before he had his company. Then around the time he began his company, Image Comics let Channel Zero go out of print. Larry offered to put it back into print. Now they’ve been a very good place for me because they pretty much let me do whatever I want.

DRE: How much do you know about the comic industry now?

BW: I think I know a lot now. It’s been a solid five years of being hip deep in the shit. I didn’t even grow up reading many comics. I’m sure I read some when I was kid but I didn’t really start reading them until I was in art school. Vertigo was ramping up and I remember seeing some of them. I felt they were like real artwork and not Richie Rich. Then I immersed myself in comics and went back and read Dark Knight and Watchmen. Then I read everything I could find that looked cool.

DRE: When did you first discover SuicideGirls?

BW: I’ve known about it for a while but I never went to the site until some reader of my books said that Loe on SuicideGirls looked like Jennie 2.5 the main character in Channel Zero. I decided to sign up just to see if it was true. Her photographer and I are fans of my books. Then I went around the site and saw the comics groups so I figured I would stick around.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Brian+Wood/