Matt Fraction

Just my general rage at shit heads who violate the social contract, [laughs] which is really, I’ve got to say, the best part of writing that book.

Seriously writing-- like, watching the whole thing that’s going on right now, the whole south of the border-immigration policy-border fence thing and writing about it in PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL, that’s just me wanting to shoot Lou Dobbs in the face.

During the lead-up to the last election, I was planning out how the arc happens and, like, listening to Lou Dobbs every day talking about how the Mexicans are bringing tuberculosis and cross the border to steal our white women.

It was all kind of put together by the publisher. He and Kieron were pals. There was this weird thing where I had very little time to write it because I think it had to be on his plate before he signed the Marvel exclusive. But then, like he signed the exclusive, so it was, like, written for two years before he did drew anything. He was kind and professional enough to be a stand up guy about my first book, really. I had written some short stories, but that was it.

Thank you so much. It’s just his best stuff. It’s my favorite, favorite stuff Kieron has ever done. Obviously I’m biased, but right off, he said, “Oh, it’s going to be sepia.” We were just like, “Great.” And the landscape paints all of it just like fell out of Kieran’s head, like, perfectly formed.

You know, I was always a pretty precocious reader. From a very young age, they were kind of always around and I wanted to be an artist for a long time in school and all that shit.

I remember my parents having Peanuts and Doonesbury collections kind of around the house and I was always drawing, constantly drawing. So comics were sort of always there on the periphery. I remember trying to understand the format-- these were the reprints of a daily strip but I didn’t know it. I kept trying to make the third panel and the fourth panels congruent.

Yeah, because I thought, “Oh, well you always read them in a row.” It should flow one into another. Eventually you can tell that every third panel there’s a jump.

And then you’re like, “Oh.” Then you figure it out. But, you know, when you’re like four, I didn’t get it. Also, when I was four years old, I thought Phred-- spelled P-H-R-E-D-- was the funniest fucking thing in the world. It still kills me every time Phred shows up. I just, I still, “Ah, with the P-H! It’s brilliant!” So, God bless you, Gary Trudeau, resonating through the ages.

Yeah, between that and my favorite book when I was a kid-- It was this Golden Book; this Sesame Street book starring Grover called THERE’S A MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK. The whole book is Grover addressing the reader. “Stop reading this book. Put it down. There’s a monster at the end of this book. It’s going to be very scary. I’m asking you please put the book down.” And then you turn the page and he’s like, “I can’t believe you turned the page.”

And he’s chaining the pages shut and he’s building this brick wall and then finally you get to the end of the book and you realize that the monster was Grover and Grover’s like, “It was just me, ha-ha.” But, there was a character, aware that they were a character in a story, aware that they were physically present, you know, somewhere between trying to read Doonesbury and Peanuts and being aware that characters could be aware of their format - it just did my head in.

Yeah, it’s sort of-- it’s a bad idea to, you know, fight a war on two fronts. Around the same time that some friends and I from school started an animation studio I was starting to try and seriously get comics work professionally. I was really beginning to, you know, kind of quietly writing at night. I wrote hundreds of pages that nobody saw.

Just rehearsal pages, sketchbook pages. You know what I mean? I had wanted to be an artist so I had that sort of work ethic, you know? The way that you get better is you draw ten thousand drawings before you even touch paint, you know.

But the two careers started at the same time.

Yeah, and very exhausting, you know?

I was torn. I co-owned the animation studio and was doing all this great stuff and it was incredibly creatively satisfying. It really helped with the comic stuff, too. When I would get frustrated I wouldn’t have to… I was never “freelancer hungry”. I was never the guy hanging out at the bar with submission packets at 10:30 at night looking for editors.

Yeah.

It’s a little bit like high school where if you’re aloof and a little unobtainable it makes people more interested in you. It gave me tremendous freedom to be able to say, “You know what, I don’t want to have to pitch you on this WHATEVERMAN one shot because I have to go direct a video with Kanye West.” You know what I mean?

It makes you more interesting because you’re not freelancer hungry. You’re not “that guy.”

Yeah. I’m no longer involved. I really miss shooting, though, so-- I mean this past year has been sort of about my first year in comics, and I think the second year is going to be trying to get that to a point of stability but we’ve got a baby on the way.

Thanks! Yeah, I really miss shooting. Probably not this year because of the kid, but you know, sometime in my third year I’d like to start trying to shoot something again. I don’t know if I’ll be pitching music videos or just to do a short film or something, I don’t know. I miss it. I miss shooting. I miss editing. I miss being on the set with the crew and all that stuff. It’s a lot of fun.

I love it all, honestly. I was always really inspired by John Ford who had it so in his head that he could shoot kind of in sequence. I love editing and I was really good at it so it really, absolutely informed how I shot it, absolutely informs comics as well. In fact, I’m kind of writing my first big team book now and in the writing the thing I keep running into again and again, I’ve never had to orchestrate this many pieces on the board at once, and my scripts are much more screenplay-y in terms of how the action is choreographed instead of being a comic script. I’m writing for the moving image and not the static one. Amateur.

Yeah.

No it’s been announced but we announced it with the name The Champions. Then Marvel realized that --

Yeah, and the trademark had been gobbled up by somebody so now it’s called The Order. It’s my first straightforward superhero thing to so it’s a hoot.

Thank you.

Thank you.

With regard to IRON FIST, it’s the nature of work for hire.

My goal is really always be like, Billy Wilder or Steven Soderbergh, creatively, where you do these kind of crowd pleasing, “Hey, here’s Ocean’s 13”.

You know, make $180 million, then go off into the jungles of Cuba and make your six hour Che Guevara movie entirely in Spanish and then you come back and do Ocean’s 14. That’s the balancing act, you do Erin Brockovich (18:45) and then you go do Traffic.

That’s the dream model, it seems like.

I think that’s the mark of the small-minded. Do you know what I mean? Like-- are you NEVER going to have another idea? You’ve just got this one, really? No, just swing for the bleachers every single time. You’re never gonna make it otherwise.

Yeah… “Enter the Dragon”! There’s a great annual that kind of falls in the middle of it that revisits Orson Randall’s life a little bit.

We talk through outlines and we figure out what the story is verbally via or in person and then I’ll write an outline and Ed will kind of get notes on it. We’ll get the outline put together and then I kind of crank out a first draft and just send it all off and Ed will put a polished draft on it. From time to time he’ll put in like a request to do take something on – like the John Severin guest pages recently. He’ll say “I have dibs.”

We’re creatively pretty even-steven.

It’s pretty sweet, man.

Yeah, exactly. It’s doing nine holes on a Sunday afternoon with the guys you work with.

It’s a little gossipy sewing circle.

It’s kind of a super spy story with a very science fiction slant a morally dubious man of leisure is kidnapped across space and time to become his own evil twin. He’s taken to a parallel dimension where “he” was an upstanding good guy. So he replaces “the good him” in this dimension as a double agent working against his own father.

AND he has this sort of crazy twin sister and goes off on this madcap psychedelic super spy adventure and there’s lots of sex and violence.

Bond is pretty well mined, but everything after that is just, like, “Oh, right, the acronyms like U.N.C.L.E.” You can’t escape it. It’s one of those things. It’s applying hip-hop technique to comics -- you just sample everything and make something new.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I wanted to build the kind of stage where I could put on any kind of play I wanted. And to be as new wave, and formally aggressive and experimental in the telling as I liked. The eighth issue is about to come out at the end of this month and there’s a page where two years passes silently.

I think it’s a very heavy, very dense book and suddenly there’s a page with no words on it and suddenly that silence, because it’s so rare, because the book is so heavy and dense-- in that silence two years passes. It’s one of those things where you don’t really know two years has passed, nobody comes out and says “Hey, it’s two years later!”. There’re enough visual cues that you can kind of guess at it if you have to guess.

Just by what happens on that page. But it’s not like the characters are saying at the bottom of the page “Oh, it’s been two years, holy shit.”

I very recently, this came to me-- this really HAS been a strange week for me, but I very recently decided I’m no longer going to apologize for trying to write an unabashedly intelligent comic.

I’m like, “Fuck it.” I’m trying to write a smart, sharp, and sexy comic for smart, sharp and sexy people.

Who are tired of their intelligence being insulted.

Thank you for the kind words.

I went after his brother. A book about twins is drawn by twins.

Yeah, and I actually went after his brother Fábio and the two of them looked over the proposal and they were like, “You know what, I think Gabriel should draw this.” I was like, “I don’t know Gabriel.” Fábio said, “Oh no, you’ll love him.” And he’s right, I do. Fábio is taking over the second volume and Gabriel will be back for volume three.

Gabriel has that kind of precise pen like Mignola-style and it’s very kind of-- there’s a discipline; it’s a very cartoony discipline but it’s very line-based and very fine-tipped pen sort of that. Fábio has a lush-- like Jeff Smith or Paul Pope-- like a brushy sort of. I imagine that when Gabriel is done drawing a page there isn’t a drop of ink anywhere on him or on his clothing, but Fábio just attacks pages like a wild animal and comes out looking like a Pollack painting.

It’s cool. They work side by side, so Fábio was there for the entire birth and development of CASANOVA-- there’s just nobody more qualified to take it over.

I maybe get away from that in this new volume. But yeah, I was kind of tired of paying three dollars or more for a comic that you could flip through in a minute and a half.

I came up on books like Chaykin’s AMERICAN FLAGG! or you know, WATCHMEN. These comics refused passive consumption. I’m showing my art school here: I reject passive consumption. I reject the premise. I will have no passive consumers. Casanova will not stop and explain itself to you. It will not allow you to flip through it while you’re dropping a deuce and waiting for Batman to show up.

It will demand your time. It’s only two bucks, but for the time you spend with us, I want to earn every one of those eight quarters.

This might be apocryphal but I always heard that there was an interview or a story about someone talking to Howard Chaykin regarding AMERICAN FLAGG! saying, “Oh, gosh, I have to read this about five times to get it.” And Chaykin replied, “You should try reading it once, slowly.”

I would love to put that on the cover, “Try reading it once, slowly.” Some people honestly don’t know what to make of it and react with real hostility toward not being treated like idiots. I mean, genuine hostility, it’s hilarious.

The first half of #8-- which is the first issue of Volume 2-- is making fun of the Volume 1. It’s me mocking me and my CASANOVA formula. There’s a mission. There’s weirdness. There’s a fight scene. Everybody talks in catch phrases. There’s violence. And then I get him home and it’s awesome and everybody high fives. There’s the briefing, the jargon, the gadgets and whatever. Then he’s just gone.

I realized I had a formula; that I had come to using a formula for CASANOVA and that sort of horrified me. I’m making it a very ornate formula and I’m coming at it differently, but it’s there, even if only I can see it. So the first half of the issue fucks with that, it just makes fun of it and makes fun of me, mostly, and it’s just ridiculous and so it becomes kind of a grotesque parody and then Casanova disappears. That’s the mystery of the second volume. In page eight or page nine the main character disappears. He’s gone, basically, he’s just gone-- so Casanova doesn’t actually appear in the second volume of Casanova. But his absence is basically causing this catastrophic decay of spacetime. The tagline for the volume is “When is Casanova Quinn?” He’s missing from time.

I realized the other day that I’m kind of doing a very similar thing to what Ed (Brubaker) is doing with Captain America where there’s a book about Captain America without Captain America in it. Where you’re telling stories about the character and what the character means in the space created by his absence.

Having shot Stilt Man in the taint with a bazooka -- I’ve come to realize every character is somebody’s favorite character.

I used to work at a comic shop. I did a signing there and afterwards my old boss took me out to lunch. We sat down and I swear to God the first words out of his mouth were, “Did you always hate Stilt Man or something?” No, I was just-- I thought it was funny. But I would hope whomever I kill -- I would hope I earned the story.

Thank you.



To read the first full issue of Casanova, visit Newsarama here. Photo of Matt Fraction by Doug Hesse.

And here are some panels from CASANOVA issue 8 by Fraction & Moon: