Greg Rucka: Whiteout
by Alex Dueben for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Greg Rucka is the author of ten novels including the Atticus Kodiak series and two novels and a long-running comic book series about British spy Tara Chace. He has written hundreds of comic books including long runs on Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Wolverine. He is currently writing Detective Comics, which does not feature Batman but rather Batwoman, a character Rucka helped create. Next month a new series “Stumptown” about an Oregon-based private eye will debut from Oni Press.

Oni was the publisher who gave Rucka his first break in comics, the 1998 miniseries Whiteout. The comic has been made into the film Whiteout starring Kate Beckinsale and directed by Dominic Sena and is coming out Friday. Beckinsale plays Carrie Stetko, the U.S. Marshall in Antarctica who finds herself in the midst of a criminal conspiracy.

I talked to Rucka recently by phone to talk about the film and his other projects. We’ve spoken numerous times over the years and our conversations always return to comics we love, gender politics, and Rucka’s tendency to end (not to mention begin) his novels with horrible events happening to all his characters.


ALEX DUEBEN: Whiteout comes out Friday. Have you seen the film?

GREG RUCKA: I’ve seen it and I think it is a perfectly reasonable adaptation of the source material. I think that anybody going into it expecting to encounter the graphic novel is somebody who deserves the disappointment they will undoubtedly be feeling. I mean what Lieber [Whiteout's artist] and I did was tell a good, or at least a reasonably good murder mystery given the medium. To make a movie is very different and I think they did a very admirable job of adapting some of the core elements of Whiteout into a screen story.

AD: It was made a while ago. I remember sitting down with you and the director Dominic Sena back in 2007 after the film had been shot.

GR: I have been told a bunch of reasons why they held off on the release. The most compelling one that was given to me was basically Warner Brothers inherited a whole bunch of movies from New Line and they didn’t want to bring out all the murder mystery suspense thrillers at the same time which makes a certain amount of sense.

AD: You’re credited as an Executive Producer on the film, but what was your role in production and pre-production? Or did you have a role?

GR: It was nonexistent, really. I was granted a token executive producer credit. What ended up happening was that I got to go for a set visit and then ended up going a second time. When I went up the second time, I got invited to stay, and I stayed for about three weeks through the end of filming. I did some rewrites, as they were constantly reworking the script, so I was part of the process. But that’s about it. It was never a movie that I wanted to write for the same reason that I personally never wanted to do it as a novel. To me it was always a graphic novel.

AD: Having spent those weeks on set, has that made you interested in doing more work in Hollywood or did you run back home grateful for being a novelist?

GR: I would love to do more in Hollywood. It’s not as if I’ve never worked in film and TV prior. It was the first time I’d ever been on set for any duration. Boy, was that a learning experience. I used to be as opinionated as the next arrogant bastard to come along and after three weeks of Whiteout I left going, I will never again walk out of a movie going how could they make something so bad. I will forever be forced to walk out of a movie going how could they make anything that was good. Everything in the process is against them. It’s kind of staggering.

AD: The book was released about a decade ago and it’s been in development pretty much ever since.

GR: It was optioned fairly quickly after it came out and the option lapsed and then someone else picked up the option and the option lapsed and someone else picked up the option. Lieber and I used to joke, nobody was ever going to make this thing but we were perfectly happy to keep cashing their checks. My agent called and said, Joel Silver wants to make Whiteout. I said, ha ha ha sure. She said no really. I said fine. Let me talk to Steve, I’ll see what he says but I can’t imagine he’d have any problem with it. He said exactly what I said, sure knock yourself out. Why not? So I called my agent back and she called back that night and said Joel’s going to call you at 7:30 tomorrow before he flies to Berlin. And he called at 7:30 in the morning and says Greg we’re going to do Whiteout. I was like, great. He said, we’re making it this year. I said, all right. He said, excellent fantastic I’ll talk to you later. That was it. The next thing I knew they were casting the thing and going into production on it. I’m still a little stunned.

AD: Years of nothing and then a whirlwind of activity.

GR: As I said, we wrote a comic. We didn’t write a comic so that some day someone would want to make a movie out of it. We wrote a comic because that was how we wanted to tell the story we wanted to tell. Steve and I were of a mind that the movie’s the movie and the comic’s the comic. It wasn’t as if I was heavily invested in the thought of one day somebody will come and make a movie of this thing. It’s exceptionally flattering but it’s fundamentally surreal right up to and including when you walk onto a set and see that they’ve decorated it like it’s a Steve Lieber drawing. It does mess with your head a little bit. You’re like, wait a minute, that was a two dimensional black and white image. What’s it doing walking around and talking in color.

AD: In some comics circles having a movie made and a production deal is seen as lending their work respectability or credibility or something like that--

GR: Maybe I’ll get some artistic credibility. (laughs) I think comics still struggle desperately for that. It’s one of the reasons I tend to get a little annoyed when I hear creators talking, well we did it as a comic so we could sell it as a movie. That’s always seemed to me essentially crass. You work with people who have a respect for the medium. My first comic book project was Whiteout and the first collaboration I had in the medium was with Steve Lieber. One of the things I learned from him really early on was that you’ve got to treat the form with respect because nobody else is. I’ve got nothing against somebody coming along and saying, let’s make a movie. That’s great. It really is. If it brings more attention to the work, even better. If it’s a good movie, even better. We wrote a comic. That was the way we wanted to tell the story and that was the story we told. And I’m perfectly content with that.

AD: You and Steve Lieber have both talked about doing a third Whiteout miniseries, Whiteout: Thaw. Are you still planning to do that?

GR: Steve’s drawn the first issue and the first seven pages of the second and the reason he’s only drawn the first seven pages of the second is because that’s all I’ve written. That’s entirely my fault and it comes down to a couple of things. He and I had a discussion about that. I don’t want to write something just for the sake of writing it and I don’t think he wants to draw something simply for the sake of drawing it. There really was a question of balancing the other work commitments with wanting to create a product of quality rather than a product that I was just rushing to get done so it would have synergy with the movie. We’re going to do a third one. It will be the third one that we have always planned on doing, but it will probably be another year before it comes out.

AD: Since we’re talking about comics, that’s a great segue into your new comic Stumptown. What exactly is Stumptown?

GR: Stumptown is my homage to The Rockford Files. I grew up on private eye stories. That was really how I came into writing was writing P.I. stories, or at least trying to. For a really long time I’d wanted to do a series that would feel to me like a modernization of what you got when you watched Garner in The Rockford Files. That it was a show that was less about mystery than it was about the detective and those characters and that character’s life. It’s drawn by Matt Southworth. It’s going to be colored by Lee Loughridge.

AD: And it features a female private eye.

GR: Write what you know.

AD: I read the first issue and it’s a fabulous character piece with a pretty simple starting point where she’s down on her luck and gets hired to find a missing girl and gets roughed up and finds something is going on but hasn’t figured out what yet.

GR: I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I’m just trying to streamline it and put modern rims on it.

AD: What is it about female characters in traditionally male roles that you find so compelling?

GR: Ugh.

AD: This is a question you’ve answered too many times over the years?

GR: It is a question I get so often and it is a question that I find very difficult to answer. I suppose the fundamental is that I like women. I like writing about female characters. I think I probably identify more with women than I do with men. But there are also I think dramatic dividends. You yourself just said she’s hired to find the missing girl and she gets roughed up and these are all tropes of the genre but they’re all tropes that normally happen to a male protagonist. I think once you play with the genders you find yourself with different dramatic opportunities and different dramatic dividends. I think I’m doing it now mostly because I’m pretty good at it. I don’t write exclusively women. It really does come to who’s the character. Is the character male or female. Is the character married or single. Is the character straight or queer. Are they religious? These are all character questions. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.

AD: Do you think the same story and the same beats in a story become novel by changing the gender of the character?

GR: I think so. Gender politics affects everything we do every day. Gender politics feeds directly into sexual politics and we’re all hard-wired for sex whether we want to be or not. It is encoded deep in the DNA. As socialized and civilized creatures, all that is troubling but it’s still something that we effectively deal with every day. I’m not saying it’s overt and I’m not saying it needs to be the thing that drives everybody but it’s present and it does affect how we act. Basically I’m just exploring that on different levels.

AD: And we respond to violence differently when it’s a male protagonist than with a female protagonist.

GR: The idea of strong female characters who can negotiate traditionally testosterone-y violent situations, I find that cool. I liked it in Queen and Country with Chace, I liked it with Carrie in Whiteout, I like it with Dex in Stumptown. Dex doesn’t swagger. She never walks around going I’m the toughest person here, she’s very much a gambler. The Marlowe line about being willing to take what brains the good lord has given him and a willingness to get roughed up on behalf of a client. I’ve always liked that as a private eye mantra.

AD: Your other big project at the moment is Detective Comics which you wrote earlier in the decade way back when Batman was in the book.

GR: Way back when in 2000. Yeah. Now in Detective Comics is Batwoman. And I’m writing Action Comics and Superman’s nowhere to be found. I’m trying not to take it as a referendum on DC’s opinion of me. But yeah Kate Kane is Batwoman and she’s heading up Detective Comics at least for the time being.

AD: For people who might not know, who exactly is Batwoman and why has she taken over DC’s flagship title?

GR: She’s taking over the flagship book because Batman “died.” Meaning that no fan actually believes he’s dead and even the publisher is not trying to convince anybody he’s dead, but characters in the Batman universe believe he is dead. Batwoman is a woman named Kate Kane. She’s in her late twenties. Why she’s there and why she’s doing what she’s doing are questions that we’ve yet to answer. We’ve got our fourth issue coming out this month and that will complete our first story arc and following that we will finally tell the origin story for the character which will explain why a perfectly reasonable young lady decides to dress up as a bat at night and kick people in the teeth. (laughs) And of course the thing that you’re really asking is, she’s gay. And yes she she is.

AD: I wasn’t actually going to bring up her sexuality. I thought it would be a novel experience for you to get asked about the character without going, so, lesbian superhero?

GR: How terribly professional of you. (laughs) But yeah Kate’s queer and she’s designed that way if that makes sense. When the character was proposed one of the things that was proposed was that we were going to introduce a character into the Bat family who’s a superhero and who is a homosexual from the beginning. It’s not going to be a shocking realization or an after school special. It will be simply a matter of character as much as anything else is.

AD: As much as you may hate being asked about it, and the way it’s being asked, I know from our conversations over the years that you really push to have a greater diversity of voices and characters and believe that a fictional universe should bear some resemblance to the real world.

GR: Absolutely. It needs to be representational. Look, I write suspense thrillers but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think of them as anti-art or even sub-art. Hidden deep within my material, to me at least, is an artistic agenda. One of the things I think we are obligated to do as artists is to reflect the world around us. The world around us is not white and straight. It’s much bigger and broader than that. I think that if you want any sense of verisimilitude in your work and for certainly emotional resonance you need that verisimilitude then you’ve got to be representational.

AD: We would be remiss if we didn’t mention your collaborator on the book, the great artist J.H. Williams III.

GR: Who I really feel is breaking new ground in what can be done on a comic book page and how a story can be told. I think he is a phenomenal talent and an honest to god true artist.

AD: I know you’re working on a new novel for next year but I’m not sure if you want to say anything about it.

GR: The new novel is the new Chace novel which should be out around this time next year. It’s called The Last Run. It’s the story of Tara’s last job in the field. She’s been working in the special operations office for several years now and she actually has a line in it, at this point if there’s an intelligence agency in the world that doesn’t know how I am it’s because they’re not bloody trying. There’s some truth to that. This is her saying I’ve got a daughter, she’s turning five I need a desk job. Then a job comes in and the politics conspire because the prize is so big that you’ve got to send her. She goes and of course, things go horribly, horribly wrong. (laughs) As you might expect.

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