Matt Fraction: Casanova

Yes. Very much so, but this time there had been a long gap [since the last issue]. I worked on the first script for a year, on and off. I don’t necessarily know how to articulate it, but it’s the difficult child. It’s the one that requires the most thought and work. It made my bones in some places. I wanted it to be as good as I thought I was, if that doesn’t sound too egomaniacal. I went back and reread all of [Casanova] to date and was humbled by the experience, because I didn’t think it was that good. [laughs] So there’s the added pressure of putting your money where your mouth is, trying to live up to whatever reputation I and the book had. I’d start over, constantly trying to push up my game and push up the book’s game. I don’t know that it was successful, but it reached a point where I felt like, today, this is what I am able to love.

Well we wanted to sell, to be quite honest. Retailers treated the one color Casanova as though it were a black and white book. It was referred to in reviews as being black and white. Aesthetically it was a choice we all liked. And it was a weird format. It was two dollars. There’s enough about the book that’s counterintuitive, that to actually start off in a hole was silly. When we went to relaunch it, we wanted to give the book every chance it had to succeed in the direct market. The direct market was engineered to sell one thing. It was engineered to sell Batman. We can use Batman as a metric on the sales charts where Batman sells “one” and things sell either above or below “one.” It is truly designed to move Batman comics. Retailers were not carrying the book because it was weird. I had a retailer tell me he didn’t order the book because if he had to chose between a two dollar Image book and a five dollar IDW book, he would rather the IDW book sat on his shelf because he would make five dollars, not two dollars. I was like, let’s stop trying to exclude vendors, because if retailers aren’t carrying it, then readers aren’t reading it. I think it looks like no other comic out there. Yes, it is full color, but there’s not another book in the world that looks like Casanova. We’re still doing something weird.

That was part of the hiatus. It’s one thing for me to be the guy who writes Iron Fist and The Order and for you guys to be known for Brazilian comics no one’s heard of, but you go do Umbrella Academy, and I’ll go do X-Men and when we come back we can be the guys who did Umbrella Academy and X-Men. It certainly can’t hurt.

It’s now thirty-two pages an issue, so it’s now sixty percent than any other comic. [laughs] Comics are about twenty pages now and this is twelve pages longer. It’s different. The collection will eventually be the same length [as the previous collections], but the storytelling is entirely different because it’s not in discreet sixteen page chapters anymore, but bigger, more robust, more complicated thirty-two page chapters.

Very much so. Where it goes and how it ends and all that stuff, if we are lucky enough to get there. The first three story lines are going to work as a trilogy. The fourth one kind of works as a standalone chapter that would bridge the way to a second trilogy which would be the final volumes. If it ends at any point along the way, it will still be a fairly complete story just not the entirety of the story I wanted to tell if that makes sense.

Casanova was the first regular “monthly” comic that I wrote. I wrote short stories and two graphic novels, but yes, absolutely, it’s very much the first stage

This past year has clearly been one of transition for me. What keeps me coming back to it is that it is the comic that I wrote when I didn’t think I was ever going to get a chance to do it again. It’s the comic that I wrote because I wanted to see. I wrote it because if I had this one chance to make a comic what did I want to do? Another fucking Batman ripoff or something that I actually wanted to read? I created the book that I wished existed and it remains that very much. I made Casanova because there was no Casanova out there. That it has been such a constant struggle at this point, there’s a degree of stubbornness that I will not let it beat me involved. [laughs]

I think with regards to the stuff I’ve been doing at Marvel. Doing a big event book like Fear Itself that moves the numbers that it moves and is looked at by the volume of people that are looking at it and garnered the press attention that it’s garnered, I’ve never worked on a stage that big.

I hope so. That’s what’s nice about it. It felt like a vote of confidence. It was very rewarding.

Accidentally. I didn’t have any access. I saw the movie the same time as everyone did. I saw the trailer the same time everyone else did. I had no special access. I wrote the book I wanted to read. I was reading the casting information and was like, oh, this sounds like the kind of movie I’d want to see. Issue one was put to bed before the film came out. After I saw the movie I came back and I added the in helmet shots, the 2001 shots they did inside the helmet. That I got from the movie.

Well I did, but that was from reading “Variety.” I wasn’t even doing Iron Man at the time. I read in “Variety” that Jeff Bridges was going to be Obadiah Stane and I knew who that character was. I was doing a book called The Order and I thought I should bring a Stane character back. I knew I wanted an Iron Man villain at the end of the first year of The Order. I thought well I’ll create a new Stane character, because in the comic Obadiah Stane blows his own head off on panel in a way that would be very difficult to get out of. Even for comic book deaths it was pretty gruesome. I thought, I’ll create this new Stane character and that way whoever’s writing Iron Man when the movie comes out will have a Stane back on the board that they can play with. Little did I know that it would be me. So The Order ended up serving as a prequel to my Iron Man run.

It’s fun. It’s a ridiculous way to make a living. I get to play with some of the best pop culture icons that the world has yet to conceive. I’m not one of these guys, the comics mainstream is full of these guys, who work in the comics mainstream while one hand pinches their nose closed and they recoil in horror and shame that they’re not writing the great American novel or some other kind of creative opus. I quite enjoy my job. I like the people that I work with. And you get to work with these incredible enduring icons. I like the people. I’m also not one of those who believes he’s beyond editorial. It’s always nice to work with people whose job it is to make you look like a better smarter writer than you are.

Fear Itself is at its heart a big Thor story, so the next year or so of Thor deals with the fallout from Fear Itself. There’s a sort of oh so hip weary cynicism that farts out of the commentariat where one drolly rolls their eyes on hearing that everything is going to change. Well, shithead, it’s a comic. It’s changing every thirty days. That’s what they do. These stories constantly move and if nothing ever changes. In theory every comic is constantly changing and if it’s not it gets cancelled because people get bored because nothing happens.

So everything that comes out of Fear Itself will be playing hell on the characters of Thor and Iron Man. Tony Stark has relapsed and that’s going to become public knowledge. I’m not interested in doing a story about Tony drinking again. He fell off the wagon for a night and is back on. Now he’s dealing with the repercussions of that relapse. We’re going to do a recovery story rather a story of the relapse itself. The fact that Tony pilots this four billion dollar war suit that could produce megadeaths were he to put his mind to it and was legally intoxicated while doing it will cause him a lot of problems in the next year.

And I’m launching The Defenders out of Fear Itself, which is kind of like Marvel’s Doom Patrol. They’re these characters that everybody loves but for one reason or another seem chronically incapable of sustaining their own books. It’s Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer and She Hulk and Iron Fist. It’s a chance to do stuff I’ve not really done at Marvel. I’m writing it in a way I’ve never written before. Doing a kind of story I’ve never done before. It’s exciting.

The thing is, Tony dealt with his alcoholism by staring out of a window in the rain all night clenching his fists and by morning he was okay. At the time they weren’t allowed to talk about Alcoholics Anonymous. He just sobered up by willpower. But later began to drink again and drank much that he lost his company and lost the suit and Rhodey took over as Iron Man and Tony spent the better part of a year and a half homeless and drunk in New York in a tuxedo with long hair and beard and eventually almost froze to death in a blizzard. There was another much longer much darker chapter of that. In both cases there wasn’t the editorial breadth or depth and maybe it was inappropriate at the time based on the audience to show all this stuff. So the chance to deal with things like the program and the media and rehab culture. When rehab is televised as entertainment, how do you get sober? It’s our chance to do this in a way that Iron Man had never gotten to do. I’m not interested in Tony crashing into walls and shit like that. I wanted him to relapse. I wanted him to have a bad night. I wanted his reaction to the scariest thing he’s ever seen. The world’s going to end, we’re all going to die, what do you do? Tony got drunk. I wanted to deal with how does he pick himself up after that.

What do you do when the world knows that you were piloting the most dangerous weapon mankind has conceived of and you were ripped to the tits? You don’t get to be a superhero after that. If an airline pilot gets caught drunk, he doesn’t get to fly anymore. If the guy flying an F-18 is caught drunk, he doesn’t get to fly anymore. Why should Tony Stark get to fly Iron Man if he’s doing it drunk? So the story is called “Demon.”

It is a psychedelic science fiction superspy comic about a wastrel who is abducted into a parallel universe where he is known for being moral and upstanding. He basically gets to be his own evil twin. The new volume opens up with him going through time and space and adopting all these different aliases and disguises to prevent, basically, himself from ever happening. It’s very spacey, very cosmic, very trippy science fiction. It’s a lot of sex. A lot of mind-bending, brain-warping medium-pushing stuff.

In a world where a twenty page comic can be read in the time it takes to say “I just read a twenty page comic,” [laughs] this one will refuse you that privilege. It’s psychedelic sci-fi. And equal opportunity nudity too. Lots of undernuts, underballs and dangling nut sacks. There’s a lot of genitals. Pretty much everybody in the book, you get to see their genitals at some point. [laughs] Hard to believe the book’s not a screaming success. More tits than a National Geographic. More dicks than a Maroon 5 concert. [laughs]

[laughs] I want to end anywhere but there.

We’ve got two kids and finding balance between our work lives and our home lives. That is the challenge. It’s like water will find its own level. In the last year we’ve learned, maybe I’m not going to get the luxury of a ten hour work day, so how much work do I have to get done today and how much time do I have in which to get it done. It’s amazing when you remove the luxury of time just how much you can get done if you need to write x amount of pages and you only have four hours to do it, I think you surprise yourself how much work you actually get done. Finding time to find room for everything. We’re still not great at it. The deep secret is that every parent would much rather be playing with their kid or dicking around in the front yard than working.