Steven Seagle has truly developed into one of the best writers in comic books. Though Seagle denies the idea that there is such thing as Seagle book, much of what Seagle has done outside the superhero world has been compelling and fun. He had a major creative breakthrough a couple of years ago with the semi-autobiographical It's a Bird which told parallel stories of his familys strife and trying to find a way to relate to the character of Superman.
Seagles latest work is the ongoing Vertigo series American Virgin, co-created with artist Becky Cloonan. American Virgin is the story of Adam Chamberlain who is a youth evangelist who believes God wants him to remain a virgin until he is reunited with his fiance, Cassandra. But while with the Peace Corps in Africa, Cassandra is raped and murdered by terrorists which sends the very horny Adam into an emotional and ideological spin.
Buy the first trade paperback of American Virgin
Daniel Robert Epstein: So tell me about the play youre traveling with. I read that five or six people wrote it.
Steven Seagle: Yeah the three performers, myself and my wife.
DRE: Whats it about?
SS: The title is N*W*C. It is sort of the life stories of the three guys who are in it, told for comedy and trying to get at this idea of why theres still the idea of race in America. The basic tenet of the show is that race is a social construct, not a genetic construct and the guys use comedy to defuse that idea. Its really funny.
DRE: How did you get involved in it?
SS: My wife is a teacher and these were all her former students. We got to know them when they were on her competitive speech and debate team. Then they all transferred to UCLA and majored in acting but they didnt like what their opportunities were so they came back to us and we all worked on the show.
DRE: Had you written plays before?
SS: I used to do the speech thing myself, which is almost the same thing as acting. Theyre very closely related. If you ask anybody from one camp how much like the other one is, they would say that theyre mortal enemies, but theyre really almost the exact same thing. So Ive done that for years and really this play borrows more from those traditions than it does from theater, but the show is in a really entertaining format and we present it as theater.
DRE: Is the run over or are you just on break?
SS: The run is done for the year and then we go back in the spring. So it is a long, ongoing thing.
DRE: Wow, thats wild.
SS: Yeah, the guys did it at UCLA as a student show. It was hugely popular so they got money from the school to do it for the whole university. Then that was hugely popular, so we got signed up to do a run in downtown LA for six weeks and from there we were spotted by a management company that signed us up for this two year tour.
DRE: Thats so awesome.
SS: That all happened in six weeks. Its real cool.
DRE: Is the show coming to New York anytime soon?
SS: We have held off on New York because, as you know, we have to do New York right. So we decided wed get this year of touring under our belts, make sure we have everything the way we want it and then we would go to New York. But lately we have thought maybe we will park it in LA instead of New York since we all live in LA. One of the things were doing over this break is finalizing whether were going to do both or do one or the other. Ill let you know. It will definitely find its way to New York eventually. Were doing a four month extended run next year but we just dont know where.
DRE: Ive only read the first trade paperback of American Virgin. Im one of those guys who just reads the trades.
SS: Who can blame you?
DRE: Seriously with the pamphlets, I just dont know about them anymore.
SS: I can never keep track of them. Im delighted by the whole turn to books. I like them because I cant remember week to week, month to month. So I would just save up a years worth of something and then read them. So this is essentially the same thing but it looks nicer.
DRE: American Virgin is very unique, especially for mainstream comics. How did you come up with the idea?
SS: One thing that is happening that I love is that everybody I talk to is like, I have no idea where this book is going. Some people say that like its a bad thing but I think thats the most beautiful thing there can be. When I look back over the books Ive done I think they all have one thing in common, but Im not going to tell you what that is. But, by and large, I think when you look at the books I wrote and you didnt know I wrote them I dont think youd know who wrote them. I like to always be walking over different ground with each book doing very different things, laying down a different structure with a different storytelling. You cant tell that my best books are Seagle books because theres no such thing and as for my worst books I think you can tell that theyre Seagle books because theyre just bad.
DRE: [laughs] American Virgin is very much in the zeitgeist of whats going on today. How old is the main character of Adam Chamberlain?
SS: He is 20 but he has a birthday in the story arc thats out now.
DRE: People holding off on having sex is getting popular again or at least CNN is talking about it again.
SS: It comes and goes. Whats interesting about it for me and the reason why I picked that for the character is that I like how institutionalized its become. Abstinence used to be a personal choice. Now its a wear a t-shirt, buy a book, do a TV show choice. Its a market niche as much as a personal consideration and thats very much the operational status of Adam as a character. Hes the figurehead of that market niche which carries its own dangers. Hes this super public figure whos made this claim that God told him theres only one woman for him and then shes murdered. Now after youve been in the press telling everybody theres only one girl you can ever be with and shes dead and youre horny. I think thats an interesting dilemma for somebody.
DRE: Whats also interesting is that Adam is still very earnest.
SS: He believes it. Comic books are nothing if not people who like to prejudge stuff. Thats what we do, we read the catalog and go, I know what that is. I just let people say what they wanted. They assumed it was going to be a bash the Christians comic but Adam as a character is stronger than that. Somebody who honestly believes what they believe is a force to be reckoned with. When we talk about fundamentalism and terrorism and whatever, the part people keep missing is that these people arent out to do bad. These are people who believe in what they believe in with the core of their being and thats both enlightening and terrifying depending on what the circumstances are.
DRE: Did you know anyone that had taken these pledges or did you just do research?
SS: Hes not based on anybody from my life. Hes based on a lot of research. This book was going to be a very different book when I pitched it. It was actually a werewolf book but [Vertigo Executive Editor] Karen Berger didnt go for that at all. I still liked the themes a lot so I tried to figure out Well what other character could populate this? Adam came out of stuff that I was reading about these movements. Its hard to ignore fundamentalism in the US right now because its so politically active. I started getting interested in this youth virginity movement. I started reading about it and I was immediately taken about the fact that there were two sorts of figures, people who seemed to be just full of bullshit and using it as a badge of honor and people who genuinely bought into it. So I wanted a character who was put between those two points of view.
DRE: I also do a lot of movie coverage and Im finding that a lot of the films critics are prudish. I just had a conversation with a friend about the fact that since movies are mostly made for the mainstream audience, which is a somewhat conservative audience, so when theres a movie that has a lot of sex in it peoples personal opinions tend to cloud their judgment. I can see very much the same thing happening with this book more so than almost any book coming out from Vertigo.
SS: Yeah its definitely a book that people meet from where theyre coming from, which I appreciate. I think there are two kinds of readers of this book, people who absolutely love it and people who just revile it. Personal tastes aside, I understand that if I dont like a comic its just that I dont like it. But the stuff Ive read about this book is just interesting. It becomes a Rorschach test because people take a lot of personal baggage into the series, which I think is cool because thats still getting to them.
DRE: Are you finding that its weeding out the people that are a little uncomfortable with the idea of sex even though theres not really any sex in the book so far?
SS: Well theres some sex in the future, dont worry. We said that in Penthouse a couple months ago so now Ive got to live up to it. I think there are some people who think theres not enough sex in the book but Im trying to be true to the character. Its not like Adam is going to have one incident that completely changes his value structure and he becomes a practitioner of all deviant sexual acts that there are. I think some people expected that or wanted that. The other side of this whole mediated Christian values America is that theres so many downfalls for people who as soon as their dark secret is out its darker and more secretive than you ever imagined. I think some people who are implying that the book is unfair or whatever, secretly want it to be much nastier than it is.
DRE: Has any kind of Christian audience picked up on this?
SS: There was a funny day at the San Diego Comicon this year. They had family day and I was at the Vertigo booth. The Orange County Christian families would come up and would see the Frank Quietly cover to number one, which is troubling but then they would see the word virgin and react both positively and negatively to the juxtaposition of those two images. They would ask, Whats the book about? I would tell them, Its about a Christian youth minister whos trying to keep a pledge of virginity but his girlfriend is murdered and he finds it difficult. You could see that they were engaged by that. Theyre like Oh that speaks to our value system. But you could tell by looking at the image they knew there was something else going on there and I didnt tell them anymore because I want people like that to find the book. Adam does stay true but hes in a world thats tempting on every conceivable level and thats the world we live in. I think its dumb to turn a blind eye to that and I hope people are uncomfortable reading the book. Thats part of the reason Im doing it.
DRE: How difficult is it to create someone with moral values and then to shatter them?
SS: I havent been able to. Thats what I find interesting. Since he is a created character I certainly have things in mind but I find that as I write him he is stronger than I think and he is able to get out of things I dont think he should be able to get out of because of his belief system. Thats not just high falluting writer talk because when you make these characters you have to make them believable. The things I try to put in front of him as obstacles have not beaten him yet. So its becoming a, me versus him book. I keep trying to up the stakes and see where he will crack and he keeps finding ways around that. I find that interesting because his point of view is not my point of view but it seems to be working for him.
DRE: When we spoke about two years ago, you said you had a book but you hadnt been able to find an artist for it yet. Was it this book?
SS: It was.
DRE: I read a story where you and [Vertigo Senior Editor] Shelly Bond both thought of Becky [Cloonan] but you thought she was too busy or something like that.
SS: Becky was literally the first person I thought of. There were two things I wanted, somebody young and somebody female because if a guy is going to do a book about sex for Vertigo that immediately sets yourself up for attack. People might say, Oh this is misogynistic, this is all male point of view. I didnt want that. I wanted half the creative team to be female. So I was trying to think of who I could get and I thought of Becky right away. Shelly had found Becky probably through her book Demo and she thought of her. It was the first name we both came up with and Shelly said, I think shes busy. I said, Oh yeah, I read a bunch of stuff online for what shes doing. Forget it. Lets move along. We didnt even call her, which was dumb for two supposedly semi-smart people. Then we went through a bunch of samples from a lot of other people, some of whom I liked and Vertigo didnt and vice versa. At some point it just dawned on me, We never actually called Becky to ask her how busy she was. Shelly called her and she came on board so that was kismet.
DRE: Has Vertigo been a little cagey with promoting the book?
SS: I think they did a huge push for the launch. We did a lot of media and theres been a lot of media just drawn to it, like the Penthouse story was a two page, color spread. Thats weird for comics to begin with and it wasnt the least bit salacious. Monthlies, as we know, decline as they go and hopefully the trade paperbacks will bolster it up. I think thats how most Vertigo fans read it these days.
DRE: Was it a major choice to make it a male character rather than a female character?
SS: No, the book was always a male character because I think if youre going to do a book about virginity then I think its a much more interesting dramatic starting point for it to be a guy because theres such an expectation that guys give it away and girls hold onto it. So I wanted to just flip that.
DRE: Were you a virgin before you got married?
SS: Well, technically Im not really married. I just say that because I feel married. I dont even believe in marriage. I think when our country allows everyone who wants to get married to get married then Ill be in favor of it but until then Im not so cool on it. So no Im not Alan Chamberlain.
DRE: You mentioned that the book is going to be like Preacher was with its dark humor but the characters in a lot of other books are put in very unreal situations. It doesnt seem like unreal things are going to be happening to Adam.
SS: Thats been misinterpreted. What I said was that I want to do for Global Sexual Ritual what Preacher did for gross out humor. So I dont think American Virgin is going to be a haha, look at the snot coming out of my nose book ever, which Preacher did very well. I loved the toilet humor in that book. I just meant that in the way that [Preacher co-creator] Garth [Ennis] was constantly able to go back to the well and find something grosser than the last thing you read, were going to do that with the sex elements of the story. Were not going to leave the real world; were just going to find out about things youve never heard of.
DRE: Was it difficult to get Frank Quitely to do covers?
SS: I think Shelly asked him and he was right on board. But unfortunately his schedule on All-Star Superman keeps him busy so we lost him very quickly after three issues. But Shelly and I were thinking alike again and we both came up with Josh Middleton and his covers have been beautiful.
DRE: From what I read, your family is very Southern Baptist church people.
SS: We were raised that way but we had three ultra-corrupt ministers in a row, which was enough to even knock my mom out of that church. As a kid we had one minister who rented us a house he didnt own and then skipped town with our money. We had one whose wife was completing his masters in theology for him and we had another one who was having an affair and had the church secretary covering it up but the whole church found out. My mom was like, If these are the people telling us whats wrong with us, I dont think I need to go.
DRE: [laughs] What does your family think of your books?
SS: My mom reads all of them and she always gasps at them. Shes like, You werent raised with this. When I did Sandman Mystery Theater, my mom said, Where did you come up with this stuff? American Virgin she likes but she thinks the same thing. She cant imagine where its coming from but Im a research guy. I read a lot, I listen to a lot. I watch TV all the time, listen to the radio all the time and the stuff that interests me for stories is sometimes about me and sometimes its about the world and American Virgin is one book that came from the world.
DRE: I got Kafka from Active Images not too long ago.
SS: Oh yeah, my first comic ever.
DRE: What award did Kafka get you nominated for?
SS: We were nominated for an Eisner for best limited series but we lost to a little something called Watchman. Even I voted for Watchman the year we were nominated.
DRE: That must have been amazing for your first book.
SS: It was goofy especially for that book. It seemed to be flying under the radar. There were a lot of books out at the time and I was new and looking around and going, God, everything is better than mine. Im never a guy who calls up his friends and says, Find out whos on the committee and get me nominated. Because whats the point of that. But getting the nomination was awesome.
DRE: Did you change it at all for this new release?
SS: I couldnt help myself with a little George Lucas magic but I did not add a scene where Han Solo did not fire first so I hope everybodys ok with it.
DRE: Who put that out originally?
SS: Renegade Press. It was right after Deni Loubert and Dave Sim broke up and Deni formed Renegade Press. She actually was supposed to do a Ted McKeever book called Transit that Vortex eventually put out. I guess that deal fell apart and she had a printing hole she had to fill because she had a group discount for a certain number of books. She needed it quick, so we did that book very fast.
DRE: Did Active Images come to you about reprinting it?
SS: Ive known [Active Images founder] Richard [Starkings] for a long time and I think hes a great guy. He said he was getting into publishing and I told him last year I had a book called Solstice that we never released the final issue of. I said, Why dont we finish this and you can put it out? Because it needed to be relettered and hes obviously got a lettering company and he agreed to do it and that book came out so well. Then I was like, Richard, why dont we just go find everything Ive got and put it out? So were trying to do one book a year, remastered, finished or whatever it needs. They dont make any money so its obviously a labor of love.
DRE: The last time we spoke you also told me about a pilot you came up with called Carnival.
SS: Oh that? That was a long time ago.
DRE: Yeah, I only bring it up because of the cartoon Freak Show on Comedy Central?
SS: Yes, it is pretty much the exact same concept ten years later.
DRE: Are you guys going to press charges? Im kidding.
SS: No, mine was Mission Impossible set as a traveling carnival and theirs is a comedy. Its like our play is its a comedy about race. How many of those are there? Thousands? But its always the execution. I feel like if I could go back to Carnival it would look nothing like Freak Show. It was nothing like Freak Show. So I dont really get too bent out of shape about that stuff.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Seagles latest work is the ongoing Vertigo series American Virgin, co-created with artist Becky Cloonan. American Virgin is the story of Adam Chamberlain who is a youth evangelist who believes God wants him to remain a virgin until he is reunited with his fiance, Cassandra. But while with the Peace Corps in Africa, Cassandra is raped and murdered by terrorists which sends the very horny Adam into an emotional and ideological spin.
Buy the first trade paperback of American Virgin
Daniel Robert Epstein: So tell me about the play youre traveling with. I read that five or six people wrote it.
Steven Seagle: Yeah the three performers, myself and my wife.
DRE: Whats it about?
SS: The title is N*W*C. It is sort of the life stories of the three guys who are in it, told for comedy and trying to get at this idea of why theres still the idea of race in America. The basic tenet of the show is that race is a social construct, not a genetic construct and the guys use comedy to defuse that idea. Its really funny.
DRE: How did you get involved in it?
SS: My wife is a teacher and these were all her former students. We got to know them when they were on her competitive speech and debate team. Then they all transferred to UCLA and majored in acting but they didnt like what their opportunities were so they came back to us and we all worked on the show.
DRE: Had you written plays before?
SS: I used to do the speech thing myself, which is almost the same thing as acting. Theyre very closely related. If you ask anybody from one camp how much like the other one is, they would say that theyre mortal enemies, but theyre really almost the exact same thing. So Ive done that for years and really this play borrows more from those traditions than it does from theater, but the show is in a really entertaining format and we present it as theater.
DRE: Is the run over or are you just on break?
SS: The run is done for the year and then we go back in the spring. So it is a long, ongoing thing.
DRE: Wow, thats wild.
SS: Yeah, the guys did it at UCLA as a student show. It was hugely popular so they got money from the school to do it for the whole university. Then that was hugely popular, so we got signed up to do a run in downtown LA for six weeks and from there we were spotted by a management company that signed us up for this two year tour.
DRE: Thats so awesome.
SS: That all happened in six weeks. Its real cool.
DRE: Is the show coming to New York anytime soon?
SS: We have held off on New York because, as you know, we have to do New York right. So we decided wed get this year of touring under our belts, make sure we have everything the way we want it and then we would go to New York. But lately we have thought maybe we will park it in LA instead of New York since we all live in LA. One of the things were doing over this break is finalizing whether were going to do both or do one or the other. Ill let you know. It will definitely find its way to New York eventually. Were doing a four month extended run next year but we just dont know where.
DRE: Ive only read the first trade paperback of American Virgin. Im one of those guys who just reads the trades.
SS: Who can blame you?
DRE: Seriously with the pamphlets, I just dont know about them anymore.
SS: I can never keep track of them. Im delighted by the whole turn to books. I like them because I cant remember week to week, month to month. So I would just save up a years worth of something and then read them. So this is essentially the same thing but it looks nicer.
DRE: American Virgin is very unique, especially for mainstream comics. How did you come up with the idea?
SS: One thing that is happening that I love is that everybody I talk to is like, I have no idea where this book is going. Some people say that like its a bad thing but I think thats the most beautiful thing there can be. When I look back over the books Ive done I think they all have one thing in common, but Im not going to tell you what that is. But, by and large, I think when you look at the books I wrote and you didnt know I wrote them I dont think youd know who wrote them. I like to always be walking over different ground with each book doing very different things, laying down a different structure with a different storytelling. You cant tell that my best books are Seagle books because theres no such thing and as for my worst books I think you can tell that theyre Seagle books because theyre just bad.
DRE: [laughs] American Virgin is very much in the zeitgeist of whats going on today. How old is the main character of Adam Chamberlain?
SS: He is 20 but he has a birthday in the story arc thats out now.
DRE: People holding off on having sex is getting popular again or at least CNN is talking about it again.
SS: It comes and goes. Whats interesting about it for me and the reason why I picked that for the character is that I like how institutionalized its become. Abstinence used to be a personal choice. Now its a wear a t-shirt, buy a book, do a TV show choice. Its a market niche as much as a personal consideration and thats very much the operational status of Adam as a character. Hes the figurehead of that market niche which carries its own dangers. Hes this super public figure whos made this claim that God told him theres only one woman for him and then shes murdered. Now after youve been in the press telling everybody theres only one girl you can ever be with and shes dead and youre horny. I think thats an interesting dilemma for somebody.
DRE: Whats also interesting is that Adam is still very earnest.
SS: He believes it. Comic books are nothing if not people who like to prejudge stuff. Thats what we do, we read the catalog and go, I know what that is. I just let people say what they wanted. They assumed it was going to be a bash the Christians comic but Adam as a character is stronger than that. Somebody who honestly believes what they believe is a force to be reckoned with. When we talk about fundamentalism and terrorism and whatever, the part people keep missing is that these people arent out to do bad. These are people who believe in what they believe in with the core of their being and thats both enlightening and terrifying depending on what the circumstances are.
DRE: Did you know anyone that had taken these pledges or did you just do research?
SS: Hes not based on anybody from my life. Hes based on a lot of research. This book was going to be a very different book when I pitched it. It was actually a werewolf book but [Vertigo Executive Editor] Karen Berger didnt go for that at all. I still liked the themes a lot so I tried to figure out Well what other character could populate this? Adam came out of stuff that I was reading about these movements. Its hard to ignore fundamentalism in the US right now because its so politically active. I started getting interested in this youth virginity movement. I started reading about it and I was immediately taken about the fact that there were two sorts of figures, people who seemed to be just full of bullshit and using it as a badge of honor and people who genuinely bought into it. So I wanted a character who was put between those two points of view.
DRE: I also do a lot of movie coverage and Im finding that a lot of the films critics are prudish. I just had a conversation with a friend about the fact that since movies are mostly made for the mainstream audience, which is a somewhat conservative audience, so when theres a movie that has a lot of sex in it peoples personal opinions tend to cloud their judgment. I can see very much the same thing happening with this book more so than almost any book coming out from Vertigo.
SS: Yeah its definitely a book that people meet from where theyre coming from, which I appreciate. I think there are two kinds of readers of this book, people who absolutely love it and people who just revile it. Personal tastes aside, I understand that if I dont like a comic its just that I dont like it. But the stuff Ive read about this book is just interesting. It becomes a Rorschach test because people take a lot of personal baggage into the series, which I think is cool because thats still getting to them.
DRE: Are you finding that its weeding out the people that are a little uncomfortable with the idea of sex even though theres not really any sex in the book so far?
SS: Well theres some sex in the future, dont worry. We said that in Penthouse a couple months ago so now Ive got to live up to it. I think there are some people who think theres not enough sex in the book but Im trying to be true to the character. Its not like Adam is going to have one incident that completely changes his value structure and he becomes a practitioner of all deviant sexual acts that there are. I think some people expected that or wanted that. The other side of this whole mediated Christian values America is that theres so many downfalls for people who as soon as their dark secret is out its darker and more secretive than you ever imagined. I think some people who are implying that the book is unfair or whatever, secretly want it to be much nastier than it is.
DRE: Has any kind of Christian audience picked up on this?
SS: There was a funny day at the San Diego Comicon this year. They had family day and I was at the Vertigo booth. The Orange County Christian families would come up and would see the Frank Quietly cover to number one, which is troubling but then they would see the word virgin and react both positively and negatively to the juxtaposition of those two images. They would ask, Whats the book about? I would tell them, Its about a Christian youth minister whos trying to keep a pledge of virginity but his girlfriend is murdered and he finds it difficult. You could see that they were engaged by that. Theyre like Oh that speaks to our value system. But you could tell by looking at the image they knew there was something else going on there and I didnt tell them anymore because I want people like that to find the book. Adam does stay true but hes in a world thats tempting on every conceivable level and thats the world we live in. I think its dumb to turn a blind eye to that and I hope people are uncomfortable reading the book. Thats part of the reason Im doing it.
DRE: How difficult is it to create someone with moral values and then to shatter them?
SS: I havent been able to. Thats what I find interesting. Since he is a created character I certainly have things in mind but I find that as I write him he is stronger than I think and he is able to get out of things I dont think he should be able to get out of because of his belief system. Thats not just high falluting writer talk because when you make these characters you have to make them believable. The things I try to put in front of him as obstacles have not beaten him yet. So its becoming a, me versus him book. I keep trying to up the stakes and see where he will crack and he keeps finding ways around that. I find that interesting because his point of view is not my point of view but it seems to be working for him.
DRE: When we spoke about two years ago, you said you had a book but you hadnt been able to find an artist for it yet. Was it this book?
SS: It was.
DRE: I read a story where you and [Vertigo Senior Editor] Shelly Bond both thought of Becky [Cloonan] but you thought she was too busy or something like that.
SS: Becky was literally the first person I thought of. There were two things I wanted, somebody young and somebody female because if a guy is going to do a book about sex for Vertigo that immediately sets yourself up for attack. People might say, Oh this is misogynistic, this is all male point of view. I didnt want that. I wanted half the creative team to be female. So I was trying to think of who I could get and I thought of Becky right away. Shelly had found Becky probably through her book Demo and she thought of her. It was the first name we both came up with and Shelly said, I think shes busy. I said, Oh yeah, I read a bunch of stuff online for what shes doing. Forget it. Lets move along. We didnt even call her, which was dumb for two supposedly semi-smart people. Then we went through a bunch of samples from a lot of other people, some of whom I liked and Vertigo didnt and vice versa. At some point it just dawned on me, We never actually called Becky to ask her how busy she was. Shelly called her and she came on board so that was kismet.
DRE: Has Vertigo been a little cagey with promoting the book?
SS: I think they did a huge push for the launch. We did a lot of media and theres been a lot of media just drawn to it, like the Penthouse story was a two page, color spread. Thats weird for comics to begin with and it wasnt the least bit salacious. Monthlies, as we know, decline as they go and hopefully the trade paperbacks will bolster it up. I think thats how most Vertigo fans read it these days.
DRE: Was it a major choice to make it a male character rather than a female character?
SS: No, the book was always a male character because I think if youre going to do a book about virginity then I think its a much more interesting dramatic starting point for it to be a guy because theres such an expectation that guys give it away and girls hold onto it. So I wanted to just flip that.
DRE: Were you a virgin before you got married?
SS: Well, technically Im not really married. I just say that because I feel married. I dont even believe in marriage. I think when our country allows everyone who wants to get married to get married then Ill be in favor of it but until then Im not so cool on it. So no Im not Alan Chamberlain.
DRE: You mentioned that the book is going to be like Preacher was with its dark humor but the characters in a lot of other books are put in very unreal situations. It doesnt seem like unreal things are going to be happening to Adam.
SS: Thats been misinterpreted. What I said was that I want to do for Global Sexual Ritual what Preacher did for gross out humor. So I dont think American Virgin is going to be a haha, look at the snot coming out of my nose book ever, which Preacher did very well. I loved the toilet humor in that book. I just meant that in the way that [Preacher co-creator] Garth [Ennis] was constantly able to go back to the well and find something grosser than the last thing you read, were going to do that with the sex elements of the story. Were not going to leave the real world; were just going to find out about things youve never heard of.
DRE: Was it difficult to get Frank Quitely to do covers?
SS: I think Shelly asked him and he was right on board. But unfortunately his schedule on All-Star Superman keeps him busy so we lost him very quickly after three issues. But Shelly and I were thinking alike again and we both came up with Josh Middleton and his covers have been beautiful.
DRE: From what I read, your family is very Southern Baptist church people.
SS: We were raised that way but we had three ultra-corrupt ministers in a row, which was enough to even knock my mom out of that church. As a kid we had one minister who rented us a house he didnt own and then skipped town with our money. We had one whose wife was completing his masters in theology for him and we had another one who was having an affair and had the church secretary covering it up but the whole church found out. My mom was like, If these are the people telling us whats wrong with us, I dont think I need to go.
DRE: [laughs] What does your family think of your books?
SS: My mom reads all of them and she always gasps at them. Shes like, You werent raised with this. When I did Sandman Mystery Theater, my mom said, Where did you come up with this stuff? American Virgin she likes but she thinks the same thing. She cant imagine where its coming from but Im a research guy. I read a lot, I listen to a lot. I watch TV all the time, listen to the radio all the time and the stuff that interests me for stories is sometimes about me and sometimes its about the world and American Virgin is one book that came from the world.
DRE: I got Kafka from Active Images not too long ago.
SS: Oh yeah, my first comic ever.
DRE: What award did Kafka get you nominated for?
SS: We were nominated for an Eisner for best limited series but we lost to a little something called Watchman. Even I voted for Watchman the year we were nominated.
DRE: That must have been amazing for your first book.
SS: It was goofy especially for that book. It seemed to be flying under the radar. There were a lot of books out at the time and I was new and looking around and going, God, everything is better than mine. Im never a guy who calls up his friends and says, Find out whos on the committee and get me nominated. Because whats the point of that. But getting the nomination was awesome.
DRE: Did you change it at all for this new release?
SS: I couldnt help myself with a little George Lucas magic but I did not add a scene where Han Solo did not fire first so I hope everybodys ok with it.
DRE: Who put that out originally?
SS: Renegade Press. It was right after Deni Loubert and Dave Sim broke up and Deni formed Renegade Press. She actually was supposed to do a Ted McKeever book called Transit that Vortex eventually put out. I guess that deal fell apart and she had a printing hole she had to fill because she had a group discount for a certain number of books. She needed it quick, so we did that book very fast.
DRE: Did Active Images come to you about reprinting it?
SS: Ive known [Active Images founder] Richard [Starkings] for a long time and I think hes a great guy. He said he was getting into publishing and I told him last year I had a book called Solstice that we never released the final issue of. I said, Why dont we finish this and you can put it out? Because it needed to be relettered and hes obviously got a lettering company and he agreed to do it and that book came out so well. Then I was like, Richard, why dont we just go find everything Ive got and put it out? So were trying to do one book a year, remastered, finished or whatever it needs. They dont make any money so its obviously a labor of love.
DRE: The last time we spoke you also told me about a pilot you came up with called Carnival.
SS: Oh that? That was a long time ago.
DRE: Yeah, I only bring it up because of the cartoon Freak Show on Comedy Central?
SS: Yes, it is pretty much the exact same concept ten years later.
DRE: Are you guys going to press charges? Im kidding.
SS: No, mine was Mission Impossible set as a traveling carnival and theirs is a comedy. Its like our play is its a comedy about race. How many of those are there? Thousands? But its always the execution. I feel like if I could go back to Carnival it would look nothing like Freak Show. It was nothing like Freak Show. So I dont really get too bent out of shape about that stuff.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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Oh, it wasn't Steven Seagal. Nevermind.