For me Ed Brubaker will always be a complete lowlife. Not because I found him rifling through the trash and eating dirty diapers but rather because of the book that helped kick off his comics career, the semiautobiographical A Complete Lowlife. Since that books publication not much has been heard from Brubaker, nah just kidding again, hes one of the busiest writers in the comic book industry having completed extensive runs on Batman, The Authority and created owned books like Sleeper and Scene of the Crime. Most recently, Brubaker was thrust into the media spotlight due to having written the death of Captain America in issue 25 of that book. But right now Brubakers favorite book hes working on is Criminal which he co-created with artist Sean Phillips. Criminal is an ongoing series through Marvels creator owned imprint Icon. The first storyline, Coward, has just been collected into trade paperback and it is about a low level desperado named Leo who is able to plan any heist. When Leo is pulled into a scheme to steal a few million worth of diamonds, he sees the chance to retire but he soon learns that his cohorts are not to be trusted.
Check out the website for Criminal
Daniel Robert Epstein: So I shouldnt call you killer then?
Ed Brubaker: No man. Well, you can but its not accurate.
DRE: [laughs] Im kidding, I didnt even read it.
Ed: Oh, you havent read the comic. Its widely available now [laughs]. The day that it came out, not so much.
DRE: I dont really read Marvel books until I get them in the trades and even then I dont read a lot of them.
Ed: Yeah, thats understandable.
DRE: Its hard to think of what Marvel stuff I read. I read some of the House of M stuff in trades. That was bizarre.
Ed: Yeah, that was an alternate reality. The best of Marvel or DC stuff is really the stuff, Im going to get in trouble for saying this probably, where guys like [Brian Michael] Bendis and [Alex] Maleev were doing Daredevil for 50 or 60 issues and you could just read that without caring about anything else. I like when theres a singular vision or when a writer and an artist are clearly working on a book because they want to do that book and they have stories developed for that character. When all the events start to crowd it in, I know sales go up, but personally my favorite Marvel books are Garth Ennis Punisher and I cant think of anything else. A little brain fart there. I think there are a lot of good Marvel books and they are better than they have been for a long, long time.
DRE: Thats what they say and certainly the art has gotten a lot better in the past ten years or so.
Ed: Yeah. It depends on what kind of books you like to read but I think that was what was the most interesting thing about Bendis coming to Marvel. At the same time that me, [Greg] Rucka and a bunch of people were over at DC he broke in at Marvel and brought that indie comics flavor to some of their books. Hes done like 110 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man and its a fun book.
DRE: It seems like superhero comics today are not meant for people that have read, like myself, a lot of superhero comics. Its so hard to come up with something new for these characters.
Ed: The new stuff is not embraced by the fans. Thats the secret thing that no one really wants to talk about. People always say we should create something new but when you do create something new or some new twist on superheroes like what Sean [Phillips] and I did with Sleeper its embraced by people who dont read comics but its not embraced by the people who read comics. Unless we get lucky, the fans want to see the old stuff over again.
DRE: They say there are about 150,000 people who buy the floppies.
Ed: Its probably closer to 200,000. Thats what we guesstimate based on how well Frank Millers Dark Knight sequel did with its first issue. Whereas with Captain America number 25 theyve sold something close to 400,000 at this point. Clearly there are not 400,000 people reading it because Im signing a stack of ten for one person.
DRE: But isnt it insane that the numbers not getting really bigger. If the first Spider-Man movie making $400 million doesnt get a ton more people reading Spider-Man than nothing will.
Ed: Yeah, a couple people have isolated what they think the problem is and I agree with them. The Spider-Man movies elevate the Spider-Man trades overall. I remember talking to people at Marvel that the Ultimate Spider-Man trades always do huge numbers around those movies but theres not one trade that every store orders that sells like 300,000 copies. There are ten or 15 different trades that all get orders in smaller numbers so they do benefit from it. All the Sin City books ended up selling like a half million copies of those books around the time when the movie came out.
DRE: Which is unbelievable, but then again, how many people went to go see that movie.
Ed: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people who saw that movie were like, Im going to go check out that book. Ive never read 300 and after I saw 300, even though I didnt think it was a masterpiece or anything, I was like Im going to go check out that book. I wandered into the Barnes & Noble next to the movie theater and they didnt have the book and I was like Well, shit. When theres a single thing that you can sell, like when the V for Vendetta movie came out. The book was everywhere. Thats generally how movies help books sell. With the From Hell movie Eddie Campbell said they sold like 100,000 copies of the Top Shelf edition of the book. But when you have Spider-Man and Fantastic Four or Batman, there are too many options for the average person. They dont have just one book to go into the bookstore and go, Oh this is the Batman book. These characters have been around too long.
DRE: Maybe things will change now that Marvel is making their own movies but I think another big problem is that theres no real synergy between the movies and the comics.
Ed: Yeah, I dont look at it that closely because they havent made one out of anything Ive worked on yet [laughs]. I guess they did on Batman. But they did those movies on Batman long before I ever worked on it.
DRE: Yeah, you dont get to call dibs on that, Im sorry.
Ed: Yeah. They did the Catwoman movie when I was working on Catwoman. I was really glad they didnt make me change Catwomans costume into torn up Levis or whatever.
DRE: That was a terrible movie.
Ed: Hopefully I will never see it. [laughs]
DRE: I saw it in a hotel room.
Ed: Was there no porn?
DRE: Well youve got to pay for porn.
Ed: [laughs] Ive seen about two minutes of it and that was enough. If that movie had promised some nudity I would have watched it. Its sad that such a cool character had such a bad movie. The Catwoman of the Batman TV show must have launched 1000 boners around the world.
The floppy market is interesting. I think its going to go on for a long time. Everyone keeps saying the floppies are doomed and everyones buying trades. But if they really look at it, the floppies especially through Vertigo and Wildstorm and any independent book that comes out, really help support being able to create the trades. Thats why I get really frustrated when people tell me theyre waiting for the trade on Criminal because nobodys paying us to do this book. If the comics themselves dont sell then it may get to the point where we cant continue to do the book because you have to sell a lot of trade paperbacks to make up for how much money you can make selling the comic at first.
DRE: Do you know how Criminal is doing?
Ed: I dont know what the orders are for number six are but we never went below 20,000 for the first five so were doing well enough to keep it going. I figure we can survive depending on foreign sales and trade paperback sales. Im hoping we can find a good level to stabilize that. It seems like its one of those books where every time I go to a convention I bring stacks of it to give away to fans and as much publicity as I did about the book when it was launching I still meet tons of people whove never even heard of it. They say they are huge fans of mine and have been to my website. But its on the front page of my website so its like, Do you just not look at stuff when you click on things? I dont understand how you could not have heard of book by your supposedly favorite writer. This is my favorite book that Im writing.
DRE: Im not going to rip on your fans or anything but the majority of your fans must be readers of your X-Men and Captain America.
Ed: Yeah, Captain America and Daredevil which have both had about the same amount of readers in the last year, like mid-50s. I thought they were reaching the exact same people but I think theyre two completely different audiences with about a ten or 20 percent overlap.
DRE: The concept of the Marvel zombie, the fans not the book, must have become more concentrated over the last 15 years. I bet a big chunk of people who read Marvel books, only read Marvel books. Also because the floppies are so expensive now.
Ed: Yeah, and you do hear from people who are like Im waiting for the trade. Im waiting for the trade and its like, Well, you better buy the damn trade when it comes out. [laughs]
DRE: I think you guys will be pretty surprised when the trade comes out. Look what happened with something like Runaways. They were about to cancel that book and then the trades did well.
Ed: Ive been really surprised. The last book we did, Sleeper, consistently sold around 12,000 copies an issue and I figured wed do a little bit better than that with Criminal since it is through Marvel. But I knew a straight crime comic would be a hard sell. But we sold out of the first issue at 31,000 copies or something like that so it was beyond my expectations. Every issue has sold better than I thought it was going to. The foreign market has really been crazy for it. Over in Europe they love crime stuff.
DRE: Thats the great thing about over there.
Ed: They love everything but superheroes [laughs]. Youd be surprised though, Chris Claremont is one of the most popular comic book writers in France. Milo Manara called up Marvel asking to work with Chris Claremont.
DRE: Wow.
Ed: Bendis told me that and I was like, Oh my God, we would kill for that job.
DRE: Well write the same book for 17 years and see what happens.
Ed: [laughs] It already feels like that.
DRE: Also when it is a miniseries within a series I think people will wait for the trades even more.
Ed: Thats why we did it as an ongoing instead of a series of miniseries like Sin City was. We considered relaunching with a new number one every five issues, but I really want to have something that goes on and on and I think all the stories do link together. Like I just finished writing a scene that shows what happened to the little girl at the end of issue five. If you read the previous one, its like an Easter egg and if you didnt its just part of the story. It is designed for them to be read together. Like if you read one George Pelecanos book you want to read them all.
DRE: Ive never read an Icon book in floppy before. Theres almost no Marvel indicia on the comics.
Ed: Yeah it just says that its published by Marvel. Because of the content they dont really want the big Marvel logo on the front. We package the whole book and turn it in to them print ready and then they just send it to the printer. They work with us on marketing and soliciting while they handle the printing. We oversee every aspect of it so its a lot closer to working with someplace like Image.
DRE: Thats definitely what it sounds like.
Ed: But the advantage of Icon over any other places who do that is, like you said there are Marvel zombies, and there are stores out there who will only order books from Marvel. So Im getting into stores that never would have carried my stuff before. Even if that store is only ordering two or three copies thats still reaching a reader who might not have seen it before. I stopped being such an indie comic snob sometime in my late 20s because when I worked in comic book stores I found that the people buying X-Men and the people buying Eightball, 90% of the time were the same person. People who like comics tend to like a lot of comics [laughs]. People who work in alternative comics often think that people who buy their comics are the hippest, coolest people who only buy McSweeneys and Fantagraphics. It turns out that you have plenty of nerds buying your stuff too. Also Im not a genre snob so I didnt really care about that aspect of it.
DRE: Could Leo be the Complete Lowlife all grown up?
Ed: [laughs] No, thank God. I think what I realized with working on Criminal is that the autobiographical aspect of it is the stuff about family. I guess its the running theme through all my stuff, which I never realized until people pointed it out. Im always talking about generational stuff and families and dysfunctional families and the families that people create around themselves to replace the family that they dont like. Theres that aspect of it and while I was working on the character arc my stepdad was starting to get into the bad stages of Alzheimers. Then he had a stroke and died almost instantly, it was shocking. That was on my mind as I was writing Criminal. Ive known a few different people who have had close families where their dad or mom had Alzheimers and went through hell. Leo is me processing my own rage that I keep in check 99.9% of the time.
DRE: Im not going to give away the ending but did you always know that he was going to go through that change at the end?
Ed: Oh yeah, that was always the secret. Every Criminal arc is building toward this big meta-arc that I want to tell after five or six different stories. I want to tell the story of what happened when Leo was a teenager, with him, Ricky Lawless and Ricky Lawless dad. I want it to be a multi-generational story where part of the story is about their parents who are planning a heist and about these teenagers who are realizing exactly who their parents are and wanting to emulate them. So I had all that back story. I have a huge notebook filled with all the different characters that are going to star in the various stories. I knew the reason that Leo was the kind of guy who would walk away from a fight because of the violence that he feared was inside of him. I think thats something a lot of people grapple with, especially anybody who was around real violence. For a few years when I was a teenager and just before I turned 20 I lived around a lot of drugs and violence and crime and that eventually really scared the shit out of me and scared me, not straight exactly, but straight-ish.
DRE: [laughs] I just interviewed Scott Frank who directed The Lookout.
Ed: Oh wow. I havent seen that one yet, I hear its great.
DRE: Its okay.
Ed: Was it as good as Brick?
DRE: No. But I really love Brick.
Ed: Brick and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang were my favorite movies in the last couple years probably.
DRE: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favorite movies.
Ed: Thats the movie I watch like once a month. Actually your interview with Shane Black was what made me sit down and finally start writing Criminal because Id been kicking around all these ideas for years. I remember there was something he said about being frustrated about working with all these other people and deciding that he wanted to just direct his own stuff. Its a lot easier for Shane Black to do that because hes a multimillionaire. But after reading that interview and seeing that movie I was like, I need to get off my ass and do something that I really want to do, that Ive just been putting off. Doing the work for hire stuff only was starting to get to me.
DRE: My interview did that? Thats so cool!
Ed: Thats the only interview that I can find with the guy.
DRE: There were only a couple. There was one on CHUD.
Ed: Hes pretty reclusive.
DRE: Hes not reclusive.
Ed: Really?
DRE: Yeah, it was Warner Bros.
Ed: They just did a really shitty job publicizing it?
DRE: Well the movie only cost $15 million. I think they knew it wasnt going to make a lot of money so they basically dumped it.
Ed: Its too bad because thats the best screenplay that Ive seen in a long time. It was filmed so beautifully. I dont think theres a bad beat in the movie and Ive watched it like ten or 15 times. I loved Brick but its clearly someone doing Red Harvest in high school basically and every time someone does Red Harvest its generally interesting but what I liked about Brick was how tight it was and much like actual Dashiell Hammett stuff, you actually have to pay attention to figure out what the hell is going on.
DRE: [Brick writer/director] Rian [Johnson] did a really good job of putting all the film noir conventions into high school.
Ed: He also did something that went beyond the Hammett or even Millers Crossing. In Millers Crossing, Tom [played by Gabriel Byrne] is not a very sympathetic guy while in Brick the main character has more heart than anyone in the movie. You end up feeling really heartbroken for him at the end which I think elevates that movie beyond just doing a pastiche of that genre in high school.
DRE: Its always nice to have a sad ending. Its almost like real life.
Ed: Yeah, its like real life or real noir. The dialogue was so cool and those actors were so good in their delivery because the dialogue was really cheesy a lot of the time. Im really interested to see his next movie.
DRE: My point with Scott Frank was that since hes written so much crime stuff, I was surprised when he said the least interesting part of The Lookout was the actual heist. Whats your opinion of the heist in Criminal?
Ed: Thats why I put it in act one. [laughs] To me it was about everything around the heist. I love the heist as a genre but I think you have to have an interesting heist to hook everybody into caring about it. The heist is the vehicle to introducing all your characters and introducing the tension between them. In Coward, the heist itself is pretty much something I thought of while I was watching an armored car stuck in traffic one day in the Stockton Street Tunnel in San Francisco. I had been reading about all these UPS trucks that had been getting robbed in the financial district. These guys were breaking into the back of the UPS trucks and stealing computers and stuff and thats when I thought it would be interesting if somebody could figure out a way to get an armored car stuck in traffic and rob it. Ive been thinking about that for eight or ten years. But the heist itself becomes mechanical. Its almost like youre leaving parts around and making sure that youve got everybody where they need to be. That part of it was a pain because in comics especially you have to make sure everythings incredibly clear. I thought we pulled it off well but I was really relieved to be into the aftermath of the heist [laughs].
DRE: Do you write full script for Sean?
Ed: Oh yeah, I do full script for everybody. My scripts for Sean are pretty non-descriptive. My scripts tend to be the way I wrote them for myself when I used to be a cartoonist, which was just enough to remember what I needed to draw to go along with the dialogue or the scenario and then let the artist figure out how to pull it all off. I was talking to Brian Azzarello about this years ago. He gives even less description than I do. I tend to tell whats important or write what the characters are feeling so that can come across. Im much more about the emotions of these characters than I am about the camera angles or anything like that. I almost never suggest a camera angle for Sean unless its incredibly important for the scene to be from that angle.
DRE: I believe Bendis has said that he doesnt like his own artwork. But obviously you guys could do so much better writing four books a month than drawing one book a month.
Ed: [laughs] Yeah, I am an incredibly slow cartoonist. Its funny because I only started writing as a kid so I would have something to draw. I wanted to be a superhero penciler as a kid. Then when I got up to around 14 or 15, I started reading underground and alternative comics and I decided I wanted to be a writer/artist. So I actually started focusing on the writing part more but I never imagined that I would not draw. I went through some weird, life-changing stuff in the late 90s and after a couple of years of that rollercoaster I ended up with a career as a writer. I still draw once in a while but drawing comics is so hard. It took me six months to draw a comic generally and part of the problem was that I knew it was going to take me forever to draw and that I would be mostly unhappy with the art. I always felt like I was slamming up against my limitations as an artist as far as most of the things I could draw. I always felt like, Okay, is this story worth six months of my life? So coming up with stories that felt like they were worth my drawing efforts was incredibly hard. I kept having ideas for stories that I knew I could never possibly draw. Right after I got married I decided I was going to try and do a graphic novel that was going to be just a straight mystery. I actually went to various locations that were going to be in it and took a lot of photos and things like that and started to sketch things out. I instantly felt frustrated with my own abilities. It wasnt exhilarating to sit down and draw but what was exhilarating was to write scripts for Sean Phillips and Michael Lark and get back pages that were way better than anything I could draw. At this point, I figure most of the kind of stories that I could draw myself I could probably get someone else better than me to draw the same thing and get it published. But you never know. I wonder every once in a while whether I should try to do a weekly strip or just try to have a much simpler style of drawing than the one I was trying to do before.
DRE: Im sure you remember when Jim Valentino was the great autobiographical artist.
Ed: He did a strip about belladonna that totally freaked me out.
DRE: Oh thats a great one, isnt it? [laughs]
Ed: Yeah, he takes belladonna and hes high for like six months or something.
DRE: And he thinks hes covered in fur at one point.
Ed: That made me never want to do that drug.
DRE: [laughs] He did this other semi-autobiographical story years ago called Touch of Silver. In the intro, he wrote how he loves doing superhero books but mostly he does them for financial reasons and he understands that theyre adolescent male power fantasies. Even though you do stuff a for a bit of an older age than when he started doing superheroes but do you feel like youre writing adolescent male power fantasies?
Ed: Well, theyre not anymore adolescent than something like 24 [laughs]. I try to write stuff that I would enjoy reading. Its a little different than a teen book like the X-Men. I had to make a switch in my head when I started working on stuff like Batman or Catwoman to try to figure out what my angle was going to be so that I could make it feel like I wasnt slumming or something. Some friends of mine from alternative comics had gotten work that DC or Marvel bottomed out pretty quickly because you could tell it wasnt their real work as far as they were concerned. My feeling is always that anybody whos buying it needs it to be your real work. Its just taps into a different part of your creativity. To me it was trying to think of it as being something like a pulp writer, which is something I completely admire. These guys who would sit down and write for two cents a word or something and support their families throughout the Depression like Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, these fucking lunatics. I knew going into it that the majority of the audience was college age or older so I never felt like I needed to dumb anything down. Im not trying to write superhero comics that arent superhero comics but I try to write them as if they make sense [laughs]. I just accept that this is the world that these events take place in. All pulp fiction is adolescent power fantasy. Ive been re-reading all the Parker novels, the Richard Stark books. They even say on the covers of a lot of them, A story of violence. Theyre littered with violence but they also have some of these coolest most inventive heists of all time.
DRE: Have you seen the directors cut of Payback yet?
Ed: Oh yeah, I saw that a couple weeks ago.
DRE: I loved it.
Ed: I loved it too. Ive got to agree with [Payback writer/director Brian] Helgeland because in the making of thing he said Its not like Im saying my version is a masterpiece. Its just my version. I thought it was a much better movie. I had recently reread The Hunter and it is amazing how close it is to the book. It is less mean than the book, the book is really fucking mean. There are only a couple things in Payback that really irritate me now as opposed to before when half the movie really irritated me. Its irritating when he steals from the blind guy but the blind guy is not really blind. Its much cooler if he just steals from the blind guy and then pushes him down. Parkers an asshole. Parker is not a nice character. He only cares about two people. As much as I enjoyed it I really still prefer Point Blank. It doesnt follow the book but its such an artfully made film.
DRE: Its going to be tough to compete with a movie youve seen a trillion times.
Ed: Yeah thats true. But you know what came out this week thats a really great movie almost no one has seen, The Silent Partner.
DRE: They sent me the DVD. I was like, What the hell is this movie? Ive never heard of the director. Then I was reading what Patton Oswalt wrote about it in the back of Criminal and I was like, Now Ive got to go find the DVD. [laughs]
Ed: Yeah, David Goyer and I talked about that a long time ago. I was talking to him about Curtis Hanson and I said Curtis Hanson wrote that Bedroom Window movie which is like half-good. David said Even before that he wrote The Silent Partner. I had seen it on HBO when I was in eighth grade and it scarred me. I actually went on Amazon and tracked down the book. Its based on a book by a Danish writer named Anders Bodelsen who apparently is real popular in Denmark. I found English translations of them used on Amazon for like a dollar.
DRE: Have they shown up yet?
Ed: No, theyll be here next week probably. The book that its based on is called Pick a Number. I dont want to ruin the movie for you but Christopher Plummer is so good in it.
DRE: Im sure this is very old news, but I read you wrote the script for The Fall.
Ed: Yes, right now we actually have potential financing for that in place and we have a director attached and actors are actually reading the script. We have to attach some actors to it to get the financing completed but theyve got some pretty big name actors reading the script right now. I think everybody whos read the script really loved it. Ill be amazed if it does actually happen but theyre optimistic and this foreign financier loved the screenplay. He is apparently a guy who one of the producers has worked with on a number of occasions so hes not one of these weird flakes. The plan now is either through some American means or through foreign financing to raise the budget to make it. It would be a low budget. We refer to it as the slacker noir genre. Its interesting because I wrote three drafts of the script and then the guy whos going to direct it, Bently Tittle, is a screenwriter and actor and has been directing music videos for years. He did a pass on it to tighten it up and changed the age of the main characters, which I was really against at first but when I read his draft it was really weird because its a much better movie and 75% of it is still exactly what I wrote. He just changed the context a little bit and it made it much more exciting and made me actually think, Okay, I can actually see this getting made now.
DRE: Do you write spec scripts for TV or movies?
Ed: Besides The Fall, I wrote a couple other scripts when I was in my 20s to try to figure out how to write screenplays and comics. But Ive got a couple of things up in the air right now. Weve had some discussions with a couple of different places about optioning Criminal. I would want to write the script for that unless theyre willing to pay me enough to not write it. My uncle [John Paxton] was a big screenwriter from the 40s to the late 70s. I always fantasized about having that lifestyle a little bit. I already write and most movies suck so how bad could I be?
DRE: Did you ever get a chance to hang out with your uncle?
Ed: I met him as a little kid and I was really impressed because he was writing the Emergency spin-off cartoon Emergency +4 which was probably the thing he was least proud of in his career because hed also won the Screen Actors Guild award earlier that year for the Walter Matthau movie Kotch. He was really tight with most of the Hollywood Ten but somehow he managed to escape all of that [HUAC] nonsense unscathed. I guess he wasnt political or never attended any meetings or anything and he didnt name names because [Spartacus screenwriter] Dalton Trumbo was his best friend.
DRE: How are you holding up after all this Captain America stuff?
Ed: I was pretty exhausted for the first couple of weeks. It was really hard to find the time to get work done because I was literally doing interviews everyday. Between print, TV and radio stuff I think I did 40 or 50 interviews in three days. Just this week I finally have been getting back to full time work where I dont have to do Cap stuff constantly. But every day or two, I get three or four emails from people telling me what a douchebag I am and how I ruined their favorite comic character.
DRE: Whatever.
Ed: Yeah. I love that they can have him as their favorite comic character and they say theyve been reading it for 30 years but yet they dont know that within the last 30 years hes died four or five times. This is just the only time it ever got media exposure.
DRE: Didnt everyone blow up and die in Heroes Reborn just ten years ago?
Ed: They killed him before that too. I know [Jim] Steranko killed him once. I know [Mark] Gruenwald killed him.
DRE: Gruenwald killed him?
Ed: Yeah, Gruenwald killed him at the end of his run. He had him dying of cancer or something like that and then [Mark] Waid revived him at the beginning of his run.
DRE: Oh yeah, I stopped reading Captain America after Ron Lim left.
Ed: At the end of it he was wearing a suit of armor. Its not good.
DRE: [laughs] And he turned into a wolf or something.
Ed: Yeah, I stopped reading them around the time of Cap Wolf. About a year before is the point when Gruenwald should have resigned from the book.
DRE: If he had left right after Ron Lim did it would have been perfect.
Ed: I think he did a really good job on the first 50 issues he did up to issue 350.
DRE: I love that run of Captain America.
Ed: Yeah, the whole Super-Patriot becomes the new Captain America thing was really cool.
DRE: Gruenwald really liked to have fun with the continuity.
Ed: Exactly. The only thing I dont really like about the Gruenwald run is that hes the prime guy who said that Cap never killed anyone during the war. He had that whole scene where Cap killed a terrorist. He couldnt get to his shield so he picked up a gun and shot a guy and then went on national TV and apologized for saving a room full of people. He saved like 60 or 70 people by killing one guy and I thought, Are you kidding me? Even as a teenager I remember reading that one and going, What? Is this the same guy who Steranko had blow up a whole warehouse full of Hydra and then walked away lighting a cigar or something? Is this the guy who fought in World War II for five years? I couldnt believe that. Thats my only real bone of contention with that era. It may have been editorially mandated but you cant say the guy is a super soldier and that he wouldnt have killed Nazis.
DRE: Whos going to get mad at someone for killing a Nazi?
Ed: What point would there be? Lets create an army of these super soldiers who are all pacifists [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] Lets give them all shields.
Ed: What good is The Human Torch and Toro flying around on fire if they cant send giant exploding fireballs down on people that are not non-lethal? How do you have a non-lethal exploding fireball? It just doesnt look right [laughs]. The Sub-Mariner will bring this tidal wave but itll only wind people. Its not going to drown anybody.
DRE: Yeah, the water would only go up to everyones neck.
Ed: It just seems like that era did that.
Also Cap also died during Dan Jurgens run. Thats at least four times where hes died. So to get email from people who claim theyve been reading the book for 30 years and this is the last straw and theyre quitting all comics. Arent they at least going to stick around and find out what happens next?
DRE: Are you going to keep writing the book for a while?
Ed: Yeah, Ive got it mapped out to issue 50 or 60.
DRE: I know you cant really talk about how Cap will come back. But if someone has read comics for 30 years then why would they be so mad about a character dying? They should know better.
Ed: Its not just comics. It is any serialized fiction starting with Sherlock Holmes apparently. I date it all the way back to the compare it to the gospels of Jesus.
DRE: He came back to life too.
Ed: He came back and for a long time there was no story about him coming back. Then they came up with a story where he came back just to piss off the Christians. But [Arthur] Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes die and then years later after people demanded it, he did a story that basically said, Oh this is what really happened and how he really didnt die. Episodic fiction has always had characters die but the story isnt They died and its just a trick. The story generally comes to How do they come back or do they come back or does someone else pick up the mantle? With the story of the death of Captain America, theres so much to explore once hes dead. Much like with bringing Bucky back, that had been done before but I always felt like it was a cop-out. As a kid reading the book it always infuriated me that it was always a robot or a stand-in or some kind of trick and I just thought, Why dont they bring Bucky back? Bucky is a cool character. So when I started the book I wanted to do that story but I wanted to do it in a different way than anyone else had ever done it. Thats the same thing with the death of Cap. Were trying to do a superhero death in a way thats completely different than anything else thats ever been done. Were actually dealing with the ramifications of it as opposed to next issue people trying out to be Captain America. Theres not going to be anyone running around in a Captain America costume for a long time.
DRE: Is that true?
Ed: Yeah, theres no replacement Cap being brought up immediately or anything like that. The book is now about the world and the rest of the cast and how they deal with this loss. The book then becomes the exploration of the loss of the spirit of America in a way. It has some resonance with most people in America right now.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the website for Criminal
Daniel Robert Epstein: So I shouldnt call you killer then?
Ed Brubaker: No man. Well, you can but its not accurate.
DRE: [laughs] Im kidding, I didnt even read it.
Ed: Oh, you havent read the comic. Its widely available now [laughs]. The day that it came out, not so much.
DRE: I dont really read Marvel books until I get them in the trades and even then I dont read a lot of them.
Ed: Yeah, thats understandable.
DRE: Its hard to think of what Marvel stuff I read. I read some of the House of M stuff in trades. That was bizarre.
Ed: Yeah, that was an alternate reality. The best of Marvel or DC stuff is really the stuff, Im going to get in trouble for saying this probably, where guys like [Brian Michael] Bendis and [Alex] Maleev were doing Daredevil for 50 or 60 issues and you could just read that without caring about anything else. I like when theres a singular vision or when a writer and an artist are clearly working on a book because they want to do that book and they have stories developed for that character. When all the events start to crowd it in, I know sales go up, but personally my favorite Marvel books are Garth Ennis Punisher and I cant think of anything else. A little brain fart there. I think there are a lot of good Marvel books and they are better than they have been for a long, long time.
DRE: Thats what they say and certainly the art has gotten a lot better in the past ten years or so.
Ed: Yeah. It depends on what kind of books you like to read but I think that was what was the most interesting thing about Bendis coming to Marvel. At the same time that me, [Greg] Rucka and a bunch of people were over at DC he broke in at Marvel and brought that indie comics flavor to some of their books. Hes done like 110 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man and its a fun book.
DRE: It seems like superhero comics today are not meant for people that have read, like myself, a lot of superhero comics. Its so hard to come up with something new for these characters.
Ed: The new stuff is not embraced by the fans. Thats the secret thing that no one really wants to talk about. People always say we should create something new but when you do create something new or some new twist on superheroes like what Sean [Phillips] and I did with Sleeper its embraced by people who dont read comics but its not embraced by the people who read comics. Unless we get lucky, the fans want to see the old stuff over again.
DRE: They say there are about 150,000 people who buy the floppies.
Ed: Its probably closer to 200,000. Thats what we guesstimate based on how well Frank Millers Dark Knight sequel did with its first issue. Whereas with Captain America number 25 theyve sold something close to 400,000 at this point. Clearly there are not 400,000 people reading it because Im signing a stack of ten for one person.
DRE: But isnt it insane that the numbers not getting really bigger. If the first Spider-Man movie making $400 million doesnt get a ton more people reading Spider-Man than nothing will.
Ed: Yeah, a couple people have isolated what they think the problem is and I agree with them. The Spider-Man movies elevate the Spider-Man trades overall. I remember talking to people at Marvel that the Ultimate Spider-Man trades always do huge numbers around those movies but theres not one trade that every store orders that sells like 300,000 copies. There are ten or 15 different trades that all get orders in smaller numbers so they do benefit from it. All the Sin City books ended up selling like a half million copies of those books around the time when the movie came out.
DRE: Which is unbelievable, but then again, how many people went to go see that movie.
Ed: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people who saw that movie were like, Im going to go check out that book. Ive never read 300 and after I saw 300, even though I didnt think it was a masterpiece or anything, I was like Im going to go check out that book. I wandered into the Barnes & Noble next to the movie theater and they didnt have the book and I was like Well, shit. When theres a single thing that you can sell, like when the V for Vendetta movie came out. The book was everywhere. Thats generally how movies help books sell. With the From Hell movie Eddie Campbell said they sold like 100,000 copies of the Top Shelf edition of the book. But when you have Spider-Man and Fantastic Four or Batman, there are too many options for the average person. They dont have just one book to go into the bookstore and go, Oh this is the Batman book. These characters have been around too long.
DRE: Maybe things will change now that Marvel is making their own movies but I think another big problem is that theres no real synergy between the movies and the comics.
Ed: Yeah, I dont look at it that closely because they havent made one out of anything Ive worked on yet [laughs]. I guess they did on Batman. But they did those movies on Batman long before I ever worked on it.
DRE: Yeah, you dont get to call dibs on that, Im sorry.
Ed: Yeah. They did the Catwoman movie when I was working on Catwoman. I was really glad they didnt make me change Catwomans costume into torn up Levis or whatever.
DRE: That was a terrible movie.
Ed: Hopefully I will never see it. [laughs]
DRE: I saw it in a hotel room.
Ed: Was there no porn?
DRE: Well youve got to pay for porn.
Ed: [laughs] Ive seen about two minutes of it and that was enough. If that movie had promised some nudity I would have watched it. Its sad that such a cool character had such a bad movie. The Catwoman of the Batman TV show must have launched 1000 boners around the world.
The floppy market is interesting. I think its going to go on for a long time. Everyone keeps saying the floppies are doomed and everyones buying trades. But if they really look at it, the floppies especially through Vertigo and Wildstorm and any independent book that comes out, really help support being able to create the trades. Thats why I get really frustrated when people tell me theyre waiting for the trade on Criminal because nobodys paying us to do this book. If the comics themselves dont sell then it may get to the point where we cant continue to do the book because you have to sell a lot of trade paperbacks to make up for how much money you can make selling the comic at first.
DRE: Do you know how Criminal is doing?
Ed: I dont know what the orders are for number six are but we never went below 20,000 for the first five so were doing well enough to keep it going. I figure we can survive depending on foreign sales and trade paperback sales. Im hoping we can find a good level to stabilize that. It seems like its one of those books where every time I go to a convention I bring stacks of it to give away to fans and as much publicity as I did about the book when it was launching I still meet tons of people whove never even heard of it. They say they are huge fans of mine and have been to my website. But its on the front page of my website so its like, Do you just not look at stuff when you click on things? I dont understand how you could not have heard of book by your supposedly favorite writer. This is my favorite book that Im writing.
DRE: Im not going to rip on your fans or anything but the majority of your fans must be readers of your X-Men and Captain America.
Ed: Yeah, Captain America and Daredevil which have both had about the same amount of readers in the last year, like mid-50s. I thought they were reaching the exact same people but I think theyre two completely different audiences with about a ten or 20 percent overlap.
DRE: The concept of the Marvel zombie, the fans not the book, must have become more concentrated over the last 15 years. I bet a big chunk of people who read Marvel books, only read Marvel books. Also because the floppies are so expensive now.
Ed: Yeah, and you do hear from people who are like Im waiting for the trade. Im waiting for the trade and its like, Well, you better buy the damn trade when it comes out. [laughs]
DRE: I think you guys will be pretty surprised when the trade comes out. Look what happened with something like Runaways. They were about to cancel that book and then the trades did well.
Ed: Ive been really surprised. The last book we did, Sleeper, consistently sold around 12,000 copies an issue and I figured wed do a little bit better than that with Criminal since it is through Marvel. But I knew a straight crime comic would be a hard sell. But we sold out of the first issue at 31,000 copies or something like that so it was beyond my expectations. Every issue has sold better than I thought it was going to. The foreign market has really been crazy for it. Over in Europe they love crime stuff.
DRE: Thats the great thing about over there.
Ed: They love everything but superheroes [laughs]. Youd be surprised though, Chris Claremont is one of the most popular comic book writers in France. Milo Manara called up Marvel asking to work with Chris Claremont.
DRE: Wow.
Ed: Bendis told me that and I was like, Oh my God, we would kill for that job.
DRE: Well write the same book for 17 years and see what happens.
Ed: [laughs] It already feels like that.
DRE: Also when it is a miniseries within a series I think people will wait for the trades even more.
Ed: Thats why we did it as an ongoing instead of a series of miniseries like Sin City was. We considered relaunching with a new number one every five issues, but I really want to have something that goes on and on and I think all the stories do link together. Like I just finished writing a scene that shows what happened to the little girl at the end of issue five. If you read the previous one, its like an Easter egg and if you didnt its just part of the story. It is designed for them to be read together. Like if you read one George Pelecanos book you want to read them all.
DRE: Ive never read an Icon book in floppy before. Theres almost no Marvel indicia on the comics.
Ed: Yeah it just says that its published by Marvel. Because of the content they dont really want the big Marvel logo on the front. We package the whole book and turn it in to them print ready and then they just send it to the printer. They work with us on marketing and soliciting while they handle the printing. We oversee every aspect of it so its a lot closer to working with someplace like Image.
DRE: Thats definitely what it sounds like.
Ed: But the advantage of Icon over any other places who do that is, like you said there are Marvel zombies, and there are stores out there who will only order books from Marvel. So Im getting into stores that never would have carried my stuff before. Even if that store is only ordering two or three copies thats still reaching a reader who might not have seen it before. I stopped being such an indie comic snob sometime in my late 20s because when I worked in comic book stores I found that the people buying X-Men and the people buying Eightball, 90% of the time were the same person. People who like comics tend to like a lot of comics [laughs]. People who work in alternative comics often think that people who buy their comics are the hippest, coolest people who only buy McSweeneys and Fantagraphics. It turns out that you have plenty of nerds buying your stuff too. Also Im not a genre snob so I didnt really care about that aspect of it.
DRE: Could Leo be the Complete Lowlife all grown up?
Ed: [laughs] No, thank God. I think what I realized with working on Criminal is that the autobiographical aspect of it is the stuff about family. I guess its the running theme through all my stuff, which I never realized until people pointed it out. Im always talking about generational stuff and families and dysfunctional families and the families that people create around themselves to replace the family that they dont like. Theres that aspect of it and while I was working on the character arc my stepdad was starting to get into the bad stages of Alzheimers. Then he had a stroke and died almost instantly, it was shocking. That was on my mind as I was writing Criminal. Ive known a few different people who have had close families where their dad or mom had Alzheimers and went through hell. Leo is me processing my own rage that I keep in check 99.9% of the time.
DRE: Im not going to give away the ending but did you always know that he was going to go through that change at the end?
Ed: Oh yeah, that was always the secret. Every Criminal arc is building toward this big meta-arc that I want to tell after five or six different stories. I want to tell the story of what happened when Leo was a teenager, with him, Ricky Lawless and Ricky Lawless dad. I want it to be a multi-generational story where part of the story is about their parents who are planning a heist and about these teenagers who are realizing exactly who their parents are and wanting to emulate them. So I had all that back story. I have a huge notebook filled with all the different characters that are going to star in the various stories. I knew the reason that Leo was the kind of guy who would walk away from a fight because of the violence that he feared was inside of him. I think thats something a lot of people grapple with, especially anybody who was around real violence. For a few years when I was a teenager and just before I turned 20 I lived around a lot of drugs and violence and crime and that eventually really scared the shit out of me and scared me, not straight exactly, but straight-ish.
DRE: [laughs] I just interviewed Scott Frank who directed The Lookout.
Ed: Oh wow. I havent seen that one yet, I hear its great.
DRE: Its okay.
Ed: Was it as good as Brick?
DRE: No. But I really love Brick.
Ed: Brick and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang were my favorite movies in the last couple years probably.
DRE: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favorite movies.
Ed: Thats the movie I watch like once a month. Actually your interview with Shane Black was what made me sit down and finally start writing Criminal because Id been kicking around all these ideas for years. I remember there was something he said about being frustrated about working with all these other people and deciding that he wanted to just direct his own stuff. Its a lot easier for Shane Black to do that because hes a multimillionaire. But after reading that interview and seeing that movie I was like, I need to get off my ass and do something that I really want to do, that Ive just been putting off. Doing the work for hire stuff only was starting to get to me.
DRE: My interview did that? Thats so cool!
Ed: Thats the only interview that I can find with the guy.
DRE: There were only a couple. There was one on CHUD.
Ed: Hes pretty reclusive.
DRE: Hes not reclusive.
Ed: Really?
DRE: Yeah, it was Warner Bros.
Ed: They just did a really shitty job publicizing it?
DRE: Well the movie only cost $15 million. I think they knew it wasnt going to make a lot of money so they basically dumped it.
Ed: Its too bad because thats the best screenplay that Ive seen in a long time. It was filmed so beautifully. I dont think theres a bad beat in the movie and Ive watched it like ten or 15 times. I loved Brick but its clearly someone doing Red Harvest in high school basically and every time someone does Red Harvest its generally interesting but what I liked about Brick was how tight it was and much like actual Dashiell Hammett stuff, you actually have to pay attention to figure out what the hell is going on.
DRE: [Brick writer/director] Rian [Johnson] did a really good job of putting all the film noir conventions into high school.
Ed: He also did something that went beyond the Hammett or even Millers Crossing. In Millers Crossing, Tom [played by Gabriel Byrne] is not a very sympathetic guy while in Brick the main character has more heart than anyone in the movie. You end up feeling really heartbroken for him at the end which I think elevates that movie beyond just doing a pastiche of that genre in high school.
DRE: Its always nice to have a sad ending. Its almost like real life.
Ed: Yeah, its like real life or real noir. The dialogue was so cool and those actors were so good in their delivery because the dialogue was really cheesy a lot of the time. Im really interested to see his next movie.
DRE: My point with Scott Frank was that since hes written so much crime stuff, I was surprised when he said the least interesting part of The Lookout was the actual heist. Whats your opinion of the heist in Criminal?
Ed: Thats why I put it in act one. [laughs] To me it was about everything around the heist. I love the heist as a genre but I think you have to have an interesting heist to hook everybody into caring about it. The heist is the vehicle to introducing all your characters and introducing the tension between them. In Coward, the heist itself is pretty much something I thought of while I was watching an armored car stuck in traffic one day in the Stockton Street Tunnel in San Francisco. I had been reading about all these UPS trucks that had been getting robbed in the financial district. These guys were breaking into the back of the UPS trucks and stealing computers and stuff and thats when I thought it would be interesting if somebody could figure out a way to get an armored car stuck in traffic and rob it. Ive been thinking about that for eight or ten years. But the heist itself becomes mechanical. Its almost like youre leaving parts around and making sure that youve got everybody where they need to be. That part of it was a pain because in comics especially you have to make sure everythings incredibly clear. I thought we pulled it off well but I was really relieved to be into the aftermath of the heist [laughs].
DRE: Do you write full script for Sean?
Ed: Oh yeah, I do full script for everybody. My scripts for Sean are pretty non-descriptive. My scripts tend to be the way I wrote them for myself when I used to be a cartoonist, which was just enough to remember what I needed to draw to go along with the dialogue or the scenario and then let the artist figure out how to pull it all off. I was talking to Brian Azzarello about this years ago. He gives even less description than I do. I tend to tell whats important or write what the characters are feeling so that can come across. Im much more about the emotions of these characters than I am about the camera angles or anything like that. I almost never suggest a camera angle for Sean unless its incredibly important for the scene to be from that angle.
DRE: I believe Bendis has said that he doesnt like his own artwork. But obviously you guys could do so much better writing four books a month than drawing one book a month.
Ed: [laughs] Yeah, I am an incredibly slow cartoonist. Its funny because I only started writing as a kid so I would have something to draw. I wanted to be a superhero penciler as a kid. Then when I got up to around 14 or 15, I started reading underground and alternative comics and I decided I wanted to be a writer/artist. So I actually started focusing on the writing part more but I never imagined that I would not draw. I went through some weird, life-changing stuff in the late 90s and after a couple of years of that rollercoaster I ended up with a career as a writer. I still draw once in a while but drawing comics is so hard. It took me six months to draw a comic generally and part of the problem was that I knew it was going to take me forever to draw and that I would be mostly unhappy with the art. I always felt like I was slamming up against my limitations as an artist as far as most of the things I could draw. I always felt like, Okay, is this story worth six months of my life? So coming up with stories that felt like they were worth my drawing efforts was incredibly hard. I kept having ideas for stories that I knew I could never possibly draw. Right after I got married I decided I was going to try and do a graphic novel that was going to be just a straight mystery. I actually went to various locations that were going to be in it and took a lot of photos and things like that and started to sketch things out. I instantly felt frustrated with my own abilities. It wasnt exhilarating to sit down and draw but what was exhilarating was to write scripts for Sean Phillips and Michael Lark and get back pages that were way better than anything I could draw. At this point, I figure most of the kind of stories that I could draw myself I could probably get someone else better than me to draw the same thing and get it published. But you never know. I wonder every once in a while whether I should try to do a weekly strip or just try to have a much simpler style of drawing than the one I was trying to do before.
DRE: Im sure you remember when Jim Valentino was the great autobiographical artist.
Ed: He did a strip about belladonna that totally freaked me out.
DRE: Oh thats a great one, isnt it? [laughs]
Ed: Yeah, he takes belladonna and hes high for like six months or something.
DRE: And he thinks hes covered in fur at one point.
Ed: That made me never want to do that drug.
DRE: [laughs] He did this other semi-autobiographical story years ago called Touch of Silver. In the intro, he wrote how he loves doing superhero books but mostly he does them for financial reasons and he understands that theyre adolescent male power fantasies. Even though you do stuff a for a bit of an older age than when he started doing superheroes but do you feel like youre writing adolescent male power fantasies?
Ed: Well, theyre not anymore adolescent than something like 24 [laughs]. I try to write stuff that I would enjoy reading. Its a little different than a teen book like the X-Men. I had to make a switch in my head when I started working on stuff like Batman or Catwoman to try to figure out what my angle was going to be so that I could make it feel like I wasnt slumming or something. Some friends of mine from alternative comics had gotten work that DC or Marvel bottomed out pretty quickly because you could tell it wasnt their real work as far as they were concerned. My feeling is always that anybody whos buying it needs it to be your real work. Its just taps into a different part of your creativity. To me it was trying to think of it as being something like a pulp writer, which is something I completely admire. These guys who would sit down and write for two cents a word or something and support their families throughout the Depression like Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, these fucking lunatics. I knew going into it that the majority of the audience was college age or older so I never felt like I needed to dumb anything down. Im not trying to write superhero comics that arent superhero comics but I try to write them as if they make sense [laughs]. I just accept that this is the world that these events take place in. All pulp fiction is adolescent power fantasy. Ive been re-reading all the Parker novels, the Richard Stark books. They even say on the covers of a lot of them, A story of violence. Theyre littered with violence but they also have some of these coolest most inventive heists of all time.
DRE: Have you seen the directors cut of Payback yet?
Ed: Oh yeah, I saw that a couple weeks ago.
DRE: I loved it.
Ed: I loved it too. Ive got to agree with [Payback writer/director Brian] Helgeland because in the making of thing he said Its not like Im saying my version is a masterpiece. Its just my version. I thought it was a much better movie. I had recently reread The Hunter and it is amazing how close it is to the book. It is less mean than the book, the book is really fucking mean. There are only a couple things in Payback that really irritate me now as opposed to before when half the movie really irritated me. Its irritating when he steals from the blind guy but the blind guy is not really blind. Its much cooler if he just steals from the blind guy and then pushes him down. Parkers an asshole. Parker is not a nice character. He only cares about two people. As much as I enjoyed it I really still prefer Point Blank. It doesnt follow the book but its such an artfully made film.
DRE: Its going to be tough to compete with a movie youve seen a trillion times.
Ed: Yeah thats true. But you know what came out this week thats a really great movie almost no one has seen, The Silent Partner.
DRE: They sent me the DVD. I was like, What the hell is this movie? Ive never heard of the director. Then I was reading what Patton Oswalt wrote about it in the back of Criminal and I was like, Now Ive got to go find the DVD. [laughs]
Ed: Yeah, David Goyer and I talked about that a long time ago. I was talking to him about Curtis Hanson and I said Curtis Hanson wrote that Bedroom Window movie which is like half-good. David said Even before that he wrote The Silent Partner. I had seen it on HBO when I was in eighth grade and it scarred me. I actually went on Amazon and tracked down the book. Its based on a book by a Danish writer named Anders Bodelsen who apparently is real popular in Denmark. I found English translations of them used on Amazon for like a dollar.
DRE: Have they shown up yet?
Ed: No, theyll be here next week probably. The book that its based on is called Pick a Number. I dont want to ruin the movie for you but Christopher Plummer is so good in it.
DRE: Im sure this is very old news, but I read you wrote the script for The Fall.
Ed: Yes, right now we actually have potential financing for that in place and we have a director attached and actors are actually reading the script. We have to attach some actors to it to get the financing completed but theyve got some pretty big name actors reading the script right now. I think everybody whos read the script really loved it. Ill be amazed if it does actually happen but theyre optimistic and this foreign financier loved the screenplay. He is apparently a guy who one of the producers has worked with on a number of occasions so hes not one of these weird flakes. The plan now is either through some American means or through foreign financing to raise the budget to make it. It would be a low budget. We refer to it as the slacker noir genre. Its interesting because I wrote three drafts of the script and then the guy whos going to direct it, Bently Tittle, is a screenwriter and actor and has been directing music videos for years. He did a pass on it to tighten it up and changed the age of the main characters, which I was really against at first but when I read his draft it was really weird because its a much better movie and 75% of it is still exactly what I wrote. He just changed the context a little bit and it made it much more exciting and made me actually think, Okay, I can actually see this getting made now.
DRE: Do you write spec scripts for TV or movies?
Ed: Besides The Fall, I wrote a couple other scripts when I was in my 20s to try to figure out how to write screenplays and comics. But Ive got a couple of things up in the air right now. Weve had some discussions with a couple of different places about optioning Criminal. I would want to write the script for that unless theyre willing to pay me enough to not write it. My uncle [John Paxton] was a big screenwriter from the 40s to the late 70s. I always fantasized about having that lifestyle a little bit. I already write and most movies suck so how bad could I be?
DRE: Did you ever get a chance to hang out with your uncle?
Ed: I met him as a little kid and I was really impressed because he was writing the Emergency spin-off cartoon Emergency +4 which was probably the thing he was least proud of in his career because hed also won the Screen Actors Guild award earlier that year for the Walter Matthau movie Kotch. He was really tight with most of the Hollywood Ten but somehow he managed to escape all of that [HUAC] nonsense unscathed. I guess he wasnt political or never attended any meetings or anything and he didnt name names because [Spartacus screenwriter] Dalton Trumbo was his best friend.
DRE: How are you holding up after all this Captain America stuff?
Ed: I was pretty exhausted for the first couple of weeks. It was really hard to find the time to get work done because I was literally doing interviews everyday. Between print, TV and radio stuff I think I did 40 or 50 interviews in three days. Just this week I finally have been getting back to full time work where I dont have to do Cap stuff constantly. But every day or two, I get three or four emails from people telling me what a douchebag I am and how I ruined their favorite comic character.
DRE: Whatever.
Ed: Yeah. I love that they can have him as their favorite comic character and they say theyve been reading it for 30 years but yet they dont know that within the last 30 years hes died four or five times. This is just the only time it ever got media exposure.
DRE: Didnt everyone blow up and die in Heroes Reborn just ten years ago?
Ed: They killed him before that too. I know [Jim] Steranko killed him once. I know [Mark] Gruenwald killed him.
DRE: Gruenwald killed him?
Ed: Yeah, Gruenwald killed him at the end of his run. He had him dying of cancer or something like that and then [Mark] Waid revived him at the beginning of his run.
DRE: Oh yeah, I stopped reading Captain America after Ron Lim left.
Ed: At the end of it he was wearing a suit of armor. Its not good.
DRE: [laughs] And he turned into a wolf or something.
Ed: Yeah, I stopped reading them around the time of Cap Wolf. About a year before is the point when Gruenwald should have resigned from the book.
DRE: If he had left right after Ron Lim did it would have been perfect.
Ed: I think he did a really good job on the first 50 issues he did up to issue 350.
DRE: I love that run of Captain America.
Ed: Yeah, the whole Super-Patriot becomes the new Captain America thing was really cool.
DRE: Gruenwald really liked to have fun with the continuity.
Ed: Exactly. The only thing I dont really like about the Gruenwald run is that hes the prime guy who said that Cap never killed anyone during the war. He had that whole scene where Cap killed a terrorist. He couldnt get to his shield so he picked up a gun and shot a guy and then went on national TV and apologized for saving a room full of people. He saved like 60 or 70 people by killing one guy and I thought, Are you kidding me? Even as a teenager I remember reading that one and going, What? Is this the same guy who Steranko had blow up a whole warehouse full of Hydra and then walked away lighting a cigar or something? Is this the guy who fought in World War II for five years? I couldnt believe that. Thats my only real bone of contention with that era. It may have been editorially mandated but you cant say the guy is a super soldier and that he wouldnt have killed Nazis.
DRE: Whos going to get mad at someone for killing a Nazi?
Ed: What point would there be? Lets create an army of these super soldiers who are all pacifists [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] Lets give them all shields.
Ed: What good is The Human Torch and Toro flying around on fire if they cant send giant exploding fireballs down on people that are not non-lethal? How do you have a non-lethal exploding fireball? It just doesnt look right [laughs]. The Sub-Mariner will bring this tidal wave but itll only wind people. Its not going to drown anybody.
DRE: Yeah, the water would only go up to everyones neck.
Ed: It just seems like that era did that.
Also Cap also died during Dan Jurgens run. Thats at least four times where hes died. So to get email from people who claim theyve been reading the book for 30 years and this is the last straw and theyre quitting all comics. Arent they at least going to stick around and find out what happens next?
DRE: Are you going to keep writing the book for a while?
Ed: Yeah, Ive got it mapped out to issue 50 or 60.
DRE: I know you cant really talk about how Cap will come back. But if someone has read comics for 30 years then why would they be so mad about a character dying? They should know better.
Ed: Its not just comics. It is any serialized fiction starting with Sherlock Holmes apparently. I date it all the way back to the compare it to the gospels of Jesus.
DRE: He came back to life too.
Ed: He came back and for a long time there was no story about him coming back. Then they came up with a story where he came back just to piss off the Christians. But [Arthur] Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes die and then years later after people demanded it, he did a story that basically said, Oh this is what really happened and how he really didnt die. Episodic fiction has always had characters die but the story isnt They died and its just a trick. The story generally comes to How do they come back or do they come back or does someone else pick up the mantle? With the story of the death of Captain America, theres so much to explore once hes dead. Much like with bringing Bucky back, that had been done before but I always felt like it was a cop-out. As a kid reading the book it always infuriated me that it was always a robot or a stand-in or some kind of trick and I just thought, Why dont they bring Bucky back? Bucky is a cool character. So when I started the book I wanted to do that story but I wanted to do it in a different way than anyone else had ever done it. Thats the same thing with the death of Cap. Were trying to do a superhero death in a way thats completely different than anything else thats ever been done. Were actually dealing with the ramifications of it as opposed to next issue people trying out to be Captain America. Theres not going to be anyone running around in a Captain America costume for a long time.
DRE: Is that true?
Ed: Yeah, theres no replacement Cap being brought up immediately or anything like that. The book is now about the world and the rest of the cast and how they deal with this loss. The book then becomes the exploration of the loss of the spirit of America in a way. It has some resonance with most people in America right now.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
root_beer:
Sweet Interview. I didn't understand what he was saying about Bendis and Maleev in the begining though. I'm pissed I missed him at the Seattle con.
jacob_dodd:
Ed's an awesome dude. And Criminal is awesome, he gave me the first two issues free at a con last year and got me hooked. It's great stuff.