When one thinks of Matt Wagner what comes to mind is the dark visionary who brought Grendel to the comic book page or the man who made Two Face truly scary for the first time in Batman: Faces. What doesn't come to mind is the word jolly. I don't think I ever laughed as much talking to a comic book creator. I first started remembering Matt Wagner's name when I picked up an issue of Dark Horse Presents and there was a new character called the Aerialist in it. It was wild but what made it stand out so much was when the guys started fucking each other and smoking pot. I was shocked but at the same time I thought "this guy has got balls." Since then there hasn't been a project that Wagner has done that hasn't intrigued me on some level. From his sequel to his highly personal story Mage to his work on Sandman Mystery Theatre.
His latest project as writer/artist is called Trinity and it teams Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman early in their careers when they all meet each other for the first time. Its in comic book stores now. All artwork used is copyrighted to Matt Wagner.
Daniel Robert Epstein: So you're getting to play with all of DC's biggest toys. What's that like?
Matt Wagner: Its great fun. Certainly you have the vast weight of former stories in front of you. Especially with a tale like this which takes place early in their careers. You have to take all the various versions into account. I tried to make it fit into their continuity but it's just too much for any one person to take in. Additionally I'm trying to make it so the average person off the street can read it. There is certain things they are going to expect of Superman and Wonder Woman that may not mesh totally with continuity.
DRE: Did DC Comics come to you?
MW: I pitched it to them. The guys in charge of Batman, Bob Schreck is my former brother in law so we've been working together since the early days of Comico. That's 20 years. A lot of stories recently have dealt with the end of superheroes careers like [Frank] Miller's second Dark Knight mini-series and Kingdom Come, so it struck me that it would be a neat idea to do a story in their beginnings where they are not so contentious and at odds all the time. I'm kind of comparing and contrasting their three characters.
DRE: I know it's a Bizarro story. So is it a comedy?
MW: No I'm not playing Bizarro for the humor angle but for the scary angle. He has a demented mind and all of Superman's powers so that's a pretty horrifying combination. So he's in Frankenstein mode. I'm adding a couple little things I hope they'll put into their continuity specifically with Bizarro. Like if he's an imperfect clone of Superman then he won't be vulnerable to Kryptonite so like Superman he absorbs solar energy but imperfectly. Then if he absorbs too much his cell structure starts to calcify so that's why his face is all craggy and crusty. I'm glad they're letting me throw in things like that.
DRE: I know you've done Batman stories in the past. What's it like using Superman and Wonder Woman?
MW: Batman is hardly in the first issue. He has a very important role but we hardly see him in costume at all. It's more about Wonder Woman meeting Superman. Again Batman is there and does something that kicks the story into gear. Of course the main villain is Ra's al Ghul so the bad guy part of the story is at the behest of one of Batman's villains.
DRE: You have such a big following when it comes to your non-superhero work. What do those fans think when you do a project like this because it doesn't get more mainstream than this?
MW: I tend to think my readers tend to like good stories. There's a retailer who's been a fan of Grendel for years and he's very alterno-indie minded so he's been pretty harsh on this project but I like to think the others are just interested in a good story. If I can bring some of my indie readers who might not regularly read Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman over to read this story that would be great.
DRE: How important is this story to you? It's obviously not as personal as something like Mage.
MW: Nothings like Mage. Mage is autobiographical and it's emotionally exhausting which is why I don't do it very often. I do a storyline and that's all I can do for a while.
DRE: About every fifteen years.
MW: [laughs] Right. Mage is also unique because it's the only project where I don't do any layouts and I don't write any story. I kind of know internally what I want to happen but I just sit down with blank pages and start going. So I let the story and myself kind of create each other. Certainly you can't do that with these three big characters because they want to know what the hell you're doing with them.
But there's a reason I wanted to do Trinity. I grew up reading DC more than Marvel so these characters have a deep connection to me in a grand nostalgia that I still find contemporary in the way I think.
DRE: Trinity is not a retro story?
MW: No its for a modern audience. Its set a few years ago because part of the plot has to do with Ra's al Ghul sending Bizarro to steal some nuclear missiles and he brings back a whole Soviet submarine. So this is at the point when the Soviets still had those things.
DRE: Its when they could fit their name on the side of the sub.
MW: Yeah. I didn't want to overplay the political side of it so I just put a big red star on the missiles.
DRE: One of your most controversial works was The Aerialist. I thought that was really interesting. Is it still not completed?
MW: It's still not finished but it wasn't the controversy that scared me off it, fuck that. I started it when Mage and Grendel were wrapped up in bankruptcy court so I had nothing else I could do. When Mage and Grendel became available to me again the Aerialist was still unfinished. I got swayed back to them because they are a broader and deeper pastiche and franchise and the Aerialist got left in the dust.
DRE: What inspired The Aerialist?
MW: When Mage and Grendel were wrapped up in court. It was upsetting because these characters that are mine were effectively legally taken out of my hands and I wasn't allowed to have them anymore. So I wanted to do something where I could draw lots of big balloon shapes and rendering. Also I was so pissed off at society that I wanted to put in every social taboo I could think of to piss people off. Homosexuality has become the norm but back then people just lost their ass over it [laughs]. Dark Horse in fact published a letter in Dark Horse Presents [the comic anthology book where the Aerialist was shown] that was written in and ooey and gooey over Frank Miller, The guy wrote "the challenging world he presents to us that are so like our own but so different and so makes you rethink the way the world is." Then right under it a letter from the very same guy in response to The Aerialist and he wrote "Oh fags. Fuck that."
DRE: That's so funny. I was definitely surprised because I saw this great art with these guys jumping then hey, he just went down on that guy. You must have known in advance that it was going to shock people.
MW: Absolutely. That entire civilization in The Aerialist grew marijuana because it's a plant you can get the most usage out of with a limited amount of space. I was heading towards some other things that were really in your face too but I don't know if the book will ever get finished.
DRE: Yeah I was a lot younger when that came out and I didn't realize that some works didn't get finished.
MW: That's the glaring sore thumb in my career but I've done a lot of other stuff.
But I wrote Sandman Mystery Theatre for years and that was quite controversial. We structured that in a way that every 12 issues Wesley Dodds, The Sandman, and his girlfriend Diane Belmont went through a major step in their relationship. At the end of the fifth year she gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion back in the 1930's. That stirred up a fucking hornet's nest. People don't bend very easily on either side of that issue. We tried to not present it as a pro-choice argument. but just that abortions do happen. If your daddy is The Sandman [laughs] its not the best parenting situation.
DRE: What was good about that is it was the natural progression of the series.
MW: Yeah it didn't come out of the blue. It was a buildup.
DRE: You always seem to be able to stay a "hot" creator. Is that because of the people who want to work with you? Like Brian Michael Bendis [writer of Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil] and DC Comics.
MW: Well the issue I did of Ultimate Marvel Team-up with Bendis was different. I've rarely ever worked with other writers. It's a small handful, James Robinson [for Terminator one-shot], Neil Gaiman, Greg Rucka [Grendel: Past Prime], Bendis and I think that's it. That's a pretty good bunch to be associated with. The Bendis thing was just a lark. I had never done much Marvel stuff and he told me he wanted to launch this book and he was calling all of his favorite artists. I said I would do it only if it was number one and I got to draw Wolverine. But more importantly I've always looked at my career and my existence as an artist as a personal journey. I'm continually trying to make it more interesting for myself which is why I don't repeat myself very often. I think that's why people tune into my stuff after all these years. As a storyteller its my job to take the audience somewhere they don't expect me to take them. If they know what to expect too much then I'm not doing my job hard enough.
DRE: I did read this great quote where you said "Comics won't die because they provide something no other medium can." What is that quality they have?
MW: I keep trying to figure that out and in recent years the word I keep coming back to is intimacy. Certainly video games and movies can offer the same bombast. It used to be that the main things comics provided was that anything can happen in a comic book. You can draw anything and you couldn't up until recently film anything. Video games give you the wish fulfillment that comics gave. But comic subject matter is so all across the board. Superheroes still dominate but in a much more varied fashion than just adolescent wish fulfillment. The thing about comics is the intimacy. It's just you and the comic. Even if you're watching a movie by yourself it just doesn't have that same sense of intimacy and I love movies. I just feel that you are at the mercy of the filmmaker more than you are at the mercy of the cartoonist.
DRE: Movies are set in a certain time span.
MW: Did you see the Hulk yet?
DRE: Yes I did.
MW: For all the various reviews of it there isn't enough made of the split screen work. To me merging and melding images is the filmmaker trying to translate some of the peculiarities of comics without getting wrapped up in Pow, Blam and speed lines that the 60's Batman TV show did.
DRE: I thought the Hulk was the closest to putting some Jim Steranko ideas up on screen.
MW: Exactly. When you view a comics page you can be viewing several different moments at once. I remember one scene in the movie where there are headlights on a car at night then it fuzzes into a little ball of light which becomes a moon then the camera pans down to a night setting. That's sort of an effect you see in comics a lot. Comics have a luxurious sense of time.
DRE: Transitions is definitely something that comics do uniquely.
MW: Yeah. I remember seeing Will Eisner [creator of The Spirit] speak one time. He pointed out that one of the differences between film and comic books is that you have no control over the film but with a comic there's always a point where the reader has control of the story because they have to control the page. Eisner said that he always strived to make that final last moment on the right hand page so compelling that the reader would automatically turn the page without the reader thinking that they might not be able to do it. There's an old Edgar Allan Poe "In a short story every word tell." I try to approach comics the same way. You shouldn't be able to just get it just from seeing the visuals or the script. It has to be the fine meld of the two.
DRE: That's why I thought silent stories were always hard to pull off in comics.
MW: They are very hard to pull off. For the first Grendel: Black, White and Red series I did a story with John Paul Leon that was supposed to be a silent story with three horizontal panels per page so very much a widescreen format. When we got it done he had done an amazing job and yet we both felt it needed some kind of words. The key was to not put in too much and be overloaded. So what I ended up doing was single word captions in each panel like "Betrayal", "Retribution" to accentuate what was going on in the panel and that worked out great.
DRE: Neil Gaiman is very popular on our site. What was it like working with him?
MW: Well I've known Neil for years. I met him at the DC offices years ago just when he was starting Black Orchid. I think him and [Dave] McKean had Violent Cases only in England.
DRE: I guess that was 1988 or 89.
MW: Yeah, with the Sandman Midnight Theatre we did, it was funny just how much in sync we were on it. We just understood what it needed to be. The fact that Morpheus was not going to appear very much in it and yet we felt his presence had to bleed all the way through it. When you read that story it feels very much like a walking dream state. Yet it still feels like a Golden Age Sandman story as well.
We co-wrote it. Neil was in Santa Barbara for a lecture at UC Santa Barbara and DC flew me down there. We just spent the weekend at the hotel just hashing out ideas and pretty much had the skeleton of the story hammered out by the time the weekend was over. I then went and wrote a detailed plot. Teddy Kristiansen painted the pages from that and then Neil scripted the actual verbiage over the pages.
DRE: I spoke with Dave McKean recently and he talked about the movie, Mirrormask, which he is directing that him and Neil had written together. Dave had mentioned to me that he didn't realize that they had been working together for 15 years but when they actually tried to write together it was a nightmare.
MW: Well if you see anything that Dave has written you can see that it isn't anything like Neil's stuff at all. Dave's stuff is almost like tone poems where Neil is very structured and very driven by speech and by character interaction.
DRE: Was it tough working with Neil?
MW: At that point I had already been working with Steve Seagle on Sandman Mystery Theatre in a similar way.
DRE: So how did you develop your unique drawing style?
MW: I think its been a progression. If you look at stuff I've done I always draw everything a little bit different. That makes it interesting for me. I have no desire for the stuff I do when I'm sixty to look like the stuff I did when I was 20.
DRE: Do you still use pencils?
MW: Yep. Pencils, ink then color on the computer.
DRE: The coloring is very important to your work. Joe Matt [creator of Peepshow] colored the Batman/Grendel crossover.
MW: I heard he was moving to Los Angeles.
DRE: I heard he was moving to New York then he went back to Toronto. His friends pick on him too much. He needs to leave Canada.
MW: He needs to get out of his fucken apartment [laughs]. He should go have a life.
DRE: What was he like to work with?
MW: Well I had met Joe in college so we had known each other a long time before we worked together. Color is a very big deal to me. I colored the whole first Mage series myself. I usually have a cut and dried instructions for a colorist. Joe and I knew each other well enough so we worked together smoothly.
DRE: I think he lived off that money for about ten years.
MW: Yeah. I certainly didn't.
DRE: What was it like being a character in Peepshow?
MW: I paid him back making him a character in my book. I made him black in the book because he's already a comic book character so I needed something to distinguish him.
DRE: Where does the rage and anger of Grendel come from?
MW: From the other side of where the hope and exploration of Mage comes from. I'm a very distinct Libra. People always ask if there will ever be a Mage/Grendel crossover and I say abso-fucken-lutely not. Two halves of my brain and soul and never shall they meet.
Originally Grendel was dark but it got a lot darker. I've always had a fascination with those two things, heroic fiction/mythology and crime/horror stories. The light and the death.
DRE: What's going on with the movie adaptations of both?
MW: You got me [laughs]. The Grendel movie is in major stallage.
DRE: Who would be the best director for both of them?
MW: I think anyone who understands action, comedy and character can do Mage. But Grendel is such a dark thing that it takes a real visionary to pull it off especially the Hunter Rose story. Hunter Rose is such an attractive but unsympathetic character. I don't know though. When we first started the process I used to sit around and think in that vein but now there is so much talent available that I don't have a wishlist.
DRE: Did both Batman/Grendel stories work as well as you wanted them too?
MW: Oh sure. They both stand as bookends. It was great pr to team up with Batman. I was trying to show non-Grendel readers the breadth and scope of the Grendel. The first one was real dense and character and the second is all bolt and bombast. I love the ending of the last one with Hunter Rose's skull on display in the Batcave. That just tickled my ass something fierce to draw that.
DRE: Were you ever a Goth?
MW: Not really. I was quite into punk when I was younger and I still listen to a lot of punk music. But I'm 42 years old and I'm bald. I've seen more Grendel tattoos than you can shake a stick at. Whenever I go to convention there are plenty of Goths in the crowd.
DRE: That's awesome.
MW: We were publishing some Grendel tattoos in a book and this guy sent in a photo of his back with the entire Grendel oath tattooed on his back, its lengthy. I was at a comic convention in Baltimore and this six foot six, 300 pound guy with a shaved head comes up to me and says hey. He took off his shirt and his entire back was just covered in Grendel tattoos. Even more impressive than that is they were all based on various painted covers I had done. If you know anything about tattooing, those real rendered painterly looking tattoos take a long time and they're really painful.
DRE: You think enough of your art that you don't mind someone putting it on them forever?
MW: Its not my decision.
DRE: You like punk, emo or Goth girls?
MW: I might have gone for the punks when I was younger but now that I'm older there's something charming about the emos.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
MW: Non-silicon. I guess the amateur stuff. There's something that feels real dirty about that stuff. The high gloss stuff is like watching robots going at it. Recently there's been a whole wave of guys who are doing computer animated porn shorts. They're incredibly stiff and sculptured. For all intents and purposes it looks like the high gloss commercial porn. Of course the women have these breasts which stick up like perfect mounds pointing to heaven and the guys look like Richard Corben characters.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
His latest project as writer/artist is called Trinity and it teams Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman early in their careers when they all meet each other for the first time. Its in comic book stores now. All artwork used is copyrighted to Matt Wagner.
Daniel Robert Epstein: So you're getting to play with all of DC's biggest toys. What's that like?
Matt Wagner: Its great fun. Certainly you have the vast weight of former stories in front of you. Especially with a tale like this which takes place early in their careers. You have to take all the various versions into account. I tried to make it fit into their continuity but it's just too much for any one person to take in. Additionally I'm trying to make it so the average person off the street can read it. There is certain things they are going to expect of Superman and Wonder Woman that may not mesh totally with continuity.
DRE: Did DC Comics come to you?
MW: I pitched it to them. The guys in charge of Batman, Bob Schreck is my former brother in law so we've been working together since the early days of Comico. That's 20 years. A lot of stories recently have dealt with the end of superheroes careers like [Frank] Miller's second Dark Knight mini-series and Kingdom Come, so it struck me that it would be a neat idea to do a story in their beginnings where they are not so contentious and at odds all the time. I'm kind of comparing and contrasting their three characters.
DRE: I know it's a Bizarro story. So is it a comedy?
MW: No I'm not playing Bizarro for the humor angle but for the scary angle. He has a demented mind and all of Superman's powers so that's a pretty horrifying combination. So he's in Frankenstein mode. I'm adding a couple little things I hope they'll put into their continuity specifically with Bizarro. Like if he's an imperfect clone of Superman then he won't be vulnerable to Kryptonite so like Superman he absorbs solar energy but imperfectly. Then if he absorbs too much his cell structure starts to calcify so that's why his face is all craggy and crusty. I'm glad they're letting me throw in things like that.
DRE: I know you've done Batman stories in the past. What's it like using Superman and Wonder Woman?
MW: Batman is hardly in the first issue. He has a very important role but we hardly see him in costume at all. It's more about Wonder Woman meeting Superman. Again Batman is there and does something that kicks the story into gear. Of course the main villain is Ra's al Ghul so the bad guy part of the story is at the behest of one of Batman's villains.
DRE: You have such a big following when it comes to your non-superhero work. What do those fans think when you do a project like this because it doesn't get more mainstream than this?
MW: I tend to think my readers tend to like good stories. There's a retailer who's been a fan of Grendel for years and he's very alterno-indie minded so he's been pretty harsh on this project but I like to think the others are just interested in a good story. If I can bring some of my indie readers who might not regularly read Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman over to read this story that would be great.
DRE: How important is this story to you? It's obviously not as personal as something like Mage.
MW: Nothings like Mage. Mage is autobiographical and it's emotionally exhausting which is why I don't do it very often. I do a storyline and that's all I can do for a while.
DRE: About every fifteen years.
MW: [laughs] Right. Mage is also unique because it's the only project where I don't do any layouts and I don't write any story. I kind of know internally what I want to happen but I just sit down with blank pages and start going. So I let the story and myself kind of create each other. Certainly you can't do that with these three big characters because they want to know what the hell you're doing with them.
But there's a reason I wanted to do Trinity. I grew up reading DC more than Marvel so these characters have a deep connection to me in a grand nostalgia that I still find contemporary in the way I think.
DRE: Trinity is not a retro story?
MW: No its for a modern audience. Its set a few years ago because part of the plot has to do with Ra's al Ghul sending Bizarro to steal some nuclear missiles and he brings back a whole Soviet submarine. So this is at the point when the Soviets still had those things.
DRE: Its when they could fit their name on the side of the sub.
MW: Yeah. I didn't want to overplay the political side of it so I just put a big red star on the missiles.
DRE: One of your most controversial works was The Aerialist. I thought that was really interesting. Is it still not completed?
MW: It's still not finished but it wasn't the controversy that scared me off it, fuck that. I started it when Mage and Grendel were wrapped up in bankruptcy court so I had nothing else I could do. When Mage and Grendel became available to me again the Aerialist was still unfinished. I got swayed back to them because they are a broader and deeper pastiche and franchise and the Aerialist got left in the dust.
DRE: What inspired The Aerialist?
MW: When Mage and Grendel were wrapped up in court. It was upsetting because these characters that are mine were effectively legally taken out of my hands and I wasn't allowed to have them anymore. So I wanted to do something where I could draw lots of big balloon shapes and rendering. Also I was so pissed off at society that I wanted to put in every social taboo I could think of to piss people off. Homosexuality has become the norm but back then people just lost their ass over it [laughs]. Dark Horse in fact published a letter in Dark Horse Presents [the comic anthology book where the Aerialist was shown] that was written in and ooey and gooey over Frank Miller, The guy wrote "the challenging world he presents to us that are so like our own but so different and so makes you rethink the way the world is." Then right under it a letter from the very same guy in response to The Aerialist and he wrote "Oh fags. Fuck that."
DRE: That's so funny. I was definitely surprised because I saw this great art with these guys jumping then hey, he just went down on that guy. You must have known in advance that it was going to shock people.
MW: Absolutely. That entire civilization in The Aerialist grew marijuana because it's a plant you can get the most usage out of with a limited amount of space. I was heading towards some other things that were really in your face too but I don't know if the book will ever get finished.
DRE: Yeah I was a lot younger when that came out and I didn't realize that some works didn't get finished.
MW: That's the glaring sore thumb in my career but I've done a lot of other stuff.
But I wrote Sandman Mystery Theatre for years and that was quite controversial. We structured that in a way that every 12 issues Wesley Dodds, The Sandman, and his girlfriend Diane Belmont went through a major step in their relationship. At the end of the fifth year she gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion back in the 1930's. That stirred up a fucking hornet's nest. People don't bend very easily on either side of that issue. We tried to not present it as a pro-choice argument. but just that abortions do happen. If your daddy is The Sandman [laughs] its not the best parenting situation.
DRE: What was good about that is it was the natural progression of the series.
MW: Yeah it didn't come out of the blue. It was a buildup.
DRE: You always seem to be able to stay a "hot" creator. Is that because of the people who want to work with you? Like Brian Michael Bendis [writer of Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil] and DC Comics.
MW: Well the issue I did of Ultimate Marvel Team-up with Bendis was different. I've rarely ever worked with other writers. It's a small handful, James Robinson [for Terminator one-shot], Neil Gaiman, Greg Rucka [Grendel: Past Prime], Bendis and I think that's it. That's a pretty good bunch to be associated with. The Bendis thing was just a lark. I had never done much Marvel stuff and he told me he wanted to launch this book and he was calling all of his favorite artists. I said I would do it only if it was number one and I got to draw Wolverine. But more importantly I've always looked at my career and my existence as an artist as a personal journey. I'm continually trying to make it more interesting for myself which is why I don't repeat myself very often. I think that's why people tune into my stuff after all these years. As a storyteller its my job to take the audience somewhere they don't expect me to take them. If they know what to expect too much then I'm not doing my job hard enough.
DRE: I did read this great quote where you said "Comics won't die because they provide something no other medium can." What is that quality they have?
MW: I keep trying to figure that out and in recent years the word I keep coming back to is intimacy. Certainly video games and movies can offer the same bombast. It used to be that the main things comics provided was that anything can happen in a comic book. You can draw anything and you couldn't up until recently film anything. Video games give you the wish fulfillment that comics gave. But comic subject matter is so all across the board. Superheroes still dominate but in a much more varied fashion than just adolescent wish fulfillment. The thing about comics is the intimacy. It's just you and the comic. Even if you're watching a movie by yourself it just doesn't have that same sense of intimacy and I love movies. I just feel that you are at the mercy of the filmmaker more than you are at the mercy of the cartoonist.
DRE: Movies are set in a certain time span.
MW: Did you see the Hulk yet?
DRE: Yes I did.
MW: For all the various reviews of it there isn't enough made of the split screen work. To me merging and melding images is the filmmaker trying to translate some of the peculiarities of comics without getting wrapped up in Pow, Blam and speed lines that the 60's Batman TV show did.
DRE: I thought the Hulk was the closest to putting some Jim Steranko ideas up on screen.
MW: Exactly. When you view a comics page you can be viewing several different moments at once. I remember one scene in the movie where there are headlights on a car at night then it fuzzes into a little ball of light which becomes a moon then the camera pans down to a night setting. That's sort of an effect you see in comics a lot. Comics have a luxurious sense of time.
DRE: Transitions is definitely something that comics do uniquely.
MW: Yeah. I remember seeing Will Eisner [creator of The Spirit] speak one time. He pointed out that one of the differences between film and comic books is that you have no control over the film but with a comic there's always a point where the reader has control of the story because they have to control the page. Eisner said that he always strived to make that final last moment on the right hand page so compelling that the reader would automatically turn the page without the reader thinking that they might not be able to do it. There's an old Edgar Allan Poe "In a short story every word tell." I try to approach comics the same way. You shouldn't be able to just get it just from seeing the visuals or the script. It has to be the fine meld of the two.
DRE: That's why I thought silent stories were always hard to pull off in comics.
MW: They are very hard to pull off. For the first Grendel: Black, White and Red series I did a story with John Paul Leon that was supposed to be a silent story with three horizontal panels per page so very much a widescreen format. When we got it done he had done an amazing job and yet we both felt it needed some kind of words. The key was to not put in too much and be overloaded. So what I ended up doing was single word captions in each panel like "Betrayal", "Retribution" to accentuate what was going on in the panel and that worked out great.
DRE: Neil Gaiman is very popular on our site. What was it like working with him?
MW: Well I've known Neil for years. I met him at the DC offices years ago just when he was starting Black Orchid. I think him and [Dave] McKean had Violent Cases only in England.
DRE: I guess that was 1988 or 89.
MW: Yeah, with the Sandman Midnight Theatre we did, it was funny just how much in sync we were on it. We just understood what it needed to be. The fact that Morpheus was not going to appear very much in it and yet we felt his presence had to bleed all the way through it. When you read that story it feels very much like a walking dream state. Yet it still feels like a Golden Age Sandman story as well.
We co-wrote it. Neil was in Santa Barbara for a lecture at UC Santa Barbara and DC flew me down there. We just spent the weekend at the hotel just hashing out ideas and pretty much had the skeleton of the story hammered out by the time the weekend was over. I then went and wrote a detailed plot. Teddy Kristiansen painted the pages from that and then Neil scripted the actual verbiage over the pages.
DRE: I spoke with Dave McKean recently and he talked about the movie, Mirrormask, which he is directing that him and Neil had written together. Dave had mentioned to me that he didn't realize that they had been working together for 15 years but when they actually tried to write together it was a nightmare.
MW: Well if you see anything that Dave has written you can see that it isn't anything like Neil's stuff at all. Dave's stuff is almost like tone poems where Neil is very structured and very driven by speech and by character interaction.
DRE: Was it tough working with Neil?
MW: At that point I had already been working with Steve Seagle on Sandman Mystery Theatre in a similar way.
DRE: So how did you develop your unique drawing style?
MW: I think its been a progression. If you look at stuff I've done I always draw everything a little bit different. That makes it interesting for me. I have no desire for the stuff I do when I'm sixty to look like the stuff I did when I was 20.
DRE: Do you still use pencils?
MW: Yep. Pencils, ink then color on the computer.
DRE: The coloring is very important to your work. Joe Matt [creator of Peepshow] colored the Batman/Grendel crossover.
MW: I heard he was moving to Los Angeles.
DRE: I heard he was moving to New York then he went back to Toronto. His friends pick on him too much. He needs to leave Canada.
MW: He needs to get out of his fucken apartment [laughs]. He should go have a life.
DRE: What was he like to work with?
MW: Well I had met Joe in college so we had known each other a long time before we worked together. Color is a very big deal to me. I colored the whole first Mage series myself. I usually have a cut and dried instructions for a colorist. Joe and I knew each other well enough so we worked together smoothly.
DRE: I think he lived off that money for about ten years.
MW: Yeah. I certainly didn't.
DRE: What was it like being a character in Peepshow?
MW: I paid him back making him a character in my book. I made him black in the book because he's already a comic book character so I needed something to distinguish him.
DRE: Where does the rage and anger of Grendel come from?
MW: From the other side of where the hope and exploration of Mage comes from. I'm a very distinct Libra. People always ask if there will ever be a Mage/Grendel crossover and I say abso-fucken-lutely not. Two halves of my brain and soul and never shall they meet.
Originally Grendel was dark but it got a lot darker. I've always had a fascination with those two things, heroic fiction/mythology and crime/horror stories. The light and the death.
DRE: What's going on with the movie adaptations of both?
MW: You got me [laughs]. The Grendel movie is in major stallage.
DRE: Who would be the best director for both of them?
MW: I think anyone who understands action, comedy and character can do Mage. But Grendel is such a dark thing that it takes a real visionary to pull it off especially the Hunter Rose story. Hunter Rose is such an attractive but unsympathetic character. I don't know though. When we first started the process I used to sit around and think in that vein but now there is so much talent available that I don't have a wishlist.
DRE: Did both Batman/Grendel stories work as well as you wanted them too?
MW: Oh sure. They both stand as bookends. It was great pr to team up with Batman. I was trying to show non-Grendel readers the breadth and scope of the Grendel. The first one was real dense and character and the second is all bolt and bombast. I love the ending of the last one with Hunter Rose's skull on display in the Batcave. That just tickled my ass something fierce to draw that.
DRE: Were you ever a Goth?
MW: Not really. I was quite into punk when I was younger and I still listen to a lot of punk music. But I'm 42 years old and I'm bald. I've seen more Grendel tattoos than you can shake a stick at. Whenever I go to convention there are plenty of Goths in the crowd.
DRE: That's awesome.
MW: We were publishing some Grendel tattoos in a book and this guy sent in a photo of his back with the entire Grendel oath tattooed on his back, its lengthy. I was at a comic convention in Baltimore and this six foot six, 300 pound guy with a shaved head comes up to me and says hey. He took off his shirt and his entire back was just covered in Grendel tattoos. Even more impressive than that is they were all based on various painted covers I had done. If you know anything about tattooing, those real rendered painterly looking tattoos take a long time and they're really painful.
DRE: You think enough of your art that you don't mind someone putting it on them forever?
MW: Its not my decision.
DRE: You like punk, emo or Goth girls?
MW: I might have gone for the punks when I was younger but now that I'm older there's something charming about the emos.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
MW: Non-silicon. I guess the amateur stuff. There's something that feels real dirty about that stuff. The high gloss stuff is like watching robots going at it. Recently there's been a whole wave of guys who are doing computer animated porn shorts. They're incredibly stiff and sculptured. For all intents and purposes it looks like the high gloss commercial porn. Of course the women have these breasts which stick up like perfect mounds pointing to heaven and the guys look like Richard Corben characters.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
VIEW 15 of 15 COMMENTS
kinghell:
Wagner's a genius, and I'm very happy that SG.com ran the interview with him. Portland (and the entire state of Oregon) is such a mecca for comics creators. I grew up in Vermont, home to just about everyone who drew Swamp Thing (Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, Scot Eaton, etc.), as well as a fellow by the name of Frank Miller. I was very happy to find that, after relocating 3000 miles, I managed to once again stumble into the midst of comics brilliance.
ainur:
Time for a new MW interview - Madame Xanadu is fantastic!