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Friday, September 3, 2010
1602 Wrap Up - The Neil Gaiman Interview
Pomerantz asks Gaiman the questions you've been wanting to hear!
Winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, the Bram Stoker, and other awards too numerous to mention. Best selling novelist. Television writer. Children’s novelist. And, of course, writer of possibly the greatest comic book series of all time. Neil Gaiman. Regular readers of Mysteries and Conundrums know that I’ve spent the better part of the last year poring over every word and studying every panel of his latest comic book series, Marvel’s 1602. Mr. Gaiman was kind enough to reward my months of devoted toil by talking with me about 1602 and other aspects of his long, illustrious career. JP: It seems paradoxical, but I felt that 1602 captured the essence of Stan Lee’s creations better than most of their modern incarnations. To a large extent that’s due to your talent as a writer. But it also seems to me that something about the early Marvel Universe, a large part of its charm, is somehow incompatible with today’s world. It was only by being taken completely out of our time that the characters were able to regain the spirit of their first decade.(To some extent, the Ultimate Universe was an attempt to address this issue in a contemporary setting. But, with the exception of Ultimate Spiderman, which, I think, does recapture a lot of what made Stan Lee’s stories so special, most of those titles fall short of that goal.) Do you agree that there’s something about the cynicism and worldliness of the last few decades that make it difficult to tell contemporary stories about the Marvel Universe? Or is it just a question of effort on the part of the writers? NG: I think it probably has more to do with your goals. What I specifically wanted to play with was the feel of the original Stan Lee (and Jack and Steve etc) characters. I wanted the simplicities. I wanted to write the characters I fell in love with when I was seven (in UK reprints, so I got the Marvel universe from the start). I didn't want to do something that was like a Marvel version of Alan Moore's 1963, though -- apart from anything because the original Marvel comics were those things that Alan was recreating, which meant that if I went that route at best I'd come up with something that was an imitation of what Stan and Jack had done. So I decided to do something else instead. The best thing for me about the 1602 conceit was the idea that I was going to simply start the engines of the Marvel universe earlier, and see how it worked. Some things were just sitting around in the back of my head, and had been for a long time -- I thought it might be fun to create a daredevil who was closer to Matt Murdock's imaginary brother Mike than he was to Matt himself, for example. Many of them turned up quite happily on the page. Mostly I was just impressed with how well Stan, Jack et al had built things. JP: The obvious conflicts in 1602 were the physical ones, like the fights with Doom and his squad of assassins. But the more important sources of tension were the battles that several characters had with their own consciences. Fury forced to betray the crown he had worked his whole life to protect. Donal knowingly committing what he knew his church would consider a sin. Uatu disregarding the Watcher creed by interfering in history. In each case, the characters had to violate the tenants of a structured belief system in order to do what their personal morality told them was right. (Rojhaz, on the other hand, was unable to make that leap. He was committed to his dream of protecting Roanoke in order to build a stronger democracy in America, even when it was clear that goal was a chimera.) Did the importance of those struggles have something to do with your choice of the era in which to set the story? The seventeenth century was a time when notions of individual conscience and political liberty first began to dominate the world’s stage. NG: I don't honestly think so. If I'd done a similar story set several hundred years earlier (or several hundred years later) I'd like to think that, at the end of the day, it would have had people coming to their own conclusions about right and wrong, and people changing their minds. (I think that someone changing their mind about something important to them is much more interesting than a thrown punch, all things considered.) JP: Upon first reading the final issue of the series, I, and many other people, had no doubt that the President-For-Life was George W. Bush. Then, in your blog, you made it very clear that this was absolutely not what you intended. Looking at the panels with that in mind, most of us came to believe he was actually Killgrave, the Purple Man. But the first impression persists and it led to a very odd Schrodinger’s Cat type phenomenon, where the President is both GWB and Killgrave simultaneously. The two reads are very different. If he’s Bush, contemporary political commentary is brought to the fore. If he’s Killgrave, the "tribute to early Marvel Universe super-characters" aspect is emphasized. I actually think the story is stronger if the President-For-Life is Bush. It ties in better with Rojhaz’s political motivations for protecting Roanoke and Virginia. (One doesn’t necessarily have to hate Bush to appreciate this read.) You were surprisingly unambiguous when you declared the President wasn’t Bush. I’m curious how you feel about readers processing him that way anyway. Do you have any further comments on the conflicting interpretations? NG: I think it's fascinating that so many readers read that image as Bush. Looking at the art, it looks to me like a pretty average-looking elderly white male, coloured purple, with a slightly weak chin. No particular Bush characteristics. But it obviously shorthanded to Bush for some people (is it the weak chin? I keep puzzling over it, possibly because I simply don't see it -- if I'd thought it looked like Bush in the pencils I would have asked for it to be redrawn.) I did actually work out the entire rationale of the Purple Man President future, once it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to get the Cap stuff to happen in current continuity, as all the writers had other plans for him, so I built the 2061 future instead. I didn't have that many pages to play with in #8, so you don't get given more information than you need, or that Cap has. Anyway, as a foreign citizen, criticizing an existing president or government would have been the furthest thing from my mind. And, under the Patriot Act, it's probably now against the law anyway. JP: Virginia Dare was an intriguing character. For most of the series it seemed she would turn out to be key to whatever caused the changes in history. And she was key, just not in a way any of us were anticipating. We spent months struggling to find a Marvel analog and speculating what it was about her that could have caused the universe to behave in such odd ways. Most of us thought there would be some standard comic book, cosmic whatever involved. In the end, her importance turned out to be purely in who she was. The first child born to an English colonist in the New World. The first child of Steve Roger’s America. I’ve lived my whole life in New York, and neither I, nor anyone I know who grew up with me, had ever heard of Virginia. (She seems to be better known in the South.) Learning about the history and legends associated with her was a lot of fun. It’s a pity more Americans today aren’t familiar with her. It’s also very surprising. In American Gods the "native" mythologies were portrayed in a pretty negative light, compared to the Old World varieties. Do you think there’s any hope that the US will ever develop a common tradition of folk stories and legends, beyond the level of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree? Or does the media suffused, Digital Millennium Copyright Act spirit of our age make that impossible? NG: I think that where Virginia was concerned, I'd assumed that if I, an Englishman knew the story, and had known it years ago in England, then it was something every American had probably imbibed with his (or her) mother's milk. I was, of course, completely wrong. I don't think that US folk stories and legends are an impossibility (I think that Urban Legends and comics and some TV actually fill some of those slots). I do think that Americans don't get taught much history, American or any other kind, and lots of what they get taught is wrong, and that's a pity. (My son Mike, when he was about 12, was told by a teacher that I had lied to him (Mike) when I told him that criminals were transported to America instead of being hung in the eighteenth century; the only people who came to America back then, he was huffily informed, were People Seeking Freedom.) The only native mythologies I remember talking about in American Gods was the scene where Johnny Appleseed is bitching about Paul Bunyan, who was probably a Madison Avenue creation circa 1910. He's not a native mythology, any more than the Taco Bell dog. JP: I could have phrased my question more clearly. Where I said "native mythologies" in American Gods, I meant to refer to the new gods, like Media and Technology. They weren’t necessarily that much more evil than the immigrant deities (if "evil" is even the right word), but their youth and lack of sophistication made them come off that way. NG: I agree -- shallow, not evil. And scared, of course. JP: Do you read Bill Willingham’s FABLES? It’s conceptually similar to American Gods, but couldn’t be more different thematically. (It’s one of my favorite on-going comic series.) NG: Yes, I love Fables. Although I tend to accumulate a lot of them so I can read it in one sitting. JP: One of my first reactions to 1602 was "Oh, this is like American Gods, but in reverse." Instead of taking classic mythological figures and placing them in a modern context, you took contemporary heroic figures and placed them in the European past. Were you conscious of that parallel? NG: Not really. Although, obviously, they're both fundamentally about America. 1602 began with wanting to talk about the good, precious things that make America and the American ideals so valuable, and wound up also trying to talk about the ways the American ideal can go wrong. JP: Every geek dreams of being able to nitpick their favorite stories and put the author on the hot seat. Now it’s my turn! Here’s a bunch of fannish questions about 1602 that have inspired a lot of online discussion. (I respect that stories have built in, intentional ambiguities, so feel free to take a pass where you feel it’s necessary.) Why did Doom try to have Virginia Dare killed? It doesn’t seem he could have known of her importance. NG: Ah... that's a bit of plot that wound up getting thrown out, because of page count issues. And which I tried at least alluding to in the Dr Strange-knows-everything splash page of #7, but took out again because the page once lettered was too text-heavy, and something had to go. I'm not sure if I'll ever go back and do more 1602 stories, but if I ever do, you'll find out. Virginia gets a lot more interesting as she grows up. JP: The story made it seem that the Inquisitor needed his helmet in order to escape the stake. But Magneto’s helmet simply blocks telepathy, it doesn’t enhance his powers. Is the Inquisitor’s helmet different or was Enrique simply playing up the drama of the scene? NG: The Inquisitor's helmet also enhances his powers, in the 1602 universe. It magnifies them. Javier made the helmet for him, when they were both young churchmen in Northern Spain, before the Inquisitor became an Inquisitor. I'm not sure that he could have broken the chains, or ridden the earth's magnetic field, without it. Or at least, he believes he couldn't. But the 1602 powers tend to be significantly less than the current version of Marvel powers -- they're dialed back to the 1960s versions, and sometimes less than that. (Dr Strange, for example, never got the amulet, and has less magic than the 1960s version.) JP: What prevented the Watcher from observing the arrival of the Forerunner? Javier also seemed telepathically powerless against Rogers. NG: Yup. I noticed that too. JP: What was the deal with the dinosaurs? I understand why the Forerunner’s arrival would have prompted the universe to create the other "Marvels". But what does Captain America have to do with prehistoric creatures? NG: It's the ripple effect; it's alluded to in the Watcher's big speech on the splash page of #3, and in #6. Cap's arrival was like a stone dropped into a pond: one of the things it changed was that the Savage Land effect now covered most of America. A long time ago, different animals went extinct, different animals lasted. Even the housecats were sabre-toothed... Luckily, the laws of narrative meant that you didn't get a Bradbury butterfly effect going on. JP: Speaking of the "laws of narrative"... In the series, Reed called them the "Laws of Story", and he explained to Ben Grimm that those laws would prevent him from ever becoming permanently human again. To Reed the "Laws of Story" are as fundamental to the way his world works as the laws of physics. And he’s right. It’s the "Laws of Story" that necessitated the creation of the Marvel heroes and villains soon after Captain America arrived on the scene. But invoking the "Laws of Story" within a story can be dangerous. For a writer of your caliber it might not be much of a problem, but, in lesser hands, such a move could be used to justify all sorts of improbable coincidences or poorly thought out plot devices. Do you think you might be establishing a dangerous precedent? NG: Yeah, probably. But I wanted a Reed who was really smart. And I was getting fascinated by the constraints of classic Marvel characters -- of course Ben can never UnThing, for example. It's not that Reed is the voice of the author. He's much cleverer than I am. I also thought it would be a good way of explaining to the readers what kind of a story this was, for those who weren't certain. It wasn't a metafiction. JP: Continuing the discussion of the "Laws of Story". It’s such an important theme in so much of your work. I’m curious if you feel they have any power in the real world? In general, I’m interested in your personal relationship with the supernatural. NG: I'm not sure that laws of story relate to the supernatural, except in that people are very good at seeing patterns everywhere. I noticed a long time ago that the Universe rewards belief systems. It doesn't really matter what you believe -- it'll be there and waiting for you if you go and look for it. Decide the universe is, say, run by secret enormous teddy bears, and I can guarantee you'll immediately start running across evidence that this is true. It's part of the fun of being a writer. Mostly you create stories by deciding where you draw the lines -- where it starts, where it ends. In life, afterwards, we tend to use death as the final line. But no, I don't think we live in a universe that follows the laws of story. It's the difference between any iteration of the Marvel universe and ours -- and why death is never final in the comics. JP: Still exploring the same topic. This is a subtle question, so I’ll try to phrase it very carefully. You’re a difficult writer to characterize, but much of your work is a type of fantasy. And you inspire a very loyal following. A lot of harm has been done in the real world, from all sides of the political spectrum, by proponents of one sort of irrational belief or another. One group crashes planes into buildings, another promotes horrendous amendments to the Constitution, both in the name of unseen forces they believe control the universe. Do you think, by writing the type of stories you do, as powerfully as you do, you might be unwittingly contributing to the spread of this way of dealing with the world? I don’t intend this question to be accusatory. I’m glad you write what you write. But I do think it’s a troubling issue for all fantasy writers that ought to be brought into the light and grappled with. NG: Er, no. I think that good fantasy does the opposite. It helps exercise the mind, and explore possibilities. It helps see things from different points of view. Some kinds of religious dogma tends to suggest that it's a good thing to do something because God wants you to, and that there are no alternatives. And at that point you get idiots crashing planes into things. (But I don't think evil is the province of the religious; there was nothing religious about the Nazis, or about Stalin's regime, except in the broadest possible terms: the single worldview, the easy, thoughtless, right and wrong. They would all have considered themselves extremely "rational" people; Nazis knew there were extremely rational reasons why the lesser races needed to die.) Good fantasy, on the other hand, like good SF, is all about alternatives. It's about challenging worldviews, not reinforcing them. (For example, Good Omens, the book I wrote with Terry Pratchett, is a book that suggests that possibly Armageddon might not be any fun for the people caught in the middle, and that if Good was certain to win there wouldn't be a battle, and that possibly angels and demons both consider themselves to be the good guys.) Mostly, my fiction tends to be about consequences. And I think that's got to be a good thing. One of the things I enjoyed in 1602 was that many of my characters were extremely religious, because you couldn't create a worldview at that time which wasn't mostly religious and in which religion wasn't important. And I tend to confuse good scientists with gnostics, anyway. JP: I wish I could give a copy of Good Omens to everyone who’s reading Left Behind! (It’d be fun to watch them burn it after reading the first few pages.) I wasn’t trying to draw a simple opposition between religion/science. The Nazis are actually a good example of what I was getting at. Hitler was partially inspired by Teutonic heroic archetypes. Part of the Nazi mentality was to take such stories literally and try to apply their lessons in the real world. In other words, one of the sources of Nazi terror was the attempt to treat reality as a fantasy story. I certainly don’t mean to align myself with the morons who want to ban Dungeons and Dragons or Harry Potter. I’m just trying to express that writing powerfully about the fantastic can have a dark side. It’s sort of like the Theory of Relativity: Beautiful in it’s own right, and having the potential to unleash unlimited energy. But inextricably linked to destructive possibilities. NG: With respect, I think suggesting that writing powerfully about the fantastic is "inextricably linked to destructive possibilities" is only true if writing about anything is "inextricably linked to destructive possibilities". By the same token teaching people mathematics is "I.l.t.d.p." or writing poetry is "i.l.t.d.p." I think a lot more has been made of the Wagnerian side of Nazism than was around at the time. Belief systems didn't matter to the guys who ran the camps or the soldiers on the ground: it wasn't what the Jews believed that meant they had to die, it was what they were. Nazi eugenicists believed that everything they did had a profound scientific basis. That's nothing to do with applying "teutonic heroic archetypes". Good things get done in the name of belief. Bad things get done in the name of belief (including the belief that scientists know what they're doing) (something that my weekly subscription to New Scientist disabused me of long ago). I don't see that Fantasy has anything to do with it. (Still, I wouldn't mind the world of Spinrad's "The Iron Dream", in which Hitler was only ever an SF writer...) JP: A SANDMAN question. I think SANDMAN is the one of the greatest comic book stories ever written. But I always thought it suffered somewhat for being part of DC continuity, particularly in the early issues. On the other hand, it was fun seeing the superheroes attend "The Wake". And, for those who knew what they were, Rao and "The Light of Oa" added tremendous charm to "The Heart of a Star" in Endless Nights. Still, to me at least, the minuses outweigh the pluses. I think the whole structure would have worked better if it was a self-contained, stand alone work. I understand, historically, why the series wasn’t done that way. But I’ve always wondered, would you change it if you could? NG: I don't know. Probably not. If you're going to change one thing, you might find yourself changing everything, and then you've got a different story. When I started, Sandman was part of DC continuity. It hadn't occurred to us to make something that wasn't. The opening storyline came from asking myself "well, if he exists in the DC universe, why haven't we heard of him before" and the obvious answer was "he's been imprisoned". The writer I was in 1987 had enormous fun writing Scott Free's dreams, or the John Constantine crossover, or the Dr. Destiny stuff. On the other hand, I kept being irritated by having to fit that week's DC continuity, which kept shifting -- it was the Joker in Arkham, when I wrote it, and then I had to rewrite it into the Scarecrow for example. The writer I was by 1989 was perfectly content to be allowed to go away from the DC universe, and only occasionally come back to do things like the Element Girl story or the Prez story every now and again. (And I wouldn't give up having written either of those stories for all the gold in Ireland.) JP: Do you think you’ll ever return to "long form" comic book writing? I mean another opus stretching over many dozen issues, as opposed to shorter stories or limited series? It’s a genre in which your work has never been matched. NG: Maybe one day. There's lots of other things I haven't done very well yet, though, whereas I got pretty good at doing that. I'd rather learn how to do a few other things well first. 1602 was interesting for me on that basis, as I'd never had much desire to write superheroes, or any belief I would be particularly good at it. So I thought it might be interesting to try and figure out how to do it. JP: One of the major themes in your work is the necessity of change. In many of your stories characters reach a dead-end where continuing on as they are would be a type of death-in-life. That was central in SANDMAN, and it was also important in Neverwhere and, to a lesser extent, in 1602. Have you ever had occasion where that applied to you? Have you ever come to a point where you were forced to say "No, this isn’t right. Continuing on this way is a dead-end. I have to start over again in a completely different direction." Do you ever feel such a point might come in your future? NG: Sure. But that's why I'm not a journalist any more, for example. But I tend to be good at deciding to move on before I'm completely done, which allows me to go back and do other things... JP: And finally, can we have the entire Ballad of the Fantastick? Or do we have to wait for the trade? NG: I think you'll have to wait for the trade -- I have to assemble all the material for it, and fix all the goofs, and so on, and decide what original material goes in. I'm looking forward to people getting to see Andy's original pencils -- they're a lot more dynamic than what was printed. JP: Thanks, Neil, for taking the time for this very interesting conversation. --Jason Pomerantz
http://www.fiddleandburn.com Plug - FIDDLE AND BURN’S Greatest Hits! The Quest: Thirteen year old Hal Rantz is desperate to acquire a copy of the new version of his favorite computer game, Death Zone 3. It’s not going to be easy.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
