NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT WITH BRIAN BENDIS

Chapter Two: THE RED STATES OF COMICS

B- Ok, now the one constant criticism I see is that Marvel of late, is that it’s almost completely a superhero company, a one-genre company. Now, easily it can be argued that within the genre are many layers of other sub genres. Daredevil is a pulp comic, FF, Warlock, and others are Sci-fi comics, Venom and such easily are horror comics. My argument to this critique is do you go to KFC and yell at them for making so much chicken?

But, on some level, I do see the point.

But I am also not a genre snob, I love good superhero comics and know that many of my favorite mainstream comic book writers pour a lot of their own lives and experience into the superhero books they write, no matter how fantastical. And, good fiction is good fiction and I don’t care. But...

... I also buy a lot of comics that are not superhero and I also vaguely remember making them at one point. Could this generation of Marvel make Epic Illustrated, a Stray Toasters? Can we do for instance a teen drama that doesn’t involve a costume?

Q- That is a very long question, you really love your own dialog don’t ya?

B- It’s a complicated subject.

Q- Here’s an even longer answer.

B- Wow, who would have guessed?

Q- If you keep this up I’ll post this interview without grammar corrects, then everyone will see what we deal with on a daily basis.

When I was on the outside looking in at Marvel, I use to look at the current EICs and wonder why they didn’t take the opportunity to expand reader’s tastes. Surely with the Marvel machinery behind them, they could force the issue, move the mainstream comic’s industry towards a new place, different styles etc. Well, now that I’m in the seat I see not only how difficult it is, but how my predecessors did try in many cases and just had to put their hands up and say okay, it is what it is. We’ve had so many off-beat projects that we’ve done, that I had such high hopes for but in the end the fans and retailers basically told us with their dollars that it wasn’t what they were putting on the top of their reading lists. X-Statix, I feel, was a book that broke that mold, but it never scored high numbers like the rest of the X books, and we kept it alive as long as we could.

Remember Trouble? That was an honest attempt at a romance with a top-flight creative team. Look, I could give you a laundry list of this stuff, but we both know, that if it doesn’t have capes it’s a hard sell. And there in lies the mystery to me, because like you, I read the letters, the e-mails, the posts that are craving for material that’s not superhero oriented. So much of it that it would lead us to believe that there is really an audience out there, but I think this more than anything attests to that very large silent majority in comics. I now call them the “Red States” of comics, who are out there - the ones who don’t write and don’t post on web sites, who are truly driving our industry. And it’s not just us, anyone doing non-super hero stuff, for the most part is finding themselves hitting a very small audience. By the way, I don’t use this “Red States” comparison in a bad way, I just mean that until they vote, with their dollars, you forget that these fans are not only out there, but they’re out there in huge numbers.

Look, this won’t prevent us from continually doing this stuff, Runaways and The Pulse to some extent are offshoots of this, but we have to be careful taking our shots. Things at Marvel are very simple, if tomorrow the world changed and no one wanted superheroes and wanted romance books, you’d see us producing romance books. There is no conspiracy here, if the industry feels like Marvel is putting out too many superhero books, then it has to look inward at itself. Perhaps we need to accept that ultimately that’s what “today’s” fan wants out of their comics, and what’s really wrong with that? The only thing I can imagine is that perhaps some are embarrassed by this, or have a touch of that self-loathing we’ve discussed so many times in the past. People like what they like, I turn on TV and for the most part it’s three things, Reality Shows, Sit-coms and Police Dramas. With the exception of Reality Shows, it’s been the latter two since the dawn of TV.

B- But does the new bookstore climate offer us the opportunity to do more of that, and are we ignoring it?

Q- It brings up an incredible opportunity and we’re monitoring it all the time. I don’t think it will be the immediate cure all for this particular problem, but I think that over time, as we convince more and more people of the legitimacy of comics, that this will open the door for more of that. I mean, how long ago was Maus written? You would have thought that that would have been the opening shot over the bow that people were ready, especially in the mainstream, to read something other than superheroes, yet here we are.

B- I cannot believe that in the 21st century we are still looking at the same mainstream coverage, "BAM! POW! COMICS JUST AREN’T FOR KID’S ANYMORE!" Really, that’s really the headline still? It’s been about forty years since that was a credible headline. Why the #!$% can we not break this mindset!!

Q- We’ve done a lot of this damage ourselves. Back in the ‘50s as an industry we had to protect ourselves by kowtowing to the government. It was all self preservation, but I feel that that did unimaginable damage to our industry by forever solidifying in the minds of American mothers in particular, that comics are and should always be nothing but a child’s medium. How dare we be anything but that because that would be shirking our responsibility. Then of course, forty plus years later he we were still hugging the Comics Code like it was actually protecting us from something. It was comic’s equivalent of, “if you see the flash, tuck and roll,” or hiding under our desks when the fire drill alarm rang. First of all, we should be so lucky if someday we matter enough to grab some Senators ire because that means as an industry we are reaching more than just our niche market. Secondly, no little scalloped shaped stamp is going to save our @$$ if we do. The only thing that would save us is if unlike the ‘50s we all stand up and fight back rather than bend over.

B- But that was fifty years ago? It’s really our fault?

Q- I believe we did the most damage to ourselves. Also, think about how many different genres were prevalent before then.

Funny, this is just really fresh in my head again because I just got an original copy of Seduction of the Innocent, the book that started this whole mess, for Christmas. It’s amazing to me as well how much damage that crappy book did and how those running the show at the time and in some cases still running the show have embraced the outcome of it. Sure, to a point I buy the argument, we did what we had to do to keep the industry alive. But, there’s another part of me that says, hey, only one guy stood up to fight against it, his name was Bill Gaines and all the other publishers gladly watched him stick his head of the fox hole only to get it blown off. Why? Because he was the number one publisher at the time and POOF he was gone. Simply shameful, yet every time we place a Comic’s Code stamp on a book, I feel we embrace that heritage, that act, that lack of fortitude and courage and the reason we still deal with this mess with how people perceive us.

B- Moving on, let’s kiss a little Whedon ass. Sincerely, I read Astonishing #7 over the weekend; I loved it top to bottom.

B- I was reading Astonishing and though I was there with you in LA the day you got Joss, I realized I actually didn’t know the story of how he got to Marvel. I just know it was exciting and I am asking as if you and I were actually talking. If I was talking to you on the phone today I would have asked mister "dodging three questions so far," but what you told me on the phone today was pretty cool too. :)

Q- If you were actually on the phone talking to me with these grammatical mistakes I would assume you were drunk.

And, another thing, are you actually going to bed thinking about comics? If you are we really have a whole other serious conversation that I don’t think you want made public.

B- Dude, I am knee deep in House of M. You want me eating, sleeping and $#!@@%$# Marvel Comics.

Look, in all seriousness, Joss is arguably the most important ’new’ comic writer and it’s a sincere question.

Q- Okay, you’re right, it’s just that I’ve told this story a bunch of times, don’t you dogmatically read any press that has my name on it like you should?

My contact with Joss began four years ago on my second day, no kidding, second day as EIC. I had to fix X-Men and I had to fix Spider-Man, the mandate was simple. I had heard that Joss was a huge fan of X-Men and had been involved with the first movie and I had always wondered why Marvel had never asked him to write the comic, so somehow I got his number and I cold called him. We spoke for a few minutes and he was really intrigued, he was also in the middle of the red-hot Buffy show and he was working on Firefly as well. He said he’d get back to me. True to his word he got back to me a couple of days later and said that the time just wasn’t right, maybe some other day.

Flash forward to I believe it was July of 2003, I was in LA taking care of some Marvel business and on my way to San Diego Comicon. In LA, between meetings, I was checking my e-mail when I got a very cryptic e-mail from Grant Morrison saying he was leaving X-Men, that his run was done. This kind of took me by surprise and came sort of suddenly, I had no back up plan since I was given next to zero notice. Kevin Smith gave me a ride to San Diego and I was so exhausted from my business dealings in LA that I literally slept the entire trip while Kev and another friend chain-smoked the entire ride there. When we got there I was dizzy and just disoriented from all the smoke and uncomfortable sleep. I must have been green when Kev woke me up.

Anyway, I had a panel to do and only an hour to check into my room and get back to the convention, I was still kind of down about Grant’s leaving. So, as I’m humping my luggage up to my room, my cell phone rings and its Managing Editor David Bogart, he says he’s sorry about the Grant news, “what Grant news?” I replied. With half an hour before my big Q+A panel I find out that Grant has signed exclusive with DC. So, I run down to the hall and make my way through the crowd, and as these things go, who should be the very first person I run into at Comicon but Grant. I tapped Grant on the shoulder and basically asked him what had happened. Without getting into detail he told me of a falling out he had had with Bill and that was that. We parted ways because he had a signing, I believe, and I had my panel. A month later Rich Johnston reports that Grant and I had a fist fight in the middle of the convention center, that gave me a great laugh. Anyway, I had a great Q+A and the subject of Grant only came up near the end and quite honestly I think I answered the question of who would be replacing Grant with a wait and see. I mean at the time he had several months worth of stories in the can.

Cut to the next day, and I was doing a signing at the Wizard booth. I was speaking to Gareb Shamus, but all the while I was worried about X-Men and what to do next, how do you follow what Grant did on X-Men, how do you follow the most significant X creator since Chris Claremont? After Gareb stepped away for a bit I just started to obsess over it, running through creator’s names in my head. I know this sounds like BS, but I then flash backed to my original call with Joss, I had completely forgotten about it, and I also knew that whatever number I had for him I had long since lost. And, swear to God, just as I was thinking this, I look up and there’s Joss standing right in front of me with hand extended, “wassup, dude!” In retrospect I should have just sat back down, closed my eyes and imagined myself doing nasty things with Pamela Anderson, maybe that would appear too!

I personally think it was one of those cosmic instances that life puts in front of you. We may not have known it, but we were kind of looking for each other within that gigantic con. I hadn’t thought about Joss until that minute and I’m sure he wasn’t coming over looking to write X-Men, as a matter of fact I know he wasn’t. Regardless, the subject came up and he was intrigued. What followed was a series of comedic e-mails trying to convince Joss that it was safe to come in the water. He too felt the ghost of Grant overshadowing any ideas he had. And now, here we are today, how did we follow Grant, well I think Joss has done just fine. Not only has he done incredible work on X, he has also proven to be a great new voice in the world of comics, he is on a caliber with Alan Moore and perhaps even a Brian Bendis. He’s also been the perfect compliment to what Grant set forth. Grant gave more X-Men ideas than we could ever imagine, Joss has taken much of that and given us an incredibly focused look at the world of X.

End Chapter Two

Tomorrow Brian and I reveal the secrets of the Internet, Lindsey Lohan vs. Hillary Duff and Rich Johnston writing Captain Britain.