520 Weeks – Mike Costa on “Blackhawks:” “We Don’t Know if There is Kryptonite in the New 52.”

On Tuesday, August 31, 2011, “Justice League” #1 dropped, officially beginning the experiment known as the New 52. DC Comics was not just relaunching all of its titles, it was doing so in a new, clean(er) continuity, in an attempt to revitalize and enthuse the fan base. It was an unprecedented move that bore good, bad, and mediocre comics.

Over the next year, we’ll be discussing each of the New 52 titles with a member of its creative team. We’re not taking any clear path through these books, but hopping from title to title, line to line, in an effort to spotlight the breadth of the initiative.

Today, we’re chatting with Mike Costa. Mike discusses how he became a ‘military’ writer early in his career, having written “GI Joe: Cobra” for IDW, followed by “Blackhawks” for the New 52. He also wrote books like “Web Warriors” for Marvel, “Transformers” for IDW, and co-created and co wrote “God is Dead” with Jonathan Hickman for Avatar Press.

Mike just finished up a stint writing and producing Lucifer for Netflix. You can follow him on Twitter, @MikeCosta.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cover by Ken Lashley

How did you get involved with the New 52?

Mike Costa: I’m trying to remember who exactly emailed me. I think it was Mike Martz.

I know that to be true, actually. I just talked to him last weekend, he mentioned that “Blackhawks” was part of the Bat office because he loves the idea of Blackhawks. So he fought for it because he wanted to edit it.

MC: That’s even funnier then because he stopped editing it not too long into my run. I mean, my run was only eight issues, but in those eight months I had four editors. It was Mike, and then Mike handed me off to Janelle Asselin, who was his assistant, which is normal. Janelle was really great. Mike was super busy with Batman, so I get it. And then Janelle left DC, so we moved over to Matt Idelson’s office. And he handed me off to Chris Conroy, who was his assistant. Chris is one of the big editors in DC now. He’s the only guy who’s still there out of all these people. Chris was great; I loved Chris. And he was basically my editor for like the last four or five issues. So there was some continuity there.

I first became aware of your work because of all the stuff you were doing over in the GI Joe corner of comics over at IDW. That seems like that is a pretty good guess as to why you got the “Blackhawks” call.

MC: I am almost positive that Mike said that to me. Not that it would be like a mystery, you know? So the situation with “Blackhawks” was…so this is fun. This is a fun New 52 story that typifies the chaos but doesn’t really lay at anybody’s particular person’s feet. They wanted to do a Blackhawks revamp, obviously, and they had already hired a different writer who they would not tell me who it was at the time. I have since found out and I will honor the you know, ‘we don’t talk smack about other people,’ but whoever this writer was did not turn in stuff that they liked. I never saw what he turned in. I actually asked, “Oh, can I take a look?,” and they were like, “No.” I think they just didn’t want me to, even unconsciously take anything that that guy did.

So I don’t know what it was if it just wasn’t what they wanted, or if it was bad, I don’t know. But it didn’t work out. And so they parted ways with him, and that’s when they contacted me. But they were so deep into the process at that point, that when Mike contacted me and asked me to do it, of course, I said yes. I’m not going to say no. At that time, I’d done a couple things for Wildstorm, but I had not worked for DC proper or Marvel. This was my first you know, big two gig and it was the New 52 was a big deal. So I was like, “of course I’ll do it.” And they were like, “great, because we were working with somebody else on this and it’s kind of late in the day and we need the first issue next week.” Okay, I can handle that.

So I was like, “so who are the Blackhawks?” Like, I know who the originals are, but they had the cover image [from issue #1], you know, that cover? And I’m like, So who are these guys by Ken Lashley, and Mike was like, “Oh, I don’t know. Whoever you say they are”. And I go, “well, what are their names?” He’s like, “I don’t know.” So I’ve got to name everybody, I’ve got to come up with who all these people are. And then I’m like, “so what is this comic? Like, what is it about, you know, what are they doing? What’s the team?” He’s like, “that’s up to you, man.”

So I had to come up with all this stuff from scratch, and deliver a first issue in one week. And I was very excited about it. Obviously it’s a lot, but I was like, “I could do this.” And I did it. I knocked it all out and I got it in. And I remember it was back to a normal schedule after that. I don’t remember how long it was, but it probably was a month later, maybe it was turning in an issue, and I said, “I would love to see some of the art on issue one, I’d love to see what Ken Lashley is doing. And they were like, “oh, yeah, Ken hasn’t started on that.” And I was like, “I had to rush out a script in a week, and it’s been three weeks into the art hasn’t started? I could have taken that time!” But that was just very typical of the complete editorial confusion going on at the New 52 of like, one hand does not know what the other hand is doing. We need this stuff tomorrow. And then it’s a month until they actually need it. But they didn’t know that at the time. I don’t think anybody was ever working with me in bad faith. I’m sure that when they told me they needed the script in a week, they really did need it. And then it just didn’t anymore for whatever crazy reason. I also went through many artists as well.

I think it was five?

MC: Off the top of my head, it was Ken Lashley on issue one, Trevor McCarthy on issue two. Issue three was Graham Nolan [Editor’s note: Graham Nolan actually did layouts for the first four issues, with Lashley, McCarthy, Trevor Scott, and Victor Ibanez doing finishes on each issue.]. And then, the fifth artist was Cafu and then Cafu stuck with the comic for the second half. I think there’s a few pages in the final issue that he wasn’t able to draw or maybe the second to final issue [Editor’s note: it was the penultimate issue, with Carlos Rodriguez taking some pages].

Looking back, Cafu was so good. Honestly, all the artists were good, but Cafu was so right for the book; I’m glad we ended up with him, but I wish we had had him the whole time. I feel like it would have been more consistent, and the book came into its own when he started drawing it. At the beginning of the New 52 I think he was on “Grifter,” which is a strange choice because he really sung on “Blackhawks.” He’s a big, like, tech guy, he draws tech so well. I loved getting those pages, they were so great.

So, were you aware of what the Blackhawks were in the original continuity?

MC: Yes, though I will admit that I never read any of the pre DC stuff when they were at a different publisher [Quality – ed.] before DC took them over. The Blackhawks that I was familiar with was Howard Chaykin’s reboot of them [from 1988 – ed.]. I’d read that a few years ago, and I was familiar with who the characters were even before I read the Chaykin run, but the Chaykin comics were the only ones I actually read. But it didn’t matter; I specifically asked, ”do we want a connection to the old run?” and they were like, “no, this is a brand new thing.”

I don’t know how much of this people outside of the industry were aware of, but they [DC – ed.] truly didn’t know what the New 52 was like. They couldn’t answer my questions. “Well, does the old continuity exist or not?” Clearly it did because Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and Geoff Johns’s run on Green Lantern continued as if nothing had happened, right? They had stories they wanted to tell and no one’s gonna say no to Geoff or Gran. They continued writing the comics they were writing, whereas you know, other things were completely rebooted from the ground up. You’ve got Barbara Gordon as Batgirl and she could walk again and they just explained it away in one line. Just crazy stuff.

So when it came to a book like mine that was already brand new characters, they just didn’t know, they didn’t have an answer for that. So I just didn’t do it because I wasn’t all that familiar with those characters, and I didn’t see a compelling story to tell. Also, I didn’t want them at the last minute to tell me no. That didn’t happen to me, but it was happening a lot. I feel like part of the reason that I had such an easier time than a lot of my colleagues is that I was working completely in a bubble, which was actually by editorial edict.

If it was up to me, I would have had somebody show up in issue two. I don’t remember specifically who, but I think I may have asked about it. But they fully told me, “we don’t want any other DC characters appearing in this book. We don’t want you to have guest stars, you want this book to live on its own.” I thought that was a weird choice. Look, I’m not an idiot, a book that has nothing to do with DC continuity coming out in a sea of 51 other comics, it’s the comic that no one’s going to read. If you’re looking at the shelves, and you’re like, “Oh, what am I gonna pick up? There’s a there’s 52 new comics out this month. I don’t have that much money. Well, probably the comic that has no characters I have ever heard of!”

So you would think it would behoove them to put other characters in it, but they told me not to. So I was like, okay, I can handle that. It makes it easier; I don’t have to meet with anybody. In the second issue, there’s a character breaking into their base. I wanted him to be breaking in to steal kryptonite. And I said,”Can I have him steal Kryptonite? We won’t see Superman, but it’s valuable material.” And they were like, “We don’t know.” I was literally told, “We don’t know if there is Kryptonite in the New 52.” So we have to check with the Superman office. To be fair to DC, when I worked at Marvel, this happened over there all the time, and they were not going through major relaunches, it’s just lack of communication between offices. But it took forever to get an answer. And at the last minute, the answer was “no, you can’t use kryptonite.”

So stuff like that was happening. [The upside of that is] you can just read “Blackhawks” as its own thing. It has nothing to do with anything, you know. So I kind of appreciate that, honestly.

I’m really interested in your, I guess I’m gonna call it, self identification. You were writing “GI Joe: Cobra” at the time, and then you got this book, so you got this reputation as being ‘the military/paramilitary guy.’ Is that how you see yourself in comics? Or is that just sort of what happened?

MC: No, man. I was friends with Christos Gage from my time working at Wildstorm. And Andy Schmidt, who was an editor at Marvel and then at DC, was put in charge of GI Joe at IDW. He reached out to Chris because he had worked with Chris a bunch at Marvel, and said, “I’m going to relaunch GI Joe and we’re going to do three different titles. One of them is going to be about ‘Cobra’ and I want you to write it.” And Chris said, “I am way too busy for that. But I do know this kid – Chris always referred to me as like a kid – he probably knows GI Joe better than me, because he’s younger, you should hire him. And that’s how I got “GI Joe.” So it wasn’t like I had all this military knowledge. It was literally, I was a writer who was younger than Christos Gage.

Luckily, I was doing the “Cobra” book and they had Chuck Dixon on the main book, and Chuck, you know, he is a paramilitary guy; he knows all that stuff. I was faking everything, I was making stuff up. I did as much research as I possibly could without really immersing yourself in the world and the literature of it. There’s only so much you can glean from reading articles about stuff and I was always very aware, acutely aware of that, like, I don’t really know, the language that soldiers use when they speak to each other. Chuck knows all that stuff, I just don’t. But I was really lucky that I was doing an undercover book, so it kind of didn’t matter. And Cobra could kind of be whatever I wanted it to be because, you know, they’re a shadowy corporate terrorist organization. So I was really excited about building that up, because that involves stuff like, you know, nation states, and, and like international corruption and finance.

I really had a great time with “Cobra,” and to your point about getting this reputation based on that comic years later. Years later, I was at San Diego Comic Con, and I met Tom King. I ran into him at the Eisner’s, and I was such a huge fan; I think “Sheriff of Babylon” is one of the best comics of the past decade. It’s so good. And Tom is in the CIA, like, he knows this stuff. And I introduced myself and I was like, “Hey, Tom, I’m Mike Costa” and he knew who I was right away. He was like, “Oh, Mike Costa, ‘GI Joe: Cobra!’ Dude, I was reading that when I was in the CIA.” He was very complimentary.

So then when I got “Blackhawks,” it was for that reason. But obviously, “Blackhawks” is also not military. I don’t need to know any of this stuff. So yeah, but maybe to expand upon your question a bit and to answer it in a broader way, I was certainly aware that I got this because of the idea that I was a writer in that space. And so I don’t know if it was a conscious decision to step away from that. But it was a conscious decision that I didn’t want “Blackhawks” to be as dark a book as “Cobra.” With “Cobra,” I wanted it not to be a fun book. It’s about horrible terrorists, whereas black whereas when I got “Blackhawks” I felt like okay, this is my first shot at like a mainstream, you know, quote, superhero book. And I really had an intention to make it fun, to make it joyous. And I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this in an interview, but there was a thing that was my key inspiration for the whole comic.

So I think it was a local convention in Detroit, you know, one of the ones that was like, in a hotel ballroom or something. My dad was a big collector; that’s how I got into comics, I’d go with him. And I was still a kid, high school at the oldest. It was at a dealer table, and I was overhearing a conversation with two guys, one guy going through a long box and the other was the dealer. And the one guy said, “the greatest opening line that you can possibly have in a story is no time to explain, trust me.” I don’t know if that’s true, i’s just someone’s opinion, obviously. But it was such a compelling piece of writer’s knowledge. It sets the stage perfectly, “no time to explain, trust me,” and then you’re just off to the races. So when I got “Blackhawks,” I very intentionally made that the first line of dialogue in that comic, because I do think it does work, particularly in the medium of comics. It captures all of the propulsive forward momentum and the excitement and the ‘check your brain at the door’ kind of aesthetic that comics gives you. Let’s just start this ride. And that was very intentional. And I don’t think it was intentional, that I was trying to be like, “I don’t want anybody thinking, I’m the dark military guy so I’m gonna just change myself.” It was much more like, “I want this comic to be as fun as possible.” And so that was my starting point.

Looking back, was “Blackhawks,” the book that came out, is that the book you wanted to write?

MC: 90% yes, and the only missing 10% is that we didn’t have a consistent artist. If we had Cafu the whole time, then it would have been 100%. My only intention with the comic when I got it was to make this as fun and straight ahead as possible. I threw so many ideas in there that I had come up with over the years that I had wanted to put into a comic someday, and they went into “Blackhawks.”

I got the sense very early on that nobody knew what was going on in DC. It was just total chaos. I was listening to friends of mine who were having a much harder time than me and being asked to rewrite stuff a million times. The idea of what they should be doing is changing, and they just have no concept. The only thing that’s winning out is brute force, and it really reminded me of the 90s. Like, they made the announcement that Greg Capullo was going to be on “Batman,” which, I don’t know if anybody remembers, but at the time, everyone was like, “what? Greg Capullo?” Obviously, we were all wrong, but at the time, he was like the dude who used to draw “Spawn,” like 10 years ago is now drawing Batman. So I really got it in my head, “well, this is the 90s again” And so I made this personal secret decision that I was going to write “Blackhawks” as if I was writing an Image comic in the 90s. Whether or not Image comics were actually written this way, I don’t know because I haven’t ever talked about this to anybody who was working back then. But having read them, it always felt like nobody knows; it doesn’t seem like these guys have a plan? You know, it doesn’t seem like the people working on this comic have any concept of what’s going to happen one issue to the next, or sometimes one page the next.

So I created this system for myself, where I would make sure that every issue ends on a cliffhanger. And I did no planning; I did not know how I was going to get out of that cliffhanger until I started with the next issue. The only reason I was even able to get away with this is because I was on a book that nobody was paying attention to. So nobody asked me for an outline, nobody asked me to tell them what was going to happen. Nobody cared. They just cared that I got my scripts in on time. I know that that was not the experience for a lot of people in this era; a lot of people had to turn in these huge outlines, and then the outlines get thrown away. I was really lucky that that didn’t happen to me.

I think that is ultimately what makes “Blackhawks” so successful to me is that I went about it as an intentional experiment to create a comic that had this improvisational energy to it, where I truly didn’t know how to rescue the characters stranded in space. “I’ll figure that out next month.” Whether or not the guys who were doing comics back in 1993 really were doing that, it felt like they were, it felt like there was just such energy and creativity just blasting through these comics. It felt like making comics with your friends, and I wanted to do everything I could to recapture that energy. And I feel like “Blackhawks” kind of did it.

I mean, like your mileage may vary, but for me personally, I am really, really proud of “Blackhawks.” The only regret that I have is that we didn’t have a consistent art team until the last few issues because I am really proud of that story.

Your run only lasted eight issues. For a lot of folks I’ve spoken to whose books had similarly short runs, they knew pretty early on that the book wasn’t going to go 50 issues. So when did you when did you get a sense for the title’s length?

MC: I would say almost right away. I didn’t know, obviously it was gonna go eight issues, but I knew from the beginning that no one’s gonna buy this comic, no one’s gonna care. They won’t let me have anybody in it . We were already onto the third artist before the first issue even came out. That’s just a death sentence. You can’t do that with the first three issues. So I knew that the book wasn’t gonna last. I didn’t know how much time it was gonna have.

I don’t remember even thinking about it, just knowing like, this is not going to last all that long. So eight issues is probably close enough to what I expected. I mean, I certainly didn’t think we’d get the ax at issue four. We’d get like a trade out of it. I remember when they told me that issue eight was going to be the final issue, and it was when I turned in issue seven. I think they let me rewrite issue seven. They let me finish the story in a way that made sense, which I really appreciate.

For issue eight, I got notes back from somebody who had never given me notes on an issue before and he gave me notes on the final script issue. And my notes on “Blackhawks” were extremely minor. The only note that I ever remember even getting from Chris [Conroy], was I had a sequence in I think issue six with a character sitting at a bar and telling a story. Chris suggested we cut into and see the story as he’s telling it, instead of like a page of people sitting in a bar. That’s a good note. That’s the only note I remember getting.

So I turned in this script for issue eight, and the note is “you really need to have the characters on the first couple pages saying each other’s names because if a new reader picks this up, they’re not going to know who anybody is.” And I remember thinking that this is the last issue, I don’t know why we’re worried about new readers. Like there’s no more issues after this man, what is the goal you’re trying to achieve here?