Interviews 

Karen Traviss Gets Real With All-New “G.I. Joe” #1 [Interview]

By | September 24th, 2014
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

After several months of mandatory leave, “G.I. Joe” is back with an all new #1, and a new writer in novelist Karen Traviss, who’s ready to bring the real world to G.I. Joe like never before. Operating as the new “fourth season,” the book kicks off with a ne wdirection that spins a more realistic take back into the “Joe” franchise, starting with an arc titled ‘the Fall of GI Joe,’ starring Scarlett as the lead.

With “G.I. Joe” #1 is on sale today from IDW, we talked with Traviss about her plans for the series, her diverse career history, and her new novel, “Going Grey.”

Full disclosure, Karen, I’d seen your name on some Star Wars books before, but hadn’t familiarized myself with your work until IDW announced you’d be taking over G.I. Joe. I’ve since discovered you’ve worn a lot of hats over the years. If you will, share a little about your journey from defense correspondent to novelist, and how you eventually landed in the driver’s seat for “G.I. Joe”?

Karen Traviss: It’s a long history, so I’ll make it quick. (And if all you’ve seen is Star Wars, then you’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on!) Advertising copywriter, newspaper journalist, TV reporter and producer,  newspapers again (defence correspondent), spin doctor, and now novelist and scriptwriter.  Novels, comics, games. Own copyright stuff: military/political SF and techno-thrillers. Franchises: Halo. Gears of War, “Batman”, and another that I can’t mention yet. Currently writing my 26th novel.

How familiar were you with G.I. Joe before this? 

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KT: I’ll only write for franchises that I know little or nothing about. If I’m too familiar with something, then I can’t approach it as a writer. Obviously I knew what G.I. Joe (Action Man in the UK) was, but I hadn’t read the comics. When I write, I want to come to something as untainted by preconceived ideas as I can be, and explore it. I’m not interested in what I already know. I’m interested in what I don’t know, be it characters or situations, and the fun of writing is in exploring that. It’s like visiting a new place and meeting new people.

It’s a journo thing. I treat everything like a reporting job. I tell myself this is a real scenario and treat it with appropriate real-world, common-sense questions, then let the various individuals have their say.

What kind of research and resources did you dive into before taking over the series? 

KT: I have a method that works for me, which is to assemble data in as raw a form as I can before I start. In this case, it means getting a shopping list of characters that I can use, with a one-para bio, and a quick timeline. That’s all I want to know before I start. In real-world terms, if I want to really get to know Fred Smith, I don’t want to know what you think of him. I want to meet Fred Smith and have him tell me who he is. The nearest thing to that in the franchise world is to get a pared-down fact sheet.

Then I see what strikes me as my list of “journo questions.” Why is this guy in that role? What happened to that woman? What’s the situation in that country now?  With comics, I’ll then ask for any issues that are relevant to where I’m going, or where I think I’m going when I start the process. (The characters send me off on different tangents, but you have to start somewhere.) I’m a comics reader and for some reason I find that I can read what others have written/ drawn without it interfering with my thoughts. It’s not the same with novels – despite being a novelist, I hate reading prose fiction, and I don’t. Another writer’s novel is too much of a personal filter for me to get any useful “independent” data out of it, and I don’t want their take on it influencing how I write. For some reason, I don’t have that problem with comics. It might be because I was brought up on comics and they’re lodged in a different area of my brain now.

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This being a relaunch of sorts, what should readers know about G.I. Joe before picking up your first issue? And for lifers like me, and carry-overs from the previous runs, what can we expect?

KT: I’ve tried to stick to the existing universe as far as humanly possible. Any writer is going to have an entirely new take on anything because storytelling is such an individual thing,  but I’m also a believer in not fixing what doesn’t need fixing. So I’ve picked up on some storylines from the previous run, but they’re five years on from the last time we saw them, and a lot has happened. The world has changed, people have moved on, and there are new challenges. I’m basically an extrapolative writer – I look at a situation and ask where we could go from here.

What informed your decision to move the timeline ahead five years? Any chance we’ll be seeing any of the missing five years?

KT: I was kicking around the possibilities with John Barber at IDW and he mentioned that I could set it whenever I liked, and that rolling it forward was also possible. I just thought that five years ahead would give us enough space for a look at fresh situations without losing sight of questions that existing readers still wanted answers to. Although events in five-years-plus world indicate what’s happen in that time, there’s still plenty of room for stories in the missing chunk. I’m only thinking in terms of the current series at the moment so that I’m not distracted!

IDW’s shared-universe G.I. Joe line has usually consisted of at least two separate ongoing titles. This new series marks the first time since obtaining the license that we’ve had just the one book, and I was impressed at how well you managed to co-mingle story beats and characters from all the previous titles — “G.I. Joe”, “Special Missions”, “Cobra”, “Snake Eyes”. Was that a challenge?

KT: If I say no, that sounds weird. But no, it wasn’t. I didn’t even see it that way. I just started with the characters and asked myself, “Who were they then, and where are they now?” I build every single story I write – be it a novel, a game, a comic, a short piece – from the characters. Almost all my writing effort for anything goes into building and/ or developing characters, understanding them at the level where I can step into their heads and see the world entirely through their eyes instead of mine.

So I don’t see things from the perspective of events. Events are what the characters cause by their reaction and interaction. Even though I have to start any story with a rough idea of where I think it’s going, I find it rarely survives contact with the characters. Even I don’t know how a story ends when I start. I just take a step in a direction and then the characters take over; sometimes they play out much the way I’ve anticipated, sometimes they don’t even come close. That’s how I like it. In broad terms, I’m discovering the story for myself a few steps ahead of the reader.

Slightly related to the previous question, I think you’ve put together an interesting mix of Joes as your core team. Can you tell us a little about the team, and why you chose the characters you did?

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KT: I aimed at a small core cast so I could spend time on letting the reader get to know the characters and feel invested in their lives. Scarlett as the day-to-day boss of what remains of the G.I. Joe teams came up as a suggestion from John Barber while we were spitballing. When I was going through the list of characters I could use in the current canon, I needed a comms/ technology person, so Mainframe was ideal – I also wanted to see if his relationship with Scarlett would survive her new role, because I can see it putting some strain on her. She’s a hands-on person and now she’s stuck in a much more political, horse-trading kind of role.

Helix looked interesting as a character who didn’t or couldn’t relate to the others, and the more unfamiliar a mindset is, the more I want to explore it. I don’t recall why I settled on Roadblock; he just seemed interesting, especially with his culinary skills.  Siren and Isaac seemed like characters whose story needed to carry on. I’d worked in PR for ten years so I had a technical understanding of what her role was, although since I started writing her the nuts and bolts of the job have become far less relevant than her problems as a parent who thinks she wants out of Cobra and is only staying on for her son’s sake. I had to wonder how much of her would be left by the time she accepts Isaac has to make his own choices and live with them.

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Isaac is the catalyst character. I wanted to use him from the moment I was told that the last thing readers had seen of him was aged 8, threatening to kill his own mother if she betrayed Cobra. Now that’s a fascinating psychological train-wreck to examine. What would he be like in five years’ time? So he instantly became the character whose actions would influence everyone else’s. It was fun to work up a psych profile on him and see the layers.

I tried to recycle existing characters as much as possible, but I didn’t have a spy, and I needed one badly, so Josh Spinetti was born. Like everyone else in the series, Cobra, separatists, and politicians included,  he sees himself as a patriot doing the right thing. Maybe he is. I don’t know. He’s certainly willing to die for what he believes in. I just make the characters as real and rounded as I can and then it’s up to the reader.

The only other main characters that I’ve created so far (by issue 4 at the time of writing) are the Schletevan rebels, and they’re equally complex people with lives and families that are nothing like any of the G.I. Joe team’s. I’ve also brought back a G.I. Joe character that readers won’t have seen for some years, and freshened him up a bit. So he might not be exactly as readers recall him, but he’s definitely what his character would be if he were real. I won’t mention names yet.

Steve Kurth has done a fabulous job with all of them, by the way. It’s been great developing the characters with him.

There’s clearly a lot about the politics around G.I. Joe and Cobra that interests you, and it’s one of my favorite things about the concept too. I was intrigued by how much of that you infused into this first issue, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Do you feel like it’s more important for G.I. Joe to pull from the real world these days rather than, say, its comic or toy roots? For instance, there were no Joe or Cobra vehicles in this first issue, and no Vipers or solders decked out in anything other than real world fatigues. Was it a conscious decision to avoid those things? 

KT: No, it’s simply that I don’t write that way. If a franchise approaches me to write for them, then they know they’re going to get real-world stuff that’s character-led and dominated by the interpersonal dynamics. That’s why they hire me. Special Forces have become an increasingly political tool; I know that politicians see them as a cheaper, more direct, and more politically acceptable option than conventional warfare of big numbers and high casualty rates. So the question I start with is: how would G.I. Joe teams be used if they actually existed? It all flows from there.

Cobra gets the same analysis. Spending billions on hardware hasn’t won the ideological war for them, so under Tomax Paoli, they try a different tack, by taking a political route. And internally, that’s not popular with old-school Cobra folk like the Baroness. It’s a recipe for strife.

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How does your approach to writing comics differ from the way you work on novels? And just to specify things more, I’m wondering about your methods related to licensed properties and how the various IP owners influence your writing habits.

KT: Trying to fit a writer to how a franchise works isn’t the way to produce good stories, regardless of the medium. Franchises need to pick the writer who works the way they do. From the first franchise novel I wrote, my style and approach was established, and trying to change that would just have meant readers wouldn’t get what they’d come to expect, and I’d have loathed doing it.

As I’ve said, franchises who come to me know they’ll get authentic, character-driven military fiction. To do that, I need them to give me a few clear rules on what’s available to me from their toolbox,  and then leave me to get on with it. I need to tell the story my way. (And, if the story is part of a wider world like a game or a movie, then I need to be kept up to speed on everything that’s happening in that, otherwise there are inevitable canon problems and a lot of wasted time, especially with novels.) I’ve had franchises approach me and it’s been clear from the start that they want to tell their own story and just have someone else put that into words;  I can’t do that, because that’s not how I tell stories, so I give them names of colleagues who enjoy working that way. There’s no point wanting a Karen Traviss book or comic just like the one X franchise had if you then want me to write like someone else. It doesn’t work that way. But editors and producers generally know that, so I tend to get approaches from franchises who specifically want a “Traviss take,” as some have called it.

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Artist Steve Kurth’s a guy who certainly knows his way around G.I. Joe, having worked on the property several times in his career. But he’s changed his style up a bit for the new series, and it very much compliments the more pragmatic atmosphere of the story you’re telling. What kind of conversations did you guys have about the look of the book?

KT: I think every writer and artist combination is different, not only in terms of working out a joint method, but also in what the mix of creative DNA spawns, which can be unlike either of its “creative parents.”  I’ll write differently for different artists, depending on their strengths. Coming from TV, I tend to write very detailed, very directed scripts that are more like shooting scripts, with shot sizes, angles, lighting, and so on, but once you’ve gelled with an artist, you know how they think and they know what goes on in your head, so you can write more loosely.

For the first issue, Steve and I spent a lot of time kicking stuff around. We had to get to know each other’s thought patterns. Which way were we heading? Cinematic, impressionist, arty? I’m definitely not an impressionist-type writer, so Steve was presented with my nit-picky detail and humungous files of visual references. In turn, I found Steve could do really stunning character studies, very finely detailed realist stuff, so that meant I could go for broke on the emotional direction because the reader would really see complex facial expressions. There are some panels with Rashidov (the rebel leader) and Isaac that are absolutely fantastic examples of characterisation.

Partway through the pencils on the first issue, we hit a point where it all fell into place and became effortless, where we just knew what the other was doing and would do. From that point, it became the kind of “shared brain” that you really aim for. We have intensive discussion about some specific parts, especially the technical stuff that we both want to get absolutely right, and the rest just seems to happen almost by osmosis. It’s one of the reasons I love writing comics. Much as I like writing novels, the day to day experience of working with an artist or someone else with a totally different profession from your own is a wonderful thing that makes you raise your game.

It’s been pointed out you’re the first woman to write G.I. Joe. I know you’ve talked about that elsewhere, and I certainly don’t want to downplay the importance of it, but I’m equally as interested in the fact you’re, I believe, the first English writer to work on G.I. Joe comics published in the states. You’ve mentioned Action Man, but were you familiar with Action Force?

KT: Action Man is part of the language, even for people who’ve never seen the figure. It’s so frequently and commonly used that it’s hard not to know what the concept means even if you’ve never heard of G.I. Joe or seen the products. I’ve never seen the “Action Force” comics, but like everyone else, I use the phrase “Action Man” a lot.

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It doesn’t come through in the issue if there are, but I wonder, as someone born in the UK, are there any specific challenges to taking over a series that’s so intrinsically American?

KT: I’m bound to take a more international overview because that’s the way we are in the UK. But the reality – and remember this is a realist take on the IP – is that America operates in a multinational world now, and doesn’t or can’t act on its own. Today’s political necessities are very different. We can see that by watching the news any day of the week. There’s also a multinational angle to the movies, and while that’s a separate canon, the films do make the point that US special forces are likely to be working closely with a lot of different NATO SF and even non-NATO. So there’s no cultural issue there for me. And I’ve been writing for US audiences for so many years and I’ve spent so much time in the US that I’m “bilingual” in a story sense.

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The archetype of the Real American Hero is still very valid for US readers, but you’d be surprised how many non-American G.I. Joe fans there are, and I think the archetype of service, what the ordinary man or woman in uniform does for their country, is the same worldwide.

Tell me about your latest novel, “Going Grey”. It’s a series, correct? Just from the description, it seems like it could almost be a companion piece to G.I. Joe. Were you working on both projects at the same time?

KT: “Going Grey” is the first of my new military techno-thriller series. Some readers say it’s still SF, but it’s a long way from my “special forces in space” kind of books. It’s here and now, with a bit of extreme biotech that turned out to be a far more feasible than when I first thought of it as a comics superpower parable, but for the most part it’s a real-world story about identity and what it means to be a man in today’s society. Again, it’s “bilingual” in the sense of having English and American characters.  They’re not alike in any way, other than being military fiction.

I’d almost finished the book (actually, another rewrite after real world events had overtaken it again) when IDW approached me to do “G.I. Joe”. The freaky thing was that when I got the call, I’d literally just finished a scene where two of the main characters – Rob, a former Royal Marine, and Mike, a National Guardsman turned private contractor – are discussing having G.I. Joe and Action Man figures as boys and what effect if any it had on their career choices. When I looked through the manuscript again, there were other uses of the term Action Man that I hadn’t even remembered. So when I say the term is culturally embedded, I mean it!

What’s in the pipeline? What other Karen Traviss projects should we be looking forward to?

KT: I’m working on “Black Run”, the sequel to “Going Grey”, and a couple of other original novel series. On the franchise front, I’m concentrating on comics so that I’ve got time for my novels. One of the original novel series might morph into an original comic, though. Sometimes it’s hard to choose which medium would be best.


Chad Bowers

Chad Bowers has been reading comics for most of his life. His transition from fan to professional is a work in progress. He’s the co-founder of ACTION AGE COMICS, creator of the webcomic MONSTER PLUS, co-creator of AWESOME HOSPITAL, THE HARD ONES, and DOWN SET FIGHT (coming soon from Oni Press) with Chris Sims. He reviews comics, writes G.I. JoeVersity, and co-hosts The Hour Cosmic for Multiversity Comics! If you've got nothing better to do, you can follow him on Twitter or Tumblr.

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