Milton Lawson on “Orson Welles: Warrior of the Worlds”

Orson Welles wore many hats in his day: filmmaker, actor, writer, producer, pitch man, raconteur . . . the list goes on and on. But what can only be told now is that you can add ‘defender of the Earth’ to that list as well. According to Milton Lawson’s Orson Welles: Warrior of the Worlds graphic novel (now on Kickstarter), the thespian led a secret life keeping this planet safe from invaders from not only Mars, but all around the galaxy. I checked in with Milton to find out more about the KS campaign and Welles’ life in general, both in front of and behind the camera:

Art by Renton Hawkey.

I’m going to ask you to channel a little bit of your book’s protagonist here and tell us about this Kickstarter campaign in your best Wellesian voice and manner.

Milton Lawson: Let me preface this by saying I will never have a Wellesian voice, more like a pretty weak radio voice. But the project is Orson Welles: Warrior of the Worlds, a graphic novel series about Orson Welles and his secret life defending Earth from aliens. It takes the premise that Welles’s original War of the Worlds radio broadcast was not a dramatization of HG Welles; not a hoax, not a prank. It was actually a live broadcast of events that actually occurred. And the comic asks the question, “Well? Then what happens next?” And the answer to that question is he joins a secret government agency tasked with defending the Earth from alien incursions and other nonsense.

Talk a little bit about your collaborators.

ML: I have been ridiculously fortunate in the collaborators that I have and have more collaborators than are listed on the Kickstarter page because the project is structured where each chapter is done in a different visual style. Most of the chapters take their visual cues from something in Welles’s filmography or occasionally in his real life, so almost every chapter is from a different artist, though some artists are doing more than one chapter. The anchor of the team is Erik Whalen, a remarkable sequential storyteller who has done works like Spiritdrifters and Disconnect. The first chapter is inspired by Citizen Kane and, therefore, subsequent chapters might have a linking scene to introduce them.

Art by Erik Whalen.

Then some of the artists we have on board for the other chapters include Rem Broo of The End Times of Bram & Ben. He’s going to be doing an action-packed chapter. Renton Hawkey, who is a newcomer, but you can find him on Instagram to see a lot of his cool cinema-inspired art. He is doing a chapter that is a very spoiler heavy so I can’t divulge what happens there. Jorge Santiago Jr. of Spencer & Locke fame is doing a chapter that is kind of a steampunk action sort of chapter. Martyn Lorbiecki, who’s done Earworm and The Ghost Butterfly has a really cool painterly watercoloring style to his artwork. And he is doing a chapter set in Brazil during carnival, and he renders the glorious colors of the carnival festivals in watercolor in a really beautiful style that we have on the Kickstarter page.

Art by Martyn Lorbiecki.

We’ve also got some artists lined up to do chapters in volume two, and one of the features on the Kickstarter page is we’ve got a video trailer that demonstrates the concept of the series as a whole. And the artwork on that was done by Dave Chisholm and Chris Doré. And both of them may or may not be slotted into volume two, depending on timing and availability.

I recommend people go check out the Kickstarter for that and also for the trailer, which features of very apropos voice for the subject matter. How did you snag that particular actor for the voiceover?

ML: The story behind the voiceover was kind of multi-part. First was the idea itself, generated in a class from Heather Antonios at the Comics Experience workshop focused on crowd-funding campaigns and just the idea of something to help set the campaign apart. And it just so happened that that was a few months before the great voice actor Maurice LaMarche was scheduled to come to Houston for the Comicpalooza convention. A really good friend gave me the heads up about it, so I decided to create a sort of proof-of-concept portfolio laying out some test pages, sketch work, and a script of what the narration would be. I printed all that out and approached Mr. LaMarche in his autograph line at the show. Of course it was the longest autograph line because he has a tons of adoring fans, of which I count myself. And he was just immediately so delighted by the premise and so friendly. We exchanged contact info and he said if I needed someone to narrate this, he could do that for me. It took us several months to generate all of the artwork necessary for the narration, but once we got that in the can, he provided the narration. And that’s one of the hooks that we hope grabs people for the series as a whole.

It definitely grabbed me. I saw the trailer and immediately fired off a message to you about how great everything looked and how the guy you got to do the Welles voice was pretty good. Not knowing, because I hadn’t scrolled down far enough yet, that you actually got The Brain himself to do it. So of course it was going to sound great! [laughter]

How did you get Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou involved? He seems to be a rather busy dude.

ML: I assumed that his availability was not going to be such that he would be able to take on a new project. But several months ago I co-wrote a short comic with Rick Quinn as part of an anthology series of sort of Black Mirror-esque sci-fi short stories called Uncanny Valley. And Haas had lettered it. I was slightly on his radar because of that, and I’m hugely thankful.

In addition to the lettering, he’s just an all-around smart comics dude with a real discerning palette. So it’s another, and I keep trying to find a better way to say this, but his and LaMarche’s involvement alone are confidence builders by association. And since you’re not really that known of a commodity, the company you build around you to make this thing becomes really important in persuading someone to back you.

I see your Roger Ebert & Me collaborator Rem Broo listed. How did you guys come together?

ML: We met several years ago and potentially collaborated on another comic series. I was looking for artists and it was at the very beginning of my comic writing career. I just posted a lot of ads at some of the haunts that are known by artists, places like Digital Webbing and PencilJack and DeviantArt. He answered an ad for that kinda cyberpunk project. And unfortunately for me, the amount of time it took between him answering my ad and my replying to him, he had already gotten booked up by another project that turned out to be quite time consuming.

But I kept emailing him and it just so happened he was available for Ebert & Me. That project does have somewhat of a similarity to the Orson Welles project in the sense that it’s got a film name in the title and has connections to movie history. And ever since we worked together on that, I’ve had the same request out to him: “If you have any availability coming up, keep me posted.” And he had some availability that lined up with this project, I asked him if he would want to work on that, and he said yes!

For a book like Warrior of the Worlds, you’re essentially handling four or five different simultaneous collaborations. Why not go with one art team?

ML: We’ve only generated a small percentage of the full project, so some of these logistical challenges are still ahead of us. But in general, the concept came around partly because it just fit the material really well. Welles is associated with a number of visually distinct genres and styles and touchstones that immediately when the premise came to me soon after that, those opportunities presented themselves.It’s also, from a logistical point of view, for someone such as myself who’s doing everything independently and not very well known in the industry yet, it’s a way to increase the project scope while still being manageable. Each of these artists are really only committing to a small page count; they’re not getting roped into some long series they have to block out months of their schedule for.

So I get to have my cake and eat it too! The ambition of a larger project but on a compressed timeframe, and the commitment on each person is smaller. So, in a weird way, it’s an easier way to tackle a project of this ambitious scope.

It still sounds like you’re doing Welles proud with the amount of hustle and platespinning for this project.

ML: Ha! I hoped that the Welles fans such as yourself would recognize that because, particularly in the post-Ambersons era of his career, he was blackballed by the industry and he had to string together all of his projects through hook-or-crook DIY mentality. Just total punk rock filmmaking. He kind of invented a lot of the independent ethos. And so I felt that this approach was also appropriate in sort of inspired by that aspect of Welles’s oeuvre, you know?

What came first for you? A love of film or a love of comics?

ML: They really do go on parallel tracks. If you had asked me this question at other points in my creative career, I might’ve answered differently. But the majority of my creative efforts were originally focused on film. The scripts I wrote were film scripts, the projects I tried launching were film projects. Interspersed through that I also was trying to do comics work without fully realizing it. In the early dawn of the internet age I tried to launch some webcomics before we even had the term webcomics. And that was the first time I tried to write comic scripts.

When I was very young, I was inspired by the early late Seventies, early Eighties Spider-Man comics. And around then I saw the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and the Star Wars films, so they each kind of informed the other for me.

When did Welles enter the picture for you?

ML: I saw Citizen Kane on the big screen in 1991, when the 50th anniversary was happening and they took 35mm prints of the film around the country. I saw it in an old school, old timey, doubledecker movie theater and that completely blew my mind.

I saw the role of a film director in an entirely new light, because going into that film, you cannot help but get caught up in the fact that there’s somebody behind that camera directing your eye, constantly telling you, look at this, look at this, watch this. I walked out of that theater just completely inspired and immediately started devouring as of his filmography as I could.

And as it just so happened, a number of his key projects at that time were either unavailable on home video or in some form of relative incompletion to where you couldn’t necessarily see the best version. So there was also a bit of a bit of an unfinished mystery aspect of his career and I found that pretty intriguing as well.

I first learned about the existence of The Other Side of the Wind that year, and it was still, you know, languishing in vaults somewhere. And at that point you really couldn’t see The Chimes at Midnight except on a really terrible video transfer with audio that was entirely out of sync. So I still had things to look forward to even though he had already died several years before.

I guess that would also be before the Touch of Evil restoration?

ML: Right. I feel like that was probably late Nineties. Also the Othello restoration was soon around the corner there as well.

Was it Welles’s filmography or just Welles as a creator that got you? Did you delve into like any of his other endeavors, like listening to the Mercury Theatre radio plays?

ML: It was both.

I mostly focused on the filmography stuff because I was totally enchanted by cinema and still am. But you can’t help but be impressed by the legends of his stage performances. So I read up on those to a certain degree. I listened to a number of the audio dramatizations and radio work. He had expanded the character from The Third Man into some additional broadcasts. And since I loved The Third Man so much, I caught little glimpses of that here and there. But it was still mostly focused on the filmmaking side.

Judging by the preview pages up on the Kickstarter, you’re not the biggest fan of his turn as Unicron in the seminal piece of film that is 1986’s Transformers: The Movie? [laughter]

Art by Erik Whalen.

ML: I’m sort of simultaneously not a fan and a fan. Purely the performance itself is glorious and I love it. I mean that’s just, that’s just great to have Orson Welles, even if his voice is in mechanized planetoid format. But, but also as someone who kind of laments the way that the industry treated Welles over the latter half of his career. I truly lament that he was constantly having to do . . . let’s say . . . more universally commercial work that played off of his amazing vocal talents in order to finance his true passion, which was directing films.

Transformers became kind of shorthand in my house growing up for a movie where great actors came to get a paycheck. I had it on video tape, I watched it a billion times at least, and I distinctly remember one time of my dad scoffing when he caught Welles’s name showing up in the opening credits. At the time I was annoyed, but in retrospect I could see how someone knowing of Welles longer could would think that.

ML: I grew up with a sort of vague awareness of him as an omnipresent figure. He was in those Paul Masson wine advertisements that were on television constantly with the whole “We will serve no wine before its time” slogan. He did the talk the talkshow circuit constantly. I didn’t understand why this guy was on TV; I just knew he had a booming voice and did wine ads. That was how I first became aware of him as a kid.

You can go on YouTube and see him on The Dick Cavett Show, for instance. He was such a wonderful raconteur that I just get sucked in. Whatever he’s talking about, I’m just 100% glued to the screen.

ML: He was fairly well known for such a long period of time. He navigated and that everyone, so he has anecdotes about everyone. And so that’s, that’s always fascinating.

It’s difficult talking about him because he did so many things really well and he was such a larger-than-life character that it probably sounds like you’re just playing into the Welles mystique, you know? I mean, he had an amazing voice, right? So just his vocal work; people would kill to just have that slice of ability and talent and they could make star careers out of that. Then on top of that as a radio director, as a stage director, as a film director, like he was so good at all of that. And as a writer! Chimes is basically him building a whole new Shakespearean high drama play out of the Henry plays; taking parts from here, parts from there. It’s amazing.

ML: He’s done work for multiple mediums that can contend for the greatest ever produced by that medium. Kane is often #1 or #2 on most critics lists for the greatest film of all time. His modern-dress Julius Caesar stage production is widely regarded as potentially the greatest stage work ever done. And that War of the Worlds radio broadcast is an essential radio drama. So he’s quite a historic figure in terms of his creativity, but there is also that brashness in his aesthetics that he’s constantly shaking you by the lapels and demanding your attention.

For a lot of people, that doesn’t necessarily work well. And in some of his films it doesn’t work particularly well, either. Some of the almost soap operatic aspects of Confidential Report, AKA Mr. Arkadin I personally found a little difficult as a Welles fan to connect with. Um, there’s still aspects of that film there that are genius in terms of the composition and camera work. But in general, that work in particular, I can’t really dive into as much as some of the others.

I’ve problems staying objective about this, obviously. [laughter]

ML: He means different things to different people. And it can all be true . . . but neither is the entire truth.

It’s interesting how his life ended up echoing the path of Kane’s and how that movie set a template for his life in a way that kind of a blessing and maybe a bit of a bit of a curse as well.

ML: We structured this entire series around that uncanny similarity and leaned into it. The structure of Kane has a MacGuffin of the mystery of the word ‘Rosebud’ that Kane utters on his deathbed and through the searching of Kane’s history to uncover the meaning of that word that people don’t understand you learn the story of Kane.

And in our book we have the real-life Welles on his deathbed muttering some seemingly nonsensical words and finding out what those words mean. I hope we illuminate this fictional alternate history of Welles that we have in this story, but also that people that are familiar with his career arc and his real life will also find a bit of a connection there as well.

You show your Welles homework pretty early on. Even on some of the preview pages up on the Kickstarter page, after the real Welles passes you have someone going to inform one of his friends, and we see she’s gone to see Peter Bogdanovich. Because of course it would be him, ascot and shades and all.

ML: Thank you. And just to tease you even further, in pages very soon after those we’ve got a super deep cut for Welles collaborators. I don’t even expect you to recognize this name, but one of Welles’s late-stage collaborators as a camera man named Gary Graver and we have him make a cameo as well. And I would say that that qualifies is like quite a deep cut.

Had to Google that one, and it is very much a deep cut!

Do you have a favorite piece of fiction ABOUT Welles, either on screen or on the page?

ML: The short answer is I almost love all of them universally because I’m clearly the target audience for that. There are a number of performances of Welles that I think are really great over the years. I love the performance but not the film Me and Orson Welles by Richard Linklater. I can’t remember the gentleman they got to play Welles, but I thought he captured Welles really well. I liked Tim Robbins’s film Cradle Will Rock, but the one I continue to go back to and draw the most inspiration from is RKO 281.

That one is the behind the scenes story of the making of Citizen Kane. The fact that as it was completed it was met with powerful industry forces marshaled against it. Hearst almost had the film negatives burned and we would never have gotten a chance to see it. That story in and of itself, I think, is a ridiculously compelling story. And then I thought Liev Schreiber did a fantastic embodiment of Welles and has quite a resonant voice himself.

That would be my top is as well. With him, John Malkovich as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Roy Scheider as the RKO studio head . . . those three were great. And obviously James Cromwell as Hearst was fantastic. But Schreiber really did an outstanding job in that film.

ML: And I must confess, I am somewhat fearful of the upcoming David Fincher project Mank.

I don’t know how familiar you are with this, but apparently Fincher is doing a film about Mankiewicz. The Mankiewicz family is involved and there are absolutely correct criticisms and complaints of Welles’s behavior. His attempts to steal credit from Mankiewicz and other aspects of Welles’s personality during that time period in which a more accurate representation of Welles is not going to paint him in the most honorable of lights.

However, there is an extreme version of that championed by critics such as Pauline Kael that I feel went way too far in the other direction. She basically put forth an argument that any greatness inCitizen Kane is due to just the cumulative efforts of a lot of studio talent, and that Welles himself was just a secondary player and beneficiary of it. I find that argument to be wildly unsupported by facts and history, and I worry Mank is going to lean into that because it makes for an interesting and dramatic telling to go fully in that direction. I just hope he finds some ground that’s a little more objective, but I’m not expecting it.

That Kael stuff was from the early Eighties or something, right? Collected from her review columns into a full-blown book [Raising Kane]?

ML: Right. I read that book like from a dusty old book in the library. So to me it was ancient, you know, but it could have been the Eighties.

I say that because in the last, you know, twenty if not thirty years, we’ve seen so many more instances of Welles succeeding in other projects. Like the stuff we talked about before: The Other Side of the Wind, the restored Chimes at Midnight or Touch of Evil. I feel all of these other films have helped strengthen the case that Welles was a genius. And that somebody like Fincher wouldn’t just contradict all that just to be sensationalist, you know?

ML: I hope so. I hope that would help.

The argument you just made is precisely the argument that Peter Bogdanovich made. He started compiling interviews with Welles in the hopes of writing some sort of book that would be a counter to Kael’s. And one of the things he pointed out was, if you look at the other films in his career, they have a unifying stylistic aesthetic to them. Her argument was that Kane’s look was all Gregg Toland’s doing. Well, yes, Toland was an amazing cinematographer and had a track record of his own. But the look of Kane is clearly out of the eyes of the man who went on to make other films like Touch of Evil and The Trial and Chimes and so forth.

I’d forgotten about The Trial!

One of the things I thought RKO 281 was really good at was balancing Welles’s obvious genius and charisma with his propensity for being a raging asshole. There were times Mankiewicz and company just wanted to kill him because his genius stoked his ego to the point where that ego almost cost them everything. You can look back on it with the dispassion of history and say that ego was justified because look what came out of it. But it doesn’t excuse all the behavior, some of which was pretty awful.

ML: There was an incident between Welles and Mankiewicz that I don’t think they fully put into RKO 281 at the depths that it really went to. There was an incident where Welles got so violently angry at Mankiewicz that he threw a glass at him and that from that point on . . . Oh wait, no, it wasn’t Mankiewicz. It was [producer/collaborator] John Houseman. He threw a glass at Houseman. And from that moment on Houseman said “Okay, I’m done with this dude. I’m not going to talk with him ever.” And then thirty years later or something, they both accidentally got booked on, I believe, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show or some other program of that era. And I think they were somewhat amicable to each other. I may be misremembering that, but yeah, he was definitely a Grade-A asshole at times.

For sure.

Speaking of movies, I want to get your take on the current ‘blockbuster movies are/aren’t cinema’ question?

ML: I think I will answer it for myself and dare say even try to predict what I think Welles would have said. Which is probably a foolish thing to do, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

I think that this entire discussion and argument is unfortunately hinged entirely upon a somewhat peculiar semantic boundary put around what is considered cinema and what is not, and what Scorsese criticized about the Marvel films. I think he just has a narrower definition of what the role of cinema is and what he considers cinema is. It’s perfectly valid for him to have those views for himself and to share them. I have a wider tent for myself.

I definitely consider the Marvel films and the other big blockbusters as appropriately quote unquote cinema, because I think they tap into those deep Joseph Campbell-ian mythological structures that resonate with audiences. Those resonant moments are just as valid as some film student watching a John Cassavetes film and really digging the emotional nakedness of those films. That connection is just as valid as the person eating popcorn and getting inspired by the heroic accident of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.

And I think Welles himself would’ve kind of been in that camp as well. Yeah, many of the productions he did in theater, for example, were ‘high theater’ inspired by classics and Shakespeare, as you said. But he was never above using the flashiest, most crowd-pleasing techniques to try to get butts in seats to try to up the entertainment value. Or try to use lighting and sound and costuming and casting tricks to just give it the old circus view. I think Welles would be smiling at seeing those sort of techniques work.

And you know, Kenneth Branagh did Thor. If timeframes were different, I totally could’ve seen Orson Welles directing Thor, you know? That sort of Shakespearian grandeur of it, with the Jack Kirby visuals in the background? I think he would have been inspired by that.

You’re writing comics, you’re putting projects together. What are you reading or watching in your spare time to recharge the batteries?

ML: In the comics world, this is possibly a cliche, but I was really inspired by George Takei’s graphic novel memoir They Called Us Enemy; that was pretty fantastic. Of course I was jazzed by Hickman’s reinvention of the X-Men. The, those books were, were really interesting to me. For movies and television? I just saw The Irishman and I thought it was really good.

And just to throw this out there, there is an amazing series that not a lot of people got to see from Amazon Prime called Patriot And it’s about this sort of damaged and disillusioned intelligence operative; very grounded. It only went for two seasons but it was a perfect two seasons and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Anything else coming up that you can talk about or can plug or tease?

ML: I do! However, it’s a little bit premature, so what I think I will just do instead is ask folks to follow both myself and Dave Chisholm on Twitter at @citizenmilton and @chisholmdave, respectively. We have a three-issue collaboration that’s going to be in the June Previews catalog, maybe plus or minus a month. I can’t divulge the title or publisher and all of that kind of stuff yet, but it’s a sci-fi mini in the works. Or in the can, actually. And I may have another project launching early next year in the mystery genre, so stay tuned on that.