Antony Johnston has been building worlds for years. Whether it’s “Wasteland”, his work on various video games, or his recent Image books “Umbral” and “The Fuse”, Johnston has a knack for making the story feel immersive. “The Fuse” is no different as Johnston and artist Justin Greenwood take us high above the planet Earth to The Fuse, part solar station, part frontier space settlement.
The second arc of “The Fuse” kicks off with issue 7, which takes the two lead detectives to various parts of the station as they investigate the murder of a racer involved in the illegal sport of gridlocking.
Read on as we talk with Johnston about gridlocking, representative media, lived-in sci-fi, and both playing up stereotypes and breaking them. “The Fuse” #7 comes out this Wednesday.
This issue, the first of the second arc of “The Fuse”, introduces readers to a lot more locations and concepts on the Fuse. Klem and Ralph venture outside the station, to the upper levels, and even under the outer shell of The Fuse. We only saw a few levels in the last arc, so how much fun is it now to not only journey to new parts of the Fuse, but also introduce new concepts, like the sport of “gridlocking”?
In addition to what you already mentioned, Klem and Ralph will also go “over the wall” in this story, to parts of the Fuse that are still a working solar energy station; and venture into “Smacktown” on level 44, right down at the base of the station, where dealers and junkies live among the gravity generators and cops fear to tread.
One thing I love about “The Fuse” is that Ralph, one of the two leads and a homicide detective on The Fuse, acts almost as an insert for the reader. While Ralph is fleshed out character in his own right, he’s also very new to The Fuse and has gaps in his knowledge of the place and people. Was this intentional, as an easy way to give readers bits of information, or something a little more unplanned?
AJ: Definitely intentional. It’s a common device to have an “audience viewpoint” character in stories like this, where you’re taking readers into a new world they’re not familiar with. Ralph isn’t entirely ignorant, of course, but there are enough gaps in his knowledge of the Fuse — not to mention pop culture — to keep things interesting.
“The Fuse” features a diverse cast. Ralph is a black German, Klem is a female Russian, and some of the supporting characters run the gamut of nationalities. I see it almost as you setting the Fuse up as being just as diverse as the planet where all these people came from. Is that fairly accurate?
Beyond that, though, there’s also the issue of representation in media. I’m so tired of seeing the same straight white male cast — especially in protagonists, and especially in comics. We created the world of “The Fuse” to be deliberately diverse and inclusive, so that we could get away from those stereotypes.
I like to say that we’re using archetypes, but breaking stereotypes — so yes, we have a cynical veteran cop, a fresh-faced hotshot detective, a darkly humourous M.E., and so on. But within those archetypes, we go against the grain; the cynical cop is a woman, the hotshot is a black German (and he’s the one with a mysterious past, not the veteran), the M.E. is Pakistani… this isn’t just window-dressing; it changes the character of the archetypes, while also increasing representation. That’s important.
Continued belowGridlocking is the new, and illegal, sport that’s introduced in this issue. Racers use the solar grid and some modified bikes to race each other. In a place like the Fuse, what makes a sport like this so entertaining and how exactly does it work?
AJ: Part of the appeal of gridlocking is its very illegality, of course. It’s tolerated by the authorities, because it’s more or less harmless, and it gives the Residents of Midway City an outlet. It’s the old saw of bread and circuses, to keep the plebs happy.
And there’s also an almost nostalgic element to it. Space isn’t a place where you can really hold events like Nascar, or Formula One, like people enjoy on earth. But what you do have is these mile-wide flat solar dishes, full of metal… a station full of electrically-powered maglev vehicles… and a huge, and growing, population comfortable with venturing out on spacewalks. In those circumstances, a sport like gridlocking is all but inevitable.
“The Fuse” has been part sci-fi, part police procedural, and part character drama from the start. This arc introduces a little more sci-fi into the mix. How do you balance the varying genre parts, while making them all fit together into a cohesive whole?
AJ: That’s the eternal balancing act of a book like this, and every arc will approach it differently. “The Russia Shift” definitely erred more on the side of murder mystery, because we wanted to ease people into the world with something they could grok as familiar and understandable. But the sci-fi and character drama were also present, of course, because they’re a part of the world.
“Gridlock” is more sci-fi, as you say, with elements like gridlocking, Smacktown, the solar energy station, and more that I won’t reveal yet. But, again, the murder mystery and character drama is still there. And future arcs will be different again; I’m pretty sure the third arc will focus more on the actual business of being a cop in space, for example.
It’s constantly shifting, but that’s one of the enjoyable parts of writing “The Fuse”. It keeps things interesting and different every time I come to the page.
You mention that Ralph and Klem will be going to all sorts of places, and even outside of the residential area of The Fuse, with this arc. How much time have you spent worldbuilding and figuring out how various levels and areas of the Fuse function and interact?
AJ: Quite a bit. Worldbuilding is kind of my speciality; not only do I thoroughly enjoy it, but it’s one of the things videogame developers hire me to write. So I have a lot of experience, both professionally and from when I spent most of my youth designing worlds for role-playing games. So that ‘wasted youth’ has really helped throughout my writing career…!
I’ve been working on the world of “The Fuse” for almost ten years, on and off, so there’s a lot there which readers will probably never see, or where only eagle-eyed readers will make the connections. I know the station’s history, layout, media landscape, the succession of Mayors, its legal system, the physics of its orbit, the street numbering/naming system… the series bible is quite extensive.
That said, I also like to leave myself as much leeway as possible within that framework, because new ideas and thoughts help to keep it exciting for me, as well as the readers. Basically, what’s in the pages of the comic is canon. Everything else is just notes and suggestions; it’s all in service of telling the best story possible.
As you mentioned, representation in media is something that you’re conscious of and I think it shows in your other works, like your other Image title “Umbral”. Both “Umbral” and “The Fuse” have found seemingly strong audiences since they started. Do you think being representative, and seemingly by association being inclusive to readers as well, helped in that?
AJ: Well, I certainly hope so. But the truth is, our audiences would almost certainly be a lot bigger if we did just stick to a regular whitebread cast; I’ve seen some commenters say that the fact Rascal is a girl, or that Klem is an un-sexualised older woman, actually puts them off reading these books, because apparently anything not aimed directly at them is ‘pandering’. So, you know, fuck ’em.
Continued belowMy audience may not be the biggest in the world, but it’s loyal, and full of readers who understand what I and my collaborators are trying to do. That’s much more important to me.
A big part of Image’s surge the last year or two has been great sci-fi and fantasy titles. Even just a few years ago, it wasn’t as easy to find any good sci-fi or fantasy in comics, much less in TV or the like. How does it feel to be able to play in those re-emerging genres when just recently it would’ve been much harder?
AJ: It’s weird. On the one hand, it’s great, because as you say, there was a strange dearth of fantasy and sci-fi in comics for a long time. There was even a long-held received wisdom that sci-fi comics didn’t sell, that nobody wanted to read them. I think that’s been proven clearly wrong in the past few years, thank goodness.
On the other hand, it’s kind of frustrating — and not just for me, I’m sure everyone else doing a sci-fi book right now feels the same way — because we all thought we were doing something that would stand out, and now suddenly everyone else is doing sci-fi too!
While “The Fuse” is sci-fi, it’s very grounded sci-fi. The human element is at the forefront, with Klem and Ralph taking the lead as they delve into the police procedural aspects. How do you balance making the Fuse seem like a real place, while also giving it that right sense of fiction and futurism?
AJ: That comes from sticking firmly to what I call “lived-in” sci-fi, where everything is well-used, a little scuffed, even old.
Very few things on the Fuse are brand new — we don’t have that stark, shining white aesthetic of a work like 2001, or the old Flash Gordon series. I’ve always been more inclined towards Alien, or Escape From New York — hell, even Star Wars — where the tech looks like people actually use it every day, personalize it, put stickers on it.
That may seem like more of a visual thing, but it informs how the story is told, and how the characters behave, to a much larger extent than you might think. It even influences the kind of stories you tell, because the tech is largely extrapolated from what we know today, and expect to see in the near future.
So that drives a large part of “The Fuse”’s attitude. This isn’t a book about starships firing lasers at each other, or aliens with psionic powers appearing to the world. This is about how humans don’t really change, no matter how much tech you surround them with — and how that’s both good and bad, just like our world today.
