At C2E2 this last weekend I had the opportunity to talk to Mags Visaggio about her new series from DC’s Young Animal imprint “Eternity Girl.” The series, whose debut issue we loved, follows the story of Caroline Sharp and her ongoing quest to die, a quest that may end in her destroying the whole universe. You can check out the interview below in which we talk what influenced the series from comic books to philosophy, and what the book says about mental health. Issue #2 hit stands today and there are some minor spoilers below.
So Mags thanks for taking the time to do this.
Thank you for having me.
So we’re talking about “Eternity Girl,” and actually Multiversity a couple weeks ago when issue #1 came out, it was our Pick of the Week, it was a really great debut issue. How did the concept of “Eternity Girl” come about?
So “Eternity Girl” sort of just happened. Do you remember, or are you aware of, the Element Girl short that I did in “Shade, the Changing Girl?” So basically it kind of came out of that. After I turned in that story, and my editor on it Jamie Rich, he was really impressed with it. And I thought, “This is my fucking chance, I’m gonna go for it.” So I decided to push my fucking luck and I shot him a line and said, “I know that Young Animal isn’t really looking at pitches, but I would really love the opportunity to talk about doing actually an “Element Girl” book that sort of follows up from what we were doing because I actually have a whole story I want to do with this character. Just this little three-pager opened up a whole lot of possibilities for me.” And he was like, “Yeah I’d love to take a look at your pitch.” Which I was just very surprised that he said yes to that. And so the book really started as an “Element Girl” book, because I wanted to sort of tease out what I thought was me trying to answer “Sandman” #20, the famous Element Girl suicide issue. That’s an issue where for all of its artistry, it’s a masterpiece of single-issue storytelling that I just go to a lot for the technical skill with which [Neil] Gaiman executes that issue, but, it’s still an issue that ends with ok yeah suicide. Thumbs up!
As someone who deals with major depressive disorder and being passively suicidal very often, sometimes actively suicidal, I was like that’s not, to me, a satisfying ending. I wanted to do a book about getting the character Urania Blackwell to a point where she could endure her life. And so the way the short was structured was that she had popped back into existence and she didn’t even know how. Like she had died, and to her that was her happy ending, and here she was alive again, and I wanted her to be dealing with that existential drama. When we decided to do an original character, it opened up a lot of possibilities in terms of being able to invent a much larger backstory that elevated those scenes a lot more. But everything came out of this “Element Girl” story, and so Element Girl’s psychology and the structure of Element Girl’s story in “Sandman” is still at the root of this book. I just wanted to do a book where recovery was the goal. I wasn’t going to accept Urania’s “happy ending.”
So you’ve talked a lot about the influence of Gaiman and other comic history things of the Silver Age, “Watchmen”
The biggest influences are Gaiman, [Alan] Moore, and [Grant] Morrison.
Right, right. I’ve read issue #2 there’s a lot of [Jack] Kirby in there too. Can you talk a little bit about that and also some of the other influences? There’s a lot of religious and also philosophical thought in here too.
Yeah there’s tons of that in there. It’s interesting because none of the religious and philosophical stuff is anything I really subscribe to. But to me it made sense. I needed to structure Caroline’s existential nightmare, and I didn’t want to do this from a Christian philosophical angle because that doesn’t get me where I want to be. Especially considering how much of this story was structured on the idea of being on the receiving end of a trillion reboots, which is isn’t part of my religious background or my philosophical background, but definitely felt like something that had big existential consequences. And so I really dove into [Friedrich] Nietzsche and he plays into a lot of this. I’ve been working a bit with Nietzsche in my own personal life in terms of the idea of “your meaning is what you make your meaning.” You get to define your own existence. That seemed like a path out for Caroline. But that first meant staring down meaninglessness in a really big way. Which is not as easy for me to do because I don’t really believe in meaninglessness, but I needed Caroline to be convinced of her meaninglessness and so I really had to dive into the absurdity in her existence. I have a lot of background with [Søren] Kierkegaard, so I really needed her to be staring into the abyss. Staring into the whole, that is Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and to not see that she had any options. Because the leap of faith is really hard to make.
Continued belowWhen you’re looking at comic influences, like I said, Grant Morrison has been a huge influence on me, which is something I’m really surprised by. As much as I love his work, that was never the work I wanted to do in comics. I always wanted to do what Mark Waid did. That sort of like idealistic superhero stuff. The more work I’ve done, the more I really find [Morrison’s] adventurousness and his perspective on superheroes infecting my work. It seems to be much more in line with how I think now, whereas Waid was definitely where I was in college. But like I did a “Superman” script for the DC Writer’s Workshop, not like a thing that’s ever going to happen, but it was part of a practice thing, and not even consciously, I was really drawing on what Morrison does with traditional superheroics. Everyone was like it really feels like “All-Star [Superman] in a bunch of ways, which was not my aim, but I’m definitely really influenced by the shit Morrison did there. So you’re going to see Morrison all over the place in this.
Alan Moore comes in to just a small extent in that we’re borrowing a little bit of “Watchmen” terminology, and there’s some structural relationships to Doctor Manhattan in this. But that’s just like fangirl riffing in it. I don’t know how on board I am, because Moore is like so many levels above me with how he is operating structurally. So I just did some superficial grabs because I thought they made sense.
Sure, sure
But yeah definitely Morrison and Nietzsche are the biggest influences on the book right now. I was really surprised as I worked on the book about how much time I kept on having to go back to Nietzsche. I thought I was going to be spending all this time in Kierkegaard, because that was sort of where I wanted to go with it. My original ending for the book, the ending changed as I worked on the book, speaks to how much Nietzsche’s philosophy of making your own meaning came in. I thought I was going to be doing a book about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and that’s absolutely not what it ended up being. You can still see Kierkegaard’s imprint on it if you look, but Nietzsche’s all over it in ways I was not expecting.
Very cool. There’s a lot of dysphoria about whether or not all these events are happening to Caroline, whether she’s real or not since she references her own comic history. I’m sure these are going to continue, but could you talk more about that. Is this sort of like a metaphor for a lot of the stigma that surrounds mental health or depression issues?
I don’t really like messages. Messages are never my goal. I’m never trying to do a social thing in my books I’m always coming at it from my perspective. My perspective is that of a transwoman who deals with depression on a regular basis, who has been in therapy for years. It’s not quite like I’m trying to make a statement or talk about the stigma, as much as, the environment we have right now gave me the opportunity to tell this kind of story.
Cool. Let’s talk about Sonny Liew’s art and Chris Chuckry’s colors that are very muted and sort of pastelle. What’s it like getting to work with them on this book?
They elevate my work in ways that I never really saw coming. It’s been extraordinary and I honestly can’t believe how lucky I am. Sonny in particular, because he’s really driving it and he works with Chris. I don’t work with Chris, I let Sonny direct all that. But Sonny will take the goal of the page and accomplish it in ways that I didn’t really ask for, he’ll push it. There’s this interesting image in issue #2 where the characters start flipping upside down, what’s interesting to me, and this might be me reading into it, and if it is I’m totally cool with that because I’m a big believer in the text in the reader’s head being more important than the text the writer or creator was going for, but the way those positions go you get this weird spiral motion. You’ll also notice there’s that {W. B.] Yeats quote, the widening gyre, that quote appears a few more times, that sense of the spiral, the cycle, is all over the book. I don’t know if that’s what Sonny was trying to do, but he did it and it works so well, and it elevates what the book is supposed to be. Both of them are bringing so much more to the book than I ever could’ve expected it to be.
“Eternity Girl” #2 is out now.
