In the past five years, writer Mark Russell has emerged on the comics scene with a distinctive wit and sensibility that has critics lauding his wide-ranging work, from DC’s “Prez,” “The Flintstones,” “Exit Stage Left: Snugglepuss Chronicles,” and “Wonder Twins,” to his turns on “Red Sonja” and “Lone Ranger” (Dynamite) and “Judge Dredd: Under Siege” (IDW).
Recently, AHOY! Comics has been Russell’s publisher for his original collaborative creations, the Jesus-meets-superhero buddy comedy “Second Coming” and the wealth-inequality lampoon “Billionaire Island.” The first arc of “Second Coming” has recently been collected in its first trade paperback collection, and the second issue of the six-issue “Billionaire Island” comes soon from AHOY!
Mark Russell was kind enough to dive deep with us about writing comics satire and humor, his artistic partners and process, and his works’ sharp social and political commentary. (You can also hear this interview can be heard on the Comics Syllabus podcast.)
We’re really excited to talk to you about “Second Coming,” whose trade collection is coming out from AHOY! Comics, and also to chat up “Billionaire Island,” which is your new series from AHOY! as well.
Mark Russell: Well thanks, it’s been a weird ride for me because I never really anticipated becoming a comic book writer. I just figured I would always do books like “God is Disappointed in You.” So it’s been a weird, sort of sideways journey in my life. I just sort of fumbled into this medium. But now, it’s hard for me to imagine doing anything else.
Yeah, and that was around 2015?
MR: 2015 is when “Prez” came out.
So we’re looking at five, seven years in this business, and wow, quick rise. Here you are working on “Wonder Twins” at DC. And “Red Sonja” was one of my favorite series of last year. Pretty remarkable!
MR: Thanks yeah. I’m still relatively new to comics, so I don’t feel like I’ve been tapped out yet. I’m like a virgin oil field, still. Probably not as virgin as I was in 2015, but still, I feel like I’ve got a few ideas.
I’m really curious about “Second Coming,” a prime example of the richness of your ideas. The hook, the premise, is immediately fascinating: Jesus comes to earth and kind of “odd couples” it with a Superman character named Sunstar. I’m really curious how this idea came to you. Was it looking at this superhero-obsessed pop culture and wanting to make a commentary about superheroes? Was it the Jesus side of things? Was it that juxtaposition coming to you fully formed?
MR: It really started as two completely different ideas that occurred to me as two sides of the same coin. One was a comic that was about superheroes and actually how limiting it is to be a superhero, and how few of the world’s problems can actually be solved by, you know, beating people up… or flying.
And then the other was a comic idea about Jesus Christ returning to earth and just being sort of appalled at what’s been done and just how far afield Christianity has gone from his actual teachings.
And it occurred to me that these are really two different ways of approaching the same idea. One being that physical violence, forcing people to stay in line because they have to, is really an act of futility. And the other one is like trying to heal the world with empathy and compassion, how that’s met with resistance because we’re so used to every problem in the world being solved by one of two solutions: punishment or bribery.
Haha. I thought you were going to say, “punch or kick.” But no, it’s like either the carrot or the stick, right?
MR: Yeah, the two major innovations we’ve been able to come up with that have made civilization possible. Neither one of which is too promising.
I’m dipping into the later pot, but those different kinds of coercion really come up as a theme in “Billionaire Island.” I think throughout your work, I think it’s fascinating the way you explore the manifestations of how we dehumanize each other as we try to control each other.
Continued belowMR: Yeah, I think a lot of these problems stem from the fact that humans, homo sapiens, did not really evolve to live together in large numbers. We’ve sort of evolved to live together in sort of small, familial clans. So I think a lot of what religions and laws attempt to do, usually unsuccessfully, is to get you to treat complete strangers like family. Because we’re used to dealing in small, familial groups where we don’t need to be told not to kill somebody because they’re our brother or cousin or mom. We don’t need to be told not to rip them off because we know that if we do, they’ll gossip about us, and we’ll be known as “Thrak the Thief” throughout the clan.
Oh, Thrak, that guy drives me crazy.
MR: Oh God, Thrak, don’t get me started on him. Yeah. Watch your pebbles!
But when these natural familial controls of peer pressure were removed, and suddenly we’re immersed in a civilization full of strangers, they had to come up with other ways to keep you from harming each other.
Those ways usually boiled down to either “the government is watching you and will punish you” or “God is watching you and will punish you.”
Right, right.
MR: I think that’s largely what the Ten Commandments and the laws that Moses passed down in the desert were about. Because he was leading basically this nation on a desert hike, and he didn’t have much in the way of government infrastructure. You know, he couldn’t say, “we have a police force, we’ll be on you…”
So he had to come up with laws like, “well I can’t watch you all the time, but God can.” And he knows if you are coveting your neighbor’s mule or if you are sleeping with their wife or something.
Yeah, yeah. And that sort of clan mentality, that tribalism, and that effort to control via the production of a larger authority… man, that is so much of what you satire, what you lampoon so ably, certainly in “Second Coming,” but also in everything from “Flintstones” and “Snagglepuss.” I think that’s so vital a counter-voice to the way that so much comics can be pretty bought in to the power plays and power trips.
The book had a little bit of controversy in its pre-publication. “Second Coming” was resurrected at AHOY! after originally being fostered at Vertigo. Can you talk about the book’s controversy and why you and Richard Pace chose AHOY! to bring the book back?
MR: Really, when “Second Coming” was announced initially at San Diego Comic Con a few years ago, there wasn’t really much of an outrage. It was announced, and people sort of said, “Oh that sounds interesting,” or “oh, that sounds terrible.” And after a few initial mutterings, social media just sort of died down. And it was announced well in advance, like eight months before issue one was scheduled to drop.
But then around Christmas– must have been a slow news day– Fox News finally caught wind of the story–
Whoa boy.
MR: And they did this culture feature about this comic that was “making fun of Jesus Christ,” and that’s sort of when the controversy really started. That’s when people started paying attention. And that’s when it started blowing up on social media, and then this petition started to get DC to drop “Second Coming” and then that petition ended up generating about 500,000 signatures in the end. By signatures, I mean like somebody taking a break from their internet porn long enough to spend three seconds to click the ad that asked for them to sign a petition. But unfortunately, every one of those clicks then auto-generated an angry email that went directly to my publisher. Which wasn’t a good look for me. So they got hundreds of thousands of emails demanding that they drop “Second Coming.”
But I don’t think it was that so much. I think they were prepared for a little bit of controversy. It wasn’t so much that as, there was all this executive change at the top at DC. And so everyone was a little nervous. Like, nobody wanted their name to be called to the principal’s office at that time because people were getting laid off. So they sort of just discreetly asked me, you know, “would you be interested in taking this somewhere else?” Which I didn’t have a problem with. You know, they were really nice about it.
Continued belowYou know, it wasn’t like they were jerks or they broke any promises to me. And to be honest, they did a really good job getting the idea into shape and having me work with editors and stuff…
Marie Javins and folks like that, right?
MR: Yeah. But they were asking me to change a lot of the stuff I originally put in. To make it shorter and tighter and stuff. Which I understand. That’s the DC way, they want everything to be sort of a car chase. But it was really sort of veering away from the vision that I wanted for it. So I said, yeah, maybe it’s the best if we just sort of, I just sort of take it somewhere else.
So they gave me the rights back and, of the publishers that I thought I was going to take to, AHOY! was sort of at the top of my mind. Just because I had worked with them on a couple other projects like the “Edgar Allan Poe: Snifter of Terror.” And I had a good time working with them, and it’s staffed largely by exiles from Vertigo like Tom Peyer, Stuart Moore. So this was sort of a natural fit just for that reason alone.
But they also just really got the sensibility, you know? There’s not many places that do humor comics well, and AHOY! is one of them. So it all just seemed to come together that AHOY! was the right publisher.
Especially because being a small and new publisher, they aren’t really scared of publicity. You know? There’s no such thing as bad publicity to them; the controversy was a plus, I think.
Yeah, yeah. In some ways, you help define them as much as they’re helping to create a space for you. Because I think AHOY! is standing out with stuff like “Captain Ginger” and with your work and the “Poe” work, there’s a voice that your voice is contributing to defining over there.
MR: Yeah, they do comics that you wouldn’t find at any other publisher, is one thing that appeals to me about them.
For sure. Richard Pace feels like the perfect partner for this project. Not unlike how Steve Pugh feels really right for your work. They both have— you mentioned before a little bit of Mad Magazine in your long-ago comics diet— but that kind of Jack Davis/Will Elder realism employed for satire kind of style. I love the way Pace does superhero like superhero and does the Jesus scenes kind of like the muddy old Bible illustrations, and he brings together those sensibilities in “Second Coming.” How did you start working with Richard Pace?
MR: Well, I think it was the Vertigo editor Molly Mahan who came up with the idea of Richard for the comic. She showed me some of his work and I thought, yeah, that looks really great. Because one of the things that I really look for in an artist, especially in a title like “Second Coming,” is how well they can handle emotional nuance. How well they can handle facial expressions or people having different types of emotional reactions to what it happening. And he did that extremely well.
The fact that he could also do the superhero and the fight stuff was just kind of a bonus.
It’s amazing. yeah.
MR: So they signed him on, and his work has been phenomenal. And then also, Richard’s idea was to bring Leonard Kirk on to do inks. And it’s really given the work an extra visual dimension, because the Old Testament scenes are very muddy and naturalistic, and then the heaven scenes are very hyper-focused and surrealistic. So he gives the sort of real sense of traveling, of places and times being very different within just the visual look of the comic, which is really wonderful.
It pulls off the meeting of these worlds in a really wonderful way, and like you said, Pace and Kirk really do a fine job with the emotion. I’m looking at a page right now where Sunstar is dejected, and Jesus kind of has this wry look on his face as he drops some wisdom about loving his father but knowing that he’s always the life of the party, and not the one to take care of the hard cleanup of the aftermath of his action. But just the subtlety of emotion on these characters’ faces as they interact… it’s pretty stunning, it’s pretty great.
Continued belowMR: Yeah, to me that’s the soul of the comic.
Mm hmm, this odd couple relationship.
MR: And just the fact that they do have these subtle emotional responses to each other that don’t need to be stated overtly because the artwork shows it.
You know, for all the things that you send up, and you bring such a humorous, satirical light to, [Comics Syllabus co-host] Johnny Hall has noted how attuned “Second Coming” is to Christ working from compassion and empathy in a brutal era. Do you think that’s a big part of your work, creation of art via empathy, via understanding of what people’s suffering is?
MR: Yeah I hope so. I feel like as a writer, your duty is to talk about the thing that bothers you the most. Whatever is haunting you. It’s not just to sit down with a blank piece of paper and make up a story. I mean, anyone can do that. But there’s something unique about, with each person, about what is bugging them, what haunts them, what obsesses them. And that’s what you should be writing about, because that’s the insight you’re going to have that no one else does.
And then you put that in the context of a story. But really, it’s the unique— there’s a metaphor I like to think about, like we’re all a different part of eyes for God to see his creation. So, it’s like, my experience is so much different than yours and yours and Johnny’s, that only through looking through all of our eyes does God or the universe or whatever get a complete picture of the universe. So there’s no point in me trying to write, like, a Tom King story or a Cecil Castellucci story. Because God can already see the universe through their eyes. What the world doesn’t have is a Mark Russell story. So I might as well write about the things that I care about, the things that I sort of obsess over.
That’s beautifully put. I love that. You’re reminding me a little bit of an interview with comedian Michelle Wolf, and she talks about how you find jokes: it’s wherever you feel tensions. She has a unique comedic voice, but it’s like, what is the issue— whether it’s feminism or race or whatever— where I feel, “oh, that’s where I feel nervous about that. That’s where I have to find my way to the humor.”
So as you say, I think there are things that you uniquely see and talk about. But I wonder about the use of humor. You are a satirist. Particularly in comics, it may be all too rare and may be under-acknowledged, but I’ve always thought of the medium as this great gadfly, this great source to do that “emperor has no clothes” kind of deconstruction of power. As you were surprised to find yourself a comic writer, how do you feel the medium serves humor? Humor’s hard to do in comics. What have you learned about how to do that?
MR: Humor’s hard to do period. But I think the reason why you don’t see a lot of it in comics is that it’s highly personal and it’s something that sort of has to gestate within you. Like Michelle Wolf, I’m sure you see a 20-minute HBO special of hers, she’s probably been working on that material for a year. It takes a long time to get the right note to make a joke work inside your own head. Because a lot of what it is is finding essence. Boiling a problem down to its utter essence is usually what makes it funny.
And it’s difficult to do that month after month, when you have deadlines, or if you’re like most comic book writers, writing three or four titles a month. It’s difficult to nail that every single one. So people rarely— they usually use it as sort of a leavening agent in writing their action story, but it’s hard to produce a lot of humor that quickly.
But for me, I always use the crutch of the fact that I’m writing about— the world seems so absurd to me on its face, it’s not that hard for me to find funny ways to put it.
Continued belowGeorge Saunders, the writer, once said that “humor is the truth quicker than you expected it.” And so that’s sort of what I like to do. I like to think, how do I put this as quickly and as succinctly as I can. And that usually just automatically makes it funny.
Yeah! And also, as a vessel for truth, like the court jester, the only one in the room that can say the thing that everybody’s kind of thinking, but can right to it in that cutting way.
MR: Comics, if you choose to make a satire or write humor, actually really lends itself very well to it, because it’s so flexible as a medium. It’s like, in “Billionaire Island,” I have this guy, he’s sort of an amalgam of like Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, all these guys who try to come across as grass-roots, blue collar, man of the people pundits, but they’re really just millionaires and this is just a performative sort of thing for them. There’s a guy in “Billionaire Island” and his name is literally “Some Angry Guy on a Motorcycle,” and he does these right-wing conspiracy theory podcasts. And when he see him, he’s like literally on a motorcycle. But then you get the point where the billionaires on Billionaire Island call him, and you see him, he’s on his motorcycle INSIDE HIS MANSION. So he’s inside, like, this mansion with a chandelier and, you know, gold candles in the background. And he’s, like, just sitting on his motorcycle talking on the phone from inside this mansion. To me, it’s like, that’s a metaphor for all these Alex Jones and Sean Hannity types. But it’s something I could get away with in comics but I probably couldn’t do in any other medium, but visually, it’s wacky enough, it can all kind of make sense—
You can do that punch, yeah.
MR: —in that context.
Haha… that’s so good. I’m just looking at this photo of Trump, and it’s attached to a coronavirus announcement, and he looks really serious, and somebody’s handing him a document, and you’re like, “that’s so staged. He’s not listening to any briefings right now.” So the absurdity of that artificial staging for those theatrics…
MR: I’m sure he thought that was genius. He probably was like, “Hand me a document in the middle, it’ll look like we’re working.” It was probably like a menu or something.
Haha that’s right. There’s so much of that good stuff in “Billionaire Island.”
You know, one of the characters I think you create so well is that God the Father character. Thinking about how you construct that character and that kind of humor, were there inspirations for you for that tone? Was there a certain actor or something like that, who feeds into your inspiration for the tone of the character of God?
MR: I think I was just inspired by the Old Testament God, actually. You know, he’s like a guy who has a quick temper, he’s always sort of changing his mind. He’s like, “Oh, I’m going to lead you to the Promised Land… No! You pissed me off! Now you have to wander through the wilderness for forty years.” Or it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to flood the earth. You humans are no good.” Then it’s like, “Oh, here’s a rainbow. I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.” You know, he’s a rather mercurial figure. So I just try to play on that.
But when you’re God, the stakes are so high that it’s sort of funny to be sort of a hothead when you can, you know, destroy the human race within five minutes.
Which I guess is probably also true of Sunstar and superheroes, then. The scariest thing we can imagine would be like somebody like a Superman, because you know, he has one bad day, he has five minutes where he’s super angry, we could all be dead by the time he recovers.
Yeah. And that kind of brings me back to the function of humor, you know, like maybe the sociological or anthropological function of satire. Because what do you do in the face of power so coercive? Power so…. One of the things you have to do, is you have to take it down a couple pegs with humor. I feel like that is… I don’t know how comfortable you feel with this label, but I feel like that is the political project of your books.
Continued belowMR: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, humor is useful when the truth is too awful to contemplate. It makes it feel a little more manageable. It makes the perspective feel a little more human, if you can laugh at it. Or as the awesomeness of power and— one of the themes of “Second Coming” and of all my work is that when power is concentrated, there becomes no good way to use it well.
Everything you do— like if you’re a hundred foot tall giant, even if you’re trying to, you’re always stepping on somebody. Every time you turn around, you’re destroying a house. And that’s the problem of, whether it be wealth inequality or investing all the power of life and death into our political institutions, is that, you know, they’re a hundred foot giant. Even if they are trying to do well, which they not always are, they’re going to be destroying lives.
Yeah, absolutely. But to go a different way is full of its own ambiguities and ambivalences, which you write so well in your Jesus character in “Second Coming.” What galls me the most about the controversy, people bristling at you taking on a Jesus character, is that actually, you do so much good for Jesus, for that character. You do a whole lot to render not only the beauty of a character like Jesus, but also the contradictions, you know?
MR: Yeah. It’s actually a very pro-Christ comic book. And I think that’s one thing that’s sort of gotten lost in the controversy. Because the controversy happened before anybody had read it. So people felt entitled to make up their own extrapolation of what the comic was going to be and what it was going to be like, because there was nothing to contradict them.
I think that’s one of the reasons why controversy has largely dissipated. Because now that the comic is actually out, people can read it for themselves, that narrative that this is mocking Christ or that this is just making fun of Christians is contradicted by the reality of the comic.
It’s more about the institutions of religion and the institutions of power, and about how they’re failing people. And the tragedy of Christ is how those institutions manage to co-opt his message.
Yeah, a message that Jesus himself was pointing out prophetically…
MR: —anti-institutional.
Exactly, the problems with those institutions. Exactly. It’s a wonderful piece of work as a comic. It’s great fun. And actually, really touching!All your books have this note somewhere, and there’s a lot about fatherhood and adoption and of course about the exercise of power and unaccountable authority that you depict.
That actually brings me to “Billionaire Island” because there’s a whole lot of that commentary there too! Maybe you can talk a little about the premise of “Billionaire Island,” and how did you arrive at this amazing depiction of wealth inequality?
MR: So “Billionaire Island” is about a group of the world’s richest billionaires who decide to escape the end of the world by building an artificial island on the Gulf of Mexico, and they call the island “Freedom Unlimited” because there’s no taxes, there’s no laws— beyond the ones that they make— and you can get away with anything…
Neoliberal freedom, right? So we know the kind of freedom we’re talking about.
MR: Right. There’s literally offshore banks on Billionaire Island, you know, and you can go to a restaurant that serves nothing but endangered species, you know… whatever you want, if you’re a billionaire, it’s your playground.
But it’s really about them trying to wait out the end of the world, and the people who are trying to not necessarily stop them, but… There are two protagonists, and one is a guy whose family was killed by this virus that they created in the food supply to control the rest of the non-Billionaire Island human population. And so he comes to Billionaire Island looking for revenge.
And the other [protagonist] is a journalist who hears about this virus, is going to do a story, and wants to ask the guy who owns the Monsanto-like corporation on Billionaire Island, Agrocorp. She goes to interview this billionaire, Rick Canto, who owns that company. And she ends up getting locked in a giant hamster cage in which he keeps everybody who’s problematic for him, because there are no laws against kidnapping or false imprisonment on this island.
Continued belowSo he has this hamster cage full of accountants, middle managers, people who’ve seen things they shouldn’t have seen. And this journalist.
That’s sort of the premise. The billionaire’s, like, trying to wait out the end of the world on this island, and the people who are pesky enough not to let them do it.
Mmhmm… and here they are, Shelly Bly, the reporter (I love that shout out), gets thrown into this cage match in the bowels of the island, in a dungeon, along with a young executive and all these others. And there’s this mini-hyper-capitalism survival thing going on there.
MR: Yeah, it’s sort of a microcosm of the world that we live in, that it’s a hamster cage and they’re prisoners of this system, but they’re also sort of taken care of by it. They bring them food three times a day, and the food’s not bad. And they change the water bottle that they can suckle from… And someone brings them fresh sawdust…
So you do sort of feel like you’re taken care of at the same time you’re a prisoner. And a lot of the arguments they have about whether or not they should try to escape, and about, “oh it’s comfortable here and there’s nowhere else to go,” are sort of these microcosms we have of the arguments we have about participation in the capitalist system of the United States.
It’s like, “well, on the one hand, I gotta pay the bills, and this job does it.” And on the other hand, it’s using prison labor!
It’s a brilliant and hilarious framing device, for you to have characters voice those different experiences, these tiny obsessions that form as you’re in that rat race. So clearly, metaphorically part of this bigger machine that we have to be aware of.
I really enjoy that first issue. You hinted a little bit at where it’s going, though. With that incredible wealth inequality and corporate system, we also have some comeuppance, right? Is there a revolutionary bent in this story?
I think there is. There’s a sense that the system is driving us over a cliff. And somebody’s got to grab the steering wheel away from the people driving it. Or we will all plummet over the cliff.
I think in a lot of ways, “Billionaire Island’s probably the darkest, maybe the most angry work that I’ve done, because I think that it is very much rooted in my own sort of angst about what is happening in the world, and the prospect for human civilization surviving the 21st century, which I don’t think are terribly great.
Yeah. No, it’s dark and scary times. Johnny suggested exactly that sentiment, that this is maybe your angriest book. And it’s not the job of this kind of text to highlight sources of hope— that’s not the point here, necessarily. And yet, I detect in your characters, in their persistence to do things about it, in their agency, some openings for, “let’s not just sit idly by… we have some things to do!”
MR: Right. In a way it sort of harkens back to “Second Coming” in that the two heroes are a person who would not be punished and a person who would not be bribed.
I like that: ” A person who would not be punished and a person who would not be bribed.”
MR: So by defying those, the carrot-and-stick that Billionaire Island, the capitalist system, was able to use against them, they have successfully taken themselves outside the system and can change it.
Just to pivot a little bit, can you talk about working with Steve Pugh, whose past collaborations with you have been really awesome? How do you work with Pugh similarly or differently with other artists you’ve partnered with?
MR: Yeah, I was lucky enough to work with Steve on “The Flintstones,” so really early in my comic career, I got to work with Steve. And it kind of spoiled me, because he got me so well. I didn’t have to write a ton of art notes to convey the sensibility and the emotion of what I was writing. He just sort of got it.
Continued belowSo I usually give him very light art notes because I know that he just gets it and he’s going to run with it and do something wonderful.
That, and when I see his art, you know, it’s usually even more cartoonish and crazy than what I had written, so that I have to go back when I’m writing the dialogue and amp it up even more! Make it even wilder to match the art.
So we do have this effect where we sort of, like, exacerbate each other? Sort of amplify each other’s natural tendencies for satire.
So you write to the art, the art sort of rises to your sensibility in the writing. That’s cool!
MR: Yeah, and then I got to do the rewrite based on the art, thinking, “Oh man, I got to live up to this!”
It’s a little bit like Stan and Jack, that Marvel method, where they co-constitute each other. The best kinds of marriages in comics work.
Can you talk a little bit more about your process in terms of crafting the story? Are you a full script writer at the outset, or is it sort of an issue-by-issue, let’s see where this takes us? Or are you the kind to architect the story from the outset?
MR: I start with an architecture. I usually have an outline, and I write a full script. But usually in the act of writing, the story changes from what I had originally planned. So there is the architect in me, of “oh I know how this is going to go.” And then there’s the craft side, which is like, “oh, this would be nice if I just sanded this a little more,” or, “it’d be great to have sort of a plot twist here, a little metaphor there.”
And what I’ve learned is that when they come into conflict, when the craftsman comes into conflict with the architect… Side with the craftsman. Change the script to conform with what feels natural AS YOU’RE WRITING IT. Rather than trying to force it to stay true to this sort of blueprint that you’d drawn up months before. Because that craftsman, when you’re in the weeds, when you’re doing what makes sense at the moment, that’s where you get the strong emotional moments. That’s where the humanity of the work comes through. And you don’t want to kill that in order to preserve the bones of this three-act structure that you had written an outline for.
That’s brilliant. I mean, how many stories have we seen that become deadened because they’re over-committed to whatever the structures or forms or genre conventions, right? So to have a pulse on where the life is in the work, and to follow that, to some extent.
MR: Yeah, it’s the difference between buying a bench at Walmart that’s the same as all the five hundred other bunches they sell, or making one in your garage that’s a hand-crafted wood bench that looks like nothing else in the world. And the craftsman is the one that’s going to give you the one that’s like nothing else like this in the world. So trust THAT part of your creative process.
That’s right. Specially shaped to your butt and your butt’s needs.
MR: Yup. Unfortunately, not all butts will fit this bench. But those that do are really gonna like it.
That’s right. For my caboose, distinctly crafted.
So “Billionaire Island,” is it a six-issue arc?
MR: Yeah, six issues, and I hadn’t planned for any more, and it ends on a pretty big end point. So I don’t know that there are ever going to be more, although if they wanted me to make more, I’d find a good story. But yeah,
And I should have mentioned, “Second Coming” might be back for more, right?
MR: It will be. Ideally, because I got to tell so little of what I had to say in the first six issues, ideally “Second Coming” would go on for twenty-four, thirty issues. But yeah, there will be more. I can guarantee at least another six, probably.
Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s great to hear about. It’s funny that you say you didn’t get to say so much; you ended up saying so much! But I imagine there’s so much more terrain for you to explore in that.
Continued belowMR: Thanks. Yeah, I had a lot more planned that I knew was obviously never going to fit inside six issues. But I think that’s good, even if you only do get six issues, to make the world you’ve created feel like there’s more. I think that’s what something like Tolkien does really well. You read Lord of the Rings, you get the sense that he’s not just making this up as he goes along. This is like something you’re reading about that takes place in a fully formed universe, as he’s conceived of the laws of physics, of all these things that might not even be in the text. But that make you feel like you’re in good hands because the world has been more thought out that what you’re just reading in the pages. And I think that was maybe the advantage of having more to say in “Second Coming” than I was able to do in those six issues.
In your career, aside from these books, you’ve worked with lots of different bits of pop culture, from Count Chocula fanfic to writing “Wonder Twins.” How do you take on these different pop culture pieces?
MR: I think a couple ways. One, you think that whatever project you’re working on, if it’s an existing intellectual property, like “Flintstones” or “Wonder Twins,” you think, what is it about this cultural equity that I want to borrow on? What is it that I want people to come in with the sort of preconceived notion about, and then change?
So then, what I like to do is usually take two or three things that I love about the series, that I love about those characters, and throw away all the rest. Just start fresh, retaining only the two or three things that make them recognizable and I think are worth saving.
Like for the “Flintstones,” that was the Fred-is-the-everyman, and also the animal slavery, the animals that live as appliances and seem to be aware that they’re not living their best lives. And so I built the series on those presumptions, that Fred is, like, carrying the banner for all of us, and we’re just sort of these cogs in civilization; and the animals are the ones who pay the price for it.
And “Wonder Twins,” it was just sort of, I took the idea that they were the superheroes who were allowed to make mistakes. My only exposure to the Wonder Twins, I think anybody’s exposure to them, was pretty much just the old “Super Friends” cartoons, in the 70’s and 80’s. And I liked them back then, when I was a kid, because Batman had to be perfect, Superman had to be perfect. They could screw something up. They could make mistakes and it was okay. And so I wanted to play with that idea.
That, and they were sort of B-listers. You weren’t going to send them to go deal with Doomsday. So it allowed me to come up with a cast of B-list villains for them to deal with. That was a lot of fun. And allowed me to talk about the issues of villains, sort of being themselves, working stiffs, most of whom are either on the way up and just trying to figure out what they’re good at, or on the way down and in a state of tragic decline. And they’re never going to make it to, like, the Hall of Doom.
We could talk for hours more, and folks should definitely follow “Billionaire Island” and check out “Second Coming.” Thanks for talking with us!
My pleasure.
