Multiversity Comics Presents: Rick Remender

On the first of a few Multiversity Comics Presents interviews we’ll have this week, we have Rick Remender. You may know Remender from any number of titles – Marvel’s The Punisher or Doctor Voodoo, Radical Comics’ The Last Days of American Crime, Dark Horse’s The End League, Gigantic or Fear Agent…you name it. This guy has had a varied career, and he’s really moving up now that’s a Marvel exclusive writer.

Check out after the jump for the interview, in which we go over his comic history, The Last Days of American Crime, The Punisher, and the real reason why comic creators flock to Portland, Oregon.

How did you decide to get into comics? Why was that the place for you?

Rick Remender: I grew up on comic books. Obviously most people doing this did. I think when I was 10 or 11 I found Secret Wars #4 at a 7-Eleven I used to skateboard outside. After skating out there, I went inside to get a slurpee and to play video games and I saw this comic book with The Hulk holding up a mountain (laughter) and all these dead heroes surrounding him and I said “you know, maybe that’s not so stupid, but even if it is I probably need to know why the Hulk is under a mountain.” (laughter)

So I bought it and you know I was just drawn in. I just fell in love with it. Read comics obsessively. Collected them obsessively. Ended up managing a comic shop and getting into collecting vintage, high grade Silver Age, Golden Age, EC Comics. The further back I went the more I realized things were better in the 50’s for a little while there. There’s such a rich history to be discovered…it’s kind of like someone who finds a new genre of music, like somebody introduces them to jazz. Then they start digging into it and finding thousands of wonderful, magical albums. And I just fell in love with comic books.

I went to the Joe Kubert School for a couple weeks and it wasn’t really for me. I came back to where I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and Don Bluth had recently moved his animation studio to there. I sent in my stuff and I got hired…so at the age of 20 or 21 I was working as an animator for Don Bluth on the film Anastasia. I did that and I worked on their next movie, and I did some stuff on Titan AE. I moved to Los Angeles and worked on The Iron Giant for a little bit. During that time I just couldn’t get it out of my head that I was making a great living and that there was obviously a lucrative career and that there was a lot of work to be had in animation, but I just couldn’t get all of these stories I wanted to tell out of my head.

As I was sitting there flipping paper, slowly animating, incrementally moving lines closer to my desk, I would sketch characters. A lot of them would be Wally Wood style, EC…science fiction heroes. Designs that would eventually inspire Fear Agent. I would write story ideas down and think they were interesting, and at night I would go home and type out these short scenarios.

One thing we would do to fight the monotony of the animation world was a couple buddies of mine and I got together and created a book called Captain Dingleberry (laughter) just to do whatever goofiness we wanted to do and it wasn’t really intended to make a living or anything else. It was just sort of a side project to have fun with. So we did about six or seven issues of that and actually did make money. By the 3rd or 4th issue Slave Labor Graphics got in touch with us and they wanted to publish it so we didn’t have to deal with self publishing.

All of a sudden we were publishing comics and a little money was coming in and I was completely addicted to, more than anything else, the creative freedom. When it comes down to it and its working right and you’re working with people you respect and have similar interests and visions for things…there’s no other place you can create something with a committee of people and input. Comic books have no committee of input…it’s you and your friends. That purity of intention for me has always been the driving factor to keep me doing that.

That kind of ties into my next question. You’re talking about a committee of one basically, and you started off your career doing things like XXXombies, Fear Agent, Gigantic, The End League, but you just recently signed exclusively sign with Marvel. How did that come to be?

RR: Well, you’ve actually sort of noted the middle of my career. I had been doing comics about 7 years prior to Fear Agent or any of the things like that. I’d done numerous graphic novels like Black Heart Billy and Donald Creature? I’d been rattling around out there in the industry for 12 years…I’d inked the Avengers for a year, did finishes over Kieron Dwyer on a lot of superhero stuff. Around 2004 I sort of had compiled all these various scripts and ideas that I had put together…some of them collaborations and some of them things I had just cooked up.

Out of that there was Sea of Red, Strange Girl, Fear Agent, the End League, Sorrow, Night Mary, XXXombies, and all of these things we had sort of discussed. Just through happenstance, I sent them all out to publisher…every single one of them saying “let’s do these”…and they were all approved! (laughter) At the same time I was working full time as a storyboard artist at Electronic Arts storyboarding the 007 game “From Russia With Love” and then Dark Horse hired me to work on Bruce Campbell’s The Man With the Screaming Brain. I had Night Mary at IDW and Fear Agent + at Image and blah blah blah blah. I spent two years just killing myself producing…working like an animal. (laughter).

I don’t even remember 2005 to 2007; it was just sort of a blur.

I think the work I created during that time paid off in dividends in that my career really took off. I had lots of work offers for writing jobs. I’d always written as a break to get away from art, which is kind of consuming. If you are storyboarding all day and drawing pages at night, writing is a really nice break. But all of a sudden what I was getting offered was tons of writing work. The more writing work I got offered the more I did, and I think by the end of 2007 I was writing full time. I haven’t drawn a page since the end of The Last Christmas which was 2006.

Long story short, I think the material I produced caught a lot of ideas and sort of built my name. I started working with Matt Fraction on Punisher: War Journal, and from there they offered me Punisher and then the exclusive contract. I’ve got a lot of other big announcements that are going to be coming about Marvel projects. I think the Chicago show there will be a really big announcement.

Sweet. Well, I saw that there was a Fear Agent announcement coming at Wondercon. Could you share that with us?

RR: Sure, yeah. The Fear Agent stuff is something I’ve hinted at and discussed a little bit here and there. It’s nothing about the film which we’re still not talking about, it’s what the publishing plan is. We’re launching the first issue of the last arc in July. Dark Horse is going to do a big PR campaign and get the word out there so it can get the attention it deserves. The art team is Mike Hawthorne, Tony Moore and John Lucas…the pages are stunning. We’ve got three issues in the can right now. It’s more than anything else just to announce that July is the launch date for the final arc.

The main point of this interview was to talk about The Last Days of American Crime. For those that haven’t read it, can you share the concept with our readers?

RR: The concept as I conceived it was in a post 9/11 world had terrorist attacks continued and had we had more and more, and in this world if suspend your disbelief for long enough to believe that there is technology capable of subtle mind control. It came from a question I had been asking myself…there was a while there that everyone had been petrified that there would be a dirty bomb attack…so I asked myself “how far would we go if the technology was there to prevent that?” What if you could just make crime itself illegal…broadcast it from a tower some sort of frequency, a neuro inhibitor that makes it impossible for people to do things they know to be unlawful. Would we allow that sort of thing to be implemented or would it even matter…would the government just do it anyway? It’s another way of enforcing laws that are on the books.

It really got me excited and so I started writing about this world where the government had devised this broadcast that would neurally inhibit people from doing things that were illegal, and they decided that because all they were doing was enforcing the law that they didn’t need to tell anyone about it and that they were just going to do it. Then the Washington Post breaks the story and the entire country goes haywire…just goes shithouse crazy.

In the midst of all of this, one of the things that government had been doing to sort of help the transition and also to decoy to keep the attention away from the broadcast is the transition from paper money to electronic money. Where all funds will be transferred electronically and can be taxed and tracked and no more illegal operations can be funded.

All of these things sort of congealed into a soup where I started thinking of a heist story in the middle of this where a guy was in the middle of planning on stealing one of these boxes that charge the fiduciary charge cards now has two weeks before all crime is illegal forever to finish the job. He’s a down on his luck, ex meth addict with a mother who has dementia. He’s hard boiled and he’s not a super nice guy, but he’s likeable and sympathetic and you want to see him make this happen, but obviously the deck is stacked pretty highly against him.

You talked about how you developed all of those comic ideas back in 2003/2004. Was this one of those ideas, and was this a reflection of how the government was during that time period, where everyone was afraid of the Patriot Act and the control the government was trying to assert on people?

RR: Well yeah, but more than anything else it was just an examination of how far people would allow things to go for the idea of safety. We don’t live in a safe world and as the population increases and we’re at 8, 9 billion people. There are various religions and odd purposes and politics and everything…we became more and more sort of partisan. As the world sort of finds these divides and the population grows, things are going to be less safe. There’s going to be more conflict, there’s going to be more terrible things, and there’s going to be more people blowing themselves up in subways. I just think…the question is how far would we go to feel safe? Ultimately, I don’t think there is such a thing as security. I don’t think we could…I think if someone wants to do these horrible things it’s very difficult to stop them in most cases. So I’m not willing to give up my personal liberties. I think everything in this country is based around the idea that personal liberties come above all other things.

So for me, the question was merely how far would the population go if something like mind control was feasible, and would we allow it? Obviously there are portions in the story that are for it and some that are against it, and that debate was sort of the fun background noise of the first issue.

In the first issue, we never actually get any direct conversation or anything stating “this is the situation, this is what’s going on with the world.” I loved that, but why did you decide to go that route in expressing that?

RR: I think it just comes down to not wanting to do exposition. You just want to drop people in the middle of the story and then have them sort of unearth what’s interesting or what they might like about it as they’re reading it. The last thing you want to do is start a movie and have five minutes of (Remender adopts a narrators voice) “In this world this is what is going on, and this man blew this man up and this guy did this and then the locusts came and the locusts ate chocolate cheeseburgers.” (End narrator voice and laughing) I think that there is a tendency of people…it almost comes from an arrogance where you assume where people are going to love your great idea so much that they are going to be really enthralled by it. Unless you’re Tolkien and you’re writing the Lord of the Rings and you’re catching people up on the Hobbit (laughter), that’s something that is really interesting that actually does captivate and grab and move quickly, that exposition at a beginning of a story will fucking murder you.

Agreed entirely. It was a breath of fresh air to read it.

One thing I really like about the book is the “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” attitude to everything. It seems like everyone is trying to get everything in, there’s a dude at Enrique’s building randomly getting a blow job from some random woman. Do you think that’s how people would react?

RR: I think some people would. I think some people would be out there…you’d have the overweight forty year old business man who never hired a prostitute, he might sneak out one night to get dirty head on the side of an alley way (laughter). I like the idea that there’d be the eccentric, kind of crazy people who went out and started hunting lions in the zoo. I just like the idea that some people would just go shithouse nuts, and even if it’s just five percent of the population that’s enough to make things interesting on the streets.

As for the rest of us, everybody else with families and people like myself are quite likely inside of the house with the doors and windows barred up with a shotgun pointed at the window. That’s not the interesting story. How I react in that world is I’m in a basement with all the food and water I could scrounge guarding my ten month old daughter and wife, you know.

But I like the idea that there are a lot of different components of society and I like trying to play with…in terms of the gangsters in the next issue we really see how the Mexicans and the blacks and all of their territorial disputes are playing out. Now that they have ten days to settle all scores, you’ve got these bitter rivals, these gangsters, who are not friendly with one another and only have ten days to basically take care of all of their business and finish whatever it is they want to get done. The gangs are at it, and it’s a war zone in different parts of Los Angeles. And I think it would be. A lot of it was just thinking of different parts of the city and thinking of how they’d respond to only having ten days left to do anything illegal.

Graham is a grizzled guy and someone who is put upon even when he’s winning, so to speak. I mean, he hooks up with Shelby in the bathroom and then immediately gets sucker punched then with the combination of the “fuck a loser” comment and then finding out she’s part of the pair of freelancers he’s going to do this job with. How did you come up with this guy, and why do you hate him so much?

I think that I just wanted to say that the world was ugly. Shelby’s character…that does more to develop Shelby than Graham because he’s more of a victim of that. That interaction sort of plays itself out in the second and definitely in the third issue quite a bit.

The idea that you have a down on his luck hardcore guy who is doing his last grift is one that is very appealing to me. So I wanted to make sure Graham had his teeth kicked in plenty.

While the actual government actions are left in the background, the heist itself is very much in the foreground. What did you look at in terms of developing this heist?

RR: I had recently read American Tabloid by James Ellroy, and then I watched Mamet’s movie Heist which I think is a really perfect screenplay. I got inspired by the intricacies of both and how each writer handled the various ins and outs and the cross threads and I used that to sort of take the structure that I have and take it in a different direction that I might not of had I not been influenced by those things.

Besides that, I think it was inspired by those two things and Tarantino’s True Romance screenplay…the original screenplay in its original format is incredibly inspirational. It’s just a super great pulpy crime story. Those three things probably had the biggest influence. To a certain degree Frank Miller’s Sin City stuff, and the Hunter, the Richard Starks Parker series…all that stuff. Ed Brubaker’s work on Criminal. There are so many different crime things that I’ve been inspired by that I’ve probably shown different bits of inspiration throughout this.

You can definitely see those inspirations throughout. What can we expect in the second issue, and do you have any idea when we’ll see the third and final issue?

RR: The second issue is going off to print right now. We didn’t want to rush Greg, he’s doing just beautifully, digitally and classically painted pages and it was more important for us to look back when the series is finished in a hardcover collection when the movie is coming out and be able to feel 100% proud of our work. So we let Greg take the time he needed to take. It’s worth it, issue 2 is really solid…it’s going to be great. So I’d expect issue 2 to ship in about four weeks and it to ship with the second printing of issue one. So the people who missed the first issue can get both and you know…that’s 100 issues of story there.

As far as Greg Tocchini is concerned, how did you hook up with him?

RR: I approached Rafael Albuquerque to see what he was up to.

For this book?

RR: Yeah, he was one of my first choices.

I love his work.

RR: Rafael and I had been working on a couple other projects together and this thing came up and it was ready to move, so I asked him what was going on. He was really busy at the time and he said, “look, Greg Tocchini is a powerhouse master.” I went on his site and started digging through it and saw that his pages were gorgeous, but on the mainstream stuff he was doing it didn’t capture the same sort of, it didn’t have the same life or voice of the stuff where he was actually doing the colors. When we approached him we got budget and offered him the whole gig, like you know “hey, do you want to do a book where you have 150 pages of everything?”

And that’s an undertaking…that’s a lot of work…and so I didn’t anticipate that he would. Not only did he say yes, he jumped in. Greg went nuts. Every page is drenched, there’s so many details and the shadow work…the figure work…it’s mind boggling how talented this guy is. Being able to see him do all of the work and to color it and everything else is a real treat for me. I just couldn’t be happier. I hope I get to work with Greg for the rest of my career. It’s just a fantastic collaboration.

I’m looking at a page towards the end of the first issue. There are riot squads everywhere, helicopters flying overhead, it really conveys the madness that is going on in the city. I guess it makes your job a lot easier to have such a talented artist onboard.

RR: Oh it makes my job possible! (laughter) If you work with somebody, and I’ve worked with guys…I’ve worked with shitty artists. People who…the art tells the story. I don’t have to write a bunch of words. That’s the beauty of having a brilliant storyteller for a collaborator on a comic book. I don’t have to write (narrator voice back) “Los Angeles burns tonight. Helicopters buzz around like mosquitos. The blood smell exciting them.” (End narrator voice) I don’t have to write heavy handed, expositionary dialogue to paint the scene. The art paints the scene, and thank god.

I’m really glad you don’t write like that because I’m pretty sure I’d hate this book and not be doing this interview right now.

RR: (laughter) You get my message though, the point is with an artist as talented as Greg it’s all there in the visuals and fortunately that means…I’ve had projects where it’s not there in the visuals and I’m forced to take a heavy handed approach to captioning to sort of fix what’s not there in the art.

Having done that I just want to lock guys like Greg Tocchini, Tony Moore, Mike Hawthorne, and Jerome Opena, and Eric Canete, these really brilliant bastards who I’ve been fortunate enough to work with and chain them up in my basement (laughter) and never have to work with anyone else.

That way you can still make comics if the world is ending.

RR: What’s that?

That way you can still make comics if the world is ending, you’re down in your basement with your water and your food and your artists.

RR: (laughter) Way to bring it around.

I know this is being made into a movie and Sam Worthington was cast in it, and he’s now the megagod of the world due to Avatar…how’s that all going?

RR: It’s going great. I just turned in the first draft of the screenplay a couple weeks back, and then I went to Los Angeles and met with Sam and the producers. Had a meeting earlier that day with the producers and we tore into the screenplay a little bit, working on the revisions now. Sam is super excited and just a really great guy. I think with Sam’s contribution and his addition to this, Kevin (Cash) is going to be a legendary character. I think the addition of the sorts of cast members we’re talking about and the director we’re talking about…if it comes together the way it looks like it’s going to I think the film has the potential to, I think, be absolutely legendary.

It’s Sam Worthington playing a force of nature psychopath. It’s something we haven’t seen Sam do in American film. We’re used to seeing him in big budget action films…we’re going to be put him in the position to be a hard boiled psychopath. I like the juxtoposition of the lantern jawed hero and…Sam can get crazy in his eyes. There’s just a perfect mixture of handsome heroic good looks, but something devilish brewing behind the scenes.

If we get the other actors it looks like we’re going to get and the director…it’s crazy. We’re talking like Academy Award winners.

You damn tease. I want to hear this now.

RR: I wish I could say!

I know, I know. Looking forward to hearing about that.

Just a couple quick questions about The Punisher. How has the response to FrankenCastle been?

RR: The response has been great. I just got back from the Seattle ComiCon (Emerald City ComiCon), and I sold out of Punisher comic books and had an endless stream of people who were really excited about it coming over. There’s a population of people I think online and I think this can often paint perception. People who will post mindless and nasty things after a Newsarama interview or something. We’ve literally had two pieces of negative email in a sea of dozens and dozens of pieces of mail of people excited about the kind of fun we’re bringing to the book. For people who haven’t read it, I think it’s a mistake to assume what we’re doing is supposed to be goofy. Is it tongue and cheek occasionally? As much as any sort of action film is.

Sort of like Predator. Predator has real tension, Predator has real stakes. It’s also got a crazy looking science fiction monster running around a jungle.

And some hysterically awesome lines.

RR: It’s inspired by a lot of…tonally from that place.

And Marvel loves it. They’re changing the name of the series to FrankenCastle.

Really?

RR: Yeah, as of issue 17 the book becomes FrankenCastle. We’ve got some giant crossovers planned…we’ve got Frank Castle supercharged and capable of fucking up people of a higher caliber than he was used to. People who I used to wonder “what if Frank could actually do something?” Because in the Marvel universe he can’t and he never has. It’s like (impersonating The Punisher) “take that Mexican, no more crack! Bop bop bop (gun fire sound)! Look out Puerto Rican!” (laughter) It’s like him running around killing people for selling pot on the street corner, and I’m obviously downplaying his role but that works when you can do it completely hard boiled, noirish and drenched in blood in the Max book like Jason Aaron is doing.

In the Marvel universe, the question becomes what is this guy doing? Why is he out there? What happens when he runs into a guy who controls magma (laughter) and shoots lava at him? You know what he does? He fucking runs.

That’s what I loved about the first issue when he fought The Sentry. Everyone was wondering how was he going to fight The Sentry? I was thinking before I opened the book, I would just run if The Sentry was anywhere near me. And that’s what he did.

RR: It’s a great action sequence. It’s a sign of Frank’s intellect that he could get away from The Sentry. This is a sign of who Frank is, and that he could exist as a person in the Marvel universe and make it past someone like that using his head. We worked real hard that he could get in and out of situations made logical sense and that it was something that was clever.

But it also inspired in me that I didn’t want to just see Frank run anymore. Everything that happened in those first two arcs, Frank gets geared up and he attacks it head on. Even with the weaponry he had, he still faces someone like The Hood and what he has at his disposal becomes overwhelming to Frank. And the Hood obviously does things a bit dirtier than Frank, in terms of resurrecting Frank’s family and the ugliness he put him through. It seemed like a natural conclusion to the fact that he tried to assassinate the leader of…whatever you want to call Norman Osborn. The Emperor of Earth, or whatever his title is. You try to assassinate the guy who has his teams of Avengers and Thunderbolts and blah blah blah, and he’s going to kill you and that’s what is going to happen.

Frank Castle or not.

At that point The Hood had worn Frank’s soul down, and Osborn sends Daken in and it seemed to me when I was writing it and I couldn’t do anything else. Frank had to die. Frank getting away from this again just felt like a cheat and unnatural and I didn’t like it.

From there, the idea was how low could I take Frank and what was he going to find once he’s dropped into that sewer and what is going to stitch him back together and what aspect of the Marvel universe are we going to throw him into. The choice was the monsters.

As Frank makes his way out of the first FrankenCastle arc, what we see is Frank Castle rejuvenated with a new power set that makes it possible for him to go out and get payback. That’s the next seven issues…Frank Castle fucking up the people who have fucked with him.

Nice. I’ve been really enjoying it. Well, I wanted to share some praise. I interviewed Jason Aaron a little while back and he said you are writing the exact Punisher comic I would be if I was writing the Marvel universe Punisher.

RR: Jason and I talk quite a bit. I think it’s important that the two books are separated because I can’t do…if Frank is going to be hardcore crime buster, it needs to be a hardcore crime story and you can’t do that in a normal PG 13 comic book. You can’t tie somebody’s hands to a buzzsaw and whittle away at his fingers until you get information from the guy. If you can’t do that, then you’re hobbled and it doesn’t work as well.

It’s nice, and especially because I’m talking to Jason about what his plans were for the Max story and it made it more and more abundantly clear that I needed to lean in a completely different direction and that I needed to dial into the sort of things I liked to do in Fear Agent. Since Tony Moore was coming onboard, Tony and I were talking and this was the sort of thing that got us the most excited.

I just have one more question. What’s the deal with Portland…why does everyone in the comic book world live there? Is it because of Voodoo Donuts? What’s going on with that?

RR: Voodoo Donuts is pretty good, but I think it’s the orgies we have. We just love to have the sex with each other. It’s the big comic book secret. Most of the reason we do comic books is because of comic book professional sex parties. Just a lot of squibby, middle aged guys, flabby bodies…I’m kind of divulging secrets that are going to get me taken out by the illuminati of comic book nerds.

I have to admit, I sort of got a feeling about this when I was at Emerald City ComiCon. This isn’t that shocking. We actually did a write up about this.

RR: About the sexual illuminati amongst comic book professionals?

We said it was a Multiversity Comics exclusive, we didn’t get a lot of good feedback because no one believed us. It’s good to get corroboration for the story.

RR: I’m glad I could help. (laughter) Beyond that, I think it was a sort of a place where…I was in San Francisco for 10 years, we were trying to find a place to move and start making babies. There were already a lot of other artists up here and that means you have people who belong to a community that are like minded and do the same thing. But there’s also no sales tax and it’s inexpensive, or at least in comparison to Seattle or San Francisco and still have the same sort of culture. When it comes down to it, I make my money freelance so if $100 comes in and I’m in San Francisco that’s a parking ticket. But in Portland that’s an entire week of groceries. It’s much cheaper to live here so that freelance dollar goes much further. So as more come here more come here. It has a lot to do with the culture.

It’s a great city. I was just always curious about the abundance of creators there. I just assumed it had something to do with Voodoo or not pumping your own gas.

RR: Oh yeah, I hate pumping my own gas. That’s why I moved here.