Multiversity Comics Presents: Ron Marz

A little while back, Brandon and I spoke with superstar writer Ron Marz. We’ve been waiting to get closer to Top Cow’s huge summer event Artifacts, and now that we are within a month of its launch its time for us to start building the hype. Marz has been doing some seriously great things at Top Cow for a while now, including his run on Witchblade that has added a lot of weight to a book many people used to not take seriously.

Check the interview out after the jump. It’s a good one, as it was a fun time chatting with a writer who has been a favorite of ours for years.

I wanted to start out with talking about your work on Witchblade and the upcoming Artificats event. I wanted to say that, for me personally, I hadn’t really read much Witchblade. But then I picked up that free comic book day Artifacts issue and that really got me into it and since then I’ve picking up Witchblade, beginning at the start of your run. It’s fantastic stuff — really a lot different from what I thought Witchblade was based on what you hear.

So, for me — because I’m not completely caught up — and for people like me, what can you tell us about Artifacts.

RM: Well, first of all, thanks. I appreciate you kinda diving into Witchblade. And second of all, if I had a buck for every time someone said to me, “Wow, Witchblade is not what I thought it was based on what other people say,” I might not have to write the book anymore. I love hearing that kind of stuff. I think it really shows how big of an impression there is out there about Witchblade in specific, and just kind of in general what Top Cow is doing these days. It’s hard to change peoples opinions if they haven’t looked at the book in ten years, and it’s an easy way to dismiss a book by saying, “oh, I saw Witchblade in an issue in 1998, and I didn’t think much of it.” So it’s obviously the same thing — Batman is the exact same character he was when he was first created.

But anyway. Artifacts is kind of the culmination of a bunch of subplots and story threads that we’ve been trying to weave through, specifically Witchblade and Darkness and some of the shorter events we’ve had in the past like First Born and Broken Trinity. This whole story line pulls together all those threads and pays off everything we’ve been doing, so in some sense the stuff that’s led up to this is kind of in the play offs and Artifacts is the Super Bowl.

So, with it being the culmination of everything you’ve done, are you still looking to stay on the book past that, or how long of a run do you look at having at this point? I know you’re exclusive with Top Cow now.

RM: I’m committed to Witchblade up to at least 150. We kinda made that decision a couple years ago, and now that we’re getting into that ballpark, I think 136 just came out, Stjepan Sejic (who is my artist on the book) and I are realizing we’ve got a lot more stories to tell than we can get in between now and 150. So I’m in for the long haul in Witchblade, I’m in for as long as they’ll have me really. It’s just been a complete dream for me to jump on to the book. I think I probably had much the same opinion that you had originally. I had never honestly read the book until they offered it to me, probably over five years ago now. I hadn’t read an issue, I just knew what it was about. Then when we worked out for me to do the book, I obviously jumped in and got myself familiar with the details and the concepts and the history behind it. I haven’t had a down moment in five years writing the book. It’s just been a ball from day one.

Going back to Artifacts, you’re writing a lot of books for Top Cow right now. You’ve got the Velocity mini, you have Angelus and Witchblade and everything of that sort — does everyone get involved with this big event? Is it really the event that bridges every series together in the Top Cow universe?

RM: It’s really an event that brings together all the concepts of the Top Cow universe. I would stop short of saying it brings together all the series because I really want Artifacts to stand alone as a thirteen issue series. If you just read the thirteen issues of Artifacts, you’re going to get the whole story. It’s the difference between a situation where, “Oh yeah, we’re doing this crossover series,” and then you find out you have to buy three dozen other tie-in books to get various subtle aspects of the story. We want the thing to be mostly self contained, and there’ll be reflections of what’s going on in Artifacts in Witchblade, in the Darkness, as it becomes more necessary. As those characters and those titles are effected more, there will by necessity be some reflections of that in the monthlys. But again, if someone just wanted to read Artifacts, they could do that. Obviously we’d like you to read everything because it’s a very contained publishing line, but I’m never comfortable with crossovers that just seem to keep sprawling and ultimately become kind of an excuse for a publisher to pick a reader’s pockets.

Can I just say that I appreciate both the concept from both a personal standpoint and also from my wallet’s standpoint, because it sounds like it’s actually a series that I can afford to read. That is one of the problems of the industry today — whenever you have an event from any of the major publishers, it seems like it’s not just one series, it’s one series plus a billion tie ins.

RM: It’s understandable from a publishing point of view, that if you’ve got a series getting a lot of notoriety that’s going to be a fairly big hit, you’ll want to capitalize on it as much as possible. But I think what you see sometimes is a series comes out, it’s a hit with retailers and readers, and then the decision is made to make more. Let’s not do a dozen tie-ins, let’s do three dozen tie-ins. So we made the decision before we even started on Artifacts that, as much as possible, it’s going to be self contained. To us, thirteen issues is a pretty big chunk anyway. If I can’t tell this whole story in thirteen issues, I kinda suck.

You’re working with Michael Broussard on this book, and as you mentioned earlier — there’s this misconception about Top Cow. I know that when I was growing up that there was always this perception that it was really risqué, and we talked to Filip Sabilik about this and how, to a certain degree, people thought it was like a T and A company. Really, when you get down to it, you’ve worked with some amazing artists since you came to Top Cow. You’ve worked with Mike Choi, Michael Broussard, and Stjepan Sejic — how does their work compare to each other? How is it working with these amazing creators?

RM: Overall it’s tremendous. To me, that’s the best part of my job — when new pages come into my inbox a couple times a week. Whether they’re from Stjepan, or Michael, or Nelson Blake the Second who is doing Magdalena with me, or Kenneth Rocafort who just turned in a bunch of Velocity pages in my inbox on Friday… that’s absolutely the writer’s reward for all of this. I think I’m completely blessed with the guys that I’ve been working with, specifically individually. They all bring something a little different to the table and I try and make sure that I can capitalize on the strengths, shy away from the stuff they may be unenthusiastic about drawing. That’s one of the jobs of the writer, to make sure the artists that you’re working with are happy. It takes me a week or so to write a script for an issue, and then those poor bastards are stuck with it for five weeks. So it’s in everybody’s best interest, especially mine, that I give them something to draw that they’re excited about drawing. Michael Broussard, turns out he’s really into the aspect of how…the Tom Judge character in Artifacts. So after having that discussion, Tom Judge had a bigger role in Artifacts in Michael’s issues because that was something he was really excited about drawing. I think it helps everybody’s work process if they don’t have draw themselves bored everyday, if they’re actually excited about what they do.

That brings up an interesting question. I know that Michael Broussard was announced as the artist for the first four issues. Is he doing the entirety of Artifacts at this point?

RM: Mike’s doing the first four, and then we have teams yet to be announced. We’re not revealing the PR department’s job at revealing the second act and the third act. Then the last issue, number thirteen, will done by yet another artist — a special guest artist to be named. The idea behind that is it will make it a lot easier for us to stay on schedule if we split up the art duties into three acts — issues 1-4, 5-8, and 9-12, and then the last — hopefully extra sized — issue to pay off the whole thing. It’s happened with a number of crossovers, from every publisher. The bigger the story the tougher it is to get the damn thing out on time if you’re just working with one artist, so it really felt like the best decision all around. We can get some while Michael is working on the first act, and get that second team going on the second act even before he’s done. Hopefully things kind of fall into a regular schedule and we can keep the book on a monthly schedule. It seems like the best option to ensure that it comes out on time and people stay excited about it.

One aspect that I really love about the Witchblade series that you’ve done is some of your covers are just beautiful, and some of my favorite covers are the Chris Bachalo covers. What is the possibility of getting him to do some interiors with you?

RM: Chris and I already did a Witchblade issue.

You did? Because like I said, I’m still behind. So that makes my day to hear that.

RM: You apparently didn’t do your homework! Chris and I did… I believe it was issue 87 together. It was written as a one off issue, a one and done story. I wrote it to appeal to Chris’ sensibilities shall we say, and the kind of stuff he really kicks ass at, so it’s actually one of my favorite issues of my run. It’s just a very kinda weird issue that has more of an open ended conclusion than a lot of them do.

So is there any possibility of him coming back and doing a prolonged run?

RM: Probably not. Chris is fairly tied up doing mostly Spider-Man stuff for Marvel. I would love to work with him at any point on any thing, but for the foreseeable future Stjepan and I will be the guys on Witchblade.

Let’s talk more about Top Cow as an entire universe. As we mentioned earlier, you’re an exclusive writer to Top Cow right now and you’re pretty much the architect of most of the universe. What is it about working with Top Cow that you connect with so well? Because it’s really brought out a lot of the strength’s of your writing.

RM: I think it’s a few things. Principally, they let me do what I do. Not that they just let me do whatever the hell I feel like and then print it, there’s obviously more editorial control than that. As my relationship with Top Cow and the People there — Filip and Matt Hawkins and Marc Silvestri, Rob Levin who was the editor before Filip — as those relationships developed, those guys got to trust me. And I think that’s a hugely important factor in a relationship between a writer and editorial. They trust you to know what you’re doing and when I ask for a little extra room to do something that’s a little bit more out of the ordinary they’re much more likely to give it to me because I haven’t dropped the ball yet, or at least not recently. So they let me do the kind of stories I wanna do, and the fact that it’s a fairly contained universe. We’re not in the line of thirty or forty books like Marvel or DC, and obviously from the sheer point of numbers that’s harder to coordinate. So we can be small and contained and I can actually evolve the characters, the ones that I deal with — obviously the Darkness is Silvestri’s baby right now, and he’s doing an awesome job with it, so more in terms of Witchblade and Angelus, Magdalena. I’ve been allowed to really do some permanent changes to the characters. I was allowed to have Sarah get pregnant and have a baby and KEEP the baby, not have the baby age to a teenager into a supervillain or anything crazy like that. They let me do things to the characters that I probably couldn’t get away with at Marvel or DC for instance, because those universes are really about the illusion of change because they’re maintaining icons. I don’t think anybody in their right minds that Bruce Wayne was really dead and never coming back.

Wait, he’s not?

RM: Yeah, that’s a spoiler. My fault. SHOCKINGLY, Bruce Wayne’s coming back.

You know, I give people a little bit more storywise here than I could at other venues for those sort of reasons. I think the other factor in this Is I find the characters to be a bit more mature and well rounded because there are no strictly black and white characters. This isn’t a universe of “white hat” and “black hat,” the quote unquote heroes have shades of grey, and so do the villains. Jackie Estacado (The Darkness) is, in all respects, kind of a bastard. He’s not a nice guy. He’s a murderer and has been a drug dealear and a mob kingpin, and he’s the hero of that book! He’s the guy that you root for despite all that! Sarah is a New York City detective, but she’s not really… her hands aren’t holy white by any means. There’s a lot of conflict in her character as well, and that’s something that I think I respond to as a writer. I can do some more mature stories and not in the sense of people’s clothes falling off or throwing around the f-bomb. I can do stories that, hopefully, read like real people.

Kind of tied into all of that, one thing you were recently talking about on Twitter that I thought was really interesting was how the death and loss in comics, it just doesn’t have the same weight anymore because it never exists. Would you be able to elaborate a little bit on that? How would you fix that? How would you remedy that and make things matter more in comics?

RM: In a larger sense, you can’t. That genie is out of the bottle already. Everybody has been dead three or four times and has been brought back. When Jean Grey gets killed, nobody gives a shit — nobody believes it. It’s not something that anybody takes seriously because of the cynical nature of characters and the fact that if you kill of a character, the next creative team comes in and wants to use that character so they bring that character back. It’s almost pandemic to long term superhero story telling where there’s really no end to any of the stories, it’s all just middle. Once you’ve started that process of resurrecting characters on a regular basis, the emotional weight of a death scene or killing off a character is really reduced and in some cases even completely exorcised from the process. When Batman got killed for instance, even for us to understand what happened. Again, who took it seriously? When you kill off your icon character and you don’t get an emotional response from your audience, it’s kind of a waste of time.

Characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man are even beyond comic icons — they’re fictional icons of the 20th century, so I think they’re kind of in a separate category. But you know, your meat and potato characters, most of them have been dead or near dead or somewhere near that any number of times in near history and the seriousness is taken away. I try to make sure that when the characters I have some sort of control of, the ones that I’m writing at any particular point, if I kill off somebody they’re dead. They’re not coming back. When I kill off somebody in Witchblade, that’s it. When Sarah’s — and this might be a spoiler if you haven’t caught up — Sarah’s first partner, or long time partner Jake McCarthy? When he got killed, that’s it folks. It’s over. You’re not going to see him again. I just don’t have a lot of interest in reducing the meaning and seriousness of death by playing fast and loose with it. Obviously the only thing I can control is my books in specific so the character that gets killed in Artifacts #1 is dead. That character is not coming back, will not be resurrected, will not be going back in time to become a cave man — any of that stuff. That’s my take on it, that’s my choice. I don’t expect every other writer to have those same views, but to me that’s what I think is most dramatically effective, so that’s how I’m going to do what I do.

So what you’re saying is that, we’re not going to get a reveal that at the end of Artifacts, that Sarah’s dead former partner Jake McCarthy is not the ultimate villain and also Sarah’s long lost twin brother?

RM: Uhm… yes. (laughs) There’s gonna be some fairly graphic changes to certain characters, and there’s going to be some situations in Artifacts as we go, and those are going to permanent, and then they will begin to evolve from that point. But something like a character getting killed — to me, that’s set in stone. If you see a body… well, at least you’re flirting with “Bucky dead.” That’s not really the case anymore. The one sacred death in comics was Bucky, and of course that’s kind of the resurrection that looked the best.

One thing that you talked about on Twitter was the recent X-Men death, and Brandon is a non-supporter of that act, so it really struck home with us — with Nightcrawler.

RM: Wait, Nightcrawler died? What are you, kidding me?

He’ll be back! I’m just with you in the fact that the revolving door of death has taken away a lot of the meaning and being able to take it serious. That’s why I do enjoy reading stuff like your Witchblade because when things happen, it does feel permanent. I have been reading the trade paperbacks and completely spaced that Bachalo issue, but I got up to the part where her partner dies, and you feel like — that was that. He’s not coming back. That’s what’s nice about your work there, so I agree with you 100%. The death in mainstream is just not emotionally satisfying.

RM: To me, it’s just come to the point where obviously every character is somebody’s favorite, and anytime you kill off a character somebody’s going to pissed off and somebody’s going to be disappointed. In my own mind, I feel like if you’re going to kill off a character, have it be meaningful. Have it be permanent! Have it effect the characters around that character, and play it as real as you can, because a funeral is no fun. Everybody is touched by death in their life at some point, and I want to try and reflect that in the fiction as much as possible.

Going back to the perception of Top Cow — for a person who is as much ingrained in that universe as anybody, how difficult has it been for you to overcome that perception?

RM: I don’t think we have. It’s an uphill battle, and you win one reader at a time really. The funny thing is — those kind of perceptions are in the mind of people who don’t read our books, so the people who have the least amount of factual information, the least amount of experience? Always the ones who are loudest about it. It’s a nuisance, but what can you do? You want to spread the word that this is what you think it is. But I’ve found that the best way to do that is stick the book in front of someone and say “read this.” It’s much more interesting to have that experience and go “Oh, ok. I was wrong,” then to tell someone. To talk to the audience and deal with their opinions about what it is you’re doing with the book and why it’s not what people think it is. But until they actually see it, it’s kind of wasted energy.

This whole misconception abut the Top Cow universe is how we all started reading Top Cow, because we spoke with Filip Sabilik a while back and he said just try it out, and we did and we’ve all been very impressed with Top Cow’s work over all. We’ve got the books in our hands and we connected immediately.

RM: I appreciate that, and I guess I have some fans of the books push their views and say, “try it out, ” and people say it’s bullshit, and I don’t know. Maybe that happened, but I haven’t experienced it personally. Every reaction I’ve got is what you guys are telling me, that you never knew.

When you guys are putting out and Phil Hester’s initial runs on Darkness and Witchblade at 4.99, it’s hard to not at least try it. That’s where I was at. I went and read Artifacts from free comic book day and then I went to go get the trades and said, wow, five dollars? Uh, yeah! That’s almost the cost of a single comic now, so it was a steal of a deal. It’s a good way to hook people.

RM: When you can either pay four bucks for a 22 page comic or five bucks for six issues? Five bucks seems like a pretty good deal.

What else are you writing right now? What else should we be looking out for?

RM: Oh geez, let’s see. Witchblade and Magdalena continuing… we’re in the midst of issue four of Angelus right now, that’ll be off to press soon, and that’s a six issue mini so we’ll wind that up just as Artifacts #1 is hitting. I’m also doing a four issue Velocity mini with Kenneth Rocafort who is just one of the best three or four guys working in the business right now. Putting him on Velocity… I could write this one book and people would think it’s cool. That’s a huge safety net to have. So that’s the bulk of what I’m doing right now. I’m also working on a creator owned book called Shinku which is a modern day vampire story with Lee Moder, publisher to be announced, so I hope we have the first issue of that by the end of the year or so.