Last month, we featured a discussion pulled straight out of an e-mail discourse Ales Kot and I had been having since August 11th. In it, we discussed various elements of storytelling, particularly centered around his book “ZERO” which was just seeing its second collection released.
Today, we present Part 2 of that discussion. Moving away from “ZERO”, we now focus on a different part of Ales’ overall oeuvre — his work for hire at Marvel. “Iron Patriot,” “Secret Avengers” and the upcoming “Bucky Barnes: the Winter Soldier” (out this week) are all put under our microscope in this fashion as we discuss their relationships, overall themes in his work and more.
I’d like to move on now to your work-for-hire work if that’s alright, but as we transition one thing you mention here is something I’d like to pick-up on. In regards to you sitting down with a Shaman, I think I can easily see how you might process this and other aspects of your life we’ve discussed and translate it to “ZERO” — but what about with the books you do for Marvel?
We’ve touched on this with “ZERO” certainly, earlier in this interview in fact, but we’ve never really talked about this for your work for hire gigs. When it comes to taking parts of your life, or finding inspiration, or even doing research, how do you find things influencing you in the WFH process versus the creator-owned? How is the creative process different?
Because, not for nothing, but last time I asked you about doing a WFH gig you didn’t seem quite enthused — but with two books under your belt and a third on the way, I’d guess your attitude is a bit different now at Marvel.
Ales Kot: The last time I answered by saying that what I do at companies that own what I work with is owned by the companies and therefore the companies have the last word on what I write. Therefore, unless I am given free reign, I will never be able to create something as creatively satisfying as the work I own myself, with my collaborators. That doesn’t mean I can’t make good stories. I also said I am interested in having full creative control in everything I do.
These things stand.
I feel it’s a bit of a push and pull situation. I explore, learn and apply what I learned, and sometimes I go purely based on feeling without knowing anything at all. My dealings with Marvel are very specific in that when I work with Wil Moss, who is my primary editor there, we very much get each other, and we get great support from the assistant editors Jon Moisan and Jake Thomas as well as from the Editor-in-chief, Tom Brevoort. I know that there are certain things I shouldn’t do — characters can’t smoke and for some reason women can’t show their nipples but men can (how absurd is that? this is a general cultural issue, and a major one), the cursing has to be bleeped out — and I adhere to them, while also writing in a way that is true to me, true to what I want to relay through the story, true to what I’m working with.
But is me not even considering adding these and other possibilities a matter of self-censorship, a connection to the Marvel universe as it exists right now, or both? I don’t know. I wonder about it. We live in a world where some people still seem to self-censor. Am I doing this myself? If so, why? I ask myself these questions. I find that asking myself questions is vital to my overall well-being.
My basic approach is there is no difference between me working on comics I own and comics that are owned by Marvel/DC/else when I begin the work. If someone wants to make a difference, if something “can’t be done,” I assess the situation and work with it in a way that takes it as a useful fork in a road instead of a roadblock. Black Swan theory application.
But do I have it all figured out? No. I feel like I’m arriving to the next stage of knowing something and simultaneously knowing I don’t know anything at all. Life is weird! It’s such a paradox. I love it!
Continued belowSo lets approach your WFH work in a past, present and future tense as long as we go through your Marvel work. We’ll start with the past.
While there was no huge announcement about its cancellation like there are some books, your work on “Iron Patriot” capped off with issue #5 from what was assumedly an ongoing into just the one story. You and I have sort of discussed this before, but I think when I read the first issue of both “Iron Patriot” and “Secret Avengers” in the same day my comment to you was that I thought “Iron Patriot” felt less like a “you” book than what I would’ve expected. If I understand correctly, the book was you attempting to approach the series and character and issues within in a different way than you would approach similar material in other books you write, but could you talk a bit about how it is you saw “Iron Patriot” differently and why you think the title was less successful than I’m sure you would’ve liked?
AK: First things first — “Iron Patriot” was always a mini-series. That’s what I pitched and that’s what got greenlit. There was some miscommunication online, but as far as I am concerned, I was always adamant about it being five issues long.
Now that’s out of the way: I feel “Iron Patriot” is both my weakest work and also a treasure in disguise. The reasons why it’s my weakest work are the same reasons why it’s a treasure. Oh wow — I’m having a deja vu! I already wrote this email! Glitch in the matrix? P.D. Dick was on that a long time before that movie.
There are reasons I won’t go into because I choose to always discuss them with my team first, and we haven’t had the post-dissection sit-down yet. The gist of it is — I tried doing things a different way, because I wanted to take myself out of my own comfort zone. I thought, let’s try a more rigid type of storytelling, something that really goes act one, act two, act three, let’s think about it that way without bending it, let’s see what happens — and what happened is a comic that is okay, but not great. And I want my comics to always be great.
I took “Iron Patriot” because I wanted to write an African-American protagonist, because I had something to say, because it felt right. But I also took it on because I was riding a high of being fresh at Marvel, wanting to make the biggest splash possible. Thankfully, the story still came first for me, always, and that saved my ass on that count. Still — something I should watch out for.
Also, I usually pick my team. With “Iron Patriot”, I allowed for something else, because I thought, why be rigid about it? Turns out I just know what I’m doing and what I need. That’s not me dissing other ways of assembling teams, as I’m sure they can work well, but in my case — I need to have the last word. The team was professional and talented, but there’s magic to the way I assemble my teams. I can’t explain it. It’s often based on feeling.
I also learned I’m just not into sticking by any sort of a super-detailed page-by-page outline. I like having them sometimes, but only if I can dump them and rewrite everything whenever I choose.
So that’s…four lessons I got, and the fifth one would be me realizing that even with “Iron Patriot”, I was still able to turn the story into something personal. Even though I wasn’t sure how, it all connected in the last episode, because my dad’s dealing with cancer and I was just around, seeing him, spending a lot of time thinking and feeling out the situation. So writing “Iron Patriot” helped me make sense of some things in my life.
As for why the title wasn’t successful sales-wise…man, that’s a loaded question. The comic not being great as far as my work is concerned is one obvious reason, but then again, “Secret Avengers” is great and it doesn’t break sales records either, at least not in singles — however, I suspect it will sell real well in trades, as most of my work does. When establishing a relatively new/not well known character, there’s so much that has to work just right — the comic, the PR, the timing, all of it. And we obviously weren’t in that great sync that creates a perfect wave. But that’s okay! It’s a great learning curve for me, because my next comic at Image has an African-American protagonist.
Continued belowWhat else is there as far as reasons go? Could it have something to do with racism, in some cases of retailers and readers? That is a question, not a statement. I wonder about it.
Some people like to say that we live in a post-racist society.
And for that reason alone, I was happy to work on “Iron Patriot”, and I’m glad it led me to where I am now. I’m happy I created new African-American characters who matter. To paraphrase Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” it all matters. All of it. Every project, every story, every sentence, every word.
One thing that I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on a bit further is the topic of diversity in comics. You wanted to work with a character like Rhodey because he’s a non-white character in comics, and on a surface level I can understand that and the need for more important and prominent non-white characters in comics. But what do you see as the responsibility of writing — or, as you mention, creating — new characters of color or women or anyone that just breaks the standard white guy mold into something as large and complex as the Marvel Universe? This is an important job, something we need creators to actively participate in to help comics; what steps do you take to make sure you’re approaching these issues appropriately?
AK: The responsibility is to be true to what I feel, to what I see, to what I want to bring to the fiction I’m co-creating. So the responsibility is to communicate truth, either by telling it or by making up stories that tell it. This doesn’t mean I have to pander or educate — but that by being true to myself and my life experience I communicate these truths consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously.
I’m also tired of whitewashing in all stories, whether the fictional ones or the ones we live here on the planet. I’m tired of all racism. I want to create narratives that either deal with it or ignore it by creating worlds where things are different.
The steps I take are constant research. Constant listening. Constant learning. Staying true.
Lets take a shift over to “Secret Avengers”. We’ve seen two iterations of the book from you; the finale of Nick Spencer’s run that you co-wrote with him, and the book that you’re doing now with Mike Walsh and Matt Wilson. The latter is what I’d like to focus on (though we can talk about the former too).
The book has grown through its first arc into something complex and weird and dark yet still quite funny, combining some of the things I see from you in your other books, but in terms of voice have you found “Secret Avengers” to be a more comfortable vehicle for you — and, where do you feel the book falls into the so-called “indie-fication” of Marvel?
AK: “Secret Avengers” is a joy to co-create. We let loose! We go crazy! I usually write the first drafts in a day or two, mostly as dialogue, and then cackle at my writing when I reread because I forget I wrote it and get lost in the story. “Secret Avengers” is a very open, often hilarious collaboration. I came up with so much stuff without knowing where it would lead, and trusted my subconscious and reverse-engineered and utilized so many different techniques and it somehow holds together. I suspect it might have to do with me inhaling storytelling techniques as a little kid and never really stopping.
Indie-what? “Indie” is such a loaded term. Comes from independence. Is anything ever truly independent? We’re all in this together. “Indie” gets sometimes used as a way of saying “our comic won’t sell that well/won’t be appreciated by many people/won’t be talked about much/doesn’t quite fit into the narrow mainstream mold as defined by most of what massive corporations do” and frankly I have no time nor energy for that narrative. I am here to find as many people as I want, to connect with them as fully as I want, and to participate in the constant conversation that life is. So there’s no separation to me. I am mainstream. What I do is mainstream. What Image Comics does is mainstream to me. Everything is mainstream. There are no separate flows of life — the separation is an illusion, this idea we fed ourselves. Love is the answer, no matter the question. Life is a river and we’re all mainstream.
Continued belowThis leads me on at least two interesting tangents though: 1) the totalitarianism of “love” as something to be explored and 2) yes, Marvel certainly feels much more open to experimentation than DC felt last year when I worked with them and actually also 3) but the conversation is no longer Marvel and DC, it’s Marvel and DC and Image and Dark Horse and Fantagraphics and Koyama Press and plenty other comics publishers. Is Michael DeForge’s ‘Lose’ less mainstream than the next most-selling superhero comic to me? Nah. I’ll reiterate. Life is a river and we’re all mainstream.
You mentioned earlier that part of the reason that “Iron Patriot” may not have been successful is that you didn’t have a hand in forming the team, but with “Secret Avengers” it’s you and Mike Walsh, who have worked together in the past with the first issue of “ZERO”, plus Matt Wilson on colors, Tradd Wilson on covers (who also did an issue of “ZERO”). After talking to you my assumption is, “Ok, Ales was offered “Secret Avengers” and named Mikey for his artist,” but before we talked and in general when people like me look at the actions of a company like Marvel overall, there are definitely always assumptions from us about how we think things are happening behind the scenes; we ask questions, sure, but we’re often met with “no comments” or vague, dodgy replies.
So to pull the veil back a bit, see the wizard behind the curtain, could you talk a bit about the “Secret Avengers” team, working with Mike and Matt and Tradd? At a company like Marvel, books often seem story/writer-driven, but so far you’ve taken no breaks or had any fill-ins; it’s all Mike and Matt, all the time, and it all feels very much like the story you want to tell. I’m sort of thinking here of that Jodorowsky quote from Jodorowsky’s Dune, in which he talks about how he couldn’t have made the film without his spiritual warriors — are we looking at a similar process for you?
AK: I did have a hand in choosing the team for “Iron Patriot” — I just chose to approach the choosing differently, as in, I chose to believe other people might know better than I. And the thing is, the process of picking a team can be a conversation, and I chose to not be as huge a part of the conversation as I aim to always be. I thought doing it differently might be useful. And it was! Just a different way I might have expected. But the beauty of it is that I feel everything is exactly the way it should be. I’m glad we made that story. The key realization I am having right now is that the conversation, and in fact every conversation ever, has to be equal. I chose to not have my voice heard equally and I’ve seen the consequences of that, and therefore I know better now. It’s a matter of learning to love myself fully.
I knew exactly what and who I wanted for “Secret Avengers” and I got everything and everyone I asked for. Making “Secret Avengers” is a perfect experience. It’s everyone firing up with ideas, amusing themselves with the comics we make. Comics are a collaborative process (unless we talk a single creator experience, and even then, the moment reader enters the experience the comic becomes a conversation, because the blank fields between panels are open to constant re-interpretation) and I want everyone I work with to both give their best to the creation and have a joyful, creative time doing it. I believe I can speak for everyone when I say everyone’s having a wonderful time.
I asked for Mike, Matt, Tradd and Clayton, our letterer. I asked for no fill-in issues. I pitched a very specific format of the story. I made changes, plenty of them. And the beautiful thing is everyone at Marvel that I interact with feels so on board with it. I feel the joy and amusement and creativity we feel when co-creating the story radiate outward and connect. Fill the story with what’s alive in us and let it speak for itself. Are you primarily acting in a reactionary way, trying to make a “grim story” that’s going to sell because “grim stories sell?” That mash-up of greed and reactionism will fill the story. Are you primarily having fun, telling a story that uncovers what’s alive in you, laughing at yourself while making it, being enthused by your collaborators’ work? Well, then that’s what’s going to show.
Continued belowLets talk about influence. Specifically, lets talk about Tlön.
Now, I don’t know how direct you’ll want to be on this since I imagine we’re kinda verging towards spoiler territory. But recently, both in solicits and in the book itself, we’ve seen that the book is moving towards something called Tlön, a reference to a short story by Jorge Luis Borges which I wrote a little bit about on the site in one of our Soliciting articles. What I want to ask about, though, is in terms of approaching something like this — something that has a history, though is maybe not too well known — how do you find the process of incorporating it into your own fiction? We’ve talked about “ZERO” and your personal life and where you bring that into the book, but where does Borges’ Tlön fit into your fiction? And, perhaps more specifically, where does Tlön come from for you?
AK: Ahahahahah! To answer the first two questions with clarity would be to uncover too much of the story that is to come. To answer the third — where does everything come from?
All this time and thought I put into asking you about Tlön, for nothing! (Not that it wasn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy there.)
But, OK, then let me rephrase and try again, see if this fits better: “ZERO” and “Secret Avengers” are both spy stories, ones that feature both subtle and overt influences. “ZERO” comes from Bond spy-fiction but also has nods to Blade Runner or Roland the Paladin with Burroughs on the way; “Secret Avengers” has True Detective and John le Carre, and now Borges. They both have the mushrooms.
Looking at both books and trying to figure out where they connect to you, I imagine you at a crossroad of surreal, spy fiction — down one way is a book like “ZERO”, the other is “Secret Avengers”. What draws you down each path? Why spy?
AK: Well, it’s all about the war meme, I suspect. I wanted to explore and figure out my relationship to war and violence through fiction, and then delete or transmute that which I no longer wanted in my life. And it’s going on.
As for the other bit, I find the absurd, surreal, and just plain wyrd are large parts of my daily life, so they find their own ways in regardless of what I do.
Case in point, I just wrote this to someone else so I’ll repeat myself a little: “Secret Avengers” is the second part of my war trilogy, which is an examination of the war meme through comics. The trilogy begins with “ZERO”, which began as a a tragedy, then continues with “Secret Avengers”, which began as farce, and ends with “Winter Soldier”, which is a combination of both. It’s my way of talking with myself and with the world. Discussing and working through war and violence. Through their consequences. Through the worlds their narratives bring, and other options, and how we interact with them, and what can change and how. It’s limited because I am barely a writer at this point — I just got started. It feels like I’m just warming up.
The whole trilogy is hugely important to me. “Secret Avengers” is my way of seeing I might be able to pull off anything I want to pull off in fiction as long as I follow my truth. But then again, which project isn’t that? Even the one where I didn’t fully succeed at that, “Iron Patriot”, feels important precisely because it showed me what happens when I second-guess myself too much. So “Secret Avengers” — another beautiful lesson in embracing both chaos and planning. And just laughing! That’s one of the best feelings — writing the first draft, which usually happens in a day or two, mostly just dialogue — and then coming back and cracking up because I read and forget I wrote the story. I just get sucked in. Fiction’s transformative. People who say otherwise simply lack the understanding of how fiction and the world constantly interact. Everything we do is a story. Everything is belief, also, I suspect. So when Adam Curtis makes a case for us not believing for anything right now, perhaps that’s a good place to be, precisely because the awareness of the lack of universal meaning can be followed by the realization that each one of us can create our own meaning, and that by combining and uniting these meanings we can create communities that perhaps go with the universal flow instead of trying to piss against the wind and being surprised when our own warm yellow urine hits us in our collective face.
Continued belowThis seems as good a time as any to talk about about your “Winter Soldier” book now that you bring it up. I’ll be honest and note that I’ve tried to avoid most recent interviews with you as I wanted to just ask you the things I wanted to ask you here, so forgive me if I’m being repetitive — but one thing I notice cropping up a lot is the talk about how it’s a big space book, a cosmic spy epic with Bucky acting as the new Man on the Wall.
So continuing on our thread here, with “ZERO” as the “grounded” (do you see me doing the air quotes here) war story, “Secret Avengers” as the more bombastic and chaotic one and “Winter Soldier” now heading out to the stars, can you talk about how this setting and approach and character and demeanor relates to your processing of our obsession with war and violence? Especially considering it spins out of Original Sin, which, y’know, started with a murder.
AK: “ZERO” begins as tragedy, “Secret Avengers” as farce. “Winter Soldier” begins as both. The idea of a man on the wall guarding the universe from the threats, because of the narrative that says the universe has to be full of threats…well, I mean, that’s a narrative, certainly. The thing about Bucky Barnes a.k.a. Winter Soldier is that he often accepted ready-made narratives as his own. And now he’s — at least temporarily — accepting another one. But with accepting it comes something very new — an expanse of the universe, of seeing galaxies, of seeing new worlds. Is that expansion mirroring Bucky’s internal expansion, however unacknowledged it might be in the beginning of the “Winter Soldier” series? And if so, how does that expansion reflect what’s happening inside him?
I believe that everything relates to everything. I actually believe that everything is everything. I am not saying this in just spiritual sense, but also in a scientific sense, because I like to combine spirituality and science. Non-dogmatic science knows we don’t know. Dogmatic science is just another religion. This is why I don’t like to spend much time on obvious glorifications of science as the means-of-it-all. It’s sometimes used as a shorthand that’s supposed to half-assedly cauterize the seeming wound of the not knowing. But why should we perceive the not knowing as a wound? Why not perceive it as a gift? I love that I don’t know anything. It’s one of the most liberating feelings I have ever experienced.
“Winter Soldier” is about that feeling. It’s about seeing something restrictive and choosing what to do with it. It’s also my chance to work with Marco Rudy and go the way of 70’s spy SF paranoia, Heavy Metal magazine SF/fantasy hybrids, galactic adventures, all that — fully painted. It’s our chance to explore the universe. I’m writing open style for Marco, with almost no dialogue, only adding narration and dialogue after he turns in his pages. I love the flow of it — it reflects the feeling I write with, the feeling the narrative has, that of an expansive SF adventure. Because I take this universe as an expansive SF adventure.
You actually brought up something that I wanted to jump on, so lets talk about this now: the painting of the book. I know there’s a lot of interesting things to talk about with this series — outer space! aliens! spys! sexy abs!!! — but the painting thing really intrigues me. Obviously you’re no stranger to curating art and obviously you’re no stranger to going after specific artists for their styles in your work, but how did the introduction of the painting come about? And, even further, but with you writing it open-style (“Marvel style”, some even say), how does this collaboration between you and Rudy differ from something like “Secret Avengers”, in which dialogue is one of the first things you work on?
Continued belowI guess what I really want to ask is: as you access the spirit of making comics in different ways, what do you think having fully painted pages in this books allows you to say and do, especially on the two stages the book offers: that of space in general, and that of a character with a currently very high profile like Bucky?
AK: Ah, I just said I wanted to work with Marco Rudy and it worked out! And I’m not here to tell Marco what to do. I wanted him to do whatever he wanted. I told him what kind of an aesthetic I’m imagining, which was a merging of 70’s Steranko and classic Heavy Metal magazine — Corben, Moebius, Druillet — with the Marvel universe, and I told him I want us to maintain clarity of storytelling and complexity of his art. I occasionally suggest a layout or a technique, but for most part, I stay out of Marco’s way and interact with the art when it comes in. I write open style, which some people like to call Marvel style but I prefer calling it open style because that’s what it feels like to me. I write the script without dialogue, or without most dialogue, instead describing what happens on every page, suggesting key visuals and such — and then work deeper afterwards, adding monologue/dialogue, captions, all that. I let the art influence the writing. The mingling of elements creates a greater whole.
The comic enables us to show that the weird is possible and beautiful. The comic enables us to show that death of imagination is not the only option. EXPLORATION! ADVENTURE! SPACE!
So, I know this is somewhat of a question you’ve been asked before, but I want to recapitulate on it a bit. Bucky has his high profile now thanks the films, and certainly the comic that revitalized him and eventually went on to star him from Brubaker and Co., but he’s still pretty malleable as a figure. Years of brainwashing certainly leave him open to discovering new things about himself.
So taking that, taking the PTSD aspect you’ve explored in “ZERO” and “Secret Avengers”, taking the space and adventure and the exploration — what’s the draw for you about him and his voice, specifically? I’m not going to ask you what you find attractive about Bucky because I know it’s sexy abs, but in your second time with a Marvel book that has a sharp focus on one character, what have you found out you like while inhabiting the Winter Soldier’s skin?
AK: Bucky isn’t dead. He’s a wide-eyed person who just forgot to be wide-eyed for a bit. I can relate to that quite easily. The world can feel dead because certain media promote death and war as the status quo. Everything dies. The world is a sad place. Kill or be killed. Neuter your dreams. Curb your idealism. That sort of cynical shit. Despite thinking he might be aligning with that while telling himself that he’s one of the good guys — a toxic narrative if we’ve ever seen one — Bucky feels more, and is thrown/throws himself into that complexity. He might just not let his past define his present.
One last thing on the “Winter Soldier” area of your work, and I don’t know if this is too telling, but as “Winter Soldier” is coming up I wondered if you could give some teases for what we could expect to see in a similar light to things we’ve seen you do in other titles. “ZERO” is to Burroughs as “Secret Avengers” is to Borges as “Winter Soldier” is to…
