Visaggio and Smith Kickstart “Andrew Jackson in Space” [Interview]

Sci-fi space adventure comics are tons of fun. But what if your protagonist is the man who will eventually become one of the most beloved, and also most hated, American Presidents? What happens when you put Andrew Jackson alone in space? This is the story writer Brian Visaggio and artist Jason Smith seek to tell with their aptly titled “Andrew Jackson in Space”.

Currently running on Kickstarter, “Andrew Jackson in Space” is just over 50% funded and still has a ways to go. If you’re up for a story that reads a bit like Doctor Who meets Indiana Jones, then you better follow that link.

Read on as we chat with Brian and Jason about the legacy of Andrew Jackson, Kickstarter as a funding tool, and making a reader empathize for someone who’s a bit of a villain.

You two are going to Kickstarter to get some funding for your comic “Andrew Jackson In Space”. While the title is fairly self-explanatory, I know there’s more to it, so what else can you reveal about the book’s premise?

Brian Visaggio: I like to think the title says everything you need to know: Andrew Jackson is in space. It takes place in the early 19th century, maybe twenty-seven years before he becomes president. The basic premise is that this young buck, still his early thirties, simply wakes up one day to find himself on the other side of the galaxy with no idea how he got there, or why. It’s an action-adventure story as Jackson tries to find his way home, encountering new friends and new enemies and new escapades along the way.

Structurally, it’s kind of similar to something like Doctor Who, where we’re free to do both monster-of-the-week concepts and larger story arcs. Jackson even has a companion of sorts, a deposed alien queen whose story is the main focus of the first arc.

So yeah. After “Stronghold”, my current long-term project, I’ve been wanting to do something a lot lighter. “Stronghold” is a very grim book; it was supposed to be. This is much lighter, with more room for humor, more room for levity, more room for crazy heroics.

Taking Andrew Jackson and putting him in space is, honestly, not exactly a common idea, I would think. What made you hit upon the idea of it all?

BV: Last summer, I was developing an anthology comic series called “America Fantastica”. I wanted to do a weird-fantasy and science fiction series set against the backdrop of American history, because I’m a serious history buff. So there were going to be stories about 1970’s rock bands fighting the end of the world and demonic bankers in the Gilded Age and probably something about Aaron Burr’s mad plot for world conquest. But it wasn’t coming together the way I wanted it to. I still may get to it eventually.

Anyway, I was trying at the same time to develop a short comic for artist James Kersey, who had been wanting to work with me. So I scanned my list of “America Fantastica” plot seeds and say “Andrew Jackson vs Robots.” So I was like “ok, yeah, I can probably get eight pages out of that.” So I started doing development on the idea, and hit upon Jackson fighting robots in space. So while I was looking for a story, I started developing the circumstances of Jackson, and I began to think that this had some teeth: Jackson, lost in space, trying to get home, having adventures along the way. It had a great hook, and it could open up to lots of different kinds of stories. And Jackson is such an interesting figure — there’s always a bit of the villain in him. So this started to look very, very, very interesting.

Jason Smith: If I could add to this, I was saying to Brian a couple of weeks ago that this story is not what I expected when he first told me about it. I was expecting some kind of period piece and instead it’s this crazy space adventure. The “fish out of water” angle is a great hook because once you start reading you’re going to find something you weren’t expecting. And I think people will be surprised by what the story actually is.

Jason, Brian’s already talked a bit about how he started with the idea for “Andrew Jackson in Space”, but how did you get involved?

JS: This past fall, I was in the process of designing “Unlawful Good” for our editor, Heather Antos, and she connected me with Brian who was looking for an artist for his short horror story “The Sisters”. While I was illustrating that, we discussed doing more work together in the future. Anyway, towards the end of October, Brian asked if I’d be interested in taking over the art duties on “Andrew Jackson in Space” and I said sure. I finished up “The Sisters” one week and then started work on “Andrew Jackson” the next. So it all happened really quickly.

You’re hoping to raise $4000 with the Kickstarter, with the large majority of it going towards paying the art and the colorist, Harry Saxon. What, to you, makes Kickstarter such an attractive platform for the book, beyond the aspect of getting the necessary funding?

BV: I like to think that it increases people’s investment in the book, and it gives people a sense of ownership; this becomes your book, too, in a way. I think that’s kind of beautiful. In addition, I like giving people insight into how comics get made, how difficult it is and how rewarding it is. Because it’s seriously a shitload of work, and it’s expensive as hell; but we all want good comics out there, and I like how this balances out: there’s those of us who want to make them, and those of us who want to help people make them. This really makes the whole comic-making enterprise a team sport, where we all work together to help get good comics with new creative voices out there.

A lot of artists talk about having trouble with likenesses. While Jackson is a bit before the invention of the camera, there’s plenty of paintings depicting him. How much of the generally accepted look of Jackson did you stick with and what was a little more your own style?

JS: Yeah, likenesses are tough! I did quite a bit of research to find reference of Jackson but I also talked to Brian quite a bit to get his input about how he saw the character – some which was historic, some his own invention I would think. From there, it was really sitting down and drawing and trying to figure out how to make it my own a bit. I tried to pick up some of Jackson’s facial features – the shape of his head, his long nose – but I’m really not trying to draw him as accurately as I can, I’m trying to capture an overall likeness and add in some character stuff that Brian and I discussed like his eyes and wild hair so it’s more our own. I should also point out that Brian already had some initial character designs done so I tried to start there and then make it my own. We did alter a few things but my main contribution was to make him younger. So in the end, I think he’s a bit of my interpretation of Jackson.

I think taking someone from the early 1800s and throwing them into a sci-fi landscape, complete with futuristic tech, can create an interesting visual dichotomy if you choose to stick with the old vs the futuristic. What was the process for nailing the look that Jackson has during his travels, and also that of his surroundings and the alien characters?

JS: Well Jackson wakes up with basically only his wits and the clothes on his back (some of which he doesn’t even have anymore!). So the dichotomy, if there is one, comes from dropping a human into these alien worlds. I’ve really just tried to have fun with the designs and do whatever. Brian and Heather and I discuss the designs quite a bit and I think we’ve got a pretty good angle on things. Mainly I’m just trying to have fun with it.

Andrew Jackson is a problematic historical figure for anyone that cares enough about certain periods of American history. Is any part of the more problematic side going to be tackled with this book, or is it mostly just a fun action-adventure with a young Andrew Jackson at the helm?

BV: This is a question I sort have to always be asking myself. My goal with Andrew Jackson in Space isn’t polemic, and it’s not historical criticism, but of course this is something I can’t ignore. Jackson carries a ton of historical baggage and that’s not something anybody should pretend doesn’t exist. And honestly, what’s the point of doing a book starring Andrew Jackson if you’re going to ignore the historical person in the process? If this is just a fun adventure book with a young, charismatic adventurer hero, then fuck it. It doesn’t need Andrew Jackson to do that. That just becomes a gimmick. It adds nothing to the story.

Like I’ve said. I’m a lover of American history. Jackson is paradigmatic of his age; he’s representative. And that means he brings a lot with him, both good and bad. Jackson was absolutely an inveterate racist and white supremacist. But he was also a folk hero for the common man and a populist; his primary political goals weren’t his personal aggrandizement, but to raise up the dignity of the white yeoman farmer, to bring them to the political table. He was representative of how white America saw itself: non-nonsense, gruff, unrefined, and ready to act. And he was cruel; his role in Indian removal makes very clear that anything that stood in the way of his goals, even when those goals were good, was going to be swept away, often violently. So we have a merciless, difficult man with very specific horizons before his eyes. I have not come to praise Andrew Jackson.

The thing is that so much of what he believed about the world depends on his context: a poor, white, Scotch-Irish fellow from the hills of North Carolina who made his fortune on the frontier, in a context of a society that denied personhood and dignity to vast swathes of its population. And in “Andrew Jackson in Space”, he has been removed from that context entirely.

I don’t want to minimize his racism, but racism depends very much on being in a position of power; in “Andrew Jackson in Space”, he is in no such position. He is alone, not part of a ruling class. He is back on the fringes of society, not slowly ascending to its summit. He doesn’t have the mass support he enjoyed as a folk hero after the Battle of New Orleans. He doesn’t have his wealth. He doesn’t have anything when our story starts; he’s stranded on a backwater piece of shit planet because someone stole his spaceship. So he’s fucked.

So what I’m trying to do is mine the man’s character to find out how he’d respond here. Because that’s what’s relevant to this comic. So what do I find in Jackson? A profound resourcefulness and resilience, an unforgiving pride, a brutal determination and harsh pragmatism, a very ancient sense of personal honor, a devotion to his friends, and a hostility to anyone who would try to set themselves above him. That’s what I’m trying to use to guide me as I navigate him through this new world.

And what’s really cool to me about this is what I said above: Jackson always has a good bit of the villain in him. There’s very little he wouldn’t do to accomplish his goals. So he’s always going to have the capacity within him to do terrible things. That’s what I really want to show: that this guy here is the sort of guy who could eventually become the guy we know as the architect of Indian removal, but being put through dramatic experiences that could have the potential to change him.

I’m still undecided as to whether or not this Jackson here should be read as the guy who will eventually become president; I want to be free to have him change and grow and learn and have his mind opened and broadened. Maybe nobody should see my Andrew Jackson as being identical with the seventh president of the United States; he is a fictional character based, as much as possible, on the man. But he is in a brand new world.

JS: This is one of the main things that has really excited me about the story – who is this Andrew Jackson. Reading Brian’s scripts, Jackson is a really interesting leading man because you’re never really sure where he stands. There’s obviously the historical facts of who Jackson is, but what happens when he’s not in the majority? Does that change his approach to things? We’ve joined his adventure before he becomes the person he is as President, so I’m interested to see what his personality traits make him do in this new environment. Does he become that same person? What does he do in various situations? I think that tension makes for good story potentials.

In the Kickstarter, you talk about how the first issue originally started as a one-shot, but turned into a full arc. With that in mind, I have to imagine that this first issue is able to act as a stand-alone story – because of the realities of starting a new comic and that other issues may never get made – but also feed into a larger story. It seems like very few comics nowadays can truly act as both, most heavily acting either a stand-alone story or merely a piece or a larger arc. Did you find any difficulty in striking that balance?

BV: The first issue isn’t entirely stand-alone; I mostly wrote it as a proof-of-concept. It did originally stand on its own, and the subsequent three-issue arc was going to be unrelated, but after some discussion with my editor, Heather Antos, I decided to develop a new story out of the first issue, developing its themes and really watering the story seeds present in it. So the current story, I think, works on its own to an extent; it still ends on a cliffhanger and leaves the resolution open, but that’s mostly because I decided to limit it to twenty pages.

The balance, then, leans pretty heavily in favor of it being part of a story arc, while serving the role of a pilot: it introduces the main players and concepts, while opening up into something a lot wider.

You’ve already mentioned that Jackson meets a companion of sorts in this first issue. What more can you tell us about the deposed alien queen who’s going to be a driving force of the story?

BV: Not sure how much I should give away here. It’s all in the first issue. But her name is Elida. She’s the former queen of the planet Arriopa who was deposed fifteen years earlier in a planet-wide revolution analogous to France in 1789. She fled, and has been living on the run ever since. She and Jackson have a little bit of history when the story begins; suffice it to say, she’s the reason he’s stranded at the beginning of the book.

You’ve said a couple times that Jackson “always has a bit of the villain in him”, which I think is a nice way to sum him up. With that in mind, how do you go about building a character who can be the villain, but build him in a way that the readers empathize with him and want him to succeed, even despite his possible villainous nature?

BV: Have you ever seen the movie Max?

I can’t say I have.

BV: Max is a movie about the young artist Adolf Hitler in the 1920’s. It’s a fascinating movie; Hitler is a kid trying to make it as an artist in Vienna slowly getting sucked into radical politics, and his primary foil is this Jewish art dealer played by John Cusack. It does a remarkable job making Hitler into someone sympathetic. And you know how it does it? But recognizing that the darkness in him doesn’t make him any less human. They find the positive in him but they don’t pretend he isn’t Hitler. There’s this old trope that even Hitler loved his dog; here, we get to see him as a struggling creative, desperate for a little recognition, resentful of his circumstances, filled with anger and passion which he funnels in precisely the wrong direction. You sympathize with him, root for him, you’re on his team, and you’re afraid for him because you know where his failure leads, not just institutionally but as a person.

So you get people to sympathize with a man like Jackson by seeing him as a human being, and by granting, a little bit, how he sees himself, and recognizing it as subjective but still informative for him.

These are always people we’re dealing with here. We humanized Darth Vader for chrissakes. Just gotta recognize that and treat them accordingly. Nobody gets up in the morning, twirls their mustache, and says “Hmm, how can I be as truly awful as humanly possible today.” So you have to find in someone what makes it possible for them to be monsters, and see how that informs them as actual human beings.

Depending on how this Kickstarter goes, what’s the plan for the other three issues of “Andrew Jackson In Space”?

BV: In terms of plot, I don’t want to tip my hand too much. We develop the story from issue 1 over three more issues, introduce a significant new character, and then at some point there’s a dramatic rooftop confrontation. It’s great.

Practically, if we successfully fund issue 1, we’re going to try and fund issue 2, and so on until it’s done. I have a million stories in mind, but my focus is on getting this story finished.