ZED Presents…
The Carpe Noctem Interviews: Vol. 2
Conducted by Thom Carnell
Edited by C.K. Burch
Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 by Thom Carnell
ZED Presents…
Publishing
Entire contents © Thom Carnell 2011
Cover photo of Monica Richards by Clovis IV.
ZED Presents… Publishing
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Table of Contents
This issue’s lineup was handpicked for Jon Edwards, a true supporter of independent thought and lover of big words.
Our never-ending thanks for your friendship.
Introduction
When I first met Thom and Catia Carnell, I had no idea the wild ride that I would be in for, nor was I aware of the depth of knowledge and experience in both publishing and horror that I would be exposed to or, thankfully, brought in to be a part of. I remember seeing Thom speak at the 2008 Bellingham ComiCon, and then a few years later was able to actually meet the man through Catia. Both of them are funny, witty, intelligent, and have a crossfire that’s both humorous and interesting to view. But it was the writing that brought me into the fold with them; a casual aside about a former graphic novel project that I was working on perked up Catia’s ears, got her talking about Carpe Noctem magazine and their history with the publication, and after what felt like the blink of an eye I was being asked to proofread Thom’s first novel, No Flesh Shall Be Spared. I enjoyed it, offered my pointers, and expected nothing more in return. But if anything, Thom and Catia remember the guys who help out, and soon I was helping out more, and more, until here I am writing the introduction to Volume 2 of The Carpe Noctem Interviews, and editing them as well. And there are some great reads on display in this volume: Clive Barker, Nacho Cerda, Frank Miller, Stuart Gordon, Tom Rainone, among others. I did some proofreading and editing work on Volume 1 as well, and while I had known of Thom and Catia’s involvement with the industry, man oh man was I unprepared for the depth of their experience, and the work that they’ve done as a part of it.
I was a peripheral student of horror a little over a year and a half ago, and since then have written my first horror novel, and I’m currently working on my second. I owe that reinvigorated sense of wonder and fanboyish glee for the genre to Thom and Catia. They’ve been mentors and teachers, and friends as well. Reading these interviews was an absolute pleasure and they are a tribute to the genre. Horror isn’t dead; it’s undead, and it’s coming for you. Seize the night!
- C.K. Burch
Frank Miller
Frank Miller was one of those interviews I was really nervous about doing. I’d heard he did not suffer fools lightly and I was worried. I’d read articles in Wizard and other comic journals that painted him as someone who gave no quarter. What I found instead was a highly intelligent man who talked slowly, carefully considering each and every word he said. As we went through my list of questions, Frank gave up insight into his characters that gave them a dimension I’d never really considered. I’m proud of this one.
Walking The Streets of SIN CITY – Volume II, Issue 2
It’s not often that a person gets to make a mark in his chosen field. It is less likely that one would have the opportunity to make such a mark that one re-defines what the field is capable of. From his first forays into the comic form, Frank Miller has brought to it a quiet sensibility and intimate knowledge of the darker and street-wise side of the super hero genre. His work on Daredevil, his introduction of the character Elektra, the ground-breaking majesty of Ronin, and the now legendary treatment of the Batman mythos have established him as a unique voice in an industry of safe and sometimes paranoid artists and writers. His characters tend to be so “real” that the readers feel that they know them on intimate terms and revel in the victories and, at times, weep at their demise. Now with his latest labor of love, Sin City, he is turning his eye to the all too real world of the crime story. In stark pages of black and white Frank Miller is again re-defining what the medium is capable of achieving, and more importantly, breathing new life into a genre long thought dormant.
Based on the reception that comic art receives in Europe and Japan, where do you think that American Comics went wrong?
I think there were two very important ways that American comics went wrong and both happened in the period, more or less, in the forties and fifties. In the forties, they established a factory system where people weren’t allowed the legal authorship of their own work, setting in motion a system where artists/cartoonists would feel ultimately punished for being generous with their talent, which created a very bad mentality. In the fifties, a deadly mistake was made in that comics allowed themselves to be classified as children’s entertainment only. This had not been the case before, we’ve all seen the photographs of World War II soldiers reading their comic books, but in the fifties the publishers allowed this misconception to become the guiding rule and we accepted stricter censorship than any other form of entertainment with the Comics Code.
How do you react when people, even today, still label comic art as “kiddie books”?
If it’s people from outside the field, I think it’s a very understandable position because that’s how we continually present ourselves. With people within the field, I think it’s a very sad self-contempt. Not that there is anything wrong with entertainment for children, but to handcuff an entire story form to one age group is absurd. Especially since everyday people open up their newspapers and read the comics or the editorial cartoons and enjoy them as adults. To say that once it’s more than three panels long it’s for children is absurd.
Could you ever see yourself going back and working under that sort of system, under the banner of say DC or Marvel?
Well, I’m a fairly cautious person in a lot of ways and I try to never say never again, but my focus has so shifted and I’m in such a lucky position right now. I’m an artist doing exactly what he wants to do and enough people are showing up to make it worth my while to do it. So, to abandon something like Sin City in order to go back to a Daredevil or whatever, might give me some sentimental pleasure, but I don’t think it would ultimately be as satisfying as it used to be. Also I feel that I’m, at this stage of my career, contributing to the future of the field rather than continuing to mine the past.
How did your new comic line for Dark Horse Comics, Legend, come about?
Well, John Byrne and I decided that since this was an imprint happy business, imprint crazy business, and since a bunch of us all, being in good terms with each other and admiring each other’s work, wanted people to notice it, that would be a good way to turn Sin City readers onto Nextmen, Nextmen readers onto Monkey Men and so on. We’d seen what had happened with Image and how they initially established their imprint as the first imprint that represented the talent and not the bankroll and that it had worked. And we thought we’d have our bowling club to see if we could help bring more readers to each other’s books.
Is there a philosophy to Legend or is it people doing what they want to do for themselves?
Well, it’s all creator owned. There aren’t any editorial parameters. Every one of us is able to do all the primary functions of a cartoonist, in other words, all of us can draw and all of us can write. Essentially, the over-all idea… John and I felt that we were doing comics that really didn’t fit any of the convenient niches of the day. We weren’t part of the stampede of brontosaurus with the new super hero universes. We weren’t Marvel…we weren’t DC…but we weren’t doing whiny biographical comics. One feeling that John and I both share is that we are entertainers, so we wanted to do comics that were a lot of fun, but not part of the old status quo.
I know at one time you had some real concerns about censorship and a rating system. Have your fears come to a reality or have things gotten a little better?
It’s just an ongoing fight. I’m convinced that what happened in the 1950’s created a battered child syndrome in Comic Book Land. People quiver in fear every time we get a little bit popular, and are convinced that this omnipotent outside world is going to come in and crush us. It’s important to point out that the outside world never did a damn thing to us. The U.S. Senate never censored comic books, in fact, they’ve indicated to us it was the publishers themselves that instituted the Comics Code, in order to put William Gaines out of business. It’s a scandal in our history, but since comic book history has been so poorly represented, people do think that at one horrible time in the fifties Frederic Wertham showed up and shut us down. Never happened. Comics have never been censored by anyone but comic book publishers’ distributors, but every time we get any attention at all there’s a lot of fear talk running around. This is happening now, and people are under the delusion that putting little apologies in the corners of the comics are going to protect us. The cover labels…the labels…whatever. In every case where a shop gets busted they look for those ratings and nail the books with them on it. They’re a red flag for the censors. They’re the worst thing we can do to ourselves.
So, in your opinion, what is your answer to the “protect the youngun’s” quagmire? Is it cover advisories? Is it warnings? Is it self-policing?
What would you say is the solution to preventing young children from going into a bookstore and buying The Catcher In The Rye? There is no solution. There is no over-arching solution that isn’t censorious. Believe me, all of the people involved in this rating system debate… I’m the only one who has ever worked under one. I’ve worked in Hollywood and I’ve seen how it works and it is the most censorious, insidious, corrupt pile of crap you ever saw. Solutions are like any real world solutions, situation by situation. A shop on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood can’t play by the same rules as one in Waco, Texas. Shop owners are a pretty smart bunch; they know their clientele. The problems that pop up are fairly rare. I have to be responsible when I do my book to give it a title and a look that tells you what it is. Honestly…not with a little apology. Nobody picks up Sin City expecting Little Lulu. A publisher has to represent it properly to the distributor, the distributors to the retailers, the retailers to the readers. It’s tougher that way, but it works.
Do you think that it’s a case where the parents’ groups that are standing up and saying, “Look at the stuff Little Johnny came home with” is just putting off their job as parents on somebody else?
First off, which ones are saying that about comic books? I’d have to challenge that because nobody’s saying that about comic books except comic book people, except for tiny regional sites that are just part of the publishing business. Comics are not under assault by the outside world at all. It’s very important to realize that we are not under attack. We are acting as if we are, but we aren’t. If we are, I think we at least owe it to ourselves to go down in flames, but before we can get into that debate, I’ve got to point out that there is no threat. Right now the censors are eating Hollywood alive. They’re eating the video industry alive. They’re frying the biggest fish in the world and why bother with the minnows?
Speaking of censorship and films, what do you think about groups like the M.P.A.A. being able to squelch an artist’s voice or vision just because there’s one too many hip thrusts?
I think the M.P.A.A. is a capricious, corrupt organization that never should have existed in the first place and if Hollywood had any courage they wouldn’t have ever introduced a ratings system.
You also have been quoted as saying that the entire comics industry has gone “chicken shit”. Can you elaborate on that?
Referring to our history again… I don’t remember saying the whole industry had gone chicken shit. I must have been in a mood. [laughs] It just gets back to this misperceived notion that we can’t fight fights. Here we write all these stories about these heroes who go up against unbelievable odds for the greater good, and the first time some wacko tele-evangelist waves a comic book, people are talking about shutting ourselves down, even if they don’t wave the comic books, we think maybe they will. We do all these heroic stories and the history is a history of cowardice. These things could be fought. The First Amendment is a powerful tool. I honestly also believe that if they ever do come after us, that it might be the best thing that ever happened to us. It might be the best format for us to show the world that we aren’t just churning out pabulum for kids. These things can all be managed. You gotta understand that the President of the United States changes his policy if he gets enough letters. We’ve got the most devoted fans you can find in entertainment. We can mobilize, we can stand very proud and say that we love this and we’ll stand by it as a story form. These aren’t the old days where we were all split off in separate [directions] and there were only a couple of publishers and they didn’t like what they were doing to begin with. These aren’t those days. We could do much better. If there is a fight, I would hope we would approach it with energy and enthusiasm and come out of it better than we started.
Speaking of Hollywood, what was your overall impression based on your experiences with the Robocop films?
Oh man! [laughs] What a crazy town! What a crazy business. This won’t translate into print, I’m sure, but you can hear the pleasure in my voice when I say that, because it was a lot of fun. It’s a very exciting business. It also drives you out of your mind. I’ll no doubt dive back into it sometime. Right now, I’m having too much fun doing Sin City. I’m having too much fun drawing, to tell the truth, and having the freedom I have, but it’s a very, very exciting business.
What do you think of “criminal chic”? The idea of someone who is basically a criminal being portrayed in a very romantic way.
There’s a long history of that. You can go all the way back to Little Caeser and White Heat. The gangster film is a classic American genre. It doesn’t mean we are teaching people to be criminals or anything. It just means that every once in a while we get tired of one kind of lead character and go for another. They tend to provide really juicy roles for actors. I mean, James Cagney built his career playing the most venomous villains you could find. It comes and goes. I think there is a bit of a resurgence in crime fiction in general right now, outside of comics. That is par for the course.
Moving into some of your comic work, what did the series Lone Wolf And Cub in particular and manga [Japanese term for comics] in general show you was possible in terms of storytelling?
I learned a lot from Lone Wolf And Cub. Kojima’s story telling introduced a different kind of pace that particularly intrigued me, in that he was willing to let the whole process be a lot more fluid and take up as much space as it wanted to build its mood. I think that the manga often tried too hard to be movies and ended up reading a little bit like flip books, where you’ve read thirty pages and absolutely nothing’s happened. But I think that elements have been achieved there that can be wed to American comics to create a much different, more flexible pace. That’s a lot of what I’ve been up to with Sin City. Where sometimes the text is very heavy and then sometimes the story just rockets along with action. I’d like to have a little more variety in the pace. We’re just coming out of the Dark Ages in Comic Book Land. It used to be that all the pages had to have six square panels. A lot of experimentation you see going on now, I think, is just playing with the toys, finding out what works. In my case, the Japanese stuff was a real refreshing influence.
I’ve noticed there is a lot of Catholic imagery in your writing of Daredevil. Was this a way of giving some character insight or was it a way of hinting at the redemption that Matt Murdock strove for?
Yes. [laughs] I pretty early on decided that I’d declare Matt Catholic. He just seemed so prone to guilt and so full of volcanic violence that it seemed to fit him very well. It was one of my earliest decisions working on Daredevil, when I took over as writer, and, to my mind at least, it made sense out of this strange man that could somehow be a lawyer and a vigilante at the same time.
Did you really get death threats over killing Elektra?
Oh yeah.
What were those like?
That was a very strange evening. I was alone in my apartment and I took home this huge pile of mail that had come in from that issue of Daredevil, which covered just a wild range of reactions. The mail from Daredevil was always delightful to get because people who write into comics tend to be a really intelligent bunch who read the stuff very, very closely and while they call you on your mistakes, it sure is nice to see some of the little touches noticed that you didn’t think anybody would spot. That night was particularly strange because there were four death threats amidst it. People saying “you killed the woman I love, I’m coming after you” and so on. I realized I struck a nerve. I mean really, we all love to tell the stories about the death threats and about the wackos and about the people that come up and say “Sign my breast” and all that, but the fans I run into in my experiences are delightful people. The wackos are very, very few and very, very far between. I don’t want to put forth a weird images of comics readers as being these really loons. They aren’t. You couldn’t ask for better.
When you worked with Bill Sienkiewicz on Elektra Assassin, did the way he portrayed your scripts have an influence on you after that came out and hit the market?
Do you mean on how I drew or how I wrote them?
C: All of the above.
No, I’m serious. What happened was I wrote him full scripts and then I re-wrote them once he drew them, because he was a wild man and a very different book was produced. In fact one that was much more a wedding of our sensibilities. The series really came together midway through one evening when he was in my apartment in California and the two of us were up ‘til about four in the morning laughing and rolling around on the floor, both of us drawing pictures of characters and stuff, and I realized that there was a screwball humor element to the series that really should be in it. And the story outline had to be expanded to accommodate that. Bill has a touch of the absurdist in him.
Having read Stray Toasters I would agree.
In that sense, it resembles working with Geof Darrow. Where you give Geof a straight forward eight page story, you’ll end up with a hundred page epic that will just bring in elements that you never would have imagined and I like to collaborate in a way where both of us play off each other, so working with that kind of person is a lot of fun.
How do you feel now about the appearance of some woman called Elektra in Daredevil lately?
[laughs] Well I feel like when I created Elektra I was a kid. I was in my early twenties. I knew the rules and I knew that even though they promised up and down that would never happen, that it was gonna happen. All I can say is, it stings. It stings like hell. Please don’t buy it. But I can’t belly-ache too long and hard because a generation of Kirby and Ditko didn’t have the ground rules spelled out for the way I did, and they got ripped off a lot worse than I did. So Marvel can drag that corpse around the block all they want. I hope I don’t have to see it, but I still own Sin City and it’s not a mistake I’ll make again.
Will you ever re-address that character?
Elektra? No. They’ve made that impossible.
I recently sat through and read through the bulk of everything that you’ve written.
Poor guy.
No. No. Come on. I noticed that one thing in Ronin that, I don’t know whether it was just me or the mood I was in or what, but some of it plays like a love/hate letter to the city of New York. Is that far off the mark?
Have you ever lived in New York?
No.
Well, I lived there for ten or eleven years and you gotta have both sides to your relationship with a city like that. You gotta love it and hate it. Eventually it was a city that I had to leave, but sure, that was all through Daredevil too. American metropolises are ghastly wonderful things. They’re strange.
A couple of questions on Batman. I think a lot of that’s already been covered. What do you see as a major difference between your vision of the contemporary Batman and, say Alan Moore’s or Grant Morrison’s?
I don’t know Grant Morrison’s. I’ve been careful not to read Batman since I left the character. It’s just something I do since I tend to get so focused on my own idea. I shouldn’t dislike someone else’s idea, and why make for bad feelings? I have read some of Alan’s and Alan and I, as with everything super heroic, disagree completely because Alan has a very – the easy word is cynical, but it’s not cynical. His attitude toward the super hero is that it is in itself a corrupt idea; I don’t think I’m misstating his case. I’ve always been in love with the heroic, so my approach to the super hero, as much as I am known for the grim and gritty kind of stuff, is essentially romantic. Allan has a much more modern sensibility than mine. I mean “modern” in the broader literary sense. I believe that Superman and Batman are the extension of Odysseus and The Scarlet Pimpernel and all…the grand tradition. I once put it to Alan and we both had a big laugh, about how much we disagree about all of this. I put it to Alan saying, “Between Dark Knight and Watchmen, I provided the brass band funeral and he provided the autopsy.”
The funny thing is, that when you say you are mostly known for the gritty and what-have-you, I would agree, but on the other hand, there were some very tender moments involved in Dark Knight.
I loved working on that book.
It shows.
It was an absolute joy to work on. People are shocked when I tell them how often I would be laughing out loud while I was working on it. I would think it was funny or I would know I had a “moment,” especially once Robin entered the story. I loved doing Robin.
It was such a stroke of genius to make her a woman.
Well the costume seemed to make a little more sense. Bury the ghost of Wertham once and for all.
Did Hard Boiled start out to have such a kinetic energy as it ended up with?
Well, words aren’t as kinetic as pictures. Everything is in the hands of the artist. I knew that I had a wild man on my hands, but I had no idea what was coming. When I wrote the first issue of Hard Boiled full script, which every panel had a description, every caption and word balloon in place. Geof delivered the artwork to me; I spent two and a half days in my studio cursing his name, storming around. It was brilliant and my script was completely useless and I had to completely re-think my approach to the whole thing. So, no. I had no idea what I was in for, but I so loved working with Geof. It was great.
When I read Hard Boiled the first time, I remember looking at it and thinking it was a fairly small book, but why is it taking me so long to get through this, because…
There’s only six words here, why am I only on word four?
Yeah, because it becomes almost a Where’s Waldo kind of thing. You’re looking through the panel and just looking at every little thing. It’s just fabulous.
He holds the narrative well enough so that, in a way, he brings an absurdity to comics that is very refreshing. No wonder the guy lives in France.
What brings you back to Martha Washington?
Martha was always intended to be an open-ended series. The main thing that brings me back is the same thing that brings Dave back: we love her. After doing the two hundred pages of Give Me Liberty, the very last thing I wrote to Dave was a note on the cover saying “I miss her already.” When his schedule cleared up enough and there was time in mine, we did the new series. I’ve already plotted the third series. Our plan is to chronicle her entire life. It could take thousands of pages. Who knows?
Moving on to Sin City…
Please!
Can we look forward to a Sin City film directed by Frank Miller?
It’s the only way that you’ll get a Sin City film.
It’s the only way?
Yeah. Whether or not that happens, or when it happens, I can’t comment on, but that’s the only way it’ll ever happen.
That just brings a smile to my face.
Well, that’s what’s great about owning it. I can’t say that about stuff I don’t own, that’s why it’s so important. If you like the way I do something and I own it, that means I can guarantee I’m the guy that does it.
You create a lot of really strong characters. The three that immediately come to my mind are Elektra, Casey McKenna and, a new person I am absolutely in love with, that’s a person you refer to as “Deadly Little Miho”. Is this something you set out to do? To specifically highlight female characters or were they just the ones for the job?
Well, it came naturally. Not only was there a real lack of that in comic books, but the women I’ve known in my life have been extraordinary.
Will we see more and more of Miho?
Oh yeah. See, Miho is a real scene-stealer. She was originally a background character, but she’s so fun to draw she just pops up and she’s grabbing full pages right and left and taking most of the action.
Even though the ending of second issue of Sin City: The Big Fat Kill had been tipped to me, it was still such a surprise to see the beauty of the way it all played out.
Well, thank you. I’m having an absolute party on this one. I’m on the last issue now and it’s a big thirty-seven page story. We’re going fatter with the last issues…an even fatter kill. It’s a wonderful feeling really. Once you get out into the spookier waters of creating something out of whole cloth, you can lose some of the fun that came from working on the old monthlies. I’ve done enough Sin City now, I mean, I’ve done more Sin City for instance than I did Batman, that I’ve got the kind of momentum that I had in my old Daredevil days. Where the story ideas just keep coming. It’s a real good time. It’s a lot of fun.
I notice a lot of your fight scenes are very well executed. Did you ever study martial arts?
A little bit.
How far do you think realism should be taken in comics?
[laughs] Well, only if it looks good. I always chuckle when people tell me that my work is realistic. I mean, comics don’t lend themselves to realism, to my mind…not often. Occasionally somebody will do something brilliant that is genuinely realistic, but for realism nothing is going to beat documentary. I think that people often feel that something is realistic when it feels emotionally true. When it inspires a gut level reaction that is vital and strong, but that’s what romance is. That’s what melodrama is. Hitchcock once remarked “melodrama is reality with the boring parts taken out”. And so, to do a realistic comic book would mean taking you through all the tedious paces of mundane life, and we all know that pretty well, that’s why I don’t do auto-biographical comics.
Do you prefer writing and drawing solo compared to collaborating?
I don’t prefer either. It really depends on which and where. They’re different pleasures. Right now, I’m rocketing along on Sin City and loving doing the whole thing myself. But finishing Sin City then working with Dave Gibbons or Geof Darrow is jumping into someone else’s mind. It’s like I’ve been playing a solo and I get to play with somebody else. So it tends to make me come back to drawing stronger with a little more diverse set of abilities. Also, I write very different stories for other people than I write for myself. Dave Gibbons, he has a such a particular set of remarkable strengths. He’s an excellent dramatist. He gives the best actors you could ask for. And he can also make you believe anything. I can type out “gay nazis in a laser cannon” and he’ll draw it in such a way that it’s utterly believable. So I can take that angle of Martha that much further; it’s such a spectacle that the biblical climax of the second Martha Washington series had, I don’t know many artists that could have pulled that off.
That’s quite a testament. Let me ask you some “from the hip” opinions of certain other writers.
Ok…[hesitantly]
Neil Gaiman.
You know, I haven’t read as much Neil as I’d like to. I’ve only read a few of his stories. He’s obviously a very, very skilled writer. Boy, does that guy use words well, but I can’t go into it deeper because I haven’t read enough of it. It’s sitting in a stack of things that I will read. I want to give it the time it deserves.
John Byrne.
Oh, I think John is a very good writer. He’s clever and his Next Men series is an unfolding science fiction epic that I don’t imagine anybody else would have either the discipline or the patience to do.
Paul Chadwick.
Well, you’re naming everybody I like. I love Paul’s work. Getting a Paul Chadwick comic for me means I get to sit down and make sure there’s no music on and nothing going on in the house and delve into it. He’s so contemplative. It’s amazing in these politically correct times, he brings his own conscience and his own beliefs to bear but he never preaches. And he proved with his last series that he could handle suspense with the best of us.
Alan Moore.
[laughs] I mean, I’ve loved Alan’s stuff since the old Warrior days. I think he’s at his best nowadays when he’s doing the stuff he really loves the most, stuff like From Hell. I’m monitoring. I am watching. I wish there was more to look at these days.
Will Eisner.
Oh! [laughs] Will’s like the practicing master of comic art. For me to comment too much on his stuff would be kind of dumb, because he’s teaching us all so much. Here he is with so much great work behind him, and continuing to explore. He’s an example to follow as far as how to take one’s talents and develop them into full maturity.
And finally, any list wouldn’t be complete with the name Jack Kirby on it.
Oh yeah, Jack was pretty good wasn’t he? [laughs] I mean Jack was our Beethoven. Beethoven, Elvis, whatever fields we want to pick.
Wonder how Jack would feel being compared to Elvis?
[laughs] “I’m sure he’s a great kid!” The thing about Jack, what was so extraordinary, was that if you judged an artist by his influence, then he was clearly and absolutely in a class by himself. You can mark with an absolute line before Kirby hit his prime and (the history of comics that is) before Kirby and since Kirby. And they’re two distinct eras, because Kirby re-invented the entire medium, and everybody works in the wake of what he did. I don’t think we’re likely to see anybody as brilliant as that again, anytime soon. I think that really if there were any eras or ages of comics, what just ended was The Jack Kirby Age.
With the advent of writer and artist owned characters, do you foresee a new renaissance in the comic field?
Well…that’s what I thought about the time I did Ronin. I thought that we were really going to see everything explode and burst open and a glorious new age was going to be upon us. I still have hopes, but not as wildly optimistic. I think that now that so much of the power has shifted to the artist, that it’s up to the artist to decide what they are going to do with this power. It used to be so easy to blame everything on the publishers, and rightly so, they were behaving like scum, but it was a fantasy to think that once the handcuffs were off all the artists would rise to it. We’ve just been through that whole embarrassing period where everything was a new super hero universe, and some of the worse comics ever created sold brilliantly.
Do you think that once the artists found this freedom, they thought to themselves “Well, I can write!”.
I’ll jump on that in a minute. But my main point was that we saw this embarrassing stuff, all these “Super Hero Universes Of The Week” for so long as everybody was trying to cash in on a false boom, and the artists played into that just as much as anybody else. So I mean, given freedom, what did a lot of people do? The same thing they did at Marvel, only get paid better. I hope a renaissance is coming, but I’m not in quite such a hurry anymore. I think that as time goes by the artists are going to have to grow up and realize that to have the freedom that we have is a very rare thing, historically, for any art field, and to use it to find our own voices and do our best work rather than to pander. As far as artists who try to write, who maybe you think shouldn’t… God bless ‘em, I think. This is one art form and at least let them try.
What is the present situation of Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot?
Geof Darrow is finished and the book is about to go on the schedule. So it should be coming out late Spring.
What character haven’t you had a crack at doing that you’d love to?
Superman.
I’ve read that. Why and what direction would you take him in?
One of the reasons is pure vanity, which is to have something on my shelf with an “S” on the spine. He is the big one. He’s the final word in super heroes. The first and the best. The other thing is there’s a lot of childhood affection, (there’s a lot of that), that would make me want to do at least one book. As far as where I’d take him? Oh, that’s up to me and it’s something I would never talk about ahead of time.
My first thought when I read that was “Well, Frank’s already kicked his ass.”
You mean in The Dark Knight? Yeah but, he was the antagonist in The Dark Knight. If I did a story where he was the hero, I’d have a whole different slant on it. [laughs] Wasn’t it fun seeing Batman kick the crap out of him?
It was great! [laughs] Not only that, but taunting him while doing it.
Yeah [laughs]
Is the present day a time for heroes? Do you think that we could use more of them in literature and, more importantly, real life?
Well, that question lends itself to very facile, cheap answers. Cheap answer number one is “Yes, we need someone to show our children how to behave.” Cheap answer number two is “Oh a hero is somebody that makes the rent.” These are clichés that are all false. There’s always room for them, but a good hero isn’t necessarily a role model. In these politically correct times, people have come to mistake art and entertainment for propaganda. It’s not the role of any entertainer, and anyone that is any damn good at the job will tell ya, that if they have to preach a doctrine, they will do a bad job. So as far as heroes go, I feel like I’m writing about heroes all the time, some of them happen to be real crazy, and some of them are more purer of spirit than others, some of them just decided to do one thing right and that makes them heroic in the story, but none of them are little guide books for people to live by. You want to look for heroes in the real world? They aren’t hard to find at all. Look at Stephen Hawking. You want to see heroic? I’m not saying I want to do a Stephen Hawking comic book, but… People are capable of great things.
Clive Barker
I first met Clive Barker at a reading in Berkeley in 1986. After he read, I stood on the sidelines and watched him interact with the long line of people who had waited hours to meet him. In each case, he was polite and made a connection with his fans that was palpable. Later, after introducing myself to him, we talked a bit about the link between sex and horror. As he talked, I noticed his hand drifting across the first few pages of my copy of Damnation Game. When I left, I looked inside the book and saw a beautiful drawing he’d made there. I’ve since interviewed Clive many times for Fangoria. True to form, he has always been kind, giving, and an absolute dream to interview.
Sailing the Seas of Quiddity – Volume II, Issue 3
I have spent nearly my entire lifetime reading horror novels, watching horror films, and generally reveling in all things deemed “scary”. From the classicism of the early vampire stories and tales of Golems through the archetypical Universal monster movies of the thirties up to the horror booms of recent years, I’ve seen it all. In the early- to mid-eighties, there came a strange time for the horror genre. The books in vogue at the time ranged from the prolific tales of Middle Class America threatened by a fearsome encroacher in the novels of Stephen King, (who would soon become a cottage industry unto himself), to the purple-prose angst of Anne Rice’s romance novel vampires. Every writer who put pen to paper attempted to be original and their efforts only served to illuminate how badly the genre needed a new voice; a voice which was unafraid to step through the mirror of our discontent and act as tour guide to a fantastical world waiting for us, the readers, if only we would dare to take his hand and join him on his travels.
I was given a copy of Barker’s Books of Blood as a present from a friend and was immediately held under its spell. His writing was tight, his characters fully fleshed (if only metaphorically), and shit could he tell a story. Here was someone who embraced everything I held dear in writing. These tales were not merely allegory or moral melodrama. His so-called “monsters” were thinking and feeling organisms who, many times, were more human than the people who inhabited the waking world.
It wasn’t until several years later that I met the writer of these wondrous tales. At a reading in Berkeley, California I had the pleasure of coming face to face with Clive Barker. The first thing I noticed was how “normal” he appeared. It’s hard to believe that from this well-mannered, erudite gentleman has sprung some of the most terrifying images in the Horror Pantheon. Rawhead Rex. Pinhead. The Cenobites. Mr. Mamoulian. The Citizens of Midian. Candyman. And now with Lord of Illusions, the ubiquitous Nix. The list goes on and on. He has never shied away from his role as storyteller, nor has he ever courted public opinion. He has merely presented himself as who he is. A writer. A very good writer. He continually lays his soul bare for us to read and enjoy. He’s up front, honest about who he is, and yes I’ll say it again, a really nice guy. He is Clive Barker, and if you haven’t read any of his work, it’s about time you did.
Has writing always been something you did or is it something you came to later in life?
Storytelling is always something I’ve done. I haven’t necessarily always written short stories for instance, they are a relatively late thing. I wrote plays from my twenties. I suppose I was writing short stories when I was a little kid as part of school project and so on, but my earliest recollections are really of oral storytelling around camp fires at scout camp, or frightening the beejeezus out of my brother. (I have a younger brother who was very susceptible to being scared so I would play on that, I suppose, when I was a kid.)
What kind of a kid were you?
Pretty introspective. Pretty troubled, I think, living in Liverpool in the fifties, which was not perhaps the most stimulating of cities to live in. I don’t think any of post-war England was particularly stimulating. I was born in 1952. There were still ration books. The city had been very heavily bombed during the war. It was only seven years after the war had finished and the really aggressive urban renewal had not really begun so, it wasn’t a city with a huge number of places of great stimulation for a kid. In retrospect, there were also some good things about it as well as bad. We didn’t have a TV in the house, there weren’t videos, there weren’t video games. We went to the movies maybe once a year. It was a very big deal to go to the movies. I think I first went when I was six or seven, and it was an annual event. So, it was a time where, really, the imagining had to be done without a lot of external stimuli which I think was probably one of the good things about all of them. You were turned upon yourself to create your own entertainment and, in a way create your own world, which is what I’ve been doing ever since.
Was the oral tradition of telling a story something big in your family? Was it something your parents did?
I have Irish-Italian blood, Irish on my father’s side, Italian on my mother’s side. Both nations that have a high degree of fantasy in their cultures. I was in Ireland about a month ago, and one of the things that never fails to astonish and actually reassure me is how commonplace the fantastic is in the Irish culture. It’s more likely that somebody is going to sit you down and tell you something slightly off-beat and strange than talk about politics. I’m not talking now about necessarily a fan or somebody who maybe you would think would be predisposed to talk about this type of material. I’m actually talking about somebody who might be putting on your makeup for a TV show or somebody who is a rep for the book company, ordinary people who very casually tell you tales of ghosts or of statues of the Virgin which weep. And so, I think that is very much a part of the Irish nature. As indeed, I think there is a kind of melancholy morbidity. And then of course, the Italian certainly isn’t lacking in a wonderfully full-blooded, shall we say, dark fantasy tradition. I think it influenced me. My paternal grandmother was a fine storyteller and loved to talk about death. Lived to talk about death. So, yeah, I think it’s always been there.
I know that there has been a shift in your writing. I mean, you are labeled a “Horror” writer, but you are doing more, not really full blown fantasy, but fantasy-type writing. Which do you consider yourself, or do you consider yourself just a plain writer?
I think I consider myself a plain old imaginative writer. I think I’m less and less labeled a Horror writer. The books tend not to go on Horror shelves anymore and when they do, when I find them on a Horror shelf, I tend to take them off. I mean, certainly, some of them belong there. I agree in a moment that a book like The Damnation Game or the early Books of Blood belong there, of course they do. It would be misleading for them to be anywhere else, but it’s as equally misleading for Imajica, Weaveworld, Everville or The Thief of Always to be on a Horror shelf. I would like to come to the place where we could do away with nonsense descriptions and instead of talking about Science Fiction, Horror Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, what would happen is that we would talk about Imaginative Fiction. It would seem the most mature thing to do.
What would you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
Let’s start with the weaknesses because there’s always so many more of those. I have a real passion for the detail. One of the things that I am constantly carving out of drafts before I send them to my editor are details within details within details. It’s particularly true with the fantasy stuff. It’s true with something like Imajica obviously where you’re creating a series of five worlds and they’re interconnected and so on. I could go on forever about what is going on in those things, and I just love it. I have a kind of zoologist’s eye, even though the flora and the fauna that I am describing are only the things that I am seeing in my mind’s eye. I feel like Marco Polo making reports back to Venice about what I’ve seen and I want to be able to detail them as much as I possibly can. I have to cut back on that. I think that, and you can interpret this as a strength or a weakness, maybe it could be a description but, there’s a deeply perverse element in me that flies from anything that I think I found before. In other words, if I feel that a character is moving in a direction that I think I have encountered before, or a situation reminds me too closely of something I’ve read or something that I’ve seen, I will tend to just throw it out, which means that the books very often take extremely strange turns. I think I am much [more] preoccupied with sex, much more than maybe other writers in the fantastic genre presently, more than contemporary writers are, which means that my characters tend to have more actively, and certainly have more vividly described sexual lives. I think that I like to write much more about outcasts than I do about people who are within the mainstream and again, you might say that is a description as opposed to a weakness, I don’t know. It certainly means that by and large I tend not to write about people who are banging the mainstream of American cultural life, or indeed English cultural life or French, whatever I am writing about. The weaknesses keep mounting up. I do really like words. I tend to become, I think, a little delirious on words once in a while. I can write stuff and like it just because I like the sound of it.
Do you find that sometimes you have to catch yourself from falling in love with sound of your own voice?
Oh, Lord, absolutely. That’s the great note from Williams. “Slaughtering your favorite children.” Whenever you find a sentence which you’ve polished and devoted hours to, it probably doesn’t belong. Strengths. I have a very vivid imagination and I have a real passion to communicate what’s going on in my head to other people.
Since you’ve brought up sex, I want to ask you about that. I’d like to get your thoughts on the relationship between Sex and Fear. You seem to plumb that with a journeyman’s ability.
Well, the truth is, sex is more fearful than perhaps it has ever been before, that’s the first thing to say. As a gay man, with a lot of gay friends, some of whom I’ve lost, that certainly sharpens the edge of one’s knowledge more than you would like, really, but there’s something else, something even if AIDS were not such an important and tragic element of our lives right now: the issue of sex stirs us up because it’s a control issue. We, as personalities, tend to like to be in control of ourselves. We don’t like to relinquish control. Sex demands that we relinquish control. Chemicals flow in our bodies which say “Oh, well, you don’t want to get a hard-on? Too late, guy.” [laughs] You are not master of your own anatomy. Speaking to my women friends, it seems that, even though the manifestations may be not quite so obvious, nevertheless, they feel the same kinds of demands and psychological changes and they’re as every bit as inevitable for a woman as they are for a man. There’s also the issue that we feel closer to something which is erasing part of our personalities. By which I mean, our personalities are constructs, the masks we put on and take off. I think it’s fair to say that if root elements remain a constant nevertheless change. One of the things that sex does is it makes us less ourselves. There’s something wonderful about that. There’s something wonderful about the fact that we are being transformed, in a way, in the grip of sexual feeling. That, as we move towards greater and greater intimacy with somebody our personalities become less important to us. In fact, in the height of love and the height of lovemaking one of the things we want is to be erased, to be subsumed by the other person. To become, in a way, blocked and so identified with the other person that maybe both personalities disappear. There’s something transformative and extraordinary.
I wanted to ask you about The Advocate article that’s just out. I don’t really want to dwell on this, but I think that it’s important. Why did you choose now to come “out”?
The truth is, I didn’t choose now. I’d done articles in The Advocate, I did a big piece in The Advocate about four years ago, nobody gave a flying fuck about it, but I did it. I’ve read at gay book stores. If anyone ever asked me the question, I gave them the answer. It’s just that no one has really been interested in the question. The truth is, I don’t quite know why suddenly everybody was. I don’t mind at all. I’ve written a lot about gay people in my novels, Imajica has a gay relationship which is cherished in the context of the novel and becomes a very important part of the novel. I’m writing about another gay character right now. It’s never been an issue, really. I guess maybe because I’ve always thought it was so obvious and I’ve had many letters from gay men and women saying “Well, we love the fact that you write about gay characters and we love the fact that you’re gay” and so on. And I always thought, “Well, there you go.” It’s not even an issue. So then, I was a little startled, but not unhappy, just startled. I mean I did a piece in Out, I did a piece in Ten Percent Magazine around the same time which was a function to some extent that I have a wonderful publicist whom I’ve just taken on, who said “Well, why don’t we do all these things?” I said “Well, sure.” It’s just fine. It’s just surprising that anybody would be surprised.
Did the media behave in a way that you expected or was it a complete shock? Were you surprised that people jumped on it?
I was surprised that people jumped on it.
I would think that we as a culture had moved well beyond that.
I would have thought so, too. I was somewhat startled. I didn’t, again, mind. It’s the truth and certainly nothing I am unhappy about. I think it’s very important right now, perhaps more important than it’s ever been, with so much negativity being directed towards gay men. So much disinformation is being passed around by people who want to get political headway out of it. People in my position, if you will, whatever you want to call them, media people, celebrities, whatever, say “Oh yeah, by the way, me, too.”
I find it interesting when someone like Stephen King says “I’m married,” people aren’t saying “Oh, really? Let’s talk about that!”
I’ll tell you what I think it is to some extent. People who exercise influence on the culture, in some way or another, particularly if it’s a relatively mainstream influence, (I make movies and I paint pictures and I write books which hit the bestseller lists, so I am a relatively mainstream presence,) are not, by and large, identified as gay. There are a few exceptions to that. Elton John would be one, I suppose. But when you actually think of mainstream authors for a moment, I mean, people who write thrillers or science fiction, (Sam Delany would be one in science fiction, the late Patricia Heissman would have been one, though I don’t know whether she liked to be called lesbian in her life,) but now, keep adding to the list and it’s not that long a list. I think, curiously, it’s more understood that people who work behind the scenes, in some way or the other, either because they are movers and shakers like David Geffen, or because they are people who make things look amazing, like the costume designers who work in Hollywood or the amazing scenery designers or the people who work on Broadway, that kind of thing, I think people accept. But people who are bang in the middle of things, actually you are going to be reading my words tomorrow, or you are going to be looking at my paintings tomorrow, or you are going to be seeing my movies tomorrow, I mean how many gay filmmakers do you know who don’t make gay films?
I think the other thing is that you are not a stereotype. Using your example of Elton John, people can say “Well, you know, he’s flamboyant, blah blah blah.” The whole idea that I am reading articles and I’m looking through the Internet and people are making such a big deal about it kind of bothers me.
Yes, they are making a bigger deal of it then I think any of us would have thought. By and large, they are not making a negative deal of it, which I think is very reassuring. Maybe you have been reading different entries on The Internet than I have, I don’t get a look at these things, but I get reports from people, people tell me the response has been “Oh, how cool.”