Interviews

LWW: Hi Ed, how’s it going?

EB: I’m exhausted, I barely got any sleep last night. It’s an on and off problem, I get really … I work in the evenings sometimes and I have a lot of a really hard time going to sleep afterwards because my head’s still buzzing.

How do you deal with writing so many books at the same time?

I have trouble sleeping!

For years now I’ve been writing three to five books a month; generally as long as I give myself a day a week to not get in bad shape with the layouts and outlines and the flowchart of where things are at, I’m fine, I can just write a comic every week, sometimes a little more than a comic every week.

One of the things I’ve found with Criminal is that now I’m the publisher too and there’s all kinds of other concerns such as printing costs, where we’re printing it, production, all these other things that go into it that have nothing to do with sitting down and writing a book. That’s taking more time than I’d imagined, that’s a little frustrating, especially since it ‘s an independent book and Criminal is never going to sell Daredevil numbers, but I make time and I really don’t want to do anything else other than rent a movie or read a book. It’s really fun to sit down and create stories.

You have one of those jobs that so many people would love to have

Exactly, it’s hard to complain about deadlines when you’re getting paid well to write what people are actually reading – a few months after you write it, it’s published. A few of my friends are novelists who are working on something for six months or a year and it comes out two years later and it barely sells; I have friends who are in TV and in film and sometimes they’ll write something that never comes out, or they’ll write something and by the time it comes out their name’s either off of it or what it is, they wish their name was off of it. So even when I write an issue of Captain America or Uncanny X-Men, it’s nothing really but what I intended to be and it’s printed and a few months later it’s out there. It’s a pretty satisfying job if you can get it.

And that means that feedback comes through so much quicker too, from readers and customers.

You know, I’m of two minds on that because the only people who really give us feedback quickly are more fanatic – and I don’t want to blast them – and how many people is that exactly? When something’s selling 100,000 copies and there’s like 50 people online raising hell, does that really make a difference, does that mean people are really that upset’- well, no that means that a few people get really upset.

So I’m of two minds about it – I’m totally used to going online when a book comes out and seeing what people are saying on the various review boards and the message board threads where folk are talking about what comics they’ve bought, and I’m always a little irritated if my book isn’t being talked about by Wednesday night and then I realize that I have a stack of books I bought at the store this week and I haven’t even looked at them, so maybe people have lives!

Still, at some point every month I wish for the days when I didn’t have a computer, when I wrote on a typewriter and faxed my scripts in. I remember the first time, when Larry Young, of all people, told me that there was a place online that was reviewing comic books and they’d reviewed some of mine and I was like “Really? There’s like a website that reviews comics? Wow’. That changed everything.

How do you feel about the sales for Criminal, are they roughly what you were expecting?

They’re better than I was expecting initially, our idea of where we debut … we debuted about 10,000 higher than that. I think we’re doing respectably for an independent, non-superhero book. I would of course like for us to be selling to more people, but the first issue is sold out and we’re about to put the fifth issue to press and it’s the last part of the storyline.

The trade paperback and issue #6 come out in May and I think that’s the next chance we have to pull more new readers. We’re really gonna give that a big push and try and get some of those … I’ve been hearing from a lot of stores who sell out the first day, and a lot of readers who are trying to find it and haven’t been able to find it and right now they’re waiting for the next jumping-on point, so I’m hoping that we’ll stabilize the in high teens, low twenties area and I think we can survive for a long while if we stay around that level.

Because we’re doing it all ourselves and we’re handling everything, I’ve got a foreign sales contract with Delcourt and they’re selling it all over Europe, and I’m negotiating a deal with a other foreign publisher for the UK market, and there’s some of that stuff coming in that’s making additional revenue that way, and of course there’s Hollywood interest and things like that – if there’s movie money starts happening then sales on the comic become less of a survival thing.

We’re still at the point where I think we could sell somewhere between two and five thousand more a month if more stores would look at what they were actually selling and go ‘you know what, I could probably sell five more of those’. There’s just a bunch of stores that order only for subscription on a lot of books.

It’s a mature readers type book and that’s harder to get a lot of stores to carry. We had to move from one printer to another because we had nudity and swearing in the book. I was like ‘we have nudity?’ and then I realized we have one panel of partial nudity

Shocking …

and it wasn’t even in a sexual context.


If I understand correctly, each story arc of Criminal will be self-contained?

Yeah, they tie into each other and the characters who star in one are background characters in other ones, and they all have little bits and pieces of a story that forms a cohesive backstory for these characters and the links between them. It’s much more like a series of novels that are all about these people who all knew each other as teenagers and came apart and came back together in a way.

Leo is the star of the first storyline, and at the end of the first storyline the way he’s left is [off the record spoiler removed] and the next time we see him is issue #7, I think, and he’s more of a supporting character in the second storyline.

The main character in the second storyline is this guy Tracy Lawless who is from a family that’s been referred to throughout the first storyline – Leo’s best friend from childhood was Ricky Lawless, and he mentions Ricky Lawless’ brother who went away and joined the military in issue #5, it’s mentioned early on that Ricky Lawless died, there’s little bits and pieces like that. If you read them all, they fit together like a puzzle, but at the same time issue #6 – if you haven’t read issues #1-5 it’s basically like a first issue to you.

I was inspired by Elmore Leonard and Richard Starke and a lot of these writers who write books that have the same character reoccurring but each book stands on their own. I really wanted to do a comic book like that, and Sin City was always a little bit like that, but I hate to compare Criminal to Sin City because I don’t want to appear to be a Sin City knock off, but at the same time I think that what’s really cool about Sin City is that the city became the main character. For ours, it’s really the mood is the character, and the bar that they all hang out at. I like the idea of creating a universe of noir characters who all at some point take centre stage to tell a different kind of noir story.

Did you already have the concept for Criminal in your back pocket, waiting for the opportunity to use it, or was it something that you came up with when the opportunity to do a book for the Marvel Icons imprint came along?

It was more that I had a bunch of ideas for crime stories – the first storyline in Criminal began life as a pitch to a European publisher for a series of crime graphic novels. Then Sean & I were figuring out, after Sleeper, what do we want to do next and how do we want to do it, and I just thought, it would be great if there was a book that was everything I wanted to do in crime comics under one umbrella title. I had all sorts of different ideas that I wanted to do but I didn’t want to have this character who had lived ten different types of noir story, I thought that was unrealistic. I wanted to be able to create a whole bunch of characters who had different motivations and different histories.

I started thinking, what if I did a book set in the same world, and the characters all knew each other, and the mood and the storylines would coalesce where you learned bits and pieces of each characters back story. You learn a major secret in issue #5 that lets you know more about a character who will appear in the next storyline; and through that storyline you get bits and pieces of his history and if we get that far, when we get to the sixth storyline we actually tell the story of the main characters when they were teenagers and part of the story’s about their parents who were a gang of criminals, and then the other part of the story is about them and how the two plot lines connect.

It organically came together once I started thinking of doing a book like that, linking all these stories together. It all takes place in the same sort of fictionalized world, like the city that they live in is never named. The areas around the city that they go to are named really plainly and vaguely. In the second story they’re planning a heist in a place called Centre City, which is basically like saying it’s in Springfield, and I suppose it could be anywhere.

There’s an old Ryan O’Neal movie called The Driver, made in the early 1970s, one of Walter Hill’s first movies, and it’s just a bout a guy who’s the getaway driver and you ask yourself ‘what city is this’ and you realise that it’s everywhere – it’s filmed partially in Chicago, partially in San Francisco, partially in LA, anywhere they had a cool moment to have a car chase scene they just edited it in, and they never named the city, and they never named the main character, he’s just ‘The Driver’, and Bruce Dern, who’s the bad guy, ‘cause he’s the cop, he’s just known as ‘The Cop’, and I like the idea.

The few times that we make a reference to the city … in issue #3, I think … there’s a moment where Leo drives past a sign on the way back to the city and you can’t see the top word, it just says ‘something City’. I know the name of the city – if we ever have to name it, it’s Bay City, which is what Raymond Chandler referred to Santa Monica as. I just liked the idea of … Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and all those guys made fictional cities for their detectives to work in and I thought that was kind of cool and a little nod to Chandler with Bay City, but a lot of it is based on San Francisco, where I lived for a long time.

I first started reading you with Catwoman and then Gotham Central, before going back to read Sleeper. You’ve done quite a lot of work for DC and other publishers, and given that, how does it feel to suddenly be lauded as the next big thing at Marvel?

Pretty good (laughs).

I started in comics in the 1980s. I remember when Eddie Campbell picked up the award for From Hell for Best Graphic novel or something, and he said ‘oh boy, overnight success after 25 years’ and it feels a little bit like that. I think all the work I did at DC helped me gain a level of confidence and proficiency in what I do that when I got to Marvel … I grew up reading Marvel, I didn’t grow up reading DC other than the odd Batman comic or Jonah Hex or some of the weirder war stuff.

I didn’t start reading DC until I was a fan of Warrior magazine and following Alan Moore and I was like ‘okay, well, I’m going to start reading Swamp Thing and then through that I cam to some older DC stuff … but I’ve never had the affection for DC characters that I had for Marvel growing up – my first comics were Captain America, Iron Fist, Spider-Man and things like that, those were always the ones that were closest to my heart, and when I read DC that didn’t feel like Marvel books.

I was kind of a comics omnivore but the only real DC books that I’ve really had any true affection for and that I’ll buy to this day are Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lane comics. I’ve never been able to buy into Superman but I love Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lane comics because they’re so ridiculous.

There’s this really great episode of Jimmy Olsen where Clark doesn’t have time into his Superman outfit and just flies up into the sky and saves a ‘plane. It’s the only time ever when Superman is too slow to change into his own costume, flying back down with his hat still on. Jimmy sees him and he thinks ‘oh no, Jimmy just recognized me as Clarke, he’ll know I’m Superman. So when Jimmy lands he runs over and goes “I know you’re … “ and he sees Clark has these giant wings from some Mayan exhibit he’s visited and he says “Jimmy, you’re never gonna believe it, these Mayan wings really work, I can fly!”. Jimmy’s immediately all “I wanna try them” and Clark hadn’t thought of that. The rest of the story is Superman following Jimmy about and using his super breath to convince Jimmy those wings really work, and he keeps doing things – after a day or so, when he realises Jimmy’s not going to get sick of flying – he keeps doing things like trying to blow him into live volcanoes, tries to blow him into the middle of a gunfight, just to let him know how dangerous it is to be able to fly. Things like that are hysterical and I have complete affection for to this day.

I think there’s really cool things at DC. Batman Year One is still one of the greatest superhero stories, ever, there’s some great characters at DC. I loved the Teen Titans as a kid, that was one of my few books that I really loved, and I loved the Mike Grell era of Legion of Super-Heroes. I go back to that and the anatomy on the characters is so weird, they all have calves on their arms, but as a kid I couldn’t get enough of that stuff. That was my teenage years, and they were all about the kids. I was always a big Bucky fan so I always liked the teen sidekick stuff.

It was fairly easy for me – I remember writing my first issue of Captain America and getting the pages in the mail from Steve Epting and when I opened those first two pages I was so blown away by ‘I’m doing Captain America, I got a new number one book and I’ve got this great artist, this is gonna be a really big deal’ – I could feel it, that it was going to be different from being one of five people writing a Batman comic or doing books at DC that people would say ‘this is one of the best comics DC is publishing’ but sell for something like … with Catwoman, it was always frustrating for me that it was hovering in the level of the thirty thousands when we had launched so well and I just thought people love this book but there’s only so many people who will love it, because it’s Catwoman. I get to do the exact same kind of stories and do them on Daredevil instead and we got thirty thousand more readers.

If you look at what I did on Catwoman it was much more like a Marvel book, much more inspired by Batman Year One which was Frank [Miller] coming off being a Marvel writer and doing to Batman what he was doing to Daredevil. The Catwoman stuff was inspired by that and a lot of people also told me that Catwoman felt like both a Marvel book and kinda like an independent comic – there were issues that were just characters talking, no action or anything, and I really like that. That’s something that I think you get from Marvel, it’s much easier to do on a lot of Marvel books. You’d have whole issues of Fantastic Four when I was a kid that were just about Ben Grimm being depressed and going to Yancy Street.

It was weird … I read a couple of hundred issues of X-Men before I started on Uncanny [X-Men] and there were issues of the Byrne and Claremont run that had just three pages of action – I remember them as being action packed but they weren’t, they were six to nine panels a page, mostly the characters talking and doing things and having enormous thought balloons about their phobias – often in the midst of a fight scene they’re going ‘I hope I don’t get captured in that tiny cage, I’m claustrophobic, I remember that day when I found out I was claustrophobic so many years ago. I can’t believe I’m thinking of this right now’. Reading those thought balloons … it underscores why I’m glad we don’t do thought balloons any more.

I loved Gotham Central, for a long time that was my favourite comic. Looking back at your work for DC now that there’s a little distance, what’s your favourite thing that you wrote for DC?

There’s one issue of Batman that I’m really fond of that Sean Phillips drew, the one with the detective who investigated the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. The first 18 issues of Catwoman I’m really fond of, up to the stuff I did with Cameron, and the Javier Pulido arc is the best stuff I ever did on Catwoman – such a hard story and then a three issue look at these characters and what happened to them afterwards. I thought was really rare to be able to put across in a comic and Javier’s art was so out there and arty that it was shocking to me that they let us do it.

Scene of the Crime I’m really fond of, I really like the Joker collection The Man Who Laughs – I should say a one-shot - that I did with Doug Moenke, that’s been out of print for a while, that came out a couple of years ago. I was really happy with that. That was the only joker story I ever did. Gotham Central was a labour of love for all of us, it’s something I look fondly back on. They stumbled so many times with that book, it could have been a much bigger success than it was. It was never to the point that they talked about canceling it but we always felt a certain kind of ‘why aren’t we reaching more people?’

It took them forever to bring out the first trade paperback – I think we were on issue #18 or #19 before they put out the collection of #1-5, and by that point Michael [Lark] & Greg [Rucka] had already won the Eisner Award for the second storyline! I just thought that DC didn’t know how to handle the book, because it wasn’t a DC proper book and it wasn’t a Vertigo book and because of that I felt no-one knew how to deal with it. I’d have people within the company telling me it was their favourite book and I’m like ‘well then why don’t you promote it? Why are we waiting for trade paperbacks?’ to the point where by the time the third trade paperback came out the book was done, and that trade should have come out two months after the story ended. That just drove me crazy. And they genuinely did love it, too, they weren't lying.

I remember when the people in marketing told me that they’d read the first issue and it was one of their favourite comics that DC had published in years and I said ‘oh, are we gonna get the cover of the Previews catalogue then? ‘cause we could really use it’ and they said ‘oh no, Aquaman’s getting that. Aquaman’s tenth series … Aquaman’s only going to sell as well as Aquaman ever sells, but that’s the way marketing works – they always put the money in the stuff that’s already more guaranteed to sell. They rarely put marketing money into the stuff where there’s risk. I’m excited to see they’re putting money into a push for the new Minx line that Vertigo’s doing and I think that’s a really good idea because there’s no guarantee that that stuff will make money and you’ve got to get the word out about it if you want to. There are a fair few things I did at DC that I don’t look back at fondly.

Being in that Batman office when I was … I got to learn how to do the monthly comics drive, but I think that’s probably the weakest stuff I did overall and I think that came from me mentally not being able to get over the fact that I was doing one of three Batman books that came out every month and there were all these other anciliary Batman books coming out and I didn’t feel that I could make it mine. It was always ‘what if I use this bad guy and he’s using the same bad guy that month?’ Once I got Catwoman and Gotham Central I felt that those were ours and we could make those books what we wanted them to be without worrying anyone else’s books. When we were working on Gotham Central we did what we wanted to do, we didn’t worry whether someone was using Joker or the Mad Hatter that month.

Coming soon in Parts 2 and 3: Ed Brubaker discussed the ending of Civil War, and his plans for Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil and Captain America.