Interviews

Managing editor Ian Murphy talks to X-Factor , Fallen Angel and Dark Tower: The Gunslinger writer Peter David.

Discuss the interview here on the LiveWire Forums

Read Part 2 here

LWW: Is it okay if I call you Peter?

PD: Yes, well, it's my name.

Thanks. I just wanted to check what your preference was.

Certainly, other people who are not named Peter would not want to be called Peter. That certainly makes sense.

I was a big fan of X-Factor when you were first writing it; obviously it's a completely different comic to what it was then, but how do you think your writing has changed since your first X-Factor run? How differently was your approach second time around?

The original X-Factor – I shouldn't say the original, because I didn't write it originally – but when I first started on my initial run of X-Factor , it was almost intended to be an antidote to the other types of X-books that were coming out at the time. The X-books were so deadly serious all the time that I endeavoured to have it be the opposite. The book was intended to be lighter, the book was intended to be more fun.

The other aspect was that the writing style of the X-books of the time called for characters to have lengthy monologues about whatever was going through their heads – everything stemmed from the way Chris Claremont wrote the books, so everybody tended to write that way. I was much more of a fan of showing rather than telling, of having character revelation come as a result of their actions rather than things that they said.

There were two problems in terms of my approaching the book the way I did. One was that because it was humourous some people tended to dismiss it, because they wanted their comic books to be serious, dammit, and because the characters did not reveal their characterisation through lengthy monologues some readers were under the impression that they had no character depth, that they didn't know why the characters did what they did and they were not the least bit interested in trying to figure it out for themselves because they were accustomed to having absolutely everything spelled out for them when it came to characterisation.

My realisation of that is what resulted in X-Factor #87, the only issue of my run that anyone seems to really remember, that involves them all going to a psychiatrist. I decided to do one issue in which absolutely everyone spells out everything that's going through their heads so that I would never have to do it again.

In terms of the current book, the tone and style is very different. The way that I handle X-Factor now flows from the Madrox mini-series, which had very much of a ‘film noir' attitude and since that worked as well as it did that's pretty much what I've stuck with in the tone and attitude of the series as it stands now. Yes, humour occasionally still rears it's head but it's generally done in a more subtle, far less slapstick style than the previous one.

Given what you were saying about your frustration with the writing style of the day, with the internal monologues, how does it feel to know that that psychiatrist issue of your first X-factor run is the one that's most fondly remembered and celebrated? Is that a frustration?

It's not frustrating, it's amusing. It was an issue that served a means to an end. It was a way of letting the readers know that, yes, there were things going on in these characters heads, no, they were not individuals with minimum depth to them, that the book required a little bit more investment of thought than some of the other X-Men books because I wasn't going to spell things out for readers on a regular basis. By giving the fans the tool of X-Factor #87, I was trying to give them the Rosetta Stone, as it were, of X-Factor , that they would be able to then use that to translate why characters did what they did in subsequent issues. I didn't know at the time that I was going to wind up leaving the book in short order, but that's the way it goes.

I thought the Madrox mini was wonderful, and I really enjoyed the way you introduced the idea of the duplicates having such different personalities. I know we'd seen this a little with the ‘independent' dupe that was in your first X-Factor run. I really feel that has invigorated the character and given him so many more possibilities. How did you come up with that idea?

Actually, I was having discussions with my wife about it, we were batting ideas back and forth and I think she may have been the one who said wouldn't it be interesting if the dupes had different personalities – after all, that's what I'm experienced with writing, having done that whole multiple personality thing with the Hulk. I just took it and ran with it.

It makes a lot of sense as well, given that our own moods change from day to day, and aspects of our personality are more dominant at times than others. It's the kind of thing that you read about and wonder why it hasn't been done before.

I generally like to – this may sound silly – do things in comics that make sense. I don't mean that in a flip manner. I like to do things that look at what's gone before and say ‘wow, this really does progress logically from what we've seen'.

It's a seeming contradiction to say this, but it's the grounding of the fantasy in reality that allows us to suspend our disbelief and go with the flow.

I generally tend to ground everything that I do in some sort of reality, no matter how fantastic the things I write are, if they don't have some sort of real world relevance, I don't quite see the point, I don't see the reason for it. I'm not the guy to go to if you want a story in which a dwarf and an elf and a fairy are teaming up to search for some fantastic, mystical gem of such and such that has no real world connotation, that has no real world relation. I don't understand … that's really not something that I'm good at. There has to be some sort of parallel to the real world, something that you sit there and go ‘okay, I see what this is really about, I see what he's really talking about here' because if there is nothing like that I have trouble relating to it and I think if I as the writer have trouble relating to it, certainly the readers are going to also.

Thinking of X-Factor, Hulk and other books you've written, there's a great sense of psychological depth that you bring to your writing. Is that something you've got a background in? Where does that come from?

I'm sorry, I would love to tell you that I have a Master's degree in psychology or something like that but not really, no – I've done research into it, particularly when I started on Hulk, I was reading all kinds of psychology texts because I felt it was really necessary, I knew the types of stories I wanted to tell but I didn't have the tools in order to tell them, so I did a ton of research at the time and my research took me in interesting directions and allowed me to make leaps in learning and logic that I didn't even know I was making. For example, after an issue of Hulk came out somebody wrote in and said they thought it really interesting that the Hulk had been reading Nietzsche, which I thought was intriguing because I hadn't, I confessed to that being a gap in my education. I think we ran the letter, and my attitude was, if the Hulk's been reading Nietzsche he's been doing it on his own time because it sure didn't come from me.

While the Madrox mini got great reviews and a good fan reaction, the sales on it were reasonably quiet – were you surprised ….

That wasn't a shock, I am the master of reviews that saw ‘what a great book, why isn't it selling more'. I can't tell you how old that gets.

Were you surprised, then, when Marvel gave you the chance to do a X-Factor book on the back of it?

Yeah, I was really dumbfounded. I'm fond of saying that [X-Men editor] Andy Schmidt willed X-Factor and willed Madrox into existence. Not only was I astounded that X-Factor was a go, I fully cop to being amazed that we got the Madrox limited series off the ground. I mean, on the surface of it it doesn't sound particularly promising: ‘hey kids, let's do a five-issue noir-ish type series at t time when it's not like people are banging down doors saying ‘we really want noir' featuring this C-list character who has at best a modest following and make him the lead character in a mini series that nobody's asking for featuring him doing stuff that nobody's asking to see or for him to do. Madrox in no way shape or form fits into the classic ‘because you demanded it' type of thing. When it was announced it was more of a ‘ why are they doing this?' reaction.

What do you think encouraged Marvel to give you the chance to run with it?

Because however modest or quiet the sales were, Iv guess they were satisfied with the level of the sales they saw and thought there was the potential for an audience for an ongoing series. Which I guess is self-evident – they wouldn't have done the book if they hadn't thought there was something there.

When it came time to develop Madrox into a series and you came to put together the team you would work with … all of the characters you chose were, shall we say, less popular, none of them were A-list, you'd struggle to describe them as B-list. I wondered if that was a deliberate choice, that you were looking out for those characters?

Believe me, if they'd said ‘and you can have Wolverine be a member of X-Factor', I would have jumped at it, are you kidding? The bottom line is that when you've got the A-list characters, they're in high demand. There are some characters that you try for … there was a little while there when I thought we'd be able to use Nightcrawler, I'd have loved to have been able to use Nightcrawler, but I was told no. I said ‘well can we use his daughter' [Nocturne] and I was told no, we couldn't use his daughter; and it became a matter of ‘okay, here are the characters that we can use, which characters would, based upon availability, be the most compelling fit for X-Factor , and for the tone and style of what I was doing? This is not a series where you want to use, for instance, Shatterstar, because some guy walking around with a big honking pigstick would be inconsistent with the noir feel that you want to establish for the book; plus I wanted to have characters whose personality would mesh, and by that I mean would in fact play well off each other – you wanted characters who in some shape or form would be at odds with each other just because it made interesting reading.

Thinking of all the different personalities of the dupes we've seen appear in Madrox, do you plan to re-use any of them?

I have re-used some of the specific dupes. The obviously gay Madrox has shown up a couple of times, I think the hypochondriac Madrox has shown up a couple of times, and certainly the ‘X-Factor' Madrox who showed up at the end of issue #1 and then book-ended issue #12. I'm not sure if I'm going to use him again because I blew him away in issue #12 so it may be time to put that particular aspect of Madrox to rest.

After developments in issue #14, when Rictor's sexuality was discussed, I found myself thinking what a mind-twisting thing it would be for Madrox if his gay dupe started dating Rictor, with him looking on. Is that the kind of thing you might have any interest in exploring?

I have much more fun tweaking the fans than actually spelling anything out. If I definitely … I certainly don't think we could say at this point that Rictor is definitively gay. I think we could make the argument that he's bi, but I don't see the point at this juncture in spelling it out – not because of any sense of homophobia or anything like that but out of a sense that I think it's more entertaining and more thought-provoking if we keep it ambiguous.

Rictor made this passing comment in #14 where he talks about gayness and then he says ‘not that I have any problem with it myself' and there are some people who interpreted it as a Seinfield ‘not that there's anything wrong with that' kind of thing and there are some people, including Rich Johnson (who reported that this exchange definitely made clear that Rictor was gay) … I think it's much more interesting to have Rictor's comments be a litmus test for the agenda of the readers than if you just show him involved in some sort of bisexual relationship.

I have no trouble with writing gay characters, I've had gay characters in several of my books. I got an award from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination for the representation of a lesbian character in Supergirl – which is interesting because when I introduced the character I got outraged letters from straight readers who were apparently writing in on behalf of outraged lesbians everywhere, talking about how poorly conceived and executed the character was; but in the meantime GLAAD gave an award to that character; so it has been my experience that readers always bring their own baggage to whatever they read. Every story, every book, every TV show is viewed through the perception, through the prism of the individual readers' biases, and that's just how it is, no matter how much people claim otherwise.

Matters of sexuality are the most incendiary in that regard and I – in the case of Rictor – think it's more interesting to be vague about it. If word came down on high ‘you have to make a decision, you need to spell it out one way or the other', then I would probably have the character be bi, if for no other reason than I think that would be more intriguing and offer more storytelling possibilities than he's straight or gay, but as long as there's no edict coming down to make a definitive judgement one way or the other, I'm perfectly content to leave it as it is and let the individual readers mileage vary in terms of their interest and their own comfort level.

Given Rictor's had – like several of the X-Factor line-up – a limited number of experiences before this, what inspired you to use the character?

Andy and I decided early on that we wanted to have a depowered mutant as part of the group. We looked at the list of the available depowered mutants – because even some of the depowered mutants have plans … have things going on in other places – and Rictor was on the list of depowered mutants that were in play and I decided that based upon his past history with the other characters that he would be a good match; I also liked notion of Rictor because of the concept that he was once connected to the planet, a sit were, and how isolated and alone one must feel if you were once connected to the ground beneath your feet and now all you do is just walk around on it and feel totally detached.

With Siryn, you had the wonderful scene when Cyclops comes to tell her that her father, Banshee, is dead, and she just refuses to believe it, in complete denial, in a way that makes so much sense knowing the world the characters operate in and how often we see characters ‘die' without dying, or be resurrected.

Considering the world that the characters are operating in, I don't see how a character would react in any other way.

Is that denial something you plan to return to with the character? It's not something I'm aware of having been explored in other comics.

Yes, I have, it is something that I will … well, first off, I have already done that. I first established that she refused to believe it in issue #7, and then I had it brought up again in the psychiatry issue. That was my signal to the reader that it wasn't some throwaway thing, that it was something that I was going to be getting back to.

I have to admit that a part of it stems from my own caution. Years ago we decided at a big Hulk cross-over thing that we were going to kill off Nick Fury. That was it, he was done, we'd pretty much done everything that we could reasonably gonna do with the character and we were gonna shock people by killing off Nick Fury and goddamn it, it was gonna stick. It fell to me to write the funeral issue, and we had a sequence the rein which the Howling Commandoes absolutely refused to believe that Nick Fury's dead. They just don't buy it, they say there's no way that Nick Fury's going to kill us. Then they become convinced because Wolverine verifies that it's really him, and Wolverine's senses can't really be fooled. The final sequence has the bunch of them sitting in a bar all bummed out because Nick's really dead and they now have to cope with the loss of their friend.

The printed issue was barely dry before word came down from on high … Bobby Chase rang me up and said ‘you're really gonna love this. There's going to be a Nick Fury TV movie that could lead to a TV series and they went ballistic when they found out that we'd killed him, so Nick Fury has to come back from the dead. I was furious because I had worked my ass off writing this story that absolutely, convincingly put paid to Nick Fury and then the guy's coming back???

And now Banshee's dead and I'm sitting there thinking I've gotta have Siryn react to this, it's his daughter, I have to have her react to it. I didn't even know that he was being killed off, I found out about it when the book came out. It looks like Banshee's dead and I call up Marvel and say ‘Hey, Andy, is Banshee really dead?' and Andy comes back and says ‘yea, he's really dead' and I'm ‘We've got his daughter in our book, don't we have to have her react to this?' and he said ‘yeah, I think we really do'.

So I decided to write the story the way we did and we sent word over to the office that was doing Deadly Genesis , we said, whatever you do, don't have Siryn at the funeral crying, so naturally the comic has Siryn at the funeral, crying, so thanks a lot, guys! Which again I didn't know about until the issue came out.

At any rate, I wrote the story the way I did and part of it was self-protection. She's in denial and that makes sense but I'm being cautious about it because for all I know, Banshee's going to come back. For all I know we're going to hear ‘hey, banshee's going to be a character in the upcoming Wolverine movie and Sony or whoever it is found out that Banshee's dead and on high said ‘no way' and bring Banshee back'. If that ever happens, my attitude would be to have Siryn finally come to terms with the fact that her father's dead and have it be this big incredible issue … and then Banshee shows up next issue at which point Siryn's reaction would be exactly the same as mine would: ‘I knew it! I knew it!' and then she'll be all pissy with everyone else who was telling her she should have accepted it because she subjected herself to all this grief and how her father's back.

Did you specifically ask to use Layla Miller, or did Marvel ask you to use her?

It was a suggestion. Keep in mind that when we were developing X-Factor , nothing had seen print yet of House Of M . I knew that the storyline was coming but it's not like I fell in love with Layla Miller and thought ‘let's have her!' What happened was … I don't know whether [ House of M writer Brian Michael] Bendis suggested it to Andy [Schmidt, X-Men editor] or Andy came up with the idea but Andy approached me about using this character, Layla Miller, and he discussed her in general terms and I was sent the scripts for House Of M so I could read up on the character, and I felt strongly that it was a really good idea to have a character who somehow came out of House of M , that since House Of M and M-Day were going to have such a direct impact on X-Factor it made sense to have as many people impacted by House of M as possible. Rictor filled the bill for having a representative of the depowered mutants and Layla Miller filled the bill for having someone who was directly related to the machinations of House Of M .

And it's the chance to build something enduring, an enduring character, out of what might be a milestone story.

Exactly. I think Brian was aware of the possible criticism that the only reason Layla Miller was introduced was in order to be a plot device for House Of M , so if she continued in X-Factor that removed the criticism, at least in his mind, I know that it did in mine, it didn't in the case of some fans. Some fans refused to buy X-Factor because Layla Miller was in it because they were still pissy over her being a major factor in House Of M . My attitude was that this is the Marvel Universe and we introduce new characters and if she was introduced in a book, in a situation that specifically called for her talents, well, okay, but the fact that she was a continuing character in the Marvel Universe removes the stigma to my mind that she was a deus ex machina that people seemed to attach to her. The argument that I used was that if she is a dues ex machine than so is Tia Dalma the voodoo character who was introduced in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 because without her the film doesn't work; some people said the film didn't work anyway but … in the film Serenity , a major part of the film hinged on the character Mr. Universe, who was nowhere to be seen in the previous 13 episodes of Firefly . Does that mean that the film Serenity sucks because they introduced a new character who was instrumental to the plot? I don't think so. So why is it that the Marvel Universe has to be locked in amber simply because it's been around longer?

What kind of a challenge was it for you to develop her character, given that while she had this crucial role to play in House Of M she was pretty much undeveloped?

The first thing was to introduce her catchphrase, “I'm Layla Miller. I know stuff.” I used it to excess in the first couple of issues just to make it seem lame and annoying. I had a real strategy with Layla, a real battleplan, I wanted people to be good and sick of “I'm Layla Miller. I know stuff.” By the third issue, at which point Layla very carefully and thoroughly manages to take out an assassin simply by removing a couple of spigots from a bathtub and as a result causes him to become electrocuted and as he's laying there dying in the blackness, Layla, who's been carrying a flashlight about the whole issue sits there and says ‘your wife will miss you, your mother won't, and he says “Who are you?”. She shines the flashlight up towards her face and looks like something out of the Blair Witch Project and she says “I'm Layla Miller. I know stuff.” And the light clicks off and I wanted readers to come away from that thinking this kid is the scariest, most badass kid in the Marvel Universe because she will take you down before you even know you're in a fight. People came away from that third issue … that was the beginning of the turnaround, as I knew it would be. People came away from the third issue going ‘What a creepy kid'. That was the first issue where I made it clear that this kid was, as I had one of the characters say, a cross between Nostradamus and Wednesday Addams, and everybody loves Wednesday Addams, particularly the way Christina Ricci played her, and that was the first part of the turnaround.

The second part of the turnaround was X-Factor #6, which had Layla's backstory, or at least as much of her backstory as she chose to tell people. I went around when people were bitching about her, crabbing about her catchphrase and that kind of thing, and I said to people ‘by the end of #6 Layla Miller's going to be the breakout character of this series' and indeed, if you look at various fan polls and that sort of thing, Layla has now got a vocal fanbase, a very sizeable number of supporters, people saying she's their favourite character. The number of people who still bitch about Layla as being a dues ex machina and not a worthwhile character have shrunk almost into non-existence whereas the number of people who love the character and what I've done with her has just grown.

People loved issue #12, where Layla managed to break out a woman who was a prisoner and had been carted around in an armoured car. We had a sequence where you don't understand why, but she's calling and ordering pizza from four different places, then she wanders over to a hardware store and orders a pair of boltcutters, and then later on the armoured truck is stuck in traffic because four pizza delivery trucks have al collided at an intersection. They figure there's no problem because they've got the woman secured, and you angle around and there's the door open with a pair of boltcutters sat next to them like the walking stick at the end of Miracle On 34 th Street and fans have just loved it because you never know what Layla is going to do next. Her most casual comments … you can read into them because you don't know what's going to happen with her, and I love having the other characters in X-Factor never knowing what to make of her.

I have a sequence in issue #17 where Jamie is in Michigan, pursuing one of his dupes, and Layla contacts him and says he needs to come back and she's arranged for a one-way ticket at the Detroit airport and he says, ‘let me guess, you knew I was in Detroit because you ‘know stuff'' and she says no, I knew you were in Detroit because you've got a locator beacon on your ‘phone, doofus' and she hangs up.

The other way that you've played this so brilliantly is her repeated comment that one day she's going to marry Madrox. Both the readers and the characters are in the same position of having no idea whether she's just making a cruel joke or if she's deadly serious about it …

And then we had Rahne have a vision of Layla much older and on her way and laying there covered in blood along with Madrox; and of course on the one hand fans can say this is nothing we ever have to worry about because with the way time moves in the Marvel Universe we'll never reach that point because Layla's 15 … on the other hand, things can happen … am I above doing something so that that sequence could happen before people are expecting? No, I'm not above that at all. I want readers to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

That is kind of the point of the whole book, we call it X-Factor for a reason. I wanted to set the tone from the first issue, when the dupe talks to Rictor and finally convinces him to come off the ledge and then shoves him off himself. I actually toyed with the notion of Rictor going splat and that was the end of Rictor. We were doing this thing where Rictor was going to be a regular member of X-Factor and he's dead at the end of the issue. I decided not to do that because #1 I didn't want Jamie to have Rictor's blood on his hands, even if it was one of his dupes, and second I thought it made X-Factor seem incompetent if they lose one of their own people.

The other thing about Layla is the constant sense of under-reaction to everything that's going on around her, including the whole thing about the duplicates of Madrox sleeping with both Siryn and M – is that because she ‘knows stuff' and so she already knows about it and is prepared for it?

Yes, sure. She's got plenty of time to process this stuff, so she manages to handle everything with … like I said, it's the Wednesday Addams model. She has the opportunity to know how she's going to react. Nothing phases her, which is why when she does get phased by something you know that it's pretty monumental; and the fans loved it when in issue #12 the Elder Trypp showed up and caught Layla so flat-footed she's standing there forgetting that she was pouring milk, and milk was pouring over the glass.