Interview: Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

If you’ve been following our regular coverage on this title, you know that we’ve been taking our time with the issues of Rucka and Lark’s sci-fi of an all too real future, Lazarus. In the lead up to the release of the first hardcover, and at the commencement of a new story arc, we took some time to sit down with the creators, and talk about the past and future of the book. Enjoy!

Robert Mackenzie: When we did our first interview with you way back when, I remember we talked about various social nightmares and disasters and remarked that it was eerily close to what was going on in Lazarus. Since then we’ve had Ferguson, we’ve had Russia in the Ukraine, we’ve had ISIS/ISIL – do you feel more and more that life syncs up with art, or is it a matter of writing about what you see?

Greg Rucka: You know, Michael and I keep joking about the fact that we started this as “speculative fiction” and there are times when it feels like we are doing documentary. It’s not the first time in my career that I’ve written stuff that seems more prescient than perhaps it actually is. I don’t actually feel that I am…I’m not a Warren Ellis, I’m not educated enough in the various disciplines required to really be able to predict a future and a technological/political/sociological/economic curve, the way that people like Warren and others really can do it. What I AM good at is paying attention and doing my research, and I try very hard to acknowledge the complexities of the situations we’re facing at any given moment in all those realms as described, and then try to distil from them – and I may have some talent – to take that data and distil it so it works in an entertainment form instead of a 200 page document saying “this is what the future may look like”. I’m leery of trying to predict stuff, because there’s an old saw, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, that “truth is stranger than fiction”. There’s shit that happens every day, and if you put in a story people would say “oh, that’s unbelievable”! So the nature of fiction is that you have to tell a lie that sounds like the truth, but it can’t actually BE the truth or your audience is going to leave.

David Walker: Part of speculative fiction has always been that although it tries to “predict the future”, it is as much about the issues of the day and the challenges facing society at any given point.

Michael Lark: Y’know, I tend to shy away from words like this usually, because I like to keep it more grounded, keep my own self more grounded, but it all becomes metaphor. Science fiction is all a bunch of metaphors for stuff we’re experiencing today, I think. That’s always been my opinion. I always think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that the big bads in each episode were metaphors for things the characters were going through.

David: Or Star Trek and the civil rights movement, or dealing with cultural change in the sixties.

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] I sound much less educated than Greg does, I might let him do the talking on this one.

Robert: But you’re not wrong, though! I think we’ve commented, or rather induced from each of you each time we’ve spoken, comments to the effect that the important thing about science fiction is it presents the reader’s problems through a different lens, rather than “as it turns out, the real thing we needed worry about were de-oxygenated fish-people” and not have a metaphor behind that.

Michael: And it’s not just about looking at societal issues, it’s about looking at individual issues, because the story’s about people, it’s not about a society, it’s about the people in it. So it becomes a metaphor for our individual experiences. When we did Half A Life on Gotham Central that was my favourite thing about it, that Greg was wise enough to make Two-Face the big bad in that story, and it became this great story about a secret life and having two sides to the way you live your life, and reconciling those two. Usually, you read comics and the bad guys are just the bad guys. It was nice to work on something that had those tropes, but that was using them in a more intelligent and mature fashion.

Robert: That seems very apt. Speaking of individual issues, though stepping away from the narrative a little bit, I got the impression from some comments that you guys have made that over the course of doing Lift there were some production issues.

Greg: [Laughs] To be perfectly blunt, what happened was some confusion. I had a miserable time bringing all the threads together on the last dozen or so pages of the book, and I sent the script to Michael with a note saying I was going to be reworking them. And…[laughs again]…I failed in the note to specify exactly what part I was reworking, and the result was that I ate a good week and a half of Michael’s schedule and he couldn’t draw anything as he didn’t know what he could draw! I’m speaking for you , Michael, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it ended up as him noting that there seemed to be four pages he could do safely, and then ending up in a holding pattern. That, coupled with the fact that there was an enormous amount of work to be done on that issue in the background…

Michael: Plus, I got sick in the last week or so, and Greg, didn’t your whole family get sick in that.

Greg: Yeah, that was the night of a thousand vomits.

Michael: You know, our schedule is so tight, and pretty much any comic book’s schedule is so tight that if you have one thing happen you can kind of work around it, but if you have more than that it’s just impossible to deal with. These things happen in comics and unfortunately retailers aren’t terribly forgiving of that, and I think partially that’s because they’re used to dealing with the Big Two publishers, and if Lazarus had been a book owned by Marvel or DC and all these things had happened, they would’ve brought someone else in to finish the book. We don’t have that “luxury” if you want to call it that, and retailers were like “oh, well, then we have to drop our orders.” If one thing goes wrong, sure, two things, maybe, but it was just a domino effect.

Greg: It was just a staggering cascade of failures. It was an Apollo 13 moment.

Michael: Greg is being generous to me in taking as much of the blame as he has as I think it was mostly on my shoulders.

Greg: We can argue about that at another point.

Michael: Oh, I’m happy to assign the blame to you if you like.

Robert: For the purposes of the historical record. Then you can just bear a grudge in silence in future. I’m very tempted, in fact, when this interview goes up to call it either “A Staggering Cascade of Failures” or “Night of a Thousand Vomits”. Very evocative.

Greg: There was a bug that blew through Portland, and my parents had come up to visit a couple weeks after and they both got hit too. It was literally one of the most vicious things I have ever experienced. It started after a dinner where we thought maybe the spinach was bad. I think it went Elliot, then Jen, then Dashiell and then it was me. I was last man standing, but it was one of those illnesses where vomiting once wasn’t going to be enough. Five or six times might do it.

Michael: I remember you telling me one morning you spent the night on the bathroom floor.

Greg: I was going to call an ambulance. We were at a point where no-one could take care of anybody else. The next day it was like of the aftermath the worst frat party ever. It was BAAAAAAD.

Robert: Hastily moving on from the production problems then, we’ll talk about Lift itself. Lift had a lot to say about the failure of systems – the Carlyle security forces, the screening process. Given how much the people in the world of Lazarus pay attention to the trappings of success, the banners, the sigils, all that feudal, almost fascist insignia, how much time did you guys spend thinking about sowing the seeds of failure to the point where it all comes together?

Greg: I think a lot of those elements tend to sit really subconsciously with me when I’m constructing the story. I tend to be more aware of them as the story progresses, and I start to see the moments of parallelism and moments of contrast. I knew at the start of the arc what the story was about, and I knew of the Barrets place in it. I knew where I wanted them to be. There is a very long game plan for the Barrets and this was their first story. Trying to balance that with moving Forever out of the first arc, part of the necessity of that was showing the failure of the systems in that world, right? The injustice of it. Because it is an unjust system. It is not remotely equitable to anybody, really, participating in it. I’d argue that it’s not equitable to the Carlyle family either. There is a moment in #9 that nobody picked up on, and it was one of those beautiful little things that Michael does so well. Gimme a minute.

Michael: I do these beautiful little things REALLY, REALLY well, according to Greg, but a lot of the time he never really remembers what they are, and he has to go look it up. But it’s things I do naturally, because I’m like that.

Greg: It’s that moment with Rihan in Issue #9, when he’s adjusting Steven’s tie. And I had thought we’d get a comment, and someone would say “Oh, are they lovers?”

Robert: I must admit I just assumed!

Greg: Good! Because that’s EXACTLY what that moment is supposed to tell you. It’s supposed to tell you that, and their relationship can be acknowledged, everyone can know about it and not care, but the fact is they’re never going to get married, Rihan is always going to be a serf, and that’s always going to be a division. Not only that, but it’s also going to be the thing that ends the relationship, because Steven is also going to benefit from the longevity his family can provide, but he’s going to have a very steep uphill battle in arguing that the proprietary technology that allows him to be in his sixties and look like he’s in his thirties should be shared with the man he loves.

Robert: The incipient tragedy built into it, that one is almost definitely going to outlive the other.

Michael: There are a lot of story seeds scattered throughout that second arc. That second arc, in a lot of ways, although it’s a story in itself, is a set-up for a lot of other stories that are going to be taking place. As the series progresses, God willing, people are going to look back on the second arc and say “OH! Now I see what that was!” There’s room for a lot of that because Greg is actually looking ahead, and knows what he’s doing.

Greg: Most of the time. Cackle, cackle.

Robert: How far ahead are you guys, not necessarily in scripts, but in terms of what you’ve planned out ? Are we one year ahead, are we two, are we five? What kind of beats do you want to look at going forward.

Greg: Actually, you’re asking that at a really interesting time. Trautmann and I got together about two weeks ago. We put out a picture on Instagram of us doing the map. I was talking to him, and I had an initial idea of what I wanted to come out of Conclave with, then talking to him I said I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to do that. So, at this moment, coming out of scripting Issue #15, I don’t know what Issue #16 looks like. That said, I know what Issue #50 looks like, I know what Issue #25 looks like. There are elements of the story I know exactly where they slot in, but I’ve got some more literal story issues I have to try and resolve. And not to drop any spoilers, but I was looking at doing a little time jump, about a year, after Conclave, in about Issue #16 or so, but now I don’t think I can do that. That it might be problematic, though admittedly I’m thinking of examples where it’s been tried by the Big Two and we’d probably have a very different result, given that this is one book.

Michael: I don’t know how privy I am – I don’t even know what Greg’s talking about right now – but what I see as I’m working with it, we know the beginning and we know the destination, but the journey in between has a lot of unknowns. We’ll encounter them as we get there, but really we just know how the destination we’re heading for. We know SOME big moments in the middle, some of the waystations, we just have to get them. Thankfully, that’s not my problem.

David: Given that, between the time when you first started thinking up this story and when it hit the stands and got into the hands of readers, how much did the concept change, how much did that ending and all the big waypoints in between evolve as you’ve gone into process?

Greg: Oh, the ending has shifted.

Michael: A few shifts have happened! A couple of big things that have occurred. We might have talked about this the last time, about the characters telling you what to do. Some things that happened made it just a matter of how things had to be.

Greg: Let me give you an example. I knew about the Barrets, and what was going to happen with the Barrets. I didn’t know about Marisol until I started Lift. I knew there had to have been a teacher, but I didn’t know who that teacher was. Just the process of putting her down on paper and asking the necessary questions about her purpose and her place and the things that brought her there, the character springs to life. You guys have read Issue #11, and that moment between her and Marisol, it’s another one of those things Michael does so well every time, the emotion in just those two panels alone, is so crystal clear. The overall idea has not shifted, the trajectory has refined itself and certainly the world has continued to refine itself alongside as we move forward. There are certain questions that get asked, and I don’t have an answer for them, so I have to think of that. I picked sixteen Families. Why did I pick sixteen? Because it was more than fifteen and less than seventeen. If I had been smarter I would’ve said eight families, so I wouldn’t be killing Michael as he draws twelve!

Michael: I’m actually planning out a panel right now, and I’ve got Sevara Bittner, and I’ve got Nkosi, and I’ve got both Carraghers, Rausling, and I’m still not finished. The Armitages are all in it, and the Carlyle party are all in this one panel.

Greg: Trautmann and I thought about putting out, and we may end up doing it, an online scorecard saying “Identify the players!”

Michael: Most of these people aren’t even named at this point, but they are going to be named later, and they have to be there, because we’re in an enclosed space and I can’t just add random people later. I have to work with the people that I’ve got. There’s about eighty of these people, and I suspect when I start working on 13 there have been more.

Greg: Because, because–

Michael: Because Greg’s a bastard! [laughs] Normally I do photoreference, at least of myself for the men. Here I was just like, “I’ve gotta get some people in here in the background.”

 

Greg: From the left there’s Sevara Bittner. Qiniso Nkosi, Mzamo Nkosi. Luka Rausling. That’s Carragher the elder, and one of his daughters, Shauna Carragher. Then Natasha Bittner at the end.

Michael: Shauna’s based on, what’s her name, Greg? You guys will know her.

David: [laughs] Yes, we know.

Robert: I was going to ask, because it’s a telling likeness for her, is her dad, Carragher senior, based on her dad?

Greg: Less so. Shauna has certainly got a big piece of Gina Rinehart.

Robert: Oops, you said it.

Greg: The description of Carragher senior I gave to Michael was “think Brian Dennehy”

Robert: For not-Lang Hancock.

David: I wanted to ask, who was the casting direction for Sonja?

Michael: We didn’t really have one! She appeared in Issue #8 in flashback, as a hologram that little Forever killed.

Greg: I didn’t have any suggestions. I think Michael said the woman who plays Brienne on Game of Thrones (ed: Gwendolyn Christie)

Michael: Yeah, but I didn’t really use that. She’s probably too much of an Amazon compared to Sonja. I just remember thinking she’s Swiss, she’s got blonde hair, fair skin. In #8, it was so brief, I didn’t realise she’d be so important so quickly. Then it was just a matter, for costume design, of getting less ceremonial, lighter, armour for travelling. It was then an artistic choice of picking something to blow in the wind for a little bit, then the hood came in and it just took off.

David: I’m not really big on having “favourite characters”, but the I’ll confess seven year old in me is just jumping up and down and screaming her name.

Michael: I think the design just really came together in a good way. I think, Greg, you even changed her story a little bit based on the design. There are a lot of nice things like that which happen with this book, little happy coincidences happen.

Greg: One of the thorny problems we’ve been dealing with is what happened to the Middle East in Year X. Because there’s no answer to that that’s not going to piss off somebody. We finally came to a conclusion about it, and I think of the sixteen families we will now have seen eight or nine by issue twelve, but at least four more showed up for conclave.

Michael: You said there’s fourteen families in Conclave.

Greg: Yeah, I think there’s two families who declined the invitation to attend.

Michael: Oh, I know because I had to make the banners for them!

Greg: Going back to the root question: sixteen families, and I put down names. I came up with some names, and I looked at the names, and I did a little research. I wanted them to be globally representative. And I found out, for example, that the last name Minetta, is actually a family name that is not uncommon in India. And I thought “Oh, that’s awesome! It sounds Italian, but I can use that for India”. But I didn’t do the bios for them! And now, we have to do the bios, and when we do them not only do we have to do the history of the family, the business has to be researched, the region has to be researched, extend family or immediate family can be provided, and then I can give all that to Eric, so he can do all the stuff that would lead to the coat of arms. We need to do that, because here we are in Conclave, number one, but also pages for the hardcover collection have to go to the printer in October. And one of the things we want to include in the Volume One hardcover is the map. As of the year X+65, this is what the world looks like, and here are the families that hold these areas. Lovely – we have to have the answers to questions that I have actively avoided answering for a while. It’s fun, I enjoy it, but–

Michael: I have to admit I’m laughing inside a bit right now.

Robert: Schadenfreude.

Greg: Doing to me the equivalent of what I’m doing to you this issue, I guess.

Michael: Well, what I get…Greg says “they’re in a ballroom!” Well, that’s all well and good, but somebody has to design that ballroom, and then I start asking questions. “What about this, what about that?” And Greg says, “Oh, I didn’t think of that!”

Greg: It takes a LOT of time to come up with the Family bios. It takes me on average about three to five hours for each one of those two to three paragraph write-ups. It takes longer to write those than eight to ten pages of an issue. Because I’m so freakin’ anal about it, and I want it to be believable.

Michael: That’s both of our curse, that we’re like that.

Robert: It’s not like the fans are driven to pedantry or anything, so I’m sure you’ll be safe there. [laughs]

David: Speaking of pedantry, we were just talking about coats or arms and a number of people armed with swords and polearms. In terms of the world, where do you see this return to kind of medievalist aesthetics springing from. I see the metaphoric connection between feudalism and the elite, but at what point did someone suggest a literal return to sharp pointy sticks?

Greg: I think the sharp pointy sticks were actually causal, and I think this comes out in Issue #12. This isn’t really spoiler-y. Hock’s play, the thing Malcolm’s responding to when he calls the conclave, is that by having Jonah in his possession, Hock has the ability to unravel one of the two pillars of Carlyle power – Carlyle’s mastery of genetics and longevity. Carlyle allies benefit from that technology, Carlyle enemies suffer from not having it. Carlyle enemies therefore must take steps to replicate it in their own way. Hock’s primary way of doing so if pharmaceutical and that’s what he provides to his allies. If you remember your timeline way back in Issue #2, Hock and Malcolm Carlyle started the Lazarus Project together. Hock’s not starting from ground zero, he has some resources in terms of that technology, but he never mastered it. So in having Jonah, he has the means to unlock it, and if he can unlock it successfully he can turn to all of his allies and all of Carlyle’s allies and tell them “there’s no reason to stay. The thing that he has held over you, the thing that he is giving you, the thing that he has used to create his Lazarus – a concept that comes out of the Macau Accords and the trial by combat provision in it. That trial by combat provision provides for the role of the Lazarus. And when you have your Lazarus, i.e. Carlyle brings out Forever, and you can stab her in the chest and shoot her in the brain, and that doesn’t do her in, the effective method of killing her is chopping her to tiny pieces. Bladed weapons are good at that! And that’s the connection. And you see in #11, when Forever is speaking to Sonja Bittner, that there is this very formal, artificially courtly means of interaction. So they sort of combine. It all gloms together over the course of 20, 40, 50 years to create this post-modern feudal and pseudo-chivalric, to an extent, set of behaviours and interactions between Families. We haven’t seen Forever with a gun in her hand a lot, but it is established she’s perfectly comfortable with a firearm. But the bladed weapons tend to signify the Family and that role of defender and attacker, and pragmatically the means of disposing of an enemy Lazarus. We meet the Nkosi Lazarus in Issue #12 actually, and he’s a two weapon guy. Neither are swords, but both are bladed. It’s getting to that point where I’m thinking “does everybody have a sword?”.

Robert: Give ’em something else. Battle-axe. Wolverine claws. Chain with a spike on the end.

Michael: I hadn’t thought about a battle-axe, Greg.

Greg: You like a battle-axe.

Robert: It’s not very Indian.

Michael: I’m thinking Kristoff Mueller.

Greg: No, Mueller would be like a zweihander. One of those massive eight feet tall two handed swords. You want a battle-axe or a great big spiked club? That’s going to be coming out of Vassalovka.

Michael: Ah, nice.

Robert: The spiked club is great, because as you said, for everyone else it’s dignified and chivalric. Guy with ‘board with a nail in it’ says something.

Greg: “I have the most high tech board and nail! Carbon fibre board, kevlar finished titanium nail!”

Robert: When you’re talking about the design of the other Families – and Michael, I’m thinking of the visual elements very much here as well – do you start from a character perspective, as in, “I need a person who believes this thing, and is going to have this argument with Malcolm”, and then you build a Family or a culture from the Family that you’ve built, or do you start from the outside in, and say “I want someone who represents India, or China, or what’s happening in Australasia” and then you design the society, and then from there you design the Family and then you design it’s members.

Greg: Latter more than the former, at least in terms of concept. Not in terms of physicality of design, which I’ll leave Michael to answer. It is far more the latter for me, how have we carved up the planet, who has what? Who has Central Europe, and how difficult is Central Europe to hold? Rausling is really central Western Europe, and he’s in a really terrible position. He’s got Bittner on one side, Armitage on the other, and Armitage is okay, because they’re the British Isles, and they benefit from what the British Isles has always benefited from – they’re not huge, but they’re really hard to attack. Rausling has Bittner and Vassalovka, then down to the Southwest he’s got D’Souza. North Africa we’ve got Martins and as of now an undecided thing that will become apparent later. So, y’know, if Vassalovka, Bittner and D’Souza are all breaking bread together, he’s kind of SOL. Your choices are pretty clear, as opposed to say someone like Carragher – they’re Oceania. Australia, New Zealand, portions of South East Asia.

Robert: Always the last to fall on the Risk board.

Greg: One of the things that becomes clear in Issue #12 is that of all the Carlyle allies, Carragher goes back the furthest. They are joined at the hip in many ways.

Robert: That doesn’t sound familiar at all.

Greg: [laughs] No, no I bet it doesn’t.

Robert: Michael, what about from a design point of view? Where do you start with that?

Michael: What usually happens is I need to know a little bit about the characters. Usually Greg will give me just a sketch of what they’re about, what their personality is, and what I’ve asked him to do sometimes is to give me who he’d cast for the role. Then it goes through the filter of how I draw, and after that it becomes a little bit of bouncing back and forth. Y’know, there’s all these characters in this panel I was just talking about that Greg is going to be seeing for the first time – hopefully later on today, knock wood. I’m sure that how he writes them will be informed a little bit by how sees them look. It often happens, however he writes the character will be partially in response to how he sees them looking and how they carry themselves. For me it’s a ground-level, human approach to the characters. While Greg has to worry about how they’re interacting and the political situation, that’s not a concern for me right now. I need to make sure that they’re individuals, and really importantly on a technical level, that the readers can recognise them. That was one of the struggles with Gotham Central, we had so many non-costumed characters, and some people complained about not being able to recognise the characters. To me, it wasn’t that bad, but I can see where some people were coming from, because it’s a different task for an artist and it was a different kind of book.

Greg: It was a different kind of book for a different kind of reader. In something like Central there was always a portion of the audience that was expecting to get a Batman book.

Michael: You mean there was a portion of the editorial department that was expecting to get a Batman book? [chuckles]

Greg: That too. But I think there were people that, for lack of a better phrase, wanted to read it more quickly than it was drawn or written to be read.

Michael: I was talking before about casting ideas for the characters. Hopefully, in seeing these characters in a few hours time, and hopefully that will inform how you write them.

Greg: Absolutely. I mean, Marisol, as I was saying, gelled in the story but only after that first visual came together. I remember we went back and forth about her tattoos –

Michael: And her hair! I had given her long hair!

Greg: Her hair, yeah, but also the Dagger tattoo. It was the crew cut, and the Dagger tat. And once we’d resolved those, I said “Right. Now I know who she must be.”

Michael: Originally I gave her long flowing hair, and we were worried it was going to look too similar to Forever’s. I forget if it was you or me or Trautmann who suggested the crew-cut, but suddenly she sprang to life! She became Marisol.

Robert: It does really say who the character is.

Michael: Whichever one of us it was who came up with it was a genius. I think it was my ex-girlfriend who came up with the tattoos.

Robert: I love the subtle reminder in Issue #11 that she’s ninety, whilst still showing off the crew-cut and the muscles and the big shoulder and the tats, and talking about her ass. It’s a good way of driving that home without hammering it too heavily.

Michael: One of the things I love about the way Greg writes, he uses the term “soft worldbuilding”. I love doing it that way. I love that we don’t just hit people over the head, I love that Greg does not underestimate the intelligence of our readership. I think that so often happens in the entertainment industry, the assumption that your audience is stupid. And I’m glad we refuse to do that.

Greg: Our audience is smarter than we are.

Michael: Oh, yeah. You guys make us sound much more intelligent than we actually are.

Robert: Look, it may just be cargo culting, but I don’t think we’re finding anything that isn’t there.

Michael: No, but you’re finding stuff we didn’t know was there.

Greg: You’re talking to a liberal arts English major, so very rarely am I going to come across a read of something that I’ve written and go “oh, that’s just wrong!” If it’s there in the text, and you can support it, then it’s there in the text, and you can support it. That’s the nature of reading any work. Sometimes things are more active than others, certainly. Sometimes things are meant to be more overt than others. I do like to believe, though, that we’re loading the book. You get a lot for your $3.50.

Michael: There’s been a lot of times when I’ve read your…I don’t think it’s fair to call them reviews.

Greg: Analyses.

Michael: Analyses – that I’ve been like “Oh, we did do that! Cool!” Happens every time. Because we’re so, or at least I’m so, caught up in the issue, it’s like a tornado. Everything’s flying around, gotta be done quickly, and I’ve had the luxury of an extra week on this issue, and I haven’t known what to do with myself. Everything is such a blur, and then you come out the other side, and especially when I read your analyses, I think “Oh, that’s there. That’s awesome!”

Robert: We’re permanently on 5 weeks now, that’s the turnaround?

Greg: Yeah, that’s right. Because we don’t want to kill Michael. And because neither one of us wants to miss dates. I think we may have bought ourselves an extra week for Issue #15 as well, because as I finished breaking down Conclave it became clear that it was going to have to be at least 24, if not 28 pages of story.

Michael: We’re learning as we do this, too. Greg’s had more experience doing creator owned comics than I have. I started out with them, but my career just became Marvel and DC for a while. We’ve learned how we deal with the deadlines and stuff. We were smart, on this issue that I’m working on right now, Greg had some family stuff happen that slowed us down a little bit, but I always knew this issue was going to be a lot of work. So we planned ahead, and now Greg’s saying we should plan ahead on #15, and somewhere in there the holidays will come up.

Greg: #15 is the holidays issue.

Michael: Last year the holidays almost killed us. I think we’ll probably plan on that from now on, too. Just getting a little bit smarter so we can tell people when the book will come out and that’s when it comes out. We don’t want to be telling people we missed the deadline by a week and asking them to hold on because it’s going to be an extra week. I’d rather plan all that stuff out in advance.

Robert: I know an extra week helps us! We always regret not having a chance to read it as soon as possible, of course, but an extra week gives us a chance to really dig into it. So on behalf of this portion of the readership, it’s all to the good.

Greg: [laughs] It’s all for you!

Robert: Put the blame on us. In a letter column.

David: “There’s these two guys, they keep bugging us for more time to write reviews…” [laughs]. Conclave certainly contains a lot of payoff for story beats that started as far back as Issue #1. I know Malcolm certainly got to turn the Machiavellian side up to about 11 and indicate he’d put these schemes in play. You were talking too about how Lift contains all these seeds for bits you’re hoping to get to in the future. Do you figure out the result first, and then seed the scheming early on, or do you have the characters come up with a plan first, and then as you write figure out how it all turns out?

Greg: No, it’s far more deliberate than the latter. I may not know the actual mechanism, I may not know precisely how Malcolm’s plan will execute, but I know what it is broadly. So the question of Jonah at the end of Family, I knew the answer to that. I knew the moment we introduced the Barrets where they end up. That may change, the story is organic and needs to live, but for the big story gambits, I know them for the most part in advance when I am introducing the foundation for those gambits, even if I don’t know the particular manoeuvre that’s going to execute it. Coming into Conclave I knew what the outcomes would be, but one of the things Trautmann and I keep going round on, that keeps coming into play, are what exactly are the triggers that Malcolm is working towards. This is the result he wants, how is he getting it? One of the things Eric and I talked about – we were drinking, I had gone for more ice, and we were sitting on the deck, and he said “I’m not sure how I feel about Malcolm getting everything his own way.” And though that’s his nature, that’s sort of what he does, I pointed out there is one specific thing he does not get, but he has no idea he didn’t get his way. So, if you see stuff being paid off being planted earlier, sometimes it’s happy coincidence, but most of the time it’s malice of forethought.

Michael: I do think there have been some times where things have occurred to you as we’ve been progressing in the story. Where you realise something that we’ve done has given you an opportunity.

Greg: The story’s alive, and not respecting that is foolish.

Michael: It’s really interesting for me to watch, because I’m always looking at it from the outside, and it’s the closest I’ve ever been to watch it, as you say, come alive. Working with corporately owned comics, there’s so much of that which is already there. You’re applying more and more layers of icing to a cake that’s already been baked.

David: The shot with the direct right-left contrast between Sonja and Forever, from a visual perspective, is just such an intensely powerful image.

Michael: Oh, thanks! From my perspective, that was just a question of having to get the pages done, so I chose to use the same angle for the whole conversation, but I really like the contrast between the two of them. Light/dark, blue/red. There’s some nice scenes coming up with them. Greg is developing a cool relationship between the two of them. I’m excited to be drawing it.

Robert: I must admit, and it’s partly in visual cues and partly in the way she’s written that, for someone who is presenting a human finger in a box after killing a bunch of guys in the road, I felt a huge degree of – I don’t want to say pity, but let’s say sympathy. She seems more trapped than Eve, I think who is now struggling for independence.

Greg: You guys are going to really like #12. Sonja doesn’t say a lot in #11, but one of the things she does say over and over again, is “I am sent by my mother”. That line gives her a lot of vulnerability. “My Mom says I have to come talk to you.”

Robert: There’s a tone of almost post-operant conditioning.

Michael: It might’ve been the Multiversity article by David Harper, where he said that the physically strongest characters in this book are the emotionally weakest, and I think you guys are touching on that here. Sonja is standing there with her sword and a half and her armour, and she’s badass and took this guy apart before he could react, but there’s this unspoken vulnerability about her. I love that.

Robert: This, of course, brings to mind the contrast, that one of the strongest and scariest characters in the book by far is the relatively speaking decrepit Hock, with his power-legs and gangly skeleton arms.

Greg: He’s decrepit!

Michael: He’s Montgomery Burns!

Robert: We name checked that in the review! Was that a deliberate design decision? Did you think of Monty Burns, and then add Palpatine and whathaveyou?

Michael: I didn’t even think about Palpatine.

Greg: That was subconscious.

Michael: But if you’re going to draw a decrepit old man, there’s only so many choices. Greg just said “make him as old and ugly as you can”. I think I can even push him a little further. In future issues he’s going to get a little nastier. There’s aspects to him we haven’t talked about yet. He’s rotting from the inside.

David: On the subject of Hock, I wanted to take a minute to talk about Hock’s New York. We talked with Greg, and you, Mike, in previous interviews, about slums and about the process of taking a clearly recognisable city like Los Angeles and turning it into something new. With New York, how did you go about adapting it without breaking it up or degenerating it so heavily?

Michael: Well, we didn’t get that big a look at it, but it was mostly just discussions between me and Greg. I mean, we exchanged a lot of emails and pieces of photoreference, lots of Skype calls talking about that. The one page where we get to see street level New York was the last page we did, and I literally stayed up all night on that the last night before deadline drawing that page. It was a lot of work, but it was just a matter of Greg knowing what had happened ecologically, that the city had been flooded, we knew what had happened politically and what Hock’s heavy hand had created, so it really wasn’t that difficult. It’s New York, but with canals. There are raised sidewalks, but are they raised sidewalks from utopian science-fiction art from the 1950s? No, they’re something they had to cobble together because they had no money and they’re not going to waste money on non-persons. It’s just talking, but then I have to put it down visually on paper. I don’t know how much I brought to that. Honestly, I think my biggest contributions were a lot of the propaganda posters that were hidden throughout.

David: I did adore those, they had a very Brazil vibe to them.

Michael: Well, those are Trautmann. I think the only one I had any responsibility for was the one with Hock’s eyes on it, but Trautmann did the other ones. That was so fun. That night, he was working on those, every time I turned around there was a message in the inbox with a new one, and they were all so darkly funny. The workplace health and safety one – I don’t even know if you can see it anywhere, but we have to make sure it goes in the hardcover, because it’s so hilarious. I still think we should sell a little package of them as part of our merchandise. Not really big, but maybe 8.5 x 11 for people’s offices or whatever.

Greg: I love the safety first one where the guy has his head snapped from his neck on the ground! [laughs]

Michael: It’s probably meant to be blood, but it almost looks like he’s a little alarmed at having lost his head. The one where he’s missing his arm, I like the jagged edge. The jagged edge, and he’s looking for his hand on the ground.[laughs]

Greg: It does look like he can stick it back together, doesn’t it? I love the smiley face on the “consult your behavioural manager” one, too.

Michael: The smiley pill, yeah?

Robert: Very disturbing. But eerily evocative of things that I have seen.

Michael: You know what? That’s a great description of Trautmann.

Robert: This isn’t a bad place to segue then, talking about bonuses and incidentals, to shameless hardback plugging. What’s in the fancy new edition? What do we get to see?

Greg: We’re still actually trying to figure out what we’re going to put in it. There’s going to be the map. All the previous backmatter is going to be included. So the timeline’s going to be cleaned up and presented, we’re talking about how to lay that out. All the Family bios will be in – I think – because we will have them all by then. So you’ll have the Family livery and bios. I really want to include a lot of Michael’s designs and his pencil pages. I think those pages are absolutely wonderful.

Michael: We really only have pencils for the first issue. We really don’t pencil any more. I just go straight to ink.

Greg: I want to include a fair chunk of the process stuff, and show off not only what Michael’s doing, but also what Owen Freeman’s doing on covers.

Michael: We got really lucky with Owen. I had been looking for cover ideas at one point, and I had stumbled across some of Owen’s work online. I had no idea who he was and just thought “wow, this guy is really good” and he had a similar approach to me in terms of how he handled colour, how he told stories with his images. I said to myself, “I’d like to be able to do covers like that”. We met each other on Twitter, and it turned out he was a fan of mine as well, and he wanted to be doing comics work. He does illustrations for The New Yorker and Nike and big worldwide clients and I thought it would be so cool if we could get him to do covers. Greg and I batted around the idea for a bit, and then we were in San Jose, and Owen came out for the show because he lives in the Bay Area, and we all just got along really, really well. We got back to the table after meeting him, and I asked Greg about what he thought about him doing the covers, and Greg said “absolutely”! So I texted Owen right then, and there was no hesitation. He just said “I’m in”! It’s been great – he thinks of stuff I never would have thought of. His cover for #15 is so cool. The cover for #14 is just amazing in my opinion. He’s just knocking the ball out of the park. He was a lucky find.

Greg: So we want to include elements of that, the Hock workplace signs. There are a lot of bells and whistles that disappear on the page, but there are elements of worldbuilding that Trautmann has done with Michael, showing some of those screens and how we put together the monitor stuff. I’ve got in my reference folder from Eric the Hock screen layout, the multi-monitor, where he’s built the frame and the news tags, and the slogans and everything. “Hock Family Forces Achieve Glorious Victory”. I love stuff like that. A chance to show and share that. There’s a 5 page history of the Daggers which we’ll include if we have the room. He builds these things really modularly, so it’s really easy to swap out elements.

Robert: You should really get someone who does coding to turn this into a downloadable thing.

Greg: For people’s smartphones? Yeah, we’d do that. That’d be fairly easy. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, just get the resolution requirements online. Hock screens in real life.

Robert: Oh, that’s scary.

Greg: Well, it should be! Hock’s not a nice man.

Michael: But he makes Malcolm look so nice by comparison.

David: I find that very interesting, in terms of the moral questions you raise, because the “enemy” (in Hock) is more overtly evil but once you’re talking about the lives of hundreds of thousands, millions, how much does it tie back to the choices of any one person?

Greg: I think there is a companion question about how much one is willing to impose one’s will. I think it’s very clear in Issue #10 that New York is built in Hock’s image. They are a parallel. You look at Carlyle and I think it’s much harder to discern where Malcolm’s hand is visible and where it isn’t. I think that tells you a lot about the two men.

Robert: Now with Owen doing covers and Trautmann doing bits and pieces in the background, are we going to see more incidentals and more little bonus things? Greg, I know you’ve dropped the seed for bits and pieces here and there. You’ve talked about things you’d like to do, given the time and resources.

Greg: I still want to do a short story collection. Obviously my father’s passing this summer derailed many, many things, but that is still high on my list of to-dos. I think we’re going to try and get the next patch underway in the next month or so. Michael had the idea of doing a stencil, which I love. We talked about doing a sticker-sheet once we have the coats of arms. I really want us to do a shirt or two.

Michael: Oh, we need to do a shirt. And the big one that I’m excited about, we need to do a statue of Forever.

Greg: I have no idea how we’d go about doing that. I know for shirts I want to do two. Do a Dagger shirt in the faded, distressed army style – the shirt you see Marisol and young Forever wearing. I’d also really like to do a simple black one that has the Carlyle crest on the chest or on the left shoulder. I think if we did that in a women’s cut, we’d probably sell a fair few of those too. One of the interesting things that comes out of merchandising is that should we find ourselves in a position where we sell the rights, our having “staked a claim” in certain areas of merchandising will protect us from being exploited without seeing any benefit. So there’s just a literal desire to see some cool stuff out there, because I love stuff like that, the artefacts and pieces of the world. We were talking for a while about doing, or trying to do, Forever’s sword. Trying, frankly, to find some other ways to monetise this, because the book is solvent right now, but y’know, readership isn’t everything we’d want it to be, and making sure we can keep doing it is always a concern.

Robert: Do we need to be concerned?

Greg: I don’t think we do. It’s clear to me we’ve got a tradewaiting portion of the audience, not unreasonably so. It’s a fairly complicated story in a lot of ways, and there’s a not unwarranted desire to read it together. So that doesn’t really worry me. As long as the floppies are breaking even, I think both Michael and I and Santi and now Tyler and Owen, and Eric and Jodi, everybody involved, we’ll be okay through trades. But our profit on this is in trade sales, and we’re still early days in terms of that accounting. Second trade is fresh. Once there’s more out there, when the back catalogue has filled out, we’ll be in a much better position.

Michael: That’s true.

Greg: Nobody from Image has come to us and said “Oh, you guys are in trouble.” We’ve had numbers go up, and numbers go down, and numbers go up again but we keep coming in consistently around 20,000 copies in the floppies. We would like that to grow, but that said, we are not the first Image book that was selling in the high teens/low twenties that after the two or three years picked up. I’m not holding my breath on an explosion, but I think as more trades get out there, and more people encounter the book, we’ll see some growths.

Robert: It’s certainly easier to hand around to non-comics readers in trades. I’d never give, say, my father, six floppies because he’d laugh it off, but if I give him six trades he’ll say, “alright, I might give it a crack”.

Michael: Yeah, it’s almost unfortunate that the marketplace requires us to do it this way. I mean, it’s good in terms of a workflow and keeping us going. Who knows? If I didn’t have a deadline every month I might never get anywhere in terms of getting stuff done. But, yeah, I look at my son and he and his buddies and they all just buy trades. They don’t buy the floppies of anything. He’s just fourteen years old and he’s just starting out on his comic book reading journey, but I do think that’s where our audience is now for sure.

Greg: I will also add that I quite like the rhythm of a monthly issue. I like the serial nature of storytelling and the structure it allows for. I really do enjoy that, the academic or intellectual problem of “you have twenty-two pages, how are you going to tell your story?” I love that sense of structure – and I say this as somebody who writes novels – one of the dangers in a novel is that you can wander off and really screw yourself. You’ve got all the rope, you can hang yourself without meaning to. If we say Conclave is going to be five parts, that’s one-hundred and ten pages of story, give or take. That’s a fence around your playground. Being able to use the space efficiently, and I’ve always felt that if you do an issue right, your last panel should be inevitable. From your first panel to your last, it should be a journey, and in the way that if you read a good story, a novel or a short, when you get to an ending you know that’s the way it had to be.

Robert: We’ve got a wide scope of new characters coming up, and we’ve spoken about a few above and we’ve seen more alluded to. I’m excited to see Malcolm’s closest crony, who that guy is.

Greg: Not a crony!

Robert: Is there anyone who we should be particularly excited to meet, without dropping any spoilers?

Greg: Yeah, you should be particularly excited to meet all of the Lazari who are wandering around this thing. ‘Cause there are a lot and one of the decisions I made for Conclave is that unless the story really required it, we are very tight on Forever’s POV of the action. So during deliberations she’s not in the room, because you don’t put your Lazari in the room with all the Family heads. Asking for trouble. So as a security measure they all go into this room, Malcolm, Beth, Arthur, the Bittners, maybe one or two others, but Forever, Joacquim, Xolani Nkosi, Sonja Bittner, people like that are outside. When you put a bunch of Lazari in one place like that, they’re going to socialise.

David: You get a Lazarus mixer.

Greg: Yeah, and one of the things I’m really, really delighted to be able to do with this is show their interactions amongst themselves and I think in a lot of ways its not exactly what people expect. There is a sequence in 12 I am just tickled by, and I cannot wait to see what Michael’s done with it. And that leads into another sequence in #13, where we’re going to have six, seven, maybe eight of these guy in the same room.

Michael: Oh. Good.

Robert: That’ll be fun for you to draw.

Greg: Like I said, #13’s the hard one.

Michael: We’re shifting our publication schedule to maybe a nine-week schedule…[laughter]

Robert: Eve feels very vulnerable in her interactions with her family, and Sonja’s a little under the thumb of her mother, and even Joacquim feels like he’s maybe just getting out in his early 20s. So, to the extent that they’re all gathered at a party with their parents in another room is that like the teenagers hang-out whilst the adults do the “boring” stuff in the other room?

Michael: Well, they are that age!

Greg: Many of them, yeah.

Michael: If anything they look older than they actually are because of their strength and stature.

Greg: I don’t think they’re going to be playing Spin The Bottle! One of the things you see is that they’ve interacted before, some of them. In #12, Sonja meets Xolani Nkosi for the first time, but Forever’s already met him before, and it intimates the amount of time it’s been since they’ve seen each other. Thomas Huston is the Armitage Lazarus, and he greets Forever with great familiarity. I think, again, it’s a twofold question. The nature of being a Lazarus is that you’ll probably end up dead at some point. The question no-one seems to have asked yet is “Is Forever the first of the Carlyle Lazari?” and the answer is that I’m not going to tell you.

David: Forgetting Forever, how many generations of Lazari have there been so far?

Greg: Well, again, it depends on your Family and what your resources are. The Li family Lazarus, when you meet him, very interesting guy. Hopefully not at all what people expect. The description for Huston is that he’s late 20s/early 30s, Sonja and Xolani are about Forever’s age. Rausling’s guy is, I think, in his 20s. The nature of what they are and what they do means they are kept on a pretty close leash. They’re not getting a lot of interactive experience. They socialise with underlings, people they command, which isn’t going to build any social familiarity in the relationship. They socialise with their creators, and so the only people they get to interact with as peers are each other. Those interactions are rare when they’re outside the structure of Family negotiations, as we saw today.

David: They don’t pick up the phone and gossip on the weekend?

Greg: You got it. And I suspect different Families have to deal with it in different ways, but I suspect that one of the things that every Family has realised is that if you get them all together and they’re talking, and trying to use the teenager analogy, it’s going to make them want to do it all the more. Their interactions are not governed by anything other than “you know where your loyalties lie” when push comes to shove.

Robert: Indeed, I don’t think it’s verging into spoiler territory or even significant speculation to say that everybody who is invested in the program is invested in keeping them on a fairly tight leash, because the more they figure out about the commonalities of their experience, the more it might raise red flags for them.

David: Plus the general problem with soldiers. You don’t want fraternisation with enemy forces.

Greg: That’s exactly it. And this is a great thing to end on, because what Robert said specifically is precisely the problem, and that grows out of what you said, David, because particularly out of the Cold War – I should say the first Cold War – there were these instances of Eastern bloc NATO soldiers meeting in non-battlefield environments and being able to put aside the political polemic stuff. They are instruments of policy, not the makers of it. Their understanding that they are instruments of their Families creates an interesting dynamic between them.

Robert: Even beyond that Christmas Truce for soldiers who have got things in common, there’s almost a John LeCarre, Russia House, more in common with each other than with anybody else thing.

Greg: Yes! Joacquim says that in Issue #3 and the Rausling Lazarus is new, you learn that in Issue #12, and then Huston says to Forever that someone needs to teach him how it works. And Forever says “you’re the one to do it”. Then in #13, I’m putting a whole slew of them in a room together. The thing that’s killing Michael in the upcoming issue is the ball, the thing he’s going to want to stab me through the throat for in Issue #13 is going to be the poker game. But it’ll be easier, they won’t have a lot of people in the background.

Michael: Yeah, I’m not so worried about the poker game. Eight people I can deal with – there’s going to be over 100 people in this scene, and the problem is that a lot of them need to be people, need to be a particular person.

Greg: Have to be recognisable enough that when you recognise them later you can say “aha!”

Michael: Even though I have no dialogue to help me. Because Greg hates me.

Robert: Just give them all really distinctive Bond villain characteristics. Here’s that representative with the giant afro–

Greg: Here’s the one in a Doctor Who scarf, here’s the one who always wears his baseball cap backwards.

Michael: Actually, I decided they’re all going to have capes and tights, and all they need to decide is what colour they are.

Robert: Big symbol right on the chest!

Michael: That should make it easier.

 

 

 

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