Writer of Deadpool, X-Men, X-Force and Cable Fabian Nicieza has a new comic out. The Unbeatables is part of the IBD Unmasked project. I spoke to Fabian at length about his new project, his career, future writing, burritos and everything inbetween.
IC: How much did you know about IBD before the project?
FN: I knew nothing about it when the editor at Marvel, Darren Sanchez, originally called. I’ve known and worked with Darren for twenty years and he’s been Marvel Customs solutions editor for a couple of years now and I’ve done a few other jobs for him and we’re friends so when he calls me it’s usually because he thinks it’s something that I’m going to be interested in, number one, and number two, he’s going to need my help. He described the project to me and I’m a bit of a glutton for a challenge and I said “sure, it sounds pretty darned interesting” and we went ahead from there. That was the start of the process for me a few months ago. Marvel had already been working with Takeda and produced an eight page comic and Samarium several months ago so it was escalating towards a bigger project. When they were ready to being the bigger project they called me in.
IC: You already had Samarium from a previous comic but the other characters are new for The Unbeatables, aren’t they?
FN: All the other characters we’d created for this storyline. The idea that we’d talked about was to try to reflect the community, and the community also involves the family, friends, the loved ones of people who have IBD. You can explore an aspect of the challenges that are faced by people who have IBD, not just through their own personal challenges but through those of the people in their lives. We thought it was important to have a little bit of a combination. Not only that, we didn’t want it to seem too coincidental to the point of not being believable that every single character has IBD and also has superpowers. So by not having all of them have IBD it gives you that freedom to develop your story in a cleaner fashion. That being said, part of the story is also predicating on a couple of twists that explain why the characters who have IBD are so integral and important to the conflict and challenges that they face in the story.
IC: How did you go about balancing promoting awareness and telling a good story?
FN: The goals of Takeda and the goals of the IBD community and the goals of Marvel in producing and crafting this project are 100% laudable and I approach it with a complete understanding, but as the writer sometimes I have a slightly counterintuitive requirement which is that I am crafting a story about these characters and my job is to make it as believable and entertaining a superhero adventure of this new group of characters as I can, and all those other considerations become secondary to me. They become folded into aspects of the character personalities or requirements of the plot but they’re not primary to me. Primary to me is making a really exciting story. All the other elements fold into it but my primary driver is to make a reader, whoever they are, get a second issue.
IC: How is The Unbeatables being released?
FN: It’s multiple chapters. I’m not 100% sure how they plan to release the material. I’m writing it one or two chapters at a time. I’m looking at it as a 64 page graphic novel or a king size annual from back in the day. I’m still learning these people as I write them. You don’t jump into a project and create five characters and know them right at the beginning. You start to learn who they are, how they think and how they might react as you progress. That’s why writers are normally in a much better flow with issues four or five or six of a comic than they are sometimes with issue two and three, and this is no different. I’m still plotting the story and I’m learning something about them as I go along.
IC: Some comic book characters have been going for years and have masses of back story and character development over the years. Is it easier writing about new characters or harder?
FN: It’s much, much harder. You’re crafting whole new characters and creating a story that works for them and figuring out their powers and abilities and personalities and their conflict and their past, and how that might address their reaction and things like that. You also have the standard approvals process that has to happen between Marvel and the outside company, and those approvals processes are always incredibly complex, I will say with a pleasant smile on my face. Labyrinthine is another word I could use. Often when you’re working with custom comics for the Big Two you’re dealing with companies that are not very familiar or well-versed with comic language. A lot of it requires explaining. A lot of it requires patience. A lot of it requires building and earning trust from them so they know that you know what you’re doing. I can’t just say I’ve been doing this for 30 years and sold 200 million comics. That doesn’t resonate with them.
IC: What’s your role at the moment? You’re working for Marvel some of the time but you do other things now.
FN: I’m a freelance writer. If someone calls me and has an interesting offer I listen to it or a friend calls me and needs a hand I jump in and help them. The majority of what I’ve done for Marvel and DC in the last couple of years has been custom comics because the editors know me and I know them and they tend to hire established professionals who know what the jobs entail. This is my third custom comic for Marvel in the last year and I’ve also done three for DC. I’m not a full time comics writer anymore and I haven’t been for a while so when I do comics I like something that’s challenging.
IC: We touched on it earlier when talking about the good story balancing with a message. Did you have any help to get the message across?
FN: As I progress through the story, the story is structured in a flashback mode. We start with the team together in the height of a conflict that they’re really having a problem with and then we flashback to how they gather and how they came to understand their powers and then we flashback to see chapters of them as individuals. We have a great community of people with IBD actively involved with this process every step of the way. We’ve had video conferences with them as we’ve discussed characters and got feedback from them. They’ll see my plot and they’ll see my script, and I’m asking if they’ll please give me best practices or an idea of how they might react in this situation. I want to try to add real human touches, within the context that once the story escalates to the superhero stuff then the real daily challenges have to get stretched on a rubber band, just like all superheroes. Everybody in the community should be able to read this and in my opinion, first and foremost, get a very entertaining and exciting story with interesting characters. The second plot part is that they see aspects of their lives reflected in what these characters go through and how they face challenges and hopefully come out with a positive view of the book, the characters and their ability to surmount their daily challenges. Honestly, as a writer I approach it no differently from if I’m writing a Captain America comic book. There’s an aspirational goal you want to see of yourself reflected in the characters’ struggles.
IC: I liked the spread of characters. You’ve got people from all over the world, they’re different ages, some have accepted IBD more than others.
FN: All the characters are in slightly different stages of their lives. There’s a range of ages from 20 to almost 40, they’re in different phases of IBD. Each of them has a unique set of struggles that are reflective of the community.
IC: Have you ever had to turn a project down, either by thinking it’s something you couldn’t do justice or because you weren’t happy to have your name on the cover?
FN: There are a few credits in the background that I regret having done. Some of them were because of my lack of skill. There are others I look back on and regret having done because, frankly, I was doing a friend a favour. Some of those are tiny little anchors around my ankles of my career. I won’t name names because any comic is going to be someone’s favourite comic, but in a career that’s spanned 30 years and a thousand comic books you’re going to have that. If you don’t have that then what kind of a career did you have? I almost relish and cherish some of them but almost every single one of them were because of a friend who happened to be an editor asking for a favour, and I did it for my friend or I did it for the company I was working for. None of that is reflected in [The Unbeatables]. This is a mature, veteran writer who is enjoying the opportunity to get to write challenging stories whether that be a five page comic for the Make a Wish Foundation which isn’t even really going to be printed other than for a family or a 54 page graphic novel for a pharmaceutical company that is for the IBD company. I find those very interesting writing challenges at this point in my career.
IC: If you wrote a comic someone didn’t like today they could be online in seconds telling you what they thought. Do you think social media has changed things for artists and writers?
FN: I had more respect from negative comments years ago. Anybody who wrote an actual letter and mailed it to the office complaining about the work you did was investing far more time, effort and energy into the process. One of my most enjoyable memories career wise was some guy who waited almost two hours on line at a San Diego Comic Con while we were doing signings. He didn’t want anything signed, he just wanted to tell me that he thought I sucked. All the people around him were like “What?” and I said it was fine, he’s entitled to his opinion. If he thinks I suck it must mean he reads the comics. I cashed the check anyway. I said “You waited in line for, what, how long did you have to stand there” and he said “two hours”. I said “You waited in line two hours to tell me I sucked?” and he said “Yep.” I go, “was it worth it?!”, he said “yep” and I said “OK, great, have a good day.” I don’t put too much emphasis on social media criticism because I think that the majority of it is incredibly under thought and far too easy to have been committed by the person who is doing the complaining. As a result I don’t respect a lot of that negativity because I don’t think it comes from a place of putting effort into your thoughts. Something like Twitter doesn’t provide you with the means to have any kind of a meaningful conversation about the criticism. The very format of the tweet lends itself to prevent honest back and forth discourse which is what you would always prefer out of the criticism. I personally don’t put that much stock in it. I’ve been part of a couple of Twitter flame wars here and there in the past and I handle it as best I can with a shrug of the shoulders and just move on. I certainly don’t let it keep me up at night and I wish other creative people in my industry would also do the same thing and engage less in that kind of stuff.
IC: If you had a free choice on writing another awareness comic, is there one subject you’d pick over the others?
FN: No. I wouldn’t want to throw a dart at a spinning dartboard of causes or issues. I don’t seek out working comics very much anymore. If it comes to me I take it case by case. The custom comics stuff is not all cause or issue or disease related or anything like that. I enjoy it because every job is quite a bit different which is interesting, as opposed to writing a monthly comic with the same characters and the same group. I’m not going to actively make a phone call and say “there’s this foot rash comic I would really really like to do”. It doesn’t quite work that way. But if a good foot rash comic came to me featuring Quicksilver then yeah…
IC: What’s coming next year for you? Are you working on any new projects?
FN: No, not really. A couple of projects I’ve been percolating with but it’s not much of a percolation because we don’t work really hard at doing the percolating so I can’t say for sure whether anything will happen for next year or not. The majority of my work is intellectual property management for Hollywood Studios and a video game company and a toy company and that takes up most of my time and has done for quite a while. There are no comic books that I’m actively able to promote on the horizon because some of them are NDA for custom comic reasons, and 90% of the people wouldn’t know if it came out and that’s fine with me. I’ve had plenty of loud, bursting credits in my career.
IC: You’ve been in the business for a long time. How does your experience relate to someone starting out? Do you have any tips for young writers?
FN: aIf you want to be a writer, keep writing. Write anything and everything you can. If you want to be an artist, draw absolutely everything, not just superheroes or something. I would strongly urge if you want to be a creator and create comics that you should just do it. If you’re a writer find an artist to work with and produce a digital comic. You just scan them and put it up online. If you get ten people to read it and react to it at least you’re getting that reaction and you can build it from there. I think that it’s never been better and never been harder to create comics and develop yourself as a comic book creator. The presence of the interwebs makes it easier than ever to have the ability to place material online without having to pay for paper and distribution and trying to reach a wide audience with it. By the same token there’s never been more of that content out there which means that you, not just have to be a good writer and a good artist, you have to be good at marketing and promotion. You have to be good at getting eyeballs onto your website or onto your link or whatever. You need to think as a marketer just as much as you need to think as an artist.
IC: If there was one question you wished I’d asked, what would it be?
FN: What am I having for lunch?
IC: What are you having for lunch?
FN: I’m not 100% sure so you might have forced me to pin it down. I might go for a burrito. We just moved offices so I’m in a new office and I’m just learning the restaurants in the area. There’s a burrito place nearby that looks OK so I think I’m going for that. Be sure to hit me with a hard edged follow up and see how that burrito went.