Revolver

It’s never boring when I get to catch up with writer/artist Matt Kindt about his creative and marketing process–as well as the film, Donnie Darko (and a range of other topics–including video games, Crisis on Infinite Earth and learning how to drive a stick shift). Had I known we could have talked while at a baseball game (this will make sense once you’ve read the interview), well I was crushed (OK not crushed, but I’m finding out next year if Kindt is partial to major or minor league baseball–and we’ll plan our next interview accordingly). Although I was fortunate enough to read an advance black and white preview of Revolver (his new graphic novel for Vertigo “a tale of two worlds — and how both test a man to his limits”), I’m looking forward to this Wednesday, July 14, when I can buy the book in its final form. While we all wait, enjoy this interview.

Tim O’Shea: How much advanced layouts, given the conflicting narratives that you maintain throughout the tale, did you have to set up at the project’s outset?

Matt Kindt: I lay everything out well in advance. I don’t pencil any pages until the entire thing is layed out. Especially with a book like this where I had a hard page count, meaning I couldn’t go over my page limit, I had to be very precise with everything, including where the page-turns would be for certain big reveals, etc.But I really do that with every book – I don’t start penciling anything until I’ve figured out the entire book.

O’Shea: Again, given the complexity of the book, how concerned were you when the book’s editor switched from Bob Schreck to Joan Hilty?

Kindt: I wasn’t concerned with the book as much as I was just hoping that Bob Schreck would be okay and happy and then just a little nervous meeting/working with Joan only because I’d never really had a good long conversation with her before. But Bob ended up good and happy and Joan ended up being a fantastic champion of me and the book so in a way I ended up coming out ahead on the deal by getting to work with both of them.

O’Shea: Am I crazy to say that — to a very limited extent– this book reminds me of Donnie Darko? That’s not a slam, what I mean is that once you read the book, you want to go back and look at it again to see what you might have missed on the first readthrough?

Kindt: No – that’s great. And it’s definitely my intent. It’s a fine balance though – I want you to be able to “get” it on a first read through so I try not to make it intentionally obtuse or confusing where you’re having to decipher a lot of things to just figure out what’s happening. I think that takes you out of a book when that happens.

But what I did want to do is put some extra things in there that you don’t notice the first time but after you get the meat of the story you can go back through and pick up on some other little subtleties. I think the page numbering text-scroll is one of those threads too where you can pretty much ignore it, but hopefully ou’d go back again and read it and get that extra layer of story.

What I hate is a story where it all hinges on some twist and once you get the twist then there’s no reason to revisit the work again. Donnie Darko is great in that way because you get this sort of crazy twist but the first 90% of the film is still so enjoyable that you want to see it again because it’s just good. Where something like The Sixth Sense is maybe good for two viewings – one to be surprised, and two to see it with open eyes. But I tried to make Revolver into something that isn’t so much about a twist but about these characters making some choices that we can all kind of relate to.

O’Shea: In our previous interview we discussed your affinity for diagrams, how the hades did you fight the urge to not execute a detailed aerial view of San Francisco [which you referenced in the publication Revolver (within the book Revolver)]?

Kindt: You crack me up! Well, I don’t know. I had so much I wanted to pack into the story that there just wasn’t a really good place for it – I actually have a detailed drawing laying around here somewhere, so I didn’t really fight the urge to do it – I did it – but I didn’t think it fit for some reason at the time.

O’Shea: How insane did you drive yourself when you decided to make the footer of the page (where the page numbers are shown) also be where you provided a statistical news crawl throughout the tale. Did you strip those in after drawing the pages? On a related note, why did some of the pages not have the news ticker–is there a message in their absence?

Kindt: It did drive me crazy. And it was one of those ideas I’d had after all of the art was completed. Credit to my editor Joan for letting me dump a bunch of extra stuff on her at the last minute to edit. I felt a little bad about it but once I had the idea, I couldn’t NOT do it. The hardest part was keeping each piece of text relevant to the page it appeared on and also incorporate the page numbers. Short answer is yes, it drove me crazy. Some of the pages without the text were simply design decisions where the art went full-bleed and I didn’t want the text running over it.

O’Shea: On page 36, there’s a flashback torn strip of Sam learning to drive stick shift from his late father. In trying to convey the flashback nature, when did you arrive upon the decision to try to pull off the look of a textured tor piece of paper (and how the hell did you pull it off so well)?

Kindt: Well, I don’t have a lot of flashbacks in the book so I just wanted to set it apart from everything else to keep it from being visually confusing. And I loved the little flashback mini-story – which is actually an autobiographical piece – me and my dad trying to teach me to drive a stick shift.

O’Shea: Color is crucial to the shifts in narrative, how did you decide which portion would garner certain colors?

Kindt: All of the color shifts are based on the two different world’s that Sam occupies. I was calling them Earth 1 and Earth 2 in my script as an homage to Crisis on Infinite Earths which I loved growing up. But I really felt like if the main character was going to be shifting his realities, the reader really needed a visual clue so we could follow him.

O’Shea: I cracked up when I read your description of the book in a CBR interview earlier this year: “I was limited to 160 pages, so it’s a pretty snappy book.” You do realize that you fit more story in 160 pages, while others may take 250 pages or more to fit all that you get into your story.

Kindt: Ha – yeah, actually it’s closer to 190 pages. I originally started out at 160 pages but then requested 30 more so that I could fit it all in. And to Vertigo and my editors’ credit they were pretty flexible.

I don’t know what to say really – the characters end up being kind of real to me and every one of them has a back story and history that I’ve also got in my head – but at the end of the day you can’t just branch off into everyone’s back story without losing the main narrative so I have to pick and choose what to show and hope the rest just sort of gets in their subconsciously.

I’m also not really a fan of big decompressed stories – which I think is the case with a lot of manga storytelling where they’re telling a pretty short story over 36 volumes. You end up flipping through those pages so quickly and reading it like a magazine instead of a book which just isn’t as satisfying to me as a reader and an author. I like to spend a little more time on each page and slow down the reading process a little bit.

O’Shea: After a day of working on pages, when you have to step away to clear your head and get a fresh perspective–what kinds of rewards do you give yourself for the hard work? What do you do for non-storytelling fun?

Kindt: Well, my wife jokes that I have at least 3 birthday parties every April for my birthday – which usually involve go-carts, paintball, and baseball games spread out over a few weeks. But on a regular work day I usually play with my daughter, and then read, watch movies, and play xbox until I can’t keep my eyes open.

O’Shea: For future interviews with you, will I expected to feed you a meal–as happened in this recent Toronto Star interview by Corey Mintz? I love how you described it in this tweet:”Easily my favorite interview ever-cleverly disguised as the most awesome 5 course meal ever…”

Kindt: Yes. Or we could go to a baseball game and talk about comics or go to the pool or pretty much any of my birthday-type activities. I think it’d actually be kind of funny to do in interview on xbox live while playing Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead, y’know? Deep questions and answers followed by screams and profanity as I get shot from behind. I don’t think that’s ever been done…

O’Shea: As far I’m concerned, you are one of the best creators in terms of marketing your work. What quirky items are you developing for Revolver?

Kindt: Well, I think the Revolver convention promo thing is going to involve squirt guns. That’s all I can say right now….

O’Shea: Anything else I should give you a chance to talk about?

Kindt: Can’t think of anything – I Twitter and Facebook and blog and website all the time so you can catch up to me on all of that stuff. I’ll be at SDCC next month and NYCC in the Fall as well. Other than that…I’ve got four new books coming out in the next two years so I’m going to be pretty busy for a long while.

Revolver by Matt Kindt

Happy Sunday and Happy Fourth of July, as we once again delve into what the Robot 6 crew are reading this week. Joining us as our special guest this week is Jeff Lemire, creator of Sweet Tooth, The Nobody, The Essex County Trilogy and Lost Dogs, and the writer of the Atom strip in Adventure Comics and the upcoming Superboy series.

To see what Jeff and the Robot 6 crew are reading, click below …

*****

Chris Mautner

Blackest Night

DC sent me a copy of the new hardcover collection of Blackest Night, so I finally got to see what all the fuss was about. Honestly, the best I can give it is a shrug of the shoulders and mere “eh.” It’s neither so awful to merit my scorn, nor good enough for me to endorse or recommend on any level.

The basic concept is sound. Killer even. Utilizing the basic “superheroes versus zombies” angle gives you the opportunity to offer a commentary on the nature of the industry to recycle and reuse their properties until they become bereft of all vitality and charm. On another level, you can examine what death actually means in a world where people with god-like powers can not only survive horrendous disasters but come back from the dead seemingly at will. What meaning or power would death hold in such a place? At the very least, you should be able to pen an entertaining, slam-bang horrorish thriller.

Sadly, Geoff Johns and company do none of the above. It’s just one gigantic set piece after another that never really gels into a collective whole. Part of the problem for me is that I really don’t care much for Ivan Reis and company’s art. To me it’s emblematic of the worst of that post-Image, post 90s style, all over-rendered musculature, gritted teeth and PhotoShop tricks. Their habit to constantly provide one enormous, densely packed splash page sequence after another really annoyed me as well. I understand that kind of momentism is what the kids crave these days (“Oh boy, here’s where all the DC heroes come to kick some zombie ass! Look, there’s Starfire in the far right corner! I wish I could buy a poster-sized version of this!”), but it severely interrupts the story’s flow and really doesn’t make for very good comics. It’s as though Reis is more concerned with making things look cool than with making things look good.

I didn’t have any trouble following the story, despite all the hardcore DCU references, nor was I put off by the “superhero decadence” scenes like Firestorm’s girlfriend turning into a pillar of salt — it’s part horror story. That stuff comes with the territory. And I did like how Johns opted to use second and third bananas like Mera and Atom to help save the day. There was something charming about that. Ultimately what really, truly bugged me was Johns constant need to remind us — in captions and dialogue — just how awesome all these second stringers were. Every other sentence uttered by the cast seems to be a love letter to Flash or Green Lantern. Did Johns forget about the “show don’t tell” rule? I felt was like I was constantly being elbowed in the ribs by Johns and Reis while trying to read as they shouted at the top of their lungs, “This is awesome isn’t it? Isn’t this awesome? This is so awesome!” No guys, it really wasn’t.

Tim O’Shea

Not to go borderline jingoistic on the Fourth of July (particularly for our international readers) but my favorite reads of this week involved Steve Rogers.

When I was a kid in the 1970s/1980s, Marvel captured my interest with the multiple super teams, The Champions, The Defenders and, of course, The Avengers. Ed Brubaker’s approach on the Secret Avengers (issue 2 came out this week) reminds me of the 1970s teams, with heroes you normally would not imagine teaming-up: Moon Knight with Valkyrie, for one example, or Beast and Sharon Carter. And I’m really happy to see how effectively Brubaker is utilizing Carter, after her using her too often (not always) as a plot device or prop during his Cap run.

Meanwhile in Captain America 607, it’s interesting to see how the Bucky and Steve Rogers dynamics are shaking out–as shown in this issue. Aw hell, who am I kidding–Steve Rogers is going around in one of Nick Fury/SHIELD’s flying cars! It’s panels like that which make me love comics.

Saving the best for last, Karl Kesel is writer, penciler and inker on Captain America: The 1940′s Newspaper Strip–originally developed for Marvel.com’s Digital Comics Unlimited Service. This is the first of three issues in a limited series. In an afterword of the first issue, Kesel wrote: “I’ve often wished I had been born 50 years earlier so I could have written and drawn an adventure strip, and I finally got my chance. I have to say: it’s the hardest, most satisfying job I’ve ever worked on. And I could do it for the rest of my life.” Good news, Kesel, I would read them as long as you were producing Cap tales.

Tom Bondurant

Well, you know already that I liked Wonder Woman #600 pretty well. Subsequently — and thanks to Amazon.com, ha ha — I read the first collection of Diana’s “Mod” period. These stories come from Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky, with Dick Giordano’s inks distinguishing them from, say, Sekowsky’s JLA work. Basically they read like the comics equivalent of a late-’60s spy knockoff. Not nearly as bad as “The Girl From UNCLE,” but more like O’Neil and Sekowsky wanted to do Emma Peel and couldn’t decide how “serious” it should be. In fact, towards the end of the book Diana has already returned to Paradise Island to fight gods and monsters alongside her Amazon sisters — never mind that when the Amazons left our plane of reality a few issues earlier, they made it sound like they were never coming back. The rest of the book is similarly uneven, almost to the extent that it doesn’t connect at all to the familiar status quo. Still, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the experiment, mostly to see how far afield it got.

Unknown Soldier #21

Both Madame Xanadu and Unknown Soldier had fine standalone issues this week; and both with guest artists, too (Marley Zarcone on MX, Rick Veitch on US). It’s already too late for Unknown Soldier, but perhaps it will do well enough in trades to warrant the occasional special issue or OGN. Madame Xanadu, however, has definite crossover appeal, especially with main-line superhero readers like myself who enjoy the occasional Phantom Stranger or Martian Manhunter guest-shot. The latest issue doesn’t have anything like that, but it’s still an excellent little fantasy/horror tale set in the early days of the Civil Rights movement. I really wish DC would promote the heck out of Madame Xanadu — it’s consistently among the best books in the publisher’s lineup.

Meanwhile, Action Comics #890 probably doesn’t need much more promotion, but if future issues are as good as this one, it too deserves to be one of the publisher’s top sellers. New writer Paul Cornell and returning artist Pete Woods bring us the continuing adventures of Lex Luthor, now busy trying to unlock the secrets of Oan-type power rings. By no means has Lex been driven to do good by his involvement in Blackest Night — instead, he’s in full-on megalomaniac mode, and that’s what makes the book so enticing. In a way, Lex’s quest for this particular knowledge makes him a good reader-identification character, because what semi-serious DC fan hasn’t wondered how the rings really work? (Notwithstanding Ganthet’s DIY sequence in Green Lantern Corps, that is.)

As far as phone-book collections go, I’m working my way through Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 2 and Essential Captain America Vol. 4. Finally, while buying some short boxes (better for the aging back) at the comics shop today, I picked up the Muppet Show: Treasure Of Peg-Leg Wilson collection, and can’t wait to read it.

Sean T. Collins

Two anthologies and a lackluster manga for me this week. Click the links for reviews…

not simple by Natsume Ono: Ludicrous melodrama and coincidence mar this manga about a broken family.

Shitbeams on the Loose #2: Fun if not light-the-world-on-fire material from the altcomix edge.

Closed Caption Comics #8: A thrillingly dark and dirty anthology by the CCC collective.

Jeff Lemire

Atari Force #1

1. Atari Force: Gerry Conway and Jose Luis Garcia Lopez: Amazing art and some really fun Sci-fi concepts. This is a really overlooked gem from the 80′s that still holds up to other great team books of the day like The New Teen Titans and The Legion of Superheroes. I wish DC still owned the rights so I could pitch a revamp!

2. Tumor: Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon: A really great graphic novel in both concept and design and in it’s execution. Tuazon’s washy, loose art is a perfect fit for protagonist Frank Armstrong’s increasingly diluted state of mind. He has a brain tumor, but he has to finish on each case before he goes…great read!

3. Revolver: Matt Kindt: Matt’s debut Vertigo GN is awesome. His art has never looked better and the post-apocalyptic concept of a man caught between two world’s (literally) is perfectly explored with Matt’s trademark sense of cleverness, great characterization and amazing art. Also features the coolest page numbers EVER.

3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man

I’m a great admirer of Matt Kindt‘s work. Honestly, I’m an even bigger admirer of Kindt’s ingenious nature. Case in point, for his latest book, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man (published by Dark Horse and released in late September), he has developed a Giant Man Mini Comic – Spy Capsule and Giant-Man 3-D Postcards. Before we get into our email interview about 3 Story, I have to reiterate what I said in last week’s What Are You Reading that (in addition to checking out Kindt’s latest work, of course) you should pick up Strange Tales 2 (featuring Kindt’s Black Widow tale).  Here’s a bit of Dark Horse’s background on the tale (before stepping into the interview): “Craig Pressgang’s life is well documented in his official CIA biography, Giant Man: Pillar of America, but the heroic picture it paints is only half the story. The continuous growth caused by Craig’s strange medical condition brings a variety of problems as he becomes more isolated and unknowable. Told in three eras by three women with unique relationships with Craig, 3 Story follows his sad life from his birth to the present.” Be sure to visit the Dark Horse site for a seven-page sample of the book. 

Tim O’Shea: A three-fold question of sorts (pun intended): Which came first, the idea to build your latest book as three stories in one, or the fact that the lead character was three stories tall in height or that you wanted to tell the story from the perspective of three women?

Matt Kindt: I wanted to tell the story from three different generations’ perspective — that was first. Then the idea for the title. I’m usually terrible with titles. It takes me forever to come up with something and then I usually go back to the working title anyway. Super Spy started out as my jokey working title and then it grew on me so I just left it. A friend accused me of naming it 3 Story so it would be filed on the bookshelf next to my other book 2 Sisters — completely unintentional. But I’m thinking my next book might be called “4 Shadows”. (kidding)

O’Shea: In a recent post right before SPX, you wrote: “sold out of 3 Story last weekend at Windy City Con but should have a whole new stack of books for SPX”–did you sell out there as well?

Kindt: No — came close — but I had a LOT more books for that show. But I think I sold even more at SPX which was a great show.

O’Shea: I love your penchant for diagrams in the midst of your storytelling, at one point in this book you diagram a bullet as it enters a man’s eye and exits out his neck. What motivated you to make that storytelling choice? Later in the story you utilize architectural plans. Did you do those yourself–and if you did, did it require a great deal of research to get it just right?

Kindt: Someone asked me about the bullet diagram thing and if it was a reference to the JFK “magic bullet” which might be kind of true. In my storytelling I really like to just break down a moment sometimes — and show every second of that key moment. So that was just one kind of way of doing it. Instead of showing him just slump over. Bullets do crazy things and bullets are terrifying to me — it’s such a careless and horrible thing to fire a bullet because they can bounce of and around and pass right through you and you don’t even feel it or paralyze you. So by breaking that all down and showing the path of the bullet, to me it helps focus on this really horrible thing instead of just glazing over it.

With the architecture — I did a little bit of research and then built some blueprints based on a bunch of reference I’d pulled — I had an idea of the shape and size of the thing. I liked the idea of his home being a sort of extended upside-down ship in the middle of this field. I think the blueprints came from this idea I had of wanting to do a scene between them that was really just talking about their sex life but do it in a way that sort of protected the characters’ privacy at the same time.

O’Shea: Can you explain your affinity for the Cold War era, given that it is seemingy the backbone of your story? I place the middle of this story around 1963 (feel free to correct me here) a full 10 years before you were born.

Kindt: Other than World War II, the Cold War was the other great time period for spies — great gadgets, great cars and clothes. And a lot of history happening then. Civil rights, JFK, Vietnam starting. Lots of material and themes there to tap into.

O’Shea: You were very selective of when you stepped away from full color storytelling into small 8-page b&w snippets every 20 pages or so (it seems). How did you decide what parts warranted that unique treatment?

Kindt: Most of that I had built into the story as the threads that tie the action and sections together. I had a LOT of back story and things I wanted to get in to the main narrative and a lot of things that I ended up just pulling out of the book completely. So those sections serve that purpose but I also like the idea of making the book feel a little like a scrapbook or a secret file that you’re picking up and trying to put together the pieces of this story.

O’Shea: In college, Craig’s room-mate is Ray Cool, an African-American student. As far as I can tell, Ray is the only African-American in the story. Is this a subtle (or maybe just subtle to me) effort on your part to emphasize that the two are kindred spirits as outcasts of sorts, given the 1960s and the Civil Rights era?

Kindt: I’d accept that interpretation. That character is actually a sort of amalgamation of a few real people — friends of my parents during the 60s so he can be that be he’s also just very kind of real in my mind.

O’Shea: I love the nuances of pop culture you use in the story. For example, one WWII era letter to Craig’s mom quotes the Andrew Sisters’ Shoo-shoo Baby? How did you come up using that song in particular?

Kindt: I listen to a lot of music — and jazz from that era is just really great. I had another 10 pages or so in the book that I took out that went into Craig’s shoes and a lot of symbolism with these empty shoes and the feelings that his mother got from seeing his shoes and then his wife and daughter. So kind of a silly pun almost by using that song.

O’Shea: Any chance you would consider creating a sequel Secret Files of Giant Man (along the lines of this separate story)?

Kindt: I would love to. Usually with my books there is so much work put into it that I use everything and everything I did ends up in the book. With 3 Story, it was a little different. The ending and the different little moments were really delicately balanced and I had a lot of extra story pages and ideas that I just pulled out of the book so the story beats would be a little more “poetic” and have a unique rhythm to them. So there are whole subplots and other aspects to Craig’s life that I would love to put together somehow.

O’Shea: Speaking of that short story, I loved the rare instance of him underappreciating the size of something in the Louvre, but what was the thinking in choosing that particular art piece?

Kindt: That was my reaction to that piece when I first saw it. Only in reverse. That had always been one of my favorite paintings but I’d only seen reproductions in textbooks, etc. and they were always 2 or 3 inches big. So when my wife and I tracked it down at the Louvre it was literally a shock — that painting is huge in person. Large than life size. Just crazy big. So I thought it would be funny for him when he got there to not be as impressed.

O’Shea: You used 1960s magazine style ads as storytelling elements in a few pages, How did you come to decide to attempt that (it really worked with the one on page 88) experiment?

Kindt: Initially as I was writing it I knew he would have to make money somehow and product endorsements and advertising seemed like a simple easy fit. Then my next thought is that it would be fun to put ads inside the book so when you flip through it, it looks like there are real ads in the book. I did a ton of fake ads (again, didn’t use even half of them) and as I was putting them into the story and writing the fake ad copy it seemed like a waste. If the ad copy is just cheesy 60s ad copy then it’s kind of a waste to read it let alone write it. So I thought I’d slip some more subtle character dialogue and scenes in there so they ads wouldn’t just be filler. They’d be integral.

O’Shea: Of the three women that tells Craig’s story, who do you find that you feel you executed the most effectively in the book?

Kindt: I think the mother and the wife are probably the most fleshed out and real to me — but only because the daughter is still trying to figure it all out. Trying to figure out who her father was and who she is. The narrative trick there I suppose is that her thoughts and dialogue at the end really end up becoming the Giant Man’s. Most effectively then? I don’t know — they all kind of serve their purpose I suppose.

O’Shea: What do you care to tell folks about your other upcoming projects–Revolver (Vertigo); The Tooth, a fun 70s style comic with Cullen Bunn (Oni); and the Super Spy sequel, Super Natural?

Kindt: Those are the next three books I’m working on. Revolver will be out Summer 2010 and The Tooth is going to be starting up on-line first for free (in November) and then packaged in book form in 2010 as well. Super Natural — still writing and re-writing it and whipping it into shape. It sort of sat on the shelf for a year or so as I finished up 3 Story so now I’m getting back into it and trying to make it a worthy follow up to Super Spy. We’ll see!