Danny Graydon

Last week, legendary UK Comics scribe Pat Mills posted some exceedingly good news on his Facebook page:

“DC Comics confirm Marshal Law omnibus for firm publication date of Spring 2013. It will feature all the Law stories apart from the crossovers.  These might be included in a later omnibus edition.  Sorry about  delays, but this does sound as though it’s finally set in stone.”

Hurrah! Let Joy and Jubilation reign! Finally…! Criminally-underrated, Marshal Law – penned by Mills and blessed with a visual tour-de-force by League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist Kevin O’Neill -  remains one my all-time favourite comic books, a wonderfully funny and scabrous swipe at Superheroes that, twenty-five years on, has lost absolutely none of its merciless satirical edge.

Given that so many classic comics series are bestowed deluxe hardcover collected editions these days, Law’s deserved passage to the same has been frustratingly glacial, thanks to a lengthy stint in limbo at Top Shelf Comix where the promise of a two-volume, slipcased collection of all the Law stories kept slipping back over a period of years, for reasons never explained. However, despite the rather amusing irony that Law has ended up at DC, home of the superhero archetypes that Mills and O’Neill so savagely mocked, the bottom line is that a truly great series that is ripe for discovery will once again be available. It’s a shame that this initial omnibus won’t feature the crossovers, but one mustn’t complain – at least it’s actually bloody happening.

To mark the happy news, here’s a feature on Marshal Law that I wrote for Judge Dredd The Megazine back in early 2009, entitled “FEAR AND LOATHING IN SAN FUTURO!” in which I spoke to Pat and Kevin about their infamous creation.

Enjoy!

In 1987, as superhero comics embraced a “Grim and Gritty” period typified by ultra-seriousness and not-a-little pomposity, writer Pat Mills and artist Kevin O’Neill – both 2000AD legends – provided a savage satirical riposte with Marshal Law, a blackly-hilarious and shockingly-blunt series that took Comics’ most beloved genre to task. A shamefully-underrated Comics gem remembered very fondly by its fans and ripe for rediscovery, Mills and O’Neill spoke to DANNY GRAYDON about the sheer pleasure of taking caped Gods and “blowing the bastards away…!”

When it comes to superheroes, Pat Mills is pretty damned unequivocal: “I fucking hate the bastards…!” he declares, somewhat gleefully, down the phone. A little extreme? Perhaps, yet this is no knee-jerk snobbishness on the part the veteran comics scribe: “When I say I hate them, let me quickly add to that: I hate the value systems that they seem to stand for. If you had superheroes who were actually doing something heroic for a change, who were dealing with real-life issues, as opposed to tokenism. If you had stories which were actually interesting – as in Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and a minority of others.”

 Given that Mills illustrious 40-year career in Comics has been anchored on vivid and varied explorations of the term “hero” and its complexities, generating no shortage of classic characters, his innate dislike of the comparatively-lightweight ideologies and straightforward action that defines the superhero genre is understandable. However, in the mid-80’s, Mills intense dislike of anything involving a cape and tights magnificently fuelled one of his most potent characters: the futuristic super-hero hunter Marshal Law. Created with his long-time 2000AD collaborator Kevin O’Neill, Marshal Law gained instant notoriety for its scathing and ruthless dissection of the superhero genre. Possessing a rare combination of outright hilarity and righteous indignation, Marshal Law is a modern classic.

First appearing in 1987 and then sporadically over the following eleven years via a handful of publishers, Marshal Law was a popular success – providing Mills with his most significant foray in to the American market – but the character never attained the recognition it deserved. Indeed, it’s criminally-underrated. “It’s funny,” observes O’Neill, “There was a book called The Dark Age about the 80’s superheroes, ‘Grim and Gritty’ period of Punisher and the like, and they managed to cover the whole decade but they didn’t mention Marshal Law at all! It surprises me, because the book was popular but now it almost seems to be forgotten.” Perhaps, but the character undoubtedly has a fervent cult following amongst comics fans, with such high-profile followers as acclaimed Scots comics scribe Mark Millar (Wanted, Civil War), who fulsomely proclaimed “I love Watchmen. I love Dark Knight Returns and I worship Will Eisner, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but Marshal Law is still my favourite comic book of all time.”

According to O’Neill, the character’s gestation period came at a time when they were struggling to crack the US market: “Pat and I had done a book called Metalzoic for DC Comics which, unfortunately, came out the same time as The Dark Knight Returns and so wasn’t very successful. While we were doing that I scribbled down some ideas, made the play-on-words “Marshal Law” and drew the rough image of him. I posted to Pat and said maybe we could do something with this. Originally, it was going to be a Mad Max kind of strip, with lots of weird cars and strange mutants and stuff like that.”

               “We knew that Marvel Epic wanted a story from us and Kevin came up with this incredible design for a character.” Mills recalls, adding that, at that point, superheroes weren’t even a consideration. “I came up with a classic crime thriller plot, involving an illegitimate son who comes after the father. The original intention was to show the plot from six different angles and to have a central character who was corrupt.” However, rather inevitably when Marvel Comics is in the equation, superheroes became a consideration. “Both those elements were diminished when the superhero element took centre stage. I kept looking at the guy and thinking there’s a kind of superhero thing here and Marvel is the home of superheroes so I really should do them. But how the hell can I do them? I loathe them! I’m not really qualified to write about superheroes, but I’m sure as hell qualified – in fact, uniquely qualified – to write a superhero-hunter.”

This Eureka moment gave the character, as Mills saw it, “an energy that is very much unique to him.” It certainly inspired O’Neill, who created potent new elements to surround the character, notably that the character work in a dystopian, earthquake-devastated future version of San Francisco – dubbed San Futuro – which would be populated with superheroes, who had returned from a Vietnam-style conflict as disenfranchised, disillusioned veterans, albeit dangerously powerful ones. “Kevin and I are extremely influenced by the surreal and cutting-edge fantasy of Metal Hurlant Magazine, which was coming out with the most astonishing, surreal fantasy and we were trying to adopt that style.”

In O’Neill’s hands, San Futuro became a vividly baroque mix of dystopian city and surrealist nightmare. “We wanted it to be a recognisable ruin of San Francisco but also to be incredibly operatic.” says O’Neill. “There is some wonderful Surrealism that Kevin gets in but he draws it with a “straight bat”, adds Mills, referring to the gloriously-OTT environment of the San Futuro Police Department, replete with giant Magnum .44 elevated walkways and a Commissioner’s office where the desk is surrounded by a small shark-infested moat, a location, according to O’Neill “became more ludicrous each time we went there in an effort to show just how duplicitous (Law’s Police handler, McGland) was.”

Crucially, the leather and barbed-wire sporting Marshal Law (O’Neill: “The Gestapo look always works!”) would be powered by the contradiction that he himself is a super-powered war veteran, who retains his ideals and chooses to become a licensed vigilante charged with policing his own kind with terminal prejudice. “He’s the only one who wanted the job of doing it to his own.” says Mills, “He feels he has to do something about this plague of so-called superheroes who are swamping his city and behaving reprehensibly. Of course, inevitably, his attention strays to the upper-echelon superheroes and, let’s face it, superheroes would be a rich elite.”

The first storyline, Fear and Loathing, saw Law brought into conflict with America’s Greatest Super-Hero, The Public Spirit, whom Law sees as a corrupt mockery of heroic ideals. While the ultra-patriotic The Public Spirit was generally perceived to be a swipe at Superman, Mills maintains that his focus was broader than that. “Indirectly, you could say he was. In fact, the main inspiration was the American iconic figures who have something in common with Superman. A prime source was Ronald Reagan. I had a book of Reagan’s speeches and he had this very jingoistic, Wild West gunslinger rhetoric. From a visual point of view, he is the ultimate hero, but I was actually using lines directly from Reagan. Additionally, I used some John Wayne lines. If he comes across as very real, it’s because he is based on real figures, all of which adds up to a very scary image.”

If Marshal Law’s despised nemesis was a determinedly cynical mix of The Man of Steel and US political icons, there was something decidedly unsettling about The Sleepman, not only a serial killer but The Public Spirit’s illegitimate and more-powerful son. In fact Marshal Law’s young, supposedly-disabled assistant, The Sleepman’s hideous appearance and penchant for raping women dressed as The Public Spirit’s super-heroine girlfriend expressed a grim perversion of Spider-Man’s signature mantra – “With the greatest power comes the greatest irresponsibility…” – and underlined the extent of the ruthlessness which Mills was applying to the genre.

While Fear and Loathing and its successor, 1989’s Punisher/Marvel pastiche Marshal Law Takes Manhattan, were controversial but very popular, the third instalment seriously ruffled feathers in the industry. 1990’s Kingdom of The Blind (published by the short-lived UK comics publisher Apocalypse) in which Marshal Law faced a very thinly-disguised version of Batman called The Private Eye, perfectly coincided with the immediate aftermath of the phenomenally popular Tim Burton Batman movie released the prior year and which had ignited massively renewed interest in the character. “[That story] was an absolute blast,” recalls O’ Neill “the first one we did outside (Marvel imprint) Epic. Batman’s in the news now, but he was very much in the news then. Pat did warn me that people might find it objectionable – and indeed they did, that one more than any other. It made people blanche! Pat was always amazed that I was a Batman fan and that he never was – but some of the more venomous stuff came from me, as I was always pushing him to go further. It just didn’t bother me.”

“Within the industry, I think it’s pretty fair to say that just about everybody was pretty critical.” Mills adds, “These characters are considered to be almost Gods and, certainly, professionals both in Britain and in America took particular exception to Kingdom of The Blind. I think (artist) Simon Bisley, amongst others, thought it was very mean-spirited.” Not unsurprisingly, because the pair’s deconstruction of the genre’s most popular character was utterly unforgiving: The Private Eye was a supremely vicious thug with a murderous hatred of the lower classes and whose suspiciously-large number of teen sidekicks was down to the fact he was harvesting their organs in an effort to prolong his own lifespan. As for his alter-ego, billionaire Scott Brennan was an arrogant and vigorously-elitist Orwellian poster-child possessed by a pathological fear of his inherited riches being taken away. Ouch.

“I read a book about the dreams of very rich people and a very common dream, I discovered to my great delight, that for all their billions, they are absolutely tormented that someone was going to take it all away from them. That was my story: he’s a billionaire who’s going to get out there and do it to them before they do it to him!” It allowed Mills to exercise one of his most vigorous complaints about superheroes: “It’s very bad to have these wealthy, patronising people made in to heroes, when the working-class heroes are thin on the ground. These people are scared and to eulogise them as Percy Blakeney’s and the like, it’s ludicrous!” The story remains a firm favourite to the pair, especially O’Neill, as “that was the one where I was really happy with the artwork.”

Visually, one of the series’ joys was the profusion of punning graffiti that often filled O’Neill’s panels. From an over-sized bullet emblazoned with “This is it: THE BIG ONE!” to a gun barrel marked “Swallow This” to a superhero corpse with his head smashed through a TV with “Turn on, tune in, drop dead!” scrawled on the side, they all amusingly added to the series already very mordant humour. “When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of MAD paperbacks,” O’Neill explains, “They were so densely populated with background material, notations, the equivalent of Graffiti, I guess. I was a big fan of Bill Elder and Wally Wood and it just seemed incredibly American, that form of density. You could read it three or four times and it would still be funny.” For Mills, this seemingly-simple visual extra provided a vital service to the series: “Those graffiti lines were pure Kevin. You can look back at certain scenes in the script which might not have been particularly humorous, but by the time Kevin’s worked on it, there is a dark black humour there.”

One of the best aspects of Marshal Law, Mills notes, is that “he’s not a character who runs out of steam when you’ve satirised the obvious superhero targets.” Following the duo’s masterful filleting of The Dark Knight in Kingdom of The Blind, the subsequent stories demonstrated Law’s genre versatility, although maintaining the core superhero satire. The Hateful Dead (1991) and Super Babylon (1992) received a hearty infusion of Zombies, while 1994’s SF Horror entry Secret Tribunal is essentially Law vs. Alien. The character also indulged some high-profile crossovers, with the existentialist horror of Law vs. Pinhead: Law in Hell (1993), Image Comics big-hitter The Savage Dragon (1997) and finally – as well, as somewhat surprisingly – The Mask (1998). “We got in to the notion of crossovers as it is a good way to promote the character and a good way to take him further.” Mills explains. “One of the reasons is that these people who secretly pray to these icons probably thought to themselves “Well, okay, you’ve taken the piss out of Batman and Superman, why don’t you f**k off now?” but Marshal Law isn’t that slight a character. Those big superheroes were the ones I guess we had to start with, but he is very much an all-round character. You can hit all kinds of notes. It’s a much wider concept.”

While Marshal Law has faded from view in the last decade – save for two text novellas, collectively titled Origins, published last year – an intriguing reminder of Mills and O’Neill’s creation came in late 2006 with the publication of The Boys, a creator-owned series written by Garth Ennis (Preacher) and drawn by Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan). While not pastiche-led nor as surreal or dystopian as Marshal Law, instead favouring Preacher-style ultra-violence and sexuality, the series concept – about a super powered CIA squad whose job it is to keep watch on superheroes and, if necessary, intimidate or kill them – is remarkably similar to Law (particularly the main super-antagonist, “The Homelander” essentially being a post-9/11 version of The Public Spirit) a fact seemingly totally lost on the book’s fervent core audience, likely too young to remember the barbed-wire clad Marshal.

“I’ve heard about this!” Mills exclaims, “I deliberately haven’t read it myself because it is in the same genre as Law. It is flattering that there are other anti-superhero characters out there. I suppose whatever motivates Garth may be the same as what motivated me, but in the case of Marshal Law, what makes it so strong is that it is very apparent that we really mean it. It’s not in tune with the fashionable sensibility in modern comics which is to be very cynical and very violent. Marshal Law may have those elements, but it’s primarily because I feel so passionately about the notion of heroes and heroism and the way they are so devalued.”

               The series’ descent into relative obscurity has in large part been down to the fact that getting hold of the various stories has long been a difficult proposition. This year, however, the series will get the treatment it has long deserved when indie US comics publisher Top Shelf publishes a lavish hardcover collection of every Law story. Unsurprisingly, the prospect thrills Law’s creators: “It needs it, doesn’t it? It’s such a classic character.” Says Mills. “It’s amazingly gratifying.” O’Neill enthuses, “There’s still an undercurrent of interest in Marshal Law and it’ll be good to get a complete collected edition. It’s running to at least 500 pages and will probably end up being a couple of volumes in a slipcase. It’ll certainly be substantial. I will be looking through boxes of stuff to find sketches, notes and various other things.” While the extras are to be determined, Mills confirms that the Savage Dragon episode – collected for the first time since its 1997 printing – will be coloured and the Law Vs.Pinhead tale will be re-coloured.

“When I was doing a signing tour for [The League of Extraordinary Gentleman] The Black Dossier,” O’Neill mentions, “the question I was asked most often was “when will there be more Law books?”.” Unfortunately, it won’t be happening in the immediate future as O’Neill is fully committed to the forthcoming fourth volume of League, while Mills is busy maintaining his considerable output for 2000AD and his French comics series, Requiem Vampire Hunter. Encouragingly, though, the enthusiasm is only too apparent: “Of all the things I’ve worked on, Law is the one I’d go back to – but it’s when we both have the time. I’m sure we’ll do more as we never got fed up with it. . Whenever talking about the earlier books, we always end up laughing our heads off and talking about what we should be doing.” O’Neill says. “I’d always make time for Kevin,” says Mills without hesitation, “but the compromise solution we have at the moment is the novellas – which isn’t entirely satisfactory, but I think there is a market for pulp fiction and therefore a Law pulp fiction novel. If Kevin doesn’t have time to do another Law graphic novel, we will probably end up writing another text novel.”

After 23 years, Mills enthusiasm for Marshal Law clearly hasn’t dimmed, likely because the character directly caters to the core concern of his writing: “Once I get into Law, I find it quite a wrench to come out of again. What he’s saying is actually very, very important: people who have the label “hero” are often undeserving of it and there are so many everyday heroes who are ignored. Marshal Law is so important to me for that reason. Kevin and I still miss the character a great deal because there is so much we can still do with him.”, before mischievously adding, “Here’s this character waving two fingers in the air at characters who are regarded with quasi-mystical significance and to me, it’s like, I can’t think of a better reason to blow the bastards away…!”

On March 14th, I made my debut appearance on BBC 1′s flagship and long-running Film programme, Film 2012, in a video segment covering Comic Book Films. Hosted by my good friend and EMPIRE colleague Christ Hewitt, the segment features myself, Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar (Kick-Ass), Pixar director Andrew Stanton (John Carter) and MARVEL Entertainment’s Kevin Feige discussing the current state of comic book cinema in what will be a banner year for the genre, thanks to such hugely anticipated fare as The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers.

It’s long been an ambition of mine to appear on this programme, having watched it since I was very young, and I was enormously pleased with how this came out (and given that I am speaking alongside three dsitinctly heavy-hitters, I thought I acquitted myself well!). Oh yes, and I get to show off some sartorial geekery via the War of The Worlds leather jacket!

Here’s the entire six-minute clip, via YouTube:

Huge hanks to Chris and BBC Producer Suniti Somaiya for inviting me to take part! Hope to do it again sometime…

Bryan Singer’s SUPERMAN RETURNS gets a terribly unfair rap, not least maintained by the simple-minded cacophony of online fanboys, whose criticism seems confined to a small array of gripes (e.g: “Superman just lifts things!”; “Superman’s a deadbeat Dad!”; “Superman’s doesn’t punch anything!” etc) that are tediously parroted in a knee-jerk fashion, with determinedly little or no recognition of the film’s strengths. I’m a hearty defender of Singer’s film, in spite of knowing only too well that he essentially remade (and sequelled) Richard Donner’s hallowed 1978 original with a melancholic sheen.

Brandon Routh was a fine Man of Steel – it’s a genuine shame that he’ll never reprise the role – and I consider the film’s deliriously-exciting airline rescue sequence to be one of the very best action set-pieces produced in the last decade, a bravura showcase of digital effects. Yet, what I continue to find particularly admirable was the film’s bold focus on Superman’s most vital element – behind the invulnerability and superpowers, he’s a man with a vulnerable heart – and the film’s plot presents him with a singular emotional challenge – a son unknown to him –  that cannot be overcome by physicality. Granted, it may not have been a plot element that was riven with excitement – and one that couldn’t possibly have been ignored in any sequel -  but it effectively mined a seam of emotional drama that most summer blockbusters would be less than concerned with.

Five years on and the recent release on Blu-Ray of the existing five Superman films released between 1978 and 2006 provided the opportunity to finally see the discarded alternate opening to Superman Returns, a seven minute sequence in which Superman travels, via a crystalline spacecraft reminiscent of that which rocketed him to Earth in Donner’s film, to the radioactive remains of the planet Krypton in a fruitless search for survivors. As cut scenes go, it was a bloody expensive excision – reportedly costing $10 million! – but, as you can see below, it was impeccably rendered and provides a nicely moody atmosphere, if perhaps a little too dark, sedately paced and a low-key introducion of our hero.

Does it make a valuable addition to the film? I think so: aside from the opening text, the mission’s failure is only mentioned by Clark to his mother (“That place was a graveyard…”) and it adds a level of gravitas to the later revelation that he was actually duped into leaving Earth, also foreshadowing the climactic peril of New Krypton. It also features a nice development of the detail in Donner’s film that Superman’s S shield motif is actually a family crest of sorts, and it’s certainly dramatic to see it here as a monolithic stone monument. The film’s ultimate opening makes an immediate connection to Donner”s film with the shot of the barren Kryptonian terrain that opened that film – replete with Marlon Brando’s voice over – and so was much more effective in setting out its stall, but the Return to Krypton sequence is far from a deservedly-dumped dud – for ten million clams, one should hope so!

Once Blu-Ray emerged as the clear victor in the so-called Format Wars with HD-DVD a few years back, that was the green light to embrace hi-def home video. Since then, I have been an enthusiastic convert, building up a growing library of new releases and upgrades of my favourite classics. With the latter, there’s no doubt that Blu-Ray is a veritable minefield of “double-dipping” – but, let’s face it,  it is difficult to turn down the prospect of films like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back To The Future and The Lord of The Rings Trilogy in stunning, fully-remastered transfers. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Of course, one of the inherent ironies of Blu-Ray is that, in many cases, double-dipping is part of the package, with a DVD version offered alongside the Blu-Ray disc. Initially, I thought this was resoundingly pointless – why would you want another copy in lesser quality? – but, actually, it’s become rather handy, as it gives me a version that I can show to my students via my laptop (which has a B-D drive, but which doesn’t function with the university’s overhead projectors). In “Triple Play” editions, you also get the added bonus of a “Digital Copy” – to play via iTunes or Windows Media Player – which perfectly caters for the vast increase in mobile consumption. Again, it’s handy to have a stash of movies available on your laptop, readily available if, say, you’re travelling.

Except, I discovered that the generosity of a digital copy turns out to be an irritatingly limited gesture.

Recently, I upgraded my laptop and transferred over an existing selection of digital copies that included regularly-watched fare like the JJ Abrams Star Trek, Inception, The Hangover, Watchmen and others. When I tried to play them on Windows Media Player, the DRM (Digital Rights Management) kicked in and asked me for the code that came with the Blu-Ray. I got the case for Star Trek off the shelf, got the code and typed it in… only to be told that I have exceeded my one-time-only use of the code. With the exception of one film – The International – all of the others did the same thing.

So, basically, the effusive promise on a Blu-Ray’s packaging that you have “a digital copy to watch whenever and wherever you want!” has a hidden caveat – so long as you don’t upgrade your fucking laptop/desktop/tablet/iPhone. (Which, I add, is an anathema to every consumer electronics manufacturer in existence.). The digital copy is undoubtedly offered a means to offset the hugely-damaging effects of online Piracy, so why apply such a limitation? I suspect the answer may lie in a corporate eye for future dividends ie – “Upgraded your laptop but want to have a digital copy of Inception to watch on the go? Well, come and get it on iTunes for just… etc“

Except: why in the hell would I want to do that? I bought the Triple Play Blu-Ray set for £2o, so surely I should have the right to have the contents available for perpetuity. I’m certainly not going to buy the Blu-Ray set again – although I’m quite, quite  sure the studios would love that! As a friend of mind rightly pointed out: “DRM hurts no one but the consumer.” Of course, this isn’t the end of the world: I do have two versions of the film to watch, but it’s irritating that the version that’s purposely meant to allow more flexible viewing has been taken away because I simply purchased a new laptop. Yet, the biggest irony of all is that such behaviour by the studios is surely utterly self-defeating. If you’re determined to have a digital copy of your favourite film and have been denied ongoing access thanks to the vagaries of DRM, then there is one avenue that can sort your issue out with no added cost: Bit Torrent.

Now, that’s worthy of a hearty “D’OH!”…

I am a big fan of the Downfall spoof. The long-running internet meme – anchored on re-subtitling a key scene from the superb 2004 film Der Untergang, in which Adolf Hitler receives the news that the tide has turned against The Third Reich, prompting his unrestrained fury – has proved so wonderfully malleable, even if, much to the producers chagrin, it does make light of a very serious moment in world history. The internet is teeming with then now (and the true gems are certainly far outnumbered by the vaguely-amusing ones…) but, in the wake of the News International phone-hacking scandal that’s dominating British Media at the moment, a new stone-cold classic has emerged- and which, rather refreshingly, doesn’t use the same old sequence…

“Oh yeah, I’M THE BOSS…!” Love it. Whoever did this: top work…!!

These days, the only time you hear about Danny DeVito’s 2002 black comedy Death To Smoochy is when it’s the punch-line to The Daily Show host’s Jon Stewart’s habitual self-mockery of his acting career, the pinnacle of which, he quips, was as the film’s “fourth male lead”. In actual fact, the genial Stewart was being a little self-aggrandising: he was at best fifth. “Ho-Ho” etc.

If Stewart’s amusing self-deprecation gives the impression that Death To Smoochy was a bad film – he’s also played on the fact that it was the last film he ever appeared in – then the film’s performance certainly reinforces that notion. Despite receiving a wide release in over 2000 cinemas in the U.S, it  was a box-office disaster, grossing just over $8 million from a budget of $50 million and international earnings were negligible (although, in the U.K, the film was the victim of sheer bad luck as the intended distributor went under shortly before the release date, so only attendees of the press screenings ever saw it). The reviews were mixed and it swiftly swan-dived into obscurity.

It was an ignominious fate for a film that appeared to have a lot going for it. A merciless and gleefully misanthropic skewering of the world of Kids TV (a wonderfully designed one, too…), it had the the presence of two high-profile stars in Robin Williams and Edward Norton, bolstered by a fantastic supporting cast including DeVito, Catherine Keener, Pam Ferris, Harvey Fierstein and Stewart. Then there was the fact that, as a director, DeVito had a proven track record in the realms of satire tinted with gallows humour, notably with 1987′s Throw Momma From The Train and 1989′s The War of The Roses. DeVito himself seemed genuinely perplexed by the film’s reception, ruefully opening his commentary on the film’s DVD release with: “Hello. It’s Danny. It’s been, um… I guess now a few months since the release of Death to Smoochy, so the mourning period is over…”

The film’s outright failure has always surprised me because it’s actually a tremendously funny film. Williams, who at the time was exercising his acting muscles with considerably darker roles in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia and after Smoochy, One Hour Photo, is terrific as the hugely popular but woefully corrupt host “Rainbow Randolph” whose wilful bribery of parents desperate to have their kids centre stage on Randolph’s show is exposed by a Police sting operation (“And for what, Randy?? Asswipe Money!” admonishes Stewart’s similarly-corrupt TV executive) and which launches him into a hilariously-embittered vendetta with Norton’s swiftly-placed, squeaky-clean successor Sheldon Mopes a.k.a “Smoochy The Rhino”. Long criticised for squandering his huge comedic talents in overly-saccharine roles, here Williams puts his famed manic energy and improvisational skills to great use in creating a proper bastard sinking to increasingly amusing  lows. Randolph’s efforts to sabotage Smoochy’s show with phallic-shaped cookies (“They’re made from dil-dough!”) and later frame him as a neo-Nazi ringleader are particular highlights of Williams’ performance, which, quite unbelievably, got nominated for a Razzie Award.

Moreover, it’s a satire with real bite. However: this, I suspect, was a big part of Smoochy’s downfall. Culturally, Kids TV is something of a sacred cow in the U.S, a slice of Americana that generated genuine and fiercely-loved icons from long-running and resolutely clean-cut shows like Sesame Street and Mister Roger’s Neighbourhood. A mainstream Hollywood film portraying it, therefore, as riddled with corruption, graft and Mafia ties, eagerly pursuing barely-concealed commercial agendas, with presenters who are heroin addicts and which manipulates children’s perceptions  – beautifully done in a sequence where Norton’s Smoochy leads a group of kids in a song about dealing with an abusive stepfather – was always going to struggle to get a widespread audience, especially in the ultra-sensitive national mood that dominated America post-9/11.

Yet, in the years since, Death To Smoochy has never graduated to full cult status – not really – which is surprising as it has all the hallmarks of a solid and enduring cult film, not least via a script stuffed with quotable lines. There’s no time limit on attaining cultdom, obviously, but it’s a film that’s undoubtedly ripe for rediscovery and reassessment no matter what. Nowhere near as poor as dismissive reviews, vastly-erroneous Razzie nominations and Jon Stewart quips might lead you to assume, DeVito delivered a dark comedy to savour.

FABLES is far and away one of my favourite comic books. Since its debut in 2002, the epic and multi award-winning series has wowed fans and critics alike with its masterfully modern take on classic Fairy Tales and Folklore, rich with inventiveness, elegance, wit, emotion and action. Having passed 100 issues and now a veritable franchise replete with equally-acclaimed spin-off’s, it has become one of flagship titles of DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint. The release of a new trade paperback collection – of which there have been sixteen so far – is always a source of high anticipation for me.  It was simply fantastic, therefore, to have the opportunity to speak to the series’ mastermind Bill Willingham for the latest issue of COMIC HEROES (#7), which hits the shops in the next week or so. My enjoyable chat with the very genial wordsmith lasted for well over an hour, and, as a result, I had loads of extra material that my 2000-word feature simply couldn’t hold. It’d be a shame for it not to be seen, so am placing the unexpurgated version here. Thanks to Pamela Mullin at Vertigo for setting this up.  Enjoy!

DG: It’s astounding to think that Fables is closing in on its tenth anniversary – did you ever think it would go this far?

BILL WILLINGHAM: At the beginning, I was in this pattern of coming up with ideas for Vertigo comics that they would agree to do and which would get a pleasant amount of critical attention and no sales. Even though I thought Fables was a stronger idea than most, I expected it to follow that pattern. If we got a full 12 issues out of it, I would have counted that as a masterstroke of success! So yes, the long-term success of Fables has come as a bit of a surprise – and continues to. I am not the most trusting fellow: I keep expecting the entire readership to wake up in time and collectively realise that we have been making these stories of talking ducks and moo-cows and exclaim “ what were they thinking?”…!

Instead of twelve issues, you are now pushing 160 with the core series and the Jack of Fables and Cindarella spin-off titles. Fables seems like the natural successor to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series – would you agree?

 I like to put the caveat when those comparisons are made, in the sense that Sandman was certainly its own thing. I wouldn’t try to recreate it in tone or in substance with a series of my own. If Fables seems to be the anchor upon which Vertigo is moored at any given time these days, then sure!

A hallmark of Fables is the incredibly intricate plotting – how much of it did you have worked out in advance?

 At the beginning, I think I had a couple of years worked out. You generate three or four story arcs in the proposal and you’ve got the first two years right there. When I began to see that it had legs and that the investment of care and planning might actually pay off, I think at any given time [Fables artist] Mark Buckingham – who is integral to long-term planning- and I have the next year’s worth planned, in that we know what every issue is going to be and probably the two years beyond that in broad strokes and lots more that we hope the book survives long enough to be able to do someday.

Fables is similar to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman in that it exposes literary archetypes to new audiences – what’s the feedback from fans?

 When we started Fables, what we do all along is take all of the well-known stories – Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Cinderella, the three Bears, all of the others that are well established in the public psyche – and use them as a carrier mechanism so I would be able to use some of the less well-known ones, the more fun and the more interesting ones. My favourites are certainly more esoteric. There have been occasions where I haven’t known who this character was and that has inspired me to go and look up those stories. I hope this continues to be true. We are not overriding the old stories, we are part of the same ongoing process.

How did you develop the characters in to their various roles? Was it vital to go against expectation, as in positioning the Big Bad Wolf  – a classic villain – as the hero figure?

All this happened at a time when fairytale characters were coming round the bend again and, even in modern settings where I was going to tell you new stories, every character would more or less be the same character they were in the original stories. But, ff I’m going to be successful in all in this new take, it would have to be all “Oh, I would never have suspected this character to be like this!” – but I would also apply logic and so this character would more than likely end up in this position etc. And so someone like Snow White would become this authoritarian character by the time that we meet her. With Bigby Wolf – my two favourite fairytale characters of all time were the Pied Piper of Hamlin and the big bad Wolf – I figured that if I kept Bigby is a villain, then I would only be able to use him two or three times because I hate the idea of the recurring villain. Then, it becomes the story of a completely impotent protagonist. You know, if the Joker can’t be stopped and will always come back than Batman cannot truly work so I didn’t want that. But I wanted to use the Big Bad Wolf wrote long time. I figured that I could come up with a reasonable idea for how Bigby could have become reformed. One of those being, of course, that he met the woman for him. I joined a church once because my girlfriend of the time was into all that so I can see that as a pretty effective motivating factor for reform.

An early treat was seeing Snow and Bigby get together – how confident were you that they’d make a good couple?

 Initially it came as a dare: what is the most improbable thing that I can do? Most of Fables is asking those kinds of questions. Every one of those questions get answered in a way that makes a good story. With Snow and Bigby it’s like: he’s a wolf and she is a fairytale princess who keeps getting her heart broken by anyone she cares about. The likelihood of them getting together is pretty low so let’s see if we can make it happen! It’s an irresistible challenge.

The series rewards long-term readers as all the characters eventually get their moment in the spotlight: is there anyone who you have big plans for?

 There are recurring characters we have plans for. The question would have been yes a few years ago when I finally came up with a good story for the Pied Piper, my other big favourite. This ended up being Peter and Max, the Fables novel. So, I have been checking a lot of those off the list. However, there are new characters like Bigby’s cubs-they’re the ones that we have these wonderful extended plans for.

You certainly play the long-game: Frau Totenkinder was the dark horse of the series for 90-odd issues!

 Yup, she got quite a moment in the spotlight when she finally did! That was simply a case of her growing on me as a character. I didn’t think she would be as important as she became. However the coolness factor as well as that there are more interesting things here than you might have suspected, she certainly earned her moment in the sun.

Some of the characters go through startling transformations in the series, Flycatcher for one…

A big part of that is down to Bucky: he said early on that I should not kill off Flycatcher because he’s a real favourite. That had a big effect, because I would have just gone ahead and done it if he had not brought up! He said don’t kill him and I clearly wanted to. So it was just a process of what is the most evil stuff that I can do to him instead of killing him but then get a good story out of it. More interesting than a tragic character is this hapless, innocent character who turns out to have a noble and solid force within him. And I love doing that: Boy Blue was going to be nothing more than an office clerk that he developed into a surprising character arc. Such things are not planned from the beginning, they simply evolved from them being in the right place.

Yet, you’re not afraid to consign major characters to dark fates, like Prince Charming and Boy Blue – would you ever declare the likes of Bigby expendable?

One of the rules that we made when I got into this was that no one is safe so the long-term answer is yes. Like anyone else in the series, like Flycatcher – even though Bucky would be saddened by this - they can potentially go. That said: I don’t think I have any base plans at the moment to do so. I think the story wherein that actually happened would have to be pretty awesome.

Superhero comics notoriously subscribe to the idea of death being reversible, do you subscribe to that with Fables’ characters?

 Sort of yes and no. My reflective answer would be that the whole superhero thing of “no one’s ever really dead” undercuts the power of the stories. Generally I think dead would be dead. Of course, you’re dealing with a cosmology that is already ready-made where that is not the case, where there is such a thing as an afterlife and things like that. So I suppose there is a process of negotiation. Okay, so I want this story to mean something, let’s say that I want to remain adamant that Boy Blue is dead so that his death story continues to have its power, then there needs to be something that expresses that these people do believe in an active afterlife. There are stories where you actually go to Hell and meet the Devil. So they know those places exist and that is why you get the occasional mentions. But mostly dead is dead. We’ve thought of a story that may come up sometime soon where we may use the ghost of Bluebeard and Shere Kahn for. So yes we will bring characters back as ghosts for a while because we can get a good story out of it but the rule generally is dead is dead-with some restrictions.

It’s routinely alluded to that Fables have a measure of their power by just how beloved their stories are – will you ever divulge the true nature of their power?

 Well, I want to! I think it works well as a mysterious thing right now. One of the things I hate in stories is a massive information dump that occurs in fantasy and science fiction which explains how the world works. I have hopefully been pretty careful about avoiding that. At the same time, I think it’s important that I know what the answers to the questions are. Unless that there’s someone who shows that this is how it definitively works, people will interpret it in various ways. If we ever bring it to an end, I hope that all of the big questions will be answered.

One of the interesting – and amusing – elements of the Fables existence in our world is the sheer level of bureaucracy they have to negotiate…

And they should do! That comes early on in the things that have shown up in my writing. I like to do stories about bureaucracy. I mean, if any of this stuff existed – i.e. magic and miracles and wonders – it would be part of the same mundane nature of our everyday lives. There would be rules, red tape, all of that. For some reason, that idea is endlessly interesting. I have a story kicking around that I may actually write someday: what happens in heaven when a “Certificate of Damnation” goes missing? Anyone who finds it can just fill in any name that they want and it’s like “okay you’re damned now!”. Just that kind of bureaucracy of missing paperwork – but in fantastical situations.

Presumably, you chose New York as the location for Fabletown because of the cosmopolitan nature of the city and of its 17th century incarnation as “New Amsterdam”, but were you ever tempted to place Fabletown in Los Angeles?

 I considered a lot of places. I was living in a small town in Vermont and I didn’t think it would appeal occurring in a small town location. I was familiar enough with New York, but not at all with Los Angeles. I visited there a few times and I got lost every time. Hopelessly lost! I was thinking of setting it in Philadelphia, because there was a big urban environment that I was fairly familiar with. However, I finally chose New York two reasons: one was that Fables’ editor Shelly Bond lived there so if location scouting was needed, she could. And she volunteered it! The other is that New York is always going to be the official city that represents coming to a new world. Of Ellis Island etc. You know, people from all over the place flooded in to become Americans and they came to New York. It’s not the case any more but historically it was the case. It was the centre of that.

There’s a clear metaphor of Fabletown being very much like Israel – how much of this informs your stories?

 Yeah that was in issue 75 with the mission where Bigby does give the big Israel analogy beforehand. On one level, I am perplexed: there were some definite pushback from some readers who are not of a pro-Israel stance, who said it’s a very nuanced situation and you don’t know what you’re talking about things like that and that it’s ridiculous to make that comparison. My perplexity was that I was giving Bigby an analogy to use so someone who had not heard of it could have understood. Whether or not you are pro-or anti-Israel, you would have got it. It worked for the story purposes. On the other hand, I think it is an apt analogy: Israel still does exist today, partly from outside help but mostly because they are stiff-necked bastards who are simply not going to roll over so the world will think nice of them. I admire this. My mother was pro-Israel for her entire life and I think managed to pass that along strictly by virtue of the notion of rooting for the underdog and an admiration for their tenacity and I think that shines through in Bigby’s perspective.

A key mystery of the first years of the series was the identity of The Adversary – how did you arrive at your ultimate choice?

[SPOILERS!] It’s probably well-known that my first choice for The Adversary was going to be Peter Pan. The reason for this was that Peter Pan in the original tale – or rather the Disney tale that every kid grows up with – scared me! This was because he was supposed to be the good guy and yet the whole premise of this story is that he comes to your house in the middle of the night and steals you away from your parents! At that point in my life, being kidnapped from parents was amongst the greatest fears that I had. So, when we saw that version in the theatres, I could not understand how people thought that this was a great story – I was like, “No! This guy is a monster! A Villain!” – and this stuck with me for many years! So, when I did Fables, I really wanted him as the Dun-Dun-DAH! Surprise Villain. However, the situation in England with The Great Ormond Street Hospital and joking aside – I joked about those rotten, little sick kids ruining my idea! – I didn’t want to be the one stealing royalties from these kids so we couldn’t use Peter Pan. Although he was public domain here in the US, he wasn’t yet in place we wanted to sell the series to, so we had to switch them out. I still liked the idea of The Ultimate Villain being looked upon as one of the good guys in Fairytales and they had to be one that everyone knows, but because we had already launched Fables by then and getting it underway, that list of characters was pretty short. We were already using everyone that we had planned to. It was a matter of mentally going down that list and seeing a) who was still available and then b) who would make the most logical Dark Lord. The moment I picked Gepetto from that mental list, I saw in my mind this image of him carving soldiers from this magic grove of wood. I just had an image in my mind of an army of these guys marching down the streets in Fabletown, getting blasted away as they advance, but picking up spare parts from the fallen to repair themselves. This was during the very first round – of many – attempts at a Fables movie. I just couldn’t get that image out of my mind. No flesh army can do that. It turned out to be a stronger idea that Peter Pan, I think. I can see how a literal puppet-master can, by trying to do the right decision at the time, ultimately become an evil emperor.

You’ve parodied many genres throughout the series – what was the most satisfying?

The story of Bigby’s adventures in World War II was one of the most researched stories that we have done, for sure. I wanted it set in Frankenstein’s castle and when I was in the Army in Germany, I was stationed at the Frankenstein castle and was amazed how dilapidated it was allowed to get. I think it was because the Frankenstein story is simply not that popular in Germany. Things like Halloween was just not a big deal over there, so there wasn’t the cache of the spooky Frankenstein castle! However, they have since restored it. At the time, all the castles in Germany could be rented, so as to help pay for the upkeep, for weekends and parties etc. Of the big ones, the restored ones, which you could rent out for weddings and the like, were incredibly expensive. People in the military or the middle classes could never afford it. Because the Frankestein castle was just a ruin – like one tower and a few walls were all that was left – you could rent that for a song, so it was a popular place for people to go and spend a weekend. There were no facilities, you sleep in sleeping bags, there was nothing, but you were in The Frankesnstein Castle, for God’s sake! When I wanted to use that for the WWII story, I did a lot of research, finding out where Mary Shelley probably saw the castle on one of her trips through Germany and plucking that out as a good name for my protagonist. Also, there was this serendipitous thing where it turns out there was, in the nearby town, a secret underground tunnel which ran from the town in to the Frankenstein castle! It started with me thinking is there any way I can do a Wolfman versus Frankenstein, Universal Studios-style monsters story and then, the commando group were mix and match, patchwork versions of all the people I served with in the army.

The series can be tremendously violent – was it important to evoke that often-overlooked aspect of the original stories?

I think so. I certainly don’t have a yearning for lots of on-screen gore – things like Friday 13^th do not appeal to me. However, as terrible consequence of a good story, then yes, absolutely. Part of the promise of Fables was to bring back the grim nature – no pun intended – of the original stories. They were macabre! You know, ‘Dad was a meanie, so we’re going to kill him, cut him up and serve him to his own family as a lesson’! Well, that’s a little OTT even for me!

Speaking of violence,  Boy Blue’s incursion into The Homelands where he used the Vorpal Sword to slay Imperial forces left and right was distinguished by that marvellous “SNICKER-SNAKT” sound-effect!

 That sound effect is actually in the original Jabberwocky song in Through The Looking-Glass where that poem appears. It’s just a short poem and part of it is that when you encounter the Jabberwock, you have your Vorpal Sword and you can slice the beast’s head off. In the midst of this wonderful jumble of the English language, which has more made up words every line than I think anyone has ever done, put in ”SNICKER-SNAKT!” as the sound of the Vorpal Sword – which cannot be improved upon! You HAVE to say it out loud!

You have an excellent collaboration with artist Mark Buckingham – What makes him the ideal core artist for Fables?

Well, he has built his own job there! I have been in this business long enough to see that one of the handicaps of starting a new ongoing series was that it’s hard to keep an artist on a long-term basis. Artists, like writers, like to do many, many things and writers can do those projects because even thought the work might be just as emotionally-intense, it’s not as time-intensive. I can work on Fables and other things, artists have to work on what they’re doing at any given moment. As a result, they tend to come and go. So, my intention was to have a different artist do each story arc. When Mark was brought in early on, it was a no-brainer; I had worked with him of the Merv Pumpkinhead special which was delightful. I said of course he needs to be one of our first guys. I think he was the one who said that he wants to be one of the first guys, but I also want to be the second and the third and fourth etc. He wants it as a regular gig, which surprised me and I didn’t think anyone would want this long-term. I am so happy he offered to stay. If I could adopt him and force him to work on Fables for the rest of his life, I would! Luckily, he seems inclined and loves the book as much as I do!

Does “Bucky” have story input in to Fables various arcs?

Oh, gosh, yes! As a matter of fact, he’s turned in to the first guy as far as floating story ideas and he has come up with some of the more ingenious ideas. One of which was that if Fables do gain power as a result of their popularity in stories, what if Jack would try and manipulate that by creating more stories about himself, which launched the whole “Jack In Hollywood” thing, which gave Jack his own series. That was Mark’s idea. Odd that it was for a story he didn’t actually draw! He will offer these ideas: when we needed a name for the archetypal literary characters for Jack of Fables to use in the The Great Fables Crossover, we were wracking our brains to figure out a good name for them and he was sketching at the SDCC, and he just pops his head up and says “Oh, they’re Literals!” and then pops back down. Of course that’s their name!! It works on so many levels and he just came up with it while we were creating tumours trying to come up with something! That, of course, was when Matt and I decided to kill him…! Seriously, though: Bucky is the next guy in line when it comes to contributing ideas…

You’ve also generated an superb array of guest artists to do the fill-in stories – are these people beating your door down to be involved?

Fables has done well enough and garnered a good readership – in the community as well – among civilian readers and non-comic book pros – that some comic book artists do approach us and say I would be willing to do a story some day. That’s nice! The other side of the coin, because it’s an ongoing concern, I have my lists of people I would just kill to work with someday and now I have something that I feel I can knock on their door and say “Would you like to do it?”

How vital were James Jean’s painted covers towards establishing the series identity?

Oh, I think that was the other secret in our favour: James Jean is the one living example of the overnight success story. The day after he graduated from art school, he came up to the Vertigo offices looking for work. Shelley saw his portfolio and was impressed enough. We were just starting our search for the cover artist. Shelley and I didn’t agree on everyone that was on the list, but it both agreed that it should be someone whose work doesn’t look anything like what’s on the stands today. He walked in and wowed her. She pointed me to his website and it absolutely wowed me too. I’m not sure he got the job while he was still in the office, but it must have been no more than one hour later. He walked out with the gig. The spontaneity of those covers is vital to us.

The logo is also very appealing… 

I guess… I have admitted this before, but I never liked it! I’m not sure who designed it. I designed what I thought would be a good logo and DC hated it and said we have to get a real graphic designer to do it. So, maybe there was some resentment there! It’s grown on me and I don’t think it really took off until James started doing clever things with it. He took something that I thought was graphically funky and, first by putting the circle round it, found so many fun things to do with it. It won me over, because he did. He totally designed those covers beyond the art. He intergrated all aspects of the cover in to the story he was telling with the single image. 

The series had a great spin-off in Jack of Fables, a character who is just an unrepentant – but utterly charming – swine: what do you enjoy about the character?

 Exactly that. I don’t want to be him, I don’t think I would want to spend time with him if he were real. Part of the escapism of our stories is that we can briefly inhabit the lives of people that we would not even consider knowing! Certainly, it’s arguable that a couple of the best movies ever made – The Godfathers – they are wonderful, but very few people who think they are wonderful and would watch them time and again would think “That’s probably a good lifestyle! Le’s start whacking our rivals! Etc” – so, yes, we love doing Jack, Matt and I, and he was certainly the poster child of the “Dare We Do”-school of writing. We would get ideas in our heads that we were fearful of going too far and Jack is all about “Why Not??”. He’s not a pleasant person and has a rogue’s charm sometimes, but always to the point where he’s completely self-serving – and not long-term, planned self-serving, but the Robber Baron of old that planned an empire, but created jobs for thousands etc. Jack is the epitome of the immediate self-serving who damns the consequces – which are always terrible consequences – but he never learns.

 With Jack of Fables now finished, will the characters be integrated back in to the core Fables series?

 The official word is that any character who survives the end of Jack of Fables is welcome back in to the main series if we can come up with an interesting story for them, so the answer is a qualified yes!

There’s also Cinderella’s adventures which beautifully parody the spy genre: what are the plans for those?

Chris Roberson, who does such a wonderful job with it, as long as he keeps offering story ideas, then we’ll keep doing it. If there’s always a new Cindarella min-series in production, then we mustn’t use her too much in Fables, so the character is available for them. So, we keep pushing her role in the main series back. I imagine there will be a time when we’d do another Cindy story in the main book, when I can steal her back!

What’s the current state of the Fables TV series?

 At the moment, it’s gone again. It was going to be a movie, two or three times, I think, it was going to be a TV series on considerable occasions now and, each time, a pilot script was produced each time. I don’t want to be dismissive of those writers, but I read those scripts and while they were good stories, they just weren’t “FABLES” enough. They didn’t feel like there was an effort to translate what we were doing in the comic. It perplexed me, as I thought why don’t you just use those characters in the way you want to instead. So, I was not happy with that – but don’t assume that I had much say in the matter. Part of DC’s deal is that, early on, they purchase from me my share of the rights for the TV and movie adaptations, so they can have it done with a single voice and not have me being one of the voices carping in and saying “I want it this way!”. I am glad they didn’t happen, as I would like to see a TV or movie series done in a way that’s more faithful to the book. I had an invitation from the head of Warner Enertainment, at some point when he visited DC, invited me to put in to an e-mail memo what I think a Fables movie should be. He was adamant it could be a feature not a TV show. I did and I haven’t heard back yet, even that they received said mail. What I said was that I was too intimidated early on to write a Fables movie script as I thought the pros know better than I do. Now, having seen the pro’s take a shot at it twice and missed wonderfully, I am now of the opinion that I am the better choice to write it.

With the current arc, Super Group, you’re finally embracing the realm of superheroes – do you feel that superheroes are modern fables?

Yes and no. I think we’ve become too sophisticated as readers to believe these stories. My understanding of the fairy tales in their earliest form, on some level at least, they were told to be believed. I don’t think we’ll ever look back and think that at some point in our past, Superman and Batman really existed. As mythology and folkore, as things that were important to us as a culture, then absolutely. I think that superheroes are now embraced as a reasonable form of literature and the fact that it’s embraced so much by cinema is testament to that. This is part of our cultural folklore – for better or worse.

The forthcoming OGN, Werewolves of The Heartland, sees Bigby searching for a new location for Fabletown – will they be settling in your hometown of Minnesota?

A little bit! Actually, I’ll give you a scoop: when I was living in Las Vegas, for reasons that continue to confound me, moving to my new home in Minnesota, I drove through Iowa, past a town called “Story City”. That was just too much! It turned out to be this wonderful small town and it was not named because it was a place of storytelling, which I found out when I said to the waitress “I know you want to take my order, but don’t you want to tell me a story?” and she said she’s never been asked that, which broke my heart! Then I found out later on that it was named after a famous Federal Judge. However, they do have one storytelling festival every year. I made my decision then and there that somehow, I would have to set a story in Story City and that’s where Werewolves of The Heartland was born. So, I have not told anyone else this!

What do you see as the core of Fables’ enduring appeal?

It’s a story in which you can understand what we’re trying to do in a single line – characters you know from fairytales in a modern setting – so it’s available and open to people who wouldn’t be inclined to pick up a brand new series. The other thing is that we have been blessed with a fanatical and evangelical readership. They put these things in the hands of their non-comic book reading father or mother or girlfriend and what have you and say “This is why I love Comics” and a lot of people get attracted to the series that way. Anecdotally, I have heard so many tales from people who say “When my wife brings home a copy of Fables, I have to read it first!”

Fables genuinely feels like it can run and run – but do you have a climax in mind?

 Yes. Originally, the ending I had in mind was the moment when Gepetto signs the Fabletown compact. The problem with that as an ending was that I thought it was too good a story and I didn’t want to keep putting it off. We finally decided to just go ahead and do the story and we’ll come up with another ending for it someday. So, now, I have what I feel to be the current final ending of the story in mind – with the hope that we don’t have to get to it any time soon! One of the reasons we keep it fresh is that we make sure that each new story is not just a continuation of the last one. We change as often as possible. People ask when Fables is going to end and I say “It ends all the time!”. We keep concluding, but then we start another story under the same name…

Volumes 1-16 of FABLES, Volumes 1-9 of JACK OF FABLES, Cinderella: FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE, PETER &MAX: A Fables Novel and FABLES: Covers By James Jean are all available in the UK from TITAN BOOKS and in the USA by DC Comics/Vertigo.

(An abridged version of this interview appears in the forthcoming seventh issue of COMIC HEROES, available from Future Publishing, priced £7.99)

For all the massive – and deserved –  success that Marvel Entertainment has accrued in the last decade with its film incarnations, last year’s underwhelming Iron Man II suggested that the studio seemed more focused on Forthcoming Attractions – specifically, the set-up for 2012′s Avengers - than generating  a coherent film that could stand on its own merits. The debut of Shell-Head’s fellow Avenger Thor, however, shows a lesson very swiftly learned. Hugely enjoyable, suffused with engaging good humour and, for the most part, vividly-rendered, the Kenneth Branagh-directed blockbuster provides The God of Thunder with a strong screen debut,  instantly banishing memories of the character’s ultra-lightweight, low-rent appearance in the 1988 TV-Movie The Incredible Hulk Returns.

Following a brief introduction to storm-chasing scientists (Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings), the film’s rush to the magical, cosmic realm of Asgard quickly shows why Branagh was a fine choice for this material. Amdist gorgeous vistas – golden towers overlooking moonlit seas which stretch off in to infinite space (all of which look great in 3-D) – Branagh brings his extensive Shakespearean background to bear as Asgard’s battle-worn King, Odin (Anthony Hopkins, bringing the RSC), prepares to hand over the throne to favoured son Thor (Hemsworth), while brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) looks on with simmering jealousy.

The fractured Father-Son dynamics give the film a fine dramatic core as the brash and arrogant Thor, who impulsively fancies being a warrior King rather than a peacetime one, jumps at the chance to bring the hammer down on neighbouring enemies The Frost Giants (led by Colm Feore’s Laufey) when they make a secret incursion to  Asgard to steal back the source of their powers. Joined by Loki and fellow warriors Volstagg, Hogun, Fandral  (The Warriors Three in the Thor comics) & Xena-like Sif, the ensuing smackdown in the freezing tundra’s of Jotunheim is a vigorous action high-point that subsequent set-pieces struggle to match.

Triggering a new conflict – and Odin’s extreme displeasure – Thor is banished to Earth a mortal (with a tight-fitting t-shirt), along with his fabled Mjolnir, embedded in a rock where it can only be released by “the worthy”- not, alas, Stan Lee in his customary cameo – the latter attracting the attentions of Portman and  soon after, S.H.I.E.L.D, led by Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson. If Thor’s (rather brief) banishment to “Midgard” slackens the pace somewhat, it’s leavened by some wonderful and endearingly-goofy fish-out-of-water antics: Hemsworth imperiously walks in to a small town pet shop demanding “Bring me a horse!”, only to be told by a sheepish clerk that they only have dogs, cats, mice etc, to which he retorts “Then give me something big enough to ride!”.

Hemsworth, so memorable in his small turn in JJ Abrams Star Trek as Kirk’s doomed father, is undoubtedly a star in the ascendant: he showcases gigantic charm as the humbled God, suitably regal and comanding in the Asgardian sequences while forging great Earth-bound chemistry with Portman’s Jane Foster, whose flustered look when she spies Hemsworth’s utterly-cut torso and girlish giggles in response to his smiling chivalry probably didn’t require much acting, one suspects. He also has a great foil in Hiddleston’s great turn as the quietly-malevolent Loki, a politically-minded trickster with a simmering sense of entitlement. Idris Elba also registers strongly with his limited time as Hemdall, guardian of the Bifrost bridge.

Thor is peppered with small issues: Rene Russo’s turn as Odin’s wife Frigga is so small that she might want to change her agent; Jeremy Renner’s fanboy-baiting cameo as Cliff Barton a.k.a The Avenger’s Hawkeye is largely pointless (he’ll basically be seen as “The SHIELD Agent Who Uses A Bow”); the presence of Thor’s Asgardian comrades on Earth stokes the camp-o-meter and the third act’s small-town carnage possesses echoes of Superman II (you’ll be yearning for a swift return to Asgard and a more epic backdrop, that thankfully comes). Indeed, the choppy nature of the second half strongly suggests that there was loads of material left on the editing room floor ( Thor and Jane’s burgeoning romance feels sketched as a result) and that an extra 20 minutes could have been justified.

Yet, Branagh’s film is possessed of such bright and breezy fun – “It’s a superhero movie, but with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in”, as Hopkins observed – that such misgivings are easily forgiven. It covers the key bases of a fluid origin story, a good sequel set-up (make sure you stay for the end of the final credits) and, yes, furthering the stage for next year’s Avengers, but never at the cost of an engaging and invigorating introduction to Thor and his world. After the dreadful folly of Sucker Punch, Thor is a proper opening salvo for this year’s blockbuster season and, if Captain America and X-Men: First Class deliver on the fulsome promises of the trailers, 2011 may well be a banner year for Marvel’s film unit. For verily: it kicks Asgard.

Fans of Adrian Tomine may have been wondering where he’d disappeared to. It’s been four years since the release of his penetrating graphic novel Shortcomings and, aside from his editing and design  work on Drawn and Quarterly’s Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections and various magazine and album commissions, he’s been fairly quiet. As it turns out, Tomine was negotiating such pivotal life events as marriage and children and it’s the traditionally-stressful run-up to the former that informs this utterly charming comics gem. Harking back to his beginnings in small press mini-comics, this square-bound, 56-page collection of amusing, beautifully-observed vignettes was originally intended to be a gift for his wedding guests, but with its thankfully wider release, should be required reading for any couple whose sense of humour has been progressively eroded by the throes of nuptial narcissism.

With great precision and terrific good humour, Tomine expertly skewers the curious circus and the immediate, total command of one’s attention  that surrounds planning a wedding. Indeed, the opening strip “Engagement” swiftly prompts a huge grin as Tomine and his new fiancee enjoy an amusingly-brief afterglow before she exclaims “Okay! So the first thing we need to pick a date, right?” and whose sudden torrent of questions is interrupted by Tomine’s half-joking offer of elopement. Tomine provides some amusing broad strokes of the experience – there a nice splash image illustrating her focused dedication to the organisational work while he lies on the sofa watching The Wire, eating crisps - as well as nicely judged expressions of the previously-unimportant niggles that crop up in every consideration (regarding the florist, the half-Japanese Tomine reflexively goes for the Japanese option while his fiancee goes for the Irish one) as the pair struggle in vain to not become “those people”.

Tomine beautifully takes the teeming absurdities to task: the two-part “D.J” is particularly hilarious in its evocation of how simple tasks like choosing music become unnecessarily-complicated when the process is formalised (“Well, what I do is get a sense of the vibe and then pick the right song for the moment…”). Yet, any cynicism is leavened by a beguiling sweetness, particularly in the climactic “Honeymoon Suite” and “After Hours”, where the newlyweds big day ends in a wonderfully natural and low-key manner that defies the best-laid plans.

As ever, Tomine’s black and white artwork showcases his ability to capture considerable emotional nuance in deceptively-simple fashion and this greatly amusing short outing is a reminder of the humour that peppered the earliest Optic Nerve material before he developed in to a valued chronicler of modern disconnectedness. It’ll be good to see more of this in his future work. For the married, this little treat will surely provide the odd wincing flashback with a knowing smile and for the yet-to-be-betrothed, it’ll reaffirm your committment to never be “those people” until, inevitably, you are.

Scenes From An Impending Marriage is published by Faber & Faber on May 5th, priced £7.99

My confidence in Zack Snyder’s forthcoming reboot of Superman took something of a tumble a few weeks back when I saw the woeful Sucker Punch, a plotless mess that seemingly merged a rejected concept for an Evanescence music video and the masturbatory fantasies of a teenage video-game fanatic. Yet, the rising fears were ultimately calmed by the knowledge that Snyder – who is clearly dependent on strong source material - would be supported by Christopher Nolan and the screenwriter David Goyer who, via Batman Begins, obviously know a thing or two about successfully rebooting a moribund superhero franchise. The news, however, that actor Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire) has been cast as Kryptonian villain General Zod in Man of Steel - note the confirmed title – has prompted a heavy sigh.

It’s not so much the choice of actor – he’ll work well, I think – but more the fact that, yet again, the cinematic Superman just cannot escape the immense gravity pull of the Richard Donner Superman movies. I can certainly understand the impulse: the flagstone of modern comic book cinema, Superman: The Movie (1978) casts a very long shadow indeed. It’s not a perfect film, but it got the make-or-break areas – casting, tone, respect for the source material, the achievement of spectacle – abundantly right and is utterly deserving of its hugely iconic reputation. The 1980 sequel, impressively coherent given the extremely fractious nature ot its production – Donner was fired having shot 70% of the film, his replacement Richard Lester re-shot Donner’s footage to gain sole directorial credit –  remains lauded for its breathtaking action sequences and Terence Stamp’s vivid and aristocratic portrayal of the pathologically-arrogant General Zod.

It speaks volumes, of course, that Donner’s films – film-and-a-half if we’re being pedantic – have excercised such a potent influence on the screen Superman in the three decades since their release. The soon-to-end Smallville TV series has showcased numerous explicit homages to Donner’s films and where Zod himself  has been a recurring presence for years. Far more pointedly, Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns posited itself, rather boldy if ultimately to its heavy detriment, as a de facto sequel to Superman II. There’s no doubting that such connections to Donner’s illustrious duo provide a great frisson in the fan community – myself absolutely included – and but the news of Zod’s presence in Snyder’s film is fostering a very heavy impression that there’s now  an outright  dependence on Donner’s films to ratify any current film incarnation.

Certainly, I can see the fulsome attraction of Zod: the General is more than a match for Superman and, of course, he provides a narrative link to Superman’s origins on the planet Krypton. Yet, this has all been done - and done iconically well. Isn’t Snyder’s film meant to be providing a revitalised, updated take on The Man of Steel? Do we really need to see the narrative hook’s of this new film blatantly plundered from a pair of highly-regarded predecessors over thirty years old? After all the flak that Bryan Singer’s film got for its overt dependence on the Donner films, the choice of Zod for Snyder’s does unavoidably send out the message that Man of Steel could conceivably be as  much a re-tread of Superman II as Superman Returns was of the 1978 film.

Besides, it’s not like Zod is the only viable big-hitter antagonist. While Superman’s Rogues Gallery was never as strong as Batman’s, he undoubtedly has a decent array of (cosmic) villains to face off against: Doomsday, Darkseid, the Cyborg-Superman, Mongul and, perhaps his signature alien nemesis, Brainiac. He could hit any one of them! It genuinely surprises me that Brainiac – who similarly has a direct connection to Superman’s alien origin via his abduction of the Kryptonian city of Kandor – didn’t emerge as Man of Steel’s main antagonist, not only because he has been very prominent of late in the Superman comics – particularly The New Krypton arc - but he’s never appeared on the big-screen. His time may yet come, of course. Then again, they could have taken a minor character and given them a dynamic big-screen reinvention, which is where Stamp’s Zod came from in the first place.

Once again, I dutifully return to the seemingly-default position regarding any misgivings regarding Snyder’s film – “In Nolan We Trust”.  The presence of Zod in Man of Steel is not a fatal excitement dampener by any means but it does, I think, highlight a disappointing dependence on prior history, as well as a lack of creative spark (both of which are indicative of a wider problem in Hollywood itself). It’s absurd to think that by 2013 when the Superman film franchise will be 35 years old, the six films will have essentialy utilised just two antagonists. I fervently believe – and I say this as a passionate fan of Superman: The Movie, which remains one of my all-time favourite films - that Donner’s efforts now absolutely need to be left to take their place in history, rather than being habitually leant on to provide gravitas or impetus. There’s no reason that a new Superman movie couldn’t equal or even better Donner’s seminal originals – but first you have to step out of that shadow.