{"id":595,"date":"2007-08-28T06:45:28","date_gmt":"2007-08-28T06:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2007\/08\/28\/an-interview-with-matt-wagner-part-two\/"},"modified":"2007-08-28T06:45:28","modified_gmt":"2007-08-28T06:45:28","slug":"an-interview-with-matt-wagner-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2007\/08\/28\/an-interview-with-matt-wagner-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Matt Wagner, Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Creativity
\nPhoto credit: Greg Preston.<\/i>
\nWelcome to the second half of this two-part interview with Matt Wagner, award-winning comic book writer and illustrator, and creator of Mage<\/i> and Grendel<\/i>. If you haven’t already read the first part of this interview, be sure to check it out to hear Wagner talk about the birth of Mage,<\/i> and why comic book creations often look like their creators. You can find it here<\/b><\/a>.
\nMatt Wagner on the Web:<\/b> mattwagnercomics.com<\/a>
\nCV: I recently read your Batman<\/i> run — the “Dark Moon Rising” books. Could you describe where the idea for those books came from? <\/b>
\nMW:<\/B> They\u2019re actually based on two of my favorite Golden Age Batman<\/i> stories from the late \u201930s and early \u201940s. They\u2019re both pre-Robin stories — before Robin shows up. \u201cThe Mad Monk\u201d is in Detective Comics<\/i> #31 and #32. #31 you\u2019ll recognize — it has a very famous cover; it\u2019s a huge image of Batman looming up over a small castle in the foreground. There\u2019s a moon behind him, and he has absolutely ginormous bat ears. In fact, when you look it up, you\u2019ll go, \u201cOh, of course — that cover.\u201d The other one, \u201cHugo Strange and the Monster Men,\u201d was in Batman<\/i> #1.
\nPart of the fun of playing with somebody else\u2019s toys is the challenge of trying to tell a story where some of the playing pieces are already in place on the board. In the world of Grendel<\/i>, in the world of Mage<\/i>, I\u2019m the absolute god. Whatever I say happens, happens, and there\u2019s never any question. With Batman<\/i> there are many other aspects to consider. [Also,] any work I\u2019ve done for DC, I always like to work early in a character\u2019s career because I hate the giant, extended, huge continuity crap you have to deal with in their world. And I\u2019ve just always liked primary-motivation stories.
\nSo I decided there was a missing link in the early Batman<\/i> tales, where we needed to see his transition from Batman Year One<\/i> — the Frank Miller\/David Mazzucchelli classic storyline where he\u2019s fighting just thugs and mobsters — to his more established litany of costumed crazies that eventually becomes his absolute normalcy, you want to call it that [laughter<\/i>]. And so I decided to take these two early stories and revamp them into a modern setting. I wanted to dig deep into the actual origins of this character.
\nThose early primal Batman<\/i> tales are neat because the conventions that have since become established as being comic-booky were fresh and new and were based more on a pulp tradition than what we think of as comic cooks. And they were just so unfettered and raw. So I took those and tried to squeeze them into DC\u2019s continuity and make them work.
\nCV: What’s your creative process when you’re tackling a project like this — what sort of thought bubble might we see over your head while you\u2019re at your desk? <\/b><\/p>\n


\nMW:<\/B> Well, it varies in regard to the project. I became known in the industry working my way up through the independent [comic book] publishing boom of the early-to-mid-\u201980s. And so my first approach to comics was doing my own thing, owning my characters, having absolute say over what happens in every regard. Eventually I got enough renown in the industry that I got many offers to come work with the bigger publishers and to play with their in-house characters.
\nAnd I get a big kick out of that. I\u2019ve done quite a few Batman<\/i> projects at this point, even two crossovers between Batman and my character Grendel…. Working on any of the characters that I don\u2019t own, I have to be very premeditated about it. I have to come up with a story outline to get approved by the publisher, etc., etc. With Grendel<\/i> it\u2019s much less so. With Grendel<\/i>, often I\u2019m working with another artist — I don\u2019t draw it all the time — and I\u2019ll figure out what that artist\u2019s strengths are and try to write a story that plays to that.
\nMage<\/i> is the one that stands out alone as being completely different from all those. I treat Mage<\/i> like a Zen journey. I don\u2019t write down any plots. I don\u2019t do any thumbnails, which is a traditional way that comic book artists work, where you basically sketch out a small version of what the page will look like before you take it through to final completion.
\nI just sit down with blank pages of Mage<\/i> and I just start drawing, and I let the story take me where it wants to go. And that\u2019s not to say that I don\u2019t have a few ideas about where I\u2019d like it to go, but I try not to nail that down. I try and take it a step at a time, and so the story becomes a journey for me, almost writing me at the same time that I\u2019m writing it.
\nCV: There\u2019s no script when you start? <\/b>
\nMW:<\/B> No, I just sit there with the board and start drawing on it. I mean, you know, I don\u2019t just start in the upper left-hand corner and go to the bottom right-hand corner. I view that two-page spread that you\u2019re confronted with when you\u2019re looking at a comic book and I basically break it down there on the spot.
\nOn the other end of things, everything else I do, I work with plot and dialogue. There are basically two different scripting or writing methods in comic books: One is what\u2019s called a \u201cfull script,\u201d wherein the writer will describe the entire layout of the page, how many panels it has, what happens in every panel, and then he will already have the caption narration and any of the word-balloon dialogues already in the full script. So it\u2019s very much like reading a script for a movie.
\nThe secondary method, which became popular in the \u201960s under Stan Lee and used to be known for the longest time as \u201cthe Marvel style,\u201d was that the writer would write a plot, then the artist would draw it based on the plot. It would come back to the writer and the writer would provide the captions and dialogue after the art was finished. That second method is the way I have always worked. I\u2019ve written, I think, two full scripts in my twenty-five years in the industry.
\nPart of that, I think, is a result of the fact that I\u2019m an artist as well as a writer. I can verbalize things in a way that I know an artist will be receptive to. Additionally, for me there\u2019s a certain moral conundrum there. I work with other artists in order to collaborate, in order to see a bit through their eyes, to get a little flavor of the way they view the world and to let them have some play in how the story will take shape and see its final visualization. And since I\u2019m able to draw, I feel like, well if I wanted the ironclad control of a full script, I kind of morally ought to draw it myself. So my plots tend to look like: page one, and I\u2019ll describe what happens on page one, but I don\u2019t break it down into panels. I might throw in a line of dialogue or a little bit of captioning here and there, but very brief — just enough to add some flavor\u2026.
\nWhen the art comes back from the artist, the way they\u2019ve chosen to lay out the page, the way they\u2019ve chosen to draw the individual characters, gives it a certain concrete aspect, whereas earlier it was just an abstract idea in my mind. And seeing it brought to reality like that will suggest to me narrative tone or individual character syntax. I\u2019ll see a character\u2019s face and I\u2019ll say, \u201cThat character curses like this.\u201d Or \u201cThat character gets out of bed on this side of the bed.\u201d Or, \u201cThat character likes whiskey instead of vodka.\u201d And so those decisions happen after it\u2019s drawn, and I\u2019m able to imbue a whole new life to it even at that seemingly final stage. Whereas in a lot of cases, those narrative decisions are already set in stone from the beginning in a full script.
\nCV: How does this compare to your process when you\u2019re drawing your own work? <\/b>
\nIf your readers aren\u2019t familiar with the stages of a comic book pages\u2019 production, there\u2019s often a team — one is a penciler and one is an inker. The first artist, the penciler, will do the layout and the drawing. The inker then takes ink and renders the pencils into a finished, reproducible image. Most pencilers tend to pencil fairly tightly. They tend to give their lines the sort of weight and flavor that they want from the very beginning. I\u2019m exactly the opposite because I always ink my own work. My pencils are what most people would describe as just incredibly sloppy because I want to be able to draw in the ink, too. I want to make the inking stage not just a repetitive tracing of what I had done in the pencil stage.
\nSo the pencil stage is basically getting the pace, getting the scope of the story, getting the weight of the drawing. And then the ink is bringing the final form and the lighting and the texture to the page.
\nCV: What do you think are the ingredients of good storytelling? <\/b>
\nMW:<\/B> Well, of course storytelling in comics varies in many regards because it has to rely on a visual reality and that visual reality could be great and bombastic or very mundane and ordinary. And both [approaches] make perfectly viable comics. I think with comics, due to that visual element, there\u2019s sometimes just a hint and sometimes a giant splash of the surreal that needs to invade comic book storytelling.
\nWhat makes a good story is something that takes you some place and teaches you something\u2026. Certainly if they open the first page and they know where it\u2019s going to end, then I\u2019ve failed. At the same time I want the story to be provocative enough that they\u2019ll be asking themselves questions about the story or remembering parts of the story after they\u2019ve closed the book.
\nPeople are always trying to compare comics to film, and comics aren\u2019t film. Film basically mesmerizes you, and you sit there and you absorb it in the way the director wanted you to absorb it. Comics have a crucial moment where it\u2019s interactive — where you turn the page. And therefore the comic artist has to make his work so compelling that you\u2019ll automatically turn the page. In fact, Will Eisner used to claim that that bottom right-hand panel on page right had to be so compelling that the reader would just turn the page without thinking about it.
\nCV: Do you work on other kinds of art in between projects, or are comics your complete focus? <\/b>
\nMW:<\/B> That\u2019s my medium.
\nCV: No fine art or anything like that on the side?<\/b>
\nMW:<\/B> No, no fine art. I never had any aspirations beyond that. Because I never thought of comics as something less, you know? I\u2019m fully satiated both creatively, financially, spiritually, in every regard by the act of creating comic books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo credit: Greg Preston. Welcome to the second half of this two-part interview with Matt Wagner, award-winning comic book writer and illustrator, and creator of Mage and Grendel. If you haven’t already read the first part of this interview, be sure to check it out to hear Wagner talk about the birth of Mage, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversations-about-creativity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}