Adam Gallardo: You created Hunter Rose, the original Grendel, when you were 19, and you're back working with him again--what it is that brings you back to that character?
Matt Wagner: Partially reader response. Additionally, I find he is an endless well of really twisted psychosis to draw from. And when I said reader response, I always find that kind of ironic because up until we did "Black, White, & Red," "Devil By the Deed" was the only Hunter Rose story aside from the two issues where he meets Batman in the Grendel/Batman crossover. So basically that's a 48-page story that has struck some sort of iconic chord with so many readers that they keep coming back. And, again, it's only a 48 page story in its original form and I think that speaks of how archetypical the character is. He really strikes some note with readers and with creators alike. I find it is never hard coming up with more stories about him, even though his life is very succinct, he doesn't lead a long life -- he dies young in a very tragic manner. But I find that it is quite easy to come up with more twisted scenarios to have him star in. And the artists seem to have a grand time with him. Almost every example of art we have gotten in [for the new anthology] is just terrific and a couple of them have really knocked the ball out of the park, so.
AG: I read a rumor on the Internet that this might be the last time you write Hunter Rose. If he is he is an endless well, why do you think this might be the last time?
MW: You know, I'm tempted to make the Mick Jagger promise. I don't know if you know what that is, but Mick Jagger swore that he would never sing Satisfaction after the age of 40. He broke that promise fairly rapidly. I just turned 40 last year and I contemplated striking the same sort of vow with this. Again, as you said, I created Hunter when I was 19, and he is a character that never gets past his early 20's. I think the older I get, the harder and harder its going to become for me to find any sense of contact with the character that I felt when I was younger.
AG: With the original Grendel series, you went from singular Grendels into a world where Grendel is a worldwide, dispersed, phenomenon. What was it that made you want to go back to Hunter Rose and make Grendel singular again?
MW: Oh, partially the fact that we had done a lot of material in the future scenario. We reached a point where I felt we were spinning our wheels a little bit and I thought that going back to the beginning would be a good way to re-energize the concept. Additionally, I think it does have to do with the world today. A movie producer told me one time that he thought Hunter Rose was a very apt metaphor for today. Specifically, you know, the number of young people that we have in the world that are maybe a little bit too smart for their own good and a little unchallenged. The most they are challenged by is . . . trivial knowledge and pop culture events, you know? And they don't really have a sense of history. And in fact Hunter Rose really doesn't have a sense of history. He understands history, but he thinks history is going to end with him. And I think that sense of self-absorption is very prevalent in a lot of today's youth. On the latest Elvis Costello album there is a great song called Spooky Girlfriend and he is singing it as a much younger man than he is, and he is kind of troubled by the sort of empty desires of the youth of today and he uses the Spooky Girlfriend as a metaphor for how the young people he sees aren't really interested in any sort of equality between the sexes. Young men just want a Madonna /whore and they want her to be kind of interesting and spooky at the same time. But not too challenging.
AG: So how much of that was in you when you created the character?
MW: I think quite a bit. Quite a bit, sure. I was not yet fully engaged in my career and my ability to express myself creatively like I am now. Now that is a very deeply ingrained part of my life and my existence. But certainly I grew up with the general sense of ennui, you know kind of out in the country and most of the people I knew thought drawing was for sissies and that sort of stuff. There was a general sense I think in myself where I didn't feel very engaged growing up by the world around me. Matter of fact, it was only when I went off on my own, when I left home that I began to feel more engaged ,and you can definitely see that in the Hunter Rose story line.
AG: How do you decide which artists you want to work with on the anthology?
MW: It usually starts out as two or three people that I have focused on and then a scatter shot from there. I just keep broadening the net and seeing who I can get in. Certainly there are many people I ask and they can't do it for a variety of reasons. They are not interested, or they have exclusive contracts with their publisher, or their schedules are just too full. And then I get solicited from a lot of people at conventions and such. Grendel is well known as being a good launching point for a lot of talent. You get hired to do Grendel, you'll get hired at DC eventually. [Laughs]
Often I will have a distinct story idea and I will say, "this will go really well with this artist." Other times I get the artist and then figure out the story based on that. For instance--this is someone I was referring to earlier about hitting it out of the park -- Jill Thompson. I have known Jill for years and years and years and this seemed a perfect opportunity to do something with her that wasn't too much of a commitment. That's the other nice thing about these series, they're all 8-page stories so I get to work with such a wide range of people. And its a nice strike and destroy sort of structure. Anyway, I wrote Jill's story to utilize her now-famous super-deformed style and -- the story is called "Grendel, the Nasty Little Devil" -- and its all cutesy. There is even gore in it and it's cute too. The gore is cute! [Laughs] And she just did a fabulous job with it. Another instance of that is Andy Watson who does a variety of books, mainly for Oni Press. I did the introduction for his trade paperback of Geisha, and as a thank-you, he did me a beautiful little piece of Grendel riding a stallion into the surf with the sun going down. And all of it's in his stark, simple style that somehow manages to combine Japanese Manga and New Yorker cartooning all in one unique synthesis. I thought, "Damn, this is so nice, I got to have him in the Grendel anthology, and I've got to get this page in the story somehow." So, for his story, I wrote a something that was all single-page illustrations almost like a Japanese illuminated scroll. And each of them has a Grendel haiku. And of course, unlike haiku that are trying to describe the beauty and one-ness of nature, these are all twisted and corrupt and horrible.
AG: Do you approach stories differently that you know you will draw yourself, versus one you know will be drawn by another artist?
MW: [Pause] I must. [Laughs] It's not very conscious on some level. A lot of what I do is innate. Even down to the fact that when I am working on something for myself, I don't always work on it the same way. For instance, whether working on Grendel or almost any other thing I have drawn, I tend to do layouts and breakdowns and such. But when I am working on Mage, which is a much different creative outlet for me -- its looking internally as opposed to externally -- I don't do any layouts. I don't do any plot. I sit down with blank pages, which its not to say that I don't know what I want to happen in each issue, but it's a much more free-form, Zen approach where I just start drawing and let the story take me to the end of each issue.
AG: Can you do that with Mage because you're working off the template of Arthurian legends?
MW: I am working on Arthurian Legends, but more of a template is my own life. I am trying to create this large metaphor for my life so I find if I get too finicky with that and try to nail it down too much, it doesn't have the same depth and power that it would otherwise. It doesn't strike the same chords, 'cause then I'll get to page 14, say, and this event or this image will occur to me and it just makes such sense to reflect on something that happened to me eight years ago. And if I would have tried to think of a metaphor for that, instead of letting it take me there, it wouldn't have turned out near as good.
So the question is, do I work differently on my own projects versus those I write for others? I work differently on every single thing I do, pretty much. But I am fairly rigid in that I never write what is known in the industry as a full script. I always work in a plot and dialogue fashion. In fact, I am coming up to my 20th year writing and drawing professionally for comics and I have only ever written one full script, ever. Working in plot and dialogue fashion with other artists makes it more a true collaboration in my mind. It gives them a chance to have some input. If I wanted to nail down every single moment of staging, every single camera angle, every single nuance, morally I ought to be drawing it. I just got an e-mail from Dan Breretton who just turned in his pencils, and he was telling me this might not be quite what I was expecting. And I thought, "that's the whole joy of this!" Maybe its not quite what I am expecting, and occasionally something comes in and, yes, it's not what I had in mind. Therefore I am forced to readdress the story for the final script. That keeps it fresh and exciting.
AG: Right. You would think it would be the opposite, that since you are an artist, you must see these things in your mind that you would see full scripts detailing what . . .
MW: Yeah, except for me, the only reason to collaborate and the reason I moved toward collaboration early in my career -- my first several things were all very auteuristic. Mage was a one-man show basically. And Grendel nearly was too. When I finished up with Mage and I did the Grendel back-up feature in that series that later was collected as Devil by the Deed -- I had a lot of early success, I had a lot of people slap me on the back, and I had a lot of Eisner nominations all over the board, and it was quite a heady time. And it struck me that everybody was giving me the impression that what I was doing was exactly right. And I knew it was dangerous for an artist to feel that way. So that was when we decided to expand Grendel into a monthly and to have it become a rotating group of artists that would address it, because I thought the only way for me to grow and expand myself was to learn how other people see things. See through other people's eyes and not make it such a focused funnel of my own experiences, and not make it such a focused funnel of my own experiences, my own ways of looking at the world. Because that will atrophy after a while. You have to have this fresh way of looking at life all the time.
AG: Right. You brought up Mage earlier. Are you working on the third volume of Mage now?
MW: No. No, there is a Mage movie in production right now. I think it behooves me to wait until the movie comes out to release the third series.
AG: How is the movie going?
MW: Good.
AG: What stage is it in?
MW: They [Spyglass Entertainment] are hiring a director, and they are hard-core on this one star they are trying to get. They have their green light from Disney so they hope to be in production by -- I'm pretty sure they hope to be shooting before the end of the year.
AG: Is this based on a screen story by you, or . . .?
MW: No, it's based on the comic written, written by a fellow named John Rogers. He's a really good screen-writer who, when Spyglass Entertainment optioned Mage, he came and found them because he told them he was a big Mage fan. So that's always good.
AG: Have you ever considered resurrecting Grendel Tales?
MW: Oh, yeah, we will resurrect Grendel Tales. It became evident at one point there with the state of the market at that time and place, that I hadn't been doing enough active work on Grendel. It's just a great venue for incorporating new outlooks from writers, too, and not just artists. It became evident at one point that we were not publishing enough Grendel that I was actively involved in, that I was writing, and I think it weakened the franchise there for a while. So now we have focused on getting back into print the vast amount of material that had been out of print from the old Comico days, and these anthology series. That seems to be doing the trick very well.
AG: Beyond the "Black, White & Red" series, what do you see doing with Grendel in the future?
MW: Immediately following the "Black, White & Red" series is going to be the Dark Horse remastered editions of "God and the Devil" which was the next story line in the Comico run. And this was a 10-issue run, it was drawn by a combination of teams, mainly John K. Snyder and Jay Geldhoff, switching off the inking and penciling duties with each other. And following that we will probably do the further adventures of Grendel Prime and Susan Verhaggen, the scenario of which was set up in Past Prime, the Grendel illustrated novel. I think I probably would like to follow Mike [Mignola's] lead on Hellboy and the next book of Grendel Prose would be a group short series about those two characters by various authors. I would do the illustrations.
AG: Besides doing your own creator-owned comics, you also do a lot of stuff for mainstream publishers like DC --
MW: I'm just getting ready to start a biggie.
AG: What's that?
MW: My biggest thing for DC ever. I don't even a working title yet. But it's Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It's the first time Superman and Batman meet Wonder Woman in their continuity. And right now I am drawing the whole thing. So it's a big deal.
AG: You seem to be one of the only writer/artists who goes between the worlds of creator-owned and company-owned comics. What do you think it is about you that makes that possible?
MW: The reason that is, is that I did it backwards from most of the other writer/artists you see in the industry now. Most of the others started with either Marvel or DC and discovered the joys of owning their own characters and following a creator owned path. I did it the other way around. I was first published as a creator-owned guy in the early 80's and then later, I went and did stuff for the big companies. I find that balancing trick just perfectly easy. I guess part of that is I have found such reward, not only financially but creatively, from the two creator-owned series that I have. Mage and Grendel really do kind of fulfill the dual nature of my creative impulses. Going to play with the big characters is just fun, almost like a band doing cover songs - you know. In the case of something this big, it's a neat chance to make a real mark on these characters.
AG: Do you have any other creator-owned characters you plan to do?
MW: Yeah, I think I do - I think I will probably cast my line into that pond again, but this time, since I am a father now and have children, I am aiming for something kind of all ages. Not quite as aimed towards adults as most of my material is.
AG: Great. Do you pan on getting to that any time soon?
MW: Oh, no, the big DC project is going to keep me busy for a good long time. I guess I should mention the variety of the merchandising at Dark Horse's line up to tie in with "Black, White & Red". We are doing a PVC set that I designed that features all six of the Grendels and Jupiter. So its Hunter, Christine, Brian, Eppie, Orion, Grendel Prime and Jupiter. And then we are doing a Grendel lunch box as well. Cause nothing says lunchtime like Grendel! [Laughs] Then I think Graffiti Designs is going to be issuing some T-shirts and maybe some plush toys based on the Jill Thompson story and Bowen Designs is releasing a full set of Grendel mini-busts that will be packaged three to a box. He has been doing this recently with some kits. So the first set would have Hunter, Christine and Brian and the second set would have Eppie, Orion and Grendel Prime.
AG: So lots of Grendel stuff for your fans in the future.
MW: Lots of Grendel. Yeah.
Grendel: Red, White, & Black, a four-issue series written by Matt Wagner and drawn by Stan Sakai, Jill Thompson, Kim Mahfood, Andi Watson, and others, will be available in comics shops on September 11. The Grendel lunchbox and PVC set will both be available September 4.