Shawna Ervin-Gore: How did you become involved in the Magic series?
Mike Grell: I was contacted by Dark Horse and Wizards of the Coast. I understand that I was recommended by Michael Ryan (former continuity editor for Wizards), who did an excellent job crafting the story in the first place. He was instrumental in my being selected -- it turns out he was familiar enough with my work to know it and give me a good recommendation.
Ervin-Gore: And what convinced you to take the project?
Grell: It was way too good to turn down (laughs).
Ervin-Gore: Based on what?
Grell: Based on the popularity of the Magic trading card games to begin with. It was an opportunity to work on material that was so popular, that had risen to such a level in the public perception -- it was a golden opportunity. And the material I was given was extremely well thought out. Michael Ryan and Mark Rosewater had sat down and put together a chronological storyline that had everything planned out. Even the back-story was extremely well thought out. The characters were very well developed. It's a fascinating combination of interesting characters and compelling scenarios that just can't miss.
Ervin-Gore: Even with such a thorough background, there must be some additional process to taking a property that is inherently non-comic and adapting it to comic form.
Grell: To begin with, when Peet Janes (the series initial editor) contacted me, I had been familiar with a couple of other attempts by the comic industry to adapt various games, and the problem they always ran into seemed that the people who were producing the book lost track of the fact that we're dealing with apples and oranges. The game might be a heck of an apple, but what you're selling now is an orange. They have a passing similarity, but you can't forget that you're still dealing with an orange. My area of concentration was to make certain that first what they gave me worked within the context of the story, so that a reader who picked up this book, who had never heard of the magic game, who never played it, who might have a passing knowledge that such a thing exists but has no knowledge of the inner workings of it, would pick it up, be able to understand what was going on, and would have an appreciation of it completely on its own merits without comparison to anything else that had been done. In point of fact, I am that reader. I have friends who have worked on the card game, I have friends who are avid players; I am not. I don't play games, I've never played the card game, and I had no advance knowledge of the game before I started.
Ervin-Gore: And despite that, you were compelled enough by the information given to you by Wizards to take the offer?
Grell: Right. There was a story outline that was presented to me that I read carefully before I met with the people from Wizards. I had a chance to speak to Michael Ryan and Chaz Elliot [creative director for Magic], and I talked to some people who really knew what it was about. From the start it was abundantly clear that they were going to give me the kind of latitude I needed to pursue this from the storytelling standpoint. It's probably better thought out than I ever anticipated.
Ervin-Gore: So then you haven't run into any real problems with the adaptation?
Grell: The only problem we're likely to run into is that there's so much material that you have to be careful picking and choosing what goes in and what doesn't. At some stage of the game you have to play film editor and some of the stuff ends up on the cutting room floor, simply because it's interesting, but it's not necessary in the telling of this story. With four 24-page books, we have to make sure the story gets told and that most of the cute parts get left behind.
Ervin-Gore: Given the fantasy element involved with Magic, is it safe to say fantasy is a genre you're interested in?
Grell: I would be a darn liar if I said I wasn't interested in fantasy. The first book I ever created was Warlord for DC Comics, and with the Warlord I had taken a modern character and thrust him into a strange world where creatures of mythology and dinosaurs and everything else were wandering around. And since I'm part of the Seattle Knights Medieval Action Troop, my life is sort of rooted in fantasy. Plus, I'm a cartoonist, so yes, I'm interested in fantasy. But I'm not an avid reader of fantasy novels. For instance, I'm probably the only person I know who's never read the Tolkein Ring trilogy.
Ervin-Gore: I didn't think it was possible not to have read those.
Grell: It is, and I haven't.
Ervin-Gore: Well, what kind of comic book is Magic: The Gathering going to be?
Grell: I see it as a saga -- a very in-depth story of a young man's quest. It's almost a spiritual journey or a spirit quest that he's making into manhood. There are strong overtones of Joseph Campbell and the archetypal mythic hero. I think there are certain parallels to other types of storylines, such as the Luke Skywalker quest in Star Wars, which is not to say it's based on that in any way, shape, or form.
Ervin-Gore: For the most part, all of Star Wars is archetypal, so it would be hard to say something is based on that when it is inherently composed of other stories.
Grell: Exactly. Luke Skywalker is that same sort of archetype and takes the same journey that Gerrard takes in the Weatherlight Saga, and they don't follow the same path, and they don't wind up in the same place certainly, and they don't have the same kind of adventures, but when you get back to the absolute basics of the archetypal, the quintessential essence of the hero is still the same.
Ervin-Gore: And what are the elements of the world of Magic? What sorts of things does Gerrard have to deal with?
Grell: Gerrard has found himself in a very unsettling position that he never wanted. He's thrust into a position of authority and command of a flying ship called Weatherlight, and he's in charge of a crew who look to him for guidance when he's not entirely certain where he's going himself. The crew is comprised of a number of different human and semi-human characters, including Tahngarth the minotaur, Mirri the cat warrior, the former captain of the ship, Sisay, who's fallen into the hands of villains. At the beginning of the story Gerrard's quest appears to be to free her and satisfy a certain debt of honor that he has to her. Of course, he's being lead along a path of his own destiny whether he likes it or not, and there are a number of very intriguing things that are revealed about his past that he turned his back on, and things that he tried to avoid that are now coming back. You can deny the truth, run away from it, but if you know something to be true, it's always going to be there and it's always going to nag you.
Ervin-Gore: When you were finally given reign of the project, what did you add to the characters to make them come to life?
Grell: Humor -- that was one of the big things that I stressed in putting this all together, because the dramatics in the situation are already very established. Clearly these characters are very intense with everything that's going on around them. The thing that I found that was universally lacking with the exception of the Squee character was a sense of humor. So I tried to humanize them and make them a little more reachable to the audience so that readers wouldn't see them as one-dimensional characters who are interested only in the action, only in the danger, only in the adventure. I want them to be seen as characters that have a fun side and some weaknesses as well.
Ervin-Gore: And similarly, what kinds of questions were you asking when you got the storyline from Wizards? How much did you need to straighten out before you understood what they were looking for?
Grell: I asked about a million questions such as: Who are all these people? And what is Stronghold? And what is the Legacy? Because as we discovered in the actual physical process of going through this, things that were abundantly clear to people over at Wizards were not spelled out in any form that I could understand . . . if I don't understand it the readers aren't going to understand it, so we had a good deal of conflict over exchanges of information that were absolutely necessary. When things settled down I understood and they understood that, number one, this stuff is far more complex and deeply thought out than I had given it credit for, and number two, they have to be careful that I have all the material. I'm a carpenter building a house and they need to give me nails.
Ervin-Gore: So when you're fleshing something out dramatically and trying to convey that information to readers, you can't really work with givens.
Grell: That's a big part of it. Ultimately what people are relating to is the story. Of course the story is related to the game, and in some senses the two are the same thing, but we had to make it clear that this time around, we're not playing a game, we're telling a story.
Join Mike Grell in his telling of Magic: The Gathering: Gerrard's Quest. Fans of the card game and non-gaming adventure-lovers alike will enjoy this four-part fantasy saga from the instant the first issue hits comics stores March 25.