Shawna Ervin-Gore: Hi, Craig. I hope you're ready to talk about this big project you're working on.
PCR: I'm having performance anxiety already (laughs).
SE-G: I don't think you have anything to worry about, considering the amount of time and energy you've put into this so far. The main thing I want to do is get your intentions for this adaptation of The Ring Cycle in your own words. Can you lay a little bit of groundwork on the nature of the story and why you've wanted to do this for so long?
PCR: Okay (laughs).
SE-G: I guess that's not such a small question.
PCR: Well, there are shelves of books that have been written on what this story is about, although we can start with sort of a simple "what happens, and what happens next" look at it. The Ring Cycle is very essentially about the theft of some gold from the bottom of the Rhine river, and how that gold is used to produce a ring of power, which is cursed. As years go by, various people gain control of the ring, and the curse which was placed upon the ring becomes realized time and again.
SE-G: And the ring is cursed by whom?
PCR: There are a couple of curses to consider here. Alberich--a gnome of sorts, of the race of the Niebelung, who live deep underground--curses love in order to gain control of the gold, in order to forge the ring of power. Then, after the ring is stolen from him by Wotan, he curses the ring itself, proclaiming its owner will be miserable, murder will always follow, and all sorts of other bad things will happen. There are attempts all along by the elementals--the earth mother and the Rhine maidens--to get the gold back to where it belongs, which it finally does in a series of events similar to Ragnarok--the end of the world. So the story is full of flood and fire, and destruction, before the gold is finally returned to where it should be. And in the meantime what has happened is there has been a complete transformation of humanity to its next stage-- this ancient world, pagan world of the gods and the Elementals is transformed to a new world with consciousness infused by love.
SE-G: What sort of time span are we looking at? That seems like a big transformation to take place in one story.
PCR: It takes place over a couple of generations. From the theft of the gold by Alberich to the theft of the ring from Alberich by Wotan is an indeterminate time--it seems to happen fairly quickly. We are talking days, weeks, months perhaps. And that's during Rhinegold, the first of the four stories. From the end of Rhinegold to The Valkyrie [The second book of The Ring Cycle--ed.] is about a generation, because in that time, Wotan has come to Earth and fathered the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde.
SE-G: And Wotan, to establish his character, is a god.
PCR: Wotan is sort of the big daddy god--the head of the air spirits. And he is supposed to be the law giver and the law protector, and he, of course, is stealing the gold and is promiscuous and has broken laws himself. And he's tried to twist power to his own advantage. He's noble, but he is flawed.
SE-G: This recognition of faulted gods is part of this kind of mythology, and in crafting the story, Wagner referenced many different mythologies, including Greek mythologies, right?
PCR: A bit of Greek, yeah. They think he may have brought in elements of Greek, which he is certainly steeped in, and Norse mythology. He went back to the Eddas and more of like a pan-Germanic thing. It is German mythology, but it goes so far back, we're really just talking Northern mythology in general.
But we were talking about how much time has elapsed, so let's get back to that. At The Valkyrie, a generation has passed--time enough for Wotan to have gone down to Earth and to have sired these children who have reached the age of being ready to start a new generation. And those children also bear children by the end of the Valkyrie, and their child comes of age in the next book, Siegfried. So, by the end of the entire tetralogy, you're talking about a handful of generations--probably less than 200 years.
SE-G: I think that's a good indicator as to the amount of action and events that are packed into this story, because the eventual changes for humanity seem so, for lack of a better word, evolutionary--which I always assume takes thousands of years.
PCR: But in that respect, not much time has elapsed.
SE-G: Yes. Well, let's talk a little more about Wotan. He comes to suffer quite a bit because of his involvement with the ring and because of its curse.
PCR: He's involved in a series of events that are going to trip him up as he keeps trying to untangle this mess through more cunning, more dishonest plans, and they never really do work right. Wotan sires children outside of wedlock in hopes that they will sire a child who will use the power of the sword to regain the ring and restore its powers to Wotan.
SE-G: So, the ring is forcibly taken from the original thief by Wotan, and Wotan relinquishes it to a pair of giants whom he owes payment.
PCR: Right. Originally, Wotan promised his sister-in-law, Freia, to the giant brothers, as payment for building Valhalla. But he tries to renege on his payment, so they demand something more valuable in return, which ends up being this mysterious and powerful gold. And once these giants get the ring and the other gold that was not fashioned into the ring, the curse is again fulfilled. First, they give up love--the girl they had hoped to gain from Wotan--in exchange for the power of the gold, then, one of the giants murders the other to gain ultimate control of the ring.
SE-G: That is a great scene, by the way, in your telling of it. It works really well, graphically, when you show how the giants demand that Wotan give them enough gold to obscure their vision of Freia.
PCR: Thanks. The piling of all that gold is a great image, and, of course, the final piece of gold Wotan relinquishes to completely obscure the giants' vision of Freia is the ring, which gives the giants great power.
SE-G: It's funny--we're obviously talking about events which occur on a very grand, mythological scale, and I think it probably seems very academic in a lot of ways. But on paper, especially in your adaptation, this is just a great story. Some of these scenes are really funny and really touching and they work on a lot of different levels.
PCR: Oh, yeah. That's why I wanted to make this into acomic book.
So anyway, it passes from the giants to the one giant, and he hordes it. He turns himself into a dragon to guard it and hoards it for about two generations until Siegfried comes along.
SE-G: And Siegfried is Wotan's son?
PCR: He is Wotan's grandson--the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan's illegitimate children, who were separated at a young age and are reunited on a dark and stormy night as an exhausted and pursued Siegmund stumbles into Hunding's hut, where he finds Sieglinde, who is held there in enforced marriage-bondage to Hunding. They realize their kinship, and in open defiance of the world and its oppressive mores, run off together with the express purpose of perpetuating their race--and Siegfried is the result of that union.
SE-G: This is spicy stuff!
PCR: Yes (laughs). This is also where it gets more difficult to explain.
SE-G: I'm worried we might give too much of the story away, so let's talk about some less story-specific aspects of the series. What aspects of this project, aside from the compelling story elements, made you want to pursue it in comics form?
PCR: Well, the story elements themselves are very exciting--we've got magic, power struggles, betrayals, incest, illicit druggings, hugely conflicting accounts from various characters--it's very melodramatic, and literally action-packed. There are times you don't know who to believe. And the whole thing began, in a much narrower sense in Wagner's mind, as a critique of the capitalist-industrialist society, so it's very political in concept. And, speaking for myself--as an artist who is a capitalist to his roots--I'm fascinated by how the project grew in Wagner's mind, to be so much more that a narrowly political allegory.
And artistically, it's been very exciting to compose. A lot of the action in this story is a lot more internal, and I find it really fun to try and make internal drama visually dynamic. That's the challenge. And besides simple body language, or the relation of the figure to the panel, its also the other elements of the panel that can sort of amplify the emotional state, using just natural elements like fire, air, the water. The shape of the clouds in the sky can comment on the emotions of the characters--the twisted branches or the full leaves. I mean, certainly the one explanation you see over and over in the Wagner librettos is, "Act three--a wild, rocky path. Act two--a wild, rocky path." So, right from the beginning, he was using his settings to comment on the action or to set a mood for action to take place, and for the emotional-intuitive action to take place.
SE-G: From the first few issues, which are currently in production here at Dark Horse, it seems some of the most exciting scenes are essentially arguments between different characters over who should control the ring.
PCR: There are certain things you can do with music that you just can't do with pictures, but that was the challenge--to try to find ways to use pictures to further the story the same way that the music would give your characters emotional reactions to events or the music that lets you know what the characters are thinking.
SE-G: That was one of the first things I noticed about your adaptation of Pagliacci last year--there were times, looking at the visuals on the page, where you can tell what the music would have been doing at that same point in the story. Based on the layouts, you could tell when the music would have been very tense and higher, and it was also relatively evident when the images depicted more of an "aria" from the original work.
PCR: That was the challenge and I'm glad I had that to practice on before I actually went into full production on The Ring.When you just read the words to that big aria, that's the point where someone is pouring their heart out about their emotional state--sort of the country music part of the opera . . . you know,"my heart is breaking, my dog ran away" . . . and I think we can all relate to that.
Look for issue one of P. Craig Russell's 14-issue adaptation of Ricard Wagner's The Ring of the Niebelung in comics shops February 2, 2000.