MESCALLADO: Going back to your childhood, was there any difference in your life once you decided to become a more active comics collector?

BUSIEK: As far as collecting comics changing my life -- I can't really say that it did. I had a couple of paper routes back then, so I had spending money, and I regularly went in to Harvard Square to buy records and books at the Coop. Once I started collecting comics, I'd go into Harvard Square to buy comics and back issues at the Million Year Picnic, and that probably decreased my record-buying. Which was a good thing, because I bought a lot of lousy records, simply because I wanted to buy something with this money I'd earned.

So I was still hopping the bus to Harvard Square, still spending my paper-route money, still spending a lot of time reading, still hanging out at Scott's to avoid doing household chores, still stopping off at the Harvard Square Brigham's for a patty melt, fries and a root beer -- it was the same life, with different reading material.

MESCALLADO: What other writing did you do at the time? Did you try out other forms while in college, or fresh out of college?

BUSIEK: I wrote a number of short stories before college and during college -- some of 'em for writing class, some for myself. Without going back and looking at them, I suspect they were self-indulgent adolescent junk -- though one of them eventually turned into The Wizard's Tale, so I guess it had potential. And I wrote a rotten one-act play, a masque, and an agitprop play that got performed at least once, by a sidewalk theatre troupe in London. After college, in addition to writing for New Media, I did a couple of articles for a video magazine, but that wasn't experimentation, that was paying the rent. Oh yeah, and I wrote a one hundred word article about Hank Williams for one of the Penthouse subsidiary magazines that I got $150.00 for -- that may have been my oddest assignment, and the best rate for any prose I've written.

MESCALLADO: What did family and friends think of this career path?

BUSIEK: I guess they varied. Some friends thought it sounded cool, some thought it was a dumb thing to do. My mother was very supportive of anything her kids wanted to do, particularly anything creative. My father, on the other hand, thought there was no future in comics, no money, and I should stick to something with some security, like computer programming. He'd press me to quit and go back to school for something sensible, even after I'd started writing professionally -- right up to the day he was interviewing for a new assistant, and one of the applicants asked, "Are you related to Kurt Busiek, the writer?"

After that, he called me up and asked me to send him some of the comics I'd written. I don't think he ever read them, but he kept them on his coffee table at the office, so I suppose that indicates some pride in what his son does. And, of course, I'm supporting a wife and child, and own my own home, so I think I've put his financial worries to rest, too.

MESCALLADO: So you were aware of the so-called "overgrounds" such as Cerebus and Elfquest. What about underground comics? Were you aware of them, did Crumb or Shelton or any other underground comix creators have any influence on you?

BUSIEK: Chris Bing, who I mentioned earlier, had a decent collection of undergrounds, and I remember reading a bunch of his Zap comics, Freak Bros., and Checkered Demon stories, wherever they appeared, and stuff like that. I was more interested in the mainstream stuff, though -- and his Adams, Steranko and Barry Smith books had more of an appeal for my young mind. The books he had that I really liked, though, were Meef and The Balloon Vendor, by Sheridan and Schrier. I loved that stuff -- gorgeously-rendered art and trippy, dreamlike stories. I can't say they influenced me, though.

MESCALLADO: You never wrote Kool-Aid Man? Part of the Busiek Legend as I understood it was that you worked on the character. Do you know how that mis-perception came about? Or is this the first time you've heard this?

BUSIEK: It's not the first time I've heard it, but I expect it's just a common mistake -- someone hears that I wrote Jell-O Man, and they remember that I wrote about a heroic snack food, but since there was only the one issue of Jell-O Man, and many more of Kool-Aid Man, the title gets swapped somewhere down the line. I'd like to have written Kool-Aid Man, mind you -- Dan deCarlo drew most if not all of those, and I've always wanted to work with him. Even on the adventures of a sugary drink.

MESCALLADO: The one time I was in Boston, I paid a visit to Million Year Picnic because it was on that Comics Journal list of Best Comic Shops in America. Anyways, how involved were you in fandom? You wrote letters, did your own comics, knew people in the industry. What was your take on fandom and its role?

BUSIEK: Beats me. I don't know that fandom has recognizable-enough boundaries to say how deep into it one is -- and back then, I was too ignorant of what else was going on to see myself as having a place in it all. I was just hungry for knowledge, for information -- I read all the magazines I could find, from TCJ to RBCC to others; I read any book I knew about, from Steranko's History of Comics to Jules Feiffer's book to the Origins of Marvel Comics books to All in Color for a Dime. I wrote my letters and I talked with friends who were into comics and I soaked up as much as I could. I did correspond with a couple of other fans I met through lettercols, and I wrote for fanzines once or twice before starting to do stuff for New Media, but I didn't have a sense of organized fandom that I recall.

I did meet Peter Sanderson one evening at the Picnic, and was flattered that he recognized my name. I don't know if I'm answering your question, though -- if I'm not, maybe you can try another angle.

MESCALLADO: No, your answer was pretty much what I wanted. But does that mean you didn't attend any conventions at the time, or belong to any comics clubs?

BUSIEK: No, I did both, but it didn't feel like "organized comics fandom" to me. The first convention I attended was in the Sheraton in the Prudential Center Plaza in Boston, and I wandered all over the hotel trying to find the place, and couldn't. Then Wendy Pini walked by in full Red Sonja regalia -- chainmail bikini, broadsword, cloak -- and I figured that if I followed her I'd find the convention ballroom. I didn't know who Wendy Pini was at the time, but she certainly stood out. And sure enough, she led me to the convention ballroom, as opposed to say, heading back to her room or something.

But my experience with cons at the time was more about buying back issues and getting the occasional autograph -- I didn't feel like part of a community, aside from the friends I already had, but more like a customer at a really cool garage sale. I don't think I made any connections at the cons, aside from meeting a woman who was putting out an X-Men fanzine Scott McCloud and I did some work for, but that wasn't a lasting bond or anything. The one thing I remember about her was that I told her I thought Action Comics, then written by Cary Bates, was doing some really good stuff, and she sniffed and said, "I wouldn't know -- I don't read war books."

I sure bought a lot of back issues, though.

As far as comics clubs, we had an informal one at my high school, where we'd sit around after school and argue about whether Cyclops could beat Wolverine, and stuff like that. Eventually, we started playing superhero-based role-playing games, in a manner immortalized by Scott McCloud in a late issue of Zot! But that didn't feel like organized fandom, either -- and the club in college was one Scott and I started, and it wasn't much of a club. And since we started it, it didn't seem like part of a larger community. We did meet Ivan Velez, Jr., though, who went on to do the great Tales of the Closet and books for Milestone.

MESCALLADO: Was the networking not as intense as today?

BUSIEK: I expect my years of letterhacking, and maybe my work for New Media, made my name known to some people in the business -- Len Wein and Roger Stern both told me that they used to look out for Busiek letters in the fan mail because they knew they'd be usable -- but that's kind of impersonal, too. And I didn't start doing the "New York Correspondent" thing for Comics Feature until after I'd made my first sales. So I've always advised would-be comics pros not to worry too much about networking and concentrate on making their work as good as it can be. It may not be the best advice, but it's what worked for me.

MESCALLADO: So what exactly did you admire in the creators you named earlier, what did you learn from them as a comics writer? I can see the Englehart influence in the way you handle team comics and the dynamics of characterization, but is there anything else you could pinpoint, any specific strategies or attitudes to your work?

BUSIEK: With Englehart, it's definitely the character drama, as you note. His stuff, the Claremont stuff I like most, the Gerber stuff -- it's all storytelling that grows out of the characters, rather than event storytelling that builds from a plot development and fits the characters into it. With Cary Bates and Archie Goodwin, I think what I got most from them was story structure. I was used to the relatively freeform atmosphere at Marvel, where stories would sprawl across however many issues they needed, and encountering Cary Bates's tight, cleanly-structured DC stories was an education in how to create a satisfying one-issue structure. A lot of the best Marvel writers accomplished that too, but it was buried deeper, and it was easier to see it and learn from it in Flash or Superboy. And Archie -- well, Archie was simply a master of craft. His Iron Man issues, his Manhunter, his Star Wars, are all carefully and elegantly structured, without the plot mechanics ever overwhelming his character concerns. He balanced story architecture and character drama better than anyone else in the mainstream, unless you reach back to Kurtzman at EC and Eisner and Feiffer on The Spirit.

With Caniff it's all character, as well -- his characters are so distinct, so individualized. Each of them has their own essential attitude and spirit that informs everything they do, and makes the intrigue richer because the characters are so lively. And with Starr, it was how he made everything look easy. His dialogue, in particular, is deceptively simple; it carries the exposition needed to remind you what's going on and who the characters are in every daily strip, without falling into obvious recap or distorting the characters' natures to get them to supply the appropriate information. I spent hours studying his dialogue and trying to get the same relaxed, casual feel into mine -- a verisimilitude that does the job without being obvious about it. That's something I've slacked off from recently, as I've been writing so many Marvel superhero comics -- I find myself adopting the more declarative, more obviously-expository idioms of Marvel's past writers, and while I enjoy it, I wouldn't want to do too much of that outside Marvel.

I think that's about everyone I mentioned -- I liked the Lee/Colan Daredevil for its daffy approach to character-based humor, and the Thomas/Roth X-Men for the liveliness of its cast, particularly their broad personalities. I don't know how much I learned from them in terms of technique, but the spirit of those books is something I tried to recapture while figuring out how to get my own ideas down on paper.

MESCALLADO: Did you anticipate a move into the editorial side of the comics industry, were you comfortable with it?

BUSIEK: ...Jim Salicrup, who edited Marvel Age, was always open to trying something new -- indeed, he was usually the guy who came in with the new ideas. His laid-back confidence and good humor were contagious -- and he was always committed to finding new ways to get comics in front of people. He didn't get much support from the higher-ups when he'd do something like pitch a Cyndi Lauper comic in magazine format for newsstand distribution, but he was always in there swinging, and taught me a lot about not being complacent, even during boom times.

Of course, I was making $500 a month and living in the New York metropolitan area, so things were never all that comfortable, but I learned a lot during the time I worked on the book, and I desperately needed the work. So all in all I'd say there was more good in it than bad.

MESCALLADO: Did you get to work closely with Fred Hembeck on Marvel Age? What's he like?

BUSIEK: Fred's a sweetheart, and I always enjoy talking to him. But I didn't get to work very closely with him on Marvel Age -- Jim Salicrup was the guy who talked to Fred, while I chased down Marvel editors we needed artwork from and proofread typesetting.

MESCALLADO: How aware were you of McCloud's Creator's Bill of Rights -- of his inspiration for it, of the decisions he made in drafting it?

BUSIEK: ...As for the Bill of Rights, he told me about it while he was working it up, and we argued various of the points for hours. I didn't think he'd really focused on what the bill was supposed to be -- whether it was a list of rights that creators should be aware they have going into a contract negotiation, or a list of rights he thought should be in any contract. Some of the points, like the right to total control of packaging and promotion, and the right to walk away unencumbered whenever the creator felt like it, struck me as unreasonable demands to make on a publisher, but were things that a creator should be aware he can negotiate on, rather than simply accepting whatever the publisher's standard plan is. All of this was years ago, though, and I haven't lived with the Bill the way Scott has, so I may be getting some of it wrong, or remembering points Scott subsequently dropped -- but as I recall, Scott tended to argue from idealism, and what would best serve creative freedom, and I tended to argue from pragmatism, and an awareness of what kind of deals a book publisher would make (since I believe I was working as a literary agent by then), to balance the need to an author for freedom while recognizing the publisher's need to protect and recoup his capital investment. Scott seemed to see the publisher as a necessary evil who should be bound securely, and I saw the publisher as, ideally, a partner who should have the ability to thrive as the creators did, and vice-versa.

Ultimately, I think that's why the Bill had more of an emotional impact than a practical one; it was neither fish nor fowl, in that it sounded like a list of contract demands but worked better as an instructive tool, as a list of rights every creator should be aware that he had, even if he chose to bargain some of them away in return for publisher services. But then, I don't have the Bill in front of me, and I'm sure Scott would differ with my interpretation were he here.

MESCALLADO: Reading issues of The Liberty Project for this interview, I enjoyed how unexpected it was, how it played off the uncertainty you're talking about. What do you think were the strengths and weaknesses of The Liberty Project, looking back at it now?

BUSIEK: Oh, geez, Ray, first you hit me with the Bill of Rights and then with specifics in The Liberty Project? You may have just read them, but it's been at least five or six years for me...

But going on what I remember, I think we had a distinctive concept and some lively characters, all of whom were built around strong enough personality cores to be vivid and memorable. We had a lot of energy, which came through on the page, and I was reasonably in control of my craft as a writer, so the book was clear and readable -- and fun, in an era when darkness was starting to overtake everything. And we didn't fall into any formula trap -- we wanted to keep things changing, keep things from ever being predictable. Had we continued, I think we'd have kept it up -- we had plans that would have thrown in regular surprises and status quo changes for another 25 issues or so.

On the other hand, we had a lousy title -- "The Liberty Project" isn't exactly a grabber, and its meaning only becomes clear after you've read the book and had it explained -- and had the bad luck to premiere at around the same time as Suicide Squad, a DC book with a similar concept. And we were kind of raw -- it's an unpolished book, and we were caught in the middle, perception-wise: Too mainstream to be an indy book, and too far from the mainstream (in terms of our lack of polish and our publisher) to attract a mainstream audience that could find stuff to satisfy them on the Marvel and DC racks -- notably Mike Barr's Batman and the Outsiders, which had the kind of script approach I was doing my best to emulate, and Jim Aparo and Alan Davis to boot. So while we might have been able to win readers over with distinctiveness and spirit given enough time, we didn't have the chance to get enough of them to sample the series before it died.

MESCALLADO: As a mainstream comics writer, did the "Class of '86" -- books like Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and Elektra: Assassin -- have any influence on you? Gerard Jones called it "Our Favorite Year" in The Comic Book Heroes, and it seemed like a very invigorating time for the industry. What was your own take of that time?

BUSIEK: It did feel like a very invigorating time -- like the mainstream was growing and changing, and if creators like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz could do this kind of stuff at the big companies, then the gates must be opening to better and better things. I wasn't wild about all the notable books coming out at the time -- the constant deification of Moore in both fan and pro circles grated on me, and predisposed me to dislike Watchmen, and Elektra I found confusing and hard to follow at first -- though coming back to both projects in later years, after the screaming had died down, let me see them apart from the fuss, and I found I liked them both taken on their own. But the thrill at the time wasn't whether I liked them or not, but the fact that books like this, with such a strong sense of the creator's own vision, were being published and being successful. It really felt like it was the death of house styles and a new era beginning for creativity and vision in the mainstream.

And then, of course, it turned out that the lesson apparently learned from the success of those projects was that darkness and death would sell. At first, of course, it was format -- the publishers started putting out squarebound books in profusion, as if that was the secret of Dark Knight's success -- and then the dark, violent and bloody tide swamped the industry, and that touched some sort of chord in the readers, since it succeeded for a long time, even when badly done. Instead of following Alan and Frank by finding a vision and expressing it, it seemed everyone had decided that what we needed was homicidally-psychopathic penguins, since it had worked with the Joker, and ever more brutal and "shocking" heroes. Oh well -- it had been a nice dream.

As far as influence went, I wasn't in the best place to be immediately influenced by the books -- in the first place, I wasn't getting much work at the time, so I didn't have a place to express whatever vision I might have had; in the second place, I was still jonesing to do the kind of mainstream stuff I'd been trying to break in for, so I don't know how much of a unique voice I'd have been able to offer in any case; and in the third place I reacted more to the overwhelming response the books got, rather than the books themselves, as I mentioned, which made it hard to see them as creative works rather than events.

But the ambition of them, the scope of the stories -- that's something I was very impressed by, even if I couldn't figure out how to accomplish anything like it myself. I wanted to -- I just didn't know how.

MESCALLADO: Why do you think there was such a darkness in those comics of 1986? Do you think it was a response to the optimism of Reagan America, a natural effect of trying to pick apart -- even deconstruct -- the superhero genre, or just the predilections of the creators involved?

BUSIEK: I think that at the start, it was likely a cross between the predilections of the creators and a desire to push the envelope, to go a little further, to push the form. Certainly, the darkness of Dark Knight was no surprise to anyone who'd read Miller's Daredevil, and Miracleman, V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing presage Watchmen. I think it's the response to those books on the part of the audience that turned it from individual vision into a tidal wave.

And while I expect there was a certain amount of response to Reagan-era America, which showed a lot of optimism and smiles over a cold heart, I also think there was a strong element of pendulum-swinging to it, too. The audience reading comics at the end of the '70s and the start of the '80s was largely used to a generally-positive status quo, an optimism and hopefulness in their comics, and a sense of the good-guy hero. So the darker characters, when they showed up -- Wolverine, who got darker and darker as time went on, Elektra, Rorschach and so on -- stood out as something special, something new, something different. And because they were the new cool thing, they got a lot of heat, a lot of interest. And so we got more of them. The violence and the darkness ramped up, as anyone with a hint of shadows to them -- Green Arrow, for instance -- turned darker, and other characters were turned darker.

And it happens more and more, until darkness becomes the new status quo. And then somebody like Mark Waid comes along, and does an undeniably upbeat, positive, daylight, good-guy hero like Flash -- and all of a sudden, that's seen as new, as different, as fresh, because it's been missing for so long. And the pendulum starts swinging the other way...

I think there's room in the industry -- and even in the superhero genre -- for a full range of tones, from sunny to grim, and from hyper-realistic to utter fantasy. As long as the majority of editors and creators all rush off in the same direction as soon as something turns out popular, though, we'll have that pendulum ruling the industry, because there's no sense of proportion. Or at least, it seems that way.

MESCALLADO: Several people -- myself included -- have also noted the way that the deconstructive superhero subgenre led to the misappropriations of the "grim and gritty" superheroes that followed. But don't you think that such misunderstanding and bad emulation is a natural result of any innovative success in commercial entertainment? Not that I'm excusing what followed, but in some ways I can't help but feel a fatalistic realism when looking back.

BUSIEK: Oh, sure. Do a hit movie about a killer alien stalking humans trapped in a spaceship and you'll spawn a dozen more movies about monsters and their prey in enclosed spaces -- most often spaceships, even. Make it clear that there's money in animated features, and they'll start showing up in profusion -- some well-made, some cheap attempts to capitalize on the success of the high-profile stuff. Heck, if someone makes a hit live-action musical, there'll be ten more in production in no time.

So it's really no surprise that the success of Dark Knight and Watchmen produced lowest-common-denomitaor imitations -- but at the time the books came out, there was a feeling of hope that a new era was dawning, and it was a real disappointment that it turned out to be business as usual so thoroughly and so fast. But yes, it was predictable, to the realists in the field. Me, I'm pragmatic about business, but I'm an inveterate dreamer, as well.

I also think the syndrome is worse in comics, particularly since the other mainstream genres fell by the wayside and the superhero emerged as the last man standing. If talking-baby-or-animal pictures hit in Hollywood, there are plenty of people who'll chase after the fad and drive it into the ground -- but Hollywood doesn't stop making romantic comedies and buddy pictures at the same time. They don't charge down the talking-baby path en masse, and it feels like in comics, that's just what we do, over and over.

MESCALLADO: What was it like, seeing a project of yours turned into a kind of franchise that tried to imitate yours and Ross' success? I know that this is a case of living by the rules of the game, but do you think this was a wise decision on Marvel's part, were you comfortable with such a reaction on the company's part?

BUSIEK: ...As for the idea of turning Marvels into a franchise, I assume you're talking about the Tales of the Marvels projects. I was all for those. The roots of the Marvels project were in Alex's original idea of an ongoing anthology of painted stories about the heroes, so it seemed appropriate somehow to have it turn into that in the end. And I looked forward to seeing other writers take a crack at it. And sometimes it worked -- I liked the Blockbuster and Wonder Years ones, for instance. But it didn't last. Instead of an approach it became a formula, and I heard from one later writer that he'd been told his script had to start with a normal scene that built to a second-page reveal of superhero action, because that was the way Tales of the Marvels projects opened -- this despite the fact that Marvels itself only opened two issues that way. At that point, I knew it was dead, but it was kind of fun to see something I'd co-created take on a brief life of its own like that.

The one thing I wish they hadn't done was use the plastic covers. We'd done that as an attention-getting gimmick on a series we thought wasn't an easy sell, and it fit thematically -- the idea of opening that cover and stripping away all the real-world trade dress and entering the world for real -- but it was an additional expense, and a gimmick that really was only going to be tolerable once. Plus, they slapped it on everything painted for a while, including the Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales specials, which had actually been started before Marvels, and had nothing to do with it beyond being painted. So they immediately looked like Marvels knockoffs, which hurt them with readers, and all the Tales of the Marvels stuff looked like an imitation. They didn't need the formula -- they could have done projects about a normal person's view of the Marvel Universe with whatever kind of art suited the story. They could have done painted stories that didn't depend on that man-in-the-street viewpoint. They could have saved the plastic covers until people had forgotten that they were essentially paying an extra buck in order to have a book that doubled as a coaster. But they did the whole thing -- painted art, normal-guy viewpoint, plastic cover -- and as a result it all smelled calculated and mercenary. And there was no way that was going to last.

MESCALLADO: I wrote in a column that books such as Waid's Flash and your own Marvels and Astro City were intentional repudiations of the whole "grim and gritty" movement, that there was a definitive opposition to that darkly realistic post-1986 aesthetics and ideology with the "nuevo traditionalists" (and I apologize now for that clumsy label). Do you see it that way, or was it just happenstance, a case of the pendulum swinging for the sake of swinging?

BUSIEK: I think what happened was that writers like me and Mark -- and Karl Kesel, for that matter -- got a chance to do the stuff we liked, which falls into either the "retro" or "reconstructionist" camps, depending on your viewpoint and the time of day, and we happened to do it at the right time for the audience to see it as something fresh and different, just as Wolverine and the Punisher had been new and different a decade earlier. I don't think it was intentional, in that we were just writing the kind of thing we wanted to see, not placing ourselves in opposition to anything, and I don't think the pendulum swings without a reason -- it's not like we got given work on marquee projects because it was fated. But the readers were ready for what we were offering when we were able to offer it.

MESCALLADO: Marvels has become a very influential comic in the years that followed -- it was the first runaway hit for "nuevo traditionalist" or "reconstructionist" superheroes. How do you feel about having such an influence with that work, of re-aligning attitudes towards the genre?

BUSIEK: Resigned.

I don't know that it's as influential as you suggest, but then, I see it from the inside, so maybe I wouldn't know. But sometimes it seems that comics is a vast field of possibility, with a large city in one corner of it where almost everybody lives, and a few scattered suburbs here and there. And when someone like a Frank Miller or an Alan Moore or a Neil Gaiman comes along and strikes out in a different direction, lots of people go, "Oh, look! The new direction!" and trudge off in their footsteps. And I wish what they'd see is that the fact that Alan or Frank or Neil can go off in a different direction means that they can find their own vision, their own direction, and go off on their own. I'd love to see tons of creators "leaving the city" and striking out on their own, rather than following in the paths of previous trailblazers. Blaze your own trail, dammit!

I cast this in terms of Frank and Alan and Neil because I don't terribly feel like a trailblazer. Mark Waid, Alex Ross and I may have made life easier for people who already had a more shiny-happy vision of the superhero than the grim & gritty crowd, but I don't know whether we've changed people's career paths. I have noticed a rise in series about cities or communities, and that the phrase, "it's like Astro City _____" has been cropping up as a sales logline here and there. But I haven't actually read many series I think are like Astro City or Marvels.

But to whatever degree I've become an influence, I recognize that it's inevitable if someone's at all successful, but I'd rather not, thanks. I wouldn't mind being an influence in terms of technique, or in terms of people keeping their mouths shut about upcoming plot twists, but as far as direction goes, I'd just as soon people found their own, and embraced what works for them. McCloud's the missionary, not me -- I want to enthrall and audience, not start a movement.

MESCALLADO: You say that you don't want to start a movement, but in some ways it seems Alex Ross is at least interested in responding to the grim & gritty subgenre on his major projects. He's said in the past that he saw the death of Gwen Stacy as the end of the Silver Age and its innocence, for example, and Kingdom Come is apparently an attempt to explore the different kinds of heroism (or lack thereof) in the wake of the whole deconstructive superheroes trend. Are you comfortable with these kinds of oppositions being drawn, of your work inevitably taking the side of the "reconstructionists" by those who want to draw the recon vs. decon lines? Or is this not a concern for you at all, even on that level?

BUSIEK: I think there's a difference between responding to something and starting a movement. Alex is influenced by what he's seen in comics and elsewhere, and that fuels his projects, just as it fuels mine, or anyone else's -- you express, as a creator, what you're inspired to express. That doesn't mean we're waving banners and shouting, "This way, boys!" as we try to take the whole industry crashing into a new direction.

Not to say that creators never start movements, or want to, but for me at least, I don't write with the idea of what it will inspire other creators to do. I write for me and for the readers, and I try to write honestly and well and in a way that'll entertain and involve the audience, and affect them with the story itself. Anything beyond that is something I'll think about after the fact. It's your job to identify movements and trends, and talk about which ways the creative community is shifting. My job is to tell the stories, and whatever part I play in the overall shift of creative sensibility is a byproduct, not an intent on my part.

I'm very interested in affecting the industry as an industry, but more in things like distribution and packaging and how to get comics in front of new readers again. But I think that's all about creating opportunities for lots of different creators to express their own visions and have them reach a receptive audience, not about inspiring creators to follow my creative visions in connecting to the audience we've already got. Creatively, I want creators all going every which way -- I want to see Paul Grist and Linda Medley and Stan Sakai and the Hernandez Brothers and Karl Kesel and Warren Ellis all thriving and doing what they love best, and the way to do that is to create a business environment that'll make that possible, not to rally them creatively. They rally themselves just fine already.

So I guess the question of my work being classified one way or another by those who are making these distinctions doesn't really concern me, no. That's after-the-fact analysis, and I'm concentrating on other things.

MESCALLADO: So what exactly is your affinity for the superhero genre? Why does it appeal to you, do you think? And are there any other genres which appeal to you with similar strength?

BUSIEK: Hell, I don't know. If I could articulate it, I'd probably be able to let it go and go on to other things, but since I can't, I mess with it, exploring the genre until I find out what it is. I could say it's the metaphoric power of these symbolic characters, who stand for something wider, more universal -- that the context of the superhero world is by its nature artificial and thus the conflicts resonate with the reader as a stand-in for emotions or internal conflicts or whatever that he feels himself in a way that's harder to do with something more realistic, but I don't know that for sure. Maybe it's the scope of the entangled, fictional history, maybe it's the way a world of anything-goes peril and danger works as a character crucible, maybe it's something else. I'm still finding out.

As far as other genres appealing to me with similar strength, I can name three, though one's nonfiction, so I don't know if "genre" applies. I love well-written biographies, and someday I'd like to figure out how to do a good, in-depth biography in comics form. Other creators have done great things with history, from Jack Jackson to Larry Gonick, but I'd like to find a way to get on the page what it is that hooks me into a really solid, well-written life story. Or a patchwork history -- lots of different takes on living through the Great Depression, or the Australian Gold Rush, or something like that. I like high adventure as well, which has similarities to the superhero genre with all the roller-coaster plotting and the character clash and interpersonal drama, but without so much over the top fantasy and pseudo-science, and I'd love to do something like that at length someday. And I love quiet character stories, whether it's the kind of kids stories Beverly Cleary and Robert McCloskey wrote, or Nevil Shute's sentimental novels, or Rumer Godden's books. I have a sketchbook that I consistently forget to bring to conventions -- one of my dream projects is just to ask dozens of artists to draw me a normal person, whatever comes to mind, and then when the book's full decide that these people are all the citizens of a small town somewhere, and do a series about their lives, and how they intertwine.

So I guess, in comics terms, what I'd like to do beyond superheroes boils down to Terry and the Pirates and Gasoline Alley, with a non-fiction history or two along the way.

Of course, then there's children's fantasy of the sort I did in The Wizard's Tale or the never-completed Magic Shop. Or an adult urban fantasy. Or any of a dozen other things that'll probably occur to me as soon as I finish this sentence.

I guess I just like stories about people, and any form I can get to that through is one I can get excited about.

MESCALLADO: Where do you think the animosity between established Marvel/DC creators and the Image founders came from? Was there some underlying resentment of Image's financial success and creative lapses (i.e., the late shipping of books, the derivative nature of certain characters)? And do you think your own fringe status before Marvels helped you see beyond such divides?

BUSIEK: I don't know that I'd say there was animosity between those camps -- particularly not from pencilers and letterers and so on. I think a lot of writers and editors resented Image, though -- they'd just essentially up and announced, "Hey, we don't need you" -- and then proved it, at least in the short term.

The thing is, Image came across as a movement, as a step forward for artists' rights, a bold new direction, and so forth and so on, and that was polarizing. I don't know if they intended to come across that way, but between Erik Larsen's "Name Withheld" letter, which got tagged by CBG as "Artist to writers: We don't need you and we don't want you," and some of Todd and Rob's excessive verbal posturing, Image seemed like a philosophy, a cult. And to the people who were being left behind, it was threatening. So while there were a number of artists knocking on Image's door, looking to do their own stuff and make a fortune, there weren't that many writers. Chris Claremont did some stuff for Jim and Marc, and Todd hired Frank and Alan and Neil and Dave and Grant all in a row, more or less, but for the most part, Image felt like an artists' conclave, where art ruled the roost and writing was secondary. Good writing, even, was a sales gimmick.

So at Marvel, the sense I got was that these guys were traitors, and they were ruining comics, and they were ungrateful bastards who'd been incredibly disloyal -- which, in practical terms, means they walked away while they were still hot. I don't know whether it was the fact that I never had felt terribly welcome at Marvel, or that I'd talked to Mark Evanier too much, or what, but I saw Image as simply a group of popular creators forming their own company, and breaking the hold that DC and Marvel had over the superhero reader, a process Valiant had started and Image finished. And I thought that was a good thing. Not that I was riveted by the quality of the Image books -- I liked Savage Dragon a lot, and found some of the others engaging, but that was about it -- but the idea of breaking open the industry so that the audience would follow whatever talent they liked rather than a company logo, that appealed to me.

And Image squandered their advantage so thoroughly, with the late books and the lame stories, and by not building something of lasting appeal. It turned out that they did need writers, and they did need editors -- at least, some of 'em did. And they could have gotten all the control they wanted by having the editors and writers work for them, while still benefiting from having people who knew what they were doing in those chairs. But by the time they started to realize that, they'd already started tumbling from that initial peak.

But at the time we're talking about, I simply figured Image was another company, one run by a different group of people with a different set of priorities than most other companies. They were reaching an audience well, and they might be able to let me have access to that connection, too, without my having to give up ownership and control.

MESCALLADO: Was the fact that you were working on a ninety-nine cent book important in any way? Personally, I thought that added a cachet of increased accessibility to people who didn't usually read comic books -- though there was that weird irony of Wal-Marts or whoever thinking the profit was too low so they started packaging the ninety-nine cent books in two-packs. And in recent memory, Untold Tales was the Spidey title least mired in complicated, byzantine continuity -- perhaps another irony, given that it was a "historical" series. But did the packaging have any influence on how you understood the book, of the audience you could reach?

BUSIEK: The 99-cent line was ill-conceived right from the start. The whole point of it was, as you note, to make it accessible to people who weren't regular comics readers -- it was supposed to go out onto the newsstands and catch the eye of kids who could try it, understand and enjoy every issue all by itself, and hopefully be encouraged to try other Marvel books. But once the line was under way, Marvel discovered that retailers refused to take a 99-cent book. They weren't about to use rack space for a product that brought in only half the profit of other comics that could be in that space instead. So for the newsstand, the 99-cent books came out as $1.95 flip-books, with two of the 99-centers printed in one double-sized package. Which ruined the whole idea of appealing to new readers with a low price, unless they actually checked and saw they were getting 40 pages of story for the price of a 22-pager, and how many first-time comics browsers are going to do that?

More, the title wasn't designed to attract new readers, either. If you'd never read Spider-Man stories, which would you pick for a first taste -- something called Spider-Man, something called Amazing Spider-Man, or something called Untold Tales of Spider-Man? The one called Untold Tales sounds like Spider-Man: The Apocrypha -- even more Spidey for those readers who already buy all the rest and still haven't gotten enough. It certainly doesn't sound like an entry-level book. I wanted to call it Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man -- Karl Kesel's suggestion -- but that was nixed by higher-ups because it sounded soft. That's what I liked about it -- it sounded welcoming.

But rant, rant, rant -- it's all water under the bridge now. For all that we had almost no chance of reaching the audience we were aiming at, we did make Untold Tales as accessible as we could. Every single issue was a one-issue story, complete in 20 pages. There were sub-plots that continued, and the occasional teaser for next issue, but the main stories all wrapped up by the end of the book. Every issue was designed to introduce readers to Spider-Man, the series set-up and the supporting cast. We didn't use footnotes to refer back to the old 1960s continuity, since that would make readers who hadn't read that stuff feel they were missing out. We simply explained everything -- if we brought in the Vulture, we'd introduce him and explain how he broke jail without ever making a thing out of the fact that he got carted off to jail in a story that came out 35 years earlier. We'd remind readers of all the relationships between the characters, all the sub-plots, whatever. Every issue had to be an introduction, and had to give the reader a complete story.

Not that other books shouldn't do this, of course. Even part four of a seventeen-part epic should be something a new reader can pick up, understand, be satisfied by and walk away knowing who all the characters are and what the series is about. But we bent over backward to make it extra-clear in Untold Tales.

And we kept it featuring stories that would be good for younger readers. Not a lot of politics, more romance and flirtation than sex, more action than violence, that sort of thing. We didn't talk down to readers -- Stan's books were wordier than most Marvel books today, and didn't keep the vocabulary simple -- but we did keep the stories straightforward, so they could be understood by readers who didn't have a whole lot of life experience or weren't so practiced at reading comics that they'd pick up on implied but unstated information.

None of that really had to do with the price -- it was the point of the book, so we designed the book to work that way. The price was another reflection of the same point, but I'd have written it the same if it was $1.50 or $1.95. It'd still have been an outreach book, whatever the price.

MESCALLADO: How do you feel about John Byrne's re-working of Spider-Man's early history in Spider-Man: Chapter One?

BUSIEK: I haven't read it. I meant to, since I like a lot of what John's done, but somehow I never got sent that week's bundle of comps, so I missed #1, and by the time #2 came out I found I just didn't have the interest.

The stated purpose of Chapter One was to rework and represent Spider-Man's early days for a new audience, and to whatever degree it was successful, I'm not that audience. There may be tons of kids out there who weren't enjoying Spider-Man because the first 18 issues were too old-fashioned -- I don't actually think so, but maybe there are -- but the concept just doesn't do anything for me. I like the Lee/Ditko stuff, and whether I'd done Untold Tales or not, I don't really have any desire to see the classic stories replaced and revamped.

People assumed there was some kind a feud between John and me over this, because John said something about negating my Amazing Fantasy mini-series, and "Man of Steel-ing it" out of continuity. But I can't really get upset about it -- people have been revising Marvel and DC continuity for longer than I've been alive, and if I really thought my work would be sacrosanct and untouchable when Kirby's isn't, Englehart's isn't, Claremont's isn't, and, for that matter, even Byrne's isn't, I'd really have to be kidding myself. The chance that someone might come along later and undo something you've done goes with the territory, and if you don't want it to happen, you shouldn't work for Marvel.

Ultimately, it's the company's decision to preserve the past or rework it, and John couldn't do any of what he did in Chapter One without the publisher's approval. I'm confident John did what he thought was best -- he's making the best comics he can, the best way he knows how, and while I may make substantially different creative choices, I've got no reason to doubt his sincerity.

That said, and from what I saw just flipping through the issues, I'm not wild about this kind of continuity revision. I think that making a few cosmetic changes here and there in retelling origins -- much the way John revised Iron Man's origin years ago to take out all references to the Vietnam War without actually changing the structure of the story -- is necessary, given Marvel and DC's policy about time always rolling up behind the heroes so they stay young. But I think that in that sort of situation, you should preserve as much of the original as possible -- I think it allows you to accommodate new readers by modernizing details while not driving away existing readers by negating their memories of the character, or upsetting stories that were based on details of the early days that have now been thrown out.

Besides, I think that if you stray too far from the original material, someone'll come along later and put it all back. Someone'll be retelling Spider-Man's origin six years from now, and they'll reference it from the original, because they liked it better, or because they forgot about Chapter One, or whatever. And the original story will be back, dressed up in more modern clothes.

So ultimately, I don't see the point. Making substantial revisions to a character's history (as opposed to adding stuff, or revealing heretofore unsuspected complications, or all that kind of thing) tends to make me, as a reader, less interested in the character since it's the history that, to me, makes the character who he or she is -- that's the story, that's the biography. But ultimately, it's Marvel's call, and I get the comics free anyway, so my preferences as a reader don't do much for their bottom line.

But as it happens, I'm told that nothing in Chapter One negated the Amazing Fantasy mini-series anyway -- and I've since used a villain and a TV show introduced in Amazing Fantasy in modern-day stories, so they must have debuted somewhere.

In the end, it's all a tempest in a teapot, I think. But I doubt I'll be doing any flashbacks to Spidey's early days until and unless someone puts the Lee/Ditko stuff back. I'd rather think of that as the "real" story, with no offense meant to John, his editors, or anyone else.

MESCALLADO: Why did you decide to call the series Kurt Busiek's Astro City? That is, why the conscious inclusion of your name?

BUSIEK: That was Jim Lee -- or at least he triggered it. I'd been calling the book Astro City in the proposal, and when Image agreed to publish it, he mentioned that he didn't think the title worked. He was concerned that it would give the wrong impression -- that people would think of the Jetsons' dog, and think the book was supposed to be comedic, or cartoony, or something.

I liked the character of Astro City as a title, though. I messed around with some others, and the only one that even came close to working was Omega City, which sounds to my ear like some outer-space place Jim Starlin would write about, and would saddle me with omega-symbols in the visuals somewhere. And by then, Alex and I had come up with the Astro-Naut, so I had reasons to want to preserve he name.

And then I realized that if I stuck my name in front of it, it would have a pretentious, self-important feel -- a kind of artsy-fartsy flavor that would, theoretically, balance the other half of the name, and they'd cancel each other out. So I went with it, and Jim okayed it.

It worked out pretty well, I think -- awards-night jokes aside. Nobody had any inherent interest in a book called Astro City, but Marvels fans knew my name and associated it with a different kind of superhero story, and one they'd liked. So my name may have brought people over from Marvels who wouldn't have noticed the book otherwise. And it also served to label the book as personal -- as my vision, rather than just the latest superhero project from Image.

I don't know, maybe it would all have been just fine if we'd just called it Astro City. But I'm used to it that way, now.

MESCALLADO: You've said that Astro City is a comic which you want to treat as a writerly challenge. To quote our last interview, just when KBAC was going to debut, "One of my basic rules for Astro City is that if the story's comfortable, if I know how to write it, with no problems, then I throw it out and do something else." Exactly what kind of challenges or discomforts are you looking for? Is it strictly in terms of expanding the metaphoric range of the superhero genre? Are there formal experiments you had in mind, or moral dilemmas such as the one in "Safeguards"?

BUSIEK: If I could explain it exactly, I wouldn't need to do it.

It's just a sense that, when I'm starting on an Astro City story, it should be something that, in some way, I'm not sure I can pull off. Some intent, some effect of the story on the reader, something that I have to stretch to be able to accomplish. More than that, I don't really know if I can put into words -- I suspect that the more I try to describe it, the more it would simply be repetition.

But taking a stab at it, I'd say that when I sit down to write an Astro City story, if I know how it should all play out and don't have any qualms about how to deliver what's in my head on the page, then I shouldn't be writing that story. That's not a problem in Avengers or Thunderbolts, but in Astro City there's got to be some sense that "I don't know how to do this" when I'm starting out. Whatever's in my head needs to be something that I don't know if I can get onto the page. And in the writing of it, I find a way to do it, if I can.

Sorry if that's not more clear. I suspect that if it was, there'd be no need to write Astro City...

MESCALLADO: Which Astro City story has earned the most attention or controversy, best as you can tell? My guess is "Safeguards" but I may be biased because I really like that story and how it's constructed.

BUSIEK: In terms of audience reaction, it'd have to be "Safeguards" -- which is odd, in that that issue was one of the two lowest-selling issues of the whole series, so fewer people had the chance to read it that any of the others. But "Safeguards" is an example of what you just asked about, in terms of setting myself a challenge. What I wanted to get onto the page was an idea about empowerment, about Marta having more personal strength in a place where she knew the rules, where she controlled the safeguards and could use them to protect herself, versus a place where she had to depend on others for protection. In trying to realize that idea, it got all tangled up with this very American idea that frontiers are to be conquered, and any time anyone chooses not to brave the unknown, they're retreating. So readers wound up seeing a story that had a contradictory effect -- was Marta's choice right or wrong? The story supports either interpretation, and is richer for it.

The audience didn't exactly polarize around the issue -- there was a lot of argument over the underpinnings and meanings of Marta's choice, but those differences didn't seem to make it a bad story in anyone's eyes. Even those who thought it was a story about a woman failing and hiding in her parents' values thought it was a well-written story about failure.

For my part, I'd like to stumble into that kind of problem more often -- it was a very difficult story to write, but the results were far more rewarding than anything I could have done that I knew how to do going into it.

MESCALLADO: I know you're especially proud of the characterization in Thunderbolts. What was it which made the characters and their interaction work for you? Did you have a clear idea of how you wished to develop the characters as the story progressed?

BUSIEK: I picked the characters in the first place for their motivations, because I thought it would make an interesting ensemble. Zemo wanted to rule the world, and Moonstone wanted to manipulate things to her own advantage, which gave me a nice conflict at the heart of things. But in addition, the Beetle had become a villain because he wanted respect and never got it, which made it interesting to see what he'd do once he did get it; the Fixer wasn't so much a villain as an arrogant engineer who likes a challenge and doesn't care about the law; Goliath was a born follower who seemed to get lost whenever there wasn't someone to tell him what to do, and Screaming Mimi -- well, she had no real personality to speak of, so I built one in -- a fragile, battered ego who'd developed a tough shell to protect her from all she'd endured. That gave me a cast with varied motivations, so that while they were united in a common purpose, they had different reasons for it, which could keep them bouncing off each other nicely -- and they were also chosen for the varied effects that their masquerade would have on them. Zemo it wouldn't affect at all, of course, and to Moonstone it was largely just another arena for manipulation. But the Beetle got respect for the first time in his life, the Fixer got ongoing and satisfying challenges, Atlas was eventually plunged into a situation where he had to choose who to follow, and then to choose what to do for himself, rather than for a master. And Screaming Mimi was defending herself against hurt, but got validation and tenderness instead, which she wasn't prepared for.

And then, of course, we threw in Jolt, the naive gull with the ideals of a Captain America, to act as a further catalyst.

Everyone got their motivations messed with -- they got poked in the heart of what made them tick. So of course they did interesting things. I can't say I had it all mapped out -- in fact, I had directions for everyone but they changed as we played the book out. Atlas was supposed to emerge as the most heroic, for instance, and MACH-1 is the one that did, while Atlas found himself mired in angst and unable to become self-directing. Songbird got to be more fun after we brought her out of her shell and then hit her again, making her more defensive than ever for a while, and stuff with Moonstone emerged that's still playing out, so I shouldn't say too much about that.

But we had a lot of strong character cores, and we threw them into a cauldron that affected each of those cores directly. It's not hard to do good work under those circumstances.

MESCALLADO: Speaking of Heroes Reborn, what did you think of that experiment anyway?

BUSIEK: As I've often said, it's not what I would have chosen to do. I can't argue that it worked -- it boosted sales on all four books, kept them quite high, and let Marvel bring them back at a higher level than they'd left at. So in financial terms, which is what it was all about, it worked -- and it brought in more readers to try those books.

In aesthetic terms, it didn't interest me a whole lot. I thought Iron Man was the best-crafted of the bunch -- Fantastic Four was well-drawn but rushed, and the other two were enthusiastically sloppy -- but as I mentioned when you asked about Spider-Man Chapter One, a lot of my interest in these characters is due to their history. I see who they are as defined to a great extent by what they've been through, what they've experienced, and not just what they look like, what attitudes they project and what powers they have. So these guys were not the characters I had an attachment to, and there wasn't anything in the stories that hooked me in, the way a good Elseworlds project can. And of course, as with Chapter One, I'm not the target audience -- I don't need a new beginning to make me interested in Iron Man or the Avengers. I was already hooked.

The main thing I appreciated about the whole Heroes Reborn experiment, aside from the clean slate and the sales boost it gave us guys who came along afterward, was that it happened off in its own world, and had an entry point and an exit point. The characters could come back as they had been without a big to-do, once the experiment was over. So they did it, they got a benefit out of it, they put it away, and we got the real guys back.

Not much to complain about, from where I sit.

MESCALLADO: What exactly attracts you to Iron Man? You've said that, aside from a handful of issues, writing the book never quite clicked for you. What expectations were you bringing to it, what did you want to accomplish with the character?

BUSIEK: I think what I like most about Iron Man is the Caniff influence Don Heck brought to it. Kirby and Ditko were terrific action artists, and most of the early Marvel heroes have that kind of sensibility looming over everything. But the Iron Man series in Tales of Suspense was much more Heck's strip, and Heck was more of an illustrator than an action artist -- his work is so much about the people, the settings, the moods and so on more than the flying around and hitting. That's not a slam on Kirby or Ditko -- they did terrific interpersonal stuff too, and great staging -- but in Heck's work it's the main point, and the action is almost an intrusion. And Heck's sensibility came through most clearly in Iron Man. Plus, I expect he influenced the series in terms of introducing villains like the very Caniff-like Mandarin and the Dragon-Lady-esque Black Widow, and the comedic supporting-character stuff with Happy and Pepper.

Beyond that, I think Tony Stark is one of the best-conceived heroes in comics. Not Iron Man, per se, but Tony. He's an inventor, a ladies' man, a businessman and an adventurer all rolled into one, and any one of those four would be a rich source of story stringboards. With all four at once, there's just no reason for things ever to slow down -- stuff can be arising from one quarter while Tony's dealing with stuff on another front, and the series should never lose freshness, because it doesn't need to depend on only one source of story possibilities.

I did say that it's Tony who's the great concept more than Iron Man. Iron Man's got a major flaw in that Stan, Jack and Don never gave him a reason to be Iron Man beyond that he was stuck in the chestplate, and so long as he had the armor, he might as well use it to protect his company and do good elsewhere. That's not as strong as, say, Spider-Man's feeling of great responsibility, Reed Richards' questing scientific adventurism, Daredevil's need to be what his father forbade him to be, and so on -- but I think that's one of the reasons I like the character even more. He's not so strongly motivated as Iron Man that it takes over his life, the way Batman dominates Bruce Wayne (who is also a ladies' man and businessman, and an accomplished engineer, depending on who's writing him). It lets Tony Stark be the central role, and Iron Man be merely one of the facets.

So there's Tony -- charming, handsome, wealthy, brilliant, headstrong and courageous -- in the middle of a very Caniff-like world of intrigue, romance and adventure. I'm just a sucker for that kind of thing. I fastened on Iron Man as a book I wanted to write when Bill Mantlo was doing it, and doing mostly a reiteration of what Archie Goodwin had done with his classic run, including the very Caniffesque Madame Masque. The Mantlo stuff led me to the Goodwin stuff, and to the Lee/Heck stuff, and I got a real sense of possibility to the character, and really wanted to play with that possibility someday. And this was all before I'd read any Caniff, aside from the occasional Steve Canyon Sunday page -- I didn't discover Terry and the Pirates until I ran across those '70s reprint collections in The Million Year Picnic, around the time Bill left the series.

So what I always wanted to bring to Iron Man was that kind of richly-textured intrigue and lush, romantic character portrayals I like so much in Caniff. I wanted to give the series a sense of danger -- not Iron Man going from story to story, but Tony Stark waltzing his way through a minefield of business competitors, master villains, dangerous women, technological threats and more, with the idea that the sense of danger was permanent; it permeated Tony's world so that he was always in the midst of it, not triumphing over it. I wanted to give the book an international-adventure feel, with a lot of exotic locations, and the kind of multiple interrupted-serial-romances that Caniff did so well with Pat Ryan and his major romantic interests -- Normandie Drake, Burma and the Dragon Lady.

And unfortunately, the superhero stuff just kept getting in the way. The need to get Tony into the armor, and into battle with recognizable and theoretically-popular super-threats would take up enough of the book so that I didn't have enough space left over to build that sense of textured intrigue. So for the first year, the romances got short shrift, the international stuff became more travelogue than exotic settings, and the sense of ongoing danger I tried to create just came off as slow, unresolved plot threads. We had some nice moments here and there, as I got a piece of what I wanted to materialize on the page, but never really all of it at once. I think the closest I came to clicking with it was #13, and that would have been even more fun if we could have spread it over three issues, with a lot of Gothic threat and verbal banter between Tony and "Dr. Basel," but if we had, Tony'd only have been in the suit in one of the issues, and I think that would have been a problem.

I do think I could have found a way to do it, if I'd been able to step back and analyze it out, and work out long-form structures that'd run a year or more and keep the superheroic visual content meaning something while the intrigue and character drama bubbled along at its own pace, braiding multiple storylines in and around each other -- but by the time I realized I was floundering, I was sick, and it was all I could do to keep writing the book, much less to get far enough ahead so that I could take the time to work out something that ambitious. It may be that I'll get another crack at it sometime, or that I'll create a straight adventure series, and will be able to pace things out better without the superhero in there. I guess I'll see.

I don't think I really screwed up or anything, though -- on my own in the first year and with Roger Stern doing all the heavy lifting in the second, I think we delivered a pretty good Iron Man series, one that doesn't stack up too shabbily against the rest of Iron Man history. I was just hoping to do something that was more than that, something that matched what I see in my head when I think about the character -- and that, I didn't manage.

I'm pretty pleased at how thoroughly the series was about Tony, though. Even in the armor, he never came off as Superhero Guy -- he came off Tony Stark wearing a cool suit, but Tony first and foremost, and I think that's how it should be. So I'm not embarrassed at my Iron Man run. I just wish I'd been able to take it further than I managed to.

MESCALLADO: How did you strike up a collaboration with Roger Stern? What exactly does that entail for each of you?

BUSIEK: Roger's been a friend of mine for a good long time, and I admire his work -- he's a very clean, very effective craftsman. And his sensibilities and mine aren't too terribly far apart, so when I started needing deadline help on a couple of jobs, I asked him. He co-plotted a couple of issues of Thunderbolts (and then did a fill-in chapter on his own) to buy me time, and co-plotted the last issue of Untold Tales, as well. And it worked out quite well -- it was fun to work with him, and the results were good. I don't really like co-writing as a general rule, since I'd rather do the whole thing myself, and I'd much rather see a complete Roger Stern job than one in which he only does part of it, but if it needs to be done I've never had a smoother experience or been more pleased with the results.

So when I took on Avengers Forever and didn't want to give up anything to make room for it on my schedule, it rapidly became clear that I wasn't going to be able to make the deadlines. We'd talked about my giving up Thunderbolts, but when push came to shove I just didn't want to, so we asked Roger to come in and essentially take a book's worth of pressure off of me by co-plotting the research-intensive Avengers Forever and co-plotting and scripting Iron Man.

And he agreed, and it's worked out very well -- though neither of us ever intended it to be more than a stopgap measure to get me through a year of overwork. We've now finished our last plots together, and I'm grateful it all went so well. But I'd still rather get to read solo Roger Stern comics...

MESCALLADO: You've said that the "Ultron Unlimited" storyline is where you feel you've truly hit your stride with Avengers. I have to admit, reading it has been a complete fanboy thrill for me, it's a real roller coaster ride. What do you think happened with this story? Was it reaching a point where you had mastery of your characters and their situations, or was more involved?

BUSIEK: I think it's two factors, more than anything else. First and most importantly, we took the time the story needed, instead of rushing it. Too often, in the first year, we rocketed through a story in two issues because we needed to be somewhere else -- for a crossover, a guest-shot, a double-sized issue -- by the third one, and didn't give ourselves the room for the story to breathe. With "Ultron Unlimited," we started off budgeting three issues for the story, but expanded it to four when we realized it needed the room. And that's given us an enormous benefit -- we can explore situations that, in the first year, we'd simply have breezed over. The set pieces don't have to be rushed, and the character stuff doesn't have to be cluttered. As such, the pace is much more assured, much more accommodating to the drama and excitement.

Second, we also spent a lot of time in the first year building a foundation -- setting up the Wonder Man/Scarlet Witch/Vision triangle the way we wanted it, establishing Justice's and Firestar's concerns about being on the team, exploring the Scarlet Witch's superpowers, setting up Hank and Jan in their new dynamic. Once we got all that stuff rolling, it was easier to keep it moving and let it play out. We'd gotten the momentum going, and the story let us build from that, let us take advantage of it, instead of having to concentrate so much on set-up work.

MESCALLADO: So what plans do you have for the future of Avengers? What's your commitment to the series contractually at this point?

BUSIEK: I committed to another year on Avengers back in June, though my lawyer and Marvel's legal department are still dickering over bits of the contract. That would keep both George and me on the book at least up until whatever issues ship next fall, and possibly longer, of course. We've got up until #30 pretty well outlined out, with several more adventures loosely planned beyond that -- and of course, I always have agonizingly long-term plans for any book. But #23 will be a Vision/Wonder Man focus, #24-25 is a two-parter pitting the Avengers against the Exemplars -- the new villains introduced in the "Eighth Day" event that came out of Iron Man; #26 is a breather-issue to let George recuperate from the double-sized #25 -- we'll have a guest-artist, and the story will feature a number of heroes who have associations with the Avengers but aren't on the roster at the moment. #27 we're not talking about yet, since it's a surprise of sorts. #28-30 will take the Avengers to Costa Verde to free a god and to learn more about the origin of Silverclaw, including just why she wound up the sponsored child of the butler to the Avengers, which was not a coincidence. After that, we've got stories planned involving Madame Masque and Count Nefaria, following up on plot-threads from Iron Man, we've got more trouble with the Triune Understanding coming, a space-epic involving repercussions from Avengers Forever, a number of new character-oriented plotlines, and more.

We all feel pretty good about how the book's working, in the wake of "Ultron Unleashed," and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. For those of you out there who like this sort of thing, at least.

MESCALLADO: Another tough question: how important do you think the business side of comics is? I've heard people say that a scenario where comics emphasized the artform and let the corporate direct market bullshit die off would be preferable. Poetry doesn't try to be a multimillion dollar merchandising machine, why should comics?

BUSIEK: I'd hate to think the only two choices are multimillion dollar merchandising machine and the poetry industry. Back when I was a literary agent, we'd get tons of poetry submissions, and had to point out to a lot of laureate hopefuls that poetry is a field where more people create it than consume it -- there are thousands of people writing poetry in their spare time and wishing they could get it to a readership that would appreciate it, but most of those people don't go out and support the work of other poets. Poetry is a form where it's even harder for most of the people trying to do it to connect with an audience than comics.

Which might be fine for people whose main interest is expressing themselves on paper and realizing their vision. They can support themselves with a day job, do their comics in their spare time, circulate them to whatever extent they can manage, and reap whatever self-fulfillment there is in that. But for me, and I suspect a lot of other creators, a huge part of the urge to tell stories is in the idea that we're reaching an audience, that there are people out there in the dark hearing us and wanting to know what comes next. I want to reach as larger an audience as I can -- not just packing in bodies, but reaching people who'll enjoy the tale I'm telling. That's a part of the process, for me, and a healthy industry that reaches more than a tiny fraction of the reading public is a good way to make that goal reachable.

I also like doing this full-time -- I like supporting myself and my family by being a storyteller, so an economically-viable industry in which I can reach an audience is a good thing there, too.

But I realize that my goals aren't everyone's goals, so I've got no problem with the idea that I'll work toward what I want while other people work toward what they want. And people who want to emphasize the artform with no marketplace concerns can do that -- they don't actually need the marketplace to die off, though. They can just ignore it, and do what fulfills them as if it isn't there, while those of us who want a healthy industry can do what we do, separate from what they do. They'll have what they want, and we'll have a stab at what we want. Heck, the marketplace is dying as it is, so they might even get what they want for all of us.

Me, I think there's room -- or could be -- for all of us, just as the book publishing industry manages to publish best-sellers and category fiction and literary work and non-fiction and even poetry collections here and there. Ethan Canin doesn't have to destroy Danielle Steel or Dean Koontz to write what he writes and reach an appreciative audience, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't have to compete with the latest offerings on the SF shelf. So I don't see any point in destroying the "corporate direct market bullshit," when anyone who's not interested in it can just sidestep it.

If nothing else, Danielle Steel and Dean Koontz help a lot of those bookstores who make Canin's and Marquez's work available stay in business. I'd hope the comics industry, if it could be made healthy again, could do that far more than it does now -- with mainstream comics and kids comics supporting an infrastructure and attracting an audience -- while more serious work can be made available through that presumably-healthy infrastructure and can have a shot at winning over some of that mainstream audience.

MESCALLADO: I agree with you that the direct market has become a trap for the industry, but how would you replace it? How viable do you believe other markets could be, such as the Internet, or the trade paperbacks in bookstores scenario, or even a renewed focus on newsstand sales?

BUSIEK: I don't think there's an easy answer. I wouldn't want to replace the direct market, for one thing, since I think it could serve a valuable role in a healthy comics industry. It just can't do it all by itself. What we need is a feeder market -- a broad-but-shallow selection of comics that are widely available, and can do the job of reaching impulse readers, exposing them to comics the way radio airplay exposes people to the latest in popular music, and the music section at Target or Sears sells Ricky Martin and whatever else is moving to casual customers. That kind of structure feeds into the dedicated music stores, where they offer greater service and deeper selection to the more dedicated and knowledgeable fan. The direct-market store could fill that role, serving the existing consumer who has already decided he or she wants to buy comics and is willing to go to a destination store to get them. But it can't thrive without that feeder market creating new customers.

So comics have to be out there -- they have to be out where people shop, in formats they'll pick up, featuring material they'll like. Otherwise, it's like having a network of "Just Socks" stores, trying to sell socks to a society that has never formed the idea that they actually need or want socks.

As for how we get comics out there, there's no one strategy to that, either. Exposing people to comics via the Internet is good, though it'll only reach some people. Getting graphic albums into bookstores is good, too -- things are much better on that front than they were 15 years ago, when any comics-related book was shelved in "Humor." In a lot of bookstores, we have our own section now -- which, unfortunately, is treated like it's all one genre, but at least that's an improvement over being treated as part of the same genre as Mad Libs and 101 Dirty Golf Jokes. The more stuff we get out there, the more selection there is, the faster that "graphic novels" rack will turn into multiple racks, and the stuff on it can be grouped in a more discerning fashion.

And yes, we should get back out onto the newsstand -- and by that I mean the newsstand, not the spinner rack in a dusty back corner. To do that, though, we need to compete economically with other magazines, the way Japanese comics do, the way many European comics do, the way we used to, back in the Forties. That means delivering a package that costs the same kind of money as other magazines, so retailers have a reason to carry it other than love of the artform, and offers value for money, so customers aren't being asked to pay 10 or 15 cents a page for a skinny pamphlet that'll take them 15 minutes to read is they go slow. And it means making sure the content of such a package will be accessible to the people who pick it up, and entertaining, enlightening, informative or whatever -- so that they'll actually want to pick up the next one. Heck, Wizard competes on the newsstand and sells better than any direct-market comic we've got -- and its target audience is comics fans. That's like Premiere magazine outselling whatever the top movie of the moment is; it's preposterous. If there are that many people shopping the newsstands who'll pick up a magazine about comics, then surely there's a market there for actual comics, if we do it right.

Doing that would be expensive, of course -- but less expensive, in the long run, than watching the industry slowly collapse in on itself.

MESCALLADO: Speaking of Japanese and European models of comics publishing, are you familiar with attempts to popularize manga in America? Aren't magazines such as Smile and Mixxzine and Animerica Extra good examples of what you're saying could be a possible newsstand solution?

BUSIEK: I haven't seen either Smile or Mixxzine. Animerica Extra is at least an example of the kind of format I'd like to see more of -- it's certainly value for money, in terms of the price/content ratio, and it's something that would make newsstand retailers a decent profit. But it's not terribly accessible, since the stories are serialized without much regard for new readers, and unless you're reading it regularly you're likely to be confused. I know I was -- I picked up four non-sequential issues at the San Diego Con, and while I could follow Short Program (which is all one-issue stories anyway) and Video Girl Ai for the most part, Steam Detectives would have lost me completely if I hadn't read the collected volume and learned who all the leads are and what they do, and the other story, the name of which escapes me, I just gave up on. I don't know who these people are, or what they're talking about, and the introductory material isn't much help. I've ordered a full set of the magazine, though, and I look forward to finding out -- but I don't think an outreach magazine should depend on that reaction.

I also don't know what kind of efforts Viz is making to put Animerica Extra onto the newsstands. Is it widely available, or do they concentrate on the direct market and mail-order?

MESCALLADO: I'm actually not sure about Animerica Extra, I think it doesn't go far from the direct distribution route, if at all. Switching over to the more European model of graphic albums, how do you feel about the occasional attempts at complete American graphic albums, such as Erik Drooker's Flood or Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby? I'm not sure about Flood, but I know Cruse is struggling to convince DC to push Baby to a wider audience. How viable does this format seem to you?

BUSIEK: I'm not all that familiar with the European market -- it used to be that a lot of the albums were serialized first, before being collected, but I don't know how much of that they still do. I've been getting a French kids album series called MÈlusine, and it reads like it could have been serialized in one- and two-page sections, somewhere, but I don't know if it is.

In any case, I'm all for more comics being done in book form first. Why I Hate Saturn did well that way, and Understanding Comics did phenomenally well. I'm told that Sin City: Family Values did very well as a book-format-first project, and Frank Miller and Mike Mignola were both offered the opportunity to do their next Dark Horse projects that way, though Frank elected to go the serial route for presentation reasons, and Mike didn't want to be off the stands with new material that long. The main concern is whether the book can recoup its costs fast enough -- or at all -- in that format, and it seems to be that at least some of them can. Scary Godmother's apparently doing well enough to keep doing more albums, which is great. And the more stuff like this succeeds, the more it'll encourage others to try it, and it'll build up from an occasional thing to just another good way to do comics.

They're certainly good formats to reach out to new readers with, since they offer complete stories, in a package that takes a while to read.

MESCALLADO: You mention how Marvel hasn't pushed for consistent trade paperback reprints outside of the Essentials line. You've also implied in news pieces that one of the reasons you're leaving Thunderbolts, at least, is the fact that there isn't a trade paperback reprint line which will reap you continued royalties after the initial comic. Is that accurate? How important do you think the trade paperback option is, not only for the publisher and readers, but also for creators?

BUSIEK: Marvel does do trade paperbacks; they just don't keep them in print for the long haul, the way DC, Dark Horse and others do, which cuts down on their earning potential and makes book collections that could be profitable over time unworkable, since they don't make their costs back in that first wave of orders. So while DC's got Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One and maybe even Ronin, I think, in print, and Dark Horse has the Sin City books, the Martha Washington books, Hard Boiled and 300 available, Marvel's got a few Frank Miller collections they reprint every now and then -- but back in the Eighties, they put out a couple of collections of early Miller Daredevil, and then gave up on the idea of reprinting it all, because the initial orders weren't high enough. This is an industry where you can absolutely, undeniably move Frank Miller collections, and make a profit doing it, but Marvel's not geared for that kind of backlist. I think it's silly, and bad business for a company that wants to make money wherever they can, but until they change their thinking on it, we won't be seeing a lot of popular, eminently-salable stuff in print. They recently canceled a trade paperback of the first few Heroes Return Fantastic Fours, because the orders weren't high enough to justify it. That's a Scott Lobdell/Alan Davis collection, featuring popular heroes in a high-selling series. If a publisher can't sell copies of that, and steadily, they're doing something wrong.

I think trade paperbacks are a wonderful thing, positive on so many levels it's hard to imagine a mainstream publisher not embracing them. My gripe about the lack of Thunderbolts trades, though, isn't merely about royalties. The royalties are very nice, but simply keeping the work available is an issue as well. I regularly hear from Astro City readers who just tried an issue, liked it, and went back and got all the trades -- or from someone who heard good things about the series and picked up the first trade to "start at the beginning" and see how they like it. And at the same time, I hear from people who've heard good things about Thunderbolts, but are resistant to try it because back issues are so hard to find, and they don't want to get hooked on something they can't get the rest of. Now, for a long time, Astro City and Thunderbolts sold at almost the same level, and had the same kind of reader loyalty -- rock-steady sales, issue after issue after issue. And the Astro City audience supports the trades unbelievably well -- we're on the fifth printing of the first one, I think, and they get reordered steadily, week after week after week. I would guess that Thunderbolts trade paperbacks could very likely do as well, if they were kept in-print and available -- the audience was the same size, and was just as loyal, and the longer positive word-of-mouth on T-Bolts spreads, the more potential readers there are who are interested in picking it up from the beginning. But the Astro City books were there, and the Thunderbolts books weren't -- and Astro City has been slowly, slowly increasing in sales, and pulling away from T-Bolts. Maybe it's something else going on -- but even if a T-Bolts TPB would only be on its third printing by now, is that really such a bad thing?

I can understand the economics of it to Marvel -- T-Bolts is not a name that means anything in their bookstore TPB program, and the advance orders they'd likely get on a T-Bolts collection in the direct market wouldn't make it profitable right away. So it's their choice, and I don't begrudge them that -- I knew the bed was on fire when I lay down on it. But at the same time, I'd like to build something more lasting, less ephemeral than a book that appears on the rack and vanishes, never to live again except as a back issue. I'd like readers to be able to try out the beginning of a series, by picking up the TPBs, and I'd like to have a body of work out there and available; it's fulfilling to see your work last. And of course, I like the royalties -- it's always nice to have work out there continuing to sell and to earn money. And when my daughter needs braces (I did, and my wife did; I think it's a fair bet that my daughter will), Astro City #1 will be able to help pay for them, while Thunderbolts #1 won't.

So while I don't begrudge Marvel their choice, I want other things than what they can offer me -- I want to be able to have my work stay available, like the work of Robert Heinlein did, so I could discover even the stuff that first came out before I was born, or like Dick Francis's has, or John D. MacDonald's, or any of tons of other authors whose work I came to years after it was published. And if Marvel can't offer that, I need to find it someplace else.

All of this is a personal reaction, so the question of how important it is to others is going to vary depending on what it is they're looking for. A couple of years ago, I wasn't as concerned -- as long as I was having a good time and reaching a good audience, I didn't mind that most of what I was doing wouldn't last past its initial release. But as soon as my wife got pregnant, I became more forward-looking, and questions of what I was building for the future, where I'd be in five years, or ten or more -- they started to loom larger in my mind. Other creators aren't all going to be in the same spot I am, so they're not going to share all the same concerns.

But I think trade paperbacks offer great advantages for everyone. To the publisher, they're a way to keep making money after that first release, and to keep attracting customers. To a creator, they're a way to keep reaching readers, and to have the satisfaction of knowing that readers can get and read the whole series. And to a reader, they're a smorgasbord of extra choices, offering the chance to read more good comics without having to be a collector of first editions. You can just be a reader, and still have access to this stuff. What's bad about that?

MESCALLADO: You've now mentioned a couple of times how you would like to have an influence on distribution. What exactly does this mean for you, for the kind of role you can play? Do you think Diamond would benefit, for example, from a comics creator who can advise on marketing strategies?

BUSIEK: I'm not talking about trying new distribution approaches within Diamond -- I don't think that's a terribly effective way to get comics in front of people who don't read them, since Diamond largely services the direct market. I mean new distribution beyond Diamond and the direct market, just as I think we need different formats and different content. Trade paperbacks into bookstores is another distribution channel, for instance, as is the Internet. Getting back into the newsstand market with a package designed to function there, instead of the standard-format comic book, would be another distribution channel. And there are more, and I'd like to see what can be done within any of 'em, and what else can be found to do. I don't want to go into specifics -- I don't mean to be mysterious, but these are things I want to do, and I don't want to talk publicly about them until I'm in a position to do them. I think I've got some good ideas, and if someone beats me to the punch, then that's how it goes -- but if someone beats me to the punch with a sloppy project that queers the market for other projects because they saw me talk about how I wanted to do it and decided to get there first, then I'm an idiot and I just shot myself in the foot. I don't want to do that.

But I think one of the worst mantras of the last decade is "If you build it, they will come." That's from a fantasy movie, for Pete's sake, and it was magic, not marketing. I think a far better mantra for us to keep in mind is, "The mountain will not come to Mohammed." If we want new readers, we have to go get them -- put comics in front of them, in a format they'll pick up and with content they'll like. We can't hope they'll wander into comics stores and poke through stuff that bores them until they discover the book we're hoping they'll like.

I'd like to go out there beyond the direct market, where I can have a crack at new readers. But to do that, I need to have some influence, at least, over distribution and packaging and promotion, not just content.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #216