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JOE CASEY: COMICS, DRUGS & CORN FLAKES Introduction  Following your work on Wildcats, Automatic Kafka and Superman you seemed to take a sabbatical from comics for a while, then recently you return with, not one or two but three new superhero series? What had you been doing in the downtime and what was it about these projects that encouraged you to return? Lemme tell ya', it never felt like "downtime" to me...! I've been writing more than ever. Not only the three new series, but several OGN's for Larry Young, an original screenplay (or two), and a whole mess of new songs. It's just timing that the three "big" projects are all hitting the stands in Nov./Dec. EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, in particular, has been written for months. THE INTIMATES was pitched and approved about two years ago, but the wheels turn slowly at the monolithic, icebergian DC Comics. But it's all good. I guess it either makes me look like an unstoppable comicbook writing juggernaut or an overworked, sleep-deprived sap. U-Decide! Besides, I'm way too young to even consider the idea of revelling in anything that might possibly resemble "downtime". Downtime is for losers and old people. I love my job and I usually end up loving whatever kind of shit I get myself into. The only part that gets to be a grind when you've got several things launching all at once is the amount of promotion you have to do... all at once. Now back to the promotional interview already in progress... Working in video games, animation and movies, as well as playing in a new band, do you find it hard to have time for it all and what are the largest differences you've experienced writing for one medium versus another? It's all creative. That's the most important thing. To compartmentalize them all would probably take more effort than I can afford to expend, so I just try to go with the flow and let everything happen naturally. Five years ago, I might've been a little more concerned about keeping my worlds separate (for whatever reasons I can't even recall) but now we're living and thriving in a mediaspace where my band, BEST OF SEVEN, can get a nice, big write-up in VAMPIRELLA Magazine (thanks, Mo!). I go into Hollywood meetings and the folks on the other side of the desk seem fairly impressed that I've written Superman and the X-Men, so I've certainly got no complaints. The differences are actually virtues in my mind. I love the collaboration that creating comicbooks provide. When you're really in synch with an artist, it's fuckin' bliss. But because of that, I can savour the particular solitude of an activity like writing screenplays. Then, of course, when I go out and play gigs with the band, it's an incredible rush of intense social activity. It's meeting and interacting with huge groups of people in one, big blast. Writing songs for people to listen to is, in a way, the ultimate intersection of each kind of creative discipline, since you tend to write a song alone, learn it and develop it in collaboration with your band, and then put it out there for a big audience. Has getting married drawn you towards working on more 'commercial' works, or can mainstream work be considered more of a means to an end of ensuring the opportunity for more personal or creator owned works? Again, I try not to look at it like that, if I can help it. I think, if anything, I've been able to focus my work to a greater degree than ever before. I don't take something on anymore unless I feel obscenely passionate about it. Especially writing superheroes. I've said this before (ad nauseam at this point), but my biggest crime writing UNCANNY X-MEN was that I didn't go into it as an X-Men fanboy, which is what the diehard fans of that franchise deserved. That being the case, I probably didn't have any business taking the gig but at the time it felt right, so here we are. With EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, I'm such a slobbering AVENGERS fan, that it feels absolutely right. At that point, it's not a means to an end because I'm doing the shit that I love. And I actually think THE INTIMATES is as personal as any wholly owned property I've ever come up with.  For a while, the notion of comic creators as rock stars was thrown around, which has since seemingly been debunked. As one of the few people that actually fell into that category, how did you feel about that label and for that matter, was or can it be a fitting portrayal? The "comic creator as rock star"-thing was and is pure bullshit. If you want to be a rock star, the comics biz is the last place you're going to find that particular kind of gratification. And I gotta' be honest, on many levels, it really doesn't hold a candle to blasting an A chord to a throng of screaming chicks and everyone should just accept it. Having done both, I know the difference. Comics have so many more of their own special virtues but being any kind of a "star" really isn't one of them. This cult of personality nonsense has really got to stop. My favourite writers weren't my favourites because of how "cool" or "hip" I thought they were. They were my favourites because they wrote cool comics. Mike Baron. David Michelinie. Steve Englehart. Frank Miller. Howard Chaykin. Alan Moore. I don't recall any of these guys being overly concerned with their image. Nor was I ever particularly envious of their lifestyles - whatever they happened to reveal about them, which wasn't much - other than the fact that they were writing comics professionally. Sorry, but WIZARD is not MAXIM. Not even close. It's really a weird sickness that probably has a lot to do with the perceived "Hollywood-ization" of comicbooks and the complete misunderstanding of the Stan Lee Persona Phenomenon. But what's worse is that lately it's turned into "comic creator as politician", where creators are now using online interviews or message boards to do massive amounts of spin control on their own careers. And there's the practice of leaking supposed sales information just to brag about how much a book is selling just to generate more buzz. Then, of course, a few months later, when the real numbers are known, the sales figures turn out to be nowhere near what fans were led to believe. But who cares about truth when you've got buzz, right? And if readers don't fall all over themselves praising their work, I've heard creators respond, "If you don't like it, you're just not getting it". How fucking pretentious is that?! Whether it's true or not, why even say something like that? I've never seen more creators sling more bullshit than I've seen in the past few years. And, just like politicians, sometimes the whitewash is perceived as truth. What's so horrible about admitting when something goes off the rails? Not everything sells like gangbusters. Sometimes readers don't like your work. I have no problem admitting that I made a lot of bad creative choices when I was writing the highest profile gig of my career to date. It's certainly not fun to admit but what's the point of trying to convince anyone that I was just "ahead of my time" or that readers just didn't "understand" what I was doing? Learn from your mistakes and move on. Then there's the "comic creator as Hollywood insider", which is also just as cringe-worthy. Publicly bragging about movie deals and how much money you've made is also pretty fucking obnoxious. It doesn't matter how many names you can drop in one sentence, you work in comicbooks and, quite frankly, that's as good as it gets so why try and add on some forced layer of "coolness"? Y'know, I'll admit this is all just my personal bullshit I'm throwing around, but I think I've been hip-deep in this business long enough to have a pretty good sense of what's real and what's not. Obviously, not everyone feels this way, but I'll take being a person over a personality any day. I think you've just described 'Comic Creator Corporatism' as for the relation between creative to consumer, I've seen both sides, hideous fans and thin skinned creators. Fans can be vicious spiteful and just down right crazy but at the same time I get kind of sick to see the creators who surround themselves with cliques whose sole purpose in life is to feed that creators ego. But what may be worse is when it's true, that readers really don't get it or don't even take the time to bother. Should creators not bother trying to create intelligent works? Because there's already a whole stable of people in the industry that will write down to the readers. The Filth is a prime example of a series readers didn't get, though many who didn't get it didn't seem to READ it either. Another good example... Automatic Kafka. I loved THE FILTH in the most glorious, unhealthy way (which was probably the point of the series, right?). I know what my relationships are with my favourite works of art, comicbooks or otherwise. I guess from my own point of view, I've got a pretty level-headed outlook as a fan... and so as a professional, the best I can try to do is foster that same type of relationship with whoever is reading my books. I don't write down to them. Ever. And, besides that, I think I try and project a bit of Anti-Fame whenever possible. When I'm at a convention, I don't really get off on signing stuff and I think people who read my work know that. I'd rather have a good conversation with a fan rather than just sign something and be able to brag about how long my line was. The last thing I want is to have my ass kissed by anyone. Back to the person vs. personality issue you brought up. Do you find it hard to fight when people get preconceived images when they hear you took your Superman & X-Men money and locked yourself away with a bag of drugs or when you seem to have perfected the 'wearing sunglasses indoors' look? I never said it was a "bag" of drugs, did I...? And people don't seem to realize that sunglasses allow me to sit at the Man Of Action booth at any given time of the long convention day and fall fast asleep without anyone realizing it. Trust me, I would never mistake practicality for personality. If someone has a preconceived image of me... well, at this point, that's more on them than it is on me. All I can be is myself and however someone wants to judge that, it's their right as an American. My mistake, I should clear this up, it wasn't actually a bag but rather several cowboy boots filled to the brim in addition to the several pounds worth carried in neatly atop the chests of dozens of amateur porn stars and what's this 'it's their right' shit? The 'all I can be' sermon, what are you, an army of one? What happened to the old Joe, the Joe who liked to wave his dick in the air and hassle shop keeps for corn flakes? Huhn? Hippy? Hey, if we can't transcend ourselves in some way, what good is getting older? Certainly your looks go right in the shitter, but at least we can claim some form of personal enlightenment, right? Of course, one can never outgrow waving his dick in the air. So just fuck right off. How's that for pseudo-youthful rage? Good ideas and lasting stories, as more new projects come out the ratio of what's good in the creative pool seems to lessen, and what actually is good tends to be ridiculously expensive. What steps do you take as a creator to help promote a new series? As you can see, I pound the virtual pavement to an almost ridiculous degree. Especially lately, with all this new stuff coming out. I put myself out there and try to build that awareness. I think half my time lately has been spent doing interviews...! Not that I mind. Not at all. I'm really glad for the opportunity to try and get readers interested in buying the books. And if I can present some sort of alternative view of a comicbook writing career, a change from the "ENVY ME!"-approach that I see some creators take, then I'll be happy to try and do that.  Kay, be honest, 'cause almost every creator has a bad interview story, what's the worst part of doing these interviews? Trying to sound like we know what we're talking about! Plus, I hate to repeat myself from one interview to another, and the more you do, the tougher that gets. Besides that, it's actually good fun to talk about something you're excited about. Sometimes it's even therapeutic, in a weird way. In the best interviews, you're being taken to task - in the nicest way possible, of course - for some of your decisions by the interviewer, and often forced to try and verbalize and reconcile things that you may have done on pure instinct. Tom Spurgeon interviewed me for THE COMICS JOURNAL a year ago, and he really looked at my work from an angle I'd never imagined. By doing so, he forced me to look at my own work from a different perspective, and that's been invaluable. Are the companies themselves doing enough to help get the word out or is it left up to the creative team more and more? That's a tough call to make, because obviously the publishers don't have unlimited marketing budgets. The promo people also don't have time to read everything so it's probably in everyone's best interests for the creators to have the chance to speak about the work. With something like EMH, I was just so goddamned giddy about writing an Avengers project that I was eager to talk about it, to connect with fellow diehard AVENGERS fans out there. I find a lot of value in that kind of shared appreciation for something, a situation where we can all be fans together. To interact with other AVENGERS fans on the few message boards I've visited has been fun as hell. That's pretty important because there's a lot less communication these days, for example, one publisher in particular used to send out press releases all the time. If a certain title got a new artist, they'd show it and that small gesture, an inside look at the book, was really a great factor in attracting attention. Then one day they stopped and in about a year there's been maybe three press releases total, whereas before there could be maybe one a week. I think those kind of teases are intrinsic to the whole process of making and selling comics. Readers do generally respond well to smart marketing but that's often fairly low on a publisher's priorities. So, some of us have replaced that with a more direct communication with readers via the Internet. It's just part of the new media landscape, so we all need to adapt as best we can. Exclusive creators are a growing stock amongst publishers, have you been contacted about a contract or if contacted is it something you'd have an interest in? I'd never dismiss a good offer, if it were placed on the table. But I've gone almost ten years without signing exclusive to anyone and I seem to be making out okay. If I found myself in a position where I was doing a majority of my work-for-hire gigs at a particular company, then it might make sense. Being independent has kept me from ever becoming dangerously complacent about my own career, but I have to admit I'd be curious as to how something like that might play out. In other words, never say never... Being a fan of genre films, do you have any genre comics in the works? Quite a few. Practically all of them are for Larry Young, who is the all-powerful purveyor of modern pulp fiction. WARHEAD is a sci-fi war epic (as if the name didn't give that away). KRASH BASTARDS is a futura-samurai manga and FULL MOON FEVER is a sci-fi horror thriller. Hopefully, all of these will see print in 2005. These are all no-money projects, so it's not like anyone's working on deadline. But I'm collaborating with some great artists, so when they do come out, I think it'll be worth whatever the wait turns out to be. For me, it's actually liberating to break away from writing superheroes every once in awhile. Here's a great cliché: you get to flex a different set of creative muscles. Blah, blah, blah... When you say manga do you mean manga influenced or are you actually trying to do a piece in manga style? Both, I guess. It'll be in the traditional manga format as we know it here in the States. Those dimensions, read right-to-left, the whole bit. It'll be AiT/PlanetLar's first "authentic manga" (as the fine folks at TokyoPop label it). Luckily we snagged an artist that can think that way, so I think it's going to turn out pretty cool. Introduction
 Jonathan Ellis is Co-Editor in Chief of PopImage  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-Mail Us - Send us an e-mail commenting on this article. Man Of Action - Creative Collective of Joe Casey, Joe Kelley, Duncan Rouleau & Steve Seagle Marvel.com - Publishers of Avengers: Earths Mightiest Heroes Wildstorm.com - Publishers of The Intimates Aftermath.com - Publishers of Infantry AiT/PlanetLar.com - Publishers of forthcoming Joe Casey OGN's Comic Book Resources - Home to The Basements Tapes Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
