An interview with Larry Young, by Scott J Grunewald
I met Larry Young, writer of ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE, at the 1999 San Diego Comic Convention. Aside from his obvious lust for me, I noticed something else about him. He looks you in the eye. In fact, he looks everyone in the eye. Okay, so it's not the most astute observation that I've ever made, but as the con went on, I noticed that less and less of the creators and exhibitors were bothering to look people in the eye and listen to what they had to say.
But not Larry Young. He shook every hand, looked in every eye, and talked to everyone who walked by his booth. What does this mean? Its obvious: Larry Young is not human. He is an alien who used his alien vision to take over the minds of the hapless fanboys who walked into his range. Luckily I was wearing my aluminum foil Superman Underoos and was unaffected by his sinister gaze.
He's also a pretty nice chap, who agreed to spend some time and answer many of my stupid questions (Not all of them though. He didn't answer the questions that I wrote in his secret alien language. As if his coy "What the hell is this gibberish supposed to mean, Scott?" would fool me.)
PopImage: What is the basic concept of ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE?
Larry Young: Fifty years after Neil and Buzz first set foot on Tranquility Base, the world's richest man, Ishmael Hayes, gets it into his head that he wants to see the moon from the inside of a spacesuit. He invites his favorite news guys to come look at his project when eco-terrorists opposing his plan cause a premature launch. The Hayes Corp moon ship and the Channel Seven News Team rocket up to the moon towards an uncertain destiny which involves cancelled credit cards, secret plans, monomaniacal derring-do, and cows jumping over the moon.
PI: Are your main characters based on people you know yourself or just pulled out of your proverbial ass?
LY: In order to get a handle on the characters from the get-go, I based the staunch but seemingly brainless on-air newscaster, Dave Archer, on my father-in-law, who was an on-air guy for station KRON in the '70s. He's got the same sort of speech patterns, and was a handy guy for getting those broadcast details right. Once I started there, the no-nonsense segment producer, Annie Franklin, seemed like the sort of gal my wife is. From there it was a small leap to pattern the wisecracking cameraman, Heck Allen, after me, since I am constantly a good-natured cranky-pants. But it's a matter of roles and functions...
I wanted certain things to happen in the story, and certain sorts of characters drive the dynamic I wanted to write. I think every good SF adventure story should have the lovable goofball that learns a stern but fair lesson, a take-no-prisoners sort that learns that responsibility should be shirked sometimes, and a roguish wise-ass to poke the pins into all the other characters with the well-placed barb or the pithy comment. I looked around for inspiration and saw that all of my friends and family serve those archetypal roles in our interpersonal relationships. So, to answer more directly: Kinda.
PI: Now that the first miniseries is over, what's next for you? An AiT ongoing? Another mini? An all-new series?
LY: I wanted to make a big splash with this first story arc, and if nobody cared, at least I would have the satisfaction of having done the sort of comic that I wanted to read. Fortunately, it's been pretty well received, and we're going to keep plugging. Coming up next, in September, under our own publishing imprint (AiT/Planet Lar), is the one-shot AiT: COOL ED'S. This one takes place in the bar on the moon ten years after the events of the first mini. I'm taking a page from Frank Miller's SIN CITY model, and jumping all around in the world that I've set up. COOL ED'S is another sort of story I'd wanted to try flexing my chops on.
If you look at LIVE FROM THE MOON as being sort of the straight-ahead summer-blockbuster-tent pole-epic-movie sort of story, then COOL ED'S is that ten minutes in a Quentin Tarantino flick where Steve Buscemi tells some utterly compelling and ultimately pointless story, but the audience is still riveted. Kieron (SUPERMAN: THE DARK SIDE) Dwyer and I are getting a non-astronaut thing together for the winter, and Charlie Adlard and I are starting to get together the next story arc, AiT: SPACE: 1959. That should take us well into March or April of 2000.
PI: Do you plan a collected edition?
LY: Oh, yes. The LIVE FROM THE MOON trade is coming out in November, with a Warren Ellis intro and a Darick Robertson cover. It's the TRANSMET issue of AiT! We also have planned a collection of the scripts, called THE MAKING OF ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE that is going to be offered for October shipping. Sporting an introduction by Vertigo bad-boy Ed (SCENE OF THE CRIME) Brubaker, this has got all the behind-the-scenes info, the sketches, the stuff that didn't make the final cut, and all sort of other do-dads that my friends and I wish we could get a peek at from stuff like WATCHMEN or TRANSMET.
But the big publishing houses don't offer that sort of book, so we thought we'd put out a collection of our stuff to fill that perceived void. Also, it's kinda cool to compare what I wrote to what Matt and Charlie drew. You can check out the cover on: www.astronautsintrouble.com.
PI: Can you tell me more about this project with Kieron Dwyer?
LY: I don't mean to be coy, but we haven't settled any of the contractual issues. I just had a good idea I thought Kieron's art would be perfect for. I bounced it off him, he was enthusiastic, and it's all go from there. Believe me, when stuff's official, you'll hear me screaming at the top of my lungs about it.
PI: What about the next AiT story? Do you want to share any plot details with us?
LY: It's a murder-mystery involving the original Channel Seven News Team and the first man on the moon in a 1959 that never was.
PI: So what went into creating your own imprint? Would you recommend it to other people who want to get their stories out there?
LY: I've worked in some form of advertising/marketing/publishing for the last fifteen years or so, so it was a simple matter of popping open a bottle of Anchor Steam, taking a big swig, and proclaiming in a loud, unwavering voice: "I AM NOW A PUBLISHER!" The Gun Dog guys paved my way for developing a relationship with Diamond, I'd worked with Quebecor (our printer) before, and I know how to traffic a printing schedule, so it was pretty straightforward. I would recommend doing your own stuff once you've exhausted all other avenues, because being a one-man band gets kinda tiring sometimes. But if you dig the songs you're playing, it can't be beat. It works for me ...
PI: What influences did you draw from for AiT? Where did the idea come from, and whose work did you look towards for inspiration?
LY: Mimi Rosenheim (who would become editor of AiT) and I were at the San Francisco Museum of Science watching the Pathfinder Mars mission in July of '97. As they were showing the NASA feeds from the probe, just before the critical landing, they switched over to a detailed computer animation of what they assumed the landing must be like. The announcer said, "We're showing this animation because, of course, there are no cameras on Mars." Mimi leaned over and said, "Wouldn't it be cool if there were?" And the whole story of LIVE FROM THE MOON just blew into my head at once. The news crew, the world's richest man, the conflict, everything. I literally fell out of the chair. It was one of the oddest experiences of my life.
I spent the rest of the year writing the script and trying to find a publisher. Everyone was quite encouraging, but no one wanted to take the chance, the way the market was, to publish an unknown writer. So we decided to just pay the artists ourselves, and either self-publish or hope that someone would pick it up once the art was completed. As far as influences and inspiration, I'm a pop culture maniac. The world is just one big bucket for me to reach into and pull out what I need.
PI: AiT seems to be steeped as much in old pulp anthologies and film noir as it is in sci-fi. Was that a conscious decision or something that just evolved as you put the story together?
LY: I just got back from AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, and I told my wife that Mike Myers obviously spent a lot of time as a kid soaking up the spy movie thing. That movie is just so obviously a labor of love from somebody who loves the genre. She said to me, "You know, that's you and the astronaut thing." And she's 100% right.
When I was a kid, I read all the Heinlein, all the Asimov, all the Silverberg and all the Ellison I could get my hands on. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Have Spacesuit; Will Travel" were two of my favorite books as a kid. I love 2001, PLANET OF THE APES, SPACE: 1999, UFO, CAPRICORN ONE ... if it has an astronaut, and he's in trouble ... I just love the hell out of it. And all of this pop culture SF that's been percolating around in my brain since I was a boy just lined up and filtered out into ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE.
PI: Anything specific that went directly into AiT?
LY: Not consciously, although my old college roommates have detected a faint whiff of SALVAGE 1 (an old TV show starring Andy Griffith about a junk man who built his own rocket). But they are all winos and rummies, so don't listen to them. Plus, they all, to a man, still owe me money. And I'm coming for them. Oh, yes.
PI: Was your decision to produce the comic in black & white a style choice, or a monetary one?
LY: Well, the decision to produce the comic as a B&W was a style choice mandated by economics, how's that? :) It didn't really take a brain surgeon to see that doing a color book would be wildly more expensive, and, since two-thirds of it takes place on the moon, which would be all gray tones anyway, that'd sort of make it silly to do in color. But the choice of artists was made because their work was so fitting to B&W. When Matt couldn't finish the first story arc, Charlie was the only guy we thought could finish it ... and his stuff is just amazing. And, in COOL ED'S, he really makes the characters in that his own.
PI: Do you have any plans for a color special or a new series in color?
LY: Hey, if somebody like Wildstorm or Image Central wants to pay the colorists, I'll write the hell out of it.
PI: But you don't have plans of ever putting one out yourself?
LY: I had Matt and Charlie draw a little more "open" than they probably would have, with an eye that we might do it in color someday, but when you realize it costs between $5 and $8 for a single page of film to make your printing plates, and it costs about $70 for a color book per page, you can see where production costs increase by a factor of ten.
PI: This is, if I'm not mistaken, your first pro work in comics, how did you get this book made? How did you hook up with the artists?
LY: Here's a bit of trivia: My very first "official" comics work has never seen print. When Tom Fassbender was editor of the Image/Motown line, they had a book called CASUAL HEORES, I wrote the series bible for them and the script for the never-produced issue #4 that Jay (JETCAT) Stephens did the cover for. But I got paid, so even though it never got drawn, I consider that my first writing gig in comics. But the artist on that issue was to be ... Matt Smith, so I always had it in my head that we were destined to work together.
After he bowed out, I was making a dream list of guys to take over, and Spitfire Services agent Sharon Cho put me in touch with Charlie, who accepted on the spot. It was a bit of a charge for me, because I'd been a big fan of his stuff on Topps' version of THE X-FILES. And because I'm the wise and terrible Minister of Propaganda for the San Francisco comics store, Comix Experience, I have some contact with the folks in comics.
I was thrilled to get Brian Wood, Steve Weissman, Kieron Dwyer, Scott Johnson, and Darick Robertson for the back ups. They all are just friggin' great. And that's not to leave out color maestro Matt Hollingsworth, working his poly-chromatic magic on the covers... but I have pictures of him screwing small farm animals, so that's more of a blackmail thing...
PI: Those are some pretty big name guys for a newcomer to get. How did you hook up with these guys?
LY: It's back to the money thing again. The one thing that all of these guys have in common is that I love their art styles. So I wrote some emails, made some calls, wrote little two-pagers, sent some money, got some art.
PI: So how DID you get AiT out there? Whats the back story? Did you have to kill anyone?
LY: How comics are published is not a secret. I had the idea; wrote a proposal. I showed it to Matt, who loved it. I told him I'd pay him his page rates up-front. To show I wasn't just talking out of my ass, I gave him a $1000 retainer with the first script, and I paid him as he delivered art, just like a "real" publisher. You can get any artist to work for you if the price is right. Artists want to draw; pay them, and they will. I designed a lettering font for the word balloons, lettered it, and made the whole thing ready for printing. I shipped it off to Quebecor; in two weeks they send blue lines for corrections, and then you're done until next month. Being on time -- shipping your book when you say you will -- is extremely important.
PI: Could you give me a list of creators who you would like to work with in the future?
LY: Man, I love anybody who can draw.
PI: Do you have any aspirations of working for some of the big guys on established characters?
LY: Charlie and I have a Batman Elseworlds proposal in the hopper, and I have a secret desire to do a Kamandi Elseworlds that would do for the Last Boy on Earth what Neil Gaiman did to the Golden-Age Sandman. I'm not sure I could ever get DC to go for it, though, so I may just do it under another name. I've got a thing going with a screenwriter pal that would make a good series for Marvel, but I think I have to get a little higher profile before Mike Carlin and Stan Lee start taking my calls. So, hell yes! If you're an editor reading this, and you've got a gig for me, that email again is planetlar@earthlink.net
PI: Do you have any remorse over killing off a bunch of innocent cows?
LY: None whatsoever. I find cows to be inherently evil.
PI: Is that because they can look through your human flesh suit and see your true alien form?
LY: No, it's the whole Mrs. O'Leary's cow thing. As soon as you turn your backs on those logy dullards, they burn down Chicago.
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Astronauts in Trouble