Hot Shot of the Week Companion Feature
10 Questions About Criminal #2 with Ed Brubaker
Ed Brubaker is the author of the creator-owned Marvel/Icon comic book, Criminal. With a long history writing crime and police fiction in comics that includes such gems as Vertigo's Scene of the Crime and DC's Gotham Central, Brubaker and collaborator/co-creator Sean Phillips have brought to life an original and engaging series with Criminal, and its recent relaunch has only called more attention to an already well-loved and well-reviewed title. Coupled with the phenomenal sales and critical success of Captain America and The Immortal Iron Fist, Brubaker has established himself as one of the most talented and valued creators at Marvel Comics.
Comic Related (Russell Burlingame): Have you had any censorship issues with Marvel? I look at the sex scene coming right in the beginning and I immediately think of an indie title.
Ed Brubaker: No. The only problem we had was we had to switch printers because one wouldn't print anything with nudity in it. The nude scene was a woman looking at herself in the mirror to examine a gunshot wound, too, so it wasn't something sexual. But in Quebec it's anything goes.
CR: You're pretty young. What made you want to explore a Vietnam vet?
EB: I'm not that young, I'm 41. My dad was in Vietnam when I was born, and I grew up around a lot of military and vets, and in the 70s everything was about Vietnam, to some degree. There was no way to do a story about 1972 that didn't get into the war a bit. Plus, I wanted to make the parallel between Teeg Lawless and his son, who starred in the last book.
CR: On that note, is there a universality to the experience of returning vets, do you think? The lines about him coming back to kids who hadn't existed when he left for the war seemed like it could have happened last week.
EB: Yeah, I do think that's true. I was just thinking about this, because all the Iraq movies are tanking at the box office in the last year, but all the Vietnam movies, back in the late 60s and all through the 70s, those all did pretty well, I think. And I realized the difference is the draft. We have no draft now, so if you aren't enlisted, and you don't want to think about the war, you don't have to. You can just turn off the news and the internet and ignore it all.
CR: How was this title originally developed? Was Phillips part of the original pitch or was he an artist that you found during development?
EB: Criminal was something I was only going to do with Sean, because of our previous work together. We both really wanted to do something like this. I was trying to figure out what that would be, and so I asked myself what kind of book would I write for free if I had to, and this was it. It's the kind of book where I can tell just about any kind of crime story or noir.
CR: Is it hard to walk the line of keeping your characters relatable and making them someone that a reader can sympathize with, but still making them realistically criminal?
EB: I don't know. I think I just worry about making them people I can understand or relate to or sympathize with. If I can find the way into who they are, and why they're criminals, then I hope the readers will like them, too. I worry less in a noir about having likable main characters, though. Which is kind of cool.
CR: So this Blast of Silence spread at the end--did some money change hands or was that just you guys making sure the world knows about one of your favorite flicks? I know I have an unhealthy fascination with a little flick nobody's ever heard of called Zero Effect, and tend to promote that movie at the drop of a hat.
EB: I love Zero Effect. I'm really hoping we'll get a sequel to that someday. As for Blast...I think it was just one of those things. Other people have been championing that movie for decades, and it clearly had a major influence of a few big directors. So Criterion would have put it out anyway, but the editors there saw Patton Oswalt's article in Criminal, with Sean's illustration, and contacted Sean to do art for the cover and the booklet. It's nice to see all these connections being made around our comic like that.
CR: So was this issue a one-and-done, or are we going to see more of Teeg?
EB: He'll be around in some other stories, but these first three issues of the new volume are all self-contained short stories. Standalone issues are rare in comics, so I thought it'd be fun to do a few. Turns out it much harder, and we're doing 30 pages an issue, but they still feel crammed to me. I've had to cut stuff out of every one for space reasons.
CR: How regular is this series going to be? Is it one of those things where the creator-owned nature is going to mean it falls low on the totem pole if one of your big properties starts to run behind, or is the monthly deadline a must in your opinion?
EB: I think we'll be mostly monthly. That's the goal. 10 issues a year, basically. This is my highest priority in some ways, because we own it outright. It's ours, so I lavish a lot of care onto Criminal.
CR: How has writing this compared to working on something like Gotham Central, where you're writing the stories from the other side of the law?
EB: It's completely different. Gotham Central had a whole procedural vibe that Criminal doesn't get into, really. Sometimes, I have to admit, I miss writing the good guys. I have an idea for an upcoming story that managed to find the link, though, I think.
CR: What's the closest you've come to a happy ending for one of these characters?
EB: A bus ride out of town with a sack of stolen money on her lap. That's as good as it gets in Criminal. It's either that or a quick death.
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Page last updated on April 13, 2008