Russell Discusses Manhunter #34 with Marc Andreyko
It's been a few months since we announced it, but this week we're happy to finally have the initial installment of Closing Statements, the new monthly Manhunter column where ComicRelated will sit down with series writer Marc Andreyko (and sometimes others) to discuss the series, its future and the many complex ins-and-outs that make it one of the most critically-acclaimed comics DC has published in years.
ComicRelated: Was it a decision between you and editorial to add all the guest stars to this arc (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey, Blue Beetle)?
Marc Andreyko: No, I just felt like the characters I used were important to tell the story; I didn't really think of them as guest stars because they're important engines to telling the story the way it should be told. Really, are there 10,000 fans who will follow every Iron Munro appearance? And given how close El Paso is to Juarez, not having Blue Beetle appear would have been more distracting than not, I think. I wanted to use the Suicide Squad and the idea came from Joan Hilty, saying wouldn't it be cool if one of the reasons Kate's killing Multiplex's dupes was that she knows it wouldn't kill him—credit where credit is due on that one, I took the idea from Joan and finessed it from there.
CR: To clarify—that trial that Kate mentions (where Multiplex duped her, so to speak) never happened on-panel, right?
MA: I like mentioning history that we didn't necessarily see. It contributes to the idea that there's a lot of backstory for every person and that we don't see every minute. I try to make it where you basically know who these people are enough to know what the story is.
CR: Was the dog something that Iron's being straight about, or is he trying to use it to convince Ramsey that his powers were all a "gift" from Thor?
MA: Basically we'll find out, and I'm not making every scene with them as expository as it probably needs to be. I want to have it feel natural. The dog is there because Iron had the dog made to take care of Ramsey and keep track of his abilities...like a cyborg MRI-slash-pet. It's kind of exactly Ramsey said. Like in T2 – The dog is programmed to listen to Ramsey's instructions and he did so too well when Ramsey said to fetch the stick and he didn't think to stop at the curb or anything. The questions will be resolved totally in terms of what Ramsey knows and doesn't know in the issue coming out next week.
CR: Is there a danger, writing something like the Juarez story and feeling reductive, like you're giving "the answer" when these events are real?
MA: Well what I'm doing (and this is something that I guess that I've never hidden, that I thought was apparent but I guess a lot of people might not know this). I'm not saying what's happening in Manhunter is the only thing that's happening in Juarez. There is no one cause—it's the perfect storm of a people and an area and a gender that the culture feels is disposable. In the last issue of this arc, issue 36, Kate's giving a press conference related to someone else and she says that if the bad guys get caught it doesn't mean the area is safe—they were using the area to dump the bodies, they were going to an area where they knew it was safe because these things were already going on. By the very nature of the medium I'm writing in, there has to be some superheroics involved, but I tried to make it as real as possible within the DC Universe. I think I remember a thing in the newspaper that 3,000 people have been killed in gang fights—killed in that part of Mexico this year, which is insane, but we don't ever talk about that because they're not Lacy Petersen and Natalee Holloway, because white and blonde are more important.
CR: Is there a concern that you're going to be pigeonholed as "the political book?"
MA: What I'm trying to do is to take issues that are more societal than specific events. The next arc is about abortion, and how people in the DC Universe feel about that. I'm not using this book as a liberal soap box, but I'm putting this out there for you to go, if you feel so inclined, to research the reality of this story. I don't want to be didactic, that doesn't interest me. I don't agree with everything that Kate does or thinks, but I understand it. I don't want to have characters that all agree with me, that doesn't interest me.
CR: Is there a fear that you'll alienate readers by being sociopolitical and addressing some of this stuff?
MA: I didn't try and paint the people who are protesting as racist hayseeds—they're frustrated. The ones to get mad at aren't the workers—the unemployed protesters or the migrant workers.
CR: How many Crime Doctors is this now?
MA: I think this is just two. When I created the Romanian sadist doctor, I didn't necessarily say, "Let's create a new Crime Doctor." People aren't going to call themselves that in real life, but it's just what you have to do in this kind of story, because when you don't have a codename it's impossible for a lot of people to remember who's who.
CR: Will there be fallout from the story that's going on now?
MA: All this stuff with the pharmaceutical company—they have fingers in many pots and it'll be kind of shocking. You'll see in the last part of the story how deep their tendrils wrap around both in the daily lives of people in the DCU and in the superhero lives of the DCU. It's something that's been going on for a long tiem where there was Luthor's Everyman program and some of the stuff they were doing at STAR Labs and everything else. It's been going on in the DCU for a long time, and it's going to impact a lot of heroes.
CR: Will we see Dylan again soon or will his arc take a little longer to pay off?
MA: That's going to be a long haul—Dylan has a very very very rough road ahead of him. Once again, a huge complication on Wednesday. I think there's a couple of good "oh shit" moments in Wednesday's issue.
CR: How is it writing a character like Ramsey? It seems a lot of writers don't know what to do with young kids.
MA: I love writing Ramsey. When I put him in there, I blew him up because I wanted to get that out of the system right away. Children of superheroes are like partners in the Clint Eastwood movie—you don't want to get too attached to them because they'll be killed or they'll be blown into the future or something. I just try to think, like, what would I have said when I was six? It's like when they're going over all this stuff about family and legacy and evil uncles and so on, and he just says, "Can I keep the dog?" The scene between Ramsey and his grandmother in this issue coming up this week is a short one but it's really one of my favorite scenes. Kids are smart. They might not have the vocatbulary or all of the cognitive tools necessary...but they're smart. I would love nothing more if in 25 years I'm still around, if I'm writing Manhunter again and it's him. Or not even me, really. I'd love it if another writer picked it up and did that.
CR: It seems like just about everybody has something important going on right now.
MA: I try to pull a page from the Robert Altman playbook—just because you have a lot of characters doesn't mean you should short-shrift all of them. They should be living breathing people, not plot devices. Some of them started as plot devices, but they developed really well.
Page last updated on October 12, 2008