Kurt Busiek
by David O'Leary
Welcome back to the twentieth edition of 5 Minutes With... where my guest today is legendary writer Kurt Busiek. The creator of Astro City, co-creator of Marvels and writer of JLA/Avengers talk us through the appeal of writing a weekly comic, writing the Marvels sequel a few years too late and the attraction of writing Green Lantern for Wednesday Comics. And much more besides so read on...
DO'L: Kurt, many thanks for joining us here on CR. It's a great pleasure to talk, being a long time fan of your work.
KB: Thanks!
DO'L: I've read that you weren't a big reader of comics as a child and only got into them as a teen with an issue of Daredevil #120. To this day for some reason I can still recall Tony Isabella's story with fondness as it is also one of the first books I ever recall reading. I don't recall you ever writing Daredevil though. Would you like a run on the title someday?
KB: I read comics off and on, when I was a kid, but my parents didn't approve of comic books -- at least not your basic average American comics -- so I'd only see them at the barber shop or over at friends' houses, or when I'd buy one to read and throw it away before getting home. So I saw them on a scattershot, irregular basis.
DAREDEVIL #120 was the first comic I picked up that I saved, and I started reading and collecting regularly at that point. So that's what I could say is the start of my time as a comics reader.
Would I like to write DAREDEVIL someday? I'm not sure. I like the character, but I'm a huge fan of the Lee/Colan Daredevil, and would have a ball writing that guy. Since those days, though, Frank Miller transformed the character, and now it's Millers DD who's the definitive version, and all that's happened to DD since has built on and been informed by the Miller run. And while I admire the Miller run immensely -- and DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is one of my favourite comics collections of all time -- I'm not sure I'm the guy to write that character.
So I'd love to write a Daredevil based on the Lee/Colan run, but the modern-day DD, I suspect, is better off in other hands.
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"Hal always seemed like the kind of guy you could relax and have a beer with"
On the attraction of writing Green Lantern for Wednesday Comics
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DO'L: When envisioning Astro City, was your plan to have it go on for this length considering the expansive continuity it has and the immense fan following it picked up over the years?
KB: We didn't have any expectations -- I don't often go into a series thinking I'll write it for X amount of time, unless it's designed to be a closed-ended series, like TRINITY or AVENGERS FOREVER. I just go into regular series assuming I'll write them for a good long time, and we'll see what happens. And ASTRO CITY, to my surprise and delight, turned out to be something readers embraced, and it's gone for 15 years now, with no end in sight. I'm thrilled, but I can't say we ever had plans to end it at any particular point. It's fun to do and the readers support it, so we're just glad we get to keep going.
DO'L: With Marvels with Alex, knowing how that book would look and considering how well it was received and its legacy, had you any idea on how high a pedestal the book would be held almost two decades after its release?
KB: You mean when it started? We had no idea it would be as successful as it was. We thought no one would pay much attention to the story of a little old guy wandering around the Marvel Universe witnessing things and going, "Whoa! Look at that!" I predicted at one point that #2 would be the best-selling issue because it had the X-Men in it, and was 100% wrong. #2 was actually the worst-selling issue, because people ordered it before #1 came out, so they ordered less than #1. When #1 came out, Marvel started getting tons of advance re-orders for #3 and #4, but it was too late to order more #2, so there you go, I had it completely backwards.
We were bucking so many tides. It wasn't an action series, there were guest-stars but few of the really huge names, I was a nobody, Alex was a newcomer, and the project was all about history at a time when that sort of thing was considered a dirty word...we knew by the time #1 came out that we'd get good response because people had been seeing the art at conventions and reacting positively, but we had no idea whatsoever the reaction would be as good as it was, or that the book would still be in print today.
DO'L: What prompted the return to Marvels in Eye Of The Camera. Had you the story in place for long and what do you make of working with Jay Anaceleto?
KB: EYE OF THE CAMERA came about largely because Tom Brevoort asked for it. He wanted to do something for Marvel's 10th anniversary, so back in 2002 he called to ask me about doing some sort of anniversary project. Once we got the ball rolling on it, it became EYE OF THE CAMERA, and took eight years to get it all done, so we missed the 10th anniversary a bit. Heck, we only made the 15th anniversary by the skin of our teeth.
For the story, part of it -- the ending -- was something I'd already worked out. Alex and I had talked about doing a project called EPILOGUE, way back when we were finishing up the first series, a story that'd tell about Phil dying of cancer in a hospital in Florida, and having Maggie visit as the X-Men were "dying" in Dallas, so he could reflect back. That's what we started with, and since it had been so long since the first series, and we wanted something that would stand on its own as well as work as a companion project, we kind of took that "Epilogue" idea and built a new story onto the front of it, to lead in to it. All that stuff I worked out when we started in on it, but the last 30 pages or so were pretty much conceived back in 1993.
As for working with Jay -- it was great. Slow, but great. Jay showed us layouts of every page, so we could make sure the storytelling and research and stuff was right, and then he'd just go to town, delivering these meticulous pencil renderings that just got more and more gorgeous as the series went on. I'm thrilled to have had the chance to work with him. I never spoke to him the whole time we were on the book, and don't think we've ever met -- it was all through e-mail. But it all worked out very, very well.
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"We didn't have any expectations"
On initial expectations of Astro City
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DO'L: Roger Stern and yourself had developed Avengers: Forever but only after the original idea (Avengers: World in Chains) was scrapped. How far into the original idea had you worked and were you happy with the outcome of the finished product?
KB: That's not quite right. AVENGERS FOREVER was developed by me, Carlos and Tom Brevoort, and Roger joined the gang around issue #3, when it was clear that I just couldn't keep up with five books at once without getting some help. So Roger was invaluable, but the main story had been worked out before he came aboard.
The original idea, AVENGERS: WORLD IN CHAINS, was one I'd worked out years earlier, in the late 1980s, and had outlined for a pitch back then that never went anywhere. I pulled it out of the files when Carlos and I were tapped to do an Avengers project, and we'd been fleshing it out, designing the details of it, but I hadn't written the first plot yet when we discovered that Marvel had just solicited a new series that had a similar idea -- not the same, but structurally similar enough that it made trouble for our series. So we scrapped the WORLD IN CHAINS project and worked up AVENGERS FOREVER.
WORLD IN CHAINS is back in the files, and who knows, maybe we'll see it someday...
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"We were bucking so many tides"
On the reaction to Marvels on its original release
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DO'L: The 1998 Marvel Annuals were team up affairs and you wrote the Avengers/Squadron Supreme. It was not the most obvious team up but ended up being a very enjoyable story. Had you any input in putting the team up in place and if not were you wondering how would approach it?
KB: I knew from the start that I wanted to follow up on what we'd done with the Squadron in #4-5 in the annual, so when I was told that the "theme" for that year's Annuals would be team-ups, I said, "But I don't want to bring in Spider-Man or the X-Men or anyone; it's going to be crowded enough as it is. Can we call it AVENGERS/SQUADRON SUPREME, and say that's the team-up?" And they said yeah, sure.
So it's the same story it was going to be all along. We just put both logos on the cover.
DO'L: Trinity was the third 52 part weekly series that DC did in a row. After hearing the writers of 52 and also the creators behind Countdown say how gruelling that year was, why still, did you agree to do it as it must have been some challenge?
KB: It was, but the other weeklies DC did had writers who were trying to gang-write a weekly book in addition to writing their full load of other books. We had the advantage of seeing how hard that was, so we racked back my workload, first taking me off AQUAMAN, then off SUPERMAN, too, so I only had TRINITY and ASTRO CITY to work on, and I had Fabian's help on TRINITY.
That made it a lot easier, for two reasons. First, we had more time to concentrate on it, and second, it was just two of us. When you're trying to coordinate weekly plotting among four writers and a profusion of artists, it's way more time-consuming than just writing a normal book, but with TRINITY, we could have a conference call of the entire writing staff by me calling Fabian and chatting about story while he was watching his daughter's school basketball game. Much easier. And we had only four pencilers -- Bagley doing a huge, huge amount of work, and the three other guys backing him up. Keeping the creative team small and making sure we weren't trying to juggle too many projects made it much smoother.
Also, the fact that we weren't trying to tie in to other books helped, too. TRINITY was self-contained, so there was less editorial coordination, and that was a huge time saver.
DO'L: JLA/Avengers created a lot of buzz at its announcement. As a project touted over twenty years prior to its release but not realised due to inter-company politics, at what stage did you come aboard the project and what was your reaction after being asked to do it?
KB: When Marvel and DC started talking again, I was writing AVENGERS, so right from the start of that, the plan was that I'd be involved somehow. Mark Waid, who was writing JLA, was expected to be a part of it, too, and he and I had some fun discussions on how to make it work. But by the time the deal was made and the project was announced, he'd left DC for CrossGen and I wound up as sole writer, and had already worked out a lot of the basic story ideas in preparation.
And I was thrilled, of course. I love working with George, I loved writing those characters, and I'd been one of the many fans who'd been looking forward to the crossover back in the early 1980s -- in fact, one of my last jobs in the fan press before breaking in as a pro was working on an article announcing the crossover, in 1981 -- so it really was a kind of dream come true to be chosen for that book.
Kurt Busiek
DO'L: Your work on Wednesday Comics saw a return to Green Lantern for you. DC has stated that they approached creators to write the characters they would most like to write for this project. What is your attraction to GL?
KB: I like the whole thing. The idea of the Green Lantern Corps, this interstellar corps of, essentially, Texas Rangers in space, the ring as both badge of office and weapon, the science fiction and all -- and particularly Hal Jordan, who always worked for me as Indiana Jones before there was an Indiana Jones -- cool, resourceful, always making it up as he goes along, but confident that whatever the emergency, he can find a way to deal with it. The way I look at it, Hal's sort of the anti-Batman -- Batman likes to plan ahead like a chess master, but Hal's a test pilot, the kind of guy who lets himself get strapped into an experimental rocket-powered plane that just might blow up in mid-air, sure that he's got the reflexes and quick thinking to deal with it if it happens, and come up with a solution before he hits the ground.
Plus, Hal always seemed like the kind of guy you could relax and have a beer with, while so many other comics heroes are emotional wrecks, tightly-wound and obsessive. I like the guys who aren't so grim all the time.
DO'L: With such a long and varied career behind you, what is your personal favourite work you've done?
KB: Hard to say. Certainly, a bunch of ASTRO CITY issues would be in contention -- #1, #1/2, the Atomicus issue, the Infidel issue, a few others -- along with SUPERMAN: SECRET IDENTITY #2 and ARROWSMITH. It'd be hard to choose.
DO'L: What is keeping you busy right now?
KB: ASTRO CITY continues, and I'm doing a new creator-owned book for WildStorm that isn't quite announced yet. Plus BATMAN: CREATURE OF THE NIGHT, a thematic follow-up to SUPERMAN: SECRET IDENTITY, the ARROWSMITH sequel project, DRACULA: THE COMPANY OF MONSTERS for Boom, and a couple of others things that haven't been announced yet.
DO'L: Kurt, many thanks for taking the time to speak with us, take care.
KB: My pleasure!
Many thanks to Kurt once again for a great talk. Please join me again soon for another edition of 5 Minutes With...
Interviewer Bio
David has been with CR since June 2008 and started out as a reviewer and has expanded to do a couple of columns for the site also; starting with 28 Words Later with artist Declan Shalvey and later 5 Minutes With... where he talks with the industries best and brightest from Kubert to Moore.
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