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Murder
in the First (Person)
An
Interview with Greg Rucka
-by
Andrew Goletz and Erich Schoeneweiss
Greg
Rucka is leaning back in his chair smiling as Erich and I are laughing
hysterically at one of his stories from the recent San Diego Comic Con
(unfortunately the stories were off the record, so you’ll have to get me or
Erich really drunk to get them out of us).
He takes a sip of his Coke. It’s
early on a Sunday afternoon in New York City.
Greg, Erich, and I are the only ones sitting in the Stoned Crow, a pub in
the West Village. We chat for a
while about different creators, trade stories we’ve heard about this person or
that person, and talk about bar video games (the old Cyber Ball robot/football
game in particular).
We
met Greg earlier in the day at mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village called
Partners in Crime. It’s the kind of bookstore that you would think a crime
fiction writer visiting New York would go to. After exchanging pleasantries, we
made the brief trek to Pub while my wife Lisa (and photographer for the
interview) went for a stroll around town.
During
our walk, Greg spoke briefly about the inspiration that one can take from a city
like New York. ‘There is just so much going on here,’ Greg commented. The
last time I was here this guy was standing on one foot, balancing himself in the
middle of the street divide while standing on a 20 dollar bill. He wasn’t
moving. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing. I watched this for 20
minutes before I walked away. Fascinating. The man from Oregon spoke of details
only a born and raised New Yorker would know of and made it sound like he was
the only one who knew about this secret world in the city. That’s how good
Greg Rucka is. His eye for detail and his curiosity about people and how they
behave…it’s as if nothing escapes him.
Greg is a very open, easy-going
man. He seems to honestly enjoy
sitting and talking with us. Surprising
maybe, considering Greg Rucka is the author of the four Atticus Kodiak novels
(Keeper, Finder, Smoker, and Shooting at Midnight – if you can, read them in
that order), chronicling the adventures of a personal security expert.
The novels, while exciting and at times funny, can be dark and disturbing
as they explore assassinations, drug addiction, conspiracy, and loss.
A fifth novel, Critical Space, is due next year.
Rucka has also made a name for himself in the comic book medium with his
gritty style. The two WhiteOut
miniseries for Oni feature US Marshall Carrie Stetko her search for personal
redemption on Antarctica. He took
DC by storm with his brilliant work on Batman through much of No Man’s Land
and that continues now in Detective Comics. It seems every time you pick up an
industry news magazine Greg’s name is mentioned somewhere.
So…
Greg has kept Erich and I entertained for several minutes now and we turn the
tape recorder on and dive into the interview …
Gray
Haven: So, based on the stories you’ve been telling it seems you’ve
established good relationships with some other creators?
Greg
Rucka: I love Garth Ennis. You read his stuff and you really expect him to be
like ‘I will kill you’ but he is sooo nice. I had a chance to meet the other
‘crime writers at a convention this past summer. Wizard even did a story on
us: the Murder. Inc thing. With the exception of Bendis, who was making a funny
face, we all looked the part you know?
GH:
Erich and I were discussing this earlier. You guys all look the same.
Rucka:
Well we were telling Brubaker, ‘you need to shave your head, man’. Garth
writes the nastiest stuff of any of us and he looks like a great big farm boy.
He’s fair-haired and always smiling, and he’s like the friendliest guy in
the world. It just doesn’t fit.
GH:
You can save Brian Bendis’ ass if you come up with a reasonable excuse why he
wasn’t wearing his wedding ring in the Wizard shoot.
Rucka:
He wasn’t?
GH:
No. A bunch of people on his website pointed it out. I don’t think his wife
was pleased (laughter).
Rucka:
I can’t help him. I have no idea. Sorry, Brian.
GH:
You had a pretty funny story about that Wizard shoot.
Rucka:
We had this big argument during the Wizard thing. They wanted us to wear these
colored t-shirts and Azzarello was like ‘fuck that’. Brubaker’s article
was such bullshit, talking about selling drugs.
Sure you were Ed. Azzarello looks like he will hurt you. He’s a nice
guy, but he has that look like ‘I’ve seen a man die in his own vomit’.
So anyway, they have all these different colored shirts and Brian and I
pick them out and it turns out we both are wearing black, and then these other
two are like, ‘nooo, we’re not gonna do it’.
GH:
Do you get tired of these interviews?
Rucka: Devin Grayson has gone so
far as to create a template document that will have all the answers to these
questions that everyone always asks. I mean, you know that there are going to be
certain set questions that you’ll always be asked and you accept that fact,
which is why I prefer to do interviews in person.
GH:
(crossing off half the questions on our list) So you can just walk away?
Rucka:
(laughing) No. When you’re on the
phone and want to think about an answer you just get an awkward silence. Here,
there’s still silence, but at least we’re looking at each other, you know?
The interviewer is like, ‘He’s really quiet, but he must be thinking, or I
hope he’s thinking.
GH:
Or you can take a drag from your cigarette.
Rucka:
It’s all a matter of perspective. There’s
a great bit in an old Doonesberry where one of the people is interviewing
another and the interviewer is like ‘what’s wrong, you’re just sitting
there’ and the guy getting interviewed replies, ‘I’m tired, we’ve been
at this for 14 hrs’ and the interview goes ‘well, what are you thinking’
and the guy says ‘I was thinking I’m going to probably get another cup of
coffee’ and the thought bubble under the interviewer was ‘he drinks coffee
the way other people drink Evian’.
GH:
You write comics and novels. Is there a different thought process that goes into
the way you take on each?
Rucka:
Yes. One of the reasons that I like comics is that comics are a logic problem.
You know the old saying, ‘there are only a limited number of games of chess
that can be played?’ There are only a finite number of moves you can do, but
there are so many that IBM needs to create this supercomputer to do it.
Comics
are like that. They’re a finite form. In a monthly book like Detective, you
have 22 pages. Whether it’s a two part or a one part or whatever, there are
certain things you need to do within those 22 pages. You need to move the story
from one point to another. If you’re doing it well, it has to be done in a way
that’s engaging to a reader and forces them to turn the page. I want every
issue to have an emotional truth. There has to be a moment where a reader
connects with something that’s going on in the story. Some writers are better
at this than others.
Chuck
Dixon is a master at getting you to turn the page. You can blow through a Chuck
Dixon book because every page propels you to the next.
There are other writers that will
pull you in on an emotional level. That’s a finite problem. Paradoxically,
I find that more liberating. With a novel, there’s an issue of structure. I
usually have to write a pretty detailed outline before I start or I get lost. My
second novel, I did not outline completely. Finder is the only novel I had to
rewrite from top to bottom three times and people are always surprised when I
say that. If you read Finder, the SAS weren’t in it until the final draft, and
you know they’re pretty essential to the story.
With Critical Space, which will be out Fall 2001, I outlined the first
half of the book. I got to the end of the outline and wrote the next section and
all the alarms went off and these little voices that I never listened to for the
first 5 or 6 yrs that I was writing…well I listened to em: ‘This isn’t
going to end the way I want it to’. One of the reasons Critical Space is so
late is because I had to do a major rethink on it. I took about a month to just
sit back and think what to do. I was able to change around more successfully
because the outline was there. Bantam is fairly forgiving. If they say you need
to give us a 90,000 word novel and I turn in 120,000, they’re not going to
automatically make me cut 30 thousand words out of it. That’s a huge
difference. There’s a character difference. You can spend more times on
things.
There’s
a certain difficulty in writing something like Batman. For example, I’d love
to write more about the cops, but the book is Batman: Detective Comics and
Batman has to be pretty prominent. There are issues where I’d love it if you
never even saw him. Detective 747 is a good example. It’s about Montoya, but
it’s a Batman story and was important to pull him in. I don’t think Batman
even speaks in that issue. Bruce does, but Batman doesn’t.
If
I’m writing a Kodiak novel I can do whatever I want. I don’t have to worry
about Time Warner coming down on me saying ‘the hell you will’. My
editor’s great. Either that, or I haven’t come up with anything so ghastly
that she’s had to come back and tell me to tone it down.
GH:
Did you have a lot of freedom in the revamp of Batman after No Man’s Land?
Rucka:
Half-way through No Man’s Land, Denny knew they were going to do a revamp and
they were going back and forth with ideas for awhile. He said to me,
‘this is your book, do what you want within these parameters’. He had
asked who I wanted to draw it and I’ll admit, I’m notoriously weak on
artists. I know what I like, but I don’t know who drew it. They selected
Martinbrough on the basis of ‘The Hill’, and other work he did and he and I
met and we were like, ‘this is great, this’ll work’, but that was pretty
much the extent of that control. This year has been pretty much the year after
No Man’s Land. We were about to get out of the gate and do what we wanted to
do. The problem is the books sold pretty well during NML and there was a drop
off after. Certain books were left behind and a corporation has a vested
interest, so now we’re back to doing certain ‘events’.
I
hate ‘events’ because you really can’t do anything new. You can’t break
his back again, you know? So that becomes kind of annoying. The flip side is we
have talented people and the stuff we have coming at the end of the year is
really good, but it has ‘event’ written on it. Officer Down is an
‘event’. It’s good. It’s not bullshit, and that’s the thing that
mattered most. But it’s still an ‘event’.
We didn’t want to do an event just to sell more books; we wanted to
write a story where we’re doing something.
There’s
an important action in the story and the overall scheme of that is very
important to what we’re doing.
GH:
From a creator’s point of view, do you get aggravated with news sites and
Previews giving away major plot points of the book or is it just something you
accept?
Rucka:
They haven’t given it all away. None of us on Officer Down wanted to comment
on it, really. We were sticking to our guns on this, but Michael Doran of
Newsrama kept at it and finally Patty Jeres in marketing sends me an email
saying ‘you have to talk about it’.
I
understand why they have to do it because it’s marketing. More people will buy
the books if they think something major happens, but at the same time you lose
an element of the storytelling. It should be surprising.
In the 1st issue of OD, Gordon isn’t shot until page 22. I
wrote it like that deliberately, so you wouldn’t know what’s going on.
You’re reading and enjoying ‘oh what’s going on’,
‘oh it’s his birthday’, and then it’s like ‘oh my god, he’s
been shot!’ But now people are
going to read it and flip through it, waiting for it, get to the end and say
‘oh, page 22, what a rip off!’ It changes the nature of how you tell the
story and so on.
The
second the story broke out, a guy emailed me saying ‘don’t let them kill
Gordon’ and put up a site with a petition on it and had people fill it out. He
didn’t tell the people filling it out that it was going directly to me. The
day after the story, I received almost 400 emails with these people writing some
fairly nasty stuff, that if they knew I was reading this directly they may not
have said such things. I was pretty
livid about that. I was like ‘don’t do this to my personal email. Don’t
barrage my home.’
GH:
Yeah, send complaints to DC or whomever, you can’t change that crap.
Rucka:
The fans believe they should make the ultimate decisions, but they’re wrong.
They’re not the writers, they’re readers, and they need to trust that there
are some good writers and they tell good stories and let us do our jobs.
GH:
Is it more difficult to write a character like Batman that’s not your own as
opposed to say Carrie Stetko in Whiteout?
Rucka: Different responsibilities.
Batman is for the most part boring. He’s cooler than Jesus, and you can put
him into a situation that’s really cool, but it’s hard to be in a position
to say ‘we’re going to do something really different with Batman’ because
most of it has been done. The last different thing done with Batman was by Frank
Miller and now he’s undoing it!!! This
is why I’m much more interested in writing about Gordon or Montoya.
GH:
Which is why I think people are responding so favorable about Detective Comics.
I love the fact that this just isn’t about Batman. For the first time in a
long time, you get a flavor for the rest of the city and who the cops are, etc.
Rucka:
That’s the thing. The current storyline 751-752 isn’t about Batman, it’s
about Bruce, and it really isn’t even about him, it’s about Poison Ivy.
There are occasional stories that will be about Batman, but others that
aren’t. 750 wasn’t about Bruce, it was about Talia. It wasn’t supposed to
be about this great big Batman/Ra’s fight. If I had my way, I’d have Talia
go out, get a tattoo or a nose ring and go wild because you’re 25/26 and
you’ve been daddy’s little girl for so long and your father is The Demon’s
Head for crying out loud! There are some serious issues there! I’m working on
something now which is a four issue prestige thing, tentatively titled Death and
the Maiden which will be a very specific story about Bruce and Talia and Ra’s,
and will ideally change things.
GH:
And in your Kodiak novels, you have a little more control.
Rucka:
Yeah, well. If you like the books, you’ll really like 5, Critical Mass. It
really changes everything. One thing you can say about me, I’m not afraid to
fuck with my characters.
GH:
The Kodiak Novels just scream film franchise.
Rucka:
We optioned it, but nothing happened. It took 8 months before we heard anything.
It’s crazy. I have two agents; a literary agent and one in Hollywood.
Hollywood is very excited about Critical Space. You couldn’t make a movie out
of the first one. You couldn’t make a movie out of the second one. You could
make one out of the 3rd, but people wouldn’t understand the ending.
You can’t really do the 4th, but the 5th is viable as a
film.
People
have said it’d be a great television show, but the problem is the desire to
see it done well. I get an occasional email asking me ‘who I see in these
parts’ and always end up bashing my head against the wall because I’ve never
even cast them because they’re novels. I have no clue. I’ve heard everything
from Russell Crow, Brendon Frasier, Noah Wyle. I kind of like Wyle because he
can do that physical sort of awkwardness, which is there in Atticus, you know?
There was a bit in ER where Wyle maces himself, goes backwards and flips over
and I thought, ‘that was an Atticus moment’. I couldn’t cast Natalie to
save my life. I’ve never seen Natalie. Natalie is my own problem. She’s the
type of character that appears over and over in my work. There’s the evil
variation, the amoral variation, the good variation. Bridget’s another one.
They said Angelina Jolie would be a good one for her. No she wouldn’t.
GH:
Well you said you based Bridget on a friend.
Rucka:
Well there’s that very specific body type, you know? I didn’t base it on her
per se, but just the image. And people are always like, ‘you made up that
back-story’ and I’m like, ‘no I didn’t’. I knew Shooting at Midnight
would be told at some point when she appeared in Keeper and actually if you go
back and read Finder very carefully, there’s a ‘tell’. Atticus mentions a
skin graft, but he doesn’t know what it is. He calls it a discoloration, but
there it is. It’s there!
And
things don’t come up again till later. There are things I consider non-issues,
and Atticus shares that. He’s not gonna tell you Dale’s gay because he feels
its irrelevant and it should be irrelevant to you, too.
GH:
The Question appeared in the Batman/Huntress mini-series. Anything else going on
with the character?
Rucka:
I love The Question. I was a huge fan of O’Neil’s run.
GH:
Rumors of a backup in Detective Comics?
Rucka:
I can confirm that. They wanted to do an 8 part backup in Detective, but I want
it to be 10-12 parts. Rick Burchett will draw it, and it’ll probably be a year
before we get to see it because there are 2 other backups to come before it.
Helena and Tot will be in it. Richard may not be in it. Charlie is going back to
Hub city. The title I was working on is The Question: You Never Asked. At the
end of the series he leaves Hub City and in the Quarterly, Jackie dies, which I
guess shows you the impact it had on me since I forgot about it when I did issue
3 of the mini and wrote Charlie saying, ‘Jackie’s with her mom’ and the
implication is what? Myra’s dead? I need to figure out a way to deal with
that, but I don’t think the death held the impact that Denny would have
wanted.
GH:
Are you going to do a recommended reading list?
Rucka:
No. Denny’s list was related to the story he was telling. My story isn’t the
search for self-enlightenment that his was, and I won’t derive the work in the
same way.
GH:
What do you think of Joe Quesada and his appointment to EIC?
Rucka:
Joe is phenomenal. He’s also an incredible salesman. I’m excited to see the
direction the company is heading in.
GH:
Any other projects you’re working on?
Rucka:
I’ve talked to Stuart Moore about doing something more with Yelana (Black
Widow)
GH:
What’s the fascination with these dark characters?
Rucka:
I don’t know. You can spin it around and ask why do people like reading about
it so much? Steven King talks about needing to exorcise the ghosts. I had a
great childhood, it’s not like I’m running away from something. After an
interview someone asked me what is it about ‘fathers and daughters’ that I
keep going back to and family in general? Maybe
it’s because I know how lucky I’ve been and I want to do something with it.
There
is a fascination too, that a lot of this stuff is true. People always look at me
strange when I say professional killers exist, but they have to. Logic dictates
they must exist. Do you believe there are people that train their whole lives to
kill? No. Back it up. Do you believe the government kills people? Yes. How do
they do it? They send people. Just anyone? No, specifically trained people. On
the basis of Patriotism? That’s not going to be enough. You have these trained
killers doing government work and then decide, ‘you know what, I can be making
a lot of money if I just detach myself from the political and emotional side’.
I guarantee you there are people that take a lot of money to kill people and we
never hear about it because they’re very good at what they do. They commit
assassination in a way that you don’t know it’s assassination. It was a car
crash. He died of AIDS related complications. The heater malfunctioned and it
caused a fire. One of the first times I met Garth Ennis (doing his uncanny Ennis
impersonation) he told me ‘You can’t believe that people like that exist?’
and I told him that I did. So he tells me, ‘If you wanna kill someone, why not
just blow them up?’ Because then everyone knows it. He was fascinated by this.
GH:
And from a sadistic point, where’s the challenge?
Rucka:
Now your getting into issues of character and some of that’s in Critical
Space. Why do you do what you do?
GH:
Are you hinting that the assassin Drama is coming back?
Rucka:
Critical Space is the sequel to Smoke and Drama is back.
GH:
Where do you find the time to write all this?
Rucka
I don’t know
GH:
Well how long does it take you to write, a book like Detective?
Rucka:
It depends. The Montoya issue for instance, I had planned for a long time and
when I sat down to write it, I banged it all out quickly because it was in my
head. Others take a week, maybe a week and a half because it’s agony. For the
most part, I can do a comic script in 2-3 days. If I’m lucky, 1 day. With No
Man’s Land, the stories were so well plotted that I did it just like that, in
a day. An issue like 752, with the resolution to the current story is like when
most fans will be like, ‘what’s this about’?. I want more punching! I
needed an emotional resonance.
Sometimes
it takes longer if you run out of page room and you have to jettison ideas. You
also want to be fair to the artist. I don’t want to give Shawn pages where
there are 12 panels on each page. He’s gonna be like ‘don’t do that
again!’ I usually give the artist a rough idea of what I want and leave it up
to them.
Queen and Country, the new series for Oni (a spin-off of White-Out featuring
British agent Lily Sharp) is taking longer to write because of the nature
of the book. They’re spy stories and not just James Bond spy stories. To write
a complex story, you have to know where it’s going to end. I’m writing a 3
issue arc and to do it right I’m going to have to know how it ends and I
don’t know yet and it’s driving me crazy. And I am going to draw from real
life. I don’t know if you saw this on the news but someone fired a rocket
propelled Grenade at the MI 6 building in London. Someone walks up and pops the
rocket right at the secret service in London. It’d be the equivalent of
someone going to the CIA building and doing the same thing. What the hell is
going on there?
GH:
One of the things that drives me crazy is when a company announces a creative
team and it turns out they only stay for a few issues.
Rucka:
I understand that. The lead time in comics is weird. People were talking a year
ago about me writing Wonder Woman and my first issue won’t come out until
November 2001, if then. That’s partially the nature of publishing and the
nature of comics. Comics are far more fan interactive, with a lot of info coming
in and out. It’s marketing, too.
GH:
You deal with female characters a lot: Huntress, Carrie, Talia, Montoya, Wonder
Woman, Bridget, Natalie. What draws you to them?
Rucka: I just want to do right by
them, you know? A lot of people will say that there’s no difference between
men and women and that women are just guys with tits. I hate that. No they’re
not. As a guy, you really don’t have to worry about being raped. I mean, it
isn’t something that’s a major concern of yours. But women have to always be
aware of that risk. A woman walking in NYC alone at 1 in the morning has an
entirely different perspective than a man will. I think it’s wrong not to
treat them any differently.
There was a scene in the first
draft of the Whiteout screenplay where it describes Carrie as being outside and
she feels someone is out there and she runs. Excuse me? Runs? It’s Antarctica.
Where is she going to run to? And she’s a federal agent. She isn’t going to
run, she’s going to go find the person and take them down. I want to treat
female characters as real people and not just two dimensional stereotypes.
GH:
You did a story in NML where Batman and Gordon have a heart to heart and Bruce
is ready to reveal his identity but Gordon stops him. When you write the
characters, do you write them with the belief that Gordon knows Bruce Wayne is
Batman?
Rucka:
I can’t answer that. I really can’t.
GH:
Big fan of crime dramas in other mediums, like television?
Rucka:
I loved Homicide. I like Law and Order because they are consistently good. NYPD
Blue is like a soap opera now. I can’t watch it. There aren’t really any
good cop shows.
GH:
Have you checked out CSI?
Rucka:
Yeah, CSI. Very realistic (laughter)
GH:
Organic or non-organic web shooters?
Rucka:
(looks at us in disbelief)
GH:
There is a debate going on about this.
Rucka:
You’re kidding me?
GH:
No. There’s even a website, www.noorganicwebshooters.com.
Rucka: I don’t really know. I guess if you do organic web shooters, they
better not be coming out of his wrists (laughter). I prefer the idea of him
having mechanical shooters. Peter is brilliant. I like the idea of him creating
these devices.
GH:
You’re a politically vocal person. What’s your take on the election?
Rucka:
For me, this election is about the Supreme Court, and the fact that I have a
nine month old son, and the kind of freedoms I want him to have when he’s 20.
So I’m voting for Gore. I think that Bush will create a court that will undo
the last 120 yrs of our freedom including a lot of privacy rights. I really do
think that there is a likelihood my son could be denied certain rights or not
get certain things in his life because some corporation will look and say ‘he
did this when he was 7, etc’. I’m not even talking about things like
abortion or homosexuality, freedom of press. Right now Scalia is talking about
what God would want him to do, and there’s no place for that on the court.
There are a minimum of two and a maximum of 4 Justices that will need to be
replaced. The worst case scenario is that it’s a court of 8 conservative
judges for the next 20/30 yrs. The best justice is Souter. He’s follows the
Constitution. A true conservative will follow the Constitution as he should. And
I think everyone should vote. Low turn out means Bush wins.
GH:
Whose writing are you a fan of?
Rucka:
I’m fortunate in that I’m a fan of the group I’ve been associated with.
I read Bendis, Brubaker. Love what Bendis does. Garth Ennis never lets me
down. I enjoy what Ellis has been
doing. Alan Moore scares me. Jeff Johnson. Mystery writers: Dennis Lehane, SJ
Rozan.
GH:
If you had to spend a time in jail with any criminal, who would it be?
Rucka:
(pauses as if stunned by the question a bit, looks at his friend who has just
joined us) Honestly never thought
of this one. Sigmund Rosenblum aka Sidney Reilly, Reilly Ace of Spies. They did
a series about him on Masterpiece Theater. He got locked up a lot. That would
have been pretty cool. And he escaped a lot, too, so it would have been cool to
hang out with him cause I’d be able to get out of jail pretty easily.
GH:
Finally, why should someone pick up a novel or comic by Greg Rucka?
Rucka: I guess because you’ll be reading a competently told story and you’ll
be guaranteed to come away feeling something.
We end the interview with my
wife, Lisa, returning to take some photos of the group and a long discussion and
question and answer session with Greg about parenthood and what to expect our
own little bundle of joy arrives next Spring. Over two hours after we first met,
we come away knowing more about Greg Rucka the writer, the father and the
person. And we’re thankful for the experience.
If
you haven’t done so already, pick up one of his comics and/or grab one of the
novels. You will not be
disappointed.
Copyright©2000 GrayHaven Magazine and contributors