In The Glass Box, the prolific J. Michael Straczynski—the longtime comics artist on such titles as Spider-Man and Captain America and the creator of Babylon 5, whose plaudits include two Hugo Awards, the SFWA Ray Bradbury Award, the Eisner Award, the GLAAD Media Award, and two Emmys—explores a too-plausible future for the U.S. He spoke with PW about his new novel and his other contributions to popular culture.
Where did the idea for The Glass Box come from?
It came from looking at the culture now, and how people are starting to interpret involvement in a protest movement as meaning that there's something wrong with you. We hear about Trump derangement syndrome. We hear about people saying that if you don't agree with us, that in some way you are insane. Part of what led to this is what they call sunshine camps in North Korea, where people who are dissidents or protesters are brought in to be reeducated and kept there for potentially years at a time. What if we had a government, five minutes into the future, that is equally as repressive in trying to create a similar environment of fear, and wanted to use the medical establishment, as other fascists have done before? How would that play out? I figured that the best point of view would be someone who was brought into that system to be reeducated and who begins to take the whole system down with her.
You've said before that, with established mainstream comics characters, you view your job as asking unlikely questions. Could you expand on that approach?
Spider-Man is a good example of that. For 50-plus years, we've known that Peter Parker got bit by a spider and got his powers. I like to look under the hood and say, oh, wait, hang on a second. The spider was irradiated—we know that part of it. But did the spider have the powers from the radiation, and therefore gave it to Peter, or was that spider bringing the powers to him in the first place, and had to get to him before the radiation killed it? Because the second question implies intent. And the moment you put intent into that equation, it changes everything. It opens up whole new possibilities of storytelling. Out of that one question came the Spider Totem idea, but also the Spider-Verse. All the things you've seen since then from the Spider-Verse, the characters and movies, and the animated stuff, all that came from that one unlikely question—that implied intent.
With Captain America, everyone's always talked about how Steve Rogers got the super soldier serum, and had been a sick, weak kid. But no one ever said, well, hang on, there were years between when his parents died, and when he got the serum—from age 14 to about 17 or 18, he was on his own in New York with no family, trying to survive. What did that look like? What happened during those years? And I remembered that during the late 1930s in New York, where he was living, the American Bund, and the American Nazi party, were quite powerful, and were trying to keep America out of the war. There were big parades and marches down the block from where Steve lived. Now, let's put those two on a collision trajectory, and see what happens. So it's the question of what happened during those years, which no one's ever once dealt with, and what happens when young Steve comes across this Nazi party in the U.S. when he doesn't have powers. That situation is the one we can relate to—very few of us actually have Super Soldier serum, but we all have the capacity to stand up against tyranny and fascism and brutality. And that's what I have him doing.
What was it like returning to the Babylon 5 universe in the animated film, Babylon 5: The Road Home, and is there any news you can share about the long-rumored reboot?
It was different from the TV series in the sense that we didn't have to worry about budget, because in animation, you could do anything, like blow up planets. I started off in animated television—He-Man, and Ghostbusters, and so on. So it's kind of fun to go back and play in that world again. The hardest part of that movie was knowing that we have lost so many of our Babylon 5 cast members. When I talked to Warner Bros. about first doing it, I said that I wanted this to be a tribute to the show to the fans and to our fallen friends. I sent a note before we made the deal to the surviving cast members to say, look, if we do this, you may be acting in a scene with someone who is not here anymore, and if anyone is uncomfortable with that, just say the word, we won't do it. But if you want to make a tribute to our fallen friends, then we can do this. And they all said absolutely, they were on board. As to the future, I know there is interest in doing more animated movies. The live-action reboot had been with the CW, and now we have interest from at least two streamers, so I think we have a good chance of selling it.
Your fiction has often anticipated real-life events. In Babylon 5, you had a corrupt, antidemocratic Earth Alliance President, Morgan Clark. In an unfinished project you were developing with longtime Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont, The World on Fire, you imagined a devastating attack on New York before 9/11. And in your comic series, The Resistance, begun before Covid-19, a global pandemic gave some individuals superpowers. Do you feel that you have some sort of special insight into global political, cultural, and scientific trends that enables you to be so predictive?
I don't know that I have any particular insight. I just try to be aware and awake. I have a background in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and have been interested in politics and literature. I have a huge interest in history, and there are cycles that we go through that repeat themselves. So I think that combination of interests just gives one a pair of antennae that make one more receptive to what's going on in the world. I'm not particularly very smart, but I do just stay open and aware.
Is there a common theme linking your screenwriting, your novels, and your writing of comics?
I have a film that should be going to production in Germany in 2024, and in the course of working on that, I was talking to the grandson of one of the physical architects of the concentration camps. He said that there were two primary rules you had to follow in the design for those camps. Rule number one was that once you're out of the barracks, there was nowhere you could go in the camp where you couldn't be seen by a guard, either on the ground or in the tower. Rule number two was actually more important than rule number one, which was that there could not be beauty anywhere, because beauty leads to hope, and hope leads to insurrection.
At the heart of all my work is hope—the idea that one person can change the world. We are told on a daily basis that the individual is not of consequence, that you can't fight City Hall, that you are helpless, that you have to accept what is. And I don't believe that. I've never believed that. I think that one person can change the world—one person with an idea, whether that's Gandhi and Martin Luther King, or, unfortunately, one man with a bullet. We are, every day, being factionalized and marginalized within an inch of our lives. I write about the fact that we are better together than we are apart. The common coin of our humanity is bigger than where they want to bring us.
