Though he earned the unfortunate nickname of “The Man Who Killed Captain America” after one of his 2007 stories assassinated the venerable Marvel hero, writer Ed Brubaker's body of work stretches beyond the superhero genre and into gritty crime dramas and dark espionage tales. This past summer Brubaker's latest creations brought him even more critical acclaim and commercial success in the comic shop market and soon, along with such collaborators as Sean Phillips, Steve Epting and others, he will land in the book market in a big way.
Aside from an ongoing run on Captain America, a series which just saw its numbering rebooted backwards to celebrate its 600th issue, Brubaker's bread and butter have been a series of comics produced with Phillips for Icon, Marvel's creator-owned imprint. In Criminal, the creative pair explores a new variety of hardcore crime tale in each new series while the just-completed Incognito series features the complicated story of a super villain placed in a witness protection program. Both series will ship new book collections this November—a debut trade paperback for Incognito and an oversized hardcover omnibus for Criminal—while the latter will feature a new story arc called "The Sinners." Meanwhile, Brubaker continues to work on his superhero opus, Captain America: Reborn, resurrecting the murdered hero and earning the #1 comic shop sales rank for July. In addition, he and longtime collaborator Epting tell the espionage-flavored origin of Marvel Comics in a pre-World War II story featured in the publisher's 70th Anniversary series The Marvels Project. Brubaker spoke with PW Comics Week about all these books as well as the influence writers from Elmore Leonard to Kurt Vonnegut have had on his career.
PW Comics Week: The simplest way to describe Criminal is that it's a straight crime comic. But slowly over the course of the series, you and Sean have been introducing a larger story about generations of criminals tied to one robbery in the '70s. How would you describe the larger concept?
Ed Brubaker: The hook is that there's no hook. [Laughs] I mean, honestly there's the back story of the characters who are interlinked. Every book stars a character who was a supporting character in a previous book, but I sort of took that from Elmore Leonard more than anything else. There is a big story that we're building towards that will probably run like eight issues or so, but I'm still not ready to tell that story yet. Really, the thing that I wanted to try to do with Criminal was to create an umbrella title where I could do anything—anything in the crime field or any kind of noir story. I wanted to create a book that was the kind of book I wanted to read—where in every story line, you can just pick it up at the beginning and start there. If you're reading the series and following it in order, there are Easter eggs for you, but basically you can pick up any volume and start it. I always joke that it's like [Frank Miller's] SinCity, except that if someone jumped off a roof and landed on a car they'd die...and so would the people in the car. It's a more realistic version of that kind of thing.
But it's more than that. SinCity was about taking the superhero conventions and putting them in a noir world. The capes were overcoats, basically. But what we're doing is creating our own world of noir and crime and exploring any kind of genre you can do within that field. Our first story was a heist story. Our second story was a revenge story. Our third story was some sort of arty, cryptic, Rashomon-style crime story. [Laughs] And our fourth one was the most twisted thing I've ever written, which was a paranoid rant on the whole "Postman Always Rings Twice" genre but adding a lot more craziness into it. It's just the book I always wanted to read, but unfortunately there's no great hook for it. There's no, "He's an undercover cop working for…" There's no super twist other than us trying to create the best crime comic we can possibly create.
PWCW: With the next arc, you move into an area that has been a little more well-traveled in comics: a mafia story. Plus, you're bringing back the character of Tracey Lawless who proved very popular in Criminal's past. After experimenting with elements comics readers aren’t used to seeing, have you reached the point where you can now use a recurring character to play around with what readers expect to see?
EB: Yeah. A little bit. Part of it is that each character like Tracey or Leo [from our first arc "Coward"] —after we do a sequel to Incognito, we're going to do a sequel to "Coward." Part of that is just creating these characters and wanting to come back and tell more stories about them. I read a lot of series crime fiction. Most of the crime fiction that is out there and popular is series fiction. Even with TV shows like The Wire, you want to see what happens to Jimmy McNulty next.
With this story, and one of the things I'm trying to do in Criminal each time is push myself further and try something different. When we sat down to do what became [our third arc] "The Dead And The Dying," I wanted to do three stand-alone stories that would link together and ultimately be a story about a tragic femme fatale. You rarely see the point of view of the femme fatale, and I wanted to try something like that. With [the fourth story] "Bad Night" I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown writing it because it was so different from everything I'd done, and it was so intense and personal. In this one, I'm trying to push myself further by expanding everything I've done in the previous ones and taking on three or four plots—even though we mainly follow Tracey. It's also a flip on the [police] procedural, which is something I really love. Like "Law & Order" or any kind of private eye fiction. It's still taking on that genre and doing our own twist with it. Tracey's clearly the most popular character and people keep writing me asking, "What's next for Tracey?" So this is like his detective story, except it's about a guy who has no idea how to be a detective, working for the bad guys.
PWCW: From your previous super spy collaboration Sleeper through Incognito through this, telling the story of a man on the wrong side of an equation seems to be something you and Sean enjoy doing. What's the attraction to those kinds of set ups?
EB: I like grey moral areas. With Incognito, it was about trying to sort of flip things, where Sleeper was like, "What if you're a good person forced to do bad things?" [Incognito ]was about "What if you're a bad person forced to do good things?" With this storyline "The Sinners," Tracey is a guy who was trained by the military to kill people, but he mostly killed people who deserved it—or people who his government said deserved it at least. Now he's working for Mr. Hyde, and he hates being an assassin and won't kill anybody who doesn't deserve it. Suddenly, there are guys in town who are connected and who are starting to show up dead—drug dealers and higher up guys in various crime organizations around the city where someone should have to order their deaths or give the OK. Nobody knows who's doing this. So Tracey's sent to solve this crime, and he finds out pretty quick that the people he's trying to find—he kind of approves of what they're doing. He thinks most of these people deserve to die. [Laughs] So he's in kind of in a fucked spot in some ways. Is he going to turn these people over or help them? And putting characters in a fucked spot is kind of what writing is about.
PWCW: With the big Criminal Omnibus edition coming in November, you've got a third format for the series where the single periodical issues are essentially a magazine featuring all sorts of articles on crime fiction along with the comics and the softcover trades present the stories in book form. With a big special hardcover, who is your audience? Do you think your fans are buying these stories multiple times, or are new folks going to pick this up for the first time?
Ed Brubaker: Probably there will be some people who buy it twice. With the Omnibus, it's sort of a limited thing where we set a print run on it. More than anything, I think it's something Sean and I really wanted. It's something of an art book where the art is reproduced bigger and it's on really nice paper with a lot of extras in the back. I have a feeling that about half the people who buy will be people who have bought the comics and the trades already and just want to have this really nice art book edition. I buy stuff multiple times all the time, so I'm clearly that buyer. [Laughs]
I always joke that Criminal and Incognito and all my Icon stuff are really reader supported. Kind of like PBS...I feel like the people who buy our book every month are the people who we're trying to reward with everything. I get emails from some of the same people now every time an issue comes out. It feels like less of a fanbase and more of an extended family of people who like all the same stuff as we do. Criminal the magazine is a hybrid of things. It's bigger than the average comic, and the back matter is a whole thing on its own. That's why we don't reprint that stuff in the trade book collections. Most of the articles that aren't written by me are done as favors from friends of mine who are crime writers or journalists. It makes Criminal the magazine a really cool thing that's different than anything else out there.
PWCW: On the superhero side of the equation, you're currently working on Captain America: Reborn, which has resurrected Steve Rogers two years after he died in a highly-publicized issue of the regular Captain America comic. You waited quite a while for the comeback. How did you have to adapt your writing to work as an "event comic" outside the regular series?
EB: Basically, deciding to do it as an event and have Bryan Hitch draw it affected it a bit, but mostly what affected it was the timing. Marvel's Dark Reign story is going on now, and I always thought when we brought Steve back it had to be a full "taking characters from all over the Marvel Universe" story. You've got characters from the Avengers and the Fantastic Four in there and all sorts of supervillains. I always thought it should be a combination of a Captain America story and an Avengers story or a Marvel event. It's got to be a big thing. But really, what affected it were things like in the next issue we see the Thunderbolts, and that's affected by "Well, who are the Thunderbolts now?" or having Norman Osborn in charge of [super spy organization] H.A.M.M.E.R. When I first came up with the idea of Steve coming back, that wasn't going to be a part of it.
Really, the way the story is being told is the way I always planned to tell it, but when you start working with Hitch, it turns a different lever on in your head, you say, "How can I make this the biggest scene possible?" And when you get the pages back from him, he's figured out how to take it up another eight or ten levels. He's an amazing collaborator in that he adds so much to what you do. But basically the story is the story I'd set up to tell from the beginning. We saw hints of it issue #42 when the Red Skull and Arnim Zola were about to bring him back and Sharon [Carter] broke the machine and sent him skittering through time accidentally.
PWCW: The device you've used to bring Steve back—which involves him jumping through the moments of his own life—reminded some people of similar mechanics on ABC's Lost but with issue two things have started to get more complicated.
EB: Yeah, well comic fans can be knee jerk about things like that. People who didn't see Lost didn't think that. [Laughs] But it was one of those things where I saw the last season of Lost and I went, "Oh fuck!" I had this story planned out, and I had no idea they were going to be doing [Kurt] Vonnegut the whole season, but the way things worked out were totally different. Honestly, mine was a very direct riff on and tribute to Slaughterhouse Five—to take a World War II veteran like Steve Rogers and have him be unstuck in time. I even used the phrase "unstuck in time" and was very deliberate about it in issue #1 that it was a complete nod to Vonnegut with Arnim Zola saying, "Listen: Steve Rogers has become unstuck in time," and the very first line of Slaughterhouse Five is "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."
I was talking to [Lost co-creator and occasional comics writer] Damon Lindelof about this after everyone was saying, "It comes from Lost," and he said he got so much shit for ripping off Vonnegut. [Laughs] Apparently, most people who read my comic haven't read Slaughterhouse Five, which was forced reading when I was in high school. Ultimately, they're similar approaches to similar ideas, and I didn't formulate my idea because I watched Lost. I'm not going to change my plans because Lost did something similar...and with Steve unstuck in time you get to revisit classic moments and watch him struggle through his own life. For people who have just picked this thing up for the first time and haven't read Captain America, they can see that these are formative moments that shaped who this guy is and why he's a hero.
PWCW: How is the challenge of taking all those moments and fitting them into a time-travel story different from writing your other new book The Marvels Project? In that series, you have to look at the history of Marvel superheroes in the 1940's and rework all of that information into an espionage tale.
EB: They're totally different challenges, actually, because The Marvels Project is so much more of a sprawling epic where as with Steve's story in Reborn you're finding eight or ten key moments from his life and have them seen through a new perspective. With The Marvels Project, it's more about looking at a huge history from all the stuff that was published in the 1940s and all the stuff that's been told about that period in modern Marvel and all the retcons [retroactive continuity, or revising a past comics storyline to accommodate a current plot] that have occurred. You have to take a lot of threads and ideas that weren't meant to be a part of the same universe or linked—for instance, how a lot of [former Marvel editor-in-chief] Roy Thomas' reign was about trying to find ways to make the 1940s characters link up with what was going on in the 1970s. He was telling all these weird stories to explain things like how Captain America was published in the 1950s even though Cap and Bucky were blown up at the end of the war. I’m taking all of that stuff and finding the stuff that makes sense as a canonical Marvel origin. It's different kinds of storytelling. Reborn is a Cap/Avengers slam bang where as The Marvels Project really takes it's time.
The hope is that this will be the project that stays in print forever. When anybody wants to know, "How did Marvel start?" you give them this book. It really does get into the blending of actual history, the comics of the '40s and our modern retcons and weaves a story amongst all of that. It's among my favorite things that I've ever done at Marvel. What an honor to be asked to write the official "This is how it all began" story.
