In an industry where the issue of creator-owned properties versus work-for-hire is one of the most contentious, a select few comics creators manage to be prolific in both. In Greg Rucka’s case, a steady stream of mainstream and independent comics share resume space with a successful line of suspense prose novels, and Rucka’s popular Queen & Country series about British intelligence operatives straddles both media. On September 24, Oni Press will release Queen & Country Definitive Edition: Volume 3, collecting volumes seven and eight of the original comic series—which also happen to be critical tie-ins to the two existing Queen & Country novels, A Gentlemen’s Game and Private Wars (both from Bantam). Artists in the third volume are Mike Norton, Steve Rolston and Chris Samnee, and the edition includes a collection of Rucka's scripts with art by Rolston.
Queen & Country , which originally ran from 2001 to 2007, centers on Tara Chace, an operative, aka “Minder,” for the special section of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The intensely researched, Eisner Award-winning series grew out of Rucka’s “lifelong healthy obsession with spy stories,” which he decided to write after determining that he didn’t have “what [author John] le Carré would refer to as the ‘intestinal fortitude’” for spy work itself. Specifically, Queen & Country was inspired by the 1978-1980 British television series The Sandbaggers, created by Ian Mackintosh.
That show gave Rucka “the realization that all espionage is political. For all the stuff that James Bond had done, those stories largely ignored issues of politics—he was always fighting supervillains, a global evil organization,” Rucka says. “The way I explain the nature of Q&C, both the novels and the comics, is that every story has to have two antagonists—the first is whoever it is that’s trying to blow up the bridge or assassinate the prime minister or steal the missile codes. But the second antagonist is always Tara’s own government, the bureaucracy. I’ve had friends at the State Department and elsewhere explain to me that the bureaucracy cares only about its own perpetuation. And I love that inherent drama, that we ask people to sacrifice so much on this altar of patriotism and defense of intangible ideals, and they’re doing it for people who will write them off at a moment’s notice if it becomes the politically viable thing to do.”
Rucka was already the author of several prose novels starring professional bodyguard Atticus Kodiak before he entered comics with Whiteout (Oni), followed by a slew of titles for Marvel and DC including Elektra, Gotham Central, Checkmate and Wonder Woman. As a result, he knew early on that the Queen & Country series would spawn at least one novel. “One of the things I love about comics is that as a medium you are able to do very different things—time works uniquely in a comic, in ways that it can’t work in any other entertainment medium,” he says. “By the same token, a novel will allow you glimpses at the inner life of a character, and the exploration of those crucial details that reveal so much in a way a comic can’t.”
The audiences for each formats only overlap to a certain degree. “I can think of almost nobody who’s read the novels and then tracked down the comics,” says Rucka. He attributes this to the fact that stores where suspense fans would find his novels aren’t likely to carry the comics, as well as to the stigma that some people still attach to reading comics. On the other hand, he says, “The Q&C comics readership almost universally went to the novels. They were very [aware] that ‘ok, there’s a novel coming.’ ” Aiding this is likely that the Queen & Country novels are not adaptations of the comic stories, but distinct connecting events in the series’ time line.
A fourth and final volume of the Definitive Edition is due in the first quarter of 2009, collecting the Queen & Country: Declassified miniseries that details past missions of characters like Tara’s boss, director of operations Paul Crocker. For the fourth volume, says Rucka, “I’d really like to do some interviews with the different artists that have been involved,” who include Steve Rolston, Jason Alexander and Carla Speed McNeil. Rucka also has plans for a new Queen & Country novel, likely out in summer 2010, following his upcoming Kodiak novel due next summer. The good news for Queen & Country fans is that Rucka intends the next Tara Chace novel to serve as a bridge to a second run of the series with all new stories.
Currently writing the Final Crisis: Revelations miniseries for DC, with a major upcoming DC project to be announced, Rucka will release his next creator-owned book for Oni—Stumptown with artist Matthew Southworth—early next year. This “love letter to The Rockford Files’” will star a detective named Dex who is, like Tara Chace and many of Rucka’s best-known protagonists, a strong and capable woman who finds herself in dangerous and challenging situations. “I’m a feminist, and I think I exhibit my feminism by being as mean to my female characters as I am to my male characters,” says Rucka. “I’ve had people accuse me of sexism for that, but it seems to me that going easy on a character, especially in a kind of fiction where we define their strength by the abuse we hurl at them, that would be the height of sexism.”
