Since quitting his day job as a cofounder of design studio MK12 to become a full time comic book writer, Matt Fraction has moved easily between independent titles and superhero books, earning him both popular recognition and indie acclaim. Despite writing duties on high-profile Marvel titles likeImmortal Iron Fist, Punisher War Journal and the Civil Warspinoff,The Order, Fraction is still hard at work onCasanova, his creator-owned series from Image Comics.Casanova#8 hits shelves recently, launching the second volume of Fraction’s hyperkinetic series about a reality-shifting sci-fi superspy.
PW Comics Week : The second volume of Casanova just launched, and you’ve switched artists—from Gabriel Ba to Fabio Moon. I hear that they are actually twins?
Matt Fraction: I swear to God [Fabio Moon] is the identical twin brother of Gabriel Ba. It couldn’t be more perfect for the book. I’ve seen them both together, and I have a photograph of the three of us. He exists; it’s not a ruse. I can only tell them apart by their shoes.
PWCW: Their artistic approaches are very different. How is that going to work in terms of the style of the second volume versus the first?
MF: We’ve got two issues in the can, the third script is finished, Fabio’s noodling around on it now, and it’s great. It’s a new volume; it’s a new story; it’s a new status quo. It’s a piece of this ongoing story, but it’s this entirely new experience. I think about the way Alfonso Cuaron directedHarry Potter [and the Prisoner of Azkaban], which suddenly looked very different from the last twoHarry Pottermovies. It still feels like aHarry Pottermovie, but suddenly the light’s all blue, and everybody’s wearing street clothes, but it’s still done organically.
This is clearly a new chapter [of Casanova], with new themes and new ideas, new characters and everything else. It’s really appropriate... thematically it makes sense. Fabio has a very lush, painterly stroke. His work is very much about the brush. And then the theme of the arc is gluttony. [Fabio] is much more organic and loose, and there’s a tactile sort of aggression to his work, while Gabriel, with his pens, is cool and considered and precise and elegant. So it’s nice, it’s a really cool fit. It’s like a new color. It’s like the first story arc was green, and this one is blue. It looks great. I couldn’t be more enthused.
PWCW: You’ve said before thatCasanovawas about growing up. Is that something that you see working in the second volume? Is it a maturing of the first volume?
MF: It’s interesting, because Casanova goes away about halfway through the first issue and doesn’t come back. The whole kind of mystery of this second volume is where is he, what’s going on? Where is Casanova Quinn? Because he’s outside of the time stream, and no one knows where he’s at or what’s going on.
PWCW: So he’s the Carmen San Diego of the book?
MF: He’s the Matt Lauer of the book. Where in the world is Matt Lauer? [laughs] It’s a continuation of those themes, with the main character no longer the lens through which we view them, and rather considering the negative space that he leaves behind. There’s the Bob Dylan line, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody”—even where Casanova finds himself, even offstage. Where he is and what he’s doing, and how he comes to the decisions he makes continue his trajectory from the end of our first arc.
PWCW: In the liner notes ofCasanova#7, you talked about how you used the series to channel events in your personal life. Is that something you’re continuing to do in volume 2?
MF: Check this out. So I write the end of [Casanova] #7, and it’s the most terrified I’ve ever been. It’s the most honest and—it was horrible. I regretted writing it. I’m still uncomfortable about it. But it was part of the covenant; I felt like I had to do it. There’s a part at the end where I go, “F--- you, powers that be! Come and get me! I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah,” all Elton John style.
And I swear to God, I wrote that on December 22. By Christmas Day I was in the emergency room, sicker than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I was so sick as to be required to go to the emergency room to make sure I was okay to travel. So, you might be done f---ing around with the powers that be, but the powers that be are not done f---ing around with you. It was Christmas Day in the ER, just surrounded by all this sickness and tragedy, and I felt like: okay, so this is what it is.
So when we meet Casanova again [in issue #8], he’s sitting in an emergency room, surrounded by sickness and tragedy. And everything he sees, until the comic booky s--t starts, I saw. I watched a woman be told her mother was dead in a car accident. I saw the widowed guy strapped down to a gurney, horrendously banged up. The triage nurse is like, “Oh, his wife died in a car accident. I hate working Christmas; it’s so terrible.” I had presence of mind enough to jot all this stuff down, so it shows up in the book verbatim.
And I stayed sick. The first three months of this year I was sick, sicker than I’ve ever been and I couldn’t shake it. I was in and out of the hospital once a month for the first six months of this year. I was on antibiotics for f---ing ever. Finally, when Casanova was better, and he’s on the beach, sitting in the sun, feeling good, I ended up on the beach sitting in the sun, feeling good, and I got better.
And then I took him the f--- off the board.
Maybe it’s coincidence, I don’t know. It surely must be coincidence, right? That’s coincidental. I’m looking at two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine random events, and sensing a pattern that isn’t really there. I’m just imposing my own sense of order on chaos, right?
PWCW: How much of it do you think is subconscious? Do you look back on work you’ve done forCasanovaand then realize later that events have bled in from your own life?
MF: There’s a lot of me in that book, as strange as it is to say, but I hope it doesn’t stop anyone from enjoying it. It was my first own ongoing book, the first monthly series I ever wrote, and I just wanted to put my heart and soul into it. As sort of naïve and weird and stupid as that sounds, I just wanted to write hard and write well, and write the kind of comic I wanted to read. And now I’m on this incredibly bizarre journey with it, so we’ll see what happens.
PWCW: You started out as an online critic and commentator about comics, and now you’re making them. How did you make the transition from someone talking about comic books on the Internet to a full-time writer and creator?
MF: My career has many fathers, and I can let them speak for themselves, as they often do. Most simply, I just tried to write as well as possible about the medium that I loved, in a way that I didn’t think was being done—or rather, was being done all too rarely. And it still isn’t done nearly enough. Even if you’re talking about the mainstream, the superhero mainstream—I mean, I like genre work. I am not Eddie Campbell; I am not Jim Woodring. My taste is very meat and potatoes when it comes to this stuff.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate [superhero] stuff; it doesn’t mean I don’t give it the same critical eye that can and should be focused on it. Just because you’re writing a story where Nightwing punches a terrorist in the face—and god help you, because you’re really sort of in trouble if that’s where you’re at—it doesn’t mean it can’t be done with a modicum of art, or artfulness, I should say.
So what I tried to do was just speak intelligently, and be funny, and be smart, and write to impress people. You know, write like you’re trying to get girls to like you—to get noticed. And sooner or later, someone’s going to ask you to put up or shut up. And that’s what happened: I got offers to do short stories. So I started to do shorts, and the shorts led to a graphic novel, and the graphic novel lead to my career.
And I had the luxury that—and I can never devalue this—I was never freelancer hungry. I had a really cool day job [with design studio MK12], so I didn't need it. I wanted it, but I didn't need it, and it gave me the freedom to walk away from stuff. It made me a bit of a commodity, and I was desirable, because there were design magazines that had my name in them—MK12 was then gaining global notoriety. I’m not saying I was ever a cross-media star, like Allan Heinberg or those guys, but there was a little bit of value to being able to mention in an interview about MK12 that I wrote comics, and vice versa.
PWCW: You’re doing a lot of mainstream work with Marvel now as well, withImmortal Iron Fist, Punisher War Journal and The Order. How does your approach to these kinds of mainstream books differ from your creator-owned work, likeCasanova?
MF: It’s a different set of creative challenges. A lot of the tools are the same and a lot of them are different. In fact, writing the mainstream stuff’s almost harder, because there are these sort of fixed rules. WithCasanova, if I'm like, “f--- this guy, this character’s terrible,” then I can just kill him. I can take my main character off the board for seven months. You can’t do that with the Punisher or Iron Fist. But it’s great, it’s fun. I love working at Marvel. [Editor Axel] Alonso brought me in, and he’s kind of one of the greatest editors in the industry.
PWCW: Would you want to be on a major flagship title likeSpider-Man or X-Men?
MF: Yeah, sure, that’d be great! Absolutely. Part of the reason that I went after thePunisherthing was that it was in the middle of [Marvel’s crossover series]Civil War, and I thought, “Wow, you might never have a chance to be part of a ridiculous crossover ever again.” It was one of those completely sick things.Civil War was like, f---! It was huge. I signed [nondisclosure agreements] before I could even have the phone call....
I have a lot of fun writing the Marvel stuff. And ultimately, I have to write three books in order to be able to afford to do Casanova , where I can sort of send all the money to the artist. But it’s cool, it’s great. It’s an opportunity to learn, it’s an opportunity to get smarter and hopefully write the kind of fun good stories that I grew up reading. Every now and again, you get these kind of opportunities like the Sensational [Spider-Man Annual] thing, which was very clearly writing a romance comic dressed up like a Spider-Man comic. Absolutely, I would like to step up in the Marvel lineup somehow.
PWCW: Now thatCivil War is over, how do you feel about it in retrospect?
MF : I’m really, really amazed and really kinda proud that they set out to change the status quo, and they changed the status quo. The metaphor is: it’s our job to take the toys off the shelf and break them in, in new and interesting ways, and then put them back together in a way you didn’t expect and leave them for the next guy. It’s a relay race everyone’s running, whether it’s me or Ed Brubaker or [Brian Michael] Bendis or anybody else. It’s just our time to play with these particular toys. I think Marvel wanted to bring about a radical sea change, and they stuck with it, and they pulled it off. Whether or not you like the new status quo, or you like how they got there, it’s a different place now than it was a year ago. It’s going to remain that way for a while.
PWCW: Is Cap coming back?
MF: I just came back from spending six days with Ed [Brubaker] and his wife in Seattle, and I don’t know. Ed put it like this: someone said something like, “then at the end ofCivil War, Captain America can go out and find America.” And Ed’s response was, “Cap doesn’t need to find America, America needs to find Cap.” It’s a weirdly similar thing to what’s going on inCasanova. Take your main character off the board, and you can still tell stories in his absence. Water flows where it has space to flow. So if you take away Captain America, you can still tell Captain America stories. What you can tell about him in his absence is often a little more profound than when he’s actually there on stage.
It’s a really interesting time [at Marvel]. But whether it’s Captain America being assassinated, or Punisher putting on this kind of hybrid Captain America costume, or the stuff that Brian [Michael Bendis] is doing with Avengers, or anybody doing anything else, the goal is, hopefully, we earn it through character and story. It’s not a sale-boosting stunt to get another thousand copies sold. It’s born out of the character, born out of the story line and born out of our times.
