AVC: How does the collaborative process between you and Matt Sturges work?
BW: It's actually pretty wonderful, because Matt is this new, young, eager writer who is very good at meeting deadlines. Since I've only ever been so-so at meeting deadlines in my career, and have often been very bad at meeting them, that part of it is great. He's pretty insistent on getting things done in a timely manner. It works pretty well. One of the reasons I wanted to bring him in on this is that we definitely didn't want Jack to sort of be a Fables-lite, or Fables Jr. kind of book, that we wanted it to have very much its own character. And part of the way to ensure that is to bring another voice into it. Plus, I've known Matt for some time. He was on the short list of just terrific writers I know who weren't getting a lot of work, because they were even worse than I am at getting the work. We brought him in, and it works pretty well. He lives in Austin, I live here in Vegas. We spend a lot of time on the phone together. The way we do Jack is that he'll take the lead on one story arc, while I'm taking the lead on another story arc, and so he'll do the first draft of one issue, and send it to me to mess all over it. I'll be doing the same with him. We're almost swapping story arcs, as far as who the head writer is, and who the junior, gofer, "let me grab coffee while you're doing this" writer is.
AVC: Is there more potential for future spin-off series? Could you ever see Fables as something like Sandman or X-Men, spawning dozens of titles by different writers?
BW: [Laughs.] I hope not. I could see different characters where it might be great for that character to have his own book, but I don't want to do it. I think as much Fables stuff as I can do, I'm doing already, and I don't want to release any more control of it to anyone else. So the answer is no, but at the same point, these are all public-domain characters, so anyone who wants to use these same characters in whatever different ways they can think of, I'm fully supportive of them doing that.
AVC: What can you say about your upcoming House Of Mystery series?
BW: It's a revival of the old House Of Mystery series from DC. Matt Sturges is actually the main writer on it, as a matter of fact. It's his series. I'm sort of fiddling with him on the very first story arc in it, because DC has this idea that you want a well-known writer to hand it off to one who isn't that well-known, which I personally think is not all that necessary. But then, I'm not the one whose fortunes are tied up in this, and who are in that stage of second-guessing everything. Anyway, it's Matt's series. The premise is about the House Of Mystery from the old series, the one that Cain inhabited right next door to the House Of Secrets with his brother Abel. One day, the house goes missing. Cain is at his brother's house having some afternoon tea, he walks out the door, and finds that his house is gone. The series takes off from there, and it's all about where it ended up, and how the house is in this weird place between places, and how it keeps several people captive inside it, while others can come and go as they will. It's a big mystery, the idea being that it's a mystery whose solution is going to come along in the course of the book at some point. The series is about the nature of stories and things like that, as well, so even though there's going to be an ongoing storyline, there's also going to be inset stories as told by the patrons of this place. So in the first story arc, I'm writing the inset stories, and Matt is doing the ongoing storyline. It's a very wonderful series. We've just gotten all the art for the first issue, and it's probably the best first issue of something I've ever seen. I'm pretty happy with it.
AVC: Will it be close to the old horror-suspense tone of the original title, or is it going to be more like Cain and Abel in Sandman?
BW: We're trying for something completely different. It's not going to be horror, it's going to be mysteries, and it's going to be several embedded mysteries where some will be solved right away, and there'll be an ongoing über-plot where you'll get hints to what's going on slowly but steadily. With the proviso that unlike Lost, or The X-Files—or I guess Twin Peaks was the first perpetrator of this type of thing—all the mysteries do actually have solutions, which will arrive at some point. It's not a, "We're making this up as we go along, and we have no idea what the grand mystery behind everything is."
AVC: How active are you as an artist these days?
BW: Very inactive. I've gotten terribly slow. I'm still drawing things, but I think the art side of my career is now, I'll do an issue of something, or a standalone story, and when it's entirely done, I'll go look for someone to publish it. I just couldn't keep up as an artist on a regular book at all.
AVC: As an artist, do you do visual scripts, sketching out for artists what you want to see on a page? Do you draw things for them, or storyboard anything?
BW: I don't. I think that would be a little too presumptive, to tell them their own business. At the same time, I hope it translates to the scripts having what the artist needs, and not calling for things that can't be done. The perennial complaint about new comics writers is that they ask for more than one action in a single panel without realizing that you can't show both cause and effect in one image, or that there are some things you just can't fit into one page. Hopefully, I tend to avoid that kind of stuff.
AVC: Are there any plans, in the wake of Fables' success, to bring your older titles back into print? Ironwood, and Elementals, all of the small-press stuff?
BW: Well, I guess Fantagraphics keeps Ironwood in print in collected form pretty consistently. When I left Comico, I sold the rights to Elementals to Andrew Rev, who bought out the old Comico and formed his own company called Comico. He screwed that up, and he's dropped out of sight for years now. The chances of ever seeing that in print again are as close to absolute zero as we can get, I think. I did a book for Vertigo called Proposition Player, and it sold all of six issues. It was going to be an ongoing series, but when we got the sales in, they were horrible. We pretty quickly retroactively decided that this was a six-issue miniseries. That, Vertigo brought back into print. They collected that. I don't know that it's done that well. My impression is that whatever is working with Fables doesn't necessarily apply to the other stuff. Certainly Robin, when I took over that book, sales went up a little, then started declining again. Shadowpact is not exactly ripping up the charts, so I don't know if there's any crossover of cachet there.
AVC: Proposition Player does really read like something that was intended as an ongoing series, but that got wrapped up abruptly. Do you think that there's any potential for reviving that, as you get better known?
BW: I think that the main character's problems and adventures are just beginning. Having achieved that, how do you actually run everything? It seems to me just rife with story ideas, so I wouldn't mind continuing at all. At the same time, I doubt that there's a lot of interest at DC in doing it. There's a fellow, though, that I met at San Diego a few years ago, that is determined to make a movie out of it. He's been fiddling with it and shopping it around for some time. If that ever happens, then maybe some interest might be revived in it again.
AVC: Do you have any interest in going into the film industry?
BW: I suppose I do, as much as anyone. I mean, every industry in the world is exotic to people looking at it from the outside. I think that's part of the same reason, right now, that film people are so fascinated with the comics industry. They're not inside it, and they don't see just how dull and soul-draining it can be. Like everyone else, I'm interested in it, but at the same time, the few dips into that pool I've had have not exactly been encouraging, in the sense that I still have not the slightest idea how anything can get made in Hollywood. We've been shopping the Fables movie rights around for many years now, and at many times, there's been great interest at a certain studio or whatever, and then three months into that process, so-and-so leaves, or gets fired, or gets a better job at a different thing, and then the project is killed there. I have no idea how it works, and I guess I find that fascinating. At the same time, I'm kind of overworked now, so even if I could get into that racket, I wouldn't know how I'd find time.
AVC: You talk about the industry not being what people expect… Have comics lived up to your expectations? It sounds like you spent your life struggling to get in, and now you're there. Is it what you hoped it would be?
BW: Well, yeah, it's mostly what I expected it to be. There's pitfalls and unexpected turns in everything, but the joy of doing comics is still there. The outsider's fascination with what the industry might be like is, of course, all gone. I've been in this long enough to know precisely what the comics business is like. There's that part of me that wants to go explore other things that there's still that nascent excitement about.
AVC: You've written a number of prose novels that are out of print. Are those likely to ever see the light of day?
BW: Maybe. I've got one or two standing offers to write book books, which I am interested in doing, because I enjoyed it. It's such a different type of writing than for comics. If I pursue expanding into any other type of storytelling, then that'll be it, and it's probably for selfish reasons. That's the one area even more than comics that a writer controls, absolutely, the story. Whereas if you go into the film thing, there are legions of people that are going to second-guess every decision the writer makes, so that 's probably not the right direction to go for someone that's as selfish as I am, that wants to control the story as much as possible. So yeah, more prose work in the future.
AVC: Do you have any interest in continuing Coventry?
BW: If I do, maybe as prose novels, because it spun pretty wildly out of control when I was doing it as comics. At the same time, that's one of the examples I was alluding to earlier, that it's all kind of well-trod ground now. I mean, the idea of a comic, or a novel, or even a TV show about every monster-related thing that you've ever believed in is actually true, and it's all encapsulated into this city is being done to death now. I'm not entirely sure it's fresh enough ground to warrant taking it up again.
AVC: Has Fables given you more cachet as a writer, when it comes to projects like the Dr. Fate one-shot, or writing Robin? Do you get more offers?
BW: Yeah, I suppose so. It's pretty nice that Fables has caught on, and it's getting lots of critical attention. I just found out in an e-mail yesterday from someone at Newsarama, that Walter Mosley, from the Easy Rawlins books, he likes my work. That's pretty nice. I guess I get more job offers.
AVC: Is it harder to be invested in stories with characters that you're not originating, when you've got your own hit books going on?
BW: I don't think so. It's certainly harder to get my own way. With writing Robin, it had to fit into all those other Bat-books. I mean, there were like 12 Bat-books coming out a month, and you couldn't write anything that contradicted all of those. There was a lot of coordination with the editors, to the extent that there's more editorial coordination and less, as a writer, getting to make up any thing you damn well please. That was a little frustrating, but I don't think it was less of an emotional investment. You hear sometimes that people who create their own stuff save all their good ideas for their own properties, and don't spend them on the company-owned projects. I disagree with that. My personal theory is that we've all got this bucket full of good ideas, and if you just hold onto them, your bucket never gets fuller. There's only so many you can hold at a time, but as fast as you use them up, it fills up again with more good ideas. My notion is to spend everything you've got coming through your head as fast as you can, and you're guaranteed to get more good stuff. So while writing Robin and stuff like that, if I had good ideas, I'd try to pitch them and run with them. Sometimes it backfired. It was my idea to make Spoiler into Robin, just before she died horribly. I thought that would be a good thing for the character, but it turns out that legions of female fans now detest me for doing that.
AVC: With the bucket thing in mind, are there any company characters out there that you'd really like to have a shot at?
BW: Well, sure. Right now, with Marvel and DC at a stage where everything company-character-wise is plotted in these intricate, company-wide crossovers, the most obscure character you can only remember from a book way back when, someone has a multi-book crossover lined up for that character. It's pretty severe, in terms of finding somebody who's available to do things with. The ideas that I would have for a character would take them out of having to coordinate them with every other book in the world. It's a bit frustrating right now, but at the same time, I almost have no time left to do that kind of stuff, so maybe it works out.
AVC: To continue that thought, what was it like being involved in the Infinite Crisis crossover?
BW: It was pretty interesting. In that situation, they sort of divided the DC Universe into four corners, and they said, "You've got the whole magic thing." I had a lot of freedom, just coming up with anything I wanted, within the stretches of, "You have to involve Spectre, he's wigging out. You have to have Eclipso in here," that sort of thing. Every once in a while, someone would call me up and say, "Ooh, ooh, ooh, you have to make this happen to this character by such-and-such an issue." Once again, there was coordination with all the other books coming up. It was kind of interesting in the sense that you're running a race while people are throwing obstacles out and you have to deal with them, and that makes kind of an interesting life.
AVC: One of the things that gets people into your books is that they're so different from all of the superhero stuff out there. Do you still get excited by superheroes?
BW: Sure. We're in a stage, which is partly my fault, that's been described as the age of decadence in superheroes, where they're not very heroic anymore. I grieve about that a little bit, because in the effort to grow superheroes up, make them more relevant today and all of that, I'm among those who think we may have lost touch with some of the canon aspects of it, one being that superheroes should be heroic. The example is that I couldn't have envisioned a day that Captain America would be running around apologizing to Middle East terrorists for America being a prosperous nation. It just doesn't fit. Or the new Superman movie, where apparently they're embarrassed about, "Truth, justice, and the American way," so we'll just edit the "American way" out of that famous line. So, yeah, I still think things can be done with the genre, although possibly some of the things that can be done right now should maybe go back to retrieve a few of the things that we've lost along the way. Everyone wants controversy and excitement in your books, but right now, if you want controversy, take real chances in a story. Have an American or European white businessman in charge of a huge corporation that isn't out to take over the world. A religious priest character that isn't molesting young kids back in the nave every day. That kind of thing. Go in that different direction, a little bit, rather than the standard tropes that we're sort of caught up in today.
AVC: Part of what makes Fables so popular is that it gets away from a lot of comics clichés. Is there a philosophy to that? Did you ever sit down and say, "Let's make the anti-superhero comic"?
BW: Mostly, it's just trying to make a comic that interests me and talks about the kind of things that I feel like talking about. At the same time, it shouldn't be a book of valuable life lessons for the readers. As nice as people treat this material, we should never come to the conclusion that we're doing important stuff here. This is just entertainment. Along those lines, yeah, let's just do the things that entertain me or that I think would be interesting. If we avoid some clichés along the way, all the better.
AVC: There are certainly Fables fans out there who have never read your superhero stories. Does it work the other way around? Do you have people coming to you at conventions wanting you to sign Shadowpact or Robin books, and saying "What's this Fables stuff I keep hearing about?"
BW: Sure there are. Even online, when I, like everyone else, do the occasional ego search, I see people on message boards saying… usually it's kind of a complaint. Like, "His work on Shadowpact is such crap. Everyone says I should read Fables, but no way, if this is the kind of stuff he does." While writing Robin, since that's such a popular DC character, and very iconic, there were plenty of readers that weren't Fables fans. A lot of people resisted starting Fables, because it just sounds so hokey. Even I can't quite understand why people would willingly read a book about talking moocows and stuff. I expect the readership to collectively wake up one day, pop themselves on the head, and say, "What the hell have we been doing?"
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