Still Understanding

TOM SPURGEON: Let me ask you about the McCloud comic essay that you and Art Baxter did for an issue of the Journal. You very recently made a positive reference to McCloud's book, even after the thousands of words that have been written either disparaging or picking over Scott's work. You referred to it as the seminal text for teaching comics.

JAMES STURM: Understanding Comics is a great text for teaching comics. Is it the Bible? No. But it's a way of initiating discussion. At least it's something there that you can respond to. I hear far more praise for it than I do criticism. I don't understand why people disparage it.

SPURGEON: Has it been useful to you as a teaching tool?

STURM: Yeah. It's wonderful. My intro class, there's so much studio work so there was not much time to read, but we read that, we read Maus, and we read On Directing Film by David Mamet. And these three texts give a pretty solid, at least a jumping-off point to talk about most things that I want to discuss or things that I feel should be brought up.

SPURGEON: Maus because of its understated formalism?

STURM: That for sure, and just how accomplished it is in every respect. Art is someone who thinks through every line he puts on paper and has a reason for it being there. I think the best cartoonists are very deliberate; nothing's an accident. Until Jimmy Corrigan came out, maybe, you'd be hard-pressed to compare anything to Maus in terms of what it accomplished. I'm sure you could, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

SPURGEON: You lay the responsibility for better work at the artist's feet.

STURM: Sure. You can complain all that you want about comics and how horrible the industry is and a lot of cartoonists are so defeatist about it. How do you change people's minds? How do you offer evidence to the contrary? You have to make good work. And you can't wait until someone publishes you. You have to have that faith that this will find a place. And if there's enough of this stuff, people will start recognizing it.

SPURGEON: Art Spiegelman said on Sixty Minutes II recently that he's almost come to a different opinion in the last six months to a year as to how many artists were taking up this responsibility to produce good work. Has your opinion changed as to how much good work is being done?

STURM: I think there's a tremendous amount of work, really interesting and good work being done. I think that a lot of these people are relatively young. People need to stick with it for longer. When I went to SPX and saw Kevin Huizenga's work or Clumsy I was blown away. There's a lot of people I think doing good work right now.

SPURGEON: And that's different from what you saw four or five years ago, when you wrote the piece?

STURM: I was supposed to respond to a specific chapter of Understanding Comics. I think I was reacting to something in Scott's general enthusiasm: "The medium itself was jet-propelled -- just strap it on!" I don't think he meant that, of course, but you know what I mean. Unbridled optimism is one of Scott's gifts and perhaps I was unfairly trying to balance that with some pessimism.

SPURGEON: You seem to have a very different opinion now than you did then. As an art form, you said back then comics are in a state of arrested development.

STURM: I still think that. I'm excited about it, but 99 percent of the stuff being done is still garbage. Isn't it?

SPURGEON: It seems to me that there is a definite increase in the amount of considerable work, maybe not great work, but stuff that you'd even consider to be decent work or worth looking at.

STURM: I agree with that. Just think of all of these cartoonists that saw Maus in their high-school and college years who are now coming of age. And now, think of all of those kids that are in high school and college who are coming across not just Crumb and Spiegelman but Seth, Ware, Clowes, etc. I'm optimistic about comics. I think there are always going to be people that want to do it. The general skill level is pretty high. With desktop publishing as well, people are able to make these beautifully designed things and make it look like something substantial rather quickly. Hopefully some of these people will have something to say. I'm optimistic. Yeah.

Unstable Superheroes

SPURGEON: You've provided me with previews of your Unstable Molecules project, which is the name of your Fantastic Four miniseries. It should still be ongoing when this interview is published.

STURM: Were you able to follow that little thumbnail thing?

SPURGEON: I was.

STURM: Is it what you expected?

SPURGEON: It's a much more radical departure than I thought you could get away with doing at Marvel. You had, I guess, an experience reading Marvel comics when you were a kid growing up?

STURM: Loved them growing up.

SPURGEON: There was an exposure to Stan Lee, according to your profile on the Drawn and Quarterly Web site, which led you to go scurrying after...

STURM: Well, actually, probably Stan wasn't writing much of the stuff when I was reading it. But I saw him on a TV show -- Wonderama, a variety TV show on Saturday mornings. It was cartoons and a kid audience and it had a lot of kooky games that the kids would do. He was a guest on it, and soon afterward I went and got a Fantastic Four as my first Marvel comic. That really set me on my path.

SPURGEON: This would be second-generation stuff by then; John Buscema rather than Jack Kirby.

STURM: Sure, the first FF I got Roy Thomas wrote and John Buscema drew. And then there was a gap for a while. You know how it is: You can't get to the comics store because your parents don't take you. It took a while.

SPURGEON: I'm still like that. If my parents don't take me I don't go.

STURM: I'm out in the sticks here in Vermont. I go to the comics store once every three or four months.

SPURGEON: So you were a Marvel kid for a while?

STURM: Definitely. From second grade until I went to college.

SPURGEON: So was that the experience you're drawing on to do this?

STURM: No. Definitely not. It's more like the Kirby/Lee stuff.

SPURGEON: When did you discover Kirby/Lee?

STURM: I remember this Scholastic magazine called Dynamite. They reprinted the Fantastic Four. And even in high school, there was Marvel's Greatest Comics, all of those Simon and Schuster collections and the Treasury editions. So there was a lot of Kirby/Lee stuff that I read and enjoyed. I thought Kirby was weird and clunky in high school and didn't really take to it, although some of the stories I remember being moved by. It wasn't until later that I appreciated Kirby.

SPURGEON: What do you think works about those early books? Is it Kirby's visual imagination? His dynamism? Or is it Stan?

STURM: It's all of it. It all came together. You can't remove either of them from the equation and still make it happen. It's crazy. You read those essential Fantastic Four's and man, the stories still have such energy. I have nothing but awe for that material. It's uneven, though. Some issues are better. Essential Fantastic Four Volume 2 really sucks, actually.

SPURGEON: There's a rough period in there.

STURM: Volumes one and three are awesome.

SPURGEON: Three in particular is just incredible. There's a two-year run or something in there that's stunning.

STURM: I also recognize that it's for a certain type of reader, which I am, a male. One of the reasons I wasn't going to draw the whole thing and spend five years doing my Fantastic Four thing is there's built-in limited audience for it. More people might initially read Unstable Molecules than Golem, but in the long-term, more people will probably read the Golem. It has a potential for a wider audience. But Unstable Molecules, there's something insular about it. I sort of address this in my own way in the third issue.

SPURGEON: Tell me how the project started from an industry standpoint.

STURM: When I moved to Vermont, I was still running around with the Golem book, doing talks and signings and I wrote a lot of the Fantastic Four stuff while I was out on the road. I'd been mulling it over in my head for about ten years. Not obsessively, but it came up. Maybe I'd work on it a few hours once a year. And I sent Marvel the Golem book and said, "Here's a basic summary of what I'd like to do." I sent it to Joe Quesada, and he passed it on to Tom Brevoort and we went forward with it.

SPURGEON: So how long ago was that? How long does a project like this take?

STURM: I think my initial contact with them was probably about a year and a month or so ago.

SPURGEON: So that's actually pretty quickly, it seems, for a comic.

STURM: Relatively quickly. My second daughter was born in June 2002. This was a good project to work on at the time. I was actually surprised by the amount of discussion it got on the message boards and the like. It seems like there's more discussion about this than anything that I've ever done. Because it's Marvel, it has more currency? That is kind of sad.

My motives were questioned as to why I would do this project. I'm not sure you can ever say why you do anything. There's always many reasons, some contradictory. Was it the money? Sure. Was it something I really did want to do? Yes. As a teacher who taught comics, I felt it would be nice to go through this process with Marvel so I have this first-hand experience of how this thing works. Sure, I knew the general process, but experiencing it for yourself is very different. It's easy to stereotype these things, but once you're in it and you're dealing with these people and you're having this dialogue about the work, you get a different type of perspective.

SPURGEON: What's the difference in perspective?

STURM: I found Marvel very accommodating. Sometimes it's a little bit of a struggle to make them understand what your intentions are, but they've been receptive to that. I have to work harder to make myself understood with them. Clearly our aesthetics are quite different. With Fantagraphics or D&Q, they don't question these decisions you make. But with Marvel, they're used to creating a comic in a certain way. Just the back and forth about trying to get hand lettering versus computer lettering. Every freelancer who works for them probably works a different way. Even though I wrote and laid this thing out, every time pages were done by Guy Davis, I'd see them and get back to Guy and we'd discuss. And then the coloring. I'd see colored pages and give feedback to Michel Vrana. They'd send me the lettered pages and I'd make all of these notes about the lettering. So you become this production manager. It's exhausting, because I'm not used to that role. And it's frustrating when corrections you specifically called for are not done. So there's a lot of trying as hard as you can to get it a certain way, sometimes in vain. Compromises in this environment are inevitable. Unstable Molecules may work and it might totally flop. I don't know. I'm curious, I hope it works, but I'm not sure.

SPURGEON: Let me repeat the objections that people have had. If I'm remembering our past conversations accurately, you don't have any problem in theory with work-for-hire practices. You told me the simple fact was that they were investing a certain amount of money in a project and that you thought this a fair trade.

STURM: I think that for every Frank Miller, or somebody who does this great body of work for a company, and then that company mines it and makes a lot of money off of it, really that's the exception to the rule. There's probably hundreds of very uninspiring journeyman or solid craftpersons who Marvel works with. So does everyone get treated as if they are a potential Frank Miller? That's not really right in some ways. But not everybody should be treated like they are just a work for hire, either, right? So there is probably some median or case-by-case thing. Perhaps everybody should be able to negotiate something that sounds fair. I felt my deal with Marvel was fair. And that's not defending Marvel's past practices or even current practices with other creators. Historically, they are a creepy company. And I don't doubt that, like this Vapor Girl character, who is in my book. What if like some artist, two years from now, whose really a good mainstream artist, decides he's going to do a Vapor Girl miniseries. It sounds funny, but you never know. And then all of a sudden, it takes off and there's a Vapor Girl movie starring whatever young, hot babe of the moment there is. How would I feel about that? Would Marvel come to me and say, "Here's some money, thanks!" I wouldn't hold my breath for that. So it's very murky. Meanwhile, I really wanted to do this project, work with these characters and they let me -- plus, I've got 10,000 bucks or whatever they paid me. I'm content with that I guess. They took a financial risk with this thing as well. So if it tanks, they're the ones losing money. It's a crapshoot.

SPURGEON: Is there any queasiness working with characters that were part of a dispute? Maybe Stan's recent lawsuit is a contractual dispute rather than a work-for-hire dispute, but it's driven by rhetoric that claims these characters have been exploited unfairly and he's been exploited unfairly. Is it the fact that these specific characters don't hold any extra queasiness for you at all?

STURM: Like in what sense?

SPURGEON: You have $10,000 in the bank, but Marvel doesn't send Jack Kirby's children trade paperbacks of their father's work when it's re-released.

STURM: Boy. But if you extend that argument to your day-to-day existence, on how you shop and how you spend money and how you interface with the world, you couldn't touch anything. You know what I mean? It's like, we live in a tainted fucking universe. Every pair of shoes you buy was probably stitched together by someone being paid ten cents an hour under ungodly conditions. And that's not to excuse myself, but are you getting at that maybe I shouldn't do this out of concern for...?

SPURGEON: It's one thing to get work-for-hire from an artist who is ceding control of his characters to you, but you're signing a work-for-hire agreement with a corporation that may have, or may not have, unfairly taken these characters from the artist to begin with.

STURM: What the fuck have I done, Tom? What the fuck have I done? Holy shit. Black mark on my soul. I don't know. Obviously everyone's ethical standards vary, but I just don't feel I've made an egregious ethical breach. I think the question is valid and I'm glad you raised it. But for me, a few things play into it. First, Kirby himself returned to work for Marvel. Second, Marvel has changed owners several times since Kirby's stints there. Finally, I have never heard of any boycott by Kirby's heirs -- or anyone else for that matter -- calling for writers or artists to refrain from using characters he created.

Kirby created something 40 years ago that has so influenced and shaped comics history and I look to honor it. I hope that comes across in the book. Kirby's imprint is all over Unstable Molecules, his art adorns each cover (and several interior pages). My position at Marvel is no different than Kirby's was: work-for-hire.

I'm sure every character that was created some writer feels propriety for. I shouldn't do that Stingray graphic novel because somebody who developed him feels cheated? Remember that stupid character called Stingray from Marvel?

SPURGEON: Red and white costume and a fencing mask.

STURM: The Fantastic Four are characters, due to the role they played in my childhood, I feel connected to. When I'm reading this stuff as a kid, I don't know any of this stuff. These characters don't have owners. They exist. They're like cultural icons. Same with Peanuts. They belong to the public in a sense. This could just be me trying to rationale my actions... Money wise, when you look at all the time I put into this project, it's obvious that it wasn't done for the money. If anything, I'm trying to restore a certain dignity to the character. The Fantastic Four was about this family who were superheroes. But they were a family first, right? That's what made the book tick. That's what I was trying to get at, this dysfunctional family that love/hate relationship they all have with each other. I think that's what Lee and Kirby were trying to do, right?

SPURGEON: Maybe.

STURM: You think I'm full of shit.

SPURGEON: No. Not at all.

STURM: That's OK.

SPURGEON: I'd tell you if I did. The third argument that I hear from people regarding the project -- and this is the one I would least subscribe to -- is that why would someone who is doing work of your previous type want to contribute to the medium's superhero problem?

STURM: But you read the piece. Do you consider it a superhero comic?

SPURGEON: No.

STURM: I feel like I went to the Marvel universe, kidnapped some characters, brought them back to my side of the street. I don't see that as a problem. Initially, Tom [Brevoort] asked me to explore the idea that at some point these people actually get superpowers. And I was trying to wrap my brain around that. Maybe I could do six issues and I'll have them get their powers. And I realized that, the whole conceit is that they never get their powers. These aren't the same people. So it didn't make sense, and I told him I can't do that. He was fine with it. I don't think I can write a superhero book but there is that correspondence with what people imagine they'll become. But really, Sue Sturm is not Sue Storm. They're very different, but Lee and Kirby's fictional foursome are imbedded in mine, or vice-a-versa.

SPURGEON: There you go.

STURM: There you go. I've had enough of the Fantastic Four.

SPURGEON: Did you read Pete's comic, the Spider-man comic that he did [The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man]?

STURM: I did. I was doing one of these slow signings and I took it off the rack and read it while I was sitting there. It was great.

SPURGEON: I thought it was very funny.

STURM: He had a good time. And I don't think that's being a traitor to his artistic roots. It's totally in sync with what he does -- a send-up of mall culture, bad-boy behavior stuff. So it made sense. It seemed more subversive because he was actually doing it for Marvel Comics.

SPURGEON: I was honestly surprised by how radically they let you treat the characters.

STURM: My initial back-and-forth with Marvel, I was concerned... if I couldn't do it the way that I wanted to do it I wouldn't have done it. For the longest time I didn't ask them how much they pay or ask "When do you send me a check?"

SPURGEON: That doesn't sound any different from some of the companies that you've worked with in the past.

STURM: Marvel is great about paying -- on time, no reminders -- so it is a departure from my other publishers. That said, I have way more trust in my previous publishers than I do in Marvel. But I didn't want to cash the check, because I knew once I did, I was obligated. I wanted to make sure that I had enough trust in Tom Brevoort, that he'd hear me state my case and give me the agency I would need. And there are concessions to be made. There are concessions to be made when you collaborate. Positively and negatively. It comes out faster. Guy can draw quickly. Do I agree with every choice he makes or the colorist makes? Of course not. The nature of this beast is to try to all be in the same ball park. Listen, this process is not conducive to making great comics. I'm the first to admit that. That is why so few great works have been produced this way. I don't have the same expectations for Unstable Molecules as I do my own personal work. But I gave it my best shot. If my FF book doesn't work, it is not for the lack of effort. I'm really glad I did it. I'm not sure if it's any good.

SPURGEON: One of the things that I was surprised by was that this was indeed not something you could have done yourself. It was very specific.

STURM: And I actually thought about that. Couldn't I do it myself and just make the characters vaguely different? But the whole point was that they were the Fantastic Four. And using Kirby's panels within the story. I couldn't do that if it wasn't sanctioned by Marvel. That third chapter would have been impossible.

SPURGEON: Yeah. So... what's the Stingray graphic novel going to be about?

STURM: It's going to be awesome, man.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #251.]

All site contents are © 2002