Shake That Tail

TOM SPURGEON: How did you begin your very successful run on Catwoman? That book was very different before you got it. It was an exemplar of cheesecake comics.

ED BRUBAKER: The art on that was really in-your-face T&A stuff. Which I guess sold really well for a while there. I had been working on Batman for about six months or something. One of the editors we were working with on one of those crossovers, not my editor, Matt Idelson who is the editor of Gotham Central now, he called to ask me about something. He mentioned Catwoman, and I sort of ran off for a little while about how I had read the recent couple of issues and what I thought they should be doing with that book instead and how I felt the character was really underutilized and that she was really kind of a cool character if you let her be. But it was kind of disgusting the way she was always portrayed as this real sort of fawning, "Oh, I have to make out..." She couldn't have a guest appearance in any comic without kissing the main character, [Spurgeon laughs] in a really grotesque way. She could be really tough and smart and everything, and then she would do this fake shaking-her-tail kind of shit. I've never known a woman like that, outside of high school. [Spurgeon laughs.]

So I was talking to him about it, and I just cut him off when he was about to offer me the job, so he mentioned Catwoman and I started listing what I would do with the book if it were mine. He said, "Well, do you want to write it then?" I was like, "Uh... can I do anything I want with it?" "Yeah, pretty much." And I asked, "Can we give her a new costume?" "Probably." And I was like, "Can we get a new artist?" "Sure." So I said all right, I'd do it for a year, and that was that. Then I immediately started sending him samples from different artists and going "Can we get this guy?"

SPURGEON: There has been a very distinctive look on the book for most of your run -- Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart, Javier Pulido. Why did you want that kind of artist?

BRUBAKER: During that time I saw some black and white pages online somewhere of Darwyn's for the book he was doing, Batman: Ego. I was like, "Oh my God, this guy is like a combination of Toth and Kirby. If I can get this guy, that would be amazing." I mentioned it to Idelson, and he said he'd been working on the project for a long time, he works in animation, too, and he writes his own stuff and may not want to work with another writer, so they never really asked him.

It turns out he was working in a studio with a bunch of other guys, one of which was Cameron Stewart, who was the inker on Deadenders. I met Cameron at San Diego, and Darwyn was with him, and introduced himself, and I was like, "Hey, do you want to draw Catwoman?" We ended up talking about it, and he had some time in his schedule to do the first arc, so I begged him to do it with me. He thought it would be cool to do the redesign on the character, which he did a fantastic job on, and his art on the first issue is what prompted DC to look at it and re-launch the book. Matt and Bob were telling everybody that my first issue seemed more like the first issue of a new series than anything, so they decided to cancel the book for six months. I was shocked at the time, and then they wanted us to do a back-up in a Detective during the hiatus, as a teaser. Which was cool, because Darwyn and I both wanted to use Slam Bradley.

SPURGEON: Had Slam Bradley been used since like 1942 or whatever?

BRUBAKER: They used him a couple of times in the 1980s, in anniversary issues. I remember this anniversary issue of Detective that had a bunch of characters that had been in Detective back in the day. There was a Slam Bradley story drawn by Jim Aparo. Plus I always liked the name: "Slam Bradley." It appealed to me to do something that was a detective, and I thought it would be cool that since we were going to do something in Detective, to bring Slam Bradley back and have him be an old-fashioned gumshoe.

SPURGEON: One thing that struck me about your Catwoman stories is that a very stark use of color as a narrative tool. Do you work with your colorists closely?

BRUBAKER: Most of the Catwomans you read were colored by Matt Hollingsworth, who doesn't even work in comics now, he's at Dreamworks. I think he colored the first 20 issues. He pays attention to the script, and to what's being said, and really tries to distinguish a mood for the characters through the color. He's a total artist. He changes his style for the art. I look at the colors and give notes if the colorist will send me jpegs, which Matt always did. Which I loved, although he didn't always love my notes. "What about headlights on that car?" Stuff like that. But that color palette and making it part of the mood was all Matt, his being a genius.

Females and Inspirations

SPURGEON: Is Catwoman the first time you've done a female lead character?

BRUBAKER: For a continuing comic, yeah. I was more inspired by the stuff Frank Miller had done in Batman: Year One with the character. So I just took that and some conversations I had with Frank about her character and the Holly character and sort of ran with all that.

SPURGEON: You eventually become proprietary towards those characters.

BRUBAKER: Definitely. You just do. Even though I didn't create Slam Bradley, I didn't create Holly, I didn't create Selina. I created Holly's girlfriend, I guess, but she's hardly been in the comic. But yeah, I feel like I did a lot with those characters. So you do feel proprietary about it.

SPURGEON: You feel like they're good characters? Or is there something specifically endearing about them?

BRUBAKER: I started writing the book like I would start writing anything. I knew the background of Selina Kyle. I had to read all the previous Catwoman comics that came before, as much as I could. They sent me a lot of stuff, and I looked through all of it, and got an impression of who she was and what she'd been through. There was a lot of incredibly conflicting background on her. To some degree, I was able to look just at the stuff I thought made sense, and stick with that, and kind of redefine her and make her my character. No one had used Slam Bradley in 20 years or something. Holly, I didn't even know, had been killed off 10 or 12 years previously. [Laughter.] Which is why in that Secret Files I did a story with Eric [Shanower] about that.

With Sleeper, I created every single character except for Lynch and Tao, but at the same time I feel like I've probably written as much Lynch and Tao as anybody ever did. Everybody else I completely created. So with Selina and Holly and Slam, even Leslie Tompkins although I don't feel as proprietary about her since she's appeared in a bunch of Batman stories, but I like my version of her, they were a good cast to do a bunch of crime stories and do stuff that I thought was a lot different than what was going on in mainstream comics at the time, character-driven explorations, as opposed to straight plot-driven action. I remember I was talking to Judd Winick at a comic-book convention, the first time I met him. He said, "You know what I really like about Catwoman? It's the closest thing to an alternative comic that gets published by DC." [Laughs.] It was during the Javier Pulido run, when it was pretty much a plotless narrative. Okay, here's a bunch of people standing around and talking about their feelings, and a guy having sex with a girl half his age, even though he knows it's a pity fuck.

SPURGEON: There's some really bleak stuff in there; I was very surprised.

BRUBAKER: I was trying to do a crime noir comic. It's not like Catwoman's really a superhero, or even a hero. She's somewhere in between a good guy and a bad guy.

SPURGEON: Are you more comfortable with that kind of story?

BRUBAKER: I think so. I always want to try everything. I would love to write Archie comics, really, but there's no money in that. [Laughter.] The crime stuff, the murky grey area, living-on-the-edges-of-society stuff, that seems to be something that comes naturally to me.

SPURGEON: There's a certain visual approach that connects Catwoman issue to issue, at least until recently.

BRUBAKER: A lot of people were saying it looked like the animated art, from the Batman animated cartoon. Darwyn Cooke worked on the Batman cartoons in Bruce Timm's studio, on Batman Beyond and stuff. So he definitely came from that animation background, but I never thought of what he was doing on our book as looking like that. When I would get the pencils, they reminded me more than anything else of early '60s Jack Kirby. The pages were more cartoony than Kirby's stuff, but you look at those early Fantastic Fours -- they're gorgeous to look at, but they're not realistic. The people have a style about the way they're drawn. I looked at it and compared it to that stuff a lot. There's a certain simplicity -- that's a terrible word for it -- but there's a certain simplicity to the layout and an economy to the backgrounds that a lot of fans mistake thinking that's actually easier to do. It's actually much harder to do comics with less detail than it is with a lot. To pull everything off and make it look right, it's not like Toth just craps that shit out.

SPURGEON: When there's a formally audacious use of the art, how much of that is in your script? There's a scene rather early on in your Catwoman run where Slam Bradley gets shot in a sting they're running.

BRUBAKER: Oh yeah, that.

SPURGEON: The scene breaks out of the grid and out of the tiers. It's sort of shocking, because everything before that was pretty tightly controlled.

BRUBAKER: That was crazy. And that was all the artist, Brad Rader -- he's another Bruce Timm studio guy. That wasn't me. [Laughs.] My script read chronologically, and he just did this bizarre thing. He was really into Steranko as far as layouts go, and he liked doing layouts where everything felt like it was happening at the same time. He did a couple of scenes like that.

SPURGEON: There's another scene where Catwoman and Slam Bradley meet with a cop named Farucci in a diner. And that is a very... a very measured scene. There is a lot of emphasis on her placing her hand on his hands a couple of times. The scene has to vary in the way it looks because otherwise it's boring [Brubaker laughs] or at least I would assume that because it's boring otherwise you change perspective. Now is any of that you?

BRUBAKER: For that, the script would say "She puts her hand on his hand and looks at him sympathetically." But I don't give a lot of camera direction. I'm not into that school of controlling every aspect of what the guy draws. I used to do little thumbnails or little grid patterns to show the artist how I pictured things. What I found out was that most of the artists, especially the good artists, the most fun they had is in breaking down the story, because they can figure out the layout of how it's going to work, the pacing. When I was a cartoonist, doing the breakdowns was the fun. Somehow your brain allows you to just have fun with it and not worry about it because this isn't what gets printed. So you don't need the net. The breakdowns become the net, I guess.

It also depends on the artist I'm working with, but I work with Sean Phillips and Michael Lark, and it would be stupid to tell those guys how to do certain camera angles and shit like that. They would erase it from the script before they printed it out. Cameron Stewart was the same way. For Cameron I would write eight or nine panels on a page, because we were using a four-tier grid. Then I would get 16 to 20 panels on the page. [Laughs.] I'm like, "Okay, that's fine." I like that when it's an artist I can trust. When it's an artist who is going to make the right decisions and not delete the shit I wrote.

Pieces of Yourself

SPURGEON: Is there anything that surprises you when you've read your mainstream work after the fact? Some people believe that when writers are doing mainstream work that because they're not conscious of using it for inner expression that stuff subconsciously works its way into books anyway. [Brubaker laughs.]

BRUBAKER: Are you trying to find the nicest way to say this without insulting me, the mere idea of doing work-for-hire?

SPURGEON: No, I'm wondering about those comics as expression. I thought it was really affecting, for instance, when I read Joe Casey's comics how much he's obviously thinking about the issues of maturity and responsibility, and what it means to be adult. Do you impart those kinds of issues onto your work, do you think?

BRUBAKER: I learned a long time ago to stop making a real separation in my head between the work-for-hire stuff -- unless it's something that I'm ordered to write where I have no feeling for the character and it's non-stop plot. That stuff is boring to write and you can't put yourself into it. But if it's something where you've created the whole storyline, there's always going to be big pieces of yourself in there. I'm exploring the same themes in my Batman comics and my Catwoman comics that I was probably exploring in Lowlife: family relationships, personal relationships, people not being able to escape their past... That's the stuff that interests me, and that's the stuff I write about. I don't make such a big differentiation in my head any more between the stuff that I write for a paycheck and the stuff I write because I want to. There are ideas I have that I don't think I could get paid by DC to write, so I sit on those sometimes, but the nice thing about what I've been doing for the last couple of years is I get to write about stuff that I find interesting and somebody pays me.

SPURGEON: Is there stuff that maybe you've tried to work into superhero book, maybe Catwoman, where you're just like, "This isn't working."

BRUBAKER: No, not really. It's an old saw, but the characters kind of write themselves. You figure out what you want them to do, and they don't always follow suit. As far as Selina and Holly, they have things in their background that are very similar that have happened to me in my background. There's a whole issue of Catwoman that's told from the point of view from Holly, the sidekick, where she's seeing the world through junkie vision. Which was totally me listening to my neighbor in Seattle who was in Narcotics Anonymous and listening to her rant about how she keeps seeing the world in junkie vision. It's all stuff like that. Honestly, I think it kind of comes down to not thinking there's anything wrong with pulp fiction. And realizing the genre doesn't have to stop you from doing something good.

SPURGEON: When you say that you can talk about all of these issues when you're doing a mystery, or that you can work through these issues in Catwoman and Gotham Central, does that pulp element add anything to what you're doing?

BRUBAKER: I think it does, actually.

SPURGEON: What does it add? The way you framed it earlier is that you were surprised that you could do anything you want with those elements, but at the same time those elements have to have an influence.

BRUBAKER: That came from first discovery, reading this stuff as an adult, some of which I'd read when I was younger. I remember reading Raymond Chandler when I was younger and not getting it because it was too dense. I think there's something cathartic about some of the elements of the genres. I think there's something comforting about... the same thing about working with a net. Like we talked about how Philip K. Dick wanted to write just straight fiction, but you read his straight fiction and it's like he couldn't loosen up. The best stuff he wrote was the crazy stuff. I wrote autobiography, and I felt like I did that pretty well, and I think I've found something in the framework of writing the genre fiction that's sort of comforting in the same way writing autobio was. It goes more to the craft, and it gives you a net to work with.

SPURGEON: How does that work on the reader, then?

BRUBAKER: God knows. [Laughs.] Episodic fiction has been around for so long. Readers just love it for some reason.

SPURGEON: I have to imagine there's a difference reading a story where the author talks directly about family and one where they're saying it through Catwoman.

BRUBAKER: Well...

SPURGEON: And I don't mean that in an insulting way, just that there has to be a difference. Maybe those elements ground that material?

BRUBAKER: Maybe what I'm trying to do is make Catwoman a book where you can do stuff like that, too. It could be a failing of mine that I sometimes forget what these comics are supposed to be and do with them what I want to do with them. [Laughs.] I'm certain there are hardcore Catwoman fanboys that wish I'd never taken over the book.

SPURGEON: They want the tail back.

BRUBAKER: They want the tail, and they want her shaking it all the time and they want the supporting cast to go away and for her to stop fucking Slam Bradley on his desk.

SPURGEON: [Laughs.] Those poor fanboys.

BRUBAKER: I think part of it is that episodic fiction is just huge. That's why every company in Hollywood wants to not just buy something, but to start a franchise. Everyone wants sequels, they want to see what happens to these characters next. If you can do something within that episodic comic book thing that goes even a little bit beyond just entertaining people, that's great. I don't think entertaining people is anything small, really. It's certainly something not very many people can actually do.

But I don't feel like I'm trying to make bold artistic statements with any of the work I've ever done. It's been about creating characters, exploring ideas and themes, and trying to entertain. To me, writing is about asking questions somehow, not about having answers. You're exploring things through characters, and you can ask just as many questions with something like Buffy and Catwoman as you can anywhere else. It's all up to the writer.

Personally, I like episodic fiction as a reader, or a viewer on TV. If a writer is good, and I like the characters, I've had a couple of different mystery series where I've read 10 or 12 books. I love Maison Ikkoku. That's one of my favorite manga, which is just a complete soap opera. I read the entire thing in about three months. That doesn't say anything beyond people are crazy and they love each other. I guess that's a theme. [Laughter.]

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #263.]

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