The Power of Fables: An Interview with Bill Willingham, Part 3
In which Bill Willingham describes the plot of his new prose book, spills the beans on what dastardly plots he has upcoming in both JSA and Fables, speaks on Obsidian and other characters, and reveals whether he will be doing any more drawing in the future.
Part 1 of the interview | Part 2 of the interview
Let’s talk about your new prose novel, Peter & Max. How would you describe it?
Peter & Max is a prose novel set within the Fables fictional universe, but it’s a self-contained novel. It tells its own story. You don’t need to be deeply versed in the entire Fables mythos to get a good story out of it. It tells the story of the Pied Piper, who’s been my favorite villain of all time in fairy tales, with the possible exception of the Big Bad Wolf. But since I decided to make [the Big Bad Wolf] a hero in Fables, there’s really only one good villain left. So I was holding off on the Pied Piper until I could really do a story worthy of that particular character. Peter & Max is a biography of the Pied Piper as filtered through the Fables fictional universe. And it includes his younger brother, Peter Piper, simply because I love those mash-ups of “Let’s take this story and see if I can put part of that story in with it.” In the tongue twister Peter Piper, his last name kind of cried out that he would somehow be related to the Pied Piper, so we made him his younger brother, so that made the Pied Piper story an epic version of sibling rivalry carried to such ridiculous extremes that it can’t help but be a fun and exciting story, I hope.
What made you decide to do a prose novel now?
Well, remember how we were talking about how I still think I’m a kid breaking into comics? And I do believe that. There are challenges in comic books that will never go away, which is in each case, every time you set out to write a story, you have to write an engaging and interesting story. But there are no challenges in comic books left in the sense of “Do I understand the mechanics of how this is actually done?” I know how to write comics in the sense of I know how to physically construct comics that fit the format. So looking for more challenges in storytelling, prose writing is still one of those things that I don’t feel that I can say I fully understand, and I wanted the challenge for myself to see if I could write an entire novel. At the same time, the Pied Piper story, I realized right away, was the story I wanted to tell. But if we did it as a regular Fables comic series, it would have to be 20 issues or more. And that would make those that thought The Good Prince was too long and dragged out go back and realize that it was practically terse by comparison. It just would not have worked, pacing-wise, in the format of comic books. I thought a prose novel was the best way to tell that story. So the two needs kind of serendipitously came together. I wanted to write a novel. Here’s a Fables story that kind of needed to be a novel, so why not?
It really speaks to the success of Fables that Vertigo’s first prose book is from this series.
It’s an enormous compliment, and my gratitude to DC and Vertigo is unbound. I wanted to do this and was determined to do it, but I knew that DC just didn’t do novels, so I thought I had to take it to a novel publisher. But as a courtesy, of course, you offer it to DC/Vertigo first, because they’ve really done right by me with Fables. But I expected it to be kind of a rote, Here it is, I’m offering it to you guys first, and they say, Thanks, but we don’t do novels, and then I would be free to take it someplace else. But they just surprised me by saying, “Good idea! Let’s do it.” And just for that, they decided for the first time to be a novel publisher, which is a huge decision, and to this day, it surprises me that they made it so agreeably. The DC Comics of old used to be—there’s one horror story I know for a fact to be true because I was friends with the people who went through it—where, for an eight-issue miniseries, they took eight years to decide to do it, second-guessing things, changing things. DC Comics used to be the company that was so in love with taking meetings they would take meetings to plan meetings. And that kind of slow-boat bureaucracy was just a story killer. You can’t come to them with this enthusiastic idea for a new story and then do eight years of meetings and planning and second-guessing and all that kind of stuff and still have any enthusiasm for that story left by the end of it. It’s a story meat-grinder. And that DC no longer exists. It’s gone. When I offered them Fables as a novel, the amount of time it took for them to say, “Yeah, good idea, let’s do it” was so quick that I wasn’t even ready to get started. I just assumed it was going to be a longer process to make those decisions.
You’re also working on one of DC’s most legendary series, Justice Society of America.
Yeah!
What do you have coming up that you can talk about?
Well, your timing is pretty good, because right up till today, I couldn’t give away some of the things that I’ll gladly spill now because DC just put up the February solicitations. And we see by the cover of the February issue of JSA—and this is now the book that I’m writing separate from Matt, now that we’ve split the series into two ongoing series and he’s doing his team and I’m doing mine—as you can see by the cover of JSA #36, we have our heroes standing in front of a bleeding Nazi flag, a very wonderful cover that Jesus Merino produced for us. And my guess would be that if you have a cover like this that they’re going to be fighting some of the DCU’s Nazi-themed villains in an upcoming arc. If not, then that’s really an incredibly inappropriate cover.
But it’s such a dramatic cover, and the first thing they realized—and once again, the old DC would have shut this down immediately, but the new DC is a little more agile—they could not sell this cover in Germany because Germany just does not allow any depictions of the swastika or the old Nazi symbology. So yeah, we will not have German sales for this one because of this wonderful cover. But that’s a roundabout way of saying that the JSA, my thinned-down team of the JSA, will not only be fighting the Fourth Reich, a DCU villain team with an ignoble history, but a pumped up Fourth Reich. Because now that DC has got all the Red Circle Comics properties, it turns out that in the old Red Circle run of superhero-themed comics that every other villain they had was some sort of a Nazi character. So now we have a cast of hundreds of potentials, and we’re going to see a Fourth Reich that’s actually the size of a real army, and that’s going to present a nice challenge for the JSA. In the five-issue arc that Matt and I are doing together now, the opening scene is that the character Obsidian is turned into a black egg. And this arc here, the JSA vs. the Fourth Reich arc, is the culmination of why that was done to him, what that’s for, and what happened as a result of it. That’s what this storyline is about. It gets very grim, very brutal, and we’ll see a bunch of DCU guest stars in ways that one probably never expected to see them.
Speaking of Obsidian, he’s been a very controversial character, given his history of having come out as gay and then being treated as straight by other writers. What’s your plan with him?
Well, I’ve always loved the character Obsidian. I think that he is one of the most visually interesting characters—just the look of him, the design of him—that DC has ever produced. And I apologize to whoever originally designed Obsidian that I don’t know who you are, because I should. I think with the exception of the original Batgirl costume—which I still believe was the best superhero costume ever designed, so of course they had to change it—that Obsidian is it. It might have been Jerry Ordway or George Perez, I’m suspecting, but let me say right now, that it’s gonna end up being somebody else. But whoever you are, you did great. My worry was that I was never going to get to write the character before someone designed a new costume for him that would just be wretched. But they didn’t. That’s good. So I love this character. Plus, I love his power set: the darkness-based, sort of a dark version of Green Lantern where we’re shooting a construct of visible darkness. I love the paradox of that, because darkness is by its nature the absence of stuff, so there can’t be solid darkness, but in the fairytale world of superheroes—and superheroes are a subset of fairytales—you can. You can say that someone makes solid constructs out of darkness. I love that. I love it so much that even in Shadowpact I tweaked Nightshade’s powers to a certain extent so I could do that with her.
But now I get to use the original, Obsidian, and he’s great. But of course there was a hew and cry, because I am known for being an evil rightwinger, that the character at some point along the way was made gay or revealed to be gay or however you want to define it. And of course, being a card-carrying Republican, we are required by law to oppress gays wherever we find them, so there was a lot of message-board activity on how “It’s obvious what Willingham is gonna do,” “Is he gonna ruin this great character?,” “Is he gonna—oh, my God!—‘cure’ him of being gay?” But the question was never posed to me. I mean, no one ever came on my message board and just asked outright. It’s just been on other places, and I have a policy of not engaging in any but my own message board, because these are basically anonymous people indulging in just ridiculous excesses of discourse.
What I did do is, every year at San Diego Comic Con, there’s a gays-in-comics panel, and I did appear on that for the first part—I wasn’t able to stay for the entire panel—just to set the record straight for the people who were worried about that. The two questions that were asked most often were, Will I keep Obsidian as a gay character, and Will I treat him well? And I addressed those two questions. To the first question, yes, he’s going to continue to be gay. I have no plans to do otherwise. If anyone changes that, it won’t be me. And the second question, the answer is of course not. He’s a superhero in a superhero comic. By nature of the beast, they don’t get treated well. As a matter of fact, if their life just goes wonderfully, you don’t have a story. The whole point of it is adversity comes and they throw themselves into the firestorm, often at great cost to themselves. They try to overcome that to make things better for the world at large. It’s sacrifice. It’s suffering, and it’s struggle. And for the same reason, under my hand you’re going to see a lot of female superheroes get the crap beat out of them, because that’s also the business they are in. It is not some kind of hidden agenda. “Oh, obviously he hates gays because he just had the crap beat out of this gay character…or this female character or this black character.” There was even this comment by someone [on a message board] that said, “Look at the first JSA issue [Willingham did], and the first thing he does is kill the black character!”—that was Mr. Terrific, the cliffhanger ending where he’s bleeding on the floor and possibly dead. You know, that kind of jumping to conclusions is silly. And even if he had died, so what? That’s the business they’re in. It’s not an agenda-driven thing of we don’t like these characters so of course they’re going to get into trouble and we’re going to make their lives horrible. Well, of course that’s exactly what we’re going to do for no other reason than they’re superhero stories. That’s what’s going to happen.
So yeah, Obsidian I plan to be one of my favorite characters. There’s a long story arc where he’s going to be for the most part offstage for a while to just set up the really cool thing I’d like to do with him. So I hope that I get to follow through on all that. Part of the early stages of taking over a book is to, in reasonable ways, get all the pieces into place so that they can be in the right position for you to do the stories you want to do with them. So getting Obsidian in the right place is a fairly long process in the sense that it’s going to take the first five or six issues of my separate run on JSA to get that set up. Once it is, I’m looking forward to having great fun with the character.
What about the other characters in JSA? Any other character arcs or developments you want to talk about at this point?
Sure. One of the really grand things that happened as a result of DC’s asking Matt and me to take over the JSA and then split them into two teams is that Matt and I basically got to go shopping for our favorite characters on each team. There was a little give and take, but for the most part, I ended up with the characters I really, really wanted to do stuff with on my team, and Matt says the same thing. So all of them are going to get their moment in the sun.
In the big Fourth Reich Nazi arc, the character Mr. Terrific is kind of the forefront guy. I’ve been on record for a long time saying I just hate dumb hero characters, the people who are vastly powered but they just can’t figure out who to punch. I much more prefer the smart character, and Mr. Terrific is the epitome of that character. And they’re in such a dire circumstance in the Fourth Reich story arc that it’s going to take a very smart, very clever fellow to find the one way out of it. So he takes the forefront in that arc.
In story arcs to follow—should DC be generous enough to let me continue on this series—all the characters are of course going to be in every arc, but just like in Fables, we’re going to move certain ones to the front and center spotlight from time to time. We’re going to see some fun things happen with Green Lantern and the nature of how his powers work. [He’s] a magical version of all the other Green Lanterns; they’re kind of science-fiction characters with Oa and the central power battery and stuff like that. So we’re going to play a little bit with that and some of the consequences of how his powers work.
Flash—I love superspeed characters in the sense that I always wonder, if they can really move that fast and their perceptions are really that fast, why do they ever need any other teammates? Almost every mission would be, “Oh, so-and-so’s invaded Cincinnati! Let’s go get him!” As they’re dashing out the door to the Quinjet or whatever their transportation is, there’s this little blur and Flash is coming back saying, “It’s taken care of, you can head back to the coffee room. Got it disarmed. Gathered all the evidence. They’re in jail.” All that. And then every mission would be that. There would be one scene of them dashing to the bus or the transportation and then Flash there saying, “Yeah, got ’em captured. Taken care of.” So that presents an irresistible challenge to me to come up with interesting stories that don’t discount his abilities but still show why he needs to work within the framework of other people with other abilities.
And Liberty Belle I’m looking forward to working with. I could not tell you a single reason why I love this character, but I do. And it’s something about the look of her, the kind of old-fashioned iconic nature of her uniform. I’m not sure. I just do. So she’ll have her moment. And then one of the things I talked DC into is letting me get Dr. Fate back in the JSA, even though it’s a different Kent Nelson than the original Kent Nelson. Yeah, I’ve got the characters I want in here. They are an almost crushing responsibility in the sense that this is the very first superhero team ever, and that is a big responsibility to do right by.
The JSA will be appearing on a couple upcoming episodes of Smallville. Are you involved in that in any way?
No, that’s Geoff Johns. One of the reasons I agreed to do the JSA following Geoff Johns, which would seem like a suicidal career move, is that it’s actually just a perfect career move in the sense that there’s no way to lose. Either my run on the JSA bombs, in which case the excuse is, well, yeah, but who could follow Geoff Johns on the JSA and not bomb? So I’m covered. I’m not expected to do as well as he did. Or it does well and I say, Ha! I followed Geoff Johns and look! Either way, I’m okay. But no, that’s Geoff all the way. I’m looking forward to it. I’m waiting for it. I think it’s a double-episode thing, if I remember correctly. I have resisted all temptation to get him on the phone and ask for inside information. I want to approach those episodes strictly as a fan of what he did with those characters and a fan of the series in general.
What can we expect coming up on Fables?
Coming up on Fables is, for the foreseeable future, the Mr. Dark villain continues to be the biggest thorn in Fabletown’s side that they’ve ever had to face. To use a terrible cliché, considering the name of the villain, things are going to get much darker before they get better. And things are already pretty grim. We destroyed Fabletown, for God’s sake. We took away every single thing they relied on in previous stories, their fortune, their magic stuff, all of the business office and their headquarters. We just took it all away from them, and all I can say is that is not as bad as things are going to get. Once that storyline is concluded, we are going to move into the next phase of Fables, which will continue to have the same big cast but the cubs, the seven children of Bigby and Snow, are going to move to the spotlight. They’ll be old enough by then, and we’re going to start seeing what kind of interesting tales and adventures will happen to them.
One last question: Will you be drawing more any time soon?
No, but I haven’t completely given up on it. As a matter of fact, in Fables #100, which is going to be a 100-page issue, Mark Buckingham will of course draw the main story, which is going to, I think, be about 60 pages. It’s going to be a big moment in the Fabletown history, of course. But in one of the backup features, Mark and I are switching roles, where he is writing the Fables story and I am drawing it. Now, a caveat to the people out there who know I have gotten so slow at drawing that I could not possibly draw on a regular basis and still continue with comics as my career: Once in a while, a small project like this I can do. And DC, having learned their lesson, was rather dubious about me drawing even a short story and having it appear in this millennium, so I think Mark is going to be writing a prose story that I will do separate illustrations for. And as many as I can complete for the story by deadline time is the number of illustrations that will accompany this Mark Buckingham story. So yeah, there will be some artwork from me. I am continuing to draw stuff. It’s just stuff that you the readers will never see for a long time. It’s just going to take a long time to do in addition to writing the things that I’m writing.
Part 1 of the interview | Part 2 of the interview
-- John Hogan
