Tag: Image Comics

Erik Larsen called the entire comic book industry “pussies” in 2005, when he publicly released a letter to all writers and artists, challenging them to own up to their creativity – instead of writing other people’s characters for “The Big Two” (DC and Marvel). He is the Publisher and Co-Founder of independent publisher Image Comics. In our following conversation, I found Larsen to be a very intelligent, sarcastic, and warm human being with a very grounded point of view. One that he not only believes in, but follows.

Under his guidance, Image Comics has brought us some of the greatest modern comics being written today: Invincible, Walking Dead, Fear Agent, The Sword – just to name a few. What started off as a quick phone interview, quickly turned into a conversation. Although long-winded, here is the conversation we had about the current state of comics, the purpose of an independent publisher and a look into the beginnings of one of the greatest publishers in comics today:

Hi. Is this Erik?

What can I help you with, sir? My good sir?!
 

[Both laugh]

[continues]My good friend, my best friend in the world? Hey, how’s it going?

I’m all right. It’s great to be talking to you. It’s awesome. You guys are honestly my favorite publishing house.

Oh wow! Well, that’s one.

[Larsen thinks it’s Geekspeak calling…Gilmore clears up how to say “Geekscape”…instead of what he thought was “Geepskate”]

Anyway, so I wanted to ask you a few questions and, you know, have our audience get to know you and all that.

OK. Are they all going to be stumpers? [Am I going to be] sitting there stumped the whole time?

No. We’re just looking to get to know who Erik Larsen is, a little bit.

Right. All right.

Just general questions. I’m not going to try to stop you in your tracks or anything.

You’re not going to be like, “what happened in spawn number 25 [laughs], page 3? Huh? Those important pivotal events, you know?”

[Laughs] If you don’t know you should be fired.

Uh huh.

We’ll petition for you to fire yourself [both laugh]. So, let’s start from the beginning.

All right.

How did you start drawing?

I don’t know. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. That’s what kids did. I just started drawing as a kid. My dad read comics when he was a young man, so we grew up with comics in the house, just kind of all around. All these old crusty comics. My dad, in fact, used to delight in pointing out all the expensive comics on the walls of comic book stores that we had completely destroyed when we were younger. We would just be reading them and fall asleep reading them and wake up with a copy of some Karl Bark’s duck story wrapped around our faces. [laughs] At that time it was just [about] “I got comics, I got kids, let’s get those together.” And we just tore into them. Eventually it got to be a smaller collection than it was and then my house burned down and then it was eliminated entirely.

Oh, wow. So all of your dad’s old comics were just…

Yeah, my dad’s comics. He’d given them to me at one point and it was like —

Oh, man.

— that was bad news.

Oh, that’s tragic. That is tragic. Wow. So your dad was into comics.

Yeah, he was. He didn’t draw or aspire to do any of that stuff, but he definitely read comics as a kid. He wasn’t a comic book collector in what we think of as being comic book collectors these days. He was just a guy like every other kid who read comics because that’s what kids did at that time. It wasn’t an unusual thing for somebody to be buying comics. He bought them from the early ’40s till the comics code came into play. He bought all the early EC stuff. So comics were kind of growing up with him and when the comics code came along and EC Comics was basically put out of business – there weren’t comics for him to read anymore. He, by that point, was older. So he stopped buying comic books because there wasn’t anything for him. It all became Batman and Superman and stuff like that. So that’s how he stopped.

So who was the first character that you were obsessed with? Did you have one?

Not so much. Captain Marvel was big in my dad’s comic stores. He had a lot of those and I was a big fan of that. So I liked him a lot. But when it came to buying comics myself, probably the Hulk early on –

Really? OK.

– yeah. I guess because I wasn’t there for the early Marvel comics stuff. I was sort of too young for that. I came along in the mid ’70s , so a lot of those books were pretty far into their runs and Jack Kirby was over at DC at the time. He wasn’t at Marvel. And I really wasn’t even aware of who he was. But at one point Marvel Comics had jumped up to $ .25 and DC’s were still $ .20. So that’s when I started checking out the DC’s. [laughs] It’s like whoo, five for the price of four, why not?
That’s when I discovered Kirby. I was like “this guy’s good!”. Then when he came back to Marvel it was like “all right, this will be the greatest thing ever!” [laughs It wasn’t the greatest thing ever but it was pretty good.

So is that what inspired you to actually pursue this as a career? What was the moment when you decided that this is going to be your career, as opposed to just something that kids do?

When I was in fourth grade I started drawing my own comics, just like 8 and a half by 11, folded in half, and just creating my own comic book characters and having them get into battles and meet famous comic book characters and beat ’em up and stuff like that.

So there really was no period when I wasn’t [into comics], that I can remember. I don’t remember a period when I wasn’t drawing comics. I always did that as a little kid and then as I got older I was still doing it. Then eventually I was getting towards an age when it seemed like you got to be picking out a career for yourself and I was like, I’m already doing this, why don’t I just do this? Me and a couple of buddies published a fanzine when I was 19 years old and then we sent that around to everybody we could think of and it got reviewed in a couple of different places, like the Comics Buyer’s Guide [for example]. We always had our addresses so people could mail away and get copies. A couple of guys who bought it through the mail were wanting to start up their own comic book companies and they actually hired me based on my fanzine stuff. So I’ve been working ever since then really.

Nice.

So at about 19 years old I got my first real gig. It was a paying gig. It wasn’t paying real well, but whatever. Beggars can’t be choosers.

That’s so great. That’s so early.

So at this point I’ve been doing this for 25 years.

My god. Did you go to college?

No. I didn’t.

Just straight into comics. OK.

No, straight out of high school and into doing this professionally.

That’s amazing. That is amazing.

Yeah, it is, really. You get these stories about people and they tell about all these jobs that they had…I’ve never had another job. [laughs] It’s like, I never did dishes or anything else. Comics are the only job I’ve ever had.

That’s so awesome though. I mean, it’s what you wanted and you got it like almost immediately.

Until I was getting good enough paying gigs that I could actually afford to pay the rent, that is. Then eventually I had enough scratched together that I was able to come down and move down to San Francisco. I would [often] get hungry in the middle of the night. I worked odd hours. And I would think “there’s no place open”. [laughs], I want to eat and there’s no place to go to eat. So I wanted to move to a town where there was some kind of a night life. I wanted to be someplace where if I decided I needed a cheeseburger at 3:00 in the morning it was possible for that to happen.

Right. Where you could not starve to death.

[laugs] Right. So I came down and in about a week I found an apartment and that was it.

Rent controlled?

Rent control. There were a few guys who had a studio that I knew of in San Francisco and they had sort of a “hey, if you’re in town and want to share some studio space, we got a drawing board” operation – and a guy who never shows up to use it. So with kind of open invite it was like wow, I could be part of a studio and be able to see people instead of just being this recluse. And so I shared a studio with Al Gordon and Chris Meriden and Pete McDonald. And it was just four of us in a little studio apartment – or “studio”, not apartment…in San Francisco.

So that’s how one of the best publishing houses in comics got started. Nice. You said you started out just writing a bunch of characters and they would do crossovers with any popular characters. Do you remember any of those?

Sure. I would just have whoever. I’d have Batman show up or Superman or the Hulk or Captain Marvel.

My characters were the same guys I’m doing now.

Really? 

Oh yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, they changed a lot because [Savage] Dragon when he started off was kind of an amalgam of Batman and Speed Racer.

And Captain Marvel. He had this cape and cowl – so you can imagine how he’s got a fin now.

There would be a cutout like Batman’s mask. There’d be a little hole and it would be flesh-colored and the fin and the green skin, that would be his version of the Batman cowl. Eventually I just got tired of drawing the little line and all the trappings that came along with it being a costume and I just said “I’ll just make it part of his head”. I had him become just a guy who would wear regular clothes [as opposed to] a guy who was in a superhero outfit.

There it is. The secret origin [saracastically].

Nice. That’s good.

There’s something about the creations of children. They’re either incredibly just ripoffs of other guys or they’re just these kind of cool characters with no real pretensions or anything else. They just kind of strip away all of this other stuff. A lot of times what people tend to do when they’re in the business and they’ve been here a while, is that they come up with a character and it will be of too thought-out, you know what I’m saying? 

Yeah.

Like their powers are very complicated in a way and their names are something where you go, “I don’t even know what that means!”, you know? It’s got all these literary pretensions and stuff like that.

Whereas when you’re a kid you’re just like Toothbrush Man [laughs]. He’s a toothbrush and he goes out and he fights crime. He fights cavities.
 

Exactly [Laughs]

He’s Toothbrush Man. And that’s a cool thing, you know? Because kids aren’t sitting there going “what’s his motivation?”. It’s like: he’s a Toothbrush Man; he doesn’t need a motivation. He’s out punching cavities. He’s got to protect the teeth. That’s what he’s all about

Exactly.

And there’s something cool about that.

There is. I love Toothbrush Man [laughs].

That’s actually Joe Keatinge’s brother had that one.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he had that as a character and he was like, yeah, that is a cool one. Toothbrush Man.

Toothbrush Man. Have you guys ever received a treatment, an image for that yet?

I’m sure Joe wants to put it in. He’s just like “this is too cool.”

I just imagine the character always smiling really big, with, like, perfectly white teeth.

What else do you need?! Kids come up with cool stuff. I think that’s one of the things that appeals to me about really early comic books, like comic books from the 1940s, is that they sort of were approaching characters in that same kind of way. There hadn’t been a million characters yet and you [didn’t] go “well, you can’t do this because this has already been done before”. It was just, “what do you want to do?” My character is Plastic Man and he’s made out of plastic. You know what I mean? They just went for it.

Yeah. It was a little more innocent.

Very much so. And the origins were really, really simple. I jumped into a burning vat of steel. Now I am Steel Sterling. It’s like, “What?! How’d that work? Kids, don’t try this at home! I’m special, OK?”

I know. There’s so many origins like, that. It’s like…really? When was the last time lightning made anyone really fast? Like when people still didn’t know enough about science and all this type of stuff wasn’t in the general knowledge as much, it seems that people would just buy it more easily. It’s like, OK, gamma rays, huge green monster, makes sense.

Sure, why not? But see, I like that stuff. There gets to be a point where you think things through so much that it doesn’t work anymore, you know? Where you really go “Uuh, yeah. You know, if you just told me he was a magic dude and made everything small, that’s fine. Don’t try to explain to me how things can be small and retain the atomic structure that they need in order to exist…”

Totally.

I’m going to glaze over first of all [with these types of stories] and second of all: you’re going to get it wrong. And you’re just going to look stupider than if you just said “yeah, Mr. Magic just waves his magic wand and there you go.”

They become more explanations than they do stories.

Yeah.

That leads me perfectly into what I’m sure you’ve heard about non-stop. That letter that you wrote in 2005 [The letter he wrote to all major publishers and current comics writers where he called them all “pussies”]

Which one’s that?…Oh yeah, yeah. Actually, you know, nobody. I would think that people would have got more upset than they did but most of the people were “Yeah, OK.”

[laughs]

…”You got us. You’re right.”

That letter is amazing. I mean, at first it comes off like “OK, this guy’s really pissed”, but by the end it’s like “I agree wholeheartedly with absolutely everything this guy has to say.”

What’s kind of sad is that you get situations like Mike Wieringo passing away, and he is a guy who had a bunch of characters that he created when he was a kid that he never got the chance to do anything with professionally. I think towards the end there we had been talking about him doing some of that stuff – to finally get some of those characters into print. And he passed away before he got the opportunity really to tell the stories that he always wanted to tell. I think after that I’ve heard from a number of people who were just kind of going, “I don’t want that to be me. I don’t want to be that guy who’s going to be taking a bunch of great characters to the grave, you know?”

It’s tragic. It is.

It really is tragic. Just imagine if when Jack Kirby passed away all that he really had to show for it was yeah, he did a pretty killer run on Batman 30 years ago, rather than here’s a guy who created everything.

Exactly.

And a lot of guys, that’s all they’ve got. Hey, I did a run on Spider-Man and hey, I did a run on this. And I never really contributed anything of worth or value that anybody is going to remember.

And something you say in this letter…well, just kind of like as a side note. Right after Mike Wieringo died when I picked up the next week’s comics, they have that In Memoriam ad where it’s just a drawing of him with a huge pencil waving goodbye to the Fantastic Four? Have you seen that?

Yeah, yeah.

I fuckin lost it there. I don’t know why. That’s just the saddest picture I’ve ever seen. It’s insane.

Well, that was when he was saying goodbye to the Fantastic Four, not goodbye to the world.

I know. The picture is just such a perfect one for that. It’s just so perfect of a picture to just kind of. Oh man.

Sure.

Anyways, what I was saying is…what was I saying? [laughs] I got all caught up in that.

You’re all choked up now.

Oh yeah, because it’s so fucking sad.

It is. Well, all that stuff, you know? The book that he had done with us, Tello’s. You know, the orders came through on that hardcover book and they were OK. They were not exceptional. And it’s really kind of sad that it took him passing away before suddenly everybody decided ‘hey, we should buy this thing’.

Right.

Then we sold out on the hardcover in pretty short order directly after that. But it’s like, that’s what it takes? Jesus Christ.

It’s always sad when that happens to artists. But anyways, you were saying that a lot of people – all they have is their best run on Batman, and it’s just such a good point. I mean, like you were saying, people can just completely come along and erase anything that you’ve done. Take J. Michael Straczynski who wrote Spider-Man for so long. Brand New Day is completely overturning everything he did.

Yeah, well, there you go. That’s the thing about all comics [that] you just have to realize. As a creator working on it, they’re not yours and you’re replaceable. And as soon as you’re gone, the next guy can come on board and say, …”you know what? Yeah, that whole clone saga, that was a big mistake, let’s pretend that didn’t happen”. So whatever your big story was that you contributed, it can just be undone. Just like that. And that was somebody undoing somebody else’s story, and then the next guy comes on and undoes that, you know? Spider-Man, as a comic, doesn’t read as a consistent life of one character.

At all.

It’s such a mess. It’s so all over the place.Now there’s flashbacks in some of those comics of Peter Parker in high school with Gwen [Stacy]. It’s like she wasn’t even introduced until he went into high school. What are you doing stories where they’re hanging out? She was introduced when he went to college. There’s these scenes of them hanging out in high school, and that doesn’t make any sense.

Exactly.

At least to have somebody there who can point somebody in the right direction and say, hey you might want to crack a back issue every now and then just for the hell of it.

And that kind of repels readers, too, doesn’t it?

It does. And for me, if I’m sitting there going onto a book and I’m not that familiar with the book and I’m writing it, my inclination would be to go forward, not to go, hey I’m going to retell this origin that I’m not that familiar with. Because now we’ve got sequences where Aunt May is saying, “Oh I wasn’t there when Ben was shot…”, and yet we’ve got flashback scenes in issue one of Spiderman where she is seeing him get shot. So which is it? Who’s right here, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko or whoever is trying to inject something of their own into it 45 years after the fact?

Totally. And probably the remedy for that is publishing places like Image, where someone can essentially have their own characters and they can have them live a realistic life.

Well, the beauty of it is that you don’t have successive creative teams coming aboard somebody’s character and undoing everything that’s been done before. It’s really nice that I’m going to have the final say on Savage Dragon and it’s not going to be somebody else coming aboard, saying hey, but I think it’s origin should be such-and-such or whatever.

Which makes perfect sense. I guess we’ve really gone over everything that I wanted to go over as far as why Image Comics exists.

Image Comics exists for a number of reasons. Most of which were a group of guys who wanted to have a little bit more of a control over what it was that they were doing and wanted to be able to be the guys who were exploiting it. Even today, we’re seeing situations where guys are coming back to Marvel and have rebooted and popularized a character that pretty much had no life prior for quite a long time. And then along comes a movie studio, and they say, “we’re going to make a movie of this character that you pumped some life back into, but you’re not going to see a piece of that at all because that’s owned by Marvel Comics.”

And that’s terrible.

Oh, it’s the way things go. It’s just the way it is. That’s what you signed up to, and what do you get out of that? Well you get a page rate.

So you guys don’t do that over at Image?

I sure as hell don’t [laughs]. You know, that’s the thing is that it’s kind of a situation where guys are making their own choices and doing what they want to and deciding how it is that they should do things. It’s all over the place. If I were to decide tomorrow? Yeah, I don’t want to do my book anymore and I want to have other guys do it, maybe I would be doing something akin to a Marvel Comics kind of thing where I’m controlling the property that other people are working on.

But it would have to have the permission of the creator.

Absolutely, yeah. Every creator owns their own characters, and they’re able to decide what the fate of those characters will be.

But what if, you know in the long run, I’m sure Stan Lee and Steve Ditko got together and they were like: “OK we can change it, then we can hand this off to other people. We can hand Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, off to other people and we’ll have them along the way. We’ll still own them as characters.” How do you think you can learn from Marvel’s mistakes as far as that’s concerned, so Image never turns into a Marvel?

[laughs] I don’t know that you can. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that. But ideally what you’d have is a situation where you’d have stuff like Tintin, which started up by one guy. He told all the stories he had to tell. He died, and that was the end of it. Nobody has written or drawn any Tintin stories since.

That’s great.

I think that’s a valid thing. Charles Schultz did all the Peanuts stuff. There’s not going to be anybody else doing any more Peanuts stuff now that Charles Schultz has passed away. And there are innumerable situations like that, where creators basically said their piece with their character and that’s all that’s going to be said. I could see [UNINTELLIGIBLE] doing the quite opposite of that and just going, you know, once I die I don’t give a shit anymore, you know?

[laughs] Really.

I’m dead. So if suddenly it’s like, OK I’m dead, now my character is going to just immediately go into public domain and anybody can do Savage Dragon stories. Have at it, kids, and just do that! That’s something that I’ve thought about as kind of an appealing idea, that the character could live on but it would essentially be fan fiction by whoever the hell wants to do it [laughs]. Why not? We can make up our own rules as it goes along. There are several different characters that are in public domain, that people can just do whatever the heck they want to. All the Oz characters are in public domain. A lot of early comic book characters are in public domain, and people, if they feel like they want to do a story with Stardust or Space Myth or Sub Saunders or Flip Falcon; they can go do that.

Yeah, totally. I mean, eventually, if I lived for 1,000 years, I’d like to make the Machine Gun Mickey story.

Yeah, well there you go [laughs]. What’s been kind of fun is, we’re doing this next issue project thing, where we just take old public domain characters from the 1940’s and just go, OK, let’s do the next issue of Fantastic Comics. The book went up to issue 23 and then it was cancelled, and there hasn’t been an issue out in whatever, 50 years [LAUGHTER] you know? Let’s do the next issue of that. This will be the latest Image Comic ever.
That’d be awesome.

We’re doing it. We’re working on it right now. We’re doing an issue of a book called Fantastic Comics, and it will be out in January (Pick it up in stores now!).

Oh that’s great.

I did the lead story, and it’s Samson and then a whole mess of guys contributed to it. It’s really great. I’m actually coloring, as we speak, a Flip Falcon story that was written by Joe Casey and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz – and it’s just cool as all hell.

That’s awesome. So is it going to look all retro, then?

Kind of and not at the same time, because there are artists who are I totally want it to look just like it’s from 1940, and then there’s others who are just going “oh I don’t draw like that” [laughs]. Bill Sienkiewicz, you’re not going to look at it and go, wow, that looks like some artist from the ’40s, because it totally doesn’t. But it’s colored in a way that it’s colored all flat and crappy-looking, so it’s kind of low-tech in that degree.

Do you plan on continuing it, or just it being one issue that ends it?

Well the idea is, at least initially, to do one-shots. So it will be a series of one-shots by a number of different characters on a number of different books. So the first one is Fantastic Comics, and then I think we’re doing Crack Comics after that. And then after that we’re doing…I think Speed Comics is after that. They’ll all be just new books featuring old characters.

That’s awesome. That sounds great. We’ll make sure to pick those up. You’re taking all these risks. Every time I pick up an issue number one of the newest Image, which I usually do, I’m picking it up with no expectations except for what maybe the writer or artist has already done, and it’s awesome, because it’s a completely new universe.

Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really a lot of fun —

Frankly, it’s more exciting.

–to be able to do that. I couldn’t agree more. And with a lot of it, at this point, a lot of those books, let’s take the big two, for example. They have been around so long and been going on for so long that I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll just read an issue of it and I’m like, I’m so lost. I don’t know who’s alive anymore and who’s dead and who the characters are and what the relationships are with each other. I just feel kind of lost. Whereas, you know, when I’m sitting there reading the Image stuff, I’m just kind of falling into a new world entirely. I can just get in on the ground level with this and read and enjoy this universe here.

Yeah totally. Earlier this week even, a friend of mine who doesn’t read comics at all, he saw, I think he saw like a Long Halloween in my car, and he said “oh hey, I didn’t know they still wrote Batman comics!”

Oh yes! They only cost a dime!

They’re 25 cents, pick one up! Then he goes back into his cave. Anyway, I love all the characters that you guys are starting up. Invincible is so great. Do you guys consider Invincible your flagship character? I see him flying across the screen on your web page. Are you thinking of making him —

I don’t know about flagship [laughs]. I think everybody who’s doing a book considers that the flagship character. I would think that Todd [MacFarlane] would consider Spawn the flagship character of it. In their own worlds, they’re the main guy. And it’s kind of cool to be able to have a company where everybody feels like they can tell their own stories without feeling like they’ve got to consult with each other. We don’t have these huge, orchestrated events where every book crosses over at every other book, so everybody feels obligated to buy a huge shit-load of books that they may not even be interested in, just so they feel like they got the full story.

That’s awesome. I’d also like to commend you guys for finding people like, I mean Rick Remender writing Fear Agent and the Luna Brothers writing everything that they’ve written. I mean, these are guys that are bringing I think some of the best writing in comics to the table, and if it wasn’t for you guys, we wouldn’t be able to tell our audience about it all the time.

I’m pleased you did that. And then I’m really happy that there are guys who have been in the business a while, who are either creating new things for Image Comics, like Kyle Baker, or bringing characters that have been at other publishers to Image Comics. Like Mike Allred with Madman. It’s kind of nice to be able to have a home for the best of everything, I think.

It’s really kind of an amazing time to be part of this. There are just a lot of changes that are coming along, a lot of creators that are going to be coming aboard and either returning to the fold or going to be doing their first ever Image Comics. It’s just an exciting time to be here.

Yeah, totally, and so you know, having said that, do you still think most of the comic book writers and creators out there are pussies? You wrote: “Why are you such a pussy?” Any retorts to yourself writing that article?

Well, you know what it is? I’ll tell you. You could go that route or you could go the route that says: we’ve all got families to feed. And there are some guys who simply do not have that creative fire at all. They say “I could never come up with anything on my own, it’s a good thing that this stuff’s here!” And then there’s the guys who say: “I just always wanted to draw Batman, that’s it, the sum total of my existence, draw a Batman.”

That makes sense.

And it’s like, if you want to draw a Batman, and you don’t have any ideas of anything on your own, and you don’t ever aspire to anything. DC Comics is the place for you. Because it’s the one thing we can’t give you. We can’t give you Batman. We can let you create an entire universe and come up with everything cool you want to come up with, but we can’t give you Batman.

So is that your state of the union post-2005 incendiary letter?

[Laughs] It’s fun to get to play debate, and it’s fun to get in there and make the argument. But there are always two sides to every argument. At the very least. If not more. And it can get complicated. Some people say: “it’s easy for you to say ‘go and create your own stuff’, but I’ve got to put food on the table and I can’t trust that the numbers I’m going to get from my creator-owned book are going to be the kind of numbers they would need to be in order to be able to survive in this industry.”

On the other hand, there’s a lot of creators who are doing stuff at Image Comics who have stuck their toe into Marvel or DC and found that [they] do way better doing stuff at Image. Even if the numbers aren’t as big as they would have been. Robert Kirkman makes a killing at Image Comics, you know. He doesn’t make a huge percentage of his income off of doing his Marvel stuff. The Luna Brothers? I’ve seen those checks. Those guys are doing just fine. And I’m guessing that they weren’t getting that kind of money doing Spider-Woman over at Marvel. You know there’s a lot of stuff where guys can go and do stuff there and then try it out. If they go and sell the Ultra film or The Sword film or the Girls film that’s one thing. They’re not going to get anything out of a Spider-Woman movie.

I just want to have some cool comics out there. I don’t know about the rest of anybody. But I’m all about just being able to have something that I want to read. And that’s the greatest part about a lot of this stuff is just being able to have there be something that I want. I’m excited about that. I’m a comic book fan.

Transcription by Andy Breeding