Bill Messner-Loebs: A Career Retrospective (Part II)
By Darren Schroeder
Darren Schroeder continues his in depth discussion with Bill
Messner-Loebs, artist-writer extraordinaire. In the first part of
the interview Darren and Bill discussed his beginnings in the
industry, and reminisced over favorite Loebs penned comics,
including the Flash. This is where we pick up the stream of the
conversation...
Darren Schroeder: Comic characters don't usually fare very
well in the translation form page to screen. Do you think the
Flash show was a success in this respect?
Bill Messner-Loebs: I enjoyed it. The relationship between
Flash and his father was too - peculiar for my taste. Oddly
enough, given my opinions above, I thought the show when there
were real super villains for the Flash to react against. This
probably had less to do with the S-Vs themselves, than it forced
the writers to write NEW stories rather than watered down cop
show cliches. "Real life" in TV land seems always to translate to
old episodes of Mannix. The episodes with the female jewel
thief that Howard Chaykin did were my favorites, however, so it
could be the writing just sharpened up at the end. Too late, as
it turned out.
DS: You worked on Christmas with the Super-Heroes
for DC in 1989. Christmas specials can end up as overly
sentimental books. How do you think your contribution ranked on
the sentimental scale?
BML: I thought they had a nice feel to them. Mark Waid was
my editor there, and he helped keep me from going
overboard.
DS: What was the inspiration behind Epicurus the
Sage?
BML:Looking back it was probably Jesus. I've always likes
the gospel form - Jesus in the marketplace, in come the Pharasees
and try to trip him up, he says something clever, boom, next
scene. Jesus in the rich man's house, Peter mouths off, Jesus
raises someone from the dead, boom, next scene. It's a very
seductive pattern. But I've always loved early Greece, too. It's
that arid, simple, clear landscape. The desert, the deep woods,
the empty, blighted streets. All my best work seems to take place
along frontiers. I'm currently working on a series set in 1900 in
Alaska. There's something about emptiness that stirs my creative
juices.
DS: Justice League Europe seemed like a cash in on
the success of Justice League International, mix a couple of
popular characters along with a few second string heroes. With
your contributions to the series were you consciously trying to
overcome this image?
BML: Well, the notion was that JLE would be a "more
traditional" superhero book, so they wanted a "more mainstream"
scripter to do it. My reputation as mainstream has always bemused
me. Anyway, Keith Giffen was plotting the book, which meant I got
xeroxes of Keith's breakdowns, with rough dialogue on them, which
I was supposed to polish into funnitude. But not really funny,
because this was supposed to be a mainstream adventure book and
the action if you'll recall revolved around excising tumors with
heat vision, deformed babies and the like. Well, about three or
four issues in I was called into JLE central and informed
that I was not making the deformed babies or the tumors hilarious
enough. I was given a little lecture about the nature and
construction of comedy. I asked what about making JLE more
"mainstream"? I was told that series of conversations had never
really happened. I was sent home to do better. I didn't
really.
DS: The deformed babies storyline centered on Metamorpho
and his wife. From memory that seemed quite a cruel storyline to
base around a character that was usually the comic relief. Was
that interesting to work on?
BML: Not really. I discovered I enjoy making the story,
not polishing it.
DS: You said they so they wanted a "more mainstream"
scripter, so what is your definition of mainstream?
BML: Hmm... Mainstream means superhero, almost always, and
a certain easy way of dealing with issues and characters that
doesn't disturb the majority of the readership. It also carries
with it a surface-y quality and a certain professional gloss. I
started out wanting to be in the undergrounds as a satirist, and
I'm amazed at where I ended up.
DS: JLE is one of the few team books that you have
worked on, is this by choice on your part?
BML: Except for Wonder Woman, which I actively
tried for, and Hawkman, too, come to think, everything
else I've ever done has been brought to me. I'm not really a big
fan of team books, but when you think about it, each time I've
gotten a single character book, I've turned it into a team book.
So there's fields for study in that.
DS: What was the best comic convention that you have been
to and what made it the best?
BML: The best is certainly the MotorCityCon in Novi,
Michigan. That's Novi, Michigan. Not only do they really care
about the guests and put us up and feed us, but they bring in a
true range of cartoonists, from Image to the Golden Agers. They
also support local talent and indys - plus wrestlers and
playmates and lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my.
DS: The theme of heroes trying make things better comes
across in quite a few of your comics, I'm thinking here
especially of Dr. Fate but it appears as well in
Hawkman and Wonder Woman where you take the
character out of the clichéd cycle of superhero vs. supervillan
fights and have then interact with "normal" people and
recognizable problems. What is it that attracts you to this kind
of subject matter?
BML: Probably real life itself. I would be writing about
normal people and problems if I were writing any other kind of
fiction. Also I was powerfully affected by the first few GL-GA
stories Denny O did. They "peeled my eye-balls" as they say. And
I've always wanted to get that same sort of feeling into my
writing. Plus - keeping track of the hundreds of para mutations
of hero-villain appearances and creating new and pungent super
villains every month is for hardier and more complex minds than
mine. Give me the simple life!
DS: Giving Inza Kent the power of Dr. Fate allowed
for some interesting re-working of the character, what facets of
this interested you?
BML: One thing I had noticed about characters with great
powers - that they instinctively all knew they couldn't change
the "real world" too much, even though that's the first thing
most of us would try. Now the mechanical explanation for that is
the writer doesn't want to be put in a box. Superman can't cure
cancer, because cancer will still be around in the readers'
world. But this only shows the limitations, self-imposed, of
mainstream comics. SF and Fantasy books change modern life all
the time, with little penalty. I thought we could at least
explore the question. Plus, in the Dr. Fate mini-series, which I
liked quite a bit, much had been made of Kent and the Lords of
Order being old, burnt-out farts. I thought some fresh and
enthusiastic would make a nice change. And Inza had been on the
back burner for an awfully long time.
DS: The relationship between the haves and have-nots was
an important part of your work in Dr Fate, with the
denouncement of US politicians in issue 39 being especially
blunt. Do you think politicians really care about the effects of
their policies on the population?
BML: I think most of them care, depending on their own
definition of the term. I care less about getting rid of the "bad
apples" and more about correcting systemic flaws, like campaign
finance. Obviously the two are not mutually exclusive. But in
comics we tend to deal with politics in a shorthand way, that our
problems are caused by bad people doing bad things, while in the
real world problems are caused by good people doing bad things,
or even just the easy things.
DS: The plot line seemed to develop quite well over the
long run, even managing to incorporate the regular DC-wide
crossover event, War of the Gods, without too much obvious
effort. Was this planned in advance or did it develop as each
issue was written?
BML: My work is both effortless and gracefully
professional. Actually... what happened was I came up with one
paragraph springboards for issues, 6 issues at a time. Then my
editor and I would chew over them and he would make suggestions
as to how we could arc in and out of the crossovers. When the
actually crossovers hit, of course, it was like riding out a
typhoon on an ironing board.
DS: Now I have to admit I'm a Dr Fate groupie, so
I'm curious to know whether you were a fan of the character
before and also if you have followed his (so far) strange career
since?
BML: I was introduced to the character largely through
cameos in various Alan Moore books, and then the Giffin
mini-series. Like most writers I find reading books once I've
left them a hideously depressing experience, and one I try to
avoid.
DS: The loyal fans of a title can get quite vocal if
things start happening that a character "would never do". Are
these people being "no Life fan boys" or "astute critical
readers" and does this help or hinder the writer?
BML: I try to get feedback at cons, but not over the Net.
I find hard core fan reaction to my work voraciously negative -
usually I was brought in to move things in a new direction and
fans by their very nature like things as they are. So, to do my
job, I couldn't care. I thought some of my best work was going to
be on Thor and a lot of fans just hated it. Of course, I never
got the chance to win them over. Most editors will tell you that
the majority of letter writers will mourn for the guy you
replaced and hate you, until you leave, and then you become the
object of grief. Therefore, much adverse reaction is ignored out
of hand.
DS: Do you have a huge collection of comics that makes
moving house an unpleasant concept to even contemplate?
BML: Moving is ALWAYS terrible to consider, but I've given
away most of my comics. It's the accumulated detritus of a
lifetime that weighs me down.
DS: Is working on comics a full time job for you?
BML: It is, though during the current slump, I've been
working part time for the Census and trying to break into novels
and screen writing.
DS: Any ideas about the reason for the slump?
BML: All the usual suspects: Too many superheroes, greed,
a miserable distribution system, too little real innovation. But
the most interesting explanation I heard came from Gary Groth.
Gary thinks that comic books only sold really well when they were
64 pages for a dime. He thinks that when they were cut to 32
pages they started to lose readers and pretty much that trend
continued, disguised by new trends and speculation swings, for 30
years. When the last speculation binge died out there was only a
tiny percentage of true readers left. I don't think that explains
everything, but it explains a lot. And doesn't leave much that we
can correct, in the short run.
Links:
A somewhat
complete
but not quite correct William Messner-Loebs
bibliography