If Ed Brubaker is getting tired by now, he isnt showing it.
Call it a matter of creative harmony.
Brubaker likes to joke that hell know hes made it when his comics are sold at airport bookstores.
Where the Body Was cover artImage: Image Comics/Simon and Schuster
He and Phillips are coming perilously close.
He and Phillips are already onto the next book.
And the one after that.
And the Amazon-produced adaptation of Criminal lately given the go-ahead.
And speaking for myself, its hard to imagine complaining one bit.
Zach Rabiroff, io9: I hope you wont mind if I start with an editorial statement.
Ed Brubaker: I think everything we do is the best thing weve done, generally.
I felt like that was a real achievement.
io9: Thats actually something youve been talking about for quite a while.
Brubaker: No, it started with the dead body on the street.
That was always part of it.
A really small epic that took place on one street, basically.
I always really wanted to do something like that: graphically, I love stuff like that.
Its got this weird, nostalgic feel, even though its nostalgic for the 30s and the 40s.
And the inspirations for it were more literary.
io9: I think it was Robert Altman who really made that a 90s movie thing.
Brubaker: Yeah, totally.
Im not sure if you got that same sense.
Subconsciously, youre always writing about yourself, I think.
So, yeah, this is an incredibly personal work.
Palmers in his early 30s.
Everybodys slightly at a different place in their life.
io9: Did you feel like it was constricting to be working within this limited setting?
Brubaker: It was definitely a challenge, but it was more fun than anything else to me.
Then it was really about how to weave their stories around each other and in what sequence.
It was a joy to write it.
Id actually want to do another really contained thing like that at some point.
I would love to do something that all took place in a motel in the middle of nowhere.
It felt almost freeing to be able to jump around from character to character.
Brubaker: I cant remember which one its called.
I think its Appointment with Death.
Its the Poirot movie Peter Ustinov did after Death on the Nile.
I love stuff like that.
I think thats why the book is a crime story.
Everybody in the book is either a criminal or a child superhero.
io9: It certainly has the feel of something thats autobiographical to some extent.
Im not sure how true that is.
Brubaker: Some bits of it are close to things that really happened.
Theres no exact dialogue or anything like that.
You take bits and pieces of things that are happening in your life.
And thats part of what the book is about, I think.
Its that famous John Lennon quote about life is what happens while youre busy making other plans.
The older you get, the more true that feels.
Its like, How do you make God laugh?
The nature of life.
Palmer is trying to control his life.
So he doesnt end up getting very much of one.
When people were walking on the sidewalk, you knew exactly where they were.
But in general, the layout of the street was right there.
I think it was a lot of fun for both of us to do.
Weve done a few things here and there where well jump around between different characters.
Each book is a different character, really.
And in Cruel Summer, every chapter was a different character, but the story kept moving forward.
So it really jumped between character and character.
But those were still plot-driven, like a murder mystery or crime thriller.
it’s possible for you to sense the moving plot through each chapter.
It felt a lot more experimental on that storytelling level.
Like, half of Peanuts is just different characters walking and talking out loud to the reader.
So it felt like a real comic book kind of thing to do.
Ive said, Its kind of like reading a podcast.
We never question it.
Thats why there are all these epistolary novels.
Brubaker: I still do it.
I do it with the Reckless books.
I did the exact same thing, but now its literary tradition.
And the answer can be, Well, he didnt.
Its a major shift in literature.
Youre hearing his story.
He may be dead by the end of it.
Until then, people would have rioted in the streets.
Nobody reads Dracula, really, because weve seen all the movies and we know the story.
Dracula is a bunch of diary entries and letters and shit.
io9: Well, I dont see how a novel with a cowboy vampire hunter can be totally boring.
Even with Dumas and others, there was always this sense that someone was actually telling you the story.
We lost that in the 20th century at some point.
We stopped worrying about that so much.
Brubaker: Oh, yeah.
I had everything mapped out.
I wrote down everybodys stories.
Youre like, Holy shit.
Like Leopold and Loeb, Oh, I can do this thing and let myself not feel guilt.
It seems like the kind of thought experiment a shrink might have.
Brubaker: I guess.
I love being able to blend things that really matter to me into a genre story that is compelling.
io9: Why do you think that is?
Brubaker: Everythings a little bit more interesting when theres a murder mystery going on.
Look at the book Pulp that Sean and I did three or four years ago.
You could get that same stuff into just a really straight story about what was really happening back then.
Or you could do a story where some cowboys rob some Nazis and get in a big shootout.
It still has all the same context.
It heightens the drama and the emotiontheres literally a gun to your head.
Its something I noticed when I first started reading mysteries.
He wrote a series of books about a gay lawyer in San Francisco who was also Latino.
It said a lot about the Mexican community in San Francisco and the gay community in San Francisco.
Theyll reelect Marion Barry even after hes been sent to prison because he is a voice for them.
Its things like that, which I think you might write about in genre and seem less didactic.
Its just part of the world of the story that youre telling.
It goes back as far as [Dashiell] Hammett.
Hammett was hugely influential on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who didnt write crime fiction.
Thats always my thing; I want to entertain people, but its a wolf in sheeps clothing thing.
The sheeps clothing is the crime story, I guess.
Those are things that are on my mind a lot more these days.
Were always writing something reacting to our lives and our world.
Brubaker: We work exactly the same as we have for 20 years.
Its a very steady collaboration.
I dont know if theres anybody else in comics whos ever really done what we do for this long.
io9: I was thinking about that.
Whether I could even picture any other writer or artist collaborations of this length.
Were 20 years into it, and weve got something like 40 books in print.
Were working on the Criminal TV show now.
So yeah, were an incredibly prolific team.
And I think part of it is that we trust each other.
io9: I take it theres no temptation thats developed at this point to explore other partners.
Whos better than Sean?
I email with Sean every day, and I get pages from him almost every day.
Its just a great working relationship.
Youve got a good thing going.
io9: Youve certainly established a brand together, which cant have been easy.
Were like the goalpost now.
The first few years of Criminal were not a successful thing.
We had to really fight to get that book known and to build a market for it.
io9: So where do you go next?
Brubaker: I never want to try and do something that feels exactly like whatever we did before.
The next thing is really its hard to describe.
Its kind of like a Satanic Panic neo-noir.
It takes place in modern times.
io9: Right, because Satanic Panic can mean any time in 20-year cycles, so take your pick.
Its kind of a weird horror-thriller noir story about the Satanic Panic.
Its called Houses of the Unholy.
Sean said its the weirdest thing weve ever done.
So take that for what you will.
Well keep trying to keep ourselves entertained, and hopefully entertain our readership, too.
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