There's no such thing as a 'typical' Matt Fraction comic book.
The Brisbane Writers Festival guest may have grown up reading comics, but he has no desire to replicate the material he was raised on. He's moving the medium forward, both through his high profile work at Marvel Comics on titles like Hawkeye, The Invincible Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, Uncanny X-Men, The Immortal Iron Fist and Fantastic Four; and through his creator-owned comics — particularly his interdimensional, idiosyncratic spy series, Casanova.
His most acclaimed work of late, Hawkeye #11, has been lauded as "the best superhero comic of the year" by Wired and "the future of superhero comics" by The AV Club, but it's not really a superhero comic at all — it's a detective story told almost entirely without words, from the point of view of Hawkeye's one-eyed dog, Lucky (aka Pizza Dog).
Currently based in Portland with his wife (fellow comic book scribe and Brisbane Writers Festival guest Kelly Sue DeConnick) and their two kids, Fraction is in the middle of one of the most productive stretches of his career. He's about to wrap up acclaimed runs on Fantastic Four and sister title FF before writing the next major Marvel event, Inhumanity.
He's also just launched two creator-owned series, Satellite Sam (with comics legend Howard Chaykin) and Sex Criminals (with comics provocateur Chip Zdarsky), and he's preparing to drop Ody-C, his sci-fi, gender-flipped take on The Odyssey, on an unsuspecting world. He's recently started writing for TV series Da Vinci's Demons. Oh, and there are still new issues of Hawkeye to write every month, too.
Somehow, Fraction took time out from all of that to talk family, funny books and moon mansions with us.
Your superhero books aren't about superhero tropes so much as they're about people. FF is about a guy dealing with the loss of his child; Invincible Iron Man was about a guy trying to overcome his own self-destructive nature; Hawkeye is about... Jim Rockford. Is this all part of your plan to make comics ‘less comic-y’?
‘Plan’!! Oh, oh I wish I was so organised and far-seeing as to make plans. I suspect it’s more about trying to find my way in to writing these long-running (in some cases) or long-existing characters that I didn’t create but rather inherit for a brief time -- to start with the characters themselves and grow out from there. The pyrotechnics and visual excitement and action stuff, the genre stuff, the superhero stuff -- it’s all meaningless if you don’t care about who it’s all happening to, I guess. Or if *I* don’t care about who it’s happening to. That’s terrible, ending sentences with prepositions. That is the kind of crap up with which you should not put.
When I read Hawkeye or FF, I don't feel like I need to be reading five other books to understand what's going on. Do you feel like Marvel and DC do a good enough job of making their books accessible to new and lapsed readers?
That’s really what I mean by ‘less comic-y’ -- like, nobody should be punished for not being a comic fan like me, meaning, a buy-new-stuff-every-week, stay-on-top-of-the-quote-unquote-news, have-a-room-full-of-boxes, sort of... uh, supernerd.
And... and, I think you’re trying to get me in trouble.
Characters like The Fantastic Four and The X-Men have massive shadows cast over them by certain creators. Does that make your job harder?
In the case of me writing on Fantastic Four, it was liberating, it was inspiring, it was, like, having permission to go nuts. That Stan [Lee] and Jack [Kirby] forged the foundation stones of the Marvel Universe in the pages of Fantastic Four was at the core of my albeit too brief time there. That said, I found it really hard to get out of Chris Claremont’s shadow when I was a part of the X-books -- a personal failing, a fannish failing, call it what you will.
I am fond of saying that writing Uncanny X-Men was the toughest job I ever loved. My wife will tell you she could always tell on what days I was writing Uncanny because I’d go stomping around the house. So on FF -- totally inspiring. On Uncanny -- crippling and smothering! Just couldn’t keep my teeth in its neck for very long.
That said -- the stuff Brian Bendis and Jason Aaron are doing right now on the X stuff is so markedly different and new and fresh and exciting. I hope they choke.
Obviously, modern superhero comics are very serious business, but how important is it for you to inject a sense of humour into your books?
Ugh. Yeah, boy, you said it. My friend Howard Victor Chaykin introduced me to this line of critique, first said by his mentor Gil Kane, about a creator who shall, as I am if not a gentleman than a wolf making occasional stabs at being gentlemanLY, remain nameless: it mistakes enormity for gravity. Comics these days do that a lot I feel.
Again I don’t really feel like, y’know, there’s no master plan in effect here, there’s no, like, cause/effect at play but... but, I don’t know, I laugh a lot in my life. My wife, my kids, my friends are all, by and large, loud and hilarious. So I feel like it’s just writing what I know?
That said, I reallllllly don’t think it hurts. In a world of chin-stubble and severed limbs and stuff, maybe a dog with a slice of pizza in its mouth isn’t the worst thing.
Grant Morrison has talked about how he strives for a musical rhythm to his comics; does music affect your work in a similar way?
In an algebraic sort of way; I’m drawn to writing for grids, especially an 8-grid (meaning four rows of two long, rectangular panels each) which breaks down into a 1/16th panel array or up to four panels or two or any kind of variation... all of which is sort of the visual equivalent of a 4/4 time signature, right? Sort of?
I think about comics way too much. Like if I was in A Beautiful Mind it’d just be stupid rectangles and squares floating around. A Banaliful Mind.
I dunno. I wrote an issue of Thor once in iambic pentameter and someone showed me a review that said I clearly hated poetry because a character that was a poet died in it. Nobody knows anything.
Hawkeye #11 — the Pizza Dog issue — was one of the most inventive comics I've ever read. Did it take a significantly longer time than usual to put that one together, or did it just flow out of you?
Yes. It took forever. I think we’d still be noodling around on it if they’d let us.
The funny thing is, it was supposed to be easy. It started off as a text-story with spot illustrations. Like, there’d be ONE drawing a page and a block of text under or beside it... anyway then [artist] David [Aja] and I realized we sorta didn’t want to do that and we just fell down the rabbit hole.
FF and Fantastic Four feel like the most family-friendly books you've worked on. Does that just come with the territory, or are you consciously trying to write comics you can read to your kids?
It was very conscious -- Iron Man and Thor, which I had been a part of for... eesh, like five years? Four years? -- were very much NOT for kids. And so much of the early Stan and Jack stuff just sparks wonder with kids, if you’ve ever shown it to ‘em. So we’d pile into bed at night and I’d read old Stan and Jack issues to them, and then when my issues came out, we’d read those.
One night my son realised I was ripping him off for Franklin [Richards] and then realised I was basically just lifting my family life. He literally said -- hey, that’s just like I do. And he gave me this very adult look. Hilarious.
How does their feedback affect the books? For that matter, how does the act of reading your dialogue out loud affect the books?
I had a Thing voice. My kids are great character generators. I owe them residuals for some of these new Inhuman characters. Bendis and I both have tapped Henry.
The other day they came up with a story between the two of them I sort of think I have to write it and sell it and buy a damn moon mansion for them with the money, it’s so good.
Annnnd and and, and reading it out loud is HORRIBLE. I usually never read it out loud, and never reread my stuff after sending it off for press. So I’d literally be, like, noting how bad my stuff was as we were reading. My poor children. Anyway, reading my stuff out loud is horrifying and I now try to do it as a part of proofreading.
Ody-C is your gender-flipped take on The Odyssey. Did your daughter influence that creative choice?
Yeah. I didn’t think they’d ever let me write Wonder Woman and I wanted her to have as classic a hero as I could muster. And, y’know. Odysseus. He’s pretty good. He’s a good one. That story? It’s pretty good. So yeah, that one is all for her.
Some of your most exciting work is being done at Image right now. Are creator-owned books dead at Marvel? What does that mean for Casanova?
I don’t think so; plans, as they say, are afoot. Do people say that? Plans are afoot?
Annnnd... Casanova will be back in 2014.
Satellite Sam is exactly the sort of book Howard Chaykin would write, and it's being illustrated by none other than Howard Chaykin. Is it intimidating to send him those scripts?
I know, right? It’s like I tricked him into drawing my Howard Chaykin fanfic. It was intimidating to pitch him. The first two were intimidating. First issues are always pigs. Awful, brutal pigs. BOARS.
First PARTS are easy. First ISSUES are murder.
And two, I just wasn’t there yet. Three, three I felt like, okay, three I felt like I got to where I wanted to be. I’d [finished] the first issue by that point, so it was easier to see it all maybe?
I don’t know if any of that makes sense.
It was never more frightening than pitching him the story initially but I just pretended I was Howard. He’s got, like -- like, if he was in a Howard Hawks movie, someone would say he had a lot of moxie.
Do you assume more of the editorial duties on your creator-owned titles? What sort of a logistical challenge does that pose?
Yeah, usually. And I’ve been very fortunate, whether it was Alejandro Arbona working on Casanova or Tommy Kuddles working on Satellite Sam and Sex Criminals -- I have smart, well-read, talented people with good taste and the ability to spot typos and have, like, patience (all things I am not/do not/can not) watching my back. But yeah, basically, it’s like a rowboat compared to a, like, Naval Frigate or something.
To what extent, if any, do you feel like your work is compromised by monthly deadlines? In an ideal world, would monthly serialisation still be the best way to tell these stories?
I need some degree of time pressure so as to not infinitely noodle around on things. I’d never deliver anything if I didn’t have to. What’s that old saw, writing’s never completed, just abandoned? That.
It’s... rules suck, let’s not talk about rules, let’s say these are shapes. Forms, right? The monthly form, the monthly shape, that I like all right. It’d be nice to get paid more so that I didn’t have to do so many a month but the actual monthiness of it all... that’s a shape I kind of dig.
I think I’d take a monthly deadline if it meant I could have more than 20 pages. I feel that’s a more difficult shape to manage. There’s a reason those first issues of Satellite Sam and Sex Criminals and Casanova aren’t 20 pages.
You've joined the writing staff for Season Two of Da Vinci's Demons. Has writing comics prepared you to write for TV, or has there been a steep learning curve?
Yeah, I think so -- that and my past life in advertising. I’m unafraid to talk up in rooms full of creative, competitive, people and have long since gotten over the anxiety attendant with hashing out ideas as soon as they occur to you. And having to obey the 20-page shape and the deadlines all helped too. It was a lot of fun.
You're appearing on a number of panels at Brisbane Writers Festival. If a student of writing was going to pull apart and study one issue of yours, which one do you think it should be?
Don’t! Screw my stuff. Go read something from Alec or Hicksville for god’s sake, there are real artists coming to this thing.
Matt Fraction will participate in five sessions (including a keynote presentation at 11:30am on Sunday September 8) at Brisbane Writers Festival from September 6-8. For all your Matt Fraction-related needs, head to mattfraction.com.
