In the final installment of their conversation, Review Fix’s Alan Hawkins and Dark Horse’s John Ostrander discuss the future of comics and entertainment media, the influence of Shakespeare, character ethos and how to connect with readers, and we learn a secret or two about Jahan Cross, the Agent of the Empire.
Review Fix: Do you have any thoughts on comics in print vs. smart phones and tablets and the like?
Ostrander: Well, the way comics in print right now goes, is for the most part you have the monthly pamphlet size, which is generally 22 pages of story. But then X amount of issues are generally gathered into a trade paperback as we call it, which is then sold as a collected edition. Usually at Dark Horse we plot our story arcs to be five issues long so that they’ll make one complete story arc for the trade paperback, which will provide a complete read for you. The objective of the monthly pamphlet has been to basically absorb the costs of creating the work so that when it’s gathered together [as a TPB] it’s basically a profit center.
However the digital is going to change this tremendously I think. It’s been coming the past couple of years, and now it’s coming in a very big rush. Dark Horse just announced that they’re going to be offering their books on sale digitally the same day as they’re available in the stores. Previously they had delayed it by about a week, as have some of the other publishers. But there is money to be made on that and I think the monthly comic book as published is going to be on the way out eventually, probably sooner than later. They can create the same material and then publish it later as a trade paperback if people want it. But just put it on sale digitally, which costs a lot less to them. There’s no printing, there’s no paper, there’s no transportation fees and so on. It’s actually more economical to do it that way. So I think they’ll do that. And it’s also better for creators who create their own work. You can now get that out there digitally without going through a major publisher.
Review Fix: But you think there will still be a place for paper somewhere in there, like special TPB editions right?
Ostrander: Yeah, I think generally trade paperbacks have their own market. They’re good to market in different bookstores, even at airports. There are people who like to have the feel of paper. For instance I was offered a newspaper subscription recently. They would send me the paper three days a week and digitally the rest of the week; I said no thank you. I like to read my morning newspaper at the breakfast table. I think the same will be true for those who like having the print. An analogous situation would be that we’ve seen with music, that LP records have actually made a comeback in a niche market. So I think there will always be a market in some ways for print. Will it be expansive enough? I don’t know, but it will always be there.
Review Fix: I see and you mentioned TPBs in airports. That’s an interesting thought. Do you feel that comics have grown up a bit?
Ostrander: Yeah, take the biggest selling movies recently, the superhero stuff and that doesn’t even include the stuff that starts as comic books that people don’t usually associate with it. For instance, the movie “Road to Perdition†was a graphic novel first, so was “A History of Violence.†There’s a whole bunch of things. And the nice thing about a trade paperback is, if you’ve got a two-to-three hour plain ride you can probably read the whole thing.
Review Fix: Right, so it fits neatly into that market. And it’s good that you brought that up because the next thing I wanted to get into is the connection between comics, movies and video games. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.
Ostrander: In some ways the Japanese pushed this forward with the whole idea of anime/manga going to movies, to TV and to video games. And increasingly publishers or owners of the intellectual properties are seeing, not just in one field but in others, a big selling video game will have as big a weekend as a major blockbuster. It’s as important an event to the people who own the intellectual property, as a major movie would be.
Review Fix: Do you think you can go the other way? Can you get a good comic book out of a movie or a video game?
Ostrander: Yeah they’re trying to. There have been comics based on the Halo game, Joss Whedon’s “Serenity†and “Firefly†series have appeared in some miniseries over at Dark Horse. Speaking of Joss Whedon, he took “Buffy the Vampire Slayer†and he did what would have been the next season in a comic book series, I think it was 50 or 60 issues, so he called that Season 8, and they’re now doing Season 9; and Whedon is overseeing and in some cases writing them. So they are as much canon for Buffy as if they had appeared on television.
Review Fix: And they’re doing well are they?
Ostrander: The Buffy comics sell very well. I don’t know how currently they’re selling, but when Season 8 was out it was often top 10 or top 20.
Review Fix: How do you think the tastes for the audience and readership of comic books may have changed in recent years?
Ostrander: Well there is a certain percentage of the non-comic-book-reading public that thinks they’re kids stuff. Far from it, the majority of comic book readers are adults, and with considerable disposable income in some cases. So I think that, particularly in the time since I’ve been here working in comics, they’ve become more and more adult centered, sometimes to the detriment of comics. I think that there needs to be more comics out there to get the kids back into it. Because right now they’re going basically just to video games or somewhere else, and if we lose those readers we may never get them.
Review Fix: I’m interested in your explorations of ethics and morality, like in the Specter, and in how your early life at Seminary may have affected your writing. Do you sometimes have a situation in mind, or a particular end or moral to the story that your characters are designed to explore?
Ostrander: Well actually I don’t try to write answers I try to write questions, and explore those questions in such a way as to let the reader answer it. That way the reader is involved in the story and they’re not told what to think. Yes, I’ve written stories that have a strong viewpoint, one way or the other, but I try not to write and say ‘well this is the answer’ because I don’t believe in that.
Review Fix: So you may have a few characters who have a strong angle to them, but it’s never clear who is the “bestâ€?
Ostrander: Right. I’ve said over the years that Shakespeare is one of my influences. And the influence that Shakespeare has is how he wove the themes, or the moral questions that he wanted to talk about, into the plot. It was always part of the plot. [His characters] talk about certain things because it was vital that they be considering this or that. So as a result the thoughts came out, but they were always part of the plot. Story to me is what matters most.
Review Fix: So is that sort of thing going to be seen in Agent of the Empire and can you give some other examples?
Ostrander: Suicide Squad- they were supposedly doing things in the interest of the country, but they were using bad guys to do it and they did bad things, so where was the moral standpoint? With Grimjack, one of the questions I asked is ‘how do you make a moral choice in an amoral world?’
You have to find the right story for the questions that you want to ask. The Specter was a good place to do those explorations of good and evil, of redemption and of judgment, because that was part-and-parcel of the whole concept of the character. I’m interested in a lot of different things, but I try not to shoehorn something into a series where it doesn’t belong.
Review Fix: Are there were certain moral questions you are fascinated by, which might be the inception point for a character or a whole series to arise?
Ostrander: Yeah, with Agent of the Empire as we’ll see in the first arc, our lead character, Jahan Cross has reasons why he’s working for the Empire. He does not care for chaos, and he believes the Empire is the best shield against chaos. He’s had first hand experience with it, as we’ll see in the story. So that’s what shapes and forms him.
The questions we’ll see as we go along are: ‘how far will he go for that / does he have any moral standards of his own / will he transgress those, if that is what is necessary to achieve his mission?’ So we’ll play around with those ideas, you know; can you hang on to your own personal code of ethics if you’re working for something like the Empire that may not have those?
I don’t propose to make it front and center in anything. It’s one of those things that happens along the way. I don’t want Cross to stop and have this deep conversation with himself because that’s just not what goes on in Star Wars. But I want those questions to be in there, and particularly to let the reader voice those. With reading (more so than other things like movies and television) it really requires that linkage; that the reader is doing their part, that they are contributing though their own imagination and they’re involving their minds and hopefully their hearts.
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