Image via Complex Original
In today's vast world of creator-owned comics, there's a writer for just about every type of reader. But for those who crave a guy who can do a bit of everything, there's Rick Remender.
Remender's the author of Deadly Class, which dives into a high school for assassins set in the '80s; a gorgeous adventure at the bottom of a dystopian sea in Low; and Black Science, which follows Grant Mackay and his band of "dimensionauts" fending for their lives across wildly different universes. But though his palette is diverse, his acerbic wit and emotional honesty runs through each project. Maybe it's his background growing up as a punk outcast, but Remender's take-no-prisoners writing has produced some of the most honest and raw comics in the business. "I always use the analogy that the dagger in your back is not metaphorical—it’s a real dagger in your back," he says of Deadly Class.
Today Complex has the opportunity to premiere the cover of Image's Black Science Vol. 2: Welcome, Nowhere, that's set to drop December 24. I chatted with Remender about his punker roots, the horrors of social media, and his upcoming comic, Tokyo Ghost. Oh, and none of this art has been seen anywhere else before now. Cool, right? Check out artist Matteo Scalera's impressive cover for Black Science Vol. 2 below.
Nathan Reese is a News Editor at Complex. If you want to talk comics, he's on Twitter.
The second volume of Black Science is about to launch. This is a great place for newcomers to jump in—how did you initially conceive the comic?
The original concept of "dimensionauts" is something I played with a bit in my bookFear Agent, where we did a bit of dimension hopping. It always stuck with me that it would be a great premise for an entire book: a family and a crew of scientists (at odds with one another of course), who are being propelled through these infinite dimensions. That opened up the ability to tell any kind of story I wanted to—basically changing the genre, the setting, and theme, story by story. That allowed me to say different things about anything I wanted. It was an infinite opportunity to tell any kind of story I wanted.
That was really the initial inspiration for Black Science: to be able to do anything. We've got 40 issues worth of ideas at this point. It’s just limitless.
As crazy as the events in Black Science are, the characters' motivations seem firmly rooted in reality.
I think the themes just spoke [to me]. From a workaholic father who’s dedicated himself to creating a device that, while potentially very beneficial to mankind, can also be very detrimental. He's doing a kind of research that’s not legal, and doing it to follow his anarchist credo—no authority but himself, in terms of Grant McKay. It was really just figuring out the normal, everyday soap opera of what these people are dealing with and themes that are hopefully universal—like the impassioned employee and the bureaucratic management guy who are at odds, the workaholic who ends up falling into an affair with his lab partner—the things that are believable, that ground the thing, while we then go into some very unbelievable situations.
Black Science can range from really pulpy, to very dark. How do you balance the tone?
I find that I try to create or build my own books with a sense of Saturday cartoon wonder, but tell them in a way that’s a little more mature because it’s more interesting to write it that way. I can fill crap in that got me excited by comics as a kid, while saying things about adult life that have some sort of a philosophical point of view. Hopefully it makes people think and have something to say with the stories that's beyond high adventure, beyond just soap opera, beyond just action.
Matteo Scalera's art in Black Science has been fantastic. How's it been working together?
Matteo’s been somebody I’ve been following for a while. When I was doing Secret Avengers at Marvel and we needed a new artist, I pushed to get him on that book, and we did. During the course of working together on Secret Avengers, I just fell in love with everything he does. As we continued to talk and figure out what we’d do next, Black Science seemed perfect, because it demands somebody that can realize any kind of a world that you think up. It demands somebody that can design literally anything. He’s so versatile, and his storytelling is so pitch perfect and clear that it enables me to write the kinds of scripts that I enjoy the most, which are high octane and fast-paced. We get a lot of fluid action, and it offers a very cinematic experience. We’re having a blast making it.
What's the process like when transferring the script to the page?
It’s always just perfect, a joy to behold. There’s never those moments where I cook something up when I’m concerned that Matteo's not going to be able to visually sell it. I end up with less dialogue than when I started because it’s just not necessary to convey the information. All comic books really come down to the art. I don’t think there are many examples of a great script that was translated poorly and still lead to a great comic book. I’m not writing a novel, I’m doing something that’s going to be visually interpreted by somebody. So that person’s voice, and their storytelling sensibility, and their design sense—basically everything that the artist brings, in my opinion—defines all comic books. In terms of Matteo, you can pretty much guarantee that no matter what you turn in, what’s gonna come back is going to be true to what you’re trying to accomplish, while adding new things and having an incredible sense of dynamics, but never at the expense of clarity. He’s amazing.
Of the books you're writing right now, it seems like Deadly Class is the most personal.
Well, I wrote journals through most of my late teens and into my late 30s, so it was an exercise in keeping myself writing. When I was like 19, 20, 21, 22, I wrote a lot about what had happened to me in high school and college, those sorts of things. Deadly Class has been a lot about taking those and writing it from that perspective—finding the thoughts and emotions that I was going through then, which are so different to what I’m dealing with as an adult with a family now. To reconnect with it, examine it, and put it on the page.
I think it would be a mistake to think that any of these things are entirely autobiographical. All of the characters have little pieces of things I was dealing with, or pieces of friends that I had and what they were dealing with. Then I fictionalize them and put in things that are a little more exciting, with the high-school-for-assassins idea. When somebody betrays you in this story I hope it feels true and honest to the kinds of things that are universally experienced from that age and growing up.
Do you consciously write for readers who were the same age as you were then?
That’s absolutely a large part of this. I remember being that age and there weren’t many things that felt true to my experiences. I remember finding Optic Nerve, finding Evan Dorkin’s work, and Dan Klaus, and Love and Rockets with the Hernandez brothers, and Charles Bern’s work—the indie guys of late ‘80s and early ‘90s spoke to me, but there wasn’t anything that touched on the true, ugly, honest emotions of what it was like to be an outcast at that age. To feel that hopelessness, fear, and anxiety, of all the things that you go through. Most of my mail is from people in their teens and early 20s who are currently experiencing these things, who can identify with and who can find solace that they’re not alone.
What spoke to you the most when you were a teen?
I found punk rock. I was listening to Ian MacKaye talk on Another State of Mind about how modern American youth culture is all about drinking beer and chasing tail and racing cars and playing Sammy Hegar records, and I didn’t identify with that—that misogny and the ugliness, the sort of frat mentality of that particular era and what the American youth culture was like. That stuff not only spoke to me, but informed my life—the philosophical leanings of the punk movement and the things that were going on in the mid ‘80s were the things that cooked me into the person that I am and led me to the choices that I’ve made.
Why choose the Bay Area for Deadly Class's setting?
I was working as an animator at 20th Century Fox. I was 25 and I had a house in Phoenix and a golden retriever and an alcoholic girlfriend, and I was still living within 10 miles of the high school I went to. That was going to be my life. One day I woke up and recognized that life is short and this is not the story I want for myself. So I packed up my stuff, I got rid of every possession I had, the car, the house, the dog—eventually the drunk girlfriend—and then I moved to San Francisco. I lived in the Bay Area from the age of 25 to about 34, and it was sort of like my second youth. It was a huge, huge stage of my life that really informed so much of who I am.
I took the experiences I had growing up in Phoenix—all of the violence I was surrounded by and all the drama of high school—and then mixed it with the experiences I had in those 10 years in the Bay Area. [Deadly Class] gave me an opportunity to do something that merged the two things. I just love the Bay Area, so I like exploring it some more.
Low is one of the most atmospheric comics I've ever read.
I’m glad you said "atmospheric," because that was the goal with it. This one was going to be a much slower burn. I can slow the car down and give you a chance to look out the window. Greg Tocchini and I have been working together now for five or six years. I wanted to let him, for lack of a better term, do some world-building and then drift through that world, as opposed to running through it. My instinct is normally to do that. Put it up, figure it, and then literally go through and gut my outline, gut my scripts, until what’s there is just the core essential plot beats and character beats. That was one of the goals with Low, to set that all up and to not gut it as much—to allow the pace to be slow, to allow more character building, for a more introspective analysis of the characters, as well as getting a better look at what this world is like. We’ve got like 60 issues plotted. I don’t know if we’ll have to cut a chapter or two out of it, to wrap it sooner, but in the perfect world, we’d get to all sixty issues and get Greg to slowly paint us this journey.
Even though it's slow, the reception has been great. Are you surprised that it's resonating with people?
Normally with that kind of pressure I at least have the back-up of, "okay they liked Fear Agent so I can at least do it this way and I have a good sense that people will enjoy." Or, "I built it this way in Strange Girl—this road trip style—and I paced it this way so I have something in the background I can lean on." With Low I have nothing. Low and Deadly Class were very much different creatures. The way those things were built and how I proceeded with them—I’ve been feeling uneasy the whole time. This is the kind of story that I would like to read, and this is the kind of pacing that I would like to read, but my fear was that the audience would find it too slow. That they wouldn’t want to just enjoy a slow journey through something like this. That they would prefer a high-octane action book. We’ve gotten a lot of mail and sales were strong, so I can take a little bit of a breath. This one didn’t crumble around me.
You have yet another comic coming out on Image as well. What's up with Tokyo Ghost?
That one’s launching next summer, so we’ve got a little time before it happens. Sean Murphy, the artist, is definitely one of the best in the world. He and I have been cooking this up for a couple of years now. The story is something that’s very unconventional. It’s a risk in how we’re approaching it, but it allows a lot of creative liberty and freedom, and hopefully surprises people. When it opens we’re looking at a sort of dystopic, ugly super future Los Angeles where the oceans have risen and most of LA is islands. In order to deal with the ecological collapse going on around them, the population have turned to electronics to escape. [It's an extension of] how you can’t have lunch with somebody without them checking their cellphone seven times, and that’s just a social norm. That’s just changed in the last four years to the point where nobody’s not looking at their Facebook page where they’re trying to enjoy lunch with you.
What's so compelling or scary about that technological shift to you?
Sean and I really wanted to exponentially increase that technological addiction, and dig in to what the ramifications of that might be with a population that is so removed from the physical waking world, so immersed in this artificial bullshit. As we were building on that, there was a desire to do something that merged Lobo and Judge Dredd, and some samurai story ideas that we had. So over the course of the year of development, we cooked something that's a solid three-act structure for the first 10 issues, and no act is the same as the act before.
Just looking at your books, it seems like you really like using dystopias or alternate realities to tackle contemporary issues.
I read an article once that attributed all human imagination to an evolutionary need to imagine the future to prepare for survival. I always thought that was a very interesting concept. If imagination exists, why does it exist? Evolutionarily, why did we develop the imagination at all? It doesn’t give us anything, right? But it does. And this article talked about how, as you get older, your imagination dwindles because you no longer envision yourself in a future that you have to prepare for. And I thought that was really fascinating. I think that's why I’m tickled by telling sci-fi stories that take place a little bit in the future. They can be a cautionary tale. It’s taking the things that I see now that trouble me and exponentially increasing the trouble and seeing what the consequences can be for the world.
Do you use social media in your own life?
I’ve shut down most of my online presence except for Twitter and my website. There was a point where I had a Tumblr and Facebook page. It was like opening a door to a thousand voices constantly filling my head with nonsense and garbage that created an almost ADHD effect. My attention span was drifting, I couldn’t finish whole novels, I couldn’t finish whole articles. If it wasn’t like a sound bite or a headline—like getting into the deep substance of something an author was trying to say in an article—I found my leg bopping and I couldn’t focus. I think that’s a real danger. So Tokyo Ghost is an examination of that, with a very Clockwork Orange, super, super, ultra violent, insanity mixed in.
You were prolific before with your Marvel stuff, with runs in Captain America, Uncanny Avengers, and much more, but your recent creator-owned work has really kicked into high gear with the Image releases.
I started doing creator owned comics in 1997. Then I did four books a month with Image from about 2004 to about 2008, so I’ve got a long history with the guys there. I would not have the career I have now were it not for that. The transition to Marvel was quite different and difficult for me in that I had lost that control. I had to run it by an editor who had to approve things and edit things and change things. I would compromise based on what they thought, sometimes that would lead to a better story and sometimes it wouldn’t.
Now, I take those two schools of thinking and try to vet what's working and what isn't. I’ve even brought in one of my former Marvel editors to edit one of my creator owned books. There are benefits to both sides. You can become quite self-indulgent when you’re doing a creator owned book without any other voices, when you’re not asking for help or vetting it past another person. Whereas with an editor, it can be a little constricting and the purity of your intention can be lost. I feel very lucky that I’ve had both of those experiences for the amount of time I’ve had. Now I’m doing both and for the first time I feel quite balanced in my life.
