ASTRO CITY. AVENGERS. UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN. THUNDERBOLTS. These are some of the most exciting new series to hit the stands of comic shops in the past few years, and they have all emerged from the brain of one man: Kurt Busiek. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, PCC editor Matt Springer recently conducted a "virtual interview" with Busiek from the comfort of each of their homes, typing away about Busiek's current series, his taste in music and movies, and the state of the comics industry. We won't get into what they may or may not have been wearing as they composed their separate portions...

Two questions I have to ask from the outset as a good and responsible journalist, so please forgive me:

1) Can you let slip any clues as to the new Avengers lineup?

Nope.

2) Any more clues as to the "mystery Avenger"?

Nope. Gee, that was easy...

Who are your favorite all-time Avengers, and have they changed at all over the years?

I started reading AVENGERS regularly when Steve Englehart was writing it -- my favorite Avenger then was Hawkeye, and it still is, so I guess my tastes haven't changed that much. They have in other areas, though -- when I first decided I wanted to write comics, I wanted to write the X-Men. I no longer have an itch to do that, but that desire to write Iron Man, once it got going, has never faded.

Other Avengers I like include Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Wonder Man, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, the original Swordsman, Mantis, the Beast (easy to tell when I got into the book, isn't it?), Quicksilver, Giant-Man and the Wasp. But that doesn't mean those are the only characters I'm going to use -- especially in the case of the dead ones. I think there are plenty of other Avengers that are good characters, and I'd never limit the team just to my favorites. There are too many other factors -- keeping the interactions fresh, the team roster balanced, and so forth.

Can you let any details slip as to your long-term creative plans, in terms of villains or even themes you'd like to explore through the World's Mightiest Heroes?

Well, they're fighting Morgan le Fay right now, and we've got plans for Whirlwind, the Squadron Supreme, the Supreme Intelligence, Moses Magnum, the Grim Reaper, the Thunderbolts, Ultron and plenty of others, including new characters and classic ones.

I'm not big on "theme," though. The best discussion of theme I've ever seen, in THE FICTION EDITOR by Thomas McCormack, pretty well demolishes traditional ideas of theme and instead argues that the writer's intent -- whether it's to impart a message, explore an idea, evoke a feeling or anything else -- is what matters, rather than any narrowly-defined sense of "theme." On that score, I'd just like to get readers to see the Avengers as I do, as something stirring and majestic, as the "senior varsity" of the Marvel Universe, with the weight of their history and traditions behind them even if the team members at the moment weren't there when that history happened. It's more a sense of atmosphere, of banners and muted trumpets, that to me makes the team the Avengers, distinct from the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Justice League or anyone else.

If I can get that across, I think I'll be doing fine.

How does it feel to be writing characters (in both the Avengers and Iron Man) that you've followed and loved for so much of your life? Is it creepy or weird to go from reading about Tony Stark's alcoholism to deciding whether or not to reference it in the actual pages of IRON MAN?

It's not creepy or weird. It's fun. I've been coming up with ideas for these characters -- particularly for Iron Man -- for twenty years or more, and it's a thrill to be able to get to use them. I get to be the guy who brings these folks to life now, and that's a blast. In some ways, it's like writing a historical novel; it's just that the history is fictional. But I have to do the research and stay true to the record just as I would if I was writing a novel about, say, Erwin Rommel. I get to be informed by the past even as I bring the character into the future -- if I found that creepy, I wouldn't do it.

You're writing Avengers and Iron Man, you've done Spider-Man, and I know you've mentioned that you'd love to write Hal Jordan someday. What other DC or Marvel heroes are you itching to get a chance at writing?

Those are the big ones. I'd love to write KAMANDI or JASON'S QUEST at DC, and I suppose it'd be fun to get a crack at the FF or Wonder Woman or Blue Beetle someday. But honestly, if I was in the Superhero Supermarket Sweep and could grab anyone I wanted, I'd go for Iron Man and the Avengers first (making sure Hawkeye was in the mix somewhere), Hal Jordan as Green Lantern next, and then I'd have to stop and think for a little while...

In other interviews, you've said that the name of your company, Juke Box Productions, is inspired by your philosophy behind a great comic book, which should be as brief, brilliant, and memorable as a great pop song. What kind of music has inspired you as a creator? Are there albums or songs you've returned to time and again throughout your life as you write?

Hmm. That's not a question I've thought about much. There's plenty of music that's inspired me, from the soaring beauty of Emmylou Harris's voice to the bite of a Warren Zevon or the energy of early Tom Petty, but I don't know how directly any of it's affected my writing. It's more a feeling than anything else -- that philosophy you mention above is encapsulated in the sound of Nick Lowe's PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE, but I can't do more than cite it as an example of the clean hit you get from a pop song that just _works_, which should be present in a comic that works, too.

Would that be why you seem to prefer single-issue stories (along with the ease at which new readers can pick them up)?

I don't "prefer" single-issue stories per se -- I think even single chapters of multi-part stories can be structured and told so that they work as units by themselves as well as pieces of a whole. I like a mix between one-issue stories and longer stories -- always with the understanding that even Chapter 4 of 7 should introduce the characters and the situations, and resolve something, so the reader feels he or she had gotten somewhere by reading that one issue.

I've also read that you really enjoy the Stiff Records-era ironic rock, stuff like Nick Lowe and Graham Parker. Do you think that kind of irony manifests itself in your work?

I love that Stiff-era stuff, and in fact have both the Stiff Boxed Set and Live Stiffs in my CD player, along with a number of albums by Stiff alumni. I don't know if I hit the same kind of ironies they do; they tend more toward cynicism than I do. But I think there's an interplay between sentimentalism and irony in my work, and the irony's got to be at least partially informed by Lowe and Parker and Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello. On the other hand, if I could write a comic as joyfully doofy as Madness's "Baggy Trousers," I could die happy...

This is definitely a tough question, but if you could take any five albums onto a desert island, which would they be?

Five albums, let's see...

PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE, Nick Lowe
LUXURY LINER, Emmylou Harris
WARREN ZEVON, Warren Zevon
THE HOAGY CARMICHAEL COLLECTION, Hoagy Carmichael et al
LINCOLN, They Might Be Giants

Ask me again tomorrow, and I'd probably have a different list, but at the moment, I think those five'd cover a solid range of moods.

I'm also curious about your taste in films. What kind of movies do you enjoy seeing? Are there films that have acted as creative talismans throughout your career?

I find myself returning to a few movies over and over again, movies that strike a certain chord in the way they use language well and dialogue that tells us a lot without putting it all on the surface. Robert Towne's TEQUILA SUNRISE, for instance, or James L. Brooks's BROADCAST NEWS. SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE's a terrific movie to watch for the way the screenplay works, too -- just check out how much exposition and characterization gets established in the first few minutes, and how elegantly. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. SAY ANYTHING. THE BIG CHILL and BODY HEAT. HIS GIRL FRIDAY. CASABLANCA. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. I'd love to get a copy, someday, of the original cut of HEAD OVER HEELS, before they chopped off the perfect ending and rereleased it as CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER (the title of the novel it's based on). THEY ALL LAUGHED. BULL DURHAM.

Some recent movies that I expect I'll be getting on laserdisc (or DVD, sigh) include AS GOOD AS IT GETS, for some really quirky, unpredictable characters, and GOOD WILL HUNTING, for solid melodrama told through distinctive, well-crafted dialogue, and GROSSE POINTE BLANK, for its ambivalence and great use of metaphor.

Of course, I've got both DIE HARD and MORTAL KOMBAT in my laserdisc collection, too. I like to see things blow up and people hang off bridges, and my wife and I will go see the dumbest stuff sometimes, just to decompress from the week. But then, I am a superhero fan...

I suppose it could be said that the comics industry is "in trouble," though (as many have pointed out) it's also true that things seem to be cyclical in this industry and we're just due for an upswing. What do you think needs to be done to move us toward that upswing in popularity and sales?

I don't think upswings just happen, and I think they've largely been illusory. If you look at the overall sales history of comics since the late Thirties, the trend is steadily downward after about 1947, disguised by the emergence of Marvel Comics in the Sixties (which didn't make sales go up industry-wide, it just boosted Marvel over DC) and the direct market boom of the Eighties (which was a matter of selling comics more efficiently to a smaller audience, but not bringing in new readers). I hate to be a doomsayer, but I don't think we're going to "grow" out of the current slump in any sort of organic manner -- I think the way out is through starting over, through trying new ways to reach the general consumer out there.

Comics are not unpopular in this country -- comics strips are widely read, and book collections of them sell extremely well. And even superheroes aren't unpopular, judging from the success of them on TV and in the movies. But the traditional comic book package isn't popular, and I think we've worked hard (if unintentionally) to make it that way. It started back in the Forties, when publishers chose to cut pages rather than raise prices -- resulting in a package that was affordable to kids, but no longer competitive with other magazines, so newsdealers no longer made the same profit from comics. I think that, more than any uproar over content, was what hurt comics back then, and through the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, I think the overall picture of the comics industry is one of dwindling display space, dwindling outlets, and consequently dwindling readers. And that kind of decline is next to impossible to reverse, because once a store eliminates comics from their product mix, how are they going to know to bring them back?

That's the situation until the late Seventies, when the major publishers take their first steps into the direct market, and discover that they can make more money selling more efficiently. The direct market really isn't designed to bring in new customers, but it sure serves existing customers well, and I think that's why the direct market boom lasted for just about a generation. When we started aiming comics at existing readers, it became more important to "keep" a reader than to "catch" one -- and the content of the comics changed to reflect that. Continued stories kept readers on board by not giving them jumping-off points, and stories that continued into other series got them to buy series they otherwise wouldn't have. Recaps and character introductions atrophied, since the bulk of the readers didn't need them. And the whole language of mainstream comics changed, as we tried to constantly up the energy level for experienced readers rather than keep comics clear and readable for newcomers.

But all that only went so far -- until the regular readers realized they were being rooked, being forced to buy platinum-covered up-priced specials and tie-in mini-series and sprawling multi-series epics that promised a lot of bang but only pointed readers toward the _next_ big non-revelation, and so on. The regulars started to quit, and we weren't bringing in new readers to replace them -- how could we, when your average member of the target audience rarely saw comics, and if he did they were impenetrable and chaotic, demanding that the new reader buy several series for a period of months even to figure out who the characters were, much less whether he liked the stories.

The price has now crept back up so that comics aren't that much less expensive than regular magazines, but they're an awful lot thinner. The average comic costs about a dime a page -- which is worth it if you know what you're getting, but a newcomer doesn't know that. We're trapped in a format that's too expensive for browsers to pick up on impulse, too cheap for non-direct-market retailers to give it display space, and too often forbidding to new readers.

Then what's going to "save" the industry? Could the answer possibly lie in a digest format, like that used for Japanese manga?

I don't think there's a way out of that mess -- a lot of us are trying to make comics comprehensible on an issue-by-issue basis again, but that doesn't solve the price problem, or the distribution problem, or the display space problem. I think what needs to be done is to back up and take another run at it, starting with the kind of package comics were in when they were last a mass medium in this country -- thick, entertaining packages that compete economically with other magazines and deliver value for money, comprehensible stories, approachable characters, and material aimed at a wide readership.

That plays into the "manga format" you mention, at least to a degree, but I don't think we can just change the format and the content and expect readers to find us. The mass audience in the mountain, and we are Mohammed. We have to go to them, not expect them to come to us, not after we've spent decades chasing them away.

Unfortunately, that takes money. Millions of dollars. I don't think it can be done on a shoestring, since the problems of content, packaging, distribution and promotion have to all be solved at once. But I think it can be done, and I hope it happens.

Could you explain some of the early history of THUNDERBOLTS? Where did you get this concept, and how exactly did it develop?

I've always been interested in villains, particularly villains who reform--it's no surprise that Hawkeye's my favorite superhero, that ALIAS SMITH AND JONES used to be my favorite TV show, or that Donald Westlake's crime novels, both the comic Dortmunder ones and the deadly-serious Parker ones, are favorites. And THUNDERBOLTS wasn't the first time I wrote about villains -- LIBERTY PROJECT and REGULATORS took different roads into similar territory.

What became THUNDERBOLTS started out as an Avengers idea. I like to keep myself alert on long car trips by mentally assigning myself certain series and seeing what I can come up with for them. On one such trip, I was playing around with ideas for AVENGERS, and riffing off the fact that the team often changes its membership, I wondered how it would work out if, over a year, most of the members cycled out and new members cycled in -- only to reveal, at the end of the year, that the team now consisted of Masters of Evil in disguise, and a vastly-outnumbered Captain America. The idea sounded like it could work, but it had drawbacks -- would the audience support a team of unknowns until they found out the truth? Could you effectively characterize that many characters without blowing the secret? If the readers liked the new heroes, would they turn on the book when the rug was pulled out from under them? And so on.

But I filed the idea away, thinking I might get to use it in some form. Then, years later, Onslaught happened, and Marvel invited me -- and a pile of other creators -- to a conference aimed at figuring out how to deal with the Marvel Universe post-Onslaught. While I was getting ready to go, I remembered the villains-as-heroes idea and realized it would work even better as its own series. Such a team could win over the public in the wake of the loss of virtually all the classic, trustworthy, comforting heroes, and that'd put them in place to take advantage of that public trust in a pretty big way. So I called Tom Brevoort, my editor on UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, and pitched the idea to him. He liked it, so once I got to the conference, the two of us cornered Bob Harras in the conference center bar and pitched it at him. He thought about it for about fifteen seconds, and said, "Sounds good. Let's do it."

The rest was a matter of picking the team, figuring out how best to introduce them, and just rolling from there.

Were there any villains you considered for inclusion in the Thunderbolts, but dropped? Any plot bits you wanted to get to in the first year of the series, but couldn't?

I wanted to use the female Yellowjacket, at first, but quickly discovered that she'd both reformed already and been killed, so she wasn't an option. So I went with Screaming Mimi, and found a way to make her interesting to me. I can't think of any plot bits we didn't get to use, though I'm sure there were some -- I tend to plot thirty page stories and have to trim them or squash them into 22 pages, so stuff gets left by the wayside. But nothing comes to mind.

I know that comics are often plotted months in advance, and that you had a firm outline for the Thunderbolts probably for a long time. But did that outline get any tweaking as time went on? In other words, has this whole nefarious plot been in your head since the title was launched, or were any of the blanks filled in later?

We stuck pretty closely to the outline I had planned for the T-Bolts, though it was a fairly loose outline. We knew that they'd get exposed around the time the heroes returned, but I didn't know at the start that Zemo would blow the whistle himself. I knew that his plan would involve using the team's security clearance to get access to military computer systems worldwide, but didn't know he'd use the bio-modem (I didn't even invent that until working on the TEAM-UP issue that introduced it), or that he'd end up on a satellite. We didn't know that Techno would die, or a dozen other details. We knew what direction we were going in, and where we had to get to, but a lot of the details got filled in along the way.

Perhaps the most powerful moment in THUNDERBOLTS to date (at least for me) was Zemo's amazing line in issue #10: "Control hope, and you control all!" It seemed to work on two levels: Zemo controlling the hopes of his teammates, and the Thunderbolts as a whole manipulating the hopes of a public hungry for heroes. Was this your goal thematically all along? Is it safe to call THUNDERBOLTS an exploration of "hope," or is that reading too deeply?

Beats me. I've learned by now that there's a lot that goes into a series that isn't necessarily intentional, and I can see stuff coming together that I didn't start off with the intention of getting to that point.

The focus on hope started in the flashback issue, as a means of tying together a bunch of unrelated vignettes into a coherent story. But it wound up feeding into the present-day story, as the crushed hopes (or newly-awakened hopes) of the T-Bolts got manipulated by Zemo (whose father first made the hope line concrete) and Meteorite (who controls others through their hopes). When I started out, I was more thinking about what makes some characters heroes, and what makes them villains, if it's opportunity or inclination or what -- and the various characters' motivations were an important reason they were chosen for the team. But opportunity and motivation have a lot to do with what we hope for and whether we get a chance at it, so I suppose it was a case of boiling the initial stuff down into a more poetically-phrased idea.

We'll have to see if we're still playing with hope issues in a year, I guess...

Where do the Thunderbolts go from here? Will this become the story of a team on the run, or will there be some heroic stability arriving in the future?

Or will we do something else? I can't tell you, I'm afraid -- that's what we put out the book to answer, and I'd rather the stories themselves did the answering.

Let me toss your own words back at you for a sec. Here's a comment from an interview with Ray Mescallado for Overstreet Fan: "Expectations exist to be confounded, and assumptions to be questioned." A lot of your writing seems so intently focused on thwarting expectation--taking the archetypes behind superheroes and toying with them in ASTRO CITY, for example, or the recent plot twists in THUNDERBOLTS. Is this a conscious creative decision on your part, in the sense that you will anticipate expectation and then deliberately thwart it? Or are you more focused on creating a good story, whether it fits what a reader expects or not?

It's not a conscious decision in that I've chosen deliberately to mess with the readers. It's more a matter of where my interest lies. If I'm plotting a story, and it just follows the traditional patterns, it's as likely to bore me as it is to bore the readers. So I ask myself where else can we got from this set-up? What happens if things go clack when you expect them to go click; what are the repercussions of that? And the stories come out of asking questions like that, out of trying to make the story interesting enough for me. I'm a reader too, after all, and I'm as prone to boredom with the familiar as other readers are.

Could you comment on some of the great artists you've worked with over the course of your career? Let's start with Pat Oliffe.

Pat's got a great sense of storytelling -- he can boil down a scene into a few well-chosen panels that make clear what's happening, where it's happening, and who's doing what, and he infuses the characters with facial expressions and body language that do more than half the job in getting their part of the story across. Plus, he designs great characters.

For the most part, he didn't have a lot of story input on UNTOLD TALES, though I was always open to it. I'd plot the stories and he'd draw them, but he really made them lively and fun.

How about Ron Frenz?

I haven't worked with Ron that much--two issues of UNTOLD TALES, I think, and one of those was co-plotted by Roger Stern. But Ron shares a lot of the same characteristics as Pat (not surprising, since they share a studio)--clarity, energy, solid visual characterization. I'd love to do more with Ron.

Your collaborator on AVENGERS, George Perez?

George is a whirlwind of enthusiasm and energy -- he puts so much into a page that you'd think it would be too crowded to work, but it's always clear, it's always readable, and it's full of the most amazing stuff. He and I don't co-plot AVENGERS, but he adds to the plots, throwing in invented bits of business or character reactions or whatever, so what turns up on the page is his as much as it's mine. Whenever I get a package of art pages, it's a revelation -- what's there on the page is the story I plotted, but it's so much bigger and grander than I imagined it that it takes me a few days to get used to it to the point that I can script it. Amazing stuff.

And how about Alex Ross?

Alex is amazing in a whole different direction. Like George, he thinks everything through in excruciating detail, but unlike George, he doesn't do a lot of improvisation. He wants to know everything there is to know about the story and the characters before he puts pencil to paper -- he wants a full script, so he knows everything the characters are saying, and he wants to know why it's all happening, what's going on underneath the story. Working with Alex on MARVELS was a rare treat, since it was the first time I'd worked with someone as obsessive as I am. It started as his idea, and he and I fleshed it out into a detailed proposal. Tom deFalco wanted changes that kept the core idea but threw out all the stories (basically, he asked us to scrap the idea of adding new events for Phil to witness, and instead have him witness and react to already-established events from Marvel history, which transformed the series), and at that point I worked up new stories, keeping the underpinnings and character thoughts Alex and I had worked out, but framing new events around them. So Alex didn't have as much input into the details of the stories as we'd planned, but he had enormous input into the understructure. It was a challenge to work that way, but a thrilling one that made me a better writer, and I've looked for more of that kind of challenge since.

Are there any artists you're dying to work with out there that you haven't yet?

Oh, there's a ton of artists I'd love to work with, from Alan Davis to Jerry Ordway to Walt Simonson to Stu Immonen to Alex Toth to Carlos Pacheco and on and on.

Can you ever see yourself collaborating with another writer? I'd love to see a Waid/Busiek project someday.

I have collaborated on a few projects -- with Steve Mattsson, Tom deFalco, G.L. Lawrence and Roger Stern -- but the closest I've come to collaborating with Mark Waid was the last two issues of VALOR, which were part of the "End of an Era" six-parter. He was writing LEGIONNAIRES, Tom McCraw was writing LEGION, I was writing VALOR, and we traded around a lot of ideas and suggestions. That's the best way to do it, I think -- in my formal collaborations, I think the results have been decent, but not as good as either writer could do on their own. So I love to throw ideas back and forth with Mark, who's a good friend, but I think I'd rather see any finished work have those ideas filtered through one writer's vision, rather than a compromise between two.

Unlike many other comics creators, you seem to be happy and content just writing comics, as opposed to using comics as a springboard into film or television. Do you have any major plans or dreams for other creative mediums, or are you a comics "lifer"?

I think I'm a lifer. Other forms intrigue me, and I'd like to write a novel someday--I've written some prose fiction, and I've been a literary agent, so I delude myself that I understand that end of the business--but when I think seriously about writing for TV or the movies, I don't really thrill to the idea. The writing sounds like fun--the actual sitting down and working up a story and getting it onto paper, learning screenplay form, all that creative stuff--but the selling of it, and the rewriting, and the changing it to please actors, directors, producers, advertisers and god knows who else is the part that sounds like hell. I admire people who can do that and produce good work, but I'm happier in a tighter collaboration. It only takes a few people to put together a comic, and I find it immensely satisfying to work in that kind of collaboration.

Every now and then, I realize that comics are in trouble, and maybe I should make some effort to get a toe into TV and/or movies just in case. But then I go to LA, to talk to someone who's interested in an ASTRO CITY movie or something like that, and I leave thinking that I'd rather put that effort into getting the comics industry healthy again, so I can stay doing comics for the rest of my life. It just sounds like more fun--at least to me.