Who doesn't love time travel? That wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nonsense is the epitome of everything we love about science-fiction. Image Comics' new mini-series that debuts this week, Comeback, takes that idea and brings it into a much more realistic world. If you enjoyed this summer's most recent cinematic time-travel adventure, Looper, then this is going to be a book that's right up your alley.
Writer Ed Brisson -- a guy who's probably lettered some of your favorite comics -- teams with artist Michael Walsh to bring you a time-travel crime story that'll have you enthralled by page five. Rather than let me ramble on, I thought I'd turn to Ed to pitch you the book himself.
Ed Brisson: Comeback is about Reconnect, an illegal time travel operation that, for a huge sum of money, will go into the past and rescue a loved one taken too soon. However, as always, there's more to Comeback than we initially suspect.
The series follows Mark and Seth, two agents working for Reconnect who get trapped in the past when a mission goes sideways. They have to figure out how to get back to their own time while being on the run from both the FBI and agents within their own organization. They're on the run and trying to find the leak in their organization that tipped the FBI to them before they're hunted down by whoever it is that's killing all of their past connections.
IGN: Where did your interest in time travel come from?
Brisson: Time travel is a concept that's always interested me, but is something that is rarely used in a way that appeals to me. For the most part, I guess I have issue with the lack of limitations on most time travel stories. I'm not interested in people going back into the 18th century or shooting forward 50 years and zooming around in flying cars. It was from that frustration that I sat down and tried to figure out an interesting way to use time travel and blend it together with crime.
For the reasons already mentioned, I really wanted to keep everything fairly limited, so when I started working the idea of time travel in, I limited it to 67 days. Now this fantastical thing is real (in the story), but is in many ways sort of unimpressive. 67 days? The goal was to take this and build a compelling story around it. For me, the more limitations you place on the situation, the more you force the characters to become inventive.
IGN: Any particular favorite time travel stories?
Brisson: Time Bandits. I've probably seen this movie 3,000 times. Funnily, it goes counter to what I said earlier. This film does so many of the things that usually irritate me about time travel, but it's just such a solid film. I discovered it when I was about 10 and used to force my parents to rent it on every second trip to the video store.
More recently. I was really impressed with Primer and Source Code. Primer gets crazy complex, but I like that they really kept it small. Source Code was just a great movie.
IGN: What complications arrive from a narrative perspective when building a time travel story?
Brisson: What complications don’t?!? When I set out to write Comeback, I had this goal where I wasn't going to over complicate things. I kept saying: I'll just keep it simple, easy to follow. Another frustrating aspect of time travel for me is when things get so convoluted that it's near impossible to unravel what happened.
The problem then becomes that in order to not fall into that trap, you have to do some pretty complex management of what happens. Trying to manage what happens in both the future and the past where you have two things happening at the same time in the past that each effect the outcome of the future and… my head is spinning even trying to talk about his.
I'll just say that it's something I've had to be careful with. In the story there's something fairly big that happens in the past that creates a huge change in the future, but has to be handled so carefully so that it still works; that this change in the past can still result the outcome that we need.
I feel like I'm talking Greek. Not even sure I'm following myself. [laughs]
IGN: Is this a case where you could see the story stemming beyond the planned 5 issues?
Brisson: Absolutely. Michael and I have already talked some about what the next arc would look like and it would be great to have the chance to explore that. The premise, I think, has a lot of potential to keep generating stories, but I wouldn't ever want to do something where we set out to do 200 issues. If we ever did more, it would be with a definite end in mind.
Brisson: Michael [Walsh, artist] and I were working on another pitch in mid-2011 called Five Years. It was essentially a pitch for a five issue Murder Book story and we were pretty excited to get it happening. Michael and I had already worked on a Murder Book story together (Settling Up). After I'd finished scripting it and while Michael was illustrating that pitch, I'd come up with the idea for Comeback and was fleshing it out.
I'd mentioned it to Michael and he asked if it would be cool to work on it together if Five Years didn't get picked up. Sometime around October of 2011, we gave up on Five Years. We'd pitched it to about 6 publishers and none was interested in picking a crime book from a couple of unknowns. The feedback was actually pretty good, but we weren't able to land a deal anywhere. So, from there, it was on to Comeback.
As for how it ended up at Shadowline/Image... that was the first and only place that we pitched the book to. Luckily Jim (Valentino) dug it and signed us up.
IGN: How did you hook up with Michael in the first place? What does he bring to Comeback?
Brisson: Well, Michael and I first met (online) back in 2010 when he hired me to letter a pitch that he'd written and drawn. I really liked his work, so after lettering the pitch for him asked if he'd be interested in working on a Murder Book story. I don't think he had any idea that I wrote, but he really seemed to dig Murder Book and jumped on board.
Something clicked when we worked on that story. I felt like we had the same sort of sensibility and I felt that his artwork and my writing really meshed well. We talked about doing a pitch together (Five Years) and basically came up with this plan where we were like: “We ARE going to get a publishing deal within a YEAR.”
It sounds sort of arrogant in retrospect, but I think what it really did was push us to just keep working and not waste time. Michael is a guy who is always working and always pushing himself, so it was great to be able to team up with someone who had that sort of energy. When Five Years didn't get picked up, we didn't dwell. We hopped right on to Comeback and had the art done by January.
In late January, we contacted Jordie Bellaire to see if she'd be interested in coloring the book. Both Michael and I are fans of her work, but thought that she'd be too in demand to take on a pitch – not even something that had a publisher. Luckily we didn't let that stop us. We decided to shoot for the stars and I sent her an email and we were incredibly lucky that she was both interested and had the availability to come on board.
In February, we pitched the book to Shadowline, just after the Image Expo and got green lit in March.
IGN: You’ve been actively working in comics in various capacities for many years. Can you talk about your history in the industry?
Later that same year, after reading and becoming heavily influenced by Joe Matt's Peep Show, I started a mini-comic called Sob Story – a series of 20 page auto-bio comics that I'd print up.The books cost me 53 cents each to print and I'd sell them out of my backpack and at record shops for 50 cents. I was losing 3 cents on every copy sold, but I was just more interested in getting the comic into people's hands. I was also writing and contributing to a lot of zines around this time.
I did three or four issues of Sob Story and managed to sell 300+ of each comic, almost all by hand. I took a break from creating comics for a couple of years and then started back up in about 2000, by doing comics for college papers while I was attending Langara College. Then I launched an online version of Sob Story that ran for about 4 years. I stopped that in 2004, adopted a pen name (due to an overbearing, micro-managing boss) and did another web comic called Hate Song for another 3 years.
In 2006, a friend of mine mentioned that the manga publisher he was working for at the time was looking for a letterer. Being that I'd been lettering my own comics digitally for a couple of years, I applied and surprisingly got the job --- surprisingly, because I'd never read manga before. There were so many things I screwed up in the test for the job that I shouldn't have been hired. My guess is that they were desperate. But, everything I needed to know was fairly easy to pick up. I'd gone to Langara to learn pre-press, which transferred nicely into that work.
From there, I kept getting lucky and landing lettering gig after lettering gig. I've done everything from manga to Avril Lavigne books to coffee table books from more traditional publishers. I've probably lettered 300 pitches for people since then and am now lettering books for Image, Shadowline, Oni, Viz and others.
When I started to pick up the lettering work, it was a way to earn extra cash to put toward my own projects, but it's since become my sole source of income. I left my dayjob in 2010 and have been lettering for a living since – something I never would have expected to be doing.
In 2010, I sat down and forced myself to start writing these projects I'd wanted to do. I was pitching things, but mostly writing and posting Murder Book short stories, trying to make them as available as possible – free to read online, print editions to sell at conventions, etc. Like I'd done with Sob Story 16 years earlier, I was really just trying to get my work into people's hands.
I managed to build up a little bit of a readership from that and have just been working on pitching to publishers ever since. At the start of 2012, I'd set a goal to try to have two pitches picked up by the end of the year. I honestly thought that it would be impossible, but I somehow managed to pull it off – it helps to have talented collaborators, that's for sure!
IGN: So you accomplished your goal, then. What else do you have coming out?
Brisson: I am writing a story for Riley Rossmo's series Dia De Los Muertos that should be out early in 2013 through Shadowline/Image. I have a second creator-owned series coming out through Shadowline, but I can't really say too much about that book right now. Beyond that, I have a third series that I'd like to pitch that I'm in the very early stages of planning. It's a project that I've wanted to do for years and am finally at the point where I feel like I can move forward with it.
Brisson: You are the first person to ask me about this. I've been anticipating this question for a while.
When I first saw a trailer for Looper back in April I nearly blew a gasket. It put me into a funk for weeks. At that point, we were just wrapping up the first issue of art on Comeback and here comes this friggin' movie that looks like the same thing we're doing – a time travel/crime story! I couldn't believe it. I was so mad. My first book with Image and people are going to think that it's a rip on this movie. For months, you couldn't say “Looper” to me without me scowling.
However, after seeing the film, I feel much better. Beyond the surface time/crime elements, Looper and Comeback have very little in common. The closest they come, in a way, is where the two do completely opposite things to one another. Looper sends people into the past to have them killed and disposed of, Comeback saves people from the past and sends them to the future to save them.
All that emotional baggage aside, I enjoyed the film. I thought that it was pretty great, although there are a few things that it did that really didn't make a lot of sense to me regarding past/future consequences, but that's probably only because my mind is so heavily buried in that stuff right now.
IGN: Anything you want to add?
Brisson: November 21st isn't only the date that Comeback hits shops, it's also Micheal Walsh's birthday!
Joey is IGN's Comics Editor and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito, or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN. He thinks Back to the Future Part III is awesomesauce.
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment