I’m not sure what you can expect from me post-wise beyond the usual thrice-weekly reviews, but you know, keep your eyes peeled. I’ll be working for CBR at the show, so look around there, too.

* Curt Purcell liked The Dark Knight less than I did, it turns out, but I still think his is the most cogent explanation of why the ending felt out-of-balance, and what could have been done to fix it, that I’ve seen so far.

* Matthew Yglesias points out that there’s almost no conceivable reason this movie was rated PG-13 rather than R aside from the MPAA simply rolling over for a great big studio’s great big blockbuster. Seriously, children, even older children, have no business being at this movie. Not only would it scare them, I think it’ll be tough for them to appreciate the themes. And the length–there have been 2 1/2 hour movies that kids have loved in the past, sure, but those have tended to have Ewoks or Orcs in nearly every frame, not serious men in neckties debating ethics.

* While I enjoyed the film a good deal, if you take this quote from Heidi MacDonald and swap out Batman Begins for The Dark Knight…

we didn’t think BATMAN BEGINS was the Dostoyevsky-level masterpiece most fellows think it was.

…you’ll get how I feel about it. It was a good movie and it’s growing on me as we speak, but No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood it wasn’t, and as you see an increasing number of statements like “Take away the Batsuit and the clown make-up and you’ve got an all-time-great crime movie” you’d be well advised to compare it to actual all-time-great crime movies and keep this in mind. Heidi groks this, which I appreciate.

* The part of David Edelstein’s now-infamous-in-fandom pan of TDK that struck me the most was when he specifically lambasted its action choreography, which I thought was quite strong, by unfavorably comparing it to BB‘s, which i thought was horrendous no matter if that was what they were deliberately going for.

* Similarly, I still remember when Jim Henley called my review of Batman Begins picayune and wrongheaded–I used it as a tagline for the whole blog for a while–so it’s funny to watch the tables turn and see him be harder on The Dark Knight than I was on specific points where I really gave BB the business–the dialogue, the costume, and the Bat-voice, for example. Still, he mostly liked it and gives his usual smartly reasoned reasons for doing so.

* Which reminds me, SFF publisher Tor has launched a new web presence centered on pretty terrific thinkblog anchored by Jim (their superhero correspondent) and his fellow ADDTF fave Bruce Baugh (who’s working the RPG beat). Notable posts thus far include Jim’s common-sense note that mainstream audiences do, in fact, like superheroes, duh, and that the comparative obscurity of superhero comic books has more to do with the format than the genre. If you said this kind of thing back in 2003, which I did (warning: like all my posts from that era, this one goes to 11), Dirk Deppey, Chris Butcher, and Tim O’Neil would kick you out of the art club. (J/K, guys! LYLAB!)

* Back on Bruce B.’s home blog, he’s put up a twofold post I really appreciated regarding Zach Snyder. First, in light of recent, somewhat vapid interviews he’s given regarding Watchmen, Bruce suggests that the director is better at making movies than talking about them, and that that’s fine. Second, he has a brief but detailed and full-throated defense of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake as far more thoughtful filmmaking than even many of its defenders give it credit for.

* Meanwhile, Matthew Perpetua says that Watchmen trailer’s use of a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and overall ’90s/early-’00s-ness in terms of its superhero imagery is a deliberate bait and switch on Snyder’s part, in the same way that the original comic used contemporary superheroisms in order to subvert them. How about that?

* Also on the Watchmen beat: At AICN, Matthew “Ozymandias” Goode speaks to Capone about his character and the film, revealing that he concocted a backstory for the character that involves Nazi Germany, which isn’t so hot, and that he looks a lot like David Bowie, which is.

* Grant Morrison discusses Final Crisis and Superman Beyond at length in an interview with Newsarama’s Matt Brady that will also hopefully continue to increase Geoff Johns’s hipness quotient, since as usual Morrison goes on and on about how good his stuff has been lately.

* I’m not sure if I ever blogged it, but Morrison also relaunched his website recently, putting a “blog” section behind a registration wall that’s really worth climbing. The most recent entry practically bursts with enthusiasm for The Dark Knight, which it compares to the book version of Watchmen in terms of the impact he thinks it will have on superheroes in its medium. He then gushes about the movie version of Watchmen, and indulges in yet another of his periodic, richly entertaining insults of Alan Moore, whom he derides as a grumpy old fundamentalist operating on counterculture-approved lines for wanting nothing to do with Hollywood in general and this movie in particular.

* Some SciFi Channel exec says Battlestar Galactica will return for its final episodes beginning January 2009, and that its prequel Caprica may go straight to series instead of being aired first as a backdoor-pilot TV movie. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking during ABC’s fall season press tour, Lost mastermind Damon Lindelof compares the upcoming season of Lost to The Two Towers in that it serves as a bridge to the final act yet has to be satisfying in its own right. (Via The Tail Section.) Sadly, this is as close to Lindelof as I’m going to get for the time being, since I have other commitments during the San Diego Lost panel.

* Hubba hubba: Very talented comics artist Cliff Chiang is posting pinup-style portraits of great women from nerd entertainments. (Via J.K. Parkin.) My personal favorite is his Teela from He-Man (I know it’s technically called Masters of the Universe, but I never asked my brother if he wanted to play Masters of the Universe with me):

* Finally, Jesus!

(Now there’s a play-on-words you’re not gonna see a lot of!)

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.

The Dark Knight, I’m legitimately happy to say, is superior to Batman Begins in nearly every conceivable way, but the most important one is definitely the script. I’ll tell you, watching this thing makes it even easier than it was before to blame superhero-hack David S. Goyer for the gaping plot holes, leaden dialogue, and wild internal inconsistencies that had me ready to storm out of the theater watching this film’s predecessor. In fact, since the entire moral lynchpin of this film–whether or not Batman could or should kill the Joker, and what it means for him and for Gotham City if he won’t–is completely invalidated by Batman’s murder of Ra’s al Ghul (and that’s exactly what it was, folks) at the end of the first film, this makes ignoring Begins not just fun but practically necessary.

I feel like this movie got what Batman’s about much better than Batman Begins, too. The first film portrayed him as a neurotic, driven to distraction by crime, obsessed with fear, and repeating those two words over and over again like Rain Man. This movie drops those leitmotifs almost entirely, giving us a character it makes sense for the public to refer to as the Caped Crusader–a guy who, when a Chinese mob financier skips town, flies to Hong Kong, cuts off the electricity to his goddamn skyscraper, glides in on his Bat-cape, beats the snot out of his guards, grabs him, leaps out of a building on a hot-air balloon that a jet then snags to whisk them away, and brings the dude back to Gotham, dropping him unconscious on the steps of police HQ with a note to deliver him to Jim Gordon. Gone are the days when his primary on-screen crimefighting sequence involved running over police cars for some reason. Even Christian Bale’s growly Bat-voice seems to work better here, perhaps because his actions better match the superhuman conviction his monster voice implies. (And on a purely nerd level, they find an excuse to give him all-white eyes behind his mask, which pretty much made my evening.) Overall, I feel like I understand why he’s doing what he’s doing–that it’s more than an anti-littering campaign on steroids, it’s truly a drive to put a dent in crime in the city–and why people might choose to support him in this endeavor rather than run away screaming.

And the movie also gets the Joker. Now, I insist that Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson also got the Joker, mind you. All camp is not created equal, and too many people have this reactionary attitude to it (post-traumatic Adam West disorder) as though camp begins and ends with Schumacher rather than Sontag. But camp can be serious business in a world (even in a fandom, sadly) where rigidly patriarchal concepts of what constitutes seriousness hold sway, and Nicholson’s larger than life gay-vaudeville-pimp-comedian-dandy-performance-artist was compelling in his refusal to be normal. This is by no means mutually exclusive with being frightening, by the way. “And now…comes the part…where I relieve you, the little people…of the burden…of your failed…and useless lives,” says the Joker without blinking an eye just before gassing downtown Gotham City. He’s killing the squares. That’s subversive and that’s horrifying.

Ledger’s Joker is a creature in that vein, but instead of being larger than life, he’s smaller than life. I know that seems counterintuitive given the for-the-ages performance he turned in–surely this will be the most-referenced portrayal of a Villain since Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter–but what the Joker is is a human being reduced to only cruelty and glee. Earlier in the day I watched a documentary about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who in the ’80s terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco by breaking into people’s houses at random and killing and raping with no pattern. Once Ramirez was caught, his affect throughout his trial was of someone having the time of his life–shouting “Hail Satan!” at the cameras, sneering at the victims’ families, growing his hair long and wearing sunglasses and flirting with his groupies, proclaiming that he is beyond good and evil, reacting to his sentencing to death by saying “Big deal. Death always came with the territory. I’ll see you at Disneyland!”

That, I think, is the Joker in this movie: A guy who loves hurting people the way you or I love our favorite meals or television shows, just loves it to pieces. The film’s plot and set pieces make it quite explicit that his goal is to see our worst suspicions about human nature confirmed, and reinforce it with how it introduces him to us: No big entrance, no “origin,” he’s just standing there on the corner waiting for his ride. Just by existing he stands as a reproach to the trifecta of Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent: They believe in the better angels of our nature, and the Joker is just havin’ a blast showing us that there’s no such thing.

He’s also got a great, great music cue, a neverending crescendo of discordant strings, which reminds me again how much better this movie was than the first one, which had no memorable music to speak of despite boasting two separate composers. In addition, The Dark Knight had better fight choreography that takes advantage of its environment and is easy to parse from beat to beat, making the consequences of each maneuver easy to grasp. It had a better car chase sequence, one with stakes and with genuine antagonists. It had better performances from all its recurring players, perhaps because they weren’t hamstrung by one of the dumbest scripts of all time, but in general they all (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and especially Gary Oldman) seemed more comfortable in their skins and with their role in the story. It had a much better performance from the love interest, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who unlike Katie Holmes made the bold choice of imbuing Rachel Dawes with, get this, recognizable human emotions. It had genuine shocks–I was totally convinced that Gordon was dead, for example, and stunned that the news hadn’t leaked. It was visually much more sophisticated–the staging of Batman and the Joker’s final conversation, little touches like the Joker’s Harvey Dent campaign sticker, the bravura opening sequence, the snuff-film hostage tapes, and on and on. There was no dopey doomsday device. The one time it danced up to the ridiculous moral inconsistencies of the first film, Lucius Fox’s sudden objection to Batman’s methods when he discovers he’s spying on the entire city, it actually had Fox make his objection on specific grounds that made sense–too much power concentrated in the hands of one man–rather than asserting that a guy who spends his days helping a masked vigilante run around breaking people’s legs to get them to talk is suddenly in high dudgeon over warrantless wiretapping.

It wasn’t perfect, though. It felt long, it sagged when the Joker wasn’t involved, and even though the film did yeoman’s work in making us understand just why Batman and Gordon were so high on Harvey Dent’s transformative potential for the city, it still overestimated the degree to which we (or at least I) were invested in his saga, so that when it saved the big ending for a resolution of his plotline rather than the Joker’s, it felt miscalculated and anticlimactic. And perhaps ironically, leaving the Joker alive at film’s end was more of a fourth-wall-breaking reminder of Heath Ledger’s truly tragic death, though I don’t know if there was any way around that. I also wish there were some way for Batman to talk about his crusade without sounding ridiculously overblown and pretentious, but there may not be any way around that either.

Overall, though, I feel like here’s a movie that conveyed what the Joker and Batman mean to me: the most gleefully pessimistic take on human nature imaginable, and a rageful insistence that it need not be so. Good job!

Via Top Shelf 2.0 webmeister Leigh Walton I discovered this rave review of me and Matt Wiegle’s “Destructor in: Prison Break” from The Crooked Man at Rare Maiden:

It’s got everything you could ever want in an adventure comic: a forbidding prison island, robots, a cast of monsters, dragons, a huge fight, a heart-felt ending, a diagram… It’s that impossible-to-ever-actually-create strip that you always wanted to draw when you were a kid. But it works, and all in only 12 pages.

He’s got a lot more to say about the strip, including an appreciation of its lack of context that really makes me feel good about doing the strip that way, and an evocation of both Moebius and the Cocteau Twins, which I can always get behind. If you like, you can read the review, read the comic, and buy the collection.

* The Dark Knight came out and I’ll probably go see it this weekend, god help us all. If I blow another gasket I’m blaming all of you personally.

* With The Dark Knight came a Watchmen trailer. I liked it, other people really liked it, while I’ve heard some skeptics too. (It could do with a smidge less slo-mo, but that was the case for 300 as well.)

* Meanwhile the movie’s on the cover of Entertainment Weekly (it’s good to own the magazine, eh Warner Bros?) and they have an extensive look at the film’s road to production, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes from director Zack Snyder about how much ass he’s gonna kick, as well as a sizable interview with writer Alan Moore, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes lambasting films he’s never seen.

* Jim Treacher has a pretty extensive Watchmen-news roundup that I recommend browsing, though Jason Adams is the one asking the hard questions. So to speak.

* EW has also posted a preview image gallery of things that we’ll be seeing at San Diego Comic Con, including shots from Frank Miller’s The Spirit, a page from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3, and other nerdy things.

* George A. Romero is officially making a sequel to Diary of the Dead, which I still haven’t seen, starting this September. So I guess he liked it, then.

* Someone could have told me that credit-design god Saul Bass directed a movie about killer ants.

* Don’t forget my article on Dumb Doomsday Devices in Superhero Movies or me and Matt Wiegle’s new Destructor comic.

* Finally, The Beef comes through.

Check out me and Matt Wiegle’s action-adventure comic strip spectacular “Destructor in: Prison Break” over at Top Shelf 2.0.

Then read my piece on The 6 Dumbest Doomsday Devices from Superhero Movies over at Topless Robot.

* In a few days I will be interviewing Brian K. Vaughan, writer of Lost, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Doctor Strange: The Oath, The Escapists, and so on, for a cover story in The Comics Journal. Is there anything you’d like me to ask him? Please post your questions in the comments to this post.

* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part one: Chris Butcher calls out the owner of the San Diego Hyatt for donating $125K to support an anti-gay ballot initiative. He suggests that you don’t patronize their facilities any more than you can help it during Comic Con.

* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part two: Tom Spurgeon examines the catastrophic (pending) failure of Platinum Studios, a “comics” “publisher” run by obvious grifters. He suggests that we as an industry and art form should be able to agree that this is a morally bad way to run a business.

* Good people making comics better for the rest of us: Christ Jesus look at Fantagraphics’ SDCC signing schedule.

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follet takes a look at Alex Proyas’s The Crow, “the quintessential Goth Movie.”

* And now, a bunch of interesting (note: consult thesaurus for synonyms of “interesting”) reviews of older things…

* Inveterate person who doesn’t have much use for superheroes Tom Spurgeon takes a look at Joe Casey and Frazer Irving’s beautiful-looking, underappreciated miniseries Iron Man: The Inevitable.

* Bruce Baugh takes a look at Rian Johnson’s po-faced high-school noir Brick. I watched both this film and Donnie Darko for the first time right around the same time and started to reimagine high school as a sort of heavily medicated flat-affect genre-revisionism wonderland.

* Matt Maxwell, like me, found much to admire in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend–at least until the ending with its forced Shyamalanisms and Hollywood inversion of the titular concept.

* At The House Next Door, Will Lasky discusses M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, comparing the director’s oeuvre to Rod Serling’s and declaring that since his films rely on their protagonists’ dramatic self-discovery, they really do require The Twist–not as a matter of pyrotechnics but of dramaturgy.

* Looks like they might remake, and by remake I mean cut the balls of off and otherwise ruin, The Monster Squad.

* There’s a trailer for Frank Miller’s The Spirit out there, if you can still find it, and believe me, it’s nuts. Somehow I don’t see the fan/critical community that rejected Speed Racer and is increasingly divided about 300 appreciating this thing at all, but time will tell. Since I really don’t care about the Spirit as a character or franchise, the chance to see my favorite cartoonist take movie-making tools and go as absolutely bananas with them as Lynn Varley did with Photoshop while coloring The Dark Knight Strikes Again tickles me pink.

* In the comments downblog, Jon “The Forager” Hastings discusses the strange case of Guillermo Del Toro, throwing his career into relief by comparison to similar disreputable-genre visual-stylist nerd icons Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.

* Yours truly weighs in on the controversy over The New Yorker‘s Obamas-as-radicals cover at Tom Spurgeon’s blog (scroll down).

* Over at Loren Coleman’s joint, paleonotologist Darren Naish debunks the trunks, throwing cold water on that awesome “dinosaur with a trunk” image I posted yesterday. Oh well.

* Finally, congratulations to my Partyka chums Shawn Cheng, Sara Edward-Corbett, and John Mejias for making it into the Lynda Barry/Jessica Abel/Matt Madden-edited Best American Comics 2008!

[Editor’s note: This is one of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on March 30, 2007.]

TV Q&A: ‘BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’–MARK VERHEIDEN

The writer of the stunning Season Three finale takes us behind the shocks–and tells us what’s in store for Season Four

By Sean T. Collins

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t yet watched the “BSG” Season Three finale, stop reading here, for the love of gods!

Have you lost sleep or sanity (or countless work-hours gathered around the water cooler) trying to process all the series-rocking revelations in last Sunday’s “Battlestar Galactica” season finale? Blame Mark Verheiden. As the writer responsible for the episode, titled “Crossroads: Part Two,” he set Gaius Baltar free, revealed four more secret Cylons, brought Starbuck back to life–and showed us Earth.

Wizard went to action stations with the veteran TV and comics scribe and “Battlestar” co-executive producer to look back on Season Three, look forward to Season Four and learn whether Cylons–and Starbuck–can really be trusted…

WIZARD: How did you land the writing chores for the season finale? Is that a real plum gig, or a real hard gig?

VERHEIDEN: Well, [executive producers] Ron Moore and David Eick make the decision of who writes which episodes. Some of it is rotation-based: “Who’s up?” Obviously, when you’re on the last episode, you get to be here longer. So there is that aspect, but I was flattered to be asked to do it and I had a great time doing it. I can’t really tell you exactly why [they asked me], but it’s nice to be trusted with it. By the way, I think that any of the writers could’ve handled it. It’s a great staff here. But it was great that I had a chance to do it.

You had a lot of balls to juggle in that final episode: Baltar’s trial, Laura’s cancer, Adama’s relationship with both Laura and Apollo, Starbuck’s return, the shot of Earth, the opera house dream sequences, the appearance of the Cylon fleet, the revelation of four out of the final five Cylons.…How do you even go about weaving all those threads together?

VERHEIDEN: When you’re here through the entire process, you’ve been following the strain of these stories all along. We all have ideas where we’re going with each one of those stories anyway. It just becomes an issue of sitting down and trying to order them up and figuring out a way to bring some of them to fruition or a close, and which ones do we want to continue into the next season. That’s really a process that comes out of working with Ron and David and in the writers’ room with the rest of the writers; we call that breaking the story. For every episode we do the same thing: We sit down and we look at the balls that are in the air, the stories that we want to tell, and then we break it down on note cards and put it up on a board and say, “This is how we think it should go.”

The interesting thing with “Crossroads” parts one and two is that ultimately, in the editing process, material from what was in part two ended up in part one and stuff in part one ended up in part two. It’s a little bit of a mix-and-match process. Even at that stage, we’re rethinking and configuring what we want to put in the show. Again, with so many balls in the air, I think that even after the fact–when you’re editing, obviously–you’re thinking, “Well, where do we want to present these? Where do we want to cut a story off and pick up the next story?” There are decisions like that, and it’s really just part of the process of figuring out the story. That’s how you do it. You do have a lot of things in the air, and that frankly makes it more fun.

Really? I was wondering if you went into it sighing, wondering how you’re going to pull it off.

VERHEIDEN: We do that with every episode. [Laughs] But it’s not so much a sigh of defeat, but more like, “Wow. A lot of challenges here.” It’s really great, though. One of the wonderful things about this show is the fact that there are so many places that we can turn. We have such a large cast, and each of them has their own idiosyncratic issues that they have to deal with. We have the Cylons. We have science-fiction conceits. We have interpersonal conceits. There are just a lot of ways stories can go. So rather than that being challenging–well, it’s challenging, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity because you’ve just got so many choices that you can make. You’re not locked into any one thing that you sort of need to do or tell. That’s great.

One of the big reveals for this episode was the identity of four new Cylons: Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Anders and Tory. Around my office, at least, we had a lot of people who couldn’t possibly wrap their heads around people like Tigh and the Chief being Cylons. I know that Ron Moore has said in interviews that they are, but I want to get as many people on the record as possible. So, are these four Cylons? Pinky swear?

VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] They are Cylons. No, this will not be a “Dallas” dream episode where you wake up and go, “We’re not Cylons!” Without getting into any kind of spoiler territory, we will be exploring what that means as we go into Season Four, but they are Cylons. So, harbor no hopes that it’s some kind of dream or nightmare. When we do something like this, first of all, it’s not without considerable thought and planning, and second of all, we don’t do it so that we can pull the rug out from under the audience and say, “We were kidding.” Not with this one anyway.

I’ve seen fans of the show comment that because of the leadership role these characters played in the New Caprican insurgency, it essentially makes that conflict a Cylon civil war, even if these characters weren’t consciously aware of that. Is that one of the long-term planning points that you’re referring to?

VERHEIDEN: Well, I think that what happened on New Caprica will certainly be an issue that we have to think about as we go along. Basically, they are Cylons and we’re going to approach that. I really don’t want to give anything up about what we’re doing next season… [Pause] …that… [Another pause] well, what can I say? I’m trying to think what would be interesting here. [Yet another pause] Well, I think that I’ve said it. We will be exploring what it means to have these guys being Cylons for sure. Oh yeah, I was going to say… [Super-long pause] Well, no. I will end there. [Laughs]

Clearly, they’re a breed apart. For example, we’ve seen a younger Tigh in flashback sequences, so it seems unlikely that there are thousands of regular, aged Colonel Tighs walking around on some base ship somewhere. Are those different rules for these guys something that will be coming up in Season Four?

VERHEIDEN: All stuff that we’ll be exploring. We do know who they are. So in terms of, like, if we’re just winging it and backpedaling as we go? No. We know who they are, and that is going to be a big part of what we get at in Season Four.

Switching gears for a moment, I loved Apollo’s courtroom speech in Gaius Baltar’s trial. It showed that he’s such a noble, likable character even when he’s doing something that you don’t agree with, and it also tied in all these events from the past where characters from the Galactica have committed horrible crimes of treason and been forgiven. How did that speech, and its references to those plot points from all three seasons and the miniseries, come about?

VERHEIDEN: That was a culmination of something that Ron Moore really wanted to do. The entire idea of the trial of Baltar was to explore the concept of guilt or innocence within the fleet, and also to suggest that this is a fleet that only had an ad hoc justice system. We’ve never really seen the justice system in the fleet, and I think internally we always assume that the captains of each ship always dealt with whatever issues came up on a summary basis. So we were interested in just trying to explore how you create justice in this world.

The second question, which is the one that Lee attacks in his speech, is “What is justice?” What does that mean in this particular world, where we’ve basically been reduced to 38,000 people and vengeance and attempts to get retribution for things in the past might not be as valid as they would, say, in a different circumstance. It was also fascinating, I think, that Baltar was the elected president of the 12 colonies and found himself in an untenable position. Lee’s speech was an attempt to address the practical realities of the situation that they found themselves in, and pull us out a little bit from us screaming for blood. That’s where the impulse for that came from. And again, one of the great things about working on a show that has such a rich background as “Battlestar” is that you’re able to pull from a lot of events that happened in past shows to demonstrate how the fleet’s justice system or sense of justice has been tested or not tested, or how forgiveness has been the rule of the day.

Internally, we thought one of the more interesting moments pointing out that [President] Laura [Roslin] had pardoned everyone, so we’re not quite sure why that pardon didn’t manifest itself all the way to Baltar. How come he got excluded from that when we forgave everyone else who may have actually done more heinous crimes than him? Of course, the horrible thing is that Baltar, in fact, is at least complicit in the genocide of the whole civilization, if you go back that far, but that’s kind of one that we can’t really prove. I’m sure that he would have a very facile argument as to why he wasn’t to blame. “It wasn’t me!”

As the proud owner of a homemade “Free Gaius” T-shirt, I was happy with the verdict.

VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] He’s free. Sort of.

Oh yeah–he’s been whisked away by the Cult of Gaius, or whoever these people are. Is that storyline going to dovetail with the religious aspects of the show, or is it a separate beast?

VERHEIDEN: It doesn’t really give anything way to say that we’ve always explored the role of religion in civilization and in the fleet. It’s certainly an issue that will come up, whether Baltar’s story goes that way or not; that remains to be seen. But absolutely, the role of religion is an issue that we will continue to explore. Certainly, in the fleet and in what we’ve said already, religion has played into it, as well as faith and the “polytheist versus monotheist” situation. Those things have all played a role in how we ended up where we are.

Speaking of which, at least in terms of prophecies and visions and things of that nature, Starbuck is back and has apparently discovered Earth.

VERHEIDEN: That’s what she says.

Should we trust her, Mark?

VERHEIDEN: Well, you know– [Laughs] I trust her. You don’t trust her? She said it with great enthusiasm! You’ll just have to see. I say that not meaning it in one way or the other; it doesn’t mean to trust her or not to trust her. It means that obviously, when she comes back with a piece of information that relevant, it will become an issue as we go forward.

Even just the choice of that final shot, pulling back through the Milky Way and zooming back in and showing Earth, seems to be sending a message that the goal line is in sight.

VERHEIDEN: I don’t know if the goal is in sight, but certainly the goal of the fleet is to find Earth. That [shot] was a really wonderful sort of wish of the fleet, to be there. That’s how you can take that. You’ve seen Earth. What Earth is and what it might be is stuff that’s still up in the air, but the goal of the fleet is still to find Earth. Obviously, we’re going to be exploring that. When Kara comes back and says something like that, it’s not a thread that will be dropped. Let me just put it that way.

And speaking of Earth–I think–this episode used the Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower.” How difficult was it to thread that song in? That’s a huge earthquake in terms of fans’ interaction with the world of the show.

VERHEIDEN: Right. Well, Ron has said that you shouldn’t take that as meaning anything specific to, say, Bob Dylan in the ’60s when he wrote the song, except in the sense that for all we know this song and these lyrics have existed on many planes. Maybe Bob Dylan is the one who picked it up here, in our place. It gets kind of mystic here, but I don’t think that you should draw too much from that, except that there are connections and there are very many interesting eddies and byways in the universe of “Battlestar” that remain to be explored.

On a more pragmatic level, “All Along the Watchtower” was there because Ron Moore has always wanted to use that song and use it in some way where we were, again, thrilled with how it worked into this final episode, and also with the version that [“Battlestar” composer Bear McCreary] did. I thought it was suitably evocative and eerie and really worked well. In fact, I thought that the music in that episode was just fantastic all the way through.

It really conveyed the sense of borderline chaos that was gripping the fleet throughout the entire show. It lent the episode an air of weirdness.

VERHEIDEN: It really did hammer that home. I especially loved the music when Tigh, Tory, Anders and Tyrol got together, which just seemed to raise to this crescendo of, “What in the world is going on?” which is exactly what they were thinking and what we hoped the audience was thinking when we got to that point. Again, as they said, a light switch clicked, and the music was really helping to push that moment.

When Tigh walks into that scene, I believe his exact word was, “Whoa.” It was a funny moment. Even Gaius, despite having been in a very tortured and tormented place the entire season, was calling Gaeta “butterfingers” at the trial and got back to his smarmy self when the trial was over. Was it a conscious choice on your part to inject those humorous elements into what was such a momentous episode?

VERHEIDEN: Well, the Baltar character, by definition, has sort of an ironic disconnect with himself at times. I wish I could take credit for everything, but the “butterfingers,” I believe, was something that [Baltar actor] James Callis came up with. It was perfect. I mean, it was just so perfect. A lot of that is how he plays it. We think that James is a fantastic actor and brings so much to the part, and he brings this sort of naïve malevolence, or, well, I don’t even know how to put it. It’s this odd, almost disconnected from his own understanding of what he’s done, sort of defense. It’s a moral relativism, which gives so much more to each scene that he’s in.

But conscious choice? Yeah. Obviously, we scripted it, and he brings an attitude to the show that is very unique to him. It’s always fun to go to him because he brings something unusual. I don’t think that funny is necessarily the right word, but sort of ironic. Well, in the case of “butterfingers,” it was just funny.

Tigh also shined in this episode. His arc in the third season was more of a downward spiral than an arc, but this moment that one would think would shatter him became his finest hour. I found it moving.

VERHEIDEN: I’m glad. I’m glad that came across. Michael Hogan is a fantastic actor, and the Tigh character has been through a very, very difficult season on the show. There is something reassuring [about] hearing him say that he wants to reassert his humanity despite what’s happened. We’ll see where that goes, but I think that of all of the [newly revealed Cylons], he’s certainly the one who, discovering that that’s true about himself, has the most to catch up to, given what’s happened to him in the past. If he’s a Cylon, then it’s interesting what’s he gone through. Well, he is a Cylon, and so it is interesting what he’s gone through.

Given that only these four came together, can we take from that that the fifth Cylon is elsewhere?

VERHEIDEN: I think you can take that the question is still in the air.

It seems as though there’s a different explanation for Starbuck’s reappearance than the old Cylon-recycling trick, right?

VERHEIDEN: Well, again, we’re getting into where we’re going in Season Four, and we’re awfully early to be giving up things.

You can take the Fifth. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah, I think I will take the Fifth on that. I feel more comfortable with that. [Laughs] It’s a question that’s hanging out there, and it’s a question that will be explored. In terms of who it might be and is there a fifth one–those are all things that I’d just as soon not get into because there are surprises to come.

Do you have a favorite character whom you love to get your hands on when you’re writing an episode?

VERHEIDEN: They’re all great–which is the standard answer, but they really are all great. One of the fun things about the show is that their voices are all so different. Adama’s voice–I mean, I really love writing for Adama. It’s really fun to write for Laura Roslin. I think that Tigh brings a pathos to his character that’s very interesting to try to find. His voice is one that has a tragedy to it that’s maybe even stronger than the others. But I’ll tell you, they’re all so rich, and the show has managed to invest them with such rich backstories and textures, that they’re all great to write. If I was going to pick one where when you get to them you go, “Wow, we can really go to town here,” then Tigh is someone who fascinates me, but also Adama and Laura. Both of those bring very strong personas. I say those, but I’m certainly not excluding anyone else. Starbuck is always fun and crazy. She’s such a live wire that to try and capture that is always a blast.

Is there anyone who’s been difficult to get a grasp of?

VERHEIDEN: I don’t know if it’s been difficult. I will say that when we started doing the stories on the Cylon base ship, that was a learning process internally here–just trying to get a handle on how to play those scenes, to figure out their interpersonal dynamic. It’s obviously a little different than with the humans, since there are multiples with each of them. I would say that in the two years that I’ve been here, working that out and trying to understand how that world worked was a challenge. That would be the one.

Even besides the basic nature of the Cylons–they’re not human and are fundamentally a different species, in at least some ways–there was also a different storytelling rhythm during scenes on their ships, even in the way cuts are made from shot to shot and from scene to scene.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah. We made a conscious choice to sort of present the base ship in a different way than we presented the Galactica, our side of the universe. Those were conscious choices. That also [involved] just trying to understand how these creatures, or these robots, or machines, or half-human half-machine entities, communicate with one another–an interesting and different, and yet understandable to us, way of communicating. All of those things just took time to figure out what we wanted to do there, so as challenges go, that was one of the bigger ones, trying to understand those people. By definition they are alien to us, and it’s necessarily harder to empathize with them, to understand what they’re saying and where they’re coming from.

Until the episode that focused on Boomer and Caprica Six back on Caprica, where you saw things from their point of view and learned that they truly are multidimensional characters, I was pretty sure that they were all evil all the time and everything else was just a false front. Convincing viewers that these are more than just Terminators must be a challenge.

VERHEIDEN: Right. In a way, to say that the Cylons are like the Terminator or soulless, empty machines diminishes their capacity for anything. I was going to say evil, but I don’t know that you apply evil to that. Certainly the genocide of the human race was an inherently evil act; however, that was prompted and didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t just sociopathic, it came out of things that had happened prior. So it’s sort of an “understand your enemy” point of view. I don’t want to speak for Ron and David Eick, but we never wanted to end by saying, “We’re up against this soulless mechanical army.” We wanted to say that they had their points of view, too. That’s why we actually went over to the Cylon side for a while.

In many ways, the most interesting relationships on the show are in these pairings of a Cylon and a human, whether it’s Six and Baltar or Athena and Helo or Boomer and the Chief–although it turns out that that’s not a Cylon-human pairing after all.

VERHEIDEN: Well, Chief and Cally…

That’s true–you’ve created more of those relationships with these new revelations.

VERHEIDEN: Yes, and we also created a situation where people have a secret. And strictly from a dramatic standpoint, that’s always interesting to explore. We’ve got four guys with a pretty big secret now.

How does it feel to work on a show that is this good?

VERHEIDEN: It’s fantastic. You can take one step back and watch a show and go, “Wow.” I mean, I’m a fan of the show, too. So when I can take a step back and look at the first five episodes that we did this year–and look at most of the episodes, actually–I can go, “It’s really a wonderful thing to be on a show that you can be so proud of.” I’ll tell you from a writing standpoint, too, the great thing is being able to explore concepts and conceits and political dynamics and nonpolitical dynamics and character interactions that you just wouldn’t get to do if you were doing–not to put down cop shows, but you just couldn’t go there. By being a science-fiction show and by having created the political dynamics we have, we can go and explore relationships and philosophies and things that you would get in big trouble if you tried to do in sort of real-world terms. But since it’s one step removed in our “Galactica” universe, we can explore them with an abandon. That’s been almost a liberating experience, as a writer, to do. It’s been just great.

Does it burn you at all that you guys haven’t been recognized by the Emmys? I know it’s baffling to a lot of fans. Is that something that’s even on your radar screen?

VERHEIDEN: Do we read the nominations when they come out? Sure. [Laughs] I speak for myself, but you can’t live your life worried about whether or not you’re going to win a prize. You have to go ahead and do the best show you can, and if we get recognized, great, and if we don’t, we still know it’s a great show. I mean, we did win a Peabody, which is one heck of a recognition. I don’t feel like we’re under-recognized in terms of people who have found the show and can appreciate what we’re doing. In terms of Emmys, it would be wonderful, but does my world turn around it? No.

I guess this is a fatuous question considering your job, but how much attention do you pay to “The Sci Fi Channel is picking the show up for 13 more episodes, and now it’s 22, and now there’s a special two-hour movie-type episode in the middle?”

VERHEIDEN: I pay intimate attention to that. [Laughs] Those things I do pay a great deal of attention to, because that impacts what we’re doing here.

It obviously makes a big difference in how you write the show.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah, and it’s great to have 22 [Season Four episodes] for sure, I’ll say that.

I just don’t know how I’m going to wait until 2008 for them.

VERHEIDEN: Well, there is the two-parter that will be on before that.

Of course! Do you know when that’s airing?

VERHEIDEN: I have not heard. Maybe someone else knows it, [but] I’ve only heard the generic term of “fall.” So hopefully you’ll have that.

* It’s been a bit of a mental shift to adjust from “not going to San Diego Comic Con” to “going to San Diego Comic Con” with less than two weeks to go before the event itself, but I’m managing, I think. The complete programming schedule for the show is up, along with the artists’ alley listing (I am ready for this show to destroy my David Bowie sketchbook), the autograph listings, and the exhibit hall map.

* And while I wait for individual exhibitors to produce their own at-the-booth signing schedules and so on, other interesting tidbits begin to materialize, like a screening of The Midnight Meat Train nearby to the con on Friday the 25th.

* Evil on Two Legs’ Jon continues his look at pop music in horror films, this time highlighting some very effective sequences in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Frank Darabont’s The Mist.

* Victoria Large of Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Hellboy II:

It’s a visual feast (Could we expect less from director Guillermo del Toro?)

Why, yes!

* If it seems like I’m disproportionately harping on Del Toro lately, it’s just because I feel such a disconnect from my fellow genre enthusiasts regarding his work. It’s like I’m going out of my way to be a one-man CW-buster. That being said, it sounds like the folks at Reverse Shot like his stuff even less than I do, backhanded compliment for Clive Barker notwithstanding.

* Could all those dinosaurs with nostrils on top of their heads in the dinosaur books you had as a kid actually have possessed trunks? That’s the conclusion of Bill Munn, the designer of that awe-inspiring Gigantopithecus model from the American Museum of Natural History’s “Mythic Creatures” exhibit, as Loren Coleman reports.

Check out the creature gallery at Munn’s website, too.

* The great cartoonist Anders Nilsen has posted some breathtaking horror-inflected covers and interiors at his website.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being a horror fan who reads comics is that most Western cartoonists’ attempts at the genre rely on a surface “scariness” that delivers little in the way of actual fear. It’s a bit like if every horror movie was still shot on the same cobweb-shrouded Universal sets. That’s why it’s so compelling to see artists like Nilsen, Tom Neely, Jordan Crane, Al Columbia and others take things in a much more unorthodox and visually sophisticated direction.

[Editor’s note: This is one of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on December 30, 2006, I think.]

TV Q&A: DAMON LINDELOF

Co-creator Damon Lindelof reveals the secrets of Season Three’s second half–from the truth behind the Others to the return of Walt and Michael to that damn four-toed statue

By Sean T. Collins

It’s coming.

After an intense six-episode “mini-season” that barely tided the show’s fanatical fans over, “Lost” heads back to a TV (and water cooler) near you on February 7, 2007 for 16 back-to-back, rerun-free episodes. But the show’s countless mysteries have kept us talking all season long. What’s the real story behind the sinister Others and their plans for prisoners Jack, Kate and Sawyer? Why was kick-ass character Mr. Eko killed? What really happened when the Hatch exploded? And what’s up with that four-toed statue, anyway?

Wizard had one choice–either give up working on the magazine and debate these questions full-time, or turn to the man with all the answers, “Lost” Co-Creator and Executive Producer Damon Lindelof, for guidance. So find a comfortable spot in your polar bear cage and sit back as Lindelof dishes the dirt on the best show on television.

WIZARD: The first six-episode mini-season is over. Did you guys accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it?

LINDELOF: I think that in many ways, yes, and in many ways we wish that we could’ve done more. Our über-goal in the first six episodes was to really begin to set up the mega-story of the season, which is who the Others are and what they want and why they took Kate [Evangeline Lilly], Jack [Matthew Fox] and Sawyer [Josh Holloway]. I think that we at least answered the third question. We feel that we told that story fairly compellingly and well.

The Others were such shadowy villains for so long before these first six episodes. Did you consciously shift gears on that by fleshing out Ben and Juliet?

Well, yeah, that’s always been what the show has done, which is that you sort of look at a character in one way and then suddenly you completely shift their perception.

By the end of the first season, one half of the audience was convinced that Locke [Terry O’Quinn] was a bad guy and the other half that he was a good guy. Now I think that everyone has come around to thinking that he’s a good guy, but they don’t really know him yet. So we’ve done the same thing with the Others, which is whether they’re villains or not–and I think that they’ve done a lot of villainous things–it’s our jobs as writers to explain why they’re doing those things in a real and emotional way.

[These Others] dress up in these hillbilly clothes in order to purposely deceive the passengers of 815 and they’ve abducted people and taken children. What does all that mean?

Those are the acts of a villain. So that is the secret recipe of “Lost,” which is, “Why do people do the things that they do, and can we give the audience an understandable explanation as to why they do the things they do?” That is the über-goal of Season Three as a whole.

Will we get explanations on the supernatural stuff like the smoke monster and Desmond’s new psychic abilities?

Right out of the gate in one of the early episodes, we are going to explain what is happening with Desmond [Henry Ian Cusick] and what the story function of that is. The monster is something that we use very sparingly on the show. We know what it is. We know how it functions.

It killed Eko! Why eliminate such a fan-favorite character?

We feel like the death story of Mr. Eko [Adewale Akinnouye Agbaje] accomplished really two things as storytellers. The first is that it told the audience that, “Yes, we are willing to kill characters that you love as opposed to characters that you just want us to kill, like Shannon and Boone or Ana-Lucia.” That was an important thing to do, because I can’t think of a character that was more beloved than Mr. Eko, at least in terms of Season Two. Secondly, we furthered the audience’s expectations for what the capabilities of the monster are. That is to say, is it just black smoke, or can it take the form of other things? What does it know about our people? What is its function–is it supernatural or is it technological? All of these things are still very much in play. I think we tend to use the monster when it relates directly to informing character, as opposed to just an arbitrary plot device that can move the trees around and make scary noises.

Two of your most prominent characters right now are Nikki and Paulo, the castaways who were introduced during the mini-season. Did you guys think that it was risky to introduce them that way?

Well, that is a case where the separation of the season actually hurts you, because Nikki [Kiele Sanchez] and Paulo [Rodrigo Santoro] are actually part of a larger story that has not yet quite activated itself, and what you have seen so far is really setup for the big payoff that happens in the middle of the season, around episodes 13 and 14. It’s just a scenario where all I can say is that we think the payoff of the idea is very cool, and you just have to trust us a little while longer.

Nikki and Paulo have talked to each other about one of the complaints that some critics of the show have, which is that in this big group of 40-odd survivors, there are really only a handful who do stuff that matter. Are Nikki and Paulo going to be used to further that element at all?

I remember there was an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” called “Below Deck.” Basically, the entire episode was told from the point of view of the guys who were bouncing off of your primary characters. So it was like, “Oh, yeah. There is a whole other crew to the Enterprise that’s around, but never f–king does anything.” The idea of hearing what they had to say is inherently interesting to me. We initially talked about doing that with Nikki and Paulo, but it was like, “Do we want to do that out of the gate, or do we want to see them in a couple of stories first, and then have the audience go, ‘Who the f–k are these guys? I would’ve noticed them–they’re spectacular looking. So what are they trying to pull on me here?'”

Every idea on “Lost” that excites us is one that starts out as a terrible idea that should be impossible to execute. Then we go, “All right, that’s worth doing because the degree of difficulty is so high.” I think great episodes of “Lost” are separated by very little from the terrible episodes of “Lost.” But the thing that they all have in common is that we were trying to execute a very difficult dive. Anyone can jump off of a diving board and land in the water, but not everyone can do a triple back flip and go in without a splash. For me, the only reason to do the show is to attempt difficult dives. Otherwise it’s not going to be interesting anymore.

What’s up with the four-toed statue? Are we going to start seeing four-toed people running around anytime soon?

Well, I can’t tell you that we’re going to see four-toed people running around, but I can tell you that the statue does become a big part of the storytelling in much the same way that you have to wait for things on “Lost.”

At the time that we showed the statue, it was a reminder to the audience that this island has been around a lot longer than the Dharma Initiative. At the end of Season One, we showed you the Black Rock, which is a 19th-century slaving vessel. At the very least, it’s a very old ship. It basically says, “Oh, yes, this island has been here and people have been coming to this island much longer than the Dharma Initiative.”

There is this incorrect way of thinking about the Others in that they are the remnants of the Dharma Initiative–the foot was sort of a not-so-subtle reminder that this island and its mystical aspects have been in play for many, many hundreds of years, as opposed to just 1980 when the Dharma Initiative started making their little orientation movies. The origins of the foot and the rest of the statue and all of those things will be revealed in time–probably not soon enough for a great majority of the fans, but at least it has activated their imaginations.

With the return of survivalist Locke–as opposed to button-pushing Locke–will his tormented side continue to come out from time to time the way it did when he was pushing the button?

Yeah. I think Locke is constantly tested. I mean, the reality is that his character archetype is that of a seeker. So he is seeking meaning for his place on the island and understanding as to why he’s been given this gift from the island and what he’s supposed to do. I think that what was interesting about that story the first time we did it was that he wanted purpose, and the island said, “Okay. Your purpose is to push this button every 108 minutes.” And he became very angry at that being his purpose. It felt mundane to him. And he basically got punished for doubting the fact that that was his purpose. Not having pushed the button has basically…The characters don’t really have any understanding quite yet of how momentous it was to not push the button. Other than the fact of the not-pushing of the button is what crashed Oceanic 815 in the first place and brought them all there, the idea that the sky turned purple and the island shook… Events in the finale last year catastrophically screwed them all in a way that they don’t really appreciate yet.

Another loose end from the season finale of Season Two is what became of Michael and Walt.

It would be a massive and depressing cop-out to not see them again and to not fundamentally understand what happened to those characters. I would be loathe to say that we will never see Michael [Harold Perrineau] and Walt [Malcolm David Kelley] again, but in what context–whether they actually made it off of the island or any of those things–is all up for grabs. I would say that you’ll not be seeing them again any time soon.

Which characters will we be seeing flashbacks from soon?

I will say that we will be getting a Desmond flashback in the near future, coming back from the break. And I will not be specific as to who, but we might be getting some flashbacks from the Others sooner rather than later. And there is definitely a Hurley [Jorge Garcia] flashback in the first batch of episodes.

You’ve said that there is a sort of five-season plan in place for “Lost.” Are you guys still on track for that plan?

Did I say that?

I think you said it…

I think that’s one of those things that has been attributed to me that no one has actually said. There have been sort of vague questions as to how much story we have or what the plan is, and I think that the only thing that I’ve ever said on the record is that if we were in a position to actually end the show on our own terms, that it would probably be at the end of four years. That would be the ultimate nexus point for the show. But unfortunately, it’s completely moot whether it’s four years or five years or seven years, because I don’t own the show and [co-creator and executive producer] J.J. [Abrams] doesn’t own the show and [executive producer] Carlton [Cuse] doesn’t own the show – Touchstone and ABC own the show. And as long as it’s a show that is popular and that people are watching, they’ll never let us end it, which is sad and depressing.

I guess as far as problems go, that’s not a bad one to have, that people love your show so much.

I know. That’s right. But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch “Twin Peaks”? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch “Moonlighting”? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch “Lost” will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.

* Hey, how about this: Chris Pitzer of the great indie publisher AdHouse Books describes my anthology comic book Murder as “A well executed mini anthology with the percentage of stories I like being on the higher side. Really chunky, too.” Why not purchase a copy for three bucks plus shipping and judge for yourself?

* AICN’s Quint talks to director Guillermo Del Toro about Hellboy II: The Goldeblahblahblah yeah yeah yeah he asks him about The Hobbit and its sequel. Del Toro says his past comments regarding possibly not making the second film if they can’t “find the story” have been “taken out of context,” and that if they didn’t think there was a story there to make, the idea of a second movie would never have come up in the first place.

* Speaking of Del Toro and Hellboy II, I tend to be more credulous regarding reviews of his work if they’re written by people who, like me, didn’t much care for Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, and that’s the case with The House Next Door’s Jonathan Pacheco, who (also like me, most likely) treats the film as a way to read the tea leaves regarding Del Toro’s pending work with Tolkien’s material.

* And speaking of Tolkien, Kristin Thompson notes that an upcoming video game will be based on the premise “What if Frodo didn’t destroy the Ring?” This is totally alien to any kind of storytelling Tolkien would approve of and totally rad for nerds.

* Jim Treacher makes the case for Hancock, in both non-spoilery and spoilery fashion.

* Evil on Two Legs takes a look at the use of pop music in horror films. “Goodbye Horses” FTW. (Though I thought the version from the film was by Q Lazzarus.)

* If you’d like to hear how America has been torturing its prisoners, here you go.

* Finally (via Whitney Matheson): Cocksuckers.

* I’m going to the San Diego Comic Con this year after all, it turns out, courtesy of Jonah Weiland and the fine folks at Comic Book Resources. If you are a comics-related person whom I previously told I wasn’t going, I take it all back and I hope to see you/interview you there. Here’s the Thursday programming line-up for the show.

* Meanwhile, lots of nerdmedia news seems to have broken, or “broken,” in the past couple days. To wit:

* The Exterminators, Simon Oliver’s late, lamented Vertigo series, is being developed as a TV series by Showtime.

* The remake of Red Dawn will be written by Carl Ellsworth (who wrote Wes Craven’s Red Eye and a screenplay for Y: The Last Man, which I guess isn’t being written by Brian K. Vaughan anymore) and directed by Dan Bradley, a second-unit/stunt guy who’s worked on movies from the Spider-Man, Indiana Jones, Bourne, and Bond franchises.

* Jeepers Creepers III: Cathedral is in the works, with molesty writer/director Victor Salva again at the helm and original JC actress Gina Phillips all growns up and reprising her role. (Via Dread Central.)

* Jon Favreau has been signed for Iron Man 2, according to one-woman Marvel Studios rumor mill Nikki Finke. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Quentin Tarantino’s script for his World War II flick Inglorious Bastards has leaked, I guess, and people like it. That particular link leads to Harry Knowles, who conveys his enthusiasm for the potential film with his typical degree of understated restraint.

* Speaking of action epics, Johnny Ryan is releasing an ultraviolent action-adventure graphic novel called Prison Pit in 2009.

* Our last bit of fresh news is that Darren Aronofsky is in talks to direct the Robocop remake, maybe, possibly. Like Red Dawn I’m not sure this is a film that needed to be remade–you’re simply going to lose something that made the great ultraviolent Reagan-era action films so great when translating them into this decade, unless your name is Sylvester Stallone–and moreover this is like the twelfth nerd-wet-dream project Aronofsky has been associated with (remember how he was going to make Batman: Year One and/or Ronin with Frank Miller?), but it’s out there as a possibility. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Meanwhile, some folks is talkin bout nerdmovies. For instance:

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles the seminal Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House as part of his New Cult Canon series. I want to point out that the film’s love for its leading man’s body simply cannot be overstated. Dude was breathtaking.

* Rich Juzwiak of FourFour praises the hell, and SPOILS the shit, out of Carter Smith’s The Ruins. He even blows the new director’s-cut ending, sigh. But it’s still nice to see someone outside the usual horror circles talk about a very interesting and (as he points out) beautiful-looking, if not entirely effective, horror movie. Elsewhere, Jason Adams responds.

* Kramers Ergot editor Sammy Harkham has posted the entirety of a Fangoria-produced documentary on special effects wiz Tom Savini. Sammy gets a little snotty in describing Savini as “merely” a gore expert, and gets in some digs about his personality that I don’t think are justified by anything I’ve ever seen the guy do, but there you go, it’s a very important figure in alternative comics talking about a very important figure in horror cinema, what am I gonna do, not link to it?

* On the comics front, Big Sunny David Allison discusses the fool’s errand of searching for strict one-to-one allegory in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Saga at the expense of enjoying its weirdness, invention, and emotion as-is.

[Editor’s note: This is one of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 31, 2007.]

I CAN HAS COMIX?: JORDAN CRANE

SUB: The writer-artist of the all-ages adventure ‘The Clouds Above’ and the grown-up series ‘Uptight’ on why he loves short stories, ghost stories and Geof Darrow–and why he hates animation, puns and ‘The Walking Dead’

By Sean T. Collins

If it weren’t for Jordan Crane, I wouldn’t be here.

At the same time as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men reignited my love affair with superheroes, an impulse purchase of Crane’s gorgeous, wistful graphic novella The Last Lonely Saturday was my ticket to a world beyond the spandex set. From there it was a short trip to Crane’s meticulously designed anthology series NON, a clearinghouse for undiscovered or underappreciated indie talents like Nick Bertozzi, Brian Ralph, Paul Pope and Ron Rege Jr.–starting a journey that deepened my love for the sequential art medium, changed my career trajectory and landed me here at Wizard.

So it’s no exaggeration to say that Crane’s work literally changed my life, even while it rapidly changed in and of itself. Crane has careened from whimsical children’s projects like The Clouds Above—Wizard‘s Best All-Ages Comic of 2006–to brutal ghost stories like his Western short story “The Hand of Gold” to lending his talented design hand to Fantagraphics’ anthology series Mome. His current focus is Uptight, a one-man pamphlet-format comic he’d like to see last as long as Love and Rockets.

Crane peeled himself away from his pet project to reveal his animation-industry origin story, tout the value of making beautiful things on the cheap, explain why winning the prestigious Xeric Grant hurt more than helped, and explore the one thing all comics must do (aside from changing lives, of course).

WIZARD: How did you get interested in comics?

CRANE: I read lots of comics as a kid and as a teenager. I think that’s pretty standard. I swore them off a number of times, trying to be an adult, then always went back to them. At first it was kind of like exploring, like, “Oh, what’s this? What’s that?” Then I started looking for things that personally resonated with me and got into more non-mainstream stuff. The first thing that really clicked for me was when I got the first couple of issues of [Steve Purcell’s] Sam & Max. I was like, “What the f— is this?” I loved how cartoony it was. Then I found [Marc Hansen’s] Ralph Snart, which is another weirdo comic, and [Dave Stevens’] The Rocketeer. That’s when I started going into the world of weirdo comics. It was something that kind of just naturally evolved.

But in college I studied a lot of animation. I really wanted to go into animation because I thought that it would be really cool. I made a couple of short movies, then I went out into the real world and started showing the movies I had made to some people at different animation houses around town. I went to Film Roman, the people that do “The Simpsons,” and Nickelodeon, and Klasky-Csupo, and a guy at Film Roman was like, “Wow, look at this reel! You could really get a good job–in China.” I had no idea that no animation is done here; it’s all key frames. I had these dreams of getting hired by Nickelodeon–“All right, come up with awesome stories and you’ll animate them and we’re just this big animation-loving world”–when in fact you would be lucky if you got to key-frame someone else’s story, and then maybe, if you’re really good at that and outgoing and have the wherewithal to write stories on your own, then maybe 10 years later you can actually write the animation or select the key frames. I basically thought that the animators were also the people that made the stories. That’s how guileless I was. So going into the real world was like a big f—ing crap on my birthday cake when I realized that those two things didn’t go together like I thought they did.

That was when I turned back to comics, because I was like, “I can actually write and draw everything I want.” I had been doing animation for about 3 years, but I still drew comics and was the comics editor at the school newspaper, so I was still drawing comics every day. It was really terrible because I really liked gag strips, but at the same time I was going through a really big existentialism phase. So the strips were supposed to be funny but were extremely unfunny. They had a bunch of puns in them and were about ennui: Imagine Godard’s retarded brother doing really bad puns. Puns are like the lowest form of humor. But to do a story in animation it takes about a year, so I come back to comics thinking “I’m going to do comic stories now instead of 4-panel gags.” I thought that I could just sit down and write all this stuff out. Having a little more room, I could start to mess around with things. I wasn’t tied down with it having to be funny in 4 panels, so I could go for a different kind of funny and a different kind of setup, a more long-term or ongoing story that wasn’t necessarily funny, but stories that would build. And I could do a story fast because it would take only 4 months instead of a year. So that was pretty much it. As soon as I figured out that animation was bullsh–, it was comics all the way.

What came first? Was it your anthology comic, NON?

CRANE: Yeah, that was the very first time that I ever did long comics. I had made a couple of aborted attempts. There was one when I was 17 and I had tried to do a post-apocalyptic comic about all the coolest sh– ever. It had hovercrafts and hotrods, you name it. Then in college I tried to do some kind of pretentious poetry thing that didn’t work out either. Both of those were abortive attempts; NON was the first time that I finished an actual comic story. I made the decision to start publishing because at the time there was all this Internet money floating around; I was making a lot of money.

What were you doing?

CRANE: I was a designer. This was about ’96 or ’97, and the Web thing was starting to gain momentum and I was making good money, which was certainly enough to publish. So I started that and was able to get a really good boost and not have to worry about making my money back. I think I priced everything really cavalierly [laughs], because I could, and I thought that I should. Because my whole intention with publishing was to make work that people could read. And I think that it still remains that way. It was to get people to read it first and worry about making money later.

Even today, your series Uptight is comparatively inexpensive for that format. The few pamphlet-format alternative comic books that exist tend to be not as cheap.

CRANE: My intention with Uptight was slightly different. I really got sick of waiting for 2 or 3 years between books. It was also brought on by the fact that I had kids, and my working time, while they were young, was cut down for a couple of years. I was having trouble getting in as much work as I could, so it took a long time to get pages done. The Clouds Above took a long time to get out, and that’s what I was working on when they were babies. All I had done up to that point was books: I had The Last Lonely Saturday and Col-Dee and then Clouds Above, and I was working on Keeping Two, too. I was like, “God, I’ve been working this whole f—ing time and nothing’s come out.” Every time I would see people I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I’m working,” but I wanted to be around and be like, “Yeah, I’ve got a new thing–here it is.” And I was getting sick of doing webcomics, because even though it was nice to have the deadline, I f—ing hate reading online. I just hate it. I don’t even like reading newspapers online. I do, but I only skim them at best.

And I also wanted to finish something, because when you’re working on books it’s every 4 or 5 years that you finish something; other than that you’re not finishing anything. The whole thing about finishing something is that you learn things, because you’re able to look back at it and go, “Well, that didn’t work” or “I should have been more adventurous with that part” or “I should have put more thought into that.” You’re able to look at it and see how you’re telling a story and see how your drawing or lettering worked and see how everything fit together, because it’s done and it’s a whole thing. I was only getting that every so often and I just didn’t feel as if I was growing at all; if I was, it was just glacially. So I really wanted to do short stories because I get to finish things. And I just really love the short-story form and reading short stories.

I think that actually ties back in to comic books. I really like comic books as opposed to graphic novels because it’s just a quick thing as opposed to sitting down and devoting yourself to something. The other thing is that if you don’t like it, it’s over. You can get a taste for something and know if you’re going to like it or not. If you do, you can get a nice little taste and you don’t need to have this giant meal all at once.

[For example,] I was just reading online about this comic book called The Walking Dead, and I was like, “F—, man, it’s a comic book about zombies and it’s called The Walking Dead. How could this be anything but f—ing awesome?” Then I go to the store and it’s on issue #40, and I’m like, “Wow. Well, maybe I should start at the beginning.” And of course they don’t have single issues and I have to buy a $10 graphic novel. Then I get home and read it and I’m like, “F— this!” and I just threw it into the trash. So there’s 10 bucks gone for this totally hackneyed comic book. It’s just so bad, formulaic and dull. I was disappointed just because it was called Walking Dead and that’s a great title, and I just didn’t understand how it could be bad. But if it was just a single issue I wouldn’t have been so pissed off because I’d just be like, “Ahh, you know, it’s not my thing.” With just 30 pages and 4 bucks I’m not going to be super-bummed-out about it.

The short form is nice. I just really like the short, quick thing. And maybe that’s just a function of my life right now, because I don’t have tons of time to devote to any one specific thing. But I wanted to do a comic so that I would have something that would come out regularly. I wanted a regular deadline, something that I could keep pace by. If I wanted those things, I figured the most important thing would be that I get to do those things. So I’m printing it as cheaply as possible until the numbers get up and it can support itself, so Fantagraphics doesn’t go, “You know, we can’t afford to give you your own vanity project.” I want to do it so that they can afford to do it and it not be a money-losing situation for them. I’d love to make it fancier, but that’s going to require numbers–and maybe I won’t even do it once I get numbers because I do like how simple it is. It’s almost like a minicomic. It will be nice to have the option of doing something different, like a full-color pullout, if I have the numbers there, but I don’t know. Maybe I won’t even do that. It might be nice to just have it be profitable instead of breaking even. But the most important thing is to just be able to do it. The book is really where you can go all fancy, whereas this is straightforward, read-it-here, no frills.

But it’s not as though you’re a stranger to frills. Take the very elaborate NON #5, for example–it’s a die-cut cardboard container holding three separate graphic novels wrapped within a hand-silkscreened cover. Why is design so important to your work?

CRANE: NON #5 is definitely a little different than all the rest of them. NON #5 took that shape because it had to. That was the only way to collect it all together. I was originally going to have Col-Dee and [Kurt Wolfgang’s graphic novella] Where Hats Go in the [main NON] book. That was the original plan. But then Kurt and I got Xeric Grants to print them and we were able to overlap projects, which theoretically would save me money. It would’ve been a hell of a lot cheaper just to print the book as one big book, now that I look back on the whole thing. Those Xeric Grants were actually a hindrance. I was like, “Thanks for the $8,000 that ended up costing me $5,000.” [Laughs] Since those were Xeric Grant books, I wanted them to be a part of the package, but they had to work separately because they were going to be sold separately as well.

So that was my solution to that problem: I looked at the budget constraints of the book and tried to figure out how to make it as cheaply as possible. “How can we make it and still turn a profit?” It was just accepting the constraints and not being like, “I’m going to push my publisher to spend money that they don’t have.” In one way the form isn’t the point. In the biggest way the form isn’t the point. It’s about working within those constraints and creating the most high-quality work that is possible. It’s giving the proper attention to creating a book. That’s pretty much the problem that I’m trying to solve every time that I approach a book. I’m like, “How can I make this as nice as possible?” That’s one of the things that I love about old stuff: I don’t love the fact that it’s old necessarily, I love that there’s a doorknob that somebody looked at and said, “Okay, this is a handle that needs to be turned in order to open a door. How can I make this as nice as possible–as beautiful as possible?” Not just, “How can I make this functional?” If it’s in a public place, somebody is going to be touching that doorknob 1,000 times a day, and at least half of those people are going to look at it. It would be nice if when they looked at the doorknob, it lifted them rather than it just being there. I like making something that doesn’t have to be beautiful, beautiful. I appreciate it when other people do it, so I try to do it myself.

When I got into comics after graduating from college, NON was the first anthology I’d come across. But we’re now in a heavily anthologized era: Kramers Ergot, Mome, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase…

CRANE: I know. Now I don’t have to do NON anymore! It’s great! I love it! [Laughs] That’s why I was doing NON: There was all this great work and none of it was published, and I wanted to publish my own work and this other stuff too. It wasn’t that I necessarily set out to do an anthology, it was that I just wanted to put all this other stuff into this book that I’m paying to print. But now there are so many damn anthologies that there’s practically no one that isn’t getting printed. I’m glad that I’m not publishing an anthology right now. And in a way, NON was really easy. It was a bunch of very obvious choices, because all these great guys were not being published. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was not a hard anthology to edit. [Laughs]

You’ve told stories in a wide variety of contrasting tones. For example, The Last Lonely Saturday is about an elderly couple and how they’re reunited after death, and it’s an incredibly sweet and romantic all-ages tale. But in Uptight #2, your story “Take Me Home” takes almost the exact same idea and spins it into this brutally grim, EC-flavored morality play. How do you handle this aspect of storytelling?

CRANE: Whenever a story occurs to me, I just want to do it. I don’t have one particular type of story that I’m interested in doing. If a story is exciting to me, then I work on it; if that story gets finished, then I can put it out. I don’t really have a filter, because with comics you can do anything that you want! That’s the great thing about comics. Anything that strikes my fancy is what I follow until the fancy has been stricken to death [laughs], or it actually winds up going somewhere.

So with The Clouds Above, you didn’t sit down and decide to do a children’s book?

CRANE: No. I love children’s books. And it’s not a children’s book–I was trying to do a children’s book, and they’re f—ing hard. I like fantastical stories with kids and I wanted to do an adventure story. There was a certain mood that I wanted to create in the story. It wasn’t that I was thinking that I wanted to hit a certain age group. If anything, Clouds Above isn’t malicious and f—ed-up enough. It needs to be way more malicious–which would remove it from the age group that it’s about and make it practically unreadable for kids. But there are plenty of kids’ stories that are totally f–ed up, and kids read them. I just wanted to create something that struck a certain emotional tone. That’s how I tried to go about it.

Who are your artistic influences?

CRANE: I could trace influences, but I don’t really look at anybody to see how to draw so much as I really like the way something makes me feel. At the very beginning I really liked Geof Darrow. Some of the basic things about the way I wanted to draw are that I don’t want to do half-toning and I don’t want to do cross-hatching. I want a straightforward black or white line. But apparently, somewhere along the line, it’s become okay for me to do washes [laughs], which seems to be completely against anything that I initially wanted to do. But I just love the way it looks. So washes are okay, apparently. As far as the line art, it’s always been clean-line art. No cross-hatching–it’s either black or white, and trying to make an image out of black and white. So to that end Geof Darrow really hit on something that I wanted, and I looked to him for a while. Then his influence fell off after a while, as I was trying to do less lines and trying to hit the actual thing without a lot of wrinkles and junk. But there are people whose art I feel a certain kinship with. For example, I like what Hank Ketcham does with black and whites. It’s amazing. He does a lot of cross-hatching and I don’t want to do that, but the things that he does with spaces of black and white is insane. And José Munoz draws so messy but it all makes sense, and he doesn’t give a f— where he puts black. He’s crazy. He just throws it on the paper and it’s really exciting. There’s just such life to his drawings. It’s the same with Jaime Hernandez–there’s so much expressiveness and he just lays down the black. It’s crazy. And then there’s Hergé, who practically doesn’t lay down any black. He does, but it’s very selective and there’s a lot of life to these apparently simple drawings. They really bounce, and they have a lot of heft and roll to them.

I think that covers the spectrum. You can see why I feel a kinship to those people, because it feels like there are similar aims, at least drawing-wise. Those are people that I feel are doing the drawing right. I agree with some aspect of their drawings and it makes me excited to feel this kinship with it. And it’s not like that’s the only kind of artwork that I like. I love John Porcellino and Kevin Huizenga. Kevin is another one that I feel a kinship with because of the simplicity and cleanliness of the way he draws. And Sammy Harkham, who I share a studio with–there are definitely things that he does that I really like. It’s mainly cartoony stuff, like the way he draws a puff of smoke coming out of someone’s eye.

Is E.C. Segar an influence on you? I see him mainly in your character designs, I think.

CRANE: I’d love to say yes, but I don’t think that I could draw anything as crazy as Segar. I really like how crazy he gets, but I guess I haven’t looked at enough Segar to say that he’s somebody I really pore over. I love his work. Frank King as well: I haven’t read enough of him to cite him as an influence. I like a lot of the old-time cartooning where it’s very simple, and there are areas of black and white and it’s very clear, and the character design doesn’t overwhelm the pacing. It all reads along at the same pace. I guess I’m trying to get away from the super-detailed.

And when you ask about influences, I don’t cite anybody outside of comics because I think the art for comics is very different than the art for illustration. A finished panel for a comic is an incomplete thing because it’s attached to the thing before it and the thing after it. If it’s complete then you’re at a kind of a standstill, so it needs to be incomplete. It needs to be not a full statement, and it’s kind of a very hard thing to do. Jaime does it really well. If you isolate any one of his panels, they just don’t work on their own. There are a couple which are intended to be complete statements, but by and large they don’t work on their own. Even some that you’d think would work when you’re isolating them don’t work. I’m doing a screen print with him soon, and I was going through a lot of his comics and trying to isolate panels that I thought would be awesome prints, and it took a lot longer than I initially thought. You’d think that you could take anything from Jaime because it’s all brilliant and amazing, but it actually doesn’t work on its own. So that’s why I’m citing only cartoonists, because I think it’s a very different style of drawing.

You’re also not mentioning any animators.

CRANE: It’s true. I don’t like animation anymore. [Laughs] The love affair is over. I had a really big appreciation for the early Max Fleischer stuff, but it’s not like I want to draw like that. It definitely is something that did not have an influence on me.

What are you working on now?

CRANE: Uptight #3!

Is Uptight the plan for the foreseeable future?

CRANE: Yeah–for the rest of the future, as far as I can tell. I just want to do Uptight. I’m obviously going to collect them, but it’s a place for everything that I’m working on so that I can have something regular come out. Short stories are necessary because you want there to be a finished thing in it. But I can also catch all the incomplete sh– that I’m working on too, because comic books do that as well. That’s what DC and Marvel are all about, because all that they have are incomplete stories. I’m working on some stories for the next issue of that, and possibly some new Simon & Jack stories. And also the usual terrifying and f—ed-up ghost stories. I keep on doing ghost stories because I still haven’t read a good one, so I want to try and write a good ghost story.

I’m always happy when people whose work I enjoy come out with comics on a regular basis. I think that some cartoonists have benefited from working in the long form–like the impact that Craig Thompson’s Blankets had just from being this giant phone-book-sized graphic novel–but it’s fun to get short-form comics as a fan.

CRANE: I think the short form keeps you engaging. That’s the most important thing for a comic to do, to be engaging–for it to demand that as a reader you give something to it, and you give it. To do that, each part should be complete–not just each story, but each part, each page, each row of panels. It’s subdividable. I mean, being utterly leadenly serialized is bad too, but…If you look at a novel, it’s made up of paragraphs and sentences, but each one of those is complete. When I look back at something like Col-Dee, which I worked on in long form, I see that parts of it are incomplete–not by design, but just because I didn’t see it.

So from now on, I don’t care if I never learn anything more about drawing. [Laughs] I just care about writing, and being engaging as a writer. I mean, that’s your f—ing job. Whether you look at someone like Stephen King or someone supposedly “good” like Flannery O’Connor, both of them, aside from their numerous differences, are engaging. That’s the hardest thing to be, the most important thing to be. If you can be engaging, f—! [Laughs]