Interview: John Barber Comic Writer and Editor (3 of 3)

Here we go with the last installment of our interview with John Barber, IDW writer and former editor\writer for Marvel. Enjoy!

• Where do you get your inspiration as a writer?

I don’t want to sound too new-agey-bullshitty, but I guess from everywhere. I think story ideas tend to happen when a couple disparate notions crash together. So maybe it’s thinking about some news story, and then seeing how that can be transposed with something else. I mean, if Andy says, “pitch a Transformers series,” well—one of the elements is there already. You have the Transformers. But there has to be some other idea coming in there, some sort of thought that makes the story be about something.

If you’re telling larger-than-life heroic fiction—and by no means is that all that comics can be, but I mean in the realm of Marvel comics or Transformers—you want to take something real and blow it up to extreme proportions. As you abstract a feeling or a concept, you make it more relatable to more people. Like, if you tell a story about the day-to-day struggles of a high-school student in real life, that can be great. I mean, demonstrably, that can create great works of film, comics, TV, literature, songs, whatever.

But as the reader, you relate to the realistic portrayals a certain way, where you say “yeah, that happened to me like that” or “my experience was different” or “they didn’t have high school in my country” or “we didn’t have cell phones when I was that age” or whatever. You can understand the pressures the characters go through, but it’s always that you have or have not gotten past those feelings, and that thing did or did not happen to you. But when you have teenaged Spider-Man trapped under tons of machinery by Doc Ock and it’d be the easiest thing in the world for him to give up but he can’t let Aunt May down the way did Uncle Ben—we all know what that feels like. Because its so abstract. Nobody’s actually had that happen to them, so everybody on the planet can approach that the same way. We’ve all had that kind of pressure.

It’s not better than other ways of telling stories, than other genres, but that’s a big attribute of heroic fiction, I think. So that’s what you want to do when you’re telling these stories—give us something real abstracted to an unreal scale.

• Since you’ve worked on some books and they’ve been made into major motion pictures, how do you feel about the adaptation of comics to screen?

I think it’s great that over the past decade or so, you’ve had big improvements over two fronts. One, where comics get turned into movies the same way novels are, and I’m happy to see that—to see comics treated like books, in that respect. I mean with movies going back to Ghost World, up through Tamara Drewe (which nobody, including me, saw) or Scott Pilgrim this year. It’s nice to see the movies being more faithful to the source material—where you don’t have movies just buying the one-line pitch and turning From Hell into a movie about a psychic detective. I mean, I remember the From Hell movie being a pretty fun film, but other than being about Jack the Ripper and referencing some shots from the comic, it didn’t have much to do with the tone or the the meaning of the comic.

And two is on the superhero movies; it’s great that “superheroes” has become a real movie genre, not just a marketing hook like it was after the 1989 Batman movie. The public now has a better understanding of superheroes, and there’s a generation of great filmmakers who grew up really wanting to do stories in the genre, the way, maybe, that Scorsese wanted to do crime movies. It’s amazing that you have people like Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky and Matthew Vaughan and Edgar Wright and David Goyer— I think they’re all older than me, but our comics upbringing isn’t that different. It’s exciting because doing a superhero film isn’t just a paycheck in the way that it probably was for people doing third-rate superhero movies in the 1980s and 1990s.

There used to be a… a way of looking down on the material, I think, when they made superhero movies. But people that came up reading comics in the ’80s had a different relationship, and now those are the guys making movies. Even people that aren’t making comics-specific things—like Damon Lindelof, he knows his comics. Lost was structured like Watchmen, and that wasn’t a coincidence—it’s that this stuff had as much of an impact on him as it did on me and everyone else from my generation doing comics now.

And it’s been fantastic to see Scott Pilgrim, Kick-Ass, and the Walking Dead TV show come out the same year. People didn’t entirely seem to understand what to make of them Scott Pilgrim and Kick-Ass, but I suspect they’ll be like Fight Club where in 10 years it’ll seem inconceivable that those were box-office disappointments (to whatever degree they were). Kick-Ass on DVD did insanely well. And, importantly from my POV, all of those books are creator-owned. In the case of Scott Pilgrim and Kick-Ass, they were being developed into movies while the comics were coming out. I lived through Kick-Ass, but it was interesting for me a couple weeks ago to listen to the commentary on the Scott Pilgrim blu-ray and hear the back-and-forth relationship the comic and the movie had, as they each influenced the other. Not in a marketing way as much as a “that’s a good idea, I’ll use that” way.

• Do you have any advice for people wanting to or trying to get a start in the comic industry?

Scott McCloud had a great line that he used to say, that I always tell people (probably misquoting him wildly on the way). If you want to break into comics what you do is: you draw a comic. Photocopy it, fold it in half, staple it and boom—you’re in comics. And the web eliminates the need for even having a stapler.

You should go out and make your own comics. Put them on the web, try to get people to publish them. Get them out there. Even if you want to work at Marvel or DC or IDW or wherever… that’s sort of out of your control. You making comics yourself is in your control. Find somebody to work with if you can’t—or don’t want to—do it all on your own. Another piece of McCloud advice is that if you’re just trying to break into Marvel or DC, you’re one of hundreds. But if you go out and do good comics, and you get them under people’s noses where they can see them, Marvel and DC will come for you, and there’s only one of you.

Beyond that, understand as much as you can about the medium and about the business industry. Have something to say. Look at film and TV and literature and art and illustration and design, as well.

I do some work—I taught a class once, and I’m a part of the online workshops—for Comics Experience. They do classes on different aspects of comic creation—writing, penciling, coloring, lettering—and there’s an online community where people can talk and interact. I’m generally wary of this kind of thing, but this is totally a good learning experience. It’s a good place to start out, or to polish your craft. There’s a website at http://comicsexperience.com

• So what’s down the pipeline for you?  Any exciting projects coming up?

Well, I’m hoping the creator-owned book I was talking about comes along soonish. I’m trying to work on more of those, as well. The Transformers series are coming out as we speak.

And there are some more things in various stages that I can’t really talk about yet.

• We always have to ask people we interview one question, If you could only take three people\items with you into a dungeon, what would they be?

That’s kinda twisted…I mean, if I liked the people in question, I probably wouldn’t want them in the dungeon with me, right? It’s a dungeon. I mean, I guess my wife and my dog are what I should say, but I don’t want to be responsible for putting them in a dungeon. Plus the dog would poop, and it’s a dungeon so they probably wouldn’t let me take her for walks. So maybe it’d be better to have my wife taking care of the dog until I get out. I might just limit myself to items, to avoid the moral quandary.

My iPhone loaded with a bunch of music, a charger, and maybe a copy of Watchmen (the comic, I mean).

Well there you have it ladies and gents, the end to an epic length interview.  Thanks so much to John for hanging out with us and dropping some knowledge. Keep an eye out for John’s new comics coming up in your local shops and digital readers.  If you want to keep up to date on his work you can find him at:

Twitter: @TheJohnBarber

http://www.moderntales.com/comics/infinity.php