MattBrady
11-27-2002, 05:35 PM
As reported in July, Oni’s Queen and Country gets it’s own spinoff this November with the three issue Queen and Country: Declassified miniseries written by series creator Greg Rucka, with art by Q&C: “Morningstar” artist, Brian Hurtt. Oni has provided three pages of art for a preview, and we chatted with Hurtt about the project as well.
While Rucka was game for the project from the get-go, the impetus to tell Paul’s story didn’t start with him. “Brian sent me an e-mail as we were working on the arc [“Morningstar," Q&C #5-7], and he said he really liked Crocker, and thought it would be really cool to see what he looked like back in the day,” Rucka told Newsarama. “The second I read it I thought it was a fantastic idea, and I wasn’t above stealing it. But of course, if we were going to do it, Brian was going to have to draw it.”
For the artist, it was something that came together almost as an afterthought. ”It happened while I was working on the first series,” Hurtt said. “I had emailed him to ask a question in regards to the story we were working on. Right before sending it off I tagged on a short p.s. asking if he'd given any consideration to doing a one-shot or miniseries with Crocker as the main character. Greg had written such a rich character that, like every other Q&C fan, I found I couldn't read the series and not want to see more of him. His response came immediately. He was really gung ho about the idea--I think the wheels started turning at high speed once he gave a thought to the prospect.”
As he explained to Newsarama in July, Declassified takes place in 1986, and Rucka was able to slip easily into the world that was. “Chernenko has just died, Gorbachev has just come into power,” Rucka said. “What’s going on within the Soviet Union at that time is that there was a hard liner/reformer fight, especially within the KGB, because Gorbachev was the young new guy who was the first obvious, blatant reformer. Other moves had been made, and now you’ve got this guy coming in and starting to make decisions that would end the Cold War. Consequently in the KGB at the time, you have these people who are hard line, who came up through the ranks, and aren’t going to back down. Now, you’ve got a situation where the government is in opposition in part to the agency. As a result, the KGB is being very, very aggressive in operations.
“As a result, the SIS is sustaining losses – they’ve got networks that are just vanishing on them, and agents who are dropping like flies. For lack of a better word, and a fictional example, it’s like taking what was happening in Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War, and amping that up and bringing it up to date. There is that level of espionage going on. Now the game is being played really hard and it’s being played on the ground.
"Into that comes a Minder who’s name is Paul Crocker.”
Of course, as Rucka has previously explained the wheels started moving a little too fast, and before he knew it, he had written 21 pages that he felt were essential to showing who Paul Crocker was (and is) and was just starting to get to the meat of the story. After running it by Oni, it was decided to change the one shot into a three-issue miniseries.
“When it was time to lay out some of the thematic and emotional stuff for Crocker, I was at page 21, and the key operational story was just beginning,” Rucka said. “I wasn’t going to be able to resolve it in 18 pages, and I panicked, because I was already late on the script. I called Jamie [Rich, Oni Editor in Chief], and told him I had a problem. He said, “What?” in the way he always does when I say I have a problem, which makes it sound like, ‘Get an ointment and don’t call me.’”
Rich read Rucka’s first 21 pages, and agreed that they were good, and served the story. As a result, they shouldn’t cut them. “Jamie laid out the options – we could slot it as a regular Queen and Country arc, which I didn’t want to do,” Rucka said. “The other was to publish it in lieu of Queen and Country for three months, and I didn’t want to do that. The other way out was to do it as a miniseries, so we went with that.”
Of course, for the guy who suggested the idea, the change came as a surprise. “I was about halfway through Skinwalker when the guys over at Oni contacted me,” Hurtt said. “They sent me the script in progress and said they had some good news and they had some bad news. The good news is that Greg's on a roll and he's pumping out the pages...the bad news is that Greg's on a roll and he's pumping out the pages. I was told that there's no way he can wrap up the story in the alloted pages-- they'd have to cut the first dozen pages or so to make it work. I threw a fit. I may have threatened violence. I had already drawn those pages in my mind and I didn't want to give them up. ‘Orrrrr..,’ they said, ‘We can turn it into a three-issue mini-series. Would you be up for that?’ I jumped up in my drafting chair and danced a jig!”
Artistically, Hurtt explained that, despite his enthusiasm, it took him a little while to get a feel for how a young Paul Crocker would look, and trying to de-age the version he’d already drawn just wasn’t going to work. “After trying to ‘reverse engineer’ Crocker and failing miserably I decided to start fresh,” Hurtt said. “The problem I was having in trying to draw the same character that we know from the current series is that when it comes down to it - he ain't the same character. The Crocker that had been staring back at me from my drawing board for months was defined by the intense eyes, the lines on his face, and that scowl. The guy we see in the first issue of Declassified isn't the Crocker I was familiar with...he's Paul. He still has this shred of hope and innocence. As the series progresses, though, we're going to start seeing signs of the Crocker that we all know.”
Crocker as a Minder wasn’t the only challenge to the series for Hurtt. Given that the series is set during the Cold War - behind enemy lines during the Cold War, Hurtt had to find reference material for the story’s locations. Yeah, right – like the Soviets were walking around snapping pictures of everything for use later...
”Google image search has become my best friend,” Hurtt said. “Time is always an issue when on a deadline but I try to do as much research as possible. There is always the fine line between being historically accurate and being dramatic and telling a story. For instance there is a scene in the first issue of Declassified that takes place at Checkpoint Charlie. Now, I did hours upon hours of research and had literally gathered at least a hundred images of the area. I wanted all the buildings and gates and guard towers to be dead on. This took a lot of detective work on my part considering that no cameras were ever allowed in the no man's land between East and West Berlin.
“I finally get a pretty good approximation of the space and lay out this elaborate two-page spread. It didn't work. It looked rather sterile and lacked a sense of despair and foreboding. So I had to redraw the whole thing and ‘fictionalize’ it a bit. I wouldn't say that all the images I studied went to waste though. By doing the research I find that it helps me get in the mindset of the story - its the method style of comic book penciling.”
As Rucka said earlier, Declassified’s story is a fast-paced one. “I’ve written a Checkpoint Charlie sequence, I’ve written a sequence where they’re watching another Minder,” Rucka said. “The long and the short of it is it’s about Crocker’s first bust-out.”
As for the long and the short of a “bust-out?” Simple – enemy agent in enemy nation gets made while on an operation. The only option? Tuck your head, run, and pray you reach friendly ground before you catch a bullet – or worse. “Nobody likes a bust-out,” Rucka explained. “Say you’re the British agents running the station in Prague, and one of your guys comes screaming in. People are shooting, and he’s driving over people to get through the gate. Who’s the heat going to land on? Not him. He may end up dead, but he’s not going to clean up the mess. You, on the other hand still have to live there afterwards.
“This is, in part, how you’d get diplomats being expelled in response to something somewhere else. One country would make the other mad by doing something like this, and then the ‘offended’ country would expel all the agents they’d made, but not actively targeted over the years, wiping the board clean, in a sense, and forcing the other country to start all over again with their operations.”
Given the speed and urgency that will have to be implied through the art, Hurtt said he’s justv going to do his best. “I have to give credit to Greg in saying that he really is pulling out all the stops with this one,” Hurtt said. “I'm just doing my best to try and keep up.”
While the immediate goal is to tell a ripping good spy story set during the Cold War, the bigger picture goal of Declassified is to crack Paul Crocker open just a little, and give Queen and Country readers a better fell for who he is and what makes him tick.
“What I wanted to do was to have an opportunity so you could see how Crocker got to be who he is and what his experience is when he’s sitting up there and sending an agent off, like the decision to send Kittering into Northern Iraq by a parachute in issue #8 – it’s nice to know a little bit about eh guy who has to make that order, to know whether or not he has any idea about what he’s asking these people to do.
“The other thing I wanted to show was that Crocker’s not very emotionally vulnerable in the series. He can’t be. He’s management. In Declassified, he’s younger, and a little more open with his emotions. There’s a bit at the end of the first arc when Tara and Anderson are at Crocker’s house, and Crocker tells Ed to go back to the office. When Tara asks if she can come in, Crocker says that his wife wouldn’t approve. I think, personally, that a guy who keeps the hours he keeps and the job he keeps manages to remain married. So – you get to see his wife in Declassified, and get an idea of their relationship.”
Most likely, Declassified will just be the first of Rucka’s exploration of the world he’s created within Queen and Country. “When I started out, I knew the series wasn’t going to be exclusively Tara, because I knew people were going to respond to Crocker– he’s such a bastard, and he’s so cool at the same time,” Rucka said. “So, from the very start, I knew Queen and Country was going to be more Tara and Crocker.
“The natures of the stories are such that it kind of shifts, which is good, because it’s sort of unrealistic in my head to see every op as a Tara op. As a result, Wallace and Kittering get elevated, and the Alexis-Crocker relationship is played up. Then, there are other things that were touched upon. Things like that – those are the itches I’d like to scratch.
“I’d like to do a story about Tara’s recruitment – who is she? How do you create somebody to do that job? What’s her circumstance? She’s late ‘20s – how do you become somebody who can speak these languages, shoot these guns, and get in and out of countries in these situations. For me, it’s all the more compelling, because we have an idea of how you do that with a guy – you go through the military. But – did Tara come up through the military?
“These are the questions that are going to be fun to answer.”
And Hurtt’s ready for the call. “Nothing is planned but, I'll always jump at the chance to work with Greg,” Hurtt said. “It's pretty much a given that if Greg Rucka asks you say yes. Right now, though, I have to get out of the way to avoid being run down by all the other artists who want to work on Q&C.”
While Rucka was game for the project from the get-go, the impetus to tell Paul’s story didn’t start with him. “Brian sent me an e-mail as we were working on the arc [“Morningstar," Q&C #5-7], and he said he really liked Crocker, and thought it would be really cool to see what he looked like back in the day,” Rucka told Newsarama. “The second I read it I thought it was a fantastic idea, and I wasn’t above stealing it. But of course, if we were going to do it, Brian was going to have to draw it.”
For the artist, it was something that came together almost as an afterthought. ”It happened while I was working on the first series,” Hurtt said. “I had emailed him to ask a question in regards to the story we were working on. Right before sending it off I tagged on a short p.s. asking if he'd given any consideration to doing a one-shot or miniseries with Crocker as the main character. Greg had written such a rich character that, like every other Q&C fan, I found I couldn't read the series and not want to see more of him. His response came immediately. He was really gung ho about the idea--I think the wheels started turning at high speed once he gave a thought to the prospect.”
As he explained to Newsarama in July, Declassified takes place in 1986, and Rucka was able to slip easily into the world that was. “Chernenko has just died, Gorbachev has just come into power,” Rucka said. “What’s going on within the Soviet Union at that time is that there was a hard liner/reformer fight, especially within the KGB, because Gorbachev was the young new guy who was the first obvious, blatant reformer. Other moves had been made, and now you’ve got this guy coming in and starting to make decisions that would end the Cold War. Consequently in the KGB at the time, you have these people who are hard line, who came up through the ranks, and aren’t going to back down. Now, you’ve got a situation where the government is in opposition in part to the agency. As a result, the KGB is being very, very aggressive in operations.
“As a result, the SIS is sustaining losses – they’ve got networks that are just vanishing on them, and agents who are dropping like flies. For lack of a better word, and a fictional example, it’s like taking what was happening in Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War, and amping that up and bringing it up to date. There is that level of espionage going on. Now the game is being played really hard and it’s being played on the ground.
"Into that comes a Minder who’s name is Paul Crocker.”
Of course, as Rucka has previously explained the wheels started moving a little too fast, and before he knew it, he had written 21 pages that he felt were essential to showing who Paul Crocker was (and is) and was just starting to get to the meat of the story. After running it by Oni, it was decided to change the one shot into a three-issue miniseries.
“When it was time to lay out some of the thematic and emotional stuff for Crocker, I was at page 21, and the key operational story was just beginning,” Rucka said. “I wasn’t going to be able to resolve it in 18 pages, and I panicked, because I was already late on the script. I called Jamie [Rich, Oni Editor in Chief], and told him I had a problem. He said, “What?” in the way he always does when I say I have a problem, which makes it sound like, ‘Get an ointment and don’t call me.’”
Rich read Rucka’s first 21 pages, and agreed that they were good, and served the story. As a result, they shouldn’t cut them. “Jamie laid out the options – we could slot it as a regular Queen and Country arc, which I didn’t want to do,” Rucka said. “The other was to publish it in lieu of Queen and Country for three months, and I didn’t want to do that. The other way out was to do it as a miniseries, so we went with that.”
Of course, for the guy who suggested the idea, the change came as a surprise. “I was about halfway through Skinwalker when the guys over at Oni contacted me,” Hurtt said. “They sent me the script in progress and said they had some good news and they had some bad news. The good news is that Greg's on a roll and he's pumping out the pages...the bad news is that Greg's on a roll and he's pumping out the pages. I was told that there's no way he can wrap up the story in the alloted pages-- they'd have to cut the first dozen pages or so to make it work. I threw a fit. I may have threatened violence. I had already drawn those pages in my mind and I didn't want to give them up. ‘Orrrrr..,’ they said, ‘We can turn it into a three-issue mini-series. Would you be up for that?’ I jumped up in my drafting chair and danced a jig!”
Artistically, Hurtt explained that, despite his enthusiasm, it took him a little while to get a feel for how a young Paul Crocker would look, and trying to de-age the version he’d already drawn just wasn’t going to work. “After trying to ‘reverse engineer’ Crocker and failing miserably I decided to start fresh,” Hurtt said. “The problem I was having in trying to draw the same character that we know from the current series is that when it comes down to it - he ain't the same character. The Crocker that had been staring back at me from my drawing board for months was defined by the intense eyes, the lines on his face, and that scowl. The guy we see in the first issue of Declassified isn't the Crocker I was familiar with...he's Paul. He still has this shred of hope and innocence. As the series progresses, though, we're going to start seeing signs of the Crocker that we all know.”
Crocker as a Minder wasn’t the only challenge to the series for Hurtt. Given that the series is set during the Cold War - behind enemy lines during the Cold War, Hurtt had to find reference material for the story’s locations. Yeah, right – like the Soviets were walking around snapping pictures of everything for use later...
”Google image search has become my best friend,” Hurtt said. “Time is always an issue when on a deadline but I try to do as much research as possible. There is always the fine line between being historically accurate and being dramatic and telling a story. For instance there is a scene in the first issue of Declassified that takes place at Checkpoint Charlie. Now, I did hours upon hours of research and had literally gathered at least a hundred images of the area. I wanted all the buildings and gates and guard towers to be dead on. This took a lot of detective work on my part considering that no cameras were ever allowed in the no man's land between East and West Berlin.
“I finally get a pretty good approximation of the space and lay out this elaborate two-page spread. It didn't work. It looked rather sterile and lacked a sense of despair and foreboding. So I had to redraw the whole thing and ‘fictionalize’ it a bit. I wouldn't say that all the images I studied went to waste though. By doing the research I find that it helps me get in the mindset of the story - its the method style of comic book penciling.”
As Rucka said earlier, Declassified’s story is a fast-paced one. “I’ve written a Checkpoint Charlie sequence, I’ve written a sequence where they’re watching another Minder,” Rucka said. “The long and the short of it is it’s about Crocker’s first bust-out.”
As for the long and the short of a “bust-out?” Simple – enemy agent in enemy nation gets made while on an operation. The only option? Tuck your head, run, and pray you reach friendly ground before you catch a bullet – or worse. “Nobody likes a bust-out,” Rucka explained. “Say you’re the British agents running the station in Prague, and one of your guys comes screaming in. People are shooting, and he’s driving over people to get through the gate. Who’s the heat going to land on? Not him. He may end up dead, but he’s not going to clean up the mess. You, on the other hand still have to live there afterwards.
“This is, in part, how you’d get diplomats being expelled in response to something somewhere else. One country would make the other mad by doing something like this, and then the ‘offended’ country would expel all the agents they’d made, but not actively targeted over the years, wiping the board clean, in a sense, and forcing the other country to start all over again with their operations.”
Given the speed and urgency that will have to be implied through the art, Hurtt said he’s justv going to do his best. “I have to give credit to Greg in saying that he really is pulling out all the stops with this one,” Hurtt said. “I'm just doing my best to try and keep up.”
While the immediate goal is to tell a ripping good spy story set during the Cold War, the bigger picture goal of Declassified is to crack Paul Crocker open just a little, and give Queen and Country readers a better fell for who he is and what makes him tick.
“What I wanted to do was to have an opportunity so you could see how Crocker got to be who he is and what his experience is when he’s sitting up there and sending an agent off, like the decision to send Kittering into Northern Iraq by a parachute in issue #8 – it’s nice to know a little bit about eh guy who has to make that order, to know whether or not he has any idea about what he’s asking these people to do.
“The other thing I wanted to show was that Crocker’s not very emotionally vulnerable in the series. He can’t be. He’s management. In Declassified, he’s younger, and a little more open with his emotions. There’s a bit at the end of the first arc when Tara and Anderson are at Crocker’s house, and Crocker tells Ed to go back to the office. When Tara asks if she can come in, Crocker says that his wife wouldn’t approve. I think, personally, that a guy who keeps the hours he keeps and the job he keeps manages to remain married. So – you get to see his wife in Declassified, and get an idea of their relationship.”
Most likely, Declassified will just be the first of Rucka’s exploration of the world he’s created within Queen and Country. “When I started out, I knew the series wasn’t going to be exclusively Tara, because I knew people were going to respond to Crocker– he’s such a bastard, and he’s so cool at the same time,” Rucka said. “So, from the very start, I knew Queen and Country was going to be more Tara and Crocker.
“The natures of the stories are such that it kind of shifts, which is good, because it’s sort of unrealistic in my head to see every op as a Tara op. As a result, Wallace and Kittering get elevated, and the Alexis-Crocker relationship is played up. Then, there are other things that were touched upon. Things like that – those are the itches I’d like to scratch.
“I’d like to do a story about Tara’s recruitment – who is she? How do you create somebody to do that job? What’s her circumstance? She’s late ‘20s – how do you become somebody who can speak these languages, shoot these guns, and get in and out of countries in these situations. For me, it’s all the more compelling, because we have an idea of how you do that with a guy – you go through the military. But – did Tara come up through the military?
“These are the questions that are going to be fun to answer.”
And Hurtt’s ready for the call. “Nothing is planned but, I'll always jump at the chance to work with Greg,” Hurtt said. “It's pretty much a given that if Greg Rucka asks you say yes. Right now, though, I have to get out of the way to avoid being run down by all the other artists who want to work on Q&C.”