BEHIND THE PAGE: ED BRUBAKER, I

[MattBrady]

by Vaneta Rogers

The teenage Ed Brubaker would probably hate the adult version of himself.

In fact, Brubaker has no problem calling his younger self an alternative comics "snob." Immersed in that world during his early days as a comics professional, Brubaker once looked down upon superhero comics, believing them somehow inferior to the things he and his peers were doing in alternative comics.

But all that has changed. And superhero fans would breathe a collective sigh of relief if they realized how delicate was the balance of events that brought Brubaker into the realm of superhero comics. After he landed a few jobs at Vertigo, the stars were aligned just right to get him writing Batman, and slowly we began to get the superhero writer who currently churns out comics like Captain America, Daredevil, Uncanny X-Men, The Immortal Iron Fist he co-writes with Matt Fraction, and his creator-owned title, Criminal.

Often pictured in his signature black hat, glasses and short beard, Brubaker's look isn't the only thing that harkens back to his more rebellious, alternative comics days. The street-level stories and psychological themes he explored during his time as a cartoonist in the indy world still help shape his writing style -- only now his characters wear costumes and capes.

Winner of last year's Eisner Award for Best Writer, Brubaker has been getting a lot of attention for the last couple years since he became a Marvel exclusive creator. Not only is he the man who brought back Bucky and killed Steve Rogers -- in the top selling single issue of 2007 -- but he was among the writers of the just-finished mega-X-Men event Messiah Complex. There's no doubt that the writer's ideas and stories have shaped much of the discussion about Marvel Comics over the last year, and it doesn't look like that's going to change. This week, Brubaker will be the writer who introduces the new Captain America in issue #34 of the hero's title series.

In this first part of a two-part interview, we talked to Ed Brubaker about his evolution as a writer and discovered some of the secrets behind what makes him the writer he is today. In a discussion that was often laced with laughter, Brubaker was surprisingly talkative and open, and seemed happy to share with us the motivations and history of the man Behind the Page.

Newsarama: Were you always a big reader? Was it always comic books? Or what kind of stuff did you grow up reading?

Ed Brubaker: Well, when I was two or maybe three, my dad had just come back from Vietnam. And he was working in an office on a Navy base. My brother was a couple years older than me, and my dad had grown up reading comics and wanted to get us reading early. My brother had been reading children's books and stuff, but my dad came home from the office one day with this enormous box of used comics. Apparently, he'd gone to the other guys in the office and asked if their kids had comics they didn't want anymore. A lot of his friends had kids who were older than us and had supposedly grown out of comics.

And so me and my brother just had to fight over this box and pick what was whose, because brothers never share anything. It's one of my earliest memories -- just piling through these beaten up old comics from the '50s and early '60s. This would have been like 1969 or something like that. And so, from that point on, I was just always reading comics. I can't think that there was a day that has gone by -- maybe a month of my life that's ever gone by -- that I haven't read a comic.

NRAMA: I guess your dad's efforts worked.

EB: Well, my dad assumed we would grow out of comics and start reading books, but I didn't do that as a kid. My brother immediately went from reading comics to reading books. There were certain comics that interested him, like Conan and a few things like that, but he never really got into superheroes. But I was just obsessed with comics, probably until I was 15 or 16. I read nothing but comics. It was like I wanted to rebel because my dad, mom and brother all read books all the time. So my one sort of family rebellion at the time was that I wasn't really interested in books. I was only interested in comics.

NRAMA: I know you were a military kid, but you spent a lot of your childhood in San Diego, right?

EB: My dad was in the Navy, so we moved around a lot when I was a kid. I ended up in San Diego. And that was where we lived when my parents got divorced. And my dad got out of the military a few years later and moved back to San Diego too, so he could be near us kids. So I went to high school in San Diego and junior high. But I moved around a little bit during that time period too, but always ended up coming back to San Diego.

But from a teenager on, I never really liked San Diego. It was such a right-wing kind of city. I was into punk rock and rode around on a scooter and did a lot of drugs and was always getting in trouble with the law. It was not a good city for me as a teenager. And I really wanted to get out the first minute that I could. And keep in mind, San Diego now is so different than San Diego in the '80s. In the '80s, it was really like a small town that was just spread out everywhere. It really felt like just the suburbs, no matter where you lived. There was no gaslamp quarter -- that was just vacant buildings and a couple of taco shops, and that was where people went to score heroin. Now it's like a ritzy kind of neighborhood and there's a baseball park. But that wasn't the San Diego I grew up in. It was hot in the summer, and very right-wing in its politics. And the cops were assholes, and they'd impound your scooter for no reason. [laughs]

NRAMA: Ah, we get to the root of the problem. The scooter impounding habit of the San Diego Police.

EB: Yeah! [laughs] But, you know, it was also that thing where if you stay in your hometown, you never get away from who you were when you were a kid or when you were in high school. I think that's a big problem with people is they don't go away from where they were and become who they're supposed to be. It wasn't until my late 20s that I actually became the person I was going to be. When I was 19 or 20, I moved to San Francisco and lived there for a number of years and moved around a little and ended up here in Seattle. I needed to leave San Diego behind, I think.

NRAMA: So getting back to your comic book habit, what kind of comics were you reading as a kid? Was it superhero stuff mostly?

EB: Yeah, it was superheroes.

NRAMA: Were you one of the X-Men kids? It became so popular around that time period.

EB: I actually ... I liked the X-Men to a certain extent. I remember I bought X-Men #98 or #99 or something like that at the 7-11 when I was in, like, third or fourth grade. I thought that was pretty cool, but I wasn't as obsessed with X-Men as everyone else was back in the '70s. I remember thinking for a long time... I think I was in like 10th grade or something, and I had every X-Men issue from like '94 up to whatever the current run was. It was right around the time Paul Smith was leaving the book. And I sat down and I read them all through, and I was unsatisfied somehow. I felt like there were still storylines that were just being dragged out. I was getting to the point where I had discovered punk rock and Love and Rockets and American Splendor, and R. Crumb and these other things, and X-Men wasn't doing it for me any more.

NRAMA: You discovered these alternative types of comics at a pretty early age then, it sounds like.

EB: Yeah. There were some really good stores in San Diego when I grew up. And I had sort of older influences of people who were trying to turn me on to different stuff. I remember I was looking for backissues in a comic book store, and I was there when they got their shipment from Last Gasp of underground comics. I was such a comic addict that I wanted to look at anything that was a comic. I was like, "Oh, what's this - Reid Fleming: World's Toughest Milkman?" And I became totally addicted to Journey to the point where I went to the comic convention and ended up hanging out, like, all day in front of Bill Loebs' table, just talking to him. And he created a Journey character named after me called Clawface Brubaker.

NRAMA: Clawface Brubaker?

EB: Yep. He's apparently doing a new Journey comic and wrote to me and asked me if he could use the character in the comic [laughs]. It's pretty funny. But yeah, I was just like a 13- or 14-year-old kid who wanted to get some insight into how to create this stuff. He was a really nice guy.

NRAMA: Did you know early on that you wanted to "grow up" to be a comic book creator?

EB: Oh, yeah. When I was a little kid reading all the superhero comics -- like Spider-Man and Captain America were my favorites -- I just wanted to be a penciller. I couldn't imagine anything being more fun than drawing the stuff. I would just write stories so that I would have something to draw. But I never really thought that I was that great of an artist. When I eventually started getting comics published, it was just stuff that I was writing and drawing myself -- it was very much alternative comics and not superheroes. But when I was growing up, until I was 13 or 14, I was just sitting at home drawing superhero scenes. I would draw three or four pages of a story and then abandon it, then three or four pages of something else. And I was creating characters that were blatant rip-offs of Marvel characters. And me and my friends at school had a Comic Book Club, and we'd sit around and draw comics, and it was just sort of that was the thing. It always, for me, there was no question I was going to grow up and be a penciller.

NRAMA: When you first started on comics as a professional, back when you were doing the Lowlife series, you were both writing and drawing, right?

EB: Yeah. At that point, I considered myself a cartoonist. In high school, I started going to some of the workshops at comic conventions and learning about the history of the medium. And my dad was always good about giving me stuff that had interested him as a kid, so when they put out those little reprints of things like Little Nemo or Prince Valiant or Tarzan or any of the newspaper strip stuff, he would get them for me. He would sometimes come home from a trip and have a whole box full of, like, these Pogo reprints from the '60s that he'd get at the used bookstore for a dollar. So there was always a certain amount of comic strip knowledge on my part.

But when I was a teenager, I remember taking in all my X-Men issues to trade in at the comic book store and getting backissues of Cerebus and some old Spirit reprints and things like that. And doing the thing that most teenagers do which is, you know, rebel against everything that they liked as a kid.

NRAMA: You were rebelling against mainstream comics?

EB: Basically. I still read mainstream comics for awhile. Probably until after Watchmen and Year One and Dark Knight and those comics, but then I quit. I would read the odd superhero comic, but pretty much from the time I was 18 or 19, I only read black and white comics or European comics or something like that. It wasn't until I started getting work in comics as a writer through Vertigo that I started reading other Vertigo comics and checking out other superhero comics.

NRAMA: Was that OK with you? That you were reading mainstream comics again? Or did you kind of have to be forced back into it?

EB: Oh, I ended up loving it. What happened to me was at some point in my late '20s, I decided I wasn't really having much fun anymore. I had forgotten why I loved reading and why I loved comics to begin with, which was that the stuff was actually fun. I had spent from the time I was 16 or 17 up until then thinking that everything had to be really important, like high art. Everything had to be very Comics Journal-worthy. I felt like somebody who came out of art school was damaged to the point where they could never enjoy Die Hard after that. And I felt like I had become sort of a genre snob even when I had grown up reading superhero comics that I really enjoyed.

NRAMA: And you discovered everything doesn't have to be high art to be good?

EB: Yeah. Everything doesn't have to be Love and Rockets or Eightball or Acme Novelty Library. There are people who just want to read episodic fiction and enjoy it. And giving people enjoyment is not a small thing, necessarily. I just realized that, why was I holding comics and literature to a higher standard than I was holding movies and TV and stuff like that, because I would watch plenty of pulp movies and pulp TV and things like that. I realized I was denying a huge part of myself. I really liked stuff like that. Like I really liked reading Conan comics as a kid, and I really liked The Shadow, and I really liked the Buffy TV show. And I think there was some part of me that was still damaged from being a rebellious teenager thinking everything had to be a certain way. And you know, the idea of something being a "guilty" pleasure. Well, why is any pleasure guilty? You know? Unless your pleasure is killing children [laughs], but if it's just a TV show or a book or comic book... then why can't you just enjoy it? Why can't you just enjoy reading Spider-Man if that's what you like? So I had kind of an eye-opening thing.

Part of it comes down to my friend Steve Weissman, who's an alternative cartoonist who did Yikes. I was working at a bookstore in San Francisco and Steve was visiting and saw that I was reading a terrible mystery novel. He asked me why I was reading it, and I said, "Well, you know, I don't really care about mystery novels." I'd never actually read mystery novels until I worked at this store. But some nights at this bookstore were so dead that I would pick up a book and start reading it, and I figured, well, I'll start reading this mystery, and if I'm not done by the end of my shift, I'll just flip to the end of the book and find out who did it. And Steve was appalled.

NRAMA: You wrote it all off as junk because you thought the genre was junk.

EB: Yeah. But I loved mystery TV shows and mystery movies, so it was weird that I figured anything that was like a puzzle -- I just had written it off. I thought, well, this isn't Nabokov. This isn't Milan Kundera. This isn't serious. Of course, you find out later that Nabokov loved mysteries. And so did Dostoevsky [laughs]. You know? It's just so funny that when you're in your '20s, you can be such a snob about that stuff. But Steve went and grabbed a bunch of Ross Macdonald's books off the used mysteries section, and threw them out before me and said, "Here, don't read that garbage. Read this."

That pretty much changed my life, because I found Ross Macdonald basically writing his autobiography in a series of mystery novels and approaching these themes that were the same things that you'd find in psychology or mythology. It made me realize I had been a huge snob and I needed to stop being like that [laughs].

NRAMA: Well, yeah, because you really could apply that to any genre. These themes that you saw showing up in mystery novels show can show up and be well-written in any genre or medium. And in particular, your mention of psychology and mythology -- those are themes that are often explored in comic books of all kinds.

EB: Oh yeah. Totally. Yeah. So now, it's like my reading new comics is completely all over the map. I read still alternative comics that appeal to me but I read all kinds of stuff. Whenever I get the flu, I still end up sending someone to the grocery store to buy me an Archie digest. You know? When you're sitting in bed feeling like crap, a big Betty and Veronica digest is really, you know, somehow comforting [laughs].

NRAMA: Laughter is the best medicine, right?

EB: Yeah. I always joke about it when people ask me what character I really want to write some day, and it sounds like a joke, but my idea of retirement someday is to write Jughead comics for a living.

NRAMA: You could draw them too!

EB: Yeah! I could probably draw those, actually. My art style was always sort of a slightly adapted version of the way Archie comics looked anyway [laughs].

NRAMA: Let's talk about the stuff you did as a cartoonist, because it was mostly autobiographical, wasn't it?

EB: Yeah. It was mostly autobiographical. A little semi-autobiographical. I took liberties with things. But most of the stuff that happened in Lowlife was stuff that either happened to me or my friends, but I changed all the names.

NRAMA: At what point do you think that you had moved more toward writing fiction as your main focus as opposed to taking stuff that had actually happened and telling that story with your cartooning?

EB: Well, the last couple autobiographical comics I did were really, really hard to do. I was writing about stuff that was still kind of heartbreaking and depressing to me. And I was never a fast artist, so it would take me three or four months of solid work to draw a comic, so I would only do one or two a year ever. And to sit there and sort of think about these really depressing things that you'd gone through -- it really had taken a lot out of me. And when I had started doing Lowlife, I was really influenced by a lot of the literature I was reading at the time, and everything was very ... "this is a story that happened to me." A lot of that came from when I was 15 or 16 discovering American Splendor and really thinking Harvey Pekar was the greatest thing in the world. And I still love Harvey Pekar, but I just went through the thing like a typical teenager who thinks he's the first person to discover punk rock and Jack Kerouac.

I still hold that stuff to certain esteem, but the "legend of me" stuff had started to wear thin on me. I'm not saying it's necessarily better or worse or anything like that. I felt like my tastes as a reader had shifted to the point where that was the stuff I was more interested in. And as I was at the tail end of Lowlife, I had started to do some stories that were just straight fiction, but around real people and real stuff, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of that. I think I'd gotten to the point where as a writer, I had developed enough of my craft that I was not just trying to express some personal pain I had felt, and I had gotten to the point where I felt enough control to actually create characters and move them through situations and examine questions, but the same kind of questions that you're asking when you're writing biography.

NRAMA: At the same time you moved away from autobiographical and toward fiction, you also moved toward writing and not drawing, didn't you?

EB: Yeah, that was a weird shift in that I never imagined I would give up being a cartoonist. But I always felt very restricted by my drawing style and what I could or couldn't do. It was always a struggle for me. I went through this really tough thing that had happened, personally, and spent about six months traveling around the country on the train visiting friends and just sort of going through a crazy time. And I had just started to get work doing writing for Vertigo. And I don't know... When I came out of that time, I had a bunch of writing gigs, and I just kept doing them. And I found that I was having a lot of fun and writing about stuff that mattered to me.

NRAMA: Did you ever try to draw again?

EB: Yeah. But when I would sit down and try to draw, I would get through half an issue of a comic and I just didn’t feel any joy about doing it. Even as a cartoonist, even when I was getting published, I always felt like I was a writer who drew as opposed to an artist who wrote things. Even when I was first getting published, I had friends who would ask me to come up with stories for them. And I had way more ideas for stories than I could ever draw myself. The first major thing I ever wrote for someone else to draw was Accidental Death for Eric Shanower, and that was because Eric could never think of contemporary story ideas. He really wanted something that didn't take place in ancient Egypt or Oz or something. He wanted a modern thriller story. I had been reading a lot of true crime and stuff like that. And so I had a bunch of ideas. But I could never have drawn a mystery comic or thriller comic. My art style would never have worked for that.

NRAMA: Accidental Death is what landed you your first Eisner nomination, isn't it?

EB: Yeah, we got two or three Eisner nominations for that, bizarrely. I didn't even know Eric had submitted it. I was really shocked. That was like 1992 or '93 or something like that. I kind of owe my whole career to Eric letting me write this thing for him just because we were friends. I think I actually did a good job on it. Of course, I look at it now and just cringe at how much overwriting I did in that.

NRAMA: When you say that you owe your whole career to that comic, you mean that it got you the attention of Vertigo, correct?

EB: Yeah. Lou Stathis had been trying to get Eric to do something for Vertigo. And Eric said he would do something for him if he let me write it. And Lou said, "Can this guy write?" And Eric said, "Well, he's up for the Eisner Award for best writer right now." [laughs] That helped!

NRAMA: You did Prez: Smells Like Teen President for Vertigo.

EB: Yeah. At the time I thought Vertigo was for teenagers. It had been so long since I read mainstream comics, I assumed that since superhero comics were all aimed at a younger audience, then Vertigo comics were a young adult thing.

NRAMA: So you thought they were trying to be cool, but weren't, right?

EB: Yeah. [laughs] But I just didn't know. I hadn't read that many of them. So I wrote a Prez comic and it was a young adult thing because I had just gone through a huge period of reading a bunch of young adult novels. I was really into Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. And I had read a couple Judy Blume novels and John Fitzgerald's stuff. And I just wanted to read a young adult thing. Then I heard the reactions from people who were, like, studying for their thesis in psychology, and I said, wait... adults are reading these? It had never occurred to me that the same people who were buying Eightball and Love and Rockets were also buying Vertigo comics. I was so sheltered from what actually happened in the comics industry.

NRAMA: So you found out the audience was the same?

EB: Yeah. I asked at a comics shop, who buys this stuff? And the guy behind the counter was happy to inform me that, while all us alternative comics snobs seem to think there's a completely separate audience, he said, "Most of the people who come in here and buy Eightball are the same people who buy X-Men." [laughs] I was like ... oooh.

I think there are different audiences for some of that stuff now, especially with bookstores. But I had no idea they overlapped like that so much. I just didn't know.

NRAMA: The whole audience of comic books has become very much adult, particularly in the direct market.

EB: Well, yeah. Now when I write comics, I don't even think about it. I just write for me. That was the one mistake that I think I really made in that Prez comic was thinking about audience I was writing for instead of just writing it for me, which was how I've done everything else.

NRAMA: So you don't think about the audience you're writing for? At some point, you started writing for a mainstream audience. You don't think about that at all? It's really just what story you feel like telling about the character?

EB: Yeah. That's how all writing is supposed to be. If you think too much about your audience and you're going to try to pander to them or cater to them, then ... you can't sit down and go, what does the audience who reads such-and-such want to see happen? Because then you're just putting together a menu. I feel like all writing ... the only person you can absolutely try to please is yourself. And hopefully, other people will enjoy it.

Like, when I took over Captain America, I thought about everything I wanted to see in Captain America while I was growing up reading that book. And what would I want to do with Captain America now that I have a chance to do it.

NRAMA: You knew when you were growing up? OK, give me an example, then. "If I was writing Captain America, this is what I'd like to see..." I mean, one of them wasn't...

EB: Well, Number One was...

NRAMA AND EB (simultaneously): "Bring back Bucky."

EB: [laughs] I did want to bring back Bucky!

NRAMA: [laughs] No way! You always knew you wanted him back?

EB: I always wanted it!

NRAMA: But you wanted to make him cool, right?

EB: Bring him back and make him cool. [laughs] But the door had always been left open to bring back Bucky. He was killed in a retcon off-panel. It wasn't like Gwen Stacy where you actually witnessed the death as a reader. You saw flashbacks of Cap's memories. It really bugged me as a kid when I found out there was no issue #99 of Captain America of Cap being captured by Zemo and Bucky being blown up. I remember when I was eight or nine years old and I found that out, I was like, "What? You mean there's no comic?" I just assumed it didn't happen then!

I was always a fan of Bucky as a character. I always thought it was cool that there was this 16-year-old kid running alongside Captain America shooting a machine gun at the Nazis.

NRAMA: I know you talked to us about your feelings on the character when you first brought him back. You had discussed with Tom Brevoort that a kid who fought alongside the Invaders had to be a tough guy.

EB: Exactly. And it was important to us to make sure we weren't just, you know, sort of pissing on everything that had come before. We wanted to create a way to fit it around the continuity. And that was where the Winter Soldier's story came from. It was a way to say, well how could this have happened? I like that he doesn't even know exactly who he is until Steve Rogers makes him remember being Bucky. And that's when the Winter Soldier personality moves to the background and we find out who this guy really is.

But the real important part of that is that if you're going to take away the tragedy of Steve losing his best friend during the war, you have to replace it with something else that serves the same function. And the tragedy was that, not only did he lose his friend in the war, but his friend was turned into everything that he would have hated. So when Bucky comes back, he's a real conflicted character. I think that's why people like the character. He doesn't feel like a stunt character. He's become a classic Marvel character. He's not a black and white good guy or bad guy. He's a good guy who's had a lot of bad stuff happen to him. He's done some bad things that he totally regrets. And I think that makes his character really work.

NRAMA: OK, so bringing him back was number one. What else did you want to do from the start?

EB: Number two was probably making the book feel like my favorite era of the book, which was the Steranko issues. It's only three issues, but I loved the way he combined the Stan and Jack version of Cap with what he was doing on SHIELD. It felt like a high-brow espionage comic with a superhero in it. The Captain America who was in that comic had such a world-weary, man-out-of-time quality. The first page of the first Steranko issue just has Steve Rogers walking toward you and it has this narration that is so depressing. And I remember reading it as a kid and it really blew me away. So I really wanted to try to capture that feel again, but take it to a modern place.

NRAMA: Well, at what point -- was it number three or maybe five...

EB: Oh, I'm always adding them as I go.

NRAMA: Yeah, like bringing in Falcon was probably one, right?

EB: Oh, yeah! I was totally bummed that there was a Captain America and The Falcon comic when my run started. No knocks against that book, but it was just, like, damnit! Now I can't have the Falcon be a major character in my book! But the minute that book got axed, I started writing the Falcon in my book, because I love the Falcon.

NRAMA: OK, but at what point did that ever-growing list evolve to include killing Steve Rogers? You had told about the death of Steve Rogers evolving out of the Civil War summit. But why did you, as a writer, see it as a good thing to do?

EB: Uh... well, that's kind of hard to answer. Some of that will get into stuff that's still coming up on the book. I can't reveal too much of future plans for the book or anything that's going to happen. But the death story was a morphing of a storyline I had been building toward since issue #1, which was the big Red Skull Strikes Back storyline. And then, when I went to my first Marvel summit and they mapped out everything that was going on with Civil War, there was this idea -- and it was just one of a lot of ideas -- that Cap would go off on his motorcycle at the end of Civil War and find America. And I remember thinking, Cap doesn't need to find America; America needs to find him.

And at the end of Civil War, I didn't think Cap could be in the "wrong" on this one. That's just not who Captain America is. He may be against what politicians want, but he's not in the wrong. That just didn't work for me. And I had just finished doing a Daredevil-in-prison storyline, so there was no way I was going to have Cap in prison. So as I've said, I don't know who it was that came up with the idea. In my mind, the first time it was seriously suggested we would kill him, it was me. So I think it was me. But I vividly remember Mark Millar saying, to my thanks now, that he didn't want to kill Cap in Civil War. I remember thinking, good, because I don't know what I would have done in Cap #25 if they had killed Cap in Civil War instead of letting me do it.

The interesting thing to me was, the storyline I was going to do with the Red Skull striking back was really about this plot that was supposed to begin with issue #25 and build toward issue #35, where the first blows would be struck. That was a story I had really been building toward the whole time. And in the back of my mind somewhere, I had thought that maybe the first blow of the Red Skull strike is to kill Captain America. It was one of those things that I had been toying with, but I don't know if I'd have had the guts to actually pull the trigger if not for the whole Civil War thing and those meetings that I went to.

NRAMA: So you it was something you'd thought about, but didn't actually plan to do until you got the OK?

EB: Yeah, basically. That's the way monthly comics are. Your plans are always evolving. If you end up getting 90 percent of what you originally wanted into the book, you're probably lucky. Like the scene where Sharon gets her pregnancy test back -- that wasn't 100 percent that I was going to do that. But when I actually wrote that scene, I thought, "Yeah, that's a great scene." I had been thinking about it, because what would be the next worst thing that could happen to Sharon? "Oh, you're pregnant with your boyfriend's kid after you killed him." So that seemed like the way to go for that.

I now have a pretty solid plan for where I'm going with the book for a very long time. But I wouldn't be surprised if that changes sometimes. It's an organic process to some degree. The death of Cap was not on my list of things I had to do with Captain America [laughs], but I did want to do a moment where Cap put down the shield. Other people have done that -- had him pretend to die or retire or get his shield taken away and given to someone else. There are these moments that defined a run of Captain America. And one of the runs is, what do we do without Captain America? So there was always going to be a void that needed to be filled, of some kind, whether that was going to be a death or him going to prison or him disappearing or something.

NRAMA: And it fit in with Bucky's story, didn't it?

EB: Yeah, but I had no clue until I wrote issue #26 or #27 that Bucky was actually going to end up taking the mantle. It didn't occur to me that it was the next evolution of where Bucky was going. I knew all along that we would also have a redemption of Bucky storyline. So once I realized how big this story was getting, I realized I needed someone back in the costume with the shield eventually. And Bucky fit so perfectly into that. It all came together.

But until then, I was like, I'm pretty happy not having a Captain America for nine months. I think it was pretty shocking that we were able to sell that many copies of a book called Captain America without anybody in Captain America's outfit.

NRAMA: It didn't hurt that Captain America #25 sold so well and got just a little bit of attention…

EB: I had no clue it was going to be that big. And I didn't know there would be this big effort by the media to analyze it and say it was like the death of America or something. I was just writing a story. I mean, I thought maybe it would sell, I don't know... like twice as many issues. [laughs] If I had known, I probably would have been nervous. Like it was much harder to write issue #34 than it was to write issue #25, because I realized we were under the microscope and I was doing the first issue with the new Captain America in it. Suddenly, I was thinking, OK, what do we absolutely need to see in an issue with a new Captain America in it? But Steve [Epting] and I both talked after issue #25 and agreed that we would never have been able to do that issue if we had any clue that it was going to have that much attention.

NRAMA: Yeah, I talked to Steve and he was thankful the one shot that kept being used on the media was one he actually liked pretty well. [laughs]

EB: [laughs] That's Steve for you. He's never happy with anything. But I think people expected it to be some lame stunt. And I think they were surprised that it just appeared to be a chapter in a story. It wasn't just, "boom," he's dead after being beaten to death in the streets or something. He was assassinated. That's pretty hardcore. That's how American icons get taken down. They don't get beaten to death by a supervillain in the street. And I don't think Captain America could ever get beaten to death by a supervillain. But anybody can be assassinated.

NRAMA: And killed, in the end, by someone he trusts.

EB: Exactly. Yeah. And that, I think, is why we held on to so many people who bought it thinking it was just a stunt or thinking it would be worth some money or some bullshiit. I think a lot of those people then read the comic and were like, hey! This is a story! And I was glad we had the twist at the end. Since most people going in to a comic store that day wouldn't be surprised that Captain America was killed, I was hoping they'd be surprised by the twist ending that Sharon was the one who actually killed him.

NRAMA: Let's go back and look at your first foray into superhero comics. Your name is really well known now, particularly after that Captain America issue, but also after Daredevil and some other titles that have gotten you attention. But what was it like when you took that first step and wrote Batman and entered that mainstream superhero world? You've become what you despised as a teenager.

EB: Oh, sure. My 18-year-old self would probably hate me. But then, my 18-year-old self wouldn't be able to pay the bills, either. [laughs]

NRAMA: But going from Vertigo, which is one level closer to mainstream, then taking that leap to Batman -- that was a big first step, wasn't it?

EB: Yeah, it was. That was Mike Carlin's doing. I met Mike and we started talking, and he said, "You could probably write Batman." And I said, really? And he said, "Yeah. You wrote a mystery comic..."

NRAMA: You wrote Scene of the Crime for Vertigo, which was a mystery comic…

EB: Yeah, Scene of the Crime was a mystery comic, so he said, "well, if you can write a mystery comic, then you can write Batman." And I thought, "Huh." It had never occurred to me. And I thought, well, I would certainly like to get more paying work. So I went home and started thinking about it and within a week or two, Bob Schreck had been moved from one office to another and was running the Bat office. And I had written some comics for Bob at Dark Horse, and he'd always been a big supporter. He'd helped get us in with Accidental Death. So that really helped, that those two guys appeared. And I read a bunch of Batman comics that I had liked when I was growing up, and I thought, OK... maybe I can actually do this. It was another one of those things where I thought, what would I want to see in a Batman comic? What would I want to read? What kind of themes do I want to write about? Of course, I think I write about a lot of the same themes in most my comics.

NRAMA: Such as?

EB: I don't even know that I can recognize them consciously. I tend to write about people who are conflicted about their past.

NRAMA: I thought I recognized what Bucky became. He's so conflicted, just like a lot of your character.

EB: [laughs] Yeah. Well, I have a lot of things in my youth and early 20s that I did that I'm not proud of. I have a lot of regrets from childhood, as I think most people do. I think people can get haunted by stuff. And that's what writers write about is the things that won't let go of them.

NRAMA: What else won't let go of you? What other themes do you write about?

EB: I don't know. Eric Shanower had pointed out once that a lot of my stories deal with parental problems, and that there were always dad figures who were very scary in my stories. But that wasn't how my childhood was at all. My dad is like the nicest, most loving guy in the world. And my mom was more of the sort of scary character in my life when I was a kid -- not all the time, but there was some strange stuff going on in the '70s in our house, and so I think there are just things that you latch onto that haunt you, and you kind of circle around whether you realize you're doing it or not. Writing is about asking questions through stories somehow and hoping that the people who are reading that stuff are pondering the same questions as you.

NRAMA: So when you took the leap to more mainstream comics, you were exploring the same themes, just with character in different clothes -- in costumes, to be exact.

EB: Yeah. It was just embracing the more pulp nature. If you're going to write a mystery, you're sort of embracing pulp already. So why not take it to the next level and have a guy who throws Batarangs or a shield? Why let your snobbery stop at mysteries? Why not just embrace the whole thing?

And when you're a writer, and someone's offering you money to write, that's pretty rare. Especially when you're poor, and I was drastically poor when I first started. When I got that Batman gig, I was living in a room in San Francisco in a flat with three roommates where we were each paying a couple hundred bucks a month in a place that was probably filled with mold and who knows what? It was a 100-year-old Victorian building that we had one floor of. I didn't have much in the way of money or aspirations at all. And so, that was a real kick in the pants to suddenly have a monthly superhero comic to write, and to have it be Batman and to meet Greg Rucka and Devin Grayson and Chuck Dixon and the people who were working the office. To see them treat me as a peer immediately and embrace me as part of the team was a real big deal to me.

NRAMA: And you getting to know Greg Rucka led to Gotham Central, which was a pretty big critical success.

EB: Yeah. When Greg and I were plotting our issues for the “Officer Down” storyline where Jim Gordon gets shot, I was talking about how fun it was to write two cops walking through a crime scene as if was something on Homicide or something, except they were talking about Catwoman shooting somebody. Or they were talking about a supervillain's crimes right after they happened, but from the cop's point of view. And this was right around the time Powers was starting. And after Brian [Bendis] told me what he was planning to do, I remember thinking, damnit! He figured it out too! But I never felt like Gotham Central was anything like Powers, and I don't think Brian ever thought that either. But I think DC thought Greg and I really fit that book because we both had experience with the whole mystery thing and had a good handle on the cop genre. The idea was it would add a certain amount of mystery back to Batman, because Batman becomes less and less scary if you're always seeing things from his point of view. If you see him through the eyes of the cops, he can be mysterious. He can walk out of the shadows in the corner and really freak you out.

Greg and I were lucky they let us take our love of things like Homicide and dramas and pulp fiction and put it into a Batman book. And I think having Michael Lark be part of the book helped keep it around as long as it was.

NRAMA: You're worked with Michael Lark several times, including right now on Daredevil. Is he one of your favorite collaborators?

EB: Yeah, Michael's like my little brother at this point. He's the only collaborator who... like, he and I get into a little tiff over nothing sometimes for an afternoon. He'll send me a snarky email, and I'll send him a snarky email back. But he's like a member of my family at this point. He's one of my best friends. Sean Phillips is too. Sean, Michael and I all worked on Scene of the Crime together, because Sean came in and inked the last few issues. And those guys are the people I've probably worked with the most.

NRAMA: You had worked with Sean on Sleeper before this current run on Criminal too, right?

EB: Yeah, and we had done a thing called Batman: Gotham Noir together.

NRAMA: And looking back at Sleeper -- and tell me if I'm wrong -- but looking at your Vertigo stuff and even the Bat-books you did at DC like Catwoman and Gotham Central, it seemed to really lean heavily toward the mystery genre or the more street-level stories. And it wasn't until you got to Marvel that you really stretched yourself to the more superhero-feeling stuff.

EB: Well, I was in the Bat-office at the time.

NRAMA: Was that all it was? And here I thought it was your style.

EB: Well, I did The Authority. But that was really me trying to figure out if I could do a big superhero thing, and succeeding in some places and failing in others.

But yeah, I mean, it was one of those things where mystery, even superhero mystery or anything like that, the trappings of a mystery are a really good thing to hang a story around, even if it's a superhero story. So, it's just one of those things where I had written so much mystery stuff and read so much mystery stuff that it was almost like a knee-jerk reaction for me to tell mysteries within these stories, or to use the framework of a mystery to tell a superhero story or a pulp story.

Catwoman is much more of a pulp comic, like Daredevil is. But yeah, it was all very street-level and less superhero in some ways. But I mean, Sleeper was really an espionage comic. And there is a different between an espionage and a mystery, even thought they're basically the same genre. But that sort of '30s and '40s pulp stuff was what has appealed to me for awhile, and I still feel like I tap into it a lot for everything I write, really.

NRAMA: Yet you've done a few things that have broken out of that mold. Some stuff has had a sci-fi or romance feel to it.

EB: Yeah, one thing that I did when I was at Vertigo was Deadenders. The original pitch was for it to be a sci-fi version of Archie. But the idea was that it would be a comic with no plot... and that, somehow, wouldn't fail. [laughs] But it was supposed to be this post-apocalypic Archie comic where it's a bunch of teenagers hanging out and getting into trouble. And you know, it was also very much a romance comic.

NRAMA: I see a lot of romance show up in your comics, especially Criminal and Daredevil.

EB: Yeah, and my autobiographical stuff and my Lowlife stuff and the even some of what I did after that always had some romance in it. I think that comes from a childhood of reading Spider-Man comics because it was always sort of a romance comic.

NRAMA: It almost felt like a soap opera for awhile there.

EB: Yeah -- very soap opera-ish, especially during the Romita years, because he had just come from romance comics to working on Daredevil and Spider-Man. So all the girls looked really hot and Peter Parker looked pretty good and got rid of his glasses and started riding on a scooter. And actually got dates! So that was the Spider-Man I grew up with. And I would read old Romita romance comics when I could get my hands on them. And I still love that stuff.

I've never read a romance novel, but I certainly have gotten addicted to sort of soap operatic episodic television. I mean, Buffy and Angel both have a sort of adventure-romance thing going on. There's a lot of that in the stuff that I write. I mean, I did one issue of Daredevil that was told from the point of view of Milla.

NRAMA: Yeah, that issue comes to mind. And a lot of this storyline in Daredevil right now concentrates on her relationship with Matt -- and their problems.

EB: Yeah, this is very much a romance-tragedy. But yeah, I guess all writers end up finding a way into the characters. That's kind of the two vibes that I feel like I still circle back around to, is mystery and romance.

And you know, people forget that superheroes evolved out of Doc Savage and The Shadow and The Spider and these things. They weren't always these virtuous characters. They were these dark characters who had dark stories around them. So whenever I write this stuff, I try to embrace that. I love that part of superheroes, that they grew out of the pulps. And I think that's the coolest thing about them in a lot of ways.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2, when we talk with Ed Brubaker about his problems sitting at a computer too long, his video game revenge on Geoff Johns, as well as his work on Daredevil, Criminal, Uncanny X-Men and his collaboration with Matt Fraction on Immortal Iron Fist.

[DarkKnight1013]

What an excellent interview. Vaneta. Can't wait for part 2

[Albert]

kudos on the interview

Now if someone can drag Morrison from his cave on Pluto and do one of these

[gsam4ever]

Bru is truly one of comics more gifted writers. His books are always consistent with quality and imagination. Captain America, Daredevil, and Iron Fist are the trifecta at Marvel. I also feel that his X-Men is darn good too but anytime you need to coordinate it with other people and books, the overall success will suffer.

[Moriarty]

Great interview.

[BornToRun]

Not enough people mention "Scene of the Crime" in these interviews. That was such a great series!

[The Fuj]

I don't pick up any of Bru's other books but UXM, and I have to say he put all his "eggs in one basket" with Rise/Fall of Shi'ar...

I think he is a good writer....of solo characters
Daredevil-great
Cap (with the supporting cast)- great


With that being said, His UXM leaves me much to be desired. His second storyarc was bad, and then it went into MC. So we have great storyarc, bad storyarc, then crossover (and I really think it was more Carey/Kyle/Yost than Bru/David)

Overall great article though.

[amdin]

Originally Posted by BornToRun

Not enough people mention "Scene of the Crime" in these interviews. That was such a great series!

And to that I say not enough people mention "Deadenders" enough. That series was just fantastic. Started off the first couple issues HATING the main character ... Hell, most of the characters. And then what it builds into is unbelievable. So well done. And so cut before it's time.

[LunarDaydreamer]

Deadenders is still one of the most personal comics to me.

I started out reading it, enjoying it, but wasn't *in* until the second storyline, which nailed me completely. I was utterly on board and enthralled, even though the series went into a more uncomfortable fast forward, until that final *perfect* issue.

With Bru's popularlity i'm surprised someone like Boom doesn't collect the entire run into a massive black and white phonebook edition. Even though I have the issues, it's something i'd love to have. Furthermore fans of Ed's new stuff may just dig it as much as I did.

Beezer forever!

>Lu

[Omega Flyer]

Wow, excellent Interview, some fascinating insight there, nice job Vaneta.

[PaulCrocker]

Great interview.

I'd love to see Gotham Central released as an omnibus. With names like Brubaker, Rucka, and Lark on it, I think a nice collection of this would sell. Those 40 issues were the most consistent in quality storytelling.
And Marvel, usually a bit better with their tpb/hc releases, are losing a great sell by not having an oversized DD collection of Bru and Lark's DD run to date. Come on! I want this!

[Punchy]

Great interview, one thing, it says Shannon Carter, when it should say Sharon, the mistake is easy to understand, since Shannon Carter is also a superhero, the MC2 American Dream.

But other than that, good stuff, can't wait for tomorrow, and the discussion of Iron Fist and Criminal.

[samnoir]

I really enjoyed Brubaker's Young Avengers Patriot one-shot.

Here is hoping that Eli can become a supporting cast member in Brubaker's Captain America series starry Bucky.

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[Xheight]

Originally Posted by BornToRun

Not enough people mention "Scene of the Crime" in these interviews. That was such a great series!

or for that matter Lowlife which I have a few issues and prowl bins for more.

[Gorgeousaur]

This interview only helps me support my opinion that Brubaker is way awesome.

[Clem]

Catwoman ruled. If Bru ever finds his way back to DC, for God's sake DO MORE.

[hunterjax]

Truly great article, Vaneta - looking forward to part two and more of these in-depth articles with creators in the future.

[von Doom, M.D.]

I bet DC is kicking themselves for letting this guy get away from them...

Captain America is one of only 3 Marvel titles I buy on a regular basis, and I buy his Daredevil in trade. I loved Criminal (being short of cash is the only reason I dropped it), and he is one of only three writers whose work I will check out simply because his name is on the cover (the others are Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison). The only book of his I won't ever get is Uncanny X-Men, and that's simply because my hatred of the X runs so deep that even Ed Brubaker can't change my mind.

[thorionthei]

I don't know why I like Brubaker's Cap. I hate that he brought back Bucky, I hate all the Winter Soldier stuff, I really hate he killed Nomad (Blue Beetle & Hawkeye all died around the same time...geez), and I also hate they killed Cap AND seem to be replacing him with Bucky! I can accept Cap dying if it was a new young character replacing him.

But I love this title. I love everything Bru writes. Though I don't like Indy comics, or doing drugs as a teen in SD, or being a rebel.

[Whipsnakes]

Originally Posted by BornToRun

Not enough people mention "Scene of the Crime" in these interviews. That was such a great series!

Agreed!
I loved that book, and the fact that it is set in my current city makes it all the sweeter.

Nice nick by the way, I have my tickets to see the Boss for the second time in April. I can't wait!

[ProudToSuck]

Vaneta Rogers writes fantastic interviews. Five stars.

[samnoir]

I would totally buy Jughead or Betty and Veronica if Brubaker was writer/drawing it.

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[Jiminy Snick]

EB: Yeah, it was. That was Mike Carlin's doing. I met Mike and we started talking, and he said, "You could probably write Batman." And I said, really? And he said, "Yeah. You wrote a mystery comic..."

Okay, guess I have found a good, solid reason to diminish my dislike of Mike Carlin.

[mjayg]

NRAMA: Yeah, that issue comes to mind. And a lot of this storyline in Daredevil right now concentrates on her relationship with Matt -- and their problems.

EB: Yeah, this is very much a romance-tragedy.

Sounds like Mephisto will be making another appearance soon...

[Tomwaitsfan]

Great interview. Really interesting guy. His books are the only thing at Marvel that I can stomach.