JONATHAN MOSTOW TALKS ABOUT THE MEGAS

[MattBrady]

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

In the world of Jonathan (U-571, Terminator 3) Mostow’s The Megas, that’s not quite true. While the series from Virgin Comics is set in present-day America, it’s a much different America than what we live in. Rather than one with the unique form of democracy that the United States is now under, America is a monarchy, ruled by the seemingly benevolent “Megas.”

And then…a murder/suicide involving the royal house. How benevolent are the Megas that rule? That’s up to Agent Jack Madison to find out, as he probes deeper and deeper into the mystery.

We spoke with Mostow about the series.

Newsarama: Let’s start with the inspiration for The Megas - what was the seed that grew into the finished concept?

Jonathan Mostow: The “seed” was an idea that I had at least a couple of years ago that came from that place you can’t explain…I was just wondering what life would be like in a country where everything about it was modern and contemporary, and yet, there was a monarchy – an institutionalized class of ruling people.

I don’t know…that idea may have started with…you know, you open up the newspaper and you read about these hedge-fund managers making $500 million a year, or some celebrity that just got caught for drunk driving, but it getting off the hook because of who they are, or even a politician getting special treatment because they’re an elite member of our society. You start to wonder if there’s just a whole different set of standards for this “elite” group of people that are not different from how the royalty used to be treated, 300 years ago in Western Europe.

I don’t know if it came from that, or from reading something about the Constitution...or both. I don’t know where it came from, but once I started thinking about it, almost as a thought experiment, I found it very interesting.

NRAMA: Almost a “Wouldn’t it be weird if we had this, wait, we do have this…” scenario…

JM: Yeah – exactly. If you lived in the 1700s in England, and you were a lawyer or a banker, you considered yourself a respectable person, and were well-off and were accomplished and educated and everything else, yet, if the Prince of Wales walked in the room, you bowed. There’s this one panel in the comic where that kind of thing happens for the first time – we’re in a club and members of the royalty come in, and the people all bow down. I just find that bizarre, and it evokes a strange feeling that made me wonder how those people felt 300 years ago.

NRAMA: As you said in your introduction, this isn’t a “what if?” story where you want your readers to be preoccupied with finding the clues as to why this timeline sprung off of the one we know, but rather , “this is how it is” and telling a story with this as a backdrop, but just to wander into that territory for a moment – in your opening, you basically suggest that a diverging point was that the Megas, or those who would become the Megas essentially “were” the Renaissance…that came away form Europe. Is that in the ballpark of what happened?

JM: The idea is this – in the sort of slight science fiction elements of the series, we’re positing that there is this group of people that has always existed throughout history that are, genetically, just 5-10% superior to human beings. They’re just a bit smarter, a bit more charismatic, more capable, have broader imagination and vision than the rest. There’s just something special about them, and they’re almost like a race of people. They were persecuted in Western Europe and essentially fled to the New World. So, instead of the Pilgrims coming over, it was these folks, and they set up their own society here and broke away from the larger monarchy that was ruling them, and set up their own monarchy in the “United States” that we see in the series.

NRAMA: To explore the world you’ve created, you start out with a murder mystery: a “Mega” apparently kills himself after killing courtesans in what looks like a good time gone bad. Why use that type of story as your opening?

JM: It’s interesting – I’m actually going through the same process on a movie I’m about to make, The Surrogates, which is based on the graphic novel. In that story, there is this fascinating world that was created in the graphic novel and at the core of the story was a murder mystery. I probably should point out that my ideas and plans for The Megas predated my involvement or knowledge of The Surrogates. But they were similar in that with both, the world itself was what made the story so special, and both that that narrative spine which is a good reason to take us through the facets of the world.

The detective narrative, which is a classic model in fiction, proves to be a great way of creating a structure of a story which would be a way to go into all these facets of what the world affords. So it’s not that we copied the idea from The Surrogates into The Megas, but I find myself working on similar types of larger stories – a mystery and an investigation which allows a character to lead the audience through the world.

And also, when you’ve given the audience a different kind of world, giving them some framework that’s a recognizable, relatable framework inside of it helps. That’s not true for every alternate universe story – there are plenty of them where there is no investigative element to the movie, but in this particular story, it seemed to work. Also, both of these stories are stories that are told from the point of view of a singular main character, and the psychological alignment with that main character is really enhanced by putting that main character in the shoes of the audience – neither the main character nor the audience knows what is going on, but both are trying to unravel a puzzle. You identify more with the protagonist that way.

And by the way – talking about this all so…clinically…that’s not how I approach storytelling at all. I go much more with my gut instinct, and later, when I’m being asked questions about it, I sound like a college English professor holding a pipe in my hand. [laughs] I just do what feels right, and after you’ve done it, you can look back and figure out how it all works.

NRAMA: Let’s talk about your p.o.v. character, Agent Madison of the Bureau of Royal Investigation. First off – what is the B.R.I.?

JM: The idea there is to keep the general population, which obviously grossly outnumbers the Mega population, to keep them in check so the Megas have to maintain the impression that there is a form of justice for them – they are not completely immune from the laws. The President of the United States is subject to the Constitution, at least in theory, but everyone knows that the President can pretty much do whatever he wants. Almost - we can’t get in his car drunk, and speed down Pennsylvania Avenue, mowing people down – for that, he’d go to jail. So they have, in The Megas, this justice system that is supposed to basically serve as the face of “Mega justice” to the population, but the “wink, wink, nod, nod” is that they’re often there to bend the rules and make the problems go away.

So Jack Madison is a guy who believes he works for justice, but understands that there’s this sort of unwritten “contract” that means when he can sweep something under the carpet, he does it, but he has to navigate that line between really making sure justice is served, and not getting himself fired or creating a larger problem. So he’s in a delicate situation.

NRAMA: And one last question about the setting – you’ve established that the world of the Megas is at a stage where the old king is dying, and a new one will be named soon. Again, a point that, historically speaking, always allows for some very…interesting events to take place. Was that your idea in using it?

JM: Right. We realized that the changeover time would also help us with exposition about how the governmental structure works – we can show it, rather than having to include interstitial material. I love the comic medium for that – that you can stop the story and throw in a page or two that’s just explaining the backstory, but we wanted to see if we could do it in a more cinematic fashion, which is revealing backstory through story, as opposed to stopping the story to reveal backstory. So by doing it within the story was a god way to explain those issues without stopping for a civics lesson in the middle.

NRAMA: Moving back to look at the larger picture, what got this project to Virgin?

JM: Virgin approached me last year, asking if I wanted to do a comic book. So I went to a meeting with Gotham Chopra and Sharad Devarajan just to hear what they were saying. They told me about the Director’s Cut series, which was, as they explained it, a place to explore an idea that I’d always wanted to explore, but hadn’t done so yet.

When that was brought into it, the light bulb went off since I’d had The Megas rattling around in my brain, but hadn’t figured out how to do it as a movie. I thought it might work out, so I mentioned it, and they responded, and it went from there.

NRAMA: Some titles under Virgin’s Director’s Cut line are somewhat…tangential with their respective directors, you’re working with a scripter, John Harrison. Was that just due to time constraints?

JM: Exactly, Writing a comic is almost as much work as writing a screenplay for a movie, and I didn’t have the time, since at that time I was writing a screenplay for a Sub-Mariner movie at that point. So we approached John and he wrote it up. It was a tremendous amount of work – like I said; it was like a movie…you’re writing out the dialogue, as well as detailed notes for the “cinematographer” and “production designer” as well. It was a lot of work.

John fashioned a lot of the story, also – if anything, John was more instrumental to this Megas story than I was. It was a collaboration, but John really deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the finished project.

NRAMA: You spoke about having never been able to figure out how to make this into a movie, but yet, the trades have reported that you’re now looking to make a movie out of The Megas…

JM: It’s all been moving so fast – typically, I think we would’ve positioned it a little more as a movie before the book came out, but the plan is to see if we can set this up as a movie someplace.

But that said, with this series, I wanted something to be out there on its own. I know enough about comics and the medium to know that it is an art form, and this wasn’t done to position the property as a movie. If I had wanted only to make a movie about this, trust me there are easier and less complicated ways to do it. It’s movie-like, but we wanted to tell a good story set in this interesting world.

NRAMA: How many issues will The Megas run?

JM: We have four that we’re definitely doing, and then, it’s in the hands of the fans.

The Megas #1 was released in comic shops this week.

[haldo]

Jeebus, I have a decent computer and corrective lenses, and I can barely make out a few words in the balloons in these pages.

Enlarging just makes it worse.

Why bother to give us preview pages if they're such a small size? Are they worried I'm going to steal them and put them on my computer?

[MrNEWZ]

Originally Posted by haldo

Jeebus, I have a decent computer and corrective lenses, and I can barely make out a few words in the balloons in these pages.

Enlarging just makes it worse.

Why bother to give us preview pages if they're such a small size? Are they worried I'm going to steal them and put them on my computer?

And here I thought *I* was blind. Wow.

In fairness, this looks pretty good. Hand no issues with the preview pages.

[Livewire2nd]

I read this last night and it was pretty Decent. I'll keep cheaking it out forthe time being.

[johhnypanic]

I really like this idea, I'm going to buy the first issue.

[adamcasey]

Am I the only one that sees the title as "Omegas" because of the wax seal circle?

[skl183]

With the actors strike coming, I"m sure he'll have plenty of time to devote to this endeavor.

[darthdad]

i'm a history buff so i'm a big fan of alternate histories so i'm intrigued enough to pick up the first issue and see how it plays out.

[Livewire2nd]

Originally Posted by adamcasey

Am I the only one that sees the title as "Omegas" because of the wax seal circle?

Yes.

[Samhain]

Isn't this, I dunno... House of M, but with a beginning just set further back in history?