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12-13-2006, 01:40 PM
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#1 |
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ANDY HELFER ON THE MALCOLM X BIOGRAPHY
 by Daniel Robert EpsteinAndy Helfer spent over 20 years keeping the superheroes of DC Comics in line by editing dozens of titles and writing many as well. Since parting ways with DC a few years back, Helfer has joined Hill & Wang, both writing and editing comic book biographies. The first volume from Helfer is a biography of Malcolm X drawn by “The Moon Ring” creator Randy DuBurke. Malcolm X is a big responsibility for any writer to do a biography of, and we spoke with Helfer about the project and his approach. Newsarama: Even though you are not a black of course that doesn’t mean you can’t be interested in Malcolm X, but was that ever an issue? Andy Helfer: No, it never was. Many people can write a lot of words about famous people whether they’re black or white, but writing concisely enough about a person to make a comic book out of it was more important than the comic writing background. NRAMA: How was it working with Randy DuBurke? AH: Great. Randy is very much a traditional comic artist pen and ink guy. We did a lot of work together back in the day for Paradox Press. NRAMA: Is the Randy black? AH: Randy is black as a matter of fact. NRAMA: I asked Brian K. Vaughn that since Y: The Last Man was co-created by a female artist, Pia Guerra, whether he felt protected from women’s criticisms about the book. Do you feel “safer” even though you didn’t pick Randy for that reason? AH: I don’t know if it’s a question of safety but working with Randy has always felt comfortable. As a writer I had to cover the facts but as an artist he had to evoke a visual sensibility and I think it is probably more important for the artist to be African-American than it is for the writer. I’m not doing my story. I’m simply conveying facts over a 40 year period.  NRAMA: How did the project come about? AH: Well, I had just come off of a 20-odd year stretch at DC Comics and [Hill & Wang publisher] Thomas LeBien had envisioned a market for graphic non-fiction because of the recent popularity of graphic novels and Manga in the general audience. He wanted to apply that or at least test the waters for that in a non-fiction way. I had met a person who has since become my partner in this venture, Jessica Marshall, and she met with Thomas and Thomas said “I’m looking to do biographies.” Since I had some experience in the non-fiction stuff with the Big Book series ay Paradox, I came to see him and we talked and we were copasetic about it. Though we did go a long way from our original intentions, which was to basically do biographies of the founding fathers and other 18th Century Americans. We wanted to do landmark people obviously, but I was an advocate of having them be 20th Century people. We settled fairly quickly on doing Malcolm X and the second book in the series will be Ronald Reagan. I felt that was as interesting a contrast as you could get. NRAMA: Why didn’t you want to do 18th Century people? AH: I can just tell you the biggest reason why I didn’t want to do 18th Century characters: horses. Literally that was a major consideration with me. I know two people who can draw horses well in this business. Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez does a beautiful horse but he’s not going to do any of these books for us. There’s always the fact that the visual reference is very difficult to find. Obviously it’s going to be interpretive drawings and I would rather have the books be one step away from documentary truth than two or three steps away.  NRAMA: It seems that if you tell people that you’re doing comic book biographies of people like George Washington, what’s going to come to mind is dry Classics Illustrated type stuff. AH: One of the things is that a lot of famous people did most of their most interesting things sitting behind desks or having a conversation with someone else. They weren’t really men of action, they were men of minds, who discussed great things. I did a discussion at the 92nd Street Y a couple weeks ago and Jessica Abel was at the panel. She seemed to disagree with the validity of doing an Einstein biography. To my mind, the visual aspect of an Einstein biography, at best, is a diagram that doesn’t have anything to do with Einstein. Probably the day Einstein came to the United States was the end of the action biography part of the deal. One of the things that I always say is that we need to have action biographies, we want people who did things in their lives, who had action as opposed to sitting behind a desk and thinking deep thoughts. I don’t know anything about Isaac Newton but my guess is once he’s sitting under the tree and the apple hits him on the head the action is probably over. But I do know that there’s a lot of action in Ronald Reagan’s life. NRAMA: With Malcolm X, it would be difficult to make a comic book, especially of his early life, boring.  AH: I think that’s true. Malcolm X’s life, even after joining the nation of Islam, was one of the great times of African-American cultural development history. Admittedly it is the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance but there are a lot of wonderful images in there. He had a lot of movement in his life going from the south to Boston to New York and to prison. There are so many different visual venues for him. Even when he was at the nation of Islam he had a period of time where he toured the United States and had conflicts with his supporters. It’s a constantly shifting set of visuals for the story. NRAMA: I also liked how you didn’t really have footnotes in the story. What made you decide to not do that? AH: I think I wanted to keep the pace as novelistic as possible. In reading different things there are certain contradictions between one source to another. So sometimes I felt compelled to say “In his autobiography he said this but other people did say that it wasn’t the case.” Then of course we had the listings of further material in the back, which was basically what I used. I wanted to keep it something you could read and not get bogged down with. But if there were things where different people had different senses of what was going on I felt we needed to cite where we got it from. NRAMA: Does a story like this have the same comic book language as something that you would have done at DC?  AH: The answer is that I could have written a 12 part maxi-series about Malcolm X. But a 12 part maxi-series will test the commitment of even the biggest fan. So when you’re telling a story in 100 pages, you have less space so you need to move through a lot of events in a relatively short period of time. Often we needed to revert to captions instead of extended scenes to discuss each particular point. In the book there’s a two page sequence called Yakub Tale which is the origin of black Islam. What I read about the whole historical underpinning of the movement could fill an issue. But I had to make it two pages, just to get the highlights and when you do that you compress the information but it forces you to rely a lot more on captions as opposed to comic book continuity which tends to occupy a lot more pages. NRAMA: The last book I got from Hill & Wang was The 9/11 Report which was in color. Why is your book in black and white? AH: If nothing else, cost. This is a $15.95 hardcover. I guess that’s the answer. NRAMA: As you said, you were the editor on the Big Books. Did you consider doing Malcolm X in that format to make it more relevant? AH: The thing about the big books was that even though they were non-fiction, humor was dominant and if not humor then at least irony. Whereas for this, we were trying to have much less editorializing and be much more factual. Although the Reagan book will lie somewhere between Malcolm X and the Big Books. NRAMA: There must be a lot of irony with that biography.  AH: By necessity, the irony is not mine. You’ve got to just scratch your head at times with Ronald Reagan. NRAMA: Had there ever been a Malcolm X biography in comic book form before? AH: I hadn’t seen any other Malcolm X books in this format and that was a plus here. Ho Che Anderson did the King books and I like those books but they are far more editorialized than this. NRAMA: Was there a specific reason that you didn’t want to editorialize? AH: It’s really not the mandate of the project. But when you’re dealing with someone like Ronald Reagan it’s almost inescapable that you’re going to do that kind of stuff. NRAMA: Who is drawing the Ronald Reagan biography? AH: That’s being drawn by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton. NRAMA: So one artist is doing half, the other one’s doing the other half? AH: Yeah. Then after that we’ve got my favorite one, I’m writing and Rick Geary is drawing a J. Edgar Hoover biography. NRAMA: So you no longer work for DC? AH: I don’t work for DC. I just ended with Batman: Journey Into Knight. I did a 12 issue series for them of Doom Patrol with Tan Eng Huat and now I’m doing this kind of stuff. I’m working on some other things, some of which you’ll never see because they’re instructional educational comics but I am working on putting together a fictional comic which I hope to get published by a book publisher. I have a lot of, perhaps misplaced, faith in the ability of book publishers to sell comics. Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography is 112 page hardcover priced at $15.95 |
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12-13-2006, 01:50 PM
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#2 |
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I'm copping this and the 911 report. Funny how I was looking for graphic novels for my coffee table yesterday and something like this rolls out.
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12-13-2006, 01:59 PM
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#3 |
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can't wait for this
ps. i bet Hudlin will have something to say about a white writer doing this book pps. i bet no one wants to hear it |
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12-13-2006, 02:14 PM
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#4 |
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Is that a real quote?
Did Malcolm actually say the words he is shown saying here upon his return to the US? Frankly, i doubt it. I've listened to and read A LOT of Malcolm's speeches, and the Malcolm of that period rarely comes across as the one in that panel does-- silly, simplistic, almost clownish. Even if this is a quote (which i doubt), it deserves to be contextualized with his other, more nuanced statements that day. Frankly, that panel leaves me a bit worried about this project. I'm not sure Helfer gets it. In any case, caption-heavy dry prose is hardly the way to capture one of the most dynamic figures of the 20th century, a person whose story needs to be told artfully. I'd be much more excited if this WAS more in the vein of the KING GN that Helfer references. KING wasn't perfect, but it gave us a sense of MLK as a person, not just a cardboard cutout reciting lines between captions.
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12-13-2006, 02:22 PM
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#5 | |
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Quote:
if the page you mention is then the quotes do check out |
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12-13-2006, 03:24 PM
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#6 | |
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Quote:
He bet not complain..he could have done this but didnt so more power to this guy for stepping up |
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12-13-2006, 03:43 PM
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#7 |
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Awesome! I'm glad to see some non-fiction graphic novel stuff getting pushed out there.
Has anyone else around here picked up that 2Pac Shakur graphic novel? I forget everything about it...who wrote it, published it, illustrated it...but it was damn fine. I'd like to see something about MLK come out like this. We've seen movies and television about Malcolm X before, but no one's really touched an MLK biographical epic. Maybe because he too..."big" (for lack of a better term springing to mind) to encapsulate on the graphic novel level? I've read all kinds of crazy, controversial stuff about him, way beyond the non-violence and civil rights marches. I'd like to see something visual that separates myth from reality. |
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12-13-2006, 04:40 PM
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#8 | |
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Quote:
They have several movies about MLK. The latest one was called Boycott starring Jeffery Wright as King. It also starred Terrance Howard. It was a HBO flick and HBO makes some quality tv movies. |
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12-13-2006, 05:13 PM
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#9 |
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i would like to get this. i hope i can grab a copy at my comic shop.
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12-13-2006, 05:29 PM
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#10 |
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I had this terrible thought of "Malcom X Dissasembled". Thank God it's not a Marvel book
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12-13-2006, 05:40 PM
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#11 | ||
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Quote:
If it's done well, which seems to be the case with this (Andy Helfer has obviously read the autobiography. And I'm willing to bet he's seen the Spike Lee film, Malcolm X. And I'm sure he's read other accounts on Malcolm X), so why would he have anything to say about a white writer doing it? Other than "job well done," which again seems to be the case here... Do you think Dwyane McDuffie (one of the founders of Milestone Comics) would have anything to say because this is done by a white writer? Or what about Christopher Priest? Who, if I'm not mistaken, when he became an editor at DC Comics, hung a Malcolm X poster on the wall behind his desk in his office. Quote:
Here's a link to the preview: http://www.newsarama.com/marvelnew/M...s/march22.html It's obviously not a biography, but I thought it was neat the way he tied him to T'Challa's father, T'Chaka. And notice in the preview, Malcolm X's trip to Wakanda (in the Marvel Universe) is set during Malcolm X's actual pilgrimage to Mecca, which is addressed in the page that AnimalMan#1-26 and Anders Wolleck were discussing. See also: IV Changing Beliefs On the side: in one of his BLACK PANTHER issues, Christopher Priest also had Black Panther pose in way that's similar to a "famous" Malcolm X photograph. Here's a link to that: http://www.digital-priest.com/archive/panther/sturm.htm Of other interest: BIRTH OF A NATION by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin and Kyle Baker. (Available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Nation-C...e=UTF8&s=books) And of course, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley. And Spike Lee's Malcolm X. EDIT: Needless to say, I've been waiting for this since, what, April? Last edited by Yugi 7 : 12-13-2006 at 05:50 PM. |
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12-13-2006, 05:42 PM
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#12 |
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This seems like a really cool idea and the sample pages are quality. I really like the simple art style that looks very striking in black and white. I'll definitely pick this up if I can find it, especially at $16 for a hardcover. Malcolm X has always been a person I've admired/had great interest in, so its cool to see his biography being told in such an interesting way.
Not sure how I feel about the Reagan biography though. I'd definitely have to give that a serious look through before I'd ever buy it. Then again, I've been pretty annoyed with the way the media has Canonized him since his death a few years back. Not that I think you should blast someone after their death, but you shouldn't paint a bumbling idiot as a diplomatic genius either. But, I digress... Last edited by Ye Olde Iowa : 12-13-2006 at 05:46 PM. |
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12-13-2006, 06:13 PM
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#13 | |
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Quote:
I love Boycott. Must've seen it 50 times by now. This looks interesting. I might check it out |
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12-13-2006, 06:25 PM
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#14 | |
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Quote:
Check out Ho Che Anderson's graphic novel "King." |
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12-13-2006, 08:22 PM
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#15 |
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interesting ...
curious to how the potential of sequential art will bring this out ... |
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12-13-2006, 08:36 PM
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#16 |
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Malcolm X? Very cool. Not written by Hudlin? Even cooler.
And Chad, I don't think that MLK would make as good a comic as Malcolm X. His life had more action in it. |
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12-13-2006, 08:44 PM
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#17 |
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This looks good, both writing- and art-wise.
I'm trying to think of other 20th-figures whose lives would translate well into this medium. John Paul II, obviously (already done by Marvel). Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama or Gandhi...? (Have any of them been done as comics yet?) Osama bin Ladin, if they could do it straight and not make him into Darth Vader. Maybe Boris Yeltsin or Robert Mugabe? (For a Greek tragedy kind of feel.) If they have to be American, then George Soros would be a good choice. Dead wrong about Newton, by the way. His life is actually quite interesting, though the political and religious backstory would get complicated. |
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12-13-2006, 10:06 PM
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#18 | ||
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Quote:
...On a side note, wasn't Helfer's "departure" more of a "____ing over" by DC over that Chrisnukkah story where the Pre-Crisis Supergirl made an appearance after it was decreed by Byrne that she was dead, buried and never existed? Quote:
The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, anyone? Last edited by OM : 12-13-2006 at 10:10 PM. |
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12-13-2006, 11:53 PM
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#19 |
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hopefully I'll like this as much as I did Kyle Baker's Nat Turner biobook.
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12-14-2006, 12:16 AM
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#20 |
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I'm sorry, but why is Reginald Hudlin's name being invoked here? What does he have to do with anything. Was he mentioned in the article and I missed it?
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12-14-2006, 01:33 AM
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#21 | |
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Quote:
However, being the President of BET, he's arguably the highest profile Black leader / figure working in the comics field today (w/ only Chuck D himself as a distinguished rival). If this Malcolm X comic were to be a crapfest, I'd doubt if Reggie wouldn't have something to say. After Mel Gibson's drunken tirade the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued multiple comments about Mel's words and what he'd have to do to make up for them. One might ask what that center has to do with a drunken movie stars personal views... obviously the answer would be that they are indeed an interested party (even if only tangentially). I personally wonder Mr. Hudlin's thoughts on this biobook. For myself I'll reserve judgment till I see more, but frankly, it doesn't impress me that the same writer will be moving on to Ronald Reagan next?! I gather "dispassionate" will be the word of the day  Hopefully it'll show some love, rather than merely being a litany of dates & places. |
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12-14-2006, 08:12 AM
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#22 |
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I’m buying a copy of this for each of my nephews.
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12-14-2006, 06:39 PM
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#23 |
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It's a good book. Helfer is a fine writer as well as being an adventurous editor, so it's nice to see him doing both.
I also recommend "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which was written in collaboration with "Roots" author Alex Haley. More important now than ever. (Waitaminute! Helfer isn't black?) |
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12-14-2006, 07:37 PM
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#24 |
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They should totally do a crossover with Red Sonja, that would be awesome.
Last edited by skeletorjr : 12-14-2006 at 08:16 PM. |
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12-14-2006, 08:29 PM
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#25 |
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Hudlin has already tied Malcolm to the 616 via his BP run
 He connected both Storm's and BP's history to encounters with X. |
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