The Prolific Brian Wood

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 23, 2008 Sign up now!

By Wil Moss -- Publishers Weekly, 9/22/2008 3:14:00 PM

You’d be hard pressed to find a comics writer with a more prolific year than that Brian Wood has had. In addition to writing two ongoing Vertigo series—the Viking saga Northlanders and the dystopic urban satire DMZ—this year Wood also wrote a graphic novel for DC’s YA Minx line called The New York Four and completed the slice-of-life Local for Oni Press (just released as a lush, deluxe hardcover edition). All of this is in addition to the design work he does for most of his books; the videogame properties he’s working on, and an unnamed “company-owned” property for DC that Wood says he’s not allowed to talk about at this point. PW Comics Week had a chance to speak with Wood about all of the above and more.

PW Comics Week: Tell me about your experience on Local, a series drawn by Ryan Kelly, that much like Demo, another series of yours, takes place in different towns across the country. It took a while to complete—did the series end up changing as a result?

Brian Wood: Absolutely, without a doubt. It’s the kind of project, like with Demo, where I knew it was going to evolve over time even if it had stayed on its original schedule, and that just kind of happens when you have these self-contained stories and you pretty much start anew every month. I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted the book to be, and it definitely is a better book as a result. A lot of time with a monthly book like DMZ, I sit down and I write an outline for the next several issues and that gets approved, that’s the plan and I have to stick with it. There’s some wiggle room there, but with Local it was pretty much wide open so it definitely changed a lot.

PWCW: Can you give me an example of a change?

BW: The biggest example—and it’s hard for me to say exactly at what point this happened—but at some point I realized that the most important aspect of this book was the main character [Megan] herself. Initially she was always meant to be a background person. It was going to be all these random stories and she would be a part of them to one degree or another, whether being kind of a main character like in the first story or just having a walk-on role. But at some point it dawned on me that the story really is more about her than the locations of the story. So I really switched gears. I [decided to] make her the point, which is really kind of a major change to make halfway through. And again, having that kind of single-issue format helps you switch things up on the fly. I’m sure if I didn’t tell anybody that, no one would know.

PWCW: How much involvement did you have with the collected hardcover edition’s design?

BW: I usually design everything I do, but this is one of the rare times where I got out of the way. It’s really Oni Press’ decision to go all out on a book like that. It’s not really the kind of thing I’d ever have the nerve to ask for. “Can you make the most lavish book ever made?” The thing weighs like five pounds. Ryan Kelly [the artist] calls it the Absolute edition [as in DC’s oversized, high-end line of deluxe hardcover collections] of Local, and it really does feel like that. I’m very thankful to Oni for doing that, and humbled that they think that highly of the book. I feel bad for everybody who has to mail it. [laughs] It is a pretty heavy book.

PWCW: You were able to retrieve the publishing rights to Demo and now its been republished in a new edition by Vertigo. Can you tell me about the forthcoming sequel to Demo? Will the new publisher follow the same format?

BW: I talked to Vertigo, they’re putting it out, and they agreed with me that it should look exactly like the original Demo.

PWCW: Will it be black and white then?

BW: Black and white. No ads, or if we do have ads they will be all the way in the back and they’ll only be ads for our other books, like DMZ or American Virgin. We’re going to have all the extras in the back. Becky Cloonan’s doing the art and the covers. What’s going to be interesting is to see how the last two or three years of Becky and I constantly working on other things is going to affect Demo. Obviously it’s not going to read the exact way as the original Demo—we’re both at very different places. So it’s definitely going to change in terms of how we tell the story.

PWCW: How do you think it will it be different?

BW: It’s a lot more compressed. I’m intentionally not talking about it a lot because the first story is really going to redefine [the book]. I think everybody kind of has an idea of what Demo Vol. 2 No. 1 or whatever we end up calling the sequel, will be. They really don’t know what they’re going to get. [laughs] I intentionally wrote a first issue that’s going to blow everybody’s preconceived notions out of the water. That’s really all I want to say about it now.

PWCW: Now that you’ve done The New York Four, the story of a group of NYU freshmen arriving in Manhattan, for DC’s teen girl-targeted Minx line, how was that experience in retrospect? Do you know of any success that the book has had with teenage girls?

BW: Not really. It’s still fairly new. I don’t have a lot of numbers for it beyond the initial orders for it, but I think they were high. Looking at the Minx line as a whole they were definitely up there, which is good. People came up to me at conventions, a few teenage girls with their parents, which is kind of new for me. [laughs] You kind of stereotype your own audience in a way, which is wrong, but there’s a certain kind of person that reads my books in a very general sense. I had a couple of teenage girls who came up and responded to the book in a very teenage kind of way, which is actually a bit refreshing. It’s like, “Oh I really loved this. It was so much fun to read.” It’s a nice contrast to see that enthusiasm, like a surface-level enthusiasm, as opposed to reading blog entries about my books where people pick it apart, because they pick apart every comic. That was kind of nice and kind of the reason I wanted to do a Minx book in the first place. There is the potential there for a different audience, different from who I usually reach.

PWCW: And you’re wrapping up a two-part story in Northlanders right now, what can you tell me about the arc after that?

BW: Ryan [Kelly] is drawing that as well. It is a serial killer-CSI kind of story set in Viking times, which made for some interesting and frustrating research. I had to find out what kind of investigations actually happened back then, which wasn’t a lot. I found out that there wasn’t a whole lot of that beyond like obvious common sense stuff that I think everybody takes for granted now, like foot print depth and size, that kind of thing, it’s pretty basic.

PWCW: In that time, whose responsibility would it be to find such a killer? Who is your protagonist?

BW: Well, initially I didn’t know. I had to extrapolate a lot of stuff out. I set the story at the end of the Viking heyday. It takes place in Ireland where we’re kind of at the point where the Vikings or the Norse are kind of the establishment; they’re no longer the bloodthirsty raiders, they’re the government. The rabble-rousers are the native Irish. So I kind of flipped it by putting the Vikings in the establishment role. There’s an Irish guy who’s on the loose and killing everybody. He’s selectively targeting higher-up Norse nobility. This other guy is a book-smart older Viking, like a college professor, who’s drafted by the king to finally hunt this guy down. There are elements I’m bringing in—there was a big famous battle at that time which was kind of the beginning of the fall of Norse rule—the battle of Klonkars—and I’m having that happen at the same time as this. The story’s characters aren’t there, but there’s some flipping back and forth. So it’s like these two guys on a very, very micro level symbolize the larger society. The older established Viking guy against this young upstart. It’s very, very bloody. So that starts with issue 11, and it’s a six-parter.

PWCW: How are things going with DMZ? [DMZ is the story of Manhattan as a war devastated Demilitarized Zone in a future U.S. Civil War.] You’ve got a good chunk of the series under your belt now. Are things proceeding like how you initially laid them out?

BW: It’s so different. I hear this from every writer. When you do a series that [goes on for this] long, you write all this stuff in the proposal, but you have other ideas as you go, especially when you’re talking about years and years. Of course it’s going to change over time. It’s wildly different from where I thought it would be three years in, which is almost where we’re at. By like a factor of three it’s the longest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m only halfway through.

PWCW: Aside from Northlanders, DMZ, and the Demo sequel, have you got anything else coming up in the near future?

BW: Yes. But I can’t talk about it, so that’s not going to help you much. There’s other stuff that will be announced soon. I’m breaking with my normal way of doing stuff—I’ve signed on to write a miniseries of a company-owned book, which DC will probably announce at the New York Comic-Con in the spring.

PWCW: That’ll be your first time on a superhero book since your stint on Marvel’s Generation X several years back, correct?

BW: It’s been a long time. I did Generation X, like ages and ages ago. Aside from that, I did a one-off, Vampirella story, and that’s kind of it. I’m still sort of seen, at least by some, as being not good enough—because obviously if I’m not working on [work-for-hire superhero projects], that’s the only reason. There’s this assumption that I would jump at any offer, to “graduate” up to that level. I have spent so much time and blood, sweat and tears building my career off the strength of creator-owned work and I’m not going to piss it off and write some completely random thing that makes no sense. It has to feel like a “Brian Wood thing,” I want it to fit into my list of work.

PWCW: You have a name out there, people pick up a “Brian Wood book.” How much are you actively involved in cultivating a “Brian Wood” brand

BW: One of the earliest pieces of advice I got from [novelist and comic book writer] Warren Ellis, who is the king at this, is that you do have to cultivate yourself as much as the works themselves. I don’t have the same kind of personality that Warren does—he’s super funny and super quick. I don’t have that. But I did keep that in the back of my mind, myself as a brand—not in a crass or like a slick, packaged way.

It’s a consideration when I decide what my next project is going to be, or what publisher I want to work with. I don’t let it ever dictate the content of a story. I keep those two things separate. I don’t ever write for what I think the audience wants, or write for a trend. I always write the books I want to write. There are certain themes that I touch upon a lot in my books and I’m aware of that and I try not to overdo it. I try to have books complement each other. But it’s an inexact science, it’s not like there’s a script you can follow.