Interview: Greg Rucka Talks Lazarus And More (Part 3)
So, Nerdspanners, this is the third and final instalment of our interview with Greg. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can check out Part 1 and Part 2. In advance of Lazarus #5 coming out in a couple of weeks, we asked to pick his brains on the comic, its origins and its future.
For those of you who haven’t read Lazarus #1-4, we recommend you grab a copy and do so now – as well as (if so inclined) our annotations for those issues. Again, Greg was relatively circumspect with what he let slip, but be warned there are both some as yet unreleased images and some very mild spoilers of things to come.
This interview doesn’t just concern itself with the comic as we dig into franchising, storytelling, the psychology of horror and the horror of psychology. Strap in, because as we came to the finish, we got deep and we got… well,yeah, weird. Hope you enjoy!
Part 3 – The Future of Lazarus and the Zombie Zeitgeist
Robert: The book is called Lazarus, not Forever. Forever is the principal Lazarus of the story, of course, but we’ve got Abigail coming in. There’s more Families that you’ve said are coming down the pipe. The Barrets are introduced, and we’re going to spend more time with Jonah, and see things from Johanna’s point of view – how much are we trending towards a bigger ensemble piece than we’ve seen so far? Are we going to spend time with different people in slices, or will we see them more as Eve travels from one point to another?
Rucka: It’s funny you ask that. Michael and I were having a conversation the day before yesterday, and we were talking about ways to tell different stories. There’s a couple of things about this. The first is an anecdote: I saw Brian Bendis a couple of weeks ago, we watched the Breaking Bad finale at his house. He turned to me and he said (and he always does this, and he’s always right) “You should’ve called the book Forever.” And he’s right, it would’ve been a better title. [Laughs] Forever is our main character. She is our primary protagonist. We will follow her more often than not. We will spend time with others. I want to do a sequence of stories that will effectively read as one-shots, but – and not like Rashomon, but – they’ll all feed into the same narrative. I’m not sure how we go about doing that. I want to do a short fiction anthology – and the more I think about that, the more I want to do it.
Robert: That would be amazing. I’m sorry, I try not to gush too much when I’m doing interviews, but you’ve got my money if you want to get a bunch of people in and do short fiction set in the universe.
Rucka: I’d love to do it. A collection of maybe ten stories, and I’d write one of them. I know which one Trautmann wants to write, and I’ll give you the following teaser on that one: Chinese. Nuclear. Submarine.
David: Awesome.
Rucka: Well, imagine you’re the captain of a Chinese nuclear sub, and you’re running silent and deep. You’re suddenly told that all hell has broken loose and the government no longer exists, but this family by the name of Li has now assumed control. And maybe you don’t actually agree with that! What is that situation fifty years later? What is that like even twenty years later?
Robert: That’s actually a really good question. How did the Chinese nuclear submarines not just nuke the crap out of the mainland? We’re getting back into the historiography here, but if there’s a culture on Earth today that’s had effort put in to abolish the idea of rulership by blood, and instead of a kind of ruthless governmental oligarchy, it’s China post-1948.
David: I’m not sure China has made that much progress on ending nepotism and cronyism.
Rucka: Yeah, maybe. I have been working on the Chinese story, the China story is still active. One of the things that Eric and I figured out very early – and this may offend some people – is that Russia rolled fairly quickly.
David: Well in some ways it’s just changing the titles on the doors.
Rucka: Exactly. Putin’s still Putin, the labels have just been stripped away. President, Prime Minister, Tsar, is there really a difference? I would argue not really, right now. There are so many little stories to tell, and there’s so much fun in developing the world. We also talked about – and I don’t know if this is something that could ever come to pass, but the dream project – would be to create some sort of app for Android or iPhone, and it’d be a globe. You’d just spin it and tap on it, and it’d tell you ruling Family, timeline relevance, insignia, key moments, key narrative dates. The little “Carlyle Guide To Your Planet!”
Robert: “All bus services have been suspended in this area, because the government has collapsed. Have a nice day!” [laughs] Is franchising a thing you’re looking at? Are you going to do the tabletop roleplaying game?
Rucka: Oh, I’m a big gamer. And in many ways this is like running your campaign. Nobody’s gotten in touch with me and said “we would like to do this thing”. I figure in another year or so, we’d have enough for a sourcebook. Then I’ll test run a game or two and see what I think. I’m not really good, in my oeuvre…this sounds so self-important, but I have no other way to put it…maybe it’s my background as a gamer, but I don’t want to tell single stories. I’m interested in the movement of these characters in these great big arcs involving the way the world develops and expands. Part of the joy in that is the fun of people to share it with. It’s a big damn world. One of my favourite things to read, growing up, was the Thieves’ World series, and if you know these books – this idea of this shared universe, where these authors all come in, and they’ve figured out certain things, but at the same time they say: here is Sanctuary, here are the rules of Sanctuary, write your stories! I remember reading those for the first time, and it was the first time I’d ever encountered anything like that.
In its own way, there is nothing as exciting, as validating, as realising “You guys like this? You want to come play in it? Awesome! Let’s play!” In developing this, and in particular working with Michael as a collaborator, is that there’s so much to explore here! One of my biggest concerns, right now, in writing this is that I don’t want to lose the plot, literally. As much as I want to explore certain things, the narrative has to go to certain points. It goes back to your question about who we are going to follow. We’re going to mainly follow Forever because this is primarily her story. But in order to better tell her story, I think it is going to be absolutely necessary for instance to talk about Jonah, and to show Jonah without Forever there. To see Malcolm on his own. I’m not sure when we’re going to back to Morray – we’ll definitely see Joacquim again, but I don’t know when we’ll go back to dancing with Morray.
David: It’s interesting that you mentioned Joacquim and Jonah in that regard. Jonah’s the other young Carlyle, whereas Joacquim has a shared role and origin, but at the same time a very different one. By mixing the two of them you sort see Eve reflected.
Rucka: Yep. There’s quite clearly a story coming where you see the Lazarus duel.
David: Pretty much implicit in the premise, yeah.
Rucka: So, that’s a question coming. I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, not every Family has a Lazarus like Morray or Carlyle. Hock has no Lazari, but what Hock has is something that Jakob Hock thinks is better.
David: Well, Lazari are cool, but from an efficiency point of view one person can only be in one place at one time.
Rucka: Exactly. It’s also part of a culture that Malcolm had a hand in creating.
David: Oh, when I say cool, I mean in-setting, rather than to us (though they’re cool here as well). It’s like knights. Knights aren’t necessarily the most efficient medieval unit in a lot ways – Agincourt and so on – but what they are is cool. They’re great PR for the feudal system.
Rucka: That’s exactly it. They have a clear purpose. To know that this thing is there has tremendous value. There’s a bit in #5 where…and I don’t want to give too much of this away, but…Forever faces an opposing force, and simply because of what she is and who she is, not only do they back down, they kill one of their own, without her even raising a finger. I’m really pleased with that sequence, because you get the effect of what it means to be a Lazarus. This is part of the value. She should strike terror in certain people. It also becomes evident in the second arc that a lot of people don’t know what she looks like. They just know there’s a Carlyle Lazarus, and a lot of the mythology surrounding that, the propaganda that follows that, has it’s own incredible value.
David: When you said propaganda, I suddenly had a flash to a group somewhere in the Carlyle offices of people in suits sipping martinis and saying “When it comes to next issue of the Carlyle Lazarus comic, here’s what we need to get out there.”
Rucka: Trautmann has described that division as “accountants with sub-machine guns.” There is a media, sort of propaganda system, introduced in the second arc called “The Post”. “Have you read the Post?”, y’know. I wrote a bit which we probably won’t get to use, but it’s the audio track for one of these propaganda shows, where you’re listening to the heroic Carlyle agent, being interrogated by the evil Hock people. It’s every TV cliché you’ve ever heard.
Robert: I have a deep weakness for those very troubling ‘30s radio shows, between Father Coughlin and radio soaps. The propagandist material.
David: “Evil forces are infiltrating your government!” [laughs].
Robert: Actually, let’s talk about that for a bit. If you have all this technology and this ability to create all these living weapons in various different incarnations…does somebody have a secret Lazarus? I mean, beyond not being recognisable, is there someone who doesn’t acknowledge having a Lazarus but there’s a ghost that disappears people. It’s got to be very tempting to build that kind of secret enforcer.
Rucka: [long pause] That would be telling. [laughs]
Robert: Yeah, I think that’s fair enough. I can see though that it’d be very tempting. The Lazarus that disappears you.
David: Or the Lazarus that disappears. You know, this Family used to have a Lazarus, but now, if you need help and you walk this part of the desert…
Rucka: Or the Family that says “we have a Lazarus, this is the Lazarus, say hello to the Lazarus” and there’s actually nothing special about them.
David: Straight out of central casting.
Rucka: Exactly. Some lucky son-of-a-bitch—
David: Not that lucky if another Lazarus turns up.
Rucka: Well, yeah. Some guy they found in a hovel somewhere, who they tell “You’re big enough, you’re strong enough. We’re going to clean you up, teach you how to act. We’ll give you this costume, you’ll have shelter, you’ll have food. You’ll be able to have sex with whatever you enjoy having sex with, but in return we’ll wheel you out and you’ll have to do certain things”.
David: You can always split the difference: “We built a Lazarus, but they’re butt ugly, so we’re hiring you.”
Robert: I do love the idea, particularly as a short fiction thing, of the My Fair Lady of Lazarus. “I can turn a flower-girl into this living weapon of death by the time we have the big Family meeting.”
Rucka: Yeah. Or maybe you keep this one on ice and thaw it out when you need it.
David: Cold Lazarus.
Not THAT Cold Lazarus. Though…
Rucka: [laughs] Frosty the Lazarus.
Robert: The Christmas special! There you go! Something for December next year. You know, a bunch of Waste kids see what looks like a bright star, and it turns out to be an underground facility, and they find a frozen Lazarus in a top hat. And they wake it up, it kills a bunch of bullies for them, says it’ll be back next year. Walks off into the wilderness.
Rucka: [laughs] We are a sick group.
David: Some portion of this might have to be redacted for the safety of the public. [Editor’s Note: We didn’t.]
Robert: In terms of the book, we could probably dig down into the minutiae forever, but we wouldn’t want you to feel like we gave too much away. So, into a broader look at things. Image, lately, has been knocking it out of the park, in terms of their creator controlled books. Phenomenal stuff. But we’ve seemed to notice on an aggregate that even though these stories are being written by independent authors—
David: –they share a sort of conceptual space, a part of the zeitgeist where a lot of media, comics, books, film, TV is talking about the downfall of Man, about some sort of apocalypse. Apocalypses. [pauses] Actually, the old Buffy question, what is the plural of apocalypse. Apocali? False Latinisms are always classy.
Rucka: [laughs] Well they make you sound smart, at least.
David: “Does it end with an ‘i’? Are you sure, it doesn’t end with an ‘i’? Maybe I know something you don’t?” and so on.
Rucka: There’s a bit at the start of Issue #6, where you guys are going to remember this conversation, and roar with laughter. I promise you.
David: I was recently reading This Book Is Full Of Spiders which examines our cultural obsession with the idea the world is going to end and the end is going to suck. There are creators now who are in your age bracket who are spending a lot of time writing about said destruction. How much when you look at other people writing about that kind of thing, do you think that’s where we are as a society?
Rucka: Well, I do think that’s where we are. I’ve just turned 44. When I was 13 or 14 I had a visit with a doctor because I was having horrible stomach issues. Couldn’t hold anything down. Going on for months. So the doctor asked me “What’s on your mind?” and suddenly, I was spewing all this information out about where I grew up. I knew for a fact that at least seven nuclear targets were in the 60 mile radius of where I was living. I knew there was a nuclear target in this location and this location, and this one and this one. The advice I got was basically, “Greg, you need to stop worrying about that so much.” Then I went to college after the Challenger exploded one morning. As a kid who had grown up where Watergate was a fact, and the government lied to you, and couldn’t be trusted, and the best and the brightest might suddenly be taken away from you for no reason, or worse because of incompetence or foolishness, or a genuine mistake. Growing up where it was just a given there was going to be a nuclear exchange. In my teens we’d passed the point of “it won’t happen” into “when will it happen”, and then the Cold War ended and the Wall came down, and we got about a decade where we believed things were going to get better. Then that turned out to be demonstrably false, but there were other ways we were killing ourselves we hadn’t even realised. Upon realising it, we can’t reach any consensus! We have a population that says “this is too hard, I’m going to go play GTAV. I don’t want to think about how I’m actually going to fix the environment, because it’s going to take Herculean planet-wide effort.” Take a look at Syria! A situation that has been developing and getting worse for three years. Even for your most humanitarian viewpoints, there’s this sense of apology. It’s not politically expedient for Russia, or for China. It goes on and on and on. So, of course, you’ve got a whole bunch of writers right now of my age, plus or minus ten years, who are saying we’re so fucked right now it’s not funny.
David: Yeah, it is a shared narrative thread.
Rucka: So part of the reason we turn to stories is that we want to exorcise these demons, but we also want to look at them. We want to get them out of the muck, and clean them off and perhaps, perhaps, motivate ourselves to try to fix them in some ways. I am…and I’ve had a couple of people remark on this, I had someone send me a note through Tumblr, saying ‘I really like your Tumblr, but I can’t read it any more, it’s too depressing. Can you just post more pictures of space exploration?” I think it’s very telling that if you look at my Tumblr it’s just “this is how politics is fucked up, this is how the economy is fucked up, here are all these emerging epidemics” here are all the horrible ways that we are going to hell as fast as we can. And here are some beautiful pictures of stars and planets. And if that’s not my subconscious saying “Can we go there, and start over?” I don’t know what is.
David: Things are really beautiful, thousands of millions of miles away—
Robert: Where we haven’t been to stuff it up yet.
Rucka: Exactly. But then there’s the really cynical view that says even if you could get out there, the odds of finding somewhere inhabitable are astronomical. You could spend a lot of time, if you were so inclined, looking at the new Star Trek movies and compare them with the ethos of the original stuff, and that optimism is just gone. There’s none of it left. We do not look to the future with optimism now.
David: That’s the thing. We were talking about the zeitgeist, and you were talking about people escaping into dumb, fun games, but it’s even there. The big dumb fun games on average now contain the dead rising and the collapse of society and the people who were previously your neighbours trying to eat your brains or steal your stuff.
Rucka: And your measure of success is how well you put a bullet into someone’s head. Though is that not, ultimately, the result of twelve years of a never-ending war on terrorism? Is that not what you end up with when you spend more than a decade, in the First World, telling people that they’re constantly under attack. You don’t know where the next threat will come from, and no, you can’t trust your neighbours.
Robert: To come right back to the beginning, where we were talking about the political situation in the United States (and here, though I think to an extent less so), there’s nothing to shut down rational discourse like an environment of total fear.
Rucka: Oh, absolutely. You can argue…Pearl Harbour was attacked, and that was a national call to action and self-sacrifice. 9/11 happened and the national call to action was to spend money and go shopping. What is the most effective means of getting you to buy something? To scare you. Advertising figured out long, long ago that fear was their most powerful tool. Fear makes you irrational, it makes you off-balance, and it makes you look for things that will make you feel better, but won’t solve the problem. Porn’s going to make you feel better! This video game is going to make you feel better! But they don’t want you to be unafraid, because if your fear keeps you buying stuff!
Robert: So, “Keep numbing yourself with the palliative, don’t take the cure”, then?
Rucka: You got it. I really do recognise that on one level some of this sounds like ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth. But there’s a preponderance of evidence! I’m not making this shit up. I’m really not. I wish I was.
David: One of the things I really admire about Lazarus is that in all the material that we’ve seen so far, is that there’s no sense that this was something that was done to us. There’s no external force, just the slow accretion of natural human trends.
Rucka: That was the birth of it. The moment was me sitting there going “What happens if this doesn’t get better?”
David: The lack of that excuse puts it back on the reader and the culture from which it comes. It makes it very different from a lot of other apocalypse stories.
Rucka: Well, it’s very interesting, because when we get to that point in the back matter, there are references to some external forces, the health disasters or what have you, with the exception of a huge earthquake that happens in about X+18 or so, they are all the results of direct action by people. It’s not an accident. It’s not something that just came out of the Congo and started wiping people out. It’s a direct result of this guy going “to win this war, I am going to destroy this country’s ability to grow their own wheat.” Oh, well, guess what happens when you do that. This pathogen doesn’t respect borders! I mean, they weren’t stupid, they had the antidote, they just didn’t count on it mutating and getting out their control.
Robert: Like almost every iteration of germ warfare ever.
Rucka: You got it.
David: Throw rats with the plague over the walls of Venice, they’re going to come back and infect you pretty quickly.
Rucka: That’ll do it.
Robert: Or plague-bodies on catapults being flung onto Malta. Which has to be the most horrible – I mean, effective, but just most horrible – siege ideas in history.
David: Probably not even that much more effective. I mean, it’s Malta. Heroic aberrations aside, you can just wait. They have no rivers. They need to import water or wait for heavy rain.
Rucka: [laughs] Well, some people are impatient. What are you going to do? And never discount the terror aspect of that. “Oh, look, it’s raining bodies!”
Robert: [laughs] Raining plague-infested bodies.
Rucka: What’s the forecast today? Heavy pus with a light spattering of limbs.
Robert: “This siege will be going on forever, dear. We might as well take the opportunity whilst we’re off work to go for a picnic.” Aaaargh. Splat. [All laugh]. I don’t know, maybe we should leave it there. I don’t know where we go from rains of pus.
Rucka: It can only turn into an increasingly dark Monty Python routine.
Robert: Greg, anything further you’d like to share.
Rucka: It’s been a real delight talking to you guys, and I’d definitely love to do it again. You should really get Michael at some point too.
Robert: We definitely want to. I considered asking him if he wanted to be involved today, but I was worried we might have gone on too long. [laughs]
Rucka: [laughs] He says, two hours later.
Robert: But definitely love to get him in, and maybe Santi Arcas. Talk a bit about their process –
David: Or just, you know, an opportunity to talk about working with you behind your back.
Robert: “I keep getting these terrifying scripts! I don’t know what’s coming next because I don’t read ahead, but now there’s rains of pus and evil snowmen and I don’t know what to do!” Michael Lark: Prisoner of his author. Really though, thank you very much, it’s been absolute pleasure.
David: Yes, thanks so much for your time.
Rucka: Awesome. Thank you, guys.