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Shawna
Ervin-Gore:
What's your thing with girls?
JW:
They're awesome! And they don't like
me...(sigh)...
SE-G:
(laughs) "Maybe if I make one up she'll talk to
me!"
JW:
The imaginary ones always talk to me, dance with me. We get
dressed up... sorry, I'm back.
SE-G::
The pattern in your interests is showing. You like girls.
What do you find so interesting about female
characters?
JW:
Oh, you know -- I like strong women. I was raised by one. I
don't see many of them and I see a lot of bullshit
pretending. There was that thing in the '80s where every
woman in a film had to have a pointless karate scene -- for
no reason! Like Wayne's World! They had to do karate to show
they were tough and then go back to being meaningless in the
narrative. Or helpless. People were attempting something
good, but the only person who was putting actual tough women
out there was Cameron. He was just kicking ass. He gave us
the two great prototypes -- Ripley and Sarah
Connor.
Also, those
women just attract me. It's embarrassing, almost. A lot of
it is inherent and studied and strongly-felt feminism, and a
lot of it is just that chicks are cool.
I've always
felt comfortable with women as people, and I was surprised
when I realized how few people -- writers and filmmakers --
actually think of them as people.
SE-G:
A lot of manga (Japanese comics -- ed.) features cool women
characters that I think you would dig.
JW:
On the one hand it seems diggable, but I'm a big fan of
puberty and people who've been through it.
SE-G:
There's that perception about manga, but a lot of manga
heroines are actually teenagers. I think the Japanese
culture or media just isn't as puritan about showing a 17
year-old undressed. Younger ages are considered adult in
other countries. Sometimes manga can seem overrun with that,
but I don't believe many mainstream American comics are
better.
JW:
There's a comics artist I won't name who I've talked to. His
creation is really popular, I guess, but there's this weird
thing, where I guess she was molested, and that's part of
the story. But you know, she's a young girl who looks like a
Playboy model in her undies. I wanted to molest her, too,
you know? The message that sends is weird, and I don't go
for it.
Because of
stuff like that I went away from comics for a long time.
Everything seemed to be soft core and all of it was
disguised as empowerment. "I have the power to have my shirt
ripped, and now you can see my nipples! Ah-ha!"
The other
thing is that, inevitably, something that is fringe
culturally will probably yield the most exploitative and the
most feminist stuff. The most radically political stuff gets
mixed in that way, like the '70s horror movies. I Spit on
Your Grave is like that.
SE-G:
That's pretty much a genre of its own -- exploited women
coming into their own and taking their anger out on the
people who hurt them.
JW:
Yeah. They show this woman being raped, and they keep raping
her, but then she gets this incredible revenge. A lot of the
Romero movies were the same way, with incredible feminist
icons that nobody really noticed. It's amazing to me that
there isn't more of it in our culture.
SE-G:
I also think that's one of the elements of comics that
society tends to have a problem with. They're being
presented with all of these visuals, and on the one hand the
comic-book industry wants things to be taken relatively
seriously, and on the other hand there's all this
titillation and improbable things being shown.
JW:
It's a fine line, but I walk that, too. There's a phrase
about "incoherent text," and it refers to having two
different things working at the same time. You need to be
able to say, "I'm pulling both ways, here. I'm saying she's
a little hottie, but I'm also saying she's a powerful person
who has levels of being that you can't see." You can work
both of those things at the same time to get a strong
response.
SE-G:
And real people are like that, too. Buffy is definitely
about that. You can't say that Buffy and Faith aren't
hotties.
JW:
Good God, man!
SE-G:
Is that a contradiction? You mentioned Ironman earlier, and
his whole deal with weakness and strength. Does
contradiction work for you?
JW:
I wouldn't say it's contradiction. It's just very basic
human stuff, I think -- stuff that's hard to deal with:
bravery and cowardice. The things in life that make you make
these extremely defining choices. To me, that's
interesting.
I sort of went
off on a tangent, but one of the reasons I've always been
attracted to female heroines is that I have always been
interested in the people nobody takes seriously, having been
one the greater part of my life.
SE-G:
Not a girl...
JW:
(laughs) No, not a girl. Although occasionally, in certain
outfits...Um, anyway...I was an androgynous little thing. I
had masses of curly red hair and old ladies would always
come up and say, "Oh, I love her hair."
A lot of
people thought I was a girl, but I was cool with it. I was
the youngest, and quite tiny, and was just the guy that
nobody took into account much. And that one, the person you
might look at and dismiss, is going to be the person who
saves the world.
SE-G:
That was just the lead-in I was looking for to start talking
about Fray.
JW:
Ooh. Sly.
SE-G:
It's established that you like comics. Did you just see what
was going on here at Dark Horse with the Buffy projects and
decide to take advantage of this connection...
JW:
Yes, I abused my power. That's right.
SE-G:
You're taking advantage of us, aren't you?
JW:
Ho, ha! I will crush Scott Allie (Whedon's editor -- ed)
with this power you say I have. I mean, yes, I always wanted
to write comics. I've enjoyed the relationship with Dark
Horse, and the Buffy comics are great, and as we started
putting writers from the show on the comic projects, I
noticed they were having all the fun. So I said, "Well, what
about me? I want to have fun, too!"
I didn't want
to write a Buffy comic, because, well, that's my day job,
but at the same time, I wasn't comfortable with launching
some completely new thing and start something that I wasn't
sure where it would go. So when I was talking to Scott, I
explained that I wanted to do something based on the
mythology of the Slayer. That way I would have some
grounding for the story, and I wouldn't be driven insane by
looking at a page and drawing a complete blank.
I also knew
the kind of rhythm of the story I would tell because of that
connection, but setting the story so far in the future
helped make it a separate thing.
SE-G:
How far in the future is Fray set?
JW:
Actually,
I'm leaving that a little vague. I'm keeping it at "a couple
hundred years in the future" because I honestly didn't have
the impetus to re-imagine the entire world. And, you know,
everything is going to be completely unrecognizable in about
12 minutes, so I don't want to be responsible for saying
what the 26th century is going to look like.
All I know is
that I wanted something vaguely futuristic, and I really
wanted there to be flying cars.
SE-G:
Yeah. Realistically, at that point in the future, we'll
probably have cellular transport or something insane like
that. You didn't want to get into that whole
thing?
JW:
No. My way around all that was to use flying cars. Also, I
needed flying cars in the story because I wanted them there
because -- and I can't say this enough -- THEY ARE SO
COOL!
Also, the
flying cars helped introduce, I guess, the economy of the
story. The rich people have flying cars. The main character
of Fray, Melaka Fray, is poor. She lives in the slums. She
doesn't get a flying car. The rich are probably all
genetically perfect, but the poor people are mutating, thank
you very much!
SE-G:
I noticed you used the implications of "our changing world"
in the story a lot, talking about how the poor people -- or
those with no resources -- have been affected by radiation
and crap like that. Did you ever read those old issues of
Creepy and Eerie magazines from the early '70s that dealt
with the poor mutant kids with missing limbs from radiation
poisoning?
JW:
No, I didn't read those, but that stuff would always terrify
me. I'm sort of using radiation like I'm using the flying
cars. I wanted cool things to be in the story, so I have
mutating children!
SE-G:
Like fish with three eyes?
JW:
Yes.
SE-G:
So Fray is a girl, she is the slayer.
JW:
Melaka Fray is the slayer and a professional thief -- a
bagman for a local sort of pseudo-mobster who is a
fish.
SE-G:
So she is sort of a hood among hoods. Let's describe her
world a little bit. It's not just fish people and radiation
and flying cars. The ever-present vampires -- or Lurks -- as
you call them are there. Why is horror such a strong
storytelling vehicle for you?
JW:
I don't believe in vampires and spirits and God and all
those funny stories people tell. I do have a fascination
with fantasy, a fascination where I love being in other
worlds and creating them. I think those elements have always
spoken to me in every thing I do.
SE-G:
And horror seems to work pretty well for getting stories
across.
JW:
Well Fray is more of an adventure story than a horror story,
I think, in the way that it is told and the way it pencils
in a few horror elements along with the excitement and the
action and the genuinely creepy stuff that I so
love.
SE-G:
The beginning is definitely creepy to me.
JW:
Well, good!
SE-G:
The opening was just freaky! These monster things are
digging a whole in the dirt to get to this door, and just
the fact that you put a door under the dirt where monsters
have to dig in the dirt to get to the door was creepy to
me.
JW:
Well good. It was suppose to be. I guess maybe I take that
part for granted a little bit, but I'm glad it
worked.
SE-G:
It also didn't seem like you were trying way to hard to make
it scary. That is part of the reason it works. Also, I'm
impressed with your script given that you've never written a
comic before. I think that there are a lot of people who
assume that comics are easy to write.
JW:
They're no easier than anything else. They are different. It
was very weird and fun, liberating and scary to actually sit
down and write a comic script the first time. At the same
time, a lot of how I can write movies comes from what I have
seen written in comics. You know, in a good sense. If you
always take that as "Oh, you mean everything is on the
surface and popping out stupid," that's not right. I mean
there is something about rhythm, and something about moments
captured that you get from comic books that you can try
totranslate into movies, but it doesn't always work. Movies
and comics are very different mediums, but they each have
their strengths.
SE-G:
I read comic-book scripts all the time and there are a lot
of people who do it for a living who don't get things like
how action moves from panel to panel. It's like they are so
wrapped up in the idea of telling their story or getting
their narrative across that they forget there is a flow of
actions and actual visual storytelling to concentrate on, as
well.
JW:
I think it works for me because I always write visually. If
it doesn't make sense to me visually I can't imagine it, and
I can't finish it. So hopefully it works out, but with
comics it's a totally different discipline. Do I show her,
you know, in the middle of the action, or has she already
landed and is recovering? Which is it? How is it done? Which
gives the moment the best impact? It's kind of neat because
I don't really know what I'm doing (laughs).
SE-G:
I want to get into the story of a little more, so this is
where I should start letting you talk a lot. Fray is a
vampire Slayer. How does she discover that?
JW:
It's probably important to understand the world she live in:
there has been no magic -- no demons or vampires or magical
creatures -- on the earth for a few hundred years. The
implication being that something happened in the 21st
century that sort of made them all go away and no more is
ever said about that. But, though no Slayer has actually
been called , the watchers counsel is still around and it
has become a bunch of insane, drooling idiots, and a bit of
vampirism has sort of resurfaced, but nobody knows what it
is. Nobody even knows they ever existed or has heard stories
of vampires -- that eradication really did `em in. So, Fray
basically someone who has always had this power in her, but
she was never trained and never "called." She's never had an
outlet for her power.
SE-G:
She's just been subsisting by being a thug for a
hood.
JW:
Yeah. She is basically sort of an anarchist, you know -- a
wild girl who likes to live one the edge. She has one
sister, an older sister who is a cop, and they get along not
at all, needless to say.
SE-G:
In the comic you refer to vampires as lurks, so despite the
fact that there have been no "vampires" people are sort of
aware that these "lurks" are out there.
JW:
Yes. It is considered to be like a sort of disease, a social
disease, maybe. Nobody knows much, but they know you don't
go in the shadows.
SE-G:
A disease is a neat way to look at vampirism.
JW:
That's also pretty much how they are dealt with. And nobody
thinks of them as demons -- nobody even knows what a demon
is. And life is strange enough that they don't even think
twice, really. They've got mutations to deal with, and
that's weirder than anything, almost. But Melaka has a sort
of primal terror of Lurks that she can never admit to
herself and, she is also kind of
self-destructive.
And because I
don't want to give away all the best parts of the story --
which of course relates to these traits in Melaka -- I will
just say that her personal demons are all a result of a
greater purpose she will eventually be called to serve.
She's just had no idea for her whole life that anything like
what she is going to experience could exist.
SE-G:
So in a sense, Fray is a Slayer without any "Slayer sense,"
or any sense of what that might even be.
JW:
Yeah, she has the strength, she has the power, but she
doesn't have the same sort of connection to all of it that
Buffy and other Slayers have had. And that definitely adds
to all of the crap she's going to end up going through
before the series is over.
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