cmx499 Interview with Stronghold Creators Brian Visaggio and Kevin Roberts
I feel like I have to write an introduction to this interview simply because all interviews should have an introduction, right?
But I don't know what I can add here. Brian and Kevin's words really explain the (really, really, really) long process they've gone through to create, re-create and continue their comic book series Stronghold.
It's great insight into the creative and business aspects of independent comic creation.
cmx499: So it's been almost 7 years now, right? That's a true labor of love. How have Kevin, Martin and you handled all these ups and downs over that time?
BV: Well, after our initial illusions of being heralded as the new wunderkinds of comics were shattered by the realities of having to actually market yourself, we just sort of settled into a holding pattern wherein we would, periodically, discuss and produce a book. The ups and downs were mostly in the initial year. We were actually picked up by a local comic dealer who wanted to get into publishing, and we had an issue distributed by Diamond, but, after they asked us for the second book, they dropped us just as were finalizing it for submission. At that point, we went back to live of the land and put it on a website, where it sort of went nowhere. That's how it was most of the time.
At this point, Martin has largely departed from the project. We bring him in on occasion when we discuss major things, but his involvement is minimal at this point.
KR: I just want to point out that Brian was the one with the fever dream of overnight success, I've always been a little more grounded as far as how the book would be received. We were all enthusiastic and excited about the project but I think I was a little more realistic as far as expectations of being nobodies.
cmx499: What's been the most important thing you think you've learned in this time?
BV: It's ok to be comic-booky. It sounds funny to have to say that, but when we were making it, I had largely withdrawn from reading all but a couple of books, so most of what I was working from was television. So I was thinking in terms of these stand-alone, semi-serialized stories with long act structures and extended character development and lengthy scenes. And then I rediscovered monthly superhero books, and I realized exactly how much development you can get out of one line in one panel.
KR: Production value is nice. Expedience is better. Meaning,it's nice to go all out and render each image to the utmost of my ability- but it's extremely time consuming; aside from an initial 'wow-factor' most people aren't gonna spend more time looking at each panel just because it took me longer for me to paint them. Comics are all about succinct, effective images, that communicate quickly to the reader. There's no shortage of great art; compelling color and draftsmanship are one of the big draws of comics. But with the initial run I was taking it too far. I had a personal crusade I wanted to accomplish. I always disliked how most comic books have this amazingly well-painted cover and then the interiors look nothing like it, not even done by the same guy, sometimes the cover has nothing to even do with the issue's story. I was resolved to maintain parity between high quality cover art and the interiors. The problem is if we're trying to crank out a book on a semi-regular basis (bi-monthly? quarterly?) it was unsustainable. So I had to learn dial it back. I had to find where expedience and image quality intersected, and you can see, even just from the transitions from Issues 1 to 3, that I'm searching for that sweet spot. You have to choose carefully what level of fidelity you're going to put in your images, because you have to maintain that for every panel you make.
cmx499: How hard was it for you to look at a finished, published product and decide to really edit it to the point of almost calling it a re-do?
BV: There's no "almost." This is a complete redo. Virtually nothing survived from the first incarnation of the book. We have re-used no pages, no plots, no dialogue, no art. We redesigned everything. Most of the characters have remained pretty similar, but Marveller was completely recreated. Originally, he was this stern, dark, Professor X-type, distant, almost ethereal. That's gone, and his motivations are much clearer now. There's a villain coming up in the next issue who has been so incredibly redone that she bears virtually no resemblance to her original form in look, mood, or personality.
The biggest change was one of premise. The original incarnation of the book was about the invasion itself. We had always been bothered by Rita Repulsa's inability to conquer the Earth in Power Rangers. It seems like it should have been easy. Just send down a bunch of monsters all over the place, make them giant at the beginning, and watch the Power Rangers completely fail to contain them. So we wanted to do a book where the Power Rangers lose. Now, the book takes place two decades after the loss, and it's about resistance, about banding together. It's much more idealistic.
How hard was it to redo? Not so hard. I felt I had written the original book into a corner, and I didn't like how dour the book was. Everyone was so unhappy, and it was so damn preachy. Every issue had to have this firm philosophical question that needed resolution -- the morality of torture, how vengeance eats you up, the willingness to do hard things -- even if the answer wasn't always something I agreed to. I felt the need to end every issue with a pithy interaction that served as a callback to something earlier. And I hated it. I could see all the seams and it drove me crazy.
I started to think, before we were finished, that this book would be so much more interesting, have so many more stories open up to it, if it wasn't about the invasion. That was too military, and there's always the temptation to build every issue around a mission with a clear military goal. But all the best TV episodes and comics, the ones I really love, aren't the big battles, but the little character pieces. And those got harder to justify.
So I pitched a relaunch, where we could take everything we'd learned in the first go-around and apply it from the beginning. This book has a much clearer beginning, middle, and end planned out. It lets me deal with narrower, clearer themes, and it builds up really sensibly to an endgame. So this is really a good development.
KR: It was kind of hard. We had put time into that book! That's a lot of art I did! You know the cliche, 'that [project] is my baby,' well it really does feel that way. You've nurtured it and watched it grow, even if everyone's ignoring it. But you have to have the guts to dispel that kind of thinking if you want to do anything better with it. It's not a baby. It's a story that could be better if you scrap everything that isn't working and go back to square 1. You're stronger now having learned what you know up to this point. And it was a good opportunity for me to try something new visually. I was itching for a change in technique for the book.
cmx499: If I may ask, how has the re-launch and sale of Volume 1 on Comixology gone so far?
BV: I'll tell you as soon as we know. Comixology only releases sales figures quarterly. Hopefully that means we get them soon.
cmx499: I've noticed that on Comixology you're listed as Redline Comics. Is that your company? Are there plans to do more with Redline?
BV: Comixology demanded a company name, so we made one up. We'd been operating as Cactus Man Studios originally, but the name was a little silly, so we came up with this one. At this point, Kevin and I don't have much in store for Redline outside of using it to put out our projects.
cmx499: Do you plan on releasing the books in other formats to other digital distributors?
BV: We hadn't considered it. Comixology is the biggest kid on the playground, so we figured we'd have most of our bases covered just by signing up there.
KR: If anyone wants to distribute it (non-exclusively of course) shoot us an email, we're interested. But yeah, Comixology was the big fish.
cmx499: Number #4 has been sent to Comixology and will be out soon, right?
BV: Issue 4 has been submitted, but we're still waiting for approval and release.
cmx499: And you're already working on #5?
BV: Yes, we are.
cmx499: And how much time do you estimate you'll need to finish and send over #5? Do you hope to get this to a regular or even monthly series?
BV: We're trying to work out a six-week schedule per issue, but I've run into some big roadblocks in getting issue 5 scripted. I work full time, and I'm a full-time graduate student, and I'm married. Sometimes I only have one free day a week not filled with other obligations, and when that happens, writing the book isn't always as much a priority as having the opportunity to turn off my brain for a spell.
There aren't plans for this to be a monthly book, mostly because we do have an end-game in store. Consider it a maxi-series. Hopefully this summer, when my school schedule is over, I'll be able to draft a bunch of issues all in one go and speed things along.
KR: The 6 week pipeline was Brian's idea. Then he has the nerve to be in school and be married and crap. Do you see what I endure?
cmx499: Do you have a set number of issues for the series planned?
BV: Roughly. It's probably not going to run longer than twenty issues. Probably fewer. We're still in Act 1, although that will end in issue 5.
cmx499: Aside from the Power Rangers, were there any other strong influences for or in the books?
BV: The biggest ones were Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, although the latter is a bit harder to see. There's some Lost in there, too, and Heroes, although it's not as cool to say that anymore. This book's origins are pretty widely spread around in genre TV shows from the mid-00's. I think that's actually a lot about what made the first run so weak, and in this incarnation, I'm working out new influences. There's some Mass Effect in there, to be sure.
As far as influential comics, DMZ has had a big impact, and Jonathan Hickman's masterful run on Fantastic Four has been enormously important to me in terms of helping me structure long-term stories. There are some shades ofSandman that haven't turned up yet, and I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't admit that Kirby's New Gods, the Inhumans, and Bill Mantlo's Rom: Spaceknight weren't exerting strong influence. And I have a truly incalculable debt to Mark Waid's Kingdom Come in showing me how hope and tragedy can intertwine.
KR: I'm the art guy, and I draw upon a lot of anime and Japanese game influence, as well as Western cartoons and comic books (remember when comics were 1.50 and sitting on a rack at your nearest drugstore?. A few big hitters that I have to mention would be the Metal Gear Solid series of games, Samurai Jack, Ninja Scroll, Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Kingdom Come, Voltron, Marvel Civil War. Movies with great fight choreography, and my own Karate training help inform me when designing the close range fight scenes. I grew up on a lot of anime from the 80s and early 90s, and if you notice the shows follow a slower pacing structure than shows these days. I have to kind of suppress that in order to make effective comics, constantly fighting the urge to do half a dozen establishing shots just to set mood before moving into action shots. Now we just consider it bad pacing because you risk 'putting your audience to sleep,' but Western and Eastern movies that predate the 90's really tend to take their time establishing mood, but at some point all the different mediums got themselves into a hurry, which changes expectations, or at least reinforces them, so I have to keep pace visually-- to keep the reader's attention, but also not to create too much work for myself. Our deadlines are imaginary but I try to stick to them (laughs). We're online now but you make too many establishing images and you bloat your page count which can make printing really pricey really fast.
cmx499: You have quite a few characters all working here in Stronghold. How easy/hard is it to flesh them all out?
BV: The difficulty with team books tends to be that you end up with a single real main character -- the leader of the team, I guess -- and the rest become much more two-dimensional. At this point, we haven't had opportunities to deal much with a few of our background characters. Because this has been such a long gestation, we do have most of them pretty well worked-out, but as always, we'll have to see where the story goes to see who they become. I'm leaving my master plan in abeyance to some extent.
KR: It's definitely a balancing act. For my part I do help Brian plan out the story for the issues, and there's back and forth sometimes about who gets to do what, who gets to speak, how much attention do they get. It's one of those things that you're always thinking about and tweaking here and there, up to the final lettering. 'Hey, Ruth's talking too much, lets let Ezra say something here too,' so one character isn't just furniture for an entire scene when it looks like they should be involved. I think, as long as we keep the characters interacting and bouncing off of each other and not stuck in their own heads (which I think was something hamstringing the initial run we did), we'll have an easier, and ultimately more interesting time developing them as the story progresses.
cmx499: There are some moments where religion seems to have a place in what's going on. For example, Marveller makes a point about that when he's explaining the conquest of the Ouranians. Is religion a part of the difference or a theme within the books? And if so, are we going to see more of the races different religions?
BV: Oh, dammit. I was trying harder to make religion less prominent in this version of the book.
I suppose that'll be impossible given my field. I'm a former seminarian, and currently a grad student in theology. I'm going to be doing another MA in philosophy when I'm done, too. So religion is always going to be something I'm interested in, even if just on a cultural level. Marveller's reference to religion was mostly just a little character moment where I'm trying to lay out that he's sort of working from an older world. I've got this schema going where the Alaqash -- Marveller's species -- are wandering, nomadic tribes, and the Ouranians are settled imperials. I'm playing it out in my head like it's the Persian Empire establishing itself over the wandering shepherds of Mesopotamia, so I wanted to bring in this ancient sort of idea where conquerors bring their gods with them.
That sort of mythology is always going to be a big part of this book. I don't want to give especially much away, but yes, belief systems and gods and myths are part of this world the same as they're part of ours. Greg is Catholic. Ruth is Jewish. Marveller worships whatever the hell it is he worships. The Ouranian cult is introduced in issue 4, and I've tried to play it out as being inhuman. But this isn't just character flavor. If it matters to the characters, it ought to matter to me, and to the story. And the Ouranian religion itself has a big role to play.
There's one moment at the end of issue 1 where I compare Marveller, who has shown up to rescue a couple of our characters, to Jesus harrowing hell. That's an old belief, one that has always resonated with me, that after the Crucifixion, Jesus descended into hell to rescue Adam and Eve from death. That sort of death imagery is something I really enjoy playing with, and I intend to keep it up in the future.
cmx499: Are we going to learn more about the T'Aaya or the Ourainians as the series progresses?
BV: Oh yes. Yes. Very much.
cmx499: Are we going to get outside of New York in any of the books? (Please feel free to be coy about or even avoid the question if it reveals too much.)
BV: This isn't a huge reveal. Yes, we will be seeing outside New York extensively. I won't say much about to what extent or what role it'll be serving, but the world outside the cities matters. We call it "the Lawless."
cmx499: Where do you hope to see Stronghold go?
BV: I wouldn't especially mind if someone wants to option it for a major motion picture. But honestly, at this point, we've been at it so long that the goal is just to tell the story, and we'll be satisfied if we can do that.
KR: Yeah I've always, in the back of my head, seen Stronghold the Comic as the pitch for Stronghold the Movie. That's my dream. I'll be the lead concept artist/visual consultant/art director, haha.
cmx499: What's after Stronghold?
BV: You asked earlier if we had any other plans for Redline Comics. We do have another book in the works, a smaller project that may run six or seven issues, called Radio Girl. We're going to be working on it simultaneously with Stronghold, and like Stronghold, it's been in development for years and years and we're finally saying "fuck it" and going for it. It's a very different kind of story, about death and growing up, about memory and identity.
I'd also like to do a straightforward superhero book at some point.
KR: Stronghold: The Movie, Stronghold: The Video Game, Stronghold: The Musical, The Cereal, The Lunchbox, and my retirement, obviously.
But I have a few ideas besides Radio Girl that I've shared with Brian that we may be able to work on. One involves Harriet Tubman (his idea, and I have one involving a boy and his lion, the wilderness, and steam/cyberpunk monsters.
