Interview: Brian Wood

Brian Wood easily became one of my favorite writers when I picked up the first issue of Local. I was still new to comics at that point and was just figuring out that comics could be about the human experience without being about superheroes and could tell a story without being action packed. It opened me up to other comics that I may not have found on my own. Here, Wood talks about writing Local and its main character, Megan.

Pink Raygun: What do you think is the most overused word in the English language?

Brian Wood: “Like”, in the pointless way so many people use it. I am guilty of this myself.

Local #1 PRG: Local is the first comic series I’ve ever bought religiously and the only comic I’ll rush to the comic shop to get the day it hits the stand. That’s not really a question. I just wanted to say that.

BW: Thank you! I really believe that when all is said and done, Local will be the best book I’ve written in this first decade of my career. At least as far as I’m concerned. It’s really turned into way more than the sum of its parts… what began as a grouping of short stories with a ‘hook’ has turned into this epic telling of a human being striving to find her place in the world. Which sounds a bit grand, but I’ve never gotten the chance to write something like that.

PRG: Megan is annoying to me, but only because I identify with her and the choices she’s made in her life so far. She reads as a very real character. Is there a real person behind Megan and how did this character develop?

BW: I built her up over time, a lot of it on the fly. Organically. I never base any of my characters on one person, but I do draw a lot from people I know or used to know, taking bits and pieces, anecdotes, personality traits, etc from others and folding them into Megan. I think she’s utterly real, no better or worse than anyone else I’ve ever met, which is why I think I am always surprised when people react so negatively to her. I know people bring their own baggage to fictional characters – especially so in comics – but still.

[nms:Brian Wood,4,0]

PRG: What was behind the decision to make a girl the center of this loose arc rather than a guy?

BW: I think I write more female characters than male. I started as a sort of stubborn response to this crazy male-dominated industry and I’ve kept that up all this time. I’ve gotten comfortable with writing women. I don’t even think about it much any more. Feels natural.

PRG: You have that nugget you want to grow into a story. How do you get from nugget to story?

BW: I start off with The Point. What’s the point? What emotion or idea do I want this story to communicate. Look at Demo #5 – the girl who is constantly judged, despite her best intentions, falls prey to that same human emotion and judges others. That’s just the point, and I have to create characters and a sequence of events and an emotional story around that. I write these outlines by hand, lots of arrows and circles and rewrites until I have a pretty decent outline I can take to full script. This sounds pretentious, but in a lot of ways it feels like mixing music. All these ideas and scenes need to be organized in the proper way to make the story.

PRG: What do you do when you get stuck?

BW: Worry, complain, seek distractions… all the while assuming that the ideas will start flowing again in enough time to make the deadline. Which they usually do, but in that respect I really feel like I’m on borrowed time. It’s like the dreaded mega-tsunami that’ll destroy the west coast of America. It’s not a matter of if, but when. Same with my crippling, months-long writer’s block.

Local #11 PRG: What’s your workspace like?

BW: I just downsized it! I’ve always had small offices, and crammed them full of bookshelves, several work surfaces, lots of peripherals like prints and scanners, storage bins. We moved recently so I really made an effort. Bit the bullet and now have a single, small desk. I invested in really nice credenzas that hold a lot of crap but look very clean on the outside. Hooked the printers up to the airport in the other room, etc, so now its less chaos and more like an orderly library. I have floorspace again!

PRG: I read that you started writing so that you would have something to draw. Until I started researching this interview, I never associated you with illustration- I only knew you as a writer. Is this notoriety you have as a writer unexpected?

BW: It’s not really unexpected since its happened slowly over the course of a decade, but yeah, I was an artist first. I started to get into comics in art school, seeing in them a rather unique way of communicating complex information that a single individual could handle. It’s not just story+art… comics are more than the sum of its parts. I can’t think of anything else that’s really like that.

I drew a lot of comics in art school. Really, I devoted the last two years of my education to learning the craft, and the end result of that was Channel Zero, a 150 page book I both wrote and illustrated. But soon after that I got work as a writer at Marvel, and immediately saw the benefit of being able to write without worrying about the drawing. My art style is specific and limited, and I had ideas for stories that my style would not fit. So i began to partner with others and gradually became known as a writer.

I still draw, mostly covers for DMZ, the occasional CD cover or poster project. It’s enough for me now.

PRG: People who grew up reading comic books tend to have a sort of reverence for them (I’ve observed). Has coming to comics at a later age helped or hindered you in that industry?

BW: Helped mostly. I like not having emotional attachments to company characters – I have built a career off of purely creator-owned work and probably would never have to do work-for-hire for as long as I live if I didn’t want to. Not that I wouldn’t… its just that I feel free to enjoy the choice, to have that option. And there is a huge sense of pride in knowing I “made it” without the crutch of Wolverine or Batman or Punisher or whatever.

The hindrance comes in being something of an outsider amongst my peers because of this, and also in just lacking knowledge on these company characters. If I did want to pitch a work-for-hire book (and I have before) I need to do a lot of research. They are all unknown to me. It’s a big hurdle.

Local #11 is due in stores on October 17th. Wood’s new series, Northlanders, is set to release this December. For more on Brian Wood, please visit his website.

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS