Interview: John Zakour
I’m so tired of bleak science fiction. Sure, it often reflects the current state of affairs, but I miss the kind of science fiction that makes me wonder and tickles the NASA obsessed little kid in me (not in that creepy, inappropriate way). I want science fiction to be fun again.
Thank God, I found John Zakour.
Zakour is the gag-writer and cartoonist behind the “Hair Color Series” of science fiction/ mystery novels [The Plutonium Blonde, The Doomsday Brunette, The Radioactive Redhead, and The Frost Haired Vixen] featuring Zachary Nixon Johnson, the last PI on Earth, and a steady stream of villainous babes who are out to destroy the world and Zack along with it.
Here, Zakour talks about his books, including the upcoming Blue-Haired Bombshell, and what he’s enjoying more than Heroes.
PRG: Your books are some of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time. I understand that you have a long and varied background as a writer [including comic strips, HTML how to books and A Man's Guide to Pregnancy]. How did you get from that to writing sci-fi/ detective/ comedy novels?
John Zakour: I had been writing an online comic strip for Prodigy and they canceled it, so I just decided I was going to write a science fiction novel and do it online. Originally, it was going to be for Prodigy and then they got sold to some Mexican company or something and they decided to push music over everything else they were doing online at the time. On a whim, I asked the SciFi Channel if they’d like an interactive, come as you go, write as I go serial for their website. I never thought they’d say anything, but they said “Sure!”, so I wrote The Plutonium Blonde sort of on the fly, week by week.
PRG: How did you and your co-writer on the first three books, Lawrence Ganem, start working together?
JZ: After SciFi Channel said sure, I thought I should get someone who could speak English pretty well. Someone who went to college for grammar and syntax and things like that. Larry is my cousin - he works for DC Comics and while he was at Syracuse he was a communications major. He knows things about verbs and stuff like that. I asked him to help me and he said sure. I would write something and send it to Larry, then he would put it in better English and make it smoother. By the time The Radioactive Redhead came around, we sort of decided that Larry didn’t really have time and I’d done it long enough that I could venture on without him.
PRG: Was there any hesitance about writing The Frost-Haired Vixen on your own?
JZ: Yeah. Larry’s always been the one to say, “We can’t do that. It’s too crazy or too outrageous.” With Frost Haired Vixen, I didn’t have anyone to say we couldn’t do something or something didn’t make any sense . I actually tried holding back a bit, but when the publishers read it they said, “Don’t hold back, go crazy.” So, I went crazy. I consider my books to be more like novelized comic books.
PRG: In the past few years a sort of sub-genre of detective mash-up has popped up. For instance, there’s you and your Zach Johnson books, then there’s also Butcher’s Dresden Files and Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen books. What do you think is behind this trend?
JZ: I think since everything has been done before we need to spin off and pull more things into it. Make it more unique. For me, I think I have a hard time concentrating on one subject so I have to make my environment really varied. And I needed something to separate me from the crowd, so I went with comedy. Being a gag writer, comedy seemed the natural way to go.
PRG: Why did you choose to set Zach Johnson’s cases in San Francisco?
JZ: I’m not sure why I picked San Francisco at first. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. It seems like a trendy city and there’s something about it that makes it a good place to set a book. And if aliens did land and share technology with us, they would probably land in San Francisco because it’s such a cool city. It’s such an “in” sort of city. I rationalized that a bit in one of the recent books where Zach mentions quickly why San Francisco was the place where the aliens revealed themselves to humanity. The aliens felt comfortable there because they identified with the gay community.
PRG: Why are all of your villains in your books women?
JZ: I’m sure it’s nothing Freudian! That’s what the publishers want. I get comments like, “You need more babes trying to kill Zach!” So, I give them more babes trying to kill Zach. It’s also a throwback to the pulp era with the beautiful babes and the macho guy. But, many of the heroes are also women. Zach is surrounded by powerful women on both sides. It shows the progressing and changing role of women in the current world and the future world. We’re very close to possibly having the first woman president of the United States. Argentina is about to have their first woman president. Women are gaining more power, so they’re gaining more power in my world.
PRG: I read that, in addition to your writing credits, you also have a Master’s Degree in human behavior.
JZ: I needed it as a defense because my father got Alzheimer’s and my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, so in order to defend my brain as much as possible, I thought I’d go to school for as long as possible. I got that degree and now I’m going to school for clinical nutrition. I’m currently taking anatomy and physiology and it’s really kicking my butt. I’m doing OK, but it seems like I learn one chapter and that knocks everything I learned about the previous chapter out of my mind. I only have so many brain cells I can put toward learning that, keeping three stories running in my brain, and writing Working Daze.
PRG: Do you find that your degree in human behavior has helped you in developing your characters?
JZ: I think so. Certainly in how Zach deals with people. One of the things taught in human behavior is how to better communicate with each other and how to define common goals, and that comes into play especially in Blue Haired Bombshell. It’s really big on trying to find common ground and working together, all those things they stress in human behavior classes which is kinda neat. All of the human behavior professors hate giving bad grades because it’s just so counter productive. They’re really big on positive reinforcement, not this negative reinforcement. I’m pretty big on that too. Now I’m also pretty big into eating properly and eating proper nutritional values. I’m simple but very complicated.
PRG: I love that “Gates” is thrown around a an all-purpose expletive in the books, which begs the question, are you a Mac user?
JZ: Yes, I am. I’ve been a Mac user since 1984 and I used the Lisa before that. I’m updating to Leopard as we speak. Sometimes I write for software development companies who are doing things for PC, so I have to have a PC in the house and ironically, when I take my tests for school, they don’t work on the Mac, so I have to take them on the PC. We have five computers in the house and four are Macs.
PRG: How many books are you planning for this series?
JZ: There’s at least seven, but I’ll keep writing them as long as Daw wants to keep publishing them. I’m just running out of hair colors after Flaxen Femme Fatale. I’m not even sure what the seventh book is going to be called yet. Right now it’s just Hair Color Book #7. It’s getting tighter and tighter now because it has to be a hair color and a sexy pulpy title.
I also have a kids’ series, Baxter Moon, coming in April with a smaller publisher. Baxter is kind of like Zach lite. He’s what Zach would probably have been like when he was 13 or 14 if he was growing up in a galactic academy learning to be a scout. I had to reel it in a little bit., so it’s not quite as out there as the Zach books. It’s good for me to write something that’s not so far out there.
I’m actually working on a more serious science fiction novel which about a bounty hunter about three or four hundred years into the future. He leaves Earth for it’s furthest outpost, which is a farm planet, to hang out and be a farmer. But, he gets drawn in to murders and things like that and he ends up dealing with what really does make us human and separates us from the animals. It’s my attempt at more serious science fiction.
PRG: How’s it going for you so far?
JZ: I keep putting jokes in it. I’m not sure if it’s going to end up as more serious science fiction or not. It’s outlined and I know what I want to do with it, I’ve just got to figure out the tone of it and how serious I want it to be. No matter what, there’s always going to be some jokes in anything I write no matter how hard I try.
Also, I may be doing some writing for Bongo Comics soon. I met with them at Comicon and they seem interested, so that allows me to buy all the Futurama and Simpsons DVDs and call it a business expense. I hope it works out with Bongo.
PRG: Are you a comic book fan?
JZ: I am.
PRG: What are you reading?
JZ: Nothing right now. Since my grown up days and having a son, I’ve really cut back on my comic reading. And since writing Zach, I also cut back so I don’t accidentally steal ideas from someone else.
PRG: What did you like growing up?
JZ: X-Men. I had X-Men #1 through #170 and they were sold on me when I was at college. I came home sophomore year and asked where they were. They paid for my college. I read Spider-Man, Batman, the stuff that was around in the 1970s. I recently read World War Hulk - someone sent that to me. And House of M. I’m reading the Wonder Woman series now. I guess I still occasionally sneak in.
PRG: How do you compare current comics with the comics you read as a kid?
JZ: The thing is, I can’t put my finger on why they’re different now. I don’t know if it’s because my brain has changed. I think things have gotten more complicated in the comic book world now, too. Sometimes I like black and white and there isn’t that anymore. You’re never sure who the bad guys are. It might be that I’m getting older and don’t comprehend them as well as I used to.
PRG: I don’t know. We had an 11 year old girl do comic reviews for us over the summer and she found that she wasn’t crazy about the new stuff, but she really liked the comics from the 1970s.
JZ: It was simpler then. It’s sort of like 24. I don’t like anything where I have to watch it for 24 hours. I want it to be escapism - read it fast and then go on to the next thing. That’s my big hang up with serial TV like 24. I don’t want to be sitting there 24 hours and if I miss an episode, I want to be able to figure out what’s going on.
It’s not that I don’t like them, I just don’t like watching them. It’s really hard for me to concentrate, be there, catch it and then figure out what went on last week and stuff like that. I like arcs on shows. I love the arc on Babylon 5 and that was a 5 year arc, but each show stood on it’s own. Once again, it might be my mind getting older and not being able to comprehend.
PRG: Other than Babylon 5, what do you like?
JZ: Currently I like Reaper. I still watch Smallville. I enjoy it. Sometimes the plots are wide open - I think they really need to hire me to write an episode or two, but it can be a fun show. I’m still hanging in there with Bionic Woman, which is another show I’d like to write an episode for so it would make more sense. I like Pushing Daisies. I’m not sure if it can maintain for two or three years, but it’s a fun watch. I enjoy Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate. Battlestar [Galactica] could stand to be a little less gloomy now and then. But, outside of that it’s a really well done show. That’s about all the science fiction I’m watching now. Pretty much anything that’s available. Well, there’s some newer stuff like Journeyman and whatever the vampire thing is now on CBS that should be Angel but isn’t Angel.
PRG: Moonlight.
JZ: Moonlight, yeah. I haven’t attempted to watch that yet.
PRG: It’s got some problems, but it’s one of those shows that has a lot of potential, but I can see it getting killed easily.
JZ: I feel the same way about Bionic Woman. It has a lot of potential, but they still have to figure out what the heck they’re going to do with it. I’m also looking forward to The Sarah Conner Chronicles. I think the girl from Firefly and 4400 would make a really fun Terminator.
PRG: Oh, yeah. Summer Glau. I love her.
JZ: She’s a really cool actress. I’m a bit surprised she’s leaving the 4400, but I don’t even know if 4400 is going to get picked up for another season.
PRG: That show got so aggravating in the last season.
JZ: I think they sort of jumped the shark. I don’t think the writers even know if Jordan Collier is a good guy or a bad guy. I don’t think they know which group from the future is the good guys and which group is the bad guys. There’s just too many super powers popping up too much. I still watched it and still think it could be a good show, but I don’t know where they’re going to be able to go with this.
Oh, and I still watch Heroes. But, that’s been really frustrating. So far, I don’t think anything has happened in this season that couldn’t have been done in one episode.
PRG: Last season, right in the first episode you knew immediately in five weeks New York was going to blow up and there was a goal. This season feels like there is no goal. It’s so aggravating.
JZ: I don’t like Hiro being in the past because we know how it ends up. There’s just a bunch of it I don’t like because it doesn’t make much sense. Oh, and I like Chuck. That’s a fun show. I’ve actually been enjoying Chuck more than Heroes. I’m enjoying Reaper more than Heroes. I’m enjoying Beauty and the Geek more than Heroes, which is kind of scary.
The Blue-Haired Bombshell will be in stores on December 4th. The previous four books in the series are currently available in paperback. You should go buy them right now. Seriously. Why haven’t you clicked those Amazon links yet?
You can read daily installments of Zakour’s comic strip, Working Daze (syndicated by United Media), at comics.com. Zakour can be contacted at johnzakour@yahoo.com or through his website.
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