Abede Lovelace: City of Walls

I met Abede Lovelace and Shaun Noel at this year’s New York Comicon where they were promoting their comic, City of Walls. The series is the story of three kids growing up in Kowloon City, an isolated and independent city formed by many conjoined buildings.

After the convention, I had the chance to talk with Abede, the comic’s creator and artist, about City of Walls and the plight of American comics.

Lisa Fary: Tell me about the conception of City of Walls.

Abede Lovelace: Before it existed as it exists now, it started off with the city itself and I had an idea. I was interested in the concept of taking something like a mall and putting apartments in the mall, so people would live there and wouldn’t have to leave for anything. You figure all of your needs kind of exist in malls now. You’ve got the food court, some of them have movie theaters, some even have nightclubs.

I read an article a little while later about Kowloon Walled City and it turned out that my idea was actually realized in Hong Kong some time ago. It was an apartment complex left to its own devices and it became its own city – everything was in the complex, they had schools, doctors, restaurants, they had everything. It ran itself. The government had a hands off policy on it and it was run by gangs for about thirty years. It was crazy stuff. That’s where it started.

As for the children, the three main characters, I wanted to do a comic where, rather than focusing on extraordinary people, I wanted to focus on normal people in extraordinary situations. Conceptually I can handle my business and when it comes to plots, I can handle my business, but I’d never categorized myself as a writer. Shaun is a writer and I’d already been working with him for quite some time, so I presented it to him.  I’d originally talked to him on a consultant tip to get his input. He ended up really digging the idea and said he wanted to come on and write it with me. Now it really is a collaboration, it really is the coming together of both of us for City of Walls.

LF: Can you talk a little bit about that collaboration process?

AL: You know, I get questions about that and I don’t have a good answer. From my experience, it’s like lightening in the bottle. I’ve had collaborations with different people on different things and they all pretty much came to failure. It can be hard working with other people. First of all, you have the economic aspect of it: everyone wants to get paid and it can be hard to get past that if it’s not the other person’s vision. That’s a hurdle that people take for granted. It’s one thing when you create something and you want to work on it with other people and are able to pay them – there’s no real conflict there. The person is a hired gun and you pay them for the work and that’s it. It’s another thing when it your idea and you’re asking them pick up the mantle of your dream and run with it. You have to inspire that person to be willing to believe in it and come along with you.

When I came up with City of Walls, Shaun and I had already been collaborating for a while, but we hadn’t completed a finished project together. We were trying to do stuff for other people, pitch things here and there, and City of Walls was that breaking point for me. I wanted to do my own thing and not be beholden to somebody else telling us no. This was the first time that I was really gonna be taking that kind of step.

The most important thing is that me and Shaun respect each other and respect what each other does. Shaun respects my drawing and storytelling ability and I respect his writing ability. That’s a pivotal thing. We work out the plot together, for the issue and the series, then he goes off to his corner and writes the script. I trust his ability to do a good job and I don’t restrict him. I encourage him to go off on tangents. I want him to do what he does and see what he comes up with because he has good ideas. There are lots of things that happen in the book that are Shaun’s ideas, then I’d work on it and by the time it had gone through both machines it was something completely new that both of us did, and that’s a true collaboration.

LF: Do you have distributorship for City of Walls?

AL: We’ve been approached. But we’re a two man team and we’re handling all of this.

LF: I get the indie comics life.

AL: Indie comics and all that, I don’t really look at it that way. I look at it as good comics and bad comics. I was having a conversation with someone at the con who was saying that this wasn’t really their crowd, they prefer a more indie toned crowd. I understood it, but for me, not for nothing I’m trying to get into all those situations. I want to be part of all those groups because at the end of the day, Shaun and I are just trying to tell good stories. I want to be able to touch all those people.

From the business end of it, those are the products that really transcend to the next level of impact and success, the ones that aren’t boxing themselves in. I have the same problem with mainstream comics that I have with independent: they’re not trying to cater to anybody else. They’ve kinda cordoned themselves off, they’ve got their stable base, and they’re happy with that. I understand that from a business level to a certain degree; expansion means risk and it raises certain problems. But, that being siad, the health of the market and the industry depends on your ability to go past that.

LF: Right. To grow the market and bring new readers into it. So, how are you approaching that?

AL: The first thing is to get our stuff out there. On a creative level I have to put out a product that is bulletproof. I can’t have plot holes, I can’t shortchange my reader, I have to tell a great story and I have to draw it in a great fashion. That means pulling out all the stops and utilizing all the tools. On a business end, I have to find markets, get my readership up, I have to find people, I have to get my material out there and build confidence.

The biggest hurdle for an independent book is trust when it comes to the consumer. Comic books aren’t a quarter or seventy-five cents. They’re three dollars, four dollars, some are five dollars now. Trust is a big thing and when you take a consumer and put them in that situation where tried and true Marvel and DC is on one side and never seen this before on that side, especially in the early stages of a series. When you’re only one issue in, that’s compounded because the person may very well be thinking it looks interesting, but it’s independent and there’s no guarantee they’ll see the second issue. I can pick it up and love, but it’s entirely plausible that the second issue never gets done, that the story never gets done and I’ve just spent five dollars on something, that while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t really fulfilling. Part of overcoming that is having that next issue in a reasonable amount of time so people don’t forget you.

I know that because I’ve had those same thoughts myself. I can name mainstream books where I was really digging it and then the writer or the artists didn’t finish it and it stopped coming out. You can count up the money you spent on it and it’s never gonna get finished and you standing there going “What the fuck?”

LF: You’re talking about the business of comics and I want to ask you something in that context. The readership is shrinking. It should be growing and it’s not. The big guys keep coming out with events that really only appeal to current, entrenched readers. From your perspective as a businessman who is operating outside of that mainstream box, what needs to happen so that comics aren’t dead in ten years?

AL: That’s the million dollar question. I can answer what needs to happen, but how to make it happen is the big question mark. In my opinion, it’s gonna go one of two ways. There’s either going to be a – for lack of a better term – a revolution on the independent side of things or it has to come from the people on top whereby they have to start letting loose those shackles.

A lot of the big companies are trapped in their own box at this point. There’s this cycle of perpetual characters who never die and at the end of the day nothing happens. They’re continuously playing to the same group of people who are going to eventually get old and stop buying comics.

The problem we’re discussing isn’t really a problem with comic books, it’s a problem with American comic books. I’ve dealt with kids, and kids read comics still and they love ‘em. They’re just not reading American comic books. They know Naruto, Bleed, all those comics. They how to get them, find the money to buy them, and they will go on in chapter and verse about the span of a hundred issue storyline and know every character. They know Spider-Man, Batman and Superman from the movies, but they don’t know anything else.

So, comics as a medium aren’t dying.It’s that these companies aren’t penetrating the younger markets. To a certain degree, a lot of them don’t cater to kids anymore, there’s a drop in making books that are kid friendly. The material is often a little past kids. Then to another degree the stories don’t grab kids. They don’t grab that sense of gripping fear when you read about these characters, get caught up in them and the story, and you wonder what’s going to happen next. These books don’t have that anymore. Nothing happens. No one ever dies. Nothing happens and stays. There’s never any grand consequence that goes down.

Let’s take Naruto, for example. Lots of characters die in Naruto. I’m just using death because it’s the most pivotal change you can inflict. Characters die badly. They will take a character that is loved, that they’re still making money off of, and then they have that issue where he dies. The kids don’t throw their hands up and say, “Oh, they killed my favorite character, so I’m not gonna buy this anymore.” They’re like “Oh my god! They killed my favorite character!” and then they go back for the next issue.

LF: That seems, in American culture anyway, to even go beyond comics. Any kind of serialized entertainment, even on television, there’s such reluctance to kill anyone off.

AL: Yeah. They start making that money and get caught up in that and get trapped, like if they kill them off the cow is dead. They have this dogma, this cycle, they’ve been making a shitload of money off of them and have decided that they’re OK with that. Its a joke when they have these big events where they will kill the character and everyone runs out to buy it. And everyone knows it’s a joke. They know he’s not going to stay dead, they’ll come back. And they do! The best you can hope for is that at least when they pretend kill them off it was a good story.

LF: What’s your greatest hope for City of Walls?

AL: I’d like to see City of Walls realized as a fully animated feature. A live action one could be done because it’s not a fantasy story, but I’d like to see it on that scale. A lot of things have to happen before that. That said, I’m not sure about changing the medium. I think comic books are the greatest storytelling medium of all time. There’s a way the comic book works on many, many different levels at the same time, as far as what’s going on with the characters, how that’s impacting the reader, and how the story is being told. It can work on all those levels without undercutting the other things. I’m not sure a movie can do that.

Case in point, Watchmen. I’m really excited about it and think it’s going to be awesome. But, it’s one of my favorites and I read it periodically and every time I read it, I uncover something else. There are so many things going on in this story, but they all get the necessary attention and nothing is sacrificed. You have the superhero line, but then you have the human condition and I’m not talking about that from the superheroes’ point of view. The real human condition. There’s a whole lot of things going on that have nothing to do with the heroes, but with just the people who live in this world. It’s beautifully written, powerful stuff that gets to being a human being and living in this world and being terrified and still having to do your everyday life. To get that across in a movie while simultaneously giving all the time it takes to do the superhero part right, I don’t know if it’s possible. It’s possible in comics.

City of Walls is available in shops around Manhattan and through Stand Alone Productions’ website. Issues 2 and 3 are also available at comiXpress.

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

Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

Related Stuff: