Greg Rucka
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Usually I would write here what my interviewee is best known for. But Greg Rucka has become a very popular writer in so many circles and there’s crossover within them all. Rucka started out as a thriller novelist which led to him becoming a very popular mainstream comic book writer with runs on Adventures of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. Diehard comic book fans know that he started out in independent comics with creator owned books such as Whiteout and Queen & Country. Tara Chace is the pivotal figure in Queen & Country and her latest and her latest adventure is in the new novel Private Wars. Tara Chace was once the most dangerous woman alive and she worked for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service. Now she is officially dead which makes her more sinister than ever.

Buy Private Wars

Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Greg, what are you up to today?

Greg Rucka: I just got back from a meeting.

DRE: What was your meeting about?

GR: It was an education committee meeting for my son’s Sunday school. Even though it isn’t really a Sunday school, it’s kind of a community learning thing. It’s not terribly exciting.

DRE: How old is your son?

GR: He’s six and I have a daughter who’s about to turn three.

DRE: Have you given them your comics to read?

GR: My boy, Elliott, has been reading the comics. He’s only now really starting to read read but he’s been picking up the comics for years. One of his favorite moments was meeting Geoff Johns not because he knew who Geoff Johns was but because Geoff was writing the Flash at that point and he knew who the Flash was. I’ve got this great picture of him and Geoff at a convention, sitting side by side, each of them drawing. But now that he’s old enough he’s started to actually read them. He’s reading Johnny DC which is what they call the kids line. I’m not as cool this year as I was last year because I’m not writing Wonder Woman or Superman. I tell him I’m writing 52 and he’s like, “What is that dad?” But it was pretty cool when Dad wrote Wonder Woman and Superman. You can’t buy that kind of credibility.

DRE: I think what happens is if you read comics before you can actually read you end up being an artist.

GR: Yeah, it seems so because he’s inclined to draw. He’s very into “I’m going to draw it, and paint it and get upset if it doesn’t come out right.” That’s pretty much an artist right there.

DRE: How did the decision to write Private Wars as a novel rather than a comic book come about?

GR: This is the second Queen & Country novel. The first one was called A Gentleman’s Game. I had always wanted to do a Queen & Country novel or two. It was something that I’d toyed with pretty much from the start because I knew there were some things about the characters that I wasn’t going to be able to convey in any other medium. One of the questions I get asked the most often is “what’s the difference between comics and novels and which do you like more?”

DRE: [laughs] I’m not going to ask that one.

GR: Well, I always say that one has a lot of pictures. But the biggest thing is the amount of time you’re able to spend on something. When you’re writing a monthly comic that is 22 pages long you are required by dramatic rules of pacing to tailor the story in a certain fashion and you’re talking to a guy who is widely accused of telling very slow stories anyway. But with a novel you’re allowed to really delve into things that you wouldn’t have the time to explore otherwise. That was always the biggest appeal of doing a Q & C novel. Now you are able to see things in the characters and about their lives that were pretty much impossible to say in the confines of the comic.

DRE: What’s interesting is that if you decided to do Private Wars as a graphic novel, much less people would buy it.

GR: I suppose so. I try not to play the numbers game in readership. Queen & Country is a black and white comic, published by a small publisher. So because it’s black and white, the majority of people who go into comic book stores just won’t pick it up as a matter of course. Also since it is published by Oni Press there are comic book stores in this country that will not carry it simply because it’s not Marvel or DC. I’m ahead in the numbers game with the novel because I’m guaranteed it’s going to be in a Barnes & Noble. Though I can’t guarantee there’ll be a lot of them in a Barnes & Noble [laughs] but it’s going to be there. Oddly enough I got lit up today on my forums by someone who complained that issue 29 of Queen & Country presumes that you’ve read A Gentleman’s Game. First of all it doesn’t, and second of all, everything you need to know about what’s crucial in the novel is told to you in the comic. But it really drove home to me the fact that most die-hard Q & C readers who are reading the comics were going to pick up the novel, that was a given. I think very few people who actually picked up the novel then sought out the comic book, unfortunately.

DRE: It might be difficult for them to find the Queen & Country comic books.

GR: Yeah, most people don’t know where to get a comic book if they wanted to.

DRE: Sometimes they’re scared of their comic book stores and rightly so.

GR: There’s a reason that stereotype of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons exists. But most comic stores you go into you’re going to find people who are enthusiastic and passionate about the medium and are perfectly well socialized.

DRE: What’s also interesting is that guys like Joss Whedon and yourself don’t do comic books for the money.

GR: Yeah, you don’t do any comics to be rich.

DRE: It can happen but it’s rare.

GR: Some people have managed it, but that was a long time ago and if that’s why you’re here now then leave because you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

DRE: Is one of the reasons you decided to do Queen & Country in novels because you want to write the superheroes and characters that you grew up reading in comics?

GR: I wanted to do Queen & Country as a comic book because that was the best way to tell most of the stories I wanted to tell about these characters. The problem that comics conditionally suffer from is that people take them as solely as a superhero medium. That’s like saying all books are romances or worse, all books are Harlequin romances. Comics are synonymous with a specific genre as opposed to speaking to their own medium and the medium itself. Comics are as valid of an artistic medium as anything else. It has its unique strengths and weaknesses and they are great things for the people who are willing to explore and broaden their palette. You can do some amazing stuff. We can talk about Watchmen as a great watermark moment and Maus and Frank Miller’s Dark Night Returns. Also look at Persepolis and The Golem’s Mighty Swing. Look at everything else that Oni Press publishes. There’s a lot more that can be done, but there’s a presumption that nothing else can be done.

DRE: How much does Tara Chace reflect your worldview?

GR: She doesn’t because she is in her own way apolitical. She’s an instrument of government. She can disagree with what the government does but at the end of the day she’s going to do her job because she’s thoroughly fucked up and has a bastardized sense of self worth. Every now and then my politics sneak in, in snarky things that her boss, Paul Crocker, says. Crocker is far more right wing than I am. I’m very to the left but my experience with people who are in these types of job is they tend to be fairly conservative and in some cases even reactionary. I will say that my choice of what the story is about tends to be about issues that wind down to my politics.

DRE: Like America’s relationship with Uzbekistan in Private Wars.

How real are these characters for you now?

GR: They are my people and I created them. They are as real as I need them to be at any given moment. Chace is very real to me. Crocker is very real to me. There are other characters that become real in the writing as I discover them. It’s a hoary chestnut to say that the characters come to life on the page. But when a writer says that, it means they got in the character’s head. You know that they understood fully this creation that they are writing about.

DRE: What is 52 about?

GR: For every week DC Comics is going to put out a comic called 52 that will run in real time. So you will be following certain characters in the DC Universe throughout this year week by week. Sometimes their stories bump up against each other but ultimately they’re all individual storylines. What you are seeing is essentially a real attempt to write an ongoing novel in the medium. The big joke in the comics’ community is that we’re NASCAR because everybody’s watching for the crash. They’re waiting for the week where the issue won’t ship.

DRE: What’s the status of the Whiteout movie?

GR: There should be an announcement about Whiteout being made in the next couple of weeks. There’s talk about actually filming something as early as October of this year.

DRE: Do they have a director?

GR: They have a production company and they have a very powerful producer behind it.

DRE: How involved are you going to be with it?

GR: I suspect I’m going to be involved in the sense of “here’s the script, stay out of our way.”

DRE: [laughs] Alexander Stuart is credited on the IMDB with the screenplay, is he still working on it?

GR: Nope. I’m actually not even certain which screenplay they’re working off of. I believe there’s going to be a new screenplay using elements of the first one that was written by the Hoeber brothers way back when.

DRE: Did you want to write a draft of the screenplay?

GR: When it first sold, I said that I didn’t want to write it. It’s not what I do. I’m a novelist and I’m writing comics and at that point it wasn’t something I felt I was in the position to do and do well. In the next couple years I’m going to try my hand at a couple of screenplays and then we’ll see how I do at adapting my own stuff. But I get really cranky when people say things like, “Oh man the Lord of the Rings was just totally not Tolkien man.” I would like slap them and say, “Asshole, he wrote novels, these are movies.”

DRE: Yeah and he’s dead.

GR: They’re not the same thing, they cannot be. There’s a great Raymond Chandler quote where he was asked “What do you think of what Hollywood has done to your books” and he says “They didn’t do anything with them. My books are right here.”

DRE: [laughs] That’s one of my favorite quotes ever.

GR: I really think that’s true. If you write a novel, you’re using the form to accomplish certain things. You cannot accomplish in a comic book what you can accomplish in a novel. That doesn’t mean comics are a lesser medium. It means that its strengths are different and it’s the same thing in film. By the end of the day the hope is that they’re going to be true to the characters that were created and they’re going to tell a story that’s appropriate for the medium with those characters.

DRE: Will your screenplay be an original work?

GR: I want to write an original. I’ve got an idea for an original that’s been gnawing at me for a couple years now. So I’m going to probably try that first and if I can manage that maybe I’ll try to adapt some of my own stuff. But I learned an interesting lesson when Queen & Country was first optioned. Queen & Country was been purchased by Fox and I don’t know where the project is at this point. It could be anywhere. But John Rogers wrote the first draft and I read it. Afterwards I wrote him an email saying, “I could not have written this.” I meant that as the highest compliment. He took all of the truths of the characters in the series and put them together in a film that I thought would have been a great movie. If I had tried to write it I would have screwed it up because I would have been too precious about my little darling. He nailed it and that was a wake up call for me, which was, “Man, I don’t have the distance.” I don’t think I’m mature enough to be adapting my own stuff yet. I hope one day to be that mature.

DRE: Bear with me while I make my point, I just read some of the collected House of M. Did you have the chance to read it?

GR: I have not looked at House of M so I will not comment on it.

DRE: Superhero comic books take what’s been done before and adds a twist or a spin-off character for future storylines. Like the Scorpion has a son or the person that Lieutenant Gordon shot comes back.

GR: We write soap operas and any soap opera does involve continuity, who’s sleeping with who, is the basic question.

DRE: Comic books have been doing this since they first came out. But how much longer can they do this before there is nothing left to pick at?

GR: I think it’s infinite because ultimately the best stories are about iconic characters. When you approach it on that level, what you’re doing is you’re telling myth and the purpose of myth is to be told and retold ad nauseum. Every generation brings new wrinkles to it. Every generation takes a look at it and says, “Well, this story was done in this way and it had this meaning.” The X-Men are a good example. What were they the analog for when they were first created and what are they the analog for now? The X-Men are always the others, the ostracized portion of the society. You look at Brian Singer’s films and they are about being gay in the world, specifically about being gay in America. That’s the allegory being told there. That wasn’t the initial allegory, but it changes and we reinterpret these stories and we reinterpret the key figures to make them suit the time. Incidentally this is the curse of Wonder Woman. She was created over 60 years ago to be a feminist icon. Well, guess what, feminism’s changed a lot.

It changes in each incarnation. There are people who have horrible problems with that change and there are people who never want to acknowledge what’s actually going on with the character. That being said, remember that the purpose of a soap opera is to entertain and so is the purpose of any entertainment medium. If we can do that, by playing with the continuity and using what came before to build upon it, so much the better.

DRE: My point is that most modern mainstream superhero comics don’t seem to made for a guy who’s read comics his entire life, how long can these stories be any good?

GR: Yeah, there’s a lot of crap out there. There always has been and there always will be. But there’s a spark of genius waiting to happen. How long are we going to be able to eat ourselves like this? For a long time to come because I do believe that the interpretations are nearly infinite. There are some examples right now, that I won’t mention, where I think some very bad decisions were made in an attempt to keep it fresh and make it exciting. Point of fact, a good story is about knowing the character and putting the character in conflict. There are things about these characters that are always going to remain the same and then there are things that are going to change. What we’re ultimately talking about is continuity and how much are we enslaved to it. The answer is you’re as enslaved to it as much as you want to be. I don’t have editors telling me that I have to tell a story a certain way because of something else. There are lots of writers writing comics who want to make the comics they loved when they were kids. So they want to play with that continuity and assume everybody else knows that continuity. That’s where they lose people and that’s why we don’t get new people in but that’s not the only way to do it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck




ovelist which led to him becoming a very popular mainstream comic book writer with runs on Adventures of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. Diehard comic book fans know that he started out in independent comics with creator owned books such as Whiteout and Queen & Country. Tara Chace is the pivotal figure in Queen & Country and her latest and her latest adventure is in the new novel Private Wars. Tara Chace was once the most dangerous woman alive and she worked for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service. Now she is officially dead which makes her more sinister than ever.

Buy Private Wars

Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Greg, what are you up to today?

Greg Rucka: I just got back from a meeting.

DRE: What was your meeting about?

Rucka: It was an education committee meeting for my son’s Sunday school. Even though it isn’t really a Sunday school, it’s kind of a community learning thing. It’s not terribly exciting.

DRE: How old is your son?

Rucka: He’s six and I have a daughter who’s about to turn three.

DRE: Have you given them your comics to read?

Rucka: My boy, Elliott, has been reading the comics. He’s only now really starting to read read but he’s been picking up the comics for years. One of his favorite moments was meeting Geoff Johns not because he knew who Geoff Johns was but because Geoff was writing the Flash at that point and he knew who the Flash was. I’ve got this great picture of him and Geoff at a convention, sitting side by side, each of them drawing. But now that he’s old enough he’s started to actually read them. He’s reading Johnny DC which is what they call the kids line. I’m not as cool this year as I was last year because I’m not writing Wonder Woman or Superman. I tell him I’m writing 52 and he’s like, “What is that dad?” But it was pretty cool when Dad wrote Wonder Woman and Superman. You can’t buy that kind of credibility.

DRE: I think what happens is if you read comics before you can actually read you end up being an artist.

Rucka: Yeah, it seems so because he’s inclined to draw. He’s very into “I’m going to draw it, and paint it and get upset if it doesn’t come out right.” That’s pretty much an artist right there.

DRE: How did the decision to write Private Wars as a novel rather than a comic book come about?

Rucka: This is the second Queen & Country novel. The first one was called A Gentleman’s Game. I had always wanted to do a Queen & Country novel or two. It was something that I’d toyed with pretty much from the start because I knew there were some things about the characters that I wasn’t going to be able to convey in any other medium. One of the questions I get asked the most often is “what’s the difference between comics and novels and which do you like more?”

DRE: [laughs] I’m not going to ask that one.

Rucka: Well, I always say that one has a lot of pictures. But the biggest thing is the amount of time you’re able to spend on something. When you’re writing a monthly comic that is 22 pages long you are required by dramatic rules of pacing to tailor the story in a certain fashion and you’re talking to a guy who is widely accused of telling very slow stories anyway. But with a novel you’re allowed to really delve into things that you wouldn’t have the time to explore otherwise. That was always the biggest appeal of doing a Q & C novel. Now you are able to see things in the characters and about their lives that were pretty much impossible to say in the confines of the comic.

DRE: What’s interesting is that if you decided to do Private Wars as a graphic novel, much less people would buy it.

Rucka: I suppose so. I try not to play the numbers game in readership. Queen & Country is a black and white comic, published by a small publisher. So because it’s black and white, the majority of people who go into comic book stores just won’t pick it up as a matter of course. Also since it is published by Oni Press there are comic book stores in this country that will not carry it simply because it’s not Marvel or DC. I’m ahead in the numbers game with the novel because I’m guaranteed it’s going to be in a Barnes & Noble. Though I can’t guarantee there’ll be a lot of them in a Barnes & Noble [laughs] but it’s going to be there. Oddly enough I got lit up today on my forums by someone who complained that issue 29 of Queen & Country presumes that you’ve read A Gentleman’s Game. First of all it doesn’t, and second of all, everything you need to know about what’s crucial in the novel is told to you in the comic. But it really drove home to me the fact that most die-hard Q & C readers who are reading the comics were going to pick up the novel, that was a given. I think very few people who actually picked up the novel then sought out the comic book, unfortunately.

DRE: It might be difficult for them to find the Queen & Country comic books.

Rucka: Yeah, most people don’t know where to get a comic book if they wanted to.

DRE: Sometimes they’re scared of their comic book stores and rightly so.

Rucka: There’s a reason that stereotype of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons exists. But most comic stores you go into you’re going to find people who are enthusiastic and passionate about the medium and are perfectly well socialized.

DRE: What’s also interesting is that guys like Joss Whedon and yourself don’t do comic books for the money.

Rucka: Yeah, you don’t do any comics to be rich.

DRE: It can happen but it’s rare.

Rucka: Some people have managed it, but that was a long time ago and if that’s why you’re here now then leave because you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

DRE: Is one of the reasons you decided to do Queen & Country in novels because you want to write the superheroes and characters that you grew up reading in comics?

Rucka: I wanted to do Queen & Country as a comic book because that was the best way to tell most of the stories I wanted to tell about these characters. The problem that comics conditionally suffer from is that people take them as solely as a superhero medium. That’s like saying all books are romances or worse, all books are Harlequin romances. Comics are synonymous with a specific genre as opposed to speaking to their own medium and the medium itself. Comics are as valid of an artistic medium as anything else. It has its unique strengths and weaknesses and they are great things for the people who are willing to explore and broaden their palette. You can do some amazing stuff. We can talk about Watchmen as a great watermark moment and Maus and Frank Miller’s Dark Night Returns. Also look at Persepolis and The Golem’s Mighty Swing. Look at everything else that Oni Press publishes. There’s a lot more that can be done, but there’s a presumption that nothing else can be done.

DRE: How much does Tara Chace reflect your worldview?

Rucka: She doesn’t because she is in her own way apolitical. She’s an instrument of government. She can disagree with what the government does but at the end of the day she’s going to do her job because she’s thoroughly fucked up and has a bastardized sense of self worth. Every now and then my politics sneak in, in snarky things that her boss, Paul Crocker, says. Crocker is far more right wing than I am. I’m very to the left but my experience with people who are in these types of job is they tend to be fairly conservative and in some cases even reactionary. I will say that my choice of what the story is about tends to be about issues that wind down to my politics.

DRE: Like America’s relationship with Uzbekistan in Private Wars.

How real are these characters for you now?

Rucka: They are my people and I created them. They are as real as I need them to be at any given moment. Chace is very real to me. Crocker is very real to me. There are other characters that become real in the writing as I discover them. It’s a hoary chestnut to say that the characters come to life on the page. But when a writer says that, it means they got in the character’s head. You know that they understood fully this creation that they are writing about.

DRE: What is 52 about?

Rucka: For every week DC Comics is going to put out a comic called 52 that will run in real time. So you will be following certain characters in the DC Universe throughout this year week by week. Sometimes their stories bump up against each other but ultimately they’re all individual storylines. What you are seeing is essentially a real attempt to write an ongoing novel in the medium. The big joke in the comics’ community is that we’re NASCAR because everybody’s watching for the crash. They’re waiting for the week where the issue won’t ship.

DRE: What’s the status of the Whiteout movie?

Rucka: There should be an announcement about Whiteout being made in the next couple of weeks. There’s talk about actually filming something as early as October of this year.

DRE: Do they have a director?

Rucka: They have a production company and they have a very powerful producer behind it.

DRE: How involved are you going to be with it?

Rucka: I suspect I’m going to be involved in the sense of “here’s the script, stay out of our way.”

DRE: [laughs] Alexander Stuart is credited on the IMDB with the screenplay, is he still working on it?

Rucka: Nope. I’m actually not even certain which screenplay they’re working off of. I believe there’s going to be a new screenplay using elements of the first one that was written by the Hoeber brothers way back when.

DRE: Did you want to write a draft of the screenplay?

Rucka: When it first sold, I said that I didn’t want to write it. It’s not what I do. I’m a novelist and I’m writing comics and at that point it wasn’t something I felt I was in the position to do and do well. In the next couple years I’m going to try my hand at a couple of screenplays and then we’ll see how I do at adapting my own stuff. But I get really cranky when people say things like, “Oh man the Lord of the Rings was just totally not Tolkien man.” I would like slap them and say, “Asshole, he wrote novels, these are movies.”

DRE: Yeah and he’s dead.

Rucka: They’re not the same thing, they cannot be. There’s a great Raymond Chandler quote where he was asked “What do you think of what Hollywood has done to your books” and he says “They didn’t do anything with them. My books are right here.”

DRE: [laughs] That’s one of my favorite quotes ever.

Rucka: I really think that’s true. If you write a novel, you’re using the form to accomplish certain things. You cannot accomplish in a comic book what you can accomplish in a novel. That doesn’t mean comics are a lesser medium. It means that its strengths are different and it’s the same thing in film. By the end of the day the hope is that they’re going to be true to the characters that were created and they’re going to tell a story that’s appropriate for the medium with those characters.

DRE: Will your screenplay be an original work?

Rucka: I want to write an original. I’ve got an idea for an original that’s been gnawing at me for a couple years now. So I’m going to probably try that first and if I can manage that maybe I’ll try to adapt some of my own stuff. But I learned an interesting lesson when Queen & Country was first optioned. Queen & Country was been purchased by Fox and I don’t know where the project is at this point. It could be anywhere. But John Rogers wrote the first draft and I read it. Afterwards I wrote him an email saying, “I could not have written this.” I meant that as the highest compliment. He took all of the truths of the characters in the series and put them together in a film that I thought would have been a great movie. If I had tried to write it I would have screwed it up because I would have been too precious about my little darling. He nailed it and that was a wake up call for me, which was, “Man, I don’t have the distance.” I don’t think I’m mature enough to be adapting my own stuff yet. I hope one day to be that mature.

DRE: Bear with me while I make my point, I just read some of the collected House of M. Did you have the chance to read it?

Rucka: I have not looked at House of M so I will not comment on it.

DRE: Superhero comic books take what’s been done before and adds a twist or a spin-off character for future storylines. Like the Scorpion has a son or the person that Lieutenant Gordon shot comes back.

Rucka: We write soap operas and any soap opera does involve continuity, who’s sleeping with who, is the basic question.

DRE: Comic books have been doing this since they first came out. But how much longer can they do this before there is nothing left to pick at?

Rucka: I think it’s infinite because ultimately the best stories are about iconic characters. When you approach it on that level, what you’re doing is you’re telling myth and the purpose of myth is to be told and retold ad nauseum. Every generation brings new wrinkles to it. Every generation takes a look at it and says, “Well, this story was done in this way and it had this meaning.” The X-Men are a good example. What were they the analog for when they were first created and what are they the analog for now? The X-Men are always the others, the ostracized portion of the society. You look at Brian Singer’s films and they are about being gay in the world, specifically about being gay in America. That’s the allegory being told there. That wasn’t the initial allegory, but it changes and we reinterpret these stories and we reinterpret the key figures to make them suit the time. Incidentally this is the curse of Wonder Woman. She was created over 60 years ago to be a feminist icon. Well, guess what, feminism’s changed a lot.

It changes in each incarnation. There are people who have horrible problems with that change and there are people who never want to acknowledge what’s actually going on with the character. That being said, remember that the purpose of a soap opera is to entertain and so is the purpose of any entertainment medium. If we can do that, by playing with the continuity and using what came before to build upon it, so much the better.

DRE: My point is that most modern mainstream superhero comics don’t seem to made for a guy who’s read comics his entire life, how long can these stories be any good?

Rucka: Yeah, there’s a lot of crap out there. There always has been and there always will be. But there’s a spark of genius waiting to happen. How long are we going to be able to eat ourselves like this? For a long time to come because I do believe that the interpretations are nearly infinite. There are some examples right now, that I won’t mention, where I think some very bad decisions were made in an attempt to keep it fresh and make it exciting. Point of fact, a good story is about knowing the character and putting the character in conflict. There are things about these characters that are always going to remain the same and then there are things that are going to change. What we’re ultimately talking about is continuity and how much are we enslaved to it. The answer is you’re as enslaved to it as much as you want to be. I don’t have editors telling me that I have to tell a story a certain way because of something else. There are lots of writers writing comics who want to make the comics they loved when they were kids. So they want to play with that continuity and assume everybody else knows that continuity. That’s where they lose people and that’s why we don’t get new people in but that’s not the only way to do it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Greg+Rucka/