[exciting music] ♪ [exciting music continues] ♪ [exciting music continues] ♪ [exciting music continues] - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer Fabian Nicieza.

Fabian, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Thank you for having me, Terence.

- Normally we talk about comics and we will in a moment, but I wanted to talk a little bit about your more recent work, which is a series of novels.

One is "Suburban Dicks" and the other one is "Self-Made Widow."

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you go from being a highly successful writer of comics to becoming a highly acclaimed novelist.

- You spend 25, 30 years being really frustrated by every time you try to write prose, throwing out any work you've done because you don't think it's good enough until one day in 2017 you say "I'm finally gonna write that novel idea that I had in 1995."

And you write it and you actually are able to finish it, and it gets good response.

And you get an agent and the agent gets multiple publishers who want to buy it.

And then you sell it as a two book contract because enough publishers wanted it that they started upping their ante.

So it was a pretty fun rollercoaster ride for a couple years there.

And it was very, very rewarding and validating to not only just finally finish a manuscript, but then to have it be published by a major hardcover publishing company that I happened to have worked for from 1983 to 1985.

And then have it get the kind of review, response, and the accolades that it got.

It was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America as Best First Novel by an American Author.

I'm not used to that kind of, let's call it respect.

So it was pretty pleasing to get.

- Now it's funny that you talk about having some doubt about your abilities to write prose, because writing comics, you're writing a story.

And granted it's a collaborative effort where your artistic partner is bearing a lot of the storytelling weight.

But you're still there designing the story, coming up with the arcs.

So as you're writing prose and you have to sort of find that next path into publishing, how easy is it for you to find an agent?

Because maybe you knew somebody when you were in comics or maybe you had an agent when you were in comics.

How does that sort of connect?

- I actually kind of lucked out into that one.

I do a lot of non-comics work and have for the last 20 years with a company called Starlight Runner Entertainment in New York.

And they had scheduled a meeting at United Talent Agency that was gonna try to combine the things we did, which was really franchise management for major Hollywood studios and toy companies and video game companies.

Try to merge that with plans that Audible had to develop original programming.

And we were presenting them a variety of concepts that we had in mind.

And my friend Jeff Gomez, who was the president of Starlight Runner, asked me if he could include "Suburban Dicks" because I was only about six, seven months into writing the manuscript at that time.

And I told him he could include it, but it's mine, not Starlight Runner's, and Jeff said that was fine.

He just needed a variety of genre because a lot of the stuff that we were presenting was skewing fantasy and science fiction.

And "Suburban Dicks" is a sarcastic suburban mystery.

So when we presented to Audible, one of the agents in the meeting named Albert Lee, really liked the idea of the book and basically gave me carte blanche that when I was done with the manuscript and thought it was in a position to present, he'd be more than happy to have him and his team at UTA take a look at it.

And that was it.

That was my in to get an agent.

I presented them the manuscript after I'd already hired a freelance editor to help me hone it and tighten it a bit because I'd overwritten a lot and I knew I had, so I needed to learn how to cut what was extemporaneous that I could cut.

Because as we all know, every word is precious.

So once it was in a position to present to them, they ended up loving it.

They really liked it.

They had some really good ideas for some tweaks, which I agreed on and also did.

And then by November of 2019 for a manuscript I first started October of 2017, he took it out to the publishers and we got the response that we got.

- It's interesting because we see a lot of detective stories that are set in the city, whatever city that may be, New York, Los Angeles, but we don't see too many stories that are set in the suburbs, which is sort of this nebulous world where people go to to avoid living in the city.

But at the same time, when I was a teenager growing up in suburban New York, you always wanted to go to the city.

So what is it about the suburbs that makes for an interesting playground for you?

- The idea was originally born of things that were happening in real life to me in my life, that I extrapolated in an absurd fictional fashion to turn into the story that it became.

And then I had the luxury of almost 20 years of being able to think about it and in essence improve it inside my own brain before I even committed to paper.

And for me, because it was of events that were happening in my real life, it was the setting that it had to be in because I was extrapolating from that point.

The fact that I live in the suburbs and have lived in New Jersey suburbs since 1968 and much of that time was also spent commuting into New York, into Manhattan for work since 1983, I feel like I have a really good finger on the pulse of both and what it's like to exist in two worlds as it were.

So though I felt very, very comfortable writing about the suburbs, the area of New Jersey where I live in, because I've been a part of it and it's been a part of me for so long.

I also thought that it would enable me to have something to say beyond just the plot mechanics or the characters involved in the story.

I thought that I'd have something to say thematically.

And also it was a great sheet because by writing what you know, where you live, you really avoid a lot of research stuff.

I didn't have to make up a fictional town.

I actually tried that at first just to fictionalize the town.

I said, "This is ridiculous.

Why am I coming up with fake names for streets that exist already?"

So my approach was every single thing in the book is real.

Whatever happens once you walk through the door is fate.

So like the bagel store that I list in the novel is the bagel store that's less than a mile away from where I live.

So that's just how I thought it would work.

I thought it would work well for me as a writer.

I thought it would work well for the reader because I think they're reading something they don't read as often in this genre, especially.

- I will say, I haven't had a chance to read the novel yet, but I've read some people who've written about it and they talk about how you are using satire to sort of make a couple of statements about contemporary society.

And I'm just wondering, when you're working in, I guess, this mystery genre and you're doing things that have a little bit maybe of a humorous bent on it, how can you kind of work all of those elements in as well as adding in a little bit of telling the readers something they might not be connecting about the real world around them?

- I have absolutely no idea.

And I'm not kidding, I don't think of it as satire so much as just my natural sarcasm coming out in my narrative voice and my characters being very arrogantly driven to do what they do.

Those are all just outreaches of myself and manifestations of myself through my characters and through my perceptions of the world I live in.

I didn't set out to write a satirical piece.

I set out to write a story about two people trying to solve a crime in the suburbs.

And in the meantime, I'm always gonna try to have something to say because even within the most innocuous of comic book writing that I may have done, I've always tried to have something there, an underlying message there, something that makes the reader think a little bit.

Oftentimes make them think that the story's viewpoint falls on a spectrum that's contrary to my own actual viewpoint because that was what worked for the characters of the story.

In this particular case, there's a lot of me in the book, but there's also a lot of the book in reality.

And I've been able to observe the area I live in for the last 30 years and my kids have grown up here.

And I've seen the demographic changes in my town since the late 80s to where we are now.

And I've watched it and absorbed it as it's all happened and listened and heard what people say and listened to parents on the sidelines of soccer games or lacrosse games, all of that stuff.

I tend to be a sponge in that I absorb tidbits.

I don't have any kind of retentive memory or didactic memory for exact conversations or exact moments, but I absorb bits.

And I tried to reflect a lot of that into the characters and into the situations in the book.

- That's interesting because when you say you write what you know, it's always tough to take what you know and make it interesting so that the audience watching or reading will be able to enjoy themselves because it's one thing to be a slice of life, it's another thing to be a slice of scintillating life that makes you want to keep turning those pages.

When you are at home and you are working on your novels or you're working on comics, is there a sort of a schedule that you keep?

Or is it something where you have to let the muse hit you and you just type when it feels right?

- I always kept to a schedule mostly because working from an office at home, once the kids came home from school, everything got a little more hectic and a little harder.

Plus I was coaching two of their soccer teams and they had all this and that going on all week long, like we all do.

So I tried to stick to an 8:30 to 3:30, 4:00 schedule for a long time.

But that's all done now because they're older, they're adults now and I don't have to.

I'm on my own schedule.

So I'm almost always at the computer between 8:30 and 9:00 and I write on and off all day long, even into the night as I feel like it.

And that works for me just fine right now because I kind of like it better because I don't feel any artificially imposed schedules or clock ticking in my head.

If I don't feel it at 11:00 in the morning, I can watch a half hour of "Welcome to Wrexham" and if I am feeling it at 10 at night, then I'll write a little bit at 10 at night.

Although not as much now because I'm an old man, so I need to get to bed and read and fall asleep.

I kinda like not having that set schedule, but for many, many years I did.

And look, I'm a product of having worked a nine to five job at Marvel Comics with a three hour daily roundtrip commute.

And at one point I was writing six monthly titles for Marvel on top of my full-time job and my commute.

So I became, by lack of preference, by force of design, I just became a typing machine whenever I needed to be a typing machine.

There are pages from a comic book out there somewhere that I typed the script for while I was in an emergency room hospital in New York City because I dislocated my finger during warmups before a softball game.

And I walked four blocks to the hospital, sat in the waiting room for hours with an ice bag on my hand and typing with my left hand because my right hand had this finger was pointing this way.

And then three hours later the swelling went down and my finger just popped back into place on its own and I go "I'm outta here", that was it.

I left without even seeing a doctor, but I got about three pages of script done.

That was just the way I existed.

It's changed as I've gotten older and I've had a little more breathing space both in terms of time and in terms of financial requirements.

Once the kids are older and mortgage is out of the way and college is out of the way, it changes the entire financial structure that you need to operate on for the better.

- And I've gotta say writing six monthly books as well as working administratively at Marvel, that's a measure of discipline that you can't quite teach someone.

So as you're sitting there in the emergency room and typing up three pages of story, are you ever thinking to yourself, "you know what, this might not be the career for me"?

- No, not at all.

If anything, I was thinking there's a good likelihood that my heart is gonna explode by the time I'm 35.

So I better get as much work in done now while I can.

I better write as much as I possibly can before my heart explodes at 35.

So yeah, no, for me the pressure, and it was a tremendous amount of pressure back then, not the least of which because you're working on some of the top selling titles in the industry and you have a new ownership that are a bunch of absolute bastards, whoop, am I allowed to say bastards, so sorry, I just did, who force financial expectations out of the company that is very challenging to meet and make.

And then once you make and exceed them, they just double up on it and they want that much more.

So thank you scumbag billionaire, Ron Perlman.

So I guess in a way I feel good that I was forged in a crucible of fire as it were and I was able to come to terms with my relative excellent mediocrity, which has been like the manifestation of pretty much my entire career.

So I'm good to go.

- I don't know about mediocrity, but-- - Excellent mediocrity, Terence, excellent mediocrity.

- If we switch back to comics a a little bit now, you are the co-creator of Deadpool, which is a character that has taken on a life once you left and once he became a media sensation in two films, and Ryan Reynolds, of course, is known, I guess best for that role.

So when you're working on a monthly book and you've gotta come up with the villain of the month, is there ever the expectation that this guy's really gonna be the one that hits, and for the next 30 plus years he's gonna be a runaway trained success?

- No, I mean, Stan Lee's on the record saying that he didn't think the books were gonna be around five years later when they started Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and all that.

Anybody who says otherwise is really just pretending, you don't expect that anything is going to have longevity, but you also can get a sense that you got something right or you put your finger on something that clicks or works.

And we knew with Deadpool right off the bat immediately that we had put our finger on something that clicked just because the reader response was so positive, so positive to the point that just a few months after his first appearance, he was one of five promotional trading cards that appeared, it bagged the next force number one.

If we didn't get a feeling that there was something there, we wouldn't have done that already that quickly.

So yes, the character actually ebbed and flowed quite a bit over the course of many years.

I cast Ryan Reynolds Deadpool in Cable and Deadpool number two, and that was published in 2004.

That book was only selling 30,000 copies a month, 35,000 a month.

So it wasn't even one of Marvel's higher selling books, but look, it's that book that got a plucky little Canadian boy to say "hey, I can play this character one day, let me sign up for a supporting role in this god awful Wolverine Origins movie and one day I'll be able to buy a gin company and a phone company and a soccer team".

So you never know what's gonna happen.

I certainly wasn't thinking about Ryan's ability to buy a gin company when I was scripting "New Mutants" 98, I was thinking I gotta get seven pages of script written overnight because the book is due tomorrow and I just got the pages that afternoon.

So the first script Deadpool ever appeared in was actually handwritten on a spiral notebook binder on the train between Manhattan and New Jersey because I had to transcribe it to my computer once I got home.

So that's where the first script existed, in my own long hand on the notebook, which I still have to this day.

- With the way memorabilia is going, that could be a beach house in Boca someday.

- We're holding onto it for Christie real soon.

We'll see what happens.

- So when you're working with an artist like Rob and it's the heady days of Marvel in the 90s when things are selling ridiculously large numbers, is this still that sort of Marvel style where the two of you just talk about what's gonna happen this month and Rob goes out and and draws something, or is it something where-- - That book wasn't that case at all because that book was an odd structure because Rob was plotting and penciling the book.

I was scripting the book off of Rob's plots.

Rob was basically promoted to be able to tell the stories he wanted to tell with these characters because he had brought so much energy, excitement, and increased sales to "New Mutants".

I was asked to be the scriptor of the book and I was already writing two Marvel books at that time, "Alpha Flight" and "New Warriors".

And those were being written under what is known as the Marvel method, which is you write a full plot out for the artist and then they break it down by panel and they determine a lot of the camera angles and things like that.

And then you script the dialogue and the captions and the sound effects off of the artist's finished pencil pages.

Rob was plotting the book.

So I was getting, if I was lucky, quite frankly, I was getting eight and a half by 11 stick figure layouts of what was happening in the book with some border notes.

And then I scripted to that.

But it was not the normal working method nor quite frankly was it even a very good working method for us for the one year we worked together because that's all we really worked together for here.

- And when you are working with an artist like let's say Kevin Maguire, somebody whose strength is that sort of great body language, the facial expressions, the person who can bring out those human elements in these four color characters, are you sort of working with the artist's strength to bring out the best in the story?

Or are you kind of coming with the story and hoping that the artist will rise to your level?

- You should be working to the artist's strengths.

Kevin's another interesting example you cite because he and I have been friends, we were roommates for a year.

We've been friends for 40, oh my god, it's been 40 years.

We worked very loosely together where we developed the story together and built it together.

So I rarely would give him a full plot, I would really give him an outline and then we talk all that through and we've worked together a few times and we almost have always worked under that kind of a method.

But let's say Mark Bagley or Patrick Zuercher, artists I've worked with on "New Warriors" and "Thunderbolts", they get a plot from me and that plot is broken down usually by page with rough information about what I want visually and what I want verbally in it.

And then we'll talk it through and then they run with it.

You get to the point where you're so simpatico with an artist on a monthly book that sometimes you don't even need to talk it through because they know what you're looking for and you know what they're gonna give you.

So sometimes the longer you work with an artist, the easier it gets to communicate.

And sometimes that means very little communication at all because you've got that worked out.

Other times you're working, you're writing a plot or nowadays it's a full script and you don't even know who the artist is gonna be when you're writing it.

But you can't play to an artist's strengths if you don't know who it is.

So that's happening more and more now, the way Marvel and DC are assigning art responsibilities on books, oftentimes they don't know what player is available to pinch hit or go to bat until after the script has already been done.

I just wrote the first two chapters of a Deadpool digital comic for Marvel Unlimited just a couple weeks ago.

And I didn't know who the artist was gonna be when I was writing it.

I just wrote chapters three and four knowing who it was, Salva Espin was gonna be able to draw it.

So he already got started.

So now I know what he does, what his strengths are, and I'm gonna try to tailor aspects of that vertical scroll, which is already limiting to a certain extent to artists because of the nature of what it is on the phone or iPad.

Now I can try to tailor some of that to Salva's strengths.

- It's interesting, digital comics are a strange new world for those of us who are used to being able to, on a 10 by 15 board, have a panoramic shot or have a tight closeup.

Now with that scroll on a phone, you really have to limit that element in the story or at least try and find a way to make it work on the phone.

Is that something that you-- - Really hard to make Superman go up, up and away when you're scrolling downwards.

I have been doing this now over five years because I've been working on "Outrage" for Web Toon since late 2017, I think it was.

I also had done a lot of digital comics before that on a completely different non-comics venture.

So that was a horizontal scroll.

So I was figuring stuff out back then too.

I was very fortunate in that I worked with Riley Brown who's one of the smartest and most experienced artists at laying out stories for horizontal scroll digital comics to the point where Marvel was hiring him to do layouts for other artists to take advantage of the strengths of horizontal comics.

And Riley and I worked on a Deadpool Cable horizontal digital comic for Marvel like six years ago I think.

So by the time we got to "Outrage", the vertical scroll was just an interesting new experiment for us and we had to figure it out.

And actually it took us six, seven chapters to really understand the strength of the platform.

And quite frankly the strengths of the platform are a lot of good talking heads.

Talking heads work great on a vertical scroll comic.

Fighting and flying don't work so much.

Diving down underwater, that works well.

So I'm hoping one day I get to write a Namor vertical scroll comic because then I could just write one panel of him diving down and the artist can just draw that.

It's actually really interesting, entertaining, and fun to figure out the strengths.

One thing we learned from "Outrage" is that yes, talking heads work great on vertical scroll comics.

It's the equivalent of pacing and editing a really smartly filmed scene in a movie or a TV show with three, four characters all talking to each other at the same time.

And the vertical scroll format allows it.

- If there's a way that the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about your projects and what you're doing, is there a spot on the web they can find you?

- I have an author website, which is fabiannicieza.com.

I hope one day it'll be the most misspelled URL on the planet.

You can always get me on DMs on Twitter or on Facebook.

I keep both open and, and have rarely had to block idiots before, but I block real quickly if you're an idiot.

So I can always be reached easily through Twitter or Facebook.

You can also email me anytime you want through my author website because there's a contact portal on that as well.

- Well, Fabian, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

The half hour has been fun and it's just flown by.

- My pleasure, Terence.

It's been a lot of fun.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture".

We will see you again soon.

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