[dramatic music] ♪ - 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 President and COO of Top Cow Studios, Matt Hawkins.

Matt, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Thank you so much for having me.

- Top Cow is one of the, I guess, the founding groups that was part of Image Comics, Marc Silvestri, one of the founders of Image Comics started Top Cow.

And you've been with Top Cow since, I guess just about that time.

So what is it-- - Actually.

Sorry, go ahead, sorry.

- I was gonna say what is it exactly that you do at Top Cow?

- I run the day to day business affairs.

I edit the books with two editors that work for me and we manage the creative and the schedule.

And I do the convention circuit.

We do about 18 shows a year all over the world.

I also manage the licensing, the film and television stuff and all the international foreign licensing.

And I write four books a month.

[Terence laughing] - Now, that's a lot of moving parts there because you're talking about conventions which involve traveling and I know during the pandemic, the conventions have slowed down a bit, but in a normal year, you're going to a bunch of different shows all across the country.

On top of that, you've gotta keep, I guess, making sure that the creators that work with Top Cow, that their books are coming in and getting edited and getting sent to the printer and getting distributed.

And then on top of that, you're writing four books a month.

So what sort of work do you to sort of schedule your time to make sure you've got enough to do the office work, the creative work and all of the other stuff that goes into being a normal human being?

- Well, I figured out about a decade ago that the easiest way for me was to write in the morning and do business in the afternoon.

Doesn't always work that way, but I usually get up between five and six in the morning.

I go work out and then I start writing and I write until about noon, grab lunch and then I start checking email and start calling people and do Zooms and figure out what needs to be done.

And it doesn't always work that way.

When I'm on a heavy deadline, the last few days of a book, like I finished "Colossus" last week.

So that book is very fresh.

When you're finishing a book, I'll probably spend the entire week, the entire day just getting it done.

Like when I have to do foreign licensing and some of that stuff, it screws up the schedule.

But in general, I try to write in the morning and do business in the afternoon.

- Now, you mentioned the new book "Colossus" which I had a chance to read.

I think you had posted it on Twitter.

And then you've got another book that Top Cow is releasing, which is "Metal Society."

And that's a book that you didn't write.

So when you've got a creation of your own and a creation that you've brought into Top Cow that you're kind of overseeing, how do you sort of make sure that you give the right attention to both?

'Cause I know like Clint Eastwood said, "Never skimp on your own closeup when you're directing your own film."

But at the same time you don't want to skimp on someone else's close up.

So how do you kind of balance between your own creative output and someone else's book and make sure they're both good?

- Well, most of the people I work with are professionals and have been doing it for a while so they don't need a lot of supervision and that makes it easy.

The one thing about Top Cow is we're sort of more of a boutique company.

We only do four to six books a month.

Marvel and DC are doing close to a hundred and Dark Horse does 40, Image Comics overall probably does 50, Boom!

and IDW both do 40, 50 comics a month.

So there's a lot of output there and we've always sort of kept it smaller and more boutique.

I mean, Top Cow I believe is the only currently owned company outright by creatives.

I mean, Marc is an artist and I'm a writer and we run the company.

I know there are a lot of creatives at other companies, but I don't think they own the companies.

And that's given us a unique, I think the greatest asset I've had is Mark Silvestri himself because he's such a talented artist and he's created and taught so many other artists.

I mean, Michael Turner, Dave Finch, Joe Benitez, these were all assistant of his that he taught how to draw.

I mean they had drawn before, but they came in.

If I showed you some of these artists' samples when they were hired, you'd be shocked.

I mean, they don't look anything like they do now.

And several of them did Marc's backgrounds for years.

And so having that level of a hall of famer artist as the primary owner of the company and my confidant, I talk to all the time and work with on a regular basis has really elevated me.

I mean, it's difficult to break into comics as a writer.

It's very difficult.

I started out, like I said, in the early '90s.

I didn't actually start with Marc.

I moved to Top Cow in 1998.

I started with Rob Liefeld with Extreme Studios.

Rob is the guy who created "Deadpool" and did "Young Blood" and a bunch of other things.

He hired me after I just met him, kind of a strange thing.

I just had a weird opportunity and I took it and I've never looked back.

I was in college, I was doing my masters.

I was working on my thesis and I met him and told him, I was working at a retail banking job, Norwest Financial.

I was literally handling people as they come in and there's nothing worse than dealing with retail people.

I hate that.

It's different when you're at a convention and you're a creative and people want to autograph your book or you're trying to tell them and sell them your book.

People that come up to the conventions, I've found are usually pretty nice and pretty cool.

They're there to have a good time so no one's there to get in your face.

So like when you're at a bank or working retail, like my son works at a restaurant, he tells me constantly about the "Karens" as he refers to them and I had to look up what that meant, but he works in Santa Monica and it's a very privileged area and he literally just quit the job 'cause he couldn't take the people anymore.

- Now you had mentioned before we hit the air that you were not a comics reader growing up and then you just sort of fell into it after you met Rob.

So what sort of learning curve was there?

I mean, obviously sci-fi and fiction are similar to comics but there is a whole different discipline when you have to think about the visual side of it and how to get that balance between words and and art.

So what was your learning curve like as you went from being a grad student to moving into the world of comics?

- When I started, like I said, I started reading the comics that Image was putting out right away and I had a perception that comics were for children.

I didn't know that they made comics for adults and I hadn't really read very many of them.

So I started reading a lot of the books that Image was putting out and then I started researching the industry.

And what I found is a lot of the books that we're finding weren't really that appealing to me personally, but they were selling millions of copies.

So obviously there was an audience for them, but then I discovered writers like Alan Moore and some people like Rick Veitch and started reading some of these books and "From Hell" was the book that kind of changed my life.

I started writing comics before that but "From Hell," when I saw how deep detailed it was, it was written for adults and he did a tremendous amount of research and he included the research in the back of the book.

So if you look at any book I do, all my research is in the back, like "Think Tank" which is the favorite book I do is about a scientist who develops weapons for the military and he wants to quit because he doesn't wanna do it anymore.

They won't let him quit 'cause he is too valuable.

Like I said, that has a lot of basis on my father's life who was a Vietnam veteran pilot and an engineer for the military for 30-some years.

So when I saw the deep dive I was able to do and "From Hell" and I even went to White Chapel and did the White Chapel tour.

I met Alan 'cause I edited him at one point and that was really interesting to be a 24-year-old guy who knew nothing about comics and I was suddenly Alan Moore's editor, that was daunting.

But you know what the thing is, that actually taught me more than anything.

I mean, when you're editing that caliber of a writer or working with artists on that caliber and the Image founders, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarland, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, these guys were all at the top of their craft.

I was brought in at an A level and I didn't understand that at the time and didn't appreciate it at the time.

I mean, I met people like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, all these people in the early days of Image Comics that came over and hung out and worked in the offices.

And I didn't know who they were.

I didn't know who Jack Kirby or Stan Lee were, but got to know them and Stan and Marc were friends.

That was very sad when he passed away.

I was sort of learning by doing, I love to do the research and what I discovered is everyone always says, write what you know and I didn't like that because that seemed boring to me so I discovered things I wanted to learn about and I started writing about things I wanted to know and that allowed me to do intensive amount of research on stuff that interested me.

And what I said is I have the unique ability in comics as a comic writer 'cause I don't think there's another comic writer like me that can read the science journals.

So I read "Nature Discovery," I read the physical papers and I get some of the UCLA, stuff sent over to me and I go through that stuff and the beautiful thing is I seem like a pressured genius even though I'm really not because I'll find stuff in the science journals that doesn't filter down to the regular press for a couple years and that's about how long it takes me to get a book out.

So when stuff filters into the regular press finally is when my book is coming out and then people are like, "Oh my God, how mad, how do you know this stuff?"

And I'm like, I tell people I read it in these journals.

To give you an example.

In 2012, I read the Harvard research about these guys that were able to insert data into DNA.

They were able to, two guys at Harvard, I don't remember the study, but they were able to record information on DNA and recover it.

So they used DNA as a method of storage, of data storage.

So that sparked my interest and I started doing a deep dive into that.

And there wasn't much because it was very cutting edge.

But in 2015, I put out a book called "Stairway" and "Stairway" was about a geneticist who was doing research and she discovered that in our DNA, what we used to call junk DNA, there's actually full of all this information that's been there for billions of years.

We don't know where it came from and all that kind of, Michael Creighton's contact.

They start deciphering it.

They figure out the cipher to figure this out and then she starts building these things and all hell breaks loose and I love stuff like that.

In the back of those books I do do intensive research and there are some people that tell me they like the back of the books better than the stories.

I don't know how to feel that but I do both, so whatever.

- Now, you talk about the back of the book and you talk about research and first, it's fascinating that you got to edit Alan Moore and I do wanna talk about that, but the thing about "Colossus," I had the chance to read that, as I said, in the back like you say, there's, I guess, your bibliography or whatever you were using to kind of build your story on.

And it's a lot of very personal stuff both you, your children and your experience traveling as sort of an Army brat, so to speak.

- [Matt] Yes.

- But you're also, like you said, working on something that is now into the mainstream culture and there's a lot of, I guess the characters, the two main protagonists that we see that first book are what we might consider to be sort of the folks who would go to a particular political rally and demand to lock someone up.

It's just fascinating because you take these characters and you have a protagonist who's a biracial teen and it's new environment.

And so when you're putting all of this together and it comes out at a time when this is again, part of that popular discussion, it's gotta be rewarding that all the work that you did laying the groundwork, doing that research just happens to coincide with the rest of us figuring out what's going on.

- Yes, and that's by design.

I mean, I tend to do things that are topical.

I try to have them come out and I can do things fairly quickly.

I mean, the nice thing about a comic book is if I try really hard, if I found out something today, I can get a comic in the stores in six months, that's fast, by the way, that's very fast.

And the thing is with digital comics, like I work with Stjepan Sejic who does "Sunstone" and number of other books.

He does a lot of digital stuff and he does Substack and Patreon.

So his stuff goes up immediately.

Like his book would come up next week.

I haven't fully gone to the digital world.

I still associate all my digital with my print and I do it collectively.

But the preview book you just read was something I put together as a digital, the book has not been printed yet.

It'll be out in March.

It's fun to do these dives and try to do things that are topical and interesting.

I think part of my goal with writing and the reason why I've shifted more honestly into writing than on the business side.

I've brought in some people to take over some of these things, I have agents, lawyers, and managers that I work with, but I really enjoy the writing 'cause it's fun for me and I get to work.

Comics are a very collaborative medium meaning, I always tell people if you wanna be a writer and not have other people change what you're writing, write novels, you're gonna have some of that, but it's the only pure written, it's the only pure writer form, maybe poetry.

But you look at film and television, it's a collaboration of hundreds of people.

You look at comics, it's a collaboration of at least two people, a writer and an artist and it's a visual medium.

So I always know that when I'm writing my stories, I'm actually writing my story for one person, that's the artist and that person then writes it and then I interpret it and then we collectively put it together and collaborate and put it out into a form that is available for mass market.

- Now, it's interesting because you say you're writing it for one person and it makes perfect sense.

That's your key audience, is that artist who is going to take your idea and flesh it out.

So when you have that idea, when you write that script, are you following sort of the full script method where you're breaking down the page panel by panel, or is it more of that loose Marvel style where you're explaining what the concepts are and letting them kind of interpret it and then you react to the artwork?

- I do both.

"Colossus" I wrote full script because I was working with an artist who asked me to do that.

So I wrote most of the dialogue in advance.

That one was a little more interesting because I was concerned with the content given everything going on and you saw that I actually self-censored somethings, I chose to do that.

The artist itself is the one that does the legwork.

I mean, I can write a comic in a weekend.

The research might take years, but I could sit down and write the thing in a couple days.

The artist takes a month, month and a half to draw it.

So that's why it's easy for me to do four or five.

I've done eight books in a month.

I know some writers that'll do 16 books in a month.

That's too many, I mean, one a week in order to shift gears, that's what I try to do 'cause it's easier for me.

But the Marvel style, I use like on "Think Tank," the book I was telling you about.

I work with an artist named Rahsan Ekedal and I've worked with him for 20-some years.

I know the guy, we're tight.

When I've been late on other projects, I'll call the guy on the phone and say, "Hey, can you do the first eight pages."

Have the plane flying and this, that and the other thing.

You can do that with someone you have a relationship built up like that.

I genuinely write full script when I'm sending it to foreign artists.

If English is not their first language, I always write full script 'cause I wanna give them as much as they can get and then they'll translate it and if they have questions they can come ask me.

And when I write for foreign artist, I often include a lot of photo reference.

If I'm working with someone in the states that I've been working with for a long time, an English speaker, I'll typically write Marvel style and that's just, you write the plots.

Sometimes you'll write page one.

This is it, you'll write the panels but you wont include the dialogue.

There's so many different ways to do it, but I've used them all.

I've written entire books but I never wrote anything down.

I mean, I verbally gave it to the artist and then I verbally gave it to one of my editors to dialogue.

I don't like doing it that way, but sometimes when you're that impacted for time, you just gotta do what you gotta do.

But my preference is the Marvel style because once you get the art, I always change the dialogue anyway.

So if I write full script, I end up rewriting it anyway.

So rather than doing that, I'd rather just write it once.

But I write very quickly.

I tell writers this all the time, I say, write quickly.

There's no such thing to me as writer's block.

If you can't figure out what to write, write anything, it doesn't matter.

You know you're gonna change it anyway.

So when I do the first drafts of my plots, I tend to do them in an hour.

I mean, very quickly, it's not and about 50% of that'll be used.

And by the way, I'm old school, dude, I'm in my 50s, this is how I write initially, I'm still in the notepad thing.

I don't type it until I've got it all flesh out.

I still do the little index cards on the wall and stuff like that.

Most people don't do that anymore but I'm just still an old school, I like it that way.

It's easier for me to visualize.

- It's funny because it's one of those things where there is really no rule to be creative.

I had a conversation with the student who said they wanted to draw something but they didn't think they'd be very good at.

And I just was like, well, did you have fun drawing?

Yeah, well, then just keep drawing.

So there's really no wrong way to be creative and the old school approach works well.

I myself, if I do get a chance to sit down and write, I will try and write down the log line, the basic idea of something and kind of just get that and then from there, my brain will kind of hopefully solve that problem that I just pose for myself.

Now, one of the things I find really interesting about "Colossus" is you are using a character, I guess it's sort of a golem and you're using that as this through line that's connecting us with events in the holocaust and events that are happening right now in this midwestern town.

So when you are coming up with this idea, and I know it was inspired by a song, how do you sort of put all of those pieces together and come up with something that's really a compelling and fascinating story?

- I have no idea.

I mean, I'm just being honest with you, I mean, I outline extensively and the golem thing came to me because when I listened to the song, that's based on, the ClayPeople did a song called "Colossus" and I read the lyrics and I'm not into heavy metal, so that's not my bag, but I read the thing and I started thinking about it and then I watched the video where they had like "Godzilla," like public domain, "Godzilla" footage fighting Martha and all this sort of stuff in their video and I'm like, I don't wanna do that.

So I started thinking about it and I looked at the words and I realized that it kind of spoke to me of drug use and addiction when I read the lyrics and I called the guy who wrote the song and I said, "Is this song about drug use and addiction?"

He's like, "How did you know that?"

I'm like, well, pretty obvious, but to me at least.

So I thought about it for a while and then for whatever reason, I remembered that X-Files episode with the Jewish golem, Kaddish I think is the episode on the third season and I was very curious.

I'd never heard of the Jewish golem myth before and for whatever reason, I remembered that, I didn't see it again, but I've seen an episode 20 five times.

So I knew what the Jewish golem was.

And so I went to a friend of mine who was Jewish guy and I asked him what it was.

He had never even heard of this myth and I'm like, okay.

So then I did a deep dive online, spoke to a couple rabbis that were willing to talk to me and kind of figured out what it was.

Initially the story I wrote was very much a vengeance and rebut story.

That was the intent.

What shocked me was when I talked to rabbis, the modern ones, they tend to say that revenge and retribution is not Jewish and that they don't support that.

Although if you look at the Polish rabbi who sort of inspired this myth, I mean, he created it.

The idea behind it is that it was created as a desire to inspire Jews to fight against oppression.

I mean, that was the idea of it.

There's a lot of antisemitism everywhere.

I'm still shocked to this day that it's resurfacing in our country right now the way it is.

And it's why I think this book is a good one 'cause if anybody comes up to me and says you shouldn't do this holocaust 'cause that didn't happen, I'm going to probably laugh at them.

I don't get violent and I don't really argue with people, but when people are stupid, I just look at them and walk away.

I mean, there's no point in arguing with people that believe stupid stuff 'cause you're not gonna change their mind.

The whole Dunning Kruger effect and all that.

People are confident when they, the stupider people are, the more confident they are in their dumb beliefs.

And I've always found that the people who I've met in my lifetime are very smart, are always very cagey about what they say.

I researched this and I think maybe this, that, or the other thing but I don't know and I'm still looking into it.

I grew up a right wing evangelical Christian and I've evolved into a left wing atheist.

And in 30 years, 22 was when I sort of lost my faith and I'm 52 now.

So it's interesting.

One of the things the, I've been married a few times.

I'm not very good at marriage but have some beautiful kids and I'm still friends with all ex wives.

I'm proud of that that I'm still friends with all exs.

One of the things they always told me is they appreciated the fact that I was never set in my decisions on things, that I would always be willing to discuss things and if someone has an opinion that's different than mine, I would love to talk to them, but I will only do it with people in this day and age who I know and are reasonable and rational because it's just impossible to debate people anymore.

I was very good at debate in high school.

And one of the things our debate coach did, which I loved was he would often have us pick a topic, like in high school I picked pro-life.

I did 'cause I was a little Christian kid.

So I picked the pro-life and I was gonna argue pro-life and one day, so I spent in researching, we're getting ready for this debate, 24 hours before the debate, the teacher brought me and the guy I was debating in and said "You guys are flipping position."

And I was like, wait, what?

It freaked me out because suddenly I had one day to argue pro-choice.

So what this guy and I did is we went and spent the day together and we just talked to we each other and figured, and it was a fascinating thing.

And then I went in and argued pro-choice and the next day, and I won a debate.

It was a moving experience for me because it forced me to really look at an alternative point of view that I radically disagreed with.

One of the things I worked with here in LA is I worked for a program called CASA.

I don't know if you know what that is.

It's Court Appointed Sanction Advocates that work for the court system out here that represent foster kids.

So I represent foster kids, I volunteer doing that, representing them for their educational rights.

when you deal with a lot of these underprivileged youth, especially in Los Angeles, it is daunting.

When people start to argue pro-life with me now, I'm like, okay, and there's been 80 million abortions from this country since Roe versus Wade that means you need to take 14 kids.

Are you willing to do that?

Do you know how many people say yes?

Zero, so I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off on a tangent.

- It helps me understand how you do the work that you do, because it is interesting, you a lot of times have to put yourself into the mindset of characters that you would find aberrant in real life and yet you have to make them believable enough for the audience.

So being able to do that is a wonderful gift to have.

I see we have about five minutes left in our conversation and I did wanna talk about the talent search.

You had mention-- - Okay.

- That Marc had helped a number of artists that are now quite large names themselves in the comics industry.

So can you tell me a little bit about the talent search?

- We do a Top Cow talent hunt every other year.

Right now we just launched one, it's on the Top Cow website, topcow.com.

So if you were an up and coming artist and you would like, or a writer and you would like to participate in this, the rules are all there on our website and you can research it.

It was originally just an art contest because we're always looking for new artists, always, 'cause we train them and we keep 'em for a few years and then they go off and do other things.

A lot of comic artists don't stay in comics forever, like they'll move into film and TV, storyboarding animation.

People tend to bounce around.

So we generally are able to keep an artist for five to 10 years.

So we're always looking to create new talent.

So Marc always has been doing this and I was running this program for him.

But then one day I just decided to add writers.

It was almost on a whim because I realized there is no mechanism for new writers to break into our industry and it's insanely hard.

To give you an example, the last talent hunt I did, we got 1100 written submissions for one winner and it's daunting, I had to read all those, but yeah, I mean, I try to help people.

I tend to help people that are nice and not douchey about it.

You'd be shocked at how many people are like, "I can do what you do, what you do is easy."

And I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna help you and I'll never see you in my industry.

So I always tell you, be kind, be friendly and be self-deprecating, you'd be surprised how much that will help you in your career.

- And I see we have about three minutes left in our conversation and I did wanna talk.

We see this a lot on social media where it's a strategy that some young artists have where they will criticize an existing artist and they'll trash talk them and then be surprised that there's some sort of blowback that maybe that's going to hurt them in real life.

So if you were talking to a young artist, what's the best way to approach an artist at a con and kind of get feedback without sounding douchey?

- Ask for it and mean it.

It's very easy for us to interpret.

I can tell within seconds if someone actually wants legitimate feedback or if they just want validation.

Most people when they'd come up and say, will you look at my portfolio?

Will you give me any feedback on my story?

Will you do this, the other thing?

They don't want feedback, they want a job.

They wanna be hired, they think they're ready.

And I could tell you that out of a thousand people that I've seen in the last 10 years, we hired one, one, I mean, that's not a huge track record and I keep track of some over time and people come and go but there's one guy I found two years ago and I saw his portfolio.

He was an artist and he blew me away and he'd never worked professionally, he'd never had any training, he was just naturally gifted.

Now that's very rare but I would just say, say, look, I'm an upcoming, be self-deprecating.

This brash confidence that people seem to have today.

And by the way, criticizing existing people is the worst thing you could do.

My industry is very small.

There's only about 1500 regular workers in the United States in comic books and that's not a lot and there are all these conventions all over the world that we all go to.

I'll be in Abu Dhabi in two weeks for a big show in the Middle East.

So word gets around.

I mean, if there's an artist who's starting a show or starting to submit and the guy or the woman is kind of douchey about it, that gets around very quickly.

And I can tell you the absolute the worst thing you can do is trash talk people on Twitter.

And the other thing you don't wanna do is just be a general douche on Twitter because I can tell you, every person I vet to hire, I go look at their Twitter feed, I go look at their Facebook, I find them and I look them.

And in many cases, what I'll do is 'cause they wanna work for us, even if they're private, I'll add them.

They'll know who I am so they add me.

You should think about that before you realize, or you should go through and purge your own feet 'cause you're going on there 'cause for me, even if you're going on there and attacking, say like, who's a good target right now?

Kanye west, let's say you're going on there and you're radically attacking Kanye west for what he's saying, what he's doing.

That's a red flag to me because if you're that willing to be that open and attacking and critical, you're probably gonna do that for everything.

There's a certain type of person I like to work with and they're very relaxed.

Yeah, I mean, I just can't handle these, there's so many people that are so angry.

Angry people, I avoid like the plague.

- Well, Matt, I'm gonna have to stop our conversation there, they're telling us desperately that we are out of time.

I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

- No problem, thank you so much for having me.

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

We will see you again soon.

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