Interview | Rick Remender

On occasion, Kara and Matt sit down by the fireplace (metaphorical) with creators to talk about their books, their process, and what they read themselves. Since some folks don’t have time for podcasts, we also transcribe these chats. Some parts of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity. Enjoy our interview with FEAR AGENT’S Rick Remender!

Matt: What a day we have in front of us.

Kara: We’re here with comics legend Rick Remender, and long-time listeners of the show will know that this is Matt’s comic creator god.

Matt: Lower case g.

Matt: First of all, Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Remender: Thanks, thanks for having me.

Matt: I blab about “Fear Agent” on this show as much as humanly possible, because we didn’t technically carry it for so long. But it’s no secret that Fear Agent is my all-time favorite comic book. This is a huge day for the company and myself, we’re able to share the love.

Full disclosure, I was rereading it again for the 100th time on the train this morning, Rick. Of course, I was sobbing by myself on the train. Trying not to look like a creeper. I’m sure that happens to everybody who reads “Fear Agent.”

Kara: At least, to the people like you who have “Fear Agent” tattoos.

Matt: Yes, I do have a “Fear Agent” tattoo.

Rick: You were crying, because you regretted the tattoo.

Matt: That was the main thing. I was looking into a reflection of myself, tears streaming down my face.

Rick: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Matt: “Fear Agent” is, the short pitch is he’s an alcoholic Texan spaceman who stumbles upon a time traveling plot from space aliens.

You follow him along the course of this book. You get deeper and deeper as the story goes on. It starts off like a sci-fi thrill ride, and then, you realize there’s so many layers about Heath and the mistakes he’s made over his life. It gets super emotional.

My question to you is, this is a big day, getting “Fear Agent” to an audience, but how important is Heath and “Fear Agent” to you as a person and where your career is?

Rick: It’s one of my babies. “Fear Agent” was something that we all fought to create, and to find an audience that we were told didn’t exist.

At a time when creator owned books weren’t really selling that well. There wasn’t an audience for science fiction stuff. We were certain that it was an untapped market and that there were people who would respond to this. When I was doing the initial outline for “Fear Agent” it ended up getting chopped up and told out of order, because I wanted some emotional components of it to hit a little bit later in the series. The initial concept, the initial idea, this alcoholic alien exterminator scuttlebutting through space and taking extermination jobs while trying to find a reason to stay alive.

That was act three. The opening is obviously, in the outline, the invasion of Earth and what happens to him. Without spoiling anything, the traumas that he endures while protecting and preserving what remains of mankind. I recognize that as we started building it and as we started getting through it, I couldn’t not do the book. This is a period of time when I think there was literally only two creator owned books that were selling enough to be sustainable. That was “Hellboy” and “The Walking Dead.” Everybody else was just grinding it out from 2005 to about 2010, 2011, right when we wrapped “Fear Agent.”

All of a sudden, people were, “Hey, we want creator owned comics.”

Matt: Perfect timing.

Rick: During those years, it became a bit of a metaphor for the experience of pushing this ball up the hill and doing everything we could and anything we had to do to keep it alive. Just grinding it out, issue by issue, for very little money. It was very difficult.

That ended up being perfect, because every time sat down to write Heath, so much of that was boiling inside of me that it was really easy to transplant that emotional state onto the character while digging up some of my own personal stuff and a lot of the fictional stuff that he’s endured, as well.

I think that that ended up becoming the emotional core. It was written from a place of truth, a place of frustration. Nothing works. I can’t make this happen. Nothing is going my way. That was Heath’s story.

It was also the story of the book, this book that we wouldn’t…we were not content with walking away from, no matter how many times all the evidence in front of us was, “Nobody wants creator owned comics anymore. Nobody wants science fiction. You guys should start something else.”

Tony and Jerome and Hawthorne and I, we couldn’t walk away from it. I think a lot of that ended up in Heath.

Matt: I think that’s how this book drew me in and how it draws in so many fans for so long. I think it’s easy to see yourself in Heath and in a few other characters in the book. You fail often in life. Sometimes, things don’t go your way. It drives you, but you keep getting pushed down.

Heath is a character where that happens to him every other issue. He’s put through the wringer so hardcore that where else would you turn besides a bottle, but he keeps pushing on. And then through the course of the book, it’s so rewarding going through the low points and the high points.

Rick: I’m glad to hear that. Again, it was such a personal book. We all fell in love with the character and the world. We loved making it.

It was one of those points in time where we were able to fuel ourselves not by financial reward, but by creative reward to make something that we thought would stand the test of time.

If we could get through the story and do our very best work along the way with the very small but loyal audience that we had back, then one day, it would find a new audience and people would be able to experience the whole story and binge read the whole thing.

That’s really been happening in the last couple years, as we’ve sold a metric ton of the library edition hardcover collections, and now, hopefully, with having the book on comiXology, find an entirely new audience of people that haven’t experienced it that are all hungry for innovative…I’m not self applying innovative, but obviously, diverse and interesting creator owned comic books.

Kara: Take us back. What was it like actually getting this project off the ground?

Rick: I started doing creator owned books in ‘97. By the time 2003 had rolled around, I had done four or five or six graphic novels worth of material. I hadn’t been able to crack through to an audience.

I was pretty frustrated. I had quit a number of jobs at Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox and walked away from a lot of lucrative paychecks and comfortable situations to try and make the kind of comic books that I wanted to read.

In 2003, I had given up. I was penciling some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and inking a few things, but I had gotten back into teaching. It was a point in time where I had to make a choice. Was I going to give comic books one more push? At that point, having put six years in for very little return, that was a difficult thing to do.

I decided that I was going to give it one more go. Tony Moore and I had started talking on the phone a little bit about our love of Wally Wood and Will Elder and all of the EC science fiction stuff and how there was nothing like that in comics. There was probably a lot of people like us who wanted it.

He was doing “The Walking Dead” at the time. We just shelved it. It was something that we might do one day in the future. When his schedule cleared up and he had some time, we started talking about doing it for real and getting it off of the ground. We developed it with the Image guys and went through a few titles and tried to figure out the ins and outs of it and how to market it.

I guess around 2004, Tony penciled the design for Heath and he penciled the first cover. He sent that to me. I inked it. I inked that first cover and the designs. Then, we sent it to a few colorists, and finally, landed on Lee Loughridge, Tony coloring his own covers.

We had a cover. We made a poster. Then, we went to the Chicago show. I think it was 2005. We made these giant, expensive movie posters that I still have a big roll of. It was such a silly idea for a promotion for a book that nobody had bought yet. “Hey, here’s a big giant movie poster for a thing you don’t know about.” But it’s such a lovely Tony Moore image I assumed everyone would want it.

Matt: I’ll take five!

Rick: I’ll set some aside for you. We hit the circuit and started promoting it and doing shows and got the first issue together. We put it out and Image launched the first issue. I forget when. 2005, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, in 2005, I think. Early in 2005, maybe. I don’t remember what part of 2005.

It finally came out. It was a point in time when most creator owned books, if you were lucky, you opened at 10 to 12,000 copies, and then, you could find a place to hold at seven or eight.

We had a problem with the second issue of “Fear Agent” where the second issue was printed on warped paper. There’s two print runs out there. There’s these warped, awful issues that printed very darkly, and then, there was the reprints that we did with the real paper.

I don’t know what the effect was on the retailer mind, but the numbers for issue three came in pretty low. I think there’s only a total of 5,000 copies of issue three out there. Something like that. The print run was really low. We had to cut it down to print to orders. I think orders were 5,000 copies, which made issue three the collectable of the run, at the time, where nobody could find three.

We hit these speed bumps that slowed things down a bit. Tony was also doing a Vertigo book called “The Exterminators.” And so, Jerome Opena came in and penciled half of issue four, and then, he and I carried the book on for the next six, seven issues. Francesco Francavilla came in to do an issue. I was a fan of what he was doing and wanted to rope him in.

We just fought it out, but the numbers were always…it was always very difficult. We were working on it because we loved it, really, at that point. I was working for free. I think we were able to pay the lettering and coloring. Jerome and Tony made very little, if anything.

Matt: That’s what I was going to ask. As you progressed further into the series, there were longer breaks in-between issues.

How hard was it when Jerome, for lack of a better phrase, you plucked him from his original gig, and now, he’s a megastar. But at the time, other publishers started to notice that and they’re taking…I think you and Jerome started doing Punisher for Marvel.

“Fear Agent” unfortunately had to get pushed aside for a while. What was that like on you and your yearning to get the story finished?

Rick: I lived with it as an ongoing struggle. Jerome was in storyboards and concept work in video games. I was a fan of his stuff and convinced him to come back to comics to do “Fear Agent.” He loved the character and the work and fought it out with me for a while there.

Eventually, the money situation got so difficult and a number of other factors. We moved the book over to Dark Horse. They supported it and Mike helped keep it going. Then, Tony came back and did an arc. Jerome came back and did an arc.

Again, the numbers were just slipping, slipping. I think we were down to 5,000, 6,000 copies again. That’s just a very difficult place to keep a book alive with talent like Tony and Jerome.

We had Mike Hawthorne coming in and helping out with layouts here and there. To keep one of the arcs going, I inked two issues of “The Last Goodbye” over Tony, which ended up being fun. I got to really dig into my Wally Wood inks. Now, I own two issues of inks so I have plenty of pages from it, which was important to me.

Then, Jerome and I did another arc. Then, Tony came back for another arc. Jerome was going to come back for another arc. The financial realities and the situation had deteriorated. I was at Marvel in Axel’s office. He was telling me that he wanted me to take over the Punisher book after Matt Fraction left it.

I was like, “Well, if I’m going to do that I want to do it right,” and brought Jerome in to do that with me. The last arc of “Fear Agent” ended up being Mike Hawthorne and Tony Moore working together with John Lucas on inks as Jerome and I went off and did some of the Marvel work.

Matt: It’s funny reading, sitting back. I generally try to read it all in one shot or two sittings.

For the most part, I think going forward in some of these gorgeous library editions people probably will have no idea that there was such a long hiatus in-between issues. There was two separate year long breaks in-between certain issues and certain arcs.

That will be lost on so many people, but for you, how did you see the fan response? Hitting a full year twice between the ends of that arc? The final arc at the end.

Rick: It was a nightmare. There was nothing to be done about it. I knew that we were going to come back.

I knew that if I could find a way to stitch it back together and we could just be patient and just keep it moving and keep coming back to it that by the time we got to the end of the story that we would be in a situation like the one we’re in where the story got completed. It was collected in these beautiful editions. Now, it’s a thing that people can go read. It didn’t matter about that.

As for the fan reaction, at the time we had a very loyal, 5 to 6,000 people who would buy it no matter what. When there was a hiatus or a break between arcs we would come back and there would be a little bit of a slip but, for the most part, those 5,000 people were always there waiting for the next issue.

By the last issue, I think the last couple of issues have pretty low print runs. I think we were down to 3,500 copies, or whatever. When you have low numbers in the industry, nobody reviewed the last issue. Nobody cared. I get to the end of the story, six years of pushing this boulder up the hill, and we get there. We stick the landing. The ending is one of the things I’m most proud of. And then crickets.

We throw it out into the world. It sells almost nothing. Literally, almost nothing. Finding any of those copies for collectors is not easy, but those last copies and issue three and four and five, they’re such ridiculously low print runs. It was a pretty big kick in the balls.

But you have to do it for you. You get to that point where you’re like, “Again ignored. No awards. No accolades. No applause. No thank you.” There was literally one review that went up for the last issue. Not that that’s a barometer for anything, but it felt like totally indifference after all this work.

I’m proud of it. We stuck the landing. I called everybody and we had a congratulatory, “We did it. I don’t care about the rest of it. We did it.”

It was a year and a half later, when we put out the first hardcover collection, and all of a sudden, people were really excited about “Fear Agent.” We sold out of three print runs. We got to work putting the second one together. We were very persnickety and meticulous about how we wanted it, because all this work, it was mostly…

In some ways, it was boutique in that we wanted it on our shelves. I wanted to know…my goal when I got into comics was to leave behind a shelf of creator owned comic books that could be looked back on like “The Rocketeer” or “Hellboy.” Aim high.

For me, that was at least…it might not be on a lot of bookshelves, but those “Fear Agent” hardcovers were going to be on mine and they’re going to be perfect. They really did. Patrick Thorpe, our editor, really killed himself with us. We put those things together.

All of a sudden, when we put out that first one there was an explosion. There was all this interest. My Twitter feed started filling up with all these really wonderful people who had found the book and other people, like you, who had been reading it and were pushing it. It was spreading and spreading and spreading.

It really did my heart good. If that’s the last scene of the movie, it’s got an up ending, because it felt like all of those years, that seven year, eight year push. By the end of it, there was a happy ending. That’s all we ever wanted.

It’s not shaking the Earth in terms of sales. It’s got rock solid sales, but the people who find it love it. To me, that was always punk rock. That was always like growing up in the '80s with bands like Minor Threat or any of the things that I listened to and spoke to me, and loved. They were never going to be these large, mainstream things that found some huge commercial success.

That wasn’t the point. The point was to make something exactly the way you wanted with your friends, and to pour your life and heart into it, and that the people who did find it loved it. “Fear Agent” ended up finding that audience. The people who have found it and loved it, it’s personal, almost, because it didn’t become this giant thing.

It becomes like one of your Indie bands you and two of your friends know about, but it’s not really that widespread. It’s like your music. It’s very personal, I think. I couldn’t be happier in terms of a result.

Kara: I think we can all agree here that “Fear Agent” was ahead of its time.

Rick: That’s nice to hear. I don’t know. Obviously, in my more megalomaniacal moments, have had those thoughts. That’s sort of self-congratulatory, but you’re allowed to say it, and I’ll totally absorb the compliment.

Kara: I did have a thought, while I was reading this, because I just started reading. This is Matt’s favorite book, and he keeps talking about it. Finally, I was like, “OK, OK.”

I did start reading it, and it’s amazing. I was thinking about what you were just saying to us about the delayed time between the different issues.

I wondered, since “Fear Agent” is a time travel story, do you think that the time that you had to wait between the issues actually added to the reading experience, especially, since years passed between the arcs?

Rick: Ha! I would love to tell myself that.

I see my wife, who I got her into comic books when we met. She likes them pretty good, and she likes reading them, but she doesn’t like single issues. It’s like getting somebody hooked on “Game of Thrones” and going, “OK, there is season five, episode four. See you in a year for the next one.”

There are going to be a lot of frustrated people. There’s going to be people who lose interest. There’s going to be people who go to college and stop reading comics, or come out of college and don’t have the money for comics, or have two kids and no longer can afford it. You’re going to lose some audience.

You’re not going to gain a whole lot of new audience. It took us whatever it was between issues 20 and 21 or 21 and 22 to get back on track. You’re not going to have a bunch of people like, “Oh, cool. Issue 23 of a science fiction creator-owned comic.” The audience, A, didn’t care about science fiction, B, didn’t care about creator-owned comics, and C, here’s number 22.

It was always very difficult when we came back. If it was up for the reading experience, if I’m completely honest, I think it probably wasn’t. I like the optimism, and I’ll try and think that maybe, for some people, it was.

Kara: Just tell people it’s part of the artistic vision. You say, “This is an experience.”

Rick: That’s right.

Matt: Embrace the vision.

Kara: It’s all about how you sell it.

Matt: “Tales of the Fear Agent,” I think, will be experienced differently for new readers that’s collected in its own trade. When this book was coming out in single issues, you had back matter of different creators telling off-shoot stories of Heath. It reminded me of those “Weird Tales” sci-fi anthologies.

What was the impetus to, presumably, get your buddies to do these Heath stories in the back of the monthly book? Was that extra incentive to get people to try it and pay their hard-earned money, maybe?

Rick: It was a desperate measure. It was me asking friends to help us make enough comic book to make it worth the $2.99.

On some issues, we were having to pull back the page count to like 17 pages, 18 pages an issue in order to survive. The difference between doing 17 and 18 pages and 22 pages, it’s an entire week of work.

When you’re working for free, that’s another week of you’ve got to go out that week and find something that’s going to put some food on the table. That was one of my many stop gaps of, “Here’s how we’ll do this.” I reached out to a handful of writers and artists that I was friends with. They all did it for free. Those people were not paid.

It was an extended hand saying, “Hey, could you guys do these and help us put this together?” A lot of people responded to the character and wanted to. We had a whole lot of pals. Primarily among them, Hilary Barta, who is one of my heroes.

Every book I’ve penciled since 2003, “Man with the Screaming Brain” with Bruce Campbell and “The Last Christmas,” I had Hilary do the finishes over than me, because he’s better than me and made me look really good. He’s also a huge Wally Wood fan and big EC fan. He wrote a bunch and roped in some of his artist friends.

Then, some others were people that I was working with like Paul Renaud. We were doing a “Red Sonja” book. Buddies like Steve Niles and Ivan Brandon. A whole slew of people. Rafael Albuquerque did a story and Chris Burnham, Gerry Duggan. There was tons of people, and I would stitch these together and go, “Can you write six or seven pages, and I’ll find somebody to draw them?”

Everybody turned in these really amazing, little short stories that did a tremendous job of filling in the years between when Heath left Earth and when we catch up to him as a full-blown alcoholic alien exterminator in issue one. In my mind, it was just going to be these fun, little things.

What it did is it became canon to me, and a lot of it ended up rounding out the universe and rounding out those years of Heath’s life that I was never going to tell stories in. All of a sudden, now, we’ve got however many pages it turned into. It was considerable, because we did them for a long time, of people rounding out those alien exterminator adventures.

It was just a sign of solidarity and a lot of people who were helping us to fill out a book and give people their money’s worth.

Kara: Now that we are in decidedly more creator-owned friendly climate, what’s it like working on all the books that you are working on, since you do have quite a handful of creator-owned projects going?

Rick: It’s a joy. It’s my dream. Again, in '97, I started doing creator-owned comic books inspired by guys like Evan Dorkin, and Jamie Hewlett, and Dan Clowes, and David Lapham. I wanted to do that. I wanted to tell unique and interesting stories in comic books with great artists. I wanted to write, and draw, and create.

I spent so much of my life and spent so many years broke. I quit a job at Fox and Warner Brothers, Electronic Arts. I quit my job teaching at the Academy of Art University. I kept quitting these jobs that were good. People were like, “Hey, here’s a good job.” I’d do it for a while, and get caught back up on my taxes or whatever, and put some food in the fridge.

Then, I would go, “OK, I’m done. I’ve got to go back to this idiot obsession of making creator-owned comic books.” Everybody around me was just shaking their head like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I’ve got to do it. Got to do it, got to do it, got to do it.” It’s almost been whatever. It’s been 18 years now of pushing the ball up the hill.

People are suddenly hungry for the things that I was hungry for. They’re excited about the kinds of comic books that I want to make. I’m able to tell the kinds of stories that I want and create the kind of comics I want with the kind of creators that I want to make them with. We’re able to pay ourselves now and to live on that. That money is not just money to me. It’s a vote of confidence from people. It means so much.

Matt: In the current climate, reading the last few issues of “Fear Agent,” your notes in the back saying this is the current end of Heath.

Would you ever want to revisit the world of “Fear Agent,” whether that be a funky anniversary issue of “Black Science” and they meet? Would you ever want to go back to it or just leave it stand as-is in the year two library editions?

Rick: We’ve had so many conversations about going back to it, and bringing it back, and building it back up, and doing more of it. I’ve heavily considered that “Black Science” could visit any of my other creator-owned books, but then, it immediately stops feeling like it has an integrity, I think.

Once the story becomes like they jump, and hey, there’s Heath Houston, it becomes like it stinks of the author’s ego. It’s like this self-indulgent masturbation of my other creations are going to meet each other. I don’t know. The “Black Science” story is much like “Fear Agent” in that it’s got its own trajectory and its own momentum. It’s its own story.

I feel like once there’s a guest star from one of my other books, I feel like it loses that. I’ve concocted ways to do it where it doesn’t derail the current story, and it’s really just an Easter egg here or there that I might do. As for bringing Heath back, we almost did it. It’s been something that Tony and I and even Jerome and I, we’ve all talked about it at length.

It’s been something that we wanted to do, but then, you do the hardest part of a book like that, and you stick a landing. I won’t self reply I stuck a landing that often, but in “Fear Agent,” I feel like I stuck a landing. The ending is this thing percolating there the whole time you’re working on it, and you’ve got dozens and dozens of pages of notes, and ideas, and how you want to do it.

Hopefully, by the time you get there, it’s an emotionally hefty thing that actually has some pathos and some weight for the reader so that they’re aware that there was an intention from the person creating the book. It wasn’t just a strung-together series of people almost dying, falling in love, not dying, soap opera, soap opera, soap opera.

The idea that we have, if we were going to do it again, I’m always afraid that once I jump into doing that, that it undoes the permanence and the weight of how we successfully landed, and stuck the landing, and ended the series. I’ve always been a little bit hesitant in that. Maybe it’s OK that Heath’s adventures and that story were told, and maybe it’s OK that that’s all you get.

It’s like the Gervais “Office” a little bit. You only get a couple seasons, and there’s not that many episodes, and hopefully, they’re all good. I guess Gervais is doing more stuff with David Brent. That’s not a tremendous…

Matt: That’s neither here nor there.

Rick: …analogy anymore, but you get the gist.

Kara: What comics are you reading now?

Rick: Honestly, I am reading almost nothing. Rick Spears “The Auteur” is the one book that whenever there’s an issue I grab and consume.

That’s nearly about it. With the two kids, the workload that I have, and trying to squeeze in exercise or life, there’s just not that much time in my life to sit down and read comics.

Matt: We probably just blew a deadline by having you on this interview right now.

Rick: There is an issue of “Deadly Class” due to print you’ve ruined!

No, I’m kidding. The little time I have to read, I almost need a break from comics. I’m reading a book now called “X Saves the World,” which is an examination on the marginalization of Generation X and the cultural shift that took place around 1999 when Britney Spears put out that video.

How marketers prefer Millennials, because they’re marketable, and there’s a large portion of them that were into Britney Spears. I find it fascinating to dig in to the generational shifts, the baby-boomers, there’s 80 million baby-boomers, there’s 40 million Generation Xers, and there’s 82 million millennials.

People born between 1963 and 1980 are sandwiched between two giant generations in the boomers and millennials. Generation X, if you add it all together, it’s not a huge piece of that pie of those 200,000 people, 40,000 are Gen Xers. I’ve always theorized that’s why Conan O'Brien got shafted, and we didn’t get a late night talk show.

Because we all liked Conan, but Conan didn’t fit the sensibilities on either side of us, or anyway. I’m trying to read things that are a little more grounded in reality and can give me a break from comic books.

Matt: Sometimes, you need a break.

Rick: Yup.

Matt: Rick, I’m really happy again, if anyone listening has checked out “Uncanny X-Force,” or “Black Science,” or anything recent, “LOW,” “Punisher”…

Kara: “Deadly Class.”

Matt: “Deadly Class,” definitely, check out “Fear Agent.” If you don’t I will slap you in the mouth, that’s a guarantee.

Rick: That’s a great marketing quote, make sure “Fear Agent” gets the front “ComiXology” page, and then, your quote that says…people respond to threats.

Matt: Yeah, it will just be a goofy picture of me with a thumbs up saying, “I’ll slap you if you don’t read this.”

Kara: That’s going on the next movie promo picture.

Matt: Rick, thanks again. Thanks for making “Fear Agent,” and thanks for coming on.

Kara: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. Good talking to you.