Interview |  Scott Bachmann

During C2E2, Kara and Matt sat down with (stood up, wrangled, it’s all the same) with some great COMIXOLOGY SUBMIT creators to talk about their books, their process, and what they read themselves. Since these interviews were done on the fly and in the heat of the con, we also transcribed these interviews. Some parts of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity. Enjoy our interview with Our Super Mom’s Scott Bachmann!

Kara:  We’re here as long as we can manage before getting kicked out.

Matt:  Our Super Mom is a book that I don’t think I’ve read from a major publisher. It’s a great, down to earth, story about a female superhero, who decides to semi‑retire with her husband/writer, and raise her kids. What made you want to create a story like that?

Scott:  Well, I had been writing a story that was a lot darker, grittier, your classic guy story. I wanted to do something that was lighter and fun. I was thinking something like Teen Titans, something to show the range of what I could do.

I was sitting at a convention, and I literally just looked out in the audience, and realized half the audience has become female. 

Not just moms pushing strollers, but female geeks and nerds, just going there for their own fun. It wasn’t just cosplayers. Really, the tide turned I think when anime exploded, and manga exploded. If you go to all those kinds of cons you see a large percentage of women compared to men. It didn’t happen in comic conventions until recently.

I’m looking out there going, “OK, no one is making a comic for these women.” The second thing is, no one’s making comics for kids anymore. It just fell out of fashion. I said alright, I’m going to do a comic for women. I go, “What would be different about a female superhero, that a male superhero would never face?” I don’t want to just make a superhero with boobs. That’s not a female character. That’s typically what happens. It’s Punisher with mascara. You don’t want to do that.

Matt:  I would probably read that, still.

Kara:  That is a great mental picture. I appreciate where you’re coming from with this.

Scott:  I wanted to do something different and I thought about it and go, the one experience that almost any woman goes through, if they’re going to have kids is, what they’re going to do after. If they’re a career driven person, do they put their career aside? If they are professional, do they find some way to continue and make it work?

The one truism in every superhero comic is, you never give up the suit. Even Spider‑Man throws the suit in the trash can in that famous issue, he’s going to pick it back up. You know it. Heroes don’t quit. I thought it would be fascinating to go with the one line of, “Would a woman quit being a superhero for her children?” The answer is, “Of course she would, if that was the choice.”

I wanted to play with that concept. I wanted to express “The superhero life doesn’t quite leave you alone, but being a mother isn’t easy, even if you do have superpowers.” It literally wrote itself.

Kara:  One of my favorite scenes in the story was, when a lot of Paragon’s, your protagonist, super‑powered friends, came over. All these women sitting around the table talking about their superheroing and basically begging her to come back and be one of them. They were talking about how guys were outnumbering them, and how they had so much fun with her while saving the world, and can’t they do it again.

I really liked that because that’s kind of how I feel about my friendships with female friends, and that’s something that you unfortunately don’t see very often in a lot of comics. That genuine just, people being friends. Sometimes pressuring one another into things. Her friends very definitely want her to come back and be the hero that she is.

Scott:  Yeah, when your friend leaves, you miss her. One of the things that you don’t find out from comiXology, is that I also write novels about the same character, which are not all ages. I get to explore themes that I couldn’t put in an all ages comic. So it’s neat to play off some of those themes in different aspects.

What I really wanted to say is you’ve got to have the super girlfriends come over. I didn’t want to have them all show up in costume and they go out and fight crime. I didn’t want it to be typical. I wanted it to be like, friends come over and say, “We miss ya.”

That’s one of the things I kept running in this comic, I wanted to keep it down to earth, in the sense that these are things that happen to real people, it’s just twisted. One of the things I used to love about the X‑Men is running around the mansion, them playing baseball.

Things that you could go, “Oh that would be really cool, if I could do that with that power!” One of my favorite things I ever did on the comic, was sleep‑flying.

Kara:  That was cute.

Scott:  With couples, someone is always going to steal the sheets, or steal part of the bed. Well, I had her sleep float. So she’s floating up, and all the covers go up with her. You could just yank the covers back, but he keeps going to himself, “Don’t wake up the super strong person!” People get smacked when you wake them up. You don’t want to do that with someone who can bench press a bus.

Matt:  There is another aspect to the book which is obviously the marriage dynamic, but it’s amplified. The husband was like a “Game of Thrones” writer. He’s got these books out, now there’s a TV show, and he needs to speed up his output for these books.

He struggles with living that life as well, because his wife takes care of the kids, but she also has to find time to go out and help people.

He almost feels slighted in a way, in this marriage. Where, “You know, I don’t have time to do this.” It’s the same in any marriage, but it’s to another level, now that she has superpowers.

Kara:  It was interesting to see the meet-cute also, because Paragon starts out as just a fan of this guy and his work, and comes up to him at a convention, and asks him to sign something and she said, “I’m Paragon!” I just thought that was such a subversion of the typical, “Don’t tell them who you are!” Right off the bat she is just like, “I love your stuff. PS. I’m a superhero.”

Scott Bachmann:  Actually that exact same scene happens in the second novel, except that’s expanded a great more. Some of the fun that I have, is when you tell stories you always edit them, and you change them over time. So I like to twist them and show what really happened, versus what people said that happened.

Here’s one thing that I did in this comic that you don’t see in comics. Nobody’s dead. They are happily married. I never wanted the conflict to be about them. It’s so easy to do, “Oh I hate being married,” or, “This is awful, this is annoying.” It’s so easy to have, “Oh we’ve only got one parent,” or, “We’re orphans,” or, “I’m angsty because this person is dead.”

Those are cheats. That’s not how you tell stories, that’s how you tell easy stories. The whole thing I wanted to say is, life doesn’t end when you get married, drama continues, and drama doesn’t have to be between people, it can be situational. So I wanted to give him a job, but I didn’t necessarily want him to be away at work all the time.

That makes it a little bit difficult to go back and forth, and also because I wanted to play with the themes of home schooling, versus regular schooling. I decided to make him a writer, and then she’s the fan girl that meets her hero. From her perspective, he’s the awesome one. There’s actually a flip to that story, where he was a fan of hers.

Kara:  Really?

Scott:  It doesn’t come up in a comic, but I can’t always fit everything in the comics. It does happen eventually. What I did want to play with is, they’re both famous.

Kara:  Right. It’s an interesting power dynamic.

Scott:  He used to be the most famous person, but now he’s standing next to someone who is even more famous, and that’s always a power struggle for a guy. She’s the alpha, but doesn’t act like the alpha. These are just some fun things that aren’t your typical way of telling a story.

Other than “The Fantastic Four” and “The Incredibles,” which is basically just The Fantastic Four, there really isn’t married couples growing and changing in comics. You just don’t do it. If you get married, you get retconned out of it because you’ve got to have it be young, or it’s got to be different, and you have to imagine that person being married to somebody else.

I actually loved when Spider‑Man was married to Mary Jane. They came up with some really interesting stories that they didn’t have otherwise. That’s why I wanted to play with the dynamics.

Matt:  You referenced X‑Men and Spider‑Man. What were your go to picks, growing up? When did you get into comics and what did you read?

Scott:  Oh my gosh. I don’t know when I started. I think I’ve always been reading comics and watching cartoons, pretty much for ever. I know the first comic that I started continually following was X‑Men during the Claremont era and “The New Mutants”.

New Mutants is probably the first comic that I said, “I’m gonna follow this to the end.” It’s because they were people. They were people first, and had situations happen second. To me that was far more fascinating than professional superheroes. Now I read friggin’ everything, so it’s soup to nuts. That’s one thing I always like about The X‑Men, it was something about the world, twisted.

Matt:  I mean “God Loves, Man Kills” still holds up to be an amazing story today. One of the best ones.

Scott:  I’ve got that at home and I’ve got it signed. I treasure that book!

Matt:  I had a friend of mine ask, “What is a current X‑Men book that’s like, God Loves, Man Kills?” I feel like it’s actually very difficult for them to do now. Even though it still should be the topic that is easy to do for that team. They’re outcasts. They’re still reviled as freaks, but you don’t see it as much anymore. At least, maybe not to that level.

Scott:  Well, it’s become more killer of the week. The X‑Men have really become so action and combat oriented in most of the stories, that you’ve lost a lot of the fun.

I really liked when they brought back Wolverine in the X‑Men, because it was almost a throwback to what X‑Men used to be like, which was day to day life, trying to survive as a mutant. Both the good and the bad, and seeing the conflict in the world.

X‑Men is an analogy, it’s in all the comics at some point, big or less. When you are publishing 10 X‑Men comics at one point, at the same time, you can’t get that one moment that’s like, “Ahh” that everybody reads.

Kara:  I had one more question about the story, because we were talking a lot about the husband wife dynamic. I actually really liked the characters of the kids, so I was wondering where the idea for those two characters came from?

Scott:  Well everybody assumes that these are my kids. I have two boys, they are in their 20s, and this is not them. Everybody in the book is based off of several people. None of them are based off of anybody specific.

Because I was going to write a female focused book, I decided to make Gail the smart one. I wanted to have the one kid that didn’t like being smart, so that is what I did with Markie. It’s not that he’s dumb, it’s harder for him to pick up what his sister does like that, so he doesn’t like going to school. He likes playing and having fun.

I wanted the sister to be totally opposite, she loves studying, she loves learning. We throw in a lot of details that you really don’t get pointed out on the comic. You notice in the background, her room is full of stars and galaxies and spaceships. I said, “Whatever we do, we are not going to make her girly. She is going to be the science nerd, the one that loves learning.”

It gets her in trouble, because she can also be the bratty sister, but I wanted her to be a role model, I wanted to say, “It’s not just the guys that can do math and science.” I also wanted to show that it’s not just girls who can be vulnerable, I wanted Markie to be vulnerable.

Issue seven will be in comiXology probably in a couple months. I’m having some issues with getting the cover done. The comic is done, it’s the cover.

What I’m doing with Markie now in the comic, he shares the power with his mother. It is an inherited power, it’s different from every other power in this universe and Markie is inheriting it. They’re actually sharing the same powers, so Markie can pull it away from mom.

Your dealing with a seven year old that has superpowers. I find that both fun and scary. He’s expelled from school. He’s not allowed to go to school, because he is too dangerous to be around other children.

Kara:  Yeah that scene on the soccer field, where he kicks the ball and it just blows a hole through a tree. If I was a parent with kids in that scenario, I would not want that child near mine. He could, just by playing, seriously injure someone.

Scott:  In the second story, he’s being home schooled, he hates it. He’s missing his friends and he wants to go back to school. Basically, the lesson is, “You have to learn to control yourself, or they are not going to let you back in.” So he has to hold in his powers and not use them. We catch him making accidents. He leaps up, and catches a ball by flying.

Then I bring in a bully at some point, where he gets beat up. The bullies were kicking around the dog, he protects the dog, and he gets beat up.

There is no way these bullies should have been able to harm him. He could have lifted them up with one finger, or use super speed to stop them. But his mother told him “You can’t use your powers if you want to go back to school.” So he actually lets the bullies beat him up. It’s not just power, but power used for what responsibility.

There has been Superman comics where, Clark Kent has hidden who he is by letting people beat him up. I think that is a fascinating dynamic to play with. From a seven-year-old mind, that’s got to be really traumatic. That’s a really hard fight of, “ I can’t do this, but I really want to.” It’s a story you’re not going to see in a comic, except my comic.

Matt:  Which you should buy, on comixology.com. What are you reading now, what do you seek out?

Scott:  My favorite comic right now, is anything that has Kate Bishop in it. She’s the lady Hawkeye. It doesn’t matter if she’s in new Avengers, if she’s in Hawkeye, if she’s starring in her own episode of Hawkeye, she’s been the best character I’ve seen in years.

She’s not perfect, she’s spunky, she screws up, but she really tries. She has no reason to be a superhero, other than the fact she wants to. There’s just something about the way they do the character, that’s just perfect.

Matt:  She was great in the Young Avengers and I totally forgot she was in that.

Scott:  Yeah, that’s where she started out is Young Avengers. She was just the rich friend of the young Avengers and said, “You know what? I want to do this too,” and picked up the Hawkeye bow and started playing around, really weird.

If I listed off how many comics I read right now, you’d run out of tape. I read a great deal, if you want to write, you’ve got to read! It just happens.

Kara:  Do you have a comic you’re reading that you think would be a good starting off point for someone who doesn’t normally read comics?

Scott:  There is a couple. It really depends on a person’s taste. It used to be you could always point someone to “Vertigo,” and they’d have a comic they could read and fall in love with. Marvel is starting to do some comics that are really easy for people to start off with. Whether it’s “Ms. Marvel,” or it’s…

Matt:  "Squirrel Girl?“

Scott:  Yeah, Squirrel Girl fits perfectly too. You don’t need any background, but if you have the background you get it, and there is a lot of inside jokes. It’s a slow entry into superheroes, but it really depends on what people like. I love superheroes, so those are the books I’m going to gravitate to, but comics can be anything.

Matt:  That’s a good quote, "Comics can be anything.”

Kara:  It is a medium, not a genre.

Scott:  Exactly, as a matter of fact most of the Submit books aren’t hero books.

Matt:  Yeah, we have a great depth of anything you want to read and Submit, you can find.

Kara:  At comixology.com/submit.

Matt:  It’s a perfect wrap Scott, I appreciate you taking the time out, and I hope everyone picks up the book.

Scott:  I appreciate it and I’m glad that comiXology is supporting Artist Alley because, we need money! It’s not cheap.