Ales Kot | Wolf + Material + Zero

ComiXology: Conversations is an interview-type show with comic book writers, artists, colorists, letterers, storytellers, and just about anyone making or reading amazing books. Portions of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity and you can find links to the books mentioned here. Enjoy our conversation with Ales Kot!

Matt: Kara, welcome back to our podcast lair.

Kara: Our special podcast penthouse.

Matt: Podcast penthouse, yes. We’re on the top floor. We have inarguably the biggest show we’ve ever done. We have, in my eyes, a legendary writer, and in many eyes as well.

“Zero,” which just wrapped up, “The Surface,” “Material,” which has recently come out, and “Wolf,” new from Ales Kot. Welcome to the show.

Ales Kot: Hello, hello, hello.

Matt: This is a treat for me. I just finished Zero, Ales, and one of the most ambitious books that I think I’ve read in recent years. I think that comes to why I gravitate towards your work. Your work pulls me in. It’s an expansive style of writing, and you kind of write whatever you want.

It’s not generally to appeal to masses. Your goal, at least in my view, is to get people thinking. What is it about comics that makes that outlet for you?

Ales: First of all, thank you for the praise. Second of all, it’s kind of fun to be called legendary writer, considering that I’ve been in comics industry for less than three years at this point.

Matt: You’re a wunderkind.

Ales: I’ll totally take it.

Ales: People to call me things, unless they’re decidedly unpleasant. It’s great feeling to see people recognize greatness. No, I’m joking.

Ales: It’s great to see people connect with what I do. In terms of art forms, I’m spread pretty wide right now. I think that’s going to continue, because I’m more and more working in TV and film. At the same time, eventually I wouldn’t be shocked if I wrote a book or done something entirely different.

I’ve always been very multi-disciplined by choice, because I believe that I also have the keys to personal evolution. If there’s any sort of commitment that I have in my life, apart from being as kind as possible and love, it would be personal evolution and helping other people evolve, too.

When you proposed that I might be a kind of writer who wants to primarily get people to think, it’s a part of it, but at the same time it’s only one side of the entire equation, which is an oblique equation.

You have the thinking, you have the feeling. You have to have the emotion, you have to have the heart, and you have to have the brain. Then you have to have all the other parts, such as crotch and feet, and so on.

I don’t really even think about what I do most of the time, nowadays at least, in terms of wanting to make people think. I want to give them something that will ignite some sort of a change that will be beneficial for them, but I try not to limit it too greatly, because then it would become preachy.

I don’t want to become preachy, except for when I have preachy characters, which are allowed to be preachy. Case in point, Professor Shore in Material, who bases his entire shtick on that.

Yeah, thinking is a part of it. Feeling is a part of it. It really has to come to identification with the characters and the story. I don’t even like to say characters. I prefer saying people and non-people in some cases. Character is a two-dimensional statement on a person, like when someone says, “He’s a character,” or, “She’s a character.”

It’s like, “I don’t really have the power to describe the person properly, so let me flatten them for you a bit, so you can digest them easier.” I don’t think that art should be necessarily digested all that easily. I think that art should be digestible when it is supposed to be. Then there are other parts that are less easy to process, but no less valuable.

You don’t come to a gallery to look at Francis Bacon painting because you want to have that feeling that you had when you saw bees and flowers for the first time. You want to look at something strange and rotting, and you want to figure out what that’s doing to you. There are so many ways of doing that, and that’s what I’m really committed to. I would say I’m committed to art.

Matt: I think that mindset is what, in my view, separates you from a lot of other creators. You’re not afraid to speak your mind and your opinion, whether it be interviews or online, where you think the industry can and should change, whether it be the art form or something else.

What do you think makes you unafraid to do that in an industry that historically has always been the opposite? Is it because you’ve stretched yourself across various different mediums yourself?

Ales: Well, the thing is, I’m not unafraid. Maybe the thing that separates my behavior a bit, although I’m sure there are other people as well, who do things that I do and are acting even more braver in more brave ways. I am conscious of my fears.

I strive to be conscious of my fears because if I wouldn’t be, then my fears would be controlling my life. I’d be basing my choices in life on anxiety and on fear instead of on what I really want, which often takes major leaps of faith.

Some of the leaps of faith just in the past two years, that could have ended with me horribly landing on my face, in some cases they still might. It’s a case of choosing that, or choosing to live in some sort of fear of not having it any better ever, and other people not having it any better ever. I feel there’s a responsibility that comes with the power.

Matt: The power of being a legend. You can say it. Just say it.

Ales: “As Stan Lee once said”, no. Yeah. Who knows if he even said it or just putting his name on it after? Anyway, it’s just responsibility that just comes to me just from being alive. It’s my responsibility to not be quiet when I see something wrong. I’m not talking about small random judgments because sometimes it’s much better to separate yourself from those, but I’m talking about major problems that are repetitive.

If I see those patterns, I know that not speaking up or not working through them, would mean to live the potential of not happening at all, and also it would be a form of aggression. Not speaking out and not acting against things that you believe are wrong or know are wrong, to me, is another form of aggression. It’s like when people pretend that racism doesn’t exist in America anymore.

Kara: I had a question about…well a few questions, actually, about Material, because when I was reading the first two issues of that story, it put me in a headspace that I really hadn’t been in since college. Because when you’re studying when you’re a student, you have a lot more free time than someone who’s working all the time.

You have time to actually stop and think about the world around you, and get angry about things that make you angry. You have time to actually see things. That’s really the feeling that I got from reading this book. Was that kind of feeling your intent in writing this story?

Ales: My intent with writing this story was primarily to keep myself sane. In order to keep myself sane, I knew that part of what I had to do was to not do more Marvel books and other part was to do something that would be speaking about all the things that I could not speak about if I was doing a book at Marvel.

Not in a way that wouldn’t be oblique and that it wouldn’t risk censorship because there’s no need to pretend that wouldn’t happen. There’s no way I could do a book at Marvel that it would have all this, would be as experimental and as wildly diverse, and that’s concerned with now, as Material is.

It came to this feeling of rage, anger, displacement, hope, all these feelings of being alive in the world and in America right now.

I wanted something that would let a lot of it out, because I don’t really feel like doing things on 10 percent when I can do 80 if it feels right, and if it’s not suicidal proposition, of course. In case of Material, it is technically a suicidal proposition because we’re making a comic that, based on all standard notions of what sells and doesn’t sell in comics, will not sell ever.

It didn’t really matter to me and it didn’t really matter to the artist. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like it completely mattered to Image, because they let us do it. I hope and think it’s because they see the value of the comic. The beauty of it is that I see people really relate to it.

I see people go, “Wow! This is not what I thought comics are like,” and, “I have no idea that people were talking about these things in art nowadays.” Like the Homan Square problem, which Russell Ackerman, the journalist who exposed it, read Material shortly after, and just found me on Twitter and was super happy about it finding another way out into the world.

Things like that and connections like that, that get created by the comic, that’s worth more to me than a $20,000 check. Although, I am happily accepting both.

Matt: Ha! The ideal world would be to get both, simultaneously.

Ales: I believe I’m getting closer and closer to it.

Kara: The annotations in this book are so dense. Do you know of anyone who’s gone through all of them and read or seen all the reference material that you talk about? Is that the perfect way to understand the story that you’re trying to tell?

Ales: Yeah, but that person vanished in the desert after.

Matt: They’re the main character of your next book after Wolf, I think.

Ales: They ate the comic in front of me. Right after they finished, they wandered off. I don’t know. One thing I do not want to ever do with my work, is to say what the meaning of it should be for anyone else but me. The reader is a part of the work, and the way the work interacts with the reader will always be different.

Me imposing some sort of statement on what it means, or what it should mean for anyone else, or the right way of reading it, is antithetical to understanding of art, and also comics.

In comics, the beauty of comics is that you’re in control of the flow of time, and even space. Comics are the first form of space travel that really works, and time travel. Technically, that may be true, because we have the cave paintings before language of other sorts.

Anyway, I don’t want to do it because of that. I want people to find their own way and their own feelings. They will make interesting cross-sections, they will combine and merge, and the interpretations will grow, and all of them will be real.

Kara: Collaboration was a strong theme that I saw in Material, especially pertaining to the storyline about the actress and the director. They’re trying to make something totally new. My question was, how is their approach in Material similar or different from your collaborations with the artists and editors that you’ve worked with?

Ales: Material is the most rigorously structured comic that I’ve ever done, in terms of panel by panel and all of those classic structures. It’s a nine-panel grid. Every scene has two pages. There are four characters. Each character has exactly three scenes. They go in the same motif. There’s a lot of almost musical composition to it.

At the same time, it’s beautiful because it creates a box that you can play within. I don’t have to think about it anymore. I don’t have to think about, boom! Here’s going to be a splash page. Or here, “What if I did the next scene with some other character?” I don’t want to do that. It’s sort of beautiful. The constraints of it are its own special form of inspiration.

It’s wildly different, because I collaborate differently with every single artist, and every single person that I work with. I try to find common language, and when we have it, then we can collaborate together. Sometimes I jump in before, at least in the past. A few times what happened is I jumped in before I knew for sure.

In some cases, it worked perfectly, in some cases less so. In general, each collaboration has to start from the absolute beginning of it. That’s just an understanding where we’re all coming from, and understanding how to work together to create something that will be more artful than if it was just me, or just me telling someone what to do.

Matt: On the topic of collaboration, how did you connect with Tom Muller? His stuff with your Zero work feels like the perfect fit, and I love that he’s actually starting to get seen in other places in comics. What connected you two together?

Ales: I sent him an email in 2011, and then he responded in 2013.

Matt: Ha!

Ales: I think I had to send him a follow-up email or something. Then, when he searched for me, the follow-up email, in his inbox to answer it, he found the email from 2011 or 2010, where I was asking if he would want to collaborate. He goes, “I’m sorry I didn’t answer before.”

I’m like, “That’s OK. I’ll wait. I waited. Every step you take, every breath you make…” I’m not that. That’s a horrible, creepy stalker song. I’m not that way, except for the Internet. I’m sort of that way on the Internet with the artists.

Matt: That’s the key. You should reach out to somebody, and then expect their reply in two years. I’m going to write that down.

Ales: You might want to just follow up in two years.

Matt: “The Wolf,” which is out now or will be out very soon, and we’ll have a link to it in our show notes, if there’s something that I am in love with, it’s paranormal detectives. I will watch anything with paranormal people getting to the bottom of anything. The first issue is gigantic, which I thank you for. It was almost 60-some pages.

What made you chose Wolf as your next book, as your next creator-owned book?

Ales: I’m not sure. It was a few things at once, combining. I always loved magic and I was always interested in magic. To me, magic is just the unseen, and I’m very generally interested in the unseen and the things that are around us that we do not quite perceive by our standard senses. 97 percent of electromagnetic spectrum is something we do not see around us.

What would happen if we suddenly saw at least three percent more? We might go insane for all we know. Maybe Lovecraft was entirely right. Maybe there are things that would just melt our brains. The thing is we don’t know. Los Angeles, where I lived once for a very nice, long, strange, not nice, great, weird, horrible part of my life was…it’s many things… It was something that I also wanted to come back to. I explored LA in “Change,” my comic that came out in, I have to mention, 2012-2013, now collected in trade paperback. You can order it at dot-dot-dot, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to come back to it, so I decided to do Wolf.

I wanted to explore my affinity towards horror, which is pretty visible in all of my books, really, and my affinity towards LA. I wanted to see what happens if I would merge that with this feeling that I was really missing a book like “Hellblazer,” back when Hellblazer was really good, when it was coming out through Vertigo.

I haven’t read the newest iteration, which might be wonderful, the one that just came out, but I just knew that I was missing it. It wasn’t that I was missing that specific book. More as I was missing the feeling that books like that, comics and books and everything else, were giving me. It was this feeling of strangeness, and creeping dread, and wonderfulness that you can’t quite see.

I wanted to do Wolf because of that. I think that’s a large part of it, really.

Matt: What’s your all-time favorite horror movie?

Ales: Probably “The Exorcist.”

Matt: What about “The Omen?” Where does The Omen place in your list?

Ales: It’d be probably in the top 15.

Matt: This interview can continue.

Ales: “Rosemary’s Baby” would be up there.

Matt: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The one thing that really started me with your work was Zero. You had this great vibe on the book. When you initially started reading, you had a different artist presenting their own look and feel for that particular issue. It followed a spy, Edward Zero, progressing through his life as he tries to go through missions, and his secrets are revealed. That series just came to a close.

Without revealing too much to those that haven’t checked it out yet, which I highly recommend…the first trade itself is one of the best comics I’ve read in the last few years. Was your overall plan for this book, for the 18 issues, the same from when you started Issue 1? Because I did not expect the last four issues at all, and it blew my brain away.

Ales: Ha!

Matt: I’’m just so fascinated by where it went. It was probably the most unexpected turn for a book that I’ve ever read.

Ales: Originally, the story was different. I think large parts of it I might still explore if we end up doing the TV show, which we might. It’s in development. Very early on, before Issue 1 even came out, I realized the connection to what’s happening in the last four issues.

I went to the publisher, Eric Stephenson, and I enthusiastically told him what’s going to happen, sort of. I thought there’d be one issue towards the end. I could just see him go pale. In his eyes, you could see the point where, his eyes were saying, “And that’s where the book is going to stop selling.”

It’s really amazing to me that, despite him looking like he was feeling like that – I don’t know what he really felt – he was like, “You’ve got to do whatever you’ve got to do.” Like, “We believe in you. Do your comics. See what happens.” Eventually, it grew into a much bigger thing.

It was different, but the thing is, to me, storytelling isn’t really…I’m not really governed by just Western principles of storytelling, where everything is very much ordered according to some ideas of storytelling logic. Which, to me, falls flat on its face very often, because it doesn’t really involve mystery.

It kills the mystery, and it kills all by killing the mystery. It just gives you this bland, soggy, popcorn. I love good popcorn, but good popcorn is a different than bland and soggy one. You need to have an alchemy of sorts, to put all the things together right.

The same comes with storytelling, to me. It’s very much a case of I want to do the best of both worlds. I want to have something that’s tightly and highly-structured in certain ways.

At the same time, I want it to be open in others, and I don’t want everything spelled out according to some Robert McKee dogmatic bullsh*t narrative idea that he applies to every single story he’s ever seen, which is horrible and damaging.

As much as other things that he says would be useful and are useful, the amount of dogma that they come with f*cks up entire generations of storytellers. You might have to bleep that out. Sorry. I don’t like that and I don’t want to tell stories like that. I don’t want to reinforce those patterns of approach to life, that say that everything can be figured out by logic.

That’s completely untrue. You have to use the heart, you have to use the brain, and you have to accept the mystery, to quote a Coen brothers’ “Serious Man.” It’s about accepting the mystery.

Kara: I had a question about Zero. Something that jumped out to me was that, in the spy genre, the emotionless spy lead who just gets the job done, is such a staple of the genre. This was the first time I really saw someone explore what that would mean to the person who was supposedly emotionless.

What inspired you to focus on that, in terms of the main character?

Ales: James Bond. I saw “Skyfall” and I thought it was horrible.

Matt: Thank you. I actually did not like Skyfall when I saw it either.

Kara: This is the first time I’ve heard anyone not like Skyfall from either of you. I’m interested. Why?

Ales: It was really bad on script level, to me. It wasn’t bad. It was beautifully shot. Roger Deakins is genius, and I’m not using the word lightly. Sam Mendes directed some very fine scenes, and the actors are doing their best with the material that they have, but it did not make Yoda-sense in how it was structured.

I did not like that it used very simplistic notions of good and bad to essentially propagate certain ideas. It was very much like the hacker panic of a 40-year-old white male idea, down to Javier Bardem’s character sort of resembling Julian Assange. Also, the ideas about hacking in that movie are ridiculous. If you’re running security tech, you’re not going to put a random USB into your computer and destroy your entire place. All those things.

I was just like, “This is not how this would work, and you are giving lots of people this grand idea of this being something that works. That revenge is something that works, that killing people who disagree with you, even if you damage them with your prior decisions, is something that will solve things.”

I really dislike those propositions of the simple black and white morality, because they damage generations. Kids see them and, unless they are smart enough or their parents are smart enough to tell them that this isn’t necessarily how the world works, they can be profoundly affected by that and eventually think that shooting people is something that’s cool.

It’s never cool. It might be occasionally necessary if someone attacks you and you have to fight for your life, but that’s a tiniest percentage of all the cases of people using guns in the world, thinking that they’re in the right.

I wanted to take a look at a symbol of state propaganda, probably the biggest symbol of it in the past 40, 50 years if we’re talking that entire side of it, meaning military-industrial complex. I wanted to take it apart. I wanted to propose something different.

Kara: You certainly succeeded. It was definitely different from what we’ve seen before and it was just terrific.

Matt: What do you read now? Usually, when we end interviews we ask the creator what they seek out to unwind or to enjoy. What do you read in your free time?

Ales: The fun thing is that everything I read is work, but it’s work in a fun way. My work is so great that I love it. Right now, I’m reading 15 to 20 books at once.

Kara: Wow.

Matt: Jeez.

Ales: It changes. I’m not stressing out about it. I just read them whenever I feel like it. I read a chunk.

Some are short stories like Laird Barron’s collection, “The Imago Sequence.” He’s only the best horror writer I read since Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood.” I would say that he’s that level of good, and quite different. He was one of the key creators that have inspired the first season of “True Detective.”

I’m reading a couple of books on screenwriting, like “Shakespeare for Screenwriters,” and Coen brothers’ interviews. I’m reading the massive annotated H.P. Lovecraft. That’s also something that doubles up as prep for Wolf and research for Wolf.

I’m ready a little bit of “B.P.R.D.” and “Hellboy” for inspiration, when it comes to the same book. It’s very much a case of, if you like B.P.R.D. or like Hellboy, it’s pretty likely that you might enjoy Wolf. It’s like that and “Lethal Weapon,” and “True Detective,” and “Sandman,” all these things whirling around in the weirdness of LA.

There’s a lot of other books that I’m reading, but I’m pretty sure that that will keep some people busy already.

Matt: That’s a pretty dynamite list. Ales, I appreciate you taking the time out. If anyone listening wants to check out something that they probably won’t read in monthly books otherwise, I highly recommend all of your creator-owned books, and we’ll have links to them in the show notes.

We appreciate you taking the time out.

Ales: Thank you. It was wonderful. I appreciate you taking the time and having me on the show.