comixology

Jason Latour | Southern Bastards + Spider-Gwen

In this episode Jason Latour stops by to talk to talk long lines and fan-girling.

Topics include wrestling promos, 37 year success story, crazy signings, who needs the KKK as a fan anyway(?), delays, reader reactions to cliffhangers, taking risks, authenicity, drawing one book and writing Spider-Gwen, mixtapes, fan-girling, Image + The Big 2 = The Golden Age, and also what he’s reading.

Links:

Transcription:

Matt: Welcome back.

Kara: To the Podcast pit.

Matt: We’re in the pit right now, fighting off people. I don’t know why we’re fighting them but we are.

Kara: We just had to kick like four people out of this room.

Matt: And they were employees. So we’re here with living legend, icon, setting the world aflame in various publishing companies. Jason Latour, welcome to the show.

Jason Latour: That was a good wrestling promo.

Matt: I may be a huge wrestling fan. Thanks for coming and talking with us. You’re a hot commodity these days. How does it feel?

Jason: Well, you said that, not me.

Matt: You can agree with it.

Jason: It is one of those, if you want to call it success, it’s been one of those 37 year overnight success stories.

Matt: Currently it’s “Southern Bastards” and “Spider-Gwen.”

Jason: Yeah. I have been very lucky to have been around comics a very long time. I’ve seen a lot of people come and go and rise and fall. And I’ve got to witness a lot of my friends go through a lot of this before I ever had the opportunity to.

One of the things I’m trying to be very cognizant of is to just enjoy it, but stay level-headed. But I don’t think anybody can prepare you for what it’s like to actually have people pay attention to you. I mean, my local convention is Heroes Con and I did that a month ago, not even a month ago. And it was the craziest signing I’ve ever had. The lines were insane.

And I walked in and there was a 20-foot Spider-Gwen on the wall and Earl Tubb on the promo books, the con books. And your whole life you want people to pay attention to what you’re doing, and then the second they do there’s a party. It’s kind of like, “Stop looking at me.” [laughs] Please stop looking at me. But I try to remind myself when I’m tired or when I’m a little out of it, it could all go away tomorrow. And likely will all go away before you want it to.

Kara: Well, hopefully not for a while because Southern Bastards is everyone’s favorite book. So please don’t stop making it.

Matt: You can’t stop.

Jason: The KKK is not a big fan of us right now.

Matt: Well, if you’re to have one enemy, it might as well be the KKK.

Jason: Exactly. You can’t win them all.

Matt: No, you can’t. And there was a part we’ve been talking with some creators about how collected works come out in trades and people never remember if books were late or any kind of delays. And you had a letter at the end of the most recent issue of Southern Bastards where you even addressed the fact that it’s going to happen. Delays happen. Don’t worry about it.

Jason: Right. I mean, the book is something we’re committed to doing. You don’t set out to do a book about an evil football coach that fights redneck stick battles with anything in mind other than this is a book you really want to do. And I think when you look at the Image line, the books that seem to have really resonated with people, all have that in common. Despite the fact that they’re very much clearly from the creative teams they’re from and from all different kinds of genres.

The commonality is they’re books by people who really care about the books they’re doing. And so my point was I’ve never been super-fast. But what I’m trying to do is if there are delays you can be sure the time is being spent on the quality of the product and not just me playing video games. I don’t have time to play video games.

Matt: You’re not watching Monday Night Raw instead of drawing a new issue.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, I’ve got 10 jobs.

Matt: When you guys set out to do Southern Bastards, it had one of the best cliffhangers at the end of that first trade in history, in my book.

Jason: Well, thank you.

Matt: It was drool-worthy.

Kara: It was like a hornet’s nest in the comiXology offices that day. Everyone got to that last page and were like, “Did you read it? Did you see it? What’s going to happen? Why isn’t it next month yet? Ah!”

Matt: And it’s one of those books too that we all read the day before that morning of. And everyone is like, “Have you read the new issue yet?” And I’m like, “No, I haven’t read it yet, so shut up.” So everyone is just agitated they can’t talk about it.

Jason: That’s nice to hear, actually.

Matt: But when you guys set out… the next one shifts. And it tells the story about the coach. Was that always the onset? You throw a bombshell out early on and then you readjust a little bit to tell the story?

Jason: Yeah, it was. From the moment we decided to do the book and we figured out that Earl was going to be your gateway into the book, yeah, we knew. I was actually telling somebody this weekend that I knew that scene was coming for months, for half a year before I drew it.

And I actually think I cried when I actually reached that moment. Yeah, we certainly want the book to - it’s not about shocking people. It’s not about trying to one up ourselves with twists and turns. It’s about the fact that it’s a story that can go any place, just like life can go anyplace. And these characters are sort of grounded in this hyperrealism.

And so one of the big explorations of the thing is that Jason and I work in superhero comics a lot and Earl is not a superhero. We set him up to have some of the same appeal that a superhero has. But at the end of the day the story is much different. And one of the more interesting reactions - and pause if this is spoiler heavy. If you haven’t read it yet, then what’s wrong with you?

Matt: Hit stop, read it, and then come back.

Jason: But just the reaction to the cliffhanger. A lot of people were a little thrown by the ambiguity of it. That’s what I wanted, but I was also kind of surprised that so many people didn’t know or were unsure of what the status of the book was. And I realized that some of that is, one, I knew where it was going. And two, I felt we had tipped our hand. But I live in the details of the book.

When you’re making a comic, you spend a lot of time obsessing over every little thing. I spend literally hours on panels that other people read very quickly. That’s the trick when you’re doing a comic. It’s how fast does it really read versus how fast it takes to make it. But I found that reaction very interesting. I’ve just told the most vague, as vague as you can get. Ha!

Matt: Well, hopefully they stop and they’re like, “OK, I’ll go read it and I’ll come back.” But it had to be tough for you because the book is coming out and people are falling in love with Earl.

Jason: Except there was this one guy. There was one reviewer that I loved rubbernecking because he was just like, “This book is nothing but Walking Tall!” This is the most creatively bereft thing I’ve ever seen. And I just used to text Jason Aaron like, “I wish I could have a camera on this guy’s room.” If you want to make what we call a callback in the biz to have his head explode like that Dave Chappelle skit with the Black KKK.

Matt: He takes the thing off and he’s black.

Jason: Yeah, certainly we knew we were setting ourselves up for it possibly going the other way. And I think the thing that’s important about creating your own book. And largely doing most books is to try and live somewhere near that edge, the point where you challenging the audience in some way and also challenging yourself.

You’re not always going to be able to do that and not all projects really call for you to be as risky. But since we own the book and no one else could tell the story. It was like, well, if no one goes with it then we just know to do something else. It’s no skin off our back at the end of the day.

Kara: I have to say the thing that I like most about Southern Bastards, which I try to articulate to people when I try to get them to read the book, is that it’s a story where when you’re reading it you feel like you’re in it. Like whenever I read Southern Bastards, I feel like all of a sudden the air has gotten hot and humid.

And if I just breathe deeply enough, I can smell barbecue and wood burning stoves or something. What kind of research or reference materials did you use to try to make that real?

Jason: Well, a lot of people have used the word authentic and I don’t really think it’s authentic. I think authenticity is a slippery term.

Kara: Like typical.

Jason: Yeah. To me the idea is to create some sort of illusion of reality that whatever the truth of it is…Narratives by function are you take an idea of the real world and you boil it down to some sort of recognizable components, right? And those are all by virtue of that process in a way little white lies. But in those lies, if you stack enough of them up you can catch the truth. So a lot of this, I don’t think there would ever really be a town that is like this. I guess by the law of probability there could be where all these things line up.

But these are very much my memories and Jason’s memories plus our love of that sort of fiction all intersecting into this statement on what we love about this genre and what we love about this culture and also hate about those things, so especially from drawing the book. I grew up visiting my grandmother in rural North Carolina. I don’t like to spend a lot of time in towns like this, but I have spent a little bit of time in towns like this.

And that sort of stuff has stuck with me in a very visceral way and I’m just lucky. I can’t ascribe that I know what I’m doing when I sit down to do it other than I feel like it’s right. And I’ve been emboldened by the fact that people who have lived it much more than me occasionally will come by and say, “Yeah, this feels real.” Because that’s really the trick with something hyper-realistic.

It’s much more a consensus reality you’re building. Other people are bringing their opinion of what the real world looks like to the book. Whereas, if it was a science fiction or something. You could just make up what everything looks like, which is difficult in its own way. So maybe that’s a very rambly answer, but that’s what I do. I give rambly answers.

Kara: That was a great answer. We’re all for it.

Matt: Do you prefer writing vs drawing? Because you’re also doing Spider-Gwen and how does that work with your schedule too?

Jason: Well, I’m very fortunate. These books have a much greater intersection than I think people realize. I mean, it’s not just that it’s me in the middle doing these books. In a weird way they’re kind of reflective of each other. And I know that sounds freaking insane to say out loud.

Matt: I want to leave immediately. It’s too insane for me.

Jason: But I think on some level, the great power, great responsibility trope that we’re trying to look at through a different lens with the Gwen Stacey stuff is also present in Southern Bastards. It’s just in Southern Bastards there’s much greater ability for things to…Greater is probably the wrong word to use. But there’s a different context and there’s a different expectation of how things will play out.

At the end of the day, I think Gwen is an inherently good person who is struggling with a lot of the same problems that someone like Earl Tubb is struggling with in that first arc. So in a weird way when I’m working on Southern Bastards, it actually fires me up to work on Spider-Gwen and vice versa, because one of the approaches to Spider-Gwen is to treat as a fun superhero allegory.

A thing that at the end of the day, as bad as it gets, it’s about trying to overcome the odds and I’m not really a cynical or an optimistic person by nature. I kind of vacillate back and forth. And so the two books allow me. If things start feeling too cheery, then I can go do Southern Bastards. And if things start to seem a little too depressing, I can switch gears and do Spider-Gwen. And I think they’re also very reflexive in the fact that Gwen, her story, she’s got a lot of depressing things going on but she lives in this real absurd world.

So in Southern Bastards, one of the things that we really try to do with the book is try to keep a sense of humor. Because we always said going into it that some of the scariest rednecks we’ve ever met in our lives were also freaking hilarious. So there’s a lot of commonality between things and it doesn’t really feel so much like switching a gear as much as it is I live with both of them all the time.

Kara: Well, I am just loving the Spider-Gwen comic. I actually didn’t even know that Gwen Stacy existed until Emma Stone was her in the movie. I’m like, “Who’s that? Where’s Mary-Jane? What’s going on? I don’t know,” because I didn’t really grow up reading Marvel comics. And then when all of a sudden that costume redesign hit the Internet, I was like, “I don’t know what’s going on, but that looks amazing and something I want to read.”

Jason: Thank you. Robbie would appreciate hearing that.

Kara: When you guys started the ongoing, I just jumped right in and it was awesome because I felt like even though I didn’t know anything about the character, I knew right away who she was. I didn’t really need to know decades of Spider-Man backstory because it was an alternate universe deal.

And there are some things that I did pick up in terms of inside jokes or referencing other characters, but it did take me a few panels to realize that Castle was The Punisher and stuff like that.

Jason: Well, it’s fun. I mean, that’s what I want out of it. Robbie and I always say that it’s not a cover song, it’s a mix tape. It’s a remix. It’s like hip-hop in the sense that you take parts of things you like and try to build something new with it. But yeah, it’s really cool to hear that you didn’t know who Gwen Stacey was because that’s one of the things that got me to do the book.

I had lived in a world where I had read Spider-Man for a long time as a kid. And I realized that I didn’t know who Gwen Stacy was because she predated me. She was just an idea of a character. It was a character who was important to Peter. But I didn’t really know anything about, when I realized that, that was half of it.

That was half of where I was like, “Now I want to write about Gwen because I’m free to write about Gwen. Because I don’t know who she is.” And then the other thing I realized pretty quickly was there’s a whole generation of people that don’t know anything about the laws of comic books that were for a long time where Bucky stays dead and so does Gwen Stacy and Uncle Ben.

And it just seemed like there was some sort of catharsis. I can’t describe too much why I decided to run with that character, but at first I literally told my editor. I knew they wanted to do something with Gwen Stacy. They had a list of characters that they wanted to potentially explore and that was the one that I was like, “That could be terrible. I want to do that.”

Kara: Well, I’m glad you did because when the movies came out and I was like, “Who the hell is Gwen Stacy?” literally everything I found was, oh, she was Peter Parker’s girlfriend and then she died and he got a complex about it. And that was the only thing anyone had to say about her. But I feel like now, oh, but she’s funny and in a rock band and badass and cool.

Jason: Thank you. I think it upsets some people that we’re creating our own Gwen, but people do that all the time with characters. And you have to allow them to be that. So the perspective that I take is that I just try to draw from my own life experience and I also try to think a lot about what the character would actually be going through if she was raised by a cop.

In her world it’s very interesting that she is one of the first super-heroes, I think. I mean, we’ll find there are a few other super-powered people over time. But she’s going through something that is supremely unique to her and from her vantage point, to wake up and be able to stick to walls.

And I think one of the big core ideas of the book is not only how does that change her outlook of the world, but how does it challenge the outlook of her father who is this guy who instilled the idea of you’re responsible for other people. And if you have the power to take care of them and look out for them, you should. But what does that do when someone can literally lift a car over their head? It changes the dynamic. So yeah, I really appreciate hearing that.

Kara: You have a giant fangirl, fanboy lovefest over here.

Jason: I will accept your fangirling. You’re going to bring a 180. I’ve sat at a lot of tables where nobody gave a crap about what I did at all, so I will never dismiss a fan.

Matt: So what do you read or what’s on the top of your poll list that you try to read when you have free time?

Jason: What’s free time?

Matt: In this mystical world where you do have it.

Jason: I could tell you what I’ve read lately. I don’t know. This is going to sound like a shill answer, but I really have enjoyed a lot of the Image stuff that they’re putting out right now. I just read the first volume of Fade Out and I really enjoyed that. I mean, I’ve read those guys’ work so long that it was interesting to see them distill what they do in a new way.

And also approach it from a new way. This is going to sound like I’m kissing his butt a little bit, but I really like Jason’s Thor. And I liked Dennis Hopeless’ Spider-Woman too. I think Silk and Spider-Woman have both been really good. And it’s really rewarding to get to work with those guys and get to do something.

Matt: I’m eager to see the new Spider-Woman arc where she was sporting that baby bump.

Jason: Oh yeah? I know about all of it, so.

Matt: I know. You probably know everything.

Kara: No spoilers.

Matt: And also Doctor Strange.

Jason: I’m kind of a Morrison nerd so I’m really eagerly awaiting that last issue of Annihilator, which is one of the craziest books I’ve read in a long time. And I like Nameless too.

Matt: Oh yeah, we interviewed Chris yesterday.

Jason: Yeah? Well, don’t tell him I said that. He doesn’t deserve to know that I like his book.

Matt: We’ll edit that out.

Jason: There’s a lot of good Image books. You can go on and on about that. But I feel like even the mainstream stuff, it’s nice to see that Marvel and DC are starting to take chances again. By virtue of these two things sort of work hand in hand.

Mainstream stuff obviously has to serve different masters and has to appeal to people across a larger scope, but the idea that there can be books that are a little more risky and creative and have unique voices to them in the mainstreaming. I think we’re lucky to be in a place like that. And I think that Marvel and DC feeding Image and Image feeding back into Marvel and DC has been good for everybody.

Matt: Absolutely.

Kara: It’s like a second golden age.

Matt: It is. We are living in the new golden age, started by Jason Latour. But I appreciate you taking the time out. We love Southern Bastards, Spider-Gwen. And I’m glad to see that there are people lining up to see you and it’s really cool.

Kara: Ticketed line, look at that.

Matt: Ticketed line.

Jason: I can’t wait to just abuse my power, my very limited power. With very limited power comes no responsibility.