Zander Cannon | Kaijumax
In this episode Zander Cannon stops by to talk monsters and feelings.
Topics include space-age ambiance, Monsters, Ultraman box sets, twin fables, whale baleen, action figures plz, reviewing older Godzilla movies, formatting the book into seasons, doing it all for one book(excepts for flats), and also what he’s reading.
Links:
Transcription:
Kara: Welcome back to the comiXologist. Matt?
Matt: Yes, I’m here. I’m ready.
Kara: We’re back in the podcast pit in San Diego Comic-Con, and we’re speaking now with Zander Cannon of Kaijumax, also Double Barrel and Heck fame. Welcome.
Zander: Hi, thanks. Thanks for having me, I do like this pit.
Matt: It is pretty nice. This way just creates a comfortable space age ambiance.
Zander: Space age, exactly what I was thinking.
Kara: It’s like we’re in a little pocket dimension separate from the reality of the convention.
Zander: Right. Which is welcome at this point.
Kara: We’re happy to give you a refuge from the badness, but let’s talk about something really important: monsters.
Matt: Monsters.
Kara: Kaijumax is just so much fun. Kaijumax, for the listeners who don’t know, is about a maximum-security prison on an island for Kaiju, or giant monsters. Godzilla is a Kaiju, for those of you who don’t know. If you saw Pacific Rim, you already know what we’re talking about.
Matt: Or you already bought the book.
Zander: Right.
Kara: How long have you been a fan of monsters?
Zander: Anybody who reads comics, I think always loves monsters, but I really got into it over the last five or six years, because my son, we found an Ultraman DVD set at the store. My son’s Korean, and so I liked the idea that we watch something with an Asian hero. There’s only so many.
We got that, and he was nuts for it. He just loved Ultraman. I mean, the original ones are so silly, so juvenile, but we must have watched every episode 10 times.
Kara: Sometimes you need that silliness.
Zander: When I would drop him off at daycare, he would give me the little cross arms zap. That was our way of saying goodbye. Everybody would look at us like, “What? Who are you people and what are you doing?” Anyway, he loved that a lot, and when you watch Ultraman 10 times, your mind starts to wander, if you’re an adult.
I remember I always liked to think, I like the idea of Monster Island, I like the idea of monsters being in another place. What they do when they are not murdering people or rampaging? But then I had to think of a way, why would they be there? And so I thought, “All right. A prison, of course.”
Matt: Yeah, when I first started reading it, I thought it was interesting because in general, you would think that a story like this is about the guards keeping them there. But it’s the total opposite, you are learning about these characters, and you feel for the main one who is trying to get out and get to their kids. It’s really about the Kaiju and the relationships. It’s like a PG-13 rated Oz.
Kara: It’s like Orange is the New Black for Kaiju.
Matt: That’s a good pitch, too. What you said about Ultraman is hilarious because my son saw a picture of Godzilla in an IDW comic book, and he was like, “What is that? I want to watch that.” We started watching the movies, and we have this Godzilla stand-up that he can play with.
It’s funny to hear about Ultraman, because I didn’t even think about Ultraman to watch, and that sounds like the ideal way to get a young kid into Kaiju and monsters.
Zander: They’re faster paced than the Godzilla movies, at least the early ones. They are very heavy handed, which is one of my favorite things, that you can’t have a Godzilla movie without a great big type of eco parable.
Matt: Or miniature twins singing a song, horrible.
Zander: Yeah, yeah. All those things have shown up in Kaijumax in one way or another, at least referenced to stuff like that.
Matt: What made you decide to pinpoint this one Kaiju specifically for the story? I guess it had to be a story demand, because how do you get to care about these Kaiju, especially one that makes a bad decision at the onset and needs to get out ASAP.
Zander: A lot of it is by the numbers, a usual prison protagonists. OK, he’s falsely accused or his got too harsh of a sentence, and so we see everything through his eyes. I wanted to give it a little bit of an extra, “oomph,” so to have the kids on the outside, so that he really feels like he’s desperate to make some sort of deal, or something like that.
Design-wise, I really wanted to make him look very familiar in terms of his shape. He looks like Godzilla. You’re like, “I know what he’s about, he stomps on city that stuff.” But then really distinguishing him in terms of color and style. But yeah, like any story, it’s about a place, and not a character.
You want a character you can really sympathize with, and get in his head. Jokes can only you so far. There’s one million jokes that are obvious from the premise, but I think that you can only get about two issues in and you’ll be like, “All right, I get it.” So, I wanted to have a little pathos, because that’s my stock in trade apparently.
Kara: The monster designs are all so varied. How many rejected sketches are just on the floor of your studio space?
Zander: It’s almost the opposite, because I don’t do a lot of sketches before hand. I’m on a tight schedule, but I just call up Google image search and I go, “Oh, Rodan.” Or pterodactyls, and you get a bunch of them, and you pick and choose from pieces here and there.
When they first appear, I designed the front of them, and when they turn around, an issue later or never, that’s when I design the back. It’s nice that the book is not about that, so it’s not about the battles and stuff like that. If they look silly, that’s all right, and if the designs are a little inconsistent, it’s not. Hopefully, people won’t care as much as they would in a so-called straight Godzilla story.
Kara: I like the whale monster designs the most. It’s of me a minute to realize what’s happening. I was like, “That’s genius, it’s just a giant whale. It probably grabs a mouthful of people and filters out the saltwater.”
Zander: I do like that idea, that they would just be caught.
Kara: That’s all I can think of whenever I read those scenes, “Ah, that must be the worst way to die.”
Zander: The joke about his name, Ape-Whale, a joke on Gojira where Gorilla and Kujira, which means, “Whale.” I thought that’s pretty inside baseball, but no, all sorts of people are like, “Yeah, that’s a good joke.” Pretty obvious, but a pretty good joke. I’m like, “All right man, you guys are on it.”
Kara: I also liked there’s a moth bug that has all these cool tattoos, but when you look closer, it’s his name in Latin.
Zander: Every time I design a monster, I think to myself, “This monster is only going to show up once, so I’m going to go all out on the design. It’s going to be really detailed and stuff like that.” And of course, which ones do people want to see again? The ones that are super hard to draw. I’m like, “Oh man, all right.”
Kara: When are we getting action figures for all of these?
Matt: That means you’d have to design the back, first…?
Zander: Oh, man. I would have to design the back. That is definitely on the schedule, and that is something that we are looking for. What’s better than rubber monsters to play with?
Kara: I need more toys for my desk, I will admit. [Ed. note: This is probably not true. 2nd ed. note: You can still see the actual desk in places, therefore it’s definitely true.]
Zander: I would like them to have little knives and stuff that they can carry around.
Kara: Like little prison shivs?
Zander: Little prison shivs, and some drugs to do.
Kara: Monster drugs?
Zander: Monster drugs, uranium.
Matt: That’s the only drug they can get.
Kara: That’s terrible.
Matt: The other thing I loved about the book…it reminds me of Double Barrel, the digital experiment with back matter to add to the experience. You added reviews of the Godzilla movies, mini reviews which I thought were hilarious.
Zander: I have to watch them all again. These should not hold up to repeat viewings. Especially within six months of each other. I love reviewing the ones that are late 60s and early 70s, the ones that are super dumb are my favorites. It’s just so fun to see the tone, be completely inconsistent throughout, and lots of singing. Lots of singing.
I just watched, “Godzilla versus Megalon,” which is the one with Jet Jaguar in it, which is sort of an Ultraman rip-off. It’s a movie that’s so obviously for kids, and so obviously G rated, and yet there’s this whole section where people are in a cab of a truck, and right behind them there’s nude pin-ups just on the truck. I’m like, “Who is the set designer that didn’t get the memo?”
Kara: I’ve actually never seen any of those movies. Are they the kind of things that you would want to watch with a group of friends, maybe some wine?
Zander: Oh yeah. You could set up a drinking game very easily.
Kara: Every time you see stock footage, take a shot.
Zander: Oh my gosh, you would be on the floor.
Matt: A miniature shot of a town being underwater or something like that.
Zander: Yeah.
Matt: Have you ever seen the updated series, there were 12 made in the 2000s?
Zander: Yeah. I’ve seen a couple of those. I’m trying to catch up. I’ve seen most, but those are less exciting to me. Except for Godzilla versus Space Godzilla, which had such a great design.
Matt: It does. But there is one, I’ve amazingly seen 90 percent of them because my son, James, wants to watch all of them. There was one where the villain does battle with every Godzilla villain, throughout history. I think it was, “Godzilla: Final Wars.” They bring them all back, and they even brought in the Godzilla movie version, the one with Matthew Broderick.
Zander: Oh yeah, and killed it instantly, right?
Matt: It was alive for like two seconds and Godzilla just destroys it instantly, it was really funny.
Zander: They’ve made a lot of references. I remember seeing another millennium era one where they made some reference to, “I think there was one in New York,” and they were like, “No, no, no, that wasn’t Godzilla.”
Matt: Another thing I thought was really fascinating is you said publicly that your goal, schedule-wise, is seasons, six issue seasons. Which I love, because it makes sense to me more as a reader, than a random, ongoing digital or anything. You have a plot, “OK, the season is wrapped up,” you can take time off and come back in a year or two.
Zander: Not much time. There’s going to be a little hiatus. I am still getting the hang of being a one man show, from writing all the way to color. But yeah, I’m going to take little breaks. It’s so important, like you say, in an ongoing, you are just setting up, setting up, setting up forever. I like the idea that I’m going to pay off these things on a regular basis.
I try to have it be in every issue, but I try to have the seasons conclude on a final note, so that then, when you get to the first issue of the next season, you can go, “Oh, OK, we’re starting again with stuff that’s iconic,” stuff that you think of when you think of a monster movie. You’re like, “Oh, OK, here’s the prison scenes,” and I can jump in very easily instead of picking up where we left off.
I find that to be so valuable to not have to remember a thousand things about a series, when you pick it up.
Kara: It seems like a good format. I’m thinking in TV series, when people are talking about them, when they are trying to get their friends into new shows, they’ll be like, “You know what, man? You’ve just got to watch the first four seasons and forget about the rest of,” or, “You’ve got to skip the first one and go to two.”
Matt: It’s like every show, ever. “Just skip the pilot. No, you shouldn’t watch the first season, you’ve got to go to the second season.”
Zander: I like to work around the mechanics of comic book publishing, too. Because especially in print, the enemy, it’s like you do six issues, and then you collect them. There’s no point in saying, “To be continued” at the end of this 150 page book. It’ll be interesting to see how it manifests itself in digital, too, where it’s like, do you divide it into seasons or let’s read every issue from this season, let’s read every issue from this season?
It’s fun, and it starts to mimic Netflix and all the other things that people like.
Kara: I like that model, because for a lot of people who maybe aren’t comic book fans, ongoings can be daunting because they say, “Oh, but it’s issue 30. Do I have to read all the previous ones?” But it sounds like with Kaijumax, you can jump in wherever and be totally fine.
Zander: Yeah. I really try to make even the fill-in issues be like, “This is about this character, you’re going to get the summary of what’s going on,” and I try to put it in the story what’s important. Each issue, each season is going to be very much focused on a certain group of characters, and will give you all the context that you need. That’s just good storytelling, so hopefully that’s what I’m going to do.
Kara: You mentioned that you are doing everything for this book, so what is your creative process? Do you start with the script, do you start with thumbnails, what do you do?
Zander: I should say, everything except for Jason Fisher does flats for the colors, so he’s one of the color guys. The processes, I don’t ever write a script. I do a bunch of post-it notes for scenes, and then when I go through the issue and I do individually, I feel like if I create a scene, if I know it’s going to happen and here’s big panel, wide panel, a bunch of grouping of small panels, then I tend to paste things a lot better.
I do that, and it’s almost like Marvel style, Jack Kirby making little notes and all that. Then I’ll go through in the gags, and jokes, and references, and stuff like that.
Matt: Rap songs.
Zander: The rap songs.
Kara: You are your own Jack Kirby/Stan Lee for the modern age.
Zander: You’re right. And my Jack Kirby hates my Stan Lee. He’s like, “What are you doing to me, man?” Yeah, so it’s a little bit backwards, and sometimes I’ll do a lot of color before I do the final artwork, because you have a big shot of the sunset, and what’s being drawn in the line work is not nearly as important as the light that’s being cast over everything.
That’s the nice thing about doing everything on it, that I can attack it from different vectors. You can say, “This page is all about the color, this page is more about the story and the layouts.”
Matt: It’s a great book. It’s one of those books that, like you said, for a parent, it’s a great book to show your kids, too. If they’re interested in Kaiju or monsters, or anything.
Zander: Although I warn people not to show it to their second graders. You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Matt: It’s come full circle from your Godzilla movie with the pictures in the background, “Why was this rated this way?” Now you’re doing it again with younger kids.
Zander: Yeah, I’m just as bad.
Matt: I appreciate you taking the time out. Heck is another great book that we love. If you read Kaijumax already, check out Heck and Double Barrel. Thanks for taking the time out.
Zander: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Matt: Absolutely.