In this episode Kieron Gillen (kierongillen) stops by to talk crushing your hopes and dreams.

Topics include breaking hearts, going into your 40s, love of pop culture, Phonogram coming full circle, the appeal of impossibility, making it awkward, being transformed by art, Phonomancers are pitiful people, transition between creator-owned books, going against your own rules, The Kieron and Jamie Moon, picking the #WicDiv pantheon, catholic free reign, almost not doing Young Avengers, and also what he’s reading.

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Transcription:

Matt: Kara, welcome back to our lounge.

Kara: Thanks, Matt. It’s the pit. It’s “The Podcast Pit.”

Matt: The Podcast Pit. 

Kara: San Diego.

Matt: It’s glorious. We have an icon in our midst. We have a living legend. Finally, we have him on the show. You might know him from “The Wicked + Divine.” Obviously, your hair has been inspired by that book, and “Darth Vader.”

Kara:“Young Avengers.”

Matt: Young Avengers, “Miss America Chavez,"oh my god.  I want to marry her.

Kara: "Phonogram.”

Matt: We should introduce him. Kieron Gillen, welcome to the show.

Kieron Gillen: Hello.

Matt: This is a big moment for WicDiv fans because I want to ask you how do you respond to the legions of fans that are now aimless, wandering, and heartbroken after the most recent issue [Ed. note: recording during SDCC].

Kieron: I like to leave people disappointed and frustrated. That’s was always my guiding aesthetic principle as a writer. I view it as a complete success. It’s been interesting. We’ve been all the way through and of course spoilers for WicDiv are about to happen, but not for issue 11. I’ll do one for issue 5.

When we killed Lucifer, it’s when the first issue came out and everyone loved Luci. It’s what Jamie was saying, “Are you at all worried that we’re going to kill our most popular character of issue five?” I was like, “Yes, yes I am.”

It turned out OK. Of course we always knew what we were planning for issue 11 as well, and the people have mostly gone with us. There’s been obviously a lot of anguish and screams and all the responses which we know has happened, because that’s why we write it, but people haven’t generally gone, “And now what?”

We have a level of trust that people know that what we’re doing, and we do know what we’re doing. We not always sure if it’s a good idea, but we know what we’re doing. We know the end. We know where we…I could write the final issue now, at least most of the final issue now.

Matt: Really, how many issues will it go?

Kieron: We normally say 30 to 60. My gut feeling is about 40. It’s a book about me basically turning 40, so the matter of it being 40 issues is appealing.

Kara: Yeah, for me personally reading that issue, I was reading it on our app in Guided View, so I was forcing myself to go panel by panel as opposed to taking every page in all at once. Every panel was a surprise for me, and my emotions during that entire thing were all over the place.

I was like, “Ah, ah, ah.” It was awful, but beautiful, and now I’m like, “But what’s going to happen next? I have to know.” Ah, so good.

Kieron: Thank you.

Kara: So thank you.

Kara: It’s that we’re really placed that issue in terms of what Matt and Jamie did, and the rise and fall, and the emotional…they say it’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s all very happy for a minute.

Kara: I know. It was just glorious. “The Wicked + the Divine” is such a distinct concept. You’re taking mythology. You’re mixing in some music. What made you want to really do this project?

Kieron: It’s a book which tries to sum up everything I’ve ever loved about pop culture, and me and Jamie have loved about pop culture, for across my entire life. It’s like it’s explicitly me creating 12 people, any of whom I would have probably killed to be at many points in my life, and killing them all.

This is basically me killing my darlings. This is me trying to get over my sorry ass, and that’s the book. There’s so much about pop music in there, and it’s also much from mythology and fantasy. It’s a lot of superhero DNA. There’s a lot about fandom. There’s a lot about being a creator.

There’s a lot about all these different bits and pieces, at the same time it’s like I’d hoped, and my life has been a process of trying to metabolize all the stuff that makes you, because everybody is…nobody is original. Everybody is bits of other stuff that they have digested.

This is everything I want to say about pop culture and after WicDiv, I’m going to have to do something else. That’s explicitly, “This is the end of all this stuff, and I’m will put away this now and see what happens then.” That’s where it came from.

Kara: For me, I found The Wicked + the Divine, and that was the first thing that you did that I was exposed to, and after that I was like, “Where do I find this creative team? What else have they done?” That led me to Phonogram.

That was some of your earlier work about these phonomancers, these magic beings, I guess, that can manipulate music or how people react to music. What was striking to me was how you and your team were able to make it and take something with a medium that you couldn’t hear, and make it all about a medium that you could hear.

What was doing that book like in terms of your creative process?

Kieron: You nailed part of it. The part of it is the impossibility. In fact, it’s not even the fact there’s no sound in comics. It’s also no control of time. Comics you read at your own speed whilst music controls time. In fact, they’re literally opposite mediums as there is no visuals in music as in what they have.

The impossibility is the part of the thing that appeals to us because the attempts to transfer one to the other has to be an act of creative magic. You have to innovate. You have to try to work out how on earth are you going to try to express something like this, and you always fail. You’ll fall short of the actual thing that you’re trying to convey, no matter what you do.

That is at least some level part of the points, the idea that all this is slightly beyond your fingertips, because that music is magic. That’s the core idea. That’s what this series runs off. That was at least part of the challenge. And we just like making things awkward.

Kieron: We never make it easy for ourselves. Yeah, it’s me and Jamie are both people who have been transformed by art. We use specifically music because it is important for both of us. Evidently for both WicDiv and Phonogram.

Phonogram especially has an intellectual rigor to it, as in anything that happens in it is a metaphor for something that music does, and if that music doesn’t do it, we don’t do a story about it.

Kara: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Kieron: It’s not like no one throws a fireball through musical powers, is the metaphor I use. If they do, it’s in a very specific situation.

As opposed to WicDiv, and WicDiv is much more about the mythology, so WicDiv is much more fantastical. Phonogram was designed as a device to talk about music and how it affects people. Specifically, phonomancers are pretty pitiful people. These are people who have a lot of stuff lacking. Why do you love music? How do you love music too much?

They’re often more like addicts. I think most of the phonomancers are kind of cautionary tales. It’s obviously desperately autobiographic. Kohl is very explicitly an avatar of me. That’s me in my twenties at my worst, often.

All the characters are very clearly based on other people I know and love, or at least know.

Kara: Will we be seeing more of this in the “Immaterial Girl”? Which is the next Phonogram book, for our listeners, coming out in August.

Kieron: Immaterial Girl, I had that planned since 2004, at least, or at least the rough shape of it. It’s on the account of Emily Aster is the lead, who is one of the major supporting characters, and now she finally takes center stage. It’s basically, she has sold half her personality for power. That’s the way I describe it. Basically, in a Faustian act. There’s a word you might be aware of from WicDiv.

The story is the half of the personality comes back and it’s about the war between the two of them. Actually, how you choose image, what you choose to give up, why you’re inspired to be someone else anyway? It’s told across about 30 years, 25 years. The opening scene is her watching pop videos in 1985. I say 1984-ish…is what actually the first panel is. The other side is about pop videos. It’s about what pop videos do and how there was a transformative moment. It’s kind of designed to be the final Phonogram. Between the three of them, there’s a rough trilogy. We come back to all the main characters and we give them a little send off.

It’s primarily, Emily was the last one. In a real way, Kohl’s could have ended in “Rue Britannia”. Kohl has kind of had his religious experience, his transformative moments. Kohl is now in a very different place. Kind of what Rue Britannia was to Kohl, Immaterial Girl is to Emily.

Matt: How does it feel for you two to be able to switch gears from one creator owned book, and then directly to another one that you have previously worked on? How does that feel to you guys? Is there any trepidation from bringing this series back from a hiatus?

Kieron: I actually wrote all of Immaterial Girl in 2012. It was always from before Young Avengers. It’s a weird sense of like, if people follow our creative path, Immaterial Girl is kind of a missing link between– almost stuff that we parody, stuff that we do in Young Avengers, actually homaging stuff in Phonogram for Immaterial Girl. Homage is probably overselling, but you see my fault patterns and, “Oh, I get where Kieron was coming from.”

Yeah, it’s weird. To us, it’s more the fact that Phonogram has not…There’s not been any new Phonograms since 2010. I haven’t written any new Phonograms since…I’m lying, I’ve written a few scripts along the way. When a new script page appears from Jamie, it feels like almost blasphemous, a little obscene, or taboo. As in, “What’s it? It’s a Phonogram page. There’s no more Phonogram. We stopped doing that.”

It is very, very strange. We originally planned to do it after Young Avengers, but there was an email or short report in the back of the WicDiv collection Omnibus thing, where I drunken emailed, “No, let’s not do this Jamie. Let’s not do Phonogram. Let’s do something else first.”

Young Avengers was about doing something new and the idea of returning to an old portrait, any old portrait, even one we love as much as Phonogram, was against the role we had created for ourselves. Let’s start something new. Also, we thought, Phonogram never sells. Let’s do something that sells for a change.

Kara: That sounds really like time travel is what you’re describing here.

Kieron: There’s so much time travel. That’s actually a theme in Immaterial Girl where you get scenes, instead of 2009 you get 2001 scene, 1994, 1991, it’s all over the place. It’s kind of Billy Pilgrim in “Stuck in Time”. That’s kind of how it feels.

Matt: Did you guys expect the huge response for WicDiv when it came out and as it grew. What was your expectations? You’re making a new thing and it’s great, but what did you have set for yourselves?

Kieron: Honestly, the actual humble, sweet thing, it’s beyond my wildest dreams. It’s more than we could have ever hoped. Me and Jamie are monstrous people…and we’re not satisfied until the moon has been renamed the Kieron and Jamie moon and our faces are carved in it. Realistically, it’s infinitely better than we could have hoped. Probably sales were about twice what we were hoping. The launch was probably about twice what we were hoping. Where the sales have stabilized, it’s definitely like way up and whatever. I don’t know how many cosplayers heard about this con, but at Emerald City had about 30, at least 33.

Kara: I saw an Amaterasu walking around.

Kieron: I’ve seen about 12 here I think. New York was about 30 as well. For an indie book, that’s enormous, you know? And the actual intensity of the fandom. All of these things are not surprising, but humbling and amazing. This is kind of what we’re hoping for.

This is a book about fan devotion. This is a book that is, we want people to get tattoos. We’ve met people who have WicDiv tattoos. We want this to be a book that changes peoples’ lives. If it hits at the right spot. The idea that you could be a Young Avengers reader at 16, and this is your first adult comic that you’ve read, and across all 40 issues, I want to tell you everything I’ve learned in 40 years.

So you don’t have to do to do the bullshit I’ve had to do, all the stupid idiot holes I fell down. Everything about pop music. Everything about life and all this life and culture and being an artist. I use the word artist generally, but being a creator. That’s what it’s about. It’s awesome to see, and weird. Every time we see the sales numbers, how much the trades sell is scary.

There’s the option now and all of those kinds of things, but it’s kind of what we were hoping for.

Kieron: We were trying to make something people…we were trying to write pop music. That’s Phonogram. It’s weird and intense and personal and deliberately obtuse.

WicDiv was us trying to be Daft Punk on the second album. We would like everyone on the dance floor.

Kara: I just love…I’m going to go again to the mythology part of it. I grew up reading a book of Greek myths until I broke the spine in half. Getting to learn about gods that maybe I didn’t know about and seeing old favorites was so interesting for me. How did you guys pick the pantheon?

Kieron: That was interesting. Some of the gods, we started with a pop star, because all of the gods are also pop star analogs. Some of them, I start with a god and try to find a pop star to suit them. Sometimes, you’ve got one which happens in the same idea. Like Lucifer being Bowie, gender switched Bowie, that was all in one thought. Another one is Amaterasu, I knew the characters was the Florence Welsh, the Kate Bush, kind of analog. But I wasn’t sure about which goddess to use. At one point, I was thinking Morrigan. In the end, I took Morrigan to be much more…most of my underground goth archetypes instead.

A lot of it was dancing and someone like Baal…I knew I wanted to do Baal because I’m very into the Phoenician gods and I find them very interesting, especially with the idea that there were many Baals. That’s an interesting idea too.

That was kind of the process. There was a mixture of ones which had “star power.” As in ones that people know. Lucifer is a vely obvious one. But the idea that I can throw in a few more obscure ones and no one would care. That was kind of the mix. A quite trashy directory off myth, all 10,000 gods, you know, that kind of book.

I went through as kind of…I want them in a big list. I am going to go through them all. There was one point that I wanted to do a really obscure Siberian god that had a one line description. I went through and literally circled ones . There was definitely kind of like an alternative dimension where I had a completely different set of gods.

Stuff I wanted to dig into. I tried to stick to a one per pantheon rule. Sometimes I cheated a bit, because I used all of the different periods of Greek gods. Every different period of Greek gods I count as a different one. And I counted the Romans as a different set.

The particularly Germanic versus Norse. I kind of took them as two sets. At the same time, there were some gods that I didn’t touch, explicitly any…I would love to Yoruba god. I was very interested in the Yoruba gods. I was aware that the chances of messing them up were too high.

The fact that they still worshiped deities with relatively small numbers of people worshiping them that I stayed away from, because that risks being messing up culturally in that kind of way. Native American gods were equally dodged for the same reason.

So mostly dead gods or the gods of living pantheons I was particularly careful. Amaterasu I was very careful with. Her story is very important to the book as it is about procreation. Apart from Lucifer, because I was raised Catholic, so I can do what the hell I like with Christianity.

It’s that kind of level of “I’m sorry”. If your religion messed me up, I can play with this, this is mine.

Matt: As a Catholic, you were raised to just live with so much guilt. That’s where it comes from.

Kara: Now we’ve got that Lucifer Died For Your Sins t-shirts.

Kieron: That was being really…we should have done a more popular t-shirt first, one that people could wear. We just thought this was so funny. A lot of what we do is to giggle – having fun.

Kara: Hopping to Young Avengers in our time travel journey, I actually recently got around to reading that because I was unfamiliar with those characters. They pop up on Tumblr. Everyone is obsessed with them. I finally got around to…

Kieron: Oh yes. That is true.

Kara: I finally got around to reading it. I was like, “Where was this book when I was a teenager?” Let’s go back in time and send it back to me. Matt mentioned America Chavez. She’s the best. With the Young Avengers team that you were working with, how much freedom did you feel like you had with those characters to do what you wanted with them?

Kieron: I didn’t want to do the Young Avengers, not because I dislike Young Avengers, but I know the original books. I like the original books. What they did was a very classical take on a superhero comic. It’s like this is almost a DC take, the idea of the team of the superheros, applied to a Marvel universe.

Especially when they came out in the mid-00s, it was one of the most traditional ideas or romantic idea of what superhero comic books are which is very interesting in many ways, but simply not what me and Jamie do. I don’t have much time for that, to be honest.

Creatively, I am kind of like anti-legacy. It kind of comes from my background. I was raised on the working class background. I was the first generation of kids that went to university. The idea of being entirely defined of what your parents did, it’s kind of creepy, that’s kind of like anti-work.

That’s our theme of Young Avengers. In the end you’ve got to be… you have to have your own destiny. You aren’t just Scarlet Witch, second generation. So, I didn’t want to do it. Axel [Ed. note: Axel Alonso, editor in chief at Marvel Comics] said, “Go away and really think about it. I think it you’d be excellent on it.” The actual mission of this thing was to really tear it up. Make it our own.

That was what they did, the original book was such a singular voice. We’ve got to start things from scratch. We’ve got to work out a way to talk about what we do which I said, I’ve got to do with Jamie. I’ve got to do with Matt. I want Lauren as my editor. I want Clayton as my letterer.

The idea of doing it as a team, as a gang. Also, as a phrase we often said, “We write it like we own it.” We tried to make it as a pocket universe. Yes, it’s playing in the Marvel universe, but we deliberately…the people they are fighting, the Avengers can’t see. It’s you fight the problems you see, it’s a Don Quixote aspect to it.

It’s like, “Can you do a pop comic book in the Marvel universe in a year? Can you do that?” That was kind of the question we posed. The answer is, “Hmm, kind of.”

Mostly. That’s what we did. It came in this really…my original pitch doc is hilarious. I got most of the people I wanted I got. There’s a few who weren’t available. I had a really weird idea that I wanted Hope on the team, and to have Hope as opposed to the Phoenix creature. She was completely calm, but also a psychopath. She had these two guns that fired flaming bullets that entered a tiny phoenix and had a brow in a bendy sort of style. It was like the universe against you as she shoots someone else in the head.

She was going to be really horrific. That’s something I didn’t do. Miss America Chavez came in because Eli was unavailable for various reasons and I wanted another Stars and Stripes hero. I’d just read “Vengeance” which had been reintroduced by Nick and Joe [Ed. note: Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta, 2011 run].

She’s perfect. I thought me and Jamie could do really interesting things with her. She’s kind of like the icon of our run. If you think about our run, all of those group shots of her toward the front.

The idea was to pretty much to tear up and start again. Young Avengers is about being 16, this about being 18. That was my core aesthetic idea. It’s a transitional age, it’s kind of the going away to university kind of age, and realizing instead of having hero figures, sort of realizing that you can be a hero figure or your hero figures are closer to your age.

When you realize that your friend who is doing cool stuff, you think, “Why am I not doing cool stuff?” That’s kind of what it is about. That’s what Miss America was as a book.

Kara: Very cool. I want to do a quick note for our listeners. Kieron is wearing a black jacket with black skulls on it. It is the most None More Goth thing I have seen all con.

Kieron: This is what we bought. When the WicDiv came out, the orders for the first issue came in and it was like, “Wow. Let’s spend some money.” We actually did a launch party. We did a proper launch party. The band Summer Camp played, who are like a British indie band who are our friends, and really cool.

It’s an Alexander McQueen jacket. This is my rock star mode. We don’t do that very often. Or at all, but yes.

Kara: Matt had a question about Darth Vader.

Kieron: Talk about None More Goth!

Matt: No, seriously. It’s like the first crossover event I think in the newer Star Wars universe. You are working with Jason Aaron on a one shot. Then, it swaps first issues. That’s got to be pretty big pressure to do the first crossover in huge mega star universe that they are pushing pretty hard.

Kieron: Obviously, everything Darth Vader is enormous pressure, but if I actually thought about what Darth Vader means, it was like, Empire was the first movie I saw. If I thought about that for a second, I would probably curl in a ball on the floor. As it is, I am somehow in denial about that.

I get out of bed giggling because I get to write Darth Vader stabbing dudes.

Of all the books I write, this is the one I find most fun. It’s like WicDiv is hard. I just spent a month writing WicDiv 14. Darth Vader, it comes out very quickly. It’s kind of like primal.

You can sort of tell. People who have responsible is because they are having so much fun with it. The crossover, it’s kind of like me and Jason can building towards. The first arc kind of dovetailed quite suddenly. The second arc, we go separate directions and we build up the cast. The third arc, we bring it together.

This is a classic Marvel crossover. It’s fun. It brings our two supporting cast together. It’s like Aphra meets Han Solo. That’s fun. The wookiees fight.


Matt: That’s like your plot outline. The wookiees fight.

Kieron: These characters meet for the first time. What happens? It’s so much…that’s fun. Me and Jason just sit and laugh. Me and Jason worked together on “Uncanny X-Men.” He was doing Wolverine in the X-Men. We’ve sort of done this before in a…we’re experienced. We’re good friends. We’re having a hell of a time. We get paid for it.

My job is amazing.

Kara: Magic.

Matt: What do you seek out when you are not writing or you maybe have some downtime? What’s at the top of your pull list for reading?

Kieron: Sleeping. Actually, Southern Bastards. We talked about Jason. Southern Bastards just gets better and better. The actual accuracy of the character of the work. It’s way different from the first and second arc. Not to spoil anything for anybody, it’s astounding. You will love that.

I am going to give a plug to Lumberjanes who kicked our ass in the Eisners. Lumberjanes is astounding. My brain is actually blanking on what’s great.

Matt: That’s a pretty good twofer.

Kieron: There’s so much good stuff coming out for Image. I pick up all their new stuff. I really like…what’s de Campi and Carla’s [Ed. note: Alex de Campi and Carla Speed McNeil] book called?

Matt: No Mercy?

Kieron: No Mercy. I’m loving No Mercy. That’s really good. Alex is an old friend from back in the day. Carla once took a tiny wasp out of my ear which flew in there at a con in the UK. I will buy everything she does forever.

Matt: Forever in your debt, yes. We appreciate you taking the time out. The entire office and we know our community is huge fans of WicDiv. I think everyone is excited for Phonogram to come back. Thanks for taking the time out. We really appreciate your hard work.

Kieron: It’s fantastic to be here. It’s the actual level of…I sort of skimmed over a question earlier. Honestly, the actual level of passion and people who are reading WicDiv is genuinely scary. No, humbling.

Kara: Nice save.

Matt: Thanks again.

Kara: Thank you.

Kieron: Thank you.

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