SuicideGirls has a lengthy interview with writer Ed Brubaker in which he discusses everything from Criminal and movies to event comics and whether, with superhero stories, he’s writing “adolescent male power fantasies”:
Well, they’re not anymore adolescent than something like 24 [laughs]. I try to write stuff that I would enjoy reading. It’s a little different than a teen book like the X-Men. I had to make a switch in my head when I started working on stuff like Batman or Catwoman to try to figure out what my angle was going to be so that I could make it feel like I wasn’t slumming or something. Some friends of mine from alternative comics had gotten work that DC or Marvel bottomed out pretty quickly because you could tell it wasn’t their real work as far as they were concerned. My feeling is always that anybody who’s buying it needs it to be your real work. It’s just taps into a different part of your creativity. To me it was trying to think of it as being something like a pulp writer, which is something I completely admire. These guys who would sit down and write for two cents a word or something and support their families throughout the Depression like Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, these f***ing lunatics. I knew going into it that the majority of the audience was college age or older so I never felt like I needed to dumb anything down. I’m not trying to write superhero comics that aren’t superhero comics but I try to write them as if they make sense [laughs]. I just accept that this is the world that these events take place in. All pulp fiction is adolescent power fantasy. I’ve been re-reading all the Parker novels, the Richard Stark books. They even say on the covers of a lot of them, “A story of violence.” They’re littered with violence but they also have some of these coolest most inventive heists of all time.
The first Criminal collection, “Coward,” hits stores tomorrow.
