Note: This interview discusses—almost immediately—the ending to IDW’s recent series The Life and Times of Savior 28. More than any other issue of the book, it should be noted here and now that the “creator commentary” provided by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Cavallaro in this issue are SPOILER-FILLED. Think of these interviews as a director’s commentary on a DVD; if you don’t want to know who Keyser Soze is at the beginning of The Usual Suspects, then you don’t listen to Bryan Singer’s commentary before your first viewing of the actual movie.

The story of Savior 28 and his Daring Disciple draws to a close with the release of this week’s fifth issue, and while there are some obvious and predictable moments in the issue (let’s face it—there’s one page that we’ve been building to since page one), there are also a few nice surprises along the way. Savior 28 is what we need in our superheroes—in spite of the kind of bad press that would make Peter Parker blush, he inspires everyday people, and in spite of his death (way back in the first issue, so don’t worry folks, I’m not spoiling anything here) he continues, in a way that I can’t imagine most mainstream superheroes being able to compete with, to effect positive change in the world he left behind.

As usual, writer J.M. DeMatteis and artist Mike Cavallaro sat down to discuss the issue with us.

Blog@Newsarama: How did Dennis age for all those years with the Master Stone in his belly? Did they put it farther out of the bloodstream to keep him from being forever a teenager?

J.M. DeMatteis: We mentioned in the first issue that Dennis received just a sliver of the Master Stone and it didn’t affect him the same way it did Jimmy.  It slowed down the ageing process but didn’t stop it.

BLOG@: Is Jimmy older upon his return? Why didn’t they take the Stone when he was dead so that they could use it again later?

JMD: Maybe the government does have that piece of the Master Stone.  Maybe those bullets blew it apart.  The truth is we don’t know what exactly happened between the time of Savior 28′s assassination and Jimmy’s return.  We don’t know how he survived or who, if anyone, helped him escape into Julia’s arms.  The mystery is part of it:  an important part.  If we’d had more room in this issue, I might have inserted a section that put forth a variety of conflicting, and unresolved, theories on how James Smith survived, the same way we put forth a variety of theories about his origin in the first issue.  In the end, though, the ending really comes down to the fact that—as Dean Haspiel, Mike Cavallaro’s studio-mate, pointed out to us—those bullets killed S-28 but they didn’t kill James Smith.  He’s just an ordinary human now, wheelchair-bound like his idol FDR…and, in many ways (at least in my opinion) a better, and far wiser, man for it.  And, really, that’s all we need to know.  The rest is for the readers to fill in.

BLOG@: Given that we see him in a variety of states of age, dress and decay, what were some of the things that you kept constant to make sure Jimmy always looked like Jimmy?

Mike Cavallaro: I’m embarrassed to say I frequently have a hard time getting a character to look the same from page to page. I feel like I was just getting the hang of what worked and what didn’t with Jimmy, and then suddenly the series was over!

I basically tried to draw his face the same way all the time, the biggest difference was his hair, believe it or not. I kept the same hair style, but kept it short for some periods and lengthened it for other eras. A beard or some stubble, some wrinkles more or less, also helped to age Jimmy when necessary. It was really a learning experience for me. I never had a story call for that before.

BLOG@: When Bruce Springsteen was recording “Born to Run,” he was thinking “I want to make the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album ever recorded.” It seemed pretty ridiculous to the people around him, coming as it did from a 28-year-old no-name with nothing in his past that would suggest he was capable of such a thing…but you were a star in comics long before this hit, and this has been on your mind for more than twenty years. Do you see The Life and Times of Savior 28 as “your masterpiece” or are you already thinking about the next one?

JMD: Anyone who walks around thinking something he’s done is a “masterpiece” is looking for trouble.  I’m always looking ahead to the next project, the next challenge.  That said, I’d say The Life and Times of Savior 28 is absolutely among the best things I’ve ever done in comics, up there with Moonshadow, Brooklyn Dreams, Abadazad and a small group of other projects that I am extremely proud of.  It’s sad to see it end:  working on The Life and Times of Savior 28 has been a great creative challenge and a great creative joy.  Mike Cavallaro has been an extraordinary collaborator.  I’m so glad he decided to come along on this ride with me.

BLOG@: I know you had said that Dennis’s fate was in your hands and that you were still debating it–what went into that decision?

JMD: In the end, it’s always the story itself that dictates how these things go.  It became clear to me that this was the way it had to end, that this was what the story wanted, what Dennis’s character dictated.  I may not have wanted to go that way…I would have liked a happier fate for Dennis (in fact, my original outline had him reunited with Jimmy at the end)…but I had to surrender to the power of the story.

BLOG@: After two decades did you just get so attached to him during scripting that the actual killing was hard to do?

JMD: The truth is, I didn’t get to know Dennis McNulty till I started scripting the series.  Before that he existed in a much broader, more general, form.  Once the actual writing started, he came alive for me.  As the narrative voice of The Life and Times of Savior 28, he was the character the readers became closest to.  In many ways, we knew him far better than we knew Jimmy.  So, yes, it was hard to do.

BLOG@: How did you guys decide on how to handle the “blam” moment?

MC: Much in the same way that our main character, Savior 28, says “fiction is sometimes a better way of getting at the truth”, I’ve always felt the same way about color, especially in comics. Coloring something its actual color isn’t always the best way to tell the story. I’ve always tried to be a narrative colorist, not a representational one. I try to look at what that panel’s really about, and how I can use color to advance the storytelling a little further, even if that means abstracting it.

On that page, you could have gone through and colored everything the same way panel after panel. But I thought it would be much more poignant and dramatic to have all the color — all the life — drain away at that fateful moment. It’s much more devastating than it would have been otherwise.

That’s something I normally would have run by J.M. for discussion, but he was away on vacation! I just crossed my fingers and made the call the way I saw it. In the end, it comes down to what I’ve said about J.M. in all these interviews — On the one hand you have a seasoned pro like J.M.D. On the other, a virtual novice like myself. But he’s been supportive and encouraging of almost any idea I’ve had throughout this entire process as long as I could make a case for it. That’s really a wonderful and rewarding way to work, and I hope we get to do more together some day.

BLOG@: There is an awful LOT of plot happening in this issue–how much of that was because of the shortness of the mini and how much of that happened because you wanted to maintain the surprise of how we got there?

JMD: The Life and Times of Savior 28 was originally planned, and sold, as a six issue series (and, frankly, there was enough material there for twelve).   A decision was made along the way to cut it to five and that really left me with a lot of story to fit into a smaller space.  There was so much information to feed into those last few issues, but I think we did it in a way that worked…balancing more typical comics sequences with text-driven pages.  I’ve always had a more novelistic approach to comics—as opposed to those who see comic books as “movies on paper” (an equally valid view)—and without that approach I never would have been able to finish this.

BLOG@: Was it nice, even with losing an issue, to have a writer who wasn’t afraid to utilize narrative boxes so that you could still have some room to breathe for these nice splashes toward the end?

MC: I was really glad that we introduced that motif almost immediately, starting, I think, in the second issue. The thing to realize is that comics of this sort are, or ought to be, a collaboration. I never felt there was a rigid demarkation between “writer” and “illustrator”. Pulling off a lot of these visuals, especially those splash pages, takes a lot of understanding and communication between J.M. and I. I’m not free to go off and draw whatever I want. That’s not comics. I have to take the text into consideration and make it part of the design, or else the page is a failure. There was a lot of careful coordination between Marc, myself, and editor Scott Dunbier to make those pages work as well as they did. Collaboration’s the name of the game.

BLOG@: Orson Welles is a great parallel for Savior 28 – but obviously there’s a hundred examples of guys who were run into the ground in life and then celebrated as heroes in death. What made Orson the guy to use?

JMD: I’ve been fascinated with Welles’ life and career since I read Barbara Leaming’s biography of him back in the 80′s.  Since then, I’ve probably read more books about Welles than any other pop culture figure I can think of (with the exception of John Lennon and the Beatles).  He’s one of those figures whose life was as interesting, as brilliant and unpredictable, as his art.  And since Savior 28 came on to the world stage at the same time Welles did, during the golden age of radio, it was natural (for me, anyway) to put the two of them together.

And, for those of you who think Orson Welles never did anything after Citizen Kane, see if you can get your hands on the movies he did after Kane, especially Chimes at Midnight.  It was done twenty years later and was the greatest film of his career.  Now that I can call a masterpiece!

BLOG@: We’ve talked about drawing celebrities and public figures before, but never in the series has one been so intrinsic to the story. What are some of the choices you made when drawing Welles?

MC: Welles came kind of easy, in fact, and I just tried to give him a sort of brooding vibe that fit the dialogue. It’s all in the script. J.M. makes it easy.

BLOG@: How much time and energy went into each of the various Savior 28 costumes seen in the series? And besides the “main” one, do you have a particular favorite?

MC: I should probably say that I labored long and hard on each and every design element featured in S28, but the truth is, circumstances didn’t allow for that. Most of the designs were intuitive, for lack of a better description. I do love drawing Savior 28 himself, and he is in fact my fav. After him, I have to say Queen Shakti is the most fun and interesting. I probably spent the most time on her crazy outfit. This took a little research into some Eastern iconography, with a nod towards “King” Kirby, or course, and voilá– A queen is born!

BLOG@: Since he was no longer part of the masked crusader set, as such, what’s the logic of Jimmy changing his costume that one last time (to the more tunic-looking one, as opposed to standard tights) once he started working for global peace?

MC: Here’s the way I see the major costume variations overall…

- There’s the “Golden Age” version, seen for the first time in issue #1, in a black and white photo of Savior 28 fighting the Master Racer. It features the standard longjohns, and a slightly longer cape.

- In the early 60′s, there’s a more streamlined version. Basically, Savior loses the cape. Dean Haspiel did a great version of this incarnation in the issue #1 guest pin-up.

- 70′s, 80′s to “present day”, we see the main version with the mid-length cape and the tunic. So the tunic comes in long before the global peace activism.

- These are interspersed with some brief wardrobe malfunctions, like the horrid Evel Knievel-esque, puffy-sleeved, late 60′s variation, and the “grim n’ gritty”, leather face mask 80′s version. Neither lasted long, thankfully.

That’s the basic timeline J.M. and I worked with. So that last version was the standard for a couple decades at least.

BLOG@: This seven-panel structure repeats a lot in the issue. Is there something particular you’re trying to evoke with it or was it just convenient for the way the story was written?

MC: The latter because, again, I think the script sort of dictates all that. Overall, the layouts in Savior 28 are very simple. When you have a script that’s this strong, you only have to tell it straight up, without a lot of bells and whistles. It was more important to create layouts that were in service to the overall narrative, and did not distract from the story itself. It’s all pretty straight forward.

BLOG@: How much guidance did you get from J.M. on the “flashback” page just before the funeral shot? It seems like you can literally boil the whole miniseries down to that one page if it had the right captions. A real triumph of sequential storytelling.

MC: J.M.’s script called for each of those shots precisely, I just had to plug them in, with the exception of McNulty in church, which we hadn’t seen before. The only change I made was that the script called for the shot of S28 flinging that tree at Ms. Jupiter, while I substituted his double-fisted attack instead. I felt the panel was too small for that shot of the tree, and went for something that hit the same beat but worked better in the allotted space.

You’re right, that’s the whole series right there on one page. It perfectly offsets the following splash.

BLOG@: How much of this story do you think is really, truly a matter of perspective? In a mainstream superhero book, for example, do you think that Savior 28 would be played as the villain when he joined up the the Lemurian and Queen Shakti?

JMD: All of life is a matter of perspective, isn’t it?  I tried to make that clear all along.  Savior 28, till the very end, saw the world in black and white.  First it was “heroes” and “villains.”  Then it was “war” and “peace.”  He wasn’t one for shades of gray.  And neither were the people who opposed him.  To some folks, the view that Savior 28 was a lunatic, a terrorist, a walking WMD that had to be neutralized, was completely valid.  And I tried to present it that way.  Even if, in the end, I didn’t agree with that view, I could easily see why people would feel that way.

BLOG@: The UN almost kinda seem like a movie audience would looking at the same thing: “Where’s the action? Where’s the punching?” Clearly they’re disinterested and skeptical for different reasons, but did that kind of parallel ever cross your mind while creating the book?

JMD: Actually, it hadn’t…but that’s a very interesting take on that sequence.  And it fits, thematically, with the entire series.

BLOG@: Did you ever consider moving the issues around or not having #2? Certainly the drama of the general public learning of Savior 28′s breakdown for the first time is a little bit lost because we already knew it.

JMD: I don’t agree.  Issue #2 allowed us to really explore Jimmy’s first breakdown in a way we couldn’t later on (I think it’s one of the best sequences in the series…and Cavallaro handled it brilliantly).  It also set up the later twist of the government revelation.  I think it was important to know about it, forget about it, and then meet it again later in the story.  I don’t think it diluted the impact, I think it added to it.

BLOG@: Obviously one of the themes of this story is that right and wrong are not usually as black-and-white as they seem. Is there any part of you that thinks maybe “the people” and their concerns over Jimmy’s potential for disaster have credibility?

JMD: As I noted earlier, I think they absolutely had credibility.  Savior 28 WAS dangerous, although not in the way people thought.  He was dangerous not because he was going to wage war on humanity or give aid and comfort to super-terrorists.  He was dangerous because he had the balls to question assumptions, about the way we live our lives and face our deaths, that most people never dare to.  For all his naivete, for all his flaws (and he had plenty of them), he was sincere and courageous and something of a visionary.

I hope he’s happy there in Poughkeepsie, changing the world one heart at a time.

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