Dragons, dragons everywhere! The She-Dragon has returned–looking ten different kinds of creepy–and finds herself facing off against a revived Savage Dragon who may be suffering from acute amnesia–or may have Emperor Kurr’s memories restored to him. All the while, there are bad guys trying to use Dragon’s blood to turn some of their B- and C-listers into Dragon-baddie hybrids, and a dark, ominous dragon calling some of the other ones names.
Blog@Newsarama: From a literary standpoint, is this issue kind of a bookend with the beginning of the series? I mean, Dragon is physically Dragon but he has no memories at the start of the issue.
Erik Larsen: That’s kind of the idea–but of course there’s no actual “end” at this point but it is hitting some of the same notes as it did at the start of the series with wildly different results.
Blog@: Does Erik Larsen draw Savage Dragon comics, IN the comics? I mean, that cover looks familiar!
EL: I’d actually done a story where Dragon met a couple creators and they’d talked about doing a Savage Dragon series–it was in Savage Dragon #105, I think, but I wasn’t one of them. I don’t really want to go there. Stan Lee used to insert himself into the comics and that was fun but I don’t want to be a character in my own book. There was a guy who looked somewhat like me at one point but that’s as far as I’d like to go. It could get too self-indulgent and self-referential. I’m not into that.
Blog@: Dragon’s language seems oddly stilted….Is that something we should be reading into?
EL: I’m trying to be somewhat cagey here and hint that either he’s a blank slate or that he’s reverted back to being the guy he was prior to waking up in that burning field 17 years ago. You can read his dialogue either way, I think but the most important thing I wanted to pull off is for him not to sound like he usually does. I didn’t want it to seem like fixing him is easy or he just becomes Superman. I don’t want readers to think he’s invincible–that he can’t be screwed up for good.
Blog@: Anarchy/Dragon seems to have no body hair! What’s with that?!
EL: He’s not becoming Dragon–he’s just taking on aspects of Dragon. Dragon’s son doesn’t really have that either.
Blog@: That makes me think: If all their experiments keep failing miserably, and the Kurr body version of Dragon is brought back from the dead with Malcolm’s blood, does that put a bull’s eye on the boy?
EL: Oh, sure it does.
Blog@: Powerhouse seems pretty defeated here. Is this just another example of your earlier comments that Dragon and the people around him are aging more like real people than like superheroes, and maybe at some point people just don’t have the energy for all that crap any more?
EL: Powerhouse has always had it tough because of his physical appearance and that takes its toll. Because he’s a descendant of a god he doesn’t get much older looking physically, but things still wear on him. He wants respect and at times he’s commanded respect but the others see him as a guy who’s been knocked off of his perch thanks to the advent of the new Overlord and they’re only to willing to needle him a bit now that he’s no longer in a position of authority.
Blog@: Erik, nothing personal…but did you have a big sister who beat you up as a child or something? There’s like ten pages of dudes getting kicked around by girls in this issue!
EL: Readers have asked for me to use more women villains for years and for some reason I never got around to it. Well, now I have. I’ve been making an effort to do more of that. It’s hard to pull off without making the guys seem like bullies but I’m doing what I can. I like that Dart, who’s physically very small and nymph-like, flits about with casual ease like a ballerina and just destroys whoever she’s facing no matter how powerful they are. She-Dragon is another story entirely. At this point she’s a powerhouse in her own right.
Blog@: I kinda like the idea of having Curley (or any of the kids, really) be the ones to put Alison down for the count. How long will the subplot with those guys be running?
EL: My thought was to have them be pretty much permanent fixtures in the book and treat them as I would any of my characters.
Blog@: Is there a different approach to the art taken when you’re drawing Golden Age Daredevil and the Li’l Wise Guys as opposed to the Dragon pages?
EL: Not really. I don’t want those worlds to seem too different from each other. I tend to lean more toward the Frank Miller aspect of my style than the Jack Kirby aspect but since all of my influences have merged together at this point it doesn’t look all that different to me.
Blog@: When you said last month that the She-Dragon’s transformation wasn’t finished yet, I don’t know if anyone had where she ended up in mind. Are there plans in store for her in the near future?
EL: I actually was thinking that it was time to close out her story. I didn’t want her to get killed off but she grew out of her role. Now that she’s in her thirties, she really can’t be that cute little girl who followed Dragon around like a puppy anymore. It was time to bring her story to its end. I’ll touch on her from time to time but I don’t see her playing a major role anymore, which is kind of strange in a way because she took over the title at one point.
Blog@: Is one of the nice things about working on your own, creator-owned title that you can DECIDE to retire a character? When Geoff Johns ended The Flash and gave Wally West that terrific send-off to fatherhood and family, it lasted like fifteen minutes because the publisher wasn’t on board…!
EL: Yeah, that is a big part of the beauty of it all. As much as a creator at Marvel or DC might try to “make that character their own” they will never be THEIR character and they can NEVER fully control that character’s
destiny. Fans used to use the term “Bucky dead” to mean a character who was actually dead and would never come back–ever. Now that term is meaningless because Bucky has been brought back to life like so many other characters. Between Aunt May, Norman and Harry Osborn, Colossus, Jean Gray, Bucky, Superman, Batman, Captain America, Robin and all the rest–it’s no wonder that fans get tired of feeling lied to and jerked around.
But that’s the nature of the beast. The companies have this corporate mandate to make money and administrators and creators get shuffled back and forth in an effort to do that. And I’m not saying “these fuckers are evil” but it does make it difficult to have any kind of story integrity when the next creator in line is rubbing his hands together, anticipating the chance to undo everything the last guy did.
That doesn’t happen with me. Love it or hate it– there’s nobody in line who can put a lie to anything I’ve done and dig up any characters I’ve bumped off.
Blog@: So…how many Savage Dragons are there right now? And is there like a Dragon Equilibrium in the universe where one has to blow up or become human in order for another one to show up?
EL: That’s what we’ll be exploring in the upcoming Dragon War. Up until this time we’ve seen two—our hero, who’s not in his right mind, and one from an alternate earth called Darkworld. Now, there are other characters who have sported fins: Malcolm, Mutation, Virus and Flash Mercury among them but they’re not Savage Dragon, strictly speaking. With Dragon’s blood being passed around like candy on Halloween things will be different over the next few months but if one was to strip away all of the pretenders, there are really just two Savage Dragons—the original and this alternate version.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I’m glad Blog@ has been covering Savage Dragon so much lately. This book deserves as much attention as possible.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Does Larsen ever get tired of bashing Marvel and DC? I’m serious, he seems to do it all the time. Does he think this will make more people read his book?
November 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
“Does Larsen ever get tired of bashing Marvel and DC? I’m serious, he seems to do it all the time. Does he think this will make more people read his book?”
You could ask the same when Joe Quesada takes swipes at DC, too.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Not to mention, Kyle, that I asked him a question that directly set up a “creator-owned versus corporate-owned” dynamic. One of the natures of these columns–this, The Gold Exchange, What’s Perhappenin’? and stuff like that–is that they’re creator commentaries. Providing some insight to already-published books and maybe a hint at what’s to come, along with some of the sensibility and personality of the creators behind the books. If you pay attention, you’d find that Erik’s passionate about his creation; Todd Dezago is really accessible to fans and aspiring creators; Dan Jurgens is a consummate professional who understands corporate comics better than anyone I know. Those personality tics are part of what makes them interesting to talk to month after month, even when the books they’re commenting on are sometimes in an “action phase” and there’s not a lot of plot to dissect.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
It’s actually a cool super hero book with nice little twists sometimes that make you go ‘Ooooohhhhh,I see!’ This is the only Image book I still buy since 1992.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Oh, please. That was hardly a “bash”. It was a clear elucidation of the benefits creators have when they own and work on their own characters. He even went so far as to clarify, “And I’m not saying ‘these fuckers are evil’”.
Can’t Erik Larsen ever mention Marvel without being immediately written off as a “Marvel basher”?
November 5th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Maybe if he stopped bashing Marvel whenever he mentioned them. For all his complaints about how corporate comics never change, never grow, can never be as FASCINATING AS DRAGON AND HIS CAST OF CHARACTERS, it’s pretty obvious he either only reads the big books like Spidey/X-Men/Avengers, or just gets by on headlines. Take Nova, a book/character he worked on in late 90s. It’s now light years apart from what the setting/concept/tone of his series was, the character has grown and matured, and fans love it. But of course, Larsen only exists to try and make his book look better than something that he didn’t happen to create.
November 5th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Regarding Nova and it’s change and growth: That hasn’t been a natural evolution. Marvel decide to change Nova, they decided to go cosmic, and it happenes. It’s not part of a process. And when the series gets canceled one day, and reviewed a few years later, and the new creative team decides to go back to the roots, and everything that matters now gets ditched. That is the point.
Not saying that Nove is a bad series as it is.
November 5th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I think the big difference between Savage Dragon and other more corporate books (and I’d include Wildstorm, Top Cow and Spawn as well) is you know one guy is steering the ship most of the changes are permanent. Characters die, get married, change careers, grow old, and it all feels natural. You may like Nova now but Marvel can easily change creative teams or cancel the book if sales dip to a certain point. I don’t have that fear with Dragon.
That said I’m digging the big changes in Savage Dragon. I’m hoping the VC perfect their Dragon serum and a few of this minor leaguers stick around in Dragon form. Also I’m digging the more alien take on the newly blank slated Dragon. I’m not seeing too many overt hints that he’s the guy he was in the Origin story but a few bits of dialogue left me uneasy. Particularly the line about “having to survive by the worlds rule… for now.”
It’s a good book and I wish there were more like it.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:51 am
While I don’t think it was a “bash” per se, I also don’t see it as a necessary critique. I mean hell, of COURSE Marvel/DC are only going to tinker so much with their iconic properties–they’re iconic! People have a brand expectation, and so, you can’t fuck with the brand after awhile. Coke/Pepsi/McDonald’s don’t change their recipes, and you know what? Yrs later people are still getting fat off all shit even though they know it’s not good for them.
And while I don’t personally read them anywhere near as much anymore, I understand too, that ultimately, those things–these mandates, editorial controls, corporate inputs and whatnot–are a reflection of the fact that these properties have become IMMENSELY POPULAR–something that the Image folks can’t boast–though I’m sure Larsen might also say he doesn’t want, either.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I have been really enjoying these interviews as well - after I read the book. Thanks to Erik Larsen for participating and Newsarama for playing host.