by Mike Collins

Richard K. Morgan is the Philip K. Dick and Locus Award winning author of such titles as Altered Carbon, Broken Angles, Woken Furies and Market Forces. He's also about to begin a second limited series featuring the Black Widow For Marvel Comics. He steps into the basement for a chat with Mike Collins about Black Widow, strong female characters and his novels, the latest of which hits shelves in a few weeks.

MC: Prior to getting the offer to write your first Black Widow miniseries for Marvel, did you ever have any interest in writing a comic book?

RM: Not really, no. I’ve had a nodding acquaintance with graphic novels since my early twenties, and there were always a few of the classics on my shelves – Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, some Judge Dredd, some Sandman and Preacher – but it never occurred to me that I’d ever write one. I was too focused on becoming a prose novelist to look at the other possibilities.

MC: How did it come together with Marvel? Did they ask specifically about Black Widow or was it just writing a comic for them in general?

RM: I think it was the Widow that did it, really. Jenny Lee had read my first novel, Altered Carbon, and was very taken with the female characters. Black Widow was the one she pitched to me first of all, and to be honest I fell in love with the character immediately. Jenny ran a couple more options by me as well, but by then I was already off and running with Natasha.

MC: What differences have you found in writing a comic as opposed to writing a novel?

RM: The biggest obvious difference, and the biggest problem I had with the new medium, was brevity – I’m used to telling a story in 400 plus pages of prose, so twenty pages, five to seven panels a page, was a pretty tight squeeze. In fact the first issue sketch I turned in to Jenny contained all the material for Issues One and Two and then some. It took a while to get that under control, but thanks to Jenny’s excellent tutelage, I was on a fairly rapid learning curve and by #3, we had things squared away. That left me with one other major difference, which is really the issue of emphasis. The point with prose is that you have practically unlimited licence to explore – provided you do your job well, you can take your reader anywhere and for as long as you like. You can digress, expand, reflect and resonate on your themes, develop your characters as much as you like, and if the prose stands up, it will work. (For some really extreme examples of this power, try Thomas Pynchon’s V or Vineland). Comics – even the most sophisticated comics – just won’t carry that much weight. But where the comicbook medium scores over prose is in terms of visual impact - in this it’s akin to cinema. There is no substitute for a really powerful visual image. Think of the death of the joker in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, or the canal tunnel sequence in Alan Moore’s From Hell. Or in cinema, the furious, hating face of the Vietnamese girl at the end of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It is practically impossible to render that much intensity in prose.

MC: Can you tell us a little bit about what you have in store for the Black Widow in the new series you're writing?

RM: Well, not much without spoiling the surprises, no. Suffice it to say, the new arc picks up almost immediately after the end of the last collection, and pursues a number of the themes and characters that emerged last time around. At the same time, it is a very conscious attempt to do things differently this time. I’m exploring new angles on the character of the Widow, and also trying to shade in a backdrop of moral consequence, which I find distressingly absent in a lot of superhero fiction. There’s some foreign travel as before, but the story is a lot less global in scope, and the enemies are far less easily defined than before.

MC: You seem very adept at writing strong female characters. Is that a conscious decision?

RM: Thank you. No, it’s not really conscious. I like women – genuinely like them as opposed to just wanting to fuck them, though that too, ahem, well, anyway, AHEM, I like women, so it seems natural to treat my female characters with as much affection, attention to detail and respect as the males. Out of that grows their strength and more importantly their three dimensionality. In the same way you’d want your daughter to grow up strong and independent, I want my characters to have an inner life of their own, not just conform to some wank fantasy stereotype of womanhood. In this, all I’m really doing is my job as a writer – the problem is that elsewhere in comics you seem to have a number of other writers who would just rather perpetrate the wank fantasy thing. Whether that’s out of their own personal issues or a simple desire to bullseye a big male audience with personal issues, I don’t know – but it pisses me off no end.

MC: Do you think there are any other comics projects we might see you write? Any particular characters that you'd like to take a shot at? Any particular artists you'd want to work with?

RM: Well, it’s always a possibility. To be honest, at the moment, I’m fully engaged with Natasha and quite enjoying revamping the character, and that, along with my novel writing commitments is keeping me more than busy enough. I’ve had a few ideas for other Marvel characters, simply because they’ve been called to my attention, but whether those ideas will go anywhere remains to be seen. As far as artists go, I’m a big fan of Kevin O’Neil’s work on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the whole Lucifer team – Gross and Kelly and the really weird stuff Dean Ormston does. I’m also very impressed by guys like Eduardo Risso and Marcelo Frusin. As you can probably guess, I’m not a big fan of photo-real artwork.

MC: How would you describe the experience of working with Marvel on this series? The experience of writing a comic in general?

RM: It’s been a riot. High points include Jenny Lee chasing me all over Peru and Bolivia with Fedex, trying to get final text sorted, and the massive battle to prevent Natasha’s spine-cracking scene being censored out – which we won. That, plus getting to work with Bill Sienkiewicz and Goran Parlov, both of whom really went the distance for the project. At the time, I never realised how privileged I was to just step into the comic world and be handed such a fistful of talent to work with on my first outing.

MC: Switching gears, I'd like to ask you a little bit about your novels. Woken Furies is soon to be released in the US. How did you come up with Takeshi Kovacs and the world he lives in?

RM: I always liked the idea of a character who scares the people who run things – Kovacs is a product of the Protectorate war machine and its repressive policing systems, but he’s gone AWOL, and all the violence and intelligence that he once deployed for political reasons is now his to hand out as he personally sees fit. The elite enforcement division he once belonged to, the Envoys, are already a force that terrifies politicians on all sides – but an Envoy who no longer has any allegiances but his own personal loyalties is truly something to give the George Bushes of this world nightmares.

As to the Protectorate itself, that was easy – I just extrapolated current geopolitical trends into an interstellar context without permitting faster than light space travel. People in Kovacs’ universe get about between star systems as digital data streams transmitted in hyperspace. They can then be downloaded into fresh bodies at the other end. This is the only interstellar communication that really works – the colony ships that actually physically went to the Settled Worlds took decades and centuries to arrive, and clearly you can’t deploy a rapid response force like that. The only alternative is to send men like Kovacs as data and give them combat bodies when they arrive. Some of these ideas have appeared in the literature of SF before, notably in the work of Poul Anderson and Robert Sheckley – all I did was revamp them and give the whole structure a bleak noir twist borrowed from the American crime writing tradition.

MC: One of the hallmarks of the Kovacs novels are the amazing abilities hardwired into his sleeve. He has the neurachem, the bio plates and in Furies the Gecko climbing spines. How do you come up with them?

RM: Uhm – hard to say where inspirations like those come from. Neurachem is really just another word for a jacked up nervous system, and that’s a concept with a long SF pedigree. You find it way back in Alfred Bester’s work from the fifties, in William Gibson’s cyberpunk realities and everywhere in-between. Specific stuff like the bioplates in Broken Angels and the gecko hands in Woken Furies are usually the result of extrapolation. I’m a climber, and the whole climbing community has been hearing for a while now about a new material which in effect gives you the ability to cling to things like a gecko. This is being tested currently in glove form – I just pushed it into the future and imagined a genetically engineered version of the same thing, built directly into the body’s hands. With the bioplates, it was more an image that I extrapolated from – the idea of a character so steeped in warfare that the weaponry no longer ended in his hands, it went beneath the skin and lived inside him too. One of the great things about the SF genre is the way in which you can allow your future technology to express symbolic imagery of this sort in concrete form.

MC: How long do you envision the Kovacs series to be?

RM: Ah – in fact, it’s done. Woken Furies is the last Kovacs book I’m intending to write. I’ve tried to make each of the three books a little different to the last, and to take Kovacs somewhere new emotionally each time; after Woken Furies I don’t see where else I can take him, and I’m not prepared to just do replica novels until my toes curl up. Almost every long term series character I’ve ever read has eventually declined into weak-assed repetitive mediocrity, and that’s not somewhere I want to go. You’ve got to keep trying something fresh, otherwise you’re not a writer, you’re just a word-whore.

That’s not to say there will never be another Kovacs novel – as a fan in San Diego, Terry Hertzler, told me, in ten years time I’ll be a different guy, and so will Kovacs, so who knows what I might think of to do with him then? But for now, I’m definitely of the opinion that less is more.

MC: Market Forces was a wildly different novel from the Kovacs books. How did that come about?

RM: Market Forces grew out of a single short story idea I had for pointing up the way high powered decision makers in the world of global capital are insulated from the long term consequences of their decisions. Although the story was never published, a film producer friend of mine read it and asked me to turn it into a screenplay for her – which I did. We then spent a fruitless eighteen months trying to get backing to make the film, after which I went off in a sulk and started writing Altered Carbon instead. Then, once I was published, it seemed like an obvious idea to turn the screenplay back into prose and see if it flew as a novel. The irony is that it flew so well that now there’s a movie option out on the book and with a bit of luck and a following wind, it may finally become a movie after all. You can probably guess how I feel about that.

MC: Is there any news to report on either Altered Carbon, your first novel, or Market Forces being made as movies?

RM: As yet, no. Both options are on-going, but in Hollywood terms that can mean anything. They may make the movies, they may not. I try not to worry about it too much. Not like I haven’t got enough else to do.

MC: What are you currently working on?

RM: I’m currently writing a new SF novel called Black Man, which deals with genetic engineering about a hundred years from now. The idea is that in much the same way that we are now looking back at the pollution problems of the twentieth century and dealing with the fallout, so in a hundred years we will be dealing with the fallout from a number of ill-advised experiments and a century of incautious development of gene biotech. Oh yeah, and Mars is being colonised.

MC: Thank you for taking some time to answer my questions!

RM: My pleasure – cheers.

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