"Steve Englehart Interview"
DEC 2000 Product
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Steve Englehart has written numerous comics during his
career including Justice League of America, Detective, and Green Lantern for DC, The Night Man for Malibu, and Avengers, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer, and the recent Hellcat mini-series for
Marvel. This month, he pens Fantastic Four's Big Town, a story of a Marvel
Universe that might have been. Worlds of Westfield Content Editor Roger Ash recently spoke with Englehart
about Fantastic Four's Big Town.
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Westfield:
What is Fantastic Four's Big Town?
Steve
Englehart: The whole thing that Marvel is built on, and I think it was
certainly a good way to go, is that reality didn't really change when the super
heroes came. It was still our reality and the super heroes were living their
secret identied lives amongst normal people. But I thought, once Reed Richards
and Tony Stark started inventing giant machines to fight off Dr. Doom and repel
Galactus and things like that, there would not only be the psychological change,
in the fact that Galactus nearly ate New York and people would react to that,
but on a more practical level, there would be all these advances. It's like they
always say, if you do the moon shot, you get real useful things out of it. If
they had invented all this stuff, if they had gone so far out beyond the cutting
edge in order to accomplish what they were doing, that stuff would feed back
into the general population. To come to the bottom line, once Reed Richards took
his girlfriend, his best friend, and his girlfriend's brother into a rocket and
went to space and came back with super powers, the world started to change at
that point. Big Town begins 10 years to the day after that, because the
general conceit these days is that the entire history of Marvel took place in
ten years. So, New York has become the focal point of the world because the
super heroes are there. The FF is there, the Avengers are there, Professor X and
Hank Pym are there. There's a street gang in New Jersey called the Mutts, which
is short for Mutants, and it's basically the original X-Men. Because of all of
this, there never was a Silicon Valley. Everybody who was interested in that
kind of thing came to New York because that's where Reed Richards and Tony Stark
were. The entire history of the world has been reshaped by the fact that these
people exist. What I'm saying is, here is the Marvel Universe if that had
happened. It's extrapolating from the original Marvel thing, but going in this
direction rather than the one that they took. Some people have said, "Is
this an Elseworlds?" I'd say it's The Road Not Taken. It's called Big
Town because it's this huge city. Physically, New York is now three
times the size that it was. It encompasses a good chunk of New Jersey, a good
chunk of New York state, and a good chunk of Connecticut. All of it has been
rebuilt because there's been so much money and so much technology. The
technology was a good thing; everybody really got into it. Which isn't to say
there aren't bad parts of town still, but it's the Marvel ethos that super
heroes are good and do good, taken in this different direction. The other
meaning of Big Town is that it's like going to the "big town." It
has that glamour. And it does have the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers, and the
original X-Men, and a few random other people, all living in this same place and
so they interact. It's not a question of that this is the Fantastic Four's book
and maybe the Avengers might guest star. No. They all live in this place so they
all hang out together and they get into adventures together.
Westfield:
What's the story of the mini-series?
Englehart:
Reed always thought that if he invented something that would be useful to normal
people, he would find a way to manufacture it and get it out to them.
Inadvertently, he became extremely rich and extremely famous, more so than he is
in the regular Marvel Universe. Which is very embarrassing to him. In the first
issue, because this is the 10th anniversary, people are continually kissing his
@$$. He's going, "Look. I did what I thought was the right thing to do.
Don't worry about it." But there's a major corporate empire based in the
Baxter Building and there are thousands of people who work for them. Among them,
down in the computer room, was a computer programmer named Sally Juárez. She
was cute and Johnny Storm was walking by one day and saw her and now they're
about to get married.
But,
if this had happened, and if the whole axis of the world had shifted to New
York, where does that leave Doctor Doom and Magneto? Despite the fact that they
each want to rule the world, and each therefore has very little use for the
others, Doctor Doom, Magneto, the Red Skull, Ultron, Prince Namor, and the Hulk
have all banded together to stop this. Each has his own reason. Doom is
defending Latveria. The Sub-Mariner is defending Atlantis. But they feel that if
they don't hang together, they will hang separately and history will completely
pass them by. Over the course of the limited series, you've got the personal
story of the Fantastic Four which happens to be right about the time that these
guys are going to launch an attack on the city and try to bring it down.
Westfield:
Will the series be focused mainly on the heroes, or will we be seeing some of
the average person's perspective of what's happened?
Englehart:
Both, but mostly on the heroes. I was aware of Marvels and Astro
City, which took it from a normal person's perspective and looked at the
heroes upward, but I had so many heroes, all in the same city, that that was a
driving force. Still, the spine of the story is Johnny marrying a normal girl.
When we first catch the Fantastic Four in the first issue, they're going to
dinner to meet her family for the first time out in the rebuilt Bronx.
Westfield:
Who are you working with on the series?
Englehart:
Mike McKone and Mark McKenna. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted,
visually, as I was thinking this out because there are a lot of themes. Because
it was taking the original Marvel and taking it to this big, successful point
that wasn't on the original trip, I naturally came back to the most successful
part of that trip. But this is not a case of wanting to replicate the 60s.
Around FF #50 when Galactus was arriving and the Inhumans were showing
up and the Black Panther first appeared, there was a period there where Stan and
Jack were at the height of everything they could do and it pointed the way for a
lot of what Marvel would continue to do for a long time. I wanted to capture
that SPIRIT. So I went to my local comic book store and I started looking
through the racks and talking to the guys who own it. I said, "I've got
this image, and I want somebody who can draw this big, open, expansive,
optimistic kind of thing." They suggested people and it didn't work. I kept
looking and eventually I got to some Mike McKone Iron
Man stuff, and that was it. I wanted somebody who could do people,
because I do people, and I wanted somebody who could draw cityscapes, because
that's what a lot of this is about. And he did all of that. So we went out and
tried to get him and were fortunate enough to do so. He generally works with
Mark McKenna, so we got lucky there, too.
Westfield:
You've also been working on some TV projects. What's the difference between
writing for comics and writing for TV?
Englehart:
Primarily space considerations. I always like to pack as much story as I can
into the space available. That's always been something that I wanted to do - to
give people full value for their money. I took that with me into television,
where you think in terms of four acts in 43 minutes. Then, when I came back to
comics, 22 pages was not very much anymore in terms of trying to get stories as
I envisioned them. Big Town has a lot of pages over its length, but it was tough
getting my vision into them.
Westfield:
I've been enjoying the Hellcat
mini-series you're writing. Are you planning to do more with the character or
would you like to?
Englehart:
Tom Brevoort, Kurt Busiek, and Fabian Nicieza brought her back in the Avengers
and Thunderbolts
Annuals this past summer. Big
Town had already been approved by this time, but Tom came and said we've
got a three issue Hellcat
mini-series which will come out sooner that I'd like you to do. It was a lot of
fun. Norm Breyfogle and I really enjoyed working with each other and enjoyed
working on her. You'll notice in the two issues that are out thus far, I rarely
call her Hellcat. I keep calling her "Patsy" because it's about this
GIRL. She keeps saying "I'm just a normal girl," and she is. It's
about a person who just happens to have all these powers. When it got done, I
was hoping she would not fade back into limbo. Now Marvel's announced this
project that Kurt and Erik Larsen are doing, the Defenders, which has the
main group, which is Dr. Strange, the Hulk and the Sub Mariner, I guess, and
then people like Hellcat and Valkyrie and others who are kind of like on call.
My impression is that Hellcat will not be appearing regularly, but that could
change at a moment's notice. Our series seems to be attracting enough interest
that it may come to that. I would have loved to have done more with her, but I
don't have a venue for it. I am talking with Tom Brevoort, and through him to
Marvel, about another limited series in which I would expect her to guest star,
but that's not approved yet, so I don't know if I'll have that chance there or
not.
Westfield:
Do you have any upcoming projects?
Englehart:
That's it at this point. This reconnection between me and Marvel seems to have
gone well on both sides. I really enjoyed doing Hellcat. They enjoyed
working with me and Norm. The book is a three-issue series about an obscure
character, so it isn't going to rival the X-Men,
but it's doing well for what it is. They're happy with that. The Big
Town thing after that, everybody's very happy about that, so I would
expect that there would be more. The caveat being that the industry is sort of
shrinking all the time so it's not as easy as it once was to say "we like
you, do something". It's all got to go through profit and loss analyses and
all this kind of stuff. It's not necessarily a writer/editor decision about this
kind of stuff, but I would like to do more. I've always liked doing comics, but
unfortunately the business isn't as robust as it once was. That's the nature of
doing them now.
Westfield:
Any closing comments?
Englehart:
I've always liked exploring new territory. If you give me an established
character, I'll try to find something new. With Hellcat, I didn't want to
revisit her; I wanted to find where she was NOW after all that she had gone
through. It's fun doing Big
Town because it's another way to do something that I haven't done before
and, in fact, nobody's done before.
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