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Thursday, September 2, 2010
The Bon Alimagno Interview
The Vampirella Editor discusses with Michael May the feasibility of legitimizing T&A
 When Devil's Due and Chaos! Comics announced that their re-launch of Evil Ernie was going to be done by Alan Grant and Tommy Castillo, it got me thinking about the recent trend of bringing serious talent together to tell serious stories about traditionally frivolous characters. I posted over on the Great Curve blog about it and got an interesting email response from Bon Alimagno, Editor of Vampirella.
In my Great Curve post I talked about how Top Cow had hired Ron Marz to breathe new life into Witchblade, a one-dimensional character with nothing going for her but a skimpy costume. Witchblade, like most of the original output of Chaos!, came about in the heyday of the Bad Girl Craze in the ‘90s, when all a character needed to be popular was clothing that was inversely proportionate to the size of her breasts.
The Bad Girl Craze has been over for years and comics readers seem to be looking for more intelligent stories, so it makes sense that publishers try to accommodate that. What doesn't immediately make sense though is that they use T&A characters to do it. Marz's effort with Witchblade has been valiant, but eighty-plus issues establishing the character as being nothing more than sexily bland makes it a difficult battle to fight, much less win.
Chaos! founder Brian Pulido tried to class up the one property he escaped his bankrupt company with when he took Lady Death to CrossGen. It was fairly well-received too. But now she's now gone back to her roots and it’s hard to know how to read that. Was it CrossGen's suggestion to focus more on the storyline than Lady Death's underwear? Did Pulido give up on that take on her because he just prefers the half-naked, Anna Nicole Smith version? Or is the move back the result of serious market analysis and a hard look at sales numbers?
Probably, Pulido just knows what makes his fans happy. I mean, if you look at his other Avatar books, all starring buxom gals in very little clothing, there's definite harmony going on there. Which begs the question, who's on the right track? I wondered if comics that started out as T&A concepts should even try to be anything more than that. Or should they just stick to doing what they do best: titillating the easily amused? I wondered if readers would allow these characters to rise above their roots or simply dismiss them.
A lot of critics have dismissed Frank Cho's take on Shanna the She Devil as simple T&A. I'm actually enjoying it and not just for the cheesecake. It's not a perfectly executed story, but there is a story there and it's engaging me, so I figured that the experiment is sort of possible. I say “sort of” because Cho felt he had to make his Shanna completely different from the established Marvel version to do it. He took the character concept, but created a whole new character from it.
I admitted on the Great Curve that I didn’t have answers to my questions, but that I was curious to see if it's going to work to keep the low-brow characters and create intelligent stories for them. As Editor of probably the most famous of all scantily clad heroines, Bon Alimagno was nice enough to send me a thoughtful email that detailed his perspective on the trend.
What follows isn’t so much an interview as it is a conversation with each of us raising questions and seeing if we could figure out some answers.
Bon: I was intrigued to see you talk about the current trend in “bad girl” comics toward more meaningful content. As the editor of Vampirella, one of the characters at the vanguard of that whole craze in the early nineties, I don't think that trend is really new... for Vampirella it was something that was interrupted and, once restarted, ignored by the general audience. I believe she's been unfairly branded with the “bad girl” scarlet letter... despite being a character capable of great depth.
 Archie Goodwin in the early seventies wrote some of the more compelling Vampi comics ever, ones that used a sort of Dark Shadows formula, thick with horror and seduction. Kurt Busiek revived her in the early nineties, tapping back into that formula but updating it with a more modern sensibility that accepted the kitsch nature of the character, while executing the story as if it were a Vertigo book.
One editor, now the current VP of Operations at Marvel, brought in people like James Robinson, Warren Ellis, and then Grant Morrison and Mark Millar (as a team!) to work on her. The result was a series of stories that were unafraid to find value in this character. Since then, we've had writers like Jay Faerber, Ben Raab, Dan Jolley and Brian Wood work with us... again to tell character-driven stories, not ones fueled by T & A.
I just got elevated to this position in early December. I immediately sought out the best writers I could find, people like Mike Carey and Christopher Priest to see if they'd be willing to work on Vampi. To my surprise, with absolutely no hesitation, they both said yes. So Mike will be re-launching Vampi later this year with Priest following. I'm getting them to tell stories that really get into her psychology as a character, exploring her alien nature and the effects of multiple, contradicting origins. I think people will be pleasantly surprised by the results, the exact sort of meat in the cheesecake you wrote about.
Really, I don't know if it's an industry-wide trend or what... just that editors are either bored or insulted by working with a character with no “there” there. So they go out of their way to either find what makes their characters tick or as you suggested they reboot them – if only for their own sanity.
I've not read the re-launched Witchblade, but seeing what Jim at Top Cow's doing, bringing in the likes of Marz and Terry Moore for Vampi/Darkness, I think he definitely is the sort of person who wants to put out readable stories and not stroke books. Same with me. I just wanted to go as far as I could go in terms of developing a real, honest to god character for Vampi.
And it's been my experience that that's what her fans want. I've gotten calls, I've heard from folks at the cons... They want her to be more than a pin-up, they want her to feel real and the best way to do that is to, yeah, add meat to the cheesecake.
Michael: I think it's meaningful that as I was writing the Great Curve article, Vampirella never entered my mind as an example of what I was talking about. I know about the dark period you mentioned, but like you said, that's an abnormality in a long career. Vampirella started as something more than simple T&A, so she's got a head start on characters like Lady Death and Witchblade and Purgatori and a mess of others we could mention.
Still, the effects of that dark period have lingered. I was pretty into Vampirella when she first went color back whenever that was, but became disinterested as she entered the T&A period. Your plans for her are exactly what it would take to get me interested in her and buying her books again, but in the meantime, it sounds like Harris has been steadily moving in that direction already with folks like Faerber and Wood. The problem is that I missed out on that because I'd already formed a perception of what Vampi had become and simply allowed her to slip off my radar. While adding some meat to her is more like returning to her origins than trying on something new, I'm assuming that there are other readers who will need to be won back. Do you think that hiring recognizable, respected writers is enough to do the trick?
Let me use Lady Death to explain where I'm going with that question. When CrossGen got her, the first thing they did was redesign her look into something less suggestive. That went a long way in communicating to readers that this was a much more meaningful take on the character. Obviously, that was a lot easier to do for her than for someone whose outfit has as long a history as Vampirella's, but I'm wondering if stepping completely away from the cheesecake is a viable model to follow. Not only for Vampirella, but for any character who's been tainted by the T&A factor. I'm sure you'd get letters from long-time fans about that change, so my question is sincere. I don't know if it would be viable or not.
It occurs to me though that in Ron Marz's Witchblade, the main character stays in street clothes the whole time and never gets into the revealing outfit. That might be another example of the CrossGen/Lady Death model if it weren't for the sexy Greg Land covers that show her in the costume. Maybe Top Cow is trying to figure out how to please both groups? But if that's the case, are they doing themselves a disservice by having those covers send a message that nothing's really changed?
Bon: I don't think Top Cow's doing a disservice... if anything, it's good business. Any magazine, movie, TV show, comic book, etc. gets drastically more attention and likely higher sales if an attractive woman is featured on the cover or promo art. That's just human nature and nothing can be done about it. We'd be stupid not to follow suit as well. The key is to make sure that there's something underneath that cover to keep and hold the buyer's attention. And the key to that nowadays is good writing which is why I asked the likes of Mike Carey, Christopher Priest and others to write Vampi.
I figure the last thing any would-be critic could say about Vampirella now is that it's just a “stroke book.” That's ridiculous. These guys don't do stroke books. Same thing with what Top Cow's doing: Ron Marz, Terry Moore and the like don't write anything less than quality, character-driven stories. But is bringing in respected writers going to work to change the perception of these so called “bad girl” characters? I don't know. Honestly I believe it won't.
A few years ago we did this crossover with Witchblade. The story's title was “Brooklyn Bounce.” As soon as an article about it was posted on one of the comic news sites, a blogger took one of Steve Pugh's panels featuring a very buxom Vampirella, reprinted the title and wrote something like, “Need I say anything more?” Knee jerk reaction of course is that, yeah, this was just going to be another one of those exhaustingly bad T&A books. Thing is, it was written by Brian Wood. Brian doesn't do stroke books. If people didn't get the obvious joke of the title, then, OK. But dismissing it out of hand and seemingly lumping it in with some of the snuff of the mid-‘90s is a disservice to folks like Brian who, yeah, went out on a limb for us and took on a character against his rep to tell a good story.
Everyone already knows what they want and what they don't want and no one's eager to change that. If anything that's what the industry is currently relying on for any small measure of success it can find. But “bad girl” books have been relegated to a kind of ghetto of the industry that fits into the “what they don't want” neighborhood. And that's my biggest concern with the Vampirella re-launch: will we be able to break through that iron wall of preconceived notions and find the audience I know would enjoy it if they just gave it a chance. It's so hard in today's market place to do that.
I think many out there view putting the “meat” in the “cheesecake” as you put it, telling great stories with Bad Girl characters, should feel unnatural. Well, it does. I'm totally aware that we aren't telling Shakespeare here, we're telling stories featuring half-naked women. But that shouldn't be considered a limitation, but a strength: by their very nature, these characters, especially Vampirella, are able to push the limits of propriety and good taste. That doesn't mean telling lewd, pornographic stories, but ones hell-bent on upsetting the social order and questioning society's staid values. That's something we shouldn't shy away from but embrace. Therein lies an enormous amount of storytelling potential that, I think, great writers have and will take advantage of.
When I first came to Harris I certainly thought that Vampi fit the “bad girl” mold. But after reading Vampi stories by the likes of Goodwin, Ellis, Robinson, and Morrison/Millar, I saw just how much potential and value this character really possessed. So the big challenge is educating the greater comic readership out there to give these characters the chance they deserve.
 Michael: The press release you sent out about Vampirella #0 made me think of something else. That's one, beautiful cover you have there. It's sexy, but not pornographic. Not even soft-core. There's gradations of “sexy.” GQ and Esquire have sexy women in them, but not like Maxim and FHM do. And Maxim and FHM don't go so far as Playboy, which doesn't go as far as Penthouse and Hustler and so on. Your Vampirella cover strikes me as being GQ/Esquire sexy. Most of the Witchblade covers are like that too (or, at most, Swimsuit Illustrated sexy) except for the one that looks like she's having an orgasm. When you compare those to a lot of the Bad Girl books from the '90s, there's an obvious difference.
We haven't talked about books like Wonder Woman because she never really became a part of the Bad Girl craze, but she's the Queen Mother of Sexy Costume Wearing Heroines. And DC has never, to my knowledge, shown her on a cover all bent over with her butt up in the air or with her legs spread. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bondage, whatever... there's a feminist issue there that deserves the attention it's received, but that's not what we're talking about. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I doubt most guys actually find Wonder Woman sexier when she's tied up than when she's not. My point, which I'm dangerously close to getting away from, is that Wonder Woman covers, generally speaking, have been sexy without becoming tasteless.
And maybe that's how one goes about selling a cheesecake book that people can take seriously.
Bon: It's funny you bring up Wonder Woman. I saw this WW history book a while back with reprinted fan mail from the forties or fifties. One actually asked for more bondage-type scenes. In the letter writer's view it made her look stronger to struggle and, I'm assuming, break out of chains and manacles and the like. Sort of perverted logic there.
You're right that doing more seductive-looking as opposed to skanky covers wouldn't carry the “bad girl” baggage. But, again, I feel that these characters were buried so deep in the bad girl genre, it'll be difficult to dig them out. It would require a sort of industry-wide trend toward Jusko/Chiodo-esque covers, with stories that match that intent.
Really, that's why companies are doing so many of these cheaper, bargain intro issues, because you need a sledgehammer to break through the walls of preconceptions that strangle this industry. Unfortunately, that's a pricey hammer – the investment put into these issues to price them so low whether it be 10 cents or a dollar is way more than what most comic fans realize. I wish it was easier.
At this point in the conversation, both Bon and I started to digress, so we decided to end it there and save other topics for other articles. It’ll be interesting though to see if this trend works out. Obviously, I have a lot less staked in it than Bon does, but it’s still a fascinating experiment and I can’t wait to see how it comes out. I’m hoping it does, because I always enjoy seeing good writers rise to difficult challenges. And I’m especially curious to see if Mark Waid has a Purgatori story in him.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
