Flashback February

Flashback February: Alex Ross

Published

10 years ago

February 29, 2016

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♦2016 is an anniversary for Tripwire. It marks the 24th anniversary of the magazine, which began back in February 1992. So for the rest of February, we shall be representing some of our classic moments over the past 23 years. In Tripwire Volume 1#12, out in Spring 1996, we interviewed future superstar Alex Ross about co-creating DC’s Kingdom Come with writer Mark Waid. So on the last day of February, here it is…

Son of A Preacher Man

“When you watch the Max Fleischer cartoons, I think you’ll find Superman a much more inspirational figure than the current Fabio-like one that you have today.”
Alex Ross is not one to hold back on his opinions. Since I started TRIPWIRE, I have to honestly say that I haven’t enjoyed an interview the way I enjoyed conducting this one. It’s not easy being a comic superstar. People pestering you constantly at conventions, no time to yourself. Many people turn into obnoxious,
walking egos. Not Alex Ross. Ever since Marvels hit the stands in 1994, he has maintained a very low profile. Some covers and the odd short story but nothing major. May of this year will change all that with the publication of Kingdom Come, a four-part prestige format series set sometime in the future of the DC Universe. Expectations of this comic are incredibly high but Alex Ross is characteristically unfazed.
Kingdom Come is much more Alex Ross’s project than Marvels was. He’s had a significant amount of input and collaboration with Mark Waid:
“The seeds were first grown for Kingdom Come when I was working on Marvels. Halfway through anything, I think about possibilities for my next project. So I thought ‘I want to do this thing at DC’ but DC was going to be hard to tangle with because I already knew from previous experience that they were real sticklers
for the way that their copyrighted characters look. I couldn’t have done a retro thing with DC because their past no longer existed. The thing I enjoyed the most about working on Marvels was that the central character, Phil Sheldon, was based on a real man, and this lent realism to the project. I’d always wanted to use my
dad as a main character for something. My dad is a seventy three year old minister. He looks like a throwback to the 1930s, with pure white hair and white beard. It was unusual because, for one thing, you never really see older people being used in comics, especially not as motivating characters.”
When it was first announced, some people accused DC of trying to cash in on the success of Marvels with Kingdom Come. But Alex convinces me that the two projects are miles apart:
“The sense is that it’s twenty years or so in the future but quite honestly, it’s a commentary on today. Things don’t look any different to nowadays. But if there’s this large number of superheroes in society, why do they never make an impact upon society at large? If you take what’s going on now and look at everybody being published in comics, in the future you will have superheroes almost as a percentage of the population. In Kingdom Come, there’s a sense that the old guard live in the background of society. Of course, after fifty years of letting superheroes go about their business and do whatever they like unfettered results in a sense of chaos. The state of chaos looks similar to what is the average Image or X-Men comic with gangs fighting gangs. The only way that you can tell the difference is by the colour of the costumes. I point out as reference to this the fact that the DC vs Marvel/ Marvel vs DC crossover divides the two universes simply by nothing more than a red god-like being and a blue god-like being pitting each of their players against one another.”
The state of the comic market today is something that’s examined allegorically in Kingdom Come. Alex Ross has taken a lot of care to try and introduce elements that aren’t ever seen in comics usually:
“We set the stage for the main part of the story. The problem is that there’s too many superheroes and too little reason. Whenever they fight in public, people get hurt. It’s something that you never pay attention to in your average comic book. They’re not really worried about the bystanders so much as just beating the ass end of the other guy, and there’s a certain etiquette that’s been lost to the whole process. When we see Superman at the beginning of our story, he’s out of the biz. He’s not really in retirement but he’s abandoned what he had devoted himself to for all those years. But you will see him as the figure that commands the most respect and certainly his stepping back into the fray could trigger off a season of change. But, of course, that season of change that he’s going to bring is not going to be good. One of the first things that happens is that the main character, Norman McCay, comes into contact with the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, who is about a hundred. Dodds passes on his visions of the future to McCay.”
Alex Ross has a definite conscious reason behind using his father as the central figure. His father is a minister, hence the tacky headline, and Alex wanted to portray churchmen in a different light:
“Part of this idea came to me because my father is a minister. He actually goes and visits a lot of people who are elderly and infirm. I always thought of this as an interesting function that people don’t usually associate with ministers. The average idea in America, and I’m sure it’s the same case in Britain too, is that ministers are guys in the black coats and the white collars. If you want to see one you’ll go over there. The fact is that that’s priests and Catholicism. That has nothing to do with Christianity. What I wanted to give the world was a sense that he doesn’t have to dress like that. One thing about my father is that he’s never ever worn one of those fuckin’ outfits!.”
Alex gets quite irate at this stage. It is a very refreshing facet of his personality that he speaks his mind. Someone was telling me that this is because he’s a Texan.
After this slight deviation, we continue to chat about Kingdom Come. Alex speaks in quite an elaborate manner. You don’t often think of artists as people with lots to say. The purpose of the original Sandman is integral to Kingdom Come: “You get a sense here that Wesley Dodds is dying. As you probably know, people
who hold onto religion are the elderly and McCay has to give Dodds some sense of peace as Sandman is dying. Sandman is significant because he comes from the first era of superheroes and if he was alive at this time, he would be the longest-living character in the DC universe. And, by his passing on, he has literally
passed on these visions to the main character. These visions become something which torments him, as a religious man, and the comparison is made with The Book of Revelations, in The Bible. This was Mark [Waid]’s idea by the way. It’s very loosely inspiration as far as the way that McCay is interpreting these things,
with the superheroes seen as symbolising these grand icons.”
There is definitely a feeling of almost a biblical epic with Kingdom Come. The religious connections continue:
“The Spectre comes from out of nowhere to state that he is more or less a figure of God. He is an instrument of God’s vengeance, here to perform judgement upon the great cataclysm. To go back to Norman McCay’s purpose in Kingdom Come, he is there as the ears and eyes of ordinary people but he’s going to filter the experience for those people who aren’t comic fiends the way that Mark Waid and I are. So, The Spectre takes McCay on a tour which is very similar to the scene with the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol.
The Spectre is the Ghost of Christmas Present, if you like, because nothing he’s showing him is happening at any other time than the present. But he takes him to an invisible plane where The Spectre and McCay can watch every event as it happens from an unseen point of view.”
Ordinary people and ordinary life is very much a part of Kingdom Come. The differences between Kingdom Come and Marvels are even more obvious:
“We get to see personal scenes of superheroes that you didn’t get to see in Marvels, so this is pure extension of the ideas in Marvels with more satisfaction for the superhero hungry reader.”
Alex Ross is fairly unique in that he utilises a lot of photographic reference in his work. He isn’t bothered by criticism that some people think that using photos is a cop-out:
“As I like to point out to everybody, you have no idea how bad the references are that I get. In my own defence, this stuff is exceptionally poorly lit, and a lot of times I work from stuff that’s out of focus. On occasion, I’ve posed dolls for a lot of background characters but they didn’t need to be a certain physical type. With the main cast in Kingdom Come, I’ve made a conscious effort to differentiate characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Lex Luthor. All these people are very specific entities and characters. They’re not cookie cutter versions of one another.
The idea here is that I’m going to try and use the realism aspect to bring a sense that Superman and Batman don’t look physically alike. The main problem I had with these characters was that, with fifty years of history, what do you assume these features to be? The creative part for me has been to try and imagine how
they would look like in reality and to go back to the vision that the original creators had. My Wonder Woman is a little updated. She’s presented as being as beautiful as you could make her. But she’s portrayed as a character that you should take seriously. This ruled out the possibility of doing a perfect period feel for her. The loincloth skirt that I’ve drawn her works as a sexy device but also gives a sense of the very early skirt that she wore when she first appeared.”
Alex Ross describes Kingdom Come as ‘The last great war between superheroes’.
It sounds to me as if it will be something with much more depth and characterisation than that. I’m certain that whatever project Alex Ross is involved with after Kingdom Come (It may be a Vertigo miniseries featuring a forties DC character but that’s not confirmed) will be interesting and unique.