culture Chip Zdarsky Strikes Again

The cartoonist talks to Torontoist about Howard the Duck, depicting female sexuality, and the Sex Criminals TV deal.

HOWARD THE ▯UCK SIGNING WITH CHIP ZDARSKY

No One Writes to the Colonel (460 College Street)

March 11, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Free

How seriously should we take the threat of world domination by Marvel Entertainment? Very seriously. Why? Because the comic conglomerate has become so powerful, so influential, so unstoppable, it’s in the midst of a project long thought impossible: reviving Howard the Duck.

Yes, 29 years after his ill-fated, George Lucas–produced movie, and a few months after his surprise appearance in the film Guardians of the Galaxy, the notorious “duck from outer space” is set to emerge from generations of scorn and ridicule. And who is brave enough to take on this Herculean task? No less than Toronto-based artist Chip Zdarsky (the pseudonym of former National Post illustrator Steve Murray), who is writing Marvel’s rebooted Howard the Duck series with artist Joe Quinones.

Zdarsky is best known as the illustrator for Sex Criminals (the alternative comic created with writer Matt Fraction), which follows Suzie and Jon, a couple who can literally stop time during sex, and who use the opportunity to rob banks. The seriocomic sci-fi whatsit was named the #1 graphic novel of 2013 by Time magazine, and was recently optioned for television by Universal TV.

On March 11, Zdarsky will be the guest of honour at a launch party for the first issue of Howard the Duck and the second collected volume of Sex Criminals, hosted by The Beguiling and held at No One Writes to the Colonel (460 College Street). In anticipation, we spoke to him about returning Howard to his roots, and the future of Sex Criminals.

Torontoist: Like a lot of people, my main exposure to Howard the Duck has been through the bad George Lucas movie. Did you know the comics?

Chip Zdarsky: I knew the comics before the movie, or around the same time. I love the movie—I was in Grade 6 when it came out, so I was kind of the perfect age for it. At that age, it’s a walking, talking duck—I’m going to enjoy it on some level. And actually, I really loved the closing song, I don’t know if you…

(*singing*) “Howaaard… the Duck…”

Yeah, yeah… it’s got that great ‘80s movie moment where Howard stumbles onstage, someone throws him a guitar, and he can just play really well. But I loved that song so much as a kid I actually recorded it off the TV.

But I had a weird Uncle Fred, who was the old hippie guy who collected all the underground comics. So whenever I was at his house, I’d go through all the Robert Crumb books I probably shouldn’t have looked at, and Howard the Duck, and I loved them. He kind of bequeathed them to me a few years ago. So when Marvel asked me to pitch on it, I was like, “Oh my God!” and I just pulled out the stack of old black-and-white magazines, and I was ready to go.

Were you surprised to get that offer? I wouldn’t necessarily think Sex Criminals would be on Marvel’s radar.

Sex Criminals was on the radar enough that they started to hire me for cover jobs—which was great, it was a thrill just to do that. I grew up reading those comics, so to be able to draw Spider-Man on a cover, that’s pretty cool. But I would always go a little bit above and beyond with the jokes on the covers, so they gave me a two-page joke thing to do for one of their crossover tie-in issues, and those just went really well. The editor said, “Hey, I don’t know if you saw Guardians of the Galaxy, but Howard’s in it. I think the time’s right for a Howard book. Do you have any ideas?”

The whole process was basically me pitching ideas, getting on the phone with him, writing a script, talking about artists… at no point did anyone say, “You have the job.” So up until the day they announced it, it was just like a weird game of chicken between myself and an editor, pitching each other ideas back and forth. I never really got used to writing Howard the Duck until people started saying, “Hey, guess what, you’re writing Howard the Duck.” “Oh yeah… that’s kind of weird…”



If you’re doing Batman or Superman or something, there are so many rules, and so many fans that are invested. Are you bound by much with Howard the Duck?

There’s both a good and a bad with Howard’s limited run. The good is that there’s not a lot of continuity: you can read 30, 40 issues and you have everything. But, it’s a beloved run—most of that is by the original creator, so anything I do is going to be compared to that. Either I’m not using that creator’s work enough, or I’m using it too much as a crutch.

I’m finding with the Howard comic, I’m trying to weave in as many Marvel characters as I can, because I know I’m going to get fired in five issues, and I want to write Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. With those, it becomes interesting because you have to run those by, like… Spider-Man’s appearance had to be run by the Spider Office. And they call it the “Spider Office.” So they had to make sure it’s in continuity, and in character. I said I want Dr. Strange in issue four, and I got a note back that said, “That should be okay. As far as we know, though, Dr. Strange may be on the other side of the known universe fighting the White Demons at the time.” I never got those notes at the National Post.

Are you able to put your own personality into it?

I think so, yeah… I mean, it’s kind of up to other people to determine. It’s tricky, because if you’re writing Spider-Man, there’s a voice to Spider-Man—you can’t really deviate too much from that. And it’s already in your head: you’ve read the comics, and you know what a Peter Parker quip is going to be. But there are three or four jokes in the first issue that I’m surprised made it through—that felt a bit too much like me, like it was Sex Criminals or my old alternative comics. But so far they’re on board.

The design of Howard looks different from the original comics—it looks a lot like the movie versions. How much direction do you get on the design?

It’s funny; when I first got the job, they asked me to draw, and I couldn’t, because I’m doing Sex Criminals full time. They wanted to push it more towards the current movie version—the one that appeared at the end of Guardians—and I was like, “Ah, I dunno about that, I kinda like the bigger eyes…” But then when they hired Joe Quinones, who’s the artist on the book, and got him to do designs, they were so much better than mine. He’s able to pull off that look: smaller eyes that are still really expressive. Some of it still stems from the old Disney lawsuit back in the day.

That’s still a major concern?

Oh, yeah. The first thing that happened after I got the job, they sent me all the original legal documents where Disney basically redrew Howard for them and said, “Alright, here’s what you have to do: the eyes have to be this big, the feather colours have to be this colour, and he has to wear pants.” And so he still has to wear pants—all those rules still hold up, even though Disney owns Marvel. It may hold up ever more, if they want to differentiate that from Donald.

Those were not problems, really. I don’t really care if he wears pants or not. I have no story beats that involve him not wearing pants.

Is the tone of Sex Criminals easy to get right?

It’s a tricky thing, because when we first started talking about it, it was essentially a sex-joke book—just a couple of guys out-grossing each other. But when we started plotting out the first issue, it became pretty apparent it wasn’t going to be that. The tone changed a lot from concept to issue one, and issue one set the tone, so it’s been pretty easy to keep it.

Matt and I talk on the phone before an issue, hash out ideas, and then he delivers the script fully-formed. At that point, it’s basically up to me to add background jokes, especially if the tone of the issue is less on the funny side. Like, if we’re doing something a bit more serious, I kinda have to find areas where I can still have a joke here and there.

The bathroom scene in issue one is a good example. That was originally another scene that was kind of a downer scene. After reading the script, I was like, “We’ve got a downer, downer, downer, and we solicited this as a joke book, so we should probably get some jokes in there.” The balance seems to have worked. The only problem is, what’s next? How do you up the stakes? How do you keep it fresh? Which I think any creator has to deal with it.

Hopefully we can maintain that. If we can’t, we’ll stop. That’s the nice thing about creating your own series—we’re not going to get kicked off the book; we’re not under obligation to do 100 issues. When we hit the point where the characters wrap up, we can actually wrap it up.

Sex Criminals is very good in its early issues at articulating how pornography and masturbation influence male sexual development. But how do you go about female sexuality?

Matt hit the ball out of the park on that. He talked to a lot of ladies before writing issue one, and got a lot of feedback and their own stories filtered through him for that. That was the tricky thing. When we started to write issue one, we were writing it from Jon’s point of view, and it wasn’t clicking, and I think we just realized it was too easy. It’s a couple of straight white dudes writing about a straight white dude. When the focus became Suzie, it forced Matt and myself to up our game a little bit. Like, I’m not even that good at drawing women—there’s that. And Matt had to explore a bit more through his friends and family what it meant for a women to develop her sexuality at a certain age.

People often discover their sexuality when they’re in their early teens. Was that an area you went into with any trepidation?

Yeah, the depiction was tricky, especially issue one, with Suzie. Her development starts at age 10 or 11, and in the script, yeah, it’s going to have her in a bathtub and she’s going to use a faucet… and looking at that, okay, how do I draw that? It was a good challenge to make it tasteful and accessible. No matter what, whether they’re young or old, our rules for the story have been the same: it’s never about titillation, no matter what. We don’t put anything in the story in order to get a reader aroused. If there’s any nudity in it, it’s situational nudity. So that helps us get around those kinds of issues.

What can you say about the Sex Criminals TV show?

I know about as much as everyone else does. It’s been in the works for a while. I think I signed the paperwork in early December, and I kind of forgot about it. Matt’s agent has been working on it for a while to secure the best deal where we retain the most control, and so the deal has it that Matt basically is in charge of writing the pilot, which is awesome. Usually something like this, you’ve signed the paper and you hand it to somebody who changes everything.

My involvement is up in the air, I guess. Legally, they don’t have to involve me in anything, except for sending me cheques when it does well. And I’m not super-keen to do Hollywood-style work, really. The comics take up so much time I’d rather do that. But if they need consultation for the look of things, I’m happy to do that. I think comic creators can go a little crazy if they get too involved with it.