Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Ed Brubaker%27s new spy series %27Velvet%27 debuts Oct. 23

His horror noir %27Fatale%27 wraps its fourth story arc next month

%27Captain America%3A The Winter Soldier%27 is based on one of Brubaker%27s classic story lines

When Ed Brubaker and his wife were hiking in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles and he ventured past where Raymond Chandler used to live, naturally Brubaker took lots of pictures.

That shouldn't come as a jaw-dropping third-act reveal to his fans since Brubaker himself has become a master of the noir and pulp that permeated one of his favorite eras.

He's brought elements of both to superhero comics as a scribe of not only Marvel Comics' Captain America series but also DC Comics' Catwoman and Gotham Central, his classic book with co-writer Greg Rucka that took a tough and gritty look at being a Gotham City cop with the likes of Batman and his villains running around.

He's put that fare aside, however, to focus on a pair of books with fantastic femmes fatales.

Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips' Image Comics series Fatale melds noir with horror as it takes the immortal Josephine and the men mysteriously attracted to her from the 1930s on, while Velvet (debuting Oct. 23) is his new Image book with his old Captain America partner, artist Steve Epting, that centers on Velvet Templeton, a secretary with the secret secret-agent skills of a female James Bond type.

Those take up about half of his work life — Brubaker also devotes a good amount of time to screenwriting, like his Oscar-nominated uncle John Paxton (Crossfire, The Wild One) before him. Brubaker has written two movie screenplays and two TV pilots in the past year and a half, and he is working with director David Slade on a big-screen adaptation of Coward, the first book in his and Phillips' noir-tinged crime series Criminal.

Like many of us, though, when he's not working he finds himself "distracting myself from writing by looking at the stupid Internet," Brubaker says with a chuckle. "That is my life. It's my way of connecting with people."

The writer, who splits time between Seattle and Los Angeles, talks with USA TODAY about what's to come in Velvet and Fatale, working in TV and watching his Winter Soldier story line unfold on the big screen in the upcoming Captain America sequel.

Q. Have you found living in L.A. to be inspirational to your writing?

A. A little bit. The whole time I've been down in L.A., I keep wondering how anybody gets any work done there. (Laughs) People are always going out and doing stuff and getting together for parties. I just keep thinking, "When does anyone write? Everyone's in meetings all the time." That was the biggest thing.

There are several clichés about L.A. that are 100% correct. You'll spend the first half hour of every meeting talking about what way you drove to get there. But really, I've had this Hollywood fascination just because my uncle was a screenwriter in the '40s and '50s who was pretty famous at that time. We would go up when I was a kid to visit L.A. and go to Universal Studios and visit my aunt and uncle.

I always saw his bound screenplays and awards — he was one of my big inspirations to become a writer. A lot of his friends were members of the Hollywood Ten, he wrote two or three Eddie Dmytryk movies, so he had really interesting Hollywood stuff. I've always been fascinated by that era.

Q. We've seen a lot of that throwback noir and pulp stuff from you over the years. Were there certain key movies or novels you grew up with that set you on this path?

A. My dad always took us to the Bond movies even when I was far too young for them. He would watch any spy movie. And then later when I turned 18, I was told the family secret that my uncle was a big CIA agent and had been since the mid-'50s. I've been fascinated with that world ever since then. And I found out my dad was not just some guy in the Navy — he had been in naval intelligence. There was this whole other side to my personal history that led me to this lifelong fascination with this world.

I would talk to my dad about it after I would read books if he'd read it, and he'd tell me which parts were (wrong) and what parts were accurate.

I found out recently that my brother started down that path before he ended up going to law school instead. I was kind of impressed by that.

I have my uncle's medal from when he retired from the CIA, and apparently he only got to keep the medal because at some point his cover was blown in the '60s and he moved up the chain to become a guy who managed other people. If you're still covert I guess when you retire, they keep your medal in a safe.

Not to say that I don't make up a lot of (stuff) or get stuff wrong on purpose because the realistic way is incredibly boring. Most police work if you're a detective is either stakeouts or talking to people, and that's super boring in a comic. (Laughs) You didn't see too much of that in Gotham Central.

Q. With your dad and uncle being so involved, did you ever consider going into the intelligence field yourself?

A. Oh, God no. I was pretty far on my way to being a writer and an artist when I found out all that stuff. I don't understand why, maybe it's because I grew up on military bases, but I have a huge anti-authoritarian streak in me. I cannot abide being told what to do by anybody. (Laughs) So I would be the worst soldier of all time.

Q. What's the gist of Velvet?

A. It's hard to describe it without using the archetypal words for it. It plays with a lot of the stereotypes and archetypes of the spy genre, like the Girl Friday and the superspy and the technology of like the Bond films and Mission: Impossible. But it's kind of like if John le Carré had done a Bond novel.

There's this archetypal secretary who's in a lot of spy movies and novels — the Moneypenny type. It goes through pulp fiction, this Girl Friday idea, and I thought, "What if that character was also a Modesty Blaise or Black Widow type? What if that was her secret past?"

It's touching on a lot of the stuff I love about the spy genre that's been in comics, but it's never been in comics that much in America. You've got the Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff that Jim Steranko did and the odd thing here and there. I really wanted to do something that felt like the kind of thing that Steve and I did really well, but that also felt like a different way into those stories.

Q. Spy stories have been very popular on screen and in novels. Do you have any insight on why not in comics?

A. To do the kind of version people expect to see in comics is to do the widescreen spectacle stuff, and in that way you're just doing the same kind of thing superhero comics do. For some reason the audience that love those Steranko Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics is a smaller fraction of the comic-reading audience. I don't exactly understand why — that was stuff I loved from the time I was a kid because it looked so cool and I loved that mysterious nature of it.

Maybe because a lot of realistic espionage is the most interesting kind to some degree. That's one of the things we're trying to do in Velvet is find that middle ground between a realistic espionage story and that over-the-top Mission: Impossible/James Bond kind of stuff. Where I came down on that ground is when you have those amazing over-the-top action scenes, the violence in them needs to be incredibly realistic. I thought, "That can be the distinction. People can still be doing amazing things, but someone can still get shot in the face."

Q. What's been a surprising aspect for you about finding Velvet's voice?

A. I hadn't written a first issue in a long time that wasn't for Sean or wasn't for somebody you already knew who they were, like a Marvel or DC character. Suddenly I realized after the first five pages, oh (crap), nobody knows this world. (Laughs) I had to stop and go back into my outline and move some stuff around and expand, and the first issue just kept getting longer and I was like, "Uh oh."

I had all these years to think about this character. She just kept growing in my head over the last five or six years till the point where she stepped away from this Girl Friday archetype and became this real character in my head. I started understanding her backstory and knowing what her whole history was and what happened to her that made her stop being a secret agent and become a secretary.

A lot of the stuff I write in Fatale is very dark or doomed, and Velvet is actually a character you can root for because she's going to be in a tough situation, but also there's a lightness and sarcastic tone to the way she looks at the world. I knew her well enough by the time I started actually writing her narration that I could watch her go from dark to light immediately. That's been a lot of fun for me, to write a character with a good sense of humor.

Q. Fatale wraps up its fourth arc next month with issue 19, set in the 1990s Seattle rock scene. You've gone through many decades so far, are you excited about finally getting to modern times or do you have a soft spot for the old stuff?

A. During the next arc after this one, there will still be flashbacks to things here and there throughout history. I've been following this trajectory almost on instinct — there was a point where I wasn't even going to have a '90s arc and then I realized there was still stuff I haven't really explored with Jo and who she is and what she can do and what's happened to her. I wanted to flesh out more sides to her and the curse that she has. Then suddenly that opened up a path for me to do a story that has turned out to be the best one so far.

I'm excited to get to the modern stuff just because there's an intentional repetition to the way the story lines have gone, and the fourth one veers off from that a lot. You can still feel a sense of impending doom for anybody who comes into contact with her, and in the next story line that is really flipped on its head. Anybody who's been reading this far in will be pretty stunned by the way things go in the fifth story line.

You get hints in the fourth story line about how she's really taken control of her own destiny, and that's a lot of what the next story line is about. Her trajectory throughout the story has been one that goes from victim to not victim, hopefully. I don't want to reveal too much, but it is a noir.

Q. Do you intend on staying in modern day for the duration of the series, or have you considered venturing into the future?

A. I'm not sure exactly. A lot of it is still to be decided. I decided at some point around issue 10 or so that I wasn't going to say how long Fatale was going to go. I was going to write it till it's done. Until I get further into the next story line, I won't know what's coming after that. I have an idea of how the ending will be but it's still coming together.

Q. Will you give people a one arc's head's up — sort of a two weeks' notice?

A. (Laughs) Maybe. There's no benefit in that. Your numbers don't go up like they do on TV. If only.

Q. Maybe you can break up the final story line over two years. That seems to be a thing now.

A. Yeah. Can you honestly believe how many people are watching the finale of Breaking Bad? It's like 7 million people last Sunday night, and Season 2's highest rating was 800,000 people.

Q. But that one was one of the shows that really started the whole binge-watching craze.

A. Totally. You can catch up on Breaking Bad in two weeks and be ready for the finale. It's amazing to see it happen that way because it's a miracle they can get around in a lot of ways just because of its quality. It's the joy of cable television these days.

Q. As a screenwriter yourself, is it cool to see just how smart TV is now?

A. I want to see it catching onto the networks more. I'm excited to see what comes out of the next year or so because the networks are being driven out of competition in some ways. You've got shows like The Walking Dead that gets higher ratings than almost anything on any of the networks. Game of Thrones is on HBO, but how many millions of people watch it around the world? The networks are going to have to by nature try to become competitive and a little more like the European channels where you do shorter seasons.

I've gone through pilot season twice and done three TV pilots. Two of them I'm really happy with the way they turned out and I felt like the people I was working with were really great. The notes I got from them actually made them better.

One of them, I went through the very typical studio-system notes that you hear about, the nightmare. I had actually thought that all of the screenwriter people are just complaining about getting notes at all — "I've gotten great notes! I don't know what these people are talking about." And then I had that complete experience of "Oh no, she can't be this age, she has to be 22. And the dead guy has to be alive. Can it be more like Moonlighting?" Literally, that was a note.

I see why all the really great shows are on cable. People will complain about some of these showrunners being really iron-fisted, but I think that came from a lot of people watch David Chase not budge and get his way on everything and make The Sopranos amazing.

Coming from comics to TV is a lot more similar because they're both, in my career-wise, very writer-driven, where features are very much about collaborating with a director. If you've got a good director, it's similar to when you're collaborating with an artist except they're in charge, which is weird. (Laughs)

Q. Is there a TV show that most influenced your writing overall?

A. When I first was starting to get my career moving coming from independent comics into working on Scene of the Crime and Batman and even Sleeper, The Sopranos was actually a huge influence at that point. I never talked about it to anybody and nobody ever noticed but I literally didn't think I could write commercially. The biggest stretch I thought was, well, maybe I could write a mystery. I thought I was a very indie-minded, non-commercial guy.

I was at an arts festival in Savannah, Ga., and I turned on HBO in the hotel. I hadn't had HBO in years and they were showing the college episode of The Sopranos, when (Tony Soprano) takes his daughter to go visit the college and runs into a guy in witness protection. That just lit my brain on fire and made me realize that I could write the kind of story I wanted to write in other mediums and then even try to find ways to fit that kind of tone into superhero comics like Batman.

It was a big moment. At that point, I thought most TV shows were pretty crappy other than The Larry Sanders Show.

Q. Velvet and Fatale are your major comics right now, with no superhero stuff on your plate. Do you miss those in capes and masks yet?

A. Part of it is just enjoying working on my own schedule and not having to do comics where the end of every story is that everyone puts on costumes and goes and punches each other. At some point when having to do 18 issues a year of everything, I hit some sort of a wall — I was having a really hard time figuring out third acts for anything because I had written so many superhero comics, they were all blending together in my head. I just thought, OK, I've done enough of these.

I had never intended to do superhero comics as long as I did. I was just having an amazing time on Captain America. I was always the guy trying to make his superhero comics different originally, and some of my stuff didn't sell like when I was doing Catwoman and Gotham Central. Greg and I were sneaking our cop comic into the Gotham City world and totally getting away with never showing Batman. That was always my thing, making a different kind of comic like Sleeper, an espionage comic that just happened to have superheroes in it.

Every day I get pages from Epting now and that part of my brain is on fire. It's fun to work with a guy like Steve where you can write these amazingly choreographed action scenes and detailed cityscapes, and he totally taps into this other side of my brain. Hopefully that fulfills the part of it that had fun doing superhero comics.

Q. With Marvel's Agents of SHIELD about to premiere, all sorts of people think a Gotham Central show is totally doable now, too.

A. The book is actually more popular now than when we were doing it. There's been talk of Gotham Central on TV since when we were doing the comic even (in the mid-2000s). Everyone at Warner Bros. really loved it. Chris Nolan after they did Birds of Prey had asked them to just please not do any Batman-related stuff until he was done with his trilogy — looking at Birds of Prey, you can see why. It was not the world's greatest pilot.

Every season, I wait to see if they're going to announce something like that, and just a couple of months ago there was some article in the Hollywood Reporter about them supposedly developing it. I haven't heard any confirmation on it or anything. You can easily see it.

It's bizarre to me. Since my career began, the entire entertainment world has changed the way they deal with comics.

Q. And fans will be able to see some of your fingerprints on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, out April 4. Is that going to be enjoyable for you to see them take one of your signature story lines and put it on screen?

A. I read the script and I was really blown away by it. The tone of it and the Bucky stuff is so perfect and the way I'd want it to be, I was so thrilled to see that. But to me the biggest thing, too, is it's the first time Marvel has put out a movie where there's a specific book the title of the movie relates to. And now they're doing that with Avengers: Age of Ultron.

They're putting out a hardcover collection of Captain America: Winter Soldier and that's because that movie is coming out. That is the first time Marvel has one specific book to point people to, as opposed to when X-Men: First Class came out and there's 15 trade paperbacks and people who see the movie don't know which one to pick up. So it's exciting, as the guy who gets royalties for that book.