Artifacts #26's Ron Marz Interview [Exclusive]

Apppearing in the back of Artifacts #26, out today from Top Cow, is an interview ComicBook.com conducted with series writer Ron Marz and outgoing artist Stjepan Sejic. For the full interview, check out the comic either on ComiXology or at your local comic shop--but here you can get a peek of Ron Marz's share of the conversation. Russ Burlingame: This has to be the first time that you've had a miniseries go to ongoing without missing a beat, right? I mean, Artifacts is kind of an odd animal. Ron Marz: Well, this isn't the standard operating procedure in comics. This was initially planned as a 13-issue, event-type series where we were going to literally destroy the universe so there was not an initial plan to extend it. As we got into it, though, it was successful and the response was such that it felt like there was more story to tell. There was a natural progression in the story for these characters in this universe after we had basically destroyed the universe. So the decision was made to keep it going--and yeah, you're right, it's very unusual for a publisher to not take every opportunity to slap a #1 on the next issue...but the decision was made to just keep going. RB: And because it's continuing a thread that have been going on for a logn time, I feel like there's some weight to a higher number and that weight extends beyond the one-month bump that you get from a new #1. RM: Certainly that's the overall mindset at Top Cow, which obviously has books in The Darkness and Witchblade that are in triple digits. There aren't any books at Marvel and DC that have three digits in their numbering anymore! Its certainly the anomaly because the easy gimmick is to just relaunch but I think there's something kind of honorable about just continuing. RB: With Artifacts it's interesting because, say, three years ago you were writing a bunch of Top Cow books as opposed to just one but now you get to serve in that same capacity as a kind of Top Cow myth-maker, but do it while still having time in your schedule to do creator-owned material of your own. RM: Yeah, it does afford me the opportunity to play with all the different characters in the universe with a bit more freedom than, say, when I was just writing Witchblade. Certainly Tom Judge is the spine of the series in a lot of ways--he's the recurring character--but I can have him do a solo story, I can have him bounce off other characters or I could have him kind of do a cameo appearance in someone else's story. RB: When Top Cow did the Talent Search this year, it felt like the stories they were soliciting are the kinds of things that would be totally at home in Artifacts. RM: I've always said that one of the things about working for Top Cow that's really attractive is the amount of freedom that I'm afforded at any point during the process. Whether it was on Witchblade or Magdalena or Velocity, they really trust their creators to create, which is more rare than you might expect. They let the creators take the ball and run with it and Artifacts is really just another example of that where the idea was to continue the book and have Tom Judge be the main character as much as there is one--but really it's kind of turned into "whatever character Ron feels like writing this month." Which is cool, and I make sure that I don't abuse the privilege and that we're serving the needs of the universe and the readers. But it's fun for me because I get to pick the toys I want to play with. RB: But the fans want ALL the toys played with. Do you ever feel like you've got to make someone show up just to have them on the page? RM: It's kind of like writing a team book, actually; in a team book you generally make sure that everybody makes their appearance in each issue or each couple of issues. For Artifacts, I guess I'm keeping it more in mind that we'd like these characters to appear or have some impact on the overall storyline every story arc or so. We're not getting everybody into every issue but everybody is in every five or six issues to a certain extent. RB: It isn't a traditional team, though; a lot of these characters would be happy to never see each other.

RM: When I was a kid, I was reading The Avengers and they mostly sat around the mansion and waited for somebody to attack them. That's not the most proactive sort of storytelling. I want to try and balance between that sort of passive storytelling and the sort of more aggressive team concept where your team goes out and beats up or The Authority shows up and overthrows dictators. I don't want to do a steady diet of either one of those ways of telling a story. Sometimes the characters react to events around them, sometimes the characters are instigating events around them. RB: How different is it writing the story as an ongoing as opposed to a finite series? RM: For the first year, we knew that we were telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. We knew how this was going to play itself out over the thirteen issues. So that was fairly tightly choreographed because it had to be in order to hit all the points that we needed to hit and make sure all of the characters who needed to be in there, were in there. It was more of a plan in place because that's what the story was. The second year of the book has been a little bit more free-form in terms of me being able to meander around a bit and not have to pay off certain story points on a set schedule. Certainly, when we started working on the first few issues of Artifacts, we didn't know we were going to continue. It was only halfway through the series that we really got serious about, "Okay, we think we're going to continue this." So the game plan didn't change that much from the start but we kind of had to come up with a new game plan starting with issue fourteen. RB: How has it been to work with Stjepan again? This is a guy with whom you have a long-term relationship, so does that make it easier? RM: We've been working together for so long and have worked on so many things together there's a shorthand to the way we work now. I know what he's going to do, he knows what I'm going to ask for--it's almost improvisational, like jazz, to a certain extent. There's still a full script but we've worked together so often I think we play off each other almost subconsciously. So having him jump on the book from issue fourteen when we got finished with our Witchblade run and then moved immediately over to Artifacts was pretty seamless. The way I'm telling the stories and the kind of stories I'm telling are certainly affected by Stjepan's presence on the creative team. At the very least, I would tell these stories in a different way with a different artist and I might be telling different stories altogether  To me, that's the beauty of the collaborative process is that you figure out what the creative team do best together and you move in that direction, rather than setting the direction and then just hiring whoever to draw it. RB: Well, and you had so much momentum coming out of Artifacts #13, it had to be a relief that you didn't have to retrain anyone. It was more like, you stop at the train station, pick up the new conductor and keep going. RM: [Laughs] Yeah, that's a good way to put it. RB: And how important is it to you to have that kind of relationship? It seems as though guys who lived through comics in the Nineties have a very different view of artists than the younger writers do. RM: I think for whatever reason, the industry is more writer-driven now which, as a writer, I don't think is a good thing. I think that comics work best when they are a collaboration with the art and the story each as important as the other, and when they are seamless, rather than an assembly line in which the writer is kind of handing down the script for an art monkey to draw. I don't think that particularly serves what comics do best. So I'm all for the collaboration aspect of what we do in trying to work toward the artist's strengths rather than just treating the artist like a cog in the machine. I don't know that that notion is as commonly held now as it was fifteen years ago, which I think is unfortunate because I think more and more artists are being viewed as interchangeable. Part of that comes from the audience, part of that comes form editorial dictate, part of it comes from writers who don't have much of an art background and can't communicate on that level with an art team. RB: Of course, nowadays another change is that many publishers don't like the kind of short stories you've been telling in Artifacts; "your story is no good unless it can fill a trade." RM: Well, sure, and I certainly understand that part of the publishing plan for any publisher is reprinting single issues as collected editions. I have no problem with that but I also think you can do two, two-part stories and then one, one-part stories and then come up with a five-issue trade that is satisfying to the readership; you don't have to take your two-part story and pad it out to five issues. To me, it's more of a math problem than a storytelling problem. As long as you are doing stories that can be collected in a sensible package, I think you should be able to tell any kind of story you want. RB: The other thing that strikes me is that when you see a one-part or a two-part story at many publishers, it's because there's a fill-in. So it strikes me when you see it at Top Cow and you just know it's actually intended to be that story. RM: Frankly I would rather take fifty pages of story and squeeze it to forty than take fifty pages of story and stretch it to sixty or eighty just to make it more trade-friendly. It's a creative choice that I can make becuase I'm given the creative freedom on Artifacts to do that. Certainly there are other venues in comics where the creative team is not given the freedom to make those calls. RB: Following the massive arc of the first year, you just know that you're going to have a segment of the audience that's always "When do we get to blow up the universe again?". Do you have anything in the offing to challenge that kind of scale? RM: Well, the Progeny storyline that we're telling starting [this month] is going to bring together some threads that have been unspooling ever since we got to the end of issue #13 and brought that whole storyline to a close. There were certainly loose ends that were going to rear their head--and that was the plan, too--because you want a satisfying sense of conclusion, not necessarily a sense of completion, if your story is going to go on from the initial storyline. Progeny is a four-part storyline because that's what we needed to tell the story. I think we'll probably get to something bigger and more quote-unquote epic down the road, but I think we want Witchblade and The Darkness and Artifacts to be strong enough series that they can stand on their own, so that when they do come together, it's sort of special. I think that's maybe an old school mentality, where you don't have crossovers happening every month, where you expect your monthly books to be strong enough to bring the audience back on a monthly basis just for that series rather than tying it all together and holding the audience hostage in terms of making them buy everything. RB: What is the thing that keeps you tethered to Top Cow, even though you're doing a lot of work with a lot of other publishers? You're amassing a run that's got to be right up there with how long you were on Green Lantern, right? I mean, just about nobody stays anywhere that long anymore. RM: Well, actually, I'm trying to add the numbers, but I think in terms of consecutive issues, my Witchblade run is longer than my Green Lantern run. We did 75 issues on Green Lantern and 80 issues on Witchblade. That's all ballpark, but when I find a book that seems to be a good fit, I like to stick around for a while. RB: So many of the characters in this series, too, are characters that people are only kind of glancingly familiar with. In today's comic market, the idea of this being upgraded from a mini to an ongoing, I think really speaks to the accomplishment you guys had since it's not like anyone feels obliged to come back for a lot of these characters. You come back because you're enjoying it. RM: I think it's hard for me to speak to that because ultimately we just try to tell the stories we're interested in and then we hope that the audience comes along for the ride. Ultimately there's some marketing sensibility to how things are put together. We don't want to go off and do a year's worth of issues on minor characters that maybe the audience doesn't care about because the easiest thing to do in this industry is lose readers--that happens on a monthly basis just due to attrition. So you don't want to give anybody a reason to step off the monthly series if you can help it. That said, as I said before, a lot of it is just what kind of story do we want to do? There's not a Machiavellian plan in place to maximize the marketing potential. I completely understand why books do that, and I don't begrudge the Big Two doing that. This is, after all, a business and you have to sell a certain number of copies to keep the books going. But doing a book like Artifacts is a little more fast and loose. RB: And we're losing Stjepan, unfortunately, but what's the artistic future of Artifacts look like? RM: He's stepping off with this issue and he's going to go do an Aphrodite 9 miniseries. So there's an Italian artist named Marco Turini who is going to hop on board at least for the short term before he heads off to do some Cyber Force issues. RB: So is there a longer-term plan in place after he's gone, or are you going to be a little more experimental? RM: I think, all things being equal, Stjepan and I would like to bend more of his efforts to Ravine, which he's bound and determined we're going to do multiple graphic novels every year, so Marco will do a few issues and then we'll settle in with a new team. Marco's doing #26, which is the last issue of the "Progeny" crossover. Then he's doing #27 and 28, which is going to feature Magdalena. It looks really cool--it's got a different vibe do it, and I think he's getting used to the American comic vibe and I'm getting used to how he approaches pages, but I really like how it's coming together. It looks like Nelson Blake will draw #29, and that will be a Tilly Grimes solo story. RB: Do you enjoy breaking in a new artist, so to speak? I mean, you're doing it with a Magdalena story, which is in your wheelhouse. RM: I like breaking in new artists because it's kind of like going on a first date. It's a little tentative and awkward at first but then you figure out what each of you does best and how to best collaborate and make it work together. I always think it's exciting to work with a new artist because there's a sense of discovery as you get deeper into the project. RB: Is it tough to lose a guy like Stjepan mid-storyline though? Or is it a little easier because as a crossover there are already other talents involved? RM: I think the answer is both. When you work well with a guy and frankly when you're buddies with a guy, it's a little tough to have the team split up, but in this case we're still working together on a daily basis on Ravine and I'm sure we'll find some other things to do together too. It's not like we're breaking up--we're just working on a different assignment together. I think if it was a situation where he and I weren't going to be doing a book together, it would be a lot tougher. RB: Is there an overall direction that you're trying to take the series this year? RM: Well, the main thrust of the story is still Tom Judge keeping watch over these artifacts and figuring out what happened to some of them that haven't been seen since issue #13. So that's the overall direction and the fact that these are fairly powerful and even dangerous items and that Tom feels responsible for making sure that they're not used for nefarious purposes and they don't fall into the wrong hands. RB: Of course, a lot of people would argue that Jackie is the wrong hands...! RM: Yeah--oh, yeah. And I think as events unfold in The Darkness and that gets kind of folded into what we're doing in Progeny, yeah, Jackie's trouble. I think Jackie's frankly at the moment more of a villain than he's been in quite a long time and the reasons might be justified in his mind, but I think most other people have a different take on it.