Lady Sabre's Rucka: "This is Where the Newspaper Strip Has Gone"

There are just a bit over twenty-four hours left in Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett's Kickstarter campaign for the collected print edition of Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, Volume One. Last month, shortly after the project launched and was almost immediately funded, Rucka spoke with ComicBook.com about the project; at the time, we ran a Kickstarter-focused article that discussed, among other things, the controversial Wish I Was Here Kickstarter campaign from Zach Braff, which was in the headlines at the time, and the responsibility that Rucka felt to his audience--especially the backers of the book. This time around, we'll take some quotes from that same interview in which Rucka talks about his creative partners, the comic itself and the joy that he gets from working on the title. ComicBook.com: Do you think that in the first and the last few days, the Kickstarter will be particularly crazy because you're an established talent and so you've got fans who know for a fact they plan to support this book, and it's just a matter of timing?

Greg Rucka: I do some things in my career very well and I think I'm pretty self-aware. One of the things I've never gotten a handle on is the popularity of my work or how large that base is. If I had a better idea of that I'd probably--not to sound crass but I'd probably do better at leveraging it in a way. I've spent so much this week on the phone with Rick and Eric because every time something changed with the campaign we had to talk about it. And Eric pointed out on Wednesday--he said, you know three weeks ago we had a conversation where you and Rick were panicking that this campaign wasn't going to work and here we are on Wednesday panicking because it has. Rick said something very interesting to me--he made the statement that this was he felt the first time he had been involved with something that was successful and that he could feel he had succeeded on his own merits, drawing the way he draws, telling the story he wants to tell in the story he wants to tell it. To which my response was, "Dude, you've got two Eisners," and his response was "Yeah, but I've got two Eisners for drawing like Bruce Timm. This is the first time I really feel that there's been a response to me just being me." I'll tell you right now--the whole campaign is worth it just for that. He's a dear friend and I feel that if this is finally giving him a moment in the sun then it's about time. You know, he and I did a couple of issues of Detective Comics and a Legends of the Dark Knight issue during No Man's Land that to this day is one of the books that I'm most proud of. But yeah--he's flown beneath the radar for much of his career and I think that certainly at the Big Two they don't like his style. It is not the flavor, and he has suffered as a result.

ComicBook.com: Webcomics to a lot of people who read paper comic books are kind of a ghetto and at the time when you started doing this, there weren't a lot of top-tier comics talent that were doing free webcomics just for the love of the work. Rucka: No, there weren't many. there were some, definitely. We went into it because this was a story we wanted to tell and we couldn't tell it anywhere else and we wanted the freedom to tell the story we wanted to tell the way we wanted to tell it. The downside to that is that we did it all for free for two years. This is really the first attempt to monetize it in any way, shape or form. So you know, there's two years' of work in this already. That's I think another reason why a lot of professionals hadn't come to the Web; they weren't getting paid for it. That is changing now.

I don't think we're pioneers in any stretch--Warren was here long before us. Waid was putting in a remarkable amount of research before Thrillbent even was a glimmer in anyone else's eye. He and John Rogers spent literally years trying to figure out how they were going to do this. Karl Kerschl and Charles Christopher and that's barely scratching the surface of significant, industry-established talent who were looking to the Web. So I have a very hard time looking at what we've done as in any way remarkable or particularly pioneering. It's hard for me to look at us and go "We have blazed any sort of trail," because I really doin't think we have. What we have done, I feel pretty well, is to deliver a good webcomic. We have not exploited the form to its fullest, nor have we ignored that it is a different form but I certainly don't feel that we've reinvented the wheel. That's not false modesty; I just really don't. We came to the Web because that was the place we could pitch our tent and we'v ebeen remarkably fortunate that there have been people who found us here and have been visiting. ComicBook.com: One of the things that's kind of impossible to reproduce in pritn is the sense of community and interconnectivity that you get, between the script/page side-by-side and the comments thread. It feels very intimate. Rucka: Yeah. Very deliberately so. I think that is one of the things that you get when you come ot the web and I think you would be foolish to ignore it and I think worse, you would ignore it at your peril. We have, and this is one of the reasons we went to Kickstarter--there is a community that has formed. We have people who come every Monday and every Thursday. They're there and when the screen is not up at midnight Sunday night or midnight Wednesday night, they want to know where it is. And that's wonderful--that's a precious, precious thing, to have people who care and are invested and they come everytime there's a new screen. Or they come every three months and they read in batches but they keep coming back. That's our community and we talk about Kickstarter as a community format--it's an opportunity to present to that community: "Here's what we are after now." And genuinely I enjoy it. I enjoy being able ot talk to people about the work and I love listening to people talk about the work if for no other reason than I think it helps me hone my craft becuase sometimes you get a question "What's going on here?" And sometimes it'll be, "Well, you're not supposed to know yet," and sometimes it'll be be like, "Ooh, that wasn't clear. How do we fix that next time?" ComicBook.com: You're very transparent--you've had script books out for other books as well. It's gaining some steam as something that's done but it's something that not all writers seem to be comfortable with.

Rucka: Yeah, I'm not sure I would understand why they wouldn't be, honestly. Do you have any idea what that's about? I really don't. It's funny because guys I'm friendly with have been willing to share that kind of stuff with me, but I've heard these stories of guys who are really protective of it, and some of those guys are terrific talents, so maybe it's just that some guys believe in the magic of the format and if it's the script it's not the actual comic. That's all I can think of. Interesting, because I would take the Penn and Teller approach to cups and balls with that. I fyou're good enough to do the cups and balls with transparent cups then you don't need to dress it up as anything else. Once you read my scripts, you're going to see how I write. That's fine. That doesn't mean you're going to write like me. You're going to have a template and an idea of how one writer does it but the nature of any creative endeavor I think si that those endeavors are unique to the voices of the people creating. Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker and Geoff Johns and Gail Simone and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction and I could all sit down and be given the exact same parameters for a story to be told in 20 pages using the same characters with the same plot and you're going to get a different story every time. And you're going to get it simply because we're different people and our approaches are going to be different and what's going to matter to us in the story is going to be different and I feel that that is why we have writers. That's one of the beauties of the form. These aren't made of gold. I have no problem sharing the scripts. I have no problem even talking about why I make the decisions I make. Sometimes I can't articulate why I do it, sometimes I can. So yeah, the new stretch goal is the annotated process book and that's going to be the scripts from chapters 1 through 5 with my annotations. There will be notes, there will be comments from Rick and Eric. The book will contain design work from both Rick and Eric that people haven't seen and sketches and the like and it is meant very much to be sort of a complete behind-the-scenes. And if somebody picks that up and uses it as an instructional aid, so much the better. When those first Sandman trades came out and the first Watchmen trades came out and you could see the scripts in them, that ruined a whole generation of comic book writers. People said, "I need to write my scripts like Alan Moore," it's like "No you DON'T!" Alan needs to write like Alan. You don't need to write like Alan. I remember seeing Garth's scripts once and I was genuinely surprised by how sparse they were. Frankly, a script is barely half the story. I could give you the script to Lazarus #1, but that script is not gonna have the 25, 30 hours of conversation that Michael Lark and I have had about that issue and about how we wanted to see elements executed and ideas and world-building and answering questions, et cetera et cetera ad nauseum. Again it goes back to the idea that I don't think the script is all that precious. If anything, my only hesitation in sharing scripts is that I tend to view them as fairly intimate documents because they're documents that are written for an artist. I was telling somebody else this week that the older I get, the more I think of scripting as an epistolary form. This is me, having a conversation with the artist primarily and the editor and the colorist and the letterer on a secondary step about "This is the issue, this is what the story we're trying to tell is, these are the things I feel are important in the story, here is why. Go to. Take that and run." The joy of working with Rick Burchett or a Michael Lark or a J.H. Williams or a Steve Lieber or I can go down the line is that these are artists who will take the script and they will consider everything in front of them and then they will bring their immense education in the form and their talent together and they will ask the question, "What is the best way to tell this story visually? I now understand what the story is that the writer wants us to tell, so some of the ideas that the writer may have are great visuals, some of them stink on ice, some of them are perfectly serviceable but maybe there's a better way to do it." That's all valid.

ComicBook.com: And it's a bit more of a novelistic approach, isn't it? Because you guys are doing this on your own, you've got a unique ability to do something you could never get away with in mainstream superhero work, which is that if you want to you can go for weeks at a time without Lady Sabre ever actually appearing even though her name is in the title. Have you ever had readers say to you, "Hey, where the hell is Lady Sabre through all of this?" Rucka: Not actually like that. We've gotten some saying, "I can't wait to see what's going to happen when we get back to Her Ladyship," things like that. But Rick is a huge fan of Terry and the Pirates and sort of rekindled my love for the comic as well and I think that Lady Sabre is enormously influenced by that style of storytelling. One of the biggest hurdles, and I tlaked about this at the start, was trying to figure out how you pace a webcomic. I think I've finally gotten the hang of it but that said, you look at what Caniff did and he allowed his story to breathe. He let it go where it needed to go. And yeah, she's in the title but so are pirates. So we've got a large crew. We're on chapter nine right now; it's another cutaway. It's a cutaway to a man named Farrow and we're going to do the revelation of the smoke, which has been talked about off and on for the last few chapters and then we'll go back to Her Ladyship and there are some specific beats to follow up. We're about 2/3 of the way through this first book. We're heading toward the downward slope and that will lead into Book II, the second book of Sabre. We envision this as a pulp serial first and foremost. It's going to go on and on and on and on. And ideally it's going to go on and on and grow and grow and age and age and be pulled by cliffhangers where we can and by investment in the characters and their stories primarily. This is an ongoing concern, so perhaps because of that I don't feel any rush. This comic is very much about the journey, not the destination. Lazarus is very much a comic about the destination. There is an endpoint to the series in mind--it's an ongoing series but it will end. There is an ending for it and when it does end ideally it will be the ending that the reader feels was inevitable, was the ending that was coming all along. With Sabre the nature of that kind of character for me is that she's a serial hero so she'll solve this adventure, she'll resolve it, there will always be another adventure an Drake and Drum may not be in the next adventure. They may retire only to come back in another three adventures because Drake's daughter wants to be a pirate and his son has been kidnapped or God knows. And like I said, that was one of the things that I loved that Caniff did in Terry and the Pirates. He had the luxury of time. This is where the newspaper strip has gone, because this is our syndication format.