Frank Miller

Frank Miller is a comic book writer, artist, and filmmaker. He rose to prominence drawing Marvel’s Daredevil in 1979 and became its writer in 1981, introducing Elektra and turning the series into a major success. He went on to create Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, write Batman: Year One, and create Sin City and 300, both of which were adapted into films. His latest book, Push the Wall, recounts his life and career in comics and filmmaking. Works mentioned: Sin City Superman: Year One Daredevil Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 300 Elektra Lives Again Push the Wall ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AGZ ⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠⁠ ------ Athletic Nicotine ⁠⁠https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes ⁠⁠https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter ⁠ Follow Tetragrammaton: ⁠⁠https://x.com/tetranow⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tetragrammaton.now Follow Rick: ⁠⁠https://x.com/rickrubin⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin⁠⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  My very first note that I wrote down, in fact, about Sin City at all, was I wrote Conan in a trench coat. Because I wanted to bring out an absolutely barbaric element to an urban setting. So it would feel nothing like a cop show, or Private Eye story, or any of that. And that it would cut loose with real savagery.

• 0:48Rick Rubin?

  Do you typically have a name right from the start for a character?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Marv just leapt into my head as a name. It was, I had different names and they all were such clichés. And they sounded like Private Eyes and all of that. And one day I just went, "His name's Marv."

• 1:06Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Like the most non-tough guy name I could have come up with.

• 1:11Rick Rubin?

  And then, the characters, would you say they flower out of the world?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  I guess so. It's very vague at the first. I mean, I had to have the world for the character to emerge. Because there had to be a sense of what he would be up against. And what police created him.

• 1:31Rick Rubin?

  How long would it be before there's a scene?

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know how it is for you, but scenes leaped my head. They just bolted into my head. And I usually have the very first scene of the story down before I have any idea where it's going.

• 1:48Rick Rubin?

  And are they typically in order like that?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  It's pretty much like that. Again, getting back to Sin City, because it seems to be the best example. I knew for a fact that this brute, who was such a loser and fulfilled with self-loathing, would wake up next to this goddess who had picked him up at a bar. And he'd had this wild night with her. And had fallen passionately in love that first night that he'd wake up, and she'd be dead next to him. I just knew that for a fact. I just felt that was a savagely compelling opening. The fun came on figuring out what the hell that meant.

• 2:31Rick Rubin?

  I'm just hearing it, it's great. You said the first note you wrote for Sin City was, "Marv is like Conan in a trench coat."

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Trench coat, yes, yes.

• 2:40Rick Rubin?

  Typically, how many notes might you make before you start writing?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  I'll stray ones all over the place.

• 2:47Rick Rubin?

  Lots?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, lots. Sometimes I'll charge ahead and then I'll, the next day, I'll let a gazillion stray notes, sometimes on Post-its and different notes.

• 2:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what some other notes might sound like.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Well, the first sex confederacy. Because I had just been to Texas. And I was really struck by how forceful and intense and powerful southern women were in this very macho state. And how they went against what most people's expectations are. And I thought, "Okay, then, let's just take this to the cartoon level. And basically have it be that southern women have taken over the South and made it the most feminist part of America."

• 3:42Speaker 00

  So it's cartoon thinking, but I found it kind of delicious.

• 3:46Rick Rubin?

  Do they usually come from things you notice in real life?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  I think the best ones do. So other things are just reactions. I mean, I find that a lot of good ideas come from seeing something, seeing somebody really screw it. Just screw the pooch. And go, "Man, if you'd just done this, you would have had something really cool." And just going ahead and doing that. And by the time it's done, nobody even would recognize it as having to, anything to do with what I was reacting to.

• 4:18Rick Rubin?

  Like missed opportunities?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yes, and the creative act to me is one where you have to embrace the unpredictabilities and go down those back alleys. And there's just weird places. But I always tell people just coming in, as I always say, "Make mistakes. Make tons of mistakes." They're gonna be your best friends.

• 4:42Rick Rubin?

  Do you typically write too much?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  I tend to fall toward the too little. When I do my second pass, I go like, "Okay, Frank, this is haiku. I was thinking that I was playing Guru and this was just so good that my shit don't stink." And I gotta either soften it, or sweeten it, or just clarify things. I mean, I was criticized early on by a director I worked with, who complained and said, "You just write too tight." And I still don't entirely agree with him. Because I find that most writing that's done, particularly for the screen, is pretty damn flabby.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  But at the same time, he had a point, that you can be so tight that it starts to feel as if you're withholding.

• 5:35Rick Rubin?

  How is telling a story visually different than telling it just with words?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Well, I don't really work strictly in prose. I mean, I've never written a prose novel. Comics have been my medium ever since I was a little kid. I drew before I even knew how to read. We generally do. The English language, like the Japanese, is a bunch of pictographs, anyway. And I think in comics, the fundamental mission is to reconnect the two. So that you are experiencing the two, but not as separate things. They become one unit in your mind, even though physically you can see they are two.

• 6:23Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like the images do more of the work?

• 6:26Speaker 00

  I think they'd better. I think that if comic books are simply illustrated prose, then they're a backward form, indeed. I think that comics have more in common with hieroglyphics than they do with illustrated children's books.

• 6:44Rick Rubin?

  Makes me think of silent movies, how much is conveyed without any words, or maybe just a few cards to push it along.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Think of the astonishing work that, like Stan Kubrick, for instance, would do. The best pieces of 2001.

• 7:01Rick Rubin?

  Silent.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  You know, the entire sequence of the goddamn bone with the monkeys. That's the soul of the movie. That's the entire story of the movie. And there isn't nothing but a bunch of grunts there. It's also the spiritual peak of the movie.

• 7:20Rick Rubin?

  Would you say all of your work has a spiritual component?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  It's funny, because I'm not a religious guy, but I believe so. Because I believe that humans are spiritual creatures. And I have discovered that my entire journey as an artist is to explore and define the heroic. And there's no way to do that without embracing a higher meaning and to examine the endless puzzle of good and evil.

• 7:53Rick Rubin?

  How is it different coming to a character that's not your character? To start with Batman, for example? Do you feel required to take from the past?

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So the editorial decision I made coming in was to regard the entire tapestry that lay of the character as material to pick from. And I felt free to ignore the garbage and the bad decisions and the stuff that just didn't fit in with my point of view.

• 8:26Rick Rubin?

  In your mind, was your Batman the same person as the Batman before?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  No, not really. Because he couldn't be in, be a character. A character's not a portrait of a person. A heroic character especially, he's like a piece of artwork that presents something. The character himself has a tone, has a theme. And the world around this character reflects that character. The best enemies of any of the characters I've worked on have been perverse reflections of the character himself. The reason the Joker is the best Batman villain is because Batman is someone who faced insanity when he was a child

• 9:17Speaker 00

  and has enforced sanity by himself in the world ever since. And now he's up against someone who is categorically insane and seeks to create chaos wherever he goes. I added, giving the Joker perverse sexual streak, so that he became, to my mind, a mythic figure in terms of that he represented all kinds of arcane forms of sadism and evil. So that he was, in fact, more evil than insane.

• 9:52Rick Rubin?

  So would you say that of any of these characters, they're only a person in a poetic sense?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:57Rick Rubin?

  Is that correct?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  I agree completely. It's a beautiful way to put it. In fact, I'm going to steal that. Thank you very much.

• 10:04Rick Rubin?

  You're welcome. My gift to you.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Hey, I got the seal from Rick Rubin.

• 10:11Rick Rubin?

  I'd never imagined it in that way before, but hearing you talk about it, that's what I'm hearing.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, that's perfect, yeah. And also, the same is equally true villains. I'm just picking around for iconic villains that I didn't make up here. But if you want to go for the one that's made the biggest imprint on the popular imagination, it would be Darth Vader, properly named Dark Father, because he's the nightmare version of anyone's father. And he represents categorical evil with authority behind it. And there you have a beautiful two-dimensional character. Two-dimensional is not always bad.

• 10:51Rick Rubin?

  And is it always as cut and dried as good versus evil? Or are there shades of gray all the way around?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I don't think there's shades of gray. I think there's a multiplicity of colors and complexities. I mean, I think a character can have an evil streak a mile wide and be a saint. For instance, I'm putting together my studies on a potential Alexander the Great project. And there's no way to portray a character who was without question a history-changing, world-saving figure, who at the same time was a ruthless, ruthless slaughterer of many, many thousands. And so to me, that is not so much a dichotomy

• 11:44Speaker 00

  as a dimensionality of these characters. Because really, he couldn't have been great without being both. I mean, Alexander's a nice guy, would not admit to history books.

• 11:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Is it typical for writers of cartoons to both draw and write?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Sadly, no. There's usually one writer, sometimes more. And it's usually an art team that puts together the black and white artwork, usually two people, which one would work in pencil and the other would go over in ink. And then there's a color artist. Nowadays, that can be a team using computer work and so on to achieve it. Starting in 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put together Marvel Comics. And when they did, Stan Lee decided that fastest way to get these things done was to jot down a story and hand it to Jack Kirby

• 12:48Speaker 00

  and have Jack Kirby come back with a bunch of illustrated pages, on which Jack Kirby would write all these notes about what these characters would be saying. And Kirby would include brand-new scenes and so on as he was working out, making the story real to them along the way. Steve Ditko did the same. And then Stan Lee would come in and deliver a script on top of that. Starting with that, the whole game changed.

• 13:14Rick Rubin?

  What was it before that?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Before that, it was very much people working in series. The writer would talk with the editor and get a story approved. And the writer would sit down and write up a script that said, "Panel one." And it was a script that began with a description of the illustration, and then dictated what the characters were saying. Included all the little sound effects and all of that. When I first worked in comic books, I worked over scripts like that. But at Marvel Comics, it was the other way around. And it's still done both ways.

• 13:51Rick Rubin?

  Interesting.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  But that's why you see when you, if you compare the other comics to the Marvel Comics of that time, there's this endless energy and vigor in the Marvel Comics. The characters are flying across the page constantly and talking while they're fighting. And all those preposterous conceits of the comic book that we now take for granted, they very quickly went from being a tiny little company to a burgeoning giant and eventually eclipsed everybody else.

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• 16:28Rick Rubin?

  Besides Marvel, historically, who were the other big comic companies?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Well, DC Comics is, of course, the giant that goes all the way back because they had Superman and then later Batman. But there were also faucet comics. Captain Marvel, which during its reign, it outsold Superman. And it was the most popular comic book in America. In the 1950s, a true golden era, the line called EC Comics came along with the horror comics and science fiction comics and produced the best-written and by far and away best illustrated comics of the time and perhaps the best illustrated of all time.

• 17:12Rick Rubin?

  What was different about what EC was doing?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Well, I think the biggest factor was a man named Harvey Kurtzman, who was an artist and a writer, and a publisher named William M. Gaines, who had a vision for a comic book company that would aim for adolescents instead of children. Because EC Comics was not for little kids. It was gruesome, it was terrifying, and it was sexier than hell. The fans of it were so devout that they still hold dimensions of their own. And those comics are still the most highly valued ones you're going to find. They've come out in glorious editions

• 17:58Speaker 00

  the size of the original artwork. They do mark a watershed in the evolution of the art.

• 18:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you think part of it was the comics that came before them were made with this specific idea of, these are for kids, they're these kind of disposable things?

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:16Rick Rubin?

  And that EC thought, we can elevate this to be something bigger?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. But I think the other thing was, it might have been Gaines, I suspect it was. I think that he probably said, "Why lose them when they're 14? You know, why not play to the kids who are starting to get boners and really have violent fantasies and all that stuff? You know, let's raid some of the commercial magazines and get these guys who can draw better than anybody to come in. And then let's have them tell all kinds of different stories." They didn't even compete with the guys in tights. But they were doing crime stories.

• 18:59Rick Rubin?

  They didn't have any superheroes?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Nope, not a one.

• 19:02Rick Rubin?

  It was more story-based or genre-based like movies?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yes, it was. It was. It's like comics before and after have been one genre, medium, pretty much. I mean, in recent years, it's gotten much more diverse. But it's still overwhelmingly centered on superheroes. In fact, it's centered on the old superheroes.

• 19:24Rick Rubin?

  If you were tasked with reinventing a classic character from the past, let's say Bugs Bunny, how would you approach that?

• 19:33Speaker 00

  I don't think I'd touch Bugs Bunny because my mind doesn't work like that. That's just not my kind of meat.

• 19:40Rick Rubin?

  Did you never like Bugs Bunny?

• 19:41Speaker 00

  I complained fine when I was a kid. It's just my imagination doesn't go in those directions. But recently, I was working on a Superman project that I was writing. And I found that in that one, I was harkening back to the 1940s in a lot of ways, and applying it more to the current world. But what I was seeking was really, in a way, a lost glory in that I wanted the sense of wonder. I wanted it to be that breathtaking moment when the impossible can happen. And that's very difficult to do when flying is normal.

• 20:23Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever research the history of how Superman came to be?

• 20:28Speaker 00

  The only stuff I know is about the two little kids in Ohio.

• 20:34Rick Rubin?

  I don't know anything about this.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were two Jewish kids in Ohio. But one of them drew and one of them wrote. And they both had this fun idea of this character named Superman. My own suspicions, which I have to throw at you, is that they just happened to choose a word that was in the air at the time, Ubermatt. And there's something about Superman that flies in face of knots and movement. And if you look at him, he has black hair, thick eyebrows, and he's very much a Golan. I mean, I submit that the only way to really understand Superman is to accept that his origins are profoundly Jewish.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Because everything about the character, his origin is Moses. You know, he arrives riding in a crib from outer space. So the echoes are there. And I think these youngsters were channeling what they learned in the temple into Superman.

• 21:37Rick Rubin?

  So many of the superheroes have some connection to radioactivity.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  That started with Marvel.

• 21:45Rick Rubin?

  Either poisoned by radiation.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's radioactive spider.

• 21:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  The radioactive bomb that went off and created the Hulk. It goes on. That was during the sixties when it was the Red Scare. The nuclear stuff was going on. And we had all the movies where we had giant ants. Yeah.

• 22:04Rick Rubin?

  Are comics an extension of sci fi?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  The superhero stuff is related, but it's also an extension of ancient mythology and of fantasy. I always seem to bring in Star Wars references here because Star Wars is such a fine amalgam of doing fantasy and mythology and science fiction all together. And I think that the superhero is very much of a part of all of that. The fact that it can be done by one person has a lot to do with it as well. You know, Jack Kirby is able to stand as a titan in a small field. He created just thousands of characters and he never stopped.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  After doing all this amazing stuff at Marvel Comics, essentially being one of the premier architects of it, he ran off and created what was called the Fourth World. That was published by DC Comics, where he created another grand universe that has yet to be explored in film and so on. And he never stopped for as long as he was alive.

• 23:17Rick Rubin?

  Who were some of the characters from the Fourth World?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Fourth World was all about what he called the new gods. He was taking the superhero back into mythology so that there was an eternal contest between two planets that were near Earth. One called New Genesis. And then across from it was this industrial, ghastly, polluted place that was that had slaves and trolls and was run by a monster named Darkseid that was called Apocalypse. Spelled wrong just so they could trademark it. And Darkseid was plainly the model for Darth Vader. But he was a much bigger, more demonic character who he would obliterate people with blasts

• 24:05Speaker 00

  from his eyes and so on. But he didn't have giant cannons that could blow up entire planets though, so it's. But yeah, everything in Kirby's world was Wagnerian. And he got more so as he got older.

• 24:19Rick Rubin?

  What was his first character?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  First character Kirby ever made up? Oh my God.

• 24:25Rick Rubin?

  Do you know?

• 24:26Speaker 00

  First big one he made up during World War Two, which was Captain America.

• 24:31Rick Rubin?

  Oh, Captain America.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, he made that up during World War Two. Marvel Comics got the rights to it and revived it.

• 24:39Rick Rubin?

  Is patriotism a big theme in comics?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  It is in Jack Kirby comics. Well, think of it this way. Jack Kirby's given name at birth was Jakob Kursberg. And he was a, he was a small man. He must have been the kind of kid that would have been bullied, especially during antisemitic times. He actually grew up in a rough neighborhood in Manhattan. So he enlisted in World War Two and he took on the most dangerous job a soldier could make, which was to be a scout and charge in enemy territory, which small men could do very well. And so patriotism was in his bone.

• 25:20Rick Rubin?

  When you came into the field, there were writers and there were cartoon makers. How did it work out that you did both?

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Basically I had lobbying to get to do it. And I was working with an editor named Jim Shooter, who was the boss at Marvel at the time. He was one of those guys who's known as a real tough editor. But if you were ready to confront him right back and make your case, he was like the kind of producer you want to have in that sense.

• 25:46Rick Rubin?

  He would push you, but he would still listen?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I pushed to get the job because at the time I felt I just had, I had more to bring to this. And also I was going to write my own work and I was ready to just go do it on something else. I wasn't ready at the time to make something up. Nobody was thinking in that way, really. We very much were trained to be part of a football team, so you know. It was when I started making up characters of my own and realizing that I had to control them that I kind of stuck my sword in the ground and said, I've got to be the one to tell these stories.

• 26:32Rick Rubin?

  How much would you know about your characters beyond what's on the page?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Everything I could think of. And we had wrote biographies. I feel you've got to do that homework. Because otherwise you're bluffing and you can really stumble.

• 26:50Rick Rubin?

  They have to be fully formed entities for it to work.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  You've got to have a fully formed in your mind. And at the same time, you've got to let them turn around and kick you in the ass or surprise you. I don't believe that creativity is a rigid process. And I do believe the character has every right to talk back at you.

• 27:12Rick Rubin?

  So you can have an idea of this is what this character is like. And in the middle of the story, he could decide to do something that you would have never imagined him doing.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yes, oh yeah.

• 27:22Rick Rubin?

  That happens.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. Or for instance, when my Marvel and Sin City would show a feminine side, there would always be something I really liked. Like, there's one moment I recall writing these lines and I didn't even think before I wrote them down.

• 27:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Where it's like, all of a sudden I'm crying and I don't know why.

• 27:44Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like you were channeling?

• 27:45Speaker 00

  It felt that way, yeah. Like it was just, it was just coming out and it was right.

• 27:51Rick Rubin?

  Are you ever surprised by what comes out?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. A lot of times I don't expect it, yeah. Those are the best times.

• 27:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 28:01Rick Rubin?

  It's so interesting.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  You know what I'm talking about though?

• 28:03Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:04Rick Rubin?

  But it's just so cool. It's so mystical.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  But that's what's the beauty of it. I mean, that's, that's why we fucking call it art. You know, it's one of the reasons why, I mean, anybody who knows, who knows me could tell you, I've got a real gripe against this new church of AI. Because to me it is disavowing the creative act of self. For us to have the hubris to think that we can understand the human mind and the creative process and recreate that mind and that creative process, that is us saying we are gods.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  And what has that shit ever been crapping out? I've read some AI scripts. My God.

• 28:57Rick Rubin?

  How have comics changed just with computers being involved, even pre-AI?

• 29:02Speaker 00

  No, no, no. So far, the only ways they've changed have been in terms of simple things like the introduction where processors change the writing, the act of writing so profoundly that it can never go back. It has now become something where it's much closer to the way the mind works and by and large the benefits have so far outweighed the shortcomings. Yes, there's been a whole lot of flabby writing. That's a separate problem. That means that we got a flabby writing problem. It doesn't mean that it's an impediment to creating and creating in a much more natural and beautiful way.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  The other way that computers have affected things, generally for the positive, is it in terms of coloring the comics because it just introduced a much broader range to the palette. The equivalent of movie special effects and all that can be done. Where it has become a dead loss. The ink renderings traditionally have been done by hand. People have been simply having the computer do that. And I find the results to be as if you've all of a sudden had Ronnie the robot playing one of the instruments in your band.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  It's just, to me, it's an emotional flatness. Because comics have an amazing number of disadvantages to other media. We're the tough little kid on the end of the block. Movies are the big, big guy who drives a nice shiny car and you know, and has all the gals and all of that. But we should make use of what advantages we have. And the chief advantage I can think of is the celebration of physical drawing itself and the seeming magic of what drawing is and the individual creative mind at play and in exploration.

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• 32:52Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of comics from the beginning that we know and every big change and breakthrough along the way.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Okay, it goes back to a magazine that came out called Famous Funnies in the 1930s, where a publisher, I believe it was Max Gaines, who was the father of the EC Comics guy. He simply bound together a bunch of newspaper strips and sold them as a magazine. They sold very well. Because of this, all of a sudden, they said, "We need more of them. Let's get some new material in there." And the American comic book was born.

• 33:35Rick Rubin?

  And were comic strips around for a long time previous?

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Hundreds of years.

• 33:39Rick Rubin?

  As long as there have been newspapers?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  They're pretty damn close to it. The first recorded one was The Yellow Kid. I don't have the date of when that was around, but that is a beautiful little strip where we're talking the early 1900s. The earliest ones tend to be like simple genre work. Westerns were a very big deal from very early on.

• 34:04Rick Rubin?

  This is in the 1930s?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it eventually grew into very primitive science fiction stories.

• 34:12Rick Rubin?

  Would these be simultaneously when Westerns were popular in movie theaters?

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 34:16Rick Rubin?

  There was always a parallel between movies and comics?

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Usually, the first thing that came out in comics that had not existed anywhere else was Superman. No one had ever seen a superhero.

• 34:26Rick Rubin?

  We so associate superheroes with comics, and it sounds like in some ways it defined the genre.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it was something that no other medium could do.

• 34:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  I mean, they started moving toward it when there was the early 1960s Superman TV show with George Reeves and others that followed it. But it wasn't really until the 1970s, when they unleashed the Christopher Reeve Superman movie, that all of a sudden it became a genre in film. And that was really the biggest upheaval in comic book history. And that's only increased now that they've worked out the kinks and they can turn around superhero movies with seeming ease. And now that the two major comic book companies have been bought by movie-making corporations.

• 35:21Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Daredevil.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Daredevil was created in the early 1960s by Stan Lee and an old artist from way back named Bill Everett, whose work goes back at least into the early 50s. He was kind of the weak sister to Spider-Man, even though the great artists I've mentioned before, Wallace Wood, drew him and gave him the red costume, we all know. He originally wore a circus outfit that was yellow and really silly looking. So it became a beautiful book. It had a series of really major artists, major talents in comics history. For the longest time, it was illustrated by Gene Colan, a very talented and

• 36:08Speaker 00

  kind of hard-to-define artist whose work had a great moodiness to it, even though his physical kinetics were not particularly exciting. It was as if he was one of the few superhero artists who had never seen Jack Kirby's work. It remained by and large a weak sister title to Spider-Man, but it was kept alive through the sheer vitality and sales of Marvel Comics. You know, when I was first working at Marvel, I wanted to have my own title to take over, to really get things rolling and have something to commit myself to. And Jim Shooter was keeping me busy,

• 36:51Speaker 00

  saying that he didn't think I was ready for a title of my own, but he'd keep me busy. He was true to his word. And one time I got to do the second-string Spider-Man book, which The Spectacular Spider-Man. And in the story, the story featured Daredevil as a guest star.

• 37:08Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  And the two of them having a fight. And I got very intrigued by this blind guy. And the idea of a superhero's main feature was an impairment.

• 37:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  And I just drew the hell out of the story and added all kinds of plot elements and so on. When I finished it, I told Shooter that if Gene Colan ever left the book, that I wanted him to consider me. When I said this in front of the staff, they all thought it was hilarious because, you know, what an uppity kid. But everything fell into place and it turns out Gene Colan was really getting burned out on it and getting older. And Jim Shooter was of a mind. He liked the fact that I put so much labor into it, so much love of the city, so much understanding of the character. And also, frankly, that I listened to him so much because he was quite a teacher

• 38:04Speaker 00

  when it came to the fundamentals of comic book storytelling and of dramatics, that he okayed me to come on as illustrator. And later, I took over the writing as well. It was a wonderful journey. It was my baptism.

• 38:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  You know, the very first time I wrote an issue, I brought in the character that I'd made up many months before of Elektra. And she ended up changing the entire story. What had been a monthly comic book with monthly adventures that would occasionally be two or three issues long became a sprawling Greek opera that just the name Elektra must have inspired it. I shamelessly stole the crime lord from Spider-Man comics, the kingpin. Just stole him cold and put him in Daredevil and decided it was a crime comic.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Decided it was going to be like the old crime comics and like the Mickey Spillane novels I loved so much and like the old movies I loved so much. And so it was my attempt to bring back, to bring that genre back into comic books.

• 39:18Rick Rubin?

  How important is seeing emotion in comics?

• 39:22Speaker 00

  It's vital. And the thing is, it's like all the best things in comics. It's vital precisely because it's the most impossible thing. It's like sound. We are a silent medium, but that's why we, that's why if you look at us, we're so damned loud. It's why we're screaming all the time. That's why there's sound effects as big as your fists. That's why our idea of an action scene might involve an exploding planet, is that we don't think small because if we get small and quiet, we can be a little too easy to ignore.

• 40:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. So because it's quiet, you have to make it loud.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does get into Marshall McLuhan land here. You know, that it's not a hot medium. It's very cool. So you have to do a bit of Rothko there to get people's attention.

• 40:19Rick Rubin?

  When did you first come in contact with manga?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  That was at the time I was working on Daredevil. And I was dating a woman whose father worked for an oil company. And he went to Japan a lot. She said, "Hey, there's a comic book from Japan." And it was a little samurai comic called Lone Wolf and Cub. And I opened it up and I was immediately enraptured by it because the storytelling pace was completely different. The drawing style was completely different. There was an energy to the very strokes of the brushes on the pages that spoke to the emotional content of the scenes in a more intimate way than I was used to.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  It was more based on energy and flow than on form. So naturally, there was more a sense of continuous movement throughout it. It changed the whole way I've thought about comic books ever since.

• 41:20Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  This was a case of my chosen medium changing before my very eyes. It couldn't have been more dramatic. Imagine walking into a theater and for the first time seeing D W Griffiths when after what what had come before.

• 41:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  For me, it was it was like one of those moments.

• 41:38Rick Rubin?

  Have there been any other moments like that where you're seeing something that there's no context for it?

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Earlier, where when I was a child, it was when I'd been growing up reading Superboy and Legion of Super Heroes. And I was over at a friend's house and saw Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four.

• 41:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, I realized comic books could explode and that that that if somebody got angry, everything in the room could fly around. Since Lone Wolf and Cub, there have been events where an artist like Dan Klaus will come along. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. The work has a very static look to it. It follows this almost metronomic rhythm where there will be exactly four lines of hand lettered copy underneath each image. And it will tell you a deeply disturbing tale that usually includes no violence of any kind and leaves you unsettled.

• 42:41Rick Rubin?

  It's like psychological violence.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's many others. I've got to mention Spiegelman's work for his for his. Spiegelman had always been a figure who would bring a very compelling passion to his work and a highly intellectual concept, everything he did. But with Miles, he took brutal family history and in a master stroke that only a thinking man's artist could do, he turned them into mice. And that was at once a commentary on the fact that they died like rats. And it also distanced you enough from the horror by making them look like little animals

• 43:28Speaker 00

  in a Saturday morning cartoon that you were able to read the whole thing, knowing you were reading an atrocity and not turn your head away. And it takes somebody who really knows what he's doing.

• 43:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Spiegelman knew exactly what he was doing and he executed it mercilessly because he does not waver in that.

• 43:52Rick Rubin?

  Has any of your work ever been censored or banned?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. One of my Daredevils was banned by the Comics Code back when that was around. It was rejected by the Comics Code. And one of its rules was that one could never feature drug use in a comic book. I did this comic book during the Angel Dust business that happened in in New York. It was an issue of Daredevil. And they brought out this fossil rule and said, we just can't let you do it.

• 44:23Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  And so I said, I want to talk to him. And so it was arranged and I went and talked to him. I'm telling you, it was a moment that we could have been filmed because I walked in and it was this little office that looked like it was 1954.

• 44:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  And the people that looked like it was 1954, I'm not talking like they looked like they were all that old.

• 44:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  But they looked like they were still dressed that way. And they were like relatively young people that way.

• 44:52Rick Rubin?

  Like the Beatles hadn't happened yet.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:54Rick Rubin?

  And this is in the seventies?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I just sat down with them and and we all talked and I had to tell them how the comic book market worked and what the audience was like now and so on. And I got to do my story. I mean, I did my story, got to see Friends. That might have been the beginning of the Ed Comics Code because it was it was dead within a year. He got thrown out.

• 45:21Rick Rubin?

  And did you ever read Underground Comics?

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Love him. I love him, obviously, Crum. You know, he was amazing.

• 45:28Rick Rubin?

  Art Crum.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, Art Crum. And I think that Richard Carvin was one of the most astonishing talents to ever work at comics.

• 45:38Rick Rubin?

  Did your Batman have to look like the old Batman?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  First thing I wanted to match was the silhouette. He had the massive square look to him, not just the London jaw, but the impossibly broad shoulders, chest, the big hands, the big feet. He had a beard planted and he had to look as if he could crush someone's head with his hand. I felt that he had gotten very long, delicate ears, in case bat ears. And I went back to the 1950s, chopped off little things to just keep a more formidable, brutish look to him.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  And he'd gotten so that his cape had become a parachute, made of parachute silk and been long and beautiful. That was the Neil Adams look that had dominated for so long. And not only did I not have the skills to imitate what Neil Adams did, I didn't have the desire really. I wanted to go for a much more rough and tumble look. And so I made his cape have weight for not to be very long, but for it to to feel like it was made of canvas. And the same with that belt, instead of being bright yellow, it was a canvas like okra almost.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  And then I started playing with all the toys, the big, pretty Bat Arangs. I decided to bring in a bit of the ninja, touch them and make them absolutely sadistic, lethal, small things that could poke an eye out. And most fun of all was to take the name The Batmobile and turn it from a sports car into a tank.

• 47:34Rick Rubin?

  Did you have to get permission to do that?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  At first, the editor was nervous about a lot of things, partly because Danny O'Neill was was far from politically conservative, but he as a man, he was a very conservative fellow, didn't believe in taking too many chances. And also, he he had made his name on that character with a very different interpretation. And so there was some resistance there and in other quarters. But the boss, Jeanette Khan, the publisher, she knew something new was coming. And the editor in chief, Dick Giordano, was a longtime veteran of comics.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  He had been tasked with turning Batman around and he knew something bold had to happen. And they both invested themselves thoroughly. And luckily, basically, I had the support of the Top Guns. So so we rolled ahead.

• 48:34Rick Rubin?

  Have that ever happened before in comics where a really loved character came back in a totally new light?

• 48:42Speaker 00

  I don't think it had happened before, as I can recall. After that, it started happening all the time.

• 48:47Rick Rubin?

  But based on the success of The Dark Knight?

• 48:50Speaker 00

  I think it was people realized that this stuff could be.

• 48:54Rick Rubin?

  Well, if people hated The Dark Knight, people wouldn't have.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Every once in a while, it takes a shock to make a medium change course.

• 49:04Rick Rubin?

  No, those are all the best moments. We don't want more of the same.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  We want Elvis, you know?

• 49:11Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about working with Robert Rodriguez.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Robert Rodriguez, man, that was just a kick in the ass. That was just great. As fine a collaborator, that is a good a man as you could ever find. He had a a way of getting his guts into a project. Basically, it was a gut-first creative talent. He immediately saw Sin City as a series of technical problems to solve, and he loved technical problems. He's like a wizard at turning a complicated problem into a simple problem. Like he would he would often say things to me that sounded like guru-like, like you just got to shoot it backwards to make it work. And he'd be right.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  And so from the beginning, he showed his hot concept for Sin City to me by saying, all these people for all these years have been adapting comic books to movies. This time, we're going to adapt a movie into a comic book.

• 50:15Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  See, that's simple inversion, and that explains Sin City.

• 50:20Rick Rubin?

  And it's so different. If you think of the history of comics turning into movies, I would say often unsuccessfully. Maybe Superman was successful on some level. I remember like Dick Tracy. What did you think?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Dick Tracy was Dick Tracy and Popeye were campy nostalgic romps. Superman was actually a joyous celebration, but it was also in itself an exciting ride.

• 50:52Rick Rubin?

  It seemed like a regular movie. It didn't seem like a comic book movie.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  No. No, it didn't. One of the main reasons too is I spoke with Richard Donner about this, and he said that his main operating word making Superman was verisimilitude. He said, take it seriously and get all the details right to give you every evidence that this is really happening.

• 51:20Rick Rubin?

  Took it seriously.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  There can't be a dust spot that isn't evidence that this is really going on.

• 51:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  I believe that's why it had the perfect tagline with you'll believe a man can fly. And you're watching that movie and the movie is more than half over when he first takes off. That's how long it takes to lift him off the ground. I mean, that's how much work it is and should be to do fantasy. And my biggest reservation about the current crop is you go in and it is like a Saturday morning cartoon. It's like everybody can do all this ridiculous stuff. And I don't feel wonder because there's no frame of reference.

• 52:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and it makes it seem like what they're doing isn't difficult.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 52:12Rick Rubin?

  It's just presented as it's ordinary.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And it's also almost desperate need to clutter the screen with so much of it all at once.

• 52:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Rather than bring out the wonder of of a single element against a more recognizable setting and cast.

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• 54:11Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about Electra. When did the character come to you?

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Oh, way back when. When I was a kid drawing comics that were little black and white crime comics that I did that published in a school newspaper.

• 54:26Rick Rubin?

  So you had first drawn her then?

• 54:29Speaker 00

  I had a character named Electra. And she had the black hair and the intense eyes and all of that, but it was me drawing as an amateur. I mean, I couldn't draw much of anything then. I always knew I wanted to use that name, but I had already decided that I would be a comic book professional, but I was always just making up characters right and left. Since I had studied the whole story of Agamemnon and the House of Atreus, and Agamemnon's daughter Electra was really one of the most frightening characters in mythology. And the original scary, avenging, dark-eyed daughter. That was her real beginning.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  When I developed her as a comic book character, I was just beginning as a professional writer. So I did what any sincere artist does. I looked around for who to steal from. And I looked to an idol and mentor of mine, Will Eisner, and his masterwork, The Spirit. And perhaps my favorite story in it, which was one called Sanseraf, which was about The Spirit's first girlfriend, the love of his life, who fell into a life of crime. And a little eight-page story breaks your heart as she's the one criminal he lets go.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  It's not just for old times' sake, it's for passion's sake. And I took the structure of that little eight-pager and made it a 21-pager, or whatever it was, and made it my first writing job. Then it turned to its own thing. It turned into a martial arts adventure character who ended up having weird relationships with the Antichrist and all kinds of stuff, but that's how it began.

• 56:21Rick Rubin?

  Are there a finite number of stories? Do all stories break down into a handful?

• 56:28Speaker 00

  I don't believe so. I mean, I've heard that said. I've even thought it myself. But the more I do of it, the more I believe that the beauty in what we all do is chaos. The accident, the thing that's not supposed to happen, but works anyway. And there'd be no reason to make stories if we were just kicking out an algorithm, to use the language of our time.

• 56:59Rick Rubin?

  Explain to me what a graphic novel is.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Okay, graphic novel is a term that was coined by Will Eisner in the 1970s. And he did this because he was so impressed by the European Bonfessiné. Eisner was out to make comic books. He always wanted to make them compete more with literature, which is very different than my goals. But he also thought that the term comic book was essentially derisive, that it meant it was dumb stuff for little kids. And so he coined the term graphic novel. I've never made much use of that term because I don't care what they're called. Like, a song is a song is a song.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  But in terms of format, that's where I really wanted to push the handle up.

• 57:51Rick Rubin?

  What would you say the delineation is between the comic book and the graphic novel?

• 57:55Speaker 00

  First and most physical version is page count. Graphic novel in America has always been between 48 and 64 pages long. I did not find that acceptable. I've gone more into multiples of 100 pages. That's where you can really tell a story and let it breathe. American comics have been too constipated and congested for way too long. Too many damn words and not making really good use of the form itself. Instead, making it look kind of like illustrated books or just repeats of the sad old time that were made back in the 1940s to the 1960s.

• 58:40Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about comic book stores.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  I love comic book stores. I think that they're a miracle that I saw being born, that comic book publishers were going out of business. The sense of doom when you entered the offices was palpable.

• 58:58Rick Rubin?

  Why did that happen?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Here, I've got to backtrack a bit, and you are hearing my interpretation of history.

• 59:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  In the 1950s, when we all got investigated by the Senate and accused of creating juvenile delinquency and all of that.

• 59:14Rick Rubin?

  The government went after comic books?

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:16Rick Rubin?

  I don't know about this.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, they were called the key for hearings. I've read the entire transcripts of these hearings, where the great comic book publisher was Bill Gaines of EC Comics, who was the first one to be on trial because the whole thing was a setup to put him out of business. He was up there speeding on diet pills, but that's the myth, okay? But no, but he was up there defending comics vociferously, and they were charging them with everything. They said that Batman and Robin were a homosexual couple. This was, of course, in a time when homosexuality was considered the equivalent to child molestation.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  And all of this was generated by a pop psychologist looking to make a name for himself named Frederick Wertham, who wrote a truly execrable book called Seduction of the Innocent, about how comic books were poisoning and perverting the minds of children in America. Yet, in order to survive, the comic book publishers, authors of all these heroes who never gave up, abjectly surrendered and apologized in public and paid for the strictest censorship board in American history. And he made the Hays Code look gentle.

• 1:00:42Rick Rubin?

  I had no idea.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like a family scandal that, you know, nobody talks about.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  And this Cold War relic existed and stayed in place into the 1970s.

• 1:00:58Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it went completely irrelevant. I mean, it included...

• 1:01:03Rick Rubin?

  Were the people making comics afraid?

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Everything was still submitted to them, and you were told by your editor, you can't do that. No comic book show used the word horror or terror in its title. It was a rule, and it was enforced.

• 1:01:17Rick Rubin?

  But you could see a movie with horror or terror? You could read a book with horror?

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  This is comic book.

• 1:01:21Rick Rubin?

  Anything?

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Yes. There were comic books that were kind of spooky and had the supernatural in them, but they were called mystery comics. They couldn't call them horror comics.

• 1:01:33Rick Rubin?

  Were ghost stories allowed?

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  They did allow some ghost stories because it didn't specifically outlaw ghosts. Everything was followed to the letter. It also had a lot of religious stuff in it that, of course, that there's always a lot of that in any censorious crap. And of course, anything to do with sex or nudity. The prohibitions on violence were much milder.

• 1:01:57Rick Rubin?

  Of course, because

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  It's the 50s.

• 1:01:59Rick Rubin?

  The war machine must go on.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And largely, we got by by ignoring the damn thing. Mainly because it was run by a bunch of people who were totally out of touch. You didn't really step right on it. You were gonna get away with it. But I was exactly the age and of the temperament to step right on it repeatedly.

• 1:02:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Because I wanted to, I wanted to crush this thing. It's not good to just have a tumor on your butt and not do something about it.

• 1:02:31Rick Rubin?

  So we're getting to comic book stores.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:34Rick Rubin?

  Industry is folding.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Let's just put it this way. Gasping for air, I think is a good way to put it.

• 1:02:40Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  It's getting sad and old. And these bright little comic shops, I think it started in California, most things do in entertainment. They, they started just setting up deals with the publishers where there were no distributors. The stuff would just be shipped directly to the stores. The way it was set, it became set up was that new distributors moved in and they would simply buy books from the publisher. They wouldn't say, we'll buy these and return the ones they didn't sell. They'll say, no, we're taking this 40,000 copies of this comic and we'll take the risk, but we want this slice of the pie. And so you

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  had an entity as a middleman, because these were comics fans who were doing it. So they were much more in touch with what would be sellable and so on. And then you had all these bright new comic shops popping up. They were beautiful. They were nice, clean places. They weren't the little drugstores with the spinner racks. And they sold lots of toys and all of that. So they had a real good retail base. And they'd come in and they'd have a relationship with the customers. So when the customer came in, he wouldn't just go and buy Spider-Man and ignore everything else. There'd be someone there who'd say, hey, you know, that guy from Spider-Man, he's on a new book here. And then, of course,

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  the good ones like Golden Apple would get the idea of saying, hey, they really like this guy's drawings. So let's have him come in and sign the books here. And that'll be an event that'll sell more books. And, and it all became more and more of a community. Meanwhile, these conventions were happening, where people were showing up in costumes and joyous events. And those started a long time ago. This started, started with the science fiction people and continued with the comic book people. The term I've been using again and again over the past few years is tribe.

• 1:04:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Because I love tribes. I love the existence of them. I love seeing gamers, their passion, the intensity and the creativity they bring to, to stuff that I know fucking idea what you're doing. But, but I like to see what their minds are doing. With comic book people, they don't have to be making them to be creative. The debates, because I'm a devoted debater. So it's like that, to me, that sort of thing is what makes, makes the human life worth living.

• 1:05:15Rick Rubin?

  It's like a fraternity.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Yes. And the argument part of it is, is a big part, important part of it.

• 1:05:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  I do think that as a society, we've gotten so gun shy about even disagreement that we are threatening ourselves, debilitating ourselves even, by acting like it's rude to say you're wrong.

• 1:05:42Rick Rubin?

  What was the first comic book convention you ever went to?

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  First comic book convention I ever went to was a San Diego convention. I was invited to a San Diego Comic-Con. I had no idea what they were like. It was back when it was a very small convention. It was completely contained in one hotel, the Westgate Hotel, like a real old fashioned California hotel. I went to it and I believe I was 24. I was probably drawing daredevil all the time. And at that convention, I remember I walked into a room and met Jack Kirby. I met many other people at that same convention, but

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  that to me was just like, my God. And I meet him and he's this sweet guy and he's, he was a ball of fire. To the end, he was a ball of fire. But at that point, he was not an old man. Even though you'd think he was ancient because he'd been working for so long.

• 1:06:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  He was young when he started. I remember sitting down and talking with him. And as soon as I would throw an idea at him, it would come back to me, reinviginated, strengthened, and blossoming in 18,000 directions at once.

• 1:07:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  It was, I was witnessing genius in action. Everything he saw and heard was being processed by an engine of creative intellect like I'd never seen before.

• 1:07:12Rick Rubin?

  So at these conventions, there would be talks?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 1:07:17Rick Rubin?

  They would sell collectible comics?

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  That was mostly what they did.

• 1:07:22Rick Rubin?

  Trade comics, sell comics?

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  People had, most of the convention, well, it was all in one hotel. And they would take the bottom floor of the hotel. And there would be a bunch of people sitting on, on folding chairs at collapsible tables with cardboard boxes full of old comic books that they were selling at either slight markups or at a lower prices than comic.

• 1:07:49Rick Rubin?

  Like a flea market just for comic books.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  And then somewhere along the line, before I ever got into the thing, they got the idea of, hey, this guy lives in town. Let's have him show up and, and have everybody meet him. And then it's the, the people behind it knew that something was growing in there.

• 1:08:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  There was a lady who, who I've known for years now, Jackie Estrada is one of them. And she, she would just cheerfully introduce people. And then we'd, we'd end up on stage together swapping jokes and things. And eventually it, it started growing into something else where issues of the day would come along. Sometime in the 1980s, when comic books started growing up with things like Dark Knight and Watchmen coming out, when everything started going right, come on, you're a little bit acquainted with entertainment. You know what I'm talking about. What do people do? They shit their pants in fear. Instantly,

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  people were saying, well, we need a rating system like they have in movies. Come on, man. You know what that means.

• 1:09:02Speaker 06

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• 1:09:42Speaker 06

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• 1:10:26Speaker 06

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• 1:11:17Rick Rubin?

  How would you compare your work to, say, Alan Moore or Grant Morrison?

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  Very different animals. Particularly in the case of Alan, we arrived at similar times. We approached superheroes with similar notions superficially, but profoundly diametrically opposed points of view. His work was an autopsy on the superhero, and mine was an attempted resurrection. I was kind of like the witch doctor calling lightning down to bring the thing back to life, and he was the clinician saying, "This thing never should have lived." It was just a very different... even though we became fast friends, we'd love so much of the same stuff.

• 1:12:09Rick Rubin?

  Between the two of you, you're the kings of the graphic novel.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  For a while there, it was like that. And as the counterpoint to us, the dramatic counterpoint was Spiegel. Because he was coming in from the literary world. But it needed all three of us for that kind of magic moment to happen.

• 1:12:28Rick Rubin?

  And had you and Alan not been so diametrically opposed, you both didn't need to be there. That's the way it works. It's like, you need those counterbalances, the different points of view.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  That is one quarrel I have with our current age, is people now come to think conflict is a bad thing.

• 1:12:50Rick Rubin?

  They think they're all supposed to be the same.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  And I don't think conflict's a bad thing at all. I think conflict is how things get defined.

• 1:12:57Rick Rubin?

  So, we went from strips to books. That was a moment. And then, from books of strips to single-subject books. Since that, what had been the biggest breakthrough moments in comics?

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  The biggest leap to me has been, in terms of format, is what's now called the graphic novel. Because that, for the first time, declared that we're not simply something that becomes a collectible intake, that we can seek permanence, and we can seek legacy.

• 1:13:39Rick Rubin?

  It's not disposable anymore.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  No. Nor is it precious.

• 1:13:44Rick Rubin?

  That's a big difference. It's a big difference.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it also nor is it precious.

• 1:13:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because it's still comics.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  But what I mean, though, is that it's not precious because a copy of Farewell My Lovely is not precious, because you know that you can get another one.

• 1:13:58Rick Rubin?

  Are you saying wider distribution is part of what makes it not precious?

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  We might be using precious in different ways.

• 1:14:06Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  But precious, I'm using precious as a pejorative. I'm using it to mean that it's a dainty thing that has to be...

• 1:14:14Rick Rubin?

  Like fussy.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Or kept in a plastic bag, or something worse. I'll be sitting signing comic books, and someone will bring one that looks like the dog ate half of it, and it's been pissed on, and so on, and I'll say, "This is the proper condition of a comic book. It's been read to death," you know? And those are the ones I do the free drawings on. I believe that what we do only exists in that it interacts with humanity. You know, it's not a jewel that's to be worshipped.

• 1:14:45Rick Rubin?

  Since the graphic novel, have there been any breakthroughs?

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  People would immediately bring up computers when you ask that, online comics, et cetera. I won't join that crowd. I mean, I think that, obviously, it's the entering other media, but that isn't really a breakthrough, that's being adapted.

• 1:15:06Rick Rubin?

  Can you imagine any way that a comic could become a movie that hasn't been done that you'd want to see?

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Whoa, man.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  So, Alan, why'd you give me one of these smart ones?

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  I've often wondered what it would be like to bring in some of the methodology of improv, to explore things with actors, and let it take unexpected courses, and then build your whatever effects you needed, or whatever around that. I am in love with actors. I mean, they have been the most thrilling part of working for the screen. They're the special effects. We know they're not human, okay? We know this. It doesn't have to be discussed. They are different creatures.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  To see what would come out of them by testing and taxing, and make directing become much more participatory and challenging task.

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  So that the division of labor wasn't so much a division of labor between script writer comes in, drops his piece of genius, his immutable piece of genius, and then each person does their immutable piece of genius, and make it more what you see people do when they workshop a play. I'd love to see something develop in cinema that would be like that.

• 1:16:41Rick Rubin?

  And it sounds like that has the potential to capture what you described about Jack Kirby, of it being more alive.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the idea of doing it, but doing it with a writer always there, someone who would know how to take... Because, you know, almost no actor can really ad lib. You know, it's not what they bring to the table. They can express a feeling they have that gives me the nod, and that's a very valuable thing to do.

• 1:17:11Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of Three Hundred.

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  It's as simple as this. I was a very, very young boy, and my father took me and my older brother Steve to the movies on a Saturday at the Capitol Theater in Montpelier, Vermont, and we saw The Three Hundred Spartans, a 1962 Richard Egan classic that told the story of the Battle of Thermopylae fought before ADBC. Now, the story told in that movie is fundamentally historically accurate, although it was all done in very 1960s. We really wish this was Ben-Hur kind of posturing.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  It was perfect for a little boy my age, and for one my brother's age. And I sat in the theater. This whole wonderful story unfolded, where these handful of men with spears were fighting an unspeakable horde of enemies, defending what would become democracy and science and all of that. And then at the end, they got betrayed, and then encircled, and brought down by arrows, and they died to a man. And I sat there next to my brother, and we talked quietly with each other, and one of us dared the other to ask Dad something.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  And I said to my father, "Dad, did the good guys die?" And he said, "I'm afraid so, son."

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  And in that moment, in that amazing moment, my entire concept of what a hero was changed forever.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  A hero was no longer the shining figure who could fly through the air and could get bullets bounce off his chest, and would save the day every day, and would win. A hero was someone who was willing to commit to the death, to failure and death.

• 1:19:20Rick Rubin?

  Could be the martyr.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. But was willing to go that last bloody distance in the effort to achieve something. And that has informed everything I've done ever since.

• 1:19:33Rick Rubin?

  Wow. Have you ever had a hero die and then figure out a way to do a second story after they're dead with that character, or no?

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not going to have people come back to life, even if I'm doing Justin City, and I don't really like supernatural stories a lot of the bunch.

• 1:19:51Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever had anyone come back to life in anything, or no?

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I did with Elektra in The Dead of Comics. I brought her back to life.

• 1:20:01Rick Rubin?

  When you killed her, did you know you were going to bring her back to life, or no?

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  No. I killed her, then I got the idea, partly because I was working on a book, and I kind of missed her, and the book was really not getting fun to do anymore, and I thought, "Well, I'll try this, and maybe it'll be really cool."

• 1:20:23Rick Rubin?

  And did you explain her coming back, or was it like a cartoon where...

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  No, it was done with mystical ninja tricks, man.

• 1:20:30Rick Rubin?

  You made sense of bringing her back. It's not like you ignored the fact that she was killed off.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  I did, and I almost instantly realized I'd made the biggest creative mistake I'd ever made in my life. And so, once I realized that error, it being comic books where you can do anything, I did a big old fancy pants graphic novel called Elektra Lives Again, where I really killed her, and there was no doubt.

• 1:20:55Rick Rubin?

  Well, until you bring her back next time.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  No, bring her back after that one, no.

• 1:21:00Rick Rubin?

  So you saw the movie Three Hundred, and then what happened next?

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd already told my parents I was gonna be a comic book artist. And I said, when I get good enough, I'm gonna make a comic book.

• 1:21:12Rick Rubin?

  And when was that?

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  After I'd done Sin City. I decided, okay, I'm good enough now. I'd done Dark Knight, I'd had all the success that you can get in comic books and all that. But I realized I'd been putting it off. And then it was time to really take the challenge on.

• 1:21:28Rick Rubin?

  And you wrote it as a graphic novel?

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wrote it as a graphic novel. I intended it for that horizontal format. But at the time, the only way to really make a nickel doing comics was to have to be in the standard comic book format. So I got clever. And I decided to format the entire thing for double page spreads. And did it as a regular comic book. Planning it to be published in a horizontal format as a hardcover.

• 1:21:57Rick Rubin?

  Had anyone ever done that before?

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  Uh, no. And I decided there would be no softcover edition. Because I didn't want there to be a cheaper version. Or a compromised version. And I'm glad there was, there wasn't a softcover.

• 1:22:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  There wasn't some of the European ones, but, but I couldn't really control that.

• 1:22:15Rick Rubin?

  How did that end up becoming a movie?

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  That was my call, because I, I owned the property. And I was very protective of it. Zack Snyder wanted to meet me, I was living out in Los Angeles at the time. And I met with him and he came. And he, knowledge of the battle was encyclopedic. And he had already done some tests that he wanted to show me of the way he would do the visual effects to supercharge the action and so on. And that way you could get across the scope of the Persian army. With, with various like computer duplication figures and such. And I saw it was in very good hands. So, so I approved the project. After that, I visited on set.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  But I was not in any way a principal production.

• 1:23:04Rick Rubin?

  What's it like seeing something that you write turn into a film?

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  It's as simple as this. If it's good, it's really nice.

• 1:23:13Rick Rubin?

  Is it surreal?

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm sitting there and just biting my lip and going, God, did that work? Was that right? And then very early on, I'll get the feeling this is missing the point. Or, oh no. The central meaning has been lost, or something like that.

• 1:23:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What does push the wall mean?

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  It's got multiple meanings, but it essentially means to test boundaries of the medium itself. And to defy and trample traditions.

• 1:23:49Rick Rubin?

  I would have never understood that if you didn't tell me that right now.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:23:52Rick Rubin?

  I had no idea what it means.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  Okay. Hey, we really bombed on this one.

• 1:23:59Rick Rubin?

  So that's what-

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  Rick Rubin says we got a lousy title.

• 1:24:01Rick Rubin?

  No, it's, I didn't understand it.

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:24:04Rick Rubin?

  And I thought maybe it had some personal meaning.

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  Well, the personal meaning is that it's, I've always felt that, that it was my role in comics to be pushing the laws.

• 1:24:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Pushing against the laws in a very sort of constipated, high tradition bound medium that should be a joyous explosion of creativity.

• 1:24:23Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about writing the book.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  Thawne and Strang.

• 1:24:28Rick Rubin?

  Did you remember a lot of the things in it? Or did things come to you as you were writing that you didn't remember that you remembered?

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of it also came from, because this book was often, often done in the form of a dialogue, where, where I was getting asked questions and, and it was translated back into as if it were all something that I composed. Lots of things came up that I hadn't particularly remembered. There were vivid memories that I've never lost, like the business of falling through the ice as a child, which was a very formative thing in my life that I think actually was character forming for me.

• 1:25:05Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Just to come that close to a parent death at that young an age. Yeah, I've always been someone since who's very aware of the possibility of cataclysm. That I would walk into a room and imagine what if that fixture isn't so good? I, for instance, one of the things I, I find myself thinking about a lot these days is following what's going on and observing what I see in our politics and everything else. I see very fundamental mechanisms of society and, and how the mechanics of life are breaking down.

• 1:25:49Rick Rubin?

  How much would you say you were influenced by television growing up?

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  A lot. A whole lot. Starting with Saturday morning cartoons. Uh, like I said-

• 1:25:59Rick Rubin?

  What were the cartoons you grew up with?

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  Superman. The original Viper Brothers Superman, that was the one I watched the most. But I ate up all kinds of things like Johnny Quest and, and all of those. But then I went along on to be, to follow fantasy on TV. You obviously think it's like Star Trek and all of that, but you know, Western shows when they were on. And then later, and when I was, I was still a kid, I became totally enamored with the old show Kojak.

• 1:26:30Rick Rubin?

  Great show.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  And it was another thing that made me fall in love with New Yorkers, I haven't been there yet.

• 1:26:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  But that Kojak show was the first police procedural TV show we ever had. And with one of the most amazing heroic actors we've ever had. Because if anybody that ugly who could play a hero that pure, he was such an ancient Greek hero. He really brought the, the Greek to that character in a, in a classical sense as well as a police sense.

• 1:26:57Rick Rubin?

  What makes a story great?

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  Stories gotta have one, one thing that can make it great. I'd say for me, a story has to involve a test of the human character.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  And a definition of that character through the test. That's why the hero is always to me, the subject is because a hero is a character who is endlessly tested. This goes all the way back to the the, the earliest heroes.

• 1:27:36Rick Rubin?

  Is there always one hero? Or can it be more than one?

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Oh, surely there can be more. I mean, there could be more than one. I don't know, you always wanna go for the Avengers, though. Because the hero should never outnumber the threat there is. Jason and the Argonauts is a, is a wonderful story about heroes. Three Hundred has got three hundred of them. So no, it can certainly be. And if you think about Robin Hood, that's a story about many heroes, there just happens to be one title character.

• 1:28:07Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the decision for Batman to sacrifice Robin.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  Sacrifice Robin?

• 1:28:13Rick Rubin?

  Didn't your Batman kill off Robin?

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, he did.

• 1:28:19Rick Rubin?

  That's a big choice. That's a big move.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, but he, he got really bad.

• 1:28:25Rick Rubin?

  I see. How did Robin turn bad?

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  He could never measure up.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  He idolized Batman. Everyone considered him the heir apparent.

• 1:28:40Rick Rubin?

  It's the story of Satan.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  And he couldn't measure up. And the old fuckers wouldn't die. So it's like he, he grew to hate him. It's basically

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  it's, it's, it's a study of sin, envy.

• 1:28:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Killed him.

• 1:29:00Rick Rubin?

  Didn't wanna live in the shadow of Batman.

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  That's right. It's like, well, it's like the play Amadeus.

• 1:29:06Rick Rubin?

  It's the oldest story in the world.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so you might say, he had the Solari complex.

• 1:29:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Do you remember when the idea hit you for that to happen?

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  I don't remember exactly when that hit me. But I, I remember-

• 1:29:20Rick Rubin?

  It's a big idea. Just if you look at our life with Batman and Robin forever, it's a really big idea.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Rick Rubin?

  It's a push the wall idea.

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  The line that really hit the editor Bob Shrek the hardest was when Robin says to Batman, "I love you." And then Batman just responds, who likes just something completely snarly and gnarly and, you know, just doesn't give an inch back. Because, come on. That guy was out slaughtering people. You know, Batman's got kind of a thing about innocent people being slaughtered.

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  Batman couldn't for a second, even countenance having, having an ounce of feeling for someone who did exactly what that nameless mugger did to his parents.

• 1:30:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  And doing it with joy.

• 1:30:14Rick Rubin?

  Was there ever any consideration of creating a new villain instead of going with one of the classics?

• 1:30:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the problem is classical villains were so goddamn good. But I mean, I could, it would be fun to do sometime, would want those.

• 1:30:30Rick Rubin?

  Does it make it less Batman if it's a new villain?

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  Uh, it depends. It all depends because like and I, my attention has gone elsewhere in so many ways. That I really feel like I wanna spend, I wanna give it, most of my energies to, to making up stuff that's pulling us in new directions rather than pulling the old stuff

• 1:30:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  in fresher directions. I'd rather be like starting some new gardens rather than killing old ones.

• 1:31:00Rick Rubin?

  How important is it for stories to be timeless?

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  If you think about that, you're killing yourself.

• 1:31:07Rick Rubin?

  If you do something topical based on what's going on in the world today, does that make it too disposable?

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  A Tale of Two Cities is topical.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Herodotus is topical. If you do a story about something that's going on right around you, you're still doing a story about people facing conflict, facing trials, making decisions, and dealing with the twin natures of the human and the natural. And these things are immutable and unchangeable. And so I don't think there's a distinction there.

• 1:31:44Rick Rubin?

  What's the relationship between free speech and comics?

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Same as the relationship between free speech and any other story form. Same as the relationship between free speech and any conscious life. It's a function of thinking freely. It's a prerequisite to living freely.

• 1:32:06Rick Rubin?

  And if we don't have that, what's the point?

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  There is none.

• 1:32:10Rick Rubin?

  If there was a piece of advice you could give your younger self about stories, what would you tell him?

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  Move back to Vermont, pump gas.

• 1:32:20Rick Rubin?

  Good one. You'd be right.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Now, what would I tell him now? I'd probably just give tips on how to save time. Don't go down these particular dark alleys. But mostly, it would just be, take the chance. Do not think about trends or...

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  Do not ever think of, "People like it when..." or that sort of thing. See what's bugging your gut. Tell that story.

• 1:33:22Speaker 07

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:33:36Speaker 06

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin?

• 1:33:41Speaker 06

  Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.