Vanity Games

I want to try something new(ish) this week. Back when I was a D&D blogger, I started doing “fast five” interviews with DMs–and it was a lot of fun. I may still do that (depending on how the sites that host my D&D posts receive the idea), but in the meantime I still have my own site that I can fill with whatever whimsy I like. I really enjoyed the “fast five” format, so I figured I’d give it a whack with webcomic creators, who seem as game a bunch of folks as any.

Last week I gave a (rather glowing) review of Guilded Age; it remains a comic I am thoroughly excited to see updates for, not only for story but also for art and characters I truly enjoy. Phil Kahn made the terrible mistake of being particularly gregarious with his time and attention, so I decided to take advantage of him and ask some questions about his comic. Much to my delight, T. Campbell got in on the action, too, so you get two webcomic writers for the price of one with this interview!

* If you had to describe your comic in ten words or less, what would you say?

P: The saga of the working class adventurer. (Which I think is the actual tagline on the website, so…duh )

T: That’s the tagline we use most often, yeah. I sometimes go with “fantasy reinvented” if I want to pique their curiosity.

* Why do it? What keeps you coming back for more?

P:  I keep coming back for more for the regular reasons: trying to build a business doing what I love. But the thing that gives me the giddy little thrill is seeing how the audience reacts to each installment.

T: Comics have always been one of my passions. When I was a kid with a serious speech impediment, I was looking for unusual ways to get my thoughts out and express my imagination. These days doing it’s just a part of me.

* I certainly was surprised by the adjunct of the “real world” with the very heavy fantasy plot (and then further surprised when it integrated well and wasn’t painfully hokey as such crossovers often are). Was that the plan from the start? How much of this do you have mapped out? Does Guilded Age have a set beginning / middle / end arc?

P: Yes, it was planned from the start. It was originally scheduled to happen earlier, but we kept changing the total chapter count, so it got pushed back a couple chapters. We have the entire story outlined on all major plot points but have left ourselves plenty of wiggle room for whimsy.

T: We knew the hardest thing about Guilded Age would be managing the relationships between the two worlds– one of high fantasy and one of urban fantasy. Sure enough, it was, both in terms of telling the story and managing the reaction. But it was worth it. Both worlds now have weight and reality to my mind.

GA is the most master-planned series I’ve worked on to date, and I love the way it’s coming together.

* I read somewhere  that you (meaning Phil Kahn)  used to play tabletop games as well (mostly as a GM). What’s the strongest way that influences the comic? Also–any particularly fun warstories / DM horror stories from that era of your life?

P: A lot of the time I consider the existing games and universes for the purposes of “doing it differently.” That’s one of our creative missions, is to take the things we think are tired and overdone in fantasy fiction and changing it to how we like until we like it. A lot of the time when we’re deciding on what our characters can and can’t do from a “class” standpoint, we apply the same method. The only warstory that immediately recalls is when we had one player in our group who never showed up for games, so after missing a couple weeks we continued without him… but our Barbarian used him as several things up to and including: Weapon, puppet, chamber pot.

T: Phil’s more versed in gaming than I am (I could manage about eight non-consecutive months of tabletop gaming, and about two sessions of World of Warcraft). I think that helps us, that he can bring more of a gamer’s perspective and I’m more of a cold outsider to certain tropes.

* Parting shot: if you wrote for one of the tights n flights comic shops (DC or Marvel), which character / story would you want to write?

P:  I would love to write something like The Adventures of Hank Pym, where we bring him back to his roots as a crazy science-adventurer while continuing to crack wise at his terrible past riddled with mistakes and regret. Hank Pym is so ripe for comedy, and he’s still one of the smartest guys in the entire 616 and frankly, if you think the power to grow and shrink is boring then you have no imagination!

T: Speaking of imagination, if I could only do one, I’d probably go with Green Lantern. I think the multicolored Lanterns introduced in recent years are neat, but for me, the main draw is that the ring is a creative force. You wear it and you essentially get the ability to rewrite the comic you’re in. This has been explored a time or two (Willworld, Emerald Twilight) but for some reason, no one’s thought this idea could carry a whole series. As if it’s more interesting to use the ring just to make shields, fly through space and blast stuff. I’d be fusing a lot of the basic ideas and approaches of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman with the superhero genre, until somebody in editorial stopped me.

Thanks bunches to both Phil Kahn and T. Campbell for giving me the time to answer my questions. It was great to get a peek behind the scenes and into the minds of the creators of the great webcomic, Guilded Age. As a bonus, volume 1 of Guilded Age is available for those of us who like sit-down-and-read-em comics!