November 2007) (original) (raw)

Ann Nocenti

If you read comics during the 1980s and 1990s, you most certainly read something by Ann Nocenti. Many women creating comics now look to her as an influence; she was the most prominent role model that we had of a woman making her (successful) way in an industry that is still male dominated.

She followed Frank Miller on Daredevil, co-created Typhoid Mary and Longshot, and wrote a slew of other comics, mostly for Marvel but a few for DC, most notably a Kid Eternity mini-series. Quite a legacy.

While she's no longer writing comics, she has had an undeniable impact on comics and graciously took time from a busy schedule to answer questions.

Sequential Tart: How did you discover comics?

Ann Nocenti: As a child they were frowned upon as by my parents as junk, but we had a few in the house ... a Dick Tracy anthology, of which I remember the great "ugly art" and was curious about the grotesque pear-shaped man and the squiggles that made up some villain's face, Mumbles, I think. I was more attracted to the "monsters" than the heroes. We also had a Pogo anthology, which I loved, and a few Archie comics ... giving me that eternal girl dilemma: Betty is "good" but such a boring chump, Veronica's a bitch but smarter and has more fun. But these rare glimpses of comics were left behind as just random shreds of litter in the playpen. I stumbled on some R. Crumb in college but wasn't aware of the whole superhero world until I answered an ad in the Village Voice and found Marvel.

ST: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

AN: No. I spent my childhood drawing, studied painting/etching/printmaking in college, and came to NYC with a portfolio of artwork I couldn't sell. The choices for work seemed to be either climb some corporate ladder or juggle drinks; I chose the drink slinging. I was working some jazz club, got to know a lazy writer with a drinking problem and a book due, and he hired me to ghostwrite it for him. From then on, I switched from pictures to words.

ST: How did you get in to writing comics? And was there anybody who was "good" to you while you were breaking in?

AN: Like I said, I answered a Village Voice ad. Denny O'Neil gave me my first story .... I wrote about a guy with so much luck it destroys him. Then Mark Gruenwald gave me the dubious assignment to kill off Spider-Woman. The editors up there at the time: Louise Jones, Larry Hama, Al Milgrom, Archie Goodwin, etc. were all very generous in teaching me about the world of comics, as were the artists like Walt Simonson that streamed thru the joint.

ST: What was your first published work? And do you think it's held up well, or do you look at it and wish all the copies could be pulped?

AN: the stories mentioned above were the first, and I haven't looked at any of it since, so not sure how it holds up. I imagine it should all be pulped.

ST: You were the writer selected to take over Daredevil after Frank Miller left. How did you land that job? Did you feel any pressure?

AN: Ralph Macchio asked me to take over Daredevil. I'm not sure why; you'll have to ask him. I think it was because I was too new to comics to understand Miller's legacy or be intimidated by it (out of ignorance), and since I came from another field (I'd been working a bit in film and journalism), I think he liked the idea of a non-comics person bringing in other influences.

ST: You also wrote Daredevil from 1986-1991. That's an insanely long run by any body's standards.

AN: Long? I enjoyed it. Daredevil is a rich minefield of contradictions that can be riffed on endlessly.

ST: What kind of a stamp do you think you made on the character?

AN: Yikes! That's for others to say. Being kind of comics-stupid, I wasn't that aware of what came before my Daredevil and never read what came after, so I'm not sure how to answer that. I thought of Daredevil more like my buddy, my pal, my alter-brain or something. Like an invisible friend I carried around with me. I usually just dumped whatever I was thinking about or encountering into the comic. Maybe that's not the way to go about it, but I did have a story due every month, and that ain't easy.

ST: How did you not become completely burnt out?

AN: Writing comics is more fun than ... well, more fun than a hell of a lot of other things. It's a joy and a delight. I guess I didn't get burnt out so much as I wanted to go back to film and journalism after a
while.

ST: What's your favorite Daredevil story or story arc?

AN: Well, I loved Bullet and his son, and I loved the "NYC goes to hell" storyline, and, of course, Typhoid Mary was a hoot to write. But I like single stories too. I remember I wrote a story where Daredevil is on the road and ends up teaching someone a lesson by "hanging" them and then teasing them by batting at the chair legs. Kinda touched on something sadistic in a hero I guess. I don't remember the name of that one or much about the story, but I remember liking how it came out.

ST: Typhoid Mary is an insanely great character. (Pun intended!) What lead to her creation? What were you trying to say with her, and do you think you succeeded? Did you have any idea that she would become an iconic character?

AN: I think I was just sick of how females in comics were either goody girls or witches and wanted to shatter the female thing by making her all types rolled into one. I've always like the multiple universe idea, like all the many paths one didn't take, but perhaps some doppelganger of yourself did. So, she was kind of walking all roads. No, I didn't know she'd become popular. I just loved writing her.

ST: Where did the idea for the Typhoid mini-series come from? And why was it important to tell that story from her point of view as opposed to a (typical) hero's?

AN: I just wanted to be in her head. Sort of inside her own deluded idea of herself ... you know, like real life.

ST: You also created the famous X-Men characters Longshot and Mojo. Where did you get the idea for Longshot?

AN: Longshot was a reaction to the deep origins of characters. I wanted a tabula rasa, a clean slate for a hero. Then to see if heroism rose in him or not. His glowing eye came from a one-eyed cat I lived with at the time, but of course Arthur Adams pulled it off. I was also interested in a more androgynous hero, a non-macho guy.

ST: Frankly, Mojo seems like the sort of character Grant Morrison would create in an effort to critique the mass media. Was there any specific event or trend you noticed that prompted him?

AN: I'm not that familiar with Grant Morrison's work, but I was studying media at the time, going for a masters degree up at Columbia's School for International Affairs, and was reading Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, Ed Hermann, Lipman, and others like that, so it came out of reading them; but it also came out of trying to write journalism myself and hitting on the multiple media ownership dilemma. That led to the idea of Mojo, and his need to control all media. I also did a New Mutants story where I literally had a character called "manufactured consent" after Noam Chomsky's book. I was working at a magazine, Lies Of Our Times, then, and we critiqued the New York Times coverage of stuff. So, it was out of that swirl of stuff that Mojo came.

ST: After many years of working at Marvel, you did the Kid Eternity series for Vertigo. How did that happen? And what was it like writing something that wasn't about superhero in the traditional sense? What did you find interesting about the character of Kid Eternity?

AN: I think some nice Vertigo editor called me (Tom, I think his name was), and he sent me some old story about Kid Eternity and how he'd resurrect Lincoln or someone to help in a fist fight. I thought, 'This is cool, I can resurrect my heroes.' So, I put Kid Eternity on a kind of vision quest, making him a bit naive and open like Longshot, and resurrected people like Neal Cassady when he needed a great wheel man to drive a virtual highway, and Freud and Jung to debate the human mind, stuff like that. It was insane fun. In retrospect those comics seem overly dense with ideas, like they were written by a kid on an acid trip that wouldn't shut up.

ST: And then, in the mid 1990s, you pretty much fell out of writing (and editing) comics and ended up working as an editor for Scenario Magazine. What prompted the change in career?

AN: I had been getting hired to write films based on my comics writing, so my career just naturally shifted to film. I love magazines, and Scenario was like getting paid to go to film school .... I traveled the film fest circuit, saw great films, published the scripts of the ones I liked, and got to interview all the great directors, from Coppola and Polanski to Soderbergh and Aronofsky, to wonderful writers like Steve Martin and Mel Brooks ... it was a great gig.

ST: You also worked as an editor for High Times. How did that happen? And did you find it at all ironic that you went from writing a character like Daredevil who would jail drug dealers to working at a magazine which advocates legalization of cannibis?

AN: I was hired by Richard Stratton, who I had worked with on Prison Life magazine, to take High Times out of the "pot porn" gutter and make it more relevant. We brought in people like Jim Jarmusch, Norman Mailer, Luc Sante, and Gary Webb and interviewed people like Dave Chappelle and Ani Difranco. We were trying to expand the "dumb" pothead image.

I can't remember if I ever had Daredevil bust anyone for smoking pot ... hard drugs maybe, but that's a whole other ballgame. And comics are read by kids, and I don't advocate drug use for anyone whose still growing. The arguments are endless as to why it is hypocritical that pot is illegal but alcohol and all manner of pills aren't � substances that cause more death and harm are legal, while pot, despite its medical advantages, is illegal. It's just silly, but all drugs that "open the mind" rather than dull it have tended to be scorned. But ultimately, it was impossible to get advertisers in a pot mag other than awful "fake bud" companies and the like, and it was hard to get people to "out" themselves by talking about drugs, except for the courageous types like those I mentioned above.

ST: What are you up to these days?

AN: I'm an editor/writer at Stop Smiling magazine. I have a film in post-production that I wrote called Patriotville. I was in Baluchistan this winter and shot two documentaries, one about their bid for autonomy from Pakistan, and I went out into the desert on a falcon hunt with Qataris (from Qatar) and shot that doc footage and wrote about it for Details magazine. I also wrote about my time in Baluchistan.

Now I'm working on a documentary about Kosova and writing a new feature script.

ST: 2004's Batman & Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows (which was wonderful, by the way) is your most recent comics work that I know of. Any plans to return to writing or editing comics?

AN: If the right offer came up, sure. But my last trials with the comics companies were too corporate for my taste ... endless pitching and proposals and then even going to contract on stuff that would just get shelved before a word of the actual comic was ever written and getting stiffed on any pay. So, it kinda sucked. Too much red tape.

ST: Are you currently following comics? And if so, any thoughts about the way Longshot is depicted in Ultimate X-Men? Or any of the ways other characters you created have been depicted?

AN: I haven't looked at many comics in years, so I don't even know what Longshot is up to or any of that.

ST: Where do you see yourself in five years?

AN: A few years ago I strung a tightrope in my yard ... five years from now I hope to be able to walk it.