Adam Warren was kind of enough to consent to an email interview, so of course I immediately bombarded him with way too many questions. As a result, we’ve got a long, and wide-ranging, interview that I think is pretty interesting. We cover a lot of ground, and Warren does it with good humor. And I do mean a lot of ground– this thing weighs in at over 5800 words. I went through and added in links for context or reference, in case you’re curious about a few of the topics that come up.

Thanks to Ken Kneisel for supplying me with the majority of Warren’s run on Dirty Pair, Jacq Cohen at Dark Horse for turning an offhanded Facebook comment into a fun interview, and finally, Adam Warren for answering a million questions.

After you finish reading, you should buy some Empowered (One, Two, Three, Four, Five), Dirty Pair, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, and Livewires. While you’re waiting for those to arrive, visit his DeviantArt to look at some art.

Let’s get it in.

(and yes, adam warren week is just three days long. shut your face.)

At the time that I’m writing this, Empowered has been out for a couple of weeks. What’s your workday like now that it’s on shelves? Do you take a vacation between books or get right into working on the next volume? What do you do to relax?

Right now, I’m working on an Empowered one-shot (in conventional comics format, for once!) and frantically trying to wrap up a few other miscellaneous art jobs before I head off to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (ouch). This is more or less par for the course, as I usually try to work up other pitches or grind away at brief stints of better-paying work before I go back to full-time work on the next Empowered volume; in a way, though, this almost is a vacation, compared to the crazily long hours I often have to work as a volume’s deadline looms ever nearer.

As for relaxing, well, once the workday’s over, I might read some books, watch a DVD (starting over with The Wire season 1, at present), or crack a Sam Adams or two and catch some Craig Ferguson in the wee hours… (Though the latter’s not an option, of late. Since the spectacular onset of the digital TV revolution, my remote neck of the woods went from receiving about eight different TV stations’ signals to receiving a grand total of none whatsoever; yay, DTV! So, no Craig Ferguson for me, nowadays.) Ah, the manifold joys of the rural-dwelling freelancer’s off-work lifestyle…

How fast are you, art-wise? Do you do any digital work, or are you strictly lo-tech? What do you listen to while you draw?

I certainly wouldn’t claim that I’m an especially speedy artist in general… but, when working in the straight-to-pencil format used for Empowered, I can usually turn around at least two pages per full workday, which isn’t too shabby a production rate.

That’s the whole point of the format, really: to move on to the finished page as quickly as possible, leaving out all the intervening stages that used to slow me down as an artist. As in, my technique used to progress from scrawled roughs to very tight but undersized layouts to even more tightly penciled, full-size pages to final inks that were even tighter still; on Empowered, I jump from the thumbnail/rough stage straight to final, penciled pages (at the wee 8.5” X 11” size, BTW), a considerably more streamlined process.

While the technique I use on Empowered is indeed extremely “lo-tech”—nothing but graphite on letter-size copy paper, without resorting to such high-tech, cutting-edge, space-age innovations such as bristol board or inks or a separate lettering stage—I  can’t say that it’s strictly lo-tech, as the pages still wind up getting scanned into Photoshop, then tweaked and cleaned up (and lettering-corrected, as necessary) at Dark Horse. Contradictorily enough, only modern scanning and printing technologies make Empowered’s primitive process viable in the first place…

Nowadays, I listen to a helluva lot of talk radio when I’m working, mostly of the sports-related variety (I am a New England native, so Pats/ Sox/ Celts interest comes naturally to me), occasionally mixing in some books on CD for variety… I do, however, switch over to music from the ol’ iPod when working on scripts, due to the sad fact that talk radio’s babble frequently derails my train of dialog-related thought. (Unless I actually want to mix references to KG and Jonathan Papelbon and Randy Moss into my scripting, which is rarely the case.)   

While doing research for this interview, I realized that you don’t sell your original art. I don’t think that you travel to many cons, either, so genuine Adam Warren Sketches(TM) are pretty rare. Do you prefer to keep your art within the confines of published books, rather than sketches and such?

It’s not that I’m particularly opposed to selling my artwork; it’s just that I’ve never clawed out enough free time to set up some means of actually selling the stuff. (Plus, I am a tad paranoid that some Empowered material might need to be rescanned at some point; such are the problems inherent to working in the ever-tricky medium of grayscale.)

I should say that, back when I used to attend considerably more conventions than I do now (the invites dried up a long time ago, for better or for worse), I did crank out a goodly number of commissioned sketches every year… Empowered is descended from the last major clump of such commissions (mainly of the “damsel-in-distress” variety) I took on, after all. Now, though, I no longer have the time to deal with many (or any) more such requests along those lines.

Side note: Come to think of it, my attendance at San Diego this year will mark my first convention appearance during the entire time that Empowered has been coming out… Alert the media! Well, perhaps not.

In general, I suppose that I do prefer to keep my artwork within the confines of a published book, or at least within the confines of a story… Drawing as such doesn’t interest me all that much, save for as a means of conveying a narrative. I’ve never filled a sketchbook, I don’t draw people in the subway (er, that is, assuming I moved to a location that had a subway), I don’t hang around sketching with fellow artists after conventions (though the first part of the social “Drink & Draw” experience does appeal); in short, I don’t do the things that a real artist, someone who’s Crazy In Love With Drawing, should do. Luckily, this isn’t a major, psyche-twisting source of angst for me, as I pretty much see myself as a writer who happens to be able to draw.
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I think Gen13 may have been my introduction to Adam Warren. I kinda sorta remember picking up it up when I was super high off Wildcats 3.0. Later, I picked up Livewires, a Marvel miniseries that Warren wrote and Rick Mays drew in 2005. I can’t help but associate one series with the other, even beyond the Adam Warren connection, because they both take the idea of a “comic book universe” head-on and treat it with a certain measure of, if not respect, realism.

Most comics tend toward real life in terms of technology and style. Reed Richards is a crazy supergenius, Superman’s an alien, and lasers exist, but real life is more or less the same as it is in our world. Gen13 and Livewires, though, take the opposite tack. Superheroes run rampant in Gen13, by way of a not-so-underground youth sub-culture based around being posthuman. There are gimmick groups, really professional teams, people who just abuse their mental powers to get themselves off, and others who are ironic superteams. Livewires exists in the black ops area of the Marvel Universe, performing cleanup jobs on rogue technology and getting into high tech gun battles.

The two books also places young people, or at least reasonable facsimiles thereof, right in the spotlight. The members of Gen13 are hormonal, angsty, and focused on how other people perceive them. Roxy struggles with her body, Caitlin tries to be the mother of the gang, and the others all have their own problems. Livewires stars androids are like next-gen ’80s John Hughes movie stereotypes– the goth, the cool guy, the popular one, the jock, and the newbie. Their stereotypes help create their personality and provide a few fascinating inversions of the stereotypes over the course of the story.

Warren, particularly in Gen13, throws the characters up against the wall over and over again, and we end up seeing what makes them work. There’s an issue of Gen13 that centers around Sarah Rainmaker, her powers, and her relationship with her uncle. It’s one of those things where a character has a heart to heart or a vulnerable moment while doing something athletic or using their powers, but it provides great insight into Rainmaker’s mind. It shows how she was built as a person, and then it shows exactly what she’s capable of. Not to mention that it’s mildly funny at the same time. Not to mention the end of his run on Gen13, which is up there with Hitman and New X-Men for my favorite endings of all time.

In a similar vein, Livewires is about identity. The main character, Stem Cell, doesn’t believe she’s a robot (pardon the r-word, my mecha, i’ll do better) until she’s forced to face reality. The disbelief is designed to make it easier to activate her and get her used to real life, but it also brought a few questions to mind as I read over the book.

Why should the mecha be treated as less than human? Their personalities may be programmed, but their AI is as good as any human’s. They perform a lot of the same jobs, often with greater accuracy. As in Pluto, what does it mean to be human?

It’s the fact that the books focus on younger people that makes them work for me. Teen Titans, X-Men, and pretty much everything but Runaways have devolved into generic superhero tales, all full of sound and fury and continuity. They’re no longer about teenagers doing teenaged things, like Warren’s Gen13 run was. When’s the last time Robin and the gang went out to a party of teen heroes? Gen13 did it, and they found a bunch of friends in the form of the Mongolian Barbecue Horde (amongst other names). They’d hang around the house, play DDR, talk about girls or boys, and do teenaged things. It wasn’t just wham, bam, another friend is dead, time for a funeral.

This is a big part of what I like about Adam Warren. He manages to latch onto something that you either hadn’t thought of, or wished would happen, and spins it into something fresh. Writing teenagers isn’t as simple as mentioning Xbox or iPods or PlayStation. That kind of Mad Libs writing always comes off lame. Actually knowing what you’re talking about, taking into account how teenagers act, and being willing to experiment makes for a good time.

Case in point– Adam Warren’s Galacta, daughter of Galactus, has been greenlit for a series of stories on Marvel’s webcomic service. He wrote a tale about Gali and her issues with eating, and bam, people dug it. It was something fresh, and it worked. I’m pretty pleased, and look forward to seeing it when it drops. I know that with Adam Warren, I’m getting something that’s going to be interesting.