This week on War Rocket Ajax, Kevin Church joins us to talk about writing Wander, his new comic with Grace Allison for Monkeybrain. The discussion gets onto his ambivalence towards fantasy and his influences, and you can listen to the whole show right here at ComicsAlliance!War Rocket Ajax #125: Ugly Leading Man with Kevin Church

(WARNING: Contains NSFW language)


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In this week's episode, Chris is celebrating his 30th birthday with a trip to Los Angeles, and Matt has opinions about the Olympics! Fortunately, we seem to have recovered from the exposure to Sonic the Hedgehog fan-art that we suffered last week.

When Kevin joins us, the conversation turns to why it's strange that Kevin would be launching a fantasy title with Wander, since he doesn't particularly care for the genre:

I think that actually helped me a little bit. Kind of like when someone who's not super into science fiction gets an angle on it. I have read the first three and a half Game of Thrones books, I was midway through the fourth one when I decided I needed to take a little break, but in the case of something like that, you're looking at something that's much more about political maneuvering and things like that, versus elves and dwarves and dragons and what have you.

Wander being fantasy, the premise of the series is that we're going to see multiple genres as it goes on. That's why the first arc is "Olive Hopkins in the 9th Kingdom." The second arc -- probably the first arc's going to be eight to ten issues -- the second arc, we're going to see Olive move into another genre. One of the things I want to do is that I'm really tired of people talking about how meta things are, but I want to try my hand at writing different genres that I wouldn't ordinarily be that into, and second of all, doing comedy, or doing something that is at least pleasing to me as a reader and as a writer, in these genres. I like a lot of science fiction. So little of it has any humor in it that is not obviously just straight up parody. I'm not the world's biggest Joss Whedon fan, but I'll give him a lot of credit for having a lot of organic humor in stuff like Firefly.

That's another thing: I'm going to keep the tone fairly light, but we're going to see themes cropping up through the series that are going to be slightly more difficult.


Plus, we get off on a long tangent about '70s movies!


Show Notes:

The Long Goodbye is available on Netflix.


Chris's Rec: The Real Rocky

Matt's Rec: Breaking Bad Season 5.

Comics Reviewed:

Action Comics #12: "The actual trajectory of this story is really intersting, and it really moves. I like how quickly it moves, introducing all the Mr. Mxyzptlk stuff and getting to that right away, and making no pretext, no effort to dragging out this new secret identity any further than it needed to go." "I would much rather have a book like this that's maybe a little too fast than one that was too slow."

Archer & Armstrong #1: "This issue is fantastic. I loved it." "It's political, but here's the thing: We get some of Archer's inner monologue in the middle of this comic, and he makes some strong points! It is very obvious that Van Lente is making fun of that lifestyle in the early pages, but Archer's not an idiot."

Batman #12: "The character that we're introduced to, the one who's the first-person narrator for the issue, is a great character who I really hope we're going to see again." "I referred to her as the New 52 Harold, which I think has the potential to be 100% accurate. Harold is no longer a Hunchback, he is now a teenage hipster electronics genius. Exciting!"

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