Broken Frontier

Christos Gage is a writer who definitely isn't afraid to diversify his writing. TV, movies and comics, Gage has done them all. Throughout Gage's very diverse output he always has deconstructionist themes running through his work. Gage tends to take an established genre and add his own unique twist, creating real genre-busters. Join Broken Frontier as we sit down with Christos Gage for a quick chat about post-apocalyptic fiction, breaking the superhero rules, and beating writers block.

BROKEN FRONTIER: A lot of your work shows deconstructionist themes. Starting with you first film The Breed and going up through Absolution, you take the common genre themes and flip them on their head. What led you to this approach?

CHRISTOS GAGE: I like the idea of taking an established genre that I enjoy, and try to look at it from a slightly different perspective. I ask myself “what makes this interesting” and “how can I approach this in a slightly different way”. So something like the vampires being the oppressed ones in The Breed, or anything like that, it's what really gets my juices flowing and gets me interested in writing about it.

BF: Stormwatch PHD follows a team of un-powered humans trained to take out superhumans. What inspired this particular genre flip?

CG: I was thinking specifically about the WildStorm universe and the fact that in the WildStorm universe there is the concept of the “post-human”, and how groups like the Authority were celebrities and then they even became like gods and rulers. In the pages of The Authority, London was getting destroyed one week and Miami the next week. So I thought “what would it be like to be a normal human in this world?” It would probably be pretty damn scary, so I thought about what normal humans would do to fight back.

BF:Two other titles you did for WildStorm, Authority: Prime and Wildcats: At World's End, have very apocalyptic themes. Are end of the world stories of a particular interest to you?

CG: I've always liked post-apocalyptic movies, one of the first ones I saw was Damnation Alley. It's a genre that I find interesting. I think I might take a break from it for a while, because I've done a lot of it, but I do enjoy it very much. When the structures of society are taken away, what happens? I think that's an interesting theme to explore.

BF:So, how does Absolution fit into all of this?

CG: Absolution is about a world where superhumans are part of the police force, and they operate under the same rules and restrictions. John Dusk is a superhero who has seen one too many criminals get off, and he's tired of it so he starts killing them. Eventually he's found out, and his friends, colleagues, and his girlfriend come after him. It was a fun series to work on, it allowed me to do a lot of things with a superhero that you can't do in a regular superhero comic, because quite honestly it would undermine the premise of that comic. You can't do an Absolution-like storyline with one of the Avengers. I like being able to cut loose and do it.

As much as I like working on the company-owned characters, I like being able to break the rules with this one. It also fits into my background with police procedural drama, my wife and I wrote for Law and Order: SVU so I have a significant background in that. We're actually working on a sequel to Absolution now, a second season if you will, that comes out early next year.

BF: Whats the craft of writing like for you?

CG: I try to take a very business like approach from it, in the sense that working at home it's easy to get distracted. I try to get up every day and write five pages, treat it like a job where you clock in and out and do your work. Obviously you end up doing things at odd hours just because it works out that way. I try to sort of create a structure around it, because I know a lot of people who are writers or other creative people and they have a hard time keeping a schedule, and I never wanted that to happen.

I'm always working on enough projects that I don't get writer's block. The best cure for writer's block is a stack of bills that need to be paid. Sometimes I'm not feeling it on one project, but I'm working on enough stuff that I can go to another project and switch gears a little bit, and them come back to the one I was having trouble with. Usually by that time I've either thought of a solution or I'm in the right state of mind to do so.

The collected edition of Absolution is available now from Avatar Press priced $24.99. Look for the sequel to hit stores the beginning of next year. Christos Gage is also currently working on GI Joe: Cobra for IDW and various titles for Marvel.