Broken Frontier

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. And a little over a decade ago, an extraordinary animated series called Gargoyles debuted. With its mature storytelling and a mixture of fantasy, mythology, science fiction, and even Shakespeare, Gargoyles was unlike anything from the Disney Studio before or since.

Ten years after the series left the air, creator Greg Weisman is continuing the saga in a new ongoing comic series from Slave Labor Graphics. We find our scaly heroes facing a new status quo after their existence is exposed to the world. Broken Frontier talked with Greg about Goliath and his clan.

Part One

BROKEN FRONTIER: Gargoyles was known for a sense of style and maturity unlike many cartoons of the time. Was this something you had to fight for on television and do you think the comic will provide you with more freedom in this regard?

GREG WEISMAN: I didn’t have to fight that hard back in the day. A lot of it had to do with a very unique set of circumstances when we produced that show. One reason was that I had been an executive at Disney for five years. I often compare my role to sort of a trustee at a mental institution. He’s still a patient but he’s the one that, you know, they give the billy club to [laughs]. He’s the lunatic most trusted. It was the first show I ever produced, so to some extent, I got that freedom by just not knowing that I wasn’t supposed to have it. But I also got it because I had great bosses who believed in the show, going all the way up to Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. Everyone was tremendously supportive.

I even had a terrific standards and practices executive. Usually, people refer to those positions as censors or, you know…morons [laughs]. But I did not have that experience on Gargoyles. We had a woman named Adrienne Bello who really understood the concept of context and of consequences and gave us freedom to tell a story as long as we were responsible in telling it. In those first two seasons, I’m not saying we didn’t fight for certain things but the Disney of that era was not holding me back. We were really doing what we wanted to do.

Now, if you’re comparing that to what I’ve done since on other shows, I’ve found life much more restrictive on television. In the years that have passed, there’s a lot less openness to the kind of thing that we were doing back in the mid 90s. So the comic book is a great feeling of freedom relative to more recent days in animation. I feel like I’m right back where I was and that’s a great thing.

BF: Fans responded to the character of David Xanatos because he was far more complex than a stock villain. Can we expect the same ambiguous morality from him in the comic despite his current truce with the Gargoyles?

GW: Yeah, definitely. I think one of Gargoyles’ strengths was the complexity of its villains, specifically Xanatos and Demona. We had villains that were sort of a cut above the cliché. With Xanatos, the truce with the Gargoyles is meaningful to him, but that doesn’t change his basic objectives or methods. He’s not above using the Gargoyles to get the things he needs.

We’re also going to be seeing some pressure put on Xanatos starting as early as issue #2 coming from the Illuminati society. We’ve always seen Xanatos as the top of the pyramid but we’ll start to see what happens when pressure starts coming at him externally. What the audience can rely on is that he doesn’t want to smash the Gargoyles while they’re sleeping. He’s got no interest in that. Then again, he almost never did. In the pilot, there came a point where he started to think of them as a liability but very quickly he realized these guys are more useful to him alive. That kind of amorality hasn’t really changed.

I think the main thing that’s changed is that Xanatos has realized that he loves his wife and son [ex-mercenary Fox and their child Alexander]. What’s changed for him most is that priority of family. I don’t think we’re going to see a huge seminal change in David. All our characterizations were, I like to think, gradual, real, and psychologically believable. We’re not going to see Mr. Sappy Good Guy any more than he’ll be a mustache-twirling villain.

BF: Season 2’s “Avalon World Tour” story expanded the Gargoyles universe considerably. Will we be seeing these other locales in the comic or will the focus remain in New York?

GW: I would say that the bulk of the stories are going to be set in New York. But I’ve already planned in the first arc to get back to Great Britain, once in the present and once in the past. We expanded the world very consciously and that will continue in an outward sense. But also ramifications of that will continue to come into play. Gargoyles has a truly immense supporting cast and given enough time and enough issues, we’re going to see everybody. There is and always was a plan. I’ve got literally a decade’s worth of stories on cards and notebooks. It’s bizarre, for a show that I haven’t officially been on since 1996, I’ve never stopped working on it. It’s a huge relief to me to finally have a creative outlet to do more Gargoyles.

BF: You have an obvious love for Shakespeare based on past stories on the show. Are there plans for other Shakespearean or literary characters to have a role in the comic?

GW: Absolutely. If you expand beyond Shakespeare, starting with issue #3 we begin to introduce new characters, some of whom have a literary origin. I have plans for new Shakespearean characters as well which will be moving forward…

BF: You probably can’t reveal too much about it at this point.

GW: Yeah, I don’t want to give away too much but the short answer is yes. I have a liberal arts background and I like making use of it. I obviously have this love of Shakespeare which, really, I would call more of an obsession [laughs].

BF: I’m definitely with you there, as I was an English major myself. On that note, I’ve noticed that the Gargoyles version of Oberon and Titania is strikingly similar to the look of those characters in DC Comics’ Sandman and Books of Magic series. Since you’ve worked at DC in the past, was one a conscious homage to the other?

GW: Well, I wasn’t that involved with the visual side of things so that might be a question to pose to Frank. But I did specifically say to him that I didn’t want them to be Caucasian [both versions have Oberon with blue skin and Titania with green]. I didn’t want them to have any skin tone that labeled them as some existing ethnic group. The way we were building our “Third Race” [Oberon’s Children, also known as the faeries], there were all these pantheons of beings—the Egyptian pantheon with Anubis, the Norse with Odin, various Native American figures like Coyote and Raven, all these legendary tricksters and gods—and we were saying it was a feudal system and at the top were Oberon and Titania. What I didn’t want to have happen was to have all these ethnic groups and at the top of the system are a couple of white guys. I wanted Oberon and Titania to be something larger and other.

In terms of the work of Neil Gaiman, I’m a huge fan and one thing that has always been true is that he and I are interested in similar things. He’s just a whole lot better than I am. But we do seem to sometimes touch on similar topics and characters.

BF: In the past, you’ve spoken about potential spin-offs of the show you had wanted to do. Are you planning to incorporate any of these ideas into story arcs of the comic series?

GW: The short answer is yes, absolutely. We’re going to, as I said, pick up where we left off and that’s got to be true for all the characters, including the ones we had plans to spin off. It’s a huge cast of characters and we’ll be advancing all their stories. If this book is a success for SLG, I’d be really open to doing a spin-off, doing a second book. Nothing would please me more. But I’m trying not to get ahead of myself.

So, for the time being, the plan is to take all those as part and parcel of the main book and advance their stories at the rate the characters demand it. One of the great things is that the characters have always been real enough to those of us who’d been working on it, that they began to tell us what happens next. That’s when you know it’s working.

BF: Finally, to wrap thing up, what would you say to win over someone who has never seen or read Gargoyles before?

GW: “Give this a shot.” For a younger audience with have these great monster heroes that burst out from stone and great action, humor, and all sorts of things. And for an older reader, it’s written on multiple levels, so it’s got real intelligence behind it, it’s got a great storyline, it’s got romance and wonderful characters. And it’s got literary references up the butt [laughs]. So, the short answer is, just give it a shot. Give me three issues. If I haven’t introduced the characters in the first two and grabbed you by the throat with the third, then you know, walk away. No hard feelings. But if you give me three issues to try and hook you, I think you’ll find that it’s pretty cool. This may sound like my own arrogance, but we’ve had fans that stuck with us literally for ten years without any new material. And I don’t think that you get that kind of loyalty unless the property is really sort of once in a lifetime.

The Gargoyles comic is set to debut from Slave Labor Graphics tomorrow, June 14th 2006.