Broken Frontier

Al Schroeder III is a busy man in webcomics. He writes two regular webcomics - Mindmistress and  Flickerflame - and has even participated in several webcomic crossovers, somewhat of a rarity in webcomics. He's also a longtime comic book fan, revealing how he bought Fantastic Four #2 for a whopping fifty cents back in the days of dimes. Because of this, Schroeder is an even bigger rarity - an old school comic book fan whose street cred extends all the way back to the letter columns of All-Star Comics - and yet still writes for one of the newest sequential art mediums on the Internet. I recently caught up with Schroeder to ask where comic books have been and where both webcomics and print comics are going.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Why webcomics? Why did you choose this medium specifically to tell stories like Flickerflame and Mindmistress?

AL SCHROEDER: Because according to a Newsarama article,  it'll cost over $300 to get every Secret Invasion-related title---and over $100 to get every Final Crisis-related title. Whereas you can read the entire archives of a brilliant webcomic like, say, Parallel Dementia, for free. Webcomics are the way all entertainment is going...online. DC recognizes it, with the ZUDA enterprise. Marvel recognizes, with their extremely reasonable price for a year of digital comics. (My wife got me that for Christmas.) I have SERIOUS problems with both interfaces for viewing both ZUDA and the digital Marvels---but online's the easiest way to deliver a story.

Mindmistress would have never been bought by DC or Marvel. The idea of having a mentally handicapped woman as an alter ego would have been toned down, been dubbed too controversial---despite the literary success of Of Mice and Men, or Flowers for Algernon, or Forrest Gump---and Lorelei would have ended up as a young woman who has her occasional dimbulb moments, as do we all. Whereas for me, the hidden hierarchy of society---how we ignore, often, those who are not mentally up to standard---was paramount---and the contrast with how MM must view US---is the heart of it. What they would have made of it--- wasn't the story I wanted to tell...

But in webcomics, I can tell ....

Any. Story. I. Want.

Mindmistress has probably been the most satisfactory experience I've had online. Flickerflame was an effort to explore another idea---of a guy getting superpowers, and joining a team which he thinks is the Super Friends---but turns out to be the Legion of Doom. (And, also, trying to apply the law of conservation of matter/energy to shape-shifting.) An anti-superhero. There have been some like that in the past...but Flickerflame's the anto-hero's anti-hero. He's ENORMOUS fun to write.

BF: I used to think for $20 I can buy a lot of enjoyment out of a stack of comics. But as you pointed out in the beginning of your answers, it's getting harder and harder to do in these crossovers, especially if my favorite comic A's storyline continues in comics B-Z. Do you think all this emphasis on crossovers is hurting or helping the comic industry as whole?

AS: Welllll, this sounds hypocritical, because Mindmistress took part in a series between a BUNCH of webcomics called the Crossover Wars, and is currently taking part in a "team" book, called the Crossoverlord----but at least that's free. Nine-tenths of these huge crossovers are wayyyyy too much.  No one can keep track of it all, and no one should try.  The first mega-crossover, Crisis On Infinite Earths, three-fourths of the books with "Crisis" plastered on them had little or no connection with Crisis, except for mention of "red skies". 

Both Identity Crisis and Civil War were actually good ideas---Identity Crisis because it was basically a character-driven story, and Civil War because I'D sure want superhumans registered and responsible to SOMEONE....but trying to get all the other companies' books on a bandwagon defeats the purpose. It's a strength of a "shared universe", but it's also a weakness. The new reader seems overwhelmed.  To keep up with it all, they have to pauperize themselves.  Most don't even bother, and I think in the long run they're REPELLING new readers---no matter how much they think they're cementing together the old readers that are their fanbase. I think mini-series should  just stay within the single series, and just slight mention made of them in other books, at leastuntil the mini-series has run its course.

BF: You told my editor you were an 'old letter column writer.' What can you tell us about your background in comics and how it's affected your webcomic creations?

AS: Well, let's see. I was born in 1953. I got Amazing Spider-Man #1, X-Men #1, Fantastic Four #2 (actually I got that one from another kid for fifty cents...he went away chuckling at the deal he made, what a sucker I was.)  I had been a big Superman fan before that, but Stan Lee hooked me with Kirby's fantastic imagination and Ditko's down-to-earth storytelling and far stranger mysticism. To this day, Superman is my favorite character, and the original run of Lee and Kirby on Fantastic Four my favorite comic. I got the original Crisis on Earth-One/Earth-Two while on vacation.

In the early Seventies, I started writing letters to comics. My first published letter was talking about Power Girl's debut in Gerry Conway's revived All-Star Comics, because I was kind of a nut about the early Superman. (A love I've explored in some articles I've  collected in an online repository called Schroeder's Speculations, which has, among other thing,  a Wold Newtonish "biography" of Superman.) I had hundreds of letters published at both Marvel and DC, under the name "Al Schroeder III", to distinguish me from my father, who might have been embarrassed to be thought of as a comic book fan.

I had one story published---or rather, I supplied a detailed story synopsis, and Marty Pasko wrote it and Curt Swan drew it. "The Master Mesmerizer of Metropolis"...the most universally reviled and ignored Superman story EVER. *Grin* You can see its pluses and minuses in an online review at the Superman Homepage here -- and I still think it's a better idea than having the Silver Age Superman and Clark both coming from the same small town, looking almost exactly alike, and nobody noticing. But the negative reactions are all due to my ideas, Pasko and Swan did a magnificent job.

A woman called Barb Long saw my letters in the Superman letter columns, and wrote to me. I wrote back. That was in 1979. Six months later, we met face to face. Six months later we were married. (We've been married for twenty-eight years now, and had three sons.) We honeymooned in New York-and both DC and Marvel invited us to their offices, on separate days. Barb flirted with Julie Schwartz and Cary Bates, and Julie Schwartz, Jennette Kahn, and Sol Harrison took us to lunch. (Sol told us of outtakes he saw of Superman II.)

When we went to the Marvel offices, we fleetingly saw Jim Shooter, and Roger Stern graciously took us out for lunch. There is a paragraph devoted to our story in The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, in the opening section, "Gathering the Greatest", because Barb and I were some of the ones DC consulted for picking the "greatest" Superman stories.

BF: This past month I've been exploring super-heroes in webcomics. They don't seem to be doing as well as other genres, at least in circles like TopWebcomics. Why do you think that is?

AS: By the nature of the Internet ---quick, quirky, and humorous works better. A single page with a single punchline works better than continued, involved storytelling. It's like newspaper comics, where eventually humor strips like Peanuts (and the immortal Bloom Country and Calvin and Hobbes) overtook storytelling strips like Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon. But the uncensored freedom of the Internet makes them much funnier and much more frank. You would never see something like the sardonic Something Positive in a newpaper strip---but it's one of the most popular webcomics out there. Deservedly so.

Also, it's a more international audience. The European comic community was never enslaved to the super-hero model, nor was the Japanese manga community. Actually, the diversity of webcomics is MUCH more healthy than the current American comic scene, reminding one of the diversity in manga.

And of course, webcomics have their cliches too. Strips about teenage braindead videogaming slackers, often with talking animals as pets, are as numerous in webcomics as super-heroes are in print comics. If you want to make a "success" at webcomics, that's your model....

But...when you think about it...webcomics authors are not directly paid, usually. You might sell some merchandise, or be picked up by other media (the dangling hook for the ZUDA hopefuls), but people don't start webcomics to get rich. Even the biggest ones are chancy at best. "Success" is usually only in the number of pageviews. Since that's the case....why work on something unless it's what YOU want to read?

I like super-heroes...the sense of wonder, the wish fulfillment, the fantasy. Reading Lee's Thor led me to a love of both Shakespeare and Tolkien. Reading Superman, the beneficient alien, led me to a love of science fiction. I read 200 books a year now. (One could argue if Siegel and Shuster had never created Superman, I would have never have met my wife, and my sons would have never been born.)  I'm a keen reader of comics still, and I'm not blind to their faults. As you mention, super-heroes are much less frequent on the web than other types of comics....partly due to overuse in American comics, partly because the younger generation is bored with them...deservedly so. I grew frustrated that there was nothing out there like what I enjoyed as a kid. In the sense of ---what I enjoyed most were the NEW ideas that Ditko and Kirby (facillitated by Lee's dialogue) shot at us.

I believe Mindmistress was the first comic to use a utility fog (a cloud of nanomachines that can create almost anything out of thin air)---several years before even Dresden Codak, another innovative and imaginative webcomic, did so. In the past year I introduced a group that shared skills, the same you or I could share files, across a personal "net". (Not entire minds. Just---skills.  Downloading a skill in archery in a minute or two, for instance.) It's that sort of thing that I enjoy writing AND reading. Although I acknowledge my debt to Daniel Keyes and Flowers for Algernon, (no idea is totally original) no one else had  a superhero(ine) whose alter ego was mentally deficient. (Although the Hulk sort of was the reverse....)

No-one else was really doing the sort of comics I liked to read, on the web---So I made my own.

BF: Finally, having been a comic book fan for a great deal longer than I have, what do you think about where the comic book industry is today, specifically regarding super-heroes?

AS: First off, the super-hero comics in America are mainly being supported by people like me---aging Baby Boomers trying to recapture the thrill they once had. When was the last time you saw a REALLY original idea for a super-hero?  Half the comics out there are reboots or "legacy" characters. How many comics out there are NOT reworking ideas Kirby, Lee, Ditko and Fox had a generation or two ago?  Most of the stuff out there is just ... variations upon a theme.

(There are exceptions. Gaiman broke new ground, with Sandman, yet still didn't cut off connections with older DC concepts, like House of Mystery or House of Secrets. There are others.)

It's not healthy. There are younger fans, but fewer and fewer, every five years. It's as if TV was STILL running I Love Lucy with new actors, Leave it to Beaver: The Third Generation. TV reinvents itself, thank goodness. There needs to be something original out there....not just constant reworkings of already mined material.

It's not---productive. It's masturbatory. It's fan fiction gone wild. Everybody wants to write the Big Three at DC, or do their own take on Spider-Man. I'd rather they tell their own stories....with their own characters.

I poked fun at the current state of the comic industry in a story called Comic Mindset at the Mindmistress site, where Mindmistress confronts the various thinly-veiled comic companies, and comments on their various mistakes. It sums up my opinions quite well.

We've never been more popular, in one sense. Iron Man is a blockbuster. Spider-Man II is an excellent superhero movie. But we've become mainstream. Safe. Dull.

We need to do something...new.