Broken Frontier

Broken Frontier's Neil Figuracion met up with American Virgin creator Steve Seagle and asked him about the his religious roots and the inspiration for his controversial series.

Part 1 – Faith-based Initiative

BROKEN FRONTIER: Steven, I hope you don't mind if I ask about your religious background.

STEVEN SEAGLE: No that's fine. I was raised Southern Baptist in a hellfire and brimstone kind of church. I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. My parents are from North and South Carolina.

BF: Straight out of the Bible Belt!

SS: Straight out of the Bible Belt. We had some problems though. When I was a kid I remember, four or five years old. We went to three different churches in a year. The first church, the minister had his wife finishing his Doctorate in Theology for him. My mom thought that wasn't very respectable. So she pulled us out and went to another church. That minister was having an affair and [my mother] was like "what the...?" Then we moved to Alabama. We rented a house from two ministers who took our deposit money. Turned out they didn't own the house and they left town.

BF: So I guess you've seen a lot of hypocrisy in the church...

SS: (chuckling) Little bit, little bit. It's not that I'm totally against the church, but at least from my family, it was like three bad circumstances, so we kind of withdrew from organized religion. I still find it fascinating as a subject. Obviously it's pervasive.

BF: Especially considering American Virgin, where did the inspiration for Adam Chamberlain come about?

SS: I teach one class a year. I used to teach college, and I still teach one class [in Speech] a year. I just noticed in the last couple of years a spike in the number of students who would say "I'm not worried about the test – God's looking out for me!" or "I'm majoring in Agriculture because God told me to." I didn't mind, but it was strange to me. More and more I was hearing I don't really have to worry about what I'm doing because I'm being looked out for from on high. I'm all for faith and whatever anybody wants to believe. It was just strange that this really became very pronounced kinda overnight. I hadn't heard that at all in the ten years that I taught stuff before. That was in the back of my mind, and I always wanted to do a Vertigo book that was not a fantasy, not a fairy tale. I wanted to do something out there. I thought, "well, they haven't done a sex book, really." They did kind of a camp sex book with Operation Knockout. I thought "I want to do something a little bit more legit." Just the idea of seeing those two worlds together made a lot of sense.

BF: What is it about religion that makes it mix so well together, or mix not-so-well together with sex?

SS: I don't know, but it's a country where we're constantly watching news stories about ministers who are abusing children or televangelists who are having affairs with their secretaries. It seems like every time there's an intersection of religious icon and sexual secrets – you just want to read that story. Part of it was crass commercialism, thinking maybe people will want to read that comic. That didn't turn out quite that way. Also, it's two subjects that fit well together. Sex is necessary for life to continue and yet a lot of organized religion seems to be about denying it in a lot of ways.

BF: Yet it seems that the kind of sex that the church objects to most is the kind that doesn't lead to procreation. Is there room for the faithful, Adam for instance, to reconcile sex and pleasure?

SS: In actuality, a lot of the virginity movement speakers and evangelical churches claim to be very pro-sex, with the immediate footnote that they are pro sex only after church recognized marriage, with some also stipulating that they are speaking of 'procreational' sex

only. The next major story looks into exactly what [non] procreational activities our youth minister will find acceptable in his chaste existence.

BF: Something I find really interesting is that for all of the hypocrisy in the church as portrayed in American Virgin, Adam is very faithful.

SS: He's legit. He's the real deal. A lot of people thought when the book was announced that it would be a "bash the church" comic, but that's really boring. That's been done, it's predictable, it's expected. So, I didn't want to do that. I'm not a big fan of "oh, the character told me what he was going to do," but just from the way he was created I find that when he's in a situation where I think he'll be compromised, he's just not compromised. He has a way to explain it, to justify it, to get out of it. To coexist with views that aren't his own. He over-philosophizes at times. He just believes and it's hard for me to violate that and do something out of character.

BF: Do you think there's anything that your audience could learn from Adam?

SS: Learn? Entertainment is interesting that way. It's like you always learn from the stuff that you like, but indirectly. I've got no big lessons to tell people, per se. I learn from Adam. He winds up at an orgy in one of the recent issues. He's naked at the orgy and he's amongst people he would consider sinners, but he still emerges with no regrets. I find that really compelling, that his belief structure sort of keeps him intact through hard times.

Continued tomorrow...