I have interviewed a mess o’ people over the years — Jason Aaron, Scott Snyder, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Charles Soule and Brian Michael Bendis to obscenely drop a few names — but outside of Eliot Rahal and Kyle Starks (two repeat customers who are always good for great insights and even better laughs), my favorite person to chat up in comics is Tom Peyer, AHOY Comics’ editor in chief and a 30-year veteran of the industry.
He’s a writer — handling the duties there for The Wrong Earth and Penultiman, two of the company’s best titles — and he’s an editor, overseeing other winning books like Happy Hour and Second Coming. And most importantly, he understands what makes superhero books work and mean something in 2020.
He’s also a Yankees fan, which gives us something else to talk about.
So for at least the sixth time (because it entertains me, and I hope it entertains you, Loyal Content Consumer, and because I always learn something), I talked with Peyer via email, asking about many of the books AHOY is in the process of rolling out, including the next chapter of Second Coming (out this week) and the third volume of The Wrong Earth, which comes out in January.
We also talked about what a shitty year it was, and whether there is a pony somewhere under 2020.
But we began with baseball.
We start these things as we always do — with Yankees baseball. I simply cannot forgive the front office for ALDS Game 2 and the absolutely bush league, little brother call to start Deivi García in hopes of tricking the Rays into loading their lineup with lefties and then switching to mercurial dipshit J.A. Happ, a plan that exploded into flames when neither guy could handle what was asked of them. There were games after that, sure, but the series was over — a fitting, shitty, stupid end to a shitty, stupid season. Anyway, assuming we survive the pandemic and there’s baseball next year, who do you like in free agency? They won’t spend money to rebuild the rotation or keep DJ LeMahieu, but it’s nice to dream.
It is nice to dream, yes. It’s sad that New York is such a small market or the Yankees could spend what they need to. My most controversial opinion: We still don’t have conclusive proof that Gary Sanchez is bad. A 60-game season tells you nothing. You need at least 90.
[Will’s note: I feel like Sanchez is bad in the way that democracy is bad: He’s the least worst of all possible options. They’re not getting J.T. Realmuto. But Sanchez is also not getting better…so *profound shrug.*]
So I know a guy. He’s not a friend — I actually fucking hate him, if we’re being honest — but he lost his job in November, and he’s been showing his ass every day since. He’s originally a New York guy, and since you folks at AHOY are an upstate bunch, I was wondering: Would you have a spot for him? He’s a figurehead sorta fella, so I wouldn’t give him any real responsibilities, but giving this guy some sort of make-work gig might keep him from continuing to fuck stuff up out of spite.
Something in your description compels me to place all of my trust in him. And we do need someone in charge of winning…
Let’s talk about 2020 since we’ve almost made it through this shit bucket of a year. How do you look back on it — on how AHOY was able to adapt and what you were able to accomplish?
I’m proudest that Hart [Seely], our publisher, did not issue any “pencils down” orders. The guy supports staff and creators better than any publisher I know.
Medals for distinguished service during lockdown should go to Stuart Moore and Deron Bennett for deftly navigating the stops and starts of printing and distribution, and to David Hyde & co. for keeping our name out there. And to all involved in every capacity, who must have felt as hopeless and scared as everyone else, but pressed ahead anyway.
And I should single myself out for special praise here, because just the other day I entered the right cooking time into the microwave instead of my PIN number. Matt Brady, who writes science columns for The Wrong Earth and its spinoffs, has one coming up in TWE: Night & Day #1 that investigates the causes of Pandemic Brain. What are his conclusions? I forget. Now where did I put my toupee…?
I had occasion to chat with some of your artists a few weeks ago; Soo Lee and Russ Braun had a lot of cool and interesting things to say. Who are some of your other favorite folks on the art side? (And, no, you can’t say, “They’re all great,” because we know that.)
If I name anyone, I have to keep working with people I didn’t name. And they will hate me. I’m happy to answer all reasonable questions, Will, but I’m not putting my life in danger.
[Will’s note: Reasonable.]
Now on to some specific books. Just in time for Christmas, we’ve got the second coming of Second Coming. What do the good readers out there have to look forward to in the next chapter of this series?
The first issue is a real departure for the series. It takes us back to the planet Zirconia to witness the origin of Sunstar. It’s a funny, original and surprising take on a familiar story.
[Will’s note: I got a read on that. Definitely didn’t remind me of the destruction of any other doomed planet in comics.]
You’re also continuing to besmirch the good(ish) name of Edgar Allan Poe with Snifter of Blood. What’s coming up in the rest of this run, and can I suggest “Snifter of Bile” for the next series? I thought that was a good one.
Blecch! That is a good one!
We’ve got not one but two adaptations of “The Cask of Amontillado,” and only one of them has killer robots. We have a couple of stories by the terrific Paul Cornell. (I can single him out for praise because the other writers will hate me no matter what I do; writers are made of jealousy and hatred, myself included.) We have a lurid new cover treatment where we just slap down the horror fonts and watch them fight, inspired by Myron Fass’ exquisitely tasteless 1970s company, Eerie Publications.
[Will’s note: Writers are terrible people, all of the rest of them included.]
Before we get to your books, let’s talk about one you’re editing: Happy Hour by Peter Milligan and Michael Montenat. This has been such an interesting series, this idea of a dystopia in which everyone is forced by the state to be happy in the face of reality, personal feelings and even normal human interactions. What’s it been like to watch this book come together — and also, can you explain how the Peyer Unhappiness Scale works?
The Peyer Unhappiness Scale (PUS) involves a two-step process:
- I pause to get a sense of how happy or unhappy I am.
- I assign an arbitrary number to it.
Try it, it works!
Happy Hour has been a very satisfying book to work on; it rates a very low PUS number. Like, a 2.7 at most. Peter and I go back to pre-Vertigo days at DC; his Shade, the Changing Man was the first title I worked on from its beginning. We used to talk his stories out a little bit before he wrote them, and watching his mind work was an education for me. It’s ridiculous that we went 20-something years without working together, and I’m glad that’s over.
I hadn’t worked with [artist] Michael [Montenat] before, so I wasn’t prepared for how hard he works and how seriously he takes it. And the effort shows. It’s a great-looking, well-told story, and his covers are especially stunning.
Now, on to your stuff. Penultiman, like The Wrong Earth, has been strangely touching with laughs and this surprisingly strong undercurrent of sadness, like M*A*S*H but without the Korean War, field hospital or Alan Alda. But this is what I’m curious about from your perspective: What’s the difference between the pain of not fitting in or being an outsider (like, say, a superpowered alien from a doomed planet who lands in the Midwest as a baby to be raised by human parents) and the pain of not ever being good enough, a fact that keeps smacking our Penultiman in his almost perfect face?
Well, both feelings can come entirely from within. You can believe the crowd has rejected you; you can decide they’re right to do so; and you can be wrong about all of it. Chances are, they’re not even thinking about you, or they’re wondering why everyone hates them. That’s the beautiful gift of being human: the power to make each other feel terrible without even trying.
The Wrong Earth, your other superhero book that’s not at all commentary on superheroes, relationships and the changing tone of comics over the last 50 years, comes back in the next month or so. What’s coming up in this third chapter of the series? Is there an overall theme, like sidekicks in the previous installment?
“Can two masked crimefighters share a planet without driving each other crazy?” Starring Tony Randall as Dragonflyman and Jack Klugman as Dragonfly.
[Will’s note: What about Dragonfly as a medical examiner? Could that work?]
Speaking of series that like to talk about superheroes, it seems like there are a lot of them out these days. I’ll spare you the pain of going on the record with names and/or publishers, but where do you think some creators go wrong when they try to take on the idea of capes ‘n’ tights?
It’s an understatement to say that superhero comics can get pretty self-referential. I guess that’s unavoidable, since they’re built around this naïve adventure model that ran out of gas about 60 years ago. But if all a superhero encounters is other superheroes, or twisted versions of superheroes, or the odd, smirking villain, and there are no stakes on the human level — if they’re just fending off attacks and never helping anyone — then the snake is really feasting on its own tail.
I’m reminded of the Steven Moffat years on the Doctor Who TV series. Moffat’s great, but he was so enamored of his hero that he made the Doctor the answer to every question, the punchline of every joke. Everything revolved around the Doctor all the time until he was no longer an instrument for saving the universe, but saving the universe was an instrument for celebrating the Doctor. Which to me took it pretty far out of whack. And that happens to some extent with the big comic book heroes. Yes, to dress as a ferret and fight crime indicates a profound depth of sadness, but I wish Ferret-Man would talk about something else once in a while.
But — and here I contradict myself — as long as you’re playing to what you love, I can’t say you’re doing superheroes wrong. What you love was probably formed by your earliest exposures. If your first was, say, “Batman: Hush,” that’s a very different experience from the children’s comics that bit me at the age of 6. So your comics will be different from mine, and I might not find them interesting. But that doesn’t make either one of us wrong.
Finally, 2021 is almost here, and there’s no way (probably) it can be as bad as this year. What’s just over the horizon for you and AHOY? What do you think we’ll be talking about a year from now?
We hope to be able to offer uninterrupted service in 2021, but that’s up to the pandemic, and how willing people are to fight it.
So, be a superhero, wear a mask.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
