Ryan North Talks Lower Decks #1, Star Trek AI, and Pizza Shakes

Somewhere on the Trans-Canada highway, that great artery connecting all ten Canadian provinces, Ryan North speeds along in his car. There, among the anonymous byroads of rural Quebec, where the Internet is spotty, the white-throated sparrows serenade with their call of “oh-sweet-Canada-Canada!” and the cabanes à sucre provide the vital, sugary lifeblood to the world’s pancakes, Ryan joins me for our appointed interview over Zoom. 

[the following interview has been edited for length and clarity]

Mark Turetsky: This Lower Decks comic that you’re writing. It’s a 3-issue mini. Is it one story arc, or is it more episodic like the show?

Ryan North: It’s one story arc. I actually had my choice between “do you want it to be 30 pages and three issues, or 20 pages and 4 issues?” and the shape of the story made it that it made sense to have these breaks, these big cliffhangers at the 30 page mark. It’s the first time I’ve gotten to do that, where they were like “whatever sized vessel this story needs, we can do.” I was like great! So it’s one longer story. 

I did the Adventure Time comic back in 2012, and the fun thing there was that Adventure Time was these 11 to 12 minute shorts, and we’re doing four 4-issue arcs that are 20 pages. And there was a challenge in, “how do I spread Adventure Time out into a larger story?” because there’s more narrative there. And the fun thing about Lower Decks is that it is based on Star Trek, and everyone knows what an hour long Star Trek looks like, or a two hour two-parter Star Trek looks like, and so I didn’t feel like I had to invent anything to tell a longer Lower Decks story. It feels very at home in that world. 

Mark: I would have thought the temptation would be, there are four core characters, so with the choice between a 3 or a 4 issue mini, have each issue narrated by one of the four characters.

Ryan: We’re thinking along the same lines, except I had just done that with the Power Pack miniseries I did for Marvel. And if I do 3 times 30, that’s 90 pages of comics, while 4 times 20 is 80, so this way you get ten more pages of Star Trek. 

Mark: How cool is it that the show is going to cross over with Strange New Worlds?

Ryan: I’m so excited! I had all these conversations with [showrunner] Mike [McMahan] and he hadn’t told me about that. And I get it, you want to keep stuff like that under wraps, I don’t hold it against him, I don’t know if I could keep that secret. I know nothing about it. It’s something that I’ve thought of, and dismissed as being too perfect for this fallen world. But it’s happening! That’s great! I’m excited, but I know nothing.

Mark: I know you’re a huge Star Trek fan, but I look at your work in comics, in your nonfiction books.

Ryan: How to Invent Everything, How to Take Over the World.

Mark: You have a focus on problem solving. Especially in Squirrel Girl, it’s about avoiding conflict and finding solutions, which is a pretty strong theme in Star Trek. Do you think Trek had that influence on your way of thinking and writing?

Ryan: Oh, possibly, yeah. I have a friend whose father would pause episodes of TNG and say, “What would you do here if you’re Picard? What’s the right move here?” Which I love. I’m not sure if I would love it as a kid, or be immensely frustrated as a kid. She spoke of it very positively, and I think there’s a type of person who was my age, watching TNG as a kid, and seeing these moral stories. And Star Trek, yes, it has cool space battles and stuff, but I think, all of the captains, they don’t go in looking for fights. They go in looking for mutual understanding, infinite diversity in infinite combinations, they look for peace, and mutual knowledge. And so, as cool as the space battles are, they’re always in one sense a failure of diplomacy, and this notion that, with the right ideas, we could find a mutually satisfactory middle ground. I think that’s great. You see that in Squirrel Girl, you see that in a lot of my work, this idea of knowledge being an intrinsic good. Something that we can go to before violence. 

Mark: You seem to have an interest in formalistic uses of language. Can we expect any Tamarian [the “Darmok” language] to show up in your Lower Decks comic?

Ryan: I do have [Kayshon], the bridge officer from that race, he makes a couple of appearances in the mini. And I was looking at Memory Alpha to see what kind of Tamarian cultural references had been done before, so that if I was inventing a new one, it would fit into the culture as we have already established it. You can’t just make something up, you have to make sure it fits. You have to have it all click together. 

I love how Star Trek has rules to explain its fictional technology. But if you break those rules, there’s usually a deeper understanding that can explain the breaking of those rules. So, in “Relics,” they’re holding open the Dyson Sphere with the Jenolan’s shields, and then they beam out, which should be impossible; you can’t beam out through shields. And they don’t explain it in the episode, but you have O’Brien’s shield recycling technique, which leaves a millisecond-sized window, where you can beam through. And so it’s that depth of knowledge about Star Trek, and the rules on top of rules that make it feel like a lived-in universe. And wanting to be consistent with that leads to things like going to Memory Alpha, and looking at the whole cultural knowledge of this race, and making a new expression that they have that feels like it fits in with the others.

Mark: The thing is, Lower Decks as a series exists as a kind of discussion in Tamarian, right? But instead of Tamarian cultural references, it’s all Star Trek references. 

Ryan: Yeah, and I think the joy is that we don’t know this culture, but we learn it. And we learn it through exposure. That whole episode of Darmok made me think of early language acquisition, where babies learn language not by being taught it, but being exposed to it, in hearing it spoken around them and deducing what words and phrases and grammar and syntax must be. That’s the best part about Lower Decks: I’m approaching it as a guy who really loves Star Trek, and has all this knowledge and all of these references at the tip of my finger, but if you don’t have it, if you don’t understand what’s being done, all these references, it still stands on its own. It’s not just “hey remember when…” It’s telling this story that’s in this universe. And every episode is, ideally, an on-ramp for someone to discover it. That’s my theory. I haven’t spoken to the showrunners about it, but that’s what I think Lower Decks is trying to do. To live in Star Trek and embrace Star Trek, but also not be opaque to people who haven’t done Star Trek before. 

Mark: The way it treats the world of Star Trek, I think, is a lot like the way you treated the Marvel Universe in Squirrel Girl. 

Ryan: It’s accessible, yeah.

Mark: It’s accessible, and you’ll make jokes about, like, Galactus, and all this stuff that’s really funny if the reader knows what you’re talking about, but not alienating if you don’t.

Ryan: That’s great to hear, because that was what I was shooting for. I wanted the book to be accessible, where if it was your first comic, you wouldn’t be lost. And it ended up being the Deadpool cards in that book were a great way to do that, completely by accident. I just thought they were funny but I realized very quickly, here’s one panel where you get to break the fourth wall, basically look to the reader and say, “here’s this villain’s origin, here’s what their interests are, here’s their powers, here’s their weakness, and here’s what they want.” Done! One panel. So efficient! I kind of miss it, doing other stuff since then. Because it’s such a quick way to get people on board, but the idea behind it is, every comic is someone’s first comic. So let’s not demand that you have this knowledge. Let’s make it accessible so if you do have it, great, if you don’t, here’s what you need to enjoy it, so that we’re all on the same page. 

Mark: I’ve been reading some old Chris Claremont X-Men, and…

Ryan: They do explain their powers to each other a lot!

Mark: They explain their powers to each other, but also, I was just reading a Marvel Fanfare arc, where they fight Sauron, the dinosaur man.

Ryan: The dinosaur man, yeah.

Mark: And there’s one issue where they devote two whole pages to recapping Sauron and his dealings with the X-Men. This is two out of twenty pages in this issue.

Ryan: That’s a fair percentage. I think there’s a line. I haven’t read the comic you’re discussing, but you probably don’t need to know Sauron’s full history. But if you say “he wants to turn people into dinosaurs,” you probably have enough to hit the ground running. 

Mark: Speaking of dinosaurs, you’ve written extensively about one particular dinosaur, and one or two others. 

Ryan: For almost 20 years. 

Mark: I haven’t been reading Dinosaur Comics for the whole 20 years, but–

Ryan: That’s allowed.

Mark: It’s kind of amazing to me, it seems like a clearing house for random ideas that don’t really fit in anywhere else. Has it been difficult to keep writing it, considering you’ve taken on so much other writing work?

Ryan: No. It’s funny, right, because, I think at first blush something like Dinosaur Comics sounds hard. I thought it sounded hard, you’re remixing these same six pictures. And 20 years in, surely you’re out of ideas for these same six pictures, but the thing that’s missing there is that it’s a really flexible format, and I also really love how bite-sized it is. It’s like nothing else I do is that small. 

Working on How To Take Over The World, that’s a 450 page book. That’s a couple of years of effort, of research and writing, and writing a comic, it’s usually a 3 or 4 issue arc, and you’re writing one issue at a time and a page has more stuff in it than a Dinosaur Comics. Dinosaur Comics is almost like poetry or haiku where you have this one idea you get to explore. And I love how pure and bite-sized that is. You have to do this thing and it’s done at the end of it. I’m not writing a script for an artist. I’m not sending it off to an editor, I’m just writing the comic and putting it out. So it still feels different from everything else that I do, and it still feels like it’s its own special little thing. So I keep doing it, I like it.

Mark: So is people sometimes kind?

Ryan: [laughs] People is sometimes kind. I still love that. For people reading this, this is almost two decades ago now, a reader of mine went to Japan and used a blank template of Dinosaur Comics for his English as a second language course, for his students, and sent me the results, and they were adorable. And one of them, on the last panel, the person had T-Rex saying “people is sometimes kind.” and I was like, “oh my God! People is sometimes kind!” 

Mark: And it was as a reason not to kill people. 

Ryan: Yeah, we shouldn’t kill people, because people is sometimes kind. And you know what? I stand by that. They aren’t my words, but they are true words. 

Mark: You’ve done quite a lot of fan fiction stuff using the Dinosaur Comics format. You’ve got a lot of Batman…

Ryan: Sherlock Holmes…

Mark: An unspecified British spy…

Ryan: Angola Maldives! I named him by looking at a map. 

Mark: But I don’t think you’ve ever really written about Star Trek… 

Ryan: Not a ton, no. Maybe not at all.

Mark: All I found was talking about which Star Trek episode was the worst. 

Ryan: Really, what did I say?

Mark: “Spock’s Brain.”

Ryan: Fair enough, yeah.

Mark: T-Rex was arguing that it’s clearly “Spock’s Brain,” and Utahraptor was saying “no, it’s ‘Threshold’.” [note: I misremembered, and it’s the other way around.]

Ryan: Interesting. Yeah, I’d go with “Spock’s Brain.” “Threshold,” the last five minutes is where “Threshold” falls apart. 

Mark: Is there any particular reason you haven’t written about Trek? Were you saving up all of your Star Trek mojo for your eventual licensed comic or licensed story debut?

Ryan: I would like to think that I was that clever and mercantile, but no, I think part of it is that Star Trek is important to me, I care about Star Trek more than I care about Sherlock Holmes. And so it’s easy to make jokes about Sherlock Holmes, and a bit harder to make jokes about Star Trek for me. But also, yeah, I think part of it is, I’ll give you this answer by way of an analogy.  

In How To Take Over The World, there’s a chapter on using computers to hack an election, the untrustworthiness of computers. And I thought that chapter would be one of the easiest to write, because I studied computer science, and I know this stuff backwards and forwards. And it ended up being one of the harder chapters to write because I did know so much that I forgot what it was like not to know it. And so I wasn’t explaining it as well because I was assuming stuff people didn’t know. 

And I feel like with Star Trek, when you’re writing for a general audience, like a Dinosaur Comics-reading audience who may not have ever seen Star Trek, I have a very hard time judging what is known about Star Trek and what is not. Like if I say “Spock’s Brain,” most Star Trek fans I think would recognize or at least have some idea. The general public might be like, “Okay, is that weird? I don’t know. Sounds cool. Spock has a famous brain. I want to know more about it,” and I think that might be part of it. The nice thing with Lower Decks is you are speaking to a bit more of a Star Trek audience, but you’re still keeping it accessible. I think they’ve gotten better at that over time. But I wasn’t specifically saving it. I wish I’d been that smart.

Mark: You have done some Star Trek writing through an AI…

Ryan: GPT-NG!

Mark: So what kind of guarantee can you give that this comic won’t be written by that?

Ryan: It’s coherent, so there’s a difference. It keeps track of plot things for more than five seconds. I was using the beta of GPT-3, a next generation AI algorithm, and it was fun, because it’s trained on Internet data, and there’s a lot of Star Trek stuff on the Internet. And I was curating it, obviously, and a lot of them would be just slightly wrong, or very obviously wrong. 

And there was one point where it started generating Tuvix prompts. And I was like, “oh no, you don’t know what you’re walking into here, Star Trek AI!” So it was fun, I had it do a couple of crossovers between the shows, and it was basically just doing a couple sentences of plot summary for different episodes with interesting titles. And then I was posting them until I ran out of credits, and I stopped.

Mark: Yeah, I’m trying to get onto the Dall-E 2, I’m on the waiting list right now. 

Ryan: That’s fun, I have a friend who’s on it. It does incredible results as long as you don’t look at the words.

Mark: Do you know about the secret language that Dall-E 2 uses? 

Ryan: Yeah, I think, I hesitate to call it a secret language, because I think that suggests a lot of stuff that likely isn’t happening. At its core, it’s trying to connect words to shapes, and when you build up a neural network for that, neural networks are famously just a bunch of connections that are hard for a human to look at, and they become very black boxy. The input goes in, the output comes out, and it’s hard to say precisely why this happened and this other thing didn’t happen. And what it’s doing is it’s building up a representation of these concepts through whatever technique it can, and using a scoring function to see if that’s a good technique or a bad technique. It’s pseudo-random and it iterates on itself. It evolves that representation. And you would expect something like that to have artifacts like that, where this word that does not exist in the English language produces this reliable image out the other side. 

And that to me is an artifact of an algorithm, and where you see this, like, “they have a secret language, and what is this word that humans don’t know, but it makes a scary monster come out the other side, what is the spooky thing going on here?” I know it’s a Ryan thing, I’m very particular around being accurate on what these algorithms do and don’t do, but like that Google Engineer saying “I think this might be conscious,” No, it’s not. It’s so far from that. And you should know that it’s not.

Mark: You programmed this thing to be convincing.

Ryan: But you have, like, in the early 60s with the Eliza chatbot, where you would say, “I feel sad,” and it would parse out the word “sad,” and say “tell me about sad.” You had people then thinking this was a credible psychologist, because if you don’t know what it’s doing, then you’re willing to forgive a lot of the faults. And be like, “oh maybe this is more alive than it looks. Maybe this is conscious.” All that stuff. It’s not. So that’s my downer answer on technology.

Mark: I do appreciate that now, canonically, Iron Man uses Dr. Sbaitso as his therapist.

Ryan: Yeah, I was pleased to get that in. 

(“ryan north in a car in the style of lower decks” according to Dall-E mini)

Mark: How do you think TNG‘s Moriarty rates as an example?

Ryan: Moriarty is an interesting case, because the crew assumes he’s sentient basically as soon as he claims to be. And we know where it’s very easy to write a program that claims to be alive. In How To Take Over The World I did just that, writing something like :

10 PRINT “I promise you, I’m alive! Please don’t shut me off! Oh God, I’m begging you!!”

20 GOTO 10

But we as viewers understand Moriarty is alive because he looks alive and acts alive, and the episode isn’t asking us to interrogate that, it’s asking us to interrogate what it means to be alive when you are a holodeck program created to be evil. Can you grow past that? If you do, can you convince anyone? Those sorts of interesting juicy questions.

Mark: Are you ready to talk about which Star Trek episodes you haven’t seen?

Ryan: It’s just one. And I‘ll never say which one it was. Because the writers of that episode are probably still alive. I turned it off at the teaser. I watched the teaser and I was like, “I’ve seen enough of this premise, I’m done.”

But I like it because there’s still, no matter how much Star Trek I’ve seen, which right now is all of it,  there’s still one episode that I haven’t. I’ve always got that last little bit. So I’ll never really fully run out the clock on Star Trek that way. 

Mark: I had a teacher who taught Shakespeare, and he had read every Shakespeare except for Timon of Athens. And he said he was saving it for after he retired. There’s one last Shakespeare that he can read. But evidently it’s not a very good play. 

Ryan: No. He’s going to be disappointed. But I like this tacit comparison of Star Trek to Shakespeare.

Mark: Star Trek certainly borrows a lot of episode titles from Shakespeare. Getting back to your Lower Decks miniseries, are there going to be any Parliament-class [Canada-themed] starships in this comic?

Ryan: I won’t answer that question, but I will say you get to invent starships when you’re writing a Star Trek comic. And when you invent a starship, you get to name that starship. And I was like, “So, Star Trek, a lot of ships named after scientists. Not a lot named after computer scientists.” So the first issue has the USS Lovelace, which I felt like, “this feels like this should have happened by now, so I’m going to do it.” So we get maybe the first starship named after a woman computer scientist. Possibly. But if not, the second or third. I was just glad to do it. But there was no USS Lovelace established in canon.

Mark: Is there anything you can tease about the plot?

Ryan: I guess a lot of the covers have shown Dracula. That’s been published. So there is Dracula in it. It follows a classic Star Trek format, where there’s an upper decks plot and a lower decks plot, and they intersect, and Dracula is in the middle of it. 

Mark: You’ve written in a lot of different media: comics, prose, nonfiction, choosable path, video games, webcomics, what’s your favorite medium to work in?

Ryan: It’s comics. The reason I say that so quickly is that my experience as a writer in comics is that I imagine a story and I picture it in my head, and I break it down into panels, and I write it all out, and then it goes off to the artist. And I get back these pages that are better than I imagined. And it is a collaborative medium, and the privilege of being a comic writer is you get to work with these really great artists. And their whole job, everyone on the team: the editor, the inker, is to make you look better than you are. Because everyone’s bringing their a-game, everyone is bringing their best stuff. And you are a part of that machine, but you’re not the only part of that machine. 

And so every time I get to read a comic I wrote, it’s better than what I was picturing when I was writing it. And it still feels like a magic trick, after doing this for years. And that’s my favorite part of it. You’re collaborating, you’re coming up with something together with someone else. And it’s more than you ever could have done on your own. That’s the joy of it.

Mark: I was hoping you were going to say “gross-out videos of you eating a disgusting thing.” Because now you’ve got the ghost pepper video, you’ve got the pizza shake.

Ryan: Oh, the pizza shake. Desperate times.

Mark: What possessed you?

Ryan: I had mouth surgery, I had to eat food that was bland, and cold, and soft. I was like, “well if I put this pizza in with water and blend it, it becomes cold, bland and soft. It’s not good. No one should do it. I learned a lesson. The Vitamix blender company called me out on Twitter. When you mess up your meal so bad that the company publicly calls you out, that’s a high water mark, I should say closer to a low water mark.

Mark: Well, it depends on how much water was in the blender with the pizza. 

Ryan: Too much water, too. I later made a pizza paste, which is closer to play-dough, and that was more palatable. It was like what you imagine play-dough should taste like. 

Mark: You’ve also got Danger and Other Unknown Risks, you’re reuniting with Erica Henderson.

Ryan: That was a book where Erica and I have been trying to find something to do together for a long time, ever since Squirrel Girl ended, and this book came out of us having a lot of conversations about things we like, things we don’t like, stuff we love to see in stories, and unlike all of the other comics I’ve done, this was even more collaborative than we’ve already been talking about. 

I would write a draft, she would send over not just notes, but her version. Characters would die, characters would live, we’d go back and forth. So it was that passing scripts back and forth before she even started drawing. And so at the end I was like, “Erica, I want to credit this not ‘written by Ryan, drawn by Erica, let’s do ‘written by Ryan and Erica, drawn by Erica’.” And she was like, “Thank you, and also I was just about to ask if we could do that.” So we’re on the same page. So I’m really excited for it. It’s a fun adventure. It’s got the same sort of depth of emotion that Squirrel Girl had, and Erica’s obviously an amazing artist. And it’s something that I think will appeal to people if you’ve read any of our stuff, but also goes in some interesting and different directions, too. 

Mark: I’m trying to think, is this your first creator owned comic work?

Ryan: It is. Pretty much. I did Midas Flesh with Boom around 2015. I say pretty much because I was writing it and Branden Lamb and Shelli Paroline was drawing it. It felt more like the classic comic we were discussing. And this is more just pure collaboration with Erica.

Mark: Star Trek deals with a lot of doubles: evil versions of characters, polar opposites. What would Ryan South be like?

Ryan: There was a time in my life where I emailed everyone else named Ryan North, and I said “Please stop using my name, or pay me $20.” I also emailed Ryan South and Ryan East and Ryan West. But Ryan North was the main focus. And I got back some very angry emails from other Ryans North. And I got back one guy who was playing along. And he was like, “Oh hey Ryan North! I’m also Ryan North, as you know, but I’m 40 years old, and you are clearly a teenager. So I’m you from the future. Do you have any questions for your future self, oh past me?” 

So I was like, “Oh fun this guy’s playing along. I’m bored in the computer lab, I can ask some questions. So I was like, “Yeah, what’s your greatest piece of advice for me in the future?” and he was like, “Stay away from women named Susan, they’ll ruin your life.” Very bitter. I’m like “Whoa, this goofy cold email got very strange very fast.” 

So I think he had had a divorce and was unhappy with Susan. I still remember her name. So he made an impression. But then the Ryan Souths, Ryan Easts, they’re generally nice people in my experience. But also at one point on Facebook, because Ryan North is my name, and if you look at other first letters like Ryan Borth, Ryan Corth, they kinda sound like fake names. So in the early days of Facebook, I went through and friended Ryan Borth, and Ryan Corth, and Ryan Lorth, and Ryan Worth and a lot of them accepted the friend request. I had a really ludicrous list of friends.

Mark: Let’s assume that that other Ryan North was really you from the future. Did you ever meet a woman named Susan whom you didn’t marry? Do you think maybe you avoided the dark future he represented, now that you’re around his age?

Ryan: Never! Perhaps by being made aware of my future, I couldn’t help but avoid it. I never got the chance to ask Old Ryan before he (presumably) faded out of existence.