The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

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The Eisner Award-Winning writer takes a seat in The Outhouse to talk about the new Punisher #1, as well as his first foray into the world of webcomics!


Greg Rucka has spent much of the last decade as one of the most sought-after names in comics. Known for his well-observed and nuanced takes on the superhero, crime, and espionage genres, Rucka has won four Eisner Awards (including one in 2011), a Harvey Award, and the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book. After having written for all three of DC's "trinity" characters (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman), as well as for Wolverine and Spider-Man at Marvel, he is one of the better known writers in comics. He has also gained plenty of acclaim for his own properties, such as Queen & Country, Whiteout, and Stumptown. His newest projects include Punisher #1 for Marvel, which is out today, and his new webcomic Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether. Rucka stopped by The Outhouse mere days after San Diego Comic-Con to talk about his newest projects, Comic-Con, and being a Big Shot.

The Outhouse (OH): How was Comic-Con?

Greg Rucka (GR): It was one of the best San Diego Cons I’ve been to in the last decade, I think. This is my twentieth in a row. It’s an awful lot to go to. I had a great time. I signed mostly at Oni. Matthew Southworth and I signed a lot of Stumptown. Folks came up with other work. We got some good feedback on the webcomic Rick Burchett and I started. And I was over at Tr!ckster for two of the symposia. That was actually quite remarkable. That was really a great experience. Of course Mike [artist Michael Lark] and I won an Eisner Friday night, so there was that too! So it was a good San Diego Con by any metric.

OH:  What do you hope to accomplish when you go to a major con like that?

GR:  Well, I’m a writer, not an artist. I can’t draw to save my life. And I don’t spend a lot of time online chasing down forum discussions about what I’m doing. So the primary draw of any con for me is to get to meet the fans. You get to talk to people about what they think of the work, hear what they’re saying, and meet people. San Diego Con is sort of it’s own beast because it’s so big and it becomes such a marathon. It used to be, I would go and try to do some business, and this year, maybe this is why I had such a good time, I didn’t even bother. I went to the panels, and Tr!ckster, and signed, and met people and attend the Eisners on Friday, and that’s what I did. When you’re a writer, you’re working alone, and you’re sitting at a desk wherever you are, and there’s no interaction with people while you work. Not to sound too touchy-feely about it, but it is good to meet people and hear what they say and sign for them. I enjoy that.

OH:  It seems like that tends to be more of a motivation to go to these events for comic book creators than it is for other people like actors, et al.

GR:  Absolutely. Like I said, writing can be very isolating. It can be very rewarding, but it’s something you do by yourself. Actors, very rarely are they working by themselves. They are working with others. And another reason I forgot to mention in the list of why I go to cons is that I get to see other professionals. I get to see my peers. That’s something I don’t get to do that often. There are some large cons, and some smaller ones where I live, but no matter how large, that’s just a fraction of a community that is global. There is an agent out of Spain, David Macho, and I haven’t seen him in a couple of years, and it was great to see him and catch up. He’s got some great guys working for him. I got to meet Pere Perez, whom I’ve worked with. That was really a delight. I got to see Nicola Scott, and I haven’t seen Nicola since last San Diego, I think. So it’s an opportunity to catch up with people that are friends but without these shows, I’d probably go potentially years without seeing them. Or never!

OH:  One thing you hear about San Diego a lot is that it’s gotten so big largely because the movies and video games have come in and almost taken over, while the comics take less and less of the real estate in there.

GR:  Oh yeah. I honestly don’t think anybody could objectively dispute that. All you have to do is walk in the hall. I can remember when I first went, Image was just getting their huge booth, and people were there to just stand on line for hours and get their MacFarlane and Liefeld signatures, and I was in the DC booth, which was just across the aisle, and they clearly were busy the whole weekend. Those were nothing compared to the lines outside Hall H for the Doctor Who preview [this year]. I arrived late on Thursday, and I was told I had missed the worst of it. There had been people camped out for the Thursday Twilight panel since Tuesday. Look, you can dislike it, you can accept it, you can love it, but Hollywood now knows about San Diego Con and they’re not going to forget, and until San Diego becomes and uncool place to be a geek, they’re going to continue because, if for no other reason, they know it’s a way into our pockets. If you can get the same fan passion that drives comics behind your movie or TV, or whatever, that’s a step up. My understanding is that Spielberg and Peter Jackson shared a stage at San Diego this year, and that in and of itself is remarkable. They debuted Cowboys and Aliens at San Diego. I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that Captain America premiered the Friday of San Diego.

OH:  Have the other cons stepped up their comics presence in response?

GR:  I think so. I think that it influenced the creation of Tr!ckster this year too. That’s not to say that Tr!ckster is meant to be another convention per se; my experience is that it was sort of an old style salon where people would go and hang out and talk art and storytelling. It wasn’t only about comics, it was about creative endeavor.

Heroes con, for example, is very much dedicated to comic books, and quite lovely as a result. There’s Emerald City, there’s Geek Girl con, which is not going to be restricted to comics. In order for a movie to do well, you need more than 200,000 people to see it. For a comic to do well, if you get a quarter of a million people to buy it, that’s a staggering number in this market. All you gotta do is look at it from an economic angle. I’ve been down on San Diego for the media saturation, but this year, it really didn’t bug me. Either I found a level of peace with it or I was able to navigate it in a way that it worked for me.

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OH:  How did you end up on The Punisher?

GR:  Steve Wacker chased me! [laughs] And wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’s very good at that. He can sell water to…somebody who has a lot of water [laughs]. He called me up and said “you’d be really good for this.” And my first response was “You do, huh?” And he said “Yeah, and it’s also set in the Marvel U,” and I was like “You jerk!” He basically put this in front of me and said “It’s going to be real dark.” He and I had several, and I mean several conversations, and, like I said, he’s very good at it, and he asked me the right questions so that I started really thinking about it, and then he showed me Marco Chechetto’s artwork, and I was like “all right, that’s that. You’ve persuaded me.” That’s how it came about. I’ve been reading Garth’s stuff, the MAX stuff with Jason Aaron, and I haven’t really been reading the Marvel Universe stuff, so I went back and looked at that, and thought “I can see a way to make this work for me.”

It’s funny, I did a Marvel panel and I was talking about the book, and I won’t say I was misquoted, but it was half the quote. I made the statement that Frank isn’t broken, you don’t need to fix him. I saw some people respond who said “wait, so the sociopath isn’t broken?” That’s not what I meant. Frank is a character, as a human being he’s very flawed. But the fact of the matter is, you can’t change the Punisher, otherwise you don’t have the Punisher. That’s not what the stories are about. You can never do a story where Frank is saying “I’ve exacted my revenge, I’ll put down my gun.” You can’t do a story where “I’m so overcome with guilt for the many lives I’ve taken, I will kill myself.” He’s never going to do that. If you try to write that story, the audience is going to say “What are you trying to pull?” If I give Frank a girlfriend, everybody knows that girlfriend’s gotta die. It’s the nature of that character’s story. So I’m not going to sell the audience that bill of goods. When I say that Frank is not broken, I mean that a good Punisher story can be told a million different ways. There are going to be a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things. Frank is going to kill them, let’s watch. That’s the way the Punisher works. I think it’s in that simplicity, that’s the remarkable complexity. Once you start asking questions, you treat the material seriously, and if you treat the character seriously– and that’s how I work, I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s how I approach it– then you have to ask questions like “how can he keep doing this and not eat a gun? How can he do this and not cross that very amorphous line between anti-hero, which is what he is, and villain, which he’s very close to.”

If Steven had asked me ten years ago to write a Punisher story, I would have responded with a “Hell no!” and I would have ended it there, because ten years ago I wouldn’t have been willing to see that complexity, if that makes sense. I really like the character now, and what you can do with him. Comics has a lot of characters where you say “This character is like that character and vice versa,” but Frank is unique. Frank is not Superman or Batman or Spider-Man or Wolverine or Wonder Woman. There’s really not an appropriate analogue that matches. You can say he shares things with Batman, but there are really few characters where you can hold up a mirror image. Frank really shouldn’t work. As a character, he really should not work. He’s inherently a revenge story, and revenge stories pretty much all end the same way. They end with the guy seeking revenge, getting it, and then dying because there’s an imposed morality there and a variety of expectations. The fact that Frank can continue, and has continued, I think, makes him really remarkable and fascinating and worthy of more examination.

OH:  Why does the Marvel Universe need the Punisher? What does he bring to the universe that wouldn’t be there otherwise?

GR:  I’m not sure the Marvel Universe does need Frank. On a basic level, at least for my purposes, what Frank does is allow people like the Fantastic Four to save the planet while he’s out there putting a very small dent in crime on the streets. I’m not sure I’d be willing to argue that the Marvel Universe needs Frank. I do think what characters like Frank bring to that larger universe is that he demands, whether you want it or not –and I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s going to be twenty pages of navel gazing introspection, it absolutely isn’t–but what he does is he raises the question of morality. He forces the question of right or wrong, and he forces the question of heroism. We’re telling stories about heroes, and here’s Frank. He’s an anti-hero, really in the truest sense of the word. He is not a heroic man, and he has no interest in heroism. When you take someone like that and you put him opposite say, Spider-Man, or Daredevil, or The Avengers, it forces against them a really interesting question. The danger of putting the Punisher in the Marvel Universe is that eventually one of these guys is going to notice, and he’s going to say “You can’t go around killing people!” And Frank’s response would be “Why not?” [laughs] And then you get into a very interesting place. At what point can they not suffer this guy going around doing this anymore. At what point do they go “It doesn’t matter if the guy was a mass murdering pedophile, you can’t arbitrarily become judge, jury, and executioner. I understand that horrible things befell you. I understand that your family was brutally murdered. I understand that you are filled with an all-encompassing incandescent rage that fuels your every move. You can’t wander around shooting people. We have cops for that. There’s a reason why Captain America isn’t taking off people’s heads with the shield.” So you end up in a position where you have to talk about that. And eventually we will. That’s not where we are at the start, but we will when we get further into the run. He’s going to do things, and Daredevil’s going to notice. And when that happens…Frank’s not an idiot. One of the things I like about the character is that Frank has to be really smart. He has to be soldier smart. And that I think is the other difference is that he’s not a crime fighter. He’s a soldier in a war. And as far as he’s concerned, he may be the only guy who’s fighting it.

OH:  What is the approach to writing Frank Castle in the current Marvel Universe? To what extent will the book reflect the universe as a whole?

GR:  At the start, not a heck of a lot. We start post-Fear Itself, so he’s working in an environment that exists because Fear Itself has happened. Do we talk about Fear Itself? No. Does Frank talk about Fear Itself? No. Frank is a street-level character. We did an 8-page story for Spider-Island…Just a little Punisher story. At the start, his interaction with the rest of the Marvel Universe is very limited for obvious reasons –we’re starting out. As it goes, it will expand. I also feel like I should clarify, we can talk about all this stuff on a thematic level. All of that stuff is there, but it’s not overt. What is overt is there are people Frank feels needs to die, and he’s going to kill them now.

OH:  How does Frank Castle relate to his past now? Does he think about his origin story, the murder of his family, or is he simply on this fixed course now after all these years and that’s just where he is now.

GR:  I don’t think a day goes by where he doesn’t think about Maria and Frank Jr. and Lisa. I don’t think a day goes by where he’s not in some way acutely aware of their loss, and is not feeding that furnace. There’s a military wives saying that says “A distracted soldier is a dead soldier.” When he is on a mission, that’s not something that’s on his mind, because that takes away the soldier. That takes away his ability to do what he needs to do. I think Frank is one thing above all others: he’s ironically a master of himself. He’s one of the most controlled and self-controlled characters in all of comics literature. He does what he does because he’s fighting a war. He’s fighting a war where, for lack of a better analogue, the Pearl Harbor was the murder of his family. That doesn’t mean he’s always thinking about Pearl Harbor, but that also means not a day goes by when he isn’t aware.

OH:  You mentioned that Stephen Wacker showed you Marco Chechetto’s work as he was talking to you about writing The Punisher. Was he already assigned to the book before you were?

GR:  No, I think it was an issue of assembling the team. We were talking about artists to work with, and he jumped very quickly to the top of the list. When Marco and I got to exchanging emails, it turned out we were very much on the same page about what we wanted out of the series, how we saw Frank, and how frankly we wanted to portray the violence. It’s not a MAX book, so you are sort of limited in the depravity and inhumanity and violence you can draw. But you can imply a heck of a lot. Frank is a very violent man, and he has put himself in a very violent world, and to not reflect that is to, in my opinion, you’re removing an element of the character.

OH:  What’s the collaboration between you two like?

GR:  We’re communicating fairly regularly simply on the basis of pages coming in, and I’m giving him feedback. It’s not the most in depth collaboration simply because there’s half a planet between us. He’s in Italy, and there’s a different language, and I have no Italian, and his English is actually remarkably good. It’s funny because you’re talking to me on a day when I’m writing him a fairly long email where I’m saying “Ok, this is where we’re going, this is what I have in my head. What do you think?” So we’re really having the first big collaboration conversation. It’s not as if we need a deep collaboration because when we first started talking, we were saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” We were very much in agreement, and that is manifested very well on the page.

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OH:  What is your process like? When you have a story idea, what comes next? Notes? Outline? Is it different depending on the book?

GR:  I tend to do a page breakdown. It won’t be incredibly detailed, but what I try to do is think “ok, I have twenty pages for this story. These are the things that have to happen in it, how am I going to work it out?” And then the writing of course changes all that. I also find that I really like the editorial process. I really enjoy having and editor that I can call and say “this is what I’m thinking” and bounce ideas off them and hear their response and hear their ideas. Steve is very good at that, so it’s a very easy relationship.

OH:  Does it work the same way when you’re writing novels?

GR:  Yeah, it’s very similar, actually. In this case I spend a lot of time talking to my agent and telling him “this is what I’m thinking.” [laughs] I find that I need to verbalize a story, I need to speak it before I can write it. I’m not sure why that is. I’m not sure how I’ve evolved to that point, but the last couple of years I’ve found it much easier to work that way; to have someone to talk to and have another set of ears. I find that verbalizing helps me crystallize the ideas. Also, I’ll surprise myself and see things that I didn’t see when it was just bouncing around in my head. Especially on a novel, you’re talking about a long-form project, it’s something that can take a month, or six months, or a year to write. When you’re trying to sustain an idea for that long, you need to keep feeding it, you need to keep it sporing and an idea that is that long for me very rarely stays the same from conception to execution. Also I’ll find myself in a position where I’m saying “all right, I’ve reached this point in the writing and thinking about this character, and that changes something that I thought I was going to do. There have been some books where I’ve had moments that brought the book to a screeching halt because something happens in the writing that I didn’t anticipate and has forced me to reevaluate where I’m going. Sometimes it goes pretty much by the numbers, but in a way I find that less satisfying. It’s not quite as exciting. It’s not the same as when you can feel the project sort of come to life.

OH:  Has there ever been a case where your idea for a novel, as it evolves, morphs into something too big, and you have to shave it down?

GR:  Sometimes it can do that. Sometimes you think “well I can go this way, but if I go that way, this novel is going to be 500,000 words long, and that’s a big frickin’ book!” Most of the time if it gets that out of control, it normally means that the book is offering to go in a direction where I don’t want it to go. As I said, there was at least one novel where I hit the halfway point and the book just said “No you’re wrong, we’re not doing that.” It ended up going in a radically different direction, but yeah, in a much broader, much bigger direction.

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OH:  Your other big project right now is Lady Sabre and the Ineffable Aether…

GR:  Yeah, Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether. We just put up a mirror because like an idiot I used a URL that was far too difficult for people to remember. The URL is lady-sabre.com. It’s Rick Burchett’s beautiful art and hopefully me doing entertaining writing.

OH:  Steampunk seems like a departure for you. Is that why you decided to go that way for your first webcomic?

GR:  That’s part of the pleasure of doing a webcomic. There’s almost no expectation for what a Rucka/Burchett collaboration would look like. Rick and I, for years, have been looking for projects we can do together, and have been stymied on more than one occasion. Rick and I also share a love of many of the same things. So when we said “let’s do a webcomic, what kind of thing do you want to do?” We hit on swashbuckling very early. We hit on that steampunk aesthetic very early, and we hit on this idea of these sailing ships very early, and it grew from there.

I never know what I’m supposedly known for or what people expect from me at any given moment anyway. That’s probably been the downfall of my career. I’m not very good at delivering what people expect, I suppose. But we’re doing this for fun. We wanted to do something that was fun! I think Rick Burchett is one of the greatest American comic book artists working today. I think his storytelling is incredible, and I think there are many younger artists that could stand to learn from his technique. He’s a very smart, very gifted storyteller, and I’ve always felt like he has not gotten his due.

OH:  When did you guys first meet?

GR:  I just did a blog post on the site about this. Denny O’Neill introduced us in 1998 or 1999 at San Diego. We went out to dinner, it was Denny, Rick myself, and Denny’ wife Mary Anne, if I remember correctly. By the end of the dinner, Rick and I were like “ok, we’ve gotta work together!” [laughs] I’ve got a joke on the website that we’ve been saying to each other for years that we were separated at birth by twenty years. We share so many of the same loves and so many of the same references. He’s one of the few people in my life where I can say “it is like this thing,” and he’ll say “oh yeah, I saw that thing. Did you see this thing?” We have, as a result, a very nice shorthand.

OH:  How was the schedule decided upon? You update it every Tuesday and Thursday, right?

GR:  Actually, new screens are Monday and Thursday, and we try to get content up every Tuesday and Friday as well. Wednesday, we figure you’re going to the comic book store, you don’t need us.

OH:  In creating a webcomic, what should each installment achieve? Should webcomics be seen as part of a larger whole, or can each installment stand alone?

GR:  It’s interesting that you should ask that, because I am painfully aware of how little I know about telling a story well in this particular medium. The nice thing about a webcomic is that if you attract people to it, they may not come every day you update, but they’ll come back and catch up. At its best, I would hope, and I haven’t mastered this yet, I hasten to add, but I hope the Monday update brings you back on Thursday, and the Thursday one will bring you back on Monday. That you will, at least not in terms of the narrative itself, but in terms of the potential of the story, of where it’s going, it will engage you enough to keep coming back for more. We’re still in the early days here, we’ve posted all of five screens [at the time this interview was conducted], and that’s crawling by any webcomic standard. I have a friend, Neal Bailey who does a webcomic at charlieeverett.com. And he’s been doing it for nine months. At that point, you have a body of work. People can go back and read these updates. The ideal is that we’re gong to leave you with something every update day that will make you want to come back. At the worst, we will leave you something that will not send you away screaming [laughs]. I never want someone to say “All right, I give up. This is crap!” And if that means the best I can offer you is beautiful Rick Burchett art on your monitor, I’ll take that! I’d much prefer you to come back to see how the story is going, AND the beautiful Rick Burchett art, and there’s interesting entries on the plot as we build the world up and things like that.

OH:  Is each screen a different script, or is there a larger script you wrote that was then cut down to installments?

GR:  That’s interesting. If you go to the site now, we’re posting scripts as the screens go up. And you’re going to see in the next coming months how my scripting is changing. The stuff that I’m writing now, now that we’re actually live and seeing how things are working or in many cases not working the way I was hoping, I’m modifying how I write. Initially, I had no idea how to go into it. I wrote it very much like I was writing a comic book, and that’s describing it like a comic book page. And at this point now, I’m writing it specifically for the date. “This is Chapter 3 Day 1 Screen 1. Chapter 3 Day 1 Screen 2. Chapter 3 Day 2 Screen 1, Chapter 4 Day 1 Screen 1 and 2 and like that." That’s just trying to find a way for it to work for Rick and myself. I think when I came in I was, if not oblivious, I was being willfully ignorant of how much of the pacing I could control and needed to control. And at this point, now that we’ve gone live, and updating, and people are reacting, I’m far more aware of “we can control this better. We can take a firmer grasp of how we’re feeding the story.”

The urge in these first few days is to put up more things than we have been, and I’ve been very resistant to doing that, as I don’t want us to burn the lead time that we’ve created for ourselves. The most important thing, the law–there are a couple of laws we’ve set up for ourselves, and the first is: We Can Never Miss. If we say there’s going to be a screen on Monday, there’s going to be a screen on Monday. If there’s a screen on Thursday, there will be a screen on Thursday. We cannot miss. I think when you are offering something like this for free, and you are hoping it will generate word of mouth and people will come back to it and people will be drawn into it, you’ve entered into a contract. So that’s #1. Law #2, is It’s Gotta Be Fun. We have to have fun doing it. If we’re not having fun doing it, then there’s no point doing it because we’re not making money on it. And if I wanted to be miserable doing something, there are plenty of places I can get a job and do that. If I’m doing this for free, I damn well better be having fun doing it. [laughs]

I’m sure there are people who are doing webcomics for years who have maybe seen it, they’re kinda rolling their eyes going “Ohh boy, do these guys have a lot to learn.” But it’s not often where you get to have fun with your education, so I don’t mind that.

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OH:  What is the status of Stumptown?

GR:  Matthew is halfway through issue seven, I’m writing issue eight. When eight is in the can, we’ll solicit the next arc. We’re hoping to be able to do that by the end of 2011, and ideally we’ll have the next case therefore coming out in early 2012. We’ve had all sorts of scheduling problems, which is no doubt clear to the people who have been waiting quite patiently for us to deliver. We are finally getting on track with it. I am optimistic. Matthew…you know, you gotta make a living while doing this, and making comics isn’t the easiest way to make a living.

OH:  You live in Portland, OR. Have you done much work that takes place right where you live?

GR:  I wrote a novel, Fistful of Rain that takes place in Portland. There are moments in Patriot Act that occur in Portland. I very much wanted to do something set in my hometown. I’ve very fond of Portland. PI stories rely on a sense of place. This is a place I know, and it’s a place I could learn more about.

OH:  That specificity of location must be a great tool that’s available to you.

GR:  Actually, one of the reasons this next issue is taking so long to write is that it goes all over Portland, and I have to figure out logically how it works. Matthew is very careful about his reference, since he knows he’s drawing real places, and anytime I do that, I have to be able to provide him with references, otherwise all I’m doing is just hobbling him.

OH:  What is the latest on Queen and Country, which you had brought into novels?

GR:  The last novel was called The Last Run, and it’s out in paperback now. It was kind of the end of the way I view the end of the first series of Queen & Country. It takes Chase to a place that leaves her in a good location for my moving forward. What I’ve been talking to James Lucas Jones at Oni about is to try to get series two going hopefully by Summer 2012. So there are plans for a second Queen & Country series that would follow Chase, but also follow a new character.

OH:  To your knowledge, how much of JH Williams’ Batwoman will involve story elements you created?

GR:  Batwoman, with JH, was totally collaborative, and she can’t be in better hands. I would argue that I know her better than he does, but I would also argue that that’s by only a few percentage points. I’m not worried. I’ve seen some of the art, but I haven’t read any of the stuff Jim and [co-writer] Haden [Blackman] are doing, but I’m not worried. I do not worry for her in Jim’s hands. I’m looking forward like everybody else to see what he does.

OH:  What would you like to say that we haven’t addressed?

GR:  I think we’ve covered just about everything! [laughs]. I’m really excited about all the stuff that’s going to be coming out over the next twelve months. Hopefully a couple of the projects I’ve been sitting on over the last year or so will crystallize and I’ll be able to start talking about them soon. There are like two or three other things that I really want to get out there and get going, and I’m just waiting for the stars to align. Punisher starts [today, August 3], we double ship in August, so the second issue will be out end of the month, and I’m hoping people will enjoy it as much as Marco and I have. It’s a different story style, I think, for a Punisher story, but it’s the Frank that people know and love. Well, I’m not sure you can love him, but grudgingly respect and stay out of his way. [laughs] And like I said, Lady Sabre has a new screen up every Monday and Thursday. Rick and I are committed to this for the long haul.

OH:  How does it feel to be a Big Shot at Marvel?

GR:  [laughs] I’m not a big shot at Marvel! Or are you referring to the initiative itself? It is kind of awesome to be doing anything and you have Brian Bendis on one end and Mark Waid on the other. Those are two of my heroes, so how can I be unhappy? I think the biggest thing that comes out of that is “man, don’t be the guy who fucks it up!” [laughs] Especially after that Daredevil #1. That was an amazing issue! It was a stunning issue in so many ways. And you are talking about two guys who are virtuosos at their craft. It’s always good to be kept on your toes.



Written or Contributed by: Royal Nonesuch


http://173.199.169.70/index.php/features/interviews/15057-the-outhouse-interview-greg-rucka.html/

[BlueStreak]

Excellent interview.

[False Prophet]

Very nice. Good job, RN. I found his explanation of his "Punisher isn't broken" comment interesting.

[GOSD]

I wish that we could have asked some questions...

I've met Greg before. He's a great guy.

Good job, Royal!

[Punchy]

This is literally one of the best interviews about comics I've ever read.

Yes, literally.

[outsider]

Whoa, this is a high-profile interview--nice job, Royal!

[365Dom]

Great interview. You really got a lot of his time. I like Rucka not only because he is an amazing writer, but because he is very fan friendly. If you tweet him, he usually responds. Good man.

[fieldy snuts]

Great interview, a lot of subjects covered there that piqued my interest.

[Potter Who]

Totally awesome. Haven't read it all yet, but I did skim through your questions, and it looks like it'll be really good.

[Eli Katz]

Royal, thank you for asking about Stumptown. Thank you!

[mrorangesoda]

Good interview.

[Starlord]

An amazing AMAZING interview!

[GatheringComic]

Very good interview. Big fan of Rucka's and I'm really looking forward to Punisher.

[Evan Meadow]

Great interview. I went to a book signing with a friend Rucka had out here last year and just had a blast listening to him answering questions, getting my books signed, and then hearing him read from his next novel.

Which of course after he read the chapter he brought with him, I wanted the book right then and there.