Fraction's Casanova Offers Cheap Thrills

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on December. 20, 2005 Sign up now!

by Ian Brill -- Publishers Weekly, 12/20/2005

Matt Fraction has been both a comics pundit and a creator. He has worked in that area between corporate superhero comics and independent books, including quirky genre stories such as the crime caper Last of the Independents and the spy/monkey story The Annotated Mantooth. Now he will be writing his first ongoing monthly series, Casanova, due from Image Comics in May, with art by Gabriel Ba (Rock and Roll). Casanova follows in the format of Warren Ellis’s Fell: fewer pages than the average superhero comic but more story content, to make a satisfying monthly reading experience

To get the obvious out of the way: What is the book about?

The shortest, write-it-on-the-back-of-a-business-card pitch for Casanova is "the world's greatest thief gets blackmailed into being a pawn and double agent in a global game of super-espionage." There are more keywords and PowerPoint topics, like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Diabolik, Jim Steranko, Jerry Cornelius, Nick Fury and Our Man Flint.

Then I do a little interpretive dance.

Why the espionage angle? Is it because it's something we haven't seen done in comics with much success for a long time?

Well, yeah, as far as comics are concerned, it might as well be a dead genre, and it's always been one of my favorites.

Aside from the tropes of the genre, there's something about the term "superspy" that's inescapably retro, in a way; the genre reflects the time of its birth, the mid to late '60s through the early '70s. So we've been able to pull together a dozen different visual streams of influence to inform Casanova’s design, fashion and even architecture, and bend it around to our way of thinking and push forward.

This is maybe an overly complicated way of saying I love the look associated with the superspy genre, and hope it vibes hard as a visual experience as much as a written one.

Did you decide on the format before or after finding out about Fell and its format—a cheaper comic that is condensed and direct in its storytelling?

After. At the time, I was digging through a lot of old X-Men comics and was pretty surprised to find a lot of the issues in the Claremont/Byrne run on that book were 16, 18 pages, something like that... and those books are pretty dense, you know? Wholly antithetical to the way a lot of books are now. That was the initial hook, taking on that challenge.

You've written about how each single issue will have storytelling "weight" with enough content that purchasing just one random issue of the series will be a satisfying reading experience. Will this mean that all the issues will feature self-contained stories, or are you going to find a way to utilize storytelling arcs, either with plot or character or theme?

I feel like it's going to exist somewhere between the two;mdash&I hope, anyway. I'd like there to be enough of a self-contained story per issue that a reader will come away satisfied by the experience but, at the same time, have a collection of other arcs and themes bubbling around the edges that will rise and fall as we go along. I keep thinking and looking at long-form episodic television&emdash;not so hermetically sealed as CSI but not as labyrinthine as a show like Lost either.

I keep looking at shows like Buffy and Angel, honestly, for a kind of template.

The art in the book is drawn using an eight-panel grid. How did you come up with that concept?

It's something I've used before (in the "Fate" story I wrote for Four Letter Worlds and the 30 Days of Night story called "Juarez") that helps ground me to the page, helps keep my head in tune with all the different rhythms and generally lets me stop worrying about the basics of page layout and just write. The first time I ever remember seeing this was when David Lapham started doing Stray Bullets. Really I just like it because a four-tiered book has a very European feel to me.

It's only my road map, though. Gabriel will be adding and removing his own flourishes as he finds them.

How and when did Gabriel Ba become involved in the book?

I had originally gone after his brother, Fabio Moon, maybe in May or June. They talked between themselves and decided Gabriel would be a better candidate to draw it—and once I got to know him, I certainly agreed.

I created a massive bible that had 50-some pages of visual references, from architecture and fashion to comics and commercial art and films and everything in-between. I trust Gabriel's instincts as a creator and a cartoonist and have really enjoyed the places he's taking it all... he's departing from the grid where he's inclined to do so and interpreting the scripts through his own filters and I love seeing what he's doing. I genuinely enjoy collaborating when the results are like this.

I'm working with Fabio on another book.

Will Casanova feature supplemental material in the back of the book, like Fell?

Yeah, it will, and I'm not wholly sure what it'll be quite yet. I might present a lot of the visual history the book is being built on. I'd like to run a letters column. I'm enamored of the idea of running fake ads, too. We'll see, I guess.