John Ridley Fights for The American Way

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on April 18, 2006 Sign up now!

by Ian Brill, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2006

John Ridley is a novelist (Conversations with the Mann), a screenwriter (Three Kings) and comics scripter (The Authority: Human on the Inside). He combines social commentary with slick and entertaining storytelling. The American Way, his new series from Wildstorm/DC, takes Silver Age super heroes into a story about the civil rights movement and Kennedy-era optimism.

PWCW: Tell us about The American Way.

John Ridley: The American Way is what I call a semi-historical graphic novel. A blend of fact, fiction and super-heroics. It's set in America in 1961, and is about a group of superheroes—the Civil Defense Corps—brought together by the government to make the citizens feel safe and secure. The heroes fight aliens and super-villains, but it's basically a show put on as a form of seemingly benign propaganda. The story is told largely from the point of view of a young ad man, Wes, —who's brought in by the Kennedys to help sell the legend of the CDC to America. The story really takes off when one of heroes dies of a heart attack and Wes's big idea is to add a new hero to the team—a black guy. The idea being that if there's a black hero the country can look up to, it'll help quell racial tensions. Of course, the question is: Is America in 1961 ready for a black man with superpowers?

PWCW: For the book's setting and subject matter, did you have to do research on early 1960s American life?

JR: I'd written a novel a few years ago, A Conversation with the Mann, which was set in the late '50s, early 1960s. The canvas of the story was the burgeoning civil rights movement. Among other books I'd read—and really loved—in doing research were Taylor Branch's first two tomes in his series on America in the King years. So, coming into The American Way I had a pretty good idea of events I wanted to reference and the milieu of the times.

Then, by chance, browsing in a bookstore I came upon a book called The Sixties Chronicles. It's an absolutely fantastic book that's a day-by-day, year-by-year chronicle of the 1960s. The thing is, I didn't want The American Way to become a dry dissertation on the '60s. So the trick was weaving history and fiction. Some of it is fairly well known—the Bay of Pigs and Yuri Gagarin. But other things, like Robert Williams and Radio Free Dixie, are things people might have to Google up. My hope is, of course, that they will.

PWCW: You've written stories for some of Wildstorm's company-owned characters; why have you decided to do a series you created?

JR: My editor at Wildstorm, Ben Abernathy, asked me to create a new "universe"—new characters that are unique from other aspects of Wildstorm comics. How the heck do you say no to playing god? With The American Way, I get to tell a story of real-world politics set against some fantastic elements. I think it's a unique telling of a superhero saga. It's not about some crazy villain with an antimatter weapon who wants to take over the world. In this story, society's the supervillain, and just wearing tights and a cape doesn't make somebody a hero.

PWCW: Why stick with Wildstorm?

JR: Ben, my editor, has been really, really supportive of my earlier efforts and was extremely open to the concept of The American Way when I pitched it. In 2006, there are still relatively few—I would say almost no—minority heroes in the world of comic books. So, doing something like this—a historical piece that's thoughtfully written but that'll still appeal to comic fans—you want to work with people who you trust and who trust you to deliver the goods.

PWCW: The book seems to use Silver Age comic book archetypes to comment on America as a whole at that time. Why choose the superhero genre to tackle issues of propaganda and race?

JR: I didn't choose the superhero genre to write about propaganda and race as much as I wanted to write a graphic novels series that approached the idea of superheroes from a unique perspective. So often in comic books, as grand and well told as the stories can be, they tend to have no resonances with real life. It's people who can fly or fling spider webs vs. some supervillain with a death beam from outer space who wants to take over the world. That, of course, is a simplification, but at the core it's what most comics are about—big, august but not wholly relatable themes. I wanted to tell a story that was not only character-driven, but dependant on the moral viewpoints of the characters. How would the most powerful people on the planet react to the changes in the world around them? And what would they do if society was the supervillain? For me, that dictated the time and place of the story.

Has there been a moment in American history that's held as much promise and peril as the early 1960s? You had Kennedy and the Mercury astronauts, but you also had the Cold War and the civil rights struggle. So many of the images of the era—a young and vigorous president, spacemen with the "right stuff"—were as much for propaganda value as anything. It wasn't that the government wanted to lie to the people to control them, it just wanted to give the people something to believe in besides the fact that the world might end in an atomic war.

This is the world, the era in which I wanted to tell a story that was, on the one hand, quite fantastic and on the other fairly realistic.

PWCW: How does writing for comics differ from writing novels or writing for film?

JR: Comics, graphic novels, are a very, very visual medium. I'm a writer, so admittedly I've got a stalker-like obsession with my own words. With comics you've gotta be able to give your reader some fantastic visual elements they can dig along with the story. Part of that comes from the way the story's laid out, but I have to give great credit to my collaborator on the book, Georges Jeanty. He's got a wonderful style that evokes a simplicity of the era, but at the same time has got a level of detail that a modern audience has come to expect for their three bucks a month.

PWCW: Why do think we see so many writers from TV, film and novels now writing comics?

JR: As far as TV and film writing go, with graphic novels your ideas aren't limited by budget. In The American Way we open with our heroes repelling what seems to be an alien invasion in the heart of New York City. Okay, so, already you're locked into a $60-plus million movie. With comics, you can let your imagination run free. Also, I think a lot of these writers grew up reading comics. Sometimes it's hard bringing that level of imagination to the big and small screens. How many comic adaptations have we seen that are just... uh, let's be polite and call them awful? If you're going to write comic stories, you might as well to it for the companies and audience that really get what comics are about. It's for the love. It's certainly not for the money.

PWCW: Can you see yourself writing a continuing series like Greg Rucka and J. Michael Straczynski have?

JR: I have nothing but respect for writers that can take these ongoing series and keep the characters and stories fresh month after month. That's great writing and great creativity. I think that's something I need to work up to, and would take on with great caution.