interview fallen angel de peter david

[Virgule]

Viens la mon crimson......

http://newsarama.com/forums/showthre...threadid=13982

PETER DAVID TALKS FALLEN ANGEL
It’s an all-too common story: a well-reviewed series with a small group of core fans that’s struggling. Newsarama spoke with Peter David about Fallen Angel, and the creator was very candid both in what’s been going on, as well as his view of the ups and downs the series has seen in the marketplace.

For those who’ve missed it, or are…”waiting for the trade,” Fallen Angel follows Lee, a mysterious figure in the fictional city of Bete Noire who…helps people. Why she helps people has been pretty much an unknown since the series began, as has her background, the extent of her powers (she’s strong, and pretty invulnerable, and who knows what else). The series has a curious supporting cast – Dolph, the bartender at “Furors,” the Magistrate, Doc Juris, who’s the main string-puller in town; Asia Minor, who has his thumb on virtually all of the city’s illegal activity; and Slate, Juris’ Chief Examiner. If you look at them kind of squinty, Slate kind of looks like Peter Lorre, and Juris might just be Claude Rains…but more on that later.

Oh, and then there’s Black Mariah, who brings death and decay with her very touch.

It’s a series shifts between the literal and the metaphorical, and occasionally dances with the allegorical. Redemption is an ongoing theme, but all in all, Fallen Angel has a dreamy quality, almost as if everything that’s out of focus just might not be real, anyway. In it, Peter David and artist David Lopez have achieved one of their early goals with the series – they’ve created their own world with its own rules, and none of the strings that come with a DC Universe setting.

Most recently, the series wrapped up its “Down to Earth” arc in issue #11 (it kicked off in issue #7), which, among other things, gave a few more clues as to Lee’s role in Bete Noire, as well as showed the status quo – and then changed it. Lee’s relationship with Juris was altered, perhaps irrevocably; the antagonism between Black Mariah was fully explored and moved to a new level; Lee’s history was hinted at – strongly; and mixed up in all of this was a quest for a shard of the True Cross, according to some Christians, a piece of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.

But what did the “Down to Earth” arc do for Lee as a character? As David explained, if you just connect the dots, it’s all pretty clear, and Lee is laid bare like never before.

“Lee’s personal tragedy, her Achilles heel, is that she’s emotionally disconnected,” David said. “We can surmise at least one of the reasons she’s done so: She believes she failed her daughter [as revealed when Lee touched the shard of the Cross] and doesn’t deserve happiness as a result. Furthermore, because she’s so emotionally scarred, she keeps herself sheltered from all further opportunities for heartbreak because she doesn’t want to take the risk of any more personal tragedy touching her.

Because of the developments in ‘Down to Earth,’ however, we begin to see cracks in the shell she’s created around herself. My intent was to pingpong the reader’s sensibilities. To drive them to a point where they practically despise Lee for her actions, but by the end of the story they’re rooting for her to be happy…except that happiness is denied. She’s ‘punished’ for her actions just at the point where the reader is ready for her to get a break.”

In regards to the loathing readers may have felt toward Lee during the arc, a lot of it was founded during a scene which stretched between issues #7 and #8, where she got the drop on Mariah, captured her, and literally tortured her into telling her what she needed to know. It was cold, it was brutal, and it was hardly how you’d expect a “hero” to act. But that’s one of the things about Lee - readers aren’t sure if she is, in fact, a hero, or just someone whose own, personal motives result in good for a small group of people.

Or the short version – don’t expect her to be up for JLA membership soon.

“It was really a fascinating exercise in yanking the reader around,” David said about the torture scene. “Keep in mind that the woman Lee was torturing was a murderess, ran a white slavery trade, and presumably engaged in all manner of nastiness. Yet by the end of the issue, readers actually felt sorry for her. I wanted readers to be angry at the Fallen Angel for treating Mariah so brutally and then remember at some subsequent point, ‘But…wait a minute. Mariah’s pretty evil. And Lee’s working on behalf of a nun. So doesn’t Mariah deserve whatever she gets?’ And the answer of course is, No, no matter how evil someone is, they don’t deserve to be dehumanized and receive that kind of treatment. And considering what we’ve seen the “good guys” doing in Iraq to prisoners, I’d like to think that Fallen Angel #8 was a bit prescient in its story telling. Indeed, if the story had come out a month or two from now, everyone would have seen it as an Iraq allegory. My guess is that conservatives would have castigated me by saying I was trying to make heroes look bad.”

All that taken into account, David can still quickly summarize Lee: “She’s a classic noir figure of gray morals and human frustrations” and that’s something that, while she has her own agenda, also allows her to help others.

“I believe, as is the case with many such characters, that she’s seeking redemption for past misdeeds,” David said. “The difference is, for many such types, there’s an inherent belief that they really do deserve redemption and all they have to do is work for it to achieve it. The Fallen Angel is so lost an individual that I don’t think she really believes redemption is possible. That’s why she isn’t simply a do-gooder. If someone seeks her help and she feels that person isn’t deserving, she doesn’t just turn them away. She makes sure that person goes down in flames. In a way, she’s punishing herself through them.”

That was, in part, the start of Mariah’s downfall in “Down to Earth” – she sought out Lee’s help, and also knew where the Shard was. In Lee’s eyes, Mariah deserved what she got, but there was another reason she entangled herself in the mess as well.

“Lee wanted to obtain the Shard in order to give it to the nun who’d been seeking it in the first place,” David said. “She may have felt the first glimmering of pity for Mariah, but it wasn’t enough to turn her away from her goal. The thing was, the quest she was on really wasn’t about the Shard. The Shard was almost a side issue. The quest was about finding enough of a sense of mercy in her heart to give aid to someone she personally despised-not because she thought that person was deserving-but simply because it was a human being in need.”

Along with the revelation about failing her daughter that came out of “Down to Earth,” Dolph, the genial old barkeep came through in the clutch with some insight as to who Lee is in the larger picture of Bete Noire, and it was a slight eyebrow raiser.

As Dolph explained it, Doc Juris, who, to this point, had been almost played as a moustache-twirling villain thanks to his machinations and string-pulling, is in fact, the agent of order in the city, while Lee is the agent of chaos. One needs the other, as Dolph explained.

“Order requires Chaos to define itself, much as good requires evil - or vice versa,” David explained. “My guess is that if she were not in Bete Noire, someone else would be, serving much the same function. It stems from the notion that the circumstances of a given time give rise to the people who fulfill the functions those times require.”

And as for opposites attracting, true, Lee and Juris had been lovers through the early days of the series, despite Lee nearly loathing herself for her attraction to Juris. But by the end of the arc, after coming to see many things differently, Lee was ready to openly love Juris, and deepen their relationship.

But that was the happiness that was denied that David mentioned earlier – Juris turned Lee away. It’s all part of the show, folks.

“I wouldn’t say she needs to be unhappy,” David said. “I would say that the tone and style of noir runs counter to a nice, clean, happy ending. I think the classic example of that is the movie L.A. Confidential. Anyone who’s seen that film and has any sense of noir knows where the film’s proper ending is: It’s when Detective Lieutenant Exley is walking toward the approaching cop cars, his badge held high after performing a cold blooded murder, and shouting, ‘I’m a police officer!’ Instead it goes another ten minutes and gives us a tacked on boy-gets-girl tidy wrap up. It felt wrong. Just as having Lee wind up in Juris’ arms would have felt wrong. Besides, it also leaves open the question of just why Juris rejected her. Was it because he wanted more than she could give and just couldn’t stand the relationship anymore? Or did he have another motivation? Was he trying to shield her from something bad coming down the pike, and felt she’d be better off distanced from him? We’ll find out.”

And the finding out begins with this week’s issue, #12, a flashback showing the first meeting of Lee and Juris ion New Orleans a few years back. But – just because New Orleans is being tossed into the mix, don’t expect Bete Noire to be nailed down on the map of the DC, say, somewhere between the Big Easy and Hawkman’s fictional St. Roch.

“I’ve always said that Fallen Angel is Casablanca by way of the Twilight Zone,” David said. “The thing is, in order to enter Bete Noire, you literally have to leave who you were behind. So if any DCU characters did manage to swing by, you’d know them by their iconic air, but not by name or face.”

Keeping Bete Noire away from the rest of the DCU helps the series, in David’s eyes, in that it allows him to head to the more metaphorical if he wants, because, as the writer said, the series is designed to make the reader think.

“Readers can give it as surfacy, or as profound, an interpretation as they want, and that’s fine by me,” David said. “Furthermore, I don’t see how spelling how my thoughts on the true nature of Bete Noire—either in the book or in an interview—could possibly be of benefit. I want Fallen Angel to be a personal experience for all readers, and if I impose my particular worldview upon it, how does that help? I mean, look at The Prisoner. The series ran all of seventeen episodes, and forty years later, it still provokes discussion and the imagination. You don’t see people getting into spirited debates over the deep sociological allegories represented in The Six Million Dollar Man.”

But – approaching the series in that manner does mean walking a fine line between telling readers just enough to keep them interested while leaving conspicuous holes to be filled in later – or never. It’s a line that David can sometimes find frustrating to walk, given the market and what’s accepted as “proper” storytelling in comics today.

“Frankly, I’m mystified why the Fallen Angel is suddenly the poster child for ‘If a character is too enigmatic, you lose audience.’ To use The Prisoner again, did anyone stop watching the series while complaining, ‘They’re not spelling out whether Number 6 is actually secret agent John Drake and that’s ruined it for me.’ I mean, it was understood: If you wanted to think of The Prisoner as a continuation of Secret Agent, then fine. If you wanted to think of Number 6 as a wholly original character who just happens to be a dead ringer for Drake, also fine. For that matter, Wolverine was an enigma for decades. Irrespective of the quality of the series itself, does anyone think Wolverine was improved as a character by Origin? Are today’s audiences dumber or needier than they were back then? I’d like to think not. The fact is that anyone who is really, really reading the series has already learned a hell of a lot more about the Fallen Angel in one year than they learned about Wolverine in twenty or the Prisoner in forty.”

So – back to issue #12, the first meeting of Lee and Juris. Did she have a life before all of this? What was she doing when Juris found her?

“I could answer all that, but then there’d be no need to buy the issue,” David said. “We do establish how long they’ve known each other and indicate some of what she was up to beforehand.

“Issues #12, #13 and #14 are all stand alones. This is not to say that there are not continuing threads. Events that occur with Asia Minor in #13, for instance, resonate into #14. And #14 ends, not with a cliffhanger exactly, but a revelation that’s designed to be something of a body blow to one or more of the characters. Then issues #15-#18 are a four part arc that stems from the notion that Doctor Juris’ overseers—the Hierarchy—have been watching what’s going on in Bete Noire lately and are not pleased with what they see.”

On the sales side of things, David has made no secret about the fact that Fallen Angel isn’t lighting the charts on fire. He’s also made no secret about his feelings about this and his view of the industry: basically a place that’s nearly closed to new ideas, and peppered with readers who will “wait for the trade,” despite the fact that the industry’s current publishing model can’t support a poor selling monthly as a trade paperback.

“There is incredible resistance to anything new and certainly to anything substantially different,” David said. “Readers look, not for reasons to stick with new characters, but for reasons to drop them. If you’ve got a mainstream Marvel or DC character in substandard stories, fans will bitch about the quality of the stories for two, three years while nevertheless supporting the characters. If it’s a new character or new series, fans give it a much shorter leash. Either that or they’ll simply use new launches to sample books that they figure they’ll then pick up as trade paperback collections, on the assumption that if the series is any good, it’ll make it to that point. Except there’s no guarantee, but one points that out at one’s own risk. There’s almost no characters in the top 100 who launched as recently as twenty years ago. Fans are reluctant to make the emotional and financial commitment to new characters. As much as a vocal minority claims they want to see new and different, the spending majority supports the core books and/or variations on them - i.e., Ultimates, and that’s pretty much it.”

In terms of who shoulders the responsibility for low sales, David pointed to an very public experience in his own recent past which put the bulk of the burden on writers.

“Thanks to the blowout I had with Marvel a few years back [U-Decide, where David’s Captain Marvel was put into competition against Bill Jemas’ Marville, and the Joe Quesada-sponsored Ultimate Adventures, with the emphasis placed on readers responding to the quality of the story more than the art, packaging, or promotion] there’s now this perception that the person who has the least influence over a book’s success—the writer—is apparently the go-to guy when a book doesn’t continue. I knew that Fallen Angel conceptually was going to be a tough sell from the get go. We’ve got a female lead who doesn’t dress in a revealing costume, in an environment shrouded in ambiguity. Ambiguity isn’t easy to get audiences to embrace. A film historian pointed out that if Casablanca were being made today, the studio would have excised all ambiguity in the script by the second draft. Instead it’s sixty years later and we still don’t know whose side Ilsa was really on. That was my creative decision, and if that provides us difficulties—if asking the audience to step up a few levels rather than dumbing down costs us readers—that buck stops here.”

That approach, David explained, doesn’t wash if you look at the sales charts. “If the writer were the be-all, end-all of a book’s success, Brian Bendis’ Powers would be selling on par with Spider-Man. Furthermore, let’s face it: If Jim Lee were drawing Fallen Angel, our sales would be double, triple, quadruple what they are right now. Dave Lopez is doing a terrific job and improving exponentially as the series continues, but he doesn’t bring a huge fan following with him. Furthermore we got slapped with a ‘For Mature Readers’ label after I’d been told that the point of the series was to bridge the gap between the DCU and Vertigo and there’d be no label. The label effectively cut us off from the fourteen to eighteen year old audience in a number of markets. So we’ve got all the disadvantages of a Vertigo title with none of the advantages, and all of the disadvantages of a DCU title with none of the advantages. Plus we get no advertising. So I don’t think it’s exactly fair to lay all that at my door.”

Originally, Fallen Angel was launched with two other new titles with female leads, Bad Girls, a miniseries which didn’t make it to its final issue; and iCandy, which was similarly cancelled. While it is a testament to the book that it has survived where others have fallen, there’s no support of a small “network” of new titles with female leads. As for David’s view on the effect of having no “line” at all to fall in with…

“I think it was catastrophic. When launching the series was first discussed, I myself was skeptical over the chances of success for a ‘non-aligned’ title. I was told not to worry because we’d actually be part of this group of books. They’d be advertised together, pushed together. They’d have a unit identity that promotion could wrap itself around. Within six months, the other titles were gone, and I was left with exactly what I feared: A single unaligned title. And if you think marketing doesn’t make matter, look at the return of Kara Zor-El accompanied by a full court marketing pus -result: A number one comic; as opposed to the return of Kara Zor-El with no marketing push whatsoever - result: A sales-climbing comic that was canceled. So marketing makes a huge difference.”

That said, what are the reasons not to go full-out and move Fallen Angel over to Vertigo? David tried to count, and came up with none. “There’s really no reason we can’t. Since we got slapped with the same label as a Vertigo book, I’ve amped up the mature content - stopping short of using the 'F' word or having full frontal nudity. But without the Vertigo label, we’re still flying under the radar of those who only buy Vertigo titles. At this point, we’re probably going to stand or fall on th'e success of the first trade paperback, due out next week. If all those people who told me they’re waiting for the trade come through and the trade sells out quickly, then that means we’re right in the Vertigo sales model that’s serving to keep many monthly Vertigo titles alive. If the trade sits there, we’re probably screwed.

“The ideal notion is that we have it both ways: That the trade is successful and spurs sales on the monthly. That’s one of the reasons I have issues #12, #13 and #14 each being stand-alones: So anyone who buys the trade and wants to check out what’s currently going on can do so without coming into the middle of a multi-part story. I’ve been assured that we have until at least issue #18 to prove that the series has the support required to continue. I’m hopeful that we’ll rise to the occasion.”

Donc on sait plusieurs choses ici :

- vous passez à côté d'une série géniale !
- FA sortira au moins jusqu'au numéro 18.
- PAD serait d'accord pour être sous le label Vertigo (là où la série aurait du être dès le départ).
- David Lopez est un excellent dessinateur. Oui, il est balèze, ce gars !

[Cseigneur1]

c'est pas LE label putot?

[Virgule]

	Citation:			Posté par crimson10
	Donc on sait plusieurs choses ici : - vous passez à côté d'une série géniale ! - FA sortira au moins jusqu'au numéro 18. - PAD serait d'accord pour être sous la label Vertigo (là où la série aurait du être dès le départ). - David Lopez est un excellent dessinateur. Oui, il est balèze, ce gars !

tiens un crimson....

[cytrash]

j'ai cede aux messages sublimiminaux de la signature de Crimson et je me suis procure les trois 1er numero de la serie et le choc : c' est franchement genial!!! tt est bon ,les persos ,l'ambiance ,les dessins ...tout ...
je suis devenu un accro de fallen angel ...