On everything from Marvel to Image to his early days with a fanzine, we sit down and talk about it all!
 
Upstart: We’re talking with Erik Larsen - not only of Savage Dragon fame – but the man who has blossomed out into a whole mess of things…
 
Larsen: Damn near everything!
 
Upstart: You seem to be a little bit of everywhere. Image Comics, Marvel…
 
Larsen: And what’s going on with Marvel Comics right now!?!? My god, it’s gone crazy.
 
Upstart: Any of this editor changing business your fault?
 
Larsen: No, no… (laughter) but it sure is interesting to watch it all happen! Bob Harras is fired and Joe Quesada is in!
 
Upstart:What’s your take on all of it?
 
Larsen: It’s pretty nutty. I hope it works!
 
Upstart:I hope something works! You do keep playing with Marvel though. I heard you were doing a revisit to the Defenders. Excited?
 
Larsen: Yeah I am actually, it’s got a lot of characters that I like all together in one place.
 
Upstart:I know you did the Incredible Hulk at one time so I’m sure you’re very happy to be using him as a regular character again.
 
Larsen: It’s nice to have an ensemble cast that’s been in comics for a lot of years.
 
Upstart: You have a thousand fans who are dying and wanting to know about a thousand different characters...
 
Larsen: And that’s the thing. If I just reintroduced a character one at a time, I could cruise up to issue #200 of this Defenders series easily. And that’s without repeating anybody!
 
Upstart: You did Wolverine, Nova, and even though you had a quick stint at DC, you keep coming back to Marvel. What brings you back?
 
Larsen: Those are the comics I read as a kid and that’s the stuff I enjoy. I was picking up pretty much the whole line of Marvel’s books and - at the right age - I was reading all of the mainstream ones. Hulk, Defenders, Avengers, Captain America, Captain Marvel… all of them. There was a period there that I was getting everything. It was the stuff that appealed to me and I was a complete Marvel zombie.
 
Upstart: Never DC?
 
Larsen: Well there was a while there when Marvel’s comics were a quarter an issue and DC was priced at twenty cents an issue and I started to experiment with some of the DC books. I was thinking, ‘that’s five of these for the price of four of these"…
 
Upstart: Did Kirby’s involvement at DC have anything to do with it as well?
 
Larsen: That was the time that I discovered his work that was reprinted. I’d seen his stuff in Marvel’s Greatest Comics but I had never seen any of his newer work. So the first comic I bought that Jack had worked on was at that point.
 
Upstart: The Golden Age of Marvel reminds me of Savage Dragon in a lot of ways and I wanted to talk with you about this piece printed in the back of some Image issues titled Building a Better Funnybook. You said you thought that the new direction for Savage Dragon was your chance to fix what you thought was wrong with comics. What’s wrong and what do you want to fix?
 
Larsen: There’s a lot wrong. But it’s like trying to figure out what is wrong everywhere and how to fix it everywhere. I think, though, that there are different solutions for different places. There are certain books from certain companies that magically transformed into something other than a book for a kid. Right now, I think Daredevil found its place in being a book for somewhat older readers. Before that, it was kind of the book for people who didn’t quite like Spiderman.
 
Upstart: Different villains, same book.
 
Larsen: And it was sort of like ‘Spiderman-Lite’ when it started out – there was a lot of the same type of quips, the same type of movements, the same kind of action – with a bit of a different cast and set of villains. Even then, you’d get Elektra or some of the Spiderman villains would come over.
 
Upstart: What would you do if Bob Harras had been fired and the first person they asked to be Editor in Chief was you? What direction would you throw Marvel in?
 
Larsen: I’d kick everyone off of all the Spiderman books… immediately. I mean, Spiderman’s the biggest trade racket in the place and they really need to clean it up. It wouldn’t take long either if they just said chapter one was a bad dream or treated all of what’s happened as a mini series of someone who had a different take on the character than what it was going to change into and become.
 
Upstart: An Elseworld?
 
Larsen: Yeah, an Elseworld or what have you. They’re going to forever reprint the old issues so to treat those as anything other than as a canon is stupid in the long run.
 
Upstart: Would the characters benefit from your take where each one ages and expands throughout a saga?
 
Larsen: I don’t think so because what you would end up with, forty years from now, is a really old Spiderman. We all like the idea of the characters growing up with us but we’re all wanting them to start aging now. You’d have Spiderman as an old guy, you’d have his children running around and I don’t know if you can count on the next generation of creators, who have witnessed what has happened to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to give us the next Spiderman, the next Thor, the next whoever. Marvel has got to have the illusion of change. It’s necessary. I can do it in Savage Dragon because it’s my own book and if I kill off a supporting character I’m pretty confident that I can come up with somebody else.
 
Upstart: With your run on Nova, you didn’t have him age but he changed as he got new jobs and wanted to be an avenger.
 
Larsen: You can do that with certain characters – not address the age – but it gets a little old when you have a character like Peter Parker in college forever. It’s tough to be a long time reader and stay with him as he’s in college for thirty years. Especially with a schooling plot device because the readers themselves are graduating and moving on and it gets a little bit tiring. Now having him be a photographer forever – nothing particularly gets old about that as long as there aren’t those clear indicators that a huge amount of time has passed. You can make it work.
 
Upstart: The readers are sticking around a lot longer than they used to.
 
Larsen: True but that’s a double pronged sword… if you completely play to the readers who have been there forever, which seems to be what’s going on too much, you have a new reader saying “I don’t understand this book at all”. Pick up an issue of the X-Men and you realize, oh shit, there’s an incomprehensible long winded back story that you and I will never be able to fully understand. And a story I’ll never be able to afford! I can’t even begin to comprehend trying to get into that.

When Frank Miller took over Daredevil, you didn’t get that since though. Those issues followed directly with what had come before. When Walt Simonson took over Thor, there wasn’t this overwhelming sense of “I gotta rush right out and buy the back issues”. These two worked because both of them were introducing new elements, new characters, and really treating the characters themselves as icons. They asked themselves what the most essential parts were and used them but left the other history out.
 
Upstart: Fans know it anyway so they get a deeper story and new readers aren’t lost. And all the while, your characters are developing.
 
Larsen: Exactly. With Thor we needed to know that this guy is Don Blake, that he is a god, and that Thor’s dad is Odin. Beyond that, there isn’t that much you need to know.
 
Upstart: Was that your approach with Wolverine?
 
Larsen: Yeah… to try something new. I don’t think you’d read issue #133 of Wolverine and go “God, I really need to read issue #132” to know what went on because it was really a new and fresh start – avoiding what had come before.
 
Upstart: What do you think of new talent? Do they tend to come in and just rehash old material for the characters they work with?
 
Larsen: I don’t care for it when it happens… I’m not big on doing the same thing over and over again. That’s why so much changes in Savage Dragon… I mean, I get bored with it! (laughter) When Dragon was a cop for forty issues, I said all I wanted to say about Dragon being a cop.
 
Upstart: But you did leave it open to return if you ever wanted to in one-shots or mini-series.
 
Larsen: It’s like the Dragon / Superman one shot I’m working on right now. And if I ever finish it will be a miracle! It’s Dragon as a cop.
 
Upstart: Well, you just destroyed the world the Savage Dragon readers are used to and now he’s in a completely new one. What brought you to deciding to do this part of the story now?
 
Larsen: My thinking about the ramifications of the idea. What the fun could possibly be! Not much more than that though.
 
Upstart: With No Man’s Land and Marvel Onslaught, things appeared to change but they didn’t, how are you going to avoid this?
 
Larsen: It’s like the Age of Apocalypse a few years back. At first everyone was in the mindset of “this is cool”! People immediately got sucked into that and then they went back and approached from the direction of fixing things to be the way they were before. Not many people or books, as far as I know, have really taken something and just tried to screw with it and just leave it that way. I'm just going to leave it.
 
Upstart: Did you leave yourself a safe out or are you totally committed to the way your book is going?
 
Larsen: Well, if I took him back to the old world it wouldn’t help cause I really wrapped it up. I mean, his wife would be dead, some of his friends are dead, everyone who had superpowers doesn’t have superpowers except for a couple. You turn back and what have you got? (laughter) At some point in the future, I will have the kids who are in that world grow up and seek the Dragon in this new world. The old world still exists but the Dragon is dead in that old world. The image universe.
 
Upstart: So you departed from the mainline Image continuum books and have established your own? No interaction with other Image titles as in the past? The Larsenverse?
 
Larsen: Savage World! (laughter) Or whatever!
 
Upstart: How much longer is the Dragon series going to run?
 
Larsen: Until I retire. Dragon will be monthly for sure up through issue #100 and probably beyond. Once that date hits, I can always do more and I think I will.
 
Upstart: Are you ever going to pass the torch?
 
Larsen: No never. Never!
 
Upstart: Is it a matter of not trusting the characters in the hands of another creator?
 
Larsen: It’s more a matter of the book not making enough money to be able to afford it! (laughter) Nobody else is this foolish… I wouldn’t want to read anybody else’s Dragon really.
 
Upstart: Well let’s talk about that commitment. You’re the iron horse of Image.
 
Larsen: Let’s not talk about my commitment at Image! I look around at all comics and nobody has stuck around a book for eight and a half years! It’s not like I’m this exception at Image… I’m sort of the exception everywhere. (laughter) Byrne’s not still with X-Men, Peter David left Hulk and Aquaman, and the list goes on. Except for maybe John Romita Jr. but even it’s been an interrupted stay with time off for other projects. See, I can get a rant going pretty easy! (laughter)
 
Upstart: You have had a commitment to your readers and others as well. If you look in the back of an issue of Savage Dragon… this book isn’t just you but three other mini comics or more. How did that process work?
 
Larsen: I’m kind of a history buff in terms of comics because my dad read comics when he was a kid. So I always had his stuff around and a lot of this thing about older comics is that they would have some little one page gag type thing in addition to the main story. It’s just kind of the way comics were done and I liked that. Chris had sent my a comic strip he was trying to pitch called Misery Loves Company and it was… frankly, quite awful! (laughter) It wasn’t very good but neither were the strips in the old comics! You know, I’ve got pages to kill rather than running ads for stuff. Why not give Chris a shot and see what he comes up with? And they started out a little bit dry but over time has become a much better cartoonist as time has gone on. He’s expanded from one joke over two pages, to a bunch of strips, and he keeps experimenting and getting better. I mean, what the hell? Why not!?
 
Upstart: There’s the Dragonbert strip too…
 
Larsen: The Dragonbert guy just starting doing that stuff on his own and posting it online. At one point, the message board on my site said to check it out and I contacted him and asked “do you mind if I print some of these”! He was like, “okay” and after the first time I read the strip it became an issue of running it in every issue. And so it stands.
 
Upstart: Alright, just to swap subjects out of the blue, I’d like to talk about Graphic Fantasy. You were 19 years old and you and some friends were doing an independently published zine. Any recollections from that period of your life?
 
Larsen: At that point I was trying to get into business. As I always am and always have – trying to get some real work! There was a comic called Charlton Bulls-eye which Charlton Comics was putting out and people would send in their stuff, they would print it and give you no money for it. Cause they had no money! And it was sort of like a new talent book but you’ve got to keep all of your copyrights and all that other stuff.  Several people had done issues and so I thought I should do one of those. I drew my own Dragon story with the intent of running it in there and I sent it off to them. Then I met these other guys that wanted to do their own fanzine. So the three of us got together and talked about getting all of our characters together and putting them in one giant book where they could team up and do all sorts of things. Well, my story ended up not being used in Charlton Bulls-eye and the company went out of business so I had this finished story and I just thought it’d be easier to use it. They had drawn theirs as well but they weren’t very good at inking so I ended up inking the entire book and it was 72 pages.
 
Upstart: Fun…
 
Larsen: It was alright. So we put out the first issue and it was black and white printed on a table top printer – so it was god awful.
 
Upstart: You got a few volumes out and then what happened?
 
Larsen: Gary Carlson bought one through the mail and we were in correspondence through the mail. Then a man by the name of Moses – or as he called himself… Mr. Moses – he also approached me about working for his book called Wonder World Express. I ended up doing work for both of them.
 
Upstart: I remember hearing you doing a rant last summer at the Chicago Convention when someone asked you for advice on getting into the business. Your response was “don’t do it!” so…
 
Larsen: It depends on what you want to do cause it’s really tough. If you’re an artist all you have to do is send out your stuff to as many editors as you can think of. If you’re good, you’ll get hired. If you’re a writer, it’s really difficult. With artwork it’s two seconds of looking at art and you can tell whether the person is good or capable of doing the job. With writing you have to sit down and read to see if they have sentence structure, story structure, and to see if they know how to write a plot so an artist can follow it. Is it interesting and all that other stuff. It takes a while to be able to get through that and make that work. So most editors don’t hire writers. They hire their friends and people who have been recommended to them by other people. So it ends up being a networking thing and that’s how people get work – you know somebody who knows somebody.
 
Upstart: You started out as a writer/artist in the fanzine and have come back full circle to being a writer/artist.
 
Larsen: I was hired as an artist but worked initially as both and have worked back to it. In all of the books I’ve been involved in, I’ve usually helped to make things that don’t work end up working so there’s been tweaking here and there. All the time, I was doing proposals and such. I quit doing the Punisher series because a Nova series had been accepted by Marvel Comics and when that ended up not happening it was like… “oh fuck”!
 
Upstart: What would rather be recognized as – writer or artist? If someone stopped you in the street to compliment you, would you be more flattered by a compliment to your writing or your art?
 
Larsen: I think I’m probably a better artist than I am a writer. Although, I can see a lot of areas in my art that people would think sucked. But it’s supposed to suck! (laughter) I’m more often than not able to pull off the things I want to pull off as an artist than as a writer. There are areas as a writer that I feel I’m not doing what I’m trying to do. Whereas, with my art, there’s not many situations where I find myself unable to draw something or at least fake it to make it work. I clearly don’t know what the hell I’m doing!
 
Upstart: We heard you’re reprinting “Talk With God”?
 
Larsen: We’ll see. It’s something the guys at image would really like to see happen but honestly I don’t know that there’s much of a market for these prints. They can make money but it takes a long time and I end up with a lot of money tied up with books for years.
 
Upstart: I know everyone always asks you what Dragon’s origin is and I just wanted to ask why that became such a big deal?
 
Larsen: I don’t make a big deal of it because his origin, to me, is that he was found in a burning building without his memory and that to me is the important part. As how he got there, I don’t think it’s that important.

Once you find out what that is you ruin it! I’d rather it not be ruined and be simple and pure and everything it is. I’ve told a couple people but not many!
 
Upstart: And finally, we talked before about the astounding length of time you've been doing Savage Dragon. What’s it like to be working on a character today that you started when you were a kid?
 
Larsen: It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty damn neat. At this point I’ve gotten to do all the stuff I started out to do. When I started the book I had one goal of working in some fanzine stuff – rewrite and reillustrate those stories. All because that was sort of the end of my childhood. I did all these comics for myself – 55 or so issues of Dragon as a kid. Those two fanzine stories were the end of what I did as a kid. What I wanted to do as an adult was do a series of stories that ended at the same place. Once I got there, I could go off in any weird direction I wanted to and…
 
Upstart: You did it!
 
Larsen: This is it! I got to that so the rest is gravy.
 
Upstart: Alright, well we certainly appreciate your time! Good luck with Dragon in the coming issues and beyond. Thanks for taking time out of your schedule!