Craniums Cracked By Crime Destroyer

by Vince Brusio

Sam and Josh Bayer had a deep love of comics, and wanted to make new heroes in an indie vein. Tools needed were from the obvious arsenal: backgrounds, brainstorms, and bulletproof heroes. Oh, yes, and Herb Trimpe. Which is where the story goes sideways. Trimpe? They got Trimpe to jump on board a book that shows heroes going Rodney King on a guy? Yes. This is not your typical superhero book. It has a dash of Flaming Carrot Comics. A pinch of Tales Designed To Thrizzle. This is a wax museum with a pulse, and it is the beginning of Fantagraphics’ All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer #1 (JAN171762).  Your education to this project which will leave you cut, burnt, and grimacing begins in this PREVIEWSworld Exclusive interview with writer Josh Bayer.

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Vince Brusio: What was the catalyst for you creating All Time Comics?

Josh Bayer: All Time Comics started as a chance for the Bayer brothers to work together.

My brother, Sam, and I have always looked for a chance to work together, and after I started to build up the indie comics side of what I do and garner a small audience, he asked me to shepherd this basic fundamental concept he's had for doing a superhero line. We've always been close, and I think it’s as much a chance for him to give me a project he knows I love, as much as it’s a chance to do something that he is interested in building up a multimedia platform for. Bottom line: this project came out of our shared love of comics.

Vince Brusio: How was Herb Trimpe brought into this project? What moved that mountain?

Josh Bayer: It wasn't that hard — although initially Herb resisted. The day he said yes, I sent an email to my brother and to Ben Marra an email with huge 18-point bold text that said, “HERB SAID YES,” in the body of the email. I was ecstatic! I also didn't know what to expect. I’d seen the way certain artists’ work became distorted as they got older. I suspected Herb was gonna send wispy sketchy art, and I couldn't have been more wrong. The work coming in looked like it could have been done 40 years ago. I loved the visual solutions he came up with to tell the story. It was all amazing.

Vince Brusio: Give us some background on the characters in this universe. Who’s a radical? Who’s a closet Republican? Who has a diaper fetish? Feel free to embarrass us.

Josh Bayer: Crime Destroyer is a bitter war vet who comes back and discovers his family has been murdered, and he becomes a superhero. He has a great supporting cast and the sickest villains. We have a very colorful world that Ben inhabits.

Bullwhip has a familiar “acrobatic woman in a cat suit swinging into battle” vibe. She may seem like a familiar type going way back to the roots of comics. She is the most interesting to write, because there is so little we know about her background. She has no baggage, so in a way she feels real — like the way a rock star with a loud personality is accepted. Like you wouldn't really wonder about Alice Cooper's or Ziggy Stardust’s childhood, or which community college they went to because they are so unreal they become a living fantasy figure.

Atlas has ultra-matter vision and a cape in his secret identity. He's a City Planning employee, which is a job that could mean so many different things that it gives him an excuse to march around waving his arms taking care of city business. I wanted him to have a job that entails some decision making and responsibility. In my mind, his origin involves him uncovering alien machinery buried in the sewers, and the machinery re-codes his body, charging him with superpowers like strength and ultra-matter vision. He also has sycophantic kid sidekick, sort of, in another city named Toby Whey. I love writing Toby. Ben and I came up with this idea that Toby would constantly be getting burned, and cut, and shot while trying to sleuth around to help out Atlas. It’s a comic book, so there’s no real explanation as to how he continues to survive these incidents.

Justice, the Star of Blind Justice, was a late addition to the catalogue when Sam called me up and wanted a character who might or might not be crazy, believing himself to be bulletproof. I got a lot of ideas from Sam’s concept, and fleshed out a whole existence for Justice where he’s living disguised as a catatonic resident [1] at a head trauma ward. Justice is a little guy, but like a blowfish, he layers homemade armor made from phone books, duct tape and cardboard under his suit. He looks like he has this massive silhouette, but would appear to be a tiny Walter Mitty type underneath it. All that stuff gave him the feeling I wanted, and his raison d'être is somewhat logical and plausible by comic book pulp standards — and also just on another level, it’s broad strokes, a big iconic concept that doesn't need to be reality-based.

All those things might seem familiar: Atlas disguises himself as a City Planning employee, which sounds official. Blind Justice disguises himself with bandages, and is not bulletproof, but believes he is bulletproof. The heroes either live in Optic City or Swan City, our fictional metropolis. All these familiar attributes really are just starting points and, as soon as possible, the characters’ own identities start to emerge in the books, and that’s where we are right now.

Vince Brusio: The book solicited in the January PREVIEWS is All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer #1 (JAN171762). Is this a one-shot? An ongoing series? Tell us how titles will roll out for this book, and future titles in the All Time Comics universe.

Josh Bayer: It’s a series of one-shots that are written to bring the reader into this universe, as if they were picking up a comic that had been running for a couple hundred issues. You are introduced to characters whose stories are midway through, not at the beginning. We tried to elicit the impression that these guys have a fleshed-out universe for the first six books. That was a layer that Ben, in particular, gave the books. We kept on getting more ideas and kept on spitballing new books, and, as a whole, the first six books hang together almost like a variety television show. Like MR. SHOW, they’ll look good collected as a trade paperback but are each a standalone thing.

Vince Brusio: The cover for Crime Destroyer shows the heroes pounding the perpetrator into the pavement. Not exactly a fair fight. Three heroes kicking villain while he’s down. How does this cover foreshadow the content that’s coming to a comic shop near you?

Josh Bayer: That cover is a work that is about looking at heroes from a different point of view, not that they are necessarily bullies, fascists, or evil. But it’s a series where we want to cast them in a different light and give artists like Jim Rugg, who drew that cover, a chance to put their slant on them. Even though I have affection for all these characters, I thought Jim was emphasizing something that is undeniable and sort of disturbing and funny. The idea of law enforcement being scary and disturbing depends on your vantage point. From the view of the cops and soldiers, I think many of them think what they do is justified no matter what -- and self-appointed vigilantes, probably a thousand times more so.

Comics flirt with the appeal of violent power fantasies. Ben Marra and Johnny Ryan get right to whatever id quality it is that has made us all so obsessed with comics all these years. In comparison, Al Milgrom, Herb Trimpe, and Rick Parker are these gentlemen, these total professionals, whereas we younger artists from the indie scene are these weirdo punk rock fan geeks. It’s an interesting collaboration because these older gentlemen are all about harnessing the same sort of crazy energy that made comics so pulpy and accessible. In general, the people who drove comics had a craziness inside. Hopefully it’s a craziness that people want to read.

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Vince Brusio writes about comics, and writes comics. He is the long-serving Editor of PREVIEWSworld.com, the creator of PUSSYCATS, and encourages everyone to keep the faith...and keep reading comics.