Interview Highlights

"Once you pay your eight bucks to see a film, the experience is over after two hours. Once you pay your three bucks for a comic, it's yours. You can enjoy it again and again, any time and any place you can read."

"I'd like to see not just a base on the moon, nor an outpost, or even a colony. I want to see a Hilton and a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe."

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	Astronauts in Trouble

Why astronauts? What made you decide that you wanted to do this story?

Ever since I realized, as a boy, that creating comic books was a job one could actually have, as opposed to comic books magically appearing on the newsstand in some fashion, I wanted to write comic books.

This particular story saw its genesis when the Mars Pathfinder mission landed on Mars back in 1997. My wife Mimi and I were watching the feeds from NASA at the San Francisco Museum of Science.

At the critical landing phase, NASA showed a detailed animation of what the touchdown must be like, because, as the voiceover guy said, "there are no cameras on Mars to record the event."

Mimi, who would become the editor on the project, turned to me and said, "Wouldn't it be cool if there WERE cameras on Mars?"

Well, I really fell out of my chair when the whole story of "Live From the Moon" just blew into my head at once . . . the rich guy, the camera crew, the bad guys, everything. I knew I had to write this comic.

Why comics? What makes Astronauts in Trouble work best as a comic book?

I work as the promotions director and Minister of Propaganda for the award-winning comic book store Comix Experience in San Francisco, and, as such, have to read A LOT of comics in order to stay up on the industry. I just wasn't reading the kind of comic I wanted to read.

Where was the Apollo 13 sort of comic? Something that will deliver movie-style thrills along the lines of Armageddon?

I mean, it doesn't cost $200 million to draw guys in spacesuits exploding on the moon, right? So, there's a plus for the format, right there.

The scripts in The Making of Astronauts in Trouble are incredibly detailed. How do you think that affected the finished product?

Well, as a writer, I think that's part of the job. I want to give the artists as much detail as I can. I saw "Live From the Moon" extremely clearly in my head, so it was just a matter of describing those details and letting the lads run with it.

While I was pretty rigid about staying true to the original dialogue, I also let the artists run a little. I wanted Matt [Smith] and Charlie [Adlard] to have as much fun drawing it as I did writing it.

I wasn't too keen on some subtractive changes, but I very much enjoyed each artist's additive changes.

Matt drawing the floating credit cards that Potter destroys off camera in a fit of pique in the second chapter was a nice touch, and Charlie giving the HayesCorp security forces the cover art for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as their departmental insignia made me laugh out loud when I saw the original art for the first time. Ol' Charlie knows what he's doing.

And then, I did a couple of things to make myself laugh that I think only a few people get. Dave Archer, the anchorman, is named after the Kier Dullea character in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman. Bow-man; Archer, see?

Reviewers have described the series in cinematic terms. Did you consciously think that way when you were writing the book?

Oh, absolutely. Maybe this is just my bias as a comic book enthusiast, but I think of comics rather like small movies where the reader can control the time and space in which he experiences the narrative.

In a theatre showing a film, if you don't hear a spoken line, or are momentarily confused with an intricate plot point, you're out of luck. If you don't understand something in a comic book, you can go back and read it again until you work out what's being communicated.

Once you pay your eight bucks to see a film, the experience is over after two hours. Once you pay your three bucks for a comic, it's yours. You can enjoy it again and again, any time and any place you can read.

So when I was plotting out the structure of "Live From the Moon", I was very aware of the cinematic nature of comics, with the additional trick that the physical form of comic books adds in little story bonuses.

I'd try to sort out little mini-cliffhangers at the bottom right panel of the right-hand page of the comic, because the physical act of turning the page protracts the amount of time the reader's eye has to see the continuation of the story.

So things would blow up, questions would hang in the air, things I'd want to underline all ended up there. That's a comic book way of emphasizing the scene changes one gets in the movies.

Do you have a background in film?

I haven't officially studied film or its techniques; I just enjoy the form quite a bit and pay attention to story-telling details.

Hollywood likes to option comics properties. Would you like to see a film version of AiT?

Absolutely. I think the story is particularly well-suited for a two-hour film.

Any thoughts about dream casting? You have some actor/actress descriptions in The Making of Astronauts in Trouble -- Beau Bridges for Dave, Janeane Garofalo for Annie -- are these the people who would appear on your call sheet, or have your thoughts changed since you wrote those descriptions?

The Annie bar is Janeane Garafalo high, that's for sure. I originally had Jeremy Piven's onscreen persona in mind when I was writing Heck, but Ryan Reynolds from Two Guys and a Girl can have the part, as far as I'm concerned.

Dave was based on my father-in-law, Thayer Walker, who was an on-air guy for KRON-TV in San Francisco in the late '70s. So we'd at least have to get him to read for the part, just to keep peace in the household. I'm still thinking Beau Bridges, though.

Astronauts in Trouble is set in 2019, fifty years after Apollo 11's visit to the moon. Do you think we'll get back to the moon before then?

Sadly, I don't. The Lunar Prospector mission didn't settle any questions about water trapped as ice on the moon, and it's a fact that water stores will be needed to establish a permanent base.

If mankind returns to the moon in the next 20 years, or even in the next one hundred, it will definitely be a privately funded affair. I don't think "Live From the Moon" is too far off what will really happen. I'll probably be off on the dates, though.

Where would you like to see the space program go next?

I think we've done the low-Earth orbit thing, and it looks like the ISS is stalled or moving at a glacial pace. I'd like to see a return to the can-do American spirit I grew up with.

I'd like to see not just a base on the moon, nor an outpost, or even a colony. I want to see a Hilton and a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe. Let's make that happen, and then we'll talk about the 20 volunteers we're gonna send to Alpha Centauri A.

In the series, the Hayes Corporation manages to construct an elaborate base on the moon without anyone learning what they're up to. Do you think this would be possible in the real world?

I think you'd have to have the cooperation of NORAD, at least, to keep it quiet and to spin the data to the rest of the world. You might be able to get away with five or six serious payload launches, if they were roughly done at the same time, and claim that they were destroyed in orbit or lost or even misfired weapons tests.

But I think if you're going to buy into a flying newsvan, the Mob as a nuclear power, and robot miners, a secret base that was built while the world's attention was elsewhere isn't that much of a suspension of disbelief.

The Hayes Corporation cuts corners in terms of materials and safety precautions in their moonbase. Do you think the conquest of space will shopped out to the lowest bidder?

Economics will always be a factor in human endeavor. I tried to skirt around this by Hayes just being a focused nutcase, with no one to nay-say him. But I think if space is claimed by the private sector, there are going to be accidents that may not have anything to do with quality control.

Building a space station, for example, is an immense engineering challenge, factors of ten more complex than, say, building a suspension bridge. And there will probably be that attendant loss of life and limb. But that doesn't mean it's not worth it.

What's cool about space?

It's all about the cosmic vastness. Space is just ... what's the mathematical term? Really, really BIG.

The limitlessness of space seems to contain the whole of human imagination, and still leave plenty of room left over for other things.

That, and the spacesuits. Astronauts are like modern-day knights in shining armor, suiting up to get the job done. Spacesuits are just darn cool.

Do you have any final thoughts about Astronauts in Trouble or space in general?

Just that I think 78-year-old John Glenn is an honest American hero. At first, I thought Glenn's second mission to space was the heroic return of the Old Guard, once again making an assault on the ramparts of the Deep Black.

Then -- and this may be because I absorbed every single thing written, said or shown by the media -- I began to see it as sort of a pseudo-event. More of a rah-rah by NASA to get the country feeling good about the $100 jillion the taxpayers are about to spend on the ISS.

But I would have done the same thing if I were John Glenn -- come up with some flimsy science to experiment with, and be rewarded for many years as a loyal Democrat. Why not? It's how the world works.

I just wish I had some quid pro quo coming to me so they'd launch my comic-book-writin' butt up there. I wanna sleep in zero gravity, and eat ready-to-eat meals.

I want to be an astronaut, put on the suit, and I have a feeling writing Astronauts in Trouble is as close as I'm going to get.