October
13 One Vote, One Love

Politics is one of those topics that’s rarely used in fiction in the United States. Whether it’s because people prefer entertainment and politics separate or because it’s so hard to be political without also being preachy is hard to say. But the rare success, such as TV’s “The West Wing,” show it can be done. Comics has for the most part lacked a lot of overt political fiction. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson put heavy overtones of politics in their excellent “Transmetropolitan” series, but the sci-fi elements and setting made it more abstract than concrete.

But the divisive politics of the past four years have begun to change this, with more documentaries such as “Fahrenheit 9/11” putting film in the political arena. Comics played a part in the days after 9/11, with a number of excellent benefit projects seeing print. Now comics also are moving into the arena more fully, with Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers” and now with the immensely entertaining indie comic series “Everyman, Vol. 1: Be the People” (FWD Books, 96 pages, black-and-white, $6), written by brothers Dan and Steven Goldman and drawn by Joe Bucco.

The book, released to comicbook stores today and coming soon to Amazon.com, is a rarity: A modern political fiction that is relevant, believable and invigorating. The story follows author Thomas “Mack” Womack and his girlfriend, social engineer Perdita “Dita” Orozco. Frustrated with the state of politics in 2004, they concoct a web site called onelove.us, promoting nonpartisan solutions to the nation’s ills. (The URL is live with a companion site the Goldmans created). They join with presidential aide Manolo "Prex" Perez to establish a fifth-column network the exposes the corruption of the administration of President Henry Birch and promote a people-first platform for the country. At the center of their struggle is a report Perez “retrieves” from the White House proving Birch plans to use electronic voting machines to ensure his re-election.

The Goldmans have a very smart story with likeable characters and a lot of well-researched infor-mation that makes it satisfying without being preachy or falling victim to asides into trivia or senti-mentality. The climax is thrilling and fun, giving the book a satisfying conclusion, while leaving the door open for the next volume to go just about anywhere. The book uses fictional figures —Birch’s VP is Hanes and his Democratic opponent is Mr. Berry — but the story is firmly set in the larger issues and developments of the nation as it is today.

Variety: What are your backgrounds and how did you get into publishing comics?

Steven: My background is actually in theater and journalism. I went to school for theater, thought I was going to be an actor and ended up moving to playwriting. Along the way I was doing arts and music journalism and when I moved to New York I ended up falling into a position at Fox News.com. I’d always followed politics, but that sort of brought everything very sharply to the fore-front. This was between May and October of 2000, the build-up toward the election. I was watching firsthand what had been a fairly independent dot-com of the Fox News Channel become this very — what they kept describing it as was applying more synergy between the two, where they wanted to have the news on one reflect the news on the other, even if the people gathering that news were differ-ent people. And it was like firsthand learning the business of media spin. It made me pretty ill and I ended up quitting actually, just before the election. I didn’t want to be there anymore. And since then, my brother and I got a house together in Brooklyn and we had been talking for a while about doing comics together. We actually pitched a couple of things to Marvel and we just were going to the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con and we decided ‘Why write other people’s stuff when we could do our own and pitch those kinds of concepts?’ And we went out to San Diego with, I think, 10 proposals.

Dan: We had some really fantastic original stuff and everyone was floored.

Steven: And then 9/11 happened.

Dan: Yeah, and then these two planes hit the World Trade Center and everything just sort of faded into the background for a while.
Variety: Did you guys read comics as a kid, was it something you’d always been interested in or did you come to it later.

Dan: Comics has always sort of been there. When our family moved from Detroit to Miami, I used to be — I’m the older one — I used to help out my dad. We would sell videotapes out the back of our diesel station wagon for extra money on the weekend. And if I worked my ass off all day in the hot sun, he would buy me a bag of comicbooks. And this was before comicbook shops, so this was just like a plastic bag with a stack of comicbooks from the garage. Like no two with the same character and they ranged across 40 years of comics history. I would bring them home and Steve and I would sit on the floor of one of our rooms and read them over and over and over again.

Steven: And later on the down the line was the Albertson’s, going to the grocery store, saving up our dimes to buy an issue of Captain Carrot or (Chris) Claremont and (John) Byrne or Claremont and (John) Romita (Jr.) doing X-Men.

Dan: So they’ve always been there. Steve went to school and studied theater and I studied film. And I was sitting in film school learning about storyboarding and visual storytelling and my brain was going crazy about comics. I guess I kind of always knew this is what I’d be doing.

Variety: Given that the story is so specifically set in the present, why did you give the poli-ticians fictional names?

Dan: Two words: Patriot Act.

Steven: Well, one more word: libel.

Dan: It just seemed like there’s a certain power to the fiction. We wanted it to be abso-lutely thinly veiled, kind of gossamery thin. But at the same time I didn’t want to be hauled away in the middle of the night for something if what we had prophesied, with the president coming in for a second term and things getting worse, if that actually was to happen.

Steven: The other thing is that if you fictionalize it you have the chance to make the world a little different and people aren’t going to jerk quite so hard. They’re not going to be like, “Well, that didn’t happen!” “He didn’t do that!”

Dan: It’s a very different thing to have a story where the current president, even mistak-enly, orders the execution of someone. I mean that’s … I didn’t even feel that that was necessary. It gets the point across just changing the names slightly.

Variety: What made you want to do this as fiction? Were there any films, books, comics that you wanted it to feel like?

Dan: Actually, I think one of the reasons we did it is because there’s nobody doing this.

Steven: Absolutely. … There’s nobody doing hard political fiction like this. There’s nobody doing a “West Wing” that isn’t trying to maintain the status quo, that dreams of something better.

Dan: So I would say “Everyman” is not really inspired by any other fiction. I think that it’s more inspired by, we were working crappy jobs at very large law firms that handled clients like Enron and Haliburton and the Carlisle Group at the time. This is back last winter. I’m a graphic designer and Steve’s a legal secretary, and I would be designing PowerPoint shows on economic opportunities in Iraq and stuff like that and I would get edits in from people and then see those edits in the news three to six days later. And that was really horrifying because I was helping people get a jump on taking advantage of the situation. And I was getting so pissed off. I talked to Steve and we got so angry and that anger was coming out of such a place of frustration and love — love that I didn’t necessarily know I had for this country. Next thing I know, we’re writing this book and we’re realizing that we really really do care about this in a way I was never conscious of before.

Steven: I’ve always had this strong political bent. It goes back to when I was in seventh-grade civics class and my teacher sat us all down and said, ‘Here, I want you all to summarize the debates and I want to hear your thoughts on what each candidate said and, if possible, what you think of each issue.’ And that was the first time somebody had asked me to really formulate my own political opinions. Ever since, I’ve kept close attention to it, but working for Fox really brought that into sharp focus.

Dan: It’s funny because I’m the opposite. I’m a history buff, but I’ve always felt current politics — I guess everything you could even say post-World War II — is just kind of disgusting be-cause it’s such a machine. And I just turned away from it and focused on other things in my life. It just seems like lately, the last few years, things have got so in your face and so obviously manipulated. Maybe I’m just older and paying attention a little closer, but things seem especially bad now and so much so that I needed to do this.

Variety: How did you guys find your artist, Joe Bucco, and talk a little about how you worked with him on this.

Steven: We put an ad on Craig’s List and got a response and checked out his portfolio. And Joe was just — other than the fact that he’s really talented – his style totally fit our story. On top of that, he was really cool. It was easy talking to him and it felt like it would be really easy to work with him and to crack skulls in a nice way. We push him and he pushes us and the comic is better for it. We really developed a good synergy. I mean Joe’s part of the family now, our whole FWD Books family. It’s been great. But yeah, it was something as simple as an ad on Craig’s List in the beginning.

Variety: How long did it take you to do this book? Were you trying to get it out before the elections?

Steven: The funny thing about that is, if we had thought about this book two years ago, I’m sure we would have had a lot more time to work on it. But we were actually working on a different graphic novel back in December. Something that we put on hold that we have to get back to. But some-times we work in person, sometimes we work over instant messenger, sometimes on the phone. And I happened to be sick that day and we were talking over instant messenger and Dan’s like ‘I’ve got this idea before we get working on the thing we’re working on.’

Dan: And I knew the minute I sent him these three lines that that would be the end of the project we were working on. I did it anyway and I think we typed at each other for probably four or five hours nonstop and just had at least the very shred of this story by the end of it.

Steven: I had been waiting probably my whole life to do something like this. Whatever we have to say about the sitting president, I think in ‘Everyman’ as long as people can pick up the book and look beyond the swipes that we do take, it’s not about that.

Dan: Really, having “Henry Birch” in this volume, I mean he remains in the story but he’s not as large of a player later on. But you see that once we sort of sweep him aside, from here the book is about America, and not necessarily about the America of today or the America of the past. It’s more the American dream and how we can make that manifest if we just give a shit about each other. Just tweak the systems a little bit it’s not really that difficult to make things work better.

Steven: The thing is, we’re living in a bipartisan system in which everybody is beholden to somebody and there’s this violent hate between the parties just based on values. But nobody is step-ping in from the outside that’s kind of banging their heads together and say: ‘Look, you can get along, you can find solutions together that aren’t the minimal possible compromise and make everyone happy. But we have to stop throwing venom at each other long enough to even give that a try.’

Dan: It was really interesting. We watched, I wouldn’t even say a lot but definitely the first season, of “The West Wing” when we first started talking about this just because I had no idea what the inside of the White House felt like. … What was interesting was watching (President) Bartlett and these tiny little victories that just sort of held the wolves at bay on both sides: kept the party happy and kept the opposition satisfied. And then there was that one episode where he decided he just wasn’t going to take it anymore. He wasn’t going to just sit on the fence and try to be reelected so he actually could do some good. He was like ‘I’m going to do some good while I have this chair.’ And that, Steve and I were talking about that, and that one moment in the series really fed into the characters of Mack and Dita and Prez.

Steven: The whole thing about Mack and Dita is it was never their intention to do what they end up doing at the end of the book (and I don’t want to spoil it for people who read the interview) but it was never their intention to go the route that they did, they did it out of just a sense of doing something that no one else had tried yet.

Dan: And that they felt they could do more than they were already doing and they just de-cided to go with it.

Variety: It seems like even the smallest level of government concerned with very minor things can become hardline partisan almost overnight.

Steven: If you go back and read the comments on the forums of places we’ve been inter-viewed already — on Newsarama, The Pulse — we have people violently reacting based on something in the interview — they haven’t read it yet, they don’t really know what it’s aboutbased on what we’ve talked about because we sometimes go on a limb in an interview — and they’re like “I see enough paranoid leftist literature in my local bookstore, I don’t really need to read a comic about it.” We’re paranoid leftists and that’s not really what it’s about.

Dan: We don’t dress ourselves up as anything other than something new.

Variety: How was the book received at the Small Press Expo?

Steven: We actually had a teacher come up to us who we had convinced to buy the book, and she came up to us the next day while we were talking to Whitney Matheson of USA Today and she was just like ‘Oh my God, you guys this is one of the most amazing, well-thought-out, well-researched political books I’ve seen in a long time!’ And this is midinterview; she just burst right in

Dan: I had a lot of people coming up to me when I was sneaking away from the table to check out everyone else’s stuff and I got stopped probably about three times by groups of teenagers who said, ‘Hey, aren’t you one of the Brothers Goldman? You did that “Everyman” book?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I did.’ And they were like, ‘Thank you. Thank you for doing this because this is the one voice we have been waiting for but have not heard.’ That one touched me the most because that was basically the source of it, was that that was this voice that we wanted to hear and that no one was saying. So we figured, shit, let’s do it ourselves.

Variety: Since this is a first volume, where do you plan on taking the story next?

Dan: We’re looking at ‘Everyman’ to be between eight and 10 volumes right now. It’s a really big story. It’s sort of our chunk of American history that we’re going to make up. And yeah, we’ve got a few pretty hot ideas.

Steven: We’re probably going to tackle the war in Iraq, or the aftermath of the war in Iraq. I would imagine, if we haven’t reinstituted the draft by then, I imagine we’ll see — hurriedly — our esteemed leader pulling troops out because he has to.

Dan: I hope to God it’s over by then.

Steven: I don’t know that it’s going to be. But we want to kind of brainstorm it and think about other ways the situation could be resolved. And that’s going to be most of what makes up Vol. 2, looking at geopolitics the way they’ve been done up until now and how could an outside eye who’s trying to really make the peace try to bring people together in peace the way either party’s president wouldn’t.

Variety: Had any nibbles from Hollywood yet?

Steven: We have been talking to some Hollywood people about developing my book ‘Styx Taxi’ and about ‘Everyman’ and it’s kind of going to be dependent on who wins the election.

Dan: This thing will either be untouchable or hot. That’s kind of the direction we get, is it depends on who’s sitting in the Oval Office.

Steven: Personally, it’s the reverse of what I thought it’d be. I though if Bush wins, this is much hotter. But apparently it would be so hot that people would drop it.

Dan: It’s definitely something we’ve thought about. Not so much as a movie, but more as taking our grand structure of the whole administration we’re going to tell and wrapping it around seasons like an HBO show. … That HBO show format really seems influenced by comicbook and I think the two of them really feed off each other. It’s definitely a format I want to do a lot of work with throughout my life.