Posted in: Avengers, Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: matt fraction, rick remender, robert kirkman, writers room
Rick Remender On The “Battlefield” Of The Marvel Writers Rooms
Rick Remender on the “Battlefield” of the Marvel Writers Rooms a decade and a half ago
Rick Remender did not leave Marvel because he failed there. He left after deciding he had already taken all they could give him, even if it was not all they wanted him to give them. That is the through-line of his new conversation with John Siuntres on Word Balloon, how he got in, what the work did to his writing, how the building actually felt from the inside, and why, thirteen years after his last assignment, he talks about the era as time served rather than a door he still wants open.
Rick Remender states that Matt Fraction, already established at the company, brought Remender in as his successor on Punisher. Remender still frames that as a favour with real-world stakes. “Matt was an advocate, and he had already had success there. And so his bringing me in to be his successor on the Punisher was… an advocate. [Robert] Kirkman helped get me going at Image and introduced me to Eric [Stephenson, Image Comics publisher], with whom I became pals. And Matt really did a wonderful thing for me, helping me get that job at a point in time where babies were emerging from my wife and money was tight.”
Marvel was not, in his telling, a dream clubhouse. It was the job that let a writer with young children stay in Portland instead of returning to a coastal city for video game work. Rick Remender said “It was a paycheck at a point in time when we were living in Portland. There’s no industry around. I’d left LA and San Francisco, and I was able to support the kids, pay the mortgage, and have a job without having to relocate back to a city that… was on the books. I had been offered a job at Electronic Arts… I didn’t have to go back to the thing. I could keep working on what I kind of wanted to because of Marvel. And I’m always grateful for that.”
The Good That Came Out Of Marvel
But gratitude and affection are not the same thing. Rick Remender is careful about both. Asked what good came out of Marvel, Remender does not lead with characters or events. He leads with quantity. “There was a real progression in my writing based on the amount of work that I had to take on to support my growing family. And just the pure tonnage of writing.”
Rick Remender has a metaphor for that grind that sounds like something he has tested on himself for years: “I equate writing to falling down an infinite well of possibilities. And every time you fall down the well, and you choose different roads and put things together in different ways, every new chemical iteration, concoction, teaches you something about ‘this works, this doesn’t’. If you’re not careful, that can calcify you into a caricature of yourself. So it’s also trying to remain fresh. Go into the parts of the tunnel you haven’t been before. Feel the fear of not knowing what you’re doing, but you still have the lessons every fall, from yes, no, yes, no.”
The assignments themselves were not specifically the toys he grew up wanting. He grew up in the 1980s. Marvel, in that stretch, handed him properties the company itself treated as 1990s leftovers. “There were a lot of interesting things being given that were seen as ’90s relics, which is what Marvel did when I was there… take these relics of the ’90s, which are not things that I was even really a fan of that much. Punisher,Deadpool, Venom. I grew up in the ’80s, so for me, I wanted the traditional things I grew up with as a kid.”
The job, as he describes it, was to take material that felt committee-built or inauthentic to him and still write it at the highest level he had. “The challenge was writing things that weren’t necessarily in my wheelhouse and finding ways to do it where it was still true to my sensibility and that there was something to be said about the world, something to be said about myself, something I wanted to write about myself through these characters and an artistic approach, something visual that hadn’t been done in that book or hopefully ever before.”
Taking The Jobs You Don’t Want
He says he almost refused one of those jobs on principle, then used that refusal as a test of ego. “I realised there was a job, that I didn’t want, that I took because I pooh-poohed it. I said, ‘Oh well, this is not for me.’ And I said, ‘look, if you’re too good for something, or you think you’re too good for it, chances are you may not be’. There’s always an inherent internal conflict, and you always make sure you’re beating up your own ego and never buying into any sense of self-inflation. So I took the job, and I said to myself, if you can’t write this at an A+ level and make people fall in love with this, even though the germs of it may seem inauthentic, they may seem like they were committee thinking… if you can’t take it and make it A+, then you’re not an A+ writer. And so I took the job, and I worked myself to death on that.”
That is the closest he comes to a mission statement for the Marvel years: humility as work ethic, just not humility as gratitude toward the brand. Remender is blunt about where he sat in the company’s unofficial caste system. “I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I was not what Marvel was banking on, and that’s okay. Even back in those days, they made little clubs, you know, like we’re the Architects and we’re the pretty, we’re the sweet boys and nobody else’s. No, those boys don’t matter.” He says the photos from those retreats still look, to him, like a goon industry making its favoured writers pose. The feeling of being outside the club was not abstract. “That can really feel like you’re being [screwed] on by a company because it is. I mean, you know, it is.”
How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bombs
His response was not to lobby his way into the club. It was to treat the slight as fuel for the books he was given. “What I’ll do instead is I’ll take your B and C tier books you’re giving me, and I’ll bring in my art teams, and I will, under the radar, make A+ level books out of them. And if I can do that, then if I can outdo not being part of the cool kids club, and if I can outdo taking things that people… were not the cool toys, that would be a validation of sorts that nobody could take away.”
He is equally blunt about not romanticising that fuel. “I don’t love competition as an art fuel. I think that there was a positive to that end.” The positive, in his account, was tenacity: rewriting until a script “sings”, until he could feel the emotion in work that had not been designed for his sensibility. “That really came about from being overlooked. And that ultimately made me a better writer.”
The creative retreats are part of this interview that will probably travel. Rick Remender had already worked in writers’ rooms for games (Dead Space, Bulletstorm) and animation. He thought he knew what a table of colleagues looked like. Marvel’s version surprised him. “Sitting at a table of 15 people that you expected were all on the same team in the same company, and realising that it’s actually just a battlefield to see who’s going to get ‘Hoblingoblin versus Reblingoblin’, or which goblin are you going to get? Guys, I don’t care what goblin… The backdoor backstabbing, everyone is trying to kill one another. There were a lot of lessons about navigating those types of rooms that aided me in my film and television career.” He does not describe this as an accident of personality. He describes it as design. “I wasn’t exactly ushered in and welcomed in a way that made the experience very pleasant. And I don’t think that the corporate environment there is built for that. They pit people against each other to get them to compete, so they can feed on the ideas. All of the things I’ve read in all of the various books about how these things operate, and cults operate the same way. So I wasn’t blind to what I was dealing with. The problem was that I didn’t have any options.”
The Billion Dollar Man
Remender has enough distance now to inventory what the company kept. “I haven’t worked at Marvel for thirteen years. So there’s enough space that I can see it was beneficial in many of these respects. And they used my ideas and things and four movies and three TV shows and generated a billion dollars worth of stuff and, you know, okay, that’s how the business runs. They’re not going to share that with you, and you’re not going to get a gold star on your forehead. So, it’s probably good to know when you’ve served your time.”
And by the end of the interview, he was getting a little more candid. Rick Remender said, “I just got to a point with it where I’d had a number of really bad experiences, and I had one particular editor whose game was to let me pitch him stories, and then he would go and pitch them as his own. And that happened enough times, and then every seventh idea, he’d let me slide one through that I got to write while telling me that ‘without me, you’d be dead here, kid. You wouldn’t have yourself a career if it weren’t for me’. You know, classic sort of pimp mentality. And so not everybody has those experiences, right? And not everybody has personality issues with um, some of the narcissists that are currently in control of a thing. I’ve had people tell me like, ‘Oh, dude, you should come back. It’s not at all like what it was. That person’s gone, and they’re not throwing their dick at people’s faces anymore.'”
And while Rick Remender finds he gets new readers who still arrive through Uncanny X-Force and Venom, a newer cohort knows him from The Sacrificers, Grommets, Seasons, Escape, and now Hammerfist, and when they ask whether they should bother with his older work, “I’m like, I don’t know…”
Always good to keep your face free of genitalia in the workplace, I find…
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