comiXology Conversations
Susana Polo | Polygon
In this episode Susana Polo sat with us to talk about Batman but also other comics.
Topics include Susana’s deal, wanting to be friends, video games and entertainment, audience reaction, what would you say you do around here, growing up and getting older with Frank Miller’s work, critical thinking, what we need from Batman OK, Bane and Knightfall forever, poor Jim Gordon, Arkham vs Telltale, the fake geek girl, obstacles creating the Mary Sue, and what she’s reading!
Links:
the comiXologist > Subscribe on iTunes
comiXology: Conversations > Subscribe on iTunes
Transcription:
Kara: Welcome back to comiXology Conversations. Big show today, Matt.
Matt: Huge show.
Kara: One of the biggest we’ve ever done.
Matt: In history.
Kara: We’ve been talking with folks that help spread the word of comics in the world of writing. Today is no different, because today we have with us the entertainment editor of Polygon, Susana Polo. Welcome to the show.
Susana: Hi guys! Thanks for having me on.
Kara: Absolutely. Researching for this show, we were like going all over the place saying like, “What is Susana’s deal?” That led me to your Tumblr, and I was there to research questions, and basically the one question that I have for you from going through that is “why aren’t we friends yet?”
Susana: Tell me that you found my Tumblr because I haven’t been updating it regularly in forever.
Kara: That’s fine because I saw lots of posts about Tim Drake and that’s all I need to know.
Matt: First, I like how your intro to interviews is “what’s their deal?” and then also that in the notes, “why aren’t we friends yet?” I thought that was hilarious. Now that you guys are best friends, I want to get into Polygon, obviously. You’re an entertainment editor. Something that’s always struck me about Polygon–why does a video game site, in your opinion, need an entertainment editor?
Susana: My editing chief, Chris Grant, has the sentence that he likes to trot it out for this. They tried it out in my interviews and a lot of other explanations about this. That he looked to Polygon’s coverage and went, “We’re talking about a Batman game, so why wouldn’t we talk about a Batman movie, or a Batman comic? We know our audience [is] interested in these characters. Why aren’t we expanding to talk about that stuff too?” The answer was that everyone at Polygon was a person who was an expert in the videogames industry and had no idea how to make that expansion, which is why he hired me, or rather, why they put out a job listing and I showed up for it and they hired me. What I try to do with our entertainment coverage is expand the site into areas that I know our audience is interested in and that I know that our audience wants to hear more about. We talk about Game of Thrones. We talk about Marvel movies. We talk about Star Wars.
There are a ton of Star Wars games out there and people aren’t playing them just for the game play. They’re playing them because they’re attached to that universe and that franchise. Just take those interests and to expand upon them and deliver that news and coverage and editorial work to our audience is the goal of our coverage.
Matt: How’s that reaction been at first? I feel like in my head at first that would be like…some video game people will be like, “Get this out of here. I don’t care.” Then, over time, maybe the shift in Polygon’s view, were people then…did they get more comfortable seeing posts about movies and seeing posts about comic books?
Susana: I was actually pretty surprised at how little “I thought Polygon was a video game site”-like comments that we would get on stuff. It was just not the same. We didn’t get any but we didn’t actually get a lot of push back on that. I think we’ve been pretty good at sticking to stuff that our audience goes, “No, yeah, this make sense. Why wouldn’t we be talking about the comic book influences on the Arkham games?” I actually did my first video game review for this site a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. I reviewed Telltale Batman which I enjoyed.
Matt: Talk about that a little bit. You’re the entertainment editor. Do you receive pitches from team and then at the same time, you can also do pitches? What’s that experience like?
Susana: It’s a mixed bag. It’s definitely the case that I look at our team and I go, “Look. All of you watch television. I know you have opinions on this. I want you to write them down for me.” Sometimes that’s a bit of struggle but I know…for example, “I know all of you watch Game of Thrones. I know you’re watching Stranger Things. Don’t tell me you don’t have anything to say about Stranger Things.” Yes. I’m in this position where I’m coordinating, getting our writers and helping them, guide them into this new arena. Also in a position where I’m Polygon’s comics expert so I’m trying to manage all this editor stuff with going, okay, no, I’m the person who needs to comment on this issue. I’m the person who needs to write an article about…I’m the person who needs to write 4 articles about Suicide Squad while the movie is coming out. I’m the person who needs to give our audience a broader context for whatever is happening in comics Twitter this week.
Kara: One of your articles that we’ve all read from Polygon was the one where you talked about the evolution of your thinking about Frank Miller’s work, which resonated with me, because I, too, devoured Frank Miller’s works about Batman when I was younger with the understanding that “every fan” loved them. It was something that I should be reading and be loving also, but I didn’t have the tools to think critically what I was reading until much later. Do you think it’s possible to be critical of work but still love it? Is there another work that you used to love but upon revisiting you decide it’s no longer for you or even the vice versa?
Susana: Oh, yeah. Appreciating work or loving work that you can appreciate is not perfect or even has very big flaws in it is like…I don’t know. I founded The Mary Sue and one of our big watchwords on it was you can appreciate media and deconstruct it and criticize it at the same time. You can enjoy stories that you know are flawed. I’m a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings has problems. One of my most nostalgic comics–I go back and read them over when I need to calm myself and be de-stressed and stuff–is Tintin. I grew up reading Tintin books. You can’t approach Tintin without talking about the racial stereotypes and colonialism and all the stuff that is baked into those stories. Yeah. I wouldn’t say that I’ve … I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that I have decided that Tintin is no longer for me because I can still put it in that space where I’m like, “This is very nostalgic and it was part of my childhood but it also has huge problems.” I don’t know. I’d have to think about that.
I think the Dark Knight Returns is definitely in that place. There was a period where I thought this is very important and this is very…this is something I’m “supposed” to like. This is what Batman is like. As I get older, it had to…I had to put it in this place of like, “This was very important when it came out and what this did for the history of superheroes was very important,” but it’s been 30 years, guys. It’s been 30 years and I don’t think The Dark Knight Returns is still particularly relevant to our modern idea of what Batman is like or what we need out of Batman as a character as a modern society.
Matt: What you mentioned earlier too is, I think, a hard idea for many comic readers to grasp, which is you can still maybe enjoy something but also be very critical of it at the same time. I feel like that’s another level of comic love that it’s very hard for people to get to where they don’t grow out of that hardcore love or something that they read when they were 10. It’s still untouchable to a certain point.
Susana: There’s that Rubicon that every person who comes to comics through superheroes need to reach, which is the point where you stop following a character and you start following creators. We realized that you’re never going to like everything that happens to a character and the way that you deal with that is not by getting mad, but by stepping back, taking a deep breath, and accepting that you need to wait for the wheel to turn around until the character becomes the one that you really like again.
Kara: Reboot?
Susana: Yeah. Exactly. I think we’re also dealing with that these days in the “fan reaction” to Warner Bros’ DC movies which is that critics are wrong, the movies are great and real fans really like this, which, I can’t even begin to describe how much I hate that idea as a critic who is a fan. Just the idea that if I didn’t like Batman V Superman, that just means that I don’t like Batman enough and it’s like …
Matt: There’s no gray area possible.
Susana: It makes me want to flip a table or say things that you can’t say on the radio.
Kara: Especially when you’re dealing with characters who have been around for over 70 years. There’s no one iteration of lots of these superhero characters. We’re talking about Batman a lot, but Batman’s a great example of this, because maybe every half decade something gets really majorly tweaked about his character. Contrast Adam West’s Batman with Frank Miller’s version of Batman with the Batman: The Animated Series Batman. It’s like all of these versions is the same character at the core but there’s enough differentiation where if they all got in a room together, it’d be like, “Would the real Batman please stand up?” You wouldn’t know what to do.
Susana: Yeah. I still haven’t even gotten used to Damian.
Matt: I love Damian. I love Damian.
Kara: He’s such a brat. So adorable.
Matt: He’s an adorable brat.
Kara: Adorable murderous brat.
Matt: Listen. That’s in the past. We don’t have to talk about that. He’s grown up even though he’s the same age. Outside of Frank Miller’s work, what were some of the works that you read as you were first getting into comic books that were influential on you?
Susana: Jeph Loeb’s Long Halloween is still probably my favorite graphic novel. Just top to bottom. The story of Long Halloween and the art in it … I can go back to that and be blown away.
Matt: They don’t make books like that anymore I feel like. Even though it’s an odd thing to say but that book is really special.
Susana: Yeah. I think the first collected trade that I’ve read that wasn’t a graphic novel and it was published in one of the core Batman books was Knightfall.
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Susana: I have a real, I think, slightly disproportionate love for Bane as a character as a result of that even though his introduction is probably the worst version of him in comics.
Matt: His intro story? It’s really dark.
Susana: No. His origin story is great but his intro as like this … We’ve never seen him before. We don’t explain who he is. He’s just got this weird gang of … Yeah. They all have their own weird little … They’re all trying to be set up as their own weird little super villains but they’re totally boring. All of a sudden here’s this guy who can beat Batman. He wears a luchador mask and we’re not going to explain who he is at all. Not to mention the whole killing prostitute thing that they just slide in there. I love Bane’s origin story. I love the stuff that further writers like Gail Simone have done with him. I love a lot of the stuff that he does. I think part of that is because as an 11 or 12 year old kid reading Knightfall, I didn’t have any context for Bane’s weird contextual place in the story. He was just another supervillain I’d never heard of like all of the other supervillains who hadn’t been on Batman: The Animated Series who I’d never heard of. He was scary. He was terrifying. He actually beat Batman.
He didn’t just injure him. He made him not want to be Batman anymore. He made him give up and that was so scary. That was so the ultimate villain win.
Matt: I actually just reread that probably the first time since I was 11. The one thing that really struck me was … Is it Jean Paul Valley-
Susana: Yeah.
Matt: -who eventually became Batman? That storyline was actually really well done in that Jean-Paul was like … He becomes Batman when his back’s broken.
Kara: Is he the one in the really outrageous costume that’s like, so 90s?
Susana: Yeah.
Matt: He looks like Zack Morris. He’s essentially Zack Morris in Batman. He starts fighting villains and he takes it to an R-rated level because he’s like Batman would put the scarecrow in the Arkham Asylum and then he’d come out and kill 20 people. Why do you do that? Let’s just end it now and save countless lives! That struck me a couple of months ago. That’s pretty smart idea from Jean-Paul Valley even though he’s a sociopath.
Susana: Yeah. My favorite Batman stories are actually the ones that have the most ludicrous setups but then they use them to do really, really good character work. The idea that Batman would, after having his back broken, go follow this kidnapped acquaintance to try and get her back and leave Jean, not Dick Grayson but Jean-Paul Valley in charge of being Batman with Tim Drake to watch him? With the 14 year old kid or 16 or whatever old Tim was, to be in charge of this guy that he barely knows and make sure everything’s okay. That’s really silly but it is also, “Wow. What a character moment for Tim,” wrestling with this older guy who’s becoming more and more violent and crazy. Then the stuff that they do with Dick Grayson afterwards where he feels personally betrayed that Bruce didn’t ask him to be Batman even though that’s something he doesn’t want. He’s like, “I don’t want to be Batman. I don’t want to be you. I want to be my own person.” That was stuff that really, really has stuck with me for a long time. It was part of the reason why …
I talked early about the comics readers Rubicon of, “I need to step back and separate myself and start following artist instead of characters.” My breaking point for that was when there were two Batmans and one of them Dick Grayson and one of them was Bruce Wayne. I was like, “No. We talked about this in the 90s. Dick doesn’t want to be Batman. That’s not how it goes. This is inconsistent characterization.” Then I was like, “No. Just need to step back. Step back. I’ll come back when Grant Morrison’s not on the book anymore and he can do his stories and people can enjoy them and they’ll be good. I’ll come back because I don’t particularly like that thing. It’ll be fun.”
Kara: I want everyone to have your attitude about this. You’re just like, “It’ll be fine eventually.”
Matt: I love that this has turned into a Batman podcast but I have one more thing to talk about Dick Grayson. You read the Scott Snyder Detective run. I felt like that was amazing.
Susana: Yeah. Scott Snyder won me for a long time with the Detective run, particularly with the backup about James Gordon and Barbara Gordon and stuff. Then re-won me with Death of the Family. That’s it. He can do whatever. I’ll go read it. Yeah.
Matt: The James Gordon character … There’s so many tangents but the James Gordon character when I first read that, you just feel so terrible for Jim Gordon.
Susana: Yeah.
Matt: Not the son. Man, his family has just been totally destroyed. The son is a murdering psychopath now. Come on. Poor guy.
Susana: Yeah. That’s my thing. People are like, “Why doesn’t Batman kill the Joker?” I’m like, “No. Why doesn’t Commissioner Gordon kill the Joker?”
Matt: Right.
Susana: Would you really think a pre-New 52 commissioner Gordon, where the Joker murdered his second wife, put his daughter in a wheelchair, threatens his city once a month… Gordon could just shoot the Joker. There would be no consequences for it. No one would–
Matt: Everyone in the city would turn around. No one was looking.
Kara: Yeah. I didn’t see it.
Susana: Just in self-defense. Yes, Batman would be incredibly mad at him but like … I’m shrugging. It’s a podcast. You can’t see me shrug.
Kara: Jim Gordon. Best most decent man ever even at the expense of thousands of lives?
Matt: Yeah. One of the other things you talked about the Telltale game. A portion of your interview was you talked about how the Arkham series in particular didn’t mesh with your vision for Batman. Why was that?
Susana: We gave that game a very high score and there was a moment where our reviews editor was like, “Susana, do you want to review …” Not that game. I mean the third game. “Do you want to review Batman: Arkham Knight” I was like, “I’m nervous about it. I don’t really think my first video game review should be an AAA game that’s highly anticipated. That’s scary.” He was like, “Okay. That’s fine.” Then I played it and was like, “Oh. I would not have given this game a good review. I’m glad that I didn’t do it,” because I couldn’t stand the story. I’m so tired of seeing The Killing Joke brought up again and again. I’m so tired of seeing the Barbara Gordon aspects of The Killing Joke, which are incredibly minor in the comic, get brought up as like the only thing that we still consider to be canon from it. I didn’t like the way any of the female characters in the game were treated. The mechanics of the game required so much suspension of disbelief to think that Batman wasn’t murdering people.
Matt: He was using rubber explosive bullets.
Susana: Yeah. You literally lay out in the beginning of the game that the whole…all of Gotham has been evacuated and nobody is manning the hospital so who’s keeping these guys that you hit with the car from getting concussions and slipping into comas?
Matt: Maybe they have their own doctors, their own evil doctors that drive around the hospital van.
Susana: Yeah. It was just this mix of like … I think also the pacing of the game where you would get these story beats at where like Barbara Gordon would … I won’t spoil anything but you’d get these story beats that were incredibly emotionally hard. Batman would walk out of the cut scene and you’d go, “Okay. What’s the next point of my thing? I got to go fight some mooks. I’m not going to go back to the Bat Cave and brood. I’m not going to go immediately off after the Joker. I have all these side quests to do.” It didn’t feel like my guy.
Matt: How does the Telltale game compare with that? What’s that like for you?
Susana: The Telltale game is … I said this in a little bit of my review and I think I expanded on it when we did our little review podcast called Quality Control run by Justin McElroy. I talked about what Telltale’s really doing is that through dialogue choices, you can play the Batman that is in your head as the real Batman. That you can decide how violent you are. When you’re interrogating a guy, you can decide what your relationship with James Gordon is. You can decide what kind of Bruce Wayne you are. You can decide whether you are the Bruce Wayne who pretends to be an idiot in public or Bruce Wayne who’s just this brooding grumpy orphan in public. Those are the choices that the game presents you with. It allows you to really feel like you’re doing your version of Batman and that’s really cool to me because everybody has an idea of what Batman is like. Not even like nerds at this point where he’s reached a point of cultural saturation. Where we all have some first place that we saw Batman and understood what the character was about.
That’s I think my favorite thing about their new series.
Matt: Yeah. It’s cool that they took a different route. Not the same people that have done it but the people that made that decision.
Kara: I remember when the first Arkham Asylum game first came out and my initial reaction was, “I’m not a gamer but you get to be Batman and that sounds really cool,” but then I read a couple reviews about it and I was like, “This is very punchy. Very fighty. Not a lot of detective work going on here.” I feel if it was, like, Batman is the world’s greatest detective, so here, go on this Gotham RPG to go and solve mysteries, I would have been so there. Since it was just punching, I was like, “Oh.”
Matt: Like Mist but with Batman?
Kara: Yeah. I would have played that.
Susana: I definitely enjoyed the first Arkham game. As a comics reader for a very long time and a person who came into all of the rest of my nerdy interests through Batman, the first Arkham game was the first time that I ever wanted to be Batman. I was just like, “Oh, no. This is cool. You feel very cool when you are Batman.” Yeah. I enjoyed the series. The third game just lost me.
Matt: What was the first Spider-Man game that allowed you to web sling? Do you remember playing that one when that first came out?
Susana: Yeah. Vaguely. A little bit.
Matt: That was like mind blowing to be able to web sling essentially. That’s besides the point.
Kara: Until you get to the edge of the city.
Matt: Yeah. I remember there was a part where you had a helicopter. You had to follow the helicopter. I think there was a glitch where you could just continue web slinging even though there’s no buildings around.
Kara: You’ve written about the concept of the “fake geek girl” in the past, which I wanted to talk about. The article that you mentioned in your farewell piece on The Mary Sue is one that you wrote that really resonated with me because when I was younger, I studied up on comic stuff, knowing that I’d be challenged on all of it at some point. When I got older, I realized how dumb the whole concept of gatekeeping was and I calmed down a little bit. You mentioned that this article that you wrote is one of your most often quoted ones. Why do you think it has such a broad appeal for people?
Susana: I think I put a pretty good hook on the end of it. I think that’s part of it. I think people like quoting that. That’s just a writer thing. I’m trying to remember what I said in it specifically. What I like to do, this is a lot of The Mary Sue, is to condense the internet arguments down to…there are lot of ways that you can refute the idea that women get into nerd stuff for attention but not because they genuinely enjoy it. There are a lot of angles that you can attack that really, really flimsy assumption on. I think a lot of what I try to do in my writing about those topics is to distill it down to…you don’t have to talk about all of the reasons why it’s wrong. You have to talk about the reason that is quickest to explain, most obviously refutation of it and that is most easily grasp by folks who don’t want to believe your side of the argument. The easiest way to pin that down for me was, “Look.” Now I’ve completely blanked on what I wrote in the article.
Which was like the assumption that because somebody doesn’t know about a thing … Likes the thing you like but doesn’t know enough about it, your attitude towards that shouldn’t be you don’t get to know anymore about it. It should be, “Oh, cool. You like the same thing. Let me help you out with that. I know other stuff that’s really cool. Let me tell you about this other stuff that’s really cool. Yay. There’s one more person who likes the thing that I like.”
I spent my childhood being the only person I knew who read comics. Also being the kid who … I wasn’t the only person I knew who read comics but being the kid who had a lot of interests that I didn’t really know anyone else who was into Batman, I didn’t have a lot of friends and the ones that I had were more broad science fiction folks and fantasy folks. I never really found a community of other women who were as deep into superheroes as I was. Coming from that place, when you find somebody else who’s interested in that, you just want to keep interacting with them.
You just want to talk about it. The idea that you would find somebody who’s into stuff that you like but maybe not as much and you wouldn’t want to … My whole thing was loaning books and DVDs to people to be like, “You should be interested in this. I want to talk to somebody about this. I want to have more people to discuss media with.” I don’t understand the attitude that you want less people to discuss media with or that you only want a certain kind of person to do that with. There’s a certain kind of person who couldn’t possibly get on your level about it. Yeah. That’s what the fake geek girl gatekeeping. There’s all kinds of gate keeping. I would say that the gatekeeping of women from comics is one of the most big talked about ones lately but there’s all kinds of like racial divides where it’s just like, “I wouldn’t have thought that you’d be into,” and it’s like, why not? Comic book superheroes are such a broad mythological ancient wish fulfillment idea. There’s no reason why they’re not, they shouldn’t be universal to everybody.
When they start becoming universal, get really uptight about it and have that, “Well, we were here first.” The idea is just it’s transparently gross and just bad. That’s my eloquent rebuttal of it.
Kara: I’ll sometimes bring it to just a purely capitalist level and be like, “If you like a thing, then you should want everyone else to like the thing because if enough people like the thing and spend enough money on the thing, they’ll keep making the thing. Then you get to keep enjoying the thing.”
Susana: Yeah. It’s something we’re seeing in comics and movies these days where it turns out that our stories weren’t niche because they weren’t universal. They were niche because they were hard for the mainstream to get a hold of. Once you actually present The Avengers to the mainstream or … I can’t think of other good examples right now. Once you actually present comic book stories and to a certain extent video game stories to the mainstream, it turns out those stories are just really good stories. What was keeping people from interacting with them wasn’t that the mainstream can’t identify with Peter Parker, it was that the mainstream doesn’t see comics pushed up everyday. The mainstream has trouble digging into … There are hurdles in front of new readers. Mainstream new readers have trouble with that stuff. It isn’t that they’re snobby, it’s just that, “Hey. Comics is a tricky hobby to get into.” We should help people do that because then we get to have more comics.
Matt: The dream.
Kara: It is a beautiful dream. Let’s go a little further back in time. Earlier we mentioned that you had founded The Mary Sue. What was the most important thing to you in creating that site and what was the most challenging obstacle you faced?
Susana: That’s a tough one. I think the most important thing for me in creating The Mary Sue was that I could never quite tell whether it was correlation or causation. The Mary Sue seemed to happen in a time when … My best example of this is that The New 52 was announced the spring that The Mary Sue started to exist. It just happened to correlate that at that point was the point where the comics industry, where DC announced this big slate and comics, the people who were talking about comics and the comics industry and the comics media, were at a point where when DC announced a whole new slate of comics and there were only two women working on them, everybody said, “What’s going on?” It’s not something that would have happened I think like in 2006. Five years earlier or 10 years earlier. The fact that we happened to be there at the same time that that started to happen and helped amplify these discussions around where women were in comics and where other minorities were in comics and in media and in broader media.
That’s I think what really mattered to me about The Mary Sue. As far as my biggest hurdle goes, I think it was probably trying to understand the community that we got and making sure that we were listening to it. Also tempering the way we listen to it with our own judgments about what was going on.
Matt: To mean like your biases that you didn’t even realize you had at the time?
Susana: Yeah. There’s a lot of listening and going, “Oh, I was actually wrong about that. I’m going to reword and rechange and not … Yes. I’ve been taught a thing. I’m going to carry that forward.” We’re in an ongoing discussion right now about the connection and the communication between fans and creators and how online space has sometimes allows that connection to be used to harass and abuse. Sometimes it is used to foster greater community and more communication and sometimes we get really good stuff out of it. Sometimes we get really bad stuff out of it. There were times at The Mary Sue where we got bad stuff out of it. Those were rough and they were … From both ends. From the “girl shouldn’t read comics and play video games” and from the “you’re not working hard enough for the standards that we have” and from folks who we couldn’t seem to communicate our ability to conform … There were folks who had this idea that The Mary Sue was 3 women doing it for fun and not folks who were working for a company who were trying to be paid for what they were doing.
Sometimes it got really messy and stressful. That was the rough part of the job I think.
Kara: I had another question about a specific article because I read your piece about Secret Six which long times listeners of our show will know I’m obsessed with. I was just so in love with it because you were able to articulate things that I so far have been unable to articulate about my love for the series, specifically the use of the “of all people” phrase to describe how inexplicably each character works so well with one another, which I thought was pretty genius. It got me thinking, when you’re writing opinion pieces like that, what’s your process like to focus your argument?
Susana: I don’t know. That’s rough. I think a lot of my process on that is just I have a broad idea of how to tell stories and I try to tell a story in an opinion piece. I’m actually working on another one about Secret Six right now because I can’t be stopped. Yeah. I had to sit down yesterday and be like, “I know what I want to say in this but I actually have to think about what the order I want to say things in.” The thing I always come back to on an opinion piece is is the amount of time I spent in middle school learning how to write five paragraph essays where you lay out your thesis and then you write three paragraphs supporting it and then you write a conclusion and it’s awful. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. You hate it. I got to writing opinion pieces and went, “Oh, they already taught me how to do this. I’m not going to write a five paragraph opinion piece but that’s the structure.” That’s what you need to do. You have an idea.
One of my professors in college in one of my 101 courses was explaining to all of these kids who were taking the class because they needed to take a class that had writing requirement. I majored in creative writing so this is not a big deal to me, but laying it out for all the kids who maybe didn’t have a writing background and like, “You’re writing me an essay. You tell me what you’re going to tell me. You tell me. You tell me you told me.” That’s the structure of an opinion piece. You tell your audience the opinion that you were going to tell them and then you tell your opinion with all of your backup and stuff and then you collect yourself at the end and you say, “This is what I told you.” That’s the basic opinion piece. I also try to walk into it. I usually try to walk into opinion pieces like I am talking to a friend and going, “Look,” because I do this a lot.
I was sitting in the office the other day and I had our best proofreader on the site looking through the article that I wrote with two other co-workers about The Killing Joke animated movie. He just looks up and looks at me and goes, “Has there ever been a Batwoman?” I unhinged my jaw and just vomited, like word vomited the entire history of Batwoman from the 50s and the 60s and the post Comics Code and then Kate Kane and Greg Rucka and 52 and Renée Montoya and then JH Williams III and how I want to get a Batwoman tattoo. I try to bring that “Oh my God. You don’t know about this? Let me tell you about this” energy into my opinion articles because that’s the thing that people who don’t know comics want to hear about comics. They want to hear about the time that Superman got high on magic Kryptonite. They want to hear about, “Oh, President Obama is in Suicide Squad this week.” That’s how you get people … People are interested in comics. Everybody cares about Batman. One of my favorite stories about the death of Superman is that …
Maybe I’ve read it in an intro or something but we put out the “Death of … “ The book where he dies and nothing else happened in the news that day except that Superman died. It was just a total coincidence. There weren’t any other big stories. The story became that Superman had died in comics and you would think that everyone in the world had been reading comics straight for ten decades for how much they cared. Everybody cared that Superman was dead even though they weren’t into comics. It’s like, “Of course. People care about superheroes even if they don’t read about comics.” They care about those ideas even if they don’t read them regularly. You can hook people with that. You can get them to read comics which is like …
Matt: Do you remember when they had the black arm band? They would give those out in comic shops where you have mock funerals in comic book shops?
Kara: You’re showing your age.
Matt: It was a wild time.
Kara: You talked about Batwoman and Batman. We talked about Tim Drake earlier. Are all of your favorite characters Bat characters or is there just certain type of character you find yourself drawn to?
Susana: Batman’s my guy. Batman is my core competency as a comic book person. I’m embarrassed to admit how recent it’s been since I’ve gotten into Marvel stuff. I’m reading All New Wolverine right now and loving it. I love She-Hulk. I really, really love She-Hulk. I love Jessica Jones. Yeah. A lot to my faves are Batman people.
Matt: I guess you must have loved Red Robin. Remember when that series came out?
Susana: Yes.
Matt: I love that series.
Susana: Yeah. Took me a moment to place …
Matt: I think that might have been right before pre New 52. I think it ended because of The New 52.
Kara: No, because it was Batman died or “died.” Everyone was like, “Okay. He’s gone. It’s over.” Timmy Drake, he was a late teen at that point, Timmy Drake was like, “No guys. He’s not. He’s not dead.” Even Dick Grayson was like, “No, Tim. It’s over. He’s dead.” Tim was like, “No. I’m going to find him.” Tim goes on this madcap global adventure to find Batman as the Red Robin.
Susana: Ra’s al Ghul starts calling him detective. That’s how badass Tim gets.
Matt: That was good. That’s all we had to say. That was so good. That’s like one of those unsung titles that gets lost in the shuffle of the Bat death, the New 52 and all that stuff.
Susana: I miss the tacit assumption that Tim Drake will succeed Bruce Wayne as Batman. I miss when that was the tacit assumption in the Batman mythos that Tim is actually the best Robin. He’s the one who’s a detective. He’s the one who made it so Batman couldn’t not make him Robin.
Kara: Tim Drake is the best Robin.
Matt: I feel like they should another … Like a Rebirth Tim Drake series. Maybe not the Teen Titans or whatever he’s up to now but …
Susana: Maybe we’re going Detective Comics because now it’s him and Kate Kane and Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown and Clayface of all people.
Matt: What else? We usually ask folks what they’re reading but you already named a few. Is there any other titles that you would recommend to folks maybe they’re not reading?
Susana: I’m so bad at remember my pull list. I’m reading All New Wolverine. I’m really in love with it. Oh God. I’m so bad at remembering my poll list.
Matt: What’s on your nightstand?
Susana: There’s just a pile of books next to my bed. I’m reading Descender. I’m reading Saga but it’s on hiatus right now.
Kara: I recently got a friend hooked on Saga who’s not a comic person. She gets to the end to the most current issue and I have ten all-caps text messages from her in a row where she’s like, “What do you mean there’s no more of this? What do you mean I have to wait? Why do I have to wait? What is happening? I don’t understand.” I’m like, “Better go back and reread it. You gotta wait.”
Susana: I’m reading ODY-C. Matt Fraction and Christian Ward’s ODY-C which I really love and I totally understand when people can’t get into it because it’s pretty dense. Even I think like I need to go back and read the Last Arc to figure out what happened. The idea of a genderbent retelling of the ODY-C in space where almost everyone is a woman because the gods destroyed them male gender for crimes against the gods. That female humans responded by inventing an intersex gender to allow them to reproduce so that humanity could continue existing among the stars. Retelling the story the ODY-C with all women. It’s a comic where the Cyclops, that Odysseus tells the Cyclops that her name is All Men. The Cyclops is screaming about how All Men has put out her eye. All the other Cyclops’ are like, “There aren’t any men. That’s not a …” That’s very deeply satisfying for me.
Kara: I was reading that book for awhile but like you said, it is … You have to commit to it.
Susana: Mm-hmm.
Kara: I wasn’t ready to commit but every time I looked an issue I was just completely blown away from the art and just all the colors and how really transportive that whole world was that they built.
Matt: Susana, I appreciate you taking the time out. Hopefully people check out your stuff at Polygon and they check out some of your picks. Maybe they pick up Knightfall. Let’s be real. That’s the dream here.
Kara: That’s the whole goal of this podcast right now. To bring back the 90s in the real way to people.
Matt: Thank you for coming on the show.
Susana: Thank you guys for having me. I hope I haven’t talked too much.
Kara: You can never talk enough about Batman.
Matt: Goodbye!