All the excitement over movies like Watchmen is likely to create an opening for younger writers working in comics; after all, somebody's got to provide the raw materials that Hollywood will pounce on after it runs out of classic comics series to turn into movies. At least, that's the hope of people like Ed Brubaker, who recently shared his hopes and dreams with Los Angeles Times blogger Greg Braxton. "Last summer changed everything, you could feel it," says Brubaker, who had no credit on The Dark Knight but ended up getting a payday out of it anyway: "I even got money for the Batman movie because DC felt like there were fingerprints of stories I had written in the movie." In a comics universe where "mainstream" superhero creators and "alternative" creators are generally assumed to have limited interest in each other's work and, in their grumpier moments, to wish each other dead, Brubaker is unusual in having started out in the grungiest of "alternative" circles and wound up writing about costumed crimefighters. In the early '90s, Brubaker was part of the autobiographical comics scene with his Lowlife series, which featured thrilling, two-fisted tales of ripping off his employer, having his artwork compared unfavorably to that of Chester Brown, and needed a haircut. (He also edited the superb, single-issue comics anthology Monkey Wrench.) Brubaker began to edge towards the mainstream, and away from illustrating his own scripts, with the story An Accidental Death, which was drawn by Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and serialized in Dark Horse Presents in 1992, before being reprinted as a stand-alone volume by Fantagraphics. (That must have been sweet, given that it was the rejection by Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson that inspired the Lowlife story "You're a Good Man, Chester Brown.")
Brubaker had done work for DC Comics starting in the mid-90s, but he didn't start writing superhero comics until 2000, when he first started writing Batman. He's currently writing both Captain America and Daredevil for Marvel. But his real interest, from An Accidental Death to his Marvel Icon series Criminal, is in crime fiction, and much of his most interesting work, including his series Sleeper and the new Incognito (which is about a super-powered villain in the Witness Protection Program) has one foot in the world of superheroes and the other in hard-boiled fiction. Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise are reportedly interested in making a movie version of Sleeper, but in the meantime, Brubaker is testing the waters of live action with Angel of Death, a new web series he's created for Crackle.com, Sony's bid for your on-line entertainment fix. The series, which premieres this week and will consist of ten weekly installments, stars stunt woman and Death Proof star Zoe Bell as a hired killer who turns on her employers after suffering a traumatic head injury. (The cast also includes Doug Jones and Lucy Lawless, which must have made for quite an on-set reunion; Bell used to work as Lawless's stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess. Brubaker says that Sony "green-lit it before I even wrote it, and they started filming two weeks after the final draft. I guess that's the world we're living in right now." You can watch episode one below:
