We've met a Woodbeck in these pages before, and thought that it was high time we checked on the other side of Woodlesbeckian Thought. Even a move to Saint Paul couldn't stop our intrepid TFO reporter. Terrain was braved, and after a sit-down in the satellite wing, we've got a Stunt Casting for you. Best one yet? Possibly so.
The Factual Opinion: What made you pick Infinite Horizon?
Josh Woodbeck: I'm feeling very self-conscious about this dictaphone. I picked it because it was the one with a cover that stood out the most for not looking like a comic book. Upon looking at it at first, I hadn't realized that it was a guy's face with a green circle in the middle--it looked like something abstract, a warped image--and everything else had "Title of Comic Book" and "Character Presumably Associated With Comic Book" under [the title]. And I guess while I don't know that much about comics, I feel like I had read a handful that are about certain "characters" and I have an expectation about how those are going to go, and I didn't know what to expect from this one. So. That's why I picked it. Oh, and it said Image, and everything else had a comic brand that I'd heard of.
TFO: DC? Marvel?
Woodbeck: DC, Marvel...I'm seeing 100 Bullets from Vertigo on the table. You've actually given me an issue of 100 Bullets once that I never finished. When you spread them out, [Infinite Horizon] was the one that looked different, and I figured because I didn't have an expectation towards it, perhaps it would be better.
TFO: Better than Wolverine?
Woodbeck: Yeah, I don't have anything against Wolverine. I watched the X-Men cartoon as a kid and thought that was pretty cool. I've got no beef with Wolverine. I guess I just feel like I kind of vaguely understand what's coming. It's going to be a short tale, with some background that I don't really get, and then a battle scene, then presumably a cliff-hanger--which is actually exactly what's in [Infinite Horizon] as well, I just expected something else!
TFO: How do you feel about reading the Odyssey as a comic book?
Woodbeck: I guess I hadn't realized that this was the cyclops from the Odyssey. Oh, there's a character named Penelope, sure.
TFO: Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no background...no recap page or anything like that?
Woodbeck: No, it starts with [the main character] all dehydrated, coming onto a beach. Then finding a cyclops...
TFO: Yeah, it's a modern re-telling of the Odyssey. Set in a war-torn...he's in some vague Middle Eastern country, or he was, and now he's on some island. His wife is in a civil war-ridden US.
Woodbeck: OK. It's actually more intriguing, given that back-story. As it is, I just picked this up and didn't really understand it. It felt kind of like a shitty version...not a shitty version, but a version of Mark Trail comics that used to run in the Star Tribune when I was growing up. I'd try and follow [Mark Trail] for four or five days and it wouldn't go anywhere and I'd forget about it. Then in a few months I'd try again and never understood what was happening. So, with that [Odyssey] context, it's something of a more interesting concept. I like the idea of modern, even popular, art-forms playing with classic stories, because I feel that it's so rare that you actually hit upon a new story--so therefore, why not start upon the best archetype there is and work with it. So that's a cool idea to me. But in reading this I didn't get the connection, and the reading was itself somewhat underwhelming.
TFO: Would you say it might work better if you got a chance to read it in a collected edition?
Woodbeck: Potentially? I would give it another chance, given that you've mentioned the story of the Odyssey. Maybe just to see how it all played out. But even knowing that, I don't feel that this is a captivating comic, and you telling me that doesn't make want to pick it up again and look for parallels. I just wasn't that excited about what was happening in this comic.
TFO: Let's go more into that. What specifically did you find underwhelming about this? Was it the story, the art? The whole presentation? The chapterized format? In other words...not extrapolate. What's the word?
Woodbeck: Not sure.
TFO: Give me more.
Woodbeck: Give you more. Expand upon...
TFO: Expand Upon!
Woodbeck: ...upon the broad statement that I found it underwhelming?
TFO: Yes.
Woodbeck: Well, for starters: the cover art was quite cool. The little inset in the back was a pretty cool drawing...it looked like something out of a New Yorker magazine, something like that. I was interested in that. But the art itself was kind of flat...I don't know, the drawings weren't interesting, but it didn't seem to be saying anything with it's lack of detail. Just sort of a flat, not quite human depiction of the characters. It seemed to be...I don't know. Less cool. The characters didn't look "cool," they didn't look stylized, they just looked like they weren't drawn as well as...I would like to see characters drawn, perhaps. That was kind of disappointing. The dialog was written very much in a sort of "epic" style. Where [the characters] makes these bold statements--the dialog between the woman at home, and whoever these two guys are who are talking to her were "epic" as well. They said these "great" things and were talking about "great" things happening, which I couldn't really understand without a backdrop. Almost like it was a jargon that they were speaking, and if you stuck with it long enough, or if you pondered it long enough, perhaps you'd pick it up--but it was all deliberately...highfalutin, without any substance behind it, just a style of an epic. The presentation didn't make me want to put any stake in with the characters. That could have been just because it was a segment of the serial, but when you have that little opportunity to ensnare the reader, I would like to be invited to have something else tied into the events and the outcomes of the characters...and the style of the text just didn't draw me in. I don't know. It may not be the length of it either, because I really disliked the movie 300 for very similar reasons. The first battle scene in the movie is supposed to be this big epic, but I was so bored by that point already that I didn't care when all the legs started flying. I was turned off through the rest of it. I don't know whether I want that in the interview or not.
TFO: No, it's fine. I think it's an interesting point to make. It almost sounds like you're...and I'm probably reading way too much into it...you're speaking to a very general problem that anybody would have with the pamphlet nature of these kind of comics. Not a trade. That they are so short, but they want to tell these long stories. They don't take the time to welcome someone who hasn't already bought into the whole conceit. I mean, this is the third issue. But even by the third issue, if you haven't read the first two, there's little reason to continue after this. You pick up on number three, and it doesn't make you want to go back and read the first two. It doesn't make you want to go on to read number four. There's maybe a masochistic sense of "maybe this will get good, maybe I'll stick it out." But if it's not free...why would you? That's kind of a general problem that, I would say, affects most comic books. What is there that makes you want to read more? And this. This fails.
Woodbeck: I'm with you. This is one of six though, right? I have a tough time imagining that six, of this length is enough to draw someone in. I mean, serialized television clearly has the same issue; where you can't pick up an episode of The Wire, or The Sopranos, in the middle of season three and have enough going on there that makes you check it out from the beginning. But what those have over [Infinite Horizon] is the buzz and excitement of people you like who are watching [serialized television], with writers you like saying, "Do me a favor and check this out" and....with comics, it has to be...Well, I'm not part of a peer group that talks about comics. The people I know who talk about comics are more exceptional...well, I should say more exceptional than "average." Although maybe that's not true, because I do have friends who like comics a lot. I lost where I'm going with this.
With television, you get buzz about certain shows, people who you like writing about certain shows and you think "OK." I'm willing to give this a try, and start at the beginning, because this is going to "blow my mind" and "change my life." With comics, it has to be something truly special--either it's a character you've heard about just by virtue of people you hang out with that like comics, so you believe you "know" this character, and it's going to be the same old/same old, and it just carries on, ad infinitum...or it's something so exceptional that you "have" to read it because it's going to change the way you look at the medium in general. But a six-part series about the Odyssey that isn't "hyped" and where the art and dialog isn't so clever...well, upon first read, I won't go back and check out the beginning.
TFO: So your reaction is more specific to this series.
Woodbeck: Potentially. I would say that it would be difficult for a comic to captivate somebody who is outside the habit of reading comics. To pull those sorts of readers in...unless there is something that's so exceptional about it that you were hearing about it in different medias. Or you know someone who is just adamant that you have to check this out, "or else." And you only get so many chances with those. You can't pull that card with every single comic you come across.
TFO: Not everything is going to be "you gotta check out 100 Bullets." Because if you're pulling "you gotta check out 100 Bullets" about Green Arrow & Black Canary, then eventually people are going to stop taking your recommendation.
Woodbeck: They're going to think you're just spouting off.
TFO: We've talked about this a little bit, but let's be more specific: What's your experience with comic books.
Woodbeck: Somewhat limited. I tried, when I was in 9th grade, to pick up some Marvel. I was taking an industrial arts class--we had to do screen printing and airbrushing--there were....some misfits in that class, let's say. One of them, that sat next to me, was the big scary dude, with the stubble and the stylized glasses.
TFO: In 9th grade?
Woodbeck: No, I think he was in 11th or 12th grade. The class was an elective. I was kind of interested in the older misfit type, they appealed to me. He was talking about the greatness of these Marvel comics, and he was subscribing to them like magazines, had them coming in the mail. There was this interweaving storyline, and it was "cool." So I tried to get into it--it was the Onslaught storyline, right? In Marvel? I just didn't have the wherewithal to follow it. The idea was cool. That there was this "presence" that was showing up across these different comics, and that this was there was this big interweaving thread. Conceptually, it was really interesting to me. But I just didn't have the time or the effort to track it all down and start all the way over. I read three or four books in an attempt to follow that before going "I just...I'm busy. I'm not even busy and I'm busy." I read the Watchmen about a year ago, and thought it was awesome. I've occasionally been in a friends living room who's got some comics and flipped through them during an idle moment. I sort of enjoyed that. I guess. I've watched most of the movies. I've liked super-heroes, historically? I grew up on the Superman movies, the Tim Burton Batman movies. With the recent up tick in super-hero movies, I've probably seen about 2/3 of the recent super-hero movies. Just because I kind of like the spectacle. I wouldn't call myself knowledgeable about comics. That said, I did have a buddy who collected those fucking trading cards? Like Marvel trading cards? I don't know what they were called, but they had pretty cool pictures on them. He was really into them, and he had a bunch of duplicates and gave me a fuck-ton of them. I put them in one of those baseball collecting binders when I was in fourth grade. Through that, I feel like I know most of the characters, what they do...there's also those video games that have come along. So, I feel like I know about the trivial knowledge of who's who in comics, and what they can "do," but it's mostly through a medium besides the comics themselves.
TFO: Have you had any exposure at all to the non-super-hero stuff? The art comics, the autobiographical comics, the American Splendors, the Acme Novelty Library...any of that kind of stuff?
Woodbeck: Very limited. I read a copy of Tales Designed To Thrizzle, which was fantastic and very silly. I liked it as a one-off. When I was a freshman in college some girl was reading Maus, and was going to incorporate that into her thesis paper. That was kind of intriguing, but not so intriguing that I got around to reading it. I don't know. I guess, with those sorts of comics, I've read them like you would read a magazine at the doctors office. You're sitting around, you read the first three pages and think "Intriguing. I'd like to know more," but never get around to finishing it because you don't actually buy them yourself?
Just to make a broader statement about comics: I've always thought comics were kind of neat. But I'm really too cheap to invest myself in it. Sort of a personality flaw. I think it's very cool, and there's enough stuff going on in them that I'd like to know it. I'd like to approach them from a critical standpoint because it's popular entertainment, but it's popular entertainment that you could get more out of than just simple, thrilling adventure stories, if you were just to devote the time to it. But there's just so many of them. Making the inroads takes a lot of time. When it comes to dorky things to find more value out of, I've gone more for modern literature or fucking serialized television. Stuff that comes in a package that I don't feel so self-conscious about. Even though it all kind of a sucks.
TFO: ...
Woodbeck: I sound like an asshole. That'll happen, I guess.
TFO: No, you don't sound like an asshole. How do you want to close this out?
Woodbeck: Well, is that it?
TFO: Well, I can't really think of anything else to say. Because, honestly, Infinite Horizon? This is the last issue I'm reading. I liked the way it opened. The second issue I was kind of ehhh. The art, I realized, just isn't for me. [Noto] is a brilliant cover guy. Gorgeous covers--but it strikes me that Phil Noto can do a cover, once a month. He can't do a whole comic. It's just too much for him. Because this? This is just boring. I read this, and I can barely keep up. I read the first two issues, couldn't tell you how they ended up on that island, at all. There hadn't been any indication of weird cyclops-ey type monster characters, at all. Cyclops showed up, and all the realism that was in the comic--because it was pretty realistic at first--just went out the window.
Woodbeck: A guy in armor who speaks in cyrillics.
TFO: It came out of nowhere, literally, out of nowhere. There's no connection between this and the previous characters, just that main character--but arguably, they haven't really developed any of these side characters. I don't know anything about the other characters after reading three issues of this comic. Nothing.
Woodbeck: Which is pretty poor. Yes, I don't know. I feel like this interview had a pretty glum tone to it. I actually think comics are quite cool. Walking into a comic store is...sort of intriguing, you know? All this stuff that you don't know. Sort of like a Pynchon novel where there is so much information, you could almost touch it--if you were just smarter, or you had more time to devote to it--but I don't have that. I've always liked the idea of comics, and still do. I'm just a tightwad. My wife would want to buy expensive shoes if I was spending several hundred dollars on comics a month, and I just couldn't abide by that.
TFO: And that's where we're going end.
-Conducted at the Brooklyn offices of the Factual Opinion in the alternate wing--visitors to the main office be forewarned that wedding planners are in residence for the duration. Packages can be left with the doorman.
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