ComicBuzz Chats With Alisa Kwitney

With the release of Howl this week from AHOY Comics, we are delighted to be joined by writer Alisa Kwitney. Alisa was a staff editor at DC Comics and author of the Eisner-nominated series Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold.

Hi Alisa, it’s so wonderful to have you here with us.

Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?

I am a human, and not a fungal alien parasite. I am the daughter of humans Ziva Kwitney, a psychotherapist and journalist, and Robert Sheckley, a humorist and science fiction writer thought by some to be an influence on Douglas Adams. In the 1990’s, I was a staff editor at the VERTIGO imprint of DC Comics and worked on Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN series. I am the author of many human novels and comic books and some human non-fiction, and I have produced two human young, viviparously, in the human manner.

howl1_8

Can you tell us about the origins of Howl?

My elevator pitch was “Mrs. Maisel meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but I guess you could also say that it’s my take on the classic Delmore Schwartz story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which has the narrator viewing his parents’ courtship as if it were an old black and white silent film. (He tries to shout at the screen, hoping to change the outcome.) Except in my case, my parent’s courtship is a sci fi B-movie from the late fifties. Directed by Roger Corman.

What can you tell us about Ziva Rodblatt?

Ziva is a feisty intellectual and aspiring writer, the one subject in her NYU psych class who doesn’t cave to peer pressure, and the girlfriend of science fiction writer who writes about human women as if they are secretly malevolent aliens intent on taking over his free will. Any resemblance to my own mother as a young woman is completely intentional.

howl2

What made Mauricet the right artist for Howl?

Mauricet has the rare ability to depict subtle nuances of emotion between characters as well as the gift of making interactions genuinely funny. Add to that his fondness for the many things I throw at him — pulpish SF covers, motorcycle gangs from the fifties, the protean horror prosthetics and puppetry of practical effects wizard Rob Bottin. And when he changes something I write, it is always only to give himself more work and make it better.

How long have you been working on Howl?

This is embarrassing. It’s been a long time. In my defense, I was doing a lot of caretaking, and it felt like a really important story, because in so many ways it was the story of my mother and her marriage to my father.

howl1_9

Who is Myrtle Morel?

Myrtle Morel is a psychotherapist who chooses to work primarily with writers, artists and creative types, because she thinks that by co-opting them she will leave the rest of the human race…I mean, because she likes working with creative types. She was based in part on the real life psychotherapist Mildred Newman, who worked with a lot of creative folks in the late fifties, sixties and seventies, including my mother and father, their entire crowd, an abstract expressionist (I spoke to his daughter), the actor Anthony Perkins (of Psycho fame), Richard Benjamin and his wife Paula Prentiss, and the directors Mike Nichols and Paul Simon.

She is also based a bit on the sophisticated older woman character played by Nina Foch in An American in Paris, who gets used by Gene Kelly while he pines for ingénue Leslie Caron’s character. I can never watch that movie without wanting to slug Gene Kelly’s character.

howl3

Can you tell us about the world that Howl is set in?

It’s set in the late 1950’s, mostly in New York City, in Greenwich Village at a time when that little blip of real estate was the epicenter of progressive, cynical, post-nuclear counterculture. This was the time of Beat poets and an explosion of interest in a sociological kind of science fiction and abstract expressionism and folk revival and jazz. You had tourists coming downtown to experience a real Beatnik nightclub, in the last moments before the goatee-wearing, bongo-drumming absurdists and sandaled folk singing poets broke into the wider culture. A lot of what we think of as being hippie culture in the sixties began earlier, in the fifties, with the Beats.

How did AHOY Comics get involved with Howl?

I pitched the idea to Tom Peyer, who had edited Mauricet’s and my previous series, GILT. I didn’t know at the time that he felt about John Carpenter’s The Thing and Rob Bottin’s practical effects the way evangelicals feel about Christmas. I am always trying to think of ways to trick Tom into working with me again.

howl1_10

What has it been like working with AHOY Comics, Mauricet and Rob Steen?

I love AHOY. They have this crazy idea that you should let creative people be creative, but they also get behind their projects and promote them. As for letterer Rob Steen, he is brilliant. At the very last hour, when HOWL #1 had already been lettered, I discovered that there is an entire generation of younger readers for whom script might as well be runic symbols. I mentioned this to Tom and Rob just turned around and redid all the Ziva captions. Unbelievable.

How would you describe Howl?

Hmm. Maybe: HOWL is the story of the science fiction community of the late 1950’s, told from a female perspective, as B-movie science fiction.

Or else: In a sense, this is the series where the rom com sensibility from my chick lit novels fell into the social satire from my literary debut book and then rolled around in the purulent exudate of my forays into body horror. (As I write this, my daughter shows me a picture of a sushi plate featuring fish sperm.)

howl1_11

With Howl #1 releasing on January 15th, how do you feel?

My mother, who was my best friend and mentor, died on November 11. Celebrating her with humor and weirdness and knowing a version of her is about to be released into the world — I don’t know how to describe how it feels. It’s different than any book launch I’ve ever done before.

howl4