Talking with Writer Len Kody

April 28, 2009 by Richard Caldwell
Filed under Featured, Interviews

New and energetic to the comics medium, Len Kody is firing his imagination in all directions, currently scribing one of the far better web comics to be found on the intra-webs, Chicago: 1968. A modest personality with a great respect for knowledge and history, Len’s interview was long-sought by our own Richard Caldwell.

Len, I found your work through the excellent Chicago:1968 web strip, though much of your work is set in times gone by.
Are you a history buff?

I guess I am a history buff, now that you mention it. I’m into Chicago history, in particular. I really get into the research when I do a period piece. You’re creating a world, in a way. Or re-creating one, at the very least.
What I like best about studying history is the perspective it gives you on the present. When it comes to Chicago history, I feel it’s the closest I can come to getting in touch with my “heritage,” in a way. Being just an average white guy of mixed European decent, all I can do is look at the time and place where all of my component ethnicities met and mingled – on the southside of Chicago, sometime during the late 19th/early 20th century – and work from there.
I’m also something of a political junkie. And it seems to me that an understanding of history, especially more recent history, like what happened in 1968, is essential to understanding the politics of today.

Where did the inspiration for Chicago:1968 come from specifically? And has researching for the comic affected your knowledge and understanding of the American political spectrum, or is it all old hat for you?

My grandfather was a Chicago cop in 1968. So for years I’d been told the story from his point of view. It was one of several dozen stories he’d regularly told me that made up the landscape of my childhood.
The original idea for writing a story set in Chicago in 1968 first germinated in my mind in 2003. It was shortly after the US had invaded Iraq. I was in college at the time, and my politics were then, as they are now, pretty far to the left.
My grandfather, on the other hand, was much more on board with the Bush administration’s military adventures in the Middle East. I didn’t begrudge the man for it. He grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. He worked a dangerous and thankless job to help put my dad thorough school, so that I could eventually grow to become a pot-smoking, radical college student with the audacity to question the clearly suspicious motives of my government.
So writing Chicago:1968 is my attempt to reconcile all that.
The thing about 1968, and Chicago 1968 in particular, was that it was the birth of the American political spectrum as we know it today. Before 1968, the South voted solidly Democrat (because they still resented the Republican Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves). And the white working class could be counted on to vote Democrat, too (because the pro-union president FDR made loyal Democratic voters of them thanks to his New Deal). And there were socially liberal Republicans back then, like Nelson Rockefeller, who was defeated by Nixon at the ‘68 Republican convention in Miami. Because before Reagan and his successors had harnessed the apocalyptic fantasies of the fundamentalist Christian sects, the Republican party was the party of the country clubs. They were always pro-business. But it wasn’t until 1968 when they started to ride the wave of conservative white backlash against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the women’s liberation movement. The debacle in Chicago in 1968 was a turning point for conservative white voters who were made uncomfortable by the pace of progress in America during that time. So the Republican party has happily provided them a refuge ever since.
Researching Chicago:1968 has been a long process, beginning at least 6 years ago, in 2003. And perhaps earlier than that, since first hearing about it as a child on my grandfather’s knee. So Chicago:1968 is really the product of a life-long struggle to understand the American political spectrum, and more generally, to understand America and my role as an American citizen.

Have you always been so passionate about writing, as vocation? What authors informed your voice?

You know how some people who’ve been to prison talk about how finding Jesus gave their lives focus and meaning for the first time? That’s what it was like for me reading Spider-Man comics in the 4th grade. Writing comics is probably the closest thing to religion I have in my life. I’ve wanted to be a comics writer ever since I’ve known there was such a thing. And I can pretty much say with certainty that every decision I’ve made in my life since then has been wholly or partly informed by my desire to write comics.
It might be uncool for me to say this… fuck it. My earliest influence was Stan Lee. And it wasn’t even his writing per se that really inspired me. Because a lot of that 60’s Marvel stuff seemed pretty corny to me even then, at 10 years old, whenever I could get my hands on the reprints. At the time he represented for me the absolute height of success that a comics writer could achieve. And he still does, to a certain extent. I think Stan is the patron saint of all comics writers. He’s the archetype, and we’re all just variations on a theme, true believers!
It doesn’t hurt that he created a universe of characters that represent some of comicdom’s earliest attempts at complexity. I’ve always been a Marvel guy, but the greatest character Stan Lee ever created was Stan Lee. And it’s that part of the Stan Lee mystique that continues to influence me to this very day.
There’s only a narrow window of time in one’s life where a book can change the way you see the world. I was 11 or 12 or so when “Kraven’s Last Hunt” by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck blew my mind for the first time. I think what I responded to in “Kraven’s Last Hunt” were things that I did not become aware of until much later. For instance, the repeated use of the modified William Blake poem “The Tyger”, and the incorporation of some of Blake’s mysticism and philosophy into the story, is stuff that I couldn’t even start to unpack until my early 20’s, when I began to study William Blake and his heavily illustrated poetry.
Blake is one of my favorite poets because he was actually one of the first comics writers (excluding cave-painting prehistoric shamans, I suppose). Blake was a visionary poet who literally saw angels and reptilian creatures on a regular basis. He created his own cosmology that included interpretations of Heaven and Hell that weren’t entirely Christian. His “illuminated texts” represent his writing at its most complete and transcendent. He was a printer and engraver – a member of the working class – and he developed a method of incorporating his poetry and artwork into a single, cohesive hybrid art form (which Scott McCloud would later define as “comics”) by engraving both words and images onto a single plate so that they could be printed as a holistic unit and distributed to the masses.
But “Kraven’s Last Hunt” was only the first step in creating my own, personal cosmology. My biggest influence these days is the Holy Trinity of British comics writers: God the Father – Alan Moore, God the Son – Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison – The Holy Spirit.

All of those names you mentioned- Stan and Blake, Moore, Ellis and Morrison, even Marc DeMatteis- all are writers not just of fiction, but persons with distinct character and ideals. Their works attract notice because there is often the high concept being tossed about and exemplified and hopefully passed on for consideration by the reader. Now I could see how the same inspired writing could show in Chicago:1968, but for you are there yet any other precepts, other stories that you would like to oneday explore?
Or to put it another way, do you think that Spider-Man could still be used for educational or thought-provoking tales? Is it an appeal of comics that, should the archetypes become too stale and worn, that whole and brave new worlds can be created instead, with the ease of some drops of ink and a few well-crafted words?

Well, I’m no Carl Jung, but I suppose an archetype is an archetype because it’s immutable. Cultures and contexts change. Civilizations rise and they fall. But mankind always has and likely will populate his world with gods and monsters.
The writer’s archetype is the shaman. And shamans, through ceremony and storytelling, use the signs and symbols of his or her culture to make meaning. Human beings dwell in a world of meaning. Without stories to model the passage of time through linear plot, to present for us a relationship between cause and effect, to show us people as individuals with sets of characteristics independent and separate from one another, then perhaps the phenomenological world as we know it wouldn’t even exist. At the quantum level, for instance, where human consciousness can only barely penetrate because of the near infinite smallness of the particles involved, protons and photons affect each other from great distances and exist in simultaneous states of matter and energy – the rules of linear narrative simply don’t apply. Shamans told stories of the gods, seemingly, to explain phenomenon – Thor makes thunder, Chronos makes time, and Atlas holds up the sky. These shamans appeared to pay tribute to the gods who made the world. But, perhaps, through storytelling, the shamans were creating the gods, and hence, creating the world that we all perceive.
So yeah, the writers that inspire me are shamans in their own way. As all writers are, or should at least aspire to be.
The superheroes that populate today’s comic books are our own post-modern mythology. It is no easy task, I think, to create a god. If you think about most of the superheroes around today, almost all of them were created in the 30s/40s, and in the 1960’s. Both of these decades were huge pivot points in the 20th century, times like crucibles out of which immortal supermen were born. Do we live in such times now? Only History can judge. In the meantime, seize the day, my friend.

And what of today, and tomorrow? What’s ahead for Chicago:1968 (trade collection, please)? What stories are itching to break out before THE MAN condemns you to more respectable work, like lobbying for pharmaceutical companies?

The Future!
Well, I’ll continue to put out the Chicago:1968 strip at my own site (via webcomicsnation) and on the Image/Shadowline site until I see the story through. Afterwords I’m hoping to see it published through Shadowline.
There’s going a be a change in Chicago:1968 in the very new future. With the most recent update, pg.45, where we witness the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, we’ve officially “put to bed” the first half of the story. All the context has been set. The second half of the story will focus exclusively on the Democratic National Convention. To reflect this move from one chapter of the story to the next, and because of personal decisions made by myself and my creative staff, Jenny Frison will be moving on from Chicago:1968. I’ve already gotten unofficial confirmation on a new artist. It was only the other day, so I don’t feel comfortable announcing his name just yet. But he’ll be on board for our first update in May. So stay tuned for that.
In the meantime I’ve been developing other creator-owned properties, which are in various stages of development. Chicago:1968 is very research heavy. so I’m kinda looking to do something a little less so. There’s a Sci-Fi thing I’ve been tinkering with for a bit now, about Pluto and insects and high school. I had to shelf it while I focused on getting Chicago:1968 out on a weekly schedule, especially once Shadowline got involved. I’ve been working on some work-for-hire projects, too. Which I will announce at the appropriate time.
In the more distant future, I’d like to do a follow up to Chicago:1968. I’m thinking of going even further back into the past for inspiration. You see, when I first conceived of Chicago:1968, the war in Iraq was the issue of the day. This time I’d really like to do something about the economy. Two specific events show some promise. The 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, also called “A Century of Progress” because it took place on the centennial anniversary of the city’s founding (not to be confused with the 1893 World’s Fair that was the setting for the popular book “Devil in the White City”). The 1933 World’s Fair was intended to provide the city and the country with a beacon of hope during the first Great Depression. It was also the year that both FDR and Adolf Hitler took office as heads of their respective states. So I’m really interested in juxtaposing the alternating feelings of hope and doom that must have pervaded that time, and is certainly the prevailing mood these days. Alternately, I may also like to dig deeper into the Haymarket Square Riot, which was a violet confrontation between Chicago Police and labor leaders in 1886, another time of great economic strife. I reference Haymarket a few times in Chicago:1968, in the form of a recurring series of nightmares that Clark Zomski, one of the policeman characters has. I always kind of saw 1968 and 1886 as being connected by some kind of transtemporal ley line. Whichever way I decide to go, it’s going to have to wait until I’m ready to take on another research-heavy project like that.

So yeah, those are my plans. But, as they say, when man makes plans, god laughs.

http://www.lenkody.com