Sometimes at a press junket it just feels more interesting to ask the subject about her or his own trajectory in contemplation of the circumstances – both cultivated and happenstance — that facilitated their work, and to just let them talk to the camera. In this case we have a truncated oral history of sorts from Matt Fraction, the artist behind Marvel’s latest Iron Man, who was also tapped by the film’s director and more recently SEGA, for enhanced versions of what he’d been laying down on paper.
Iron man lives again!
“When I was a kid I used to make comics but I would call them movies you know and I would thread them on the dot matrix printout paper” Behind him the string of lights remind one of said holes, and of moments in time, as it were, as he shares anecdotes: “You know, with the perforated sides — and tie them to gather with yarn.“ He also shares an “epiphany” he had about “having to stop writing about writing and instead actually write” which reminds me of my favorite scene in The Last Minute where a dude’s imminently Ex-girlfriend blows up on him after hearing one too many bullshit stories about process — it’s a righteous moment that plays out endlessly through history, but I digress.
Matt says he was “incredibly inspired by” the resilience on exhibit in a scene from the biopic Ed Wood and follows this comment with a grateful — in other words earnest – re-enactment of the scene when the legendary auteur misses not a beat in response to a gruff studio heads’ blunt assessment, already envisioning and pitching his next project. After this very effective impersonation of Johnny Depp impersonating Ed Wood, Matt’s tone goes serious and he spaces his words, as he localizes his point: “You know, you have to…. I had to…find that courage….to suck”
He re-visits the point about going from critic to creator, citing two additional elements he viewed as key: “I was young enough and had a low enough overhead that I could afford to sort of starve and go hungry and take my time.” ‘Great advice for those looking to not get pulled in by the machine as it were.
Element two in assessing his own hustle is one he cites as far rarer: A “creatively satisfying day job” helped him get his “creative ya-yas” while also keeping him from getting “particularly desperate” and sustaining his vigilance against the kinds of mercenary gigs that’ve put the kibosh on many a creative hustle. “I said ‘No’ to a helluva a lot more [offers] than I said yes to, and I pitched stuff that got rejected way more than it was accepted…I think that perseverance paid off, and that the people at Marvel learned to like my work and that led to one thing, and then the next, and the next, and that led to Iron Man, and then you learn that the director of the film likes your comics and wants to meet with you and talk about the movie, and then the second film, and then the people making the game wanna talk to you about it too…it’s crazy…”
He concludes, noting that his is not a life that “Could be plotted with a guidance counselor” [ED NOTE: And whose is, really?] “You couldn’t sit down in a room with an adult and say ‘a,b,c,d,e,f,g…it makes no linear sense; there’s a lot of completely random chance, and a lot of hard work. And you know that expression? Visions come to prepared spirits? I think I was just doing everything I could to prepare, and got really lucky. I thank my lucky stars every single day.”
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