James Robinson: That will definitely be a theme that runs through the book, the monumental excesses that Greg and I get up to while we are attempting to come up with ideas for this character that we, at first, have no affinity for. We do enough drink, enough drugs and enough sex that we begin to enter Airboy's dimension and talk with him and experience life from his perspective.
When did you realize you wanted to pull this character out of the public domain and put him into a book?
I saw "Adaptation," and I began to get ideas. I pitched it to Eric [Stephenson] and explained what I wanted to do in terms of showing me and Greg doing things that people don't generally want to be seen doing, and he loved the idea. I wanted to push it all the way.
Why do you think these characters sit, relatively unused, in the public domain?
Some people don't realize they're public domain, and sometimes there's a reason why they became irrelevant. You can only do so many serious, grim and gritty reinterpretations of public domain characters. The big group of them, Nedor [Publishing], which is where Alan Moore took a lot of the characters he put in "Tom Strong." Dynamite with Alex Ross also did that [in "Project Superpowers"]. But those characters are kind of lame, so you can only take lame characters and make them grim and gritty so many times before people call B.S. Really, a WWII boy aviator in a plane with flapping wings called "Birdie" -- well, I guess it's kind of amazing when you put it like that actually -- but it's a character that has an appeal to a certain kind of reader and not to everybody.
It sounds like it would be pretty easy to take these characters that were once very sincere and serious and pull them across the irony threshold to become a laughable caricature -- but it doesn't sound like you and Greg are doing that. It sounds like you're taking him seriously and treating his emotional reactions about his relevancy in the world with dignity.
You take someone like Batman, who has changed and evolved over the decades. If they'd stopped publishing "Batman" at the height of the Dick Sprang stories he would've been quite a campy, silly character, fighting villains on giant props and all of the things back then that Batman was known for. I could see how you could poke fun at that, too, but you see how a character can evolve when it grows with the culture who reads it. For today's reader, Batman is a very sophisticated character and you can add that sophistication if you want to. With Airboy, the idea of this young man that finds himself in our world when he was fighting to keep it free from fascist tyranny, and we haven't really changed for the better. Those are the questions we've been asking.
What has Airboy been doing since he last appeared in comics?
He's just been in his world, fighting Nazis and thinking everything is fine. We take him on a drinking tour of San Francisco; the gays in the Castro think he's adorable. You know, he's got to experience all of [our world] before it drives him crazy and he has to go back to his world -- and we go with him.
Esta última portada pertenece a la reedición de IDW de los cómics de Airboy de los '80, los de Eclipse, por Dixon y Truman.
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