I recently got a chance to speak with Matt Fraction. Fraction is part of the writing team that revitalized Marvel Comics‘ Iron Fist. He’s recently started writing Ma

THE COMIC BOOK GUY: First off, I wanted to ask you about “Thor: Ages of Thunder.” Is that something that came up spontaneously or something that you were moving towards?

MATT FRACTION: I never— and people might argue that I still don’t — but I never understood Thor. It was one of those characters where I never quite got it. And early on in my relationship with Marvel I told my editors there, “Oh hey, I’m not the guy to talk to about a Thor mini-series.” I very specifically remember saying that, because I didn’t get the character. It was all thees and thous and I just didn’t get it.
But then I got it.

I was at inker and writer extraordinaire Andy Parks’ house, and Andy has an original (Jack) Kirby Thor page. And something about looking at that page — and it’s not even a particularly spectacular Thor page, I think you could argue, as far as Thor pages go — but there was something about seeing it in its raw form like that. I suddenly got it in a way that I never had before.

And then I started bugging Warren Simons, the Thor editor who’s my editor on “Iron Fist,” “Iron Man” and a couple of other things with ideas. Things like, “Oh hey, you know what’d be cool in Thor, an army of skeletons while it rained blood.” You know what I mean? Just all these rediculous ideas would come into my head and I’d just throw them out there because — well because I’m a jerk I guess. (both laugh)

Eventually it came to a point where, it wasn’t a conscious audition but it was kind of auditioning for a mini-series. Then the opportunity came along to do this and I was like, “Sweet! Finally I get to put all my stupid ideas in one place.”

So it’s a chance to do Thor as I understood it as I had my sort of revelation about him. Sort of a, “This is the greatness that I see about Thor.”

TCBG: So you kind of move toward him once you understood him.

MattF: Once I understood him I couldn’t imagine not telling Thor stories. Once I had, experienced the character for the first time, it was I could do not to think about it.

TCBG: And “Ages of Thunder” is kind of a good introduction to people who aren’t used to it. It does a good job of letting you know what he is. Which is Thor is a gods ass kicker.

MattF: Yeah, I mean they don’t give thunder to the lightweights. (both laugh)

TCBG: Well, beyond that, you now have the Secret Invasion Thor. What can we expect out of that.

MattF: In the main Thor book Thor has sort of, as the Asgardians do, they’ve regenerated themselves post Ragnorok. And part of this is Thor wanting all of the gods, not to ascribe motive, but sort of to reconnect the gods with man. He’s positioned them in rural Oklahoma. And so the problem is, that these Skrulls are coming and they don’t just want to fight they want to save man. They’re sort of Skrull crusaders in a way, there’s a religious aspect, there’s an aspect of faith to their war. And so they’re going to come for gods. And Thor, buy putting Asgard in rural Oklahoma has endangered the very people that he sort of wanted to honor.

So it’s Thor realizing that the Skrulls are coming and he has a town to protect. He has two towns in that he has Asgard and this town of mortals that never did, well, “they never did nothin.’” So it’s Thor facing a war on two fronts. It’s Thor trying to protect Asgard and Thor trying to defend this town.

TCBG: And is that the reason that Thor’s not wrapped up with the God Squad that Hercules is sort of leading?

MattF: Well, it’s not necissarily the reason but…Let me not answer that because I don’t want to step on anyones anything. But all will be revealed.

TCBG: Well, along those lines, is “Invincible Iron Man” going to tie into Secret Invasion in any way?

MattF: Well the first arc is pre-Secret Invasion and then the second storyline is post-Secret Invasion. There are absolutely repercussions and ramafications. The Secret Invasion is going to have a very profound effect on the story but Secret Invasion is so big, it’s kind of its own thing. So the second storyline deals with the ramafications.
The Secret Invasion comes in between and the status quo has changed between the first arc and the second arc. It’ll all make sense in the reading.

You don’t have to know anything about Secret Invasion to read “Invincible Iron Man.”

TCBG: I was asking because Iron Man is really at the core here.

MattF: Exactly. And that’s the thing, he’s such a major character in Secret Invasion that to do a tie-in would be superfluous.

TCBG: Well, in that regard he was also a major character in Civil War and so you had to have come into this while everybody hated Iron Man.

MattF: Yeah, that was really one of the reasons that I wanted it.

TCBG: Oh really?

MattF: Yeah, I really aggressively wanted it. He’s so hated, he’s so despised, he’s so damaged at this point. He’s held in such low regard that he’s just a great character to write.

TCBG: Well, do you think that was warranted?

MattF: Um, I don’t think it’s my place to say that people were right or wrong for people to react to stories the way they reacted. Brian did that terrific, “The Confession” story where Tony still thinks he made the right decision but the price was too great and he wouldn’t make it again. That’s what’s important to know.

MattF: So I don’t think it’s necisarily warranted, I think he’s gotten a bad rap. So what I’m really looking forward to doing is reminding people who Iron Man is and why he’s a hero worthy of their love and admiration.

TCBG: And how do you see him as a character, other than being worth of love and adoration?

MattF: He’s fantastic as a character. As a hero he’s a cross between Robert Moses and Chuck Yeager with a little bit of James Bond thrown in. So as a hero he’s terrific, as a man he’s direly flawed. He is his own arch enemy, and there’s no end to the great stuff that comes with that. He’s infinitely complex without even getting out of bed.

It’s just a great character to write.

TCBG: So did you fall for the character as Iron Man or as Tony Stark?

MattF: I think a little from column A and a little from column B. I thik iron Man is always going to be easy to like but Tony Stark is just as fascinating.

I said earlier that he was on a redemption arc and it got interpreted to mean redemption for Civil War. But no, he needs to be redeemed for a lifetime of sins. His flaws run deep and to his core and go back years. Lest we forget, this is a weapons manufacturer. And that’s really what it’s all about. He’s dealing with the unfortunate aspect of his legacy, in a very real way.

Once he’s put these terrors in the world, someone is going to make them better. And by better I mean more terrifying.

Oppenheimer would weep if he could saw the capability of hydrogen bombs today.

TCBG: And that is one of the things that I saw in the teaser that Joe Quesada put out.

MattF: One of the things that this guy seems to be dealing with is that, even just his Iron Man armor, he’s put out some really amazing weaponry, that a lot of people have gotten a hold of.

Yeah, and tweaked. You’re not allowed to say, “Nobody touch my stuff.” You can’t really do that and it, again, speaks to the core flaw in his character. Tony Stark thinks that the world revolves around him. In his weakest moments he thinks he can control the world and ultimately he can’t.

I think that comes in. I think somewhere you referred to him as being like Bill Gates and if you look to what MicroSoft has put out, it really lends itself too that. In that technology is always evolving.

Yeah, that whole thing was misquoted and miscontextualized. That metaphor was to explain why he’s losing. He’s this sort of bloated tyrant of the 20th century and he’s faced with a 21st century for the first time. And that’s not necissarily casting aspersions on those whose methodologies differ from his or Bill Gates. It’s just that, Tony Stark isn’t going to survive in the 21st century playing by the rules of the 20th century. And that really is what he’s coming to realize in our first “Invincible” storyline. He’s starting to realize that he’s a bit of a dinosaur and he needs to evolve, he needs to up his game.

TCBG: I think remember when Warren Ellis moved onto Iron Man, he made mention of the fact that he had cell phones that could do as much as Iron Man’s armor could, that they’d never really upgraded the armor in that time.

MattF: Right, but I mean, the armor costs like $4 billion so it’s not like you could armor the entire police force of Paducah, Kentucky in Iron Man suits.

But there are real questions he starts to wonder. Like at one point he’s released a little bomb swarm and he’s wondering, “Can we create airborn vaccines? Can I like fly over Africa with vaccines like a cropduster?” So he’s wondering, “How far can we push this.” It’s one of the thing that we’re playing with for his character. It’s not, “is this strong enough to fight Fing Fang Foom?” Now it’s like, “Hey, how do I fight AIDS in Africa? There’s a villian. How do you do that? How do you fight hunger?”

I mean for all his accomplishments, he’s still a weapons designer at his core, and I’m trying to get him back to the daydreaming inventor in a lot of ways.

TCBG: And actually, I visited your blog and saw your mention of that misquote but where I saw it it felt more like MicroSoft versus Linux where, like with windows, they just keep pilling stuff into it where Linux is pretty streamlined.

MattF: It empowers the user. It’s about user empowerment. If you read the whole quote, I think it’s clear. If you read the portion that that [person] took out of context, that turned into this headache that I had to deal with. But the thing is, what happens when you meet someone who thinks that the Iron Man shouldn’t be piloted by one guy and shouldn’t cost $4 billion. And that’s what this guy — and sure he’s a genocidal terrorist — but he’s applying open source or his understanding of open source philosophy towards terror. And that’s a foe for Iron Man to fight because he’s antithetical to everything Iron Man stands for.

I’m not saying that MicroSoft is good and Linux is bad, I’m saying MicroSoft is old. MicroSofts business practices are old, the philosophy.

TCBG: Sort of the swarm or acting like a hammer instead of a scalpel.

MattF: Yeah. The name of the first “Invincible Iron Man” issue is “The Five Nightmares” and it’s all about Tony Stark talking about his five nightmares. And it’s all, “The Iron Man is going to be come cheap, the Iron Man is going to become disposable, other people will be able to pilot the Iron Man other than me so I won’t have control over the Iron Man and lastly someone’s going to do this without me. And these all come true in the first issue.

TCBG: That’s pretty funny because all of those nightmares are pretty narcissistic.

MattF: Exactly. Exactly, it’s classic alcoholic behavior. Tony is really a dry drunk at the moment.

TCBG: Yeah, and putting him in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D. is sort of like handing him keys and a bottle.

MattF: Yeah, these are very real things that he’s dealing with.

And yeah this entire MicroSoft/Linux thing just infuriated me. Just because it was such a deliberate miscontextualization. If you read the issue, it’s clear it’s not true but no one’s going to read the issue. It just became a thing that I had to deal with.

TCBG: And it’s something I’m noticing these days that even the proximity of a photo to a story can change things and take them out of context.

MattF: Yeah and he absolutely didn’t say what was being said. It was great for that guy, that guy wound up getting a bunch of hits and a bunch of referrals and everything else. And I got a bunch of angry people and suddenly I had to justify shit that I never said.

But that aside, what’s important is that philosophically the “Invincible Iron Man” is Tony realizing he’s got to evolve, he can’t run like a technological Plutocrat. As a hero, as a man, as a businessman, as an engineer, as a designer, as a futurist, he’s been living in the past and needs to develop. And he finally meets someone whose beating him at a game he was never designed to play.

TCBG: Like you said earlier, it seems the Iron Man armor gets more powerful and addresses specific foes and such. But it’s one of the things where it’s not really addressing the problem he’s looking at symptoms as the problem.

MattF: He’s just making the weapon stronger, he’s not making it any smarter. He’s not designed to fight an asymmetrical war, and when he finally comes across someone that’s fighting him on those terms, he’s at a loss.

TCBG: And one of the things to come out of those preview pages is that (Zebediah) Stane doesn’t think he’s a bad guy.

MattF: Oh yeah. He’s nationless, he’s loyalless, he…well he does lack the ‘right and wrong’ gland that most people have. I mean he is a villain, he is a bad guy, but yeah, he thinks he’s just trying to make a living, y’know.

TCBG: Well, and I think the best villains, that’s one of the things about them. I remember a friend and I were discussing Dr. Doom one time and I said that ultimately, the best thing about Doom is that he doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. He honestly believes that the world will be a better place when he’s in charge.

MattF: Sure, he’s a benevolent monarch. He believes he’s a benevolent monarch.

TCBG: So the movie is coming out at the same time as the book. What do you think of what you’ve seen of the movie?

MattF: I’m excited. I’m the guy in comics that doesn’t really like comic book movies. I don’t dislike them, but I’m not as impressed. I tend to dislike them more than my coworkers. But I saw that first trailer right after San Diego (Comicon) last year. I was in a room with a bunch of other X-Men writers. We were exhausted. We were tired of comics. We were tired of each other. Everyone just wanted to go home and sleep for a week and we turned up at the Marvel West offices and they were like, ‘Hey, let’s watch … let’s show you this ‘Iron Man’ Super Bowl reel.’ And they showed us the clip and we all just yelled and went nuts and we just wanted to see it. I was genuinely enthused, and that was before I was writing the book.

TCBG: Well, that was one of the things. If you look at the movie, it seems to be doing about the same thing you are in that it’s looking at Tony Stark and looking at his realization that he has an awful legacy at this point.

MattF: Yeah.

TCBG: Ok, this is going to be kind of a goofy question but I kind of have to ask. Tony Stark is pretty heavily known as a womanizer in Marvel Comics, is this something that’s going to be addressed?

MattF: Yes. It’s like a superpower. He’s great. It’s going to be celebrated. Is that what you mean by addressed?

TCBG: Well yeah, that and if there would be repercussions from it.

MattF: Yeah. He’s in bed with a woman on page four of the book. Like very. I mean, repercussions, yeah, inadvertently there’s a huge repercussion.

But yeah, I love it. It’s one of my favorite things about Tony. I mean he’s in bed with a naked woman by page four or five or something.

TCBG: See listing it as a superpower just cracks me up.

MattF: It’s kind of thing like to me, it’s mostly what I responded to with James Bond. I love Bond as a character but it’s not the super spy stuff, although that’s great, it’s not the action, although that’s great, it’s that Bond always knows what to do in any situation socially. That was always exciting and fascinating to me as a kid.

To be the kind of insecure preteen/teenager and then to watch a guy that looks great in a tuxedo, order the right bottle of wine, sit down at a back baccarat table and win $20,000 and then like nail Ringo Starr’s wife. It was always sort of like g__damn that is incredible. That’s a superpower. That’s what I always loved about Bond was Bond knowing absolutely the right thing to say at any given time. And I want to play that up with Tony is that Tony can’t help but just be that cool.

TCBG: Well there was an interview with Marilu Henner on Jimmy Kimmel, where they brought up Gene Simmons’ constant flirting and she said, that’s just Gene. If Gene were here and no one else was he’d be flirting with the table.

MattF: Yeah, exactly.

TCBG: I’m really looking forward to the comic, it looks like a lot of fun. And Stane is definitely taking a different tactic with Stark than his predecessors have.

MattF: Yeah, I mean he doesn’t want to kill Iron Man. I mean he does, but his ultimate objective isn’t like “mwaha ha ha, you know. His objective is, “I want to prove that you’re obsolete.”

He wants to drive Stark to extinction. That’s what he’s about. And I think that’s something that we haven’t seen before. It’s not, “I’m going to punch you. I mean, I’m going to kill you. Don’t get me wrong. But I want to be the extinction level event that wipes you off the face of the Earth.”

TCBG: And like you said that is a whole new way to look at it. In the past it’s been using a bigger stick.

MattF: Yeah, “My robot can beat up your robot.” But this is a battlefield where Stark has never been challenged on. That’s the basis for the, albeit specious, MiroSoft/Linux analogy. MicroSoft was never designed to face something like Linux.

Not Linux, but the open source movement. The creative commons license is like the bubonic plague to an organization like that, that prides itself on locking down rights and proprietary information. Something like open source is a revolutionary act, so Stark is faced with a revolutionary villain, on the surface.

TCBG: Thanks a lot for your time.

MattF: Sure. Tell Joe I said hi. Take care

TCBG: You too.