Cowboys in Space: Erik Jensen and R. Emery Bright Discuss The Reconcilers
Set in the year 2165, The Reconcilers takes place in a world where corporations have taken over and become the ultimate leaders of humanity. Humans toil for the good of business, and laws form around corporate needs. The world is bloody, dangerous, and violent too, with death matches broadcast as sport. Life is not much better on the moon, where mining bases have been established. But as the story unfolds, a small mining company named Hansen Lunar Engineering is about to become a major player with the discovery of vast amounts of liberty ore. The protagonists of this expansive series include Sean Hexhammer, who’s trying to live down his violent past, and Alex Hansen, daughter of the company’s owner, and a courageous and interesting cast who promise to become more engaging as the series goes on. The titular reconcilers are machines who enforce corporate law, and they hark back to the many sci-fi and comic influences the series thrives on.
“This is a tribute to every fanboy who grew up reading comics,” says writer Erik Jensen. “We felt like we wanted to give something back to the comics community that’s inspired us to do imaginative things.” He’s one of the several people on the collaborative team behind The Reconcilers, which also includes R. Emery Bright, Jens Pil Pilegaard, Erol Hasan Yundem, artist Shepherd Hendrix, and cover artist (and creative godfather) Neal Adams.
The Reconcilers is being described as Gladiator meets Bladerunner. Jensen adds, “Emery and I and Erol and Pil are fanboys at heart. And Erol and I become unintelligible when we talk about comics stuff. Emery and Pil will just say, ‘The geekdom is too thick in here. We must get out of this room.’”
Since we love geekdom around these parts, we couldn’t wait to find out more from the team behind Reconcilers about what they have planned for this ambitious new series. This interview with Erik Jensen and R. Emery Bright delves into what it took to get this first volume made and what’s in store going forward.
Congratulations on launching Reconcilers. So, it seems the idea behind this began life as a movie screenplay—is that correct?
Emery: It started as a story, actually. It began as a series of stories, putting stuff down on paper. Being that I came from a TV background, it was the only way to reference it in my head. But one could even say it was sort of a summary or a treatment of a story or something along those lines. But we quickly realized that the world we were about to enter into was so huge that the restrictions and limitations of the screenplay format would not do it justice, so it turned from that into a series of stories and then we embarked upon issue #1 of what is yet to become 100 issues of The Reconcilers.
Erik: Emery and Pil and I all come from a sort of DIY background. And all of us are big sci-fi geeks. So it’s really satisfying for us as artists to see something that we accomplished together in a world where this doesn’t just get shoved into a drawer. You know, the economy’s been tough, so there are some larger studios like Disney that do half as many movies as they did five years ago. So it’s a shrinking market and a lot more people are looking for work, so it’s nice for us to be able to embark on a serial adventure that we have total say over and we can have a $100 million budget, in our heads anyway, for our little 96-page graphic novel. It was fun to imagine a world like that and actually see it come to fruition, you know?
I love the art and the “human” look of a lot of the characters in the book.
Erik: As opposed to the steroid look and the boob look of most comics? (laughs) Well I joined on as a partner after the initial concept was discussed and talked about, and when it came time to develop the characters and story, all three of us got in a room together and one of the first things that came out of my mouth was how my favorite movies are the James Cameron movies of the ‘80s, like The Abyss, and I love those movies because the people look like they work for a living. I just saw the promo last night in the theater for Sucker Punch, which I really want to see, but everyone in the movie is so damn pretty it hurts. It’s harder for me to relate to characters like that than it is for me to relate to people who work for a living. My grandfather was a mechanic, so that sort of mechanic swagger that Del Toro has, that’s based on a real person. And Emery’s from Liberia, so the character Ekun, his—pardon the pun—roots are definitely in Liberia, and there’s a grounded grandeur to the way that he speaks that wouldn’t exist if Emery and I weren’t friends. I’ve always found that if you want to make good science fiction, it’s really hard to relate to teleportation and laser blasts and, in our case, space elevators unless you have characters whose shoes you can step into. If you can’t step into their shoes, you’re not going to get into the space elevator.
Emery: Exactly. Even as far as the action is concerned, we were blessed also to have a member of the team who is involved in mixed martial arts and would constantly sit there as a voice. Pilegaard would always say, “That would never work on the street” and try to keep us true as far as the action was concerned. Just to bring up a film that a lot of people have seen, Eastern Promises—those fight scenes with Viggo Mortensen. Typically, if we see someone’s throat get cut, it’s so smooth, but that’s not what happens in real life. It’s messy, it’s real, it’s gritty, and I think all of those things can lend credit to a work.
Erik: One of the things Emery and I talked about was the opening to Saving Private Ryan. When you first watch it, you don’t know what the hell’s going on in that fight. There’s one side and there’s another side, but there’s all this stuff that seems to be going on at once. And look, I’m a big fan of martial arts movies and I’m a big fan of what Pilegaard does with the ultimate fighting, but the ultimate fighting is very different from the martial arts. The martial arts are smooth and there’s a kind of poetry to them, and battle has got a guttural thing to it. It’s not a pretty event. Although I think Shep has drawn it prettily, it’s really brutal and rough.
Emery: Exactly. I have studied Tae Kwan Doe, and that’s more of a beautiful series of dance moves, but again, having someone who had actually been in the octagon looking over Shep's shoulder really helped.
Erik, you mentioned the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and speaking of that, the opening to Reconcilers begins things in a way that the reader doesn’t immediately understand. Was that intentional?
Erik: Right, the fake beginning with the guy you think is the hero of the book and he gets killed right away? In terms of us as creators, we’re all hyphenates: Emery’s an actor-producer-writer; Pil’s an actor-writer-director; and I’m an actor-writer-dilettante. But my whole playwriting and screenwriting stuff has always been about implicating the audience and playing a little bit with them. I’m a big fan of Alan Moore’s, and there’s a book he wrote called Light of Thy Countenance. In it, you think you’re in the beginning of one type of story, and then you realize you’re getting a God’s-eye view of the world. You think you’re getting one woman’s dialogue, and he tricks you and you realize you’re getting God’s point of view as she talks to herself. It’s sort of hard to describe what he does, but I’ve always been a big fan of pulling the rug out from people and letting them think we’re going one way and then heading another way with it. Also that opening of The Reconcilers, it’s a combat opening where you see a guy who’s alone in his room and he’s looking at a picture of his wife and family and taking off his dogtags rather than putting them on, and you’re seeing that he has a draft notice, that he has no control over his life. I think that’s one of the present concerns that I have now about the world that we live in, and I place it in a science-fiction context so that it can resonate there as well. So when he goes into battle, he’s not going into battle of his own volition, and he’s not going into battle as a brave person, either. My cousin was in the National Guard in Iraq, and I think he’s a brave guy, but going into battle is a scary event, and anyone who says different is either crazy or a fool, you know? That’s what my cousin said to me. It’s something that I wanted to resonate in the book: The best warriors really would rather not kill. There’s nobody who hates war more than a general. And that’s where we find Sean Hexhammer at the beginning of the book. He’s walked away from that violence because of the violence he experienced with his family. I thought that was a fun way to start the book. Or a poignant way to start the book anyway.
You also brought up the space elevators a little bit ago. I loved seeing those in the story, because they’re based on real ideas, right?
Erik: That’s our tribute to Isaac Asimov. He said, “Once everybody stops laughing, they’ll actually get around to building these things.” But it’s based in real science.
Emery: It is! They do hold competitions every year out in New Mexico. Richard Branson is one of the sponsors and godfathers behind it. NASA holds a competition for a space elevator, and every year they have tons of entries from various universities that are committing a lot of resources to doing this. So it’s very real and it’s something that is forthcoming.
Erik: The idea is you basically shoot a satellite into the air and you use these new hyper-carbon compounds that are associated with all these new materials that they’re developing—a lot of nanofibers. You shoot the satellite into space, and then a nanofiber ribbon descends into the atmosphere. In Reconcilers, we’ve got ours on land, but I think technically you would need to put a platform, like an oil derrick, out in the middle of the ocean and it just follows the orbit of the planet. The way that gravity and orbits work does the job. Then you get a solar panel to power it and you send capsules up and down. And that’s a really inexpensive way to get stuff into space. We were interested in it—again, being the grandson of a mechanic, I’m always interested in how things work. Emery and I actually hired an industrial designer, this guy Alan Quiros and his brother Norm, to design most of our tech because we wanted all of our vehicles and the machines and the living quarters to look like people were actually there. The Hansen headquarters and even the bar that they’re in are based on shipping crates, like the kind that they ship across the ocean. If you’re going to spend that much money to send a shipping crate up there, why spend the money to get it back down? Why not turn it into a building? That’s the idea.
You have a big creative team on this project. How do all of you work together?
Erik: Pil really helped us focus on the combat and the sheer emotionality of what it’s like to enter into the arena. In terms of more of a cocreator/editorial relationship, we talk about what the scenes are going to be. We’d put ideas in a big hat and kind of shake them up a bit. There’d be phone conversations between me and Emery. I knocked out the draft, and then Emery would call me with notes and make me get rid of half of what I came up with (laughs). And then we’d discuss whether a scene was honest and true, whether a character would really say this. Weirdly, I guess because we all share film language, it was a lot like working on a film. It was kind of a George Lucas model, like with Indiana Jones.
Emery: Yeah. I happened to be fortunate enough to work on The Wire with David Simon, and talk about someone who sort of steals from life to create and entertain. That’s my influence. So we’d sit in story meetings and hash through stuff and really try to make sure that it was grounded in reality, ripped from the headlines, trying to definitely speak to what’s present, what people are talking about, what’s real. My wife does women’s rights work and human rights work, so I was always sort of sensitive to the have-not side of things, the disenfranchised, and I’d try to inject that into whatever stories and plot points we were coming up with. Coming from Liberia, it’s not easy. I’m one of the lucky ones, to be here. The country went through civil war and prior to that there was a coup and you feel all of that coming out in The Reconcilers. And if you don’t feel that now, buckle up, because shadow forces around the world have shaped me into basically who I am. I came here after the coup in Liberia that was more or less engineered by mega corporations putting the interests of the people below their own. So it was easy to make the connection once we saw what was happening in the mid-2000s. In my head, that started bringing all that back, and then you lead up to a few years ago, when we saw the marriage between energy companies and mercenaries really start to take hold and crystallize. You look at the personality of the corporation, so to speak, and it’s not a far jump to say, “Oh, wow, this is something that could easily happen,” in terms of them pushing for sovereignty and once they become sovereign, what’s the next step?
Erik: And not to let our politics lead, because we really are leading with a good story—that’s first and foremost for us. But the recent Supreme Court decision that basically more or less allows corporations the same amount of ability to have a say and influence over elections. Corporations seem to have all the benefits of citizenship and none of the responsibility. And I’m not saying all of the corporations, but there are a lot of them out there and looking out for the little guy doesn’t seem to be on many lists. I mean, you can just see what happens to the stock market—when a corporation fires a bunch of people, their stock goes up. That’s interesting. And so we’re interested in exploring that. We’re interested in exploring the anxiety of the people who are making a living experience under that. But more than that, we’re trying to tell a good story that people can relate to. And frankly, right now, people can relate to corporations calling the shots.
Emery: And it’s not all bad. If you look at the process of reconciliation in the book—would reconciliation have saved lives during the civil war in Liberia? Yeah! And so you sit there and you look at a guy like Max Socor, who is a hero of the people and whatnot in the beginning, and you draw parallels to the Robert Mugabes and the Stalins, the people who were heroes and at one point in time they had the people’s interests deeply at heart, and I’m sure there were tears shed because of the casualties of war and people becoming disenfranchised, losing lives, children, etc. So the process of reconciliation, I look at it as, as crass as it seems, I lost relatives in the civil war and perhaps they’d be walking around today if something like that had been place.
Erik: And also the title Reconcilers refers to more than just combat. These characters have a lot to reconcile within themselves, and there’s a lot to reconcile between each other. Their current conditions, which the mass of people have allowed to come into existence, by the end of the book it seems that people have woken up to a sort of irreconcilable state. I love what Mandela did in South Africa in terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There’s a dialogue of reconciliation that takes place. It’s a very interesting sci-fi world, but the concerns are modern-day concerns. Janette Kahn, who was the publisher at DC Comics for 25 years, said really nice things about the series when she saw it. She oversaw the creation of Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Ronin—incredible comic books. And she said, I’m quoting her roughly, “Like all good science fiction, Reconcilers is rooted in what’s going on in the real world and it’s in large part about who makes the big decisions in our world and how they go about making them.” And that’s an interesting concept. It’s something we’ve been interested in. It’s hard to believe that a comic would take on such serious issues instead of pulp entertainment, but comics always have; you just have to hunt around to find them. And we hope that we’re one of the ones that people hunt around for.
Does working on a storyline like this, with its dark overtones and in a way cynical look at how corporations are taking over—does it have an effect on you?
Erik: I disagree with you that it’s cynical. I think people are always talking about, “Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel?” I think people are the light at the end of the tunnel. And that’s a natural thing we’re trying to address in the book, too. People’s hopes and their desires and their bravery in the face of incredibly bad odds, those are the things we’re really focused on in the book. Obviously, we’re starting with our version of The Empire Strikes Back, where things are really, really bad at first. But over the next 100 issues, there are going to be a lot of twists and turns, and all of the tiny details that you see in this issue #1, we’ve got them all planned out. There are very interesting and mysterious things going on. But I believe it is a hopeful book.
So you have the whole series mapped out at this point?
Erik: Oh, yeah. I’ve been a big fan of Dave Sim’s [creator of Cerebus the Aardvark]. He planned 600 issues: This is what’s going to happen and this is what’s going to happen to Cerebus at the end. We’ve got a beginning, a middle, and an end for Hansen and Sean Hexhammer and Max Socor. We’ll have to say goodbye to the series at some point. We don’t want to be like some TV shows who wear out their welcome by a couple of years. We want to actually have a comic book that people can put away when they’re done and say, “Wow, that was an experience.”
If the series unfolds over 100 issues and they’re all 96 pages, like the first one, does that mean you’re planning on an almost 10,000-page story?
Erik: Well, we don’t want to make the Gutenberg Bible of comic books. We’re in a lot of discussions about formatting. Emery and I have been talking about this; we want to release the issues six times a year, so I’ve been advocating for 96-page issues, and I think there’s a lot of good back and forth about that. Right, Emery? (laughs)
Emery: Yeah. (laughs) Certainly there’s a lot that we still have to talk about. But we’re somewhere between, say, 50 and 96 pages, I would think. We just have to have a few more conversations and decide what we want to do. We’re already, I guess, close to that point, so we just have to decide whether we want to bifurcate the next two issues or if we want to combine them into one issue.
Erik: We’re kind of slaves to the industry, and to the economy as well. If the book does really well, it will be easier for us to do these larger, more special books. And if it does modestly, we’re going to have to do a one-at-a-time sort of thing, similar to what one of my favorite books, Y, the Last Man, did. Just do the issues and then maybe a couple times a year release the larger volumes.
Emery: We’ve talked about things and we’re going to be talking with Neal Adams about this and his wife, Marilyn. Obviously, they are godparents to us. They helped us simplify the large subjects we were wrestling with, and when you talk about story and keeping characters real, they were very key in that whole developmental process. Neal will always point out things we need to do. One of the times we went out to see him in New York, a two-hour story meeting we had with him led to a 40-page cut and rewrites.
Erik: Yeah. (laughs) He basically took the comic script, which was 250 pages or something like that, and he slammed it down on the table and said, “Guys! What the hell?” And we were like, “Well…” And he just said, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” And that’s now the sign that we all have above our doors.
But does that mean the story might take 15 years or so to finish?
Erik: Yeah, and let’s hope we get better over the years. (laughs) And again, we could decide to go to the 22-page format and go monthly. We’ve got basically five people working on this project right now, so we have to take into account that we’re not the size of a large publisher.
Emery: Neal Adams happened to do an article called “The Most Interesting Cover I’ve Done All Year,” and in it, he talked about our relationship and how we talk to him. Not having a huge financial war chest to embark on this adventure to start with, we managed to talk him into doing the cover for us, and that’s kind of where we are. This is not a major corporation. We believe in quality and we have good people who are in charge of quality control. I mentioned Erol before—he has stepped in and helped us out. I have to say, I’ve been around bright people, but I think we have the most talented, the brightest, and just the most honest people to work with—people who really get this medium.
Erik: The short answer to the question is we’re scrappy. We don’t have a big war chest. All we’ve got are what we believe to be good stories, good writing, and good art. And as long as we’re true to that, people will come to us and we’ll grow accordingly.
How did you guys first get involved with Neal?
Erik: Emery can talk anybody into anything. (laughs)
Emery: Actually, my sister read an article in the Times about Neal’s work with Dina Babbitt, who was a Holocaust survivor whose artwork is—unfortunately she’s the late Dina Babbitt—at the Museum of Auschwitz in Poland, and they refused to give them back to her. Neal and Stan Lee had done some work on this in trying to bring light to this injustice and my sister read this piece and she said to me, “Oh, wow, Neal’s my neighbor.” We started talking and she introduced me to Neal. And at that time, we talked about doing a graphic novel—Erik and myself and Erol and Pil. We talked about it and I told them, “Hey, guys, guess what? I’ve met Neal Adams.” And of course we all wet ourselves. We had a series of calls with Neal and he got it right away.
Erik: He said, “Cowboys in space. I get it.”
Emery: So we started talking about it and he just took us under his wing.
Erik: A couple of people who have interviewed us have said, “Oh, they got a big name on the book and they just want that big name”—no, Neal was an integral part of the creative process and an inspiration. I remember a long conversation we had about Batman and what motivated The Batman, and a conversation about Deadman and what motivated him and other DC Comics characters. Being from a film background, it was just like an acting exercise. A character can’t just do something because you want him to do something. Which is why I think the third Spider-Man movie falls flat, because everyone was thinking about the spectacular spider and they forgot totally about the man. The same thing with Watchmen. They forgot about the men and the women and just said, “watch.” People were bored, more or less. I mean, the movie did well and I love that movie; it’s a definite guilty pleasure for me, and I’ll never listen to Leonard Cohen the same way again. But the second you start thinking about the special effects and forgetting about the people who are living in that world, then you run into some trouble. You can’t lead with that foot. Because special effects don’t have a foot. People do.
What can you tell us about what’s coming up for Sean and Alex in the series—that you feel comfortable giving away?
Erik: Without giving away too much, at the end of issue #1, there’s a revelation about Sean. And that’s a very important thing; it’s key. That’s going to drive a lot of what happens with him, at least initially. With Alex having taken over her father’s company, that’s a big deal too. She’s a 20-something-year-old woman who has basically flunked out of school and she’s being asked to run what’s about to become a major, major, major corporation. That’s a tough transition to make. She’s responsible for a lot of people. And we’re going to expand the world for each of the characters. Del Toro’s got some interesting stuff in his past. Ekun left his wife and family. The reason is alluded to in issue #1, but there is a whole area of the world to be explored there as well.
Emery: There’s a lot of internal reconciling that the characters will have to do within themselves, as Erik pointed out. There’s a lot of dramatic fertile ground there to explore.
Erik: All I can say is I’m a big fan of artists like Frank Frazetta, Ernie Chan, Alan Moore—ongoing things are very, very appealing to me. An ongoing struggle. Because that’s what life is, you know? The difference between a movie and life is that a movie is over and life goes on. And so do any serial dramas.
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