Angeltown's Gary Phillips: Q&A

Posted: Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Posted By: Tim O'Shea

Gary Phillips’ Angeltown, the first issue of which goes on sale tomorrow, is the kind of comic that keeps me interested and enthused about the future of comics. This story is one that I can envision recommending to my mainstream/non-comics reading friends. Phillips, who is an accomplished crime novelist—in addition to his forays in comic writing for Oni (Shotcallerz, Midnite Mover), recently discussed his first work for Vertigo with SBC. As detailed at the Vertigo site, the five-issue collaboration with artist Shawn Martinbrough opens with “a special 40-page issue at no extra cost! Meet Nate Hollis — a Los Angeles-based private eye who's cool as a frozen cucumber and tougher than a box of nails. He's just landed the biggest — and possibly the last - case of his career. When a pro basketball star — L.A.s #1 baller — mysteriously disappears after his wife is found brutally murdered, it's up to Hollis to find him and either bring him to justice or prove his innocence. However, the smooth-talking P.I. soon learns he's not the only one looking for the infamous hoopster, and must navigate between a crooked District Attorney, a ruthless and resourceful gangster, and a deadly-but-beautiful bounty hunter.” SBC thanks Phillips for his time and thoughts. On a side note, this was a fun interview, not only for the insight into his craft, but also for Phillips’ use of the underappreciated word “verisimilitude”.

O’Shea: Is the mystery fueling Angeltown partially inspired by Kobe’s legal plights of the past year?

Phillips: Funny enough, the idea for the Baller arc came about prior to the Kobe Bryant sexual assault/rape scandal that leapt onto the headlines last year. Though once that happened, me and Will Dennis, my editor at DC/Vertigo, realized it would bring a topicality to the story we hadn’t planned on. As you probably know, from pitch to production often happens slower than you would like as the writer given these characters and situations are burning up in your head and you want to get them out there as fast as you can.

In this case, as it is for most pitches, the idea for what became Angeltown went through several iterations before arriving at Nate Hollis and the arena he operates in. But once there was agreement on those basic concepts, I had to come up with possible plots that would, naturally, be entertaining and put the character through his paces.

So riffing on the classic PI story where he’s sitting at his desk brooding and in walks the good-looking dame, in this case Nate comes to see the good-looking dame. Monica Orozco is a lawyer and her client is this high profile, rude-boy pro basketballer Theophus “The Magician” Burnett. Now a lot of cats came to mind in forming Burnett’s character from Dennis Rodman, Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson and so on. I figured appropriating these dudes’ public personas--as they occupy a bad boy archetype--was something not often seen in comics. And as Angeltown is mystery, you have to have a dead body. Then once you mix those two elements together, you ask yourself, “What If,” and it’s on.

O’Shea: Do you look forward to a day when an interviewer won’t point out that you’ve developed a strong African American lead character with Nate Hollis, a rarity still in mainstream comics at present? Would you much rather be at a point in your life (and with consumers as a whole) where they would instead note your use of two to three strong and successful female characters who are more than just props for the men in your story?


Phillips: That’s a heck of a two-pronged question. Yeah I guess black (or for that matter Latino or Asian) lead characters are still kind’a rare in comics as they are in TV and film. But that fact that Nate is black is not a statement of anything other than that’s how I saw the character in my head. It made sense insofar as the tough urban environment he operates in. Just as I imagine other characters as white, as women, what have you. My job is to try to bring some verisimilitude to the page and present a story that the reader will take away something of value; that they didn’t blow their three bucks on ya-ya.

But let me add that being a black writer doesn’t mean that I should only write black characters just as being white means you can’t write black characters. Angeltown is populated with all sorts of folks of various races, ethnicities, genders and persuasions and how they interact.

And while the mini-series contains sexual content, I’m very conscious, or try to be, that the women aren’t there merely as props of sexual conquest to make the hero look good. I hope I’ve shown them as dimensional characters as I’ve done with Nate.

O’Shea: How much is Hollis driven by his father’s tainted past and how much of a foundation to the story that you want to tell is his relationship with his grandfather?

Phillips: The murder of Nate’s police detective father is a source of guilt for him. The backstory is that Nate was away, he’d had an argument with his old man and split from town several years before. One of the things they argued about was Nate following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a cop. But that wasn’t for Nate.

So he’s out in the world (and maybe that story can be told one day) doing certain things, and learns of the old man’s murder. He comes back to L.A., becomes an investigator for the D.A. partly as a way to look into his dad’s killing, and gets caught up in some political shenanigans that gets bounced by the politically ambitious district attorney.

Yet the answer to that murder haunts him and his grandfather, the father of the murdered man. And yes, there is more to the old man than Nate knows. Clutch--he’s called that because he was a clutch player when he was a pro football star way back--has secrets to be revealed too, should Angeltown return.

O’Shea: You’re a successful novelist. What is it about the comics medium that draws you to want to pursue this story in a sequential art fashion, rather than a prose novel?

Phillips: Comics were and remain my first love. Way back when I was a youngster, I wanted to be a comic book artist. Those dynamic Captain America pages by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane’s fluid Green Lantern work, Sterenko’s ‘70s cool Nick Fury, Neal Adams’ stylized realism, that was the shit. But after years of art classes and drawing and writing my own comic book stories into the wee wee hours at the drawing table my dad bought me, it turned out my art teachers and friends were right--I suck as an artist.

But all that work wasn’t for naught. That was how I learned to be a storyteller and if I couldn’t draw the stories I wanted to tell, at least I could write them. So for me, I’m just living the dream by being able to tell stories in this most unique medium of comic books.

O’Shea: Do you think Angeltown would be as effective with its noir element without an artist like Shawn Martinbrough? What strengths do you perceive he brings to the project?

Phillips: Where the hell do I start regarding the great work Shawn has done on this mini-series? If he doesn’t become a superstar penciler-inker after Angeltown is done, then there ain’t no justice. (of course I voted for Kerry, so there may be no fairness in this world). But really, Shawn’s work proves why comics at their best can be such a visceral jolt to our brains. That this marriage of words and pictures is something the geek or addict in us can’t get enough of and it’s because of the artist’s skill, the way they interpret the world for us that we can’t wait to see what else they’re going to come up with. That’s what I feel about Shawn’s art on Angeltown--from the way he portrays the various environs the story takes place in and around, his perfect capturing of mood and emotion on the character’s faces and his sense of composition. The man’s got the goods.

O’Shea: You clearly have an appreciation and understanding of L.A. as evidenced by the first issue. Is Los Angeles a character in itself in your story?

Phillips: Oh yes, Los Angeles, the L.A. beyond the palm tree postcards and shiny Hollywood sign is very much a character in Angeltown. From the streets to the suites, baby, and a lot of points in between.

O’Shea: In an article you wrote in 2002 for American Prospect you wrote, “If it is journalism’s duty to serve as watchdog, popular fiction’s role can be to excavate beneath the surface of the official story line for motivation and, subsequently, richer insight.” Do you think you were able to achieve “richer insight” with this miniseries?

Phillips: Hmmmm. I would say that Angeltown is another effort at excavating what it is that makes us tick as human beings. I write crime fiction because it provides the opportunity to offer readers characters who are degrees of good and degrees of bad. The good guy is flawed yet trudges on, and the bad guy is never truly that bad, they have a point of view as well. The richer insight that fiction allows is the parlor trick the writer seeks to pull off with the reader. Can you empathize with my protagonist yet also while not agreeing with the villain, understand where he or she is coming from? That things are not quite what they seem in Angeltown. For every story told it’s a delicate balance you don’t always achieve, but for me it keeps me coming back to my keyboard.

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