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| Michael May ©2021 with friend |
I've mentioned here and upon most of the websites I've appeared upon, (and there have been many), that Michael May is friend of mine, as well as a brother in ways. We've spoken about many different aspects of comics, prose, movies and more.
We are very different though, and while we both might have common areas of interest, we go about writing about what we like in the form of reviews very differently, and our prose and comic writing is even more different. Which is a reason why I always wanted to have Michael writing on sites I wrote upon. His talent is evident, but he goes about things in ways I am unable or differently aimed. As such it adds to whatever the site is aimed at to have his labors upon it.
Being that I think Michael is a very talented writer, I have written more questions for him to answer and consider. (I mention all this for an alert to my bias, but, generally the reader should understand, any interview in the last few years that I've done is with people I've great love and respect for. There is only one exception to the loved and respected and it needs not be addressed, but just to say, I absolutely felt that BEFORE the interview...)
ALEX: You've written prose, doing reviews, commentary, and performing interviews. You've written comics and illustrated prose. You write sermons. How do you perceive your creative fire. Are you writing to share an idea or truth, are you trying to write great works that will entertain, or are you simply following an urge and letting that urge guide you in your choices and decisions? How do you decide which to follow, or do you? Are writer's created, or are they born to do what they do?
MICHAEL MAY: Holy cow, what a great group of questions. I'll tackle the last one first. In some ways, it's the easiest to answer, but there's also some nuance there that needs unpacking. I don't believe that people are born to do anything; not in the romantic sense that we usually mean by that. We get super passionate about things, and some of those things resonate with us because of personality traits that we're born with. But our passions are also created over a lifetime of experiences. So even having a passion for writing is something that develops over time, I believe. And then we get into the talent part and that's even more learned and practiced. I firmly believe that anyone can write. It's just a matter of having the desire to work hard at it. Because writing well is super hard. At least for me it is.
Thinking about what drives my writing: I'd love to say that I start with an idea or truth that I want to convey. That's what makes writing art. There's a great quote from a Nick Offerman movie called Hearts Beat Loud where his character says, "When life hands you conundrums, you turn them into art." The writing that touches me deeply all starts from that place. But I'd be lying if I said I started there.
I grew up on adventure heroes like Robin Hood, Tarzan, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes. They're characters with distinct personalities and motivations, but their stories are also heavily plot driven. The best ones do have some kind of theme they're addressing, though. For Robin Hood, it's the exploitation of the poor by the rich. For James Bond, it's questions about identity and nationalism. So my fiction usually begins with a plot or character that I think is cool and want to bring to life. And as I start fleshing it out, I'm trying to uncover motivations that I relate to and hope that others will, too. I hope that all my stuff has something to say, but it's something that I pull out of the work instead of building on it like a foundation, if that makes sense.
Now sermons are a whole other thing. I preach rarely - I much prefer the dialogue of teaching where everyone can contribute to a discussion - but when I do preach, it's definitely because I have something specific I've been thinking about and want to share. That's so different from fiction, though.
ALEX: You've been in the journalistic side of comic books and popular culture for as long as I've known you. (Since around 2004 for those not knowing). How does covering popular culture change how you write and thereby create popular culture yourself. Do you as an author have a duty to promote others, or, actually why is it that you do what you do regarding journalism in popular culture. What is your reason for doing what you do?
MICHAEL MAY: My motivations for writing about art have changed over the years. I got started by reviewing comics just to get closer to that industry. I wanted to write comics, but needed not only to teach myself how to do that, but also to meet people who were involved in doing that professionally. Reviewing comics was a way to do both of those things. I learned so much about the craft of writing comics by not only reading lots of comics, but also by being forced to then think about and explain in print what does and doesn't work. And the more I wrote about comics, the more I started meeting the people who were actually making them.
So that was why I got started, but right from the beginning, I struggled to define who my audience was. I mean, presumably it was comics readers, right? But was I primarily writing to introduce them to new stuff? In other words, was I basically doing free marketing for what I thought were worthy comics? Whenever I leaned towards that motivation, I only wrote about comics that I really liked. Which had the benefit of being positive, but also made me concerned that I wasn't fully serving my audience, whoever they were.
A different way of thinking was that I was basically Consumer Reports: warning comics readers away from bad comics while steering them towards good ones. But I was never satisfied with that approach, probably in large part because comics readers weren't where I was getting most of my feedback. I heard far more from comics creators and that was always my favorite part of the job. It's super gratifying to hear an artist confirm that you got exactly what they were trying to communicate. And even when I was critical, I refused to get nasty with my criticism and more than once got a thank you from an artist about something negative I'd written about their work. As nice as it is to hear that I understood an artist's intention, it's even more ego-stoking to hear that I pointed out a flaw that they hadn't considered and would work on in the future.
But that's weird, right? Writing reviews for the people creating the comics instead of for the people reading them? So I'd go around and around and eventually decided that I had to be writing for myself. By the time I quit writing about comics for money, I decided that each review was basically a decision about whether a comic belonged in my personal canon of Good Comics. That sustained me for a while.
Outside of studying comics and learning from other people's successes and failures, I don't think there's a big intersection for me between writing about art and writing art itself. Those are two separate itches that I have to scratch in completely different ways. I will always want to write stories. And I will always want to shoot my mouth off about what I'm reading or watching. And I find that I can't really do one while I'm doing the other. I stopped writing about comics as a paid gig so that I could concentrate on my graphic novel. And now that I don't have a big deadline in front of me at the moment, I'm more focused on commenting on other people's work. But not as a paying gig or anything.
Towards the tail end of my time writing at Comic Book Resources, I was getting some pressure to turn in articles that would generate clicks. I had a couple of recurring features canceled that I really enjoyed writing and thought were kind of important, but not enough people were reading them. From a business standpoint, I understand why those decisions were made, but I had also clearly reached a place where I wasn't doing this for fun anymore. And frankly it didn't pay enough to be a job that I was doing instead of actually writing comics.
These days, my reviews are pretty much journal entries for myself. I love it when someone reads and likes something that I've said or written, but mostly I'm just logging what I read and watch so that I can remind myself later if I want to. I use GoodReads and Letterboxd for pretty much everything. And occasionally I'll get sucked down a rabbit hole of watching all the Turn of the Screw adaptations or something and write about that project on my website. And then there are the podcasts...
ALEX: So you've entered the realm of podcast. Does it require different personal gifts and skills than writing and website journalism? Is it more expensive or time consuming than the writing aspect of journalism? What caused you to move from written word to spoken word? Tell me about your specific podcast and what you cover and why?
MICHAEL MAY: Writing is a lonely business. I'm a pretty heavy introvert, so it works for me, but it can't take the place of actual discussions about things. My art criticism pieces don't generate a lot of discussion almost by design. I like to think things through on paper and from a lot of different angles, so by the time the piece is published, I've pretty much had the discussion already. It was never intentional, but I realized a while ago that I don't invite a lot of other viewpoints with my written work, even when I close by saying, "Let me know what you think in the comments." (I'm thinking mostly about my personal website here. It was different at Comic Book Resources, which had a very vocal, if not always polite group of readers.)
Podcasting though is all about social interaction for me. There are a lot of very good solo podcasts out there, but I've never been tempted to do one on my own. My first podcasting experience was as a guest on a discussion show called Nerd Lunch and I loved it. I was talking about the same kind of stuff I would write about, but got immediate responses to my ideas as well as introductions to other people's ideas. And all without having to constantly hit refresh on a comments section and wonder if the next response was going to be insightful or insulting.
So I caught the podcasting bug hard and started a couple of spinoff podcasts with various Nerd Lunch guys as well as with other people. I kept thinking of new things I wanted to talk about and start shows for: Tarzan movies, Westerns, Thundarr the Barbarian, nautical adventures, Christmas movies, etc. I'm a total slut about starting new podcasts or being a guest on someone else's show. It's just so fun to sit down and have these conversations. And when you record them and release them for anyone to listen to, you get to have all new conversations with listeners who have completely different points of view. It is so incredibly rewarding to me.
Last year the Nerd Lunch guys closed up shop on their show after more than 300 episodes. They'd built an amazing community of guests and listeners around themselves, so it felt like there was going to be a big hole in the Internet once their show ended. To try to keep some of that vibe going, I got their permission to start a sequel show called AfterLUNCH. It's just a general pop-culture show where we talk about what we're watching and reading, but we also play some games like creating imaginary theme parks or talking about who would win in a fight between Sasquatch from Alpha Flight and Gandalf.
The Western podcast I do with Nerd Lunch's Paxton Holley has also been a big hit. It's called Hellbent for Letterbox and we're getting ready to release our 100th episode. That's got a super engaged audience too, which is awesome. I love Westerns and I especially love all the recommendations and requests we get from listeners as well as their always polite thoughts on what we've talked about. It's great.
You asked whether it's more time-consuming and that's another benefit. When I write a review or a thought piece, I spend a lot of time making sure that I'm being as clear as possible. I reread and reread and reread again. It's incredibly labor intensive and time consuming. When I podcast, I may have a few notes to remind myself of certain points I want to bring up, but it's way less time than a written article. Having the actual conversation may be as many or more minutes as I would have spent writing an article, but the benefit of its being an actual conversation with real people whom I know and like more than makes up for that.
Financial expense is a drawback though. It costs literally nothing to start a blog and start writing. You can start a podcast for free and release audio files into the Internet, but to actually have it appear on podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher and be convenient for listeners requires a hosting service that costs money. But even then, there are inexpensive options and tiered programs that give you wide outreach without a lot of other bells and whistles.
As far as different gifts and skills go, I can only speak for myself, but I'm definitely using a different set of tools between writing and podcasting. With writing, it's all about the ideas and how well I can put them into words. Podcasting for me is social. It's knowing when to speak and when to listen. And if I'm hosting, it's about facilitating the discussion so that everyone feels welcome and is able to contribute. I'm not saying that I always do that perfectly, but it's what I'm trying to do and it's completely different from writing.
ALEX: In a world of social media I've seen you interact and know people think of you highly, and yet, your journalistic endeavors in written word didn't have huge numbers in terms of comparing to the mainstream or popular culture mainstream sites. Does that reflect how you view what you do, is it what you do and therefore whoever follows and watches is good enough? Why do you not seem to be motivated by hits or buzz? When I was more active I never gave one shit about numbers and that is probably why I failed, but, you seem at ease with whatever happens, and I am both impressed and confused by that. And I leave a map full of burned bridges and no fly zones wherever I've been, you seem to build bridges and build communities. How aren't you a Publisher of a major press? You'd kick ass as such.
MICHAEL MAY: I have an easy answer for the publisher question, so I'll start there. Someone once joked that the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to go into it with a large fortune. I would love to be a publisher or an editor, but not enough to make my bet and roll the dice. Which leads me to something I alluded to earlier, because it's become my mantra, especially where podcasting is concerned. I keep doing this until it's not fun anymore. If I'm not having fun, or my co-hosts or guests aren't having fun, we're doing it wrong and we need to either fix it or stop.
This is something I learned early on in writing and particularly in studying some of my favorite authors. All of the great ones say the same thing about refusing to write with the audience in mind. You have to write for yourself and then hope the audience finds you. If you want any hope at all of creating great art, that's how you start.
It is not, however, how you run a successful business.
There are a billion how-to-be-a-published-writer articles that talk about audiences and how to market to them. They're all correct from a business standpoint and they all make the business sound absolutely miserable to me; always chasing this illusive audience that loves Harry Potter or Marvel movies or whatever and is looking for the next thing like it. You can spend an entire career chasing those trends or you can do what you love. I choose to do what I love, but it's definitely at the expense of business success.
I keep running into this decision over and over again. I decided several years ago that I'd never be a full-time freelance writer. When I was a kid, I had such a romantic notion of what that was like, but then I got to know actual freelancers. Even the ones who 100% love what they do are hustling to find gigs way harder than I want to hustle. And these are people with a lot more talent and much deeper connections to the publishing industry than I have. There's a reason that charities like The Hero Initiative exist: Freelancing is brutal. There are people who are built for that life and are great at it, but I'm not one of them. Giving that up has let me focus on writing for fun.
Same with podcasting. I can't make it a hustle. You'll never hear an ad for a Casper mattress or anything else on one of my shows. I don't join cross-promotional networks. I mean, what it really comes down to is: if I'm not losing money on it, I'm not happy.
How that applies to whatever level of success I've achieved is pretty easy to figure out. I'm a skeptical person, but I'm not a cynical person. I like positivity. I have a snarky bone or two in my body, but they always speak quietly in the back of my head and then apologize. And it's an old maxim that positivity does not generate hits. There's a reason that politicians on both sides of the aisle so often speak to fear in their rhetoric. It's an incredibly easy motivator. Negativity provokes a strong response.
There are horrible things in the world that need fixing and talking about and I do engage with some of that on social media, but I try to do it by promoting voices with solutions. There's a place for calling out what's wrong in the world just for the sake of saying it's wrong. But the Internet has that place covered. It doesn't need me for that. I'd rather be the person saying, "Here's something we can do." Or more often, "This person has a good idea. Let's listen to them."
Like I said earlier, I'm not a natural preacher, but I do feel like I should clarify that I'm a Christian and that my beliefs about that lead me to value things like love and hope and joy. Not that Christians have the monopoly on those values, but these are things that are so integral to my faith that I'm not ever really tempted to give them up for something as ephemeral as clicks or downloads. That being settled, I have to let the audience be whoever it's going to be, even if that's "no one."
Happily, it hasn't turned out to be no one. There are lots of people - and I hear from them all the time - who are grateful for positive, welcoming voices. The numbers may not be huge, but they're super appreciative. And being connected with those folks feeds me too. That's way cooler than being an Internet celebrity.
ALEX: Tell me about what is upcoming on Kill All Monsters with the very talented Jason Copland? With King Kong and Godzilla doing their own match soon, (or as this is published just opened) do you have any plans to focus on the new acceptance in the mainstream with Kaiju? Could there ever be a series of prose that considers Kaiju, or does that need to be visual from the first?
MICHAEL MAY: Jason is currently working on an awesome-looking scifi/crime graphic novel called Full Tilt that he wrote himself and is now drawing. There's no official deadline on it, so it'll be done when it's done. I highly encourage people to watch what he's doing on social media and/or sign up for his newsletter though. The stuff he shares looks amazing and without hyperbole I can say that it's truly going to be like nothing we've ever seen before. It looks epic in every way.
Once that's done, he'll be ready to start drawing the sequel to Kill All Monsters, which is subtitled Manhattan Mass. It's all written; there's just no way to know the timeline on when it'll be completely done and ready to read. Jason and I are both crazy excited about continuing the story though and I've written some pretty crazy, exciting stuff for him to draw. Hopefully he won't hate me when he's done.
That's a great question about kaiju in prose and whether that's a genre that needs to be visual. Personally, I think there's a place for kaiju prose, but then I tend to want a heavy amount of human involvement in kaiju stories. I'm one of the people who had no problem with the slow reveal of the monster in Gareth Edwards' 2014 film. I think it could have had a more exciting lead actor, but I like the impulse to let the human characters have the story and bring Godzilla into it gradually. Other folks strongly disagree and wanted more Godzilla from the beginning. I don't imagine those folks would love a kaiju prose story. But I'd love a novel or collection of short stories about people trying to deal with this threat in various ways.
ALEX: Thank you so much Michael! Please share your social media and various links to let the readers know where to find you, what you've done and where you play online.
MICHAEL MAY: Thanks, Alex! My website is https://www.michaelmay.online and the best place to stay up to date on my various projects, both writing and podcasting. I'm also very active on Twitter at https://twitter.com/michaelmaycomix if people want to interact with me directly and get a quick response.
Kill All Monsters ©2021 Michael May and Jason Copland
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