The Ashcan

Mary HK Choi tackles dude-ish superchick Lady Deadpool

Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by Anupa in comics, Interviews, media

Deadpool, that churlish, craggy-faced Marvel anti-hero will be hitting the big screen some time in 2012—played by dreamboat Ryan Reynolds, no less—so like me, if you didn’t know, you’ll be hearing the name and bandwagoning very soon. His gender bender counterpart, Lady Deadpool—girly-churl, blonde and babely—demanded a writer who knows that this is funny, hyper-meta shit and ‘Pool-ies always spit real talk. Enter Mary HK Choi, via phone from Comic-Con in San Diego.

It’s no secret that we heart the TheAwl.com writer and Complex contributing editor around these parts, so when the opportunity to interview Choi for the National Post’s Arts blog, The Ampersand, came up, I belly-flopped to it like an overeager drunk at a fancy pool party. You can read the shorter, more newbie-friendly conversation over there, but the full text is here for the comics and writer geeks out there.

You’ve said your foray into comics happened after childhood. What was the first comic book you read?

I remember reading Arkham Asylum when I was really small, only because my brother had it. It was a really, really beautiful book; creepy and enigmatic and the cover was very beguiling. I remember being young enough to be completely spooked out by the whole thing. But then, as far as sort of a real entree, I sat down and read Preacher. That whole series had a good and substantial long run, so I sat with that and ate its brains out. I think at that point I was good and hooked.

Were you a Marvel fan before you began working with them?

Yeah, I guess that’s the irony. That I’m like “DC, and then Vertigo” and then I was like “and then MARVEL!” But I would say that my familiarity of the comics universe at this point, Marvel’s been pretty much more of what I’ve learned about. And I’m not trying to give you a very diplomatic answer, and my admiration for the “other camp” is not at all compromised. It’s just what I got into and what was around me at the time.

So given the fact that you were old enough to form opinions about these things, did you care about the portrayal of female characters in comics?

I did care. One of my favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite comic books to date is Zero Girl by Sam Kieth. To me, that was a very realistic, poignant, but not precious, depiction of a chick’s coming of age story. And after that, I read this series called Alias by Brian Michael Bendis to which a lot of people are like “J-GAR!” and I’m like, “No, it’s something else!” The character’s name is Jessica Jones—I love how pedestrian that is—an alcoholic private investigator who has a huge backsliding, fall-from-grace because she was previously a super heroine and had these great, altruistic motives and now she’s just cobbling and cajoling a living together and is a mess, and unceremoniously prancing into booty calls and stuff. It’s incredibly dark and her psyche is sort of wounded, but it wasn’t stereotypical or flat. It was very nuanced and studied. A lot of people just assume that it’s all these bulbous-glanded chicks with 18-inch waists, but I came into it so late that, blessedly, other more realistic avenues had already been explored and more complex aspects had been available to me.

And that approach is clearly something you applied to Lady Deadpool.
Totally. And these are two women I’ve mentioned who are not unorthodox in their appearance, in the sense that they’re not laced up or buttoned up. They’re just sort of figuring things out and in transition. But, if you look at it, there are other very statuesque, more ubiquitous-physique ladies who are totally badass and totally developed in their characters, too. Take someone like an Emma Frost—that’s a pretty actualized character, AND she’s a freaking bombshell. She looks amazing, and in white no less.

What does Lady Deadpool have that we haven’t seen before?
It’s just so weird because I can sit here and tout all these things that I’ve done that are (sarcasm) wholly original and never been done before! I think that’s kind of a slipper slope in the sense that I don’t know 100 per cent what’s out there. I will readily admit that I’ve skimmed merely the surface: it’s like small triangle versus iceberg. But the thing I enjoyed about writing Deadpool is that he is completely out of his tree. He’s a complete lunatic, he’ll say whatever and it will be totally linear vis-a-vis his own mania. So there’s that huge disconnect, and a disjointedness to his response to actual stimuli that the reader sees or that anyone who is interacting with him sees. Lady Deadpool is hot, badass, has a bodacious body, but I actually really like the fact that, the way I wrote her, she comes off like a total meathead. She’s very open and crass. I didn’t want the translation of Deadpool’s temperament to the female gender to be like, “Oh, you know, she’s dry!” and “Rapier wit!” I didn’t want it to be meta and ironic because she’s a chick and therefore more graceful in her humour. I wanted her to be exactly like Deadpool, but with female wants—when she sees a guy, or has an opportunity to binge eat, she would just be really into instant gratification. I like that she kind of talks like a dude which, if anyone meets me, they’ll see the parallels in how lazy I was in writing her dialogue because it’s the shit I would say.

Is she for guys or girls?
I think she’s for both. I can definitely see detractors in both genders; guys being like, “Who talks like this?” and girls being like, “Oh god, who talks like this?!” And then both genders thinking this is so déclassé, there’s no real goal here, what’s actually happening? I can totally see people saying that, and they would not be remiss.

So how did you hook up with Marvel in the first place?
They approached me. It’s no secret that my brother, Mike Choi, is a comic book artist and he’s been very well received and has been doing it for quite some time. They do have these boiler plate roles as to who they’ll let submit for them. There were definitely parameters that I massaged myself into because I am previously published and have written little fiction-based, almost fanfic, type things in the front of a magazine that I had launched several years ago. And I have done preorting and actual magazine stories, features and cover stories. I did fall within the scope of being previously published and I understand that it’s completely typical that I do have the background that I do.

But it’s like, you want things right? I launched my own magazine that died, and I was at a bunch of other magazines and those died, and I’ve launched several other magazines beyond that. I did a couple of vanity projects for different corporate clients like PepsiCo and Samsung and Nike. So I was doing a bunch of things, and figuring out what puzzles I wanted to get into. I got into blogging because I was like, “What is this WordPress, HTML thing that I need to know about?” and I was writing for The Awl for a while and I got to do a bunch of food reviews and movie reviews. And just because The Awl was so new, and because they’re so amazing, we had a lot of rapt eyeballs on us. So I know that a couple of reviews I had written were well-received—like I did something for V and 2012 and Avatar. It was weird because I had known the primaries at Marvel for a while, like CB Cebulski, who was like talent scout, writer, editor, and he just got a crazy VP promotion this week. I’d known him socially because he lives in New York too, and my brother lives in California, so we’d gone out for drinks and I’d seen him at events. But I don’t think it occurred to anyone that I’d write for them, and to this day I haven’t gotten everyone in a room and been like “Listen, how did this cross your mind?” But I think there was talk of a meeting where an editor I’d never even met mentioned my writing, as far as they had read it on The Awl blog, so my name started circulating. And when I found out I was ecstatic and being uncouth—spazzing out basically. So the ball started rolling from there.

What was the character development process like?
That’s the thing that’s so rad. I’m writing the first Lady Deadpool one-shot. So while Victor Gischler had explored that this person exists, there wasn’t a lot in terms of what her personality should be. I’m incredibly lucky and blessed that I surreptitiously waltzed into that nexus. It was totally footloose and fancy-free. All I knew was that it had to happen in the future in terms of continuity for other things that were going on. But in the nature of all these Deadpool offshoots existing is that there are also all these other simultaneous strands of parallel-running, and not-parallel-running universes. So I could have ostensibly put her not only in any timeline or timeframe, flux capacitor, or whatever, I could also put her geographically anywhere. So with that much of a loosey-goosey XY, I chose the setting as New York in a one-room apartment with the major crux of the incident being that she can’t get her TV to switch on. Because that’s just hilarious: to take it so myopic that they’re like, “You can do ANYTHING!” and you’re like “Alright, I’m going to do this.” With that in your crosshair though, you can really talk about her.

What was the biggest writing challenge when it comes to going from media to fiction?
Figuring out how much you can get away with saying in 22 pages. There wasn’t a set beginning and an end, so I got to do whatever I wanted. It was kind of like an out-of-body experience. I have no muscle memory or cerebral memory for what curtailing my story into 22 pages feels like. So you overshoot: you cast this impossibly wide net, with holes and tears and dredge up so much crap like toilet seat, old boot, all this crap you can’t use. The first thing I did was sit and write every personality quirk I would need for all the characters, and then I cobbled their interactions. With magazine writing, you sit there and put the LEGO pieces together as a house, and you have your green swatch so you know how many little divets you get and that’s your word count. I can do an interview and think, “that’s my pull quote, my intro.” With this, I couldn’t identify any of the markers, and not only that, there weren’t markers given to me. They were markers that I could conjure, which is just batshit. You can drive yourself crazy being like, “Is that good? Am I brilliant? Am I retarded?” It’s kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure, except it’s got a bajillion pages and you’re constantly flipping and you don’t know where you’re at.

What was the timing of the process?
It was sort of leisurely in the beginning, where I was able to wool-gather and be all precious and pretty about it. And then when something was due it was due. So I got my beats in, I got my script in, I did the edits and the edits beyond that, smoothing a couple things out, location captions. Due-date to due-date, those things were really fast.

What are you going to take away from this experience?
I want to do more fiction. I’m in a very lucky position where during Lady Deadpool I did another 11-page digital with Marvel for another property called Shanna the She-Devil. And that was only 11 pages, and after agonizing over 22, 11 went really quickly. So hopefully I’m getting faster at it. But I definitely want to write a feature-length script for a movie. I’ve tooled around with writing a sitcom pilot with a friend, and that took fucking forever—I couldn’t believe it. So hopefully I’ll just do this, while I do the other thing.

What’s been the most interesting thing about entering the comics world?
I, like, descended upon this whole industry, plucked from the sky—and I say ‘descend’ not like there’s a hierarchy, where I’m waving from an ivory tower but I just came out of nowhere. And with my brother being who he is, it’s like, I don’t know how dubious people are of my merits on a one-to-one basis because I am blessedly ignorant of all of that. But, I think the really nice thing is that—and I know I’m really new—but I don’t feel totally unwelcome. I think that that is surprising. Not that I was like “I thought these guys were assholes! They’re not assholes!” It’s not that, it’s just, you know, people are genuinely inquisitive about where I came from, and curious about my brain and my process because my brain used to do different stuff. And I think I’m really lucky that I know it’s a huge, huge leap from what I do to what I’m doing now. If writing a book for Marvel was the only thing I wanted in my whole life, from when I was a kid until whenever, and I thought about it every day, and there was a patron saint of sequential art that I prayed to and I had a medallion and an amulet…..I would probably, not be disappointed, I’d just have so much invested. Every negative word or disappointment, or every edit I’d have to do would feel like this huge concession, or disappointment or some huge chink in my armor. I’m just doing this from a vantage point that it’s the coolest freaking opportunity I’ve had in a long time, and that’s rad, and I’m really curious what becomes of it. And I really, really hope I get to do it again. And if I don’t I understand—(laughs) it’s not you, it’s me, and that’s fine. I’m glad I have a tougher skin and I’m not so new to the ways of the internet that I stalk message boards like, “No you’re wrong! My intention was this!” I’m in a bubble about that stuff, which is nice.

What has the reception been like?
It feels different. When I went in I started waving like the Queen and there’s a huge flotilla that I got to stand on—No! I’m kidding. Nothing’s changed at all. It’s exactly the same. In fact, I went to buy my comic and I was like, “I’ll have FIVE of those, please!” And he looked SO dubious. He was all eyebrows, and the intonation was like, “This piece of shit?” And my bottom lip was quivering, like, “Yes, I’ll take five,” gesturing with my hand. I’m here as a creator amongst a grip of real creators, so it’s much more of a fanfare at home where all my journalist friends and media people-friends are TwitPic-ing their comic book. And everybody’s like, “Hey nerd, I haven’t been to the comic book store in 20 years!” So that’s been really entertaining, they’ve been really supportive.

And the biggie question: why would you say comics are important?
That made my heart lurch. They’re important. I’m gonna go in here. Thinking about where we’re at with technology, how much has changed in our lifetime, how quickly information is processed and eaten, and how we’re all these great big minnow-eating whales that float with our mouths open and all this fucking shit comes rushing in and that’s how we get our sustenance…Everything is so ephemera. News happens really fast and we know every angle of it as soon as it happens. We read stories really fast and the story-writers are going even faster, and everyone is just disgustingly prolific and engorged with information, addicted to getting the information and addicted to putting the information out there. And then think about your RSS feed. Now think about someone having to sit there and draw that for you. The thing that blows me away about comics is that some person sits down, and hunches—they may or may not have lumbar support, I don’t know—and with their hands and brain, they draw an entire piece of art for every snippet of words you’ve committed. That’s, like, kind of beautiful, and it’s heroic and it’s romantic. We’re talking about paywalls, and how we’re gonna monetize news, and this seems like an unfathomably incongruent input-to-ouput to sales to supply and demand-analogy. At the end of it, it’s like opera dude. It’s important. It’s broke if you think about it in terms of money, but someone sits down and makes you a piece of art work, and does it over and over again for each page. And then does that over and over again to tell you a story—and that’s just sick to me. And the fact that it’s print, you know? I’m sure if I had a film background you could talk about it in terms of visual fodder or mis en scene, but I’m from a print background. I will try to make a magazine til the day I die, to cantankerous mocking and derision from all bean-counting people. But I fucking love that. Give me something I can hold—and that’s no detraction away from the comic book apps and the iPad. That’s beautiful. That’s really cool, it’s the future. It feels great. But this is an art form and it’s so noble and it’s important and it’s a wonderful unifier, and it’s a great way to get a story. Everything that you find engrossing on a page, someone has put there for you.

Tags: comic books, Comic-Con, Deadpool, featured, Lady Deadpool, Marvel comics, Mary HK Choi, Mike Choi, reaching for the stars, Ryan Reynolds, stanning out, the awl, women writers, writing