A few months back writer Simon Spurrier (X-Men Legacy, Number Cruncher) was kind enough to give me an interview for a profile feature I planned to write about him and his work. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in pitching it around, but it seems like a tremendous waste to let it rot in my archives. Especially considering how gracious Spurrier was in giving me the interview and about the whole exercise in general.
So anyway, here is the feature I wrote based off our interview. For those interested I will also post the interview itself in a Q&A form at a later date so you can see his thoughts on some things I don’t mention in the feature. Enjoy.
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X-Men Legacy #4
Simon Spurrier writes comics. He writes comics about lots of things. He writes about six-gun toting talking gorillas and planets that are shaped by the human psyche. He writes about quantum mathematics and abstract fractal ferns, about space faring men of silver, host to the power cosmic, and about perfectly normal men in equally bizarre situations. He’s even been known to write about a little thing called love. Simon Spurrier is a storyteller – and he wants to control your mind.
“If I’m right, and story is a critical and completely core part of the human experience, then telling stories is tantamount to being an extremely good manipulator – an extremely powerful controller of minds and controller of people,” says Spurrier. He then alludes to Alan Moore’s thoughts about storytelling – idea-space and magic, and how the three are intrinsically linked. It’s a mental check to measure his own feelings against. “He’s not wrong. I wouldn’t put it in such frilly terms, but to tell a story which changes the way in which somebody thinks, or to change the way in which somebody digests information is essentially to fiddle with people’s minds. That’s quite a seductive thing to be able to do.”
He laughs heartily as he relays this – machinations of mischief implied by his tone. The question is why he writes, what it is about stories that makes him want to communicate them to others. In answering, he seems genuinely unsure, as if he’s never been asked the question before – which he has. “I was asked by someone recently, ‘Why do you write?’” He reflects, conjuring the scene in his peripheral memory – “and the first thing that came to my mind was not ‘why do you write?’ but it suddenly occurred to me that I can’t think of any writer who’s ever stopped writing. So don’t ask me where the imperative begins, I don’t know, but I feel as if once you’ve started you can’t stop.”
Spurrier, 32, has been writing comics for a little over a decade. He cut his teeth at British publication 2000AD, penning stories for Tharg’s Future Shocks and Judge Dredd, among others. He speaks about this early period with the sort of wry, self-deprecating humour you might expect from a writer, but at the same time there is a definite nostalgia present as he recalls certain events, especially his many failings early on: “The best rejection letter I got was from then editor, David Bishop. This was after years of submitting an idea every couple of months, and the letter just says ‘no, no, no, no, no, no – no.’” He associates this letter with a turning point in his life – a point where he finally began to accept critical feedback and used it to, by his own admission, become a better storyteller. Not long after this revelatory moment is when his work at 2000AD began, and would continue for many years.
Silver Surfer: In Thy Name #2
From around 2006-07 he began to branch out, publishing work through big names like Image and Marvel. Yet still he remained just below the mainstream radar, like some contrary stealth jet – dropping strange and evocative thought bombs like Silver Surfer: In Thy Name and Gutsville sporadically over the years, a trend that continued until 2012 when he took on regular writing duties for X-Men Legacy at industry titan, Marvel comics, home of the superhero – a strange gig considering his conflicted thoughts on cape comics: “At its best it can be really aspirational and transformative and good. At its worst it can be an absolutely lazy attempt to define the world in terms of binary morality.” The mainstream, where the same superhero stories are told time and again, nothing ever really changes and the work is dictated by the idea of the ‘predictable sale’. It is the last place you’d expect to find Simon Spurrier. The very notion of a story without an ending aggravates him. “I dislike stories when they don’t end, that’s not a story as far as I’m concerned”. The topic gets him a little riled, but he fights to express his reasoning in a clear way. “If you accept that the story is… if it’s a way of making information digestible, then in order for it to be a unit, in order for it to be a package of information, our brains automatically want it to have an ending”.
Once again channelling that contrary jet Spurrier has found a way to avoid the pitfalls of mainstream comic writing, telling an intricate, emotional and well-structured story in X-Men Legacy. His work on the book is drawing to a close and, while he speaks fondly of his time writing it, he laments that his brand of thoughtful, modular storytelling has yet to garner as much of an audience as some of the bigger name comics out there. However, he remains hopeful. He senses a change in the way mainstream publishers work, and he certainly wants to be a part of it. “They are waking up to the fact that there are styles beyond their historical house style. They’re awakening to so many things”, he says thoughtfully.
X-Men Legacy has inarguably been a critical success that defied all expectations, but Spurrier is ready to put it to bed. The story needs to end and he’s already excited about his upcoming work on X-Force. “It’s an interesting set of parameters and it’s a good opportunity to do some important allegorical stuff, real world stuff,” he says with an un-disguisable enthusiasm. X-Force, being a book about clandestine covert operations, gives Spurrier the rare opportunity to tell a very topical story in the comic medium, and he can’t wait.
X-Force #1
Even reflecting on this ever-growing body of work, he struggles to tell me why he writes, why he has left this distinct and creative footprint on the industry. He pokes and prods at the issue with suggestive insight but can’t quite commit to an answer: “My suspicion is, if you characterise yourself as a writer and you’re literally the last person in the world, so there’s nobody to read your writing, would you still write? My guess is probably not. I suspect that there is an element of, forgivable but very, very clear narcissism involved in the imperative to write.” Perhaps it is simply a matter of ego, a desire to be heard, but something in the way he talks about storytelling makes me suspect otherwise. It’s the way he separates writing, and hence himself from what it is to tell a story.
“Story is a component of life,” he says. “Our very peculiar human way of perceiving the information of the world is to generate narratives. And so it happens every time you have a conversation, every time you paint a picture, every time you play a piece of music. Writing is just one element, probably the best known element but it’s just one element of what it is to live with, experience and generate stories.”
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Thanks again to Simon for the interview, check him out on twitter @sispurrier
Watch this space for the Q&A.
spoiled broth 