"In-your-face creator Erik Larsen unveils his changes for 'Aquaman,' how the Dragon won't fight Superman and why he wants Peter David's old titles."

VITAL STATS
Occupation:  Writer/artist/creator of The Savage Dragon
Born:  December 8, 1967 in Minneapolis, Minn.
Base Of Operations:  Oakland, Calif.
Career Highlights:  Rose to prominence following Todd McFarlane's explosive run on Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man in 1991;  co-founded Image Comics in 1992 to write and draw The Savage Dragon, which he continues to do today;  is now slated to write DC's Aquaman this summer.
Favorite Artistic Dodges:  "You notice that in The Savage Dragon nobody ever actually gets into or sees a car?  We play with camera angles so that they're avoided completely.  and there's not a person alive who possesses any sort of animal--dog, cat or otherwise."

    Erik Larsen is making the photographer very nervous.  He's trying to shoot a picture in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and an El Nino-powered storm is sweeping in, clouding out the sun.  But Larsen, writer/artist of Image's The Savage Dragon, won't sit still.  He has spied an 8-foot-tall statue of a sphinx--body of a lion, torso of a woman--and he is loping toward it.  As the photographer readies his camera, Larsen folds himself alongside the statue's pedestal and--there's no easy way to say this--extends his tongue toward the sphinx's bared left nipple.
    "Um, I don't think we want to do that one," says the photographer.  He's fiddling with the green cellophane over his flash, designed to light Larsen to look like his creation, the Dragon.
    "Okay," says Larsen.  "How about this?" He climbs onto the pedestal and sits cross-legged, facing the sphinx.  The scene looks innocent enough, though a bit ludicrous--a big, balding, goofy-lookin' guy facing down a statue.  And then you notice his hands, which are cupping the sphinx's breasts.  The photographer laughs, in a short burst.  "Hey," Larsen says through a smile that wraps itself across the bottom of his face, "I'm just trying to be supportive."
    Can we get a rimshot here?  When you hang around with Larsen, you begin to wish you had a drum set, just to give the zingers the attention they deserve.  And it's not just boob jokes, though he's got those, too (On his notoriously well-endowed female characters, with another sly smile:  "I just plain like drawing big knockers.")  A lot of the digs are pointed inward ("You can pretty much tell I'm editing myself by all the typos and spelling errors."), but there's plenty to go around.  His opinions about other comic writers and artists--even his colleagues at Image, which he co-founded--are notorious.  Larsen has maintained a famous letter-column feud with Incredible Hulk writer Peter David, and his impression of Spawn mogul Todd McFarlane is dead-on.  The Savage Dragon can be funny as hell;  its creator is even funnier.
    But don't start getting the idea that Larsen is totally wacky.  You've got to be at least a little responsible to create, write and draw 50 issues of a single comic book series (as of June).  Your sense of irony has to be a bit more finely honed than hooters humor if you're going to appreciate taking over writing tasks on Aquaman, formerly written by Peter David (Larsen steps in with that book's 50th issue).  And you have to have a little class to resist the temptation to turn David's tenure on the book into a dream or something.  "I won't be going out of my way to contradict or undo anything he did," Larsen says.  But, he adds, in classic Larsen fashion, "There are too many normal-looking folks down there, and I'd like to change that--after dealing with all those freaks in Savage Dragon, normal-looking folks just don't cut it for me."  And there goes that smile again.

Wizard:  It's been hinted that everyone dies in Savage Dragon #50.  That true?

Larsen:  I just tell people stuff to keep them guessing.  If I killed everybody off, I wouldn't have anything to draw.  The beauty of the book is that there's so much of a cast that I could do a wholesale slaughter and still have plenty left to deal with, and often do.  I like people not knowing what's going to happen in Dragon.  The book can really take U-turns or switchbacks that are so abrupt that you just don't see things coming.  It gets to be real tricky writing a story that surprises people.  But I want them to be.  I want them to not see something coming.  When I killed Rapture [Dragon's ex-girlfriend, in issue #43], she wasn't even on the cover that issue.

That was surprising.

Watch out for those left-handed pages, man;  they're killers.  That's the beauty of being your own boss and knowing where the ads line up.  You can plan things out.  I write stuff like, every right-sided page could say "to be continued" on the bottom of it, because there's almost always something that's leading you into something else.  That's part of the joy of storytelling:  keeping people reading ahead, wanting to know what's going to happen.
    I also like the idea that this isn't playing games.  There are repercussions here.  People do get hurt.  You are fighting with somebody, that guy's got a shovel in his hand, you might just get it upside the head, and you might not feel too good about it the next morning.
    I'm doing the Dragon/Superman crossover, and people keep saying, "Oh, man, I can't wait for that fight!"  Why the hell would they fight?  In the story, Dragon's going to be a cop and Superman is Superman.  He's not going to punch Superman.  What is he, insane?

Dragon meets Superman?  That's cool.

It'll be two one-shots [due out in August].  It will have regular Superman back when Dragon was a cop, and then regular Superman when Dragon's in the SOS [Special Operations Strikeforce].  In the one that I'm doing, Superman comes to Chicago because a bunch of his foes have joined the Vicious Circle [Dragon's supervillain organization], and in [DC's one-shot], Dragon goes to Metropolis.  In the first one it's sort of like Dragon's a small-town sheriff and here comes some big guy to help him out, and he feel kind of resentful.  And then in the other one, Dragon will be more in the position of [broadens shoulders a la Dragon], "Well, they asked for my help;  I better go in."

You pencil, ink, write and edit Dragon.  Is it noticeably harder than being just the artist or writer?

For me, the writing is the fastest part.  I've never spent more than 24 hours scripting an issue of Dragon in my life, or anything else, for that matter.  The actual words that come out of people's mouths in the book come quickly to me.  I just sit down at the computer and go through the entire book writing whatever the hell comes into my mind, and then I'll go through it a second time, maybe a third, and clean it up, turn it into something more coherent.
    I've got scribbled notes that run about three years ahead of where I am almost all the time, but it's fairly loose and there're areas to insert all sorts of different things.  I know what happens at the end of #50, and generally speaking, what happens the three or four issues after that.

So what's up with the over-endowed women?  Is that for the 13-year-old boys or is that satire?

I just plain like to draw big knockers.  That's what it comes down to, I guess.  It keeps me entertained.  When a guy is in a room by himself all day long, he tends to let his imagination go a little wild.

Have you gotten flack from parents' groups?

Parents' groups are blissfully unaware of the Dragon's continued existence, and I thank them for their ignorance.  Once I did the God-versus-the-Devil issue [Dragon #31] where the Devil kneed God in the groin, and I didn't get much flack for it, I pretty much figured I could get away with anything.

Is there anything you wouldn't put in the book?

I'd say full frontal nudity or anal penetration, but give me a couple of months [Laughs].

What do you want to work on next?  I hear you submitted a proposal for the Incredible Hulk, since Peter David is leaving it.

I didn't get it.  They had better get somebody really brilliant on that book, or they'll look like complete idiots.  My proposal was like, eight pages long, pretty extensive.  I'm an old Hulk fan, so a lot of it was characters I liked when I was a kid that were in the Hulk book.
    I knew pretty much when I was writing the proposal that it wasn't quite what they wanted.  I think they wanted to do some Vertigo stuff, have him be real dark and scary.  It's like, come on, you got enough dark and scary books out there.  The main thing I wanted to do was to have Bruce Banner and the Hulk get separated again, except have Bruce Banner be completely whole and functional, and the Hulk to be sort of a superpowered Deadman-type guy, a ghostly Hulk who could inhabit other people and turn them into the Hulk.  It seemed like it was taking what Peter had done to kind of a next step.  I screw around with that for six months to a year, and then go back to doing dumb-as-a-post Hulk.  I thought that would be a nice segue to get him there, rather than have him be dumb right off the bat.

But Aquaman is a go?

It wasn't a book [about which] I was going, "Oh, Peter David left Aquaman [which David was also writing].  I've got to get it."  I realized at some point I've been playing in my own sandbox for six years, and nobody knows who I am anymore.  I should get out and write another book.
    The thing is that I just recently got the book, and some of the stuff that is in my proposal will make it into the book, and some won't, and I don't know which is which.  I know at this point my first issue, issue #50, is going to be a double-sized book that catches everyone up on the book.  I'll esatablish that Atlantis, which had been floating all over the place, is now set down in one location, and then start dealing with what that location is and what is near it.  I've got an entirely new undersea realm that is buried deeper than Atlantis, this group of kind of fluorescent guys, because when you get down real deep, nobody can see.  I don't think I have a really good name for their city at this point, just the Hidden City.  Down there is a guy named Noble, who is their king, and when Noble discovers that Aquaman's Atlantis is above his city on the edge of a precipice, he's like, "What's going on here?"  He didn't know there was anybody else in the ocean.  And Noble's people have always been underwater and don't even know there is a surface world.
    I really want to introduce a lot more different kinds of folks down there, people from his world, from Noble's world, and mix things up a little bit.  When I look at Aquaman I go, "You know, everybody in this book is a human being.  They look like human beings, and they walk around on the floor doing the same stuff that you and I would do."  How come every building has a door in the bottom and that's it?  These people swim.  It's almost like you expect somebody to plug in a toaster.  This world has so much potential and possibility, and not that much of it has been tapped.

What about villains?

A hero is measured by his villains, and Aquaman's got Black Manta, Ocean Master and that's it.  You're not going to see a recognizable Aquaman villain for the first year.  He needs a rogues gallery and he has none.  I sort of have Noble in there as the guy who can do stupid things.  Aquaman wouldn't be the sort who would want to invade the surface world, but Noble might think that was a good idea.  It gives me the contrast, something to play off of.

Sounds like fun.

That's what I'm all about, trying to make stuff interesting, dammit.  Why aren't you reading Aquaman?  Why isn't everybody reading Aquaman?  Maybe it's not everything it could be.  Thank God Peter was around, because Peter kept that book going for a long time.  He got 46 issues out of it, and that's a good run on a book that hasn't had much of a run before.
 Even people who can't stand me and think I'm the Antichrist taking over from Christ--look, if Doctor Doom was following Reed Richards as the new writer on a book, you'd kind of want to find out what Doom was going to do.  I think they'll stick around for a few issues just to see how bad I screw things up.  For the people who've read it all along, I think they're in for one hell of a ride.  And if they haven't read it, they've got something to look forward to.

A frequent contributor to Newsweek, Adam Rogers is curious to see if Larsen truly can get away with anything.