♪ [heroic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer Gene Salassie.

Gene, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Thank you for having me.

I'm super excited to be here.

- Gene, we are going to talk today about your new book, "The Avengers for Dummies."

I love this book because, I mean, I think we're all familiar with the "For Dummies" series, but to see something that is specific to a comic universe, that seems like it's a little bit unique.

So how did you get involved with this project?

- A friend of mine, ironically, Troy Brownfield, he's a writer and editor.

He also happened to be the editor that gave me my first break in the comics.

He was contacted by Wiley Publications to kind of spearhead their first book, "Marvel Comics for Dummies," and lo and behold, they were looking for recommendations for other writers for that first wave of books.

Two of them were left, and one of them was "Avengers."

He knew that I'm an "Avengers" mega fan, so he recommended me, and I luckily got the gig.

- And what I think is really interesting about this book is that it is, well, for those of us who like to read comics, you know, we get kind of pulled into the canon and the history.

But sometimes, you know, we don't need to know every single piece.

Sometimes we just want to know what happens so that we can enjoy the next chapter.

And I think what is really interesting about this book is that you are talking about periods throughout the "Avengers" history.

In broad strokes, we know the events, we know the dates, but we don't know, you know, that Cap said this to this character or something like that.

So when you were going through, I guess, the history of the "Avengers," all the iterations, all the different major storylines, you know, is this something where you start at the beginning and just work your way to the end?

Or do you create an outline of things that you think would be the right fit because you're that mega fan?

Or is this something where the editor's coming to you and saying, "This is what we hope to get out of it"?

- Well, it's a little bit of all of the above, really.

I know with the "For Dummies" books, they have a specific format where we want our table of contents that's going to be your roadmap.

And we want to hit important beats, but we don't want to take the super deep dive into the minutiae of everything.

We just want to be able to, for lack of a better term, make this approachable for Dummies.

And we just try to keep it to the broad strokes, try to keep it to the important storylines, except for when we got into every person who had ever been an Avenger up until that point.

That's where-that was a fairly long chapter.

The rest of the items, we kind of try to hit and run, hit and run, to give the audience sample-sized piece of every facet of the "Avengers" history.

- And, you know, we talked a little bit before we started to record, you know, being comic readers, we probably have characters that we love.

And you mentioned in the book that your favorite Avenger is Hawkeye.

And I think it's interesting because Hawkeye was a character who, for most of the run of the Avengers, didn't have a book of his own.

So his stories were told in the pages of the Avengers, whereas someone like Captain America or Iron Man, their stories were told in the solo books.

So as you kind of were going through, did you find a lot of the interesting character moments were coming from those supporting characters, the ones who didn't have their own solo books?

- Yes, which is funny.

It confuses people when I say Iron Man is my all-time favorite character in general, but Hawkeye is my favorite Avenger.

And one of the reasons why I gravitated towards the team, other than they were the first superhero team I ever did that deep dive with because of my mega fandom of Iron Man, and at some point, all these Avengers references, it's going to lead you to start reading that book as well.

And one of the things that I think makes this book work even more so than, let's say, the Justice League, it's not all big guns.

When you have all big guns on the title, in my experience, it limits what the writer of the team book can do, because they then have to answer to all of the other individual writers of their books and respect what's going on.

Whereas with the Avengers, you can have maybe half your roster be those big guns, but then you bring in your Hawkeye, where you're dealing with someone with a massive inferiority complex.

You bring in your Hank Pym, who's dealing with this mental breakdown, basically.

The Vision, Scarlet Witch, will they, won't they?

You know, Wonder Man trying to find a newfound confidence when the dude literally died, and throwing yourself into the battle with some of the Avengers-level foes.

That can happen again at any point.

So that's where the meaty, dramatic stuff happened with those, for lack of a better term, second-string Avengers characters.

- And you know, I think we all tend to think of the teams that we first started to read comics, those were, you know, your Avengers or your Justice League or something like that.

And I remember there was, I guess, back in the late '70s, George Perez was working on the Avengers, and there's a famous cover, I think it's of the Grim Reaper, about to swipe down and have the trial of Wonder Man and the Vision.

And you know, that to me was like, that is the Avengers, that is the all-time great roster, the Beast, Wonder Man, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch.

Never knew anything about Iron Man or Thor, you know, because they weren't in that book.

So, you know, as somebody who's been reading comics, what was the team that first sparked your imagination?

- Funny enough, my very first issue of Avengers was issue 189.

It was a Hawkeye centerpiece.

And it actually made me hate the character at first, because he was such a jerk.

This was when Falcon was given his spot, when the U.S.

government had a heavy hand in Avengers activity.

And I was like, he's such a jerk, he's such a jerk.

By the end of the issue, Dude takes down Death Bird, who's a major, powerful X-Men villain.

Not Magneto class, but a serious threat.

And I'm like, okay, he can handle his own.

Some of them have no powers.

And I gravitated toward the character.

I would say every roster I liked to a certain extent.

The Roger Stern era with Wasp, She-Hulk, Hercules, Namor, the early West Coast team, because Mockingbird and Hawkeye were one of my favorite couples.

And I'm a huge fan of Jim Rhodes, who was at the time taking over for Iron Man after he had his second battle with alcoholism.

But I would say my all-time favorite roster, the Kurt Busie and George Perez era.

It essentially boiled down to basics, what the Avengers were, and they're Marvel's Knights of the Round Table.

That run encapsulated that better than any run, I think, before or after.

- And I think there's the one storyline where they are essentially Knights of the Round Table, kind of bringing that message not only subtly, but obviously to the fore.

And that was, again, that's something we talked about before we started to record.

George Perez, his impact on the Avengers over numerous decades is just, I mean, it's immeasurable because he was on the book in the '70s.

He came back in the late '90s, and he also did the JLA/Avengers crossover.

So as you are going through the big moments of the Avengers history, how many of these are George Perez's involvement, and how many of these are just maybe the nostalgia of George Perez being that artist that meant so much to you because of his work on the Avengers?

- I made no bones about it.

George Perez is my all-time favorite comic book artist.

But I tried to not show as much favoritism, and it just, he happened upon, there happened to have been so many eras, so many iconic covers.

Like when you go through the book, that first appearance of Taskmaster, that cover, and I'm sure if you ask any of the Image Seven who were fans of George Perez, that was an iconic cover.

I mean, you have a new villain that's brandishing sword-wielding abilities on par with swordsmen, shield-slinging abilities on par with Captain America, can fire a bow as good as Hawkeye, and George Perez just nailed it with that one cover.

And between that, the cover for volume three, issue one, where you see every character who had ever been an Avenger up until that point, whether it's the solo character just looking awesome moments or the team splashes or a dramatic moment when dealing, there was an issue in Boosie X-Run where Wonder Man and Vision were really kind of having a heavy, heavy, heavy drama between them because of both of their feelings towards Wanda, who at this point Vision was divorced with but still had feelings for.

He can nail the emotional, he can nail the action, and I don't think any artist had nailed it that well for so many eras of Avengers history the way George Perez did.

- I mean, you'll get no argument for me, George Perez is in my top two or three comic creators of all time, and going back through my collection, the number of comics that I have with his artwork in it is probably second only to someone like a Dan Jurgens because he worked on Superman for so long.

When we start to think about the Avengers in the early 2000s, it's a great team, it's a great book, but it doesn't have the same, I guess, name recognition that it would have just a few years later when the Marvel Cinematic Universe elevates the Avengers into, I guess, everybody's discourse because we're all talking about those Avengers films.

So, as you're writing the book, is this something where you're thinking about the audience of those films who may have never read the comics and you want to sort of explain that Civil War is similar to the film but the storyline in the comics is different and here's how you can kind of maybe get into it if you'd like to?

- Exactly, and that was the main purpose of the books, especially with the mandate to try to stray away from as much of the MCU and movie-related side as possible because they're going to be two different masters, so to speak.

So, we did our best to keep it to the books and make it easily digestible, explaining things like Civil War, explaining things like Ultron, little bite-sized morsels that, "Okay, this is what this character's all about.

Okay, this is one of his most important stories."

And I think we made it as easy to digest for the new-coming audience or people who maybe lapsed fans that were, let's say, they read Avengers and then they dropped off during that 2000s period.

Here's catching everything up to date.

I would say it's as up to date as of last year because I believe I featured, referenced Blood Hunt, which was either the 2023 or 2024 event story.

- The event story that you're mentioning, there have been, I guess, since Secret Wars and Crisis on the Infinite Earths, that's been the big thing.

There'll be some sort of multi-series spanning epic that features an unbeatable foe, and somehow the heroes do kind of find that way.

So, thinking back to Avengers Endgame and Infinity War coming from the comics, when you're explaining the difference between the comic and the film, is this something where you're able to kind of point out that although it's different in the movie, you can see the seed of it here in this scene?

So, although the relationship might be slightly different, you can see that this is where it came from and you can kind of make that one-to-one correlation?

- Yes, and I think where that really hit home was in the section where I'm discussing the Avengers, the top villains of all time, because some of the ones featured in live action may not have gotten as big of a platform to show how really dangerous they are.

Or some may, we got a snippet of it, some may have focused so much on the minutiae leading up to it.

For example, Civil War in the movie, we got a snippet of how dangerous Zemo was, but he was more of the cerebral villain that wouldn't be able to bring it to, what did he call him?

Basically, he said, "We can't defeat gods.

How do you defeat them?

By having them destroy each other."

Whereas in the comics, one of the, I'm sure you've probably read multiple times, Under Siege, where he organizes probably the most powerful and largest assemblage of the Masters of Evil ever, stormed their headquarters and, for all intents and purposes, tortured Jarvis, waterboarded Black Knight, and my pick for the Avengers' number one villain is probably Kang.

And Kurt Busiek's run, the Kang Dynasty was brutality on a level that you rarely saw in an Avengers book.

That's where those differences come into play.

For someone in the movie, hey, he got defeated by Ant-Man.

A whole different ballgame in the comics.

- Yeah, and I guess, too, in the movies, we're thinking about the personalities.

So if somebody like Paul Rudd is playing Ant-Man, we're going to think, "Well, I like this actor.

He should be able to win this battle."

Plus, I think the understanding for film is a little different than that of somebody who's been reading comics forever.

And you mentioned the Masters of Evil run from the '80s, John Bissema and Roger Stern putting together that Under Siege storyline is one of my all-time favorites, and I do go back to it from time to time because it's one of those ones that's in my sweet spot when I first started reading comics heavily.

You always go back to the one that got you into it, and that was one of those ones that just felt so right.

As somebody once said, there's no stalgia like nostalgia.

So I'm a big fan of that particular one.

In addition to your work on Avengers for Dummies, you are also a writer of comics, and you had a Ringo Award-nominated series, The Ghoul Agency.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that series.

- Well, that one was super fun to write.

I believe that launched in 2022, actually 2023 when the trade paperback came out.

It's essentially an all-ages book about an advertising agency for the undead, and our lead character, Shae Melendez, is trying to just navigate the world of advertising where there happens to be a supernatural backdrop.

I think The Office meets Beetlejuice.

That's a great pitch right there.

I mean, the fact that advertising is just such a big part of our society and the fact that the supernatural phenomenon, those types of movies are so popular, and combining that into a series, it's just a very clever look.

But you say it's all ages, so how do you take something as terrifying as Beetlejuice, let's say, the concept behind it?

The movie itself is humorous, but the concept behind it is kind of scary.

So how do you make that palatable for an all-ages audience?

- There are lots of examples.

I would say some of the best episodes of, like, let's go back to the DCAU, where Batman animated series, Superman, Justice League, they're watchable for kids can just jump right in and watch.

But they'll have those deeper themes that the adults will appreciate, and those dangling plot threads that pay off eventually at the end of the story arc that just don't want to make it too kiddy, because then the adult will probably never pick it up.

You don't want to make it too adult, because the kids won't get the jokes, won't get a lot of the character beats that you're trying to tell.

So it's a balancing act, really.

- You said this came out as a trade paperback.

So was this something that just came out as a collected edition, all the story together, or was this individual issues that was eventually put together?

- They were individual issues that came out in 2022, and the trade paperback came out in 2023.

- As you are getting this work done, you're collaborating with an artist.

How does this collaboration work?

Is this something where you're just giving them the story and they're delivering exactly what you're looking for, or is this something where they can say, "Hey, I've got an idea.

What if we try this?"

and it lets the two of you sort of bounce back and forth?

- This is where the artists Orlando Baez and colorist Sam Nang, we kind of hashed this out as they used to call it the Marvel method, where just gave the basic plot, let them run wild with it, because once again, this is a horror comedy.

So it's pretty much anything goes in this book.

There were very few scenes that had to be reworked because they were so out there that it just worked for this particular book.

- It's got to be rewarding that something that you're coming up with the idea that somebody else is picking up on it and is able to contribute and make it all that much better.

So is there some scene that you may have had in mind that when the pages came in, you said, "Well, I don't need to do anything.

In fact, I could cut some stuff out here and just put in one or two words instead of this soliloquy I had planned."

- I would say issue three is my favorite of all the issues in the series.

Essentially, it's from the point of view of our security team.

There's a really old retired guard and a younger one who is basically a ninja.

And they're trying to uncover a leak that within the company, a rival company got a bunch of plans for a campaign and they lured away two of their biggest accounts.

And the security team, they're trying to figure out, they're just following the breadcrumbs, the clues.

Meanwhile, because that occurred, the lead character, Shay, got blamed for it and was suspended without pay.

She's reading this old Agatha Christie novel and we're juxtaposing the scenes between the novel and their investigation and the hilarity of what they have to utilize.

It's played against the Agatha Christie novel and that was one where I think there was only one scene and one panel in that whole 22-page book that had to be reworked just to get a better camera angle for the punchline of the joke.

Otherwise, that to me was perfection on the part of the artists.

- It's fun too when you are reading a comic and you get to know the characters, the lead characters, and then we flip it and we bring in a different point of view.

So we follow, in this case, the security team or maybe it's the issue of the Avengers where Jarvis is coming in with the vacuum and he's going to clean up the mess.

And then through his cleaning up, we see the story from a different point of view and put all those loose threads together.

So as you're doing that, as you come up with these other supporting characters, were they factored in at the beginning or was this something that as the series revealed itself, you kind of saw a possibility?

- They were there from the beginning.

I just, as the story unfolded and the universe started expanding, I hate using this cliche, but I think the halfway point of issue two, the characters started writing themselves.

And their personalities, their character ticks, whatnot, they just kind of took hold and it just was off to the races from there on.

- And I see that we have probably a little less than five minutes left.

You mentioned personalities.

Another book that you wrote is about professional wrestling.

And I know that there is a big connection between pro wrestling and superheroes.

You can say that perhaps pro wrestling is sort of superhero battles on the mat.

So what sort of connections did you see between your work in comics and the Avengers for Dummies book and the book about pro wrestling?

- Well, that other book I wrote and how they rumbled essentially was covering my picks for the 80 greatest matches of the last 40 years.

And just like with Avengers for Dummies, it required research yet because I was covering pro wrestling and MMA for two different sports sites.

So I watched a lot of pro wrestling and I have since the late 80s.

So it didn't require much research.

So I just let my fandom just run wild with that book.

And a lot of it was rewatching matches I may not have seen since like 1992 or 1997 or 2003.

The one case, 1979.

- You know, wrestling, it's interesting when you watch people who are very good at it because there is a story being told in the ring through their match.

So I'm just wondering, you know, you said that you were going back and you're watching matches from the 90s and all the way through the modern era and relying on your fandom.

So what's the one match to you that just really spoke to you that the characters in the ring became greater than the actual events in the ring?

- There's so many of them.

And I can't use my number one and number two because I cheated.

Those two, number two was a trilogy of matches that told the story across three matches.

Number one told the story across four matches over a year and a half.

But my number three pick, I believe, was Rey Mysterio versus Eddie Guerrero from Halloween Havoc in 1997.

Ultimo WCW there.

Lucha Libre has become very commonplace now in American wrestling these days.

Even in the late 90s, we still didn't, it wasn't as prevalent.

And I will give credit to companies like ECW and WCW for, they were the ones that really brought it to the forefront, tried to make it a household name.

And though there was a lot of high flying in that match, it did tell a very, very solid David and Goliath story.

And I know most people would laugh at considering Eddie Guerrero Goliath, but when you consider Rey Mysterio's size, it definitely made for a great David and Goliath story.

- And I see we have just a couple of minutes left in our conversation.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you, where can they find you on the web?

- I'm on Instagram @gene_salassie.

I'm also on Blue Sky as well, genesalassie.bluesky.social.

- Gene, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of - Gene, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

It's been a fun and informative half hour.

- Thank you so very much.

I really appreciate it.

- And I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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