MISS FURY #8 is on sale this week. Mike Carroll, writer of JENNIFER BLOOD (issue #35 on sale this week as well), asked Rob Williams some questions about Miss Fury and what it's like working on this classic character.
MIKE CARROLL: Miss Fury is often regarded as one of the “forgotten” comic-book characters of the Golden Age (though, like many such characters, she’s reappeared quite a few times since, in different incarnations!). Is there anything specific about the original character that drew you to her?
ROB WILLIAMS: The thing I found intriguing about Marla Drake was the fact that she's this rich socialite who doesn't need to do the costume heroics, she could live a life of riches. So why does she do it? And there's a world war on. Young Americans are off in Europe dying for a cause. What's her cause? What war is she fighting? She's called Miss Fury. So, what has she got to be angry about? All these things fed into our character and the book's core concept.
MC: Time-travel stories are notoriously hard to write! How do you keep track of all the different elements without getting tangled up in knots? (I picture your workplace festooned with teetering piles of old comics – all with bookmarks on every page – and a great big chart covered in push-pins, lengths of string and yellow sticky-notes…)
RW: You're right about it being brain frying. When I finished the end of our initial arc, with issue five, I kind of silently swore that I'd not write a time travel story again for a while. It's not just time travel too. It's the knowledge that when you change the past, you immediately move into a different reality. So it's keeping track of which version of a character we're currently dealing with. I have notebooks! Well, a notebook! One of the core writing tenants that everyone can learn from is, I think 'keep it simple stupid.' I plainly didn't do that with Miss Fury. I wanted it to be a more ambitious book than a simple 'jewel thief fights the bad guys' thing. I blatantly didn't want this to be Catwoman mark two. The time travel gave us a lot of narrative freedoms. But I'll be staying linear with my storytelling for a while, I think.
MC: As a comics writer you’ve developed a strong reputation for very solid, entertaining and fast-paced stories, many of them very hard-hitting with no holds barred… And your take on Miss Fury is very much in that same mould. Was there a temptation before you began to take a simpler, more traditional approach, perhaps one closer to the original Black Fury / Miss Fury stories?
RW: There's always that option before you start any project. But I felt, given her background and history, it'd be true to the character to make the book more adult. She's called Miss Fury. You could do an all ages children's version but I'm not sure it would be the best fit. On the other hand I was determined to make this more than a T&A book. She can be violent and formidable in that tight costume, but I wanted to make her a three-dimensional character. If she's a sexual character, why is she a sexual character? These themes seemed best suited to a more mature readers approach.
MC: Have you had any contact with or input from Victor Gischler who’s using the character of Miss Fury in the NOIR series?
RW: No, that's Victor's own version of the character, which is fine. He's a good writer. He'll do Marla justice, I'm sure.
You can check out an extended preview for MISS FURY #8 HERE. Both MISS FURY #8 and JENNIFER BLOOD #35 are on sale now!
5 Comments