[heroic music] [heroic music continues] [heroic music continues] [heroic music continues] - 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 Alisa Kwitney.

Alisa, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Thank you so much for having me.

- Alisa, you are working on a new, I guess we could call it sci-fi horror series for Ahoy Comics called "Howl," which is set in 1950s New York.

So what is this series about?

- My very short pitch phrase is its "Mrs. Maisel" meets "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

And I have a slightly longer version too.

It's very much set in New York City.

It's set in the Village during the beatnik era.

And for, you know, people who don't know, the beats were sort of the forerunners of the hippies.

Why, they were wearing berets and bare feet and going braless and smoking locoweed before the hippies.

And this was a period when my parents, the science fiction writer Robert Sheckley and my mother Ziva Kwitney, were actually living in the Village.

So I had always wanted to write about it, and because my father was a science fiction writer, I wanted to write about the science fiction community.

And at a certain point I realized that not only should the story be about science fiction, it should be science fiction.

- It's interesting, I got a chance to read the second issue, and what I found really fun about it is that there's stuff happening that is very subtle.

I mean, there's a truck that goes by, and when I reread it, suddenly the picture on the back of the truck made a lot of sense.

And I don't wanna give too much away, but it seems like there's some sort of space spore involved in this that is affecting people.

And I'm just wondering, as you are writing this for your artist collaborator, are you thinking of all these little visuals or are you sort of leaning in on them to say, "Hey, you know, this would be a great time for us to maybe foreshadow something and add to the discussion with the audience"?

- Very much both.

So Mauricet, my collaborator, whose name I was mispronouncing, by the way, for years.

'Cause, you know, it's been a long time since my high school French.

He's Belgian, by the way.

I don't know why I feel compelled to say this.

So he and I have been working together for almost a decade, or maybe it is a decade now.

And one of the things that we do is we talk, we kibitz, we farbreng.

And so in addition to the scripts, I will talk about things that are in my mind.

You know, there's a lot of memoir in this.

There are actual lines that were lines between my parents, and yet there's also a lot of B-movie lore in this.

So if you are the kind of person who endlessly rewatches "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," particularly the 1978 version, which is my preferred vintage, you can see that there are trucks that are beginning to, you know, carry away garbage bags.

And only after some rewatching do you think, "Wait, what was that?

Was that a husk?

Was that plant material?"

And you begin to see these sinister bits and pieces of business going on in the background.

So I very much wanted that to be the case.

But Mauricet just comes up with other stuff.

You know, he would put spore prints.

So there is a thing that people do, I did not realize this until people who were related to me explained it, that you take a mushroom and you kind of dip it, I guess, in some ink, and you create a print, and by that you can discern if it is the kind of mushroom that you were hoping it was.

And so there are these spore prints as visual motifs.

But yeah, no, the truck was something I definitely gave, you know, Mauricet the nod about.

- In this book, there's a lot of humor, and, you know, again, this is what I think makes sci-fi so much fun, is that you can go in many different directions.

Sci-fi can be something as horrifying as the original "Alien" film.

It can be something as humorous as, you know, "Night of the Comet," let's say.

Or it could be something that is a little bit in between, you know, with a little bit of camp going on here and there.

As you are writing, and you clearly have a sense of humor.

You and I were joking around quite a bit before we started recording.

So when you're putting together these ideas, how do you sort of balance, there's a serious tone, there's a serious statement that I might be wanting to make as a writer, but at the same time, my personality, my humor is also going to be reflected in these characters and these events?

- There is nothing in my life that I don't try and approach with humor, including the most serious stuff.

In 2020 when my mother was already suffering from dementia, she said a wonderful, very lucid thing to me.

She said, let's see if I can remember it exactly, "Do not forget your sense of humor with this.

It is a tool and a weapon and an asset."

And I think that, you know, what humor really is, is it's a way of doing a really rapid reframing of something.

You know, I think about humor all the time, and it makes it possible to sweeten, you know, some of the pills that you have to take.

So I'm glad, by the way, "Night of the Comet."

"Night of the Comet"!

nobody has said "Night of the Comet" to me in, you know, since my hair was really large.

So that was a great movie, and also had a lot of humor.

- And this is why I think sci-fi is one of these underrated genres, sci-fi and horror, because you can make a comment about contemporary society, you can make a comment about events that are happening in the real world today, and yet by couching it in this fantastical world, people don't necessarily see that, you know, you're trying to teach me a lesson about what's happening in America or in, let's say France, pardon me, Belgium.

But, you know, we are also able to then reflect on the underlying human issue and we can say, "Oh, I see why somebody would have this problem."

So as you are using this classic sci-fi setup, you know, and you're trying to make perhaps some sort of commentary, how does it help you as a writer knowing that people will be more willing to accept this message because you're putting the pill inside the peanut butter or inside the, you know, piece of cheese?

- First of all, it is what draws me as a reader.

You know, I'm trying to make something that feels delicious, and I like some salt with my chocolate.

I like humor mixed with horror.

I also have a deep love of body horror, which is a kind of horror where you get to be very creative and it doesn't skew as dark.

It's disgusting, but it doesn't necessarily go completely nihilist.

The other thing is my father, and I suppose to some extent my mother, they were both absurdists.

I think I once saw something that said, you know, an existentialist believes that there's no inherent meaning in anything but it's incumbent upon you to create the meaning, and a nihilist believes that it's incumbent upon you but it will all come to nothing anyway, and an absurdist thinks, but you gotta laugh!

So I think coming at this, you know, some of it's humor, some of it's body horror, some of it's absurdist, and then there's two fictional worlds, there's my version of 1957 and 1959, and then there's the science fictional element to both.

But, you know, the '50s, first of all, the '50s, were not what people think they are, not what most people think they were.

You know, they were not this beautiful conservative time when women, you know, wore heels and men wore hats.

It was a time when people were already retreating from, you know, the horrors of atomic war and this sense that we could incinerate, you know, the whole planet and everything in it at the drop of a hat.

And so all of "Leave It to Beaver," you know, goodness and gosh darn it no cursing was this patina that was being smoothed over everything so people wouldn't think too hard about what happened at the end of World War II.

- As I guess a country, our opinion of ourselves is formed a lot by media.

And we may not think about it too much, but the cowboy ideal, the taming of the American West sort of gave us a certain idea about what society should be like, even though most of that is fictional and it's all made up to project an image.

And I think when we look back at shows like "Happy Days," which were set in the '50s and gave us this idyllic lifestyle of Richie Cunningham and The Fonz, it's really not looking at everything in a realistic way, but again, putting that coat of paint over something and saying, "No, it's perfect."

- Yeah, exactly.

You know, right now I'm sort of revisiting the material and thinking about how it would be to write it as prose.

And I just did that little bit of extra digging as I was trying to give a snapshot of the late '50s and discovered even more crazy things.

Like I've just learned that in 1957 there was the Plumbbomb series of atomic tests, where I think, I can't remember how many, but I think there were six in August alone, and tourists were going to Las Vegas and booking, you know, rooms in the Flamingo and Sands Hotels and you could sip your atomic themed cocktail while watching nuclear bombs named Priscilla or whatever be detonated over the desert.

- It's a weird time in world history.

And, you know, when you do come across a film or, I guess it would have to be a film, that looks back at that era with some sort of honesty, it's always also usually put into the production code.

So I think a lot of the 1947 film "The Best Years of Our Lives," which looks at issues today when we watch that movie, you know, PTSD and infidelity, and doesn't really hide it, but also has to put it into this safe smiling face of this is what you're allowed to see in cinema.

Probably a very ham-handed attempt for me to stitch this all together, but, you know, we tend to think of comics as this safe space for us to tell stories, because again, we always think back to that 1950s "Hey Kids!

It's Comics!"

So as you are working in comics and trying to tell a story for a grownup audience, I don't wanna say an adult audience because that takes on a different meaning.

But as you are telling a story for a grownup audience, do you ever face people saying, you know, "Well, this isn't like 'Archie'"?

- Well, gosh, even "Archie" isn't like "Archie" anymore.

But I wanted, see if I can say this correctly.

I wanted to have this be delicious as well as nutritious.

If nutritious is I wanted it to be about stuff that felt psychologically real in terms of relationship.

I think one of the things that startled me was to realize how much, you know, my father and these other futurists who were thinking about the future couldn't fully comprehend a future in which women were as human as men.

They could think of aliens, you know, being kind of like, "Well, this would be the Martian equivalent of a businessman, and this would be the Martian equivalent of a housewife," but, you know, further than that, they could not quite go.

My father was a satirist as well as a science fiction writer, and I love, you know, pointing out this blind spot.

I don't know if this is answering your question, but I have to say that because I am such a pop culture person, when I thought about pod people, I also wanted to go a little bit into "The Return of Martin Guerre," which was based on a true story of this medieval peasant who, you know, leaves his wife, goes away to war, comes back, and no one's quite sure if it really is the same person.

And the wife is not contesting it though, because it becomes quickly apparent that this new Martin Guerre is a new and improved version.

And so I wanted to play with that.

Or another way to say it is John Carpenter did "The Thing," which is, you know, this ultimate horror film about a shape-shifting alien.

And around the same time, he also did "Starman," which is, you know, deeply romantic with young Jeff Bridges as the hunkiest and most romantic of shape-shifting aliens.

So I didn't just wanna play with science fiction and horror and politics, but, you know, there's definitely romance in here as well.

- It's funny when you talk about futurists being unable to think of women as being equals, let's say.

But it's also interesting when we take a look at science fiction from, let's say the era of the original "Star Trek," where everything's very optimistic, and then the, I guess, projection of the future in contemporary times where it's really dark and a lot of these stories take place in, you know, a dystopia where Matt Damon's got to fight to get a can of beans from Jodie Foster or something like that.

I don't know if that's the actual plot of the movie.

So as you are sort of using this 1950s to reflect the current times, how are you sort of, you know, using the past to reflect the present?

- I think that there is a moment that we're living in which is having a love affair with the '50s.

It's so clear.

I mean, if you look at the Trump woman.

You know, however she comes into the public eye, the Trump woman is wearing a very tightly fitted structured shift dress and high heels, and she's very coiffed and, you know, very made up.

And it's this whole love affair too with all the things that represents, more traditional male and female values, you know, of classic gendered roles.

You get what you get and you don't get upset.

Sorry, my dog is scrabbling down there, so if there's a weird sound, that's what it is.

She's digging her place to safety.

So it's a moment where there's a love affair with this idea.

Stop that!

Stop that!

There's a love affair with the idea of 1950s values.

And so it seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, remember, you know, abstract expressionism as a wail of despair from artists who said we were about to blow up the world?

That was the '50s too."

- And you know, it's funny, because the title is referencing a classic Allen Ginsberg poem, "Howl."

So again, you know, as you are putting this together, obviously you are, as well as a writer, you are a reader and you are probably in your own way a scholar if you are not a formal scholar.

So as you are putting all of these pieces together, consciously, are you thinking, you know, I'm going to make this connection to the audience that if they're paying attention to it, they're going to know this is the title of that great poem, or are they going to just think it's classic science fiction horror kind of title?

- We actually went through some different titles.

I think we went through Future Wife and Flesh Puppets along the way.

I think there was a period of time where I wanted to call it Of Flesh and Fungus, like a bad, you know, Faulknerian title.

But "Howl" I think also to me evokes the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" film from 1978 where the pod-infested aliens, you know, look like you or me, but when they spot someone who has not yet been transformed, they do this point and sort of.

[imitating alien shrieking] There's this, you know, horrific sound that comes out.

Yeah, no, I think it's all in there.

One of the conceits I have is that when people go fungal, they go in the idiom of whoever it was.

So if someone was an abstract expressionist or, you know, a jazz musician or a science fiction writer, you're gonna see that reflected.

And there is a point where one person is, I think I've used just enough so that I can't be sued, you know, it's fair usage, but as someone is decompensating fungally, there's a little, "I've seen the best minds of..." - What struck me in that second issue, you have these pod-infested or or fungal-infested men talking to a therapist about how they don't understand the women in their lives because, you know, they're aliens.

But if we're looking, we can also see that this is the classic discussion that men have had sitting around the bar on a Friday afternoon after work.

You know, "My wife just doesn't understand me."

So when you're putting it into the science fiction context, I mean, it's got to give you a lot of room to play with and just sort of take something that is very real, but make it very, as you were saying earlier, very absurdist.

- Oh, that was one of my favorite scenes.

So I have to talk, may I talk for a moment about the character of Myrtle Morel, the therapist?

She was based on one real-life figure and one fictional figure.

So my mother and father and just about every one of their generation that I know of, writers and artists, all ended up at some point seeing the therapist Mildred Newman.

She was co-author of the first big, you know, self-help book phenomenon, "How to Be Your Own Best Friend."

I mean, that I guess and the Dale Carnegie book, but...

So she was a celebrity therapist and she saw Mike Nichols, Paul Simon, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Anthony Perkins, who my mom saw in the office as she was coming and going, and she had all these workshops.

Anytime I talk to someone who's my age and they have a parent, they say, "Oh my god, my mother and father were seeing Mildred!"

At some point I may want to do some nonfiction book about her, but you can read about her in the Mike Nichols biography.

I'm sorry, I could go off on such a tear about Mildred Newman.

So I found her fascinating.

But I also thought about the character in "An American in Paris" that's played by the actress Nina Fochs, I think it is.

She's the older, sophisticated woman who is, you know, discarded by Gene Kelly's character in favor of, you know, the gamine Leslie Caron.

And there's not a woman that I know of my generation who loves musicals who didn't say, you know, "He was just a complete ass to that character," and, you know, you wonder what happened to her.

So both those characters went into the DNA of Myrtle Morel, who is the therapist, and also, you know, not what she seems to be.

- You know, it always fascinates me when I get to speak to an artist or a writer and just hear what little pieces of just life have sort of come into their mind as they sit down and create.

I know for me, like I like to refer to certain TV shows that might, you know, that one odd character that nobody else from that episode of "Taxi" is going to appear in something that I do in sort of a reconfigured way.

So is this something that you're doing as well?

I mean, could we expect like, let's say a pastiche of Dr. Joyce Brothers and Gavin MacLeod in something?

I mean, that sort of mindset?

- You know, to some extent.

I'm trying to think who else.

I mean, there are a lot of science fiction writers who belong to the Hydra Club.

That was the real name.

I rename it Scylla because Hydra is now so associated with Marvel supervillains.

But I remember that there was a letter in which my mom said, you know, "Guess who hugged me as if he'd never seen me before and held on just a little too long?

That's right, Ike."

And, you know, science fiction fans will recognize who that was.

So I wanted to have that.

So it's not necessarily an actor who's in the DNA, but there are other characters.

So I planted little things around that character's Upper West Side apartment.

I said to Mauricet, you know, "I think there should be lots of, you know, kind of contemporary, modern brutalist sculptures and they should all be a little, you know, overly sexualized," 'cause it just seemed like the right choice there.

- Again, when you are working on something that is fantastical and is pulling all of these threads and putting them together, you know, what does this allow you to do in the future?

I mean, when you see an audience reacting a certain way to a project, is there a security in saying, "I can keep going in this direction career-wise because I know that my audience will love more of this sort of, you know, science fiction, or do I go in a completely different direction because, you know, I've got a creative itch to scratch and now I'm going to go into Elizabethan meets, you know, King Arthur or something like that"?

- You know, at this particular moment, I'm still very gripped by this.

In the previous series I wrote, "G.I.L.T.," I ended up revisiting New York City around 1973, '74 and riffed on disaster films and weird buildings in the city.

And now I've been, you know, very much in late '50s New York, and there's something about that whole, you know, somewhere between the '50s and the '70s that still is gripping me.

And I'm also, I'm right now very hooked on the TV series "9-1-1."

And it's this wonderful combination of disaster movie tropes and, you know, soap opera characters.

It's horror adjacent, but it ends well enough, you know?

And I think that that kind of wanting to dip into horror, but have it be campy horror, horror that's not, you know...

I would like to make you think, but not make you so horrified that you feel as though you've watched the evening news.

- When you think about that era between the 1950s and let's say the 1980s before technology changed so drastically, where, you know, we all have, as one character says, a phone permanently stuck to our hands, there's enough there that an audience can recognize, "Oh, yeah, that's a car, that's a television, oh, there's a telephone on the wall," that you can tell stories.

But also as a writer, you don't necessarily have to lean on the fact that, yeah, they could solve this problem by Googling it.

- Maybe it's because I'm not a straight-out mystery writer, but I think that most problems cannot be solved by Googling.

I was thinking about people in their teens and 20s now, and how there's a culture where it's sort of okay to take out your phone.

And so maybe some questions can be answered, but in the old days, yeah, we used cigarettes, but we spent a lot of time watching people, looking at faces and reactions.

And as a comic book person, that's what really fascinates me.

The reason Mauricet and I are, you know, such a good pair is because it's all about reactions.

And that's, you know, that's where problems can be solved maybe.

- Well, Alisa, they are telling us that we are out of time, which is a shame, 'cause we were having a great conversation.

Thank you so much for taking time out to talk with me today.

- Thank you so much, Terence, and I wish I could take one of your courses.

[Terence chuckles] - I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

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