We chat with writer Joseph Sieracki about resurrecting Captain Suave for Zoop.
Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the coolest and most thought-provoking creators in the industry. In this entry, we're conversing with Joseph Sieracki about The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
In this country, it seems that our natural response to homelessness is willful ignorance. How that person arrived on that corner or at that stoplight begging for change is their problem, not ours. They're easy enough to dismiss when you're trying not to spill your fries while gripping your steering wheel and/or phone. "Come on, light, turn green already."
Few comics, movies, and books depict homelessness as a lived experience. Popular culture is as disinterested as its consumers, so it's always such a shock when a story like The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave arrives. Written by Joseph Sieracki and illustrated by Kelly Williams, the comic has finally been collected as a trade paperback. It will soon be released thanks to Zoop (join the crowdfunding celebration here).
The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave grabs its inspiration from Don Quixote. However, rather than tilting at windmills, this series blurs reality with a Silver Age superhero aesthetic. The central character finds relevance as the titular crimefighter while partnering with a Cleveland nurse facing his own demons. Sieracki and Williams bring the same passion to this narrative as their previous collaboration on A Letter to Jo, a true story exploring the World War II romance between Sieracki's grandparents, told from the battlefront as one participant writes home to the other.
With days left on the Captain Suave Zoop campaign, we spoke with Joseph Sieracki about the series and the heavy problem at its center. We discuss his relationship with Don Quixote, why he felt Cervantes' story fit so easily with superheroes, and the research he applied to confront homelessness in America.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave and Those Windmills
Brad: The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave is this cool superhero riff on Don Quixote.
Joseph Sieracki: Yeah. So, it's an absurdly long title, The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave, which is an homage to a story in Don Quixote, which is a meta-textual book. If you're not familiar with Don Quixote, there's the actual within the book, the fictionalization of Don Quixote's life. So, we play around with that meta-textual aspect a lot but try to modernize it for a homeless man living in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, who believes himself to be a superhero. So, yeah, like a modern spin on Don Quixote there.
Lisa: What's your relationship to Don Quixote? Is this an idea that you and Kelly came up with together?
Joseph Sieracki: Not together. Certainly, we developed it together. But the idea initially came to me when I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Are you guys familiar with that?
Brad: Oh, yeah. I love the book.
Joseph Sieracki: Big Michael Chabon guy.
Brad: Yeah. Absolutely. English major. I think all English majors like Michael Chabon. He's got it going on.
Joseph Sieracki: So, I was reading that book - it's essentially a riff on Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. I started reading more about their history and how it's tied to Cleveland. I am a born and raised Clevelander myself. I started thinking a lot about them, and somewhere along the lines, Don Quixote got into my head as well and I brought those two together.
Now, I hadn't actually read Don Quixote before that. I knew what everybody knew about the windmills. So, then I read Don Quixote and thought, "This is crazy funny." And it's also crazy modern, given that it was written hundreds of years ago. And this whole meta-textual aspect, it felt too perfect and just bringing those two things together, I loved it.
I've heard a lot of other writers saying that that's a book that they'll just return to regularly just because it's so magnificently written. And I've read it a couple of times myself since.
Lisa: What I enjoy so much about Captain Suave and the Don Quixote idea, even though I've only seen the musical - is it forces you to converse with yourself. Is your idealism rooted if it is not grounded in the truth, you know what I mean? I feel like we can't deny that Captain Suave is tremendously well-intentioned, and his ideals are shining and beautiful. It's just that it's not real.
Joseph Sieracki: But it's real to him. I think that's the thing that matters the most. He is, at his core, a wholesome character. I've written a few comics and graphic novels. This was one where I really felt that connection to a character where you could put him in any scene, and I knew how he was going to react in that scene because, at the end of the day, his intentions would always be pure and he would always be trying to do the right thing.
It just got me thinking character-driven first. I never really thought all that much about it. Do you start with the plot and then start filling in the characters, or do you start with the characters? I've heard it discussed both ways. Writers have different approaches, but especially with this book, I really felt character first. They were speaking to me. I knew what they would do in these various situations and then just let it hit the fan from there.
The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave and the Silver Age
Brad: And Kelly Williams is having so much fun in this series as well. I love his work on A Letter to Jo, it has a Jeff Lemire-like quality, right?
Joseph Sieracki: I said the same thing when the first time I saw his.
Brad: Yeah, yeah. And Lisa and I were just talking about Fishflies the other day and we had Letter to Jo on the table right next to it.
Lisa: So, the comparison is circumstantial.
Brad: But Captain Suave KellyWilliams gets to really play around in the tropes and aesthetics of Silver Age superhero comics, and damn, am I a sucker for that stuff?
Joseph Sieracki: That was really a fun aspect, just mirroring the reality versus what's going on in his head and using these two completely different styles side by side on the page. Honestly, I did not know if it was going to work or not. He hand paints, watercolors the reality, and then he digitally colors the fantasy using that, what's it called? Ben-Day dot color pattern.
Brad: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joseph Sieracki: So, you're seeing hand colored and digital colored side by side on the same page. I'm like, is this going to look weird?
Lisa: No, it's seamless. Sometimes it does a thing where it clips - here's the fantasy and here's the reality right next to each other. But other times, it's done in sequence, and it is so fun to just dig into the page to...
Brad: Bounce back and forth.
Joseph Sieracki: I'm glad to hear you say that. I must shout out our letterer on both A Letter to Jo and Captain Suave. Taylor Esposito does a great job in both capturing these different styles and these different times. In Captain Suave, he tried to go for an older lettering style, which you get in the fantasy versus a more modern in the reality pages. So, we get that mirror aspect as well.
Researching The Life and Death of the Brave Captain Suave
Lisa: How was the research for this story? It has the literary aspect, and you did have to go back and read Don Quixote, but you have characters who are suffering from mental illness, homelessness, and drug addiction.
Joseph Sieracki: I started reading a lot of books on poverty, homelessness, and mental illness to better understand that and incorporate that into the story. Again, it's not something that you really often see in media like, what's the last movie where you saw homeless people in it? It's not something you see very often.
Brad: Emilio Estevez's The Public. That's the last one we watched; it was two years ago.
Lisa: Few and far between.
Joseph Sieracki: And there's the one with Robin Williams as well.
Brad: The Fisher King, and that's a Don Quixote spin, too.
Joseph Sieracki: That is like a Don Quixote character. That was the only one that I could really think of off the top of my head. So, it's not something you see in a lot of media. It's something that we definitely wanted to bring a light to. And yeah, I needed to better understand homelessness and how that happens in a country where we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world. I honestly didn't know.
I started reading a lot of books on these topics to get a better understanding of how this happens and try to incorporate at least a little bit of that into the absurdity that is the story. Because we're definitely absurd in a lot of places because of the source material. Don Quixote is absurd in a lot of places. We wanted that rooted in reality. And so, his backstory is actually very similar to a case study of a man who was homeless in Cleveland, Ohio.
It's not unrealistic - what has led him to this path. These are things that actually do happen to people. And likewise, Stanley and his story and backstory is also a mirroring in many ways a story from an actual person in one of those books that I had read about. Not that far off from reality.
Lisa: I feel like Captain Suave is a character who could literally have a thousand iterations and go on forever and ever. What was the motivation for you to really have an arc with a stopping place, even if it's a temporary stopping place?
Joseph Sieracki: In all honesty, monetarily speaking, I just don't think we could pump out 20 issues of this. Ten seemed like a stretch as it was. So, I figured two arcs, five issues a piece using standard 22-page issues along the way. I would say that the first arc ends in a pretty satisfying spot, but it is not the end of his story.
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