ince the debut of Mage: The Hero Discovered from Comico in the eighties, Matt Wagner's has been a cult to be reckoned with. Toeing the gray line between the mainstream and alternative, Wagner's work commands fierce loyalty from a strong group of fans who are enamored of its hints of ancient myth in the contemporary milieu of adventure oriented comics. After nearly a decade's hiatus, Wagner returned to Mage earlier this year with his new series The Hero Defined. Feature editor and publisher Charles Brownstein sat down with Wagner shortly after the series debuted to discuss myth, Mage, and comics for Feature #4. What follows is an excerpt from that interview.

Feature: Tell me about the creative roots of Mage. What are the roots of the overall story?
MATT WAGNER: Well, as most comics fans, I'd always had a strong interest in heroic fiction. I reached a certain age in my teen years where I realized there was certain heroic fiction that dealt with surface gloss, and certain heroic fiction that dealt with its subject on a deeper, more instinctive, mythological level. As a young creator, I was constantly trying to find a source of that and was frustrated to find that I only had the ability to deal with surface gloss. Most of my early efforts at creating stories before my publication days were pretty trite and in fact the early issues of Mage: The Hero Discovered had a certain ordinariness about them.

The thing that makes them special and the thing that led me in some way to that deeper spirituality in those myths was by personalizing it and making it an analogy of my own life. A myth about me. That's how myths work best, when they touch you inside. So, I had an interest in Arthurian legend at the time and initially had started working on a story about the second coming of King Arthur but it suffered from exactly the sorts of shortcomings I was just speaking about. It was a much more ordinary looking and feeling sort of story. I think I only produced two pages before I gave it up. The character wore a cape [chuckles] and had a beard and headband, and was very mundane looking in a superhero sense.

Then DC announced that they were doing Camelot 3000, so I thought, "Well, ... it's been done." Then when Camelot 3000 came out, I felt it was trapped by the surface gloss. It was just taking the old legends and transporting them into a modern environment and not bringing a modern environment to the myth. So that's when I hit upon the idea of trying it again and trying it from a different standpoint.

One day-- this is when I lived in Philadelphia--I was down at the Philadelphia Waterfront doing some sketches, and one of them was a sketch of myself. For some reason this particular sketch kind of stuck with me and I realized this was a way to approach this story, as a fictional analogy of my growth as an individual. My discovery of power in my life. My coming to terms with being something effective in life and the world.

Tell me about the process of transposing the analogy of your life onto the Arthurian folklore.
A lot of it was instinctual. I kind of knew the metaphors I wanted to use, but I explored it as I went. I didn't really know the end of the story. I knew a couple of points and a couple of scenes I wanted to do, for instance, the scene where Kevin [Matt's alter-ego] falls through the elevator. That was a very distinct scene I wanted to work towards, and I didn't get to that until issue #6. There was a scene where Kevin runs after a fleeing car and he kicks it, and his foot gets caught in the hole that he's kicked in the door and so he gets dragged down the street. I'd say it probably wasn't until issue #8 or #9 when the image of him pulling the magic bat out of the trash dumpster in the alleyway actually formed into a coherent element in my mind. I knew ultimately it would come to something like that, but again, it was the journey itself that gave me that vision.

I approach the sequel quite a bit like that as well. Almost any other storylines I work on-- the various Batman work or Sandman Mystery Theatre--are much more controlled according to their overall story and point of climax. I do very complete story outlines, thumbnails, and breakdowns, but with Mage, I just sit down with two blank pages in front of me and start. I know where each issue will end, but I don't know it page by page, I take it one step at a time. It's a much more Zen-like approach and really fits the difference in the subject matter and intent.

How important is the Arthurian tradition to what you're doing with Mage? Are you appropriating bits and pieces of it or are you attempting a faithful translation?
**BREAK Well, the first Mage series had most distinctly to do with King Arthur and the Arthurian legends. That is, it had to do with what I feel are the important parts of the Arthurian legends; the important characteristics. I'm a firm believer in the Campbellian attitude that all myths are kind of describing the same process of human evolution and life. It's basically man coming to grips with his own mortality and his own desires. The fact that his reach will always exceed his grasp.

In the first storyline Kevin was clearly set up as the king of this little group of adventurers and all the supporting characters are there to support and defend his role as the reborn Pendragon. The king of this situation. In the current series, Kevin has to deal with the influx of other myths into his life and the fact that these other influences have impacted other people in different ways. The characters he runs into all have their own agendas and he must learn to deal with that. Instead of taking a stance he needs to question his own stance.

What went into the creation of the characters both in the first Mage series and in the current series? How did you identify the fundamental concepts that were at the core of these characters? How did you distill the essential characteristics into your current cast of characters?
Well, again, this is an allegory of my life. A lot of it is pulled together from either various individual people I know or various groups of people I've known rolled into one character. First of all, I try to distill it in that the physical characteristics are only going to be applied in a very cursory manner. For instance, the Merlin character in The Hero Discovered is not an old man with a white beard. I was very tired of seeing that same old interpretation over and over again. In the legend, Merlin is the one who inspires and invigorates Arthur to take up his powers and place in the world. So, in The Hero Discovered, I decided to paint a character who was much younger, much more sprightly and energetic. No matter the heroic potential or mystical obscurity, I try to make sure that in all cases however I paint the character won't distance it from the modern and everyday reader.

Again, the stories have to appeal to every man to be a successful myth. A lot of comic book stories today, including stories I've done, deal with characters so above and beyond the scope of normal human existence that they're very alien and very strange and mysterious. For instance, Hunter Rose --the twenty-year-old best-selling novelist, genius assassin --is deliberately set up as an alien creature, as is Batman. Batman is so far above the norm of human existence that you can thrill to his adventures but you can't really identify with his personal grief and emotions. So, to bring the myth home I try to make it such that each character is somebody you feel you'd meet walking down the street. In The Hero Discovered, we have all these personifications of hero myths from around the world and they're all just guys in ratty t-shirts and jackets, and I think that's a vital part of how I distill these legends.

This brings to mind the idea that the myths talk to one another in the storytellers' interpretations. You seem to be exploring that a bit in the current Mage series. You know, Hercules dealing with King Arthur, and so forth. How are you finding the challenge of making these myths relate to one another? What bits need to be hacked out and what elements of the myths are actually complementary to one another?
Well, one of the hardest things that I'm finding is to not make Kevin the central point again. Certainly, the story's told through his eyes and, in his personality and beliefs about his role, he seems to have natural leadership inclinations, but I gotta make sure that the other characters have just as vital a role in what goes on. I've studied a lot about the other myths. I'm fairly good at melding them all and trying to realize how they all speak the same language. I realize that what they're all trying to say is this: live your life and don't be afraid of your life.

Biology plays a large role in our reality, especially so in the modern world where a lot of people are so divorced from their own physiognomy that they're afraid to be human. We're so bombarded by information that has been doctored to a certain slick level of perfection we're scared of our own warts and chest hairs. I'm married and have two kids and I know various friends that kind of frown upon that. Certainly you give up a certain amount of personal freedom by going through parenthood, but I tend to think personal freedom is a greatly overrated quality.

How so?
Personal freedom for its own sake is a dead end. There's only so many times you can have fine food, there's only so many times you can have great sex, there's only so many times you can have great drugs, there's only so many times you can read great books [chuckles]. There's only so many times you can do all this stuff because it doesn't necessarily lead to any growth. Following through with growth in your life and growth in society is much more productive, rewarding, and sustaining. Now, I'm a strong, almost libertarian advocate against any kind of personal prohibition. The option for personal pleasure has to be there. Anytime you try to repress that it just raises its ugly head and turns into a mutated beast. Planting seeds that will grow beyond the immediacy of your small life span is much more important I think.

How do the myths say this?
All the myths deal with man's confusion over his mortality. Joseph Campbell once said that "man looks around him and sees nothing but death," and I would add to that by saying, "and wants nothing but sex ." What that means is, we all know it's all gonna end. We all know we're all gonna die and, as a result, we all want to just live in that life spark of that moment of orgasm forever. We all want the pleasure to never end because that means we're still alive. Whereas, true wisdom comes with the realization that the certainty for an end for you means the allowance of everything to continue. You're a part of the whole organism of life, the whole unto itself. **BREAK This kind of brings up the interesting contrast between the Western and Eastern myths, where Eastern myth is cyclical in nature and Western is much more linear. It seems like you're trying to impose the Eastern idea of "it is a cycle" upon these Western myths like Hercules and his 12 labors and King Arthur.
I think the Western myths are cyclical as well. The fact that Christ will be reborn, the fact that Arthur has gone to Avalon and will return someday. The Eastern mythologies bring it down to a more day to day sort of reality. They know that the fact that the sun rises and sets in and of itself is a metaphor for eternity. Whereas in the West we see things in terms of a lifetime as opposed to a moment, the East has succeeded in realizing that time is non-linear, that a moment is the same as an eon. The West has trouble seeing past the moment of their own death. A lot of it might have to do with environment. When we think of Western culture, we think mainly of Europe and European culture which, although lush and fertile has harsh winters and a stronger change-over in seasons which might account for the severity that comes with the linear aspects you're speaking of there.

Who is Kevin to you this time? How has he changed and how does that relate to how you've changed?
I just got a letter from somebody pointing out that all the chapter titles in The Hero Discovered are from Hamlet, which is a classic story of indecision and self pity -- whereas all the chapter titles in The Hero Discovered are from Macbeth which is a story about the failings of ambition and arrogance. This time around I'm getting a lot of varied fan mail, and it definitely does affect people. Some people just adore it and some people just hate it. They go on and on about how, "This isn't the Kevin Matchstick I knew. This guy is too cocky and too arrogant. What happened to the doubt and sense of loss that Kevin experienced in The Hero Discovered?"

My answer to that is, "Well, he experienced it and found a way out of it." It led him to something that is not necessarily an answer, but a different stage. The way it relates to my own life is that in my late teens and early twenties I was as cynical and self possessed as most teenagers are. Once my career started to take off and I found a path for my "power," as it were, I took off running and never looked back. So that's where Kevin's arrogance comes from and the wisdom he gains this time around will maybe disprove his surety the same way the first one disproved his uncertainty.

It's a little strange here because the Kevin I'm dealing with is me of about eight to ten years ago. He has found what he thinks is his direction. People were telling him certain things about himself that he didn't believe; finally he realized they were true, and that realization sparked a great capacity in him. By that capacity I mean the bat-the power, the ability to take arms and defeat the supernatural threats that are coming against him. Certainly in that period of your life, you feel very confident, you feel more fire about your effect on the world, and maybe it just ain't so. Maybe the world is having more effect on you than you have on it. That's where I'd say Kevin is now, as of The Hero Defined.

How much of the story you're doing now is an attempt to do a faithful retelling of classic stories, how much is an attempt at modernizing those stories, and how much of it is "myth-bending?"
Well, it's all myth-bending. It's all taking the stories and filtering it through my sensibilities, my world, and my view of reality. I would even say maybe it's not myth-bending, but myth creating. I think we're doomed or blessed, I don't know which [laughs] to create the same myths over and over again-to strive to get in touch with that primal reality that is so much deeper than we can understand.

People used to pester Joseph Campbell: "Do you believe in God?" His response was, "God is a metaphor for everything we can't understand about the world and life and the universe, so in that sense I believe in God. I believe that there is a greater mystery beyond myself. Do I feel like God is personified? No. I feel it's only personified when I perceive it." He argued in that analogy wherein there are two types of people in the world: the theists, like monotheists, polytheists, who believe that their mythology is historical fact. The atheists know that their mythology is a metaphor.

This, I think, dashes the old, snipingly uttered gripe "Athiests don't believe in anything." Well, that's not true at all [laughs]. So it's all myth-bending to fit my specifications. How slavish am I to the original sources? About half, I'd say. I'm trying to dig through the surface gloss that's told by generation after generation of storytellers from the past and filter the important essence of the myths down through me.

You can't be too slavish to any old myth. The stories of King Arthur weren't written down until hundreds of years after the events supposedly occurred. Most myths are handed down by word of mouth for generation by generation of oral storytelling. The gospels weren't written until seventy-five years after Christ died. Again, it's all filtered through the original storyteller, and that's what makes it special, that's what makes it intimate, and that's what makes it truly spiritual.