Kevin Gunstone: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

By Mike Jozic

While still a fresh face to the comic-reading public at large, Kevin Gunstone isn’t exactly new to comics. He’s been lurking around in the lesser known corners of the industry for a while now, crafting stories for anthologies like Absence of Ink Theatre, and more recently, having had a hand in shaping the Mangaverse experiment over at Marvel with collaborator, Ben Dunn. This April, Gunstone and Dunn plan to make some waves – or at least very strong ripples – with their latest offering, the six-issue mini-series, The Agents.

Published by Image, and part of the “manga month” event, The Agents is the story of a global protectorate known as The Agency. Based out of Britain, the global protectorate works toward keeping the peace in a world where both Moscow and Washington, D.C. have been obliterated by nuclear attacks. The Agents, through espionage and counter-intelligence, help maintain the peace whenever conflict arises.

I spoke with the U.K based writer about his new series, as well as his past work for Marvel, and where he’s looking to for the future.

MIKE JOZIC: Although, obviously, published second, The Agents actually predates your Mangaverse work for Marvel, does it not?

KEVIN GUNSTONE: Yes.

JOZIC: How long did the project sit on the proverbial shelf before you had a chance to really do something with it?

GUNSTONE: It wasn't really too long. I started on The Agents in early 2001, and things were going along quite nicely, at least as far as the story was concerned. However, I was speaking to Ben on the phone one day, and he then told me that he wouldn't be able to draw the book for a while. He then went on to speak in hushed tones about this 'Marvel' project he was working on. Little did I know…

The Agents was always in the back of our minds though, even when we were working on Mangaverse, and as soon as we finished our run on it we knew this was the book we wanted to produce next.

JOZIC: Did the idea for The Agents come from you, Ben Dunn, or was it a collaborative effort between the two of you?

GUNSTONE: I suppose it was 'sort of' collaborative. Basically, Ben's always wanted to draw a story like this, he asked me if I was interested in writing it, so I spent some time devising the whole 'world' of The Agents and the ideas and story behind it. Ben loved it, so we put it into production. I made quite a few visual suggestions for the characters, some of which Ben followed, and some where he had his own ideas, its all worked out quite well though.

JOZIC: And what would you say is the basic story of The Agents? What are readers getting themselves into when they pick up a copy of this book?

GUNSTONE: The basic plot of The Agents is that of an action/adventure story with characters that initially seem quite familiar. However, as the story progresses we find out that they’re something quite different, and act in a way you wouldn’t normally expect. Alongside the action we look at the question of British Imperialism and a real mystery about the heart of the Agency itself.

JOZIC: Will The Agents be considered a manga book, or are you playing this one straight, accepting the look of Dunn's work as influenced by it, but not playing up the trappings of it?

GUNSTONE: As far as I’m concerned I’m playing it straight and Ben’s just drawing it in his normal style, although that style is more realistic on this book than in some of his previous work. I’m writing this as I would any other American comic, and so I’ll let other people pigeonhole it!

JOZIC: Was it always the plan to have the series published by Image?

GUNSTONE: No, it was Antarctic originally. But after Mangaverse, I think that Ben wanted it to be a little more high profile. There were no complaints from me, since I'd always wanted to write a series for Image!

JOZIC: Were there hard feeling over at Antarctic when you decided to move the book to Image?

GUNSTONE: Possibly, although I haven’t really had too much negative feedback from the people I know there such as Rod Espinosa. I think they were a bit disappointed more than anything else, and as Rod knows, I’m more than happy to write more books for Antarctic in the future.

JOZIC: On looking at the Agents preview pages on the Image site, I have to say, that is quite the opening for a new series. What do you do to top blowing up Washington D.C. and Moscow over the next 5 ¾ issues?

GUNSTONE: I don't really know if you can top it, although there's quite a few big action sequences later on. What the explosions in the US and Russia do is act as the catalyst for the whole story and the characters in it. I also enjoy writing 'big' openings for stories, since I think it engages the reader right from the very start and helps the story hit the ground running, so to speak.

JOZIC: You have some pretty obvious nods to the existing Spy lore in popular culture, with shades of Bond coming through in those first five pages. How much of a role will that influence play in the overall style of the series?

GUNSTONE: In a way it's all influenced by it. I absolutely love Bond films, (especially the Sean Connery ones), and lots of other cult Sixties shows, but the difference with this story is that it tries to give the personnel a little more depth. I wanted to try and explore what actually motivates the kind of characters one would normally find in those stories and films. It’s all very well, wanting to blackmail governments for large sums of money, or, in more extreme cases control countries and individuals, but the question has to be 'why'? The way I see it, if you're involved in that sort of plot, then you must have a strong personal philosophy for wanting to do so. That's something that doesn't just apply to the villains (whoever they are), but Nigel Cord and the other members of The Agency as well. And, in a nutshell, that's what this story is about.

JOZIC: So, the series is called The Agents for a reason. You're going to be focusing on the characters much more than the agency they work for or any other element of the story?

GUNSTONE: Funnily enough we were going to call it The Agency originally, but then Top Cow started publishing a book with that name so we had to change it. It probably wasn’t a bad thing though, because although the Agency is always in the background of the story, the real focus is on the agents themselves.

JOZIC: When I first heard about The Agents I thought, "Here comes another humorous send-up of every spy film I've ever seen." But The Agents is intended to be more of a straight on, action-adventure story, isn't it?

GUNSTONE: Yes, this isn’t a parody in any way, but that doesn’t mean to say there’s no humor in it, since there’s quite a bit. Of course, with Ben on the art you’ll find a few Easter eggs in there, which will hopefully make you smile, but we’re certainly not playing it just for laughs.

JOZIC: Will there be more of a classic suave European spy feel to The Agents, or more of a slick US style of espionage storytelling?

GUNSTONE: It's very much anchored in the European style, mainly drawing from classic films and shows from the Sixties. I suppose this is how I'd interpret a Bond-like film, if that's not too big headed!

JOZIC: You've obviously had some time to rethink The Agents from when you were originally working on it. Did anything get changed or revised from the original pre-Mangaverse The Agents, to the one that we'll be seeing on the stands soon?

GUNSTONE: One of the positive things that came from putting the book on hold for around a year was that I learnt a lot from the run on Mangaverse in a lot of different areas. Essentially, the actual story itself is the same, the difference being the way it’s told. It's a lot tighter now and the characters themselves are far more rounded.

JOZIC: Can you give some examples of changes that were made after returning to the book from the year-long hiatus?

GUNSTONE: There have been changes to the supporting cast, such as Haiku, and especially Douglas Chance, as I felt their roles in the story needed to be strengthened. As for the story itself, its something I’m still working through, since although all six issues are pretty much written, I’m currently just going through each script and revising them so everything fits together more than it did originally. I really can’t say what some of the changes are though without giving part of the story away, and I’d prefer it to be a surprise!

JOZIC: Do you think that, with Marvel's recent interest in cracking the Manga market, combined with the already large number of Manga influenced artists, there might be a backlash that would do more harm than good to the style and books like The Agents?

GUNSTONE: Yes, it could do. Ben has his own style and he is obviously influenced by Manga and Anime, however, this has been his style for the last fifteen years or so.

One of the things which I find quite mystifying is the argument that American produced books aren't 'proper' Manga. By and large they aren't, its just an influence, but I do find it slightly odd that in the world of music artists seem quite at liberty to borrow elements from other musical genres and nobody really cares less, whereas in comics people seem to get quite angry! At the end of the day, the only important thing is whether you've
enjoyed it or not, regardless of its influences.

JOZIC: I think the backlash to Western Manga may be related to the fact that those who read "true" Manga are making a choice not to get involved with the mainstream western market. To have a push over here towards the Manga style...I can see that as being perceived as a failed attempt to capture the "magic" of manga. In essence, we're getting the stuff wrong.

GUNSTONE: I think that a distinction really has to be drawn between Western Manga and Eastern. Personally, I don't think that Western Manga will ever be the same as its Japanese counterpart, simply because, not only is the subject matter quite different, but the industry in America publishes in a different format to that in Japan. Perhaps if Marvel, DC or some other company started publishing original, non-superhero B&W material in the phonebook size format then things could change. With Mangaverse, we weren't really trying to create a story which could have originated in Japan, but instead something that took elements from both Manga and
traditional Marvel storytelling and tried to synthesize them into something new. That's how I view most American Manga, it's not 'wrong', just different.

JOZIC: As far as the art goes, manga style is pretty easy to pick out of a crowd, but what does it mean to write in manga style?

GUNSTONE: If you look at Japanese Manga you’ll notice that the one major difference is the amount of space available to tell the story, which is a luxury that wasn’t really to be had in Mangaverse. So, because of that we couldn’t really have long sequences of wordless pages (which would have been nice), we had to try and economize by using visual storytelling and trying not to be too wordy. That’s fine by me, because my own approach to writing isn’t to overwrite and fill the page with pointless captions telling you what’s going on, but to use words where they’re needed and let the art help tell the story - and Ben’s very good at that.

I should point out that I don’t really consider myself to be purely a Manga writer, because my main influences are from more mainstream American comics. But, when I write these series I do try to complement the artist I’m working with at the time.

JOZIC: Is Ben working from full scripts, or do you just write up the plot and script the story later?

GUNSTONE: Ben works very much from full scripts, which he does pay attention to – most of the time.

JOZIC: How difficult was it to pull off a manga version of the Marvel Universe?

GUNSTONE: I only really came onboard for Mangaverse starting with the second bookend of the original event, so Ben (and others) had already done a lot of the work towards the actual characters themselves. I don’t know if it was really difficult, but more a case of trying to forget a lot of what I know about Marvel characters and trying to think of a way they could be reinterpreted as something different.

JOZIC: Ultimately, how successful do you think the experiment was?

GUNSTONE: On a personal level I thought that some of it worked pretty well, and I’d have said for the most part that I was (and still am) quite proud of it. There were one or two problems, the first issue was very much co-written with Ben and I felt that there were far too many words in it, and I wasn’t overly happy with the resolution in issue six. Unfortunately I thought of a far better ending after it had been written and drawn.

As far as the public are concerned, the readers who bought it after the first couple of issues, when it started to settle down, seemed to like it although there was never really a fantastic amount of discussion about the series. I also got the impression that some people felt negatively about the book simply because they didn’t like the idea of doing Marvel characters in a Manga style.

JOZIC: You said your influences were more American mainstream, so what comics do you, yourself, read?

GUNSTONE: Although you might not notice it in my writing, I'm actually quite influenced by Jack Kirby. There are quite a few reasons for this, aside from his incredible art and storytelling, I'm just constantly amazed by the number of truly great concepts he originated over the course of his career, and the way he created stories that were actually about something, using his characters to really represent different sides of an argument or conflict. Also, being British, I've always been a fan of Alan Moore. One of the things I really like about Moore is how he brought influences, such as mainstream literature, from outside comics into his work.

Having said that, I feel that I pick up influences from a load of different places, and when I read a comic or even watch TV or a film, I'm always looking to see what the writer has done well or even not-so-well and mentally make a note of it. I buy an absolute mountain of comics every month and at the moment I'm really enjoying The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lucifer, X-Statix, Thor, JSA and the New X-Men.

JOZIC: The preview pages on the Image site were all in black and white. Is this how the series will appear, or will it be in full color?

GUNSTONE: It is in black and white, and having seen Ben's art I think it really suits the mood of the story we're trying to tell and it gives the book it's own identity.

JOZIC: If The Agents proves to be a success for you and Ben, do you have any more stories in mind for these characters? How many more Agents minis do you think could you write?

GUNSTONE: I'm not sure. There are quite a few countries, organizations, and individuals that I've already created for The Agents world who don't make it into this story and I'd like to explore them in the future. Ben and myself have been talking about doing a sequel and the way I see it is that there's a definite story to tell, pretty much all of which is based around the central character of Nigel Cord and how he develops through time. I know what happens to Cord at the very end, and it’s just the case of finding how long it takes him to get there.

JOZIC: If this does turn out to be the last time you get a chance to write for these characters, is there anything you wish you could have done with them that you didn't have a chance to this time?

GUNSTONE: Not really, because when I originally wrote it I only ever thought of it as a one-off series. Ideas about how the characters could be developed in the future and other storylines came later. The main thing, which I probably haven’t explored as much as I wanted to, is the background of the supporting characters, and one or two ideas that could be shoehorned into the story, but which I feel wouldn’t have the necessary space to develop as much as I’d like them to. Having said that though, this story does have a definite beginning, middle and end, and there won’t really be any plot threads left dangling.

Also, since The Agents is very much set on a world stage, I really wanted to explore what happened to the USSR since the destruction of Moscow. That goes for the Japanese as well, who I envision closing their borders to the outside world just as they did during Eighteenth and Nineteenth century.

JOZIC: Do you have anything planned for when The Agents is done, or are you not even thinking about that yet?

GUNSTONE: Oh, I'm always thinking about it! There's quite a few things I'd like to do, and it's just a case of seeing what happens first. I'd like to do some more creator-owned books, because I have a lot of ideas that I've stored up, and it's simply the case of finding the right artists to work on them and in some cases I think I might have.

JOZIC: On a personal note, why did you pursue writing, particularly writing for comic books?

GUNSTONE: I've read comics over the last 25 years, and when I was younger I spent ages in my bedroom copying out the pictures. In fact, I used to write and draw my own comics - trust me, they were dreadful! I was never particularly interested in school, and somehow I ended up finding myself working in an extremely dull job in the Civil Service.

I always retained my interest in art though and made a break for it after seven wasteful years to became a full-time art student. I actually ended up working with another comic writer, but by then I was starting to get a real interest in developing characters of my own, and I started to feel that my writing was better than my art, so I decided to concentrate on that. Six years later, here we are!

JOZIC: Do you aspire to hook up with a major publisher like Marvel or DC and a regular monthly assignment, or do you prefer doing your own work and having control over it?

GUNSTONE: Yes, I'd love to do a book for Marvel or DC, who wouldn't? When I was writing Mangaverse I enjoyed the buzz of having a regular deadline and seeing the book come out every month. Also, having read their comics for so long I have a really deep affection for a lot of Marvel and DC characters, so it would be fantastic to get the opportunity to bring my thoughts and ideas about what makes, say, a good Black Knight comic.

However, I also really like having control over my own work, from finding an artist, to developing the idea together, since I do like to have a say in how the comic is presented and designed. The other thing is that you can produce the story as you see it, rather than sometimes how a group of people see it. Obviously creating your own series has more of an element of risk to it, not least financially, but it's something I enjoy doing because it lets me explore ideas and situations that I might not be able to touch in the mainstream superhero market.

JOZIC: How different was the dynamic when working for Marvel compared to a smaller publisher?

GUNSTONE: The great thing about working for Marvel is how fast things move, whereas working for a smaller publisher, because there isn't so much money involved, the whole development of the comic and the production of it invariably takes a lot longer.

JOZIC: Do you have a routine you follow when you write? Regular work hours, music, Ice Cream Snickers bars?

GUNSTONE: Yes, I actually work quite normal hours mainly between 8am and 5pm, which I think is a legacy of my time in the civil service. I don't normally listen to music since I find it too distracting, especially if there's singing involved, and I have no real vices apart from cigarettes and coffee.

JOZIC: Barring the Earth opening up and swallowing you whole, where do you see yourself a few years from now? Where would you like to be, career-wise?

GUNSTONE: What I'd really like to do is have a long run on one title, where I can really develop ideas and characters over a period of time, although the main thing is that I still want to be writing comics. I'm pretty greedy, and I'd love to be writing two or three regular titles a month.

JOZIC: In closing, for those people out there who still aren’t convinced, why should they pick up The Agents when it comes out?

GUNSTONE: Because Ben and myself are trying to create a comic which is not only entertaining, but makes you think about it afterwards, (in both the ideas it explores and the characters themselves - who I hope prove to be memorable), instead of something that you can put down and then forget about a couple of minutes later.

If you enjoyed this interview and would like to leave a question or two for Kevin, click on over to the Feature/Forum Project, hit the Kevin Gunstone thread and post your thoughts and queries.

To see a Script-to-Page Comparison of the first 5 pages of The Agents click on this link.

	Mike Jozic has spent the last several years interviewing comic book creators and other entertainment related personalities for various publications. He has been published both online and in print, with his work appearing in The Comics Journal, FearsMag.com and Silver Bullet Comicbooks. He maintains his own website at www.meanwhile.net and currently serves as the Features Editor for SBC.

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