Over
the course of this blog’s history, I’ve been fortunate to have my work read and
shared by major comic book sites, pros in multiple industries and the
occasional minor celeb, but to this day, I get more excited when I receive a
plug from Sean T. Collins than anybody else.
Sean
T. Collins is a former co-worker/current friend/forever guru to all of us here
at the Cool Kid’s Table. When it comes to writing intelligently, insightfully
and oft-hilariously on comics, TV, movies and just about anything, STC is my
standard of excellence, whether at his own blog, on one of his various ventures
or even here when we’re fortunate enough to have him.
Sean
spends a lot of his energy breaking down, y’know, “good” show like Downton
Abbey or Breaking Bad, which I love to get his take on, but it was of course a
special pleasure to read him attempt to bring some class and critical breakdown
to a true American classic like Gossip Girl. As a fellow who’s versed in both
art house smarty-pants stuff and daytime soaps, STC offers a unique take.
Imagine
my joy then when as the final season of GG churned its way out Sean informed me,
Kiel, et al that he was writing a Gossip Girl comic telling the “secret origin”
of Chuck Bass! It’s fantastically drawn by Dan White and you can find the whole
thing right here.
I
immediately got on Sean’s case for an interview, and around New Year’s, he gave
me the holiday gift of his extensive thoughts on the show, the comic, Chuck and
more.
Do
enjoy.
In stark earnestness, what made Gossip Girl a
show you found worth giving your time to? I'm not talking guilty pleasure
territory here, I'm asking what genuinely quality factors do you feel it had?
STC: As one of those obnoxious people who says things like
"there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure," I have to go with stark
earnestness regardless. In that light, I think it's starkly, earnestly a fun,
soapy, sexy show about attractive young quasi-sociopaths getting involved in
crazy hijinks. That's either going to float your boat or it's not, but it
certainly floats mine.
Thinking about it more
specifically in terms of its place in my viewing trajectory, maybe Gossip Girl
was the first television show I was able to watch with the new appreciation for
glam decadence that had opened up the music world for me a few years prior, I
don't know. Looking back, I think it was the first soap I ever really watched,
opening the door for The Vampire Diaries and True Blood and The Young and the
Restless years down the line.
But GG always had that
deliciously incoherent mixture of celebration and satire of the lifestyles it
was depicting, giving it an is-it-or-isn't-it edge that most of those other
shows, however much I enjoy them from time to time, can't really match. This
was especially the case when the characters were all supposed to be 17 years
old—what can I say, I've been a sucker for teenage sensation since I was one
myself. But the decision to go full-on pervy with the love interests in the
final season—Nate goes jailbait, Ivy goes Oedipal twice over, Serena and Lily
have both been to seventh heaven with the same guy, etc.—showed that the show
never really lost its knack for being dirty even as the kids grew up and the
show lost its must-see-tv buzz. You never knew when GG was going to pull
something as shiny and sleazy as a mid-'00s Goldfrapp single out of its sleeve.
Did I mention it was
sexy? I mean, I sincerely appreciate that, I truly do. For squeezing Blake
Lively into all those toothpaste-tube dresses, for playing lingerie dress-up
with Leighton Meester time and time again, for crafting a
dandy-of-the-underworld look for Ed Westwick, for every glimpse of Penn
Badgley's chest hair, for every close-up on the inhumanly beautiful face of
Chace Crawford, Gossip Girl did humanity a great service.
Finally, Chuck Bass and
Blair Waldorf are terrific characters, as memorable as any on TV. It took them
a while to get a handle on Chuck, obviously, but once they figured out what
they had with him and Ed Westwick, a simultaneous Batman-and-Joker that would make
"Batdance"-era Prince jealous...hoo boy. And Blair's manic
perfectionism as expressed by Leighton Meester's chirpy caffeinated porcelain
doll face—hoo boy again.
Going 90 degrees or so, what is absolutely
ridiculous about the show to the point where it does become a guilty pleasure?
STC: This isn't so much a "guilty pleasure" thing as a
"love to hate it" thing, but repetition, repetition, repetition. All
those times someone found out something Serena was withholding from them, and
she sighed with that slurry pitch-shifted voice of hers, "Look, I was
gonna tell you, but..."—half-apologetic, half-irritated, all-ridiculous.
All of Nate and Serena's four-episode-arc significant others. Rufus, the Human
Turtleneck, disapproving Lily, Miss Congeniality, being cold. Vanessa spending
however many seasons she was on the show busting everyone else's chops for,
essentially, being Gossip Girl characters. It was fun to make fun of this
stuff.
Ditto all the things
they picked up only to drop. Eric Van Der Woodsen, the adorable younger brother
who could have been an awesome main character if this dirty and decadent show
about teen sex weren't too cowardly to show a dude kissing another dude for
reasons other than Chuck/Blair intrigue. The fact that all of them spent two
seasons worrying about nothing but college and then all of a sudden, blam, it's
never mentioned again. The need to cycle through love interests and villains
preventing them from keeping most of the best of both categories around for as
long as they deserved to—when they broke the mold, they had at least as many
misses—I was never really sold on Ivy or the jailbait girl, though hubba hubba
in both cases obvs—as hits Juliet, the Prince.
Now then, why a Gossip Girl comic? Of all the
subjects out there and even all the TV shows I know you love and are intrigued
by, what made this the right source material?
STC: The quick answer is that Robin McConnell of Inkstuds fame wasn't
proposing to do a zine about any of those other shows, so I didn't get the idea
to do something on anything else. The less quick, possibly less accurate,
answer is that Gossip Girl fits squarely into some stuff I've been thinking
about a lot lately in terms of comics writing: sex, success, celebrity,
discontent. The comics I've done about Drake and David Bowie aren't a world apart from the world of young Charlie Bass.
Was there an aspect of doing a Gossip Girl comic
that was less intimidating than doing, say, a Mad Men or Sopranos comic because
there probably aren't the same expectations attached? Knowing you, I'm doubting
this entered your mind, but if it were me, I'm sure part of me would certainly
be thinking "Best case, it's art, worst case, it's parody I can easily get
away with" or something along those lines.
STC: Hmmm...I don't think so, no. I mean, if I were to do a comic about
Mad Men or The Sopranos I wouldn't write it in the style of those shows, you
know? I wouldn't be competing with Matthew Weiner to see who could write Tony
Soprano or Don Draper the best. So the weight of expectation wouldn't be
insurmountable, for me at least.
Why the structural choice to go with the
newspaper style series of comic strips rather than one story? It's one of those
things I would never have thought of and didn't realize how brilliant a choice
it clearly was until I saw it laid out.
STC: Well, the whole thing clicked when I realized I could reenact the
first Peanuts strip with GG characters, and that set the template for what was
to come. But I'm sure on some level I was thinking about Daniel Clowes's work
in this format in books like Ice Haven and The
Death-Ray and Mister Wonderful and Wilson,
where he uses individual strips or old-fashioned Sunday-page-length vignettes
to tell an overall story. Other people have done that too—Tim Hensley and
Adrian Tomine come to mind, not to mention all the actual comic strips that
have told ongoing stories, Peanuts included—but I bet Clowes was what gave me
the sense that you could really do this.
I know you've got a soft spot for Chuck Bass, so
I wasn't surprised to see the story center on him, but what about this
character intrigues and attracts you?
STC: He's just the break-out combination of actor and star on that
show. As I said before, it's one of those remarkable Wolverine-type situations
where they didn't quite have a handle on him at first, but they very quickly
saw they had a golden goose and just kept cranking egg after egg out of him. As
a result there was something of a no-prize factor in trying to figure out how
the leering creep of season one and the vigilante hero of the later seasons
could possibly be the same person. I was struck by the throwaway mention of
Chuck losing his virginity to crazy-even-by-GG-standards Georgina Sparks when
he was in the sixth grade and, because sexual hang-ups were basically the story
of my own adolescence, figured that must be where the origin story would be
located.
For anybody who has never read your thoughts on
Gossip Girl, explain the Chuck-Batman thing.
STC: Like Batman, his one real super power is that he's unimaginably
rich. He's a scion of privilege with a personality born out of tragedy. He
walks the line between hero and monster. He dresses well. He's in love with
Catwoman, basically. His catchphrase is announcing who he is. And he
wears a lot of purple, which is a Joker thing not a Batman thing but it's in
the ballpark.
How much time did you devote to actually setting
this in –or lack of a better term—Gossip Girl continuity and thinking about
where you knew the characters were before the show?
STC: Quite a bit, actually. I wanted it to work as well as it could, to
the point where I asked Dan White, the artist I was extremely lucky to be able
to work with on it, to try to find pictures of all the actors when they were
6th-grade aged and make it look like this really was an unseen season of the
show. I tried to base all the relationships on whatever information about them
we had from the show at the time. I think we did a good job, though I was
bummed when the final season either revealed or reminded me that Serena and
Georgina didn't meet and become evil friends until high school.
What did Dan think when you approached him with
this idea?
STC: Dan didn't have a ton of experience with GG, but several of his
compatriots in the Mindless Ones group blog did, and they set him on the path
of righteousness. I think that for Dan the real appeal here was the
experimental appeal of collaboration, since he mostly writes and draws his own
excellent stuff.
What aspects of this do you feel like were
distinctly Gossip Girl and which were just a story you wanted to tell?
STC: Figuring out what Chuck Bass would be like before he became
"cool"—that was unique to that character and that world. I wouldn't
have thought to write someone like that but for the show. The rest...I think a
lot of it was probably just me projecting about the inner lives of the popular
kids in middle school who I continue to resent to this day, honestly, and that
could have happened any which way.
How did you come to see young Chuck—and to a
lesser extent the other characters—as he was in this story? How did you arrive
at the characterization you landed on?
STC: Like I said, I had the idea of Chuck Before Chuck. A kid with that
Croesus level of money and influence, that anachronistic vocabulary and sense
of self, but largely pre-sexual and without the self-confidence and swagger and
style; what would that look and sound like?
Who was the most fun to write besides Chuck?
STC: Georgina, for sure. She had to be true to the character on the
show, she had to be the kind of person who would terrify and turn on and
transform the pre-Chuck Chuck I came up with, and she had to
be a young person with issues of her own driving her to behave the way she
behaved, rather than just a plot device existing to service the needs of the
Chuck story.
I know you think the end game for the show should
be a Chuck/Nate romance, or at least you have intimated as much…
STC: The show's been pretty wimpy about same-sex relationships, as I
said earlier. No way would it make two of its Big Three male leads gay at all,
let alone gay and involved with one another. To be clear, I'm happy with Chuck
and Blair working out, even though I can't for the life of me see why their
collusion in criminally negligent homicide was necessary for their happy ever
after to take place. I'm much less happy, however, about Nate winding up, in
the parlance of my wife, FOREVER ALONE. He couldn't get with Jenny in her final
cameo? Come on, GG.
All said and done, what were the parts of the
comic you thought hit best?
STC: I like Blair, I like Bart, I like the longer monologues, and I
think I got the sex stuff the way I wanted it to be, which was always gonna be
the challenge.
Did you always know that was going to be the
last panel?
STC: You bet. By the way, SHAME on the show for not giving Chuck one final
"I'M CHUCK BASS." SHAME!
Could there be more Gossip Girl comics in your
future or is it Vampire Diaries' turn?
STC: Haha! Neither, most likely, though with any luck I'll have some
more TV-related stuff coming up.
