Comic Genius

Like Luke Skywalker, Jason Aaron grew up in a small town, far from the action. In the Jedi’s case, it was a lonely outpost on Tatooine; for Aaron, it was Jasper, Alabama. And while Skywalker grew up to fight for galactic freedom, Aaron now stands as one of the leading lights of the Marvel Universe—a comics writer whose storylines for heroes such as the X-Men and Thor have generated critical acclaim and unusual amounts of buzz.

Last year, Marvel’s editor in chief called with the ultimate gig. Disney, Marvel’s parent, had secured the rights to Star Wars, and was eager to start telling stories. Aaron was tapped to write one of three books that Marvel would launch, picking up the stories of Luke, Han Solo, Princess Leia, and other main characters between the initial film and The Empire Strikes Back. For someone of Aaron’s generation, who grew up with the original movie trilogy, it was “a huge thrill.”

It was also the latest achievement in a storybook career. Aaron’s ride to the comics stratosphere began in 2001, the year after he graduated from UAB with a bachelor's degree in English. He entered, and won, a Marvel talent contest—“something they had never done before and haven’t done since,” he says. His prize: “I got to write a Wolverine story that was published in 2002.” For Aaron, who had wanted to be a comics writer since he was a kid, it seemed that everything had fallen into place. And then—nothing. It would be nearly five years before his next comic book was published, a Vietnam War story called The Other Side.

“I worked harder on that first issue of The Other Side than any other script I’ve written,” he says. “That’s probably the lowest-selling book I’ve done, but to me it was the most important. It got me my next gig, a book called Scalped that’s ongoing with Vertigo, and then all that together brought me back to Marvel, where I’ve been ever since.”

Aaron, now living in Kansas City, took a break from plotting Skywalker’s latest adventures to discuss his work process, his inspirations, and the UAB professor who helped him hone his craft.

UAB Magazine: What does a comics writer do all day?

Aaron: I work from home, usually writing a script a week. Right now I’ve got seven different projects in different stages. It will be Star Wars, then I’ll work on an issue of Thor, and then I might do lettering corrections on a different project. I write different characters, different genres, and very different types of stories. It keeps me on my toes.

What I write is like a movie screenplay, except it’s broken down into individual images. There is no set standard script format for comics. But most people work in full script, which includes all the panel descriptions, all the dialogue, and everything else. That gets passed off to a team of people: a penciler, an inker, a colorist, a letterer. I work with artists and collaborators all over the world. And everything flows through the editorial offices in New York.

 A few times a year Marvel has creative retreats. They bring in a dozen or so writers, and we sit in a room with the editorial staff and talk about what we’ll be doing for the next year or two in our books.

UAB Magazine: What is it like to write new adventures for the Star Wars characters? They have become modern mythological figures.

Aaron: I’ve had some cool moments before, like the first time I wrote Spider-Man and Captain America. But when I sat down to write that first [Star Wars] script, I put on the John Williams score and got all giddy.

We haven’t seen a lot of this kind of book over the years. Though there have been tons of Star Wars comics, there was never much that involved the cast of the original movies—especially set during that same time period. So it’s fun to pick up those characters from the end of the original Star Wars and then write the next chapter.

UAB Magazine: What restrictions do you have on the kinds of stories you can tell?

Aaron: Not many. Marvel is open to shaking things up, which is a hallmark of the company. Many of these characters have been around for more than 50 years. You can’t tell the same stories over and over again and pick the bones of the great stories from the past. You’ve got to take those characters somewhere new and tell a story that we haven’t seen before. It has to honor the past but also be easy to come into for someone who has never read that character’s adventures.

UAB Magazine: Do you feel pressure writing for these iconic characters? Your decision to have a female lead character in the Thor series got national attention, and you recently surprised Star Wars fans by revealing that Han Solo had a wife.

Aaron: It was a big deal when news broke that a new character would carry the Hammer. It was announced on [the daytime TV show] The View and became a mainstream story. Whenever something like that happens, there will be a vocal group of fans who are opposed to that change or worried about the direction it’s headed. There was quite a bit of that, at least initially, but for me that has always been washed out by the opposite, which is the number of people turned on to the book, especially people picking it up for the first time.

There’s always been that balance between honoring where these characters came from but also making things fresh and open to new readers. I think we’ve struck a good balance of that with Thor. And the sales have reflected that.

UAB Magazine: What faculty members or experiences stand out for you from your time at UAB?

Aaron: I started out in Tuscaloosa but switched to UAB because I felt I fit in better, and I liked that UAB was an urban university and had a more diverse mix of people.

By that point, I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know exactly where that would take me. When I started school, I wanted to go into journalism, and then I switched to an English major and thought I would be the next Great American Novelist.

I took a lot of creative writing courses at UAB—as many as I could. I took multiple classes with Dr. Larry Wharton [now retired]. His classes were a big influence, in large part because he was a pretty no-nonsense guy. He would tell you up front: “This is about working on your craft. It’s not a place to come if you’re looking for cheap therapy.”

You let your friends read your stuff, and your mom tells you you’re awesome, but if you’re going to be a writer, it’s important to experience a situation in which somebody doesn’t like what you wrote. That’s what Dr. Wharton did for me. Those kinds of classes force you to break out of your shell, write outside your comfort zone, and write on a deadline. That was all prose writing, which is different from what I do now, but you have to learn the basic craft of telling a story, and then you can apply it to whatever writing you want to do.

UAB Magazine: We have to ask—do you already know what’s going to happen in the new Star Wars movies?

Aaron: I might know a little bit, but not much. The book I’m doing is set in a different time period. That said, we’re not just talking about one new movie; we’re talking about an avalanche of new things. We [Marvel and Lucasfilm staff] definitely talk about ways to tie things together. You’ll see some of that as our Star Wars comics go forward.

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Published July 2015