Interviews

Webbed Bridges!

By Koncise
May 3, 2005 - 14:20

Webbed Bridges!

Here at the Comic Book Bin we don’t just ride with the big dogs. We like to shine the light on the young bucks just coming into the game (just checkout my Leroy’s interviews for the great job he’s been doing here).

I decided to holla at Petar Bridges to talk about his up-coming, first major comic book work, which just happens to be for Marvel Comics. And to see what path he took to get here.


INTERVIEW – Petar Bridges


Koncise: Easy Petar, so how’s life been treating you?

Petar Bridges: Right now, life is as good as it has ever been. If I could rest on my laurels for what’s come about in the first quarter of the year, I’d be very satisfied. Anything else from here on out is going to be icing on the cake.

K: Glad things are gravy man :)

Basically, I want to deconstruct Petar Bridges for the masses, so cats get an insight, which will then give them an understanding of what your voice is.

So what do you do (if comics aren’t the main flex right now) and where do you hail from?

PB: I’m based in Brisbane, Australia. Primarily, I’m a screenwriter, because that’s where I seem to be having the most luck lately. And the money’s pretty decent too. But I’m interested in writing for a wide variety of mediums – film, television, comics, novels, journalism etc.

K: I know its not your thought, but I still blame Australia for some very dark moments from my youth……Neighbours, Home & Away, Jason Donavon and Kylie Minogue. I just felt a shudder go down my spine lol

Have you made any attempts at these other writing mediums yet, or are these just areas you’d eventually like to get into?

PB: Hahaha. I actually had a friend who worked on Neighbours who said he might be able to get me on staff as a writer – or at least an introductory meeting with the script supervisor. That was 3 or 4 years ago. I politely declined. But I did meet a lot of ex-Neighbours and Home & Away stars back when we were auditioning for a film here. Some were real arrogant and difficult to talk to, but others like Dan Paris and Cathy Godbold were awesome. I still want to work with those two on a film some day.

K: :)

So how do you like to kick back in your spare time?

PB: I like what I do, so I barely have any spare time. Writing is my hobby and I’m now in the fortunate position of being paid to do it. But when I’m not writing, I’m probably watching a movie, going to the gym or just staring at a wall and generating ideas.

K: Do you find yourself coming up with ideas while watching films?
Kinda like “I’d of taken the story in that direction”.

PB: Oh, all the time. And it’s not a bad attitude to have as a screenwriter, because if the movie you’re watching is a big success, then agents and producers are going to be looking for similar material. That’s the way it is in Hollywood – you see an awesome movie one year, then you see a dozen of the same the next year. And if you can write fast, you can get in on a trend while it’s still happening. Is it wrong or cheating to re-hash or add a new spin to the latest big thing just to make money? Possibly. But the money is enough to keep your rent paid and your fridge stocked with food for a few years while you write what you love. It’s a compromise.

K: Do you keep a pad with you or a tape record at all times for notes?
And why that tool other the other?

PB: No. My laptop is always turned on during the day and I will make notes for each idea I come up with if I know it’s something I’ll forget – like a small character detail or something. But I’ll usually store everything in my head until I’m ready to write. Stuff like major sequences or spotlighted scenes, I’ll visualize them in my head and, for the most part, they seem to stay there until I’m ready to write. I still have half-finished scripts in my head from up to 5 years ago that are still clear as day.

K: You’re like the Jay Z of writing :)

So you’ve got a story coming out in Spider-man Unlimited. Is this your first piece of comic work?

PB: As far as professional writing goes, yes. I was actually training as a penciller from the time I was 10 up until I was 19 or 20. In that time, I had done a lot of comic art here in Australia that never saw print. I did the usual trek of assembling portfolio pieces and sending out submissions, hitting the rare convention down here and stuff like that. I had some very close calls along the way, and if the industry hadn’t fallen apart in the mid-late 90s, things may have been very different for me as a comic creator. But I had been doing comic art in every spare moment for almost ten years, and I had burnt myself out early on. And it was about the same time that people were urging me to explore my writing, so it sort of evolved from there.

K: What type of this did you draw? I mean, existing characters, your own creations or abstract art?

PB: I mainly worked on new and existing Australian comics. I hooked up with a few different writers and did the art for their comics – none of which ever got released. But it kept me out of trouble in my teens. I also did portfolio pieces that I took to the rare convention down here – usually cross-company combinations like Hulk/Superman/Gen13.

K: What format did you use for the art, pencils, paint, carcoals, etc?

PB: For pencils, I just use a standard 2B mechanical pencil. For inks, I used whatever I read Jimmy Palmiotti was using at the time – a #2 sable brush. Incidentally, I showed Chris Bachalo some inked Vertigo-esque samples at a convention in Sydney in ’98 and he said I had excellent linework. And that was actually the first piece I had ever inked, so I felt pretty good about that for a while.

K: With praise like that, was it hard for you to put the art on the back burner, so you could focus on your writing?

PB: No. I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it full-time as a career. I wasn’t particularly fast at it, so I could probably do a page a day in 14 hours or so. But I didn’t want to be cooped up inside all day, every day, drawing comics. I still like to do it in my spare time as stress relief, but it’s not where my heart is now. With writing, I’m very fast. I could write a pretty decent 20-30 pages in a 14 hour day. My last two screenplays I wrote in about 4-5 days each. But as long as I stick to 10 pages a day, that’s still productive. That takes maybe 3-4 hours and leaves me plenty of time to work on other stuff like comics, novels etc.

K: So why did cats start getting on you about your writing? Did you write stories to go along with your early art, or was it that they felt your voice through the artistic vision?

PB: I was just encouraged by teachers and friends who read pieces of my work. My teachers would praise my creative writing abilities in English or History or whatever, and my friends and I used to make ridiculous comics in class and share them at lunch time. Not stuff fit for public consumption, mind you – but we made each other laugh.

But the big turning point was with the first screenplay I wrote in 1998. I sent it out to agents and stuff and said I was going to make it myself. It got a lot of favourable feedback and we had a pretty well-known cast lined up for it. That was pretty crazy. My brother and I were going to produce it and we were like 20 year-old kids doing ‘lunch’ with these Aussie celebrities and talking to agents and going to film festivals and stuff. It was a lot of fun.

But the reception to the writing itself was the most rewarding. And it wasn’t just potential cast members blowing smoke up my ass or anything – they were really enamored with it.

K: That sounds big man, what happened in the end?

PB: It had elements of terrorism in it, so it was shelved after 9/11. Nobody with money wanted to touch it. It got into the Top 50 of Project Greenlight Australia this year, so there’s a bit of renewed interest in it now. I might dust it off and take another pass at it later this year and see what happens.

K: Well man, sounds like you should. That top 50 place could be a sign.

What made you want to do comics?

PB: Originally, it was a fan thing. I just wanted to be part of that world and to write for the characters I had grown up with. Now, the desire to work on some of those characters is more of a wish-fulfilment thing. I have ideas here and there for some of the major characters, but as my sensibilities have evolved towards a film environment, I find myself more interested in pursuing smaller projects at smaller companies like Image or Oni. I guess my current mindset is geared more towards creating things that either haven’t been seen in comics in a long time, or haven’t been done at all.

K: So what comics did you read as a young buck?

PB: My friends and I would each decide on a list of 10-20 comics we were going to buy each month to make sure no one else was buying them. Then we’d swap them after we were done reading them, so we were effectively reading 60 books a month for the price of 20.

I was a big Captain America fan for a while, then I moved on to stuff like 2099 and Midnight Sons. Johnny Blaze was my favourite character and probably still is. And I’m not talking about when he was Ghost Rider – I’m talking about when he just rode a bike and had a Hellfire shotgun in Spirits Of Vengeance.

Then I moved on to Vertigo stuff like Preacher, Jonny Double and Sandman Mystery Theatre. A bit of Sin City too. That’s the stuff I’m more likely to read nowadays.

K: I like that idea of co-ordinating and swapping books. Most of been great having so much to read.

How is the comic environment in Australia by the way?

PB: Dead. There was a time back in the mid 90s where the Australian industry really could have been a big success if all the little indy comic creators pulled together and formed a collective company. It would have been much easier to attract investors and raise production quality. But everyone was content doing their own thing, and when that late 90s slump hit, the Australian industry just fell apart.

K: That’s a real shame. Not only for the homegrown talent like yourself, but for the industry as a whole.

So, was it hard breaking into Marvel?

PB: Oh boy, yes. Very tough. I’ve been trying to crack Marvel as a writer since 1997 – so that’s about eight years of persistence. It’s actually harder to break into mainstream comics than it is to break into Hollywood.

K: Reggie (Hudlin) said the same thing, bout breaking into comics, its crazy.

So how did you stop yourself from becoming disheartened? What advice would you give?

PB: I think you just sort of know whether or not you’re going to make it one day. It’s not an ego thing – it’s a gut instinct, more or less. You just keep knocking on doors, getting people to look at your work and build a respectable contact base. You learn your strengths and weaknesses from people’s reactions. If you keep getting told you suck, then you probably do suck. But if people seem genuinely interested enough to tell you what to work on, then you should use their advice.

With comics, I always knew I’d work in them at some point. It was just a matter of convincing the editors of that.

K: You hear that kids, its about attitude and inner belief.

I’m sure cats will find that advice helpful, thanks man :)

Can you take us through the whole experience of getting published?

PB: I sorta found an ‘in’ with Joe Quesada back in the early days of Marvel Knights through his Event Comics forums. I pitched him a few things, including a Punisher proposal and a Ghost Rider proposal, that he seemed to like. He even passed along the Ghost Rider proposal to the editor at that time, which was a pretty huge endorsement, though nothing came of it. By 2000, my interests had well and truly shifted to film, so I was off exploring that route. Then when Marvel announced they were actively seeking new talent from other fields, I had my agent at the time contact them and send some samples over.

Teresa Focarile responded to my screenwriting work and requested more samples. So that sort of went on for a while, as a back and forth. I lined up some pitches for Epic, but that went under. Then the Unlimited titles popped up as an opportunity and Teresa told me to think up some ideas for that.

But, as much as I love Spidey and the X-Men, it was incredibly tough coming up with a story that hadn’t been done before with the characters. I was lost. So I drew upon my cinematic bag of tricks and treated my submission like a short film. I took an angle on the story I had in mind that interested me about Spider-Man’s world, then developed it as I would a short film.

I sent the first draft over to Tom Brevoort and expected the ‘thanks, but no thanks’ brush-off. Instead, I got a pretty in-depth series of notes on what should be changed to suit the medium. So I made the changes, re-worked the story and sent it over again. The next morning, an email from Tom said “This looks good to go”. And that’s how it all began.

K: So what made you take the route of sending over your screensplays over actual comic work?

PB: Marvel were actively scouting writers from fields other than comics. And I didn’t have any comic work prepared anyway, so I just had my agent send over my latest script. I didn’t think much more on it until my agent said they wanted to see another sample.

K: OK, I see.

Did the whole Epic thing have an adverse affect on you and why did you decide to try again with the Unlimited books?

PB: It didn’t really affect me at all. I was still vaguely mapping out ideas when Jemas left and the plug got pulled. I had some great ideas that I’d like to explore for characters like U.S.Agent, Nightstalkers and Luke Cage, but they were still just random thoughts at the time.

I tried again for the Unlimited books, because I knew I could whip something up quickly and it would be a nothing-ventured, nothing-gained thing.

K: So when you got the notes back from Tom Brevoort, how did that feel?
I mean, was there a sense of “cool, he got back to me” but then there’s the aspect of your story not being at the level you thought it may have been (do you get what I mean)?

PB: I’ve been getting notes from readers, agents and development people for a few years, so I’m pretty thick-skinned. But Tom’s notes were more to do with condensing certain aspects, elaborating on certain points, cutting unnecessary pieces and stuff like that. Mostly formatting stuff relevant to comics. It was encouraging.

K: So there are only two Unlimited books, X-Men and Spider-man. How did you decide in the end, which one to pitch for?

PB: I just didn’t have any ideas for X-Men. And even with my Spidey story, it was more of thinking up the story first, then working out how Spidey fits into it.

K: So lets talk about your story.

You mentioned that it was hard coming up with something original to write about. So have you taken an old theme, but put your slant to it. Or did you find something fresh?

PB: I’ve taken it from the point of view of an average guy – similar to the way Kurt Busiek writes Astro City. I didn’t want to write 11 pages of Spider-Man beating up some villain and spouting witty banter. It’s been done a million times. I just wanted to tell a story from someone else’s point of view.

K: Can you tell us the basics of your story, to wet cats appetites?

PB: It’s about a guy who wakes up, bruised and battered, in an alley and can’t remember anything. He only knows his name because he reads it on his license. So there’s a sort of internal monologue going on with this guy as he makes his way through the streets looking for help. He’s trying to figure out who he is and what happened to him. Then he meets Spidey…and things get interesting.

K: Sounds interesting man.

Do you think this approach gives you more scope to tell a story?

PB: It’s a very small scope story that opens wide at the end. I was actually worried that an artist would balk at it, because the first chunk of the story is just an average guy wandering around the streets. Not very visual. But Cully has turned it into a work of art. He hit every note I was aiming for. It is almost exactly as I saw it in my head.

K: When you first wrote the story, did you have an artist in mind for it, or an art style you’d like to be incorporated in it?

PB: Yeah, definitely. I was envisioning someone along the lines of Frank Miller, Sean Phillips or Michael Lark. Someone with a semi-realistic noir quality.

K: So how did Cully Hammer become involved with the project?

PB: I was emailing Tom to see if my story was still on track for the issue and the reply I got was like “Yup, no problems. By the way, Cully Hamner is doing the art”.

K: lol that must have been a pleasant surprise :)

What was the experience like. Was it hard co-ordinating stuff, with the time barrier and freshness of the partnership?

PB: Well, Cully had already finished the art by the time I even knew he was doing it. I only recently got in touch with him via his message board to thank him for doing a kick-ass job. The stuff really is so similar to what I had in mind.

K: If he can do this jus from your notes, that’s great.

Would you like to re-team for some more work?

PB: Of course. He has a very distinct style that can easily switch between light-hearted and dark. I’d love to do a Batman or Spidey one-shot or mini-series with him. I’ve had a cool Batman story in my head for a while now, so who knows…

PB:

K: I’ll keep my eyes open for that one man :)

What are your views on original stories. Do you believe there are still fresh ideas out there, or do you think it’s more in the telling?

PB: Probably not. I think these story archetypes that we explore over and over again are important and interesting because they deal with universal themes.

Most ‘original’ writing now is a fresh spin on a new genre or the combining of different story elements from these archetypes. Maybe one day someone will come up with a new archetype, but there are still a lot of avenues to explore in the existing ones. If you’re creative, you can make the mixing and blending work to your advantage and come up with something fresh.

Even something touted at ‘original’ like The Matrix is still just the sum of its influences. But it worked on a lot of different levels, because the influences were strong and the writers understood why those things worked. That’s a big part of writing; understanding how and why things work.

K: Are you working on anything else right now?

PB: In comics, not really. I’m in a state of flux right now, where I’m waiting for the issue to hit the shelves. From there, we’ll see whether the fan or creative community responds to it. But I had a blast doing it, so even if this is my last comic work ever, I still did it in style.

I sold my first feature film screenplay this year, ‘Between Lives’ and that’s currently in development. I’m actually finishing the second draft up as we speak, so it’s all getting very intense and exciting. As with the Spidey story, this was something where I sent over a sample to the company in question -- not expecting anything more than a brush-off – and it all just happened over the course of a week or so. One Friday, I was an aspiring screenwriter, the next I had a film in active development.

In film, I have a couple of other things that are looking very promising, so my fingers are crossed there.

In comics, I have 2-3 concepts I’d really like to explore, but finding artists to team up with for them has been ridiculously hard. One is a Western, one is a Politcal-Drama and the other is a Crime-Drama. When I find artists for those, I’ll pitch them.

I’m also attempting to do my own riff on Scott McCloud’s 24 Hour Comic idea. I don’t have 24 hours to concentrate on one thing, but I have decided I’ll instead do a 1-hour page a day for a year, and end up with a 365 page graphic novel at the end. I’ll likely start that in May or June, depending. But it will be a totally free thing up front – people will be able to read the comic online each month. At the end, I’ll probably print a cleaned-up version as a TPB.

K: I really like the idea of the “1 hour comic”. Will you put up on the site, your thought processes and how you came up with the concept?

PB: I’ll try to do that as much as I can. I might add an essay or annotations with each issue to explain how I got to that point and so on.

K: Can’t wait to check it out man :)

Are you able to tell us anything about the story for “Between Lives”?

PB: It’s an old school horror film born out of my frustration with today’s horror films. Everything now is flashy imagery combined with sharp music cues to make you jump. And I think that’s an insult to the audience. It’s like being told “You don’t know what scares you, so here’s some timed sharp string music to tell you what scares you.”

A real horror film should be creepy and get under your skin in a way that you won’t notice until it’s too late. Look at what most people consider to be the scariest film of all time ‘The Shining’ – it has maybe two or three real jump-in-your-seat scares. Yet it stays with you and you think about it for days.

Between Lives is about a young student who takes a night shift job in an underground parking garage to pay his way through school and have spare time to study. But when he’s told the place is haunted, he begins to look for things. And the more you look, the more you find. Real or not.

I liked the idea of a horror film set in a parking garage. They’re already creepy enough as it is. But make it a claustrophobic underground parking garage, then throw in ghost children and creepy voices and you’re building on a whole heap of different fears at the same time.

I just finished the second draft last week and the producers are very happy with it. It should turn out pretty good.

K: Well, all I can say is, I’m glad I can’t and will never drive. Cause now I don’t want to go into an underground parking garage lol

Hopefully man, we can shoot the breeze again, when your other projects come together?

PB: The online comic thing will launch at www.pulseratecomics.com probably on July 1st. Between Lives will hopefully be in theatres next year. Everything else is up in the air and waiting to drop. But we’ll see how it goes from here.

K: I want to thank you for your time Petar and hope the Spider-man Unlimited story, is just the first of many steps for you within the comics world.

And good luck with all your other ventures :)

I’d also like to thank to thank Cully Hammer for the gorgeous art samples.

Spider-man Unlimited #9 is in stores 4th (6th for the UK cats, cause of the Bank Holiday) May 05 (that's today kids, so don't miss it!).
The other story of the issue is written by Christopher Yost and art from Drew Johnson. The issues cover is by Salvador Larroca.

You can also find character Bio’s for Spider-man and his supporting cast, as well as Wall Papers and monthly solits over at http://marvel.com


FEEDBACK: If you have anything you’d like to say about this (constructive analysis warmly welcomed), why don’t you stop by the Discussion Thread: http://www.comicbookbin.com/forums/index.php at our Forums :)


Koncise an out :)

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12