A comic book writer from Georgia has released a new variant of his graphic novel that takes aim at Trump.
Patrick Gerard, born in Ohio, grew up moving around the Southeast. He received an MBA from the University of West Georgia and, believe it or not, a Master of Arts from East Tennessee State University in oral traditional storytelling. He has been active in geek culture for a couple of decades, from work on the underground publication Fanzing through acting as an associate producer on web series. He is probably best known for his comic book Ungrounded, which features his own work and the art of Eryck Webb alongside contributions from a number of award-winning comics creators, including Brian Augustyn (Batman: Gotham by Gaslight), Tom Peyer (Batman '66), and the Eisner-nominated Dennis Culver, among others.
Ungrounded tells the story of a mad scientist turned super-hero who teams with a treasure hunting girlfriend (who echoes Disney's Scrooge McDuck), a zombie-vampire-werewolf bounty hunter, and a flying polar bear. The group encounters everything from living computer viruses to U.S. Government bureaucrats (complete with the casual revelation that the United States has half a dozen secret states kept hidden from the general public), to a positively Lynchian detour into a small town that seems drawn from "Twin Peaks". Along the way, the book takes rapid-fire swings at North Korea, scripted cable television dramas like "Breaking Bad", and the Middle East peace process in ways that recall Mark Millar's The Ultimates.
Ungrounded, which began its existence as an online crowdfunded series, has earned some stellar reviews within the comics industry. Sterling Gates, whose work with Supergirl proved deeply influential on the new CW series, described the book as "brimming with imagination, wit, and beautiful artwork", while Dr. Julian Darius (documentary producer and founder of the comics academic publishing operation Sequart) described Ungrounded as the "antidote to everything unsatisfying with super-heroes".
Most recently, Gerard has released a new "cover variant" of his graphic novel Ungrounded: The First Revolution. This new edition features a new cover which takes aim at U.S. President Donald Trump.
We had the chance to chat with Gerard about comic books, politics, and geek culture.
Let's start with the elephant in the room: why tackle Trump with the new cover?
Because I think he's a figure who deserves to be targeted. I'm not generally an advocate of real world violence but I think it's a satisfying image to look at.
American comic books have a grand tradition of this kind of thing. People forget that there were many American Hitler sympathizers in the 1930s. My grandfathers, who served in WWII and Korea, used to talk about that. Meanwhile, the comics of the day were doing covers where heroes were punching Hitler before the U.S. Officially took a side. Many of those comics didn't even have Hitler or Tojo or whoever on the inside but they used the cover to make an artistic statement, a values statement.
Are you worried about backlash? Over a third of Americans strongly support Trump.
Not really. Trump isn't that popular globally. Look, I sell comics globally. I have them printed in six or seven different countries. I'm not some kind of shadowy globalist elite indifferent to the plight of the working man. I've had jobs unloading trucks. But shipping is expensive. I have a significantly European audience to a point where it makes sense to have comics produced in the UK or Germany and shipped direct. It beats a living room full of boxes.
Now that I've confirmed that this cover takes precisely zero political courage to produce, let me clarify: If there's backlash, I'm fine with that. I'm deeply concerned about the treatment of undocumented immigrants and LGBT people. Less than a third of Trump's hires are women. The world is half women. His policies are even more disastrous towards women and women's health. There's a reason I chose to have a female character from my book punch Trump on this cover. I thought, after everything, that it's so much more satisfying to see.
I've always been political. I was very right wing when I was younger, more so than my parents. I asked for (and got) a Rush Limbaugh birthday cake one year. I won a contest to be an opening speaker when the far-right politician Pat Buchanan announced his presidential run in 1992. I was twelve. I'd get worked up reading James Dobson religious articles. I collected Jack T. Chick tracts from churches. My mother, who was profoundly religious, would get exasperated and call me her "Little Thumper" because of my taste for fire-and-brimstone Bible thumping and anti-taxation rants. I grew out of all of that as I matured.
The worldview I had as a child seemed catastrophically ill-equipped to handle the real problems I encountered as a teen and adult. I think people who cling to that far-right, anti-government worldview can handle a bit of political satire directed their way as they dismantle civil rights, gender equality, financial sector regulation, and environmental protection. I sincerely think Trump's policies are a threat to the survival of the species. And if we can survive these changes, I'm not sure that the world he wants to create is worth living in. If I can squeak out a condemnation of him with a comic book cover, I think it's worth it.
The cover, incidentally, is a nod to the first issue of Captain America, from 1940, where he punches Hitler. In everything I do, I want to be part of what I describe as the grand tradition of comics. Don't like the cover? It's a variant. Buy a different cover.
How did your comic book Ungrounded come about?
It actually began as a response to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen that I had been thinking about since 2005 or so. Dave Gibbons picked up on some of what I was doing with that right away when I met up with him for a dinner at Comic-Con a few years back. Most of that is subtle. There are references in here to some really obscure stuff but they aren't essential to enjoying the book. I'm big on playing structural games with comics. I suppose that kind of thing started when I was suspended from high school newspaper staff after it was discovered that I was inserting secret messages into the articles. If you find any brilliant hidden messages in the book, I probably meant to put them there. Unless you hate them, in which case it was unintentional.
The initial book was crowdfunded online. I had support from friends. I know a lot of people who seem to think there will be no justice in the world until I'm writing Superman. There were a lot of strangers who supported the book as well. I was actually walking down a street in Budapest a couple of years ago when I realized I had just passed by one of my backers' apartments. I actually mailed all of those books myself. We've moved more copies than some of Marvel and DC comics have in recent years. Once we started recruiting veteran talent, the book took off in a wild direction.
How did you connect with those people?
Social media is one of the big places. I tend to try for some presence at the major conventions. Tom Peyer, who was an an assistant editor on some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and a lot of Grant Morrison's comics at Vertigo, described what we were doing as a cross between Morrison and Jack Kirby. So I hired him!
Seriously, though, I've known Tom online and in passing at conventions for almost twenty years. Working with him and Brian Augustyn were always bucket-list items for me. They both have a history with Mark Waid (Kingdom Come). I joked to Brian that this was like headlining with the Beatles and he fired back that it was more like filling in for Gladys Knight with The Pips. Other contributors like Art Thibert (X-Men) and Dennis Culver happened more through happenstance. I've been traveling in geek circles for a long time and you develop connections with people.
How did you first connect with geek culture?
Well, I was born in Ohio, near the border with West Virginia where all the Mothman sightings happened in the sixties and seventies. The Mothman was this weird, mythical creature that the government was supposedly hunting as part of Project Blue Book, I think. The stories captured my imagination from a very young age. After that, my family moved around a lot. By the time I was eight, we'd moved fifteen times across five states, mostly in the Southeast. My parents would buy a commemorative spoon from every state I visited. I've found that preacher's kids and army brats were the people I could relate to especially well. I suppose you could say I was an extrovert but a misfit extrovert.
I was an only child and I was nearly home schooled at one point. My parents were academic types although neither had finished a graduate degree at that point. My mother studied French, German, Greek, Latin, American Sign Language. I always felt under-stimulated and like a bit of an oddball at school and so my mother would come up with extra assignments for me. I had a pretty high IQ but I also got diagnosed with chronic depression when I was seven and we didn't really have the money to capitalize on that. Mom tried to sell a story to Reader's Digest about how I'd memorized the names of all the U.S. Presidents when I was three or so. Now there are kids on YouTube doing that and I'm a bit jealous of all the attention.
We were poor but we always managed to make the sacrifices needed to be tech early adopters. We had a Texas Instruments personal computer before PCs were affordable. We had internet pretty early on as well. Pretty soon, I had a Geocities page being indexed in "best of the web" books at bookstores. I was playing online RPGs with guys like Jim Butcher (The Dresden Chronicles) and Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + The Divine). When I was a teenager in the 90s, I reached out to Jeph Loeb, who's head of Marvel TV now. He was a significant life mentor for me. We must have shot several thousand e-mails back and forth about writing and how to construct quality entertainment. He used to say that I was going to be his replacement someday. Fingers still crossed.
It certainly sounds like you've been connecting with your inspirations. Was that ever a source of anxiety for you?
Not generally, no. Maybe I'm a narcissist. Probably. I first shook Stan Lee's hand when I was younger and I thought, "Finally. Why doesn't this happen more often?" I'm at a minimum, a misfit extrovert.
I do get a bit anxious around introverts. Geek culture tends to have its share and that brings out some kind of urge in me to nurture introverted people. It's beautiful to see them open up and get excited about what they love.
I get nervous around some intensely clever people but that's mainly because I recognize their time is so precious. I get a bit lightheaded around Grant Morrison. The first time we chatted, I found myself feeling a bit tipsy and we detoured through half a dozen topics, including the idea of Batman action figures coming to life to fight crime and the significance of Donald Duck's wardrobe full of sailor suits.
Felicia Day is similar for me. I think she's successfully branded herself as a geek and a genre actress but I don't think people, especially outside her bubble, necessarily realize how acutely clever and insightful she is. She's a quick thinker, a million ideas a second, and capable of insanely workable snap judgments, which I think is where her business success comes from. Within a minute of meeting her, we were laughing about the idea of wearing a hazmat suit to keep a kitchen clean and restaurants where you eat ice cream with your hands. Everything connects to an article she's read because she reads constantly. She's extremely well-read, witty. and intelligent. People might have missed that she has some new comics in a library edition of The Guild from Dark Horse. I understand, now that she has a daughter, that she's considering more writing and I certainly hope so. Because she has a brain that the world isn't getting enough of.
The source of anxiety, for me, really, is how small the portions can be when it comes to interacting with so many clever people in the geek world. I think if you attend conventions, especially the big ones like San Diego, the interactions are appetizer sized and you may find yourself wishing it was a more of a buffet experience.
What other projects are you working on?
Well, I had a project greenlit with IDW. It was an adaptation of a New York Times bestseller that was turned into a movie this past year. The original author and a friend of his wanted me scripting the adaptation. Unfortunately, there were some rights issues with the original publisher that the author didn't anticipate when he approached us. It's a shame.
There's also an online game – an MMORPG like "World of Warcraft" – that wants me to write a comic for them but their first priority is continuing to develop and support their game.
I do have some other projects in the hopper, including a particularly wild reinvention of a classic fairy tale, swapping out the girl's romance with the prince for some axe wielding sci-fi/fantasy. I hope we're talking about that one this time next year. It's very Jack Kirby. It doesn't have a home yet, though.
That said, I have a million different projects I'd like to pursue.
You can follow Patrick Gerard on Twitter at @_PatrickGerard_
News of upcoming projects can be found at his official website.