The BSC Beat Interview – Deep Cover with Mike Costa and G.I. Joe: Cobra

Back with another edition of the BSC Beat, our 10 question, topic specific, interview format! Today we have one half of the writing team of one of the three new G.I. Joe titles being published by IDW. Mike Costa is teaming up with Christos Gage and artist Antonio Fuso to bring us G.I. Joe: Cobra, a 4-issue spotlight on Chuckles going deep cover and infiltrating Cobra. The story was previewed (along with shorts on the other two titles) in IDW’s Zero issue (see my review). You can also check out the longer On The Spot interview I conducted with the writer of the main title, Chuck Dixon, for more info!

And yes I know that there is one extra question, but our silly ideas and goals of even, numerical, limits cannot contain G.I. Joe! I’d like to welcome Mr. Costa as we talk Joe, what Donnie Brasco has in common with You Got Served, and getting the license to kill from Hasbro.

    
Jay Tomio – You are co-writing one of the three non-film related IDW G.I. Joe titles. To start us off can you give us the basic gist of this – a miniseries – titled G.I. Joe: Cobra?

    
Mike Costa – Well, the decision was made early-on in this re-launch to introduce Cobra very slowly into the universe. Readers will probably remember that at the end of Chuck Dixon’s 5 page preview of the main G.I. Joe book, Duke hears the name “Cobra” for the first time. When our book premiers, they still don’t know what Cobra is, or if it’s even anything at all other than a blind alley. So our book follows a Joe undercover operative who’s spent the past year or so working his way into the seediest corners of the Earth, and we join him at the moment where he’s recruited into an organization he slowly begins to realize is Cobra. Then we follow him as he starts to find out just how far out into the world (and down into darkness) it goes.

    
Jay Tomio – You are co-writing this with Christos Gage. How were you and Mr. Gage brought on to the title, and what has the collaboration been like thus far?

    
Mike Costa – Well, Chris had worked with Andy at Marvel, and the way I understand it is that when the decision was made to expand the Joe relaunch into a trio of books, Andy called Chris up and asked him if he’d like to write a title that focused on the bad guys. Of course, Chris is absurdly talented and in-demand, so his plate was too full to take on another book… but he told Andy he’d do it if he could bring on a co-writer, and that’s when he called me.

The collaboration has been fantastic. This is my first book as a co-writer, and there hasn’t been a single argument. The way it’s basically worked is that I write the first draft of the script, then I send it to Chris and he takes a pass. Then Chris sends it back to me so I can see what a REAL comic-script looks like. Then we send it to Andy, and he shoots it up to Hasbro, who almost always have one or two little weirdo changes they want to make because ultimately they’re the boss and they get to say what’s what. Then I make those changes (which to be fair have always been incredibly minor and often sensible) and they go to Antonio to get drawn. And it’s really as simple as that.

I’d always imagined that co-writers must sit in a room with each-other, pacing back and forth with each dictating parts of the script to the other, arguing over every detail. And maybe the wheel of karma will eventually land me in a nightmarish situation like that one, but so far this couldn’t be more easy and smooth.

    
Jay Tomio – I heard about your mini via a podcast interview Any Schmidt was on, and the moment he said “Chuckles” I’m one of those Joe fans that were like “I’m in”. I realize he’s a character that presents even more leeway than Hasbro has already reportedly given IDW, but beyond that, why Chuckles? Who brought him it up first?

    
Mike Costa – I did. Andy, to his eternal credit, is either an amazing editor who fosters creativity in his talent… or he’s totally asleep at the wheel at just lets them do whatever deranged thing they want. Because basically he said to me “We want to do a book about a Joe going under cover in Cobra. Pick any Joe you want. You can even kill him in the end, if you want to.”

Now, I doubt he thought I was going to pick someone like Chuckles, but Chris left that decision up to me, and he was honestly the first character that came to mind. And to everybody else’s credit (or their DIScredit, if somehow the fans revolt) both Andy and Chris said “yes” immediately, after I made my case.

And – yes. I was given permission to kill Chuckles. So now you know he’s not safe. As to whether or not we actually DID decide to kill him… read the book.

    
Jay Tomio – Will Chuckles be the exclusive POV of the series?

    
Mike Costa – Yes. We’re in Chuckles’ head from the very beginning, and we stay there until the end. We only see what he sees, and we only know what he knows, which allows for a lot of unpleasant surprises. This is his story as much as it is a story about Cobra. Maybe even moreso.

    
Jay Tomio – Is the Cobra agent we see in your portion of the Zero issue meant to be a named character?

    
Mike Costa – He is. We name him in issue 2. And sharp-eyed, hard-core Joe fans might even recognize him. We’ve tried to pepper a lot of little Easter Eggs throughout the series. This is the only one I’m going to give you guys notice on. The rest are up to you to fin .

    
Jay Tomio – What do you identify as the biggest tweak you have to make to the Cobra organization to modernize it and make it a viable reality, even more so than perhaps was done in its most recent incarnation?

    
Mike Costa – Well, the entire mission-statement of the re-launch is the attempt to (for lack of a better word) “modernize” GI Joe by making it more (again, for lack of a better word) “realistic.”

I know that’s a pretty obnoxiously glib answer that retreats from a statement even as it makes it, but when you’re talking about fiction, particularly in comics, words like “realistic” are prohibitively loaded.

For me, the biggest thing I’m trying to do is to figure out how an organization like Cobra would actually operate in the world today. And the biggest question there is “what is their goal?” That was the question I had to answer for myself before I could move any further, because “world domination” is the goal that the original Cobra had and, come on, that’s a goal that just doesn’t make any sense. What does it even mean? And even if someone was so insane and motivated that they could create a multi-national organization to that end… How do they make it work? What’s the plan? Who would work for them, and what would their motives be? Why would you strap a helmet on your head and engage an elite American military unit in combat so some guy who doesn’t even know your name can “rule the world?” That’s inherently ludicrous.

And yet, average people fight for goals that are just as and evil for men who are just as faceless all the time, in a lot of seriously shitty places in this world. The only difference between the real world and the comic-book world of super-villainy is that, in the real world, the motivations of these people are tremendously banal.

So, in our book you might not find out what Cobra’s ultimate goals are (we have to leave some stuff to be revealed later, after all)… but you will see the kind of people who work towards them. You’ll get to know them, and you’ll see into their hearts, and I think what you’ll find there is real, and something that can’t be written off as cartoonish. And that’s the biggest, and most difficult, thing I wanted to accomplish with this series… and it’s also I think the thing that sets this re-launch apart the most from the previous incarnations of G.I. Joe.

    
Jay Tomio – What was your experience with G.I. Joe prior to working at IDW?

    
Mike Costa – My experience, obviously, was only as a fan until I got the call that made me a creator. I was born in 1981, so GI Joe was a big part of my life as a kid. I grew up watching it with my younger brother, who even moreso than me pressured my parents to spend unreasonable amounts of money on the toys. But those toys were awesome. We even had that insane, massive Cobra base, and I had a friend whose younger brother would actually sleep on the Joe aircraft carrier, it was so huge. It was one of the major elements of the great mid-to-late 80s trinity that all boys my age worshiped (the other two being Transformers and the WWF, two other properties I’d love to write for, if you happen to be reading, Mr. McMahon.)

I’ll admit to not really following the comics once I got into my teens and crossed over into the 90s. I was way more into Marvel, DC, Image and Valiant then, and the 80s properties seemed like weird zombies shambling around in the end of their mothballed epoch. At that time G.I. Joe existed to me mostly in my imagination and memory, where it accumulated talismanic power that I didn’t want to compromise by reading their contemporary adventures. Once the series and the movie was released on DVD I re-visited it quite a bit and stoked that great, money-devouring fire of nostalgia that so many children of the 80s have been feeding for the last few years, now that we (mostly) are adults with real jobs and disposable incomes. Being a part of the re-launch now… I have to compromise my humility to admit that it’s basically the most awesome thing ever. I get to do what every kid my age was doing 20 years ago – I get to make up adventures for these characters, but I get paid to do it.

    
Jay Tomio – Before coming in, what member of Cobra did you most want to write about, and if you can, what has become the aspect or character that you most enjoy?

    
Mike Costa – This project was brought to me whole cloth. Andy all ready knew what he wanted and in my first conversation with him he layed out the entire skeleton for me: “Joe goes undercover in Cobra. At first he doesn’t know who they are… then realizes they’re bigger than he imagined, and things get worse from there.” I pitched Chuckles and a few other characters for the series, and all but one were okayed. The only guy that I wanted to use but couldn’t actually WAS a Cobra character… but Andy’s suggestion for his replacement turned out to be far, far better than my original choice, so really it all worked out. I don’t want to reveal any names because it’ll give some things away, but rest assured… this series has a twist at the end that I think will please a lot of Joe fans, and that all came from Andy suggesting one particular character over another.

That said though, Chuckles is really the star of the show, and while villains are fun to write, Chuckles has a lot of anti-heroic aspects that are really interesting to get into. He’s totally impulsive and basically unable to get along with people in positions of authority. The only reason he’s hacking it in Cobra is because he knows that the kind of insubordination that just got him in trouble with the Joes would get him shot and dumped in a ditch here. Also, when you’ve got a quick-witted, impulsive character and you start turning up the heat with his situation becoming more and more desperate… well, the breaking point for a guy that never seems to take things seriously is a lot uglier than for someone who’s all ready wound tight with things like “rules” and “protocol.”

    
Jay Tomio – Semi-touched on above, but in other interviews you stated that G.I. Joe: Cobra is going to be the darkest of the titles. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that, and is it just a case of a man (Chuckles) confronting worse and worse the deeper he goes and having to become worse himself with each step? Will we seem empathy at some point in a way we have seen in several books and films ala a Brasco?

    
Mike Costa – Well, it really comes down to the question: Where is the line drawn between someone only “pretending” to be something… and actually being it? If you’re under cover with a bunch of murdering terrorists, what will you have to do to maintain your cover? Is your cover more important than the life of another human being, or several? If you participate in the planning of an act of mass destruction, are you complicit in the carnage that follows? At what point is what you’re doing even legal anymore? At what point does the evil you do outweigh the bad?

As the series goes on, Chuckles has to face more and more questions like these, and then the growing darkness in himself as he continues to make impossible choices. If we do our jobs, then the audience should absolutely feel for him. This is a man stuck pretending to be someone who is willing to do the worst things imaginable… which means that sometimes he actually has to do them. In a way it’s a horror story, in that Chuckles is forced to participate in horrors, and the readers will have to face them. We want that to have some weight.

As for Donnie Brasco, that’s a great movie… but Brasco never had to do the things that Chuckles has to do. Compared to Cobra, the American Mafia might as well be a break dancing squad from “You Got Served.”

    
Jay Tomio – You said this at Newsarama:

“For Chris and I, whenever we had an idea to really shake-up an established character, we always used the original characterization as a launch-pad. We were really serious about maintaining the core “truth” of that character. “

What is the core of Chuckles (other than picking up missiles and tossing them at tanks)?

    
Mike Costa – Man, I love that scene in the movie. There are all these characters he’s coming up in basic training, and they all get one spotlight scene to sort of establish who they are… and that’s what they come up with for Chuckles. It’s so bizarre and hilariously clear they really had no concept of who he was supposed to be under that stupid shirt and nonsense name. And I’ll admit that’s why I chose him in the first place. Because, even more so than an insane mistake like Big Lob, it was clear that Chuckles was a visual design first and an actual character… well, never. So that was a big blank canvas to work on.

However in my research I discovered to my tremendous surprise that Chuckles’ actual specialty is “undercover.” So it looks like the universe was nudging me in the right direction all along.

The thing is – the way I saw it, any guy who wears an obnoxious Hawaiian shirt in an elite military unit is basically saying “fuck off” to the concept of the military itself, or authority in general. And the kind of guy that would do that has both great strength of will and also tremendous character flaws. He’s a guy who’s going to push everyone else away because he’s only out for number one, and is basically perfect to be sent into a situation where there are no rules but self-preservation.

Now, I’ll allow for the possibility that that kind of analysis might ultimately be intellectually derelict… but you have to admit it at least SOUNDS high-minded. And that’s the kind of enormously pompous consideration that I tried to bring to every classic character that we use in this series. To take characteristics that, at least originally, might only have been created for very shallow and superficial reasons (like Chuckles’ shirt) and really try to extrapolate what kind of person would exist underneath that. Instead of throwing out the superficial elements that originally made the character recognizable I asked why, emotionally, they would exist in the first place. That, for me, was way more fun and rewarding than simply having Chuckles wear a different shirt because the Hawaiian thing might look silly. Nothing’s silly if you give it an anchor in the character.

    
Jay Tomio - On a fundamental level, what are the differences in the way you an Mr. Gage view storytelling, and how do they create a better story? Or is it a matter of having similar sensibilities?

Well, honestly I’m guessing that Chris views storytelling through the practiced eye of both a natural-born writer and a veteran of comics, movies, and television. And I view it through the eye of a lunatic kid who conned his way into a dream-gig and is going to run amok until someone figures out that I don’t deserve to be here and fires me.

Surprisingly, that has yet to put us at cross-purposes. I’m lucky not only in that Chris is the reason I have this gig, but also that Chris is a guy who always has the right fix for a problem. And, frankly, even I’m not stupid or ego-centric enough to not know a better idea when I see it. When he sends my scripts back to me after his pass, the only changes he ever makes are for the better. Cleaning up some wonky dialogue here, adding a panel for better flow there, things like that. So I get the benefit of seasoned storytelling instincts without the hassle of having to be a working, in-demand writer for a decade to earn them.

    
Mike Costa - I’ve never really thought about it as a matter of “sensibilities” so much as I’ve looked at it as “here’s what I’m sending him and I hope he likes it.” He only steps in when I screw up. But thinking about it now to answer your question, I realize that I’ve probably had that luxury for the simple fact that we probably do have very similar sensibilities after all. We agreed on so much from the very beginning. There were never any arguments on what the story would be, or where it would go, or how dark it would get. There was just me throwing out an idea and him giving it a little polish to make it stronger. He’s never vetoed anything I’ve suggested. Which either makes me a genius, or him just really adverse to conflict. In case anyone asks, I’ll go on record saying it’s the former.

    
Jay Tomio - I want to thank Mr. Costa for joining us today at BSC!