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WIZARD Q&A: 'AYRE FORCE' SCRIBES JOSEPH ILLIDGE AND ADAM SLUTSKY | | Industry veteran Illidge and newcomer Slutsky take media giant Bodog into the world of comics with the graphic novel 'Ayre Force' | | | By Lee Rodriguez | | Posted 4/15/2008 | |  | | | Who wants to be a superhero? Who doesn’t? On April 16, multimedia conglomerate Bodog Entertainment enters the comic book arena with the release of Ayre Force, a hardcover graphic novel starring Bodog founder Calvin Ayre and a team of black ops agents made up of real-life members of Bodog’s various branches. We caught up with writers Joseph Illidge and Adam Slutsky for a chat about the project and why now is the time for a leap into the comics medium. | |  WIZARD: For those of us who might not be familiar with it, what can you tell us about Bodog?
ADAM SLUTSKY: Bodog is basically a multimedia conglomerate. It started with Calvin Ayre getting into online gaming, specifically sports betting.From sports betting to even "American Idol," anything that is live action and not recorded from all sorts of games, baseball, football, mixed martial arts: you name it, you can bet on it. He then got into poker with the poker explosion that came a few years ago. They have a well-known online poker room. Depending on what country you're in—if the gambling is legal—you can play for fun, or you can play for real money up to tens of thousands of dollars. They then got into Bodog Music, which is the music arena representing bands like Bif Naked, who from what I understand does very well in Canada in more of the punk rock scene. They represent the Wu Tang Clan. Of course, this is post Old Dirty Bastard, unfortunately, but they have them, and now of course, mixed martial arts is huge. They have Bodog Fight. They're doing pay-per-view events as well as online, and I think you can see them on some TV channels as well like the VS Network, and I think even Spike TV is clamoring for them even though they're working with UFC. So, they're into a little bit of everything and rest assured they have their sights set on everything, and graphic novels just seemed like the next step.
WIZARD: When did the idea to start the comics division come about?
SLUTSKY: This is pretty wild. A good friend of mine by the name of Jamie Gold won the World Series of Poker Main Event back in 2006. At the time it was the biggest first prize of any sporting event in the world. Jamie beat out a field of 8,772 people and won $12 million. Jamie just happened to be represented by Bodog at the time. They put him into the World Series of Poker. They had a joint deal in terms of PR and marketing and that type of thing. So when he won and I was covering the event also for a magazine called Bluff, I started talking to Jamie about Bodog. I'd heard of them, and they were in my periphery, but I didn't know everything they were in, and I was looking at this huge multimedia conglomerate and thinking "My God, there has to be a way to incorporate everything and get it out there and do something fun."
I certainly am very new to the graphic novel and comic book world, but I had become a big fan recently, obviously because of things like 300 and Sin City and all the ones that were making the big Hollywood rounds. So I thought, "Wow, this would be a great medium to bring a fictional world and the factual world and sort of meld them together" with Calvin’s charities in there once I found out a little more about those things, but I didn't have the first clue where to start.
So, I put out my feelers and started looking around, trying to find someone who really understood the graphic novel and comic arena, because I certainly did not. I found a guy named Shawn Martinborough [Ayre Force's artist], who had just came out with a book called How to Draw Noir Comics, and I saw some of the galleys on that and got a bit of an advance and did some checking and put in some calls to Shawn, who put me in contact with Joe [Illidge]. Joe sent me some of his work, and I was just blown away by his writing and his creativity, and more than that, his experience. Just seeing what these guys knew about the arena when anything would have seemed like a lot to me, but then I talked to them and saw exactly how much they knew, and it was like “Ok, these are definitely the guys to work with.” We pitched Bodog and they were interested and it just sort of went from there and we started throwing storylines back and forth of all the different facets of Calvin’s company.
I will say this: what I had originally envisioned, after bringing in Shawn and Joe, has been just pumped-up on steroids to another level. It's huge and I'm just blown away by it.
WIZARD: I'd say it's definitely the right time to get involved in comics. The medium in general has taken a more mainstream path the past few years because of all the movies and such. It seems like now people are starting to take a look and say "Hey, there might be something to this." For example, Virgin has a comic book line out now.
SLUTSKY: I had heard that. I don't know specifics, but I had heard that.
JOSEPH ILLIDGE: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen some of that stuff. I know that Guy Ritchie came up with an idea called Game Keeper.
SLUTSKY: Madonna's husband?
ILLIDGE: Yeah, yeah, totally. And Nicolas Cage and his son have a book called Voodoo Child.
SLUTSKY: Really!?
WIZARD: Yeah, and ["X-Men" star] Hugh Jackman even has a book coming out through them later on this year.
ILLIDGE: Oh yeah! I think that just hit the internet like last week. So you're starting to see all of these stars sort of start to gravitate towards comic and I think—like you said—that this is sort like the height of convergence between the cinematic and graphic novel worlds.
SLUTSKY: It is an incredible medium, too. I had no idea of the level of expression and entertainment that actually took place. I mean, I knew a little bit, but once you really get in there and start reading and you see where some of these storylines start going and all these franchises and is just unbelievably compelling.
WIZARD: Absolutely. I've always told people who aren't really into comics that it’s like a movie limited only by the confines or your imagination.
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ILLIDGE: You are absolutely right, and that's one of the things that [long-time Batman editor] Denny O’Neil who was my boss when I worked on the Batman line of books said to me exactly. He said that comic books have an unlimited special effects budget. It is excellent.
SLUTSKY: I'd like to say something on that, if I could. This is very interesting. I came into this process with more of what you would call a realist or Hollywood approach, and Joe and Shawn were able to look at me and say, "Look, you can now think sort of beyond the box," and by that I mean way beyond the box and take things in the story to levels that you would never be able to go to in a feature film, even if you did have an unlimited special effects budget. You can really take your characters and expand the horizons on that and it really does open up a whole new world, not only as a creator, but also from a reader's standpoint.
WIZARD: And now there's a lot more out there than just the superhero stuff, and we're seeing a lot more genre stuff in the market. Frank Miller sort of broke the mold back in the day with Sin City, but now we have books like Criminal and there are some more mercenary and action-fueled titles that you just didn’t have a few years ago, and that definitely expands your audience, so I think Ayre Force will fit in nicely with some of this more genre specific stuff out there today.
ILLIDGE: No doubt about it. Funny enough, one of the things I stressed to Shawn and Adam was that when you take a mainstream approach to the comics medium, they immediately think "superhero, superhero, superhero," and I really wanted to stress that these are not superheroes in the most basic sense. This isn't Superman or something like that. This is more in the vein of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six or Greg Rucka's Checkmate.
WIZARD: Exactly. As much fun and as great as that stuff is, there's more out there. I know a lot of people don't know that movies like "A History of Violence" and "Road to Perdition" were actually based off of comic books.
ILLIDGE: YES! Exactly! There are TONS of people that have no idea "Road to Perdition" came from a graphic novel, and what's more, that it's really one of the best translations of a story that I've ever seen.
SLUTSKY: Wow. I am learning that right now. Thank you both, gentleman [Laughs].
ILLIDGE: Totally. It comes from an incredible graphic novel series by Max Allen Collins.
SLUTSKY: That's incredible.
WIZARD: Now more than ever is the time for these different sorts of projects. So on that note, what made you decide to tell this sort of story? Who are the Ayre Force and how did you come to this story as the first in what is likely to be a series of stories?
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ILLIDGE: Yeah, platforming off of Adam's original idea which was creating a group centering around Calvin Ayre, founder of Bodog and featuring people from the three main divisions of Bodog (music, fight, and poker), the general high concept premise is that Calvin Ayre runs this covert operations team. So that was the basic idea and what we said was that's not the story. That's a premise. So we had to build the story around that and what's really cool is that Calvin Ayre gave us a lot of room to build this universe. He really took off all the restraints and let us go for it and really create a mythos that really in some ways connects to the Calvin Ayre Foundation, and one of the main causes they take up is the fight against bear bile farming. So, we used that as the introduction into the main story. The mythos was designed so that beyond this story there are the possibilities for more stories. If we do more stories, you'll learn things that call back to the first book. We wrote it in a way that if this is the only one, this is gonna be the most kick-ass book we can do, but if we do more, then we can just spike it up and spike it up. I kinda would say it’s more akin to the Bourne movie franchise where they could have ended at the first one, but because you made it to three, you got a whole bigger picture in this macro arc.
WIZARD: Now, for all of the characters, at least the Ayre Force members, you used real people from the Bodog team. How do all those guys feel about being immortalized in comics now?
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SLUTSKY: I've talked to a few of the [mixed martial arts] fighters, but the biggest connection I've had is with some of the poker players, and David Williams—who is one of the characters in the book—first saw one of Shawn's renderings months and months ago before the full story concept had been worked out. I showed it to him one night before he was set to play, and he was so jazzed that he couldn't sit down. He was all "You’re kidding me? I'm gonna be a superhero!?" He didn't even know about it the context of where the story was gonna go. Obviously they see it as a big stepping stone personally as far as public relations and getting their names out there, but to be a part of the team and really be involved and to be linked in like this, they're all very flattered.
They're all very excited, as is Calvin. I mean, who wouldn't want to be this mythical superhero type who may or may not be the real guy? And that's the neat thing about Calvin. He's really into a lot of the things you're going to see and read about in the book. He's into all the tactical gunplay stuff. He calls himself a billionaire playboy, but he's also a very generous benefactor to a lot of causes.
WIZARD: This first story touches on the bear bile farming and Ayre Force moving in against a farming operation and things of course don't go according to plan. So, is the rest of the series going to sort of follow up on that with some more of Calvin Ayre's pet projects and get some activism out there as well?
ILLIDGE: Basically, the way we kicked it off was we started off the story with the cause and used that as the gateway to the bigger mythos and a way to introduce the fictional villains. So we said okay, if these are not "superheroes," then the villains cannot be supervillain-ish. We're not talking about the Vulture or Doctor Doom. We have to talk about something real world, or at least plausible. Like Adam said, Calvin has a lot of interests, and one of those interests is science. So we really thought about what is one of the aspects of the supervillainy of the real world and we inevitably came to the pharmaceutical industry.
SLUTSKY: Joe brought a huge chunk into this in that he made it very clear to me that no matter how cool your hero is, he can be even cooler if you give him a really cool villain and if there's parts of the villain that you really like and sort of get jazzed about. So if you have that interesting opposition going, then you can do so much more with your main character. I think it was Joe that brought in the pharmaceutical and science angle, and if you want to talk about really opening up a plot line and a storyline for a standalone book, or even future books, I was just blown away by that idea.
ILLIDGE: It really just seemed to work. Shawn Martinborough, the artist, will always cite Hans Gruber from the original "Die Hard" as one of the coolest villains of all time. So basically, once you get into the bigger story is when you find out the origin of Calvin Ayre and the villains and how it deals with the pharmaceuticals and how it deals with eugenics. So we used that as a gateway to the fantastic, because ultimately, this is a graphic novel, and it is genre fiction, so you have a fantastic element to it, but it just has to be grounded enough that people aren’t defying gravity and that you can suspend your sense of disbelief just a little bit and still believe in it.
SLUTSKY: Oh absolutely, especially with what you read about today with all the things happening around the world and even with China doing stem cell research. Some of this stuff is more than just plausible. It wouldn’t shock me if some of this stuff is actually taking place.
WIZARD: You're talking about having the fantastic element to it, and it's pretty out there. When I was trying to explain it to some friends of mine, and I said that it's kind of like a Michael Bay movie where it's sort of over the top, not too super serious and yet not too terribly out there, but is just a lot of fun and entertaining.
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ILLIDGE: A lot of that credit has to go to Shawn Martinborough who not only is one of the best storytellers out there, but he has just such a wealth of cinematic knowledge, and you can see his sense of drama and storytelling in his work. Even when we wrote the script and turned it in, Shawn changed a few things, but he made it more dramatic. So when you say it makes you think of a Michael Bay movie, to me, that's the biggest compliment we can get. It has that super cinematic quality to it that it leaps of the page and that’s the sort of thing that is constantly attributed Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Ultimates and Ultimates 2. You put it in that category, and I take that as a huge compliment.
SLUTSKY: I was thrilled to hear you make that reference. That is a huge compliment, and again, what Shawn delivered on was incredible. Each week, I'd get bits and pieces of the story as Shawn would finish pages, and I couldn't get enough. I knew where the story was going, and I still couldn't wait to get the next installment.
WIZARD: It's got a very cool look to it. There is definitely a likeness to the characters, but at the same time, they have this sort of stylish comic presentation, and the layouts are excellent. It is very widescreen in its presentation.
ILLIDGE: Thanks so much. Now, you got the 12-page preview, right?
WIZARD: Right.
ILLIDGE: Let me tell you...It's going to get dark starting on page 13.
WIZARD: There are certainly some very imposing silhouettes on page 12.
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ILLIDGE: Shawn definitely knows how to amp up the drama. I think I read in Denny O’Neil’s DC Comics Guide to Writing, and I think [American Flagg creator and current Punisher War Journal artist] Howard Chaykin said the same thing: that every (story) has a beginning, middle, and an end in and of itself, and I definitely think of that page in that context. When their feet hit the ground, you see that and immediately go “"Ok, these guys aren't normal" because first, neither you, nor Adam, nor I could jump out of a helicopter and survive and second, you'd have to be pretty massive if you're breaking the ground when you land, and that is totally a Shawn thing. I didn't write that.
SLUTSKY: Yeah, that isn't in the script at all
ILLIDGE: It was all Adam to give you that little visual cue so that you sa, "Holy crap. These guys are in trouble."
WIZARD: It's pretty great-looking stuff.
SLUTSKY: That's certainly music to our ears, especially coming from someone like yourself, who sees this stuff on a daily basis.
WIZARD: It's a lot of fun.
ILLIDGE: One other thing I wanted to mention is that above and beyond the proceeds of the book all going to the Calvin Ayre Foundation, the book is completely green and environmentally friendly. It's good for the fans. It's good for the causes, and it's good for the planet.
SLUTSKY: That's exactly right. That's a trifecta, and if you’re talking about a gambling book, then that's what it’s all about [laughs].
ILLIDGE: Yep. It's supposed to come out on the 16th, and if you don't see it then, you can blame the Skrulls.
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