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Q&A WITH 'SPEED RACER' COMIC WRITER ARIE KAPLAN
'Chronicles of the Racer' scribe talks about Jews in comics and making a legacy character out of Speed
By Carolyn Fowlkes
Posted 05/07/08
The trade paperback of Speed Racer: Chronicles of the Racer hit shelves this April, looking back at legendary speedsters who were tearing up the road (or the water) long before Speed ever stepped into the Mach 5. Prior to his foray into racer territory, writer Arie Kaplan tied up his new book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books, a comprehensive guide to the history of Jews in the comic industry and Jewish influences on the medium, to be released later this year. We caught up with Kaplan to reflect on his comic, the challenges of building a new history in the Speed Racer universe and continuing his exploration of the legacy of Jews in comics.
Are you a big Speed Racer fan?
I am, actually; as a kid I was a huge fan of it. I used to see the reruns on Cartoon Network, and it's funny because there were a couple of things about it that bothered me. Like I always used to be annoyed that Speed never realized that his brother is Racer X. It was so obvious to me as a five year old.
Did you grow up watching the cartoons?
Yep.
Did that influence your writing at all?
A little bit. When IDW Publishing called me up about the Speed Racer comics, one of the first ideas I pitched to them was [turning] Speed Racer into a legacy character, where Speed discovers that he's the latest in a long line of Racers who've been around since the dawn of human civilization. In every generation there has always been a racer, like there's a Roman racer called Swiftus Romulus who has a pimped-out chariot called Marcus V. [Laughs] Who doesn't love a pimped-out chariot? If you don't love a pimped-out chariot you're dead inside.
What gave you the idea to do a legacy comic?
The idea of a story that kind of repeats itself and the theme of "the more things change the more they stay the same"...that's a theme I play with a lot in my writing. I'm really fascinated by the idea of immortality and how things evolve throughout history. And also if you look at the Chronicles of the Racer miniseries, one big overarching theme is evolution. You look at the way technology has evolved--in Issue 1 it's chariots, in Issue 2 the big dominant technology is suits of armor, in Issue 3 you've got these pirate ships because that was the dominant mode of travel, and in Issue 4 you've got the frontier where people were mostly travelling by horse. But since it's the late 1800s you've got the first cars being invented, and you're finally catching up to where technology is somewhat modern. So it's the first racer who's driving a car.
So you're not just looking at the origin of Speed Racer but also the origin of the Mach 5.
Exactly. In Issue 4 [the racer is] the Navajo bounty hunter whose name is Sleek Raven, and his car is the Model 5. But he's really wary of this car. He kind of jumps into it to save someone's life, but he's really wary of it because it's this new vehicle and his real mode of transportation is his horse, Five Mockingbirds, get it? [Laughs] But the car is something he's wary of, because the theme of the issue is the old technology versus the new technology, which is something that was big in the old west. People were inventing things like cars and repeater rifles and there were little hints of modern technology cropping up in this barbaric frontier. It was this dichotomy of the old and new and high tech and low tech, and I just wanted to play with that a bit.
What have been some of the challenges of creating a new story in the Speed Racer universe?
One of the biggest challenges is, if you set in the world of the Speed Racer cartoon, the cartoon is very thinly written. The English dialogue scripts were written by Peter Fernandez in three days each. [It wasn't his fault, he's a really good writer.] But he was under incredibly tense deadline pressures, and within that there wasn't a lot of room for character development. So one of the big challenges for me was to take those characters and flesh them out.
I had to make Speed into more of a fleshed-out, three-dimensional teenager. I had to Peter Parker-ize him. And also with Trixie, make her more of a normal teenager girl and make her and Speed's relationship more of a realistic teenage relationship, and all within the confines of an all-ages comic. You don't want to go too much above a PG rating.
You also want to make Pop and Speed's relationship more of a normal father-son relationship. A lot of critics have pointed out that there's a scene in Issue 1 where Pops and Speed have a father-son game of basketball, saying, "I don't remember that from the cartoon," and that's because it wasn't in the cartoon. I invented that. And there's a scene where Speed's a jerk to Trixie and they have a fight in a restaurant, and it's like, "Did Arie Kaplan invent that?" Yes, Arie Kaplan did invent that, because Arie Kaplan needed some conflict and for Speed to have a dramatic arc as a character because none of that was in the cartoon. You need that for these characters to play as real.
And audiences kind of expect that these days.
Yeah, they do. One of the first e-mails I shot out to [editor-in-chief] Chris Ryall [at IDW Publishing] when I was doing issue one said, "Look, I'm doing something a little different. I feel like I need to rework these characters a little bit and make them more like the characters in the Cartoon Network version of Teen Titans, is that okay?" And I was terrified his reply was going to be like no, no, no, but immediately he was like, "That's perfect, that's exactly what I want." And that was cool, because the thing I like about those shows is that they're really good, really fun, really solidly written kids' shows, but they're also really clever, smart shows that adults can get a lot out of too. So I put a lot of Easter Eggs in the Speed Racer comics that adults can get a lot out of.
These Easter Eggs, are they all in-jokes from stuff that you remember from watching the cartoon?
Sort of. I had to do a lot of research, so yes and no. It does come easily to me to do stuff like this, but I did have to fact check a lot of stuff because I wanted to get it right.
Have you seen the Speed Racer movie?
I have not. It looks like a lot of fun and there's such an incredible cast in the movie, and the Wachowski brothers are incredible writers and directors. It's very hard to go wrong with that, so go go go.
Do you think that with the new movie and the new cartoon show and your comic coming out all at once, there's going to be a big Speed Racer resurgence?
I certainly hope so, not only because it'll help people like me but because I think it's a great character. One thing I was thinking about a lot while I was writing the series was that this is a great character, but the reason I had to flesh him out a lot was because not a lot has been done in recent years, and that's too bad. One thing that turning Speed Racer into a legacy character does is create a built-in story generator. Now you can create so many stories out of that premise. Almost anyone can be a racer. You can play with ideas of what a racer is and what a hero is. Hopefully if this movie takes off and the franchise becomes more popular, we'll be able to see more stories about racers, because I have more stories to tell as well.
I heard you moderated an NYCC panel about Jews in comics. What did you guys talk about?
I interviewed Al Jaffee who is one of my Mad Magazine colleagues for my book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. It was Danny Fingeroth and I talking to Al about his life and his work, because he had recently been profiled in the New York Times and he's now a Living Legend, and a book of his Tall Tales cartoons [is coming out soon]. Al was so nice to just do the panel in the first place and we just talked about what it was like for him coming up in the ranks with colleagues like Stan Lee--he and Stan Lee used to do a comic back in the forties called Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. You don't think of people like Stan Lee and Al Jaffee doing a comic called Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal, but everyone has their humble beginnings. And he was talking about that and how he started out working for Will Eisner. It was really like an "inside the actor's studio" kind of thing.
Can you give us an overview of your book and your work involving Jews in comics?
Sure. My book is the most comprehensive overview of Jews in comics. It goes through the entire history of the [comic] medium and every genre from superheroes to autobiographical graphic novels like Maus and American Splendor and more recent works, and it talks about things like how Chris Claremont revamped the X-Men in the '70s and '80s by making Magneto a Holocaust survivor. It talks about what Image and Dark Horse did with Jewish characters like Go Girl, and the recent rash of superhero movies and how that's affected things [for Jews in comics].
It's sort of an oral history, [weaving] in quotes and comments from the people I interviewed into the narrative, and it goes into behind-the-scenes anecdotes, like, who really created Superman? And who really created Spider-Man and the X-Men? What did Chris Claremont's teenage experiences in a kibbutz have to do with his work on X-Men? How did Art Spiegelman come up with the idea for Maus? How did Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines come up with the ideas for Mad Magazine? How Jewish is Mad Magazine? What role does Yiddish play in Mad Magazine? All these questions are answered in the book and a lot of them are questions that people have been asking for years.
What about your own heritage as a Jew and your interest in comics compelled you to write this books?
When I started out as a freelance writer, [one of my other clients] aside from [Mad Magazine] was a Jewish magazine called Reform Judaism Magazine. There was a three-part series I wrote for Reform Judaism called "Kings of Comics." And that was a really ground-breaking work on the area of Jews in comic books. It really predated a lot of other works on the subject. A lot of these other books cited that magazine series. Very quickly people started asking me, "Hey, do you want to write a book of your own?" and I thought, I really should, especially because all these other people are writing books on the same topic.
At first it was going to be like a director's cut of the magazine series, then it just started ballooning and now it's just this [massively researched and lavishly illustrated work], this 200+ page definitive volume. I have things on Neil Gaiman in there--a lot of people don't know that Neil Gaiman is Jewish and they don't know that Chris Claremont is Jewish, and that's the other thing, people don't know that certain people in the comic industry are Jewish. I talk about who the Jewish creators of the original comics were, [folks like Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Jerry Robinson, all of whom I interviewed.] And I also talk about who the Jewish creators of the modern comics are--people like Brian Michael Bendis, Lauren Weinstein, and Judd Winick--and what a lot of the Jewish subtext is in comics today and comics back then.
To me personally this strikes a chord because I write for Mad Magazine and Tales from the Crypt, and there's a big chapter about Mad Magazine and Tales from the Crypt in the book. And so the fact that I write for those two titles now means that I'm part of the story and I'm continuing the legacy. I'm very proud to be continuing that legacy. And that has to do with Speed Racer, which is very much about tradition--one of the first words heard in Speed Racer Chronicles of the Racer Part 4 is "Are you ready to break from tradition?" That whole series is about tradition and following in your ancestor's footsteps.
Check out an introduction to From Krakow to Krypton at Yavnet.com and visit Kaplan's website to find out more about his comics and other works!
