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[TOP COW SPOTLIGHT:] 'FRESHMEN SUMMER SPECIAL' | | We spend some summer time with 'Freshmen' writer Hugh Sterbakov to talk about the latest installment of his college-based series | | | By Kevin Mahadeo | | Posted 7/1/08 | |  | | ![[TOP COW SPOTLIGHT:] 'FRESHMEN SUMMER SPECIAL'](http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/wizarduniverse_2063_350885258)
After a long break, the Freshmen class returns—not to battle Calculus and Biology 101, but to battle a 100-foot tall, crazed and obsessed houseplant.
Freshmen, the critically acclaimed series created by Hugh Sterbakov and Seth Green, follows a team of college students accidentally granted a bevy of strange and borderline useless powers—such as sticking to any surface and burping a cloud of gas which intoxicates anyone who breathes it in. After two miniseries of fighting overpowered frat boys and facing their worst fears, the class took a break from the comic world.
This week, the summer vacation ends, and the kids return. We talked with writer of the Freshmen Summer Special Sterbakov about the one-shot, the future of the series and playing one-time wingman for his best bud Green.
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Can you give everyone a run-down of what this summer special's going to be about, for those who do not know, and are new to that idea of the Summer Special?
STERBAKOV: Well, it's in the gap between Freshmen II and whatever we do next, and it's kind of like a nice fun little epilogue to Freshmen II. It doesn't really get into the big overall storylines of whatever installment we'd do next. It doesn't necessarily resolve what we had brewing at the end of Freshmen II, but it's just a fun, exciting, adventurous one-shot full of action, which we haven't really had the opportunity to do with our characters because we've been doing a six-issue series. When you do those, it tends to be every issue is playing an important part in the ongoing storyline. You don't just get to have a real fun one-time adventure. So that's what we're doing. We're just throwing our kids into the mix and having some fun. It takes place at the end of their summer vacation after their freshman year, and they're having to fight a new, improved version of the Green Thumb's plant, which is back for revenge and looking significantly bigger and angrier.
And for those who don't know, the house plant is named Susie.
STERBAKOV: The house plant is named Susie. We have this character, the Green Thumb, who's one of a dozen characters we've got. His ability is to hear plants talk. What you don't realize is that plants are extremely bitter and pissed off and foul-mouthed about everything that humanity is doing to them, and Susie in particular is really obsessive about Charles, the Green Thumb, because he's her owner and he takes care of her, and once he realized he could hear [plants] talk, he realized that she's kind of got a fatal attraction thing going on for him. And she's been riding him and riding him throughout the course of Freshmen and Freshmen II with guilt and—anything and everything that a girlfriend or an ex-girlfriend does to a guy—to the point where it started driving him to some really dramatic points when he tried to kill himself because he was overwhelmed by the guilt from the plants and the fact that he's uncomfortable with who he is. So a lot of the second series was him finding himself and growing some balls and sticking up for himself. And at the end, he kind of let this plant be destroyed and said goodbye to his old life, and started owning up for who he wants to be for himself. It was a really nice little thing, and honestly I didn't even intend to bring her back. I thought it was a great beat for Charles and for the character. But I'd always been concerned that both series started slow. So I had in my head for the next series a one-shot action issue to start out with—the revenge of this plant coming back. Now, our kids all got their superpowers in this explosion in the science building and what occurred to me was that Susie was there too. She was part of it, and it didn't do anything to her. So I decided, ''Well, it could certainly mutate her now!" She could become a giant crazy woman or a plant in the shape of a woman wanting revenge on her ex-boyfriend who left her. And that actually ties right into some of the other things that we had left over from the end of Freshmen II, so it worked out really well. It's one of those big, ''Everything's a metaphor! Everything means something!" But it all blows up in a lot of fun and action.
You know, you said Susie was there was the explosion happened. You should totally play it off as ''We planned this all along!"
STERBAKOV: You know, I should, but when I hear other writers do that it drives me bonkers. So I like to be honest about happy accidents, I like to be honest when I screwed up and I like to be honest when I did something pretty good. I can't take credit for it but it's the kind of thing that everybody does. You can't say that we had the idea of the Hobgoblin when we created the Green Goblin. Part of it is ripping and exploring things and realizing what you've done, so it was a happy accident. Of course, if somebody was going to be one of my nitpickers, they could say, ''Well, what about other things? What about the bugs that were in the building? What about the flies?" Maybe I'll get to those, I don't know.
Freshmen 5: Attack of the Insects.
STERBAKOV: Exactly. Attack of the insects that have been sitting around four and a half years waiting for their revenge! Maybe, if I'm drunk and there's that kind of necessity, maybe.
Do you draw influence for the characters from your own life?
STERBAKOV: Oh, absolutely. Every one of these characters... Seth and I are very similar in a lot of ways—and it's us. The school is the school I went to, the frat guys are the frat guys that I didn't get along with. Everything. Every little part of it. Neither of us are Amish, but that's it. I'll give you that. And neither of us are gay black guys. But other than that, it's absolutely just us.
So, you drank heavily and vomited often?
STERBAKOV: I plead the fifth on that.
Susie the house plant coming back like a crazy stalker. Ex-girlfriend?
STERBAKOV: Definitely. I've had some crazy girls in my past and some of them would own up to that. Some of them I'm still friends with, some of them I'm not, but Seth has had some really crazy girls in his past and I've watched that happen, and [Susie's] definitely drawn from both of us, and it's really interesting. We've had some fascinating things happen to us because of women through him. The truth is, women will do anything to get to him. They love him and I can't blame them and I love him too, but you've never seen a woman embarrass herself and lose her dignity like she does when she's trying to get Seth's attention. I'm sure he's going to be pissed at me for saying that, but it's true. And there are dozens and dozens of girls out there, who if they heard that would be like, ''Yeah. That was me." It's just absurd.
Did you take one for the team? Like, ''Seth, I'll jump in front of you for this girl."
STERBAKOV : So many times, and I could tell you so many stories. I'm married now, so not anymore, but I can tell you one night in particular Seth was romancing a girl—she's actually an actress, she's a famous person so I won't say her name—he was romancing a girl and I got stuck out on a balcony with her friend for three freaking hours of insanity. I couldn't even control this woman. I couldn't even get her to listen to me long enough to understand that I agreed with her. It was one of the most mind-boggling nights of my life, and then Seth and this girl he was romancing come out on to the balcony and I looked at them and said, ''Please tell your friend I agree with her! Please make her stop!" And all she's doing is laughing. Yes. I had to go down in flames as a wingman for Seth so many times I can't even count.
I'm not even sure where this interview just went now.
STERBAKOV: This is not relevant. It's all from experience and it's all been brutal. The brutality of my growing up and trying to date and trying to find myself and trying to be comfortable and even moving out to LA. Your best friend's a movie star and a foot and a half shorter than you, and all these things that go on in LA. It's all just manifesting in Freshmen—all these kids hating themselves and falling apart and destroying their lives with superpowers.
In that respect, who would you say you're most like in the cast?
Literally every one of them is a part of me. The most interesting thing though is the Beaver because he's so self-confident, he's so dismissive of everybody else, but that's my brain with the self-loathing. What Beaver says to the other kids, that's what I've always thought of myself. Before I was married, I'd meet a girl and I'd say one thing to her before my brain is saying, ''You are so stupid. That is the dumbest thing to say." And that's where the Beaver comes from. But I've been Annalee with trying to understand what the hell other people are doing; I've been Paula by just feeling like I don't look good enough, like nobody will ever love me; I've been Norrin, just wanting to immerse myself in fantasy worlds. Every one of these characters comes from me. I've been Liam, just feeling like everybody understands this world and I don't. When I first got to college, everybody seemed to know each other and everybody seemed to get along They all liked music that I didn't like, they all wore things I didn't wear and every single one of them comes right from inside my neuroses, my pathos.
So you're really just expressing yourself in the utmost way in the entire series pretty much.
STERBAKOV: Exactly. And I'm certainly not here to toot my own horn or anything, but I think a lot of people have really latched onto the characters. The fans love them, and I think more so than our plotting, certainly more than our marketing, the characters are really latching onto people and I think it's because they're all real. They all come from places that people can identify with because if I've felt this way, I'm sure everybody else has felt this way at some point in their life, too.
Let's talk about this one-shot. We kind of get the general idea: Susie comes back, she's mutated, she's crazy. But you mentioned that you wanted to see action-packed, so I guess this issue is action-paced more than anything else?
STERBAKOV: Yes. It really is. We're working really hard on Freshmen this year, a lot more than a one-shot comic book. And we decided that we wanted to put something out there. We wanted to have a presence in San Diego, we wanted to make the comic book fans understand that we're thinking about them and we're not neglecting them, and we want to have a book for them. But for a dozen reasons, we didn't have the ability to do Freshmen #3 just yet. So we wanted to do a one-shot and it came down to how do you do a one-shot when all of these stories have been so complex, so character-driven. I looked at it like the opening scene of a James Bond movie. ''Okay, this is going to be something that's going to play around with the bigger story line, but it's just going to be something really quick-paced, very fun, very funny, make a point, and get out." And so I just thought to myself what if we have this giant rampaging attack, and you see when you open up the comic, you start right in the middle of it. We don't start with Susie's vines growing and building. We go right into it because we just felt like it'd be the most fun and people really like fast-paced stuff right now, so we just decided to try to get it really going and get the jokes in there along the way and get the character stuff in there along the way, but both the plotting and the action take the forefront.
| |  Is there a scene you can call out that's one of your favorites in this issue, or one you can tease as one of your favorites?
STERBAKOV: From a pure fun perspective, I always loved Beaver. He's so much fun to write, and watching him interact with society is always hysterical. And actually more so than ever in this issue, he's really out in the public. He finds himself conflicted by the inanity of both his situation and how other people react to him. And there's a scene with him in a gas station where he's actually with Liam's horse and buggy, and they're filling up a gas can, and people are honking at them, like why the hell are you filling up a gas can with a horse and buggy. And he's just yelling at people in the cars, just screaming at people like, ''Why don't you take this time to mourn the death of intellectualism in your society?" And it's just so fun to watch him react to them. And then toward the end we have this "Buffy" montage moment—the musical moment where everybody's singing and thinking. We have a full two pages with four intersecting scenes where everything's weaving together really nice—the scenes and the metaphors—and for the writer it's like, ''Ooh, look what a good writer I am. Look what I did. I merged all of the scenes." So I can be pretty proud of that. If my screenwriting teachers are reading, they'll be impressed. But you've got to make sure it's fun for everybody. That it makes sense. So I'm really pleased with the way the issue worked out and I'm definitely happy with the way everybody reacted to everything. And I actually squeezed a great moment out of this for Renee, who really went crazy at the end of Freshmen II. I hadn't thought much about it, but it worked so well in this issue that I'm really pleased with how she comes out of it. Like I said, I'm really pleased with it.
Beyond the one-shot, you mentioned a little while ago that you have other stuff in the works. So let's hit up on that, what other stuff do you have?
STERBAKOV: Well, we've been working in a bunch of different mediums. We started this as a movie pitch and then we did it as a comic book, and now we're going back and we're trying to develop it differently. We had a couple deals I thought we were going to be able to discuss by now, but Hollywood and everything is rush-rush-rush, slow down. So I'm not quite ready to talk about anything just yet on the record, but I think that by the end of the year we're going to have some really great stuff. And we already do, we have the statue and we have this hardcover. We're doing a bunch of different stuff, but I think you're going to hear about us taking these characters into other mediums pretty soon, hopefully by the end of the year, at least talk about it, and go from there and just get everybody really excited about it. The thing I said from the beginning is that I'm a huge comic book fan. I have 42 long boxes of comics. I have every appearance of Spider-Man. If Top Cow can sell this comic, I will continue to write it till I die. I don't care if I'm retired in some $4 billion mansion collecting thousands of dollars a second from Freshmen merchandise—which seems unlikely, but hell, anything can happen—I'll still want to write the comics. This is never going to be a case of "movie star and his friend start a comic book in order to get a movie going and then forget the comic book." That's never going to happen at all. But that having been said, with the work we've been doing this summer, you can see why we could only do a one-shot this year.
Seth does "Robot Chicken." That seems like such an easy in for you guys to throw in your comic. Haven't you ever said, ''Seth, you do a show, with toys, about comics and pop culture. Where the hell are the Freshmen?"
STERBAKOV: Well, for sure, and I also bought him toys for "Robot Chicken" and I actually wrote the Star Wars episode. We had the Freshmen ads on bumpers on "Robot Chicken." We had that one scene very briefly where the "Robot Chicken" nerd is reading Freshmen. It's not out of the question but there's two things. First of all, it's a little bit apples and oranges because there aren't Freshmen toys. "Robot Chicken," in my opinion, really flies when they're using toys that we all know and love. They're using our favorite toys and making jokes out of them. Now, Freshmen are not toys that we love. There really aren't even Freshmen toys yet. So it would be a bit of a stretch. The second thing is it'd be a little too "wink-wink aren't we proud of ourselves," you know? I'd be worried about how people would react. We don't want to stuff anything down anybody's faces. I don't know. If it came up, if the right skit came up, and Freshmen got a little more into the cultural consciousness and it felt like it wasn't pushing it too much to put it on "Robot Chicken," then it wouldn't be out of the question. But we just haven't done it yet. They actually developed a sketch about me because I guess I'm so cool, and I have a pretty funny personality. I'm very self-deprecating. It sounds like I'm just saying that, but I will bring down any room with self-deprecation. And so they started workshopping this character based on me, and they already have a doll of me because they've put me in a couple times, and they had a sketch and they pitched it and it didn't go through. So that's the great thing: I'm worth writing the sketches up, but I'm not worth actually animating and putting on the air. So it's not out of the question, but at some point maybe we'll do it.
Who shines the most, would you say, in this special?
STERBAKOV: It's the first time we've had an issue narrated by the Intoxicator. It's definitely Charles' story, but I stepped back from it and realized that we had an issue of Freshmen narrated by Charles, and it was good. I'm very proud of it. It's probably the most dramatic of any of the Freshmen issues, but it was really heavy. It would wear on your shoulders to read it. And I just didn't want to do that again, and I felt we got all the points across, too. So I thought, ''Well, this is going to be an action issue, and there's not going to be a lot of insight in the narration. Here's an opportunity to have something narrated, almost nonsensically, by the Intoxicator." So he's narrating this issue, and you'll see in the captions he forgets what's going on, he doesn't remember what happened at certain points, he's completely drunk, so that's a lot of fun. At one point he says, ''I forgot this part. I fell asleep." And there's one part where he goes, ''Ooh, ooh ooh," you know, he's talking about his own dialogue. Like I said, there's that connection where everybody starts doing the same thing, the musical montage without the music, and in the captions, he's like, ''Ooh, look, everybody's thinking about the same thing! That's so neat!" So it's really fun and wink-wink to be able to have that character really shine a little bit. It's frustrating that he hasn't really been involved in the story, and he is more or less so far a one-joke or one-note character. That bothers me because I think he could be our breakout. But I haven't been able to let him shine yet, so he gets to shine a little bit more in this, and kind of lets you imagine what else could come from it. I have a to-do list for "Freshmen 3" or whatever we do next, and Elwood the Intoxicator's at the top of the list of people I want to use and learn more about. And also Liam, even though Liam got to narrate one issue himself already. I just want to see the characters evolving more. We've just had too many. I wrote out Long Dong, and I wrote out Cacophony in the beginning, with an eye towards bringing her back. I mean, obviously she got written out in the first issue. It's just a matter of trying to balance everybody and wielding this fifteen in order to get all these jokes in. Jimmy, our character who's sticky all the time, he's got a great one little joke in the summer special. He just shows up somewhere you'd never expect him and does something you'd never expect. So it's a matter of trying to balance everybody, trying to use everybody to their best potential and not leave anybody behind. So that's the big challenge and it's something I'm going to try to adhere to. And people fell so in love with Paula in the first series and they wanted to see more of her, and I felt so guilty not using her in the second series, but I had to get everybody in love with everybody.
That's the problem with an ensemble cast.
STERBAKOV: It's huge, and it's not X-Men. I don't have four monthly ongoing books—the Young X-Men, the Old X-Men. I don't have all the opportunity for that, and I knew that the concept of this, the very core of it, is that these kids are in the real world. So I couldn't have this accelerator machine going off every month or every year. It had to be a one-time thing and so I'm trying to build the most from these characters and what happened in that one incident without creating more. I purposely created a bunch so I'd have a lot to work with later, and now it's just a race like ''Oh, God, I've got to get them all in there."
You could totally write Astonishing Freshmen, Uncanny Freshmen...
STERBAKOV: If the fans will buy them, I will write them. We're just trying to market this book. The thing is we just got such good reviews and people loved it so much, I just wish more people would pick it up, and we could convince Top Cow it'd make sense to do a monthly book, and just get it out there. It's just a matter of how much the market can sustain. But a lot of folks want to read comic books right now that are dead frickin' serious. You've got Wonder Woman killing people right now. There's not a lot of room for ''Whoo! We're having fun! We're all drunk!" It's not fitting in right now.
Freshmen II ended their freshman year and this is their summer special. If you do continue, is the title still going to be Freshmen? Would it be "Freshmen 3: Sophomores"?
STERBAKOV: It would be something very close to that. The intellectual property is Freshmen. And metaphorically these kids literally won't be freshmen. They'll be sophomores. This issue ends the very end of their summer. They're going to go back to school in a week or so and they're going to be sophomores, but the intellectual property, the logo, the team name, for the time being is still Freshmen. We'll keep calling it Freshmen, and then we'll call it the Sophomore Year or whatever we're going to go with. It could be something like Star Wars, where you have the word Freshmen small and the word Sophomores big. I'm not teasing. I've certainly been asked this question before and I've given it a lot of thought, but I haven't settled anything. It is a challenge, and I really would love to write them through the end of college, so it's a problem I'd like to keep having.
Hopefully the summer special picks up, because Freshmen is a great series and people need to buy this thing, dagnabbit.
STERBAKOV: We're trying to get the word out there. It's been a rough ride. I don't know why. The trades sell really, really well, though. Extraordinarily well, apparently. I think we were in the top 10 selling trades for both the last two years. The challenge is going to be to get into other mediums because that's what drives the comic book sales right now. The truth of the matter is, the way these creators make these comic books now, it's all to get a Hollywood deal because that's where the money is. So if we can start bringing in ancillary money, we'll certainly convince Top Cow to do more. We are so close right now to these other big deals. Top Cow is talking about doing another book with me. Hollywood's responding to me because of other projects, so I have a firm hope that we'll be able to keep doing the Freshmen comics and keep the kids in this. It's never going to be the same; even if we do a movie several of the characters will be different. I can tell you we'll have to pull some of the characters out, but I want to keep doing this version with the freedom that we get with the comic book, the ability to do the narration the way we do it. Nobody wants it more than me, but I'm optimistic and that's rare for me.
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