Behind the scenes / Q&A with Will

Dr.Brooker, What was the major influence in your life that made you decide to do a PhD on Batman?

I'm thinking about a question you asked Sarah last week and was wondering - what advice would you give to PhD students, female or otherwise?

The hardest thing is the time it takes between me writing ideas down, and actually seeing them as finished, coloured pages. I'm not saying Suze and Sarah are slow, because they're not, but it does take a big chunk of time to get each issue complete, and you can understand I am impatient to see the script in its fully visual form.

As I've said above, it's a lot faster than writing a film script and getting that produced, but on the other hand, there is a delay when you compare it to writing a page of conventional fiction, which is 'finished' in its prose form. A comic script isn't finished in itself, and is waiting to be completed by the artists, and that does take time.

I think there is certainly a trajectory towards increased specialisation as you progress through academia -- most obviously, from the many subjects you study and are expected to excel at when you're 16, to the one very narrow topic you're meant to become an expert in when you do a PhD.

In terms of selling yourself to institutions or publishers, I think there is value in having a sense of branding about yourself professionally -- establishing yourself as the person who does this thing and that thing. It makes it easier for people to understand what you offer, and see how you would fit in with them, and helps you to build up a specific, distinctive profile.

For that reason, I don't mind the whole 'Dr Batman' reputation. But if someone genuinely thought I write about nothing but Batman, I would have to correct them. I generally tell people that my work is about the dynamic relationship between stories, storytellers and the people who listen to stories -- something along those lines, to indicate that I am interested in producers, narratives, audiences and cultural context.

On one level, research through creative practice is more accepted now than it's ever been before, in the academy, and it's entirely possible to pursue a PhD through digital art, as Sarah did. Fan studies has also made it more possible, I think, for people to address their own passions and enthusiasms and examine them in their academic work. There has been a movement towards foregrounding individual, personal subjectivity, and talking about yourself and your own cultural position critically in scholarly writing.

However, I think there is still a tendency to want to label people neatly, within academia as perhaps in many other professions. So I think things are probably more flexible and fluid than they were, but that people still do like to pigeonhole.

Will, you handpicked the team for MSCSI - have their been any pleasant surprises, or has the team dynamic operated as you foresaw?

In terms of MSCSI, it is hard to say as I've consumed so much and I'm sure a lot of it has all factored in. Explicitly, I was thinking about 1990s episodes of Friends when trying to capture the sense of Dahlia, Kit, Kay and Cat in their shared home.

The scenes between Cat and Enrique are meant to have a feel of John Bender and Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club and Claire Danes and Jared Leto in My So-Called Life, or Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the first (Raimi) Spider-Man movie -- a bit of shy flirting, direct challenging, sly glances, brushing of hands and so on.

Some scenes in issue 1 were meant to look a bit like the Batman Animated Series of the 1990s, when Cat is walking home from the library and we are focusing on dark backgrounds with strong direct lighting.

The first big splash of Cat walking through Gloria is probably inspired to an extent by Blade Runner (and many, many other science fiction films, like for instance I Robot, The Island and Equilibrium, in its reveal of a busy, crowded, detailed, alternate-universe metropolis.

That said, what was it like being my supervisor?