In Part 2 of my interview with Sluggy Freelance creator Pete Abrams, we discuss more characters, more on writing, celebrities, copyright issues, and the Sluggy books.

ANB: Returning to characters, one of the most surprising supporting characters has been Oasis. As I understand it, she was only supposed to be one time character for the “Isle of Doctor Steve” storyline. Is that true?

Pete: That is completely false. Oasis is probably the most far ahead I’ve planned for anything. I know a lot of people think it was supposed to be a one shot and I think they point to the Torg with the shopping cart comic as evidence I didn’t intend for her to come back.

Actually, that’s one of my favorite strips. It’s one of the ones that every time I thought about it, it was like, “No. That’s too wrong. I can’t do that to all of the Oasis fans out there.” But every time I pictured it in my mind, it was so darn funny I just had to put it into a strip.

Oasis has been planned from the very beginning. There are probably another good two solid Oasis stories before you learn all of the secrets. I do believe there are some jaw-droppers ahead. AND the clues are there!

ANB: Do you drop clues in current storylines for future storylines?

Pete: Whenever I can. I don’t want people going nuts looking for every little line I draw as part of a clue – people do that anyway. (laughter) I will drop clues here and there but don’t feel bad if you miss them because I’m not making them very obvious.

I guess it is more along the lines of knowing that’s the way it was from the beginning. I don’t just pull this stuff out of my butt randomly. Take X-Files. I always got the feeling that Chris Carter (the creator) didn’t really know where it was going. He came up with an interesting thing, and then dug himself a little deeper. I just wanted people to know that I actually have endings in mind; I have resolutions for everything – all of the various plotlines that have been opened.

One of the reasons I moved “Dangerous Days” ahead (which was scheduled to occur a couple of stories later) was because I’d been raising to many new questions and not answering any of them. I wanted to resolve the whole Aylee issue and so I moved it ahead.

ANB: I feel your writing continues to improve with each storyline. I tend to compare Sluggy to Babylon 5 in terms of writing.  JMS (the creator) had his whole Babylon 5 story mapped out ahead of time, and then wrote the individual stories for TV.

Pete: I actually did a “Who’s Line Is It Anyway” with Jason Carter (the ranger Marcus on Babylon 5) and Richard Biggs (Doctor Stephen Franklin on Babylon 5) at Dragon*Con this year.

ANB: How did that go?

Pete: I don’t know. Everyone’s response seemed pretty good but it was obvious that Bill Holbrook (Kevin and Kell, On the Fastrack and Safe Havens) and I were WAY outclassed by them. That’s to be understood because they are actors and they are used to this kind of thing. Now, if they had a big sheet of paper and had everyone take turns drawing something funny on it, their butts would have been ours!

It was fun and I think it went OK. I hope to never see the video!

ANB: Oh, it was video taped?

Pete: It was but I don’t know what the policy is so I don’t know if they just archive it, sell it, or blackmail me with it later. The guy in charge said he was going to send me a videotape so my wife could see. She almost went to Dragon*Con just to see that.

ANB: You’ve gotten to meet a few celebrities through Sluggy. Here’s a dumb question: how cool has that been?

Pete: It is cool! It seems like every year I become more of a “celebrity”. So I still spend 90% of my time doing what I’m doing the whole time so it doesn’t influence me. When I go to a convention, for the duration of it, I’m like a celebrity – I get all of those celebrity perks and benefits. Then I go back home and I go back to living my own life.

ANB: Who are some of the celebrities that you’ve met?

Pete: Last year at ComicCon, I got to talk to Mark Hamil. That was cool. He came to one of the parties afterward. Now HE was a celebrity! We caught him right when he walked in. I had a pleasant conversation with him but then he got swamped and vanished and I didn’t get to see him the rest of the party. I thought that was pretty cool.

John Ringo is pretty cool. He’s not a “celebrity” as such but he is a New York Times best-selling author. There were a lot of Sluggy references in his last book and there’s going to be more in his next book. There may even be a little picture of Bun-bun on the cover of Mr. Ringo's next book. You know, if bun-bun was going to make the cover of a New York Times Bestseller, you'd think it'd be on one of my books, but that's Bun-bun for you, no loyalty. *laughter*

ANB: You’ve had to worry about copyright infringement. In the “Fire and Rain” Oasis storyline, there were some concerns about your using quotes of music in your strip. Let’s say someone wrote a novel containing large amounts of Sluggy references (stories, characters, etc) would there be any concerns on your end about this?

Pete: There are two angles on that. One is, “What is legal and what is not?” The other is, “What is the intent?” So using Sluggy illegally with good intent, I’d probably just shrug it off. When using it legally with bad intent, there’s not much I can do. It’s only if it was illegal with bad intent that there’d be a problem. John Ringo actually asked me last year before the book came out if it was OK. So he got permission (to use the Sluggy references).

My publisher is looking into getting usage for the lyrics in the book. No record company contacted me (about my using the lyrics in the strips). What happened was a lot of people were contacting me about the fact that (as I said), I was doing something illegally but with good intentions. Because I did do something illegal, I left myself open. So I chose to pull the lyrics out.

Hopefully my publisher will get permission so I can put the lyrics back in because it really hurt (the story) to pull those out. It should be easier to secure the rights for the book. I’m not sure what their policy on web-usage is. I figure we’ll print a few thousand books and pay a flat amount of money per book to have the quotes of lyrics in there. This will probably be a nominal fee and we will be able to afford it. However, if you tell them that my website gets between nine and ten million page views per month, even a nominal percentage fee would cost me a phenomenal amount. But he (David at Plan 9) is going to look into that as well to see if we can bring the lyrics back to the website as well.

ANB: How did you hook up with Plan 9 Publishing?

Pete: David contacted me relatively early on. They’d just published their first book which was Kevin and Kell. So then they contacted me and said, “Hey. Do you mind if we turned your comic strip into a book and then give you some of the profits?”

So I said (skeptically), “What do I have to pay you?”

“Nothing,” they replied.

“What rights do you want?” I asked.

“None – just the book rights.”

“Okay.”

I had been approached in the past by some people, some nice, and some who were a little more on the scary side. Dave offered me the perfect deal.

ANB: So who’s idea was it to switch the Sluggy books to the new format?

Pete: I think Dave always had an eye toward, “How can I get Sluggy done in color?” and make it affordable. It’s something we always wanted but was always an impossibility. So when the opportunity presented itself, we decided to give it a shot.

ANB: How do you feel about the way Book 7 came out?

I love it. It's the happiest one of my books have made me since the first one. It's just plain beautiful!

ANB:  Going back to the writing, how do you keep track of the various story thread woven throughout the Sluggy world?

Pete:  I pretty much keep them all in my head.  I have lots of reminder notes and that kind of thing but pretty much it is all in my head.  If anything happens to me, everyone is in trouble!

I do a really good job of mentally keeping track of everything but I still make mistakes.  With five years of archives, I cringe for those e-mails that come in when I do occasionally make a mistake.  There are enough watch dogs to let me know if I'm missing something or if something is not jiving. 

The first one I can remember as far as making a faux pa  (and it was very minor) was when Torg gets his lung punctured by Aylee, he asks for a medic and she doesn't know what a medic is.  However SHE asked for a medic when Bun-Bun first burst out of her stomach.  So nothing gets past the Sluggites. 

I think that the continuity is one of the reasons that Sluggy is so popular.  It is something that you know -- there will be continuity.  And also the characters change -- things have impact on their lives.  You always have Torg and Riff there but their apartment complex might turn evil and blow up, Zoë goes away for a year, etc.  Things change, relationships change.  I think that's kind of cool. 

My favorite relationship situation is between Gwynn and Torg right now.  I love the fact how slowly over the last couple of years Gwynn has started to really not like Torg and Torg has been slowly, more and more responding to her animosity by busting on her which is going to increase her animosity.  It wasn't one thing that Torg has ever done to her to cause the gradual shift in their relationship. 

(Now that they are roommates), there are plenty of opportunities.  I'm considering trapping them in an elevator just to see what would happen.

ANB: (Laughter)  That's evil! 

Continue to part 3 of the Pete Abrams interview (coming soon), otherwise please click here.

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