Geekscape Interviews: Joshua Fialkov, Author of ‘Pacific Rim: Tales of the Drift’ on Love and Mechs

Pacific Rim rocked. In a better world it would have been a cultural phenomenon, but as it stands it’s one of those things that was too cool for the rest of the world to get (although China loved the shit out of it).

No self-respecting geek should pass up Pacific Rim, and Joshua Fialkov, the multi-time Harvey Award nominee, is relishing his chance to write the new Pacific Rim comic series Tales from the Drift, out now on Legendary’s comic imprint.

Over a week ago, I had the chance to catch up with Joshua about his influences, Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham’s input, and one strange element he’s adding to the Pacific Rim mythos: Love.

What excites you about Pacific Rim personally?

Fialkov: I love it for a bunch of reasons. The main thing is I’m 36 years old, and it hit so many of the “love buttons” from my childhood. I loved Godzilla as a kid, I loved Ultraman as a kid, I loved manga and anime. I grew up with as much of that stuff as I did American comics, if not more.

I did too.

Fialkov: The one that I always remember is there was an anime and a manga series called Gunbuster. Remember that thing?

Yeah, actually.

Fialkov: It’s like a battle school and they’re training, it’s about teenage girls training to operate these fighting… essentially they’re like little versions of the Jaegers. So, I love all the stuff. What it does for beyond that is it hits all those buttons and it mashes them up into something wholly original and wholly different, while at the same time it’s also providing commentary on our world. What I like about it and what I tried to bring in for the comic book was the idea of humanity, of humanism. Because Pacific Rim is really a story, about what mankind can do as a species.

Contrary to what people will say, contrary to politics and to wisdom, it’s really a story about how we as a species can team up and make something greater than ourselves. And it’s done both literally, in terms of everyone building the Jaegers, but then even specifically when you have the two pilots drifting together. When they’re interfacing, they’re creating something bigger and better than themselves. Something that neither of them could do individually that they actually need each other to do. And that speaks to the very core of who we are as people.

Because the truth is, none of us are an island. Everyone needs the people around them. And all of us, whether we want to admit it or not, none of us want to be alone.

Even Batman needs help sometimes, right?

Fialkov: That’s true, and sure, he gets a lot of Robins killed, but you know, can you blame him?

Of course.

Fialkov: It really is right, that type of humanity is the thing that really stuck with me, and it’s also what so much of what Tales from the Drift is about because you have as sort of the central conflict, you have these two Jaeger pilots who are in love, and they have become a unit. They are in love in a way that no one in the real world can actually be. They know every single thing about each other. So I thought the idea of telling a story that starts with we see where we’re going, we see that eventually they’re going to become this well oiled machine, but when they first meet they just absolutely hate each other.

And getting to play out those two things, getting to play out how they made the moves to get to the point where they don’t just love each other, they trust each other implicitly seemed like such a fun thing to do. You’re really telling the story of a romantic comedy, you’re just dressing it up in the clothes of giant robots and giant monsters.

I would certainly watch more romantic comedies if they all had giant monsters and giant robots.

Fialkov: Right?

You’re saying something big about the story right now. What can you tell me about your comic, especially since this isn’t the first time Pacific Rim is hitting comic book shelves. You’re talking about love. What can you elaborate about that?

Fialkov: Even though there have been other comics, everything that we do is designed so you can read it entirely on it’s own. So if you haven’t seen the movie, though it’d be weird that you’re reading this, but if you haven’t seen the movie and you’re interested in just seeing what Pacific Rim is all about you can just pick up the comic.

If you have seen the movie, or if you have read the other comics or the other books, they’re all built to be part of one kind of bigger story so they enhance each other and they make each other. They tell parts, we tell parts of the story that are in the movie and in the other comics and in the other books, but we’re telling them not only in a different medium, but in a different way.

So, just as an example, so our story is very specifically about two pilots, Duke and Kaori who are pilots of Tacit Ronin which we saw for twenty seconds, ten seconds maybe, in the movie. And Tacit Ronin is by far my favorite of all of the Jaegers. It’s named after Ronin, it’s Japanese built, and it looks a bit like a samurai. It’s neutral pose is sort of like the dueling samurai position where the samurai grabs his sword.

There’s another Japanese Jaeger named Coyote Tango. Does it show up?

Joshua Fialkov: Coyote Tango does I believe show up in issue 3 or 4. More Jaegers show up. We get to see a whole bunch of them. And Tacit Ronin, we’re seeing Tacit Ronin at the top of our story at sort of the peak of its skills. But unfortunately as the Kaiju are getting more advanced and as the Kaiju are developing, it’s just kind of not enough.

So this is a prequel?

Fialkov: Yes, it takes place before the movie. So we get to follow this love story of two pilots who are now deeply in love and how their love is the thing that either saves or dooms them in the process of fighting this gigantic monster. And like I said, what I’m proudest of really is that it’s very much a story about the people inside the Jaeger, while still having literally eleven pages of monster fighting.

It’s interesting that you’re introducing love, because love happened in Pacific Rim but in a drastically different way. Mako and Raleigh loved each other but not in the traditional movie sensibility. What made you want to insert unambiguous “I love you” into Pacific Rim?

Fialkov: Part of it is that it comes from a story that Guillermo and [screenwriter] Travis Beacham, part of it is that it comes from a story that they really wanted to tell. But then the other side of it is, like you said, we see in the movie two core relationships. We see two brothers at the beginning, we see Raleigh and his brother, and their understanding of each other is because they’ve been together their whole lives. They’ve had this entire life together that has made them easy to become a pair.

And then on the other side you have Mako and Raleigh learning to fight together, and both of them are sort of desperate for this thing to work. They are literally the last hope, they have no choice but to find a way to make it work.

What’s different about our story and what’s sort of fun to explore is this idea that these two people when they met, when they got together, the last people they wanted to match with, the last person they wanted to have a high drift compatibility score with was each other. So we get to see them really resist, and really not want it to work even though everyone around them is telling them “You idiots, this is the thing that’s supposed to work.” So I think that story is really fun and it’s really powerful.

And, again it’s fun because you’re taking those romantic comedy tropes and you’re playing it against the big giant epic scale of a giant genre story.

How much input did Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham have? Did they have any suggestions, or were they totally hands-off allowing you to do what you want?

Fialkov: Like I said, it came from a story the two of them put together. Travis wrote it from conversations with Guillermo, and then once I was brought in it was a very open conversation. I got to sit down with Guillermo and talk about what his vision was and what he wanted to accomplish with the story. He reads every script, he sees every page of art. He’s hands-on, but hands on in the very best way. You’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say.

So what were some of your own personal influences? What got you into comic book writing, and what’s it like to be tackling something as big as Pacific Rim?

Fialkov: I got into comics very specifically to tell incredibly personal stories. It was a way to really do what we’re doing in Pacific Rim which is to tell genre stories, stories that are dressed up in the clothes of genre, but are really about people, about people and how they cope.

So this is my sixteenth or fifteenth year writing comic books, it’s been a really long time, and the bulk of what I do are books. Like, I do a book called The Bunker at Oni Press. Also coming up on Wednesday I have a new volume of a book I do called Exodus: The Life After, which is a big crazy adventure story set in the afterlife for suicides. The main character is a guy who woke up one morning in the afterlife for suicides, has no memory of committing suicide, and then goes on this epic adventure with Ernest Hemingway and an assorted cast of weirdos as he tries to figure out who he is and how he got there.

And there’s two trade paperbacks of The Life After out, and then I have a third book that I’m doing right now. It’s a book called King which I’m doing with Jet City which is an imprint of Amazon. It’s a post-apocalyptic adventure book about after every possible apocalypse that has ever happened, there is one man left on Earth, and all he wants to do is get to work to get paid. It’s literally a story of the worst commute ever.

People really don’t know if Pacific Rim 2 is coming. That’s still very much up in the air, and I read conflicting reports every day. So with the fate of Pacific Rim up in the air, what was like to contribute to a story that you don’t know is going to be built upon tomorrow?

Fialkov: I mean, I know that everybody and Legendary loves Pacific Rim. They all believe in it, they care about it. This is their baby. I know that it’s something that, there will be Pacific Rim stuff for years to come. I don’t know anything about the movie or anything about that stuff. Working on it has been really rewarding, again because the difference between this and any, I mean I’ve written He-Man comics, I’ve written Doctor Who comics, I’ve written Spider-Man, I’ve written all these different characters, but you never really get to work with the person who created the character.

Getting to work in this universe with Guillermo and with Travis has really been probably the most rewarding part because you’re getting it, like I said, straight from the horse’s mouth and you’re getting their full vision for what the world’s going to be. And these guys have such a crystal clear vision for the story they’re telling and what the universe is. I’m’ like everyone else, I can’t wait to see what they do next.

What else can you tell me about the book that we don’t know yet? Is there anything that you’re adding into the Pacific Rim mythos that might be included into Pacific Rim 2?

Fialkov: There’s some stuff, I don’t want to spoil it. A lot of it is in future issues. I do want to say, our artists are Marcos Marz who is pencils and ink, and the colorist is Marcelo Maiolo and the two of them are doing career defining work. It is so gorgeous and so cool. Guillermo hand-picked Marcos to be the artist. They’re both just doing brilliant work. And getting to work on it, just as much a fan as you are, I’m as much of a fan. So getting to add to the history of the universe, getting to add to the story of what comes next is such a huge huge huge gift for me.

Pacific Rim: Tales of the Drift is out now on comic store shelves.