Geekscape Interviews: Jeremy Bernstein, Author of ‘Santa Claus: Private Eye’

What does Santa Claus do on the other 364 days of the year (365 on leap year)? Dude has gotta eat somehow. How does being a private detective sound?

Jeremy Bernstein is a screenwriter and game designer known for his work on Dead Space 2, the Pretty in Pink video game (yes, really!), and the popular television series Leverage. Now, Jeremy and his team are behind the new digital comic series, Santa Claus: Private Eye, available now on Thrillbent.

Primed to be a cult hit, Private Eye has jolly old Saint Nick moonlighting as a detective in the seedy underworld of crime and corruption. How much can the big red man who judges the naughty and the nice take before he breaks?

I have so many questions, but I only have one that I really need answered: Why Santa Claus?

Jeremy: [laughs]

Because cultural myths are a lot of fun to imagine in wholly different lights. But why detective noir and why Santa Claus? What inspired this particular story?

Jeremy: Honestly, I was looking to write a supernatural detective show. As a TV sample. And I was just trying to come up with a supernatural detective that I haven’t seen. The genre has been done so often: There’s teen vampires, teen wizards, what’s a supernatural creature that hasn’t been done as a detective? And there was a little voice in the back of my head that went, well, there’s always Santa Claus. To which I said, haha nice, very funny. But no, seriously, what are we gonna do?

That damn little voice.

Jeremy: I know! That snarky little bastard. But the more I thought about it, [it made sense]. Well, he knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, which is a really useful skill for a detective to have. He can climb down the chimneys, right? So he’s really good at getting into places to sneak around. If Santa Claus had to moonlight, private eye is not the worst job in the world for him. So, then I started thinking, “All right, but why?” Like, why does Santa Claus have to become a private eye? And as I started going down that road, that’s when I really started focusing on the character and thinking about what’s this take on Santa, and as you said, it became a chance to really deconstruct the myth. And when you look at that myth, of the person who brings joy to everyone, the one everybody counts on to make them happy, what makes him happy? Who brings him joy? That became a really interesting question to me.

So once I looked into that I was sort of like, all right, I was trying to come up with an idea for a TV show. Nobody is going to make this TV show. It was too big of a swing. But I need to tell this story. I need this out there. It’s not enough for me to write it and [have it] sit on a shelf. This is one I need people to see. So, then I started thinking about comics. Self-publishing a comic is a viable goal in a way that self-publishing a TV show, while getting there more so, it’s still a much harder undertaking. So that was the genesis, really. And once I had the sort of depressive Santa, so clearly he’s a noir detective, right? That fits with the noir genre where he’s down on his luck and it’s all about the seedy underbelly of being Santa Claus. I want to read that.

You said before that Santa Claus is the judge of naughty and nice. In film noir, no one is naughty or nice, especially the protagonists. In your vision of Santa Claus, there’s something morbid about him. What do you think is bugging him?

Jeremy: That’s a tricky question. Because I know the answer, but I don’t want to say too much without spoiling stuff that’s coming down the pipe. I will say, the secret origin of Santa Claus: Private Eye, of how he decided to take up this Nick Santana identity and why he decided to do that, is something that will be answered in the course of the run. But, it gets at that very fundamental question of how thankless a job Santa Claus has.

The premise is admittedly absurd. When I first heard it, I thought it was a comedy. I then read the previews and though it started as campy-dark, it went Hitchcock almost immediately. What made you want to play it straight?

Jeremy: I’ve seen campy Santa. Once I looked into this character, and who he was, it became very serious. And I wanted to treat that character fairly. That said, and it’s one of those things that I personally really enjoy about it, is it is very serious, but there’s an inherent absurdism to it. And my goal was to write something that if you did a search and replace on Santa Claus, and swapped it out with Sam Spade, it would read perfectly reasonably. And yet at the same time, it’s not Sam Spade, it’s Santa Claus. And so it can’t help but be comedic on some level, and then the more seriously you take it, the more interesting it becomes.

This is your first foray into comic books. What led you to this medium, aside from it being creator-owned? What freedoms do you like about the comic book medium that you haven’t experienced in movies, video games, and TV? 

Jeremy: I think the biggest freedom is that the teams are so small. In TV and video games, you want to be as involved as you can, but there are very few people who know everything that’s going on and get to keep an eye on every part of the process. And then on top of that — not to say it doesn’t exist outside the constraints of a comic book — it’s much easier to actualize your vision in the way you want it. It will always happen [like], oh gosh this prop isn’t exactly the way I wanted it, or jeez, we’re shooting in this location which isn’t exactly the way I thought it, so we’re going to have fudge this or that.

There’s always something that doesn’t quite manage to be what you wanted. In comics, it’s much easier to have everything the way you want it. And honestly when you’ve been working with people as talented as the guys I’ve been lucky to work with — Mike Dorman, my artist, Rob Schwager, my colorist, and Troy Peteri, my letterer — everything got turned around so much better than I even expected or envisioned. So that to me is the big freedom, like that is the one where the only constraints are how good the team is, and the team was so good there were no constraints as far as I was concerned.

You’ve developed a reputation for traversing genres like it’s Middle Earth. You’ve done Dead Space 2…

Jeremy: [a really big laugh]

…the Pretty in Pink game, and TV shows like Leverage. Now you’re doing noir comic books. I speak as someone who loves genre benders, but is it difficult to remain tonally uniform when working on a particular property? Do you find yourself tempted to throw in a joke when you’re working on something super dark, or vice versa? 

Jeremy: Yes. [laughs] It can be very frustrating. My very first draft script for Dead Space 2 had a lot of one-liners in it that would have felt in place in the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger version of Dead Space 2. And you know, the hardest part of Dead Space 2 was giving Isaac a voice. Because, here’s a character that people are already attached to, but he’s a silent character in the first game, and he speaks in the second. So there was a lot of back and fourth between me and the producers and the whole team trying to figure out what that voice was.

I like a little levity in pretty much anything that I do. And you know, I salted in a little too much levity in that first draft, obviously it went by the time we delivered the final product. So yeah, I am often tempted to lighten up dark things or darken up light things.

I had a couple Leverage pitches too that the showrunners were like, “That is too dark for this show. That is not a place we want to go to.” But I think part of the fun of writing is the iterative process. You take your first swing, and you see what works and you see what doesn’t. You see what’s success and what’s not and what people respond to. And you refine from there. That’s why editing is such a critical part of the process. Personally, the only way I learn where the line is, is by running into it head-first. So, I would much rather push something too far and say, “Okay, that’s too far. That’s where I cross the line,” and have to pull it back, than always wonder if I could have done more.

That’s just artists exploring creative boundaries. It’s a disservice to limit oneself. As I said, you’re a genre bender, but I gotta dwell on the Pretty in Pink game. That’s like, out of left field.

Jeremy: [laughs]

What mediums and what genres do you want to tackle next? Do you look at a particular genre and say to yourself, “I’ve got a story in me that I can do.”?

Jeremy: Oh God, I’ve got a list. I’ve got a list on my white board, right here. I’m working on a sample right now that is a — god, I don’t even know how to describe it. Sci-fi, political allegory? It’s a big, deep, sort-of Babylon 5-ish sci-fi story.

Oh man, I love Babylon 5!

Jeremy: You know, The Sopranos is the show that gets all the press, but I will argue with my dying breath that Babylon 5 is the show that gave us the current golden age of television.

Totally agree.

Jeremy: When the final history book is written! But yeah, so I’ve been working on that. I have a sort of backdoor superhero story that might become a comic. You know, you’re not wrong, I’m all over the map! [laughs] And you know what, I was just thinking about a medical show recently. Which is a lot more mundane than what I’ve done, but as long as there is a strong character and something interesting to say, either about that character or about the form, about the medium, then those are the kinds of stories that really draw me in.

I think you should expand your universe with Santa Claus: Private Eye. The Easter bunny is his doctor, or his therapist.

Jeremy: [laughs] Well, if this does well enough and we end up doing more of these, which I’m hopeful, Mrs. Claus makes a brief appearance via phone but I’ve definitely got some plans for her. And there’s a Tooth Fairy out there that I have some ideas about as well.

Ultimately, with Santa Claus: Private Eye, it’s a small digital comic, but every comic is a story with a big thematic idea. What is it that you want to say with Santa Claus: Private Eye? You said before, you want this story told and not just sitting on a shelf. What is it about this story you want the world to know?

Jeremy: That’s a really interesting question. I think a lot of it asking about why we do the things we do. Do we do them because it’s what we want to do? Or do we do them because it’s what’s expected of us? And what comes out of that in the end? Where does that leave you? How do you find happiness when you feel like you’re not really living for yourself?

That’s resonant. 

Jeremy: That’s a really good question, I’ve never really had to articulate that in quite the same way before, but I’m glad I did.

Santa Claus: Private Eye is now available on Thrillbent! You can also follow Jeremy on Twitter!