Part 2 – Mark Russell, writer of DC Comics’ Flintstones and Prez – Book Club Discussion

– This picks up immediately after Part 1, which can be found here:
https://stargazercomics.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/part-1-mark-russell-writer-of-dc-comics-flintstones-and-prez-book-club-discussion/

ST: It seems that, unless people are forced outside of their comfort zone of taking orders and asking about fries, most people don’t actively try to use their “computer.”

MR: Well yeah, we numb them. They’re so exhausted, dealing with these mundane, uninteresting questions… when they go home, they don’t want to deal with the world.

They associate the world with boredom and hardship….

…

…

ST: YEP!

[roaring laughter]

ST: So we’ve touched on this a little bit, but in the Flintstones, there’s a lot of critique of Western society, American society…

Generally, what are your thoughts on our modern society? On the citizenry of this country? Stratification of power…

What do you think about where we are right now?

MR: What I hope we’re seeing is the last gasp of the entrenchment of these traditional institutions, which were outvoted decades ago.

The central conflict of the 20th century was, “should institutions change to serve the people, or should people change to serve the institutions?”

I feel like this is what fascism was about… trying to cram people back into the lines to serve the traditional institutions we’d created.

And I think in a lot of ways, that is what American politics is about now.

The insitutions have changed too quickly!
We’ve got same sex marriage now.
We’ve got secular education.

We’ve got all these institutions changing to serve the people. Now it’s time to force people to change to serve the institutions.

Obviously, I’m on the side of the institutions changing to meet the needs of people.

In the end, there’s nothing more important than unlocking people’s potential. And the institutions are good, only to the extent that they allow people to do that. To the extent that they LIMIT people’s potential, I think they should be changed, or abolished.

I think right now what you see is a real backlash against feminism, against gender equality, against marriage equality… against all of these social institutions that have changed over the last 40 years.

One last attempt to get everyone to squeeze back into these traditional institutions.

Get all the foreigners and immigrants out of this country, close all the Planned Parenthoods and get the women back into married relationships, make sure the men have all the money, like they used to…

———————-

ST: It seems that these things are cyclical in nature, too. Like… we change, and backlash occurs from traditional institutions, and then the institutions change, and then we change, backlash occurs, and so on.

MR: You’ll always have backlash, but the key is…
Imagine you’re playing football, you know, it’s ok to take a sack or a play with no gain every now and then, as long as you’re picking up 6, 7 yards on every other play.

You march steadily down the field and eventually, you score.

I think the key is to make sure that the pace of progress changes institutions with society, to make them move to allow people to achieve their potential within society, whether male, female, black, white, gay… whatever… that’s the goal… that’s the trend that society has taken over the past 150 years.

As long as you’re outgaining the forces of the backlash, eventually you’ll win.

I will never expect to live in a world where it’s utopia, and there’s no backlash, or anyone trying to oppose you.

But I do expect people to work to out-gain the defense.

———————-

MR: The culture war is the really the only war that I advocate fighting. Once you change most people’s minds, then people will say, “of course women are equal to men,” or “of course we shouldn’t have racial profiling,” … THEN, it makes it a lot harder for the institutions to get around that they’re on the wrong side of history.

ST: And this is your contribution?

MR: I think so…
I feel like this is my contribution to the culture war, and just the human conversation.

That’s my ultimate aspiration in life, is to just have some small moment where I am part of the human conversation that we call culture.

———————-

ST: You touched on this early on, but I really enjoy that you’ve taken this old cartoon, with old traditional references, and have brought it into the modern time.

MR: Well, so much of it felt irrelevant to me. For example, the gentlemen’s club, the Waterbuffalos.

Who belongs to a rotary club anymore?
Is there anything more obsolete than a gentlemen’s club?

[roaring laughter]

MR: But what is relevant to our experience is thousands of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Returning to a country which has done absolutely nothing to prepare for their return to everyday life. So I wanted to make the Waterbuffalos something relevant.

I wanted people to be able to find themselves and their world in this comic.

And I felt the best way to do that is to not have it be about gentlemen’s clubs, and women who are addicted to credit card shopping.

I wanted to make it feel like a world people recognize, and can accept criticism of.

ST: Yabba-Dabba-Do as a PTSD zen mantra is very impactful!

MR: Well, like, who here has a catch phrase? Who here has a thing that they yell when they’re happy?

“GAZOOT!”

[roaring laughter]

MR: But we do have these little coping mechanisms that help us deal with the fact that life is overwhelming sometimes.

There’s nothing more meaningless to the world than gentlemen’s clubs, except maybe catch phrases!

So you take the catch phrase and you make it something that IS meaningful to people.
I think everyone feels overwhelmed by the world at times. And as nonsensical as they may be, we come up with little coping mechanisms to feel like it’s manageable.

———————-

ST: So, did you work down a list of things to take over from the original Flintstones?
Like, okay… we need: talking appliance animals, rock puns, catch-phrase…

MR: I’m not that methodical. I don’t really know what I’m doing.

[roaring laughter]

MR: I thought about it when it occurred to me, but I didn’t really have a plan.

ST: Were there things from the original that you definitely wanted to bring in?

MR: One of the only things I really liked about the original cartoon were the animal appliances.

Even as a kid I found that shocking!

That you would have this cartoon about a little bird who lives inside a camera!
And he only comes out when you press the button to take a picture, chizzles the picture, and then goes right back into his stone jail cell.

To me that was horrifying!

ST: It’s the ultimate expression of man believing that this world is ours, and we have domain over it…

MR: You exist to serve me, and I’m sure you enjoy it!

[roaring laughter]

ST: When the garage door closes on Powergoat…

MR: Yeah, you think it’s funny when he’s mowing the lawn with Powergoat, but then you realize that he’s going to be in that garage for the next week… in the darkness!

And I think this relates to people, because we’re all seen as our economic function, rather than people.

It becomes easier to dispose of someone, or treat someone poorly, when you just see them as the guy who hands me tacos, or the street cleaner, or the janitor… as opposed to the human being that is taking out the trash, or a human being that is handing me tacos.

That’s the sin of Fred and Wilma, in the Flintstones. They’ve reduced these creatures to their economic function, and don’t see them as living beings.

And it’s not an intentionally evil choice that’s being made. It’s just the desire to have the things in life that everyone else enjoys, without thinking of the consequences.

———————-

ST: To touch again on the comments you made earlier about the culture war. As a vet, returned from multiple tours in Iraq, I see a lot of the perspectives in this book, when I look at society. I can see the criticisms of the answers given by traditional institutions.

People are used as tools and critical self-reflection is easily dismissed. There’s not a good path for the people that reflect and consider that, “maybe I’ve been wrong.”

MR: Yeah, that’s a hard come-to-Jesus moment for a lot of people to have.

We all, in our own way, have reduced people to some function that they have.
That’s a soldier. It’s okay if he dies.
That’s a janitor. It’s okay if he’s forced to clean up trash for nothing.

And civilization has managed to do that to all of us.
It’s reduced us all to a minor function within. We’re all expendable.

If we’re going to take advantage of all the things that civilization provides, without reducing people to these roles that they play, we’re going to have to start seeing each other as MORE than that. We have to see one another as complete human beings.

And we have to realize that there are human costs to everything that we ask people to do. Sometimes we’re going to have to say, “no, we’re not going to ask someone to do this, because of the human cost to them.”

That’s incredibly hard to do!

If we’re enjoying all of the things civilization affords us, it’s difficult to step back and decide to not enjoy things because of the human cost.

The bowling ball.
The vacuum cleaner.
The janitor.
The soldier.
It’s too much!

And I think this is the only solution to the problems created by civilization. To begin to sort of unpack and see one another as complete human beings, and not as functions.

———————-

ST: So is the main tactic just raising awareness? Spreading the message?

MR: You know, raising awareness is great, but it only does so much. Awareness by itself does nothing.

People were aware of slavery in the Antebelum South. No one was surprised to hear that slavery was going on. Awareness of it did nothing to end it.

In the end, again, it’s the culture war.

You have to have a majority of people saying, “this is intolerable.” Not just that we’re aware of it, but we’re intolerant of it.

Until you get a majority basically willing to go to war over it, or to change laws to do away with it, awareness won’t do much.

Awareness is a good first step in winning the culture war… in getting people to decide that you’re right and that this thing is unacceptable, but it’s ONLY the first step.

The next step is like what I think all science fiction is. It’s finding a way to get people to examine their lives without taking it personally.

ST: This is one of the reasons we opened this shop. Comics, for us, have always been a subversive genre of media. Flintstones fed perfectly into our philosophy as a shop. The whole point of having discussions like this is ***SPOILER ALERT*** we just want to infect your minds!

We live in a society of absolute propaganda. A memetic society. Non-stop. All the time.
If we don’t fight back with the propaganda of the people, of class equality… the propaganda of the people who don’t have shit, then we’re going to be doomed to continue down a path of exploitation.

MR: I think really the only purpose of culture is subversion. All culture is an admission that culture before was inadequate.

Culture says, “things need to be different, now.”

It’s why you create anything, because you’re not happy with what came before.

So really, subversion is the engine of the evolutionary change that makes our society better. Culture is at the very ground floor of that.

Culture changes people’s minds, which changes their social beliefs, which changes their politics, which changes the world.

Within the culture war, there are no non-combatants. There are only soldiers and captives.

You’re either fighting the culture war, to move society in the direction you want to see the world go, or you are a captive to what someone else wants you to believe.

So I encourage everyone to have a creative outlet. That’s your entry, not only into the culture war, but into culture. That is you being fundamentally human.

I think that humans evolved to create art and express themselves to the universe in a way that they could not express any other way.

You’re not living a full human experience if you don’t have this sort of outlet for the deepest part of your humanity.

If you don’t have a way to express to the universe, the most important thing to you, I think in a way, you’re being cheated.

I encourage everyone to do something artistic!
Find the way that you can feel the most comfortable communicating to the world!

PART 3 COMING SOON!

Part 1 – Mark Russell, writer of DC Comics’ Flintstones and Prez – Book Club Discussion

– Our recording missed a bit of this first question, but this transcript picks up very early in the conversation.
– For the sake of not typing a lot of sound effects, imagine that we were all laughing, almost constantly, throughout this talk!

ST: Can you tell us a bit about what your initial thoughts were when DC approached you to write the Flintstones?

MR: I thought, you know, it’s set in prehistoric times, and I’m really sort of interested in human anthropology and paleontology. To me, that’s the important thing… what I look for when I’m writing something… what could I link it to, outside of comics, that I’m interested in.

And for the Flintstones, it was like… I’ve got a lot to say about human evolution and where we’re going, and how the problems we have now are, I think, due to the problem that we’re not living life the way we actually evolved to live it.

So I thought, Flintstones gives me the chance to really impose these views on people through an innocent comic book.

ST: When they made the offer, was it in his (Dan Didio’s) mind that this should be a book that has a lot of biting social critique? Or was it just completely, “hey, write a Flintstones book?”

MR: No, he had this memory of the original Flintstones being that way, which I don’t have at all… but he seemed to think that the original Flintstones was really subversive and satirical… whereas, I just thought it was a bunch of shitty rock puns… with a Honeymooners story tacked on to it.

But no, that was what he wanted and so that’s why I took the gig… because I thought we both felt the same way about it. They’ve been really supportive with the direction I’ve taken, whereas most publishers would have been…

…if it had been up to Hanna Barbera, I think… this would have been cancelled after issue number ONE!

[roaring laughter]

The vitamin pill people weren’t happy!

[roaring laughter]

DC was really supportive, though. They did what they had to do to push it through!

It’s good to not let the tail wag the dog… you know… to let the vitamin pill people tell the number one comic book publisher in the world what to do!

ST: So with all of the historical content in the book, were there any nonfiction references that you consulted for historical or philosophical inspiration, as you were preparing?

MR: I didn’t really do a lot of research for the Flintstones, I just sort of drew upon things that I had read. Like, a lot of the critique of marriage I drew from having read Sex at Dawn, which is about how human sexuality evolved and how marriage was created with the advent of agriculture… how humans superimpose their own breeding framework on the same agricultural patterns they created for animals, and it was a way of creating a stable population base for farms, and later for factories.

One of my favorite books that was really influencial on the Flintstones, was Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, which is a brief history of the human race. He really goes into depth about how the human race evolved and what we evolved to do and about the sort of strange decisions we’ve collectively made, without realizing we were making them.

Basically, civilization and agriculture turned us into zoo animals. Our species has been around for 200,000 years, and it’s only about 8,000 years ago, we were hunter-gatherers. So the adjustment to having to live on farms, or in towns and cities has been really hard on us. It’s not a natural way for us to be living. So we had to create institutions like religion and politics to coordinate with each other and make life livable for large numbers of people in a small space.

And so I thought the people of Bedrock have an excuse for getting all of this wrong. They’re the first people to do this! They’re the first people to have to figure out how religion should work or how politics should work. So why don’t I make the mistakes I think we’re making, in their world.

But make the mistakes seem reasonable, because these are people who have no idea what they’re doing. They’re not sophisticated enough to realize that what they’re doing is going to cause horrible problems later on.

So it’s really, in a lot of ways, my grand critique on civilization.

ST: How much of the writing process is DC and how much is purely you?

MR: DC really allows me to do whatever I want… as long as it’s not too obscene. The book is rated teen, so if I call someone an asshole, they’ll say, “no, change that.” Or if it’s going to get them sued, like… you can’t use the word Avengers anywhere.

[roaring laughter]

Or, for example, in issue number eleven, there’s a reference to the blue man group… so I mean, we changed it to the green man group.

And I originally had in Professor Sargon’s science cave, he was doing experiments with a cocaine addicted rat… and we had to take that out!

We don’t want a cocaine addict rat to be a bad influence on children!

[roaring laughter]
ST: We love your satirical and critical approach to normative values and society. You address many topics including religion, marriage, war, genocide, art, science, and labor rights. Of those topics is there one or two that are particularly important or personal to you?

MR: Well one that sorta seems to show up in everything I do, is religion. Because I grew up in a very religious household. It pervades all my work. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write something that isn’t permeated by some sort of commentary on religion, or about the impact religion has on people. Because it’s had such an impact on me.

And I think ultimately you write about the things that have wounded you. You write about the things that have left their mark on you… and writing is a form of therapy.

So religion is really important, but I think overall, the thing that I’m trying to wrap my head around, in writing the Flintstones is how people can be so nice and good as one… as one person, yet so terrible when you get them together in large numbers. It’s like, you’re a good person, you’re a good person, you, you… but together, you’re a MONSTER!

And this is my critique of civilization. How do we get it where people are as good in a collective, as they are individually?

ST: You talked about the mistakes made in the Flintstones, as a reflection of the mistakes we still make today. Even though civilization and agriculture are relatively new in the history of the Earth, we have for example, made amazing technological advancements as a species in a very short time. Why haven’t we been able to grow out of these fundamental mistakes that you address in the book, as well?

MR: Well I think it’s because we’ve invested our identity in these mistakes. We don’t see them as mistakes, because this is who we are.

You’re brought up a Methodist, so you don’t see the problems of Christianity.
To be otherwise would be to unravel your personal identity.

This is one of the reasons I wanted to write the Flintstones, because they’re NOT that invested. They’re still finding their way. So when they fuck up, they can be honest with themselves, and say, “well that was a stupid idea!” “That was a dumb god! What was I thinking worshipping that god?”

So we have so much of ourselves and our identities invested in these decisions, or it’s invested for us by our parents and by our schools, that we’ll never admit to ourselves that they were mistakes.

But I wanted people to start thinking about themselves and their relationship to politics and religion and society, through a Bedrockian… someone who is like, “Ok, so we voted for Clod the Destroyer… that was… dumb…”

“Remind me why we’re spending a trillion dollars going after the lizard people?!”

They are still new enough, they’ll ask themselves these questions, whereas people today, who vote on these things have so much of their identity invested in the way they vote, they don’t stop to ask themselves these questions, or consider that they may be making a mistake.

ST: I really love how Clod is starting a war on the lizard people, where his father started the war on the tree people, and Barney’s reflection to Fred that this all sounds very familiar.

MR: I think a lot of politics is about a bunch of rich guys trying to prove to their daddy that they’re a big man too, now! Like George W. Bush had to prove that he could have a bigger war than his daddy’s war to show that he’d grown up. And Donald Trump is always trying to prove himself to his billionaire dad, that he belongs in the club too.

I think this is one of the problems of creating this stratified society, where you have this ruling class that’s always the same people. That they’re substituting their own personal hang-ups, their need to prove themselves to the others in the ruling class, for actual policy decisions, that benefit each other.

They’re playing their own game, and the rest of us are cannon fodder for their psychological need to feel like they’re better than their dad, or grandpa, or whoever had the job before them.

They’re more concerned with their legacy as it relates to their family and the others in the ruling class, rather than if the policy will work for the rest of us.

ST: And really, legacy is akin to happenstance, right? Like the Neanderthal at the beginning of the book, who died wearing Mr. Slate’s stone chain, the curator at the museum believed him to be an important person, but really, he died as a joke and a slave to Mr. Slate.

MR: To me that’s about the futility of trying to maintain your legacy, because the ages will have no idea who you were. They’re working from really incomplete evidence, and they’re going to come up with their own conclusions.

So, trying to sacrifice the world beneath you, to try and build this monument to your legacy is like Ozymandias. It’s futile, because you’ll end up half sunken in the desert and no one will remember who you were.

Oblivion awaits us all!
If there’s one thing I want people to take away from this, it’s “Oblivion awaits you all!”

[roaring laughter]

ST: Some of my favorite parts of the book, throughout, are vacuum cleaner in the dark closet and bowling ball, and their friendship. These quiet moments of humanity, within these objects that no one really pays attention to.

MR: In a way, that’s a great thing to bring up, in relation to futile legacy.

People think that these monuments to themselves and their accomplishments are what they’re going to be remembered for, or where they’ll find meaning… when really, all we have are these relationships between sentient beings, sharing experience in the universe. This is ultimately the only legacy we not only are capable of… but that we need.

ST: But with characters that no one pays attention to. You know, it’s the servants.

MR: Yeah, one of the directives from Hanna Barbera, was that the animals could talk to the animals and the humans could talk to other humans, but animals and humans can never talk to one another… or understand each other.

Originally, I had just been writing dialogue between animals and humans.
But, when they said that, I thought, “this is a really good limitation!”
When you have limitations on your writing, a lot of times, it spurs your creativity.

So when I wasn’t able to have them all talk anymore, it created this real upstairs/downstairs effect, where the people employers have their world, and the animal employees have their world, and they have no idea what the other is really wanting.

The bowling ball has NO IDEA why this guy wants to roll him down an alley at these pins.
And the humans are completely oblivious to the suffering their causing.

Obviously, Fred and Wilma are good, compassionate human beings, but they just never stop to think about the misery they’re imposing upon the coat rack… an elk that has to stand there all day, holding people’s coats on his antlers, or like vacuum cleaner sitting at home alone in the dark all the time.

Because it never even occurs to them that these are beings worthy of their consideration.

Which, I think, in a lot of ways is what we all do. I have an iPhone in my pocket. Some guy in some Chinese factory probably worked 100 hours a week, making that iPhone. Perhaps, jumped out of a window, trying to kill himself… yet, I still got it.

The thing that civilization is really good at is removing you from the misery that goes into everything you enjoy, to the point that you don’t know it’s there. We’re all guilty of that, but we need to remember sometimes that everything we enjoy has to be built upon someone else being forced to do something that they don’t want to do.

That’s one of the cardinal sins of civilization, to me… the division of labor.

The fact that, instead of living whole, human lives, hunting, gathering, foraging and using our minds in the way they were designed, we’re spending all day soldering a diode, or asking people if they want fries and a soda. The division of labor has forced us into the jobs which are not challenging or satisfying to us in any way. We created the most sophisticated computer in the known universe, the human brain, and we use it to ask people if they want fries with their sandwich.

PART 2 COMING SOON!