Geek Syndicate
GS: While many of the characters you’ve
worked on for the Big Two, like Punisher
or The Avengers for example, have landed
on the big screen, how does it feel to have
one of your personal creations like 2 Guns
be adapted into a movie?
Comic book movies are all the
rage nowadays, but it’s become
uncommon to see a non-superhero movie come from comics. 2
Guns from writer Steven Grant,
artist Mat Santolouco, and publisher BOOM! Studios broke the
mould and made a bit of money in
the process. With the success of
the movie and its release on BluRay and DVD, writer Steven Grant
was kind enough to answer a few
questions about the comic, how it
came to be a movie, and how his
expectations were met.
GS: You’ve had a career in comics that’s
spanned three decades and given you the
chance to work with Marvel, DC, Dark
Horse, Boom!, and more. What about
comics has been so enjoyable that you’ve
stuck with them for so long?
SG: I do love the juxtaposition of art
and text that you just don’t find anywhere else. It’s a medium that has
always captivated me. But I have to
say in my case it’s mainly been inertia. It’s a sad truth that once you get
associated with one thing it’s just
easier to keep plugging at that one
thing, and unfortunately when you
work in “the arts” – I use the term
loosely – you have to keep an eye on
where your money’s coming from.
Comics have always been much nicer
to me than I deserved, so they ended
up being home. Plus while I have no
problem writing prose I don’t especially enjoy it. Comics, despite their
aggravations, are just more fun.
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SG: Wonderful sums it up nicely.
What’s most wonderful is while they
changed the story around a little,
everyone involved (but I have to
give special mention to producer
Adam Siegel, screenwriter Blake
Masters and director Baltasar Kormákur) went out of their way to
stay very close to my sensibilities on
the project. When it’s your baby, and
I wrote 2 Guns out of thin air when
nobody wanted anything to do with
it, you lose the level of detachment
you feel with something someone
else created that you worked on.
I may have shown Marvel how to
make The Punisher a saleable character instead of a third rate nutjob,
but I really didn’t do anything that
wasn’t already inherent in Gerry
Conway’s original. I just sculpted
it a little and lit the path. 2 Guns, I
built with my own two hands. That
someone liked it enough to turn out
the movie they did, this isn’t a field
especially fraught with sense of accomplishment, but I got a sense of
accomplishment out of that.
GS: 2 Guns, the comic, was first published in 2007. What was the process like
that took the story from comic to movie
over the course of six years?
SG: I’d written it several years before Boom! published it but nobody
wanted anything to do with it. I was
regularly told it was completely uncommercial, a recurrent theme in
my career. Somewhere along the
line I mentioned the story to Boom!
founder Ross Richie – he remembers
it, I don’t – and when he founded the
company he asked if I’d ever done
anything with it. I hadn’t, and he really wanted to publish it so I figured
what the hell.
Ross had spent the years since his
employment at Malibu in Hollywood
making a lot of connections, and he
thought 2 Guns would make a great
film, so for the next few years while
I sat at home doing other things he
hustled it like a mad dog all over
town. Curiously, when it was serialized as a mini-series nobody
wanted anything to do with it. Any
other publisher probably would’ve
stopped throwing good money after bad and dumped the thing at
that point, but Ross collected it in
trade and another curious thing
happened. As soon as it was a book,
everyone wanted it. It ended up in a
bidding war.
Universal came in with the best deal.
I’m not sure where Marc Platt’s production company entered into it,
but that became the main production company, working with Ross,
and they brought in Blake Masters to
write the screenplay. Universal loved
the screenplay, it hit the annual list