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Yeah - family. The Hopeless-Savages (note hyphen) are a family. A few years back, punk rockers Dirk Hopeless and Nikki Savage did probably the most anti anti-establishment thing they could: fell in love and got married. Hence the name. In the years since, Dirk and Nikki have had four kids: Rat, Zero, Arsenal, and Twitch. Too Much is Arsenal's chance to shine. In each outing of the family, covered in the two previous miniseries, there are actually two stories - the central story, and the kind of "how we got here" part, told in flashbacks, provided by a different artist from the main story's penciller. In Too Much Hopeless Savages, Christine Norrie is handling the main story's art, while Ross Campbell is handling the flashbacks. But first, let's kill it - yeah, there have been two other Hopeless Savages miniseries before this, but you don't need to have read them to pick up issue #1 of Too Much Hopeless Savages. Honestly. "Too Much Hopeless Savages is kind of sequential, in that I age them a little bit to keep track of where they are in terms of their chronology, but no, you don't need a lot of the information from the second miniseries to follow the third," Van Meter said. "In fact, the only super-relevant thing that happened in the second miniseries was that Zero got a boyfriend, so in this miniseries, he's part of her narrative device - she's writing him letters from her vacation. But that's really all you need to know, and I'm betting that part is clear whether you knew it or not." The story of TMHS is mostly about Arsenal Hopeless-Savage who goes to Hong Kong to participate in an international martial arts tournament. But, like the other miniseries, that's just the start of it. "While Aresenal's at the airport, a mysterious object gets put into her bag, which leads to lots of pseudo spy hijinks and mayhem." Did Pacific travelers learn nothing from the perils of Greg Brady? Nothing? "Okay, it may be a little like the tiki god in The Brady Bunch, but I like to think of it more along the lines of The Maltese Falcon," Van Meter said. "Along those lines, the title is a direct reference to The Man Who Knew Too Much, so it's sort of about being mistaken for somebody who's more involved with these things than they really are, and it leads to a big international escapade. That mayhem is part and parcel to Arsenal. As those who read the two previous miniseries remember, she's the family ass-kicker. "The big story about Arsenal has always been that she's incredibly physically competent," Van Meter said. "She's got all of these martial arts skills, and is tough as nails and fairly no-nonsense if it comes down to beating the snot out of anyone who's giving her a hard time. One of the things that I wanted to do in this story was to tell a narrative that uses that, and let her go nuts a little. She's got lots of bad guys that she has to fight in this, and that's fun to write, and fun for Christine to draw. It plays on a certain kind of genre, so I get to do a little bit of Hong Kong action, which is fun. But I also get to tell some stories about how she got that way, and became the person that she is now." The miniseries also gives Van Meter the chance to delve deeper into the family tree, knocking two grandmothers off of the branches and into the action. "Bringing the respective grandmothers in is exciting for me, because we get to meet a whole new layer of these people's lives," Van Meter said. "There's also some action adventure, which is something that was much more prevalent in the first miniseries than in the second. It's also a chance to do more with Arsenal - I've always really liked her, but she's always been very much a background character, so this is really her story." Speaking of showing how Arsenal got to be the way she is today, Van Meter said that's where the flashbacks, which have been a part of Hopeless Savages from the beginning, come in handy. "When we realized that I was always going to use flashbacks as part of my narrative device on these stories, I realized that their stories are always about how what happened yesterday leads to what is happening today. Structurally, it's something I've always been interested in, and it's now become an inescapable part of telling stories about this family for me." Something that's becoming a mild issue with the series is, well, life imitating art in a way. Van Meter featured the Hopeless-Savages on a television show entitled Fame and Shame in Ground Zero #4, and while that show was a gentle nod to VH1's Behind the Music, there's another television show that's come within the sphere of the Hopeless-Savages. You ay have heard of it - it's called The Osbornes. One hears it's quite popular. "While I was writing the scripts for issues #3 and #4 of Ground Zero, people told me I needed to check out this new show called The Osbornes," Van Meter said. "I had no idea what they were talking about. I watch just about zero television as it is, which is a side effect of having a toddler. Now I know why my dad used to sleep in front of the television half the evening - if you have kids, you fall asleep when you sit down. "So I didn't know anything about The Osbornes for a while, and when someone explained it to me, I made it a point not to see it or hear anything more about it until after I finished the book, because I didn't want it messing with my head." After Ground Zero came out, Van Meter found that the comparisons between the two in the comics world were becoming more and more common. "People kept saying that Hopeless Savages was like The Osbornes, but only sweeter," Van Meter said. "I don't mind the comparison, because I understand why people need to make the comparison, especially to people outside of comics. At the same time, it is distressing to me when I hear that someone assumes that I didn't produce the work out of its own. Obviously, there is very little, if any 'Wholly original' work today, so yeah, I had influences, but if anyone, the Hopeless-Savages themselves, came from the Zappas as a reference point from when I was in junior high. The images that they showed of that family were very provocative and interesting. "But other than wondering what it would be like to be in a family like the Hopeless-Savages, I can't really say there's any source material there. Now that I have see The Osbornes, and what I've seen was a riot, but what is Osbornes stays Osbornes. Actually, probably one of the things that made me want to take the family out of their house and away form their own fame a little might have something to do with feeling hesitant to the art imitating life problem of doing something similar to something that was on television. In retrospect, that may have had something to do with it, but really, I remember finishing Ground Zero, and thinking that I really wanted to do an Arsenal story next." "I can imagine myself coming back to them as I grow older, or up, or whatever I'm supposed to say now about adding more years on to my age," Van Meter said. "I can see myself using them to explore things in my own life. For example, Arsenal has a lot of different stuff going on in her life during this miniseries that I was going through two or three years ago and can look back on with a more objective slant to write about. That's inescapable. I can't help but draw on my own experience to some degree, but at the same time, it's also a great chance as a writer to try and say something true about really ordinary experiences, because these people are so sort of hyperbolic in their own way. "I'm never ever going to fight fifteen bad guys on a crowded market street, but Arsenal, going through some personal problems and later being placed in physical jeopardy is a totally sound fantasy for me. I can remember walking around when I was pregnant with my son, and feeling that much more defensive about, say, the guy who was running the red light when I was trying to cross the street. Yeah - it would have been really wonderful on a level to pull him out of his car and smack him around. That feeling of being very aggressively protective of myself and my family is what was the fuel for Arsenal's adventures - she can do anything. It's fun to be able to play with that." Or for another example, Van Meter, a mom herself, is finding more and more that she has in common with the Hopeless-Savage's mother, Nikki. "She's an ex-drug addict who is always going to have a little bit to do with whatever anxiety I have about getting older," Van Meter said. "She's on her own with the ex-drug addict thing, but I think the idea of her being a rock star who's 40 with four kids hits everyone who's feeling their 30s rush past them right, well, if it's not right where it hurts, it's where it really stings. I think at some point in all our lives, we felt like we were rock stars, and now, Nikki is 40 with kids." "At the same time,
Zero is the least complicated, because at least for me, her crises
tend to be these universal teen crises. I can look back on my
own teen years, and while I didn't live through anything remotely
like what happened to Zero, her feelings and emotions are born
out of what is really familiar to me from those days." "It gets to be hard work to allow these characters to grow and change in ways that seem natural," Van Meter said. "At the same time, as we all grow older, I'm not sure if I ever want to get into the heavier stories that go with really committing to following them throughout their whole lives. I don't want to tell the story where Dirk dies of congestive heart failure, for example. I don't necessarily want to go there. "I may change my mind someday, but right now, I can't imagine myself wanting to tell the really, really heartbreaking stories unless I can do it in a six page flashback and then redeem it. That's just where I go for them. One of the things I look to is that these characters are a big outlet and resource for me as a certain kind of optimism that I need in my life as a writer. I really hope that comes across to people who pick up Too Much Hopeless Savages." |
Zero
Hopeless-Savage got her spotlight in Ground Zero, and now
it's Arsenal's turn in Too Much Hopeless Savages, which
hit shops this week from Oni. Newsarama caught up with TMHS
creator & writer Jen Van Meter for a quick chat about the family.
But
using Hopeless Savages as a means of personal exploration
does have its limits. "Looking at Ground Zero, nothing
that happened to Zero ever happened to me, personally," Van Meter
said. "But at the same time, I've had a lot of people come up
to me and say that they felt there was something very honest in
the relationship between Zero and Ginger, not necessarily because
it happened just that way to them, but I think collectively, we
can all look back on our own lives and the lives of our friends,
and feel that it should have happened to at least one of us. That
seemed to ring true."