The Four Color Media Monitor

Leftist comics writer Matthew Rosenberg was interviewed by Dying Scene, where, along with a new comic he's written titled What's the Furthest Place From Here, he also told them about a career he had in music distribution:

Dying Scene (Forrest Gaddis): For people who aren’t familiar with you, can you give us a little background and tell us a little bit about What’s The Furthest Place From Here?

Matthew Rosenberg: I’m in New York City. I’m from here. I grew up in the punk and hardcore scene in New York. I used to run a small indie label (Red Leader Records) in my bedroom, tour with bands, put on shows, but eventually I worked at a merch company for a while. All the stuff that is punk rock jobs; I worked at a record store, worked at record labels. Putting out records was really kind of brutal. We were putting out records in a time of the rise of iTunes. Everything’s online and people were downloading things and it was hard to figure out how to sell music to people. We just kept having distributors go out of business on us. We put the label away and stopped doing it. I sort of looked for another job that I could do that was something I was as passionate about as music and punk rock. The only other thing in my life that was a constant was comics. So, I set out to make comics. I’ve been a comics writer professionally for a decade now. I got my start at Black Mask Comics. They first published me which was really serendipitous because they were all punk rock people. Black Mask was founded by Steve Niles who wrote 30 Days of Night.

Dying Scene: Okay, is it Steve Niles? I always thought it was Brett (Gurewitz) from Epitaph also?

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah, it was also founded by Steve, who was in a bunch of Dischord bands back in the day. He was in a group with Matt Pizzolo, who is the third partner. He was a Long Island hardcore guy and put out the New York Hardcore documentary and a bunch of music stuff. I had friends who knew him. I went through Black Mask and did a couple books there and then moved on to Marvel. Now, I make books at DC and Image including What’s the Furthest Place From Here? which is my current ongoing series that I do with Tyler Boss.

With his politics, that he forced upon the Punisher, it's hard to see how he does better with this, even if this time, he's working on his own creations and productions. But, this does tell why he went into comicdom more than music. Because the downloading business all but rendered the music distribution business obsolete.

Dying Scene: Did you and Tyler come up with the concept together?

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah, me and Tyler did a book together called Four Kids Walk Into A Bank and we knew we wanted to do another book together after that. So we started doing a different book and we realized that it was just Four Kids Walk Into A Bank, but sci-fi. We realized we didn’t want to do the same thing again. So, we sat down and tried to think of a book that would be very different from the book we made before and that’s some of What’s the Furthest Place from Here is. We wanted to do something that was big, sort of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic, ongoing, and had a big cast. We wanted to tell a story about kids who grew up in subculture, if that makes sense. We didn’t want to do a story about kids who loved comics and I said it should be kids who love punk rock. It should be kids who grew up surrounded by punk rock whether or not they fully understood it. The premise of What’s The Furthest Place From Here? is, it’s a post-apocalyptic story where there’s no adults left in the world. It’s just gangs of children and each gang lives in a building where they take on the personality of the business or the entity in the building beforehand. So, the kids who live in the bank control commerce and the kids who live in the police station try and enforce their own laws and rules on people. Our story follows the kids who grew up in a record store. They worship all the records that they grew up around and consider them their gods. They take care of them and try to do right by them. I’ve been working on it now for four years.

Based on how he describes the teens living at the police precinct, it wouldn't be shocking if it turned out they were the baddies, and this GN another metaphor for leftist anti-police propaganda. That's practically why Donald Trump was elected 4 months ago. Why, it wouldn't be a surprise if, based on what's told about the teen bankers, this were also an anti-capitalist metaphor.

Dying Scene: Has anybody asked about doing a film or TV adaptation of What’s The Furthest Place From Here?

Matthew Rosenberg: I can’t talk too much about that, but we have a deal for it. It’s being developed now. The thing I can talk about is that when you put out a comic on a certain level, like an Image Comic, it’s very much on the radar of a lot of Hollywood people from the go. They’re always looking out for things to adapt and buy, and so when a book comes out that’s like our book, you get a lot of inquiries from the start. You get a lot of producers and actors and directors and studios just asking if the rights are available? It’s always flattering, but me and Tyler knew that we were doing a huge story, and we’re doing a sort of non-traditional story. In a lot of comics, you read the first issue and it says, well, this is the premise of the book. These are the good guys. These are the bad guys. You’re going to follow them. Our book doesn’t work like that. We wanted to do a real three-act structure through the whole narrative of thirty-plus issues. You don’t really know what the book is about for a long time, and we didn’t want to go into conversations with people about adapting it or buying it or anything without them knowing what it was. We told everyone, we’re not going to have conversations about selling it or optioning it until we’re 10 issues out. We took it off the market immediately, which business-wise is probably stupid, but artistically I think was the right choice to do. When we brought it back out, we had meetings with all these people and big studios. A lot of them said, well, how would you see this as being a movie? I don’t have any idea how you’d make this a movie. It’s got this huge scale. Then we met with one company who said, “We know how to do it. It would be super faithful. We want you guys involved. This is how we do it.” It just made so much sense what they said. We don’t need to go out and have a bidding war on this. They understand what it is and they want to do it. They brought in some amazing people to work on it. So we’re really excited because people who’ve done some of my favorite stories in recent years are attached.

Dying Scene: I saw that you were in Ireland because they are making Four Kids Walk Into A Bank a movie.

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah, me and Tyler went over to Dublin for a week right before Christmas. I think they just wrapped shooting the other day. Shooting over six weeks in and around Ireland. It’s really fun. It was a weird one.

Dying Scene: Did they do a good job matching it to Tyler’s art?

Matthew Rosenberg: Me and Tyler are producers on the movie, so nothing caught us off guard. We’ve been there at every step and we’ve seen from the concept art, look books, casting, and all of that. There’s places where they made choices to go a different way, which totally made sense because the comic would be hard to adapt as a movie. There’s a lot of stuff that is specifically for comics. You want someone other really talented people to come in and say, I’m going to do my version. Like when a band does a cover song and it sounds like the original song, what was the point of this? So they took their old spin on it. It’s incredibly faithful. I think it was really intense for Tyler being in the house that looks like the house and car he drew. It’s especially funny because the car he drew was based on his grandmother’s old car. So he said, it’s really weird that someone had to go out and buy the same model car as my grandmother drove in the 90s.

Sounds like we have here yet another GN that was only produced for the sake of providing moviemakers with more material, not to mention pushing potential propaganda, even at a time when wokery's alienated many people. There have been some people who've argued comics can't be developed solely to get movie and TV deals, or even theater adaptations, and the upcoming adaptation Rosenberg and Boss have in the works only explains all the more why this is becoming quite a farce already. Even novels have for too long been used as a source for producing screenplays.

Dying Scene: I saw you did work on some of the Archie comics, too.

Matthew Rosenberg: I did. I’m really good friends with Alex Segura, who used to be a vice president of Archie. He’s a music guy and wrote Archie Meets Kiss. I said to him you should do an Archie Meets Kiss book, but with a band that doesn’t suck. The obvious one is Archie Meets Ramones. I said, how do we do that? You have to go out and get the Ramones’ license. I spent about 18 months. everything is different estates If we want the logo, that’s the licensing department. If you want likeness rights, that’s estates and that’s people. If you want to reference songs, that’s publishing. I came back to Archie and they were baffled that I did that. It did really well. The folks at Archie called me and said, we want to do a music thing. Do you want to do The Archies as a band touring and draw from some of your experience touring with bands? There was a special musical guest in every issue. And we got awesome ones. I mean, we had Blondie and Tegan and Sara, but I had lined up some more for later on. Bands that they were pretty confused by that I got. The Mountain Goats gave us permission and that was going to be fun and I was talking to Converge about coming on. I wanted to do the Archies get booked onto a hardcore show in a basement. It was a Converge show at a Legion Hall, everyone’s spin kicking and crowd killing and all this stuff. Then, The Archies have to get up and play. Then the book folded right before we were going to figure out how we were going to do the Converge one. The Archie company is owned by this family and these people who’ve owned Archie for years. They would send us notes like, can we get Van Halen? I don’t think we can get Van Halen, but also that’s not exactly selling comics to teenagers in the supermarket. I think the legal nightmare of us trying to get Van Halen in a comic is going to kill us. Whereas I just went to a Mountain Goats’ show and was like, hey, guys, can we do this?

I'm sure Rosenberg's work on Archie is bad news too. If a specific project was shelved, however, it's fortunate, because the less propaganda like his on the market, the better. And selling to teens? They threw all that away long ago for the sake of PC. Whatever they've been writing up in the past decade has been bottom of the barrel, woke stuff, including how the Kevin Keller character is depicted as homosexual, and how they put such an emphasis on horror themes, another serious issue plauging the entertainment scene of recent.

Dying Scene: The other thing I saw online randomly, and I have to ask, is you wrote an album with a member of the Wu-Tang Clan?

Matthew Rosenberg: My first published comic, I got hired through music people to write the companion comic to an album by Ghostface called, 12 Reasons to Die that RZA produced. I did a six-issue comic that was a concept album of a story of a mobster who got killed. Ghostface played the mobster who got killed and came back from the dead to haunt the twelve gangsters who killed him. I wrote the comic to it. I got along with RZA and Ghost. Ghost wanted to do another concept record. It was weird, he did a 12 Reasons to Die 2 that I didn’t work on. Adrian Younge, the producer, and his team put that album together, but then Ghost wanted to do another concept album that was sort of similar. They hired me to write a story. It’s called 36 Seasons. Tommy Boy put it out. I wrote the story. They said, we don’t really know how to do this. It’s just a story. You didn’t break it up. I broke it up into songs. This is what the song is. You have to figure out who the guest vocalists are and give them characters. We can figure out who they are and where they appear. I had all these conversations with legal where they said, we can’t do that because of music publishing and the way it works, you didn’t write lyrics or music. While the whole thing is based on your writing, there’s not a legal definition for what it is. you’re an influence. I literally titled the album. I think I named some of the songs, but not all of them. None of those fall under ASCAP BMI songwriting.

Well there's another form of darkness produced even within the framework of the music industry we could do without. Sometimes, I wonder if even musicians are too hung up on darkness, and sadly, probably have been for a long time. And here's more about another comic Rosenberg recently published:

Dying Scene: So looking ahead, I know you got, We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us.

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah. I won’t say where I got the title from, but I am a big Against Me! fan from the No Idea days and back. Coincidence.

Dying Scene: Do you want to give a little bit of the premise of it?

Matthew Rosenberg: We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us is sort of a 1970s James Bond type spy story about sexy super spies, crazy mad scientists, power-hungry humans, but it’s told from the POV of a 13-year-old girl who is the daughter of the world’s greatest scientist. Everything goes wrong for the girl, she discovers who her father is at the same time that the world discovers who he is and where he has been hiding. She and her robot guard set out with sort of a choice whether she wants to follow in her father’s newly discovered footsteps and become this villain and get revenge for the wrongdoings that have been done to her and her family; or she could go and live a normal life for the first time. It’s a revenge story about family and regret and the way violence sort of ripples through their lives. The way that generations of anger and resentment and hate sort of manifest. It’s a dark comedy too. I made it sound like a bummer, but it is actually funny. That comes out March 26.

Even the mention of "dark comedy" is cause for dismay, as is the talk of violence as a tool used by the star characters in the comic. At the end, they say:

Dying Scene: Thank you very much for this. This was awesome.

Matthew Rosenberg: Thank you, I never get to talk about the music. Comics people don’t know what to say about music stuff. You meet a lot of people in comics doing this. When I worked at Black Mask, most of the staff at Black Mask was straight edge, punk rock and hardcore kids.

Dying Scene: I feel comics are the punk rock art form.

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah, I always think that it’s pretty egalitarian. There’s a low bar to entry and anyone can do it. It’s like mini-comics are our demo tapes or 7-inches. I think it’s a really good way to put it.

Unfortunately, the "low bar" is more easily accessed by leftists, certainly in the mainstream. That's how Rosenberg got the assignments he did in the past decade. Alas, he's just another overrated liberal ideologue, and it won't be surprising if, in another number of years, nobody will care much about his pretentious stories.

Labels: Archie, dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda