Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best #1 is out today an Kieron Gillen talked to writer Chrissy Williams about the series and what fans can expect.
In April, Golden Rage is showing its not ready for the retirement home, coming out for a second series. I’m biased about this one as much as one can be – I’m married to her - but that means I’ve been close enough to see this together, and it delights me. An island where post-menopausal women have been abandoned by a society and left to fight it out. “Battle Royale Meets the Golden Girls” is the easy pitch, but it’s not a book that chooses easy. I’m struck by the team’s choices throughout – it’s a book about conflict, but it centres solidarity and the cast’s shared humanity. It’s also just plain fucking weird. The second series picks up where the last one ended, with the women waiting for an invasion from the mainland… and then goes in a different direction. This is my favourite sort of grandma of a comic, with that twinkle in its eye that knows it’s causing trouble.
I talked to Chrissy about what it’s like to bring it back.
It's a killer high concept. "Battle Royale Meets the Golden Girls." There's an easy way to do it. It's to do it straight - exploitation violence pulp explosion with entertaining old ladies. That sounds fun, but while it absolutely includes that, it skews. It's weirder, more personal, oblique, and at any chance avoids the obvious thing. The drinking of tea is as important as the wielding of axes, and it's clear you love the cast. Basically, do you not like money?
I suppose a more accurate elevator pitch would be "come for the grandma-on-grandma action, stay for the seven-page clowning sequence that explores infertility and pregnancy loss" -- but it's a bit wordy. Hmmm. I guess I would say that, for me, the sheer relentlessness of endless violence sounds a little... implausible? Not to mention exhausting? I mean -- when's the tea coming? Can I have a sit down? Are there biscuits? Battle Royale is definitely in there, but I wanted something just slightly more grounded. I think it's a reflection of the ages and life experience of the characters. Battle Royale was about being a teenager - my favourite age for melodrama. By the time we get to menopause, I feel like everyone deserves their own internal Bea Arthur, rolling her eyes at how ludicrous the world is. You need humour to survive, I think.
It's your second comic series. Like, showing my age, I remember I came to my second phonogram series - the singles club - with a lot of chips on my shoulder in terms of things I wanted to better position. Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best seems more confident than that. What were your goals, hopes and themes?
Well, we certainly don't have as much to say about Blondie as Phonogram does... There are two sides to this. One is just wanting to be back in that world, to figure out what would happen to these characters next. Both Lauren, the artist, and I really do love these characters a lot, and we love spending time with them. Two, having established this optimistic community, I wanted to think more about how it might actually work. It's a way for me to channel ideas about female friendships and support networks, and especially intergenerational trauma and relationships, as well as what can challenge our sense of community, whether internal politics, or physical hardship, health, family, personality, even. Also I wanted to set it in winter, because blood on snow looks awesome.
In your other life you're a published poet. With Tom Humberstone you published an introduction to Poetry Comics, and your collaboration An Introduction To Charts won a Selkie Award for best Narrative. Care to talk a bit about poetry comics, and how that impacts your thinking when working in more genre work?
Ah, so many other lives... Yep, poetry is the beginning and end for me, I think. So doing a narrative comic like Golden Rage is a really interesting formal challenge for my brain. As you can probably tell from the aforementioned clown / miscarriage sequence, I'm not super interested in just acting out the conventional tropes of action plots - unless I'm exploiting them for comedic value, or trying to point out that "look, older women can do this shit too FFS." I feel awful for these wonderful characters and the various hells I put them through, especially when some of them are channelling really personal experiences of grief and loss. I'm trying to write credible, nuanced, rounded people, and they become very real to me.
It's a bit different in poetry comics. The "character" to some extent is the voice that speaks the words, and no one gets to know how much it really is or isn't "me". Poetry plays with that tension. The artist then has to choose whether to show any actual characters on the page, and how the images will flow and support / contradict / juxtapose the words. It's not about building character, or plot - it's about using language and art to put unexpected ideas and images together. And I go in knowing there will be art in there to carry meaning too, so I'm explicitly writing words that lean into that. Of course, that's not unique to poetry comics, but they somehow feel like a really clean true example of how text and art work together in comics.
I've worked with Tom on our own poetry comics for such a long time (we're working on a new one atm). I now just send him the text itself, and he goes off and blocks it all out and composes the pages into roughs. Then he sends it back, and we chat about any areas where the pacing feels like it needs to change, or what have you, and we work on it together. But really it's all him. The epitome of "no comic exists if it hasn't been drawn -- the script is not the comic". The poem isn't a blueprint, or film script, it's a springboard. It was really exciting that Introduction to Charts won the Selkie Award for "Best Narrative". I think, or hope, there's an increasing appetite for interesting and unconventional storytelling.
I wrote this question, almost as a joke, thinking I'd expand or delete it, but I realised that it actually perhaps stands best alone. So let's just say it: You like women. Discuss.
I never used to. I grew up with all the internalised misogyny the eighties and nineties could throw at me. And then one day I woke up and realised all my favourite music was by women. And all my favourite writing was by women. And that the brash sarcastic irony bullshit adopted by so many of my 90s-raised male friends was all just smoke and mirrors. They didn't own what was good. They didn't own what was important. I've had to unlearn all that (I'm still unlearning it) and so it just seemed like WRITE WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE INTERESTED IN was the best thing to do. And it so happens I am interested in the Golden Girls and being angry and drinking tea and wondering what it would be like to exist without men.
Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best is available on April 9th. If you want to know more, here’s a primer. Its lunar code is 0225IM300.