I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy Bernstein, writer of all kinds of things such as Leverage, Pretty in Pink, Dead Space 2, and now his new Thrillbent comic Santa Claus: Private Eye. If the name of the book caught your attention, you are definitely not alone. In our chat we touched on his new book, how it came about, and even talked some Dead Space to boot, so without further ado, here is our conversation:

Matt Mueller: I got to go through the first four chapters of Santa Claus: Private Eye. I really enjoyed it. Can you go into some detail of how the whole project and getting the artist, and the colorist etc. came about?

Jeremy Bernstein: A lot of it came through Thrillbent. You know, I had had the idea. I had been sitting on it for awhile, I worked with John Rodgers when I was on Leverage, and when I first started turning my attention to a comic I wasn't thinking of asking him to publish it but given his experience in the comics world I was asking him for some guidance on comic book writing, and I gave him the pitch and he said, "Let's talk about that some more." So yeah, Thrillbent was able to hook me up with Mike Dorman, my artist, and Rob Schwager, my colorist, and Troy Peteri, the letterist, I think does everything at Thrillbent.

Mike was a fantastic find honestly. I believe he just sent John a tweet over Twitter, and said, "Hey ,I'm an artist, I love the site and here's my portfolio. If you are looking for someone to do drawing, let me know." And we checked out the portfolio and it was fantastic. And he sent it in right as we were looking for an artist for this. He had some great noir-ish stuff that was right up the alley of what we wanted and we hired him off of that. He just killed it, and it was fantastic working with him, and I can't say enough good things about him. He took what I wrote and gave me what I meant, which is just the dream for a writer. Then Alex Courtland, producer at Thrillbent, got in touch with Rob Schwager, though, I don't have the details on how that happened. But we were delighted to get him as he is one of the greats and has so much experience and does such great work. There was a brief period of time where we were debating if it should be a black and white comic, and ultimately decided if you are doing Santa Claus you gotta see the red in the suit, and I think that was the right call because watching what he did, the art is amazing, and Mike just killed it. And then Rob came in and I didn't think it could get this much better, but it really did. So every time I get new pages I'm just utterly [delighted] with how it’s turned out.

So glad you ended up going with color, as I'm a big fan of how Thrillbent does the more motion comic style in their books, and having it in color only enhances that.

Mmhmm.

At the beginning, when the Christmas tree is front and center, the lights are flickering, and things like that add a lot to the book overall. And, of course, the red is iconic. I'm glad you get to see the red in the suit, though seeing it in black and white would have been cool, I think going with color was a great choice.

The worst idea we had was like, "Well, what if we did just white, black, and red?" (laughter) and then we were like, "Yeahhh, that would be dumb. Let's not do that. That would just be pretentious."

Plus it might evoke memories, not fond ones mind you, of The Spirit movie a few years ago. Most people didn't exactly react well to that, and no reason to get anyone confused.

Yeah, no no no.

It's also nice to be seeing people getting jobs on Twitter, because everyone seems to ignore my tweets when I send out ( in my view, wonderful) ideas. I'm trying to get a CHiPS reunion going again, cause they had the previous one, but now I want a third one, but no one seems to be hopping on that bandwagon with me. It's nice to see someone succeed where I am failing.

(Laughter)

Overall, the art comes together really well here, and it's a story where you hear the premise and my initial reaction was to laugh. That sounds awesome, and like it would have a more goofball slapstick feel, but then you read it and it is very different. Was it always envisioned that way, and did it always have a darker edge to it? Or was it more lighthearted at some point but then branched off to where it currently is now?

It started as, well, the initial idea was I just wanted to write a supernatural detective story and was looking for a supernatural being that hadn't been done. We've seen vampires and we've seen werewolves and lizards and what not, and not to denigrate those because I love them, but I was just looking for something fresh. In the back of my head I was like, "Well, I could do Santa Claus hahaha." And then kind of went, "No seriously." The more I started thinking about it the more I was like, "Well, he knows if you've been naughty or nice, right?" Well, thats a good skill for a detective. He can climb down chimneys, so he's really good at sneaking into places to snoop around. If Santa Claus had to moonlight, moonlighting as a detective is not the worst job in the world for him. And then I was sort of into moonlighting as detectives, and that kind of led me pretty naturally into the whole sort of noir area.

Then the thing that really sealed it for me, as far as the noir aspect, was when I started thinking about the character and asked the question of why would Santa Claus moonlight and finding the sort of dark and depressive take on Santa Claus. He brings the joy to the world, but who brings joy to him? You know? Why does he do that? What does he actually get out of it? Does he get anything out of it or is this just sort of an endless existence? Once you turn being Santa Claus into a midlife crisis, and a job where you are stuck in a rut, then it lends itself pretty nicely to a serious noir take. You know noir is always a down on his luck guy, and it's always about the seedy underbelly of things. A depressed Santa wandering around in the seedy underbelly of humanity with a gun and a trench coat? I'm sold! That is something I want to read.

Yeah, and you get to the end of chapter 4. Aince this will go out before everyone has a chance to read it, I won't go all spoiler, but towards the end he discovers something, and it got me thinking. I never thought about, especially when you hear about all the legends about Santa Claus, but you know he doesn't just find cookies and milk waiting for him.

Yep.

He must find all kinds of stuff, because late at night and early in the morning is when all kinds of dark things go on. It made total sense that he would happen upon something of that nature. So how on earth does he deal with that on a regular basis? Plus, it kind of brought up the topic of, someone has to pay for Christmas. Whether it be of magical origin or someone actually having to pay all these elves and for the upkeep of the North Pole. I really enjoy how some of those are woven in. As far as bringing him joy goes, it's evidently not his wife, because every time she is mentioned it is not in a joyful way.

(Laughter)

I do love the icy font used on the dialog boxes when it comes to her.

I've got plans for her. The fun in this kind of mashup is sort of taking the troupes of both genres and figuring out how to smoosh them together, so having Emily the elf become the receptionist, sort of a the girl friday, was a very obvious one. Having Jack Frost as the street snitch was another one that seemed like a good mashup. I wanted a very noir-ish Mrs. Clause when she does finally show up, which hopefully this will do well and we will do another cycle and Mrs. Claus will play into that one a little more heavily. It was fun just sort of figuring that one out and who she is.

Poor Jack Frost, I feel really bad for him.

(Laughter)

His first thing in awhile right? I mean I loved their take on him in Rise of the Guardians, and that didn't do well so I was bummed. Then you had Martin Short in The Santa Clause 3 and I felt bad because that wasn't received too well, and now he's a bum peeping on people. This guy can't catch a break.

Haha, you know I have to say it was something that my mother said that tipped me off on that, because my family lives in Chicago. Double paned windows don't frost up.

Aha!

So what the hell does Jack Frost even do anymore?

I never really thought of that. He serves no real purpose anymore.

Yeah! He's a magical avatar whose domain has disappeared from out from under him. So now he just becomes a bum who looks in windows. Okay haha, why not? I'll write the hell out of that.

Sandman probably feels the same way since the day they introduced Ambien. Probably hates that.

Yeah, the modern world is not good to mythical figures.

Not at all. I'm kind of feeling bad for them now to be honest.

(Laughter)

Now you've had a pretty interesting and varied writing career. You've written for TV shows, movies, and video games as well. What was the biggest transition or was there one at all in going from those formats to comics?

You know, I almost feel bad saying this, because I know a lot of people who talk about how hard a transition it is. I didn't find it that hard personally, and I think it is because I've always been a very visual writer. I always try to visualize a scene and then describe what it is that I am seeing. Not every writer works in the same way, but I think that helped me tremendously when coming into comics because it just required a little bit more specificity in terms of what each individual image was. There was certainly a learning curve. It was initially written as a conventional graphic novel before Thrillbent got involved, and then I had to convert it into the digital comics form. Learning how to manipulate the page turns was a really tricky but satisfying problem to work with. It was an unfortunate turn when I got it into my head that it was the odd pages that were the ones you flipped over and not the even pages, so all my big reveals were in the wrong place and then I had to cut a page from the beginning and add a page at the end. That was not my best day working on this, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Alot of people say, or some of the tv people say when you are writing a comic you are also directing at the same time, and they say that as if its a bad thing, but I really enjoyed getting to do that.

How was your experience writing a video game? I know at this point video games are not near movies as far as scale and production and things like that, but there are a lot of people involved in making a game nowadays, and it is getting much much closer.

Oh yeah.

How was that whole process of writing the script [for Dead Space 2]? It was really well received.

Yeah it was a real honor to be a part of that. The hardest part of working on games has been that its only in the last few years that people have really started taking stories seriously in games, and really the last 5 years it has been turned on its head, as story and narrative become an asset rather than an add on. You know the hardest part of it was working freelance on it. The whole team was up in San Francisco and I was down here working in LA, so that was the big challenge. Sort of having a very important role to contribute and they were really open to my ideas, I went up there a couple of times and spent weeks in a room with those guys figuring everything out, but in a lot of ways being a part of a team was the biggest challenge, and I think that jobs, especially in big triple A games like that, jobs for freelance writers on that kind of thing are drying up. I think those writers are being brought in house as full time hires, which I think is great for the medium. I think that narrative has a lot to offer in how it can work. When narrative integrates well with gameplay that is when magic really happens. When narrative and gameplay are at odds, that's when you don't have a mature medium. So that was the biggest challenge for me working on that.

As far as the actual writing process, games certainly have their unique elements. They are much more focused on what the player does and not on what the characters do, and you have to be able to write a story for someone who may not be playing the game the way you're thinking of it, and that can be a really tricky part of it. When push comes to shove, for me, I went to USC film school in the screenwriting program, that's where I got a lot of my grounding anyway. The definition of a story that they teach us there is someone who wants something badly and is having a hard time getting it. Well, in video games, the character wants something badly, that is their objective right? You usually put that right up on the display because it's such an important part of the game. It's having a hard time getting it. Well, that's gameplay, right? So that definition of a story to me defines the essence of a game, and so I find with sort of that philosophy I find that to be a very natural way to think about game stories when coming up with it and that was a lot of the approach I brought into Dead Space, was to say, "What do we want? What's our objective? And what's in our way? And how do those things continue to escalate throughout the course of the story so it doesn't go flat?"

Games have gotten so much better and more involved, especially over the last 5 years, and really when it comes to narrative, though, it's not for everybody of course. I know plenty of people who, when it comes to story, they don't care. They will blow things up thousands of times and could care less as to why, which is completely fine. For me and the types of games I like to play, the narrative adds so much and keeps me from feeling as if I'm just mindlessly clicking and moving, clicking and moving, and so on.

I do a lot of talks about story in games, and it's why I'm going to China actually. I'm doing a talk at GDC China about character in video games. I would go to these conferences and 5 years ago the conversation was all about how writers need to be taken seriously. At GDC in San Francisco this year we were sort of having the conversation we have every year, and were all sort of realizing that that is not the conversation anymore. The conversation now is how can we make the most out of the access we have. The conversation honestly was more of a wish list. It was like, "Well, it would be nice if I had a better office." It's not quite that trivial, but like, compared to what we were talking about 5 years ago, which was, "Will somebody for the love of God please take writers seriously!" That's not the conversation anymore, and that to me is really exciting, and I'll be the first one to admit that Tetris doesn't need a story. People ask me. It doesn't.

Games don't need stories, but human beings love stories and crave stories. There is not an art form out there that we haven't at some point turned towards the telling of stories. So if we're going to tell stories in games, let's do it well. If we don't want to tell [a] story in a game don't bother, who needs it? That has long been my case. People ask me what my favorite game is and, honestly, my favorite game is a board game. It's called Blokus. I don't know if you've ever played it, but I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s just brilliant and simple. You have four players and you've got four colors, and it's a big grid, and you have pieces that are like Tetris pieces. You play them on the board and the rule is that your pieces can only touch at corners. You can't have any two edges of your color touch. Everyone plays one piece and takes turns going around the board, and whoever has the fewest pieces left at the end is the winner. That's it. That is the entire game. It is that simple and it is just extraordinary. The interactions and the strategies and the gameplay that comes out of such a simple set of rules is fantastic.

As a writer and a narrative junkie, this is my favorite game, so I don't need narrative in my games. But if its going to be there it better be good.

Yeah it better impress.

Yeah exactly, it better be worthwhile.

Before we wrap up here, when does the next issue of Santa Claus: Private Eye drop?

We are dropping every Monday between now and Christmas.

Hey that worked out.

Hahaha, not a coincidence!

Haha, know your market.

Absolutely.

Well thank you for taking the time to talk to me, really appreciate it.

Oh my pleasure, thanks for having me on!

I really enjoyed that talk, and thanks to Thrillbent for the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy. If you are interested in Santa Claus: Private Eye, you can head over to Thrillbent’s site and give the first four chapters a read, all free of charge.

SANTA CLAUS: PRIVATE EYE - A Sitdown with Jeremy Bernstein