Edited by Sam Thielman
I’LL BET YOU HAVE SOME WORKPLACE ANGER, frustration, sadness, and maybe even trauma. While I am the last person who should be giving out mental-health advice, can I recommend starting a fiction project and putting all of that into the wickedest character in the story?
WALLER VS. WILDSTORM #3 is now out in the world. I’ve written before that this miniseries is show-and-prove time for me when it comes to writing comics. Issue 3 feels to me like we’ve reached the point in the narrative where like the stakes are the highest. The first two issues are a climb up a roller coaster. There are dips and loops along the ascent, but they foreshadow a massive, heart-stopping acceleration to come – something that pays off the time spent heading up to the peak. Now the drop is here.
The key to that drop is to turn loose a villain we’ve been teasing throughout the first two issues. He’s one of my favorite bad guys in comics, one of the first I reached for when I got to make my wishlist of DC/WildStorm characters: Deathstroke the Terminator. Little did I know when editor Chris Conroy greenlit my use of Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson that I would have moments writing him when my chest heaved and my fingers shook with how I could use him to vent things that my wartime journalism had stored within me. Nor did I know I would love that feeling—that I would feel cleansed by it.
Writers sometimes steer Deathstroke into antihero territory. Christopher Priest’s recent Deathstroke series—Eisner-nominated but still underappreciated—is an example of this done exquisitely. Even though WALLER VS. WILDSTORM is out of continuity, I didn’t want to undermine anyone’s work with the character. Our story is set in the past, before we first meet Slade back in New Teen Titans #2, when he is an unambiguous villain making a group of teenagers pay for his poor parenting choices, and that’s a narrative opportunity. If you have a different take on Deathstroke, it’s not a problem – the character growth he’s undergone all happens after WALLER VS. WILDSTORM. In this book, he’s at his worst.
And the thing about Slade is that he’s a kind of person to whom I have had closer proximity than I ever imagined I would: a mercenary.
THEY DON’T LIKE TO BE CALLED MERCENARIES. Mercenary sounds bad, like someone who values money over human life. Like someone without honor. They prefer the neutral term contractors. The boldest among them joined together in the 2000s and formed an industry mouthpiece/lobbyist group in Washington D.C. called the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA).
Business was booming back then, but on top of all the money, they wanted respectability. In 2007, I covered the IPOA confab, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, for TPM. It was filled with assurances that the assembled mercenaries had committed themselves to the highest ethical standards of mercinariness [Mercenarity? Mercinosity? I need to lie down.—Sam]. The pieces I did on the conference appear to be casualties of TPM server migrations over the years, and I can’t remember if the conference was before or after Blackwater’s massacre at Nisour Square. But that seminal event happened in September 2007, and Blackwater, which IPOA had defended, pulled out of the association.
Earlier that year, I was on an embed that began in Baghdad. Central American guards from the big “peace operations” firm Triple Canopy stood watch outside the building where journalists passing through the Green Zone could temporarily bed down on cots, dormitory-style, and work. While U.S. officials would describe the mercenary presence as a mission to defend the building, there was an unavoidable intimidation factor there. Years later, on a different embed at Bagram Airfield, I got to enter a freezing-cold shipping container that served as a control station for Army drone operations in eastern Afghanistan. The screen-filled console was a two-seater. One seat was for a young warrant officer. The other was for a much older contractor, who offered guidance and supervision during their stretch of surveillance operations, which had gone on long enough for crushed cans of Rip-It to litter the floor.
Through it all, the State Department repeatedly gave massive contracts to companies known for abuse and blocked oversight of their operations. One of the largest private military companies, DynCorp, faced credible accusations of human trafficking—first in the Balkans, and, when they faced no substantial reprisal for it, later in Kuwait. Those accusations never stopped the contractor from winning huge Army contracts for training U.S.-sponsored Afghan police. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that trafficking is a structural practice for labor exploitation amongst military contractors.
As I was drafting Deathstroke’s role in this issue, I wanted to gesture at all this, and give the reader a sense of what being a mercenary really entails. Slade refers to himself as a contractor, as the real-life Slades do. Even when he’s being evasive, Slade is telling his version of the truth, particularly in one important scene. Over the years I have interviewed several in the mercenary game, from the wraparound-sunglasses-and-pistol-holster-on-the-thigh guys cashing paychecks to the military-contractor executives who write them. Their various justifications helped me find some of the vibe I was going for when writing Deathstroke. As of a few years ago, a painting of me conducting one of those interviews hung, improbably, in the National Press Club.
More broadly, Slade became a place to put a lot of bad feelings. While I didn’t want to write him as a two-dimensional character—hence his truth-telling, however skewed, in the aforementioned scene—I was compelled to present him as a distillation of all these structural aspects of the mercenary industry that I don’t have the luxury of personalizing in my journalism.
Slade revels in his impunity. He thinks he has a superior grasp of strategy than the people who sign his contracts. He toys with people’s lives. When I found myself in depressive episodes while I wrote the comic, episodes both related and unrelated to the work I’ve done over the years, I listened to the ways those episodes had me internally vocalizing contempt – for myself, for others. They became Slade’s voice. Is this a bright side of disassociation? I don’t know. But I felt better after this approach to writing him, and hopefully you got a good comic out of it. (AIPT thinks so!)
I also loved writing Slade and Adeline’s extremely toxic marriage. If you’ve ever been around two awful people who love each other – I’m not naming names! Nor am I linking to pieces that I could link to! – my hope is you’ll recognize their dynamic. It’s a deep love. It can often be a durable love, even as it’s filled with pain. Until suddenly, and predictably to everyone who isn’t part of the relationship, they run out of other people to unite against, and it’s no love at all.
PODCASTS! If you’re not sick of me talking about my process of writing WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, my friend Mimi Chan graciously had me on her podcast this week to discuss the series, how it relates to my journalism and so forth. There’s a section that may or may not make sense where I try to describe pacing the story in drumming terms.
And if you want me talking about my latest Nation column and its implications, pals Danny Bessner and Derek Davison had me back on American Prestige! I’m grateful to all three of them for making me a return guest.
And! Have you seen my buddy Eric Battle’s stunning variant cover for issue 3? The one with the 2000s-era WildStorm logo? Eric and I are going to be at Everyone Comics & Collectibles in Long Island City—that’s right off Queensboro Plaza—signing it from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 21! Come through and say hi!
So that means I’ll have signed in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and Manhattan. What comic shop in the Bronx wants to have me sign the book? I just need a Bronx signing and I’ll have gone all-city for my first comic!
“I MUST BECOME A MENACE TO MY ENEMIES.” A typically show-stopping quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates (via June Jordan) when Harper’s Bazaar talked to him and others about how it feels to have their books banned. Truth, crushed to earth…
HERE’S WHAT THEY THINK ABOUT YOU. And they intend to discipline you: “We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.” But the reason why they need to inflict pain is because all of their wealth, all of it, derives from what you create, and they fear that slipping away.
Don’t you think you should own it instead?
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