When crime writer Greg Rucka made his comics writing debut with WHITEOUT in 1998, many readers regarded him as an outsider. He wasn't seen as an aspiring comic creator getting his big break, but as a novelist slumming it in comics. According to Rucka himself, nothing was further from the truth.

"Comics have always been a love. I've been trying to write comics for years. I've been trying to get people in the industry to give me work," says Rucka. "I'd go to San Diego with copies of each novel as they came out and hand them to people and say, please, read them, and they would say thank you very much, go away now. I was the annoying fan tormenting a professional, an editor.

"And I think it took the third novel before I was finally given a chance to sit down with an editor, and that was Bob Schreck just as Oni was getting off the ground, and that was how WHITEOUT came about."

Rucka grew up with comics the same as most other creators. "I started reading them regularly when I was about twelve, with Marvel books, X-MEN. That lasted until college. When I left for college, I'd kind of given up on X-MEN and moved on to 'smarter' books like THE SANDMAN and HELLBLAZER and things like that. I came in at just the right time - at, for lack of a better phrase, the renaissance.

"The first comic books I remember actually searching out on my own, versus a friend saying 'you've gotta read this', were the Frank Miller BORN AGAIN issues of Daredevil, that story arc. That was a point of pride with me, that I discovered it and that I knew it was quality. We had WATCHMEN, we had DARK KNIGHT, we had all these things coming up around the same time, so that was what hooked me in."

Today, Rucka has become something of an industry mainstay, writing the same characters he grew up reading, including Batman, Elektra, and now Wonder Woman and Wolverine. But it was WHITEOUT that got him attention.

Written for Oni Press, with art by Steve Lieber, WHITEOUT told the story of federal marshal Carrie Stetko on the trail of a killer in the frozen Antarctic wilderness. Rucka believes that it's a story that just had to be told in comic form. "WHITEOUT, I think, would stink as a novel. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words do I have to spend describing the arid, barren frigid desert that is Antarctica versus Steve Lieber, boom, a page, OK, let's get on to the story now?

The differences between writing for comics and writing for novels are fairly elementary, says Rucka. "Novels are by their nature far less collaborative. I can't draw to save my life, so every comic I do is collaborative, and in the best instances it ascends and becomes more than the sum of its parts. The best a novel can be is the best I can do. ... When the writing happens, that's me in a room."

And there's another vital difference. "Where I am in my novel writing career, I do get feedback, people e-mail me or I get letters, but not nearly as many, as quickly, as vociferously as in comics.

'Every comic I do is collaborative. The best a novel can be is the best I can do.' "Comic books - anything to do with superhero comic books - people feel ownership, and consequently they are more inclined to share everything they are thinking, and that changes the nature of the interaction. It's hard. I'm very selective where I go online now, because there are only so many times you want to take a beating that you don't think was warranted. Even when the beating is warranted, how many times do you want to take it?

"A lot of internet criticism seems to be about somebody who really has no critical basis, no critical agenda other than a desire to string ten or fifteen derogatory words together in the most creative way possible, and that serves no purpose other than to stroke their ego, and if they need their ego stroked, then I really don't need to read it."

Rucka did once have a message board at the now defunct NextPlanetOver, but it didn't appeal. "I have great admiration for people like Brian Bendis, people like Warren Ellis who have the focus ... to get in there and maintain that presence. But to a great extent I feel, what am I going to say online? I'm not certain that my opinions matter all that much. If you want to know what I'm thinking, read the stuff close to me. My agenda is pretty much there. My politics is pretty much there.

"I believe every artist is political whether they want to be or not, regardless of what you're writing. I think you can either ignore the fact or run to the fact, but you cannot change that fact. I feel for the most part that there is an obligation; you don't present an empty entertainment.

"One of my favourite movies in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which topically is nothing but what it appears to be, it is a throwback to the pulp serials and it's an action adventure movie. What that movie is about is two men fighting over one woman - for her soul. If you watch the movie carefully, it's all there, texturally, dramatically visually, the movie is telling you something about the nature of redemption and about obligation and loyalty and hurt.

'If you want to know what I'm thinking, my agenda is pretty much there.' "What Jones has done to Marion prior to the start of that movie is unconscionable. Is it a redemptive story for him or not? These are questions that you can't ask of the text. You're not obligated to ask them. But I feel very strongly that as creators we're obligated to try to pose those questions. You don't have to go to them if you don't want them, but it's my obligation to at least throw it out there and say, think about this, maybe? Fine, if you want to ignore it, read about the Black Widow jumping up and down on people and breaking heads and kicking and punching, but there's something else going on."

After WHITEOUT, the next thing Rucka threw out to his readers was a sequel, WHITEOUT: MELT. There have long been plans to make it a trilogy. "I have an idea for a third and what would be a final Carrie Stetko story, but there's no plans to do it right now," says Rucka. "I felt, in retrospect, that MELT was a rushed project. There was a lot of pressure from Steve to do a follow-up, and Oni to a lesser extent wanted a follow up, and I rushed into it. There are things in MELT that I quite like, but I won't make that mistake again. I wasn't ready to sit down and write it, and I think it shows. If it happens it'll happen."

Instead of a third WHITEOUT, Rucka used that book's British intelligence agent Lily Sharpe as the inspiration for a new ongoing series at Oni, QUEEN & COUNTRY. Tara Chace, a character with more than a passing resemblance to Lily, is the lead in this contemporary espionage thriller that deals very heavily with current events - not an easy task when the comics have to be written months before they see print.

"I've been really lucky," admits Rucka. "When I wrote the first issue of the [Operation Crystal Ball] story arc ... I was pretty certain that by the time it came out I was going to have to do radical rewrites all the Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and Mughniyeh references. I didn't have to change anything.

"I do a lot of research for the stories, and then I try to be somewhat logical about where I think things are going to be when the issue comes out, that's how I try to stay topical. ... The last issue [of Operation Morningstar] was finished before September 11. I went after the Taliban because I was furious. I mean, I was just seeing red. I knew how awful they were, I knew what they were doing. I knew Al Qaeda was trafficking heroin. I knew that they had ... enough opium to supply the world for the next two and a half years. All of that I knew. There was no way I could know when that issue would finally come out that everyone else would know who the Taliban were. So that wasn't topical, that was just dumb happenstance.

"I try to keep informed and apprised, and I do my research and then I look at the world in relation to the story and say, what's plausible here, what could happen? QUEEN & COUNTRY isn't real, but I try to make it as dramatically real as possible.

While Greg Rucka believes WHITEOUT wouldn't work as a novel, a novelisation of QUEEN & COUNTRY is in the works. "I'm actually not sure how the idea of the novel came about. ... QUEEN & COUNTRY was optioned as a movie, and my [book] contract was up for renewal. So I had one other book to write under that contract, and then my agent wanted to negotiate for another two books. The first book that the publisher wanted was the movie tie-in book.

"But since, one, there is no guarantee there will be a movie, two, my involvement in said movie, should it happen, will be very limited, that leads to three, which is, a book starring Tara Chase. ... It will be very different [to the comics], simply by dint of it being a different medium, if nothing else."

"You cannot take a comic book and make that comic book into a novel accurately. You can try to capture the feel, you can maybe tell in the main the story, but they're different mediums, and I think it's foolish to say, 'Well, WHITEOUT was a successful comic book, therefore it's going to be a successful novel'. It's going to be a totally different thing, and you have to approach each medium with respect for the medium in which you're going to work.

"I'm a writer, it's what I do for a living. ... In that job description I think is a necessity for me to be able to tell a good story in a variety of mediums. I should be able to write a good novel, I should be able to write a good short story, a good play, a good comic, and, if I want to be successful as a writer, to myself, then I want to be able to do these things well."

So far in QUEEN & COUNTRY, Tara Chace has had to deal with organised crime, international terrorism and corporate espionage. What's next? "I cast around for the ideas, but then what tends to happen is I build up a file, and then decide pretty much at the last possible moment what arc I'm going to do.

"I know there's a Middle East arc that I've been very frightened of sitting down to write, about what's happening in Israel, but I think I'm going to have to get over it because it's not possible to write about current espionage and say, 'Well, we're just going to ignore that portion of the Middle East. Nothing's going on there'.

"I have some other stuff. It's trying to figure out what's plausible and what works rather than what's lazy and what's obvious. For instance, it would be really easy to go, 'Communist China! Bad!'

"I'm trying to find a way to deal with the espionage relationship between international banking and money laundering, and trying to make that compelling and sexy - or at least compelling - rather than making it twenty-two pages of just pure text, which is what I'm afraid it would end up being. Money laundering is a huge industry, and I'm sure that [Strategic Intelligence Services], much against their charter, is all over bankers in London right now trying to figure out where the money is going and who's doing it and who's laundering it and how it's going where, but I'm still not certain what the right way to tell that story is."

In time, says Rucka, Tara's adventures will come to a close. "I don't know when it will end. I go back to THE SANDBAGGERS, which was the inspiration for it. American television was horrible in the 70s; there was no sense of self-control, no sense of restraint. It works? Make another season, and another season! You know what? End it after three seasons. Let it stop. Give it an ending.

"Which is something that British television does do; there are finite stories, and you have a stronger story if you have an ending. There is an overall ending for QUEEN & COUNTRY. How long it takes me to get there is another question. That's the journey."

In part two, Ninth Art talks to Greg Rucka about women, sexuality and superheroes.

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

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