Brendan McCarthy talks to Mark Kardwell

Wed, Sep 8, 2010

With the collected edition of the great Brendan McCarthy’s weird and wonderful Spider-Man: Fever due to hit the shelves this week, Mark Kardwell talks to Bren:

“Mark: This is your first piece for Marvel Comics. What was it like working for the fabled “House of Ideas”?

Brendan: Other than to cut a few lines of text, they pretty much left me alone to get on with it, which suited me fine. The editor, Steve Wacker, suggested that I add The Vulture to the opening sequence, which worked well. They seem to like the new sparkly kooky-book style: David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video, with all that great ‘black sky’ video feedback, fused with a Tim Burtonesque surrealism — with a light sprinkling of silver-age stardust.

Marvel got a fun and unusual comic — and I was able to get the Ditko/Dr. Strange thing out of my system. The FEVER trade collection also reprints the 60′s Spider-Man Annual by Lee and Ditko that inspired my story. I wish they could have scanned it directly off the old printed pages to get the period feel. Still, artistically it’s Ditko at his peak. His genius is there to be enjoyed. Sadly, I am not worthy to sharpen his pencil!

That said, another story has started to take shape, probably just starring Dr. Strange and Clea… I’m interested in different forms of magic and enchantment, not just that dark Aleister Crowley angle… Hollywood, for example, is certainly a place of magic: Enchantment by the manipulation of projected light. The name ‘Hollywood’ has a deeper esoteric meaning too. The wood of the Holly tree was used by Druids to make wands. I think Dr. Strange should get involved with The Light-masters of Hollywood. There’s some great online articles by Jay Weidner on the esoteric symbols concealed in corporate Hollywood movies. I recently suggested to Vertigo a Sandman/Dr. Strange cross-over as I think the characters go together well. I’d like to see Mike Kaluta do a Ditkoesque Dr. Strange too. I think he’d be a total genius on it.”

I also suggested to Marvel a Lady Gaga/Dr. Strange team-up. A comic and video combination on a new song. It’s only a matter of time before the fantastic visual world of Ditko’s Dr. Strange is brought to a wider public.”