How Kaptara pushes the outer limits of the comic medium
With a gay hero and a nostalgia-skewing plot, Kaptara represents a moment — not just for its two breakthrough artists, but for comics as a whole. The Post’s David Berry previews Kagan McLeod and Chip Zdarsky’s mad creation
I remember when I first saw him, I didn’t think he was my kind of buddy, actually” Kagan Mcleod says of his initial encounter with Chip Zdarsky at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont. “He had really poofy blond hair.”
“But in college,” McLeod continues, “you try to scope people out and find someone with a similar sensibility. His sketchbooks were filled with Spider-Man, so that was enough.”
“There tends to always be a subsection of comics people at Sheridan — even though they try to beat it out of you at every opportunity,” responds Zdarsky, cheerily unphased. “You end up being drawn together, no pun intended.”
Zdarsky’s hair has since flattened into a brownishgrey, unkempt in the way of someone who spends 15 hours a day in his converted garage studio hard at work. Sketchbooks are not apparent in the mildly cluttered space — there are some superhero action figures — probably because Zdarsky’s lost the time for idle drawing. When I came in to meet him, the artist also known as former Post illustrator/advice columnist Steve Murray was in the middle of a variant cover for an undisclosed Marvel comic, which he fit in between drawing Sex Criminals, his hit Eisner-winning series (and potential Universal TV show) with Matt Fraction. That was all-consuming enough that he used his lunch and bathroom breaks to write his two concurrent monthly series: Marvel’s reboot of Howard the Duck and, now, with McLeod as artist, Kaptara.
Kaptara, whose first issue will be released April 22, is not the easiest series to elevator pitch, but the gist of it is that Keith Kanga, a relentlessly sardonic, mildly sheltered gay space-biologist put onto a mission because his rich aunt happens to own the company, is dropped into an alien world populated chiefly by, well, as Zdarsky puts it, “a planet populated by the action figures of our dumb ’ 80s youth. It’s like how, even as a kid, when you play with toys, there was never a purity of universe — my He-Man figures would fight my Marvel superhero figures, the G.I. Joes and all the knockoff figures my parents would buy me.”
“For me,” McLeod interjects, via FaceTime from his own studio across town, markedly serious, “it would be my G.I. Joes — and then I’d pick one other type of toy to be a predator, and then I’d hunt them.”
Befitting an action-figure world, there is the looming threat of apocalyptic war in Kaptara — not the ideal métier for Keith, a man whose aggression is all passive. Even early in the series, the tension (and, for that matter, humour) comes from the extent to which Keith is willing to drop an exterior better suited for fending off the dull insults of aggro bros to actually get down to fighting off that giant snarling space moose — or at least providing some moral support to the strapping man-atarms who he keeps making eyes with, Lance.
As you might have put together, Kaptara is a series that wouldn’t have existed before now: the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles have been the extent of winking mainstream genre pastiche, such as they still are, and the number of gay characters, let alone gay leads, in comic books can be counted on one hand, which would probably be flopping down in unconscious stereotype.
Although it’s loosely based off a concept Zdarsky originally brought to Fox animation (“They saw some of my online erotica — honestly — and asked me to pitch, but none of my ideas were Family Guy, so they didn’t really work”), it’s a story that fits into a confluence of moments for both him and Kaptara’s publisher, Image Comics. Not only have the skewed escapades of Sex Criminals increased Zdarsky’s stock to the point where he can basically pick his projects, but the success of it and titles like it — the knotty space opera Saga, the sideways mythology-minded Wicked and Devine and the runaway horror of
The Walking Dead — have encouraged Image to expand well beyond the usual purview of monthly titles. Kaptara, for instance, comes on the heels of Bitch Planet, a pulpy story of an all-woman prison planet — a whole new world in more ways than one.
“A lot of it kind of came from Sex Criminals,” Zdarsky says of his series with writer Matt Fraction that chronicles the exploits of a couple named John and Suzie, whose copulating literally stops time. “We started writing that with John as the main character — and it wasn’t clicking at all. At some point, one of us had the suggestion, ‘ Well, why is it him?’ It seemed like the easy choice. So the main character became Suzie, and it kind of challenged us both to not take the easy way.
“All of the Avengers are white,” he continues. “Which is one of those things where, if you’re a white guy and you’re watching, you don’t even think about that — but it’s crazy to think about. And P.S., there’s a sequel coming out, and all these new characters are white, too! And what are their sexualities? I’m gonna tell you right now they’re all straight.”
Kaptara’s approach, he adds, “makes for a more interesting story, and it feels better, and it’s nice to not just throw another straight white male lead into the world.”
Still, as Zdarsky alludes to above, if Kaptara occupies a unique place even in Image’s esoteric pantheon, that’s the result of a lot more internal dynamics than external ones. Although this marks his and McLeod’s first mainstream-backed collaboration, its spirit of playful experimentation — with its childhood-mining world as much as its choice of lead — stems from their own history together: what started in college grew to sharing tables at comic conventions, working tables at a national newspaper (this one) and even founding a comics studio together, the Royal Academy of Illustration and Design. It’s the last one in particular that Zdarsky and McLeod look back on while they’re working today.
“Back then, loneliness was the main thing,” Zdarsky says of the studio’s founding. “We were working out of our homes, and you can go a little bit crazy doing that — even though we’re both back to doing that now.
“But there was this studio sketchbook we’d pass around, with ludicrous characters, and a narrative would kind of evolve through,” he continues. “And that’s kind of the inspiration for working on this book, because that’s probably the most fun I’ve had, drawing.”
“When this first started, Steve asked me, if we were to do a comic together, what would I want to do,” McLeod says, “and it was something where we could just make up funny characters like that, totally ludicrous worlds where we could do whatever ridiculous thing we wanted. That’s exactly what we ended up with.”