Snake Preview [Starlog/Issue 312/July/2003/US] By Daniel A. Dickholtz

Catching Snake Plissken, gun-toting bank robber and snarling ex-soldier, shouldn't have been this easy. After all, this is the guy who in Escape From New York, with both a pardon and his life at stake, went into the decaying urban hell of Manhattan - that sealed-off dumping ground for all the nation's murderers, thieves and thugs - and brought the President back out after Air Force One crashed there. This is the same one-eyed warrior who, more than a decade later, was forced to invade the ruins of Los Angeles and save an ultra-conservative chief executive's daughter [and a secret weapon] from the hordes of "undesirables" imprisoned there. Yet William O'Neill and Tone Rodriguez, the respective writer and artist of John Carpenter's Snake Plissken Chronicles - a new bi-monthly comic book from Hurricane Entertainment and CrossGen - didn't even have to break a sweat to capture the anti-social anti-hero.

"It's weird," Rodriguez remarks. "We were just going to wrap up the most recent arc of Violent Messiahs, and then this project landed in our laps."

"The agency that represents our comic book properties was dealing with [producer] Debra Hill and John Carpenter in trying to relaunch the Snake Plissken property," O'Neill explains. "And they asked us, 'Would you guys be interested in being the ones who produce it?' I've been a fan of Escape From New York since I first saw it on HBO when I was a kid back in '82, so I said, 'Yeah!'

"At one of our first meetings. Tone [showed them] some preliminary artwork that he had done, to whet their appetites, and also to prove to them that we could do professional work. John saw the art and said, 'Oh, this is great! If the book looks this great, I don't care how it's written!' I was like, 'Oh, good. That's a load off me. If you're looking for non-quality writing, I'm your guy.' Of course, I'm being sarcastic. John cares greatly about what's going on in the book."

This isn't the first time that the near-future's most wanted lawbreaker has infiltrated the four-color format. Back in 1997, Marvel published The Adventures of Snake Plissken as a one-shot lead-in to that summer's theatrical release of Escape From LA. This ongoing comic, however, is part of a more orchestrated plan to revitalize Snake. Although Hill, Carpenter and Snake Plissken himself, Kurt Russell, don't have complete control over the characters and incidents contained in the movies, they do have all rights to Snake himself, and their intention is to feature him wherever they can. Special Edition DVDs of the two Escape movies are scheduled for release before the year's end, and novels and a video game are also forthcoming. And in even bigger news, an anime Snake Plissken movie is due out next year, a preview of which will be included on the first film's new DVD.

While Hill announced that the animated movie will take place after Snake's rampage through Los Angeles, the comic is set in between the two live-action adventures. "We pick up the story the very next day after the first film," O'Neill notes. "But because we're trying to keep references to the actual films at a minimum, I just wrote vaguely in the very first panel, 'Early the next day.' John thought that was great, because it acknowledges the film without having to actually go into detail. We figure that if you're picking up this comic, chances are you have seen the film."

Atlantic City

Anyone who has seen Escape From New York will remember that the 1981 movie is set in what used to be the future - 1997, a period now six years out of date. "We had a big discussion about that when we first started to figure this out," O'Neill admits. Attempts to simply nudge the movie's plot to a later date proved particularly problematic due to 9/11. "The World Trade Center is a pretty pivotal plot device in the first film," O'Neill continues. "That's how Snake gets into Manhattan [he lands on one of the Towers' roofs], and then that's where they try to leave from. [But in reality, the Towers] were destroyed in 2001, and, of course, there's no prison there. So, we're going along with the old timeline of the first film, and I guess one would have to view it as an alternate reality. It's 1997 - which is some 16 years in the future from when the film was made - and I'm writing the comic that way, too. I'm viewing [the setting] as 16 years from the time I'm actually writing, which is right now."

The two films left the creative team with another potential creative mine-field. Outside of New York and Los Angeles, almost nothing is seen of the rest of the country. And since the movies couldn't be referred to directly anyhow, O'Neill had to imagine Snake's brave, newer world.

"The first film implies that WWIII is going on," O'Neill says. "It apparently hasn't gone nuclear, because there would be no film and everyone would be dead. But society has essentially started to collapse, and every major city has broken down into its own little universe, with its own laws. The areas between these cities are nomadic waste-lands, free-fire zones. With that sort of pseudo-anarchy going on, there's a lot of potential for Snake to run into trouble."

In that kind of dystopian landscape. Snake emerges as a latter-day version of "that Clint Eastwood character, the Man With No Name, who goes wandering from town to town, trying to mind his own business," O'Neill comments. "Snake really doesn't care about other people's problems, but occasionally he gets pulled into them, whether he likes it or not. He's somebody who doesn't want to care about doing the right thing, but sometimes he ends up having to."

Remarks Rodriguez, "After the first film, you realize that this guy is just an A-number-one badass who has a lot of distrust and disdain for most people. He has a very short list of people he actually likes. In Escape From New York, he had a job to do, and he went out there and bitched and moaned the whole time - just gritting his teeth until he could get back and kill somebody - but he did do the job. But, because he was forced to do that. Snake is pretty pissed off at the beginning of our story."

When Escape From New York ended, Snake was last seen heading off in some direction away from Manhattan. To O'Neill, who was raised in New Jersey, it only seemed natural that Snake might want to travel to the biggest city in the Garden State. "I wanted this first four-issue story arc to be like a rollercoaster ride, just balls-to-the-wall action," O'Neill grins. "And because Snake has the pardon from the first film, he has a clean slate to do whatever he wants. So, off he goes to Atlantic City to pick up his life where he left it, which means that he's back to a life of crime. He gets involved in a caper that I like to think of as the ultimate car boost.

"And since it's a pseudo-futuristic [environment], it's a highly tweaked Atlantic City," O'Neill comments. "The casinos are 60-story-tall buildings, with all these huge, goofy gambling-themed cartoon characters on the roof and big dollar signs everywhere. There's one called the Dead Presidents, which has a theme of money and dead Presidents. All the waitresses walk around in George Washington wigs. And on display in that casino is the '61 Continental that John F. Kennedy was in when he was assassinated. Snake and his associate/friend - even though we use the term 'friend' loosely - hatch a scheme to steal the car and provide it to a client, who will then give them something around $30 million for it. But things just go terribly wrong from there."

Philadelphia

And after that bit of grand theft auto, the one-eyed rogue ventures to the City of Brotherly Love. "In the next story arc," O'Neill reveals, "Snake ends up in Philadelphia. The tentative plan right now - and this could change - is that Philadelphia is the polar opposite of New York. When New York became a prison, all the wealthy people who lived there had to go somewhere, so they all moved to Philadelphia. It's crystal clean. Everything is bright lights and glass buildings. I want to make it the ultimate politically correct town, where smoking and eating meat are illegal - like some of the things that they allude to in the second film. Philly is a walled community, but for the opposite reason - it's to keep people out. And dirty, scruffy Snake has to break into the city."

If the legal barriers are ever settled, adaptations of Snake's filmed trips to New York and Los Angeles wouldn't be out of the question. Having befriended the upcoming animated movie's screenwriters, William Wilson and Corey Mitchel, O'Neill notes that they wouldn't mind if he adapted their work as well. At the same time, faithful readers should expect to see a few familiar elements from the comic on the big screen when the anime feature comes out.

"We've discussed having some of the characters I created show up in the film and vice versa," O'Neill reveals. "Let's just say, hypothetically, that I create a story that takes place in Texas, and I put a governor there. That would become part of the continuity, and if the [anime people] had a story to tell that took place in Texas and involved a governor, it would be the same guy. We're trying to keep our universes in sync."

Although he was already a devotee of Snake's screen appearances, O'Neill prepared himself for the comic series by "watching the first film religiously - specifically, how Snake reacts to situations, interacts with people, does he actually have friends. We've had some debates on whether Snake ever actually smiles, and I've watched the films a couple of times now, and he doesn't so much smile as smirk. As trivial as that sounds, that's important for a character who's very quiet and solemn. To know that every once in a while, he'll smirk - even if it's in a cynical, mean-spirited way - is relevant. I need to know as a writer what, if anything, he finds amusing, what pisses him off, what he's willing to tolerate."

Rodriguez, on the other hand, relied on "a lot of photo stills. We have a great little program where we can run the DVD, freeze frames and print them out. The funny and bizarre thing about the character is that when Snake is happy, he looks 'Rrrri' And when Snake is mad, he's 'Rrrr!' And when Snake is surprised, he's still kind of 'Rrrr!' But because the comic book has to freeze a second of time - unlike a motion picture, where it keeps going - if I require a specific [reaction], I need a different expression than the 'Rrrr!' face that Kurt does all the time in the movies. So, every so often. I'll get a shot of Kurt from another film - like John's Big Trouble in Little China, where Kurt's facial expressions are all over the map - and I'll use that for reference. Drawing Kurt has been a challenge, man. I want our Snake to have the essence of Kurt's character."

Even with the level of support that they've received from Carpenter, Hill and Russell, there are still some things that O'Neill and Rodriguez can't do, such as reveal anything about Snake's background. "John feels very strongly that it's much more romantic to keep that mysterious," O'Neill offers. "It would be nice to tell those secrets, but I definitely understand his point-of-view."

And while O'Neill has found that it's acceptable to give Snake plenty of reasons to distrust nearly everyone he meets, playing up other character traits won't necessarily receive the same nod of approval. "When I first went over some story ideas with Debra, I mentioned that I would like to take Snake to Atlantic City and maybe have a scene of him gambling, and she stopped me and said, 'Snake never has any fun!' " O'Neill laughs. "So, I know that I can't have Snake lounging on a recliner, drinking a beer, watching football. His life always has to suck. I'm afraid. There's no rest for the wicked or Snake."

New Jersey Turnpike

In charting Snake's exploits, the illustrator had to get a geography lesson from his comics collaborator. "Our story starts in the middle of New Jersey, on the Turnpike, and Bill grew up there, so he knows what the terrain looks like," Rodriguez explains. "When I got the script, I said, 'OK, Snake's driving down the highway,' and I drew my highway. But whenever I do a highway, I draw a desert. I'm from LA, so, to me, everything is desert and mountains. It was really interesting to sit down with Bill and go over everything. 'No, no,' he would tell me. 'There has to be a lot of green. The New Jersey Turnpike doesn't look like the freeways out here.'

"That was the weird thing for me, just sucking it up. What's a tollbooth? I don't know anything about that stuff. I just did a skyline of Atlantic City, because I've never been to Atlantic City before. I wanted to make [our version] look a lot like the real place, though, so I went ahead and used the reference that Bill gave me. The great thing about Bill is that he's also an artist. If I don't get something, he can go ahead and visually explain it to me."

John Carpenter's Snake Plissken Chronicles wasn't supposed to lead the new wave of media designed to reintroduce the rough-and-tumble rogue. That honor was being reserved for the Special Edition DVDs - until their release was rescheduled for later this year. That change of plans put an extra burden on Chronicles' creative team, who will soon discover if the world really desires the return of a character who has only appeared on screen twice in two decades.

"When we were first offered the property, we mulled that over: 'Will people be interested in Snake Plissken?' From what we've seen so far, I believe that people will be," O'Neill says. "We received a lot of response from the sneak preview issue at the San Diego Con last year. Unlike Star Wars or Star Trek, where the fan base is very visible, there are many die-hard Snake Plissken fans who keep it to themselves that they're fans. It's not like there's a lot of merchandising out there. There aren't any T-shirts: 'I heart Snake Plissken.'

"I'm not looking to change the world with this comic. I don't have any of those excuses that I love to hear people use when they try to justify why they like Star Trek: 'Oh, it shows the human condition and how we'll all be living together in peace in the 23rd century.' No, you watch Star Trek because you want to see Kirk get laid and spaceships explode, all right? Let's be honest. So I don’t have any of those justifications, other than that I don't consider entertaining people to be a cardinal sin. I believe that Tone and I are doing a pretty decent job of creating this comic book, and I think that when people are done reading it, they'll say, 'That was pretty cool!' "

"I go to the comic book store and buy comics because I want them to be good, you know what I mean?" Tone Rodriguez says. "And Chronicles is going to be a good book - & great, fun I read. And who doesn't want to see Snake Plissken?!"