The hero or the fool: Matt Kindt, David Lapham talk life, power, and culpability in ‘Knight City’

Knight City ain’t your average superhero book.

For one, it’s about more than leaping tall buildings and saving kittens. In the three-issue miniseries, we encounter the titular Knight as he’s stuck — between his days as a triumphant hero and his “nights” as yet another loser with no powers. So, as he nears his breaking point, a choice emerges: “embrace his extraordinary abilities or seek solace in the ordinary.”

But Knight City‘s just as important for the “heroes” behind the scenes, as comics pros Matt Kindt and David Lapham join forces for this personal and profound exploration of what it truly means to be a hero.

Perhaps you’d think that having two such heavyweights together again might be an issue. (The pair worked together on the recent-ish Hero Trade.) But there are no egos in this project; just good ideas.

“My initial thought was like, ‘Well, he doesn’t have to wear any clothes. He could just be naked.’ And Dave…you were talking me off the ledge of that idea,” Kindt said in a recent Zoom. “And it’s like, ‘Well, it might make sense if he has a high vis suit, so it’s more of…here comes the emergency help.’ And he’s more of a calming presence when it’s time to rescue people rather than this naked guy.”

That instance very much set the tone for the entire collaborative process across this book, with Kindt writing and coloring and Lapham handling the art.

“I think that it’s been very collaborative and back and forth,” Lapham said during the same Zoom call. “We’ve both been around for a while, even if I started as a wee lad. But Matt’s very open to ideas and going back and forth. And I think we’ve never had a conflict. There’s often this gray area in the middle where in the process ideas come up. And then if we determine that the new idea is better than the old idea, we go that way.”

OK, maybe there was one minor, near-conflict, but it was thoroughly resolved.

“I was going to paint a test page and send it to Dave to approve,” Kindt said “Once it was time, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I got to paint the first issue.’ So I just painted the whole thing. And then after I painted it, scanned it in and I was like, ‘I never sent a test page for [Dave] to approve.’ I was so scared. But he was kind enough to love it.”

That’s because at the end of the day, Kindt and Lapham aren’t just old pros, but they’ve found in each other the kind of craftsmanship and artistry that really makes a difference. Call ’em the “Indie Comics Batman and Superman,” if you’re so inclined.

“Here’s the thing – I was a fan of yours so long before we ever met,” Kindt said. “Anytime I’m writing this, I’m always like, ‘You don’t need me. Why am I here?’” Kindt’s such a fan, in fact, that he even decied to “write in the grid you used in Stray Bullets – that six and eight panel things. So every time I write when we’re together, I’m always like, ‘OK, I’ll do that, ’cause that’s what I like to see.’”

Meanwhile, Lapham is appreciative of Kindt’s “great scripts that are really, really tight as a whole, but they also contain big rooms of space for the storytelling.” He’s equally appreciative that he didn’t have to color this bad boy.

“I’m usually really terrified of color,” Lapham said. “That’s why I work in black and white. I can’t really do it myself. If we do a Stray Bullets story, I’ll color it with Photoshop. I could keep changing the colors until I figure out something that I’m happy with or that Maria is happy with. Coloring can be great, but it’s totally putting your trust in someone else’s hands.”

And after Knight City, Kindt understands the feeling.

“I was thinking, ‘Is this how Dave Stewart feels when he’s painting or coloring Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy comics,'” Kindt said. “Like, ‘I hate this guy. I’m never working with him again.’ That, and is this why people do adult coloring books for therapy?”

But despite their camaraderie and connection, a singular question arrives: Why opt for a superhero book? Given their individual skills, and how effectively they’ve meshed as a unit, wouldn’t they want to do something a bit more, say, groundbreaking? That’s not to disparage superheroes (it’s so much of our bread and butter here at AIPT), but these two have done some wild, inventive stuff over the eyars, and wouldn’t that be more interesting?

Turns out, superhero stories are more essential than you’d expect for our comics paladins.

“Some of the biggest superhero fans I know in that way are guys like the Hernandez brothers and Evan Dorkin and people like that, who don’t do anything really to do with superheroes,” Lapham said. “They have that love from those original things and stuff that they grew up with.”

And Kindt and Lapham are the same way: No matter where they’ve gone creatively, superheroes are an undeniable foundation.

“Watchmen and those Alan Moore things would be the North Star,” Lapham said. “And, of course, the Dave Gibbons artwork, which was bred into me and I do think about it a lot because it was at that time when I was a teenager and it left an impression on me. I think about it a lot when I’m drawing these deconstructed superhero stories.”

Added Kindt, “There was a point in comics where you could just read everything because there wasn’t a Watchmen or Dark Knight [Returns]. As I got older, I was like, ‘Are you going to be like Watchmen?’ If it’s not going to be better than Watchmen, why bother?”

So, then, how do you work in the same realm as a Watchmen, even if you know you can’t tell as quite a revolutionary superhero tale yourself? Well, you find other inspirations and in-roads.

“One touchstone for me in how I approached storytelling was Concrete by Paul Chadwick,” Kindt said. “I didn’t realize that at the time, but what he was doing with that book was taking an absurd premise, a wild superhero-type premise about a guy where aliens come down and made him this big concrete monster, and Chadwick was writing a book that was like, ‘If that happened, then what would this guy do?’ I think that every story I write, if it’s a twist on a superhero or it’s a detective, you can apply that same idea.”

For Lapham, it’s sort of the same idea: Get back to something elemental that spoke to you as a young, hungry fan.

“It seemed like the only place to go was back to the traditional superheroes, and so you saw people going back to the simpler time before they were all horrible rapists and murderers in their private life,” Lapham said. “We can have fun with them again.”

So, Kindt and Lapham boiled Knight City down to a rather basic question: “It’s this idea of who’s the hero here, Clark Kent or Superman – that idea of what’s the real identity there,” Kindt said. “Who’s the real person?”

Kindt said that it’s not about “the superhero thing,” but rather the “moral dilemma,” adding, “Do you owe it to the world to use this ability for good? Or, is it OK to just not do that and to just be a normal person?” It is a story of dichotomy — power versus powerlessness; freedom versus obligation; and heroes of yesteryear and also today.

To better understand this dynamic, let’s look at an important enough element across Knight City #1: sleep. More specifically, after a long day saving the world, the Knight tries to find a place to unwind. When you’re this world’s version of Superman, it means traveling a mile under the Arctic tundra.

“Like, what would a person really do in a crazy situation,” Kindt said. “So maybe subconsciously, I was tapping into that idea of…if you’re a superhero, if you can hear everything, what’s that like for real? And I think that was the kernel of this story – how do you sleep at night, if you’re laying down and then you can hear everything. I can’t sleep in a room that has a ticking clock. You can literally hear your life ticking away as you’re going to bed, which is not a great feeling.”

It’s not just presenting cool visuals — “I’m going to do a shout-out to your lettering, Dave – when he goes to sleep that first time and then the lettering and all the sounds and everything, that’s so great” — but asking some important and cutting questions.

“And if he’s trying to six or eight hours of sleep at night, does that mean 10,000 people die because he couldn’t stay up,” Kindt said. “How can you sleep if you have empathy?”

Still, some of this is reflected heavily in the design and visuals of Knight City. Lapham said he wasn’t “spending months creating a bible for this three-issue story.” Rather, he did heaps of character sketches beforehand to nail each person and facilitate these big questions.

“That’s really important because you have to make the character real,” Lapham said. “They have to look a certain way, and sometimes that’s an exploration where you draw a bunch of takes until you look at the one and go, ‘That’s the person I can see being this person in the story.’ But I always believe you have to do some design work, sketch work, character work. You have to do just enough that you know what you’re doing. I think some people maybe get lost in that and then maybe that would be more interesting than the actual book that comes out.”

Like when it came to giving Knight shoes or not. If you recall, Kindt had to be persuaded to even put clothes on our hero in the first place. But he still got his way when it came to the choice of footwear.

“He’s barefoot the whole time. But I don’t think we ever really talk about why,” Kindt said. “Shoes are ridiculous if he can’t be hurt. And I personally hate wearing shoes. I’m always in flip-flops or something. I don’t want to wear socks or shoes if I can help it. So I like, I was like, ‘Why would he wear shoes?’ Like, he’s putting on that outfit to make other people comfortable. But shoes, he’s not wearing shoes. He doesn’t need to.”

It’s about having fun, yes, but this kind of story must always be about the person over his feats (or what he wears on his feet.)

“I think the themes and stuff I’m interested in are about why we do what we do,” Kindt said. “I like character-driven stuff, and to me, the plot and all the superhero stuff, all that’s cool because it’s a visual medium. That other stuff to me is the fun, candy coating trappings that give people… that two-sentence pitch where people pick the book up that sounds crazy. But that’s not the fun part. The interesting part to me is more about, say, why are we here? What are we doing? Why do we do what we do?”

At the same time, Knight City goes even deeper than some of these more “basic” questions about morality and one’s personal destiny. For one, I questioned whether the book is about aging. (The interview took place on my 40th birthday, FYI.) It just seemed like the Knight was grappling with changes, both personal and professional, that come to men of a certain age.

Kindt said he doesn’t believe it’s about that, and said that it’s ultimately “whatever you’re going to take from the book.”

Or, as Kindt added, “It’s difficult in a lot of ways to talk about these things. It’s like David Lynch, where he just won’t talk about what anything means because it does mean whatever you think it means. And sometimes it’s hard to articulate that stuff.”

Again, though, the magic of Knight City comes down to what this moment means for our lead, and how he has to see further than he’s ever had to before. (And that ain’t easy even with super vision.)

“I thought was interesting was him having to make his choice, to be a hero or to be a regular guy,” Kindt said. “But also a thing that I just remember we explored was how his being this super person affects those around him.”

If Knight City is about something more specific, it’s that last bit — as Kindt put it, “What’s your obligation to the world? At what point do you get involved in doing something?”

Sure, it’s maybe something that happens as we get older, but Knight City asks the question of everyone across the board. It’s a query that Kindt himself has regularly grappled with in recent years.

“As I get older, I’m like, ‘I’m too old for this protest.’ But then there’s a point where I’m like, ‘Well, if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?’ And then what can you do? How much am I willing to sacrifice? How much am I willing to risk to help other people,” Kindt said. “And that’s a hard question when it’s super easy to just sit at home and be comfortable and enjoy reading and watching movies and just whatever.”

Lapham, too, is in a similar boat: “I’m definitely a homebody. I don’t go anywhere. And so I can only imagine that would necessitate a complete upheaval and change.”

Knight City certainly asks these massive questions of one’s morality, and how they’d tackle, say, the continued onslaught of modern fascism. But it also asks deceptively simpler questions that still manage to make folks take a long, hard look in the mirror. Questions where our own heroes feel even closer to the Knight himself.

“So I think that’s the question I ask myself. And I think that’s the question that this guy’s asking – what’s more important, your personal happiness or helping others,” Kindt said. “And then to echo that, there’s a breaking point, too, where you take on too much and then you start to do more harm than good.”

Even if you’re the world’s greatest superhero, that kind of personal shift is truly massive. It’s never easy to make a move no matter how many tons you can lift in the air.

“It’s very hard and almost impossible to change,” Kindt said. “It always requires sacrificing a lot of what you were and what you did. You can’t change without all the circumstances around you changing. To apply that to this book, obviously we’re doing a planetary scale and dimensional scale that has to be reckoned with.”

But for Knight, it’s not just planetary or dimensional in scale. It’s not just a question of slightly ambiguous ideas of, say, “Should I save the day or myself?” In Knight City, our soaring paladin has been given a face to the very issues he’s grappling with: his lovely girlfriend Laney.

“He has to choose between, ‘I’m going to live in this world where I’m a superhero, or I’m going to live in this world where I’m a normal guy.’ But he has the same girlfriend in both” Kindt said. “And then what was interesting to me was him becoming aware of how he acts and how he is affecting those around him. And then he’s second guessing.”

Kindt added, “Is him being this superhero in one world handicapped his girlfriend’s ability to have a career? It’s pulled her into this black hole of his life where she can’t reach her full potential. But in the other world, where he’s just a normal dude, he’s not messing her life up.”

It’s not about, as Kindt put it, “Oh, this poor guy.” Rather, it’s about Knight “being aware of how his actions affect other people, then learning to care about that as well and being conscious of it.”

It’s another lesson that both Kindt and Lapham have worked through in their own personal lives. Each regularly works with their respective spouse: Sharlene Kindt has worked on books like Dept. H and Mind MGMT, and Maria Lapham is a writer on Stray Bullets and the more recent Good As Dead.

For Kindt, it’s often a question about who deserves what credit (and why).

“I’ll say just on a personal level, what we chose to do for a living affects those around us,” Kindt said. “And then if you have family or your wife and kids…I’m not doing what I’m doing without the help of my wife. She doesn’t get the credit she deserves. And it’s not like, ‘Oh, she’s just supporting [me]. She’s doing hard work that deserves credit.'” (Kindt said he also thinks about this as it impacts his 22-year-old daughter.)

Lapham is very much in the same boat — albeit with a few added layers.

“Maria and I, we actually do work on the books in tandem,” Lapham said. “A lot of the times with Stray Bullets, and especially stuff that we do that’s 100% ourselves, I usually almost never write by myself. It’s usually the two of us together.”

Lapham added, “When we first started Stray Bullets in the beginning…since it was just the two of us, we just listed that she was the publisher and I was the artist or whatever. And it wasn’t a big deal. And then, years later, we realized it was a big deal because we established something that wasn’t true. And then we had to go about trying to retrofit it, which is difficult.”

So, then, what do you do? How do you act like the hero of your own story without hurt/damning the ones that matter the most? For Kindt, it’s about de-centering himself in this process.

“I want to help, but also I don’t want to…everything doesn’t and shouldn’t revolve around me,” Kindt said. “I want everybody to be able to pursue their dream like I was pursuing mine. And if I can help with that, it’s a delicate balance that you have to strike in your personal life.”

And for Lapham, it’s about being grateful for the opportunities that he’s afforded as a family man.

“But in every single way, you don’t get to do what you do without the people all around you,” Lapham said. “They are contributing to it, and being part of the things that enrich your life and are reason that you’re in that space to be a dork who dreams of superheroes and weird stories and who gets to draw graffiti and complain about drawing tattoos.”

At one point, we get back to the idea of knowing what this story’s about, and my own aging-centered interpretation. While Kindt stood by his “Lynch-esque” approach, he said interviews like this one have some inherent value (beyond marketing/promotions, of course).

“I don’t really know what the book is about until somebody starts quizzing me,” Kindt said. “Or, they sit down and they start telling me and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s it.’ It’s just subtext while I’m doing it. And then I only become aware of it as we start talking about it. Like, now I know what the book is about.”

And Knight City is about all those things we’ve already mentioned: personal responsibility; the true value of heroes; what we owe our friends and family (and how we “pay them back”); and even how we make choices. It’s also about the friendship between two artists, and how they take all that they love (people-centric narratives, old-school superhero comics, meta-tinged storytelling, etc.) and make something truly great.

And as it turns out, Knight City is also a really handy mechanism for sorting through your own personal life.

“We do a family art night,” Kindt said. “So we’ll just get together and draw and paint. And one night I was like, ‘What would you do if you couldn’t do the thing you’re doing now?’ You can’t do comics and you can’t do anything comic book-related. What would you do?”

Kindt added that he’d “have to do a lot of soul searching on that answer, because the immediate one that comes to mind is stocking shelves at Target.” Meanwhile, I came up with “mortician,” but that’s a bad call given that it involves too much actual blood and more schooling.

Fortunately, Lapham had a really great answer. One that wasn’t only more thoughtful and measured, but spoke to the heart of why Knight City is such a potent and important spin on the “same old” superhero stories. A testament to what these heroes actually provide: A shared magic that makes the world a better place (if only for 32 pages).

“I’d want to be a chef,” Lapham said. “There’s creative elements that are similar to what we already do. You’re creating something for someone else to consume. And so I think there’s all the elements that are in comics.”

Knight City #1 is due out February 4 via Dark Horse Comics.