ANTHRAX Guitarist Talks Comic Books

ANTHRAX and THE DAMNED THINGS guitarist Scott Ian recently spoke to Bryan Reesman of Attention Deficit Delirium about Scott's passion for comic books, including Ian's collaboration with DC Comics on a two-issue Lobo run and a Demon mini-series that is in the works. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow belw.

Attention Deficit Delirium: How did you get involved with DC, and how did you pick the titles that you were going to work on?

Ian: They initially called my manager a few years back asking if I would be interested in coming in and having a meeting. We had no idea what they wanted to talk about. So I set it up and met a bunch of editors at DC, and they asked, "Do you know why you're here?" I said, "Actually, no. Not a clue." They said, "We want to do a book with you. We think you've got a pretty good point of view and have read a bunch of stuff you've written, and we just think you've got something to say." I was like, "Really?" I kept looking over my shoulder thinking there was someone standing behind me. They said to take some time and think of characters and gave me an open door as far as the DC universe was concerned. They said to think about characters and come up with some storylines and outlines. I had a couple of ideas for some Batman stories, but I immediately found out that some of their A-list characters — Superman, Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — have a lot of rules and regulations that you have to follow unless you're Frank Miller or Grant Morrison or someone like that. But for someone like me [it was different]. There's a lot of continuity stuff that I don't know because I haven't followed a lot of that stuff. So I basically said to them that I wanted to do a horror oriented story and what character could I use where I wouldn't have to worry too much about stuff? They immediately came back to me and said they had wanted to do another Lobo book for a couple of years. The light bulb just went off because I was a big fan of Lobo in the '80s, and I just felt it was the perfect character to start with because he's very no holds barred and you don't have to worry too much about reality when you're writing Lobo. In some ways it made it easier for me, but at the same time made it harder because I had so much freedom with the character and started getting too big with too many ideas. Then I tried paring it down.

Attention Deficit Delirium: What led you to The Demon?

Ian: It's just another character that I've always really liked, and before Lobo was even finished they were asking me about doing something else. I had brought up that I already had Lobo in Hell, so I thought why not stick with it and try a Demon story next. They loved it because he's one of those characters that they only use as a recurring or background character, but it's been a while since The Demon had his own book. I think I have something cool to say, and I think I came up with a really cool idea for a back story for this character that I created for the story. The Demon just fit in as the character that needs to fight this person.

Read more from Attention Deficit Delirium.