If someone carved a Mount Rushmore for comic book geekdom, two of the faces would be the guys from Fatman on Batman. Both of them will be at Northern FanCon this weekend to broadcast the world famous podcast and meet the local public.
One of those faces for Mount Geekmore is, of course, Kevin Smith, no introduction needed.
The other is, due to an enormous body of work within the comic book industry, Marc Bernardin, who needs less and less introduction the larger Fatman On Batman gets.
For those just catching on to the podcast and beginning to go below the surface of comic books and their internal infrastructure, Bernardin is a blinking, breathing revelation. He has written comics for both the DC and the Marvel franchises, plus worked as an editor and/or writer for some of the pillar names in pop-culture periodicals like Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter and the L.A. Times. From feature articles to critiques, from contributing writer to inventor of his own original comic universe, Bernardin is a rare and heralded author of archetypal story.
So, at the same time, broadcasting live to world, Northern FanCon will have Kevin Smith and wordsmith.
Bernardin explained to The Citizen how he likely became a writer in the first place.
"I think it probably came from seeing Flash Gordon - the 1980 film with Sam Jones (one of last year's guests) and Melody Anderson - and being petrified that Flash Gordon was going to die, and my dad leaning over to me and saying 'it's ok, they never kill the hero' and me asking who's the 'they' you're talking about? Who's this 'they' you speak of that has control over whether the hero lives or dies?
"And that led me to begin to pay attention to what was scrolling ahead of and behind the stuff I loved to watch. Other people actually made this stuff."
Even as a child Bernardin understood that he had no effective talent as an illustrator, so if he were going to participate in this world of heroes, villains, mentors, tricksters, and plausible impossibilities he was going to have to use the skill he knew he possessed: wordcraft.
"I was an unbounded consumer of stories," he said.
"I was reading Three Musketeers and Sherlock Holmes and stuff like that when I was eight and nine years old, and ingesting comic books at an unruly pace. I was inhaling as much narrative as I could at a very young age."
That led him into recreational writing, then journalism and scripts, and up the reputational ranks he scaled. He is now not only an active creative writing force, he is also called upon as a commentator.
His chief advice to aspiring or struggling writers (because in all honesty, writing is necessarily a mental struggle for any composer) is simple.
Be arrogantly dedicated to the story you're working on, but be unfailingly humble to the audience you're reaching for.
"Be mindful of the fact that every minute somebody's spending reading your work or watching your TV show is a minute they could be spending doing something else," he said.
"I'm always trying to earn the time spent. After that it's just adjusting the fuel-air mixture for whatever outlet it is," be it a new comic plot-line or a television script or a magazine article that he happens to be penning.
His favourite thing to do is build a good sunset story. That's the kind of tale where the resigned cowboy rides off to face one last gunfight, or the veteran bank robber sets up one last heist. It is the kind of story set around a principal protagonist, a lone wolf, an outsider.
That narrative electricity gave him a sizzling jolt when he and co-writer Adam Freeman plugged into a cutting edge character for our time.
She was Destiny Ajaye and her universe was Genius (Series 1: Siege, Series 2: Cartel), an original comic with Afua Richardson as inaugural illustrator and published by Top Cow.
It's premised on a black teenaged girl who ascends to leadership in the gangs of South-Central Los Angeles and declares war on law-abiding society, specifically the LAPD.
"Genius is about a girl who's smarter than anybody else," Bernardin explained, like a proud father. "She's a prodigy. She's a prodigy at an awful thing. And what does it mean to be the best at something awful? What does it mean to be so smart you realize you're a villain? What does it mean to realize you don't have the emotional capacity to form real bonds with people? What is it like to be apart from everyone else? That sort of thing.
"At its core it's a heroic story. The hero defends the village but is not of the village. The hero is never the one who sits at the table with everybody; the hero is the one who shows up, does the awful, necessary thing, and then rides off into the distance. So what's it like to want to be in a world that has no place for you?"
Destiny Ajaye was that outsider in the world of corporate comic publication, too. Bernardin said he had a file on his hard-drive dated 2005 that outlined the initial sketch of the Genius series. All it said was, "What if the greatest military mind of her generation happened to be a little girl?"
It was fleshed out into a formal pitch by 2008 or '09. Everyone Bernardin talked to in the publishing world - and remember, he is one of the faces on Mount Geekmore - said "hard no" to the femme fatale he and Freeman had conjured up.
"The marketplace was a fundamentally different animal at that point," he said. "Looking to pitch a book with a black lead was hard. Looking to pitch a book with a female lead was hard. Looking to pitch a book with a black female lead was impossible - who also killed cops. That was a no-go at almost every publisher we went to."
Time melts glaciers. Top Cow was the first to say "okay, hmmm, tell me more" when Destiny was described. In 2014 they finally brought her off the storyboards and into the printing presses.
"The world has changed and the comic book industry has realized its shortcomings in a pretty real way," said Bernardin. "The thing that was an anomaly four years before was now what people were looking for four years later."
So now the conversation can shift to maybe making Genius into a hard boiled movie, or a rapid-fire television series.
That conversation, and many others besides, are the commodities Bernardin and Smith trade in on their podcast.
Blessed with a voice as rich as his imagery, Bernardin was well suited to making public appearances and on-camera discussions.
It was fate-ordained that Smith and Bernardin would find each other and open up the mics. Bernardin is not Smith's only recurring co-host, but he did consider it a win to get the call to come so far north of his Southern California home to do Fatman On Batman here in Prince George.
Bernardin will ride shotgun on the Battlestar Galactica live podcast tonight at 7:30 at the
CN Centre mainstage (Michael Hogan and Tricia Helfer will be live alongside him).
He and Smith will broadcast
Fatman On Batman for the live
CN Centre audience at 7:30 p.m. Saturday (separate tickets required, available online at the Northern FanCon website).
Finally, Bernardin will break down the writing and publishing processes for fellow scribes in a free Creative Corner workshop on Sunday at 2 p.m. in Kin 1 Arena.
