Einstein, heady subjects at heart of Seagle's 'Genius'
- Steven T. Seagle%27s new graphic novel %27Genius%27 out on Wednesday
- Einstein co-stars as the conscience of the brilliant but troubled main character
- %27Genius%27 is Seagle%27s latest semi-autobiographical work
Fittingly, Albert Einstein plays a significant role in the new graphic novel Genius, but it wasn't a theorem or E = mc2 that led to writer Steven T. Seagle's including the famous theoretical physicist.
No, it was an opera.
Philip Glass' 1976 work Einstein on the Beach became a creative touchstone for Seagle, even though he knew very little about it and, when searching for information in pre-Internet days, couldn't find production footage or much of anything about this avant-garde opera.
So, he made a lot of assumptions about the work based on albums and the few reviews he could find, and it became "more of a fictional construct in my mind," Seagle says.
"The opera is more an impressionist painting of Einstein than a biography. Einstein is a loose construct in that work — an idea. I wanted to cast a similar net in the semiotics of comics and let him function as a visual and literary metaphor instead of a character."
In Genius, Seagle's latest work with artist Teddy Kristiansen from First Second Books, the wild-haired Einstein acts as the conscience of the graphic novel's main character, Ted.
Ted was a brilliant child who was way ahead of everyone his age, but as an adult working at a prestigious think tank, he's having a problem coming up with that one big idea that'll get him out of his slump and impress his boss.
Yet, as much as he's a genius, he lacks social know-how, and his life's about to become more complicated when his wife gets sick. The one man who might be Ted's saving grace is his father-in-law, a dying man who goes in and out of lucidity but, following a stint as a military bodyguard for Einstein in the 1930s, may hold the scientist's last big secret that could change the world.
Much of Seagle's work deals with the theme of struggling with one's faith — in the Vertigo Comics series American Virgin, his main character has issues with literal faith in God, while Ted is dealing with a crisis of confidence.
"I view myself as having a very solid sense of who I am and what I do and why," Seagle says. "And yet, my characters all seem to be doubting all three of those things with some regularity.
"Maybe the work is my therapy and I'm working on it."
Einstein as a totem was hwo Seagle envisioned him from the beginning — "a nagging voice in Ted's head, with more Nobel Prizes than Ted has," he says.
As a freelance writer, the closest Seagle gets to focused structure is having story meetings for the Disney XD cartoons Ultimate Spider-Man or Marvel's Avengers Assemble with his partners in Man of Action Studios.
The rest of the time, he says, Seagle is — not unlike Ted's search for his big idea — working alone in a room all day writing.
"I don't know many writers who don't drift. So I just imagined that a physicist like Ted — who is living a different caliber creative life — would also drift. And who better to drift to than the rock star of physics?" says Seagle, who finally saw Einstein on the Beach this year — "all four hours and 20 minutes with no intermission of it" — in Berkeley, Calif. (His review: "Amazing.")
With Kristiansen, Seagle is building a large body of work on two different tracks: highly avant-garde experimental narratives, such as House of Secrets and The Red Diary/The RE[a]D Diary, and semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life stories as in It's a Bird… and Genius.
"Teddy is a lover of literary and artist biographies, and I felt telling biographical stories was an automatic in to his muse," says Seagle, who's already 40 pages into the pair's next project. (In addition, a hardcover, full-color edition of Seagle's first graphic novel Kafka, an espionage-tinged romance being developed for TV with Kenneth Branagh, arrives Wednesday from Image Comics.)
A real-life subplot in Seagle's life actually became one in Genius. He and his wife Liesel went to Colorado to spend a couple weeks with her grandparents, Max and Grace. Max was in the latter stages of emphysema and was dying, and — like Ted's wife Hope in Genius — Liesel dropped a bomb on her husband: her granddad knew one of the great secrets of the 20th century.
"It was something big — on the level of knowing for certain that the moon landing was a hoax. That kind of big," Seagle recalls. "But as an ex-military man who had sworn an oath, Max planned to take what he knew to the grave with him.
"I became obsessed with trying to convince Max to tell me what he knew. I couldn't accept the idea that the definitive truth about this very inflammatory subject would be lost with his passing. I played a mental chess match with him over the weeks, that he eventually won."
The writer later realized that, had Max told him, he might not have known what to do with that kind of earth-shattering info.
"It was the kind of truth that would have changed everything," Seagle says. "Max kept it in his head. I thought he was being stubborn. After he died, I realized he might have been doing us all a favor."
While he admits that he is a fan of "writers putting it all out there," he also prefers the formalism of a constructed story. So with Genius, Seagle landed in a place where he was very honest in terms of family history, but took the liberty of inventing what he needed to shape the story in a way he ultimately found satisfying.
"I didn't feel comfortable writing about what Max actually knew," he says, "so the arrival of a lost Einstein theory is an invention — same level and scope — but distanced enough that I could deal with it thematically and focus on Ted's journey rather than all the reportage and documentation baggage carried by the 'real' subject."
Seagle crafted quite a few emotional and touching scenes in Genius, and the one that really chokes him up is the image of Ted's wife lying in bed, unable to sleep due to her mind running wild thinking about her impending medical results.
He had a similar occurrence in his own world, the writer says, "and I feel like Teddy gave the character this haunting facial expression that perfectly captured a kind of midnight mortality soul-searching that seemed exactly right.
"She's right next to her life partner, but couldn't feel more isolated. That's one of the main ideas I was interested in with the book — the degree to which people allow their thoughts to hold them hostage — and Teddy gave me chills with that image."
Another point Seagle makes in Genius is that small details in life are sometimes more important than the big picture.
"I can't count the number of times I thought some big shiny bauble was the prize only to learn that what stayed with me long after the fact was some minute detail on the path to that big shiny bauble," he says.
"There are one or two grand thinkers per generation that re-shape the whole world, and thank goodness for them. But the rest of us impact micro-societies on molecular levels. Our orbits are important to smaller circles of people in more subtle ways."
Seagle also feels the "fame train" of recent decades has really clouded that truth for far too many people.
"There is enormous weight in the little impacts we have on others," the writer figures, "but we've been brainwashed into thinking that if an event doesn't have a zillion 'views,' 2 trillion 'likes' and a billion dollars of revenue attached, it's somehow unimportant. I don't buy that."