SPENCER LAMM
072 | W W W. S C I FI N OW.CO.U K
BOOK CLUB
InterviewCan you tell us how you met the
Wachowskis and got involved in The
Matrix comics?
We met at Marvel comics, and worked on
a book called Ectokid. Lana was hired to
be the writer right at the same time I was
hired. The Matrix was still years away at this
point, this was mid-Nineties and The Matrix
started fi lming in 1998. At that point Lana
and Lilly wanted to be fi lmmakers. They
were writing a bunch of scripts and I have
drafts of The Matrix that defi nitely pre-date
the fi lmmaking draft by at least a couple of
years. They got interest in the script of The
Matrix but people didn’t fully understand it.
That’s where [artist] Steve Skroce came in.
They didn’t just do normal storyboards,
Lana and Lilly had to go in to Warner Bros,
and walk executives through the script.
And they did that with two 11x17 book
glyphs of Steve’s work. They were more than
storyboards; they were basically full-on
comic books and they walked the executives
through visually what the fi lm was.
My connection with the fi lm itself is that I
stayed in touch [with the Wachowskis] after
I left Marvel and would talk to Lana and get
In 1998 we were already reaching out to
authors and explaining what we wanted to
do which was ‘we want to do a ten-page story
centred on a fi lm that’s coming out next year
from Warner Bros. A sci-fi. And can we tell
you more?’ If they said yes then we would
send them the script. There was no security,
it was a different time. Some people like Bill
Sienkiewicz responded really well and I am
completely indebted. Some people who will
remain nameless responded with not-so-kind
words but most of the people we got, Neil
Gaiman, Kurt Vonnegut... that all happened
back in 1998 before the fi lm came out.There are four new stories in the new
edition, can you tell us about those?
We already had 28 stories but we originally
did trade paperbacks and it broke down well
into 12 stories for each, so that’s 24. That left
four stories. So actually these four stories
are not technically new, they were just never
printed before. It’s a beautifully unique
situation to be able to have something new to
print 20 years after it was fi rst created.You have mentioned The Matrix
website, where users could use codes
to unlock content on the site, can you
tell us more about that?
The website was born of the comics. We
would not have been doing the website if
we didn’t have the comics. If we didn’t have
the notion of ‘hey let’s do these comics, hey
let’s do them digitally’ then it wouldn’t have
happened. And then if we’re doing them
digitally, we have to be in control more
directly of the website.
If you look at the end pages in The Matrix
book, they are literally the news updates that
I wrote throughout the dates of us releasing
the comics. It was a bit of push-and-pull,
but eventually we did get complete control
of the website. If you look at the credits of
the fi rst Matrix fi lm, one of the last things
is code=stake and that’s our fi rst major
code for the website. The codes thing that
we set up is something that I could not even
imagine now. We would put stuff up and
people would fi nd codes. There were even
dedicated websites to fi nd the codes.What made you decide to come back
to The Matrix 20 years later?copies of the script as things were moving
forward. And Lana was like ‘if we do this, do
you want to work on it and do the comics?’.
[When fi lming eventually started] Steve
and I jumped on a plane to Australia where
they were fi lming in 1998. I didn’t have a
fi rm plan but the bottom line is my theory of
doing the comics turned into me doing the
The Matrix website. Thank God I went. I was
going more as a vacation really. And it was
amazing. I realised I had a tape recorder,
a camera and access. So, I did interviews
with Carrie Anne Moss and did all this stuff
just because I was there! And that was all
the content we used for the fi rst wave of the
website and the comics.
It was more passion and interest and
excitement in the moment. I’d already met
with the powers that be at Warner Bros so I
knew I already had some kind of a budget to
do a website and to put together the comics.
There was no plan to get content or anything
except go to Australia and see friends but
then it turned out to be a Godsend.How did you compile the original
stories for The Matrix comics?We speak to the editor of upcoming graphic novels The Matrix Comics: 20th
Anniversary Edition and Doc Frankenstein, as well as the creator of the original
Matrix website, about working with the Wachowskis and his extensive career
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