Today’s issue of Just Out featured, among a litany of other amazing content, a piece on Vancouver-based publishing house, Bluewater Productions – the brainchild of Darren G. Davis, and the home of some big time comic books.

As is usual in print media, you can only include so much information in a story, while entire interview transcriptions are blasted out into the ether via potato guns at a predetermined precipice due east of the peak of Mt. Tabor.

In an effort to decrease ether pollution, here, in its entirety, is the full interview with comic book wunderkind, Darren G. Davis…right after the jump!

What was the impetus behind you getting into comic book publishing?

When I was a kid, I always collected comic books. From there, I ended up working in the industry at E! Entertainment Television, and USA Networks, which is the Sci-Fi channel, then I worked for Lionsgate. From there DC Comics decided to double my salary, so I decided to go for the money. I always wanted to work in entertainment, so doing the comic book stuff is kind of two-fold because a lot of the stuff I was doing at DC and Wildstorm was selling their services to studios and doing stuff outside of the comic book market.

Was that an easy transition?

Yeah, because I was doing a lot of marketing and advertising in the entertainment industry. At E! I was in ad sales and at USA I was in marketing, and Lionsgate I did art direction, so it really tied in to what I was going to do at DC. I got to meet a lot of the top people in the industry and watch what they were doing and thought to myself, “I can do that.” So I launched my first comic book in 2001, which was the 10^th Muse, and it launched as the 6^th highest selling comic book. So it beat Batman, Superman, it was huge, insane. It was good though, and just from there I started adding different titles, and now we’re a publisher. 2001 is when I started producing comics, and I started Bluewater about three years ago, self-publishing.

Did you have connections for your more far-reaching comic ventures (Shatner, Harryhausen, Reichen Lehmkuhl, etc.) from your time with E!, USA, etc.? What do you feel is the allure for these big names to gravitate toward Bluewater?

We just signed Logan’s Run, we’re working with the novelist on bringing out the new comics. We’ve done a lot of licensing.

Comic books don’t sell as much as they used to sell. Back in the ‘90s they were selling 9 million copies, and now DC and Marvel are struggling at 100,000 copies. Circulation is so down on it, and being an independent publisher you’re way down on it, so you have to think of different things to gain interest. So bringing William Shatner, bringing Ray Harryhausen…I don’t want to do adaptations of anything. I want to try to do stuff that’s brand new and utilize the talent of these people. So like with William Shatner, we wanted to build on his creation of Tekwar, and with Ray Harryhausen we wanted to do sequels to all of his films, rather than just retelling all of his films. So we want to do something totally new.

You’ve received a lot of attention from the Female Force and Political Power series. What made you decide to break into biography comics, and do you feel like the exposure for those has been good or bad in terms of promoting the rest of your catalogue?

Yeah, it’s kind of fun. We just announced the Stephanie Meyer comic, the woman from Twilight, and Entertainment Weekly picked us up, Perez Hilton picked us up. It just took off again.

My partner and I were sitting around, watching the election from home and just like everybody else, we got so excited about this election. We started to think to ourselves, “Let’s do a Hilary Clinton comic.” Someone else did a Barack Obama and John McCain comic book. We were like, “Let’s do Hilary Clinton and tell her side of the story,” or “Let’s do Sarah Palin too! So we can have bookends.” We started to get a lot of buzz from it, CNN picked it up and all these places, so we thought, “Let’s do Michelle Obama and make this a bi-monthly series.” I just don’t do anything half-assed, I kind of just jump in all the way, so we’re like, “Okay let’s do it monthly and pick different people and different demographics.” So the next one we picked after that was Princess Diana, and then from there we’re moving to Oprah Winfrey. We just found out today that Barbara Walters might be writing the foreword to her book, we’re doing a version on her. So it’s really taking off. Sarah Palin signed a copy of her comic for us. Bill Clinton’s assistant called us asking for a copy of the book for Bill. And we’re like, “Why don’t you go buy it?” But still, it’s pretty cool.

So you’ve had some feedback from subjects?

Yeah. It’s good. For some reason these books have taken a life of female empowerment. We’ve been doing a lot of signings and we see a lot of older women who are coming in to buy them for their daughters, and people that have never been to a comic book store. It’s really weird. We’re sold everywhere from comic book stores to Jo-Ann Fabrics. It’s baffling; this whole thing is totally baffling to me. In theory I think the genre is great because there’s only so much you can tell within 22 pages, so they really are talk pieces. You pick one up and you read about Sarah Palin and that will either inspire you to learn more, or it will just be something you can talk to your friends about. It’s never really what I wanted my career to be, but just like anything, you have to make do with what it is.

Do you feel like all the publicity for Female Force is good or bad publicity in terms of other catalogue?

Our numbers have gone up because of Female Force. People are starting to trust the brand a little bit more. Also a lot of the comics that we pick, like Legend of Isis, we have optioned as a film at Paramount. 10^th Muse has been optioned at Universal. Those can do well on their own, but total brand new titles, it’s harder for us to bump into the marketplace. That’s why we’re doing licenses, and then intertwining one of our personal projects.

Explain the importance for you of penning the Lost Raven graphic novel. Is this part of a series on Zak Raven? When did this saga begin?

Yeah, honestly, I don’t care so…basically I was diagnosed to be HIV positive about, it’s been 10 years now. I wrote a journal, and I thought there were so many different hard decisions I had to make in that world that I probably wasn’t really equipped to do. I was a different person 10 years ago. I didn’t have the support from people that knew what was going on. I had the support from my family and friends, and all that stuff, but I didn’t have the one-on-one to know what to do. There are so many decisions that are stuck with me now from taking the medications and not taking the medications, and even as weird as how to date. So this book really gives people who are HIV positive the knowledge to know that they can make choices and that they don’t have to make their choices right away. I’m not preaching to anybody and I don’t tell anybody what to do, but the biggest thing is I want to make sure that they know they have a choice. I didn’t know I had a choice or not, because I listened to my doctor. He was one of the best ones in LA, but back then they wanted to…with the HIV medications there is, because I didn’t have any problems, they wanted to hit it hard right away so there wouldn’t be any problems. Still to this day, I haven’t had any problems at all. My partner is negative, I’m positive. So there’s, like, zero problems with it. Then also for people who don’t really know about the disease, it was a really good way to reduce stigma. He [Raven] thinks he’s somebody who’s not dying from it, because I wasn’t dying, nor have I been dying. I think that was my biggest problem when I’d have to go through support groups. People would be telling me that their friends died and everybody died, and I’ve never know anybody who’s died from it.

That explains the mirrored journal approach.

Yeah, I wanted to figure out a cool way to take my journals and transfer them into a comic book. So I came up with this idea of him getting shipwrecked on an island and basically during the day he can fight monsters and it’s a government-run island doing DNA testing on humans to do space travel for the future. And at night, all he has is this journal that he’s washed up on shore with and it’s basically his stresses of being HIV positive today.

So it is the first of its kind?

Yeah, this is the first graphic novel that ever had an HIV character as a focus, and it did really well. My crown glory from Lost Raven is that I got to speak at Yale University. That was about two years ago, and I got to speak twice there.

What can you tell me about the film being developed for Zak Raven?

There’s a kid’s book that we did called Zak Raven, Esquire. We were going to do two versions of it that had nothing to do with each other, so then we just called it Lost Raven. That’s being developed into a film by Golden House Entertainment. And we have Reichen [Lehmkuhl, from The Amazing Race] who is slated to possibly star in it.

I read about X-Factor, 45, with the world’s purported first gay comic book kiss. What are your thoughts on all mediums embracing the gay community, especially comic books, and how important is it for you to include educational story arcs, a la Zak Raven, within your comics?

Unless there’s a reason to put a gay character in a comic, unless it helps the story, I’m not going to do it. To be really honest, my demographic is straight men, 18-35. People will buy one issue if I have a gay kiss or gay sex or something, and then they’ll go back to picking up X-Men. So it really is a hard thing, but if it does really help the story, and it’s organic to it, I’ll definitely add a character. I think we have two characters that are gay. One we actually have is coming out, which is called Camelot, 10^th Muse’s brother. So we’re doing a storyline on that, because it makes sense to do it. There’s a reason to tell it, it’s not just to exploit it, to get the press that we’re doing a gay comic book.

Then what I really love the most is the book that we’re doing with Reichen. It’s called Wasps. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve met. He’s amazing, he really is cool. What I love about his comic book is it’s not exploitive; he’s just a guy who happens to be gay. It has nothing to do with, “let’s add this, let’s add that! Let’s get the bed scene!” I think that drives the story for me better than to do something like what X Factor did.

What’s the connection between Camelot and 10^th Muse?

He’s the male 10^th Muse. In Greek mythology there were nine muses, she was the 10^th one. We used a photo model for it. Do you remember Sable from WWE? She was the photo model for a while, then we moved to Cindy Margolis. We were even going to actually use Farrah Fawcett, and then she started getting sick and so we had to put the squash on that. We were going to do a version where the 10^th Muse goes back to the ‘70s. Farrah saw the image and loved it and was going to sign one, and then all this stuff happened with her.

I understand you sponsor a gay softball team?

Yeah! It’s the Seahorses, they’re part of the Rose City Softball Association. They didn’t win, but they didn’t lose. It’s a brand new start up team, and we’ll probably do it next year too. We’re part of PABA, we just joined about three months ago.

Additional info?

A lot of the stuff that we do I try to taker from my childhood, so now we have everything from Logan’s Run to… Vincent Price scared me as a kid, even the Muppet Show. Ray Harrayhausen, working with him…a lot of the stuff is based off my excitement level. I’ve been doing it 10 years and it still keeps truckin’. I didn’t think we’d be doing political comics, because honestly – I’m sure it’s not the most PC thing – half the people we do stuff on, I have no clue the real stories behind them. The exciting thing for me is I get to learn about them. We’re doing Ted Kennedy. I just know what’s in the headlines, but now I’m going to get to learn a bit more about him, Ronald Reagan. The only one we had squashed was Ann Coulter. I even hired a writer to do her and he was like, “I can’t find a non-biased way of doing this.”

They’re sold at the White House too, at the gift shop. [The Michelle Obama comic] was the top selling independent comic book the month that it came out. And the Stephanie Myer one is going to be even bigger, it’s monthly. We’re also going to be doing Michael Jackson. The hardest thing with these though is that comic fans are kind of ruthless. We’re called “whores” and “bottom feeders,” because we’re doing this Michael Jackson comic book. We’re trying to do these things where we’re really paying homage to them rather than exploiting them. Like the Michael Jackson one, we didn’t rush to get it out the next day after he passed. We’re printing it in October, and we’re also working with the official Michael Jackson fan club to do it. Do I like him as a person? You’ll never know, but we’re going to really tell an unbiased viewpoint of these people’s lives.

I do read a lot of stuff that’s out there. Message Boards are toxic. People hide behind screennames, and they can talk shit about you and not really be liable. But what people don’t realize is that they are liable for their postings. They’re admissible in court, so watch yourselves!

Any exclusive insider Bluewater info for you to share?

SE Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders, she’s coming to comic books for the first time. We haven’t announced this anywhere. She wrote The Outsiders text; she was the JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. We’re doing a couple of her existing properties as graphic novels, and then we’re also going to be doing a brand new young adult graphic novel that has never been seen before. She’s created one just for us. I’m a huge fan, so I’m really excited about that. That’s going to be 2010. We’re also going to be working with Steve Harvey on a bunch of kid’s books that we’re going to transform into graphic novels. We turn down celebrities, famous directors because we don’t want to flood the market. It’s hard to tell certain directors no!