Multiplex is a webcomic about life at the movies and all the fun and drama that can happen there. We recently spoke to Gordon McAlpin, the comic’s creator, about Multiplex’s evolution, the many very realistic ways it showcases diversity in its cast, and how to address Hollywood’s ongoing problems with racism.
TMS: In a nutshell, your comic is about people working at a movie theater and the adventures they have there. Would you like to expand on that a bit?
Gordon McAlpin: That’s more or less the elevator pitch that I give at conventions, myself. It’s more like a sitcom-style approach to humor comics, so the humor is a little more character-based than gag-based, but yeah… basically, it’s about a bunch of kids that work at a movie theater. Or, not so much “kids” anymore, because they’ve been aging in real-time as the strip has progressed, so the main characters (Kurt and Jason) are in their late twenties now.
TMS: Multiplex features a very diverse cast and as a result deals with issues like inter-faith dating, internalized homophobia, and corporate sexism. Did these themes come up naturally or did you consciously choose to bring them up? Do any of the characters represent parts of your own background?
McAlpin: It’s a little of both, I guess. I don’t generally like to be didactic (that might surprise some of my readers), but when you throw different characters at each other, stuff happens. Sometimes I find these dualities funny or interesting, and sometimes I like to talk about how people talk about ideas.
To me, the arc with Jason and Angie’s relationship was really about zealotry, for instance, not religion. I was drawing parallels between people who are overzealous about religion (e.g. fundamentalist Christians like Angie) or atheism (Jason) and people who are overzealous about any other kinds of opinions, such as (surprise!) movies. Neither of them was right or wrong, exactly.
So Jason is pretty heavily based on my own background, but most of the characters are some part of me. Especially the horrible ones. Jason is like an exaggerated version of me when I was twelve years younger. He’s half Filipino, half white. His birthday is November 7th. He’s kind of grumpy. He’s very passionate about his opinions and (arguably) overly concerned with stating his opinions about everything very precisely, especially movies, and he enjoys talking about those opinions with people.
For the most part, the events in the comic aren’t from my life. I’ve never worked at a theater. I just, you know, research and extrapolate from similar jobs I’ve had and so on.
One exception to that was Jason and Angie’s relationship. That was kind of inspired by a short-lived relationships I had, where things didn’t work out partly because of the fact that I was an atheist and they were Christians. And through those experiences, I felt like I got a little smarter and less… abrasive than I was when I was younger.
In a sense, the first several years of Multiplex are sort of a bildungsroman about Jason — a coming of age or spiritual education. He starts off as a pretty big asshole, and he slowly but surely shaves down the sharpest edges. Slightly. Apparently so slightly that some of my readers haven’t even noticed.
TMS: In the face of the numerous cases of white actors being cast in roles that should go to people of color as well as the recent all-white Academy Awards, how do you feel about the need for racial diversity in Hollywood films? Are there any less-known actors who you think should start getting some starring roles?
McAlpin: This is such a complicated question. The short, obvious, and entirely too easy answer is, “Of course Hollywood films should have more racial diversity.” But that says nothing about why the problem exists or how to fix it.
50% of movie tickets in America are bought by minorities. But they star in nowhere near that percentage of the movies that get produced. Minorities in America will and do watch movies about white people — Hispanics and Latinos especially, who buy roughly 1/4 of all movie tickets in the U.S., despite being only about 17% of the population — but the reverse is generally not the case.
Same with gender: women buy as many movie tickets as men, but men are far less likely to see movies starring women than the reverse. In other words, for all the whining you see from the anti-SJW contingent about pandering to women or minorities, the opposite is the case: Hollywood panders to white men. (I don’t think anyone reading The Mary Sue will be shocked by this revelation.)
But is Hollywood under any obligation to do anything but try to make the most money possible? No, it isn’t — but I think it should do it anyway, because pandering to racists and sexists is, in itself, racist and sexist. And if they don’t, the audiences that care about that sort of thing should stop supporting it. It’s the money men who refuse to finance films with women and minority leads more than anything else, and money men only care about money.
But audiences — and I include myself in this — literally reward this pandering by continuing to shovel money at these companies. Even if we boycott, say, Ghost in the Shell, we’re still going to see a dozen other Paramount or Dreamworks movies. Their takeaway will just be: “See? Women can’t carry a big-budget movie that isn’t Star Wars.”
The situation is exacerbated by the death of mid-budget studio films. You can take chances with “small” movies in a way that you can’t with $200 million (plus marketing costs) at stake. But Hollywood is obsessed with the blockbusters. I think we would have seen a Black Widow movie by now, except that a Black Widow movie wouldn’t need to cost $150 million and Marvel Studios just does not make $60 million movies. Maybe the success of Deadpool — which took forever to get off the ground, in part because of its relatively low cost — will change that, but I’m afraid Hollywood will just see it as a call for more R-rated superhero movies. The fact that a $60 million movie now is considered “mid-budget” is insane, really.
The thing is, outside of Hollywood, there are a lot of films by and about women, Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, gays, lesbians, and what-have-you… because the democratization of filmmaking technology means anybody who wants to be a filmmaker can be. But these independent movies aren’t the action movies and CG animated blockbusters us nerds all scramble to see on the big screen. If we really want more diverse films, not just pay lip service to the idea, I think we the audience need to stop focusing so much on Hollywood, and we need to support independent theaters, support independent studios and filmmakers, and maybe focus on new ways of funding the movies we want to see. Equity crowdfunding hasn’t really taken off yet for film. I think there’s a lot of potential there.
In any case, until Hollywood starts losing money from not making movies that are representative of the world we actually live in, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of improvement, and I think it will be easier to effect that change is from outside than inside.
As far the actor thing… hm. I don’t know! I’d rather see good actors in a good supporting role than a bad starring role. But here are a few actors I mostly or only know from supporting roles who I’d love to see more:
Kiersey Clemons was great in Dope. I just finished watching that one, and she cracked me up.
Kathryn Hahn is always funny.
Lizzy Caplan is doing well with Masters of Sex, but is mostly stuck with minor roles in film.
Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield from The Wire) has been working steadily on TV for ages. He’s on Amazon’s Bosch series now, which I really like, but he doesn’t get nearly as much to do on it as he deserves.
Anthony Mackie is pretty well known for being Falcon in the Marvel movies and a few other supporting roles, but he hasn’t had much in the way of starring roles. He’s so charming on-screen that I want to be buds with him.
TMS: How have your art and writing evolved since you started Multiplex?
McAlpin: I had only drawn a couple of very short comics in Adobe Illustrator before starting Multiplex, so I had no idea what I was doing. The drawings were terrible. The character designs were terrible. The layouts were terrible. I was trying to channel movies a bit too much, so I repeated panels in order to emulate long takes in film without regard for the fact that repeating panels more than four times in a row gets incredibly monotonous.
So I’ve gotten better, I got faster and I built up a huge library of characters and backgrounds. The technology available to me has improved, too, though. I bought a Wacom tablet and started sketching things out, which helps the characters look less stiff, and the character designs look a bit more like how I draw by hand now (just, you know, without outlines). I started using Astute Graphics’ Illustrator plug-ins to push color around and all kinds of other tricks, too. And Illustrator added features like the Blob Brush or the improved Free Transform tools, which help tremendously.
Writing-wise, I think the strip started improving as soon as I decided to age the characters. As soon as I did that, I knew that the main characters had to get promoted or leave eventually — and that I had to start working toward an ending. So I loosely mapped the rest of the series out in 2008 or 2009 and have been working toward that ending ever since. The specifics change all the time, of course, but the ending is still basically the same as it was eight years ago.
I’ve started writing more with the collections in mind, too, so that there’s a bit more thematic unity to what will (hopefully, if they’re ever printed) appear in the fourth, fifth, and sixth books than there was in the first few, more gag-strippy years of the comic.
TMS: Your storylines over the last few years have gone from being more about staff pranks to corporate intrigue. What made you go in this new direction?
McAlpin: The characters got older! The reason for the “corporate intrigue,” as you put it, is that this is the kind of stuff movie theater managers have to deal with. And, of course, some ushers, but for the most part Norma — the “good” manager of the last several years of the strip — insulated Kurt and Jason and the gang from the upper management’s shenanigans, so I could let them be goofy and play their pranks and be kids. Now that Evelyn has taken over as general manager and Jason and Kurt are both managers, as well, they’re exposed to that stuff, and so they needed to choose to either be quiet and play along or fight it.
The focus on the theater potentially shutting down also plays into the single most obvious plot line of any story about any business: the “we’ve got to save the ______!” trope. I’m just doing it a little differently, I hope, than say, Car Wash, UHF, Blues Brothers, Babe: Pig in the City, The Muppets, One Crazy Summer…
TMS: You’ve said Multiplex is going to end soon. Do you have plans for a big finish? Will there be a happy ending and a big kiss to finish it off?
McAlpin: My readers already know that the chain that owns the Multiplex 10 has decided to sell or close it, but the main characters don’t know that just yet. So like I was just saying, the strip has been leading up to this “we’ve got to save the movie theater!” storyline for a while. Hopefully the readers will see that it’s all been leading to where things end up, and that they get a satisfying farewell to their favorite characters. No comment about whether or not there’s a happy ending, though. Mwah hahahahaaa… Just kidding. Most of the characters make it out alive.
The big kiss actually already happened, though! Jason and Becky got together at the end of the story arc where they made a zombie movie. Maybe Jason and Kurt will kiss.
TMS: What comic projects do you have planned for when Multiplex is done?
McAlpin: More Multiplex, for starters! Multiplex: The Revenge (Book Three) will be released in the fall — hopefully September. The strip should still be going at that point, though. I’m not sure exactly how long it will take to wrap everything up. I’d guess somewhere between six months and a year, though. But after the strip ends, I’ll be continuing to do two Multiplex strips a week like usual, except they’ll be bonus strips for the collected edition of Book Four and movie review comics and things like that. I’ve been using Kickstarter to fund the production of this new material, but since the regular strip will be over, I’ll be using Patreon to fund the bonus comics instead, assuming my patrons stick around.
Since I’ll have time to work on some other projects, I do have a non-fiction comic that I’ve been meaning to work on, to pitch to various publishers. The most I want to say about that right now is that it’s about media history.
TMS: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?
McAlpin: I have two other Multiplex-related things that I’m working on, slowly. One is a Multiplex-inspired board game with Vile Genius Games. They will be running a Kickstarter for the board game this summer. (That’s their project, really, not mine, though it’s based on my game design, and I will be doing all the art, of course.)
The other is a Multiplex animated short that will also serve as a pilot, if there’s enough interest to keep making more. That will be half prequel, half reboot, since it’s set in the present day. That will tell the story of how Jason and Kurt first met. I’m working on the script for that right now, now that my “writers’ room” (fellow movie webcomics veterans Joe Dunn and Tom Brazelton, plus veteran web series writer/producer Dana Luery Shaw) and I have figured out the general story. I hope to launch a Kickstarter for the animated short soon after Multiplex: The Revenge is released this fall.
Multiplex can be found here.
Alex Townsend is freelance writer, a cool person, and really into gender studies and superheroes. It’s a magical day when all these things come together. You can follow her on her tumblr and see her comments on silver age comics. Happy reading!
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