When I looked at the list of authors who would attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, I saw a familiar name, C. S. Pacat. I had the pleasure of interviewing Cat ahead of her panel Creating a Monster at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. We spoke about her incredible career, how Batman saved her from bullies, the recurring theme of displacement in her work, and how long she sees herself writing in the Dark Rise universe.
C.S. Pacat is The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Dark Rise and Captive Prince trilogies, the GLAAD-nominated graphic novel series Fence, as well as a writer for DC Comics. Educated at the University of Melbourne, C.S. Pacat has since lived in a number of cities, including Tokyo and Perugia, and currently resides and writes in Melbourne.
Date: 25 May 2024
Location: Carriageworks Media Room
OK, first of all, congratulations on your entire career from LiveJournal in 2009 with the online serialization to self-publishing of Captive Prince and where that ended up, Fence, and now Dark Rise. Thank you for accepting this interview!
In a past interview, you spoke about reading DC from the age of five and pooling money together with your classmates in primary school to buy the latest issue of Batman. In my head, it looks like a band of small children saying very seriously, ‘here’s 50 cents, here’s 10 cents, we’re going to get the next issue of Batman.’ I found that so cute.
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, this was decades ago now. I went to quite a rough and tumble primary school so not a lot of us had any money. We would chip $0.05 here, $0.10 here, and we’d pool all of our money for the week. Or sometimes we, you know, would skip buying lunch or something so we would have some money to buy that week’s Batman comic. We had a communal copy that we used to pass around.
But my really clear memory of that is that there were two bullies in my year level and I won’t say their names but they were a pair of redhead twins. I've never been able to enjoy the Weasley twins from Harry Potter because they traumatically take me back to my school bullies.
And because they were the bullies, they would always read the comic first. But one morning, they told me that they were going to bash me at lunchtime, me and my friend, but that was the week that Robin died in the Batman comics.
Ohh no!
And so they obviously read it first, and then they spent the whole lunch time crying in the bathroom, so they forgot to bash me.
I always think that like ‘Oh, Batman saved me when I was a child!’
That's so unfortunate. But I am glad that you didn't get bashed.
We were all getting bashed and bashing back in the day. Like I said, it was quite a rough and tumble primary school.
What does it feel like to be on the other side writing now for DC and how did you come to write for DC?
I got the gig writing for DC, yeah. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to write a comic series of my own, Fence, a sport series about competitive fencing.
I got the opportunity to write for DC when Tom Taylor, one of the best writers of comics today, absolute powerhouse at DC, writer of Injustice and Deceased, offered me the opportunity. It was an eight or ten page short as a part of a comic series called Dark Knights of Steel which is Batman and Superman but in a medieval setting. The editors at DC had read Fence and were fans, and they were happy to have me try out.
I think it’s quite a usual path: having some proof of work outside of the DC or Marvel stable, and then they’ll offer you, often as a first gig, a shorter comic like a ten-pager. It was very cool to get to write because in that ten pages I got to write Batman and the character Bane. Very, very lucky that I got the opportunity to write two high profile characters on a first outing, which is not always necessarily the case.
How did it feel? It was terrifying. I had no idea that creative pressure that I would feel when faced with writing characters with such a long and respected legacy. I just did not want to let down these icons, these iconic characters. Millions of people love Batman. You’re just a caretaker when you are writing such a beloved character.
It’s different from writing my own characters. They come out of me. If a reader loves them, I can pretty much know that whatever I did to create that character in the first place, my continuing efforts will be authentic to that. Whereas, if we come into something like Batman or Superman from the outside, you want to handle it with great care and respect the legacy.
That’s your attitude towards all things, a very considered and careful approach that comes from a place of knowing how much it means to the fans. You want to be considerate of that, and I love that.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's because I am a fan as well, you know, and we've all had the feeling of, ‘I love this thing so much, but then it's just turned a very weird direction.’
Yeah.
So, you know, you want to make sure that whatever you're contributing is authentic to that core experience that fans love.
Thank you.
So a little bit of a swerve from Batman, but in an interview with Booktopia, there was a question about ambitious goals and I found your answers super interesting. In my opinion, you’ve certainly achieved the former writing high octane escapist fantasy with intense and queer characters.
The second goal was touching on Alan Moore’s concept of the idea space and you say your most ambitious goal was to create something as iconic and long lasting as Tolkien's elf. What do you think that influential idea will be? And do you think you’ll be cursed like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes or Gege with Gojo Satoru?
I would love to be cursed like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock.
Yeah, to just recap, like Alan Moore has got this idea that ideas can be alive and that they passed from, almost like a virus in the way that a virus is alive, one human to another and the humans can die, but the idea stays alive.
He talks about some ideas having this viral power more than others. He was forming this concept before we had the idea of a meme but memes are very short lived. They burn brightly and then they burn out.
Whereas yeah, to use that example, Tolkien created what we all think of as an elf. That idea has so much power. It’s what we all gravitate towards now in our universal unconscious. And it's very hard to make an elf that is not like that.
There was Dracula in the vampire space. But then then it was Anne Rice, I think, that really colonised the idea of what we think of vampire is. That it is very attractive, dangerously attractive with a long, intense relationship between vampires. A kind of seduction and repulsion together.
I would like to contribute some kind of idea that has a power of its own like that.
I can't necessarily say what that will be.
But what I do think is that, just going back to Anne Rice, the place where there is new stuff to unlock or uncover is still very much the queer space because there's just been a lack of storytelling in that space. I feel like when Anne Rice moved in and queered the vampire or brought queer energy to the vampire then that was part of that essence of the new.
So what do I think will be that idea? I don't necessarily know exactly what it will be, but my hope is that it will be very queer. It would be very cool to kind of unlock a new space within storytelling for queer people that could feel iconic.
That’s really nice. Thank you. I love that you explored Alan. Alan. Why am I incapable of saying Alan?
Yeah, I know it's hard, right? I agree.
Alan Moore's idea of exploring and then like charting it against memes and then delving into Dracula and then tracing that to Anne Rice. And I've seen your tweets about the live-
Oh right, God, that TV series is so good though.
And then linking it to the idea of that queer space and that idea of the vampire being dangerously sexy. You can see that imprint in pop culture.
I didn’t know what answer I was expecting, but I'm really glad it was this one.
The next question is there is a recurring theme of displacement that you've spoken about in previous interviews. You've spoken about the intentional integration of that in the Captive Prince with the displacement of Damon from his kingdom.
In Fence, you can see it in the diverse background of characters due to the nature of young athletes having to move around a lot and being away from home as a result of that. Is the exploration of the steam of displacement more intentional or more incidental like throughout your entire body of work?
I think it's almost more incidental and is just like a theme I'm naturally interested in because of my own lived experience.
I grew up back in the 80s and my family is Italian. Back then being Italian was to be a kind of other. And so especially coming from a lower socioeconomic background, I had the experience of feeling really, really like not Aussie but feeling Italian. Obviously as soon as I go to Italy I just feel very Australian. There is ‘that weird kid of migrants’ feeling where you don't exactly fit in anywhere.
I got a scholarship to an extremely expensive and exclusive school, and immediately there was a process of class and cultural reprogramming where I was learning to pass in that environment. But it meant I was also growing in a way that I couldn't be my authentic family self at school because that would not fit in.
But I then also couldn't be my whole school growing self at home because it would just not be understood at the same time. In the 80s, being queer was to be a cultural outsider.
In my early 20s, I moved to Japan and lived there for six years. I’m not sure if it’s so much the case now but back then in the early 2000s, to fit in in Japan, you must look Japanese, speak Japanese, and be Japanese. If you don’t fulfill all three check marks, you’d always be an outsider. The feeling of being the outsider was strong there.
But then I had so much reverse culture shock when I came home. you know, I'd gotten so used to a culturally Japanese way of being that I found it very hard to reintegrate, so I've had all these experiences in my life where I've just kind of like, just as I'm getting settled somewhere. I'm like shifted out of a comfort zone or placed into an outsider role.
So I just think I'm naturally interested in outsiders and like. What does it mean to try and integrate into a space? How does that change you and how does that mean once you're changed? How does that mean you can never really go home again?
I don't know the answer to that or how to reconcile these disparate parts of yourselves and-
Yeah.
Then how do you show yourself in a way that can be recognized to someone in the fullest sense, right?
Yeah. They say when you learn a new language you gain a new soul but it’s not like you can ever show one or the other. It’s very hard to find someone to be with that you can show both sides fully. Maybe there isn’t an answer to that but that’s probably why it keeps popping up in my work.
Our audience is primarily uni students with a majority being Gen Z. Could you pitch your series, Dark Rise, in one sentence.
Rise of a villain.
Please share some book recommendations. What books would you recommend to read for pleasure? One for challenge. Besides Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.
Well, for pleasure, let’s say Interview with the Vampire cause we've been talking about it. For challenge, I really love the short stories of Jorge Luis Boroes so I would say a collection of his short stories.
Writing the Captive Prince trilogy and side stories, all of them delightful, spanned seven years. How many more years do you see yourself spending in the Dark Rise as its author?
Well, I'm finishing book three now, so that will take me to a total of four years. A couple years more depending on if there’s more to say and do in this universe.
OK, gorgeous. ‘Dark Rise’ is my agonised love letter to those English pastoral fantasies that child me loved. How would you describe the Captive Prince in a similar format?
I think that Captive Prince is the queer romance that I always yearned to read and never found on bookshelves. At the time that I was writing it, you know, the number of queer books that existed on commercial shelves you could count on the fingers of one hand. It’s the epic romance that I always wanted to read and never found. I’ve said this before elsewhere but I think ‘Thank God that era is now closed.’ and that we’re now in this golden age where there’s so much queer fiction available now.
Absolutely. Thank you for this interview! I hope your event goes well.
Cat was incredibly kind and generous with her answers even as we ran over time (due to my questionable time management).
It’s easy to understand why fans lined up with her older work clutched with the new for her signature and how queer couples came together over a shared love for her work. Her impact in the queer romance has changed the lives of many and made space for more like it on bookshelves around the world.
Captive Prince is available now through Penguin Books and where good books are sold.
Dark Rise is available in-store and online now.
You can find C.S. Pacat on her Website and on Facebook and Twitter.
