Interviews
The Mind Behind ‘The Guardians of Justice’: An Interview With Adi Shankar – Part 1
Adi Shankar is a remixer of media. While the producer/showrunner/storyteller has had his name attached to several films, it is that of his Bootleg Universe that stands out among his work. In taking iconic characters throughout pop culture, Shankar crafts narratives around them that subvert their source material. His Power/Rangers short, one of his most prominent releases, looks at the darker side of the franchise – specifically its weaponizing of youth. Fan fiction is nothing new to geek culture, but Shankar’s work both honors established characters, while peeling back the layers to their source material’s psychology.
Following up on his wildly successful Castlevania anime on Netflix, he eagerly anticipates the release of his new show, The Guardians of Justice (GoJ). On GoJ, Shankar is the creator, producer, a writer, and director. With several nods towards classic comic book characters, GoJ is so much more. It surpasses the realm of media remix Shankar has created in the past, playing out as an adrenaline inducing acid trip of violence and style. A murder mystery meets superheroes meets political satire that takes place in a warped reality reflecting our world – resulting in pure chaos and intrigue.
While the show won’t be out on Netflix until early next year, GoJ makes its premier at Cannes this week. In a two-part interview with Bloody Disgusting, I spoke with Adi Shankar about GoJ. In part one, we discuss the origins behind the show – the influences that helped to shape the show and what the work personally means to Shankar. We also discuss comic book cynicism and his personal relationship with comics growing up, as well some of his favorite characters from GoJ.
Michael Pementel: In a way, is GoJ a reaction to how overpopulated the mainstream has become with superhero stories?
Adi Shankar: I don’t think it’s a reaction to the superhero genre becoming hyper mainstream. In a way it’s just a love letter to the superhero genre. Superhero films aren’t even a genre anymore; GoJ is a love letter to the motifs, the world, and style that is the literary device of superhero stories.
MP: If the show is a love letter, why lean into a cynical atmosphere?
AS: I feel like comic books – the superhero genre in particular, at least the era I grew up reading – existed in a cynical paradigm. They felt authentic to the superhero genre. […] They themselves were cynical of superheroes. Superheroes have been around for a long time – they’ve always been popular – but you effectively had two companies, for all intents and purposes, that controlled two superhero universes. So, when you talk late 80s, early to mid-90s, the comics started getting alt-fictiony [sic], cynical, and existential about their own existence as a genre.
MP: What are the comic book stories from your youth that hit home for you?
AS: I really didn’t understand what I was reading content wise when I was young. We’re talking early to mid-90s at this time, but I had no idea what I was reading because of all the back stories that took place years ago – without that context, a lot of it felt confusing and overwhelming. So my entry point to superheroes were actually these trading cards; you could look at a character, be like, “That character looks cool,” then you could read the back, and in a paragraph, learn about who this character is. Through these trading cards I came to understand what was going on in the stories.
At this point in my life, I was more drawn to the artwork than I was to the stories. Because at this time I’m a blank canvas; I hadn’t read a superhero story, so I don’t know what’s a cliché and what’s new or innovative.
As I began to get more into reading comics, I was really drawn into cross over events. Someone once handed me a stack of random comic books, and among them was one called Maximum Carnage, where you had all these different characters and it was centered around an apocalyptic type of event. There was also the Fatal Attractions mini-series where Wolverine famously lost his Adamantium. It was cool because [the X-Men were on] a space station and had this Buzz Aldrin vibe to their spacesuits.
MP: What are some other works of media and/or artists that aided in influencing GoJ and that you wanted to pay homage to?
AS: John motherfucking Carpenter. There’s absolutely no one more responsible for revolutionizing genre cinema than John Carpenter. There was a fusionairy [sic] impulse that Carpenter had that is at the heart of what I wanted to do with The Guardians of Justice. Now obviously we’re fusing different things; Carpenter was fusing Tales From The Crypt with Howard Hawks, I’m melding a filmation [sic] style to like, darkness and global chaos.
Another influence, Natural Born Killers, the Oliver Stone film. Now I’ll be clear, I did not like Natural Born Killers, I did not like the plot, the story. Though, what I watched it for was the visual ingenuity Oliver Stone achieved. The film shifts wildly between different formats, from sitcom to outlaw animation. I don’t want to say it unlocked a world of potential in my mind, because I was already speaking those terms – I was wondering why movies didn’t do that [regarding varying stylization]. The film proved to me that the format of a scene could shift depending on the creative necessities at the moment.
Regarding other inspirations and homages: Mortal Kombat. There are major fight scenes that literally become Mortal Kombat [regarding] the onscreen text and announcer. Another influence is Kung Fury. I watched Kung Fury and I thought it was absolutely genius. I thought that shit should be winning awards everywhere.
There’s also Paul Verhoeven. I mean, I think this is a cheat one, because to say that Paul Verhoeven was an inspiration – he is an inspiration for 90% of movies that come out now. Also Saturday morning cartoons. Ultimately the show is a Saturday morning cartoon, just done partially in live action. Lastly, though there are more influences, the Animatrix.
MP: What is your favorite character from GoJ and who was your favorite character to write?
AS: There’s a superhero panda in the show; the fuckin’ panda is sick. His name is Teen Justice Panda. So that’s cool.
Regarding favorite character to write, the President. I wrote him as how I felt what people outside America hear when the American President speaks. As someone who straddles both worlds [being an immigrant] – I’m very American, but I’m also not – I’m able to thread this needle that was easy for me to do because of this unique background that I have.
MP: On a personal level, what does GoJ represent to you?
AS: One way to kind of view this project is that, this is a love letter to everything I loved about America growing up. Both good and bad. There’s really two geneses to this. The first, I was walking around a Wal Mart the year I moved to America by myself full time which was 2001. It was September, a few days before 9/11, and I thought, “Man you know what would be really cool? If someone made a DVD of different takes on superheroes.” The second genesis, months before this project began, I was experiencing some pretty intense sadness and depression. Which, I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who reads this or who hasn’t watched the show yet, but that [depression is reflective within GoJ]. But that’s when this project came up. As the project progressed though – and the execution of this idea – so much of my life has been America. American comic books, American TV shows, American pop culture, American propaganda, etc. In a lot of ways, GoJ is a remix of everything that has influenced me. […] There’s a lot in there that are homages to video games, cartoons, literary stuff, and cinema.
MP What is it you wanted to say through GoJ?
AS: I was just trying to explore the intersection between mythology, power, and fascism, and how logos plays to that. The show is as much Wag The Dog and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – it’s more that than a superhero story. I wasn’t trying to make a superhero show. I like superheroes as a concept, but I don’t care about them on a cellular level because they are just constructs. This project is how I see America. This is like an outsider’s view of America.
Keep a look out for later this week when we publish part-two of my interview with Adi Shankar, where we discuss more on The Guardians of Justice, as well as dig into his creative background.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
You must be logged in to post a comment.