You may know him as the podcast co-host of Fatman Beyond with Kevin Smith, but Marc Bernardin has carved an eclectic award-winning career as a journalist, a comics writer, and a screenwriter. In his role as podcast host (and probably as fan), he attended Comic-Con, though he couldn’t promote any of his current television work. Which was just fine, as the big news for Bernardin is the impending release of his graphic novel with artist Ron Salas, Messenger: The Legend of Muhammad Ali. The biographical work has been over ten years in the making, finally seeing print on August 15.
Marc was kind enough to sit down with me on a balcony at the Bayfront Hilton, where we could both enjoy some cool breeze before returning to the heat wave in L.A. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
Derek McCaw: You wrote a graphic novel called Messenger. Not THE Messenger, though you wanted that as the title. As writers, we both know the article is very important. Why did you want “THE”?
Marc Bernardin: Because I liked the definite article. I liked it as, he’s THE guy. THE Messenger. Growing up, watch enough movies with “the.” It’s not just Godfather, it’s The Godfather. Something about it just sounded nice, but I understood that there’s too many. The Messenger: The Legend of Muhammad Ali, one too many “the”s. Also, as a journalist I’m sensitive to the repetition in the sentence. It fights it.
Derek McCaw: What brought you to this material? Obviously he’s a hero, he’s a legend, he’s Muhammad Ali. What did you think you needed to tell in a graphic novel?
Marc Bernardin: I’ll be candid. I fought this one for a while. Because the first instinct that a writer has when faced with a life like Muhammad Ali’s is to tell all of it, cradle to grave. It’s a biography; that’s traditionally how one does things. But the life is so big, there’s so much of it. And you can’t fit all of it, because it’s Muhammad Ali, right?
The thing that I was able to crack for myself, that let me get under the hood, was rather than try to tell all of it, then to use ten moments of his life – ten rounds, ten chapters – to illuminate who he was. Who he was to both himself and who he was to the world, who he was to kids, who he was to adults. That was my way in. Very much inspired by seeing the Steve Jobs movie that Danny Boyle directed from the Aaron Sorkin script. I went, yeah, see, there’s a way to do this, where you can use moments to tell larger stories.
Derek McCaw: You said who he was to all these people, so let’s get to it. Who was he to you?
Marc Bernardin: To me, my first interactions with Muhammad Ali were Muhammad Ali on the wane. I came of age in the 70s and the early 80s, when he was still fighting he was not the Muhammad Ali of his youth, and nobody could have been. The only opponent that he couldn’t beat was time. And it turns out, his own anatomy turned against him. But as I got older, the things that I began to understand about Muhammad Ali is the sacrifice, the things he was willing to give up because of what he believed in. Things I would not have been willing to give up myself. Like, despite the fact that I’m currently on strike – Writers Guild!
Derek McCaw: We’re talking about a graphic novel, so it’s perfectly okay…
Marc Bernardin: I can do this. But him being willing to walk away from being a boxer, because he didn’t want to join the draft. He didn’t want to be in the military; he didn’t want to go to Viet Nam. You know, his abilities and his weaknesses. He’s a very human person, despite the fact that he was the most famous person on the planet in the 20th Century. You couldn’t go a place in the world where a person didn’t know who Muhammad Ali was.
The way he wore that, the way he used that, the things he believed in and made a part of that… once I figured out how to do it, it was kind of irresistible to write about.
Derek McCaw: Why was First Second the place to do it, or did they come to you?
Marc Bernardin: They came to me, which made it nice. My editor there, Calista Brill, who I had pitched unsuccessfully in the past to do a couple of graphic novels there, approached me out of the blue. She said, hey, I’m looking for somebody to do a Muhammad Ali book, and I feel like that person has to have a very specific set of skills. One of them, you had to be a fan. Not just of Muhammad Ali but sports in general. It would be great if you were a person of color. And most especially, be a journalist. Because this is going to require a lot of research.
And I think her list of people who ticked all of those boxes was relatively small. I don’t know if I was the first person she called, or the fifth person she called…
Derek McCaw: Let’s say it was so small you were the only one.
Marc Bernardin: It was a one of one option set. Yeah, she reached out to me just over ten years ago. It’s been a while. She said hey, is this something you’d be interested in? I deliberated on it, thought about it, was afraid of it, and then said, you know, yes. YES. Yes, yes I will.
Derek McCaw: First Second always strikes me as strong in YA; their books have something educational or inspirational, at least what I’ve read. You may have the chance to speak to a lot of kids who have no idea who Muhammad Ali was. Which is astounding to think about but probably true. What would be the one thing that you would hope a kid getting this book would walk away with?
Marc Bernardin: I think it’s how much life there was in Muhammad Ali. He was never a boring person. There was always some bounce in his step.
One of my favorite stories about him, that I couldn’t put into it because it was too inside baseball, was he was being interviewed by a journalist when he was in his later years. Parkinson’s had robbed him of a lot of his mobility, his agility. So this journalist interviews him, they get into a boxing ring of course. And so this journalist gets in the ring with him, and Muhammad is kind of throwing these little jabs, whatever, and then Muhammad snaps, like… he doesn’t hit him. But the guy says, “this thing came at me like a freight train and I didn’t expect…”
Nobody knew it was still there. And he doesn’t do it for everybody, he doesn’t do it all the time. If he needs to, he could still summon that old spirit again. And like, that’s the thing. The indominatible nature of Muhammad Ali. He was still that kid from Louisville. He was still that kid who won Olympic gold. He was still that guy who stood side by side with Martin Luther King. He was still that guy who did all those things. Even though life paid him back in ways that were not quite fair for all of his efforts, he still had it. He still had some fun. The spark never left his eyes.
There’s a chapter towards the very end – the book begins with the Olympics in Rome, and it ends with the Olympics in Atlanta. The gulf – the journey that he’s traveled – between those two moments in his life, that guy at the end is still that guy at the beginning. And that’s the part of it that I wanted to be sure to clarify. You couldn’t break that spirit, no matter what you did to him, no matter how hard you tried. And lots of people tried.
Messenger: The Legend of Muhammad Ali will be released August 15, 2023, through First Second Books.
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