For his part, Trevor Von Eeden told the website The Arrow Cave in a 2011 interview, “All of the jobs I’d done for DC during my entire 25-year-tenure there were assigned to me.” Further to the notion of the duo’s collaboration, Von Eeden continued, “Working with Mike W. Barr was a great pleasure for me. I liked both his writing and he as a person the few times that we’d met. I’d never met Bob Haney [the veteran DC writer who scripted many of Von Eeden’s GA stories], and the scripts of his that I’d drawn (such as I remember them) were essentially generic superhero fare.” “By the time, I pretty much knew what I would get when I gave Trevor a plot,” remarks Barr. “He never ignored the plot, but he would sometimes take an elaborate physical maneuver I had conceived and reduce it to a less elaborate bit of business that was still very dynamic.”
sarcasm, but Len cut me off. ‘No, no,’ said Len, ‘He’s not like that.’ And I almost hugged him. “Somehow I got talked into continuing the series and was able to devise a plot I was comfortable with. To this day, I find it very different from my other work, in both plotting and pacing, but I can reread it with a great deal of pleasure, which is not something I thought I’d ever be able to say.” The same Dick Giordano that Barr and Wein had that meeting with was also a legendary inker and was enlisted to help break Green Arrow out into his own miniseries. How did the other creators feel about this addition? Both are quite succinct. Von Eeden stated on The Arrow Cave, “I LOVED Dick Giordano’s inks!” Barr opines, “Dick Giordano did a gorgeous job inking the series.”
ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY
The plot that Mike had so much trouble with begins with a standard superhero introduction showing Arrow helping a deli owner deal with a couple of toughs prepared to rough him up. In this sequence, though, we see an early example of the synergy between the two creators. Towards the end of the WFC run and blossoming in that Batman Annual, Von Eeden began to develop a highly distinctive style both in the look of the artwork in general as well as his inventive and experimental layouts and storytelling, which would probably be considered to reach their apex in the Thriller title (see BI #98 for coverage). “Trevor worked from my plots on the miniseries, rather than full scripts,” reveals Barr. “This is evident in the number of panels he packed into some of the pages, which is obvious as early as page two of issue #1. If I were full-scripting a story, I would never write 15 panels for the penciler to draw, thinking this an excessive amount of work for him. “But Trevor liked breaking my plots into groups of smaller and smaller panels, which is fine with me, as long as the story is told—and Trevor was a wonderful storyteller.” And break them into smaller panels, he did. There are a significant number of beautifully designed pages in the series with panels numbering into double digits, culminating with eighteen on page 11 of issue #2. Trevor Von Eeden explained his thought process this way. “The GA mini, like Batman Annual #8, was an extended story, which allowed me to develop my storytelling and drawing abilities in a real way—like a real artist and professional—rather than just knocking out light, ‘fluffy’ pieces one after the other. I took the opportunity to develop my own skills (drawing, layout/page design/storytelling), using those jobs essentially as… fodder.” The Barr/Von Eeden duo continued to develop their synergy as the series went along, with the former telling BI, “Later in the series, when Trevor’s layouts became more complex, it became a challenge to place the dialogue balloons so the reader’s eye was guided in the proper order. It became kind of a game between Trevor and me.”
With a cover date of May 1983, Green Arrow #1’s banner trumpets the fact that we had “The Battling Bowman—in his own magazine AT LAST!” However, we fans only ever see these results of the creators’ labor, and often never know how much blood and sweat goes into getting them to us “at last.” Where the Green Arrow miniseries is concerned, story-wise it had a particularly difficult gestation. Mr. Barr lets BI in on the details: “My problem was that when I took on GA as a series assignment, I had only three or four really good ideas for the character, which was unusual for me. So when I agreed to write the miniseries, I realized I was out of ideas for GA. By ‘ideas for GA,’ I mean not just fight scenes for an archer, but stories about the man. So I started to dig deep, determined to find some more. “But early in the series’ production—maybe after issue #1 had been penciled and dialogued— I became very dissatisfied with the story and asked DC to cancel the series. I should have realized that wasn’t going to happen, since DC had already expended a fair bit of money on the series, but Len played along and got us an appointment with VP Dick Giordano to discuss the problem. Len and I went into the appointment, during which I detailed my problem with the story. Throughout this, Giordano hadn’t even looked at me, he just kept inking a page from one of his freelance assignments. Finally, Dick looked up—at Len— sighed wearily, and said, ‘Okay, how much does he want?’ I opened my mouth with the intent of explaining the difference between his motivations and mine with an Ollie-like blast of
The Bright Knight The colorful cover by Trevor Von Eeden for Batman Annual #8 (1982), written by Mike W. Barr. TM & © DC Comics.
TECHNICAL ECSTASY
22 • BACK ISSUE • 1980s DC Miniseries Issue
