Modern Masters Vol. 3: Bruce Timm by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T H R E E :

BRUCE TIMM

Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Modern Masters Volume Three:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME THREE:

BRUCE TIMM edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover painting by Bruce Timm all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington proofreading by Fred Perry and Sam Newkirk If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

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Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2012 Bruce Timm unless otherwise noted. Angel and the Ape, Aquaman, Baby Doll, Batgirl, Batman, Batman Beyond, Big Barda, Billy Ruck, Black Canary, Bruce Wayne, Catwoman, Clayface, Darkseid, Dee Dees, Derek Powers, Dr. Destiny, Etrigan the Demon, Flash, Gray Ghost, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hahhk, Harley Quinn, Hawkgirl, Heart Throbs, H’ro Talak, Inque, Jesse Custer, Jim Gordon, Joker, Jonah Hex, Justice League, Kamandi, Lara, Lashina, Lex Luthor, Livewire, Lois Lane, Martian Manhunter, Mera, Mercy, Metamorpho, Mr. Freeze, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Nightwing, Orion, Paran-Dul, Patty Champ, Penguin, Phantasm, Poison Ivy, Ra’s al Ghul, Riddler, Robin, Roxy Rocket, Sapphire Stagg, Scarecrow, Solomon Grundy, Star Sapphire, Supergirl, Superman, Talia, Ten, Terry McGinnis, Tsukuri, Tulip, Two-Face, Wonder Woman ©2012 DC Comics. Fairchild ™ and ©2012 Wildstorm Productions. Black Panther, Captain America, Cloak, Dagger, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Modok, Morbius, New Mutants, Power Pack, Punisher, Redwing, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Thor, Tomb of Dracula, Wolverine, X-Men ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. Beany & Cecil ™ and ©2012 Bob Clampett Productions LLC. Blackstar™ and ©2012 Filmation. Darth Vader, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker, Star Wars ™ and ©2012 Lucasfilm LTD. Bride of Frankenstein ™ and ©2012 Universal Studios. Freakazoid, Space Ghost, Tiny Toons and all related characters ™ and ©2012 Warner Bros. Conan ™ and ©2012 Conan Properties International LLC. Elric ™ and ©2012 Michael Moorcock Vampirella ™ and ©2012 Harris Comics. Sin City ™ and ©2012 Frank Miller. He-Man, Man at Arms, Skeletor, Sorceress, and all related characters ™ and ©2012 Mattel THUNDER Agents ™ and ©2012 John Carbano. Shell Scott ™ and ©2012 Richard S. Prather. Editorial package ©2012 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To the memory of Fred Gettys. We miss you. And to Fred’s granddaughter and great-grandson, Donna and Iain. Acknowledgements Bruce Timm, for all his valuable time and for digging extra deep into the art files. Kyle Feeley, for relaying messages and for some excellent scanning work. Special Thanks Fred Perry, Sam Newkirk, George Khoury, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and last, but never least, John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Three:

BRUCE TIMM Table of Contents Introduction by Grant Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Part One: “Monsters and Comics—That Was It for Me” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Part Two: From Filmation to DIC & All Points in Between . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Part Three: Warner Bros.—Home, Sweet Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Part Four: Building a League of His Own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Part Five: Oh, Yeah... He Does Comics, Too . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

It’s funny these days, how different everything is. As someone who remembers when public sightings of comic book super-heroes were as rare as Roc flocks flapping through the echoing canyons of Manhattan in the ice cube chill of midwinter’s three a.m., it’s hard to handle the sensory overload of this world that’s come upon us; a world where Batman and Robin and Beast Boy appear on the sides of buses going up and down my street, like giant hallucinations, where marquee posters of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Daredevil and all the rest, replace grim, urban facades with the blue, red and green fever-dreams of the teenage comics fan I once was, and where Doctor Fate, of all people, Doctor Fate can now appear on network cartoon shows enjoyed by millions. Those of us who grew up nourished only by monthly glimpses of these impossible beings, now live in a world of super-heroes. Their images are everywhere. Life becomes manga. The comic heroes have found their true home in our streets, on our TVs and movie screens, and wrapped around our public transport. How did it happen? Who really opened the floodgate for this flamboyant inundation of fluorescent regalia, alphabet suits and goth noir ? Who distilled the power of Kirby, the elegance of Toth

and Raymond, the vigor and passion of Adams, the chiaroscuric classicism of Steranko into a magnificent popular vision of the comic book character as contemporary animated hero and made it shine for a mass audience? Who gave us a Batman with all the excitement, grit and edgy pulp romance of modern comics and none of the psychological hang-ups, setting the template for the super-hero action movies of the 21st century ? Who raised the bar for serious comic book animation even higher than the Fleisher Brothers’ Superman cartoons of the ‘40s ? Whose brilliant and much-imitated designs primed the mass mind for the coming of the supermen into every area of the media ? Need I say more? Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Bruce Timm, Modern Master deluxe!

Grant Morrison

MM: You were born in 1961, is that correct? BRUCE: Correct. MM: Whereabouts did you grow up? BRUCE: I was born in Oklahoma—we lived there for two years. We moved to Ohio and stayed there for a couple of years. Then we moved out here to California when I was, I think, five or six. MM: You have siblings? BRUCE: Yes, I have two older brothers, one younger. MM: Was there a big gap in ages? Above: Vampire in the Hammer Horror “vein.” Right and Below: Two of many Frankenstein images Bruce has drawn over the years. Next Page: Cover to Essential Spider-Man, Volume One. Spider-Man ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

BRUCE: No, we were all about two years apart, so it wasn’t anything drastic. MM: So you were all having to share things as you went along? BRUCE: No. They would have them occasionally, but they didn’t really care that much about them. My older brother—that was my first exposure to comics—he had a couple of comics. But it was never a big deal to any of them. None of them were fans like I was. MM: Was there anyone else in your family that had an artistic streak? BRUCE: Not really. My mom painted some and drew, but never seriously. It was just an occasional hobby for her. I’m really the only one with that leaning. MM: What did your parents do for a living? Is your career path far different from theirs? BRUCE: Yeah, I would say so. My dad was an engineer, and my mom for years worked for the phone company. 6

MM: Were comics always just there for you, or did you get into them more as you got older? BRUCE: We would occasionally have them around the house. I would mostly get comics when I was sick—pretty much a common story. I’d stay home from school sick and be miserable and when Mom would go to the drugstore to get medicine I would say, “Oooh, get me some comics.” [laughter] We weren’t poor by any means, but we weren’t wealthy, either, so comics were a luxury. Then when I got older and had allowance I would sometimes spend my money on comics, but I wasn’t fanatical

year, Saturday morning really capitalized on the Batman craze, and there were a zillion super-hero shows. I watched Space Ghost and The Impossibles and Birdman and all that crap. Jonny Quest.

about it. When I was a kid I was into so many other things, like Hot Wheels, and comics weren’t a prime thing for me. I didn’t seriously get into comics until I was 12 or 13. There was a period where I was interested in comics, but distribution was always really spotty.

MM: Were you, even back then, more interested in the adventure series?

MM: You weren’t one of those kids who rode his bike five miles to the drugstore every week?

BRUCE: I guess. I was like most kids—I was pretty uncritical. I would watch everything that was on. We would watch the funny cartoons as well, but, yeah, I particularly liked the adventure cartoons.

BRUCE: Later I was. Once I really got into it I had a whole route—I would cover the entire town. Because this one liquor store would get the Warren magazines, but wouldn’t get the Marvel black-&-whites; this other liquor store over here would have the Marvel black-&-whites, but not the Warren magazines; the supermarket would have a rack of the regular comics. So to collect everything—before the days of comic book stores—you really had to cover some ground.

MM: Did you have a favorite? BRUCE: Not especially. I really liked the Grantray-Lawrence Spider-Man show—that was one of my favorites when I was a kid. The Marvel super-hero shows, too; I really liked those, even though I could tell they were done on the cheap. Even as a kid I could tell they were pretty tatty, but I liked them.

MM: Did you have to hide your Warrens from your parents?

MM: Was it the cartoons that sparked your interest in drawing, or had it been there all along?

BRUCE: No, fortunately my parents weren’t too nosy about things like that. I mean, I wouldn’t leave them lying around. I had an uncomfortable incident one time when my mom found one of my National Lampoons. [laughter]

BRUCE: I always drew, ever since I was really little. I have a pet theory that all kids draw when they’re little—it’s just something they do as part of their development—and at a certain point, most kids find other interests and don’t go on with it. Not that every kid has within them the ability to become a great artist, but all kids do doodle. Some kids are obviously better than others and get encouragement and continue on with it.

MM: How old were you? BRUCE: I don’t know, 14 or 15 years old. But the Warren comics didn’t raise too many eyebrows.

MM: Did you have any favorite comic titles that you had to have?

MM: What about cartoons? You were just the right age for stuff like Space Ghost and Jonny Quest.

BRUCE: Whenever I would occasionally buy comics, it was not so much the characters, as much as whoever had a cool costume that appealed to me. I remember specifically buying Captain America, Daredevil... those are the two that I really, really liked a lot. I didn’t actually buy a Spider-Man comic until I got older. Of course, when I got serious about it I got everything.

BRUCE: Sure. I’ve told this story before, but my first serious exposure to super-heroes in any medium was the Adam West Batman show. I’d seen comics, and I think I’d seen a couple of episodes of the George Reeves Superman show, but when I saw the Batman show I thought, “Wow!” That was really something. And then the next 7

MM: When was it you started noticing and/or paying attention to artists’ credits? BRUCE: Around 12, 13. What happened was there was a kid on my street who had gotten a comic collection from a cousin of his. This cousin had apparently bought tons and tons of comics over the space of about two years and wasn’t interested in them any more and gave them to my friend. My friend had no use for them—he wasn’t into comics at all—so he basically gave me the whole set. It filled literally one whole drawer of his dresser, and it was all across the board. Lots of different comics from 1971, ’72. There were a lot of DCs and Marvels and some Charltons—a broad sampler of what was in comics at that time. It was like, “Wow!”—this big treasure-trove that I studied and traced from. I started noticing that John Buscema looked different when he was inked by Vince Colletta than when he was inked by Sal Buscema. That was when I really started analyzing and getting into the artistic aspect of it. MM: Were you a tracer at that point? BRUCE: Of course. I would try to swipe or just draw from one occasionally, and if I couldn’t get it right then I would literally try to trace the drawings. I didn’t have a light box or anything, so I would hold them up to the window. MM: Were you—like typical kids— just drawing fight scenes, or did you ever attempt to do sequential storytelling? BRUCE: I had a short attention span—and do to this day [laughter]—so that seemed beyond my means and skill level. I’d do a couple of short, onepage bits of continuity, but very rarely. The only thing I have from that period that survives is—around this same period that I was getting seriously into comics, I was getting into Mad magazine, and I drew this... for want of a better term it was a mix of “Mad Monster Party” and “House of Dracula.” It was a monster mash and each monster would have his own one-page story. It’s really weird, because it’s got Mort Drucker swipes all over the place. [laughter] It’s very odd.

MM: So you were into monsters, in general? BRUCE: Oh, yeah. Monsters and comics—that was it for me. MM: That was a great time for it. BRUCE: Oh, absolutely. MM: With Ploog and Wrightson— BRUCE: And Gene Colan. I was into all that stuff. MM: I assume you were taking some type of art classes in school. Did you any encouragement there? BRUCE: I just took the basic, required art classes. I never took any specialized art classes. MM: A lot of high schools have two or three levels of art classes. Did you— BRUCE: Naah. I would take—just because it was easy and fun—I guess it was just called Art, which was kind of all over the place. But it was all basic, rudimentary stuff. I took a ceramics class. MM: Did you enjoy other mediums besides drawing? BRUCE: Well, I had a good time in that ceramics class. I took it in summer school and again the next year. I was never very good at sculpting, but it was fun and I really liked the teacher, Mr. Hull. He was actually one of the few teachers who really encouraged me in my art. The cool thing about Mr. Hull was he was also in charge of the yearbook, so two years running in junior high school he had me do a bunch of spot illustrations for that and I actually did the cover, too. So he was really cool. MM: So did kids seek you out? “Hey, draw something for me.” BRUCE: Oh, yeah! I was always kind of shy and withdrawn, so I didn’t make friends easily. But people would see me draw stuff in school and they would ask me to draw

things for them, and I would try to do them to the best of my ability. It was a good way of breaking the ice and meeting people. I’ve said a zillion times, if I could draw horses, you know.... [laughter] I would have been really popular with the girls, but I couldn’t draw a horse to save my life. [laughter] There was a guy on the junior high football team—this really large kid named Robert Hardison— and he was really into Bruce Lee. So I used to draw him Bruce Lee drawings, and Robert became my unofficial protector. Whenever some of the rougher kids would bully me, if Robert was around it was like, “Hey! You leave him alone. He’s cool. He draws me Bruce Lee drawings.” [laughter] MM: Did you have any friends who were into comics, too? BRUCE: There were very few kids when I was growing up who were into comics the way I was. In fact, I think I only knew one, and he was only into it for a very short period of time. Comics have always had that kiddy stink on them—that comics are only for kids, and when you reach a certain age, you should really give them up. Even by junior high school it was really kind of frowned upon. It was like, “Wow, you’re reading comics? What are you, a little 9

Previous Page: Daredevil and Dracula were two of Bruce’s favorites growing up. Top: Morbius, the Living Vampire appeared in one of Marvel’s black-&-white magazines which Bruce collected. Below: Mix one part cheesecake with two parts horror and you have the Bride of Frankenstein. Daredevil, Morbius, Tomb of Dracula ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. Bride of Frankenstein ™ and ©2004 Universal Pictures.

kid?” So comics weren’t something I was proud to be reading in public. It was a sure way to end up in a trash can. [laughter] MM: As you got closer to the end of high school, did you have any aspirations of going to an art school after graduation?

Above: Spot illustration for Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine. Next Page: Bruce: “Just for fun I did this as an homage to Tom Sutton. I loved his mondo-bizarro Frankenstein stories for Skywald—a guilty pleasure for sure, but still....”

BRUCE: Somewhat. All I ever really wanted to do from an early point on was to be a comic book artist when I grew up. From what I’d gleaned from reading about comics and in general, I realized that might have been an iffy proposition and probably didn’t make a whole lot of money. I realized that comic book artists weren’t world famous, weren’t millionaires or anything, so I wasn’t sure if I was actually going to be able to make a living doing that. So the plan was that I was going to go to college and learn a different trade as a fallback position. But it really didn’t work out very well. I really liked the concept of college much more than the actual doing of it. [laughter] I only spent a year in college before they asked me to leave because my grades were so bad. Even while I was in college, I only took one art class. My parents would probably have paid to send me to art school, but just in talking it over with myself and with them, we thought that any type of artistic training I might get, I would probably be better off learning it on my on. Which was really stupid—I would have been much better off if I had gone to art school. Of course art school is much more expensive than a regular college, and there weren’t really any close by—this was before I had my own car and could drive. Art Center, which is the really big art school out here, is all the way out in Pasadena, so that wouldn’t have been too convenient. In retrospect, it probably would have been beneficial for me to have gone to an actual art school and learned all the stuff that to this day I still don’t know how to do—like perspective [laughter]—basic, rudi10

mentary things like that. I can fake my way, but I literally still don’t know a lot of really basic things. For the most part I really am self-taught, and there’re good sides and bad sides to that. MM: So what happened after you left college? You were working at K-Mart.... BRUCE: Yeah, I started working at K-Mart in my senior year of high school and through college I was still working there part-time. When they kicked me out of college I went to work there full-time. MM: Did desperation kick in? “I’ve got to find a way out of here!” BRUCE: Oh, yeah! I hated it—working with the public is like, yuggh. MM: So where did you turn first? BRUCE: To this day I am relatively unambitious and lazy, so I didn’t really pursue it that much. I remember seeing an ad for Filmation Studios where they were looking for new artists and they were actually pretty close by—I could get there fairly easily. At that point I was already borrowing my parents’ car, so I was mobile. They were within ten miles of my house, so I drove over there and applied. They had a standard beginner’s art test, which was doing layout. Layout for Filmation has a slightly different meaning than it does generally in animation. Their layout position was basically an in-between stage between storyboard and animation. What you would do is you would take the storyboard drawing and blow it up on the Xerox machine, and then flesh the drawings out, because the storyboard drawings would sometimes be very rough and very crude. You would flesh the storyboard drawing out into an on-model pose and those drawings would go to the animation department and they would actually animate them. I took the layout test and didn’t get the job, so I had to tough it out at K-Mart. When the next summer came around, Filmation was hiring again, so I took the layout test again and this time managed to do a decent enough job to get in the door. That was it—from that point on I was in the animation business.

I'm influenced by anybody and everybody I've ever looked at—everybody from Ditko to Mike Mignola to Kevin Nowlan to Marc Hempel, but these are the main ones:

The funny thing about Kirby is that I actually became stylistically influenced by him pretty late—probably in my early 20s. I had seen his stuff and been influenced by other artists, but I was always a little ambivalent about his artwork. I would go through these love/hate periods with it, where I would look at it and think, “It’s pretty good, but if only it wasn’t so weird and abstract. If only he had a better inker”—I’m talking about the DC stuff. Of course, now I look back on the DC stuff and it’s some of my favorite stuff. The Mike Royer stuff is killer. Somewhere in my early 20s, just from looking at it more and more, I just really started grooving on it and started aping it. There was a time when I was definitely trying to mimic Kirby’s style. Everybody looks at Kirby and thinks it’s so weird and obvious that anybody could swipe it, but it’s a lot harder to do than you realize. shows, we have found that the more you try to stick to the actual Kirby-ness of it, the more it loses. Everything about animation is exaggeration. The Kirby style is somewhat abstract; it has to be translated. You have to find a middle ground between what Kirby did on the comic book page and what can actually be animated. We’re always pushing Kirby onto our younger board artists who’ve never really been exposed to his work. “This is an example of good staging. This is an example of a good round-house punch. This is an example of a good explosion.” Even though it will have to be translated, the dynamism of Kirby is a good starting point for animation.

There’re certain things in the staging and the exaggerated action poses, that are definitely in my work— some of his usage of those great slashy straight lines he uses in place of muscles. If you use those weird, straight lines as a crutch to cover up a bad drawing, they don’t really have much purpose. But to get certain thrusts or lines of action into your drawings, they’re a great tool. Some of the abstract ways he does wrinkles on clothing and things like that are good comic book tricks I use in my own work. Every time we have done Kirby-based designs in our

I think it was Christmas ‘73, I got this book called Comix, by Les Daniels—it was a history of comics. That was one of my favorite books, and in it was a reprint of a war story that Kurtzman had drawn himself called “The Big If.” At the time I thought, “This is the weirdest looking artwork. It’s so crude and cartoony.” But I read that story over and over and over again. The storytelling in it is so cinematic. I think that’s when I started making the connection to the Mad stuff. Years later, once I found more and more Kurtzman reprints, I just became a total fan of his work. It’s not that I ever sat down at any time and tried to swipe from Kurtzman, but when I started doing comics I

“The Big

If” ™ a nd ©20 04 resp e

ctive ow

ner.

Kurtzman is one of those influences that I didn’t even realize I had been influenced by until late in the game. I first discovered his work through the Mad paperbacks. I loved the Wally Wood “Superduperman” type of stories. I really liked the way the stories were told; I liked the staging of them. The Wally Wood Mad stuff is my favorite Wally Wood stuff. It’s got so much more life than the rest of his work—even the sci-fi stuff he was doing for EC. The combination of the exaggerated cartooniness and the slick, realistic anatomy is the coolest combo. But at the same time, I was noticing that the stories that were drawn by Jack Davis and Bill Elder and people like that, even though the artwork looked different, there was still a similar storytelling style. I was too young to fully realize it, but I did realize at least subconsciously there was a similarity there. Years later, when I found out that Kurtzman had layed all those stories out for those guys, it all made sense.

noticed that my panel progressions and the way I was telling the story was very Kurtzman-like. To me, Kurtzman is just about the best storyteller in comics that I’ve ever seen. Just in terms of telling the story in a way that you get what the story’s about. He very rarely goes for flashy camera angles; the only time he will use a trick shot is for a specific story point. He’s just a natural storyteller. The camera’s always in exactly the right place to give you the information you need to understand the story. To me, everything is about telling the story. All the pretty artwork and the stylization, all of that is gravy. To me, it’s all about clarity; it’s all about telling the damn story. I can’t praise Kurtzman enough; he’s one of the geniuses of comics.

Inc.

Buscema was a major, major influence on my artwork. You probably don’t see it much in my work now, just because my style has gone off in a different direction, but there are still certain types of super-heroic poses and attitudes where I see a big John Buscema influence. Leg muscle shapes and posing, there’s definitely a lot of John Buscema there. There is probably as much John Buscema in my work as there is Kirby, it’s just not as obvious. Another thing about Buscema, he’s very much like Kurtzman in the fact that I stared at John Buscema comics for so many hours in my formative years that by osmosis I picked up a lot of his storytelling techniques: his camera angles and how he cuts, at what points in the action he cuts, when he goes to an action pose, when he goes to a close-up, when he goes to an up-shot, and so on. You’d probably look at my work and say, “Well, okay, I don’t see any John Buscema,” but I see it.

Silver Surfer ™

Wood was definitely a big influence. I still see a lot of Wood in my stuff. Not so much any more in terms of the things that Woody is remembered for, like the high contrast split lighting, but the way I use drop shadows is very much influenced by my staring at Wally Wood comics for hours on end, especially the Mad comics. I don’t really ink anything like Woody, but the way I spot blacks and some of his lighting tricks I have incorporated into my own work. Again, it’s not obvious, but I know it’s there.

Batboy, Rubin ™

lications, Inc.

He was a superb draftsman—a thousand times better than I’ll ever be.

Toth’s an interesting one. I did go through phases where I tried to swipe his stuff, but he was just too bloody hard to swipe. That’s the weird thing: everybody thinks of his stuff as really cartoony and simplified, but deep down inside he has so much knowledge of how to draw that his drawings are really very subtle. They’re almost photographically solid. Everything he draws is absolutely solidly constructed. When he puts pencil and ink to paper, it’s as if he’s tracing off a photograph or a statue that he’s seen in his mind.

Toth is a tricky one. Artists love him; he’s the quintessential artist’s artist. Most people are not huge Toth fans. He’s still kind of an undiscovered treasure. He draws as well as anyone who has ever drawn comics, anybody you can name—Reed Crandall or any of those “realistic” guys—but he doesn’t bother with all of the doodly stuff. He doesn’t bother with drawing every single plane on a person’s face, because he knows that it’s not going to reproduce all that well anyway. He doesn’t do a whole lot of rendering. To me his stuff looks like a high contrast photograph. You get just the essentials of what you need for the picture to read, and it’s astonishing.

When I started doing the Batman Animated style, I did look at lot of his model sheets from Hanna-Barbera, and they weren’t very helpful to me. When I really started looking at them I realized that even in his simplified animation drawings some of the characters would be really stylized and cartoony, but his human being figures are just like his comic book figures. They’ve got so many subtleties to them. He didn’t exaggerate. His animation models really aren’t made for animation. Everybody may think they are, and he may have thought so, and animation historians may look back with fond memories on the Alex Toth-designed Hanna-Barbera shows, but there’s a whole lot of subtleties in those shapes. Space Ghost’s head is a tricky shape to draw. It’s not a straight-against-curve, it’s a whole lot of curves that intersect, and if you get one of them off, he doesn’t look like Space Ghost. So I don’t consider Toth a huge influence in that respect. Obviously, the overall feel of my Batman kind of has some of that Space Ghost type of feel, but it wasn’t like I had Space Ghost designs out when I did it. It was kind of like me remembering what Space Ghost felt like. I would be a better artist if I were more influenced by Alex Toth. I wish I had one-tenth of his knowledge and talent, but I don’t.

When I discovered his work it was like a bomb went off inside my brain. I stared at his work and tried to copy his poses. Obviously he’s on a much higher plane than I will ever achieve. When I draw Captain America, if I don’t do a somewhat Kirbyesque Captain America, it just does not look right to me. It’s the same thing with Frazetta: I’m a big Conan fan, and whenever I try to draw Conan, if I try to draw a “Bruce Timm” Conan the way I draw a “Bruce Timm” Batman, I’m doomed to failure. Conan, in my mind’s eye, is a Frazetta drawing. I cannot get away from that image of Conan. It’s such a perfect marriage of concept and image that it’s definitive. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate other people’s versions of Conan. I like the Barry Smith Conan; I like the John Buscema Conan. I actually like this Cary Nord guy who’s doing the new Conan comics for Dark Horse, but I see he’s got the same problem I do. Even though it looks pretty unique, there’s still a little Frazetta in it. You can’t help it. My “Timm girl” is a very stylized, five-steps-removed version of a Frazetta girl, particularly in the heart-shaped faces, the slightly slanted cat eyes, the little button nose, the little bow lips, cupie doll mouth.... Obviously, my girls aren’t quite as curvy as Frazetta’s, but occasionally I will do that, just for variety.

Steranko was no longer doing comics when I first started reading them, but Paul Gulacy— who very early in his career was a major Steranko clone—was. I loved Gulacy’s stuff, then when I found Steranko’s stuff I said, “Oh, so that’s where Gulacy came from.” Steranko is one of those crazy-ass, unique guys that the more you look at his work, the more you realize it’s impossible to swipe. You can clone some of the stylistic things, but he’s kind of like me in the fact that he has 18 different influences all coming out at the same time. You can look at any Steranko page and point out a little bit of Reed Crandall here, a little bit of Kirby there, a little bit of Richard Powers here, and a little bit of Wally Wood there, and it’s all happening at the same time. That’s not to say he’s derivative. The synthesis he’s come up with is uniquely Steranko.

Dan DeCarlo is one of those guys I became influenced by through the back door. I had read some Archie comics when I was a kid, but not a lot of them—I was much more into the super-hero stuff. I had already formulated my basic “pretty girl” theory early on during Batman. There was the influence of Frazetta on the facial construction, and there was Lynne Naylor, who unlocked the door to drawing pretty girls in the Batman Animated style for me. So those influences were already gelling for me when someone pointed out Dan DeCarlo’s work to me. At the time I only knew vaguely who he was, but to me he was just another one of those Archie guys. I think it was Glen Murakami who showed me these Dan DeCarlo comics, and I could see they were better than the run-of-the-mill Archie comics. The other Archie artists are all good and the work is professional, but they don’t quite have that same structural solidity.

Some of his storytelling tricks I’ve specifically swiped without having his work in front of me—some of his repeating panels tricks and things like that I’ve incorporated into my own work. One thing in particular I picked up from Steranko is the exaggeration of poses. Steranko was one of the few guys back then who was out-Kirbying Kirby. He would have characters with their feet 20 feet apart when they were throwing a punch. His line of action would zigzag throughout the figure so that he would have these ultra-dynamic poses. Even if I’m not consciously thinking about it, that exaggeration still shows up in my stuff.

Dan was a really good storyteller. If you’ve seen some of the work he’d done before Archie—he even did some one-page gags for some of Martin Goodman’s men’s magazines in the ‘50s—it was very exaggerated. Not to the Bill Ward extreme, but almost. His women were very zaftig and bouncy and lively. I started getting into his stuff and collecting as much of it as I could find. Even though the “Timm girl” facial characteristics were already in place—the little button nose and the big, wide smile and the big, round eyes— from looking at Dan’s work, I could see that he was doing it better than I was. Little tricks that he would do, I incorporated into my style—it’s very subtle.

Below: Blackstar marked Bruce’s foray into animation. Looking back at his work from the show, Bruce said, “In retrospect, I’m stunned they actually hired me!” Next Page Top: Bruce: “Done for my local comics shop—don’tcha love that fancy signature? Yeesh!”

MM: Did you know anything about the animation business when you applied with Filmation?

MM: Speaking of crummy cartoons, you started at Filmation working on Blackstar. What was that first experience like?

BRUCE: Very little. Like I said, I always wanted to be a comic book artist; getting into animation was not really a goal of mine. I watched cartoons, but I had no great love for them. What it came down to was that I was aware enough of my own limitations to realize that, even though I was the best artist anyone knew in school, my stuff was not quite as good as the professional comic book work I saw. But I’d look at these crummy cartoons on TV and say, “Well, geez, I’m probably at least that good.” [laughter] Again, not being very ambitious and not having the greatest selfesteem, it just seemed like an easy way to get in the door. And it kind of was. If I look back at the drawings I was doing at Filmation, they were really pretty wretched by any kind of professional standard. There were a lot of artists who were quite a bit better than me.

BRUCE: It was fun. There were good things and bad things about it. The pros were that it was an adventure cartoon, so I had some kind of affinity for that. Halfnaked, muscular guy running around, I could do that. It had monsters in it, I could draw monsters. It had kind of a third-generation Conan/John Carter knock-off quality to it, and that was right up my alley. On the other hand, artistically, it was like, “This is really crap.” [laughter] “This is really dumbed-down Conan/John Carter.” There’s no violence, very little action. He would run, he would occasionally point his sword—he would never cut anything with it, but lazer beams would come out of his sword. But occasionally you could do a halfway decent action pose. It was neat just to be paid to be a professional artist; to actually get up every morning, go to work, and be paid to draw. On the other hand, Filmation was really a factory. They would literally tell you, “Don’t spend all your time doing a great drawing, just do a good one.” Basically what that meant was if you spent extra time drawing muscles and knuckles and things like that, it wasn’t going to animate well anyway, and in a nice way they were saying you don’t really draw muscles well enough to be drawing them anyhow. [laughter] “Crank it out” was the order of the day. MM: They had a lot of stock footage they would reuse over and over, too. BRUCE: Half the time you wouldn’t even have to draw anything. You would get your assignment for the week—you would get a section of the storyboard, say 40 scenes that you had to lay out that week. Before you even sat down to draw it, you would get

folders for each scene, and within the folders they would have the stock poses already Xeroxed for you. The storyboard artists would indicate right there on the storyboards, “Use this stock pose,” “Use this close-up for Blackstar’s close-up,” “Use this running shot of Blackstar for this scene.” All you had to do was paste them down. Half the time you wouldn’t even have to do that—you’d just have to cut out the registration holes and number the scene and do the camera work layout. You’d have these field guides where, according to the storyboard, you’d have to indicate where the camera was supposed to move. Occasionally you’d have to doctor the drawing. You’d use the stock “Blackstar Standing” pose and then have him lift his arm and point, so maybe you’d get to draw his arm. Rarely did you get to draw a whole, new scene. It was easy, easy work. I could get all my work done by Wednesday and then fart around the last two days of the week and just draw goofy stuff. Not exactly challenging. MM: One of the highlights of working there had to be meeting Russ Heath. BRUCE: Yeah, I was fortunate enough to share a room with Russ Heath. Russ was one of my idols in comic books. He was one of my favorite artists, so that was a kick. I kind of drove Russ crazy, because I would be pestering him all day with questions about working for DC and different people he knew in the business and did he really enjoy working on “Sgt. Rock.” As great an artist as Russ is, he’s very pragmatic. It all came down to, “What are you talking about, was it great working in comics? It was a job. I did ‘Sgt. Rock’ because, yeah, I was always interested in the war stuff, but it was no big deal. It paid well. If somebody paid better, I’d do that.” It was an eye-opener. But Russ was fun. He was fun to hang out with and pester.

Filmation would hire everyone to work like crazy through the summer to get that fall’s season of episodes done, and then lay everyone off in the fall. That was just the way it was. If you were lucky enough to get work at one of the feature divisions or commercial work or something, then you could continue working through the offseason, but a lot of people were just plain out of work from fall until late spring. With me being a newcomer and not being very good anyway, I was out of luck. By the time I got laid off there was no other work. I knew I wasn’t good enough to get in at Disney. I applied over at Bakshi’s—Bakshi was doing Fire & Ice at the time—but they were full up and weren’t hiring. Then right around that time there was an animation strike, so everybody was out of work. Striking out, I ended up going back to K-Mart for the next half a year or so. It was spring of ’82 or summer of ’82, the strike had ended, and I’d heard—I think through the union—that Don Bluth was hiring for Secret of N.I.M.H. They were finishing it up and they had this big push to try to get it done. On a whim, I went and applied over there. What I

MM: Did you ever think to ask him for contacts at DC? BRUCE: You know, strangely enough, I never did. I think it was self-awareness of my own abilities. I wasn’t brave enough to actually say, “Could you give me Bob Kanigher’s number so I can call him and ask him for work?” Russ probably would have said no. [laughter] MM: You weren’t in the business very long before there was a strike. BRUCE: The way the business worked back then, at least for TV—this was before G.I. Joe and He-Man, before the whole syndication thing blew wide open—the only TV animation work that was available was for the networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Traditionally what that would mean was that Hanna-Barbera, Ruby-Spears, and 19

Top: This piece was done for a mini comiccon held at Cal State Northridge. Below: Bruce doing his best Mike Golden impersonation in this Batman panel, probably from the early ’80s. Next Page: A page from a He-Man mini-comic done in the mid-’80s.

ended up doing over there was animation in-betweens. I worked there for a few months while we finished the movie up. Don had all these grandiose plans: He was going to hopefully keep everyone employed, he had his follow-up to Secret of N.I.M.H. all planned—this movie called East of the Sun, West of the Moon—and supposedly had all the financing in place. Then Secret of N.I.M.H. came out and didn’t do very well, so unfortunately Don had to lay almost everyone off. He kept a few of his key staff members on for as long as he could, but people like me were the first to be let go. After that... MM: It was back to Filmation wasn’t it? BRUCE: Yeah, I was fortunate that after Bluth let me go, Filmation was just starting

up on He-Man, which was a revolutionary thing for them, because it wasn’t even summer yet—it was still spring. They said, “This isn’t just 13 episodes. This a full run of 65 episodes, so we’ll be able to keep you employed for the whole year.” So that was cool, and, again, it was kind of a Conan/sword-&-sorcery knockoff, so it was up my alley. I mean, it was He-Man, it wasn’t anything great. [laughter] But it was okay. There was a little more artistic freedom on it, if you can call it as such. Supposedly they had a bigger budget than they had with the network stuff. There was supposed to be much less a reliance on stock, but we ended up using stock quite a bit. But I stayed on He-Man for that whole first season. When that was coming to the end of its run, they didn’t really have anything in place to follow it. They were hoping to do more He-Man, but the financing for it wasn’t really in place yet. In fact, He-Man wasn’t even on the air yet, so they weren’t sure how it was going to go. The only show they’d managed to sell to the networks that year was... either Fat Albert or Gilligan’s Island—I can’t remember which—it was one of the goofy shows. So they had everybody who was employed on He-Man test for that show, and they were going to pick the best because they could only afford a skeleton crew with just the one show.

possibilities of animation. They wanted to bring back the glory days of Disney animation and keep going further with it. So their little group splintered off from Disney and Don set up his own studio with the intent of becoming the premiere animation studio in the United States. He would have these studio meetings where he would get everybody in a room and—[laughs] you’re always tempted to use the word preach, because Don is a very religious man—he would lecture on the state of animation and the possibilities of animation and it would be a one-hour, two-hour meeting. It was really quite inspiring; he would get you fired up about working in animation. With Filmation, it was cool to be paid to draw, but it was very artistically unfulfilling. Whereas with Bluth, it was like “Wow, I’m not nearly good enough. I need to get better to compete with all of these great artists working here.” I learned a lot from working at Bluth. Doing in-betweens is kind of a drudge job. Sometimes you’re literally laying two drawings down—two extremes— and laying a sheet a paper over them, turning the light box on, and “tracing” an imaginary drawing in between those two drawings. It could be that mechanical at times. Other times it’s taking the animator’s loose drawings and tightening and cleaning them up so they can be Xeroxed cleanly. It’s not exactly a challenging job in that respect. You’re basically being somebody else’s wrist. At the same time, I found it to be essential training, because I found a lot of the things I’d been trying to do at Filmation—wanting to be a comic book artist, I would look at the Filmation models and think, “Oh, well they’re too simple. The anatomy’s all wrong. You’ve got to put a zillion muscles on there like Jim Starlin or Jim Steranko.” [laughter] Of course, that stuff doesn’t animate, so actually drawing every single line over and over and over again on the character, you realize there’s a reason why you don’t put in all those muscles: It’s a pain in the ass to draw all the

Somehow I actually managed to pass that test and I was going to stay on—I think it was Fat Albert. But then I heard from someone that Bluth was hiring again for the video games. I thought that sounded more fun, so I went back to Bluth. They had already done Dragon’s Lair—that had already come out and been a big hit—and they were in the middle of doing Space Ace. I worked on Space Ace, and when that was done, worked on Dragon’s Lair II. Of course, while we were working on Dragon’s Lair II, Space Ace came out and didn’t do nearly as well as Dragon’s Lair, so once again Don’s financing fell through. MM: How different was it working on the video games as opposed to straight animation? Were you working on shorter segments? BRUCE: I was just doing in-betweens anyway, so I just did whatever they handed to me. It was really fractured. Again, when you’re doing in-betweens, you’re rarely working on a whole sequence. You’d go to your boss and get 20 or 30 scenes that weren’t even connected to each other. Very rarely would you work on two or three scenes that were actually in sequence. Especially for Dragon’s Lair, which had much looser storytelling; it was less linear. MM: How was the studio environment different at Bluth than somewhere like Filmation? BRUCE: Well, they were diametrically opposed. Filmation was all about doing the least amount of work to get it done. If you know the history of Don Bluth, he and his core group of guys were the last of the later generation of Disney animators who were trained by The Nine Old Men. But at that point in time, even Disney was cutting back on their budgets, and they were reusing a lot of old animation and not worrying about pushing the envelope artistically. The whole Disney studio was in the doldrums, and Don and his gang were all fired up about the 21

Below: Bruce: “Another very Mike Goldeninspired Batman from ’83.” Next Page: Two-page sequence from a He-Man mini-comic.

lines over and over. Not only that, but being able to flip the animator’s drawings, you could see all the classic animation theories— “Squash and Stretch,” and “Straights Against Curves,” all of that stuff—you could actually see them in action. Things that were theoretical you may have read about in a book, to be able to actually work with the drawings in your hands and see them move, you’d go, “Oh, I see how that works.” At Bluth, the drawings of the characters would be so distorted, the arms would bend backwards, I’d think, “That’s not the way an arm works.” But when you flip it you realize it’s just an extreme. That’s a drawing you’ll only see for a millisecond, and it’s there just to add impact to the rest of the drawing. So I was studying and analyzing that stuff as much as possible. MM: After your second stint with Bluth you ended up at Marvel Studios for a while. BRUCE: I bounced around all over the place. After Bluth I went to work at Marvel; I worked on the G.I. Joe show. This was after they’d done the first mini-series and they were doing the first series of 65, so I worked on that. By happenstance Russ Heath was working there, so

I was working with Russ again and driving him crazy and making contacts in the business. While I was at G.I. Joe I was doing character designs—they had no layout department. This was the first time I had worked in the system where you send all the animation overseas. At Marvel they would just do character designs, storyboards, background designs, and vehicle designs and ship all the rest of it over to Japan and have it animated there. Russ, obviously, was the main character designer. They had hired him specifically because he had done the “Sgt. Rock” comics. I basically did all the boring designs that Russ didn’t feel like drawing. [laughter] MM: So you were designing incidental characters. BRUCE: Yeah, incidental characters, background people—literally anything Russ didn’t feel like drawing or didn’t have time to draw. I did a little bit of vehicle design as well, but when I say vehicle design, I didn’t actually create anything from scratch. We would get Polaroids of toy prototypes from Hasbro, and we were told to make them look as much like the toy as possible. Half the time we were literally tracing off Polaroids—blowing up tracings and filling in the details. Again, not exactly artistically fulfilling, but it was money and a good job. And I made contacts there. In fact, one of the contacts I made there was a friend of a guy named Lee Nordling. Lee was freelance editing for the He-Man comics that Mattel was doing and would package inside the toys. So I met Lee, and he hired me to do some He-Man comics while I was working at Marvel. I would work at Marvel during the day, and go home at night and draw these eight-page, ten-page He-Man comics. It was He-Man—it wasn’t the greatest stuff. The scripts were passable—again, it was all dumbed-down for kids. I felt like I was flying in under the radar. I still didn’t think I was good enough to get comic book work, but at least I was getting to do comics, even if they were these tiny, crummy He-Man comics. It was a good learning experience, getting to learn how to do continuity, because I’d never really done that. I’d never really spent time drawing my own continuity, so here it was, “Okay, I’m here. Now I have to do it.”

this arm looks okay, but the rest of the drawing’s pretty bad.” [laughter] I had a couple of pieces there that were drawn from photographs, and he would say, “Huh, now this, I could tell you drew this from a photograph, but it’s still pretty solid. So if you could do some more stuff like this, and less like this other crummy stuff, you just might have a chance.” [laughter] Archie was cool. Even though I didn’t get any work from him, he didn’t make me feel horrible about it like a lot of other people did. From that point on I went every year and made the rounds of the portfolio reviews. During one of those trips, the guy I talked to at Marvel was Carl Potts. He wasn’t super-impressed by my stuff, but there were some samples where he didn’t like the drawings, but he liked some of the inking techniques I was using. He actually gave me some inking samples to do. He didn’t end up giving me any work—he gave me these really long, detailed criticisms of what I had done wrong in the inks—but he was still fairly helpful. He gave me a couple of really basic storytelling tips that, in retrospect were so simple, but until hearing somebody actually verbalize them, were things I hadn’t picked up on my own. He gave me a piece of paper and said, “Draw me a sad guy. Draw me a comic book panel with a sad guy in it really quickly.” So I drew a box and drew a guy sitting in

Based on that, I was actually brave enough to show my work for the first time to comic book professionals and try to get professional comic book work. That was the first year I went to the San Diego Comic-Con. I showed my portfolio around to everybody and didn’t get any work. MM: What year was that exactly? BRUCE: It was ’85. I got a lot of rejection. Some people were not nice about it; I met a lot of nasty comic book professionals who would really look down at you. Again, my stuff was crap. [laughter] I don’t blame them, I’ve been in that situation on the other end and have to look at crap and tell them “Well, you’re not very good.” MM: What exactly were you showing them? BRUCE: I was showing them my own sketches—just loose drawings that I had—and a lot of them were unfinished pieces. There’d be an arm or a hand or a face. I had a couple of completed illustrations and I had my He-Man continuity pages. One of the nicest rejections I got was from Archie Goodwin. I think he was working at Marvel at the time on the Epic line. He was patient enough to go through my portfolio with me, and even though he was telling me my stuff wasn’t any good, he would occasionally point out bits and pieces of drawings and say, “Well, 23

I worked with Dave Stevens. What had happened was while I was working on G.I. Joe, Will Meuginot—who was a sometime comic book artist and one of the main storyboard artists on G.I. Joe— his wife, Jo Meuginot, colored his comics and also a comic called Crossfire, which was a DNAgents spinoff comic. There was a period of time where she was sick and couldn’t color an issue of Crossfire, so Will recommended me for the job and I colored that one issue of Crossfire for Will and Mark Evanier. Mark and Dave Stevens were friends, and Dave needed help recoloring the Rocketeer for the graphic album, because the first four chapters had been printed in flat color and he was going to redo the color in that “painted” color for the graphic novel reprint. So I went and met Dave and showed him my samples. He said, “Ah, yeah, I guess you could do it.” [laughter] I basically quit working on She-Ra, even though I knew that Dave’s thing was a short-term gig. I was kind of tired of working at Filmation at that point, so I basically went freelance for a period of time. I was coloring the Rocketeer for Dave for about a month and also drawing He-Man comics. That was fun, because Dave was one of my absolute idols of the new comic book artists. I would drive over to Dave’s house and color the work right there in his house. It was him, myself, and Joe Chiodo all just hanging out in Dave’s house and coloring The Rocketeer. That was cool. I learned some coloring techniques from Dave and would pester him with questions about art and art influences. When I would take a break I would go over and watch him draw, because he was still finishing up the last couple of pages of The Rocketeer. Watching him draw and ink was enlightening. It really explained why he did very little work. [laughter] He’s very, very meticulous. He would do a super-tight pencil and I was always amazed by his ink line. It was probably one of the most perfect ink lines you’ve ever seen in comics—it was just gorgeous. And it’s not done effortlessly. You never saw anybody ink so slowly. That brush would slowly glide across the paper, then he’d go back in and scrape it with an Exacto knife, and occasionally go back in with white-out to get those tapering thickto-thin lines. Oh, my God! [laughter]

it looking sad. He said, “Well the simplest way to make this guy look really sad is to draw him smaller”—and he drew it right in front of me, basically the same drawing I had done, but much smaller and in the bottom of the frame, so that all of the negative space was crushing down on him. I just went, “Ohhhhhh!” I had read all these books—Will Eisner’s book on visual storytelling and all these different things—but for some reason, when I was reading those things it all sounded clinical and academic. It was like, “Wow, I have to know all this stuff to be able to draw comics. It’s too much to know.” But Carl just showing me that one, simple technique unlocked the door. In amongst the trips to San Diego and showing my portfolio, I just continued bouncing around the animation business. I ended up working at every place in Southern California that had work except for Disney and Hanna-Barbera.

MM: Did you learn how to color just through trial and error?

MM: You even went back to Filmation again. I believe you worked on She-Ra.

BRUCE: Yeah, totally trial and error. The thing about coloring The Rocketeer was they had just started that lazer scan, full process color. Pacific was doing that, then later Eclipse and a bunch of others were doing that. It was

BRUCE: Yeah. It was while I was working on She-Ra that 24

really a yucky medium, because they would print a grayline version of the line art on this waxy paper, then you would have a clear overlay of the line art which you could lay down on top so you could see what it would look like when it was printed. Dave and Joe had figured out by trial and error that the best medium to color on this grayline material—it had a really bizarre surface. You couldn’t use paint, because it would get gunky on it and you couldn’t move the paint very well. So they were using these water-based felt-tip markers called Stabillo markers. You couldn’t apply the marker directly on the grayline, because it would get blotchy, so what you had to do was lick the tip of a Q-tip, dab the marker onto the Q-tip, and then use the Q-tip as a brush to apply it to the paper. They found that human saliva was the best medium to get the smoothest gradations and coverage on that waxy surface.

MM: How many brain cells did you lose working that way? [laughter] BRUCE: Probably not as many as coloring with regular oilbased markers. At least they weren’t putting out toxic fumes. Dave would say, “Qtips are cheap—don’t reuse the same Q-tip. Throw the Qtip away and get a new one.” But I’d be lazy. [laughter] I’d be trying to get the thing done, so I’d keep relicking the same Q-tip and end up with that marker dye on my tongue. Later on when I did coloring work for First Comics, I was coloring all that stuff with those toxic-smelling permanent markers. Back then there was a medium in the marker ink called xylene, which was supertoxic. You really had to be working in a well ventilated room or otherwise you’d pass out from the fumes. MM: In ’87 you went over to Bakshi’s. BRUCE: During the freelance period there was a new company that started up. Kind of like the way Don Bluth broke off from Disney, there was a group of people who broke off from DIC—who were doing Inspector Gadget and stuff like that. They’d set up their own shop at this production company called Kushner-Lock in Westwood. Their goal was to put DIC out of business, and they had all these grandiose plans. To hire everyone away from DIC and get all these supposedly great people, they were paying the best rates in the industry—way above union scale. I didn’t necessarily want to work there, but you couldn’t turn the money 25

Previous Page: Skeletor shows who’s boss in this He-Man mini-comic page. Left: This 1988 THUNDER Agents piece was a part of Bruce’s portfolio on his trips to the San Diego Comic-con. Above: A late ’80s Daredevil. Daredevil ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. He-Man ™ and ©2004 Mattel. THUNDER Agents ™ and ©2004 John Carbano.

down. The money was really, really good. So I worked there for a short period of time on a show called Spiral Zone. It was another toy knock-off thing. It didn’t set the world on fire and Kushner-Lock got out of the animation business right after that. But while I was working there, through a friend of a friend I had heard that John Kricfalusi was starting up this Mighty Mouse show. I knew John socially. I was really good friends with this guy named Jim Gomez. Jim and I shared a room at Filmation on He-Man, and Jim had known John for years—they went to school together in Canada. I had actually done a little bit of freelance work for John when he was doing freelance models for DIC. So I had met John and John’s girlfriend at the time, Lynne Naylor, both through Jim. John was doing this Mighty Mouse show for Bakshi’s. It was for less money than what I was getting at Kushner-Lock, but it sounded like a whole lot of fun. I was a real big fan of John’s stuff. Even though I didn’t feel naturally inclined to do the “funny animal” stuff, I was just so into John’s artistic style. So I quit Kushner-Lock and went to go work for Bakshi’s and John. MM: The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse was the best show you’d worked on to that point. Did it feel that way to you as you started working on it? BRUCE: Let me put it this way: Secret of N.I.M.H. was probably the highest quality product that I had worked on—my own contribution to it was minimal—whereas Mighty Mouse was artistically and creatively the most fulfilling job that I’d had in the animation business. John, in his own weird way, was kind of like Don Bluth in that he wanted to bring back the glory days of animation. But instead of the glory days of Disney animation, he wanted to bring back the glory days of Bob Clampett—the golden years of classic Warner Bros. animation. Similarly to Don Bluth’s studio meetings with everybody in the room listening to the gospel according to Don, John would have Friday night get-togethers over at his place after work. Anybody who wanted to could go over to John’s place, drink a lot of beer, and stay up all night talking about cartoon theory. It was an eye-opener. I was back to doing layouts as I had been at Filmation, but John had a completely different idea of how to do layouts. John’s whole theory was that every single step of the animation process, instead of making the process weaker and duller, should be plussing it. Theoretically the storyboard would already be as good as John and his storyboard guys could make it. But when he’d give you your section of the storyboard to blow up into layout drawings, he really wanted you to push it. A) there was no stock, so you had to draw every scene from scratch. A little bit more work, but definitely more fun. He would say, “The drawing on the storyboard is okay, but we can make it ten times better if we did this.” He would sit down with you, and you’d brainstorm with him about how to make the gag funnier and how to make the drawing funnier. The first week I was there—again, not ever having 26

drawn that kind of stuff, John basically took a gamble on hiring me. He hired me based on Jim Gomez’ recommendation; he looked at my stuff and said, “Well, he draws fake super-hero crap, he doesn’t draw funny animal stuff. But what the hell, I need bodies, so I’ll hire him.” Jim [laughs]—trying to be a nice guy— had told John to go easy on me my first week, because I had never done this stuff before. That was like lighting a fire under John: “Go easy on him!?! What, are you crazy?” At the end of that first week, I went in to show my work to John, and there’s no polite way to put it: John tore me a new asshole. He just tore into me. My drawings were all real weak and pathetic. John is one of those guys that you either love him or hate him or do both at the same time. It’s the weirdest thing: He can tear you down and kind of inspire you at the same time. He had two different techniques. He would take your drawing, lay a sheet of paper over it, and fix your drawing and show you what it should look like—which was very instructive. His other technique was to ridicule your drawing. [laughter] He would take your drawing and lay a sheet of paper side-by-side with it, and he would draw a caricature of my drawing. “See this elbow you drew here? That’s not an elbow, that’s a mashed potato!” And he would draw a caricature to exaggerate the flaws. It was hard to watch. It really just made you feel like crap, but at the same time you instantly saw what he was talking about. It was like a light bulb going off, but he was so nasty about it, and literally every single drawing I had done that week had to be redone. I went home that night, I was so depressed. I’d never been that depressed based on anything that had happened in animation. I was destroyed. I did not want to get up and go back to work the next day, but somehow I managed it, and within a couple of weeks I’d actually gotten better at it. In the long run I was never cut out to be part of John’s group. It’s not in me to be that wild and extreme—basically I just don’t think I’m funny. [laughter] That’s bottom line: with John

it’s all about being funny. Yeah, he cares about good drawing, he cares about all that other stuff, but what he really cares about is being funny. If a cartoon is not funny, it’s not worth watching. But I guess I got better pretty quickly, because John would actually, on occasion be complimentary about my stuff. [laughter] I actually became one of his main guys. I did learn a lot from him. Again, it was kind of like being at Bluth, only like an X-rated version of it, in that everybody who was there was driven by this desire to further the cause of animation, in its own weird kind of way. It was an even more tightly knit group than at Bluth. It was a small studio—a real small group of people. We were feverish about it. When I was at Filmation, I couldn’t wait for six o’clock to come along so I could get out of there and go home. But at Bakshi’s, we would stay there until one or two o’clock in the morning, just because we were enjoying what we were doing so much. The deadlines were bad— we had a whole lot of work to do in a short period of time, but we were also inspired. For a lot of us, this was a dream gig. At that period in time, animation—especially for the networks— was very, very conservative. Broadcast Standards and Practices ruled with an 27

Previous Page: Inking samples done for Marvel in the late ’80s. Power Pack pencils by June Brigman (top) and Jon Bogdanove (bottom). Below: Another inking sample, this one over Larry Stroman pencils. Bruce: “Doing my best to ink like Dave Stevens and failing miserably.” Left: Bruce: “Around ’87, ’88, I got seriously interested in art deco illustration of the ’20s’30s, and started experimenting with it—it would heavily influence the Batman: Animated style a few years later.” Cloak, Dagger, New Mutants, Power Pack, Punisher ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Right: Batman sketches from the late ’80s. Below: A late ’80s Spider-Man sketch. Next Page: An aborted attempt at Batman continuity samples, done around ’88 or ’89.

iron fist. But the year before, Pee Wee’s Playhouse had been on CBS and had been a big hit. It was quite irreverent for the time, so CBS was giving John and Ralph a little bit more leeway in terms of content. It wasn’t rude; it wasn’t nearly as blatantly offensive as Ren & Stimpy or Beavis & Butt-head would be, but at least you could actually have some humor in it. A lot of us felt it was the first time in the business that we were being allowed to work without handcuffs on. You got to stretch your muscles and go crazy. It was a great place to work, and I met people I would end up doing work with later on, like Ted Blackman, who was our main background guy on Batman. I met him there at Bakshi’s, and strangely enough he was not actually part of the group—nobody really liked Ted at the time. [laughter] I don’t know why, but for some reason he was kind of on the outside there. And John didn’t really care much about backgrounds at the time. He really only cared about the character drawings, so it was like, “Ah, 28

somebody’s got to draw the backgrounds, it might as well be him.” Ted was actually doing really good work, but John just didn’t care. And Vicky Jensen— who later won an Academy Award for Shrek as one of the co-directors—she was a background painter at Bakshi’s. Andrew Stanton, who is now a big muckity-muck at Pixar— he directed Finding Nemo—he was one of our interns there. [laughter] It was a wild place. There was a lot of stuff happening there. MM: Who would come up with story ideas? Was it John or a group of writers? Something like Bat-Bat. BRUCE: Well, again, John generated a lot of the ideas himself, but he also had really good writers working with him. There was a guy named Tom Minton, who started off as an artist in animation, and he has this really odd, dry, ironic wit. He kind of reminds me of Michael O’Donoghue from National Lampoon. Tom would come up with ideas on his own, and sometimes it would

just come out of a conversation John and Tom would have and they would just develop the idea and run with it. There was another guy working there—a young animator/writer named Jim Reardon—who is now one of the big directors on The Simpsons. He’s been directing The Simpsons for ten years now. Jim came up with a lot of ideas on his own, too. I’m not exactly sure where Bat-bat came from. It was probably John’s original idea, then he and Jim brainstormed a bunch of ideas together, and then Jim wrote the script.

BRUCE: It was like going back to the Filmation days, because we had done the show for the network—we had done 13 of them and that was it. We all had to find stuff to do in the meantime until the next season. John, on his own, was trying to get his own projects off the ground, independently of Ralph, because he and Ralph weren’t exactly hitting it off any more. As the next season rolled around, he and Ralph had a big falling out, so though Ralph did get a second season of Mighty Mouse, John didn’t do it. I don’t even remember what I did in that fall and winter before Beany & Cecil. I think at that point I was still doing He-Man comics for Mattell on the side, and I had started coloring comics for First Comics.

MM: That was a great episode. BRUCE: It was awesome.

MM: You started that in ’88, so that sounds right.

MM: It was probably my favorite of the series. Were you still there when the big flower sniffing controversy came about?

BRUCE: Yep, and that was right before I went back to work for John at Beany & Cecil.

BRUCE: We were all gone by that point. By the time the shows actually aired, we were done.

MM: With Beany & Cecil, was that the first chance you had to direct?

MM: Were you doing Beany & Cecil right after Mighty Mouse or did the shows coincide?

BRUCE: Yeah, but I wouldn’t even qualify it as

being directing. There were directors that worked for John who actually had a directorial style. There was a guy named Eddie Fitzgerald, who was this wild, comic genius, but he was a walking disaster area. Some of his cartoons would come out really, really funny in that old, anarchic, Bob Clampett/Tex Avery kind of way—an anything goes kind of way. But he actually had a real directorial style. The two shows I directed for John, I was basically a layout supervisor—John basically directed them. All I did was hand out the work to the animators, and de facto, I was the director of the episodes—but in credit only. I don’t really consider them my work. MM: For the show, did you go back and look at all the old Bob Clampett Beany & Cecils? BRUCE: Oh, yeah. That was part of the allure of working with John. He would preach Bob Clampett as gospel. Not only at work, but on Friday nights we’d all get together at his place and drink beer and watch cartoons and look at artwork and just bullsh*t all night. That was his main influence in life: Bob Clampett. MM: You said you’d never been a huge study of the classic animators. Was this your first exposure to some of that material? BRUCE: Oh, yeah, yeah. It was eye-opening. Up until that point,

before I started working with John, one Warner Bros. cartoon looked the same as another to me. I couldn’t tell a Bob McKimson cartoon from a Chuck Jones from a Clampett. The stuff I learned from being with John and his gang, it’s like night and day. I guess it’s analogous to when I was a kid and first started really analyzing the comics, and being able to tell John Buscema from Sal Buscema, or John Buscema inked by Tom Palmer as opposed to John Buscema inked by Giacoia. It was that same kind of thing. For whatever reason, I never really watched funny animal cartoons with that same kind of analytical eye. But just from studying it under John’s tutelage, it was like a key being turned. “Oh, my God! Now I can totally tell the difference.” I was into it pretty hardcore there for that yearand-a-half, two years that I worked with John, taping every cartoon off of TV so I could get a complete collection of Clampett cartoons. I think TBS was running them every day, so I’d tape them every day. MM: Let’s go into the problems that developed on Beany & Cecil with—originally it was ABC, right? BRUCE: It was ABC. It was a disaster just waiting to happen. In retrospect, I’m surprised we all didn’t bail on it right away, because the warning signs were there. ABC wanted to do Beany & Cecil. They were negotiating with 30

the Clampett family to do Beany & Cecil. The Clampett family was very, very close to John, because he had known Bob when he was still alive and he was the carrier of the Clampett torch. So the Clampetts really wanted John to do the show. ABC didn’t want to have anything to do with John. They knew his reputation and, again, because of the flowersniffing thing on Mighty Mouse, they didn’t want to have any kind of controversy like that. Even though that was totally blown out of context—that was the biggest bullsh*t ever. So the Clampetts said, “Well forget it. We don’t want you to do Beany & Cecil if John’s not doing it.” The negotiations went back and forth for a long, long time. In the meantime, knowing that John was going to do Beany & Cecil at DIC—we were supposed to have started in June—I went there and interviewed with Richard Raynis, who was in charge of production for animation there, and told him the whole story of how I had worked with John and I showed him my portfolio, as well. I had a bunch of other stuff in there besides Mighty Mouse, and he said, “ Wow! Well John hasn’t made his deal yet, but in the meantime I can hire you and have you working on these other shows, and when John gets hired for Beany & Cecil, we can switch you over to it.” That was cool, because I wasn’t doing anything at the time, just coloring some things for First. While we were waiting for John’s deal to happen with ABC, I worked on a show called C.O.P.s— which was another one of those toy shows—I worked on The Real Ghostbusters— MM: What were you doing there? BRUCE: Character design. Finally, ABC broke down and said, “Fine. We really want to do this show. If we have to do it with John, we’ll do it with John, but we don’t want any of his funny stuff.” John really tried to pull a fast one on ABC. ABC would approve the storyboards, but not the layouts—that was just the way they worked.

They didn’t know about layouts, they just figured you approve the storyboard and that’s the cartoon you get back. Well John would take those storyboards and say, “The gag here on the storyboard isn’t really funny, what else can we do with it?” You’d end up throwing in all these gags in the layout stage that didn’t exist in the storyboard. ABC had no way to police that—they didn’t know it was happening. So when the cartoons would come back, they’d look at them and go, “Wait a minute! This is not the storyboard we approved!” Even before it got to that point when the cartoons came back and they discovered they’d been kind of hoodwinked, the executives in charge at ABC were not happy with the direction of the series. Even with those watered down storyboards, they had major BS&P censor issues. As bland as the gags were in the storyboards, they still hated them—they thought they were off-color, they were too violent, they were too this, too that. There were screaming matches happening at DIC. The ABC people would come over and they’d go into a conference room with John and Richard and whoever else, and you could hear them screaming from three doors down. It was really unpleasant. John doesn’t handle pressure very well, so he started freaking out because he was in such a codered state of war with ABC. It was tough. The more ABC would try to pull him back, the more he would try to shock and outrage them. It actually made me feel uncomfortable working as a layout supervisor/“director.” It was different from Mighty Mouse. It went beyond “let’s make this the best cartoon we can”—at that point, it was “okay, let’s make this the most shocking, offensive cartoon we can.” Knowing that it was not going to end well, I quit before the series even began airing. 31

Previous Page: The cover to Pulp Magazine #1 done in the late ’80s (above) and a cover for Astro Adventures—which Bruce feels is one of his better “pulp-style” illustrations—done for Bob Price’s Cryptic Publications, circa 1988. This Page: Pre-Batman: The Animated Series Batman sketches, circa 1988-’89. Batman, Joker ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

MM: Was it that you didn’t want to get branded as a trouble-maker?

MM: Did any of the Clampett family get to see the finished animation? BRUCE: Yes, and they all forgave us. [laughter] They were cool about it. They were not ultimately very happy with the cartoon, but they supported John—they were there the whole way. MM: No chance of those popping up on DVD at some point, I suppose? BRUCE: I would doubt it. They weren’t very good. Part of the problem was, since the negotiations for the show went on so long, we didn’t get started on the show until mid-July, and the show still had to hit the air in September. And by doing that layout step, that slowed down the anima-

MM: It had a beatnik vibe to it. BRUCE: Definitely had a beatnik thing going for it. MM: Right down to the beat poetry and bongos. BRUCE: But Clampett, at that point, was never going to be Lenny Bruce. But John would. John’s sense of humor... is not gentle. [laughter] And Beany & Cecil, for all of its subversive qualities, was still a gentle kids’ cartoon. We would do gags where it was all about humiliating Beany because he was such an obnoxious, little Boy Scout. It was the anti-Beany & Cecil show—it was not really a good show.

Below: Bruce: “My first collaboration with [Paul] Dini (he wrote the script). Also my first pro storyboard.” Next Page: Bruce: “From my last He-Man comic (’89)—a shortlived ‘teched-up’ re-vamp of the toy line.

BRUCE: Maybe, partly. Partly it just wasn’t fun any more. I’d had such a good time on Mighty Mouse, and was so looking forward to having that type of experience again on Beany & Cecil, and almost from the word go, Beany & Cecil was not that. I didn’t think anyone was going to get blacklisted from it or anything, but it got to the point where I started dreading having to come in to work in the morning, it was such an uncomfortable atmosphere.

tion process down, so we didn’t ship the shows until very late, and the overseas studio had less time to animate them. They were pretty shoddy as far as the animation quality. Intrinsically, it wasn’t a good fit to have John working with those characters. If you look back at the original Beany & Cecils that Clampett did, they were kind of subversive, but they were subversive in a very sly kind of way. He was not an inyour-face kind of guy at that point. He was sticking in weird jokes that were that ’50s, ’60s era, hipster kind of—

I went to was Disney, strangely enough. A friend of mine from Bluth, Terry Shakespeare, was working in their publications department. This was at a time when they were doing Disney Adventures and overseeing all the overseas—

MM: Was there a time when you were only coloring for First? BRUCE: Probably before and after Beany & Cecil. I was coloring stuff for First and for Malibu, or Eternity— whatever they were called at that time.

MM: This was when they were publishing it themselves, right?

MM: They may have changed names while you were working for them.

BRUCE: They were publishing Disney Adventures themselves and they were technically publishing all the Disney comics throughout the world. They would farm out the artwork to overseas artists, but it all had to come back to Disney to be corrected. There was a skeleton crew who worked on the Disney lot just doing the publications work. And they were also doing licensing artwork. I interviewed there and took a test to see how well I could draw the Disney characters, and I couldn’t draw them to save my life.

BRUCE: Coloring an entire comic book takes a lot of work. I wasn’t able to do it while I was working at Beany & Cecil. I was still coloring covers for First and Malibu/Eternity all throughout that, because it was easy money. Once I was done with Beany & Cecil I went back to coloring for First, and I even did one more He-Man comic at that time. Mattel in a kind of desperation were trying to resurrect He-Man. They reinvented him as a sci-fi hero rather than a fantasy hero. It was very, very short-lived. From a combination of the disappointment of what happened with Beany & Cecil and a disappointment of just coloring comic books, which was not very fulfilling to me, I almost had a nervous breakdown. I had met my future wife at that time, and we were dating, and I was thinking, “I’ve got to make a living somehow. If I’m going to marry this woman and have kids and the whole schmear, I can’t just be living this freelance comic book coloring life.” I wasn’t able to color them fast enough to make really good money at it. I had an ulcer at the time, too—a lot of things were all happening at the same time. As part of my therapy for getting rid of the ulcer I had to quit smoking, I had to quit drinking coffee and alcohol, I had to quit sugar and fat, all at the same time. So I went cold turkey on all of those substance abuses for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks I had a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t even breathe. MM: It’s amazing you weren’t just sitting in bed in a state of shock. BRUCE: I was. I was just lying there in bed, watching TV, shaking. It was horrible. Once I was through all that and was able to deal with stuff, I said, “I’ve got to do something. I need a job. I can’t just color comic books for a living. I’ll never be able to afford to buy a house, raise a family, and all this stuff.” The first place 33

way before the movie happened, and no one had done a Batman cartoon in 15, 20 years—unless you count the Superfriends. Batman was just laying there and nobody knew what to do with him. Somehow Nelvana got ahold of it and they pitched to one of the networks a very kid-friendly Batman show. Bob had done some presentation artwork for that.

MM: Your brief time drawing funny animals certainly wasn’t in the Disney style. BRUCE: That was the nice thing about working for John, was that the stuff was so out there and extreme and distorted, that in a way, he didn’t mind ugly drawing. He was really good at the fundamentals of drawing. He knew what a three-dimensional drawing was and would try to impart that, but in the best of both worlds you would have a solid, three-dimensional drawing that was also very extreme and exaggerated, which is not really the Disney style. Disney style is all about drawing—all about the fundamentals. Looking back on it, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, that I didn’t get hired at Disney, because I wouldn’t be where I am today. The next thing that happened was one of the guys I’d worked with on John’s crew on Beany & Cecil—a guy named Bob Camp—called me up and said, “Hey, Warner Bros. is starting up a TV division and are going to be doing cartoons for syndication. Come on over, they need people.” So I interviewed there with Art Vitello, who was my director on Tiny Toons, and he hired me.

MM: So when you came on board Tiny Toons, did they put you on background and character designs? BRUCE: I actually did storyboards until the end. I did some character designs on the side, but that wasn’t really my area. I did my first storyboard work on Beany & Cecil for John, so I had some of those boards in my portfolio when I went over to Warner Bros., and that’s what got me hired to do storyboards for Tiny Toons. MM: How long did you stay with Tiny Toons? BRUCE: It was March of ’89 when I started there, and the next year was when we started on Batman, so a little over a year. MM: You worked on the Bat-Duck episode before you left. Did they specifically give that one to you?

BRUCE: Strangely enough, yeah. I first met Bob at DIC, before he started working for John. Bob got hired on Ghostbusters while I was working on Ghostbusters, so I met him there. The year before that he had done some freelance work for Nelvana, who was developing Batman. This was during a real fallow period in Batman’s history,

BRUCE: It was the luck of the draw. Paul had written the script, but it was whatever scripts were available and whatever directing team was available at any given time. There was no rhyme or reason to it, you just got whatever script came down. Art Vitello’s unit got the Bat-Duck script, and I probably said, “Hey! I want to do that one!” [laughter] Storyboards ™ and ©2004 Warner Bros.

MM: Bob had been putting together a Batman project earlier on, right?

MM: Tiny Toons really made a lot of in-roads for afternoon cartoons. Were you seeing that happen as you were there? Although, I guess it really got started with the Disney afternoon cartoons. BRUCE: It was around the same time. I guess Disney had started it. MM: With Talespin and the like. BRUCE: Well, technically Filmation started it with He-Man, and right after that was Marvel and G.I. Joe. MM: And Thundercats, too. But for the most part, those cartoons were action/adventure shows designed just to sell toys. BRUCE: Disney’s afternoon cartoons were adventure cartoons, too, they just happened to have funny animals in them. But I have to give Disney credit for spending the money to get them done well. They were the first guys who said TV cartoons don’t have to look as crummy as they do. Because they were Disney they had a reputation to uphold—in fact, that’s probably why they stayed out of TV for so long. But at that point the overseas studios had gotten good enough to be passable, so Disney spent a little more money to make sure they got the best overseas studios to do their work, and spent a little bit more money in-house to have a little more time on the schedule to make sure the pre-production was done right. So Disney kind of started it, and Warner Bros. followed suit with Tiny Toons.

MM: Seeing Talespin and Darkwing Duck, it was like, “Hey, there’s finally some decent

cartoons on TV again,” and then Tiny Toons upped it another notch. It wasn’t a completely outrageous show, but it at least harkened back somewhat to the old classic Warner cartoons. BRUCE: They tried. I was spoiled. At that time I was one of Kricfalusi’s moonies. I had the gospel according to John drummed into my head, so what we were doing on Tiny Toons seemed like really weak tea to me. MM: Well they didn’t have a big-screen budget to work with, either. BRUCE: We actually had a much bigger budget on Tiny Toons than we did on Mighty Mouse or Beany & Cecil. It was just a matter of tone. Everybody at Warner Bros. claimed to want to resurrect the old Warner Bros. style. But if you look back at those classic Warner Bros. cartoons, they’re subversive as hell. They’re not Ren & Stimpy outrageous, but they’re pretty outrageous for the time period. Unfortunately, what everyone thinks of as old-school Warner Bros. animation is basically Chuck Jones—Bugs Bunny raising his eyebrow. I’ll give them credit for trying, but the Tiny Toons version of wacky didn’t go much further than crazy Tex Avery takes. They

Previous Page and Below: Elmira and Dizzy Devil pair off in this explosive scene. Meanwhile, Bat-Duck (better known as Plucky Duck) faces off against numerous evil-doers. The first sequence shown here mimics a scene from Bob Clampett’s classic cartoon, “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery,” which features Daffy Duck in the role of “Duck Twacy.” In the second sequence, BatDuck outwits Polecat Woman and The Question Mark. Above: Bat-Duck in his many variations: Golden Age Bat-Duck, ’60s BatDuck (complete with pot-belly), and the Duck Knight.

Cecil I thought the sun shone out of John’s ass. [laughter] I thought he was a genius—and he is a genius—but I didn’t want to be one of those moths caught up in his flame any more. When I worked on Tiny Toons, I still had a little bit of that John fever in me—I still wanted to make great, oldschool cartoons—but, at the same time, I didn’t want to get my hopes up and be disappointed. So I took the Tiny Toons gig as kind of a mercenary gig. It was the best of both worlds, because it was a good enough show that I could have fun with it, but, at the same time, if my stuff got thrown out or got changed, I ultimately didn’t care that much. I pretty much said, “I’m going to come in, I’m going to do nine-to-five, cash my check, and not worry about it.” MM: Did your attitude just completely wash away when Jean MacCurdy came to you and Eric Radomski with Batman?

Above: An evil caricature of the Tiny Toons directors—(left to right) Kent Butterworth, Rich Arons, Eddie Fitzgerald, Ken Boyer, Gerard Baldwin, Art Vitello, and Art Leonardi. Next Page: Early B:TAS development concepts and sketches. Bruce: “Struggling to find a decent Bruce Wayne design.... I nailed Batman himself fairly easily early on... everything else took a lot of R&D (check out the weird-ass Joker!). Batman, Bruce Wayne, Joker ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

thought that was the be-all and end-all. Any time you would try to put in something really bizarre and funny, usually Spielberg would shoot it down. He was pretty conservative about that. I mean, I give Steven a lot of credit for insisting that the cartoons be done—like Disney did—with a decent budget, with the best animation studios available, and stuff like that. He was really into it—he really was. I just remember a number of times, some of the ideas that we would float past to try to make the cartoon just a little edgier. This was Color Purple-era Steven and Alwaysera Steven—he was still kind of into that goopy, sentimental mode. So the cartoons could never be quite as edgy and hip as we really wanted to make them, because Steven would always pull it back. MM: Did you feel like you could keep working there for a while if it came down to it? BRUCE: The weird thing was that I had gotten my hopes up so high for Beany & Cecil and been so disappointed. Mighty Mouse lit the fuse under me. Working for John on Mighty Mouse was like, “Wow, now I have a mission. Now I know what life is all about.” And the next year working on Beany & Cecil with John and pretty much the same crew, and having it just go down in flames, was such an eye-opener to me. Up until Beany & 36

BRUCE: Oh, yeah. MM: Was it just, “Okay, forget it. I’m sucked in again.” [laughter] BRUCE: Yeah. It was really funny, when I was on Beany & Cecil—you brought up the directing thing—when I was a director on Beany & Cecil, it was so unpleasant that I did not want to direct any more. Back when I was working on Mighty Mouse, that had been one of my goals. “Man, I can’t wait to be one of these directors. I can’t wait to be one of John’s inner circle and be able to have my own show and put my own stamp on it. On Beany & Cecil I realized I wasn’t cut out to be one of John’s directors, because basically I was John’s wrist—I was just following his orders. And I didn’t really have a comic sensibility of my own to impart as a director. So becoming a cartoon director was not really a goal of mine any more. But the minute the Batman thing opened up, it was, “That I can do.” And I didn’t even go in there hoping to be the producer or the director of the show. When I showed those first Batman drawings to Jean, I was hoping I would maybe get to be the main model designer on the show. That was the extent of my ambition. I would have been happy just doing that. So when she came back and said, “I want you and Eric to produce the show,” it was kind of like, “Oookay, I can do that.” [laughter] Once she

said they were going to develop it as a cartoon, bang, I was so there. I knew exactly what to do with that cartoon, I knew it was something I could excel at; so all that stuff where I had said I didn’t want to care about animation any more, I didn’t want to be a director, I didn’t want to be in a position of power, the minute it was dangled in front of me with the right property, I knew I could do something with it. MM: Things moved along fairly quickly, and Jean asked you to put together— BRUCE: Well, actually, there was a rough period in the meantime. Tiny Toons was winding down. I showed my drawings to her, she teamed Eric and I up to do the show if it ever got done, and a lot of it was just deal making. Even though the first Batman movie had come out and been a big, big hit, nobody had done a straight super-hero cartoon in a long time. You look at the G.I. Joe cartoon and you realize it basically is super-heroes with guns and planes. MM: And the most popular character is the guy in the mask. BRUCE: Right, but they’re not long-underwear superheroes. For some reason, there was a time period there in the ’80s when you couldn’t sell a super-hero show to save your life. When I was at Marvel, Margaret Loesch, who was in charge at the time, was trying to sell an X-Men cartoon for the longest time. It was the number one comic, but she could not get anyone interested in doing an X-Men cartoon. She eventually spent Marvel’s own money to produce a pilot, but still nobody nibbled at it—nobody wanted to do it. So even though the first Batman movie had been a big hit, all the shows that were in syndication at that time were comedy shows. G.I. Joe might still have been on, but it wasn’t doing the same kind of numbers it had done early on. There was some hesitation as to whether anyone would actually watch a super-hero cartoon— especially produced at the kind of scale Jean was talking about, because Jean was spoiled by work-

ing with Steven on Tiny Toons and she wanted the reputation of Warner Bros. to be the Cadillac of TV animation. She didn’t want to produce a cheap Batman cartoon, and not only that, but everybody had all this money invested in the franchise because of the movie. There was a lot of negotiation—a lot of things going on behind the scenes. Jean was close with Margaret, who was now in charge of Fox Kids, so they got into negotiations, and maybe instead of syndicating it, Fox would run it in their afternoon line-up. Margaret was interested, Fox was interested, Warner Bros. was interested, but they had a lot of red tape to get through: who was going to pay for the show, who would have what rights, whatever. In the meantime Jean kept saying, “We’re going to do this, so get started on it. Start developing it now.” But we didn’t have any money to hire a crew, so it was basically me and Eric and Paul—who was still working on Tiny Toons, but we got to borrow him for a while to work on the bible—and I brought in an old writer friend of mine named Mitch Brian. We flew him out and he worked with me and Paul for a couple of weeks on the bible. I got to borrow Ted Blackman occasionally, kind of on a freelance basis, to do some background designs. It’s common knowledge, but Eric and Ted and I did this short, minute-and-a-half animation test for Batman to show the suits what we were going to do. Jean was kind of hoping that would kick-start the process, that they would look at that and say, “Okay, fine. Here you go. Greenlight it.” The irony of it was, by the time we got the test done, it was a done deal. The show was already sold. But it was good we had done this cartoon, because Jean took a big gamble in

That was a major inspiration for me. I was always into the whole pulp genre: Doc Savage and The Avenger and The Shadow. I was really into that when I was a kid. That was something that I really wanted to do with the show. There was something about setting it in that old-timey, moody world which seemed to be just a no-brainer. We really wanted to bring this film noir/pulp/Citizen Kane/Fleisher Superman feel to it. MM: The Batman movies had some influence on the development of the cartoon as well, if for no other reason than that’s what got them interested in doing it in the first place. In your original design for the Penguin, he had a ’50s/’60s Dick Sprang look to him, but you ended up making him look more like he did in the second Batman film. Didn’t the Catwoman have to change a bit as well? BRUCE: We had a love/hate thing going on with the Tim Burton movies. Obviously our show would never have gotten made if it hadn’t been for that first Batman movie. There are some interesting parallels, somewhat, in the design of the movie and what we did, but I made it clear to Jean when we first got the gig that I didn’t want to make the TV show just a spin-off of the movie. I didn’t want the show to look just like the movie. I didn’t want to use their Batman design, I didn’t want to use much of anything they did. I wanted the show to be unique. Not only that, but I had my own ideas of what Batman was. They coincided in some places with the movie, and some places they didn’t. Tim Burton and Anton Furst used retro/deco elements in their version of Gotham City as well, but theirs was more of an ugly take on it—it was a deliberately ugly, brutal take on the futuristic design—and we didn’t really want to go that way. It certainly worked for the movie, but

putting Eric and I in charge of the show, because neither of us had produced a show before. Neither of us had come close to having that level of responsibility for a show. I don’t know what the hell she saw in us that made her think that we would work. But if she ever had to go to the suits at the network or at the lot and say, “I’d like these two guys to produce the show,” she could show them that piece of film and say, “This is what they’re capable of.” MM: As you started production on Batman, what did you use as your starting point? You’ve said in the past that the show was influenced by the Fleisher Superman cartoons, Citizen Kane, and so on, but you’ve also drawn covers for pulp-style magazines. Did your interest in the pulps play a role in Batman’s development? BRUCE: Oh, yeah. Even before production started, while we were still doing development on it, I had my walls plastered with color Xerox blow-ups of pulp covers. 38

we wanted more of a pure, old-fashioned kind of art deco. Burton and Furst were probably influenced by pretty much the same sources we were. There was an architectural visionary named Hugh Ferris, who did these elaborate, futuristic cityscape architectural renderings. They were just gorgeous—these massive deco buildings rendered very moodily. That was one of our prime influences on the look of the show. I’m sure Burton and Furst were looking at that stuff, too, and then they went off in their own direction with it. There were things about the first movie that I thought they got just right—the spooky aloofness that Batman has and the fact that he isn’t chummy and hanging out with Commissioner Gordon. I was particularly taken by the scene where Batman takes Vicky Vale back to the Batcave and he’s not making eye contact with her, he’s not talking to her, he’s just being monosyllabic. I thought that was a cool way to go with the character, and that probably influenced us to a degree. We wanted to keep him remote and creepy as much as possible. Obviously over the course of 65 episodes, and ultimately more, he has to come into contact with other people, so he has to be a little more verbose than that. Batman Returns was in production at the same time we were. I initially designed The Penguin to look like the Dick Sprang/Jack Burnley Penguin, the classic Penguin, and Catwoman— MM: I’ve seen several different designs for Catwoman. BRUCE: The one that got on the screen was pretty much like the one we first went with. We did get a call that the studio wanted The Penguin and Catwoman to look as much like the movie versions as possible. I didn’t really want to do that, but you get the word from on high and you’ve got to do it. What was fun about that was they didn’t have any photographs of Danny DeVito in his costume, and not only that, but they weren’t going to give me any. Eric Radomski and I went and met with Tim Burton for a short meeting and Tim sketched out while we were sitting there kind of what they were looking like. His drawing style is almost abstract—it’s not realistic at all, it’s very cartoony. I could kind of see where he was going, but it was still a lit-

tle vague. Then later I got to go over to the studio while they were doing the first costume test on Danny. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, but I brought my sketchbook and got to see him in his full regalia, so I just sat there and sketched him while they were taking pictures. Now the Catwoman thing, in retrospect I wish we had made Catwoman more like she was in the movie, because I think that black costume is really, really cool. At the time I was kind of put of by all the stitches. I thought it was a morbid way to go with the character, and I didn’t really see the character that way. But the all-black costume—we ultimately did that later on, because we really liked it—but at the time we were just starting Batman, we were still trying to feel our way around in terms of stylizing the characters for animation purposes, and I was terrified of doing a character in all black. MM: Did the fact that you were painting on black boards for the backgrounds contribute to your concerns over an all-black costume? BRUCE: Maybe, to a degree. We had never done a character who was all black with no shading on him, that was literally a black holding line filled in with solid black—we thought it would look too flat. The other possibility is to make the character predominantly black, but with a highlight on him, like with Batman’s cape and gloves and stuff. On a character like Catwoman, who’s curvy, just trying to shade a character like that and put the highlight in the right place—if it’s not in the right place, it’s going to look really, really weird. I actually tried to do a number of versions of it, and even I was having a hard time pulling it off. I couldn’t really expect our guys in Korea to figure it out on their own. So, basically, I kind of lied to the lot. I didn’t really lie, but I gave them my 39

Previous Page Top: The influence of the pulp magazines on B:TAS came to the forefront in “Beware the Gray Ghost.” This image is a “direct swipe from a George Rozen Shadow cover.” Previous Page Bottom: Bruce’s first— and preferred— Penguin design, along with Tim Burton’s rough sketch, which Tim drew during his meeting with Bruce and Eric Radomski. Above: The B:TAS Catwoman (left) is close to the final design. Bruce: “Fox Kids was worried she looked too ‘naked,’ so I added the Julie Newmar-ish belt.” The New Adventures Catwoman (right) turned out to be much closer to the movie design. Catwoman, Gray Ghost, Penguin ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

reasons why I didn’t think we could do it. I put her in that all-gray costume and sent over to them for approval, and they said, “Ah, it’s close enough.” MM: It was still the full-body suit. BRUCE: It was a full-body suit, but I put gloves on her. Initially she didn’t have gloves, she was in the David Mazzuchelli Catwoman outfit—gray from head to foot. That was my compromise—we put the black boots and gloves on her and a little bit of black on her mask. MM: You did a lot of the designs yourself, but Kevin Nowlan also came in and drew up some designs. How many people did you have working on the character designs?

Above: Poison Ivy before Lynne.... “My first design.... My God! This is horrible! Look at those proportions! Thank God for Lynne Naylor!” Right: ...And Poison Ivy after Lynne, along with Bruce’s first drawing of Harley Quinn. Next Page: A birthday drawing for Arleen Sorkin, the voice of Harley.

BRUCE: It was over ten years ago, so it’s hard to remember exactly. A lot of people. Like you said, I did a lot of the designs myself. Kevin Nowlan—I had him do some design concepts—Mike Mignola. Those were the only two outside guys that we had. There’s a really talented cartoonist/artist named Lynne Naylor—who I’d worked with at Bakshi’s—who designed some of the characters as well. She designed Poison Ivy, Montoya, and Summer Gleason, because at the time my female characters were just coming out too stiff and too masculine. Lynne is a great “good girl” artist, so I had her come in and do some really cartoony designs on those characters, and it really gave me a handle on how to stylize female characters for animation. In-house we had a lot of our staff artists take a shot at designing some of the characters. Man-Bat was designed by a great, young guy named Mike Kim, who I’d worked with on Beany & Cecil. MM: So it was a large team. BRUCE: Oh, yeah. At the height of production we had a gigantic crew on B:TAS. 40

MM: I know you weren’t hot on using Robin in the show, but being a kids’ show the higher-ups wanted him there. How did you go about settling on his costume and which identity he would have? BRUCE: Well, at the time, they had just updated Robin’s costume in the comics— maybe a year or two before. Neal Adams had designed the modern day outfit, which took him out of the... MM: It gave him long pants instead of the briefs. BRUCE: Yeah, it gave him long pants and the ninja boots, the black cape, and all that stuff. We thought that was definitely a step in the right direction. If we had to use Robin, if we could give him a little more dignity, that would be a good thing. The little fairy boots and the bare legs is just... [laughter] it’s just too weird. That was our starting point. MM: Then you did what Denny O’Neil had done and sent Robin off to college. BRUCE: We tried to keep him out of the show as much as possible. Ultimately, Robin’s a big part of the Batman mythos and you kind of have to deal with him, but we really wanted to keep Batman a loner and I think he works best that way. If he’s got Robin, then he has to talk, and we didn’t want that. We wanted to keep him as this creepy, remote, almost mythological figure—really more like a shadow than anything else. Ultimately, I think Robin was a good thing for the show. It did the job that Robin’s supposed to do: he’s kind of an audience surrogate character. With his sense of humor he brings a lighter touch to the show. Otherwise it would have been just grim, grim, grim. It turned out okay. MM: Going along with the lighter touch, Harley Quinn was originally created as a one-off character. Obviously she took

MM: Speaking of the darker show, you had many problems arise between Broadcasting Standards & Practices and what some of the things you wanted to do in the show. What were some of the bigger issues they had throughout the show’s history? With Robin’s origin episode, you had to show the deaths of his parents off-screen, although I think that actually helped the effectiveness of the scene. BRUCE: Absolutely. MM: There was the way guns had to be drawn—what were some others? BRUCE: They had a huge list. We were never allowed to put children in jeopardy—or if we did, they went over it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it wasn’t too disturbing. Characters going through plate glass windows, that was a standard. We eventually did all of them, but every single time it was a battle. It was a struggle to find an acceptable way of doing it that would please both them and us. MM: How did the submission process work? Was it presented as storyboards or were there meetings beforehand or...? BRUCE: We’d send the script over for approval. We would then get the regular network creative notes and also the BS&P notes. So right then and there, there was a lot of back and forth on “You can’t do this; this is not acceptable. Find some other solution.” Then the writers would try to figure out some type of compromise. We would send them the storyboards as well and we’d go through another round of both creative notes and BS&P notes. That was probably my least favorite part of the process at that point. I got really heated—I don’t even remember what episode it was over—but I was on the phone with both Sydney Iwanter, who was our creative liaison at Fox, and Avery Coburn, who was our BS&P gal, and I was getting really, really frustrated with the network notes—specifically the BS&P notes—and I was starting to lose it. We got a call from them the next day, and they said, “Avery doesn’t want to deal with Bruce anymore.” [laughter] “He’s just too intense.” So, from that point on, I said “Fine, I’ll let Alan Burnett deal with it.” It was just too, too much. Ultimately they were good to us. They allowed us to do things that really no other cartoon was getting away with at that time. The cartoons were definitely ballsier than anything that had ever been done for TV, in terms of the intensity level and the adult situations and the violence. Like you said, “Robin’s Reckoning” is a perfect example of it. That was an instance where BS&P actually caused us to do something that was cooler than if we had just shown it. If we had just shown Robin’s parents falling to their deaths, it would be shocking, but so what. The

on a life of her own. Did you have any idea that she would be a strong enough character to eventually have basically her own episodes? BRUCE: Not at all. When Paul first mentioned the idea to me, I thought, “Okay, that’s kind of clever.” We put her in “Joker’s Favor,” but it wasn’t until we got the footage back from overseas and we saw her on the screen that everyone instantly fell in love with her. It was a combination of the personality and the voice— Arleen’s voice—and the visual. It was “Wow! She’s a doll.” She’s a great character; you just realize we caught lightning in a bottle. As much as I didn’t want to keep using her, because I had this gut feeling.... We kept trying to make the Joker scary, and scary, and scary, and by having his wacky girlfriend there it brings out his goofier side. I was really concerned about that, but we all loved the character, so Paul kept sticking her in every Joker show. We would read it and go, “I don’t know, maybe we’re overusing Harley. Joker’s losing his edge.” Sure enough, I think that is kind of the case. Eventually she became such an integral part of our version of the characters we were able to pull off some really dark stories with her, as well as some fun and light ones like “Harliquinade” and “Harley’s Holiday.” But certainly “Mad Love,” which we did in the re-vamp Batman, was one of the darkest shows we ever did. 41

way we staged it where you see their silhouettes on the trapeze, you hear a gasp from the audience and the trapeze swings back into the frame and it’s been cut—that’s artistic and cool and it gets the point across. It’s subtle, but it’s more powerful than if you had actually seen it.

MM: They chose “On Leather Wings,” the first Man-Bat episode and probably a very good place to start from, even though it utilized a character most of the viewing audience was unaware of. Did you feel good about having that as the premiere episode?

MM: Once production started up, you had a lot of episodes that had to get done right away, because the show was going daily right off the bat. You really had to rely on a lot of different animation studios—more than you would have preferred, I’m sure. What problems resulted from having to deal with so many different studios?

BRUCE: Oh, yeah. We designed it as such. That was the first story we thought of when we first started plotting out stories for the show. Man-Bat was chosen specifically because he wasn’t familiar to very many people outside comic-book fans. Nobody had any preconceived notions about him. It wasn’t like the Joker, where you had to deal with people expecting him to be Jack Nicholson or Cesar Romero. It was kind of like our manifesto. The episode was designed to show you what the show was going to be about. It’s not about—even though we were eventually going to do that too—the wacky Joker or the silly Penguin; it’s dark, it’s spooky, it’s mysterious. It has as much to do with mood as it does with action. It was the show in a nutshell, and I think it worked really well in that respect.

BRUCE: Oh, it was tough. We had some great studios, we had some good studios, and we had some bad, bad, bad studios. MM: AKOM. BRUCE: Yeah, that’s an open secret. You know, it’s weird; relatively, the stuff that AKOM did for us was probably miles better than what they had been providing for other studios on other shows. But just by our own relative standards, compared to the best being those TMS episodes, the AKOM episodes were just poor, poor, poor if you A-B them. The strongest example of that was the Clayface two-parter. Part one was animated by AKOM, part two was animated by TMS, which was really unfortunate because if you watch both shows back-to-back, the first half is just godawful—it’s just ugly to look at; it’s an eyesore—and part two is like “Wow!” It’s eye candy—just eye-popping. That was kind of a drag, but we eventually got to the point where we said, “We don’t want AKOM any more. Their stuff just is not up to snuff.”

MM: And there were some scenes with very little dialogue, as well. BRUCE: He’s actually pretty chatty in that episode, strangely enough. We still hadn’t quite nailed down his personality yet. I mean, he’s joking with Alfred in the Batcave and stuff. He wasn’t quite the Batman that we really wanted him to be, but we were playing around with things and trying to see what things would work. There is a cool moment where he’s in the Batcave and he’s talking in his Batman voice to Alfred, then he gets a phone call from Dr. March and while he’s still wearing the Batman costume, he’s speaking in that jokey Bruce Wayne voice. I wish we had done more stuff like that, because that was kind of neat.

MM: Batman made its premiere in prime time. How did you decide on which episode to use? BRUCE: We had nothing to do with it. The network decided; it was completely their choice.

MM: Episode 14, “Heart of Ice,” is one that you directed. You were behind schedule, so you were really forced into directing.

MM: How many episodes were ready for them to choose from?

BRUCE: Yeah, I didn’t want to be directing episodes.

BRUCE: By the time we aired? I don’t know, maybe 20. We were still in production when the show aired.

MM: So it wasn’t in your plans to direct at all through the entire series? 42

BRUCE: No, that’s what I had directors for. [laughter] In a way, Eric and I were directing the entire series. We were kind of directing the directors. Every time the director would be done with their storyboard, they would bring it to me or to Eric—whoever was available—and we would sit down with the director and go over the entire storyboard shotby-shot. “This works fine. This doesn’t—how can we plus it?” We would spend a day or two tweaking the storyboard, and when the show came back animated, I would be sitting in the editing room with the director and the editor, basically calling the shots. That was plenty for me to do. Eric and I were working with the writers on the scripts, working with the directors on their storyboards, and overseeing the art direction on all the other aspects of it—we had pretty much a full plate. On top of that, to be responsible for directing individual episodes as well, there’s not enough hours in the day. But we had to, because we were way behind schedule. Even though we had four directing/storyboard units, it just wasn’t enough to get back on schedule, so it was decided over our heads that Eric and I would direct a handful of episodes ourselves to get us back on track. The problem with that was that all of our storyboard guys were booked; they all had their own shows to do. There’s always a shortage of really good board guys in the business. There’s tons of board guys—and most of them are competent—but there’s very few of them who are stellar, and we were very, very picky and most of the really good freelancers in the business were already working for us on a regular basis. So what I had to do on “Heart of Ice” was, we had one really good, regular freelancer—Phil Norwood—and he had a little time, so he gave me about week and boarded a third of an act. Basically, the rest of the episode, whoever on our crew that had a day or two of downtime in between scripts, I got to use them for that period of time. So there were probably ten different board guys who worked on that show as opposed to the usual three. I did a little bit of it here and there myself. It was a real hodgepodge; we tried to pull it all together and somehow it just magically happened.

BRUCE: I did at least two-thirds of that show. I did bits and pieces of the first act. A guy named Larry Houston did some of the first act—I think about half of the first act. I did the second act myself with a couple of clean-up guys, and the third act I penciled and inked it all myself and then couldn’t draw for a month after that. [laughter] I wrecked my hand on that show. MM: How much time did you spend on that show? BRUCE: Every waking moment. [laughter] That was one of those instances where I’d get home at four o’clock in the morning and my wife would be sitting there on the stairs, “Why didn’t you call?” [laughter] That was a tough one. MM: Was it Paul’s idea to combine the two Batman comic-book stories into that episode? BRUCE: Yeah, that was totally Paul’s idea.

MM: You had to storyboard a lot of “The Laughing Fish,” as well as direct it. Didn’t you have to storyboard the entire third act? 43

MM: “Heart of Ice” and “The Laughing Fish” ended up being two of the most memorable episodes in the entire series. With Mr. Freeze, did you feel more free to do your own take on the character since he was a rather minor character in the comics?

This Page: Storyboard panels from “The Laughing Fish.” Next Page: Flyer for a Halloween party co-hosted by Bruce and Henry Gilroy, one of the writers on B:TAS. “Henry’s popped up as several characters in my Batman series. He’s in ‘The Man Who Killed Batman’ and ‘Joker’s Millions’—he has a cameo in Harley & Ivy #1, too.”

Again, you usually didn’t get a choice over which scripts you got, it usually was whatever script was available. Occasionally the directors would be able to say, “I know the Ra’s al Ghul script’s coming up. I really, really want that one,” and you’d try to arrange as much as possible. Kevin Altieri threatened to do all kinds of horrible things to everybody if he didn’t get the Ra’s al Ghul script, so he got that. [laughter] When “The Laughing Fish” came down—I think it came down at the same time as the first Riddler script—Eric didn’t want to do it. He read the script and said, “Ah, I don’t like it. I want to do the Riddler show.” So I said, “Fine. I love ‘The Laughing Fish’ show. I’ll definitely do it.” That was something that Paul—in his own twisted, little brain—had somehow figured out the fish connection between the two comic-book stories and had melded them together, and it was seamless.

BRUCE: Early on in the development process, that was one of those epiphany moments. I was talking with Paul and with Mitch Brian about how some of the characters were automatically there. Like the Joker, you automatically knew what to do with him. Catwoman you could have gone any number of ways with, but there was this exotic jewel thief version of her in the zeitgeist already. Mr. Freeze has always been a joke. As an example of what we could do with some of those lesser rogue’s gallery characters, I somehow had this idea in my head of Mr. Freeze and using the cold as a motif for his emotional being and not just his visual. I said, “What if this guy is literally a zombie? What if he’s a walking dead man who absolutely has no emotions, nothing.” And Paul and Mitch kind of went, “Well that’s kind of neat. That would be a neat way to go with it.” Beyond just talking about it at that early stage, we didn’t get to Mr. Freeze until later on when Paul came back on the show. He had gone back to work on Tiny Toons for a while, then Alan Burnett brought him back on to Batman on a full-time basis. Once he got back, that was the first script Paul worked on. He remembered what we had talked about way back in development, and kind of came up with his own spin

MM: Had you read those stories before? BRUCE: Oh, sure. I swiped Neal Adams’ stuff directly for the shark sequence. 44

on that. Even though we kept him cold and emotionless, in a weird way he’s actually the most emotional character. That’s his whole shtick, his wife was killed and that’s what led him to become a super-villain. It’s an interesting character. MM: Moving on to another episode you directed, “The Man Who Killed Batman,” it’s really a Will Eisner-type story— BRUCE: It’s totally an Eisner story. MM: It follows this Joe Schmuck nobody who makes his way ploddingly along. How did the story develop? Did Paul simply bring it in? BRUCE: He just brought it in. That was one of those things that came completely from the mind of Dini. [laughter] MM: That episode—even though they’re really just cameo villains—has some of the best Joker and Harley moments of the series. How did those scenes develop? BRUCE: You’d have to ask Paul. We were all so busy at that point and wearing so many hats that I don’t have a specific memory of talking over that story with Paul. At that point in the show, the writers were just writing and the artists were just drawing, and I didn’t have a whole lot of input on the scripts. Probably, Paul came up with it on his own and talked it over with Alan and then just went off and did it himself. By the time I got it, it was a fait accompli. Fortunately it was great, and all I had to do was stage it properly. I did quite a lot of the board myself on that one. I had a great time with Joker’s eulogy especially. I had to act that whole thing out with the Joker, and that was one of the highlights of the episode for me.

back. Actually, in the script it was a little bit more explicit that he died. It was one of those cases where BS&P said, “Oh, no. You have to be more vague about it.” MM: In the second season the title of the show changed to The Adventures of Batman & Robin. BRUCE: Fox really wanted to increase Robin’s visibility. The first season had done really well, probably better than anybody had expected. But there was always this concern that the show skewed older than the demographic that they wanted to reach. So they thought one way of getting kids to watch the show more was to put a kid in the show, even though Robin wasn’t really a kid any more. They really insisted in that second season that we put Robin in the majority of the shows.

MM: “Day of the Samurai” was one of the few occasions you did not work with Paul Dini—Steve Perry scripted that one. I think the most interesting aspect of that show was the ending. The villain, Kyodai Ken, effectively dies at the end. You don’t see the body, so there is an out— BRUCE: No, no. He’s dead. [laughter] MM: That was definitely the intent?

MM: You had planned for some new villains for that second season. There were plans for a Nocturna storyline.

BRUCE: Yeah, we were never planning on bringing him 45

Was that going to basically follow the storyline from the comics?

MM: You had also planned for the Creeper to show up that season. BRUCE: Yeah, the Creeper show just didn’t gel that first time around. We went back and forth on it, and a number of writers took a stab at it. It just never got to a point where we all felt happy with it, so we just dropped it. MM: What changed in the third season that made it work? BRUCE: I couldn’t tell you exactly what the final thing that made it work was. MM: Was it tying the Joker into his origin?

MM: It’s not a bad, little twist. It helps explain the Creeper’s insanity. BRUCE: I was drawing him one day, just for fun, because we were talking about going back and trying the Creeper again, and I was having a hard time. Because we wanted him to be maniacal. I love the Ditko Creeper, but if you go back and read the actual comics, he laughs but you don’t really see him laughing. It’s always a long shot of his silhouette leaping over buildings and there’s those big letters “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He would use that to intimidate people, but it’s a weird, absurd thing: He’s a yellow guy with a feather boa and people are terrified of him. Why are they terrified of him? [laughter] It works in the comics, but not logically if you really think about it. We thought, “The laughing thing is good, and the reason people are afraid of him is because he’s insane. He’s maniacal, you never know what he’s going to do.” So I kept drawing him with this big rictus grin, and it just looked like the Joker again and I didn’t want him to look like the Joker. I wanted him to look unique. I don’t remember who it was, but somebody said, “Wait a minute, maybe he looks like the Joker for a reason.” And I said, “Ahhhhhh.” It was probably Paul and I and maybe Glen Murakami—I don’t know, it Storyboards ™ and ©2004 Warner Bros.

This Page: A nightmarish storyboard sequence from B:TAS. Next Page Top: Kitten with a whip. Next Page Bottom: The final design for Baby Doll, the psychotic child star who never grew up.

BRUCE: Oh, yeah. That storyline in the comics was a really long, drawn out, soap operish kind of thing, and we were going to do at most a two-parter with it, trying to condense the best parts of those comics into one finite story. We never got very far with it, because we knew that it was going to be tricky. We called up Fox and said, “We’re thinking about doing this story, blah, blah, blah,” and the minute we said vampires they said no. “Well what if we—?” “No.” [laughter] “What if we never ever see fangs?” “No.” “What if when Nocturna bites Batman it’s all in the shadows?” “No. No vampires, period.” “Well that’s one not worth doing then.”

BRUCE: That was certainly an element that hadn’t been there before. I don’t know who came up with that shtick—actually... God, I think I might have. [laughter]

So Babydoll, I think, fits. She’s not physically imposing, so she’s the type of character that always has to have a henchman do her dirty work, but Scarface is the same way. But I thought it was a really interesting twist—something I don’t think had ever really been done before in the comics or anywhere. There were so many child stars in the news in the 15 years up until that time—child stars who had “gone bad”—and I thought it was a very interesting take Paul had come up with.

was a long time ago. But it came about when we realized the Joker grin is the key.

MM: In between the first and second seasons there had been talk about a possible Catwoman spin-off series. Why was it dropped? Was it dependent on there being a Catwoman movie?

MM: Do you think Babydoll was successful as a character? BRUCE: I liked Babydoll a lot. I know a lot of people don’t like Babydoll at all, but—

BRUCE: No, it was all very vague. When Batman Returns came out, there was a lot of talk about spinning Catwoman off into her own movie. We were coming to the close of our first run of Batman episodes, and we said, “Well, what are we going to do next?” There were a number of proposals. We talked about the possibility of doing a Robin spin-off show, which didn’t terribly appeal to me, but we did a little bit of development artwork on it. And the other possibility was, because of the popularity of the Catwoman character from the movie, we thought maybe we could do a Catwoman spin-off TV show. We talked about it a little bit—what would the premise be, and what would make it visually different from Batman—but I’m not sure if it was ever really pitched anywhere. I never pitched it to any executives, and I think it just died of inertia.

MM: I think in her second appearance, when she was paired up with Killer Croc, she really worked. BRUCE: See, generally, people hate that episode. It’s just too weird; they can’t wrap their head around it. I think both Babydoll episodes are terrific. I think she’s a really cool character. That was the weird thing, we always kept trying to create new Batman villains who felt like Batman villains, and it’s a tricky formula to get right. You think of the classic Batman villains like the Joker and Two-Face and the Penguin, they all have these really cool, weird visual gimmicks, and they all have some kind of weird, twisted psychological twist that makes them Batman villains. You have to have that combination. We were talking about it one day, and of all the Batman villains who’d been created over the last 30, 40 years, very few of them have those classic features. Man-Bat kind of works because he’s literally the reverse of Batman and he’s also got the obsessive interest in bats. Scarface is one of the few characters in the modern era who has that kind of edge. It’s a real creepy, Dick Tracy kind of visual with a definite psychological malfunction.

MM: As far as the second season goes, were there any episodes you were more heavily involved in than others? I know you were very involved in “Trial.” BRUCE: There were a number of them: “Showdown,” the Jonah Hex episode—that was one that was really near and dear to my heart. 47

MM: How did that one come about? Even though I love the character, it was kind of odd seeing Jonah Hex show up in Batman. BRUCE: I don’t know where the initial idea for that one came from. MM: But Joe Lansdale was an obvious choice to script that one. BRUCE: Oh, yeah. He had already written a couple of episodes for us, and he had already done the Jonah Hex comics recently. It was natural to give him the script. But what happened there—again, the idea probably came from one of our lunch time conversations between myself and some other creative people from the show—it was probably Kevin Altieri. But I remember being at a recording session with Kevin, and during one of the breaks Kevin and I started fleshing out the story a little more—just brainstorming and coming up with ideas. Between the two of us we hit on the idea of doing the Master of the World thing. The character of Ra’s al Ghul’s son was something that came out of that conversation. We pretty much had the story plotted out in broad strokes within the space of 20, 25 minutes. It was, “Okay, I know what that story’s about.” Rather than verbally pitch it to anybody afterwards, I went home and plotted the episode out in longhand, just the main storybeats. I gave it to the writers and they went, “Okay. This 48

works.” [laughter] Joe was available, so we sent it off to him and he stuck really close to the outline, and it just happened. MM: How did “Trial” develop? BRUCE: Well, when the home video people came to us and said they wanted to do a direct-to-video Batman, we all sat around and threw out ideas of what we would like to do. “Trial” was a story that Paul and I came up with, because we thought it would be a natural for a big budget direct-to-video to have all the main villains in it—kind of like the Batman movie from the ’60s, but it would be our take on that. We were talking about it and mentioned it to Alan Burnett, and he shot it down. He didn’t want to do it. He thought it was too gimmicky and that there wasn’t enough of a story there to stretch it out for 70 minutes. Ultimately, I think he already had the germ of an idea for Mask of the Phantasm in his head, and I think that’s probably the main reason why he shot it down. He really wanted to do something darker, something more personal, more—not soap operish, but definitely more backstory-oriented with Bruce Wayne. You know, an adult, dark love story. MM: Well, let’s go into Mask of the Phantasm. Originally it was to be a directto-video production—

wanted with it, when we got the call from the States that they were definitely going to release it theatrically. It was just... oh, man. Because the storyboard was done and were in that 4:3 TV format. It was really late in the production stage—we were handing it out to the animators—“Now what the hell are we going to do?” So I sat there with a piece of paper and an exacto knife and made a little 1.85:1 template and laid it over the storyboard and said, “Well, okay, it’s not going to be that difficult.” We had to go shot by shot, laying that template over it. “Is the shot going to work? Do we have to make it wider? Do we have to adjust the frame up or down?” Most of the shots worked without too much tweaking, but it was a nerve-wracking thing to have to do at the last minute. MM: Were you satisfied with the results as it came across on the big screen? BRUCE: I think we could have done better. Which is really weird, because we spent a lot of money on it for the time. We had a much bigger budget for that show than we did for the regular TV show, and I don’t think it really shows on the screen. I think it looks like an episode of Batman. I don’t think it looks like a theatrical production. I mean, it’s okay, the

BRUCE: For all intents and purposes, it was. It got theatrical release as an afterthought. MM: Before you knew it was going to show in theaters, it was being produced to fit the TV format. At what point did you actually find out it would have a theatrical release? BRUCE: Well, they had been talking about it as a possibility, and they kept going back and forth on it. We ultimately said it probably wasn’t going to happen. There weren’t a lot of direct-to-videos that got theatrical release. The Aladdin movie was one of the few that did, but that was Disney. We just thought, “Ah, there’s no way that Warner Bros. is actually going to release this theatrically. They’re just not into it to that degree.” Eric Radomski and I were in Japan going over the storyboard with the animators in detail, explaining what we 49

Previous Page: A concept sketch and part of Bruce’s handwritten plot for “Showdown,” which featured a surprising guest-appearance from DC’s western hero, Jonah Hex. Below: Poster concepts for the theater release of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Batman, Jonah Hex, Phantasm, Ra’s al Ghul ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

Comic-Con—Paul and I had lunch with Denny O’Neil. The possibility of us doing comics came up at that lunch. I don’t remember if Denny suggested it or if we suggested it, but I remember Paul and I sort of had light bulbs go off over our heads at the same time. “Oh, yeah, we’d love to do that! That would be cool.” Denny said, “Well, any time you guys want to do something, let us know.” Once we got back to town, Paul and I just had a couple of lunches where we said, “What do we want to do?” He had this idea for Harley’s origin— the idea that at one point she was Joker’s psychiatrist— and I thought, “Wow! That’s a really cool twist. You didn’t see that coming.” One thing led to another, we pitched it to DC, and they said, “Great! Do it!” MM: Being as the only comics you had done up until then were those He-Man comics, did you have any trouble adjusting to the comic format? BRUCE: Oh, yeah. Hell of a time. I was totally intimidated by it, because I always wanted to be a comic book artist and here’s my big shot. I had done those He-Man comics for Mattel—which fortunately very few people had seen— but I hadn’t done anything of that length. Those little He-Man comics were what, ten, twelve pages tops. I don’t remember how it was decided that it would be a 64-page prestige special, but that was the correct length for that story—but it was really intimidating. What was always one of my big hindrances about doing comic-book samples, was the page layout. I was always impressed by people like Steranko or Neal Adams who could do these really cool page layouts that weren’t just the grid. They would integrate the entire page design into their storytelling, and I always held that up as something that all artists should aspire to, but I never had a knack for it. I’ve told this story before, but one day I was reading this Legion of Super-Heroes comic that Keith Giffen was writing and laying out at that time. It just struck me that the entire comic was done on this rigid nine-panel grid—three tiers, three panels per tier. I was looking at it and looking at it and going, “You know what? This is really a great format.” Because you can just concentrate on the storytelling and not worry about doing an elaborate layout. You could almost storyboard it. If every panel shape is predetermined, all you have to worry about is camera angle and body language and that stuff. One step of the process is already eliminated. I had a lot of experience doing storyboards, so for me it was the perfect format. And it has stayed with me to this day. I have since done comics that had a little more variety in the page layout, but whenever I’m roughing the story out, I’m not thinking about the page design. I’m not thinking about

animation’s good—it’s definitely comparable to the other stuff we were doing at that time. If TMS had animated it, it would have had a little bit more finesse, a little bit more polish. It’s not even so much the money, but the thing was cranked out really quickly. There was never enough time to finesse it to the point I would have been happy with it. And, again, it was never intended to be theatrical. If we had known going in that it was going to be a theatrical movie, we probably would have worked a little bit harder on it to broaden the scope of it, to make it a little more elaborate. I don’t know, it’s all hindsight, but I was never very satisfied with Mask of the Phantasm. It was a pretty good attempt, but I’ve always felt it was lacking in some respects. MM: Let’s sidetrack just a bit here and talk about Mad Love. Were you done with production on the second season before you started it? BRUCE: Yeah, we were pretty much coming to a close, so we had a little bit of time on our hands and it was a bit easier to fit Mad Love in at that point. MM: Did DC approach you about doing something for them? BRUCE: It was kind of mutual. I don’t remember specifically what the details were. I remember being at the San Diego 50

how the whole page flows, I’m thinking about how to tell the story from shot to shot. Trying to tie it all in so that each page is a work of art, I don’t even think about that. You know the 180º line, right? If the character is on screen left, you should never suddenly flop him and put him on screen right. It’s a film rule. It doesn’t really apply to comics, but I’ve got it so ingrained in my head from working on TV and film that I have a really hard time breaking that rule. Sometimes it’ll cause me to do really stupid things in comics, like having characters drawing your attention out of a page in the wrong direction. In a comic you should always try to direct the eye from left to right. MM: The “Z” pattern. BRUCE: Exactly. So I violate that sometimes just to honor that 180º line. But, you know, most people don’t notice it. [laughter] Comics are so much more fluid than film. You can break that 180º line however much you want. I see artists who are very well thought of—brilliant artists with terrific reputations—doing all kinds of stupid things. [laughter] I see them do it all the time, where they’ll have a really harsh design element dragging your eye out of the page and breaking that “Z”. So, if they can do it and get away with it, then what the hell. [laughter] MM: Rather than having to rely on photo reference for the piranha trap, Paul actually gave you a stuffed piranha. [laughter]

BRUCE: Mad Love came out right around the same time as Mask of the Phantasm. I can’t remember.... We did seem to have a lot of time on our hands during that big spate of comics the next year. When we did the Demon story in the second annual we hadn’t started on Superman yet, because Glen was working on the Gen-13 direct-tovideo out of his house. So that was before Superman, because we brought him back as the art director on Superman. MM: So what were you doing for Warner Bros. at that point? Was that during the time you were on Freakazoid? BRUCE: I spent some time developing Freakazoid with Alan and Paul. Ultimately it became a project that I— MM: You got out of that pretty early on. BRUCE: Yeah. We had a lot of meetings with Steven. He was so used to working with Tom Ruegger, who did Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, and he had that as a specific example of the kind of humor that he was comfortable doing in animation. Freakazoid started out as not that. It was more a hybrid of a comedy and an adventure show. I was never very keen on the idea in the first place. What happened was, Steven had approached us and said, “I really like your Batman show. I want to develop an adventure cartoon with you guys as a way of doing something different than Animaniacs and Tiny Toons.” But he said he didn’t know

BRUCE: Paul has this weird animal fetish. He’s just really into animals, and he’s got all kinds of stuffed animals in his house. I don’t know where he got the damn piranha from, but he got me a stuffed piranha. It was one of the most disgusting things I had ever seen. [laughter] I hated even to touch the damned thing—I thought I was going to get some kind of disease from it. But it was a great tool; I could draw that piranha from any angle. MM: ’94 to ’95 was really your most prolific time in comics. You’ve got a short story in the first Batman Adventures Annual, one in the second annual, and another in the Holiday Special. Did you just have more time then? Had Superman started production yet? 51

Previous Page: Mad Love was eventually adapted for The New Batman Adventures. Bruce drew these two design roughs for Harley’s “seduction” scene. Below: Harley Quinn attitude studies.

MM: I liked the show quite a bit.

what he wanted to do. He said, “You guys come up with a bunch of ideas, and I’ll pick one and we’ll do that.” In various permutations of teams—Alan Burnett was behind all of them. He worked on the writing end with everybody. But we all came up with a bunch of different, weird adventure concepts. I know Eric Radomski and Ronnie Del Carmen came up with one called Joe Grunt, which was more of a futuristic action/adventure show. I had an idea for another futuristic, Star Wars-type show about a smuggler/space pirate, and another was a teenage, Jonny Quest-type show. For the sake of variety, we thought we should throw in a super-hero show, as well. Off the top of my head, I said, “Well, what if we did something that was a little more like Spider-Man, more of a teenaged super-hero.” After talking it over with Paul and Alan, that became Freakazoid. And, what do you know, that’s the one that Steven really liked. [laughter] Actually, he liked Joe Grunt a lot. He really, really wanted to do the Joe Grunt show. We had meetings with Jamie Kelner, who was the big boss at the WB, and Steven was pushing hard to do Joe Grunt, but Jamie just didn’t like it. Just did not like it. He thought it was too adult; he just wasn’t keen on it. But he did kind of like Freakazoid, and that was the show we ultimately went with. In the development meetings with Steven, we could just tell that the show was becoming much more of a comedy show than a super-hero show. I mean, it probably would not have worked as a straight super-hero show. It was really neither fish nor fowl; it needed to be one or the other. It was such a weird idea that it really probably needed to be a comedy more than an adventure show. It wasn’t my forte; I just didn’t have any feel for it. It was mutually agreed by all parties that I wouldn’t produce the show. Tom Ruegger took it over and it became what it became.

BRUCE: I actually liked the second season better than the first season. The second season was less Animaniacs. It was more Monty Python; it was much more surreal. It was less hip, topical in-jokes and— MM: And more eating cotton candy in the Himalayas. BRUCE: And the weird Astro Boy parody and stuff like that. I thought that stuff was much funnier and much more unique. The first season, to me, was just Animaniacs with a super-hero in it. MM: How did Superman end up being the next project? BRUCE: It came around the same time I was becoming disenchanted with Freakazoid. I’d already pretty much pulled out of Freakazoid, and I was sitting around my office, “Well, I’m getting a paycheck, but I’m not doing anything, and that can’t continue for too long before someone notices.” There was interest in doing an animated Superman, because there was a lot of talk about doing a movie—I think that’s what started the ball rolling. So, just casually, Jean MacCurdy mentioned to me one day, “Do you want to do a Superman cartoon?” And I went, “Yes! Let’s do it.” 52

MM: So it wasn’t so much of an interest in Superman on your part, it was more that you needed a project. BRUCE: I was desperate. She may have mentioned it to me while I was still on Freakazoid, and to me it was kind of like an escape clause. I didn’t have quite as much interest in doing Superman as I had with Batman. I always preferred Batman to Superman when I was a kid. MM: Yeah, me too. BRUCE: I knew immediately what to do with Batman, whereas with Superman I wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. I don’t think he’s as interesting a character on the face of him. With Batman, you look at him and you get it. With Superman, you get the concept, but if he’s done badly, it could be bad. He doesn’t make as much sense in the modern world as he did when he was first created. Times have changed and he means something different now than he did way back then. The context of the character is different. So you had to find ways to keep him true to the spirit of the comic and the spirit of the character, but at the same time not let him become a cornball anachronism. That was kind of tricky. You can even tell in the Christopher Reeve movies, they kind of struggled with the same thing.

Sometimes they would get it right, sometimes they wouldn’t. They kind of got him right, but they lost it in the villains. They were still lost in that old-school, Adam West Batman, hokey camp. But they pretty much got Superman right, and they were able to play him as “truth, justice, and the American way” with a straight face. You kind of giggled, but at the same time you thought, “Wow, this guy really believes it.” It’s somehow strangely not corny. We had to find our own way of doing that. In retrospect, I think we did a really good job with the Superman show. It was a little bit more of a struggle than the Batman show, but ultimately I think it was a pretty darn good show. MM: Were there any villains that stood out for you in the development stage, where you said, “We can do something with this guy”? BRUCE: It was tougher on Superman than on Batman. Going back and researching the actual comic, Superman’s rogues gallery is automatically a lot less interesting than Batman’s. We went back all the way to the beginning of the comics—we had all those DC Archive editions and a lot of reprints that were available—especially in the early days, most of Superman’s villains were older fat guys in suits. [laughter] The Prankster and Toyman and all of those guys were grown-ups wearing street clothes. They had interesting gimmicks, but for the most part weren’t visually 53

Top: Title sequence for Superman: The Animated Series. Previous Page: Bruce only worked on Freakazoid for a very short time, but he did make a significant contribution to the look of the show. Left: One of Bruce’s many self-rejected Superman designs. Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Freakazoid ™ and ©2004 Warner Bros.

interesting. So we had to do a lot of reimagining and reinventing of the characters. Certain characters, like Brainiac and Parasite, are more interesting, and there was a little bit of a visual to key on already. But the characters like Toyman, we had to drastically reinvent them to come up with a visual gimmick that worked. In a weird way, we made them more like Batman villains—we gave them a psychological twist, as well as a visual. Above: An early, squinty-eyed, Siegel and Shuster type Superman. Right: Neither old nor fat, Livewire is an exshockjock with a grudge. Below: Lois Lane—’40s style! Next Page Top: One of several early design concepts for Lara, Superman’s Mother. Next Page Bottom: Boy, that Kyle Rayner sure can draw! Actually, Bruce swiped Silver Age Green Lantern artist, Gil Kane, for this mock-up of GL Kyle Rayner’s artwork in the “In Brightest Day” episode of Superman. Lara, Livewire, Lois Lane, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

MM: Was there any particular moment of enlightenment where you suddenly knew exactly how to handle the show? BRUCE: It was tough. We went back and forth on the general concept of Superman way more so than with Batman. On Batman, we kind of hit the ground running—even though we had problems with our first story editor—Eric and I and the directors were all on the same page. Whereas with Superman, we were all kind of floundering a bit. We couldn’t quite agree on a general approach to the show as to what would be the correct way to do a modern Superman. At one point, visually we were still thinking in terms of the retro thing like we had done with Batman, but we wanted to give it a slightly different feel so it wasn’t exactly what we had done before. At one point, again looking at the old comics, I toyed around with the idea of making it almost a dead-on adaptation of the Siegel & Shuster look. MM: Squinty eyes and all. BRUCE: Yeah, yeah. The squinty eyes, the more squat figure, the more balloony kind of look. I did a number of drawings based on that, and it just wasn’t quite working. Ultimately it came back to the fact I was doing basically what the Fleischers had already done to perfection. In a way it was even more retro than Batman. I did a drawing of Lois Lane where she looked like she was literally wearing 1940s clothing. 54

The Batman show, as retro as it was, the women’s costumes weren’t exactly period, but this was really, really period. At a certain point, we toyed with the idea of opening it up and having the show— instead of being about just Superman—kind of a prototype Justice League show, where it would be Superman and a rotating supporting cast of other super-heroes. I actually did a couple of development drawings along those lines and Jenette Kahn was the one who put that to a stop. She met with us and said, “You know, I just don’t think you guys should do this. You should give Superman the respect that he deserves and give him his own show, the way you did Batman, before you get into the Justice League.” Right away we said, “Yeah, you’re right.” We went back to the drawing board and came up with a visual look that was a little more unique to itself. It was still retro in a way—we still had art deco on the brain—but instead of doing the sharp, angular, moody art deco we had done in Batman, we went with the bright, futuristic, optimistic, ocean liner art deco—which was more in line with Superman’s character. We knew we were going to use Darkseid as one of our main villains, because we had so few good villains. We figured Kirby had used Darkseid and kind of melded the Superman mythos with the Fourth World mythos in the comics, and they were actually doing that in the comics even at that time we were doing the show. Mike Carlin had brought all that back. So that gave us a visual for the futuristic elements of the show—all the super sci-fi machinery. We thought rather than making it deco, we’ll make it Kirby. That was another mix in the brew and things started gelling at that point. I did zillions and zillions and zillions of drawings of Superman. I just couldn’t quite nail him down in the powerful, iconic image like we had done with Batman. We went any number of ways with it, from the Shuster look to something almost Kevin Nowlanish, where he was a little more remote and kind of creepy looking—all kinds of stuff. Eventually, strangely enough, Dan Riba brought in some cheap bargain

tape he had bought of the old Hercules show from the ’60s. You remember those really cheap Hercules cartoons?

always obscure characters, like Jonah Hex or Zatanna—they weren’t mainstream DC superheroes. We tried to ignore the DC universe as much as possible in Batman, because we wanted to keep that gritty, down-to-earth, realistic feel to the show within reason. We wanted to keep the show a serious crime drama. De facto, we didn’t want to deal with the idea of a Kryptonian guy across the river doing superheroic things in the same world. So we tried to limit the guest-stars in Batman. Whereas with Superman, automatically you’ve got a guy from another world, so it opens up the show to a broader fantasy scope. So we felt more comfortable using characters like Green Lantern and Flash in Superman.

MM: Vaguely. I saw part of one years ago. BRUCE: We were watching it just for fun, and I went, “Wow! Look at him. Look at that face. That’s Superman!” I freeze-framed it and drew him from that old Hercules cartoon, and that became the way of nailing down his image in simplified, animated form. That’s where his face came from at least, and after that he was an easier nut to crack. MM: Going back to the idea of having a rotating supporting cast of super-heroes, there were a lot more guest-stars in the Superman show than there were in Batman. Was that a case of needing to add something in order to generate more story ideas? BRUCE: Kind of. Superman’s a hard character to do, period, because he’s so strong. You don’t want to depower him to the point where he’s not Superman anymore, but at the same time, if he’s too strong then the stories don’t make sense. If he can turn back time and undo anything horrible that’s happened, then there’s no drama. If he’s so fast that no one can ever sneak up on him, or so powerful that nobody can ever knock him down, then, again, there’s no drama, there’s no conflict. It’s always a struggle to find that right balance, to put him at just the right peak of power. You’ll notice that we didn’t really start bringing in the guest-stars until we were further on. At that point it was probably a matter of the writers being a little burned out and not really being able to come up with interesting standalone Superman stories, so bringing in guest-stars is a springboard to send the stories off in a different direction. Also, when we did do guest-stars in Batman, they were

MM: Besides the Darkseid episodes, my favorite episodes were the Bizarro shows and especially the Mxyzptlk shows. Was it simply easier to do the broad humor and get away with it with Superman than it was with Batman? BRUCE: Yeah. I mean, some of the Batman comedy episodes were pretty broad, too, but certainly Superman was much more of a lighthearted show right out of the gate. Part of that was by design, part was a desire on our part to not just repeat what we had done on Batman. We could have made Superman a much more moody, film noir series—more like the Fleisher Superman cartoons. But we wanted to use a different palette for variety’s sake. We wanted to do an entertaining super-hero show that was a daytime show and not a nighttime show. Ultimately, I think the best episodes of Superman are the ones that are darker. [laughter] “Apokolips Now” and “Legacy,” the shows that have some real dramatic heft to them—where you have a sense that the world is in real jeopardy. To me, those shows are much more satisfying than the run-of-the-mill Superman show. Superman is a more optimistic show, and that’s the 55

reason why, I think, “Apokolips Now” and “Legacy” work so well. He is normally a character who is optimistic and brighter, and you put him up against a character like Darkseid who pushes his buttons and brings out the worst in him, then it’s much more dramatically effective. MM: Did you feel it was important to really limit those darker episodes in order to keep them as effective as they were? BRUCE: Well, we didn’t keep a running tab on it, but.... I’ve used this analogy before, but the reason “City on the Edge of Forever” is one of everybody’s favorite Star Trek episodes is because it’s so emotionally heartfelt. The characters go through such an emotional upheaval in that show, and it was something they didn’t do on a weekly basis. It was one of those shocker episodes. It was like “Wow! Kirk actually falls in love with a woman for once instead of just having sex with her and leaving her to go off gallivanting through space.” [laughter] He actually falls in love with a character who dies tragically at the end, so you feel the character has gone through something truly profound. If you do that on a weekly basis, obviously it dulls the impact of it. They tried to repeat “City on the Edge of Forever” in effect later on in a number of other episodes and it was just like “been there, done that.” It was the same kind of thing with Darkseid on Superman. We didn’t want to have every episode be about Darkseid tormenting Superman; that would have gotten old real quick, and it really wasn’t what the show was about. MM: Did the Kirby/New Gods episodes have a higher importance for you personally, as to making sure they were done “right”? one day. I took a legal pad and plotted the whole thing out and handed it to Alan. He handed it off to Rich Fogel to write and it stayed very true to the outline I had done. The only major plot change that Rich and Alan added to it was they added the Steppenwolf character into it, which didn’t really change the structure of the story at all, because the invasion of Metropolis was in my outline. But Rich was the one who came up with the idea of having Steppenwolf leading the charge. My original ending was a little more oblique. Turpin was still going to defy Darkseid at the end and say, “You guys can’t have this planet. We’d rather die first.” At that point Darkseid was just going to go, “I really want this planet. I don’t want to just destroy it, so you win.” And everybody realized that was just too anticlimactic. I had thought of the idea of having the New Gods show up as the cavalry at the last second and having that as the reason Darkseid gives up, but I rejected it myself because I thought it was too easy

BRUCE: Yeah. A, because of my love for Kirby, and B, my affection for the whole Fourth World scenario that he created. The “Apokolips Now” story came out of a number of brainstorming sessions with myself and Paul Dini, in particular. We were sitting around, talking about Darkseid—what about him do we want to use; what would work for us in animation; how to pare down that big, sprawling mythos Kirby did over five books into a half-hour adventure cartoon. We had come up with a couple of springboards of what to do with the character, and then the “Apokolips Now” storyline just came full-blown into my head 56

and too pat. But Rich and Alan both felt that we really needed to have that. MM: Were there any problems with Standards & Practices over Turpin’s death? BRUCE: Oh, yeah, definitely. Not even with just BS&P, but with DC Comics. Any time you kill off a character who existed in the comics, they get in there and say “Wait a minute.” This goes back to the very first conversation I had with Paul about Darkseid, when we came up with the idea of taking a hint from Kirby about the anti-life equation which Kirby never really gets around to defining in the comics. It was a cool sounding concept, and that’s Darkseid’s big motivation, but Kirby never really tells you what that is. So we took that to mean he’s kind of a psychic vampire; he feeds off the despair of others. It’s not enough to have a guy who wants to go conquer planets, there has to be

a reason why he wants to conquer planets. What he wants is to demean and debase and demoralize the people of each world and put them in abject misery so he can gain some level of power from their misery. While we were talking about that, I jumped ahead to the end of the story and went, “You know what? What he’s got to do is after Superman has defeated him, Darkseid has got to kill someone who is very close to Superman just out of pure spite.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was channeling the end of the Galactus trilogy. That’s exactly what that is. It’s Galactus saying, “Well, you’ve defeated me, but since you’re not my herald anymore—bang!—you can’t ever leave this planet.” But the minute I said that, Paul said, “Yeah, that’s the way to go. So who’s he going to kill?” And I thought, “Who better? Ma and Pa Kent.” We mentioned that to DC

Previous Page Bottom: Leader of the Female Furies and servant of Darkseid— Lashina! Previous Page Top: Daily Planet funny page mock-up from “Mxyzpxylated.” Below: Superman squares off against Darkseid.

Comics and they said, “Sure you can kill them... as long as you bring them back.” But whoever we killed, we wanted them to stay dead or it’s a cheat. It was a good thing we didn’t kill Ma and Pa Kent, because that would have been just wrong. So who can we kill? We can’t kill off Lois, can’t kill off Jimmy. We could kill off Professor Hamilton, but none of us really liked him anyway, so we figured if we killed him it would be “Oh, thank you, Darkseid.” [laughter] It came down to Dan Turpin. It was one of those weird things, Kirby had just died within the past year or two, and Paul and I had gone to his funeral, so the minute we realized it should be Turpin—we had already based Turpin on Kirby visually—it was “Well, that’s what we have to do; we have to kill him.” I was able to channel Kirby’s funeral into the show. I put Kirby’s actual funeral into the show.

show did much better than Superman had done on its own. That was one of those rare instances of things turning out the way you hoped they would. But when Jean mentioned it to me, at first I wasn’t too keen on the idea. At that point I was really into doing Superman, and Batman felt like old news to me. I didn’t want to go back and do more episodes of Batman. But we had tweaked our in-house design theories on Superman a bit. Superman was a bit more angular than the original Batman show was, and I was pretty pleased with the results. I thought the animation was much more consistent on Superman. So I thought, if we took that idea and went even further with it, what would be the result? One night I was doodling and I did a couple of really designy drawings of Batman and the Joker, and I went, “Wow, that’s kind of neat. That could get me excited about doing more Batman.” So I mentioned it to Jean, and she was okay with it. She thought in a way it was probably a good thing to freshen up the design for licensing and toys and everything, to give them a slightly different look. Everybody was cool with that, so we took that and ran with it. The inclusion of Batgirl and Robin was, again, influence from above. The consumer products division and the people at the WB wanted to make sure kids would watch the show, so they strongly suggested that we include Batgirl and Robin as a way of courting young girl audiences as well as young boys. At first we were a little reluctant to do it, but then we started thinking why not? We liked the Batgirl character and I certainly didn’t mind putting her in the show. At that point, we reimagined Robin. Rather than just bringing Dick Grayson back, we reversed ourselves on our theories about Robin from the first season. The first season we thought it didn’t really make sense to have a little boy going out into battle with Batman, so that’s why we

MM: You were kind of worried about Roz Kirby seeing the episode weren’t you? That never happened though. BRUCE: Yeah, she died right before the episode aired. MM: Obviously it’s a shame she passed away, being the sweet and generous person she was, but was it better that she didn’t see it? BRUCE: Probably. Who knows? Again, it had been a couple of years after he had died, so she might have been okay with it. But at the same time, I certainly didn’t want to cause her any more pain. I’m sure Jack’s death was a really horrible thing for her. They were so close for so many years. But she might have realized it was a touching tribute; she might have seen it in that respect. In a way, it was probably a blessing that she never got to see it. MM: How did the decision come about to produce The New Batman/Superman Adventures as a package? BRUCE: Well, what happened was that Warner Bros. had gotten the rights back to show Batman on the WB. The initial run was done for Fox, and they had the exclusive rights to run Batman cartoons for a number of years. That had run out, and Warner Bros. got the rights back to show the original episodes on the WB and they thought they would freshen the package with new episodes to give it a kickstart. We were already doing Superman at that time, and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to combine the two, but it was a really good idea. Superman did well on the WB, but it didn’t do quite the same numbers Batman had done on Fox for a variety of reasons. I don’t think the character had as much broad appeal at that point as Batman did. Batman had a very public profile because of the movies, whereas Superman didn’t have anything like that at that time, so he was kind of an also-ran. The WB had just started out, too, so they weren’t on as many TVs as Fox was. They hoped that by pairing him up with Batman that it would raise the ratings level, and it did. The combined 58

Previous Page: Where the new look began. Bruce’s first design sketches utilizing a more angular style. Above: Title boards for The New Batman/Superman Adventures.

Harley and Mercy run across the background beating the snot out of each other. Who came up with that scene?

made him older. It was the current trend in the comics as well. But we started thinking less literally and less logically about it and thinking more viscerally, that—going back to the original concept of Batman and Robin—Robin was supposed to be an audience surrogate so kids could imagine what it would be like to fight alongside Batman. It doesn’t make any logical sense—there’s no reason Batman would actually put a young boy in that kind of jeopardy—but viscerally there’s something about it that works. So we took that idea, and taking a cue from the comics, we used their current incarnation of the young Robin, Tim Drake, and incorporated him into the show. Which left us with “If we’ve got the new Tim Drake Robin, what happened to Dick Grayson?” And obviously the answer is he’s grown up and become Nightwing. Strangely enough, I think that version of the Robin character, by splitting him up into two characters—one younger and one older—is much more interesting than the Robin we did in the original Batman: The Animated Series. I always felt like the original Robin we did was neither fish nor fowl. He wasn’t a little kid and he wasn’t a grown-up, and he wasn’t dark and he wasn’t light. By having a very young Robin, who’s a real smartass and a real ball of fire type of character, and having an older, more disillusioned, a little bit more pissed off Nightwing makes him a much more interesting character. It certainly gave Loren Lester, the actor, more to work off of and a much more interesting character to play. I think his performance improved drastically as well. It was serendipity—it worked out really well.

BRUCE: I couldn’t tell you. We knew from the beginning that if we were going to pair Luthor and Joker up, they both had henchgirls, and the first thing that popped into our testosterone-driven heads was “cat fight!” [laughter] MM: Overall, did the episode contrast the styles of the two shows in the way you wanted? BRUCE: Yeah. More so than the styles of the shows, we really just wanted to contrast the two characters and their personalities—where they’re similar and where they’re different. Obviously, we were taking a hint from what they’d been doing in the comics ever since the John Byrne revamp back in the late ’80s. The twist that we put on it that made it really interesting to me and that no one had really done before was the Lois Lane/Bruce Wayne thing. Actually, even that was kind of inspired by the comics. Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude had done a World’s Finest mini-series where they

MM: With Robin you weren’t just using Tim Drake, you were also incorporating elements of the Jason Todd Robin. BRUCE: Oh, sure. We’ve taken some critical hits for that. Some people don’t like us messing around with the mythology that way, but there was no way to have three Robins. We don’t have as many episodes to play with, and we have to keep the continuity a little bit more streamlined so that the casual viewer at home doesn’t get completely lost. So we combined the best elements of the Jason Todd and Tim Drake characters and mushed them together. MM: The season kicked off with the “World’s Finest” crossover. Was that one of the first ideas you came up with? BRUCE: Oh, sure. That was kind of a no-brainer. Superman was our current show and we were reintroducing Batman with a new look, and everything dovetailed. We always wanted to team them up anyway. MM: My favorite scene was the Joker and Lex Luthor negotiating very businessman-like while 60

hinted at that—where Bruce Wayne and Lois were flirting—but they didn’t really go any further than that. But we took a look at that and said, “Batman and Superman are kind of antagonistic towards each other anyway, so why don’t we throw Lois into the mix.” Bruce romances her right out from under Clark’s possession. “That’s cool, now if we take that even further....” It was definitely me who came up with Lois finding out his secret identity. I thought it was an ironic thing to do. She’s been with Clark Kent/ Superman all these years [laughter] and never saw past those glasses, and then she’s with Bruce Wayne a couple of days and suddenly she discovers his secret. So it was just a way of throwing curve balls at the audience that they hopefully wouldn’t see coming. MM: With the “Legends of the Dark Knight” episode, what made you think of adapting Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Batman into the show? It doesn’t seem to be a natural style to try to animate. BRUCE: I don’t know, the idea just occurred to me. I think it was right after Batman Forever had come out, and, obviously, I didn’t really like that movie very much. But I started thinking about how there’re so many different interpretations of Batman—everything from Adam West to Frank Miller to Tim Burton, and Shoemaker started bringing the Adam West elements back in—and how everything comes around and goes around. There’s a certain validity to all those different versions. They don’t cancel each other out, they’re all, to a degree, justifiable. So, free associating, I ended up with that concept of Batman as that urban myth in Gotham—he’s not a showboat or had his picture taken or anything. So it would be interesting if everybody had their

own idea of what Batman would be like based on what they heard. Some people would think he was this dark, satanic figure, and some people would think he was an upright, Dudley Do-Right type hero. That led me to think of doing the different vignettes in different comic book styles. You really can’t get more opposite than Dick Sprang and Frank Miller—those are two of the most obvious extremes—and we just took it from there. MM: You went out of your way to make sure Frank was cool with the idea. BRUCE: We didn’t even think about that—it was Paul Levitz. When he found out we were doing the show he said, “Well, you’d better clear that with Frank.” It’s not that Frank has any legal control over the Dark Knight.... MM: They just want to make sure he continues to play in their playground. BRUCE: Exactly. So I called Frank up and he was totally cool with it. He was like, “Yeah, go for it. I’m curious to see how it’s going to come out.” That was his one stipulation, “Just make sure I get a copy of it when you’re done.” MM: Did you get any feedback from him? BRUCE: I did actually. He’s notoriously hard to get ahold of on the phone, and after I’d sent him the show—I happened to be out of the office that day—he called back three times to talk to me about it. He was just raving. Every phone message that he left was longer than the previous one. “Wow, I just watched it again, and Lynn was going crazy, going, ‘Oh, my God! There’s Carrie Kelly!’” He was pretty happy with it. I sent a copy to Dick Sprang as well—this was fortunately before he passed away—and he was 61

Previous Page Bottom: Cover to the World’s Finest comic-book adaptation. Left: The animated version of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. Below: The Scarecrow turned out to be one of Bruce’s favorite character re-designs for The New Batman Adventures. Batman, Harley Quinn, Joker, Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, Mercy, Scarecrow, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

very pleased with it as well. He realized that we weren’t making fun of him, that it was an homage. So all in all that was a nice thing.

Below: A wicked Demon sketch. Right: Of this early design of Terry (when his last name was still McGavin), Bruce says he “kinda looks like Jason Priestly—dunno if that was intentional or not. Also a little too ‘Peter Parker.’” Next Page Top: A “notquite final” version of Batman Beyond. Next Page Bottom: Bruce loves the full-mask version of Dr. Strange. So much so that he used it as inspiration when designing Batman Beyond.

MM: You bring in The Demon during this season, and you used him later on in Justice League. Was he a favorite character of yours? BRUCE: It’s not so much that he was a favorite character, it’s just that I’m such a Kirby fan. I mean, I like the Demon comics. It’s not my favorite Kirby comic or even my favorite DC Kirby comic, but I always kind of liked The Demon and the fact that he was based in Gotham City, even in Jack Kirby’s version, it just seemed interesting to team them up. Of course, we’d teamed them up previously in the comics—we’d done that annual. The comic book animated continuity is actually different than the actual animated continuity—they’ll do things that contradict what we do and vice versa. But for the sake of the Demon story we did in the animated show, we subsumed the annual we had done into the animated continuity just to get things moving faster. We didn’t have to have them meet and slow the story down. The story starts as a fait accompli; they’ve already met each other off-stage and have some history together. MM: Production for Batman Beyond started up before production on The New Batman/Superman Adventures ended. When I first heard about Batman Beyond, I was like, [incredulously] “Ohhh, Batman in the future? I don’t know.” BRUCE: Yeah, me too. [laughter] MM: But as soon as I saw the intro, I thought, “Hey, this might be kind of cool.” Didn’t Darwyn Cooke storyboard that? BRUCE: He didn’t actually storyboard it. It was looser than that. He would come up with ideas for concepts for shots and run them by me, and I would either say yea or nay. It wasn’t boarded from beginning to end. We knew we were going to do it MTV-style with the real fast cutting, and we didn’t know exactly 62

what the music piece was going to be and we didn’t know exactly where the shots were going to fall. So we just did a zillion shots and jammed them all together afterwards. Like I said, he would just come up with concepts for shots, and sometimes he would do a little thumbnail of it and say “this is what I’m talking about,” and it just went on from there. It probably would have been easier on him—and on everybody—if we actually had done a storyboard. But this gave us a lot more freedom. So he would work up the shots—he was doing it all on the computer with After Effects. He would assemble a rough version of the shot and run it by me, and I would say, “Okay, it would be cool if we did this with that” or “Add this” or “That shot is getting too complicated.” It was a lot of back and forth. He also enlisted some people on the crew, because the problem was we didn’t have any animation yet from the show when we were doing the main title. We tried to limit the kinds of shots and make them all symbolic and simplistic and not relying on actual animation. We realized we did have to have some movement in the thing, so Adam van Wyck, who’s one of our storyboard artists, actually did a little bit of animation— that weird martial arts dance shot and that “Night on Bald Mountain” bit at the end. Curt Geda animated the shot of Dana and Chelsea dancing, and Darwyn animated a few shots himself. Later on we did get some advance footage from the first show, so Darwyn incorporated that into the background. I think it’s on one of the TV screens in the Batcave—Bruce Wayne’s watching it. The rest of the shots are all static, just with camera movement and overlays and stuff. It was a whole hell of a lot of work for him, but

would work, you said you felt the same way. Was Batman Beyond more or less forced on you?

obviously it came out great. It was a manifesto in a way. “Everything you think you know about Batman, forget about it. This is not your father’s Batman; this is not your grandfather’s Batman. This is an absolutely brand new Batman for the twenty-first century.”

BRUCE: Well, we had a meeting with Jamie Kelner—the president of the WB network—and he basically said, “Batman is doing well for us, but we think it’s time to do something different with Batman to freshen up the franchise.” At first we were a little bit hesitant. Where’s this going? It quickly became apparent that he was talking about more than just revamping the costumes or the look of the show again, that he really wanted an all-new Batman show. He kept leading into it, and then he came out and said, “It would be great if we had a teen-aged Batman.” And immediately all of us just went, [disgustedly] “Aww, man. That’s the last thing we want to do.” Also, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was their big hit at the time, and I think Jamie was very much influenced by Buffy. He really wanted us to Buffy-ize Batman. We didn’t really want to do that, but it sounded like he was pretty serious about it, and rather than just handing it off to someone else to let them do it and possibly mess it up, we figured we kind of owed it to the character to give it our best shot and at least try to see what we could do with it. At that same meeting I hit upon the idea of setting

MM: The music was a huge factor throughout the series in helping distinguish it from the previous Batman shows. How closely involved were you with the music? Was much of it left up to the music director? BRUCE: No, again, it was a little bit of back and forth, but I wasn’t sure Shirley and her group were going to be able to do it. I’d never heard them do anything similar to what I knew the music had to be like. We had experimented with incorporating rock music elements into some Batman and Superman episodes in the past, and it never really worked. So I just assumed that they couldn’t do it. I had a meeting with Shirley, and I basically told her that. I said, “I may have to look outside of your group to find somebody to do the music for the show.” She said, “Well, okay, I understand that you want something different, but I guarantee you we can do it.” “Oookay.” She said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll do a demo for you. I’ll put together a CD of music samples of what we can do.” So she got together with our other composers— Kris Carter, Lolita Ritmanis, and Mike McCuistion—and each of them did a couple of sample tracks on their own. Before we even got that far, she said, “What kind of music do you envision for this?” I said, “It’s gotta be really up-to-date. It’s gotta be really nasty. It’s gotta be techno/heavy metal/rave music.” She was like, “Okay.” I gave her some examples of White Zombie and Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction and a couple of other things. They came back with this CD of tracks and it just blew me away. It was, “Wow! That’s exactly what we need.” In fact, one of those temp tracks that Kris Carter had done ultimately became the Batman Beyond theme, with just a little bit of reworking. MM: Earlier, when I said I wasn’t sure if a future Batman 63

This Page: Bruce Wayne at age 60, with and without the bat-suit. Next Page Bottom: Bruce Wayne at age 80, as he appeared in Batman Beyond. Next Page Top: Early design (left) and the rough final (right) for Derek Powers, a.k.a. Blight, a stand-in for Dr. Phosphorous.

it in the future so we could keep Bruce Wayne in the show, but just change his role slightly. The whole premise of Batman Beyond was basically thought up and nailed right there at that first meeting. It was on a weekend—Jamie dropped that bombshell on us on a Friday afternoon—and I was in torment about it, going back and forth about it, thinking, “Oh, this is so commercial. This is something we really don’t want to do. It could be really cheesy.” I remember Paul and I kept calling each other all weekend, and we were kind of on the fence about it. And then Monday morning I met with Glen Murakami and told him what had happened and what Jamie had said, and Glen immediately said, “Let’s do it.” I said, “What?” [laughter] He said, “Oh, yeah, come on, let’s do it. A futuristic show, high tech, rock music. It could totally work. I’m totally into that.” Glen being enthused about it made me enthused about it. So from that point on, it was full steam ahead. It was a tricky show to do, because, as you mentioned, we were still finishing up Superman and finishing up the new Batman at the same time. We hardly had any development period on Batman Beyond. Jamie had basically given us a green light at that meeting, so we had to start from scratch and just go with it. We were making stuff up as we went along. MM: So you didn’t have a fully developed bible detailing the continuity between the original Batman series and Batman Beyond? You didn’t fill in the gaps between the shows at the beginning? BRUCE: We intentionally left that vague. When we started talking about the pilot episode, I think it was actually Alan’s idea to start it at a midway point in the past, showing Bruce Wayne’s last night as Batman. When he pitched that idea to me, that he has a heart attack and actually has to pick a gun up to defend himself, I just went, “Wow!!!” [laughter] “Oh, man, we totally have got to do that!” MM: It was the perfect reason for him to give up being Batman. BRUCE: Exactly. We were all pretty excited about the show at that point. 64

MM: Did you go from there to developing the villains? BRUCE: It was all happening at the same time—we had to hit the ground running. Everybody came up with villain ideas. Artists would just sit down and start drawing concepts. Glen and James Tucker both did sheets and sheets and sheets of different villain concepts without even really knowing exactly what they were, just drawing interesting designs. A lot of the villains from the show came about that way. Shriek was developed that way—that was just something Glen had doodled. Inque was done that way. James Tucker had just drawn this interesting, blobby character, and we went, “Wow, what the hell is that?” and came up with the backstory afterwards. The ones that Glen came up with were: Curare, Shriek, and later on the character that became Payback—that was one of Glen’s doodles that the writers came up with a story for. Some of the villains came up the opposite way: the writers would come up with a villain idea and we would have to come up with a visual for them. It was a lot of back and forth; it was chaos. MM: Was there a mandate in place that— with just a couple of exceptions—stated no classic Batman villains allowed? BRUCE: That was something that Glen and I pushed for—and fortunately, most people agreed—just because we really wanted to establish that this was an all-new character. We felt it would be really, really easy just to update all of the old villains, but we wanted the show to be unique unto itself. We wanted it to have its own unique mythos and feel. Just bringing back old villains and updating and futurizing them, we felt it was too simple and a cheat. So what we wanted to do was come up with classic Batman style villains—we talked about this previously, that there is a certain kind of Batman-ness to all the Batman villains. They’re all kind of like Dick Tracy villains with the bizarre visual and the bizarre, psychological kink. So we wanted to use the classic Batman villain archetypes, but put different spins on them. Thus you get Inque, who’s a shapeshifter, but other than that she has no relation to Clayface. She has a different motive, she has

a different feel, she’s sexy, she’s liquidy—she’s not like a big pile of crap, you know? [laughter] MM: Blight is not unlike Dr. Phosphorous. BRUCE: Blight is totally Dr. Phosphorous. I mean, come on. [laughter] But that was a total gimme just because we had never done Dr. Phosphorous in the animated series, and I had always kind of liked that visual. There was that one story that Walt Simonson had done back in the ’70s, and I always really liked that. So we said, “Okay, we’ll do Dr. Phosphorous, but we’ll change his name and his origin story, but you’ll have the same kind of visual. The same thing with The Royal Flush Gang. I had always liked the look of those characters in the comics, and we’d never really had a chance to use them before. Even though they’re existing DC characters, they’re new to animation.

MM: The part of the supporting cast that I really enjoyed seeing in there was Ace. [laughter] Who’s idea was that?

MM: Besides which, they’re a generational super-group that just keeps on going.

BRUCE: That goes all the way back to the very beginning of Batman: The Animated Series. Our very first story editor was a lady named Sean Derek, and when Eric Radomski and I met with her for the first time, we said, “This is how we see the show: We want it to be film noir, adventure, mood, mystery, horror,” all this stuff. And Sean sat there listening to us going, “Hmm, yeah. I can see that. Oh, can we give Batman a dog?” [laughter] That was the last thing we were expecting. I didn’t want to rock the boat, because this was literally our first meeting with her, and I’m going [uneasily], “Well, ummm, maybe. Maybe if it was a big, black, ugly dog, like a Rottweiler or a Great Dane or something.” But we dropped it after that—obviously we never gave Batman a dog in the original series. I don’t remember how it came up in Batman Beyond, but it was probably us thinking how Bruce Wayne doesn’t have Alfred anymore; he’s living in that big, old house by himself. Is he absolutely alone? Well, no, he would probably have a guard dog. So remembering that conversation with Sean years ago—I think initially Alan and Paul intended Ace to be a German Shepherd. German Shepherds are cool and everything, but they’re not quite “Batman” enough. So we made him a Rottweiler/Great Dane mix, and he’s the big, hulking, Hound of the Baskervilles type dog.

BRUCE: Right. So in a way, they were linked to the old show even though they never appeared in the old show. Bane—I wasn’t really thrilled about using Bane, but at least he wasn’t the same old Bane that he used to be. He was a wheelchair-bound invalid, so that was okay. The only—at least in the first go-round—actual Batman villain that we used was Mr. Freeze. I always had a soft spot for Mr. Freeze, and I watched the story development of that one very, very carefully. Because I have such a soft spot for him, I feel that every time we bring him back it should be something new and unique and it should be a great story. We don’t ever want him to become a run-of-the-mill Batman villain. I definitely stuck my head in Alan’s door often to make sure that story was going to play out well. And the interesting thing about that was, visually, it gave us a chance to redesign him once again. That very first Mike Mignola kind of design we did for Batman: The Animated Series was really cool—it was very retro. Then when we did the revamp episodes, Glen came up with the sleeker, darker, even slightly more futuristic take on it—which was again very effective. So for Batman Beyond we said, “Well, how do we futurize Mr. Freeze?” In the meantime, Kelley Jones was one of the regular Batman artists in the comics, and he had come up with an interesting design for Mr. Freeze where he had a giant robot kind of look. And he lit the inside of the helmet so that his face was always backlit, so he had a blown-out, silhouetted face. We incorporated that into our new design and came up with yet another really cool Mr. Freeze design.

MM: Talia reappears in one of the better episodes. BRUCE: Yeah, that’s one of my favorites. MM: It’s a very intense episode, and it was a natural story also, because of the Lazarus Pits. There was a lot more screen time for Bruce Wayne in this episode. Was this episode a way of providing a sense of closure for the original series? BRUCE: I’m trying to remember the genesis of that one. I’m sure the basic idea originated with Paul, and in fact, 65

I think what actually kickstarted the idea—I think he started with the musical, strangely enough.... Definitely, that’s what it was. I think that even predates Batman Beyond. We had heard that some people were developing a Batman musical. [laughter] For real—in fact, there’s still talk about it. So we were joking about how silly that could be, and Paul came in one day singing, “Superstitious, Cowardly Lot.” [laughter] He had written down some joke lyrics for it, and I was laughing my head off. I said, “Man, we gotta put that in the show somewhere. We’ve gotta do the Batman musical.” So that was one of those ideas we came up with that we put in the ether and waited until an opportune moment to use it. It was sometime later when Paul came up with the Talia/Ra’s idea. That may have even come out of one of our lunch time meetings. I seem to remember myself, James Tucker, and Paul talking about the mind switch gimmick. I don’t know, you’d have to

ask Paul. My mind can only hold so much crap. [laughter] Anyhow, Paul came back with the concept of Talia offering to put Bruce in a Lazarus Pit, and it turns out not to be Talia, it’s Ra’s. Somewhere along the line I suggested to Paul to plug the Batman musical in there as a way of starting the show, with Terry bringing Bruce there as a birthday present, and Bruce starting to feel his age. None of these things are fully formed. Usually there’s a lot of back and forth. MM: Let’s talk Return of the Joker. You started production on that around the same time you started production on the second season of Batman Beyond. There had to have been a lot of juggling on your part. BRUCE: Well, that was the thing. Batman Beyond, the first season had come on and it did great in the ratings, and we had already gotten the pick-up to do the next batch. Right exactly at that same time, the home video people came to us and said, “Hey, we’d really like to do a long form version of Batman Beyond for direct-to-video.” Initially, my boss, Jean MacCurdy said, “Bruce, I don’t think you can handle both. I don’t think you can do the series and the directto-video.” There was no way in hell I was going to let anybody else go in there and play in my sandbox at that point. So I said, “Let me think about it. I’ll come up with a solution.” I was talking it over with Shaun McLauglin, who was our production manager at the time—he’s now our associate producer—and, just batting around ideas, the solution we came up with was hiring TMS to do the bulk of the pre-production on it, because we’d had some success with them in the past working on both Superman and New Adventures of Batman. Then it was just a cost-saving measure; we could cut down our budgetary costs by sub-contracting out the pre-production as well as the actual animation. Fortunately TMS got really, really good at it, and they really seemed to understand our storytelling style. So that was our solution, but to ride herd on it, we wanted to have one of our in-house directors overseeing the thing. At that point we pretty much decided that Curt Geda was the go-to guy in that respect, because he’s a really good storyboard artist himself, and we

be more adult than the TV show. If anything, we want it to be a little bit more kid-friendly.” And we said, “Well, because of the fact that people are just buying it, and not watching it with commercials and stuff, doesn’t that automatically make it acceptable to do something that’s more adult?” And they said no. The way they see it is they market their videos to kids and their parents. They don’t market them to comic book fans, they don’t market them to adults, they don’t really market them to teenagers. They figure they’re an impulse buy—that some mom is going to be walking through a Target and say, “Oh, my kid likes Batman. I’ll buy him this Batman video.” Also, their theory is that because of the nature of home videos— that kids will watch the thing over and over and over again, rather than an episode that comes on once and they never watch it again—that any adult subject matter, i.e., violence, is going to be seen by them over and over and over again, therefore you have to tone it down to lessen the impact of it. Anyhow, we didn’t agree with them. [laughter]

knew he’d be able to handle a lot of the storyboarding himself. We had to take Curt off the series and put him in charge of the direct-to-video, then we had to replace him with somebody. James Tucker had really come a long way as a storyboard artist and had started off as a character designer for us, so he seemed to have a good, well-rounded bag of tricks and we thought maybe now was the time to promote him to director. So he took over Curt’s crew on the series, and Curt had some freelancers as well as TMS. It was kind of a juggling act, but it all came out terrific. MM: What were the demographics on Batman Beyond? It seems that when they wanted a teen-aged Batman, they wanted a younger audience. BRUCE: That was the idea. That was actually the thing that started the whole ball rolling. At that meeting with Jamie, he said that they were happy with what the New Adventures of Batman was doing, but they were, as usual, a little bit concerned that the demographics were skewing older. I mean, kids watched it as well, but they wanted more kids to watch it. Specifically, they wanted girls to watch the show. They didn’t want to do a show that was exclusionary to girls. So Batman Beyond— again going back to Buffy, Buffy was a show that appealed to both boys and girls, but older boys and girls. That was the weird thing, that was the thing we couldn’t quite get our head around, was that he kept using Buffy as an example of what to do with Batman. Buffy’s a great show, but it’s not for little kids. So, yeah, Batman Beyond ultimately didn’t become a show for little kids. That was what it was intended for, but in its own way I think Batman Beyond is actually darker even than the regular Batman show.

MM: Obviously. BRUCE: We were very stubborn, so we went ahead and just did what we did. We sent them the script, they had some concerns about it, and we toned down some of the stuff. At a certain point we said, “Well, the rest of this, if you guys are still worried about it, we’ll deal with it at the storyboard stage.” So we did the storyboard, sent it over for approval, and never heard back from them. Well, it turns out they’re not used to looking at storyboards. They’re used to the script being what’s on the screen. They figured, once they sign off on a script, that’s what they’re going to get. We didn’t even have that process on this video, because the way we normally work is you get the script approved, then you get the storyboard approved, and you’re go. But we never got notes from them on the storyboard, and we had a deadline looming. We had to get the thing done and shipped it off to Japan and Korea, so we just kept going. Very, very late in the process, while the thing was already in the middle of being animated, they came back and said, “We want to revisit some of these issues we had about the script.” We said, “Well, we sent you the storyboard. We said we were going to go over it at that point.” They said, “Oh, well who has time to look over a storyboard?” [laughter] It was like, “Oh, boy. Now we’re screwed.” So we tried, while it was still being animated, to pull back some of the elements that were giving them the jitters, and felt we had come to a decent compromise. We

MM: Absolutely. And I think Return of the Joker took that a step even further. BRUCE: Return of the Joker is pitch black—it’s dark. MM: That’s why I was wondering. Was it the fact that it was going direct-to-video and not having to go through BS&P? BRUCE: Well, there was some miscommunication there. It was all kind of vague. Here’s the thing: When they told us they wanted to do a direct-to-video Batman Beyond, our first thought immediately was “Great, we don’t have to deal with Broadcasting Standards & Practices, so we can do something that’s a little bit more adult.” And right off the bat, the home video people were telling us, “Well, no. We don’t want it to 67

toning it down and making it something it was never intended to be, I felt we were really losing something. And I got a lot of heat on the internet for it, because the original version had somehow gotten sneaked out, and when it became known we were going back in and recutting it and “sanitizing” it, fans were calling me all kinds of names and saying, “Why doesn’t he have the balls to stand up to Warner Bros.? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I just do not have that kind of clout. If I’d gone in there and said, “I refuse to cut it,” they’d say, “Okay, fine, we’ll do it.” God knows what would have happened at that point, so as painful as it was for me to go back in there and keep snipping off my baby’s fingers, I’ll be damned if I was going to let anybody else do it. I think the “watered down” version is still okay. There’s a couple of story points that don’t really make any sense, because important story information was lost due to adult situations, but ultimately it’s okay. It’s still kind of disturbing, but the uncut version is obviously the way to go with it.

got the animation back, they looked at it, and they pretty much signed off on it. They said, “Well, we’re a little worried about this, but okay.” We assembled our first cut of it, scored it, did all the post-production stuff, and we were happy with it. In fact, we were thrilled with it. But, again, even as we were watching it—James Tucker came to one of the sound mixes, and it was that flashback sequence, and he sat there just chuckling and shaking his head. When the lights came up he said, “This is not a kids movie!” And I’m like, “Well, yeah. It isn’t, is it?” We screened it over at the Warner Bros. lot for the crew, and there were some TV executives from the Kids WB there. It was a weird screening, because they were digging the story and everything, and when we got to that flashback sequence it was absolute silence. [laughter] I think I heard a couple of shocked gasps. When the thing was over, there was a polite round of applause, but I think people were stunned by how dark it was. It was so beyond the pale of what we had done before. That’s when the sh*t hit the fan. There had been some executives there, and they all started freaking out about how dark it was. Then it became this big internal political thing, because there was a tacit agreement between the home video people and Kids WB that Kids WB was going to do crosspromotion for it. They were going to run commercials for it and even do a contest for it, and it was going to be this big promotional thing. And the Kids WB said, “We’re not going to have anything to do with it. It’s too dark. We cannot promote anything on Kids WB that we wouldn’t run, and in its current state, there’s no way we would ever run Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. It’s just too intense.” To make a long story short, I ended up cutting the thing five or six times. I’d cut a little bit off, resubmit the cut, and they’d say fine. Then two days later they’d say, “Aaah, now we want you to cut some more.” It went back and forth, back and forth. The weird thing is, I’m usually pretty budget-conscious, and when we delivered our first cut of Return of the Joker it was actually under budget by a little bit. By the time we had to recut the thing and rescore it and pay to have some new animation done for linking segments, we were over budget—that kind of bugged me. But ultimately I was just despondent over—because I thought we’d had something that was really special, and by

MM: And at least it did finally get an official release. BRUCE: Yeah, thank God! I didn’t think that thing was ever going to see the light of day. I thought they were just going to bury it and pretend it never existed. It was just good timing. The way they market these things, they usually put out three or four theme-related videos at the same time, and they were putting out the first Justice League and The Legend of the Dark Knight. Just as part of that group, they said, “Let’s release the uncut version of Return of the Joker,” and it was just “Hallelujah!” MM: One of the cut scenes that was mentioned in the commentary track of the DVD that sounded pretty interesting featured the Dee-Dees dancing. How long was that scene, just a few seconds? BRUCE: It wasn’t more than ten or 15 seconds, something like that. When Curt delivered his first storyboard for the whole thing—we always do this, even on the TV shows as well—quite often you’ll just board something ’til it feels right, and then once you time it you realize it’s way too long. Return of the Joker was way, way, way long. MM: I think you said it was 14 minutes over. BRUCE: Something like that, yeah—some crazy, huge number. So we had to do some radical cutting on that thing just to get it down to the acceptable length. We knew we couldn’t just go in and nickel-and-dime it and 68

take out one scene here and reduce the number of punches in this scene. We knew that we had to take whole chunks out, because 14 minutes is a long time. We had to sit down with the storyboard and go through it page by page. I realized there were those two big chunks we could take out. There was the dialogue scene with the red herring character, Jordan Price, and Bruce Wayne. It really didn’t advance the story, so I said, “That’s the first thing to go,” and it was a pretty lengthy scene and all dialogue. Then there was a sequence in the ruins of Arkham Asylum, where Bruce goes back and Joker’s left a little present for him. It was a great little sequence, but you could lift it out of the movie and not miss it. It didn’t advance the story; it didn’t cause any story continuity problems. The Dee-Dee dance sequence was something when I went through on the nickel-and-dime pass, where I was literally going through shot-by-shot, taking stuff out. The Dee-Dee dance stuff was great, and I love cute girls dancing—I’d have loved to put that in the movie—but it obviously didn’t add anything to the story. It was just eye candy, so it was out. Also, that opening fight scene with Terry and the Jokerz gang in the warehouse, it just went on and on and on—and it’s still pretty long. It’s a very long sequence. That was one of the major sticking points when we were doing the cut version of it. The home video people said, “Reduce the length of this by half. The fact that it goes on so long is creating an aura of unending violence.” So my editor, Joe Gall, and I, we loosely translated what

they said into reducing the number of blows that were thrown. [laughter] We didn’t actually shorten the length of it by half—we reduced it by maybe a quarter or a third— but we took out every other act of violence. If there was a shot where Batman threw three punches, we would have him throw one or two. It still came out long, but I think it’s a terrific sequence. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. When we first started talking about doing the direct-tovideo, we wanted to start it off with a “James Bond” style pre-title sequence. We

wanted to have a real balls-out action sequence. It was really not much more elaborate on the script page than “Batman fights the Jokerz.” We pretty much left it up to Curt to choreograph the sequence. MM: Something that really stood out for me was the fact there are two onscreen deaths. There’s no blood, but two people obviously die. What made you think it would be okay to do that? BRUCE: Temporary insanity. [laughter] I don’t know. MM: Even without BS&P, you had to think that might not get through.

Above: Terry was still a McGavin at the time this rough was drawn. Next Page: F/X breakdown of J’onn communing with the Pytar from Justice League’s second season episode, “Hearts and Minds.” Batman Beyond, Martian Manhunter and all related characters ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

BRUCE: Well, yeah. Obviously we fought for it, and eventually lost—and then won again—but we tried to do it in such a way that it wasn’t gory. We felt you should never take death lightly, but at the same time, it’s a great way of establishing the Joker as truly evil. That was one of our internal mandates, just amongst ourselves, was that we really wanted to make the Joker scarier than we’d ever done him before. So if he kills somebody off in his first scene, this is a whole new Joker, an all-bets-are-off Joker, so we pushed for it. We felt that if he’d shot him with a bullet, obviously we’d never get away with that, so we made it a cartoony looking gun and we even put that big, orange safety tip on it that kids’ toys have to signal that “Hey, this isn’t a real gun, it’s a toy.” That was a gag right out of the comics. That was from a story Len Wein and Walt Simonson had done—a Joker story where the “Bang!” gun with the flag was actually a dart gun. MM: So what did happen to Nightwing— or is that a direct-to-video for another day? BRUCE: Maybe. I don’t know what happened to Nightwing. For the most part I don’t really care. MM: Were you holding back that story in anticipation of the Titans series, not knowing if they’d be using Robin or Nightwing? BRUCE: No. Going back to the very beginnings of Batman Beyond, I really did not want to deal with the old cast. I really did not want to do that. The Commissioner Gordon thing 70

just seemed like a natural. That was something that occurred to me one day. I said, “Okay, fine. If we have to have a police commissioner, make it Barbara. Why not? You still have Commissioner Gordon, but it’s a different Commissioner Gordon.” Once I said that, we started filling in the backstory about what happened between her and Bruce in the past, and it was just interesting. It was an interesting way to go with the character, and a way of coming up with a Commissioner Gordon who deals with Batman completely differently than the old one did—where they’re much more antagonistic. But for the most part we never wanted to go into what happened to Joker, what happened to Tim Drake, what happened to Dick Grayson. We just felt that’s not what the show is about; it’s about Terry. We had to have that conversation with the writers quite often, because they would go into these story pitches where literally they were just pitching Batman: The Animated Series stories that were set in the future. It was like, “No, no, no, no. This is not Batman: The Animated Series. This is a completely different show, and it has a different kind of dynamic to it. We have to deal with the fact that Terry is a different kind of character than Bruce Wayne. The dynamic of the show is Terry being the new, young Batman; learning the ropes; and dealing with this cranky, old bastard shouting in his ear all day. You can’t just do old Batman plots. Or if you do, you have to massage it so that it fits within this new show.” When we did the direct-to-video, we realized we were going to have to use a high-profile Batman villain, and obviously it’s going to have to be the Joker. At that point it was, “Fine, we’ll use the Joker. How do we put him in the Batman Beyond world? What’s the twist? What’s the story?” Then the Tim Drake thing got subsumed into that, too, and once we’d opened that Pandora’s box, we knew that then we were really going to start getting the fans saying, “Well, you told us what happened to Tim Drake, now what happened to Dick Grayson?” We felt if we were ever going to do more Batman Beyonds, then maybe we’d deal with that at that point. [sarcastically] Fortunately, the first one didn’t sell very well, so we didn’t have to deal with it. [laughter]

spend too much time with what Batman’s doing, then you forget about what Wonder Woman’s doing. It’s hard to keep a group dynamic going during an action sequence. It’s easy enough if you’ve got Batman all by himself fighting the Joker or even a group of thugs—it’s easy to follow his storyline. An action sequence isn’t just action, it’s still part of the story. It’s integrated into the story so that it starts at a certain point and it ends at a certain point. It’s not just fight, fight, fight, fight, stop; in the best of all possible worlds, it also advances the story. It’s really easy to get lost on tangents; it’s a difficult balancing act.

MM: For years and years you swore up and down that you would never do a Justice League show. What made you give in? BRUCE: A number of things. Some of it had to do with coming to the end of one project and wondering what we were going to do next. We were already starting to lose some of our people because we were wrapping up on Batman Beyond and knew we weren’t going to do any more. You know, you can’t afford to keep people on if you don’t have any work. So, that was part of it, and another part of it was there had been a resurgence of the Justice League in the comics in the very recent past. Grant Morrison had done his—it really wasn’t so much a revamp of the Justice League, it was more of a back-to-basics approach and giving it a modern twist—version of the Justice League which got a lot of fan reaction and, obviously, sales spikes. At the same time that got us interested in doing the show, it got the fans rabid. All along, ever since the very beginning of Batman: The Animated Series, that was something people kept saying: “When are you going to do the Justice League? When are you going to do the Justice League?” And then Grant’s version came out and then people really wanted to see an animated Justice League. At that point it was like, “Well, you’ve got to bow to the inevitable,” and with some hesitation, knowing how difficult the show was going to be, we said “Okay, let’s do it.” We called Mike Lazzo, who’s the head of programming at Cartoon Network, and I barely got the words out of my mouth before he said, “Fine, let’s do it.” It was a very easy pitch. I also have to say that on the Batman Beyond episode, “The Call,” where we had the Justice League Unlimited— the future Justice League—that was almost a trial run for a Justice League show. We said, “How difficult is this going to be? Let’s find out within the scope of a Batman Beyond episode.” And it was actually quite difficult. Just staging an action sequence that has that many players in it is the single hardest thing to do about the show. Just trying to keep everybody moving all at the same time and not losing the audience. If you

MM: In “The Call” the characters are getting picked off as the story progressed. Was that done as a way of freeing up some space? BRUCE: No, I think it just developed that way. I don’t think that was intentional. As we were beating it out, we realized we wanted the climax of that story to be Batman Beyond versus Superman Beyond. That was why we took the Justice League out one by one and ended up with that scary, possessed Superman chasing Terry throughout the arctic. Specifically what I was talking about was that big action sequence at the climax of part one, where the city’s being bombed and the Justice League are all running around trying to save people. And also, the thing that was a textbook example of what I worried would be the problem with Justice League was the action sequence in the beginning of part two, when Terry has told the other members of the Justice League about Superman going rogue, and then he goes crazy and starts attacking them. The way it was storyboarded, because the storyboard artist was trying to constantly remind the audience of where all the players were, you’d have a bit of action taking place with one character and then the camera would pan over and find out what was happening with another character. It was a nightmare in the 71

editing room. Just as you were building up a head of steam pacing-wise, suddenly you’d have to stop and pan over to somebody else and it was like, “Aagh!” It was driving us crazy. It was a learning experience. We learned it’s better to just cut to a character who’s doing something and then cut to another character rather than panning over to them. Or, the other way to keep track of the characters is to have something happening in the foreground with one group of characters while something’s happening with another group of characters in the background, and then cut. But panning from one to another, that panning is dead time—it slows the pacing down and actually makes things more confusing. We sat there in the editing room pulling our hair out, but we developed a list of “dos” and “don’ts” about how to stage an action sequence with a large group of characters. But there is no rulebook. To this day, every show has its own problems. Every time we get in the editing room we’re kind of going, “Okay, Batman’s story is coming along fine, but what about Wonder Woman’s story?” It’s a constant struggle of trying to juggle all these characters. MM: Where did you start when it came time to begin production on Justice League? Was the first step simply figuring out which characters to use? BRUCE: The first thing we wanted to do was to nail down which version of the Justice League we wanted to do. As I think I mentioned, one of our early Superman story ideas toyed with the idea of doing Superman and the Justice League. At that point we were thinking—again, this predates what Grant had done in the comics—rather than doing what everybody was expecting, which was doing the core characters, we would use some of the more offbeat DC characters, like The Question and some of the New Gods characters, as part of the Justice League. But times had changed and our feelings had changed, so we felt that when people think of the Justice League they think Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, etc. That was pretty much a no-brainer; that was something we all pretty much agreed upon right off the bat, so that’s what we did. The only things that really needed to be settled on were which version of the Green Lantern were we going to use, because there’s so many. We could have used Hal Jordan or Kyle Rayner or Guy Gardner, but for a number

of reasons, including ethnic diversity, we chose to go with John Stewart—which has turned out to be probably the single most controversial aspect of the show amongst die-hard comic book fans. John Stewart never really got a whole lot of face time in the comics. There was a small period of time back in the ’80s when Steve Englehart was writing the comic, when John was the main Green Lantern, but aside from that he wasn’t really one of the— MM: His solo series in the early to mid-’90s, Green Lantern: Mosaic, wasn’t a great seller, but it was one of my favorite series. And ever since Cosmic Odyssey, he’s probably been my favorite of the Green Lanterns, so I was actually happy that he was the one you decided to use. BRUCE: Well, good, good. I’ve always kind of liked him, too, and, again, aside from the ethnic diversity thing, we were looking at what the group dynamic was going to be. One of the things we really wanted to avoid was having a group of characters who were all pretty much interchangeable. Going back and rereading a lot of the Silver Age Justice League comics, they really are all the same character. Batman has no different a voice than Superman or Flash. They’re all kind of the same character; the only thing that differentiates them is what colors they’re wearing and what powers they have. So we really wanted to make sure they had a much more interesting group dynamic than that and that they all had different personalities. Going back to

the original version of John Stewart from Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ day, the thing that made him interesting to us was that he was quite a bit more of a badass. If you go back and read those, he comes across as a stereotypical, angry, young black man. We knew we didn’t want to do that exactly, but we still wanted to keep a little bit of that edge to him so that he would be one of the more strident of the characters. We hit upon the idea of the Green Lanterns being kind of a paramilitary force, so we said, “Ah, marine. Okay, Louis Gossett Jr., Samuel Jackson.” So that became our take on him. MM: The only complaint where I agree with general fandom—and I can see your side of the argument, too—is how he uses the ring. [laughter] The very simple

shields and beams. It seems like an animated series would be the perfect place to show off all the cool effects, but at the same time— BRUCE: Well, it’s one of those things: you never know when an idea is silly but cool, or when it’s just silly. The idea of a guy making giant, green boxing gloves—at the time—struck us as being just plain silly. In retrospect I’d have to say it was probably a mistake. Yeah, it’s a visual medium and that is kind of what the Green Lanterns were always about, even going back to the Golden Age. So we probably should have given him a little more variety in the kinds of things he makes. I mean, honestly, bottom-line, I have to say that it really doesn’t make any sense for a guy who’s got this powerful ring on his hand that he can shoot lazer beams with, there’s no reason for him to make a giant, green lazer gun that shoots beams. MM: No, but a giant, green battering ram is really cool. BRUCE: Yes. [laughter] Correct, correct. So we didn’t really quite think that through. We limited what the ring is. We felt that it’s just a weapon, so he’ll use it as a lazer beam and make shields with it. And it does make sense for his personality to treat it that way, but at the same time, yeah, we could have been a little bit more imaginative with his usage of it. In fact, he does do a little bit more of that usual Green Lantern stuff in the second season.

Previous Page: Bruce: “The infamous ‘old, tired-looking’ Superman re-design from JL Season One.” Above: Storyboards from the climactic Superman/Darkseid slugfest in “Twilight.” Left: Bruce: “For one mad instant, I toyed with the idea of giving the JL a ‘uniform’ costume design.... I got as far as doing Batman and GL designs before coming to my senses, realizing it would be a horrible, horrible mistake.... I did resurrect the concept for the ‘evil, alt-universe JL’ story, ‘A Better World,’ a few years later.” Batman, Darkseid, Green Lantern, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

MM: Yeah, even the Cartoon Network commercials promote that viewpoint.

MM: In the first season, Hawkgirl seems to get a bit of a short shrift. She does have some very interesting scenes, especially in “War World,” where you can see her personality play off the other characters, but....

BRUCE: Right, exactly. Obviously we didn’t want to fall into that trap. We knew we wanted to use—the Aquaman episode was one of the first stories we plotted for the show. Again, we kind of reversed ourselves. When we did the Aquaman episode of Superman, we had a kneejerk reaction to what they were doing with him in the comics, which we didn’t agree with at the time. We were saying, “Oh, no, that’s not Aquaman. Aquaman’s not a guy with a giant hook on his hand. Aquaman’s the seahorseriding, orange-and-green guy.” [laughter] But over the course of time, we took a second look at the character in the comics and went, “Well, you know, there’s something about that. The hook has a Peter Pan/Captain Hook kind of piratey motif; the long hair makes him more of a barbarian, so that’s more mythological.” There were all these things that were gelling for us. In retrospect we probably could have made him the seventh member of the team instead of Hawkgirl, but it’s all in the character dynamic balance—which characters will play off of each other interestingly. The other thing is we knew going in that having that many characters was going to be difficult, so we really wanted to keep the lineup down to no more than seven main characters, and even then we don’t put all seven characters in very many episodes. So it was

BRUCE: I would disagree with that. Yeah, we haven’t said what her backstory is outside of the publicity material; we haven’t dealt with her backstory as part of an episode yet. But other than that, I think she does come across as a fairly three-dimensional character within the scope of the show. People have a tendency to think, “Oh, well she’s just the badass of the group. She’s just the one who charges into battle and beats everything up.” But that’s not really true. We have shown her other sides to her. We’ve shown her compassionate side in the “Legends” episode, where she is empathizing with GL’s loss of his childhood heroes. MM: I think she’s also the character with the best sense of humor. BRUCE: She has the potential for it. MM: It’s a very sarcastic sense of humor that the other characters don’t seem to display as much. Now as far as leaving Aquaman out of the lineup, were you just trying to avoid that whole Superfriends image? BRUCE: Obviously we had a knee-jerk reaction to the Superfriends. That became a running joke. It’s in the pop culture zeitgeist now that Aquaman is the lame one. 74

either Hawkgirl or Aquaman, and we chose to have Hawkgirl, again, for diversity—so Wonder Woman wasn’t the only girl in the group—and also because I always liked the character in the comics. I always liked the visual of her. MM: Hawkman and Hawkgirl were always—except for that period in the Golden Age when they went to standard cowls—among the most visually striking of any comic book characters. You really harkened back to the Silver Age in a lot of the episodes in the first season, particularly in “Brave and the Bold” and with the Justice Guild. Were you trying to pay your respects to that Silver Age period? BRUCE: Definitely. We ended up being more Silver Age than we really intended. When I look back on the first season now, it feels very Silver Age to me, and some of it was intentional and some of it wasn’t. Despite what I said about us wanting to make sure the characters were all, personality-wise, different from each other, there is a certain kind of blandness, I think, in the first season. I think the character dynamics weren’t quite what we could have done with them; we could have mixed it up even more.

Part of it was maybe a reaction to what had happened with Batman Beyond and Return of the Joker. As you mentioned, Batman Beyond was supposed to be a kids’ show and it really wasn’t. It seemed to me—and maybe it was a reaction to the Superfriends—that Justice League would lend itself to be much more of a kidfriendly show than what we had done on Batman Beyond or even the regular Batman show. So without trying to dumb it down or anything, I think we were making a concious effort to make it a little more of a family-friendly show, but unfortunately by pulling back on some of the more adult storylines, we didn’t really replace it with anything. The shows really have no edge at all, very little. Something of a blandness set in with the show. We made steps to remedy that situation in season two, and to the point where I think the season two episodes make a much better show across the board. We’re constantly calling it “new, improved Justice League.” MM: Is “Savage Time” considered a sort of bridge between the seasons? BRUCE: Kind of. “Savage Time” is a really good show, but there’s still a little bit of a blandness in the dialogue I think. There’s a reliance on clichés just to get the story going. What you tend to do is write a first draft that will have a certain number of clichés as placeholder dialogue so that you can tell the story, then you

Previous Page: Bruce’s edits and storyboard ideas for the ending of “Legends.” Above and Below: More “Twilight” storyboards. Left: The “old school” Aquaman as he was designed for Superman.

MM: Did you suggest to Cartoon Network the idea of premiering “Twilight” with the two Superman/ Darkseid episodes? BRUCE: No, that was something Cartoon Network came up with on their own, which I thought was a great idea. MM: Yeah, they really made an event of it. BRUCE: Actually, we may have suggested 76

Right: The knockout punch from “Twilight.” Below: Pencil rough for Tsukuri, who’s name refers to the plane design of a Japanese sword. Next Page Top: Rough designs for Metamorpho and his main squeeze, Sapphire Stagg. Metamorpho and his gal pal were created at the height of the Silver Age, and these designs strongly reflect Ramona Fradon’s artistic style from the comic book series. Next Page Bottom: Batman is on his own against Dr. Destiny in this storyboard from “Only a Dream.”

take a second pass at it and say, “Okay, how do we put a spin on this dialogue so that it flows better or sounds a bit fresher?” and rewrite it so that even if what they’re actually saying are clichés they’re not saying it in a cliché way. But what happened with “Savage Time” was that there were a whole lot of things going on at that time internally. We were really rushing to finish the season, and there were some problems with the first draft and the second draft structurally. That was a very difficult show to beat out properly, because there was a lot happening. We had three or four major plot threads that had to pay off by themselves and then also had to dovetail into the main plot. That ate up the time we had for rewrites. So the final draft of the script was not quite as polished as I would have liked, but it’s still a really good show. The story is ultimately the key. As long as it’s a good story and holds your interest, you can forgive some lapses in logic and lapses in the dialogue. Again, that was one of the areas we really concentrated on in the second season. We basically said no script is going out until we are happy with it. Fortunately we were able to do that on time and on budget. [laughter] But we had six or seven drafts of certain scripts just because we kept going over it and going over it and saying, “Well this part’s better now, but there’s still this one line over here that really bugs me.” We made sure we spent the time and fine-tuned it.

that to them. I don’t know, because we had done “Twilight” so long before it aired, it gets hazy. I think we probably had suggested that they might do something like that. In fact, we may have suggested something even more ambitious: to run every Darkseid episode. It makes quite an interesting saga with “Tools of the Trade” and “Father’s Day” and “Little Girl Lost.” I think what we suggested was running an episode each day during the week leading up to “Twilight,” but I can’t complain with what they did. It was a good idea to run “Apokolips Now” and “Legacy” and then “Twilight” back-to-back. MM: You said “Twilight” was done well ahead of time. Were you just holding it back with the intent of having something to whet the fans’ appetites over the summer? BRUCE: Oh, no. It was just a weird scheduling thing. We were in production on Season Two for a while and, with the vagueries of scheduling, as it turned out we actually finished all of Season Two before they started airing any of them—except for “Twilight.” “Twilight” they ran early as a “summer bonus” thing, but the rest of the season didn’t air until much later—they were waiting for a window in their schedule and wanted to give it a big relaunch push. Also, at that point they were inspired by the way HBO runs their original programming— shows like The Sopranos. They wait until they have basically every episode in the can before they start running them so they can

run them back-to-back-to-back-to-back without any repeats in the middle. That did well for them, so that’s what Cartoon Network wanted to do with Justice League. MM: You were listed as co-writer on “Twilight”—as you were in the Superman/ Darkseid episodes. Were you there to make sure the continuity carried over or—? BRUCE: No, [laughs] I hadn’t intended on contributing that much writing to that episode, but what happened was it was at the end of the first season—we were pretty much finished up— and just in case we got a pick-up for a second season, Warner Bros. paid Rich Fogel to come up with a couple of episode ideas. So he came up with a couple, and we had talked about bringing Darkseid back anyway, so one of the premises he came up with was “Twilight.” Initially, myself and James Tucker both were kind of reluctant on his pitch, just because we didn’t think pairing Darkseid up with Brainiac was necessarily a great idea. There aren’t that many DC villains who are, on their own, big and strong enough to take on the entire Justice League, so we thought it was using up two big villains all at once when we should have one Darkseid story and one Brainiac story; Brainiac could easily have had his own Justice League episode. We told Rich our misgivings about it and he said, “Let me work on it. I think I can make it work.” To make a long story short, he turned in his outline—I still didn’t think it worked. We went back and forth on how we thought we could fix it, and there were other structural problems, I thought, that the show had. Rich had put in all this stuff with the New Gods, with Highfather, and I was all for showing them more, because we had never actually done that much with them in Superman. We had done a flashback to the whole “Pact” thing, but Highfather never even spoke. So I thought it was

a decent idea to do that, but he had so little screentime over the course of the story and it seemed to be a tangent away from the rest of the story, which was all about Superman and Darkseid, and I thought it was throwing the story out of kilter. So that was one of the things we tried to address. This went back and forth for a while. I just felt that the script wasn’t quite everything that it could be, and especially since it was going to be our Season Two premiere, we wanted to make sure that it was gangbusters. Just out of frustration—I wasn’t getting my point across or whatever—I took the script, and rather than try to discuss it back and forth like we normally do and then let Rich have a pass and me make notes on it, I took it home one weekend and did my own polish pass on the whole script. I still think it had some of the same structural problems that it initially had; I still think Highfather’s kind of pointless in the story, but at least some of the other scenes have a lot of zing to them. The stuff between Batman and Superman in Rich’s draft—I hardly changed anything structurally, I just went in and punched up some of the dialogue in some of the scenes I thought were underdramatized. MM: Superman and Batman seem to reverse roles in that episode. BRUCE: In what way? MM: Superman becomes the incredibly intense one— BRUCE: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was all there in Rich’s original idea. He kind of danced around the issue a little

Two we said, “Well that’s something we definitely need to address.” We want to make the show more ballsy—not contemporary necessarily, but more sophisticated, a little edgy, but without getting dark, dark, dark. We don’t want to make the show depressing and still have to keep in mind that sixyear-olds are watching the show, so it’s a bit of a balancing act.

bit, I thought, in his version of it, so I dotted the “i” and crossed the “t” just to make sure it was very clear as to what was going on. I must reiterate, that script is mostly Rich’s; I just went in and gave it a polish more than anything.

MM: What’s the story behind “The Terror Beyond”? BRUCE: That’s our backward homage to the Defenders. It was one of those weird things where I had pitched a story that had an odd two-part structure. We wanted to bring Aquaman back, because we really liked the Aquaman episode from the first season, and I was toying with this idea of H.P. Lovecraft—a lot of his Cthulhu mythos deities are water-based. So that gave me a hook, and I thought, “It could be interesting if it was a Lovecraftian monster attacking Atlantis and the Justice League helps Aquaman defeat the monster.” Then I thought, “That takes care of the aquatic side of the Lovecraftian theme, but then there’s the sorcerous side of it.” So the original story was, at the end of part one, they seemingly defeat the monster, they fly back towards Metropolis, and they get back home and realize that whatever they had done to defeat the monster has unleashed a portal and now there’s a full-scale invasion of our dimension from these Lovecraftian beasties. Part two would not have Aquaman in it, but would have Dr. Fate, just to keep our guest-stars down to a minimum per episode. The writers totally did not like the story. They thought the gimmick of it—the fact that it was two seemingly unrelated stories that are connected by a thread in the cliffhanger—they thought it was a little odd. They just could not see the story. So I kind of gave up on that, but then I mentioned, “You know, we’ve got Aquaman here and Dr. Fate, we’ve basically got twothirds of a DC Comics alternate universe version of the Defenders.” Little light bulbs started going off over everybody’s heads. I said, “All we need now is the DC equivalent of The Hulk.” Somebody mentioned Grundy and it all went off from there. It was a weird, fun thing.

MM: We talked earlier about Season One having a Silver Age feel to it. In Season Two you used a lot more of those classic Silver Age villains, like Eclipso and Despero— and Vandal Savage comes back not once, but twice—but they’re tweaked in a way so that they don’t feel like Silver Age characters. BRUCE: That was a conscious decision. One of the things we felt we may have dropped the ball on in the first season was that we were probably too beholden to our childhood memories of what Justice League should be. I think I mentioned this before, but we made a conscious decision to try to do a show that was a little brighter and more optimistic than some of our previous shows. Some of the shows we’ve done in the past were a little on the dark side and definitely edgy—Batman Beyond and Batman and even some of the episodes of Superman—so we decided to try to do a more upbeat, daylight type show. The problem was it came off a little bland. When we went into Season

MM: There was a lot of buzz when Kyle Rayner appeared at Superman’s funeral in “Hereafter.” Is there a

backstory for him, just for your own internal reference, or is it just a case of “he’s off in another sector”? BRUCE: I’m not sure we’re ever going to get into the nuts and bolts of explaining why Kyle Rayner is not the current Green Lantern of Earth. A lot of people were like, “Oh, they just retconned their own continuity. They should have used Kyle. I don’t like that.” So we just threw Kyle in there to say, “No, no, Kyle’s still there. He still exists in the animated universe; he’s just not stationed on Earth at the moment, regularly.” “STARCROSSED” EPISODE SPOILERS AHEAD! MM: Probably what got the most attention in the second season—and you gradually built up to it—was the Green Lantern/Hawkgirl romance. When did you decide that would be a running subplot? There are hints of it throughout Season One—is that when it was decided? BRUCE: In the season finale the

Thanagarians show up on Earth and we find out Hawkgirl’s whole cover story about being transported here against her will is all a lie. She’s actually been spying on Earth to find out about our defenses. During the course of that episode, the Thanagarians turn out to have not exactly altruistic motives towards Earth, so Hawkgirl becomes a reluctant traitor to Earth and the Justice League. This is something we had in the works since the very, very beginning of Season One. The idea, strangely enough, actually came from Paul Levitz at DC Comics. When we were having a brainstorming session with him, he suggested we do some big stunt: either we kill off one of the major characters or have one of them betray the League. Well, we know from experience 79

Previous Page: In these storyboards from “The Terror Beyond,” Hawkgirl shows both her vengeful side and her tender side. Above: Rejected concept sketches of H’ro Talak. Below: From “Wild Cards.” Bruce: “I pulled rank, called ‘dibs’ on the ‘big kiss’ scene.” Hawkgirl, H’ro Talak, Solomon Grundy ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

we thought it would be even better if she fell in love with one of the Justice League members or vice versa, and we quickly decided it would be John Stewart. So they would gradually fall in love, and right when they get together and become a couple she has to basically stab the Justice League in the back. We laid the groundwork for the love story angle all throughout Season One. It starts out very, very subtly. Even in “Secret Origins,” we were very conscious of the end sequence— when they all get together in the Watchtower for the first time, you’ll notice that Hawkgirl and Green Lantern do come flying into the scene together. It was subtle things like that we started doing right at the beginning. And then of course, the “War World” episode was the first time we really started hinting at it, when they were stranded together on a foreign planet with no way of getting back home, getting on each other’s nerves—“meeting cute.” Then, by the season finale, in “Savage Time,” when she has to leave him behind on the battlefield and is torn up about it, then is reunited with him at the end, it’s pretty obvious at that point what we were headed towards.

that even though he said that, DC Comics really does not like us to kill off any of their major characters. It kind of reduces their marketability. [laughter] We thought it was a good idea, so we thought, “Well, obviously we’re not going to be able to kill off one of the big seven, but we can have one of them betray the League.” It didn’t take us very long to realize that it had to be Hawkgirl. The tricky part of it was that she’s a character that, even though we hadn’t even written anything with her yet and our version of Hawkgirl didn’t really exist before our show—she has some of the same characteristics of the comic book character, but her personality is pretty unique to the animated series—from the get-go, we all really liked the character. That made it even more obvious that she was going to have to be the one to betray the League, because if somebody betrays the League and it’s somebody you don’t like, then you get nothing. It’s like, “Oh, that rotten person, I never liked her anyway.” But if it’s somebody you like and have sympathy for, then you’ve got a conflict, you’ve got drama. So we started laying the groundwork for it right off the bat. We didn’t do much with her backstory in the first season, but at the same time we decided she would betray the League—and in the course of plotting that out—

MM: The scene in “Comfort and Joy” was the clincher. If you didn’t like Hawkgirl before, you had to like her then. BRUCE: Which part specifically? MM: The whole barfight sequence. BRUCE: That turned a lot of people off. A lot of people were like, “Eww. You’ve fallen in love with this woman and she turns out to be a beer-drinking, belching, brawling chick.” [laughter] MM: I think that episode fully realized her personality and really established her as a unique character. You get glimpses here and there up to that point, but the barfight sequence gives you the full picture. BRUCE: It’s like, “Okay, this is what you’re in for, John Stewart.” [laughter] Whatever, I like a girl who can belch. [laughter]

MM: To what extent do you think working in animation has affected the development of your style? Do you even consider yourself to have a style, per se? BRUCE: I suppose. There are certain things, whether I’m doing comics or I’m doing animation—or a super-hero comic or a horror comic—that, I guess, are stylistically true from job to job. But I do try to apply different rules to different things. I’ve made a conscious decision in certain comics jobs I’ve done to try something different with each one. Even though you can look at them all and see it’s Bruce Timm, “Red Romance” looks complete-

ly different than the Kirby homage stuff I was doing, which looks only somewhat similar to some of the Batman: Animated comics I’ve done. To answer your first question, I definitely think animation has influenced my comics work. Strangely enough, there was quite a bit of back and forth between the Batman: Animated show and the Batman: Animated comics. We did the style for the animation, and then DC, I think, made a really smart choice in trying to adapt the animated style for the comics. I, in turn, was influenced a lot by what Ty Templeton and Rich Burchett and Mike Parobeck were doing in the comics. Before I’d done Batman: The Animated Series, every time I’d tried to do comic book work, I was still stuck in not knowing who I was—trying to be Dave Stevens and Mike Golden and Jack Kirby and Walt Simonson all at the same time. I thought that’s what comic book work looked like. If I was ever going to get comic book work, that’s what I had to draw like. Fortunately, the styles have changed so drastically over the last ten years that even mainstream guys like DC and Marvel are much more accepting of more stylized artwork than they were. I remember ten years ago there was a Dutch Superman graphic album done by Teddy Kristiansen, which was really pretty; it was very nice. If anything it kind of looked like the stuff that Tim Sale does. At the time—and I think to this day—it was only published in Holland, because DC looked at it and said, “This doesn’t look like a DC comic. We will not publish this.” I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s kind of shortsighted.” But they’ve since opened up to—there’s been the whole Vertigo movement. The indy scene has become a little more accepted by the mainstream. Guys like Ted McKeever and Mike Allred. 81

Previous Page Top: A revised rough design of Paran-Dul for her appearance in “Starcrossed.” Previous Page Bottom: Bruce drew this Green Arrow design as part of a development pitch “around 2000, I think, between Batman Beyond and Justice League. He’s in JL Season Three (Justice League Unlimited), but wearing his more traditional Neal Adamsera outfit.” As for the Black Canary drawing, Bruce says, “This was done years ago, just for fun. Black Canary will show up in JLU (Season Three), but she’ll look a bit different.” Left: Batman on the move.

MM: How does it feel to look on the comics stand and see a variety of titles based on your art style? And for my money, Batman Adventures has consistently been the best Batman title since it started. BRUCE: I think it’s cool. It’s a little scary, because there are guys doing the “Bruce Timm” style as good, if not better, than I do it. [laughter] That’s a little unnerving, but at the same time I’m not too freaked out by that, because the guys who have been influenced by my work have been influenced by other people as well, and they’ve become unique in their own way. There’re still things that I do that nobody else does. If you look at someone like Mike Oeming or Darwyn Cooke, you might say, “Oh yeah, there’s a Bruce Timm influence there.” At the same time, Mike Oeming is easily as heavily influenced by Mike Mignola as he is by me, so there’s a definite stylistic change there. And Darwyn wasn’t influenced by my stuff until very late in the game, when he actually started working for me. He’s my age, so he’s had 40 years of influences as well outside of the animated style. I look at Darwyn, and knowing the stuff that he’s into, I see it in his artwork. It may not be as obvious to other people, but— while I can see some of my tricks—I’m seeing Daniel Torres, I’m seeing Frank Robbins, I’m seeing Johnny Craig, I’m seeing Caniff, I’m seeing Sickles. We all might be in the same school, but we’re all still unique. As for the actual animated books, sometimes they’ll go through slumps where they’ll have an artist on the book who’s okay, but not exactly dynamic. Right now, with Rick Burchett being the main artist, I think the book is awesome. Rick, to me, is the best of those guys. Ty’s really good, too. MM: When you get stuck on something, what do you do to get yourself out of it? What do you look to for inspiration to spark the fires again? Or do you just have to put it away for a while and come back to it later? BRUCE: Sometimes, yeah. If I’m working on something that’s not happening, I just have to put it away and do something else and come back to it at a later date. Sometimes I’ll come back and look at it and go, “Oh, that’s not so bad.” [laughter] I’m the world’s worst procrastinator. I put things off until they absolutely have to be done, as you well know. [laughter] MM: Yeah, well, I’m right there with you. BRUCE: Sometimes it’s just a matter of having to get the thing done. Sometimes I have no inspiration and still have to get the thing done. When I’m doing animation work, quite often I will look at other people’s work for inspiration. If I’m designing a character it’ll be, “This design is really boring. It really needs a Kirby touch.” At that point I will go to my Kirby library and pull out a bunch of stuff and go, “What would Kirby have done? Well, there’s an interesting shape there. There’s this weird-ass techno motif here. There’s a weird sci-fi thing here.” And I’ll incorporate some of that into my design. We’ve designed so many hundreds of characters over the last ten years that we sometimes fall back on the same formulas and we need to look at something different. I’ll either look at photographs 82

of movie stars or look at artists’ work. For the very first version of Talia we did in The Animated Series I was looking at the way Frank Robbins drew women to come up with some different design theories. But there’s no set answer really. MM: As a fan of Harvey Kurtzman, do you fall in with his obsession for photo reference? BRUCE: Hell, no. [laughter] That’s where Kurtzman and I part company. [laughter] I am way too lazy for that. The more I learn about Kurtzman, the more I find out he had his own demons that hindered him, at least professionally. If you look at how he and Elder would do those “Little Annie Fanny” comics, that’s the most anal way to do even a painted comic that I’ve ever, ever seen. I have some of his roughs from “Little Annie Fanny” and it’s layer upon layer upon layer of tissues. He would do a really good rough and then tighten it up and change things. It’s like, “Well, it’s a little bit better, but not a thousand percent better. You could have just given us the original rough.” I should do more reference—and sometimes I’m forced to do it when I get a comic book story that has something I just don’t know how to draw, like an airplane or something. Other than that, things like telephones or phone booths or other common objects, I can fake it just from observation and imagining in my head “What does a phone look like?” I can draw it out of my head without having to go find a phone to draw. My work would definitely benefit from doing a little more research, but I just can’t be bothered with it. When I’m in the middle of drawing, I’m in a white heat. I can’t stop for anything. If I’m roughing the story out and I get to something I don’t know how to draw, if I have to stop what I’m doing and go get reference, I’m thrown off. That’s probably just rationalization and making excuses, but it’s just the way I work. When I’m working I’ve got to keep working; I can’t stop.

favorite scenes—was the seduction sequence. How much of that was you and Paul interplaying off each other, or was it all in the script? BRUCE: The whole book was pretty much plotted out between the two of us, and then when Paul wrote the script, he added some bits of business and stage setting and stuff that we hadn’t previously discussed—a lot of it I threw out. Paul’s a great collaborator because he doesn’t take offense if you change what he’s written—as long as it not drastically different than what we talked about. I basically took what he had written and did my own editing on it as I was drawing. It was like, “Ah, I don’t feel like drawing that,” or “I think I can do this more effectively.” I couldn’t tell you which specific bits came from him and which ones came from me. MM: Your Kurtzman influence really stands out in places in Mad Love. You used the Kurtzman nervous sweat quite a bit. Was that a conscious decision on your part? BRUCE: As I was drawing it I wasn’t even really aware that I was kind of channeling Kurtzman. I think my storytelling style is very meat-and-potatoes; it’s not very flashy. My primary goal is to tell the story; I’m not

MM: Your first real comic book work—and we talked about this some earlier—was Mad Love. One of my favorite scenes—and probably a lot of people’s 83

Previous Page Top: Rough layout for a Superman Adventures collection. Previous Page Bottom : A variant cover of Black Panther #2. The guy in the shades firing two guns was later changed for the final cover. Below: Harley loves her puddin’. Harley Quinn, Joker, Superman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Black Panther ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: A rejected cover concept for the Mad Love one-shot. Next Page: Rough layouts of pages 4 and 5 of “Cruise to Nightmare,” which originally appeared in Superman & Batman Magazine. Batman, Harley Quinn, Joker, Poison Ivy, and all related characters ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

even concerned with designing the whole page. Going from panel to panel, each panel is important. Obviously, the way the panels connect to each other, there’s a rhythm. But other than that I don’t look at a page and say, “Oh, this page is unbalanced because I’ve got three little, tiny heads up here and one giant figure down here.” It wasn’t until I got to that one sequence towards the end of the book where Joker’s pacing back and forth in front of the ringing telephone that a little bell started going off in my head. I went, “Wait a minute. This whole thing is kind of Kurtzmany. What is it reminding me of?” It dawned on me that it was that sequence from “Batboy and Rubin” where they’re driving past the building trying to throw the rope onto the build-

ing. “Missed! Missed!” When I realized that, I said, “I’d better not take a look at that, because then I’ll just swipe it exactly.” [laughter] I was just trying to remember what the rhythm of it was, and it’s a tricky thing. I had to redraw it four or five times because it was like “There’s too much of the Joker in this frame. There’s not enough of him in this frame. He’s got to be off here. There’s got to be paper in the air here.” It took me a while to get the rhythm just right. MM: That was a very funny scene. That and the scene with the Joker dragging Harley down the stairs by her nose. BRUCE: Oh, yeah. That was a little bit I threw in. That wasn’t in the script. Yeah, it’s very Kurtzmany. MM: The next story you did was for the Superman & Batman Magazine, which was canceled before it had a chance to appear, “Cruise to Nightmare.” Were you approaching it as if it was the third act of an animated episode? That’s the vibe I got from it. BRUCE: Kind of. It was a challenge, because Mad Love was a big, sprawling 64page book, and here it was six pages. Fortunately Paul didn’t overwrite that one. It was very concise, and I didn’t have to throw anything out. I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of a third act of a longer story; it did seem to have a beginning, middle, and end, even though it’s a short, little story. The only thing really of interest for me in drawing that story was I always like to change up my drawing style. Around that time Marc Hempel was drawing Sandman, and I was really getting blown away by Marc’s work. What I liked about it was—people think of my style as being very, very simplified, and what Marc was doing on Sandman was going even more simplified. His run became a little more stylized and noodly later on, but those first two issues were ultra-simple. It was about as simple as you could get and still be a drawing. I was influenced by that, and I was also influenced by Kevin Nowlan. You probably can’t tell any of this, because it doesn’t really look like it [laughter], but Kevin had drawn a Man-Bat story in Secret Origins—at that point it was probably ten years earlier. It’s my favorite Kevin Nowlan story. It was completely different than any-

MM: In “24 Hours” you got to ink Dan DeCarlo. Did you try to ink it more in his style rather than your own?

thing he’d done before or since. It was a really strippeddown style; it had almost none of the feathering and rendering that he’s famous for. It was really stripped-down and elegant. The way that came out in “Cruise to Nightmare” is that the line doesn’t have quite as much thick-and-thin on it as does Mad Love—Mad Love is pretty juicy. I was trying to do a really thin, dead line style on that story, and it’s stripped down even more than my stuff normally is.

BRUCE: I tried to stay true to the pencils. His style changed a lot. People think Betty and Veronica have looked the same for 40 years, but his style would change drastically every five or six years. I really liked the stuff he was doing in the ’50s, where Betty and Veronica were a little more statuesque. They were more like the girls he was drawing over at Marvel in Sherry the Showgirl and things like that, and it took him a while to realize, “Oh, these are teenage girls. I have to make them not quite as zaftig.” Then the girls got really, really skinny for a while, then they got a little more in between. I just like how crisp his early stuff was; I like that crisp, slick line on it. So that’s basically all I tried to do. I tried to slicken up the pencils as much as possible. Dan didn’t quite have the drawing chops that he had in his early days. Some of the drawings got a little mushy here and there. Also, I think he was trying to draw the characters somewhat on model. His version of Batman and Joker were probably not how he would draw them himself if left to his own devices. They were a little stiff, and I tried to put a little more on the Joker and Batman drawings, but everything else I tried not to put my own personality into it.

MM: Moving on to the Batman Adventures Annual #1, the framing sequences featured Roxy Rocket. Why do you think she never quite caught on as a character? BRUCE: I don’t know. She doesn’t really fit the classic Batman archetype. It’s a neat motif—the crazy, thrill-seeker, stunt girl—but she’s not psychotic enough. [laughter] I liked her; I thought she was an interesting character. I actually thought she came out really well in the animated series. In the show they made her a little more psychotic, a little more disturbed. She was almost suicidal in her quest for thrills, whereas in our story she’s kind of like an Al Capp character—her last line of “Oof! What a man!” I thought it was a different kind of villain for Batman to face, and that’s one of my favorite Batman episodes ever. It’s animated really well, the story’s interesting, I love all the little acting bits the storyboard artists and the animators gave her, and I just think she really comes alive on the screen. She’s a terrific character.

MM: Let’s move on to the Holiday Special, specifically “Jolly Ol’ St. Nicholas.” BRUCE: That’s one of my favorites. 85

MM: It’s a great little story. And you dropped Batgirl into the story and scripted most of her dialogue as you drew it?

Above: Roxy Rocket design for her appearance in Batman Adventures Annual #1. Right: Cover rough for Batman Adventures Annual #2. Bruce: “It’s interesting to compare this very tight rough with the final (inked by Mike Royer).” Next Page: Bruce: “I really liked this piranhahead Etrigan, but Glen wanted to stay truer to Kirby.... He was right, of course.” Batman, The Demon, Roxy Rocket ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.

BRUCE: Well, what happened was that Paul pitched to DC on the concept of doing the book—the short story format and all the little Christmas stories—and while we were talking about it, I said it would be really cool if we got our crew to do it. Instead of getting the usual suspects, the Klaus Jansons and whoever else, it would be a neat, little Batman: The Animated crew book. We knew all the guys were really good artists and were itching to do comics anyway, so DC signed off on it. They needed to see samples from people to make sure they’d be able to do it, but that was no problem. Paul and I had a couple of conversations about what the specific stories would be. He just had this vague ideas they’d all be Christmasthemed stories, and he had the idea that they would be chronological—that they would start early in the Christmas season and the last story would be on New Year’s Eve. We had this really long phone conversation trying to come up with Christmas motifs that would work in a Batman story. We just banged ideas off of each other. The only one we didn’t nail down that night was Ronnie [del Carmen]’s story. Ronnie sat in on the plotting session with us, and between the three of us we came up with that story [“The Harley and the Ivy”]. But what ended up being the Batgirl story was originally just Bullock and Montoya. It dawned on me just 86

as I was getting ready to start drawing the thing that there weren’t really any sexy girls in it. [laughter] Montoya’s sexy enough in her own way, but it’s still kind of straight. Up until that point, every story that I’d done for DC in the Batman universe had a sexy gal or two in it, so I wanted to keep that going. Batgirl wasn’t in the book and I thought she could work in the story, so I just figured out how to do it and called Paul. Paul was kind of shocked. “Wait a minute! Batgirl’s not in this story! What are you talking about?” [laughter] But it all just seemed to fit. The story became more about Batgirl and less about Bullock and Montoya, thus it became a lot more fun for me to draw. MM: Much like what happened with Mad Love, this book was used as a springboard for an actual episode of the show.

BRUCE: When we got the call to do more Batman episodes—normally we don’t like to repeat ourselves, but we were so busy doing Batman and Superman at the same time and we had to get going on it really quickly. I don’t remember who mentioned adapting the Holiday Special for the series, but we thought, “Why not?” It’s cute, and we had done anthology stories before, like “Almost Got ’Im,” and it was one less story that we had to come up with.

Kirby’s longtime inker at DC, Mike Royer, to ink the cover. Do you think that worked well? BRUCE: I don’t think it was the best match. What happened was my cover rough—this was back when I used to make my roughs really, really tight. My thumbnails were practically camera ready. I had already done a version of the cover that was fairly tight and gotten it approved by DC, and they said, “Why don’t we just run this?” And I said, “No, it’s still a little bit loose. It’s a little bit rough. Let me do a fully penciled version of it, and I’d really like to get Mike Royer to ink it.” They said, “Okay, fine.” At that point I took my same-size rough, blew it up to the usual size, then traced it off in pencil and sent it to Mike. What Mike did was basically just trace what I had drawn. I don’t know if it was because he had never inked my stuff before, but he was very faithful to the pencils to the point where it was almost too stiff. It didn’t have that old, devilmay-care, Mike Royer splash-theink-on kind of feel. I think it came out okay. Honestly, I look at it and I don’t like my drawing of it. It’s more my fault than Mike’s. It’s not really Kirby and it’s not really me.

MM: The second Batman Adventures Annual was a rush job and was done Marvel style. Just how long did you have to do the book? BRUCE: We had less than a month, I think, from beginning to end. We started out working from such a simple plot; it wasn’t plotted out in-depth at all, just because of the time factor. So as Glen was going through it, he got about halfway through the book and realized it was time for the climax. It was like, “Wait a minute, we can’t just have them fight for the last 20 pages.” Talking it out between the two of us we came up with the idea of doing that dream sequence. Glen said, “Okay, I can do that,” so he just went crazy for eight pages, slowed the book down, and filled up the pages.

MM: You had a story in the first issue of Batman: Black and White: “Two of a Kind.” You went to a strict eightpanels-per-page layout with that story. Why did you decide on that?

MM: The dream sequence was very Kirby. BRUCE: Very Kirby. That was the only time in the entire book that I took Kirby books out and had them laying in front of me to actually swipe stuff from. Through the rest of the book I just wanted to just channel Kirby. I didn’t want to actually look at Kirby to make a dead-on swipe. It’s so tempting to reuse a pose or a head or a hand that he’s done—like the old Rich Buckler style. I wanted to do our interpretation of Kirby without it being a direct swipe, but Glen and I both really love that story from Weird Mystery that the fish-god lady was in. Obviously, I had to look at the book to get her details right. Also in that story he did some really cool expressionistic, designy water shapes. They were a little different from the usual Kirby krackle, so I specifically used that as reference.

BRUCE: That is a specific swipe from Alex Toth. Alex Toth did this one issue of Hot Wheels—the classic Cord story—and I guess it was controversial at the time that he did it. He got a lot of resistance from DC over it, but I guess they were running so late they had no choice but to run it. Everybody complained that it looked like an animation storyboard, which, of course, was the point—he tried to make it look cinematic. Anyhow, I thought it was a really good way to break up the pages and to, again, do something that was a little different from what I’d done before. Also, it was a real time-saving device, because that story was something Paul and I had discussed at lunch one time—between the two of us we didn’t come up with much more than the springboard—the idea of TwoFace falling in love with twins—one good and one bad. It

MM: To further the Kirby theme of the issue you got 87

Right: Enter... Hahhk! Created for Batman Adventures Annual #2. Below: Self-rejected sketch for a Sin City pin-up. Bruce: “Pretty effin’ weird, but I kinda like it.” Next Page: Bruce: “There was some talk about me doing a treasury-sized FF oneshot a few years back (after Avengers 1 1/2).... It’ll probably never happen (alas!). I did do these warm-up sketches for it, though.”

didn’t really go any further than that, but the idea stayed in my head and I kept thinking about it. I was originally going to pitch it as a graphic novel as a follow-up to Mad Love. It could have been a much, much longer story. So when Mark Chiarello called me and asked me if I wanted to write and draw a story for Batman: Black and White, I said, “Okay, sure.” I’d never written a script all by myself before, so I was thinking, “What the hell am I going to do?” I thought of the Two-Face story, but I didn’t know how I was going to tell that whole graphic novel in eight pages. Again, it’s an Alex Toth thing. I was reading some of his old romance comics from the ’50s, and what was interesting was it wasn’t using that cinematic storytelling that Mad Love has, where you have space to do repeating panels. It’s actually an old school thing—it’s not just specifically Toth— where they would have one panel that would represent an entire period of time with a caption that would explain what happened there. The panels weren’t really sequential; they were almost like snapshots. I thought if I did that and relied on heavy captions as well as the pictures to tell the story, then I might be able to condense the story down to eight pages, and it seemed to work pretty well. MM: You were able to be a little racier with the story, because it was the first time you’d done a Batman story that 88

wasn’t set specifically in the Batman: Animated universe. BRUCE: Right, even though it is, still. It’s still our version of Two-Face. MM: Do you consider it as Animated continuity or do you feel the story simply stands on its own? BRUCE: Both really. To me it fits in the Batman: Animated world if the Batman: Animated world were R-rated. [laughter] Obviously, it’s a story we could never ever adapt for the cartoon, because it’s got a grisly murder in it and a lot of sex, but other than that it does kind of fit into the film noir world of Batman: The Animated Series. MM: Avengers #1-1/2 was your first interior work for Marvel. Did you go into it thinking, “If I did an Avengers cartoon, this is what I would do”? BRUCE: No, not at all. It was just a total fanboy jerkoff. Obviously, I’m a huge Marvel fan and a huge Kirby fan. Those early Marvel books—I don’t like the artwork as much as I like his later stuff. I don’t think he really hit his peak until around Fantastic Four #65 or #66, but those early books do have a lot of charm—specifically that really early version of Hulk and that early version of Iron Man where he’s the big tin-can Iron Man. It was just the opportuni-

and did a good job with the scripting—but there’s this retcon movement going on in comics where, even though we were doing an old-school Avengers story, he was still trying to update it in the dialogue. Characters were speaking more modern than they would if it was literally 1963 Stan Lee. There shouldn’t be a period in the whole book. Every sentence should end with an exclamation point. [laughter]

ty to draw the tin-can Iron Man and Hulk in his Bermuda shorts for a whole book—that was the big charge for me. MM: After doing Batman for so long, did you have to warm up a bit before drawing the Avengers? BRUCE: It was really tough. My self-imposed rule was that I was going to try to make it look as much like authentic 1963 Kirby as possible. Unlike the Demon book where I was trying to make it look kind of Kirbyish, I really wanted this book to look like an artifact, like a missing issue of the Avengers. I had all the comics out in front of me to see how he drew backgrounds, how he drew the characters, how he told the story. I had to really research it, and I still didn’t get it right. [laughter] There’re certain Bruce Timm-isms that I just can’t avoid doing, like the straight arm theory and things like that. And I can’t really draw Kirby gal faces at all. They have those really weird, wide doll heads; it’s just impossible for me to draw. So the Wasp looks like one of my typical Bruce Timm girls. I think it came out okay, I just set myself too difficult a task.

MM: There should have been more alliteration, too. BRUCE: That’s something that people exaggerate. Stan didn’t really do that much alliteration, but there was a corny oldfashionedness to his writing back then, which Roger didn’t really grab. I drew Walter Conkrite as the newsman on the first page; in the script it was supposed to be Bernard Shaw. I’m like, “No, forget that John Byrne stuff. Forget the idea that the origin of the Avengers only took place five years ago. No, it took place in 1963. That’s what the whole book is about.” Even though they wanted to fit it into continuity, if I drew everybody in modern clothes, with modern cars, etc., it would ruin the effect. At a certain point as I was going through it, I knew some of the jokes were not the kinds of things Jack and Stan would have done, but knowing the way Roger was writing the book— that it wasn’t going to be a perfect 1963-style book—I figured I could get away with the barfing joke. And not only that, but some of the elements in the story are almost parodies of old-school Marvel, too—Jan flirting with Thor, Thor and Hulk going at it all the time. That’s in there during the period; those are very much in character. But you don’t want to make it exactly the way Stan and Jack did, you want to lampoon it just a little bit, make it a little over the top, so that it reads. It’s an homage and a loving parody at the same time.

MM: The Hulk from that period was a lot different than he is now, and you and Roger played with that quite a bit, but I think you injected more humor into his character than he actually had. BRUCE: Yeah, I know. MM: The whole barfing scene, the “Robot?” response.... BRUCE: I always think that if you’re going to do a pastiche, you should try to make it as much like the original as possible. That’s why I tried to do the dead-on Kirby rather than the “somewhat Kirby.” I don’t want to slam Roger—Roger’s a good guy, and he wrote a good story

MM: You read Vampirella as a kid, did Harris approach you about doing a back-up story or did you go to them? 89

Below: A gorgeous Vampirella piece. Next Page: On the left is a rejected cover rough for Heart Throbs #1. On the right is a rough of the final version.

BRUCE: They called up. They were doing that stunt where they had me and Tim Sale and Alan Davis doing these little back-up stories. They gave me a list of writers who they were talking about approaching and Ty’s name was on there. I knew he was really good, so I figured, “Fine, I’ll do a Vampirella story with Ty.” I didn’t talk to Ty directly, we talked through the editor, Dave Bogart. Ty sent back this script which was completely not what I wanted to do. When I’m doing something retro, I want it to be retro. I’m not a big fan of the modern Vampirella comics— the “bad girl” revamp of the line. To me, it’s just not Vampirella anymore. What Ty had written—ultimately it turned out be a good story, it just wasn’t what I wanted to do initially. I was hoping for something more like an Archie Goodwin/José Gonzalez Vampirella story—something a little more fantasy-oriented. They were just in this studio throughout the whole story—there were no monsters, no sword-and-sorcery. I thought, “That’s kind of boring.” Of course, it did have the advantage that she was naked throughout most of the story, so there was something there. [laughter] I was going to back out of the story, because the story just wasn’t getting me fired up. I went back and forth with the editor on it, and eventually decided to just dive in and do it. As I started drawing the story I started getting into it more, and I began to realize it was great that it was set in this art studio, because I didn’t have to get any reference. [laughter] The only time they’re outside the guy’s studio is when they 90

have the flashback to Draculon, and that gave me a chance to pull some imagery from the José Gonzalez stuff. The challenge for me was to have fun with the storytelling of it. Even though there weren’t any terribly interesting visuals in it besides the paintings of naked women and Vampirella in her birthday suit and the guy at the easel, I did try to put a ’70s-era look to the guy, so he looks kind of like Adam van Helsing from the old comics and a little like a ’70s Italian horror movie hero. Once I stopped fighting it, it became easier, and I think it came out nice. MM: You did a story for Flinch—a Vertigo anthology—called “Red Romance.” You worked with Joe Lansdale on that, who you were already familiar with from Batman. BRUCE: Here’s the thing on that story: it’s another example of me being the reluctant artist. Axel Alonso called me and told me about this book—originally it was supposed to be for Heart Throbs. He told me he was doing an updated version of the old DC romance comics. He mentioned a list of different writers he could get, and he mentioned Joe Lansdale—and I love Joe’s stuff. Besides just working with him on Batman, I’m also a fan of his fiction—his novels and short stories—and he’s just a great guy. Now, again, I was thinking “DC romance comics.” You know, the sobbing stewardesses and stuff. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking getting Joe Lansdale to write a love story. [laughter] So I get this script and I’m reading it going, “Oh, my God! This is the vilest thing ever! This is in Preacher territory.” [laughter] I was also kind of thrown off, because I’m used to the way Joe writes where—even if he’s writing horror—it’s usually this over-the-top Texas twang. It’s a bizarre funny/scary/horror/sick thing, and this story didn’t have that. The captions were very dry; they weren’t over-the-top funny. I called Axel up and I said, “Man, I hate to do this to you, because I specifically requested Joe, but I can’t do this story. It’s just horrible.” He talked me through it saying, “I understand what you’re saying. I know it’s not really funny, but there is humor in it, so maybe if you went over-thetop with the violence, in a Monty Python kind of way, it would take the curse off of how disturbing it is.” Just from talking to

more vile than any given issue of Preacher. I think it’s the fact that the characters really don’t have any redeeming qualities. They’re just two horrible, horrible people. The way Axel and I eventually came to see the story was that even for all the horrible things that they’re doing, they do genuinely love each other. They’re sick—it’s definitely Natural Born Killers territory—but they do genuinely love each other. So that’s the kind of thing that I tried to put into the story. At the end of the story when she’s being tortured, he’s watching and he’s so happy for her because she’s enjoying it.

Axel, I was able to see the humor in the story, because what they do is just so ridiculously over-the-top. So that gave me the courage to actually attempt to do the story. The very few bits that I changed from Joe’s story were when they were on their mass murder spree. Some of the specific gags that he had written weren’t quite over-the-top enough. He had written the bit where they pushed the old man down the stairs—a classic Richard Whitmark thing to do. Originally, they were dropping a brick on a guy’s head, but that wasn’t over-the-top enough, so I changed it to a bowling ball. I hate to say it, but I’m the one who came up with the cigarette scene. In the script she was just burning his chest with the cigarette, but I didn’t think that was enough and she needed to burn something else. That bit caused some trouble with DC. I had to change those panels, because there was a little too much of Mr. Johnson. [laughter] I did it in a slightly different style than I normally do, too. There’s very little thick-and-thin in that story; it’s kind of a dead line. The characters are really angular. I like the look of it. I really like that crisp angularity of it. When we turned it in, Axel was really happy, and everybody above him went crazy—everybody from Karen Berger to Paul Levitz said, “You can’t run this story.” Which to me was kind of funny, because it’s certainly no

MM: The looks of sheer joy on both their faces. BRUCE: I think that kind of redeems them in their own weird way. It’s so ridiculously over the top. He’s just had all his teeth pulled and his face is all bloody, but he’s looking at her with this dopey grin on his face. “Oh, I’m so happy I made you happy.” Editorially, everybody above Axel was just not seeing it—not feeling the love. [laughter] Eventually, the decision came down that it wasn’t going to run in Heart Throbs, because even though Heart Throbs had some pretty edgy stuff in it, it wasn’t quite as horror-oriented as “Red Romance.” Fortunately, right 91

around the same time, Flinch was getting going. So they said, “Okay, don’t run it in Heart Throbs, run it in Flinch. Nobody will see it.” [laughter] MM: I love the “boredom sets in” panel. Below: Billy Ruck and Patty Champ, the sickest couple you never want to meet. Right: Rejected pin-up intended for the final issue of Preacher. Next Page: Cover for Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Comics Magazine #4.

BRUCE: Yeah, I liked that one. They’re in their underwear drinking beer watching TV. It’s the juxtaposition of it, because the rest of the page is sex and violence at the same time, and then—bang!— they’re sitting there watching TV. A couple of years ago at San Diego, I was hanging out with some other artists, and we were all showing each other what we were working on. I showed Paul Rivoche “Red Romance” and he just went pale. He was looking at it going, “Well, I can appreciate your drawing ability, but it’s not my cup of tea.” [laughter] Mike Allred, who up until that point really liked my stuff, said that was the first comic of mine that he just could not bring himself to buy. Of course, since then he’s done far worse things in X-Force, but at the time I guess he was in his Madman mode—light whimsy. MM: Let’s move on to Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Comics. BRUCE: [sarcastically] Yes, let’s. [laughter] MM: You didn’t do a whole lot— BRUCE: I did a lot! I’m in every single issue, buddy! In for a penny, in for a pound. [laughter] MM: Overall, did you and Erik Larsen see eye-toeye on the final product? BRUCE: Erik and I were in total sympathy. We were exactly on the same page, but the problem was nobody else was. Erik called me up after Avengers #1-1/2 came 92

out. After Avengers #1-1/2, I swore off doing Kirby. I can’t get Kirby out of me, but I was never going to try to do a dead-on Kirby homage again. So Erik called up and told me the whole concept of World’s Greatest, and it was going to be twelve issues of Kirby homage. Not only that, but his self-imposed rule was that he was always disappointed by the last year of Fantastic Four, because Kirby was just marking time before he went to DC and he wasn’t creating new characters; he was just treading water. So he wanted to say, “What if Kirby had a last burst of inspiration before he left Marvel and went to DC and pulled out all the stops and really had a lot of fun?” I’m thinking, “Great, it’s hard enough to try to draw Kirby on his worst day, now you want us to channel Kirby on his best day.” I said, “You know what? It’s impossible. It’s just not going to work, because in Avengers #1-1/2 that’s what I tried to do.” He said, “You did?” “Yeah, I did. I tried to.” He said, “Well, you failed miserably!” [laughter] I said, “Well, yeah. Duh.” [laughter] We didn’t want to go to the usual suspects, either. There are people who have

last issue over Erik’s plot. They managed to get Stan to do it, and I think that’s what saved it. It was fun, but it was frustrating as hell. Every month I’d get the pages and go, “This doesn’t look like Kirby.” Some guys were pretty good at it in places. And the story was so wonky; the story was so retarded. [laughter] It was just Erik going crazy: “Yeah, Dr. Doom collects everybody’s powers and by the end of it becomes Galactus!” It’s like, “You’re nuts!” [laughter] Some of the guest-writers got it, and some of them didn’t. Some of them tried really hard to make it sound like Stan. That’s where I go back to the alliteration thing, because everybody thinks Stan alliterated like crazy and he really didn’t. He did that a lot in Stan’s Soapbox and he used hyperbolic language, but he didn’t alliterate a lot in the comics. Everybody was doing that “flaming falcons of forensics” and it was like, “Aahh! Stan really didn’t write that way.” Going back to Avengers #1-1/2, we were kind of doing an homage and a parody. There were certain things that we had to do: We had to have the Thing and the Torch fighting with each other and all that stuff. It’s something you’ve seen so many times that you have to put a little

made a career out of channeling Kirby, like Ron Frenz. “Ah, we don’t want to do that Ron Frenz stuff, because it looks kind of like Kirby, but it’s not dead-on Kirby. We want to find people who will really get into it and channel Kirby to make it look perfect.” I was just thinking, “Man, you don’t know what you’re asking. It’s just not going to happen. But, what the hell, I’ll do something.” He wanted to have me pencil at least a chunk of every issue, so I did my first five pages for the first issue, and it was the misery of trying to ape Kirby. Even with all of the artwork laid out in front of you, it’s impossible. He’s unclonable unless you literally trace off the panels, which I didn’t want to do. So after those first five pages I said, “Forget it. I’m not doing this anymore.” And then Erik sent me copies of the pages he had done, and I called him up and totally reamed him out. “What the hell are you thinking? You think this looks like Kirby? This doesn’t look anything like Kirby!” [laughter] His Reed, if anything, looked like a John Byrne drawing. It didn’t even look like Erik’s drawing anymore. He just sat there and went, “Yeah, I know. It doesn’t look anything like Kirby, but I’m going to get Joe Sinnott to ink it and it’ll look good.” [laughter] I told him I didn’t want to do anymore after the first issue, and he goes, “Oh, but that’s how I sold the book to Marvel. I told them you’d be in every issue.” I was like, “Now what do I do? Okay, fine, but I’m not penciling anymore. I’ll just ink other people. That’s the best I can do.” We quickly ran out of people to use. The people who can even kind of draw like Kirby, you can count them on one hand. At that point Erik and I said, “You know, maybe Ron Frenz isn’t so bad. Maybe we should get him, because his stuff will look a lot more like Kirby than anybody else that we’ve got.” Sure enough, they got Ron and he was happy to do it. At a certain point, once Ron’s pages started coming through, I said to Erik, “You know what? We should just get Ron to draw all the books from now on, and I’ll ink him and Joe Sinnott will ink him and Al Gordon will ink him. That’ll be your best bet at making it look like Kirby.” He was definitely the best of everybody at making it look like Kirby. It didn’t happen, because they had a lot of other people who wanted to do stuff. So from that point on, I just inked other people. Some of them were good and some of them weren’t very good. Some of them didn’t get what we were doing. Some of them weren’t even trying to do Kirby. It was a train wreck. It’s twelve issues of “what the hell were they thinking?” MM: But you got all twelve issues out. BRUCE: Yeah, every issue we thought for sure that Joe [Quesada] was going to pull the plug. Joe hated the book. I think what it was was Stan. Stan saved the book. It was Erik’s idea to get Stan to script the 93

pencil it and I would ink it, but we couldn’t come up with anyone that we could both agree on that would work. It was coming down to the wire and I just said, “Fine, I’ll just do it.” I had to take time off from work to do it—I used some of my vacation days. I actually penciled the whole thing out in a day—a very, very intense day. It took a couple of weeks to ink it. Ultimately I think it’s really good. I think it’s a really good story. I don’t know what my objection to it was at first, because I look at it now and it’s a neat little story. It was an opportunity to draw one of my favorite characters; I love Captain America. I was specifically trying to not make it a Kirby parody or homage, but if I draw Captain America any other way it doesn’t look right. It was an instance of me channeling Kirby without swiping from him. There are Kirbyish touches on him, but it’s not a direct Kirby homage. The biggest challenge, to me, was the coloring, because I knew it was going to be colored with that limited palette: red, white and blue. Then Andrew sent me some jpegs of some stuff other people had done, and they were kind of cheating. They were using pink and gray tones. I’m thinking, “That’s not red, white and blue. That’s red, white, blue and gray and pink. If it’s going to be red, white and blue, then those are the only colors I’m going to use. I’ll use variations of those colors.” I ended up using pink for the captions only, just to set them apart from the art, but I really wanted to be true to the mandate. Fortunately, because it’s a horror story and it all takes place at night, it just made sense to color the story predominantly in blue and only use red for effects. I really liked the way Marie Severin would do that a lot at EC. Any exterior night scene, it would be a pale blue, a medium blue, and a dark blue. I think that works great.

parodic spin on it. Otherwise, what’s the point? The issue I scripted was, I think, the only issue in the entire series that the Thing doesn’t say, “It’s clobberin’ time!” Everybody had him say that—sometimes twice. If you go back and reread the originals, he really didn’t say it quite that often, but nobody can resist it. I teased it. I had him start to say it, and then Johnny interrupted him. I actually had more fun channeling Stan than channeling Jack. I thought I did a pretty good job of aping Stan. MM: Let’s talk about the Captain America story you did for the Red, White & Blue book. You said you didn’t like the story to begin with? BRUCE: I got the story and went, “What’s this? I want to draw the Red Skull. I don’t want to draw some werewolf guy in a castle.” I don’t know why I resisted it, because I love drawing werewolves and castles and monster stuff. I don’t know what I had in mind, but when I got the story, it didn’t send me. I really tried to bail on that book. I was really busy with Justice League, and I know how difficult it is for me to do a comic when I’ve got all this other stuff. When I go home I’ve got to be husband and daddy, so I don’t really have time to go home and be comic book artist. I was dreading having to do the story. If it had been one of those stories where I read it and went “Wow, I can’t wait to draw this story,” then I would have been fired up. It didn’t hit me that way initially, and I tried to back out as soon as I read the script. Andrew Lis, the editor of the book, just kept at me. That’s the thing: I tried to get out of it early on so that he could find somebody else to draw the story, but he kept saying, “No, I really want you to do this story.” We went through a bunch of different things where I would pencil it and somebody else would ink it, or somebody else would 94

MM: Harley and Ivy is a story that starts way back. BRUCE: Yeah, right after Mad Love. MM: That’s when the basic story was put down. It took Paul a while to get the scripts ready. BRUCE: Yes. We got the okay from DC to start talking about it, but because of what had happened on the second Batman Annual, where we got caught with our pants down because they had put it on the schedule before we were ready for them to do that, we said, “Don’t put Harley and Ivy on the schedule until it’s done. I don’t want you to schedule it and then us have to bust our butts to get the thing done and maybe screw it up.” We had a gentleman’s agreement with DC that whenever we turned it in, they would do it. Paul and I talked about it, and we plotted it as we usually did—over dinner or over lunch—and we came up with the basic concept of what we were going to do. We had the three stories broken down. It’s three separate stories that connect; it’s not one long story. There’s an overplot, but each issue is completely different. The first takes place in Gotham City, the second in the Amazon, and the third one takes place in Hollywood. So we had the story pretty much nailed down, and I said, “Well, when you’re ready to give me the script, give me the script.” I don’t know if this was after Batman during the Freakazoid era, or just before Superman, but there was a period of about four or five months where we weren’t terribly busy, and I kept telling Paul, “You know, this would be a really good time to do Harley and Ivy, because I have free time. Once we get ramped up again, it’s going to be very difficult for me to do the book.” Paul said, “Okay, I’ll get right on it.” Dini time is not real time. [laughter] I would come up to him and say, “When am I going to get the script?” “Oh, you’re going to get it next week.” I automatically translate that into “two months from now.” That’s just the way it is. The frustrating thing was he didn’t get the script finished until about a year later. When he finally turned the script in, I think we were in the middle of doing Superman. “Great, Paul, but I don’t have time to draw it now, so it’s going to have to wait until I get a chance to get to it.” Unfortunately, Paul forgot that we

weren’t going to invoice them until I was done, so he went and invoiced them right away and got paid. Suddenly the book’s on the schedule. So I get this call from Scott Peterson saying, “Oh, so when are you going to turn in the first issue?” I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He says, “Paul invoiced us for all three issues, so I assume that means they’re on their way.” I just blew up. “No, I’m not ready to draw the damn thing, and Paul wasn’t supposed to invoice you yet! I’ll get to it when I can, and that’s all I can do. Either that or you can get someone else to draw it.” He said, “No, I don’t want anyone else to draw it, so take your time and do it when you can.” I think a couple of years go by and I never had time to draw it. We were working on the New Adventures of Batman and I was getting really excited with how the new, ultra-designy look was coming out, so that got me fired up to do the comic. I thought, “Well, I’ll do the comic in that style.” Once I get into a groove, I’m actually pretty fast. It’s just getting me to the starting gate. I think I penciled all three issue out in about two weeks. Once I get going, I’ll stay up all night because I just want to keep going. To cut myself some slack and makes things a little easier for me, I was going to have Shane Glines ink it. Shane started working for me on Superman—he’s an awesome artist. The only problem was I didn’t fully pencil it. My pencils are really, really loose, because I usually do most of the actual drawing in ink. Some panels would be tighter than others, but the backgrounds 95

Previous Page: A typical day at the Baxter Building. From FF:WGCM #1. Above: Page 6 of “An Epic Battle,” Bruce’s contribution to the Captain America: Red, White & Blue anthology.

does it change from week to week? were just sketched in. No ruler touched the page. Once Shane started inking it, he started choking—he started BRUCE: That would be my problem with doing a getting intimidated by it, because the pencils weren’t monthly book. I would get bored, because I have so complete enough. He’s a good enough artist that he many interests. I’ve done my Captain America story, I’ve could take my little doodles and bring them to compledone my Vampirella story, [sarcastically] I’ve done my tion, but he was trying to think, “How would Bruce draw romance story.... [laughter] I still want to do Conan; I’m a it?” If he had just gone and done it the way he would huge Conan fan. I’m going to do a Conan story somedraw it himself, it would have been just fine, but he was where before I die. But I don’t think I could do Conan second-guessing it. It was really, really tough for him. on a monthly basis. I don’t think I could do Batman on a He finally finished the first issue and got two or three monthly basis. It would have to somehow incorporate pages into the second issue and then the pages just stopped all the things I’m interested in: pretty girls, monsters, coming. He was just burned out and couldn’t go any further. super-heroes, guys with guns, and barbarians. If there So I said, “Okay, I’ll take it back and I’ll finish it up.” By that was some book that had all that time, I was up to my eyeballs in in it, I could do it. work—we were doing Batman Beyond and Batman and Superman all at the MM: Have you ever considered same time. So I inked a couple of going the Mignola route and crepanels here and there, maybe a comating that perfect comic for you? plete page, and I just ran out of gas and it sat in my office forever. Every BRUCE: Of course. I’ve toyed year at the conventions I would be with it. For a very short period afraid to go see the DC guys. I went of time, I was actually a member through four editors on that book: of Legend. I was the last guy Scott Peterson, Darren Vincenza, inducted into Legend—it was Bob Schreck, and then Joan Hilty. I me and Walt Simonson. Gary was talking to Joan, because Joan Gianni got in just before I did. wanted me to do the first four covers Frank Miller and Mike Mignola of the Batman Adventures relaunch. and Art Adams and Mike Allred Once we got done with those, she all really liked my stuff, and I said, “People keep asking me about guess Chadwick likes my stuff. this Harley and Ivy story.” She, on her It’s hard to get a bead on him, own initiative, had dug up the but I guess he must have voted Xeroxes of it to see what it was all because they all voted me in. about and how much of it was done. There were some internal “You know, you’ve got the whole problems in Legend. Some of the first issue done.” I said, “Yeah.” “And guys thought Legend should be the rest of it’s great. Why don’t you whatever you wanted it to be, like just finish it and get it out of your if Mignola wanted to do one way?” I went, “Aahhhh, okay.” I didbook a year, that should be fine. Conan ™ and ©2004 Conan Properties International LLC. n’t really have the time to do it But there were others who didn’t because I was working on Justice want it to be like Liefeld and League at the time, but I worked on it here and there when I those guys at Image who were really starting to miss their had a little time, mostly at night when I got home, and deadlines. They felt that anybody who was a part of Legend eventually just got it done. should be able to produce on a regular basis, because they thought it would make the rest of them look bad if they MM: Could you do a monthly book and stay on schedule? didn’t. There was some nervousness on some of the members’ parts, because they didn’t think I was going to be able BRUCE: If it was my main gig I probably could. It to do a book on a regular schedule. As it turned out, I never depends on what book it was and if I was teamed up with did do a book, and then Legend kind of went away. It was a good writer who kept me excited and inspired. I don’t kind of a shame, but I never did have the time. I had some know how long I’d be able to keep it up. I think I could ideas for what I wanted to do, but I was too busy. I’ve got handle a monthly book, but living in Los Angeles, I’m not ideas in my head for creator-owned properties which evensure I could survive on the pay of just one monthly book. tually will be either comics or something else someday. MM: If you had a dream book, what would it be? Or 96

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Previous Page: Bruce’s first design for the cover of this book. Bruce: “It ain’t bad, but I decided I just didn’t have time to do a proper job of it.” Looks pretty good as it is, don’t you think?

Batgirl, Batman, Big Barda, Black Canary, Catwoman, The Dee-Dees, Harley Quinn, Hawkgirl, Inque, Lashina, Mera, Poison Ivy, Star Sapphire, Supergirl,Talia, Ten, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2004 DC Comics. Thor ™ and ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

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Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

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BRUCE TIMM You don’t have to be a fan of comics to know the name Bruce Timm. As a producer, director and designer of the Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series, as well as The Superman Adventures, Batman Beyond, and currently, Justice League, Timm is making an enormous impact in the field of animation, creating work that both kids and adults can equally enjoy. His impact also extends into the comic book industry. Timm’s first foray into comics was the Eisner Award-winning The Batman Adventures: Mad Love, and his soon to be released mini-series, Harley and Ivy, is a highly-anticipated event. Often imitated, but never equalled, Timm blends the cartoony and the realistic in such a way that is undeniably appealing. MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-30-6 ISBN-10: 1-893905-30-6 51595

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