Write Now #16 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

INSIDE: TODD McFARLANE ON WRITING SPIDEY & SPAWN!

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In the the USA USA In

M AG A ZI N E

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CONCLUDED FROM BACK ISSUE #23: STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE

SCRIPT & PENCILS FROM BENDIS & CHO’S MIGHTY AVENGERS

Summer Summer 2007 2007

M AG A Z I N E Issue #16

Summer 2007

Read Now! Message from the Editor-in-Chief ....................................................................page 2 The Writin’ Side of Me Interview with Todd McFarlane ......................................................................page 3

SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE Cosmically cool Q & A with some of the greatest Surfer scribes ever: STAN LEE, J.M DeMatteis, Steve Englehart, Ron Marz, and Jim Starlin ............................................................................page 25

STAR TREK COMICS WRITERS ROUNDTABLE Part 2 (Continued from Back Issue #23) Another kind of space-spanning survey, featuring: Mike W. Barr, Peter David, Laurie Sutton, Len Wein, and many more.................................................................................................page 55 Feedback Letters from Write Now!’s Readers .............................................................page 69 FREE PREVIEW of Draw! #14 ......................................................................page 70

Nuts & Bolts Department Plot to Pencils to Script to Finished Pages: SPAWN #52 Pages from “Messiah” by Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo ......................................................page 17

Plot to Pencils to Script to Finished Comic: AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #1 Pages from “Happy Accidents,” by Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli ...............................................................page 35

Creating Comics Step By Step (Part 2 of 3) Steven Grant delivers the second part of his information-packed series on making comic books ..............................page 41

Script to Pencils to Finished Comic: THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #3 Pages by Brian Michael Bendis and Frank Cho....................................page 51

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor-In-Chief Managing Editor Special Thanks To: THE SILVER ERIC FEIN SURFER WRITERS Cover art by THE STAR TREK MIKE ZECK WRITERS and PHIL ZIMELMAN And… Designers RICH J. FOWLKS and DAVID GREENAWALT Transcriber STEVEN TICE Circulation Director BOB BRODSKY, COOKIESOUP PERIODICAL DISTRIBUTION, LLC Publisher JOHN MORROW

ALISON BLAIRE TOM BREVOORT CARMEN Q. BRYANT CHARLES COSTAS KIA CROSS LAUREN CROSS MICHAEL EURY RICH J. FOWLKS STEVEN GRANT DAVID GREENAWALT BOB GREENBERGER CHRIS IRVING JIM McCANN TODD McFARLANE CHRIS POWELL JIM REID VARDA STEINHARDT STEVEN TICE JIM WARDEN MIKE ZECK PHIL ZIMELMAN

Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! is published 4 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Fax: (919) 449-0327. Danny Fingeroth, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Write Now! E-mail address: WriteNowDF@aol.com. Single issues: $9 Postpaid in the US ($11 Canada, $16 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $26 US ($44 Canada, $60 elsewhere). Order online at: www.twomorrows.com or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com All characters are TM & © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © the respective authors. Editorial package is ©2007 Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. All rights reserved. Write Now! is a shared trademark of Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

WRITE NOW | 1

THE WRITIN’ SIDE OF ME:

THE TODD McFARLANE INTERVIEW Interview conducted by Danny Fingeroth via telephone 5-30-07 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by Eric Fein, Danny Fingeroth and Todd McFarlane

odd McFarlane’s comic book career spans more than twenty years and dozens of popular characters. As artist, his work has graced the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man (where he cocreated Venom), The Incredible Hulk, and Detective Comics. His professional writing career kicked off with the launch of one of the bestselling series of all time, Spider-Man. After years as one of the industry’s top creators, Todd joined several other popular comic book artists to form Image Comics. There, he launched his own creator-owned series, Spawn, which soon caught the attention of Hollywood and was the inspiration for a live action movie and an animated series. In addition to his comic book work, Todd also heads up his own toy and collectible company, McFarlane Toys. A busy man of many interests (including part-ownership of the Edmonton Oilers NHL hockey team), Todd was able to give us some time to speak about the subject of Write Now: writing for comics and related media. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: Did you write as a kid at all, or in school, Todd? Was that anything you were interested in then? TODD McFARLANE: I was pretty good at sort of short story stuff, but I think that was just a byproduct of my wild imagination as a whole. DF: What kind of short stories? What would they be about? TM: The teacher would assign us to do a factual composition about, say World War II, I couldn’t do something like that. But if they said, “Go home and come up with a made-up story and bring it in,” and you could add fantasy stuff and big, dramatic melodrama to it—the equivalent of the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk stories— then I could put in a flying elephant, and purple dinosaurs a thousand feet tall, and I could do it easily. DF: This was in elementary school? TM: Oh, yeah. You know, the “creative writing” classes. DF: What about in high school or college? Did you do any writing then?

TM: Not nearly as much. The writing there was more serious so a lot of it was more historical reports and dissertations in some of the classes. And you had less of a chance, or at least in the classes that I was taking, to just have fun with writing like I did when I was in high school or younger. DF: I’ve read that you didn’t really read comics until high school. How’d you avoid them? TM: Umm…I played a lot of sports. You know, when we went on road trips, Mom and Dad would stop at the 7-Eleven and buy a couple of Slurpees and a couple of comics and throw them in the back to me and my two brothers, so it’s not that I was devoid of comics. I’d read a handful, so I was aware of what comic books were. I never bothered collecting them, though. But at the age of about nine I started collecting baseball cards and football cards, so I was collecting, it just was in a different place. Later, all of a sudden I went, “Hey, you know what? Let me check out these comic books that I keep sort of walking by.” TODD McFARLANE | 3

DF: You must have been drawing as a kid. TM: Oh, yeah. I was the proverbial “best-artist-in-theclass” kid from Day One. It really goes back to the first Major League Baseball game I went to in the Anaheim area in California which I got to attend because, as a kid in kindergarten, I won an art contest. I drew a pitcher throwing a ball, and it got hung up in the stadium. My dad said, “I’ll take you to the ball game and you can see your artwork and you can watch the game.” So we went. Maybe around then I would have started collecting comic books or done something different, but Dad took me to a ball game that day, and I got to see art, and at the same time became mesmerized by sports. And that was after watching sports on a black-and-white TV my whole life, then walking into a stadium. That was a big moment for a kid back then. In person, you see the bright green grass, and the reds were fire truck red, and it was like walking into the Land of Oz. You went from the black-and-white into the color. You just went, “Wow.” DF: With your love of sports combined with your artistic talent, you could have gone on to paint sports portraits or do sports magazine illustration. What was it about comics that made you at some point realize that the storytelling in them appealed to you? TM: This is weird, Danny. I remember the day of consciously going into a store to buy my first handful of comic books. I mean, I close my eyes and recreate it. I remember the books that I bought. They were on a spinner-rack. What I don’t remember is, “why now?” I mean, why, at the age of sixteen? I’d been walking by comic books all my life. The closest I can give you is that I had been that incessant doodler for so long, but I didn’t have any focus for my art, and maybe I was just getting older, going, “Somewhere along the line I’m going to have to figure out what to do with this.” And so what happened very quickly was that when I bought those comics and fell in love with them and became a fanatic of comics, that I went, “Aha! Now I know what to do with this doodling. Train myself to draw American super-hero comics.” Because I had, like, fifty styles back then, and all of them were raw, at best. And so I thought, “Focus on this one task called ‘super-hero comics,’ see if you can teach yourself this, because it’s kind of cool.” And from there on, from the time I started collecting, I stopped drawing just willy-nilly doodle stuff and Mad magazine type stuff, and I just went, “Everything’s now going to be super-heroic stuff.” DF: Was there any friend or relative who said, “Hey, you should check these comic book things out,” or did it just sort of dawn on you? TM: Like I said, I’d walked by that store 500 times. And I just thought—because comic books were only 30, 35 cents back then, and I had a couple of bucks in my pocket—”I’m going to go buy five comic books.” Why 4 | WRITE NOW

then? I don’t know. And those five soon turned into 35,000. DF: Now, you said somewhere that you got over 700 rejection letters? I remember seeing them at that exhibit at the MoCCA [Manhattan’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art] last year. TM: I sent off about 700 samples, and about half of them came back rejects, so about 350 out of the 700 were officially rejected. The other ones just filed it in the garbage and didn’t even bother to send a rejection letter. DF: What kept you going through that? TM: A lot of the same things that keep me going now: stubbornness and immaturity—the two things I’d rather not teach the youth of America. You know, I give seminars and discuss, how do you succeed? I hate to say it, but it’s about characteristics I’d rather not even give my own boy, let alone you good people reading this. But you’ve just got to get myopic and stubborn. Those aren’t really the best traits to have. But that was it. I was blinded by my own talent to think that I was better than I was.

DF: Well, that’s often what it takes to get through the rough spots. When you sent in the art, was it drawing stories you had written, too, or you would take other people’s stories and interpret them your own way? TM: At first it was just pin-up shots. But then, the people who were responding, said, “Hey, you’ve got to give us page-by-page story stuff.” So there were two ways of doing that. You could either, go and look at a comic book and then do your own re-imagining of an existing comic. I did that from time to time, and, as I’ve told kids, it’s a good way to do it, but make sure you don’t take the Byrne-Claremont X-Men at the peak, or whatever’s a top ten book and try to do better than that. Go get a book that’s floundering, and re-imagine that book, because you’ve got a much better chance of inspiring somebody to hire you with that than trying to draw like Neal Adams or write like Chris Claremont. But I also did, at that time, create my own characters. So in high school I created this character amongst many, called Spawn, and I actually did like a 25, 30-page comic book of that, and that was part of some of my samples when I was sixteen. And then they just went dormant until I pulled them out in the early ‘90s.

Spider-Man #1, but actually you had writing experience. TM: I was writing, but not nearly at the prolific pace that I was drawing. I was probably doing five pages of artwork for every one page I was writing, where a true writer writes all the time. But at that point, my first drive was to do artwork. DF: I imagine you weren’t doing much writing once you actually broke into Marvel and DC as an artist. TM: When I first broke in, it was strictly as a penciler.

DF: Sort of like Erik Larsen with the Savage Dragon. TM: That’s it, yeah. Along those lines. DF: So you would do some of your own stories and some adaptations of other people’s stories, it sounds like. TM: When I was re-imagining someone else’s stuff, like if I were looking at a badly drawn Captain America story, then I would use that story, but draw it my own way. If it was my character, the true writing came then. I wasn’t trying to rewrite Captain America. They’ve got a writer for that book. I was never, at that point, trying to take over a writer’s spot. I was trying to take over an artist’s spot. But when I did my own comic, then there was no writer, so I had to be the letterer, writer, penciler, inker, all that stuff. DF: And would the character always be Spawn, or did you have other characters, as well? TM: I had some other ones. I had a group called “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” and then I had this other one called “the Bruise Crew.” DF: So people may think, “Oh, Todd just suddenly started writing one day, with

Here’s a rare glimpse of the creative process Todd uses to create an issue of Spawn, specifically 1996’s #52 (cover by Greg and Todd shown above). On this page, we see Todd’s skeleton plot-outline for the issue. It’s a “beat sheet” style plot, which Todd used as notes for his telephone plot conversation with penciler Greg Capullo. [© 2007 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.]

SPAWN #52 NUTS & BOLTS | 17

Todd hand-wrote his script for page 4 of the story on an overlay that went over a copy of Greg’s pencil art (see next page). Todd and Greg are working “Marvel-style,” aka plot-first style, where the dialogue is written after the pencil art is done. Also shown is how panel one of the page came out. You can see the entire page later in this Nuts & Bolts section. [© 2007 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.]

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SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE H

e started out as a distant gleam in outer space, and ended up more than 40 years later— appropriately—on the “silver screen.” Bad, bad Norrin Radd—better known as the Silver Surfer—first appeared in the pages of the classic Fantastic Four #48, the first part of what has come to be known as “The Galactus Trilogy.”

Over the intervening years the Surfer has starred in two ongoing series and a whole bunch of limited series and one-shots. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of guest appearances he’s made across the Marvel Universe. The Surfer has been written by some of the finest writers in the business, and they took their cues from the men who created him back in 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As the story goes, it seems that, after discussing the Galactus story with Stan, Jack went home to draw it. When he brought in the penciled pages, he had added a shining character riding a surfboard through space, a character that hadn’t been part of the team’s plotting session. Queried by Stan as to who the figure was, Jack said that he figured a character as awesome as Galactus would have a herald to announce his coming to the worlds he would devour. Stan liked the idea, one of them named him the Silver Surfer, and the rest is comics history. It turned out that the Surfer became one of Stan’s favorite characters to write for reasons he discusses on the next page. In honor of the Surfer’s 40-plus years of traveling the skyways of the Marvel Universe—and his cinematic debut in this summer’s blockbuster bonanza, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer— I decided to get together a virtual roundtable discussion of some of the greatest Surfer Writers of all time. I say “virtual” because I didn’t actually sit these guys down in one room. As with our nowlegendary Spider-Man Writers Roundtable in issue #14, I asked them all the same dozen questions and am running their answers consecutively. So there’s no “cross-talking” as there no doubt would have been were all these writers in the same room, and if a Roundtabler doesn’t have an answer to a given question here…it’s because he chose not to answer it. Of course, there was one writer who got his own very special set of questions. Needless to say, that was The Man himself—Stan Lee! I couldn’t really ask him what it felt like taking over a character with a legacy like the Surfer’s—since he was responsible for so much of that legacy! His erudite answers lead off the section, and then we go roundtabling with the rest of the Surfer-crew. So polish up your silver coating, align your surfboard’s rudder—and let’s get this beach-party started!

Danny Fingeroth Editor-in-Chief

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WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE

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STAN LEE ON THE SILVER SURFER

We kick off our Silver Surfer Writers’ Roundtable with an e-mail chat with the Surfer’s co-creator, Stan Lee, in which The Man gives us his thoughts about everyone’s favorite sentinel of the skyways… DANNY FINGEROTH: You’ve always had a special fondness for the Surfer, Stan. What is it about the character that appeals to you? After all, a nearly naked guy surfing through space on a “board could as easily be seen as silly as dramatic. (And you are the guy “who wrote the “Silver Burper” parody in Not Brand Ecch.) STAN LEE: I loved the fact that I could express so much of my own philosophy through the Surfer’s dialogue. Through his eyes we could see how mankind’s foibles and insanities would register on a being from another world. And I liked the fact that I could have him speak in a stylized manner—not a dialect, not an accent, just a very individual way of framing phrases and sentences.

was no way he’d continue to obey Galactus if it meant the death of innocent planetary inhabitants. DANNY: Did you see the Surfer from early on as not just an exciting supporting character, but as a figure who could carry his own title? How did you know he could headline his own book? STAN: I didn’t know that he could, but the more stories I wrote about him the more I liked him and the more I was determined to have him carry his own title. DANNY: Would it be safe to say that Spider-Man represents your more freewheeling side and the Surfer the more serious you? Either way, please elaborate. STAN: You summed it up perfectly. I don’t know how I can elaborate on a perfect summation. Although Spidey wasn’t always all that freewheeling. As I recall, I tried to inject many dramatic elements into his stories as well DANNY: What did John Buscema bring to the portrayal of the Surfer? STAN: I think John brought a sense of really fine illustration. To me, he made the Surfer stories seem more than comicbook artwork—he seemed to give them a more mature, classical, ultra-dramatic look.

DANNY: I know Jack This classic cover to Fantastic Four #50 was the climax of DANNY: Is or was there a specific drew the Surfer into the actor or public personality— Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus Trilogy” that introGalactus story as a duced the Surfer. Cover art by Kirby and Joe Sinnott. or writer—you think of when “surprise,” but who [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] writing the Surfer’s dialogue named the character? (aside from Laurence Fishburne, STAN: I don’t remember who voices him in the FF2 movie)? what Jack originally called him, but I named him STAN: Not really. I don’t know of any actor, or anyone, The Silver Surfer. who phrases things the way I had the Surfer do it. It was just my own contrived little style. DANNY: The Surfer started out as Galactus’ herald. Did you and Kirby know from pretty early on that he DANNY: Of all the characters that you and Jack came would rebel against Galactus, or did that evolve as up with, why do you think the producers of FF2 chose the story went along? to use the Silver Surfer for the sequel? STAN: His rebellion against Galactus evolved. STAN: I never discussed it with them, so your guess is However, I knew that it had to happen, because I as good as mine. But, since we’re guessing, I’d think it wanted the Surfer to be a good guy—in fact, more might be because his flying surfboard gives us a great than a good guy, almost a Christ-like guy—and there 26 | WRITE NOW

visual effect. Also, his background, origin and purpose are so totally different from any other character that an audience is apt to see in any movie anywhere. DANNY: Do you think the Surfer works best when he’s in a fantastic setting, or when he’s in a more normal, earthlike environment? STAN: Both. In fantastic settings he’s one of the most unique characters anyone will ever see, while in a normal, Earthlike environment he best personifies the always exciting “fish out of water” theme. DANNY: Considering their deep connection, do you think Alicia would have ever gone off with the Surfer? STAN: Not if I were writing it. I’d never have Alicia be unfaithful to ol’ Ben. Besides, as I recall, Shalla Bal was the love of Norrin Radd’s life. I’m not sure whether she’s supposed to be alive now or not, but if she is—he’d never rest till they were reunited. At least, he wouldn’t if I were writing it. DANNY: What are you proudest of that you’ve done with your writing of the Surfer? STAN: I think I’m proudest of the fact that the Silver Surfer seems to mean so much to so many older, more literate, more sophisticated readers. DANNY: Would you ever want to write another Surfer story? Who’d be your dream artist to draw it? STAN: Perhaps, if I ever had the time. Hey, there are so many great artists who could do a fantastic job with the Surfer. There’s Alex Ross, John Romita Jr., Jim Lee—I could go on and on. Incidentally, since I’ve

Now that’s we’ve heard from Mr. Lee, let’s find out what the Roundtable has to say about the Sentinel of the Skyways… DANNY FINGEROTH: What is it about the Surfer that’s so appealing? After all, a nearly-naked guy riding through space on a surfboard could as easily be seen as silly as dramatic. J.M. DeMATTEIS: It’s a testament to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (and John Buscema, who did such brilliant work on the original Surfer series) that he doesn’t seem ridiculous. If you look at Kirby’s original Surfer, there’s nothing remotely silly about him. He radiates dignity and power (in context, even the surfboard works). And Stan’s dialogue took what was there in Jack’s extraordinary visuals and deepened it. The Surfer was curious, grave,

been away from comics for so long, there’s one thing I truly regret. I’ll occasionally thumb through a comicbook that catches my eye because of the sensational artwork, but since most of today’s terrific artists are new to me, I never can remember their names. So there are many more I should be mentioning, because I love their artwork but regretfully, I can’t recall their names. In fact, my memory is so unreliable that I’ve even forgotten if you have any more questions for me. So I might has well sign off now—but not without one enthusiastic EXCELSIOR! Stan Lee co-created the Marvel pantheon of characters including—in addition to the Silver Surfer—the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men. His hit Sci-Fi Channel series, Who Wants to be a Superhero?, returns for a second season on July 27th. And Stan will soon be getting his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame! The Surfer’s first cover appearance, in FF #49, although he debuted in the previous issue. Art by Kirby and Sinnott [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

and philosophical. This was a character you had to take seriously. Hey, if you didn’t—Galactus would come and eat your planet! For me, though, where the character really came into his own was in the Lee-[John] Buscema series. Those first six issues of the original Surfer run are among my favorite mainstream comics of all time (the third issue, which introduced Mephisto, is probably my single favorite Marvel comic): a wonderful mix of adventure, philosophy, and raw emotion. Stan was really trying to stretch the boundaries of the Marvel universe, giving us a protagonist whose greatest power wasn’t his cosmic bolts: it was his compassion. The Surfer, as Stan has often noted, is a character with a genuine spiritual component—and that set Norrin Radd apart from the rest of the Marvel Universe, making him utterly unique among the Lee-Kirby creations. STEVE ENGLEHART: When played right, he’s the archetypal SILVER SURFER ROUNDTABLE | 27

Here’s the cover to the premiere issue of the Surfer’s first solo series, from 1968, and a panel from page 6 of the issue, which illustrates the Surfer’s eloquent frustration with humanity. Script is by Stan and the art is by John Buscema (pencils) and Joe Sinnott (inks). [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] opposite. People take one look at this guy zipping through space on skis and immediately think it’s ridiculous.

“noble savage.” That sense of alien aloneness with a great heart appeals to lots of readers. The problem is what he looks like. Your first reaction is, he looks terrific— but the longer-term reaction is, there’s an impenetrable reflective barrier around him that means you can’t get close to him. You can understand him, you can feel his pain, but all that time his form—and he’s all form, being naked—is a solid wall between you, the reader, and him, the character. It’s subtle, psychological, but it’s why, I believe, he could be simultaneously highly acclaimed and a hard sell. Why he could work as a poster but not as a comic. RON MARZ: You know, it’s kind of curious. Obviously the character was created during an era when surfing, thanks in great part to musicians like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, was being popularized in the public consciousness. And on a very surface level, the Surfer could very easily be seen as camp, but you just don’t get that reaction, even from non-comics readers. Somehow, Stan and Jack captured some magic. There’s majesty to the Surfer, both visually and in terms of his character. I guess the other side of the coin is the Black Racer, a Kirby creation who is in a lot of ways a DC counterpart to the Surfer. But with him, the reaction is just the 28 | WRITE NOW

JIM STARLIN: Well, at the time I got hold of the Surfer, it hadn’t been so long ago that he’d been trapped on Earth. His adventures in outer space were just beginning, so to speak. Plus there was this nobility about the Surfer that was so appealing. But the big draw, for me, was the fact that writing the Silver Surfer gave me yet another chance at furthering Thanos’ story. Every time I came back to Marvel, it was really to write and draw the Titan again. Surf, Warlock and Captain Marvel were never anything but excuses to do another Thanos tale. FINGEROTH: Was there anything you consciously (or, in retrospect, unconsciously) set out to accomplish during your run on the Surfer? DeMATTEIS: My run on the series [Volume 3, issue #’s 126 –145] was a little frustrating. I had a very big story planned for my initial arc—among other things, it dealt with the death of Galactus and Galactus’s desire to have the Surfer’s forgiveness before he died. I remember writing up a lengthy outline for the arc, which my editor read and approved, being as excited about the story as any I’d ever done—and then having it shot down by the Powers That Be (after I’d already begun working on the story) for reasons that escape me. (Perhaps something to do with continuity or another upcoming Big Event.) So I had to shift the storyline in midstream and then, as

I recall, my next idea was shot down, as well. My whole run on the book felt like that: jumping through hoops, trying to adjust stories on the fly. (Time, and distortions of memory, may have magnified that feeling.) That said, I got to work with brilliant artists like Ron Garney and Jon J. Muth (among others) and do some good work. Still, considering how much I love the character, I never got to do the Surfer I wanted to. Of course, if I’d done the stories exactly the way I’d originally envisioned, I still might not have been satisfied. ENGLEHART: Make him work as a comic. There were 20 years of disappointing Surfer numbers when I got there and I liked the challenge of trying to turn that around at long last. MARZ: First and foremost, I set out to not embarrass myself. Surfer was very literally the first job I had in comics. Silver Surfer Annual #3 was not only my first job for Marvel, it was my first time writing a comic script ever. So to say I was a rookie is an understatement. When Jim Starlin stepped aside and Marvel handed the book to me, it was very much on-the-job training. So I don’t know that I had any goal in mind other than trying to tell a good story every issue, and get better at the craft of writing. Jim’s Surfer issues were hugely entertaining, and set a real high-water mark for the character, so I wanted to continue that as best I could. STARLIN: Yeah, despite the flippancy of my previous answer, Surf was always a character I loved and thought had tremendous untapped potential. One of the things about the Surfer was that he’d aided Galactus in destroying who-knows-how-many planets and killing countless folk. But this noble creature never seemed to be bothered by the evil acts he had aided and abetted. So this was a track I, early on, decided I wanted to explore.

In 1978, Marvel produced its very first self-contained graphic novel, The Silver Surfer, published by Fireside Books. It featured a new, alternate version of the Surfer’s origin, sans the Fantastic Four, and re-teamed Lee and Kirby for the first time in several years. Inks are by Joe Sinnott. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

FINGEROTH: Was it more—or less—pressure to be writing a character who, while a Marvel icon, wasn’t as high-profile as, say, Spider-Man or the X-Men? DeMATTEIS: To me the Surfer is as high-profile as Spider-Man or the X-Men. He is, in many ways, the ultimate Marvel character. A fusion of Kirby’s cosmic grandeur and Stan’s very human heart. I don’t know if that creates pressure—once you start writing, the story and characters take over and it’s got very little to do with how you feel about it—but it does create a situation where you feel a great sense of responsibility to the character. If you’re writing the Surfer or Spider-Man, you

want to do your absolute best. Better than your best. ENGLEHART: That stuff never matters to me. MARZ: In my mind, less pressure. Spidey and X-Men were franchises, especially so in that period. I had a good relationship with the editor, Craig Anderson, so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure. Although, I do remember seeing a sales chart fairly early on in my run and Surfer was selling a lot of copies, a hell of a lot more than Superman. And I thought, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Here’s this rookie writer, writing a character you’d have to consider as second-tier, and we’re kicking Superman’s ass. It didn’t seem quite right. STARLIN: It’s always so much easier taking on the second stringers. In fact my favorite characters to do are the ones that are on the verge of cancellation like SILVER SURFER ROUNDTABLE | 29

IVE #1

AVENGERS: THE INITIAT “Happy Accidents” Plot for 23pgs. Second Draft

PAGE 1 Panel One Open on Iraq… an armored VIP car from the A military convoy is escorting en one of the supposedly safer “Gre tours it as nse Defe of ent tproof Departm k four-by-four with black, bulle blac a is car VIP The Iraq. in Zones” windows. Panel Two oy’s trucks, a soldier spots an In the bed of one of the conv and it’s a local car. It’s pretty beat up, It’s ing. oach appr car zed unauthori oy. conv the rds veering towa shout Panel Three his unit draw their weapons and The soldier and other men from se. cour ge chan to car the for out warnings . The Panel Four up speed as it heads right at them But it’s no use, the car picks fire. open to but ce choi soldiers have no ly a car Panel Five where we can see that it’s clear We cut to the inside of the car, containers holding gallons of and s shell ry armo with bomb. It’s filled their bodies are drive on as both their car and gasoline. The suicide bombers chanting oaths to both Al ts, zealo are bers bom The riddled with bullets. Qaeda and Hydra.

AVENGERS: THE INITIA TIVE #1 “Happy Accidents” Script for 23pgs. PAGE 1 Panel One LOCATOR CAPTION: Baghdad, Iraq. ELECTRONIC BALLO ON (no tail): Desert Eag le to convoy. Status of “Carrot Top”? GUNNER IN FIRST CA R: “Carrot Top” is secure, sir. minutes out to base and We’re ten all’s clear. No sign of— GUNNER IN FIRST CA R: Hold up! Panel Two GUNNER IN FIRST CA R: contact! GUNNER IN FIRST CA R:

We have contact! I repe at! We have

Vehicle heading this way ! Panel Three FIRST SOLDIER/BRST :<PULL OVER!> SECOND SOLDIER/BRST : <STOP or we will OPE N FIRE!> Panel Four FIRST CAR (in the dist ance): Son of a @#%*! They’re speeding up! Panel Five FIRST SOLDIER/BRST : It’s an I.E.D.! SECOND SOLDIER/BRST : LIGHT IT UP! SFX (guns): BRRAT SFX (guns): PKA PKA PKA Panel Six SFX: TNK TNK TNK FROM INSIDE THE CA RBOMB/ BRST: <HA IL HYDRA! Cut off a limb, two more will grow in its place!>

Here are plot, script and art from Avengers: The Initiative #1. Initiative is a series that spins out of Marvel’s Civil War limited series. As a result of CW ‘s events, it was mandated that each state would have a government-supervised super-team. Initiative focuses on the training of these heroes, including MVP, Cloud 9, Armory, and Trauma. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE NUTS & BOLTS | 35

For this series writer Dan Slott and artist Stefano Caselli work in a hybrid version of the Marvel method and full script. Dan writes a plot that has the description of each page’s action broken down into panels, but without final dialogue. Stefano draws the story, and then Dan writes his script based on the penciled pages. Stefano pencils and inks his work, so what we see in this Nuts and Bolts section is his inks and printed comics pages—which show how important the role of colorist Daniele Rudoni is in the finished art. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

PAGE 2 Panel One Suddenly, a heroic figure leap s out of one of the convoy’s armo vehicles! It’s THE GAUNTL red ET, the one American super hero who’s fighting the War on Terror on the front lines! Panel Two From his giant mecha-glove, THE GAUNTLET projects an energy hand that wraps around enormous the car bomb… Panel Three …right as it EXPLODES! THE GAUNTLET stands firm, unflinching, as he’s backlit from the explosion. Panel Four The convoy comes to a stop as some of the soldiers go up to GAUNTLET to salute him and/ THE or congratulate him. THE GAU NTLET tells them that there’ll be time for that later. First things first, they should secure the perimeter!

36 | WRITE NOW

PAGE 2 Panel One It’s— SOLDIER: It’s not slowing down! Everyone FALL BACK! GAUNTLET: SOLDIER: THE GAUNTLET?! Panel Two GAUNTLET:

I’ve got this one.

Panel Three GAUNTLET:

Got it well in hand.

Panel Four SFX: BWCHOOM Panel Five RIGHT! We had no idea YOU were SOLDIER: Damn, sir, that was ALL . detail this to ed assign (space) Sarge, all the boys are proud to have SOLDIER: Just want you to know, … you HERE back CAPES are busy coolin’ their heels SOLDIER: …while all them other el-thems g amon n’ fighti Or home! You men secure the Not now, soldier. First things first. GAUNTLET: perimeter… Panel Six GAUNTLET:

…while I check on the “package”.

CREATING COMICS STEP BY STEP

STEPS 4-6

s we said last issue:

“Steven Grant has a long and successful career as a comic book writer. He, along with Mike Zeck, brought the Punisher to new heights of popularity with their groundbreaking limited series. Steven has also scripted stories featuring Spider-Man, Batman, and even Robocop. He is also the creator of the popular independent comic book series, Whisper. Steven has a weekly column, Permanent Damage, on ComicBookResources.com. “In ‘Creating Comics Step by Step,’ which first ran on Permanent Damage, he explores the process of how writers craft their stories. Steven has taken many agreed upon approaches of professional writers and presents them in an easy to understand and fun way.” There are ten (up from nine) essays for this series. We ran the first three last issue and are happy to run the next three here, with the last four scheduled to appear next issue. So grab that highlighter for the important points Steven makes (which is all of them) and enjoy this middle third of his Master Class in creating comics! —DF

Step 4: PLOT The term “plot” is often misconstrued, and just as often segregated from “character,” especially by critics who subdivide fiction into “character-driven” and “plotdriven” stories, by which they generally mean either the character’s behavior and responses determine the direction of the plot (and wherein plot is sometimes invisible) or the requirements of the plot predetermine a character’s responses. The distinction is largely overblown, and often used to separate “mainstream” fiction from “genre” fiction and imply an innate superiority of the former over westerns, detective stories, horror stories, science fiction, etc., all of which do have their own content requirements before you can join their club. But that’s really smoke, obscuring a simple fact:

Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa from 1503 to 1506. Does this world-famous work of art tell a story? Should it? Character and plot, in practice, are indivisible. Character without plot is a painting, a static persona: Mona Lisa, the corners of her mouth slightly upturned, eyes lightly dancing, hands crossed just a bit unnaturally in her lap as a storm seems to gather over a landscape behind her that’s cultivated but still seems to suggest something of the wild. Her hint of a smile has captivated viewers for centuries, but its meaning is lost, unknowable. She’s only a moment in time, trapped there forever, and while we can judge her character by what da Vinci left on canvas, that’s all we’ll ever have. She projects a character, but we can’t even know what of it is real and what we’re projecting. She has no story moving through time.

STEVEN GRANT | 41

She has no plot. Story, loosely defined, is character in motion through time. Plot is the shape of that motion. There’s a concept in physics called the Heisenberg principle, which says that in order to truly understand subatomic particles you have to know two things—the nature of the particle and its movement—but if you slow down or stop a particle in order to determine its nature, it no longer has any movement to know, while if you don’t interfere with its movement you can’t discover its nature. You need both, but in getting one you lose the other. Fiction’s a lot like that. If you fixate on character, you lose a sense of plot. If you fixate on plot, it’s easy to abandon your character. It’s not as complicated or indeterminate as nuclear particle physics, but you’ve got to keep your eyes on both elements at the same time. Like I said, there has been a longstanding tradition of being dismissive toward “plot-driven” stories, and it’s not a wholly inaccurate presumption, but the distinction is unnecessary: a better term for a story where the plot overwhelms and dictates a character’s behavior is “bad story.” But there’s no reason to stigmatize plot or character during development; some writers are naturally more attuned to thinking mainly in terms of plot and others in terms of character, and more often writers will generate some stories from plot and start plugging characters into it and other stories by wrapping a plot around some character(s) they’ve conceived. I’ve done both; I suspect most writers with any sizable output have. The process of getting to the story is unimportant. Only the resulting story is important. The reader will only care how you got there in retrospect, if then. So you’ve got your general idea, and you’ve whittled down the many possibilities it suggests to a general theme. At that point either characters that can carry and personify the theme are starting to occur to you (if the character wasn’t already part of your original idea) or you’re getting an idea for a plot. Start loose on either, and, again, don’t get so in love with any concept that you won’t throw it out to make your story better. Take whatever you’ve got and start working out the other. Since we’ve already covered character, let’s start with that. I mentioned the three most basic questions to ask about your main character: • What does he want? 42 | WRITE NOW

• What is he willing to do to get it? • What’s he afraid of? Answering those three questions brings you not only to the rudiments of character but also to the rudiments of his plot. Goal is plot. Determination is plot. Fear is plot. A spoiled girl wants to keep her family home. She’s willing to lie, cheat, steal or kill to keep it. She’s afraid she’s going to lose everything that ever meant anything to her if she doesn’t stay single-mindedly focused on her goal.

That’s the loose plot outline to Gone With The Wind. As soon as you know what your character wants, that’s the beginning of your plot. And of your character. You just ask different questions of both. • Character: why does he want it? • Plot: what’s he going to do to get it? Plot is really problem-solving. Initially, you present yourself with a series of questions/problems, and then you answer them. The answers you choose determine the direction of both plot and character, and those in turn (not to mention where they come into conflict with each other) generate other problems/questions, and the process recurs. And both plot and character develop.

Complications: Your character does not exist in a vacuum. He’s part of a world, whatever world that happens to be. Choice of world is what determines genre, and once you choose a world you play by the rules of that world; in a story set in the Wild West your character can’t suddenly haul out an Uzi unless you intend it to be a very different kind of genre. Presumably he’s not going to be the uncontested lord of his world, unless he’s

A superhero-supervillain confrontation is always more satisfying when a character’s motivations are multidimensional, as in this Spider-Man vs. Shocker battle in Amazing Spider-Man #46. Script by Stan Lee. Art by John Romita, Sr. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] them that distinguishes one story with that framework from the next, which is why one story may be far more memorable than another with basically the same overall plot. It’s all in the details. It still all comes down to character in the end. How your characters act on the worlds they exist in, are acted on by those worlds, and the reactions of each to the actions of the other are your story. This can be as simple as a super-hero fight where a villain hits a hero and the hero hits back or as complex as a political chess game between opposing sides of a major public issue, or two expert generals on either side of a war manipulating whole battlefields. either going to be brought low or you’re writing a very boring story, so there will most likely be other people and at minimum other forces in his world whose goals will at least temporarily align or conflict with his. I spoke of primary and secondary characters; every time you introduce one, and answer those three questions and then start to answer new questions the answers generate, each character develops their own plot. Where the plots intersect is the soil where your larger plot grows. Traditionally every protagonist has an antagonist. In the simplest stories, common in comics, either both are after the same goal (known from Hitchcock as the MacGuffin, the something the characters have an excuse to fight over) or the protagonist’s goal is to keep the antagonist from attaining his goal (The Shocker wants to rob a bank because that’s what he does; Spider-Man wants to stop him because that’s what he does). Those are plot-driven types of stories: in either the structure of the story determines the overall arc of the character’s behavior, and, window dressing aside, any character used in them is basically interchangeable with any other character used in them. On the other hand, it’s how the characters play in

The main thing to remember is that conflict is drama, and, as mentioned before, there are three kinds of conflict: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself. Adversaries need not even be traditional enemies; loved ones in adversarial relationships are the stuff of many stories. Breaking away from traditional concepts of hero and enemy can increase conflict, as Akira Toriyama plays with consistently in Dragonball: no matter how much martial artists respect and admire each other, only one can win the title of The Strongest Under The Heavens, and it’s the emotional complexities of the players, and their struggles against their own perceived weaknesses as exposed in combat, as much as the fight scenes that makes Dragonball a success. As you develop your plot, which can simply be understood as the string of events that carries your story from start to finish, or the sequence of obstacles and resolutions that a character or characters experience on the way toward the achievement of their goal, a number of things must constantly be kept in mind. Unless you’re writing a story that calls for random action—they exist, but they’re tricky—all events added to your plot must serve several elements of your story STEVEN GRANT | 43

PAGE 13 4- Ext. Street- same Ultron takes Sentry's blow. Catching

it. Slamming into it with her hand hard. 1 - ULTRON

Robert... 2 - Spx: smackfoom 3 - ULTRON ted... Your physical defeat has been calcula big shadow coverin held by Ultron, looks up in horror. A 5- High looking down, Sentry, still being re. hid face and its not raining on him anymo 4 - ULTRON And executed.

g half

The Mighty Avengers launched out of the final issue of Marvel’s Civil War (#7) and was formed by Tony Stark as a government-sponsored super team. Here we have some of Brian Bendis’ script and Frank Cho’s art (his inks over his pencils) for TMA #3. The issue pits the Avengers against a new version of Ultron, and she is a foe to beware— and yes, we said she. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MIGHTY AVENGERS NUTS & BOLTS | 51

Page 141- Ext. S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier- day Big panel. Over the Sentry's head, looking him/ us. Ultron is throwing it at him. Shootin

straight up. The massive S.H.I.E.L.D.

Helicarrier is heading for

g it at him.

2- Int. Helicarrier science center- Same Maria hits her head hard against the some are out.

console. The monitors are flickering

Ultron's face. Some are in and

each other. Wonder-man has devastation. People are falling all over Some show ULTRON, some show the tech. Wasp is floating and dodging chaos. grabbed Black Widow and a science 1 - Spx: clang

Brian favors writing full scripts (scripts containing each panel’s action and copy) and uses modified screenplay formatting, which employs a “slug line” to give the setting of a scene, and then just a few lines to describe the action in each panel. Dialogue and sound effects are then centered on the page. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

R MARIA HILL

2 - S.H.I.E.L.D. DEPUTY COMMANDE Agh!

the chaos. Ares is on top of her. Everyo 3- Ms. Marvel lifts her head up among gravity and free-fall. To barks an order.

ne struggling with the

3 & 4 - MS. MARVEL Simon! Go! 4- Ext. City- Same High looking down. The Sentry is flying right for us with

genuine panic in his eyes.

a god moment. Backlit to lighting Powered, ready for what he has to do, actually cool. Superman moment. If superman was He is tearing up through the battered

52 | WRITE NOW

caverns of the city.

that is bolting sideways. A real

star trek WRITERS ROUNDTABLE PART TWO (CONTINUED FROM BACK ISSUE #23, NOW ON SALE)

Conducted via e-mail by Robert Greenberger, October through December, 2006.

ur sister publication, Back Issue, published part one of a writers roundtable discussing the joys and pitfalls of adapting Star Trek from screen to comic book. The discussion over there included topics on going from screen to print, working with licensing restrictions, the role of the artist on such a property, and how the various

companies that have handled Star Trek through the years have been to work with. Of course, the preceding summary is no comparison to actually reading the first part. So let’s get re-introduced to the participants, and then get back to the discussion… —DF

a quick introduction to the dramatis personae: mike w. barr Mike was a long-time DC Comics writer and short-time DC Comics editor with twin passions for Star Trek and mystery fiction. He was the debut writer for DC Comics’ run of Star Trek and has also written the Trek novel Gemini.

peter david The self-proclaimed writer of stuff’s credits include a well-regarded run on DC’s version of Star Trek in addition to numerous novels for Pocket Books. He also co-created the fiction-only series Star Trek: New Frontier.

michael jan friedman A novelist who is also a Star Trek fan, Mike sold one story to Pocket Books, which brought him to DC’s attention, and he became a successful writer for them in the 1980s and 1990s. Mike has written countless novels for Pocket Books and more recently has tackled the Wolfman, Aliens, and Predator for DH Books.

glenn greenberg

“I am a former editor and writer for Marvel Comics, which is where I wrote the Star Trek: Untold Voyages limited series. Currently, I’m an editor and writer for Scholastic Inc. and a recurring writer for Simon and Schuster’s Star Trek: Corps of Engineers line of e-books. My first e-book has already been published, and I’m currently writing my second one.”

andy mangels

A long-time fan, Andy turned his passion into a career as a comic-book writer, critic, historian, and novelist. He and writing partner Michael A. Martin have written for several of the Trek franchises at Pocket Books.

martin pasko “I have more experience than I’d care to

admit with branded entertainment properties in a variety of media. While still in my teens, I began a comics career working for many publishers, including a long association with DC, both freelance and on staff. I’ve also written and story-edited for TV, both live-action (Twilight Zone, Max Headroom, Roseanne) and animated (the original Batman [The Animated Series] and many other series). After a long stint at DC as an editor and Creative Services manager, I now freelance and run my own consulting business, creatively developing clients’ toy and game properties into story-driven entertainment. I’m told I’m the only one on this panel to have written both the Trek comic books and the comic strip, as well as having supervised the comics’ production as an editor.”

laurie sutton “I’ve written DS9 for Malibu and Voyager for

Marvel, and have enjoyed being an editor for both DC and Marvel. I first encountered the once-in-a-lifetime, original-run Star Trek in 1966 when I was 13 years old and visiting Brownsville, Texas, while on a family road trip vacation (our own ‘trek’ if you will!). It was dinner time and we were all going to go down to the Holiday Inn restaurant, but this program came on the TV and that was it for me! I was fascinated, entranced, hooked! I sat like a five-year-old with my face as close to the screen as possible. Thank goodness my parents observed the obvious and let me miss dinner and watch the show. Their simple, single ‘indulgence’ set the course of my life, to a large extent. If they’d made me come to dinner, I might not have followed the Trek path with the sort of joy and freedom I have to this day.”

len wein Len can count among his earliest comics writing assignments several issues of Gold Key’s Star Trek title. Years later, after co-creating Swamp Thing and serving as editor-in-chief at Marvel and Batman editor at DC, Len returned to the 23rd century with a multiissue stint on the title, in time to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary.

howard weinstein At 19, while attending the University of Connecticut, Howard sold the script to “The Pirates of Orion,” which was aired during the second season of the animated Star Trek series (now available on DVD). Additionally, he provided story help to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. He subsequently wrote several novels and short stories for Pocket Books and Star Trek comics for DC, WildStorm, and Marvel.

STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE | 55

Greenberger: Each Trek ship has its own crew, but sometimes you need to add to the complement in order to tell your story. Are you better off grabbing an obscure character from one episode or creating your own recurring ensemble to pick from? Sutton: It depends on who you grab!!! Barclay was a good one—so many paranoias upon which to play! And, honestly, what reader is going to care about Unknown Red Shirt Shot by Phaser? Personally, I utilized these sorts of throwaway characters as mouthpieces to advance the story. (Then there was the time that I invented a character to honor a friend of mine and the editorial vision went elsewhere! *another sigh* ) But to answer the question directly: In order to tell the story, use the character who will do so to best advantage, known or invented. Greenberg: I’ve tended to use pre-established characters, no matter how obscure. I think it’s fun to take a background or minor character that you’ve seen but know nothing about, and provide some history or characterization. In Untold Voyages, for example, I used the alien ensign that Uhura scolds at the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Remember him? He defends Captain Decker after Kirk assumes command of the Enterprise, and Uhura tells him, “Our chances of returning from this mission in one piece may have just doubled.” I gave him a name—Ensign Omal—and had him substitute for Spock as Science Officer when Spock was away on leave. Weinstein: Depending on the story, either or both. One enjoyable aspect of doing the comics (and print fiction) is the chance to take a minor character from TV or a

movie and make that person a real 3-D character. But it’s also fun to make up brand new characters, since we couldn’t make any mold-breaking changes to the series regulars (though I enjoyed giving secondary characters like Sulu, Chekov, Uhura and Saavik bigger roles than they ever had in TV/movie Star Trek). Pasko: With the original series, budget limitations usually precluded going much further than pointed ears and blue skin in the depiction of aliens (this was long before the later features and the other four series, whose FX budgets allowed for a wide range of non-humanoid crewpersons and aliens). And even Star Trek: The Motion Picture included odd-looking aliens only as background extras in walk-bys or in the scene on the massive rec deck set where Kirk addressed the assembled crew. So I was wary of trying to invent new supporting cast except as throwaways (killed or moved off the Enterprise by the end of the issue), and tended to keep them humanoid to avoid violating the “feel” of the source material at that time. I kept remembering those multi-armed and animal-based aliens Filmation created for that dreadful pseudoanimated show. They just felt “wrong” to me, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake. Today, of course, I’d be Ferengi-ing it up along with everyone else. But I think your question really has more to do with how the writer is structuring the comics series than the character mix; the considerations you raise come into play only if you’re structuring the book as an ongoing soap opera, which I didn’t. Otherwise, Roddenberry’s old “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch provides the answer: the ship’s size is such that around any corridor is a previously unseen crew member (or prisoner/passenger/guardian of special cargo, etc.) who provides the jumping-off place for a story. Wagon Train, after all, was more like an anthology show with Ward Bond and the other regulars wrapped around the guest star’s story like a framing device, and in his original conception, Roddenberry was envisioning a science fictional equivalent of that (the second pilot and the first season’s “Charlie X” are perhaps the purest examples of how that structure plays). It’s been said that it was NBC who steered Roddenberry toward more conventional formatting. The only advantage of comics over film that I felt I could leverage was that I could call for menaces—as opposed to supporting cast—that were more visually spectacular and larger in scope than the original series’.

Though the original Trek series was cancelled after just three seasons, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise found themselves back in action in a Saturday morning animated series which reunited most of the cast of the original series and ran for 22 episodes during the 1973 and 1974 TV seasons. [© 2007 Paramount]

56 | WRITE NOW

Barr: Depends on the needs of the story. New crewmen can sometimes reveal something new about established characters, but sometimes a story has a need that only reviving an established character, with his/her baggage— Kevin Riley, Tonia Barrows, etc.—can serve. David: I think the best approach is to use both. That’s what I did with New Frontier. John Ordover, in hiring me for the gig, suggested using several oneshot or occasional characters, such as Shelby and Lefler and Selar, to intermingle with the wholly original characters who were going to populate the ship. That way the long-time fans have a vested interested in characters they’ve met before, and at the same time will become invested in the new guys. Wein: Generally, some obscure character from some episode. I won’t be seeing any licensing revenue from anyone I create, so why help fill Paramount’s coffers?

In addition to scripting

Mangels: Mike and I did a many Star Trek comic combination of adding new book adventures, characters and spotlighting Peter David has written obscure characters in all the more than two dozen stories we wrote—in addition to Star Trek novels covering core characters, of including the New course. It’s made difficult Frontier series, which because of that old juggling job of moving established is based on a concept characters forward when they he conceived with can’t move forward because John Ordover. they’re on a show still airing. [© 2007 Paramount] The key in creating new characters is to not allow them to overshadow the main characters (as I feel some DC books did in the past), but to add flavor and further interaction to your main cast. It was also fun to explore the secondary characters. Paramount wasn’t quite as restrictive with what you could do with them, as long as you didn’t go drastic with things that might be contradicted on the show. Our last DS9 story was a very taut thriller with Garak, and allowed us a lot of exploration of his history. Friedman: As I started writing the ST: TNG comic, it became pretty clear that Paramount didn’t want us inventing new characters. Later on, we had a lot more freedom. However, I enjoyed mining episodes for secondary characters to use in my comic stories, like Lt. Rager, Sonja Gomez and so on. I wrote one standalone story in which someone’s murdering Starfleet engineers, so I was able to mention some of Geordi’s predecessors on the Enterprise-D.

Greenberger: Klingons or Romulans? Sutton: I like the visuals of the Romulans. They have such a sexy, subdued elegance. But I like the Klingons as characters because they are so no-holds-barred medieval. Greenberg: Hmmm… if you put a gun to my head, I guess I’d have to answer Klingons. But I’m using the Romulans in my next e-book. Weinstein: Klingons. That may be because the later TV series and the movies included much more cultural development for the Klingons than for the Romulans. Romulans pretty much were pills, but Klingons are fun. Any characters who get to say things like “I’ll cut out his heart and drink his steaming blood” are fun to write! Pasko: I was allowed to use only the Klingons because the Romulans hadn’t appeared in the feature film. But I always thought both races were overused, when the core ideas of the property—especially its notions about intergalactic diversity—offer limitless potential for all sorts of antagonists, especially recurring enemy alien races. (And, of course, the spin-off shows took greater advantage of that built-in value by creating many more recurring antagonists such as the Borg.) But of the two groups you STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE | 57

We hope you enjoy this FREE

DRAW! #14 PREVIEW!

Edited by top DC and Marvel Comics artist MIKE MANLEY, the Eisner Award-nominated DRAW! magazine is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and step-by-step demos from top comics pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling, as each artist invites you into their studio to reveal their working methods and tricks of the trade! Issue #14 features in-depth interviews and demos by DC Comics artist DOUG MAHNKE (JLA, Batman, Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein, Superman, Justice League Elite), OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), and STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max). Then, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS bring you Part III of COMIC ART BOOT CAMP: “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, covering the best ways to use black placement to enhance and kick up the energy in your pages. Plus, there's a color section, a new MAHNKE cover, and more! (88-page magazine) SINGLE ISSUES: $9 US SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues in the US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). NOTE: Most issues contain nudity for purposes of figure drawing. Intended for Mature Readers.

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #13

MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY, ALBERTO RUIZ

RON GARNEY, GRAHAM NOLAN, TODD KLEIN, MARK MCKENNA

STEVE RUDE, JIM BORGMAN, ROQUE BALLESTEROS

ALEX HORLEY, KYLE BAKER, COLLEEN COOVER, BRET BLEVINS

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Conducted by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: What is your typical workday like? DOUG MAHNKE: It has varied quite a bit over the years, but I’ve settled into some fairly regular habits, as it has become obvious to me what gets the job done. I could divide this up into two different days, which is the productive day vs. the unproductive day. They do their best to coexist, although I feel

oug Mahnke is an artist’s artist. He does all of the hard things well, and makes it look easy. He’s one of the rare artists in the medium of comics who can flex between funny, fantastic action and horror. From Seven Soldiers of Victory: Frankenstein to The Mask, Major Bummer, Superman: Man of Steel and the JLA, Mahnke’s powerful figure work has always stood head and shoulders above many other artists working in the field. It’s not surprising to find out that the man who draws such powerful and dynamic heroes is also a competitive power lifter. DRAW! Editor Mike Manley catches up with this busy artist and father of six from his home studio in Minnesota.

the unproductive day always gets the better deal as the productive one has to pick up the slack. Productive day: I get up by 5 a.m. and go right down to the studio. The first thing I tend to do is turn on the computer to check e-mail and let my brain warm-up by visiting some of my favorite sites, all of which tend to be weightlifting-oriented. By 6:00 or 6:30 I get to work penciling or inking, whichever is the DRAW! #14 Preview

DOUG MAHNKE

COMICS

priority at the moment. I might just sit in silence or turn on the radio. I get into ruts where my “atmosphere” is concerned, and will go for very long stretches doing one thing then suddenly shift and do another. It might be talk or sports radio for a month or three, then some local music station for a while, then I might listen to a Greek or Italian station on the net for days. I will also put in a movie to keep me company. Most recently on a long productive day—which actually stretched into two days—I watched the first season of The Beverly Hillbillies over and over again. I’m not actually watching it very often, just listening to it. Oddly, I did this recently with the Jet Li movie, Hero, which is in Chinese. As I sit and work I hear the house wake up, as one after another my six kids and my wife rise until the house is full of noise. Usually after seven I go upstairs for a quick breakfast with the family, then back downstairs. It might be a bowl of oatmeal and some eggs or a protein drink. Coffee is a major player in my regular day, although I try to drink green tea now and then at the recommendation of DC editor Peter Tomasi. I also drink Yerba Mate. The bottom line is THIS PAGE: Batman pencil sketch. NEXT PAGE: Cover to Dark Horse’s King Tiger & Motorhead #1.

DRAW! #14 Preview

caffeine, which I am pretty sure is the secret to the success of the human race as we know it. Back to work after breakfast, and I try to get at least one page finished by 10 a.m. I eat a snack then... probably a piece of fruit and more protein. Back to work and try and get a little more done before lunch, which can happen at any time between 11:00 and noon, or whenever my kids have lost their minds with hunger. After lunch I will goof around on the computer for a little bit, but I keep it down on productive days. I find keeping off of the computer the best way to get work done. The computer can kill your day. I don’t play any games or do much with it, but time flies even when you’re looking for reference. After my goof-off time, it’s back to work, which will be more of the same, penciling or inking. If everything has gone well, a productive day can have me finished with my work by 3:30. I’ll knock off then and lift weights until supper. I don’t have a set pattern for the amount of penciling I will do before inking, although I do know it’s best for me to mix the two, so I can make realistic projections of when I can finish a page. Unproductive days for me are almost identical to productive days, except everything is slower. I get to work later, I eat longer, I linger on the computer, I get distracted by some pointless Internet thread. I could be looking up some military reference, then discover myself an hour later looking up information on the old Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down cartoon. I might find myself paying too much attention to some facet of a page that will probably end up covered in a word balloon, or using some ink that is so thick I can barely get it to pour from the dropper, let alone flow from my nib. Out of a five-day work week, if I have two slow days it takes a couple of ultra productive days to make up the difference. The problem lately has been to turn the heat up on the productive days, as they feel they contribute enough. Occasionally I will work late, but I just function better in the morning work-wise than in the evening. Recently I’ve gone through a very long “anti-productive” slump, possibly the worst I’ve had in my 18 years of comic drawing. I chalk it up to a couple of things... one is coming off of an enormous productive stretch that lasted a couple of years and left me mentally exhausted. When I say “antiproductive” I mean in terms of quantity, as the quality is pretty high. I also was in a car wreck one year ago on October 14th, which is the date of my anniversary. My wife and I were going to go out for a quick bite at one of our favorite restaurants. To do so we were driving our kids to my sister-in-law’s place. About one mile away from our home we were rear-ended, while waiting to turn left off of the highway. I saw the car coming at the last moment in my rear view mirror and hit the gas, getting us moving just enough to diffuse a little of the impact. The driver, a young guy, nailed us at 45 to 50 miles an hour. My seat broke and threw me backwards, the back of my head smashed into my oldest daughter’s head, just above her right eye, severely fracturing her socket and the bones on the right side of her face. (I’m happy to report a full recovery by the way)... it could have been pretty grim. I received a concussion, but being the true professional totally behind the eightball with a big deadline, I went home that