Write Now #20 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

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FOCUS ON

WILL EISNER

FRANK MILLER

F I S I NA SU L E!

695

In the USA

#20

Spring 2009

MICHAEL USLAN

COLLEEN DORAN

M AG A Z I N E Issue #20

SPRING 2009

Read Now! Message from the Editor-in-Chief .....................................................page 2 THE SPIRIT SECTION begins on page 3 He Dared Evil on a Dark Knight Interview with Frank Miller ................................................................page 4 Keeping the Faith Interview with Michael Uslan ............................................................page 6

THE SPIRIT NUTS & BOLTS Thumbnails to Pencils to Script to Finished Comic: WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT #24 Pages from “Veterans’ Benefits,” by Sergio Aragonés, Mark Evanier, Chad Hardin and Wayne Faucher..............page 18

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor-In-Chief

Producing Results Interview with F.J. DeSanto ..............................................................page 25

Managing Editor ROBERT GREENBERGER

Odd Lot Perspective Interview with Deborah Del Prete ................................................page 30

Consulting Editor ERIC FEIN

Not-So-Secret Agent Interview with Denis Kitchen ..........................................................page 32

Proofreading ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON

Will Eisner and the Art of Adaptation N.C. Christopher Couch looks at a pair of Spirit stories........page 36 The Spirit of Comics! Interview with Will Eisner (re-presented from Write Now! #5)..............................................page 43 On the Creator’s Life: Interview with Colleen Doran..........................................................page 51 Being Discovered… Again… and Again… and Again… Alex Grecian on breaking into comics—several times ............page 65

Nuts & Bolts Department Script to Thumbnails to Pencils to Finished Comic: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #574 Pages from “Flashbacks,” by Marc Guggenheim, Barry Kitson and Mark Farmer ................................................................................page 60 “But What Does Danny Think?” Danny Fingeroth sums up seven years of Write Now! ..........page 69 Feedback Letters from Write Now!’s Readers ................................................page 71

Designer DAVID GREENAWALT Transcriber STEVEN TICE Circulation Director BOB BRODSKY, COOKIESOUP PRODUCTIONS

Publisher JOHN MORROW

Special Thanks To: ALISON BLAIRE TOM BREVOORT KIA CROSS DEBORAH DEL PRETE F.J. DeSANTO WILL EISNER MARK EVANIER DAVID GREENAWALT KATE HUBIN STEVE KANE DAVID HYDE ADAM KERSCH DENIS KITCHEN JACKIE KNOX JIM McCANN FRANK MILLER ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON CHRIS POWELL BEN REILLY ALEX SEGURA VARDA STEINHARDT STEVEN TICE MICHAEL USLAN STEVE WACKER

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 ©2009 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.

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While the impetus for focusing on the Spirit in this issue of Write Now! was the recent Frank Miller-directed movie, I never need much of an excuse to spread the word about Will Eisner and his creation. The things Eisner discovered, invented, interpreted and demonstrated over his long career are every bit as relevant to established and aspiring comics writers and artists today as they ever were. In the pages that follow, we hear from some of the key people behind the movie (Eisner-fanatics all); from a few of the creators on the current run of Spirit comics; from Will’s longtime publisher and friend; from a critic who has given eye-opening attention to Eisner’s work; and, finally, from the Master himself, via an interview I was fortunate enough to be able to do with Will in 2003. Eisner called the comics supplement he supplied to newspapers The Spirit Section, and that seemed an appropriate title for this series of features that follows. I hope you enjoy Write Now!’s own “Spirit Section.” —Danny Fingeroth

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He Dared Evil on a Dark Night:

THE FRANK MILLER INTERVIEW Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth December 4, 2008

RANK MILLER changed the way comics are done, starting with Daredevil, moving on to re-vision Barman in The Dark Knight Returns. Other triumphs for the writerartist included Martha Washington, 300, and, of course, Sin City, which was turned into a sleeper-hit movie which he codirected. A longtime friend and colleague of [© 2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.] Will Eisner, Miller was the natural choice to bring The Spirit to life as its writer-director.

Frank took a few minutes to give us talk to us about the character and the film… —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: When did you first discover The Spirit, Frank? Which characters and strips appealed to you? FRANK MILLER: I first discovered The Spirit when I was on a bicycle when I was 14 years old picking up comic books and discovering the works of Will Eisner who I thought was a new guy who was blowing everybody else out of the water. Then I discovered it was all written and drawn before I was born. So yeah, that’s how I discovered The Spirit. My favorite characters were the Spirit himself, Commissioner Dolan and Sand Saref.

The first The Spirit movie poster. Art by Frank Miller. [© 2008 Spirit Films, LLC. All rights reserved. The Spirit trademark is owned by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.]

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DF: Please talk a little about your process of using art from the Spirit comics to do storyboards. How did you go about picking stories, scenes and characters? How did you come up with the idea to do that in the first place? FM: I drew my ass off. I did not use Eisner’s artwork except as inspiration for the director of photography and for the crew and for the actors. But I did not

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KEEPING THE FAITH:

THE MICHAEL USLAN INTERVIEW Conducted via phone November 6, 2009 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by Danny Fingeroth, Bob Greenberger and Michael Uslan

ICHAEL USLAN is the producer on The Spirit, and shepherded the project along for more than a decade. He’s also executive producer of all the Batman films, including 2008’s box-office phenomenon, The Dark Knight.

Michael is a writer, producer, and entertainment lawyer, with a list of awards including an Emmy, a People’s Choice and an Annie. Among other achievements, Michael is also the man who brought Stan Lee and DC Comics together for the historic Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe line of graphic novels (as recounted in detail in Write Now! #18). His many comics writing credits include the Batman: Detective #27 graphic novel, and an upcoming arc in DC Comics’ The Spirit series. I spoke to Michael over the phone in the period leading up to the release of The Spirit movie. While the main topic was the creation the movie’s script, needless to say, our conversation digressed here and there, in what I think were productive directions. His infectious enthusiasm for the project—and for everything he works on—comes through loud and clear in this wide-ranging interview. Enjoy! —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: Thanks for taking the time to talk about The Spirit, Michael. You’re credited as the producer. But, like most movies, this one has other folks who wore producers’ hats and I know you’re eager to give them credit. MICHAEL USLAN: F.J. DeSanto’s a co-producer, Linda McDonough is a co-producer. Producing with me is the utterly amazing Deborah Del Prete and Gigi Pritzker. And executive producers are my wonderful, wonderful mentor Benjamin Melniker, and Steve Maier. DF: I guess I’ll start at the beginning. When did you first see The Spirit comic? Was it like the rest of us, in 6 | WRITE NOW

Jules Feiffer’s book, The Great Comic Book Heroes? MU: Y’know, that’s been a source of debate between me and one of my best friends, Bobby Klein. Bob, who is now a genius at Intel, was my comic book buddy growing up, and to this day we, from time to time, cowrite introductions for DC Archives editions. We just did a piece for Roy Thomas’s TwoMorrows’ All-Star Companion Volume 3, so we still dabble in it together. Bobby and I have been debating that, and there are three possibilities. I thought it was the Feiffer book. Bobby thinks that it was the Help! magazine reprint that came out in 1962. And I can’t tell you for sure. Bobby does make a strong case that it was the Help! magazine first. And then after that, the early Spirit stories I saw would be the ones in the New York Herald Tribune, then the two Joe Simon-edited reprint issues over at Harvey. Then there were “The Spirit Bags” reprints. And then, by the time I got to high school, the

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION Spirit appeared on the cover of the underground comic, Snarf, I believe, and then had the two fifty-cent issues of his own, if memory serves me. By then I had latched onto other Eisner stuff. Bobby’s father worked at the Fort Monmouth army base, so we were privy to Will’s PS Magazine, also, on a regular basis. Something that we saw really early on may have predated all of this—but it wasn’t Eisner. Bobby and I used to go to a flea market, Collingswood Auction, near our homes, near Asbury Park, New Jersey, and every Friday night they had a backdate magazine stand there, and this guy would come in from New York with boxes and boxes full of old, old comic books, and because they were old, he sold them for a nickel apiece.

the convention in—I want to say ’68, but I don’t have the con booklets in front of me—where Eisner made an appearance. I don’t know that it was the first big con that he did, which I think came later, but at one of those conventions when I was in high school I did meet Will just as he was being exposed to this thing called comic book fandom. I had a chance to hear him speak, and to talk to him, and that, to me, was the be-all and end-all, because as I began to go to these conventions, that’s when I began to see The Spirit. That’s when I saw the inserts and expanded my horizons in terms of this character, and began to realize that what Orson Welles and Citizen Kane are to cinema, that is what Will Eisner and The Spirit are to comics.

DF: Who would want old comic books? MU: Right. And it was in that batch, for five cents, probably sometime around maybe 7th grade, that I got an IW or a Super reprint titled Daring Adventures with the Spirit in it. It was definitely not Eisner, but that might have been my first, or one of my real early, looks at the Spirit as a character.

DF: Did you have a friendship with him then? MU: I just sort of met him. We didn’t really develop a relationship until about 1994, when I got a call from Will. He indicated to me that Steven Spielberg’s people and some other people in Hollywood had contacted him about the possibility of doing The Spirit as a movie. And, being the businessDF: The Feiffer book came out in man that he was—and he was ’65, and it was definitely my first a great businessman—he did a awareness of the character. lot of investigating, and spoke to MU: Well, no matter which ones a lot of people, and he said may have been in what order, it everywhere he spoke to people, was certainly the Feiffer book my name kept coming up. And with the color insert that was he said, “I know you went the one that had the impact. through hell and it took you ten years to bring a dark and serious DF: When did you meet Will? version of Batman to the screen the way Bob Kane and Bill MU: I met Will when I was a Will Eisner firmly embraced the independent spirit teenager. As you know, I was at Finger and the gang had intend(pun intended) of the underground comix, licensing ed him to be, as this creature of the very, very first comic book Denis Kitchen to reprint some Spirit stories in 1972’s convention ever held, which the night stalking criminals from Snarf. Eisner also provided this new, then-topical cover to the issue. [© 2009 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.] the shadows. And everyone tells was in New York City, July, me you love comics, you know 1964. Bobby Klein and I went comics, this is your passion. Is this something you there. My parents took us. It was at a fleabag hotel on might be interested in?” I said, “Yeah!” So my business the Bowery called the Broadway Central—which later partner Ben Melniker and I met with Will at the collapsed on itself! My mother was appalled. We had Harvard Club on 44th Street shortly thereafter, and we to step over unconscious drunks in the hallway in order to check in. There were roaches on the wall. had a wonderful meeting of the minds. I think Will realized at that point the unbridled love I had for comics, and the passion I had for The Spirit, and my DF: That was probably better than conscious drunks. understanding of Will’s work on The Spirit. And slowly, MU: [laughs] Sure. That was the first convention, there over a period of time, he and Ben worked out the were 200 of us there. A few years later, I think it was MICHAEL USLAN | 7

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION terms of the deal—which was always interesting to sit in on, because, from time to time, the two of them would start speaking Yiddish to each other, and I would be sitting there picking out a word here, and a word there, and wondering what was going on. But Ben and Will had a very, very good understanding. They were roughly the same age. DF: Is Ben still active? MU: Yeah. Ben is 95, and the other day, when it was nice out, he was playing 13 holes of golf. Ben is a legend in the motion picture business.

time to time, and to some of my buddies who were comic book historians to make sure I was on the right track. It’s funny how life works, but there are many interesting ways that, either directly or tangentially, Will Eisner’s path and mine crossed. DF: So you were telling me how you got involved with Ben Melniker. MU: At the time, I was reading about Ben every day in the front page of Variety. He was setting motion picture history back then. First of all, as a backdrop: Ben ran MGM for 30 years. He started with them in 1940, and was with them until about ’72. Ben put together the deals for Ben Hur, Dr. Zhivago, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gigi, and all their musicals of the ’50s and ’60s. It was Ben who had the dealings with Stanley Kubrick and David Lean, and was in charge of all the David O. Selznick pictures for them. He negotiated Grace Kelly’s contract with her dad. He negotiated Elvis Presley’s contract with Colonel Tom Parker. And it goes on and on and on.

DF: How did you become involved with Ben to begin with? MU: When I initially began to negotiate with DC for the rights to Batman in early ’79, I knew I could not do it on my own. Yes, I was now an experienced motion picture production attorney having worked for threeand-a-half years at the only major studio at the time based in New York City, which was United Artists in its heyday. But I was too emotionally involved. I DF: Sounds like an amazing needed somebody who could guy. Now, to bring things back get in there and negotiate the to The Spirit… Eisner called deal without just saying yes to you, which is fascinating. That everything in order to get it must have been an incredible done. And I needed somebody experience and a tribute to who knew how to mount a prowhat you had accomplished. duction, because I had been MU: It was a really, really cool learning how you produce and thing that happened, and it was finance films, working at UA, because of the success of the where I was in charge of legal first Batman movie, and and business affairs over a numbecause of the people that he Eisner’s cover to 1940’s Eisner & Iger Studios-proknew in the comic book indusber of really great pictures—that duced Jumbo Comics #15, featuring his creation, gave me my training, including Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. The Spirit debuted in try, in particular, who pointed the same year. [© 2009 the respective copyright holders.] him in my direction, that said, early Rocky pictures, Black Stallion, Raging Bull, “This is the guy who has undergone a human endurance contest for the ten years it took Apocalypse Now, which was a crisis every day of to bring Batman to life as a dark and serious movie.” work. Interestingly, because they all knew at UA I was So we met, we hit it off, we had an understanding. a comic book buff, anything that was comics-oriented Then it took some time for Will and Ben to work out wound up on my desk, and for a long time we had the details. And we knew. And I told Will that this was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle—a character Will creatgoing to be a challenge, a long-term thing, because the ed—in development over there, and it was left to me Spirit is a guy in a fedora and tie, without superpowto attempt to untangle the copyright morass and the ers, without all the toys and gadgets and vehicles, who lost history of Sheena. I spent an awful lot of time has heart and soul, who has the human interest eledoing that, dealing extensively with Will’s former busiments of Frank Capra, the film noir elements of Orson ness partner Jerry Iger, also with Thurman Scott, who Welles, the suspense elements of Alfred Hitchcock, all used to own Fiction House, and I talked to Will from 8 | WRITE NOW

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DC Comics is currently producing a much-praised run of new Spirit stories by top creators. Here, we see the cover to Will Eisner’s The Spirit #20. It’s penciled and inked by Paul Smith, of Leave it to Chance fame.

Here’s the first page of Sergio Aragonés’ thumbnail drawings to the issue’s story. Sergio’s famous self-caricature makes the page more than just information. It’s a welcome to co-creators Mark Evanier and Chad Hardin. But the page also contains important information as to where penciler Chad will find reference for the art that— starting on the next page—Sergio has sketched in.

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Sergio and Mark are longtime collaborators (on Groo and many other projects). Here’s how Mark describes their working process for this particular story: “Sergio made up a storyline and wrote it out in his way. Sometimes, when we work together, we discuss the plot in advance and sometimes, we don't. The Spirit has generally been one of the ‘don't’ cases. I’ve had almost no input into any of the stories before they're drawn.

“Sergio’s version was sent to the editor, Joey Cavalieri, who sent it to the artist, Chad Hardin, and I got a copy either from Joey or Sergio. Chad penciled it his way, then turned it in to Joey, who sent the art off to the inker and a Xerox of the pencil art to me. Once I got it, I hauled out my copy of Sergio’s breakdown and used it as a guide to help as I composed copy to fit what the artist had drawn. I think I had to phone him once or twice to ask about certain story points.”

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PRODUCING RESULTS:

THE

F.J. D E SANTO

INTERVIEW

Conducted October 27, 2008, in person, by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by Danny Fingeroth, F.J. DeSanto, and Bob Greenberger

.J. DeSANTO is co-producer of The Spirit movie. He has a number of motion pictures currently in development including The Shadow (Columbia Pictures) which he is co-producing with Michael Uslan, Sam Raimi and Josh Donen, Shazam (Warner Bros) with Peter Segal directing, Doc Savage (Branded Entertainment), Sabotage (iNDELIBLE Entertainment), and Loony (iNDELIBLE Entertainment). Also, he co-produced the animated directto-home DVD Turok: Son of Stone (Classic Media) which was distributed by the Weinstein Company. In 2005, he served as an assistant to the producers of Constantine (Warner Bros). He has been responsible for acquiring, developing and maintaining a large slate of projects based on comic books, graphic novels, manga and anime while also overseeing deals with writers, agents, comic book companies, creators and movie studios. Before joining iNDELIBLE Entertainment in 2008, he was the Senior Vice President of Production and Development and Producer for Comic Book Movies Inc., and spent nine years as Vice President of Development for Michael Uslan and Benjamin Melniker (Executive Producers of the Batman franchise). F.J. is also a comic book and manga writer. He has written an original manga based on Star Trek: The Next Generation for TokyoPop, for release in 2009, and is a cowriter (with Michael Uslan) on an arc of The Spirit for DC Comics. He is currently developing several graphic novel projects for 2009. I spoke with F.J. in his iNDELIBLE Entertainment office in October, where we talked about the creation The Spirit movie, as well as many other topics. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: You have an interesting overall take on The Spirit movie, F.J. Please share it with the Write Now! readers. F.J. DeSANTO: The movie, to me, feels like, if Frank Miller were to do a Spirit graphic novel, this would be it. It’s filtering Eisner through his eyes and pen—you’ll see frames of it that look exactly like something Frank drew, and that’s exciting.

DF: Tell me a little bit about the origins of the movie. FJD: Michael Uslan can give you the better details, but when I started working with Michael, which was at the end of ’94 or the beginning of ’95, he had just gotten the rights from Will. Because of the success of Batman, Will understood that Michael had the proper love and understanding of The Spirit. As a kid, I’d always see the character at conventions and stuff, but never knew much about him. But then, obviously, being in an office with Michael, there were comics, and I spent a good portion of my first couple months there just reading everything, starting with The Spirit Casebook, and then the Warren Spirit reprints Those were my education. The Spirit Casebook is huge. This is the Kitchen Sink book, and that’s what Michael would use a lot of, because the story “Ten Minutes” was in it, and a lot of the other main Spirit stories. From that point on, I watched Michael for years trying to set this movie up, from the time I started as his assistant, and then eventually his head of development, and then the head of production. When I was pitching it myself to places, I was amazed at the complete lack of understanding people would have of the character. But we pitched it actively for a long time. And, believe me, people made offers. There was a prime-time animated series offered by

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THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION a big studio. But again, there were all these little caveats like, “You’ve got to make him a ghost,” or, “You’ve got to put him in spandex,” and it was just literally, “Nope,” and we’d just walk away. And this had been going on for ten, twelve years.

DF: What else has Odd Lot done? FJD: They did a great movie called Green Street Hooligans with Elijah Wood. There was a Jennifer Lopez movie, The Wedding Planner and some other movies. DF: How did Frank become attached to the movie, and then did he throw out everything you had and come up with his own story, or did he work with what you guys had been working on? FJD: We had always been under the impression that Frank was going to go do Sin City 2, but suddenly he was available. And then Michael had the first conversation with him, and it just sort of snowballed. It happened very quickly.

DF: Did you guys have an “elevator pitch,” a short summary of the concept you could give people? FJD: Michael did it best by telling them the story of “Ten Minutes,” because it embodied the tone and feel of Eisner. And there was a Sand Saref story. We xeroxed certain stories together, like Sand Saref, to show the best of The Spirit. But the pitch was very simple: “the greatest work in the history of comics, the Citizen Kane of DF: Did Will have any input on early comics.” It was just always presentversions of the story? ed that way, always presented as a FJD: Will had passed away before Green Street Hooligans was an Odd Lot proguy who has no superpowers, who duction that featured a post-Lord of the Rings Frank came onboard, but we had is a middle-class superhero, possibly Elijah Wood. [© 2009 the copyright holders.] spoken with him about the film. He the first Jewish superhero. That was was very much like, “Ah, do whatevhow we pitched it, the average guy protecting his neigher you want.” But at his last San Diego Comic-Con, in July borhood. 2004, myself, Michael, Deborah Del Prete, and Linda McDonough, who’s the other co-producer, along with me, DF: Had many of the producers you pitched to heard of on it—we sat with Will, because we had just finished our the Spirit or Eisner? deal with Odd Lot, and started talking to him. We were FJD: It’s interesting. Michael would call this era “the just announcing the project. Jeph Loeb was originally Golden Age of comic book movies,” and it is. But I would involved, but then he went through that horrible tragedy say, in my 15 years with Michael, the first five years was with his son’s death, and he had to back out. So we sat convincing studio people that the comic book was an down with Will, and the only thing he was really adamant acceptable form of source material. And then you had Xabout was, “Don’t make it a period piece.” That was the Men and Spider-Man. People went, “Oh, these comic only time he sort of got agitated, and he specifically said, books are great.” Everybody wanted a comic book proper“Whenever I wrote and drew anything with the Spirit, it ty, but it had to be a superhero. So that was the next five was of its time. If you go back and look at it, it was always years. And the last five years is when it sort of blew wide contemporary.” That was the one thing he was really firm up. People became open to stuff like Road to Perdition. about. “What else, Will?” “Do whatever you want.” “Hey, there’s comics-based stuff that’s not superheroes.” So to the studios now, a comic book is a piece of source material that’s no different than a novel, a play, or a newspaper article. And now you have guys my age—mid-thirties—guys who are now execs, and who now have that understanding about comics, who look at Eisner and the source material as something to be revered. DF: So obviously, a Spirit movie this was in the works long before Frank was involved. FJD: We went down the road with a bunch of writers. We went down many different avenues. But just, look, this business is silly. A lot of it’s fate, a lot of luck, a lot of it’s putting the pieces together. It really took off once we partnered with Odd Lot, because it gave us the freedom of an independent company getting behind it and putting it together, as opposed to just, we’re going to set it up at a studio. 26 | WRITE NOW

DF: So the story as it appears on screen, where did that originate? FJD: It’s a culmination of Frank knowing what he wanted to do, and then we all discussed it. Everything previous to Frank coming on board was out the door. It was all from scratch. Frank very much knew from the start it was going to be about Denny Colt and Sand Saref. Michael and I had a lunch with Frank in midtown when we first started talking about the movie, and he had all these ideas. And I remember another lunch with Frank—it was me, Deborah, and Linda. They were in New York doing a film, and we met at a restaurant in Madison Square Park, and Frank came, and he had stacks of photocopies of Will’s comics. He started shaping the story by going through the Will stuff. Later, I’d get calls from Frank’s office—because I was

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ODD LOT PERSPECTIVE:

THE DEBORAH Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth December 21, 2008

DEL PRETE INTERVIEW

eborah Del Prete is a longtime comics fan who has had a successful career in Hollywood. She’s directed (Simple Justice, Ricochet River) and has produced over a dozen films, including The Wedding Planner and Green Street Hooligans. She’s a partner (with Gigi Pritzker) in Odd Lot Entertainment, which teamed with Michael Uslan and co. to produce The Spirit for Lionsgate Films. Deborah took some time to tell me how the script to The Spirit was developed. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: When Michael Uslan came to you with what he called “one of the greatest comics properties ever,” you knew he was talking about the Spirit. What had been the significance of the Spirit to you before that? DEBORAH DEL PRETE: I was a life-long comic fan, mostly DC Comics (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.) but when I started to go to San Diego’s Comic-Con when I moved to L.A. in 1992, I discovered Will Eisner and The Spirit. I was amazed by the mature writing and modern style that came from a comic from the ’40s. DF: From your perspective, how did the script and story come about? DDP: Basically, I worked closely with Frank Miller on the script. He wrote a first draft after I told him he had carte blanche to use any of his favorite Spirit stories. We agreed it would focus on the Octopus as the main villain and the Spirit’s childhood sweetheart, Sand Saref.

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DF: What were the biggest challenges in adapting The Spirit to the screen in terms of overall tone and of the characters’ dialogue? DDP: Taking so much rich material (The Spirit comics) and boiling it down to one story. Also, making sure it had a contemporary feel. DF: What kind of notes did you find yourself giving on the script? DDP: I gave the kind of notes I always do. I try to speak for the audience so it’s mostly about when I think something is unclear or if I think there is a logic issue in the storytelling. I think my most significant notes came after we did the table read. At that point, I felt we needed two more scenes—one early in the film with the Octopus and Silken when he’s asking his henchmen why they haven’t found Sand Saref. After I told Frank we needed that scene, he came back with the wacky “foot thing” scene, which I loved. I also felt we needed a later scene with Ellen and Dolan, and one night Frank wrote the father/daughter scene that helps to give the audience a better understanding of the Spirit’s complicated relationships. DF: How did Frank’s unique approach to storyboarding help the development of the script? DDP: Working with Frank is like working The Wedding Planner was a hit movie with no other director. produced by Deborah Del Prete. [© 2009 the copyright holders.] First of all, he completely storyboarded the movie so it made it much clearer to all involved exactly what he’s looking for.

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NOT-SO-SECRET AGENT:

THE DENIS KITCHEN INTERVIEW Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth December 18, 2008

enis Kitchen began his career in 1968 as a selfpublished underground cartoonist, leading to the formation of his pioneer publishing company, Kitchen Sink Press. For thirty years he published creators such as R. Crumb, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Scott McCloud, Dave McKean, Mark Schultz, Howard Cruse, Justin Green, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman and Charles Burns. During these years Kitchen Sink won industry awards far disproportionate to its market share, and sometimes more than any other publisher. In 1986 he founded and for eighteen years served as President of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to defending the industry’s First Amendment rights. Since the demise of Kitchen Sink in 1999, he has diversified his activities. He is a partner with designer John Lind in Kitchen, Lind & Associates and with Judith Hansen in Kitchen & Hansen Agency, literary agencies representing prominent comic artists and writers. He has expanded Denis Kitchen Art Agency (founded in 1990) into an entity exclusively offering original work by Eisner, Kurtzman, Capp and other clients. Here, Denis takes some time to answer my questions about his unique relationship with Will Eisner. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: When did you first become aware of Will’s work, Denis? DENIS KITCHEN: I was too young to have seen the original Spirit newspaper inserts. I first became aware of Will’s work when Harvey Kurtzman featured “Bring Back Sand Saref” in his Help! magazine #13 in late 1961. I was fifteen and pretty damn impressed. I don’t think I saw anything else until Harvey Comics published a two-issue Spirit experiment in 1966. By then I certainly wanted to see more, but there was no organized fandom, no reprint programs, no way to even figure out how many Spirits there were. It was a complete vacuum except for a handful of fans doing mimeo zines, and I wasn’t in that tiny loop. 32 | WRITE NOW

DF: How did you first meet Will? DK: I started drawing my first underground, Mom’s Homemade Comics, in 1968, and successfully selfpublished. Then I started publishing others, the beginning of Krupp Comic Works (later Kitchen Sink Press). Phil Seuling, the impresario of the earliest comic book conventions, became aware of my small Midwest operation around 1970. Phil began distributing Krupp’s titles and also hired me to do custom cartoons for his catalogs and flyers. He invited me to be a guest at his summer 1971 convention in New York City. It was my first and, it turns out, Will Eisner’s first convention as well. I was rummaging through back issue boxes like any other fan when Maurice Horn, a French comics historian, saw my name tag and said Will Eisner was looking for me. I assured him he was mistaken, but he insisted on taking me to meet Will. We met in a private suite and, after quick formalities, Will expressed intense curiosity about underground comix: their distribution, the freedom, the royalty system, etc.

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION with fans and soon Will, clearly uncomfortable, excused himself. I didn’t see him again the rest of the weekend and figured it was the last time I’d ever talk to him. DF: When did you first work with him? DK: I followed up the convention with a letter and samples of other comix. I suggested he might find them more palatable, which he did. Then I wasted no time. I proposed reviving The Spirit. He was skeptical that my hippie market would be responsive, especially after the Harvey newsstand experiment had failed just a few years earlier, but he agreed to let me give it a try.

I explained what we were doing at all levels and he said these were all the things he wished he had had when he started. I tried talking about the “old days” of comics, a subject I was intensely curious about, but he’d drop a tidbit or two and kept coming back to undergrounds. It was a pretty heady experience. Will’s interest was purely academic because he hadn’t actually seen any undergrounds, so we walked down to the dealer’s room where Phil had several tables covered with the latest. Will grabbed one at random, flipped through it and stopped at a particularly explicit and disturbing S. Clay Wilson page. Will blanched. He had no idea just how outrageous some comix were. I normally took glee in seeing undergrounds shock an older generation, but I was suddenly aghast that I was “losing” Will, the new convert. As we debated the merits of complete artistic freedom, a young artist named Art Spiegelman, standing nearby, joined the fray along

DF: What do you think there is about the Spirit that could make the character appeal to a wide audience? DK: Well, to start, Will’s art is so wonderful that it just pulls you in, especially the classic splash pages, the distinctive feathering, the luscious women, the masterful layouts. No offense to Write Now!, but art is the initial attraction for all comics. Then with The Spirit you also have the skillful writing, likable characters, memorable villains, concise plots packed generally into just seven pages. You’ve got romance, action, mystery—the whole package. And, as we’ve seen, it’s timeless. The Spirit has been entertaining generations for almost 70 years.

DF: Have you been involved in the previous attempts to make a Spirit movie? DK: Not really. At Kitchen Sink I optioned Alan Moore’s From Hell, was heavily involved with The Crow, and got Mark Schultz’s Cadillacs & Dinosaurs on CBS, but Will regularly optioned The Spirit on his own during the nearly 30 years that I was his publisher. That included the made-for-TV movie. When Mike Uslan’s group exercised their option a dozen or so years back, they tied it up until the movie Frank Miller just made. So when Kitchen Sink went under in 1999 and my role changed to being Will’s art and literary agent, the die was already cast in terms of The Spirit in Hollywood. However, my partner Judy Hansen and I are working to develop certain of Will’s graphic novels. DF: What was your involvement with the current Spirit movie? DK: Hands off. I’ve met with the producers and Frank and saw his script drafts, but I’m not in the movie DENIS KITCHEN | 33

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WILL EISNER AND THE ART OF by N.C. Christopher Couch

ADAPTATION

ike most creators, especially of popcontent for newsstand comic books. The ular culture, Will Eisner’s Spirit studio had been very successful, producstories would often reference ing lots of memorable properties and well known works of fiction as well making Eisner remarkably financially as celebrities from all fields. Eisner successful for one so young; he startwas saturated in the works of O. ed in comics at age 18, and was Henry and Guy DeMaupassant, only 25 in 1939, when he left the among many others, as well as studio to create The Spirit. Of in the popular radio, music, and course, he couldn’t turn out a movies of his time. Part of the three-feature weekly comic book by fun of reading The Spirit is himself, especially since he was also catching Eisner’s cultural refermanaging the enterprise. He essenences. (“Awesome Bells,” for tially organized a new studio, and he instance.) In a few cases, though, and Iger worked out an amicable Eisner made a point of adapting agreement about which artists might specific stories to comics form in the follow him, and which would stay with context of a Spirit tale. Here, comics his former partner. If The Spirit somehow scholar N.C. Christopher Couch examfailed, then Eisner would be in an excellent ines those cases, and along the way position to return to packaging content shows us how Eisner used his literary N.C. Christopher Couch by James Barry. for comic books. In fact, as it turned [© 2009 James Barry] influences to inform The Spirit in out, “The Spirit,” “Lady Luck” and other general. It’s a great insight into Eisner, and into the art features created for the comic book supplement were and craft of comics writing in general. Enjoy! later reprinted in a variety of Quality comic books. After Eisner returned from service in World War II, his Spirit —DF studio was used more and more to produce licensed comics, including P*S Magazine for the Army. Eventually When Will Eisner was offered the opportunity to create Eisner dropped The Spirit altogether to concentrate on his own weekly comic book as a newspaper supplement this kind of contract work, which was much more profin 1939, he jumped at the chance. He would suddenly itable in the booming postwar American economy (and have the same kind of autonomy that many newspaper post-Wertham comics industry) of the 1950s, the period strip artists enjoyed—the comic would be circulated by a that Henry Luce called “The American Century.” syndicate, and overseen by comics publisher Everett “Busy” Arnold, but effectively Eisner would be his own If Eisner was doing so well in creating original material editor and publisher. The proof would be in the pudfor comic books, why did he move on to doing a comic ding—if the supplement was successful, if enough newsbook newspaper supplement? There was no hint in 1939 papers bought and kept it to make a nice profit for all or 1940 that comic book sales were going to do anyconcerned, then it was a success. But it would all be in thing but grow. (Later in his career, Eisner would say, Eisner’s hands. He would create the lead feature—The “I’ve seen this industry die three times!”, but there was Spirit, of course—and oversee the backup stories that no hint of that then.) The explanation Eisner has offered would fill out the book. most often is that he wanted to create comic books for readers who were more intellectually adult than those Before starting The Spirit, Eisner sold his interest in attracted to comic books. But why did he expect to find the Eisner & Iger Studio to his partner, Jerry Iger, and such readers among the consumers of newspaper effectively abandoned the business of creating original comics? Weren’t these also read by children? The stereo36 | WRITE NOW

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION type is that the Sunday paper gets split up among the family, Dad reads the front page, business and sports, Mom reads the “ladies’” sections, and the kids go for the comics. Didn’t Mayor LaGuardia read the comics to the kids over the radio during the New York newspaper strike? Where were the adult readers Eisner was looking for?

Sunday funnies, either. In the 1930s, the great adventure strips had continuities that ran for two months or more. Even the family strips, like Bringing Up Father or The Gumps might have stories that continued over weeks and months. Gasoline Alley famously featured characters who grew, changed and aged at the same pace as the calendar time in which the strip ran (and continues to run). Most humorous strips, however, confined their stories to each daily or Sunday strip. There really was nothing equivalent to a short story in the newspaper funnies. The strips with longer continuities were novels, or perhaps novellas, while the single-strip stories were more like jokes or vaudeville routines or, perhaps when they were at their best, poems.

They were there; the Sunday funnies offered a variety of strips, aimed at a variety of demographics. Bringing Up Father and Gasoline Alley, with their humorous but also moving and realistic depictions of family life, attracted male and female, adult and child readers. Little Orphan Annie captured the attention of the nation, and its political content attracted the But short stories were everyIn P.S. Magazine, Eisner used appealing illustration commentary from newspapers as where in comic books. They and commonplace situations to help train soldiers well as huge gouts of mail. And weren’t usually very different on how to handle preventative maintenance on the adventure strips, from Milton from each other. Otto Binder everything from engines to sun block. Here’s his Caniff’s atmospheric Terry and the cover to 1956’s issue #44. [© 2008 copyright info.] and C.C. Beck brought humor of Pirates to the lush and sensual a delightful, self-deprecating sort Flash Gordon of Alex Raymond, could appeal to anyone to the adventures of Captain Marvel, and Dada playlets who went to a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. movie, which was as good as those of Ring Lardner appeared in the Plastic everyone. So the adult readers were there, if Eisner could Man stories of Jack Cole. But mostly the short stories only reach them, if he could just get them to pick up the were crime stories, where a mystery would be solved, “Comic Book Supplement,” as The Spirit sections were and the costumed hero would right the wrong and bring often labeled in a box at the top left. the criminal to justice. They were often inventive, as writers like Batman’s Bill Finger came up with a hundred difHis first answer to this problem—attracting the readferent and colorful story settings, and equally clever vilers—is well known. He created the amazing splash pages lains to defeat. But the stories simply didn’t have the that the feature is famous for. (These engaging splash range and resonance of the kind of fiction that Eisner, as pages, which Eisner said were designed to get readers to well as Finger and other voracious readers among the start reading as soon as they saw the supplement, were early comics creators, like Jerry Robinson and Jack Kirby, limited to The Spirit and never appeared in any of the were finding in the collected works of a Poe or a Bierce back-up features like Klaus Nordling’s Lady Luck.) Of or an O. Henry. course, once he had the readers hooked, Eisner had to give them something that they would read, and come In 1948, Eisner actually chose to adapt two stories by back to read again the next week. And if he was looking American masters into The Spirit. A close look at how he for adult readers, as he has so often said, he had to give did this can help illuminate his working methods, and them something they wanted, something familiar but also help highlight some of the reasons the stories in new at the same time. And Eisner had an answer for The Spirit were so inventive and influential. that: he gave them short stories, and not just crime and mystery stories, although there were plenty of those, but When, in the summer of 1948, Eisner adapted these short stories in a variety of genres, told in a variety of two short stories, he presented them as the Spirit’s voices, running the gamut from comedies to ghost stochoices, selected “from his vast library of mystery and ries to parables. intrigue, the works of classic masters in the field.” Each adaptation begins with a dramatic splash page showing This was something readers weren’t getting in the the Spirit preparing to read the story to Ebony. The first, WILL EISNER AND THE ART OF ADAPTATION | 37

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The Spirit of Comics!

THE WILL EISNER INTERVIEW

Conducted via telephone March 26, 2003 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Will Eisner This interview first ran in WN! #5. It seemed appropriate to represent it in this Eisner-centric issue. It stands up to—and actually gets even better with—repeated readings. Enjoy! —DF

rom the dust jacket of the hardcover The Spirit Archives, currently being published by DC Comics:

“Will Eisner’s career spans the entire history of comic books, from his formative days in the 1930s through the 1940s, when he revolutionized narrative sequential art with his internationally famed series, The Spirit, to the 1970s, when he created the contemporary graphic novel form. In addition to his award-winning graphic novels, he is the author of the influential study Comics and Sequential Art.” Or, as Dennis O’Neil says in his introduction to DC’s upcoming The Will Eisner Companion by Chris Couch and Stephen Weiner: “Will Eisner is an Artist.

“He has a vision of the human condition and the means to communicate that vision to us. It is essentially a tragic vision, though not a morose one, and that may be why he no longer does melodrama; in the world that Will has been presenting for the last quarter-century, problems are not solved by violent action and big, fluffy endings are impossible. This is our world, focused and purified and magnified, displayed for our amusement… “There aren’t many analogies, either inside or outside cartooning, for what Will does. We’re not discussing caricature here—rather, something like caricature’s smarter older brother, a graphic strategy that not only exaggerates the exterior but uses exaggeration to suggest the interior.” To which allow me to add: Will is one of the few titans about whom it can truly be said that, without him, there would be no comics artform and no comics industry. It was one of my life’s honors to conduct this phone interview with him. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Will. What are you working on right now? I know you’re in the middle of a project. WILL EISNER: I just completed a book that Doubleday is publishing called Fagin the Jew. It will be published in September, I believe. I just sent off the final art the day before yesterday. DF: That’s not part of the DC Library? WE: DC lost the bid on it. They wanted it, but Doubleday made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. DC always gets “first look” at any graphic novel I do. DF: And are you starting something new now? WE: Well, I always have... I have a file here that says “do me now.” [laughter] I’m just starting another book now. DF: My understanding is that you don’t like to talk about projects you’re working on. WE: I generally don’t, and the reason for it is it dilutes itself if I talk about it, because while I’m working on it, I’m developing ideas and so forth. It just dilutes itself in my mind. DF: At this point, how many hours a week do you devote to work? WE: I work pretty steadily. When I’m not traveling, I work from nine to five. DF: Wow. WE: Every day, five days a week. DF: What, you take the weekends off? How dare you? [laughs] EISNER | 43

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION T back to doing The Spirit, by 1950 I realized I had done all I wanted to do on The Spirit, and the opportunity to expand into teaching material with sequential art presented itself. So I started a company producing instructional material in sequential art, or comics, as you might call it. It lasted for about 25 years, and then in 1972, ‘73, I stumbled into Phil Seuling’s conventions and discovered that the underground artists—I’m talking about Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman and Spain Rodriguez and Denis Kitchen and a couple of others—were really using comics as a pure, literary form, in that they were addressing the establishment mores and morals of the time, and that encouraged me to go back to the area where I wanted to spend my life, which was producing comics or sequential art for adult readers, with grown-up subject matter. DF: Now, the stuff you’d been doing in the interim twenty years was in comics format but in an educational milieu? WE: Yes, what you might call the comics format. Actually, it was the sequential art format. It is the arrangement of images in a sequence to tell a story, and whether you do them on three tiers or two tiers, with nine or six panels to a page, is irrelevant. It’s how you arrange the images in an intelligent and readable sequence to convey an idea or tell a story that is really the heart of the definition, if you will, of what I want to do. And in 1975—or ’76, I guess, somewhere in there—I began doing what I believed was a novel form addressed to adult readers. And out of that came A Contract with God. DF: You’d always aimed at adult readers, even with The Spirit. WE: Yes. Writing for young readers was one of the problems that I had during the Eisner and Iger Studio years, and one of the reasons I went in for The Spirit—which was quite a gamble at the time, for various reasons. I wanted to talk to an adult audience. A newspaper readership would give me that. I was always very impatient talking to the very young readers. I didn’t really know what to say to them. [laughs] DF: You mean talk to them beyond just the basics of superhero action/adventure? WE: Well, candidly, superheroes are one-dimensional characPencils for a page from Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract With God. ters. You can’t do very much with them. And life experiences This art is among the unpublished pieces to be printed in Dark Horse’s upcoming are filled with story material. Everybody’s concerned with surhardcover volume The Will Eisner Sketchbook. [© 2009 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.] vival and the life experience is concerned with that and how WE: My wife says Saturday and Sunday are her days. to deal with it. So it’s a wide-open area, there. DF: Well, that seems to work for you. I’m going to ask you a DF: Now, in different hands, these can be very bleak subjects, bunch of questions that range from the pretentious to the but you certainly seem to do them joyously. picayune. So if there’s anything that you think is too stupid to WE: Well... that’s an interesting point you just made, calling answer— them “bleak.” Every once in a while people do say to me, WE: I’ll give you stupid answers. “Your stories are bleak” or “there’s a noir quality to them.” DF: Thank you. [laughs] Well, okay. You’ve been doing comics That’s French, you know. [laughter] I don’t see it that way. First and graphic storytelling for an amazingly long time and your of all, I’m not a moralist. I’m not really writing books to define stuff is still wonderfully fresh, innovative and exciting. Would human morals. I consider myself doing reportage, reporting to you say there is an overall theme or purpose or direction in my fellow man the things I see. I see a man lying in the street, your work, from the beginning to now? Or has it changed nobody paying attention to him is something I want to turn to over the years? my fellow man and say, “Hey, look at that, look at that. He’s WE: Well, the direction has always been to explore areas that lying there, nobody’s paying attention.” The other thing is, I haven’t been explored before. I guess that’s the way to put it. think it’s necessary to explore the purpose of life. That’s what I believe that this medium is a literary form and that it has not drives us in living. In one of the books I did, there’s a story been used as fully as it could. So all of my experience, all the called “The Big Hit.” At the end of the story, I have this one things I’ve been involved in since 1950, certainly, have been guy saying to the other fellow, “Living is a risky business.” an effort to employ this medium whose language is sequenReally, the whole business of living and survival is very much a tial art—that’s the medium that we’re talking about—in areas part of how we think as human beings, so if you can talk that it had not tried before. For example, when I was in the about that, it has resonance, it means something. It’s useful. military between 1942 and 1946, I realized that the medium What I want to be is useful, obviously. is usable as a teaching tool, very effective as a tool. So I sold DF: Do you think that focus, that direction, comes from the the military on the use of that. It was very successful. I went Depression era and World War II era experiences? 44 | WRITE NOW

THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION WE: Living through the Depression has made me sensitive—as it did with all the people who also lived through the Great Depression—sensitive to the human struggle for survival. This is really the heart of all living. Everybody’s concerned with survival. Anytime you discuss it, it is of importance to an adult reader. Now, one of the problems with writing to young readers is that I cannot discuss heartbreak with a fourteen- or fifteenyear-old kid, because to him, heartbreak is if his father didn’t give him the keys to the car or something like that. Or maybe his girlfriend decided he was a nerd. DF: That’s heartbreak for that kid. WE: That’s heartbreak, true. Youngsters are not concerned with survival. DF: But, it’s different. WE: It’s a different kind of heartbreak. But in one of my books—I think it was A Life Force, where this man is trying to decide what life it all about—I discuss the meaning of living, what is it, what it’s all about. He compares himself to a cockroach. It gave me a chance, again, to expand the capacity of the medium. DF: It seems that certain subject matter that, say, in The Spirit, you may have been addressing in a more metaphorical way, you’ve been getting with more directly, or at least with a different sort of metaphor system, since A Contract with God. In other words, it seems that you did have some of those same concerns when you were doing The Spirit, but your way of dealing with them changed when you “came back”—what it seemed to the public was coming back—with A

Contract with God and so on. WE: Well, one thing we don’t realize is that the artists and writers, like everybody else, grow. They grow up. [laughter] That’s a very interesting point, however, because one of the reasons I never really wanted to do a daily strip was, I discovered that daily strips would not allow the artist to experiment and grow, necessarily. He remained pretty much the way he was when he first started. If you look at the daily strips over the years, the ones that have survived for 50 years, they’re pretty much the same as they were when they started, and there’s no room for experimentation. The joy, for me... the truth of the matter is, you’ve got to love what you’re doing, you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing in order to do it well. If you don’t like what you’re doing, you don’t do it well. Nothing good is ever done without enthusiasm, really. And for me, the opportunity to cut new paths is to try new things. The real excitement for me is to do something that nobody has ever done before, if I can do it. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to invent the wheel, because somebody has already done that, but... [laughs] DF: There’s steel-belted radials, though. WE: [laughs] Okay. But the point I’m trying to make is that the excitement in any medium is to explore new territory, with all the risk that’s involved. And it’s a great risk, because you could spend a whole year working on something only to discover that it’s a bomb. [laughter] DF: To me, looking at your work over the years, one significant change is that you yourself describe as going from a cinematic style to almost more of a theatrical awareness, where people are more “on stage.” WE: That’s an interesting point, very perceptive of you, because I have always been influenced largely by live theater. And the reason for that is that live theater is closest to reality, and all the work I do is pressing for reality. All my work starts out by saying, “Now, believe me…” Even The Spirit was an attempt to create a believable hero, even though he wore a mask, which was kind of an idiot thing. [Danny laughs] I tried to make him believable. Now, the cinematic stuff I did early on was really a practical approach, because while you’re writing, in this medium anyway, you’ve got to be aware of the fact that reading patterns are influenced by other media, and in the ’30s, movies came along and began to influence reading patterns. They added to the reader’s understanding a whole new visual language, influenced graphic literacy, if you will. Movies began using the camera as the reader, so to speak. Or the audience became the camera, and the camera would look through somebody’s armpit, or look down from the ceiling. You had bird’s-eye-views, you had worm’s-eye-views, and so forth. Those are part of the language they were introducing. EISNER | 45

ON THE CREATORʼS LIFE:

THE COLLEEN Conducted via e-mail by Robert Greenberger November 2008

DORAN INTERVIEW

ob Greenberger says:

“Colleen Doran has been a writer, artist, illustrator, teacher, mentor and activist since breaking into the comics field as teen. Today, she is also an influential blogger and a general straight shooter. I first met Colleen at the beginning of her career and we’ve remained friends ever since but this was our first real chance to explore many of her influences and feelings about the business.” To which I’ll add that I’ve had the pleasure of moderating convention panels on which Colleen has been a participant, and her contributions to them always impressed me with her hard-thought opinions and her ability to defend them clearly and passionately. I’m extremely pleased she agreed to sit down and talk to Bob for Write Now! —DF

BOB GREENBERGER: Hi Colleen. Thanks for taking the time to chat. It’s pretty amazing we’ve known each other over 20 years. You’ve certainly come a far way. Your interest has always been more fantasy than science fiction or superheroes, was it that way from childhood? COLLEEN DORAN: I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. The first comics I ever read were superhero comics, and I developed a love for comics because I had a big crush on Aquaman! Aquaman comics were the first I ever bought, and when I made my first money, I got subscriptions to Justice League and Adventure Comics, starring Aquaman. My intention was to draw superhero comics eventually. I was in fan clubs and doing APA zines for superhero comics. I always liked them. BG: Well, I stand corrected. How did you discover comic books? CD: Well, when I was very little, we lived in a fairly poor city neighborhood, and I found some comics under the bleachers at school. I held on to them for dear life. And I would pick bottles out of the trash to redeem them for money to buy comics. But when I was really young, we moved out to a small town where there were no

stores and certainly no comics. And I think my parents threw my comics out, including my carefully saved Sunday Prince Valiant strips clipped out of the newspaper. So, I went for years with no comics, and kind of forgot about them. Then when I was 12, I got very sick with pneumonia, and a family friend brought me a big box of comics, and I was deliriously happy. I was hooked and never looked back! Almost all of them were Marvel superhero comics, but there were some DC Comics in there as well. I read them until they fell apart. BG: What led you to pursue a career as a writer/artist? CD: I won an art contest sponsored by Disney when I was five. I thought I would go to work for Disney. And my mother had been a classically trained artist. She was very supportive and used to give me books about art, and she gave me drawing paper. My father used to COLLEEN DORAN | 51

give me all his old papers from college to draw on. Almost all of my early drawings are on the back of university exams. I wasn’t entirely certain it was the sort of thing people did for a living. I entertained thoughts of becoming a doctor or an astronaut along the way. BG: If I recall correctly, you’re largely a self-taught artist. Was there ever any formal training? CD: Yes, but not until after I had already become a pro. Of course, I had some college, but a couple of years ago, I took some time off to take art classes at an art school—mostly digital classes. I really didn’t get much from the classes themselves, but from the time I got to devote to doing work just as a training exercise. I had not had time to simply study in years. BG: How did you make that essential first sale? What lessons can others learn from that experience? CD: I went to a science fiction convention and saw they had an art show. I was 15. I thought I could do some work as good as what I saw in that show. So, I went home that night, and my mom cut some mats for my drawings and we put them in the show. And I sold some pieces. Also, a lady named Linda Wesley had a small advertising agency, and she saw my work in that show and gave me a job. I guess the lesson is, just get out there and put your work in front of people. No one will find you if you are sitting in a corner being insecure about whether or not you are any good. BG: A Distant Soil was conceived when you were 12. Is it the same story today? CD: No, of course not! If it were everyone who read it would run screaming from the comic shop. Maybe they still do, but they are too polite to let me know. BG: You broke in in the early 1980s when there were very few women illustrators. What was harder, being a teen or a woman?

CD: Well, I’d say being a teen, because 15-year-olds are not women, they are children. Nothing is harder than having to face abuse and discrimination when you don’t have the faculties to understand it, or to handle it. I think I would have handled everything I experienced with a lot more savvy had I been ten years older. As a matter of fact, almost all of the serious problems I ever had in the business occurred before I was 21 years old. Bullies are abusive to people who can’t fight back, and when you’ve got some middle-aged editor or publisher abusing you, it’s a very intimidating thing for a kid. No one pulls that kind of nonsense on me anymore. I still have occasional problems with this or that client, but an adult knows what their rights are, and I can just pick up the phone and ring my attorney now. A child does not even know they’ve been taken advantage of sometimes, or blames themselves for their problems. Perhaps getting into the business so early was an advantage in one way, because I do meet some clueless 30-year-olds who can’t seem to stand up for themselves, or are incapable of reading a contract. Maybe I got my school of hard knocks out of the way early, but it’s not an experience I would wish on a kid. I only regret not confiding in my parents more about some of my problems. I was trying to protect them, because I was concerned about lawsuits and stuff. I had one publisher threaten to sue my family if I left the company, because my family was acting as my management. That was very intimidating to me as a kid. Now I know that publisher was full of crap, and I did eventually leave them. I just didn’t know what my rights were, and tended to blame myself when things went wrong. BG: You avoided DC and Marvel and managed to land A Distant Soil with WaRP. Was this your dream project? CD: I didn’t avoid DC or Marvel at all. As a matter of fact, I was offered a chance to try for a Legion of Super-Heroes gig by Keith Giffen when I was a teen fan of the Legion and working on an APA zine devoted to the comic. I was in several fan clubs, and often went to comic conventions with superhero art in my portfolio. However, I had signed a letter of intent for A Distant Soil with a small press, and had to Hal Foster’s classic Prince Valiant strip was inspirational to the young Colleen Doran. [© 2009 King Features Syndicate.]

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While still a teen, Colleen saw her creation, A Distant Soil, first published by of WaRP Graphics. She has since gone back to redraw these initial chapters. Here, her original covers to the first four WaRP issues. [© 2009 Colleen Doran.]

stick to my word to go forward with the project, even though it didn’t come out for a couple of years. I would gladly have worked for DC and Marvel, and began getting overtures from both companies in 1983. I began doing freelance work for DC in 1984, and for Marvel in 1986. I’ve been working for them both off and on ever since. If I was avoiding them, I wasn’t doing a very good job. I was quite skeptical about doing A Distant Soil in the small press, and told my friends not to buy it when it first came out, because I was not happy with the original version of the book. I had done some work using A Distant Soil characters for several small press gigs, mostly just pinups and stuff, but nothing was very impressive, I thought. I was not at all happy with my early publishers. They were small press, and not at all professional level. It’s always a dream to work on your childhood project and see it in print, but it’s better to be published well and to have confidence in the work you are doing. I wasn’t happy with the result or the publishing circumstances. A short time later, when I decided to start again, I chucked everything and started over from scratch, rewriting and redrawing it all! I am so glad I did that! BG: ADS has endured for two decades and multiple publishers. What speaks to you about the story and characters? CD: It’s a labor of love, obviously. It has a great deal of personal meaning for me, not only because it is something I have been working on since I was a kid, but because I am very much in love with my characters! They’ve been with me so long that it would be very hard for me to just walk away from them. The story is finite, so this is inevitable, but I go slower as I get closer to the end. I am afraid this is separation anxiety! I’ve put a lot of myself and my personal experiences into

the tale, and it is a metaphorical exploration of some of my feelings and experiences in the science fiction community and growing up in fandom, surrounded by such a strange group of people, some of whom were very nurturing, and others who were extremely exploitative and unethical. I think I just expanded on a lot of that weirdness and let it go in the story. I’ve tried to avoid the Mary Sue aspect of it, and I don’t really think any of the characters resemble me much, but some of my life is in there. BG: Talk to me a little about craft. How do you structure a story? Do you ever have to deal with ideas not flowing—or having too many ideas? Do you write a script for yourself and then draw or do you plot and draw as you go? CD: Well, that depends. When I was working for some early publishers, I had to write everything out, and often did full script. But later, I decided this was simply an inorganic and inefficient way of working that was solely for the publisher’s benefit and did nothing for me. What I tend to do now is a synthesis of sketches and copy. I often write free association copy. I almost always did that in longhand on legal pads, but lately I write on the computer. After I’ve written my breakdowns, I start doing thumbnails and script simultaneously. I may even write copy directly in the margins of the original art, and will make changes as I go. I reserve the option of doing a complete rewrite directly on the original art. Being able to write and draw the pages simultaneously means I tend to avoid those problems you get in a lot of comics where script doesn’t necessarily match the facial expressions and body language. I am pretty happy with the vast majority of the series. I found some bits of dialogue I would like to change in the final collection, if I ever get around to doing a masCOLLEEN DORAN | 53

PAGE ONE (6 PANELS) PANEL 1 Establishing shot of the LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER (see Appendix for reference). LEGEND1 LANDSTUHL, GERMANY. PANEL 2 Inside now. A wing of the hospital. Wide shot of the wing with a variety of SOLDIERS in various conditions lying on beds (see Appendix).

In Amazing Spider-Man #574, writer Marc Guggenheim tells a story that shows readers what had become of supporting character Flash Thompson. Flash was serving in Iraq, and his war experiences are juxtaposed against his memories of Spider-Man’s unique brand of heroism.

LEGEND DECEMBER. PANEL 3 CLOSE ON the LRMC SEAL (see Appendix) on a nearby wall. LEGEND IRAQ WAR, DAY 2026. PANEL 4 New angle. We’re on the side of one of the hospital beds. Close enough to the FLOOR to see the crumpled and discarded HOLIDAY WRAPPING PAPER lying on the floor near the bedside. Under the bed itself, we might glimpse of pair of ARMY BOOTS. SINGING (OFF-PANEL) It’s evening in the desert... PANEL 5 CLOSE ON a THE BEDSIDE TABLE next to one of the beds. There’s a CHRISTMAS CARD standing open on it.

Penciler Barry Kitson was challenged to integrate the story’s two separate aspects, one rooted in real life, the other in superhero fantasy. Here’s Kitson’s cover to the issue. Inks are by Mark Farmer.

SINGING (OFF-PANEL) I’m tired and I’m cold...

For this issue, could we deviate from our standard Brand New Day font for the legends and go with either Courier or Times New Roman (or the like)?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN • “FLASHBACKS” (3rd Draft) • MARC GUGGENHEIM • PAGE 2 OF 40

PANEL 6 New angle. The “camera” has moved around so that we can now peek inside the card. The text of the card reads: Merry Christmas! Hope you don’t have an iPod. I put a song on it for you. Seemed appropriate. You’re missed here. soon.

Come back home

And come back safe, alright? Your pal, Peter And the off-panel singing continues... SINGING (OFF-PANEL) But I am just a soldier, I do what I am told... END OF PAGE ONE

The story is written full-script, allowing Kitson to know how much space to leave for dialogue and sound effects. This splash page, for example, is described, but Kitson added the spider web background, linking present-time and flashbacks.

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PAGE TWO (5 PANELS) PANEL 1 New angle. On the bed now. A pair of BRUISED HANDS cradle an iPOD TOUCH. On the display, we see the graphic for the song that’s playing:

From the top of the iPod a HEADPHONE CORD snakes up towards the top of panel. SINGING (OFF-PANEL) And I just got your letter... (cont’d) And this is what I read: You said, “I’m fading from your memory... PANEL 2 Reveal the patient: FLASH THOMPSON. The headphone buds in his ears. He’s singing along. Some bruises on his face. IMPORTANT NOTE: For the duration of this issue, whenever we see Flash in his hospital bed, we never see below his knees. FLASH (singing) “...so I’m just as good as dead.” GENERAL FAZEKAS (OFF-PANEL) Corporal Thompson?

FLASH Sure. I don’t get a lot of visitors. ‘Specially not ones with four stars. PANEL 5 We can now see that Fazekas is holding a THICK FILE as he takes a seat next to Flash’s bed. Flash has a thin smile on his face. GENERAL FAZEKAS You mind if I sit down? FLASH Only if you don’t mind if I don’t stand up. END OF PAGE TWO

Note the fact that Guggenheim calls for Flash to be listening to and watching an iPod. Aside from free publicity for Apple (both in the comic and in WN!), the device places the hospital scenes in the story firmly in the present.

PANEL 3 Flash is taking out one of the earbuds. FLASH Yeah? PANEL 4 Two-shot of General Fazekas and Flash. standing over Flash’s bed.

The General is

Also, Guggenheim’s note specifies how Flash is to be shown for all the present-time scenes in the issue. This relates to the surprise ending of the story.

GENERAL FAZEKAS General Fazekas. You got a minute or ten for me? AMAZING SPIDER-MAN • “FLASHBACKS” (3rd Draft) • MARC GUGGENHEIM • PAGE 4 OF 40

Kitson does detailed, highcontrast (to show the inker where shadows should be) thumbnail drawings to design each page. He then transfers the final design to a penciled page of artwork, inked, in this case, by Mark Farmer.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #574 NUTS & BOLTS | 61

BEING DISCOVERED …AGAIN… AND AGAIN…AND AGAIN… by Alex Grecian

riter Alex Grecian and artist Riley Rossmo are the co-creators of the Proof series, published by Image. (Issue #17 should be out in late February.) Here’s how Alex describes the inspiration for Proof:

“One evening, as my wife and I were having dinner with friends, somebody said he knew why Bigfoot hadn’t been captured yet: he works for the government. Everybody laughed and picked up their forks. I picked up a pen and began writing. The scene I wrote on my napkin eventually became the opening section of the first issue. “I e-mailed the idea to Riley that night and he loved it. “If Bigfoot were real, what would he want? Why would he work for the government? What would they have to offer him? The more I thought about it, the more fully-developed John ‘Proof’ Prufrock became.” But how Alex got Proof published—what in his career led to that moment—is what I wanted to know about. Like everyone else who earns all or part of his or her living making comics, Alex has his story of when that “magic moment” (or series of them) happened, where he went from being an “outsider” to being an “insider” of some kind. He tells that story here. As with all first-person accounts in Write Now!, the idea behind printing such an article is not so a reader can do exactly what Alex or any other writer did (although attempting to do so would make an interesting premise for a story), but to inspire you to look at your own life, skills, contacts, etc. and see how you might be able to use them, as Alex used his. So read and learn (and it wouldn’t kill you to buy an issue of Proof—you might just like it)… —DF My goal, for as long as I can remember, was always

to create comics. But I’m pretty sure I took the most circuitous route possible to get there. I can’t point to a single moment and say “that’s when I was discovered.” But most of the progress I’ve made in my writing career has come about because the right person saw my work at the right time. The catch, of course, is that I’ve done an awful lot of work that reached the wrong person at the wrong time. Or didn’t reach anyone at all. And much of the work I’ve done, work which has fed directly into my writing BEING DISCOVERED ... AGAIN | 65

career, seemed at the time to have nothing to do with writing. Growing up, I didn’t know anybody else my age who liked comic books. When I reached that magic point at which future pros often begin to specialize, there was no one else around to specialize along with me. So I did everything myself. I created my own characters and “revamped” existing characters, wrote stories about them, drew them, practiced lettering... The only thing I didn’t bother with was coloring. After all, some of my favorite comics were black-and-white. I grew up in an environment where creativity was valued. My father was (and is) a professional writer, so that always seemed to me to be an achievable career goal. I wanted to write the Great American Novel. And, in my spare time, I wanted to draw comic books. So, during college, while I busied myself writing prose, I put together a portfolio and went about breaking into the comics industry as an artist. For some reason, it never occurred to me to combine my two career goals

and concentrate on writing comics. If it had, I might not have poured so much energy into drawing them, since that was always the weaker of my creative skill sets. I met Ande Parks while I was in college. He was on the verge of breaking into the industry as an inker and he introduced me to some of his friends. Through him, I met Phil Hester, who was doing some work for Caliber Comics and let me write and draw a two-page backup story for a book he was doing called Fringe. That was my first published work (if you don’t count some uncredited inking assists I did for Ande). I drew pinups for other Caliber books and, after meeting Batton Lash at a convention, sent some pinups and a back cover to him for his series, Supernatural Law. Batton introduced me to the writer, and soon-to-be publisher, Nat Gertler. Before I knew it, I was drawing The Factor for him. Our first Factor story was published in Negative Burn, another Caliber series, this one edited by Joe Pruett. The Factor spun off into its own anthology series through Nat’s new About Comics line, and I drew more of it, then moved on to draw another series for Nat. He was incredibly patient as I began to slow down. Each story took me longer to draw than the previous one had and each story looked worse than the one before it. I was discovering I didn’t enjoy drawing other peoples’ stories. Nat’s a fine writer, but I didn’t want to illustrate his scripts. I wanted to be doing what he was doing, not what I was doing. I learned how to format a script by looking at his and started writing scripts of my own. But I was still concentrating on the wrong end of the process by only writing stories I planned to draw. I still thought of myself primarily as an artist. Meanwhile, comics weren’t paying the rent. I took my portfolio around to ad agencies and print shops and got some work doing spot illustrations. On the strength of some brochures I’d designed, I landed a day job working for a printer/publisher, and learned how to get magazines ready for the press. That turned out to be valuable knowledge when I eventually began putting together a monthly comic book series for Image. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

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While I was working in the prepress department for that publisher, I was still freelancing as an artist and graphic designer and got head-hunted by an ad agency for a full-time gig. I’d done some illustrations for them and had been invited to sit in on a handful of brainstorming sessions as they worked on new campaigns for their clients. Brainstorming new ideas and fleshing

“BUT WHAT DOES DANNY THINK?!” E

arly issues of Write Now! contained editorials from yours truly with the above title. Hey, I had my name above the mag’s logo, so I figured I should make some attempt at providing profound observations (or something like them) for my readers.

But as the WN went on, I realized that I was more interested in the opinions of the people we were interviewing and who were writing articles for the magazine. I already knew what I thought! Still, this is my last chance, in this context, to comment on the state of comics writing, although, I have to say, I still pretty much feel the same way:

So those are Write Now!’s parting words of advice: Write well. There. Got that out of my system. Now, let’s get to wrapping some other points up… I think it’s pretty cool that Write Now! lasted 20 issues, spawned a “Best Of” volume, and a how-to book and DVD (the latter two with Draw! ’s EIC Mike Manley). I think it’s pretty cool that even people who didn’t buy WN knew of it and thought it was the best magazine about writing comics. That it was the only magazine about writing comics was besides the point. Write Now! gave a place for people to come for information about writing comics and related media. I was able to get the best and brightest, as well as the up-and-coming, to talk about writing and the writing life in a way that they rarely get to do. We got people to talk about their creative process, and what they do to deal with setbacks, and to actually show— with scripts and art—how they pull the rabbits out of the hat. To hear that the magazine helped people find their own way and their own voice makes me very proud and happy over what we’ve accomplished.

It all started here, with Mark Bagley’s incredible cover to Write Now! #1.

[© 2009 Mark Bagley.] Comics are an incredible medium. They can tell any kind of story, or even convey mood, feelings, and ideas without the need for conventional narrative. By the same token, I do feel that a writer who sets out to write genre narratives (such as superhero stories) has an obligation to his or her readers to make stories clear and comprehensible. (It goes without saying that the more exciting, intriguing, interesting, novel, and colorful and all those other great things a story is, the better.)

Job #1 of a genre writer is making sure readers know who the characters are and what the status quo of those characters is. Everything else takes off from there. I’m not advocating doing these basics in a hackneyed or formulaic way. As legendary editor Julius Schwartz used to say, “be original.” There are great comics that experiment with time and place and character and convention. This is a wonderful thing. But if your goal is to tell genre stories to people who like genre stories—then do just that. Learn your craft. And if your editors and your peers—or even your teachers— won’t teach you, read up on what the masters of the craft have done in the past—and then adapt the principles they used to a modern audience.

It’s been a great ride, and there are a lot of people to thank. So let me start… Who Does Danny Thank? The list has to start with JOHN MORROW. From the moment I called him and pitched the idea for a writing magazine, he has been nothing but supportive. John and the entire TwoMorrows crew—especially ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON—have always been nothing but a pleasure to work with. Thanks, folks! I also have to thank MIKE MANLEY, first for not getting ticked (or not telling me if he was) that I got the idea for WN from seeing the great work he was doing with his TwoMorrows art-oriented how-to magazine, BUT WHAT DOES DANNY THINK | 69