Write Now! #17 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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THE HIT SHOW’S WRITERS SPEAK! DAN BUCKLEY DAN DiDIO Scripts Scripts & & Art Art by: by:

GRANT MORRISON & MARK SILVESTRI ED BRUBAKER & TONY DANIEL

PETER DAVID ON STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER 74 1

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M AG A Z I N E Issue #17

Winter 2008

Read Now! Message from the Editor-in-Chief ....................................................................page 2

HEROES WRITERS ON WRITING HEROES Heroically Speaking Interview with Tim Kring.................................................................................page 3 Loeb is a Many Splendored Thing Interview with Jeph Loeb .............................................................................page 13

View From the Top Interview with Dan Buckley ........................................................................page 25

In the Hot Seat Interview with Dan DiDio.............................................................................page 30

Feedback Letters from Write Now!’s Readers ...........................................................page 39

Storming the Dark Tower Interview with Peter David ..........................................................................page 45

Testimony Interview with Douglas Rushkoff .............................................................page 48

My Life in Words: What It’s Like to be a Working Writer Michael Teitelbaum tells all about the world of children’s book writing .............................................................................page 54

Nuts & Bolts Department Script to Pencils to Finished Comic: X-MEN: MESSIAH COMPLEX #1 Pages by Ed Brubaker and Mark Silvestri.............................................page 20

Script to Pencils to Finished Comic: BATMAN #570 Pages from “The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul,” by Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel .......................................................page 40

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor-In-Chief Managing Editor Special Thanks To: ROBERT ALISON BLAIRE GREENBERGER TOM BREVOORT Designer DAVID GREENAWALT Transcriber STEVEN TICE Circulation Director BOB BRODSKY FOR COOKIESOUP PRODUCTIONS Publisher JOHN MORROW Proofreader ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON

DAN BUCKLEY KRISTY CHAN KIA CROSS PETER DAVID DAN DiDIO ERIC FEIN STEVEN GRANT DAVID GREENAWALT TIM KRING JAMES J. MARTIN JIM McCANN JEFF NEWELT CHRIS POWELL DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF ALEX SEGURA VARDA STEINHARDT MICHAEL TEITELBAUM STEVEN TICE STEVE WACKER

Script to Sketch to Pencils to Finished Comic: TESTAMENT #6 A page from “West of Eden, part 1: Breishit,” by Douglas Rushkoff, Peter Gross, and Gary Erskine......................page 50

Script to Pencils: CAPTAIN MARVEL #2 Pages from “Reconstruction,” by Brian Reed and Lee Weeks ..................................................................page 59

Creating Comics Step By Step (Part 3 OF 3) Steven Grant concludes his information-packed series on making comic books ...................................................................page 62

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: $8 Postpaid in the US ($10 Canada, $11 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US ($40 Canada, $44 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.

READ Now ! Message from Danny Fingeroth, Editor-in-Chief This might be the most eclectic issue of Write Now! ever. Just take a look at what we’ve got for you: As the cover featuring Hayden Panettierre and Milo Ventimiglia might have clued you in, we have a whole bunch of inside info from Heroes’ writers. Series creator and executive producer Tim Kring talks to us while on the picket lines at the Writers Guild of America strike! And comics own Jeph Loeb, who’s a producer and writer for the hit series (along with a mile long list of other TV credits, including Lost and Smallville), gives us his take on writing the show. Then, Peter David tells what it’s like to be writing the #1 smash-hit comic/graphic novel Stephen King’s Dark Tower! Plus, “When Dans Collide!” We have interviews with Marvel President and Publisher Dan Buckley, and with DC’s Editorial Director Dan DiDio! Both these guys have important things to say that will impact anybody looking to write for either company—or for comics in general! Eclectic enough? Wait—there’s more! Futurist-writer Douglas Rushkoff (Testament) and kids’ novelist Michael Teitelbaum (Scary States of America) talk about writing comics and comics-related material from

their own unique perspectives. And Nuts and Boltswise, we have script and pencils from X-Men: Messiah Complex, by Ed Brubaker and Mark Silvestri; Batman: Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul, by Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel; and from Captain Marvel, by Brian Reed and Lee Weeks. Not to mention some of Rushkoff’s Testament work, with art by Peter Gross and Gary Erskine. And Steven Grant wraps up his pointer-filled “Creating Comics Step by Step” series. If all that ain’t eclectic—I don’t know what is. A quick plug: My new book, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, is out from Continuum. If you dig books like Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow, or my own Superman on the Couch, I think you’ll really enjoy Disguised, too. Now let’s get eclectic—and plunge into this issue of Write Now! Write away!

Danny Fingeroth

NEXT ISSUE:

#18

STAN (THE MAN) LEE is turning 85 this December— and still going as strong as ever!

M AG A Z I N E

• To celebrate, Write Now! #18 will be a special TRIBUTE TO STAN LEE, featuring commentary and articles about Stan’s writing and how it’s impacted all of pop culture! • Among the many folks heard from will be: BRIAN BENDIS, GENE COLAN, JOHN ROMITA, SR., DAN DiDIO, TODD McFARLANE, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, and a horde of others. • Art by Kirby, Ditko, Romita, Sr., and many more! • PLUS: samples of little-seen comics and non-comics writing by Stan, direct from the STAN LEE ARCHIVES at the University of Wyoming! • And much, much more! 2 | WRITE NOW

HEROIC AL L Y SP EAKING

THE TIM KRING INTERVIEW Conducted by Danny Fingeroth via phone, November 2 and 6, 2007 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copyedited by Tim Kring, Danny Fingeroth, and Bob Greenberger

Tim Kring’s biography, from the http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/ website: “Tim Kring is the creator and executive producer of Heroes, NBC’s Emmy Award-nominated epic saga that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities. “Kring grew up primarily in Northern California. Eventually, his parents, who were both teachers, moved the family to Santa Maria on the Central California coast. Kring studied film at nearby Allen Hancock Junior College before transferring to the University of Santa Barbara, where he earned his bachelor of arts degree in religious studies. “Kring later attended the master of fine arts program at the University of Southern California’s renowned film school from 1981-84, then worked his way up in production as a grip, gaffer and on camera crews on various low budget films and documentaries. He continued working in production until selling his first pitch for an episode of Knight Rider in 1985. Kring spent the next 11 years writing feature films, including the sequel Teen Wolf II, series pilots and television movies such as Bay Coven and Falling for You. “In 1996, Kring became a producer on the popular television series Chicago Hope and was elevated to supervising producer on the series a year later. In 1998, he co-created the series Strange World and served as co-executive producer on the drama L.A. Doctors. Kring joined the staff of Providence in 1999 as co-executive producer and signed an overall deal with the then NBC Studios. In 2001, Kring created NBC’s procedural drama Crossing Jordan, which celebrated its historic 100th episode milestone in March 2006. “Kring resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Lisa, who is a social worker, and their two children, Amelia and Ethan. In his spare time, he enjoys collecting acoustic guitars.” Tim was able to take some time from his unbelievably busy schedule to speak to me about his career and, of course, about Heroes. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: Was there a moment or series of them, Tim, when you decided you were going to be a writer, or was it a process? TIM KRING: For me it was really just a process. I was in film school, and I thought I was going to be a cinematographer. That’s what I was really interested in. As a prerequisite you had to take a writing class, and I really got into writing, thought it was pretty cool. But I still didn’t think I was going to be a writer. I pursued the whole idea of being a cameraman and a cinematographer. I did that for a few years out of film school, I worked here in L.A. as a gaffer and a camera operator and that sort of thing, on anything I could get work on—low budget films, commercials, rock videos—that kind of thing. And documentaries. And I finally had a chance to get into the camera union, and it was at that point that I realized TIM KRING | 3

that I didn’t really want to be a guy that punched a clock every day, that I had something more to say than that, and I sat down and sort of went cold turkey on cameraman work, and wrote a script. DF: What was that first script? TK: Well, it was in 1984, when a lot of teen comedies were selling, so I wrote, basically a teen comedy. And I took that and went to all these connections that I had made when I did a student film at USC—all these producers and agents that you meet with, you’d show your student film. And I went back to all of them with this script, and one of them got me an agent off of that script, and I went out on the pitch circuit, where I just went and pitched anything I could, literally anything I could. I heard about any assignment, I went after it. DF: Now, like everybody, you must have had a lot of rejection in those early years. How did you deal with that? TK: Well, I still kept my day job. I was still working as a gaffer and a camera loader and that sort of thing. And I was sort of energized by the idea that I was doing something else other than my day job. I was out there taking pitch meetings and that sort of thing. I’d keep a change of clothes in the back of the car. If I had a pitch meeting, I’d duck into the back seat and put on a better pair of pants and run over to a pitch meeting. I did that for less than a year—maybe nine months—at which point, after writing this spec script, I got my first job. And once I got the first job, I literally never stopped working as a writer after that. It was just continuous after that. DF: What was the first job? TK: The first thing I sold was an episode of Knight Rider. I went in one day and I pitched eight different storylines to them, and the first seven of them were rejected, and the last one—my least favorite, it was the most ridiculous pitch—and that was the one that they liked. DF: Well, of course. TK: And for about ten years or so I worked as a freelance writer in features, television movies, and episodic television. It was all jumbled into one career. DF: And from that first sale, you got continuous work. Aside from talent, obviously, is there any key factor that made people keep hiring you? TK: In my case, I think it was partly that I had a real refusal to be pigeonholed into any particular genre, and my tastes in writing were sort of like my tastes in movies. You like to see an action film, and you like to see a drama, and you like comedy. I couldn’t understand why writers were pigeonholed. I just didn’t get why that was, and I sort of refused to be. Maybe, looking back, it might have been to the detriment of my 4 | WRITE NOW

Mohinder Suresh (played by Sendhil Ramamurthy) in the already-classic season one Heroes episode, “Five Years Gone.” [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] career, but in the long run, I think it was beneficial to have so many different genres that I worked in. Also, one thing that I’m a firm believer in, is I didn’t have a grand scheme for where I was going. I didn’t have any real plan of what my career was going to be. It was literally, all about the necessity of paying the rent, and trying to advance my career was really just to try and get another job. And so I would just literally go after any job that I felt like I was capable of. DF: Now, it’s funny—everything you’re saying sort of goes against a lot of the common wisdom you hear. TK: Really? DF: Well, a lot of people will say to have a goal in mind, although you should be prepared to adapt it—and to get to be known for one kind of thing so that your “personal brand” is not all over the place. TK: Oh, well, I can see that. Like I said, the way I did it might have been some detriment to my career, but I had a very different approach. I sort of refer to it as the “Forrest Gump” approach to writing. I just went wherever the river took me. I didn’t come from money, and I literally didn’t have another skill set that I could really fall back on. So I went where the job was. If somebody said, “Can you write a horror film?” I’d go to the video store, rent a couple of horror movies, figure out the format of them, and come back in and say, “Yeah, this is how I’ll do it!”

DF: You did have the cinematography skill set to fall back on, too. That’s no small thing. TK: Well, yeah, but that’s a very competitive world… You can’t just go out and say, “I’m going to be the director of photography of a feature.” It’s a long, long career to build up to that. So the truth is, I think there was a lot to the idea of necessity just being the architect of my career, the necessity of needing to pay the rent. DF: Let’s backtrack a little. Where did you grow up? TK: I grew up in a small, agricultural community in central California. DF: Your parents were teachers. How did they feel about what you were doing? TK: My father was always just happy that I was employed, and my mother was always worried that it wasn’t a real career, because it didn’t feel very real to them. If you don’t put on a suit, and you don’t go to an office, it’s hard to explain to your parents what you do. DF: It’s hard to explain to your neighbors what you do. TK: Right. I did have lots of things produced, unlike a lot of writers in Hollywood who can make huge amounts of money and never have anything to show their parents or their friends about what it is they do. At least I was working quite a bit in the television-movie business. At the time, in the ’80s, that was a huge, booming business. There were three networks, and each of the three networks produced up to sixty of those movies a year. DF: So that was a good time to break in. TK: It was a big, giant business. I was able to have lots of things produced and work constantly in that world. DF: And how did things progress for you from there? TK: I moved into series television in, around, 1995, and that changed the trajectory of my career quite a bit, because I was no longer a freelance guy hustling for jobs. I then had a job, working on a television show, which gives you a whole different set of skills—producing skills and managerial skills and all that sort of thing. You go from being a solitary writer to a writer that works with a staff, which is a real big change-up for somebody who’s been working for ten years by themselves, taking their laptop to a coffee shop. It’s quite a different lifestyle. DF: Was that job something you set out to get, or was it just offered to you? TK: I set out to get it, because I had written several pilots that had not gotten made, and, at the time, the only people who were really getting pilots made were people within the TV business. That was before the television business’s love affair with feature writers. And so I really felt like I needed to be within the system to get a

Heroes is more than just a hit primetime TV series. Its story also unfolds online, including in a weekly web comic (now collected in hardcover from WildStorm/DC) that supplements each week’s episode. This page from the premiere web comic chapter, “Monsters,” is written by Aron Coleite, with art by Michael Turner and Koi Turnbull, and digital inks by Mark Roslan. [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] pilot off the ground. DF: What was the first show that you were on staff for? TK: I went onto Chicago Hope as a producer. DF: How do you define ”producer,” or is it different on every show? TK: Well, it’s different on every show, but the main idea is that on a writing staff on a TV series, you have a hierarchy that starts at staff writer, which is the lowest writer. It goes through story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, then producer, then supervising producer, then co-executive producer, then executive producer. So there’s a hierarchy, there’s a rank, that you march up. Producers on most shows, these days, produce their own episodes. So you are on set, in the introduction, in prep, and in post-production. You’re representing the written word. TIM KRING | 5

DF: As a producer, are you then doing less hands-on writing and more supervising? TK: You know, it sort of varies job to job in shows. On shows like Crossing Jordan and Heroes—the way I run a show—writers produce their own episodes, and they’re expected, when they’re not working on their own production of their own episodes, to be fully writers on the show. DF: On Crossing Jordan, you had Miguel Ferrer as part of the cast, who’s a big comics fan. Did he ever talk comics with you, or try to get you to do comics-related stuff? TK: You know, I was fascinated by his comics collection. I was at his house one day, and he says, “Hey, do you want to see something?” And he comes out with these unbelievable comics that are in plexiglass. And he had everything. Batman #1, and other rare stuff. There were, like, ten of them that were just so beautiful and worth so much money. So we took one of them and used it in one of the Jordan episodes as a prop. We wrote it in—we wrote the story of how Miguel’s character’s con man father in the show had given him, as a boy, a copy of Batman #1, and then taken it back from him one night—stole it out of his bedroom so that he could pawn it. So we actually used Miguel’s comic book, as the last shot of the show. DF: In all the interviews with you I’ve read, you’ve said you weren’t really a comics reader. So even that experi-

ence with Miguel’s collection didn’t start you actually reading them? TK: You know, one of the problems with being a freelance writer, and a writer in general in television, you just don’t have a lot of time to read. And then I started a family, and right away I had even less time. Sadly, as a writer, I’ve become an illiterate guy. DF: Well, you can’t have everything. TK: It’s one of those tragic things. It’s the same thing with television. I make television, but I probably watch less television than anybody on the planet. I talk about this a lot with other show runners, who say that they literally have stopped watching television since they’ve been running shows. It’s an odd thing to be so involved in a medium that you’re no longer a fan of. DF: It seems like an all-consuming job. You must put in insanely long hours. TK: Yeah. But, anyway, I’ve become much more fascinated by comics since working on Heroes, and I pick things up that are around the office. DF: Being friends with Jeph Loeb must be an education in itself. TK: Absolutely. Jeph is like an encyclopedia, as are several of the guys on the show. They try to out-geek each other. DF: So, the inspiration for Heroes, did somebody say, “What do you want to do next?” Or did you have the initial concept first?

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TK: I had a development deal where I was supposed to come up with shows. You know, I had that sort of gun to my head where I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got to come up with something, and it’s got to be soon.” It’s that typical writer’s pressure, where you’re on a deadline and you’ve got to think of something.

connected to one another?” And all of it in a big kind of bouillabaisse kind of way, led to the idea.

DF: So you deal with these global issues, but in a metaphorical way. It seems like your thing is not, at least in Heroes, to directly deal with actual, real-life political situations. It sounds like you’re more DF: Deadlines can be your involved in the metaphorical friend. aspect? TK: I had been interested for TK: Yeah. It’s metaphorical, mostmany years in the idea of doing ly, although there are certain a large ensemble, and the seriissues that we’ve sort of tapped alized drama had really taken directly into. I saw the episode off with 24 and Lost. And NBC that we did last year, “Five Years didn’t have a serialized drama, Gone”—the one where we went so I saw a kind of need there. I into the future five years—I saw wanted to do a large ensemble that very much metaphorically, drama, because I had done a but very on-the-nose metaphorisingle-lead show, and that has cally, as a comment on the whole all kinds of problems, producsort of post-9/11 Bush administion-wise. Having everything tration world that we live in. So hung on one actor is very hard there were definitely messages. on the production. And this year, this season, we Miguel Ferrer and Jill Hennessy, stars of Tim’s are getting a bit more into the long-running NBC series Crossing Jordan. So I was fascinated by the idea Ferrer is a major comic book fan with a massive idea of this virus, this pandemic, of a large ensemble drama. I which is also something that I collection. He also has co-written numerous started thinking about what think is very much a global issue. comic books, including Marvel’s Comet Man, with fellow performer, Bill Mumy. Ferrer can be would connect with the audiAnd we’re also going to be tackence, thinking about how difficult seen currently on NBC’s Bionic Woman. ling the ideas of global warming, the world is, and how complicat- [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] and those things are going to be ed and screwed up it all is. I started to think, “Well, definitely a part of the message. But the message is, wouldn’t it be great if I could do a show that addressed again, in some ways a more metaphorical one, and in some of these issues?” The big issues—global warming, some ways a more mystical one. You know, the idea of terrorism, diminishing natural resources, and all these people who are connected in kind of mystical ways to things that all of us, when we stop and think about it, one another. are pretty freaked-out about. Here, Tim had to get back to his Executive Producer When I started thinking about the normal avenues of duties. When we picked up the interview, it was early in storytelling in television, the normal genres—a cop show, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, which may or a medical show, a legal show—none of those seemed to may not be over when you read this… be big enough to handle the size and scale of the issues that I wanted to deal with. And that‘s what led me to DF: How are things going with the strike, Tim? the idea of super-powers. I was thinking, well, if there TK: It’s surreal, to say the least. I’m actually picketing my was a cop, at least if he had a super-power, he could do own show right now. something with it. So I sort of came at it in a weird way, from that direction. But I was also really interested in DF: How did you decide whether you were managetrying to have a message in the show, a message that I ment or a picketing guy? saw as a post-9/11 message of interconnectivity and TK: Well, I’m clearly a writer. That’s what got me to the hope—the idea that we are all in this together, and that dance. That’s the stock in trade that keeps me going, what happens 10,000 miles away really does affect us. and so I am, first and foremost, a writer. So I started thinking about, “Wouldn’t it be great if I had characters from all over the world that were somehow DF: Do you feel split at all about it? TIM KRING | 7

DF: I’ve done animation work, and there was always a bible for those series. Is this something you consciously didn’t do, or is that not as common in live action as it is in animation? TK: Well, it would certainly be a luxury that we’ve never DF: I get it. I just wasn’t sure, technically, where show really had the time for. You sell a pilot and the chances runners fit in the structure of things, but now I know. So of a pilot being picked up are very slim. So you put is there a big crowd out there? everything you can into the pilot. In our case, we got TK: Yeah, although we’re split up on different gates picked up in mid-May, and we around the lot, so we’ve been needed to be in production by putting time in, in front of each the first week in July in order to gate, and then the bigger gates make our scheduled airtime. have more. I’m on a back gate And then, we really had to take right now. advantage of what’s called “cross-boarding”—meaning we DF: We’d gotten through your had all these disparate stories early career and sort of an in all these different locations, overview of Heroes. I wanted to and you’d be an idiot to go get into a more nuts and bolts back to those locations in some kinds of things. So… when you scenes that you could shoot at come into a meeting with the the same time if you knew writing staff, say it’s the beginwhat they were and could do ning of the season, the first them all at once. So we knew meeting, do you come in with a that we were going to need at really firm agenda and overview, least three scripts to crossor is it just sort of, “Hey, guys, board, and one script to prep. what do you want to do?” What’s In other words, from mid-May your approach? to the first week in July, we TK: That depends on where you have to have four scripts ready, are in the show. At the beginning written in less than six weeks. of the show, yes, there were lots So the way we did that was to of ideas of where the show was write them simultaneously, to going, and big, tent-pole ideas of dive in and say, “You take this where the season was going. But part, I’ll take that part, you take Heroes is a unique show this part.” And that’s how we because it eats up so much Self-declared science-fiction geek Kristen Bell, who did it. We just drove it to that story so quickly that it really gained notice with the critically acclaimed Veronica model, and then everyone does require an all-hands-onMars series, joins the Heroes cast for 13 episodes in responded to the show and deck, big writers room kind of season two, as Elle, who has electrical powers. [© 2007 that working method really engine that drives the train. So, Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] worked for us. So we’ve conyes, I came in with a bunch of tinued that same idea all the way through the show so ideas at the beginning of the series. Those ideas start to far, unlike most shows, where you send a writer ahead get eaten up really quickly, and then you rely on the to write an episode—that doesn’t happen on this show. writers, the energy of the room itself, the ten people in it. People ask all the time how the show is written, and DF: Is it common for there to be a bible in a live action the truth is, it’s ten or eleven writers in a room for about series? 50,000 hours. TK: Well, I’ve been on many, many series, and there’s never been a bible. The bible is compiled, in a way, as DF: [laughs] Nothing to it. Did you start out with a bible you go, because there are certain things that a writers [a detailed description of the characters and situations room needs to know about what happened in Episode of a show—DF], or did you make one after you had Ten, and as you develop characters, you put together a started working with the writers? bible as you go. There’s usually one writer who is TK: Well, we’ve never used what you would consider a responsible for keeping that. And it’s not something you bible. Now, the second season was, for us, really just a physically take out and read, it’s you go to that guy and continuation of the first. We barely took a break. We say, “Okay, his mother is also this guy’s mother, and took a week or two off, and then we hit the ground runwho is she related to now?” ning again. TK: No, I don’t. There may be a couple of show runners who are non-writers, but most of us are writers, and as I said, when that’s your stock in trade….

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DF: That’s where Wikipedia comes in, I guess. TK: Right. Now, the other thing about a bible on a show like Heroes: I think it would have been a real detriment, because, one of the things that you find on a show that has this much story, is that even if you know where you’re going, chances are you’re going to get there a lot faster than you think. So things that I thought were going to happen in episode eighteen or nineteen of the first season happened in episode six. You eat up story like you can’t believe on a show like this, chewing it up and chewing it up. And the nature of a really strong writers room is that stories become a lot more economical, so things you thought were going to take ten beats you can do in three, and it becomes sort of a game of Name that Tune. “I can name that tune in three beats.” And once you’ve figured out how to name that tune in three beats, it’s really hard to name it in five. DF: When you come into the first meeting of the second season, did you have a general place that you wanted it to end up, or it really just is freeform? TK: The idea is that, toward the end of last season, we started breaking [outlining—DF] episode two, because we had to know where we were going with the various storylines. When we walked in that first week of Season Two, there was really not a lot of, “Hey, here’s what we should do.” We kind of knew where we were going. We had this virus idea for the second volume, and we were very much aware of what we wanted to do with that. Again, I can’t emphasize enough the idea that we write toward big ideas. We write toward signposts, you know? By episode seven, we want to be here, and by episode nine, we want to be here.

of guys who I had worked with on Crossing Jordan, writers that I was bouncing ideas off of the whole time that I was writing the pilot. And then, very shortly after the Heroes pilot got picked up, I hired Jesse Alexander, and he sort of folded into the group, and for about a week the four of us were breaking stories about where Heroes is going. And then Jeph Loeb came and folded into the group, and then the rest of the staff came in, and by that time we had a big, general idea of where we were going. Now, when I wrote the pilot, I knew certain things. I knew that Claire’s father was a politician, and I wanted to get to that, and that Peter was going to be the bomb, and big ideas like that. We had the idea early on that, somewhere in mid-season, Peter needs to go to a character to teach him how to use his powers. I had had this idea of the Invisible Man. So it’s all sort of loosy-goosy, freeform ideas that get thrown up on the board, and you kind of build a structure around them. It’s all just kind of a big mess of ideas. DF: Were there any ideas that you thought were going to be great that you had to just jettison? TK: Oh, sure. It happens literally every day. If there’s nothing else that you stress in this article, this is the most important point: that a series has to be an organic process. If it’s not organic, it’ll drive you crazy, because making a series is such an imprecise science. You have to rely on 400 people who make this show to be involved, you have budgets and locations and special

DF: Big ideas theme-wise, or plot-wise? TK: Plot-wise. One idea for what to do this year is this idea of volumes. Volume One happened to be 23 episodes long, which took the entire first season, and that was something I don’t want to do again, because you end up dragging so much story behind you that, by the time you get to the conclusion, it’s really hard to satisfy the viewers over 23 episodes of something. It’s a lot easier to wrap things up in ten episodes and six episodes. This season, our plans are to do three volumes. The first one is going to be 11, the second one is going to be seven, and the last one is going to be six. DF: So let me just backtrack a second. When you did the pilot, was it just you working on the pilot? TK: Yes. I was completely alone on it. DF: So then the pilot gets picked up. Then you hire a writing staff, and you come into that first meeting with the staff and you say, “Here are my ideas,” or, “Anybody got any ideas?” What do you say? TK: It’s not quite as clean as that. There were a couple

TIM KRING | 9

effects, and all those things conspire against you constantly. So characters that you think are going to work out, that you cast, that don’t work out—then you have to move in another direction. Or you get two characters together with the idea that they’re going to have chemistry, and the actors have no chemistry with one another. So it is an organic process. You have to let the show tell you what it wants to be just as much as you are telling it what it wants to be. If you don’t, it’s just a study in frustration, trying to impose your will on this thing that’s a living and breathing entity all on its own— sort of like raising kids. It just doesn’t want to be what you want it to be. And an amazing thing happens when you let ten other writers onto a project. You have to empower them so they feel like they’re contributing, and so ideas of theirs have to be used, and pretty soon an idea that was totally yours in the pilot becomes owned by ten other people in the writers room. DF: In comics there’s always that debate—“Who created what?”—because of that same kind of collaborative phenomenon. TK: Yeah. So it is this strange collective group project, and I look at the show now, and I sometimes feel very attached to a large part of what we’re doing, and feel a tremendous amount of ownership, and then other huge parts of the show, I feel very much like I’m running alongside of the train as it’s going down the tracks, and somebody else is driving. And sometimes I look inside the train and there’s really nobody driving it. So it’s a very odd thing. One would think that it’s a much more auteur-driven medium, but it really isn’t. DF: Was it like that for all the shows you’ve worked on? TK: Yeah. I mean, there are occasionally guys like Aaron Sorkin [The West Wing] and David Kelly [Boston Legal] who write almost exclusively everything they produce themselves. But they’re not doing a kind of big, serialized engine that eats up that much story. I don’t think that could ever really be done by one person.

DF: How often do the Heroes writers meet? TK: The writers room is an ongoing thing. It ebbs and flows in intensity, depending on what the show’s immediate needs are, but there’s a writers room of some form going all the time. Now, that can dwindle down to three people for a while, especially because every writer produces their own episode. Let me explain what that means. Once we collectively write a script together, it’s compiled by the “writer of record.” In other words, the credited writer compiles that episode, and then that episode becomes his or her episode. They take that compiled material, they go through all the processes of props, musicians, notes from various parties. Then they go through production as the writer on set. DF: Are there notes from all the other writers? TK: There are notes from the writers, from the network and the studio, and then from production. There’s a huge number of notes, because every episode starts off as if it were a $500 million dollar feature, and ends up as a much lower-budgeted television show. Say, for instance, we have a scene, and the script calls for it to take place in a convention center with 8,000 extras. Everybody says they love that scene, they love the idea of the convention center, they love the 8,000 extras, but what we have budget for isn’t a convention center or 8,000 extras, but a Volkswagen—maybe one with a big back seat. “You can do the same scene, exactly, if you can figure out how to put it in the back seat of a Volkswagen.” So that’s the nature of the notes from production. Then the writer takes the project all the way through production, and then post-production as well, being involved in the editing and the mixing and the soundspotting and all that stuff. By the time that episode airs, that writer of record has a tremendous sense of ownership for that episode. That’s why, on Heroes, we have usually only one writer credited on every episode. It’s a unique process. Whereas on most shows, you divide up the season, and everybody gets assigned, “You’re doing episode seven, you’re episode nine, you’re episode twelve,” and they go off and write their episode. This is a very different model. DF: So even though each episode may have one or two names attached as writers, it’s really always a collective process. TK: Right. Now, not every episode is written by everybody, but it’s usually some amalgam of four or five people writing each episode.

10 | WRITE NOW

DF: You said that when you started the show, it was you and three other people. Who were the other three? TK: Well, the guys who came with me immediately were Aron Coleite and Joe Cacaci. Joe Cacaci was my personal assistant, and started writing episodes—he was a writer, and was a writing assistant—and started writing at

Crossing Jordan. Aron Coleite was the researcher on Crossing Jordan, who moved onto that show’s staff the last year, and then was one of the guys that I kicked around ideas with when I was doing this pilot. I launched the Heroes pilot while I was still the executive producer on Crossing Jordan. So, when you’re hanging around with these guys, and they’re your trusted colleagues, you bounce ideas off of them, and pretty soon a kind of de facto writers room develops out of the three of us. DF: Now, you’ve got these writers, you’ve got all these storylines. How do you keep track of everything? You mentioned something about having cards up on a board? TK: Yeah, the writers room has got several boards. One is for the “meta” ideas. It’s usually broken into about six or seven “pods,” and it has all the ideas of what happens in each show and each character. Those cards are on that board. Then there’s a dry-erase board you’re actually breaking the story on, so that you can stand and break the story and write and erase as necessary. And then there’s another board that is a corkboard with index cards of the structure of a given episode, broken into the teaser and five acts. DF: You don’t have any fancy computer programs or spreadsheets or anything to do this? TK: Nothing. The closest thing to that is if there is a writer’s assistant in the room who takes notes all day long, then at the end of the day—the end of the day meaning around midnight—there is a compiled set of notes he or she does, and it’s e-mailed to everybody. DF: Do you still use the old-fashioned stuff because it’s just too cumbersome to try to do it with computers? TK: I don’t know that there is any sort of program to do what we do devised for a computer. Nothing beats the visual of taking an index card and taking the pushpin out of it and moving it over to act three and saying, “I think this scene goes here.” I don’t know how to duplicate that in any other way. And, you know, there is something about standing at a board with cards on it where you really learn to look at a structure in a very visual way. You can tell just by looking at the number of cards in an act whether it’s feeling right to you, y’know? So there’s a lot of time when we’re structuring an episode, and I’ll come into my writers room, and there will be nine, ten people just staring at the board, willing it to be come a story. Minutes go by, and no one says a word. They’re just staring at the board. DF: Heroes has an elaborate web presence. Are you involved with that at all? TK: We have an “official unofficial” website for the show, just to chat. It’s kind of a community chat board. That’s 9thwonder.com. [http://www.9thwonders.com/] And

then there’s the NBC Heroes site. [http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/] That was a big, big, big part of the show from the very beginning. The intention of the show was not just to live on the air. It was pitched and created with the idea that it would have many, many platforms that it lived on, and one of them was the Internet, with the idea of multi-platform story, mass media storytelling. As long as three or four years ago, NBC was starting to ask every show to come up with ways to try and find fans and reach for attention on the Internet, and Heroes just seemed like the perfect project to do that, and it was very much designed with that in mind. So we have an entire department, our transmedia department, that handles all of that. The centerpiece of it was the comic book that we ran online concurrently with the show every week, but we also very quickly got a whole kind of dotcom experience up and running, with multiple websites and alternate reality games, and so on. That stuff is hugely important for us. DF: Do you approve all that stuff? TK: Well, to be honest, it’s too much for me to be involved in every single aspect of it. In the initial planning stages I was very involved. We have a couple of people on the show, Jesse Alexander being one of them, who were the architects of all of that stuff on both Alias and Lost. Jesse came with a tremendous amount of expertise in transmedia, and he took the ball and ran with it. And what ended up happening, and it’s a fabulous story, the success of Heroes coincided with the tremendous increase in the digital division at NBC. There were seven people working in that department when we launched, and within a couple months there were close to seventy people involved. As everybody knows, all of this entertainment is moving towards the Internet, and GE wanted to make sure Zachary Quinto made an indelible mark with Heroes viewers as the watchmaker-turned-supervillain, Sylar. While most of the show's humans who gained new abilities were scared of them or used them for good, Sylar embraced his power and used it for evil. [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] TIM KRING | 11

that they were front and center, and in many ways Heroes became the beta testing ground for how to do that. So anything that we wanted to do, anything that we thought of doing, anything that we even dreamed of doing, they pretty much said yes to, “Go try and figure it out.” So it became like the wild West out here, where we were just making up the laws as we were going along. Nobody was telling us what would and wouldn’t work. If we had an idea, we had a platform to try it out on. It turned out to be a very, very big success for the network.

into series television by pitching ideas, to make sure that it’s an idea that doesn’t just live on-air in traditional network broadcast television. It has to be an idea that has legs in multiple platforms. So I would start thinking about an idea living in multiple platforms, whether that’s games, or comic books, or some form of alternate reality. But it’s very important to start looking at where the whole digital world is going, and realizing that the projects that have the broadest appeal in the broadest number of platforms are the ones that I think the networks are going to be gravitating toward.

DF: How about the comic? Do you oversee that, or have you written any of them? TK: I didn’t write any of the comics, and it became sort of an issue for us, because it was hard enough to just write the show. A lot of the show’s writers were writing them for a while until it became just too hard for us to do. Aron Coleite must have written 70% of them. The compilation is coming out this month [November], a hardback with two covers, one by Alex Ross and the other by Jim Lee. It’s going to be fantastic.

DF: Now, what about if somebody wants to be a staff writer, come on board and join a writers room? You talked about you had your assistants writing, so obviously you’re open to that. TK: I’m a huge believer in that. As far as I can say with any certainty, I think the best avenue in is to try to get yourself into an assistant or intern position. We’ve had people who started as interns, worked their way up to writers’ assistants, and now are on staff. There is a kind of collective quality to any show, where people work closely with one another, and it’s just human nature to want to work closely with people you’re friendly with. So the guys who are hanging around, who are getting your coffee and running off the copies of the scripts, those guys become your friends and your confidants, and you’re rooting for them, and their spec scripts float around among the writing staff, [who give input on them]. There’s a real art to getting your foot in the door and then working with relationships within a writing staff, and that’s very much the avenue that I see as the most efficient way to get yourself onto a writing staff.

DF: Has the Heroes comic given you any desire to write a comic, either Heroes or anything else? TK: You know, it has. And right now I’m in a unique place, because I’m walking the picket line thinking about all the things that I could do, including comics. But while I’m making the show, it’s so hard for me to think of anything else. But it is something that I definitely would like to do. And the second that I have any breathing room at all to take on a separate project, I’d love to do some comics. DF: In terms of aspiring writers reading this, any advice on breaking into TV writing? TK: I think that right now the one piece of advice that I would give is that, if anybody is thinking about breaking

The saga of brothers Nathan and Peter Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar, left, and Milo Ventimiglia) was one of the highlights of Heroes' first season. [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] 12 | WRITE NOW

DF: Anything you want to plug, and/or anything about writing Heroes you want to say in general, that we haven’t covered? TK: What we’re trying to stress right now as much as we can, to anybody who will listen, is that Heroes has this unique format in that we write it and we air it in volumes. Volume two of the show is coming to an end with Episode 11 [scheduled to air December 3], and if you were not able to watch volume two, or it wasn’t your cup of tea, then volume three starts immediately in the next installment, and it’s a chance to sort of start again. So, unlike most shows, which have a single premiere every season, and then a single finale, we actually get to replicate that a couple of times a year, with a chance to get viewers back onto the train of the show. It’s something that I really want people to really understand about the show. This idea of “volumes” is a really unique way of doing series television. DF: Thanks, Tim. This was really terrific. TK: Thank you, Danny. I had fun.

THE END

LOEB IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING

THE JEPH LOEB INTERVIEW by Danny Fingeroth Conducted via e-mail, October 29, 2007 Copyedited by Danny Fingeroth, Robert Greenberger, and Jeph Loeb

Jeph Loeb writes comics, he writes and produces television, he writes and produces movies, he writes and produces animation. He does material like Batman: Hush and A Superman for all Seasons that mine heroes’ classic mythos for neglected gems. From his days at Columbia University film school, where he studied with the likes of Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver and writer/director of American Gigolo and Affliction) and Milos Forman (director of Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), to his work in Hollywood with people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael J. Fox, to much-lauded run as a supervising producer and writer on Smallville, to his time as a writer/producer on Lost, to his current gig of Co-executive Producer and writer of Heroes, Jeph has worked constantly since leaving film school. The fact that in addition to his screen work, his comics work, both in quality and quantity, rivals that of anyone who has ever worked in the industry is simply astonishing. The X-Men, The Avengers, Superman for All Seasons, Spider-Man: Blue, the sales record-setting Batman: Hush, the deeply personal Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, and his latest much-anticipated series, Ultimates and The Hulk, are just part of his comics resume. Tim Sale, Jim Lee, Ed McGuinness and Michael Turner are just some of the superstar artists he has been paired with. Jeph has won four Eisner Awards and five Wizard Fan Awards. Jeph has devised a career for himself where he has a variety of options in a variety of media, which for a working writer is the best of all possible worlds. Here, he speaks, among other things, about his role in and his feelings about the runaway success that is Heroes. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: Jeph, do you or Tim Kring (or anyone else) come to a writers’ meeting at the beginning of a season with an agenda/outline for that season? JEPH LOEB: We have a pretty good idea where we are going for the next three seasons. Obviously, year three is clearer than four, etc. But, as we’re doing this interview, only the fifth episode of year two has aired and we’re working on episode 17. So the lead-time is pretty fantastic. The biggest change this year was Kring’s idea of incorporating the volumes into a season. So now the viewer isn’t waiting for 23 episodes to find out who killed Hiro’s Dad. It will all be cleared up and dealt with by Episode 11. The next volume begins with 12 and ends with 18. The last pod—which we are talking about now, is 19-24. More like arcs in comics that become trades. It’s working great. JEFF LOEB | 13

DF: Was there a bible for the series before you started writing it, or did the bible come about as you were writing? JL: There were lots of notes and pages of meetings— and that all got incorporated in a bible that is constantly being updated. The truth is that the folks at Heroes Wiki (http://heroeswiki.com/Main_Page) are about as good a source as we are! DF: Tim seems to see Heroes as his vehicle to influence the world in a positive way. Do you (and the show’s other writers) share that outlook and sense of purpose? Does it spill over to the actors? JL: Absolutely. It’s part of the job. Kring has an agenda to make a difference—both politically and environmentally—and we pepper that in very carefully

to what we’re trying to accomplish. It makes for a kinder atmosphere—and hopefully a better world. DF: You’re Co-executive Producer as well as a writer on Heroes. What exactly is a Co-Executive Producer, at least as far as Heroes is concerned? JL: The same thing as everybody else—I work to make the best show we can. That starts with an idea, then the break, the outline, the script, the production meetings, the casting, the production itself, post with music and f/x and finally delivery. Kring has set up a system where while everyone works on every script, the name of record (the credit) takes it through every step of the way. It’s an enormous responsibility—but a terrific chance to work your craft. DF: Do you consider yourself a Hollywood writer who does comics, or a comics writer doing work in Hollywood, or something else altogether?

Hayden Panettiere was one of Heroes’ breakout stars, playing Claire, the indestructible cheerleader. The catchphrase, “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” helped propel the series into the forefront of pop culture. In the new season, she’s once more a cheerleader, now in California, and still gaining new understanding of how her amazing abilities work. [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.] 14 | WRITE NOW

Masi Oka portrays Heroes’ Hiro Nakamura, a fan of American comic books and science fiction, who embraces his newfound powers. Hiro recognizes that his power comes with responsibility, and that awareness inspires his actions. [© 2007 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.]

JL: I consider myself a storyteller. My dad was a stockbroker for 35 years, never sold a story in his life, but he was a storyteller. So was my son, Sam. It’s what we do and folks seem to like it. DF: In a comic, the final product, even with input from editor and artist, is pretty much what the writer hands in. Is it frustrating at all to go through the TV series group writing process? JL: Well, I’d argue that for most writers, the process in comics is very hands off. They don’t have the relationship with the artist or editor that I strive for, largely because most comics need to just get done. The deadline kills the creativity. It’s part of the reality of comics. But, it’s also why there are so many bad comics. Sorry, minor rant there. Television needs the writer’s room. Particularly at Heroes. It’s just such a group effort, I can’t see it any other way. The greatest. DF: One “problem” the X-Men comics had to deal with is the proliferation of mutants, so that being a mutant stopped being special. Do you have to, or think you might at some point have to, deal with a similar issue with Heroes?

JL: Well, if we had 40 years of Heroes I might agree. HA! Talk to me after Season 5. Besides, we kill them almost as quickly as we introduce them too! [laughs] DF: You are, needless to say, extremely disciplined, as evidenced by all the stuff you write. Any tips for writers who may not be so blessed with time and energy management skills? JL: Please. I’m the worst. Call Geoff Johns. He’s the only one I’ve ever met who can come to the office, sit down, say he’s writing this much today and does just that. Me? I just wait until the last minute and flush it out of me! Gah! That sounds awful! DF: What keeps you writing comics? I would imagine you could make more money with your time if you, say, got involved with another TV series or a feature film. Or am I wrong about that? JL: Absolutely a ton more money in TV and film. But I do comics out of love and it’s fun. It doesn’t take nearly as long. It can’t—given how much money I make in TV and the responsibility there. But, I’m very, very lucky that [Publisher] Dan Buckley and [Editor-inJEFF LOEB | 15

Chief] Joe Quesada at Marvel put up with my other career. It’s why putting me on a monthly book isn’t such a good idea, and why I work with guys who are so slow—it works in my favor. Now, with Hulk, we’re going to test the system because that has to be monthly. I guess... [laughs] DF: You manage to work with a lot of different people and some reputedly difficult personalities (I’m talking about in comics here), yet get along well with just about all of them. What’s the secret to that? JL: I treat everybody with respect (or try to). If you are hired to do a job, then do it. I will cheerlead for my crews/teams because I believe in them. In comics, the worst stuff I’ve done is when I don’t know the artists—fill-ins in particular which is why I won’t do them anymore. I believe in the talented people we’ve assembled. And I’m lucky to have Richard Starkings and Comicraft with me as my lettering and design team from the beginning—they save my ass about every day. Thanks, Rich! DF: How is working on Heroes similar to working on a big comics crossover story? How is it different?

JL: It’s not really similar. Big crossovers are still trying to get the monthly book to follow a single plot. Heroes has at any given time six-to-eight stories going. Eventually they will collide, but at first it’s mosaic storytelling. I like the differences. DF: If you had to give up comics writing or TV writing, which would it be? Why? JL: I don’t know... what would I be doing instead? If the answer is sleeping then... see ya!! DF: Is there any type of writing (subject, medium, genre, etc.) that you’d like to try that you’ve never done? JL: There’s a novel in me somewhere... a play... but I’d really have to walk away from comics and movies and television to have that kind of commitment. Someday. I’m not cooked yet. DF: Any inside info you can give about the Heroes Graphic Novel? JL: Well, that it’s not a graphic novel! I’ve tried to get this clarified, but the media just took off with it. It’s a

16 | WRITE NOW

collection of the stories that were done online. But they’ve been all digitally remastered by Aspen (Mike Turner’s company) and the book has covers by Jim Lee and Alex Ross. It’s like 400 pages long. I’ve seen an unbound copy and while I didn’t have a great deal to do with it, I’m really proud of the work. Aron Coleite and Joe Pokaski really ran that show—and with JG and Rich at Comicraft, Aspen, WildStorm, Nanci Quesada and Chuck Kim—it all came together pretty sweet. DF: Heroes has a very elaborate web presence. Can you discuss the overall web strategy for the series a little? JL: It’s tied together from Day One. Tim and Jesse Alexander hatched it and we’ve all tried to keep up with it. Since online material is a flashpoint for the WGA [Writers Guild of America] right now (this interview is being done on the eve of what might be a writer’s strike), it’s hard to be very positive about the work since it is so fantastic... but it pays very little or nothing at all. I brought Mark Warshaw over from Smallville and he runs transmedia [the usage of material in a variety of outlets] initiative. It’s an

enormous undertaking—everything from action figures to Christmas ornaments to novels to the online experience, that falls now to Mark. DF: I believe you share a writing studio with a couple of other writers. While it’s common for artists to share a studio, writers are generally more “loner” types. How did you end up in a studio situation, and how do you think it benefits your work? JL: Empath? It’s a treehouse. A magic clubhouse. It’s kind of like Doc Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. You can’t really see it unless you’re “one of the few.” It’s me, Geoff Johns, and Allan Heinberg. Brian K. Vaughn has a Jr. Empath card to come by anytime. Seriously, we just go there and knock around ideas. Writing alone sucks. So it helps to have great heads to knock around your stupid ideas. Unfortunately, Geoff’s got a movie, Allan is on Grey’s Anatomy and I’ve got Heroes, so we don’t see each other as much as we did. But, we’re still working to get Clea free from the Nameless Ones, don’t you worry! DF: You’ve managed to channel the grief from the loss of your son into inspirational, creative work. Is

JEFF LOEB | 17

The cover to Hulk #1, written by Jeph. The art is by Ed McGuinness. The new series features an energetic take on the incredible one, complete with a red version of the character. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

there anything you can say to people going through their own loss or grief, especially anyone trying to be creative and inspired through an intensely trying time? JL: Yikes... I’m not the person to ask about that. It’s an entirely personal experience for everyone. I miss Sam more every day. So... I do my best to incorporate our love for each other in my day-to-day. It’s never going to get better. The trick is making it less worse. DF: Anything else you’d like to say about Heroes or writing?

DF: Anything you want to plug? JL: Some really fun comics are coming. Joe Madureira and Chris Lichtner’s work on Ultimates is astonishing. Ed McGuinness is killing on the Hulk, and when we get done with Ultimatum, well, it’ll be pretty wild what’s happened to the Ultimate Universe. I still can’t believe they’re going to let us to do it! So much fun! Over on the other side, I wrote the “fall finale” of Heroes, Episode 11—that ties it all up just before Christmas. It’s a total “you can’t do that on television” episode and I’m very proud of the work the team did and that Allan Arkush, the director, did on the show. It’s something folks will talk about for a while. DF: Thanks, Jeph. This has been great. JL: Thank you, Danny, and happy holidays, everybody!

JL: Just that I’m very lucky to have an audience for my stories. I’ve never taken that for granted. I love what I do—if I had to work in an office and hope someday that I got a window to look out... I’d kill myself... just BLAMMO.

18 | WRITE NOW

Heroes, as if we had to tell you, airs Monday nights on NBC, and is also viewable on line at http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/video/episodes.shtml

THE END

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20 | WRITE NOW

X-Men: The Messiah Complex, Chapter One, launched the first Marvel mutant-title crossover in years. The event kicked off with a one-shot written by Ed Brubaker, and boasted the return to the X-Men of superstar artist Marc Silvestri.

X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX NUTS & BOLTS | 21

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ler.

ler glances bac

htcraw 7 NARR: Nig

5—Nightcraw

thing... Wh 6 EMMA: No

ulder.

uld be close by

ind him.

thing? We sho

ng Scott’s sho ns, still touchi

u picking up any

ma Frost. 5 NARR: Em

4—Emma frow

4 SCOTT: Yo

ps.

beh s, with Emma tt, at the control

3 NARR: Cyclo

3—Tight on Sco

X-Men. 2 NARR: The

w t h i a d o u e b -l s o w e í l l o p en l il l u s t r a t i o n , w i t h so m e co o ge a p c p a e r a co m i c . s t p a g e w il l b e f t h e p nr t i e d sky. Th e a c t u a l f i r g e s 2 na d 3 o the night-time on w ha t s i p a ring fast across p a g e p rs e ad and around Blackbird soa d TW O The n a E blurred below es. N O pag S h E P A G world arcing and the top of bot the , oss uds acr el clo 1—Wide pan s and through r -- Zoom! over mountain m, as they soa They’re flying clear above the ed. rs and moon ving at top spe them. The sta into Alaska, mo ng ssi Cro – ckbird CAPS: The Bla 1 LOCATION s e . g oh t p a e r s a rc o s b Cyclops a t sp r e a d n i t i this mission. l a r b e e lo w t h seat assembled for Th e s e p a n e s s seats. In a m that’s been tea the ts and copilot see tt pilots. are in the pilo the ship, we ler Sco ide as raw Ins er htc el. uld ) and Nig his sho gel on An now 2—Wide pan d is for m han or a the vis g of both , placin just the d. And behind (no mask on, leaning forward e for a ed, arms crosse Angel costum we see Emma behind Scott, , who looks bor the classic blue and white rine lve Wo is to k to that look: Across from her ks now . Or maybe go bac . Here’s a link loo – whoever he Angel in forever /archangel-bigcostume4.jpg haven’t seen me while, since we nyxmen.net/images/costu can http://www .un

Note how the characters are introduced by name, and also given a bit of dialogue that establishes each one’s mood and personality, unobtrusively telling (or reminding) readers of who the heroes are. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MESSIAH COMPLEX #1

X-MEN

h o m C p l xe Ms s i a ba X -Me n : Sce rip ker t by Ed Bru

The 13-chapter storyline revolves around the birth of the first mutant child since the events of House of M, which saw the Scarlet Witch reduce the mutant population from millions to 198. Note how Ed’s script gives Marc flexibility in setting the scene, and even in deciding what outfit the Angel can wear.

P A G E TH R E E 1—Scott frow

ns as his han

1 SCOTT: We

2—Wolverine

looks skeptic

2 WOLVERIN

ds grip the con

don’t know wha

al, keeping his

E: He’s got a

trols, the wor ld whizzing by around

t it is, Warren

. Not yet.

them outside

arms crossed.

point, Summe rs.

We know nex

t to nothin’ abo ut this place. nd to get there. 3—He leans back, crossin g his arms, look across from him ing out the ship on his left, glan ’s window on ces his way, his right side. frow ning. Emma, 4 WOLV: Now Emma can’t rea d any conscio us thought… Which means blocking her som e device is out… Or there ain’t any peo ple down the 5 WOLV: Eith re. er of those sou nds like a trap . 6 EMMA: The re is a third opt ion, Logan. 3 WOLVERIN

4—Scott pulls

E: An’ yet we’ re breakin’ the

back on the con

7 SCOTT: No.

trols, glancing bac

We don’t eve

speed of sou

k at Emma.

n want to thin

k about that. 5—Nightcrawl er is perched up on the edg windshield of e of his seat the jet, eyes now, his hands wide, looking dow n. Outsid pressed against e, orange and the 8 NIGHTC RA red glow from WLER: Mein below. Gott… 9 NIGHTC RA WLER(linked) : I’m afraid, Sco tt…

For a less experienced artist, Ed might have been more specific in his panel descriptions. But with consummate professional Marc doing the pencils, there’s no need to give more than the briefest instruction. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

22 | WRITE NOW

veys dow n as it sur , its jets pointing skan town (not a ckbird hovers Ala air above an e or so. The Bla P A G E FO U R the pag in t . the f fee ns) hal tow like eighty sized Alaskan 1—Big panel, g about fifty or e moderately ow. It’s hoverin from two or thre the scene bel rmath of a take reference like it’s the afte It’s a mess, real one, so just ntryside, look cou burning. the it, and r the trees around oldering, cars turned ove and n tow the s sm The center of gs on fire, tree ldings, etc. re are buildin ed walls of bui fire-fight. The under collaps e is the feeling rred corpses really want her with a few cha e, so what we ard the issu the out es lick up tow oke and flam in detail through e Sm . plac else g this thin We’ll be seeing more than any and disaster, of destruc tion it hovers. in the matter . Blackbird, as have a choice hat we may not CKBIRD: …T 1 FR OM BLA back in her eyes, leaning and closes her to her temples s her fingertips put ma Em , s. 2—Inside there, alive. ks a little nervou people down chair. She loo … There are hear them now – wait – I can 2 EMMA: I can 3 EMMA: Ter

rified…

ts his finger as Cyclops poin on his mask, down, pulling forward, looking ning lea is an g. 3—Log dshield, scowlin toward the win ’ warzone. ks like a friggin 4 LOGAN: Loo re – now. Kurt down the and you t an, I wan 5 SCOTT: Log e thing, Slim. 6 LOGAN: Sur star t to fade ears as they d of smoke app ulder, and a clou htcrawler’s sho Nig bs gra 4—Wolverine out. ’s go, elf. 7 LOGAN: Let 8 SFX: B A MF

Note how Nightcrawler’s exclamation of disbelief at the bottom of the previous page “pays off” in the “reveal” of the burning landscape in the first panel of this one. This is where the combination of words and images that is comics is on fine display. Ideally, a comic’s creative team wants every page of every story to promise and deliver like these do, in terms of plot and/or characterization and/or spectacle. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] .] l Characters, Inc [© 2007 Marve

X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX NUTS & BOLTS | 23

ching er hand is tou trols and his oth d is on the con er, as one han P A G E FI V E over his should ces glan tt 1—Sco ard. p your eyes on the dashbo vivors, and kee some buttons erage! Find sur close aer ial cov rren, give me 1 SCOTT: Wa ever did this! ugh the open for who whipping thro , and wind is rs are opening hydraulic doo the e, por t rail on plan k of the d holding a sup han one 2-- In the bac d, fighting the win now , his wings Angel stands compar tment. wind. tt through the Sco to k bac shouts the wall, as he it! Already on 2 WARR EN: g over the burnin ecially cool way arcing in an esp k of the ship, rs out of the bac soa el Ang 3— the town. wreckage of k, s the stick bac Scott, as he pull of the jet are clos ing. k t and smiles at co-pilot’s sea doors at the bac nds up into the all ser ious, as usual. The s 4—Emma bou d the ship. He’ preparing to lan ers for me? Scott? No ord what about us, ma… 3 EMMA: And truth here, Em to find out the ng goi are I and 4 SCOTT: You ks like… loo it t wha t isn’ nd pray that it 5 SCOTT: …A overlooking the in a clearing n for a landing ound here, ird hovers dow burning town in the backgr ckb Bla see the e shot, as the wid can a We e, s. tsid 5—Ou ing pine tree lder smo e town, near som Angel soaring over it. n and maybe eve this . “ tant didn’t do “…That a mu 6 CAPTION:

On this page, Marc has modified Ed’s art instructions so as to tell the story in a slightly different way than the script specifies. Needless to say, editor and writer trust Marc’s instincts in a case like this, but the entire team must make sure that the page’s text still works with the modified art. If not, it must be rewritten to do so. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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THE END

VIEW FROM THE TOP:

THE DAN BUCKLEY INTERVIEW Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth, November 11, 2007

From Dan Buckley’s official biography: “Dan Buckley is President and Publisher of Marvel Enterprises, Inc., the home of Marvel Comics. “A native of Fort Edward, New York, Buckley’s schooling includes a BA from St. Lawrence University and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. While studying in Japan, the self-proclaimed “comic geek” was graced with a career-driven epiphany, leading him to decide to approach the comics industry. Buckley entered his first tenure at Marvel in the international licensing division and eventually became a vice president for marketing services. “From Marvel he moved on to the Omnicon Group, Inc., a network of globe-spanning marketing agencies, gaining invaluable experience in marketing and communications. In 2003, Buckley returned to Marvel, the company with which he “felt at home” and had absorbed working knowledge of all its many creative facets. As the publisher, he was charged with sustaining and growing all areas of Marvel publishing and reaching out to both new and lapsed readership. “Since his return, Publisher Buckley has worked alongside Marvel’s editors and managers to invigorate the core Marvel Universe titles and characters. The growth of the Avengers books has been particularly satisfying. He is especially proud of the creation and proliferation of the all-ages Marvel Adventures line of comics that provide content-conscious material for younger readers and their guardians. This line has resulted in both healthy trade and far-ranging library programs. “Recently, Buckley’s efforts to increase graphic fiction readership have brought in such media giant partners as Stephen King’s Dark Tower and the Halo franchise. He and Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada continue to build what they see as a new “mindscape” at Marvel, and further grow the burgeoning legitimacy that the comics industry is now beginning to enjoy.” While not a hands-on comics creator, Dan is certainly an important force for determining what the media

giant that is Marvel Comics publishes. As such, it’s of relevance to aspiring and working writers to get some insight into how and why he makes the decisions he does. We were pleased that Dan took the time to answer our e-mail questions. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: Dan, the title “Publisher” used to mean the guy who owned the publishing company. Now, it’s less specific. Why are you called publisher instead of simply “President”? For that matter, where does President put you in the Marvel structure? DAN BUCKLEY: To be very honest, I really don’t know why I reentered the fold here at Marvel with the title of Publisher. I could have very easily had a more traditional corporate VP moniker like the ones you find in DAN BUCKLEY | 25

all the other corporate divisions. All I can say is that it is a cool title, and it is one that makes me feel like I will be truly connected to the Marvel lore because it feels more participatory. The cool part about being the Publisher is that I am the only one here at Marvel with the publisher title. There are a couple of other divisional presidents, but only one publisher. As for corporate structure the president title denotes that have I full budgetary responsibility for the publishing division here at Marvel. There are other divisional presidents who have similar responsibilities to the Board of Directors.

ticipating editorially and even as a writer in the comics, whereas before that, the publisher’s influence had more to do with general policy and less with hands-on creating. Where do you fall on this spectrum? DB: I am definitely involved in the creative aspect, from the annual planning process and approving the general direction of the key characters. However, I am far from being the only voice in the room when it comes to that planning. I am pretty much out of the daily process with the exception of making sure that we are putting the right talent on the right books. To be very honest, I don’t need to worry a great deal about the creative direction because Joe Quesada and the rest of the editorial staff and talent are the best of the best. I would say that I am much less involved than my predecessor in the creative end, but much more involved than any of the presidents or publishers that preceded him.

DF: How is what you do similar to what Martin Goodman or, say Jim Galton did when they ran the company? How is it different? DB: Tough question, because I am not quite sure what Mr. Goodman’s and Mr. Galton’s day-today activities were during their tenure. I imagine that they both had responsibilities that DF: Are any recent or reached into the daily upcoming storylines the activities of the operating result of an idea of yours? entity like accounting, DB: Franklin Richards: Son legal and general personof a Genius is semi-autobinel management because ographical. But seriously, I their roles were closer to do make contributions in ones of a company CEO meetings and at our than a divisional retreats, but I would not say president. The growing line of all-ages Marvel Adventures titles prothat there are any specific From the stories I have vides the company with an entry point for younger readers. story lines that are a direct heard over the years I Cover art to issue #1 is by Michael Golden. result of an idea of mine. would assume that I am a [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] bit more involved in the DF: Do you, or did you ever, planning process and the have any desire to write or draw (or edit) comics promanagement of talent. Their biggest issues were dealfessionally? ing with newsstand distribution, while our challenges DB: Nope. I have no talent in that respect. for today are primarily focused on getting the right talent on the right projects. Our distribution, while more DF: You’re a fan as well as an executive. Is that a limited, is much easier to manage because we are help or a hindrance in doing your job? blessed with a dedicated and hard working hobby DB: Being a fan in my role is a huge plus. It allows retail community. me to speak intelligently to our consumers, retailers, editors and talent. I could not imagine doing this job DF: Your immediate predecessor was famous for par26 | WRITE NOW

without having some working knowledge of the Marvel characters and their Universe. DF: What did you do at Marvel your first time around? DB: Well I moved around quite a bit during my first run at Marvel. Let’s see… I started in International Licensing for Publishing, then ran our Reproduction Department, moved into Manufacturing/Purchasing, then to Marketing for Publishing, then I was off to Fleer where I headed up the Marvel Trading Card and Collectible Card Game business units, and then I ended my first run as the VP of Marketing for Publishing & Online. Whew! DF: Why did you leave? DB: Quite simply I was tired. The bankruptcy had taken a lot out of all of us. It was emotionally draining. On top of that I figured I should go out in the world and see what it would be like to not work in comics.

it for two or three years.” Can you expand on what you meant by that? DB: Not much to expand on except that the editorial and creative teams have been doing a good job of generating excitement and keeping the momentum. The Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, the “Cosmic” line (“Annihilation,” Silver Surfer, Thanos, Super Skrull, Nova, StarLord, etc.), and the Ultimate Universe have all had exciting stories that have been well received by fans and retailers. DF: What’s your relationship (professionally, not personally) with Joe and the rest of the editorial staff? Do you sit in on editorial meetings and retreats? Can you—and do you—overrule editorial department decisions? Do you actively make editorial policy? DB: Joe and his team run creative… they are the storytellers and stewards of our properties. Yes, I do sit in on the meetings as often as I can, and I run the semi-annual creative retreats, but I am one voice in a room. I will at times overrule something if I think it is a poor decision for the long-term standing of a character, but I don’t make those decisions in a vacuum either.

DF: How would you say Marvel has changed from your first tenure to now? DB: This is a very simple answer. It is a much more practical business where upper management stays focused on running a profitable operation. Another major difference is that we DF: How would you charare always being chalMarvel made news—and sold lots of comics—when they acterize the difference lenged to grow and support signed to produce comics based on the best-selling Halo video game. The project has attracted major creators such as between Marvel and DC the business. Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev. Cover to Halo: Uprising #1 these days? I would like to add here [© 2007 Bungie, LLC. All rights reserved.] is by Maleev. DB: We sell more books. that it is still Marvel Comics, and the creative and operaDF: You seem to be interested in initiatives aimed at tional vibe in the editorial group feels similar to the getting kids interested in comics again. How does this creative legacy developed by Stan, Jack, Steve Ditko, fit in with your overall vision for the company and the John Romita, Sr., and such, in that we seem to be industry? To play devil’s advocate, how has the superoperating with a speed wobble which keeps everyone hero comics industry gotten to the point where aiming on edge and excited in a good way. This is something titles at kids is seen as a novel, risky thing? we never want to lose here… it is unique. DB: Our vision is simple… get new readers, and new readers come in all forms. The two areas we have DF: You mentioned in your recent ICv2 interview that chosen to focus on are bringing in new readers, Joe Q was challenging the editorial team for two or including new readers who come to us via our comics three years about storytelling, and you’d been “killing DAN BUCKLEY | 27

adaptations of properties like the Dark Tower, Halo and Anita Blake. Aiming superhero comics at kids is not a novel concept nor does this concept reflect any new trends in our industry. Ever since Dark Knight and Watchmen our industry has been targeting an older demo, and this was only reinforced by specialty shops whose job is to get as much revenue from one consumer as possible. Kids don’t have a lot of disposable income… young adult males do. Now I don’t think it is anyone’s fault that we as an industry skewed away from kids… the market simply took us there. However, the incredible mass market success of Spider-Man and X-Men in non-comics media have provided us with new opportunities to get kids to read comics, and I will be damned if we are not going to take advantage of the billion dollar public awareness we have been provided. DF: You’ve mentioned that the Essentials books are popular with kids. Is there anything you can do with that information as far as producing new comics? DB: Not really. My conclusions here are pretty unscientific and unsubstantiated. I know that they make great gifts for kids because they dig the fact that the books are huge and that they can also use them as coloring books. At least that’s what my nephews tell me. DF: Do you see Marvel focusing on superhero and action-adventure material for the foreseeable future, or do you imagine the company will take part in a widening of the market and try different subjects and genres? Would, say, Marjane Satrapi, writer-artist of Persepolis, or Jimmy Corrigan’s Chris Ware ever have a place in a Marvel publishing lineup? DB: We will for the most part stay in our wheelhouse, which is superhero/action-adventure comics. However, we will continue to examine third party properties to see if they are a good fit for bringing new readers into the graphic fiction genre. That being said, I have to say that I could not be happier with the success that Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi have experienced. They are great storytellers who deserve the critical and fiscal success they are experiencing. This success only shows the depth and breadth of the graphic fiction category. DF: How involved are you with Marvel’s movie and TV ventures? DB: We leave the movie and TV business to the professionals on the West Coast. They know what they are doing—just check out the Iron Man trailer and you’ll see what I mean.

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Marvel initially entered the “urban fantasy” market through its relationship with the Dabel Brothers Studio, who produced a line of fantasy titles for the company. Marvel itself now produces the popular Anita Blake series. Cover to issue #1 is by Brett Booth. [© 2007 Laurell K. Hamilton] DF: Marvel seems to be working more efficiently lately to coordinate the comics with Marvel movies. Has that resulted in more sales for the comics and/or TPBs featuring the characters in those movies? Or in more sales in general? DB: We communicate very well with Studios and Licensing, and I would say that these efforts have been a great deal of help in increasing our sales in the TPB and HC areas. DF: While comics of the past could certainly be criticized for over-explaining and recapping things, many of today’s comics do just the opposite. (While Marvel has text recap pages at the beginning of each issue, I have a feeling many readers skip them.) Does the buck stop with you as far as determining how much re-establishing of things goes on in each issue of a given Marvel title? Is there a general company philosophy about that? DB: Re-establishment policies are driven by Joe and

the senior editors. I will step in when I think that we are consistently ignoring “reestablishment,” but I leave the case-to-case issues to the editorial staff.

practical insights that you could never imagine. After that, write and draw whether you are getting published or not. Dedication is part of the process. If you don’t want it more than the DF: The manga “phenomeother guy then you generally non” attracts female and will not get that break. young readers to comics like Remember Brian Bendis and hasn’t happened for years, Mark Millar toiled away on but not, for the most part, to independent books and third comics put out by Marvel tier superhero titles for years and DC. Aside from starting a before they became “overnight separate manga line—as DC successes.” has done with CMX—what Hard work and networking can Marvel and other pubare key to success. Yes, you lishers learn from manga’s also need talent but that is a reach? given. DB: What we have learned is As for MCP, we will be that anybody will read showcasing new talent for graphic fiction as long as it is Marvel in these books but good and relevant to the most of these folks are workreader. Now we have to ing professionals who have expose more people to this been in the industry for at form of storytelling so that least a couple of years they realize how compelling, working on their own unique, relevant and creative projects with independent it is. publishers. Our new reader initiatives, Lastly, no you don’t need to All Ages and select licensed be a Hollywood writer to Marvel recently revived its Marvel Comics Presents title, properties, came directly out write for Marvel. Our biggest mixing serials with stand-alone stories, spotlighting of this realization. contributors grew up in popular as well as little-seen characters, and trying out comics. They include Brian new creative talent alongside established pros. Cover to DF: What’s the most fun Bendis, Mark Millar, Jeph issue #1 is by J. Scott Campbell [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] about your job? Loeb (comics first), Peter DB: Creative retreats and seeing David, Ed Brubaker, Matt pages before anybody else. Fraction, Jeff Parker, Zeb Wells, Dan Slott, etc. We simply want talented and creative people working DF: What’s the least fun? for us, and we really don’t care where they got started. DB: Approving invoices. DF: What are you most excited about that’s coming up DF: If it were up to you, would you stay in this job for the at Marvel? rest of your working life? DB: It isn’t just one thing: DB: It depends on how much longer my working life is. • Spider-Man: Brand New Day • Red Hulk DF: What advice can you give to aspiring writers, artists, • Secret Invasion and editors looking to break in at Marvel, and into • Uncanny X-Men #500 comics in general? Do you have to have a Hollywood • Ultimates 3 pedigree, at least to write for the company? Where does • Ultimate Origins and Ultimatum Marvel Comics Presents fit in as far as showcasing new • Dark Tower: The Long Road Home talent? And much, much more! DB: Aspiring artists, writers and editors… first go to college, all of you—yes that includes you, uber-talented penciler DF: Thanks for taking the time, Dan. This was great. phenom. While in college, see if you can get internships DB: Hope your readers got something out of it, Danny. with any of the publishers. Yes, you will be doing munThanks for the forum. dane mindless tasks, but you will also be seeing the process from top to bottom, which will provide you with

THE END

DAN BUCKLEY | 29

IN THE HOT SEAT:

THE DAN DiDIO INTERVIEW Conducted by Danny Fingeroth, November 6, 2007 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copyedited by Bob Greenberger, Danny Fingeroth, and Dan DiDio

As VP-Executive Editor, DC Universe, Dan DiDio has been responsible for implementing sweeping changes to DC’s heroes—reinvigorating old favorites and introducing new ones—and guiding such bestselling series as Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, and the upcoming Final Crisis. Before joining DC, DiDio was with the computer animation company Mainframe Entertainment where he served as freelance story editor and scriptwriter for the series ReBoot and War Planets. Later he became its Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs, overseeing the development, distribution, marketing, and promotion as well as merchandising and licensing of all Mainframe’s television properties. Among the projects he developed were Weird-Ohs, Beast Machines, Black Bull’s Gatecrasher and Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother. He began his television career in 1981 at CBS, where he worked at a variety of positions before moving to Capital Cities/ABC in 1985. At ABC, DiDio served as Public Relations Manager for the three New York-based daytime dramas, then moved to Los Angeles to become Executive Director of Children’s Programming. There, he was responsible for Saturday morning programs and After School Specials, serving as Program Executive on such series as Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Hypernauts, Madeline, Dumb and Dumber, and ReBoot. Dan also cowrote Superboy, with Jimmy Palmiotti, just before getting his staff gig at DC in 2002. Dan was able to take some time to talk to us about how he got to where he is today, and about the state of comics in 2007, 2008, and beyond. —DF

Dan DiDio, as rendered by Phil Jimenez. [© 2007 DC Comics.] DD: No. Actually, the one person who was into that was. When DC was doing New Talent Showcase, [editor] Sal Amendola, and I had a number of exchanges with him on just trying to get a project ready for New Talent Showcase. I never made it to the final cut, but he was extremely helpful and encouraging to me.

DF: When you were a kid, did you think you’d be a writer, or somehow involved creatively in media? DD: Well, I was always writing and submitting. I have a stack of rejection letters dating back to 1976, so I guess there was something in me that always wanted to write.

DF: What was your first entertainment or media job? DD: I started as a page at CBS. I was still in college at the time, and I had the opportunity to get a part-time job as a page at CBS in New York. The first thing I was working on there was The Warner Wolff Show, which was a local New York sports show. I had a chance to work with Warner and his producer, Carmine Cincotta. It was a real fun experience, because it gave me a real behind-the-scenes look, and caught all the fun of the entertainment business.

DF: Any favorite rejection letters? DD: One of my favorites was from Paul Levitz, in which he completely shot down an idea with, “Stock, basic plot with no real value.” DF: Did he encourage you to resubmit?

DF: Now, what led you to do that? Were you a communications major? DD: I was a communications major at Brooklyn College. I was operating as a teacher’s assistant for one of the graduate classes, and ultimately I had seen and watched somebody

DANNY FINGEROTH: Where are you from, Dan? DAN DiDIO: Born and raised in Brooklyn. Went to Tilden High School there, and then went to Brooklyn College.

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from CBS Human Resources have a water-spilling accident on the desk during the whole speech, and his attention was completely on the water that was pouring onto his lap rather than talking to the kids. Well, about three months later, I went to another seminar, and the same guy was there. And I approached him, and he had the typical Human Resources veneer on of just talking at you rather than to you. And I brought up the water incident, and it broke him down to the point he started laughing, and we had real comfortable conversation, and he’s the one who turned me on to the page job at CBS. Ultimately, when CBS offered me a full-time position, I wound up taking it and finishing school at night, because I looked at how people worked and how people progressed in television, and I saw how, realistically, it was more about who you knew, and where you worked, and how you were perceived, more so than the actual degree. I hate to say it that way, but it’s true. And the reality is, I was able to go from one position, from a per diem position to a full-time position there, and then we were off to the races. My most influential teacher was a man by the name of Robert Schimmel. He was the one who I worked as a teacher’s aide for, in Brooklyn College. Also, he taught my script-writing class, and he was also the producer/director of the Gary Moore Show which, during the ’50s, was one of the top shows on the air. Just sitting and working with him and listening to how things were assembled for TV shows was one of the things that made me want to learn more about the TV business, and become involved in it.

art, even if what they’re really enjoying is the story. DD: I was always most intrigued by Stan Lee, always, and I still think what he accomplished in comics stands head and shoulders above what anybody else accomplished. Not to detract from anyone, but to balance the business and balance the promotion side, to be as creative as he was, and as prolific as he was, and being able to control it and really focus it is really a testament to one man’s vision. I mean, you can sit there and argue about who created what, and who did what. And I understand that’s an important issue. But I look at the aggregate, at Marvel Comics as a whole, and what Stan meant to Marvel Comics as a whole, not just as far as the individual characters, but to the entire company, and then ultimately to the entire industry… Jumping ahead for a second, when I first got to DC, I had no publishing experience at all, so it was really starting on the ground floor and learning the business, and one of the games Paul Levitz and I played when I first got here was that I did a breakdown of the first three years of Marvel Comics, about how characters were introduced, how they were rolled out, what types of stories they were telling. It’s an interesting study to see how a universe is built, and, more importantly, how it was built on the fly. You can see how they were experimenting and changing and working to get the characters going in the best possible direction. And we go back to the thing about me studying writers— I’m always more interested in the written word and how

DF: You were a page at CBS. Is that sort of a fancy term for intern? DD: A paid intern. Basically, the page positions at CBS were handling seating of the audience, as well as more like a temp service within the company. And what’s great about that is that you really get a chance to work various departments, everything from videotape management to the CBS Morning News, the reception desk, and so on. And then, from there, I started getting involved with special events, working the Thanksgiving Day parade and the New Year’s Eve show. Then after that... it’s a long litany of bouncing around. It’s a 21-year journey. I went in there cold, and I got a chance for an interview. They just happened to need somebody at the time that I had gone in there. And what I did, then, is I rearranged my college schedule in order to be able to work full days at CBS. And I always say that Warner saved me because he wrote a letter to my French teacher getting me out of my French final, which I would never have passed, and I’d still be in college now. [laughs] The thing for me, also, with that, I always loved writing, so even while I was working my way through CBS, and then ABC, I was finding ways to submit and try to write things. My greatest accomplishment as an amateur writer was that I got an honorable mention in a Twilight Zone magazine contest submission. DF: In an Inside the Comics Writers Studio online interview, you mention that you gravitated, as a kid, to writers more than artists in terms of the comics you were reading. That struck me as kind of unique. Most kids will first look at the

One of Dan’s earliest projects as a TV network executive was the CGI-produced series ReBoot. He transitioned from working at ABC to working for Mainframe, which produced the series—after ABC canceled it. [© 2007 Rainbow Animation, Inc.]

DAN DiDIO | 31

rials. This was all still in New York. From station relations, I went into public relations for three years with ABC’s New York-based soap operas, so it got me a chance to be on set at a regular time, and work with actors. It was an incredible learning experience for me, but I was always writing. And here’s the strange part of the story. At the time, I was also helping out a friend of mine, Jimmy Palmiotti—and, actually, Joe Quesada at that time, also. Jimmy and I had grown up in the same building in Brooklyn. So when Jimmy and Joe started Event Comics, I helped do a bunch of press releases for them. I DF: That’s unusual for a kid. Kids had done some writing for things usually notice the art first. like Entertainment Retailing, which DD: You’ve got to understand that was a Wizard magazine, and Comic I have absolutely no artistic talent Book Week, a Fred Greenberg magat all. So, for me, anybody who azine. I did some work for Nick can even draw anything is already Barrucci, also, when he was doing head-and-shoulders above anythe Creator’s Universe card set. So thing that I could ever accomplish. I found ways to keep my toe in the So I know I can possibly write as comic book water just because I well as someone in the field, but I enjoyed it so much, but my real job know that I’ll never be able to was TV. One of the things that I love draw as well as anybody. So I best about television is children’s think that’s one of the reasons television, which was one my ultiwhy I’m more interested in the mate goals in the television busiwriting side, because I know that’s ness. Again, it’s about persistence. I something that I can strive to applied for the same California job achieve and work at. Of course, three times over the course of everything is a combination—the three years, to get into children’s telperfect storm of character, writing evision programming. To move from and artwork is the perfect storm the East Coast to the West Coast of everything, and those are the within a company was practically books that transcend, that are the impossible in those days, and I was evergreens. But, for me, the charmoving into programming with acter always comes first. There absolutely no programming experiwere six writers, when I got into ence, which was also impossible in comics, who were just exploding Once Dan assumed editorial direction of the those days. But somebody who was on the scene, and I would follow DCU, he “roadmapped” (a phrase he coined) a champion for me over on the them from any book to any book, storylines—events that lead readers through a West Coast, who spoke very highly regardless of what it was, because sequence of stories—throughout many titles, culminating in Identity Crisis, written by of me, was a woman by the name I had complete faith in their storynovelist Brad Meltzer. Cover art to issue #1 is of Linda Steiner, who I had worked telling abilities. They were Roy by Michael Turner. with in New York. What happened Thomas, Gerry Conway, Steve [© 2007 DC Comics.] was that, one position that I was Englehart, Steve Gerber, Marv passed over for opened up six Wolfman, and Len Wein. And, of months later. And at that point they were tired of interviewcourse, all roads lead to Stan. But by the time I was getting ing or something; I just wore them down and got the job. into comics, all his stories were out there, and they were [laughs] So then I was the executive director of ABC chilthe Bible from which all these other guys drew. There are dren’s programming for two-and-a-half years. certain people who transcend the business, and Stan’s such a person. As soon as you see his name on a comic, you buy With every position comes a certain level of authority that it. The same way for me, growing up, you see Jack Kirby’s allows you to do whatever you want in certain areas, name or Neal Adams’ name on a book, you know you’re whether you’re right or wrong. [laughter] And one of the going to buy that book, regardless of what it’s about. things that happened to me early on at ABC was that, I had just started, and I was new to the position, and new to givDF: So, from being a kid who loved comics and science ficing notes and the whole process of production. And I was tion, how did your journey end up at Mainframe Animation sitting down with the writers of our new Free Willy animatand California? ed series. These are Emmy Award-winning writers who’d DD: The dotted line goes from CBS to ABC. At ABC I worked done things like Little Mermaid, if I’m not mistaken. in what’s called “station relations,” which I worked with all I said to one writer, “This script isn’t funny enough,” as the affiliate stations, providing them with promotional mateany true executive would do. [laughs] And the writer things are spoken, all the twists and the turns. Growing up I would love the Alfred Hitchcock shows or the Twilight Zone. I loved the twist ending, the play on words, the allegorical statements being made, the high fantasy, the science fiction. Those were the things that really brought me in, and when I got into reading comics, those are the things I was looking for. I found that there were certain writers that really played into my sensibilities and told the stories that I wanted to read. I stuck with the character because of the writer more so than the artist.

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stopped taking notes, put his pen down, stared at me, and said, “Describe ‘funny.’” And I said, “It just didn’t seem to work.” And he goes, “I’ll tell you what. Until you know what you’re talking about, I’m not going to bother taking any of your notes.” And I said to myself, “You have two options. You can use your position of authority and tell him that ‘you have to take the notes or else I’m going to put in a recommendation to change writers on the show,’” which doesn’t seem to make much sense, “or you can actually do some research and figure out what you’re talking about, and come back and argue the point.” So I went home and ripped the entire scene apart and rebuilt it, figured out where the lines were weak, thought about the pacing, and came back with a two-page argument about why I believed it wasn’t funny enough. He flipped through it, threw it aside, and said, “Okay, now I’ll take your notes.” The point is, if you’re ready to make a statement or argument or a position about why you believe something should be done, you should research your position as much as possible. DF: So you had an executive position at ABC on the East Coast, then you moved to an executive position on the West Coast? DD: I was manager of publicity, then I moved into the director position on the West Coast. It was the next step up the ladder, but was just in a completely new department.

tionship on what we thought the series should be. And we basically did it together. Believe me, this was his show top to bottom. His ideas, his direction. Ian was truly a visionary not only in regard to the series, but also in the whole field of computer animation. What he did for computer-animated television is really what set the standard, really paved the way for everybody else to come. I can’t speak highly enough of this guy. He’s one of the people I considered a true friend, but also one of the true innovators in computer television. DF: And then you were a freelancer for a couple of years? DD: For a year. I did some development work for a couple of studios. I was doing ReBoot, and then I was also starting the development on a War Planet series, which was the next show that I was taking over at Mainframe. DF: But, in general, you prefer having a day job? DD: I love having a day job. I’m terrible, terribly insecure working alone at home. If I’m not talking to somebody at the office, I feel forgotten. You’re wondering whether or not you’ve fallen out of sight, especially in the TV business. You’re a flavor one minute and you’re forgotten the next. Also, I love the interaction—the exchange of ideas. I love talking to people, talking things out, the exchange of conversation, which is what really gets the creative juices going.

DF: Then you moved from ABC to Mainframe? DF: How did you end up at DC? DD: Right. Disney had purchased ABC, DD: I was working at Mainframe and and we knew that they were going to had pretty much gone from just be running our children’s department, Countdown to Infinite Crisis was one of working as a freelancer on the writing so they were asking us to close down. the major stops on DiDio’s roadmap, taking side to opening their L.A. office, and At that point I had to clean the slate of everything from Young Justice/Titans: then ultimately handling the sale of all the product that was non-Disney the product both domestically and related to make room for all the Disney Graduation Day through Identity Crisis, internationally. Then I took on the shows that were going to be brought in. building them into an explosive story One of the shows that I unfortunately which spawned four miniseries addressing marketing and publicity area, as well. And I worked closely with all the prohad to cancel was ReBoot, which was the state of the DC Universe. Cover to ductions, as well, because I was the the first computer-generated show on C.I.C. #1 is by Jim Lee and Alex Ross. primary contact in the U.S., and that television, and I basically learned my job [© 2007 DC Comics.] was eating up a lot of my time. I was on it, with all the mistakes and flying a lot. I was on a plane three weeks out of every month, aggravation that come along the way. So when ABC announces that they’re going to shut down between Europe, Asia, Canada, and the U.S. The problem our department, the people from Mainframe called me up was that I was living on the East Coast, but doing all my and said, “Hey, do you want to give this a shot? Do you work on the West Coast. I had moved out to the West Coast want to be the scriptwriter/story editor for the new season for a while, but the family wanted to get back to the East of ReBoot that we’re going to create for Canada?” I never Coast, so Mainframe was gracious enough to allow me to be had written script or story edited on a regular basis. bicoastal for two years. But it did take its toll. And I was on a plane out of Newark on September 11, 2001. Got trapped DF: So why did they offer you the gig? in Canada for about five days because I couldn’t get out of DD: Because the producer, Ian Pearson, who was also the the country. The flying started to get a little more tedious after CEO of the company, and I had struck a real symbiotic relathat, although, in some ways, it was a little bit easier,

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Dan’s roadmapping was all pointing to a cataclysmic event, Infinite Crisis, carefully timed to the 20th anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the maxiseries that started all the Universe-altering events.[© 2007 DC Comics.] because the airports were empty. But it was exhausting, still, because I was flying just as much. I was starting to wear down. And I had a friend named Sander Schwartz, who at that time was the president of Warner Brothers Animation. Sander and I would have lunch or dinner once a month, just to play catch-up. I knew Sander during my ABC days. He first pitched me Wheel of Fortune 2000 when I was at ABC, and then during Mainframe, we had worked together on Heavy Gear, which is the first Sony show that we brought into the studio. Then we worked on some Max Steele episodes, and then, ultimately, on the last thing I did with Sony before leaving, which was, ironically, Spider-Man. Sander introduced me to Paul Levitz. Or reintroduced me, because I had pitched some things to him before. I went to have dinner with Sander, and Sander sat me down with Paul, then excused himself and left and had dinner at a different table. [laughter] So it was just me and Paul, and we talked about our likes and dislikes and all that, and over a period of about four months of conversation, Paul came up with an idea on how to bring me into DC. DF: Independently, at the same time, you were writing Superboy with Jimmy, right? DD: Yeah, and the first thing I did when I came on staff was cancel Superboy. I hated the writing. [laughter] DF: And Jimmy had enough work, so why not, right? DD: Yeah, he can always find work. Me, I’m not so sure about. [laughs] DF: So you come in, and I know your title is Vice President Editorial. Are you, in effect, editor-in-chief? DD: No. Because the imprints are so distinct here at DC. When I first walked in, “Vice President Editorial” was really trying to work out the coordination between talent, promotion, story a little bit, in some ways, between Vertigo, 34 | WRITE NOW

WildStorm, and the DC Universe. There was a lot of discussion about where talent should be, and whose schedule was free, what should be on the cover of Previews, what’s going to get the focus of attention, where the marketing budget is going to be spent, where the push is going to be. And there was no real interaction between the three imprints. So what I was trying to do was try and create a hub from which everybody coordinated, and be able to capitalize on the talent and promotional opportunities between the three imprints, and also make sure that we were taking full advantage of whatever story and characters that are out there. So that’s where I first came in, because during the first year, I was still in the learning process of what was going on. And then, over the course of the year, Mike Carlin was looking for a break for his position as VPGroup Editor. And I was ready about then to make the move into my current role as

Executive Editor. DF: You’re very involved with story, which I think of as an editor-in-chief’s job, but I’m not so much interested in titles as in functions. DD: The function really is to lend a focus and a direction, a sensibility, a style, a tone, and a voice for what the DCU stands for, and what direction we’re heading. When I got to DC, Editorial was in a position of “open to buy,” which means that each editor can purchase whatever projects come his way. So what you have is a bunch of people sitting around waiting for people to pitch ideas. And while it opens you up to a wide range of ideas you really never get the full compliment of creativity that you hope will be coming in the door. You’re never really as open to new people and ideas as you believe yourself to be, and you’re still working with the same talent with which you always have. DF: But aren’t you constantly deluged with ideas from writers looking for work? And weren’t the editors generating ideas themselves? DD: I don’t know how much the editors were generating ideas, themselves. That was probably more prevalent in offices like the Batman group, or the Superman group, because they were responsible for the advancement of a group of characters. DF: They had a franchise. DD: Exactly. So it was easier for them to say, “Hey, I need a Huntress miniseries, I need a Batgirl mini.” And they had go-to people for that. I found that, again, just from the system, that each one of the groups was rather established in regards to the talent pool that they drew from, so it was a bit limiting in regards to who was going to work on Batman, or who was going to work on Superman and Justice League, and all the ideas were based on who the

editor liked to work with more so than who would necessarily be the best person for the job. And everybody was very possessive of their talent. So if somebody was working in the Batman group, and someone wanted that writer for the Justice League, there were walls keeping the editorial groups from co-operating on such things. And one of the first things I wanted to do was say, “Okay, let’s find the best people for these books rather than just finding the people who you like working with. We have to be much more aggressive in finding the right people, not just the people who we’re most comfortable with.” DF: Did that also involve searching out new people? DD: Absolutely. The industry’s a little unforgiving in that we don’t have those places anymore where we’re able to test and cultivate talent. The anthology books have gone away, and unfortunately, with the way the industry is so diverse, and so many ways that people can get published these days, more so than the past, the idea to be able to bring people and be able to nurture them becomes less practical, which is disappointing, because it seems very limiting. On the other side, though, I also like to consider DC as one of the premium places to work at, so we should be able to pick from the cream of the crop. So there are so many comics being created that, if we see something that’s intriguing or interesting, we should be aggressive in finding those creators, and see how they’re able to apply their craft to our material. DF: DC’s official policy is “no unsolicited submissions.” Is what you have to do, then, find an editor to ask you to submit? DD: The good part about it is that the editors are always out there looking and are always trying to bring people in, and I receive copies of almost every comic that’s produced, so I’m always looking for something that I find intriguing. There are a couple of people that we’ve found that way, that we’re working with right now, that we feel have the potential to be working at DC, and we’re constantly trying to weave them into our systems, see how well they understand our characters, and hopefully from there I assign them to positions where they can make an impact on the DCU.

say, Hawk and Dove, we would sit back and wait for creators to pitch ideas of what they want Hawk and Dove to be. The problem with that is you set up these situations where you were doing things that really were only subjectively better than each other, but had no clear sense of direction as far as how the characters relate to the progression of the DC Universe as a whole. What I was hoping to do with editorial was to get a clear sense of what we wanted to accomplish with a series, and then, more importantly, find the best people to accomplish that goal. That’s what we mean when we say we’re doing things that are “editorially driven.” We’re not dictating story, but really just establishing an emotional direction with the hope that we assign the right creators in order to execute that direction. The other thing, was there was a lot of focus and attention on prestige series and hardcovers when I believed that the attention should be put back onto the periodicals, and all the high-end talent we were putting on the prestige format projects should be working on the regular books, so we would have a greater potential for an increased audience on our regular periodicals. Because I see the periodicals as the bread and butter of the industry. In my opinion, the world outside the direct market doesn’t know the difference between an original graphic novel and a collected edition graphic novel. I’d much rather see the work of a high-end artist like Jim Lee come out in six months of books, because that brings readers into the store six times to find Jim’s art, which means they’re exposed to six times as many comics than if they just came to buy one hardcover graphic novel.

DF: Earlier, we were talking about you coming to DC and how your role there has evolved… After Infinite Crisis, the storylines DD: One of the things that I tried to do throughout the DCU titles leapt one year when I first got here was try to be a lit- ahead. So, to fill the readers in on what happened, they created the ambitious 52, a tle more proactive in the solicitation weekly comic book co-written by four materials and the creation materials. Realistically speaking, what would hap- writers and drawn by a veritable army of artists. Cover to 52 #1 is by J. G. Jones pen is that, if we wanted to reintroduce, [© 2007 DC Comics.]

DF: Do you think there’s still a difference between Marvel and DC? DD: Well, one of the things is that when we each went out and we got into the situation of creating exclusive contracts for talent, that allowed each company to create more of an individual look than with people bouncing back and forth between projects. Plus, there’s always a clear difference in regards to how the stories are told between Marvel and DC. Marvel stories, in my opinion—this is all my opinion, by the way—are much more reactive stories with reactive heroes, and DC’s stories are much more proactive. Marvel heroes want to be people first, they want to live their lives first, and unfortunately, all the trauma and all the attention and all the conflict comes to them as heroes, and it forces them to be heroes. DC heroes get the powers, and they automatically decide to put on a costume, to go on patrol. It’s hard to break those paradigms, or try to impose a Marvel paradigm on a DC character. When DC did that DAN DiDIO | 35

given five planet toys, and we asked with Green Lantern, I think one of the them, “What do they do?” And they weakest directions was when they said, “The planets fight each other. made Hal Jordan a drunk. It made no Now make a TV show.” [laughter] So sense to me, because they were trying we sat for weeks, and we ripped to put a kind of weakness on a characapart what each planet would signiter who has this incredibly powerful fy, what the purpose of each planet ring driven by will power. And you say would be, what the needs of each to yourself, “How could a person who planet would be, and how that has this ring, and has the strongest will would set the natural conflict power around in order to power that between them. And then we defined ring, give in to driving drunk?” It makes how the people who inhabit each of no sense, and it weakens the character those planets would see their roles at the very core, and ultimately everyin protecting the planet’s goals, and thing starts to unravel the more you try how they would compete with each to explain it. That’s what hurt Hal other, both as working side-by-side, Jordan to the point that they didn’t and working against each other. know what to do. I brought that sensibility to the When we did things like Identity table when we started looking at the Crisis, and ultimately Infinite Crisis, DC Universe. You look at the three what we tried to do is say, “Okay, our camps, Superman, Batman, and heroes are proactive. We’re not going Wonder Woman—our three pillars. to try to put all these problems on You have to break them down and them. But what we try to do is, with The sales success of 52 encouraged DiDio say, “We know what makes them them being proactive, then where do to launch Countdown, which followed the the same. Now what makes them we show the differences between our model of prime time television by using different?” And then, once you figure heroes? How do we make them less Paul Dini as the head writer, plotting things out what makes them different, you homogenous?” out and assigning scripts to a roster of say, “Okay, which heroes would line At the time we were planning those writers. At the midway point, the title was up behind Superman, behind stories, the Democratic and Republican modified to Countdown to Final Crisis, Batman, and behind Wonder conventions were going on. We looked Woman?” And then ultimately you at the conventions and you see a bunch considered the end point of the roadmap DiDio began years before. show a clear division of the of Republicans, a bunch of Democrats, [© 2007 DC Comics.] sensibility of each superhero, and and everyone is speaking passionately from there you can show who would be working together, about what they view the future of the country is going to and who would be working against each other, in particular be. You never can find two groups further apart. And not situations. one single person, I believe, thought that they were saying something that was a detriment to the country. They really DF: I get that. Now, here’s my possibly most annoying believed that they were there to help. question. While the comics of the ’70s and ’80s could be You can take that idea and you apply that ideal to criticized for over-explaining stuff, today’s comics seem to superheroes. You say, “Okay, every hero is out there working not explain anything, in terms of establishing character for the greater good. Now, how do all the heroes define relationships and “the story so far.” what the greater good is?” You take the proactive aspect of DD: Yeah, I agree. the DC Universe to the next level. “Okay, what are you heroes really trying to accomplish? Do you want the streets DF: So what’s your philosophy on this—how do you deal free of crime? Do you want to try to make life better for with recapping and re-explaining without it becoming people? What are you really trying to do?” And once you annoyingly redundant? start to break up the heroes in that fashion, they start to DD: I’m not a fan of the recap page. I think it’s lazy, and I develop down different lines of goals. It helps separate think most people gloss over it. I think the one art that’s them out, and also causes conflicts that seem natural for been lost—and probably the one guy who I’m working with who the heroes are rather than forcing situations on them that don’t seem natural for them. Then the conflicts really now who does it best, is Steve Gerber—is the ability to recap play within the true sense of who the characters are, and a story in the actual dialogue and situation without it feeling gives us better stories. like you’re recapping something. What we’ve found is that we’ve created a system, because of the collected editions, DF: Is there anybody who has inspired you with this kind of where most writers didn’t want to recap information thing, any critics or writers on story? because people were reading them as collected editions. So DD: Not really, no. I’ve been reading comics since I was 12 everybody started writing with the collected edition in mind, years old, since 1972. But besides that, there were lot of a habit we are still trying to break to this day. The idea that things that I learned in animation that are applicable to every single thing is collected is a great concept, but not comics. When we did a series called War Planets, we were 100% true. So, realistically, if a title doesn’t sell as a periodical, 36 | WRITE NOW

there’s a good chance it can’t sell as a collected edition. My goal right now is to make the books as accessible as possible. So, for instance, in Bill Willingham and Sean Chen’s Salvation Run, we added—after the first issue was done—a two-page opening recap to set up the story properly, and then it just seemed to click from that point forward. In general, we’re looking for little things, like making sure that every character’s mentioned by name. It’s something that we continue to strive to do. We’re not there 100%, but we are working towards it. You want accessibility in comics, you have to do a comic like you do Power Rangers or Ninja Turtles cartoons, which is that you tell the same story over and over again, every time. That’s what they do. The repetition factors are amazing in those cartoons. DF: But, clearly, you have the authority to put out a memo that says, “Everybody has to know who everybody is by the end of page five.” There must be something that stops you from doing that. DD: Yeah—a little thing called 65 books a month, and they’re all running late, and they’ve all got to be out the door. [laughs] DF: I’m not saying you would check all of them... DD: Well, unfortunately, that’s what I’d have to do. If you’re going to put out an edict, you’re going to have to enforce it, and the only way you can enforce it is by reviewing everything. And, unfortunately, you try to get through it as best you can, and I read through everything that does come out, but I’m also looking for different things all at the same time, with a deadline-gun pressed to my head, trying to get stuff out the door. We keep on pushing, we keep on striving, we keep on reminding. One of the things that we did reinstitute just recently is a splash page within the first four pages of a book, in order to get a big moment, or bring action to the front of the book again, bring some excitement back to the front of the books. It’s been an important thing for me because I don’t understand how we got away from something as simple as that. A splash is almost like a second cover, another sales tool, another thing to draw the reader into a particular event. That’s a good place, also, where you can recap information to set up what’s been going on in a series. Those are other places we’re trying to do it. I just think a static page with clip art and rehashed dialogue gets exhausting. DF: Of course. I’m not advocating for it to be done badly. DD: Well, sometimes being done badly is the first step. [laughter] DF: I appreciate your frankness on that. It’s a toughie. Moving on… what’s your relationship with Paul, day to day, in terms of the books? DD: Collaborative and combative—what else? In any creative situation, Paul’s the final say. And there’s a lot of things I’d like to do that, unfortunately, we can’t. There are a lot of things that he’d like us to do that we haven’t been able to execute. But, for the most part, I try to keep him in the loop as much as possible on the bigger events, the bigger

moments, and he does sign off on all the product that we’re starting up. So any book that’s starting up, I need his seal of approval, which is the right way to do it, because it’s not just about the series of comics we’re doing, but the overall sensibilities, the characters, and the direction of the stories we tell. DF: Now, you said that you sign off on every book that goes out? DD: Yes, I do. And I’ve now got somebody working directly under me, Ian Sattler, who’s our senior story editor. I usually see things in the very preliminary development stages, and then at the very end of the production of a book, and Ian’s actually riding shotgun for me on the whole process right now, so he’s able to identify problems as they’re occurring. More importantly, we’re able to bring a better sense of continuity to our characters and story, and hopefully giving a slight up-tick in the overall quality of the line. So I have a better sense of what’s going on because of his new role with the company. DF: The holy grail for both DC and Marvel has been kids and female readers, and one thing that seems to have both of those is manga. What can we learn from manga about attracting those readers? DD: We have Vertigo with their Minx line, which is directed toward teenage girls. Jann Jones, who’s in my department as senior coordinating editor has put together an initiative to really help reinvigorate the kids line for us, because, our kids books, to date, have just been derivative of what cartoons are on Cartoon Network put out by Warner Brothers. And now we’re actually starting a kids line, starting with three new titles, which is the first time we’ve done kids product that is not based on any preexisting non-comics series or product. The first one is Tiny Titans, which is a new interpretation of the Teen Titans as small children. The next one is Billy Batson and the Magic of SHAZAM, which is basically taking the concepts of Captain Marvel as set up by Jeff Smith in his run of Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil and moving it forward, and we’re doing that with Mike Kunkel. And then we’re also doing a thing called Super Friends, which is based off of the preschool line of toys created by Mattel. DF: I see that you’re on MySpace—like all the cool kids. Why is it important for you to have a presence there? DD: Yeah. It started out as one way to reach out to some of the talent that I couldn’t find any other way, believe it or not. And it’s rather funny for me, because I’m completely computer illiterate, so the idea that I even have a MySpace page, let alone that I might know how to maintain it, is hilarious. I’ve changed nothing since I got on there. But it’s actually a lot of fun interacting with the fans there, which I can do during downtime. And as we diversify our talent pool, and we’re working with people on several states and several continents, it’s an important way to reach out and be able to stay in touch with people at all hours, not just working by e-mail, but also just IMs, or MySpace. It’s just another tool to be accessible to both talent and fans. DAN DiDIO | 37

Because that’s a thing that’s great about our business, there’s such a sense of community and such a sense of interaction that, if you forget about that, I think you lose what the charm of being in comics is all about. Don’t forget: comics is a found hobby. I used to get questions a lot about, “Can you create comics that I can read with my kids?” And I would say, “The last thing I want to do is create comics that you want to read to your kids, because ultimately you read those to your kids, and these become ‘your father’s comics’ to those children.” And then they’re going to go out and find their own comics, things that are identified as their own. I found comics on my own. Most of the fans that I know found comics on their own. They weren’t something that was handed down from their parents. We hand them down because it excites us, and we want them to be excited about what we do, but, I’ll tell you, if you’ve ever tried coaching your kid in sports, you know how well that turns out. So what I say is, “Don’t worry about finding comics for your kids. Let your kids find comics.” Because kids want to find something that’s slightly subversive. There’s something a little bit subversive about comics, going back to the days of EC Comics straight on up. DF: The kid-appeal of comics has always been that they’re trashy enough that your parents won’t want to look at them, but not so trashy that they completely forbid them. DD: Exactly. You want to be out and be available to them. You want kids to find them and enjoy them, but you want them to pick and choose what they want. As far as I’m concerned, a kid reading a manga comic and a kid reading Action Comics is no different. He’s picking and choosing the type of story he wants to read. And that’s good for us, because it’s not just about just reading one flavor, one style. It’s about really participating in the whole industry and the

whole art form. DF: Any advice for people looking to break into comics as writers, or as editors, or even breaking into animation or TV? DD: Becoming an editor is difficult, if only because of the fact that there are only so many jobs in editorial. Because of that, the turnover is very light. As far as writing, I always say to people, just write. Find a way to get published. If not at DC, then somewhere else. And then, if you’re good, we will find you. It’s not a big business, so if somebody has the talent to tell a story or develop characters, believe me, we will always find work for people like that. DF: One way that people used to break in as writers was to get jobs as assistants, say, or interns, or editors. You see much less of staff people also writing and drawing than you used to. Is that present policy? DD: I believe, if we are the editors, and we are out there choosing material, that we have to open ourselves up as much as possible to see who are the best people out there. Because what happens a lot of times, the easiest person to hire is the person who’s closest, the most convenient. And we should never go the easiest route. We should always find the best route. I feel very strongly about that. And I was never a strong proponent of editors writing because it can, from the outside, appear incestuous. That’s not to say editors don’t write. I have people who have extremely deep resumes as writers who work for us here. But, on the other side of the coin, I don’t want us to look to ourselves as the first choice when we might not be the best choice. DF: Given your career in animation and TV, any tips for people who want to break into those fields? DD: That’s a difficult one, too, as always. That’s one you’re probably better served being close to the system. Be involved in the production, be part of the creative process. They bring people in because it is so collaborative and so many people touch a script and touch a story that, if you’re able to do that, you’re probably able to make the next steps naturally into just solely writing. DF: And that business is mostly in LA, I guess. DD: Yes, it is, although I did most of my writing in Vancouver, so what do I know? DF: To wrap up, anything we didn’t talk about that you would want to say to the Write Now! audience? DD: You know, we covered a lot of important stuff, and we got to discuss the sensibilities of DC’s comics. So if that gets somebody more interested in what we’re doing and gets them intrigued, then the interview will have been worthwhile.

Beyond the core superheroes, DiDio remains dedicated to reaching readers of all ages and is overseeing a revitalization of their Johnny DC imprint with three new titles, including Billy Batson and the Magic of SHAZAM, an outgrowth of Jeff Smith’s celebrated take on the Captain Marvel characters. Promotional art is by Mike Kunkel. [© 2007 DC Comics.] 38 | WRITE NOW

DF: Thanks for taking the time, Dan. This was a blast. DD: Thank you, Danny.

THE END

Feedback

Letters from our readers

Here’s a note from Mike W. Barr: Dear Danny:

Though I enjoyed participating in the second half of the “Trek Writers Roundtable” in WN! #16, one correction needs to be noted. Page 62 prints two pages from Star Trek Annual #1 (drawn by the excellent David Ross and Bob Smith), noting the issue was “scripted by Mike W. Barr from a plot by Marv Wolfman and Dave Cockrum.” Actually, Marv, Dave and I all plotted the book, thus Marv and Dave’s credit as “Co-Plotters.” (Had they plotted the book by themselves, they would have been credited solely as “Plotters.”) We hammered out the plot over a meal at a convention the three of us attended. Dave originally intended to pencil the book, but couldn’t, due to scheduling demands. Since Dave’s death, I recall that plotting session often. I thought a magazine devoted to writing would be interested in the distinction. Best, MWB, via the Internet

es/minuses, of writing for a for a particular medium—maybe comparing the process of character development and story progression in different formats, like comics vs. TV, graphic novels vs. novels vs. movies. For instance, what strengths can you bring to bear in a comic that aren’t available or simply don’t work as well in TV? They all offer episodic storytelling, usually with a protagonist that you can’t really change. (Batman’s got to be there next time, healthy, unmarried and 32-1/2 years old, right?) Also, both TV and comic writers write “episodes” with the intention that they will probably be collected and sold as a single unit. Unlike years ago when creators and companies alike thought that their product would be viewed once and then forgotten. Maybe it’s more than serendipitous that some comic publishers are not only using big time TV screenwriters, but installing them as “show runners,” as, say, DC is doing with Paul Dini for Countdown. Having comics produced and packaged similar to a season of TV, with a strong creative central figure overseeing things, rather appeals to me. Thanks for the great work. John McCarthy via the Internet

We are indeed interested. Thanks, Mike. And special thanks to ROBERT GREENBERGER for his terrific interviewing of the Treksters and for doing a stellar job as Managing Editor this issue!

Thanks for the great letter, John. Those are all the kinds of topics we love to explore here at Write Now! world headquarters.

Mr. Fingeroth,

NEXT ISSUE:

I really enjoyed the “Star Trek Writers Roundtable” crossover that you published with Michael Eury’s Back Issue magazine. I’m writing you in response to your request for ideas for future roundtables. My suggestion would be the Lucasfilm license. I’m not sure that the Star Wars comics and novels have had enough different writers to make up a two-part roundtable, but if you add the Indiana Jones comics and novels, you might have enough material. You could add a sidebar interview with Chris Claremont about his Willow novels. I also think that the late ’70s-early ’80s run of those Marvel comic books will fit in with Back Issue’s focus, as well as with Write Now!’s.

WRITE NOW! #18 will be our special STAN LEE ISSUE, celebrating The Man’s 85th birthday and his amazing career writing comics, TV, movies and just about everything else! Joining in on the festivities will be high-profile Stan-fans including JOHN ROMITA, SR., BRIAN BENDIS, TODD McFARLANE, DENNIS O’NEIL, DAN DiDIO, ROY THOMAS, and lots of others. (A perfect bookend to Roy’s Stan-celebration in his ALTER EGO magazine, also published, of course, by TwoMorrows.)

Thank you, Doug Abramson via the Internet Excellent idea, Doug. Thanks for suggesting it. Hi Danny, I really loved the Star Trek writers roundtable discussion. Love to see more of that kind of thing. Steven Grant’s piece was great, also. All in all, a very solid issue. One thing I’d love to see is a breakdown of the plus-

(And in issue #19, we’re going to focus on the writing of The Dark Knight Batman movie!) How did you like our behind-the-scenes look at Heroes— and all the other nifty stuff in this issue? Tell me your thoughts on the issue—and anything else about writing you want to ask or tell. E-mail me at WriteNowDF@aol.com, or snail-mail your thoughts to Danny Fingeroth, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Road, Raleigh, NC 27614. —Danny Fingeroth

FEEDBACK | 39

P A G E

march them as they We’re following irs into the broad sta together up the r building. Culture Cente IN’ S SHE TALK …WHAT WA TH: ? 1 TIGER MO OW YH ABOUT AN SBIAN! I AIN’T NO HA : TH MO ER le, they 2 TIG ies Angels sty arl Ch Low angle er Moth AURANT. Tig ST RE the 2 e into F ra m march lips. with red, red smiles brightly ER-LUVVIN’ ODED, MURD LO I’M A RED-B Y GAL! TR : UN TH CO MO N ER 3 TIG AMERICA LES, LADIES OSE VALUAB LET’S SEE TH : N! TH ME 4 TIGER MO AND GENTLE a big charity t plays host to The restauran nciers, diplomats, fina rich h wit 3 r e F ra m gala dinne rs Some party d guest speake movie stars an drink in hand, as everyone s, attendee laugh off panel, uncertain how to ls looks at the gir react.

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The current Batman family titles are featuring a serial, “The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul,” with a prelude story kicking things off in BATMAN #570. The story continues Grant Morrison’s run as Batman writer, and welcomes Tony Daniel as the series’ new artist. Inks are by Jonathan Glapton. [© 2007 DC Comics.]

Comics.]

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The three women Batman is fighting are Dragon Fly, Tiger Moth and Silken Spider, three very obscure villains who appeared only twice before. Note that Morrison refers to panels as “frames.” Don’t do that if you’re not Grant Morrison. [© 2007 DC Comics.]

BATMAN 670 NUTS & BOLTS | 41

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BATMAN 670 NUTS & BOLTS | 43

1 0 / 1 1

the floor.

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P A G E

2007 DC Comics.]

Grant's script is fairly minimal in its art direction, giving Tony plenty of room to choreograph the action and add or delete detail as necessary. While Grant calls for a spread, Tony's decisions where to go for close-ups gives the sequence its power. [©

P A G E

F ra m e 1

1 2

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grip.

11 BATMAN: 12 SPIDER:

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“DADDY”?

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Here, Tony deviates a little further from the art directions, choosing to go for emotionally-charged close-ups, breaking them up with a medium-shot of Silken Spider and Batman. In the last panel, placing the word balloons between the heads (as opposed to tucking them away in the corners of the panel) gives the words physical impact, using the balloon shapes to create a literal barrier between the characters. [© 2007 DC Comics.]

THE END 44 | WRITE NOW

STORMING THE DARK TOWER

PETER DAVID DISCUSSES ADAPTING STEPHEN KING’S NOVEL SERIES FOR COMIC BOOKS

Interview conducted by Robert Greenberger via e-mail, October 2007 Copy-edited by Danny Fingeroth and Robert Greenberger Peter David, self-proclaimed Writer of Stuff, has shown a tremendous range of styles as he has moved from heroic adventure to comedy to dark fantasy, from comic books to prose to screenplays. No stranger to adaptations, he previously adapted Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country for DC Comics and novelized Swamp Thing, The Rocketeer, and Spider-Man among other properties. His greatest sales success as an adapter, though, was with the seven issue Marvel miniseries that brought Stephen King’s The Dark Tower to comic books. Partnered with co-writer Robin Furth, artist Jae Lee, and colorist Richard Isanove, the title brought critical acclaim in addition to high sales and will spawn a second series in 2008. With the first miniseries now available in hardcover, and the team at work on the next installment, we thought it high time to check in and learn what Peter’s role in the adaptation process is, exactly, and how he approaches it. —RG ROBERT GREENBERGER: Okay, you get the assignment. How do you begin the adaptation process? PETER DAVID: Actually, I don’t. The process is actually begun by Robin Furth, who breaks the story down into a plot structure narrative. Jae Lee then breaks down Robin’s story visually, and I come in and write the scripting. RG: Who is Robin Furth and what is her role with The Dark Tower? PD: Robin may well be the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to The Dark Tower, save for Stephen, of course. She’s the one who worked closely with King to break the existing material down into a comics narrative, and also to develop the storylines that are to come. RG: How much involvement did Stephen King actually have with these adaptations?

PD: King has been involved in every step of the process. He worked up the outline with Robin, he approved all the visuals, and he reads every single script and line edits it. RG: While adapting something as stylized as Dark Tower, what can you bring to the table? Is there any Peter David to be found in here? PD: My job isn’t to draw attention to myself. My job is to be the stand in for Stephen King, trying to adapt his narrative voice as much as I can. RG: You told me once that you try and vary your writing to suit the needs of the material. Was that easier or harder with an adaptation? PD: Easier, since King’s work provides a wealth of material PETER DAVID | 45

upon which to base the narrative. There are times in the book where he switches into first person narrative, and he also provided a marvelous Midworld patois in the novel called “Wolves of the Calla.” I simply combined the two to create a narrative framework for the scripting. RG: Once you wrote the adaptation, did you ever tweak the writing once you saw Jae Lee’s art? PD: Well, no, because I already saw the artwork when I was scripting it. The comics are really being produced in what is called the Marvel style, with the production of a plot that the artist then breaks down into panels, after which the scripter comes in and writes the dialogue and captions.

THE DARK TOWER: A Primer The Dark Tower saga took Stephen King over 30 years to write, spanning seven novels. Along the way, his skill as a writer evolved and he has more than once gone back to revise his earlier efforts. The very first book, The Gunslinger, introduced readers to Roland Descahin of Gilead and a brand new world. The world of the Dark Tower is called Mid-World and appears to be a variant of Earth, set in some future when oil is a precious commodity and society has reverted to somewhat medieval ways. And yet, vestiges of 20th century pop culture seem to have survived. Gunslingers were the knights of this particular realm and Roland was on a quest to find the Man in Black. The Gunslinger Born goes further back, and chronicles Roland’s training and manhood test en route to becoming the youngest Gunslinger. Unlike the novels with frequent flashbacks filling in details, the miniseries goes in a more linear fashion so the final issue depicts events referred to in Wizard and Glass’ flashback sequence. To those familiar with the prose version, this will all seem fairly familiar.

It all started when Stephen King read Robert Browning’s poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” as a college student. He began writing his own epic poem while still in school, ultimately switching from poetry to prose and selling it as a five-part story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The parts were collected in 1982 as The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, and the book has remained in print ever since. Covers to The Dark Tower comic # 1 and #2 are by Jae Lee and Richard Isanove. [© 2007 Stephen King]

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Across the seven issues, readers follow Roland crossing the Mohaine Desert after completing his test where he bested his teacher, Cort. Under instruction from his father Steven, Roland and his companions were dispatched to Hambry. Upon arrival, allegiances have been turned and the Big Coffin Hunters have arrived in the city, seeking to kill Roland and company. As they fight for their lives, Roland also falls in love with Susan Delgado, complicating their ability to flee. Worse, the team discovers that the Coffin Riders possess the Old Ones’ weapons and the precious oil to bring them to life. Their true target is the Affiliation, an order that includes Steven Deschain. Lured to the Shaved Mountains, the Affiliation is about to be wiped out until Roland arrives. The battle is bloody and costly, so while Roland triumphs, Susan winds up dying. Each issue contained prose stories which provided additional information about the world and background features about the comic book, all of which were included in the recently released hardcover. The second miniseries, The Long Road Home, will continue to trace Roland leaving Hambry and what befalls him next. The miniseries is currently scheduled for a February 2008 debut. —Robert Greenberger

stuff here and there. But the material we adapted from Wizard and Glass was linear; it’s just that there was the framing device in the novel of Roland telling his Ka-Tet about the events, and that’s not in the comic. RG: Did the fan reaction to TDT comics surprise you? Was there a different response from Stephen King fans than from people who’d only read the comics? PD: Most of the fan reaction has been uniformly positive, and I’m very pleased about that. Fans can be a demanding lot, and King fans no less so. For the most part, they’ve been tremendously supportive.

RG: As a reader, did you have a favorite character or sequence in The Dark Tower? As a writer, did that change, and if so, how?

RG: Did you find new fans who liked King but not comics?

PD: We’re getting tons of readers who have never picked up a comic book before. I can only hope that they find the format interesting and compelling enough that they’ll sample other material.

PD: My favorite is probably the sequence with the Mexican standoff in the tavern where the gunslingers face off against the Big Coffin Hunters. Although obviously we had to edit down a bit of the dialogue, it’s pretty much exactly there as it is in the book.

RG: Has the process of adapting King informed your own prose work?

RG: With the first one such a success, you’ve begun work on the second. Has the process changed? Will it be any easier?

RG: Thanks, Peter. Some cool insights here.

PD: It’ll be both easier and harder. Easier because, since we’ll be producing material that’s not spelled out in the original, I won’t have to hunt around in the books to pull the exact dialogue. On the other hand, it’s more daunting because I don’t have the safety net of King’s dialogue.

Robert Greenberger is a longtime comic book professional, logging twenty years at DC Comics and one year at Marvel Comics in both editorial and administrative roles. Prior to that, he created and edited Comics Scene magazine. He is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction, most recently co-authoring (with Michael Jan Friedman) Predator: Flesh & Blood. In June, 2008, his books, The Essential Batman Encyclopedia and the novelization of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army will be released.

RG: The comics are not literal translations of the novels. They seem more linear in terms of story. Am I right about that? PD: No, they’re pretty literal. I mean, yes, we have to cut

PD: King’s prose work has always had a good deal of influence on my other work.

PD: Glad to illuminate, Bob.

THE END PETER DAVID | 47

TESTIMONY:

THE DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF INTERVIEW Conducted in person by Jeff Newelt, October 2007 Transcribed by Steven Tice

Back in the mid-1990s first flowering of the Internet, every time a major “old media” outlet, say The New York Times, needed a “hip young expert” to explain things to them, as often or not, said expert was Douglas Rushkoff. Perhaps because he always gave good sound bites about the coming electronic revolution, or just because they knew where to find him, not a week seemed to go by when Rushkoff wasn’t being extensively and prominently quoted somewhere. Finally, I saw an event listed that he was moderating. Being in the new media biz myself then—overseeing an electronic comics initiative at pioneering Silicon Alley house Byron Preiss Multimedia—I went to said event, ready to mock Douglas under my breath. Let’s see if Mr. Sound Bite can hold his own live! Well, it turns out, I have no memory of who else was on that panel, just of being highly impressed with this intelligent, opinionated, personable Rushkoff fellow. And who knew that, underneath the new media guy, was a longtime comics fan? Of course, Douglas has a zillion other interests, too, and you can read about them at his website: www.rushkoff.com. And here’s what Douglas’s official bio says: “Douglas Rushkoff is a world-renowned cultural theorist and the author of ten books on media, society, and beliefs, including Media Virus, Coercion, Cyberia, and ScreenAgers. He wrote two novels—one about early 90’s psychedelia called Ecstasy Club, and another about dot.com fascism, Exit Strategy. “He’s made two documentaries about marketing and the co-option of culture for PBS’ Frontline, The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders, and he teaches popular classes in media, interactivity, and narrative for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the MaybeLogic Academy. “Rushkoff doesn’t dabble, but dives. He has worked as a theater director, a fight choreographer, Guardian of London columnist, a rabbi, and a keyboardist for PsychicTV, among other things. “His very first comic, Club Zero-G was about kids who visit a shared consensual dreamspace when they’re asleep— remembered only by one them. Misunderstood as a Matrix rip-off by an inexperienced reviewer, the graphic novel version won ‘Worst Graphic Novel of 2004’ from The Comics Journal. Appreciated by Jonathan Vankin, of Vertigo, as an original and successful narrative experiment, Club Zero-G got Rushkoff a pitch meeting. Testament, Rushkoff’s first comic series, was the result of that pitch.”

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As for me, I figure if Douglas is good enough for the Times, then who are we to say different? Douglas recently sat down with Jeff Newelt and talked about—among other things— comics, new media, religion, and his recent Vertigo title, Testament. Enjoy! —DF JEFF NEWELT: In your comic Testament, I notice a convergence of your favorite themes… “open source” Judaism, alternate forms of currency, media viruses, corporations, etc., etc. Why did you think a comic was the way to express your ideas? DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: In comics you can combine ideas in a way you can’t in an article, an essay, or even a nonfiction book. Prose is a deeply linear medium, you’ve got to have a clear subject and make an ordered, rational argument for it. You can attempt some verbal mash-up, à la William Burroughs, but that’s working against the bias of text and books. Comics are collage. It’s sequential storytelling. There’s both

nate, fertilize, and mutate. They rise again like a mutated monster—these wonderfully rich combinations of thoughts, ideas and imagery that you wouldn’t see anywhere else can grow into new organisms. Comics give me a forum to look at the Bible as a media theorist would, while comparing it to situations, technologies and fiscal calamities that are going on today. So this seemingly staid, holy, redacted and permanent, set-in-stone book gets dragged down into this fertile ground of possibility. It’s not just EC Bible Stories, anymore. It’s a living, mutating set of myths. And that’s what gets people the most upset, but it’s also what gets people the most fascinated: “what if the Bible were alive?” Yeah, put something in comics and it becomes JN: Did you think of that analogy in retalive. That’s why Grant [Morrison] is so rospect, or when you were coming up interested in comics. You take a god with your approach to Testament...? Cover to the first issue of Douglas that’s the projection and imagery of all DR: I’ve always looked at comics as mulRushkoff and Liam Sharp’s Testament, these people focusing on it, you take any timedia—as a precursor to the Internet. Art is by Liam. object and put it in comics… it’s alive! My first books tried to explain the [©2006 Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp. All rights reserved.] That’s what he means when he says Internet to people who had never comics are a “magical sigil”: their creation is a ritual through touched it—who didn’t believe or even care that it was comwhich imagery can be beheld and disseminated. Conjured ing. And it’s hard to explain non-linear, hypertext experiences into existence. to people who’ve never been on drugs or something. But there were a lot of other emerging cultures providing easy JN: Did you have an agenda with Testament? analogies to the Internet experience—fantasy role-playing, rave DR: I’m trying to do to the Bible what Jack Kirby tried to do to music, snowboarding, dj performance. Cultures and art forms his universe. I’m trying to make these characters and situawhere things were juxtaposed, and communicating through tions come alive again by juxtaposing them with near-future their roughness or user’s interactions. scenarios that are actually happening. I’m trying to show that, Comics have always been open to these kinds of mixes— in the best sense, the Bible was warning us about what’s biased toward these juxtapositions of themes, eras and realihappening now: worshiping money, sacrificing our kids to ties. Its position in “low culture” is its strength, because peofalse idols (like oil), taking a scarcity approach toward ple aren’t necessarily expecting it to deliver all those formal resources rather than an abundance approach. At the same requirements of, say, “the sonnet,” or “the novel,” or “the nartime, though, I’m looking at how, well, the Bible didn’t work, rative nonfiction book.” did it? If this is where we are, then its lessons weren’t learned. And I’m finally suggesting that the reason it didn’t work is JN: So the power of comics sneak-attacks you, like sticking because they tried to manage society through a one-pointedmedicine in a kid’s ice cream or something…? ness. Monotheism is fine when it’s universal, but it became DR: Right. And, on top of that, because it’s ostensibly a kids’ something of an “accept our God or you’re out” thing. The medium, you can pull a Pee Wee Herman: “Where am I going notion of a universal, abstract unknowable “God” got corruptto tease and provoke culture about gay values and sexual ed, and became a “this guy is everyone’s God” mandate. innuendo, and where can I do that better than in a kids’ show?” Bart Simpson and South Park allow for a cultural criJN: And you make it clear in Testament, by the “good light” tique and irreverent jamming you couldn’t have had before you shine on the goddess Astarte, she seems to be the god on TV. that comes out the “cleanest”… this one-pointedness is related to a textual repression of the Feminine Goddess Energy, JN: Creating comics must be like messing with a Petrie dish, represented by Astarte…. What is this energy? creating a little universe that comes alive when read. DR: Well, she is responsible for screwing up the heavenly DR: Yes! Alive because it’s a cultural Petrie dish. What is a gods’ whole Eden experiment. But yeah—she’s ultimately the “culture” but a growing, fecund thing? Fecund like manure— one who got screwed over, and something of the hero in my sh*t is great fertilizer! Comics are bottom-feeders in the best god world. She represents the feminine goddess energy, the sense—reworking all of the cultural preoccupations, characters, situations, conspiracy theories that trickle down into its spirit of abundance that agricultural societies worshipped. It is disdained in the Bible, which is really about the superiority of delightful cesspool of ideas. In comics, they can cross-polliword and picture. You can communicate through the juxtaposition of image to image, or image to word, word to word, dialogue to description, or even dialogue to picture. Unlike plain text, the comics medium is biased towards these clashes, toward these mixes. Towards time travel and cultural mixing. That’s why doing comics is like doing Shakespeare. Nobody does a Shakespeare play in its original setting anymore. We perform Hamlet in an office tower or set Macbeth in the Nixon White House. We frame it so that the old myths and themes are relevant to a modern audience, and seen in a new light. There’s spoken word and a visual frame: it’s working on multiple levels.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF | 49

comics industry is of taking real risks with their characters. TV shows today are more comfortable killing off favorite characters than comics are. Brian Azzarello kills off a main character in Loveless, everybody’s up in arms, “How can you do that? You’ve killed the series!” And then I hear, “Well, that was an important asset,” as if it was an actor that you’ve lost, it was an asset to your brand. The whole beauty of comics is the freedom it affords. This is a low budget industry and an iconic form; these are not real actors with jobs, these are imaginary beings. You should be JN: Some might say you’re taking some able to f**k with them and kill them serious liberties with some pretty well and change them… let them do things established characters, these gods and that are against the grain. Biblical heroes… The thing that amazes me about the DR: I suppose some fundamentalists comics audience is that everybody’s crymight be upset, because they read the ing out for something new, something Bible selectively. But the Bible characbold, something that breaks the boundters in my stories really only do what aries, but everyone complains if it doesthey did in the original. Incest, murder... The best thing about Testament was that n’t also meet their expectations, and do it’s all there in black and white. And even no two issues were alike, as it explored so instantaneously. So I don’t mind peomy most outlandish interpretations are matters physical, metaphysical, and just ple critiquing that my characters are bad, pretty well supported by historical or plain weird. Here, the cover to #3, by and my situations are bad, and all that. If “Midrashic” (the history of interpretation) Liam Sharp they didn’t believe this, or didn’t believe evidence. It’s pretty solid Bible analysis, [© Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp. All rights reserved.] that, it’s my bad. And I’ll work on getting even if it tends towards some harsh judgit better. When I get upset is when people say, “How can he ments on these guys. The intellectual rabbis and priests are wait until issue three to introduce a major character?” As if actually pretty interested in my perspectives. there’s this formula where every major character has to be What I really shudder at is how frightened the mainstream the ethical, nomadic tribes over the farming polytheists. The nomads were dealing with scarcity. The Bible was concerned with getting people to stop child sacrifice, but they ended up completely bashing the entirety of the religions that worshipped their gods in the abundance tradition. It was a mistake to completely repress the goddess side, though, and that’s why I treat the Torah gods as antagonists by the end of the series. They were too scared of women, and kind of screwed up as a result.

a growing out of n, as if it were old maps of Garden of Ede ctive, like those spe rendering of the per nal le, in tab nsio ng d ime A three-d but it is recedi surface of a car frame of sorts, e. It is like the tabletop. It is a gs in perspectiv see the buildin you ere wh es citi . ctive. h Adam and Eve drawn in perspe ble surface - wit left to e - on that card-ta , as if they walked from top within that fram ape ks dsc wal lan e ek sam ized on the Melch different times We see them two within the same 3-D frame. all gods. Elijah and bottom right, but the table, are the the table. Her hand around or under orts are below e, as if gathered arte and her coh Bad Tree. Ast Beyond the fram n. Ede ve make the the sky abo the tabletop to Krishna are in from underneath pushes through Krishna watch. and ah Elij , arte on, in the sky ery): That Ast Above the acti iring her treach w – almost adm raised eyebro Krishna (with re. the in ak . Managed to sne follow it. is a clever one 's hope they can e one rule. Let paradise will hav Elijah: So man's ugh the floor of thro ng reachi , her hand still of the Tree of the we see Astarte ire "stage" set d take the form need to be not do Beneath the ent the surface, her arm and han o wh h, ove m and Moloc the garden. Ab She is with Atu Good and Evil. Knowledge of n. takes . Tableau One prominently see across the garden to the right, and in two tableaus place am, and Eve are leau Two takes l. Evi Melchizedek, Ad the tree of Eternal Life. Tab and od Go ge of , at place on the left her, at the tree of the Knowled furt Life, that seems probably down tree of Eternal Evil, Garden - one, the the ge of Good and in s tree "main" of the Knowled e two Tre are re The but out of place the er, ul For den. The oth . It is beautif gar way e the in som e in quite at hom or schema arte's coloring should reflect Ast alluring. ly even threatening Even from this est freely eat;. garden thou may Tableau One: everything in the Melchizedek: Of Life. tree of Eternal l, you will not of Good and Evi o: Tw the Knowledge Tableau of this Tree of Melchizedek: But you will die. n as you do, eat - for as soo at her cohorts. p, Astarte smiles Below the tableto

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things along… we might move e an idea how ges Astarte: I hav den, Astarte ana ir lock on the gar of Good and Evil. zeldek erect the ge Elijah and Mechi clue - the Tree of the Knowled the As : ent ha Comm eat " the Garden wit are told they can to "contaminate Adam and Eve not from the in the Garden, Eternal Life - but who can walk of , dek tree izel the m lch Through Me rden, even fro wish from the Ga back; only forward. whatever they y must not look damned tree. The

A page of script, a thumbnail sketch, and art from Testament #6. The script is by Douglas. Peter Gross did the sketch, and Gary Erskine did the art. [© 2006 Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp. All Rights Reserved.]

introduced in the first two issues…? JN: A superimposed shape... DR: A shape of such a formal type, of such a strict orthodoxy. Part of the problem is the way the comics are branded, and how those brands are received: “Okay, now, you’re writing a Vertigo comic,” and that means it’s got to be “Vertigo-ish.” Then you’ve either got to do the Fables thing, which is what people expected of Testament, that it was going to be another Fables series, except instead of using fairy stories, now it’s Bible stories. Or you have to do the Y The Last Man thing, which is to set up a simple, compelling premise that you understand by the end of the first issue (what if you’re the last man on earth) and then carry the basic mystery—that he’s looking to get his girlfriend and find out why all the guys died—over the course of the whole series. JN: Was Jack Kirby an influence on Testament? DR: Originally, when [Vertigo editor Jonathan] Vankin called me and said, “Well, what do you want to do in comics?” I said, “Oh, I want to do The Eternals.” [laughs] And he’s, like, “Oh, well, that’s Marvel; No, we can’t do that. Something else.” So I figured if I can’t have Kirby’s gods [The New Gods were also taken] I might as well take this great and untapped system. There’s a lot of people writing comics about God, or God vs. Satan, like Preacher… but no one’s going into real Bible mythology. Who is Abraham? Who is the cousin and brother of Lot, and people f**king their daughters, and why is that in the Bible? Why not take the best myths ever, and work with them? Marvel doesn’t own them (yet). JN: In Testament you postulate that multiple characters in dif-

ferent Biblical periods were “played” by different “actors” from the present day “cast.” How did you keep track of who was who? Did you do massive charts? DR: I’m a theater director, so I thought of it like a theater company. The modern characters are my players, and I can play them to type in the Bible, or cast them against type by putting them in the same the situation that the Bible character is confronting. So Jake’s father Alan plays Abraham for a while. The Bible characters are the archetypes for modern characters and what they’re going through. And what we learn is that the Bible characters are the gods’ way of influencing the present. Had I gone longer, I was going to then have different modern characters play the same Bible characters, and even go through the same Bible situations making different choices—and still keep it all consistent with Bible scholarship. JN: How did Vertigo deal with all the nutty, and some would and will say, heretical stuff? DR: They would ask, “Doug, are you really going to have Lot having sex with his daughters? Is it appropriate to take that kind of liberty with the Bible?” And I would just respond to the e-mail, “Okay, Genesis Chapter 24, Verse 11, Lot f**ks his daughters.” As long as it was really in there and not just my bizarre interpretation, they were totally okay. I guess they wanted me to stay with the basic formula a little bit longer than I wanted to: modern story, flash to Bible allegory, modern story kind of completes itself, then Bible story completes itself. JN: And then the story busted free of that model. DR: Right. Instead the series followed The “Rule of Three”—let it happen the same way twice, and then the third time show, “Uh-oh, the stories can diverge from the expected.” Because

Douglas writes his script as if it were a story he was telling the artist. This gives the artist the freedom to interpret the poetic language as he sees fit. [© 2002006 Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp. All Rights Reserved.]

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF | 51

my characters in the modern day have free will, and they don’t have always do it the same way. That’s the inciting event of the series: what will the gods do if we decide to do stuff differently? What happens if we break free from the Bible’s paradigm? JN: I know the series ended sooner than you’d planned. I’ve read the final scripts, and I’m guessing having to end things faster, might have given you, and thus the story, a greater urgency. The current of the story got faster and stronger towards the conclusion. DR: It added a sense of urgency to it, yeah. It forced me to have the characters revolt sooner. I was going to have them revolt when the gods order them to kill every last person in Canaan. Which is what God did in the Bible, you know. And the Israelites got in trouble because they didn’t kill everyone, they left a couple of hookers and a dog or something, so they got into all this trouble. Because the series needed to end sooner, I had them refuse to carry out the final plagues, which actually turned out to be more poignant… JN: It seems to me that there’s been a tectonic cultural shift, where there’s “Before Now” and there’s “After Now,” in terms of the respect being given comics in the media and general populace. DR: There’s been a tectonic shift, but it’s more to do with Hollywood and television’s desperate search for content. There’s a thing going on in the business world; almost every industry out there is losing money, but almost every industry out there is pretending that it’s also the next big thing. So industries are looking at the other industries as if those are the ones that are going to save them. The advertising industry is looking at the cell phone industry thinking, “Okay, that’s where we’re going to spread our messages—cell phones.” Meanwhile, the cell phone industry is looking at the advertising industry to save them. The movie industry is looking at the comics industry while the comics industry is looking at the

The Seth-designed cover to a volume of Fantagraphics’ celebrated The Complete Peanuts collection, featuring Linus, whom Rushkoff believes is the true central character of the comic strip. To Rushkoff, Linus is “this sort of Nietzschean philosopher in the midst of this weird world.” [ PEANUTS © 2005, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.]

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movie industry. You have Vertigo making comics of [Darren Aronofsky’s] The Fountain, and you have Universal making movies from Marvel properties. On the one hand I’m excited that, yeah, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, everybody cares about comics. On the other… most of our media is more obsessed with business than it is culture. The interviews are about “properties” instead of characters or issues. JN: I think another reason comics are getting more respect is the Web, because of instant access to links about comics and to web comics and exposure to comics without having to walk into a store and pick one up… DR: Web comics are not comics. They are sequential narrative, but as long as we think of web comics as comics, we’re not letting them be what they are. It’s like thinking about automobiles as horseless carriages. They are a different medium. JN: So you think that web comics is in a larval stage right now, form-wise? DR: It’s in a proto-larval stage. Web comics... what should we call it?… “digital interactive sequential narrative”… is going to be really interesting. It’s going to be free of some of comics’ restraints, because you don’t need a distribution channel, and expectations are not as set. So in some ways, and it sounds awful to say it, the longer it stays unprofitable, the longer it can prevent a set of expectations from being imposed on it. JN: But also, web comics are revolutionary because they are a marketing tool for themselves… and the distribution is by links and social networking sites. DR: That’s doing for comics the same thing MySpace did for music, or even Amazon and ratings did for books. The web is a great thing for anybody who is looking for alternative distribution means and an alternative way to develop real word-ofmouth. I mean, Shooting War [a web comic that was serialized on www.smithmag.net and then recently got a book deal with Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing] is a case in point of doing something online for free, and then, bing-bang, it becomes a real book. The difference, though, and this is the question: Do web sigils have the same effect as physical sigils? Or to put it in less occult terms, does a thought virus launched in a digital form have the same effect on culture as an object passed from hand to hand? I’m not so sure—at least not yet. Some comics have had real, strange effects. Grant told me that he started developing some of the same illnesses as his character King Mob in The Invisibles. If it hadn’t been an object—a physical comic, a totem replicated throughout the world in real life—would it have had the same influence? There’s something about killing a tree, and printing on it; on a certain level it forces a local reality, a hand-to-hand experience. A comic-store guy hands you a book, “You’ve got to read this.” You know, that eye-to-eye, hand-to-hand exchange is something that we have in the comics world that’s not in movies. It’s not in other media. When you have a physical object, you are more free in the way you interact with it, on a certain level. And it stays with you even when you’re not looking at it.

JN: What comics or creators do you dig? DR: The comic that moved me the most… was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, because it was a metacomic. It used a comic to deconstruct comics. It united all the stuff I knew and studied about Marshall McLuhan in his Understanding Media with what I suspected about comics but had never confirmed. McCloud laid out why I was thinking the things I was thinking. And his understanding of how symbols and icons work showed that not only was someone else thinking about this, but that what I was suspecting was really, really true. Also, Kirby’s Eternals. At the time it first came out [1976], I was also getting Man, Myth and Magic, this weird magazine you got at the grocery store, and this movie, Chariot of the Gods, had come out about how the Pyramids were made by aliens. So it was very, very early New Age movement going on here, which was not about pyramid schemes, but about the Pyramids! I wasn’t thinking of Eternals as comics. I was just thinking of it as cool. JN: Kirby wrote those killer essays in the back, too. DR: Yeah! Just weird, trippy stuff. So, to me, that was like reading Krishnamurti or something. Schultz’s Charlie Brown was also really important to me, especially Linus, who was this sort of Nietzschean philosopher in the midst of this weird world. I always saw Linus as the central character, not Charlie Brown, not Snoopy, because Linus was the real observer. He was like Chekhov (who puts himself in the character of the doctor) in his plays. He was the lens through which you saw everything. He was Bart’s sister Lisa, who really is the conscience of the Simpsons writers. And I love Frank Miller’s Ronin, which I still think is his best work to date. There’s one centerfold in it that opens up to this big orange thing. It’s like... oh my God. Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum is another favorite. That totally f**ked me up. That was great Batman and was really well drawn, and it lasted in my head a long time. But Grant, the person, is even more inspiring to me than Grant’s comics. The most amazing thing about Invisibles is that he kept writing it even after it started to cause him—as he tells it—to get sick, to almost kill him. [laughs] He’s a very daring person. He’s experimenting with life in a way that I’m not only not courageous enough to do, but not willing to do. He’s got a full-steam-ahead, ”I don’t care what George Bush or Margaret Thatcher or anyone like that does, because that’s adults and their games, and I’m playing my game in another place.” I was raised with too much “Jewish social responsibility” [laughs]… I’ve got to teach, and go back, learn economics, and learn philosophy and all that. And he will just go with a self-confidence and aura around him that is palpable and real and it works. It’s the best version of The Secret you can imagine; he’s a practitioner, but he’s not going to sell it like losers who market The Secret. It’s not my path, but it’s sure an interesting and daring one to be on. I love Sgt. Rock. Great short stories, and Joe Kubert’s use of the page… every composition looks like just a classic composition, but look at how he breaks up images… everything he does is really innovative, but it looks classic in its solidness...

JN: How about Alan Moore? DR: You know, Alan Moore’s Swamp Things were really important to me because they were coming out when my whole psychedelic thing was happening. So I got into Swamp Thing toward the end of his reign, where the hippie guy finds the tuber on the back of his piece of Swamp Thing... JN: And he smokes himself some primo Swamp Thing. How about Pekar? DR: I had American Splendor from issue #2 on. I actually directed a play when I was in grad school that was based on American Splendor two through five. I got permission from him in a letter to do it as an Equity waiver [permission from Actors Equity to do it with non-union actors] show in Los Angeles, and I was gearing up to do that, when he called and said that he’d made this deal with Doubleday and that I couldn’t do it. JN: And the next book? What style are you going to work in? DR: I want to do a comic where I’m just going to tell a story and not be meta. I’ve got the story outlined—I just have to resist screwing with it, now, or putting too many layers on top. Treat it more like water. I’m purposely going to go formula with my next comic. For me, working within a formula will be an experimental act. The story’s going to reflect on our times, and media, and all the stuff I care about, but I want to see if I can I just tell a story. Create interesting characters, have them make a series of decisions that put them in danger, and then come up with a unique way to get them out of it. JN: But a lot of critics stop thinking there. They don’t say, “And does he pull it off?” They resent you even trying to do that. DR: They resent once they suspect you’re trying to bend the form, as if that will maybe challenge their knowledge of the medium. Force them to think of things in a new way, or to evaluate what we’re spending our money on every month. As readers, once we see the gears turning, we feel like we’ve seen the man behind the curtain. But that’s our adversarial relationship to the writers we read, and that’s because we read as consumers rather than as readers or even as developing writers, ourselves. Comics is the one place you should read for the love of it, not because you’re a consumer.

Anointed by Warren Ellis as “NYC’s favorite freakscene facilitator”, Jeff Newelt a.k.a. JahFurry is Comix Editor of Smith Magazine, Comix Editor of Heeb Magazine, Creative & PR Consultant for online graphic novels Shooting War and A.D. New Orleans After The Deluge, Minister of Hype for online comix collective ACT-I-VATE, and Social Networking consultant for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF). JahFurry also regularly performs freestyle dancehall reggae ditties with numerous superheroes of dub, jazz, klezmer and blues.(Find out more about Jeff at: www.myspace.com/jahfurry).

THE END DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF | 53

MY LIFE IN WORDS:

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A WORKING WRITER by MICHAEL TEITELBAUM

MICHAEL TEITELBAUM has been a writer, editor, and packager of children’s books, comic books, and magazines for more than twenty-five years. Starting his career as an editor at Gold Key Comics, he worked as a children’s book editor at Golden, Grosset, and Macmillan. After striking out on his own, Michael’s packaging company, Town Brook Press, created and packaged SpiderMan Magazine, a monthly publication, for Marvel Entertainment. Some of Michael’s more recent writing includes X-Men School, Story of the X-Men, Story of the Hulk, Story of Spider-Man, and Batman’s Guide to Crime and Detection for DK; junior novels based on the feature films Men In Black 2 and Spider-Man (HarperCollins); Smallville: Arrival (Little, Brown); three Justice League novels for Bantam/DC Comics; and a six-book series for Simon & Schuster based on the Nickelodeon hit show Avatar. Michael’s non-fiction writing includes books on baseball, histories of radio & TV, Chinese immigration, and the Texas and New Hampshire colonies; and a book about how comic books are made. Michael’s latest book is The Scary States of America, a collection of 50 stories of the paranormal, one from each state, published by Random House. Here, Michael takes a few minutes to tell us how he came to have such an eclectic and accomplished career, and throws in some tips about how you might be able to do something similar. —DF I’ve sat down at the keyboard hundreds—thousands—of times to write about everything from Spider-Man and Avatar, to ghosts, Bigfoot, and aliens, not to mention baseball, pirates, mountain biking, and the U.S. Constitution. But now the task before me is to write about… me. Well, here goes. As you can see from my bio, I started my career in publishing as an editor at the now-defunct Gold Key Comics. I read lots of comics as a kid—both DC and Marvel, plus the odd Archie and Richie Rich now and then—but I never really imagined that I would end up working in the business. At the time, a few years out of college, I was working at an advertising agency and all my friends knew that I was pretty unhappy there. I had been a Communications 54 | WRITE NOW

major in college with a focus on radio and TV. But when I realized that I would have to leave New York (my first love) to begin pursuing a career in radio (my second love) I was reluctant. Those were the big bad ’70s, when you didn’t have to work on Wall Street to afford an apartment in Manhattan. So, if I was going to live in New York I had to work somewhere. I simply scoured the NY Times want ads each Sunday and applied for any job that required only a B.A. I was just looking to pay my rent and enjoy New York. I hadn’t given much thought to a long-term career goal. The ad agency job was the first one that came along. As it turned out, I did a weekly radio show on a volunteer basis, meaning for no money, on WBAI, a non-commercial station in New York at the same time I was working my day job, so that dream came true to some degree, even though it wasn’t how I was making a living. When a friend of a friend called to say he was leaving

The horror/suspense titles from Gold Key and other companies were excellent training grounds for new writers and artists, as they had to craft stories with beginnings, middles and ends plus a surprise or twist ending, all in five or six pages! Cover to The Twilight Zone # 35 is by an unknown painter [© 2007, CBS] his editorial job at Gold Key and asked if I would be interested in interviewing for it, I jumped at the chance. I was effectively an outsider to the comic book world (and the publishing world in general) but it sounded like it would be a lot more fun than the work I doing at the time. For whatever reason—my boyish good looks? my impressive interviewing skills?—I got the job. I’m not really sure why the executive editor, Wally Green, took a chance on me, but I am, of course, grateful that he did. It was at Gold Key that I learned aspects of my craft that have proven useful in all the writing I’ve done since. I learned how to plot a story using existing, well-known characters. How to set up and pay off a gag, both visually and in words. In those days—the late 1970s and early 1980s—we were publishing Disney and Warner Brothers characters. I edited Tweety and Sylvester among other titles. I also edited several adventure/horror/mystery anthologies for younger readers, as were all of Gold Key’s titles, such as The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery, and Grimm’s Ghost Stories. From these I learned the art of plotting a short story from scratch. The only recurring characters in these books were the hosts who presented the tales and so, for each issue, the writers and I were faced with the task of coming up with a variety of interesting, different stories of monsters, ghosts,

or classic “T-Zone” unexpected twists. Doing all this on a monthly deadline, filling four to five of these anthology titles with three to five of these stories was amazing “in the trenches” training for plotting a short story filled with twists and unexpected turns, suspense, chills, and surprise endings. Everything you learn about storytelling from writing, reading, editing, listening to writers speak, or reading Write Now! to discover the nuts and bolts processes, adds to your growth as a storyteller. Remain open to it all. In time—1982, to be specific—the comic book business shifted from the newsstand to the direct market. The big losers in this move were little kids—in other words, the readers of Gold Key’s line. With comics pretty much gone from the newsstand—Gold Key’s core distribution outlet— Gold Key (once a dominant player, along with Marvel and DC, in terms of sales) went out the comic book business. It was during this fadeout that I discovered the world of licensed children’s books, which not only saved my job at the company, but opened up an avenue for my writing that would, a few years later, become the basis for launching my freelance career. As Gold Key’s comics business was fading away, I spent a lot of time at the office drinking coffee, reading the paper, and talking to my friends on the phone. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that no one was going to pay me to do this forever. So when the handwriting (okay, the lettering) was on the wall about the fate of Gold Key Comics I walked down the hall to the offices of Golden Books—yes, those famous Little Golden Books we all grew up reading. Golden was a sister company of Gold Key, which were both owned by Western Publishing. The children’s book editors at Golden Books didn’t really know us comic book guys too well, so it was with some trepidation that I walked into the editor-in-chief’s office to introduce myself, explaining that I was a good editor, already on the company’s payroll, with not much to do, and asked if I could help them out in any way. When she didn’t toss me out on my ear in the first five minutes, mumbling something about “those damn comic book geeks” I took that as a good sign. Then she handed me bunch of papers and said, “We just got this in and can’t make head or tails out of it. See what you can do.” The “it” to which she was referring was “Masters of the Universe.” Apparently Golden had bought to the rights to do children’s books based on this TV show which had been based on a toy (Oy, don’t ask!). These keepers of the Pokie Little Puppy, the Tawny Scrawny Lion, and Pat the Bunny had no clue what to do with these steroid infested good guy toy characters who battled evil toys, and so the project got dumped in my lap as a kind of audition to see if I was worthy of wearing the mantel of “Golden Book Editor.” I immediately called the comic book writers and artists I was working with—the guys who did the adventure books and the two Gold Key superhero comics I resurrected for short runs, Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM | 55

and Magnus Robot Fighter. I used Golden’s “Look-Look” format—an 8 inch x 8 inch paperback with 24 pages, usually used for picture storybooks—and created in it a blend of children’s picture books with full-page illustrations and blocks of text and panels with sound effects and word balloons. The books sold, and when parent company Western Publishing finally and sadly closed down Gold Key, I was kept on to begin the next phase of my career as an editor of (mostly) licensed children’s books. During my years as a children’s book editor at Golden, the opportunity to write some of the books I was editing came up and I jumped at the chance to make some extra money. The first books I ever wrote were Look-Look books based on the movie Gremlins. After I worked for a few years as a children’s book editor at Golden, the editor-in-chief there left to work for Grosset. Shortly after, she called me and asked me to jump ship and join her there. Which I did. I had, for the moment, left the comic book world behind, and was fully enjoying working on children’s books. For the next few years at Grosset I edited licensed chil-

Magazines aimed at younger readers, filled with articles, activities and comics stories, were a popular brand extension during the 1980s and ’90s. Marvel, through its subsidiary, Welsh, put out the Teitelbaum-edited Spider-Man Magazine. Cover art to #1 (March, 1994) is by John Romita Sr. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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dren’s books in many formats based on movies such as Back to the Future and An American Tail, as well as coloring and activity books using the DC characters. I always expected to be an editor for the rest of my career, but at Grosset the opportunity to do more freelance writing came up on the An American Tail books we were creating. During this same time I began to look outside Grosset for additional freelance writing work, contacting friends I had made in the business. I started getting outside gigs for Jim Henson Productions and a packager called Parachute Press. Still, while I had a fulltime editorial job (with Golden, then Grosset), the bulk of my freelance work was with the publisher for whom I was working at the time. Things began to change at Grosset and so I looked to move on. I accepted a job at Macmillan. After a brief stay there, I launched my fulltime career as a freelancer. Quickly I learned that the most important thing a freelancer has (besides a certain amount of talent) is his or her contacts. Using mine, I expanded my freelance career and have worked on many rewarding projects, such as a Fraggle Rock and a Muppet Babies storybook for Henson, and an original Little Golden Book called But, You’re a Duck! Because of the manner in which I slid into freelance writing, I didn’t need or use an agent. When I started to shop around my own projects, I did hook up with an agent, who liked my work-for-hire stuff, and helped pitch ideas to publishers. These day, I still get my work-for-hire projects on my own and use my agent to pitch original projects to publishers. I can’t see myself ever going back to a full-time day job, as I love writing. But of course one never knows what the future holds. When I started my career, living in New York City was a big plus. All of the major publishers are here and I met many editors face to face, doing lots of legwork running from office to office. Today in the world of the Internet and e-mail I have much less face-to-face contact, something I miss, but it does make it easier for writers not living in NYC to network and make contacts. I have found that most editors don’t like getting phone calls and are less likely to response to a call than to an e-mail. Most of the major publishers I work with today are still in New York, although I do work for smaller publishers in Chicago, Minnesota, and California. I have also worked for publishers in Italy and the UK. One of the highlights of my freelance career was the creation, packaging, and editing of Spider-Man Magazine for Marvel in the mid-’90s, where, by the way, I first met Write Now’s own Danny Fingeroth. I had met Mike Hobson, Marvel’s publisher at the time, through a mutual friend—who just happened to be the same guy who had left Gold Key all those years earlier which led to my having this career in the first place. Never underestimate the power of networking. Mike and I hit it off, and talked often about wanting to work on a project together. I was no longer a mainstream comics guy so a regular editorial position at

Marvel didn’t make sense. But when the company decided to create a new magazine for younger readers, Mike called me in. The perfect project for us to do together had finally arrived. Spider-Man Magazine was Marvel’s attempt to reach younger readers (aged 6-8) who loved the Marvel characters. We did original, simple, self-contained six-page comic stories, plus puzzles, games, jokes, contests, a create your own super hero feature, a non-fiction nature feature, and the like. I wrote some material myself, but the vast majority of it I assigned out to freelancers. With this magazine I was once again trying to reach that underserved audience for comic books, the younger kids. Once again, however, as with the demise of Gold Key, the lack of newsstand distribution, ad sales, and aggressive subscription markets—not to mention Marvel’s famous mid-’90s corporate woes—doomed the mag. Over the years I have had to adapt to survive as a full time freelance writer. I adapted the screenplay for the first Spider-Man film into a junior Middle Grade novel for young readers. I adapted the pilot episode of the Smallville TV show into a Young Adult novel for slightly older young readers, and I adapted the pilot episodes (a three-parter) of the Justice League animated show into a Middle Grade novel, then wrote two more original Middle Grade novels based on the characters. I also had to adapt to changes in the children’s publishing business, as editors moved around or left and as companies gobbled each other up. I also didn’t want to be known as a writer who could only do one thing, be that movie and TV adaptations or anything else. Versatility and flexibility was the name of the game. It’s sometimes said that if writers do a wide variety of writing, they may have trouble establishing themselves as being good at any one thing. My experience has been that if you were good at a number of things, you got work doing a number of things. If you can only write one type of thing and the market for or interest in that type of work goes away, you are left high and dry. Keep trying to open new doors. You never know when the old ones are going to close. I started writing for various ages and in various formats. Sometimes editors I was working with on one type of book were also doing other types and they gave me a chance at doing new formats. Other times, those editors would recommend me to their fellow editors within a company—or even to colleagues at other companies— because I was good and always met my deadlines. This continues to be an important source of assignments for me. Never underestimate the importance of delivering quality work on time. It can often lead to the next gig. Soon, I was writing picture books, coloring books, board books, chapter books, leveled readers, Middle Grade novels, Young Adult novels, sticker books. You name it, I wrote it. In time, non-fiction crept into the mix. Lots of sports, which was fun, since I’m a sports fan. I also did “school-ish” topics such as histories of the Texas and New Hampshire colonies, Chinese Immigration, the U.S. Constitution, and the like. These projects were

research-intensive and time consuming compared to the fiction work I did, but they paid the bills nonetheless. At this point some of you might be scratching your head saying: “Middle Grade” (isn’t that where Lord of the Rings takes place?), “Young Adult” (aren’t 25-yearolds young adults, and shouldn’t they be reading real books written for grown-ups?), “Chapter Books” (don’t most books have chapters?); “Leveled Readers” (don’t all books have to be level in order to read them?); “Hi-Lo books” (does this refer to the reader’s state of mind or height?) These terms are used in the children’s publishing world to indicate several things—age range and level of reading difficulty; formats, both in terms of page count and trim size; and most importantly subject matter. When kids are ready to move on from picture books they usually step up to Leveled Readers. These go from level 1 to level 4 with each level increasing in difficulty, word count, vocabulary and sentence structure. Leveled Readers can be non-fiction, original fiction, or licensed character based. I’ve done these on everything from Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men and Batman, to professional wrestling and the space program. Next come chapter books, usually 48-64 pages, sometimes with black and white line art either at the chapter heads or full-page illustrations mid-story. Again these can be fiction or non-fiction, licensed characters or original stories and usually run from 5,000-10,000 words. Hi-Lo books, which can be chapter books or readers, are books on high interest subjects but written at a low reading level. So the book, aimed at a 6th or 7th grader, needs to be about subjects of interest to kid of that age— pop music, crime investigations, ghost investigations, XTreme sports—but written at a reading level more appropriate for a 3rd or 4th grader. These so-called “reluctant readers” have difficulty reading at their age level and because of this, shy away from books. The goal of Hi-Lo books is to capture their interest with cool subject matter, then give it to them at a reading level that won’t frustrate them. If these topics sound as if they are more of interest to boys than girls, that is probably the case. Boys tend to be among the more reluctant readers and so more of an effort is made with these Hi-Lo books to chose topics that would be appealing to them. But most of the other books I write, especially the more school-oriented titles, are for both boys and girls. Next up is the Middle Grade chapter book. These tend to be 128-225 pages, aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds (although that’s obviously quite a big range) and can be biographies, histories, or most often, fiction. Keep in mind that all these definitions and descriptions are generalizations, rules that often get broken. For example, the Harry Potter books, based on reading level and subject matter, are considered Middle Grade, even though some clock in at 700+ pages. Finally, we come to Young Adult (YA) books. When I was a kid there was no such thing as YA. Kids of a certain age went right from the Hardy Boys—which in today’s lingo would be considered Middle Grade chapter MICHAEL TEITELBAUM | 57

books—to regular grown-up Which brings me around to my books. latest work. (Remember me? I’m Now this new category for 14the working writer who’s writing 17 years olds is currently the this article.) It’s called The Scary hottest-selling genre in the chilStates of America and it’s a dren’s book universe. Again, collection of 50 short stories, one these age numbers are so vague; from each state, about the parasome 8-year-olds are reading normal—ghosts, UFOs and aliens, Harry Potter while others are Bigfoot, Mothman, and the Jersey struggling with chapter books. Devil. I discuss past lives recalled, These are longer, more sophistiout-of-body experiences, dead cated books with complicated and undead walking the earth— plots and deeply developed charyou get the idea. acters (sounds like regular At first I thought of simply colgrown-up books, right? Well, lots lecting these tales—some local of grown-ups read them too). But folklore and legends, others sinthe thing that sets them apart is gular experiences reported by the subject matter—sex, drugs individuals—and just presenting (rock & roll is too tame, unless, of them. But then I thought that the course, it includes sex and drugs), book needed a host, a Rod death, divorce, addiction, sexual Serling or Crypt Keeper type charidentity, suicide. You get the picacter (or good old Grimm from ture. For mature audiences only. Gold Key’s Grimm’s Ghost Tales). Some of you, especially those It’s when I hit on the idea of makover 30, may be wondering, ing the host a 12-year-old boy “When did the world of kids’ who is the collector of these parapublishing become so complicatnormal tales that the idea and the Michael’s pride-and-joy, The Scary States of ed? When I was a kid, I went from book really gelled. America, published by Random House, but the Hardy Boys to James Bond, I’ve created a website (see the owned by Michael. Cover design by Delacorte and didn’t think twice about it— url at the bottom of this page), and would even read the occasion- Press. [© 2007 by the Stonesong Press LLC and Michael Teitelbaum] where readers can share their al work of classic literature.” Well, in today’s world of own paranormal tales. The site, too, is hosted by the market research and focus groups, everyone in business character (who is really me—but don’t tell anybody). is looking for an edge, a way to target their product to a Random House bought the book and it was released specific consumer. The world of children’s book publishin July 2007. The Scary States of America is not my first ing is no different. I believe that this stratification has “original, non-licensed, I get a royalty, I own the rights to developed in the last few decades because of this marthe characters and stories in all media worldwide” book, ket-driven approach to the business. but it is my latest and is one of the most rewarding Lately there has been a trend to explore new themes projects I’ve ever tackled. in YA literature, or at least tell stories with mature themes The dream of every work-for-hire writer—every writer and well-developed, emotionally deep characters without (like me) who writes books based on others people’s the standard subject matter listed above. YA books frecharacters for a fee—is to write a book that is truly his or quently hit the best seller lists—the regular lists, not just her own. Once it’s sold to a publisher, the publisher is the children’s book lists—as adults seem to be reading purchasing the right to print and sell the book. But the them too, and a number of writers of grown-up books rest of the rights (TV, film, merchandise) to the property have been taking a stab at the YA category, making their stay with the writer. main characters teenagers, which seems to be the one But just because I’ve now done that doesn’t mean that hard and fast rule. I don’t do licensed stuff anymore. Sure I’d love to see In the world of comics, most of the main heroes have The Scary States of America take off and become a hit always been adults. When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko TV series which I get a crack at writing, but I’m still a chose to make Spider-Man a teenage hero—instead of a working writer, and I’ve still got to make deadlines to pay sidekick to an adult superhero—it was considered a revothe rent. lutionary move. But in the world of children’s books, kids Which reminds me. I’ve got a deadline. I’ve got to go have generally preferred to read about kids—go back to get busy writing. Tom Sawyer or Treasure Island, and of course the Want to find out more about The Scary States of aforementioned Hardy Boys—and so there is hardly ever America? Then check out this extremely cool a book for kids these days that doesn’t feature kids as website: scarystatesofamerica.com the main protagonists.

THE END

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Marvel’s first Captain Marvel is plucked out of the past for the miniseries entitled, simply, Captain Marvel. Here are a few pages toward the end of the second issue story, “Reconstruction.” The script is by Brian Reed, with pencils by Lee Weeks. The cover (above) is by Ed McGuinness. Note how Reed’s script is structured something like a movie script, with the dialogue set with narrower margins to differentiate it from the art descriptions. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

PAGE 18 1 - Int. Mother Starr's office - Night The only light in the room is from Julia's desk. This whole shot needs to be moody and spooky so our red herring of this cult sells properly. Nathan stands at the desk, sorting through Julia's papers. Looking for clues to prove something fishy is going on here. From off panel: JULIA STARR You thought I didn't see you, Nathan? Thought you could slip into my office and started going through my things?

2 - Julia enters the frame, approaching her desk opposite from Nathan.

NATHAN JEFFERSON Then I'll ask my questions quickly.

Why are you doing this, Julia? You have more money at your disposal than some people can even imagine. JULIA STARR There is more to life than money, bedding the next movie star I meet, or getting my picture in as many magaziNATHAN JEFFERSON So, you had a spiritual awakening and now here you are, leading a cult. Is that the story?

6 - Two rather large burly men in red and blue robes appear in the doorway. They are clearly here to kick Nathan's ass. BRUISER HALA CULTIST #1 Is there a problem, Mother Starr?

4 - Julia slams her fist on the desk.

JULIA STARR Just like old times.

JULIA STARR We are not a cult! We are -

NATHAN JEFFERSON Well, not just like... last time you caught me in your office, you pointed a gun at me.

NATHAN JEFFERSON Not a religion, either. Throwing on some robes and preaching twisted versions of -

BRUISER HALA CULTIST #2 Something you need us to... deal with?

PAGE 19 JULIA STARR You're quite lucky I've grown as a person since then. You have thirty seconds to get out of this church, or I call the police.

1 - Ext. Stark Tower - Night 5 - Julia turns towards the door. Pissed off rage, right out of nowhere. Heather Sante's voice comes from the level of MarVell's apartment. JULIA STARR Your time is up! Get out of We can make out the apartment because it is the one my office, now! Get out! part of the building with all its windows darkened. Guards!

3 - Nathan smiles a smart ass smile.

GET HIM OUT!

HEATHER SANTE Director Stark would have my ass if he knew we were doing this. But Mar-Vell called and asked Stark for a meeting at the helicarrier... 2 - Int. Captain Marvel's Apartment - Night Close on Heather Sante. She and a pair of SHIELD Agents are entering the apartment. They all have illuminated flashlights built into their uniforms. They are all wearing rubber gloves. The blinds are closed. The lights are off. HEATHER SANTE CAPTAIN MARVEl NUTS & BOLTS | 59 So we're gonna have a quick glance and then get out. Nobody touch a thing. You're just here to serve as extra eyeballs for me. See things I

Nathan's ass. BRUISER HALA CULTIST #1 Is there a problem, Mother Starr? BRUISER HALA CULTIST #2 Something you need us to... deal with?

PAGE 19 1 - Ext. Stark Tower - Night Heather Sante's voice comes from the level of MarVell's apartment. We can make out the apartment because it is the one part of the building with all its windows darkened. HEATHER SANTE Director Stark would have my ass if he knew we were doing this. But Mar-Vell called and asked Stark for a meeting at the helicarrier... 2 - Int. Captain Marvel's Apartment - Night Close on Heather Sante. She and a pair of SHIELD Agents are entering the apartment. They all have illuminated flashlights built into their uniforms. They are all wearing rubber gloves. The blinds are closed. The lights are off. HEATHER SANTE So we're gonna have a quick glance and then get out. Nobody touch a thing. You're just here to serve as extra eyeballs for me. See things I

miss. Understand? 4 - Int. Captain Marvel's Apartment - Night Heather is a few steps further into the apartment now. All the blinds are closed. All the lights are off. But in the beams of the flashlights, we get a sense that something is wrong in the room.

All the furniture is moved up against the walls, clearing out a large space in the middle of the room. The sound of paper being stepped on comes from the floor, drawing the attention of one of the SHIELD AGENTS and making him look down. HEATER SANTE Okay... so he closed the blinds, disconnected his computer and moved all the furniture around. Why? SFX: KRSSTL

6 - Heather and the SHIELD Agents are all looking at the floor now, shining their flashlights down. We don't see what they're looking at yet. SHIELD AGENT Agent Sante... the floor... What is all this? HEATHER SANTE I - oh, wow. Is that...? Okay, screw the flashlights. I need some real illumination. Benjamin - get the lights on in here.

PAGE 20 1 - Full page shot. Up on the ceiling, looking down at the floor. The floor is covered in sheets of paper. Each page is a piece of the Le Brun painting. It forms a huge puzzle on the floor where Captain Marvel has printed out the picture and assembled it to larger than life size. It should fill the apartment's floor. HEATHER SANTE What the hell...?

PAGE 21

Here, Brian and Lee use page 19 to set 1the reader up for the “shock” on page 20. In - Ext. Helicarrier - Night this pencil art, the detail on the many pieces of paper (drawn here as rectangles) on the There is still a buzz of activity as this flagship of through the night, but it is slightly floor isn’t visible. Reading the script showsSHIELD thathovers the papers, when inked and colored, will reduced due to the hour. reveal some kind of puzzle. RADIO CHATTER Director Stark, incoming Note also that there are panel numbers missing from the page energy signature, vector19 script. This indicates Beta-4. a rewrite was probably done, where panels were eliminated or combined. Note also that IRON MAN (RADIO) Lee added a close-up of Heather’s eye to the page, although it was not called for in the I have it. script. This emphasizes her surprise over the next page “reveal.” [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 2 - Ext. Hellicarrier Flight Deck - Night Iron Man stands on the deck as Captain Marvel lands in front of him.

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RADIO CHATTER Director Stark, do you need IRON MAN (RADIO) All units stand down. I said I have it. CAPTAIN MARVEL

The floor is covered in sheets of paper. Each page is a piece of the Le Brun painting. It forms a huge puzzle on the floor where Captain Marvel has printed out the picture and assembled it to larger than life size. It should fill the apartment's floor. HEATHER SANTE What the hell...?

PAGE 21 1 - Ext. Helicarrier - Night There is still a buzz of activity as this flagship of SHIELD hovers through the night, but it is slightly reduced due to the hour. RADIO CHATTER Director Stark, incoming energy signature, vector Beta-4. IRON MAN (RADIO) I have it.

2 - Ext. Hellicarrier Flight Deck - Night Iron Man stands on the deck as Captain Marvel lands in front of him. RADIO CHATTER Director Stark, do you need IRON MAN (RADIO) All units stand down. I said I have it. CAPTAIN MARVEL

Tony? What is it? What did you IRON MAN Why did you do it, Mar-vell? How did you do it?

3 - Captain marvel looks confused by this question. CAPTAIN MARVEL Do what? I IRON MAN Answer the question. CAPTAIN MARVEL I do not even know what the question means. IRON MAN How did you contact the Kree? CAPTAIN MARVEL Why would you even ask -

4 - Iron Man points at a streak of light arcing across the sky. It's clearly heading towards the helicarrier. Captain Marvel is shocked by what Iron Man is telling him. IRON MAN That is a Kree starship flying towards us right now. We received notification of their arrival five minutes ago as they passed the moon. They said you called them, and that you were turning yourself in for crimes committed against the Kree Empire during the Kree/Skrull

war. CAPTAIN MARVEL Madness! I never -

5 - Iron Man puts up a hand to silence Captain Marvel. IRON MAN If you didn't call them, then how did you know to be here? Now? At the location they said you requested? CAPTAIN MARVEL You contacted me, Tony. You asked me to come to the helicarrier immediately. You said it was an emergency and -

On this page, we have a scene of two people talking. To make it more kinetic, Lee has added panels, and constantly changes angles, heightening the tension of the dispute between Mar-Vell and Iron Man, climaxing the page with a large panel at the bottom. The dialogue in that panel makes the reader want to turn the page to see how the conflict builds and/or resolves. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

6 - We can tell by Iron Man's body language he's completely shocked. IRON MAN I did no such thing.

THE END CAPTAIN MARVEl NUTS & BOLTS | 61

CREATING COMICS STEP BY STEP

FINAL 4 steps

Steven Grant has had a long and successful career as a comic book writer, including work on The Punisher, Spider-Man, Batman, and RoboCop. He is the creator of the independent comics series, Whisper. His weekly column, Permanent Damage, can be found on cbr.cc. Its predecessor, Master of the Obvious, is where “Creating Comics” first appeared (not on Permanent Damage, as we had previously stated), and it is also archived at cbr.cc. For those keeping count, there are a total of ten steps (plus a “substep”) in this series. Here are the final four. The info in them is as valuable as what Steven wrote in parts 1-6. Read ’em and learn! —DF Step 7: Characterization I was doing a job for Louise Simonson, back when she was editing for Marvel, a Battlestar Galactica issue if I remember right, when I asked her about characterization. I hadn’t been hanging around Marvel for that long at that point (neither had she) but I’d become puzzled by one editor or artist or fan after another talking about this writer or that’s terrific characterization. And I’d look at the comics they talked about—and I just couldn’t see it! For the most part it was certainly better than the pure vanilla characterization you saw in most DC Comics of the late ’70s, where heroes were heroes because they were good and when you’re good you become a hero and villains were bad because that’s what villains are, and in Marvel Comics they didn’t editorially blot out all authorial idiosyncrasies so they were more interesting, but when I looked for what, in literature classes in college, was called characterization, it just wasn’t there. At least in any broad sense. It seemed every author would seize on one little character twist, then run it on every character in their stable until it became nothing more than the shtick by which that author was easily recognized. Even with the most interesting characterization, if every character in a story behaves the same, it’s not characterization. So, at the risk of looking ignorant, I asked Weezie about it, though she’d never raved up anyone’s characterization in my presence. She took my issue of Battlestar Galactica, opened it to a certain sequence, and said, “See where this character does this in this situation, but that one does that? That’s characterization.” Yes, it really is just that simple. Sort of. 62 | WRITE NOW

Awhile back in this series I raised some eyebrows when I said, despite schisms imposed by generations of English teachers and literary critics, that plot and character were really the same thing. In real terms, when writing a story, they commingle to the point of inseparability, with character’s actions constantly working on the story to change the direction of the plot and the events of the plot in ways large and small constantly altering character. But in real terms we the audience never see character. Character really only exists in the author’s head. What we see is characterization. As nit-picky as it sounds, it’s important to understand the difference between character and characterization. Characterization is where plot and character intersect. Characterization is the expression of character through action. Characterization is the means by which we (hopefully) convince the reader the story is actually happening about people. It’s an essential part of story logic, because it builds the logic of each character and establishes their behavioral patterns. Characters who establish their own behavioral logic and stick to it become “real.” Characters that play fast and loose with behavioral logic are little more than cartoons. A character demonstrates a mortal fear of choking to death on chicken meat. Given that premise, what strikes you as more logical and “real”: he goes into a cold sweat when his co-workers suggest lunching at Kentucky Fried Chicken, or he goes with them without a thought and chows down on a bucket of buffalo wings while discussing the latest company project? Every movement a character makes in a story, every word, is characterization. Back when characters still smoked, I used that as a characterization example: when your character

lights a cigarette, how does he do it? Matchbook? Cigarette lighter? Kitchen match struck on whatever rough surface is at hand? Does he smoke a pipe? Cigars? If cigars, stogies or cigarillos? Cigarettes? Filtered or straight? Plain or menthol? Straight up or through a cigarette holder? Each choice suggests something different about the character. In my early days at Marvel I’d make sense of characters by figuring out what music they listened to. (Hawkeye, for instance, had a massive collection of rockabilly records, which I thought said something interesting and different about his character.) Broadly, characterization breaks down into four forms: • big action (macrocharacterization) • mannerism and body language (microcharacterization) • background • dialogue Big action is the main form of characterization in most comics: the notion, for example, that Spider-Man will smash into a room through a window without a second thought to save someone inside. But there was a time when SpiderMan would slither in through a vent window and creep along the ceilings like, oh, a spider. But everyone understands big action. It’s the action that pushes the plot along. The cowboy wears his gun low and walks out onto Main Street to face off against three gunmen in a showdown. It’s the most instantly apprehensible form of characterization because it’s the most blatant and the most attached to plot, but it’s also the most overtly given to stereotype: you know the cowboy’s the hero because he’s the one who walks out alone against three killers. What is the perception if his behavior changes, if instead of walking out without cover onto the deserted street he hides in a bell tower or the loft of a barn, or crawls beneath the raised sidewalks of an old west town, and picks off the three killers one by one from hiding, and they never even figure out where he is? That doesn’t discount him from being the hero, but it makes him a different sort of hero (smarter, for one thing). These sound like plot concerns, but they’re really characterization. How the character behaves in the big picture is characterization. How a character behaves in any way is characterization. Not too many comics writers concern themselves with mannerism and body language, partly because of the nature of the medium: control of those things are in the artist’s hand. But they’re of necessary consideration, as they add texture and weight to characters, distinguishing them from others. (Shared or parallel mannerisms can also be used to thematically link characters.) The clothes a character chooses to wear, or whether he bothers with personal hygiene, or whether he prefers to stand with his arms folded or his hands clasped behind his back define him as much as his

willingness to leap through fire. How characters move when they walk is characterization. Everything is characterization. A trained boxer is going to move differently from a chess player, a teenage girl walking through a mall will look at different things than a 35-year-old man will. On a physical level, this kind of characterization—irrelevant to the plot for the most part—defines the relationship between character and environment. Every character in a story, even ancillary characters, needs to have some distinguishing characteristic, even if it’s only the way they stand, whether it’s the decision of the writer or the artist. The real trick to mannerism and body language, or any kind of characterization is: consistency. Once it’s established, follow it faithfully. Not that a character’s mannerisms and behavior can’t shift in the course of a story—most stories are about how characters’ behavior shifts and why—but those changes need to be properly set up and motivated, and for that to work effectively the initial characterization has to be well-established. Background, of course, consists of the details of a character’s milieu, values and history, which are often inextricably meshed, and they all influence other aspects of characterization. Someone who grew up on a farm in backwoods Alabama’s going to have different personality tics and vocabulary (particularly unconscious or automatic slang) than someone raised in a Park Avenue high-rise penthouse. Someone with seven brothers and sisters will likely have different values than an only child. As the forces that underlie personality, milieu values and history have direct effect on character and therefore characterization. It all has to be, in some form, taken into account. The most commonly abused form of characterization in comics is dialogue, which far too often is reduced to what amounts to exposition and catch phrases. The words we use, the rhythms of our speech, our grammatical shortcuts and eccentricities, these are all part of what each of us are. It’s no different for the characters in our stories; it is the most intimate and immediate expression of their psychopathologies and thought processes. But, since dialogue serves many functions alongside characterization, it deserves a discussion of its own. Step 8: Dialogue in Theory In theory, the purest comics are those done without use of any words at all, where the pictures alone carry the entire narrative weight of the story. Comics like that have been done. Very few

Two different ways a spider approaches its prey. The one on the right is Spidey’s first encounter with Doctor Doom, as depicted in Amazing Spider-Man #5, script by Stan Lee, art by Steve Ditko. On the previous page is a bombastic approach, in Amazing Spider-Man #350, courtesy of scripter David Michelinie, penciler Erik Larsen and inker Randy Emberlin. [© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] STEVEN GRANT | 63

have been done successfully. Likewise, there have been comics that depended almost entirely on dialogue with virtually no reliance on the pictures, and few of those have been done successfully either. For better or worse, we as a species are creatures of language, and written/spoken language is our primary means of communication. Language can be used to confuse, conceal and befuddle, but, used properly, it can also produce the most immediate clarity of expression. Language can even connect us after death, as anyone who has ever appreciated the work of a dead author knows. Language is one of the things that makes us uniquely human. Dialogue is language in action. As I said previously, it’s an integral element of characterization: what we say, the words we use and the rhythms we filter them through all expose our psychologies, our prejudices, our backgrounds. Those are all elements of character. Two characters, speaking to each other, are unlikely to speak with exactly the same words, phrases and phrasing unless the intent is parodic exaggeration. Dialogue serves several functions in a story: • to convey information • to connote character • to create rhythm • to alter mood and tone In most media, dialogue is specifically that: speech. For the most part, language (at least the part the audience is aware of) is restricted in television, film and radio to characters talking to characters. Even most voiceovers occur either in the context of one character explaining something, usually a flashback or visualized speculation, to another character, or as monologue, which is really a one-sided dialogue between character and audience to answer unspoken questions about plot or behavior. Comics are a special case in that there are three variations on dialogue in most comic books: • character speech • captions • sound effects Each has been dismissed by one faction or another over the history of comics, but each usually serves different, if sometimes overlapping, functions in a story. On the most basic level, captions provide exposition that answers reader questions (“Who is Johnny Thunder, the fighting plainsman? No one knows where the western whirlwind comes from or where he goes after his blazing guns and pounding fists teach badmen than law and order must rule the west!”*) or points their attention in the desired direction (“But as the stage reaches Vulture Pass...”*), while dialogue expresses character interaction and sound effects (SFX) are onomatopoeic visual representations of aural stimuli that pretend toward giving the story a richer quasi-synethestetic reality for a reader, as when the reader “hears” a gunshot by reading CRACK! In the midst of the action. Dialogue is often turned to exposition too, though. (“The sound of gunfire got me here too late to help the holdup victims! But I’ve got to

corral those killing rattlers!”*) Bearing in mind that infinite creative variations are possible and “perfect” can only be defined in the context of specific stories, in a perfect world the narrative weight of a story will be carried in roughly equal proportion by art and dialogue. Traditionally this hasn’t been the case, resulting in redundancies like having a panel showing a man sliding down a hillside, with a caption that reads “Bob slides down the hillside!” If it’s really redundant Bob might have a thought balloon that says, “I’ll slide down the hill!” This practice was born from necessity, from the days where an artist might not draw a necessary story element, such as Bob sliding down a hill. The writer would idiot proof his script by including a caption or a thought/word balloon describing what the reader was supposed to see in the panel had the artist actually drawn it, in order to keep the story flowing somewhat smoothly. The result was many stories top-heavy with dialogue and exposition, which is basically the presentation of information to introduce, to give background, to push the story forward. The problem has been that with character speech also bearing much of the burden of exposition, many of the other functions of speech get lost. So the challenge is to achieve a balance between art and dialogue, because, with comics providing space restrictions far more severe than most media, if art carries the brunt of exposition (i.e., having story elements drawn clearly enough and with enough impact that discussing them in caption or speech is unnecessary and redundant) dialogue can be turned to other, better purposes, such as enriching our understanding and appreciation of the characters and responding to them less as story constructs and more as human beings, to add new depths of perception, or to generate more and richer levels of information. Step 8A: Dialogue in Practice [an important afterthought about dialogue]

Someone called me to task when I originally wrote the above, discussing what I considered dialogue, as in, shouldn’t the captions, sound effects, and speech be taken as different elements, but the truth about comics is that they are all dialogue in the sense that when one “dialogues” a comic book, the function includes all those things. Dialogue-as-speech is arguably the trickiest aspect of writing. A certain amount of it will always be necessary for exposition—getting particular plot points over so the audience will grasp them—but the history of comics is littered with stories which have virtually nothing but expository dialogue, virtually all of it run through characters who end up sounding exactly the same. So here’s the skinny on dialogue: if you don’t know how people talk, you’re not going to write decent dialogue. The best way to learn how people talk isn’t to read how dialogue is written, but to listen to people talking. In movies, on TV, overheard in restaurants or on the bus. Actual speech. When you start really listening, you realize speech is rambling. Speech is sloppy. The relationship between speech and grammar is often tenuous. And much speech,

* From “The Real Johnny Thunder,” written by Robert Kanigher, All-American Western Comics #122, 1951.

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• I didn’t know you were in a war, I thought it was about, transcribed into print, is unreadable. about art, she said, rested on his knees peaked up But... behind her,—but it doesn’t matter if it’s really, if you’ll Everyone sounds different. really go back to work on it, Jack? she bent toward I used to work as a backstage doorman at a theater. The him,—who’s Stella? office where I sat for six or seven hours a night was blocked (from JR by William Gaddis, 1975) from the corridor to the dressing rooms and stage area by a wall I had to look around if I wanted to see who was Imagine a comic in which you could go for pages reccoming. It wasn’t long before I realized I didn’t have to look ognizing characters simply by their speech, without referaround the wall. Even the lightest footsteps clicked off the ence to their pictures. Now let’s listen to what was at one tile floor in the usually empty offices, and I quickly found point considered a high mark for comics dialogue, presentthat everyone had an identifying walk. (After awhile, it ed in the same manner: became great fun to speak to anyone approaching by name • By the time it recovers its senses—it will be too late to a step or two before we could see each other.) stop us! The problem, for the writer, is that • The winged beast goes flying the speech of everyday life can’t be helplessly upward toward space transcribed to the printed page for itself, while below it... There! That any length of time, unless your purfinishes that machine for good! pose is specifically to duplicate the • Nice work, Flash! rambling, stumbling, halting, redun• Teamwork will do it every time! dant rhythms of real speech. The • Their elation turns to dismay as challenge is to somehow approxithey walk the streets of the city mate those rhythms in something which the insect-people of coherent and focused enough to Ulisson call home... Those insect carry a story forward. The real chalbeings are still petrified! lenge is to make each of your char• Somehow—we failed! We acters sound unique enough that smashed the machine but— you could identify them without any • After an hour of futile searching... other character ever using their The machine that turned these names and without ever looking at intelligent insects into stone has the pictures. been smashed—but they still Few authors can do that. One was remain petrified! the novelist William Gaddis, who • We might as well face up to it. purposely didn’t use quotations Our mission has been a failure. marks, freely mingled exposition We might as well go back to with dialogue in a deceptively Earth... freeform style, and went for dozens • Moments later, Green Lantern, of pages at a time without ever Flash and the Martian identifying which character was Manhunter are hurtling at multispeaking. His novels are difficult, but light speed across the vast gulf once you picked up his rhythms and Johnny Thunder, the fighting plainsman, was a of interstellar space... I just hope become aware of each character’s fixture in the early days of DC Comics' western our fellow members did better particular patterns and concerns, titles. The art for this cover to issue #122 was by than we did! differentiating is easy: Alex Toth and Sy Barry. [© 2007 DC Comics.] (from Justice League of America • Thinking about that book I, #20, written by Gardner Fox) about trying to get back to work on that book I... • Would you? I’ve been afraid to ask, I’ve been almost You know which three characters are involved. Try to figafraid it wasn’t true... her hand skimmed down,—you ure out who said what. told me what it was about once but... Of course, speech in art isn’t speech in life. David Mamet • About a lot of things it’s, can’t say what a book’s about is renowned for his “realistic” dialogue (as Brian Bendis, the before it’s done that’s what any book worth reading’s “Mamet of comics,” is known in our field for his) but if you about, problem solving. listen carefully to Mamet’s dialogue, you’ll find it’s extremely • It’s a silly question, I’m sorry, people always... structured and mannered. Which isn’t a complaint; all good • No, it’s about a man who, about the war... fictive dialogue is carefully worked and structured, because • War? but I thought... your own rhythms are the ones most natural to you and if • And a general who, he’s like your father there molding you don’t pay close attention and work at differentiation, all his nose, above the battle, he’s a confusion of this your characters will sound just like you, if you manage to man’s ideas of his own father and The Lord, the way give any voice to them at all. the Lord sold Faust out in that wager... There are all sorts of gimmicks for differentiating characters, STEVEN GRANT | 65

like pompous jerks, some even speak in melodrama. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with writing any character that talks like that if that’s what the character should sound like. It’s disorienting to have a character talk like Doctor Doom one minute and Archie Andrews the next. One word about captions: captions are narration, whether it’s first person narration by a character in the story or third person/omniscient narration by the author. (There’s also second the hardest in practice: person narration, but it’s almost never used anymore.) Listen to your characters. Whatever style narration, the narrator is as much a character as Literally learn to hear their voices in your head. Write what any active participant in the story and it’s just as important that you hear. With practice you’ll start to know what constructions the narration have a steady, identifiable voice throughout the they would and wouldn’t use, what words, their speech story as well. Narration that shifts voice without good reason patterns and the ways their personalities emerge is a distraction that suggests nothing so much as authorial through their incompetence. speech. A quick word on In an ideal sound effects: world, your the object of characters could sound effects is just say whatevto bring a sort er’s on their of 3-D reality to minds at any the story by given time—the approximating practice became an aural dimenpopular following sion. But sound Quentin effects are most Tarantino’s suceffective when cess with the used sparingly: if seemingly ramsomeone’s shootbling dialogue of ing off a machine Pulp Fiction, with gun, BUDDA many not quite BUDDA BUDDA getting that virtually will be sufficient. every speech in You don’t need a that film connects BUDDA for every directly in some cartridge being way to the plot. Film ejected. Some cregives Tarantino the ativity in sound room to flex the effects is occasiondialogue enough to ally good, but it’s make it seem at least really easy to invent partly random, but Samples of how Grant Morrison used dialogue to build laughable sound comics are a much character, taken from Seven Soldiers of Victory #0, illustrated effects, and in many cases the familiar more restrictive mediby J.H. Williams III. [© 2007 DC Comics.] sound effects are the most effective um than film; the space because they’re the easiest for the readfor words of any kind er to internalize into the story, like using BLAM for a gunshot, tends to be extremely limited. At any given time it falls to charbecause for many readers recognizing them is rote and autoacter dialogue to move the story forward (sometimes with matic, which is the effect you want, for them to be just another forced emphasis), introduce or illuminate story elements, introamplifying element in the story rather than something that duce other characters—and often it all needs to be done at stands out for its own sake. Sound effects have a bad rap these once. And even while that’s happening, the characters have to days, but they’re still useful. Just use them sparingly, and use stay individualized. them well. Here’s a pretty good example (on this page) of what I mean, written by Grant Morrison in Seven Soldiers Of Victory #0. Step 9: Picking Up the Little Pieces Dialogue is something no one can ever really be sure they’re Before you sit down to write that plot or script, there are a good at; the only way to stay on top of it is to keep trying to lisfew little rules of thumb and shorthand notations to get ten to it with fresh ears. Rule of thumb: if you read it aloud and straight. While there aren’t really across-the-board standards of it sounds out of character, change it. Bear in mind that some any kind in comics, except what sells sells, there are a few people do speak in stilted, overly formal phrasing, some do talk things you could stand to know about.

from freaky speech patterns (straight say it not Yoda does— but it turns out you can hardly blame the little guy after all that shock treatment) to phoneticizin’ accents, li’l dahlin’. But virtually any gimmick is terribly easy to overuse, and all present problems in the long run. So here’s the down-and-dirty method for differentiating character voices, which is both the easiest in principle and

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seems to be any other train. Until it gets closer, and then we can see a grinning white skull painted on the front of the train, between the lights. From inside the train, we look out— past the silhouettes of men with cutlasses—at the startled commuters, including Soapy, waiting on the platform outside.

The first three pages of The Manhattan Guardian #1, written by Grant Morrison, with art by Cameron Stewart. [© 2007 DC Comics.] If you’re pitching to a comics company, the editor and/or publisher are likely going to want some outline of your idea before you begin. Even if you’re your own editor/publisher, it’s usually worth it to at least lightly sketch out the direction of your story. I reiterate: you can’t really know what a story is about until you know how it ends, and you can always change your ending in process if something better occurs to you or if you have a revelation about the hitherto unknown true meaning of your story, and knowing how it ends will at least provide you with a direction to move in so you can prevent your story from meandering. Don’t get me wrong: there may have been excellent comics stories that were created on the fly (I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but my knowledge is hardly encyclopedic), but usually the opposite is true. If you’re determined to “free your muse” and go structureless, at least take some good improv classes to learn how that sort of thing works. (Yes, there are rules.) Plots are just plots, a listing of the events of a story. If an artist will be drawing your story from a plot (known as “the Marvel method,” even though even Marvel doesn’t employ it much anymore), include all necessary action and as much emotional behavior as necessary to get the story across. Depending on the artist; some work much better in this method than others, and it may take some trial and error to figure out how elaborate you have to be. Plots can be broken down by page… Page One A subway station somewhere in New York, where COMMUTERS wait impatiently for their train, though they don’t mingle, and a Rasta-style black man, SOAPY, in jeans and an old army jacket sits on a bench, reading a tabloid, the Manhattan Guardian. Soapy lowers the paper a bit and sniffs the air, his eyes darting warily down the subway tunnel. The headlights of a train approach, but no one reacts, because it

Page Two DOUBLE PAGE SPLASH. PIRATES, reminiscent of traditional Caribbean pirates in their dress but also wearing more modern clothes and a couple carrying semi-automatic pistols instead of the cutlasses the others carry, flood off the train in an orgy of ecstatic violence: running commuters through, taking women executives prisoner, terrifying the other commuters who break and run in sheer panic, as a newspaper is prominently swept toward us. (It’s on the newspaper that we’ll put the title and credits, and whatever else we feel like.) Etc. Those were the first three pages of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s The Manhattan Guardian #1 (DC Comics), which was the closest comic at hand. [See art above.] Morrison probably wrote the scene in full script, but this is a good exercise for anyone trying to get a handle on writing plots. Take any comic at hand, and reduce it to a plot, trying to get all the necessary information about what’s in the pictures into the smallest amount of text possible. Smallest amount doesn’t mean fewest words, it means the minimum necessary to convey all the elements necessary for the artist to draw what you envision. As with screenplays, it’s a good idea to capitalize the name of any character the first time we meet them, including “general” characters like COMMUTERS or PIRATES. (It’s not necessary to capitalize them thereafter.) This makes it clear who’s necessary to a scene, and if there are too many capitalized names in your plot, it will quickly become clear you’re working with too many characters and need to reconsider. Additional information that affects the art but isn’t a part of the art directions should be put in parentheses, to separate it, as with the final line of the dummy plot above, while notes to editors, letterers or colorists should go in separate paragraphs, also in brackets or parentheses to separate them from art directions. Rewrite whole published stories into plots along the above lines and in no time you’ll start seeing story techniques and setup techniques that are (hopefully) invisible to the published work. (Just don’t change a few names and try to submit them as your own stories.) Plots may also be done for entire stories, or for sections of stories (pg. 1-6 this happens, pg. 7-9 that happens, etc.), allowing the artist greater leeway for breaking the story down into pictures. This works well if the artist is particularly experienced and/or has a strong story sense. It works less well, sometimes even disastrously, if they don’t. Scripts use roughly as much art direction as plots do, but are STEVEN GRANT | 67

usually broken down into page and panel and include all the captions, dialogue, sound effects—really every element that will be in the final story. Again, there is no real standard for script format in comics anymore, but arguably the most standard is as follows (again cribbing Seven Soldiers: Guardian #1, but I want to emphasize this is not Grant Morrison’s full script if he in fact wrote the story in full script, and I have no idea what Morrison’s script would look like): Page 1 Panel 1: A subway station somewhere in New York, where COMMUTERS wait impatiently for their train, though they don’t mingle, and a Rasta-style black man, SOAPY, in jeans and an old army jacket sits on a bench, reading a tabloid, the Manhattan Guardian. No dialogue. Panel 2: Soapy lowers the paper a bit and sniffs the air, his eyes darting warily down the subway tunnel. SOAPY 1: ->SNFF?<-

NEWSPAPER LOGO 2: THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN HEADLINE ON PAPER 3: HEADLESS HORROR IN HAUNTED HOSPITAL SUB-HEADLINE ON PAPER 4: EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS INSIDE! Panel 3: The headlights of a train approach, but no one reacts, because it seems to be any other train. No dialogue. Panel 4: Until it gets closer, and then we can see a grinning white skull painted on the front of the train, between the lights.

and various stories demand more words than others. The rule of thumb, from when the six panel grid was king, is no more than 35 words (including captions, dialogue and sound effects) should appear per panel. There’s no particular reason to stick religiously to that, but no particular reason to deviate from it as a matter of course either. Bear in mind that space in a comic book is limited (it’s also limited in most “commercial” graphic novels, since many publisher judge profitability against page count, with extended length seeing as either raising the price or eating into profits) and if you’re writing many pages in a row with several hundred words per page, odds are you’re trying to jam too much story in, and you should rethink. (You might discover you have exactly what’s right for your story, but it never hurts to double check.) Some tools for comics that don’t much apply to other media: Bold words. These are words in dialogue that are emphasized—to create rhythm, to punch home information or emotional states, to establish speech patterns, and various other thing. While once way overused, often with no ear for how the sentences would sound if spoken aloud. (You’d think every character had the peculiar lilt of Jerry Lewis’ film persona.) Fortunately, their use has somewhat fallen out of favor, meaning that when bold words are used, they can now deliver more punch than previously. (In comics, bold words are usually used in lieu of italics.) What you bold changes the meaning of your sentence. Consider this example, also from The Manhattan Guardian (where it was printed unbolded):

No dialogue. Panel 5: From inside the train, we look out—past the silhouettes of men with cutlasses—at the startled commuters, including Soapy, waiting on the platform outside. No dialogue. PAGES 2-3 Panel 1: DOUBLE PAGE SPLASH. PIRATES, reminiscent of traditional Caribbean pirates in their dress but also wearing more modern clothes and a couple carrying semiautomatic pistols instead of the cutlasses the others carry, flood off the train in an orgy of ecstatic violence: running commuters through, taking women executives prisoner, terrifying the other commuters who break and run in sheer panic, as a newspaper is prominently swept toward us. TITLE (on newspaper page) 1: PIRATES OF MANHATTAN. CREDITS (under title, on newspaper) 2: Grant Morrison – Writer /Cameron Stewart – Artist / Pat Brosseau – Letters / Moose Bauman – Colors / Harvey Richards – Asst. Ed. / Peter Tomasi – Editor You’ll notice that every dialogue/caption/sound effect is numbered in the order in which is occurs on the page. The numbering starts over with each page. There’s no real limit on how verbose your pages can get, 68 | WRITE NOW

The first example pushes home the sheer weirdness and possibly urgency of the situation, but it’s a direct statement. The second brings an air of uncertainty to the phrase; is the information true or not? The third emphasize place, as if

suggesting while we may be apprised of the situation, we’re in the wrong location. The fourth is just an illustration of a technique I’ve grown fond of: emphasizing syllables rather than words. Stressing a single syllable is just more like common speech, and in this case drives home the idea that we know something is happening, but we just don’t know what it is. Obviously these aren’t the only permutations of meaning in the sentence. You could bold virtually any of the words in the sentence (though some bolded would connote less meaning than others, and under most circumstances you don’t want to leave your readers puzzling out your meaning... unless you do) depending on what you wanted to suggest. Other common notations in a script: (T) or (thot)—used to indicate a thought balloon. LOIS (T) 8: What happened to Clark? I’d swear he just stepped into this phone booth! (OP)—used to indicate dialogue coming from off-panel SUPERMAN (OP) 9: Up, up, and away! (B) or (burst)—used to indicate a “burst” balloon, those balloons with multiple spikes coming off them for extra emphasis, usually to indicate particularly emotionally charged dialogue. Also very common these days is an alternate form of “emphatic” balloon, with has an extra-wide, often colored border to catch attention. It’s the same as a burst and can be referred to with a (B); that’s between you, your editor and your letterer. LOIS (B) 10: SUPERMAN! HELP ME! SFX:—this is the “character” name for any sound effect used in a panel, and is numbered in sequence with dialogue. Sometimes the source of the sound effect is noted, but there’s no real consensus on that. GUN-TOTING THUG 11: Too late, Lane! Your reporting may have sent me to the chair—but I’m taking you with me! SFX (gunshot) 12: BLAM There are various other mechanical aspects of writing comics, and you’ll doubtless create more to suit your own purposes as you go, but those are the most common forms and shorthands. Master those—it really doesn’t take much— and you’re ready to hold your own at plotting and scriptwriting... provided you’ve got the imagination and creative skills to match. Step 10: The Pitch Word is there are guys in Hollywood who make their livings pitching movies. Not making movies. Not selling screenplays. Pitching movies. They have the rap down so well and understand so well the buttons to push that they get meetings and studios hand them nice sized checks just to be able to snag the idea, though such ideas rarely result in finished films or even good screenplays. But the pitch is an entirely different beast from a screenplay or film. It’s not a product or a blueprint, it’s a commercial. You pitch in comics, too. Odds are you’ll end up pitching

unless you devote yourself to self-publishing, and even then you’ll have to do pitching of a sort just to get distributed. Different editors want different things in the pitches they’ll consider; some want little more than a pithy sentence encapsulating the idea while at least one prominent editor likes to see a very thorough point-by-point beat sheet for at least one full arc for any proposed series. There’s no set format. Pitches are sometimes written, sometimes verbal, sometimes both. But all have one thing in common. They’re not plots—a mistake many make—though they may include plots. They’re the distillation of your concept and intended development into tidy sales points to excite and comfort your editor and whoever authorizes the checks. If you were starting a company and trying to encourage investors, you’d present them with a prospectus. That’s all a pitch really is: the prospectus for your untested idea. I’ve written pitches that were small phone books, filled with details. Usually I find this to be a mistake: important selling points get lost in a sea of detail, which just gives “the buyer” more elements to latch onto for a reason to pass. On the other hand, too little detail may leave your series seeming derivative of existing work if any with superficial similarities exist, another argument for passing. The most effective (and, curiously, the shortest) pitch I ever did was for Badlands: “A crime story set in 1963 and starring the man who really killed John Kennedy.” You may notice an almost total lack of specifics in that pitch. I made it up on the fly and gave it verbally about twenty seconds after being asked for a pitch. I didn’t have a plotline, any idea of characters, not even a title. Just that line. But it had everything a good pitch really needs: • It tells the genre and milieu • It identifies the lead character (however sketchily) • It delivers the hook, that something that will excite an editor or publisher and make them believe it might also excite an audience That’s the minimum a good pitch will have, but sometimes it’s enough. In the case of Badlands, the minimalism worked to my benefit. The concept preyed on established conspiracy theory already well-known to the publisher and let his imagination run riot with the possibilities. Tying the story to specifics at that stage could just as easily have dampened his enthusiasm. The sketchy pitch grabbed his imagination; he wanted to see the story, to the point that he was willing to pay for the privilege. He had to have it. And that’s what you want your pitch to do. A while back back I started developing a series by way of illustrating concepts in this series. I knocked it off for a time because the material being covered made it impractical. But a pitch incorporates many of those elements, and, bearing in mind this is a quick, rough draft that would need considerable polishing and reworking—like I said, this is your advertisement, and you want it as polished and focused as possible—a the beginnings of a pitch for the series would go something like this:

STEVEN GRANT | 69

In Extremis Steven Grant Horror/political fiction CONCEPT As the end of fossil fuels threatens to collapse civilization, a company comes to the rescue with a new, clean, apparently unlimited energy source, the nature of which is a closely held secret jealously sought by others. The introduction of the new energy generates economic and political upheavals and a new social equality, but concurrently on the rise are apparently disconnected phenomena: bizarre new diseases and a dramatic increase of strange new religions and gruesomely violent crime that threatens to tear the new social order apart. The company’s closely-guarded secret is that their new energy source is one of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, discovered in its eternal slumber on the ocean’s floor. Its “pollution” isn’t physical or measurable, but spiritual. IN EXTREMIS is a modern Lovecraftian horror story, but it’s also an examination of the limits of social progress and political change centering on the question: How much of ourselves and our world are we willing to sacrifice to satisfy our desires? MAIN CHARACTERS Randall “Rand” Kinson: An industrial spy, charged with stealing the secrets of the new energy source. Despite his choice of career, he considers himself morally equal or slightly superior to others, justifying his job as “equalizing opportunity” and safeguarding the concept of an egalitarian society. A bit egotistical and sure there’s no situation he can’t handle by himself, Kinson’s nonetheless pleasant enough to others, deceptively easygoing—a handsome charmer expert at masking his darker side. Once he discovers the true nature of what’s happening, he scrambles to try to set things right, only to realize that the corruption inside him—the willful self-ignorance and easy self-deception that has made his career possible—will destroy him unless he can master it first. Elliot Banks: Owner and president of C-Power, energy providers to the world, and discoverer of what he calls “Perfect Power.” A Red baby secretly delighting both in being able to supply all the power needs of humanity while unseating the moneyed powers that have long gripped the world in a political and financial stranglehold, he’s growing increasingly isolated and paranoid, terrified of unexpected, horrifying repercussions from his “gift to the world”—not to mention in constant fear for his life from displeased rivals. Harley Second: An irresistible raven-haired sexpot utterly lacking in scruples, thoroughly decadent attorney, Harley functions as a “broker” for anyone with the money and a need for “extralegal” solutions to their problems. She revels in her ability to “finesse” situations—success is a quasi-sexual thrill for her—but lately she wonders if she’s going mad, as distant inhuman voices whisper in her ear of real power, 70 | WRITE NOW

and worship, and she grows increasingly interested. Etc. STORY (Six issues) 1) Employed by Harley Second on behalf of unknown clients to steal C-Power’s energy secrets, Rand Kinson inadvertently becomes the target of thrillkillers while prepping the job and begins to grow more aware of odd changes in his world since the advances that made CPower the salvation of American civilization. He clings to his sense of moral superiority, unaware that an unsettling growth he has discovered on his body may have origins in his decaying spirit. He starts the job, but he’s an unsuspecting stalking horse for a second operative whose mission is to kill Elliot Banks, the company’s owner, and the two operatives are intended to be decoys for each other, because there is another agenda at work that Kinson has not been told of. Etc. Without specifying it, the pitch suggests the story begins as an industrial/legal espionage thriller, with horror elements only slowly coming to light; what “horrors” exist in the first issue description would appear to be a “real world” kind of horror, the result of human cruelty. Other themes, like political machination, are also more undertones at this point than full-fledged plot points. Under these circumstances, it wouldn’t be surprising for a publisher or editor to come back saying they liked the general pitch, but could, say, the Lovecraftian element be more strongly played upfront to intrigue that audience, or that the whole story takes too long and should be sped up, or any number of other “suggested changes.” This is par all the way along the creative process once an editor or publisher gets involved, partly a question of business considerations and partly of personal taste or anticipation based on prior experience. In all these cases, remember: you’re the creator. You get to decide what goes into your story and how the story plays. But there’s a cost: you have to be willing to say no, with the knowledge that saying no may scuttle the project. Your power over your own project is only as great as your willingness to say no and stand by the consequences. That isn’t to say you should stand firm at all costs—there may be many compelling reasons, not all creative, to go along with suggested changes, and editors/publishers have even been known to be right about these things—just that ultimately it’s your decision to make. Steven Grant has been a professional writer since the 1970s. He has written for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, First, Avatar, and a host of other publishers. At Marvel, he helped popularize the Punisher with his collaborations with Mike Zeck on The Punisher limited series and graphic novel. He co-created the popular independent comic series Whisper (Capital/First) and Badlands (Dark Horse). His new four-issue series Two Guns is published by Boom! Studios. His weekly column about comics, pop culture, and politics, Permanent Damage, can be found at: cbr.cc.

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Dan Johnson

cond ucte d July 12, 2007

If you want to succeed in business, you have to tap into your full potential. While on the comics page Tony Stark may have learned that lesson a long time ago, some of the writers and artists who were crafting tales of his alter ego, Iron Man, had not. All that changed though when inker Bob Layton and writer David Michelinie were given the nod to helm the adventures of Ol’ Shellhead from Iron Man #116 (Nov. 1978) to #153 (Dec. 1981). During their run on the book, Iron Man became a major power player in the Marvel Universe and a huge hit with fans of Marvel Comics. More importantly, the man in the Golden Armor, Tony Stark, took center stage in the series and was finally fleshed out as a character. The world that the man behind Stark Industries inhabited, and comics in general, became richer for this new emphasis. Indeed, Layton and Michelinie’s initial run was so successful and fondly remembered that they were asked to return to the book for a second time during Iron Man #215–232 (Feb. 1988–July 1989). Recently BACK ISSUE caught up with Layton and Michelinie and got the story about their two times with the Golden Avenger, and we also got the inside scoop about how they are returning to the character once more in an effort to yet again build a better Iron Man. – Dan Johnson DAN JOHNSON: Thank you both for sitting down and doing this “Pro2Pro” interview with BACK ISSUE. The theme of this particular issue is “Men of Steel,” and you certainly can’t do an issue like this without talking about Iron Man. Tell our readers how you two came to work on this character. DAVID MICHELINIE: We had worked together at DC on Claw the Unconquered and we had become friends over that [series]. We had both recently left DC to work for Marvel and we were offered Iron Man by Jim Shooter. I had never read Iron Man before, and it was one of Bob’s

Iron Men Tony Stark and his temporary replacement as Iron Man, James “Rhodey” Rhodes, in a 2001 Bob Layton commissioned illustration. From the collection of Chris Murrin. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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favorite books, so we made a good team. Bob knew all the stuff that had happened in the past, and I knew absolutely nothing, so I was coming to it with fresh eyes. BOB LAYTON: If I remember correctly, there were three books offered to us and Iron Man was one of them. They were three books that were at the bottom [in sales rankings]. Do you recall that? MICHELINIE: It may well have happened, but I have no memory of that. LAYTON: I think I was just so excited to find out Iron Man was one of the books they had available. MICHELINIE: If so, then that’s probably the reason I picked it. The advantage of having you know the character was probably a factor. LAYTON: It’s safe to say that Dave kind of rolled with this. I was always such a huge fan of armored characters anyway, from my King Arthur obsession on, that Dave just listened to all my ranting about this character from my childhood and he formed his take on Iron Man from my opinions. Is that fair, Dave? MICHELINIE: [slight pause] Okay. LAYTON: [laughs] MICHELINIE: I don’t know if I formed my opinions, but I certainly got a great deal of background, and your enthusiasm bled off into my viewpoint, I’m sure. LAYTON: I was a lot more excitable in those days. MICHELINIE: I don’t know if that has diminished. LAYTON: [laughter] Thanks! JOHNSON: You said Iron Man was selling poorly when you took over. When you sat down together to discuss what needed to be done to improve the sales, what conclusions did you draw? What changes did you think had to be made? LAYTON: Get rid of the Ani-Men! [laughter] Wasn’t that our first agenda, Dave? MICHELINIE: I think our first agenda was to push the character into a more realistic direction, looking at Tony Stark as a real guy and determining what would a real guy in his position do. That’s why one of the first storylines we wanted to do was “Demon in a Bottle,” an alcoholism storyline. S.H.I.E.L.D. had been trying to take over his company and [Stark] had all kinds of women problems. As some would say, you wouldn’t give his problems to a monkey on a rock. [Faced with these problems,] what would a real person do? A real person would look for some kind of safety valve and at the time, with Tony being a millionaire playboy in the 1980s before crack cocaine became such a popular item, drinking seemed to be the logical way to push him. That was our main thrust, to try and take this character and change him as a real person and see where that led us.

Corner symbol art by Bob Layton used during the Iron Man run penciled by John Romita, Jr.

Beginnings: Inker on Charlie Nichols’ pencils for “By the Dawn’s Early Light,” published in Charlton Comics’ Beyond the Grave #5 (Apr. 1976)

Milestones: Co-creator of the Huntress / plotter and inker on Iron Man / writer and artist on Hercules limited series / writer on X-Factor / co-founder of Valiant Comics / co-creator of X-O Manowar / co-founder of Future Comics

Works in Progress: Iron Man: The End one-shot / a new miniseries featuring the third installment of the Iron Man/Dr. Doom/Camelot trilogy for Marvel Comics / writer and inker of the online monthly web-comic, Colony, at www.boblayton.com

Cyberspace: www.boblayton.com

BOB LAYTON Photo courtesy of Bob Layton.

Beginnings: “Puglyon’s Crypt,” published in DC’s House of Secrets #116 (Feb. 1974)

Milestones: Co-plotter and scripter of Iron Man / The Avengers / Star Wars / The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones / The Unknown Soldier / The Bozz Chronicles / The Amazing Spider-Man / creator of Venom / Action Comics / co-founder of Future Comics

Works in Progress: Co-plotter and scripter of Iron Man: The End one-shot and Iron Man/Dr. Doom/Camelot trilogy miniseries for Marvel Comics / short stories for Moonstone prose anthologies including The Phantom Chronicles and Moonstone Monsters: Werewolves

DAVID MICHELINIE Photo courtesy of Bob Layton.

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(above left) Layton’s first cover to Iron Man #121 (Apr. 1979), guest-starring the Sub-Mariner, was bounced for the version in the inset because “the characters were considered too high on the page and the editor felt the Iron Man figure needed to be more dynamic.” (above right) “This was my original draft of Iron Man #128 (yep—‘Demon in a Bottle’),” Layton discloses. “When you look at it, you’ll easily be able to tell why it wasn’t used. It just didn’t have any ‘ommph’—if you know what I mean. (Okay … I was still wet behind the ears then, but this drawing has to be a collectors’ item given the story’s place in history.)” (left) It’s a bad idea to turn your back on the Hulk! Note that the position of Iron Man’s body in Bob Layton’s original, unpublished cover to Iron Man #131 (contributed by Yoram Matzkin) was changed by the artist in the published version, seen in the inset. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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(right) The imbibing Iron Man, by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr., and Bob Layton, from issue #123. Special thanks to Sean Clarke. (below) Bob Layton’s takeoff of his immortal Iron Man #128 cover, a commission from the collection of Michael DeLeRee. Iron Man © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Preacher © 2007 Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

LAYTON: One of the key things Dave did when we first sat down to do this thing was ask what makes this character different than all the other Marvel characters. He wanted to know what we could do to make him different. Over the course of that discussion, we talked about the fact that Tony Stark was a businessman and he ran a business, and that became the thrust of the personal conflicts with the character. We wanted to emphasize that aspect and I think it was Dave who really clued in on this fact that was really the catalyst for some really good stories. MICHELINIE: Thank you. If you look back at our run, you’ll see that most of the stories were generated from Tony Stark’s activities as a businessman as opposed to him being a superhero and bad guys coming to attack him. The other element we realized is that Iron Man doesn’t have any powers and he makes his power with his armor, and that was the unique aspect of him. He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider or bathed in gamma radiation. Tony made himself and made his powers and his superhero identity. That was another thing we wanted to explore and play up. JOHNSON: It plays into the type of person Tony Stark would be, too. He’s not only self-made in terms of being a businessman, but he’s self-made as a superhero. You gents have already touched on several things I would like to explore further. First, let’s talk about the character’s alcoholism. Was there ever any concern at Marvel about pursuing that storyline? These days, flawed superheroes are a dime a dozen, but back in the day this was breaking new ground. I could be wrong, but that was really the first time you had a major superhero being shown with an addiction. MICHELINIE: Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams did do the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stuff with drugs. That preceded us over at DC. It was Speedy, wasn’t it, who was the addict in Green Lantern/Green Arrow? LAYTON: Yeah, and this is not to diminish that story at all, because it’s a great story, but the difference was our story was the first time a title character got involved in substance abuse. JOHNSON: That’s what I was thinking. At the time of Denny and Neal’s story, Speedy was a sidekick and not really being used all that much. Iron Man was a betterknown character, with toys that were based on the hero, like the Mego action figure. Since there was merchandise out there, I figure Marvel might have gotten hesitant at some point about Stark’s drinking. M e n

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MICHELINIE: Actually, Iron Man, at the time we took him over, wasn’t a top-tier character. He wasn’t a Spider-Man or an Incredible Hulk. He was still a secondary character at that time, both sales-wise and perception-wise. If we had tried to make Peter Parker a drug addict or something like that, we might have hit more resistance. As I remember it, we were only given one criterion to follow. We were told to do it well. Marvel gave us a lot of trust. It was a good story and they let us go. I don’t remember, and Bob, maybe you do, so feel free to break in, but I don’t remember anytime when we were doing that story arc that Marvel said, “Don’t do this,” or “Pull back on that.” LAYTON: I think Marvel thought we were really on to something, given where we started. Plus the idea was solid, and it wouldn’t be irreparable [where] if we deal with this subject Tony Stark couldn’t be Iron Man anymore. I think we presented it in such a way that

it made sense. As long as we didn’t have Tony Stark vomiting on camera or taking a piss in a flower pot in the lobby of Stark International, we were going to be fine. MICHELINIE: Save that for the sequel. LAYTON: Yes! [laughter] JOHNSON: Back in the day, the concept of a public figure like Tony Stark being an alcoholic would have been fodder mainly for tabloid newspapers you would find at supermarket check-outs. Today, though, given the world we live in with 24-hour-a-day news channels, the Internet, and the ability for the common person to record and distribute information, people are very aware that celebrities in stress-filled positions can and do turn to drugs and alcohol. What you guys did originally showed some tremendous insight into the mindset of someone who has some pretty amazing powers via his armors and a vast fortune, but who still can find his life spinning out of control and needs a crutch. LAYTON: I think that’s exactly it. It was a logical progression, especially for a guy under that much pressure and a guy who has to deal with his own celebrity as well. Tony Stark was just as famous as Iron Man. Dave and I kind of touched on that in the story where Iron Man was always kind of a nice escape valve and it was a way Stark could become anonymous and go do things. In the course of the story, when we took that away from him and he couldn’t be Iron Man anymore, that’s when the pressure really started to build for him. JOHNSON: You said you really wanted to build up the character of Tony Stark, and one of the best moves you made was to begin introducing new supporting characters to Stark’s world, both confidants and adversaries. One of the best of the new characters was Jim Rhodes. I thought it was great that Stark had someone there he could trust with his secret identity and could depend on. LAYTON: In order to make the fantastic believable you really have to surround the person doing the fantastic stuff with real human beings. That was one of the things we realized was seriously lacking, people who could see what was happening to Tony with their eyes. Tony Stark didn’t have any friends to speak of and no one to talk to who could second-guess him.

Bob Layton reveals that “this cover [Iron Man #143 (Feb. 1981)] was rejected after the editor-in-chief stated that he wanted more scope on the scene, since it took place in ‘friggin’ outer space.’ So in the final version [inset], I made the figures smaller and showed more of the space station and debris. This page was originally penciled back in 1981 and inked by me in 2005.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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WRITE NOW! #3

Get practical advice and tips on writing from top pros on BOTH SIDES of the desk! MARK BAGLEY cover and interview, BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE interviews, JOE QUESADA on what editors really want, TOM DeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, and more!

ERIK LARSEN cover and interview, writers STAN BERKOWITZ (JLA cartoon), TODD ALCOTT (“ANTZ”), LEE NORDLING (Platinum Studios), ANNE D. BERNSTEIN (MTV’s “Daria”), step-by-step on scripting Spider-Girl, 10 rules for writers, and more!

BRUCE JONES on writing The Hulk, AXEL ALONSO on state-of-the-art editing, DENNY O’NEIL offers tips for comics writers, KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts, plus JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JOEY CAVALIERI, and more! New MIKE DEODATO cover!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY022406

(96-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG022441

(80-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV022869

WRITE NOW! #4

WRITE NOW! #5

WRITE NOW! #6

WRITE NOW! #7

WRITE NOW! #8

HOWARD CHAYKIN on writing for comics and TV, PAUL DINI on animated writing, DENNY O’NEIL offers more tips for comics writers, KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts, plus FABIAN NICIEZA, DeFALCO & FRENZ, and more! New CHAYKIN cover!

WILL EISNER discusses his comics writing, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI on Hollywood writing, BOB SCHRECK details his work on Batman, DENNY O’NEIL’s notes from his writing classes, FABIAN NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, and more! CASTILLO/RAMOS cover!

BRIAN BENDIS and MICHAEL AVON OEMING in-depth on making an issue of Powers, MARK WAID on writing Fantastic Four, BOB SCHRECK’s interview continues from last issue, DIANA SCHUTZ, SCOTT M. ROSENBERG, & more! OEMING cover!

JEPH LOEB and CHUCK DIXON give indepth interviews (with plenty of rare and unseen art), JOHN JACKSON MILLER discusses writing, MARK WHEATLEY on his new Image series, & more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing! TIM SALE cover!

Part One of “how-to”crossover with DRAW! #9, as DANNY FINGEROTH and MIKE MANLEY create an all-new character and ideas are proposed and modified to get a character’s look & origins! Plus interviews with DON McGREGOR & STUART MOORE!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB032284

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY032566

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG032628

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN042904

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY043069

OUT! SOLD

WRITE NOW! #9

WRITE NOW! #10

WRITE NOW! #11

WRITE NOW! #12

WRITE NOW! #13

NEAL ADAMS discusses his own writing (with rare art and a NEW ADAMS COVER), GEOFF JOHNS discusses writing for comics, a feature on the secrets of PITCHING COMICS IDEAS, MICHAEL OEMING and BATTON LASH on writing, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts!

Interviews and lessons by Justice League Unlimited’s DWAYNE McDUFFIE, interview with Hate’s PETER BAGGE conducted by JOEY CAVALIERI, comics scripter/editor GERRY CONWAY, writer/editor PAUL BENJAMIN, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts, and a JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cover!

STAN LEE, NEIL GAIMAN, MARK WAID, PETER DAVID, J.M. DeMATTEIS, TOM DeFALCO, DENNY O’NEIL, and 18 others reveal PROFESSIONAL WRITING SECRETS, plus DeFALCO and RON FRENZ on working together, JOHN OSTRANDER on creating characters, and an all-new SPIDER-GIRL cover by FRENZ and SAL BUSCEMA!

DC Comics president PAUL LEVITZ on the art, craft and business of comics writing, STEVE ENGLEHART’s thoughts on writing for today’s market, survey of TOP COMICS EDITORS on how to submit work to them, Marvel Editor ANDY SCHMIDT on how to break in, T. CAMPBELL on writing for webcomics, plus a new GEORGE PÉREZ cover!

X-MEN 3 screenwriter SIMON KINBERG interviewed, DENNIS O’NEIL on translating BATMAN BEGINS into a novel, Central Park Media’s STEPHEN PAKULA discusses manga writing, KURT BUSIEK on breaking into comics, MIKE FRIEDRICH on writers’ agents, script samples, new RON LIM /AL MILGROM cover, and more!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: SEP043062

(88-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAR053355

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG053354

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB063440

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY063519

WRITE NOW! #14

WRITE NOW! #15

WRITE NOW! #16

BRIAN BENDIS interview, STAN LEE, TODD McFARLANE, PETER DAVID and others on writing Spider-Man, pencil art and script from MARVEL CIVIL WAR #1 by MILLAR and McNIVEN, JIM STARLIN on Captain Comet and The Weird, LEE NORDLING on Comics in Hollywood, and a new ALEX MALEEV cover!

J.M. DeMATTEIS interview on Abadazad with MIKE PLOOG, DC’s 52 series scripting how-to by RUCKA/JOHNS/MORRISON/ WAID, KEITH GIFFEN breakdowns, pencil art by JOE BENNETT, JOHN OSTRANDER on writing, STAR TREK novelist BILL McCAY on dealing with editors, samples of scripts and art, and more, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #4 PREVIEW!

An in-depth interview with Spawn’s TODD McFARLANE, Nuts and Bolts script and pencil art from BRIAN BENDIS and FRANK CHO’s MIGHTY AVENGERS and from DAN SLOTT’s AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, an interview, script and art by DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF on his acclaimed graphic novel TESTAMENT, cover by MIKE ZECK, plus a FREE DRAW #14 PREVIEW!

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN074011

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073903

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG063716

HOW TO CREATE COMICS HOW TO DRAW COMICS TRADE PAPERBACK FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

DVD

REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the WRITE NOW! #8/DRAW! #9 crossover, showing how to develop a comic, from script to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—even printing and distribution! With 30 pages of ALL-NEW material!

See the editors of DRAW! and WRITE NOW! magazines create a new comic from script and roughs to pencils, inks, and colors—even lettering—before your eyes!

(108-page trade paperback) $18 US ISBN: 9781893905603 Diamond Order Code: APR063422

(120-minute DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905399 Diamond Order Code: AUG043204

NEW MAGS: T H E U LT I M AT E C O M I C S E X P E R I E N C E !

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, plus rare and unpublished art. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO focuses on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster & more. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

BACK ISSUE #23

BACK ISSUE #24

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

“Comics Go Hollywood!” Spider-Man roundtable with STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, SR., JIM SHOOTER, ERIK LARSEN, and others, STAR TREK comics writers’ roundtable Part 1, Gladstone’s Disney comics line, behindthe-scenes at TV’s ISIS and THE FLASH (plus an interview with Flash’s JOHN WESLEY SHIPP), TV tie-in comics, bonus 8-page color ADAM HUGHES ART GALLERY and cover, plus a FREE WRITE NOW #16 PREVIEW!

“Magic” issue! MICHAEL GOLDEN interview, GENE COLAN, PAUL SMITH, and FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, Mystic Art Gallery with CARL POTTS & KEVIN NOWLAN, BILL WILLINGHAM’s Elementals, Zatanna history, Dr. Fate’s revival, a “Greatest Stories Never Told” look at Peter Pan, tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS, a new GOLDEN cover, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #6 PREVIEW!

“Men of Steel”! BOB LAYTON and DAVID MICHELINIE on Iron Man, RICH BUCKLER on Deathlok, MIKE GRELL on Warlord, JOHN BYRNE on ROG 2000, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, Machine Man, the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes comic strip, DC’s Steel, art by KIRBY, HECK, WINDSOR-SMITH, TUSKA, LAYTON cover, and bonus “Men of Steel” art gallery! Includes a FREE DRAW! #15 PREVIEW!

“Spies and Tough Guys”! PAUL GULACY and DOUG MOENCH in an art-packed “Pro2Pro” on Master of Kung Fu and their unrealized Shang-Chi/Nick Fury crossover, Suicide Squad spotlight, Ms. Tree, CHUCK DIXON and TIM TRUMAN’s Airboy, James Bond and Mr. T in comic books, Sgt. Rock’s oddball super-hero team-ups, Nathaniel Dusk, JOE KUBERT’s unpublished The Redeemer, and a new GULACY cover!

(108-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JUL073976

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: SEP074091

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073948

ALTER EGO #72

ALTER EGO #73

ALTER EGO #74

ALTER EGO #75

ALTER EGO #76

SCOTT SHAW! and ROY THOMAS on the creation of Captain Carrot, art & artifacts by RICK HOBERG, STAN GOLDBERG, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JOHN COSTANZA, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, CAROL LAY, and others, interview with DICK ROCKWELL, Golden Age artist and 36-year ghost artist on MILTON CANIFF’s Steve Canyon! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, interviews with CHARLES BIRO and his daughters, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 synopsis for the origin of Man-Thing, interview with publisher ROBERT GERSON about his 1970s horror comic Reality, art by BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, JEFF JONES, and others FCA, MR. MONSTER, a FREE DRAW! #15! PREVIEW, and more!

STAN LEE SPECIAL in honor of his 85th birthday, with a cover by JACK KIRBY, classic (and virtually unseen) interviews with Stan, tributes, and tons of rare and unseen art by KIRBY, ROMITA, the brothers BUSCEMA, DITKO, COLAN, HECK, AYERS, MANEELY, SHORES, EVERETT, BURGOS, KANE, the SEVERIN siblings—plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL—with an ALEX ROSS cover! Double-size FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with WALT GROGAN and P.C. HAMERLINCK on the many “Captains Marvel” over the years, unseen Shazam! proposal by ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK on “The Death of a Legend!”, MARC SWAYZE, interview with Golden Age artist MARV LEVY, MR. MONSTER, and more!

JOE SIMON SPECIAL! In-depth SIMON interview by JIM AMASH, with neverbefore-revealed secrets behind the creation of Captain America, Fighting American, Stuntman, Adventures of The Fly, Sick magazine and more, art by JACK KIRBY, BOB POWELL, AL WILLIAMSON, JERRY GRANDENETTI, GEORGE TUSKA, and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JUL073975

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG074112

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: OCT073927

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073947

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships March 2008

DRAW! #15

WRITE NOW! #17

WRITE NOW! #18

ROUGH STUFF #6

ROUGH STUFF #7

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with B.P.R.D.’S GUY DAVIS, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

HEROES ISSUE featuring series creator/ writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and others, interviews with DC Comics’ DAN DiDIO and Marvel’s DAN BUCKLEY, PETER DAVID on writing STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM, C.B. CEBULSKI, DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Nuts & Bolts script and art examples, a FREE BACK ISSUE #24 PREVIEW, and more!

More celebration of STAN LEE’s 85th birthday, including rare examples of comics, TV, and movie scripts from the Stan Lee Archives, tributes by JOHN ROMITA, SR., JOE QUESADA, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JIM SALICRUP, TODD McFARLANE, LOUISE SIMONSON, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, and more!

Features a new interview and cover by BRIAN STELFREEZE, interview with BUTCH GUICE, extensive art galleries/commentary by IAN CHURCHILL, DAVE COCKRUM, and COLLEEN DORAN, MIKE GAGNON looks at independent comics, with art and comments by ANDREW BARR, BRANDON GRAHAM, and ASAF HANUKA! Includes a FREE ALTER EGO #73 PREVIEW!

Features an in-depth interview and cover by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more!

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG074131

(80-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG074138

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships April 2008

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG074137

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

A NEW MAGAZINE COMING FEBRUARY 2008 FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING: BrickJournal magazine is the ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages! Edited by JOE MENO, it spotlights all aspects of the LEGO Community, showcasing events, people, and models in every issue, with contributions and how-to articles by top builders worldwide, new product intros, and more! Produced with assistance from the LEGO Group. Volume 1, #1-8 are available NOW as downloadable PDFs for only $3.95 each, and #9 is available FREE so you can try before you buy! Go to www.twomorrows.com to order. The first print issue ships February 2008—order now! 80 pages, full-color! SINGLE COPIES: $11 US Postpaid (add $2 US First Class or Canada, $7 Surface, $9 Airmail). 4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $32 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($42 First Class, $50 Canada, $66 Surface, $78 Airmail).

BrickJournal #1 (Volume 2) BrickJournal #1 (Volume 2) features reports on some of the top events worldwide that are held by the LEGO community, including Northwest Brickcon in the US, and events in Denmark and Germany. There's also interviews with LEGO set designers and other adult LEGO builders, including LEGO Certified Professional Nathan Sawaya! Plus there's stepby-step instructions, new set reviews, and other surprises in every issue!

TwoMorrows Publishing

DOWNLOAD A FREE DIGITAL EDITION OF VOL. 1, #9 NOW AT www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 FAX: 919-449-0327 • e-mail: john@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

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

MODERN MASTERS DVDs (120-minute Std. Format DVDs) $35 US EACH

GEORGE PÉREZ

ISBN: 9781893905511 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

MICHAEL GOLDEN ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

VOL. 1: ALAN DAVIS

V.2: GEORGE PÉREZ

V.3: BRUCE TIMM

V.4: KEVIN NOWLAN

V.5: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905191 Diamond Order Code: STAR18345

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905252 Diamond Order Code: STAR20127

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905306 Diamond Order Code: APR042954

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905382 Diamond Order Code: SEP042971

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905443 Diamond Order Code: APR053191

V.6: ARTHUR ADAMS

V.7: JOHN BYRNE

V.8: WALTER SIMONSON

V.9: MIKE WIERINGO

V.10: KEVIN MAGUIRE

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905542 Diamond Order Code: DEC053309

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905566 Diamond Order Code: FEB063354

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905641 Diamond Order Code: MAY063444

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905658 Diamond Order Code: AUG063626

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905665 Diamond Order Code: OCT063722

V.11: CHARLES VESS

V.12: MICHAEL GOLDEN

V.13: JERRY ORDWAY

V.14: FRANK CHO

V.15: MARK SCHULTZ

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905696 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: JUN073926

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: MAY078046

(128-page trade paperback) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905856 Diamond Order Code: OCT073846

COMING SOON FROM TWOMORROWS!

ROUGH STUFF #7

DRAW! #15

ALTER EGO #74

BACK ISSUE #26

BRICKJOURNAL #1 (V2)

The ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages, showcasing events, people, and models! #1 features an interview with set designer and LEGO Certified Professional NATHAN SAWAYA, plus step-by-step building instructions and techniques for all skill levels, new set reviews, on-the-scene reports from LEGO community events, and other surprises! Edited by JOE MENO.

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008 Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Ships January 2008 Diamond Order Code: AUG074131

(100-page magazine) $9 US Now Shipping Diamond Order Code: OCT073927

“Spies and Tough Guys!’ PAUL GULACY and DOUG MOENCH in an art-packed “Pro2Pro” on Master of Kung Fu and their unrealized Shang-Chi/Nick Fury crossover, Suicide Squad spotlight, Ms. Tree, CHUCK DIXON and TIM TRUMAN’s Airboy, James Bond and Mr. T in comic books, Sgt. Rock’s oddball super-hero team-ups, Nathaniel Dusk, JOE KUBERT’s unpublished The Redeemer, and a new GULACY cover!

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50)

SILVER AGE MEGO 8" SUPERSCI-FI COMPANION HEROES: WORLD’S In the Silver Age of Comics, space was the GREATEST TOYS!TM

The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career, spotlighting: The BEST KIRBY STORIES & COVERS from 19381987! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! Interviews with the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! A 50PAGE KIRBY PENCIL ART GALLERY and DELUXE COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, making this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Edited by JOHN MORROW. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: JUL078147 Ships February 2008

place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-bystory reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story! Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY! (144-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

Go to www.twomorrows.com for FULL-COLOR downloadable PDF versions of our magazines for only $2.95! Subscribers to the print edition get the digital edition FREE, weeks before it hits stores!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073948

Lavishly illustrated with thousands of CHARTS, CHECKLISTS and COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, it’s an obsessive examination of legendary toy company MEGO (pronounced “ME-go”), and the extraordinary line of super-hero action figures that dominated the toy industry throughout the 1970s. Featuring a chronological history of Mego, interviews with former employees and Mego vendors, fascinating discoveries never revealed elsewhere, and thorough coverage of each figure and packaging variant, this FULL-COLOR hardcover is the definitive guide to Mego. BRAD MELTZER raves, “I’ve waited thirty years for this magical, beautiful book.” And CHIP KIDD, internationally-recognized graphic designer and author of BATMAN COLLECTED, deemed it “a stunning visual experience.” Written by BENJAMIN HOLCOMB. (256-page COLOR hardcover) $54 US ISBN: 9781893905825 Diamond Order Code: JUL073884

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

ALL- STAR COMPANION V. 3 More amazing secrets behind the 194051 ALL-STAR COMICS and the 1941-44 SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY—and illustrated speculation about how other Golden Age super-teams might have been assembled! Also, an issue-by-issue survey of the JLA-JSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALL-STARS and SECRET ORIGINS, with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by KUBERT, INFANTINO, ADAMS, ORDWAY, ANDERSON, TOTH, CARDY, GIL KANE, COLAN, SEKOWSKY, DILLIN, STATON, REINMAN, McLEOD, GRINDBERG, PAUL SMITH, RON HARRIS, MARSHALL ROGERS, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON HECK, GEORGE TUSKA, TONY DeZUNIGA, H.G. PETER, DON SIMPSON, and many others! Compiled and edited by ROY THOMAS, with a new cover by GEORGE PÉREZ! (224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: MAY078045 Surface

Airmail

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$44

1st Class Canada $56

$64

$76

$120

BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$40

$54

$66

$90

$108

DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF (4 issues)

$26

$36

$44

$60

$72

ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issue subs are half-price!

$78

$108

$132

$180

$216

(80-page FULL COLOR magazine) $11 US Ships February 2008 Look for it in December’s PREVIEWS

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 14: FRANK CHO Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Frank’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art! By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: AUG074034

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career! (120-minute Std. Format DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt