Write Now! #2 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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The Magazine About Writing For Comics, Animation, and ScienceFiction

M AG A ZI N E

November 2002

WRITING THE

JUSTICE LEAGUE SHOW

MEET THE WRITER OF THE

SAMURAI JACK LIVE ACTION MOVIE PLUS:

SAMPLE SCRIPTS STEP-BYSTEP SCRIPTING ON

SPIDERGIRL & MORE!

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST #22: GOLD KEY COMICS!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #36: THOR’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY!

ALTER EGO #18: MORE TITANS OF TIMELY/MARVEL!

• NEW COVER by BRUCE TIMM featuring MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER! • An historical overview as only CBA can present it! • Interviews with and rare and unseen art by RUSS MANNING, WALLY WOOD, DAN SPIEGLE, MIKE ROYER, PAUL NORRIS, JESSE SANTOS, MARK EVANIER, DON GLUT and others! • Profiles of GOLD KEY’S TOP TEN ILLUSTRATORS, and more!

With pages of KIRBY’s UNINKED THOR PENCILS plus: • KIRBY THOR COVERS inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN! • Never-published 1969 KIRBY INTERVIEW! • Interview with JOE SINNOTT about his THOR work! • JOHN ROMITA JR. discusses his work on THOR! • NEW REGULAR COLUMN by MARK EVANIER! • Huge THOR ART GALLERY, “Tales of Asgard” explored, “FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE,” & more!

• Covers by JACK KIRBY and MARC SWAYZE! • STAN GOLDBERG tells Marvel and Timely secrets from the 1940s through the 1960s! • Rare and unpublished art by KIRBY, DITKO, HECK, AYERS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, the SEVERINS, MANEELY, EVERETT, BURGOS, SINNOTT, and more! • Plus: FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, & ROD REED—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on WALLY WOOD’s Flash Gordon—and MORE!

(Edited by JOHN MORROW • 84 tabloid pages) Four-issue subscriptions: $36 Standard, $52 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $64 Surface, $80 Airmail).

(Edited by ROY THOMAS • 108 pages) Eight-issue subscriptions: $40 Standard, $64 First Class (Canada: $80, Elsewhere: $88 Surface, $120 Airmail).

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Explore the lives of the partners and wives of the top names in comics, as they share memories, anecdotes, personal photos, momentos, and never-before-seen art by the top creators in comics!

• Cover, interview, and techniques by KEVIN NOWLAN! • Penciling discussion and demo with ERIK LARSEN! • BRET BLEVINS shows how to compose figures! • Step-by-step digital coloring with DAVE COOPER! • Designing for comics and animation by PAUL RIVOCHE! • Plus reviews of the best art supplies, links and more!

(Edited by JON B. COOKE • 132 pages) Six-issue subscriptions: $36 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $72 Surface, $96 Airmail).

WRITE NOW! #1: THE NEW MAG FOR WRITERS OF COMICS, ANIMATION, & SCI-FI The premiere issue gives practical advise and tips from top professionals on both sides of the desk, including: • STAN LEE (Marvel Comics founder and legend) • BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS (Ultimate Spider-Man) • JOE QUESADA (editor in chief of Marvel Comics) • J.M. DeMATTEIS (Spider-Man,Spectre,Moonshadow) • MARK BAGLEY on writing from the artist’s POV! (Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH • 88 pages) Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

• ALAN MOORE • WILL EISNER • STAN LEE • GENE COLAN • JOE KUBERT • JOHN ROMITA • HARVEY KURTZMAN • DAVE SIM • HOWARD CRUSE • DAN DeCARLO • DAVE COOPER and many more! (208-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US (Canada: $26, Elsewhere: $27 Surface, $31 Airmail).

(Edited by MIKE MANLEY • 88 pages w/color section) Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

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Issue #2

M AG A ZI N E November 2002

Read Now! Message from the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 2

Inside the Mind of a Writer/Artist Interview with Erik Larsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 3

Curbed Enthusiasm Interview with Justice League’s Stan Berkowitz . . . . . . . . . . . page 28

The Astonishing Antz Man Interview with Samurai Jack’s Todd Alcott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 40

“When does he sleep?” Interview with Platinum Studios’ Lee Nordling . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 55

Truth or Daria! Interview with MTV Animation’s Anne D. Bernstein . . . . . . . . . page 72

Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 89 Books On Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 91 But What Does Danny Think? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 93 Conceived & Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH Important advice from Steven Grant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 17 Designer CHRISTOPHER DAY Two scripts and a series pitch: Punisher, X-Man, and Mortal Souls Transcribers by Steven Grant. Art by Dave Hoover & Ariel Olivetti . . . .pgs. 20, 22, & 26 DEANNE WALTZ and the LONGBOX.COM STAFF Episodic animation script: Batman Beyond Publisher Pages from “April Moon,” by Stan Berkowitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 39 JOHN MORROW

Nuts & Bolts Department The 10 Rules of Surviving Comics

Feature animation script: Antz

COVER

Notes and parts of an outline by Todd Alcott . . . . . . . . . . .pgs. 43 & 46 Penciled, inked, and colored by

Step-by-step creation of a comic story: Spider-Girl #44

ERIK LARSEN

Pages from “Cry Uncle,” by Tom DeFalco, Pat Olliffe and Al Williamson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 50 Special Thanks To

ANNE D. BERNSTEIN ALISON BLAIRE A pop quiz (and enlightening answers) by Lee Nordling . . . . .page 57 SARAH CARRAGHER From premise to script... to revised script! The Phantom CHRIS DAY TOM DeFALCO Pages from “The Valley of Golden Men,” by Tom DeFalco and Lou Manna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 68 STEVEN GRANT STEVE KANE Episodic animation script: Daria ERIK LARSEN Pages from “Road Worrier,” by Anne D. Bernstein . . . . . . . . . .page 83 ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON LEE NORDLING Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! is published 4 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park PAT OLLIFFE Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Fax: (919) 833-8023. Danny Fingeroth, CHRIS POWELL Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Write Now! E-mail address: WriteNowDF@aol.com. Single issues: $8 BEN REILLY 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 SCOTT MITCHELL ROSENBERG characters are TM & © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise AARON SEVERSON noted. All editorial matter © the respective authors. Editorial package is ©2002 Danny Fingeroth VARDA STEINHARDT and TwoMorrows Publishing. Write Now! is a shared trademark of Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows AL WILLIAMSON Publishing. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

What it Takes to Sell Your Comic Strip

WRITE NOW | 1

READ Now! Message from Danny Fingeroth, editor

elcome to Write Now! #2. Thanks for coming back. We’ve got some more great stuff for you this issue.

First, though, in case you’re wondering where the Denny O’Neil interview we promised for this issue went… Denny underwent successful coronary bypass surgery in September. He’s recuperating now. We did the interview in August—and Denny had even given me his private notes for some of his “how to write comics” classes that he gives at DC. But I felt that I’d rather wait for him to recover (which he’s doing quite nicely, from what I hear) so he can give his final input on the interview and notes. Get well soon, Denny. Comics needs you!

•

• What we do have in this issue is some pretty amazing stuff. In the practical information realm: • Steven Grant tells the ten most important things you need to know to survive as a professional comics writer. Steven’s been doing it for over twenty years, so you might want to take note of what he says. • Tom DeFalco shows the “nuts and bolts” that go into plotting and scripting comics stories. Whether as Marvel’s editor in chief, or as one of the most accomplished writers in comics, Tom knows how to take an initial inspiration and structure it into a story that an artist can draw and a reader can savor. Here, he pulls back the curtain and shows you the mechanics of story-making. • Lee Nordling, who wears many hats, including that of editor of the Rugrats syndicated comic strip, describes what it takes to create a successful syndicated comic strip in his eye-opening quiz. See how you do on it! • Reviews of some important how-to books on writing. And in the “lessons disguised as interviews” department, we have: • Todd Alcott. The writer of the upcoming Samurai Jack live action feature film, and co-writer of the smash animated film Antz, talks about his career and about the writing life in general. The insights and lessons he offers are invaluable. You’ll want to cut them out and put them under your pillow. • Stan Berkowitz. He’s written countless episodes of Batman Beyond, the 1990s Spider-Man Animated Series, Superman Adventures, and, currently, the red

2 | WRITE NOW

hot Justice League. Stan was also a writer and producer on the Superboy live action series. Here, Mr. B offers a wealth of insights on what being a long term player in the TV animation business is all about. Anne D. Bernstein. Anne’s written many episodes of the MTV Beavis and Butthead spinoff, Daria, developed MTV’s Downtown series, and was Nickelodeon Magazine’s comics editor. Anne talks about her eclectic career, how she maintains it without living in LA, and what you need to know to thrive and survive and still have a career—on your own terms. Lee Nordling (wearing a different hat). Lee’s career as writer, editor, packager and consultant encompasses comics, movies, syndicated strips, and more. As executive editor of Platinum Studios comics division, Lee oversees the creation and development of comics that are on the Hollywood development track as movies and TV series.

Whether it’s in step-by-step form, or couched in interviews and articles, I’m striving to make DFWN! a place where you can get practical information, not just about how to write, but about what it’s really like to have a career as a writer of popular culture, full- or part-time. Next issue, in DFWN! #3, we’ll have the Denny O’Neil interview, as well as insights into the careers and techniques of Incredible Hulk’s Axel Alonso and Bruce Jones, Thunderbolts’ Fabian Nicieza, 21 Down’s Jimmy Palmiotti, and Astro City’s Kurt Busiek. And issue #4 is going to have the word from Howard Chaykin, among other heavy hitters, as well as an incredible new feature I’ll tell you more about next time, that will teach you more about comics script writing than you ever thought possible! Write Away!

Danny Fingeroth

P.S. On a personal note: My twin sons, Ethan and Jacob, were born July 29th. Mother and sons are doing fine so far. Dad, too. I think. This issue of DFWN is dedicated to the boys. Your dad loves you and your mom, guys. It says so right here in print.

Inside the Mind of a Writer/Artist Interview with

Erik Larsen

Interview by Danny Fingeroth on June 27, 2002 Transcription by The LongBox.com Staff

rik Larsen loves comics. More specifically, he loves super-hero comics. While he’s dabbled in TV and animation, working in them is not of particular interest to him. Erik loves to write and draw stories about spandex-clad characters beating the stuffing out of each other. Not to say he doesn’t have other storytelling concerns. He does romance and satire and mystery. He just does it all in the context of spandex punching and hitting. You know, like Jack Kirby used to do. Erik’s early work as a young kid on a character called Savage Dragon led to him to eventually become a comics pro, first as artist on such comics as Doom Patrol, The Outsiders and DNAgents. Erik went on to draw The Punisher. He then hit his stride drawing Amazing SpiderMan, following Todd McFarlane’s landmark run on the series with one of his own. Erik gave Venom the largest mouth ever seen on a non-crocodile in comics. Turning to writing, Erik wrote and drew a memorable oneshot and then a “hoohah-action-filled,” guest-star galore, multi-part arc for me on (“adjectiveless,” as we called it) Spider-Man, again having the thankless task (Thanks, Erik) of following Todd. Then the Image Comics thing happened—maybe you heard about it, it was in all the papers—and, luckily, Erik had this Savage Dragon character from when he was nine that he pulled out of his hat. He’s been writing and drawing Savage Dragon for more than ten years now. That’s more than 100 CONSECUTIVE issues. During that decade, Erik’s also found time to write Aquaman, Nova, Wolverine and a mess of Dragon spin-off mini-series. There was even a Savage Dragon animated

series in there somewhere. And what does he want to do next? Why, write and draw The Savage Dragon. You can learn a lot from Erik Larsen about dedication, consistency, quality—and about spandex-clad characters beating the stuffing out of each other. Read on and see… DANNY FINGEROTH: Tell me the secret origin of Erik Larsen. How did you get started? I know you were The cover to Savage Dragon #1 (regular always a comics fan. ERIK LARSEN: My dad bought series) by Erik Larsen. [©2002 Erik Larsen.] comics when he was a kid, so we always had them around. There wasn’t a period where I wasn’t aware of comic books. They weren’t necessarily new ones. There’d be old Donald Duck comics and old EC Comics. He had a long run of Captain Marvel Adventures. All of them were later passed on to me. DF: So he didn’t buy them for you, he bought them for himself? EL: He bought them for himself in the ’40s and ’50s, and at some point he decided to let his kids read them. These were comics that would later be worth hundreds and thousands of dollars and my brother would wake up with covers wrapped around his face. DF: If you guys hadn’t drooled all over them, they would have been worth hundreds and thousands of dollars. EL: We probably cut his collection down to a third the size it originally was by the time we were done with it. He gave the

remains to me and then my house burned down. All the stuff that I hadn’t taken care of was gone. [laughter] DF: From what I read in my research, you moved around a lot, right? EL: Yeah, for no damn good reason. We weren’t wanted by the law and weren’t an army family. My dad was a teacher of sorts. I just don’t care enough to find out what he actually taught. [laughter] DF: Is he still alive? EL: Yeah. DF: So you could ask him, but you just haven’t? EL: Give me an hour and I could finish up on the phone with you and ask him. It seemed like there were all kinds of drama things going on when I was a kid. People putting on plays and things like that, but I don’t know if he was doing other stuff like teaching English too. I don’t have any idea. He was teaching college when I was a wee lad, and he got fed up with doing that and decided to strike off on his own. He had enough money saved up that he figured he wouldn’t have to work for a little while, so he packed up the kids and got the heck out of there. DF: How many Larsen siblings were there? 4 | WRITE NOW

EL: There are four of us. I’m the second. I have an older brother and two younger sisters. DF: Any of them do anything in a creative venue? EL: No, not anything like it. DF: Was your mom artistic in any way? EL: She was a homemaker and she is currently a reverend. [laughter] She wasn’t when we were growing up. DF: That’s interesting, especially since I just read the Savage Dragon “Talk with God” story today. EL: Nothing there. No connection. DF: What was the thing that made you go from being one of the millions of kids reading and loving comics to saying: “I want to do this”? EL: What it was, more than anything, is that I just have this love for drawing. When we moved from being up in Washington after my dad quit his college deal, we moved down to California and we had no TV and no electricity. We sort of pulled into a big, empty field and he said, “Well kids we’re home.” [laughter] We built our own place among the redwoods, and then a few months later we were shipped off to various schools. At that point, there was nothing else to do but draw. [laughter] I don’t know… I’ve always been writing and drawing my own comic book stories. I don’t really remember not doing that. DF: I read that you had a friend that you did it with. EL: I had other guys that I tried to hoodwink into doing comics, too. Nobody was that enthusiastic about it. [laughter] They’d be like, “Here’s my guys,” and then draw them in a couple pictures and then that would be it. A friend of mine, Chris Vito, came up with several different characters and he said: “Use these guys, I don’t want to do anything with them.” I was always trying to get someone else to write my stuff because I would look in the real comics and there were six names in the credits boxes and I needed to have some other names. [laughter] There really wasn’t anybody who was that enthusiastic about wanting to do comics, especially not to write stuff for this knucklehead. DF: Had your friends discovered girls at that point? EL: No, we were all too young and not paying that much attention to stuff like that. We were in fifth grade. At that age, you can admire girls from afar. I did, in sixth grade, have a friend named Aaron Katz who was more into doing comics than my other pals, and he and I created a comic book together called The Deadly Duo. He would do one issue and then I would do one issue, back and forth, and we would tie them together in the weakest, lamest way just to make it seem like it was a legitimate series. In one issue someone would throw a ball, and in the next issue someone would catch it. [laughter] DF: What’s he doing now? EL: He’s a carpenter now. Completely just really didn’t go ahead and pursue his artistic stuff. Although every now and then he would say, “I really should get back to that,” and he would show me the stuff that he’d been working on, which looked like a sixth grader drew it. There was no learning curve at all. [laughter] You knock off for twenty years and come back to it, what do you expect? DF: But you kept at it. EL: I kept doing it, and at one point, when I was 19, I decided that I seriously wanted to break into big-time comics. I had been sending art samples out left and right. DF: You were 19 in what year? EL: I don’t know. What year would that be? That would be 1982. There you go. That should be simple math, I’m 39 now. It’s really not that hard.

EL: As far as I’m concerned, they are. I don’t know about the DF: You could start from your birth year and add twenty and rest of you, but most other comics just don’t do it for me. then subtract one. That’s how I would do it, but that’s me. I know Other people are publishing entire lines of comics with guys it sounds like rocket science. [laughter] swinging on trees and I don’t care. I don’t get involved with it. EL: Also my birthday is really near the end of the year, so it DF: But you would go to a movie or read a book with a guy throws things off. swinging on a tree? DF: So around 1982, so you must have felt that you were interEL: Possibly. I guess those are real different media for me. ested enough and good enough to want to send your art off. There’s comic book stuff that I have enjoyed that was EL: I would send stuff to Jim Shooter (then Marvel editor-insomething else too. I read Groo the Wanderer and there are no chief) and he would send me back polite responses. Jim was super-heroes in that. I’m just saying that me, as a creator, that good at keeping some line of communication open. He would since there is nothing that I can’t do within the realm of superrespond to people who would send stuff. heroes, and I have all these DF: You were submitting art, not writing? characters that I love, why EL: I would be sending in art. Really pursuing the writing end of not do that? things hadn’t been a big drive of mine, although at one point I DF: It makes sense. So you had done my own fanzine with a couple of other young men, kept sending stuff in and, was one of them was 26 and the other was 32. When we did the it Shooter who gave you your fanzine, I had written and drawn this story that I had sent to first break? George Wildman over at Charlton Comics, because they were EL: Shooter gave me a break publishing this book called Charlton Bullseye. The idea was at one point, but I’d gotten in that whoever was willing to do comics for free, they would a very small way before that. publish them as long as they were good enough. I’m thinking: There a guy who was “I’m good enough for that.” I’d heard that they had too much publishing a black-and-white material already, but I was hoping that this was going to be so super-hero comic called brilliant that it would knock them off their socks. Needless to Megaton that was getting a say, they got in touch with me to say the book had been bunch of pros and semi-pros cancelled, but your stuff was good. So I had this story that was to work on his stuff, and he done, so when it came to doing the fanzine, my story was put together a decent little already finished. mag. The first issue had me DF: Who all worked on the fanzine? and Gene Day and Jackson EL: It was me and those two other guys. I ended up inking their Guice. stories and saving their asses. They never really went on to DF: That wasn’t Megaton fame and fortune. I showed the fanzine to (former Eclipse Man—it was something else? Comics editor) cat yronwode, and her response was, “You EL: Megaton Man came should probably just write and not draw because your writing is around later and far superior to your pathetic artwork.” [laughter] DF: Were you at the time writing stories, screenplays, novels, anything? EL: My interest has always just been in these guys kicking the crap out of each other in comic books. I’m just a super-hero fan. I’ve never been a guy who sits there and says, “You know I really have a great story about two cats driving around in a car trying to pick up chicks.” [laughter] If I think of a story like that, I’d rather tell it with Peter Parker then with some regular guy. I just like the super-hero element and I think that for all the things you might want to do, super-heroes are the most flexible medium ever. You can tell any kind of story you want within that genre. You can do a romance—really anything. DF: You just jumped ahead ten questions because that was something that I wanted to talk to you about, but that’s okay. You clearly love the super-hero. Much of the mainstream today is super-heroes. There are super-hero westerns and super-hero space opera and super-hero horror stories. There are those who think that’s not a good thing, that it alienates readers. Do you think that comics are best suited for super-heroes, which is really what birthed the medium in a way? Erik Larsen art from Megaton (1985) and the return of the character Vanguard ten years later in Savage Dragon #14. [Art & Savage Dragon ©2002 Erik Larsen; Vanguard ©2002 Erik Larsen & Gary Carlson.] LARSEN | 5

just confused the hell out of everybody. I’ve spent my life saying I worked on Megaton not Megaton Man. DF: I’m glad I could continue the tradition. EL: Not Neal Adams’s Megalith, either. [laughter] DF: So the first thing was in an anthology? EL: I did that for him, and again it was super-hero stuff, and I was paid real money. I was 19 years old and my stuff was inked by a real inker, Sam DeLarosa. He inked my very first funny The cover to Erik Larsen’s first issue of The Doom Patrol book job and Sam #6 (March 1988). [©2002 DC Comics.] Grainger inked the second one and then we ran out of Sams, so I had to start inking my own stuff. [laughter] DF: I guess Sam Hill had to ink a few issues. [laughter] Did that open the door to make you a true professional, one people would give work to? EL: Yes. And then it was matter of networking, and working your way from doing the first job to doing something else that you might want to do even more. I would send out samples to everybody, and then I would get little bites here and there. I did some stuff for Americomics for about a year. Just jumping around doing a book here and there, Sentinels of Justice and what have you. DF: Who published that, Americomics? EL: Americomics actually is the publisher. They often go by AC Comics. They published a number of books. The most notable was Femforce. The women characters in that book basically pushed their breasts around in wheelbarrows. DF: They were ahead of their time. And then Shooter gave you a Thor job as I recall. EL: He gave me a Thor job and told me it would be in Marvel Fanfare because it was an inventory story. I didn’t know anything. I heard the name “Fanfare” and thought: first thing out of the gate and I’m a fan favorite. [laughter] It didn’t quite work out that way, but in retrospect it was cool, because he had Stan Lee script it and Vince Colletta ink it. So I felt as if I was sort of filling in for Jack Kirby. Jack’s last Stan job. Shooter and I plotted it together at a Chicago convention. We talked through the major points of where things needed to turn and stuff like that. It was essentially what everyone complains about when an artist is his own writer, which is an issue-long fight scene. DF: Was that the first official professional writing that you did? EL: Yes, but I didn’t voucher for it. I didn’t get paid for plotting it at all. There was no written plot. It was just me and Jim 6 | WRITE NOW

talking it through. DF: Where did that eventually see print? EL: It eventually saw print in Thor #385 with a Ron Frenz/Al Milgrom cover. Thor versus the Hulk. DF: That’s Thor volume 1 #385. EL: Yes Thor volume 1, thank you. I don’t think anyone’s going out and looking for Thor #385 from volume 2. [laughter] DF: That will be out in 2020. EL: If they don’t renumber it again. DF: The Megaton stuff—you didn’t write it, or did you? EL: Actually, I did. It was a co-plotting thing to begin with, and then I took over writing it and doing the whole thing. The first issue I co-plotted and scribbled notes on, and the second one the same thing, but by the third one I was completely writing it, and completely penciling, inking, and lettering it. The whole thing was mine by that point. DF: You’ve been messing around with the Savage Dragon in one form or another since you were a kid, right? EL: Yes. That just went through a number of changes over the years because, you start off just saying, “I want to draw something like this guy.” So Dragon was a knockoff of Batman, which surprises most people. Imagine the green part on his head is a mask and there’s is a cut-out part where he would have flesh, and then you have a big, green cape. But Dragon always wore bluejeans and he drove Speed Racer’s car. DF: What is it about the character that made you keep coming back to it? EL: I don’t have any idea. Because I kept changing him as time went on, and every time I changed him, it would be because I thought that the older version was really dumb. Just corny and dumb and I didn’t want anything to do with it. [laughter] DF: But you still called the character the Savage Dragon?

EL: Just the name and the basic visual. As time went on, he became bulkier, and I decided to lose the mask altogether. At some point he was a hippy version of Bruce Banner who would change into a Hulk kind of character, but not the dumb Hulk, just the same basic personality as William Johnson (the Dragon’s then alter-ego) except he was a bigger guy. At one point. I just got tired of doing the “Bruce Banner” scenes, so I got rid of the civilian guy and just concentrated on doing the big guy, and at that point that was it. There’s been some adjustments made as time’s gone on. His fin, in the early stories, looked like a crescent roll sitting on the top of his head. Anyone looking at it would go, “I don’t get how it works,” because it was fat on the top of his head and then flat as it came down. It was tough to draw and no one could get a grasp of what it looked like. At one time I made a big sculpture of the Dragon’s head so I could go: “It looks like this.” What I do as a writer is, I try to visualize stuff and then draw it. A lot of my early writing for other artists was not so much writing down and typing stuff out but actually drawing the stuff and sending it out to people. “Here: draw that,” and when they would get the script, they would go, “Oh, I get it.” I would actually draw thumbnails, just what I did as a kid—take letter-sized paper and fold it in half and call it a comic book page. That would be my plot for someone else to work from. DF: You are clearly in a tradition of guys like Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, people who write and draw their own stuff. Is that the best way to do comics? EL: There are advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is if the artist-side of the equation can get really Erik’s thumbnails for the first three pages of the “Rapture & Ricochet” back-up from Savage Dragon #4, and Adam Hughes & Karl Kesel’s final art for the first two pages of the final story. Written by Larsen. [©2002 Erik Larsen.] lazy, He can wrestle with the writer-side something for someone else and not drawing the story, what I and you can end up with guys falling down holes and fighting can get is someone who decides that, rather than doing a silhouettes. Some people have made an art of doing that— crowd scene, he’s going to do a close-up on someone’s eye. being as lazy as possible all the time. “I’m going to have this [laughter] guy stab this other guy for four pages.” Who would have the DF: Are you ever pleasantly surprised when someone else draws nerve to write that for someone else? [laughter] Nobody would. from your plots? That’s where it can go if the artist side of you can wrest control EL: Never. [laughter] Every now than, I may go, “I didn’t design from the writer who actually wants to tell a story. that villain, but I must have described it really well, because it DF: I guess that would be where the dreaded editor would come came out cool.” But almost always, I get back a page and there in because the editor would say, “There’s a guy stabbing is a huge picture of somebody’s head and then there’s six somebody in the dark for four pages. Maybe we shouldn’t do storytelling panels on the page that are so tiny you can’t put that.” any dialogue in them, and you’re screwed. EL: Yeah, Mr. Editor, but we got to get this book out by the 15th DF: Kirby is clearly your biggest influence. What can he and the or we’re all toast. other Silver and Golden Age greats teach us that we can DF: Yes, because comics never miss schedule. translate into modern terms? On a less pretentious level, what EL: It’s a constant battle, but the good part is, if the writer-side do you like about Kirby? is winning, he gets his story told in exactly the way that he EL: On many levels, there are a lot of different things that Jack wants to, or as close as he is able to draw it. When I’m writing LARSEN | 7

had going on at all the same time. Some of those were basic meat-and-potatoes storytelling, where you simply could understand what was going on because he kept it very basic and very straightforward, artwork-wise. There was nothing that was complex about to it to the point where you didn’t understand what you were looking at. In terms of the way he would do books, there is a heck of a lot of pure imagination, and firing with all cylinders, where he would just be tossing ideas, concepts, and characters out left and right. Just introducing a lot of cool and innovative stuff, and he didn’t tend to dwell on things. They weren’t planning these things for collection, so they weren’t saying: “Let’s do a twelve-part story to be collected into a trade paperback.” DF: The ways Kirby lays out a page and the way he tells a story, there’s a lot of that in your work. EL: I like the way he approaches things. I like the power and the machines and the cool buildings and pretty much all of it. DF: Any reason why that style has fallen out of vogue? EL: The thing that Jack did very much embrace was the grid. A comic book page is printed with these little “hash marks” on the sides that tell you where the half page is and where the third of a page is. Jack would just rule those off and go ahead and draw the panel, which is a great way of storytelling. But in terms of a modern reader, it just isn’t as flashy as having it be any crazy way that you want it to be every page. DF: Who else is a big influence on you? EL: In terms of drawing, there are a number of guys. Frank Miller, John Byrne, Gil Kane, Herb Trimpe, and a legion of others depending on what I’m working on. Generally, when I take over a book, I try to look back and to figure out who did it best and what the characters were supposed to look like. When I took on doing Spider-Man, I looked back at Ditko and discovered that Flash Thompson used to have curly hair and didn’t have the same comb-over hairstyle that everyone else seemed to have. I would go and try to find the more distinctive and interesting versions of the characters, so that I wasn’t using the eighth generation Doctor Octopus, but rather basing it on the character’s original look and original intent. DF: What about writing influences, both in and out of comics? EL: There are a number of things. A lot of radio shows like Vic and Sade in particular and various other things that cropped up in my life. 8 | WRITE NOW

DF: How did you get into radio? Did your folks listen to it? EL: My dad did, and I had run into a guy who was Maggie Thompson’s brother, Paul Curtis. Paul published fanzines when he was somewhat younger, and there was a sort of contingent for trading fanzines, and I ended up getting in touch with Paul at one point. We’d written back and forth, and somewhere along the line he sent me a tape of various things and I was fascinated by Vic and Sade. I ended up finding and reading a bunch of scripts from Vic and Sade. The show had a very natural and bouncy way of writing dialogue which I took a liking to. DF: Was Vic and Sade a comedy? EL: It was a comedy, but very much a slice-of-life comedy. Very conversational and it only had four characters in it. All the other characters were characters that would be talked about, but never heard. You would get these wonderful one-sided telephone conversations where you would imagine that there were other characters there, but you really didn’t know. In fact, there was one episode where there was one character and he did the show entirely by himself, but because the phone kept ringing he would have these phone conversations and you filled in the blanks yourself. You imagined what the other person must be saying. It was very clever and very smart writing and I enjoyed it. Other stuff I liked was The Shadow and stuff like that. My dad and I were at one point listening to a lot of old radio, and I have no idea why, but somehow or other we ended up listening to it. My dad taught workshops on self-reliance all over the country, and I would go off on these tours with him and be his driver. We’d drive all over the country listening to these radio shows. DF: Old radio shows are great for that. Speaking of multi-tasking, right now I’d bet you’re inking most probably, so you can talk to me but still be getting get work done EL: Right now I’m trying to pencil, but it’s not working. [laughter] I can’t really lay out stuff and talk on the phone, but what I’m doing is that I have a number of pages that need to be sent to other inkers for Savage Dragon #100. It’s a whole bunch of guys. DF: Do you want to name a few? EL: I’ve gotten stuff back from Bruce Timm and Bill Sienkiewicz. Chris Eliopolous is inking a story, so check that one out. I’d got one back from Tim Townsend. Walt Simonson swears I’m getting pages tomorrow. Walt’s good for that. Sam Kieth is inking one and so are Terry Austin, Al Gordon, Jerry Ordway, and couple of guys that I’m probably leaving out. DF: Cool. Talk about some other writing influences, screenwriters, novelists, or other comic book writers? EL: Most of the reading that I do is non-fiction. I like to get people’s own first hand accounts of what goes on with real people with real emotions and what they are really going through. It helps me, when I’m writing fiction, to be able to take this other thing and apply it. DF: Are you reading anything interesting now? EL: I’m not. I’ve just wrapped things up on Dragon #100 and have been working every waking minute. DF: You want to pretend that you’re reading something interesting now, for the interview? [laughter] EL: It will be anything that I’m interested in. I’ll wonder what’s going on with Elton John’s life, for instance, and read a story

about him. Whatever it happens to be that catches my interest. Sometimes it’s the dumbest damn thing. I once read this book about the guy with the longest long jump. Why in the world would I be interested in the story about this guy? But it was one of those things that stood out in the Guinness Book of World Records, and I read this whole book about this guy’s life. I read a number of books about Richard Nixon. DF: He’s a fascinating character. EL: He’s a fascinating guy, but not so fascinating that you want to read eight books about him. [laughter] DF: People seem to be obsessed with Nixon. People that are into Nixon seem to be totally obsessed. He’s one of those characters that turns up in so many different eras of American history. EL: I just wanted to see how this sucker’s mind works. I get started reading something and it can fascinate me. You read about him and just think, “What’s going on with this guy?” DF: Getting away from Nixon, your work has the Kirby influence and the classic look but yet there is all sorts of weird stuff going on. [laughter] EL: I think it’s a matter of having a lot of interests and fascination with a lot of different things and trying to pull it together

A very Kirby page from WildC.A.T.S. #14 (Sept. 1994), written and drawn by Erik Larsen during “Image-X Month” where creative teams switched books. Jim Lee returned the favor on Savage Dragon #13. [Art ©2002 Erik Larsen; WildC.A.T.S. ©2002 Wildstorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics.]

in some form. The thing is, I created a lot of this stuff when I was nine years old. [laughter] I’ve got thirty years of material to play off of, and over the course of thirty years you come up with a lot of wacky stuff. DF: It’s wacky but you wrap it in a very traditional-looking package. So it’s like, here’s two guys with big muscles duking it out with each other, but one of them is God and the other is the Devil and our hero is just watching. [laughter] On the one hand it’s an extrapolation of Galactus fighting the Watcher. On the other hand, it’s pretty edgy. Your stuff seems to be getting less outrageous recently, at least in terms of disturbing imagery. Is that intentional? EL: At a certain point my kids were getting older and I realized that I was producing material that is completely unfit for them to ever look at even when they’re my age. [laughter] I wanted to do something that they would enjoy and get a kick out of and that they could have read to them. It’s a real weird thing, because I have these two sides of me at play. One is the guy that wants to sneak something past the censors, and the other side is the guy that wants to tell a cool story with cool characters and bigger than life wacky stuff. The problem for retailers was the book was wildly unpredictable. They didn’t know if they could sell this one to twelve-year-olds without getting into trouble, even if they could sell the issue before it and the issue after it. Like issue #30 of Savage Dragon was distributed to the newsstand and it was perfectly fine. Issue #31 was not because of God and the Devil and the F-word. How fair is it to any kid that he can get this series but not have access to various issues. It just got to a point where I don’t feel comfortable going beyond a certain point. DF: So you have actually pulled back? EL: Post Savage Dragon #75, I really changed things. He’s in a different universe. The tone is much more low key. There’s not as much sexual stuff as there had been. There’s not as much T and A as there had been. DF: I’ve heard that with great power there must also come great responsibility. EL: I heard that repeated over and over again in a movie once. [laughter] I just ignore that little voice in my head when it says that. [laughter] But I wanted to produce something that I would like as well as something that my kids would like. I don’t feel like I’m censoring myself. This is just the type of stuff that I want to do now. DF: How old are your kids? EL: My kids are five and nearly eight. DF: Do you feel like you’re growing your own focus group in the house? EL: In a way. DF: Do they read your stuff? EL: Not so much as they have it read to them. My youngest doesn’t read yet. He watches the Dragon cartoons on TV. (laughs) DF: I know you love those cartoons. EL: Yeah, fun for the whole family. (laughs) They occupy the kids. I’m trying to do stuff that works for them and I find out really quickly what does and doesn’t work. As a writer, my tendency is to write story fragments rather than stories, and my plots don’t go from point A to B in one issue. DF: You’re aware of it, obviously. EL: I’m completely aware of it, and it really frustrates me. (laughs) I’m more aware of my own shortcomings then anybody. DF: Since you write and draw most of your own stuff, do you LARSEN | 9

start with a written plot? EL: Yes, always. DF: Even when you end up drawing it yourself? What about the dialogue? When does that get written? EL: Sometimes I pencil it in as I’m drawing if something is very specific that I have in mind, or if I have a line that occurs to me. I better write it down because there’s been times when I tried to script the stuff when I wondered what I had in mind. [laughter] DF: I read that you plan out the book a year in advance. EL: A plot thread can go on for ten years in some cases. I’m sitting there thinking: “I just can’t wait to pay this one off.” And there’ll be corny gags that will take me years to pay off. I had a character introduced in the Dragon mini-series named Amanda Mills who after a long span of time eventually married a character named Bruce Love and then after an even bigger span of time, the Dragon entered a bar and said, “I’m looking for Amanda Love.” [laughter] DF: As the sole voice of authority on Dragon, if you wanted to sit down and structure the stories differently you could. Why do you choose not to? EL: Because I am so incredibly scatterbrained that I can’t focus well enough to be able to pull that off. But I’m learning to, and I think it’s getting better. DF: When you read a lot of Savage Dragon issues in a row, they hold together in a different way then when you read them separately. EL: When you get a lot of them together and you read them, you see how the story flows. It’s structured very much like Hill Street Blues was, where any isolated episode, you may go: “I don’t know who these characters are.” But hopefully, you walk away going, “Even so, I like them and I want to find out more

about them, so I’m going to come back next to find out more.” Then, you eventually get hooked into it and caught up to speed. Where it falls apart in Dragon is when a reader doesn’t realize that a certain guy is the character that I introduced in the background of a panel of issue #6, and you’re reading issue #98. That’s great for the people who have been reading it all the way, but you can’t count on everybody being up to speed with you. DF: What keeps you from putting in a “previously in the Savage Dragon” page? EL: I find them really annoying. Maybe it’s the traditionalist in me. These days, my thought is, if I’m going to do that page, then it’s just going to be the splash page. The splash will have the credits, the title of the story, and a brief summary of what’s going on, getting us all excited and ready for the story that is here in front of us now. DF: The thing that no one does anymore and has been declared “officially dead” is flashbacks within the story. The character thinking, “I remember when it all started…” While, of course, it should be done with craft, why has that become considered wrong? EL: There are a number of things that, over the years, have worked themselves out of the lexicon. For many people, captions is one of those things. A lot of people just think that captions are bad. DF: Or if they do use them, they’re in first person narrative— really thought balloons in disguise. EL: But people think that having a caption that says, “Chicago, Illinois” will throw everybody off and the readers will be confused or something. Thought balloons have also been almost erased off the face of the planet. DF: I admire you for using them. I’ve seen you use thought balloons and captions. EL: I’m trying. There are certain scenes that you simply can’t do it without thought balloons and captions. The first place where I did it extensively was when I was doing a wedding issue. Whenever you have people getting married, people just flat out lie. [laughter] In a comic book, you can have a guest at a wedding say: “I’m so happy for you. I’m sure you’re going to have many wonderful years together,” while thinking: “They’re doomed.” To have it that they are saying the dialogue, and then having the characters get together and speak their true thoughts afterwards so you can have everything said in dialogue just strikes me as pretty awkward. DF: I did a long editorial in the first issue of Write Now! about how I feel that comics are on the continuum between novels, prose and short stories on one end, and movies and TV on the other end. I think they owe as much or more to prose, among other reasons because prose has narration and give us interior thoughts. I think that prose aspect one of the great things about comics. EL: What we are big on these days in comics is taking our strengths, things that can only be done in comics, and we make it so we can’t or won’t do those. [laughter] DF: And by the same token, taking storytelling techniques that comics can’t do well and emphasizing them. [laughter] EL: I heard an editor telling somebody who was showing him art samples that they can’t have anyone coming off of a panel because you never go to a movie and see Tom Cruise stick his hand off of the screen. I thought, that is a limitation of that medium. We’ve got enough limitations in comics as it is. Don’t impose that one on us. You know that if filmmakers could

have someone’s hand coming out the screen they wouldn’t think twice about doing it. If you could get Star Wars to have the ships going over your head—that’s cool stuff! Why are we doing this to ourselves? DF: How many speeches did Stan and Roy and all of us write for characters in the split second between a punch being thrown and landing? You could never do that in a movie. EL: You find out really quickly when you adapt something to another medium what you can and can’t do. A character like Ricochet or Speedball, who bounce around from place to place, can’t deliver that much dialogue between here and here. They just can’t hover in the air and give you some witty banter. It’s not possible. In a comic, it’s possible and fun. DF: Do you have any explanation for why comics seem to hamstring themselves these days? EL: Because comic books don’t want to be comic books. The generation that is doing comics now didn’t grow up on Stan and Jack. They grew up on Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Frank Miller and Alan Moore got their acclaim by doing more mature work, and part of doing more mature work was nixing some of the things their predecessors had done and doing something else. We don’t currently have a generation of people saying: “I want to do comics for all ages.” We have a generation of comics creators wanting to do the comic that gets written about in Rolling Stone, and the Fantastic Four isn’t going to be that comic. Spider-Man isn’t going to be that comic. Nobody wants to write Devil Dinosaur or Kamandi. Everybody wants to write Swamp Thing or Watchmen. They want to write something that can be taken seriously. The real contradictory part about this is that writers are still going, “I’m writing characters with their underwear on the outside of their pants, but I really want to be taken seriously.” [laughter] DF: That was a great moment in your Superman/Dragon crossover where Dragon says, “I’ve got a question.” EL: I pursued getting to do that book just so that I could do that line. It was my whole driving force. I just wanted Dragon to ridicule Superman throughout this thing. DF: So, a guy with a fin on his head gets to make fun of Superman? EL: That’s also part of things that I enjoy that most people just reading it just don’t quite get. I’m often very hypocritical, and I find that enjoyable. DF: You put a lot of humor in your work, which I appreciate. You don’t find it necessary to be so heavy all the time that you can’t step outside of it and spoof the industry and even yourself. Do you like humor in your work and in comics in general? EL: A lot of the comics that I enjoy have a lot of funny moments. Some of the funniest stuff that I’ve read in a comic has been delivered to us by Frank Miller, but people don’t get that part of it. People don’t walk away from Dark Knight and remember how he nailed David Letterman in a brilliant fashion. The Letterman-like character had just a few lines of dialogue and had such a small appearance in the book, and yet Miller

completely nailed Letterman both visually and verbally. He summed up the entire guy right there. You have Superman breaking open a tank to find Robin in there with a slingshot aimed at him, and Superman says, “Isn’t this a school night?” That’s a funny line, but comics people walked away from Dark Knight saying, “We got to do this grim and gritty and scowling all the time stuff.” That’s not there. Another thing that I’m very conscious of while writing stories is not having things reference material that my audience may not be familiar with. I don’t go: “Hey, it would be really hilarious if I have this character saying this line from this movie.” DF: Not even if it’s a popular movie? EL: Not even, because I can’t count on everybody being in on this joke. I strive to not have people going, “I don’t get it.” I’m on various comp lists, and I get a number of comics in my house. I can see the comics that my kids gravitate towards and the stuff that they get and the stuff they don’t get. Stuff that may strike an adult as funny, a kid doesn’t get. He doesn’t have the same frame of reference. To do an issue of Looney Tunes as a parody of an adult movie that a kid wouldn’t watch doesn’t benefit the audience at all. They just don’t get the joke. DF: But it does put an extra layer in it for an adult who might be reading it. EL: If it excludes one audience that they have, and it’s the main audience they are trying to appeal to, then it’s a mistake. If you can be clever about it, and have it work on multiple levels, that’s great. DF: Like the original Looney Tunes. EL: Or the Simpsons. The Simpsons did a parody of Cape Fear, and if you didn’t see or aren’t familiar with Cape Fear, you’re not sitting there going, “I don’t get it.” You can just enjoy it on its own, and when you discover that other part later on, then you can go, “that’s what that was really about,” but not think LARSEN | 11

you missed the entire joke. DF: That where The Simpsons writers’ high level of craft comes in. EL: Referencing movies is something that a lot of people do in comics that drives me nuts. I don’t go out and see that many movies. I’m sitting here working or drawing all the time and I have small children, so I don’t see many movies that don’t have talking trains in them. [laughter] So when I’m reading comics and there’s some joke about a movie that I’m not familiar with, it doesn’t make sense to me, and I don’t enjoy the comic. I try to not do that sort of thing to my audience. DF: By your own admission, you’re audience is not what it once was. EL: The first issue out of Dragon sold 700,000 copies. If a comic today sold 700,000 copies, I would be dancing in the streets. DF: I wasn’t trying to embarrass you with the question... EL: No, it’s that way all around. I think comics are failing in spectacular style and in a huge sprawling way. The thing is that people who are still finding their way into the comic book stores, they are being very well served by the books that are out there. And I think it’s great that those people have all sorts of comic books that they are enjoying. However, when you’ve got a Spider-Man comic that kids can’t read, then you are in 12 | WRITE NOW

big trouble. Especially when you’ve got a movie that kids are going to. DF: Do you think the Ultimate line will get those readers back? EL: I think the Ultimate line is awful. I don’t like it at all. It’s not drawing in kids. I don’t see it drawing them in. All I see is people wanting a different take on stuff. The stories seem incredibly padded. You have four- and five-part stories with things building up to something, then it will be continued and the next part will be all fight, when the issue before was all not fight. Both parts isolated and read on their own are very unsatisfying reads. A parent can go to the store after seeing the Spider-Man movie and try to buy their kid a Spider-Man comic and they’ve got Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter Parker: SpiderMan, and Amazing Spider-Man. There’s Essential Spider-Man and Spider-Girl and you bring them all home and they are all story fragments. All of them are “to be continued” and none of them are the same guy. We’ve got Spider-Girl where Peter Parker is like 50 years old. We’ve got Ultimate Spider-Man where he’s sixteen. You’ve got Amazing Spider-Man where he’s talking to Aunt May the entire issue. DF: I see what you’re saying. EL: There’ll be issues where they really want to deal with Aunt May and Peter Parker’s feelings and that relationship and will do a whole issue of that. I just can’t see an eight-year-old or a ten-year-old reading that story and saying, “I want to read more Spider-Man stuff! This Spider-Man is great!” DF: It seems like the companies want to migrate to the collected graphic story album format. EL: That’s where we seem to be headed, I guess. I don’t know. Is that working? DF: I don’t know how to separate the hype from the reality. They’d certainly have you believe that everything is going great, but the actual figures don’t seem to bear that out at all. If they are not bringing anybody new in and are just cannibalizing the old readers... EL: Mostly what we are doing is just pleasing the people that are already there and keeping those people from going away. I’ve graduated from Spider-Man and I’m tired of these old Spider-Man stories. Oh look, they are making Vertigo-style Spider-Man stories now. I guess I’ll stick around a little bit longer. DF: Where do you see your role right now? EL: I see my role as the fly in the ointment. [laughter] I don’t think I’m combating the problem at all, but I’m doing something that pleases me and pleases my audience and hopefully pleases kids. But it’s a tough thing because I’m not in the position, and the book that I’m doing is not in the position, to really be able to be that book that’s going to break through and have kids reading comics again. DF: You’ve chosen not to go the way of Marc Silvestri and Todd McFarlane, the media empire route. You seem to like the idea of working in your office 9-to-5 or 8-to-6 and having a life, and keeping it down to one book. Family seems to define a lot of what you do. You work at home so you can be with your wife and kids. You’ve worked with the same colorists and letterers from the beginning, sort of creating a Dragon family. You’re staying with the Dragon where you could start with a number one of something and have higher sales. Is that the Erik Larsen philosophy or am I reading way too much into this? EL: You’re probably reading too much into it. [laughter] I just like the idea of doing an extended run on something and not giving up on it. I have a lot of Dragon stories to tell before I

to work on Wolverine or Spidermight think that I’m bored with Man or anything else unsinkable these characters and need to move and let him go to town.” (laugh) on. DF: Moving right along… I find it DF: So you can see doing another ironic that the super-hero genre is 100 issues of the Dragon? stronger than ever in movies and on EL: I could see doing another 400! TV. Buffy, Angel, and Odyssey 5 on DF: And if it stopped being a moneyTV. And the Spider-Man movie making enterprise, what would you phenomenon has people more do? interested in that story than they EL: I’d probably jack up the price. have ever been, and yet the [laughter] At that point I’d do medium that birthed that character whatever I could to find a way to and his universe is having a hard make it work, and if it didn’t work, time. ultimately, I’d have to end it. If I EL: The medium that birthed him is ended it, I probably wouldn’t truly no longer doing super-heroes that end it. It would probably be very the majority of people recognize as open-ended, where there wasn’t a super-heroes. I think that, if you go real resolution, and you get a sense and watch the Spider-Man movie, that their adventures are going to and you enjoyed that, you’re going continue but we just may not see to get more satisfaction out of the characters for a short while. playing the Spider-Man video game Then I’d do a mini-series every year then you are going to get out of just to say, “Here’s the guy and I the Spider-Man comic. The video still like to do his stories,” and in game has more of what you like the meantime do something else, about Spider-Man in it than the hopefully. comic book does. DF: Are you still doing stuff for the DF: I think a game is a different other companies? animal because you participate. EL: Not at this point. Erik drew this cover to Aquaman #50. He also wrote the story EL: In the game you get to be DF: But you haven’t closed the door inside, but the art was by Eric Battle and Norm Rapmund. Spider-Man and to fight a bunch of to the idea? [©2002 DC Comics.] his coolest foes. You get to do that EL: I try. [laughter] I’m saying fighting and there are all these enough annoying stuff that they other cool aspects to it, whereas in the comics he might not be probably wanted to close the door on me. fighting anybody this month. There’s going to be some of the DF: The comics marketplace of 2002 is certainly different than Aunt May stuff and the Peter Parker stuff, and that’s fine, but 1992 when you and the other guys formed Image. Any advice for there are so many other media where you can do that interperanybody trying to break in today? sonal stuff so much better than in comics. What we need to do EL: The comics world is not what it was. I think it’s still more is find out what do we do so well and ask why aren’t we possible to break in, but the route these days, in terms of doing that, as opposed to chasing what everybody else in other breaking in, is to go and be a success doing something else, media is doing and trying to imitate that within our medium. and then come to comics and say: “How about giving me a DF: People have written comics off in the past and they’ve come break doing comics?” It used to be that the way of doing things back. Whether they can do that forever is the question would be to write in a mess of letters and just tell people what everybody’s asking. you think about their comics. Do that for six months, and six EL: I think that there are a number of people who really want to months following that do the same thing but start inserting try and do that. I’m all for that. some of your own ideas into the letters, and six months after DF: Are you one of those people? that start sending in plots so that people get used to the idea EL: Yeah, you bet. I love comics and I love super-hero comics of reading these letters from you every month that are funny and I love what I’m doing. If I wasn’t doing Dragon then I would and insightful. And maybe they’ll say: “He seems like an intelbe doing something else and if I were doing some other book ligent guy. I just got used to reading letters from him, and the right now for some other company, I’d be doing the same sort next thing I knew his plot for Iron Man was here.” These days I of thing that I do on The Dragon. I would be inventing a lot of don’t know if there is anyone reading the mail, and more often new stuff, tossing out a lot of new concepts with a lot of new then not there’s no letters pages in the comics, anyway. If the characters, and having a ball. letters are being read, then they are being read by office DF: Whether you owned them or the company owned them? drones, rather than by people in a position to give somebody Would that be an issue? work. So that doesn’t work anymore, so now what do people do EL: I don’t think so. For me, it’s always been this to break in? Look at who’s breaking in and where they came separateness, where I know going into it that I’m creating this from and buddy up with them. Part of the way that people get for someone else and they are going to own it. I just go with it. work is just being people’s pal. [laughter] Almost every editorial The only down side of it is when the relationship falls apart regime from every major publishing company has got the untaland you leave and there are all these places that you wanted ented pal getting all kinds of work. Everybody’s got one. All the to go that you weren’t able to get to because the relationship editors-in-chief say, “Here’s my untalented buddy. Let’s put him LARSEN | 13

was severed, and now you’ll never be able to explain what Arnim Zola had to do with Wolverine’s wife. DF: You stole that idea from me! [laughter] EL: Your plot threads are sitting out there and will never be resolved. I certainly wouldn’t be coming on and doing Captain America and saying: “Who are his ten greatest foes? Let’s rotate through them this year and then get onto them again next year. I think I would be one of the guys to have classic villains show up once or twice a year to keep those who love those characters reminded that they still exist and are still cool. But at the same time, let’s invent some new stuff. Who’s coming up with the Hidden Lands these days? Who’s coming up with the Inhumans and the Ka-Zar’s and Jarella’s World and all the cool stuff? DF: We’re getting near the end of our time here. Anything you want to plug or talk about? EL: Hmmm. I’m going to be doing some more issues of The Savage Dragon. [laughter] At this point I’m in the middle of issue #100 and completely snowed under with deadlines. When I finish that, I should be living large. [laughter] Life will be okay and the deadline pressure should have all miraculously gone away. Then I’ll be going off in yet another bold, new direction with the Dragon book, which is something that I like to do every now and then. I’ve done Dragon running around being chased by monsters and playing Kamandi for 40 issues, and now it’s time to do something else. One of the things that I wanted to do and explore is doing a super-hero who is actually

part of a real family and have that family be a real part of his life, a functional thing. The Fantastic Four get close to that but Franklin was always such an empty wimp that every writer who would come onto the book, their first order of business was to get rid of Franklin because Franklin is boring. My first order of business would be changing Franklin into a character like Calvin [of Calvin and Hobbes], having a character in this world saying, “Hey, my dad is a stretchy guy. My mom can turn invisible. I’ve got the Thing for my uncle, and life is good, so I’m going to go and wreak havoc. Dad will go to build something and there will be a piece of pizza inserted into one of the slots.” [laughter] As for the book I’m actually doing… I’m going to have Dragon getting married. Dragon’s ongoing quest has been to find Jennifer. Where is she and what’s going on? His whole world was virtually destroyed and there’s this big hole where her house used to be. Is she alive? At the end of issue #100, she comes back and it’s a happy ending, as Dragon sits in front of this great big crater that used to be where their house was. DF: Gee where did that come from? EL: Did that come from somewhere else that I don’t know of? DF: Your house burning down ten years ago! EL: There is that. [laughter] I really wanted to just take characters and explore the relationship, and have a daughter who’s trying to figure out how she feels about this whole thing. She’s got parents that dress up in their long underwear and go out and fight crime. Are you really going to feel comfortable going to school? Are the kids going to tease you? This is just a humiliating and horrible thing, but by the same token, how cool is it that this is going on all around and that you can go and take this magic potion and turn yourself into an adult because it’s sitting around the house. DF: Are you talking about Franklin or about the Dragon’s kid? EL: The Dragon. DF: The Dragon has a son. Does he have another kid, as well? EL: The son is out of the picture. Basically Dragon is jumping around from one world to the other and he ends up staying on the Savage World, which is the world where his son doesn’t exist, so he’s like, “Oh, crap. Sorry about that, kid.” [laughter] The Savage World has got all the stuff that I want, with an additional level of big monsters and buildings being destroyed. DF: The thing that you said about the daughter, the daughter has not yet been born? EL: The daughter is Jennifer Murphy’s daughter, Angel, and she’s not actually Dragon’s daughter, so she comes into the situation having spent several years on the run herself, as monsters are running all over the place and Jennifer’s just trying to protect her daughter. She left Chicago because it became this horrible cesspool, and until they fix the place up, she’s got to go to protect her daughter. She comes back later. At that point, her daughter is six or seven years old. Jennifer had a relationship with the Dragon some years back, and now she re-enters his life. They get reacquainted with each other, have a whirlwind courtship, and get married right around October, as I recall. DF: Assuming that the artist meets the deadlines. EL: That’s the idea: to have them get together and be able to play off some of the family fun and family entanglements. The book is going to be heading towards—to use Hollywood terms—Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four meets Calvin and Hobbes.

DF: Is this metaphorically or directly influenced by your own experience as a parent? EL: Pretty much. I read my kids all the Calvin and Hobbes books. It’s great stuff. Currently I’m reading my son all the Fantastic Four stuff. He’s loving it. DF: Are the Dragon’s adventures inspired thematically by what it means to be raising kids in the 21st century? EL: The nice thing about having access to young people of a certain age—my kids—is that, suddenly, you can write kid characters convincingly. That’s something that I’m taking full advantage of. Just having kids be in the comic that sound and look somewhat like real kids. DF: Perhaps other kids will want to buy the comic and read about them. EL: I’m trying to see if I can pitch this as a comic strip in the newspaper. DF: In addition to the comic books? EL: Yes, the strips could be essentially tiers from a comic book page, so that it could be both at once. It’s very weird, but I’ve done a number of them. None of them are quite done yet. DF: Do the strips have the Savage Dragon in them? EL: Yes, there’s Dragon. It’s a family humor strip, not a superhero adventure strip. DF: Why do it as the Dragon? Why not just do it as a family without a green dad with a fin on his head? EL: Because I have super-hero stories that I want to tell within those confines. My thought on it was to do a “What if all the stuff which is fantasy for him was reality for her?” When she’s coming and saying: “My dog ate my homework,” it actually did. There’s stuff that happens to her in her home-life which is completely ridiculous. The payoff is, they see the reality of how ridiculous it is. There are all these things that are fun to deal with in comics and are things that we’re used to. Alternate dimensions and evil twins from other dimensions and negative zones. All these comic book trappings that are just neat. To be able to explore some of them is a lot of fun. I’m hoping to pitch it as just Savage Dragon and give people a big warning in the beginning that this isn’t an adventure strip. DF: The word “savage” in the title might confuse people. EL: It’s a weird idea, and I don’t know if it quite works. But it kind of does. [laughter] The idea in the comic book is to have a strip that goes to the point where the antagonists are just about ready to fight, but the next daily would have the fight already concluded. But in the comic book we’d show the fight. So if somebody was reading the comic book, that would be the complete story. If you were reading the strip, it would be the complete story as far as you needed to know it for the strip. But if you read the comic book you would be getting the missing scenes that don’t work very well in a comic strip. Fight scenes in comic strips just suck. There’s no momentum. You do three dailies in a row of guys punching each other and that sucks. In the context of a comic book, you’ve got all the tension and whatever built into it, and you’re understanding that these guys are fighting for a particular reason. Again, this goes back to why I don’t like a lot of modern comics. Because we don’t have the reason that the characters are fighting built up anymore. I just graze comics. I don’t read any one series month in and month out. I buy tons and tons of comics, and I just sit there and say, “This looks good.” But when I actually read an issue of Iron Man or Spider-Man out of the blue, I’m almost always completely lost. If I read the comic as a series instead of as an isolated issue, then I guess I would under-

stand what these guys are fighting about. But modern comic books seem like episodes, and it seems like guys are fighting right out of the gate, but you don’t know why they are fighting. We never get caught up on why that is. I might care about the fight if I knew who the characters were and knew what the conflict was about. DF: You’re so old fashioned and retro. EL: I am. It used to be that I was this young punk who was coming in and upsetting the apple cart by doing things in a different way, but I guess you grow up. DF: I heard that happens. My new twins might push that along. I’ll read your comic strip for advice on child-rearing, as I’ll need to know what happens a few years in advance. EL: We’ll see if the strip idea even flies or if I even actually submit the thing. It may very well turn out that I’ll do a couple dozen dailies and figure out that I can’t make it fly at all. I think I’ve got enough of that kind of general comic strip style material, that will strike people as funny. There’s always been those kinds of bits in the Dragon comic book itself. People go, “This is a funny book.” And when I stopped doing that goofy humor for a little while and the book was straight, people really missed the goofy stuff. One of the things artistically about the strip is that it’s a lot bouncier than the comic. Angel is far less realistic in the strip than she was when she was introduced in the book. It’ll be interesting to see how people take to that. DF: In the strip or in the comic? EL: In the strip, and therefore in the comic as well, because Dragon is essentially hanging out with a cartoon character, and my stuff has never been strictly realistic, anyway. When you’ve got a character whose mouth can be big enough to fit an entire hamburger into it, that doesn’t strike you as being a real kid any more. That’s something else entirely, and that’s something that comics have gotten away from over the years. When comics started out we had things like The Spirit and Plastic Man and Green Lantern and various other books that had the comedy sidekick who was a flat out cartoon character. Blackhawk had a flat out cartoon character hanging out with him. DF: The idea of realism in cartooning is so relative, anyway. Most people don’t have black outlines around their bodies as they LARSEN | 15

walk down the street. EL: People say one artist’s style is more realistic than another’s, and what they mean is that his characters have more cross-hatching on them. Who’s got that on their body? DF: Did you like the Spider-Man movie? You implied that you did. EL: I liked it pretty well. They made some real big changes. There were a couple of scenes that were just flat out dumb. DF: Everybody probably has a different list of what those scenes are. EL: The Green Goblin on the roof trying to talk Spidey into being his buddy was laughably idiotic. DF: Because of the way it looked with the two guys in the masks? EL: Goblin’s got this unmoving mask and he’s putting his arm around Spidey’s neck like, “You and me, pal.” That was just stupid. And Spider-Man has got this on again, off again Spider Sense that doesn’t warn him of gas when it’s right there. And why doesn’t everybody know that he’s Peter Parker? He’s constantly walking around with his face out. He goes to a wrestling match as Spider-Man with his webbing out and then goes and picks up money from the promoter. He can identify who this guy is. How come he can’t figure out who Spider-Man is? When Peter went to pick up money from him for beating the guy, he wasn’t wearing the mask. DF: The whole secret identity concept is a tenuous one these days. EL: The secret identity thing can work, and Spider-Man is one of those characters who it really can work for, because his mask completely covers his face. One year for Halloween I had Marvel send me a Spider-Man costume and nobody could tell it was me when I had it on. I went on a panel at a New York convention dressed as Spider-Man, and when I was walking around later on in just my regular clothes, I got, “That wasn’t really you up there.” They just thought that the regular actor who dressed up as Spider-Man went up and did the panel because I didn’t show. It’s one of those few instances where it isn’t just somebody pulling glasses or a mask over their face. His mask completely covers it, and his secret is safe as long as you can keep people from seeing that you are squirting webbing out of your hand in front of a class full of children. [laughter] DF: The movie captured the feel of the character well. EL: It captured a lot of the feel and a lot of the sensibilities. The Peter Parker stuff was really dead on. I didn’t find Mary Jane attractive in the slightest, but I’m sure that there are From Spider-Man, #23. Story & art by Erik. other people that [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 16 | WRITE NOW

would. DF: I thought she was attractive. EL: She struck me as trashy. [laughter] She had hand-me-down clothes and was hanging out in what essentially was a trailer park. DF: I think Forest Hills is more upscale than that, but I think the idea was that it was some type of lower middle class environment. EL: It’s really weird to see something like that transformed, because I didn’t ever really think that much about Aunt May’s backyard or that one even exists. You And ten years later Savage Dragon #100. don’t really think when you [©2002 Erik Larsen.] are drawing comics about how the house is constructed and where the rooms are in relationship to each other. DF: It’s probably never been drawn the same way twice. EL: It hasn’t. And I am notorious for never drawing a place the same way twice. Jack Kirby was notorious for doing that, too. His way for dealing with a lot of stuff was to simply keep the characters moving, so if you’re going from one room to another all the time, then you don’t have to make the toaster look the same way two scenes in a row. DF: We’ve seen the Parker’s front yard a lot of times in the comics, although I don’t know if that’s ever looked the same way twice. Any last parting thoughts for the Write Now! readers? EL: I think it’s an important thing for writers to read, but maybe more than that is to do a lot of listening. When you listen to people and the way they talk, you’re going to get an ear for dialogue that you’re not going to get any other way. Reading somebody else’s prose isn’t going to give you the same conversational sensibilities that you would get from talking to your grandpa. DF: Luckily, living in the cell phone era, we get to listen to many more conversations than we want to. EL: Just get out there and listen and read and write. And for crying out loud, if you are using somebody else’s toys, don’t break them. [laughter] It’s just a simple matter of respect. If you have a cool story that you want to do and it involves killing a character’s girlfriend, make up your own girlfriend rather than killing off another character that’s been sitting around not bothering anybody for 35 years. If you aren’t able to make people like the character that you’re killing off, maybe you’re not that good a writer to begin with. DF: So that’s it, folks. You read it here: Erik Larsen says, “Killing is bad.” EL: Except if it’s a character I want to kill, of course. DF: Of course. Thanks, Erik. EL: My pleasure.

THE END

DEPARTMENT

The Ten Rules of Surviving Comics

teven Grant has been a professional comics writer for 25 years. Check your comics from 1978, 1988, 1998 and today, and you’ll likely as not find Steven’s name in the credits of a bunch of them. There are just a handful of people working today who you can say that about. Steven’s had his years of superstardom, when he and Mike Zeck told memorable stories of the Punisher for Marvel, and made his independent mark with Whisper and other properties. He’s written X-Man and Spider-Man—and adventures of WWF wrestlers. Steven’s also been quite adept—and ahead of the pack—in terms of being a proponent for creators’ rights, his own and that of others. He published the influential ‘prozine’ Wap! with Frank Miller. He was one of the first to make use of the Internet as a way to connect with readers and pros. His Permanent Damage column is a weekly highlight at the Comic Book Resources website. Steven has kept writing and surviving in an industry notorious for being fickle and forgetting those who help it flourish. His upcoming projects include: a western graphic novel, Red Sunset; a crime graphic novel, Videoactive; the return of his heroine Whisper in DAY X (all from AiT/PlanetLar Books); X-Men Unlimited stories starring Lockheed, with art by Paul Smith, and Sabretooth, drawn by David Finch; an issue of Birds Of Prey; a trade paperback of Damned, with Mike Zeck, from Cyberosia; the mini-series My Flesh Is Cool and Sacrilege from Avatar Press; and a collection of his Internet column, Master Of The Obvious. Steven’s not on Wizard’s top ten list—which is not to say he’s any less talented than the folks who are, or that he won’t be on it next month—but he’s also not waiting tables. He’s a talented, working writer who—through good, bad, and middling times—keeps writing and getting paid for it. I thought that he’d be a perfect guy to give DFWN readers some idea of what it takes to do that. Take it away, Steven…

or almost 25 years I’ve been making a living, more or less, writing comic books. While I’ve produced some top-tier work, I doubt I’ve often been considered a top-tier writer, or a particularly popular one. I’ve been saddled, at times, with the rep of having an attitude, which is probably true, and I’ve irritated my share of editors and publishers. (You could charitably call me outspoken; you could as accurately say I have a big

by STEVEN GRANT mouth.) Writing comics isn’t even something I purposely set out to do, originally. I sort of fell into it, enjoyed it, and stayed. Despite all that, I’ve kept working, through times of great change and upheaval in the comics business. When I began, in 1978, there were only a handful of comics publishers, and only a couple—Marvel and DC, in that order—were generally considered worth working for. (Thanks to my acquaintance with then-editor Roger Stern, I landed at Marvel but didn’t manage to sell anything to DC for another 12 years.) By the mid-’80s, the new direct sales market had created a publisher boom, as well as more demand at “the majors” for new material. The initiation of royalty plans at DC and Marvel in the 1980s made it possible for comics talent to not only earn a living but to also get rich. The first group to do so bought houses and planes. The second wave, who made extraordinary royalties in the booming early ’90s, put their money into publishing their own work. This became the “Image revolution,” which triggered an even greater boom, combining with the ripple effect from the first Batman movie and the media event that was the “Death of Superman” storyline, to draw strong media interest to the field. You could make a lot of money writing comics. This was followed by the bursting bubble in ’94, plunging the business into “the great depression,” with the collapse of dozens of companies, the strangulation of distribution, and the closing of hordes of comics shops. Over the past couple of years, the business has finally shown signs of crawling out of that ever-deepening hole. But that depression also triggered new markets, new formats and new possibilities, and changed the economic structure of comics.

Through it all, I worked (there were slumps; there are always slumps) while other writers didn’t. I’m not saying that to brag. It’s just the way it worked out. Writing is a complicated business, and no one can guarantee anyone (except maybe Stephen King) constant work, or even survival. Talent means something, of course, but never as much as we wish it would. We all know of talented people who’ve fallen by the wayside while much lesser talents have become huge stars, and we all know of hugely talented people who’ve become Cover to Steven’s Badlands #3. Art by big successes. Which brings us Vince Giarrano. [©2002 Steven Grant to one dictum of comics: if you & Vincent Giarrano.] can captivate a large audience with your work, you will have a career. But often, success in comics is tied to specific characters, and you can’t guarantee your audience will migrate with you to other projects. Which brings us to a contrary dictum in comics, repeating what was said above: no one can guarantee you a career. Even if you’re the greatest writer who ever set foot in the medium. Your art will only get you so far, and then you have to recognize this is also a business and you’re a businessman. There are rules to coping with comics as a business. I can’t guarantee they’ll help you maintain a career, but they’ll help minimize the odds of not having one. Here they are:

1. Understand Freelancing Unless you sign an exclusivity contract with a comics publisher, making you a paid employee of the company, you are a freelancer. Comics companies frequently take a paternalistic attitude toward the talent they work with, and they’re often not keen on sharing. (In the mid-’80s, one very popular freelancer came back from lunch with a high-ranking editor who told him the company’s priorities for giving out assignments: first to the people on staff, then to the talent on contract, then to those not on contract but who only work for the company, and last to “the scum who’ll work for anyone.”) But a freelancer is an independent contractor. You don’t work for any company. You work with them. The choice is yours. You can deal with one company exclusively if you choose. You can deal with as many as you wish. There have been a couple of times when I’ve ended up working with one company more or less to the exclusion of others, only to have the company change directions, cut back or close down, leaving me (temporarily, fortunately) high and dry. Successful freelancing means exploring, creating and maintaining as many simultaneous markets as possible, so that the elimination of any one of them can’t significantly hurt you. It pays to have as many buffers as possible.

2. Know What You Want I once met an artist who wanted to draw for Marvel but was only interested in drawing characters Marvel didn’t publish. It didn’t compute, and until he found a more serious direction he floundered. Simply put, he didn’t know what he wanted. 18 | WRITE NOW

Start your career this way: watch a football game. Now me, I hate watching football, but it’s not the game you should be watching. It’s the coach. Coaches have a simple attitude toward winning: every game is a big game. Think a coach goes into a big game without a game plan? This is your big game. Figure out a game plan first. This is where your tastes, desires, ambitions and artistic vision come in. It’s a simple question with a complicated answer: what do you want? What’s your specific reason for wanting to write comic books? To pay the rent? To get that one great idea published? To mold the future of a favorite character you grew up reading? As a stepping stone to some other writing field, like novels or movies? Do you love the idea of having great artists visualize your ideas and bring them to life? Do you just love the medium and its potential for expression? Are you comfortable writing work-for-hire, or is it your ambition to create and control your own stable of properties? There are no wrong answers. Any one of the above (and many more) are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to write comics. Regularly reassess not only your short term desires but your long term goals, because both will change over time. The answer is the foundation of your game plan. Examples: If you have a lifelong dream of writing Spider-Man, that will aim you at Marvel. If you’re trying to get that one great

idea into print, or if you’re determined to create an empire of self-owned/controlled characters and properties, you’re better off heading for smaller companies open to creator-owned projects. (But beware! Even many smaller companies these days are demanding control of media rights to offset their publishing expenses.) To the extent you want to pursue “artistic” motivations—working with great artists or experimenting with the medium’s capabilities, for instance—you’re going to make your path more difficult, because great artists are hard to come by and most companies, being in business to make money, are more interested in making money than in supporting art. But sometimes risk and patience pay the greatest dividends. (On the other hand, they wouldn’t call it risk if it wasn’t risk.) The “basest” motivation, money, actually offers the greatest latitude for a game plan: go where the money is. But that’s often the least satisfying way to go, since most of us harbor creative aspirations and constantly choking them back quickly becomes frustrating, and depressing. The “stepping stone” motive has come up more and more in recent years, particularly since comics writers like James Robinson have broken into screenwriting. With the recent successes of “comic book movies” like X-Men, Ghost World, Spider-Man and Road To Perdition, Hollywood’s interest in comics has mushroomed. If you own comics properties, it’s easier than ever (at least until the next big “comic book movie” flop) to get an option. But the “stepping stone” is a myth. I just got off the phone with a producer who gave this advice: “if you want to write screenplays, the only way to do it is to write screenplays.” Being a comics writer may get you in the door, but it won’t get you screenwriting work. Only a good screenplay sample can do that. You can only write a novel by writing a novel. At best, comics can gain you a little reputation to play off and earn you a living while you’re writing your screenplay or novel, but they can’t get you work in fields other than comics. You have to prove you belong there. Whether you’re starting or you’re stalled, figure out your own motivations. If you have an idea of what you really want—you’re allowed to change your mind as you gain experience—you’ll be able to better focus on how to get it. It’s the first step in your game plan.

creators. While there’s something to be said for pushing ahead with your own vision regardless of external conditions, it can also be stupidity. Some possibly contradictory things to keep in mind: a) There’s room in the comics medium for virtually any material. It can be as personal as you want it to be, and what you write stands a very good chance of being what is published. Only prose novels and short stories give a writer more control over the final product. As opposed to, say, movies, where scripts are often bought by producers then handed over to other writers (sometimes writer after writer; the Spider-Man movie had something like 18 different writers over the years) for frequently drastic rewrites, and just as often end up unproduced in the bottom of a drawer. In movies, your greatest satisfaction is likely to come from the paycheck. In comics, it’s likelier to come from the work. b) Comics is a collaborative medium. Even if you draw your own material, the writer in you will frequently be at odds with the artist. Regardless of intent, the artist will change GRANT continues on page 24

3. Know Your Market Remember the artist mentioned above who wanted to draw for Marvel but didn’t want to draw Marvel characters? That’s market confusion at its finest. Stay aware of the market, which is constantly changing. There’s a belief (held even by some very high-ranking members of the industry) that comics are comics are comics. It’s not true. The market’s constantly in flux. 18 months ago, The Authority was one of the hottest books going, featuring hardass super-heroes and mass destruction in “widescreen” action, and every company that published super-hero comics scrambled to have their own version. Then a couple planes crashed through the World Trade Center, and no one (even The Authority’s publisher, Wildstorm) wanted to discuss mass destruction comics. While comics were at one point a market strictly for 6-8 page stories, they evolved into a market for very long continuous stories. More recently, economic changes have pushed publishers to think in terms of units of issues that can be easily collected into book form. What the market wants influences what stories can be told, and their shape and content. Comics don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither do comics

Here, the first two pages of Steven’s full script for The Punisher #80. In addition to the art descriptions, note Steven’s instructions to artist Dave Hoover and letterer Ken Lopez. They help establish the mood and tone he’s going for. In full script, if the artist for whatever reason doesn’t convey the story the writer had in mind, the writer may not know about it until the comic is on sale. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Page 2 of the story. Note how Steven tries to give the artist enough description to draw the scene. Another way to handle such a situation would be for the writer to include a photo of the setting he wanted drawn. In some cases, it might even be appropriate to just let the artist “wing it.” Of course, if he draws something other than what the writer intended, that will have to be dealt with, either by living with the results or having the scene redrawn. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

PAGE 2 INT. CHURCH It's a big church inside: rich dark oak pews, marble floors, neoRenaissance paintings depicting the Stations Of The Cross on the walls leading from the door to the altar. Stained glass windows casting colored light on the room. At the back of the church, in the corner, is the confessional. [If the artist happens not to be Catholic, a confessional is two adjacent stalls with the entrances covered by drapes so you can't see who's inside. There is only the faintest light inside: five watt bulbs. The size of each stall is roughly the size of one of those photo machines you find at Woolworth's. Connecting the two stalls is an adjacent wall with small sliding door in it, at face level for an average kneeling person. There is a wire mesh on the sinner's side, while the sliding door is on the priest's side, and the priest opens it when he intends to hear confession. The sinner kneels, the priest sits. They can't really see each other through the mesh.] There are only a FEW PEOPLE in the pews, old women from the old country. And one exception: seated toward the back, in sunglasses and a duster, is THE PUNISHER. The coat is open enough that we can identify the skull emblem. Walking from the altar toward the back of the church, dressed in street blacks, is a priest, FATHER QUILLAN. He's in his late thirties, medium but muscular build, six feet or so tall. Caucasian, bleached blond hair, brown eyes. CAPTION I'm out of place in the church. CAPTION Only old women here, clinging to a faith crushed by the disappointments of their lives. As he passes, Quillan glances at The Punisher and does a slight doubletake. In none of these shots should we get a terribly good look at Quillan. CAPTION Old women and priests.

The good people.

INSET EXTREME CLOSE-UP Quillan's eyes, widening in alarm and fear. POV QUILLAN MEDIUM CLOSE-UP The Punisher, glowering at "us" behind the sunglasses, looking just slightly in "our" direction. At this range, we can clearly see The Punisher's face and emblem, so that no one should by this point have any doubt of it. CAPTION A good place to rest. Trembling slightly, Quillan points to the confessional. The Punisher turns his head, but not demonstrably, to look at the confessional. CAPTION And wait. CLOSE-UP The Punisher, from behind, and we're looking over his shoulder at the confessional, where Quillan is pushing aside the curtain and entering the priest's chamber without looking back. CAPTION Everyone has to rest sometime.

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If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher! his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one. If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT, and it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. If that’s the case, here’s what you should do: 1) Go ahead and READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, and see what you think. 2) If you enjoy it enough to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and purchase a legal download of it from our website, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. We’d love to have you as a regular paid reader. 3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce. We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download. TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

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The first two pages of X-Man #72. Steven wrote this story “Marvel style” (plot first). The dialogue and captions were written after the art was penciled by Ariel Olivetti. Steven could then base his text on what was actually in the art. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Please note: Damage done to the World Trade Center is in this story written well before 9/11/01. In a post-9/11 world, including such a scene would be a definite statement of some kind, depending on the context, whereas, when this story appeared, the buildings were used more or less as props.

With plot first, the artist has more freedom to pace the story and use his creativity, and the writer can see if the story is being told as he intended. This method is more of a collaboration between writer and artist but, especially when there’s a tight deadline, key story points are sometimes inadvertently given short shrift. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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GRANT continued from page 19

as well as to editors and publishers.

the work. You’ll be feeding your obsessions; they’ll be feeding theirs. Because comics are drawn, artists are necessary, and your artist and editor are the first markets you have to appeal to. c) Every publisher has their own idea of what they think is worth publishing. You don’t take a true-life personal confessional story about your first hot date to Marvel, and you don’t try to market a 300-issue long cosmic superhero epic to Fantagraphics. Keeping abreast of all facets of the market (and, if possible, anticipating them) will help limit your rejection slips and increase your acceptance letters. But you have to do the research yourself. d) When we say “the comic book market,” we mean the direct sales market. The comic shops. Which traditionally have been the super-hero/action-adventure market, fed by distributors and publishers who cater to them. Bookstores are the growing new market, for trade paperbacks and graphic novels. So far they’re showing a strong tendency toward non-color, non-super-hero material, widening a schism in the comics industry. (Though comic shops increasingly stock trades and graphic novels as well, and many shops now earn the bulk of their income from book sales.) It’s a simple formula: to keep making a living in the comics business you need to write what publishers will buy, and what they’ll buy is influenced by the market, so it’s important to watch your markets. All of them. It has also fallen increasingly to the talent to do their own marketing. Remember: in all cases you’re not only marketing your work, you’re marketing yourself. Some of the more popular current writers have put great effort into marketing themselves directly to the readership (the Internet has proven a very useful tool for that)

4. Know Your Status Machiavelli wrote: “In order to exact revenge, one must first win.” The California State Lottery said: “You gotta be in it to win it.” As a rule of thumb, it’s better to be writing anything in comics than not writing anything. If your ultimate goal is to generate a multi-volume epic saga of the settling of the West, you can look at a gig writing Robin as a distraction, but you can also view it as another step toward your goal. It keeps you fed and housed, it keeps your name in the public eye, it demonstrates your versatility, and it gives you another chance to prove yourself and convince a publisher you might just be able to pull of that Western saga commercially after all. There’s nothing wrong with working just for the money, as long as that’s not all you do. View assignments, even on books you’re not personally interested in, as exercises. (Some of the stories I’ve written that I cared the least about—recently collected GI Joe stories, for instance—are bewilderingly among my stories that have gotten the best reader response. On the other hand, know where your personal Rubicon lies, that line you won’t cross. I was asked to do a new Fu Manchu series a few years back, but, despite promises I could have a free hand to revamp to my heart’s content, I couldn’t see attaching my name to the epitome of Yellow Peril racism.) At minimum, working for the money keeps you in the game. I’ve known several once top-tier writers in both comics and films who basically took themselves out of the game by presuming their status was inviolable, that their services were indispensable and certain offers of work were beneath their dignity. The cruel fact of the writing business is none of us are indispensable— but if we write well and sell well, we can temporarily convince

Three examples of Steven’s diverse output. Stone Cold Steve Austin #1 from Chaos Comics; The Life of Pope John Paul II from Marvel Comics, cover art by John Tartaglione; and G.I. Joe #20 from Marvel Comics with cover art by John Byrne. [Stone Cold Steve Austin ©2002 World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.; The Life of Pope John Paul II ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.; G.I. Joe ©2002 Hasbro, art ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 24 | WRITE NOW

companies we are. But the competition for every gig is huge, and for every working writer there are dozens more who want that slot. Even if you’re a writer who has achieved great success in comics, if you can’t realistically assess your current position in the business at any given moment, without illusion, you can find it all gone in a heartbeat. Styles get outdated, tastes change, there are no laurels to rest on. We have to prove ourselves again with each new work.

5. Know Your Editor Editors have become the great killers of writing careers in comics. It used to be editors would stay at companies for decades, often working with the same small group of writers and making it very difficult for new writers to approach them. Later, as the market mushroomed, editors moved around, often taking talent with them and giving talent access to new companies. The pattern of the last few years has been for editors to leave comics altogether when they (usually involuntarily) leave the companies they were working for, and the turnover has been rapid. Since it has also become the style for incoming editors to “revamp” the titles they take over with new creative teams, losing an editor can leave a writer high and dry. So it’s worth having a relationship with as many editors at as many companies as is humanly possible. I don’t mean you have to become drinking buddies. But the more editors who feel they can work comfortably with you, the better your chances of continuing to make a living writing for comics. One editor raving about your work to other editors can get you more offers than dozens of great fan letters or Internet reviews. Bear in mind that editors at the “majors” now have less work to throw around than in years past, and they have to answer to people more crucial to their professional lives than you are. What do editors want from writers? Besides great stories, they want talent who’ll make their lives easier. Even if they don’t play straight with you (in my experience, most editors try to) playing straight with them will generally earn you a lot of mileage. You don’t have to roll over and play dead, just play straight.

possible, so you have an appealing pool to choose from. I know many of us cherish that Randian image of that man of vision standing on his own and winning through the strength and rightness of his ideas, but this is a business built on collaboration, and collaboration means it’s a business of relationships. You never know what’s going to come back to haunt or help you. (I worked with Write Now! editor Danny Fingeroth on Spider-Man at Marvel, and now, years later, he asked me to write this.) The relationships you build and maintain are as critical as talent in getting work.

7. Get The Work Done This is a ridiculously simple principle a lot of writers (and artists) just don’t seem to get. When you get a job or a deal, do the work. On time. It gives the illusion of a willingness to cooperate, especially on work-for-hire comics, and that cuts a lot of slack with an editor or publisher and makes them more willing to work with you again. Simply having the work ready when it’s due makes up for a multitude of sins. (Provided it’s good work. There’s always a catch.) GRANT continues on page 27

6. Network, Network, Network There’s an old saying that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. While life’s rarely that simple, who you know in comics can make or break you. I cited editors, but information is the life’s blood of a career and the more people you know the more chance you have of getting information and thereby finding opportunity, whether you’re generating your own work or trying to get work from companies. A popular artist who wants to work with you can overcome almost any editor’s objection, and artists have even suggested me for projects they had nothing to do with. I’ve had other writers recommend me for projects they were too busy to take on. Publishers I’m friendly with have recommended me to editors working for them. Even a letterer generated work for me, just by being who an editor confided in when he needed a writer. I’ve gotten work by following up on rumors people have passed along. I even had a producer call me once to pursue an idea I’d off-handedly discussed with an artist we both knew. Until recently, it was easier to sell a project without an artist attached (unless it was a superstar artist the company felt could sell books on name alone) so that the company could bring in whatever artist they wanted. A current shift: it’s increasingly difficult to sell a new series unless you have an artist already attached. Get to know as many good artists as

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9. Have A Back-up

8. Be Flexible In case you haven’t picked up on this so far: we are not gods. We do not control every aspect of our destinies. Every coach goes into every game with a game plan, but if the plan doesn’t work he makes adjustments on the fly. Sometimes things just don’t work the way we want them to. It comes down to this: you survive comics by working, and the way to keep working is to keep working. As I said above, this doesn’t mean hacking it out. If you don’t feel you can do a good job on something, walk way from it, because you’re not doing anyone (except maybe your creditors) favors by doing it. Know when to suppress your own obsessions. Sometimes you have to write The Phantom Stranger while you’re waiting for your golden moment to come up. Again, the general rule of thumb: what keeps your name in front of the public is good. And, sometimes, no matter what you do, you can’t catch a break. This is when you get creative, and industrious. Remember it’s a business. Don’t be afraid to make cold calls to editors. The worst they can say is no. Regardless of the pay scale, the only companies that are beneath your dignity to work for are the ones with a rep for not paying when they say they’re going to, and you can sometimes cut a deal even with them to protect yourself, particularly if they’re out to repair their reputations. The short version: try everything you can think of. There was a time in comics when work would come to you, but this isn’t that time and it may never be again. You have to go find it. If you can’t find it, you have to make it or reconsider your options.

The time will come—trust me, it will—when there is absolutely no paying comics work available. You can’t get it, you can’t find it, you can’t make it. There’s an old saw that to succeed as a working writer you should have a working wife, and that’s pretty close to true, but guess what? You’re a writer. Which means you’re not limited to comics. I’ve written teen adventure novels, rock and movie criticism, political essays, magazine features, Internet articles, stories for TV shows, pretty much whatever I had to do to get by. I’ve ghosted comics for other writers who had more work than time, or who just couldn’t face an assignment when it came time to do it. I’ve worked as an editor (briefly). One comics writer I know currently gets by on travel writing. Others have written screenplays and broken into movies (and these days the best way to get Marvel or DC to notice you is to have a screenwriting career). In hard times, find a niche and burrow in. If comics are your obsession, scour for paying markets that want pieces about comics. Or write a book. Teach a continuing education course about comics. You’re trying to make a living using your imagination anyway, so use it. If worst comes to worst, take a “real” job that keeps the bills paid and keep writing on the side until the doors start opening again. But keep your eyes on the doors! It’s what you love, but no one said it would be easy.

10. Be Determined Gilbert Shelton, in his hippie comic strip Those Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, used to say that dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope. Of course, we’re all dope-free now, but our version is this: determination will get you through times of no work better than work will get you through times of no determination. It’s easy to get frustrated and depressed, but no matter what, always remember this: Whether you realize it or not, you became a writer because somewhere inside you there’s something you think needs to be said that no one else can say. Most of us spend our whole careers figuring out what that thing is, but it’s what keeps us going. There’s a time to be stupid instead of smart. When intelligence tells you the odds are against you and you should call it quits, that’s the time. Determination is, in a sense, being too stupid to know when you’re beat. It’s your defense against the harsh realities of freelance writing, the one thing guaranteed to get you past the roadblocks if you let it. Don’t be afraid to use it. I tell people freelancing is like walking a tightrope without a net. The main thing to remember is: don’t look down. Now go fight the good fight, and good luck.

THE END

Next issue: Steven gives some important pointers for comics folks in dealing with Hollywood, in both comic-crazy and comic-averse times in Tinseltown. GRANT | 27

Curbed Enthusiasm

The STAN BERKOWITZ Interview Interview by Danny Fingeroth on July 9, 2002 Edited by Danny Fingeroth /Copy-edited by Stan Berkowitz

os Angeles born Stan Berkowitz has been a TV writer, story editor and producer for 18 years. Currently a story editor on Cartoon Network’s Justice League, he’s been at Warners Animation since January of 1996 (except for a brief stint at Universal in 97-98 to write and produce “Players.”) Besides Justice League, he’s worked on Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond and Static Shock, and shows he’s written for have received seven Daytime Emmy nominations in the category of Outstanding Special Class Animation. (Two have won Emmys, The New Batman/Superman Adventures in 1998 and Batman Beyond in 2001.) From ’94 to ’96, Stan was at Marvel Studios, where he was a staff writer for Spider-Man. In 1993, he co-wrote a feature called Street Corner Justice. In ’90 and ’91 he was a producer and head writer on the live action Adventures of Superboy. In ’89 and ’90, he wrote several scripts for The New Adam-12 and Dragnet: the ’90s. From ’84 to ’88, he was at Columbia Pictures, writing for TJ Hooker, Mike Hammer and Houston Knights. From ’77-’84, Stan was an entertainment journalist, writing for the likes of Esquire, the LA Times, the NY Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine and many others. He went to UCLA, and has a bachelor’s degree in film production and a masters in screenwriting. And, he just finished writing a Justice League Adventures comic for DC.

DANNY FINGEROTH: I want to go through the evolution of how a TV and movie writer works and how you got started. Was your family in the TV or movie industries or anything like that? SB: No, and that might be why it took me until I was 35 to get in. My father was from Massachusetts and my mother was from New York. My dad was in the Army Air Force in War World II and he trained here in Culver City, in the old Hal Roach

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Studios, to be a combat cameraman. He enjoyed the time he spent in Hollywood, and he made friends with some celebrities, particularly Harpo Marx. My father wanted to be an on-set still photographer for the movies, but Harpo Marx aside, he didn’t have any ins into that heavyunionized profession. DF: So it wasn’t one of those ‘you went to high school with Dennis Hopper’ deals or anything like that? SB: The high school down the road from my house had guys like Michael Ovitz and a few other future industry bigwigs going to it. I had a choice of going there or to another high school and I made the wrong choice. [laughter] DF: Nobody famous from your high school? SB: The rock critic for the LA Times, Robert Hillburn went to Reseda High School a few years before I did. We also had a Playboy centerfold, Donna Michelle, and Hal Bedsole, who played football for the Vikings. DF: Were you writing in school and as a teenager? SB: No, but my father maintained his interest in cameras and made sure that I was well-supplied with movie cameras, starting at the age of 12. So instead of putting pen to paper, I was off making movies and learning how to do stop-motion animation. DF: Did you know from the beginning of college that you were going to be a film major? SB: No, it took about two years before I could figure out what I was going to do. DF: The films that you made there, are they anything like what you’re doing now? SB: No, the ones I did there didn’t have any animation in them at all. DF: Did you write the films that you made at UCLA? SB: Yes, but the writing wasn’t in script form. It was basically a shot list. We didn’t have much access to sound equipment. DF: Even at UCLA? SB: Only on my final film, did they let me use their Nagra [professional quality tape recorder.—Ed.] and Eclair [pro movie camera.—Ed] set-up, so I could make a 16 mm talking film.

Unfortunately, that particular camera was so bad, it scratched the negatives. DF: That’s scary. I went to college in upstate New York and was a film major and it sounds like in our state college we had better equipment than UCLA. SB: I think you went to college in a more recent and enlightened time than I did. DF: That’s true. You got your Masters at UCLA, too, right? In screenwriting? SB: At UCLA they let you produce any movie you wanted—as long as you paid for it. I only had so much money from my Bar Mitzvah, and I used it all as an undergraduate. It’s very demoralizing when you’re 20 and you’re spending those last few dollars and you have no idea how they’re going to be replaced. DF: So you decided that writing would to be a cheaper way to go? SB: Yeah. All it requires is a notepad and a Bic pen. DF: They have these computers now. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. SB: You don’t really need a computer. DF: That’s true. It’s a bonus. Did you have a Master’s thesis screenplay? SB: I did. It was a film noir titled The Courier. DF: Anybody you went to college with go on to fame or fortune? SB: Penelope Spheeris, David S. Ward—who did the Major League movies—Colin Higgins, who wrote the movie Foul Play and then died young. Bill Norton, who’s written and directed lots of stuff. He and I worked on a couple of scripts many years after film school. A great guy. Then there was Greg Nava, who directed the Selena story and several other movies. He’s got a series on PBS now. DF: Now Penelope Spheeris, I know that name. SB: Her first big film was The Decline of the Western Civilization. Then she moved onto comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies. DF: Did she do the Wayne’s World movies, or am I thinking of somebody else? SB: It’s hard to keep track. I was a film critic for UCLA’s school paper, and if you had asked me a question like that back then, I would have known. DF: It says in your bio that you were an entertainment journalist. Was that the next step after college? SB: During college, I started writing movie reviews for a small local magazine called Coast F.M. and Fine Arts for $15 apiece. DF: That was when $15 was $15. SB: Yeah, but not enough to live on. So soon after I graduated, I got a job working for Russ Meyer on one of his film crews. DF: Did you answer an ad or did you know somebody? SB: I’d met Russ a few years before, when I was writing for my college paper, and I kept in touch with him. As I was finishing my thesis, he said, “I’m going to start a new film and I need people to help out on the crew.” DF: What did you do on the crew? SB: Lifted stuff [laughter]. The credit I got was “grip,” but basically, I just moved things around for him. DF: Did you start writing for him? SB: No. But he was pretty generous in terms of allowing suggestions to come from the crew and the actors. People could throw him a line of dialogue or suggest a shot. The few times I offered things, he took them seriously. That’s not to imply that he was anything but a one-man show. Of all the people I’ve heard of in the film business, he is the one who

came closest to doing everything himself, from conceiving the film to distributing it. He was even the guy who, if you ordered a video-cassette of one of his movies, would personally mail it to you. It was inspiring. DF: He was famous for softcore porn. Which films of his did you work on? SB: He never did cross the hardcore line. I worked on just one, The Supervixens. DF: That’s a famous movie and—it’s a precursor of things to come with the word ‘super’ in the title. [laughs] SB: I also appear in it. DF: Was it a speaking part? SB: No. Russ asked me to think of a line to say, and oddly enough, I couldn’t. So I said, “Russ, what if I just don’t have any pants on?” There was a long pause at the end of the line, and then he started laughing. I figured I just sold my first bit to a movie. [laughter] I play a flasher who drives a car. DF: Maybe we’ll rent that and blow the still up for the interview. SB: Not if you want people to buy your magazine. DF: Did that start you on the road to professional writing? SB: No. Back in those times, it seemed like no one in Hollywood wanted to hire film students. Mr. Spielberg’s success would change all that a few years later, but for me, at the time, there was no work other than film crew blue-collar labor. Which was a career path I didn’t particularly want to take. DF: What was the first writing that you got to do and how did that come about? Writing for pay, that is. SB: I had agents ever since film school, so I would go out to occasional meetings and maybe get an option on a spec script for a few hundred dollars. The first sale occurred because I was writing with a partner named David Lees, and he knew a guy starting a film company. We were all from the same college class, and this guy told David he was looking for a screenplay. So we sent over two things that we had written, a very long treatment and a screenplay. David’s friend got back to us rather quickly saying that he and his partners loved the screenplay, but it would cost too much to produce. Then he added, “We think your outline is crap, but we may be able to do business with you on it.” And that’s exactly the way it worked out. DF: And that was what project? SB: A movie called Acapulco Gold, produced in 1976. It was about marijuana. BERKOWITZ | 29

DF: With that title, I had a feeling that would be the subject. And that was the first thing you sold? SB: First thing produced. Once they bought the outline, they gave us a little bit of money to write a script, which they quickly rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. David and I wound up with a story credit on the movie. DF: I never heard of it. SB: I don’t blame you for not knowing about it. It wasn’t widely released until four years after it was filmed, and then it was the lower half of a double bill with a Cheech and Chong movie. DF: You can’t ask for more than that. SB: But we got more anyway: the unforgettable Marjoe Gortner as leading man. DF: For two minutes he was a big star. SB: Right after they finished filming, I saw him in a liquor store in Hollywood. After I explained who I was, he gave me a disinterested, “Uh huh,” then walked away. DF: I guess he wasn’t much of a word guy. SB: He was a very talkative guy, just not to me. [laughter] At the time, I still had some delusions about the glamour of being a Hollywood writer. DF: Even after growing up in LA and being surrounded by it? SB: I wasn’t surrounded by it. I was out in the suburbs. I was as far from Hollywood, figuratively, as someone in Phoenix or San Diego. Nobody I knew was in show business. Nobody’s dad was in it, nothing. DF: I think the impression that people from outside of LA have is that, if you are in LA, you must somehow be involved in show business, otherwise why would you live there? SB: The weather. DF: How did you make a living in those years? SB: Oh, God, it was terrible. A little work here, a little there. I developed a sense that the world wouldn’t care if I starved to death. Still have it. I finally got a job working part-time in a film lab. At the time, they were doing post-production work for educational films. Part of my job was to be a projectionist for sound mixes, and another part was to pick library music for the films. Later, the company became more of a traditional film lab, doing reprints of old movies. My job shifted to timing. [That is, making sure the films were printed the way the filmmakers wanted them to be.] Obviously, the best part of that job was watching the movies, and making sure that the print quality was good. I was right in the heart of Hollywood, but I might as well have been in a different city from the people who were doing what I wanted to do, which was to write scripts for movies or television. DF: You said you had an agent from the time you got out of college. I think that to many people this is a mysterious process. How did you get one so quickly and how come they didn’t get you more work? SB: To get an agent in those days was a lot easier. I’m not sure why things have changed, but at that time there were agents who really wanted to help students make that first sale and then make the other sales after that. The way I got mine was the same way a lot of people in my class did. Here’s the story: there was an older man named Sy Salkowitz in our class. He was probably in his mid-’40s at the time. He already had a career as a TV writer, and I think he was having a midlife crisis involving a divorce and might have been considering going for a Master’s so he could teach TV writing. He’d always be regaling us with stories about the industry, and he would pretty much 30 | WRITE NOW

take over for the teacher during class. He’d also have the whole class over to parties at his house. To one party, he invited an agent and the agent talked about what he did and then, later, I contacted that agent and showed him my Master’s thesis. He said, “Sure, I’ll represent you.” DF: Do you think that was the effect of the Lucases and Spielbergs and Coppolas and Scorseses, since they went to film school, and now the agents all wanted guys fresh out of film school? SB: Maybe, but way back then, those guys were still viewed as individuals and not part of a movement. Within just a couple years, though, Spielberg directed Jaws and the money made from that movie convinced everyone that “youth” was where it was at. [laughter] Before that, there was still some respect for older professionals. DF: Do you think that this agent was idealistic in wanting to promote younger writers? SB: There must have been a fair amount of idealism. I think he would have been very happy to start my career. But as it turned out, he couldn’t. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Who knows? DF: On your resume, you list “entertainment journalist,” from ’77 to ’84, and then in ’84 you’re at Columbia Pictures working on TJ Hooker and Mike Hammer and Houston Nights. How did that evolve? SB: While I was at the film lab, I was also doing journalism at night and writing spec scripts, too. I was a pretty busy guy. In 1983, my elderly car broke down and I couldn’t afford to replace it. I thought: “I’m 33 years old, working three jobs and I can’t afford a car. What’s wrong with me?” I soon realized that what was wrong with me was I didn’t write fast enough. I’d recently met a working TV writer whose brother I’d known in Hebrew school. I looked at this other writer and I thought, “Is he that different from me?” The answer was “Yes, because he can do a draft in a weekend and I can’t.” So when my car was in the shop, and I couldn’t go anywhere, I said to myself, “Let’s see if I can write faster.” I had an idea for a feature script that I had been wanting to do for a long time. I wrote it very quickly and I gave it to my agent, and she liked it. That, and a second script I wrote quickly, served as writing samples. DF: Do you feel those scripts were as good as anything you had written before? SB: They were better. DF: Because you weren’t worrying everything to death? SB: I was applying myself more. Working harder. And I think part of it might have been maturity. Most people get a better sense of human nature as they get older. Do you really want to have a 25-year-old telling you what human nature is all about on a movie screen? DF: It’s like going back and watching Citizen Kane when you’re twice as old as Orson Welles was when he made it. It’s still fun, but it’s not as profound as I remember it. SB: In regards to Citizen Kane, Welles’ treatment of that failing marriage was certainly wise beyond any 25-year-old’s wisdom. A lot of credit for that probably goes to [co-writer] Herman Mankiewicz. DF: So these scripts were your calling card…? SB: I had two scripts under my belt that I liked, and were I to write for television, I knew I could do it quickly. That was into the spring of ’83, but it took until Christmas of ’84 before I was able to get a writing job and leave the film lab. They were nice to me at the lab, but I felt I was wasting my potential. DF: So you showed movie scripts to TV people?

SB: Yes. Features seem to impress TV people. When I wrote a script, I showed it to everyone I knew because, unlike me, maybe they had connections. I gave the scripts to people I’d met through journalism who were producing things, and I also got a new agent who was more hooked into television production. I went around doing everything I could to promote a career change. There were lots of ups and downs in that last year. It felt as though I was pushing a car up a hill. DF: Did you go for that agent because he was in TV, or did you already have the agent and he was into TV? SB: I changed agents in June of ’84 because I felt that the new agency could really help me. And they did. DF: You wanted to get into TV because the feature film thing seemed too difficult to break into? SB: It seemed impossible, and still seems impossible. I switched agencies when the opportunity came up. My old agent had given one of those scripts I wrote quickly to a producer and the producer liked it and asked if I’d mind if he showed it to an agent he was considering signing with. I told him to go ahead. Then that agency called me and asked if I was happy with my present agent. Since I wasn’t working, and I’d heard a lot about this new agency, I gave them a try and it worked out. But they weren’t the ones who got me into Columbia. What happened was, someone that I’d shown a script to a year earlier got a job at Columbia just before Thanksgiving in 1984. The day he called to tell me this, so did another friend, who’d just gotten a job at Fox. Both had been hired as supervising producers, and before I could ask one for a job, the other one said, “Hey, how would you like to be a staff writer?” DF: So it wasn’t even: “Do you want to write a script?” It was: “Do you want to be a staff writer?” That’s impressive, Stan. SB: They felt that my work sample was good enough. But I still had to dig up a copy of the Master’s thesis that I’d written 11 years earlier, and drive that out to Burbank and put it the hands of the studio executive in charge of the show, so that he could make sure that I could do crime stuff. I got on board— and then was fired. DF: Can you say what show that was?

SB: That was Mike Hammer. DF: The Stacy Keach show? SB: Uh huh. What happened was, I quit my day job abruptly, because there was no time to give notice. I showed up at Columbia the next day. Can you imagine, one day you’re working at a small film lab in Hollywood, and the next you’re driving into Burbank and there’s your name painted on a parking spot next to Sidney Poitier’s? DF: That’s cool. SB: I sure thought it was. The man who hired me, said, “You’re really lucky you’re coming aboard today, because Stacy had to leave town for a week and we have some breathing room. I want you to go home and rewrite a script over the weekend.” No problem. I cut and pasted all weekend, and then Monday morning, I’m eating breakfast, watching the news, and they mention that Stacy Keach has had some legal problems in England. He’s gone to England to deal with a cocaine charge, and for the rest of the week, I’m getting up and watching the story develop on the news. They convict him, and I think he’ll just get a slap on the wrist. But then it turns out that in England, when you’re convicted of something like that, they literally take you from the courtroom to the jail to begin serving your six-month sentence. I was a little shocked by that, but still not worried, because there was going to be an appeal. The following week, he made his appeal. When you do that in England, you offer your argument for the appeal, and the judge thinks about it while you are in the room. This one thinks and says, “Nope.” They sent Stacy back to jail for six months, and suddenly we had to deal with the question of how to produce a show without the star. Ultimately, Columbia decided that they couldn’t, so they let everyone go. So it wasn’t just me they fired, it was everyone, and it was the week before Christmas. They said, “Stan, remember when we gave you a contract that for six weeks was going to pay you almost as much as you earned in a year at the film lab? We don’t have to pay you for the full six weeks, because this is an act of God.” [laughter] I thought to myself, it’s Christmas and I have absolutely no savings and I have alienated the people at the film lab, so I can’t go back. DF: What did you do? SB: Remember when I said that two guys called that same day? I called my agent and said, “would you please call this other guy and find out if there are any episodes left to be written on his show.” As it turned out, there were, because the star of that show had inadvertently killed himself. DF: Inadvertently killed himself! What show was that? SB: Cover Up. The star was Jon-Erik Hexum, and in the fall of ’84, Mr. Hexum was involved in some horseplay with a gun loaded with blanks. He wanted to show the folks on the set that you could put the gun to your temple and pull the trigger and not be injured. But the impact of the blank was so severe that it caused brain death. The producers took advantage of the show’s temporary shutdown to reorganize the writing staff, and it turned out that there was one extra episode available to write, and my friend gave it to me. Starting the day after New Year’s, I worked very hard at Fox for about two months, going from concept to finished script. It was cool, except one person was dead, and another was in jail. DF: Again, glancing at your resume, it seems like you’ve been working steadily since then. SB: Yeah, but who knew? In June of ’85, when they started restaffing all the shows at Columbia, my agent came back to the BERKOWITZ | 31

studio and said, “This thing about cutting Stan off without a salary was not fair. You could argue Act of God in court, but we would argue something else. And more importantly, you didn’t fire him because you didn’t like him, you fired him because of something he had nothing to do with. Why don’t you hire him back, and then we can forget about this legal stuff.” They went, “Okay,” and that was how I got the TJ Hooker gig. DF: For the readers who are not familiar with how television writing is done, it’s generally done as a team. How does that work? SB: Well, comedy writers sit in a room cracking jokes and trying to work out a script together. It’s a little lonelier if you’re doing action/adventure like I do, although, even then, there is still lots of interaction and meetings where you talk about story ideas. DF: It must be similar to a comic book series where you have to keep track of continuity and who’s alive, who’s dead, who’s married and who’s divorced and so on? SB: Exactly. DF: It sounds like, with a dramatic series, you have these meetings and then everybody goes home and writes. SB: Yes. Writing is usually solitary. But when you finish your draft, you bring it in and you sit in a room and everybody gives you notes. Hopefully, they’re thinking, “I’ll be gentle to him because, one day, I’ll be in that position and I don’t want him ripping me apart.” DF: Your whole life, you had favorite shows every year? SB: Yeah. Moreso as a child than as an adult. I knew the TV Guide when I was pre-adolescent. I knew everything that was on every station at any time. But then again, there were only three networks. DF: It wasn’t the 640 channels I have now on my television. Classic Superboy art by Al Plastino. SB: You really have 640? [©2002 DC Comics] DF: It goes up to 640, but only half of them have anything on them and a lot of them are just music. But it is amazing to go, “Honey, what’s on Channel 635 tonight?” It’s very odd. Back to your story… it seemed like that you were specializing, by choice or chance, in the adventure realm… SB: I couldn’t do sitcoms, so the only other main genre that was available was action/adventure. I was doing a lot of cop shows. Mike Hammer, TJ Hooker, Houston Nights which was a Miami Vice-type cop show set in Houston. DF: The New Adam-12 and Dragnet: The ’90s. You were reviving stuff? SB: Helping to. I was a writer on those two shows. DF: And then—I feel like James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio—and then in 1990-1991 a fateful move was made to Superboy. [laughter] SB: I don’t know how that happened. I think the producers were trying to make the Superboy show (which had been around for two seasons) a little more adult, and they felt that my background as a writer of crime stuff would help ground the show in reality. 32 | WRITE NOW

DF: There were two Superboys, weren’t there? SB: Two actors had played him, but by the time I got there, they had settled on one: Gerard Christopher. DF: So you got to do Superboy. Had you been a comic book fan as a kid? SB: Absolutely. In fact, one of the nice things about starting the job on Superboy was that the people at DC had to approve of me as a writer before I could work on the show. I was surprised by that stipulation, but it was in the contract and had to be honored. So I went to New York and met Mike Carlin and Andy Helfer. We had a day-long meeting, and I thought it went very well. We talked about ideas for the show, and towards the end of the meeting, Mike said, “Let me show you our library.” They had everything that DC had ever done and I was able to find a copy of my very first comic book, the one that my father had given me back in ’58. It was Adventure Comics and the cover was Superboy playing every position on a baseball field. Prime nostalgia. Long before I could read, I was a huge fan of the George Reeves Superman. I loved it, imitated it. The only thing I didn’t do was jump off a roof. But I had a fedora and fake glasses. And my mother made me a cape. DF: When you started working on Superboy, did it feel like, “My whole life has been building towards this moment,” or was it just another job? SB: It didn’t feel like my whole life had been building toward it. Frankly, there were too many things going on to feel much of anything. I had a lot of responsibilities, and they weighed heavily on me. But one of the nicest parts of the Superboy job was that I was able to suggest the hiring of Jack Larson and Noel Neil for one episode. DF: When you say you had a lot of responsibility, what do you mean? SB: I was a writer. I was a producer. I was in charge of hiring other writers. And firing them. DF: I guess that must have happened somewhere in the course of things over the years? SB: At Columbia, I moved up from being a staff writer to a story editor to an executive story consultant and finally to coproducer. When the folks came from Viacom and said that they wanted me for Superboy, the plan was that I would start as a co-producer and then move up to producer. DF: You must have wanted the responsibility, or at least the pay that went along with it? SB: As a writer you want as much responsibility as you can get. DF: For the control it gives you over the finished show? SB: Yes, the control. As a producer, you are more involved in casting. You want to make sure that the kind of actor you envision is playing the part. You want to make sure the sets look good and the costumes are right. There are myriad concerns. DF: There have to be writers that don’t want to worry about that stuff, who just want to write the thing and go on to the next one. Is this something that everybody wants? SB: There is a career track among writers that goes from becoming a writer to becoming a producer. That’s television. DF: So you can’t just say: “I’m a writer and this is what I do,”

because it would be seen as standing still or even moving backwards? SB: Yeah. You really have to push very hard. It’s just assumed that everyone you’re dealing with is very competitive and they want to move up in the hierarchy. They don’t want to just lay back and write a few scripts every season. It doesn’t happen that way. If you write a good script for a show, they bring you on board. They’ll make a contract with you for a whole bunch of money and you’ll be instantly called a producer. DF: It sounds like everyone who gets into that lifestyle wants the managerial track. SB: I have yet to meet someone who didn’t. DF: On Superboy you said you met Helfer and Carlin. You also worked with J.M. DeMatteis, right? SB: We brought him in as a staff writer at Mike and Andy’s suggestion. DF: You hadn’t known him before? SB: No. And I was resistant to hiring him because I believed that comic book writing is a different medium and that if you wrote for comics, you wouldn’t be able to write for TV. But the comic book writers I’ve dealt with have proved me wrong. DF: Those three guys are all excellent writers. Your involvement with Superboy was 1990 and 1991? SB: It was about 13 months. I had an odd relationship with Carlin and Helfer, because sometimes I was their editor and sometimes they were my editors. When I was their editor, I was very rough with them, very demanding. “Rewrite this. Rewrite that.” Because they were editors themselves, I don’t think they were used to getting that much feedback. Also, they had been writing for the show before I was on board, and I don’t think that the guys who had the job before me were quite that demanding. DF: The show was Florida based, but Andy and Mike were in New York? SB: Yes. We did a lot over the phone. And in the end, I think Mike wanted to get revenge on me. He said, “Why don’t you write a comic book for me and I’ll be your editor?”

DF: Did you? SB: Yes, I did. I wrote a Superboy story. It was the final one in the show’s continuity. DF: Where would someone find that, if they were looking for it? SB: My bookshelf. DF: Do you know what issue number it was? We’ll find it on the Internet. SB: No, but Curt Swan did the art, and Mike informed me that if I had been enjoying comics back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was almost certainly Curt Swan’s work that I was looking at. I just finished writing my second comic story, and one of the things that I discovered this time was that when I Poster for a feature film wrote the first one, I didn’t know what I was co-written by Stan. doing. [©2002 Respective DF: Did you write it as a full script or as a Copyright Holders] plot? SB: I wrote a detailed treatment and then later, I wrote dialogue to fill in the bubbles. DF: That’s what’s called “Marvel style.” SB: Working on the Justice League Adventures comic, I found writing in still frames really difficult. It made me think back to when I wrote my first comic and I didn’t even try to think in still frames. It fell on Mr. Swan’s elderly shoulders to fit it into comic book form. DF: So, after Superboy came Street Corner Justice. What was that? SB: I often ask myself that same question. When I finished Superboy, I was exhausted. Then an old friend from my Adam12 and Dragnet days—a director—called and wanted to do a movie. I worked on the script for a few months, but it took him forever to get financing, and the thing didn’t come out until ’96. It bombed pretty badly. DF: Who was in it? SB: Marc Singer and Steve Railsback. Marc Singer is famous

Some typical animation storyboards, these from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Batgirl Returns.” They help the animators visualize how the action will move. Storyboards are sort of a distant cousin of comics. Artwork by Ronaldo Del Carmen. [©2002 DC Comics] BERKOWITZ | 33

for Beastmaster. He was in the TV series V. In ’92 I didn’t do anything. I’d worked in Orlando on Superboy and saved the money I’d made on the show, and I didn’t have to work for a long while. I promised myself a year off, and then the year started to expand to two years. DF: Did you travel or anything? SB: No. DF: You just hung out in LA? SB: Yeah, but I met the love of my life during that period. My wife, Teagan Clive. Journalist, actress, bodybuilder, full-time muse. Just before I married her, J.M. DeMatteis called me and said that Marvel was doing the Spider-Man animated thing, and there might be work for me. Considering that I was about to get married, I thought it might be a good idea to have a job. DF: You’d been buddies with J.M.? SB: Since ’91, when he was a staff writer on Superboy. He was in Orlando for about six weeks, and I saw that he’s not just a great writer, he’s someone who knows story really well. He hadn’t done much TV up until then, but he understood what was a TV story and what wasn’t. He was lightning fast and had an instinctive grasp of production considerations. On top of everything else, he was a nice guy and not at all temperamental. Hasn’t changed, either. DF: At Spider-Man you were a producer? SB: No, just a writer. What happened there was that J.M. said: “Go meet Marty Pasko [the then-story editor of the Spider-Man animated series].” I didn’t actually meet him. I just gave him some of my scripts and he read them and said: “I like your stuff; we’ll use you.” Next thing I knew, he was off the show. I went through the whole thing again with [the new producer] John Semper. Then I wrote a script for him and he invited me to come aboard and be a staff writer. I was there for two years. DF: That was a 9 to 5 job? SB: Only at the beginning. After that, the staff was on call. There would be a few meetings during the week, and the rest of the time I’d be at home, either writing or rewriting. There was a lot of rewriting. DF: So you went from the live action Superboy and entered the world of animation. Was that something that you wanted to do? SB: Not particularly. But I wasn’t doing anything when DeMatteis called, and it sounded interesting. A lot of the stuff I do is because it sounds like fun. DF: Was there any desire to go back to the live action/adventure

stuff? SB: Plenty. DF: The work just wasn’t there? SB: It wasn’t there. Part of it is, if you are in a pleasant job situation with people you like (as with Spider-Man), you become complacent and you don’t look for other work. And, I had plenty of savings. DF: Was your agent complacent, as well? SB: If you’re an agent and you have a client who is working, you’re not going to be desperately looking for work for him. DF: So Spidey sounded like it would be fun. Was it? SB: Pretty much. And I managed to meet the most successful movie producer in film history before he became that. DF: Avi Arad is who you are talking about. It’s amazing. SB: The most successful weekend in history [the opening of Spider-Man. —Ed.] and he’s never had a dud yet. DF: And you got to meet Stan Lee, I imagine? SB: Yep. In fact, I share a credit with the two of them on one of the Spider-Man series’ Venom stories. They have story credit and I and two or three other writers have the teleplay credit. DF: That must have been confusing, having two Stans in the same room. SB: Yes, but it did help Stan remember my name. [laughter] I needed no help remembering his name. DF: I know that the Spidey show made a real point of being true to the spirit of the comics. SB: Mainly because of John Semper. John loves Spider-Man

not having it be Bruce Wayne. It’s set in the future with a different young guy, and I felt particularly close to the concept, because at the time, I was exactly half way between the ages of the young hero and the old one. I could still remember what it was like to be the young guy’s age and I had a pretty good idea of what it would be like to be the old guy’s age. It was fun to write from that standpoint. And it was inspiring to work with the actors. Kevin Conroy was the elderly Bruce Wayne and Will Friedle was the young Terry McGinnis. DF: How many episodes of that show were produced? SB: Fifty-two. DF: That’s a pretty good run. Then, from there, were you working on Static Shock and Justice League at the same time? SB: No. I was on Static Shock for about a year—all of the first season and part of season two. And then Justice League came along. DF: Justice League is a big hit on Cartoon Network. SB: I hope. [laughter] DF: Who are the others working on that with you? SB: The producers are Bruce Timm, Rich Fogel, James Tucker, and Glenn Murakami (although Glenn has recently moved on to Teen Titans.) DF: You’re the story editor, right? SB: Right, and there’s another story editor, too: Dwayne McDuffie. He’s new for season two. We have three writers on staff, and we write a lot of the scripts ourselves. We also use some freelancers. DF: When the writer’s credit on some episodes says “Joseph Kuhr,” who is that really? SB: It’s a real person. Want his number? [laughter] It’s not a play on “Joker.” It’s a real person. DF: I thought it was pseudonym for someone who didn’t want their name on it, or if too many people worked on it. So there’s a real person named Joseph Kuhr? I love that. SB: Joe did a Wonder Woman script for Justice League in the first season and he just finished an “Eclipso” script for us. DF: The minute I saw his name, I thought, “Who are they kidding?” [laughter] I’m sure that he’ll be happy to read that I questioned his existence. SB: I have a feeling he often questions his existence. [laughter] DF: The impression is that you and the other writers tend to move from project to project at Warners. Is that a mistaken impression? SB: Not as a complete group, but different variations of us move together. We were a complete group from ’96 to about ’99. That group consisted of yours truly, Hilary Bader, Bob Goodman, Rich Fogel, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett—six writers. At the end of Batman Beyond we divided into Zeta and Static Shock and the diaspora has continued. DF: So that’s not a contractual thing, it’s just coincidence? SB: Historically, this group seemed to work well together so we tried to use different permutations of the group. DF: Back to the focus of the magazine: pointers for someone looking to break in and take your job. How could someone reading this take your job, Stan? [laughs] Now would be the time

and wanted to do the ultimate one. DF: I know John literally read every single Spider-Man story published. He made a point of getting even the ones that he had already read and just went through the whole canon. Did he make anyone else do that? SB: No. If he had, I’d probably have trouble remembering my own name right now. DF: Sometimes, when I was script consultant on that show, I used to get scripts to give comments on, and I could see that, while you couldn’t do everything like the comics, you were really trying to recreate the spirit of it. So you’re developing your rep as a superhero guy and then Spider-Man ended. SB: As it was winding down, John said, “There won’t be work for you here much longer, but I hear the guys at Warners are starting a Superman series.” He added that, since I’d worked on the live action Superboy, it would make me a good candidate, and indeed it did. My segue from one show to the other was over the course of one weekend. DF: Did you work on the original Batman animated series? SB: No, I didn’t. But they revived it after we started doing Superman. The folks at the network wanted to do more Batman episodes so we switched over and started doing Batman. DF: Then it was over to Batman Beyond? SB: Yeah, except for one thing. Between Batman and Batman Beyond, a friend of mine got a job working on Players— DF: What was Players? SB: Three con men start working for the FBI, conning other criminals. A Dick Wolf Production. DF: How long was that on? SB: It appeared on your TV screen in October of 1997 and disappeared in April of 1998. DF: What network? SB: NBC. DF: I have no recollection of it at all. SB: At least you remember my name. I wrote two episodes of Players, and was a producer on it for five months. DF: So you got back into live action. SB: Briefly. I was under contract at Warners Animation, but they were kind enough to let me go over to Universal for a few months. I had to come right back as soon as the show was done. DF: Batman Beyond is one of the high points of super-hero animation on TV. It was so well executed and received. What was it like working on that? SB: It’s been my favorite so far, largely because I was there so early in the process. DF: Whose brainchild was that originally? SB: I think Jamie Kellner [then-head of the WB] asked for a younger Batman. The producers, Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini, balked at the idea of doing a young Bruce Wayne, but then they figured out a way of creating a younger Batman but

BERKOWITZ | 35

to give the exact wrong advice like, “Always use plenty of obscenities when meeting an executive.” [laughter] SB: There are certain things that you can’t train somebody for. Writing is a craft, but it is also a talent. The inspiration and ideas, I don’t know how you get people to have them. DF: Are you a cartoon guy for the rest of your career? SB: I don’t know. Presumably. I had a chat with an agent who said that for me to get back into live action TV

would be impossible. DF: Would you mind expanding on that little? Why would someone with your impressive resume not be able to do that? SB: If you’re an animation producer, and an agent approaches you and says, “I’ve got a writer that has done live action,” you get very excited. You want to work with this writer. On the other hand, it you’re in live action and someone says, “I’ve got someone who has been doing animation,” they look at it as if it’s the minor leagues. What do they want with someone like that? My experience is that everyone is always looking at the level above them. So, if you’re a live action TV producer, the person you want writing for you is a film writer. A film writer is considered to be much better than a TV writer. [laughter] And if you’re producing a film, you don’t want another hack screenwriter working for you, you want a novelist. [laughter] DF: The grass is always greener syndrome. SB: According to that agent, that seems to be the case. I’ve heard animation writers say that it’s better to have no credits at all going into a live action interview than to say that you have animation credits. DF: That’s encouraging. Not. SB: But let me tell you something: if I end up doing nothing but animation for the rest of my life, I will not be unhappy. DF: You seem to be enjoying it and making a nice living at it. SB: I work with nice people. And I enjoy telling stories. They give me an opportunity to make sure that the bad guys get what’s coming to them. DF: Would you ever want to be given the opportunity to do a Bugs Bunny or a Simpsons? SB: I’m not a comedy writer, so I don’t know if I could do that. DF: Any genre that you’ve been eager to try? What about little kid stuff? SB: I don’t know if I have that talent. DF: That brings up another question: When you write Justice League or Batman Beyond, who is the envisioned audience? Is it geeks like myself or is it children? SB: The truth is, I write for myself. But I keep in mind the censors’ point of view, which is you can’t have too much gore and you probably don’t want to have too much sexual material, because most of the people watching the show are so young they wouldn’t understand it. Within those parameters, I just 36 | WRITE NOW

want to entertain myself. DF: Usually the dialogue is kept short. SB: It’s a bit more clipped, but not a lot. We try to keep it fairly realistic. DF: You’re a witty individual. I could see you writing comedy. You never tried? SB: Not intentionally. DF: You’re really a funny person. I would like to see a comedic thing you wrote. Just talking to you, you’re always cracking me up. SB: Most people don’t consider me funny until they see me naked. DF: I haven’t had that experience yet, and I’m not rushing to. You have the very dry humor of a laid back guy. SB: But sitcoms are written almost like music. There is a very specific form to them and a rhythm. It’s a whole craft that I’ve never even come close to. DF: What about just writing a funny article? SB: My humor tends to border on sarcasm. DF: You’ve crossed that border so many times, you should consider applying for citizenship. [laughs] Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm seems to thrive on sarcasm. SB: I love that guy. But I don’t know if that’s sarcasm. I don’t even call it humor. I don’t know what to call that show. A train wreck? [laughter] I can’t take my eyes off it, though. I love it. DF: It’s a painful show to watch because it’s about how, no matter how good your intentions, you’re going to screw up. That’s the theme of every episode. SB: You remember the comedy rhythm I was telling you about? It’s completely non-existent in that show. Do you recall the one with the black dermatologist? DF: I’ve only seen a few of them. It’s too painful to watch. SB: It’s only subject is discomfort. The Larry character made a careless, stupid racist remark and then it comes back to bite him again and again. [laughter] I guess that show’s a new form. Another form I can’t do. DF: It seems to be a trademark of the HBO shows that, as good as they are, they are really painful to watch. SB: Like Oz? DF: I can’t watch it. SB: It’s my wife’s favorite show. DF: My wife loves it, too. I think women can watch Oz because they know they’re never going to be locked up in a men’s maximum-security prison. [laughs] Even the Sopranos, I can watch them the first time. I don’t watch the reruns because knowing the plot allows me to focus more on the unpleasantness. The Larry Sanders Show stands up over time. They’re rerunning it now. SB: Larry Sanders and Larry David are not what you think of as being standard sitcoms. They’re not written like standard sitcoms. DF: Any books, classes, teachers you recommend for aspiring writers? SB: A teacher, the guy who gave me my first job at Columbia, Larry Brody, is starting something in Arkansas. He can be contacted at www.tvwriter.com. He was a screenwriting teacher at a college in New Mexico, and I attended a class of his, and it was better than my entire film education at UCLA. You can look him up on the Internet, he’s done a ton of stuff. He’s a great teacher. DF: Any other tips for aspiring writers? SB: Try to write about something you care deeply about at first,

and then you’ll get into it. DF: By “at first,” do you mean in the morning, or in the beginning of your career? SB: In the beginning of your career. Be passionate about something and be sure that your stories are about something. DF: You mean about more than just the plot? SB: When I was on Superboy, I can’t tell you how many times people came to me with what they thought was a great idea for an episode, and it would just be, “Superboy fights a mummy,” or “He fights a werewolf.” I’d ask, “What’s the story?” I’d never get an adequate answer, and the episode that came from the werewolf idea attests to that. There’s a werewolf and somebody kills it. The end. It has to be a real story. Dwayne McDuffie and I had a discussion about this at lunch today. There’s got to be something that happens that affects a character and changes him or her in some way. DF: And something has to be at stake. SB: It doesn’t have to be. But a story has to be about something. That’s not necessarily true with film writing any more. Dwayne was saying that when he was doing the Static Shock series, his one rule was that Static simply couldn’t just beat someone up in a fight. There had to be more to it then that. You couldn’t just be stronger than the other guy, end of story. You needed something more complicated. DF: I think people with a comics background have that drilled into them, that a story has to be about something, with a beginning, middle, end, conflict, resolution, and all that kind of stuff. SB: People can read DeMatteis to see a guy who knows what a

story is. DF: He always manages to make his stories personal to him. The craft is giving it a beginning, middle and end. The talent is giving it the personal flair, while still doing the job. SB: Can I ask a question of your readers? DF: You may. SB: In 1960, I pestered my parents to get me the issue of The Brave and the Bold that had that first Justice League story. I was so excited to get that issue, but rereading it today—my apologies to Gardner Fox—it is terrible. From top to bottom. It’s got a stupid plot and the characters are literally interchangeable. The dialogue bubbles could go to anyone’s head and it wouldn’t be any different. The characters are established only by indicating that, “this is the guy with the ring, this is the guy that runs fast, and this one—Wonder Woman—is the guy that is a woman.” [laughter] They’re all the same. Yet I loved that comic as a kid, and as you know, those comics sold an enormous amount of copies. So my question is, for something to appeal that strongly to children, must it insult an adult’s intelligence? Were the writers doing that deliberately? Did they know the secret of successfully communicating with children? DF: That brings up something that I—and everyone else in comics—is obsessed about: Who are comics for? I think that’s the crisis in the industry right now, the question of who they’re for. SB: Did Gardner Fox and the other writers of that era have an inherent grasp of what children wanted? Did they know that what was appealing to a child would be poisonous to an adult mind?

DF: A corollary question would be: What did Stan Lee intuit that enabled him to move comics to the next level ? SB: I think I know, because I’ve gone through a midlife crisis or two myself. Stan’s never said any of this to me, but I believe that after writing comics for many years, in his early ’40s, he saw Marvel falling apart, and he must have said to himself, “Screw it, I’m going to do the comic I’ve always wanted to do.” Which is a story about a human being who is also a super-hero, who needed to work, to go to the bathroom, who occasionally caught colds and who fell in love. He was answering the questions that children ask as they get older about the DC heroes. I don’t mean to obsess on the bathroom, but “How does Superman go to the bathroom? Where does he keep his clothes when he’s in his costume?” He answered those kinds of questions. I think he was anticipating that Baby Boom children were going from pre-adolescence to adolescence, and they were interested in relationships with the opposite sex and other more mature ideas, and he was giving that to them. DF: His daughter is a Baby Boomer. Just observing a daughter that age, and her friends, must have given him some inkling about that generation’s concerns. SB: I think that he humanized the super-hero genre because of his own midlife crisis. He said, “Let’s shake things up and make it a little more real.” DF: He says that in his own way. The famous story he tells is where he’s about to quit comics, and his wife says, “Why don’t you do the comic that you want to do?” SB: I think that Stan wasn’t writing for children. He was riding the bump in the demographic as they got older and was writing for a slightly older audience. That made Marvel successful because, instead of the kids stopping reading comics at a certain age, they had a new place to go. DF: I don’t think Stan excluded children. I think he was able to eat his cake and have it, too. He produced stuff that, as they say, a child can understand but that an adult can appreciate. SB: But clearly the Marvel stuff is for older people. DF: Now it is. My experience as a kid was that I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw it. That is, I didn’t think the DCs were for kids until I saw the Marvels. SB: You were getting older and becoming more mature. DF: Then it became an economic decision. “I don’t know if I can spend three dollars a week on comics. I’ll have to cut out the DCs and just buy the Marvels.” So segue once again: If someone wanted to break into TV, and specifically animation, any advice? SB: Don’t aim for animation. Aim as high as you can. DF: Could someone still get into the business the way you did? SB: Truthfully, that’s the best way of getting in. DF: Do you still see people getting in that way? SB: Through their friends? All the time. You go to film school to make friends, and when one of them gets a job, they’ll call you and tell you about an opening. It’s networking. DF: Are you going to be writing any more comics now that you’ve written that Justice League issue? 38 | WRITE NOW

SB: I don’t know. It was so tough. DF: Really? I read the plot you showed me. It was quite good. SB: Thanks, but you only read an outline. After that, I sat down and tried to write panel-by-panel and had to think of the story in still frames. It wasn’t easy for someone used to thinking in terms of motion. DF: That’s funny. After all these years in comics, that’s how I think. SB: I know people in comics take it for granted because they’ve been doing it. I’ll bet Curt Swan didn’t even bat an eye when he saw my outline. He just fixed it. DF: Do you look at storyboards for your animated scripts? SB: Absolutely. DF: Aren’t they similar to comics? SB: Yes, they are. DF: But still not the same? Did you wind up doing full script or “Marvel style” for the Justice League comic? SB: There was no dialogue. DF: So a detailed plot—Marvel style. Who drew it? SB: Chris Jones. DF: So, after it’s drawn, you’ll get it back to dialogue? SB: I hope. They’ve told me that but, after too many years in the film business, I always wait until I actually see it before I feel as if I can tell you it’s going to happen. DF: Anything you would like to tell the world before we finish this interview? SB: I want them to answer my question: Does something written for children have to offend the intelligence of an adult? Looking back at the Justice League comics of my youth, they insult my intelligence. And yet, I loved them as a ten-year-old. DF: And you can’t find some way to love that stuff now? Not even taking into account the time it was written in? SB: That story I mentioned before, it’s a plot that couldn’t happen. It’s physically impossible. It’s based on a dumb twist that can’t happen and all seven characters are the same person, except one is a woman. What kind of woman is she? I don’t know, she’s a woman. She talks the same as the guys. DF: Okay, reading public. Send your answers to Stan’s question to me, and I’ll forward them on to him. Anything that you want to plug that’s coming up, Stan? SB: Lots more Justice League episodes. DF: Do you know if it will go beyond the second season? SB: Cartoon Network has ordered a total of 52 episodes from us in two bunches, 26 and 26. I think they’re going to spread them out over three seasons, so it will be something like 17, 17, and 18. DF: In any case, there’s going to be a lot more Justice League. Which sounds good to me. Thanks for your time and your insights, Stan. SB: Thank you, Danny. And I look forward to seeing your readers’ responses to my question.

THE END

BERKOWITZ | 39

The Astonishing Antz Man Interview with

TODD ALCOTT Interview via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth September 9, 2002 Copy-edited by Todd Alcott

odd Alcott co-authored the film Antz, wrote a script for the in-development Wonder Woman movie, and is currently working on the script for the live action Samurai Jack movie for New Line. He was born in 1961, and grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. He moved to New York in 1983 to pursue a career as a playwright. He developed a series of monologues to introduce himself into the downtown New York theater world and began staging his plays at spaces like Nada and Home for Contemporary Theater and Art. He performed his monologue shows at many different downtown venues and on PBS, culminating in the solo show “Living in Flames” at the Public and the John Houseman Theater. He contributed to three seasons of Cucaracha Theater’s Underground Soap and had his first off-Broadway production of his play “One Neck” at the Atlantic Theater in 1992. The success of that show garnered the interest of television and film producers, and in recent years he has split his time between staging his own work in downtown spaces and writing screenplays for Hollywood concerns. Plays you may have heard of include High Strangeness, The Users Waltz, Tulpa, A Pound of Flesh and Helsinor. Todd was interviewed via e-mail on September 9, 2002, with a few follow-ups on September 18th. I think that this interview is as good a primer as you’re going to get anywhere about what it takes to become a professional writer and what that life is like, with information you’ll find valuable whether you’re just starting out or have been at it for years.

OVERVIEW: DANNY FINGEROTH: You’ve got an extremely diverse career. There’s the downtown, avant-garde theater guy and then there’s the pop culture, Hollywood guy. For those readers who aren’t familiar with you (though they probably know your work), can you list some of the things you’ve done. (You can attach a resume or bio if that’s easier.) How did you come to have these two (or more) incarnations? TODD ALCOTT: The short answer is “money.” Downtown theater is a blast and hugely rewarding creatively, but does not pay the bills. I always knew, from the very beginning, that if I was to make a living in this business, I would ultimately need to write movies. There are many schisms in the work I do, and the Samurai Jack is looking at you. [©2002 Cartoon Network.] 40 | WRITE NOW

Downtown/Hollywood schism is only one. I spend a great deal of time trying to mend these schisms, but it’s a very long, difficult process, with many obstacles. Half the time I feel like I’m a huge success, and half the time I feel like I’m a colossal failure. DF: Which is the “real” you? TA: It would be easy to say that the Downtown stuff is the real me and the Hollywood stuff is all a load of hooey, but that’s not true, and this points to another great schism in my work, that of Art vs. Craft. Downtown theater is very much about Art and screenwriting is very much about Craft. I love the artistic fulfillment of hearing my dialogue spoken in the theater exactly as I wrote it. But there is also a part of me that takes pride in being a skilled craftsman, someone who can take input from a team of executives and turn it into an exciting story that will appeal to a large number of people. And while it is true that Hollywood rarely wants eclectic innovation, it is also true that Downtown theater rarely wants a finely polished story. DF: What appeals to you about the small, esoteric material that you don’t get from the Hollywood stuff, and vice versa? TA: I never considered my plays to be small or esoteric. I always strove from the very beginning to make them big and commercial. I mean heck, I once wrote a musical based on the life of Elvis Presley. You can’t get much more commercial than that. Besides, I personally don’t see a schism between esoteric and commercial. As far as I’m concerned, a commercial writer is an esoteric writer who has strong storytelling skills. Some of the biggest hits of all time have the most ridiculously esoteric subject matter. Before Silence of the Lambs, serial murder was not a subject fit for polite conversation, much less [©2002 Dreamworks Pictures.]

mainstream entertainment. Same thing with UFOs, or the ability to see dead people. Umberto Eco writes about semiotics, for heaven’s sake, but he is considered a commercial writer because he has extremely strong storytelling skills. DF: Since you started as a NY off-off-Broadway guy, how did that lead to the Hollywood stuff? TA: Just work. Work, work, work. All the time. For ten years I made sure I had a show going on all the time, solo shows and variety shows A card from one of the first readings of Todd’s One Neck. and plays and all Camryn Manheim was in this reading. Allison Janney manner of hybrids. ended up playing the role in the final production. [©2002 Todd Alcott.] In 1988, I had been living in NYC for about five years, and my playwriting career was going absolutely nowhere, just dead in the water, just me alone in my apartment late at night writing obscure little things, with no contact with the marketplace whatsoever. I had no contacts, I knew no people, I had paralyzing shyness. I thought: okay, I need to think of a way to get my work seen that involves no actors, no director, no producer, no set, no lights, no sound cues. And the answer, for me, was monologues. I had a stack of plays sitting around that had never seen the light of day, and each one had at least one good stand-alone monologue in it. So I typed up a bunch of those monologues and memorized them. And in New York at the time, there were a bunch of new performance venues opening up, and most of them had some kind of late-night variety show, where everybody got five minutes to do whatever they wanted, songs or mime or juggling or slide-shows or performance art or what have you. And no one got any money. The spaces like shows like that, because the performers all work for free and the sheer number of people on the bill guarantees a full house. So I would go to those shows and see what was usually an avalanche of pointless crap with a few diamonds in the rough tossed in, and it just wasn’t hard for me to say “my material is certainly better than this.” And so I would find out who was in charge of booking the show and talk to them. Sometimes they would want to hear a tape, or read the material. Sometimes, if they were very picky and highly principled, they would want to come see you perform somewhere else first. But often, I just had to ask and they’d say yes, and put me on a list of performers. If you have twenty acts on a bill, you need a lot of acts to keep a series running. At five minutes per act, it’s not

hard to book someone blind. There was one space called Funambules, where I got booked because I volunteered to run the concessions for a night. The artistic director of the space needed someone to sell beer before the show, and I said I would. Then, the night I showed up to do so, there was a huge blizzard and no one came to see the show. So I ended up hanging out with the artistic director for an hour-and-a-half, and that was enough there to get a booking. So I started doing these monologues, one at a time, during late-night variety shows, once a month or so at various venues, for no money. And then it was once every two weeks, and then once a week, and then sometimes two or three shows a week. At every show I’d run into somebody else who had another show somewhere, or knew someone with a show somewhere, and I’d go to see that show, and I kept meeting the same people at every show, and so a “scene” started to develop. Here’s a good story: I was in a record store one day in 1988, and they were playing a Randy Newman song called “Land of Dreams.” And I thought the song was really good, but I completely misheard the title. He was singing “Land of Dreams” but what I heard was “Living in Flames.” And I thought that was an arresting sort of a title, and it stuck in my head, because that was how I felt at the time, like I was living in flames, like I was unable to relax, to sit still, to just be. I was working a fulltime job and I was trying to get my writing out to the public and I was trying to manage my screwed-up love life and I was recovering from something very much like a nervous breakdown, and I just always felt like I had to be moving sixty miles an hour. And I left the record store and got in the subway to get to my job, and this title, “Living in Flames,” was just percolating along in the back of my head. And by the time I had gotten to my job, I had written, in my head, this monologue that I just knew was going to connect with an audience, because I knew that I had just hit the nail right on the head. This monologue was such a pure distillation of everything I had been feeling for the past few years. I talked about how I had to be doing two things at once at all times, because if I only did one thing at a time I felt like I was falling behind. I said things like “If I make a date, and she’s five minutes late, she’d better not show up at all, because I’m just going to be pissed off for the rest of the night anyway.” Just this spewing of angst and impatience and nervous energy. And the following Friday night, I was booked at a variety show called No Shame, which was at a theater on Walker Street called HOME. And the house was Poster design for Todd’s solo show Living In Flames. [©2002 Todd Alcott.] ALCOTT | 41

packed and they called my name and I walked out on stage and did this new monologue and the place just went nuts. There have been very few times in my career where I actually knew how an audience would respond to a piece of material, but that was one. In three minutes, I transformed myself from “guy they had never heard of” to “most popular guy in the room,” which was very much a brand new feeling for me. From that point on, it was possible for me to get booked as a solo act. As long as I closed my set with “Living in Flames,” spaces were happy to book me. So I would do an hour or so of monologues and always close with “Living in Flames.” And if anyone asked me what else I did, I said “I’m a playwright, you want to read some of my plays?” And often they would say yes. From that point on, I made sure that I got to know everyone I could, I made sure that everyone I met got handed a flyer, I did any show that anyone asked me to do. I never turned down any offers, just kept putting the work out there, everywhere I could. And eventually one night the right person walked into the right show and saw my stuff and said “Hey, I bet I could make money off that guy’s talent.” An example: One night in 1988 I was in a variety show on the same bill as a mime duo. A freelance video director named Skip Blumberg came to the show to see the mime duo and, as fate would have it, saw me as well. A year later, a show on PBS asked him if he knew any “edgy” performance monologists, and he thought of me, and so I got to tape a bunch of pieces for PBS. Another example: I was involved in a show at the Cucaracha Theater called Underground Soap. For three years I wrote storylines for this weekly show, and the show got to be hugely popular with downtown crowds, and that drew the attention of folks at MTV, and they liked what they saw and asked me to write for a show there. A more direct example would be: I did a solo show at a theater called HOME and after the show, the theater’s artistic

director, a man named Randy Rollison, asked me if I had any plays. And I had just that afternoon completed the first draft of my serial killer play One Neck, so I took it out of my briefcase and handed it to him and a few years later Randy directed the show offBroadway with me in the lead role. And a pair of movie producers came to see the show and liked what they saw and bought the movie rights from me. DF: Were comics a big part of your reading background? Wonder Woman from a recent Adam Hughes cover. Todd did TA: This will a script for the Amazon Princess’s in-development movie. [©2002 DC Comics.] sound weird, but I never read comics as a kid. I read Mad magazine obsessively for about six years but I don’t think I ever read a comic book until Watchmen came out, and I was 25 then. And I bought a couple of Batman collections after the Tim Burton movies came out, but I was never a voracious comics reader. I was never really aware of comics until Hollywood asked me to start adapting them. I was completely unfamiliar with Astroboy, I was completely unfamiliar with Wonder Woman. I mean, I could recognize them in a line-up, but I didn’t even know that Astroboy began as a comic book, I thought it was a cartoon show. DF: You’re an actor, too. Which came first, the acting or the writing? TA: Definitely the writing. The fact is, I am an extremely shy person, utterly incapable of dealing with strangers. That is, in fact, why I became a writer, so I wouldn’t have to deal with strangers. I can work in the privacy of my own home, in the middle of the night if I want to. And then I send out the writing, and then people read it, and then they call me up, and at that point I can deal with them because at that point they’re not strangers any more. I began acting because it was a way to advertise my writing, by doing these monologues. But there’s no way that I could make a living as an actor. I can’t stand auditioning. I get enough rejection from my writing; I’m not about to court

don’t like to audition. rejection for my physical being DF: How did you come to be as well. thought of as a pop culture DF: What notable roles have specialist? you had? TA: I have no idea. The way TA: My most notable role was, these things happen is always as I’ve mentioned, playing the baffling to me. My favorite lead role in One Neck. I didn’t writer, my biggest influence, is write the part for myself, I Samuel Beckett, and one thing never intended to do it, I would I can tell you for sure is that have much preferred to get a Samuel Beckett is never, ever real actor, but events mentioned in pitch meetings. conspired to put me in the No one ever says “This scene lead of this show in 1992, A still from Antz. [©2002 Dreamworks Pictures] is just like the bit with the playing a serial killer. It was a stuffed dog in Endgame.” great catharsis to kill people My work I do for myself is usually very dark and very onstage every night, eight shows a week for a hundred performdisturbing, but Hollywood keeps asking me to write children’s ances. films. But as far as the pop culture aspect of it goes, I don’t I have played no notable roles on film. I have a tiny part in think it’s just me, I think it’s everybody. Hollywood is currently The Hudsucker Proxy and the back of my head is displayed in spending a lot of time and energy adapting pop culture, so Six Degrees of Separation. I very much enjoyed doing both those are the jobs that are available. Forty years ago it would roles, I got to spend time with actors and directors who I have been Tennessee Williams, today it’s Tomb Raider. hugely admire, and I am terrible in both movies. DF: You seem to enjoy reinterpreting the classics of theater and DF: Do you still act in movies? film—overtly, as in your staged versions of Merchant and Swan TA: When they ask me to. They haven’t asked me to in a long Lake, or more subtly as in Antz, which producer Jeffrey time. Like I say, I don’t like to audition. I mean I really, really ALCOTT | 43

Katzenberg of Dreamworks/ SKG referred to as “Spartacus, as a comedy, with ants.” All writers do this sort of reinvention to some degree— hence the old saw that “there are only seven stories”—but you seem to really like to show the seams and make your homages/ critiques overt. Can you talk about why this is important to you? TA: About ten years ago, I had an artistic crisis. I realized that I A poster for the Off-Broadway production of One Neck. didn’t know how [©2002 Todd Alcott.] to tell a story. Like a lot of young writers, I thought that the craft of storytelling was boring or silly or unimportant. I was getting by on brash youth and witty repartee. When I realized that I didn’t know how to tell a story, I started reading the classics to find out how those guys did it. Shakespeare and Marlowe and the Grimms and the Bible and so forth. And while I was reading those classics, I started to find plays and stories that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. And I found aspects to those stories that I wanted to illuminate for an audience. So I wrote Girl in the Ashes and Jane Faust and A Pound of Flesh and Waterbirds and Helsinor and so forth. The impulse for each of those shows was different, but the movement from original stories to adaptations stemmed from this artistic crisis that I had. I remember something about those “seven stories” or “thirtysix plots” or whatever it was in college, but I never understood that argument. John Gardner said that there are only two stories: “A Man Goes On A Journey” and “A Stranger Comes To Town.” DF: Do you think that this interpretive skill is why you’re often called on by Hollywood companies to fix (script doctor) or reinterpret someone else’s work? TA: It may be related, but in my experience screenwriting is less about interpretive skill and more about story structure. Often executives and producers and directors have great ideas for action set-pieces or shots or scenes or effects, but don’t really understand story structure. So then my job is to listen to all the ideas that everyone has and figure out a way to get all of them into the script in a structure that will be dynamic and surprising and compelling and so forth. So it’s not so much about interpretation but synthesis. And here, for those interested in making it big in Hollywood, here is a story that will tell you all you need to know about 44 | WRITE NOW

screenwriting. When I was working on Antz, I would have story meetings fairly regularly with Jeffrey Katzenberg. And I was very new to this Hollywood thing and wasn’t used to thinking about story in the way that he did, so I would talk about concepts and ideologies and underlying philosophies, and after about thirty seconds of that, Jeffrey would say “Okay. Stop. What Does The Guy Want?” And he said that so often that I finally wrote it down on a card and stuck it up over my desk. Because that’s all screenwriting is about. What Does The Guy Want. What does the protagonist want, what does he have to do to get it, does he get what he wants, does he not get what he wants, does the process of getting what he wants change what he wants, and so forth. That seems like a really simple thing, but you’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t understand it, who write scripts about people who don’t have any problems, who don’t want much of anything. DF: What was the “big break” that got you noticed by Hollywood? Or was it a series of “little breaks”? TA: This is a good story, because it’s an example of how the strangest connections get made. In show business, you often find yourself in unlikely or uncomfortable situations that feel completely wrong but in the end result in a connection made that is completely unexpected. I had written this very dark and violent play, One Neck, which is about a serial killer who crashes a dinner party in the Hamptons. It was staged in 1992. In 1993, a film producer named Howard Meltzer, who had seen the play, bought the movie rights and paid me to write a screen adaptation. And for a couple of years nothing happened and I kind of forgot about the whole thing. Then, in 1995, another film producer named Andy Karsch read the screenplay of One Neck and asked to meet me. He told me how much he enjoyed One Neck, and said that he had a script called Town and Country that he wanted me to look at. And I read Town and Country, which was a romantic comedy, a genre I was completely unfamiliar with and for which I felt no affinity. And I couldn’t figure out why he thought I was a good match for this script, except that One Neck was set in the Hamptons and so was Town and Country. But I did a rewrite of Town and Country and by a total freak of nature, my draft got Warren Beatty attached to the project. So here I am, living in my dinky little apartment on 12th Street, having made no money in this business whatsoever, and the next thing I know I’m flying to LA to meet with Warren Beatty. Now then: when Warren Beatty expressed interest in Town and Country, a lot of people suddenly wanted to know who Todd Alcott was. And one of those people was Nina Jacobson, who was an executive at DreamWorks. So Nina flew to New York and met with me, and we just really hit it off, just really got along well. And we talked about a number of projects that they were doing, none of which came to fruition, and a couple of months later she called me up and asked me if I wanted to write an animated film about ants. I had never written animation. I had never thought about writing animation. But I liked Nina and I liked the idea of Spartacus with ants, and I figured that if I was going to write an animated film, it might as well be with the guy who made The Lion King. And Nina and Jeffrey and the folks at DreamWorks were all very nice and very respectful to me, and very patient, considering that I was literally coming straight from avant-garde theater. And I do mean literally. I was doing a monologue show in Chicago and flying back and forth to LA while I was having daily story meetings at DreamWorks. So Town and Country got made,

although not from my script, and One Neck is still around, although it hasn’t been made yet, and that all led to me getting Antz. And that, as they say, is Show Business. DF: Is Hollywood the goal, or a means to an end for you? If the latter, what is that end? TA: I’m probably the only writer in New York who hopes to use Hollywood as a way to get to Broadway. But seriously, I hope to continue to do both, and to finally fuse the two. This is the schism-mending attempt I was talking about before. I want to be able to have a truly popular success in the theater and a truly personal expression in movies. And I’m trying various things to make that happen. I’m working night and day to get One Neck made as a feature with myself directing, and I’m still trying to find that one big commercial idea for a show that can play anywhere in the world. One exciting development in Hollywood is that a few brave producers are approaching me about adapting classics in my own perverse style. A producer named David Hoberman asked me to adapt Gulliver’s Travels, which is a real kick, and I’m trying to figure out a way to make Moby-Dick be about something other than whaling. DF: I know you’re doing a Bizarro story for my pal Joey Cavalieri at DC. How’d that come about? Has it been fun? Challenging? TA: The Bizarro story came about because I had recently befriended Mike Kupperman, a wildly creative and very funny cartoonist who lives near me. He and Robert Smigel were going to do a Bizarro story, but then Smigel backed out, which is too bad, because I would have very much liked to have seen that collaboration. But Mike asked if I wanted to do one instead, which I took as a huge compliment, because I do not at all consider myself an adequate replacement for Robert Smigel. It’s been fun because it’s always amusing to think of funny and cruel things to do to your favorite superheroes. And Joey, who I like very much, let us do some very odd things, let us torture these characters in very odd ways. Nothing obscene or violent, but just very odd. Because Mike has a very odd mind and thinks of very odd things. It was a challenge because it’s a brand-new medium for me and I have no idea how the drawings will look in relation to my script. And it was also a challenge to think the way Mike thinks, to come up with a story that would be as plot-driven as the medium demands, but to be as off-center as his best material is. DF: Do you have any desire to write mainstream comics regularly, like Todd’s currently working on Kevin Smith and J. Michael the script for the live action Straczynski are doing? Samurai Jack movie.

TA: Probably not as regularly as those guys do, but sure, I’d like to write for comics. I’ve had a few meetings, but so far no interest. If anyone from DC or Marvel is out there, I do have some ideas. DF: What would be your dream comics project? TA: Just before Unbreakable came out, I had an idea for a middle-class super-hero, a guy who doesn’t have a billion dollars and doesn’t have a cool costume and doesn’t have a burning need to stamp out all crime. He has a Aku, Samurai Jack’s monstrous nemesis. very small, very specific, very Todd says the character will be a human possible super-power and a very wizard in the movie. specific problem he’d like to [©2002 Cartoon Network.] solve. I’d still like to write it at some point. Most of my ideas about the super-hero genre revolve around the idea of “okay now, all kidding aside, what would really happen if a guy appeared who has super powers?” And examining that in some detail. I think a number of titles raise the question but, in the end, don’t examine the question deeply enough. I also have an idea for a crime saga that would be as complex and heavy as, say, The Godfather, but would be about a bunch of feeder birds. I got this idea because I have a house upstate and we have a bird feeder that gets a pretty good selection of birds, and I was shocked at how ruthless and savage some of them are. And these aren’t crows and hawks, these are cardinals and chickadees and goldfinches and bluejays, the cutest little birds, and they are just brutal and ruthless. So I got this idea about a really mean cardinal and his rise to the top of a crime syndicate and so forth. It could be really funny and really heavy at the same time, which is one of my favorite combinations. DF: What can you tell us about the upcoming Samurai Jack feature? TA: Not much, unfortunately. The script is still in the early stages of development. I could tell you plot things but there’s a good chance they will all be changed by the time the movie comes out. I think the show is phenomenal. Genndy Tartakovsky is a terrific and very original visual thinker. One of my big tasks on this script is to find live-action ways to make the same kind of visual statements that he does in that wonderfully flat animation of his. I can tell you that we plan to deal with Aku in a much more realistic way; he’s not a fifty-foot-tall telephone pole with flaming eyeballs. As much as I’d like to see that on film, it’s been decided to make him more like a twisted, evil wizard. DF: What happened, if you can discuss it, with your involvement with the in-development Wonder Woman movie? TA: Gosh, the way you say it, it sounds like something horrible happened, when nothing could be further from the truth. I very much enjoyed working on Wonder Woman. A woman from Joel Silver’s office, the petite and stunningly attractive Susan Levine, asked me if I was interested in Wonder Woman, and I said “Why yes I am.” I felt that no one had ever really done Wonder Woman right, and of the major DC heroes, she had never been done as a feature at all. So she was virgin territory so to speak, and the more I read of the

The opening page of Todd’s first treatment (story outline) of the Antz screenplay. Says Todd: “I’m shocked, given how many changes the material went through, that most of these scenes ended up in the movie.” [©2002 Dreamworks Pictures.]

A scene breakdown using the “headlines” of each scene, along with Todd’s doodles of how he thought the Woody Allen character would look. Todd adds: “It was another year or so before they changed the title of the movie.” [©2002 Dreamworks Pictures.]

future. That’s happened with me comics, the more I felt that I before, that the studio called me had something original and back much later to help out with the worthwhile to say about her. script again. It’s funny. I was talking And of course it’s terrifying to my agent once about the people when you finally go to have a for whom I’ve written movies, and I meeting with someone like Joel mentioned Jeffrey Katzenberg and Silver, because he has this Don Murphy and Joel Silver and a reputation of being this few others, and my agent was completely outrageous stunned that I’m still alive after caricature of a loudmouth, working with these guys. Apparently, heartless Hollywood producer. these guys are feared and reviled all But he was never like that with over Hollywood for being overbearing me at all. He’s certainly maniacs, but all of them have been opinionated and he certainly Even ants fall in love. A still from the movie. very nice and very respectful to me. knows what he wants and he is [©2002 Dreamworks Pictures.] So there you go. very, very energetic, but that’s DF: Were there any specific people or events that got you interhow you have to be to get things done in Hollywood. ested in writing? And I worked on the script for a year-and-a-half and it was a TA: Again, just the simple need to not have to deal with stunning success. Unfortunately for me, “stunning success” in strangers. Writing came to me very late. When I dropped out of this instance means that my script was good enough to college after two-and-a-half years, I still hadn’t declared a interest a major director, and, as often happens, the director major. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. had a writer that he preferred to work with, and so that was Honestly, in my senior year of high school, I took the ACT test, that. which is a kind of Midwestern version of the SATs, and my test Now it’s entirely possible that I might work on it again in the 46 | WRITE NOW

and who I find compulsively readable, and Harold Pinter, who really broadened my horizons of what drama could achieve. And of course, Shakespeare is a given. Shakespeare is the tree that all this fruit grows on. Shakespeare, to me, is the Bible. Shakespeare is better than the Bible. Contains more truth, more beauty, better language, better ideas, more compassion, and a better understanding of what we’re all doing here on Earth. DF: Can you talk about writers and writing From Tony Millionaire’s Sock Monkey. Todd’s trying to turn the comic into a feature film. that influenced and continue to influence [©2002 Tony Millionaire] you? TA: I mentioned Watchmen which, as they say, blew my mind. results said that I had a ninety-nine percent chance of going But until Raw came along in the 1980s, I didn’t really follow into creative writing. And I just laughed at it. I didn’t think it comics. And I consider Raw to be so different from the tradiwas possible to make a living at creative writing. I just didn’t tional comic book that I didn’t even think of mentioning it think about it. before when you asked about comics. But I continue to follow I couldn’t keep all the grammatical rules straight in my head. the work of many of the Raw artists. I think Chris Ware is a I just didn’t understand why they were important. They tried to genius of unparalleled dimension, which I know is not a teach me but I just couldn’t understand. So I started writing disputed fact these days, but still I mention it. I’m very fond of plays. With dialogue, you don’t have to follow grammatical the work of Dan Clowes, in spite of the fact that he is now an rules, you just need to know how people talk. And it turned out Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and I am not. I’ve I had a talent for dialogue, so I kept doing that, and became a recently gotten to know Mike Kupperman, whose work consisplaywright. tently surprises me and makes me laugh until I pee my pants. I As far as my family goes, the nicest thing I can say about my love the work of Mark Newgarden, especially the strip he used mother and father is that they never discouraged me from to run a while back in the New York Press. I’ve recently gotten pursuing a career in the arts. I was the youngest of four to know Tony Millionaire, who I think is a visionary of rare skill children, so by the time my parents were done pressuring my and soul, as strange as that may sound to say about a man older siblings to excel in sports and to get good grades, they who once had sex with a pizza. I’m currently working on trying were content to let me scribble on things with markers and do to turn Sock Monkey into a feature. I greatly admire Danny my little comedy skits. Hellman’s ability to make caricature look easy. And I’m very DF: Can you talk about writers and writing that influenced and fortunate to be close friends with R. Sikoryak, whose work continue to influence you? never fails to inspire, perhaps because we share an interest in TA: My two favorite writers of all time are Samuel Beckett and adapting classics. David Mamet. I’m a big-time fan of both of those guys. The first DF: Can you discuss movies that influenced you? Who are thing I did after your favorite directors and screenwriters? Hollywood started TA: My favorite directors I have to divide into two paying me ridiculous categories, those whose work jibes with my own ideas sums of money was to start collecting first editions of everything those guys wrote. I mean, my son’s name is Samuel David Alcott, for heaven’s sake. For many years, while I was writing plays, whenever I got stuck in a scene I’d go back and re-read either Endgame or Glengarry Glen Ross and the answer to my problem would be in one of those plays somewhere. I was very much influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, who can The cover to Eightball #22 by Dan Clowes. “I’m very structure a sentence fond of the work of Dan Clowes, in spite of the fact that like nobody’s business he is now an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter The cover to Jimmy Corrigan, Boy Genius by Chris Ware, who Todd believes and I am not,” quips Todd. [©2002 Daniel Clowes]

about film and those whose work is so far beyond my comprehension that I can only gasp in astonishment. In the first category are Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. I love Kubrick’s ability to hold the camera still and have the composition do all the work. I love Woody Allen’s lighting, his way of thinking about coverage, his long takes, the way he moves actors around in the frame, his ability to get career-best performances from everyone he works with, his astonishing writing skills. And he’s a great, great, underrated actor too. And Clint Eastwood, one of America’s most underrated directors, also has an amazing sense of light and nuance, of rhythm and tension, is always elegant and relaxed, and on top of it all manages to get everything in one or two takes. In the other categories are people like Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese and David Fincher and Steven Soderberg and the Coen Brothers and Akira Kurosawa, and many others, who understand film in a much more complex way than I do. DF: Were there significant TV influences on you, as a kid and as an adult? TA: This is easy. Monty Python. Nothing else comes close. The fact is, I don’t remember watching much on TV before Monty Python. I know I watched Scooby Doo and Batman when I was seven, but those shows had no influence on me whatsoever. But Monty Python changed everything. Monty Python was the reason I started writing. My first writing was sketch comedy, and I hoped to one day have my own sketch comedy team. I’m very glad that Mr. Show came along, because their show is the show that I wanted to do, and now I don’t have to do it. David Letterman changed the way I thought about a lot of things during the 1980s. It’s hard to convey now just how surprising and shocking and innovative his show was in, say, 1985-1987. I would watch it every night, mesmerized. And I agree with Time Magazine that The Simpsons is the greatest show ever created. To this slim but robust list, I now add The Daily Show, which I think is doing amazing work right now. DF: How about animation influences? TA: There is no bigger influence imaginable to me than seeing Bambi at age seven. I vividly remember the ending of that movie, where Bambi’s father tells him that he is now king of the forest, and walks away with his head down, and we see 48 | WRITE NOW

that Bambi now stands where his father once stood. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew that I had just been told something very profound. I remember taking a shower after I got home from the movie, and sitting hunched over in the shower, staring at the drain, trying to comprehend what I had just seen. I have seen Bambi every seven years since then and it never fails to entertain, enchant, and reveal myself to myself. DF: What were some books that were—and are—important to you? TA: Fiction: Kurt Vonnegut. Raymond Carver. Herman Melville. The thing that angers me about Melville is that I never read him until I was 35. And I didn’t read him until I was 35 because I had been led to believe that Melville was boring. And it turns out that Melville isn’t boring at all. Melville is actually very, very funny. And that’s what angers me. When I was in high school trying to find ways of not reading Melville, if they had said “Read this, it’s really really funny,” I would have gladly given it a chance. But no one ever does that. So if anyone is reading this who hasn’t read Moby-Dick, read Moby-Dick. Because it’s REALLY REALLY FUNNY. DF: How did you earn a living before the writing clicked? TA: For a number of years, I simply didn’t earn a living. I starved. I quite literally starved. I lived in an unheated trailer and ate canned spaghetti, one 25-cent can per day, and listened to Elvis Costello on my Walkman, and that was my life. I worked at Burger King for two-and-a-half years. When I started, I got $3.35 an hour, and when I left, two-and-a-half years later, I was an assistant manager and I was making $3.55 an hour. When I moved to New York, I first tried to make it as a standup comic, but that was a mistake. The world of stand-up is an especially cruel and brutal place, and I was not cut out for that. But I did get two great jobs for a young screenwriter. For six years I managed movie theaters for a nice art-house chain called City Cinemas. I managed Cinema I and the Manhattan Twin and the Paris Theater. Films like Ran and The Dresser and Room With A View and Kiss of the Spider Woman I got to watch twenty, thirty, forty times, as many times as I wanted to. The Paris was the best. There was no concession stand, so there wasn’t that much to manage. I just had to make sure that the money came out right and prevent the place from

burning down. I had a huge office all to myself and I would sit there and write all night long, plays and monologues and all kinds of things. Then, for six months I worked at the buying offices of B. Dalton Booksellers. I did data entry, logging new titles and so forth. There were carts of new books coming in the door every single day, review copies for the buyers to read. But the buyers rarely read any of them, so they encouraged us to take home as many as we wanted. So for six months you couldn’t run into me on the street without me giving you a nice, expensive hardcover edition of a new book that hadn’t even come out yet. Then, I actually started to get enough work in the downtown theaters that I had to give up the office jobs in order to be in the shows, and that was that. DF: Did you have a deadline? “If I don’t ‘make it’ by age ____, then I’m going to law school.” TA: I never had a fallback position. I think it was Mamet who said that if you have a fallback position, you tend to fall back to it. If I had one piece of advice for young people out there, it would be that there is nothing even remotely shameful or silly or risky about going into the entertainment field. Entertainment is one of America’s biggest exports and is getting bigger all the time. The only risk is committing to it too late in life. If I had known that I wanted to write movies when I was sixteen instead of when I was 25, I would have gone to the right school and learned my craft and made the right connections a decade earlier, instead of sitting in an unheated trailer starving to death. DF: Is living in L.A. necessary to have a career in movies or TV? TA: It certainly helps, simply because you’re physically there. Hollywood in general has a very poor memory, and if you are actually physically there, always reminding them of yourself, they’re more likely to remember you when jobs come along. Myself, I am blessed with a veritable arsenal of representation whose job it is to live in LA for me. DF: What’s the role of the agent/manager for writers in movies/TV? TA: I have had bad representation, and I have had good representation. Good

representation is better. In a good situation, the agent and/or manager (I have both) has access to many, many different projects at many different levels of production, and has the ability to match their writer clients with projects that the writer can get excited about. Or, flowing in the other direction, if the writer is producing his/her own material, the agent/manager knows a lot of different people at different levels of the business who are looking for material and tries to match the script to the producer. You know how they say “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?” It is the agent’s/manager’s job to know many, many people, and to put them together in creative ways. At least that’s the way I understand it. DF: Any tips on how to get an agent or manager? TA: This might sound like a cop-out, but it’s been my experience that, at the moment that you need an agent, one will appear. What that means is that, if your work develops to the point where people are approaching you with money, you will have no problem finding an agent. At that point, you will most likely have your choice of agents. I tried sending my plays to agents cold, but I never got any response whatsoever. Once I had an actual show up and running, with a real run and a budget and publicity and good reviews and sell-out houses, I had no problem getting an agent. But, lest the beginning writer be fooled, agents are not the be-all and end-all of a writer’s career. My career-making breaks, as described above, all came about despite my agents’ best efforts, not because of them. Back when I had bad representation, my agent didn’t want me to work with Andy Karsch, didn’t want me to work on Town and Country, didn’t think it was particularly important to meet with Nina Jacobson. For five years they discouraged me at every turn and actively worked to sabotage the relationships I created with producers. And I put up with it because I didn’t know any better. So the beginning writer should know to trust his or her instincts; if it’s something that you really want to do, chances are much greater that it will lead to something, moreso than if you’re working on something your agent forced you to do. DF: Ever get writer’s block? If so, how do you deal with it? TA: I don’t get writer’s block, but I do sometimes procrastinate. I give myself artificial deadlines, like, say, four pages of script a day, and then I’ll waste as much time as I possibly can before writing all four pages in an hour. It’s amazing the number of pointless tasks you can accomplish with this system. Sometimes the pressure of working on a screenplay, where there is a hundred million dollars at stake and scores of people whose lives will be affected by your words, will produce a kind of panic that is sort of like writer’s block. But I’ve found that the stress of not writing is greater than the stress of writing. I also am blessed with an interest in visual arts, so I might take a break from writing to draw, or paint, or cut up little pieces of paper. DF: Are there any books on writing or writing courses you’d recommend? TA: Mamet’s books Writing in Restaurants, Some Freaks and On Directing Film all contain extremely valuable essays on writing. I refer to them all the time. Kurt Vonnegut has an essay called “How to Write with Style” that I read in 1980 when it was originally published as an ad for International Paper and which is now available in his collection Palm Sunday (page 77, of the hardcover edition, to be exact). It’s about five pages long and is some of the best advice on writing I’ve ever ALCOTT continues on page 54 ALCOTT | 49

These pages, from Spider-Girl #44, show the step-by-step process of how a “Marvel style” (plot first) comic is created. It starts with the writer (Tom DeFalco)’s plot (including potential “solicit copy” for promotional uses) which goes to penciler Pat Olliffe. Pat’s thumbnail sketches are his first step before he does the pencil art. The writer then indicates balloon placement on photocopies of the pencils, which show the letterer where captions, balloons, title and sound effect lettering should be put. After it’s lettered, the comics pages are inked (in this case by Al Williamson) and colored. The final result is the printed comics page seen here as well. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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SPIDER-GIRL | 51

On this page and the next, we skip ahead to pages twelve and thirteen of the story. Note that, since reference for flashbacks to previous comics is called for, Tom provides photocopies of the relevant panels from the issues his plot refers to. Providing such reference is generally considered part of the writer’s job, especially if the writer wants to be sure the correct reference is used. [©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 52 | WRITE NOW

ALCOTT continued from page 49

read. As for screenwriting: this is the worst cliché in the world, but I found Robert McKee’s book Story to be extremely helpful. McKee gets a bad rap in the screenwriting community for some reason, but he’s very clear-eyed and non-judgmental about many things. He knows what’s strong, he knows what works, and he knows why it works, and best of all, for every example he gives of what works, he will give an example of what should not work but does anyway. Most usefully, for me anyway, is that he breaks down the elements of Some books that inspire Todd. [Writing in Restaurants, On Directing Film ©2002 David Mamet; story in a very concrete and underPalm Sunday ©2002 Kurt Vonnegut.] standable terms, so that you know what tools you have when you’re sitting or books that feed your soul in general? down to build one of these things. TA: Apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, I can’t DF: Do you do or recommend daily writing exercises? What recommend the classics enough. Find a good edition of about keeping a journal? Shakespeare, with clear printing and the names all spelled out TA: I’ve kept a daily journal for about fifteen years now. I don’t (instead of abbreviated, as they often are), one with copious know if it has helped me increase my skills as a writer, but it footnotes, preferably on the same page as the text, and dive in. has certainly helped me to know myself, which is what One of the most valuable exercises I ever did was when I Shakespeare said was the most important thing you could do. DF: Do you have a “suggested reading list” for aspiring writers,

ALCOTT concludes on page 92

NEXT ISSUE:

FOCUS ON THE RED-HOT INCREDIBLE HULK WITH JONES & ALONSO! M AG A ZI N E

BRUCE JONES is the writer on the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man: Tangled Web, Call of Duty, the classic Ka-Zar the Savage and of many published novels and produced TV scripts. AXEL ALONSO is the editor of Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man and of DC’s Vertigo books including 100 Bullets and Preacher. Considered by many to be the best editor in comics today. Plus: Inside tips from top professionals, including:

JIMMY PALMIOTTI Writer on Beautiful Killer and Gatecrasher, co-founder of Marvel Knights.

KURT BUSIEK Writer/creator of Astro City and Thunderbolts.

ALL-NEW INCREDIBLE HULK COVER BY MIKE DEODATO, JR., NEW REGULAR HULK ARTIST!

DENNIS O’NEIL Legendary writer and editor of Batman, Green Lantern and Azrael. (Postponed from issue #2)

FABIAN NICIEZA Writer of Thunderbolts, New Warriors, and X-Men.

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• More of STEVEN GRANT’s Inside Tips on comics writing! • More reviews of Book on Writing! • And some surprises to keep you on your toes!

“When Does He Sleep?” Interview with

LEE NORDLING Interview by Danny Fingeroth via e-mail September 4, 2002 Copy edited by Lee Nordling September 22, 2002

ver wondered how someone puts together an amalgam creative career? No—not your dentist (little filling joke, there)—but someone who works successfully for a variety of clients/employers in a variety of roles, and enjoys the freedom, self-expression—and sometime anxiety—of that lifestyle. Here’s a guy who does it, and can tell you about what that life is like. Lee Nordling is a writer, editor, packager and more. Hope you enjoy this interview with him, as well as his Pop Quiz for aspiring comic strip creators elsewhere in this issue.

LEE’S BIO: As Executive Editor of the Platinum Studios Comic Book Department, Lee Nordling works with creators to develop their projects for publication, reviews previously published material for acquisition of film, TV and additional licensing rights, and works closely with Platinum’s development team on the in-house creation of comics, film and TV-related projects. Prior to his tenure at Platinum, Nordling’s impressive career has centered on publishing and the entertainment industries. A creative force, with experience as creative director, writer, editor, artist, and art director, Nordling’s worked successfully in the comic book and comic strip industries, book publishing, magazines, newspapers, toys, and advertising. He is the author of Your Career in the Comics, a first of its kind, definitive work on the business of newspaper comic strip syndication. He has written for Marvel Comics, Acclaim Comics, Disney Comics, Disney Adventures, Rugrats Magazine, and Penguin Publishing. In 1998, Nordling spearheaded a team of writers and artists to revitalize the flagging Rugrats comic strip for Nickelodeon and Creators Syndicate. As Group Editor of Creative Services at DC Comics, Nordling represented the corporate aesthetic and acted as liaison for Editorial with Marketing, Production, Advertising, Licensing and Licensed Publishing. As project supervisor for the Walt Disney Company, Nordling created and oversaw the development of such properties as Space Mickey and Poor, Poor Donald. Prior to his tenure at Disney, Nordling assembled and supervised teams of artists to produce comic books, comic strips, packaging art, and new character designs for Mattel Toys, Inc. He ran The Los Angeles Times Syndicate art department, and assisted in the development of new features. He has worked in a creative capacity with the world’s leading character-related properties, including Rugrats, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Superman, Batman, Young Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and E.T. Former Creative Director for book packager, Innovative! USA, Inc., Lee lives in Long Pond, Pennsylvania with his wife, Cheri.

PART ONE: THE COMIC STRIP INDUSTRY From Platinum Studios’ Cowboys & Aliens. Art by Ian Richardson. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC]

DANNY FINGEROTH: Lee, can you speak about the comic strip industry in general. How is it different from the comic book industry? How is it similar? LEE NORDLING: Wow! I could write a book on parts of this NORDLING | 55

Three pieces from Platinum’s Age of Kings. Art by Russell Hossain. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC]

question—oh, wait, I did! In short, comic strips and comic books are different beasts because they’re produced at different lengths or sizes and distributed to different markets. The former is an issue of space, the latter one of market or readership. In a nutshell, in a 1990s Sunday newspapers survey, it was estimated that over eighty-six million readers read the Sunday newspaper comics. With whatever dwindling has occurred in readership between then and now, it’s still an extremely large readership, what is referred to as a mass audience. In order for material to be tailored for this audience (or for segments of this audience), it needs to have a very broad-based appeal. Most people need to be able to “get it.” This is why you see so many variations on family and pet strips, because these settings connect most directly to people’s lives. It’s what the comic strip creators do within these confines that separates them from each other. You never hear anybody complain, “Oh, crap, that Mutts is just too close to Get Fuzzy.” The traditional comic book industry—where DC and Marvel are its leading publishers—is a specialty shop market, a niche market, and the more successful publishers need to produce books that appeal directly to the people who are willing to walk into a comic book shop… which is about as un-mass market 56 | WRITE NOW

as a store could get. The bulk of the editorial content—not the characters, the monthly output—produced by these nichemarket publishers has very little mass appeal. The importance of continuity, as it exists in the comic book market, is an alien concept to a mass market… except as afternoon soap operas (and they don’t even recognize that as “continuity”). Its preeminent genre, heroic fantasy/super-hero-as-soap-opera, has limited mass appeal. A mass audience requires their Batman and Spider-Man in smaller and more accessible doses than a comic book reader. Even though Marvel, DC, and other publishers produce some number of books that are targeted for outreach into wider markets (such as bookstores), this material is also not tailored to a large mass readership/ audience… nor should it be. I could generalize further about the different types of editorial produced for the comics/specialty shop market, including my own work with Platinum Studios to develop comics for the purpose of adapting them to film and TV… but basically there’s very little besides Hero-Bear that automatically says, “Yeah, some large portion of eighty-six million readers could tune into that!” Those are the markets, now let’s talk about the industries. By and large, newspaper syndicates are distributors, and comic book companies are publishers. In short, the former’s clients are newspaper editors, and the latter’s clients are readers, so, in addition to producing a differently sized product with a differently intended readership, they also serve two completely different types of masters. What they have in common are the fundamental storytelling tools of comics—the printed page, panels, written dialogue, left-to-right storytelling, etc. Unfortunately, the inbred nature of the comics culture has introduced many new, more learned and less intuitive storytelling tools… which, when used, make the books completely inaccessible to the mainstream reader. Comic strips and comic books remain blood relations, but they’re becoming increasingly distant. DF: How has the strip industry changed over the years? LN: Briefly, with the continuing decline of newspapers and newspaper readers, papers have become less competitive in the larger cities. For this and other reasons, the comics pages across the country have become more similar… which makes it increasingly more difficult for new strips to get onto the page… and carve out a readership for themselves. The plight of syndicates increasingly resembles the plight of book publishing, where the best selling authors thrive… and

NORDLING continues on page 58

“What It Takes To Sell Your Comic Strip” A pop-quiz by Lee Nordling [Note: The following quiz was used as the structure for a workshop at the 2002 Pro/Con that ran during the San Diego Comic-Con. I was joined by panelists, Gordon Kent (writer of the Rugrats comic strip, and co-creator of the Pink Panther comic strip) and Stuart Rees (cartoonist and legal counsel specializing in the comic strip medium), and we discussed how a cartoonist can put him-or-herself into that upper echelon of comic strip creators who actually get considered for newspaper syndication. The version you’re about to read distills the general consensus of answers that were arrived at by the panel, but by no means represents the opinions of all the panelists.—L.N.] This “pop quiz” is designed to test your awareness of the challenges facing somebody who tries to become a syndicated cartoonist. The purpose of this test is not to tell a cartoonist how to create, write or draw… but to make him/her aware of the possible repercussions he/she faces when making the numerous creative decisions that are involved in creating and selling a comic strip. Good luck with the test… and with your career!

PART 1: The “formula for success” How many major comic strip syndicates are there? (Circle the correct number) 4

A: Five. Alphabetically, they are: Creators Syndicate, King Features Syndicate, Tribune Media Services, United Media, Universal Press Syndicate. Please note that Copley News Service and Washington Post Writers Group and others may be major distributors of columnists and editorial cartoons, they don’t release a lot of comic strips. How many submissions do the major syndicates get per year? (Circle the approximate amount) 1,000 2,000 More than 15,000

5,000

8,000

10,0000

A: 5,000… but that doesn’t mean your odds ARE one-in-5,000… because we haven’t determined how many strips each major syndicate releases per year. On average, how many strips does a major syndicate attempt to release each year? (Please circle the approximate amount) 1 2 4 8 12 (meaning they release one new strip per month) A: 4… meaning that major syndicates attempt to release approximately twenty comic strips per year… which means twenty in 5,000 get syndicated, giving you a one-in-250 chance… but you can still do better than that. POP QUIZ continues on page 59

NORDLING | 57

the mid-level writers struggle to find book contracts. Comparatively, to find and keep a place on the comics page would be comparable to discovering your book has become a bestseller (without the income). DF: In the era of fast-paced entertainment, how does the slow-paced comic strip form survive? LN: To paraphrase, Mort Walker once said (or wrote) that it takes a reader eight seconds to read a comic strip… and that’s a lot faster than a movie or video game (unless you play video games as badly as I do). That’s the glib answer. In reality, the only way reading competes with other forms of entertainment is in its battle for the consumer’s dollar, and the comic strip only does that for the collected editions and licensed product of the most popular features. It’s apples to oranges to compare a form based on reading to forms based on viewing and interactivity, but nothing will replace a reader’s ability to review the material at his or her own pace. DF: How has it and how will it evolve? TA: How has it evolved? Okay, the Reader’s Digest answer is: As more strips have been crowded onto the page, the strip has gotten significantly smaller and cartoonists have had to develop more shorthand techniques to convey a day’s concept. Also, as people don’t necessarily read newspapers and follow the strips on a daily basis—certainly not like they used to—the once-popular continuity strips have all but died… except for those with aging-but-loyal audiences… and a syndicate editor would likely be lynched by his salesmen for trying to launch a new continuity strip without an extremely powerful marketing hook. Now, they might be able to sell and successfully launch something like Harry Potter: The Comic Strip, but it would take a dozen consecutive such successes to get enough young readers back to the pages on a daily basis and set up a situation where a syndicate could successfully launch a continuity strip with original characters. This, of course, is pure pie in the sky… and it’s never going to happen… though the Harry Potter idea isn’t bad. Hmmm… Now, where will comic strips evolve? If I knew that, I’d be a rich man… but let me guess, and we can get together in ten years and make fun of my predictions. Two years ago, I predicted that the internet would be the future of the newspaper and the comic strip… where people would get the same material to review in the morning, including local news, sports, etc., only electronically instead of on paper. I still think that’s so… but I don’t know where the revenue stream is going to come from… and if I knew that, I’d be a really rich man. Two years ago, I also predicted that paper would die as a mass medium of communication. I know that there’s some juicy electronic ink technology that’s being perfected that will allow readers to load images or type onto something that is texturally paper-like… and it will read on the page just like type… but the type (or whatever image was loaded) can be replaced by the

NORDLING continued from page 57

next page of type or whatever. I think this ink technology may figure into the future of newspapers and comic strips, too. Imagine, readers could wake up in the morning, load their morning paper files onto their paper tablet, and sit down to read it with their morning coffee. Assuming that either of these are so, then the comic strip would no longer need to be confined to its currently restrictive size… and then I think we would see a move away from the haiku-like aspect of the current form. Also, because the previous day’s or week’s comics might be accessible to the reader of the future, much like the way you can now view a month’s worth of a strips on United Media’s site, I think the story strip could make a comeback. The trick would be keeping the material suitable for a mainstream audience. However, all of that will be a long time coming. For now, the art of the form is: less is more. DF: Why does the Syndicate system prevail? Why don’t (more) people sell their own strips directly to newspapers? LN: Simply put and generally speaking, individual cartoonists don’t have the relationships with newspaper editors or the sales skills necessary to effectively package and sell their strips into a large number of papers… and newspaper syndication is a quantity business. You don’t make a living on one, two or a half-dozen papers. You make a living on fifty or a hundred papers (depending on what to you constitutes a “living”)… so a cartoonist would need to be at least as good a salesman as he or she is a cartoonist to succeed. The best parallel I can think of is: how many financially successful self-publishers are there in the comic book direct market? Not many… and they have the advantage of “only” needing to understand all facets of printing, marketing, accounting, and then make sure their books get to Diamond. Imagine having to do all that… and continually sell your strip to newspapers that haven’t bought your strip, fight to keep your strip in newspapers that want to cancel, maintain your billing system for (hopefully) hundreds of newspapers, promote like crazy… and then there are the numerous other aspects that are necessary to keeping the ball rolling. Producing and distributing a strip for newspapers is a formidable task. That said… since more papers accept comic strips from syndicates in an electronic form, there is the potential for a consortium of the right cartoonists or a new syndicate with the right editor, salesmen and product to open their doors without much overhead. All they need is a couple of absolute blockbusters to put themselves on the map, the way Universal did with Doonesbury and Ziggy, or like what Creators did when it opened its doors by acquiring the distribution rights to B.C., Momma, Miss Peach and Ann Landers. DF: How is the comic strip form different from the comic book/album form? What kinds of stories are best suited to each? LN: I think I dealt with some of this earlier, but to add to those thoughts: Comics strips are a short form tailored for a mass audience, and comic books are (largely) a long form tailored to a niche readership. Are there exceptions to the audience reach? Absolutely. Nickelodeon Magazine has a comics section tailored for kids, as does Disney Adventures, and Comics Buyers Guide has comic strips tailored for a fan audience… so 58 | WRITE NOW

From Platinum’s The Taking of Happyland. Art by Tony O’Donnell. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC]

what really divides the two? Potentially, nothing. Currently, accessibility—which is determined by either the creator’s choice of editorial content or their use of particular communication tools. To elaborate on that last point, many storytelling tools used commonly in the direct market comic book adversely affect the mainstream reader’s ability to follow the story. Some of these are visual, such as panel layout and balloon placement, and others are editorial, such as being able to discern what anybody is even talking about at the beginning of a story. This jumping into a story in the middle of the second act may appeal to a comics reader, but, unless it’s perfectly handled, it confuses and alienates a mainstream reader. DF: What sort of person tends to thrive in the syndicated strip field? What sort of person shouldn’t try to get into it? LN: It’s really tough to sum up what facets make a cartoonist thrive, besides being funny, drawing in a unique and consistent style, creating a cast of characters with the ability to bounce off each other for decades… and, most of all, being consistent and accessible to a mass audience with a quirky and personal style. The person who shouldn’t try to be a syndicated cartoonist is somebody who wants to break too many of the boundaries that define the sandbox of what’s currently perceived as appropriate for the form. People who want to break the box… usually NORDLING continues on page 61

POP QUIZ continued from page 57

and make a living as a syndicated cartoonist.

What percentage of submissions have any significant measurable professionalism? (Circle the nearest percentage) 50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

A: 10%…meaning that if you do what it takes to be of professional caliber, you now have a one-in-twenty-five chance of getting syndicated… but you can do better than that!

PART 2: Researching the comic strip business What kind of comic strips are the major syndicates looking for? It’s important to know that they don’t always buy what they’re “looking for.” (Circle all that apply)

• Strips exactly like the most popular new strip… so they can jump on the bandwagon.

• Strips just like the classics… because that’s what readers But the top 10% aren’t the strips that get really considered. It’s the strips that really excel in some way that do. What percentage of the professional submissions end up being seriously reviewed? (Circle the nearest percentage) 50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

A: 10%… meaning that 1% of the strips submitted get seriously considered for syndication. Note that this means fifty strips get seriously reviewed for twenty open slots… and your chance is now one-in-2 1/2. Let’s be tough and call it one-inthree… and that’s the best percentage you can work towards… because from this point on, it’s outside forces that determine whether or not you get the nod over the other two strips. Okay, you’re now one-in-three cartoonists that REALLY got the syndicate’s attention… and got syndicated. Of those three, how many will make what they consider to be a living? (Please circle the correct number) 3

A: 1. Yep, it’s true. Two out of three strips that are syndicated have such poor sales that their launch is aborted or they simply don’t make enough by themselves to put food on your table and a roof over your heads. Whoops! We forgot to discuss how much a “living” we were talking about. (Please circle the range of money you can at first expect to make per year on your comic strip) $25,000-40,000 $50,000-75,000

$35,000-60,000 MORE

want.

• Strips that will push the boundaries of what defines a comic strip… because syndicate execs know that the medium needs to continue to grow. • Something safe but also fresh, so they can get in a lot of newspapers. • None of the above • All of the above A: Something safe but also fresh, so they can get in a lot of newspapers. Let’s go through why this is so: If a newspaper editor wants a strip exactly like Mutts or Get Fuzzy or Foxtrot, then he/she will buy that strip, not a knock-off. Exciting new strips can create trends in humor and drawing styles… and editors will jump on the bandwagon of any successful trend… because it’s safe, it’s what readers really seem to want—or at least, that’s their assessment—but they want a fresh new twist on that trend. After all, isn’t Get Fuzzy the Garfield of the 21st Century? What kind of comic strips are the newspapers looking for? (Circle all that apply)

• Strips that stir controversy… because newspaper editors like to know that readers discuss what they publish. • Strips that readers will follow, so they’ll continue to happily buy the newspaper. • Something comfortable… just like the strips they’ve been running for twenty years. • Something that’s so new and different that readers will know the comics page has finally been revitalized. • None of the above • All of the above

Mutts by Patrick McDonnell. A: $25,000-40,000. Strips that launch often [©2002 Patrick McDonnell.] need time to establish enough credentials of A: Strips that readers will follow, so they’ll quality and consistency to make newspaper continue to happily buy the newspaper. Comic editors or committees comfortable enough to pick them up… strips began as a marketing tool, and no matter how far and it can take an awful long time—if ever—for them to reach they’ve progressed as an art form, they remain a marketing that point. tool. Take out a favorite comic strip, and people cancel their subscriptions—not everybody, but enough to hurt… and, with Now, if you’re still with us, let’s figure out how to get you into declining readership and numbers of papers, newspapers that one-in-three of one-in-three out of 1% of 5,000 cartoonists don’t need any more hurt. The comics page remains the who actually get to make a living. second most widely read part of the newspaper, after the front page. Know your business, understand the market, develop your talent, and practice your craft. Do these things, and you’re For those strips that intentionally stir up controversy—i.e. giving yourself the best chance possible to sell a comic strip POP QUIZ continues on page 60 NORDLING | 59

A: To sell the next day’s newspaper. You probably had this one figured out from the previous discussion about a strip being a marketing tool… but it’s important to emphasize this point.

express an opinion that’s likely about sex, politics, social concerns or religion, personified most recently by Doonesbury and Boondocks—they need to have a strong, loyal and vocal group of supporters to offset the inevitable critics. Regarding a quiz question covering the appropriate use of language in comic strips, I found it amusing that this publisher couldn’t run the question because many of those words were deemed inappropriate for this publication. I will point out that all of these words in this quiz question are seen commonly in mainstream comics and heard on network television. However, while many of these words can be read on the comics page, they could cause concern for editors. In many portions of the country, the comics page is considered a safe haven from the vulgarities of our culture. Ironically, even though most strips are tailored for older readers, concerned readers want the page to be “safe” for children to read. There is something about the printed word that is perceived differently by the public than the broadcast word. The latter is spoken, but it evaporates. The printed word remains in the consciousness for as long as the reader looks at it… and if it’s a word that’s perceived as vulgar by a large part of the mainstream audience, then people in that audience have the time to process their concerns, which are often expressed as anger… and aim them right at the newspaper editor. How would you like to be that newspaper editor?

It’s also important to note that this doesn’t need to be your goal for creating a comic strip. What is important is to understand everybody’s goals, just not your own.

PART 3: Creating the comic strip Please circle what’s more important in a comic strip:

• Writing • Drawing • Or they’re both just as important? A: Writing—and for those of you that are screaming that I’m an idiot, just wait a second, and I’ll explain. No badly written but well-drawn strip has ever succeeded, but numerous minimally drawn but well-written strips have succeeded and pushed their way into our national consciousness. We’ll address aspects of the style of art later, but let me add that many aspects of a well-drawn strip, visual pacing, the choice of an expression or where characters are in a panel are part of the storytelling/writing as much, if not more than drawing. Since comics are a visual medium, the lines between writing and drawing are often blurred, but I assert that the choice to have Calvin react broadly, flying back out of his chair as the monster lump of food lunges toward him, is writing… even if the only word in that panel is, “AAAAGGGHHHH!!!” One last thought, which I hope has occurred to you, a wellwritten strip that’s beautifully drawn will have an even greater chance of success. What’s more important for the quality of a comic strip?

Now, I’m not advocating censorship… I’m advocating the idea that every creator should understand the market for which he or she is creating a strip. If creators want to use language that might be perceived as offensive, that’s fine. I think they should simply realize what they’re doing, know why they’re doing it… and realize one of the reasons their strips may not have sold to a syndicate… or launched well. What is a newspaper’s primary goal for publishing a comic strip? (Please circle one)

• To entertain readers • To educate readers • To carry on a great newspaper tradition • To sell the newspaper you’re reading • To sell the next day’s newspaper

• Being hysterically funny some of the time. • Being consistently funny all of the time. A: Being consistently funny all of the time. Not that hysterically funny is bad… but it’s important that the bar for consistency of humor be set very high. People will only read a lame joke or be confused so many times before they figure a strip isn’t worth their time. The trick is learning to develop your own bar for consistency. Evaluating material without being able to test it is one of the hardest tasks a cartoonist faces… and he or she needs to do this under the gun of tremendously stressful deadlines.

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end up broken. For example, there was a very talented cartoonist working on an only marginally successful strip. He never achieved real popularity because he never truly understood the audience, and the audience never understood him. He actually thought he should be able to do whatever he wanted to… and the syndicate likely thought they were dealing with one very unreasonable and unmanageable cartoonist. So, if you want to do whatever you want to do, produce independent comics. If you want to find a way to express yourself completely within very tight constraints, be a syndicated cartoonist.

PART TWO: LEE’S CAREER: DF: Lee, you do a variety of things in a variety of media for a variety of employers/clients. This is different, it seems to me, from being a “freelancer” who may work for different clients but do essentially the same thing for each (for example, an artist who draws for Marvel and DC and has a strip for a syndicate). This seems to be a set-up that enables one to earn a living in a mostly creative capacity, even if one is neither Wizard magazine’s flavor-of-the month, nor a living legend. It’s a career path that many people live and thrive in. Do you enjoy this life/work style? LN: I love all aspects of working in comic books and strips, from editing, writing, art, design, production, printing and promoting. Add to that my love for film and developing stories for that medium. Add to that my love for working with writers and artists, and, with beginners, helping them to develop their levels of craft in all these forms. Well, that’s what I get to do. I wish I had more time for writing and drawing… but I’ll carve that time out and get some of the stuff done I’d like to do. DF: Do you recommend it? LN: Sure, if money isn’t a concern. My dad—whom I lost a couple years ago—used to say, “Whatever you do, make sure you love it—because you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.” I love what I do, but it took me decades to get this point. I was in my thirties when I got my job as Art Director of the L.A. Times Syndicate… and throughout my twenties I never knew if I’d ever get to work in the profession. But the syndicate job wasn’t an end point, it was really only the beginning of learning what was expected of me as a professional. For me, the journey was worth it… and for anybody crazy or driven enough to want to write or draw or edit or direct… you have to be obsessed, smart and/or talented enough to persevere… or you could hold out for just being extremely lucky. Most people aren’t extremely lucky, so if you’re going to make the trip, it better be worth the destination, even if the destination isn’t where you expected to be. I’m not where I expected to be, but expectations mature, and I like where I am. I received emails from a couple creators over the last few years—they were submitting stuff to me or considering a project I thought they’d be good for—and both of them were packing it in, giving up, moving on… and these were their courtesy emails to tell me about the decision they’d made about their careers. There was sadness and resolution in their words. They hadn’t gotten to where they’d wanted to be, felt they’d never get there, and situations in their lives forced them

to move away from comics. There’ve been times I thought I might have to make similar decisions… but I’m grateful I never have. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I recommend that feeling to anybody. DF: How do you make sure you’re not taking on too much or not enough? LN: I look at a job, calculate the hours involved… and determine whether or not I have that time available. It’s not rocket science, it’s math and determination… which to some people is like rocket science. DF: Would you benefit from living in NYC or LA? LN: Yes and no. Cheri and I live in an area of eastern Pennsylvania called the Poconos. We have a 3,300 sq. ft. house on an acre of land that was affordable, and we commute to our offices via the stairs. We have telephones, email and fax machines—and Blockbuster Video is only fifteen minutes away—so we haven’t lost touch with the worlds of comics and film, but we do miss friends and family and the culture that exists in each of those cities… and “yes” in answer to your next question, L.A. has culture. DF: Have you ever had to deal with conflict-of-interest between clients?

From Platinum’s Ghosting graphic album. Art by Dick Giordano. Script by Fred Van Lente. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC] NORDLING | 61

Character study (top) and location study from Platinum’s Socorro. Art by Tony O’Donnell. Socorro’s writer is Steven Grant. [©& TM Platinum Studios, LLC]

LN: If you mean, for example, do I ever have a conflict of interest between Nickelodeon and Creators Syndicate on the Rugrats comic strip… then no. I look at it this way—and this is a process that I developed when I was at Disney for seven years—each client has a window of what’s considered acceptable, in this case, Rugrats has a group of characters, a world and an attitude to stay true to, and Creators have clients and an audience to appease. I look for where those two windows share overlapping aspects of what’s considered appropriate… and I don’t venture out of that space. Thus, everybody’s concerns are met… and the property isn’t detrimentally compromised by the adaptation from one form into another. To go back to the question, if you mean do I have conflicts of interest in the use of my time between Nickelodeon Magazine and Platinum Studios, also no. 62 | WRITE NOW

With my employer, Platinum Studios, and my freelance-editing gig for Nick, I have very specific job responsibilities… and it’s up to me to determine how I manage my time and get the jobs done. Of course, I don’t get many weekends off… but I’m working in comics and film, so what’s to complain about? DF: You’ve worked on “book-plus” projects. What the heck is a “book-plus”? How does one get into that field? LN: Book-plus is product where a book is packaged with something else, like a toy, apparel, games, whatever. There are so many different types of book-plus product—and so many different types of publishers and packagers who produce it— that it’s difficult to encompass in such a limited space as this interview… but you get into this industry the same way as you would with any other publisher, with a background of knowledge and a set of skills that meet their needs. DF: You work for an L.A. company and a NY company, but manage to live a rural lifestyle. Is that hard to do? LN: I work all day, beginning usually between 7 and 8 a.m., often miss lunch, and start wondering where the day went around 6 or 7 p.m. I live online or on the phone, and I’m in constant communication with people from all around the world. What’s hard is getting away from the computer, the proposals, and the books long enough to get outside on the front deck and enjoy the weather (when it’s nice, as it is now). In short, I don’t live a rural lifestyle—my neighbors do. DF: What do you sacrifice to live and work this way? LN: Well, I don’t get to hang out at comic book stores very often, except on my business trips into NY. I love city life. I love concrete. I love going to the wider variety of stores that NY and L.A. offer. Here, we’re a half-hour from Stroudsburg (to the east), forty-five minutes from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre (to the northwest), and fifty minutes from Allentown (to our south), and these are the places that we get our bookstore and movie fixes. If we were in our twenties, I don’t know that we could’ve moved here. We used to go to comedy and music clubs, but not so much anymore. Cheri and I are pretty social animals, and we love hanging out with writers and artists… and now we don’t get to do that, except on the phone. That’s the big sacrifice. DF: What do you gain? LN: Peace. Focus. When Cheri and I relax in the evening, we watch hummingbirds battle over the feeder. The other bird feeder receives constant visitors. Squirrels scramble in front of the house over the torn strips of tortillas that Cheri puts out for them. Deer used to come for their fair share, too, and one in particular used to approach Cheri for its morning taste… but she stopped feeding it because she didn’t want it to become too comfortable around humans. We’ve seen a bear lumber through the front yard and chipmunks that weren’t animated by Disney. I guess in the best of all worlds, we’d like to have a place in NY or L.A. and keep the place in Long Pond for certain times of the year. In any case, telecommuting from the house is a lifestyle we’ve come to love. DF: I know you have some strong feelings about working on corporate-owned properties, and what a creator “owes” the property-owner in terms of style and approach to the character. NORDLING continues on page 65

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Circle all of the following that is true in order to create a mainstream comic strip?

• Some substantial portion of the newspaper readership needs to relate to a comic strip. • You don’t need to pander to what readers are interested in; they will come to you. • Readers like their beliefs to be challenged. • Newspaper editors aren’t afraid of a handful of complaining readers.

A: Left to right. While the artist can direct the reader’s eyes with many tried and true techniques, the natural way that people read (in the western cultures) is from left to right… and cartoonists need to understand that if the first character in a panel to speak is on the right, and the second one is on the left, this will slow down the reader’s process through the strip. Lynn Johnston is particularly adept at using this pacing technique to slow down the reader’s pace through a strip.

On a tangential note, the comic book culture has evolved a newer storytelling conceit that a higher balloon on the right will be read before a lower balloon on the left. A: Some substantial portion of the Unfortunately, the creators who utilize this newspaper readership needs to relate to a Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson. [©2002 Bill Watterson.] technique rarely intend to affect the pacing comic strip. If you’ve been taking the test in the manner that they do, and this is one and reviewing the answers of each of many storytelling factors that hurts the readability of question, this should have been easy… and that means you’re contemporary comic books. starting to understand the concerns with which your material is being evaluated. Circle which of the following that you believe is true. Lettering: Which of the following is more likely to get you syndicated?

• It’s better to work outside the sandbox/boundaries of what’s traditionally acceptable to a syndicate and newspaper. • It’s better to work inside the sandbox of what’s traditionally acceptable to a syndicate and newspaper. • It’s better to create material that tests the boundaries of what’s traditionally acceptable to a syndicate and newspaper. A: It’s better to work inside the sandbox of what’s traditionally acceptable to a syndicate and newspaper. It’s important that you think of all the strips that are currently syndicated as being “the sandbox.” If you try to play too far outside the sandbox, you’re not really playing within the boundaries of what the industry is looking for. If you’re trying to push the boundaries that define the sandbox, it’s important to note that this extremely hard to do, rare in fact… and if this is your goal, you can’t just be good, you need to be brilliant. A side note to this: many cartoonists test the boundaries of the sandbox after their strips have been syndicated. The trick is creating a strip where that kind of elasticity is appropriate to the original conceit. Readers are very mistrustful of too much change too quickly. In drawing the strip, it’s important to know how readers will absorb what you create. With this in mind, do mainstream comic strip readers read from:

• Top to bottom. • Left to right. • Right to left. • Bottom to top • None, they simply take in the whole panel and follow the

• doesn’t really matter, as long as it can be read. • adds or takes away 10% to the professionalism of the strip, depending on its quality.

• is the most important facet of the drawing. A: Adds or takes away 10% to the professionalism of the strip, depending on its quality. Simply put, the craftsmanship of the lettering reflects on the quality of the script and the art. Any strip or comics page needs to be appear to be of a single vision… and anything that is prominently better or worse than the whole… will negatively affect the perception of the whole. Your art style of the strip should: (Circle what you think is true)

• Imitate the style of the most popular strip that is currently being published… without looking like a rip-off.

• Be fresh. • Be personal. • Be accessible by a mainstream public. • Be contemporary. • Emulate the look of classic strips. • Be edgy. • All of the above. • None of the above. A: All of the above. More true than any of the rest, be accessible by the mainstream public. If you accomplish that, then whether your work is obviously influenced by one of the strip masters, or by the work of editorial cartoonists, or by online webisodes, it will offer a unique presence on the page… and that, in any case, should be something to strive for.

eye direction you’ve designed into the strip. POP QUIZ continues on page 64 NORDLING | 63

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PART 4: Selling your comic strip Your goal for presenting your characters in the sample should be: (Circle as many of the following that are true)

• To introduce as many characters as possible. • To demonstrate all the nuances of all your characters, so the editor will see how wonderfully three-dimensional they are. • To show all the different types of jokes they can tell. • To introduce your main characters and the world in which they live, and leave the editor wanting more. • To introduce your family of characters and show how interchangeable they are with your gags (so that each of the characters could tell any of your gags). • None of the above. • All of the above. A: To introduce your main characters and the world in which they live, and leave the editor wanting more. Each one of the above are approaches that cartoonists often take with their submissions, so let’s address each of them. If you introduce too many characters, it’s too difficult to show who your characters are and what the comic strip is about. If you explore the full range of emotions that characters could show—laughing, crying, depressed, greedy, anxious, envious, etc.—in a six-week sample, how will the reader understand what is each character’s predominant character trait? You’re much better off hammering home, in as many different ways as possible, the one predominant character trait of each character… to firmly establish in the reader’s mind who that character is… and where he or she is coming from. It takes a comic strip reader two years to get to know who a character is… so that’s two years of hammering home the character traits of each character before you can reasonably expect the reader to anticipate how your characters will react to any given situation. A comic strip character’s presence in the strip should not be to tell jokes. It should be to present one of many different personalities that you will use. No gag should be interchangeable between characters, because that would indicate one of two things: that the gag is not character-driven gag… or that you have two characters with nearly identical character traits.

A: Undersell your strip and be brief without much more than a quick biographical note and a short paragraph explaining your concept. Let the strip sell itself. If it doesn’t, it just makes you look bad for claiming you’ve created the next Calvin & Hobbes. Remember, an editor just wants to like your strip… so any amount of overselling is really just building a mountain that your strip is going to have to climb. It’s good to send original art, so the editor will be able to see how cool your work really looks. (True/False) A: False. Everybody seems to know this… but cartoonists still send in original art. The best way to send in the art is just a little larger than it would normally be printed in the paper. Why larger? Because everybody knows that strips print too damn small, so send them in at a size where the balloons are easy to read. 7 1⁄ 2” to 8” wide is fine for a sample. If you send one per sheet, or two or three, that’s fine, too. There’s no rule here, just common sense. List the factors that you can control in getting your comic strip from your board to the comics page. (Circle as many of the following that are true)

• Concept • Concept development • Character development • Quality of writing • Type of humor • Humor consistency • Drawing ability • Consistency of drawing • Ordering of gags in sample • Sample presentation • Editor’s taste • What the syndicate thinks it can sell • The salesmen’s relationship with newspaper editors • What other syndicates are offering that competes with you • Whether or not the newspaper wants a new strip • The newspaper’s budget A: You can control everything up to and including the sample presentation. You cannot control anything after and beginning with the editor’s taste. What this means is that you should focus your energies on creating the best comic strip sample you can… and not try to do the syndicate’s job… unless your goal is to self-syndicate… in which case you can’t control anything after and beginning with what other syndicates are offering that competes with you. In short, focus your efforts on what you can control. If you created, wrote and drew a good comic strip sample: (Circle as many of the following that are true)

• You will be syndicated. • You’ve gotten into the top 1% of submitters… and only

Your cover letter to the editor should: (Circle as many as are true)

• You still need to know the editor in order for them to

• Undersell your strip and be brief without much more than a

• You still have only as good a chance as anybody else.

taste and marketing perceptions stand in your way. consider you.

quick biographical note and a short paragraph explaining your concept. • Explain all about the strip, so the editor doesn’t miss anything when he/she reads the sample. • Explain why this is the funniest strip since sliced bread, so the editor will see what you’re trying to accomplish.

A: You’ve gotten into the top 1% of submitters… and only taste and marketing perceptions stand in your way. Yep, it’s good to be good, but there’s no accounting for taste. If you’ve

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More from Platinum’s Cowboys & Aliens. Art by Ian Richardson. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC] NORDLING continued from page 62

Some characters have a lot of leeway—the many versions of Spider-Man that appear simultaneously, for instance—while others do not. You won’t see a dark and gritty Snoopy, for instance. LN: Well, those strong feelings come from a misunderstanding by writers and artists regarding the nature of an assignment. For example, if Marvel hires FanFave Artist of The Month to write and draw Spider-Man, the comics culture understands that they are going to get Fan Fave’s unique take on Spidey. Also, there’s the understanding that it’s his interpretation that will stimulate (or not stimulate) sales. That, by and large, is a comics culture attitude, which is fine and true for the comics culture. But it’s an attitude that doesn’t play in the mass market. The goal within the mass market is to support the company vision of a character, not to reinterpret that vision. To clarify, if you think of a property as having boundaries that can be played within, the goal of the mass-market writer or artist should be to find a place within those boundaries where he or she can play. Their goal shouldn’t be to enlarge those boundaries… and with comics creators, that is often not the case. I’ve heard the following statement too many times: “If they hired me to write/draw it, why don’t they let me write/draw it the way I want to?”

This is a pretty severe case of the writer or artist not knowing whether they’re the tail or the dog. In comics, the culture says they get to pretend they’re the dog… at least for as long as sales of their unique vision remains acceptable. In the mass market, the culture says there’s no question that they’re the tail. I think it’s better for all concerned if writers and artists understand what’s expected of them in the first place. DF: Why the difference in latitudes and attitudes? LN: It comes back to understanding the nature of your audience. Twenty different Snoopy interpretations would confuse the mass market… and hurt the Peanuts property. On the other hand, in the comics industry, we all understand that there are dozens of different Spidey and Batman interpretations… and that each of them is somebody’s take on the core concept of the characters. Believe me, if Marvel thought that reinterpreting Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man would hurt the property, they wouldn’t allow anybody to do it. DF: What should creators know going into to such situations? LN: I think every creator should be working to find out the nature of an editor’s or art director’s goals, inside and outside of the comics culture. There are so many misunderstandings that could have been avoided if they had done this. And “yes” to your next question, it should be the goal of the editor or art director to be clear about the nature of the assignment, but too often they just assume that the creator is reading their mind and knows what they want. DF: How can a creator push the envelope to slip in his or her own vision, or should they not even try? LN: Do you see how that question implies that a creator needs to be sneaky to make a personal expression with a corporately controlled character? Who says that every assignment needs an envelope to be pushed? Again, it comes down to understanding the goal of the assignment. To clarify, I do think every writer and artist needs to find a way to make a character his or her own… but, to repeat what I wrote above, it’s important to know whether or not that should be accomplished inside the sandbox of what’s considered acceptable. DF: Anything Lee-related you want to plug that’s coming up? LN: I have numerous writing and cartooning projects I’m trudging towards getting done, but it’s too premature to discuss any of them yet.

PART THREE: PLATINUM DF: Talk about Platinum’s “mission.” It has aspects of both a comics company and a TV/movie production and development company. What’s the thinking behind this? LN: Simply put, Scott Rosenberg has carved out a niche for himself in Hollywood as the premiere film and television production company that bases its properties on comics. Both comics and film are visual storytelling mediums, so, while our comics might not be blueprints for films or shows, they do function as dramatic representations of stories that we feel could be compellingly adapted from one medium to the next. NORDLING | 65

DF: As Executive Editor, what is your role in Platinum’s creative process? LN: My office has three primary roles. I review previously published comics and recommend those that I feel could be adapted into film or TV. I work with creators to develop their concepts into finished comics, for the purpose of acquiring the properties, so that we can adapt them into film or TV. I work with creators to develop Platinum-developed concepts into finished comics, so that we can adapt them into film or TV. DF: Why—and how—should people bring their ideas to Platinum? LN: They can send an email to me at lee@platinumstudios.com with their land-mail address and phone number. I will mail them a submission kit, which contains information about our program and includes a submission agreement that I would need signed and returned before I can review any submissions. DF: Can they send their ideas to other studios/developers at the same time? LN: Sure. DF: Do they need an agent? LN: Well, yes, and there’s the rub… but creators don’t need an agent to work with us. To clarify, we need creators to sign and send to us a submission agreement before we can review their work. This is to protect us legally from the kind of lawsuits that always seem to occur when a film or TV show is produced. Somebody always seems to think some produced flying man story was taken from his or her flying man story, and this is the reason studios won’t review scripts or concepts, unless the writer has an agent or manager.

More Dick Giordano art from Ghosting. [© & TM Platinum Studios, LLC] 66 | WRITE NOW

Our submission agreement gives us the same legal protection, thereby allowing creators to bridge the “needs an agent” problem. DF: How is Platinum like other development groups? How different from them? LN: For comics creators, other film and television production companies would need to see a finished comic in order to determine whether or not they’d be interested in offering an option. We’re in the business of creating the finished comics, so we prefer to see projects at a very early stage of development. [For more about Platinum Studios and its unique role in Hollywood and in the comics community, see our upcoming interview with its founder, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. —DF]

PART FOUR: COMICS INTO MOVIES (and TV) DF: If one wants to be in movies or TV—as a writer, director, producer or development person—are comics a good place to get into the game, (both in comics-friendly times like our postSpider-Man movie era, and at other times)? LN: I think a writer could logically consider comics as a starting place that could bridge to film, but no other film-related careers make sense with comics as a starting point… except perhaps in the area of storyboard art. I feel sorry for screenwriters who aren’t getting their work read or responded to. People spend a year writing a script and can’t find anybody to read it. It’s very frustrating for them. This is where a finished comic has a real advantage in getting a Hollywood exec’s attention—it’s an easy read.

That said, it could be a problem for a writer to shift from one form of writing to another. Not everybody can make the transition. I won’t name names here, but there are some very popular comics writers that Hollywood studios would pay not to write adaptations of their own comics… so success in one industry doesn’t necessarily lead to another. DF: How can a comics creator capitalize on the current eagerness for comics properties in Hollywood? LN: Create a comic that has a broader appeal and is more visually accessible than most of what’s currently being distributed from Diamond. That’s what Platinum is doing with all its projects. DF: Why are comics useful in selling property concepts? LN: I’m repeating myself a little here, but it’s probably good to drive home the point. Comics and film are both visual storytelling mediums, and, for all their differences, that similarity makes a comic a good sales tool for showing what is compelling about a story and its characters.

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been rejected by every syndicate and nobody showed a modicum of interest, then your strip was not some combination of good or commercial enough. If you created a brilliant and commercial comic strip: (Please circle one)

• You will still only be in the top 1% of submitters. • You will be syndicated, because all the best strips ARE in the newspaper.

• You will be syndicated, and you’re guaranteed a living for the life of your contract. A: You will be syndicated, because all the best strips ARE in the newspaper. The truth is that all the really good and commercial strips are in the newspaper… and if your strip isn’t one of them, this is something you can control—you can do better next time.

PART 5: Launching your comic strip Okay, a syndicate salesman is on the road with your strip and showing it to newspaper editors. The editor has to drop one of his/her current strips to buy your strip. Traditionally, which is the easiest kind of comic strip to replace in the paper? (Circle one)

• A strip that’s been around for fifty-plus years and has changed creators several times.

• A strip that’s been around thirty years and seems to be recycling the same sense of humor on a daily basis. • A strip that’s in its prime and has been in the paper for a few years. • A brand-new strip that’s full of juice that the newspaper bought within the last year. A: A brand-new strip that’s full of juice that the

DF: If your comic property gets picked up, what are your chances of being involved as writer or in whatever capacity on the film or TV show? LN: Unless a writer has already sold a film or TV script, or is an unbelievably good screen or TV writer, it’s very unlikely that we would seriously consider attaching them to their project. For a project that we were setting up as TV or feature animation, an artist has some possibility of being attached to the show in a conceptual art basis, but that depends on how much the studio is interested in continuing with the specific look of the original comic. Scott consults with creators on the adaptation of their property into film or TV, and that may end up being as involved as they ever get. DF: Thanks for your time and thoughtful responses, Lee. Enjoy the autumn in Pennsylvania. LN: If I can ever get outside, I will. Thanks.

THE END

newspaper bought within the last year. Think of it this way, which strip doesn’t have an established readership that’s going to squawk if it’s pulled? Yep, the new guy. In fact, the first five years are the most vulnerable time for a new strip, and every syndicate salesman (from the other syndicates, not yours) is out to get you. Does that make you paranoid? Good… because they will be after you! Knowing that newspaper editors share opinions about new strips being launched, what is the minimum number of newspapers that’s considered necessary to launch a strip with hope for ongoing success? (Please circle the correct number) 4

10-15

25-30

45-50

75-80

A: 25-30. Even though Peanuts launched with only four newspapers, that was a different era, where cities often had more than one newspaper… and everybody gave comic strips time to grow. Now, like films, strips need to launch dynamically, with enough positive word of mouth and optimism for newspapers to be ready to jump on the bandwagon. If a strip launches with less than twenty-five papers, that’s a big show of no-confidence by the newspapers (unless they happen to be the twenty-four largest papers in the country, which is different and extremely unlikely)… and that’s a very tough mountain for a new strip to climb. If you’re interested in knowing more about the business of newspaper comic strip syndication, you can find my book, Your Career In the Comics, at Amazon.com for under $10. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at: LeNordling@aol.com.

THE END NORDLING | 67

Here’s a step-by-step exploration of a full script created comic. In full script, the writer provides a panel-by-panel description of the story, including the dialogue, captions, and sound effects that go into each panel.

In this Phantom story for Moonstone comics, writer Tom DeFalco begins the process with a story proposal. This allows the editor to know what story Tom intends to tell.

But, as often happens, things that seemed to work in proposal may not come together in the actual script. For example, as you can see, the art (by Lou Manna) was done from a Revised Script. 68 | WRITE NOW

The main difference between the script versions is the interpretation of a phrase in the beginning of the proposal: “… we open with a brief recap of the Phantom’s origin.”

Originally, that probably meant there’d be a small caption that recapped the origin. Somewhere along the way, it was decided that the “brief recap” warranted adding an entire page to the story. This gives a more visceral sense of who the Phantom is.

Also, although the story is action-packed, the Phantom doesn’t show up until the last few pages. By putting his origin in the beginning, we get a cool action shot of the character on the first page. With this added page, page one of the first version of the script (the plane getting lost in the storm) becomes page two of the revised script, page two becomes page three, and so on.

PHANTOM | 69

The story continues to follow the proposal outline, with most of the revised script much like the first version. But there are a couple of pages that have substantial changes from one draft to the next for emphasis, pacing, or dialogue tweaks. Compare the drafts and the pencil art and you’ll see the differences.

70 | WRITE NOW

It’s countless decisions like these, about small and large matters, that add up to a finished comics story. Do the changes improve the story? Do they hurt it? Storytelling is all about such decisions and their effects.

You'll be able to read the complete, finished story early in 2003, when Moonstone publishes it.

PHANTOM | 71

Truth or Daria!

The ANNE D. BERNSTEIN Interview Interview by Danny Fingeroth 8/15/02 Copy-edited by Anne D. Bernstein Transcription by The LongBox.com Staff

nne D. Bernstein has been a fixture on the downtown/underground New York writing, cartooning, and comedy scenes. Her eclectic interests and accomplishments led her to the work she’s best known for, her stint as a regular writer on MTV’s animated Daria series. Sending up both mainstream culture and well as the foibles of those who would sit in judgement of it, Daria was in may ways the perfect outlet for Anne’s dry humor and distinctive take on life. She was also instrumental in the creation of the acclaimed MTV Downtown series. Anne’s an animation writer who doesn’t live in LA. While New York isn’t exactly out of the way, it isn’t where conventional wisdom says a TV writer should live. How does she maintain a career in what’s (a) a demanding atmosphere and (b) a notorious boys’ club? In the following interview, Anne tells us just how she traveled her particular road, and what she’s learned along the way.

DANNY FINGEROTH: I’m here with Anne D. Bernstein, don’t forget the D. ANNE D. BERNSTEIN: It’s Anne-D, not A-N-D-Y. DF: The readers of Write Now! no doubt know her work if not her name. She is most well known as one of the writers and story editors for Daria. ADB: I was not the story editor. DF: But you’ve been a story editor of other shows, right? ADB: Yes, I have been a story editor. [laughter] I’ve given notes many a time, and I’ve taken notes many a time. DF: She’s even been a development executive. ADB: I’ve been part of a development team. DF: She’s been part of a development team. Anne is a zany, downtown New York creative person who has worked in comedy, animation, and comics, although not the super-hero stuff that Write Now! generally focuses on… ADB: What am I doing in this magazine? [laughter] DF: Write Now!—if you read the subtitle—is “about The eponymous star MTV’s Daria series. [©2002 MTV Networks.] 72 | WRITE NOW

writing in comics, animation and science fiction.” I know two of them are media and the other is a genre, but no need to get technical. But there’s nothing there that says nonsuper-hero stuff would not be in Write Now! magazine. ADB: You deal with that world of alternative/underground people sometimes. DF: Sometimes. Some of my best friends are in that alternative area. Actually, these days there is a lot of crossover that seems to be happening. One of the tactics that the mainstream companies are using is raiding talent from the so-called alternative side. Anne is here, so let’s get down to it. You’ve written all sorts of stuff. Do you see a thread between all the things you do? ADB: It’s hard to make sense of my career because it’s so eclectic. DF: Was it planned that way or did it just happen? ADB: I had many interests and my “career plan was not logical at all, although as a kid I read and drew a lot, thereby unknowingly preparing myself for a career. I hope that’s encouraging to anyone who is confused about what they want to do at any point of their life. All through my 20s I was doing different things. I have an art background and I did writing. It seemed really schizophrenic. But then, as time went on, both those interests came together in a lot of projects where I really had this great advantage from having done so many things when I was younger. When I was really young I always assumed that I was going to be an artist. I assumed that I was going to go to art school, which I did. I went to the School of Visual Arts. I was one of these kids that drew all the time and I figured that I’d do something with art or publishing. The writing wasn’t something I ever expected to get paid for. I was usually the kid that wrote the funny lyrics at camp. I was a big comedy fan, so there were roots of an interest in comedy and in comics, but it was really not what I expected what I would be making a living doing. DF: You have a letter from Mel Brooks in your private collection. What’s the story behind that? ADB: You and I were talking earlier, before the tape went on, about fandom. I have this love/hate attraction/repulsion thing about fandom in general, because in my background, there is a lot of geekiness having been a comedy fan and having been the kind of person who memorized Monty Python routines and would sit with a friend and act them out. I was really aware of who the writers were. In early Saturday Night Live you can see a lot of the writers in bit parts in a lot of the sketches, and I was very interested and familiar with who wrote what. I remember walking down the street in New York City and

do. entering a card shop and going, “Oh my God—that guy over DF: So when you wrote the letter to Mel Brooks, it wasn’t, there is [SNL writer] Alan Zweibel!” He later went on to write for “Maybe I’ll be a comedy writer one day, and he can help me Gary Shandling and he was one of the original Saturday Night break in.” It was, “Mel Brooks is cool, and I want to write him a Live writers. He was also from Long Island, and I’m from Long letter.” Island. I was really excited and whoever I was with was like, ADB: I did write funny things, but for my own amusement. I “How do you know what the writers look like?” I said, “If you wrote a comedy newsletter for some reason in junior high. watch the sketches, you can see that’s [writer] Anne Beatts Remember when teachers would make “dittos”? They didn’t sitting at the table.” I was always interested in Mad Magazine have photocopiers, so teachers in elementary schools would and National Lampoon and Monty Python. I was at a lot of the copy material on this weird purple thing. Mimeographs. My live Andy Kaufman shows that are depicted in the movie about mother was a teacher, so I used to make my own comedy publihis life [Man on the Moon]. cations with her dittos. It would be two pages and done on DF: You must have been very young. mimeograph. I would end up writing a lot in my life, and yet I ADB: That was junior high and into high school. I had a bunch assumed that I was going to be a visual artist. of friends who were Andy Kaufman fans. I was a comedy fan. DF: When the other kids were out playing ball, were you at home Career-wise, I was interested in publishing in general, and writing and drawing, or were you out playing ball too? magazines in particular. I figured I’d be a graphic designer, ADB: I was a complete gym spaz and avoided gym all costs. which was my major in college. Probably 95% of all people who end up being writers and DF: And the Mel Brooks story…? [laughter] artists are not athletes. It’s amazing to meet a writer or ADB: Real cohesive interview. I also liked Mel Brooks at the cartoonist who was popular and athletic. I admire people who time. I don’t know where he took the wrong turn somewhere are popular and athletic if they are good people, but I was later in life, but he did some incredible and wonderful definitely an “in-my-head” kid. comedies like Young Frankenstein and the work with Carl DF: What was your favorite snack while watching Reiner. I loved Mel Brooks. And I used to write letters to television as a kid? people. I have an autographed picture from ADB: I didn’t expect that question. It was ice Groucho Marx I got from writing to him. So, one cream. I was a really skinny kid and I ate day I wrote to Mel Brooks and asked: “Where enormous amounts of food as a kid. can you get a good egg cream in New DF: Potato sticks and milk is what I usually York?” [An egg cream is a local New York had because it is both fried and carbohybeverage made of seltzer water, milk and drate. chocolate syrup. It contains neither eggs ADB: That’s sounds horrible. nor cream. —Ed.] I don’t know what DF: Have you tried it? O & C brand made me do it, but I got a letter with the shoestring potato sticks? return address “20th Century Fox,” and I ADB: My sister liked those onion rings in was like: “Why am I getting a letter from a can. 20th Century Fox?” I guess Mel Brooks DF: Now those are vile. [laughter] Nobody thought the question was funny enough that can eat those. he bothered to write me a letter about his ADB: I can talk about junk food for hours. favorite egg cream place on the Lower East Side. I still have that letter in my kitchen. [©2002 MTV Networks.] DF: We’ll make that a special sidebar. So… you liked to write, but you went to art school to be a DF: So, where can you get a good egg cream in New painter/cartoonist/graphic designer? York? ADB: I went to the School of Visual Arts and I graduated in ADB: He was talking about a place that doesn’t exist anymore, ’83. I majored in graphic design. The thing I loved about SVA because he mentioned that it was at Second Avenue and 12th was that, at the time—I think it’s changed since—but the first Street. Or he may have meant Gem Spa [a candy, soda and year they told you exactly what to take. It was a foundation year magazine store in the East Village. No spa facilities. —Ed.], and you had to take photography and drawing and other basic which still exists on 8th Street and Second Avenue. But I can’t things. After that, you had a couple of courses that were really confirm. Either he was talking about a candy store that required, and everything else you could pick and choose from doesn’t exist anymore, or he meant Gem Spa. Gem Spa does a different departments, as opposed to schools like Parsons, pretty good egg cream. where, if you decide to be an illustrator you only hung around DF: Where did you get the autographed Groucho picture? with illustrators and you took a lot of illustration classes. For ADB: I got this urge once in a while to write to someone I really someone like me, who was eclectic and restless, it was great liked. I also have a postcard from [Monty Python’s] Michael to be able to pick and choose from different departments. Palin. A lot of people write back to their fans, personally. I went When I was there, there were two things going on. One was the to see Monty Python at City Center in New York, and Terry East Village art scene. But I didn’t relate to all the fine art Gilliam autographed my T-shirt. people who sat in circles smoking cigarettes and being really DF: That’s the difference between a movie or TV star as opposed serious and saying they were non-commercial when the whole to a writer or director. For the most part, no one knows what the point was to kiss up to rich people and sell them paintings. I writers or directors look like, so they don’t get swamped on the was into commercial art, and there was a division. Because streets or have that same glamour. So comedy was your first commercial artists were going to do these “horrible” love? commercial things. ADB: Art too. Art was really important. Comedy was more an The other exciting thing that nobody noticed at the time was interest. I would never say that it was something I planned to BERNSTEIN | 73

that Art Spiegelman was teaching there. He was teaching a history of comics course along with other classes, too. My roommate took his history class. I didn’t take the class, but I would sit in on it because he didn’t care if extra people would watch the lectures. There were the most amazing group of people doing comics at the time, and I could tell that the wider world and the art world didn’t recognize or care about this and had no idea about this amazing thing that was going on at the time. When I went to SVA people that were going there were Mark Newgarden, Drew Friedman, J. Paulgo (AKA Jayr Pulga), Kaz, and Glenn Head. And there were people like Peter Bagge, who weren’t going to the school but were in the same crowd. There were people around in the same scene doing exciting work, such as Gary Panter and Wayne White. There was Mark Beyer, and all these people who were working for Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Raw Magazine, and some were working for another publication called Bad News. These people were doing stuff that was really interesting, but the illustration department was conservative. They would teach you that if you wanted to do a romance book cover, this is where you put the castle, and over here you put the couple kissing. It was very technical and conventional, and these cartoonists were doing very personal work. I found it amazing and exciting. That’s where my interests in comics started. DF: I think there were probably a bunch of mainstream comics teachers and students at SVA at the time. That’s where a lot of people that I know from comics came from. But those were not the people that you gravitated towards. ADB: Within the school, I was taking graphic design classes and was getting a lot of basic, technical background to work in magazines and do layout. But I really got very interested in this new wave of cartoonists. I thought they were doing something really exciting that no one cared about at the time. DF: Did you try to draw comics like them, or your own kind, or to hook up with artists to write stuff for? How was your creative work evolving at this time? ADB: I just started hanging out with cartoonists and being interested. I had an interest before, through Lampoon, and I had a friend, Robert Leighton and we used to go to the Creation Comic Book Conventions and sit at the table with the Lampoon people. Nobody at the comics conventions cared about them. You’d have this huge convention and everybody was really excited about the more mainstream stuff, and you go over to the Lampoon table, and there would be Bobby London or Shary Flenniken or Sam Gross sitting there, and no one was talking to them. You’d go over and talk to Sam Gross and he would draw a cartoon for you. I could yak with Sherri Flenniken. I really got interested in those cartoonists and I became more aware of underground comics, and it was just a very strong interest that I kept for ten years until I applied it while I was the cartoon editor at Nickelodeon magazine. And I drew some comics, such as the first cover and other stuff for Drawn and Quarterly and some other anthology titles. When I got out of school I was a graphic designer and I also did illustration. DF: So, professionally, you were a graphic designer? ADB: Yes. My first job was in the art department at Redbook magazine, and I did a lot of freelancing, too. One client was Fortune magazine where the big decisions to make were things like, “Do you put the businessman’s picture on the left or the right?” And, “Is the caption on the guy’s picture one line or two?” I did paste-up, which is an art that has no application anymore—now I would be doing Photoshop layouts or Quark. I 74 | WRITE NOW

entered this period after school where my day jobs were art department jobs, design jobs, paste-up jobs, and I also did illustration and started to write for free. DF: You did illustration of what kind? ADB: Some illustrations for magazines and for the New York Times, but not that many. I was very frustrated in my 20s. That’s why I want to encourage anyone who is frustrated in the beginning. Because I felt like I was too scattered in different directions. I saw people doing one thing and I felt like they were moving faster. They had a goal and they wanted to become an art director and they knew they wanted to do (IT). Or I knew people that just painted all the time and their work was moving fast. In the end, it turned out to be cool, because I had this broader background and it came together later in a good way. DF: So you spent ten years working day jobs in the publishing industry? ADB: Actually, I only had one normal staff job in ten years, which was for Redbook. Then I became one of those freelancers where, maybe I’m a paste-up artist this week or have an illustration to do overnight, or maybe I don’t make any money this week. [laughter] I also started to write for Chucklehead, which was a comedy troupe. DF: How did that start? ADB: It came out of being interested in comedy. When I was in college, I stayed friends with Robert Leighton, who founded the humor magazine at Northwestern University, which is called Rubber Teeth, and through him, I met a bunch of other people who worked on humor magazines around the country at different colleges. There was a guy named Joey Green who used to organize a little convention for people who were editors

of humor magazines and they had one in Manhattan one year. It was crazy. There were underground and mainstream people and I met all these guys who wanted to be comedy writers. Joey was working on this big project that never went anywhere—a parody of college textbooks. One day I went to a meeting in a Time, Inc. conference room. Someone in our crowd worked there and snuck us in after hours.) At this meeting, I started throwing out ideas, and this guy said, “Do you want to write that one?” I said,” Okay.” That never went anyplace, but I met all these people that wanted to be comedy writers. To make the story short, one of them, Jay Martel, started doing his own shows and formed a comedy troupe. I began hanging out with them, originally making props, and then I started to write. I did that on and off for seven years. DF: What is the proportion of men to women in the comedy world? ADB: I can’t speak for sitcoms, because I get the feeling that there are more women in Hollywood, but there were many times when I was a contributing editor for the National Lampoon when I would be sitting in the room with thirteen men and be the only woman. Many times. When we were doing the textbook parody, we had a meeting at my apartment and my roommate walked in and saw me on the floor in a circle of twelve or thirteen guys and wanted to know what was going on. [laughter] If you are a woman who writes comedy, you have to struggle with the fact that you are in a minority and there will be attention drawn to you in various ways, not necessarily sexual. It’s just that you will be the odd person out a lot of times, and you have to learn to deal with that because it’s harder to blend into the group. Many times people will turn to you and expect you to represent women. Anne’s story “Out of Control Fantasy Comics,” which she wrote and drew, from the first issue of DF: Do you like being in a situation where you Drawn & Quarterly. [©2002 Anne D. Bernstein.] are the only woman in a group of guys? things for free. Once you start making a living writing, a lot ADB: I got this education in how to stand up for myself, and people start asking you how to do it. Basically, you have to how to deal with some issues in an environment that wasn’t a show people what you can write, and you want to find your professional, paid environment. [laughter] It took me a long voice. And a lot of times, those things start out with things for time, but I learned how to work with groups and to collaborate. free, or projects you come up with for yourself, or starting a I learned how to deal with group dynamics that I would later comedy troupe or making a super-8 movie or something with a face in a professional environment, but at that point there was camcorder. I once was talking to someone who wanted to be a no money involved. comedy writer. He wrote for a trade magazine about mining. I DF: And you performed as well? said, “Find a way to write something funny and find a place to ADB: No. put it.” People who hire you do not have a lot of imagination. DF: You didn’t perform? They don’t think when looking for a comedy writer that they ADB: Except for minor roles including having to hop across the should look for a guy who writes about mining. They want you stage in a kangaroo suit. I almost knocked over the guy playing to hand them something that cracks them up. My first writing the keyboard. That’s my favorite story. I had to hop across the job that I got paid for was for a friend of someone in stage in a kangaroo suit and something fell down over my eyes Chucklehead who came to see the show, a great writer named and I couldn’t see where I was going. After that, I decided that Will McRobb, (and the co-creator of Pete and Pete, which is my performing was not for me. favorite show ever on Nickelodeon. He said that if any of the DF: You tossed out before that you were a contributing editor to writers wanted to work for Nickelodeon promos, to come over National Lampoon. Is that further along in the narrative? and see him. I started getting paid professionally by doing all ADB: The challenge for Danny in this interview is to make kinds of weird little jobs. I wrote jokes for Global Village News. I sense of the chronology. My writing career started by writing BERNSTEIN | 75

wrote questions for game shows, which is a horrible job. I started to know all these writers that were doing stupid little jobs around New York and these writers are amazing people that now run sitcoms. But when I met then we were all working on dumb little shows. Then there was a strange period in National Lampoon history, towards the end, when it had been sucking for a very long time and for some reason they hired George Barkin to edit it. I don’t know much about George Barkin. He’s Ellen Barkin’s brother, and that’s about all I knew about him. DF: There’s your connection to mainstream comics. Ellen Barkin is married to Ronald Perelman, who used to own Marvel. ADB: This is like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but it’s Six Degrees of Ellen Barkin. George Barkin hired amazing people. There was a short period where they were trying to revive Lampoon and it got really funny again. Then they closed it and didn’t pay anybody and it was a big mess. I started to be a contributing editor because I knew people like Larry Doyle who went on to write for the Simpsons, and now has a movie coming out from Miramax. He was somebody I met working on lots of dinky Nickelodeon shows and he became an editor at National Lampoon. Also Chris Marcil and Sam Johnson, who are producers for Frasier now. These were people who were just around New York trying to find work. And most of the work in New York was somehow connected to MTV Networks. So I became a contributing editor for a brief time when it was funny, when it stopped sucking for a little while before it went under. DF: You are from the New York area. Did you live downtown then? ADB: No. For many years I almost lived in Manhattan. I lived in Hoboken and then Astoria. I was just across the water trying to jump on over. Hoboken was a great place to live when I lived there while going to art school in the early ’80s, because there were a lot of cartoonists that lived there and there was an incredible music scene at Maxwell’s. It’s always great to live someplace at a time when it’s interesting. Then I spent most nights in the East Village, but I was too afraid to live there because people would come to school with this really blasé attitude like, “Somebody shot my super this morning and I had to step over the body.” [laughter] I didn’t think I could live like this. “There’s this guy with a needle sticking out of his arm that was knocking on the door last night.” So I used to go out to the East Village and then come home to this somewhat safer place called Hoboken, New Jersey.

DF: You’re from the area and came to New York itself and found a group of like-minded people. It sounds like you helped each other. ADB: I found two groups, and sometimes people overlapped. I think that was the most important thing: that I recognized the people that I thought were really funny and talented and intelligent. I wasn’t about what you could do for me, or that guy’s got connections and a development deal, because no one had a development deal. None of the cartoonists made any money. I like to say that I used to do my laundry with Peter Bagge. He lived a few blocks from me. When I first met Peter Bagge, I said, “This guy is really good,” and that he was going to do something amazing. If you can find people and recognize that they’re not hacks and that they’re not just going through the motions and that there’s a spark there, then later on in life, you’ll end up working with them on projects that get put on TV or something. DF: Your career has three elements: the comedy, the cartooning, and the animation. Where did the animation connection come in? ADB: I wasn’t originally an animation writer. I was a comedy writer. I didn’t want to be called a comedy writer because I think people expect comedy writers to be stand-up comedians and to be attention-getting and to crack a lot of jokes and be very big personalities. I really don’t write anything that doesn’t have some humor to it. I tried, but it never happened, so I was a comedy writer. The animation thing only comes in way later after I worked for Nickelodeon magazine and this thing called Daria came up. It was just a project that came up that was a really good fit with what I was interested in and with my own personality. Since Daria, I’ve stayed in animation because I really love the medium and the people. I really love animation people. DF: What have you done in live action? ADB: A lot of Nickelodeon shows, such as Welcome Freshmen, and I wrote for a sketch comedy show called Random Acts of Variety on the now-defunct cable network Ha! and I wrote for live sketch comedy. I mostly wrote thinking of actors performing my stuff and not animation, but I had this cartooning background. I knew all these cartoonists and they had done the cartoons for Drawn and Quarterly and things like that. When I started working for Nickelodeon magazine, that’s when the writing and cartooning things came together, as they also did with Daria. So I started to specialize in projects that were related to cartoons and animation. They were writing projects, but there was a visual side, and even if I didn’t do the visual side myself, and was working with artists, I still had that awareness and real love of the visual stuff. DF: Was Nick magazine the first time you had a job where you fully made a living in a creative field, as opposed to freelancing here and there? ADB: Freelancing is creative. Between Redbook, where I actually had insurance—let’s make the distinction of when I had insurance and didn’t have insurance. When you’re a creative person, generally this is the big distinction. Either you pay for your own insurance or a corporation pays your insurance. So for a very long time, I was a freelancer. I used to be very proud, when I did my taxes, of how little I made. I’d do my taxes with my mom and say, “I managed to support myself on that little money.” DF: Was that money from writing or from art and designing? ADB: It was always a mixture. I always preferred it to be from

writing and illustration, but sometimes it was from pasting up charts. Nothing was a full-time gig until Nickelodeon magazine. When Nickelodeon magazine started up, before it had published its first issue, I was hired, got insurance, and went to work every day for two to three years. That was a real job. DF: That the Nickelodeon magazine job was something you got through the people that you knew at MTV and Nickelodeon already? ADB: When you freelance, you’re always looking for work. Sometimes I’d be at the Nickelodeon offices, looking for freelance assignments, and I would walk around and see people I knew and schmooze. I’d ask them: “What’s going on?” One day, someone said they were starting a magazine and here’s a name to look up. I said “that’s good,” because I had written for magazines before—for Spy and National Lampoon and Paper, When I’m looking for a job, I always have this attitude of, “Will I like this project?” I’m not real specific about, “I want to do print or I want to do animation or I want to do live action.” It’s: “Do I like the project?” I called the person who was starting the magazine, and I got hired as senior editor. When I got there, the great thing was that they knew they wanted to do this comics section. At the time, Craig Yoe had a deal with Nickelodeon. He edited the first prototype of the comics pages, but it was like a consultant thing. So I got hired on staff, and I went to the editor-in-chief and said, “You have to let me do this comics section because I’ve been hanging out with cartoonists for over a decade and I love comics. I want this to be part my job. I want to do the comics section.” And she agreed to let me do it. So finally I had a job that brought all this weird stuff together. DF: Sorry if I’m being repetitive, but I think that to someone on the outside that’s the most mystifying thing. “How do I get past that wall from my friends saying, ‘You write well,’ to a situation where someone is handing me a check for my writing?” ADB: I was once on a panel and was asked:, “How do you become a comedy writer?” I said, “There’s a simple way. You get into Harvard and you work on the Lampoon and you get out and you talk to the alumni and you get hired on a sitcom and you get rich.” This is not to disparage many Harvard Lampoon people that I know and who are incredibly talented. Then there are other people that don’t go that way. DF: In any other field—you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you know what you have to do. In most fields there is a way you do it. Entertainment and other creative fields have something like that, but it’s much more variable and informal. ADB: There are a million ways in. The thing that I always found interesting is that a lot of people are not realistic or logical in going about it. When I used to work in art departments, I worked for a while freelance at the New York Times magazine. They had “portfolio day.” You would get the most amazing number of portfolios, and people would flip through them in two seconds. I used to do illustrations for Student Lawyer magazine. I’m not saying this is great work, but everyone wants to be in the New Yorker—and I know people who do covers for the New Yorker—but I never thought that any of my friends would do covers for the New Yorker. It seemed so unobtainable. But these are the same people who used to get paid by the question for Nickelodeon game shows or made their own ’zines. Or they did a show in a hellhole on the Lower East Side. You have to network and meet people who do creative stuff and trust that, if you have something to say and

stick with it, you will start to get work that will lead to better things. DF: It’s like you have to want it, but not want it, at the same time. ADB: For everybody like me, that came to it in a strange way, there’s someone really confident, and maybe really talented—or maybe not talented [laughter]—but maybe really pushy who gets famous and rich sooner. They’re on the pushy person track. I’ve been on the development side too, so I’ve seen how people approach somebody who is on the inside and can give them work. It’s just amazing what people do. I always said that if someone comes in and their portfolio is covered with fuzzy pink fabric, they’re probably not the best person for a given job. DF: In order to be available to network, one must be in a place where there are people to network with. You’ve gravitated to the New York scene, whereas a lot of people say you have to go to LA to be in the animation business. ADB: I don’t think that is necessarily true. I’m happy when things come out of places other than New York and LA. Mystery Science Theatre is not something that came out of New York or LA. Was it Minneapolis that it came out of? You have to find a way for people to see your stuff. With the Internet, I think it’s a lot easier, because somebody could make a really fabulous animation and, well, you know how fast things go around. Like the guy who did Joe Cartoon, everybody was talking about Joe Cartoon all of a sudden and he didn’t have to be in LA or New York. He made something, and he put it out, and he kept working and got his work exposed. Personally, though, I get a lot out of being face to face with a lot of other BERNSTEIN | 77

people in an exciting city like New York. DF: I imagine that people must say to you all the time that you should move to LA, or that if you moved to LA you could have this project or that project. Half the people you meet in LA are from New York. ADB: There is an advantage to being in New York. I’ve had the benefit of working with people that I like and who know me. I’ve worked on projects where there were not a lot of layers of bureaucracy. For example, with Daria, I mostly worked with only one person—Glenn Eichler, which is unheard of in Hollywood. With most sitcoms, you sit in a room with a lot of writers, not just one other person. But when you work outside of the center of the industry, you can work on more interesting projects, and on things that get in under the radar. I feel that I’ve been lucky because the things that I’ve worked on haven’t had a lot of bureaucratic levels. When I write a Daria script, I feel like most of it came from me. In LA, people work on projects that get rewritten tremendously, or the person whose name is on it doesn’t reflect who really wrote it. DF: Most sitcoms have a staff of writers in a room and then one of them is picked to put it on paper, but it’s the product of ten different people. ADB: That’s the advantage of working for a really cheap place. I won’t skirt this issue. If you work for a place where the budget is low, the advantage is that there’s a small staff, and people really do get to express themselves in a way that’s hard to do in more mainstream Hollywood settings. DF: Animation is famous for being the lowest-paying form of script writing. Is that an impetus to you to want to switch over to live action, or do you like animation enough to stick with it despite the lower pay? ADB: If you look at my career choices, it’s obvious that money was not my primary concern. I had to deal with this a lot when there were forks in the road. Had I moved to LA ten years ago, I’d be writing sitcoms and have a lot more money. I did take this sitcom-writing workshop that I really liked a lot. DF: I took the same workshop a few years later. It’s given by a group called TIPS—(To Increase Production in the East—which

is affiliated with the Emmy people, I think. ADB: It’s a really great workshop in New York. The woman who ran it, Martha Greenhouse, ran it to support bringing TV and movie work to New York. She would get really good people, who were working or trying to work in New York, to come in and speak. Every single time there was a guest speaker, people would ask the LA question. I felt so bad for her because every time the expert/guest would say, “You probably should move to LA.” Even though the point of the course was to encourage the creative community in New York, people would say that LA is where the work is. Studios say it’s more expensive to do it here in New York, but I think it’s more of a control thing. The executives want to be able to go down to the studio floor and see the creative people. They want to know the person face-to-face. You can’t get around that unless you’re a famous person, someone that’s made a mark in theatre or something—like David Mamet or John Waters. Then you can live where you want and people will come to you. DF: The fact that a lot of your career has been in publishing reflects the New York side of it. That’s really what New York has traditionally been known for, publishing, whether it’s books or magazines or comics. People who are print cartoonists would gravitate to a place like that. ADB: There’s a mystique about New York writers in Los Angeles. If you insist on staying here, it makes it hard to get work. But on the other hand, people have this idea that New York writers are somehow different. DF: And then there are writers that prefer to live wherever. They’re like, “I’m living in Texas and I’m not going anywhere.” There are always people all over the country like that. ADB: When talking about regionalism, or a more regional voice that’s not an LA/New York voice, I think Mike Judge has brought a really interesting voice to animation and comedy. It comes out of his background. His heart is not in New York or LA. I think that’s very cool, because I do get tired of everything being set in LA or New York. DF: They’re like factory towns, where the factory makes entertainment instead of shoes or cars. Now, at last, let’s talk about Daria. Was it the first animated show that you worked on? ADB: I have to think about that. The only other animation I did was some little stuff, like the characters Henry and June’s intros for KaBlam! on Nickelodeon. DF: How did your involvement in Daria come about? ADB: I knew that I was going to be leaving Nickelodeon magazine. Let me backtrack to that for a minute. I said that I really wanted to do this comics section—and I’m still really proud about the work that was done on the comics section—because I was very interested in using atypical people. So when I got there, I contacted all these cartoonists that came out of the “underground” world. Everybody from the original underground—people like Kim Deitch and younger people like Sam Henderson and Jason Lutes. I worked with a lot of good people. Kaz, Mark Newgarden, and Jay Stephens did stuff for us. All these great people. And we didn’t have a magazine yet. It started with people pitching ideas for ongoing comic series and me choosing the ones I liked. I ended up editing people whose work I loved. I was really proud of the comics section. I hoped that it would have the impact on people that I had when I would read Mad Magazine. I’d look at the submissions and say,

“There’s something a little off about this. This comic is a little weird, and I like that. It comes from the right personal place.” It was a great opportunity to help talented people pay their rent. There’s no doubt that in cartooning, especially if it’s not mainstream, people get paid a pittance. It’s unbelievable. I did some things with a smaller anthology where they paid something like $25 a page. At that point, I had some regular work doing something else and I said, “Don’t bother trying to send me $25 from Canada. Just send me a stack of comic books.” I wanted to talk about that part of my career, because it also prepared me for the work I did with MTV in animation and development and working with creators. I did a lot of work with MTV Animation later on in story editing, collaborating, cowriting and working with creators who had previously done a lot of work where they had complete control, not commercial work. I thought it was really exciting to find a fairly well-paying commercial outlet for people to make a little rent money. Cartoonists who do their own books and get published with Fantagraphics… well, there are some people who make an okay living, but it’s really tough for most of them to even figure a way to pay for basic necessities. DF: What was your “foot in the door” at MTV? ADB: After Nickelodeon, I had added this extra thing of working with cartoonists and developing even more of an interest in comics and animation. Also, I knew a couple of people in the animation department at Nickelodeon. One of them was Jerry Beck, who was there to work on animated features in the movie division. DF: My ex-cousin-in-law. ADB: Yes. There is so much great little trivia. Is there a Danny Fingeroth fan site that will have info like: “Did you know that Danny used to be related to Jerry Beck through marriage?” DF: I won DannyFingeroth.com, I haven’t put anything up there yet. ADB: The other person I knew at Nick animation was Linda Simensky, who was in animation development and who is now a bigwig at Cartoon Network. I think we all had similar feeling about working for a corporation, because our sympathies were much more in line with the creators. We were often in-between the creators and the higher ups. We were working for a corporation and working on projects that were seen by millions. Nickelodeon magazine had a circulation of something like three million. And then there’s the pass along audience. That’s a lot of people. And when I wrote for Daria, it’s not like writing for Friends, but the numbers are astounding. DF: That millions of people would look at anything that someone does is mind-boggling. ADB: At Nickelodeon magazine, I always had my sympathies with the creators. You, hopefully, find a way to work on projects that make money for the people that you are working for—you get a decent salary to do that—and still have that flavor of coming from people, as opposed to corporate groupthink cookie cutter committees. I was looking for what I was going to do after the magazine. I wrote one e-mail, because I didn’t want it to get around that I was leaving. The one e-mail was to Abby Terkhule, who I knew from Liquid Television. I did one thing for Liquid Television called “Soap Opera.” I’d also done some other odd jobs for MTV. When I freelanced, I went in for a few days and did some promos, and I worked on this morning

show there called Awake on the Wild Side. Weird—as we get further into the interview, I start to remember all these jobs that I had. You start by writing promos. The first time I wrote an entire show episode that was produced was for Welcome Freshmen, which was a live action show for Nickelodeon. One of the people that produced that—Tim Hill—was in Chucklehead with me. He went on to direct Muppets in Space. When I met Tim, he was in a comedy troupe. Did I know he was going to direct Muppets in Space? Did he know? Of course Beavis & Butthead’s series was the unlikely spawning ground for Daria. not. He was the guy with the [©2002 MTV Networks.] keyboard who wrote the funny comedy songs, and who I almost knocked over when I was hopping across the stage in a kangaroo suit. So, I knew Abby Terkhule, because he had come to see Chucklehead once, and I’d done some little things freelancing for MTV. I wrote him this e-mail asking if anything was going on with them. It was similar to getting the Nickelodeon job, because they were doing this show about this girl which is kind of a spin-off from Beavis and Butthead. I called Glenn Eichler, the series creator. They showed me the very minimal bible that they had for Daria— which is amazing to me now, having worked in development. Things at MTV used to go a lot a more casually and faster than now that they are part of such a gigantic conglomerate. I gave samples to Glenn, and when I read the character descriptions I immediately knew that I could write this show. When you find projects that are right for you, you get a very strong feeling when you read the material. There are lots of other things where you think that, if they paid you, you could manage to do it. It’s okay and you can relate to it a little bit. But when you see a project that’s right for you, you just know. DF: Had you written 22-minute sitcom format stuff before? ADB: The closest thing was Welcome Freshmen. It was like Saved by the Bell. What was interesting is that I had this sample, a two-page piece I wrote for National Lampoon. It was called A Letter to My Daughter. The concept was that a teenage girl writes a letter to the daughter that she will someday have. She puts in it in an envelope and one day your daughter will read it and it will be really deep. When you read the article I wrote, you get the sense that this girl is in a bad position. She fooled around with guy she shouldn’t have and maybe she’s pregnant. It was the easiest thing that I ever wrote, and I usually struggle and it’s painful to write. I just knew this character so well. I think Larry Doyle changed only one word, because it came out so naturally. For years, that was my prize sample. Almost everything I had ever written was character-based and came from a certain sensibility. If you’re going for a writing job where you’ll have to write a three-act structure, then you need that sample. I used to hire writers all the time, and if I didn’t think they had written three-act

Daria co-creator Glenn Eichler. BERNSTEIN | 79

Daria Diaries. We had to create a lot of stuff for that book that didn’t exist before. We created map of the town she lives in. I named the band Mystik Spiral. For people who are into Daria, there are people that are really into Trent, Jan’s hot brother. There was a scene that I wrote that introduced the fact that he’s in a band, and I had a book on my shelf that was about mythology, and it had something about a “mystic spiral.” I thought that was great, but you have to spell it with extra y’s, because bands in high school always have extra consonants. They have k’s and y’s. I made up this band, and as time goes by, there are jokes about the band members and who they are. It’s lovely to see these worlds grow. I’m sure it’s similar in comics and sitcoms. If you build out from something that is focused and good and solid, it’s wonderful. There’s that poster of everyone on The Simpsons that has like 1,000 characters. DF: Just to interject a downer: You don’t get any Left to right: David Volger, former VP of Nickelodeon TV, now of David Volger, Inc.; Anne; monetary benefit from those things that you create that Jerry Beck, former VP at Nickelodeon, animation historian and producer; and Linda Simensky, are now part of the Daria mythology, do you? VP at Cartoon Network. ADB: No. As I said, it’s a big trade-off to work for a company like MTV. They own everything that you do and there’s before, there was no way I was going to take that big a chance. no residuals involved. They’re not bound by the Writer’s Guild I would start them on something small. If you have a sample requirements. There are no residuals and there is no additional that shows you can do three-act, great. But more important is money down the line. I can’t speak for someone who is having a sample in your own voice, one that expresses your officially the creator of anything, so I can’t comment about sensibilities. I always say to people, “Give me a sitcom spec Glenn’s deal or Susie Lewis’s, who were the original co-creators script. But then show me how you write when you’re not trying of the Daria series. I do know that a writer like me gets paid by to imitate Frasier or the Simpsons or Mad About You.” That’s the script, and then my involvement is over. It’s quite sad. one skill you look for, especially when you’re doing develDF: In live action you would get residuals, correct? opment, because you want to know what the person can bring ADB: With most projects done on cable, it’s a complicated that nobody else can. So to answer your question from way issue that I know a lot about and we could go into. back when: It was a combination of samples and knowing DF: Seems appropriate for the scope of Write Now! Glenn and it being the right project that got me onto Daria. I ADB: Most basic cable—including MTV, Nickelodeon, and was originally hired to write the second episode of Daria. Comedy Central—is non-union. Occasionally, there are times DF: So you were on Daria from the very beginning? when they do deal with unions, but they often do it through a ADB: Not the very, very beginning. The initial development was production company. I know there are projects from MTV done by Glenn Eichler, Chris Mercil, and Sam Johnson, and networks that do use SAG [Screen Actors Guild] voice actors. people who had written for Beavis. Mike Judge didn’t want But where I worked, we weren’t allowed to use SAG voices. anything to do with Daria. I don’t know the ins and outs of that. What’s interesting is that, once you get into the WGA [Writers When I heard they were spinning her off, I was puzzled. She Guild of America], which I am not—I’m in what’s called the wasn’t a very major character. But she really had a very strong Animation Caucus but not in the WGA proper—there is a attitude going, and I think that’s the best thing about doing certain point where you’re not supposed to take non-union Daria. If your main character has a really strong point-of-view work. Because most animation work is not done by WGA-bound and you build this world around this character, that is just the studios. Some primetime animation is under WGA contract, key thing. I contributed a lot to the world of the series, adding such as The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and other things for things to it. It’s great when you work on something the first Fox and the Networks. But there’s a loophole. Because most season. I would write an episode and create a character, and animation writers are not represented by the WGA, you can be they would become an ongoing character. For instance, a WGA writer and take a job for some place like MTV Upchuck was originally created to show Jane and Daria around Animation, which is defunct now, and you would not get in a party. When I made him up, I thought that character was only trouble with the union. There are a number of sitcom writers going to be in that one episode. But people liked him, the who wrote for Daria in the earlier seasons and they wouldn’t character design was great, and he ended being a main get in trouble with the WGA. But without the WGA, there are a character for the rest of the series. lot of rights and benefits that you don’t get. You just get paid When I wrote an episode about Jane’s family, I got to create for the script, and that’s the end of it. this entire family. It was stuff that they had hinted at in earlier DF: Is all of basic cable officially exempt from using WGA writers? episodes, but you would make up a character and then it would ADB: There was a lot of controversy at Nickelodeon studios stay around. I had an idea about where Brittany lived that I put last year. Nickelodeon animation writers wanted to be reprein the second episode, and she continued to live in that house sented by the WGA, and there’s a big controversy about what for the entire rest of the series. So when you get in early, it’s happened there, but we’ll see what happens. really wonderful how you establish things and then they DF: Is WGA protected work the kind of thing that being in LA become part of the character’s world. I wrote a book called The 80 | WRITE NOW

took the person three years of their life to finish this thing. You would be helpful for? don’t know if someone helped them with it. You don’t know ADB: Absolutely. There are a lot of amazing writers who want to how many times they rewrote it. And you don’t know how they stay in New York and don’t get those kind of benefits because deal with a deadline. You don’t know if they’re temperamental. there’s not that much Guild work in New York. Some people are just hard to work with. I’m not talking about Another thing about the entertainment industry is that it is people getting ridiculous over stupid notes from the company, very much a power thing. There are people with power and because you should be a little temperamental at a time like clout who will use it, and if a company wants to work with them that. and they have something the company wants, sometimes they But you get hired over and over again because you’ve can get a better deal than the average employee. I have a satisfied the people that you’ve worked for. Basically, every job unique perspective because, on the same given day, I’ve been is a test. I don’t think writing is very easy. I think it’s a painful on both sides. I had an interesting position at MTV Animation. I thing. You procrastinate a lot. In your first issue of this was shared amongst projects, so some of the time I was magazine, one of the writers was talking about “putzing writing Daria, some of the time I was story editing for someone around.” I love it when writers talk about that stuff because else, some of the time I was working in development, and there is nothing that makes you feel more horrible about some of the time I was working on the Daria website. I’ve been yourself than when you’ve been staring at the ceiling or the freelancer on the speakerphone when you do a phone watching Oprah or re-alphabetizing your records or arranging meeting and someone’s voice comes out of the phone and you your work space because you just can’t get started. Writing is don’t know if they’re in their backyard or doing their dishes. You a crazy thing to want to do, in my opinion, and sometimes I don’t know what they’re wearing, but they’re on the phone and think maybe I want a job filing things because, who forgets the their voice comes out, and there are all these other people at alphabet? [laughter] You would go to work and know that B work in an office and they’re in this meeting. I’ve been the comes after A. But every time you write, it’s not like knowing person whose voice (comes out of a phone, but I’ve also been the alphabet, because you start all over. the person in the corporate office staring at a phone. I used to I always make a distinction between hackwork and writing. draw a face on a Post-It and stick it on the phone just to make Hackwork, for a comedy writer, is when you go for the first joke it less weird. that comes into your head, that you know works because So I know what it’s like to try to get work, and I also know you’ve used it before, or someone else has. If you really want why people give some people work and not others. to write, and you want it to be fresh and new, it’s a real DF: Your job in development and editing was a 9 to 5? Was it a challenge. If someone hires you for a job, hopefully you do the paying job or a consultancy? job well, and you’re not a big pain in the ass and you get along ADB: Depending on the situation, I either came to work every with people. day or a certain number of days a week, and I was at the Whenever I hire people, I go for those that I’ve worked with company’s disposal. If they wanted me to work on Daria scripts in the past and who have done a good job. What I’m saying is, for a few weeks, I’d do that. If I was supposed be co-writing or be careful not to screw up and developing a pilot, I’d do that. burn too many bridges. You’re Within the same day, I did a judged not only on your talent, number of different things. but on whether you come DF: How was your involvement with through for people. Doing Downtown different from what you anything commercial, whether it’s did on Daria? print or television, everybody’s ADB: When I first started working job and ego is on the line. at MTV Animation, I mostly worked There’s a lot of pressure, and if in development. Then I wrote someone helps you gets the scripts for Daria. MTV Downtown project done and it comes out was something I worked on from great, you just want to worship almost the very beginning, helping them. [laugh] If somebody with its development, and when it doesn’t make their deadline, or became a show, I became the maybe do a half-assed job head writer. Then I worked exclubecause they took too many jobs sively on that for a while. When it to do at once, you don’t want to got canceled, I went back to work with them again. Or maybe mixing it up. they were just really touchy when DF: Can you talk a little more you gave them a note and about how, when you were doing wanted to talk about it for half the hiring, you decided who to an hour when it was a really pick. simple note. If you come through ADB: When I used to hire writers, for people, they are going to I always preferred to work with want to hire you again and they someone that I had worked with are going to tell their friends to already, or that someone I knew hire you, too. Eventually, all the had worked with already. When people you work for will get you get samples and things like Anne was the writer of The Daria Diaries, which brought more of the better jobs as time goes on, if spec scripts, you don’t know if it character to those for whom the cartoons weren’t enough. [©2002 MTV Networks.] BERNSTEIN | 81

they’re good, and they’ll be inclined to take talented people they like along with them. DF: It sounds exactly the same as it is in comics and publishing. The three things that you always had to have two of to get work consistently were: you had to be charming, talented, and dependable. All three were great. Two were good. But one wasn’t enough. ADB: You don’t have to be charming, because there are some people that I’ve worked with that other people think are really difficult personalities but that I love because they’re straightforward. I don’t react very well to people who are very charming, especially comedy writers. Comedy writers are really weird people, and they don’t always have great social skills. Maybe charming is not the word, just don’t be a jerk. And I really do respect people who are willing to be confrontational when it’s important. DF: When it’s important, sure. But some people are confrontational all the time. That whole dynamic between creators and editors in comics would be analogous to that between creators and development people in TV. With interpersonal chemistry, you don’t know who’s going to work well together until you actually have them working together. ADB: And sometimes the process is extremely unfair and capricious. There are things that don’t go the way they should and it has nothing to do with people’s talent. It’s a political thing. We’ve all heard stories of some staff person getting replaced, and their successor just doesn’t want to work people from the old regime, and people get cut loose because they used to work with the guy who was replaced. That has nothing to do with anyone’s talent at that point. You have to figure out how you are going to deal with those disappointments, because they are going to come up. DF: So what did you like about Daria? It sounds like you really related to the character. ADB: I really related to the character and I was really happy to see a show where the main character was an intelligent woman. I thought that was really good. Also, I grew up with a bratty little sister. DF: I though it was funny that it spun out of Beavis and Butthead. ADB: That was really funny. My idea of the kind of writing that I want to do is very character-based. Which doesn’t mean I can’t write gags, but I would never be in a job where I had to come up with topical jokes every day. I’ve done that, but I like character-driven stuff better. I like projects where you do some

type of truth-telling. You feel that, even in the environment of corporations and television, you’re expressing your take on the world. Working with Daria was a really wonderful opportunity, because, you could express through Daria and the other characters a certain truth that’s observed by someone who’s a teenager, a girl, and an outsider. And there are a lot of fans of Daria that are not teenaged girls. DF: Who is the audience for the show? ADB: The network probably assumed that it would be teenage girls. I would think that the executives wanted to do a show that would appeal to girls. But I’ve met Daria fans from eightyear-olds to 60-year-olds, male and female. I think it shows that most people don’t think they fit in socially. So that’s one aspect of what people relate to about the character. Most people look around the world and think that there’s a lot of stupid stuff going on. It’s very refreshing to have a character who points that out. I like that Daria, over the course of the shows, did become more complex and more vulnerable and more aware of her own shortcomings. In the beginning, she just looked around and pointed out how stupid everybody else was. Then you start to deal with her own personality and how she was getting in her own way. And she deals with things that most people have to deal with. How to deal with friends and relationships and deal with their families and figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. We all were teenagers at one point, and I think there is a lot to relate to in the show because of that. DF: Was Janeane Garofalo her voice? ADB: No. The big mistake people make is thinking that. But it’s Tracy Grandstaff, a Beavis writer who started doing Daria’s voice on that show. DF: What was the Daria series writing process like? From what you said earlier, it was not 12 people in a room… ADB: I always worked with Glenn Eichler almost exclusively. At the beginning, Susie Lewis was the co-producer, and she would give notes to me through Glenn, but I worked with Glenn. At the beginning of the season, I would pitch different ideas for storylines that I thought would be interesting to do that season. Glenn would read those and also be getting suggestions from other writers. He would pick which basic story ideas he wanted to do for the season and then he would start to assign writers. When I got assigned a story, it was really straightforward. I would do an outline and he would give me notes. I would do a revised outline, and this could go back and forth once or twice or eight times. It just depended. Sometimes you would go down a dead end. For instance, I did this one called Road

Worrier about going to “Alternapolooza,” a fictional alternative music festival. I wrote this whole outline where they were at Alternapolooza, and of course this became a money thing, because there wasn’t budget to draw all those people. After I did this whole outline, they said I should make it about getting there, and about Daria driving in the van with Trent and his friend Jesse. We had already established that she has a crush on Trent, and they said make the episode about riding in this van with guy she has a crush on, because we’ve never seen her that way before. It was the first season and we had never seen her vulnerable. We decided to make it about the journey, and they are never going to get there. I had to write a whole new outline and just chuck that whole thing that I had. So we’d go back and forth, getting notes and talking it through. When I get notes from someone I respect, sometimes I may argue, or make my case for something I think I need to, but they have the last word after that. Most of the time, the standard thing is you do three drafts and a polish [final touching up of the script. —Ed.] DF: When an episode of Daria airs with your name on it as writer, are the words yours or does someone else go in and rewrite? ADB: Glenn rewrote every script for every writer. Looking at the show, I could probably tell you everything that Glenn put in as

opposed to my words, because you become very close to your work. Glenn would rewrite, but it depended on the episode. Some of them wouldn’t change that much. Other times he would seriously restructure something even though I had written a bunch of drafts. I always felt that the percentage of my writing that remained was way higher than I would ever find in a conventional sitcom situation. I always felt that the vast majority of the material came out of me. DF: So it would be part of his job to do the polish on your script as opposed to saying: “Here it is for you to rework again? Is that standard procedure in the business? ADB: When I was head writer on MTV Downtown, I rewrote every script to some extent, depending on the script. There are some scripts where a lot of rewriting was done and some where the rewriting was very light. DF: And it was considered part of your job as head writer to do that? ADB: Yes—to get it into the final shape where you could actually go in and record it. The way animation worked at MTV is, once you had the script and it was recorded, it’s “locked.” You don’t change anything unless a major legal thing comes up. You have to make sure that it’s all there in the recording, because you don’t have the luxury of going in and playing around with it later. It depends on the series, but it’s usually BERNSTEIN | 83

the story editor or the head writer that gets the script to the very end of the process to make sure it times out right [that a produced script for a show lasts exactly as long as the show’s allotted length. —Ed.] DF: As opposed to calling the writer in and sitting you in a room and saying: “Do it”? ADB: At the very end, someone usually comes in and works on it again. But that’s after you’ve done three drafts, so hopefully you’ve been able to incorporate most of the notes by that point and you’ve been able figure out which jokes aren’t working. DF: So they do call in the writer at the very end or not? ADB: After you’ve done three and a polish, then a story editor or co-creator comes in. depending on the script or the writer. It varies from script to script how much that person is going to change lines and rearrange things. DF: How did you go from Daria to MTV Downtown? ADB: I worked on Daria all six seasons, so I never quite stopped, but it was nothing like a full-time job. Every season I wrote between one to three episodes. DF: Here’s the dreaded “Is it hard to be a female animation and comedy writer?” question. So? ADB: Sometimes it’s annoying, sometimes it works to your advantage and sometimes it works to your disadvantage. It’s just a factor you have to deal with. In the case of Daria, I’m sure some people thought that we should have mostly or only women writers. But the funny thing is that Daria herself is closest in personality to Glenn Eichler. And Glenn is a guy with a wife and two kids who lives in the suburbs. He’s not a teenage girl. but in a way, Glenn speaks through Daria. People often make the assumption that women should write female characters, men should write male characters, Asians should write Asians, whatever. To some extent it’s true, especially if you want a lot of detail about some specific social scene that you’re not into. There were projects that went through MTV Animation that I said I wasn’t going to work on because I didn’t know about or wasn’t interested in the world. But people sometimes want to hire me because I’m a woman and I worked on a show about a teenage girl and they want someone to work on a show about a teenage girl. I don’t like that, because it makes the weird assumption that Daria and her best friend, Jane. [©2002 MTV Networks.] 84 | WRITE NOW

you can only write about people who are like you in really superficial ways. When writing for Daria, I loved writing for Jake, her father, because there was something about him that I just understood. Maybe there’s something about me that’s like Jake. Maybe it’s that he gets really worked up and kind of nervous and panicked, I don’t know. Sometimes being a certain gender or ethnicity works to your advantage because you get an opportunity for a job because they thought you fit some profile that they had in mind. It can work against you, too. I’ve come across producers who like a writers’ room full of guys and find it weird to have a woman in the room. It’s like anything—there’s time when it works for you and times when it works against you, and you have to accept both. You have to call people on things when they are being wrongheaded about them, say if they don’t give you an opportunity to do something that you know you can do because you haven’t written for that type of project before. After Nickelodeon magazine, I made a conscious choice not to do anything kid-related for a while, because I felt that there was a real ghetto and people associate women with children. One animator made a lot of really awful comments about the women at Nickelodeon. Like it was horrible that there were a lot of women in the animation department. I don’t know why there were a lot of women in the department, but maybe the fact that there was a woman running it had something to do with it. Talk about individual people. Are they doing a good job? Did you have any problem with them? I just want to be judged by my work. I don’t like working in women’s ghettoes with all women. I just want to be given the same opportunities as anyone else and judged by my work. But it comes into the room a lot. While at National Lampoon, I was never really a girly-girl, but I wasn’t tomboyish, either, because I wasn’t athletic. But I was always down-to-earth, so I got along with the guys pretty well. I was in a meeting and someone made a comment about a hooker or something and everybody looked at me and I was like, “What?” And, on Downtown, I was always really proud when I would write the raunchiest jokes. I’ve also been in a room when a story starts to go a certain way and I end up feeling that I have to speak “as a woman,” because it either offends me or I just don’t think it’s true to the series or to a particular character. DF: If they were still making Beavis and Butthead, do you think you would have been asked to write any episodes? ADB: I actually pitched a couple of ideas to them, but I never got an assignment. I don’t have any hesitation saying I could write something rude like South Park. I like writing all kinds of characters, and certainly I have some inside knowledge about some things that women talk about or do, but it’s not like I don’t know men. Glenn would sometimes write a line that was so inside of how women think, it was amazing. But he’s got a wife and a daughter and he knows women. I know men. I have relatives and friends who are men, and I observe people. All writers observe people. You observe a strange person in a cafeteria, and in your head you get into who they are and what’s funny and bizarre about them. Any writer can write about a different kind of person than what they themselves are. The place where it’s possibly a problem is when you have to do research about something that you are not familiar with. DF: Do gender stereotypes in comedy bother you, or do you figure it just comes with the territory? ADB: I took special note of the women that were in comedy when I was growing up. You would go to a stand-up club and

there would be a couple of women on the bill, but they were always the exceptions. The early history of women in comedy was very much about the unattractive ones. Since the ’80s, it’s changed. There are women doing stand-up who are sexy and funny. Rose Marie from Dick van Dyke, I always wanted a picture of her to put on my wall. I have to fight against the conception that every female comedy writer is Rose Marie. Rose Marie is never going to have a boyfriend. She’s one of the guys. But at the same time, I always wanted to be Rose Marie because she has a cool job. Comedy writers get to spend time with really interesting people, and it’s a challenge. Hopefully people will see your stuff and relate to it, or you just entertain them. Being Rose Marie would be a hoot, but the history of women in comedy has primarily been about putting yourself down. The exception was Elaine May. I always liked Elaine May. In some movie, she did play the classic spinster, awkward character. But she, with Mike Nichols, was always a confident woman. I follow the careers of Marilyn Suzanne Miller and a lot of the other women who wrote for Saturday Night Live early on. It’s strange, because Saturday Night Live later—in the ’80s—had a reputation for not being a good place for women to work. Now, with Tina Fey there, I believe it is again. But the original series had these sketches that Marilyn Suzanne Miler wrote, like the one about a slumber party, and they would be more slice-of-life than other sketches. I used to write sketches for Chucklehead, and people would say: “That’s slice-of-life.” That became a really negative comment, like there wasn’t enough happening. Now I think I can combine that with a good narrative structure where something is happening and at the end and you feel satisfied. I can deal with the structure. But I saw certain sketches and I knew that a woman had written them, and I thought it was great that Lorne Michaels provided an outlet for that stuff. There was also a book called Titters—I never liked the title— by Anne Beatts and Deanne Stillman. It was a collection by women in comedy, showcasing various types of humor, and it was really good quality. I’ve read other ghettoized books that are by women, but the quality is often not great because the contributors are selected just because they’re women. But Titters was a really nice compilation of all these different voices. And there was a comic book called Twisted Sisters that was the same kind of thing. It was exclusively women, but it was this standard that everyone was held to, and everything in the book was real good. I take a particular interest in women in comedy I guess. DF: Any advice for aspiring writers, male or female? ADB: Someone once told me that their friend should be a writer because they were really funny and entertaining and they thought this person would be a great writer. I said, “Have they written anything?” “No.” I’m not kidding. There are people who say they want to be writers, but haven’t written anything. You have to actually write. And you have to write crappy stuff that you don’t show anybody. It’s funny. Once you make a living being a writer, a lot of people ask you how to become a writer, and you realize how many people want to be writers. Writing can be very satisfying. The classic line by Dorothy Parker is, “I hate writing but I love having written.” It is the truest thing for a writer. When you’re done and it’s out there and you’re completely over it, and people are asking you questions about it, it’s a great feeling. The struggle is over, and hopefully you did good work and

you’re proud of it. Once I was having dinner in LA with Keith Kaczorek—who writes Angry Beavers and other stuff—and we’d just had a lot of people approach us for advice, and he said to me, “All these people want to be writers. What are they thinking?” We both started going on this riff about how difficult it is to write and how you have a lot of self-doubt and all these things about how it’s a painful thing to do. Do people think that writers sip martinis and say witty things at the Algonquin roundtable? Or that everyone is a world-class wit like Ben Hecht, who used to write screenplays—good screenplays—in three or four days? DF: Are there times when you’re writing when you’re “in the zone,” and it’s flowing and it’s there? In my writing, that’s the best time, when I’m in this altered state. ADB: I don’t get that too often. I mentioned that one piece I did for Lampoon that came out that way, but it was only two pages long. I find it interesting when I write a script that it comes out in pieces. I always write these very, very skeletal first drafts that actually have things written like “Daria’s comeback [to someone’s straight line] goes here,” or “Helen says something on the topic of books.” They don’t have jokes in them unless something comes to me immediately. I try to get a feel of the structure and where things happen. Maybe Daria and Jane have a discussion about some tension between them that came about because Jane saw Tom talking to Daria. I actually type in dialogue that isn’t really dialogue. Then sometimes I sit and write a whole scene at once. I always envy writers who write entire scenes at once, or in order. I just get all these ideas and start sliding stuff in. I do have lengths of time when I am sitting and writing continuously, but I’m one of those people who doesn’t write in sequence. I decide to go into one scene when I get started on a script, and that’s the

scene I’m going to work on, because I really know where it’s going, and I have a lot of ideas about what the characters are going to say. So even if that scene’s in the third act, I’m going to do it first. DF: How do you deal with deadlines? ADB: I love deadlines and I love structure. I’m not really good without them. That’s why I don’t have a lot of material out there, like my own screenplay or something. I like rules and parameters and the challenge of working within a structure. I always have. So I love deadlines. Deadlines force me to get it done and force me to focus and I think they’re great. DF: So it sounds like you don’t do the classic Hollywood thing of pitching properties and ideas to people. ADB: No. I’ve done a limited amount of pitching. I’ve mostly worked on other people’s projects. With Daria and MTV Downtown I felt like I contributed a lot to the projects. DF: Did Downtown come out of someone’s pitch? ADB: It was one of many, many projects that I worked on at MTV as a head writer of development. I was put on projects and, depending on the project, it might have been just giving someone notes. Maybe the creator of a given property is a very visual thinker—thinks of things in images more than words—or just hasn’t written much. In a case like that, they’d have me write the pilot or I’d hire someone to write the pilot. Downtown was a series that I got involved with very early in the pitch 86 | WRITE NOW

process. I collaborated with Chris Prynoski in getting together the pilot, and I became head writer. Actually, I worked with a writing team to develop the series. The team was me, Chris, George Krstic (Take that, Danny’s spellcheck!), and Peter Gaffney. Originally, Downtown was going to be very unscripted. There was to be a lot of spontaneous improvisation. But ultimately, it was very tightly scripted. It always sounded very natural. People were convinced that it was improvised. But you can’t improvise a story that has all these plot points that fall in all the right place and people saying things to help it move along. That doesn’t happen through improvisation. There were improvisations in the recording of the script, where people would do variations of lines to get the sound of the dialogue. We had a lot of teenagers in the voice cast, because we wanted to use people that were the actual ages of the characters. So the actors would throw in slang that I had never heard of. It was great because it made it very real. DF: Are you sure they weren’t making up slang to yank your chain? Hey—that was hep slang! ADB: Recently I had a very funny experience. I’m working on a project, and I had to write a character who was a nasty, hardcore rapper. I made a joke at my own expense about watching BET [Black Entertainment television], because I did watch BET a lot—and you can learn a lot by watching BET for two days if you watch it 12 hours a day. I generally don’t like to write slang for anybody. I can’t stand trying to put on somebody else’s slang. So Downtown was great, because we wouldn’t try to write too much slang. We just tried to write how teenagers of any era would talk, and then the actors would come in and put words like “chickenhead” in, and that would capture exactly what the guy was saying about that girl. In Daria, there was very little slang, and I was really happy that we didn’t try to do that. It makes things seem dated really fast. It you try to be too into “what’s happening this second,” it also means it dates really fast. DF: Daria’s personality had that Dorothy Parker/Eve Arden vibe. She was a grown-up-before-her-time teenager, as opposed to teenagers that are more childlike. Whether she had actually “been there and done that” or not, she acted like she had. ADB: What is great about Daria is you got to write for Daria herself, but you also got to write for Quinn and you got to write for Brittany, who is a lovely girl but practically brain dead. It ended up having lots of characters. I also wrote three years worth of material on the Daria website. DF: Tell us about the website and your thoughts on web writing and the role of the Internet in media in general these days. ADB: The thing that is good about the Daria website is that they decided to do new content for it. A lot of website stuff related to TV shows basically consists of “Here’s the character descriptions and some clips to download and here are the episode synopses.” We decided to create a completely new website every year, with monthly features, and constantly generate new material. Writing the site was fun because a lot of time we would do things from the character’s point of view. One year, every month we had a faux website related to a character, as if it was their personal website. Another year we spoofed different kinds of websites that you might find, as was appropriate for each character. For instance, the Lane family is very creative, so I did a fake eBay type site where they were selling things that they had made. It was fun to take it to the

discussions with. Just type, no fancy graphics to look at. And Internet. I think people appreciated it that someone from the people also love sending each other Quicktime movies and show put the same effort into the site that was put into the funny cartoons. Right now, you don’t really sit and watch show’s scripts. Every month I had to become a different anything for a half an hour on a computer. If they merge, then character. you will. DF: Any idea of what percentage of the people who watched the DF: To flip back for a minute… Any thoughts on MTV Downtown show also went to the website? now that it’s no longer in production? ADB: I don’t really trust statistics when it comes to the web. ADB: I’m very proud of MTV Downtown. I thought it was really Click-throughs and unique visitors and all that stuff. All I can innovative. I thought it was a great show. But I think we weren’t say is that Daria has really intense fans. There was actually a given the chance to find our audience. They put us on after The colloquium on Daria that Trinity College had. It was really funny. Real World, and everyone thought it was a wonderful thing, I watched all these people present papers about Daria. They because you have the lead in from that. It turned out to work found so much to talk about. Some of the papers were about gender issues. One was on the symbolism of glasses on women in popular media. They found all these things to talk about that were topics that Daria brought up for them. Ultimately, Daria is a project that’s part of popular culture and part of the dialogue that people are having about their lives. There was enough there that people could actually write papers for college. DF: For a few years there, it looked like the Internet was going to be the launching pad for new properties as well as a medium of its own, but it got caught in the stock market bubble. ADB: It got caught in irrational exuberance. That’s a great combination of words. “Irrational exuberance” is a great use of words. DF: Assuming that the entertainment economy stabilizes, do you think the Internet will be a viable place for entertainment, or is it just another promotional tool for other media? ADB: The Internet is really best for things where people can contribute. Like the Roadside America (www.roadsideamerica.com) site always has people adding information about places to visit across the country, More promotional art for MTV Downtown . [©2002 MTV Networks.] and people talking about places to go. IMDB [Internet Movie Database] has movie against us, because that was the Hawaii year, when on the first info. It’s fun to read what people think about movies, and all episode of Real World Hawaii, people got naked and a girl these nutty opinions, where one person thinks some movie is almost killed herself by drinking too much. They got a 4.0 the worst one they ever saw, and next person thinks it’s the rating, which is unheard of, and we came on afterward and got greatest masterpiece. Things that are fluid, where people add a 1.5. That used to be a great rating for an MTV cartoon when to them, are the best websites. just out of the gate. People a few years before would have DF: So you think if people want to be entertained, they’ll still go been very happy with that rating and would have left the show to TV, movies, books and theater? on for at least six months. But it was a different time at MTV ADB: I don’t think anyone knows how, in five years, we’re going and they didn’t just leave things on anymore. They were rather to get this stuff. Is it going to be on TV or on the computer? Is impatient and moved the show around a lot and preempted it a it going to be a hybrid? The boundary is hard to define. Are couple of times. It wasn’t getting the ratings that they wanted, they going to stay separate or become one thing? so they played 12 out of 13 episodes and cancelled the series. DF: People at work who want five or ten minutes of entertainment They played the 13th once, in the middle of the night, because might be people who would go for Internet entertainment. it was something contractual that they had to do. I still really Whether you’d want to sit and stare at your computer for two am proud of that show. It was really a fun show and the develhours on a regular basis is another issue. opment process was especially interesting because we based ADB: Once you have full screen computer images, it’s almost the characters on real people. We did a lot of interviewing and like watching TV. I think the great advantage of the Internet is searching. interactivity—chat, message boards, things like that. DF: Did you feel as connected to Daria, or is it a whole different Sometimes it’s mindless, like AOL chat. But there are amazing thing? people on places like the Well who you can have amazing BERNSTEIN | 87

ADB: Probably I felt more connected to Downtown, because I was working on it every day, and I was working on many different aspects of the show. I worked with casting, and I was involved with the actors, and I was really very involved through development. We got the green light, and then we got it taken away and we had to redevelop. I worked on Downtown for a long time as a full-time job, as opposed to my involvement with Daria, which was on and off. DF: Is there any hope of reviving Downtown? ADB: I’d say no. It would be a dream if they put it on DVD or something, but they never would, because it wasn’t considered a hit. DF: Any other advice for young people who want to break into writing? ADB: I was very, very shy, and I’m still kind of shy. I talk a lot to my friends, but I don’t like cold-calling people. But when I worked at MTV Animation, I used to answer my own phone because I wasn’t high enough up to have an assistant. People were surprised that I answered my phone, and if they wanted to send me stuff, I said, “Fine,” as long as they did it the legal way, which meant that they had to sign these scary releases. I’d have to explain to them why we wanted them to sign them. I never had any intention, ever, and would never even think about stealing somebody else’s idea. If someone submits something to you and they’re a great writer, why would you ever hire someone else to do it? When I was younger, I was really scared to cold-call people and send stuff because sometimes it’s a dead end, and your stuff does get lost—especially if you call someone too high up on the totem pole. Maybe all they do is go to meetings and conferences and are never in their offices. I was supposed to hire writers, and I read everything that got sent to me. But, I must admit that there were things that I didn’t get through to the finish. At first, I used to read the whole thing, entire bad screenplays. Then I realized that after ten pages you get the 88 | WRITE NOW

sense of the piece. If anybody sent me anything that was good, I was so happy. I’m not kidding. People want to find good people. For people who hire writers, it’s a happy day when something comes in that’s great. Most of the time, with unsolicited submissions, the odds are going to be that the stuff is not so great. But we’re always happy to see something fresh and inventive. One hint that I always give people to always be nice to the person who answers the phone. If someone has an assistant, there are people who are rude to the assistant. Assistants have a lot of power because they are ones who tell their boss who called and who they should talk to. Be nice to that assistant. And if they’re not in a big rush, talk to them. Don’t say, “I want to leave a message to the head of the company.” You can say, “Who at the company hires writers to do shorter form promos?” Be nice to the people that you talk to. If you call a magazine, you don’t have to talk to the editor-in-chief. It’s always great to keep in touch with people and watch where they go. You just don’t know who will end up helping you, so don’t be afraid to ask questions. On the other hand, if someone seems like they don’t want to talk to you, possibly it’s that they have a lot to do and just can’t. It’s really hard to get in touch with top executives because they’ve got 40 calls to return from people they know personally and have very important things to do. But you can always find someone to talk to and get important information out of, even at big companies. DF: Do you have an agent? ADB: This was one of those things that worked out fairly easily for me, but that’s because I waited until I was already writing Daria to get an agent. Up until then, I didn’t really negotiate stuff. It’s easier to get an agent once you’ve gotten paid for something. Especially at a top agency, because if they get 10% of nothing, or 10% of $500, it doesn’t look good for them. I was lucky, because the first people I asked about agents sent me to their agency. which represented a lot of people I knew. I found a lot of work for myself over the years. But now that I’m freelancing, it’s really great to have an agent. It’s nice to have somebody else negotiate and it’s nice to have someone else say that they’ve heard about this project that I might be good for. Basically, the first person I approached was at a good agency and took me on. But he wasn’t that involved with my career because, at the time, I was doing things at MTV where once a year I had to renegotiate. It wasn’t like I had ten different jobs a year. DF: Do you have the same agent for animation and live action? ADB: Basically I work with Joe Cohen and Mick Sullivan and both of them are at CAA and handle anything that’s television. I still write for Nickelodeon magazine, but the agents don’t get involved with that. DF: What you are you working on currently? What’s coming up? ADB: The major thing I’m doing is a project that will air on the Oxygen Network and on BET in the spring. Oxygen had a show called X Chromosome that was an anthology animation show, and they’re spinning off one of the shorts called, “Hey, Monie” as a series. They ordered a limited number of episodes, and BERNSTEIN concludes on page 92

Feedback Letters from our readers DFWN’S FAVORITE LETTER! When this e-mail came from Mr. Lee… well, it made my decade! —DF

8/22/02 Greetings, I’ve just finished reading Write Now! issue #1, and wanted to give you good people a hearty “thanks” for putting this out. When I couldn’t get to the ComicCon this year, I gave my friend who was going one mission: find me anything having to do with comic writing. Well, he struck serious gold with Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! I read the thing cover to cover on the bus, to and from work. Can’t wait till the next one. Thanks again, Marc Fortier [via the Internet]

August 6,2002 Hey, Danny! I’m proud of ya! Write Now! is a great mag! I read it cover to cover. (Later, now that I finished the covers, I’ll read the insides!) Seriously, you did a terrific job. The book looks good and reads even better. On top of that, I wish I was still writing comics because, thanks to your mag, I learned a helluva lot. Now all that knowledge is just goin’ to waste. What’s even worse is—reading the interviews will turn all your subscribers into better writers. As if we ain’t got enough competition now! Anyway, heartiest congratulations—and break a leg! Excelsior! Stan

This e-missive from my old pal and DC Comics editor Joey C. was way cool to get, too:

P.S. I just read Ross and Busiek’s Marvels for the first time. Unbelievable. Maybe Kurt will talk about Marvels if we twist his arm when Peter Sanderson interviews him in our next issue. 7/28/02 Dear Mr. Fingeroth, I just finished reading the first issue of Write Now! As one of the legion of fanboys who dream of writing for comics someday, your magazine provided me with some important insights into the creation of comic books. The differing techniques, styles, and views of writing that your subjects revealed in the magazine fascinated me. However, what I found most valuable were the details of the mistakes others had made in the past, both in terms of the writing itself, and in presentations to editors. With any luck, some of us can learn from these mistakes, rather than making them on our own, and with the help of Write Now! find the path to writing success that much smoother. Looking forward to issue #2. Chris Murrin

Dan, It looks great! Write Now! Is pretty terrific through and through and I’m especially enjoying the interviews a lot! Also, the illustrations are great too—you picked really good things to reprint! Congratulations! Joey Cavalieri And I’m not even editing anything Mr. Nicieza’s writing now, so I know this is sincere: CONGRATS!! Absolutely excellent job on the first issue! Nice magazine! Look forward to more of ’em—and the chance to do the back and forth interview we can have about writer/editor dynamics!! Lunch and a tape recorder! Woo-hoo! —fabe And that interview will be in DFWN #3! (Now, who’s paying for that lunch…?)

Danny, I just recently purchased (and am in the process of completing) the premiere issue of your excellent (and long awaited) Write Now! magazine. While I think you’ll regret the request of having “other people come up with ideas” that might be incorporated into this obvious labor of love that you’ve created, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the ideas that have been simmering away inside this brain pan of mine while I flipped my way through your pages. First and foremost, while I realize that the interviews portion of the magazine is the major meat of your endeavor, more examples of the scriptwork of the featured writers in question might be a nice touch for educational purposes. [Additionally, in making your magazine more interactive for your readers, another nice idea might be offering critical appraisal of a few pages of a selected script material (say five pages or so) that have been submitted by the readers/aspiring writers of your magazine. The writers (and artists) featured with that particular issue could all offer their opinions of the “winning,” sent-in, script.] FEEDBACK | 89

Also, dealing with some of the obstacles to, or just plain mechanics of, writing (à lá Writer’s Digest or some other periodical devoted to the craft of writing) might also be considered. I have the worst time writing synopses myself (you know, compressing 22 or more pages of script into a saleable one page of story proposal), and that might also be something you’d want to tackle. Additional topics you might cover could include: copyright laws, overcoming perfectionism (another particular demon of mine), pacing the story, and perhaps some notes on, say, something down to earth like writers and income taxes, and some of the other nuts-and-bolts of the business of comic book writing. (More articles along the line of your “Why Comics Are Not Movies” is what I’m generally hinting at here—I found that article most informative—with the possibility of, perhaps, sacrificing an interview or two per issue to make room for such insights.) Anyhow, Danny, thank you for this long-awaited magazine that I’m sure many, many would-be comic writers have been waiting for and that you’ve put forth the initiative to put in print. Thanks again. Trevor Q. [via the Internet] Great suggestions, Trevor. I believe that this issue you’re reading, as well as future ones, will address some of the topics you brought up.

Danny, I just finished reading the first issue of Write Now!. Great Stuff! It’s about time a magazine came out devoted to the craft of comic book/creative writing. The J.M. DeMatteis interview was especially compelling. J.M. has turned out many memorable comics, most notably on Spider-Man and Silver Surfer. Glad to hear he’s a big fan of Ray Bradbury, like me. Best of luck with your new magazine. Hope it comes out monthly. You can count on me to be there. Sincerely, Jason Strangis [via the Internet]

8/10/02 Dear Mr. Fingeroth Well, it’s official. Mssrs. Morrow, Cooke and Manley are in good company. The first issue of DFWN absolutely exceeded my expectations. As you touched on in the mag, writing is actually a difficult topic to write about. The creativity and imagination required to be a great writer is very internal and, frankly, it’s difficult for many to be articulate about that process. Most interviews with writers rely on that dreaded question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I was pleased with the diversity and intelligence of the interviews in Write Now!, and look forward to more. (Personally, I’d love to hear from Harlan Ellison, Keith Giffen, and James Robinson.) Basically, my only complaint is that the J.M. DeMatteis interview was way too short. I could have read a book-length feature on that guy. He has had one of the most diverse careers in the industry. Personally, I’d like to know what 90 | WRITE NOW

the heck happened with his Daredevil run. Well, thanks from your time. If this level of quality continues, I’m certain you’ll hear from me again. Best regards, Rob Smentek [via the Internet]

August 9. 2002 Dear Danny, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the first issue of Write Now! I read it from a pro’s and a fan’s perspective, since I’m a writer, but not in comics. I’ve been a working screenwriter for about four years now. I have two produced films to my credit. One is The Breed, a vampire film starring Highlander’s Adrian Paul, that was produced by Sony, aired on the Starz pay-TV network, and is currently out on DVD. The other is Teenage Caveman, an acid trip of a movie that’s a re-imagining of a 1950s drive-in flick, directed by Kids director Larry Clark, which aired on HBO/Cinemax and was just selected to be shown at the Berlin Film Festival. I’m fairly early in my career, so I also remember what it’s like being on the other side of the “glass wall” carrying around that ball and chain, the awful word “aspiring,” before the name of one’s chosen profession. DFWN #1 was informative and entertaining from those different perspectives, an achievement for which you deserve to be congratulated. When I was in film school, I enjoyed reading screenwriting magazines like Script, Fade In, et al, but around the time I sold my first project I lost interest, for two reasons. For one thing, they rarely told me anything new, which I suppose is necessary considering they’re aimed at aspiring writers rather than working pros (as opposed to Written By, the Writers‘ Guild of America’s magazine, which I continue to get a lot out of). But the biggest reason I became disenchanted was that they seemed to perpetuate what I call the “lottery mentality”—the idea that, if you sell a screenplay, you’re an instant millionaire. This is far from the truth. (As with most lines of work, people at the top of the field make great money, but most of us don’t earn any more in a year than a mechanic or salesman, and often far less.) Not only is perpetuating that myth misleading, it attracts people whose real interest lies in getting rich, not writing for its own sake. When one of the magazines started running fashion spreads—fashion spreads, like it was GQ and not a magazine aimed at people who work in their pajamas!—I said goodbye and never looked back. That’s why, for me, Write Now! was a breath of fresh air. If there was one common thread that ran throughout the magazine, it was a true love of the game. Everyone knows writing for comics isn’t a way to get filthy rich. For every Bendis (who deserves whatever rewards come his way), we’ve all heard of talented people like Bill Loebs and Mike Baron who are having difficulty getting work despite long, respected careers. As unfortunate as this is, it also means that people who get into writing comics do so out of passion, and that passion permeated every part of your magazine. I was disappointed, though, by the part in the Quesada interview where you refrained from getting into an argument FEEDBACK continues on page 93

Gives you the lowdown on

BOOKS ON WRITING

he following are three essential books for aspiring writers, established writers, or for anyone interested in the craft. You know—readers of Write Now! Here’s what makes them worthwhile:

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

By Danny Fingeroth Panel One: Comic Book Scripts By Top Writers

By Robert McKee

Edited by Nat Gertler

Reganbooks/Harper Collins 1997

Published by About Comics, LLC 2002

The One to have. It takes the material McKee teaches in his legendary three-day Story Seminar (take it if it comes to your town!) and puts it into book form. The book’s introduction expresses McKee’s philosophy: “A rule says, ‘You must do it this way.’ A principle says, ‘This works… and has through all remembered time’” McKee then proceeds to lay out the principles of writing as he has come to understand them over his career of writing and teaching. While the book deals primarily with story as it relates to movies, its principles are easily applied to any narrative medium or genre, comics included. For instance: “Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is the risk? …More specifically, what is the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core.” McKee talks about story structure, scene structure, character development, and much more. He uses a broad spectrum of examples of movies, plays, books and theatre— from Hamlet to Wayne’s World—that most of us have seen or read at least some of. He takes each element of story—plot, conflict, character—and lays it out in clear, understandable, but not simplistic, terms. At times, especially when McKee charts and diagrams his points, it can feel like you’re reading a book about something far less unpredictable and more schematic than storytelling. But if you go with the flow, many of his points will stay with you both consciously and subconsciously. The beauty of McKee’s teaching —in both the classes and the book—is how his lessons get into your brain and improve your skill set. After intensely thinking about and trying to apply his principles, at a certain point, you’re suddenly utilizing them without even thinking about it. It’s like learning to ride a bike. Except that, after you read the book, you’re bound to come up with a better simile than that.

Page One is a terrific compendium of different formats and styles of comics writing, along with commentary about the scripts. The contributors are: Neil Gaiman, Marv Wolfman, Dwayne McDuffie, Jeff Smith, Trina Robbins, Kurt Busiek, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith and Gertler, himself. A pretty impressive— and varied—lineup, to say the least. [Panel One ©2002 About Comics.] Wolfman, McDuffie, Robbins, Busiek and Gertler write introductions for their own scripts. (Gertler writes intros for the rest.) In their intros, you get personal recollections and insights. For instance, this from McDuffie, in his intro to his Deathlok story: “For those of you going mainstream, it’s your own individual qualities that will separate your work from the run-of-the-mill. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, it’s the most valuable thing in your writing toolbox.” In his Man Called A-X story’s intro, Wolfman offers some enlightening thoughts on the difference between working full script versus plot first (“Marvel style”). And Kurt Busiek, in the intro to his Astro City story, talks about an important writing lesson he learned from reading Frank Miller’s work. Gertler’s own insights are well thought out, too. For instance, in the book’s introduction, he writes: “A comics script is a personal note written to one person, the artist. Oh, it may be designed to hold up to the scrutiny of a comic book editor… [but] the comics writer is not just giving instructions to the artist; he is transferring a vision.” And, of course, the book contains nine different comics scripts. Each has its own look and feel, but all tell the story to the editor and then to the artist—with the aim of telling the best possible story to the reader. Most of them are full scripts. The two non-full-script entries are Wolfman’s, which is plot only, though structured page-by-page, and writer-artist Jeff Smith’s Rose story, which he loosely drew in pencil, with the dialogue roughly lettered in. (Charles Vess would draw the actual story from Smith’s rough drawings.) Certainly, this is one (relatively) foolproof way to convey what you’re after to the editor and the artist. My only quibble with the book is that it doesn’t include— except in the case of Gertler’s own Fol story—any samples of the finished penciled, inked and lettered work the scripts resulted in. I can imagine the logistics of getting rights would have been nightmarish, but seeing the finished stories would BOOKS ON WRITING | 91

pulls back the curtain and shows you what makes a comics story tick. In a way, he covers much of the territory that McKee does in Story, with the crucial difference being that O’Neil’s book is geared to comics writing, specifically super-hero comics writing. He discusses story structure, plot and character development, and dialogue (with his own The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics unique observations, of course). But he also By Dennis O’Neil covers topics that are, if not unique to Introduction by Stan Lee comics, then certainly apply more to them Published by Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001 than to other media. For instance, he addresses: plot-first versus “So, just exactly what is a story?” asks Dennis full script writing, how to do continuing O’Neil in his DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics. subplots, strategies for comics dialoguing, His answer: “Here is the best one-sentence [DC Comics Guide to Writing and using dialogue versus using captions to definition I’ve ever found: A story is structured Comics ©2002 DC Comics.] convey information. Also covered are issues narrative designed to achieve an emotional effect, such as: continuity (its joys and its dangers), adaptations from demonstrate a proposition, or reveal character.” other media, story arcs, mini-series, mega-series, the everAnd for the rest of this enormously readable and instructive morphing definition of what is a hero—and what is a villain. book, O’Neil, one of the most innovative, prolific and O’Neil gives you all the tools you need to write great successful comics writers of all time, as well as an accomcomics. What you do with them, of course, is up to you. plished editor and teacher, tells—and shows—just how to But you won’t find better preparation anywhere. structure narrative. Everything you need to know is here. With plenty of illustrations, both literal and figurative, O’Neil

have been helpful. On the other hand, the stories are, for the most part, readily available from comics shops. Panel One is an invaluable and instructive read. And it’s got some really cool stories in it, too.

THE END

ALCOTT continued from page 54

decided one day that, gosh darn it, I was going to learn how to read Shakespeare. And I sat down with a copy of Macbeth and very carefully read it line by line, checking each and every footnote. And on a separate piece of paper I rewrote each line of dialogue in my own idiom, sort of “translating” Shakespeare into modern American English. It Todd posing with some of the characters he’s was a lot of fun, and worked with. showed me a lot about the play that I didn’t know was there, and when I was done, I no longer had a single problem reading Shakespeare. DF: What’s coming up for Todd Alcott? TA: I’m very excited that I’m soon going to be directing my first movie. It’s a short film based on a Chekhov short story called “Grasshopper.” I don’t think it’s going to ever be showing at a theater near you, but I’m nevertheless very excited by the prospect. And everyone out there should write a letter to all the movie studios telling them to give me the million dollars I need to shoot One Neck. DF: Thanks for your time and the illuminating answers to my questions, Todd. I think this interview was basically a textbook on the writing life. TA: Thank you, Danny. I really enjoyed being able to put into words things I’d been thinking about for years. This just in: A stage version of Todd’s play, One Neck, is being produced by the Spotlight Theater Company at the Secret Rose Theater in North Hollywood from October 31st through the end of November.

THE END

92 | WRITE NOW

BERNSTEIN continued from page 88

I’ve been working on that with Soup to Nuts, the people in Boston who did Dr. Katz and invented Squigglevision. That’s really been fun and I’m enjoying it. It’s been over the phone because they’re in Boston. The show has good characters and the company gets great voice talent. They’ve always done very improv-based stuff and, I’m amazed to say it, but this is the first show that they’ve done that uses (A) very tightly scripted, every line written in advance method. I think there will be improv in the recording. But they used to work more from bullet points and outlines. I’ve written two scripts for them, and I just found out that I’ll be doing three more. After that, I have no idea. Which is what freelancing is about. [laughter] I like being in production on a show and I really enjoyed working on MTV Downtown. These days I work at home by myself, but I prefer the teamwork involved with going into an office every day. I would very much like to create my own show or head write or story edit on a show were I can make a substantial contribution to the development stage, or at least get hired to help a show that’s starting up. DF: Thanks for your time, Anne. It’s been a lot of fun. ADB: Same here. See ya.

THE END

Anne, in Paris, contemplating Marcel Proust’s grave. As far as we know, Proust never wrote cartoons.

“But What Does Danny Think?”

So. Now Vee May Perhaps To Begin.Yes? By Danny Fingeroth, editor

ast issue I ranted on about why comics aren’t movies. And I have plenty more complaints in me. For instance… every time I read a comic and get only part of a chapter of a larger story arc, it makes me scratch my head. (Could just be dandruff, I suppose… but let’s assume it’s not.) Tom DeFalco believes that every comic should have something you’ve never seen before, be it a major plot point, a cool new use of a hero’s powers, an insight into a supporting character—something. It seems like a lot of creators believe that’s ALL they have to do. They have what I call a “minimum cool quotient.” The great Jack Kirby, when he was his own editor, used to put 50 cool things you’d never seen before in each issue—which sometimes diluted their impact. (But that’s another issue for another day.) But you sure couldn’t say he was skimping. So many stories I read now have one cool thing—and not much else—and it makes me go, well, maybe I’ll buy the next issue… if I remember… and if I’m passing the comics store and I don’t have too much else to do. Even if you’re writing with the thought of eventual trade paperback collections, why would you put so little in each issue/chapter? I don’t get it. It’s great for artists. They get to show off and draw tableaux of great beauty. But there’s so little story going on. And this stuff is supposed to appeal to a postMTV audience that can grasp ultra-compressed information? Could this be why sales, even with the current upswing, are still a fraction of what they were just a few years ago? But I don’t want to just complain (as much fun as that is). I want to know what you think we can do to make things better. Part of the solution to the problem might involve answering questions like: • Why did you start reading comics? • What made you keep reading them? • What made you become, or want to become, a comics pro?

• In an era when there are more and different types of comics—analogous to the hundreds of cable channels? —can there be a mass market again? • It wasn’t that long ago that many comics were selling a million copies each. Even if half those sales were to speculators, and comparable titles now sell, say, 50,000 each, where’d the other 450,000 readers go? • What would it take to get your kid or your kid siblings to read comics? How do we make people want to buy comics in large numbers again? It’s great to have the poetry section of the bookstore. But the blockbuster novels are what make it possible for the store to stay open and sell the poetry books. How do we get the store that is comics to stay in business— and to become a chain? At the end of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint [SPOILER WARNING!], after the narrator has spent the entire novel complaining about what’s wrong in his life, the shrink he’s been whining to finally replies: “So, now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” I’d like to ask my fellow complaining comics pros—and those of you who would like to be complaining comics pros— and who doesn’t?—for your ideas on how to fix/reform/refine/reinvent comics, specifically from the writing end. How can vee perhaps to begin? Got some thoughts on the topic? Send your comments to WriteNowDF@aol.com or snail mail them to Danny Fingeroth, Write Now! Magazine, c/o TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605.

THE END

FEEDBACK continued from page 90

with Joe about editors also writing. You said in the magazine that the interview wasn’t about you, and that may be, but the issue is a legitimate one and I would’ve liked to have seen it discussed. I think you both had valid points. Having said that, your interview with Joe was still my favorite of the issue. Please continue to explore the business side of things, as I think it’s crucial for writers (in any field) to be aware of that area, even though most of us have a natural aversion to it. Here’s to continued success for Write Now! Best, Chris Gage [via—you guessed it—the Internet]

Many thanks, Chris. As far as my not arguing with Joe, I think I stated my side pretty clearly in the question and followups. It would have been beside the point of this magazine’s mission to pursue it further. Me and Joe going at it wouldn’t have given readers any information, insights or ideas that could help them with their own writing. My main concern was to have the editor in chief of the top comics company talk about the realities of a writer getting his or her work published by Marvel today, and I think that was accomplished. What do the rest of you think? More confrontation from the interviewers, or simply let folks state their feelings for the record? Send comments on this—or any other topic—to me at WriteNowDF@aol.com or Danny Fingeroth, Write Now! Magazine, c/o TwoMorrows. 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605.

THE END

WHAT DOES DANNY THINK? | 93

Number 9, Fall 2002 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Wives Speak Out! Will Eisner does what? Dave Sim is really like that? See what it’s been like living with comic book creators over the past 60 years, with the people who know them best! I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY! is a 208-page trade paperback that explores the lives of the partners and wives of such important comics creators as WILL EISNER, ALAN MOORE, STAN LEE, JOE KUBERT, HARVEY KURTZMAN, JOHN ROMITA, GENE COLAN, DAN DECARLO, ARCHIE GOODWIN, DAVE COOPER and more! In addition to sharing memories and anecdotes you’ll find nowhere else, their better halves have opened up their private files to unearth personal photos, momentos, and never-before-seen art! Many have their own careers in the comic book field to discuss as well! Join author BLAKE BELL and discover things you wouldn’t otherwise learn about the lives of these women (and man) and the men they love! Face it, you have to read this book! NOW SHIPPING! $24 US ppd.

Grass Green Succumbs to Cancer at 63 Richard “Grass” Green succumbed to lung cancer on August 5, 2002. He was the first prominent African-American active in comics fandom of the 1960s and was considered one of the top fan artists. His first published work was on the cover of the original ALTER EGO #4 (1962). His best known character, XAL-KOR THE HUMAN CAT, first appeared in the fanzine STARSTUDDED COMICS in 1964, and returned numerous times, most recently in 2002 in a graphic novella co-published by TWOMORROWS and HAMSTER PRESS. As anyone who met him knows, Grass was a delightful guy, always quick with a joke and a smile. Our condolences go out to his wife Janice, and his many friends throughout fandom. PLEASE NOTE: You can still order XAL-KOR THE HUMAN CAT from HAMSTER PRESS, by sending check/m.o. for $9.95 to PO Box 27471, Seattle, Wa., 98125; or, you can order via PayPal at www.billschelly.com. Profits from the book still go to Grass’ estate.

Pick of the Week! Bill Schelly’s SENSE OF WONDER was recently named a COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE “Pick of the Week”! Enjoy this personal and delightful tale of the dawn of comic book fandom yourself—order it today!

It’s Official, Kids, G-Force Is Back! Were you one of the thousands of kids who got up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings because you just couldn’t miss BATTLE OF THE PLANETS? Well, this November, TwoMorrows is proud to present the OFFICIAL compendium to the Japanese animated TV program that revolutionized anime across the globe! Featuring plenty of unseen artwork and designs from the wondrous world of GFORCE (a.k.a. Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), it presents interviews and behind-the-scenes stories of the pop culture phenomenon that captured the hearts and imagination of Generation X, and spawned the new hit comic series! Cowritten by JASON HOFIUS and Eisner-nominated GEORGE KHOURY, this FULL-COLOR account is highlighted by a NEW PAINTED COVER from master artist ALEX ROSS! $20 US ppd.

Two in a Row! Hearty congrats go out to über-editor JON B. COOKE on his second consecutive EISNER AWARD for his great work on COMIC BOOK ARTIST! (We don’t count last year because they went without our category.) Regrettably they can’t give out two of those babies, because ROY THOMAS cranked out a great run of his Eisner-nominated ALTER EGO last year and (in our humble opinion) was equally deserving. Can’t find those CBA or A/E back issues you’re missing? You need look no further! We have practically every issue in stock, as well as the COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUMES 1 & 2 and ALTER EGO: THE COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION TPBs reprinting the sold-out issues of CBA and its ALTER EGO sections respectively. Check out these critically acclaimed issues and see what you’ve been missing!

Twins, Right Now! The newest addition to the growing TwoMorrows family, WRITE NOW! editor DANNY FINGEROTH, just had additions of his own—fraternal twins! ETHAN DAVID and JACOB RUBIN FINGEROTH are both doing fine, and so is Mom. Congratulations, Danny!

Oh, Sweet Relief! TwoMorrows is pleased to welcome JON WILEY, our new employee in Raleigh, NC! He’s helping beleaguered ol’ ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON with his thankless duties as our Production Assistant. Glad to have you aboard, JW!

Shipping in October! Alter Ego #18 Comic Book Artist #22 Write Now! #2 I Have To Live With This Guy TPB

Coming Soon! Comic Book Artist #23 (Nov) DRAW! #5 (Nov) The Jack Kirby Collector #37 (Nov) Captain Action TPB (Nov) G-Force: Animated TPB (Nov) Alter Ego #19 (Dec) Comic Book Artist #24 (Dec)

Pros and Cons The convention season is winding down but we’ll be making one last appearance at the Baltimore-Con on October 26-27 (go to www.comicon.com/baltimore for more info). It’s shaping up to be a great show—in addition to the TwoMorrows booth, DRAW! head-honcho MIKE MANLEY and ALTER EGO’s ROY THOMAS will both be in attendance! Hope to see ya there! If you need to contact the TwoMorrows editors (or want to send a letter of comment), try e-mail!

Back in Action! The original super-hero action figure is back! CAPTAIN ACTION was introduced in the wake of the ’60s Batman TV show, and could become 13 different super-heroes. With over 200 toy photos, this new 160-page trade paperback chronicles his history (including comic book appearances), with historical anecdotes by the late GIL KANE, JIM SHOOTER, STAN WESTON (co-creator of GI Joe, Captain Action, and Mego’s World’s Greatest Super-Heroes), & others, plus never-seen artwork by GIL KANE, JOE STATON, CARMINE INFANTINO, JERRY ORDWAY, and MURPHY ANDERSON (who provides a new cover)! Put a little action in your life this November! $20 US ppd.

John Morrow, publisher, JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR editor (and the one to go to with subscription problems): twomorrow@aol.com Jon B. Cooke, COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor: jonbcooke@aol.com Roy Thomas, ALTER EGO editor: roydann@ntinet.com P.C. Hamerlinck, FCA editor: fca2001@yahoo.com Mike Manley, DRAW! editor: mike@actionplanet.com And the TWOMORROWS WEBSITE (where you can read excerpts from our back issues, and order from our secure online store) is at: www.twomorrows.com

TRADE PAPERBACKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS

STREETWISE

TOP ARTISTS DRAWING STORIES OF THEIR LIVES

Top creators discuss all aspects of the DESIGN OF COMICS:

An unprecedented assembly of talent drawing NEW autobiographical stories:

• WILL EISNER • SCOTT HAMPTON • MIKE WIERINGO • WALTER SIMONSON • MIKE MIGNOLA • MARK SCHULTZ • DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI • MIKE CARLIN • DICK GIORDANO • BRIAN STELFREEZE • CHRIS MOELLER • MARK CHIARELLO

• Barry WINDSOR-SMITH • C.C. BECK • Sergio ARAGONÉS • Walter SIMONSON • Brent ANDERSON • Nick CARDY • Roy THOMAS & John SEVERIN • Paul CHADWICK • Rick VEITCH • Murphy ANDERSON • Joe KUBERT • Evan DORKIN • Sam GLANZMAN • Plus Art SPIEGELMAN, Jack KIRBY, more! Cover by RUDE • Foreword by EISNER

If you’re serious about creating effective, innovative comics, or just enjoying them from the creator’s perspective, this guide is must-reading! (208-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

ALTER EGO: THE CBA COLLECTION Reprints the ALTER EGO flip-sides from the out-of-print COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-5, plus 30 NEW PAGES of features & art:

THE COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOL. ONE Reprints the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-3, plus over 50 NEW PAGES of features and art: • An unpublished story by JACK KIRBY! • An interview with NEAL ADAMS about his SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI book (including unused art)! • Unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art! • An unused story by JEFFREY JONES! • Extensive new ALAN WEISS interview (including unpublished art), & more!

(160-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

(228-page Trade Paperback) $26 US

EISNER AWARD WINNER FOR BEST SHORT STORY!

EISNER AWARD NOMINEE!

SENSE OF WONDER

FAWCETT COMPANION THE BEST OF FCA

Acclaimed historian Bill Schelly gives you AN INSIDER’S TOUR of comics fandom of the 1960s & ’70s. The fans, the comicons, the fanzines—they’re all here!!

Editor P.C. Hamerlinck has been delighting fans with his new FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA) • Introduction by ROY THOMAS, cover by sections in ALTER EGO, and this volume • Special color cover by JOE KUBERT! DICK GIORDANO! presents the best of the first 59 issues of • All-new rare and previously-unpublished • Share Bill’s encounters with FREDERIC the FCA newsletter (founded in 1973)! art by JACK KIRBY, GIL KANE, JOE WERTHAM, STEVE DITKO, BOB KANE, KUBERT, WALLY WOOD, FRANK • New JERRY ORDWAY cover! JIM SHOOTER, and more! ROBBINS, NEAL ADAMS, and others! • Index of ALL FAWCETT COMICS • Over 150 photos and illustrations by • STEVE DITKO on the creation of published from 1940-1953! KIRBY, DITKO, NEWTON, EISNER, C.C. SPIDER-MAN, ROY THOMAS on the • Behind-the-scenes looks inside the BECK, KALUTA, KRENKEL, COCKRUM, birth of THE INVADERS, and more! GOLDEN AGE FAWCETT OFFICES! SINNOTT, GIL KANE and others! • Interviews and features on C.C. BECK, (160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US (216-page Trade Paperback) $20 US MARC SWAYZE, KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, OTTO BINDER, PETE COSTANZA, ROSCOE FAWCETT, AL ALLARD, WILL LIEBERSON, ROD REED, GINNY PROVISIERO, cast members of the A collection of MARK EVANIER’s POV COLUMNS, Captain Marvel serial and Shazam! TV featuring a NEW COVER and ILLUSTRATIONS by show, and others! SERGIO ARAGONÉS! Includes his best essays and • Rare and previously unpublished artwork commentaries, plus many never before published on: by BECK, SWAYZE, SCHAFFENBERGER, MAC RABOY, DAVE BERG, ALEX TOTH, • The state of the art form (as only Mark conveys it)! BOB OKSNER, GEORGE EVANS, A.J. • The industry’s leading practitioners (including JACK HANLEY, ALEX ROSS, a Foreword by KIRBY and CARL BARKS)! SWAYZE, and more! • Convention-going and Mark’s old comic book club (with unforgettable anecdotes)! (160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US (200-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE

COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION VOL. TWO

MR. MONSTER

HIS BOOKS OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE, VOL. ZERO

Second volume in the series, reprinting CBA #5-6, plus 50 NEW PAGES of features MR. MONSTER is back with a new book and art, including new interviews with collection featuring TWELVE TWISTED MARSHALL ROGERS, STEVE ENGLEHART, TALES of Forbidden Knowledge, featuring: & TERRY AUSTIN on their ’70s Batman! • Over 30 pages of ALL-NEW Mr. Monster (208-page Trade Paperback) $24 US art and stories by MICHAEL T. GILBERT! • Collects the hard-to-find MR. MONSTER stories from A-1, CRACK-A-BOOM! and JACK KIRBY DARK HORSE PRESENTS! CHECKLIST • The lost Mr. Monster NEWSPAPER STRIP! (100-pages) Lists all • New 8-page FULL-COLOR STORY by published work, portKEITH GIFFEN & MICHAEL T. GILBERT! folios, unpublished work, cross-references reprints, & more! A must-have for eBay shoppers! $7 US

WARREN COMPANION THE ULTIMATE REFERENCE GUIDE TO WARREN PUBLISHING

Editor JON B. COOKE has joined forces with historian DAVID ROACH to compile the definitive book on the black-&-white world of Warren Publishing, the publisher who created such magazines as CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, BLAZING COMBAT, and others. This book reprints the contents of the Eisner Award-winning magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST #4 (completely reformatted), plus nearly 200 new pages:

(136-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

KIMOTA! THE MIRACLEMAN COMPANION Learn the behind-the-scenes secrets of ALAN MOORE’S MIRACLEMAN, from his beginnings as Marvelman, to the legal and creative hurdles during the 24-issue Eclipse Comics series, and why you never saw the final NEIL GAIMAN-scripted issue!

Also available as a Limited Edition Hardcover (limited to 1000 copies) signed by JIM WARREN, with custom endleaves, 16 extra pages, plus a WRIGHTSON plate not in the Trade Paperback.

• New MARK BUCKINGHAM cover! • Intro & back cover by ALEX ROSS! • In-depth interviews with ALAN MOORE, JOHN TOTLEBEN, NEIL GAIMAN, MARK BUCKINGHAM, GARRY LEACH, MICK ANGLO, BEAU SMITH, RICK VEITCH, and others! • UNPUBLISHED ART, UNINKED PENCILS, SKETCHES, & CONCEPT DRAWINGS (including unseen art from the neverpublished #25)! • Special COLOR SECTION! • NEVER-PUBLISHED 8-page Moore/ Totleben story, “Lux Brevis”, and an UNUSED MOORE SCRIPT! • A percentage of profits goes to artist JOHN TOTLEBEN, who is battling the eye disease Retinitis Pigmentosa.

(288-page Hardcover) $57 US

(144-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

• New painted cover by ALEX HORLEY! • A definitive WARREN CHECKLIST! • Dozens of NEW FEATURES on CORBEN, FRAZETTA, DITKO and others, and interviews with WRIGHTSON, WARREN, EISNER, ADAMS, COLAN & many more! (272-page Trade Paperback) $35 US

US Prices Include Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail (except Warren Companion Hardcover: add $14 Airmail)

MAGAZINES ABOUT COMICS FROM TWOMORROWS Edited by ROY THOMAS ™

ALTER EGO, the greatest ’zine of the ’60s, is all-new, focusing on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews, and unseen art. Each issue includes an FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) section, Mr. Monster, & more!

ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTIONS (price includes postage) 6 ISSUES ❏ $30 STANDARD US ❏ $48 1ST CLASS US ❏ $60 CANADA ❏ $66 SURFACE ❏ $90 AIRMAIL

12 ISSUES ❏ $60 STANDARD US ❏ $96 1ST CLASS US ❏ $120 CANADA ❏ $132 SURFACE ❏ $180 AIRMAIL

❏ #2: (100 pages) All-new! EISNER “SPIRIT” story, KANE, FOX & SCHWARTZ on The Atom, L. LIEBER & JACK BURNLEY intvs., KANIGHER, FCA, new color BURNLEY & KANE covers, more! $8 US

❏ #3: (100 pages) ALEX ❏ #4: (100 pages) 60 years of ❏ #5: (100 pages) JSA issue! ❏ #6: (100 pages) GENE ❏ #7: (100 pages) Companion ❏ #8: (100 pages) Bio of ❏ #9: (100 pages) JOHN ❏ #10: (100 pgs) CARMINE ROSS cover & interview, HAWKMAN & FLASH! ROY Intvs. with SHELLY MAYER, COLAN intv., how-to books by issue to the ALL-STAR WALLY WOOD, ADKINS & ROMITA intv. and gallery, plus INFANTINO intv. and art, THOMAS’ dream never-seen FLASH story, VIN JERRY ORDWAY, BILL THOMAS remembers GIL GIL KANE, MART NODELL, STAN LEE and KANIGHER, COMPANION! J. SCHWARTZ PEARSON intvs., KUBERT ROY EVERETT, CARL BURGOS, KANE, intvs. with KUBERT, GEORGE ROUSSOS, FCA with ALL-STAR SQUADRON, MAC intv., JLA-JSA teamups, MAC intv., FCA w/ BECK, SWAYZE, projects! FCA with BECK, SULLIVAN and MAGAZINE FRED Giant FAWCETT (FCA) section MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, FOX, BECK & SWAYZE, NEW RABOY section, FCA with RABOY, FCA with BECK & & ORDWAY, MR. MONSTER, SWAYZE, & TUSKA, MR. ENTERPRISES, with C.C. BECK, MARC FCA with BECK & SWAYZE, INFANTINO / ORDWAY wrap- BECK & SWAYZE, COLAN and SWAYZE, BUCKLER & BECK WOOD & KUBERT covers, MONSTER, ROMITA & DICK GUARDINEER, AYERS, FCA, GIORDANO covers! $8 US more! $8 US MR. MONSTER, more! $8 US SWAYZE, & more! $8 US KUBERT covers, more! $8 US around cover, more! $8 US RABOY covers, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US

❏ #11: (100 pgs) Interviews ❏ #12: (100 pgs) GILL FOX on ❏ #13 (100 pages) TITANS OF ❏ #14 (100 pages) JSA FROM ❏ #15 (108 pages) JOHN ❏ #16: (108 pages) COLAN, ❏ #17: (108 pages) LOU FINE ❏ #18: (108 pages) STAN with SYD SHORES, MICKEY QUALITY COMICS, never-seen TIMELY/MARVEL Part Two! THE ’40s TO THE ’80s! MIKE BUSCEMA TRIBUTE ISSUE! BUSCEMA, ROMITA, SEVERIN overview & art, ARNOLD GOLDBERG interview & art, SPILLANE, VINCE FAGO, PAUL REINMAN Green JOE SIMON & MURPHY NASSER & MICHAEL T. BUSCEMA covers & interview, interviews, ALEX ROSS on DRAKE & MURPHY ANDER- plus KIRBY, DITKO, HECK, MAGAZINE ENTERPRISES Lantern art, origins of ALL- ANDERSON covers, Silver Age GILBERT covers, intvs. with unseen art, ROY THOMAS on Shazam!, OTTO & JACK SON interviews, plus EISNER, AYERS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, Part Two, FCA with BECK, STAR SQUADRON, FCA, MR. AVENGERS section (with ORDWAY & LEE ELIAS, never- their collaborations, plus BINDER, KURTZMAN, new CRANDALL, DAVIS & EVANS’ EVERETT, WALLY WOOD’S SWAYZE, DON NEWTON, MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD, BUSCEMA, HECK, TUSKA, and seen 1940s JSA pages, ’70s salute to KURT SCHAFFEN- ROSS and FRADON/SEVERIN non-EC action comics, FCA, Flash Gordon, FCA, KIRBY & LOU FINE cover, more! $8 US SWAYZE covers, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US MONSTER, more! $8 US more! $8 US THOMAS) and more! $8 US JSA, and more! $8 US BERGER, and more! $8 US

Edited by JON B. COOKE COMIC BOOK ARTIST, 2000-2002 Eisner Award winner for “Best Comics-Related Magazine,” celebrates the lives and work of great cartoonists, writers, and editors from all eras through in-depth interviews, feature articles, and unpublished art.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 6-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS (price includes postage)

❏ $36 STANDARD US ❏ $54 1ST CLASS US ❏ $66 CANADA ❏ $72 SURFACE ❏ $96 AIRMAIL

❏ COMIC BOOK ARTIST ❏ #7: (132 pages) 1970s ❏ #9: (116 pages) CHARLTON ❏ #10: (116 pages) WALTER ❏ #11: (116 pages) ALEX ❏ #12: (116 pages) CHARLTON ❏ #13: (116 pages) MARVEL ❏ #14: (116 pages) TOWER SPECIAL EDITION! (68 pages) MARVEL! JOHN BYRNE, PAUL COMICS: PART ONE! DICK SIMONSON, plus WOMEN OF TOTH AND SHELDON MAYER! COMICS OF THE 1970s! Rare HORROR OF THE 1970s! Art/ COMICS! Art by & intvs. with ALL-NEW on ’70s DC! BRUCE GULACY, DAN ADKINS, RICH GIORDANO, PETER MORISI, THE COMICS! RAMONA TOTH interviews, unseen art, art/interviews with STATON, interviews with WOLFMAN, WALLY WOOD, DAN ADKINS, TIMM cover! Interviews with BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, JIM APARO, JOE GILL, FRANK FRADON, MARIE SEVERIN, appreciations, checklist, and BYRNE, NEWTON, SUTTON, COLAN, PALMER, THOMAS, LEN BROWN, STEVE ADAMS, WRIGHTSON, TOTH, JIM MOONEY & STEVE MCLAUGHLIN, SAM TRINA ROBBINS, JOHN more. Also, SHELLY MAYER’s ZECK, NICK CUTI, a NEW E- ISABELLA, PERLIN, TRIMPE, SKEATES, GEORGE TUSKA, HEATH, EVANIER/SHERMAN GERBER, new GULACY cover GLANZMAN, new GIORDANO WORKMAN, new SIMONSON kids, the real life SUGAR & MAN strip, new STATON MARCOS, a new COLAN/ new WOOD & ADKINS covers, cover, and more! $9 US PALMER cover, more! $9 US more! $9 US SPIKE! $9 US on KIRBY, more! $10 US & more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US cover, and more! $9 US

❏ #15: (116 pages) LOVE & ❏ #16: (132 pages) ’70s ❏ #17: (116 pages) ARTHUR ❏ #18: (116 pages) COSMIC ❏ #19: (116 pages) HARVEY ❏ #20: (116 pages) FATHERS ❏ #21: (116 pages) THE ART ❏ #22: (116 pages) GOLD ROCKETEERS! Art by & intvs. ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS! ADAMS & CO.! ART ADAMS COMICS OF THE ’70s! Art by COMICS! Art by & intvs. with & SONS! Art by & intvs. with OF ADAM HUGHES! Art, KEY COMICS! Art by & intvs. with DAVE STEVENS, LOS Art by & interviews with interview & gallery, remem- & intvs. with JIM STARLIN, SIMON & KIRBY, WALLY the top father/son teams in interview & checklist with with RUSS MANNING, WALLY BROS. HERNANDEZ, MATT ERNIE CÓLON, CHAYKIN, bering GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, ENGLEHART, WOOD, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL comics: ADAM, ANDY, & JOE HUGHES, plus a day in the life WOOD, JESSE SANTOS, WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, ROVIN, AMENDOLA, HAMA, GEORGE ROUSSOS, GEORGE AL MILGROM, LEIALOHA, KANE, SID JACOBSON, FRED KUBERT and JOHN ROMITA of ALEX ROSS, JOHN MARK EVANIER, DON GLUT, new STEVENS/HERNANDEZ new CÓLON & KUPPERBERG EVANS, new ART ADAMS ’60s Bullpen reunion, new RHOADES, MITCH O’CONNELL SR. & JR., new ROMITA & BUSCEMA tribute, new new BRUCE TIMM cover, cover, more! $9 US STARLIN cover, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US covers, more! $9 US KUBERT covers, more! $9 US HUGHES cover, more! $9 US more! $9 US

READ EXCERPTS & ORDER AT: www.twomorrows.com

Edited by JOHN MORROW THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare and unseen Kirby artwork. Now in tabloid format, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art at even larger size.

❏ #18: (68 pages) MARVEL issue! Intvs. with KIRBY, STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS, JOHN ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, HERB TRIMPE, unseen Kirby art, Kirby/Sinnott cover. $8 US

❏ #20: (68 pages) KIRBY’S WOMEN! Interviews with KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS, and LISA KIRBY, unused 10-page story, romance comics, Jack’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY screenplay, more! $8 US

❏ #21: (68 pages) KIRBY, GIL KANE, and BRUCE TIMM intvs., FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE (LEE dialogue vs. KIRBY notes), SILVER STAR screenplay, TOPPS COMICS, unpublished art, more! $8 US

❏ #22: (68 pages) VILLAINS! KIRBY, STEVE RUDE, and MIKE MIGNOLA interviews, FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, KOBRA, ATLAS MONSTERS, more! Kirby/Stevens cover. $8 US

❏ #23: (68 pages) Interviews with KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL and TRACY KIRBY, more FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, unused 10page SOUL LOVE story, more! $8 US

❏ #24: (68 pages) BATTLES! KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM SHOOTER interview, NEW GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”) pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! Kirby/ Mignola cover. $8 US

❏ #25: (100 pages) SIMON & KIRBY! KIRBY, SIMON, and JOHN SEVERIN interviews, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, unused BOY EXPLORERS story, history of MAINLINE COMICS, more! $8 US

❏ #27: (72 pages) KIRBY INFLUENCE Part One! KIRBY and ALEX ROSS interviews, KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, all-star lineup of pros discuss Kirby’s influence on them! Kirby / Timm cover. $8 US

❏ #28: (84 pages) KIRBY INFLUENCE Part Two! Intvs. with MARK HAMILL, JOHN KRICFALUSI, MIKE ALLRED, Jack’s grandkids, career of VINCE COLLETTA, more! Kirby/Allred cover. $8 US

❏ #29: (68 pages) ’70s MARVEL! Interviews with KIRBY, KEITH GIFFEN and RICH BUCKLER, ’70s COVER GALLERY in pencil, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, & more! Kirby/Janson cover. $8 US

❏ #30: (68 pages) ’80s WORK! Interviews with ALAN MOORE and Kirby Estate’s ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER DOGS, SUPER POWERS, SILVER STAR, ANIMATION work, more! $8 US

❏ #31: (84 pages) TABLOID FORMAT! Wraparound KIRBY/ ADAMS cover, KURT BUSIEK & LADRONN interviews, new MARK EVANIER column, favorite 2-PAGE SPREADS, 2001 Treasury, more! $13 US

❏ #32: (84 pages) TABLOID! KIRBY interview, new MARK EVANIER column, plus Kirby’s Least Known Work: DAYS OF THE MOB #2, THE HORDE, BLACK HOLE, SOUL LOVE, PRISONER, more! $13 US

❏ #26: (72 pages) GODS! COLOR NEW GODS concept drawings, KIRBY & WALTER SIMONSON interviews, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, MR. MIRACLE, more! $8 US

COMICOLOGY Edited by BRIAN SANER LAMKEN COMICOLOGY, the highly-acclaimed magazine about modern comics, recently ended its four-issue run, but back issues are available, featuring never-seen art and interviews. ❏ #33: (84 pages) TABLOID ALL-FANTASTIC FOUR issue! MARK EVANIER column, miniinterviews with everyone who worked on FF after Kirby, STAN LEE interview, 40 pages of FF PENCILS, more! $13 US

❏ #34: (84 pages) TABLOID! JOE SIMON and CARMINE INFANTINO interviews, MARK EVANIER column, unknown 1950s concepts, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, KIRBY/ TOTH cover, more! $13 US

❏ #35: (84 pages) TABLOID! GREAT ESCAPES with MISTER MIRACLE, comparing KIRBY and HOUDINI, Kirby Tribute Panel with EVANIER, EISNER, BUSCEMA, ROMITA, ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON! $13 US

❏ #36: (84 pages) TABLOID ALL-THOR issue! MARK EVANIER column, SINNOTT and ROMITA JR. interviews, unseen KIRBY INTV., ART GALLERY, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! $13 US

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR 4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS (price includes postage) ❏ $36 STANDARD US

❏ $52 1ST CLASS US

❏ $60 CANADA

❏ $64 SURFACE

❏ $80 AIRMAIL

DRAW! 4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS (price includes postage) ❏ $20 STANDARD US ❏ $32 1ST CLASS US ❏ $40 CANADA

❏ $44 SURFACE ❏ $60 AIRMAIL

❏ #1: (100 pages) BRUCE ❏ #2: (100 pages) MIKE ❏ #3: (100 pages) CARLOS ❏ #4: (116 pages, final issue) TIMM cover, interview & ALLRED interview and portfo- PACHECO interview & portfolio, ALL-BRIAN ISSUE! Interviews sketchbook, JEPH LOEB inter- lio, 60 years of THE SPIRIT, 25 ANDI WATSON interview, a look with BRIAN AZZARELLO, view, LEA HERNANDEZ, years of the X-MEN, PAUL at what comics predicted the BRIAN CLOPPER, BRIAN MANYA, USAGI YOJIMBO, 60 GRIST interview, FORTY future would be like, new color MICHAEL BENDIS, BRIAN years of ROBIN THE BOY WON- WINKS, new color ALLRED and PACHECO and WATSON cov- BOLLAND, huge BOLLAND DER, & more! $8 US GRIST covers, & more! $8 US ers, & more! $8 US portfolio, & more! $8 US

Edited by MIKE MANLEY

SUBSCRIPTION SPEED:

DRAW! is the professional “HowTo” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features indepth interviews and step-by-step demonstrations from top comics professionals.

G MIN CO OON! S ❏ #1: (108 pages with color) ❏ #2: (116 pages) “How-To” ❏ #3: (80 pages) “How-To” ❏ #4: (92 pages) “How-To” ❏ #5: (88 pages) “How-To” Professional “How-To” mag demos and interviews with demos and interviews with demos & interviews with ERIK demos and interviews with on comics and cartooning, GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY, DICK GIORDANO, BRET LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN, BRIAN BENDIS and MIKE with art demos by GIBBONS, KLAUS JANSON, JERRY ORD- BLEVINS, CHRIS BAILEY, DAVE COOPER, BRET OEMING, MIKE WIERINGO, ORDWAY, BLEVINS, VILLA- WAY, BRET BLEVINS, PHIL MIKE MANLEY, new column BLEVINS, new column by MARK McKENNA, BRET GRAN, color BLEVINS cover HESTER, ANDE PARKS, by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of PAUL RIVOCHE, color section, BLEVINS, PAUL RIVOCHE, color section, more! $8 US & more! $8 US more! $8 US STEVE CONLEY, more! $8 US art supplies, more! $8 US

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US Prices Include Postage. For back issues outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail. Subscriptions already include postage.

COMING THIS NOVEMBER FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

K! OO EB ID GU

LEX NEW AOVER! C ROSS

G-FORCE: ANIMATED is the official compendium to BATTLE OF THE PLANETS, the Japanese animated TV program that revolutionized anime across the globe! With unseen artwork and designs from the world of G-FORCE (aka Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), it presents interviews and behind-the-scenes stories of the pop culture phenomenon that captured the hearts and imagination of Generation X, and spawned the new hit comic series! Co-written by JASON HOFIUS & GEORGE KHOURY. 96-page FULL-COLOR Trade Paperback! NEW PAINTED COVER by ALEX ROSS! $20 Postpaid US ($22 Canada, Elsewhere: $23 Surface, $27 Airmail)

A N I M A T E D TH EO FF ICI AL

G - F O R C E :

LOOKING FOR ACTION? CAPTAIN ACTION

With more than 200 toy photos, this new Trade Paperback Book chronicles the history of CAPTAIN ACTION, the quick-changing champion who could assume the identities of 13 famous super-heroes! Included are photos of virtually every CAPTAIN ACTION product ever released, spotlights on his allies ACTION BOY and the SUPER QUEENS and his arch-enemy DR. EVIL, an examination of his comic-book appearances, and “Action Facts” that even the most-diehard CAPTAIN ACTION fan won’t know! It features a foreword, new cover, and unseen package illos by MURPHY ANDERSON, plus historical anecdotes by the late GIL KANE, JIM SHOOTER, STAN WESTON (co-creator of GI JOE, CAPTAIN ACTION, and MEGO’S WORLD’S GREATEST SUPER-HEROES), and LARRY REINER and LARRY O’DALY (formerly of IDEAL TOYS), plus never-before-published CAPTAIN ACTION artwork by GIL KANE, JOE STATON, CARMINE INFANTINO, JERRY ORDWAY, and MURPHY ANDERSON! Order now for holiday delivery! ONLY $15.95 PLUS SHIPPING!

THE ORIGINAL SUPER-HERO ACTION FIGURE

160-page Trade Paperback! Ships in November! $20 Postpaid US ($22 Canada, Elsewhere: $23 Surface, $27 Airmail)