Write Now! #4

INSIDE: HOW TO WRITE FOR HOLLYWOOD! $ 95

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In the USA

American Flagg TM & ©2003 Howard Chaykin

HOWARD CHAYKIN DENNY O’NEIL PAUL DINI FABIAN NICIEZA KURT BUSIEK DeFALCO & FRENZ

M AG A ZI N E

May 2003

Number 11, April-May 2003 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Roy Internationale ALTER EGO editor ROY THOMAS will be a guest at the Torino Comics Convention in Turin, Italy on May 9-11. But before he leaves, he promises to complete AE #25, shipping in June and featuring a special spotlight on JACK COLE and PLASTIC MAN, as ALEX TOTH celebrates Cole’s creation!

COPYRIGHTS: Plastic Man, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Adam Strange TM & ©2003 DC Comics. All other art and characters TM & ©2003 the respective artists.

Coming Soon!

Alter Ego #24 (Now!) Alter Ego #25 (June) Comic Book Artist #24 (Now!) CBA #25 (May, final issue) DRAW! #6 (May) Jack Kirby Collector #38 (May) Write Now! #4 (May) Modern Masters V1: Alan Davis (Now!) Beck & Schaffenberger: Sons of Thunder (May) Wertham Was Right! (June) Life & Art of Murphy Anderson (June) The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (July) Against The Grain: MAD Artist Wally Wood (September) Wally Wood Checklist (August)

CONTACTS:

John Morrow, publisher, JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR editor, and for subscriptions): twomorrow@aol.com Mike Manley, DRAW! editor: mike@actionplanet.com Roy Thomas, ALTER EGO editor: roydann@ntinet.com P.C. Hamerlinck, FCA editor: fca2001@yahoo.com Danny Fingeroth, WRITE NOW! editor: WriteNowDF@aol.com Jon B. Cooke, COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor: jonbcooke@aol.com Read excerpts from back issues and order from our secure online store at: www.twomorrows.com

New Books Coming On Anderson, Evanier, Wood, & Moore!

THE LIFE AND ART OF MURPHY ANDERSON Comics historian R.C. HARVEY has compiled a lavishly illustrated autobiographical memoir of the man whose style defined the DC look for a generation of fans! It covers his career from the mid-1940s to his glory days at DC Comics on SUPERMAN, HAWKMAN, ADAM STRANGE, SPECTRE, THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS and beyond! There’s coverage of his syndicated comic strip work (BUCK ROGERS) and educational comics (PS MAGAZINE), plus Murphy’s recollections and behind-thescenes stories about LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, CURT SWAN, GIL KANE, and others he worked with—and rare art from every phase of his career! 160-Page trade paperback, $22 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD and the WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST The definitive book on one of comics' finest artists! Twenty years in the making, this biographical memoir of life at the Wood Studio by former associate BHOB STEWART traces Wood's life and career, and features many artists and writers who knew Wood personally, contributing articles and essays to make it a remarkable compendium of art, insights and critical commentary! From childhood drawings and early samples to nearly endless comics pages (many unpublished), this is the most stunning display of Wood art ever assembled!

BILL PEARSON, executor of the Wood Estate, has contributed rare drawings directly from Wood's own files, while noted art collector ROGER HILL provides a wealth of obscure, previously unpublished Wood drawings and paintings. It’s a colossal 336-PAGE TRADE PAPERBACK with color section, and a LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (with 16 extra full-color pages, plus bonus B&W plates)! Softcover is $44 postpaid in the US, or $64 postpaid for the hardcover. We’re also releasing a separate 64-page WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST ($7 postpaid in the US), detailing Wood’s published work! SPECIAL BONUS: Preorder either version of AGAINST THE GRAIN by August 1 directly from TwoMorrows, and GET THE WOOD CHECKLIST ABSOLUTELY FREE! Both SHIP IN SEPTEMBER!

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WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! Writer-historian MARK EVANIER is back with a second collection of POV COLUMNS, including many never-before-published on comic book history, creation and appreciation! Included in this volume are his definitive history of the FOX AND CROW comic book, tributes to artists BOB KANE and GIL KANE, Mark’s diatribe on comic book numbering, and many more, capped off by an essay on comics’ greatest villain, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM! This collection is profusely illustrated by award-winning MAD cartoonist (and Mark’s collaborator of 20 years on GROO THE WANDERER) SERGIO ARAGONÉS, including a new cover! 200-page trade paperback, $17 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

THE EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE From WATCHMEN to THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, ALAN MOORE has been widely recognized as one of comics greatest pioneers, and this book tells his story, as the reclusive British author speaks enthusiastically and passionately about his life and work in an extensive series of interviews! Moore displays his trademark wit and shares his unique insight on the comics that have shaped his legendary career—from his beginnings on SWAMP THING to the current success of his own AMERICA’S BEST COMICS. Editor GEORGE (Kimota!) KHOURY has assembled rare strips, scripts, artwork and photographs of the author, most never published before. It also features Moore’s closest collaborators elaborating in comic strip form on their relationships with Moore, from NEIL GAIMAN, DAVE GIBBONS, and SAM KIETH to KEVIN O'NEILL, BRIAN BOLLAND and others! (DON’T CONFUSE THIS BOOK WITH A SIMILARLYTITLED ONE COMING FROM ABIOGENESIS PRESS IN MAY. Ours is more than just a tribute book—it’s the definitive autobiographical work on Moore, over two years in the making!)

208-page trade paperback with color section, $29 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JULY! BACK ISSUE, the newest TwoMorrows mag, now debuts in October (taking CBA's spot on our schedule)! It’ll be bi-monthly, edited by MICHAEL EURY (former editor and writer for DC and Dark Horse Comics, and author of our acclaimed CAPTAIN ACTION book, as well as our upcoming biography of DICK GIORDANO), and focuses on comics of the 1970s and ’80s in a way you’ve NEVER SEEN BEFORE! Stay tuned for more details on THE ULTIMATE COMICS EXPERIENCE!

M AG A ZI N E Issue #4

May 2003

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

Chaykin All Over Interview with Howard Chaykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 3

A Man for All Media Interview with Paul Dini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 20

Not the Last... ...Interview with Dennis O’Neil Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 33

Astro City’s Marvel Interview with Kurt Busiek Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 48

All He Wants to Do Is Change the World!

Interview with Fabian Nicieza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 56 Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 76 Books on Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 77

Nuts & Bolts Department Thumbnails to Script to Finished Art: MIGHTY LOVE Story and art by Howard Chaykin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 8

Live Action TV Scripting 1: THE FLASH Opening pages from “Watching the Detectives” by Howard Chaykin . .page 12

Live Action TV Scripting 2: MUTANT X Closing pages from “The Shock of the New” by Howard Chaykin . . . .page 16

Compact Storytelling 1: JINGLE BELLE Script and finished art: “Jingle Belle” 2-pager, written by Paul Dini, art by Steve Rolston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 28

Comics 101/Classes 3 & 4 Notes by Dennis O’Neil for the writing and editing classes he teaches at DC Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 38

Compact Storytelling 2: MR. RIGHT Plot, script, finished comic. The entire “Mr. Right Battles the Dead Presidents,” by Tom DeFalco, Ron Frenz and Sal Buscema . . . . .page 44

Rejection Sketch for a new character—and the rejection letter that it resulted in.

The Earthling conceived by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire . . . . . . .page 59

From Outline to Plot to Finished Comic: THUNDERBOLTS #34 Pages from “Making Your Mark,” by Fabian Nicieza, Mark Bagley and Scott Hanna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 64

Comics Into Film: Making It Happen Steven Grant tells you how to convert your comics idea into a movie or TV series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 71

Another Kind of Comics: NEXT YEAR AT TOLUKA LAKE Steven Grant’s experiment—as seen online—with picture postcards and text narration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 75 Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! is published 4 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Fax: (919) 833-8023. Danny Fingeroth, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Write Now! E-mail address: WriteNowDF@aol.com. Single issues: $8 Postpaid in the US ($10 Canada, $11 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US ($40 Canada, $44 elsewhere). Order online at: www.twomorrows.com or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com All characters are TM & © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © the respective authors. Editorial package is ©2003 Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. Write Now! is a shared trademark of Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

Conceived & Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH Designer CHRISTOPHER DAY Transcribers STEVEN TICE, the LONGBOX.COM STAFF and PETER SANDERSON Publisher JOHN MORROW COVER Penciled and inked by HOWARD CHAYKIN Colored by TOM ZIUKO Special Thanks To ALISON BLAIRE HOWARD CHAYKIN PAUL DINI TOM DeFALCO RON FRENZ STEVEN GRANT PATTY JERES FABIAN NICIEZA ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON DENNIS O’NEIL MARIFRAN O’NEIL ADAM PHILIPS CHRIS POWELL BEN REILLY VARDA STEINHARDT WRITE NOW | 1

READ Now!

Message from Danny Fingeroth, editor

W

elcome to our frenetic fourth issue. But before we begin…

Have you ever noticed how good this magazine looks? I know I have. You know why it does? It’s because of the stellar work done by our ace designer: Mr. Chris Day. Chris is, issue after issue, able to take the raw material that I supply him with and put it through his creative imagination so that Write Now! comes out looking as good as it possibly can.

Chris will often find illustrations to perfectly complement the articles and interviews. He regularly makes suggestions that are incorporated into an issue and, even if I decide I want something other than what he’s suggested, he always adds something to my idea that I never would have envisioned.

Chris also designs other fine TwoMorrows mags, and he runs a terrific Harlan Ellison website. It’s at www.sequentialellison.com.

Putting this magazine out is a lot of work. Without Chris it’d be a hundred times harder, and nowhere near as much fun. Thanks, Mr. Day. So, here we are at issue #4. As you’ve already seen, we have a sensational, new American Flagg! cover by his creator, the inimitable Howard Chaykin. Thanks, Howard!

Inside, as always, we have some super-cool Nuts & Bolts lessons and tips on how to make your writing better.

• First, we’ve got TV and comics material from Mr. Chaykin, himself There’s some Flash, some Mutant X, and some step-by-steps on how he creates comics stories. Howard’s one of the most distinctive voices to ever come down the comics and TV pikes. Observe and learn.

• Fabian Nicieza also has granted us a boatload of his writing. You get to peer inside his brain—as messy as that may sound—as he shows us how a story goes from premise to plot to script—and more!

• Longtime collaborators Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz show how to tell a complete comics stor y in FIVE PAGES! It’s got all the elements a compelling story needs—and, of course, hoo-hah action as you like it.

These guys are masters of the craft, as the Mr. Right story they present for us will show.

• Steven Grant is back with another eye-opening article, this one about how to maneuver your way through the business end of Hollywood.

• Hollywood’s own Paul Dini shares a script for one of his own groovy characters, Jingle Belle, daughter of Santa Claus. It’s imagination unleashed for your benefit!

• And there’re more of Dennis O’Neil’s class notes, as he instructs his students in what makes a story in comics and out.

Then, sharing more wisdom, we have our “lessons disguised as interviews.” Check out this line-up: • For starters, we have an interview with Howard Chaykin himself, giving his views on the ins and outs of comics and TV as only Howard can. You may not like everything he says—but it’ll sure give you something to think about.

• Fabian Nicieza started out as a (non-editorial) staffer at Marvel, hoping for a break. With hard work and a head full of ideas, Fabe was soon the top-selling writer in the industry, writing such titles as New Warriors, XMen, and Thunderbolts. Read what he has to say about those years—and how it led to what he’s doing today in comics and in other media.

• Best known for his work on the Batman and Batman Beyond animated series, Paul Dini does distinctive comics writing, both mainstream and independent.

He’s passionate and articulate and has a lot to tell— and teach—about how he makes his own way in comics and in Hollywood.

• Plus, we have the conclusions to our interviews with Dennis O’Neil and Kurt Busiek. If you thought what they said last issue was intriguing, check them out this time around. They’ve saved the best for last—as great storytellers always do.

Next issue, we have our awe-inspiring interview with Will Eisner. Will talks about comics past, comics present and comics future. When he speaks, you listen. Ditto for SpiderMan’s J. Michael Straczynski, who’ll be interviewed by Jim Salicrup. Then, there’s an in-depth interview with Batman Group Editor Bob Schreck, an eye-opening talk with Dark Horse’s Senior Editor Diana Schutz, and an insightful yack-fest with Platinum Studios’ head, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.

There’ll be more Nut & Bolts from Fabian, Paul Dini, Joey Cavalieri (whose excellent “Writer’s Block” article in DFWN #3 unblocked writers all over the globe!) and Dennis O’Neil, and from the some surprise teachers.

And I haven’t forgotten about the new special feature we promised, but it’s gonna start in issue #6, not #5. It needed some more time to ferment, but it will be truly worth the wait.

That’s it for now.

Write Away!

Danny Fingeroth 2 | WRITE NOW

Chaykin All Over

The HOWARD CHAYKIN Interview Interview conducted via telephone December 23, 2002 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice / Edited by Danny Fingeroth / Copy-edited by Howard Chaykin

H

oward Chaykin has been an influential figure in the world of comics and television for a good long while now. Starting with such characters as Cody Starbuck and Dominic Fortune, and illustrating the comics adaptation of an obscure science fiction film called Star Wars well before the movie was released, Chaykin truly found his voice with American Flagg! Groundbreaking in a multiplicity of ways—subject matter, page design, dialogue usage, among them—Flagg! established the Chaykin brand.

From there, he continued to leave his mark with such works as Blackhawk, Black Kiss and The Shadow, and, currently, on American Century and Mighty Love. In television, he has served on staff on The Flash, Viper, Earth: Final Conflict and Mutant X, bringing his unique vision to those series.

Howard always tells it like he sees it, which generally involves stripping emperors of their clothes. In this interview, he’s as frank and to the point. Read on and learn.

—DF DANNY FINGEROTH: I’m speaking with Howard Chaykin, who’s out in his Los Angeles home/studio. Let’s star t with a little bit of histor y. You’ve always said that Gil Kane, was a great influence on you.

Besides Gil, was there anybody—any teachers or family members—who were instrumental in your becoming a professional creative person?

HOWARD CHAYKIN: My mother died never having any real idea what I did for a living. And comics were never a part of anybody in my family’s

Ruben Flagg, star of Chaykin’s American Flagg! [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. & First Comics, Inc.]

lives, so, naturally, the creative impulse was never there. I wasn’t actively discouraged, nor was I in any way encouraged. Comics were regarded as frivolous and stupid, and frankly, I don’t think anyone in my family ever really made the leap to see the difference between Howard Chaykin in 1986. reading them and doing them.

DF: What kind of work were they involved in, your family?

HC: Back then, we ran a union on my mother’s side. My father was a low-life.

DF: “Ran a union” in what sense? What union?

HC: A trade and craft union.

DF: Okay. What kind of stuff did you watch or read as a kid?

HC: At which part of being a kid? Being a kid in comic books lasts an awfully long time.

DF: Give as much of a progression as you want to give. What switched that possibility on in your brain? How does it go from, “These comic books are interesting,” to “this is what I want to do for a career”?

HC: I was obsessed with comic books from very early on. My vocabulary expanded exponentially with the arrival of comics in my life. I was an early reader, so I was reading on a fairly high level as a kid, and comics helped that—sort of “Dick, Jane” and the “invulnerable.” I was also obsessed with television and movies. The crappier the better.

DF: Action, comedy...?

HC: Both. And war pictures. I was never a horror fan. I never much liked monster movies because I was a chickensh*t. But I loved war movies, musicals, westerns, comedies, crime.

DF: And you were a big science fiction reader.

HC: Yeah, until a point in my early twenties when I realized that it had really lost its appeal to me.

DF: Because...?

HC: Mostly because I felt that it wasn’t really about much other than itself. I still write it, because there is a market for it and because I do this for a living. But I don’t much read it. I will occasionally dip my toe in, but I am woefully undereducated in terms of the guys who came into the field in the past thirty years.

DF: Who would you name as your big science fiction influences?

CHAYKIN | 3

HC: Alfred Bester.

Chip Delany. Michael Moorcock. Robert Heinlein, just because he created every boy’s dream of a perfectly ordered, fascist universe.

DF: [laughs] What more could you ask?

HC: Those were the guys. The usual suspects.

DF: And were the Mar vel comics impor tant to you?

You don’t seem to have much of the influence of, say, Stan Lee in your work.

HC: I was at The cover to the Howard Chaykin/Byron Preiss adaptation of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. The first part summer camp the year the Marvel was originally published in 1979 and it was reprinted, explosion happened. along with the never printed second half, by Epic Comics And I was unprein 1992. [©2003 Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.] pared for it. I was a real DC fan. I became a big Marvel fan, I loved the stuff, I loved what Stan was doing, I really dug it. I collected everything. But at a certain point, I lost my interest in that stuff, too. And Marvel’s not very interested in me.

DF: Well, you’ve done most of your work at DC, I guess. You did apprentice work as opposed to ar t school or college. Talk a little bit about that, why you went that road as opposed to the more traditional one.

HC: I’m a terrible student. Always have been. I’m pathetic at academic pursuits, I really suck.

DF: But it’s clear you’re quite intelligent.

HC: Compared to what? I’m not all that interested in academic pursuits. I was an oaf. And I regret it deeply, but it’s too late now, regardless of what they tell you. So I ended up apprenticing to comics’ other great autodidact, Gil Kane. He had an eighth grade education, but he was the best-read man I knew.

He made a lot of excuses for himself, but that’s just who he was. I learned a great deal from Gil. DF: It’s an amazing stor y. His assistant died and you read about it and called him.

HC: I heard that his assistant had died in his sleep. He was 21 years old.

DF: Oh my God. HC: And I called Gil and offered my services.

DF: You were living in Brooklyn at that point?

HC: Queens.

DF: Did he live near you?

HC: No, he lived in Manhattan. He lived on 63rd and 2nd in an archetypal, grown-up guy apartment.

DF: Was he married at that point?

HC: Divorced—between engagements.

DF: From what I’ve read, it sounds like he was your role model. Did you learn about writing and stor ytelling from working with him?

4 | WRITE NOW

HC: No, actually, he mostly taught me about Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth. He taught me antagonism and questioning.

DF: Can you give a little more detail on that?

HC: I’ve always been naturally hostile, and so was he. I got a lot out of learning to be argumentative with him—a debating club sensibility. And I got turned on to some interesting artists that I’d never heard of before. A lot of the French guys, paperback illustrators, guys who were of interest to him, and so on.

DF: Were you studying with Gil Kane, or were you just hanging out?

HC: I was his gofer—a total loser.

DF: And then you apprenticed for Neal Adams?

HC: I worked with Neal, I worked with Gray Morrow, and with Wally Wood.

DF: That must have been a trip.

HC: It was toward the end of Woody’s stay on Earth. He was a curious, complex and interesting figure.

DF: Now the guys that you came up with, Walt Simonson, Mike Kaluta... thematically, I’d say, these are guys from outside New York—who were not Jews. [Howard laughs] Was the fact that you are a New York Jewish guy... how did you fit in with that crowd, what was the chemistr y there?

HC: Well, there weren’t a lot of New Yorkers in this group, the guys of that generation in comics. Larry Hama, Ralph Reese, Frank Brunner. Most of the guys were guys from the Southeast.

Like Simonson, like Kaluta, like Bernie Wrightson. I was the Jew from New York.

DF: Were you the New York insider who showed them the ropes in town?

HC: They were all older than I was, and they were all already comfortable with the ropes in the world. I just basically hung around. I was also the least of them. My skills at the time were the most underdeveloped. I really didn’t get any good until I was much older than that.

DF: Did you meet them hanging around the DC office?

HC: Yeah. I hung around at the DC office.

DF: Now, that seems to be an entirely different school than, say, the Steve Englehar t/Steve Gerber school of ’70s guys.

HC: Well, Gerber and Englehart were writers. And, frankly, for the most part, we weren’t very interested in what they were doing. Well, I shouldn’t say “we,” let me personalize it. I wasn’t. Steve Englehart lived I don’t know where. I didn’t know Gerber very well. I hung out with the artists. But even then, I believed, as I believe now, that the artist is responsible for the bulk of the writing in the book anyway.

DF: So you’re hanging around with these guys, you’re getting assignments. What was your first assignment, your first ar t assignment?

HC: Love comics. I did mostly fillers. Just stuff to get in the door.

DF: The Scorpion, was that fur ther along?

HC: That was way later, when I was already getting sucked into the morass of the business.

DF: Was that your Atlas character?

HC: Yeah, it was.

DF: Now, in ever y inter view I’ve read with you, you talk about what a par ty animal you were in the ’70s, and no doubt that was true, but you also did produce an awful lot of work.

HC: I was incredibly disciplined. And I got out a lot. Unlike a lot of my peers, I never took for granted the fact that I had a career. I believed that my responsibility to my career was

important.

DF: So were you incredibly disciplined, incredibly fast?

HC: Both. And sloppy! Now, of course, I’m much more analretentive. I’m a great believer in polish, polish, and polish. So to a certain extent, the work I do in television and as a writer in comics is very much a reflection of that evolving ethic as a writer. Because I believe that first drafts are bullsh*t, and that after a first draft, you’ve got a responsibility to actually get what you really meant out there.

DF: In ar t as well as in writing?

HC: Oh, absolutely! My stuff goes through an enormous polishing process.

DF: In the ’70s, how many hours were you at the board, would you estimate?

HC: I couldn’t begin to tell you.

DF: I mean, were you a nine-to-five guy...?

HC: Hardly. I didn’t see much of the sun at all. I would work seven days a week, six to eight hours a day. And the rest of the time, because I was single most of the ’70s, I got out and drank and went to the bars. It worked for me.

DF: And you lived in Manhattan at the time?

HC: I moved to the city in the early ’70s. I’d been living in Queens in a building full of other cartoonists. Wrightson was there, Al Milgrom, Simonson, Elliot Maggin. A bunch of guys. I never had a roommate. I always lived alone. I cherish my privacy, and my time.

DF: But you’ve been married— HC: I married early and often.

DF: Let’s talk about the archetypal Chaykin hero.

HC: The standard Chaykin hero is dark-eyed, dark-haired, and Jewish.

DF: He looks like you, basically, an idealized version of you.

HC: No. He looks like a cross between Rod Steiger and Robert Downey, Jr. DF: Which point in Rod Steiger’s career are we talking about?

HC: A young Rod Steiger! If you think of Rod Steiger playing Marty or Judd in Oklahoma, crossed with Robert Downey, Jr., you get a pretty good mix of me.

DF: As I’ve been reading your comics to research this inter view, I kept thinking, “These guys all look ver y similar, and they all look like Howard.”

HC: Well, they don’t look like me, but there is a certain archetypal quality. Heroes for me are dark-haired, dark-eyed, snotty whippersnappers, that kind of thing.

DF: The dark-haired, dark-eyed thing worked for Superman.

HC: Batman, too.

DF: That’s true. It’s interesting that this is the type you keep coming back to. I can’t be the first person to notice this.

HC: Comics are a visual shorthand in a lot of ways, and it’s an aspect of the shorthand.

DF: At a cer tain point, there star ted being a high sexual content in your work.

HC: I was a horny guy in my early days. I was never particularly interested in power, but I certainly was interested in sex. And that was that.

DF: Did you think it would get your work noticed more? Was it a commercial decision, or just what you wanted to draw?

HC: No, I just had a fun time drawing sex. It worked, and I had a good time!

DF: It shows! But at the time, there wasn’t much else like that around.

HC: It was an opportunity for me to carve a niche.

DF: I know that you write comics scripts both for other people to draw and for yourself. Do you approach those scripts the same way, or do you write differently for yourself?

HC: Pretty much the same, although there are things that I would draw that I would never ask other people to draw just because I don’t believe they’re as interested in those choices as I am.

DF: A comics script of yours that you sent me was formatted like a movie script. Is that how you do all your comics writing?

HC: I tend to write in screenplay format. I believe in a lot of description. Not anywhere nearly as much as Alan Moore, for example.

DF: “And the light bulb is a General Electric sixty watter.”

HC: Yeah, “make sure the tungsten vibrates.” I like details.

DF: And you’re a full script guy, not a Mar vel style [plot first] guy.

HC: Plotting then allowing the artist to dictate the storytelling tends to be sloppy and lazy. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of artists now that have a strong understanding of narrative. There are rules, there’s a language, and there’s a vocabulary. They’re not readers. They didn’t grow up with the idea of reading as a primary tool. They grew up receiving as opposed to reading, and they’re post-analytical—more interested in sensation than sensitivity.

DF: But you would think they would have the four-act TV structure tattooed into their brains from watching so much TV.

A Dominic Fortune splash from the Marvel Hulk Magazine #21. Script by Denny O’Neil with story and art by Howard Chaykin. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] CHAYKIN | 5

HC: You’d think that freelancers in television would have that as well. You don’t know what I had to deal with when it came to freelance television writers.

DF: You seem to use a lot of stuff from the news and from histor y in your work. Is that something that you do consciously, or is it just material that seeps in?

HC: Of course it’s done consciously. Anything to keep me interested. I like to play with stuff that interests me. I don’t really care about the subject matter of most modern comics. Most comics these days are about puberty issues, about complexion issues, symbolized by super-powers or the lack thereof.

DF: What do you mean by “complexion issues”?

HC: I think the great genius of Chris Claremont was to conflate adolescence and puberty with super-heroes. I’ve gone through puberty. I liked it, but I’m glad it’s over.

DF: So that view is of super-powers as a kind of a glorified form of acne?

HC: That’s it.

DF: On to another topic. You have this fascination with the 1930s….

HC: I did. I don’t anymore.

DF: You worked that out?

HC: It was fun to draw. Now I’m perfectly comfortable with contemporary material.

DF: And futuristic material, too.

HC: Mostly contemporary. I’ve lost my interest in the future as well. I’m perfectly happy to live in the present.

DF: Oh, my God! That’s almost maturity.

HC: What can I tell you?

DF: Again, from my concentrated Chaykin research week, I’ve seen that one of your big themes is that things and people are not what they seem. Has that always fascinated you?

HC: Absolutely! The thing that continues to draw me back to super-hero comics, if anything, are the concepts of masks and role-playing. There’s a great quote from Willie Sutton, a well known bank robber in the early to mid-20th century. He was asked why he robbed banks, he said, “’Cause that’s where the money is.” He also said “There is nothing quite like being alone in a bank at night.” I felt that was an incredibly revealing idea about privacy and secrets.

DF: Almost as if the money was secondar y to just being there.

HC: It was great. It’s like having a secret.

And I love that.

DF: Now, how did you end up going from being strictly an artist to also being a writer?

HC: I was plotting a lot of my stuff from word one. Which was why writers liked to work with me, because they hate plotting, and if you can come up with a plot, they can write dialogue for it and collect a full paycheck.

Was I a schmuck to let that happen? Well, there was that paranoia about being too pushy and not getting hired again.

DF: At a cer tain point you seem to have gotten over that.

HC: I did. Again, this is old stuff. I ultimately started writing my own stuff because I was, quite frankly, a better writer than most of the guys who were writing in comics. I could

regurgitate old material as well as they could.

DF: [laughs] If not better!

HC: And I did. As I’ve said, writing and drawing are of a piece— and much of the writing in comics is done by the artist. The acting of the characters, the portrayal of emotions, the presentation of the world and a worldview. Some of it is text, but much of it is visual content.

DF: Was there any writer you enjoyed working with?

HC: I honestly can’t think of anything that was a wonderful experience. For the first time in many years I did a story that somebody else wrote. An interesting experience—but if I never did it again, it would be okay.

DF: American Flagg! was in many ways the ultimate Chaykin hero. Anything about the process of that character coming into existence that might be interesting to the aspiring ar tist wanting to turn writer, or to writers in general?

HC: I was approached by First Comics to come up with something. The company had no history, which was kind of fun.

I had a general idea. I gave them a six-page premise—everything I was interested in at the time. They jumped on it. I did it in the summer of 1982, and in the summer of 1983, American Flagg! hit the stands. I’m proud of that material. Like so much of the work I’ve done, it generated ideas for people other than me.

DF: When it came out, it seemed so different. And it was, compared to what else was coming out. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were people at Mar vel, as I recall, who could not make head or tail of it. It just didn’t follow what were then perceived as “the rules.” And I look at it now, and it really influenced so many things that came after. I mean, so many either were influenced by you, or ripped you off directly. It’s quite amazing.

HC: I have a deep capacity for bitterness.

DF: In many ways, it’s become the mainstream vocabular y now. Back then, it was just this amazingly strange thing.

Another Chaykin/O’Neil collaboration. DC Comic’s Iron Wolf. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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From American Flagg #23 with story and art by Howard Chaykin. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. & First Comics, Inc.]

HC: I opened the door for people who were borrowing my design system without any grasp of narrative. I liken it to Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner doing fake accents in German or French on Your Show of Shows [an early TV sketch comedy show]. The accents are fabulous, but the vocabulary is gibberish—creating good looking nonsense. A lot of really cool poses, though!

DF: What kind of system was it that you referred to a minute ago? Was it a system of imager y?

HC: A design system. In general, I’m a great believer in organization, structure, and so on. I’m working on a book right now that is a super-hero romance book that incorporates a lot of what I’m talking about.

DF: That’s Mighty Love?

HC: Right. There’s a lot of structural repetition from page to page in terms of layout in it, because there are ideas being evolved and developed.

DF: So that will provide something for people to rip off for the next twenty years.

HC: I can only hope.

DF: Did Flagg open doors for you? It seemed like after Flagg was when you decided to go to Hollywood.

HC: Flagg, the concept, had an agent. And that agent became my first agent. Didn’t do anything for me, but it got me another agent after that.

DF: And that first agent contacted you, or you contacted them?

HC: Because they were representing the proper ty, they took me on as a client as well, and they couldn’t sell me at all.

DF: Were they representing it on behalf of First Comics?

HC: Yeah. Because First was delusional in the thought that they were going to use their properties as a means to create a housekeeping deal—when a studio makes a deal with a comic book company and gives them an office and a stipend, and sets them up on the lot. There’re a lot of comic book companies that have that sort of arrangement.

DC is owned outright by AOL-Time Warner. Marvel has had relationships with different studios at different times. I believe Dark Horse has a housekeeping deal somewhere, or used to.

At any rate Flagg generated interest in me. There were a lot of people working at the studios at that time who liked the material. Got me a lot of meetings, got me some work. And ultimately, a couple of years later, I stumbled into television, and I’ve been there ever since.

DF: So these initial meetings were not about television?

HC: I tried to make it in features, and I never really became a feature writer. I’ve written a couple of movies, none of which have been made, all of which have been paid for.

DF: I want to get back to that in a little bit, but first, let’s just continue from where we were. At this point in the ’80s, you were kind of riding high in comics. If you had wanted to, I’m sure you could have done a lot of high-royalty, high-profile comics work.

HC: I don’t really believe that.

DF: Really?

HC: I’m not that kind of talent. I think that calls for a shared sensibility with the audience. And I’m not always interested in what the audience is interested in.

DF: How big an audience did Flagg have?

HC: It wasn’t huge. I mean, it was being read by everybody in the business. I can’t see myself drawing mainstream stuff, because it doesn’t take advantage of the skills that I’ve got. I wish I could have been the kind of talent you thought I was, that I could have been a guy to do high-royalty jobs. My own take on super-hero material is so frequently perverse that I never reached the audience that loves John Byrne’s stuff or Frank Miller’s stuff. I never reached the average reader out there because I tell him life isn’t fair and that villains are usually better-looking than heroes and make more money and are happier.

DF: Of course, what you’re considering not-great sales would probably outsell most of today’s top sellers.

HC: It’s a different business. Bear in mind, I’m saying this from the perspective of painful self-realization. I’d kill to be that kind of guy. I really would.

DF: Even now, even with all your Hollywood stuff?

HC: Absolutely. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t care about power, I don’t care about prestige, I want comfort and privacy. I love comics, I really do. I’ve got a phrase I’ve used more than once: “Democrats, Republicans and me.” I’m too mainstream for the weird guys and I’m too weird for the mainstream. So basically, what that means is I have to constantly reinvent myself on a semi-annual basis.

DF: You’d think that would be a recipe for popularity, that you would get to keep finding new audiences. But I know what you’re saying. So in your view, it was not a matter of you saying, “Screw the riches in comics, I’m casting my lot in California.”

CHAYKIN continues on page 10 CHAYKIN | 7

Howard’s script, thumbnail sketches and art from the Mighty Love graphic novel. We see the script for the end of page 18, then the script and art for pages 19 & 20. This is fullscript method (action and dialogue written at the same time).

The numbers on the script each correspond to a number that would have been indicated on a copy of the art to tell the letterer where to put captions, balloons and sound effects.

Howard, like many people who write for comics as well as for television and movies, uses screenplay format to write the script. While this format is standard—and required—for film and TV, it’s just one of many formats comics writers use.

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Note how the sound effects can become part of the art and design of a page, conveying atmosphere and ideas as much as art, color or text. The letterer, in this case Kurt Hathaway, is an integral part of the creative team.

[©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc.] CHAYKIN | 9

CHAYKIN continued from page 7

HC: No. It was “I’m never going to make the kind of money I want to make in comics, I might as well go to California because I can make some money out there.” Also, I was really getting tired of the weather. I finally reached the point where the cold was kicking my ass, and I wanted to move somewhere more comfortable. And here I am in my office, it’s the end of December, in a T-shirt. I drove sixty miles or so today with my top down.

DF: When you got to L.A., did you know anybody there—in terms of showing you around or introducing you to people?

HC: No, I make my own time.

DF: So you got meetings and so on based on your agent with the First Comics stuff?

HC: Pretty much.

DF: That’s sor t of a scar y thing to a lot of people, just coming out cold to a new town and new industr y.

HC: I’m not a joiner and a big pal-arounder.

DF: But you’re not a shrinking violet, either.

HC: Hardly.

DF: So you had some contacts in place in terms of the work out there. It wasn’t just, “I’m packing up and moving.” You made a few trips and decided, “This is for me.”

HC: I was married at the time, and the two of us wanted a change. We had an apartment in New York City that was worth

From American Flagg! #2 by Chaykin. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. and First Comics, Inc.] 10 | WRITE NOW

more than we paid for it. And we decided to come out and give it a try. We figured we’d give it a year. And I’ve been here for seventeen years. I don’t know where the hell she is.

DF: Hollywood seems to be all about meetings and constant input from various par ties, whereas comics seem more like, “Here’s the assignment” or “draw this plot and maybe I’ll give you a couple of comments on the ar t when you hand it in.” Was that meeting-mode hard to learn? I would imagine you were at the point in comics, especially with Flagg, where nobody was editing you, nobody was telling you what to do.

HC: That’s not true. I was being edited. And I believe in editing.

I believe an editor has a job. I think in my place in comics right now, that I need to have someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m not doing something stupid. The people editing at First Comics were people whose credentials were they’d read a lot of comics when they were a kid. So I got input, but mostly what I handed in went through. But I was always edited. I don’t think I was well proofread, and I don’t think I was as well artdirected, as I could have been.

DF: What was your first work in L.A.?

HC: I wrote a movie with a writing partner—a $50,000 scholarship in screenwriting.

DF: What was it called?

HC: Showdown. A pastiche of Dirty Harry and a pastiche of James Bond go after each other.

DF: And how many drafts did you write?

HC: I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. This was close to fifteen years ago.

DF: Who was your writing par tner?

HC: John F. Moore, now a successful comic book writer. He and I ended up getting hired on The Flash TV series in 1990. John is like me, an artist/writer.

DF: So that was a movie that didn’t get made, but did you get fifty grand?

HC: Yeah. So we did that, and then we worked on The Flash for a season.

DF: How did you get that first movie?

HC: You go to a meeting, do a “meet-and-greet.” You have a sample that reflects what you want to be doing. I never got work anywhere without doing a sample. To this day, the work that I’ve been paid to do in television has never generated work for me. What’s generated work for me is my specs—a Homicide, a Practice, a Sopranos, and a Buffy. And that would go down to represent me. The guys who did The Flash knew my stuff and hired me and John.

DF: They knew your comics stuff?

HC: We ended up writing a lot of episodes. And of course, it’s been rerun forever.

DF: Now you’ve spoken in other inter views, about how comics are seen in Hollywood as a genre, not a medium. So, even though you’re a guy who, in your comics work, clearly avoided all the straight super-hero stuff, suddenly you’re doing The Flash TV series. Why do they lump all the stuff together?

HC: Because it’s easier.

DF: When you were asked to do The Flash, did you channel your issues of Flash comics that you read as a kid?

HC: No. We had a great time. It was a great staff, we had a great writing season. I made some good friends on that show.

DF: And the fact that it was super-heroes, did that affect how you approached it?

HC: We approached it as seriously as anything else, and had a good time. And, of course, it ruined my career.

DF: It ruined your career because...?

HC: I was worthless for a couple of years, because the show tanked and I was regarded as a guy who only did that kind of thing.

DF: Are you still regarded as a guy who only does “that kind of thing”?

HC: To a certain extent, but in a weirder sort of way. I haven’t worked on a network show since 1993.

And that was Viper—not a real crowd-pleaser. I ended up doing Viper in syndication for three years.

Working in syndication has its ups and its downs, its goods and its bads. It’s okay. On the other hand, I Chaykin provided covers for DC Comics’ fourstarted on The Flash as issue spin-off series of the Viper TV show. executive story editor, and [©2003 Paramount Pictures.] the last job I did, my title was “executive consultant,” which was code for, “You’re an American working on a Canadian television series”—the equivalent of co-executive producer.

DF: It does seem that, while your comics work is full of irony, your TV work is irony-free.

HC: That’s television. I get hired to do eight o’clock action shows. You’re dealing with an audience that doesn’t know what irony is.

DF: So, because you can have more subtlety in certain ways, are comics more creatively satisfying to you than the TV stuff?

HC: It’s just different. When I’m doing TV, I’d rather be doing comics, and when I’m doing comics, I’d rather be doing TV. DF: Well, that makes sense. The grass is greener.

HC: Always.

DF: You’re not doing a show right now, you’re back doing a lot of comics work, right?

HC: Correct.

DF: What was your title on Mutant X? HC: I was executive consultant, AKA co-executive producer.

DF: Was that essentially being a stor y editor, or was it more than that?

HC: No. These are hierarchical titles. The bottom of the barrel is freelance, the next up is staff writer. Then it’s story editor, executive script consultant, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, executive producer.

DF: And are they just titles, or are different duties associated with them?

HC: The duties are the same, the responsibilities are different.

DF: Can you explain that in a little more detail?

HC: For example, my job on Mutant X was to vet every script we had. Everything had to go through my typewriter, because I was responsible for the tone and quality of the material. I was the story editor on The Flash even though John and I wrote about a third of the material. While we set the tone for the show, our responsibilities weren’t all that high. We were the low men on the totem pole.

DF: Were you super vising other writers on The Flash?

HC: We dealt with freelancers.

DF: So, say, on Mutant X, if it’s a team writing thing, you would get what kind of credit?

HC: I had developed the show, and my job was to vet everything through my computer.

DF: Now, “developed the show,” what specifically does that mean?

HC: They had a concept which was theirs, and I made it work for television.

DF: Meaning that you would write up the series bible? [A bible is a document that tells all about the characters, the background, and the setting of a show.—DF] HC: Well, that is a bone of contention there. [chuckles] DF: Okay, but there was a bible written and you had a hand in it.

HC: I wrote it.

DF: But essentially, even though the responsibility was greater, the job function was supervising story and writers. How would you compare that to, say, a comics editor or editor-in-chief, and by the same token, is that anything you’d ever want to go to do, to be in comics as an editor as opposed to a writer/artist?

HC: No. In television, on the writing staff of a show, in the best of all possible worlds, everybody can do each other’s job. At a point in every season, you find you’re running out of material and you’ve got to do a gang-bang, where you’ve got two, three, occasionally six guys all working on the same episode.

DF: All in a room at the same time?

HC: Generally speaking, you always write episodes together anyway. We break the stories together. But the actual writing is done alone. But you were talking earlier about the four-act structure. Syndicated television is actually a five-act structure.

Five acts with a tease, so you’re actually talking about six acts.

Six cliffhangers. Think about that.

DF: But still the same number of minutes, yes?

HC: Actually it’s fewer—because there are more commercials.

So you’re talking about forty-three minutes and twenty seconds.

DF: Do comics writers make good TV writers?

HC: Comic book guys frequently come with no idea, no grasp whatsoever of the concept of how long it takes to do something. And they have no idea how to use standing sets. In comics you’re making it up as you go along. In television, you’ve got standing sets. You’ll notice, if you watch any show with any regularity, that this week’s hotel room looks familiar— because it was on four episodes back. It’s been re-dressed— the paintings on the wall are different and so on. Hotel rooms, doctor’s offices, labs, police stations. These all get re-used.

Another example: the exterior of the hospital on ER that they stand in front of every so often was built, when I was on Flash, as the Central City police station.

DF: That’s great.

HC: You use and re-use, that’s the way it works.

DF: And is that hard for comics guys to learn?

HC: Yeah. When you’re doing an ensemble show, you’ve got to service your cast. The average show is seven days of first unit and two days of second unit. You’ve got to figure out a way to make maximum use of your lead actor if your lead is working on a given day. You’ve got to be prepared for a technical breakdown. The job is coming up with as many days as possible on standing sets, so that you don’t have to go out on location.

DF: Is it harder to get a TV writing job if you’re a comics writer than if you came from some other field?

CHAYKIN continues on page 14 CHAYKIN | 11

Here’s Howard’s script from the first act of The Flash TV series episode: “Watching The Detectives.”

Note the cast list and the set list. These tell everyone involved with producing the episode how many and which characters will be appearing, as well as what sets and locations will have to be prepared.

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[©2003 Warner Brothers, Inc.]

CHAYKIN | 13

CHAYKIN continued from page 11

that is making a mistake.

HC: There are comic book Well, what about this?” writers who come with DF: That sounds a lot like enormous reputations who being a comics editor, can’t get a job. I was taught working with ar tists, and trained that, in TV, we all writers, colorists, and so had to do each other’s jobs. on.

And, the other thing, we also HC: Comics is much more all had to cut our own shows a solitary thing. and prep our own shows. You DF: If you had an office don’t learn it unless you’re and suppor t staff at a prepping your own shows. I comics company, would would go to Canada when I there be any appeal for was doing my shows, and I you in being an editor? It would prep other freelancer’s sounds like there’re a lot shows. of the same processes DF: What do you mean by going on. “cut” and “prep”?

HC: Comics editing can be HC: By cut I mean edit for very aggravating and I airing, and by prep I mean do think it’s much too color rewrites. intrusive and I’d end up DF: I’m glad you’re getting being the kind of editor into technical jargon, because that I don’t want.

I really want to know about Basically, I’m a better this kind of stuff, and I know writer than most of the the readers want to know, but people I would be working this is getting quite complex. with, and that would mean So, if you can explain a little Promo art from Chaykin’s mid-’80s revival of The Shadow.

I’d be an editor who would more, that’d be helpful. [©2003 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.] do rewriting, which I don’t HC: In the average hour-long want to do. It complete and utterly f*cks with the artist’s television show, you’ve got ten, up to sixteen rewrites. And prerogative and the right to the pride in the work that’s done. each rewrite is on a different color paper.

DF: Whereas TV is so collaborative nobody has that kind of DF: This is before it’s shot? proprietar y attitude about their work…?

HC: Frequently, while it’s being shot. [Danny laughs] I’m HC: Ownership gets spread around. serious! The fact is, just this past weekend I watched the DF: With the exception, I imagine, of a David Chase with The episode of Mutant X, season two, that I wrote. It’s the season Sopranos, or somebody like that. opener. Because I left the show the day we finished prep on HC: Well, David Chase and David Kelley, those guys, they’re that show, I’d not seen it. one-man shows.

DF: Now, “finished prep,” meaning prep of the script?

DF: They’re in a different categor y.

HC: Meaning that, while one show is shooting, the next HC: Well, y’know, they’ve hired good people. The people Chase episode is “prepping.” That means that every day there are has got working for him are doing good work, because Emmy meetings in the production department. There’s a production nominees are on his staff. But there is a thematic unity to the meeting at the beginning, a production meeting at the end. material that comes from him.

Various departments are taking care of other responsibilities.

DF: Is that the dream of TV writers and producers, to get to Gotta build this gun, gotta get this car, and so on. that level, where you can call the shots the way guys like DF: Now I get it. those two and a few others do?

HC: And as each day progresses, what comes out of those HC: Sure. meetings, aside from everything else, is rewriting. For instance, DF: Going back to this whole discipline thing, which you rightthe scene you wrote in that hospital can’t play because they fully pride yourself on. It seems that, in comics, the creator is haven’t got the hospital for that day. So to not lose time while king, and in TV the deadline is king. You seem to bring that we wait for that set to be available, we have to figure out if we professional attitude both to your comics and to your TV work. can we get another two pages on a standing set, so that way HC: Well, it’s also because I’m a paranoid and I don’t take we get a full day there. Is it possible that you can work with the anything for granted. I assume that I can be fired at any stunt coordinator and come up with a better way of showing moment. this action, because we can’t do this, it has to be rewritten.

DF: Do you really believe that?

That kind of thing.

HC: Absolutely. We’re dealing with frivolous entertainment. The DF: For someone who describes himself as a loner and a work can be fine, it can be high-quality work, it’s irrelevant. Still person who likes privacy, is it a pain to deal with this kind of it remains comic books, it remains television, it remains stuff? movies. It’s not saving the world, it’s not curing cancer, it’s HC: No. I like collaborating. It spreads the guilt and shame. I entertainment. I’m proud of it, but I have no illusions about its like the process. Again, it gets back to being edited. The real value. challenge is trying to make something work, negotiating a DF: Is there, in the back of your mind, a project that takes you settlement, saying, “Well, now I want to do this. I think doing 14 | WRITE NOW

that show just an anomaly?

HC: Yeah. The Simpsons is a radio show.

DF: Not a TV show, a radio show?

HC: Because of the graphic style, the memorable material on The Simpsons is far from visual. We’re not talking about Chuck Jones here—or even Jay Ward.

DF: I think, in a way, the visual operates independently of the soundtrack.

HC: Maybe. But, “I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z” is great stuff!

DF: My personal favorite is the one where Bar t inadver tently gets Krusty investigated for tax fraud and Krusty has to fake his own death to get off the hook.

HC: That’s it. We’re not talking about great visual imagery— we’re not talking about drawing as character acting.

DF: So the stratification is just that guys in animation are considered to be in a ghetto, and the attitude is “don’t let them into drama”?

HC: Yes. CHAYKIN continues on page 18

A page from the upcoming Barnum hardcover graphic novel.

Written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman with art by Niko Henrichon. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. and DC Comics.]

to some next level?

HC: Something that’s going to turn me from Jerry Lewis to Richard Burton? No. Art is an accident in my world. I do what I do. I’m making a living.

DF: So there’s no dream project?

HC: Dream project?

DF: If money were no object, “if they’d let me do what I wanted, in any medium”?

HC: Not really.

DF: My impression is that, in the TV industry, once you’re typed as an action/adventure guy, you’re an action/adventure guy.

HC: Pretty much.

DF: Could you do other stuff? Say, is animation considered a step down, career wise?

HC: Yeah. But you do it anyway.

DF: Have you done it?

HC: Not yet. But, since I choose to work as opposed to whine about not working, there’s no such thing as work I would not do. Actually, that’s not true, there is work I wouldn’t do. I just haven’t found it yet.

DF: Why that stratification in the TV industr y? Clearly, the people who write The Simpsons must be regarded highly. Or is

A recent Chaykin script-only project, a revival of Angel and the Ape for Vertigo Comics. This page is from issue #2 with words from Chaykin and David Tischman and art by Phil Bond. [©2003 DC Comics.]

CHAYKIN | 15

Here, the final act of Howard’s script for the Mutant X pilot episode.

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CHAYKIN | 17

From the first Time 2 graphic novel. Story and art by Howard Chaykin. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. and First Comics, Inc.] CHAYKIN continued from page 15

DF: So if a guy who had animation credits sent around a spec drama script, would people read it?

HC: I’ve never been lucky when I’ve hired animation guys for live action TV. DF: Is it just laziness on the par t of the people perceiving, or do people have bad ex periences with writers working outside their genre?

HC: Both.

DF: Do you have any desire to direct?

HC: No. DF: Not even to direct one of your own scripts?

HC: No. It requires a kind of a bonhomie I don’t have—a level of patience for others that I lack. It’s a juggling act, and I haven’t got that kind of patience.

DF: And sitcoms, that’s another universe altogether?

HC: Not a world I have any knowledge of. Never wrote one, rarely watch them. The problem is that cable has ruined sitcoms, because they’re dirty now.

DF: Let’s say you write the greatest NYPD Blue spec script in the world and submit it to the producers of another cop drama, since one never submits to the show whose spec you did. The producers wouldn’t consider you just because of your resumé, 18 | WRITE NOW

no matter how great the spec was?

HC: They might. They might. But they still look at your credits and say, “Hmmm... why haven’t you done this before?” When I started out in comics, I lived in New York, under the eyes of the people for whom I worked. Today, people have more contact with the Federal Express guy than with their editors. So who knows how long it took to do those samples. Same thing applies to TV specs.

DF: But somebody decided to give you a break, to take a chance on “the comics guy.”

HC: True, but I didn’t come out here as a novice. I came out here as a seasoned professional. At that time I’d already started working in the TV business.

DF: That’s always just struck me as this totally bizarre thing about Hollywood, that if you are pegged as one thing, you are that, and it’s vir tually impossible to get out of that categorization.

HC: A writer can reinvent himself, but it doesn’t happen often.

I’ve been pegged as “the comic book guy.” I gave up trying to change that. My specs reflect a different sensibility.

DF: And you send those non-super-hero specs around?

HC: Yes. DF: And the studios still give you the comics work?

HC: Yes. DF: Okay.

HC: The other thing you have to bear in mind is, when comics are waxing in the public eye, you play up what you do. When a movie like Spider-Man comes out and has done very well, you go to a meeting and you don’t deny that you do this for a living.

DF: Sure.

HC: On the other hand, when a movie like Mystery Men—a movie I liked a lot—tanks, it f*cks everything up. It becomes a genre killer! Then, you say things like, “Oh, I used to do that.”

Right now, though, comics are hot. Producers are spending enormous amounts of money buying the rights to comic books that are unfilmable. Go for it, guys.

DF: Any books or courses that you would recommend, or that you recommend people avoid, as far as writing careers or Hollywood careers?

HC: Well, I took the Robert McKee course years ago, and I’m looking forward to seeing Adaptation because I hear Brian Cox does a great job playing McKee. DF: It’s funny, it’s ver y funny.

HC: You saw the picture?

DF: Yeah, it’s great. It’s not as good as the other Spike Jonze picture, Being John Malkovich, but definitely, if you liked that, you’ll like this.

HC: McKee’s course did me well. Although I’ve found, also, that the course now exists primarily to give executives a new language to hang you.

DF: And to enrich McKee, also.

HC: Well, there you go.

DF: Isn’t that the first thing ever ybody thinks, when they walk into his classroom: “Okay, we’re each paying 400 dollars, there’s 300 of us here. Pretty good take for a weekend.”

HC: I considered taking the course again, because I can get it at a discount.

DF: I’ve taken it twice.

HC: Oh, you have?

DF: Yeah. I think it’s terrific!

HC: Did you see it with Chinatown or with Casablanca?

DF: Casablanca.

The Howard Chaykin & Richard Ory cover for Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! Vol. 2 #1. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc. and First Comics, Inc.]

HC: The Casablanca thing is what sold me on it. It’s a movie I’m very familiar with, and the analysis he did completely reconfigured the film from an emotional perspective for me.

DF: He’s eminently lampoonable, but he’s ver y smar t and he’s got a lot to teach.

HC: He’s a terrific teacher.

DF: Aside from McKee, any writing books or courses you recommend?

HC: Nah, not really.

The fact is, I write action/adventure, so I tend to read a lot of action/adventure. I’ve turned a lot of people on to a lot of good guys.

do. Mighty Love will be coming up pretty soon.

DF: Tell me about Mighty Love.

HC: Mighty Love is You’ve Got Mail with super-heroes. It’s about two people who meet in their daytime identities and hate each other’s guts, but develop a romantic relationship behind their masks.

DF: And they’re super-heroes!

HC: Masked adventurers.

DF: Did it have to be with masked adventurers to sell it?

HC: Sure—but when I do costumed characters, it’s always about something else that has nothing to do with that stuff.

DF: I’ve always felt that an adult couldn’t write any superhero stuff that wasn’t a metaphor for something else.

HC: Power and Glory series was Broadcast News with superheroes.

DF: I can see that. Any TV stuff coming up?

HC: Not that I can think of. Hopefully, by May I’ll be either be running a show, or totally disgusted with TV and out of it altogether.

DF: The latter seems unlikely, but TV’s loss would be comics’ gain. Thanks for your time, Howard.

HC: Not a problem—I was only planning to brood for the rest of the day anyway.

THE END

DF: Who are you reading now?

HC: Well, right now I’m reading the new Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel. I just finished reading Dugan Underground by Tom DeHaven.

DF: I loved the first two books in his Dugan trilogy. [Funny Papers and Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies. All three novels are set in the comics world, mostly that of comic strips and underground comix . —DF] HC: I thought they were great. I had Dugan Underground on the shelf for over a year and I finally just pulled it off. I don’t believe that he was as successful overall as, say, Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, but it’s nicely put together, very satisfying.

DF: Any advice for people aspiring to get into either comics or TV? “Do this,” “don’t do that”?

HC: It’s an idiotic question.

DF: Do you have an idiotic answer?

HC: If you want to write a spec for television, figure out what the people who work in television are watching. As successful as Home Improvement was, for example, there are very few Home Improvement specs out there. You write specs for shows people in the business watch, not for shows that people between the coasts watch. If you’re going to go get a job in television, write a spec of material that people in show business like.

DF: And if people are tr ying to break into comics, would people do well to find their own Gil Kane, or was that just a unique kind of thing that happened to you?

HC: I couldn’t begin to imagine how you get into comics today. I have no idea.

DF: Finally, I want to give you a chance to plug anything you have coming up. This inter view should be coming out in May. Does the fact that you’ve drawn an American Flagg! cover for this issue mean you’re doing anything with Flagg soon?

HC: No. It just seemed the easiest and most logical thing to A page from Power and Glory #2 by Chaykin. [©2003 Howard Chaykin, Inc.] CHAYKIN | 19

A Man for All Media

The PAUL DINI Interview

DANNY FINGEROTH: I’m talking with Paul Dini, multi-talented writer, producer, and bon vivant.

PAUL DINI: Well, yes.

DF: This inter view is for Write Now!, so the emphasis is on who Paul Dini is and how he came to be, and how you, the aul Dini is an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer reader, can grow up to be Paul Dini.

(The New Batman/Superman Adventures and Batman PD: Oh God, no. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Beyond). In comics, he is the author of works such as Paul Dini [Danny laughs]—to paraphrase an old country song.

Batman: Mad Love, and giant-sized painted (by Alex Ross) DF: Those countr y songs seem to play a big par t in your projects including Superman: Peace on Earth, JLA: Secret background and your work. Now, you grew up in Texas?

Origins and the upcoming JLA: Liberty and Justice, as well PD: No, I didn’t. as the creator-owned series Jingle Belle and Mutant, Texas.

DF: You didn’t? I’m gonna fire my research staff. As soon as I Paul has also collaborated with designer Chip Kidd on get one.

Batman Animated for HarperCollins, documenting the PD: No, I grew up in California. But a huge chunk of my family creation and unique visual styling of the groundbreaking TV lives in Texas. series. Paul lives in Los Angeles and is currently at work on a DF: Ah, I see. number of television, movie, and comics-related projects— PD: I’m a native mutant Texan. many of which he talks about in this very interview.

DF: So you’re a native Los Angeleno?

Paul is constantly in demand, constantly productive, and PD: Native Californian. I grew up in sort of a weird triangle has some very informative and engrossing thoughts on what between San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, and Carmel, in places my he writes, and on how and why he writes what he does the family lived at various points, or where I lived. I spent summers way he does. I think you’ll have a lot of fun reading this at Lake Tahoe and other parts of Nevada, and I went to school interview. I know I had a blast conducting it. near Monterey.

—DF DF: And where’d you go to high school, to college?

PD: High school, I actually went to a boys’ boarding school in Pebble Beach, California. The experience there I used in my very first job for Oni as a two-part story called “The Honor Rollers,” which was about these jaded, rich, spoiled brats at a prep school very much like the one I attended. I wasn’t one of the kids depicted, but I always thought that if I continued the series, I’d throw in a version of myself. This kind of innocent, mystified by these hedonistic, little bastards.

DF: Why did your parents send you to boys’ boarding school?

PD: [In parents’ voice] “He turned thirteen and the boy went bad.” No, I wasn’t a bad kid, it’s just like, “Oh, he’s doing badly in school, but the teachers say he’s bright, so let’s find a place for him to be.”

So rather than me being held back and going to remedial class and just being frustrated, they sent me there. I would pass all these intelligence tests and Paul Dini, surrounded by some of the many characters he’s worked on. Art by J. Bone. creativity tests, yet I was doing math at a chimpanzee [Art ©2003 J. Bone; Zatanna, Batman TM & ©2003 DC Comics; Daffy Duck, Marvin Martin

Conducted February 24, 2003 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Paul Dini

P

©2003 Warner Bros.; Jingle Belle and Mutant, Texas characters TM & ©2003 Paul Dini.]

20 | WRITE NOW

level. And my teachers said, “Well, he needs to be somewhere, but obviously not in the public school system, where he’s a danger to himself and others.” So the folks shipped me off south to Old Bob Louie, AKA The Robert Louis Stevenson School. The first year was absolute hell, but after that I enjoyed it very much. It was just weird being away from home and being with all these strange characters. I was going on an art scholarship, which is odd, because I draw so rarely now.

DF: From immersing myself in “Dini-ania,” or however one would refer to the works and times of Paul Dini, I really thought, “Oh, this guy’s from Tex as,” because ever ything in the material refers to Tex as. So somewhere that Tex as thing—at least in the mythology as projected into the world of Paul Dini—really is strong.

PD: I grew up on a weird diet of ’50s lounge/bachelor pad music, because my dad was a singer and that was his music.

He was the opening act for Tony Bennett at the end of the ’50s and early ’60s. So I grew up listening to a lot of Frank Sinatra, big bands, some jazz and the crooners, like Eddie Fisher and Bing Crosby. And my mother just listened to country music. So musically I’m equally at home in the ultra-lounge as I am in the bunkhouse. We grew up, my brothers and sister and I, in a kind of rural pocket of Northern California, not far from San Francisco, but there were a lot of good country stations on the radio then. I started off listening to a lot of country music and I really loved it. I love the old performers, beginning of course with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley, Milton Brown, and vocal groups like the Sons of the Pioneers, and then Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and Willie Nelson, and then stretching up into some of the classic and modern-day rockabilly stuff. And it just is a big part of my work and my writing and my mindset. I’m listening to a great band even as we speak called The Hot Club of Cowtown, a latter-day Western swing band, that does a lot of bluegrass and old Texas Playboys numbers.

DF: And the Hot Club, of course, is a reference to the classic 1920s and 1930s Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappelli jazz band of The Hot Club of Paris.

PD: Yup! DF: That’s ver y funny.

PD: We would spend every summer at a friend’s ranch in Nevada, and I had a lot of family down in Texas, so we were always going down there to visit and just ramble around. So all that Western imagery just got naturally stuck in my mindset.

DF: I’ll tell you, it got so much on my mindset that my first few questions are: “What was it like growing up in Texas and how did it affect your work?”

PD: Well, I don’t know about growing up in Texas, but going there now is pretty good. I was just on the phone with my cousin David. He’s in town visiting. I’m going to go down there in a few months, probably for Easter, and we were making plans: “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna drive around, get barbecue, listen to music and drink tequila.” Boy I’ll tell ya, the fun never ends with the Dini clan. It’s sort of the place I run to to take my mind off of things, whereas my understanding is that everybody in Texas is trying to get out of there. But I kind of like it.

DF: Well, wherever you’re from, usually you want to get out of it at least for some period of time.

PD: Yeah, that’s true.

DF: So your dad opened for Tony Bennett. What is your dad’s name?

PD: Bob Dini.

DF: Did he put any albums out?

PD: No, but he did a bunch of singles. You can sometimes find them on eBay or in old record stores. He was a singer in the ’50s until, I don’t know, his last record came out in the late ’60s, a Christmas song which I will probably work into one of the Jingle Belle stories some day. The more kids showed up in the family, the more he decided he was going to get out of the recording thing. So he got into advertising and things like that, other ways that he could use his creativity. He’s a very creative man.

DF: He was in adver tising as a copywriter?

PD: As a writer, sort of an idea man, and he had his own agency for a while.

DF: Did your mom do anything like that?

PD: No, she basically ran the house for a number of years.

Later on she would work part-time in dad’s company, and after that she got a job managing a series of bookstores and gift

From Paul Dini’s “The Honor Rollers” in Oni Double Feature #12. Art by Tom Fowler. [©2003 Paul Dini.]

DINI | 21

stores and did pretty well with that.

My dad now lives in Boston, and my mom lives on the West Coast. One of those things. It just came to an end after a while.

DF: So apparently they encouraged your creativity, given who they were and what they did. Or did they want like hell for you not to do anything creative?

PD: There was the usual amount of grumbling like, “You kids are watching cartoons again? Get out of here. Go out and get some fresh air.” And I’m like, “Yeah, okay.” And I Cover to Dini’s Mutant Texas #2. Art by J. Bone. would go outside to [©2003 Paul Dini.] the porch and watch TV from outside. [Danny laughs] “You’re watching cartoons all day! What kind of a job do you think you’ll get if you do that?”

DF: “I’m doing research for my future career, Dad.” PD: “This is my life, Dad. Leave me alone.”

DF: So you were a huge car toon fan as a kid?

PD: I liked cartoons pretty much....

DF: What did you watch?

PD: Whatever was on. I liked the Disney stuff because it wasn’t everywhere back then. We’re talking the early to mid-’70s. If you wanted to see a Disney cartoon, you had to wait until they re-released one, and then go down to one of the two theaters in the San Francisco area that would show it. Walt was long dead, new animation was on its last gasp, and there was no video at that point.

DF: It’s strangely hard to remember a time like that. It’s such a par t of our ever yday lives now.

PD: So I’m a kid and I want to see Disney’s Robin Hood. First I’d get all excited because they barely made cartoons anymore.

I’d see ads for it on TV and I couldn’t believe it: “What? They made a new cartoon? All talking animals? Oh, I’ll go see that.”

So I’d take four connections on the bus and BART trains to get out to Stonestown Shopping Center in San Francisco to go see it, because there’s no way my folks are going to drive me all the way across two counties to watch a cartoon. And by the time I got out there, I’m all excited and I think it’s going to be really good, but it was actually kind of crappy, and I was pretty glum taking the long ride home. But there was nothing else to see as far as cartoons went except the occasional Ralph Bakshi flick, and when you’re twelve, you know you ain’t going to convince the ticket seller to let you in to see a movie called Coonskin. I was lucky in that my hometown theatre, the Orinda, showed short cartoons well into the 1980s, so I got a taste of what it was like to see a cartoon before a main feature.

Usually it was a Pink Panther or one of the later Warners 22 | WRITE NOW

Daffy/Speedy travesties. Once in a blue moon they’d show one that was sort of funny, like a Disney Humphrey the Bear or one of the Goofy “How To” shorts. Still, a cartoon was a cartoon and I’d gladly sit through whatever they ran. Other than that, there was just the stuff they showed on TV, the old Warner Brothers classics and the newer, crummier Hanna-Barbera stuff.

DF: I would have thought San Francisco itself would be a good car toon town.

PD: Only in revival houses. That’s what kept me at an early age, like 12-14, sneaking into revival houses where the week before they might have been playing hardcore foreign porn, and the next week it’s a Tex Avery festival. Well, I was up for that!

DF: [laughs] Which?

PD: Well, both! [laughter] You know, I’d go one week, see one, next week see the other.

DF: They’d only check your ID for the car toons though.

PD: “Yeah, I’m 21 years old.” “Hey, aren’t you the kid who was here last week trying to see Coonskin?” “Yes, sir. I’ll leave quietly. Please don’t call the police again.”

DF: So you liked car toons. And were you a big comic book reader?

PD: Yeah, I had kind of special tastes as far as what I liked in comics. A lot of the super-hero stuff just blew right by me. I just didn’t get it when I was a kid. I liked funny stuff. I liked things like Uncle Scrooge. And I loved comic strips. I would be much more interested in comic strip compilations than I would be in comic books. Whenever they’d put out an annual compilation of the Peanuts comic strip, I was always first in line to get that. Doonesbury, too, and the later Pogo strips. Pogo would come in our evening paper, the Oakland Tribune, and I would devour it every day, even though I didn’t understand a word of it. I just thought the drawings were pretty and the animals looked great. And then a year later, the compilation would come out and I would say, “Oh, that’s what that meant!

That hyena looks like Spiro Agnew! Man, that’s really cool!” So that stuff, I could figure it out when it was all in paperback form. There was a local strip in the San Francisco Chronicle that I loved called Gordo, by Gus Arriola. I think they only ran that on the West Coast and in parts of the West or Southwest, because it had a very regional appeal. It was about life in a small Mexican village, but it had a very urbane, very funny touch to it, and the artwork was gorgeous! No one ever inked with a brush better than Arriola, and for me that includes Walt Kelly. I loved that strip a lot. And then there was Doonesbury, of course, I always thought that was great and still make it a point to keep up with Zonker and Uncle Duke. I loved underground comix a lot. Undergrounds were my big passion. When I was in boarding school and college, everybody else would be passing around the John Byrne X-Men or the Frank Miller Daredevils. All those books were just starting to come out, the late ’70s, early ’80s Marvel Renaissance. And I was off at the head shop in Monterey trying to buy underground comix, because I thought they were hysterical.

DF: Well, they were.

PD: Yeah! Oh, they were great! But the problem with that was I was ignorant of the publishing schedules. So I would go in and find an R. Crumb comic I hadn’t read, and I’d take it back to my dorm room and I’d tear through it in five minutes. And then a month later—I’d count the days until I could get another one— I’d run back the head shop and bug the hippie owner: “Hey, you got a new R. Crumb?” And he’d say, “Crumb only draws one of

those like every seven years and that was a reprint you bought last month, stupid kid. You’re going to have to wait another seven years to get one.”

DF: He’s actually one of the more prolific underground guys, he’s got an amazing quantity of work. Besides car toons, any TV or movies that you remember being influential?

PD: Oh, I devoured all the usual stuff. The sci-fi movies that were out around at that time, the Planet of the Apes and Star Wars films, and all that good junk that everybody in the mid’70s grew up on. And it was just a part of our cultural life.

There was a hippie-run movie theater on Cannery Row that would show old, eclectic movies, or foreign films and I would always go watch whatever they were showing each week. They’d run films like Woodstock and the Concert for Bangladesh, and then the next week it would be a double feature of Disney’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Night of the Living Dead, and a week later it would be Kurosawa night with Seven Samurai and Ikiru, and the week after that might be a Marx Brothers or Monty Python festival. That was a great theater. It was called the 812, which was its street number on Cannery Row. There were no seats in the place, you came in and stretched out on big pillows on the floor and looked up at the screen. If the picture was no good, you took a nap or made out with the girl you had the presence of mind to bring with you from Santa Catalina, the local Catholic girl’s school. The 812 was right down the street from Doc Rickett’s marine biology lab from the Steinbeck books. The old lab is still there, by the way. I’m a huge Steinbeck fan and I always liked prowling around the areas where his more colorful stories took place.

DF: That’s now kind of a big tourist spot, Canner y Row, as I recall.

PD: Sure. This was kind of in the middle period, before they built the aquarium and it became all touristy. It was still touristy when I was there, but it definitely had an air of sleaze to it, which is what we, as sleazy teenagers, loved. So we’d go and we’d bug some guy to buy us a bottle of booze in the liquor store, and we’d go out under the dock of this Polynesian restaurant and drink it until we vomited. Then we’d get on board the school bus that would take us back to school, which was an old rattletrap.

We’d vomit again because it shook us around so badly.

DF: This was during the boarding school days?

PD: Yeah.

DF: So I see they were really keeping a strict eye on you there.

PD: They had no idea what we were doing. Oh boy, they’re going to read this and suddenly I won’t be invited to alumni functions anymore.

DF: Oh no. And they won’t take your money anymore, either, I’m sure.

PD: Oh, they’ll always take the money.

DF: Were you writing and drawing at this point?

PD: I always drew wherever I was. I’ve always had the same sort of... I don’t know what you’d call it, mutant James Thurberesque drawing style, which is really quite awful. Though at that time, in my mind, it was pure beauty. Then after I drew it, I would go, “Oh, that didn’t turn out quite so good, but….”

DF: You were drawing one-panel gags or strips or...?

PD: Whatever. Little things for the newspaper or for the yearbook, little caricatures and cartoons and things like that.

DF: You first saw your stuff in print in that period?

PD: Yes. And then I went to college and I would do one-panel strips for the newspaper and try and experiment with some

characters of my own and things like that. I went to college at Emerson in Boston.

DF: How’d you end up there?

PD: I was very much into TV and acting and writing, and I didn’t want to go to a big college. I did one semester at San Francisco State and I was just lost there. I felt like the place was too big, I couldn’t make any connections, I couldn’t make any friends. It was nothing at all like Animal House, the model at that time for a true American college experience. No parties, no girls, it was just this big commuter college. So I transferred the middle of my first year to Emerson in Boston, and that was a lot better.

DF: Emerson is a communications school, right?

PD: Uh-huh, communication, writing, television production. It’s grown tremendously since then. My stepbrother goes there now, and it’s unbelievably big as far as that goes. They have a full TV lab and they have real preparation for getting out and working in the film and video world.

DF: I knew Boston University was a communications school, I didn’t know Emerson was so prominent in that.

PD: Yeah! Boston U. is great in communications, and Emerson is really hot on its heels.

DF: Now, you said you were acting. So the Kevin Smith movies were not your first acting roles?

PD: No, I did some acting in college, and years before, when

From Dini & Bruce Timm’s Batman: Mad Love #1, the animated style version. [©2003 DC Comics.]

DINI | 23

my dad got into advertising, he’d shoot commercials with me in them and stuff like that. A few things here and there. I did the usual things, films, plays, and musicals in school. I loved it, I just knew I could never make a career at it. I thought I’d get into something that really had some job security, like screenwriting.

DF: [laughs] Well, there you go. Many, many mothers pray that their children will do the sensible thing and become screenwriters. Speaking of which, it says in the biographical info that you star ted doing professional TV writing when you were still in college.

PD: Right.

DF: How did that happen? That’s cer tainly unusual for a student to get a professional break.

PD: What happened was, I was at Emerson doing comic strips for the newspaper, and through some family connections— which is a great way to get a foot in the door—I met a one-time Boston disc jockey named Norm Prescott. He knew my dad back from his singing days. Norm Prescott had since gone out to California and started a studio called Filmation with Lou Scheimer. They were big cartoon producers at that time.

DF: What were they famous for then?

PD: Oh, they did a lot of shows in the ’70s and ’80s. They were doing Fat Albert, Flash Gordon, Tom and Jerry. Many times they would pick up characters that studios had done before and would do new versions of them. They were just starting in on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe when I started working for them. I started writing a couple of scripts for them freelance, which was great. It was my last year of school, and suddenly I have some money coming in. Then I went out to work with them in California. I worked with them for a while, then came back to Boston for about a year, then went back to L.A. full time. And by that time, I had written a handful of scripts that would end up getting me jobs at other places, so I freelanced scripts for Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears and a couple of other studios. And that was around ’84, and that led to me being hired up at Lucasfilm and going up to work for George Lucas for about five years.

DF: Just by showing Lucas samples?

PD: I showed the folks at his company some script samples, but I had written for a show called Dungeons and Dragons, which was on CBS around ’83 or ’84. One of my episodes had come back from animation, and I’d gotten a tape of it. It had gone to TMS in Japan, which did a really stellar job of animating it. So I sent a copy of the finished cartoon, which looked great, along with my script, up to Lucasfilm. And they loved the cartoon, and they thought, “Well, if the cartoon looks this good, he’s gotta be a good writer.”

DF: A bit earlier, you sor t of said it a little dismissively, but you said that you had a personal connection. But you actually were able then to use that to showcase your talent. I think most people if they search their network banks, they probably know “somebody who knows somebody,” and it’s really a question of using that connection, that oppor tunity, to showcase your stuff to its best advantage.

PD: I think that’s definitely true. But also, at the time, I felt like most of the scripts that were being written for animation were really awful, including mine. Cartoons were completely controlled by the big three networks, and with the exception of Mark Evanier and maybe a handful of other writers, there weren’t very many people who actually liked what they were doing or were any good at it. Many of the writers I met those 24 | WRITE NOW

first few years were in cartoons because they were waiting for something better in live action to come along. Gee, that’s great pal, but why don’t you go “slum” somewhere else and let those of us who actually want to produce cartoons figure out how to do them? One of the producers I work with, Tom Minton, has often pointed out something very true. At the time we started our careers, the people in animation were either really young, in their early twenties, or they were really old, in their late sixties. They were just getting ready to end their careers and making a little money for their retirement, I assume. But there was nobody in that middle range, which is the range I’m in now, making a career doing it. So a lot of young people came into the business when Tom and I did, with few mentors to learn from and only an oppressive TV network telling you that anything you wanted to do that was in any way interesting, funny, or creative was WRONG. Despite that, there were a number of dedicated souls who survived and made a name for themselves doing animation. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it took me years to get what I would call “good” at figuring out how to put together a decent cartoon. It was definitely a learning experience and there weren’t a lot of good people around to teach newcomers.

DF: Did you get a diploma at Emerson, even though you were already writing professionally?

PD: Oh sure.

DF: You did? And that was a degree in…?

PD: A BFA in creative writing.

DF: I was a little unsure from the narration of your writing career whether you just left the studies. So you finished school?

PD: I finished school.

DF: Finish school, folks. You heard it from Paul Dini: finish school.

PD: I finished school, got out of there.

DF: While you were finishing up in school, were you also professionally writing at the same time?

PD: Yeah, a little bit here and there, and then I went out to California. I’d been in L.A. a few times to see how it was done.

And then I went out there for good, I guess in around ’83. So I was freelance writing for everybody in town, and within a year I was up at Lucasfilm, around ’84, and developing some shows for George.

DF: Now, once you were at Lucas, could you still freelance around?

PD: I didn’t want to. It was a full-time job.

DF: A staff job?

PD: Exactly. I was developing two shows called Ewoks and Droids, which were based on the last Star Wars movie they were doing at the time. We started those shows with the highest ambition of translating Star Wars to animation, but ultimately it came off as being kiddy fare.

DF: I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that The Ewoks translated to kiddy fare. [laughs] PD: George Lucas wanted to take his supporting characters from the Star Wars movies and turn them into their own enterprises, because he was doing two live Ewok movies for television, and he wanted to expand that whole world. He wanted to take R2-D2 and C-3PO and give them their own adventures in a universe before Star Wars. At least, that was the plan. It was hard working on those shows because we wanted to make Star Wars in animation and make it as cool as possible. But we couldn’t have the “A” action figures, we had to

Art from Lucasfilm’s Droids cartoon, which Paul worked on. [©2003 Lucasfilm, Ltd.]

do what we could with the other characters. Some of the shows were fun. Ewoks was a pretty good-looking show, and it certainly filled the criteria of being in line with things like Muppet Babies and Fraggle Rock and some of the betterlooking cartoon shows that were on at that time. Droids never really gelled because it could never really be the Star Wars universe. It couldn’t have the action that made the movie so popular. It was hard to maintain the emotional involvement with the characters because they wandered from master to master throughout their run. They were difficult shows to do. Ultimately it was sort of frustrating because we were held back because of the network dictates at the time.

Lucasfilm is doing a new series of Star Wars cartoons for Cartoon Network now. They’re going to be shorts very much like Samurai Jack, in terms of the look and feel. Genndy Tartakovsky is doing those, so I have no doubt those will be awesome-looking.

DF: They’ll be unbelievable.

PD: If we’d have been able to do that kind of thing at the time, I’m sure we would have been able to do great stuff. But the edict was to deliver a Saturday-morning-friendly show to the network under the restrictions at the time, and, well....

DF: You did the most you could do.

PD: But I worked up there for four-and-a-half years, and it was a lot of fun. They were just ramping up for the last Indiana Jones movie when I left.

DF: I think in ’91 or ’92 I went on a tour of the Lucasfilm Ranch with a bunch of Mar vel folks. I remember the food there was great. [laughs] PD: Oh, yeah!

DF: [laughs] We had lunch there. It was like eating in a gourmet restaurant. So these jobs, at Lucas and so on, were they gotten through an agent, a manager, or did you just get them on your own?

PD: Word of mouth.

DF: Word of mouth. So you had no, as it’s called, “personal representation”?

PD: No, not at the time.

DF: And would you recommend that to somebody? Is that still a viable way to do get a staff animation job?

PD: There are agents who look at writers who do animation, but I also think it’s important that you have an agent who looks

with an eye for getting your material someplace else.

DF: What do you mean?

PD: The animation business has a lot of ebbs and flows, and right now it’s definitely in a down period. So if you’re a writer who writes only animation, there’s not a lot of places that are hiring right now. I think if you can diversify with what you’re doing, if you’re really good at writing adventure cartoons, it might behoove you to write a live-action adventure pilot, or a spec episode of something that’s live action, and have your agent really push that. Because animation is a great place to be when the work is good, but it’s really hard to make a career out of it and keep it going during these dry periods.

DF: Yeah, actually, I want to touch on that a little later. But I’d like to keep going a bit with the chronology of your career. Okay?

PD: Sure.

DF: Thanks. So, from the Lucas period, was Batman Adventures the next thing?

PD: No. Next I took a brief hiatus from working at Lucas to work on a Beany and Cecil revival. That was about ’88 or ’89.

I guess late ’88. They were going to put that back on the air, and John Kricfalusi was the creative director on that.

DF: Really? Wow. [John K. was the creator of Ren & Stimpy. —DF] PD: So I went down there, and that could have been a great experience except there were so many elements against it. I loved the Beany characters and Bob Clampett’s old cartoon show. I had seen John’s animation on Mighty Mouse and a few other things, and really liked the work he had done. He had animated with Ralph Bakshi on the video of the Rolling Stones song “Harlem Shuffle,” and I thought, “This animation is just incredible. I’ve got to meet this guy.” But, again, we were working in a real tight, restrictive environment. When Bob Clampett did the first series of Beany cartoons in the ’60s, he was calling the shots. By 1988, the rules had sadly changed.

John wanted to cut loose and make incredibly funny cartoons, while the network wanted stuff that was safe and “childfriendly” and what they thought was creative. So, basically, you had a fight that no one could win. Despite all odds, John produced a few cool episodes and then the network spitefully yanked Beany off the air. John is not a talent that can be reined in like that. He’s got to be let loose to do what he does best.

DF: Other wise, why bother to hire him?

PD: Right. And then a few years later he went off and did Ren & Stimpy, which was a big hit for him. I’d been getting calls while I was down in L.A. about Warner Brothers Animation, which was starting up again in a big way. Tom Ruegger, who was a writer I had known a few years before at a couple of other studios, had been hired by Warner Animation president Jean MacCurdy to help revamp their cartoons. And their first project was a show for Steven Spielberg called Tiny Toon Adventures. I had known that they were trying to develop junior versions of Looney Tunes characters as a theatrical property ever since Roger Rabbit had come out, and it had gone back and forth as a movie project and then as a TV project. And because I had worked at Lucas, I had a good relationship with the folks at Amblin. I had developed that sort of through osmosis.

DF: Amblin being Spielberg’s company.

PD: They were interested in me coming down and working on DINI | 25

would come in and write an oddball cartoon now and then, but the project there. I had worked with Tom before and he was a really, at that point I’d done Tiny Toons and Jean was putting good buddy, and the idea of doing something at Warners together a crew to do Batman. The guys she wanted to head it sounded very appealing to me, so I moved down. Early in ’89 I up were Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. I had developed a started in as part of the key crew on developing Tiny Toons good working relationship with Bruce, so I came in and wrote with him and a couple of other writers who were already in the series bible with him, and with Mitch Brian, a writer friend place at that time. Also in place was Bruce Timm, who was of Bruce’s. Then I got yanked back on Tiny Toons for another working as a storyboard artist for Art Vitello, who was one of couple of months to work on a direct-to-video feature with the unit directors at that time. I had known Bruce before, Sherri, and Alan Burnett was brought in to be the Batman because he had worked on John’s Beany and Cecil crew, and I writer/producer. He liked my work a lot, from reading some of thought the guy was just an amazing artist. I was very thrilled my other scripts, and he convinced me to rejoin the Batman to see that he was working there, too. That’s where the inklings crew as a full-time writer. of the Batman crew came from. We worked on Tiny Toons for a DF: Now, Batman: The Animated Series really set the tone for year and it was a critical and a ratings hit. Looking back at the what a modern super-hero cartoon looks like. Whose brainchild show now, I still think it was pretty good, and at the time there was that, or was it a group thing? And how did they get past was nothing like it on TV. It was the first show that could get the old Super Friends idea of what a super-hero cartoon is? away with being a bit irreverent, because it wasn’t on the three PD: Well, it came from Bruce and Eric at first. Eric wanted to major networks and it didn’t have to be Muppet Babies or do animation that was all in shadow, and he came up with the simply younger versions of the same exact characters. idea of painting all the backgrounds on black paper, so that DF: It wasn’t on the networks, it was syndicated? certain elements would pop out a bit and look iridescent PD: It was syndicated on Fox. against the blackness. And Bruce came up with a very elegant, DF: And Fox was new enough that they were willing to take streamlined design for Batman and all the other characters. I chances even with Saturday morning. think everybody was influenced by the 1940s Fleischer PD: Yes, Fox was really good about that. Margaret Loesch was Superman cartoons. We all acknowledged those as the best in charge over there. She really gave us a lot of creative super-hero cartoons ever, and while we couldn’t top them, we freedom. Also, the fact that Steven Spielberg was riding could at least try and do our take on the same general idea. shotgun was really good, because he brought a lot of enthuI’ve always regretted that the Fleischer Studio never had a siasm and love for animation to the project, to say nothing of chance to do Batman. They should have kept the Superman his considerable clout. Also, he was our best audience. If we cartoons going, and then a year or two later introduced pitched him a story and he laughed all the way through it, or Batman, and done it as a really cool, dark, film noir, detective jumped in with gag and dialogue suggestions, as he often did, type cartoon. So this was our chance to do that. we knew we had a good story. So that fun spirit rolled over into DF: It’s not just the look of Batman Adventures, it’s the tone another show, which became Animaniacs. And Steven wanted of the stories as well. How were you able to break that to keep the comedy going, so Animaniacs begot Pinky & the mindset of car toons as kiddy fare, and to do stories that Brain. were darker and more “adult”?

DF: Did you work on either of those?

PD: Well, for one thing, the Tim Burton Batman movie had PD: No, not really. A little bit here and there. One rainy day Tiny come out, and that had been successful in redefining Batman Toons writer Sherri Stoner and I were having a meeting at as a dark, shadowy character. So suddenly, Batman was really Amblin with Steven on another project when lightning blew out cool again. He was not the Adam West camp Batman, and he the Universal Studios power generator. The electricity was out wasn’t the Super Friends primary-colored Batman, he was a all over the lot, so, having nothing else to do, we went to the Amblin kitchen and ate lunch in the dark as Steven told ghost stories. Talk about your once in a lifetime experience. Somewhere in the course of that lunch Steven said he wanted to put a cute girl animal in Animaniacs, so then and there the three of us dreamed up a character named Marilyn Mink. Steven saw her as very smart and funny, a girl in the confident wise guy role usually reserved for characters like Bugs Bunny. I drew a fast sketch of her on the back of a script page and Steven okayed her on the spot. Sherri later changed Marilyn’s name to Minerva to reflect Steven’s suggestion that the character be as brainy as she was beautiful, and just like that we had our girl. That was my one sort of co-contribution of value to Animaniacs. Not bad for a stormy lunch hour’s work. Occasionally I Art from the “regular” universe debut of Harley Quinn in Batman: Harley Quinn. Like it’s animated counterpart it was written by Paul Dini with art by Yvel Guichet and Aaron Sowd. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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really dark, gothic creature of the shadows. And that image was incredibly popular when we started developing the show.

Also, we had things to pull upon like the better elements of the Batman comics, like the Frank Miller stories and some of the other darker, more primal takes on Batman. I think the network was excited to see something like that as well. That’s what we wanted to give them. And we went in, from the get-go, pretty much united with the idea that Batman is a grim crime fighter who didn’t talk much. He talks when he has to. We wanted to have a kind of terse relationship with Commissioner Gordon, but Batman never appears in public other than that. We didn’t want him running into the Commissioner’s office every time he needed something. We had all these set rules up front, some of which we violated over time, and with some of them it Storyboards by Bruce Timm for the original Batman: The Animated Series title sequence. [©2003 DC Comics.] just became expedient to think sense, so we would pitch out our thumbnail stories back and of the character in different ways than we originally planned. forth, our ideas of what we wanted to do, and we’d get some But at first, we wanted to make Gotham City dark and nightideas from him and Eric and in some cases, the other marish and haunted by crime and psychotic criminals. And directors. Then we’d go and write an outline, and the artists Batman is nightmarish himself, but he’s the one thing standing would have some input into that as well. So it just helps to between the freaks and the citizens. So that’s why those first have the artist involved in, or at least thinking about, the story episodes really have that sort of dark, film noirish character to areas that we wanted to explore. Like, “let’s take Batman out them. We were really trying to make little movies. in the woods at night. What can we do with him out there?

DF: As a writer, is that a hard thing to do? “I’m not going to Well, we can do all sorts of cool, frightening stuff. Let’s do a put much dialogue in,” do you sor t of feel like that limits you nod to Night of the Hunter and let’s but more of a thriller feel at all? to it.” And when we did do the movies, the direct-to-video PD: No. It’s very easy not to put in dialogue. [Danny laughs] movies, it was just that more intensified because we wanted to There was a whole process of discovery about how to tell the make those movies as exciting as we could. stories, both from a scripted point of view and from a visual DF: You seem to, whether full-length animations or half-hour point of view. Any time that we could do it without a lot of animations, you seem to always come back to work with the dialogue, that was great. But, on the other hand, when we did same teams. Cer tainly to someone looking at it from the use dialogue, we tried to make it as spot-on-character as we outside, there’s a core group of people and names that you could, or as witty as we could, or really try to write to the see over and over. I assume that this is intentional on the strengths of the show and the characters. par t of all par ties?

DF: It sounds like ver y much a team effor t. How does that PD: Well, with Warner Brothers, we were there a long time break down? working on different projects, and you develop a good working PD: The way it worked with us, myself and Alan, we would come rapport with the people you’re on various projects with, and up with premises or ideas for stories between ourselves or more often than not, you’d like to keep that going. So we might ourselves and the other writers. “Y’know, we haven’t done a say, “Okay, well, we did an action show last year. What if we do Joker story in a while, here’s an idea that I’ve been nursing a comedy show this year?” And you see who’s up for that, and about how he does such-and-such,” or, “How about a strong if most of the artists liked the idea, you could get a new show Catwoman story,” or something. And we’d go back and forth, going with them. It hasn’t always been that way, because some and we’d come up with, usually, the hook of a story. And then of the guys I worked with on Tiny Toons I didn’t work with on we’d sit down with Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski (later Glen Batman.

Murakami) and we’d pitch them the ideas. “Well, what do you DF: It’s a different sensibility. think of doing something like this?” And if the story started to PD: And after a while, Bruce and I got tired of working together. veer off some way like, “Oh, y’know, that has Batman in the After we did Batman Beyond, we both felt, “Yeah, I think we daytime. We don’t want to see him in the daytime,” we’d get the input there. But also, Bruce had got a pretty good story

DINI continues on page 30 DINI | 27

Paul’s full-script for a Jingle Belle 2-pager, with art by Steve Rolston.

It was created for Oni Press’s online Sunday Comics. You can access it at: www.onipress.com/sundaycomics/strip.php?id=110

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Notice how Paul “tells” a lot more of the story to the artist and editor than we see or read explicitly in the finished story. Many writers do this to convey to the other members of the creative team the sense of what they want the art and other visual elements to express, as much as the specific action that needs to be depicted to tell the story.

[©2003 Paul Dini.]

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DINI continued from page 27

need a couple of years off.” So Bruce went off and did Justice League, and I went off and did a bunch of outside stuff and some comic books and just a lot of internal Warner Bros. development.

DF: So you’re not involved in Justice League?

PD: No, not really. That was Bruce’s baby and he had a vision of the series and where he wanted to take it. Originally, I was supposed to a two-part episode for the first season, but I had an injury that limited The cover to Batman: Animated by my typing for a while, and I Paul Dini & Chip Kidd. [©2003 DC Comics.] was only able to finish a story on that one. Dwayne McDuffie took it over and finished the script. But for the second season, I came back and I wrote a holiday episode with Bruce.

DF: A holiday episode, go figure. [laughs] PD: Yeah, we wrote a Christmas special. Bruce said, “I know you love Christmas, so how about writing a Christmas episode of Justice League?” And I said, “I can do that.”

DF: As the writer, are you involved with the stor yboards, the music, and so on? Is it that much of a team effor t where sor t of ever ybody has input on ever ything in, say, Batman?

PD: Yes, if I’m producing. If I’m writing on somebody else’s show, then I don’t have much input. Like when I wrote the Justice League holiday episode, I was primarily talking to Bruce and Rich Fogel, the writer/producer on that show, and a couple of the other guys about where we were taking the story. In the script, I indicated a few musical things. And actually, there is a beat [story point] that heavily involves music in that particular episode. But, for the most part, once it leaves my hands as a writer, that’s the last I see of it. I did look at the storyboard for it, just out of curiosity, and I saw it was a typical, terrific Bruce Timm/Butch Lukic type storyboard. Butch is directing the episode, and I was very pleased with it. But as far as whipping out the post-its and making notes, I didn’t do that.

DF: Sometimes you’re the writer/producer, sometimes you’re the show runner, the story editor. I mean, all those titles seem somewhat fluid, yet on the other hand somewhat rigid. It seems kind of contradictory. Can you shed a little light on that?

PD: Well, on Justice League I’m just coming in as a guest writer and as a fan of the show. And I get to work with my old buddies again, which is great. On Duck Dodgers, which is the new show I’m doing, I’m one of the four show runners. So I’m there for every recording, I’m there at every storyboard. In fact, I’m much more involved in the storyboards on this one than I have ever been on any other show, because we’re creating the episodes in storyboards rather than writing them as scripts.

And that’s been a terrific experience, because this is trying to do, as close as we can, the old Looney Tunes-style way of creating cartoons.

DF: Duck Dodgers is a vintage character, right?

PD: Right, he’s Daffy Duck as a space hero.

DF: How could I have forgotten that?

PD: From the outset we’re saying this is Daffy Duck’s show. It’s starring him as Duck Dodgers, and Porky Pig is his assistant, 30 | WRITE NOW

the eager young space cadet, and the recurring adversary is Marvin the Martian, the belligerent little alien who is always out to invade planets and further the cause of Mars.

DF: Tell me what the show runner duties are, and what the perks of being a show runner are.

PD: Actually, I share those duties with Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone and Tom Minton. Spike and Tony were the guys who basically came up with the idea of doing the show. They have been animators and directors at Warner Brothers in the classics division for quite a while now. And they had done a trailer about three or four years ago for a proposed Duck Dodgers feature, which looks really awesome. They were pitching it to the Warner Brothers lot as a candidate for an animated feature, back when they were doing features like The Iron Giant and a couple of others. Warners ultimately passed on it as a feature, but a couple of years ago Cartoon Network saw the trailer and they said, “This is too good to sit in the files, we’ve got to do this as a series.” So Spike and Tony are really the artistic geniuses who have kicked off the show. I’ve always wanted to work with them on a Looney Tunes project.

So after getting the nod from Cartoon Network, the three of us sat down and brainstormed the idea for a series. We came up with a lot of visuals and a lot of written material which CN liked very much. We brought Tom Minton from Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries in as our fourth writer/producer, and the next thing we knew we had a show.

DF: You hear sometimes from people that there’s sor t of an “animation ghetto,” that once you’re an animation writer, they won’t let you do live action. Do you find any truth in that, or are you going to be working on any live action stuff?

Or would you rather not deal with that issue altogether?

PD: I’m in animation primarily because I enjoy it. At the moment I’m completing a couple of series and pilots and when I’m done with them, I’ll look around and see what other options there are for me. Ultimately, it’s whatever project I like that I decide to go on, whether it’ll be animation or live action. I’ve written a bunch of live action projects and I’ve had offers to do others. And I probably will take some time off and work on a couple of things like that. But, there’s never been a time in my life when I’ve been out of work, as far as the animation goes, and I’ve always liked the projects that I’ve worked on. So I might as well stick with what I like, whether that’s working on a brand new series, or else taking some time off and writing comics, or whatever. I do find generally, though, a lot of what happens in animation doesn’t translate readily into live action.

On the other hand, if you’re a good writer, you can sit down and write an episode of a spec show or write a pilot or write a theatrical feature and still get people to look at it. But just because you can write a great episode of Batman does not necessarily mean that they’re going to hire you to write on Buffy.

DF: But, I mean, if you hand in a great Buffy spec—I know you’re supposed to hand in a spec for a different show than the one you want to work for—but if you hand in a great live action spec, will the animation experience count against you, or will they just say, “It’s a great spec, let’s hire this guy”?

PD: It probably won’t count against you.

DF: Well, that’s good. Will it count for you?

PD: If you write a great spec script for any series, people will take a look at it. One of the writers on Justice League, Stan Berkowitz, goes fairly regularly between live action and animation. One season during Batman Beyond he was working

of had to wait for our stuff. It came out when it came out, on a cop show, and then he came back and did some episodes because we were so busy with the shows and everything. There of Beyond, and then the cop show came to an end, and then was never time to devote to it full time. And I did a couple of he was doing Justice League. So he’s always got a few things jobs for Claypool Comics, who do the Elvira comics, because like that going.

Richard Howell’s a good buddy of mine.

DF: Stan was inter viewed in Write Now! #2, as you and our DF: Where do you know Richard from? readers may recall.

PD: Boston. He was managing the Million-Year Picnic comics PD: I do. And I’ve turned down many freelance gigs on live shop in Harvard Square and living in Cambridge. He was action shows simply because I’d rather stay here and produce looking for a roommate for the summer, so I stayed there for a my own show. while and hung out with this little clot of comic book people. It DF: So is that sor t of the nex t step, that you’re involved in was kind of cool. production now as much as writing?

DF: Ever ybody kind of forgets about the Boston outpost of If you meet somebody at a cocktail party, do you say, “I’m a comics. producer,” “I’m a writer.” What’s your elevator pitch or your PD: Yeah. cocktail party self-definition?

DF: One thing I noticed, from a concentrated reading of your PD: I usually say something like “I write and produce these stuff over the past week or so, is that you seem to have a animated shows.” And I don’t know whether it’s just animation fascination, or one might say obsession, with mythic topics. I is hot at the moment, or a lot of people like Batman or think they were all serious, but the more capital “S” serious Batman Beyond, but usually whoever I talk to has heard of what I do.

DF: But say it’s somebody you want to impress in the business, do you say “I’m a producer,” or is that just something that’s understood that if you’re a writer, that you’re producing as well?

PD: Yeah, everybody’s producing something or other. The gag is, “You’re a producer, huh? What do you produce?”

“Oh, lattes at Starbucks.” But I don’t know, it’s all how hot you are perceived to be. It isn’t so much actual heat, it’s the perception of heat that can make your career. I’ve had agents anxious to sign me because Jack Osbourne— Ozzy’s son—knows who I am. I guess Jack likes my comics or something, which is cool.

DF: Of course, a whole other facet of your career is the comics. How did you first get into comics writing?

PD: Well, I’ve always enjoyed reading comics. Then, when we were developing Batman, Paul Levitz very kindly extended an offer to Bruce Timm and me to do something with Batman in the comics. He said, “You know, we really love the show. If you guys ever want to come in and do a run of Batman Adventures comics, or something with Batman in his established DC Universe version, or whatever, we’d love to see it.” Neither one of us was up to doing a regular stint on a book, but the idea of doing a special certainly appealed to us. So we came up with an idea and we pitched it to them, and they said, “We’ll give you a 64-page prestige book.” That became the Batman: Mad Love story that we put together about ten years ago.

We had a great time doing that. It really took a lot of people by surprise, because a lot of fans liked the show, but they weren’t expecting to get as intense and goodlooking a book as they got out of that. I mean, the Batman Adventures comic at that time was great, but this was coming from the guys who did the show, and I think because we brought an extra element of intensity to it.

They really liked it. And I think that Harley Quinn had become kind of a popular, breakthrough character at that point, so here was a chance to do her origin. It took a lot of people by surprise in a nice way. In fact, they’re reprinting it in a new edition. It’ll be out in April or May, I think.

So that came out and got us a good rep. And then we did a couple of other Batman-related projects. And I guess the fact that we weren’t doing it steadily meant you sort A Jingle Belle look at the Osbournes from Jingle Belle: Winter Wingding.

Illustrated by Spike Brandt & Tony Cervone. [©2003 Paul Dini.]

DINI | 31

expression of that is those books you do with Alex Ross, which seem to distill the essence of the iconic DCU super-heroes.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the Jingle Belle stuff and Mutant, Texas, where you deal with, respectively, the Christmas mythos and the Western mythos. Can you talk a little about your fascination with those mythologies?

PD: Sure. With the Alex Ross project, Alex wanted to do a series of books that would be accessible to fans and new readers, that would define these iconic super-hero characters that have been a part of our lives for years, but in truth, not a lot of people know everything about. For the reading public in general, they all know who Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman are, but they may not know the specifics about the characters. For the hardcore fans who read every issue, of course, you know every nuance of the characters’ everyday lives and their alternate identities and so on. What we wanted to do with these books is to show why these characters have been around for so long, and why they have meant so much to longtime fans and to popular culture in general. With each of those characters, we wanted to take something that was very iconic.

Superman is, for all practical purposes, the first super-hero, and the oldest, and in many ways the best, the most recognizable character. So, what is it about him that makes him special? One of the questions that people ask themselves is: “If Superman can make life better for everybody, why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he do things for people all over the world to

improve their lives?” And there are two answers for that. One, “he’s a mythic character, he can’t really do it.” And two, “if he did exist, he would realize that people are best left to solve their own problems. The best he can do is to set an example and sort of point the way toward where he feels mankind would be best served going.” If people choose not to follow him or not to do those things, he doesn’t have the power to change that. People have the right to make their own destinies. But, while he’s not human, he personifies the best things about humanity. That’s his reason for being there.

Batman comes from a primal urge to get even with people.

It’s the idea of vengeance, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just take the law into my own hands and make right a terrible situation?” There’s a lot of fantasy wish fulfillment with that character. He’s the flipside of Superman.

Wonder Woman is strength and purity and virtue almost as a transforming effect on people. She represents the wise and gentle side of humanity.

DF: A lot of people want to write those characters, but take the approach: “I’m going to write a stor y about this iconic character based on some obscure element of continuity from twenty years ago,” which can be a valid way to look at it. Or they may want to just take off from what the last writer did and, again, do a stor y that develops from where the character is now. What is it that makes you want to break them down and explore their core like that, outside of continuity, as opposed to doing an arc of, say, Batman comics? Is it just that you have limited access or limited time and you want to do the ultimate thing with them?

PD: Actually, we wanted to show what the characters are in their primary forms as a way of bringing in and explaining to both adults who have lost touch with these characters and to kids that are just forming bonds with them, who they are.

These graphic novels are large-sized so the art is intriguing to an adult, because they’ve never seen the characters painted like that. But I also think that it’s very welcoming for a child, because they can see the characters in big form, kind of like a real person, and they can see what is interesting and magical about these characters. You don’t have to know who Superman’s major archenemies are and you don’t have to do the ultimate Batman vs. Joker battle in these books.

The temptation is always there to do that, to say, “Well, this one should be a rock ’em, sock ’em battle, where the gloves come off and Batman kills his worst enemy.”

DF: This time for sure. [laughs] PD: But we’re not doing that, we’re doing these other kinds of stories as a focal point on the characters, and a welcoming-on point to kids who want to find out more about them. These are designed to be accessible stories, without a lot of continuity attached to them. If they read too much like the monthly books, you run the risk of losing the first time audience because they can’t make the connection of why the hero is fighting a particular bad guy.

That was just the way we chose to tell the stories.

END

PART

ONE

From Paul Dini & Alex Ross’ first collaboration Superman: Peace On Earth. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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The Paul Dini Interview Continues Next Issue!

STILL Not The Last...

Dennis O’Neil Interview

Interviewed in person by Danny Fingeroth August 22, 2002 Edited by Danny Fingeroth / Copy-edited by Dennis O’Neil Transcription by the LongBox.com Staff & Danny Fingeroth

Part 2

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s we said last issue: “For over 20 years, writer and editor Dennis O’Neil put the ‘dark’ in Dark Knight and was the guiding force behind the Batman mythos. He has been called a living legend, a master of the comics form and the dean of American comics writers. He prefers to think of himself as, simply, ‘a working, professional storyteller.’”

We said a lot of other cool stuff about Denny then, too, but you’ll just have to dig out your copy of DFWN #3 (or buy a copy!) to see it. The above gives you the basic idea.

Only one thing: If Denny is the Dean of American comics writers… who’s the Jerry?

Anyway, read and learn as we continue our interview with Mr. O. —DF

nable. I don’t have to grade. I don’t have to look at papers.

I don’t have to take attendance. I have to prepare lectures, but I have a lot of notes from previous lectures. I’m going to teach editing in a few months.

DANNY FINGEROTH: Tell me about the teaching you have DF: You’re now teaching writing? done both as an editor and actually as a teacher. You seem DO: And general story structure. And I even did three weeks on to enjoy that. I can’t imagine that it pays ver y much, so what the mythological aspects of comics. is it that you like about that? What does it feed in your soul?

DF: I’d love to see the notes.

DENNY O’NEIL: Part of it is histrionics. I did a lot of acting as a DO: I can give them to you. I’m going kid and there is an element of that. to teach editing next, and I’ve never Good teachers are good speakers, done that before. That’s terra generally. I like communicating what I incognita. This is dream gig. I spend know. Marifran has been a teacher for a couple hours Wednesday afterover 40 years and knew she was noons assembling notes, usually going to be a teacher from 5th grade from some other lectures given here on. She had a hunch that I would like and there, and come in on Thursday teaching, and by coincidence, a short morning at 11 and do the class and time after that realization on her part, go home. At SVA (School of Visual Howard Cruse was quitting his SVA gig Arts) there was that awful process of and offered to recommend me for it. I grading, which all teachers have to found that I really did like teaching. I do, and I wonder: How do you grade did it for about nine months right out something like this, where talent is a of the Navy. I was a substitute part of it? I am loathe to admit it, teacher. At that time all you needed because every semester you have was a B.A. There are people that kids that are conscientious, and they really like teaching, and I think that I are paying attention, and they are am one of them. This current teaching taking notes and they ask good gig here at DC expires in February, questions, but you look at their work and I’m wondering what will happen and it’s never going to happen for next year. How do I feed my teaching them. jones after February?

It’s pretty amazing altogether that DF: You’ve taught at colleges where comics skills are now—and have people are aspiring to become been for a while—taught in colleges. comics pros and want to learn from This is a great country because I, your experience and knowledge. But who got a D– in math and flunked you also teach at DC. You come in algebra in high school, am standing ever y week and teach younger in front of a class at the editors. What’s that like?

The cover to the final issue of Azrael: Agent of the Bat. Massachusetts Institute of DO: It’s the best teaching gig imagiArt by Mike Zeck and Jerry Ordway. [©2003 DC Comics.]

O’NEIL | 33

Technology. One of the big, surprising changes is that MIT has a pop art/pop culture department and teach comic books.

Mike Uslan [producer of the Batman movies and now licensing ex ec at CrossGen Comics. —DF.] taught a comic book course at Indiana 25 or 30 years ago, and that was the first. I was aware that educational institutions were paying attention a little bit. Every once in a while, someone who was writing a thesis would ask me for an interview or some advice, but I didn’t know that we had gotten that respectable. When you talk about the majors, in the last 25 years that’s probably the biggest one. Those older guys didn’t admit that they were comic book writers. When I came into the business, a lot of them would dodge around what they did for a living if a civilian asked. It was somehow shameful, and now it’s cool to be a comic book writer. When I first went out to Hollywood looking for a TV job, I was told to emphasize the science fiction stories I published and to not say much about the comics. But now, Larry tells me that, as the son of a comic book writer, people are often very interested in that.

DF: Tell me about the Hollywood thing. You’ve done some TV and some movie work. Would you like to have done more? Did you go out there and get a bad taste from it? Talk about that and how someone’s comic skills could be applied to that world.

DO: I would not turn down any television work that was honorable. I like working in the form, I just didn’t want to go after it and you have to do that. I went out to Hollywood when they were doing the Captain Marvel and Isis TV shows. I guess it was Harlan Ellison who was going to get me in to see that producer in the early to mid-’80s. The guy was polite but clearly not interested. Then I went out a few years later, again at Harlan’s behest, to talk to the producers of Logan’s Run. That

From Green Lantern/Green Arrow #77. Written by Dennis O’Neil with art by Neal Adams. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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time I got lucky and I got an assignment and I did it. I know it was shot but I’ve never seen it. My father-in-law saw it, so we know it exists. That was really pretty good, to on your first try end up writing a network show. I was told that they could get me additional work. But it would have meant relocating to L.A., and I had a sense that it would mean five times a week going schmoozing and talking to producers and story editors and selling myself. And that’s the single thing that I’m worst at. As I was talking about before, I was brought up to believe that a decent man doesn’t call attention to himself.

I do like the TV script form, although I’ve had horrible moments when I saw what my script ended up as. But everyone who has worked in television has that story to tell in one form or another. If you’re Steven Bocchco, Aaron Sorkin or someone like that, David Kelley, then television is a wonderful medium. It’s maybe the best medium for telling human stories.

DF: It’s got much in common with comics in that it’s a serial form that aggregates on itself.

DO: More than that, it’s generally not about who the star is or what the special effects are. They don’t have the budget for big special effects, so they have to focus on real human problems. I think the guys I mentioned do excellent work every week. Real problems which they realize in very literate and well-acted scripts. I know a woman who was a regular on the West Wing, and she then took a job with another show, because West Wing wasn’t able to guarantee her that she’d be on every week, and she would be a star on the show she went to. But she would have loved to spend the rest of her life acting on the West Wing if she could, because it was so literate and so honest and the people making it are so good at what they do. TV’s a great medium if you get to the place where you have enough clout to get your story on the screen. Some of my experiences have been where, say, an actor wants to show that he can do accents or do schtick, so he does that. Someone who worked on a show that I brushed up against had a situation where he was instructed to open on a shot of a young woman in a bikini so that he had to set the scene at a swimming pool. In another instance, I saw a show and the same young woman removed her sweatshirt in the middle of a scene, and I asked the writer why she did that. He said that someone in a position of authority on the show thought that if you had a woman who looks like that, you have to do it. TV and film writers can really have their work murdered. If you belong to the Writer’s Guild, and I do, the producers have an obligation to show you the script that they are going to shoot in time for you to take your name off it if you want to. That’s a real benefit that the union has gotten. So if the fact that what has come in is so different than what I wrote, I don’t have to take credit—or blame—for it.

DF: Is there anything coming out, or that you are working on, for TV? DO: I was associated with a kid’s show called Captain Lightning and then, because of tax and other financial considerations, it got moved to Canada, and the producer, who was a friend, was not able to use any US writers. He asked me for a recommendation for a British or Canadian writer and I was able to put him and Alan Grant together. May 3rd, the day I saw the SpiderMan movie, that producer and I went to it together and

he was thanking me for Alan. He was delighted with everything that Alan did for him. He also showed me the show and it looks great.

DF: These days, TV seems to do comics better than comics do. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Alias. They seem to tap into primal structure and character ideas. So much changes in popular media. But what holds true and how do you convey that to the nex t generation?

DO: It’s one of the tricky things about doing this work. But until it is proven to me otherwise, I will maintain that clarity is still essential. The problem that a lot of comic books have is that, unless you’ve been reading the stuff for 20 years, you don’t have prayer of knowing what this issue that’s just come out is about. The most continuity-intensive TV show was 24, but if you came in on the middle of it, you still got enough to understand what was at stake here and now. My hobbyhorse is the simple ABC’s of storytelling. Who are they? Why are they here? What is the conflict about?

DF: Why is that so hard for people to do in comics now? What is so repellent about that to so many writers and editors? Or is it that nobody’s ever explained to them how to do it?

DO: I think they come from fandom, where everyone has been reading this stuff for 20 years. Also, there’s a sense from comic book shops of wanting to keep it an exclusive club. I’m a realist, and if you could make a living and maintain the medium by knowing the size of your audience and working strictly for the preoccupations for that group, then I couldn’t quarrel with that much. But the reality is that that group gets smaller year by year as people get older or find other needs for their money.

That’s what worries me about the future of the medium. We are not recruiting new readers because it’s very hard for new readers to jump on the bandwagon.

DF: There’s been a lot of talk lately about sales going up industr y-wide. Do you think the companies are reaching out to new audiences?

DO: I hope so, but I don’t know. They are getting some help from other media. The Spider-Man movie is a big help. It’s the great popcorn movie of the summer. It’s just what you go to a Sunday matinee to see.

DF: I think it’s grossed $800 million worldwide so far. And the video and DVD haven’t even come out yet.

DO: And Smallville is an amazingly good and literate show. I’ve seen the pilot for Birds of Prey, and that looks like it’s going to be the same quality as Smallville. Those people are doing comic book material and they understand the mythic appeal of these larger than life characters, and yet they also understand that an audience has to know what the characters’ names are.

DF: I think the only show that skir ted the clarity issue was XFiles and that almost became a cult on its own. It’s the only show that really got away with not filling people in.

DO: It got away with a lot because of the charisma of the two stars.

DF: The chemistr y between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson?

DO: Yes. I found a lot to gripe about with the writing, because sometimes the plots weren’t resolved and they just sort of trailed off. David Lynch makes movies that are incomprehensible to anybody but David Lynch. I watched Mulholland Drive recently, and I called up my director son and said: “Can you explain this movie to me?” And the answer is that David Lynch gets away with it and he is the only one that gets away with it.

There are special circumstances connected with him.

DF: At a David Lynch movie, you don’t expect to come by in four weeks and see another movie that directly relates to the movie you just saw. It’s a 2-hour experience you go in for, and you enjoy it or you don’t.

DO: You get on his ride or not. They probably don’t know who killed Laura Palmer, and the thing with the dwarf is nice, and they popularized doughnuts. I was fascinated by it for a few weeks until I realized that, “This is not about who The cover for the O’Neil scripted Amazing Spider-Man killed Laura Annual #15, with art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson.

Palmer… and I [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] don’t quite know what it is about.” There are always exceptions. Some people can succeed by violating the canons of good storytelling. Just don’t try this at home kids.

DF: There’s a Denny O’Neil web site, The O’Neil Observer. It’s not a site that you run, but you do par ticipate in it. It’s a good site that’s fun and easy to navigate. Do you like being par t of the cyber world? Ever think about doing stories just for the Internet?

DO: I’ve talked with an editor about doing a story for the Internet. The O’Neil Observer is just a flattering phenomenon.

Several years ago, Bob Brodsky approached Marifran and myself in San Diego, and asked if he could do a fanzine. I was not entirely comfortable with that, but Brodsky is a terrific guy and very smart and at the end of it I said, “sure,” and gave my blessing, as long as I don’t have to do anything. And there had to be something other than me in every issue. It had to be about the craft of comic writing and not just one writer. Bob and his partner agreed to that and did the first print issue. It looked pretty good. Shortly thereafter, Scott McCullar, who had a web site for Chuck Dixon and I think for Devin Grayson, asked if he could do an O’Neil Observer website. I didn’t commit myself to any participation, but when I saw how good it looked and realized how much work they put into it, I would be a creep if I didn’t contribute. I manage nine to eleven “From the Den” columns a year for them, and a couple of times a week I log on and answer any question that I can. For example, someone asked about the best way to submit proposals, so I asked the editors that I teach on Thursday morning and I got a consensus and I did a column trying to supply information to young unpublished writers. I get a lot of questions about old work of mine. I got a question about Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter the novel. They wanted to know who the other writer was and was it really published by Award Books. I think it was Award Books O’NEIL | 35

who published that, and surely they are out of business by now.

DF: Have you thought about how the web site affects your career, profilewise and income-wise?

DO: It’s pleasant little thing to do a couple of times a week, and I will force myself to write a column sometime between now and Monday, because it’s been six weeks since the last one. Now I have more time than I have had in my life, so I do find myself logging on every other day if I have 15 minutes to kill, just to see if anyone has posted something new. If they have and it’s a question that I can answer in five minutes, I answer it.

The cover for Denny’s upcoming Green Lantern DF: You’re officially retired prose novel. [©2003 DC Comics.] now, although I have a feeling you’re busier than most people when they’re working.

Are you enjoying this new phase?

DO: I’m not an editor anymore and I don’t have a 9-to-5 job. I have all the things that AOL-Time Warner gives people that have worked for 15 consecutive years and have retired, and I have a monthly comic book obligation. I have done a few other odd writing jobs.

DF: You’re working on a novel now.

DO: I’m working on a novel and I hope to have it finished within a month. It’s a Green Lantern/Green Arrow novel and editor Charlie Kochman and I have talked about other novels. He would like me to write a Question novel. I would like to write a Question novel, and we have to find someone who would like to publish a Question novel. It’s a hard sell because he’s a super-hero only marginally.

There were a couple of hardcover publishers who were initially interested and then decided not to take it on. But Charlie still feels that we will manage to sell that sometime. I keep thinking that, before I get too old to see the computer screen, I ought to write a novel of my own, not about a precreated character. I actually promised an agent and I am a year and a half overdue on that. Partially that means I’ve been lucky to have enough assignments that I haven’t had any real substantial time. Writing a novel is not a casual effort, it takes a lot of thought and a lot of time.

DF: So you’re working steadily writing now?

DO: There are days when I don’t write and that used not to be true. Yesterday I didn’t write.

It’s a real different lifestyle and it took me a year to get adjusted to it. When you’re an editor, you’re busy all the time.

Your life is filled with white noise and it’s possible to ignore what you don’t want to face. In my current situation, those old demons pop right up, and there’s no place I can run, so I have to look at them. It’s about time.

DF: There are 640 cable channels.

DO: My brain turns to pudding after two to three hours of

television. As it is, we watch more than we used to, especially in the summer when Mari is not working as an elementary school teacher. She is also a Reiki master and she’s done a lot of that type of teaching, this summer in particular. Reiki, by the way, is an ancient healing technique that uses ambient energy.

DF: Are you going to write a “tell all” memoir about the comics business?

DO: I think Chabon beat me to it in Kavalier and Clay. A guy called me the other day. He’s writing a book about comics and he’s a reputable journalist. He asked questions about the business, and I realized that I’m at a place where I really don’t want to badmouth anybody and I don’t want to traffic in gossip.

DF: Is that a legal or an ethical concern for you?

DO: Ethical. Having said that, one of my great fears is being involved in a lawsuit. I’ve been party to enough of them to realize that it’s a lose/lose situation. Plus, you just don’t want to indulge in malicious gossip. I’ve been on the receiving end of that sort of thing a lot. I’ve heard things that were horrifying and completely untrue.

DF: No desire to tell your own version of events and to set the record straight?

DO: No. Because if someone puts something in a periodical and you reply, he’ll reply and it will drag on. That happened to me very painfully about a dozen years ago. A guy that I considered one of my two or three closest friends really did a job on me. I replied, which gave him an excuse to keep it going. I finally realized that if I shut up, it would die, and if I keep fighting, it will drag on forever. At the time he wasn’t working and I had two jobs, so he had a lot more time to worry about it. More than that, it’s a degrading thing to do, to indulge in this sniping. But on the other hand, you have an obligation to keep the record straight. But then you get a situation where, say, I know x-fact about a colleague, and if I write about it, it will make him look bad. But if I don’t talk about it, I will be lying by omission, and his behavior probably did have an affect on the stuff that he was working on at the time. I just became aware of this dilemma and I don’t have an answer for it DF: How’d did your book, How to Write DC Comics Guide, go?

How were the sales, critical reaction, fan reaction, and your reaction?

DO: The first review was an Internet reviewer and was pretty negative. From there on it was wonderful.

I want some of those reviews engraved on my tombstone. One very reputable columnist from a newspaper that people buy to get their news said it was the best creative writing book out there. I don’t agree with that, but I’m really delighted that he said it. [laughter] I think Stephen King’s book is better. But the reviews have been very good. It’s going into a second printing.

DF: I bought a copy.

Good stuff in there.

[Denny’s must-have book on comics writing (reviewed in DFWN #2). [©2003 DC Comics.]

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DO: Thank you. I didn’t make a gob of money on it, and I won’t.

It does present everything that I know about doing the basics of this work. This is not the graduate level stuff, if there is such a thing.

DF: How come it was the DC Comics Guide as opposed to Denny going and writing his book?

DO: I didn’t know it was going to be the DC Comics Guide.

They asked me to do it, and after stewing over it a day, I looked at the money and I said to the editor, “Look, I’m not going to hold you up, but you can’t be serious about this advance.” I knew that from other publishing sources that they could go a little higher than that, so I agreed to do it for not much more than I do one or two comic book stories. That’s 22 pages of comics, and the book was a lot more work than that. I thought that all I’d have to do was transcribe my class notes from SVA. I was wrong. A lot of teaching happens in the dialogue with the students and on your feet. I also found things that I should have covered in my classes but didn’t. It ended up being a pretty long process, but I did it.

DF: I imagine that it will have a pretty long life in the backlist as a perennial seller.

DO: I hope they let me rewrite it because I realized after it came out that have nothing in it on transitions, with I consider a small but important part of the craft. I know that the book has been the text for at least one college course, and the critical reception has been far in excess of what I could have hoped. People have been very, very nice about it. I guess there has never been anything quite like it. There have been books on writing comics before but not from a strictly nuts and bolts perspective. How many panels per page? What is a story structure? How do you structure a single story? How do you structure a mini-series? That kind of thing—from someone who’s had a lot of experience.

DF: Are there any other books on writing that you recommend?

DO: Everyone should experience Robert McKee’s teaching whether by taking his course or buying his book. Stephen King’s book is 70% autobiography, but the 30% that is about writing is really about writing. You get to read a working novelist on craft, and King does a number on adverbs that I was delighted with. I didn’t think that Stephen King would feel so strongly about something like a point of grammar. He also does an excellent section on theme and symbolism, not things that I associate with King’s writing. He was brilliant on how those things affect the practical writing of a novel and how you get them in there without screwing up everything else.

DF: Will your courses ever be available on video or audiotape?

DO: I’ve thought about it and, at Julie Schwartz’s suggestion, I’ve had Ivan Cohen taping them.

DF: Video or audio?

DO: Audio, which is a lot more comfortable for me because I don’t have to worry about spinach on my teeth. I hate seeing myself on television. I don’t mind listening to myself on radio, but television, I just don’t do it anymore. I’m on the Unbreakable DVD and I won’t watch it. Mari’s seen it and she has also taped a lot of the times that I’ve been on television.

Should I ever feel masochistic, that stuff is my house somewhere, and I could look at it. But I don’t foresee that happening.

DF: If you were 23 years old today, would you still get into comics or would it be something else? What would you do the same? What would you do differently?

DO: I would worry about the long-term career possibilities in

Art from the O’Neil scripted Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #2 with art by Ed Hannigan and John Beatty. [©2003 DC Comics.]

comics. I don’t know what is going to happen in ten years.

There’s going to be comics around, and there is going to be Superman and Batman and Spider-Man and the X-Men. I’d be very surprised if they were published in the monthly, cheap paper magazine format. It made all the sense in the world in 1938. It doesn’t make as much sense economically now. It is very specialized, like poetry. There is poetry being published, and it has an audience, but it’s not a mass audience.

DF: And all poets have a day job.

DO: I’ve had three people talk to my class who regard comics as a fine art because I think that is one of the places that it’s going.

DF: Do you feel sad about that or glad about it, or is that just how it is?

DO: I’ve given 38 years of my life to comic books. If what I’m saying becomes true, I won’t be happy about it. If I was 23, I would wonder about the long-term career possibilities and I might think about comics as a springboard to something else.

A lot of people have had that idea, but it hasn’t worked out for more than a handful.

DF: Oddly enough, we find the reverse happening. People who have been successful in movies and television are using those as springboards into the lower paying world of comics.

DO: If I were planning to have a family and live some kind of normal middle class life. I would wonder about a career in comics. I think it would be a terrific place to start. I don’t want to berate comics and say that all that they are good for is a venue into TV or movies. It’s a perfectly good art form in and of itself.

DF: And for the past 20 years a good way to make a living.

DO: There was about six or seven years where it was a damn good way to make a living if you were in a certain position.

Even writing part time, I was making a hell of a lot more as a writer than as an editor. That bubble popped. Is it ever going to be like that again? Not as far as I can tell. The mythology that comics have created is finding a home elsewhere, with lots of O’NEIL | 37

big budget movies by important directors. Ang Lee is going to do the Hulk. Comics themselves? I’ve heard there has been a blip in sales and I’ve heard that the basic problems are being addressed. How are you going to sell the things and to whom? You can’t sell them into supermarkets, but can you get them into malls?

DF: How do you make kids and teenagers think they’re cool?

DO: I have signed autographs in comic book shops that would be a pleasure to shop at, beautiful shops with helpful people. I’ve also been in shops in New York where it was a dank cave and the kid behind the counter in his pizza-stained shirt looked up and saw that you were not one of the regulars and went back to his reading. You would stumble over the empty boxes and there was dust.

DF: The “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons comes from somewhere.

DO: A friend of ours went into one of those shops prepared to drop 100 bucks because a teenager she knew was in the hospital and she had 100 bucks in her purse. She walked out two minutes later because the guy working there was not going to be helpful. He wasn’t going to show her the cards she wanted to look at. She was an old lady as far as he was concerned. She’s about 4 years younger than me.

Everybody who has wandered into comic book shops in various cities has had that experience, and it is a fairly serious problem.

DF: If you can find a comic book shop any more.

DO: Some of my kids’ friends have said that they like comics, but it’s a six-mile round trip and you have to drive to some place that you don’t normally go to.

You’ll drop ten dollars and get an hour’s worth of entertainment. I can go to the multiplex at the mall and drop seven bucks and see two hours worth of movies, and it’s on my way home.

DF: In my editorial in the first issue of Write Now! I did a breakdown of enter tainment cost per minute for different enter tainment media. I’m not sure if people consciously decide what they’re going to spend money on based on those sor ts of figures, but I’m sure it factors in.

DO: I think comics are a very viable form, and a lot of people would like them. But the way things have evolved is troubling. The direct sales system saved the comic book industry in the ’70s, when we were going under rapidly because the normal retail venues were going out of business or finding that they could make more money putting paperback books in the same space where their comics had been. Along came Phil Seuling with his wacky, crazy idea of selling directly to fans, and it created the thing that sustains us. But everything changes. I think that, if there is one absolute truism, it’s that everything changes.

Darwin was the smartest guy in the last 1000 years.

If you want to look at it in Eastern terms, you’ll hear the Tao is the principle behind everything, and that is change. It’s changed. I’ve had some of the best afternoons of my life in comic book shops, but there have O’NEIL continues on page 41 38 | WRITE NOW

COMICS 101 More of Dennis O’Neil’s Notes for Comics Writing and Editing Class Classes 3 and 4 Denny teaches a weekly class in comics writing and editing for new DC Comics staffers. Last issue, we showed some of his teaching notes, which were originally written as cues to himself. Here are Denny’s notes for two more classes, lightly edited by me for publication (with edits approved by Mr. O) so that the principles are easily comprehensible to others.

—DF

Class 3: CLASS DISCUSSION • [DIGRESSION] • Most of you were probably fans. Don’t mean to offend—remember: I’ve made most of the mistakes one can make.

• Without fan base, comics might have foundered in the ’70s.

• 2 of my best editors began as fans.

• Best new writer of the past 5 years began as fan.

• BUT… • Chinese philosophy: things change into their opposites. Elements of fandom now detrimental.

• Storytelling deeper impulse than fancy language?

• Our need for pattern and identification?

• Academics ignore plot, except for screenwriting profs.

• BUT—storytelling declining.

• Fans enter field to be part of “scene” without adequate preparation for making comics stories.

• Get jobs because of fan connections?

• Earlier generations: desire to tell stories or at least desire to be professional writer. Scene didn’t exist.

• Fans look back to stuff they loved. Want to recreate that. So stuff becomes quickly dated.

• Fans write for other fans.

• Fan’s agenda not necessarily good stories.

• Fan “quality” often = recognition or shared jokes.

BIG PROBLEM/ASSET: No set criteria for either editors or writers.

• Artists must at least demonstrate minimal competence.

• Serial form tricky/difficult for even experienced writers.

[End Digression]

ANOTHER TYPE OF STRUCTURE. • One-thing-after-another structure.

• Often in early comics.

• Probably inspired by movie serials.

• Series of encounters between antagonists which end indecisively until one doesn’t win.

• McGuffin changes sometimes, but essential conflict doesn’t.

• McGuffin = the thing that characters are, on the surface, after. Sets plot in motion, • Can work if all incidents are entertaining, but becomes boring if they aren’t.

• Hook can incorporate inciting incident but doesn’t have to.

• Inciting incident: What sets the train of events in motion.

• Maltese Falcon—Archer’s murder.

• Terminator—android’s return to our era.

• Any Columbo or Jessica—a murder.

• Cape Fear—DeNiro showing up or botched defense.

• “Doonsbury”—Mike losing job.

• Casablanca—theft of letters or Elsa showing up.

• Need not happen onstage.

• In comics structure: • Private eye—hired to do job.

• Cop—crime is committed.

• Archie—authority figure forbids something hero wants.

• Doctor—somebody gets sick.

• Super-hero—something threatens the common good.

• Super-heroes = tribal gods—protect tribe and its values.

• But can have more personal motivation.

• Hook should be up front in first 25% of story.

• Hook leads to—

CONFLICT • Dictionary definition: “to come into collision or be contradictory; at variance or opposition.”

—Random House Unabridged • Aspects of conflict.

• Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music.

• Nothing moves forward except through conflict.

• Should be introduced early in story (like inciting incident.)

• Kinds of conflict.

• Inner—not much in comics.

• Hamlet.

• Charlie Brown—red haired girl.

• Doonesbury—cigarette ad sequence.

• DANGER OF INNER CONFLICT: Easy to make hero a selfpitying whiner re: some middle-period Spider-Man. • Inner—not used so much in comics. Usually, emotional interaction with another character.

• Real life—married vs. fear of commitment.

• Soap operas.

• Spider-Man— • Jonah • Aunt May • Superman— • Lois, etc.

• Archie— • Betty and Veronica vying for Arch’s affections.

• Peanuts— • Lucy and Shroeder.

• External—most common conflict in comics.

• Simple fight.

• Two guys on street.

• Boxers.

• THIS IS HOW CONFLICT IS USUALLY EXPRESSED IN COMICS, WHICH TEND TO DEAL IN BROAD VISUAL IMAGES. • FIGHT OFTEN USED AS EXPRESSION/EXTERNALIZATION OF “DEEPER” CONFLICTS. IE. X-MEN (OUTSIDERS) VS. SOCIETY. • OFTEN CONFLICTS IS OVER THE…McGUFFIN. • But fight must have reason or McGuffin if it’s to be a stor y.

McGUFFIN: What the hero and villain are fighting over.

Somebody wants something the hero wants or hero doesn’t want him to have.

“The only thing that matters is that the plans, documents, secrets must seem to be of vital impor tance to the characters... to the narrator, they’re of no impor tance whatever.” —Hitchcock • Danger: Must be convincing or characters will lose credibility.

• Exception: Comedy/parody: What’s Up Tiger Lily: Hunt for egg salad recipe

Class #4 TODAY’S TOPIC: CHARACTERIZATION.

The introduction of Ra’s Al Ghul and Talia in “Daughter of the Demon.” Story by Denny O’Neil; art by Neal Adams & Dick Giordano. From Detective Comics #232. [©2003 DC Comics]

Harrison Ford: I look for the kernel of information in the scene that advances the stor y and tr y to figure out interesting behavior that will convey that kernel.

COMICS 101 continues on page 40 O’NEIL | 39

COMICS 101 continued from page 39

• Useful questions.

• What does my character always want?

• Superman: Uphold values inherited from Kents.

• James Bond: life of high adventure and sensuality and to serve Her Majesty.

• Sylvester: Tweety for dinner.

• Who or what does character love?

• Need not be complicated: “Truth, justice and the American way” are just fine.

• What is he afraid of? (From Robert Towne, Chinatown screenwriter.)

• Why does he involve himself in extreme situations?

• In a series, there must be a logical reason for the hero to continue to put himself in peril.

• TV: “Franchise.” What a character does as par t of his life that involves that person in interesting situations. That’s why there are so many cop and doctor shows.

• Super-heroes: They do it because they’re heroes.

OTHER ASPECTS OF “DEEP CHARACTERIZATION” —the kind of characterization that has to do with the character’s deepest motives and needs, as opposed to what we see on the sur face.

• Will apply equally to heroes and villains, protagonist and antagonist.

• Maybe a few of your supporting cast.

• Other characters will be designed to support hero and villain.

• Often characters will be defined by needs of story.

(Will return to this.)

• Maxie Zeus.

• “Character is action”: What hero can do to resolve conflicts in plot determines course of story.

Consistency.

• Characters must be “true” to themselves—act consistently.

• You must know before you begin who character is to make him/her behave consistently.

• Arthur Miller, et al. write 1000s of words of backstory before beginning.

• Sometimes character evolves as story progresses.

• PERMIT THIS TO HAPPEN BUT BE PREPARED TO REWRITE. • “Dialectic” between need to make plot interesting and previous notion of character. Not much applicable to “inherited” characters, such as franchise heroes.

Getting to know your character.

• McKee: True character revealed by the choices character makes under pressure.

• Greater pressure = truer character.

40 | WRITE NOW

• NOTE: EVERYTHING TRUE ABOUT HERO EQUALLY TRUE ABOUT VILLAIN. HARD LESSON: Must work as hard on baddie as good guy.

• FOCUS ON FOURTH QUESTION: WHY DOES HE DO WHAT HE DOES? • TV calls this kind of continuing character a “franchise.”

Explains TV popularity of cops, private eyes, doctors, sometimes lawyers: Franchise—the reason—is built into who they are. They deal with life and death situations.

• “Classic” super-hero answer: Because he’s the hero.

Sufficient answer for some kinds of stories, eg., Saturday morning. Will work elsewhere if you make events interesting and witty.

• Costume all the characterization you need. Shallow.

• Primitive gods and priests have special garb—maybe antecedent.

• Super-heroes use powers.

• Jessica, Holmes, Columbo use brains.

• Schwarzenegger uses force.

• “Character is action”: What the hero can do to resolve conflicts in plot determines course of story.

• Maslow: “If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as nail.”

• “Energia”: Aristotle: “Actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation. But what to do with “inherited” characters?

• Examples of creators who solved the Franchise problem brilliantly: • Moore: Watchmen and Marvelman.

• Miller: Daredevil and Year One. • David Newman & Robert Benton: Superman musical.

• Ask yourself: • How can I explain this character in light of what I know about human behavior and motivation?

• Can I use my own experience to add depth and credibility to heroes.

• Stan Lee method: Acquisition of powers would not cancel hang-ups. Spider-Man: Still nerd, still can’t get dates, still has parental problems.

• “Classic dramaturgy” vs. series stories.

• In classic dramaturgy, characterization (externals) is chipped away to reveal character, then character is changed by events.

• MacBeth dead.

• Scrooge becomes nice guy. (But does he?)

• But we don’t do classic dramaturgy.

• Franchise characters usually can’t (aren’t allowed to) change.

• We deal in the Illusion of change.

• There can be (usually temporary) alterations in a character’s emotional state.

• Others in story can and should change.

Denied classic tool of character change, we must work harder to make other elements in story entertaining.

END MORE OF DENNY’S LESSONS NEXT ISSUE!

PART

TWO

O’NEIL continued from page 38

role in one of his films last week. Tell me a little about him. also been some fairly grim experiences when we go in anonyDO: It wasn’t my finest moment as an actor, but Larry’s a mously. To get back to your original question, if you love comics filmmaker and won a big prize at the Hamptons Film Festival and are a professional and you bring to it the discipline that for Throwing Down. Best movie of the festival. I think he got any professional writer brings to his craft, and you want to take best director. It was about six years ago. After working as an a shot at it, sure. If all you know is comics and that’s your life, assistant director on commercial movies after film school, he I wouldn’t hire you because what else are you going to bring to decided that he was going to make a feature and he was the party? going to put together the financing, and he did. He put DF: There seem to be two trends in comics now. One is the together about $60,000 and got a lot of actors to work for comic that has three words a page and then there is the pizza and eventual profits. He shot this movie about two comic that has 300 words a page. There seems to be no lowlife criminals in Greenwich Village. It got into the Hamptons middle ground. What is that about?

Film Festival, and he didn’t bother to attend the awards DO: That’s certainly true and part of is the Marvel-style [plot ceremony because there was a movie that he wanted to see first. —DF.] way of working. I’ve noticed, even in my own at the same time. He walked out of this movie he went to, and writing, that you tend to write more heavily when you start with someone said “congratulations,” and “good job,” and after the the art. Sometimes it’s because the artist doesn’t draw what fourth time he realized that they were congratulating him for he’s supposed to draw, and you have to explain in captions or something specific. Finally, a young woman who starred in the in dialogue what’s going on. Every comic book writer that I movie and attended the ceremony told him he won the big know who has been doing it for a while that I know has a award. I’m very proud of him for having the guts to do that. horror story about that. There is something about that way of “I’m going to somehow make a movie,” and he did it. He working that invites copy-heavy writing. In writing full script wrote and directed it. [writer describe panel-by-panel, including text] you have great DF: Do you think that your example as parent, writer, control over how much text and where it goes. That’s one of teacher, editor gave him something to learn from? the reasons that I like working that way, because I don’t have DO: He and I talked about writing a little bit, but I’ve never to follow someone else’s pacing. Sometimes an artist gives given him any writing instruction. People congratulated me on you too much space. They give you three panels and you need how good a script he did for Throwing Down, but I really had half a panel. You wrack your brain to make filler up that doesn’t nothing to do with it. I saw it when he was done with it. He look like filler. Other times, what you had imagined to be three shows me his finished scripts, not necessarily to elicit pages of exposition you have two panels for. criticism, though he sometimes has asked for that. But he DF: As a consumer, I know that, if I buy a comic, no matter doesn’t do the kind of stuff I do at all. He won’t go near superhow beautifully it’s drawn, if I can read it in three minutes, I heroes. really feel that it’s a waste of my money.

DF: But in terms of the tenacity, and just wanting to be a DO: We were talking about that this morning. [Science fiction professional stor yteller…. author and guest lecturer in Denny’s class] Chip Delaney said DO: Yeah. I think if your father does it, it’s real, it’s a possibility, that Archie Goodwin and Julie Schwartz and I all believe in the it’s not this thing that magic people do. It’s in your living room. same thing: more words. Leaving artistic consideration aside, And then, when he was still in school, he worked for Howard one of the things that I was taught way back was if a reader Chaykin. He had admired Howard’s comics work and then got paid $1.75 for a comic and is done with it in five minutes, he’s the chance to work for him, to ink backgrounds and that kind of going to feel ripped off. You have to put enough in there so thing. To see how a real professional does it. Sit down at 9. that it is at least a reading experience for them.

Get up at 5. And then party your brains out, if you want to do DF: I believe that. that. But you get the work done first. So between seeing me DO: Throughout history, artists have made adjustments to actually make a living at it and seeing Howard and a few other conform to what the boss said. “You know that chapel? The people he admired actually doing it, it made a creative life a Pope said the ceiling had to have this much paint on it.” On the other hand, I don’t like comics where there are tons of excess words. That violates the form in another direction.

DF: The Sistine Chapel, I think, was done Mar vel style.

DO: Artists who have reached a large audience have not had a totally free hand throughout history. If you cannot accept those realities, than your life will be terrible and you should do something else. Nobody should have a life of misery unless higher powers decree.

DF: You have a son who is filmmaker and a film writer. I know it’s hard to get you to talk about him. Not. You even had a From John Byrne’s The Incredible Hulk #314, edited by Denny O’Neil. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] O’NEIL | 41

Kochman came to my apartment in Brooklyn and, for three days, he sat by my elbow while we did the editing together, with Marifran coming in with cookies and lemonade every few hours. We put in three incredibly long days and got the book edited that way. Then, that Monday morning at a quarter to 12, Charlie said: “I need another line in the introduction.” “You do not need another line in the introduction,” I said. “What are you talking about?” But I gave it to him, and the book made it. It was an incredible mountain to climb. I never want to go near another mountain like that again.

DF: Folks, don’t expect your editor to come to your house.

DO: Charlie is a terrific editor. He’s an oldfashioned book editor. His job is to make me look good. Naturally, writing that quickly, there were glitches that crept in. There were bad The origin of the Joker from Denny O’Neil & Jerry Ordway’s adaptation of the Batman movie. sentences. He would question more than tell. [©2003 DC Comics.]

“Are you sure that’s what you mean by this?” I’d put in one paragraph where Bruce Wayne is driving past this possibility for him. It’s something real people do, that real wrecked Pontiac—it was me and Marifran in the car accident— people can do. And growing up in Greenwich Village, he’d seen and he wonders if he should stop, and then he sees the actors and seen movies being shot. It was not this never-never ambulance, and decides it’s okay to drive on. Charlie said: land thing for him.

“You know, this has nothing to do with your story.” I said: “It’s DF: It sounds like, despite the divorce, you were in constant Marifran and me on Christmas Eve.” And he said: “Of course,” touch with him, saw him all the time…. and we went on to the next item. He also pointed out that I DO: The deal that Anne and I made was that we would stay ended every section with a line of dialogue and it became close to each other, so there was never a time when Larry was monotonous after a while. It was metronomic. He had growing up when we lived more than a mile apart. I saw him numbered his questions and criticisms. That was number 49. three times a week. He always had a room in my place, or, if I Occasionally he will still say to me, “49.” That’s the one we lived in a very small apartment, there was always at least a came back to again and again—and that’s what an editor does. corner that was Larry’s. His bed, his drawings, his stuff were all DF: I’m just impressed that you used the word “metronomic” there. That’s one of the things we did right about the divorce. in a sentence.

When he got to be about 15, I thought, “I can move to DO: Hey—I went to college and everything. But that’s what a Brooklyn—he’s been taking the subways for ten years now.” good editor does—notices thing that you don’t.

But I was still seeing him twice a week. Now he’s living in L.A. DF: Notices relevant things that you don’t notice. most of the time, but has kept my old apartment, and we see a DO: Yeah. Or maybe things that are, “Are you sure?” And if you lot of him. That’s one of the reasons Marifran and I decided to are, then if you’re absolutely sure that’s what you want to say, stay on the East Coast. Our other kids are scattered hither and then “’nuff said,” as Stan would say. “Let’s go on to the next yon, but at least Larry is in New York three or four months a item.” That’s what a good book editor will do: give you a very year and (geezer voice) the old folks, we wanna see the young close read with the intention of making sure you don’t make ’uns. any mistakes.

DF: Back to your career… you wrote a 100,000-word book, DF: And when is the Green Lantern/Green Arrow novel the prose adaptation of the sprawling Batman: Knightfall coming out? stor yline. I’m cer tainly impressed by that.

DO: Early next year. As far as this year, the last issue of DO: Well, it was a condition of me writing the thing. I told them Azrael—issue 100—comes out. I start number 98 tomorrow. that all I could write was 75,000 words, because I couldn’t So, barring some catastrophe between now and three months possibly write 100,000 words part time in five months. They from now, I will have written 100 consecutive issues, which said 100,000 words minimum. Roger Stern’s Superman novel, used to be business as usual for comic book writers— is actually considerably more than that. By the time I got DF: You know, even in the old days, it really wasn’t. It’s quite through writing an intro and a lot of credits—acknowledgean achievement. That’s really remarkable. ments—it was about 101,000. I did the last bit of work on it DO: It’s been my character. I’ve had more freedom on the book about 15 minutes before it went to press. It was timed to be than people usually have. And it’s been interesting to find out released with the last comic book in this elaborate continuity how writers, even if they’re writing fantasy, can’t hide. and with a BBC radio adaptation. All these had to come out on Somebody will occasionally post an observation on the O’Neil the same day. And in the middle of that, I very cleverly fell website about Azrael and I will say: “Yes, that is very, very asleep at the wheel of a Pontiac and hit a lane divider doing pertinent to my life. But how did they read that into it?” And 60. We are told the car flipped three times. We don’t know— Scott Peterson, who was then my assistant said, “Everything we weren’t counting—we lost two weeks—five days in an you’ve written for the past ten years has been about people intensive care ward, then another week or two of just not being trying to find their identity.” He was right. Why didn’t I realize able to function. I got the novel done because [editor] Charlie 42 | WRITE NOW

that at the time?

DF: You were too busy writing. Is Joe Quesada coming back to do a pin-up or something for the 100th issue?

DO: I don’t know. That’s up to the editor. My policy when I’m writing is that the editor’s job is the editor’s job. I don’t even want to see the thing when I’m done with it, though Mike does give me the courtesy of showing me the art to see if I want to complain about it.

DF: Mike Carlin?

DO: Yes. Before I retired, I was a group editor here, and one of the rules is you can’t be edited by anybody on the “food chain” who’s lower than you. There are very few higher than group editors. Carlin was pretty much it. I was originally edited by Archie, who was my equal, and when he died, Mike was the logical editor to take it over. He’s been doing it for, I guess, four years now, something like tat.

DF: Anything else of yours, your son’s, anyone’s that you want to plug?

DO: Well, Lar’s got a movie coming out that he’ll direct called Dark Sister. He produced the one that I have the brief scene in, and he sort of functioned as Assistant Director on it.

DF: They’re theatrical films or TV films?

DO: I guess theatrical. They shot it on video, but that doesn’t preclude theatrical release. The one I’m in is called Nowhere Man. It is, by the way, a heady experience to be directed by your son.

DF: I bet. And that’s Hedly. [Obscure Blazing Saddles reference. —DF.] DO: He’d say things to me like: “Pops, can you take it down a little bit? You’re a little too hardboiled on that take.”

DF: He calls you “Pops”?

DO: Yeah. Weird experience. I mean, I’ve been directed.

Marifran and I met doing a play as kids. We met in high school.

A weird set of circumstances put us back together after not seeing each other for thirty years. We went to dinner and we talked until 3 a.m. It was like the thirty years hadn’t happened.

DF: That’s a stor y wor thy of a novel right there.

DO: It’s so corny, I don’t even know if I could write it. But we realized it was probably a good thing we didn’t get married thirty years ago. I had to go to New York and go through that and, you know, get it out of my system.

DF: Whatever “it” was.

DO: Whatever “it” was. The great big cosmic It. But there was absolutely no reason not to get married now, and we just celebrated out 14th anniversary.

DF: Congratulations.

DO: So I’ve known her since she’s fifteen. It’s funny. At age 47 I would not have imagined myself in any kind of monogamous relationship ever under any circumstances again. And a year later, I was married, and it’s been the best relationship I’ve ever had in or out of marriage. So you never know.

DF: Well, you’re talking to a 48-year-old who just had twins three weeks ago.

DO: Right, right.

DF: You never know what’s gonna happen.

DO: Yeah. It takes funny, funny bounces. Marifran had become a joke, particularly with one of the women I was then dating.

Mary and I had been such Catholic kids—I mean, you can’t believe how Catholic we were—so whenever that woman and I were gonna do something less than straight-laced, I’d say: “Well, I don’t know if Marifran McFarland would approve of this.” “What would Marifran McFarland say?” Just a name I

associated with this person I was intensely involved with and who was a Very Good Girl. A Sodality Girl. Women’s Sodality.

The holy kids on campus.

DF: They didn’t have that at my yeshiva.

DO: I’m sure they didn’t. So when I got this letter from her, this woman I had this standing shtick with was standing at my elbow in my kitchen in SoHo and she said: “Come on, Den, you gotta go, you gotta see her.” And that relationship ended as a result of it.

DF: But we should wrap it up.

DO: [Codger voice] The hour is getting late.

DF: The final question is: Superman or the Hulk—who’s stronger?

DO: [In fan-geek voice] Superman can blow out a sun, man. He did that once. Poof. Like blowing out a birthday candle. The Hulk—what is the Hulk? He jumps high and he’s green. I got a bulletin for you—a grasshopper jumps high and is green. I mean, what are you tellin’ me?!?! Superman rules! There ain’t no contest, man!

DF: Well, we know where your health insurance coverage is coming from. Dennis O’Neil, thank you for your time, insights, and for all the great years of comics and all that stuff. Now before I star t cr ying, I’ll now switch off the tape recorder. Thanks, Denny.

DO: Thank you, Danny. It was fun.

THE END

Azrael says goodbye, from Azrael #100, the series final issue.

Art by Sergio Cariello, Rob Ro & Alex Bleyaert. [©2003 DC Comics.]

O’NEIL | 43

Think a complete super-hero adventure can’t be told in five pages anymore?

Longtime collaborators Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz (and inker Sal Buscema) say you’re wrong.

On this page we have the plot for “Mr. Right Battles the Paper Bag Bandits,” which appeared as a flip feature in The M@n #1. The plot, written by Tom, was the result of a telephone conference between him and Ron.

Mr. Right is a REGISTERED TRADEMARK of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and has been registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

44 | WRITE NOW

Next, Ron pencils the pages, following the written plot, adding to it where he feels it’s appropriate.

Tom then gets photocopies of the art and writes caption, balloons and sound effects.

He’ll then indicate where all the pieces of copy should go, and the letterer (in this case Jack Morelli), will letter them in.

Mr. Right is a REGISTERED TRADEMARK of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and has been registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

After Sal has inked the pages and and Bob Sharen has colored them, they’re ready for the printer.

MR. RIGHT | 45

Mr. Right is a REGISTERED TRADEMARK of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and has been registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

46 | WRITE NOW

Beginning, middle, end. Characters. Conflict. Resolution.

Denouement. Even a little life-lesson. And, of course, hoohah action! All in five pages. Pretty impressive.

In an upcoming issue of DFWN, Tom and Ron will talk about their creative partnership and give some important tips to anyone (or any two) who’d like to work as part of a regular team.

Mr. Right is a REGISTERED TRADEMARK of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and has been registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office MR. RIGHT | 47

More of... Astro City’s Marvel Peter Sanderson’s

Kurt Busiek’s Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! Interview Interview by Peter Sanderson on December 19, 2002 Edited by Danny Fingeroth / Copy-edited by Kurt Busiek

C

ontinuing (from last issue) Peter Sanderson’s discussion with Kurt Busiek. If we have to remind you that Kurt is the creator of Astro City, Shock rockets, Superstar, The Power Company, and Thunderbolts, as well as the writer of Marvels—no, you’re right, we don’t have to. Just read on and enjoy.

—DF

[Kur t and Peter were talking about Kur t’s decision to move out west, possibly jeopardizing his contacts with his East Coast editors….]

PETER SANDERSON: Networking has gotten harder now that the comics industr y is spread all over the countr y.

KURT BUSIEK: Mmm-hmm. But luckily everything worked out.

It’s not as if all the projects made it into print, but I at least got paid for the Final Fantasy stuff, and the Wizard’s Tale stuff that disappeared when Eclipse went bankrupt, and we were able to get the art back years later and bring it to Homage. But when I went full-time freelance in 1990, my fear was I would lie awake at night trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage.

And instead, I would lie awake at night trying to figure out how I was going to meet all these damn deadlines. [laughter] So since those days—that’s now twelve years ago—I have always had enough work to keep me busy. So full-time freelancing has worked out this time around.

PS: Looking back, do you feel you were naive about the comics industr y when you star ted out?

KB: Oh, completely and utterly. I had no idea what I was doing, business-wise. Actually, it was fairly smart of me to notice that there was supposed to be a new regular writer on Power Man/Iron Fist and that his first issue just kept getting delayed and delayed, and to see an opportunity there and go after it.

That was market analysis. Instead of trying to figure out what book I really wanted to write, I looked around for what book needed writers.

What I should have done at the point I was the regular writer on Power/Fist was, I should have used the fact I was there in New York and coming in to talk to Denny every couple of weeks as a starting point for talking to other writers, for pitching to other editors, pitching fill-ins for other books. Instead what I did was I said, thank God, I’ve got a steady income, I can move out of this expensive city. And I moved away so that I had this one assignment, this one contact with the company, and no avenue to pick up other work. When I ultimately lost the Power/Fist assignment I hadn’t used that time and I hadn’t used that work to build something that I could go on to other assignments from. I didn’t really have a sense of how the office politics worked, or even whether people were reading the stories I was writing in Power Man. I was just kind of stumbling along as best I could, going through whatever door looked like it was 48 | WRITE NOW

Part 2

open at the moment.

Nowadays I think I’ve got a much better idea of how the business is working and where the opportunities are for the kind of thing I want to do. And I’m much more focused on the question of what’s the best kind of job for me to pursue, what’s the best kind of opportunity to look for, as opposed to, “Give me work; I’ll write anything!”

With Power/Fist I had actually written a review of Jo Duffy’s run on the book just a couple of months before I first pitched for it. What I said at the time, finishing up the review, was that Jo had a unique understanding of these characters and their relationship, and her approach to the book, combining drama and humor is so strong. She’s eventually going to leave, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the writer who replaces her,

The splash to Avengers Vol. 3 #4 by Kurt Busiek with art by George Pérez & Al Vey. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

more like the Marvel Universe. And it did phenomenal things for their sales.

Well, nowadays, having the books tied together in a tight universe is actually viewed as a bad thing, to the point that the readers that we have now are resistant to the idea of cross-book connections pushing them to buy books that they would be otherwise uninterested in. So they resist exactly the sort of thing that were successful editorial approaches fifteen years ago.

But at the same time, comic book fans want stories about the characters they like and they want those stories to matter.

Over and over again when I talk about a new project, I’m asked, “Will this story have repercussions for the character?”

My feeling generally is your first question should be, “Is it going to be a good story or is it going to be a bad story?” Because if it’s going to be a bad story, you don’t want it to have repercussions [laughter] for the characters. You want to be able to forget about it. If it’s a good story, great. If it’s a good story, do a sequel, do more.

But I think that a big change—and I’m being sort of negative about the industry here—but I think back in 1984, let’s say, comic book fans were interested in the universes, were interested in the characters, and were looking for reasons to buy more books, more stories, more places they could explore. The idea was: spin this character off into a mini-series; let’s see that event spill off into the other books; let’s see more, wider, bigger. These days, I get the sense that a lot of comic book readers are looking for reasons to not buy books.

The audience today has both a lot of loyalty to the characters that they’ve followed over the years, but they also have a lot of fatigue. Instead of defining a good story as a story that excites them, they define a good story as a story that has “historical significance” to the ongoing story of this character. A story in which Peter Parker gets married, divorced, hired, fired, his powers change, his costume changes—these would be lasting changes—are more important than an exciting Spider-Man story that doesn’t actually have repercussions. It’s as if these fans are viewing themselves as scholars, observers of history, and they need to know the high points, regardless of whether or not they actually enjoy the stories.

This is certainly a sour view of it. But I’m always happiest when I can surprise the reader, when I can do something whether it’s Marvels or Astro City, that people will read and they’ll be surprised by it and they’ll talk it up with their friends.

Or whether it’s something like Thunderbolts, where we can just pull the rug out from under their expectations and just blow their minds.

But I find that fans, at least the vocal fans, seem far more interested in the maintenance of the universe and the idea of whether the stories being told are stories they need to read, as opposed to whether they’re stories they want to read.

PS: It bothered me that during your long “Kang War” stor yline in Avengers, the whole world was thrown into chaos, yet it didn’t affect the other Mar vel titles.

KB: We heard a lot of reactions like From the Busiek-scripted Power Man and Iron Fist #92, with art by Denys Cowan & Mel Candido . that, and we did make reference to it [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] because I would have no idea what I was doing with the book.

Naturally, that became my first regular assignment [laughter] and I was the first regular writer on the book after Jo. And it shows in the book itself. The first six or seven issues of Power/Fist I wrote, I’m me being Jo Duffy just as hard as I possibly can. And toward the end of my run I’m figuring out what I would do with these characters, with these theories from my own storytelling ideas as opposed to trying to figure out what Jo would have done with them next. But unfortunately I didn’t last long enough on the book to really implement any of those ideas.

PS: Moving to a different topic, how has the comics audience changed over 20 years? How have writing and characterization styles changed over that time?

KB: Well, that’s a couple of different questions. It’s peculiar. On the one hand, the audience is a lot smaller, but on the other, the kind of material that’s being published is a lot broader.

There’s a lot more variety in comics publishing today than there was in 1982. Back then, things like Nexus and American Flagg were alternative books that were majorly different from the mainstream. Today either one of those books could be published by Marvel or DC. And while they were certainly very good, very well done books, they were adventure books starring [laughter] heroic lead white male characters. The idea of the kind of books that we see from Vertigo these days, or the stuff that’s being published by Dark Horse, or a lot of books that are coming out of Image, these would have been complete pipe dreams back then, stuff that you could not imagine being out there on the stands. So it’s a much smaller audience that’s supporting, at least to some degree, a wider variety of material. And they want a more sophisticated approach.

There’re complaints on some fronts, and I can sympathize with them, that if Marvel’s publishing a Hulk series that ten-yearolds can’t enjoy, something is terribly wrong. But at the same time, you’ve got to face the fact that the ten-year-olds aren’t coming into the comic book stores and buying the comics. And while that’s a problem that certainly needs to be addressed, if you’re selling these comics to 25- and 30-year-olds, you might as well make them comics that they’ll enjoy.

In the twenty years that I’ve been in the business, we’ve been through a period where the fact that the Marvel Universe was a big, sprawling interrelated place was enormously important, to the point where DC did Crisis on Infinite Earths in order to make their line far more closely integrated, and far

BUSIEK | 49

here and there elsewhere. But on the other hand, we offered to any other writer out there that if they wanted to tie in, we’d be happy to have them play along, and nobody seemed to be interested. We didn’t want to require them to do it. We didn’t want to say, “Hey, Paul Jenkins, hey, Dan Jurgens, this month you have to do a Kang War connection.”

PS: This is ver y different from Walt Simonson’s “Cask of Ancient Winters” in the ’80s when people volunteered to tie in to it.

KB: Yep, yep. Things have changed.

PS: My next topic: Continuity, threat or menace? [Kurt laughs] Obviously you’re ver y interested in tying your stories at Mar vel in with past Mar vel histor y. Your Avengers Forever limited series had pages of footnotes to past stories. Yet one keeps hearing that people feel they can’t appreciate longrunning comics series without knowing for ty years of comics histor y.

KB: I can see the point, and in some ways I agree and in some ways I disagree. On the pro-continuity front, I think it’s a matter of how well the story is written. The first issue of Avengers that I read when I started reading the book regularly opened with the Avengers flying through space, being towed along by a talking stick, who was explaining to them the origin of the Kree-

World-wide devastation during The Kang War, from Avengers Vol. 3 #49. Written

by Busiek. Art by Kieron Dwyer & Rick Remender. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 50 | WRITE NOW

Skrull conflict. I didn’t know who the Kree were. I didn’t know who the Skrulls were. I didn’t really know who most of the Avengers were. And I didn’t know what the hell was going on with the talking stick. I didn’t know who the Vision was. And there was this other plot line where another talking stick was explaining his origin to him, which was all stuff that I didn’t know anything about. But by five pages into that story I knew ever ybody’s name, I knew what was going on, I knew why this stuff was impor tant, and I was sucked into the story. I didn’t need to read anything earlier than that to understand this comic.

And I think that too often writers these days assume that the readers have read earlier stuff, and they don’t provide the kind of explanations that would come as a matter of course in the comics that were history-dependent when I started reading back in the 1970s.

So on that level I think it’s a matter of craft. And I prefer to avoid the word “continuity” because, for one thing “continuity” means about six different things.

PS: Neal Adams’ studio’s name, for one thing.

KB: Yeah. Continuity can mean the long sweep of this character’s history. Continuity can mean— PS: Visual continuity.

KB: Yeah. Or issue-to-issue connection. I prefer the term “histor y.” The way I look at this sort of thing is that each company has this vast fictional history, and we’re telling stories within that, that add to and involve and grow out of that history, in much the same way that if I were writing a novel on World War II, I would get the history of World War II right, and weave my story in and around actual events. If I’m writing a story set in the Marvel Universe, I’m going to do the same thing. In neither case do I assume that the reader knows or cares about the other stuff. If I’m going to tell a story set in World War II and it involves the plot to kill Hitler, I’d better explain that there was a plot to kill Hitler, and who was involved, and why it was important, as a part of the story I’m telling. But if the D-Day invasion happens during my story, but isn’t an important part of my story, I may make a reference to it, because it’s going on at this point, and characters will be hearing about it and reacting to it, but I won’t go into any great detail about it, because all you need to know is that a whole bunch of guys came over from England and they attacked the Germans in France and they’re beating the Germans back. The complex history behind the D-Day offensive is irrelevant to my story, so I’m not going to go into it. But at the same time I’m not going to contradict it either, because it’s part of history.

In dealing with a fictional history, you do the same thing. If you’re bringing back a character who last appeared a year ago, you reintroduce him. If you’re bringing back a character who last appeared twenty years ago, you reintroduce him. In neither case do you depend on the reader knowing who that character is and already being interested in him. You have to reintroduce them not in such a way that you’re just giving the facts, but in a way that you can hook the new reader into that character, just as surely as readers twenty years ago who met him the first time were hooked into that character. That can be done well, that can be done badly, but I don’t think there’s any technical barrier. If it’s an interesting character, you show the readers what makes him interesting and they’ll be interested.

PS: I remember when I first star ted reading the annual JLAJSA team-up stories in Justice League, I had no idea that I would ever get the chance to read the original Justice

KB: New books, yeah.

Nowadays it’s that many a week. And it’s just this huge, overwhelming flood of material, and in some ways the history can get in the way.

While I’m as much a stickler for history as anybody, at the same time I have very little sympathy with the people who want to see a reference to an old story purely to see a reference, to see the past acknowledged. A writer’s only responsibility in that regard is to not contradict the past without reason or explanation. Of course, the very fact that I’m getting caught up in all of these potential complications is illustrative of the problem.

If I’m telling a Green Lantern story, well, it can be very interesting to tell a story that involves the fact that there have been three, four, five, six Green Lanterns Avengers teams from alternate pasts and alternate futures in Avengers Forever #4. By Kurt Busiek, Carlos Pacheco, from Earth, and there’s this & Jesús Merino. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] whole legacy behind them.

But at the same time, the concept of Green Lantern—at least Society stories from the 1940s. Yet Gardner Fox did such a the Silver Age Green Lantern—as the sheriff from outer space good job of reintroducing these characters that I was fasciwith the cool science-fiction weapon, who’s responsible for a nated with them and with the idea that there had been all whole space sector—that’s a really neat idea. And dealing with these super-heroes back in the 1940s. the history of what’s happened in the past all the time makes KB: The flip side of it, however, is that there is a massive new readers feel like they’re being left out, like they came into amount of this history out there, comics history, far more than the movie late. Even if you’re explaining it all, even if you’re there was when you or I started reading comics. making it accessible, you’re giving them the story of the One of the things that hooked me into the idea of the Marvel coolest sheriff in the galaxy after he’s had ninety years of Universe is the idea that there was this history that continued adventures as the coolest sheriff in the galaxy, instead of just from book to book, that it didn’t get forgotten, and that it telling stories about the concept. mattered. I picked up Daredevil #120 and there was a James Bond, every few years there’s a new James Bond flashback to Daredevil #83 in it. Now that was less than forty movie, and he’s a spy, and he does this stuff, and he has issues previous. It felt like a long time ago, but it was what? villains, and even if Blofeld comes back they don’t make lots of Four years? Five years? Daredevil was bi-monthly for a period, references to the past times they fought. They don’t let that so it might have been as much as five years. stuff get in the way of telling the story. They just don’t However, if I were to flashback to Daredevil #120 today, I’m contradict it. flashing back twenty-eight years. If I picked up Daredevil back PS: In the most recent Bond movie there’s a scene between in 1974 and it had numerous casual flashbacks to material Bond and the new Q in which you see various familiar props that happened 28 years ago, those would be flashbacks to from past Bond movies. But they don’t star t talking about 1946, to well before the dawn of the Marvel Age, to well before Bond’s past adventures. If you recognize them, it’s a bonus the origin of the Fantastic Four and everything that happened for the viewers; if you don’t, you’re not missing anything since. essential to the stor y or even to that scene.

So, when I walked into the Marvel Universe, I walked into a KB: Right. So my view of all of this is that I like the history; I Marvel Universe that was “only” thirteen years old. Sure, they like the fact that there’s all this stuff out there to pick up on as had history going back to World War II, but the main meat of it needed. I don’t particularly like it when pieces of the characstarts with Fantastic Four #1. And there was thirteen years of ters’ past get thrown away. But at the same time I don’t think it at that time. Now it’s 41 years. And when I started reading there should be any reason that writers should have to bring it Marvel Comics they were publishing somewhere between eight up. and twelve books a month.

I find myself avoiding using characters who have lots and PS: New books.

BUSIEK | 51

How Kurt Busiek and Patrick Oliffe put together an issue of Untold Tales of Spider-Man. From the UTOSM Annual 1996. Inks by Pam Eklund. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

lots of continuity baggage. I brought Warren Worthington, the Angel—I guess Archangel now—into Thunderbolts for a few issues. And, oh, the e-mails I got from people who asked, am I going to resolve his relationship with Psylocke, am I going to bring up this about his powers, or that about his history.

There’re all of these threads that attach to him, that they want to know, are you going to reference these? Even a word balloon—if I put in a word balloon making reference to his rocky relationship with such and such a character or whatever, that would have made them feel like his history was being acknowledged. Instead, what I chose to do was simply not contradict anything. I told an adventure involving the Angel, his connections with the Thunderbolts through the pieces of his history that mattered to this particular story, and I didn’t worry about the rest of it. I didn’t change anything about his relationship to Psylocke, whatever the hell that relationship was [laughter] at the time. I didn’t bring it up. It was stuff that didn’t come up in those few days.

I see a real appeal in the sort of books that we’re seeing in the Ultimate line, the fact that you can kind of start over, that you can do what would be done with these characters if you were writing them in a TV show or a movie. It’s a fresh start, it’s a clean start, and you can explore them in different ways without having to say, “Well, okay, if we bring Ultron into this Avengers story, we have to take into account the fact that 52 | WRITE NOW

they’ve fought him fifteen times before, so we’ve got to come up with a way of making their reaction to him something other than, ‘Oh, here he is again. Let’s try the seventeen things on him that worked before.’” That’s pretty dull. To somebody who’s coming to this story new, without experience of it, they want something fresh and new and exciting. They don’t want to see the Avengers say, “Oh, here’s this guy we fought nine million times before. Let’s trot through all the old strategies.” When, in The Avengers, we did that Ultron story, we started off with Ultron doing a big new thing: killing the entire nation of Slorenia. It gave us an emotional hook, an event that new readers could react to as strongly as the old readers did.

So none of this is me saying that history is bad. It’s not me saying history is good, either. It’s me saying history is a field of possibility. If you can get some use out of it, great. If you don’t refer to it, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. But I can definitely see why there are people who just don’t see the possibility that they’ll ever become familiar with the 40-plus years of history these characters have at this point. When you started reading JLA-JSA stories, you didn’t think you’d ever get to see the original JSA stories. Now you have. But you’re a dedicated comic book fan. Those stories worked just as well for you, the reader at the time who was brand new. But by the time you get to the 15th JLA-JSA crossover, these characters are all familiar with each other, and it’s just something they do every summer because they do it.

PS: Moving to more concrete writers’ concerns: Writers in other media have professional organizations to protect their interests: the Writers’ Guild, the screenwriters’ union, and so for th. But there is no such organization for comics professionals. How does that affect the career of a comics writer?

KB: I’m not really sure. That’s probably a question you would be better off asking people who have done more work in those other businesses.

PS: I know you’ve been involved in tr ying to set up an organization for comics professionals.

KB: Yeah, and those have been largely focused less around the idea of, say, collective bargaining, and more around the idea of if we have enough people in this organization we can get inexpensive health care.

PS: There you are. There’s one of the differences right there.

KB: Yeah. I’m far more familiar with why these kinds of organizations haven’t succeeded in getting started in the comics business, which is largely that at times when everything is going well, people are too busy making money and not all that worried about famine, and in times of famine nobody’s got the money [laughter] to mount something like this. I think that some sort of comics professionals organization will eventually get rolling and will very likely be a good thing. But as I understand it, there were several attempts, starting in the late ’60s, and they’ve always fallen apart.

It seems like, and I could well be wrong here, but it seems like one of the big advantages of something like the Screenwriters’ Guild is they’re making sure that the people who are most in demand don’t get all the money while the people who are just starting out get treated like crap. Whereas in comics, the problem is reversed. The difference between the amount of money that the people starting out and the people who are established pros make is not all that much. It’s more about the amount of work that you get. But comic book publishers have a fairly fixed range of pay scales, and they’re not going to turn around and pay a star writer a million dollars

The Power Company cross paths with the Green Arrow. In Power Company #8.

Art by Tom Grummett and Prentis Rollins. [©2003 DC Comics.]

ongoing. And as for forthcoming projects, there’s stuff in the works that we’re not ready to announce yet.

PS: The creator-owned projects are being done through established companies?

KB: Yes. PS: What would you say are the prospects for selfpublishing in today’s market?

KB: Well, it seems that there are people who manage to self-publish successfully. Obviously, they’re doing something right. I’ve done a little bit that’s close to selfpublishing. I’ve done books through Image, where I’m funding them myself, and I’m overseeing and handling all aspects of them.

PS: Would Astro City have been one of these?

KB: The first six issues of Astro City were done that way. After that, we switched over to WildStorm. We had an editor and we had a production facility and all that.

But on the first six issues, or on something like Superstar or Shock rockets, I was overseeing everything, including the promotion, the design of the inside front covers, the design of the ads. Everything.

My feeling is, if somebody like Jeff Smith or Linda Medley can self-publish and do it successfully, then that’s great. I admire them and I enjoy reading the books they do. But if I had the time to do the business side of it [laughter], I’d do more writing instead.

PS: That’s what I was about to ask: what your preference is.

KB: My interest is far more in writing than it is in publishing.

Despite my years of experience in promotion, I’m far more comfortable promoting somebody else’s work than my own. I would much rather be dealing with a publisher who will do the promotion, and I can suggest ideas, and I can do whatever it is I’m able to do to help, but I’d rather it not be all down to me. I want to depend on them to do some of it as well. My interest is in writing and in making comics. It’s far less in selling comics, in dealing with printers, in chasing down back pay on such-and-such a foreign licensing deal or whatever. That’s the stuff that I consider to be the stuff that gets in the way [laughs] of doing the job I want to do.

PS: You say the ongoing projects you’re doing are the creator-owned ones. Do you see yourself shifting more and more to creator-owned projects than work-for-hire?

KB: I would certainly like to be working more on stuff that I

to write a project, whereas in Hollywood they very well might.

So rather than enforcing pay scales, since comics already have those pay scales… [pause]… I don’t know…. Every time I try to make a point I realize, “Oh no, I can think of such-andsuch a guy who is paid an enormous amount of money to do something,” or, “No, I can think of payscales that are too low,” or whatever.

PS: And of course royalties used to make a big difference during the boom years, and even before.

KB: Yeah. I’m really not the guy to ask. I don’t really have enough experience to compare as anything but an observer.

PS: And onto another topic: What are your current and for thcoming projects? How do they divide between work-for-hire for major companies and creator-owned projects?

KB: My current projects include Astro City, which is creatorowned; Arrowsmith, a new series I’m doing for the Cliffhanger imprint with Carlos Pacheco, which is also creator-owned; Power Company, which is workfor-hire for DC—but I guess it’s what they call a “creator participation” project, since Tom Grummett and I created it, DC owns it, but we’re vested in it— if there’s ever Power Company toys or a movie or something, we get paid money. There’s also JLA/Avengers, with George Pérez, which of course is completely work-for-hire. And I’m doing a Superman project with Stuart Immonen called Superman: Secret Identity, that is not about regular in-continuity Superman, but is also work-forhire.

So of the five active projects that I’ve got at the moment, the five that have been announced, it’s forty percent creator-owned, sixty percent work-forhire, but two of the work-for-hire projects are shortrun series, and the creator-owned ones are Promotional art by George Pérez from the upcoming Busiek-written JLA/Avengers. [©2003 DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc.]

BUSIEK | 53

either own or that I have created myself than straight workfor-hire. There’re always business concerns there. I’m sure I could fill my schedule completely with creator-owned work, but doing a Superman project or an Avengers project or whatever is going to be easier for the publisher to get into the stores and thereby to reach more readers.

So on the one hand, I like to balance my time between the stuff that I’ve created myself and doing the stuff that’ll be easier to sell, Alex Ross’ cover for the recent Astro City: Local Heroes #1. because if [©2003 Juke Box Productions.] somebody reads my work in Avengers and goes, “Hey, this guy ain’t too bad,” maybe it’ll bring him over to read my creator-owned stuff.

There’s also the fact that I like these corporate-owned mainstream characters. I like the ability to write a Superman story or a Captain America story. I would love to write a big extensive Flash story. I would love to write a Legion of Superheroes story. I would love to write a Green Lantern story or a Warlord or Kamandi story.

Neal Adams said at one point he spent a long time refusing to do any work-for-hire and as a result he shut himself off from opportunities that he would have had a lot of fun doing. So I try not to draw hard and fast lines. I want to do creator-owned stuff. I want to do stuff I cook up myself. But I don’t know if I’ll ever make that the entirety of what I do. It would be nice if I could do that and maintain a high profile in the business, but at the same time I’m sure that were I doing that, somebody would call me up and say, “Hey, Ku-urt, you want to write a sixissue Legion mini-series?” And I’d go, “Oh, boy, that would be so much fun!” And to turn it down purely because I wouldn’t own it, that’s not about creation, that’s not about artistic fulfillment. That’s simply about the mechanics of business. So I try to keep a balance.

PS: You have, in the past, written about building a character around a central idea of his or her personality.

KB: Not necessarily just personality, but building that character around some core idea, some core concept, and that core concept influencing all of the externals, from personality to appearance to attitude… to costume and powers if it’s a superhero. Making sure that all the pieces of the individual character are pieces of a whole rather than unrelated elements.

PS: But it seems to me that one cannot reduce a person in real life to a central idea. This suggests to me that a character in a stor y is different from character in real life.

KB: Sure. Real life is not inherently dramatic. Drama can be 54 | WRITE NOW

found in real life, but there are people who live dull lives, never do anything exciting, and don’t particularly leave a mark. And the fact that they have personalities and attitudes and history and all does not necessarily make them interesting subjects for storytelling.

Storytelling is about conflict. It’s about ideas. It’s about a particular message or intent or something being brought through. And each piece of the story, including the characters, is a tool in serving the purpose of that story.

So the character of Dr. Mark Greene on ER is not a real person. He needs to have verisimilitude; he needs to feel like a real person. But his dramatic function in the story is built around his being a character, not a real person. There can be lots of contradictions and false starts and sort of wandering and meandering exploration to Anthony Edwards’ [the actor who plays Mark Greene] actual life, but Mark Greene’s got to be interesting every week. Not anymore, of course, since the character died. But within the context of the stories, he’s got to serve a purpose, and that purpose is going to be what his character is about.

PS: A craft question: Could you define the difference between what you call the premise and the purpose of a stor y?

KB: The premise of the story is the idea of what actually happens: the hook, the story, the plot. The purpose of the story is what effect the writer is trying to achieve. The example I gave in the interview you’re referring to is in The Wizard of Oz. The premise of the story is about a young girl who is whisked away by a tornado into the magical land of Oz and her adventures trying to get home. The purpose of the story is all built around the idea that at the beginning of the story Dorothy wants to be anyplace but Kansas. There must be someplace cooler than this; there must be someplace more interesting than this. She feels unappreciated, she feels ignored, she feels like she has no life. And she goes someplace else and experiences things that make her realize that she does want to be home, that her dreams are different from what she thought they were. And that idea, the purpose of the story, is that somebody can have dreams of escape but discover that home is where the heart is, home is where your dreams can take the fullest flower. The same idea—the same purpose—is behind the story in It’s a Wonderful Life. But the premise of It’s a Wonderful Life is completely different. So the premise is the mechanics, the premise is what happens: what’s the story hook? What’s the plot? The purpose is what the plot’s in service of. What’s the point?

PS: And now for the perennial question: Where is the comics industr y going? And their corollaries: Do you see yourself continuing to make a good living for the rest of your career writing comics? Do you think at some point it’ll wind down or stop and you’ll have to go elsewhere? Or, as some optimists think, will comics boom again?

KB: I have no idea [laughter].

I could be very happy writing comics for the rest of my life. I would love to be working on books that continue to get collected into trade paperbacks, and continue to stay in print and make money through royalties and have that whole backlist available to readers, just like when I was thirteen years old and buying up all of the Robert Heinlein novels I could find in the bookstore. People can buy up all of the Astro City stuff because it’s there and available and easy to find.

I’m not blind enough to kid myself into believing that there are a lot of comics writers out there who are 50, 60, 65 years

The big reveal from Thunderbolts #1. Art by Mark Bagley & Vince Russell. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

NEXT ISSUE:

old and still making their living writing comics. There are a few, but there aren’t many. So whether or not I would like to stay in the industry forever doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry is going to be interested in me forever.

I also think that right now we have a lot of trouble bringing new readers into the industry. We’re seeing a breakthrough in terms of trade paperbacks in bookstores selling better, and that seems to suggest that new readers are being brought in through the bookstores and the book format stuff. And that’s great. If we can make that work, terrific.

But despite the fact that the industry seems to be coming back at the moment, things go up and down, pendulums swing, and I wouldn’t want to count on the comic book industry coming back and being healthy for the rest of my career. I wouldn’t want to count on being welcome in the comic book industry for the rest of my career.

So, purely on a question of creative satisfaction, I’d love to write comics for the rest of my life. On the business front, I don’t know how realistic that would be, so I’ve got to stay open to doing other things. Right now, of course, my health isn’t great, and that takes up a lot of my time. But once we’ve gotten me past this, then I would like to set aside the time in my work schedule, so that while I’m writing comics, I’m devoting one week a month to working on a novel or a screenplay or something so I can do other things and put down roots in other parts of the entertainment industry. Not because I’m looking to get out of comics, but because it’s a bad idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

PS: And on that both pessimistic and optimistic note, our inter view draws to a close. Thanks, Kur t.

KB: Thank you, Peter. Hope the Write Now!—excuse me, the Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! readers—got something out of this.

THE END

THE AMAZING, INFORMATION LOADED ROSTER FEATURES:

M AG A Z I N E

#

5

Featuring an ALL-NEW BATMAN COVER BY Tommy Castillo and Rodney Ramos!

WILL EISNER This founding father of the comics industry is still producing cutting edge work today! From the Spirit to his current outpouring of personal graphic novels such as To the Heart of the Storm, the living legend talks about comics past, present and future, including howhe-does-it!

J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI The creator of Babylon 5 and Jeremiah, and the red-hot writer of Amazing Spider-Man and the upcoming Supreme Power gives his thoughts on writing for TV and comics!

BOB SCHRECK The man currently directing the Batman mythos, Group Editor Schreck got his start with precedent-breaking independent comics at Oni and elsewhere! He’s a key decision maker in the business today, and has valuable information to share!

DIANA SCHUTZ This Dark Horse Senior Editor has edited people like Will Eisner and Frank Miller. If these guys listen to her—you should, too.

SCOTT MITCHELL ROSENBERG Platinum Studios’ founder and president, Scott runs the company that gave us the Men in Black franchise and J.M. Straczynski’s Jeremiah. Find out what else he’s working on—and how you might become part of Platinum’s future!

Plus: The conclusions to the PAUL DINI and FABIAN NICIEZA interviews!

Plus: • More writing lessons from the master, DENNIS O’NEIL! • More Nuts & Bolts tips on writing from JOEY CAVALIERI and other top pros!

• More reviews of Books on Writing!

BUSIEK | 55

All He Wants to do is Change The World!

The FABIAN NICIEZA

Interview

Interviewed conducted in person December 11, 2002 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice / Edited by Danny Fingeroth / Copy-edited by Fabian Nicieza

F

abian Nicieza started in comics as a staffer in Marvel’s promotions department. While there, he parlayed proximity and talent into a few breaks writing comics stories. In short order, he became known as the voice of angry youth, at least in the stories he wrote. He minded a vein of teen angst to which he lent his own intensity. The New Warriors became his laboratory in which to try out new ideas. “All they want to do is change the world,” was the Warriors’ slogan. It could just as easily have been Fabian’s.

Always the loyal opposition, with emphasis on both words, Fabe was determined to drag comics kicking and screaming into the modern world. The critical and sales success of his work speaks to the passion and intelligence—as well as talent—that he brought to his cause.

From New Warriors, Fabe went to the X-Men books, setting new sales records, even for that high-selling line, and was also a staff editor at Marvel for several years.

After Marvel, Fabian went on to become the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Acclaim Comics, learning yet more about the business aspects of publishing, electronic media, and doing the Hollywood thing on Acclaim’s behalf.

Today, Fabian is still a prolific writer, in comics and other media. And he’s no less passionate about things. Read on, and see how Fabe uses that passion to make his projects and his career move along on the fast track.

—DF

just say Marvel wasn’t doing us any favors, but we always knew what we were doing.

DF: So Fabe, as far as I know about your secret origin, you came to Mar vel by way of the book publishing industr y, right?

FN: Yeah. Berkley Publishing.

DF: And did you always want to write?

FN: Since I was a kid. I would tell stories to all my friends, oral stories, when I was twelve or so—probably bored them to tears—and I would also write on my own, loose-leaf paper and pencil, longhand. I realized when I was about thirteen or fourteen that all the men or women who were on the backs of dust jackets in books were all really old. They all looked like they were at least thir ty! That was when I first began to understand that you don’t just become a writer when you get out of

DANNY FINGEROTH: Maybe this will be the inter view that sets Fabian’s career back on the superstar track.

FABIAN NICIEZA: No, this is a type of interview you haven’t done yet. The interview with a has-been.

DF: But you’ve only been a has-been for, like, two weeks, right?

FN: Six, I think.

DF: So Fabian is a rookie has-been.

FN: I am. I have not been a has-been for long. I think. [laughs] Apparently, I’m looking forward to a long career of being a hasbeen! [laughs] DF: Fabian, of course, is known as the original writer of the New Warriors, which was a groundbreaking comic.

FN: It broke ground?

DF: It broke ground. It was water-breaking, also, that’s why they’re the NEW Warriors. [Fabian laughs] But there was a comic that ever ybody made fun of before they saw it. I believe there was even a gag ad inside Mar vel that had pictures of the New Warriors, and the tag-line was, “Mar vel Comics. If you didn’t buy them, we couldn’t make them.” Did you write that one?

FN: No, I didn’t do that one, actually. I do remember that at a distributors’ meeting Carol Kalish was calling them “Young Avengers.” She actually said, “Sort of like Police Academy is, but for super-heroes.” I was sitting in the room cringing. Let’s A team is formed. From New Warriors #1. Written by Fabian Nicieza with art

by Mark Bagley and Al Williamson. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 56 | WRITE NOW

biochemistry. high school, or even college. You actually gotta work before you DF: They have pills for that now. [laughter] get to that point.

FN: I know. Believe me, when I was younger, I probably could So I went to college to get a degree in Public Relations and have used some! My brother was very calm, very mildAdvertising, hoping to find a job that would allow me to write. It mannered and easy-going. I was a psycho. happened to be Berkley Publishing, which was a real good DF: Was he your older brother? place with great people. But anyone who’s worked in publishing FN: My older brother, Mariano. Sweet as pie. I was a lunatic. I in New York knows that the salaries they pay are barely enough would have fits of anger and fury because I had all this crap to exist on, so there’s a lot of moving around and jockeying for inside of me, that the only way I knew how to express was advancement. I was at Berkley for two years—’83 to ’85— through physical explosions. Whether I was playing sports or when a friend of a friend told me of a job opening at Marvel. whatever, I used to have some pretty manic fits.

Besides the fact I wanted to work at Marvel, the job was paying I have two kids now, and my oldest daughter is very much $5,000 more than I was earning, which in entry-level like my brother and my wife. Very calm, very shy, really. And my publishing, is like a million real dollars. I interviewed for the job youngest is like I was. Exactly like I was. We often lift the hair and I got it. up on the back of her head to see if the three sixes have DF: The funniest thing I always find with inter views is when appeared yet. [laughter] people I talk to say this really incredible stuff and don’t even Very, very few people had the fire, the pilot light set on as realize it. You were driven enough and had a plan in high high as I did. school and college that you then followed. A lot of people, DF: How did you fix on comics as a thing to focus that drive especially a lot of writers and liberal ar ts majors, don’t. Was on? there encouragement from your family, creatively?

FN: I loved comics. I read comics growing up. They taught me FN: Very much so, but not necessarily as a career path. My how to read and write English. I never got left back a grade or Dad’s an engineer, but he’s also very artistic. He’s a math guy, anything, and neither did my brother. We picked up English so but he also did clay sculptures and clown-face drawings. But to quickly because of comics. But my original “life plan” was to him, that wasn’t suitable for a career. His own creative write books. That’s what I always “planned” to do. endeavor—a bone china factory had failed, so I think he DF: Fiction? wanted something more stable for me.

FN: Yes. But if you check out the New York Times Jobs You can imagine how excited he was to find out that I was section, you won’t see any ads that say “Novelist Wanted.” looking for a job in the communications field, which back in the I just looked today! Just doesn’t work that way! [laughter] early ’80s didn’t really mean much. But my ultimate goal, as I DF: And if they do, they usually say, “must work for free in told him, was to be a writer. Yeah, he was very excited about the beginning.” that. [Note: Fabian is being VERY sarcastic here.—DF] And he FN: Exactly. I think if I’d stayed at Berkley Publishing, said, “Don’t you want to be an engineer?” And I said, “Dad, I can’t even do basic math, how am I gonna be an engineer?”

DF: Your family came from Argentina, right?

FN: Yes. DF: Did your dad have that whole immigrant thing, come to America and strike it rich or whatever?

FN: I think he came to reclaim a life for himself and his family. After his business had failed in Argentina, he felt it wasn’t a country that would support his dreams. I was four years old when I came here, so I’ve basically been here my whole life. I didn’t even really learn to respect how enormous and difficult a life change that was for him and my Mom until I was older.

DF: I have a feeling you were probably like this as a child, though. Ver y driven.

FN: Yeah, I was. Now that I have my own kids and I see the differences in them, and I’m of the opinion that a lot of Firestorm and Speedball in action from New Warriors #40. Art by Darick Robertson & Larry Mahlstedt. it is genetics, inherited [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

NICIEZA | 57

Namorita & Darkhawk in New Warriors #14. Art by Mark Bagley and Sam DeLarosa. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

eventually, I would have made the contacts that would have enabled me to sell a book. It would have taken longer, because I think that the craft of writing a novel, a good novel, takes longer, and you need more life experience and practical writing experience in order to really be able to write a good novel. But, as it happens, in 1985, there was a job opening at Marvel, where I wanted to work anyway. I had interviewed at DC and Marvel out of college, and I didn’t get either job. Ironically, I ended up working at Marvel as an assistant to the guy who got the job I had originally interviewed for at Marvel in ’83.

DF: Steve?

FN: Steve Saffel, yeah. Steve was working at Marvel. He got the job in ’83—and deservedly so, he was far more qualified than I was. But eventually, I worked for him and with him.

DF: “If I give this lunatic a job, maybe he won’t hit me.” [laughter] FN: When I started working at Marvel in ’85, I also said, “I’m going to try to temper my enthusiasm and not try to sell immediately.” When I was in college, I had written letters to Jim Shooter, I’d submitted stories, the same usually futile spec submissions that a lot of people do. Shooter was one of the few people on the planet Earth who even bothered to reply.

He’d send back letters that just said, “Close, but no cigar.”

That’s all they’d say! And part of you gets furious, but the other part of you says, “Hey, he actually looked at it!”

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DF: Did you enter the Marvel Try-out Book contest?

FN: No. Actually, that happened pretty much after I was already in. Although that would have been ironic, huh, if I took the Tryout test and failed? [laughs] DF: Or if you won it and Mark Bagley won the ar t—which he actually did.

FN: That works better!

DF: Who won the writing in that?

FN: I don’t even remember, to tell you the truth. Do you? I just know Mark won penciling, and Doug Hazlewood won the inking.

I decided when I got the job at Marvel to try something very different for me, which was to shut up a little bit and learn. And I didn’t even try to sell a story until I was in the office for well over a year.

DF: Can we back up a little bit? You worked with Beth Fleisher [now Chris Claremont’s wife] at Berkley, right?

FN: She was actually my boss for a bit before she moved to the editorial department. At Berkley, I was working first in production, then in the managing editor’s office. What I learned at Berkley, actually, were copy-editing skills, and to see how other writers weren’t doing a good job, or were doing a good job, depending. I would have to proofread the copy editor’s work before preparing a manuscript for production, and that would enable me to see the kinds of changes that a copy editor had to make on some big name novelists, some big name authors. Copy editors would have to work the material a lot in order to make it grammatically correct and publishable.

DF: What is the difference between copy-editing and line editing? This is a question that has dogged me my entire career, because in comics, it all kind of mushed together.

FN: All I know is that the terminology we used at Berkley was “send it out to the copy editor.” And a freelance copy editor would go through the whole book and fix everything that was off.

DF: But not just grammar and spelling, they edited it for meaning, too?

FN: Sometimes. Only the best copy editors, I think, were allowed to do that. Some of them were just given the work to clean up. Berkley published a lot of genre novels. They had three different imprints, and they published a lot of monthly serial books. So I learned little bits about craft.

I do think I learned a lot more in college, though. I had taken a truckload of writing courses in college, because English was my minor. Communications was my major.

DF: What college?

FN: Rutgers. When I was in college I exposed myself to a pretty wide-variety of courses—from playwriting and poetry to screenplay to short story writing. As a reader and a writer, and it gave me a greater breadth of possibility. And being a communications major made me realize that writing corporate copy or advertising copy requires a definite level of creative skill.

One of the best things I did by getting a job at Marvel was to get a job in the promotion department and not editorial. It opened me up to a very different kind of writing. I was doing copy for four house ads a month, four promotional posters a month, four co-op ads a month. I mean, the amount of writing I was doing from 1985 to 1987, before I even sold my first comic book story, was monumental! I was burning myself out.

We had so much work to do and such limited staff to do it. It was a whole different beast than writing stories. We were trying to condense the entire theme of a book into one copy line that had a bit of a hook and a tag to it. That takes a helluva lot of

work! Sometimes I got it right, a lot of times I didn’t. But when you’re doing that much... I mean, an advertising agency has a team of people working on one account for six months. We were working on for ty different things in the span of a month, two months, at a time.

DF: That was the stuff that would go to the comic shops— the solicits and so on?

FN: Yes. DF: I actually did that way back when Mike Friedrich was doing it.

FN: Before Carol?

DF: Before Carol. I wrote the promo copy for loads of comics.

FN: It’s not easy writing!

DF: Especially in those days. You’d go to an editor and say, “What’s in the issue coming up in four months?” And they’d stare at you blankly.

FN: What are you saying “in those days?” I guarantee you that if you talked to anyone who does marketing and advertising copy at Marvel or DC or any of the other companies today, they’ll tell you they still get blank stares and blank solicit sheets every month from the editors.

DF: But there was a period, in the hear t of the boom in the ’90s, when we actually did know. [Traffic Manager] Virginia Romita was ver y strict about plots being in on time.

FN: Yes, and I like to think I played a part in getting us there.

When I got to Marvel, there was a huge division between the sales department and the editorial department. A lot of it was based on people’s personalities, and I don’t want to get into names, because it’s just not worth it. I don’t want to speak for them, but there were just differences of opinion between the people who ran editorial and the people who ran sales. I came aboard—I was just an assistant advertising manager for the first year, and then I became advertising manager—and one of my jobs was to try to bridge this gap between the two departments. I wasn’t even in the sales department, technically.

Advertising was a separate department. I didn’t answer to Carol Kalish, my boss didn’t answer to Carol Kalish.

DF: Steve was your boss, right?

FN: My ultimate boss was Mark Erickson. And he didn’t answer to Carol. Actually, after the first year, I didn’t work for Steve anymore. I had my own title, my own responsibilities, and he

In 1991, Fabian and artist Kevin Maguire created a new character called “The Earthling.” They submitted it to the Marvel editorial evaluation process.

The result: rejection—as shown by this letter written by Carl Potts but signed

by Mark Gruenwald.

had a separate title, separate job responsibilities. But one of the things that I did, along with other people who worked in the sales department, Steve and new guys like Lou Bank and Dale Kanzler, was to start bridging the gaps between departments.

The editorial “regime” had changed, which alleviated the mood in editorial quite a bit and made them a little less wary of interacting with people from other departments. I was a guy who would go out for a few beers after work. Whether I would go out for a few beers with someone from editorial or someone from sales or someone from licensing, it didn’t matter. When we played softball together, everybody started to get to know each other less as enemies and more as co-workers.

DF: I had two staff periods at Mar vel. I was there for seven years, then I was a contract freelance writer for five years, then I came back for another six years. But in those first seven years, nobody ever thought to suggest to me, and I never thought of it on my own, that it was relevant to even know those depar tments. I have a feeling there was probably ver y little staff involved in those depar tments. Was that true? Did they grow?

FN: Yeah, we definitely grew. The sales department, I think, had maybe two or three people in it, the promotions department had one or two. At the same exact time that Steve was hiring me to be his assistant in early ’86, he was having a boss hired above him. That boss, Mark Erickson, was being joined by the publicity director, Pam Rutt. So, literally, the Promotion Department went from being one or two people to being six NICIEZA | 59

people, just within the span of a few months. And then the sales department had an increase, too. But there was a reason for those increases.

There was a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done. I mean, this was a time in the industry when stores were still keeping money in cigar boxes because they didn’t have cash registers. And some didn’t want cash registers we were offering in a co-op program because they thought it would give Marvel the chance to “control their The cover to the Nicieza written Alpha Flight #90, with sales.” You know art by Jim Lee. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] back then, unlike today, Marvel was an evil and insidious corporation.

DF: So who was it that had the realization? Was it Carol who all of a sudden had the master plan, that this all had to be grown larger in order to stimulate sales?

FN: I think Carol always wanted to grow the sales department larger, because she saw the potential benefit in increasing the size of the department. She was absolutely right. There were a million things that needed to be done, outside of the company, to increase productivity and sales.

There were things that needed to be done inside the company, too, but there were tremendous conflicts of ego, conflicts of personality. There was a real dividing line between the different departments.

DF: From the perspective of editorial, it was like, “Okay, there seem to be these guys in these depar tments who have big ex pense accounts and take people out drinking a lot. But what do they actually do?”

FN: That is what we did! [laughs] That’s what we were doing, we did have big expense accounts. You guys had those expense accounts, too, it’s just that no one ever told you!

DF: Only one editor, who shall go nameless, had a chance to discover the limits of the ex pense account. [laughter] FN: But the people in Promotion and Sales were traveling a hell of a lot, too. You have to take into account that at one point in the late ’80s, before I switched over to editorial, and even after, I was doing, on average, one convention and one store appearance—at least—every month.

That doesn’t even take into account any distributor or regional retail seminars we were doing, or the major yearly distributor’s meeting we did. I was traveling two to three weekends a month for the company. I was doing public presentations for the company. I was on stage doing game shows at conventions for [late Executive Editor] Mark Gruenwald, and I 60 | WRITE NOW

was doing retail summits and retailer presentations and distributor presentations for the promotions department. This was before I was even writing a lot. I was just starting to write back then, but not too much.

DF: Were you involved in the evolution of the Mar vel convention program into a road show enter tainment?

FN: Yes. Mark Gruenwald was the one who really wanted to do that. Mark had the incredible need to be a vaudeville performer. [laughter] And he roped a lot of us.... Well, let’s just call us what we were: “dupes.” [laughter] But we were happy to go along because he’d hypnotized us into becoming Marvel Lemmings.

DF: We were team players. [laughs] FN: Yes! That’s the nice way of putting it, yeah, we were team players! And in me he saw someone who bridged the gap between the sales and advertising departments and editorial. I was writing, but I was also doing public presentations. I could hold a microphone in my hand and walk across a stage without tripping or looking like too much of a fool, usually. So he roped me in as the host of his events. And you know what? In hindsight, maybe we were dorks. But we had a great time. And any freelancers or staff people who wanted to participate in it and to have fun was more than welcome to, and anybody who didn’t wasn’t blacklisted or stigmatized. We were just a bunch of guys traveling, having a good time at conventions, trying to get the fans to be enthusiastic and have fun.

DF: I always thought Chris Claremont pioneered that. He was the first guy who, in addition to whatever events Mar vel would fly him to, would, at his own expense, fly himself to conventions and appearances and stores. A lot of us were puzzled by it or made fun of it, but it made the Chris Claremont name and “brand,” if you will, well known. It made him a name above and beyond just being the writer of X-Men, which was a pretty big thing by itself. But there’re a lot of people who are good comics writers who are no longer writing comics. Chris still is. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he took a direct hand in his own marketing and promotion.

FN: You’re probably right.

DF: I think he was probably the first person to do it.

Ever ybody does it now, but he was one of the first.

FN: That was a little before my time, and it was obviously well before the Internet. There was a lot less interaction with creative personnel pre-Internet. When we went to a convention, it might be the only time that year that a fan might get to see someone who was doing the comics.

DF: And if you insulted a fellow pro in print, then you had to wait, like, a month for them to insult you back. [laughs] FN: Yeah, exactly! Nowadays, you can have reasoned, intelligent conversations on just any message board! I hope I’m getting the sarcasm across. I don’t know if it always comes across in print.

DF: Then let me add: “…said Fabian, sarcastically.”

FN: Make that the title of the article! [laughter] Anyway, we had a good time. We had a lot of fun. We spent a lot of company money and we drank a lot of liquor.

DF: Now tell me how you made the move from being in the promotions depar tment to editorial.

FN: Well, I wanted to really ingratiate myself with the editorial department. I wanted to not be the enemy. A part of that, I’ll be honest, is the fact that I knew I wanted to write and sell my writing, and I knew that I couldn’t sell my writing if they didn’t see me as a decent chap. I had to be a good person, someone

that they thought had potential, blah blah blah. So I started going to assistant editor meetings because I wanted to get to know the assistant editors better. I wanted to learn how the editorial department taught its future editors. They actually had this little training program in place. It was almost like a course, to a certain extent, and I learned a lot about how they approached storytelling.

DF: So you, on your own initiative, went to those?

FN: Yeah, I asked my boss if it was okay for me to do this once a week. “I’m going to this meeting for an hour, hour-and-a-half a week.” And he said, “Sure,” because he saw what I was doing, he knew how it was working. And I learned a lot! I learned a lot about how Marvel editors were teaching themselves to develop the work. And it helped me learn how I needed to structure my work. Because I always wrote, I was always a writer. But I had been writing advertising copy, which was a very different kind of writing. And I needed to start understanding how to write comic book plots and comic book dialogue, all of that stuff.

DF: So in those assistant editors classes, you were there to learn how to write because they covered the basics of comics writing?

FN: Yeah. I went there to learn how editorial was preparing itself to produce comic books, which is in essence what it was.

It wasn’t just about writing. They were also teaching about how to work with freelancers, they were teaching about penciling, they were teaching about storytelling. And sometimes it was a very structured lesson, sometimes they were a little freeform and loose, sometimes they were a little boring, and sometimes they were really exciting. It varied. Mark Gruenwald brought in guest lecturers once in a while. John Buscema came in one day to teach the class about visual storytelling. I’m sitting in a room, and I’ve got John Buscema doing a storytelling class, or John Romita Sr. doing a storytelling class. I mean, come on!

How great is that!

DF: You and I worked at Mar vel at a remarkable time for the company and for comics in general.

FN: I’ve been very fortunate. At one time, I made a tremendous living writing comic books. I enjoyed it immensely. I fulfilled a childhood dream of writing. I don’t think I ever would have had the opportunity to succeed, certainly not to the level that I was able to, had I not had a job at Marvel.

DF: So you would recommend tr ying to get a job at the company you’re interested in writing for?

FN: Well, you know what? There’s a stigma that has been attached to people who are working there and writing. Fair or unfair, I’ll let that be for others to say.

DF: You mean who would freelance write while they were on staff?

FN: Yeah, while they’re on staff. And it’s frowned upon now by a lot of the companies. And there are reasons for that. Maybe the privilege was abused, certainly. But I broke in at a time when there was a tremendous amount of competition for writing assignments. Tremendous. And I feel that I did something right, because I broke through that clutter.

DF: I guess the only other person to do that was Peter David, who went from a non-editorial depar tment position to become a successful writer.

FN: Peter David was the first guy from a different department who sold his writing work to editorial. And obviously, Peter’s a damn good writer, and everybody knows that. And everybody knew that back then. But Peter was working for Carol, and Peter was working in the sales department, and there was a

stigma attached to that. A lot of editors didn’t want to touch Peter with a ten-foot pole. And in many ways, I had a harder time trying to break in, and not an easier time. It’s not like Peter broke through that barrier and set up a lounge chair in the middle of Editorial. It didn’t work that way. He was still very much considered an outsider. Editorial was, and I think to this day in many companies still is, a fortress or bunker mentality.

DF: And of course we were too stupid then to even think, “This guy promotes our books... maybe if we’re nice to him, maybe he’ll promote my books extra.”

FN: A lot of it was based on personalities. A lot of it. And a lot of Editorial is still based on personalities. To this day, no matter what anybody at any company says, they still prefer to hire people they like over people they don’t like. That’s human nature. And then secondary to that, nine times out of ten, is how good a writer that person is. And I don’t say that as a negative, because judging writing is always subjective. Always.

The qualitative measure is subjective in nature and it’s going to vary between every single reader. Some of the worst comic books I’ve ever written in my life, and I know there are a lot of those, were still someone’s favorite comic books. I’ve seen kids and adults wait on line for hours to get an autograph on a comic book that I thought just was the worst thing I ever wrote—or an editor rewrote. And what am I going to do, tell this person that they’re wrong? “No, kid, this was the worst comic ever in the world.” No! Because they liked it. That’s all that really counts. The measure of quality is very subjective.

Editors are paid to use that subjective judgment.

DF: “They’re a walking opinion,” As Tom DeFalco was fond of saying. Anyway, you had this job in another department, you could easily have been a guy who said, “I have this job, it’s cool, I’m working in comics, and I’m going home now that I’ve worked a full day.” But you had more envisioned than that, and you broke through.

FN: Yeah. Actually my first writing assignment that I sold to Marvel was a Spider-Man inventory story that got killed. I got a “kill fee,” as they called it. You got paid a portion of your total amount you would have been paid. That was my first sale at Marvel, not counting Marvel Age articles.

DF: I have a feeling that the kill fee is rare in comics these days. I bet, if they killed something, I can’t imagine that they’d pay a kill fee.

Not with today’s budgets.

FN: I don’t imagine so. But I worked through three drafts Clarke Hawbaker & Mark McKenna ’s cover to Fabian’s of this plot, in good Nomad #1. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

NICIEZA | 61

faith, with one editor, and then a new editor, Jim Salicrup, took over the titles, and decided to kill it. Shooter was very, very good about paying freelancers their due. He really was. So I got a little bit of a paycheck for it, but I really wish it had been drawn and published.

DF: That’s a way of life in Hollywood.

FN: Exactly, yeah! I tried some more pitches here and there as time progressed and I got to know the editors better. I pitched [then Marvel staff editor] Mike Carlin some Transformer stories which to this day he still makes fun of.

Maybe because one pitch included two robots getting it on....

Once again trying to break through the clutter! Sometimes, also, by the way, I would do several pitches. This is an aside. I would do several pitches. There would be two pitches that I thought were great. There were three pitches that I didn’t think were too good, but I included them in order to make those two pitches that were great look better. And there were one or two pitches in there that I knew they would never do in a million years, but I wanted to agitate and make myself noticed. So if I gave you ten pitches for inventory stories, only two of them were the ones I really thought were worth doing.

DF: That’s like when somebody has to get a rating on a movie or TV script, they’ll put in a bunch of egregious stuff for standards & practices to take out, and it’s only the somewhat less egregious stuff, that they really want to get in, that gets in.

FN: Exactly, yeah. And I did that on purpose back when I was pitching, because it was a calculated effort to get noticed and to get what I thought was my better work noticed above the rest. So anyway, in 1987, I was asked to pitch ideas for PsiForce stories. I went home and read the first three issues, which were all that had been published, and I said, “Okay, I get this. I can come up with some story ideas.” I submitted six story pitches, and one was accepted, and I wrote it up. Bob Hall drew it. And it got scheduled, because the scheduling was so tight, it got scheduled as we were doing it. And I sold a second inventory story. And Shooter shook up the whole thing, cancelled four books, right? And he gave all the books to one editor, and said to Howard Mackie, “This kid is gonna write this book.” And Howard said, “Huh?” And basically, I was assigned the book by Shooter.

So, and I’m working in a vacuum. They’re asking me to do some writing and I’m saying, “Of course!” And then the book gets assigned to Howard, and I get involved in these writing meetings with Shooter. And it was a classic situation. I had this whole story in mind. I told Howard about it, he’s actually mildly interested, although he doesn’t trust me with a ten-foot pole.

Everyone sees me as Shooter’s boy. And Shooter’s in the writing meeting, and he suggested he was going to kill off my main character, just like that! And everyone just nods their head. And I’m just sitting there thinking, “What do I say? If I say something, I’m going to lose my job! But I can’t let them kill off my main character!”

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DF: Which character was that?

FN: Wayne Tucker. He was the linchpin for this whole storyline I wanted to do. And I didn’t say a word, I decided to shut my mouth. And again, people who know me know that I don’t do that very well. So the fact that, once in a while, I was smart enough to shut up, was a good sign. And I left the meeting, and I stewed, and I worried, and people said, “Don’t worry, just let it flow.” And about a week later, Jim was replaced as editorin-chief. And anything he said in that meeting was thrown out the window. So we get to start writing with our editor. And I really was very, very lucky with Psi-Force. It was a total fluke gift, and I tried to take advantage of it because it was on-thejob training. Here I was, 25 years old, 26 years old, with a monthly book. A book that nobody has any real consideration for, no anticipation for, so it was very little pressure. It’s just onthe-job training, and that’s exactly how I took it. The book got cancelled with #32—well, all of the New Universe titles did. I learned a lot. I made some mistakes. I thought we did some really good things, too, though. Ron Lim and I did some really good issues. If you go back and look at the original work, there is a certain amount of energy and passion there, if not real structure.

DF: Let’s backtrack a little. You said something interesting, that you were very agitated when they wanted to kill the character because it would mess up your whole story line. Was it the

One of Nicieza’s earliest jobs: Psi-Force #9. With interior art by Bob Hall, pencils, inks by Gil & Nichols and cover (upper left) by Mark Texeira. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

planned to do for a year-and-a-half in advance of #75. When we sheer Fabian nature that made you think you had the right to be were doing issues in the 50s, we were talking about this. But I ticked off? I mean, you were a beginning writer and one would knew what I had to do to get to that point, and that was going think when the boss says, “Jump,” you say “How high?” and to take me through #75. Turns out, we didn’t have the luxury of not, “Oh, those bastards! They’re ruining my story!” playing those games anymore. I’d burned too many bridges.

FN: You know what, that’s personality. If anybody in any They couldn’t wait any longer. That was their mentality. position of authority, since I was a kid, told me to jump, I didn’t [Officious voice:] “We told this guy time and time again, ‘This ever ask, “How high?” I asked, “Why?” And if they didn’t give isn’t how we’re doing comics anymore.’” And my stubbornness me a good enough answer, I didn’t jump. Always. Always. I said, “I have to clear through the character field to get to the remember getting in a shouting match with my art teacher in point where my thinking is in sync with theirs.” fourth grade, and I actually started crying in school because I DF: I find it ironic, that to me, you’re still one of those “new, was so emotionally agitated, I wanted to throw out an art young Turks.” And of course, to the current regime, you’re project that I’d done, that I’d already been graded on, that had “Fabian, old Mar vel.” already been returned to me, and I threw it in the garbage can.

FN: That’s one of my biggest disappointments over the last And he got furious at me for throwing it out. And it was my art couple of years. The fact that the perception of me on the part project. And it had already been graded. So his involvement in of editors, and probably many readers, is not the perception I it was done, as far as I was concerned. And I told him that, as have of myself. We’re sitting here talking, we’ve known each well as a ten-year-old could really verbalize it. And he started other a long time now. And you think of me completely differyelling at me. And I started yelling back, and I started cr ying, ently than an editor at Marvel today does, because we’ve too. worked together. You know what a pain in the ass I was. You DF: It’s always good to yell at a ten-year-old. [laughs] know how I always pushed the envelope. I was your worst FN: But it’s good for a ten-year-old to yell back at his teacher, nightmare in a lot of ways, because I kept pushing you in ways too, I think. And it’s because, in my opinion, I have such a that, partially at least, you would rather not have in. sense of right and wrong, such a sense of quote-unquote DF: You were a nightmare that I could deal with. “Nightmare” is “justice,” that in my mind, it’s my art project, I can do whatever I want with it. If I choose to throw it out because I don’t like it, NICIEZA continues on page 67 that’s my choice. You’ve already done your part with it. I handed it in, I got a bad grade for it, deservedly so, and now I’m done. And it was very interesting, because I remember this now, to this day. These are the things that shape and form you, and I’ve always had this sense of self-determination about the things I wanted to do, how I want to do them, and why I want to do them.

DF: Obviously, this is not something you study, it’s something innate. Has it gotten you in trouble?

FN: Plenty of times.

DF: But more often than not, it’s worked in your favor?

FN: More often than not, it’s worked in my favor.

Creatively, it’s often hurt me a lot, because I pigeonhole myself.

DF: What do you mean?

FN: I can’t walk away from some of the ideas that I develop and some of the directions I plan to go in. So I overthink a book’s run. Especially nowadays when it’s not kosher to think about a book 24 issues in advance.

And I did that. I don’t do that now, because I’m starting to learn my lesson. Probably too little, too late. I don’t overthink those things anymore. And even to this day, to my last issue of Thunderbolts, #75, everyone was asking me how I felt about getting fired from it, how I felt about losing the book. And I felt that my being fired was perfectly justifiable in light of what the company wanted to do. The only thing that frustrated me about getting fired from the book was that I’d planned to enact all the lessons I’d been trying to learn the last few years starting with what would have been #76—the issue after my last issue. [Danny laughs] Patrick Zircher [Thunderbolts artist] and I had talked about it extensively, we’d planned to change the way we were telling our stories, although not the characters in the book. We wanted to use these characters and use the themes of the book to tell different kinds of stories—if you want to From Fabian’s last Thunderbolts issue, #75. Art by Manuel Garcia & Scott Hanna. categorize it, in a “new Marvel” way. That’s what we [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

NICIEZA | 63

Inc.] [©2003 Marvel Characters,

Fabian writes both full script (action and dialogue written at the same time) and Marvel style (plot first). Here, we get a look at his working method for a plot first story, in this case for Thunderbolts #34. For this story, a synopsis (or outline) actually came before the plot. The story synopsis will generally go back and forth between the writer and editor until they agree on the story to be told.

Once the synopsis is approved, a detailed plot is written. Taking a cue from TV writers, Fabian has listed the characters and settings that will appear in the story. This makes finding reference for the artist easier.

64 | WRITE NOW

The editor-approved plot is then sent to the penciler— in this case, one of Fabian’s favorite collaborators, Mark Bagley—to be drawn.

[©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] NICIEZA | 65

Copies of the penciled pages are sent to Fabian, who then writes the captions, balloons and sound effects, and indicates on his photocopies where the various pieces of text should go.

The story is lettered, inked and colored and then, voila—“Look, kids! Comics!”

[©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 66 | WRITE NOW

NICIEZA continued from page 63

want them to have it. the wrong word. “Challenge,” maybe.

FN: Which is something that 90% of the people who write FN: I loved working with you. To this day, you were the best comics these days seem to have conveniently forgotten about editor I ever had because you forced me to, not rein myself in, or just never learned. but to understand and be able to explain the things I wanted to DF: Oh, yeah, that “conflict” stuff is ver y upsetting. They do and why I wanted to do them. That forced me to focus even don’t like to traffic in it. [laughter] more on every little detail of the books. Which is, quite frankly, FN: I got so I could hone a story pitch to one paragraph and why the first two years of New Warriors still, to this day, stand present my character, my hero’s can’t/must conflict. And I as some of the better super-hero comics that Marvel’s done in made it easier for editors to read my pitches. They could read the last fifteen to twenty years. twelve or fourteen pitches on two pages of typewritten, 8 1⁄2" x DF: And you forced me to open up my perspective, too.

FN: I tried to push the envelope with you. You’d been around 11" sheets of paper, and they could say, “I like this one, I like Marvel a long time. And here’s this punk schmuck, me, who’s this one.” That’s what I started doing, and I started to get saying, “No, Danny, go for it! We’ve got do this, we’ve got to do some back-up stories, I started to get lots of Marvel Comics that! We gotta make this character pregnant, we’ve got to kill Presents stories. And you want to talk about the grand scheme that character!” And you’re saying, “Pregnant?! We’re not going of things, how I think? I started selling inventory stories, and I to make a character pregnant!” And that was okay, because started using a recurring villain in these inventory stories, a where we met was where it needed to be. It was perfect for character called the Bengal, that very few people will that book at that time. We also did some decent work on remember.

Alpha Flight, too. So it was always a great relationship DF: I remember the Bengal. because of that. I’m still that person. I just haven’t been given FN: I sold a Red Wolf story to Marvel Comics Presents, I sold the opportunities to write those kinds of books. a Daredevil inventory story, I had sold an Iron Man inventory DF: Well, let’s just get back, dare I day, to the narrative. story that never got done. All of these stories had the Bengal Because I think aspiring writers can learn a lot from your story. in them. And I was “secretly” telling a larger story, a multi-part So you got this break on Psi-Force at this ver y transitional story, a continued story, using inventory stories to do it. period for the company. Yet another transitional period at DF: So you were doing fan fiction but getting paid for it.

Marvel Comics. For a place that, I think of as for long periods FN: Basically, yeah! [laughter] Considering the Bengal’s a highly stable, there sure were a lot of “transitional periods.” character that I originally created in high school for a Ragman FN: Sure, but any company tends to have that. story idea, yeah! I even designed the costume that Ron Lim DF: So you got this break, so you took the challenge, and used! Wait! We used the Bengal in New Warriors. I forgot about obviously you took what was a comic that was on nobody’s that. I was doing this all along, with the purpose in mind that radar and parlayed that into—was the next regular series one day we were going to do a trade paperback of Bengal New Warriors? stories and everyone would see they were connected and go: FN: You know, the assumption is that I didn’t stop writing for “Cool!”

Marvel since I started, but after Psi-Force got cancelled, there DF: Okay, so you got your first gig. And you must be thinking, was about two years or a year and a half where I was dying for “I made it, here I am with my own book.” And then suddenly, work. two years in the deser t. How did you get out of the deser t?

DF: How many issues of Psi-Force did you do, ex actly?

FN: An editor named Danny Fingeroth— FN: My first monthly was #16, and it got cancelled at #32.

So a little more than a year.

DF: So that would be seventeen. [laughs] FN: Yeah! Seventeen issues! Now you see, Dad, why I shouldn’t be an engineer? [laughter] And then I went for most of ’88 and ’89 without being able to really get work.

I was struggling like crazy. What I call my year and a half of scutwork. Annual backups, inventory stories, eightpagers for Marvel Comics Presents. I pitched for new series, and I pitched for limited series, and I wasn’t getting a lot of things going. And there were a lot of new editors, too, so everyone was developing their own stable of creative people.

DF: I bet you learned a lot about craft that way.

FN: I learned so much more about craft by having to do these stories. Not just the craft of writing, but the craft of selling my writing. I learned how to laser-focus my pitches.

And I was much better at it then than I am now. Nowadays I meander too much in my pitches. But back then, I could break down a story into one paragraph, where the Jim Shooter “can’t/must conflict,” was clear.

DF: It sounds corny, but it’s the basis of stor ytelling.

FN: Exactly! And it’s what you gotta do with these kinds of characters, these kinds of books.

Daredevil takes on Bengal. From Daredevil #258 with art by Ron Lim DF: Somebody wants something, somebody else doesn’t & Jim Sanders III. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

NICIEZA | 67

DF: You still had the day job at Mar vel, right?

FN: Oh, yeah, I always had the day job, you kidding me? Getting nice promotions in my day job, yes! I held onto the day job far longer than was logical. Danny came back on staff as an editor at Marvel, and he was given a bunch of scut books to do, and one of them was the new “teen Avengers” book. [laughs] DF: At one point it was going to be called The Edge. That was one of our potential titles for New Warriors.

FN: Really? Well, it was called New Warriors. Mark Gruenwald suggested that I pitch for it, and Danny, reluctantly gave this relatively new guy a shot. I wanted that book so badly, that when you finally gave me New Warriors, I was ready to hit the ground running.

DF: Now, tell me, I’m just curious. In the years since, you must have gone through worse waits for assignments and greenlights.

FN: It’s not a matter of “worse.” The difference is, I was there in the office every single day doing my staff job. I worked there. I saw you all the time. My friends, all of us are in the same boat. We’re all trying to get work, we’re all looking for the angle, they’re all saying, “What’s going on, are you going to get it?” “I’m talking to him about story ideas or character ideas.” It was back and forth. So it’s exacerbated, it’s multiplied by a factor of… of a lot. Conversely, though, being on the freelance side as I am these days, being home alone, you’re in the wilderness. You’re lost! You pitch something to an editor, and even with today’s convenience of e-mail, where an editor could easily respond to you without even having to talk to you, much less see you face-to-face, there are still editors who just ignore you and don’t respond. I’ve had editors ask me for pitches, and I give them pitches, and I never hear back from them.

DF: I would think, especially, considering that you’ve now had experience with Hollywood, that you’d have a different perspective on “waiting.” I’m only moderately tr ying to justify myself. But when you go out in the world, to Hollywood in par ticular, you realize we were so coddled, in a cer tain way, in comics.

FN: Absolutely. Waiting is not a foreign experience. It wasn’t even a foreign experience to me then, because I was pitching inventory stories and not getting responses from editors. This was different, though. This was something that I wanted so badly I could taste it.

DF: On another track, you eventually went from Psi-Force to New Warriors. Did you want to do teen groups? You did seem to be a guy who, although it had been a long time since you were a teen, teen books seemed to be your specialty. Was that your goal?

FN: When I was on New Warriors, I think I was 27.

DF: But you did seem to have a real affinity for teenage things.

FN: Yeah, I did. I think I still do, quite frankly. I wanted to write those kinds of characters, of that age, whether it be super-hero teens or normal teens or normal teens involved in an abnormal situation, whatever it was, I wanted to write about that age. I thought, and still think, it’s incredibly fertile ground for storytelling. It must be, because we’ve got Peter Parker as SpiderMan forty years after his comic came out, grossing 480 million dollars as a movie. That age period is excellent fodder for story material. To go through the conflicts, emotional and physical, that a teenager goes through, is a lot of fun for a storyteller. To see the world through their eyes is a lot of fun. It’s great to be able to get to draw things out of that. And having a team of them.... Well, you know what? Chris Claremont showed me 68 | WRITE NOW

what to do with it in X-Men. Paul Levitz showed me in Legion of Super-heroes what to do with it, and Marv Wolfman showed me in Teen Titans. Those were great templates for me to see the kinds of twists you could put to it. And what I wanted to do was bring some “real world” issues to it, some social issues reflected through the wonky mirror of super-hero action. My original advertising copy line for the New Warriors book was, “All they want to do is change the world.” That’s what a teenager thinks they can do.

DF: I guess I’ll ask you, this is sort of a global question, but specifically here, a New Warriors question. Who are you writing for? Was there an age group, or was there just the twelve-yearold Fabian in your head? Who do you think of when you write?

FN: Not the twelve-year-old Fabian. Ultimately, I write for me first, within the context of knowing what it is I’m writing.

DF: With your background in marketing, you must have thought, “Who’s buying these things?”

FN: I thought that my audience was going to be twelve to eighteen-year-old males. But it’s not like I was writing to them. I was trying to write a cool Marvel super-hero book. For its time, 1990-1991, for the audience that was buying comics at that time—which is vastly different from the audience buying comics today— DF: Actually, it may be the same people, they’re— FN & DF [in unison]: —just fifteen years older!

FN: I think we did a very, very good book. It’s still, to this day, a book that wasn’t noticed as much as it should have been.

But by today’s standards, it more than doubled the sales of the best selling title!

DF: Even for its time it sold pretty well.

FN: Yeah, it did fine. I always wanted it to be a top five book, though. You know me, I wanted it to be the number one book, I wanted it to beat out X-Men. It never got to that point, but at its height it was selling 240,000 copies a month. I mean, that’s nothing to sneeze at, you know?

DF: Does anything sell that now?

FN: Not even remotely close to that. Not monthly, non-manga periodicals, anyway.

DF: So you were writing for a teenage audience, teenage boys.

FN: Yeah.

DF: That seemed to be where a lot of our letters were coming from. I think a lot of girls read it, too.

FN: A lot of girls read the book. And, you know what? A lot of older readers in their twenties who wanted to see a smart angle on super-heroes enjoyed it, too. It’s fun to see characters who can make mistakes, and they did, plenty of them. The older characters generally can’t make those same kinds of mistakes or else you’re not writing them properly, you know? As a writer, you can force them to make mistakes, but then you’re not being true to the character. But you can get away with murder with some of these young guys. Literally, you can get away with murder, and some of our characters did. It’s just good writing territory.

DF: You and I had a volatile but good chemistr y, and you and [penciler] Mark Bagley had a good chemistr y.

FN: Mark and I had great chemistry. We did again on Thunderbolts. I always love working with him. We tend to click.

I would love to work with him on a single character sometime, as opposed to these group books we always seem to work together on. You and I had a wonderfully combative relationship. I remember days where we would stay after working hours arguing and yelling and screaming at each other

over single words in a single line of dialogue!

DF: Well, I was right, you just couldn’t see it. [laughs] FN: Exactly! You were always right, and I was too young and naive to benefit from your wisdom and experience. [laughter] But people still remember fondly some of our knock-down dragouts. People still tell me about, “Oh man, I remember how hard you guys yelled at each other.” But they never realize that it was always born out of mutual respect. I thought you respected what I did.

DF: I did!

FN: And I respected what you did, tremendously. Even more so when I got older and I became an editor, myself. Then I really respected more of what you did. At that time I was just a writer, you were an editor, so in some ways you were the enemy. You were The Man keeping me down. That’s how I thought back then, you know?

DF: I always felt we both wanted what was best for the book and the characters. I do remember we had one argument, I think it wasn’t about anything par ticularly serious, outside Tom’s office. And the entire argument consisted of me going “way!” and you going “no way!” and me going “way!” and you going “no way!” [laughter] Tom commented on how absurd it was. But it was fun.

FN: Well, I’m not saying that they were scholarly debates or anything like that. At the end of the day, after all, we were still arguing about super-hero comics. It’s not like we were arguing about feeding the poor!

DF: That’s what you did with all your royalties, right?

FN: Yes, I did. I fed the poor with all my royalties. No, actually, I pumped it back into the editorial expense account system so that today’s editors can wine and dine their freelancers the way we deserve to be wined and dined. [Danny laughs] You know, our arguing was to the benefit of the book. When you stopped editing the book, it was not as strong a book as it had been.

And partially I guess it was because I was doing so much more writing work. But my stories were still there. I was still focused on the stories I wanted to tell. I didn’t have the amount of time to tell them the way I had before, and I didn’t have an editor who was forcing me, at a level of minutiae, to tell them properly. So I got away with some things that you would never have let me get away with.

DF: Right. And when I was Group Editor, I would see the plots, make my comments, and then see the finished stories five minutes before they had to go to press. So, I could only change things if they were really ex treme.

FN: It changed the parameters of how we were working.

DF: So while you were on the New Warriors, you also star ted working on other stuff, right?

FN: You offered me Alpha Flight while I was doing New Warriors, and I accepted it because I wanted to show editors internally that I could do two books a month. And I had no plans whatsoever on leaving my staff job. I loved my staff job. I loved working there. It was great. I knew I could write two books a month without a problem, and it was also a bit of a cocky thing. When you and I were doing New Warriors, we knew it was good before it even came out. We had, like, the first six issues in the drawer before the first one even shipped, so we knew what we were percolating was pretty good stuff. And I had the attitude of, let’s take Alpha Flight, which for one reason or another wasn’t selling as well as it could have been, and wasn’t perceived of as a book that had any juice to it, and we said, “Let’s try to make it juicy.”

From Thunderbolts #39. Written by Fabian, with art by Mark Bagley & Scott Hanna. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

DF: Did I have a bake-off [a request from several writers for ideas for a series] or did I just go to you?

FN: No, you just offered it to me.

DF: But you wrote a proposal, right?

FN: Yeah, you asked me what I would do with it and I gave you a proposal and you said, “Let’s do it.” And we did it! And you know what? We increased sales on that book by like 25,000 or 30,000 copies for the first four or five months. But, it turned out those characters didn’t excite a lot of passion in me, no offense to John Byrne, who was their creator. I’m sure that John had a passion to them, but I’m writing these guys, and I found myself almost divorced from what I was writing, because I didn’t feel enough for what the characters were doing or saying. So after five or six issues, when you told me you were going to be leaving the book as editor, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t have an interest. I said, “Let me just get to #100 and then I’ll be done.” It’s not that I had a lack of ideas—!

DF: Fabian, nobody has ever worried that you have a lack of ideas.

FN: I had ideas on that book for a long, long time to come, I just didn’t have the passion to execute the ideas, so I wanted to let someone who had more passion do it.

NICIEZA | 69

DF: If they were teenagers, would they have appealed to you more?

FN: No, it had to do with the characters. It was an interesting mix. Nowadays, a lot of writers are a lot smarter than we were back then. A writer would get on a monthly book and your job, as you expected it to be, would be to write that monthly book until you died.

That’s how we thought.

That’s how we were trained to think. Nowadays, a lot of writers don’t think that way.

They approach it like writing an episode of a TV show. So they come in, they write their four to six issues, their story Rob Liefeld’s cover to New Mutants #100. arc, and they walk out.

The story was scripted by Fabian over Rob’s plot That’s cool, that’s great! I and pencils. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] should have done that back then with Alpha Flight! I had a four-part story I wanted to tell. I should have told it, and I should have walked away.

DF: We all wanted to be Lee and Kirby, doing a hundred issues of the FF. FN: There was that, too. And there’s a different mentality today than what we had. Today, a hundred issues of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would be like five thousand issues of a current comic.

DF: I think the only thing that’s even close to that now is Denny O’Neil doing a hundred issues of Azrael.

FN: Yeah, and Erik Larsen doing a hundred issues of Savage Dragon.

DF: Right, but nobody could fire Erik. He owns that character.

FN: You’re right. There’s nothing comparable to it, and I don’t know if there ever will be any more.

DF: Not that many people did it ever, but cer tainly there’s a whole different point of view now.

FN: And even my point of view changed. I got fired off Thunderbolts at #75, but in my mind, my last issue was going to be #100. I was going to quit with #100, because I knew what I wanted to do between #75 and #100, and that would have been it.

DF: And you came on with #26?

FN: With #34. And it’s not that I had a set number of issues in mind, it just seemed to me that the way I was running my story arcs, #100 would have been it. And that would have been good. I would have been fine with that. I was going to walk away from it because I was done. I’ve quit books before. I’ve been fired from a couple, but I’ve quit more than I’ve been fired from DF: Your work on Alpha Flight and New Warriors made the XBooks possible for you, didn’t it?

FN: Bob Harras [then X-Men Group Editor] and I started talking more about work and I started doing some X-stuff—back-ups or Annuals. And Rob Liefeld was going to be taking over New Mutants, solely, as the plotter and penciler, and he wanted me to script it. Rob and I had become friendly on the phone, and met a couple of times at conventions. Rob had been talking to 70 | WRITE NOW

me about working together before he even started doing Hawk and Dove for DC. In 1988, I got a call from Rob, who I didn’t know at all. He had just called me to introduce himself.

DF: Rob must have been, like, eleven then.

FN: Nah, he was twelve-and-a-half. [laughter] Seriously, I think he was eighteen or nineteen then. And he was just really enthusiastic. He knew Ron Lim and Ron told me that Rob wanted to talk to me. We developed a relationship through that, and he wanted me to script New Mutants. Bob Harras asked me if I would do it, and I said, “Yeah, sure. It sounds cool.” Obviously there’s some energy happening in Rob’s work, there’s something positive happening here in terms of how he’s presenting the stories and how people are reacting to it, more than anything—especially younger kids. For good or bad, no matter what anybody says about Rob, somebody must have been buying his stuff. From the very beginning, there was a positive juice and energy happening around his work.

DF: Did you have any feeling about the fact that Louise Simonson had been writing the book for quite a while, and suddenly Rob was plotting it?

FN: No. No. You know why? Because I didn’t see myself as stepping in to replace Louise. I mean, I think her leaving the book was already a fait accompli. It was already done. Rob was going to take over the book. Bob wasn’t comfortable with him scripting the book yet, and Rob might not have been comfortable with himself scripting the book yet. It was already going to be someone else scripting. Bob asked me if I would do it. It’s not like Louise was still going to be writing the book.

It might be rationalization on my part, quite frankly, but this is the perspective that I remember it from, still to this day.

DF: I’m not trying to pick on you, because this kind of thing happens all the time. There was once a spoof of the Bullpen Bulletins page in What The—?, which went something like, “You ever notice how in the Bullpen Bulletins, people are always getting married but never divorced, getting hired but never fired?” [laughter] I mean, it’s the same thing. When somebody comes on a book, obviously somebody else is off that book.

FN: Why don’t you ask John Arcudi how he feels about replacing me on Thunderbolts? I mean, it’s the same kind of thing. The book is going to be published every month.

Somebody is going to be writing it. There’s actually work in the past that I turned down because I didn’t want to replace the person who had been writing it. I won’t name names or specific situations, but I turned work down when the writer still was writing that book and didn’t know that the editor was negotiating behind their back for someone else to write it. And I said, “No thank you,” because I didn’t want to do that to that person, whether it was because they were a friend or whatever.

DF: And did that save that person’s job?

FN: No. Every single time that happened, which was three or four times, that person got replaced anyway. Nine times out of ten, when an editor is going to replace a person, they’ve made that decision well before the person being replaced knows about it.

I respect Louise tremendously as a person. I respect her tremendously as a writer. I hired her when I was an editor. But at the end of the day, she wasn’t going to be writing that book anymore. There was money to be had, and there was work to be gotten, and there was attention to be gained.

END

PART

ONE

The Fabian Nicieza Interview Continues Next Issue!

DEPARTMENT

Comics Into Film: Making It Happen by Steven Grant S teven Grant has been a professional comics writer for 25 years. Best known for his work on the Punisher and his own Whisper, Steven has written X-Men and SpiderMan stories, and comics adventures of WWF wrestlers.

He’s also a widely-read internet columnist, with his Permanent Damage column on the Comic Book Resources website (www.comicbookresources.com) eagerly read by fans and pros alike.

His current and upcoming projects include a western graphic novel, Red Sunset; a crime graphic novel, Videoactive, and the return of Whisper in Day X (all from AiT/Planet Lar), the mini-series My Flesh Is Cool and Sacrilege from Avatar Press, and a collection of his former internet column, Master of the Obvious.

As a published writer and creator of “properties,” Steven has had his brushes with the Hollywood entertainment machine. Here, he takes what he—and others, from various parts of the that machine—have learned about how (and how not) to deal with TV and movie folk and shares it with you.

—DF

When you see Marvel cutting film deals right and left, DC heroes plastered across the small screen, and Ghost World, Men in Black and Road to Perdition in theaters, when every interview you read with a comics writer partly involves this or that inroad into other media, when independent comics like Creature Tech and 30 Days of Night are reported as being optioned for huge amounts of money, there’s no doubting the hypnotic attraction Hollywood now has on comics. The money, the glamour, the sense that everyone in the world wants to be a part of it—let’s face it, Hollywood sounds like everything comics aren’t. Comics writers (and artists) break down into roughly two groups: those who want a piece of it, and those who want it but think it’s jejune to say they do.

It’s no secret most comics companies now keep an eye on Hollywood sales when considering properties to publish. A successful film can increase public awareness of a property, increase licensing opportunities and revenues and raise the profile (not to mention boost the egos) of the company. Companies like Dark Horse and DC are intimately connected to Hollywood now. In the structure of the AOL/TimeWarner corporation, DC Comics Inc. is a subsidiary of Warners, the film/TV studio, and one of its prime functions, from a corporate standpoint, is to generate new licenses for media exploitation. Dark Horse successfully generated its own production company, Dark Horse Entertainment, which produced films based on Dark Horse properties, like The Mask and Timecop, and is now producing Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

If comics publishers are viewing Hollywood as a resource for

money and promotion, why shouldn’t you?

Two facts: 1) It’s hard to make a lot of money doing comics. 2) It’s hard to make a lot of money in Hollywood. Certainly there’s money to be made in both places, but in both places you have to be both lucky and smart.

There’s not a lot you can do about luck, except to be aware of opportunities and have the courage to act when they present themselves. Smart is something anyone can work on, but it starts with setting aside preconceptions of how Hollywood works and dealing with reality.

According to Ford Lytle Gilmore, who recently opened a management/production company, Illuminati Entertainment, following a career as both a comics writer (Thundercats) and in film production, the biggest misconceptions about Hollywood are “that no one reads, all they care about is the bottom line, and no one respects comics/everyone thinks it’s all about spandex/everyone thinks comics are just for kids. Sure, there are people who fit the jokey stereotype, but there are also a lot of people in Hollywood who were reading comics during the boom years and are receptive to them—even some who are championing the medium.”

“Hollywood’s a small town,” says Mason Novick of Benderspink, a management/ production company that produced films like American Pie and The Ring, and is working with comics writers like Garth Ennis. “There are twelve studios and fewer than 100 good production companies.”

Production companies line up what’s known as “the package”— The promotional poster for the upcoming Hellboy movie, property, writer, featuring art by the character’s creator Mike Mignola. [©2003 Revolution Studios.]

GRANT | 71

actors, director—and take the package around to studios for funding. Most production companies have what’s called a “first look” deal with a specific studio. If that studio passes on a project the production company can, in most instances, take it elsewhere. But that arrangement varies with each production company and studio. Like everywhere else in Hollywood, there is no “standard” deal. The deal is what you can negotiate, and that’s something to remember going in.

The cover to Max Allan Collins’ Road to There’s a reason comics Perdition. Art by Richard Piers Rayner. [©2003 are hot in Hollywood right Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner.] now: movies are hard to sell. Even with screenplays, stories are often hard to get across. But comics are visual and visceral. A producer who shows a studio a comic book shows them exactly what the movie can be. (The legend goes that longtime comics fans Andy and Larry Wachowski did their own comic of The Matrix to sell Warner Bros. on the film.) Jon Levin, an agent at Creative Artists Agency, says, “this is the golden age of selling comics and graphic novels to film and television. They’re visual media, so it’s only natural they’d want a visual basis for adaptation. Comics are essentially storyboards for movies. If you’ve got a great story and a great character, and an angle someone else hasn’t taken, take it to Hollywood. Who are the guys behind the grassy knoll? What happens when the sun goes down for 30 days in a town overrun by vampires? What happens when a typical teenager gets bitten by a radioactive spider?” Particularly with the recent success of comics-born films like X-Men, Spider-Man and Road to Perdition, film producers have discovered the value of comics as a sales tool.

Is this a phase? Several producers I spoke with suspected interest in the super-hero movie was cooling. “Costumes are a problem,” says Benderspink’s Novick. Another producer suspected the recent failure of the WB series Birds of Prey, following the success of the network’s Smallville (based on Superboy), could be partly traced to the former’s use of costumes. (Smallville went with street clothes.) “Having people do fantastic things doesn’t necessarily strain believability. When real people put on costumes, it usually just looks silly.”

But the consensus from those “insiders” I polled was that non-super-hero comics will get easier to sell, particularly if they have, as Gilmore put it, “a good idea that’s accessible to a wider audience. Buzz and sales can generate a lot of attention, but the idea is always going to be more important than the brand unless we’re talking about a legitimate icon that’s been around for decades. When today’s best-selling comics are barely cracking 100,000 units a month in the direct market, Hollywood is less interested in your sales than your story and characters. 30 Days of Night didn’t generate a bidding war because it was a ‘hot comic,’ it did it because it was a good book that you can easily see as a good movie.”

72 | WRITE NOW

Many recent Hollywood purchases make it clear that comics sales have no direct correlation to media interest, which puts the creator of a small, self-published comic on nearly equal footing with Marvel and DC. The question is how to get producers to notice your book.

It’s not as hard as you think. As Gilmore mentioned, many younger producers grew up with comics and stay conversant with them. Comic-Con International, the yearly comics show at San Diego, is now virtually haunted by producers, and is a great place to meet them and show off new properties. J.C. Spink, co-founder of Benderspink, is only one of many producers who still regularly visit comics shops as much to maintain their own collections as to find new properties, and Hollywood sports two of the best, most eclectically-stocked shops in the country, Golden Apple and Meltdown Comics. CAA’s Levin says, “small presses that publish comics have been discovered by Hollywood. Conventions, the Internet and comics stores are all combed by Hollywood. Men in Black is a great example of a comic from a small publisher with a small readership that has made close to a billion dollars.”

The odds are very good that if you have a nationallydistributed comic book, someone in Hollywood is familiar with it.

Which brings up a question comics writers often raise: How do you keep someone from pitching your property without your permission?

The answer is: you can’t, and you probably don’t want to. Under most circumstances, a producer will get in touch first to make sure the film rights to your property are still available.

But once a book is published, any producer can take it to any studio and say, “I think this’d make a great movie.” That’s not necessarily bad. It can lead to bidding wars and significantly more money. It can also lead to what’s called a “burned” property, where enough people have passed on the idea there’s no potential market left for it. But even an actual deal can result in a “burned” property.

Traditionally, the owner of a property is paid option money before a producer shops the concept around, but that’s less true of modern Hollywood, and it may not even be in your best interest. Benderspink’s Novick points out “only studios option materials, really. A producer might pay you $10,000 for an option, and that’s not bad money, but then he sells the option to a studio, so he—not you”—gets however much money that deal generates.

Illuminati’s Gilmore basically agrees: “The majority of producers are independent, with no discretionary funds being fronted by a studio or financing entity as part of an overall deal. They’re not going to be offering $50K for a 12-month option; they’re normally going to be somewhere between $10K and free—and probably closer to free. But ‘free’ can be a bit of a misnomer, considering the time and effort companies put into the project; the work they do can often mean more than a major with deep pockets writing a check. I can’t say that free options are universally bad. They’re not. But they should still have defined terms, including a defined purchase price, credit, involvement, and so on. If you’re going to sign a free option, you should definitely be much more closely involved with the project. It all comes down to what you want and feel comfortable with at the end of the day.”

How do you spot legitimate producers? “Check people out before you agree to anything,” Novick says. “Anyone can call themselves a producer. Be wary of someone you’ve never heard

of or who has never gotten a movie made. A studio deal is usually a good sign.” (The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com, is an excellent resource for checking credentials.)

CAA’s Levin suggests several litmus tests. “Any relationship between creator and producer is a partnership of trust that the creator’s vision will be carried out. You want a producer who’ll do everything possible to get the project developed involving the highest level of talent. Be wary of love at first sight: someone who’s infatuated with the project but doesn’t follow through. The main thing is to make sure the producer understands your property. It’s sometimes incumbent on the creator to dig beneath the surface and help a producer understand the full character arcs and story dynamics. You have to be open and honest with them. Being comfortable with a producer often comes out to a simple question: ‘Does he understand the material?’ You want someone who does.”

Last year I had a horror comic, Mortal Souls, published, and was contacted by an aspiring producer. A recent American Film Institute graduate, he immediately let me know he had yet to produce a movie. (This has since changed). We had a lunch, he briefed me on his background and his game plan for the project. He listened to what I had to say and didn’t imply he knew the property better than I did. I liked that he made the effort to come to me. He came across as bright, honest and ambitious, with connections, and it felt like an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of his career. We didn’t talk money. A week later we agreed on what amounted to a “pitch option,” allowing him to pitch and sell a Mortal Souls film on my behalf. While the sale is still pending (the project is tentatively placed with a major production company), the arrangement and relationship has worked out well. Sometimes you have to trust your gut.

While negotiating your own deals is common in comics, it’s generally not a good idea with film or television. Unless you pore over industry data regularly, odds are you won’t know what you’re doing. You want someone who does: an agent, a manager or an entertainment lawyer.

Eventually, you’ll probably need an entertainment lawyer, to make sure all your contracts are in order. Don’t make the mistake of thinking any lawyer will do; entertainment law is a labyrinth that non-specialists can easily get lost in, to your detriment. A one-time deal can easily be negotiated by a good entertainment lawyer, but if you’d like a long term relationship with Hollywood, an agent or manager is a better representative.

There are all kinds of agents and managers. Some “boutique” agents only represent writers. In general, though, agents and managers both attempt to organize entire packages, matching scripts with directors and actors. But there are significant differences.

Levin and Gilmore naturally differ on the relative value of agents and managers. As Gilmore puts it, “a lot of different people will define the two roles in different ways, but I stand by what I was first told at USC: an agent’s job is to service the marketplace, while a manager’s job is to service their client. That is, an agent’s primary focus is going to be on the industry as a whole, what buyers are looking for, how he can get his client’s work to fit those needs, and who’s going to be responsive to his client’s latest projects. It’s about selling the material to the industry. Managers are normally more involved in shaping their clients material as well as their careers, steering them and helping them get to where they want to be. A lot of times, managers are going to be involved with a

client’s project well after the sale, often being involved in producing as well. Managers will frequently have fewer clients than agents, too, because of the nature of the relationship.”

Levin says, “They’re essentially the same. Agents can mix and match talent in a more eclectic way, introducing comic books to talent. Managers usually focus more on individual clients but may not have as deep a field to pick and choose from to get a picture made. Who to choose to represent you comes down to the specific agent or manager, and ‘who understands my material?’”

That much Gilmore agrees with. “These definitions are generalities; not every manager is the same, nor is every agent. Many people work with both, while others work with only one. Whether a writer should try to get an agent, manager or both is up to him and what he wants in the big picture.”

Hollywood’s interest in comics has risen to the point that finding representation is much less difficult than in previous years. Novick suggests, “There are agents and production companies known for comics. Anyone with an internet connection or access to Variety can find them. Check scriptsales.com and other websites and find out who has sold what. Write them a query letter, describe your comic, ask if they’d like to see it. Don’t bother sending queries to studios; they won’t buy anything unless it comes from a producer. Run your access information in your books, make sure people can find you.”

All agree that, before anything else, you should decide what you want from a Hollywood connection. Some are happy for option money and have no interest in film projects beyond that; I spoke the other day with a creator whose self-publishing has been kept afloat over the years by option money. Some want to write the screenplays for their film projects, some want to be involved as producers. As with virtually everything else in Hollywood, there’s considerable disagreement over what’s possible and what isn’t, and only one constant: everything is negotiable.

“I don’t get the sense there’s a great feeling about comics writers as screenwriters,” Novick says. “Studios like to see familiar names on screenplays. Just writing comics doesn’t convince anyone you can write a movie. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but as a general rule, if you want to write screenplays, you should write screenplays. Prove you can do it.”

“It often depends on the specific deal and just who exactly is making that deal with you,” says Gilmore. “Some producers and execs are going to run a very tight ship and not want to have you involved much, others are going to want you to write the first draft (or in the case of non-writing artists, be involved in concept and design), and be involved every step of the way.

Most are going to lie somewhere in between. You’re never going to get final approval or complete creative control—even if you’re #1 on Wizard’s Top Ten, have something on the New York Times bestseller list, and are a household name—but I think it’s more than fair for you to expect to maintain meaningful creative consultation in your deal. That is, be kept in the loop, see scripts, offer suggestions, have a say in how the creation evolves on the screen, etc. I’d want to be dealing with a producer who responded to my story and my creation and who has actually read my work, not a producer who’s just contacting me because I fill a need or he heard my book’s hot.

Not that the latter producer isn’t going to have just as good a chance of getting my comic made into a film or show as the former, but because the former is responding to my creation on GRANT | 73

a visceral level as well. He’s responding to me and my work, and sees me as a talent rather than just a commodity—and therefore he’s the one who’s more likely to keep me involved.”

But, Gilmore added, “It’s really hard to parlay the sale of one project into a career in screenwriting. It’s becoming increasingly easier to use a body of work and a string of successes (creative successes, not necessarily financial ones) to springboard into a possible new career. There are multiple strategies to approaching The cover to the Jeremiah graphic novel it, but, to be honest, I don’t want Gun in the Water by Hermann Huppen. to give away all the tricks of my The character was brought to television trade. I will say that a lot of it is

by Platinum Studios with J. Michael about positioning, timing, and Straczynski. [©2003 Hermann.] knowing when to take risks to further your own goals. It’s not easy, but it is achievable if you have the talent and the drive, and are willing to put in the time.”

Levin is even more cautiously optimistic. “In terms of making a deal, become a consultant if not a writer. The best way to have full participation is for the comics writer to adapt his own material. Whether you can do this depends on how much someone wants the property and how much you’re willing to risk to get what you want. As in most negotiations, your biggest asset is your willingness to walk away—but only if they want your property badly. Again, you have to give producers something to work with. If you want to write, present the film story, not the comic story. X-Men in the comics is the story of a group of characters. In the movies, it’s really Wolverine’s story. He’s the focus. And remember that your hero is only as good as your villain.”

Which brings us to a point often overlooked by both fans and professionals: comics are not movies. It’s a common complaint that movies based on comic books veer from the source material, but Novick, Gilmore and Levin were all adamant about the need to recognize the differences between various media. “Have an idea of what the movie is,” Novick recommends, and he warns creators to go in knowing the resulting

film or TV project stands a good chance of varying from the source material. “Be aware that filmmaking is far more collaborative than comics, and in movies many choices are made purely for business reasons. It’s not personal. Things may work in the comic that don’t work on the screen.” While Novick doesn’t argue for abandoning artistic aspirations, he suggests creators go in understanding the only satisfaction they may ultimately get is money. “If you’re worried about the integrity of your characters, don’t sell the rights. But don’t forget: the movie isn’t the comic book. Nothing that happens with a movie can ever diminish the integrity of your work. And don’t fixate on any one property, create lots of things.”

The misconception Levin runs across most often among comics writers “is the idea that every comic book is a potential movie. Some comic books are perfect as comics, but dig them up and replant them as film and they’re not the same credible creation. What Hollywood wants is originality—but not too original. Things need to be different but not so far outside the box that they don’t relate to other movies. Heroic—but not too heroic: your hero needs to have flaws, quirks and foibles, and must be relatable. The success of Spider-Man has a lot to do with the humanness of Peter Parker. Epic—but not too epic: films need to have vision and scope, but costs can’t be prohibitive. However, each day technology expands and what couldn’t be imagined last year can now be realized.”

Many comics creators fear the increasingly symbiotic relationship between comics and Hollywood will result in comics specifically designed for Hollywood sale. But the rise in options on more eclectic material belies that, and Gilmore suggests that “tailoring” may be self-defeating. “I’ve seen too many creators chasing the supposed brass ring, and not caring enough about the work itself—and you can often see it in their work. If the book’s no good, it’s not going to generate any interest inside the industry—much less outside of it. The best way to get your comic noticed is to make a good comic; don’t treat the comic as an afterthought, or try to guess what Hollywood is going to respond to. Make a book that new readers will enjoy and that retailers can sell. If you do good work, it’s going to generate buzz within the comics industry, and that buzz is going to be noticed by other industries (at least by the people who’ve got their ears to the ground). Concentrate on the work.”

Management and Production Companies involved with comics-based material. (Note: a listing here doesn’t guarantee they will be open to new clients or projects. Check their contact information and submissions policies online before sending anything. Never visit them without an invitation.)

Benderspink (www.benderspink.com). 6735 Yucca St, Hollywood CA 90028. Principles: Chris Bender, J.C. Spink.

Circle of Confusion (www.circleofconfusion.com). 666 5th Avenue #303, New York NY 10103. Principle: Lawrence Mattis.

Collision Entertainment. 445 S Beverly Dr Suite 310, Beverly Hills CA 90212. Principles: Paul Rosenberg, Scott Faye. Collision likes to focus on cross-media development of properties.

Dark Horse Entertainment (www.dhenter tainment.com).

Principle: Mike Richardson. Dark Horse Entertainment generally draws its movies from properties published by Dark Horse Comics.

Energy Entertainment (www.energyenter tainment.net).

Principle: Brooklyn Weaver. Accepts only e-submissions.

Hollywood Comics (www.hollywoodcomics.com). Box 17270, Encino CA 91416. Principles: Jean-Marc Lofficier, Randy Lofficier, Evan Todd. Several instructional materials on website, including sample writer/artist agreements, copyright information, option/purchase agreement notes.

Illuminati Entertainment (www.illuminatienter tainment.com). Principle: Ford Lytle Gilmore. 11901 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite 494, Los Angeles CA 90025. Clients include Howard Chaykin, Steve Lieber.

Platinum Studios (www.platinumstudios.com). 9744 Wilshire Blvd Suite 210, Beverly Hills CA 90212. Principle: Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Platinum generally develops material for comics publication and media production.

74 | WRITE NOW

Good luck.

THE END

Steven Grant is an accomplished writer of many kinds of comics. Here’s an experiment he did. He invited readers of his Permanent Damage website at Comic Book Resources (www.cbr.cc) to send him travel postcards.

Steven then took the cards and assembled them into a story, connecting the pictures with a narration he wrote. Here, we see the first three panels of “Next Year at Toluka Lake.”

To see the rest of the story, go to: www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=pd&article=1391 [©2003 Steven Grant.]

GRANT | 75

Feedback Letters from our readers Hey, Danny!

As always, you’ve pulled together a jam-packed, ultra-informative collection of interviews. Aspiring writers could stand to learn something from folks like Denny O’Neil and Bruce Jones.

Take care!

Steve Roman www.star warpconcepts.com Thanks, Steve. Mr. Roman is my old colleague from Byron Preiss Visual Publications. Steve’s the creator of Lorelei.

Issue #2 is on sale now. He’s also the author of The Chaos Engine trilogy of X-Men novels from ibooks, Inc. The three novels will soon be collected in one massive hardcover by The Science Fiction Book Club. And be on the lookout for his SUNN comic this fall, from the Preiss organization. (The art’s

by Kevin Lau!) It’s been years in the making—and promises to be great!

Dear Write Now: Much as I respect Kurt Busiek’s observations, including those about movie musicals, the Gershwins’ classic “A Foggy Day (in London Town)” doesn’t appear in Royal Wedding (for which the songs are by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner), so either Kurt was thinking of another song to which Fred Astaire and “whoever” (that would be Jane Powell) danced, or the movie A Damsel in Distress, in which “Foggy Day” debuted.

Richard Howell via the Internet We stand corrected and humbled, Richard.

Richard Howell, of course, is a legendary comics writer and artist who is also the editor-in-chief of the fine Claypool line of comic, available wherever quality periodicals are sold.

And in case anyone was worrying, we aren’t changing the subheading of Write Now! to: “The Magazine About Writing for Comics, Animation, Science Fiction… and Movie Musicals!”

Mr. Fingeroth, Write Now! has been the greatest resource I could imagine!

The Bruce Jones interview in issue #3 was awesome, especially since The Hulk has been my favorite title since I was a child. Write Now! is nothing short of a “bible” for the up-andcoming writer. Thank you so much!!

David Schultz via the Internet

76 | WRITE NOW

Danny, I first heard about Write Now! when I visited the twomorrows.com site the other day. I dropped by my local store and picked up the first issue (which was the only one they had in stock). Wow. I can say whole-heartedly that this is the greatest service anyone has ever performed for aspiring comic writers like me.

I’ve just read the first two interviews (Bendis and Bagley) so far, but I’ve learned so much from them. I’m dying to read the rest of the magazine after I finish my writing for the night.

Thank you so very, very much. Best wishes for continued success.

Sincerely, Gregg Allinson via the internet Thank you, Gregg. Hope you enjoyed the next three issues as much.

Danny, Write Now! is great! I’ve found each issue to be very helpful and encouraging, particularly issue #3. I liked Dennis O’Neil’s Notes for Comic Writing and the interview with Bruce Jones.

I’m planning to attend the San Diego Comic Con. Will Write Now! be there? Although I’ve never been to this convention, my hope is to learn more about the comic book business, meet people, and try to promote my own work.

Thanks again. I’ll keep buying them, if you keep making them.

David Hopkins via the Internet Thanks, David. I do indeed plan to be at Comicon. I’m hoping to attend the Wizard Con in Philadelphia at the end of May, as well. Hope to meet you—and lots of other present and future Write Now! readers as well.

Danny, This magazine is incredibly insightful and informative. Each issue continues to improve. The questions you ask of the creators are great in eliciting helpful information, and I also get a lot out of the Nuts & Bolts tips on creating and craft. I hope your magazine is around for as long as you are willing to fulfill the needs of upcoming comics writers. Good luck Sophea via the Internet And good luck to you, Sophea. I’m pleased that the information in DFWN is useful to you and so many other readers.

That’s the whole point of putting it out.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in for sharing your thoughts. Let me know what you thought of this issue.

Send your comments to WriteNowDF@aol.com or to: Danny Fingeroth, Write Now! Magazine, c/o TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605.

Seeya next issue!

Gives you the lowdown on

BOOKS ON WRITING

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

By Danny Fingeroth

by Stephen King Pocket Books, New York, 2002 US $7.99 It’s hard to argue with success. Stephen King has the sales figures to say that, if he decides to write a book about writing popular fiction—in this one he focuses, as you might expect, on novels—you should probably pay attention to what he says.

As the subtitle states, On Writing is indeed more a memoir than it is a how-to book. A large part of it is King trying to understand how he got to where he is from his humble beginnings with a pretty disrupted home life. In the middle of writing this book, King was famously nearly killed—and actually badly injured—by a distracted driver on a road near his Maine home.

So part of the book, understandably, is about his recollections and reflections brought on by that crisis.

So it’s not a step-by-step writing guide. It’s part inspirational—If I did it, King seems to be saying, anyone can do it if he or she has talent and works at it. But there are times where the book seems taunting, as if he’s saying: You ain’t got my talent or drive, so just forget it, chump!

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.

There is certainly no shortage of tips on writing in the book. Quoting an early mentor, King states: “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

But you’ll have to work harder to find such advice here than in a how-to book.

The book is Stephen King’s story, literally. It’s how Stephen King became Stephen King. It’s how his wife, who he met at a poetry workshop he took in [©2003 Stephen King.] college, has been his muse and his guide. It’s about how he started writing for a satirical paper in high school that got him in lots of trouble. It goes on from there, telling how his career—and his life—evolved. Amid all these didactic anecdotes there are some terrific observations, such as: “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

The fear King refers to is “being afraid the reader won’t understand” what the writer means. “You probably do know what you’re talking about,” King counters. “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.”

Or this: “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” In other words, don’t overdescribe people or places. Give just enough description for the reader to personalize them. Of course, knowing what constitutes “enough” is the hard part.

There are lots of such gems in this book, but you do have to work to find them. There are very few bold rules and/or suggestions. You have to read about King’s extraordinary drive and success to get the gems and wisdom. If that kind of thing inspires you, then go for it. If it intimidates you, then you might want to save reading this book for a day when you’re feeling pretty good about yourself and your writing. After all, he’s Stephen King—and you’re not.

King offers a website to which you can send a finished exercise he suggests in the book. May as well take him up on it. Who knows, he might even reply! Even if he says you suck, at least it will have been Stephen King saying it. Maybe it’ll make you angry enough to show him you don’t.

Maybe that was his plan all along.

THE END

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Reprints the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-3, plus over 50 NEW PAGES of features and art:

Second volume in the series, reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #5-6 (spotlighting 1970s DC and Marvel comics), plus over 50 NEW PAGES of features and art:

• 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

• 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!

• New interviews with MARSHALL ROGERS, STEVE ENGLEHART, & TERRY AUSTIN on their highly-acclaimed 1970s Batman work!

• An extensive look at perhaps the rarest 1970s comic of all, DC’s CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE, showcasing unused stories from that decade!

(208-page Trade Paperback) $24 US

E! L SA $6!

N O VE SA 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: • Special color cover by JOE KUBERT! • All-new rare and previously-unpublished art by JACK KIRBY, GIL KANE, JOE KUBERT, WALLY WOOD, FRANK ROBBINS, NEAL ADAMS, and others!

• STEVE DITKO on the creation of SPIDER-MAN, ROY THOMAS on the birth of THE INVADERS, and more!

(160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

SENSE OF WONDER 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!!

MR. MONSTER

HIS BOOKS OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE, VOL. ZERO MR. MONSTER is back with a new book collection featuring TWELVE TWISTED TALES of Forbidden Knowledge, featuring:

• Introduction by ROY THOMAS, cover by DICK GIORDANO! • Share Bill’s encounters with FREDERIC WERTHAM, STEVE DITKO, BOB KANE, JIM SHOOTER, and more!

• Over 150 photos and illustrations by KIRBY, DITKO, NEWTON, EISNER, C.C. BECK, KALUTA, KRENKEL, COCKRUM, SINNOTT, GIL KANE and others!

• Over 30 pages of ALL-NEW Mr. Monster art and stories by MICHAEL T. GILBERT! • Collects the hard-to-find MR. MONSTER stories from A-1, CRACK-A-BOOM! and DARK HORSE PRESENTS! • The lost Mr. Monster NEWSPAPER STRIP! • New 8-page FULL-COLOR STORY by KEITH GIFFEN & MICHAEL T. GILBERT!

(216-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(136-pg. Paperback) SALE PRICE: $14 US

“I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY!” 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!

• 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

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

FAWCETT COMPANION THE BEST OF FCA Presenting the best of the FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA newsletter!

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE

MODERN MASTERS VOL. 1:

A collection of MARK EVANIER’s POV COLUMNS, featuring a NEW COVER and ILLUSTRATIONS by SERGIO ARAGONÉS! Includes his best essays and commentaries, plus many never before published on:

First volume in a new book series devoted to the best of today's comics artists looks at the work of ALAN DAVIS!

• New JERRY ORDWAY cover!

• Index of ALL FAWCETT COMICS! • Looks inside the FAWCETT OFFICES! • Interviews, features, and rare and previously unpublished artwork by C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, MAC RABOY, DAVE BERG, ALEX TOTH, BOB OKSNER, GEORGE EVANS, ALEX ROSS, Foreword by MARC SWAYZE, and more!

• The state of the art form (as only Mark conveys it)!

• The industry’s leading practitioners (including JACK KIRBY and CARL BARKS)!

• Convention-going and Mark’s old comic book club (with unforgettable anecdotes)!

(160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(200-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

CAPTAIN ACTION

G-FORCE: ANIMATED

THE ORIGINAL SUPERHERO ACTION FIGURE

THE OFFICIAL BATTLE OF THE PLANETS GUIDEBOOK

CAPTAIN ACTION debuted in the wake of the ’60s Batman TV show, and could become 13 different super-heroes. With over 200 toy photos, this trade paperback written by MICHAEL EURY 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), plus never-seen art by GIL KANE, JOE STATON, JERRY ORDWAY, CARMINE INFANTINO, and MURPHY ANDERSON (who provides a new cover)! Includes a color section!

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 G-FORCE (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!

Co-written by JASON HOFIUS and GEORGE KHOURY, this FULL-COLOR account is highlighted by a NEW PAINTED COVER from master artist ALEX ROSS!

(176-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(96-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

ALAN DAVIS

• ALAN DAVIS’ most IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW to date, including influences, and his views on graphic storytelling!

• DELUXE SKETCHBOOK section, & HUGE GALLERY of rare and unseen Davis art!

• Interviews with collaborators PAUL NEARY and MARK FARMER! (128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

KIMOTA! THE MIRACLEMAN COMPANION Learn behind-the-scenes secrets of ALAN MOORE’S MIRACLEMAN, from his start as Marvelman to the legal and creative hurdles during the Eclipse series, and the unseen final NEIL GAIMAN-scripted issue!

BECK & SCHAFFENBERGER:

SONS OF THUNDER

Split-biography on two of comics’ greatest and most endearing artists, C.C. BECK and KURT SCHAFFENBERGER! • Co-written by FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA) editor P.C. HAMERLINCK and MARK VOGER! • Filled with UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK from CAPTAIN MARVEL, LOIS LANE, and more, plus rare photographs!

• Foreword by KEN BALD! (160-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

WARREN COMPANION JON B. COOKE and DAVID ROACH have compiled the ultimate guide to Warren Publishing, the publisher of such mags as CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, BLAZING COMBAT, and others. Reprints the Eisner Award-winning magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST #4 (completely reformatted), plus nearly 200 new pages:

• 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 art from the never-seen #25)!

• Special COLOR SECTION, NEVER-SEEN 8-page Moore/Totleben story, “Lux Brevis”, & an UNUSED MOORE SCRIPT!

• 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!

(144-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(288-page Hardcover) $57 US

(272-page Trade Paperback) $35 US 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.

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 1812 Park Drive • Raleigh, NC 27605 USA • 919-833-8092 • FAX: 919-833-8023 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

MORE MAGAZINES ABOUT COMICS

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

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

CBA #15: (116 pgs.) LOVE & CBA #16: (132 pgs.) ’70s CBA #17: (116 pgs.) ARTHUR CBA #18: (116 pgs.) COSMIC CBA #19: (116 pgs.) HARVEY CBA #20: (116 pgs.) FATHERS CBA #21: (116 pgs.) THE ART CBA #22: (116 pgs.) 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 & JOHN ROMITA SR. 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 & JR., new ROMITA & BUSCEMA tribute, new new BRUCE TIMM cover, cover, more! $9 US covers, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US STARLIN cover, more! $9 US cover, more! $9 US KUBERT covers, more! $9 US HUGHES cover, more! $9 US more! $9 US

UE ISS !

L A AY FININ M CBA #23: (116 pgs.) MIKE CBA #24: (116 pgs.) COMICS CBA #25: (116 pgs.) ALAN MIGNOLA SPOTLIGHT, plus OF NATIONAL LAMPOON with MOORE’S ABC COMICS with JILL THOMPSON: Sandman to GAHAN WILSON, BODÉ, NEAL MOORE, KEVIN NOWLAN, Scary Godmother! Mignola ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, GENE HA, RICK VEITCH, J.H. INTERVIEW & ART GALLERY, ALAN KUPPERBERG, BOBBY WILLIAMS, SCOTT DUNBIER, extensive CHECKLIST, new LONDON, MICHAEL GROSS, JIM BAIKIE, and NOWLAN & cover, & more! $9 US more! $9 US WILLIAMS covers! $9 US

COMICOLOGY

Edited by BRIAN SANER LAMKEN COMICOLOGY, the highlyacclaimed magazine about modern comics, recently ended its fourissue run, but back issues are available, featuring never-seen art & interviews.

CC #1: (100 pgs.) BRUCE CC #2: (100 pgs.) MIKE CC #3: (100 pgs.) CARLOS CC #4: (116 pgs., final issue) TIMM cover, interview & ALLRED interview & portfolio, PACHECO interview & portfolio, ALL-BRIAN ISSUE! Interviews sketchbook, JEPH LOEB 60 years of THE SPIRIT, 25 ANDI WATSON interview, a look with BRIAN AZZARELLO, interview, 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 WINKS, new color ALLRED & PACHECO & WATSON covers, BOLLAND, huge BOLLAND portfolio, & more! $8 US WONDER, & more! $8 US GRIST covers, & more! $8 US & more! $8 US

Edited by MIKE MANLEY DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, & animation.

Each issue features indepth interviews & stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals on all aspects of graphic storytelling.

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DRAW #1: (108 pgs. with DRAW #2: (116 pgs.) “How- DRAW #3: (80 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #4: (92 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #5: (88 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #6: (88 pgs.) “How-To” DRAW #7: (88 pgs.) “How-To” color) Professional “How-To” To” demos & interviews with demos & interviews with DICK demos & interviews with ERIK demos & interviews with demos & interviews with BILL demos & interviews with DAN mag on comics & cartooning, GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY, GIORDANO, BRET BLEVINS, LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN, BRIAN BENDIS & MIKE WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO, BRERETON, BRET BLEVINS, COOPER, BRET OEMING, MIKE WIERINGO, CELIA CALLE, MIKE MANLEY, ANDE PARKS, ALBERTO with art demos by GIBBONS, KLAUS JANSON, JERRY CHRIS BAILEY, MIKE DAVE ORDWAY, BLEVINS, ORDWAY, BRET BLEVINS, MANLEY, new column by BLEVINS, new column by MARK McKENNA, BRET BRET BLEVINS, ANDE PARKS, RUIZ, PAUL RIVOCHE, ZACK section, product TRENHOLM, color section, VILLAGRAN, color BLEVINS PHIL HESTER, ANDE PARKS, PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art PAUL RIVOCHE, color section, BLEVINS, PAUL RIVOCHE, color more! $8 US color section, more! $8 US reviews, and more! $8 US product reviews, more! $8 US cover & more! $8 US STEVE CONLEY, more! $8 US supplies, more! $8 US

READ EXCERPTS & ORDER ONLINE AT: www.twomorrows.com Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail (except Warren Companion Hardcover: add $14 Airmail)

FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

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

SIMON ❏ #7:#25: (100(100 pgs.)pgs.)

Companion TJKC #18: (68 pgs.) MARVEL TJKC #20: (68 pgs.) KIRBY’S TJKC #21: (68 pgs.) KIRBY, TJKC #22: (68 pgs.) VIL- TJKC #23: (68 pgs.) TJKC #24: (68 pgs.) BATTLES! TJKC KIRBY! SIMON, & issue to theKIRBY, ALL-STAR COMissue! Intvs. with KIRBY, STAN WOMEN! Interviews with GIL KANE, & BRUCE TIMM LAINS! KIRBY, STEVE RUDE, Interviews with KIRBY, KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM & SEVERIN interviews, PANION! JULIE SCHWARTZ LEE, ROY THOMAS, JOHN KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS, & intvs., FAILURE TO COMMU- & MIKE MIGNOLA interviews, DENNY O’NEIL & TRACY SHOOTER interview, NEW JOHN AMERICA pencils, intv., JLA-JSA teamups, MAC ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, LISA KIRBY, unused 10-page NICATE (LEE dialogue vs. FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO KIRBY, more FF #49 pencils, GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”) CAPTAIN KOBRA, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, pencils, FAILURE TO COM- unused BOY with EXPLORERS RABOY, FCA BECK & MARIE SEVERIN, HERB story, romance comics, Jack’s KIRBY notes), SILVER STAR COMMUNICATE, MONSTERS! unused 10-page SOUL LOVE MUNICATE, more! Kirby/ story, history of MAINLINE SWAYZE, BUCKLER & BECK TRIMPE, unseen Kirby art, original CAPTAIN VICTORY screenplay, TOPPS COMICS, ATLAS screenplay, more! $8 US unpublished art, more! $8 US Kirby/Stevens cover. $8 US Mignola cover. $8 US COMICS, story, more! $8 US more!$8$8USUS covers, more!

Kirby/Sinnott cover. $8 US

TJKC #26: (72 pgs.) GODS! TJKC #27: (72 pages) KIRBY TJKC #28: (84 pgs.) KIRBY TJKC #29: (68 pgs.) ’70s TJKC #30: (68 pgs.) ’80s TJKC #31: (84 pgs.) TABLOID COLOR NEW GODS concept INFLUENCE Part One! KIRBY INFLUENCE Part Two! Intvs. MARVEL! Interviews with WORK! Interviews with ALAN FORMAT! Wraparound KIRBY/ drawings, KIRBY & WALTER and ALEX ROSS interviews, with MARK HAMILL, JOHN KIRBY, KEITH GIFFEN & RICH MOORE & Kirby Estate’s ADAMS cover, KURT BUSIEK SIMONSON interviews, FAIL- KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, KRICFALUSI, MIKE ALLRED, BUCKLER, ’70s COVER ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER & LADRONN interviews, new URE TO COMMUNICATE, all-star lineup of pros discuss Jack’s grandkids, career of GALLERY in pencil, FAILURE DOGS, SUPER POWERS, MARK EVANIER column, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, Kirby’s influence on them! VINCE COLLETTA, more! TO COMMUNICATE, & more! SILVER STAR, ANIMATION favorite 2-PAGE SPREADS, Kirby/Allred cover. $8 US Kirby/Janson cover. $8 US work, more! $8 US MR. MIRACLE, more! $8 US Kirby / Timm cover. $8 US 2001 Treasury, more! $13 US

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MIN O C MAY TJKC #34: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! TJKC #35: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! TJKC #36: (84 pgs.) TABLOID TJKC #37: (84 pgs.) TABLOID JOE SIMON & CARMINE GREAT ESCAPES with MISTER ALL-THOR issue! MARK HOW TO DRAW THE KIRBY INFANTINO interviews, MARK MIRACLE, comparing KIRBY EVANIER column, SINNOTT & WAY issue! MARK EVANIER EVANIER column, unknown & HOUDINI, Kirby Tribute ROMITA JR. interviews, column, MIKE ROYER on ink1950s concepts, CAPTAIN Panel with EVANIER, EISNER, unseen KIRBY INTV., ART ing, KIRBY interview, ART AMERICA pencils, KIRBY/ BUSCEMA, ROMITA, ROYER, GALLERY, FAILURE TO COMM- GALLERY, analysis of Kirby’s TOTH cover, more! $13 US & JOHNNY CARSON! $13 US UNICATE, more! $13 US art techniques, more! $13 US

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TJKC #38: (84 pgs.) TABLOID KIRBY: STORYTELLER! MARK EVANIER column, JOE SINNOTT on inking, SWIPES, talks with JACK DAVIS, PAUL GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #39: (84 pgs.) FAN FAVORITES! MARK EVANIER column, MIKE ALLRED cover inks, INHUMANS, HULK, FOURTH WORLD, DINGBATS & NEWSBOY LEGION, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH

WN #1: (88 pgs.) MARK WN #2: (96 pgs.) ERIK WN #3: (80 pgs.) DEODATO WN #4: (80 pgs.) Interviews BAGLEY cover & interview, LARSEN cover & interview, JR. Hulk cover, intvs. & articles and lessons with WARREN BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE STAN BERKOWITZ on the by BRUCE JONES, AXEL ELLIS, HOWARD CHAYKIN, interviews, JOE QUESADA on Justice League cartoon, TODD ALONSO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, PAUL DINI, BOB SCHRECK, what editors really want, TOM ALCOTT on Samurai Jack, LEE KURT BUSIEK, FABIAN DIANA SCHUTZ, JOEY CAVADeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, NORDLING, ANNE D. BERN- NICIEZA, STEVEN GRANT, LIERI, STEVEN GRANT, DENNY more! $8 US STEIN, & more! $8 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US O’NEIL, more! $8 US

WN #5: (80 pgs.) Interviews and lessons by WILL EISNER, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI, BOB SCHRECK, FABIAN NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, JOEY CAVALIERI, DIANA SCHUTZ, DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US

TJKC #33: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-FANTASTIC FOUR issue!

MARK EVANIER column, miniinterviews with everyone who worked on FF after Kirby, STAN LEE interview, 40 pgs. of FF PENCILS, more! $13 US

THE JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: (100-Pages) The definitive checklist of Kirby’s work! Lists all his published comics in detail, plus portfolios, unpublished work, & more. It even cross-references reprints, making it easy to find inexpensive alternatives to the original comics! A must-have for eBay shoppers! $7 US

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WRITE NOW!, the mag for writers of comics, animation, & sci-fi, puts you in the minds of today’s top writers and editors.

Each issue features writing tips from pros on both sides of the desk, interviews, sample scripts, reviews, and more.

TJKC #32: (84 pgs.) 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

SUBSCRIBE! THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

Four-issue subscriptions (tabloid-size): $36 Standard, $52 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $64 Surface, $80 Airmail).

DRAW!

Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

NOTE: DRAW! contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing.

Intended for Mature Readers.

WRITE NOW!

Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 1812 Park Drive • Raleigh, NC 27605 USA • 919-833-8092 • FAX: 919-833-8023 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

ALTER EGO BACK ISSUES! Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail.

AE #2: (100 pgs.) All-new! AE #3: (100 pgs.) ALEX ROSS AE #4: (100 pgs.) 60 years of AE #5: (100 pgs.) JSA issue! AE #6: (100 pgs.) GENE AE #7: (100 pgs.) Companion AE #8: (100 pgs.) Bio of EISNER “SPIRIT” story, cover & interview, JERRY HAWKMAN & FLASH! ROY Intvs. with SHELLY MAYER, COLAN intv., how-to books by issue to the ALL-STAR COM- WALLY WOOD, ADKINS & KANE, FOX & SCHWARTZ on ORDWAY, BILL EVERETT, THOMAS remembers GIL GIL KANE, MART NODELL, STAN LEE & KANIGHER, ALL- PANION! J. SCHWARTZ intv., PEARSON intvs., KUBERT The Atom, L. LIEBER & JACK CARL BURGOS, Giant FAW- KANE, intvs. with KUBERT, GEORGE ROUSSOS, FCA with STAR SQUADRON, MAC JLA-JSA teamups, MAC intv., FCA w/ BECK, SWAYZE, BURNLEY intvs., KANIGHER, CETT (FCA) section with C.C. MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, FOX, BECK & SWAYZE, NEW RABOY section, FCA with RABOY, FCA with BECK & & ORDWAY, MR. MONSTER, FCA, new color BURNLEY & BECK, MARC SWAYZE, & FCA with BECK & SWAYZE, INFANTINO / ORDWAY wrap- BECK & SWAYZE, COLAN & SWAYZE, BUCKLER & BECK WOOD & KUBERT covers, more! $8 US KANE covers, more! $8 US more! $8 US KUBERT covers, more! $8 US around cover, more! $8 US RABOY covers, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US

AE #9: (100 pgs.) JOHN AE #10: (100 pgs) CARMINE AE #11: (100 pgs) Interviews AE #12: (100 pgs) GILL FOX AE #13 (100 pgs.) TITANS OF AE #14 (100 pgs.) JSA FROM AE #15 (108 pgs.) JOHN ROMITA intv. & gallery, plus INFANTINO intv. & art, never- with SYD SHORES, MICKEY on QUALITY COMICS, never- TIMELY/MARVEL Part Two! THE ’40s TO THE ’80s! MIKE BUSCEMA TRIBUTE ISSUE! ROY THOMAS’ dream proj- seen FLASH story, VIN SULLI- SPILLANE, VINCE FAGO, seen PAUL REINMAN Green JOE SIMON & MURPHY NASSER & MICHAEL T. BUSCEMA covers & interview, ects! FCA with BECK, VAN & MAGAZINE ENTER- MAGAZINE ENTERPRISES Lantern art, origins of ALL- ANDERSON covers, Silver Age GILBERT covers, intvs. with unseen art, ROY THOMAS on SWAYZE, & TUSKA, MR. PRISES, FRED GUARDINEER, Part Two, FCA with BECK, STAR SQUADRON, FCA, MR. AVENGERS section (with ORDWAY & LEE ELIAS, never- their collaborations, plus MONSTER, ROMITA & DICK AYERS, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SWAYZE, DON NEWTON, MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD, BUSCEMA, HECK, TUSKA, & seen 1940s JSA pgs., ’70s salute to KURT SCHAFFENJSA, & more! $8 US BERGER, & more! $8 US more! $8 US MONSTER, more! $8 US more! $8 US THOMAS) & more! $8 US GIORDANO covers! $8 US

AE #16: (108 pgs.) COLAN, AE #17: (108 pgs.) LOU FINE AE #18: (108 pgs.) STAN AE #19: (108 pgs.) DICK AE #20:(100 (108 pgs.)

TIMELY/ AE #21: (108 pgs.) IGER AE #22: (108 pgs.) EVERETT & ❏ #7: pgs.)

Companion BUSCEMA, ROMITA, SEVERIN overview & art, ARNOLD GOLDBERG interview & art, SPRANG interview & art, issue MARVEL INVADERS to thefocus, ALL-STAR COM- STUDIO with art by EISNER, KUBERT interviewed by GIL interviews, ALEX ROSS on DRAKE & MURPHY ANDER- plus KIRBY, DITKO, HECK, JERRY ROBINSON on FRED PANION! overview with KANE, FINE, MESKIN, ANDERSON, KANE & NEAL ADAMS, ROY JULIEKIRBY, SCHWARTZ Shazam!, OTTO & JACK SON interviews, plus EISNER, AYERS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, RAY, BOB KANE, CARMINE intv., ROBBINS, BOBteamups, DESCHAMPS JLA-JSA MAC CRANDALL, CARDY, EVANS, THOMAS on Sub-Mariner, BINDER, KURTZMAN, new CRANDALL, DAVIS & EVANS’ EVERETT, WALLY WOOD’S INFANTINO, ALEX TOTH, RABOY, intv., panel FINGER, FCA with BECK & “SHEENA” section, THOMAS COLAN, BUSCEMA, SEVERIN, ROSS & FRADON/SEVERIN non-EC action comics, FCA, Flash Gordon, FCA, KIRBY & WALLY WOOD, FCA, SPRANG SWAYZE, BINDER, FOX, & WEISINGER, BUCKLER & BECK on the JSA, FCA, DAVE WOOD, FCA, BECK & EVERETT STEVENS cover, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US FCA, raremore! art, more! covers, more! $8 US LOU FINE cover, more! $8 US SWAYZE covers, more! $8 US & RAY covers, more! $8 US covers, $8 US$8 US

Edited by ROY THOMAS

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#20:(108 (108pgs.) pgs.)

VINTIMELY/ SULLIAE #23: (108 pgs.) Two AE #24: (108 pgs.) NEW AE #25: (108 pgs.) JACK COLE AE #26: (108 pgs.) JOE AE #27: focus,“Lost” INVADERS VAN interview, KIRBY unseen Golden Age WONDER X-MEN intvs. with STAN LEE, & PLASTIC MAN! Brother SINNOTT interview, KIRBY MARVEL with 1948 KIRBY,NYKANE, HULK covers, CON WOMAN stories examined, COCKRUM, CLAREMONT, LEN DICK COLE interviewed, Cole and BUSCEMA art, IRWIN overview BOB DESCHAMPS with LEE, SCHWARTZ, BIRO, BOB FUJITANI intv. Archie/ WEIN, ARNOLD DRAKE, JIM celebrated by ALEX TOTH, DONENFELD, Superman art by ROBBINS, panel FCA, withALEX FINGER, KURTZMAN, TOTH, MLJ’s JOHN ROSENBERGER SHOOTER, MORT MESKIN THOMAS on All-Star Squadron SHUSTER, BORING, SWAN, intv., FOX, & WEISINGER, MR. MONSTER, covers by & VICTOR GORELICK intv., profiled, FCA, covers by #1, art by KOTZKY, FRADON, FCA, Mr. MONSTER, covers by BINDER, rare art, more! $8 $8 US US SINNOTT & BORING! $8 US FCA, BURNLEY & KIRBY! FCA, rare art, more! $8 US COCKRUM & MESKIN! $8 US FCA, cover by TOTH! $8 US

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

SUBSCRIBE TO AE! Twelve-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard, $96 First Class (Canada: $120, Elsewhere: $132 Surface, $180 Airmail).

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