Write Now! #5 by TwoMorrows Publishing

INSIDE: WILL EISNER! J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI!

$ 95

In the USA

JEPH LOEB & JIM LEE

M AG A ZI N E

August 2003

BOB SCHRECK DIANA SCHUTZ

DENNY O’NEIL GETTING A NOVEL PUBLISHED

FABIAN NICIEZA PAUL DINI

Number 12, Summer 2003 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Gorgeous, George! Hot on the heels of our first top-selling ALAN DAVIS volume comes MODERN MASTERS VOLUME TWO: GEORGE PÉREZ by our own ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON! This new series of trade paperbacks spotlights the best talent working in comics today, and ol’ George is a prime example, turning out some of his most gorgeous work ever! This squarebound book provides a compelling account of Pérez’ stellar career, including an all-encompassing interview! It also contains reams of rare and unseen artwork from George’s personal files, a deluxe sketchbook and gallery section, & more! This 128page Trade Paperback NOW SHIPS IN SEPTEMBER (Diamond forgot to list it in PREVIEWS for August!!), and is $17 POSTPAID in the US.

FREE WOOD! There’s still time to get your FREE COPY of the WALLACE WOOD CHECKLIST when you order either the Softcover or Hardcover edition of AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD directly from TwoMorrows by August 1! ATG is the most comprehensive book ever produced on Wood, done with the full cooperation and participation of his estate! It features a biography by friend BHOB STEWART, plus essays from a veritable Who’s Who of industry pros who knew and worked with Woody! It also includes hundreds of pages of Wood’s finest art, much unpublished and direct from his own files, courtesy of executor BILL PEARSON and ROGER HILL! The deluxe hardcover edition includes an EXTRA 16PAGE COLOR SECTION spotlighting Wood’s science-fiction paintings, plus custom endleaves and dustjacket! Order either and get the heavily illustrated 68-page WOOD CHECKLIST (documenting his comics, fanzine, advertising, and unpublished work, and more—normally $7 postpaid in the US) FREE! The 336-PAGE SOFTCOVER is $44 POSTPAID in the US, or $64 POSTPAID for the HARDCOVER. BOTH SHIP IN SEPTEMBER!

Coming Soon!

Raw Kirby!

Alter Ego #27 (August) CBA #25 (Now, final issue) DRAW! #7 (August) Jack Kirby Collector #39 (August) Write Now! #5 (Now!)

CAPT. VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION presents Jack Kirby’s original 1976 Captain Victory graphic novel (before it was broken up for the Pacific Comics series), reproduced from Jack’s uninked pencils! NOT SOLD IN STORES! All proceeds from this 52-page book go to scanning and preserving the 4000+ page Kirby pencil xerox archives! $8 POSTPAID in the US. NOW SHIPPING! AVAILABLE BY MAIL ONLY!

Got LEGIONitis?!

If you have a bad case of hankering for more info on the history of the Legion of Super-HeroesTM, we’ve got the cure! THE LEGION COMPANION is a 224-page trade paperback by Legion nut Glen Cadigan, sure to make your flight ring shiny! It offers a complete look at the history of the 30th Century’s greatest heroes, through interviews with DAVE COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIM STARLIN, JAMES SHERMAN, PAUL LEVITZ, KEITH GIFFEN, STEVE LIGHTLE, MARK WAID, JIM SHOOTER, JIM MOONEY, AL PLASTINO, and more, including rare and neverseen Legion art by the above, plus GEORGE PÉREZ, NEAL ADAMS, CURT SWAN, and others! It sports a new cover by DAVE COCKRUM and JOE RUBINSTEIN, unused Cockrum character designs and an UNUSED TIMBER WOLF STORY, introduction by JIM SHOOTER, and more! It’s only $29 POSTPAID in the US., and SHIPS IN SEPTEMBER!

Pull No Punches!

This month, we say “sayonara” to COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and “Whoa, Nellie!” to BACK ISSUE, the newest TwoMorrows mag! Work on BI is at a fevered pitch, getting ready for its debut in LATE OCTOBER (filling CBA's spot on our schedule)! The first issue of our new bi-monthly, edited by MICHAEL EURY (former editor and writer for DC and Dark Horse Comics, and author of our CAPTAIN ACTION book, plus our upcoming biography of DICK GIORDANO) focuses on “DC vs. Marvel”, and we’ll be covering their battles on the comics page and behind-the-scenes from the 1970s, ’80s, and on up to today! When you see what we’ve got planned for this slugfest, you’ll agree it’s the knockout new mag of the year! Stay tuned next issue for all the details and ordering info!

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

Capt. Victory: Graphite Edition (Now!) Wertham Was Right! (Now!) Life & Art of Murphy Anderson (Now!) The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (Now!) Against The Grain: MAD Artist Wallace Wood (September) Wallace Wood Checklist (September) Modern Masters V2: George Pérez (September) Legion Companion (September) COPYRIGHTS: Legion of Super-Heroes TM & ©2003 DC Comics. Captain Victory TM & ©2003 Jack Kirby Estate. Pérez characters TM & ©2003 CrossGen Ent. Inc. All others TM & ©2003 the respective artists.

SOT Goes Boom! BECK & SCHAFFENBERGER: SONS OF THUNDER, our split bio of two greats of the Golden & Silver Ages, is cancelled! Due to the tremendous amount of material we've tracked down on both artists, it would do fans a disservice to bundle them together into one book as originally planned. So we're splitting it up into two separate, longer books! Look for details on our expanded KURT SCHAFFENBERGER solo book by year's end, and a separate C.C. BECK book for 2004. Refunds to anyone who preordered SONS OF THUNDER have been sent out. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we're confident fans will be even happier with the end results!

CONTACTS:

John Morrow, publisher, JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR editor, & 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

SENSE OF WONDER just sold out, but you can find it at www.billschelly.com if you hurry! • I’d order COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE, PANEL DISCUSSIONS, and DRAW! #1 and #2 REAL SOON if I were you... • Fan of old Monster Mags? Watch for CHGGGWOM in October! • Roy’s ALL-STAR COMPANION VOL. TWO in the works! • MODERN MASTERS VOL. THREE? Do the initials B.T. mean anything to you? • Bye, y’all!

Tidbits:

All prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail.

Read excerpts from back issues and order from our secure online store at:

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M AG A ZI N E Issue #5

August 2003

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

The Spirit of Comics Interview with Will Eisner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 3

He Came From Hollywood Interview with J. Michael Straczynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 11

Keeper of the Bat-Mythos Interview with Bob Schreck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 20

Platinum Reflections Interview with Scott Mitchell Rosenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30

Ride a Dark Horse Interview with Diana Schutz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 38

All He Wants To Do Is Change The World Interview with Fabian Nicieza part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 47

A Man for All Media Interview with Paul Dini part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 63 Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 76

Books On Writing Nat Gertler’s Panel Two reviewed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 77

Nuts & Bolts Department Script to Pencils to Finished Art: BATMAN #616 Pages from “Hush,” Chapter 9 by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee & Scott Williams .page 16

Script to Finished Art: GREEN LANTERN #167 Pages from “The Blind, Part Two” by Benjamin Raab, Rich Burchett and Rodney Ramos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 26

Script to Thumbnails to Printed Comic: SUPERMAN ADVENTURES #40 Pages from “Old Wounds,” by Dan Slott, Ty Templeton, Michael Avon Oeming, Neil Vokes, and Terry Austin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 36

Script to Finished Art: AMERICAN SPLENDOR Pages from “Payback” by Harvey Pekar and Dean Hapiel. . . . . . . . . . .page 40

Script to Printed Comic 2: GRENDEL: DEVIL CHILD #1 Pages from “Full of Sound and Fury” by Diana Schutz, Tim Sale and Teddy Kristiansen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 44

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor in Chief Designer CHRISTOPHER DAY Transcriber STEVEN TICE Publisher JOHN MORROW COVER Penciled by TOMMY CASTILLO Inked by RODNEY RAMOS Colored by TOM ZIUKO

Script to Printed Comic 3: THE BLACKBURNE COVENANT #2 Pages from “The Noose” by Fabian Nicieza and Stefano Raffaele . . . .page 54

Comics 101: Classes 5 & 6 Notes from Dennis O’Neil for the writing and editing classes he teaches at DC Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 59

RISEN or The Twisted Tale of How My Horror Novel Got Published Jan Strnad tells you how his opus went from idea to printed book. . .page 73 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. Danny Fingeroth’s 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.

Special Thanks To ALISON BLAIRE, NACHIE CASTRO, PAUL DINI, WILL EISNER, PATTY JERES, FABIAN NICIEZA, ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, LEE NORDLING, MICHAEL AVON OEMING, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARIFRAN O’NEIL, ADAM PHILIPS, CHRIS POWELL, BEN REILLY, SCOTT MITCHELL ROSENBERG, JIM SALICRUP, BOB SCHRECK, DIANA SCHUTZ, AARON SEVERSON, VARDA STEINHARDT, NEIL VOKES, MICHAEL WRIGHT

WRITE NOW | 1

READ Now! Message from Danny Fingeroth, Editor in Chief

his is one rockin’ issue of Write Now! And if you’ve perused the cover or the contents page, you know why.

• Will Eisner’s here. Will’s one of the titans who invented the medium and the industry of comics. Period. No Will, no comics. He created one of the medium’s most significant—and fun!—characters, The Spirit. He’s pioneered comics’ use as a teaching tool, and codified his principles of the craft into cogent, inspiring books and lessons. He invented the graphic novel format. And he’s still writing and drawing comics today. Comics that you want to read. Comics that you have to read. Will took some of his valuable time to share some of his wisdom with me and with you. It’s one of the best interviews we’ve ever had in DFWN. I’m proud to present it. • We also have words of wisdom from one of the modern masters, J. Michael Straczynski. Joe’s busy re-imagining, yet staying faithful to, Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man series. His Supreme Power is sure to be the last word on superhero team comics. And you may have heard about his non-comics work, too. Stuff like Babylon 5 and ShowTime’s Jeremiah series. In this issue’s interview with Jim Salicrup, JMS gives his insights and opinions on his own work and on the state of narrative adventure fiction in general. • Then, Batman Group Editor Bob Schreck tells you of his amazing journey from the wilds of the Indy comics world to the top of the mainstream heap. It’s an inspiring look into the mind of one of the major decision-makers in comics editorial today. • Speaking of Jeremiah, which we were just a little above… we also hear from one of the people who brought that property to ShowTime’s—and America’s—attention, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Scott was the publisher of Malibu Comics, home of the Ultraverse and the early Image Comics—and now runs Platinum Studios, which specializes in taking comics properties into other media. Besides Jeremiah, Scott also brought Men In Black from page to screen. He has a lot of information to share. • Diana Schutz, Senior Editor at Dark Horse Comics, has been an influential force in comics for many years. Among the people she’s edited: Will Eisner, Frank Miller, and Harvey Pekar. Her career is a great example of integrity mixed with eclecticism. She loves what she does, and it comes through. Diana has a rare view from both outside and inside the media mainstream. • And, of course, we have the power-packed conclusions to the Fabian Nicieza and Paul Dini interviews. These two shy fellas both were able to think of some more things to tell us about. Pretty dang smart stuff, too.

Our Nuts & Bolts how-to’s this issue are pretty amazing, too. • What’s the hottest comic today? Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s Batman. What’s in Nuts & Bolts? Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s Batman. • There’s some way cool Green Lantern scripting from Ben Raab. • Dan Slott, Ty Templeton and Neil Vokes show us some great Superman Adventures pages. • Writer Jan Strnad (remember his Sword of The Atom?) is a novelist these days. His tale of how his horror novel got published will raise the hair on the back of your head. But don’t worry—it has a happy ending. • And we’ve got two more of Dennis O’Neil’s story class lesson outlines. The Dean of Comics Writers reveals more of his secrets. Read and learn. That’s this issue. Now, a few words about what’s coming up. After talking about it for months, I’m finally ready to unleash our “mystery feature,” Write Now: In Depth! It’s a detailed study of what goes into making a comic, with articles, interviews and essays by and about an entire issue of a comic. For our premiere of this exciting feature, we’ll be dissecting an issue of Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. Nothing like this has ever been done before. We get into the creators’ minds and see just how the issue came to be. I’m really excited about this feature. More importantly—so are Brian and Michael. And wait’ll you see what creators we have lined up for future In Depth studies! Also next issue, among other gems, will be an exciting interview with Mark Waid, conducted by Jimmy Palmiotti. And Jim Salicrup will be here doing an intriguing interview with Don McGregor. SHAMELESS PLUG DEPARTMENT: I just wanted to mention that I’ll be teaching a course in Comics and Graphic Novel Writing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies this fall. It’ll be on Wednesday nights, starting September 24th. Check out NYU’s website (www.nyu.edu/scps.nyu) for more details and for info on how to get a catalogue and register. And next time, I’ll tell you about the book I’m writing for Continuum Publishing: Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society. (Stan Lee’s writing the Foreword.) Okay, I’ve blabbed on enough. Start reading, and— Write Away!

Danny Fingeroth 2 | WRITE NOW

The Spirit of Comics!

The WILL EISNER Interview Conducted via telephone March 26, 2003 by Danny Fingeroth Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Will Eisner

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

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

communicate that vision to us. It is essentially a tragic vision, though not a morose one, and that may be why he no longer does melodrama; in the world that Will has been presenting for the last quarter-century, problems are not solved by violent action and big, fluffy endings are impossible. This is our world, focused and purified and magnified, displayed for our amusement… “There aren’t many analogies, either inside or outside cartooning, for what Will does. We’re not discussing caricature here—rather, something like caricature’s smarter older brother, a graphic strategy that not only exaggerates the exterior but uses exaggeration to suggest the interior.”

To which allow me to add: Will is one of the few titans about whom it can truly be said that, without him, there would be no comics artform and no comics industry. It was one of my life’s honors to conduct this phone interview with him. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Will. What are you working on right now? I know you’re in the middle of a project. WILL EISNER: I just completed a book that Doubleday is publishing called Fagin the Jew. It will be published in September, I believe. I just sent off the final art the day before yesterday. DF: That’s not part of the DC Library? WE: DC lost the bid on it. They wanted it, but Doubleday made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. DC always gets “first look” at any graphic novel I do. DF: And are you starting something new now? WE: Well, I always have... I have a file here that says “do me now.” [laughter] I’m just starting another book now. DF: My understanding is that you don’t like to talk about projects you’re working on. WE: I generally don’t, and the reason for it is it dilutes itself if I talk about it, because while I’m working on it, I’m developing ideas and so forth. It just dilutes itself in my mind. DF: At this point, how many hours a week do you devote to work? WE: I work pretty steadily. When I’m not traveling, I work from nine to five. DF: Wow. WE: Every day, five days a week. DF: What, you take the weekends off? How dare you? [laughs] EISNER | 3

Pencils for a page from Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract With God. This art is among the unpublished pieces to be printed in Dark Horse’s upcoming hardcover volume The Will Eisner Sketchbook. [©2003 Will Eisner.]

WE: My wife says Saturday and Sunday are her days. DF: Well, that seems to work for you. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions that range from the pretentious to the picayune. So if there’s anything that you think is too stupid to answer— WE: I’ll give you stupid answers. DF: Thank you. [laughs] Well, okay. You’ve been doing comics and graphic storytelling for an amazingly long time and your stuff is still wonderfully fresh, innovative and exciting. Would you say there is an overall theme or purpose or direction in your work, from the beginning to now? Or has it changed over the years? WE: Well, the direction has always been to explore areas that haven’t been explored before. I guess that’s the way to put it. I believe that this medium is a literary form and that it has not been used as fully as it could. So all of my experience, all the things I’ve been involved in since 1950, certainly, have been an effort to employ this medium whose language is sequential art—that’s the medium that we’re talking about—in areas that it had not tried before. For example, when I was in the military between 1942 and 1946, I realized that the medium is usable as a teaching tool, very effective as a tool. So I sold the military on the use of that. It was very successful. I went back 4 | WRITE NOW

to doing The Spirit, by 1950 I realized I had done all I wanted to do on The Spirit, and the opportunity to expand into teaching material with sequential art presented itself. So I started a company producing instructional material in sequential art, or comics, as you might call it. It lasted for about 25 years, and then in 1972, ‘73, I stumbled into Phil Seuling’s conventions and discovered that the underground artists—I’m talking about Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman and Spain Rodriguez and Denis Kitchen and a couple of others—were really using comics as a pure, literary form, in that they were addressing the establishment mores and morals of the time, and that encouraged me to go back to the area where I wanted to spend my life, which was producing comics or sequential art for adult readers, with grown-up subject matter. DF: Now, the stuff you’d been doing in the interim twenty years was in comics format but in an educational milieu? WE: Yes, what you might call the comics format. Actually, it was the sequential art format. It is the arrangement of images in a sequence to tell a story, and whether you do them on three tiers or two tiers, with nine or six panels to a page, is irrelevant. It’s how you arrange the images in an intelligent and readable sequence to convey an idea or tell a story that is really the heart of the definition, if you will, of what I want to do. And in 1975—or ‘76, I guess, somewhere in there—I began doing what I believed was a novel form addressed to adult readers. And out of that came A Contract with God. DF: You’d always aimed at adult readers, even with The Spirit. WE: Yes. Writing for young readers was one of the problems that I had during the Eisner and Iger Studio years, and one of the reasons I went in for The Spirit—which was quite a gamble at the time, for various reasons. I wanted to talk to an adult audience. A newspaper readership would give me that. I was always very impatient talking to the very young readers. I didn’t really know what to say to them. [laughs] DF: You mean talk to them beyond just the basics of superhero action/adventure? WE: Well, candidly, superheroes are one-dimensional characters. You can’t do very much with them. And life experiences are filled with story material. Everybody’s concerned with survival and the life experience is concerned with that and how to deal with it. So it’s a wide-open area, there. DF: Now, in different hands, these can be very bleak subjects, but you certainly seem to do them joyously. WE: Well...that’s an interesting point you just made, calling them “bleak.” Every once in a while people do say to me, “Your stories are bleak” or “there’s a noir quality to them.” That’s French, you know. [laughter] I don’t see it that way. First of all, I’m not a moralist. I’m not really writing books to define human morals. I consider myself doing reportage, reporting to my fellow man the things I see. I see a man lying in the street, nobody paying attention to him is something I want to turn to my fellow man and say, “Hey, look at that, look at that. He’s lying there, nobody’s paying attention.” The other thing is, I think it’s necessary to explore the purpose of life. That’s what drives us in living. In one of the books I did, there’s a story called “The Big Hit.” At the end of the story, I have this one guy saying to the other fellow, “Living is a risky business.” Really, the whole business of living and survival is very much a part of how we think as human beings, so if you can talk about that, it has resonance, it means something. It’s useful. What I want to be is useful, obviously.

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

them changed when you “came back”—what it seemed to the public was coming back—with A Contract with God and so on. WE: Well, one thing we don’t realize is that the artists and writers, like everybody else, grow. They grow up. [laughter] That’s a very interesting point, however, because one of the reasons I never really wanted to do a daily strip was, I discovered that daily strips would not allow the artist to experiment and grow, necessarily. He remained pretty much the way he was when he first started. If you look at the daily strips over the years, the ones that have survived for 50 years, they’re pretty much the same as they were when they started, and there’s no room for experimentation. The joy, for me... the truth of the matter is, you’ve got to love what you’re doing, you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing in order to do it well. If you don’t like what you’re doing, you don’t do it well. Nothing good is ever done without enthusiasm, really. And for me, the opportunity to cut new paths is to try new things. The real excitement for me is to do something that nobody has ever done before, if I can do it. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to invent the wheel, because somebody has already done that, but... [laughs] DF: There’s steel-belted radials, though. WE: [laughs] Okay. But the point I’m trying to make is that the excitement in any medium is to explore new territory, with all the risk that’s involved. And it’s a great risk, because you could spend a whole year working on something only to discover that it’s a bomb. [laughter] DF: To me, looking at your work over the years, one significant change is that you yourself describe as going from a cinematic style to almost more of a theatrical awareness, where people are more “on stage.” WE: That’s an interesting point, very perceptive of you, because I have always been influenced largely by live theater. And the reason for that is that live theater is closest to reality, and all the work I do is pressing for reality. All my work starts out by saying, “Now, believe me…” Even The Spirit was an attempt to create a believable hero, even though he wore a mask, which was kind of an idiot thing. [Danny laughs] I tried to make him believable. Now, the cinematic stuff I did early on was really a practical approach, because while you’re writing, in this medium, anyway, you’ve got to be aware of the fact that reading patterns are influenced by other media, and in the ‘30s, movies came along and began to influence reading patterns. They added to the reader’s understanding a whole new visual language, influenced graphic literacy, if you will. Movies began using the camera as the reader, so to speak. Or the audience became the camera, and the camera would look through somebody’s armpit, or look down from the ceiling. You had bird’s-eye-views, you had worm’s-eye-views, and so forth. Those EISNER | 5

are part of the language they were introducing. So I employed them, because I’m always eager to reach my reader, and this was a new visual language. Now, when I started back into the graphic novel, I moved back into the live theater/real stage format, which I’ve always found to be the most sure way of communicating with my audience. One other thing I should say is that live theater has a sense of reality that movies do not have. You sit in the theater and people are doing something on the stage, they’re real people, they’re real. You are looking in on a real incident. In movies, you’re looking at something that only seems to be real. It’s an artificial reality. DF: Comics can mimic film or they can mimic theater. You’ve taken those elements and, in at least two eras, created a whole new vocabulary for people. What’s the appeal of the visual in presenting your message? You have things you want to say to say and messages you want to get out. Why not straight prose? What’s the appeal of the picture in there? WE: That’s an interesting point. Prose is a different medium. I write with pictures. Now, when people ask me what I do, to answer it as quickly as I can, I say, “I’m a writer. I write with pictures.” This is my medium, and I think there is an advantage to sequential art, because, first of all, it communicates more rapidly than text alone. Text cannot be dismissed, because text is capable of revealing the great depth that single images or static images cannot do. And that’s one of the challenges of this medium. This is something that’s challenging me all the time, how to better transmit internalization—which text can do. For example, someone writing with prose or text alone can say, “Sam Brown entered the room. His whole life experience taught 6 | WRITE NOW

him that there was danger here, and he sensed it” and so forth, and it goes on and on. Well, doing that visually, you are unable to step aside and tell all about Sam Brown’s long life experience and the dangers he’s been through. So these are the challenges that text deals with. But, nonetheless, we’re living in a time, what I call a “visual era,” in which text alone is under siege. DF: That’s a polite way of putting it. WE: Well, I think it’s about as accurate as you can be. Whenever you try to describe something, you have a tough time trying to get an accurate word. [laughs] The era we’re living in now is characterized by the fact that a huge amount of information is being poured out on us at this geometric rate of growth, and we don’t have time to read. I remember when I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts, I was trying to get my students to read, and I discovered that most of them had not read the novels that I was forced to read as a kid. They weren’t even reading short stories, which sort of went out of fashion. Used to be very fashionable in the thirties, which really taught me how to write this kind of stuff, because I was a great reader of short stories. But the times we’re living in, communication is largely done by imagery. And I’ve got to be conscious of that and aware of it. I believe that is what I feel I’m providing in working in this medium, what everybody working in what you call “comics” is providing. I hate the word “comics,” it’s a misnomer. But it’s like “Kleenex,” you know? You don’t say facial tissue… so it has stuck. DF: I guess the other shift I noticed in your work over time—and again, I’m sure I’m not the only one nor the first one, but I thought I’d mention it—is that in The Spirit, you had to get your personal statements in as metaphor through the characters, through clever storytelling devices. Now you go directly to the personal and to the memoir. But in other interviews—and I’m sorry to throw quotes at you, but I’ve been reading nothing but interviews with you for three days [laughs]—you’ve talked about how painful it is to delve into these memories and put them on paper… WE: Oh, it is. DF: But there must be some appeal to it for you to keep doing it. What’s exciting about that process for you? WE: I don’t know how other writers work, but I can only write about things that I know. Either things I’ve seen firsthand, experienced personally, or received maybe through a third party. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I’ve been unable to write science fiction stories is because I’ve never met an aliens from another planet. I don’t, know any androids. DF: [laughs] As far as you know. WE: [laughs] I don’t know, maybe I have. Some of the publishers I ran into very early on were probably from another planet. So I prefer to write from what I know. And it allows me to do some things which are very realistic and very understandable by my readers. For example, I’ve always used climate or rain—which, by the way, Harvey Kurtzman used to tease me about and call it “Eisnerspritz.” DF: [laughs] There should be a TM after that. WE: [laughs] I should copyright that, I guess! People understand climate, they understand weather, they understand rain. Everybody has felt rain, so if I can employ that in the process of conveying an idea or telling a story, I do that. So as far as philosophy is concerned, the first time I became aware that I could possibly, in this medium, deal with a philosophical idea or a morality concept was in The Spirit, with the story of

Gerhard Schnobble, a little guy who could fly. I did that and to my surprise it worked out well, it came across well, and it got a good response. And I was pleased. And it survives. As a matter of fact, the story has remained memorable among the Spirit stories. People keep constantly talking to me about it. In Denmark, there’s a building wall with a painting of Gerhard Schnobble on it. A city-financed mural. DF: And yet, I don’t think today you would do a story about a guy who thought he could fly who gets caught in a shootout. Today you seem much more involved in recounting— WE: Real stories, yes. The Schnobble story was really a philosophical statement, if you will. But now I prefer to deal with reality. DF: But reality often from, say, the ’30s, ‘40s. ‘50s. WE: Well, those are the years that I know. But apparently it doesn’t really matter, because the principles of the thing stay the same. The last book I did, the one that came out last year, The Name of the Game, which is a discussion on the whole idea of marriage and so forth, spanned two generations. Dropsie Avenue was an attempt to do a history of a neighborhood, that dealt with generations. But, as a matter of fact, I prefer to do things set in the past because that will not change, where today is liable to change on me. [laughs] DF: Is there some inner drive you feel to get this down on paper, to record a certain time and place in history? WE: No, no, it’s just an environment that’s very comfortable for me to write in. DF: Because my parents are from the Bronx of those years, where many of your stories are set, it’s fascinating for me to see what in your work intersects with stories I’ve heard from them and from my other relatives. WE: We all want to know how it was. In fact, in doing the autobiography Heart of the Storm, I remember my father telling me about his life in Vienna. He was a young painter in Vienna, an artist. And I was so eager to find out how it was then. As a matter of fact, many years ago I stopped off in Vienna when I was traveling around Europe on a business trip just to walk the street, the Prada, that he walked on. Just to get the feel of it. It’s a thing to do. I know other people do the same thing. I know Art Spiegelman went to Europe and I think he visited one of the concentration camps just to get a feel of what it felt like, what it looked like. I think one has to do that to convey a sense of honesty in your work. DF: This is just a picky note, so feel free to ignore this question. I can understand changing the names of real-life based people in your stories, but why do you change the names of streets and neighborhoods that exist or existed? Just so nobody will give you a hard time about not getting an exact likeness? WE: No, no. Because... It’s the way Faulkner created his own county...it’s almost a metaphor. It’s “an example of.” And again, it enables me to connect with the reader. If I use an actual street, with a name that truly existed, I’d lose some of the intimacy I would expect from the reader. So if it’s a street that’s got a fictitious name, it could be a street that he remembers or she remembers. As you can see, my entire preoccupation is to connect with the reader. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like to work in color. I prefer to work in a single line in black and white. I’ll sometimes print my books in brown because I think it’s a way of making it softer and easier to read, but I prefer not to work in color. DF: But The Spirit was published in color. WE: Well, that was necessary in those days. My attitude with

The Spirit was totally different than my attitude today. DF: Are there authors who influenced you years ago and today? Anybody you can cite as a particular influence? WE: As far as cartoonists are concerned, Milton Caniff was a very strong influence on me. Segar’s Popeye taught me a lot. Usually, the guys who influence me are people that I try to learn from. For example, Krazy Kat by George Herriman I discovered very early. As a matter of fact, I came upon him while I was selling newspapers in the street during the Depression, and his stuff was being published by King Features, in the Hearst papers. And I was blown away by that. I thought, “Wow, this is great!” And I’ve always remembered that he had the capacity of engaging the reader in a way that enabled him to avoid or eliminate panels. As a matter of fact, he was rarely consistent in his backgrounds. One scene had a moon and a tower, and the next scene, they were still talking in the same dialogue, but it was a rock of some kind. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. So those three authors really taught me an awful lot. I learned an awful lot about storytelling from Caniff. And of course I had many years of reading short stories. O. Henry was a tremendous influence on me. So was Saki, the French author... DF: Guy DeMaupassant? WE: DeMaupassant. And I read a lot of Russian short stories. The short stories of the ‘30s were really tremendously influ-

ential, and really, literally, taught me how to write The Spirit. Remember, doing a seven-page complete story every week was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. [laughter] I discovered something early on. I started off with an eight-pager and then I discovered I was working at a rate of a page a day. [laughter] But I discovered there were only seven days in the week. I had to cut back to seven-page stories. DF: And you filled out the other nine pages with other people’s stuff? WE: Yeah. DF: Can you talk a little bit about how you create a story? From what I’ve read, you don’t use a typewriter or a computer. WE: I don’t use a typewriter. I do the text and pictures at the same time. DF: Do you do an outline in longhand first? WE: Sometimes I will. I’ll do like a laundry list of— I’ll start off with the ending. Before I begin, I know what the ending will be. I work my way up to the ending, which is my way of doing the story. DF: Does the ending ever change as you’re working your way toward it? WE: The ending doesn’t change, but I will alter the path with which I get to the ending, because as things happen, they suggest another happening which works into it. I usually prepare a pencil rough first, a readable dummy, from which I sell the book, actually. For example, at one time I had about four or five publishers in Europe and a couple publishers in this country and I would send out a dummy to them. Nobody really knows which you read first in a sequence, whether you see the pictures first or read the text first. DF: I can’t believe nobody’s done a study on that. WE: I believe you see the images first and then go to the text, because I think this is how it works in real life. For example, just visualize a man lying on the street and a fellow comes over to him and says, “Charlie, are you all right?” He looks at him first, bends down, and then says, “Charlie, are you all right?” It comes afterward. For that reason, for example, I don’t like what I call “umbilical balloons.” Harvey Kurtzman and I used to argue about that all the time because he liked to do balloons and text and have two or three balloons coming out of the same person. And I believe that’s all wrong, I don’t think it

works. So each of us has our own style and technique and preference. A lot of people are using umbilical balloons, but I don’t use them. DF: Have you ever drawn from anybody else’s script? WE: I have difficulty writing from a script that belongs to somebody else. The problem is, I would probably change it. [laughs] No, the way I work is I have a kind of a roadmap that I’ve set up in my mind, or I have a list. To give you an example of how it might work, say, would be the case of the Spirit story where this man comes from another planet, finds it difficult to live here, and then returns to the other planet. This was the basis of the story, and I wrote down a whole list of steps. How he arrives, he gets a job in the weather bureau, and my next step, he meets this lady, and so forth. And at the end of the book, he goes off to another planet. All that’s listed down. Then I start writing my stories. Now, each page for me is a megapanel. I try to contain a number of cohesive incidents on a single page so the page has a containment in itself. But that’s also because I’m very conscious of the technology of the reading of this medium, so, for example, I believe that when you turn a page, you lose the reader for a millisecond. Unless you recognize that, you’re going to lose the thread of the story for them. I used to warn my students about the business of having someone on the last panel of page one, let’s say, start saying, “I am going to...” And on the next page he says, “Chicago.” You lose the reader in that millisecond, as they’re turning the page. That has to do with the technology of the medium. Now, that may change when we arrive at the point where all comics will be displayed electronically, over the Internet, so you’ll have a totally different kind of thing. DF: Do you think that’s going to happen? WE: Well... that’s been a long-running debate between me and Scott McCloud over this subject. A friendly debate, but an enthusiastic one, anyway. And I believe that what’s going to happen is that comics—or cartoons as still images, which print lives on—will become animated. So what you’re going to wind up with is animated cartoons. DF: Something like the “webtoons” that were popular, or were trying to be popular, a few years ago? WE: I don’t know what they were, what are webtoons?

Eisner adapts Cervantes. Panels from The Last Knight: An Introduction to Don Quixote, one of the series of graphic novels he’s done for NBM in recent years, adapting classic literature, fairy tales, and folk tales. [©2003 Will Eisner.] 8 | WRITE NOW

DF: You know, like the stuff that Stan Lee was doing with Stan Lee Media. WE: Oh, yeah, when he got into flash-animation? DF: Right, the flash-animation stuff. WE: They’ll progress into pure animation, which is being produced in Hollywood today. So I think still images, which is what comics in print deals with all the time, loses something when it’s projected over an image through the Internet. They’ve been trying to do that, a lot of guys have done that, and it doesn’t work as far as I’m concerned. DF: Well, it’s a different medium. WE: So that’s where it’s going. I’m not very interested in movies. I’ve never really been interested in getting involved in the production of a movie. In fact, I’ve never really been eager to have any of my work made into a movie. I’m satisfied with the way it’s been done with print. I love print, and as far as I’m concerned, as long as I am able to work I will continue to work in print. I’ve had offers, as you can imagine, from time to time, to do a movie, to get involved in making a movie, and was really not interested At that time.Of course, one should never say never… eh? DF: Because of positive things about print, or negative things about Hollywood...? WE: No, no. Well, Hollywood’s a story all in itself. It’s because I have really not yet licked print altogether. There’s a lot yet to conquer. DF: Well, if you haven’t, nobody has. Take my word for it. [laughs] You have had, certainly, a long and remarkable career. I imagine there have been setbacks along the way. Any advice for people about how to deal with career setbacks that would feel like impossible obstacles? WE: Stay with it. Don’t quit. Have faith in yourself. Believe in what you’re doing. Failures are a way of learning things. As a matter of fact, I was telling a story, last week I was speaking to a group of librarians and someone asked me the same question. One of the difficulties of this business is that you have to learn to deal with rejection. Every kid coming out of school, sooner or later, will walk into an art director’s office or a publisher’s office and the editor will look at his work and say, “now, don’t take this personally... but this is the stupidest, crappiest work I’ve ever seen.” DF: “But don’t take it personally.” [laughs] WE: “Don’t take it personally.” Well it happened to me, I remember, as a young kid. I showed my work to a magazine and the editor looked at this work and laughed and said,

“These are the stupidest faces I have ever seen.” And I walked out of there very dejected. And sitting out in the waiting room, waiting to see this editor next after me, was Ludwig Bemmelman the famous illustrator. A foreigner. And he said to me in broken English, “Don’t vorry, boy, somebody vill like your vork.” DF: [laughs] Did he look at your work? WE: No. I was carrying my big black portfolio, looking like the world had fallen in on me. DF: Now who was this guy? WE: Ludwig Bemmelman. He was a very famous book illustrator and painter. DF: It was wonderful that he said that to you. WE: Yeah, it was very encouraging. I walked out feeling a little better. DF: Any books or courses that you recommend to aspiring comics writers and artists? I imagine Comics and Sequential Art. [laughs] WE: Well, I would recommend that. I think that’s a very good book. [laughs] And Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, too. Those books, by the way, are different from Scott McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics, which is very important, in my opinion. Scott’s book is addressed to the broad public, and explains the phenomenon of comics, the technology and the structure of it and so forth. What I tried to do with Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling is provide something for someone who is working in the medium or teaching it. So I suggest those. But there are lots of good books... For those who want to learn anatomy—because it’s very important to be able to manipulate the human figure if you’re going to talk about it and write about it—I think the anatomy books by George Bridgman are very, very valuable. And they’re cheap and easy for you to get. Everything I know about

thing I’ve had to say. Listen, your questions are good, very provocative. DF: Thank you. That means a lot. Your answers have been incredible and inspired many of the questions. Before we wrap this up, is there anything you want to plug? I know you’re going to be speaking at the Library of Congress soon. WE: I’ll be going there next week. DF: That’s very exciting. WE: Your article will come out long after that. The only thing I want to plug, I think, is Fagin the Jew, which is being published by Doubleday this fall. DF: Okay. And maybe when I send you the transcript, after you’ve done the Library, maybe we can do one or two follow-ups by e-mail or something just so you can tell me about that, if you have the time, because that’s a very exciting thing. WE: Well, I’ll be talking about graphic novels. DF: Are you excited about speaking there? WE: What I’m doing now is accepting invitations to talk about the graphic novel. At long last the graphic novel has arrived. It’s being discovered by libraries around the world, all over the country. And I’m very eager to talk about that. I want to correct something. A lot of the people, librarians and other publishers, people who publish or buy graphic novels—I’m not talking about the readers—regard a graphic novel as nothing more than a collection of comics with a flat back. If it’s thick, if it’s got more than a hundred pages, it’s a graphic novel. So I’ve been running around trying to correct that and point out that the graphic novel is a literary form. It is written with a structure very similar to the classic novel. As a matter of fact, Signal From Space, a book I wrote... I wrote that book not because I wanted to write about science fiction, but I wanted to prove or show or demonstrate that a graphic novel could be written following the disciplines of a standard text novel, prose novel DF: The structural disciplines, you mean? WE: Yeah, the same structural disciplines. It really worked. Anyway, that’s my conclusion. DF: Thanks for your time, Will, and for sharing your knowledge. And for all the great work. WE: Thank you, Danny.

anatomy I learned from him. I took a course with him back at the Art Students League in the ’30s. And writing, I think everybody who wants to write should read short stories. Go back to the old short stories of the thirties, wonderful things. I’ve always believed that the best comic book, graphic novel, or sequential art, whatever you want to call it, is done by the same man who writes and draws it. And barring that, I think that someone who writes should be able to think graphically when he writes a book, in order to deal with the artist. As a matter of fact, I was talking about this with Neil Gaiman once, and he told me that he writes with the skills and the style and the talents of a specific artist in mind. So before he starts writing, he wants to know who the artist will be. So that’s a good tip. DF: Of course, if you’re Neil Gaiman, you can have some say in that. A lot of people just get whoever they’re assigned by the editor. WE: Well, no, I think even for a young writer who’s just starting to work at one of the major houses certainly, it would be in order to say, “Who is going to illustrate this, so I can write it better for this person” There’s some guys who can’t draw horses. So why do a story that involves a lot of horses? [laughter] DF: This is true, this is true. Anything you’ve never been asked? Anything you’ve always wanted to say for publication that you’ve never been asked about? [laughs] WE: Gee, no. I’ve been talking about this medium so long that I think I’ve gotten out every- Advice from a father to a son from Eisner’s autobiographical graphic novel, To The Heart of the Storm.

THE END

He Came From Hollywood!

The J. Michael Straczynski Interview Conducted via e-mail by Jim Salicrup May 27, 2003

M. Straczynski is the creator of the acclaimed Babylon 5 television series and is the head writer of the current ShowTime hit series Jeremiah. In comics, he’s in the midst of a much-talked about and admired run as writer on Amazing Spider-Man, and is about to launch Supreme Power. His Rising Stars and Midnight Nation series are also unique and acclaimed takes on superheroes. Besides this interview, you can find JMS’s thoughts on the craft and business of writing in his The Complete Book of Scriptwriting.

JIM SALICRUP: It seems you’ve been involved with comics and superheroes for a long time. Were you a comicbook fan as a kid? J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI: Absolutely. I’ve noted elsewhere that I learned Jim Salicrup has been on the comics scene for many years, my sense of morality, my including stints as editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man line and sense of right and Associate Publisher/Editor in Chief at Topps Comics. Jim, of wrong, from comics. I A portrait of the writer by Michael Zulli, done for the course, also wrote the legendary Sledge Hammer Limited learned to read from Series, amongst other comics, and is on the advisory board of comics, more than I ever author’s bio on their graphic novel Delicate Creatures. [Art ©2003 Michael Zulli.] the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). did at school. I must’ve been about ten when I got my first comic, and I was doomed Jim was able to corral JMS and get him to share some info from that point onward. I’ve always been a huge comics fan, with the Write Now readership. When a guy like JMS speaks, and still consider myself such. Growing up, my icons were, in you’d do well to listen. Or to read, as the case may be. order, Superman, then Spider-Man. So it’s nice to be now giving —DF back on the latter. JS: How did Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, the super-hero kids TV show, come about? And were you involved with the Neal Adams drawn comicbooks? What did you learn from the experience? JMS: They called and set up a meeting. I thought it could be fun, and did it. I learned a lot about CGI in its infancy, and took my first steps in creating a very loosely constructed arc for the season, and for the whole series, with my associate Larry DiTillio. And no, no involvement with the Neal Adams books. JS: You included a superhero, Captain Steel, on a powerful episode of Jeremiah. What was the inspiration for that? JMS: It was really something of a nod to my own background as a fan, and it seemed to me that in a time where only the kids survived after the adults had been wiped out, that those raised on comics—like myself—who went a little wonky might look to superheroes to some day save them, even if that meant becoming the heroes themselves. So it seemed a logical story to write. JS: Do you feel there’s a legitimate place for superheroes in pop culture? What’s your reaction to those that dismiss superheroes as nothing more than perverts in tights? JMS: I absolutely feel there’s a place, but my Spidey & Captain America in need of a good battle cry. Panels from the JMS-written Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2 #50 with art by John Romita, Jr. & Scott Hanna . [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] STRACZYNSKI | 11

feelings on the matter don’t enter into it. Whatever the literati might want to believe, superheroes are and have long been a part of our pop culture. We can’t just decide one day to expunge them or pretend they’re not there. The term pop culture means popular culture, the culture of the mass audience, and that’s comics as much as anything else. As for those who see only “perverts in tights,” there’s an old saying... a book is like a mirror, if an ass peers in, you can’t expect an apostle to peer out. JS: Your book, The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, offers the most common sense and practical advice for writers I’ve ever seen, while still remaining inspirational. Do you encounter wouldbe writers who are frustrated that your book doesn’t offer any “secret formula” for writers to follow? Do you plan to add a chapter on comicbook scripting in future editions? JMS: No, I think they understand what the purpose of the book is, and it says right up front that no formula is offered. If they want formulas, there are plenty of other books out there that offer such things. They don’t work, but if it comforts people to think they do, who am I to gainsay them? As for a future chapter on comics writing... it’s something I’ve considered, and the publisher has asked about it a few times, but I don’t feel I’ve been doing this long enough to be able to hold or offer an opinion. It would be presumptuous in the extreme. When I’ve been doing this for a few more years,

and can put two cogent thoughts together on the subject that can help other people, I’ll consider it, not before. JS: Many comicbook writers dream of breaking into TV and film writing, yet you’re part of a new wave that are getting into comics after having considerable success in TV or film. What’s the appeal to you personally of writing and or creating comics? JMS: It’s pretty much the same appeal of anything I do: I do stuff I like to do. I’m a comics fan, so for me, the idea of doing a comic is just Straczynski’s book The Complete Book of nifty-keen. I’m a big believer in Scriptwriting. [©2003 Synthetic Worlds, Ltd. the notion of “find what and J. Michael Straczynski.] interests you, what moves you to passion, and do it.” Because if you’re sufficiently motivated, and have any ability at it, sonuvagun, nine times out of ten you can make a living at it. Just follow your passion. The rest will attend to itself. I love comics. Always have. So for me, this is a dream gig. Especially to be doing Spidey. JS: When I was Editor and Chief at Topps Comics, Arne Starr pitched Babylon 5 to me as a potential comicbook series we could publish. I think this was back before the show was on the air, and based on what he told me and the few clips he had, I was very interested. Warner Bros., however, had a deal with its sister company DC Comics which gave them first shot at it, so they got to publish Babylon 5. What was that experience like, seeing your creation turned into a comic book series? JMS: It was a great opportunity which destructed and became a fairly wretched experience. They (DC) treated it as just a tossoff licensing thing and never gave it the support or sophistication that the series merited. When they began rewriting me— because when someone else was writing, I had my contractual approval, but when I was writing, I couldn’t have approval over my own material because that wasn’t allowed at DC by policy— I drew a line in the sand, Paul Levitz drew his line, and somewhere between those two lines we said, “Screw it.” I’d rather have it not done than done poorly. JS: How did your relationship with Top Cow begin? How is it different creating series for comics as opposed to TV? What are your current plans for Midnight Nation and Rising Stars? JMS: I went to Top Cow with the idea for Rising Stars, which did very well for them. Creatively, they left me alone and let me do whatever I wanted, which was refreshing and fun. Ditto for Midnight Nation, which—until Supreme Power came along—I considered the best thing I’d done in comics to this point. (It helps enormously that Gary Frank was/is involved in both projects.) Midnight Nation is done, and published in TPB form, so that’s over, and there’s discussion about a film, but we’ll see. The fate of Rising Stars currently is pending, given some issues between myself and Top Cow that have to be resolved before I can finish that series. JS: After reading The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, it’s impossible not to be aware of all the behind-the-scenes technical

Man’s Pals. So I felt it was vital to pare away the majority of that and launch into a re-exploration of who the character is, with and without the mask. Over time, now that we’ve rebuilt Peter as a solid, interesting character on his own terms, I’ll probably begin to slowly slide some of them in again, but for me it was important to start at the core first and work my way out from there. JS: How is your working relationship with editor, Axel Alonso, and artist John Romita Jr.? JMS: They’re both great. Axel leaves me to my own devices most of the time, which is terrific. I come to him with questions, specifically about continuity and who’s where now in the Marvel Universe, and he gently nudges me toward one thing or another, so there’s that aspect, and he’s just dynamite, one of Marvel’s best. JRJR is a dream artist. I know that he initially balked at the idea of doing full scripts, but we quickly came to an accommodation where he decided to trust me, and that’s very menschy (though if he feels strongly the need to expand or collapse a panel here or there, he has the latitude to do so and I never get in his face about it, because... well, he’s JRJR, and they don’t get much better than that). I can’t wait for his pencils to come in, they’re always a joy to behold. His faces are so full of expression, the movement so dynamic and interesting. I can’t say enough great things about him. JS: Many have praised your handling of Aunt May. Do I detect a little bit of Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher seeping into your May Parker? Did your involvement with that TV series alter your perception of senior citizens and their portrayal in the media? JMS: No, not really. I just thought that Aunt May would have the strength of character required to handle the truth about Peter,

and financial considerations that go into developing a television script. What type of adjustments did you have to make when writing for comics? Or did you find any old habits difficult to break? Or were there just new restrictions to deal with? JMS: The main thing was learning to write in still images. You can’t write “he goes to the door, opens it, and walks out into the hall.” He can do any one of those in a panel, two if you’re clever, but not all three. That, and determining the number of panels per page (I write full scripts) to get the right ebb and flow, was the hardest adjustment I made. JS: As a former Spider-Man editor, I must say that I thought you were a truly inspired choice to write the ol’ web-head. I thought anyone that could handle five year storylines, with literally galaxies’ worth of characters, would easily handle the world of Peter Parker and friends. But you surprised me. Most of your Amazing Spider-Man work has been tightly focused on SpiderMan himself. How did you approach taking on this assignment? JMS: I felt that Peter/Spidey had gotten lost in his own book, drowned by the supporting characters. It’s been my experience in TV that this tends to happen when the writers don’t quite know what to do with the main character anymore, so they create and write about characters they do find of interest. The book is The Amazing Spider-Man, not The Amazing Spider-

discussion to some extent. What they also fail to recognize is that very often it’s the geeks in high school or college who grow up to be the movers and shakers, from Bill Gates to Dick Cheney. These guys weren’t the ones on the football team, going home each night to grope cheerleaders. That’s the only salutary thing about growing up... you realize that the guys who were the most popular in high school never got past that, and many times their careers stalled out... whereas the geeks (and I include myself in that rank) felt they had something to prove, to get that damned cheerleader, and they burned up the road between here and there in an attempt to prove that they were somebody. I include Peter in that rank. He was a geek, and the version of Peter in the Ultimate book still is... and make no mistake, Peter has his moments of profound geekosity, you never quite lose that... but he’s come out the other end a bit, he’s made something of himself. That’s important, I think. JS: Any regrets about your 9/11 issue? Does mixing real-life events with the fantastic elements of the Marvel Universe work? JMS: None. That book has done more good for more people than just about anything else I’ve ever written. I still hear about it, from firefighters to priests to teachers who used the book in class. I’m inestimably proud of that book and the legacy it seems to be leaving. JS: You’re raised the controversial—to Spidey-fans—question of whether or not Peter Parker’s original radioactive spider bite was accidental. What’s been the reaction so far? Or has this new age of multiple versions of Spider-Man (animated, movie, Ultimate, etc.) made it a non-issue? More importantly, what were your story reasons for this move? JMS: Mainly, I wanted to get people thinking. We all know the

having lived through so many terrible losses and tragedies in her life. Peter got his power from the spider, but his strength of will from May. JS: As the editor who presided over Peter and Mary Jane’s wedding, I must confess I’ve been worried about them in recent years. What effect, if any, has the hugely successful Spider-Man film series had on the comicbook series in general and the Peter/MJ relationship specifically? What is Marvel’s position on the marriage? What’s your view on Mr. &Mrs. Parker? JMS: Funny thing is... nobody from Marvel has ever broached this subject to me. They’ve never said to keep ‘em apart or keep ‘em married, they kinda leave it to me to a large degree, and that’s a tremendous vote of confidence on their part and an incentive for me not to screw it up or abuse that trust. Now that they’re together, it certainly presents more challenges in terms of keeping her active and working her into the stories in significant ways. She can’t be just a spear carrier. She has to be important. So that’s a challenge, to be sure. But they’re a cute couple, and they’re very much in love, and I’d like to continue with that for a while. JS: Critics of the Parker marriage would argue that it made Peter a character that his audience could no longer identify with—married to a beautiful model. Others would argue that making him a High School teacher further alienates that audience. Are these concerns moot, now that Marvel also publishes Ultimate Spider-Man? JMS: Yeah, I think it moots the A double-page spread from JMS’s 9/11 tribute issue, Amazing Spider-Man #36. Art by John Romita, Jr. & Scott Hanna. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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being done these days by Moore, Morrison, Gaiman, Rucka, Loeb, Waid, and others. There was a time not long ago when comics got kinda dark and mean, in an attempt to prove they were Literature To Be Taken Seriously, but it was for the most part indulgent and nihilistic. Now the trend seems to be toward telling really good stories, both for the indies and the majors (not so much for DC, but that’s another story for Cover art by Gary Frank & Richard Isanove from another time). There’s the upcoming Straczynski Marvel MAX series some real experimenSupreme Power. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] tation being done, as with Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, which I thought was very smart, as is some of the Elseworlds stuff (which is one of the few places you can do interesting stuff there because there are fewer restrictions), the Hulk book has been consistently interesting... it’s just a terrific time to be a reader. JS: Finally, aside from achieving success first in either TV or film, what would be your advice to a would-be comicbook writer trying to break in today? JMS: Write what excites you, don’t listen to the people who tell you that your dreams are unrealistic, and live in full flight. The rest will attend to itself.

story, and I had no desire to change that story because it works. But for me the act of writing is looking in all the previously unexplored corners for Cool Stuff nobody’s thought of before. I don’t want to say much more than that because there’s one more act to play out in that story, and I don’t want to give anything away. JS: The trend today in comics writing seems to be a more cinematic approach, which seems to play down dialogue and virtually eliminate captions, while stretching stories out over at least six issues. You seem to strike a balance between the old approach and the new, while deftly writing story arcs with each single issue capable of standing on its own. In fact, it’s a fun to read your recaps at the start of every issue—you’ve cleverly figured out how to make ‘em as smooth as possible. Coming from television, what do you think of this trend? Any observations on the currents state of comicbook scripting? JMS: I think that coming from a TV background has helped me to structure the books in almost a threeact structure, one act per issue. And it’s certainly helped me to facilitate recaps in a fairly unobtrusive way. That comics are becoming a bit more cinematic is an inevitable result of growing up as television and film viewers, and I think that’s a good thing in that there are tools used in these media that can be useful in creating a different kind of storytelling than has been the case previously. I think probably the first really cinematic works done were Moore’s Watchmen and Miller’s Dark Knight. You look at the opening pages of DK, and that’s a movie storyboard. No two ways about it. You could take that right out to the set and shoot it as written. (And, honestly, somebody should. I keep hearing about how they’re trying to adapt Dark Knight, but can’t figure out how. Here’s how you do it, folks: JUST CHANGE THE FREAKING MARGINS. It’s all right there.) As for the state of comics writing at the moment... I honestly feel that people are going to look back at this time as a kind of new Silver Age, or a quasiGolden Age, because there’s so much good work, so much good writing, so much imaginative material Spidey faces two Dr. Octopus (or Dr. Octopi?) in Amazing Spider-Man #44. Written by JMS.

THE END

Pages from Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s acclaimed Batman: Hush storyline. Shown are Jeph’s script for Jim’s pencils, which were drawn from art descriptions by Jeph. The finished pages are inked by Scott Williams and lettered by Comicraft. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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Keeper of the Bat-Mythos

The BOB SCHRECK Interview B

ob Schreck brings an eclectic set of interests and experience to his current role as Group Editor of DC’s Batman line. Printer, musician, actor, promotional guru, indy comics editor and co-founder of indy trailblazer Oni Press, Bob is now tasked by DC with overseeing the ongoing mythology of one of its top properties, which is also one of comics’ icons, and a pop cultural institution. In this interview, Bob tells us how his experiences formed the editor and leader he is today, and in so doing shows how the comics industry has morphed in recent times—and what that means for aspiring and active comics creators. —DF

Danny Fingeroth: We’re here with Bob Schreck, Group Editor of DC Comics’ legendary Batman line, at DC’s New York offices. It’s in the aftermath of the blizzard of ‘03. The city streets are just coming to life, but here at DC Comics, life goes on. Bob Schreck: I think June is about when we’ll finally be rid of the snow, if we’re lucky. DF: Probably. So I want to talk a little bit about Bob Schreck, who he is, and how he came to me. Just curious about your background. You’re Long Island born and raised? BS: Born in Glen Cove, lived in Levittown for almost thirty years. I look back at a kind of Dennis the Menace childhood with the normal kind of insane family wacko Simpsons kind of life. DF: Is there anybody in the creative fields in your family, or did they encourage you in any way in those directions? BS: My mother was always very encouraging of anything that I wanted to do with my life, with my energies. Dad was more concerned with making sure that I always had a trade to fall back on, which I had, until that trade revolutionized itself so many times that I couldn’t get a job in it now, even if I tried. DF: What trade was that? BS: The printing trade. When I graduated from high school, I was already running a Heidelberg press and shooting my own four-color separations. If I were to walk in somewhere now and say, “I can run a Heidelberg,” they’d look at me and say, “What’s a Heidelberg?” [laughter] It’s completely bizarre. But Dad isn’t so upset with me now. After not listening to him for thirty years, he’s finally realized that I might just know what I’m doing. DF: That’s good, good that he’s come around. You were a comics fan as a kid, I would imagine? BS: I actually didn’t read comics until I was thirteen or fourteen. I read a lot of novels. I was a movie freak first and foremost. Loved film, loved stop-motion animation—Ray Harryhausen, all that stuff. Willis O’Brien, King Kong, loved the genre films and silents. And then, at the age of ten or eleven, my brother handed me the John Christopher trilogy of books for younger readers. 20 | WRITE NOW

Conducted by Danny Fingeroth February 19, 2003 at the DC Comics offices. Edited by Danny Fingeroth Copy-edited by Bob Schreck

DF: Who is John Christopher? BS: John Christopher wrote The City of Gold and Lead, The White Mountains, and The Pool of Fire. They were kind of “War of the Worlds Lite,” for younger readers. They were wonderful books, I read all three of them in a day, a day-and-a-half. I kept looking up, “Is there another?” “Yes.” And from that point on just started reading everything. H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all of that genre stuff. And probably because of school and because of my getting a little older, by the time I was fifteen I was already now reading comic books, but I was moving away from the genre works and

reading biographies and historical pieces and such. DF: Prose-wise. BS: Yeah, prose-wise. Comics, though, I hated them. I didn’t want to be caught dead with one in my hand, because that would immediately make me a kid. And I did want to be a kid, I wanted to be a grown-up when I was a little kid. DF: You read comics in secret? BS: No, I didn’t. I just didn’t really pay attention to them. And then I met my paperboy, who made horror movies—which is what I was doing, I was making movies since I was nine. And we got together to make a movie one weekend. Actually, we wrote three, made one, and then he just blurted out, “Do you read comics?” And I was like, “Nah, I don’t read those, they’re stupid.” And then the next week he brought me over, I think it was Fantastic Four or something. DF: That would be a good one to start with. BS: Yeah! I went, [begrudging tone] “All right, I’ll read it.” I read it and it was, “Wow!” It was a whole new world for me. It was the world between film and books, this weird thing that made your brain do something different that neither did for your imagination. So that was it, I immediately became a voracious reader of comics. DF: You were thirteen at this point? BS: Oh, yeah, about thirteen. It was fun stuff, and I immediately became a Marvel fanatic. And then, probably within eight months to a year, I burnt out on Marvel. I was like, “If I see a ‘Lo, Behold! The Giant Thing!’ I’m going to go crazy!” But as all that was coming down, slowly but surely, I also went so much deeper into the medium. I was collecting Bernie Wrightson’s work way before Swamp Thing. And I knew that he was rippingoff. I mean, paying tribute to. Frank Frazetta. [laughs] I think I also got super-into Frazetta through Larry, my paperboy, as I was immediately in the Doubleday Book Club. All these great books with Frazetta painted covers were available through them. I treasure those books to this day, The Warlord of Mars, The Gods of Mars, all those great [Edgar Rice] Burroughs books with the Frazetta black-and-white illos in them. So, within two years, I knew all the up-and-comers... DF: Knew them personally, or knew their work? BS: Both. Very quickly. I’ve been telling this story for a hundred years, but it was nice to hear Bernie say it, and I never prompted him on it, but I was basically the unofficial member of The Studio at age fourteen or fifteen. DF: What was the name of the studio? BS: Well, it was “The Studio.” It was Wrightson, Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Jeff Jones. They shared a big studio up on, I think it was the west side of New York. I never got to actually go into The Studio, but every convention, they would see me and say, “This kid is the least creepy kid of the bunch.” DF: Talk about damning with faint praise! [laughs] BS: I know! I became a Vaughn Bode fan very early on. It appealed to everything in my sick little mind as a kid. I said, “Everything’s here! This is so cool!” And Bernie made sure that I didn’t miss the cartoon slide show that Vaughn would perform. Vaughn would do all the voices of all of his characters. So here I am, hanging out with The Studio. I’m, like, fifteen, watching Vaughn Bode perform his characters on stage. And there’s this old guy sitting next to me with giant muttonchops, hitting my leg saying, “This guy’s great! Who is he?” And I tell him, “That’s Vaughn Bode, he’s also the cartoonist, he’s really good, eh?” “Oh, he’s great!” I lean over to Bernie Wrightson and I ask, “Who’s the old guy, and is he

hitting on me?” And he replied, “Oh, no, no. That’s Isaac Asimov. Don’t worry about him.” [Danny laughs] So, I was really very lucky. I was in an amazing place at an amazing time. DF: Were you a fan of the undergrounds, in general? Robert Crumb and Kim Deitch and Spain [Rodriguez]? BS: I wasn’t a devotee, but I knew what they were up to. I appreciated what they were doing, but I didn’t have everything they put out. But Vaughn Bode and Crumb were about as weird as I got back then—and that’s pretty weird! And then I immediately became a DC fan. And when I saw these coming attraction ads, I think after I’d read the one House of Secrets with Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, and then I saw these really beautiful ads announcing this new Swamp Thing title, that was it. That and Kaluta’s Shadow were the two highlights for that time period for me. DF: You and I are from approximately the same generation, but whereas someone like me and a lot of people in and around the business were reading them from, like, age six, you came to it from a somewhat different perspective. Did you write or draw? Sounds like you made films... BS: I made films, I drew, I was constantly begging my dad to let me draw Skippy the Turtle and take art classes by mail. His answer was, “Seven hundred dollars? I’m not spending seven hundred dollars for you to draw a turtle!” And I’d beg, “Yeah, but I really want to draw!” I had a pretty good facility with it. SCHRECK | 21

But I was making movies, too, I was reading. I was really heavily into playing sports. I played a lot of volleyball, a lot of football, a lot of basketball. DF: You were a busy kid! BS: You know, I look back now, I think every adult looks back, especially if you’ve read that much when you were younger, and you look back now and wonder, “How did I do all that?” I had an incredible social life. I was always playing sports, I was always reading books, I was always reading comic books, I was making movies, seeing movies, I mean, you just look back and you say, “God, how come I can barely get out of bed nowadays?” I started playing music when I was nineteen, but still read comics, and actually hired Adam Malin to be our keyboard player. Adam Malin was the guy who was running Creation Conventions, the conventions I was going to since I was thirteen, never knowing who he was. I hired him when I was nineteen or twenty. I went, “Oh, my God! You’re him! I thought you were 35 when I was just a kid!” DF: 35! So old! Oh, my God! How can anybody be so old! [laughs] BS: Exactly. You look at it now, I wish I was 35. So yeah, this whole serendipitous trip, that was part of it. DF: And then from there, you got involved with the fandom/convention world? BS: Yeah. When I started running the conventions with Gary [Berman] and Adam, I got to know everybody behind the scenes. I got to know Jim Shooter and Carol Kalish and everyone at all the companies. And I think, eventually, people came to understand that I was mostly a man of my word. I rarely said something I couldn’t deliver on. DF: “Mostly” is about as good as any of us can hope for. BS: Yeah, you can never be 100%. So the people at Marvel and DC began to rely on me and to be able to trust me. Two of the best things that came out of that many-year experience was getting to know Archie Goodwin, who taught me more than he would ever know, just by my sitting next to him and just listening to him. And Diana Schutz. I met both of them through 22 | WRITE NOW

those conventions. And Diana the same thing, I learned so much from her, just watching her handle situations. Both, on the technical side of the job, as well as the editorial aesthetic and people-skills aspects of the work. So everything wound up begetting everything else. Diana, Archie and my brother, Dean really were the most influential people at molding me, and giving me what I needed to get to where I am today. Well, except for my folks! DF: And you and Diana, of course, ended up dating, and then married. BS: Bi-coastal dating, living together in Pennsylvania for five years, moving to California, living there for almost a year, moving on to Oregon and getting married, and then getting divorced. But we’re still the absolute best of friends. There is a bond between us that will never be broken. DF: She asserts that, also, in her interview. As you know, the readers will be cross-checking the two interviews to make sure there’re no inconsistencies. It seems like your aesthetic sensibilities interact and interweave so much, to this day. BS: Diana certainly re-focused me on the “Vaughn Bode side” of the comics world. And there was a lot more of it at that point in time, so I was getting more entrenched in people’s work, like that of Dan Clowes and the Hernandez Brothers and all that. So she kind of re-booted my education on that. And I would always be trying to open her eyes with, “I know that’s all great stuff, but then there’s all this other really great stuff, too.” DF: Such as the superhero stuff, or more the Wrightson-type horror material? BS: Everything, everything beyond the kind of indie autobiographical, self-deprecating Joe Matt nightmares. And I love all that stuff, but there’s the entertainment side to comics, where you get away from your own problems and say, “Wow, there’s a great story in there.” DF: “Wow, Bruce Wayne has problems, too!” BS: Yeah! Or there’s a big monster, and I would rather have to deal with a big monster than my own day-to-day nightmare problems. DF: You were involved in theater, also, right? BS: I worked on a few plays in Westbury, Long Island. it was like ‘79-’81, somewhere around there. I played the Ghost of Christmas Present in a re-written, modernized Christmas Carol, where I ad-libbed lines like, “Cram it, bozo!” DF: I meant to ask you, what happened to the paperboy? Did he go on to a film career? BS: No, Larry didn’t go on to a film career. I just saw Larry last Saturday. DF: Boy, you keep relationships a long time, don’t you? [laughs] BS: Yes, I do. I don’t believe in disposable friendships. Larry and I are still the best of friends. His younger brother is a very big player at the Independent Film Channel. The funny thing is, I went and got a trade, which was printing. And Larry didn’t. He went off to college, and he did a comic strip called Action Man in his college newspaper, and as Larry’s hair just got bigger and bigger, so did his bar bill. (which is what I know I would have done had I gone to college, too!) And now Larry’s a printer. If you know what a stripper is in printing terms, well, he strips films. He keeps his clothes on, but he strips film. And he’s had a long standing career since almost in his mid-to-late twenties,

he’s always been in the printing trade. DF: So he’s the alternate-universe Bob Schreck? [laughs] BS: Yes. He damns me nightly. “You have my job! I started you down this path!” And I respond, “Larry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!” But yeah, him, Michael, his younger brother, and I are really great pals to this day. DF: Cool. And college...? BS: I told my Dad I knew exactly what I would do if I went to college. So I didn’t want to waste his money or my money. I knew it would be a very, very large bill, and most of it would go up in smoke or down a drain, and I said, “No, no, no. I’m just going to stick to it and get a real job right away.” A week after I graduated high school, my father got me a car that I had to pay for and a job. I had gotten the job through my former printing teacher. And, of course… I hated it, absolutely. DF: So where did you go from there? BS: Music. I was very fortunate. I worked a long time holding two jobs, the day job as a printer, and a night job in music. DF: Was there a period you thought you would be a professional musician forever? BS: Sure, yeah. I didn’t go into anything without my whole entire heart and soul. So that was it, I was going to be a professional musician. The turning point to heading me into that direction was when my house burned down. And I was in it, with my whole family. DF: On Long Island? BS: On Long Island, yeah. Well, the house actually didn’t burn down. It was gutted. The frame stayed, but everything in it went, including the dog that saved our lives. We had two dogs. One got out, the other one—who saved us, who woke us up— went back upstairs and died. But the rest of us got out, including my little nephew, who was two months old at the time. It was pretty intense, and I sat there saying to my brother, about a month later, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go to this print shop.” And he responded, “What do you really want to do?” Now, all that time I was reading comics and reading books and playing football. I was in my room, and I was not just singing, I was performing along with the albums. Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears. I had done that since I was thirteen. And so when my brother said, “What do you really want to do?” I said, “I want to be a musician.” He said, “Poof, you’re a musician. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. If you want it, you can have it. Do it!” I said, “Okay,” and I did. I had a tambourine and a mike stand, and a week later I had a full band in my garage. And then three years later, after a lot of hard work, we were auditioning for the biggest agency on Long Island. DF: What happened with the music? BS: Well, that agency turned us down, but we did really good. We were on the radio.. It was a live show. We came out of this club, Cheers, in Babylon, I think. We were on WBAB radio on Long Island, in Suffolk County. And the music career went on from there for another five to six years. We were playing colleges. We played the whole tri-state area. DF: You were writing the songs? BS: We were all writing, the three of us, the three main guys were writing the songs. They were pretty dreadful, though. DF: So we’ve got the Schreck history. And then was comics the next thing? BS: That’s when Adam Malin brought me into comics. DF: And how did you then become professionally involved in the

comics industry? It says in one interview that you worked briefly at Marvel in ‘83. I’m trying to remember that. I was there, then. BS: Lea Sapp left staff in the Spring of 1982 or ‘83, I can’t remember which year. And Carol Kalish hired me to handle convention booking for PR director Pamela Rutt. I was sitting at a desk and Pamela Rutt went, “Who are you?” And I said, “I’m your new employee.” And she shrugged, “Carol?” Because she knew immediately that Carol must have hired me. But Carol knew that I could do the job, because of my experience at Creation. She knew I could book everybody. It was just before they were doing their 25th anniversary events. So Carol basically wanted to know how Marvel could do anniversary convention events. So I gave her the basic algorithm of how it ran. But she buried the report, and at the time I was very angry with her because I didn’t realize she was doing me a favor. In hindsight, she knew that I would not be happy at Marvel. There was some internal politics that would have made me very unhappy there. DF: But Marvel was your first official comics industry job? BS: Yes, Marvel. After Creation came Marvel Comics. After all those years working at Creation, I got to know the guys at Comico really well—Matt Wagner and the entire Comico crew. Because I ran shows in Philadelphia, and I made sure they always had tables, because I always felt that new, young artists were good people to have at the shows, I got to know them. So

severely depressed down in southern California, John these guys were new, young artists, and I knew Gerry Giovinco Koukousatkis and Dave Stevens, both great pals of mine, and Matt Wagner and Phil LaSorda pretty well. called up Dark Horse and told Mike Richardson to hire me and After my Marvel gig, Phil LaSorda of Comico called, and said, Diana and get me out of there! And again, everything leads to “We want to hire you to be our marketing guy.” everything else. I got to know the Dark Horse fellows when they DF: Comico was one of the major indie publishers then? attended their first IADD meeting, the International Association BS: Yeah, Comico was just starting. They did four black-andof Direct Distributors. They didn’t know what to do, who to talk whites. They went to Glenwood Distributors in Las Vegas and to, and the general protocol. So I kind of helped them out, almost got pelted with produce. Everybody hated their books. because… I just do that. Grendel in Comico Premier was among them. Those were Oddly enough Dark Horse had tried to hire me three years tougher times. It was harder to get into the industry as an prior to my floundering in SoCal, but I was happily ensconced at independent publisher back then. And then Comico came back Comico then. So it was nice that my friends were looking out with color comics, with Mage as their first color book. Then for me and they called Dark Horse and Mike Richardson. And it they did Macross. That, I think, sold 150,000 copies, which was March of ‘89, I guess? Somewhere around there. Mike was unheard of for an independent. Unbelievable. Then The flew Diana and I up to Oregon in the middle of the worst rainy Elementals. And then they hired me. What they didn’t know season ever in Portland. But Diana and I said, “Wow, this is was, they had independently met Diana Schutz a couple of beautiful!” [laughs] And we went to work for Dark Horse. times in San Diego, and she had just moved out to live around DF: You were both hired as editors, or you were still the corner from me on Long Island, because I wanted to test marketing...? out the dating thing. We went from, on other sides of the BS: It started off, again, that I was supposed to be able to do planet, to now, just around the corner. I don’t think she lived on both. But I did such a good job at marketing (snicker), that Long Island for four or five months, and we were packing up there was just no time for me to work on the editorial side of together and moving to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. things. And after a certain point, about three years in, Mike and DF: That was her famous “four days working at Marvel” period? I just didn’t see eye to eye on what the company’s marketing BS: Yes. Four days. She was going to have her indoctrination by direction should be. So Mike said, “Why don’t you go into Jim Shooter, and she called them that morning and said, editorial full time?” “Great!” And I moved over to editorial, and “Never mind!” But we didn’t know we had another job at that then that began my full-on editorial career at Dark Horse. point. I hadn’t taken the Comico position yet. DF: Now you did some amazing stuff there, with a diversity of DF: This was not an editorial position, this was a marketing creators, including Frank Miller. What does that mean, editing a position? Frank Miller, editing anybody where you’re trying to help them BS: They called me an “administrative director.” realize their vision, as opposed to shepherding an iconic DF: It couldn’t be clearer than that! [laughs] character? What does editing mean in a case like that? BS: Yeah! Emphasis was on the business, but it was such a BS: Thanks. There’s definitely a big difference. When you’re great think-tank and I was allowed to have a lot of input into editorial matters. DF: It sounds like, at a company of that size, the job titles may have been one thing, but the functions bled over into each other? BS: Totally. I sought advice from everybody, and they sought advice from me. At the very beginning most of Diana’s focus was on getting those Robotech books out on time every two weeks. She’s the one that taught me how to write a press release. DF: You guys were there for a while, and then on to Dark Horse? BS: Well, we had a brief, minor stint in California where Bob Chapman of Graphitti Designs and I were going to work together. Our friendship survived those eight months. [chuckles] I love him. We’re the best of friends. We all went vacationing together last year, me, him, and Diana. So we’re still the best of friends. But it wasn’t in the cards for us to work together. DF: This was when…? BS: Between Comico and Dark The Mike Allred cover to Dark Horse Presents 100 #0, a promotional edition of the Schreck-edited comic. Horse. So while I was kind of The cover not only features most of Dark Horse’s characters, but also Schreck and other DH employees. [Art ©2003 Michael Allred; Characters ©2003 the Respective Copyright Holders.] 24 | WRITE NOW

working on Robotech or Indiana Jones, you have the licensor to be the bully. You can just say, “You know what? I think you’re a genius, but the people at Lucasfilm just don’t want this to be the way you do.” And you’re lucky, you’re off the hook. You can be the nicest editor in the world. But if you’re dealing with a creator, let’s either Frank Miller, or Bernie Mireault. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling eighty thousand copies of Sin City or ten thousand copies of the Super Jam Special. In order to help them see their own vision through, sometimes have to help them realize that they have a gun stuck in their mouth, and if they pull the trigger, and it’s going to get very ugly. You basically help them through the labyrinth of their own minds sometimes, just to be able to see, “Uh-oh, I don’t really want to do this, do I? That’s not my desired effect. That’s not what I really wanted to say.” So what I do as an editor in this instance is say, “Okay, so this part’s really cool.” And I say the point it makes, and they respond, “Oh, really? It says that?” I respond, “Oh, yeah.” Then they shriek, “Oh, God!” And usually they back off. “How can we change that?” “Well, I would do this.” “Oh, okay, great.” With Frank, this just doesn’t happen very often. The man knows what he’s doing. But everyone needs a sounding board. Everyone needs feedback. Even Frank. When we did this last Dark Knight book, he had a moment in the first draft of his plot that was superb. It was magnificent! It was wonderful! Then he rewrote the plot and it was gone. And said, “That entire emotional beat is gone, Frank! What are you doing...?” And because I’ve worked with Frank for so long, I don’t have to dance around it—I can just say, “What are you doing? I don’t know if you’ll remember in the first draft, there was a moment where Catgirl dressed down one of the guys because he killed, he went over the line and he killed, and she fractured his shoulder blade and says, ‘No more. Don’t give him any painkillers, and he’s on latrine duty.” Her demoralizing him was the worst thing she could do to him, because their code of honor is really a precious thing. Now, because she’s a tough soldier, she takes care of her troops. But the final beat has her alone in tears, kneeling down by the Batmobile, and this hand—and we haven’t even seen Batman yet—this hand just appears, and Batman says to her, “Good girl. Good soldier.” He gives her this support and reinforcement. It was just so great. The next draft I got, the bad guys were robots. They weren’t killing any people and they were expendable robots. So how can you get mad at anybody for killing a robot? And I remember even now what I said to him, I said, “Frank. Remember Star Wars: Episode One?” Because it had come out a year prior, and we all talked about it this very issue, nobody died! They were all saying that, “Millions of my people back on Naboo”—or wherever the hell it was—”are dying!” It was a whole bunch of robots fighting people we never actually saw dying! There was no carnage, there was no human wreckage. And I brought it up. He said, “Oh, you’re absolutely right,” and it went back in. Those are the types of things editors do. Does it happen every Tuesday? No, because he’s a superb storyteller and he knows what he’s doing. But even the very, very best need to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Someone who understands story. While technical and grammatical concerns are extremely important, it’s the eye towards story that I tend to worry about most. DF: One could make the case that, as the group editor of the Batman line, you have the authority of DC Comics behind you. You may not choose to wield it, but it’s always implicit. But at an Oni or a Dark Horse, where the creator often owns the property

you’re working on with them, you don’t have that. You really have to gain the trust and the respect of these people. Is there any trick of the trade, or is it just a matter of chemistry? BS: Well, chemistry helps cut to the chase. But for me, what I’ve learned is, if, when I get a script or if I get somebody’s art in my hands, I try to, as quickly and succinctly as possible, let them know I know what they’re doing, and impart that to them. I’ll point at the art and say, “This is a really beautiful moment.” Now, they know it’s a Frank Miller & Lynn Varley’s cover for Dark Knight really beautiful Strikes Again #1. [©2003 DC Comics.] moment, because they really spent some time on it. Or they know it’s a really beautiful moment because it just came out, it just flew out of their hands and they couldn’t help it and there it was and they looked back and went, “Oh, I don’t need to touch that. That’s done.” When you can recognize that, and let them know that you see it. Just by saying “that was a beautiful moment in your plot,” or “this was wonderful in your script,” or “this was great in your pencils,” inks, and so on down the line, you gain their trust, because you show that you understand what they’re after. DF: And I guess someone would approach you to be their editor because they would know from your reputation—or if they would know you personally—that you would somebody they’d want to work with. Or would it just be they would go to Dark Horse and Dark Horse would say, “Go with Bob.” BS: Not the latter. Because of the creator ownership thing at Dark Horse, it would be more of a “Hey, I want to work with him.” And at the time I went from Editor to being Senior Group Editor, I was in charge of all the creator-owned books. So I would actually be the one picking and choosing, figuring who would work with who. For instance I knew that Scott Allie had to be the guy to work with Mike Mignola. I’ve known Mike since he was seventeen. We’re the best of friends. But I knew that Mike and Scott were on such a similar wavelength with horror and comics and everything, that I’d be cheating him. And for what? For my little glory? To be able to say, “I got to work with Mike Mignola”? I get to work with him because he’s a member of the group. But the thing I always say, over and over and over again, is the most important end result is that the book wins. Not my ego, and/or evil intent, and not the creator’s ego, or the creator’s evil intent. Whatever somebody wants out of a project that stems from ego is usually bad, it usually winds-up not playing out right for the book. So I try to challenge everybody and say, “Now, you’re leaving this in there for what reason? Because I think it plays better without it, and here’s why.” So I always try to make sure that I get subsumed into the [Schreck continues on page 28.] SCHRECK | 25

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[Schreck continues from page 25.] background and that all the good intentions of the creators wind-up on the page and their missteps are never seen. That’s what I try to do every time. I don’t always succeed. DF: Well, again, if you can do it most of the time, that’s all anyone can ask. Now, at some point you decide you don’t want to be someone’s employee, you want to have your own company? How did Oni come about? BS: Well, I think Oni came about because Mike and I hit another one of those impasses. And Mike is the sweetest guy on Earth, and there isn’t anybody on this planet that loves comics more than he does. He really, really has a passion for the books. He’s still going. And there’re a lot of good editors there, but of course it’s my relationship with Diana that makes me feel that, as long as she’s there, he’s in good shape. He’s going to do fine. Because she always there to give him a good boot in the behind every now and then. We all need that from time to time. DF: And he’s fairly hands-on himself, yes? BS: Not on the comics end, no. He’s more involved in business end of things nowadays, and he’s got many hands in many pies. He’s got his movie thing, he’s got his store chains. I don’t know if you know, he’s got this big store on the Universal Walkway in Los Angeles. DF: I didn’t know that. BS: Oh, yeah, yeah. “It Came From Outer Space,” I think the stores are called, or something like that. And then they opened one up in San Francisco. They’re big, big stores. Anyway, so he’s still Mr. Business. But it wasn’t working for me, and there were other things going on. There were employees there that I really thought should not be there. I got proven to be correct, because they all eventually were fired—but they were really working against the company, while professing that I was the one that was working against the company. Anyway… DF: And of course, comic people always see things in terms of good and evil, black and white... BS: Yeah, there’s nothing but hellfire on that side. I was pure and chaste. [Danny laughs] So I’d just had enough. So I sat there for six months not knowing what to do. And in the meantime, maybe eight years prior, I had met Joe Nozemack. Right at the beginning of... it might have been Comico, or it might have been the very beginning of Dark Horse. I met Joe Nozemack, a young kid who actually looked like a baby Frank Miller when I first met him, only Joe was always on crutches. And immediately when I met him, I thought, “This kid’s a bright kid.” We became friends. You do that. As many conventions as I’ve been to, you make friends all over. Every time I went to San Diego, he would be there. So eventually we started hanging out and agreeing on what we felt were the better books in the market. He

eventually moved to Oregon and we became even better pals and then, after I had resigned from Dark Horse, we sat there and looked at each other. He had access to some money and really wanted to do something with it. And we almost simultaneously said to each other, “Well, you want to start a comic book company?” [laughter] “It’s a really stupid idea, not the best of times to do it.” DF: What year was this? BS: It was ‘96, ‘97, I think... DF: That’s when the bust was on its way down. BS: Yeah, it was over. DF: Wasn’t it around the time Marvel went into Chapter 11? BS: Yeah. So we said “yes,” and we started putting things in motion. Before I left Dark Horse—and I did leave on a snap—-but even if I was planning it, I would never have gone “wink-wink— nudge-nudge” to any of the creators I was working with there and ask, “If I do start another company, will you come with me?” It wouldn’t have been right, and it’s not fair play. So, I did leave on a snap, and, thankfully, very soon after got calls from several creators who just said, “Just wanted you to know that we’re worried about you, and anything you need, give a holler.” DF: When you work together in the same business, you have an understanding of it that nobody outside it really can. BS: And you get to know each other pretty well, and your personal life starts to become entwined, and then there is this outside bond, this personal bond. So there were a lot of people concerned, but I never said anything about what I was going to do, because I didn’t know. And then we made the announcement: “Oni Press starts here.” And then it was like, okay, fine, now what are we going to do? “I dunno.” And boom, “call up Frank Miller.” “Hey, Frank, we’ve got Oni Press going, we’re gonna do this, we’re thinking of calling up Kevin Smith…” I had tried to get Kevin over at Dark Horse. DF: Had you known Kevin? BS: Yeah, I met Kevin two years prior, because friends all said that I looked like him. And he heard about me through Joe Nozemack, because Joe was selling Matt Wagner’s art. Upon meeting Kevin, Joe said, “Oh, y’know, you look a lot like Bob Schreck.” And he had heard of me because of Comico, the Dark Horse years, and Mage and Matt Wagner. And Kevin replied, “Yeah, actually, I saw a picture of him, we kind of do look a little bit alike.” Anyway, Mike Richardson didn’t want to publish Kevin’s work, for his own reasons. I disagreed, but I couldn’t work with him, I wasn’t allowed to hire him. So when Oni started, Kevin sat over in New Jersey going, “Where’s Schreck, what’s he doing?” And my partner, Joe Nozemack was always saying to me, “Call Kevin. Call Kevin. Call Kevin.” At first I was uncomfortable, and then, finally, I called Kevin,

and he flew me out to New Jersey. Two days later we had a deal, and it all worked out great. And Frank Miller... I think Frank actually stepped in even before then and just went, “You know what, Bob? You’ve got Oni, congratulations. I got this little book, it’s called Bad Boy, it was serialized over in England. Here it is, it’s yours.” I mean, not a bad way to start a comics publishing company, Frank Miller and Kevin Smith. DF: So your vision at Oni seemed like what you were doing at Dark Horse except with nobody telling you that you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Is that a fair assessment? BS: Yeah. With Joe’s input in there, as well. It got even more eclectic than what I could do at Dark Horse. And we were actually selling a little better than DHP [Dark Horse Presents] before I left it, with Oni Double Feature. But we had Bill Sienkiewicz in there, we had Paul Pope in there. And I had already got to work with Paul at Dark Horse. We did twelve issues of DHP, a whole year’s worth of a book called The OneTrick Ripoff. DF: Were you paying actual page rates at Oni, or was it back-end deals? BS: We were paying modest rates, but we were paying. DF: With a back-end as well? BS: Oh, yeah. If there was a back-end, and there rarely was. But with regard to Frank and Kevin, they treated us like gold. With Frank it was like, “Here, go have a blast.” He didn’t want a dime up front. DF: So you’re then in what, to a lot of people, would be the ultimate place to be. You’re owning a company at which you are the editor-in-chief, in essence, picking and choosing the projects you want to work on. You’re making money, enough to live on... and more? BS: Enough to live on. DF: Okay. Some people would have said, “This is my life. This is my career. Maybe I’m not getting rich, but I have freedom.” How did the transition to DC come about after all that? BS: DC has been trying to hire me since 1987. [laughs] We all go way back. These are all my friends. I’ve known so many of

them for so long. And actually, the first Oni party, where we went to San Diego without a book—all we had was Bad Boy posters and that was it—Paul Levitz came to the party, because I’ve known Paul since I was teenager. I knew him better than he knew me back then. DF: From fandom? BS: Yes. And he came to the party, which impressed so many people, how come Paul Levitz came to the Oni party? I said, “he’s my buddy, are you kidding? We’ve been through thick and thin in this industry.” And Paul said—I do a very good Paul—[Paul Levitz voice] “I figured I’d come over here and check out what you’re up to, and after a few years of you banging your head against the wall, maybe you’ll come over and play with us at DC.” And you hear it, you laugh, “hahaha,” and then three or four years later you’re just ready to make that transition. Actually, it was a difficult decision to make —no doubt. I spoke to Matt Wagner, I spoke to Frank, I spoke to Diana a million times. All of my friends were all tired of listening. And eventually I had to make up my mind, and I did, and I went to Joe, my partner, and he was so great. “If you have to do this, do it. You’ve given Oni a great start. You go with my blessing.”

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ONE

The Bob Schreck Interview Continues Next Issue!

Platinum Reflections

The SCOTT MITCHELL ROSENBERG Interview Conducted by Danny Fingeroth via telephone February 4, 2003 Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg

rom the early days at Malibu Comics to his current status as head of Platinum Studios, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg has always had a clear vision of what he want to do. That vision has always included comics. From the Ultraverse to Men In Black to Jeremiah, Scott has always seen a clear link between comics and screened media. Here, he speaks about how that vision came to be, and about what sort of properties and creators Platinum is on the lookout for. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: Since it’s so California, please tell us where you are right now, Scott. SCOTT ROSENBERG: I am on the 101 highway, headed from my home in Calabasas to my office in Beverly Hills. And talking on the phone at the same time. DF: It doesn’t get more Hollywood than that! SMR: And I’ve this new kind of cool phone where this gel thing goes in my ear, so there’s no mouthpiece. It just records the

vibrations from my jaw. In theory, you can hear what I’m saying. DF: In practice, as well! So we’re speaking with Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, the founder and chairman of Platinum Studio. It says here they’re “Hollywood’s premiere company for comic book to film adaptations.” This is the interview for Write Now! Magazine. What’s your basic background, Scott? Were you born in L.A.? SMR: Born and bred in L.A. Threw a dart, which landed in Denver, and that’s where I went to college. [laughter] DF: Literally throwing a dart? SMR: Pretty much. Landed in Denver, not Boulder, so Denver it was. I wanted to get out of L.A. and see what life’s like elsewhere. And I loved it, but it was cold, and I just came back. DF: I think it’s like growing up in New York. When you grow up in a place that everybody wants to come to, it’s still your hometown, and you still want to go somewhere, at least for a while. SMR: I like the fact that a couple days ago it was 88, 89 degrees, and we’re wearing shorts. Took the kids out for fun. I

think at our house it actually hit the nineties. I had to actually turn the air conditioning on. DF: We had about twelve degrees here last week. [Scott laughs] And we appreciated every one of them! Did you have any family in the entertainment business? What did your folks do? SMR: No family in the entertainment business. My dad was a building contractor, my mom raised us. My brother’s in real estate and my sister’s done assorted things and is now married. DF: So you went to college in Denver. Did you major in anything

that related to what you’re doing now? SMR: Not whatsoever, nothing. [Danny laughs] I majored in marketing and management. DF: Well, that relates... SMR: A lot of it related to Malibu Comics. We were always known as being able to market right up there with Marvel and DC, but at ten cents on the dollar. I probably learned some of that there, but nothing directly related to entertainment. Except they had movie theaters in Denver. DF: Now what school was that in Denver? SMR: The University of Denver. DF: Did you ever write or draw, have any kind of creative interest? SMR: I always kind of just created comics since I was a little tyke. Never did anything with any of them. DF: “Created them,” like drew and wrote your own on lined paper or whatever? SMR: Yeah, exactly. Whole little universes and all that kind of stuff. And once it got too big and too many heroes and too many powers and whatever, then I would have to go to an alternate Earth and start over. DF: I think they do that in the real companies, too! [laughs] Before Malibu, what kind of job did you have? Or was that your first thing? SMR: Starting at about thirteen, I didn’t have any more money to buy comics, and the only way to keep buying them was to start selling them. So I started taking out tables at the local L.A. conventions. Which, of course, my mom or dad had to schlep me to, with boxes stacked up in the back of their car. DF: And they did that gladly? SMR: Oh, yeah, they were just thrilled. In particular, they were thrilled when I was sixteen and could drive myself. [laughter] Believe me, dropping me off at 6:45 in the morning and then fighting to get me out of there a little after it closed, when I wasn’t ready to go yet... [laughter] They did it, they were very supportive. And then I also started taking ads out in the

Comic’s Buyer’s Guide. DF: And this was in your teens? SMR: Yeah, thirteen. DF: So you were pretty entrepreneurial, even at a young age. SMR: Yeah. I had mail order and everything from thirteen on. DF: You just sort of thought, “Oh, I could do this,” and just did it? SMR: Yeah. DF: That’s pretty cool. SMR: No one told me I couldn’t. [laughter] DF: So went from doing that kind of thing, from buying and selling comics, directly into publishing at Malibu? SMR: Yeah, basically. When I was in college, to get the money to help make my way through, I did some buying and selling of comics, but it was a little different. I couldn’t take my collection out and go out in the winter weather, because I was in a different state and it was cold. And our storage area was cold. DF: I get it—you like warm weather. [laughs] SMR: I like warm. So I started, with my roommate, to speculate on comics. I would buy them from the distributors, buy a few hundred of this or five hundred of that, trying to figure out what would go up in value enough that I could sell them post-sale to stores. DF: This was about what year? What period are we talking about? SMR: It was ‘85, ‘86. So I started to become really well known at picking hits. Because I used to always go for writers and stories and characters, and I really didn’t go for #1’s. If I thought it would go up, terrific, I’d buy first issues. But that’s not what I was generally known for. I was known for picking the issues that I thought would matter, and hopefully I would be right. DF: And what about artists, did artists determine what you would buy? SMR: Yeah, absolutely! If I thought it was a particular new direction or an artist that I thought was going to get hot, absolutely. It was basically creatordriven. And storydriven, if someone was going to die or be introduced. And new directions for characters. Stores always blew it on those. DF: Well, of course. [laughs] SMR: So I did that quite a bit, and I did that after college, too. I then started getting approached by comic creators saying, “Hey, will you publish my comic?” DF: Huh? Now, why did they think you would publish, if you had just been speculating at that point? Rob Liefeld’s cover art for Ex-Mutants: TSEC #3. [©2003 Respective Copyright Holders.] ROSENBERG | 31

taking it from the creators and printing it without much editorial SMR: Well, the first few times they asked, I didn’t know what input? the expected of me because I didn’t know how to do it. Then I SMR: I’ve always been in favor of hiring people smarter than saw one comic I liked, and figured, “Hmmmm.” myself to help make things right. And I also believe that any DF: They figured you knew the market, so you would know what writer, any creator—and that includes myself—needs an editor. to do with their stuff. And that’s one of the reasons Malibu always had traditional SMR: Yeah. The conversation I had with the one that I liked editors, where many of the independent publishers skipped went: “Hey, will you publish this for me?” “No, I don’t know how them. So, no, I would have an editor involved in the process. to publish.” “Yes, you do, you’ll figure it out. Look at all these DF: So who was the first editor that you had at Malibu? comics, you have lots of money, you can do it.” And I’m like, “I SMR: For the initial Eternity line, Brian Marshall and his team. really don’t have that much money.” And he said, “Just read it.” DF: Do you remember who was on that? and, well, I liked it. SMR: Well, I don’t remember who was DF: Now who was that? doing what, but I used to love John SMR: This was Brian Marshall and artist Arcudi, who was there. Jimmy Ron Lim, who drew Ex-Mutants. Palmiotti’s great. Probably if I picked up DF: Ex-Mutants was the first Malibu some of the early comics I’d go into a comic? memory thing and bore you. SMR: Yep, Ex-Mutants was the first DF: You said you were flying into one, under the Eternity label. Brooklyn once a month or whatever. Was DF: Did you operate this just out of your there ever a point where you thought, basement or something? “Gee, maybe I’ll go over to Marvel or DC SMR: Pretty much. [laughter] We had a and try to get a job.” Was that ever little place that we opened that Brian something that seemed like it might be had in Brooklyn that I had to fly out on in your future? the redeye Thursdays and stay out there SMR: It never crossed my mind. I was until Sunday. Here, we had little place having fun making comic books. We in, wow, Long Beach I think—it pretty made our first one, which was Exmuch was a basement. Mutants, which turned out to be a huge DF: How often? hit. We sold 130,000 copies. SMR: I don’t remember, but it was DF: And that was also the mid-’80s? certainly often enough. SMR: Yeah, that was August ‘86. We DF: But you were still in Denver, still in then launched a second and a third college? and a fourth. They weren’t all hits. SMR: No, no. I was back in L.A. And I DF: Was there a Malibu editorial was just going to do more of the same publishing philosophy that you thought until I got a real job. [laughter] So I’d go made it distinct? out there, often with Malibu’s editor-inSMR: Well, it evolved over time. But chief, Chris Ulm—great guy!—and sleep one of the things that I was always a on the floor or on a particularly ratty Concept art for the upcoming Platinum graphic novel fan of, that I really got from the book couch and see what was going on. And The Human Factor. Character artwork by Mitchell trade was to always group the comics one of the things that I said was the Breitweiser, story by Scott O. Brown, graphic novel we did with different imprints. We then comics had to be in black-and-white, artwork by Russell Hossain. [The Human Factor and acquired Adventure Comics at one because I couldn’t afford color. And I all characters TM & ©2003 Platinum Studios, LLC] point. was going to have to aggressively price DF: Not the DC title Adventure Comics. it, because I couldn’t afford to lose money. SMR: No, the one that Steve Milo used to run, which had DF: Aggressively price it meaning...? [Adventurers drawn by Peter Hsu and a whole bunch of SMR: $1.80. different things. It was all fantasy/adventure based. And we DF: What were Marvel and DC charging for comics then? had Malibu, itself, for licensed color and color superhero titles. SMR: I think they were ninety-five cents. So it was a bit high. We had Eternity, which started off as our main line, and it But it was one of those things that either I would sell enough evolved into Robotech and all the different Japanese-influenced copies, or I would have trouble having it come out.I mean, it comics. I had started publishing titles like Planet of the Apes turns out, now, that half of all comics made in the U.S. are and Alien Nation and Ape Nation, hmm. And Star Trek: Deep black-and-white… Space Nine In fact, Paramount and others always said we were DF: Is it that high now? You mean that we’re in the middle of a their favorite licensee. black-and-white boom and nobody’s talking about it? DF: You had a lot of stuff. SMR: Well, creatively speaking, yes. I think comics are SMR: Yeah. And the reason we had different imprints is I felt creatively at a great point, and getting better. From a numbers that I couldn’t do a creator service if we had one line of comics standpoint, there are, what, 500 comics per month coming and we were launching more than one comic in a month. How out? Marvel, DC, CrossGen, most Image, some Dark Horse and do you promote it? With different imprints, you can do that. others who publish color are about half the market. That DF: Did you see Malibu as a stepping-stone to the movie and TV makes the other half black and white. stuff you do now? Or was that something that came about later, DF: Probably. That sounds about right. Were you acting as the that idea? editorial department at that point, or was it just a matter of 32 | WRITE NOW

SMR: That’s something that came about later. I got involved in Malibu out of a total love of comics. I loved every moment of the time. We then started talking to potential suitors, finally selling to Marvel. DF: What made you want to sell? SMR: We thought that we would have better distribution, better worldwide sales, better advertising support in and out of comics, a bigger sandbox to play in, and kind of did it for all those reasons. DF: And the deal was that you would stay on running Malibu? SMR: Yeah. Unfortunately, Marvel ran into a few well-publicized problems resulting in bankruptcy. DF: I think I read about that somewhere. [laughs] SMR: I left before that happened. The writing was on the wall, and I saw good friends and valuable Malibu-ites feeling that they had to leave. The guys there from the beginning, building it from the ground up with me—really, they did a huge amount and put their all into the company—there is no way I could state that enough—Malibu wasn’t “Scott” it was all of us—like Chris Ulm, Dave Olbrich and Tom Mason—and almost from the beginning, Dan Danko, all felt they weren’t comfortable any more in the environment. Others too. Because this publication is for writers, I won’t go into all the names of the colorists, and design people and everyone else, but really great folks. And… really terrific creators and fans, who are the ones that without, there wouldn’t have been a Malibu Comics. DF: Many of us saw that writing on the wall. Now, I know, at one point, you guys published the first wave of the Image books. How did that come about and what effect did that have on you? SMR: That was terrific. We basically were talking to all of the Image guys, and we knew that they felt mistreated at Marvel, that they felt that they should get more credit, more financial participation, a whole list of things that would be wholly reasonable for any creator to want, and particularly superstars. So we met with them and they know our history of our great marketing, so we stepped them through how we can make each of their comics unique—unique from a marketing standpoint—they did 100% of the creative—and how we’re good at putting comic books on the newsstand up with Marvel and DC, which was very unusual. We had the best distribution. DF: On the newsstand, not just in the comics shops? SMR: Right. We were also on the newsstand. And we did marketing directly to the newsstand. For instance, we had one article in USA Today that we knew may not affect comic store

sales as much as we would like, but we thought would affect sales on a mass market level. And it did. We did a little gimmick and it became the best-selling comic we had on the newsstand. DF: Which comic was that? SMR: Protectors #5, where we killed a character with a die-cut bullet hole through the cover. USA Today picked up the story. Let’s just say, there weren’t any on the newsstand the next day. And we used to try things like that and warn the news-dealers, because we knew the timing, when it would come out, we really paid attention to that. Anyway, we made a deal with the Image guys to defect from Marvel and come to us, have their own imprint, and do anything they wanted to, basically. DF: You were kind of their training wheels as they learned to publish their own stuff? SMR: Yep. We did it for the first year, with it phasing out over the next six months or so. We held off the launch of our Ultraverse specifically for that time because we didn’t want to be competing with ourselves with Image, and it wasn’t fair to the Image guys, so we held off on the launch of that until they decided when they wanted to bring their publishing under their own roof. DF: At this point, how big was the staff at Malibu? Malibu got pretty big, right? SMR: We had maybe a hundred people. DF: That’s pretty big. And you had that cutting-edge color separation operation there, too. SMR: That was a wonderful thing to have. Adobe still thanks us and still considers us to be the pioneers of Photoshop usage. Being able to conquer it in comics, which is now, as we all know, the worldwide standard. Adobe was actually sending people out to our place just to watch and take notes. They’d have interviews with us and put us on their website. To this day, they love us, and they want us to create electronic comics for them using Adobe material. DF: Actually, that something I want to get to a little bit later, the role of electronic comics and the Internet. But let’s stay chronological. When you left Malibu, was it directly to go to Platinum? Was that in place already when you left Malibu? SMR: No, there was a little bit of time in between. There had to be. Plus, I had kids and wanted to see them a little. DF: That’s a good idea. Now that I have my own, I try to make time so they recognize who that guy is who’s in the house sometimes. ROSENBERG | 33

SMR: Exactly! DF: Now let’s get to the present, which is Platinum Studios. How would you define Platinum? It seems to have several different aspects, that I think some people might find confusing. SMR: Okay. We’re an entertainment company that’s known for comic book-to-film adaptations. Comic books, graphic novels, online comics, illustrated whatever. I can be talked into a novel or something, haven’t been yet. I’m not opposed to other stuff, I just happen to have an unbelievable geek-like love for comic books. What I love is seeing a character move off the page into other mediums. Interactive, movies, TV, toys—anything. So that’s our goal, and how we get there is a few-fold. We have a few different ways that we work. One of the ways is, we take a look at comics as they come out, or people send us comics that are about to come out (sometimes a year or two before publishing) and say, “Hey, will this work for Hollywood?” And let’s say it’s either published or someone else is publishing it, we say “terrific” and we give them an option agreement. We then have a certain amount of time to start developing the story and figuring out how to get a production going. The more time we have—the better. If we have only a short time, it means that we have to get it out quickly to everyone’s desk. DF: The desks of production companies or of studios? SMR: Studios, production companies, you name it. Everybody. DF: Agents... SMR: Agents too. Just throw it out. And a hundred could turn into three hundred. And then the hope is, out of all of those people who saw it, one—maybe, if we’re lucky—or two—which would lead to a bidding war—would like it. However, I’m not a proponent of that method at all. That’s the easy method, by the way. I mean, anyone in Hollywood with a Rolodex who knows all those people can do that thing, no big deal, you just send them out. But the big negative for a comic book creator? If we’re working on a project, we like to look at it like it’s ours, treat it like our own little baby, which is how a creator would hope that we would. If you just toss it out like that, the odds are—strong odds—that no one’s going to like it anywhere, that it’s going to be burned at all the studios, that it’s going to be entered into their systems as “We read X and passed on it.” And it takes a hell of a lot to get past studios having turned down, wholesale, a project. A lot of people will do that. Some producers will take five or ten or fifteen comics properties and toss them everywhere. From that producer’s standpoint, it’s not a bad thing, because they want to get a couple of movies going over the year, and it’s irrelevant to them how much stuff they throw against the wall as long as something sticks. The problem I have with that is that I guess I’m not a normal producer. I want to be able to look these same creative people in the eye afterward. And, again, it would be in my self-interest, probably, to toss them out like that to move things faster. But it burns all the ones that aren’t picked up, where it’s very, very difficult for the creators to then go get something set up, because any new producer that comes on is going to want to know how it was handled before, and he’s not really going to want to hear that it was thrown against the wall. That said, producers who do that get more movies going, but it reduces odds for the individual creator’s creation. DF: What are you on production on right now? SMR: Jeremiah on Showtime. DF: How did you get it going? It was a European comic set in a post-nuclear holocaust US after racial wars, if I recall. It couldn’t 34 | WRITE NOW

have been easy. SMR: No, it wasn’t easy—at least until we figured it out! Once we figured out what to change the origins from, the stories then started evolving naturally, keeping the atmosphere of the world that creator Hermann Huppen has been writing and drawing, which Ervin Rustemagic, showed me at Malibu Comics—we’ll talk about that later when we talk more about Jeremiah. So that’s one avenue—looking at older comics and trying to figure out a contemporary spin... We also take a look at more recent existing comics or stuff that we know is coming out that the creators show us. And we’re happy for them to show us stuff even when it’s in the earliest concept, when it’s a paragraph, because we’ll know in concept if it’s something that we want to play around with. In some cases it’s like, “Oh, terrific, yeah!” and then in other cases, “We really have to see more of that one.” We’re happy to look up front. A lot of places, as you know from pitching things around, don’t really read things. We really do. So for us, seeing something really early, we’re going to get it—understand it—more, because once in comes out in the comic, it may just be a totally different direction. I would suggest a writer give us something to tease us with, give us the general idea, and then get us hot on the general idea. And then, when we start talking about what it is, the writer’s either open or he’s not, to “can it go this direction or that direction” If he’s not open to it, then we listen to his vision all the way through. If he’s open to it, then he doesn’t have to create in a vacuum, because we can say, “Well, don’t go in this direction, because we can’t set it up at these four studios because such and such happens.” So we can kind of help guide a project along. That said, we don’t insist that the comic story be the movie story, because that’s a different medium. What we want is something that we can spring from to figure out movies, television, games and so on. Now, there are two other aspects of Platinum. Sometimes creators will come and pitch us material that they want to see published. That’s why we have the whole comic book development office that Lee Nordling heads. [See DFWN #2 for an in-depth inter view with Lee. —DF] Essentially, what we do there is, the creator has to sign a submission release and all that kind of legal crap, but then goes and works with Lee. And they together try to put the concept in a fashion that our studio development office will buy, (again, we’re not looking for it to be the movie story—just something to get us inspired). And Lee’s really good at helping to fashion things in that way. He’ll even say to creators, “No, no, no. Don’t give that information yet. Give more of this.” And that’s fine. DF: Yeah, he’s real good. I work with him a lot, as you know. SMR: So we love that, because we end up with the concept in a way that we can “get” it, and then we can always say, “Okay, give us an expanded version.” And then finally we green-light the comic. And then, on the comic, what we do is, once it’s finished, instead of like at Malibu, where we competed with all the publishers, we’re friends with all the publishers now. So we’ll just figure out whichever is the most appropriate publisher philosophy to release it. Is it Image? Yeah, Jim Valentino, with some things, is a great choice. Is it CrossGen? Certainly, I love those guys over there, there’s a bunch that we’ll be doing with CrossGen. It kind of depends: Is it superhero? Is it color? Is it horror? Is it an indie that it’s going to work better with William Christiansen’s Avatar line? I’m really impressed with what William’s doing. Is it something that works better with Robb Horan’s Sirius line? There’s a whole bunch of different avenues

cover or something like that. for us to go. And that’s just in We’re about the same as the US. anybody. DF: So when does the program DF: The home run or the focus of of Platinum-produced books the company, it seems to me, is start? the movie/TV thing. SMR: Since we’re working with a SMR: Absolutely. And that is lot of creators who are telling spelled out in our agreements their stories for love, in between with creators. “Here’s the noteither other “real world” jobs, or very-good money that you get for squeezing in time around the comics”—which is the same comics that pay their bills, like with many indie comic superhero titles, we schedule publishers. On the other hand, everything around the creator, we’re willing to publish non-tradiand solicit only when finished. tional stuff. Someone can They’re mostly graphic novels, actually tell a story. It can be a so they’re going to take a while crime thriller. It can be horror, to produce. mystery, drama, romantic DF: It sounds like Platinum is comedy. So we’re not stuck with: more of a partner with the “It’s gotta be superhero and it’s creators than, say, a publisher in gotta be in the top fifty or it’s the way Marvel or DC would cancelled.” publish somebody’s work. DF: You also seem to have SMR: Yeah, I think thinking of access to people that a fledgling us as a par tner makes sense. writer, or even an experienced We completely produce a comic, writer, might not have, which I all aspects of it. Then we put it think is an important thing that out through the publisher that’s you bring to the table. right for it. So the creator ends SMR: Our Hollywood connecup with a fully-edited, done tions, you mean? comic, and chances are, had he DF: Right. pitched that same comic to the SMR: That and our editorial and publishers that we go to... well, From Barry Windsor-Smith’s contribution to the Ultraverse, Rune. development abilities. So a you know how hard it is to see Written by BWS with inks by Alex Bialy and John Floyd. writer gets a few things when a pitch, especially writers. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] they work with us. First of all, DF: But you bring an entire we’re going to read their submisfinished production to them. sions. And I know a lot of publishers I’m friends with that tell SMR: We love writers. The Ultraverse—we had fantastic artists me about their thirty boxes of unread submissions in the back with people like Barry Windsor-Smith and Darick Robertson. of their garage that they’ll never get to. It just happens that There were lots and lots of great artists. But it was a writerway. And really, it makes sense. Whatever business you’re in is driven universe. We actually created the universe by flying our a business. If your overhead is paid by how the books sell, you editorial staff and writers out to Arizona and locking us all into can’t expect a publisher to distribute material that’s not a hotel until we started the basis of the universe. commercial for their channels. On top of that, it’s much easier DF: The Ultraverse. for a publisher to work with a writer they’ve worked with before. SMR: Yeah! I’m very writer-focused. They know what they’re going to get. But we’re not that way. DF: And then is there a standard deal. I guess, again, an aspiring Our history, going all the way back to Malibu—that’s how we writer reading this is going to want to know, “If I go to Platinum got Men in Black… I think Lowell Cunningham said seventy with my idea, what kind of financial package will there be?” Or is publishers passed on that. that something that’s individual in each case? DF: I didn’t know there were seventy publishers! [laughs] SMR: They’ll order our submission kit, which they can send an SMR: We don’t care who passed on it. What we about care is, e-mail to Lee at lee@platinumstudios.com. Or they can go to do we like something? And do we think it can tell a good comic our website and go into “submissions.” And the submission kit book story? And, if necessary, do we think that it can work for totally explains everything. It has the horrible “Ya gotta sign film or TV? We’re even happy to relook at something we passed this first so we don’t get sued,” which ties in with our deals on before, because times changes, our relationships in with the studios, so that we can bring them stuff that they Hollywood changes, and what’ll work can change with the wind. don’t have to worry about. So the stuff gets seen more. We’re especially happy to look at a lot of submissions from a Basically, all the document says is “similar ideas are out there creator who keeps trying. Honestly, if a creator sent 50 in the ether, and just know that.” submissions and after all that reading we found one that DF: Your documents are very reasonable. we like, we’re thrilled. And we’re just as thrilled if we like SMR: Thanks. I just hate that those documents have to exist, none of the 50,but he sends 50 more and then, finally— but they do. So anyway, the dollars are really low because it is there it is. The one that’ll work. the comic book industry – and indies. Royalties are the same, pretty much, as anyone gives. It adds up to eight percent of The Scott Mitchell Rosenberg Interview Continues Next Issue!

END

PART

ONE

ROSENBERG | 35

Here, we have some “process” materials from Superman Adventures #40. The script, done “full script” style—with art descriptions and panel breakdowns written at the same time as the captions and dialogue—is by Ty Templeton, from a plot by Ty and Dan Slott. [©2003 DC Comics.]

Artist Michael Avon Oeming then did very rough thumbnail sketches of the story. The thumbnails are then translated into very detailed pencil art by Neil Vokes. The inks on the final art are by Terry Austin.

36 | WRITE NOW

Notice how, while the essential storytelling stays the same from sketch to pencils, there are many differences in emphasis and angle, as well as the increase in detail you would expect.

These changes could be for any number of reasons, including input from the writer or editor, or Neil, himself, deciding that certain changes would add to the storytelling.

NUTS & BOLTS | 37

Ride A Dark Horse

The DIANA SCHUTZ Interview Conducted via telephone by Danny Fingeroth January 15, 2003 Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Diana Schutz

iana Schutz has been employed in the comic book industry in one form or another since 1978, when she took her first job selling comics retail, in Vancouver, British Columbia. A lifelong reader of comic books, Schutz quickly developed an interest in other aspects of the business and took her first editing job as an assistant at Marvel Comics in 1984. That lasted all of four days, after Schutz realized her desire to be part of a smaller, more personal company. Schutz took her vision to then-upstart Comico and became one of a rare handful of high-profile female editors in the comics industry. In 1990, Schutz moved to Portland, Oregon to accept an editorial position at Dark Horse Comics, where she has held various titles including Managing Editor and Editor in Chief. Schutz is widely regarded as one of the industry’s top editors. Among the writers and artists she has worked with are Frank Miller, Matt Wagner, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Stan Sakai, and Harvey Pekar. In 2002, Schutz became a part-time instructor at Portland Community College, where she teaches a course entitled “Introduction to the Art of Comic Books.”

Diana Schutz & Bob Schreck on vacation in 2002.

DANNY FINGEROTH: We are talking with Diana Schutz, a senior editor at Dark Horse Comics. I believe that’s the correct title these days. I want to talk about the evolution of Diana Schutz, what Dark Horse is, and, as an editor, what you look for and that sort of stuff. So first, a little background info. You’re from Canada originally? DIANA SCHUTZ: Yes, born and raised in Montreal. I haven’t lived in Canada for some twenty years now. In fact, I’m thinking about taking out American citizenship. DF: Well, you should, we can use you. [laughter] DS: Finally, after all these years in this country! [laughter] DF: Anything in your background, family, friends, etc. that contributed to your current career? DS: Let’s see... I’ve been reading comic books all my life. DF: How did that start? DS: That started at age five. My mother was a comic book reader as a girl. I was kind of a voracious reader in any case. Mum used to buy me comics. I think I first encountered the medium, though, at my dad’s dental office, because one of the dentists there used to bring in his kids’ comics to put in the waiting room for the younger patients. So I was reading all the Mort Weisinger-edited comics. DF: The Superman books. DS: Yes, the Superman books. But we’re talking early ‘60s, so I was reading Lois Lane. I was reading the girls, Lois Lane and Lana Lang. And most importantly, I was reading Supergirl. You know, the backups in Action and Adventure Comics. But, yeah,

the Superman comics, that was what caught me—and held me. Forever and ever, as it turned out. So cut to 1978, I was a grad student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. The direct market had begun to blossom, and I was a regular at a local comic book shop. I wound up dropping out of grad school to work at the comics shop. DF: Would you have dropped out of grad school anyway? DS: I don’t know. I actually went back to grad school when I moved to Portland, in 1990, and got a Master’s degree in Communication Studies. But at that time, in 1978, I had been in the ivory tower all my life, and I had no social skills whatsoever. I learned them really quickly working, across the counter, in the comic book shop. DF: You might be the only person ever to have learned social skills in a comics shop. DS: [laughs] No comment. DF: [laughs] You have a creative writing degree, it says, in the info you sent me. DS: Yes. DF: What did you think you would do with that? DS: I knew that I wanted to work in publishing somehow. The reason I studied creative writing is because, like every other adolescent, I spent a lot of time writing poetry. But I never really saw myself as the Great Canadian Writer. But books— reading had been it for me for so long that publishing was definitely where I wanted to wind up. In fact, it was publishing or teaching.

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DF: Teaching at what level? DS: At the college level. DF: Which you’re doing now. Actually, that’s on one of my index cards lower down in the stack, but we have to get to these top cards. It’s very exciting, I have index cards. The first index card interview I’ve done. I have an office a few blocks from my house and I don’t have a printer here, so for a recent interview I cutand-pasted, just like on the computer, except I did it with paper— DS: By hand? DF: Yes! I had strips of paper with questions, so I cut them up and pasted them! [Diana laughs] I thought, “Wow, it’s just like on the computer!” But then I thought, “Maybe index cards.” [laughter] It was a real discovery! But I’ve just closed the window, because if there’s a breeze, I’m really in big trouble. [Diana laughs] Although it might be sort of a William Burroughs kind of random interview. DS: Yeah, a Naked Lunch thing. [laughter] DF: So you were reading comics all the way through, no stops? DS: I stopped somewhat during my teenage years. Or, I should say, I winnowed down. I stopped reading superheroes in my teenage years and concentrated exclusively on romance comics, which were still being published at the time . DF: Because the superheroes were just not appealing to what you needed at that point? DS: Absolutely. I was interested in boys, cigarettes, and other things that I can’t say in print.

DF: That whole line of cigarette comics never worked out, did it? [laughter] So you were interested in boys, and romance comics got you that fix? DS: Yeah, absolutely. Because I sure wasn’t getting them in the real world! [laughter] DF: I find that hard to believe, but okay. You were a fan journalist in there somewhere... DS: Well, working in comics retail, which I did for several years, starting in Vancouver, and from there I went to Comics and Comix in Berkeley, which is where you and I met. DF: Is that where? That was when? DS: Early eighties. DF: Berkeley in the early eighties, was I even out there? I guess I must have been... DS: Yeah, you were out for possibly a Creation Convention in San Francisco, and that’s where we first met. DF: Okay. I don’t have this as one of my questions, but I knew I was going to get it in here somewhere. This was in the era of Chris Claremont writing all the women in X-Men, and everything else going on. I remember you telling me that Dazzler, which I was writing, was the best woman character in comics, and I thought, “Okay, what’s she been smoking?” DS: Well, Paul Chadwick was drawing Dazzler, wasn’t he? DF: No, no, no. It was me and Frank Springer. Those were the heavy cleavage days of Dazzler. So, if you actually meant that, cool. On the other hand, maybe I don’t want to know if you [Schutz continues on page 41.] SCHUTZ | 39

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[Schutz continues from page 39.] actually meant it or not. DS: Well, y’know, if I said it, I probably meant it, because I’m a terrible liar. DF: You’ve said that in other interviews. I was going to ask you to try to lie to me at some point in this interview just to see if I could figure out when the lie would be. [Diana laughs] DS: Actually, truth has served me in very good stead as an editor, I’ve found. DF: Well, if you tell the truth, you don’t always have to be making up stories to stay consistent or have to remember what you told to whom. DS: There is that, and there’s also the fact that your creators appreciate honesty. You may not be painting a great picture for them, but they appreciate an honest picture. DF: Of course, there’s different ways to tell the truth. There’s a whole storytelling skill involved in that. DS: I suppose. DF: Well, you’ve certainly been doing it long enough and successfully enough that you must have those skills. Back to your history. You’re in the comics shop and you’re doing articles for different fan publications? DS: It was when I moved to Berkeley in the early ‘80s and was working at Comics and Comix. I started, at that point, writing reviews for the fan press, and so on. In fact, I edited a 32-page bimonthly newsprint magazine for Comics and Comix, which was our store “newsletter.” DF: Was that your first major editorial experience? DS: Yes, absolutely. That was in the very early days, I guess, of the personal computer, but I sure didn’t have one. So everything was typewritten and printed out and pasted up by hand. Tom Orzechowski, one of my first friends in the Bay Area, was a huge help to me, teaching me all about paste-up and mechanicals. So that led to various contacts in the field. DF: And at this point you’re disillusioned or just not interested in superheroes, but definitely interested in the medium? Or is that too simplistic? DS: No, I wasn’t uninterested in superheroes. I got back into the medium as a whole, all genres, when I was first in grad school studying philosophy. Because, as a break from reading Bertrand Russell, it was a simple pleasure to read comics. What really brought me back into comics—and I’ve said this on many an occasion—was Steve Gerber, because I found Howard the Duck one year on a spinner rack somewhere, and I was completely astonished at this idea of comic featuring a talking duck, a comic that was written for someone my age. [laughter] And that was it! I never looked back. DF: Do you think the Duck was written only for people your age, or do you think some child stumbling on it could have read it and gotten into it? DS: I don’t think a ten-year-old reader would have gotten out of it what I was getting out of it. I mean, that thing was rife with political and social commentary. DF: But also with guys in tights punching each other, too— obviously, that would be a very simplistic reading of it, but that was in it, too. DS: I tend to think Gerber was writing it for himself. Isn’t that what we all do, when we’re writing, really, in the end? We’re kind of writing for ourselves, we’re trying to please ourselves. And Marvel, it seems to me, really gave him a shot to have fun and be creative. DF: It seemed in those years, within certain parameters, people

were given a lot of freedom. So you’re back because of Gerber, you’re doing the newsletter for Comics and Comix… DS: And going to conventions for the first time, meeting people... DF: What made you think, “I want to go to a convention”? Just because you were meeting people at the store and so on? DS: Well, because the store would display and sell at conventions, and I would work behind the table. DF: So the overarching question here, as it says right here on this card, is: someone with your background and interests might go into publishing literary novels. Why comics? It seemed the comics you’re interested in are those with a literary bent. Why not go all the way into literature as opposed to literary comics? DS: I guess, again, going back to Howard the Duck, at that point I’d bought in to the field—hook, line, and sinker! [laughs] DF: So I guess, for people reading this who might be younger, who might not realize it, Howard the Duck was a huge phenomenon for a couple of years, there. DS: It was. And, again, like so many people, I had associated comics with my youth. Comics were things that you read when

A page from issue #3 of Matt Wagner’s Mage: The Hero Defined featured characters (bottom panel, from left to right) based on Matt himself, Joe Matt, Bernie Mireault, Diana Schutz, and Bob Schreck. [©2003 Matt Wagner.] SCHUTZ | 41

you were younger. And I had winnowed down through adolescence to just romance comics, comics for girls. And so discovering Howard, and discovering that Marvel and DC, all of a sudden, in the late seventies had more to offer me—the then twenty-some-year-old reader—it was fresh and it was exciting and I was hooked. [laughs] DF: I guess that answers the question of why you would go into comics publishing. So from the store, there’s your time with Comico. How did that happen? DS: Comico was a small, independent—what we then called independent—comic book publishing company located in Norristown, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes outside of Philly. And they were a bunch of young, upstart kids—art college kids—who loved comics. DF: Who were some of those people? DS: Phil LaSorda, Gerry Giovinco, Bill Cucinotta. And Matt Wagner. They had dropped out of art college to start their own comic book company. Originally, they were putting out black-andwhite, creator-owned, kind of idiosyncratic action/adventuretype comics. 42 | WRITE NOW

DF: By people such as...? DS: By people such as Phil LaSorda, Gerry Giovinco... [laughter] DF: Okay, I get the idea. DS: They were publishing their own work. But it was Matt Wagner’s stuff that really took off. He was headand-shoulders above the rest of them in talent, and you could see it, even in his early work. DF: That would be Mage, Grendel... DS: Mage and Grendel, yes. So by the end of ‘84 I had moved to New York. I worked my four days at Marvel... DF: I remember those four days you were there, because I remember you being there, so it had to be somewhere in those four days. A lot of people in a new job would say, “Oh, I’ll give it a month.” What made you say, “I’ll give it four days.” DS: I don’t know, I’m a girl, y’know? [laughter] It’s the female prerogative, right, to change your mind? DF: I’m not going to make any comment there! [laughs] DS: It became clear, very quickly, that Marvel was not the place for me. It was Chris Claremont who helped me get the job, and God bless him for it. I learned a great deal in those four days. And one of the things that I learned was that working in what is essentially a midtown Manhattan corporation is not for me. I’m much better off in a smaller business. Plus, I was living out on Long Island and doing that commute. I’m too much of an old hippie to do that commute thing and that big city corporation thing. DF: And those were the days when Marvel wasn’t even that corporate. It was actually pretty loose then. DS: Well, you know what? I walked into Marvel with hugely unrealistic expectations. I was a young fan, I was bright-eyed... I was starry-eyed, really. It was my pie-inthe-sky. I was going to work for Marvel Comics! I was going to be Ann Nocenti’s assistant editor on the X-Men in 1985! What could have been better? DF: But apparently it was not to be. DS: No, it just wasn’t for me. DF: Did you literally leave New York at that point, too? DS: Bob Schreck and I left New York about five months later. Bob had gotten work at Comico. DF: So the narrative ties back into Comico. Very nicely done. DS: They had offered Bob a job as their marketing director. Bob is the reason that I moved to New York in the first place. DF: Were you married at this point or were you boyfriend/girlfriend? DS: We weren’t married, but the long-distance relationship had gotten really old for both of us, and our phone bills were way too expensive. So I moved east. And Bob started working at Comico not too long after I left Marvel, if I recall, and then Comico offered me an editorial job. So we moved there in May of ‘85 and stayed until April of ‘89. DF: So there’s a lesson to you, readers: if you get four days’ experience somewhere, you can parlay that into a four-year job somewhere else. DS: You know the most valuable thing I learned in my four days at Marvel Comics? Well, I learned a lot of important things, but the most valuable thing was how to make a production schedule, for which I will always owe [production manager] Virginia Romita. DF: Well, she was great at that.

DS: And, in fact, Dark Horse Comics owes Virginia Romita, because when I came to Dark Horse in 1990, they did not have production schedules. They didn’t even have a printing schedule. [laughs] I drafted for them what has since evolved into a company-wide master schedule, and I put all the books on production schedules and have taught subsequent editorial coordinators how to do those things. So Dark Horse Comics says, “Thank you, Virginia Romita!” DF: So Comico was mostly the Matt Wagner stuff, it sounds like. And then, how did the Dark Horse connection come about? DS: After Comico, I spent a year freelancing, living in southern California, taking my lunch break at the swimming pool, having a year-round tan... DF: Sounds very nice. Freelancing as...? DS: I was freelance editing. For Comico, primarily, still on Grendel. But I was also doing a bit of freelance proofreading for Graphitti Designs as well. Then Mike Richardson called Bob and offered him a job at Dark Horse. DF: In editorial? DS: Marketing. Bob was working in the business end of things at that point. And at the same time, DC Comics called and offered me a job in editorial. [laughter] Which subsequently led to Dark Horse offering both Bob and me jobs, and DC offering both of us jobs. Mike flew us to Portland. And ironically, given that he’s now at DC, Bob was the one who wanted to move here. But I will say that what influenced the decision to move to Portland was primarily the kinds of books that Dark Horse was publishing in 1990. Mostly creator-owned, more sophisticated stories. DF: So you’re at Dark Horse, you’re an editor and Bob is in marketing. Were you married? DS: Yeah, we married in ‘89. DF: What was Dark Horse’s mission then? If you don’t mind a high-falutin’ word like “mission”… DS: Well, I don’t know that we’ve ever had a “mission”… other than to publish great comics, you know? The first “mission” I was given at Dark Horse was to please get Aliens vs. Predator out the door, to get it published. Because they’d solicited for it so many A page from Usagi Yojimbo #68 (story and art by Stan Sakai), complete with times and blown the ship date for months on end. That Diana’s editor’s marks. [©2003 Stan Sakai.] was the first project that I got handed, if I’m not mistaken. So, the first thing that I did was put it on a the punching-and-hitting superheroes. When you think of DC, you production schedule. think of some heroes and some Vertigo. Dark Horse is more DF: Was there a production manager who was supposed to be amorphous. They’ve been around for years and do a lot of stuff. doing that, or was there no such thing? Could you characterize it in any way, or is it really a potpourri DS: Dark Horse Comics at the time consisted of ten people. kind of place? Bob and I were the first imports, the first people who had DS: It is kind of a potpourri place. Back when Dark Horse first already worked in comics to be moved to Portland to come started publishing, in 1986, Mike Richardson’s intent was to work at Dark Horse. publish comics that he would like to read. DF: It sounds like they were pretty heavy on the licensed DF: What was his background, in a nutshell? properties then. DS: Well, Mike grew up in a suburb of Portland called DS: They had just begun to expand into licensed books. They’d Milwaukie, which is where Dark Horse is still based. He was a had tremendous success with Aliens, and they came up with comic book fan, a voracious reader of comics. And he also got this great idea, Aliens vs. Predator. And it was a great idea. into it professionally via retail. He opened up a comic book When I managed to get that first issue out, it sold 450,000 store in Bend, Oregon. He still owns a chain of comic book copies—which, for an independent publisher, a publishing stores in the Portland area. And it was his retail operation that house that consisted of twelve people, was phenomenal! DF: Really. Now, when you think of Marvel, you think of course of [Schutz continues on page 46.] SCHUTZ | 43

A rare example of Diana Schutz’s comics writing. Here is her script, and the printed comic pages, for the first three pages of Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Devil Child #1. The art is by Tim Sale and Teddy Kristiansen. Cover art by Tim Sale & Matt Wagner. [©2003 Matt Wagner.]

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[Schutz continues from page 43.] financed Dark Horse Comics. But in the early days of Dark Horse, the company was among the raft of independent, black-and-white publishers that sprang into being in the ’80s, and one of the only ones to have survived since then. At that time, they were publishing kind of offbeat, black-and-white, quirky, more sophisticated, interesting comics that older readers would be more inclined to pick up. DF: Such as...? DS: Such as Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, which was a flagship title. They were publishing a book called Bob the Alien, which was hilarious. There was the anthology title, Dark Horse Presents. Then Dark Horse began branching out into licensed properties. Cut to January of 2003, and I think the comics community at large tends to see Dark Horse as primarily a publisher of licensed properties. And while that’s true, I guess I tend to think of the company more along the lines of a regular book publisher. We don’t publish books for any one, specific readership. We publish comics that appeal to a wider consumer base. DF: Do you think that helps or hurts in the current market? DS: I think it’s hurt Dark Horse’s identity because we can’t be easily pigeonholed in the way that you can pigeonhole Marvel or DC, or even Fantagraphics, for instance. But I also think that

that gives us more freedom to do whatever we want here. DF: Now, I know you had moved up the editorial ladder up into some kind of executive position… DS: I’ve been up and down several times. [laughter] I had been editor-in-chief at Comico, and I swore that I would never do that again. Mike Richardson and David Scroggy, respectively, talked me out of that promise to myself twice in my now-thirteen years here. DF: So you enjoy it more in the trenches actually editing stuff. DS: I like getting my hands dirty. DF: Now, most of what you edit is creator-owned stuff, at this point? DS: Yeah. DF: I get the sense that you’re not just a rubber stamp, that you’re definitely in there working with the creators. What does that mean, with a creator-owned property? I’ve got the quote here that says you “facilitate vision.” DS: Oooh, I do? DF: You do! You said that yourself. [Diana laughs] Unless you were talking about your career in ophthalmology… But seriously—what does that mean to you? How do you edit a Frank Miller, a Will Eisner...?

END

PART

ONE

The Diana Schutz Interview Continues Next Issue!

All He Wants To Do Is Change The World

The FABIAN NICIEZA Interview Part 2 Conducted in person by Danny Fingeroth on December 11, 2002 Transcribed by Steven Tice / Copy-edited by Fabian Nicieza

rom Marvel’s promotions department to prolific freelance writer to “day-jobbing” editor, Fabian Nicieza has been a forceful presence on the comics scene for a good long while now. Having served as president and publisher of Acclaim Comics, Fabian is today back in the freelancer’s chair, writing for comics as well as other media. Last time, he and I were discussing his career and had gotten to the 1990’s comics boom era. Read on and see what Fabian has to say about the state of comics today, and where they’re headed in the near—and distant—future. —DF

DANNY FINGEROTH: Now, this was an interesting period in comics, because, all of a sudden, every artist believed they were a writer. But they often needed someone to come in and put words in the characters’ mouths. FABIAN NICIEZA: I think what happened is that Rob got New Mutants to plot, and the reason he got the gig was because he dumped 101,000 ideas on Bob’s lap, and Bob said, “Wow! This guy’s got a lot of ideas.” And Bob saw dollars. Ka-Ching! This guy can make the book sell. That’s part of an editor’s job, too. He saw that Rob was going to sell a truckload of copies of New Mutants, more copies than it was selling before. Well, every other artist who was involved in

that whole time period, whether it be Todd McFarlane or Jim Lee or any of those guys said, “Crap! If this guy can be plotting his book, then I want to be plotting my book, too.” DF: Those guys were great artists and great concept men, but they may not necessarily have been great storytellers. FN: Absolutely. But whose fault is it that they were writing? Is that their fault, or is that the editors’ fault for okaying it? DF: Good point. FN: I’m not going to begrudge those guys wanting to write. Jack Kirby wanted to write his own books. He did write his own books in the ‘50s, and he wanted to write his own books at Marvel and didn’t get the opportunity to. Will Eisner wrote his own work all the time. Frank Miller, Walt Simonson, Jim Starlin, Howard Chaykin—all these guys were writing their own work. It’s not like there was never a precedent for artists who wrote their own work and became writers after they were first known as artists. DF: Right. But, in the early ’90s, there seemed to be a flurry of guys who were maybe not ready. FN: Absolutely, yeah. And part of that’s hindsight. I mean, somebody decided Rob wasn’t ready to script his own work. In hindsight, do I think Rob was ready to plot his own work? No, I don’t. As the guy who scripted those stories, no, I don’t. If I were his editor, it would have been a tough judgment call. I can’t put myself in Bob’s shoes. But what are you going to do? You might forfeit the opportunity to have this guy do work that’s going to sell five hundred thousand copies. What do you do? DF: In retrospect, maybe some of the less-skilled artist/writers of that era lowered the bar for story structure. FN: Absolutely. DF: And I think, more than the chromium covers, it may have been that that led to the sales slump. FN: I think it was a combination of elements. DF: Sure. FN: There’s two ways to look at this. One way is what you just said, and I feel it’s very valid. It lowered the bar on the kinds of stories and how stories were going to be told. It lowered the bar on the expectations of what work had to be in order to sell that work to an editor. Conversely, though, someone had to be buying this stuff. Whether it was speculators buying five

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copies apiece, or whether it was one person per copy, this stuff sold a tremendous number of comics. For years. And not just by the artist–writers. And the books continued to sell after those guys left. Quite well, thank you very much. I was there! DF: We both have homes we bought with that royalty money. FN: So who was reading this “crap”? Somebody was reading this crap. Somebody was buying this crap. Somebody was liking this crap. So, was it crap? DF: It wasn’t all crap. FN: You know what? We talked before about how quality is subjective. I subjectively think that the quality of the majority of that material was crap. Even the stuff that had my credits in it. DF: Do you think there was a higher percentage of crap? I mean, we were putting out hundreds of books. Was there more crap, or was it the same crap percentage? FN: I think that we had the same crap ratio then as we do now. Of course, the people now aren’t going to say that, because they’re in charge now, and they’re going to say their work is great. Well, we were in charge then, and we thought the work was... selling. We were very honest with ourselves. DF: There were still books you wanted to read every month, though. FN: Absolutely! Not enough of them were the ones I was writing. [laughs] I mean, I made a very, very conscious decision. I both benefited from it in the short run and suffered from it in the long run. It is what it is. But what bugs me is when people rewrite history, especially when it self-servingly tries propping up their own preferences. DF: —It’s especially annoying when people who weren’t there rewrite history. FN: Exactly. At the end of the day, we had a mandate from the company to make a tremendous amount of money. We had pressure to perform at a certain budgetary level, far higher levels than the guys running the companies today have to deal with, I’d guess. So we did what we had to do to meet the expectations of our bosses, because that’s what our jobs were. DF: And along with them making a sh*tload of money, we made a sh*tload of money. FN: We made a sh*tload of money, too. No, I agree, but it’s all proportionate. The money we made was outrageous, but it was in direct proportion to the money they made. DF: There was a bigger pile of money than any creators had made in the history of comics before that. It enabled the Image guys to go start Image. FN: The analogy I’ve always used is: the biggest wave in recorded history was coming in, and a bunch of us were given surfboards and told to try to ride that wave. Some of us rode the wave and some of us didn’t. And some of us rode it all the way to shore, and some of us landed bobbing in the water just outside the shoreline, and maybe one or two guys ended up with a beach house right in front of the ocean. DF: That might be as far as you want to drag this analogy. [laughs] FN: And then some people had really nice bathrooms, and other people didn’t have really nice bathrooms. [laughter] So it was what it was. I look back on it a lot, I think about it a lot, because it was a very, very fascinating moral quandary to be a part of. You could call it “selling out,” but you know what? If there were people who were reading the work and enjoying it – and there certainly were—then who were you selling out to? DF: I think the shocking thing was not that it ended, but how 48 | WRITE NOW

dramatically and how deeply it ended. We knew sales couldn’t be that high forever, but I don’t think anybody imagined they would so quickly go so low. We thought maybe they would go back to what they were, y’know? FN: They didn’t go that low that quickly, it was a gradual process. I mean, I left Marvel before they hit the lowest point they were at. I came back to Marvel afterwards, after the Acclaim experience, and saw what the numbers were. I said, “Holy crap! That’s what books are selling nowadays?” At Acclaim we just didn’t look at sales figures, because it was too depressing. [laughter] DF: So, back to the Fabian narrative, how long were you on the X-books? FN: A couple of years for each of them. I got fired off X-Force because it was a top ten selling book. DF: Explain that, Fabe. FN: You’d have to ask Bob. To this day, I was never given a real reason. The editor wanted to make a change. Wanted to go in a new direction. The usual. At the end of the day, maybe I’d worn out my welcome and maybe he had other people pulling and tugging at him to make a change. Nothing nefarious, just business as usual. And I quit X-Men because I was going to be fired from X-Men in a few months, anyway... DF: And meanwhile, your day job changed from promotion to editorial. FN: No, at the time I was leaving the X-books, I had really minimized my daily office involvement at Marvel. I’d gone into

Editorial a few years earlier. I was a staff editor, mostly on licensed books, which anybody who’s edited licensed books knows is quite a picnic. DF: You edited Wonder Man too, though, right? FN: Yeah, I had a couple of non-licensed books. But I had Ren & Stimpy, I had Barbie, I had Bill & Ted. I did Darkman, a Hook movie adaptation, William Shatner’s TekWorld. A pretty diverse line-up. DF: And you were also writing three or four books a month? FN: There was a stretch there where I took a leave of absence and I only came in two days a week because I was writing seven monthly books plus Annuals, plus the staff job. And I was starting to really lose it at that point. It wasn’t conscious, actually. Writing that many books really wasn’t a plan at all. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. What happened is that there were demands on the budget to produce a certain amount of books, and everybody was trying to find logical spin-offs from their titles. If you’ve got a group book with one or two characters who might be able to support a mini-series, do a mini-series on them. And if those mini-series do well, make them monthly. There I was, am writing books that have franchise potential to them, whether it be X-Men or X-Force or New Warriors, you know? “Do you want to do a Deadpool limited series, Fabe?” “Well, yeah, I do! I co-created the character!” DF: There was that one year where every Annual had a new character who was supposed to be spin-off material. FN: Oh, they were? I didn’t know that! I thought they were just supposed to be trading card material! [laughs] DF: Actually, we did do a mini-series with one of the Spider-Man ones. FN: I think they ended up being catbox-liner material. [laughs] So if someone’s going to do a Night Thrasher mini-series, and I’m writing New Warriors, I wanted to be the guy to write that mini-series. If it’s going to be cat-liner material, at least let me be responsible for it! But then that mini-series sold well enough to justify a monthly series and I wanted to be the guy writing that monthly series. I didn’t write seven monthly books for all that long, because I realized my head was pretty much coming undone. DF: Of course, you had the clout, then, to be able to if not demand, then strongly request that you wanted to be the guy to write a given spin-off. FN: You know what? I never, ever thought I had “clout.” What I thought is that I had drive and I had relationships that enabled the editors to want me to do projects. DF: Well, as you know, editors are a cowardly, superstitious lot, so the thinking is: “Fabian’s good, he does this well, I know him” etc. FN: Yeah, it was logical for me to do them if I was capable of doing them. You know what, though, some might think, “You were writing so much, and most of it was crap.” Maybe so, but to this day, I still think some of the best superhero stuff I’ve written were individual issues of some of those “spin-off” books. The other thing is, I turned down monthly books during that time period. I had at least four monthly books offered to me by other editors that I turned down because it was just ludicrous. I couldn’t do it. And some things I did were favors— like NFL Superpro—which still dogs me to this day. It was a launch that needed some heavy reworking so that the NFL would approve it. The editor was having trouble, so I agreed to do it for him. I expected to get season tickets for the Jets and I

ended up going to one lousy game where they got creamed. Great seats, though. DF: A lot of this does go back to your work ethic and your seemingly boundless energy. You’re a guy who, as I recall, would write on the train to and from work on your laptop. FN: Yeah. But it was other things. It was life things, too. My now-wife’s mom was ill with cancer. My wife was spending a tremendous amount of time with her. I could either go home to an empty townhouse and stare at a TV set, or go out in the city after work with a bunch of guys and drink too much beer. Those were my choices. DF: They have museums in the city, too, you know. FN: Are there any bars in the museums? [laughter] DF: As a matter of fact, yes! FN: I decided that I could go out and drink some beers with the guys one or two nights a week but not every night, and I didn’t want to sit around an empty house, so I wrote. I wrote on weekends, I wrote on the way home on the train, because I had a long train ride. I wrote at home. I dislocated a finger before a softball game, and I was waiting in the emergency room in a New York hospital forever, so I wrote with my free hand while my other hand was wrapped up in an ice pack! I wrote, because it was a release for me from the stress of my job, and from the tensions of what was going on in my life. It’s almost what I had to do. And it’s only in hindsight that I say I should or shouldn’t have done that, but in many ways, the writing was a coping mechanism for me back then. DF: It is for a lot of people. So you did, finally, leave your staff job? FN: Eventually. I was part-time in `94 and off-staff in `95. I never wanted to leave staff. I was such a wuss about it. It got to the point where I was earning 90% of my yearly income through writing and 10% of my yearly income through a staff job. DF: Even with editorial royalties? FN: Yeah. Because I was editing the books that weren’t selling. Except for Ren & Stimpy, I barely made royalties on anything I edited. Ninety-ten, writing to staff work. But I was spending the

opposite amount of time on the jobs, 90% of my time on staff work and 10% of my time writing. And the numbers just didn’t add up. I’m no math major, but I could figure that one out. And I realized I had to leave staff. My poor assistants—Evan Skolnick and Carlos Lopez—they covered my ass way more than they should have had to, and they did more work than they should have had to. I should never have been on staff as a line editor at that time, because my head wasn’t geared for it, I wasn’t good at it. I was good at licensor relationships—I was great at that, actually—I was good at schmoozing, I was good at presenting, I was good at trying to find freelancers and develop freelancers. I wasn’t good at the day-to-day details of scheduling and the administrative work required. It’s a tremendous amount of work that anybody who hasn’t been an editor doesn’t know about. I didn’t have the head for it then. Most of all, I wasn’t good at being the one thing an editor has to be, which is a psychological babysitter. I wasn’t good at mollycoddling my freelancers. DF: Your use of the word “mollycoddle” indicates that perhaps you had some problems with it. FN: Well, think about it, though, Dan. Here I am, working a staff job, commuting an hour plus each way, each day, and writing seven books a month... and I’ve got a freelancer who can’t hand in his work on time! How much sympathy am I going to

The League gathers. A concluding splash from Justice League: A Midsummer’s Nightmare #2, co-written by Fabian Nicieza & Mark Waid with art by Jeff Johnson & Jon Holdredge. [©2003 DC Comics.] 50 | WRITE NOW

have for this guy, you know? [laughter] One time, an artist actually said to me he wasn’t handing in any work for the whole week because, “I couldn’t get my mojo up.” I almost took his head off! “You better find that mojo pretty f*cking quick!” [laughter] Said artist is today doing fabulous work, on a regular basis, for a monthly publication from another company. DF: So his mojo problems are under control? FN: Apparently he got his mojo back! He met Austin Powers! [laughter] So, no, I shouldn’t have been a staff editor at that time. I told Tom I wanted to leave staff. But he wanted to keep me on in some capacity, so did the president of the company. We worked out a part-time job which was basically coming in two days a week and schmoozing between departments, and having meetings where meetings needed an editorial representation, where other departments were doing other things that might have involved editorial. And I kind of milked that for a year and a half or so, and that was it. DF: And then you left staff completely? FN: Well, it got more complicated. DF: Or was that coterminous with the restructuring? FN: No, it was before “Marvelution.” What happened, to put it bluntly, is that I was— DF: Wait a minute! You weren’t impressed that I used the word “coterminous?” [laughs] Is it even a word? FN: No, I wasn’t actually impressed by that at all, because I had no clue if it was a word or not. [laughter] I was told point blank that I was going to be given a relatively important job at Marvel that was then not offered to me four months later. And that pretty much was the handwriting on the wall that enough was enough. So I decided that I had to start doing things on my own and I couldn’t expect the company to “be there” for me anymore. DF: So when the infamous restructuring came, you were already a full-time freelancer? FN: I was already a full-time freelancer. I was already working on a DC project at the time. DF: You weren’t contracted to Marvel? FN: No, no. They kept stringing me along on the contract. Great “company-speak,” they said they were going to offer ever yone else contracts but me and Scott Lobdell because they knew we wouldn’t go anywhere. They said it’s because we were “company guys,” but that was aeuphemism for, “You’re making so much money we don’t think you’d be dumb enough to leave.” So, I left. And when I quit X-Men, I was told, “Oh, but your contract is ready.” And I said, “Thank you, bye.” And that was it. DF: So you quit writing for Marvel… FN: No! I quit a staff involvement. DF: Oh, okay. That was...? FN: ‘95. DF: So around the time of the restructuring, I remember you being disgruntled, but you were sticking around. But also you were doing work for DC at that point? FN: Yeah, I started co-writing a project with Mark Waid on Justice League to prepare it for Grant Morrison taking over. And at that time, I was going to start trying some new endeavors. Whatever kind of contacts I had made, I was going to start using them to try to do outside work. DF: And did that happen? FN: Like anything in life, you throw fifty things up against a wall and if one of them sticks, you’re lucky. Well, I threw a bunch of

things up against a wall at a whole bunch of different people, different groups, and none of them ended up sticking. Then Steve Massarsky came and offered me the editor-in-chief job at Acclaim. DF: And publisher, too, or did that come later? FN: That came a year later. DF: Who owned Acclaim then? FN: Acclaim Entertainment owned the company at that point. They bought it in ‘94, I think. DF: Bought it from Steve? FN: Technically, yeah, they bought it from Steve Two covers from the Nicieza-scripted Acclaim Comics series Troublemakers. Cover to #2 and his investors. And by Kenny Martinez & Anibal Rodriguez. when Steve left, the the Cover to #9 by Kevin West & Rodriguez. parent company asked [©2003 Acclaim Comics, Inc.] me if I wanted to be president and publisher. I don’t think it was necessarily based on any incredible overwhelming confidence they had in me, it was just kind of a natural progression. I was probably the least of all possible evils for the job. DF: Were you writing when you were at Valiant? FN: Yeah, I wrote Turok as a quarterly, and I wrote Troublemakers as a monthly. But none of the books were selling. It was impossible to even expect them to sell for a variety of reasons. What we were just trying to do was to create content that the parent company could develop as video games, which in some cases they were smart about doing, and in other cases they weren’t. We had a lot of ideas, a lot of noble intentions, a lot of good publishing programs, but we lacked the personnel and the revenue stream to implement them properly. I learned a great deal in my two and a half, three years there, but ultimately it ended up being a bit of a career derailment compared to what I’d hoped it would be, which was a way to cement my reputation and generate advanced opportunities. I knew a few months into it that I’d made a mistake, but I wasn’t going to abandon the responsibility or the people there, so I rode it out and I think we tried our best with what we had to work with. DF: I guess you were involved more on a business level than you wanted to be? FN: Well, let’s put it this way. I had to check the contracts on the vending machines for our office. That’s not something that I was trained for, that’s not something that I should have been doing. But that’s the kind of thing the job entailed. I learned a lot. I mean, I’m negotiating film options and television options, I’m reading contracts, I’m trying to learn some finer points about all of that stuff. But I’m not a Harvard business graduate, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a trained accountant. I don’t

have a head for those kinds of things. What I’m best at is working with people to develop and present creative content, editing, licensing, marketing, promotion... DF: Somewhere in there you did some work for me at Virtual Comics. FN: That was before Acclaim, the Virtual Comics stuff. And then in ‘98, we’d already truncated Acclaim and moved part of it out to Glen Cove. I lived too far away from Glen Cove to justify that kind of ludicrous commute. I’d just had my second child. Actually, while we were doing all our layoffs and were shutting down our offices in New York is when my second kid was born. So you can imagine what a stress diet that was. I just decided I’d rather be home, so I quit, and walked out the door of Acclaim on a Friday with absolutely no work in front of me. Then on Monday I got a call from [then X-Men editor] Mark Powers at Marvel offering me Gambit, or at least to discuss Gambit. And then I just started freelance writing again. DF: So now, for the past five years, you’ve been doing a combination of freelancing for Marvel— FN: Marvel, DC—not nearly enough for DC, I think Carlin still resents that whole thing with the Transformers—Dark Horse, Byron Preiss, Starlightrunner Entertainment, Chaos!—the check is in the mail—anything and everything for anyone, if it sounds fun. DF: And also pitching and developing stuff for movies and TV? FN: Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of that. It’s a grind, and you have to have a tough shell and plug away with the expectation—or at least the hope—of a long-term payoff. DF: How do you get involved with that stuff? Do you have an agent first? FN: A friend of mine was working with an agency, and I started working with one of their agents. He recently shifted over to another company to be a manager and he liked my material enough that he asked to continue representing me. And I said, “okey-dokey.” I’ve been building up a body of spec work, feature film and teleplays, and you hope to God that your reps have connections and that they drop your stuff in the right people’s laps. And then you hope to God that those people read it. And then you hope to God that they like it. And hope to God they buy it. And hope to God you get paid for it. And then you stop worrying because chances are that it’ll never get made! DF: Did your body of comics work and/or your comics connecNICIEZA | 51

FN: I don’t know. Maybe, if I do a good enough job on the comic! They see comics as very different from teleplays, which is why I’ve been working on several spec teleplays, etc. It’s a whole new world for me and I’m on the other side of the country with no real plans to relocate unless I could get a television staff writing position. I know it’s all what is scientifically called, “spitting into the wind.” DF: Clearly, you’ve been successful for a long time. What do you have to offer? FN: Professionalism, passion, commitment, ideas and an understanding of how things are done and why on both a creative and business level. DF: In comics, or in life? FN: Both. A lot of writers don’t have that. You might have some of the most talented writers who are incapable of producing on a monthly level because From Fabian’s run on the Gambit solo-series. This panel is from issue #2 with art by Steve Skroce and Rob Hunter. they don’t understand what it takes to do [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] the work. I would venture to say that most editors who’ve worked with me found me to be a tions get you in the door with these agents and the studios? consummate professional. FN: This is what I knew and what I had confirmed: My name DF: I would agree with that. opens the door, but it doesn’t get people excited. I’m a FN: I’ve always done my job professionally. If I’ve had a little company writer, I’ve been a company writer my whole career. less passion for it the last few years than I used to have, that Now, I’m a company writer without a company. Which happens was not just a result of getting older, it was a result of having to a lot of us. It’s just the nature of the beast. So a lot of the done too much of the same kind of thing. Getting fired off development guys, producers, etc. know who I am. They damn Thunderbolts, in a lot of ways, was serendipity. It’s time to take well better, they’re 28-year-old vice presidents who were reading a look at different ways of doing things. I want to thank Bill and New Warriors when they were fourteen years old. I got that a Joe for firing me off Thunderbolts, because it was welllot when I was out in L.A. pitching Acclaim properties. They all deserved! Thanks, guys, you’re the best! My wife thanks you, knew who I was because they’d gotten my autograph at a too, `cause she loves it when I don’t have health insurance! convention five, six, seven years earlier. But it doesn’t necesSeriously, it really forced me to stop telling... I won’t say the sarily equate to them getting enthusiastic about reading same kinds of stories, because that’s not accurate, but the something. I’m not that kind of writer—Warren Ellis, Alan same milieu of stories. Getting to work on the Blackburne Moore, Brian Bendis—I don’t cook with gas, just dying embers Covenant for Dark Horse is really refreshing, because it’s [Laughs]. something very different for me. DF: But it does open doors. DF: Can you tell us a little more about the Blackburne FN: Absolutely. And then the work can speak for itself. I Covenant? happen to think I have a lot of skill in screenplay and teleplay FN: It’s a story about a writer who writes what he thinks is a writing, but then again, there are thousands upon thousands of fictional book, which turns out to be non-fiction—and historipeople smacking the same pinata. cally accurate. And it reveals something that a lot of people DF: You’ve just finished a thirty-issue, forty-issue run on would rather have had kept secret. Simplified, the writer learns Thunderbolts? he might have the ability to change the very fabric of how the FN: Forty-one issues. world works. He could be the harbinger of a whole new planet DF: That’s a pretty healthy run. What’s next? Earth. And the people who profit from the status quo don’t FN: Well, there’s a Dark Horse mini-series that I’ve got coming want to see it changed, and therefore want to stop him. out, which is a supernatural conspiracy story about a guy who DF: Do you see the future of what you’re going to be doing now learns that he might be the second coming of Christ. in comics for smaller publishers, or do you think that you’re I’m also working on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic. I’m going to get a foot in the movie/TV industry? I know it’s imposenjoying my work for Dark Horse quite a it and my editor, Scott sible to predict, but what’s your desire? What would you like it to Allie has been a pleasure to work with. As insightful as you be? without the arguing—said Fabian with a smile! FN: In comics, I would love to be able to keep doing new and DF: Thanks for making that clear. Does working on the Buffy different things for all the publishers. I’m mostly working with comic help you? Would the Buffy TV people take a look at your Dark Horse right now, but Marvel, DC or CrossGen could call Buffy comic and give you a shot? If you called them, would they tomorrow. That’s always been the cyclical nature of things. As be willing to let you pitch a spec? 52 | WRITE NOW

far as screenplays and teleplays go, you build a body of work, and you hope that that’s enough to get somebody to notice you. If it’s not, then you’ve got to come up with new things and keep the cycle going. You don’t get paid for writing specs, so you’ve also got to make a living. DF: You mentioned before that you were going to start looking, possibly, for some kind of full-time work. FN: Mostly from desire rather than necessity. I’ve been very fortunate that X-Royalties and my conservative handling of them will allow me to live very comfortably, but only for my natural lifespan. I’d like to make sure my wife and kids are comfortable when my brain explodes. I set up a ridiculously expensive standard of living for myself, but I’m tired of dipping into the “nest egg” to support it. My kids don’t deserve to lose their future because of my ego. If I do get a full-time job again, I want to get back to what I enjoyed doing and did very well, which was corporate presentation work, licensing, marketing presentation work and developing creative content for a company that understands and smartly exploits its creative content. I did it very well for Marvel and I enjoyed doing it. It’s a very different kind of creative muscle to flex. And even though I’m not as young and cute as I used to be, I can still hold a microphone and stand on a stage. DF: You’re still very cute, Fabian. FN: Thank you, Danny. Anyway, I would definitely prefer to continue writing. But, you know what? There was a time in my life when I had a full-time job and I wrote on the side. And when that writing started to make me money, that was gravy. Maybe it’s come back around. Or maybe I’ll get ten calls in a week and be more than happy to continue working as a freelancer. DF: Would you consider moving to L.A. and being one of those guys who is there pitching constantly? That does seem to be the common wisdom if you want to make it out there. FN: Yeah, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, 90% of those guys are single, or in a poor marriage, or don’t have families. Yeah, I could do it, and I honestly believe it would only be a matter of time before I succeeded. For a variety of reasons, I made a conscious choice years ago not to do that, knowing full well that it would limit my ability to succeed. I mean, Scott Lobdell, who I talk to several times a week, has been out there pitching for years, and he’s had four or five sales for movies and now he’s filming a TV pilot he created and wrote. DF: Does he live out there now? FN: Now he does. But for a long time he was flying back and forth between coasts like a maniac. It’s not the kind of life I want. I’m very, very fortunate that I earned money ten years ago to be able to support a comfortable lifestyle where I am now. My family’s here, my wife’s sister is here, our kids are settled here at school. If I could be a staff writer on a show, I would certainly consider relocating for that. But I don’t see myself relocating full-time out there. I think there’s a healthy does of fear on my part, too. Fear of failure, sure, but also fear of getting swallowed up in the world of trying to do it. If you don’t succeed, what worse place is there in the world to not succeed in selling a Hollywood script than in Hollywood? And if you do succeed, how many movies get made or make money? How many shows last more than 5 episodes nowadays? Measuring success is such a transitory proposition out there. If I don’t succeed in selling a Hollywood script or a comic book proposal out in Jersey, you know what? I’ve still got my backyard with 200 yards of woods and wild turkeys walking

around, and I’ve got my courtyard with my neighbors and their kids and we all go outside and hang out. And that’s a hell of a lot more comfortable way to deal with failure. So that’s what it boils down to—what’s the most comfortable way to fail? [laughs] Seriously, I was in L.A. once a month for nearly two years when I was with Acclaim and I enjoyed some of the energy of that pitching process, but the process of actually trying to get a deal together became exhausting. DF: So the main things, plug-wise, are the two Dark Horse series? FN: Buffy monthly and The Blackburne Covenant. DF: And when is Blackburne coming out? FN: It started in April. It’s a four-issue mini-series. I’m saving all the initial reviews because they’ve been so good. They help keep a writer warm on cold and lonely nights. DF: Art by…? FN: Stefano Raffaele. I’m also finishing up a huge 35-part custom comics project for Mattel, a Hot Wheels custom comics project. So if you are the father or the uncle of a five-toseven-year-old child who likes Hot Wheels, well, chances are, if you buy a Hot Wheels World Race car in 2003, you’ll also get a comic written by me. It’s tailor-made for parents to read to their children. The comic also spawned CG-animated episodes that will be released at retail level and probably air on one of the major networks next year as kind of a pilot for an ongoing series. I wrote the second episode of the five that are being done. DF: I wanted to touch a little bit on craft. I think one of the things that led to that early creative friction between you and me was that I had a certain grounding in craft that was, I would say, my junior high school English teacher combined with Mort Weisinger by way of Jim Shooter with maybe a little Louise Jones Simonson thrown in. I had a certain idea of what a story was, and I think you had your own idea of what a story was. How would you compare your concept to, say, from my concept and to what’s going on now? FN: You know what? I could be mistaken, but my interpretation of it is that I came in post-Watchmen, post-Dark Knight Returns, post-Frank Miller Daredevil. I was too stupid to be able to really understand the craft they employed in the structuring of their stories, but what I got out of it was the emotion and the passion that was the next step beyond what the guys from the ‘70s did. And the guys from the ‘70s were the next beyond what Stan did in the ‘60s and what Roy Thomas did in the ‘60s. Every decade it seemed like it elevated the medium that little bit more. DF: Define “elevated.” FN: Define “elevated?” Maturing the kinds of stories that they were telling, the ways they were telling them and the things they did with character. We can all pretty much agree that Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four was an elevation of craft in terms of how it was applied to superhero comics compared to what came in the ‘50s and in the ‘40s. And it’s arguable, but in my opinion, what Roy Thomas and Barry Smith did with Conan, or what Jim Starlin did with Captain Marvel, what Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers did with Batman, was a bit of an elevation from the approach to craft that Stan and Jack took in the ‘60s. Not to say it’s better than what Stan and Jack did, but it was the next step in the kinds of themes that they were trying to employ, the kinds of stories they were trying to tell, the kinds of decisions they were making for their characters. And Steve [Nicieza continues on page 56.] NICIEZA | 53

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[Nicieza continues from page 53.] Gerber, too, I shouldn’t forget to mention him, since he was a big influence. Gerber and what he did in Man-Thing and Howard the Duck and all his other stuff, all of it was the next step in the kinds of stories they were trying to tell. And that’s when guys like Alan Moore and Frank Miller came in and decided, “I’m going to take all of that and give it this slightly darker twist.” But not “darker” the way everyone else thinks of it, like the “dark and gritty,” that horrible phrase that became the catch-all. But by “darker” I mean more emotionally complex. That’s what I think a lot of the Miller Daredevil stuff was, that’s what I see in a lot of the Alan Moore MiracleMan, Watchmen and Swamp Thing material. DF: Do you think it became complex beyond the level where a child or a young teenager could read it and appreciate it? FN: Absolutely, yes. But here I was in my late teens, then my early twenties, reading this stuff, and that’s exactly what I wanted. I was no longer twelve or thirteen. When I was twelve, Englehart and Shooter’s Avengers was my monthly wow fix. Holy Toledo, you know? But I was twelve! When I was twenty, I wanted something different. When I was thirty, I wanted something different above and beyond that! When I was writing and editing for Marvel, what I really wanted to be reading was Los Bros. Hernandez, you know, Love and Rockets and all this other “independent” stuff. Now that I’m forty, apparently I want to read a lot of non-fiction history books. DF: That would be a good question. I think I should e-mail people in the industry: “What comics do you pay money for?” FN: I pay money for mainstream superhero comics that I was buying to keep up with, in case writing work crops up, although I plan to cut back on that real soon. If I get comp copies from Marvel, I’ll read just about everything eventually. I also buy DC Archives to fuel the geek engine. I’ll buy some trades when I’m interested or if friends worked on the series. In the last 2 weeks I bought Fables and Way of the Rat. DF: What was really terrific about you on New Warriors was, I think, what was terrific about Stan’s Spider-Man and Miller’s Daredevil, which was that those books could still be read by a wide age range. I mean, the same way that—and the Write Now readers I’m sure are sick of this analogy—but something like Rocky and Bullwinkle, you laugh at it as a kid, but you watch the reruns as an adult, and you see different stuff, but they’re still great. FN: There’s some permanence to the material because a lot of that was perceived of as for “all ages.” A lot of the material right now is certainly not perceived of for all ages, because it’s not being conceived for all ages. For the last couple of years, the books have clearly been created for the “cool” 40-year-old. And by “cool,” I mean someone who wants to justify why they’re still reading superhero comics. DF: I’m not even talking about content, I’m talking about just presentation. We were talking before about my old wisecrack, that the minimum requirement for a comic is to print the pages in order. That way, even if the story sucks, at least the person reading it can understand it. But even with the pages in order, many stories now are incomprehensible. FN: There’s a difference. Could I present a 40-year-old who’s never read comics before, with the first twelve issues of New Warriors and expect them to enjoy it? That’s a roll of the dice. But could I present a 40-year-old who still reads superhero comics New Warriors #1-25 and have them read it and like it? Yeah, but they’ll probably like it for the nostalgia factor, 56 | WRITE NOW

because it’s what they remember that comics were like when they were younger. Conversely, do I take Bruce Jones’s Hulk run and present it to a person who’s never read superhero comics? Yes, I do. And will they read it and will they like it? Probably. Because they don’t know those other kinds of superhero comics. They don’t know mainstream Avengers or New Warriors or even mainstream Spider-Man. So it’s different things for different audiences. The perception of the reader is greatly varied and colored by the experiences that they bring into play as a reader. Plenty of people were buying and reading—and, hard as it is for even me to believe—liking the comics. They spent hours waiting on huge lines for autographs. Oh, my mistake, they must have all been speculators. Those people at that time liked those kinds of comics. Then for a variety of reasons, many of them stopped buying. A healthy percentage of those who stayed with the hobby are now older readers and they’re enjoying all the cool books Marvel is doing. A larger percentage of those who left outgrew what was being done. That being said, the decline did happen after I’d quit X-Men, so draw your own conclusions… he said with a smile! I strongly agree with Bill and Joe when they say that the books became too mired in their own continuity and far too caught up in “posing” art and ranting dialogue. But again, the intended audience that was buying it seemed to be telling us on a monthly basis that they liked all of that. I happen to love Morrison’s current X-Men run, but I’m sincerely doubting there are too many 10-14 year olds reading it. So basically, it becomes an apples and oranges argument. Different things for different audiences at different times. Doesn’t make one inherently better than others, just makes them different and the work that came before doesn’t need to be denigrated in order to justify what’s being done now. In fact, the quality of the current material justifies that all on its own! I like the average Marvel Comics now more than I did 15 years ago, because they’re being written for a different audience. To some extent, the recent Tsunami line announcement Marvel made was the best news I’d heard in a while. It seems to me that these books are being geared for a very specific audience that Marvel is smart enough to understand they need to bring into their fold—and many of the book descriptions, like Namor, Sentinel and Gus Beezer sound perfect suited for that audience! DF: I was trained with the aphorism, “every comic is somebody’s first issue of that comic and maybe even that person’s first comic ever.” Is there a responsibility to make them accessible, and if not, how can we really complain about what’s happened to the size of the readership? FN: Granted, but you can say the same thing about any comic you read today. If you read part four of an eight-part story that is intended to be a trade paperback, which really is nothing more than a scene, not even a complete story, what if that was someone’s first comic? DF: If your intention is to sell a large quantity of a mainstream comic, I’d call that a failure. FN: It’s the other side of the same coin. If you’re going to fault over-complexity—of which we were most certainly guilty of— then you have to fault under-complexity, to coin a phrase. If you’re going to complain because you say you needed to read four issues of “continuity comics” before you could understand what was going on, well, then, you have to complain if you have to read four issues just to have something happen!

DF: It mystifies me, too. You turn on any TV drama or comedy, and with the exception of maybe the X-Files, which worked a lot on the chemistry of the two lead characters, they all have those dramatic verities that have been true for millennia. Beginning/middle/end, conflict/resolution, character development. There are millions and millions of people who watch the least popular TV show. Why is it that the comics people just don’t seem to get that? And, some people who write comics and write TV do it on TV but seem to have forgotten it for comics. Any thoughts on that? FN: I think what you’re talking about is how stories are structured now as compared to then. Ten years ago we had a severe case of verbal diarrhea. Buffy taking out a demon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer #50, co-written by Fabian & Scott Lobdell with art I’ll never forget something you by Cliff Richards & Will Conrad. [©2003 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.] said to me. You said, “I’m a Marvel and DC, especially Marvel, are strongly reaching the firm believer in putting the ‘book’ in comic book.” You wanted people they know they can reach—or want to. Black Cap? Gay writing. You wanted captions, you wanted some explanations, Rawhide Kid? Eunuch Hulk? All cool, as long as it helps them and you wanted thought balloons, which I always hated and sell a comic or a trade paperback. It’s outreach in its own way, never wanted to do. But whatever we wrote, we wrote more per just skewing older rather than younger. They’ll keep going with page back then. those these hot-button items, because they know they can get It’s tough to serve two masters, but we were trying to make publicity for it, they know that they can generate attention. It someone’s comic their first comic, and we were also trying to didn’t hurt for me to do an L.A. riot issue of Nomad that got make their five thousandth comic be their five thousandth! me on Entertainment Tonight. That must have worked to some degree, because if we had DF: The publicity can only help everybody. I’m just saying have a 400,000 or 500,000 people reading the comics and they beginning at the beginning, and the end of each chapter should varied in ages from ten to fifty, where was the fault, then? But be a cliffhanger, and I should get a complete unit of enterto play devil’s advocate, Joe Quesada said something that was tainment. 100% right—I’m paraphrasing—“when comic stories became FN: But how’s a cliffhanger a complete unit of entertainment? about comic stories,” that’s when the quality started to suffer. DF: Because you give some complete thing. You resolve one DF: I’m certainly not saying that the comics should read now like thing and then you open up this other can of worms. those of the ‘50s or ‘60s, but there seem to be certain storyFN: I imagine you’re mostly talking about Marvel—“NuMarvel” telling conventions that these days are just dispensed with I’ve seen it labeled. Like Bendis’s Daredevil, or X-Men by Grant wholesale. There’s a lot of schizophrenia. Half the time the Morrison, or Hulk by Bruce Jones? I mean, to one extent or companies say they’re trying to get the kids back, half the time another, yeah, you’re right, they’re not even remotely close to they say they’re writing off the kids. That’s one thing that I find self-contained stories. But it’s a whole new business model. massively contradictory. And, of course, everybody’s trying to find They’re being told as chapters in a novel or act breaks in a TV the best format, pamphlet or trade-paperback, or whatever. show. That becomes a whole story after four, six or eight FN: I have no opinions on the pamphlet versus trade issues, and that whole story becomes a trade paperback. I paperback. I dislike the use of the term “pamphlet.” I think it’s don’t know. I read six, eight issues of Daredevil in a row and I purposely meant to diminish the traditional comic book format. loved them. I think any place that you can generate and develop business, DF: Oh, it’s terrific. you should generate and develop business, period! FN: But I’ll be damned if I really think that the character even I’m sitting here writing three by four inch, eight-page comic moved five yards in ten issues! He went from, like, the books for Mattel. Thirty-five chapters of these funky eight-page, bathroom to the kitchen in eight issues! And he walked, he self-contained stories will be blown into a Hot Wheels 2003 didn’t even use his billy-club! That doesn’t mean it wasn’t welltoyline. Five-to-seven-year-old boys are going to be reading this written, it was gloriously written, the dialogue is great and the stuff, or having their dads and moms read it to them. But art by Alex Maleev is fantastic. In terms of action and reaching that marketplace with traditional Marvel and DC movement, there’s almost nothing happening, but the entire material is very, very difficult. NICIEZA | 57

plot structure and story progression is dependent on dialogue interaction to advance the story. Like I said before, it’s apples and oranges when comparing how books were done ten years ago to how they’re approached now. DF: So somewhere in there, they gave you some satisfying entertainment experience. I applaud that. But I guess in some nostalgic haze in my brain I have the Galactus Trilogy as a standard. FN: There’s a lot of ways to tell a story. What I don’t like is the philosophy that there is only one way to tell a story. I’m don’t want to come across as anti-anything. I’m really not. I’m a huge proponent of the kinds of the stuff being done right now, the kinds of craft that are being employed right now. I’m a huge proponent of it. I just don’t think it should be the only kind of book that is out there. Certainly not the only kind of book that a company like Marvel or DC should be doing. I also don’t think you need to put down what other people did to prop up your own publishing endeavors. The strength of that material should—and does—stand quite nicely on its own. DF: But is there still a place for that kind of stuff we grew up reading and ultimately ended up working on? FN: Absolutely. My question is, is there still an audience for that kind of stuff? I can’t answer that. That’s the ugliest question of all to try to answer. DF: I think there is, but it may not be a comic audience. It may be a TV or a book audience. FN: But comics always used licensed properties to try and

reach outside the standard superhero reader—from the 40’s until today with things like Buffy or CSI. I don’t know if younger readers would be attracted to the new style of storytelling, nor do I think they’d be interested in the “traditional Stan Lee” superhero. I think now, content-wise, the trick would be something more along the lines of a manga story approach, combined with successful movies such as Shrek or Ice Age. But as always, the key question becomes the A photo cover for the Fabian-co-written distribution model: how (with Scott Lobdell) Buffy #52. to get it into the hands [©2003 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.] of 8-to-12 year olds? This Hot Wheels comic is a great example of a custom comic program getting directly into the hands of an audience that we’re talking about, in this case, five to seven-year-olds. How often does the comics industry even think about five to seven-year-olds? The Adventures books that DC does have the look and feel of animated episodes, but without newsstand penetration, it seems they’re selling to 25-to-30-year olds! I think DC is now doing some custom comics as part of some food chain promotions, which is nice to tie in actual comic content into the toy pack the kids receive. DF: I still think that if you don’t get somebody hooked or get them used to the mode of comics storytelling as a kid, they’ll never get into it, with rare exceptions. FN: Yeah! My father, like I said, can’t read comics, because he never read comics. It’s almost like he lacks something in his brain to combine word balloons and image. DF: I know people with doctorates who cannot make heads or tails of a comic. So, Fabe, will there be comics in ten years? FN: Yeah! Absolutely! I’m very confident in the medium and the outreach of the material—both in terms of publishing content and in terms of licensing revenue now being generated. DF: Do you think there will ever be sales numbers like the 90’s again, or is that a thing of the past? FN: Not unless I’m writing seven books a month again. DF: Modestly put, Fabe. Now, we need to have some kind of a dramatic hook to end, here. Let’s see... If you could go back in history and kill one person, Fabian, who would it be? [laughter] FN: My art teacher in fourth grade who made me cry! DF: And with that we end our candid, informative interview with Fabian Nicieza. FN: Was it any of those things? DF: Yeah! It was a fine interview. Thanks, Fabe. See you in the funny papers. FN: Bye!

THE END

DEPARTMENT

Comic 101:

Dennis O’Neil’s Notes for Comics Writing and Editing Class continued

Classes 5 and 6 Denny teaches a weekly class in comics writing and editing for new DC Comics staffers. For the last couple of issues we’ve been showing some of his teaching notes, which were originally intended as cues to himself. Here are his notes for two more classes, lightly edited by Dennis and myself so that the principles are easily comprehensible to others. —DF

CLASS #5

• Good if it replaces outmoded values with current values. • Hammett’s heroes with personal code replaced “patriotic” heroes. (Spade vs. Drummond.) • Bad if does for the sake of making established hero look like a creep. • Sophomoric—like kid scrawling obscenities in wet concrete. • Appeals to audience who are in rebellion against inherited values.

CHARACTERIZATION SUPPLEMENT • ASK YOURSELF WHICH OF MASLOW’S HUMAN NEEDS YOUR CHARACTER IS TRYING TO ANSWER. • (Abraham Maslow was a psychologist renowned for this theoretical work and for championing humanistic psychology.) • Maslow arrived at list by studying healthy, successful people, not mentally ill or neurotic. • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. • Physiological needs • Air, water, food, sleep, sex, etc. Must be alleviated first. • Safety needs. • Stability and consistence in chaotic world. Mostly psychological. Home, family. • Love needs. • Non-sexual love, acceptance. Need to be needed. • Esteem needs. • Self esteem from competence. • Attention and recognition from others. Has to do with power. • Self-actualization. • Desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Seek knowledge, peace, esthetic experiences, selffulfillment, oneness with God, etc.

What is a HERO? • DEFINITION: MUST BE THE AGENT OF THE STORY’S

RESOLUTION. • Must act on, rather than be acted on. • Must be directly involved in main plot. • Can be “anti hero”—behave badly—if he does the above. • Should represent values the audience finds admirable. (Rooting interest.) • Modern trend toward “deconstruction” of the hero:

mythic imagination of the entire world. An understanding of these forces is one of the most powerful elements in the modern storyteller’s bag of tricks.” —Christopher Vogler • Most common archetypes (according to Vogler, who is greatly influenced by the works of Joseph Campbell, in The Hero’s Journey): • Hero (ex: Batman) • Mentor (Wise old man/woman) Ex: Alfred. • Threshhold guardian. • Herald (Gordon) • Shapeshifter (Clayface) • Shadow (Joker) • Trickster (Joker) • O’Neil addition: Sidekick.(Less perfect hero.) (Robin.) (Useful for exposition, etc.) • Brian Augustyn: To raise these characters above their labels, Heroes meet in Azrael/Ash written by Denny O’Neil with art by Joe Quesada & Jimmy Palmiotti. though, you have to add flesh to [Azrael ©2003 DC Comics; Ash ©2003 Joe Quesada & Jimmy Palmiotti.] their forms and depth to their souls; you have to make them live. • Criterion: Does making the hero somehow less than noble add to or distract from the story? • Read Raymond Chandler’s essay: The Simple Art of Murder. CLASS #6:

What is a VILLAIN? • We must work harder on villain than on hero. (Wish I’d known.) • Hero only as good as villain. • Villain’s motivation. • Reader should always know this. • Villains Should be colorful. • Joker, Iago, bad guys from Die Hard. • Should have edge on hero. • Hero only as good as villain. • Why Superman is hard to write: What villain/menace can credibly challenge him? How do you come up with credible challenges, story after story, while keeping stories from getting way overblown and ultimately ineffective?

ARCHETYPES: Structures which organize preexisting images that are inherent to the human psyche.—Carl G. Jung • CHARACTERIZATION AS FUNCTION OF PLOT. • Character will be determined by needs of plot. • Part of the underlying psychological structure of all narrative. • “Jung suggested that there may be a collective unconscious similar to the personal unconscious. Fairy tales and myths are like the dreams of an entire culture, springing from the collective unconscious. The same character types seem to occur on both the personal and the collective scale. The archetypes are amazingly consistent throughout all times and cultures, in the dreams and personalities of individuals as well as in the 60 | WRITE NOW

TOPIC: Myth as an element of characterization. • Superheroes come from myths. But where did the myths come from? • Archetypes: (Jung) Structures which organize preexisting images that are inherent in the human psyche. • Jung: “They occur in the folklore of Greek, Egyptian and ancient Mexican myths as well as in dreams, visions and illusions of modern individuals ignorant of all such traditions.” • European scholar Adolf Bastian called them “elementary ideas.” Ideas shaped by local conditions—”ethnic ideas.” • According to Mircea Eliade: The fire bringer known to classical mythology as “Prometheus” appears in Peru, Australia and Mexico as a hummingbird. Among the Indians of American Northeast coast he was “Raven”; among the plains Indians “Coyote”; while on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal he was “Kingfisher.” • Also: there are several versions of many of the Greek, Roman and Egyptian myths. • Myths are expressions of basic archetypes, “hardwired” into our psyches, which change according to circumstance and the times, and with repeated tellings. • George Lucas: “Mythology is a performance piece that gets acted out over hundreds of years before it actually becomes

embedded in clay on a tablet or is put down on a piece of paper to be codified as a fixed thing. But originally it was performed for a group of people in a way in which the psychological feedback would tell the narrator which way to go. Mythology was created out of what emotionally worked as a story.” • Ernst Casserir: Myth is a story which many generations agree on. • Comics are a maniacally accelerated version of this process of myth creation, because of input from many creators, editors, publishers and fans. • Julie Schwartz's revamping of the Flash in ‘56 led to revamp of entire superhero pantheon—updating them. Elementary ideas shaped by ethnic ideas. Julie took the old ideas and gave them a contemporary context and trappings. Mythological process encapsulated in short time, one place. • Something we've been ignoring: • Early myths always had a religious element. "Myths are other people's religions." • Attempt to understand why things happened or to put stories to rituals designed to make gods happy. • First plays at the temple of Dionysious—750 B.C.—dramatizing stories of gods. So another reason for change in expressions of archetypes—how they're realized in contemporary stories— is that people's idea of deities change over the ages. • Campbell: myth must do four things. • One: must give us an acceptable picture of the universe. • For thousands of years, miraculous powers of heroes attributed to magic or gods. Our society believes in neither, at least not much. (Magic and pantheon of gods is contrary to our Judeo-Christian, rationalist universepicture.) (Few exceptions like the original Captain Marvel.) We do believe in science, sort of. So— • Supes’ powers: explained by his coming from a planet with heavy gravity. • Flash: lightning/chemicals. • Green Lantern: alien technology. • Iron Man: originally transistors. Now technology in general. • Stan Lee often favored radioactivity to explain powers: • Hulk and “gamma rays.” • Spidey and radioactive spider. • Nobody says it has to be an accurate universe picture, merely one that can be accepted. • Campbell’s other requirements of myth:

• Two: Reconcile us to the foundations of our existence: • We must kill to eat, even vegetarians. And despite our knowledge of biology, there is still mystery about our origins—why did this sperm get cozy with this egg? • Comics don’t do this. Beyond their scope. • Three: Present us with an accepted system of morals: • Comics used to do this—patriotism, etc.—but don’t much now because there is very little in the way of universally accepted moral systems. • Four: Help us integrate ourselves into a social order. • As with morals—a fragmented social order is hard to integrate into. • We still have a need to belong to a special group. Some fans use fandom as the group and thus become angry when storylines and characters are changed. But this is necessary to keep the stuff current. Unlike early myths, there are a lot of mythologies competing for attention and readers will gravitate to those that are most contemporary.

THE END

O’NEIL | 61

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A Man for all Media

The PAUL DINI Interview Part 2

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

aul Dini began his career in the early 1980’s writing for such animation studios as Filmation and Hanna-Barbera. He moved to Marin County in 1984 where he spent five years developing and writing animation projects at Lucasfilm. Returning to Los Angeles in 1989, he joined Warner Brothers Animation as a writer on their break through series Spielberg Presents Tiny Toon Adventures. Dini is perhaps best known for writing and co-producing the animated Batman/ Superman Adventures, Batman Beyond, and the direct to video animated feature, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. He has also written numerous comic books, including award-winning graphic novels with producer Bruce Timm (Batman Adventures: Mad Love) and Alex Ross (Superman: Peace On Earth). He created the character Jingle Belle, who has appeared in many solo books and trade paperbacks from Oni Press. Also from Oni is Mutant, Texas: Tales of Sheriff Ida Red, a wild neo-western comedy adventure series. This March will see the release of Dini’s Zatanna: Everyday Magic one-shot from DC/Vertigo. Dini is currently writing and

co-producing a new series Duck Dodgers for Cartoon Network. In the first part of this interview, Paul discussed much of the above in detail, and we were in the middle of talking about his amazing collaborations with painter/illustrator Alex Ross… —DF

DF: Does Alex co-plot these? PD: He co-plots them. We get together and we discuss where we’re going with the stories and what elements we want to bring in. That process usually entails several weeks to a month of us just talking back and forth at night over where we want to take the stories and what elements we want to show in them. We’re working on a Justice League story now, which will be a lot longer than any of the previous books and will have a lot more characters. This is more of an adventure-type story, but it also defines what the Justice League means to the world and how people perceive these superheroes, who are fighting with their best interests at heart, but sometimes people don’t see it that way. DF: Is the continuity from the TV show or the comics or sor t of a mixture? PD: It’s sort of our own made-up continuity. It’s our wish version of what the Justice League should be. Alex is very much a purist when it comes to the starting point for these characters, so he wanted the story to begin with the first grouping of the characters from The Brave and the Bold comic books, before they got their own Justice League title. So Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and Flash are the ones who start off the story. But Superman and Batman come into it, because they’ve always been key elements of the Justice League. And from there, we bring in pretty much every other character we felt worked well with the group. Atom, the Hawks, Green Arrow, Canary, Plas, Zatanna, of course. I couldn’t leave her out. DF: When is that coming out? PD: That’ll be late this year. November or December. DF: Just in time for your holiday purchases, folks. Now, on the DINI | 63

other side of the Dini myth spectrum, of course, are the Texas myth and the Christmas myth. Again, of all the possible stories in the world, why focus on these subjects? And as a corollar y question would be, do you think that’s a good place for any writer to star t, taking primal myths and doing their own take on them? PD: Well, who’s more identifiable than Superman and Santa Claus? I’d say they kind of go hand and hand as being iconic images that came along in certain eras of modern history. Superman is from just before the middle of the 20th Century. Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas, is really is from the early 19th Century up to the present day. To me, Santa Claus is a great myth. I love Christmas iconography and everything connected to the holiday season. It’s my favorite season of the year, and, as any of the poor souls who work with me will attest, one that I start thinking about around the middle of September. DF: Is it something about the mix of the sacred and the profane in the Christmas imager y that’s appealing? PD: Actually I like the whole tangle of holidays that kicks off with Halloween and ends at New Year’s. Ever since I was a kid, I would watch specials like How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas! and listen to weird, funny Christmas songs. And I would say to myself, “I would love to make a little stamp on Christmas, something like Rudolph or Frosty.” And oddly enough, Jingle Belle did not come out of that. It was in the back of my head to someday do a holiday story, but Jingle Belle came from another place. It began in Hollywood as I watched (in many cases) extremely well known creators, producers, writers, actors and how they behaved with their children. Say you have a director who everybody reveres as being a brilliant fantasy filmmaker, or an actor who has got this wonderful childlike funny way about him. They would be larger than life, magical personalities. And then you’d see them with their kids, and their kids are, like, “Shut up, Dad. God, my dad is the lamest dad in the world.” Stuff like that. And I was thinking it would be fun to do a comment on that attitude, but not make it anybody I know or anybody you could draw a direct parallel to. And, somehow I just got it into my head, well, what if it’s Santa Claus? What if Santa Claus gets along with every child in the world except one: his own daughter. And the rest just fell into place. None of the established mythology of Santa Claus has him with a child. And the more I worked on that idea, the more I liked it. I would think, “Well, of course. When Santa and the Mrs. had a daughter, they spoiled her rotten. They gave her every great present there is.” But still, at some point, their kid has got to realize that she has, in effect, sibling rivalry with every other kid in the world for her pop’s affection, and that’s where the trouble starts. DF: That’s the brilliant par t of that character. PD: Thanks! So I would write these little bits down and I would file them away in a sketchbook, and I’d find ways of working them into different stories. And there was one that was sort of a resonant need for me, that I put into a book about a year and a half ago, where we see Jingle Belle talking about her relationship with her dad. As a little girl, she wants her dad to go ice fishing with her, and Santa says, “I can’t. I have to make presents for all the other kids. Here, take this talking doll. It’s the hot toy this year and every little girl wants one.” And so Jing sadly takes it and goes out to the fishing pond and drowns the doll. Because it doesn’t mean anything to her, and in fact, if it’s what every other little girl wants, she just resents it more. It would mean more to her if Santa just put down his tools and 64 | WRITE NOW

said, “Okay, we’re going ice fishing.” Because that’s ultimately what Jing wanted. So Jing is an eternal 16-year-old (even though I imagine she’s many hundreds of years older, being semi-immortal), and she’s getting pretty darned fed up with all this Christmas stuff. And it’s not that she dislikes the holiday or what it’s about or the feeling of connecting with her friends around that time of the year, that’s all good in her mind. It’s just that her way of celebrating is not her dad’s way. So when I write the stories about her, it’s like her trying to forge a connection with that feeling but not having to do what her dad does. DF: I would think that proper ty would be a natural for live action or something else. Is there anything in development with that or any interest in it? PD: Yes. DF: Nothing you can talk about, though? PD: No. DF: From that one word answer, I had a feeling you couldn’t. PD: It’s been a long time in coming. Ever since Jingle was first published, there’s been nothing but very serious interest in it. I’ve gone back and forth with various people and production

companies, and ultimately it wasn’t just a monetary decision. I’ve really come to love the character, and I only wanted to do something that served the character well and allowed me to continue writing stories about her. [NOTE: In May it was announced that a live-action big screen version of Jingle Belle is currently in development with Revolution Studios and Adam Sandler's Happy Madison production company. —DF] DF: Tell me a little about Mutant, Texas. That’s another mythbased project, this one about the myth of the American West. PD: Mutant, Texas came from a lot of things. It came from a love of the Southwest and of classic Western imagery. Not only the old Western imagery from the late 1800s, but also the newer faux, fun Western imagery of the mid-20th Century. The idea of cute cowgirls and radioactive freaks and monsters in the desert and things like that, fused with a love of old cowboy music and superheroes and the like. It was a real hodgepodge of images all thrown together that I thought would in some way work. And again, all of my ideas take form in my sketchbook, so about six years ago I was drawing this cute cowgirl that I was calling Ida Red, and I thought, “What kind of fun things could I have her do? What if she’s really powerful?” And I gave her superpowers and a supporting cast of weird animal and plant creatures. And then I said, “Well, now I need a place for them all to live,” so I created the little town of Mutant. A bunch of things went into the concept, including weird dreams I was

having at the time. DF: Are your dreams a source of inspiration in general, or only on that specific project? PD: Dreams always influence me, because sometimes mine are very vivid and I’ll remember certain images from them. I’ll save them and use them. DF: Do you have a pad next to your bed and write the images down, or a tape recorder to talk them into? PD: A sketchbook. I’ll put a sketch in my sketchbook late at night, and sometimes those ideas will be kicking around my head and they’ll find new ways of coming out. In the morning I’ll remember them and jot them down. DF: So you’re as much a visual ar tist as a word ar tist, it seems, although the world may not see the visual stuff that much. PD: Right. I find it’s more helpful for me to sketch out what I’m plotting and then to write about it, especially when I’m doing Jing or Mutant, Texas. The thing is that, over the years, I’ve worked in animation with so many incredible artists that I think in terms of their rendered artwork. I would love to see how some idea I’ve come up with would look if, say, a certain artist rendered it in a certain style. So, as I have access to those artists, I’m in a better position to suggest them to my publishers to work on the books, and I’m ultimately happier with what they draw than if I sat down and drew it myself. When I saw J. Bone’s amazing artwork for the first time on Oni’s Alison Dare, I knew he had a great gift for drawing girls and I wanted to work with him on Jing, Ida, or anything else he might feel like doing. DF: Are the basic character designs and costume designs yours, though? PD: Yes. With Mutant, Texas, I did a lot of the preliminary designs myself. Ida Red looks radically different in my first sketch than in J. Bone’s finished version, but she was always a redheaded girl with distinctively curled 1940s-style hair, wearing cutoffs and a Western shirt. And she always has this big jaguar following her around. Why? Because I thought jaguars were cool looking. Ida’s too rowdy to ride a horse, so the only thing that would suit her would be a jaguar, which is the rarest wild animal in the United States. There are less than a dozen of them scattered around the borders of Arizona and Texas. So naturally, Ida would find the last one in Texas and tame it. DF: Of course. And was Jingle Belle one of your designs also? PD: Oh, yeah. Jingle kind of popped fully-clothed out of my head. I just sat down and said, “Well, what would be a good look for her?” For some reason, I was seeing a lot of girls wearing cut-off overalls that summer and I thought if I made them the shorter, tighter vintage style that would be a cute look for her. Also, it’s really easy for me to draw, another plus. So I sketched that up and said, “Well, that looks sort of elfin, just color it green, give her some red and white tights and a few other things.” I added big black Doc Martens boots, because I thought that she would never wear little elf shoes. Knowing Jingle, she would want something she could stomp around in and make a lot of noise. The design got refined over the years, different people would take her and do different things with it, but it’s always come back to that sort of basic look. For one thing, it was easy to draw. DF: Mutant, Texas and Jingle Belle are owned by you, yes? PD: Right. And I was developing them independently of each other. I was actually developing Mutant, Texas first, but I hit on Jingle Belle about a year later. In my sketchbook I would

always draw the girls together, like they somehow knew each other. Then I decided to write a story where it did come out that they were friends. In 2001’s Jingle Belle Jubilee, I gave Jing, Ida and a couple of other characters a night together where they’re hanging around Jing’s igloo, talking about when they first met, which seemed like a logical way to do a spin-off. DF: So they inhabit the Diniverse. PD: They are the Diniverse. DF: Let me hit you with some random questions. In some of your tex t pieces, you seem to differentiate between “all-ages comics” and “kids’ comics.” What’s the difference between the two? PD: I’m the wrong person to ask because I’ll read anything. If there’s an issue of Looney Tunes that looks funny, I’ll pick that up and read through it. Or Dexter’s Laboratory. And I would classify those as “kids’ comics,” but I guess you could also say those are all-ages, because its aimed at the viewers of the show, who are both kids and adults. Kids watch Dexter and then their parents will sit down and watch an episode of Dexter. And if the comic book looks cool, they’ll sit down and read that too. Something that is not all ages I think is something that definitely skews more to adults, like the Vertigo stuff, the underground stuff, or some of the things that have more of an adult bent. DF: I understand that, but you seem to differentiate between “all ages” vs. “young kids,” I think. PD: I think Jingle Belle might be more for all ages, but I don’t think it’s a kids’ comic. There are stories we’ve done where she’s been swearing or she’s been making out with a guy or something like that, and I think that I read one e-mail from a very high-and-mighty person somewhere who sniffed, “Oh, this is terrible, I bought it for my daughter, and oh, she was just shocked,” blah blah blah. My attitude was, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but it was in the black-and-white comic book section, so that should have been your first clue.” Both Jing trade paperbacks that have come out have had very girl-friendly covers on them by this wonderful artist, Lynn Naylor, who’s a lead animation designer over at Cartoon Network. And I’ve always said to Oni, and I think they’ve passed along to retailers, that when you display Jingle Belle, especially the 66 | WRITE NOW

trade paperback in a bookstore, put it with the humor books, put it next to the Simpsons stuff. Don’t put it on a table selling the kiddie holiday books. If you’re selling How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and some of the softer holiday fare, as much as I would like to see Jingle Belle exposed up there, I don’t want a parent buying it, flipping through it, and seeing her getting it on with an Eskimo kid when they bought it figuring, “Oh, it’s a cute book, my two-year-old daughter would love to read this.” No, she won’t! Stick it on the humor shelf next to The Physics of Christmas or Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris. DF: And the same for Mutant, Texas? PD: No, I think Mutant, Texas is more of a kids’ book, oddly enough. Even though there’s no swearing in it, there’s a bit of violence and some disturbing imagery, because a few people, including Ida’s parents do get killed, but I think the tone of that is much more like a Disney movie. It has much more of a classic animation tone to it. I wouldn’t mind a little kid seeing that, as long as a parent or older sibling read it to them and helped them through the sad parts. DF: Almost as bad as Bambi, huh? PD: Yes. And even though Ida herself is designed to be a very pretty girl, she doesn’t have the element of raciness that Jingle Belle sometimes has. Jingle Belle is a teenage girl who wants to go out and meet boys. Ida Red looks around the same age, but her concerns are about finding a place for herself in the world and caring for her friends, which is something a child can relate to at any age. DF: So that’s more of a Harry Potter-skewing kind of thing. PD: Definitely. DF: Earlier, you said that the animation industr y is at an ebb now, a lot of people are out of work. Yet, there seem to be more venues than ever for cartoons. I know a lot of it is things like translated Japanese car toons, but we do seem to be in a car toon-friendly era. How do you reconcile that? I mean, TNN seems to be gearing towards car toons, you have the Car toon Network, of course. There seem to be new venues, and yet you and many other people say it’s a bad time in the business. How can those two things be happening, and how would that impact on somebody wanting to break in? PD: Well, let me put it this way. It’s a good time for cartoons. Maybe it’s not so good for the people making them. The money is not there as it is for primetime TV. You can create a great daytime animated show that can run four years, and get phenomenal ratings and a big cult following. But when it’s over, in many cases, there’s nothing for the creators to go onto except another cartoon show, and you may not have much choice as to where you go. On the other hand, if you create a sitcom and it runs for the same amount of time on TV, you are guaranteed pilot deals, you will be wealthy from that show beyond imagining. The disparity in money is so great, that’s the bad part for animation. Also, you loose all rights to your characters and rarely get royalties or a cut of any licensing profits. The studio that produces the show takes it all, in most cases. That’s the thing that makes a lot of creators loath to create anything new. The animation union can’t get anything for its members other than a decent health plan. Anytime the union went into a negotiation to ask for a cut of the profits for their members, they were laughed out of the room by a united front of studio lawyers. It’s like Oliver Twist begging for more gruel. DF: That’s the Animation Caucus of the WGA? PD: No, the Animation Caucus is completely different. The

rules of who gets what are different based on the writer or in some cases, director. For the most part, if you’re on a primetime animated show like the Simpsons, and you make a deal to make another primetime animated show for another network, you will get what you got on the Simpsons, which is produced under the Writer’s Guild jurisdiction. Regular animation deals for most Saturday morning shows and daytime programming aren’t covered by the WGA, so there’s really nothing extra unless you’re the show’s creator and work out some sort of a deal in advance. DF: And the basic rate for writing an animation script is much lower than live action writing, also. PD: Right. Time and again I’ll go into a meeting with an animation producer or studio executive and they’ll say, “You know, I love your work, I’m a huge fan, and I want to do an animated show on your characters, here’s our deal.” And the deal will be for like, a couple of thousand dollars. And I’ll say, “What’s this?” And they’ll say, “This is our standard deal.” And I’ll say, “I’m not signing this deal. Under the conditions of this, you’d own all rights to my characters, I could be fired at any time, and you would get all residual rights to my characters and I would get nothing.” And they’d say, “It’s our standard deal, take it or leave it.” And I wind up leaving. And in one case I had one player following me to the parking lot screaming, “What’s the matter with you? It’s our standard deal! Everyone takes it!” And I’ve said to him, “Well, maybe if more people didn’t, then you wouldn’t be in this position. I can afford to walk out on this deal because it’s my character and I can decide where I’m going to put it.” DF: That sounds like an intelligent response. PD: Well, you know, a lot of creative people take that “standard deal.” And to be fair, sometimes they’ll sell something and it will be a big hit and maybe somewhere down the road it will be worth it for them, since they can always say, “Oh, I’m the guy that created so-and-so.” But my characters are precious to me and I won’t sell them off like a box of surplus kittens in front of the Safeway. DF: And that seems to have paid off for you. Any tips on breaking into animation? Or comics, for that matter, but I know animation is your main thing. Do you need an agent or manager, is there a cer tain kind of spec script that you have to do? PD: There’s no real set rule to it. I’d say that if you were looking to write an episode of a show, say if you’re looking to write at an action/adventure show that you like a lot, then study that show. Find out who the characters are, and try and come up with something that you haven’t seen them do on the show yet. And I’m not saying bring in some big villains they haven’t fought or some big disaster that the heroes have to overcome, but look at the way the characters are structured, and look at ways to bounce ideas off their personalities. I think producers will really respond to personality writing more than anything. If you’re writing an action/adventure show, there are usually two characters who don’t get along well, or there’s some heat or some friction between them. Look at a way to construct a story out of that. Try and bring your story out of a character moment rather than out of a gimmick like a comet about to hit the world or something. I think that that’s something that a producer will look at and take notice of. Try and bring to it a flair that you haven’t seen in the show before, something that’s unexploited. DF: Do you have to establish a track record to get people to

look at your new characters or pilots? PD: Well, let me put it this way: In most studios, there’s usually an executive who’s put on to read material and to look for new properties. You find out who that person is and you get them your script. And you say, “I would like to get some response.” They’ll usually read it and give you some response. DF: This could be a pilot script? PD: A pilot or a spec script. And then you get some feedback from them. And maybe they’ll say, “Hey, I read this writer’s work and it was really good and I think you should give him a shot,” or “You should call him in if you’re looking for new things.” Or what’ll happen is, usually, if they like the script they’ll call the person in and want to talk to them. DF: And they’ll say, “Do you have anything new?” PD: Yeah, sometimes they’ll say, “Do you have a new idea for a show” or something like that. Or in some cases, if the writer will say to them, “What I would really love to do is, I would love write a Duck Dodgers or a Justice League” or something, then in some cases, the person will pass along the script to the producer. DF: And in that case, do you recommend tr ying to get an agent or manager, or does that come after you get the first break or two? PD: I’d wait until you get the first break or two. You go in and you get your first job and then that’s always something impressive to take to an agent. Because the agent likes to be impressed, too. You call up an agent and say, “Look, I understand that you represent a selection of guys who write animation, and I’ve just sold a script to so-and-so. Now they’re interested in me and other work. Can I meet with you?” And pretty much at that point the agent will say, “Yes,” or he might say, “Look, I’m full up with clients now, but why don’t you talk to so-and-so?” or “Maybe I can direct you over here.” Because everybody wants to be on the side of somebody who looks like they’re starting off big and can have something happening. DF: I know you’re pals with Kevin Smith and have been in some of his movies. How did you meet him? PD: The Kevin Smith story is rather funny. I first became aware of him when I went to see Clerks. I’d heard it was really, really funny, and I wanted to see it. I went, laughed hysterically through the whole movie and thought it was great. I really didn’t think about him for too much after that except, a few years later, when Chasing Amy came out, this girl that I had dated in college called me up practically crying, and said, “You have to see this movie called Chasing Amy.” And I said, “Really? How come?” And she said, “Because it’s our story. I’m not going to tell you anything more about it than that, but you must go see it now. It’s so sweet and funny, you’ll love it.” So I changed my plan to see Anaconda that night and saw Chasing Amy instead. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Next day I called my friend back and said, “I saw the movie, but how was it our story?” She explained, “Well, you were a cartoonist when we were in school, weren’t you? And you were always giving me those cute cartoons of us.” And I said, “Yeah. But you only claimed you were a lesbian so I wouldn’t ask you out anymore.” And she said, “Well, yes, but it was so cute, I just adored that movie.” To which my response was, “Alllll righty. Nice talking to you again.” Click. Then a friend of mine, David Mandel, who was a producer on Seinfeld, began talking to Kevin about working on a project with him, which became the Clerks animated series. And somehow he wound up giving me Kevin’s e-mail address. And I sent him DINI | 67

an e-mail, told him I liked Amy and he sent me a thank you right back, and suddenly we were kind of like internet pals. It turns out he’d liked the Batman show. I’d actually seen a photo spread of his apartment in some magazine, and he had all the Batman episodes on tape on his kitchen table. And I said, “Oh, this is a guy after my own heart.” So we began chatting, and a year or so later, I was back on the East Coast and Dave introduced me to Kevin at his offices in Redbank. It was one of those things where we just hit it off. DF: Have you ever written with him, or is it just you’re pals and you made those cameos in the two films? PD: What had happened was, when he and David started working on the Clerks animated series, I joined them one day for lunch. We were just shooting around ideas, and I popped out with: “What you should do for your pilot is a clip show, where you open with the characters being locked in the cellar, and then you just show clips of episodes you’ll never see.” Because usually that’s what you do in season five of a sit com, when you’ve run out of ideas and want to do a clip show on the cheap. Kevin and David liked that idea a lot. And they later told me, “You know what? We’re going to do that for the second episode, and all we’re going to show are clips from the first episode.” And that was about it. I think I may have written something down on a sheet of paper and handed it to Dave at one point, but ultimately they wrote the episode themselves, and they were very generous to give me a co-story credit on it, which I thought was more than nice. That was the closest I’ve come to writing anything with Kevin. He really prefers to write his own material, or, with the animated series, he had David and a small team of writers working with him. It would be fun to work with him again, but he’s very much his own guy when it comes to his writing, which is as it should be. It’s always good and it’s always inventive. And in the case of Chasing Amy and his new movie, Jersey Girl, it’s very heartfelt. DF: How about you? Do you prefer collaborating or working on your own? PD: It depends on the project. There’s no denying that when you’ve got a partner, things move a lot faster, because you’re there to motivate each other. And sometimes when I write by myself, it takes forever to finish something. Then again I’ve written with partners where I’ve seen a potentially really fun idea just go down the wrong trail. There’s just no way to deal with it other than bringing an end to the project and saying, “Look, we can’t proceed this way, because you see the story one way and I see it the other way.” That can happen if you both have equal power in it and there’s no give and take. When I’ve written with Alan Burnett or Bruce Timm, we’ve usually been on the same page on things. That’s always worked out well. In some cases, where you’ve got somebody who’s got a really strong vision of what they want in their head, you either remove yourself from the project because you don’t think you can bring enough to it, or else you say, “Oh, I can get behind that. It’s not a story I would have thought of on my own, but it would be fun to contribute to it.” And you find a comfortable way to work with them. Sort of like playing backup guitar on a friend’s solo album. DF: I guess the ultimate independent thing is a novel or a shor t stor y, where the writer alone creates and controls the world of the stor y. Do you do much or any of that kind of writing? PD: No, I haven’t had much time. The closest I’ve come to that 68 | WRITE NOW

is Mutant, Texas and Jingle Belle, as far as being things that are out of my own head. DF: Do you draw any of those on your own? PD: I think I will try and draw something with the characters at some point, and publish it. Maybe backup stories or something like that. Again, it all just comes down to a matter of time and how I feel about it. I think I’m always up for penciling something if I had an inker who could solve some basic problems I have. But again, I’m talking, like, a short four-page story or a back cover or something like that. DF: But there’s nothing out like that now? PD: No. DF: Speaking of other media, you have a ver y well-maintained and designed website. What do you see as the role of the Internet in both pop culture in general and in your career in par ticular? PD: I think it’s there to entertain and also to be informative. I’ve been running the website for about three years now, and for the first couple of years I was sort of adamant that it was Jingle Belle’s website and that she wrote all of the stuff on the site and that I was a background figure, at best, in this. I liked the idea that this would be a kind of sulky teen’s communiqué from the North Pole, where’s she sort of trapped. This is her one way of communicating with the outside world. I liked that idea, because it was her way of saying: “This is my world, and this is my take on things.” I think that sometime this year the website will undergo a synthesis, where the Jingle Belle site will still exist, but it will become part of a bigger site that I’m planning which will be more about my characters and other projects I’m doing and things like that. So you’ll still be able to get into Jing’s igloo and see those elements of her world, but I’m looking at doubling the size of the site and putting a lot more content in there. The Internet is a phenomenal resource as far as experimenting goes. I think it has a lot of untapped potential. It’s certainly a place to show off characters and have entertainment and, but I feel like it’s 1948 and we’re watching wrestling on a three-inch TV screen, as far as what the Internet can do. DF: But people loved that wrestling on the three-inch screen. [laughs] PD: Sure. And I think at some point the web will become a viable entertainment resource, but it’s just not there yet. DF: Someone will figure out how to make money from entertainment on the Internet, and that person will be ver y rich. It sounds like you’re clearly committed to the website, to keeping it going and regularly refreshed and to being there when the money star ts flowing. PD: I treat my website like my train set. I’ll go down to the train store, buy new cars, put them on the Lionel set, lay down some new tracks and refurbish it from time to time. And that’s how I look upon the website, as a hobby. I just like seeing stuff happen. I like the characters. So if I feel like I haven’t done anything with Jingle Belle in six months, then it’s time to call this animator I work with up in Canada and say, “Hey, let’s do some new cartoons.” Right now I’m really into the idea of spending a lot more time on the website and adding more diverse things to it. I’ve started putting columns that are from my own personal point of view and about some of my strange adventures. There’s usually a new one of those up every month. www.jinglebelle.com. DF: You do a lot of stuff. It sure doesn’t sound like writer’s

block is an issue. If it is, (a) how do you deal with it, and (b) how do you structure your time to get so much done? PD: I’m not married and I don’t have kids, so I need something to eat up my time. I’m not dating anybody either at the moment, although that usually tends to ebb and flow throughout the year. Sometimes I’ll be very much involved with somebody, and then I won’t look at the website for months. Now I’m taking a break from relationships, so I’m spending more time on the site and doing new projects. It depends on where my passions lie at the moment. If I’m passionate about a project, the writing tends to happen very fast. I think that’s the best way to beat writer’s block, try and be excited From Jingle Belle #4. Written by Paul Dini with art by Stephen DeStefano. [©2003 Paul Dini.] about what you’re doing. If it becomes Brothers is more kind of a kid-friendly outpost at the moment a chore to you, you’ll treat it the same way and put off getting as far as the programming on Kids WB and a few other places, to it. That’s never any good. Cartoon Network has got a few more things—with “Adult Swim” DF: Not just Jingle Belle specifically, but you have a large and with some of their comedy shows—that target an older output of work both in comics and on TV and on the Internet. audience. And then there are shows that are weird hybrids. So writer’s block doesn’t sound like it’s a problem. Like Duck Dodgers is being produced at Warner Brothers, but PD: No, but structuring my day certainly is. There are times it’s going to be a Cartoon Network show. So the sensibilities that I’ll over-commit myself to certain things and I’ll say, “Oh, I’d for that are more Cartoon Network, and yet we’re doing it out of love to write an issue of your comic, oh, I’d love to do this, I’d the Warner Brothers facility. So it’s back and forth. love to do that.” And I really would love to do those things. DF: Are you involved with Static Shock? Then there’s the process of when I can realistically get the time PD: I wrote an episode for Alan Burnett, but that was it. Again, to sit down and finish them. And that’s what I’m always I’ll occasionally go in and write an episode for another juggling. producer’s show. It’s fun and it gives me a chance to stretch DF: Are you one of those guys who, “I’m at my desk ever y myself a bit. morning at eight and I sit there until six ,” or is it more DF: Now, I know you’ve won a bunch of Emmys. You want to freeform than that? tell the folks what they were for? PD: I wish I had more regular hours. I’m always screwing PD: I dunno. I’ve got a lot of tinsel on my shelf. It was fun around and thinking, like, “Oh yeah! My Simpsons: Treehouse winning them, especially early on, because we had no idea of Horror comic story for this year, I gotta write that. When’s what we were doing and we were trying all sorts of things, that due? What month is this? Oh, it’s October? Damn! A little initially with Tiny Toons and then with Batman. We weren’t sure late with that.” any of it was going to work and yet, it did. Just because we DF: Now, you have a staff job at Duck Dodgers, but you’re took some chances and were doing things that people weren’t home now. Is a lot of your time able to be structured the way used to seeing in a while on television, it really paid off. The you like it? first season of Tiny Toons was really good. It caught a lot of PD: Yeah, I’m working on kind of a weird schedule now. I’m people by surprise. And then with Batman, it was the same writing some pilots for Warners, and I’m still putting in some deal. Suddenly, people got interested in Batman again. He’s time each week on Duck Dodgers. We finished most of the not just a goofy supporting character like he was on Super stories for this season, so other than going in and looking at Friends. storyboards and attending weekly recordings, there’s not a lot I DF: You won some Eisner Awards as well, correct? have to do with the show right now. Like I said, I’m doing some PD: Yeah. pilots for Warner Brothers, some of which are really a lot of DF: What were those for? fun, but I really can’t talk too much about them right now. PD: Well, the first one was for Mad Love, when Bruce and I DF: Those are ones that they came to you and said, “Do you won. And then we won a couple more times with Batman want to write the pilots to these shows?” Animated type comics. So I’ve been lucky to be nominated PD: Yeah. And there are a few ideas that I’ve pitched to every year. I was nominated last year with J. Bone for Jingle Cartoon Network that I’m very excited about. Belle for humor, which was a big feather in our caps. We didn’t DF: These are all animated series that we’re talking about? win, but it was just nice being in that company. It showed that, PD: Animated series, yes. hey, our dumb little book is out there getting some notice. I’m DF: The line between Car toon Network and WB seems blurr y doing a new Jingle Belle graphic novel for this Christmas and nowadays. Are they pretty much one company? it’s probably the only book she’ll be appearing in this year. PD: Well, it’s one large parent company, but there are different She’ll still be on the website and maybe in a couple of other philosophies that govern each division. Whereas I think Warner DINI | 69

places, but that’s it for the time being. It’s one long adventure and a big story about her, too. Kind of redefining the character and what her place in the whole Santa Claus scheme is. DF: The whole Santaverse. PD: The Santaverse, exactly. DF: I just want to hit you with some closing questions. The future of the comics business, the animation business, are they things people should tr y to get into, either one or both, or should they run from them like hell? PD: I think that if you’re passionate about anything, go for it. You can’t say no to that passion inside you. Every year people say, Art detail from the Dini/Ross JLA: Secret Origins. “Acting is a crapshoot. [©2003 DC Comics.] Don’t ever be an actor. Don’t ever be a comedian or anything like that.” And yet people do it every year. If you’ve got that drive inside you, there’s nothing you want to do greater than that, so you have to do it. And if you put enough thought and intensity into what you’re doing, you can’t help but be successful at it to some degree. And I’d say the same thing goes for writing. With animation, it wasn’t just the fact that I wanted to write cartoons, it was also that I really knew a lot about them. I studied them when I was a kid, I knew who all the directors were before really starting a career. And I’ve learned so much since then as far as the history of animation. As a kid, I really thought this stuff out, and I told myself over and over what made a good cartoon, what made a lousy cartoon, why Tex Avery’s and Chuck Jones’s films really endured through the years and why other cartoon series from other studios have just fallen by the wayside. It’s not just the fact that they don’t show it much on TV anymore. There’s a way of thinking about these characters that really makes them live outside of just the image running around on a piece of celluloid. DF: So clearly, advice for anybody reading this, knowing the origins of your craft, without necessarily being bound blindly to it, is impor tant. PD: Right, right. I have my favorite cartoons—I’m talking about theatrical cartoons now. I like any cartoon that made a bit of a statement and that was a bit out there and that took a chance. The Chuck Jones cartoons all took chances. Artistically, with something like “What’s Opera, Doc?” Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese wanted to do the Ring Cycle in seven minutes, and they did it. And the way they did it was they took the relationship of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and made it into grand opera. They chose passages from the music that played that up. And they looked at German set design and brought some of that in there. So there’s a lot of intelligence at work in that short, and a ton of passion and fun involved in it, too. You can’t help but respect that. The same when Jones did Duck

Dodgers and really mined the conventions of science fiction storytelling and design. He brought that all in there, and that resonated. That made for a cartoon that people think about fifty years later and makes it possible for us to do a spin-off series. I don’t know if it’s good, , but we kind of cross our fingers and pray. Hopefully, people won’t burn us at the stake for sacrilege . And Tex Avery, nothing else is funnier than the Tex Avery wolf cartoons. Somebody will look at those cartoons now and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s so awful! It’s a wolf chasing around a pretty girl! That shouldn’t be seen!” And I’ll say, “Well, it does provoke strong emotions, but since when was that a bad thing for a funny cartoon to have? And besides, the wolf always gets the living sh*t pounded out of him, so you can’t possibly take it too seriously.” DF: And it goes back to our deepest, earliest myths, to bring this inter view full circle. PD: Yeah! Cartoons are about the pursuit of something, whether it’s Sylvester chasing Tweety because he’s hungry or it’s the Wolf chasing the dancing girl because he, well, you know what he wants. DF: I think that’s generally called dramatic conflict. On to another topic: you don’t sound like a person who had a “Plan B.” It sounds like you were writing professionally from a young enough age that there was not like, “Hmm, if this doesn’t work out, I’m going to be an accountant” or something. PD: A zoologist, actually. DF: Was it? You hadn’t mentioned that. PD: Yeah. That was Plan B. DF: That’s kind of a cool Plan B. PD: Yeah. DF: Well, you manage to incorporate enough zoology stuff into your various writings. Do you read a lot? PD: Yes. Mostly bizarre animal and zoology books. DF: So not that much fiction, more nature books and such? PD: Sometimes I’ll read fiction. There’re certain genres I like. I’ll go through phases every once in a while. Like, I’ll read detective novels. I’ll just pick them up and breeze through a few of them because I happen to like them. Let’s see, what’s on my bedside table? DF: Where he’s hard at work, folks! [laughs] PD: Yeah, my bed is my command center… let’s see what I’ve got here... a book on how to be an amateur detective, an art book, Devil’s Advocate, by my buddy Coop, The Another Secret Origins detail. [©2003 DC Comics.]

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Complete Idiots Guide to Managing Your Time—I really should get around to that one someday—Fleming’s Casino Royale, a boxed set of Sun Records… The Complete Uncle Remus stories—I always loved those—Carter Beats the Devil, hmm, what else... Mark of the Grizzly—true stories of recent bear attacks—very cool—National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals, American Mammals, Borderland Jaguars…. DF: What’s the appeal of the nature stuff? Sounds like it’s a lifelong interest? PD: Yeah. I love animals. I studied them when I was in school. I went to zoology classes at another college because Emerson didn’t offer any and I had to get some class credit in science. So I went across the river to Harvard and crashed their zoology class. DF: Well, if you’ve got to crash somewhere, it may as well be Har vard. PD: One of my hobbies is nature photography. I’ve been around the world photographing bizarre animals. Any chance I have to run off to a national park or a jungle or rain forest or someplace, I take it. DF: That must be a source of inspiration for stories and characters. PD: Oh, you have no idea. I won’t bore you with some myths that have popped up around all that. DF: Do you have one really good one you want to Share? PD: I went to Indonesia a few years ago, and basically every place I went, there was some animal ready to attack me. DF: Just you, or your whole par ty? PD: Just me. I usually go solo and hire a local guide because I can’t deal with tour groups. Anyway, on this trip, a Komodo dragon came after me—it had me trapped at the edge of a boat dock. That was a hairy situation. DF: I bet! PD: It was a real standoff, where I had to fight the thing away and jump into a boat that came speeding up to the dock. The dragons are attracted to the color red and guess what color tee shirt I was wearing that day? I must have looked like a big bloody slab of meat to the lizard, which is how I almost ended up. Same trip, on Sumatra, I went down to a riverside and spooked a rhino that was wallowing in the mud there and he came charging up after me. I got out of its way really fast, but the only thing I could think was, “Wow! Sumatran rhino—this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience!” The fact that it could have trampled me was of secondary importance. A day or two later I climbed into a tree to take a picture of an orangutan. Most of these stupid things I bring on myself, so I have no one else to blame. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, when else am I going to get a good shot like this?” It was pouring rain, I couldn’t even see because the water was covering up my glasses along with all the steam from the heat. Yet, up I went to get a picture of this mammoth ape that was either gonna pee on me or kill me. DF: What a choice! PD: Yet, I had to get the picture. DF: This man has risked his life to get the inspiration to write the stories that you watch and read, folks. PD: I’ve been all through Australia, I’ve seen all these creatures there. And Alaska—all through the American West. DF: You ought to write some travel books. PD: Yeah, really. In every case, when I needed a guide, I just got one guy, who would drive me to these remote areas. Then we’d spend a few days hiking into them, living in shacks and stuff, all because I wanted to get a photo of something.

DF: There really should be some travel book. Just to wrap up with a couple questions: Is there a Paul Dini dream gig or gigs, something you’ve never gotten to do that you’d like to do. PD: Yeah, I want to host my own kids show. DF: Really? What would you do on the show? PD: Interview hot girls and show racy cartoons. DF: [laughs] I see. PD: It’s a show no child would watch, but people my age or teenagers and college kids might. I’d shoot it out of my house because I have all sorts of cool junk in there, and I’d do talk segments with girls, freaks, weirdoes and other interesting people, and I’d cap it off with a cartoon that had one of my own characters in it. A typical show would be something like, “Well, we just interviewed this dancer whom you’ll be able to see down at such-and-such club, now we’re going to show an Ida Red cartoon, and then we’re gonna come back and talk to my taxidermist and later, a guy who makes puppets.” DF: And then Stephen Hawking, right? PD: Of course! DF: [laughs] So instead of The Man Show, it’ll be The Boy Show, it sounds like. PD: More like The Never-Grew-Up Show. But Cartoon Network is not returning my calls about that. DF: Well, they might not be the network to call for this one. DINI | 71

worry about the magic with too PD: “Oh, geez, Dini’s calling again! I much. Because she’s a stage think he wants to talk about that magician, she can perform illusions, stupid show of his!” “Hang up on but she’s also got amazing powers, him! Wait, did he finish this week’s so she can just do things. And I Duck Dodgers?” “No, he’s still wanted to write a character who just working on it.” “Hang up on him!” had magic flowing through her as a Maybe TNN, I don’t know. natural force, where she doesn’t DF: TNN or Comedy Central. have to do complicated rituals or PD: Someplace like that. chant spells or traffic with demons DF: I think I’ve said this in ever y in order to do what she wants, she inter view that I’ve done, but I do can just do it. That might be kind of have a thousand cable channels on The creative crew behind the upcoming Witchblade Animated violating Vertigo rules, but so be it. my TV. There must be somebody book. (From left:) Writer Paul Dini, layout artist David Bullock, One of the points of the book is that who would want that. Penciler Darwyn Cooke, and inker J. Bone (art by J. Bone). At the there are a lot of magic-users who PD: Okay, well, I’ll come up with a bottom of the page is promotional art featuring the animatedhate Zatanna because magic is so proposal. look versions of Witchblade, the Darkness, and Magdalena. easy for her. DF: I think you could sell it ver y [©2003 Top Cow Productions, Inc.] DF: You sent me some of the easily, actually. It sounds like a finished, inked pages. It really is a lot of fun. Anything else? pretty funny idea. And what’s coming up that you want to You have another Justice League thing coming out in plug? I know you have a Zatanna project in the works. November? PD: Yeah! Shelly Bond, my editor over at Vertigo, has been PD: Yup. It’s called Liberty and Justice. It’s with Alex Ross. It’s after me for a while to write something for Vertigo. And the a big “blow the roof off the house” Justice League story that character I like best over there, actually probably one of my allhas about 17 or 18 characters from the history of the team time favorite DC characters, is Zatanna, the girl magician. involved in it. It’s a good story of the Justice League not only DF: Because she talks backwards? saving the world, but also sort of against the world, trying to PD: No, because she looks hot. save it despite itself, in spite of a disaster that’s happening on DF: Well, there you go. [laughs] a global scale. PD: I always liked the character a lot. I shoved her in a couple DF: And on the TV front? You said there was some top-secret of episodes of Batman. A cute girl magician. How can you go stuff... wrong? PD: Duck Dodgers comes on in July and we’re hoping that’s DF: And she talks backwards. going to be a lot of fun. There are also some new projects in PD: And she talks backwards. I kept that gimmick from the the works with the Cartoon Network— past versions of the character. I figured if she has to do a big DF: Right, that you can’t talk about yet. spell, like to transport somebody from one place to another, PD:—that I’m still working on—the pilots that I’m doing for she has to chant that backwards. Little spells aren’t so compliWarner Brothers. There are some projects with Bongo Comics cated. If she needs to see what time it is, she can just point at coming out. It looks like I’m going to be doing a story for the the clock and it spins around by itself. Treehouse of Horror this year, which will be a lot of fun. I am DF: And it’s Ver tigo as opposed to DCU because...? also embarking on a few ventures with Top Cow. First up is a PD: They’ve kind of established the character as being in both Witchblade one-shot in an animated style. Witchblade,The worlds. She shows up occasionally in Justice League and Darkness and Magdalena in a big team-up. some of the other DC Universe books, Darwyn Cooke, Dave Bullock and J. Bone will be although she doesn’t have an ongoing title doing the art on that. I have a secret new there. They’ve also established her as a project of my own in the works as well with the character in Vertigo’s Books of Magic and in Cow, but that probably won’t materialize until some of the John Constantine mythology. I next year. The Mutant, Texas trade paperback know that Shelly wanted to put Zatanna will be out this April, and it’ll have a couple of more firmly in the Vertigo universe. We new stories in it. But probably no substantial talked over some ideas, and I came up with new Mutant, Texas stuff until early next year. I what is actually a rather light take on the definitely don’t want to leave Ida character. I’m not sure if that’s going to piss Red for too long, because I love off hardcore Vertigo fans or that character and her world. not. The character is written But for right now, I’m going to with kind of a lighter touch for take a break from it and concena Vertigo book, but with a lot trate on the new Jingle Belle darker and sexier tone than graphic novel for later this year. for the mainstream DC DF: Sounds like a lot of cool Universe. stuff to be on the lookout for. DF: That combination might Paul, thanks for an insightful give it more of a crossover and enter taining audience. inter view. It was a lot of PD: I’m hoping. Also, with fun. Zatanna, I felt that she was a PD: Thank you, Danny. character that I didn’t have to

THE END

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DEPARTMENT

RISEN, or The Twisted Tale of How My Horror Novel Got Published by JAN STRNAD I t’s the spring of 1996, life is good and I’ve had a Brilliant Idea. I was working for Sony and CBS at the time, co-editing a cartoon series called Project GeeKeR. I loved the series and my collaborators and the money I was making, but some part of my soul yearned to explore new creative territory. So here was my Brilliant Idea: I was going to become an instant novelist. A certain screenplay I’d written on spec was cluttering up my office, having failed to illuminate Hollywood with its radiance, and I figured it would be an easy enough task to novelize it. Take maybe a month. Then I’d get the novel published, my theatrical agent would send out the screenplay with the novel, Hollywood would be overwhelmed and I’d make a million bucks. Things went “wrong” right from the start. I put “wrong” in quotes because the first thing to go wrong actually went very, very right: I fell in love. I’d been writing in the visual media for ages. Comic books. Cartoons. Television. Film. All with degrees of success ranging from “lots” to “very little.” When I started writing my novel, a supernatural thriller that would eventually be called Risen, I fell in love again with the written word. In my youth I’d harbored dreams of being a short story writer like those who filled the pages of the science fiction magazines and paperback anthologies. I studied English Literature in college and took creative writing courses from authors Jack Matthews and Richard Yates. I started selling scripts to the comics magazines Creepy and Eerie. I branched out into underground comix, did some mainstream comic book work, wrote for small independent comic book publishers, got into the cartoon business, sweated out spec screenplays, sold a couple of options and generally played the Hollywood game. The beauty of the well-turned phrase seeped out of my work, replaced by a conversational non-style that appealed to people who read because they had to, not because they wanted to. Twenty years after setting off down that road, I was back where I started, typing words to be read directly by an audience. No intermediaries. I was writing without a net, and I loved it. The novelization that was going to take a month became a real novel, screenplay be damned, no matter how long it took. I woke up every morning at 6:00 a.m., thanks to a furry, sixtypound alarm clock named “Toby,” shoved the dog out the door

and took a seat at the keyboard to work on Risen for a couple of hours before diving back into the cartoon world of GeeKeR. Nine months later I had a novel. Next came the easy part. All I had to do was place it with a publisher. But first, I needed to find a literary agent, which would be a piece of cake. I knew writers with agents to whom they would recommend me, my manuscript would be reviewed and hailed as a work of genius, and I’d be signed immediately.

Ha. It turns out that I’d unleashed a horror novel into the worst market for horror since...ever. One agent informed me that only Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Anne Rice sold well enough to attract publishers. Publishers were dropping established midlist writers–those whose books made a profit but who fell short of “bestseller” status—right and left. The apathy with which the book industry greeted Risen was enough to suck the air from an auditorium. Most agents refused to even read my manuscript. I found this turn of events deeply depressing. I mean, deeply, clinically, suicidally depressing. I blame Britney Spears. Why? Because, while good novelists were going unpublished, celebrities had become the flavor of the week. It seemed that being on television had become the prime requirement for becoming a published writer. Katie Couric, Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, John Lithgow and Jamie Lee Curtis all had children’s books coming out. Johnny Cochran and Marcia Clark had signed multi-million dollar deals, thanks to the O. J. Simpson trial. Britney Spears, for cryin’ out loud had a lucrative deal for her first novel. Britney Spears! I mean, she can’t even spell “Brittany” right! I felt like a mountain climber who’s scaled six of the Seven Summits and then is denied permission to even attempt to climb the eighth and greatest mountain, Mt. Everest, because his spot with the ascent team has been given to a sexy little pop star. People describe depression as a mental fog, or as if you’re looking at the world through a thick pane of glass, watching life but not participating. To me it was like being lost in a swamp, plodding through every day with the murk of the mundane 74 | WRITE NOW

tugging at my shoes, threatening to pull me under. Fifteen miserable months passed before salvation arrived in the form of one Stuart Bernstein, literary agent, who stepped out of the fog like the Exorcist and agreed to battle Satan for my soul. Stuart represented a pal of mine, George Beahm (author of The Stephen King Companion and other non-fiction works). George gave me a recommendation, Stuart gave Risen a read and agreed to shop it around. Stuart saved my life, literally. For a year. After twelve months of hearing the same thing from publisher after publisher—”We can’t sell horror from an unknown writer”—Stuart called me to pronounce Risen “dead in the water.” My first thought was, “Dead in the Water... good title!” My second thought was, “I’m screwed.” I’d written an unpublishable novel that, for all I knew, was an utter piece of crap. It didn’t help that my paying job as an animation writer/editor had pretty well disappeared, flown off to Canada where the government underwrites film and television production...as long as you hire Canadian writers. Depression closed in again, deep, dark and deadly. Then another miracle happened. I was meeting my wife Julie for lunch at a fast food Mexican restaurant. I noticed a booth where someone had left a single section of the L.A. Times, the business section. I figured “free newspaper” and sat down. And there on the front page was an article about printon-demand publishing. A company called Xlibris, associated in some vague way with Random House, would convert your electronic manuscript into a printable form and list your book with Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and other online booksellers. When someone ordered a copy, they’d print one up and ship it out. One copy at a time. And pay you a royalty. Best of all for an unemployed writer, the service was free. I leaped at the opportunity. I submitted my manuscript and waited to see the cover Xlibris would design for Risen. The free cover was godawful. I beseeched my long-time collaborator Richard Corben for the right to use a panel from one of our graphic novels, The Last Voyage of Sinbad, as a cover illustration. He agreed. I begged my pal Steve Vance, Grammywinning graphic artist, to work up the cover design. He did. Then I sent it all off to Xlibris along with a check for $400 for the deluxe book package necessitated by the custom cover. Yes, I am a sucker. It was now the year 2000, which many people wrongly hailed as the start of a new millennium in more ways than one. Stephen King had issued a phenomenally successful electronic book, available via download only, called Riding the Bullet. He sold hundreds of thousands of copies the first week. It seemed obvious to a large number of misguided souls that electronic books...”ebooks”...were the wave of the future, that the public demanded ebooks, that a vast market for e-material of all kinds existed in cyberspace. (The truth is that, if King had published a story available only on toilet paper, it would have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and it would not mean in any way that the public harbored a deep-seated desire for toilet paper books.) A website called MightyWords.com offered fiction and nonfiction downloads on a pay-per-download basis. The reader paid a modest price for each work he downloaded and MightyWords

split the money with the author. MightyWords had a section for horror fiction, and though it was dominated by short stories, I offered Risen as an ebook for five bucks, a lot by MightyWords standards. These two forms of self-publication enabled me to slog my way out of the depression swamp, for two reasons. First, Risen was out there and it was being read and, by golly, people liked it. The horror editor at MightyWords, a guy named Merle Kessler, featured Risen on the front page of the horror section. I later discovered that Kessler, writing under a pen name, was one of my favorite NPR commentators, the incisive and hilarious Ian Shoales. Risen became the second best-selling item in MightyWords’ horror section and garnered some wonderful reader comments. The second aspect of self-publishing that boosted my spirits came from the camaraderie I developed with my fellow Xlibris and MightyWords authors. These friendships would survive the “deaths” of Xlibris and MightyWords both. And “die” they did, for me. A few weeks after I posted Risen on MightyWords, I awoke one morning to find an email informing me that, due to low sales, MightyWords was dumping its fiction offerings. Xlibris staggered on, but it became apparent that offering self-published books with no editorial filter or guidance was not the way to set the book industry on fire. Price hikes ensued and sales fell from few to nothing. Then Risen got another break. Time Warner Book Group was firing up a new division called iPublish. Despite what the name implies, iPublish was not a self-publisher. (The “i” stood for

“internet.”) Rather, iPublish would accept submissions from anyone, subject them to critique by other authors submitting material, and the works that received the best evaluations would be considered for publication as ebooks. I submitted Risen to editor Paul Witcover and he picked it up immediately for publication, bypassing the usual submission-andpeer-review process. Suddenly I was freed of the selfpublisher stigma. With the Time Warner imprimatur, the ebook of [©2003 J. Knight.] Risen went on to great success...for an ebook. It appeared for three weeks on Palm Digital Media’s Top Ten in Horror list, rising as high as #4 behind two books by King and one by Rice. Risen rose as high as #3 among all ebooks, fiction and non-fiction alike, at Amazon.com. Risen got more reviews, mostly (but not always) positive, and averaged four-and-a-half stars out of five at Amazon.com, with about thirty reader reviews. It’s impossible to overstate how much this validation meant to me. Here was nine months’ work, twice declared “unpublishable,” finally reaching an enthusiastic, if tiny, audience. I was out of the swamp. Still, ebook sales are miniscule compared with print books. iPublish couldn’t sustain itself and, nine months after its inception, Time Warner pulled the plug. I’d terminated my relationship with Xlibris in order to make the iPublish deal, so Risen was once again homeless and unavailable. It remained in limbo for several months. Re-enter Stuart Bernstein. The market for horror had loosened up since 1996 and now Kensington Books was publishing a nice slate of horror titles. Stuart made the pitch, and in December of 2002 I signed a contract with Kensington to bring Risen out under the Pinnacle Books imprint. The mass market paperback would appear in January of 2004, seven and a half years after its completion. So much for my Brilliant Idea to become an “instant” novelist. Would I have written Risen knowing I faced a seven-and-a-half year struggle to bring it to print? No way. But thanks to support from many friends, a few readers and a steadilyemployed spouse, I managed to hang in there. Now I’m working on a new novel. Maybe it’ll be out by 2012. Mark your calendars. Jan Strnad has finally wised up, ditched his Bohemian and unpronounceable real name, and taken the pen name of J. Knight. More of his work can be found on his website at www.atombrain.com.

THE END STRNAD | 75

Feedback Letters from our readers Dear Danny: Write Now #4 was amazing! As always, “eclectic” was the word of the day. With comics as the touchstone, you managed to give insights into TV, movies, animation and, of course, graphic storytelling methods. Everyone in the issue—Howard Chaykin, Fabian Nicieza, Denny O’Neil and all the rest—brought their own personality and perspective to the topics, showing how much room there is for individual point of view in approaching subject matter that on the surface can appear similar. And you seem to be able to manage to put people enough at ease that they talk about topics they themselves may never have articulated with such depth and clarity before. Write Now! is a real asset to pros, wannabe-pros, and interested civilians alike. Thanks! Frank Saladino Via the Internet Thanks, Frank. The insights shown in the interviews and articles—as well, of course, as in the Nuts & Bolts sections—is what Write Now! is all about. Writing is both an art and a craft, and as such is an expression of the inner workings of individuals and societies. Seeing how that process manifests itself in writers and their work is endlessly fascinating—and instructive. Hi, Mr. Fingeroth, This is a response to your fine article “Idiots and Outlaws” in issue #3 of Write Now! I’m really enjoying your magazine and learning quite a bit with each new issue. Please express my thanks to all who are involved. While I can see the point you were half-jokingly making on how we can increase comic sales as a whole, it’s something I hope we don’t have to seriously resort to. I would hate to think after the industry has evolved and grown over decades, after we continue to fine tune our craft of creating comics, that we cheapen how it is viewed by catering to old stereotypes and misconceptions. Stocks rise and fall, hip-huggers enjoy resurgence now and again, and the seasons blow in and out over the course of each year. All these things are cyclical and I believe the popularity of comics is no different. We may not see comics as a booming industry for profit for quite a long time, but I’m confident the cycle will pad the pockets of artists, writers, and companies as a whole again in the future. In the meantime, we have to enjoy what we have. And what we have is great! If anything, we should be looking at how we can break this stereotype of idiocy in media. The industry is producing new titles that are testing boundaries, trying various views to get new readers, and some great work is being produced! For example, there is more than just one Spider-Man book on the market. We generally have at least three titles running now. Perhaps my youth and inexperience work against me, but it seems the industry is beginning to divide and conquer further than it has before with its core

characters, aiming them in different ways at different audiences. While manga and anime are definitely not the same as Western comics, we can learn a lot from that industry and how it is surviving. In Anime Explosion by Patrick Drazen, the author explains how many of the stories told in anime are based on centuries-old folklore and how most new series are simply recycled versions with a new twist or angle in order to have something that people of today can identify more closely with. Due to the difference in age of our perspective cultures, Japan’s mythos has been polished and refined about ten times longer than Western stories. We are just starting to refine our stories. Older readers are enjoying books that can really get to the core of what makes a character tick. To see what I mean, read recent Batman story arcs such as “Bruce Wayne Murderer,” “Officer Down,” or “No Man’s Land.” Series such as Marvel’s MAX titles can explore subjects like war with writing that provokes and art that shocks. Hopefully the end result, beyond enjoyment, is to force a reader to consider this topic and others with some seriousness. Or consider Spider-Man dealing with a possible divorce in “The Amazing Spider-Man” or the presence of gay main character in The Rawhide Kid. Comics with themes, characters, and stories deemed “too mature” for the comic code are being produced as the industry pushes its limits. Books that were once considered too mature and extreme are no longer limited to the underground market and are finding a place on the racks next to mainstream titles. The industry is evolving and new species of books are springing to life. Comics are no longer a playground just for children. The characters have evolved with their readership. Dumb things down and maybe we’re limiting ourselves in exploring these new problems, concepts, and ideas in our society. As the characters are evolving with the industry, some are polished in new series for younger readers. Ultimate SpiderMan or Batman Beyond are two successful revamps that spring to mind. As young readers identify with these “new” characters, they can grow older with the characters again and the cycle continues. So perhaps the key is to recycle the characters every twenty years or so to make sure their world catches up with ours? I’m not sure we saw many re-launch stories like these decades ago, since many characters were still so new. The secret to surviving will be to keep experimenting, keep trying new things and to keep gaining fans in new corners of society. Don’t mask this valuable medium as mediocrity. Polish and refine. Divide and conquer. Thanks for your time and a great magazine! Jason Allen Via the internet Thanks for the thoughtful letter, Jason. I hope you’re right. I’m not worried that there aren’t enough good and great comics out there. There are plenty, both current and reprints of old ones. The problem is: how do we get people outside the circle of enthusiasts to know about, care about and find them. (Dynamic Forces’ head honcho Nick Barrucci has had some interesting things to say on the topic that you might want to check out at www.newsarama.com.) Dear Danny: I must say that I’ve really enjoyed Write Now! more than I [Continued on page 77.]

76 | WRITE NOW

Gives you the lowdown on

BOOKS ON WRITING

Panel Two: More Comic Book Scripts by Top Writers

By Danny Fingeroth

Edited by Nat Gertler About Comics, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2003 In this equally valuable follow-up to the immensely useful Panel One, Nat Gertler again offers concrete examples of scripts by top comics professionals. What Panel Two has that its predecessor doesn’t is commentary not just from the writers of the printed scripts, but from the ar tists who must draw stories from the scripts. For an aspiring writer, this is an invaluable peek at how writer-artist, and even writer-artisteditor, relationships work. As the truisms go: comics is a visual medium and comics is a collaborative medium. You can write what you think is the greatest script of all time, but if your artist can’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, the chances of a successful collaboration—and hence a successful story—are greatly lessened. The stories the artists tell in words—where they usually are heard from “only” in their art—are a highly entertaining and instructional aspect of this book. Mark Heike, discussing his art on a Mike Baron Nexus script, for instance, tells a remarkably candid tale of the creative chain breaking down thanks to the non-professional attitude of his inker and his own ill-fated attempts to make things right. His essay also recounts his getting off to a bad start in his relationship with his editor on the same project. It’s a cautionary tale anyone in a freelance situation can learn from. Heike’s is certainly not a feelgood story—although the experience did get Heike back into drawing comics regularly after a hiatus. And Chuck Austen’s recounting of how he came to be the artist on two issues of Scott McCloud’s Zot! is an inspiring tale of how two creative people’s idiosyncrasies meshed for what, with different collaborators, could have been an unpleasant experience. As Austen says: “…Scott was more than happy to let me drift from his ideas and include my own, or change his entirely, but why would I? What he had done was brilliant and learned an immense amount about stor ytelling from Scott during this process. It was like working over a teaching manual for ‘How To Produce Ex cellent Comics,” and getting paid to learn.”

Since Austen is today one of the highest-profile writers in comics, what he learned apparently served him well. Aside from reflections by both writers and artists, there is, as in Panel One, a wide array of comic script formats, illustrating what cannot be repeated too often: there is no one “correct” format for a comics script. As Mark Evanier says in his intro to a Groo script for one of his [©2003 About Comics.] many collaborations with Sergio Aragones: “I hope, if nothing else, this series of books debunks a notion that I feel has been highly injurious to the comic book field. That’s the idea that there is one way to create comics: One script format, one way for writer and ar tist to communicate with one another, one way to divvy up the labors…Somehow, folks in comics learn one way to make funnybooks and they tr y to apply it no matter how their collaborators or the project at hand may change.” Gertler and the creators involved—Evanier, Heike, Austen, McCloud, Baron, Peter David, Bill Mumy & Miguel Ferrer, Judd Winick, Gail Simone, Steve Leialoha, Pop Mhan and the rest— show that there are indeed a wealth of ways to convey a story to your collaborator and then to your readers. Even Winick, represented by a story he both wrote and drew, works, in this case, using a method that differs from what you would expect a writer/artiest would employ. He starts not with the plot (as someone just doing the writing might) or with an arresting image (as an artist who was concerned with pure visual impact might), but with dialogue, finding the story as he goes, then laying out the art and then drawing the story. There’s more than one way to skin a cat—and to make comic books. With Panel Two, Gertler has again showcases a whole bunch of those ways and—significantly for working and aspiring writers and artists, as well as interested civilians—gives us revealing insights into the thought processes behind the decisions creators make.

[Continued from page 76.] even thought I would. It’s full of great interviews for any type of writing or creativity Heath Kraynak Via the Internet

pearls of wisdom with readers, because his book that I’m reading—The Complete Book Of Scriptwriting—is a how-to book that is unmatched by any in the market today. This is a person who certainly loves his craft. Andre M Williams Via the Internet Thanks for the kind works, Andre. But I have to know—was the JMS interview as good as you hoped it’d be? Let me know! That’s it for this issue’s Feedback, folks. I can’t wait to hear 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.

Thanks, Heath, Hope we keep surprising you. Hello, Danny Fingeroth! I have bought and read most of the issues of Write Now! that have hit the stores and I must say you have done an excellent job with this publication! I look forward to issue #5. I know J. Michael Straczynski will share some of his writing

THE END

BOOK REVIEWS | 77

MAGAZINES ABOUT COMICS FROM TWOMORROWS

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GRAPHITE EDITION For the first time, Jack Kirby’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created (before it was broken up for the later Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of JACK’S UNINKED PENCILS! • All proceeds from this 52-page book go toward the huge task of scanning and preserving the 4000+ PAGE KIRBY PENCIL XEROX ARCHIVES! • Includes page after page of prime KIRBY PENCILS, before any changes! • BONUS: Includes Jack’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, & more! • To maximize proceeds for archiving, this book is available ONLY BY MAIL (not sold in stores)!

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THE BEST IN BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS Top creators discuss all aspects of the DESIGN OF COMICS, from panel and page layout, to use of color and lettering:

STREETWISE

TOP ARTISTS DRAWING STORIES OF THEIR LIVES An unprecedented assembly of talent drawing NEW autobiographical stories:

THE COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOL. ONE

THE COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOL. TWO

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:

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• 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!

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(228-page Trade Paperback) $26 US

(208-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

EISNER AWARD WINNER FOR BEST SHORT STORY!

EISNER AWARD NOMINEE!

ALTER EGO: THE CBA COLLECTION

FAWCETT COMPANION THE BEST OF FCA

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

Presenting the best of the FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA newsletter!

• WILL EISNER • SCOTT HAMPTON • MIKE WIERINGO • WALTER SIMONSON • MIKE MIGNOLA • MARK SCHULTZ • DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI • MIKE CARLIN • DICK GIORDANO • BRIAN STELFREEZE • CHRIS MOELLER • MARK CHIARELLO If you’re serious about creating effective, innovative comics, or just enjoying them from the creator’s perspective, this guide is must-reading!

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:

• 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 X-MEN, AVENGERS/KREE-SKRULL WAR, THE INVADERS, and more!

• 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!

• 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!

(160-page Trade Paperback) $20 US

(136-pg. Paperback) $14 US

• 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

“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)

THE LIFE & 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!!

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE

WERTHAM WAS RIGHT!

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:

A second collection of MARK EVANIER’s POV COLUMNS, with a NEW COVER and ILLOS by SERGIO ARAGONÉS!

First volume in a new book series devoted to the best of today's comics artists looks at the work of ALAN DAVIS!

• Features many never-before published columns on comic book history, creation, and appreciation! • Includes Mark’s diatribe on comic book numbering! • Essay on comics greatest villain, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM!

• 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!

(200-page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

KIMOTA! THE MIRACLEMAN COMPANION

WARREN COMPANION

• MURPHY discusses his career from the 1940s to today in a series of interviews! • Covers his work on SUPERMAN, HAWKMAN, ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, BUCK ROGERS, and more! • Loaded with ANDERSON ART, plus behind-the-scenes anecdotes about FINE, EISNER, SWAN, KANE, and others!

• 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) $22 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! Cowritten 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

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!

ALAN DAVIS

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.

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: (108 pgs.) TIMELY/ AE #21: (108 pgs.) IGER AE #22: (108 pgs.) EVERETT & BUSCEMA, ROMITA, SEVERIN overview & art, ARNOLD GOLDBERG interview & art, SPRANG interview & art, MARVEL focus, INVADERS STUDIO with art by EISNER, KUBERT interviewed by GIL interviews, ALEX ROSS on DRAKE & MURPHY ANDER- plus KIRBY, DITKO, HECK, JERRY ROBINSON on FRED overview with KIRBY, KANE, FINE, MESKIN, ANDERSON, KANE & NEAL ADAMS, ROY Shazam!, OTTO & JACK SON interviews, plus EISNER, AYERS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, RAY, BOB KANE, CARMINE ROBBINS, BOB DESCHAMPS CRANDALL, CARDY, EVANS, THOMAS on Sub-Mariner, BINDER, KURTZMAN, new CRANDALL, DAVIS & EVANS’ EVERETT, WALLY WOOD’S INFANTINO, ALEX TOTH, intv., panel with FINGER, “SHEENA” section, THOMAS COLAN, BUSCEMA, SEVERIN, ROSS & FRADON/SEVERIN non-EC action comics, FCA, Flash Gordon, FCA, KIRBY & WALLY WOOD, FCA, SPRANG BINDER, FOX, & WEISINGER, on the JSA, FCA, DAVE WOOD, FCA, BECK & EVERETT STEVENS cover, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US covers, more! $8 US LOU FINE cover, more! $8 US SWAYZE covers, more! $8 US & RAY covers, more! $8 US FCA, rare art, more! $8 US

Edited by ROY THOMAS

N G I! N I T M CO UGUS A #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). FOR SIX-ISSUE SUBS, CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!