Write Now! #8

INSIDE: CREATE A COMIC FROM START TO FINISH!

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1994--2004

$ 95

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August 2004

In the USA

M AG A ZI N E

SEE A

BOLD NEW CHARACTER CREATED BEFORE YOUR EYES!

PLUS:

STUART MOORE DON McGREGOR INDY CREATORS’ SECRETS!

CROSSOVER WITH

The Magazine About Writing For Comics, Animation, and SCI-FI

M AG A ZI N E Issue #8

August 2004

Read Now! Message from the Editor-in-Chief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 2 SPECIAL SECTION: Write Now!/Draw! Crossover Danny Fingeroth and Mike Manley show you all the steps involved in creating a new character from scratch—including her origin story!

Meet comics’ newest action-adventure superstar: The Thief of Time! . . . .page 3 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 4 Memos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 5 Character Description and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 8 Story Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 12 Origin Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 15 Pencil Roughs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 18 Script and Balloon Placement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 22 Inked Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 28 Creators’ Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 29

The WRITE NOW! Comics School Lesson: Character Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 11 Lesson: Story Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 14 Lesson: Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 17 Lesson: Scripting Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 21 Lesson: Writing Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 27

The Science of Fiction (and the Art of it, too) Interview with Stuart Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 41

Talent, Inc. Interview with Don McGregor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 53

Clawing My Way to the Top William Harms, writer of Abel, traces his career path . . . . . . .page 63

Feedback Letters from Write Now! ’s Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 73

Nuts & Bolts Department Thickening The Plot Stuart Moore talks about storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 43

Pitch to Script to Pencils to Finished Art: PARA #1 Pages by Stuart Moore, Pablo Villalobos, and Mostafa Moussa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 47

Pitch to Script to Sketches to Finished Art: GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS Pages from the graphic novel by Stuart Moore and Ryan Kelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 51

Proposal to Script to Finished Art: BAD MOJO Pages from the graphic novel by William Harms and Steve Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 67

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor-in-Chief Designer CHRISTOPHER DAY Transcribers STEVEN TICE Publisher JOHN MORROW COVER Art by MIKE MANLEY Photography by SOFIA NEGRON Special Thanks To ALISON BLAIRE WILLIAM HARMS MIKE MANLEY DON McGREGOR STUART MOORE ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON CHRIS POWELL BEN REILLY JIM SALICRUP J. DAVID SPURLOCK VARDA STEINHARDT Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! is published 4 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Fax: (919) 449-0327.

Danny Fingeroth, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Write Now! E-mail address: WriteNowDF@aol.com. Single issues: $8 Postpaid in the US ($10 Canada, $11 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US ($40 Canada, $44 elsewhere). Order online at: www.twomorrows.com or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com All characters are TM & © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © the respective authors. Editorial package is ©2004 Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. The Thief of Time and all related elements are ©2004 Danny Fingeroth and Mike Manley. All rights reserved. Write Now! is a shared trademark of Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. Printed in Canada.

FIRST PRINTING.

WRITE NOW | 1

READ Now!

Message from Danny Fingeroth, Editor-in-Chief

W

ell, here’s something you don’t see every day. It’s the Write Now!/Draw! Crossover.

Last year, Draw! Editor-in-Chief Mike Manley and yours truly decided to do a crossover between our magazines.

Seemed like a natural. Write Now! is about writing, Draw!’s about art! Put ’em together (with lettering, coloring, and sundry other ingredients) and you’ve got comics!

Of course, we then had to figure out what exactly such a crossover would be. What we came up with was the idea that we would show step-by-step how a new character is created, and then how her origin story came to be. And that’s what we did. You hold in your hands the first half of that crossover, with the second half appearing in Draw! #9, on sale soon.

Essentially, Mike and I decided to show you as much as we could of—to in effect map out—the creative process. Although much of anybody’s process goes on inside their heads while doing things that seem totally unrelated, we tried to keep records of memos, conversations, and e-mails, and put them together to show you how we came up with Thief of Time. To be honest, since so much of creative work is unruly and chaotic, just ordering the process is in itself creating a simulation of the creative process. Nonetheless. I think there’s much of value that we came up with to show you here. Whether or not you like our new character (and I have a feeling you’re going to go nuts for her), there’s much to chew on as you follow us along the creative trail.

Now, Mike and I have co-created characters before. Together, we did 25 issues and an annual of Darkhawk for Marvel in the 1990s. While Tom DeFalco came up with the initial concept for that character, I fleshed him and his universe out substantially, and Mike designed the whole shebang. Significantly as far as this crossover, Mike and I completely co-created any new villains and many of the supporting cast members of the Darkhawk series that appeared in those issues. So Savage Steel, Lodestone, Evilhawk, and a bunch of others were cocreated by us (no doubt with input from then-editorial staffers Howard Mackie, Nel Yomtov, Greg Wright, John Lewandowski and Richard Ashford).

Thief of Time, though, is the first time we’ve completely created a title character together, and the first time we’ve worked “without a net,” that is, without editorial input.

Everything you see, love it or hate it, comes from me and Mike.

Aside from the roadmap of creation that we’re doing, I’m initiating a formal “Write Now Comics School” in this issue. I figure it’s a perfect companion to the process of seeing a new character created. There are five mini-lessons geared to give you the basics about story structure, character development and other essentials of writing. I’m not trying to make you believe I made all this up. While I’ve come up with what I hope

are unique insights and ways of phrasing things, the verities of storytelling have been the same for thousands of years. And I would be remiss in not acknowledging the insights about writing that I’ve gained over the years from folks including Dennis O’Neil, Jim Shooter, Tom DeFalco, Louise Simonson, and the late Hank Levy.

In any case, in this issue of Write Now!, I focus, naturally, on the writing aspects, while of necessity, showing a lot of the artrelated aspects of story and character creation. Mike takes the baton and brings us home with more on the art, as well as coloring, lettering and other nifty features. And the big bonus in Draw! #9 is the pull-out comic insert of Thief of Time #1. (Feel free to show it to Hollywood producers with excess cash.)

But there’s still more in this issue of Write Now! There’s an incredible interview with Stuart Moore (who Steven Grant recently called “one of the best comics writers in America”), a 110 mph interview with the legendary Don McGregor, and an engrossing article by rising star William Harms, who talks about the realities of forging your way in comics with an independent vision.

Aside from the crossover, which is really all Nuts & Bolts, we have some awesome Nuts & Bolts from Stuart’s and William’s oeuvres. From pitch to finished pages, you’ll see how these skillful gentlemen (and their artistic partners) tell their compelling stories.

Unfortunately, Dennis O’Neil’s comics class notes got squeezed out this issue, but will be back next. That’s a promise.

Also next issue, we’ll be focusing on comics legend Neal Adams! But the emphasis will be on Adams’ writing! In an exclusive interview, Neal talks about his approach to comics writing! Plus, we’ll have an interview with super-hot writer Geoff Johns! Then, switching gears, the ever-surprising Peter Bagge sits for an interview! And Wolff & Byrd’s Batton Lash talks about his unorthodox approach to creating comics. And, of course, there’ll be a plethora of Nuts & Bolts by Adams and others as Write Now! keeps showing you how it’s done!

“Where’s the hype?” you’re no doubt wondering. Wonder no more. Here it is: SHAMELESS PLUG DEPARTMENT: If you like the crossover, then you won’t want to miss the DVD version that will show you all the things that Mike and I talk about in the magazines—and then some! The mags and [READ NOW continues on page 74.]

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Photo by Sofia Negron

Making Comics What This Crossover is All About

By Danny Fingeroth “Most of my ‘work’ time is spent daydreaming. I spend very little time at the keyboard…

Daydreaming is the job. My wife’ll tell you--I do it 24/7.”

--Chuck Dixon

A

s Mr. Dixon implies, the creative process is mysterious (though not as mysterious as some would have you believe), constant, and often unseen.

So, although the stated purpose of this issue of Write Now! and it’s continuation in Draw #9 is to show you the creative process that goes into inventing a new character and her universe, as well as into telling the first story ever told featuring her, there’s a lot you won’t be seeing. As a matter of fact, you’ll have to draw on a lot of your own creativity to fill in the gaps.

Nonetheless, I believe that what Mike Manley (Draw’s Editorin-Chief) and I are giving you may be more of an inside look inside the creative process involved in comics universe and character development than anyone has ever done before.

Knowing this would be recorded for posterity, Mike and I saved notes, memos, and sketches. We recorded conversations. We saved versions of plots and scripts and character sketches. There’s a lot of stuff here, stuff you should be able to learn a lot from, even if what you learn is “I’d never do it that way.”

But bear in mind the things you won’t be seeing, things such as: • The time banging our heads against a wall when no ideas came.

• Time at the keyboard or drawing board where what’s arrived at are dead ends. (Or what seem like dead ends. Those seemingly false starts and wrong turns often lead to ideas that do work, whether in the current project or in something that won’t be created for another five years.)

• What Chuck Dixon refers to as “daydreaming”—the disjointed, impressionistic process of idea formation that comes while waiting on line at the supermarket or plunging a stuffed drain—or when you’re nodding to your spouse as if you’re actually listening to what s/he’s saying.

4 | WRITE NOW!

Editor-in-Chief Write Now! Magazine • Conversations Mike and I didn’t record—say, when sitting together at a comics convention, or when we didn’t have the tape recorder on when we were on the phone.

What you will see, though, is pretty cool. Hopefully, it will make you think about what goes into creating characters and stories and will be of use in your own writing, and in appreciating the writing of others.

Since this magazine focuses on writing, I’ve interspersed the Thief development pieces with one-page lessons on key elements of writing. You might want to refer back and forth between the Thief creative steps and the points made in the lessons.

See if you can identify the parts of the Thief material that correspond to the points made in the lessons.

While Mike and I have tried to make a coherent narrative of the creative process, bear in mind that we have imposed structure on it. The process is much more disjointed, stop-and-start, herkyjerky than it may seem when it’s organized, after the fact, on paper.

Don’t feel badly if your own process seems less structured. Most people’s are—including mine and Mike’s. The idea is to take what you’ve come up with in the throes of creative inspiration and impose logic and order on it—without draining out the juice that made the idea exciting to you in the first place.

Once again, here at Write Now! (and at Draw!, too), we’re venturing into uncharted waters to show you ways of looking at the creative process maybe just a little different than ways you’ve looked at it before. I’ve no doubt that, as always, the readers of both magazines will let us know how they feel about the results of our efforts. And as always, I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

Creatively yours,

Danny Fingeroth

Thief of Time: Beginnings Memos Between Fingeroth & Manley

H

ere’s a selection of the correspondence between Mike and Danny that got the ball rolling on Thief of Time. The e-mails pretty much tell their own story.

How It All Started

• We have a short plot outline in WN. • Also in WN, we have some of the Plot & Script, and maybe some thumbnails of the story.

• In Draw, we’d show some of the plot and script. (Maybe we do the first few pages in “Marvel style,” the last few as “full script.”)

10/1/02 Mike: Not sure how... but there’s got to be a way to do a “crossover” between Draw! and Write Now!, don’t ya think?

Any interest?

—Danny 11/22/02 Mike: As I mentioned in an e-mail last month: Any interest in doing a Draw-Write Now “crossover”? What would that mean?

Maybe we could print a script in WN and then have it drawn in Draw? Or an interview with a writer/artist or writer-artist team that starts in one mag and ends in the other. Or something actually clever!

—Danny

• In WN we’d have some of the lettered, uninked pages and some inked pages.

• In Draw, we’d have more of the lettered, uninked pages, and the rest of the inked pages.

• And then... the Draw color section could be the complete story, with a cover!

And we can then, hopefully, take whatever character(s) we come up with—which we’d share copyright on—and pitch them to publishers, using the 8 page insert as our sample. (So we should have a bunch more printed than we need for the insert in Draw.)

Let me know what you think. Once we get a basic format we’re happy with, we can present it to John and see what he thinks.

The Ground Rules 6/3/03 Mike: Here’s my understanding of our conversation about the Write Now/Draw crossover that we had today: We do a 6- or 7-page story, with cover a total of 8 pages.

• Premise, character and setting descriptions, character sketches and setting sketches in Write Now!

• Then we have a taped conversation about the characters and story, which we transcribe and put part in Write Now, part in Draw.

From an earlier Danny Fingeroth/Mike Manley collaboration: Darkhawk! This confrontation from Darkhawk #5, featuring the character Portal, has words by Fingeroth, pencils by Manley, and inks by Ricardo Villagran. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.] WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 5

Brainstorming

treasures of history. To be able to raid King Tut’s tomb, the treasures of the rich and great kings of history, the zillions of great treasures lost to the past.

6/10/03 Mike: Here are a couple of ideas I’ve been toying with for a while. Maybe one could be the crossover/pitch comic we do for Write Now & Draw: One’s about a master cat burglar who, when caught by the feds, becomes an agent on their behalf. It’s called “License to Steal.” I’d be open to the lead being female, too, or having a female partner. It would be a sort of Modesty Blaise thing, but we’d give him/her/them some cool super-gizmos.

Also was thinking of something about a time-travelling private eye, whose cases would take him back and forth in time. Working title: “Time Detective.”

Either one sound interesting?

—Danny 1/14/04 Danny: Why not combine them! What would every jewel thief really love to be able to do? Time travel and steal the great

(I think it should be a gal character. She’s gonna be more popular with the fans.)

Now to put some spin on the character interesting, maybe she isn’t all bad. Maybe she helps solve crimes, but feels her compensation is heisting the treasures. Sorta’ Indian Jen/crossed with Catwoman.

Either idea on its own has been really played out. But maybe we need to complicate the time travel. Make it conditional. The time-jump device might only be used at certain times of day—it could be her father’s device. Maybe he is kidnapped and she must steal to keep him alive. Maybe she was a spoiled daughter who must learn to put others first.

Could she have a kid sister? You get mobsters, cops, all chasing her.

Involve the cops, or government, who are also interested in the device for obvious reasons. The “man servant”—or Race Bannon, Willie Garvin character—could help her, but if he’s the cop who falls in love with her, who maybe originally wanted to capture her, we get some romance too. Make it a cat-and-mouse through time.

Some of Mike Manley’s early character sketches for the Thief of Time. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

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Ironing Out Glitches

Sure a lot to cram into a little space, but the set-up could be good and that’ll give you a lot to explore in Write Now. Your thoughts...?

—Mike

These final two e-mails were written after Danny’s initial versions of Thief’s backstory and debut plot (both seen elsewhere in the crossover) were done.

4/1/04

Detail Work Danny:

1/16/04 Mike: I love the female time-travelling master-thief idea. I’d rather not have her be daddy’s girl—isn’t that the backstory of every female thief in comics and TV?—but we can work that out.

There’s at least one movie—TimeCop—that deals with a similar motif. And of course ALL THE TERMINATOR MOVIES! But we may have come up with a unique angle.

Right now, our prime need is a look for the character so I can have an inked and colored cover to John in a few weeks. I see her as high-tech but sexy. Jennifer Garner from Alias meets Venom meets nanotech. Maybe the time travel device can be some kind of belt she wears, but one that depends on being wirelessly connected a larger complex of technology.

Maybe the tech’s something she sneaks access to—it’s at a highly guarded think-tank or even in another dimension.

For the cover, I’m thinking that we see her stepping “across time” somehow. Maybe half of her is in NYC circa 2004, while the other half of her is stepping into the Wild West? Ancient Egypt? A pirate ship? (Or will that be passe soon?)

(Among other things, we’ll have to determine if she can cross space as well as time. In other words, would she have to fly to modern Rome to go back to ancient Rome? I’d say that’s too big a pain. Nobody ever questioned Peabody & Sherman moving through space as well as time. But it could also be an interesting story element, I suppose. For the cover, though, I think we can take whatever license we want.)

—Danny

Technical Question

Okay, we have a lot to cover here. We have a mom who’s conned by a greedy husband. Does he con her waiting till she’d completed the device, knowing he’d steal it and kill her?

With time travel how do we prevent her from going back and preventing the break up? Death, etc.? We have to make it so that her altering the timeline would lead to her own death or some tricky penalizing situation.

This may be just too complicated to squeeze into 8 pages here.

—Mike 4/1/04 Mike: I didn’t think we’d show the entire origin. Maybe just a panel or two, have her talk/think about the rest.

Might be better if the “fatal mistake” the father made was done accidentally, trying to save his wife or his fatally ill infant daughter. So he’d be a good guy, not a creep.

Maybe dad’s “lost in the timestream” so she keeps following clues to where she thinks he might be, hence the need to constantly travel through time.

[Time travel stories are always full of logic holes. The idea is to just accept the logic we establish and go with it and make it as fun as we can.]

So maybe she manipulates markets and uses the dough to finance her search for her dad. Maybe the things she steals are tech or magic (or things she hopes are magic) items to further the search.

The partner? I think she does need someone to talk to and to ground her psychologically and so she herself doesn’t get lost in time. And an under the surface chemistry between them would be great in a Scully/Mulder manner.

3-27-04 Mike: Full script or Marvel style?

—Danny

This work any better for you? Let’s talk later or tomorrow a.m.

—Danny

THE END

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 7

Thief of Time: Character Description and Design H

Here’s Danny’s character description, based on his and Mike’s ideas and input. After reading it, Mike added a comment (in the middle) for them to discuss.

Mike: We won’t, of course, be revealing all of her backstory in the crossover story. We’ll only reveal as much as we need for the story to work.

—Danny • 28 years old • Professor of literature at Columbia University (so lives in NYC area) • Olympic level athlete • Mensa • Checkered love life: • Always falls for guys who embody one or the other of her passions—the mind or the body. Never been able to find anyone who embodies both.

• With her (fraternal, naturally) twin brother, she has devoted her life to finding their father, lost in the time stream.

the past in the spot the earth would be at the specific date and time. The device would have to have some global positioning system to be able to grid you in the proper place, tilt of the Earth, etc. [To get BACK to the present, your “anchorman” would have to control the GPS from this end?]

• Heather and her brother Henry were opposites. He was the science nerd. She loved literature and adventure. She traveled a lot.

• Without him, she’d have a hard time doing this.

• Henry theorized they could find their dad in timestream, but thinks it foolish for her to try. She refuses to give up on finding dad (and mom?). He helps her so she’ll have at least some chance of success. Also, he refuses to let outsiders have the tech. It stays in the family. Would he sacrifice his sister to protect the technology? Even he doesn’t know what he would do in a case like that. He just knows he doesn’t want the end of the world known as “Branscome’s Folly.”

• Their mother either (a) died when they were young OR

• Parents (Nick and Nora Branscome) were scientists working on dimensional/time travel.

• (b) was hurt in the same accident that sent their dad into time. She’s in a coma. Or perhaps she was sent to a different part of the timestream.

• Never really believed they could do it. Just theoretical.

• Hmmm. Dad sent to the past, mother sent to the future?

• They were shocked to discover they actually could travel through time. (Was it their skill or luck that did the trick—or someone else enabling it, someone with a nefarious agenda?)

• Nick and Nora did some exploration through time, thought it was “easy.”

• Used GPS satellite bullsh*t technology to travel in space as well as time Mike’s comment: You would not need a jet if you can travel in time, you’d just punch in the coordinates and you’d pop into 8 | WRITE NOW!

As we discussed, Heather has come close to her father, but each time she did, he was seemingly killed.

But then a clue would appear telling her he was somewhere in time.

THE REASON SHE DOES WHAT SHE DOES: To find her father and bring him safely to his home time.

The tech he developed keeps him jumping in time. HE CANNOT STAY IN ONE TIME FOR MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES. If she can get to him with tech her brother has developed, then maybe she can stabilize him in time and keep him in one time-place, hopefully her present.

THE END

This page and opposite: More of Mike Manley’s early character sketches for the Thief of Time. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 9

LOOK! UP IN THE SKY!

It’s... You!!

Welcome to modern society, where superhero culture has become the METAPHORICAL prism through which we see--and live--our lives.

& Cover art by Mark Bagley

Scott Hanna.

What is it about superheroes that speaks to us, that cuts across boundaries of nationality, race and gender to entrance us?

Fingeroth; Copyright ©2004 by Danny Lee Foreword ©2004 by Stan

“Danny Fingeroth has produced a readable and socially insightful consideration of the superhero. His analysis of society’s solution to its dissatisfaction with the protection provided by standard law-and-order systems makes it important and current. Stan Lee’s ‘excelsorial’ foreword is an enjoyable addition.”

—Will Eisner

paperback

$19.95 available now

“In Superman on the Couch, you’ll explore subjects that may make you reconsider preconceived notions and perhaps bring you greater appreciation of the superhero stories.”

— From the foreword by Stan Lee

In Superman on the Couch, DANNY FINGEROTH, longtime Marvel Comics writer and editor, and editor-in-chief of Write Now! Magazine, digs deep into our cultural psyche to explore just what we see reflected back when we look at superheroes.

“…With humor and a touch of comic book hyperbole, the author capably mines the genre’s cultural morphologies and the societal changes it reflects - a subject largely overlooked by contemporary pop psychologists and academics…”

— Publishers Weekly

Comics School Mini-Lesson

Character Development

by Danny Fingeroth Who are your characters? Why should anybody care about them?

These are the challenges you face when writing a story.

Creating a character can seem deceptively simple. Pick a hair color, a body type, maybe a nifty superpower, a romantic interest, and a car-style, and you have a character, right? Well, a very shallow character. One who people have no real reason to care about. You need to give your character CHARACTER. You can call this personality, if you like.

As with the other elements of story-making, character can work on several levels. A hero who claims to be dedicated to pursuing justice can have a certain interest for your readers, especially when pitted against a villain who champions evil.

But what if your hero has a bad temper and accidentally kills an adversary who was shoplifting a pack of gum? What if your villain

gives all the proceeds from his crimes to cancer research? Wouldn’t that make them more interesting? Wouldn’t that make them more like people you meet in daily life—flawed humans whose actions are often at odds with their stated intentions, or whose actions are a mixed bag of good and bad?

That’s what characterization is about. And that’s the difference between surface characterization and deep characterization.

Surface characterization is when a character seems to be about what they say they’re about. In a Superman story intended for younger readers, Superman is about doing the right thing, and doggone it, he always does the right thing.

Deep characterization is what it sounds like. A character has more complex motives. Superman, in a story for an older audience, may sometimes question why he does what he does. “Is it worth it to do the right thing when people keep committing crimes no matter how often I do the right thing? Maybe I should retire to a desert island.” The struggle to keep doing the right thing even when it’s not appreciated or when it’s hard to know what the right thing is, is a story that involves deeper characterization.

Another way of looking at deep characterization is as the real motivations a character has. This is often the opposite of, or contradicts, what a character says are his or her motivations. Face it, in real life, we don’t even know our own motivations much of the time.

How complex do you want your characters to be? If a hero is too complex, do they run the danger of being unlikable? Spider-Man is just flawed enough for people to relate to him and feel good about it. A reader feeling: “he screwed up in that situation just like I would have,” is one of the keys to Spidey’s longtime success. If Spider-Man intentionally treated his loved ones badly, he’d be more complex, but we wouldn’t like him as much, would we?

Generally, your main characters should have the most complex characterizations.

Supporting characters are just that. They exist to reflect qualities of the protagonist(s). Commissioner Gordon may now and then have a story focused on him, but generally, he’s there to tell us more about Batman’s relationship with society.

Some Mike Manley sketches, as he worked on establishing character and attitude for the character. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

Incidental characters need the least depth of all. They exist solely to move the story along. The guy who runs the newsstand exists only to sell the newspaper to the hero. “Mid-50s, gruff, needs a shave,” may be all the characterization he needs.

THE END

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 11

Thief of Time: Story Outline L

ess than a plot, a story outline (sometimes called a “beat sheet,” gives the basic skeleton of a story. In this case, based on conversations and e-mails back and forth between Danny and Mike, Danny wrote up a document to make sure he and Mike were in basic agreement on the shape of Thief of Time’s premiere story.

A GLITCH IN TIME PAGE ONE: • FULL PAGE SPLASH. Ancient Greece, the Parthenon. Heather Branscome, dressed in her adventure duds, is reaching for a beautiful URN that is on a pedestal. From the décor, it’s unclear if she’s in the past or in a museum. HB is clearly a 2004 woman.

She makes some wisecrack about the internet or Tivo, to make that point.

PAGE TWO: • As she’s about to grasp it, she is ordered to stop— —and whirls to find herself surrounded by a dozen Greek soldiers. (Yeah, I’ll get ref on all this stuff.) She laughs at them and reaches for a dial on her suit, but a quick-thinking guard has knocked her hand with his shield (or something better) and the time-dial is knocked off its setting.

She grabs the urn and, clutching it to her bosom, she turns the switch, anyway, is gone in a flash (or into the time tunnel you have on the cover).

Some out of costume character sketches of Heather Branscome. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

PAGE FOUR: Heather appears (whatever effect) inside her headquarters lab.

She’s greeted by Henry, her fraternal twin brother. He’s standing by banks of machinery, much of it digital, many computer screens. He sees that something went awry in the timestream.

She tells him of the soldier who made her do a panic-jump to a really bad place. But she has the urn.

He takes it and runs a scanning device over it.

“Dad was there, all right,” he says. He left this message.

“Let me guess,” she says. “Stop looking for me.

It can only result in the end of the world.”

PAGE FIVE: Maybe he’s right, Henry speculates.

PAGE THREE: In another flash, she’s still in the Partnenon, but suddenly bullets whiz by her. She’s in the middle of a WWII battle.

(Or she could end up chased by dinosaurs in a prehistoric setting.)

As Nazis advance on her, she sets the dial again, and disappears—still holding the urn—as a grenade explodes where she was standing.

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You don’t believe that—or else you wouldn’t be helping me try to find him, she retorts.

If I don’t, you’d just find somebody else—who wouldn’t care so much.

He’s dead, kid. Move on.

He’s lost in time, Henry. That’s not the same as dead. Not when we have the tech he invented. We can save him with it.

Or we can take his death—that’s what—and learn from it. You got so close to him, and just watched him die another way.

As they chat and work, a figure watches them in the shadows.

PAGE SIX: It’s a “hitchhiker” from the trip (a ninja, or samurai, probably).

He drops from his perch and demands the artifact back.

“Where you going to take it?” she taunts him.

He advances, wrecking the lab.

“Get him out of here, Heather!”

She sets the dial.

He smashes the urn. Sh*t. They needed it.

PAGE SEVEN: She grabs him, starts to set the dial.

He breaks free, they explode onto Fifth Avenue in rush hour.

Above and bottom left: Early sketches for the brother character, Henry Branscome. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

Battle with bystanders freaking out.

Tourists think it’s a movie shoot. Snap pictures. “Bruce Willis!

Bruce Willis!”

She pushes the buttons and she and he zoom through the portal.

PAGE EIGHT: As they go, he grabs the device from her. It clatters to the street and is crushed by a car.

They emerge in his time (ancient Japan?) and she is surrounded by ninja, with no hope of returning to the present.

But since it looks like she’s going to die here—what difference can it make?

And is that her father she sees in the distance… or a near-death hallucination?

And that, of course, is our…

CLIFFHANGER ENDING! TO BE CONTINUED...

What you’ve just read is not the first outline. It went through a few versions to get to this one, with Mike and Danny deciding on changes to be made along the way. In a few pages, you’ll see the actual plot that came from this outline. You’ll notice it’s different in several ways from the outline, starting with the length of the story.

THE END

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 13

Comics School Mini-Lesson

Story Structure

by Danny Fingeroth Ever notice how two people can be recounting the same event, and yet one of them makes it seem exciting and the other dull as dishwater? A big part of the reason for that is structure. The person who tells the compelling version knows when and how to introduce elements of the story.

Every story needs structure. Maybe avant-garde, minimalist writing doesn’t, but that is writing with a purpose other than that of most fictional storytelling. Most stories, certainly most genre stories, are intended to entertain or to educate, sometimes both. Over time, we have learned that the most effective ways to do this are with structures that Dennis O’Neil’s The DC Comics humans respond to. People seem to like to be led Guide to Writing Comics. [©2004 DC Comics.] down familiar paths of story. They like to be surprised, too. Knowing how to balance familiarity with surprise is a big part of the writer’s job. Knowledge of structure is an important tool to balance the familiar and the surprising.

Here are some “rules” of story structure, and specifically how they apply to comics.

They will serve you well when you’re trying to see why a story might not be working. (Rules, of course, are made to be broken. Structures are made to be messed with. But it’s good to know the rules before you start fooling around with them.)

• Hook (A visual or story point that makes you have to keep reading)

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• Establish situation and conflict. (Major visual action.)

• Develop and complicate situation. (Major visual action.)

• Events leading to — • Climax. (Major visual action.)

Note: Since comics are visual, major events and turning points are usually visual. But story point can be made in dialogue or with subtle visual incident if the story is strong enough and the tellers highly skilled.

Here’s a useful mnemonic device Jim Shooter used to use to map the basic structure of a story. It’s simplistic, of course, but also instructive: • Little Miss Muffett (Introduce character) • …sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey (introduce the status quo) • …along came a spider (establish the antagonist and conflict) • …and sat down beside her (build suspense)

Most stories we see hew to the classic “three-act structure.” Another way of saying this is “beginning, middle, end.” Nursery rhymes are stories. (See below.) Jokes are stories. “A guy walks into a bar…” You want to know what happens next.

Here’s story guru Dennis O’Neil’s Basic Structure for a 22-page super-hero comic book story:

• Inciting incident. (The event that really gets the story going.)

• …and frightened Miss Muffett (rising conflict) • …away. (resolution of the conflict and story denouement all at once) Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. [©1997 Robert McKee.]

That’s a little bit of info about story structure. There are shelves full of books on the topic, and all have something to offer.

See if you can find the elements of structure in the story Mike and I are presenting here in the crossover. Where do we follow “the rules”? Where do we break them?

THE END

Thief of Time: Plot W

hat follows is the “final” plot that Danny sent to Mike to draw. There were several versions leading up to this, as Mike and Danny discussed the story, leading to this plot, which Mike would do the art from. It was understood by both creators that Mike would be free to modify the story as he drew it.

The story is done “Marvel style” (see Scripting Styles lesson elsewhere in the crossover), which means that the artist works from plot instead of from a script that is broken down into panels with dialogue pre-written.

“A GLITCH IN TIME” PAGE ONE: • FULL PAGE SPLASH. Ancient Japan. (Is there a famous building associated with Japanese history? Something out of Shogun or something like that? Something we can do the same trick with— where we’re not sure at first if she’s in the past or present?)

• If we’re using a mask, THAT should be the focus of the splash: A big, impressive mask being reached for by a gloved hand.

• (MIKE: What era is your mask ref from? Where would such a mask be? A temple? A palace?)

PAGE TWO: • Heather Branscome, dressed in her adventure duds, reaches for a beautiful (JADE?) Japanese mask on a pedestal. From the décor, it’s unclear if she’s in the past or in present. HB is clearly a 2004 woman. She makes some wisecrack about the internet or Tivo to make that point. Heather smiles expectantly. She’s been after this thing for, oh, it seems like centuries.

• Note to Mike re her wisecracks: One of the reasons SpiderMan wisecracks is to relieve the tension of death-defying moments. Same with her. I’m modeling her on Jennifer Garner in Alias. Not a comedian, but never without a wry quip, either.

• As she’s about to grasp the mask, she is ordered to stop— • —and whirls to find herself surrounded by a dozen ancient Japanese soldiers. (Mike: Samurai? Ninjas? My Japanese history sucks.) She laughs at them—she’s not here to fight, she’s here to steal!—and reaches for a dial on her suit to make a quick getaway.

An early pencil rough of the first page of the Thief of Time story.

Notice how it differs from the plot and from what the actual page (seen elsewhere in the crossover) turned out to be. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

• But the guards attack, and she is dodging arrows and throwing stars, one of which hits the control and the time-dial is knocked off its setting.

• She grabs the mask and, clutching it to her bosom, she turns the switch on her costume anyway, and is gone in a flash (or into the time whirlpool you established on the cover). She has no idea when she’s going, but it’s got to be better than this!

PAGE THREE: • In another flash (or time-whirlpool effect), she’s still in the temple or palace, but suddenly bullets whiz by her. She’s in the middle of a pitched WWII battle.

• (Or she could end up chased by dinosaurs in a prehistoric setting.) (MIKE: I like both of these. What do you prefer drawing?) (Both are okay with me if you can fit them in.)

• As Japanese soldiers (or dinosaurs) advance on her, she sets the dial again, and disappears—still holding the mask—as a grenade

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 15

explodes where she was standing. (Or a dinosaur stomps the rock she was standing on, shattering it.)

• He advances, wrecking the lab.

PAGE SIX:

PAGE FOUR: • Heather appears inside her 2004 headquarters lab. It’s a violent re-entry that sends ripples through the air and knocks stuff over and about in the lab, like someone opened a huge window in the middle of a hurricane. She’s stressed from too long in the timestream.

• As the atmosphere settles back to normal, Henry, her fraternal twin brother, comes running up to her with a blanket , which he wraps around her shoulders. They’re standing by banks of machinery, much of it digital, many computer screens. Henry sees that something went awry in the timestream. (He looks related to her, of course, but definitely is more intense, with a gaze that won’t let you go if he locks eyes with you. He’s, temperamentally, Q to her James Bond. Brilliant technician and scientist, but not best-suited to field-ops.)

• “Get him out of here, Heather! This equipment can’t be replaced!”

• She sets the time-dial as the warrior swings at her, barely missing her as she athletically flips out of the way. But he smashes the mask. Sh*t. They needed it.

• She grabs him, starts to set the dial. “Time to take you back home, lover boy.”

• He breaks free, they battle inside the lab, Henry hiding behind machinery. We understand that bravery is not his strong suit.

•

• At the last second, he grabs her and is pulling her through with him. Ancient Japan is seen through the portal.

• She tells him of the soldier who made her do a panicjump to a really bad place. But she has the mask. He takes it and runs a scanning device over it. “Dad was there, all right,” he says. “He left a message.”

PAGE SEVEN:

• “Let me guess,” she says. “Stop looking for me. It can only result in the end of the world.”

• She pulls away from him but he won’t let go, no matter how hard she struggles and kicks. Henry even comes out from hiding to try to help.

• “Maybe he’s right,” Henry speculates. “You don’t believe that,” she snaps, “or you wouldn’t be helping me try to find him.” “If I don’t,” he replies, “you’d just find somebody else—who wouldn’t care so much. He’s dead, kid. Move on.”

PAGE FIVE:

• Henry: “We made a bad mistake in time once. Would you want to risk that again—with potentially earth-shattering consequences?”

• “That’s why I need you, Henry. To make sure… that never happens again. We can do it together, Henry. We have to. Don’t give up on me… don’t give up on dad.” As they chat and work, a figure watches them from the shadows on a catwalk above them.

• It’s a “hitchhiker” from the trip (a ninja, or samurai). He was unconscious until a few seconds ago. He drops from his perch and demands the artifact back. “Can’t anybody just sue us?” she asks. “What ever happened to the litigious society?”

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• The twins are halfway through the closing portal…

• …when the ninja is zapped by a futuristic-looking ray blast fired from the past-side of the portal…!

Mike’s final costume design for the Thief of Time. [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

• “He’s lost in time, Henry. That’s not the same as dead. Not when we have the tech he invented. We can save him with it. Your genius can track him through time. And I have the skill to search out the clues and bring him home.”

Heather pushes the buttons and she shoves the ninja (or whatever) through the opening time portal. As he goes, he smashes a component on the controls.

• As the portal closes and the ninja lets go, Heather see her savior…and is only slightly shocked to see…

• …her dad holding the just-fired blaster. “Stop looking,” he says. “To find me is to find doom.”

• The portal closes. Henry and Heather look astonished, staring (at the reader) at the spot where the portal had been.

And that, of course, is our…

CLIFFHANGER ENDING! Mike and Danny, per their working method, discussed changes to and modifications of this plot via e-mail and telephone. The results of their conversations are Mike’s art and Danny’s dialogue and captions for the story, which you’ll see, of course, elsewhere in the crossover.

THE END

Comics School Mini-Lesson

Conflict

by Danny Fingeroth One definition of a story is: somebody wants something, and someone or something else keeps him or her from getting it.

That “someone or something” is the conflict.

If a story was about a day where nothing went wrong and nothing was at stake, it wouldn’t be much of a story. The thing that makes a story about something is the conflict.

Conflict can be: • Physical. For instance, two characters battling. Under this could be included emotional arguments or intricate psychological conflict between two people. Also, outside—hurricanes, bombings, etc.—would be forms of physical conflict.

• Internal. This involves a character at odds with him or herself.

For instance, an alcoholic desperate for a drink, but knowing if he takes one he will be lost, must choose between need and desire.

• Personal. Has aspects of the first two types. For instance, one partner in a romantic relationship may want to get married, the other may not.

Let’s say we have a situation where Spider-Man is about to go out to fight Doctor Octopus, who’s trying to kill Jonah Jameson. As Spidey’s heading to the rescue, he hears that Mary Jane is trapped in an elevator with a madman who threatens to unleash a deadly virus on the city. What does our hero do? Save a guy he hates (Jonah) or the woman he loves—and the city, as well? That’s what’s called personal conflict. The protagonist (the hero) must choose between two things that are seemingly impossible to choose between. These echo our most difficult choices as humans, It’s easy to choose between something good and something bad. Choosing between two goods or between two bads is when life gets hard— and drama gets exciting!

Robert McKee, in his book Story, phrases it this way: “Choice must not be doubt but dilemma, not between right/wrong or good/evil, but between either positive desires or negative desires of equal weight and value. True Character can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is—the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.”

An early pencil rough version of page 5 of “A Glitch In Time.” There are at least two types of conflict going on in the page. Can you identify them? [©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley]

Another way to say it: conflict defines character.

When devising an internal or personal conflict for a character, ask yourself: what’s the worst thing (besides dying) that can happen to this person? What decision would give them the most trouble? In super-hero stories, you usually have the added need to externalize that conflict in a physical manner. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man: Master Planner trilogy has one of the more elegant mergings of external, internal and personal conflicts. In it, the thing that Spider-Man needs to save Aunt May is the same thing Doc Ock needs to rule the world.

Try to introduce your story’s conflict(s) as early as possible. That way, your reader becomes emotionally involved with your characters from the beginning. And that’s a good thing.

THE END WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 17

Thief of Time: Pencil Roughs H

ere are Mike’s early-stage pencil layouts for “A Glitch in Time.” Each story page is accompanied by comments about it from Mike and Danny.

DANNY: Strong opening. This page one art is different from the plot description and, after Mike and I discussed the first version of the layouts for the page (seen on page 15), it morphed into this layout. Since Mike is also inking the story, all he needed to draw, in this stage, was something I could make out clearly enough to write dialogue from.

MIKE: Ah, back in the saddle. A basic opening shot, establishing place and time, and a nice shot establishing our heroine and what she's after.

DANNY: A lot of story to get in here. The last panel especially ended up looking different. I think we get the feel of the spirit of Heather Branscome, the Thief of Time, here.

MIKE: This page gave me fits and in a way I'm still not happy with it. I think I was still really feeling my way here and trying to get to into the story. Sometimes it takes a while to get to know the characters. I feel it took five issues of Darkhawk to get to know the character back in the day.

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DANNY: Feels like everything’s clicking here in terms of story, personality, and page/panel design. The story’s becoming a fun ride!

MIKE: Now I feel I'm starting to cook, and drawing dinos is fun. Spreading this over two pages would have been great. I'd have been able to get some more of Heather in the timestream too.

DANNY: I love the downshift here, starting with high-speed action, then moving into brother-sister interaction. All with a shadowy menace and menacing shadows.

MIKE: I think this page works well, even silent, which is the best way to tell if the storytelling is working.

DANNY: The earlier version of page 5 (see page17) gave more room for the interplay between the siblings. But I felt we also needed to give room to the surprise of the Ninja hitchhiker attacking. I thought I could establish dialoguewise what we needed to and still have the cool action happen. Mike pulled it off beautifully.

MIKE: The main thing I was going for here is to show the warmth between brother and sister. This page is getting a bit cramped but I want to give Danny and myself room to explore this. In film or animation I'd have more room to play this out, more "real estate" to play up Heather's feelings for her lost father.

But due to the constraints of having to shoehorn a lot into seven pages, I’m forced to condense this scene. I really wanted to play up what I think is vital here, that their father is missing and that they did something while time traveling that ended up being a big mistake, a burden they both have to live with.

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 19

DANNY: The big fight scene with the Ninja gives Mike space to show his—and Heather’s—stuff. The big challenge for him as artist and me as scripter is to try to convey the sense of danger that our heroes are in, but not lose the sense of fun.

MIKE: Now we get to some more action, as the Ninja from the past attacks them. He's certainly out of sorts and out of his time here. Eye flow and dynamics leading you from panel to panel are my chief concern here—strong dynamic gestures that show how skilled Heather is at combat.

DANNY: The “complete unit of entertainment” wraps up here— and sets up a cliffhanger, as well. The father Heather and Henry have been trying to rescue ends up rescuing them, and tells them to quit chasing him if they know what’s good for them.

Hopefully, a reader feels like he or she has read a satisfying story (the Ninja hitchhiker was defeated), but also want to know what happens to the siblings—and their dad—next. And if their mucking with time travel will doom the universe. But, really, if a reader doesn’t care about the characters, then all the impending end-of-the-world stuff doesn’t carry much weight.

MIKE: The big tease. The Ninja is zapped from off-screen by the father who comes to save the day. My idea is to have him sport different items from different times, as he's jumped all over in the timestream. I was thinking sort of Alan Quatermain crossed with Michael Rennie. Again having more space to play this scene out would have been nice, and if we do expand this to a 22-pager, I would probably want to revisit these scenes and add a little.

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THE END

Comics School Mini-Lesson

Scripting Methods

by Danny Fingeroth So you’ve absorbed way too much advice from people and books about writing. You just want to sit down and write your comics story.

How do you do it?

I’m not talking about structure or character or even plot. I mean, how do you indicate to someone else what your ideas and story points are? How do you literally write the story?

If you were writing a movie script or a teleplay, there would be established formats you would need to conform to if you wanted to be considered seriously in those industries. But comics has no such standardized formatting. Still, there are, broadly speaking, two ways to write comics scripts.

One is generally called “full script.”

This means the writer breaks the story into pages and panels. You describe what goes on in each panel and, at the same time, you write the captions, word balloons and sound effects for each panel. In theory, once you (and, often, an editor) have agreed that a script is accepted, that’s the end of your involvement with a story. A piece of a full script might look like this:

The other style of scripting is called “plot first” or “Marvel style,” so called because it was popularized by Stan Lee and his collaborators on Marvel’s early comics. It gives a summary of a story that the artist then breaks down into panels. The dialogue and captions are written after the penciling is done. So the scene above might look like this, and be part of a page-description: PAGE ONE: Multi-paneled page. Inside the Starship Enterprise. The lights are dim.

Kirk lies slumped in his chair, barely conscious. Next to him, Spock holds his hands to his head, receiving a telepathic message from the Romulans. Spock quickly realizes that it’s an attempt to take over his mind.

We see Spock struggle with the mental assault. Weak as he is, Kirk tries to encourage him, and his words give Spock the ability to resist. By the end of the page, Spock is clear-eyed and in control.

There are pros and cons to both styles. The full script can give a writer a certain degree of extra control over If Shakespeare and DaVinci were comics creators, would they have worked work full script or Marvel style? Illustration the pacing, while the plot first style

by Mark Bagley and Scott Hanna. [Art ©2004 Mark Bagley enables the writer to make the most of & Scott Hanna] the artist’s strengths and contributions, and to make up for anything that may not be drawn exactly as the PAGE ONE writer envisioned it. Many writer and artists today work with a PANEL ONE: ART: INTERIOR. COMMAND DECK OF THE modified style somewhere between the two styles, where the writer STARSHIP ENTERPRISE. THE ONLY FIGURES IN THE ROOM ARE describes all panels and text, but the artist has the freedom to SPOCK AND KIRK. KIRK IS SLUMPED IN HIS CHAIR, NEARLY modify the script, and the writer then sees the story again and UNCONSCIOUS. SPOCK STANDS NEXT TO HIM, HANDS TO HIS adjusts the text as needed.

TEMPLES. In Thief of Time, Mike and I worked plot first, though we went 1 KIRK: Spock… stop the Romulans… back-and-forth in phone and e-mail conversations to get the story to a place where we were both happy 2 SPOCK: They’re beaming a telepathic message… claim they with it. mean us no harm…

THE END

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 21

Thief of Time: Script and Balloon Placement B

ecause “Glitch in Time” is a plot-first job, Danny had to write the dialogue, captions and sound effects after the pencils were done. With this method, it’s also the writer’s responsibility to indicate for the letterer (in this case, Mike) where the copy will go.

Balloon placement is an art in itself, since the word units become design elements that can affect how a reader responds to a page. The placement directs a reader’s eyes to experience the story elements of a page in a certain order and rhythm.

Balloon placement is indicated on a photocopy, usually reduced to print size, of the art. Each unit of the script is numbered, and that number indicates where the script unit with the matching number is to be lettered.

Compare this version of the pencils to the one on page 18.

Mike has refined the pencil art to the point where it’s now what is called “full” or “tight” pencils.

You can see the lettering for pages 2 and 3 of “A Glitch in Time” on the pages that follow this one. To see how the lettering for the first page of the story looks, go to page 28.

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The fun of working “Marvel style” (plot first) is akin to musicians improvising together. Writer and artist “riff” on each other’s contributions to create something new.

Danny was able to take inspiration from the artwork to come up with dialogue that he may not have thought of if he’d written a full script (that is, if he’d written the text at the same time as the panel descriptions).

In plot first, the challenge for the scripter is to not repeat in words what the artist has shown, but to tell the details of the story and establish personality for the characters, all while keeping things going at a brisk, entertaining pace.

Mike has used computer lettering and coloring tools to perform those tasks. He'll tell you the details about how he did it in Draw! #9.

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 23

Bolded words in the comic are indicated, of course, by bolded words in the script.

The job of art and script, in both plot first and full script jobs, is to make sure that when the reader gets to the bottom of a page, the question “What happens next?” is so compelling that he or she has no choice but to turn the page and keep reading.

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When placing balloons, especially if done on sketches, a writer has to be extra careful not to cover up important pieces of artwork. The shadowed, lurking figure in panel four of page four would have been easy to do that with.

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 25

The big wrap-up. Everything in the story leads to this page. Especially on the last page of a story, all elements—plot, art, script, balloon placement—have to come together. The enjoyment of a good story can be diluted by a misfiring last page— and sometimes a story that’s not so great can be salvaged by a strong finish.

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THE END

Comics School Mini-Lesson

Writing Dialogue

by Danny Fingeroth READER: But, Danny, dialogue must be the easiest thing. You just write down what you hear the characters saying in your head, right?

DANNY: Yes… and no…

READER: Well… that’s clear. Not. In life, people rarely speak in complete sentences. People rarely say exactly what they mean. People leave it to facial expression and tone of voice to get their point across.

In all narrative writing, the trick is to simulate real speech. Your dialogue has to move the plot along, convey surface and deep characterization, express the characters’ (and the writer’s) point of view, and be entertaining.

That’s a lot to ask of 26 letters.

In comics, you have an even tougher challenge.

You have static art and limited space to get all those things across. Your dialogue must be believable, but not meandering and repetitive. How do you do this?

• Practice dialogue writing. Try different approaches to the same scene. One time let your hero do most of the talking. Another time, let the villain dominate.

• Listen to people talking in the world around you, then adapt how they speak into literary speech. You’re after a simulation of real speech.

• Carry a notebook with you and write down cool things that people say. You’ll find a place to use them.

• Recite your dialogue out loud. Does it sound convincingly realistic (not real—realistic) to you?

• Practice all the above on a regular basis.

When writing dialogue, ask yourself: Does each character have a distinct personality? For example, a college professor might say: “I propose we initiate aggressive action.” A longshoreman might say: “Let’s trash the bums!” Of course, to go against expectations, and to create distinctive characters, you might have a story where your professor was the one who spoke in tough-guy slang and the longshoreman spoke like someone with a Ph.D. (An aside: Simulations of dialects and accents should be used in a limited fashion, so as not to take the reader out of the flow of the story.)

What’s the optimum number of words in a page or a panel? That’s pretty flexible. It depends on the aim of your story. Want a longer read with a lot of insights? Then dialogueheavy scripting is for you.

Want to let the visuals carry the story with a minimum of yack? Then you have to keep the dialogue sparse. A good idea, especially when you’re starting out, is to do stick figure thumbnail drawings of your story (on 8 1/2” x 11” paper) and letter in all the word balloons and captions. You’d be amazed at how much (or perhaps at how little) room your dialogue takes compared to what you imagined it would.

And did I mention that you need to practice this stuff?

THE END WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 27

Thief of Time: Inked and Lettered Pages Here’s the finished first page of “Glitch,” with Mike’s inks and letters (and a black-and-white simulation of his coloring) making the whole thing come together. We have a first page that introduces our hero and our series premise, kicks off our plot and sets the tone of the whole story. It’s not a novel, it’s not a movie. It’s comics, with the magic interaction of words and pictures unique to the medium.

Even in black-and-white, you can get an idea of how the tones of color set the mood of the scene, yet make our main character clearly visible to the reader. Ideally, the creators’ skills serve the telling of the story, the creation of a credible world the reader visits for the time he or she reads the story—a world that continues to exist in the imagination long after reading the story.

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Talking Thief of Time Danny and Mike discuss the creative process

W

hat follows is more or less a transcript of a conversation we had on May 6th, 2004. What we tried to do was simulate a conversation about how we came up with our “Thief of Time” character. We discuss what issues we were dealing with as we tried to make something original yet not completely unfamiliar, mixing genres to come up with new takes on well-traveled archetypes. Combined with the notes and e-mails printed elsewhere in this issue and in Draw #9, we hope to map the creative process as well as can be done without attaching electrodes to our brains. (Gotta save something for the sequel, don’t we?)

We had many such conversations, mostly on the phone, some in person at conventions we both attended, but that we didn’t record. We’ve tried to incorporate “highlights” of those conversations here. (The transcript has been edited by us for meaning and clarity.) You might find it interesting to compare what we discussed here and how the final story came out.

—Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley

[SPOILER WARNING: Details of Thief of Time are, of course, discussed in the course of this conversation.]

DANNY FINGEROTH: A little background for the folks reading this. We each have a magazine that we do for TwoMorrows. I think it was me who said, “Mike, why don’t we do a crossover?” And Mike said, “That’s a good idea.” Of course, we never really thought we’d have to sit down and do it. It seemed like a great idea when it was just theory. [laughs] MIKE MANLEY: Right. And then we talked to John Morrow to see if he thought it was a good idea, to see if it was feasible, because we’d have to do a lot of coordination to make sure it can come out the same month, all that kind of stuff.

Conducted May 6, 2004 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by Danny Fingeroth and Mike Manley DF: In time for the Comic-Con in San Diego. Now, I’m going to backtrack a little, because I thought it might be of interest to folks if we dug back in our archives and found some Darkhawk stuff.

Tom DeFalco had come up with the very basic premise for Darkhawk, a three-page document, which then you and I and, I guess, Howard Mackie and Nelson Yomtov had worked out. And Greg Wright. Were you working on it when Greg Wright was editing?

MM: No. Initially I became involved in Darkhawk when Howard, who was editing Quasar, which I was penciling, asked me if I wanted to work on the book. Initially, Keith Pollard, I think, had done some Darkhawk character designs, and they weren’t really happy with the way that it looked.

DF: I think Paul Neary was involved for five minutes.

MM: Right. So Howard asked me, and I said okay. I think in the beginning I wasn’t really sure who was going to be writing it, because I don’t think initially you were mentioned. I think maybe Tom was thinking of writing it himself in the beginning?

DF: If Howard had it, then I was already the writer, because Greg had put me on it.

MM: Nel didn’t get involved until issue six, seven, eight, something like that.

DF: Anyway, there are ways in which our process for creating Thief of Time is similar, and ways in which it is different, from what you Two Fingeroth/Manley creations meet. Darkhawk, from promotional art for the series’ 1990 debut, and the Thief of Time. Art by Mike Manley.

[Darkhawk ©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Thief of Time ©2004 Danny Fingeroth & Mike Manley] WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 29

would do at a large comics company. What we don’t have is an editor, which people reading these issues won’t have, if they’re coming up with a proposal for a series, either. Either you’ll be writing and drawing it, or you’ll be working with a buddy, and you’ll sort of have to arm-wrestle the way Mike and I are doing as we create this character.

[Mike laughs] An editor would come Portrait of a writer. Danny Fingeroth, in as a referee. The artist will want in the caricature of him which one thing, the writer will want the appeared in the Bullpen Bulletins other thing, and the editor will go, “Pro File” in April 1990 Marvel comics, right around the time work “Here’s my Solomonic decision.” on Darkhawk begun. Art by Steve What we’re trying to do here is Buccellato. more like what it would be like for you, the reader, trying to come up with a character to pitch to one of the major companies.

MM: I think that, today, things are a lot different.

When I was working on Darkhawk, it was basically, you’re the gunslinger. The town has a job for you—they want you to kill this deadline.

“Are you interested or not?”

And depending upon whether subject matter tickles your fancy or whatever, or the money’s good enough, sometimes, you decide, “Okay, yeah, I’ll do it.” At that time, in 1990/1991 when Darkhawk started, there wasn’t as much of the independent stuff as there is today. Now it’s a lot more common, especially since Image, for people to say, “Well, I’m going to create my own idea and I’m going to go and do it.” Because in the case of something like Darkhawk, I wasn’t the first guy thought of, but I created the design and I helped shape the concept, because it wasn’t my concept to begin with. It’s not something that I

would have ever come up with or thought of doing, myself, on my own. I wasn’t putting the elements into it that I wanted other than visually, maybe, and those elements are dependent upon the needs of the character.

DF: I think you had certain ideas of the character that were different than mine. I was leaning, because of my And a portrait of an artist at work. Mike Manley in a Bret Blevins sketch which tastes, towards more of a appeared in 1996’s Action Planet #3. “neo-Spider-Man” kind of a [Art ©2004 Bret Blevins.] thing, with maybe a little bit more of an edge than Spider-Man had. And I think the various Darkhawk editors were in agreement. But I think you had a different idea of maybe making him more of an intergalactic Punisher-type character or something.

MM: I was thinking of the fact that, since this character was created by intergalactic weapons manufacturers, the idea of making it basically Shazam! crossed with Spider-Man was, to me, just walking down the same old territory over again. That whole “at home with the mom and the brothers and they can’t find out who he is,” that to me had been played out so much that that element of the character never appealed to me.

From Darkhawk #8, by Fingeroth & Manley. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

30 | WRITE NOW!

DF: I thought of it as a chance for me to do my own Spider-Man, and for a kid—we still had significant numbers of children reading comics—to have his own teen super-character to identify with. It was an opportunity for me to create for readers of the ’90s, kids and adults, a character that was of the ’90s. “Oh, look!

It’s the very first issue, the

Keith Pollard’s original character sketches for Darkhawk, done before Mike came onto the project. Keith brought a more literal interpretation to the “Hawk” part of the character’s name. [Art ©2004 Bret Blevins.]

very beginning!” And that sort of the philosophical difference of opinions between us is where an editor would come in, for better or worse. And they seemed, for whatever reasons, to generally come down on my side as far as the character’s backstory and motivations. I have to believe, Mike, that since some of that art you did was so terrific on it that you were enjoying more of the run then you let on. And, of course, that was during the boom years, so whether you enjoyed it or not, you were definitely bringing home a nice royalty check each month.

MM: Yeah. But again, at three o’clock in the morning, royalties don’t mean anything to me when I’m struggling to do a page or have fun on a project. The money in the abstract always sounds good, but when you’re in the middle of a deadline, that doesn’t motivate me to want to be a good artist or to do a good job on a story or to solve a problem.

DF: Be that as it may, I just want to say that in this crossover, Mike and I are coming up with a character that we’re creating from scratch. And we also want to end up with something that, when we’re done, aside from

being just an example of how it’s done, we’ll have a character to show editors and producers. A character we can maybe market.

Mike and I are really looking forward to the day we can sue each other over ownership of this character. [Mike laughs] We hope this character is that successful that we’ll be forced to go to court to sue each other.

MM: We’ll be Abbott and Costello. [Danny laughs] We’ll be Martin and Lewis.

DF: We’ll need Frank Sinatra to bring us back together.

MM: That’s right. I don’t know who Frank Sinatra will be. [laughter] An important thing to note in this case is that when we started

Darkhawk’s transformation from hero to civilian identity. A dramatic moment from Darkhawk #5. Art by Mike Manley and Ricardo Villagran. [©20004 Marvel Characters, Inc.] WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 31

DF: Right. And we played with that constantly, both when you were drawing it and when Tod Smith was drawing it. So those are the kinds of decisions that go into making a character. For our Thief of Time character—and I’m still looking for a better name—I said that I wanted to do something with a burglar, a high-tech burglar. And Mike said, “Let’s make it a woman.” Which was fine with me. And then I had this other idea about a time traveler, and Mike said, “Well, why don’t we combine them and make it someone who is a burglar traveling through time?” Now, in a typical Marvel or DC sort of situation, the editor would then have been the coach, the tiebreaker, if Mike and I had had wildly divergent ideas. I guess the person who signs the voucher gets to make the final decision. [laughs] From Mike and Danny’s Darkhawk #7. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

talking about this, what we’re talking about is “What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? What would be fun to write? What would be fun to draw?” Which is completely different from something like Darkhawk, where the premise is already basically there—either you like it as it is, and maybe you can shape it a little bit, but it’s pretty much handed to you. But here, from the ground floor, we’re saying, “What do you want to do?” “Well, I like ninjas,” or “I like samurai,” or “I like pirates,” or “I like robots,” or “I like teenage girls with problems.” That’s a different starting place, too, than something like Darkhawk.

DF: I will say, to Tom’s credit in creating Darkhawk, it was a pretty broad. He painted in broad strokes. We could have gone a lot of different ways. The Darkhawk character was a collaboration not just me between you, me and Tom, but also involved the three editors, Greg, Howard and Nel. And the assistants—John Lewandowski, Richard Ashford—threw in ideas, too, which is common with properties generated at big companies, and can sometimes lead to excellent outcomes. But I know what you’re saying. But it might be informative to people to know that, in Tom’s original premise, Darkhawk is about a kid, Chris Powell, whose father is a cop killed in the line of duty, and Chris finds this amulet that gives him powers. And my contribution to that part of the origin was to say: ”You know what? There’re a hundred stories where a kid’s parent or uncle is killed and he vows to fight crime.

What if he sees his father taking a payoff and he’s completely disillusioned and he finds the power? Then he really has to figure out, “What the hell happened? Is my father a crook? Was everything he taught me a lie? Or do I have to bring my own father to justice?”

So it was a mystery for the readers. It was a thing that made it less simple than, “My dad is a cop and sacrificed himself for a righteous cause. I must devote my life to fighting crime.”

MM: His dad didn’t become the Uncle Ben of the series.

32 | WRITE NOW!

MM: And eventually, you and I could take this idea that we’re doing now and still go and pitch it to DC. So this is a character generated from a desire on our own to do something

An early original character created for Darkhawk #8 by Danny and Mike: Lodestone. Her magnetic powers were just one of her attractions. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Some of the villains Danny & Mike created to make Darkhawk’s life miserable. (Left:) Evilhawk from Darkhawk #24 (pencils by Mike Manley, inks by Tim Dzon & Aaron McClellan) and (right) Psi-Wolf from Darkhawk #17 (art by Mike Manley). [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

together, as opposed to somebody bringing you something and saying, “Hey, do you want to work on this?”

six-figure Hollywood deal, because you go get Tom Cruise assigned to it so they can get good money, we’ll probably get a deal somewhere in the mid-six figures, less your lawyer and your 30% going to the government, we could probably see a couple hundred thousand dollars each coming out of it.

DF: And we can then take it and selfpublish it or try to sell it to a comics company or a movie or TV studio. Ironically, of course, if Mike and I should find a Hollywood studio or producer who’s interested, we would probably have to make a deal to sign over the rights. Ideally, we’d be well-compensated and retain significant creative control, as well.

MM: A lot of it depends on how in love you are with that particular property. I mean, if it’s your “A” property, like something I’m very close to, say Monster Man, I’m not willing to let that go for anything less than a couple million dollars, let’s say. But something like Thief of Time, I can sit down, have fun on it, I’m not as married to this. So if someone comes up and gets your typical

DF: That would be a best-case scenario.

There’s scenarios where we’d see, like $1,500. [laughs]

Mike Manley’s cover for Action Planet Comics #1, featuring his creation Monster Man. [©2004 Mike Manley.]

MM: Well, that’s true. I mean, I’ve had opportunities like that already, with other characters and concepts that I’ve created.

I’ve had a six-figure deal that in the end I ended up turning down because I didn’t necessarily trust the particular people I was talking to. And history showed me I was right, and those people went down in flames.

Another element of doing this that’s WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 33

completely different than doing it for Marvel or DC, is that we’d likely have to give all our rights away to Marvel and DC for a pittance. In this case, we own 100%, 50% split between us. Then we decide at a later day if a given deal sounds appealing, if we’re willing to trade these rights away.

And you also have to do things like a trademark search or a title search to see if anybody else had a character of the same name. This is part of the process of being a businessman as well as an artist.

DF: Uh-oh! This sounds serious, Mike! [laughter] So now that we’ve talked about everything but the character, maybe we should talk about the character.

Based on some conversations we had, I put together a first version of the plot that I didn’t love. I thought it was a good starting point, and Mike had his comments on that.

That’s the advantage to working with a thinking artist like Mike, who actually writes a lot of his own stuff. He’ll

Mike’s own creations in action as Monster man battles the horror of the Hungus in Action Planet #3. [©2004 Mike Manley.]

challenge a writer, and help make a series or a story better.

Now, the problem you’re always going to face when doing genre adventure is, that you want to remind people of stuff they’ve seen before, because people who like this kind of material like a certain amount of familiarity, but you need it to be novel, as well.

END PART ONE The creators’ conversation continues in Draw! #9, on sale August 18!

#9

A trio of villains the Fingeroth-Manley team-supreme created for Darkhawk in issue #16. The Hawkster had to face off against Siberion, Volga Belle, and Scattershot—the Peristrike Force! [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 34 | WRITE NOW!

THE END

Before Thief of Time, Danny and Mike collaborated on character creation and development for the Darkhawk series. On this page and the three pages that follow are some of their work from the storyline that delved more deeply into the Darkhawk backstory. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Many of the secrets of Darkhawk were revealed in the epic four-part “Return To Forever” storyline that ran in Darkhawk #21-25. This page is from #24. Plot and script

by Fingeroth, pencils by Manley, inks by Tim Dzon and Aaron McClellan. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 35

Darkhawk’s amulet in action, as he transforms from Chris Powell to Darkhawk in the middle of battle. From Darkhawk #23, written by Danny Fingeroth with pencils by Mike Manley and inks by Frank Percy, Chris Ivy, & John Lowe. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

In a manner not unlike the way the backstory of Thief of Time is developed by Mike and Danny as they prepare the “Glitch in Time” story, the backstory of Darkhawk was developed and refined and fully revealed by them in Darkhawk #25.

What’s under Darkhawk’s helmet? From Darkhawk #24, written by Fingeroth, art by Manley, Tim Dzon and Aaron McClellan. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.] 36 | WRITE NOW!

On these pages, excerpts from the Darkhawk origindeepening story document are reproduced. Some of the backstory turned into actual story images, as seen in the page from DH #25. But all of it is background information the creators knew, relating to what made the series’ characters tick, even if some of it was never specifically mentioned in the pages of the comic.

Above, Mike's pencil roughs, drawn from Danny's plot.

Left, Mike's tight pencils, with Danny's captions lettered in. (See how it finally came out on the next page.)

WRITE NOW!/DRAW! CROSSOVER | 37

From fragments of ideas and conversations between members of a creative team, to a document that codifies it, to a finished story that delivers those concepts to the world, a story can travel a complicated route on its way to being told. Hopefully, the results are worth all the effort.

The Darkhawk bodies, created by Bokk, from Darkhawk #25. Written

by Fingeroth, art by Manley and Aaron McClellan. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

There’s lots more Write Now! on the pages that follow—but this ultimate crossover “how-to,” showcasing the creation of The Thief of Time, continues in the pages of Draw! #9.

38 | WRITE NOW!

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The Science of Fiction (and the Art of it, too)

The STUART MOORE Interview Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth May 12, 2004 Edited by Danny Fingeroth / Copy-edited by Stuart Moore

S

tuart Moore has been a writer, a book editor, a kitchen worker, and an award-winning comics editor. At St. Martin’s Press, Stuart edited a wide variety of science fiction and pop culture books, including The Year’s Best Science Fiction series and the bestselling Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader books. At DC Comics, Stuart was a founding editor of the acclaimed Vertigo imprint, where he initiated such comics series as Preacher, The Invisibles, and Transmetropolitan, and edited Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, The Books of Magic, and many others. He won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. From late 2000 through mid2002 he edited the Marvel Knights comics line and many of Marvel’s new MAX titles.

Currently Stuart freelances as a writer of comic books and essays, including Lone from Dark Horse, Justice League Adventures from DC, Zendra and Para from Penny-Farthing Press, the AiT/PlanetLar graphic novel Giant Robot Warriors (a political satire), stories for Vampirella and Metal Hurlant, and the just-concluded column A Thousand Flowers: Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside for Newsarama.com.

DANNY FINGEROTH: Have you always been a comics fan? How did you spend your free time as a kid? Were you writing even then?

STUART MOORE: I read a lot, and yes, comics were always a part of that. I got into them right when DC had its real renaissance in the early ’70s, with the Kirby Fourth World stuff, the Julie Schwartz/Denny O’Neil Superman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, the Neal Adams Batman stories… all that.

As a kid, I wrote stories myself, and “drew” (note the quotation marks) comic books. They were about eight pages long and featured characters like “Stretch Boy.” You know the drill.

DF: Your father was a nuclear physicist. How did/does he feel about you going the science fiction route?

SM: My parents were always very supportive of whatever I wanted to do. It was my father’s collection of Analog magazines that got me reading science fiction in the first place.

DF: Were you ever planning to go into the sciences as a career?

SM: Yes… I considered both biology and physics. But I was never good enough at them to find them fun, if that makes any sense. I still like to bang my head up against quantum physics every now and then.

DF: What was your college major?

SM: Politics. American politics, specifically. That’s come in handy lately.

DF: What jobs outside comics have you had?

SM: Let’s see. Kitchen worker at a retirement home; recreation counselor; nighttime curtain department manager of the Lawrence, N.J. Woolworth’s; and book editor. And I did under-the-table work at a bookstore when I was in high school; they paid me mostly in science-fiction paperbacks.

DF: Were you active in fandom?

SM: Not organized fandom, no. I was fascinated with it, particularly through sf fanzines like Science Fiction Review, and I went to a few conventions… but I never really got involved. There are no filksinging skeletons in my closet.

DF: What are your favorite (past and present) films, books, TV shows? Who are your favorite writers, artists, and directors?

SM: In prose, I’m most attracted to writers who work in genre but transcend those genres. In science fiction: Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Preparing for the final battle in Lone #6, written by Stuart Moore with art by Jerome Opeña. [©2004 Dark Horse Comics, Inc.] STUART MOORE | 41

world when I was in book publishing, Cordwainer Smith, R.A. Laffferty, and I had some ideas. I made a more recently William Gibson and thousand mistakes with the line, but Ian McLeod. In crime fiction: Charles the upshot was that (1) the market Willeford, Joe R. Lansdale, David took its big, sharp decline right Goodis. I also like a variety of quirky before we launched and (2) some of writers, including Charles Bukowski, the early books just didn’t come Sparkle Hayter, Clyde Edgerton, Rick together creatively. Helix’s best Moody… people with a distinct legacy was probably Warren Ellis and voice, who create a whole world Darick Robertson’s around their characters, whether Transmetropolitan, which switched that’s a bar full of broken souls, a over to Vertigo and ran for five galactic empire 30,000 years in the years. future, or a small town in North DF: Who were some of the people Carolina. who did work for Helix?

In film, there are quirky SM: I brought in a few prose writers/directors like Alex Cox, sf/fantasy writers, like Lucius Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman— Shepard and Michael Moorcock.

I’ll seek out anything they do, just Howard Chaykin, Tim Truman, Garth because I know that even if it’s a Ennis, Dave Gibbons, and some mess, it’s going to be a unique other top-notch people were experience. I also greatly admire involved, too. It was a valiant try and directors like John Sayles and we published some good work.

Steven Soderbergh who do great DF: You had what to some people work in very different genres at was a dream job, Marvel Knights different times; they’re career inspieditor. How did that come about? rations to me.

Why did you leave it? Were you I tend not to see genre movies writing during that time? unless I hear they’re really good, or SM: This is a big question. Let’s unless I’m invited to a screening. see…

I’m years behind on the recent Geoff Darrow’s cover art for the first issue of the Stuart Moore I had left DC and was pursuing a super-hero adaptations. edited Transmetropolitan, without logo or cover text. variety of side projects when the big DF: How did you get your first break [©2004 Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson.] changeover in administration as a comics writer? As an editor? happened at Marvel. I knew Joe Quesada very slightly, and I Which came first? Can you give a brief description of your career knew they were talking to my friend Axel Alonso about coming path? Were you always writing even when you had staff jobs? over to Marvel. Joe was becoming editor-in-chief, so he needed SM: After I got out of college, I had the vague idea of getting someone to replace himself as editor at Marvel Knights. into publishing... my school (Princeton) posted job listings from Several creative people recommended me. Axel and I compared book publishers, so I interviewed at St. Martin's Press. I notes… it was a weird time. haven't used my degree much as an adult, but it did help me Once we got there, things happened dizzyingly fast. Joe and get that job—St. Martin's was somewhat partial to Ivy League Nanci Quesada, who actually ran Marvel Knights, were always grads. The company was expanding at the time, and I was kind very generous and great to work with. Bill Jemas… god knows of an expert in various fields that weren't being covered very he’s a f*cking character, but it was very exciting to work with well there—science fiction, pop culture, TV, comics; youth somebody like that who so seriously wanted to make longculture, basically—so I became a full editor at a pretty young needed changes. age. DC Comics wanted to bring in an editor from outside I was at Marvel Knights for about a year and nine months. In comics to expand the department that, a few years later, that time, I edited a huge number of books, worked with a lot became Vertigo, so they advertised in Publishers Weekly, and I of old friends and made great new ones, and helped set the answered it. It was a very exciting time at DC—the entire field tone for what the company is now. As for why I left, that plays was expanding—and the job was a good fit. into your next question…

I didn’t do any comics writing while I was on staff at DC. DF: If Marvel policy had allowed you to edit and to write on the They discouraged it pretty strongly, and I could see the logic: side, would you have?

There’s a tremendous potential for conflicts of interest in those SM: Here’s a strange thing—I never worked for Marvel per se. I situations. I also believe in concentrating on something and was employed by Marvel Knights, a separate company that doing it well, and editorial work really was my focus during shared office space with Marvel and had a packaging those years. I did write a crime novel, which made the rounds agreement with them. That’s one reason the job was so to a few book houses but was never published. At the time I great—I wasn’t bound by any conflict of interest rules. wasn’t confident enough to pursue that very hard.

So I actually was writing for Penny-Farthing while I worked DF: In the ’90s, you edited DC’s Helix line. What was it? Why with Marvel. This seemed like a very natural situation for me; were you entrusted to run a whole line for DC? Why didn’t Helix remember, I started in book publishing, where it’s generally last? What were its successes and failures? What is its legacy? considered less of a conflict of interest, not more, to write for SM: DC had been trying to get a science fiction line going for some time, and I made a pitch… I’d been involved with the sf [STUART MOORE continues on page 45.]

42 | WRITE NOW

Thickening The Plot

by STUART MOORE

I

’ve been an editor and a writer, and in both jobs, plotting is an important factor when you’re starting a story. Let’s take editing first.

Different editors approach plotting differently. Some want to work the whole thing out with the writer beforehand, including all the twists. I always preferred to know vaguely where the writer was going, but then to be surprised. I don’t feel an editor can properly evaluate the success of a script if he knows all the details ahead of time—and, generally speaking, it’s good to hire writers whom you can trust to make decisions.

This goes back to the role of the editor, which (in my view) is to be the ideal reader. When most readers read an unsatisfying story, they know something’s wrong, but they can’t articulate why, or they come to the wrong conclusions. For instance, a reader may think a story is too decompressed—not enough “happens” in the particular issue—when the truth is simpler: What does happen just isn’t very interesting.

An editor’s job is to laser in on the real problems and ask for revisions—all the while keeping in mind the goals of the story. I know editors who diagram stories in great detail with charts of characters’ motivations, subplots, etc. That’s fine if it works for you. I always preferred to do it more intuitively. If, for instance, a character isn’t serving any purpose in the story, it usually jumps out at you as you go along.

As a writer, plotting is a similar challenge, but it’s much more exciting because I have greater control over the finished product. I like to leave holes in a story at the conceptual/pitch stage; sometimes you have to fill them in because an editor asks you to (“Do the bad guys really only have one starship?”

Well, no, but I hadn’t worked out all the details yet…). But generally I like to leave challenges for myself later on.

The next step is a rough outline. Then, depending on the book, I do a varying amount of research. You have to do enough to make the story plausible; Para, my high-tech thriller from Penny-Farthing Press, was very intensive because, while I knew I wasn’t really going to give myself a graduate-level knowledge of particle physics, I had to pick up enough to fake the things I didn’t know. On the other hand, writing a Kamandi/Flash story for Justice League Adventures really just required rereading a few Jack Kirby Kamandi stories to get the feel of the character. (And even then I accidentally made Tuftan the Lion into a tiger. Good thing the story wasn’t in DCU continuity!)

It’s possible to over-research. Sometimes you wind up with pages and pages of notes, and you can get distracted by little ideas that take you too far away from the thrust of your story.

At one point in Para, I got fascinated with the weird behavior patterns of various subatomic particles, and I decided to set up direct parallels between each of the characters and a corresponding particle: this person would act in an analogous way to a strange quark, this one to an electron, etc. It seemed like a clever idea, but it was too contrived and took the story too far away from its core, which was Sara’s search for what happened to her father. So the concept survived in little bits in issue #1 and #5, but it didn’t become the overwhelming

conceit I’d intended.

As the research goes along, I jot down notes in the middle of the outline and bits of dialogue as they come to me. (I carry my beloved Handspring Treo with me everywhere, so I never lose a brainstorm or a clever line that might come in handy. A friend calls it my Mother Box.) The characters’ voices generally come together during this process, too—sometimes through one or The cover for the Stuart Moore scripted Justice League two key lines.

Adventures #30. Art by Butch Lukic.

The research [©2004 DC Comics.] helps fills in plot holes, and sometimes it creates new problems, too. For instance, going back to Para again, I read about a theory of dimensional gateways called “Domain Walls,” which seemed to be exactly what I needed at a certain point in the story. But Domain Walls didn’t seem like they’d be very stable, and passing through one (even if it were vaguely possible) would probably kill you. So I had to fudge a lot of the surrounding details. Fortunately, my eccentric character Doctor Z was always inventing his own, custom-made scientific devices, so he was available to pull rabbits out of his hat when needed.

An aside on research, by the way. It’s useful and necessary, in varying degrees, to give a sense of reality and authenticity.

But you don’t do research so that all your details are scrupulously correct; you do it so you know when they’re not. It’s okay to break the rules, to deviate from historical or scientific reality, as long as you’re careful and don’t do it too obviously.

For example: I’m working on an upcoming sf/super-hero series involving a “Beanstalk,” a theoretical elevator leading all the way up from the surface of the Earth to a stable, geosynchronous orbit. I set the story in Seattle for various reasons; but as I researched the Beanstalk concept, I realized it had to be located on the equator—otherwise the orbit isn’t stable.

Rather than move the location of the entire story, I decided to fudge the issue with some talk about corrective rockets and international politics. It’s probably not the way things would play out in real life, but it’s solid enough that the story works.

STUART MOORE | 43

I usually get to a point with the research where I know I’ve done enough, the plot is solid, and I’m itchy to actually start writing. By this time, sometimes I’ve got as much as a third of the script “written” in rough form. Sometimes, as I go along, I’ll get stuck… usually for one of two reasons: Either a scene doesn’t make sense, or it just isn’t interesting enough.

If a scene just seems like taking care of business and something you have to work through to get to the interesting stuff, I find it’s best to take a break, go for a long walk, and figure out what character conflicts are running through it and what you can do to ramp those up a bit. I was very worried about writing Para #4, because most of it was what the head of Penny-Farthing called an “info-dump”—a lot of the plot was revealed in two big, key scenes, which can get very expository and dull if you’re not careful.

Before writing the second half of the issue, I stepped back and thought about the two characters involved… and I realized that, although one of them had been played as a villain for most of the series, in this instance she was actually right. Dr. Andersen, the elderly scientist who’d been our kindly father figure up till now, really shouldn’t have brought his untrained students down to a dangerous situation to die… and while Sanchez, the government agent, had kept vital information from the rest of the team, she wasn’t just being pissy when she said she didn’t want civilians down in the accelerator. She was also trying to safeguard their lives.

Once I had that dynamic down, the scene where Sanchez tells Andersen what’s really going on became a source of guilt for him… and a manipulative accusation on her part. A potentially dull recounting of long-ago events became an important character beat, and one of the scenes I’m most proud of in the series.

Sometimes, on the other hand, a scene just doesn’t make sense. In my case, this is usually because I’m trying to cram too much into it: too many characters, too much exposition, too many different emotional beats or plot twists. Then you have to pull back, focus on the most important part of the scene, and either save the rest for later or cover it in a line of dialogue.

The plot for Justice League Adventures #30 originally had an entire subplot where Superman and Green Lantern are searching for Flash through time, using Professor Hamilton’s gadgets. Superman makes contact with Flash, and Flash tries to tell him vital information that will prevent Kamandi’s devastated future from coming to pass.

But Superman can’t hear him. It was a nice, dramatic scene, but it kind of distracted the reader from the Kamandi/Flash relationship— and, in the end, there just wasn’t room for it. So Superman and Green Lantern’s attempts to find Flash wound up being reduced to one panel.

One note on character: If you’re doing your job right, the plotting should not be a separate process from working out the characters—the two should walk hand-in-hand. My upcoming story in Justice League Adventures #34 Crafty Screenwriting by Alex Epstein. grew out of thinking about [©2004 Alex Epstein.]

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Superman and Batman, and what their past means to each of them. For Superman, it’s a source of pride: the glorious planet Krypton, a childhood spent with his loving foster parents. For Batman, it’s just pain—a flash of gunfire and he’s all alone in the world. How does each of them react when faced with tangible reminders of his past? And how could a villain use these reactions A substantial subplot in Stuart’s Justice League against them?

Adventures #30, concerning Green Lantern and When I’ve Superman’s attempts to find the Flash, ended up being finished a reduced by the author to a single panel because it script, I like to detracted from more important parts of the main plot. put it aside for [©2004 DC Comics.] three days to a week, then come back and reread it fresh. Sometimes I’ll notice a plot-hole that needs to be filled, usually with a line or two. More often, I’ll see places where a character isn’t acting right or dialogue sounds off, generally because I needed the story to move along at a certain clip or reach a certain point.

Then I’ll have to go back in and smooth things out, reach an accommodation between the character and the needs of the overall narrative.

All of this is particularly tricky in comics, because usually our space is so limited. In most books, you’ve got 22 pages and then the bell sounds. You can put some things off till next issue, but you’ve got to be careful not to overstuff that, either.

In this respect, comics writing is excellent training for other fields. In his book Crafty Screenwriting, Alex Epstein gives this simple advice for film writing: “Get into your scene as late as you can, make your point, and get out as soon as you can.”

When I read that, I realized that I already do that—not because I have some great instinct in that area, but because I’m generally very conscious of the page count ticking away. On the very next page of the book, Epstein points out this very fact about comics—citing Dark Knight Returns and Sandman as examples!

A final note on plotting: Everyone does it differently. As an editor, I’ve worked with writers who make notes on napkins, others who use complex computer flow-charts, and still others who keep it all in their heads. The above is just a few examples of how I work. Your mileage will—and should—vary. That’s what makes it interesting.

THE END

[STUART MOORE continued from page 42.]

someone else. After all, if you write a book for your full-time employer, you’re likely to have some influence over the marketing and promotion, which gives you an unfair advantage over a non-staff writer. You’re not going to have that same conflict at another publisher.

I wrote the second Zendra series during my time at Marvel Knights. I could sense that the Knights packaging arrangement wasn’t going to last forever—it was actually phased out shortly after I left. And when Penny-Farthing decided to go ahead with Para, it just seemed like the right time to go freelance full time.

DF: The period you were at Marvel seemed like a unique period for the company and the industry. Any thoughts on it, looking back, especially from a perspective of info that might be useful to aspiring writers or editors?

SM: It’s a little soon to look back on it. One thing that struck me was a very strong emphasis on storytelling values, on the worth of a good writer. Marvel’s been very good to guys like Mark Millar and Brian Bendis, and for good reason. It’s paid off for everyone.

DF: Your writing work is pretty eclectic. Is there a theme that unites the things you do? Is it always that it has a science fiction element, or a genre-mixing element?

Alex Maleev art from Daredevil v2 #26, the first issue of his and Brian Michael Bendis’ acclaimed run. Daredevil was one of the books Stuart Moore edited during his run on the Marvel Knights imprint at Marvel Comics. [©2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

SM: I really like to jump around.

Science fiction is my specialty, but I don’t want to get pigeonholed. I like a variety of different genres in my own reading, and the same is true of my writing. It keeps you fresh.

DF: Following up on that (and this is not a question I ask everybody), how do you come up with your ideas? I ask that because so much of your work seems to stem from a news-related or topical issue or subject that you Richard Bennett’s cover to Moore’s Zendra #6. then wrap a [©2004 Penny-Farthing Press, Inc.] story and characters around. Is that how you do it, or do you ever come up with the characters first? Or do random ideas hit you and you combine them until you’re happy with the results? Or some other process altogether?

SM: Any or all of the above, I guess. Here’s a few examples: I’d had the vague idea for Para for a while, picking up on my late father’s experiences running the Princeton University cyclotron. At one point, the project was called Accelerator, and it would have been much more of a straight action-thriller.

When I merged it with the story of the lost Virginia colony of Roanoke, that gave it a much more personal feel, incorporating that strange, half-lost, misty feeling you get when you dream about departed relatives.

Lone was thrown to me, by Dark Horse, as an after-thenuclear-war action/western. I added a lot about why the war happened and the effects war in general has on people, because those subjects were very much on my mind and seemed to give some new life to a well-travelled genre.

Giant Robot Warriors: I had an idea that I thought was funny, about using giant robots as a substitute for chemical or nuclear weapons. But the story didn’t come together until I shamelessly lifted a plot twist from a Philip K. Dick novel, putting it in an entirely new context.

In each case, the characters evolved along with the stories.

Sara Erie, the protagonist of Para, suffers a childhood trauma and then, as an adult, has to re-enter her father’s world, which she deliberately walked away from. Lone, the character, started out as a prototypical tough-guy gunman, but to me there was something really damaged about him, as there would be with someone like that. And Rufus Hirohito, from Giant Robot Warriors—well, I wanted him to be a smartass. A little shallow, but hard-working and very devoted to his work. Kind of a STUART MOORE | 45

SM: Some of them, yes. But they have to work as comics first.

That’s my primary focus, and that’s the most important thing.

DF: Have you ever self-published?

SM: Not yet, but I have one project I’m considering publishing myself or with a partner.

DF: If comics went away, or editors no longer wanted your work, what’s Plan B? SM: Thankfully, I have a very rewarding second career as a Brooklyn slumlord. Helps pay the bills.

DF: Are you working on pitches or projects for TV, movies, prose?

Have you done so in the past?

SM: Yes, but all that’s very secondary to the comics.

Storytelling is storytelling in any medium, but there are two reasons I’m focusing mostly on comics right now. The first is that I really like the close-collaborative nature of it. In film or TV, there are a hundred people in the creative mix; in prose, it’s just one (usually). In comics, there’s a nice alchemy between a writer and one or two artists. That’s always appealed to me.

The other reason is that, having spent so much time in the field, I know what I can do with a comics page, what I can fit in Science and mystery in the first issue of Stuart Moore’s Para. Art by Pablo Villalobos & Mostafa Moussa. [©2004 Penny-Farthing Press, Inc.]

classic good-man-in-over-his-head, who has to fight to do the right thing with politics and giant robot fights raging all around him.

DF: You work for large and small companies. Is there a reason for that? Would you prefer one or the other or do you like the mix?

SM: I love the mix. Big companies pay better; small companies tend to give you more creative freedom. In every case, though, you have to find something in the material that moves you, some point to the work. Otherwise there’s no point in taking it.

DF: Do you ever work for purely backend money? Would you advise it for others?

SM: I evaluate every project individually, based on a combination of several factors: (a) the project, (b) the degree of my involvement, (c) the ownership deal, (d) my working relationship with the publisher, (e) the money, and (f) my schedule. I have no set policy that I apply to every deal. Every writer’s priorities in these areas will differ, of course.

DF: Can science fiction succeed in comics divorced from superheroes?

SM: Yes, any genre can. That said, sf has always had a hard time, going back to EC, where the science-fantasy books were the lowest sellers in the line. I wrote a series of columns at Newsarama about the relationship between prose sf and comics; it’s very tangled, goes back sixty or seventy years, and involves various resentments on both sides, and some key creative people, like the late Julie Schwartz, who’ve worked in both fields. It’s like sibling rivalry.

DF: Any comments on the influence of manga and anime? Are these fads or permanent parts of the media scene? If the latter, what can American creators learn from these approaches to storytelling?

SM: I think the creative influences are already being felt. No, it’s not a fad—but it isn’t going to continue to be the cash cow it’s been, either, because a massive glut of manga is coming.

That’s just (book) publishing as usual.

DF: Do you see the comics you write as show pieces for later use as movies or TV series?

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[STUART MOORE continues on page 49.]

Giant Robot Warriors in—what else—Giant Robot Warriors, a graphic novel

by Stuart Moore & Ryan Kelly. [©2004 Stuart Moore & Ryan Kelly.]

ss, Inc.] [©2004 Penny-Farthing Pre

Stuart Moore’s original short pitch for Para, his series from Penny-Farthing Press.

In the initial script for Para #1, Stuart broke this scene down into two pages, before condensing it into a single page in the final issue.

STUART MOORE | 47

In the final script, the original pages 8 & 9 are condensed down to a single page.

Below , the art for page 9 of Para #1, from Pablo Villalobos’ pencils to Mostafa Moussa’s inks to the final page with colors

by Mike Garcia and letters by Richard Starkings.

[©2004 Penny-Farthing Press, Inc.] 48 | WRITE NOW

[STUART MOORE continued from page 46.]

an issue. I can pace a comics story out the way I want, I can work to a particular artist’s strengths, and I have a handle on the kind of (often shorthand) dialogue you use in this medium.

I’m not that comfortable—yet—with film as a medium. A screenplay looks a lot like a comics script, but comics pacing is actually very different, and dialogue works wholly differently when it’s read aloud. I like playing with it, but I don’t feel the same level of control at this point.

DF: Do you have an agent? Would you recommend people have one?

SM: I don’t have one. If you’re doing mostly work-for-hire comics work, it’s probably not worth getting one—the companies will pay you what they can pay you, and there’s not a lot of leeway with rights negotiation. If you’re doing a lot of creator-owned work, it’s probably a good idea at some point.

I’ve avoided it so far because I know my way around contracts and I know the various companies well enough to know what I can push them for and what they just won’t give on. I’ll probably get an agent at some point for Hollywood work— screenwriting, if I get more into that, and also licensing of film rights to some of my original comics properties.

DF: How would you characterize the current “era” of comics?

SM: It’s wild and exciting and all over the place. The shift from a single-issues economy to a multi-stage one—single issues, trades, online sales—is causing all kinds of problems at the larger publishers as they try to figure out how to amortize costs properly. But at the same time, I honestly think there’s more good work being published now than ever before, on all levels.

DF: Any tips on how to break in as a writer? As an editor?

SM: As a writer: There’s no one path, but basically, you have to get yourself noticed (and not in a naked-on-top-of-the-BrooklynBridge kind of way). Do good work, network online, hook up with other creators. Small press work is practically essential; it’s much, much better to send editors a finished work than a pitch or a sample script. If they don’t know your writing, they won’t trust that you can follow through on a pitch; and honestly, most editors don’t have time to read spec scripts. It’s

Gunslingers versus cyborg-gorillas in Lone #5. Script by Stuart Moore with art by Alberto Ponticelli. [©2004 Dark Horse Comics, Inc.]

not easy. I had the advantage of years of industry contacts and an eye for artists when I made the leap to writing full-time.

As an editor: Most people work their way up. Both DC and Marvel have quietly trimmed their staffs over the past few years, but positions still open up. If you’ve got some social skills and some taste, you can get noticed at either company.

You do have to live in New York, but that has other advantages.

DF: Any tips for networking with editors and other creators at comics conventions and elsewhere?

SM: I don’t have much advice that hasn’t been said elsewhere. It’s much easier for artists to network at cons than writers; an editor can tell at a glance whether he wants to see more from an artist, whereas it’s nearly impossible to sit down and evaluate writing in a convention atmosphere. My best advice is to be courteous, touch base politely, but don’t be a nuisance.

Sometimes it also helps to buy editors drinks. In the glory days of the early ’90s, editors had giant expense accounts and they bought the drinks. Now the worm has turned. Unfortunately, I always seem to be on the wrong side of that equation.

DF: What can we learn from the current Kamandi and the Flash fight in the future in the Moore-scripted Justice League Adventures #30. spate of comics-based movies? It seems Art by Tim Levins & Robin Riggs. [©2004 DC Comics.]

STUART MOORE | 49

tend to approach the field as if like more than just a passing fad. it’s uniquely troubled and disreEven if super-heroes fade, comics spected, and the cure for the as source material seems to have industry’s problems is usually to a future, or is that overly copy exactly what book optimistic? publishing/the film industry/ SM: I agree—I think that will videogames/whatever is doing. I continue. I’ve been amazed for think that’s flawed on a number of years by how many comics fans levels. In the first place, a lot of there are in Hollywood. That the problems the comics field industry is always looking for faces are mirrored in other media, ideas, and it’s come to a point and it can be very instructive to where comics are a respected look at how those media have source of material for them. dealt with them.

DF: Do you write full script or But the comics field also has Marvel style (plot first) and why? some unique strengths of its own.

SM: I believe firmly in working out The growth of trade paperback whatever arrangement suits the collections, for instance, is writer and artist best. But I really inarguably a great thing for prefer full script. If you’re writing comics. But that doesn’t mean we work with some emotional should stop publishing 32-page complexity in the dialogue scenes, it’s essential. I’m happy to leave a Cover art for the Stuart Moore-scripted Justice League Adventures #34. comics. Why throw out a (relatively) low-priced, unique certain amount of action choreog- Art by Christopher Jones. [©2004 DC Comics.] format like that? raphy to the artist. (Well, most A Thousand Flowers has been helpful promotionally, yes, and artists, anyway.) the money it brought in was also nice. Despite that, I just DF: Until recently, you wrote a regular column—A Thousand ended it, roughly on schedule, because I’d pretty much said all Flowers—online. Why did you do it? Was it helpful promotionally?

I had to say with it. I didn’t want to start repeating myself or SM: A Thousand Flowers grew out of a frustration on my part stretching to fit the column’s mandate. with the nature of comics-industry discourse. Comics people DF: What’s coming up for you Stuart?

SM: Para, from Penny-Farthing, runs through the summer. It’s a six-issue high-tech/paranormal thriller set in the ruins of the world’s largest nuclear particle accelerator. It’s started off small, but it’s been getting nice reviews. I’m very, very pleased with it.

My third issue of Justice League Adventures will be out in August. It starts with a couple being gunned down in a Gotham City alley and a rocketship crashing into a field in Kansas. Then it gets kind of strange. Batman and Superman were an absolute blast to write together. Those two should have their own cable news show or something—like Hannity & Colmes.

The fifth issue of Vampirella Magazine features a depraved COLLECTOR PAYING TOP DOLLAR FOR little hip-hop parody called “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Bullets,” by me “ANY AND ALL” ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK and crazy Texan John Lucas. That should be out by the time AND COMIC STRIP ARTWORK FROM THE this sees print. I’ve got a longish piece in an upcoming issue of 1930S TO PRESENT! COVERS, PINUPS, Dark Horse’s Escapist anthology—“The Escapist 2966,” a PAGES, IT DOESN’T MATTER! 1 PAGE OR crazy, sad, metafictional retro-future story drawn by Steve ENTIRE COLLECTIONS SOUGHT! Conley of “Astounding Space Thrills” fame. I’ve also written a CALL OR EMAIL ME ANYTIME! very real-world, political story for Metal Hurlant, and I’m working on a wild new series with Avatar right now.

Further in the future: I’ve got projects in the works with Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, John McCrea, Steve Pugh, and Matt Howarth, among others. I like to keep busy.

DF: Any questions I didn’t ask you want to ask and answer yourself?

OR SEND YOUR LIST TO: SM: Are you kidding? I’m exhausted!

DF: Thanks for your time and the thoughtful answers, Stuart.

SM: Thanks for your time—and the longest interview I’ve ever P.O. BOX 455 • RAVENNA, OH 44266 done!

$200,000 PAID FOR ORIGINAL COMIC ART!

330-296-2415 mikeburkey@aol.com MIKE BURKEY

CASH IS WAITING, SO HURRY!!!!!

THE END 50 | WRITE NOW

Here’s Stuart Moore’s original proposal for his Giant Robot Warriors graphic novel. Stuart has “censored” the proposal here to avoid giving away the story’s “big twist.”

The cover to Stuart’s Giant Robot Warriors. Art

by Ryan Kelly. [©2004 Stuart Moore & Ryan Kelly.]

Artist Ryan Kelly’s second round of sketches for the GRW character Negamon, along with his initial layout for page 8 of the graphic novel.

STUART MOORE | 51

The script for page 8 of the GRW graphic novel, along with the final art.

Ryan Kelly’s first sketch for the character Negamon. [©2004 Stuart Moore & Ryan Kelly.]

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Talent, Inc.

The DON McGREGOR Interview Conducted by Jim Salicrup in June 2003 / Transcribed by Steven Tice Edited by Danny Fingeroth

D

on McGregor has written comics, prose, screenplays and teleplays. As part of the legendary generation of Marvel Comics writers of the 1970s, his contemporaries are folks like Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rodgers.

Among Don’s comics writing is Black Panther, Sabre, and Detectives, Inc. Known as a distinctive stylist, Don is a man of many passions, and it shows in his acclaimed work.

In this interview, Jim Salicrup—who was Don’s editor at Marvel and at Topps Comics—probes the McGregor mind and evokes reflections and lessons from Don that are a minicourse in comics all by themselves. So hold on to your seats — the interview starts at 100 mph and only gets wilder from there. Enjoy!

—DF

JIM SALICRUP: Okay, Don. Way back when, when you were writing Zorro, the comic book, for me at Topps, it was a great experience for me.

DON MCGREGOR: Me, too! It was the best experience I’ve ever had at a major company. I felt welcomed there, wanted there, like there was somebody who would listen to what I felt about the projects, and support it and books. And I’ve said this many times to people, oftentimes books need an advocate. And you were always there, and I thank you for that.

JS: You’re too kind. You’re welcome. What I wanted to talk about was, if you could, from a writing point of view, describe the difference Gene Colan’s cover to Vanguard’s all-new Spider between writing graphic novel by McGregor & Colan. [The Spider is Zorro as a comic a trademark of and is copyright 2004 Argosy book and then as Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.]

a comic strip?

DM: Y’know, every project has different challenges that you have to think about as a writer before beginning. Let’s step back for a moment to a couple of other books. When I was first doing continued series at Marvel, the Black Panther and Killraven, those were bimonthly books. I think we had 13-to- Don McGregor confers with Gene Colan over some art pages in this photo taken in the 15 pages in the beginning, early 1980s. every two months, to tell a story and introduce characters. Very quickly, I was aware that if I didn’t put a major character into an issue, that would mean a four-month time span that the readers would never see that character. If I left them out of two books, that was half a year, which is a long time to ask an audience to have an emotional commitment to those characters. So I was very conscious of trying to make sure that each character had a scene that was theirs in each issue.

When you go to something like Zorro, which was a monthly, you realize, okay, if I don’t have this character in that issue, or even two issues, one month, two months, that’s probably an acceptable span of time for the readers to come back to the characters and still have a connection with them. I kind of think of the way that J. Michael Straczynski did with Babylon 5.

It was an amazing piece of work. And later, Joss Whedon and his writers with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, I think they really came into the world of comics and created a sort of continuity and characters.

So I’m well aware of frequency when I’m going into a project.

When the Zorro newspaper strip came up, it was a totally different challenge from doing the Zorro monthly book.

Obviously, the characters, the spirit and tone of the strip would be consistent with the comic, but with the approach to the writing, there were lots of other things that had to be considered. In a newspaper strip only some people see the Sundays, while the majority of people get the dailies, especially the Monday through Friday papers, which they read on the way to work or coming back from work. Saturday’s the least-read of the newspaper strips. Yet I wanted the strips, if they were ever collected into one volume, that they would flow. There’s never a sense that we were repeating information, and yet I wanted to make sure that each audience, if they just saw it during the week, they could track the story, if they just saw the Sundays, they could track the story, and also that I could play with the DON McGREGOR | 53

visual construction of the strip. There’s a lot more you can do in terms of layouts with the Sunday strip than you can with a daily strip.

Yet at the same time, I wanted to make sure right from the get-go that I wasn’t locked into any one format. In other words, it wasn’t just a three-panel strip every day, and that’s what would come to be expected, that every day would be a three-panel strip. So every day I was conscious of what would make that strip work as an individual strip and yet flow into the next one, and yet not lock into a concrete format that “this is what it’s got to be, and this is what it’s got to be every day.” John Romita actually asked me at one point: “Don, how are you getting away with this?” And it was because I never told anybody ahead of time what I was going to do, and started it right in the beginning.

Touching on Zorro’s origin from Topps Comics’ JS: You did a great job of it.

Zorro #2. Written by Don McGregor with art You worked with Tom Yeates

by Mike Mayhew and Andy Mushynsky. on one graphic novel, the [©2004 Zorro Productions, Inc.] Zorro/Dracula story at Topps with us, and you started the strip off with him. What was that like?

DM: See, this is the fortunate part of working in comics, you can work with great people. And I’ve been very fortunate over the years to work with very talented artists. You know, you’re thrown together in the forge of creating this thing, and I think it creates a bond, if you’re lucky, between the artist and the writer. So oftentimes they take what you’ve written and bring it to life. And sometimes they go beyond what you were hoping for. Tom... just his finished work looks so great, and he’s very conscientious about telling the story. Not too far into the strip, Tom realized he was going to have trouble making the deadlines on it and brought in Tod Smith to help him. Tod is more of a cartoonist than an illustrator, whereas Tom is very illustrative in his finishes. But it was a very, very great combination. Tod followed my layouts for the strips religiously. I had John Costanza doing the lettering. I could not have asked for better people to be working with all the way down the stream with us.

But Tom would come in, and, every once in a while, there was something I wanted to change in a panel, and Tom could do that. It was especially important in terms of continuity.

There was one sequence where we had a Sunday that had a little kid stepping off of a wall, and there’s a rattlesnake right 54 | WRITE NOW

below him, and it looks like he’s going to land right on top of the rattlesnake, but when the Monday daily came in, the kid was actually above where he was in the Sunday. It was the equivalent of a bad cut in a movie. Tom was able to take the kid and lower him so he was closer to the snake, because I would never give away on a Monday what was going to happen with that character. [laughs] You’re certainly going to have to wait until Tuesday to find out. And I think I got more mail on that one strip, because people had become so involved with the kid and thought I was going to kill the kid. Actually, I did get death threats. [laughs] “You better not kill that kid, Don!” [laughs] JS: Did you?

DM: Oh, you’ve got to read the book. [laughs] JS: Okay, okay. How did you originally approach the comic strip, just as a writer, deciding what type of stories you would do, and whether to do it plot first or full script... basically, what do you do when you’re starting a new series with a character that’s been established before?

DM: Well, someone once said to me, “Don, I don’t see any difference between the way you approach characters that are your own or whether they’re licensed characters.” I have a total commitment to doing them, and they were characters that I loved. When you came to me with Zorro, you knew that Zorro was a character that I really cared about. The same thing with James Bond, for instance. I was coming to those assignments with a real passion for those characters, and having lived a lifetime with them, and was totally surprised and amazed with having a chance to write them. At the same time, I know you can’t totally be slavish to what has been done, because you need to come to it with something, bring something new to the table, as well as capture the essence and spirit, hopefully, and tone of the characters.

So starting the Zorro books, I loved this character. Nothing had to be changed about Zorro in terms of who he was as a character, the kind of character he was. I think one of the things I had many discussions with artist Mike Mayhew about in the beginning, because Mike wasn’t that familiar with Zorro, was: he’s not the Batman. He’s not the grim night stalker.

There’s a real sense of energy and humor about Zorro that’s not like the Batman at all. And it took a while to get that captured in the book. Tom Yeates, on the other hand, was as big a Zorro fanatic as myself, so he’s well familiar with the character and knows elements of his personality. But once you’ve got agreement there, then it becomes, “okay, what are these stories going to be about?” For instance, I needed to do research. What do I know about 1820s Los Angeles, California? And I spent many nights Xeroxing material at the Topps offices, trying to provide stuff I thought was pertinent to the time period. You had to find the time period that was reflective of where we were placing Zorro, and I had to decide exactly what time period I was going to place the series in.

I’m always insecure as a writer at the beginning of a project, especially when I’m mapping out a big thing like Zorro’s Renegades. And as part of the research, I came across stuff on Hawaii, and I thought, “Why not take Zorro to Hawaii? That would be great! We’ve never seen him in that kind of environment.” And it happened to be in the time span of one of the most influential kings in the history of Hawaii. And I thought, “Oh, this’ll be great! We’ll put Zorro in this entirely different milieu and see what develops.” I also had this idea about bringing him to Yellowstone Park, because I just thought

the idea of Zorro on skis... [laughs] The slopes and the geysers, Yellowstone’s got all these great visual places. That’s another thing you’re always thinking about when you’re starting stories like this: “what’s going to make it visual?”

So in the beginning I was thinking about all this, and there were so many things to research. You had the impact of the missions and how that came about, how did these people really get up to Los Angeles, what was happening with all the different Indian tribes—and there were many, their cultures were very diverse, so then you had to be very specific about which tribe you were dealing with. Yet, on the other hand, you had the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of Indians in the missions due to the diseases that were brought over. So all of these things were things wherewith to develop and shape the kind of stories we were telling. And I thought, “What would I like to see in a Zorro story? He doesn’t have to be changed, there have been great stories about Zorro. But what haven’t I seen?”

Well, it was a monthly book, and I knew it was going to take up most of my creative time to do those stories, so the first thing, I’ve got to have is a woman character in there who can be a vital, integral part of the stories. And I didn’t want to just do a senorita who he woos for a couple of moments and then

Zorro & Lady Rawhide in action in Zorro #3. Written by Don McGregor with art

by Mike Mayhew and Andy Mushynsky. [©2004 Zorro Productions, Inc.]

goes off to the next adventure or something like that. So immediately I start to think, well, I’ve got to bring a woman in there who can be his equal, visually as well as narratively. So I started working on Lady Rawhide’s character.

The next thing was, I thought we needed a villain that really was going to be very visual, that could, again, actually be a real threat to him. A lot of times, Zorro just defeats people too easily. The whole idea of chaining Zorro in a whale, doing the story where he’s chained up inside the Adam Hughes cover art of Lady Rawhide. whale, and the tide is Originally used as the cover for Zorro #3, coming in, was to give above is how it appeared as the cover to the audience the idea the Zorro collection “The Lady Wears Red.” that Zorro’s not going to [©2004 Zorro Productions, Inc.] be able to just easily get out of these things. And then the next challenge as a writer, as a storyteller, is when you get them out of it, you’d better have a damn good way to get them out of it. The challenge there is to make the audience think, “There’s no way he could possibly escape. Zorro’s dead!” You want to make them think for five seconds that the hero can’t get out of this, and then you do get them out of it, legitimately, that the audience buys it. Then, I think, you’ve done your job.

JS: I think you did a great job of that. One of the characters I was considering, actually even before I got involved with Zorro, when I was still at Topps, I was thinking about the pulp character the Spider. When I was editing Spider-Man, Stan Lee had mentioned that the Spider was one of his influences in creating Spider-Man. And I thought that’d be fun to do. And, lo and behold, we got the rights to the Spider a few years later at Topps. How did you approach that ?

DM: Rich Harvey [of Bold Venture Press] originally approached me to do The Spider. Rich is very much into the pulps, and of course that means Zorro. So he was familiar with the Zorro stuff, and he had read the James Bond series that I had done for Dark Horse, “The Quasimodo Gambit.” And I think it’s when he read the torture scene with the leeches that convinced him that maybe Don’s the guy to write The Spider.

But when he originally approached me to do this and discussed different artists, one of the artists we discussed was Gene Colan, because I love to work with Gene. I worked with Gene on many strips, many of my favorites, including Ragamuffins, which I held for years for Gene, because I just knew he could draw those little kids in the 1950s. So when Rich first approached me, he sent me a bunch of the pulps to read. He had actually read part of one to me at a diner one time after a comic convention, an opening sequence. I thought, “Jesus, this is great!” [laughs] “Where’s Norvell Page gonna go after this, if this is your opening act?” So he sent me some of DON McGREGOR | 55

Art from the second Don McGregor–Gene Colan Nathaniel Dusk, Private Investigator series. Like much of Colan’s recent work, the line art was reproduced and colored directly from his pencils. [©2004 DC Comics, Inc.]

the pulps, very kindly. And originally it was going to be set in the 1930s, a time period that was alien to me. And again, thinking visually, I was thinking, “Why not set it at the 1939 World’s Fair?” Because there’s a lot of really, you’ve got all these great buildings and everything. So I started to structure a story around that.

At that point, it was a very simple project. It looked like it was going to be great fun to do, to work with this character. I had to decide which characters I was going to bring into the strip. We had a finite amount of pages, and had to decide which ones wouldn’t make it into the storyline. It was set in the 1930s, it was going to be at the World’s Fair. I started to develop a plotline to go along with it as I was probing the characters. And Rich sent me a bunch of stuff over the Internet for Internet sites about the 1939 World’s Fair, which was really great of him. A lot of times you don’t get this kind of help from editors. So this was great, especially when we immediately go into, and start, “Okay, I can print this out and this will be great visuals for the artist to have to know what I’m talking about, what the places are supposed to look like.”

But then that project started to really change radically. Other people became involved with it. The next thing I knew, I was having to make calls to save the project, to keep it going. Once that happened, suddenly it changed to a situation where they were going to do an adaptation of one of The Spider pulp novels into comics. Now, that’s a totally different kind of project than originating your own story with the characters. And I’ve done a number of adaptations of bringing books into comics for Marvel back in the seventies. Now, for instance, a book like Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which is very much Elizabethan prose, where they describe things forever, his is like a 600 page novel, and with 48 pages of comics, I managed to get every single scene in that book into the comic. Further proof to many people that I’m just crazy. But I like the fact that we managed to do that.

On the other hand, the shortest book I adapted was Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, and it was the one book that I couldn’t get all in, because Twain’s stuff is so dense with incident. Normally, my approach to doing these kind of adaptations was to start breaking the book down, and I would probably take, I would say, the first 15 pages of the 48-page comic, and I would break down from the book the first fifteen pages and make good page breaks in telling the story in comics, yet stay faithful to the book. I’d read the book being adapted straight through from the beginning, then I’d actually read backwards as I’m breaking it down, so that I would always 56 | WRITE NOW

have enough room for the ending, so I could satisfy whatever was going to be at the end of the book. And doing it with The Prince and the Pauper, I realized there were some sequences that I just couldn’t fit in. No matter which way I tried to squeeze stuff in, it just was not going to happen.

Getting back to the Spider, now Norvell Page’s stuff is rich with incident. There’s a lot of stuff going on. That wasn’t going to be that easy a thing to break down into comics. Take one of the Spider pulp novels, I can’t remember which one exactly, but the Spider has to leave New York City. New York City is under threat, as it is in many of the Spider novels, but he has to go to someplace like Chicago. And he learns, oh, they’re going to blow up the Holland Tunnel or something like that. And it’s wintertime. So the Spider learns this in Chicago, he’s going to go through the freezing snow. He goes to the airport, the bad guys have taken over the airport. He has to gun down all these bad guys to commandeer a plane, gets up into the air, the sleet is coming down and is freezing his windshield wipers and now it’s frozen the engine. He’s gonna crash, he has to bail out of the plane, it crashes and explodes, he lands on a train, he takes over the train at gunpoint, forces the train to go to New York, jumps off there, steals somebody’s car, gets to the city in time to stop the destruction of the tunnel—all in a page-and-ahalf of prose! Now, there’s a lot of great visual stuff going on there, but if I try and translate all that into comics and do it

A splash from another of McGregor & Colan’s early-’80s collaborations, Ragamuffins. This story originally appeared in Eclipse Monthly #4. Inks

by Klaus Janson. [©2004 Don McGregor & Gene Colan.]

effectively as a dramatically visual presentation—well, we’re certainly not going to be able to do it in a page-and-a-half. And normally you’ve got to try to find a way to convert a number of pages of story into one page of comics. Or if you don’t do that, you’ve got to find a way to make up for it later on.

So I knew it was going to be a real challenge to do that. On top of that, about every three or four weeks, it would change as to what Spider novel was going to be adapted. So now you’ve put all this work and energy into trying to figure out how you’re going to do this. And the first one that had been talked about was one with giant robots. And they were supposed to be huge. If the Spider drove a car into the robots, it didn’t even reach their knees. Now visually, how are you going to approach that in a comic? Because you’ve got these really big, tall beings, and you’ve got a small Spider who is racing around their ankles. So it’s a whole challenge to figure how would you visually tell this, and what scenes can you manage to get in there? Because you know you can’t fit everything into the number of pages you’ve been given. And I’d worked for weeks on it, and somebody decided, “Now it’s going to be this one.”

And then, “Now we’re going to do this one instead.” “We want to do this one instead, we want to do that one instead.” And this was no longer the fun project it had started out to be when it was a 1930s project.

Then, after all that, it became, “Oh, no no no. This is now going to be a present-day Spider.” So now it had to be totally rethought in terms of the writing. Again, the characters were going to stay essentially the same and the tone of the characters, the relationship between the characters and many of the Spider stories hold up very well in terms of the threat to the city. And I don’t think Page is any better than when he takes some small thing, somebody’s poisoned all the cosmetics in New York City, and if you put facial cream on your face, the sulfuric acid with eat your flesh away, or if you smoke cigarettes, you’re going to start spewing up blood out of your lungs. See, all of this was being done prior to 9/11, so terrorist threats against the city were a high percentage of the Spider stories in the novels So I was very concerned about what I was going to write about. The other thing is beyond the characters, what are these stories about? Why am I writing them? So thematically, there’s really so much about these various laws that were trying to be enacted to curtail what was happening, what we can read and see and hear, this whole thing of first amendment rights coming under siege was something I really wanted to write about. And it seemed to me just perfect for the Spider. In fact, because somebody wanted him to be involved and have a publishing empire as part of this updating of the character—I don’t really know why, that was never explained to me—but that was fine, it worked within the context. Oh, great, if he’s got a magazine, he’s obviously going to get really involved with and concerned about what would be the effect on what he could put in his magazine and not put in his magazine.

So then I had a thrust of what I really wanted to start handling, and could start thematically approaching it as well as developing the characters and the story. At that point in time, when you’re developing a book, I think you’re looking at everything in terms of seeing what will spark something off. And I read something in a newspaper article about how a man was found hung on Charlie Chaplin’s old estate in Switzerland, and his body was swaying over the body of a naked, beheaded woman. I thought, “What a hell of an opening for a Spider

A powerful action page from Vanguard’s all-new Spider graphic novel by McGregor & Colan. [The Spider is a trademark of and is copyright 2004 Argosy Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.]

book!” [laughs] Certainly in keeping with anything that Norvell Page may have had in the pulp novels. So I knew I immediately had something to work on, but the character kept changing on me as I was writing it, and it really became quite a bit the way Page started a Spider pulp novel, where I was going to open immediately with the Spider discovering something. So actually I had written the first lines of it.

I found as I started to actually write it, it became more of the way Page did in a lot of the Spider novels in that it’s the Spider approaching. He’s already dressed as the Spider, but introducing all of the backstory that gets him over to there so that when the set-up comes in, he’s there, you’re just racing through the next sequence with these characters. So that influenced everything about the story.

JS: Let’s segue from the Spider, which was a pre-existing pulp character, to talking about some of your own characters. You created Detectives, Inc. and Sabre. So can you tell us about turning them into possible movies?

DM: Okay. Well, I guess first I should tell you about Detectives, Inc., because that happened first. Long before I even wrote any comics, I was involved in film, doing stuff in eight millimeter and super-eight. So when video started to come in, the VHS tapes and all, I thought, “Gee, there must be a way to make a DON McGREGOR | 57

film version of my characters.”

I knew I couldn’t do Sabre, it would require too much costuming, it was set in the future, would have required elaborate special-effects, and that kind of thing.

But Detectives, Inc. is set in Manhattan. It’s feasible for me to be able to do that. When the opportunity did come along to do it, it was much more complicated than I had anticipated in the beginning. I had not really ever worked with sound before, and I didn’t realize how much of a factor that would be. Actually, the A cover from an original Spider pulp movie script was written before magazine. [The Spider is a trademark of the second graphic album, so and is copyright 2004 Argosy it was a reverse process. I Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.] actually wrote the movie script first, but I had been in the process of developing the second Detectives, Inc. graphic album.

But I realized when the possibility came to do the movie, I didn’t have the money to do some explosive special effects I

A climactic battle sequence, also from Vanguard’s all-new Spider graphic novel

by McGregor & Colan. [The Spider is a trademark of and is copyright 2004 Argosy Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.]

58 | WRITE NOW

wanted to do. So then I looked around for something else I wanted to write about and that I thought would be a good story with those characters. I came across something on domestic violence and some percentages on it and started to research particulars and specifics on domestic violence, and thought this could be a story that’s worth writing, and certainly one that Denning and Rainier, the detectives, would emotionally react to.

Now, actually, I think movie scripts are easier to write than comic book scripts. Because in comics you normally have a really finite number of pages to deal with, you have to think about the design of the page, what’s a good place to end that page and move to the next one. When you’re writing dialogue, if you’re doing a comic, if it’s a scene between people, the artist really has to know what the “stage play” is that you’re asking for to keep that scene alive and as interesting as an action scene might be. And when you work with somebody like Gene Colan, obviously you’re going to really get that.

But I’m always working with designing pages and the pacing of the scenes, as you do have to do with a movie script, but you don’t have to break a movie script down panel-by-panel or page-by-page. So when the script was finished, and after we had had casting calls and we’d selected the actors for the roles, we had our first reading. And most of the actors had never read any of the comics. A lot of them thought of comics as more or less a kid’s medium, I’m sure, as much as anything. And I got asked by many of the actors, “How could

A splash page from the first chapter of Don McGregor and Marshall Rogers’ Detectives Inc. graphic novel. [Detectives Inc. ©2004 Don McGregor; art ©2004 Marshall Rogers]

you go from writing comic books to a movie script like this?”

And to me it was easier and faster to do the movie script than it was to do the comic book scripts. In fact, I think it took me longer to write the graphic album than it did to write the movie script, because I now had to take a 130-page movie script and break it down into seventy-some pages of comics.

And at one point I was in danger of losing a key scene that I just dearly loved, and I could scarcely afford to do this. So I called my editor, Dean Mullaney, and said, “Dean, I can’t abandon this scene. Even if I have to pay Gene to draw the pages”—which was just craziness on my part, financially, to even suggest such a thing at the time. But it would just always haunt me that the scene wasn’t there. It was a scene on the boardwalk where two important characters reveal a lot of their own relationships and their pasts to each other. It’s one of my favorite scenes.

And Dean found a way, of course, to be able to get some extra pages and get the scene into the book. But that was more of a challenge then. When you’re writing a comic script, there’s a collaboration with the artist. Everybody who works on a book’s very, very important to me. If you get a bad lettering job, it can virtually make a book unreadable, and if you get a bad coloring job, that’s the first thing people see in a color book. They may not realize it, but just flipping through the pages, it’s the color they’re able to see first, and it can really

Don mixes typeset narration and sequential panels in the second Detectives, Inc. graphic novel. Pencil art by Gene Colan. [Detectives Inc. ©2004 Don McGregor; art ©2004 Gene Colan.]

destroy the mood and tone, maybe even the look of the artwork, if it’s really, really bad.

So everybody’s very, very important, everything that they bring to the project. But especially with the artist that you’re working with, it’s important that they understand what it is you want with a scene, what do want with the characters, and capture that. When I first see the artwork sometimes, there’ll be a scene where… Well, when I’m writing it, it’s just, “Oh, my God, why do I put myself through The Marshall Rogers cover to the Detectives Inc. collection. [Detectives Inc. ©2004 Don McGregor; this?” And then you art ©2004 Marshall Rogers] see an artist bring it to life, or even go beyond what you hoped, and then you’re really excited about it. So “okay, I’ll do this again.” And it would be the same thing with a movie, when you see the actors take a scene and just soar with it and bring it so much to life. So those are the sparkling moments about it. But those are the different challenges for a writer about the two media.

JS: And what about Sabre?

DM: Yeah, Sabre’s been talked to me about off and on over the years. Obviously there are a lot of comic book characters and properties being looked at by Hollywood these days, and the more success, obviously, they have with films based on comics, the more interest there is. Sabre was always a difficult property because of some of the elements that were in it. That’s what I’ve been told over the years. One of them being that you have a very sexually charged relationship between a black man and a white woman. And apparently, even in the year 2003, this hasn’t changed all that much. I think you have more of a shot with it than a TV series perhaps, than you do as a multi-million dollar movie. And then, on top of that, we have two gay male characters in the series. And what we did in the comics in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I don’t think comics had really had a regular supporting cast of characters of this nature. So it was already, for some people, a very provocative thing.

Anyway, when I was approached last year to do some new books on Sabre, what they wanted to concentrate on was Sabre when he was younger. And I had no problem with that, I had always intended, as the series unfolded, to keep doing stories that would show how a lot of these major characters first met and first got together. I had done the first time Sabre and Melissa had ever met, but I’d never done a story where they really get together, where this is the moment that really solidified their relationship with each other, or about how some major characters met for the first time and started to establish relationships among themselves. Or what motivated some of the reactions between characters, like Blackstar Blood and Midnight Storm. So this would be a chance for me to do that.

But, on the other hand, getting back to your question, this is DON McGREGOR | 59

not coming onto Zorro, coming into the Spider or any of these characters. Now I had to go back to my own characters. I hadn’t written Sabre in fifteen or seventeen years, somewhere in that time frame.

So that meant going back and finding all of my notes. Kind of like what I think they say Joss Whedon has often done with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, where I think he has high spots where he knows for certain that he’s going to do maybe one, two seasons down the line. He may not know every single episode of how he’s going to get there, but I’m sure that he discusses it with his writers and they decide, “Okay, we want to go in this direction, here and here, and eventually this is going to lead up there.” And the neat thing about that kind of thing is, if you go back and you see the early issues, or you see the early episodes of Buffy, you say, “Oh, as far back as here, they really had this planned.” And it just lends a sense of reality to it. So I do a lot of high spots for the characters.

Since they wanted to do young Sabre, I was bringing as many of the characters as I could into the stories, it would show how all of them met, establish the kind of relationships they were going to have. That way it would work as a project for the agent who wanted to do this and pitch it as a film, yet at the same time, I would not betray anything about the characters for the people who loved Sabre. That was another major concern I had. The agent doesn’t have to be concerned about that, but as a storyteller who has a loyal following of readers who love these characters, I don’t want to do anything to betray those characters and just knock something out.

So it meant going back and really catching the voices and make sure I remember the histories of the characters and what I had established. I’m the kind of guy who can walk into a room, as you well know, Jim, and forget why I went there. [laughs] So coming back that long after, it was very intimidating, very daunting. I didn’t want to do anything that would be inferior to the original books. I’d hope I’d increased my skills as a storyteller, I’ve become a whole boatload more effective than I was back then, but you can never know that, you just do the best you can at that point in time.

So when I started to do it, I thought, okay, they were talking about doing this as either a graphic album or a miniseries, and that they could then take new product Cover to Sabre #3, written by Don, with art by Billy around and show Graham. Cover art is by Kent Williams. [Sabre ©2004 Don McGregor.]

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The opening page to Don McGregor & Paul Gulacy’s Sabre graphic novel.

[Sabre ©2004 Don McGregor.]

it to Hollywood, possibly to make it as a film or perhaps a TV series. And for me, well that would be great if it happened, obviously. And if it didn’t happen, I’d still have new books out on the character and a lot of the major characters around Sabre. Dwayne Turner was going to draw it, and I love working with Dwayne. So this was the best of all possible worlds in the beginning.

On the other hand, you have to stay alive as a storyteller. I’m not being paid while I’m doing this. So if there’s anybody out there reading this who is interested in publishing new Sabre stories, let me know! The comics are ready to go, they’ve all been scripted in very detailed synopsis form and actually broken down into specific issues. And it does deal with stuff that none of the readers have ever seen regarding the characters. It’s very dynamic and colorful and sexy stuff.

JS: You mentioned that you wanted to be faithful to your original version of Sabre. But going into this, knowing that if it would be turned into a film, did you do anything differently, or did you just approach it as you would if it was just going to be for comics?

DM: Well, the same things apply for comics and film, in that they’re both very visual, so you look for visual things to happen. Since they’re going to first appear as comics, again, my first thought was, “Okay, what will make this a great-looking scene? Where should it take place and what should it look

talked to Mike Collins over in England, and Mike wanted to do like?” I had those concerns in my mind. And then, the people it. Now it’s just finding time for him to be able to draw it and that read the comics, who were possibly doing the film, I me to survive as a storyteller, finding time to do it. The needed to fill the comic with stuff that they could visualize and difference between doing a character like Dragonflame and the make into a physical reality. I tried to stay true to the Batman, now you have to create an origin for Dragonflame. characters, but do an exciting story that led someplace big and Now, most of the properties I’ve created over the years, such had a big ending for this. as Sabre or Detectives, Inc., wouldn’t really need to be When you’re doing heroic fantasy, I think you’ve got to have revamped very much for a modern audience. But Dragonflame an ending. There’s a place you’re going, and when you get was very much rooted in the Vietnam War, which now, this those characters there, there’s been a journey, and they’ve many years later, means the character would have to be changed. But, in typical fashion of working with Hollywood on rethought. this kind of thing, I was in the midst of doing all this research So I started to do that. I’ve been doing a lot of research on and creating young Sabre and all these versions of these Sarajevo and the minefields. There’s so much stuff going on characters, when I get a call in the midst of writing the damn with landmines, and so many different places that cripple thing and I’ve spent months on it. And suddenly they’re talking innocent civilians and many, many children as well. So I’ve about, “Oh, y’know, Sam Jackson might be interested in doing done a lot of research with that. The problem I have is how to something. We should do an older version of Sabre.” Well, an get that into the story without being too intrusive or taking older version of Sabre is a completely different man. If I look at away from scenes that are happening in the present. It’s still myself at 20 and look at myself at 50, we’re talking about not something I’ve totally broken down and figured out exactly totally different human beings. So if you’re thinking of an older how to do it. My feeling is I still need to probably do a lot more Sabre, he’s not the same guy he was when he’s in his research on it. I just haven’t found the time where I can get the twenties, and that’s a totally different book. I’m not against focus to do it, but I think it should be an important book when doing that book, but that’s a totally different project. And on top we do, and I thank Jim Valentino for having faith in it and of that, I have a continuing series with Sabre and Melissa and wanting to do it. And I thank Mike Collins for being willing to all those guys that I’ve never finished. You’d have to be very gamble on it, because it’s a gamble on our part to put this careful not to give away what happened with those characters thing together. I hope that sometime in 2004 that people will in that time span, because it would give away any element of get a chance to see it. suspense. So I was concerned about that.

JS: I’m looking forward to it. Another thing you did, besides JS: It seems you’ve done everything, Don. Way back when, you making movies, writing novels, creating characters, adapting also did a prose novel featuring a character called Dragonflame.

Has there been interest in Dragonflame, as well? Has he resurfaced, too?

DM: Absolutely, Jim. Again, this is a project that is really complicated. I was working on a project for the Batman, and it was dealing with pedophilia. And I was running a lot of the scenes past a man who actually trains people who deal with such cases, because a lot of scenes where you’re seeing things from the point-of-view of this little six-year-old kid. And how do kids react? How do these people know how to manipulate kids? And it really worked as a Batman story. The Batman doesn’t need a whole lot of history. Even if you haven’t read a whole bunch of books about Batman, I think he’s such an icon that you don’t have to go into a whole lot about his past to understand who he is and why such a thing as kidnapped kids would involve him.

And everybody knew what the story was going to be, but apparently it became too hard-edged to do it as a story for the Batman. And this again is a topic you really have to research. I spent a lot of time and care with it to do it right. We didn’t discuss about having pages in the book devoted to places people could go, organizations that actually help people deal with situations like this and maybe things that they possibly could do to help. And my feeling is, if we can help one kid, one family, it would be worth doing. And after all this work, it ended up we weren’t going to be able to do it. So then I decided to revise it and do it as a Dragonflame story. And I pitched it to Image. And Jim Valentino [then publisher of Image. —DF] said, yes, he wanted to do it. The only problem was, no one gets paid up front while you’re doing the book.

So now you have to find a way to create the book and an artist that’s equally willing to put the time and effort Dramatic Paul Gulacy art from his into drawing the book without any guarantee of and Don’s Sabre graphic novel. getting paid while you’re putting this book together. I [Sabre ©2004 Don McGregor.]

DON McGREGOR | 61

characters, updating characters, somehow you found some time to actually teach a class on comics at the School of Visual Arts. Tell us a little bit about that.

DM: Yeah. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the students a lot.

One of the most difficult things about doing the class was that oftentimes many of the students were at very different levels.

Some people were Gene Colan’s cover to the second Detectives Inc. just taking the collection, published in 1999 by Image Comics.

[Detectives Inc. ©2004 Don McGregor; class because it art ©2004 Gene Colan.] was just something they needed for credit, and really had no background in writing at all, and maybe even had difficulty writing a sentence, never mind writing a comic book.

Other people, though, were really there to want to write comics. They loved comics, they wanted to do it. So you had to find a way to try to make sure each student got what they kind of needed, and yet not hold back the ones that really wanted to write comics. A lot of them were very kind to me. There’s actually some of them doing their own projects now, and I’m happy to see that.

When I was first approached about doing it, my concern was that, well, what would I want this course to be? You can’t really teach writing. You can teach the format, you can teach the way a synopsis or a proposal look. I’d always make sure that they had proposals, and I’d always make sure that they would do to a finished script. So then at least they have the format down. If they could get thirty seconds more with an editor than someone who hadn’t taken the class, then probably I would have done my job. If they understood that, really, comics are two separate kinds of writing, I would have done my job. You’re writing first, the words that the audience is going to actually read, and then second, there’s the communication with the artist. And that’s a totally separate kind of writing, and they’re both very important. And if you don’t have one or the other, you’re in serious trouble in writing comics.

So I was trying to get that down for them. And there are just the basics. No matter how many times you tell them in the beginning, “Make sure you get your name and phone number on each page so people can get in touch with you And just telling students this is not the most effective way to get their attention. They would hand all their scripts in, and I’d see all the pages with no names, no nothin’. And I would take all their pages and scatter them on the floor. And everybody would gasp, and I’d say, “Now, find your script pages and put it back 62 | WRITE NOW

together.” But after that, I’ll tell you, everybody made sure that they had their names and page numbers on their script pages.

Just imagine some editor, whose desk looks much messier than mine, because they get all kinds of scripts, and they find a script and they read a page or something and they love it.

They would love to do this thing, but they can’t contact the writer. And suppose you go to a convention two years later and you meet that person and you show him the thing, “Oh my God! I loved this thing! I wanted to publish it, but I didn’t know who it was, and I couldn’t find the first page!”

JS: Well, that was very funny and perfect for this magazine. But you’ve been involved in so much, it seemed like the best way someone could find out what you’re up to at the moment is to look into your website. So tell us about that.

DM: The website was a big undertaking. It demands a lot of time in the beginning, certainly to get it set up and to do it.

And I was writing this stuff more or less as I was going along.

What the hell did I know about computers? Kevin Hall really helped me realize my ideas for what I wanted the site to be up on the Internet. And it was very important to make sure it was just donmcgregor.com so it’s easy for people if they wanted to get to the site, there’s no dash or you don’t have to upper or lower case. The easier to just to type the name in of the person and get there, the easier it’s going to be to sell the books.

One of my hopes had been, since I had republished through Image all of the Detectives, Inc. graphic albums and Sabre, the original graphic album, I thought I could sell them through the Internet. I still think the potential is there. I don’t exactly know how to do it all and to make it all work. But I see the possibility there where, if you could make enough money selling the books on the site, hopefully you could finance other projects concerning the characters and you’re not totally dependent on distributors taking books. If they decide they don’t want to take the books, you’re dead in the water. How are you going to get them out there, and how are you going to be able to survive?

So the website is hopefully a place where you can buy the books. If you’re interested in buying the books, they’re right there. Normally, since they come to me, I normally try to give people something extra with the books that they order, since they’re in touch right with the creator.

JS: So once again, donmcgregor.com is where to go to find Don’s oeuvre and the latest news about his many projects. Thanks for taking the time, Don. The Write Now! audience appreciates it.

DM: My pleasure, Jim.

The all-new graphic novel, The Spider: Scavengers of the Slaughtered Sacrifices by Don McGregor and Gene Colan is available through the Vanguard Productions website: www.creativemix.com/vanguard.

Jim Salicrup has been on the comics scene for many years, including stints as editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man line and Associate Publisher/Editor-in-Chief at Topps Comics. Jim, of course, also wrote the legendary Sledge Hammer limited series, amongst other comics, and is on the advisory board of the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA).

THE END

One Writer’s Journey

Clawing My Way To The Top

by WILLIAM HARMS B ill Harms is the author of the critically acclaimed graphic novel, Abel. He was an intern at Marvel in the ’90s and my assistant when I was Editor-in-Chief of Byron Preiss’s Virtual Comics line. Bill went on to a career as an editor in the gaming industry, but never stopped writing. I asked him to give a view from the inside of what it’s like to try to break into the world of paying comics work. Bill’s talent is a given. His story is about the road to making a writing career, a road which he’s still on. You can find out more about him at his website: www.williamharms.com.

— DF

I

owe my desire to be a writer to Mike Linderman, who was my best friend when I was kid going to Paddock Elementary School in Beatrice, Nebraska. We always read horror stories and watched horror movies together, and when we were in the fourth grade, Mike had the idea of writing a horror novel.

Flush from reading Stephen King’s The Shining, the two of us sat down and co-wrote a 100-page sequel to Murders in the Rue Morgue. Titled Terrors in the Rue Morgue, our tale of horror was about two ghost-hunting detectives named Bill Thompson and Kilmic Robbins; there was nary an orangutan in sight. [In the original work, the murderer was an escaped orangutan. —DF] Our book has disappeared into the mists of time, but I’m sure that each and every line was a microcosm of literary brilliance.

I don’t think Mike ever wrote anything else after that, but I was hooked and spent every free minute churning out Stephen

King-inspired short stories. Sadly, despite my best efforts, my writing career hadn’t really gone anywhere by the time I left elementary school. But I kept writing, and in junior high I became a voracious reader of comic books. It was after reading Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns that I decided to try my hand at writing comics.

My first real attempt to break in came in 1989, after I graduated from high school. DC had just started a new Dr. Fate monthly and by issue two, I knew that I was Photo by Mark Madeo. destined to write the book. So I wrote a long pitch to editor Karen Berger and mailed it off. She wrote me back, saying that she wasn’t looking for a new writer, but that I should contact Joe Orlando, who was heading up DC’s new talent program.

Invigorated by what I saw as a personal recommendation, I sent a package to Joe and waited for him to call and welcome me to the fold.

I’m still waiting for that call.

A short time later, I went off to the University of Nebraska where I majored in English Literature. During those years, I wrote a number of small press comics for places like Boneyard Press and contributed to Caliber’s Negative Burn anthology. That wasn’t getting me anywhere with Marvel and DC, though, so between my junior and senior years (the summer of 1994), I interned at Marvel. I really had no interest in editing comics, but I knew that my best shot at getting a job writing them was to hang out with editors and get to know them.

By the time my internship was over, I had sold a Ren & Stimpy script to editor Tim Tuohy and had two other Ren & Stimpy ideas in for approval. A couple weeks later I submitted a proposal for a Werewolf by Night series, and artist Jim Fern was hired by Marvel to do character designs.

The whole package was winding its way up through Marvel’s hierarchy and word was that Carl Potts, the last stop before the book was shown to then-EIC Tom DeFalco, really liked the idea. Tim told me, “You’re on your way.”

Then the infamous company restructuring known as “Marvelution” happened and all the editors I knew were laid off. I was back to square one.

Around this same time, I started work on a prose short story called “Abel” that was set during World War II and was about a young boy being terrorized by his older Karen Berger’s letter to a young William Harms, in response to his pitch for the Dr. Fate monthly.

WILLIAM HARMS | 63

Art from the beginning of William Harms’ Abel. Art by Mark Bloodsworth. [©2004 William Harms & Mark Bloodsworth.]

brother. For most of my writing life, I’ve had a weird dichotomy within me. I’m divided between my desire to write hardcore literary fiction and my desire to write more pop-oriented fiction, particularly horror. After “Abel” was published in a couple of magazines, I scrapped my plans to write it as a novel and instead decided to write it as a comic book.

Not only would this possibly assuage my conflicting desires, but I also figured that a mature, literary piece of comic work would get me noticed faster than if I kept sending out super-hero-oriented pitches. And the thing that made Abel so appealing was that its ending is extremely shocking. My hope was that if I delivered a great story with an unforgettable ending, people would be hard pressed to forget about it. And so I teamed with artist Mark Bloodworth and we started work on Abel.

By this time, I was a year and a half out of college and was working for Ford Motor Credit in Omaha, Nebraska doing customer service. I figured that I was condemned to that existence. After all, I was engaged to be married in a few months and, Abel notwithstanding, there was no movement on the writing front. It was getting to be time to settle down and accept my lot in life.

Then in February of 1997, I received a phone call from Danny Fingeroth asking me if I wanted to come to New York City and interview for an editorial assistant position that had just opened up at Virtual Comics. Danny had been searching through a stack of old résumés and come across mine. He was impressed enough by it to call me. (Never underestimate the power of a well-written cover letter and résumé.) Just like the internship at Marvel, I had only a nominal interest in editing comics; however, what better way to learn about writing comics than from the man who used to edit Spider-Man? Plus, I figured he’d introduce me to all kinds of industry folks, William Harms’ original pitch letter to Dan Vado when attempting to sell him on the Abel comic. The pitch was initially unsuccessful.

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thus increasing my exposure.

And so I took off two days without pay from my job and hopped onto a bus at around four in the morning on a Thursday. After enduring a hellish trek across the country, I interviewed with Danny early Friday afternoon. The next night, I was on a bus heading home.

Monday I was back to work at Ford at seven in the morning.

About a week later, A page from one of William’s earlier published Danny called and efforts, “King David’s Skull,” originally offered me the published in Negative Burn #45. Art by Felipe position, with the Echevarria. [©2004 William Harms.] caveat that Virtual’s future was in doubt. Undaunted, I quit my job, sold my car, and moved to NYC, leaving my fiancée back in Omaha. She’d join me after our August wedding.

Alas, things didn’t work out and Virtual Comics was shuttered a couple months after I got there. I moved back to

Another scene from William Harms & Mark Bloodsworth’s Abel. [©2004 William Harms & Mark Bloodsworth.]

Omaha and got a job with an insurance company.

Some good did come out of working at Virtual Comics, though. It motivated me to get out of Nebraska and pursue a proper job in publishing. After our wedding in August, my wife and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area (which is where I was born) and I parlayed my experience with Marvel and Virtual Comics into a job working for PC Gamer magazine as an assistant disc editor (which meant I wrote the first 15 pages of the magazine each month and helped collect demos.)

As all of this was going on, I was continually shopping Abel around. I sent it to every publisher I could think of, and though many folks thought it was a great story, everyone rejected it. However, in his initial rejection letter, Slave Labor Graphics publisher Dan Vado told me that if everyone else passed on it, I should contact him again. And so I did, and this time he agreed to publish it. There was no upfront money for Mark or me, but the book was going to come out.

And that’s all that mattered.

About eight months after my wife and I moved, Abel was released by Slave Labor Graphics to a great deal of acclaim.

Rachel Pollack, World Fantasy Award-winning author (and scribe of comics such as Doom Patrol), wrote a glowing introduction and a host of respected professionals and publications, from Paul Jenkins (who wrote Wolverine: Origin) to Comic Shops News, gave me wonderful quotes to use in the book’s promotion. Everyone who read Abel seemed to love it. “Here we go,” I thought. “This time I really am on my way.”

The response from the comic book industry was deafening silence.

By now I had worked my way up the editorial ladder at PC Gamer and with the dotcom bubble in full expansion mode, I went to CNET Networks, a technology-oriented online magazine that offered news and product reviews,

where I was hired as an executive editor. Suddenly I was managing the editorial vision of a website that received millions of visitors a month, a large editorial staff, a massive freelance budget, and a syndication arrangement with America Online. I had no time to read comics, let alone write them. And with the response, or lack thereof, to Abel, I figured writing comics just wasn’t in the cards. My plan was to work on a novel whenever I had the time (which wasn’t very often) and my dream of writing comics faded away.

Unfortunately, the dotcom bubble eventually burst, and The cover to the AiT/Planet Lar graphic like thousands of other fine folks, novel edition of Abel. Cover art by I was out of a job. As my Brian Wood. [©2004 William Harms unemployment stretched from & Mark Bloodsworth.] weeks to months, I started to reexamine my life and what I really wanted to do. And I came to the same conclusion that I had after co-writing Terrors in the Rue Morgue all those years earlier: I want to write for a living.

After reading an article about Larry Young’s San Franciscobased publishing house, AiT/Planet Lar, which had a proven track record of reissuing graphic novels, I contacted them to see if they would be interested in re-releasing Abel. They agreed, and Abel came out a second time in September of 2002.

This time the response was a little more heartening.

Dan Vado’s initial rejection letter when William Harms’ pitched Abel as a Slave Labor Graphics series. He later agreed to publish it.

WILLIAM HARMS | 65

easy to get yourself and your work noticed by mainstream Before the book entertainment companies, even if you don’t have the weight of was released, a DC or Marvel behind you. With the advances in publishing someone from software, anyone can create a professional-looking comic. And Universal Studios many magazines and newspapers are more than willing to called Larry to review or cover independent comics. (Just make sure you inquire about the actually send them out to every publication that might be interrights. Since I ested.) didn’t have repreThe Internet is an excellent writer’s tool, especially when it sentation, Larry comes to networking and meeting people. It doesn’t beat going got me in touch to a comics convention, but it’s the next best thing. And don’t with Ken F. Levin. fall for the old writing workshop belief that “the work should (Ken was one of speak for itself.” Unless you’re Cormac McCarthy or Thomas the original Pynchon, that strategy isn’t going to get you anywhere. You founders of First should always be ready to go into self-promotion mode and Comics and he make sure that everyone knows who you are and what you’re now represents working on. and works with Of course, since comics is primarily a visible medium, you’ll some of the go much further, much faster, if you find one or two good biggest names in artists and develop relationships with them. Work with them to comics, including develop a comic series or graphic novel and take it to a Neil Gaiman, Mike convention and show it to anyone who’ll look at it. If no one will Mignola, and publish it, release it yourself. The industry is filled with profesMark Millar, sionals who self-published their own work and the stigma of among many such undertakings is long gone. In fact, I would love to selfothers.) publish my own comic one day, just for the experience.

Nothing ever Art from Harms’ upcoming project with artist John McCrea, The biggest thing I’ve realized, though, is that I no longer happened with Dead or Alive. It will be published by Image Comics. measure success by whether or not Marvel or DC is publishing Universal, but Ken [©2004 William Harms.] my work. Sure it’d be nice to work for them one day, but I take now reps all of my a great deal of pride in the fact that I can now write and comic book work, both to publishers and Hollywood, and things publish the kind of stories that I want to write and publish. And are slowly starting to come together, especially since he gets ultimately, that’s the most important thing. my pitches in front of people who would most likely ignore me.

Maybe, after fifteen years, I’m finally on my way.

And though I have yet to land the high-profile writing Hopefully you’ll join me. assignment that will vault me to the top of Wizard’s Top Ten Writers List, the fact that such well-placed and respected people have expressed confidence and interest in my work has given me a huge boost. This time I’m going to stick with it, for as long as it takes.

My second graphic novel with AiT, Bad Mojo, is ready for an August 2004 release, and I’m working on a project called Dead or Alive that Eisner-winner John McCrea is going to illustrate (it’s going to be published by Image) and I have several other projects in various stages of development, including an original screenplay and a novel. I still have my day job (I’m back at PC Gamer as senior editor), but I’m starting to see the light at the end if the tunnel.

So what does all of this have to do with you? In his book On Writing, Stephen King describes how, before he’d sold his novel, Carrie, he was thinking about the future and whether he’d be a working author or if he’d be the guy with five half-finished books sitting in a drawer that he’d “finish” some day. The image of myself at 50 with a drawer full of unfinished work terrifies me and, if you’re a writer, a similar vision of yourself should terrify you, too. If you want to write, you write; that’s all there is to it. You can buy and read a hundred books from Writer’s Digest, but none of them is going to do you a lick of good if you don’t sit down and write and develop and mature your craft.

The good news is that this is a great time to be writing comics, especially if you’re just starting out. Because of Art by Steve Morris for Harms’ upcoming AiT/PlanetLar graphic novel Bad Mojo. the success of comic book-optioned movies, it’s pretty

THE END

[©2004 William Harms.]

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William Harms’ written proposal for Bad Mojo, initially breaking it down as a threeissue series. [©2004 William Harms.]

The cover to the graphic novel Bad Mojo.

Art by Steve Morris. [©2004 William Harms.]

WILLIAM HARMS | 67

[©2004 William Harms.]

Bill’s full script for pages of Bad Mojo.

Art by Steve Morris. [©2004 William Harms.]

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[©2004 William Harms.]

WILLIAM HARMS | 69

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[©2004 William Harms.]

Many thanks to Bill Harms for the extended excerpt from Bad Mojo. [©2004 William Harms.]

WILLIAM HARMS | 71

NEXT ISSUE:

#

9

M AG A Z I N E

Filled with lots of NUTS & BOLTS examples of Neal’s writing and art!

Neal Adams’ Monsters ©20 04

In this exclusive interview, Neal talks about all facets of comics writing and gives us a look at how he does it!

Neal Adams

You know him as one of the most important comics artists of all time!

But NEAL ADAMS also plots and scripts with the best of them!

Plus:

Y BY RB OVVEER w CCO Neew AAllll--N

S M A D A L A NE Buddy Bradley ©2004 Peter Bagge

• An interview with super-hot, super talented GEOFF JOHNS (Flash, JSA, Teen Titans)!

• An interview with PETER BAGGE, iconoclastic writer/artist of Hate!

• More writing lessons from DENNIS O’NEIL! • More Nuts & Bolts tips on writing from top comics pros!

• And much, much more!

Wolff & Byrd ©2004 Batton Lash

Teen Titans ©2004 DC Com

ics, Inc.

• An interview with BATTON LASH, whose Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre series is celebrating its 10th anniversary and still going strong!

SUBSCRIBE TO WRITE NOW! 4 issues: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). Single copies: $8 US

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Feedback Letters from our readers Hello, Mr. Fingeroth: I have been buying Write Now! since the first issue, and I love it. Very informative, very interesting, and an excellent value.

Now, of course, come the suggestions. One thing I would like to see more of would be information on how to get our scripts in the hands of the right person. What do we send, and to whom?

If you are taking requests on future interviews, I have a couple. One person I would like to see in your magazine in the future is Peter David. I’ve been a fan of his work for years and would like to hear his story. I also think Jolly R. Blackburn, of Knights of the Dinner Table fame, would make an excellent interview.

Thanks again for putting out such a great magazine. With so much attention paid to the artists in comic books, it is nice of someone to finally pay attention to us writers.

Sean Mulligan Via the Internet Thanks for the enthusiastic comments and great suggestions, Sean. You may, before too long, see one or both of the gentlemen you mention in the pages of Write Now!

Danny: First off, love the magazine! I’ve always been interested in writing (poems, short stories). However, I never thought about writing comics, which is weird, because I’ve always been a fan.

Then, I found Write Now! on the comics rack and was immediately hooked.

The Jeph Loeb interview in issue #7 was great. He gave a lot of insight into the real work that goes on behind the scenes. I notice that in a lot of interviews with established writers, they advise us (the unknown authors) to send our work to editors and producers. Is this really a good idea or are we just bothering an already very busy editor or producer?

Also, What do you think about submitting ideas and stories to the big companies? (Marvel, DC, Image, etc.) Should you knock on their door or should you get published and hope they knock on yours?

Thanks again. The magazine is great! Can’t wait for the next issue.

Chris Campanozzi via the Internet Your questions are all great, Chris. The bottom line is, you have to get yourself noticed without becoming annoying or threatening to an editor or producer. Being published before and having people knock on your door can’t be beat. Aside

from that, do you have an “elevator pitch”? (That is, a one sentence idea you can—politely—recite to a decision-maker should you find yourself with them somewhere for a minute or less?) Have you tried making friends with assistants? They can often get their boss’s attention if they like your stuff. And often they go on to become decision-makers themselves.

There’s no one way to break in, which is why reading in WN’s interviews about how different people have done it can be inspirational to people trying to get in. Remember: nearly every “insider” started as an “outsider.”

Dear Mr. Fingeroth, I want to thank you for making Write Now! magazine happen.

It’s a welcome sight every time a new issue arrives at my local comic book store. Issue #7 was exceptionally noteworthy with the cover story on Jeph Loeb, as well as Lee Nordling’s article, “Comics Into Film: A Cautionary Tale.” In the Loeb interview, you really explore the details behind his life as not just a comics writer, but a screenwriter as well. Mr. Nordling’s article about Hollywood acquisitions of comics properties was really eye-opening to this reader, and comes from a reliable source with Platinum Studios.

The only suggestion I would have for Write Now! is that you have more articles like Mr. Nordling’s. Although I enjoy interviews with established creators, I would especially enjoy more in-depth articles on specific subject matter in writing comics, animation and sci-fi, such as a thorough anatomy of a successful comics pitch.

Please don’t take this suggestion harshly. Your magazine is still head and shoulders above just about every other comicsoriented publication out there. Keep up the good work!

Sincerely, Chris Arrant via the Internet Thanks, Chris. Your points are heard and appreciated. I always try to give a balanced mix of interviews, articles, and how-to’s in each issue of DFWN! (How did you like John Jackson Miller’s successful pitch for the Crimson Dynamo series we ran last issue? That was a real eye-opener, don’t you think? Ditto for William Harms’s article about his career in this issue.) And the questions I ask in interviews are always geared to elicit highly informational answers.

Now it’s your turn! Tell me what you thought of this issue!

You can send your comments to me at WriteNowDF@aol.com or via regular mail, to: Danny Fingeroth, Write Now!, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614.

I especially can’t wait to hear what you thought of the crossover with Draw!

THE END FEEDBACK | 73

[READ NOW continued from page 2.]

the DVD are perfect companion pieces to each other. The disc features yours truly and Mr. Manley showing and telling how we do comics—not unlike the courses we teach.

Speaking of which…

Starting in September, I’ll be teaching three courses at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Once again, I’ll be teaching Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels. I’ll also be teaching a Level Two Intensive: Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels. In the latter course, over a period of one week—four nights and two full weekend days—you will write a comics script. Is it any wonder they call it intensive? In addition, I’ll be organizing and moderating a lecture series (through NYU, but given at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art—MoCCA—in Soho), called Inside The Comics Creators’ Studio, in which eclectic combinations of writers and artists discuss their work. Some people lined up include Dennis O’Neil, Mike Mignola, Axel Alonso, Bob Sikoryak, and Joey Cavalieri. You can got to NYU’s website (www.scps.nyu.edu) for more details and info about other guests in that class. (And special guests always show up in my writing classes, too.)

Also, my book Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society has gone into a second printing! Thanks to all of you who’ve purchased it and told me how much you enjoyed it. It means a lot.

A FOND FAREWELL: It’s with great reluctance that we bid farewell to Write Now!’s ace designer and de facto editorial consultant Chris Day. This is Chris’s last issue, and it’s safe to say that the magazine’s quality, from the first issue through to this one, has been several notches higher than it would have without him. His skill, intelligence and patience will be sorely missed.

CORRECTION: Please note, in the Yvette Kaplan interview last issue, the illustration on page 63 is actually an exposure sheet, and is from Debra Solomon’s Cartoon Network special, The Private Eye Princess. It’s ©2002 Cartoon Network.

Okay, you’ve been extremely patient. Much appreciated.

Now it’s time to let you get into the issue and meet The Thief of Time for yourself!

Write Away!

Danny Fingeroth

THE END

If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher!

Advertise In WRITE NOW!

his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere

Prepay for two ads in Alter Ego, DRAW!, Write Now!, Back Issue, or any combination and save:

thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one.

If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT, and it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. If that’s the case, here’s what you should do: 1) Go ahead and READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, and see what you think.

2) If you enjoy it enough to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and purchase a legal download of it from our website, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. We’d love to have you as a regular paid reader.

3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce.

We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.

TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

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Think

THE

CROSSOVER

is AWESOME? Then wait’ll you see:

me Thief of Ti

HOW TO DRAW COMICS

anny ©2004 D Manley and Mike Fingeroth

From Script To Print

From initial idea to finished comic, WRITE NOW! Editor-In-Chief DANNY (Spider-Man) FINGEROTH and DRAW! Editor-In-Chief MIKE (Batman) MANLEY show you how it’s done in this feature-filled DVD!

90 minutes, packed with Bonus Features!

Great On Its Own, This DVD Is Also The Perfect Companion Piece To The WRITE NOW!/DRAW! Crossover!

NOW SHIPPING (or order in the August PREVIEWS)! $34 US Postpaid Price Includes US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Copy Canada, $3 Per Copy Surface, $7 Per Copy Airmail

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom.

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