Episode 3 - Eric Trautmann

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Behind the lens. I am your host, James Bowers, an audio podcast where interviews of individuals reveal perspective. I'm here today with Eric Troutman, comic book writer, editor, and graphic designer. Welcome, Eric. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

All right. So what was your first show or concert and what did you think after seeing it?

SPEAKER_00 0:21

I feel like I should warn everyone that my parents are recovering folkies. It was the late 70s. My mom's favorite artist was Gordon Lightfoot. And uh apparently the first show I ever attended was in her womb at a Gordon Lightfoot concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga, New York.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

What about what about like the one that you what's something you remember too? I mean, there's that. What about like a show that maybe you remember seeing and it had an impact on you? The first uh I mean listen to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is great, you know, in the womb I mean you can't imagine, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

But oh yeah, and and for 20 years thereafter.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Um exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Uh the first show that was a more traditional rock and roll show was Billy Joel in Montreal. My uncle had gotten amazing tickets.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

But how did you get to Montreal?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Well, I'm from upstate New York. It's a couple hours south. And then I again I was pretty young. I was maybe maybe 10 um and was on the glass houses tour. Um, I've seen him probably four times all in. I was always I um I played guitar, but I learned on a piano, so uh that was the Billy Joel heyday, right? Um he was always a favorite. So that that that's the first one I remember going, I'm at a I'm at a real rock show.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

That's awesome. And that was with your uncle. With my uncle Steve, yep. Very cool. Uh, what's something people misunderstand about how you do what you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Uh common misconception is that uh um writing is just typing. Um I ran into that a lot in my Microsoft days. It was like, oh well, you can just go type that up. It's like, no, I need to think about what I'm typing, that's part of it. Um and it is a labor of sorts, it's not physical labor, but the mental fatigue sets in pretty quick. Um if you're if in my estimation, everybody's mileage may vary, but in my estimation, if you're writing a story honestly and diligently, uh it's a lot of mental horsepower that has to get employed.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Still burns calories. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

That's a common one. I think the other big misconception is that uh um comics fandom believes that the creatives on a comic have a lot more control over the comic, especially at like Marvel or DC, than we actually do.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Oh, so that's not that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

No, uh in my DC days, um I wrote a miniseries called JSA vs. Cobra. Um it was just the Justice Society, um, Cobra, not the G.I. Joe one, but there was a similarly named group um that was created by Jack Kirby back in the day, and uh was like, oh cool, I get to I get to do something and that Jack Kirby created. That's excellent. Um, but at the time when they pitched it to me as a thing I might be interested in, was do you want to do this reboot series about Cobra? Okay. So I wrote pitch after pitch after pitch to this editor that are all focused on Cobra, because they'd just done a big event um where they'd kind of reshaped the group. And prior to that, I'd been co-writing a book with Greg Rucca called Checkmate. It's a superhero spy book, and this costume terrorist group, Cobra, basically a death cult, that is intent on bringing about the apocalypse. That's essentially what their goal is, um, were major villains in it. They were the big antagonists, so this would have been continuing on from work I'd already done. It was a subject matter I was familiar with and comfortable with, and the editor kept spiking it, and I could not figure out why. And she get kept getting angrier and angrier with me. And I was, I don't understand what it is you want. Explain to me what I'm doing wrong. She's like, Oh, well, I don't understand why you will not put the Justice Society in this book. Like, this is the first time you've mentioned the Justice Society to me after two months of pitching. Do you want the Justice Society in the book? I can do that. Well, internally, we call this book JSA versus Cobra. Well, I'm external and nobody has referred to me with that title yet. Um, and then once we went over that one pitch later, she's like, okay, you're good to go. Yeah, so it's there's not as many uh because it's such a large office and it's you know editorial buckets don't really talk to each other very well, or at least they didn't back then. I don't know what it's like now. Um it's uh it's often surprising how how they they just don't coordinate at all. It's like that guy's in the office next door to yours. You you don't even have to pick up a phone, you can yell out your open door and get an answer.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Um it's occasionally uh there's a strong vibe, even at the the big publishers, that my my uncle's got a burn, let's put the show on here. Right. It's uh it's a little confusing.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Who are what shaped the way you see things, not just creatively, but you know, as a person?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Uh my parents. Um I uh I still they're still both with me, and uh I uh I talk to them every week. We live at opposite ends of the country. Um I grew up in upstate New York, right on the Canadian border, and that's where my parents still are. Um and out here in Washington, it's a real it's a real job getting back there. I um if I don't want to be racing for connecting flights uh with layovers and stuff, that can I can get to England faster than I can get to my parents' house. That's crazy. Yeah, it is a little insane. Um so that was a big one. I mean, literary stuff, um, because I was an avid reader from a very young age. Um, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes was a very early influence. Um uh I'm blanking on the name. Um uh fantasy guys. Oh, uh Lynn Carter, El Spreg de Camp, uh, and Robert E. Howard, the Conan stuff. Um, that was pretty formative early on. Uh Fleming's James Bond, uh Douglas Adams is a surprisingly large influence on me. Um, one of the many things I have in common with my frequent partner, uh Greg Rocca. Um and uh this is a little bit of a weird one. Um I believe his name was Franz Joseph, and in the late 60s, early 70s he wrote a uh a book called the Star Trek Starfleet Technical Manual. And it struck me at the time, because my dad had a copy of it somehow, and I have since stolen it from him. It's still on my bookshelf. Um the uh the framing wor sequence for the book, the framing device, uh comes directly out of one of the episodes where Enterprise had traveled back to then contemporary America um and uh had a series of interactions with the Air Force. And this book is the real world reprint that has somehow snuck out of military custody um about information that they had gathered about Starfleet during that incident. So it's like it's like uh it's a very Grant Morrison, this artifact fell out of fiction and into the real world. Um not long after I discovered that um there was a huge resurgence in popularity of uh dem domestic board games, trivial pursuit being a large driver of that. And there was a magazine called Games, and uh its editor was Will Shorts, who still hosts the puzzle on weekend edition on NPR. Um and in every issue there's a fake ad. And if you can spot the fake ad, you win some kind of non-prize. I don't I don't remember what it was. But if you look at a lot of my graphic design stuff, I'm often hired uh to create things that look like they were real um but aren't.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

That's very cool.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

The the back covers of the series Lazarus. Um I did those. Um there's a there's a guy who's taken over the Photoshop side of that because he's much better than I am. Um, but I help craft them. So it it feels like real ads from various points in the history of this universe.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Um there was a unlike those ads where we bought X-ray specs at the other comic books we read.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah, well, I mean, in one case, uh this was my favorite. Um, there's a faction in Lazarus that's from they are basically it's rival mega corporations slash crime families, all kind of battling each other in very simple terms. One of these, D'Souza, is from uh Brazil, I think. Um, and they are a major meat supplier. Like in the real world, a lot of beef comes from Brazil, uh, and Argentina, that's another big one. Um, so I had done an ad from the 60s. It looks like it belonged on the back cover of Life. It's all retro and aged, and I type um specific, uh period specific typography, but the Photoshop work was taking a photo of a piece of steak and reshaping it into the outline of uh South America. And I remember doing it, and it took me hours, and I did it. It looks great, I think. Um people seem to like it, and I just every time Gab would come into my office, my wife would come into my office and say, uh, um, what are you working on? I have the weirdest job ever. I'm photoshopping meat. So I would say the combination of the Star Trek technical manual and games magazine, the desire to make real-world ephemera, right, that has sort of, for lack of a better term, fallen out of a fictional setting, um, is very much a thing I enjoy and uh shapes a lot of the stuff I do. Even on the current stuff like the forged uh the back matter that we include in in the uh in the individual issues, there's like you know, insignia and maps and you know stuff from that universe as if presented from that universe, so that all needs to be designed and created, and I I love doing that stuff, and that's uh I think uh uh potentially um a form of storytelling.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

So, in regard to that, what's the hardest thing for you as to staying true to your vision when you know people want results quickly?

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Fortunately, the the most I've done it is for people who get it. Um like Lazarus is written by my friend Greg, who I co-write The Forged with. In the case of The Forged, um I'm I'm often the one who drives it. Um, you know, uh we'll look at an issue of The Forged and okay, well, this is subject matter that would be appropriate and related to what happened in the issue to include as supplementary material in that issue. Um so often I'll be like, Hey, can you write up a bio on this guy, or can you write up a you know a secret military paper that we're gonna redact about this element of the blot or whatever? So I mean one of the ways to stay true to my vision is I I get to drive it a lot. Um Yeah, and in the case of the image comic stuff, it's unlike DC, like I was saying, where you know the editors don't often talk to each other. Everybody on the creative team is on a team. We all talk to each other, we all exchange ideas, it's a much more free and open communication than mainstream you know, big two comics. So that helps a lot.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

When it's all stripped away, what do you hope people feel um when they experience your work I um I tend to I tend to have a hard time with questions like this?

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Um Do you remember an old 80s sitcom, W Carrapee in Cincinnati? I do. Right. About a radio station, failing radio station. Watched it, loved it. I still watch it, I love it. It's one of my comfort shows. Um one of the characters, a DJ named Dr. Johnny Fever, the late Howard Hessman, um cracks a joke on the air about a garbage strike going on in Cincinnati and suggests that listeners throw their garbage on city hall steps and then like 30,000 people do it. And he suddenly has Mike Fright now. He can't function on the air because oh my god, there's people on the other end of that listening. So I have a hard time similarly. Like I sit in my dark office, I type my little stories, I send them off to to to the artist, I you know, I do the production work to make sure it can become ink on paper. Um, and that's sort of where my connection to it ends.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yeah, I think you as a person are probably sitting there. You want it to be good. Yeah, right. And I think think that's the one thing that you're hop you you want it to be good, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

I guess in terms of a broader audience, the thing, the thing I hope people take away from it um is engagement. Something about it made them laugh, made them smile, thought was cool. Um, you know, and and it'll depend largely on the the work itself, like something like The Foraged, I don't really want the same kind of emotional spot response um from readers of a vertigo graphic novel I worked on years ago called Shooters, which was based on my brother-in-law's Death in Combat. Like that's a different animal entirely. So I don't I don't want people guffawing at at all of the naughty jokes there. I want I you know, I there was a different story being told, but in the main, what I want is some kind of emotional response, other than throwing the book across the room because they're so fed up with me.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

But so in your own story, how did how did you what what comic or story made you think I want to do this? This is what I want to, I want to write this, or you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

I uh I apologize now because this is a somewhat long-winded answer, but I'll get us there. Um as I said, I grew up in upstate New York. Um where I grew up and the time I grew up, it was not unusual for families to go on extended like summer vacations. We're going to the Grand Canyon, we're going to Bush Gardens, we're going to Florida, we're going to Disney, you know, and my parents just don't didn't do that. They both uh I was a latchkey kid of the 70s and 80s.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

You and me both.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, and it was great. I love it. And I was an only child, so it was I spent a lot of time kind of in my own head and reading and drawing and doing creative things. Um, but uh they decided in their very NPR parent way that our big family vacation that we were gonna do wasn't gonna be to go to an amusement park or a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon. We were going to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, which is a functioning Revolutionary War era town. Everybody was you know, it was a working village, there was a blacksmith, there was a candle maker, etc. etc. The best part for me was they did a reenactment of an actual battle. That was the coolest thing, but right um, yeah, I w I couldn't have been less interested in in where we were going. But how we got there was great. Um it was a multi-day trip to get to where we were going. So we we didn't drive, we didn't fly. My parents decided we were going via Amtrak. And because it was multiple days on the on the train, um, they decided to get sleeper cars, and rather than have all three of us in the one room, they decided, provided I was not gonna be a you know a fear-old scoundrel, um I could have my own sleeping car all to myself. They thought it was gonna be in the compartment next to me. Wait, how old were you? I was like nine or ten.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Oh, okay. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yeah, oh, it's great. Um, and they thought it was gonna be in the compartment next to them. I was at the other end of the train. So all of a sudden, I am free from parental supervision, anonymity, baby. I'm I'm on a train. I it's such a James Bond moment for me, right? Like total like Matt Helm International man of cool, you know. Absolutely, and I loved it. And uh, but the best part of the train travel, other than I got a break from having to be amongst family every second of it. Um, we did a multi-hour layover coming and going through Washington, DC, and my parents decided we've got time enough to get off the train and kind of barnstorm through a couple of the Smithsonians. Uh, we did Erin Space, Natural History, um, the the art gallery, I forget what the actual name is, but um, and I was told, like, since I had been good on the train and was continuing to be well behaved, as far as they knew, um, I could get whatever I wanted within reason from the gift shop. So at Erin Space, I got astronaut ice cream, it's horrible, by the way. Um it would make me not want to come back to Earth ever. It's like you can't do this to people and expect them to come back. Um at uh natural history I got this cool like spy scope thing. It was sort of a about the size and shape of a large pen, but it was uh in one configuration it was a uh telescope, and in another it was a microscope, and I thought that was super cool. Um you still have it? No. Uh they stopped making it and I've been looking for it forever.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

And uh it's always a tough thing to find those things.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yeah, well, and when Gab and I were in DC a couple my wife and I were in uh DC a couple couple years ago and did the Smithsonians and stuff, and I hit every gift shop. And uh I asked a billion people that worked at Smithsonian, like and they looked at me like a dog that had been shown a card trick. Like, I don't even know.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

You gotta go meet that lady that sits in the basement behind the cage and convince her to go look in the box.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

That would have been great, but no, most of them just were like really confused, A, as to what it was, and B, why would you want that? You're an adult, they don't know me. Um but at the art museum, uh, the big gift, and it was expensive in the era, it was a big fat hardcover collection called the Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics. And it was incredible because this predates like digital scanning and desktop publishing, it was photographic reproductions from the original art pages of uh comics and comic strips that were being turned into comics in the 30s and 40s, uh, of first appearance of Superman, first appearance of Batman, uh early plastic man, like lots of the classic superhero stuff. But it was also my first exposure to Walt Kelly's Pogo the Possum, uh Will Eisner's The Spirit, the Harvey Kurtzman Easy War comics. Like this was really an impressive collection. And I still own my original copy, and every time I find a copy, like in a used bookstore or something, I grab it because at some point somebody's gonna ask me, Well, what what do you consider the holy grail of comics? Here, read this. Yeah, yeah. Um, but the best part of the book was in between each section there was biographical material about the creators. Um, and uh like uh Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man, um, was a hugely popular comic artist when he created Plastic Man, and it's super funny and goofy and cartoony, but that style fell out of favor as his career went on, and he ended up drawing like porn comics for girly magazines, um, and essentially ate his own gun. Um, true tales of human drama on these pages in between like the dancing raccoon and you know. Um and I remember it it was like a gong sounding. I I I because when you're nine or ten, I forget how old I was, but you know, you don't think about how the stuff is made, right? You know, like TV just happens, it might as well be happening inside the television itself. Comic books, I'm sure there's a big machine somewhere, they press a button and it spits out that month Spider-Man.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

And the reality of it is is somebody like you is sitting down and writing this out.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

And that was my first exposure to oh, wait, people make this, right? And then it was like, wait, people make this as a job? I can do this, I can do this. This could be my job. Um, and I spent the rest of my dismal academic career ignoring what the teachers were telling me and reading the assignments and doing the homework because I was trying to figure out comics. And the corollary to that, um there was a period where I was living with my grandparents over a summer because we were moving from one town to the town my parents still live in in upstate New York, and we were building a house. The house was not going to be ready by the time school started, but my grandparents who also lived in the town we were moving to and lived a block or two away from the school, um, were right there. So I would go stay with them and not have to switch schools mid-year. And uh excuse me. Um while I was there during that summer and I was bored out of my mind, um, because all of our stuff was in storage, I didn't have my books, I didn't yeah, I just I had some clothes and a couple of comics and whatever I had acquired after this move. But I was pretty bored. Malone is a very small town with not a lot going on. And a guy who worked for my dad at the retail drugstore that my dad uh ran, he was um uh pharmacy uh he was pharmacist and uh and general store manager for a regional chain of drug stores called Your Dad was yeah, my dad was uh Um and uh so this guy who worked for my dad had what um he had a he showed up with a refrigerator box and a washing machine box filled to overflowing with what are called strip com uh strip excuse me strip cover comics it's hard to say um back in the day I when you were selling your comics on magazine racks if stuff didn't sell you could return it but they didn't want the whole comic they just tear the cover off and you were supposed to as the retailer destroy the comic itself nobody ever did that so you would send in the cover cover you'd get credit for the next cheaper to send just the cover right right and uh so this guy had just hoarded them and none of them was older than like 1975 and it was all I mean it was plenty of superhero stuff a lot of DC a lot of DC science fiction which I love um but it was war comics romance comics horror comics it was just between the Smithsonian book of comic book comics and those two boxes it's like there's the entire genome of American comic books and I read every panel even stuff I didn't care about and some of them like they were missing pages and stuff so part of the fun was figuring out like well what was in between and that's uh that's uh some of my earliest attempts at comics was trying to figure out what happened in between and I was trying to draw those pages I didn't understand that often you work from a script yeah I was a little too young for that um but that uh that was definitely the big influence.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

So essentially you you're in a a state of boredom and then all of a sudden a surprise cardboard box appears and it it's continuing on and here you are today. Yeah um I that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

I was just home in New York visiting my family recently um my dad had uh some medical stuff going on so I had to fly out and help mom with it and uh you know we were just spending a lot of time sitting in the hospital waiting rooms and stuff and just talking about like how did you get here and she never knew any of this stuff and that that was part of the problem it was very cool though that you got to talk to her about it right yeah and she's like I had no idea it's like I know because she kept trying to throw my comics away the entire time I was growing up so who were your earliest influences as far as writing goes and and um you like did you absorb anything from them without realizing it at first or or what? Yeah um on the literary side of things um my first kind of big um book that I I really bonded with I felt really connected to was um uh a volume of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stuff it was a complete Sherlock Holmes it was the first book I'd ever been given that was leather bound that had uh reproductions of the original engravings from the Strand magazine in London at the time um guilt edged pages bound in bookmark it was a fancy book and I I devoured it I loved Sherlock Holmes um Tolkien was a big one um I uh I was really into um strangely the Conan stuff uh which I'm still into I went through a big fantasy period in the 70s because fantasy was everything um and I don't read much of it now but the Robert E. Howard and to a lesser extent the Elspreg de Camp and Lynn Carter Conan pastiches from that era I still enjoy um Douglas Adams the hitchhiker stuff um uh Bigwin was weirdly Brian Daly um he wrote among other things I mean he wrote many things but he was probably best known for writing uh the NPR radio dramas for Star Wars uh Star Wars Empire and years later he did Jedi before he passed away um and he had written the first three Han solo novels that came out in the era where the films were still happening um I loved how that guy wrote that guy that guy just knew how to whip words onto the page and have you want to devour them um in terms of uh like the graphic design stuff the big ones were uh um Franz Joseph had done the Starfleet technical manual which was it's kind of in universe framework was um based on an episode of the original Star Trek series where they had traveled in time this information had been left behind and secured by the US government and then it got leaked or something and that's what you were reading. It was it had fallen out of the fictional Star Trek universe into your hand. And it had like the deck plans for various types of ship we never even saw on screen uh sewing patterns for the uniforms interesting with pantone color references for what the badges and stuff should be it was amazing. Did you still have that I have my dad's copy that I I I squirred away when he wasn't looking and anytime like the Smithsonian book of comic book comics um anytime I see it out in the wild I I grab it. I probably have ten copies of it. No reason why other than I would love to see that sometime I'll I'll bring it into the into the store for you. Okay. All right in fact I will gift you one of my copies um because I have I have ten. Oh all right cool and uh uh so that that whole um fictional thing that becomes real that kind of Grant Morrison stuff um coincided with uh there was a period where suddenly American board games were hugely popular in in America uh trivial pursuit driving the charge for that um there was a magazine published called Games magazine and it was edited by among other people Will Shorts who hosts the the puzzle on NPR weekend edition um he's still doing game stuff um but every issue had a fake ad and you had you won some kind of little bragging rights prize but wasn't it like Will would leave a voice message answering machine voice message or was that him I never I never or something like that I don't know what it was I don't know if that was Will that did that somebody did that. Yeah I I don't know it kind of predates answering machines a little bit oh maybe yeah yeah uh there was like he'd you get some games stuff like here's a crossword puzzle book or something I'm sure it was like that um I never won I almost never could find the ads because they're really good at making them so uh when I started doing graphic design stuff uh in comics largely the stuff I do with Greg Rocca um at one point I start I basically what had happened was we were running behind on an early issue of Lazarus um dystopia I love that book by the way um hopefully when Michael recovers from his latest uh issue he he had a stroke when once we got back on schedule he had a stroke um he's doing fine he's he's got some fatigue and some minor health is this the same individual it's doing with you and Greg on Forge no that's Mike Henderson oh that's Mike Henderson sorry okay um you're saying Michael though uh yeah it's different character I it's amazing how often I send stuff to the wrong guy when I'm emailing stuff um I love it yeah let's put the show on right here I've got a barn um uh she I lost where I was going with that's my fault oh uh so we were behind schedule on Lazarus from the very first issue because there was uh a plan that we were on target to hit and then because of some kind of announcement schedule of when the book was going to come out like well you won't be featured in that if your book isn't ready to come out by X date so we lost like three weeks from the very first issue and we never have been able to catch up and uh so at one at the the inside back cover of every issue of Lazarus um is a preview of the next issue. Here's the cover art and a little catalog copy write up you know of what's going to happen and the release date. Pretty standard um but we were behind enough that Michael hadn't had time to finish the cover to the next issue while I was laying out the inside back cover of the issue. I was like I can't do this without the art and well I don't know so there was some talk about well do we do an ad for a trade paperback or um you know that kind of stuff and I I just hate that right um chances are if they're buying the issue they're not gonna buy the trade. If they're gonna buy the trade they're gonna buy it anyway they're not gonna see the ad in the issue so that kind of they'll know that it's coming out. Right, right. So it just seems like filler. Yeah and so I had floated the idea of well we have all of these factions in this dystopian not too distant future who have all been around for decades. Why don't we do some why don't we do a fake advertisement um for from one of the companies um and I'll make it look as realistic as possible um and that can fill that space and it's kind of fun and and uh so yeah it was a I did a fake pharmaceutical ad for a uh a visual acuity enhancer um but if you read the fine print um it's like yeah this may make your eyeballs explode and you're gonna get needles jammed in your eye and all this and the the gag there was a lot of this was actually copy I'd lifted from actual known side effects of actual visit visual acuities. Yeah every time I see that ad I'm like never putting that in my eye I don't I'm I'm gonna go blind first. I'm never doing that. Yeah um and one of the comments we got back was I thought that was real until I read the really fine print and um my dad's a pharmacist um so I had access to a lot of real world medical ads so I was making sure I had like the terminology right because there are certain things that have to be phrased certain ways to comply with you want it to be real. Yeah right um and that just sort of became a that's gonna be the new back cover on everything. So on every issue following there is a fake ad.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

As we went on I kind of run out of ideas for stuff to do from the past. And a friend of mine who designs posters for like he designed the Black Panther movie poster and stuff. He does real you know large scale big budget um print campaigns for movies and TV shows. But he's also a comic nerd and we had met because uh he used some stock art I had created on the DVD cover of the DC Legends of tomorrow um home video box set. And I was like that's the coolest thing ever right and we've we've just been friends ever since and he's a huge comic nerd so when I was running out of gas I was like I can come up with ideas but my Photoshop skills aren't quite up to yours oh he's to make oh he's so much better. So we we've started uh like I kind of subcontracted him he's he's doing more uh not stuff from the Lazarus past but more things from the Lazarus present day um which is way more his area of expertise I I I'm good at retro typography and making things look old and real he's good at making things look like this should be the the the ad you see in a magazine today this is what's coming. Yeah and uh so that's that it was uh another big thing for me was the you know it's all very much derived from that something from a fictional universe fell into the real world and making it look so real that people are often fooled.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

So when did you realize that comics could be more than a private practice or a hobby? Uh I mean at what point did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 34:01

I mean it happened at some point right I uh I think I always well as an adult I I knew it was um a job I knew it was a thing that could be be uh a career um did you wonder that when you were on the train at a as a 10 year old oh absolutely okay all right so yeah that whole time 10 years 10 years old on you're thinking okay there's a job out here like this and that's when I started like reading the letter columns and and you know the guys who were writing in and it was almost exclusively guys writing into comics like DC or Marvel books in the era that those old comics I had acquired had come from um they were the like the hardcore like nerd guys who knew everyone who inked this issue or drew that issue very much like uh Mark Wade and Kurt Busick you you put the two of them in a room together today and say hey do you remember that issue of Superboy from 1958 or whatever and oh yeah I still have it and they'll tell you all about it and they knew who drew it and you know and everybody on the Masthead they they have some personal connection to them. It's it's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

But that's when I started paying attention to that stuff you got to know who the regular writers into the letter column were um Uncle Elvis that's that's a guy who he's still around um and he's been writing into comics for forever um and now he's got a website you know um so yeah I started paying attention to that stuff but the part where I got really serious about pursuing comics was uh uh I was working at Microsoft and they're uh I it went through so many title changes I think we were called the franchise development group at that point and uh I had been hired by Jordan Weissman uh who founded uh FAFSA and FASA interactive a dice and paper game company and small video game company um creators of Shadowrun Battletech um stuff like that and I had worked in dice and paper game shadowrun was kind of big though for a while it was very big it still exists um FASA itself has long since gone out of business but the the properties are still out there um and people are still doing new battle tech and new shadow run um facet interactive had been acquired by Microsoft and they needed writers and they had this idea of so you're writing storyline essentially you're you're building your world building your world building so what they were planning to do and I think this lasted all of about a week before that got shot in the head but you had all of these video game makers right who knew how to make a game um but didn't know how to create a world um and uh it seemed to Jordan that if you had a group that knew how to build the fictional construct that could support multiple kinds of game um but they would also be the ones who would go out and get your action figures made and your comics made and your novels made and so the guys making the game don't need to worry about any of that. They're just making their game but there's a group that controls the quality and you know we've built to this this setting while your real-time strategy guy over here can do the big wargaming thing and your sim guys over here can do the the flight simulator for the spaceships or whatever you could support multiple types of game and support those with multiple types of exterior licensing um which meant bringing money in not spending money um that was very attractive to Microsoft up until the minute they tried to do it and said oh this is hard we don't like this so we got turned into sort of a triage for internal development of games that the uh VP reviewing the games um would look at and go this story is broken this world doesn't make sense go fix it and we'd get para-dropped onto Teams to quote fix their game story that was our mandate those were our marching orders nobody told that to the game studios so I'd show up and be like oh hey uh the VP wants me to look at your game story and uh fix it and uh that was not greeted warmly right um so a lot of that turned into something else but um yeah it's it opened me up to a lot of different ways to telling story right I was very much locked in a prose mindset for a lot of my early career so with that how did your how did how did your voice as a writer evolve you know maybe without you even noticing at first I became a little less dogmatic about the written word per se because I like I said I I was a a prose guy first comics came later um and uh well I mean I in gaming you're trying to tell story story became the new bug you'd put on the cover as a feature right nobody knew what that meant I spent a lot of my time explaining to people who when I'd ask them tell me your game story well this guy does this then he does this then he does this okay that's your game plot why does he do that where does he do that oh we haven't thought about that um so essentially like a a theme like what is the whole yeah yeah what is your game about what is it about yeah and uh here are my characters this is what he does or she does but why are they doing it right right so I I've been doing that kind of stuff for almost 10 years. Um I built a lot of contacts um and then I remember and again somewhat of a digression and a somewhat long story but it all ties together I promise um I had worked in Dyson Paper tabletop role-playing games for years and uh I had at the time a group here in Washington um that would meet every other Sunday and it was my turn to run a game and I decided I was going to run a superhero game published by yet another local company Green Ronan called Mutants and Masterminds and I had this idea for the setting I didn't want to use the established setting I wanted this kind of blend of 1950s sci-fi DC comics and golden age of Marvel um just kind of goofy and freewheeling and so I started um I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to stuff like this because I love making the props as I discussed earlier like making it look like a real thing. So every character was going to get the cover of their debut issue. So I'm making up fake comics doing period appropriate styles for the cover illustration for whatever year it had come out. I was doing a big map of this city and I was dumping so much money and time into just making prop handouts that eight people were gonna see I was like I'm working too hard I should just do this for real and that's literally when I was like okay I uh I knew I was done at Microsoft I was miserable there um because I had spent so much of my time like I said like tell me what your game story is when okay you told me your plot I got tired of explaining first principles over and over um to people who didn't get it and uh so I was just gonna try and go into comics and at that point uh my group had turned into a licensing group that's what we did and uh we were doing work with Prima Games which was a strategy guide publisher uh I believe it's Random House owned it I think they're gone now but I had convinced my bosses that to tie in with a game that I was doing all this world building work on it was called Perfect Dark Zero I should write the tie-in comic and we should do a deal with our strategy guide publisher to publish it because if nothing else they know how to print in color and they know how distribution works. The people at Primo were like well we don't understand how to make the comic it's like okay you're not gonna have to pay for the license to do this. You're not gonna have to pay for me. You're not gonna have to pay for the art that's all coming out of the budget I had swindled out of my own bosses. You just have to put it on paper and I will talk you through how it all works and the next time you're doing a deal with like say Sony or whoever um hey not only can we do your strategy guide we can do your tie-in comic you'll learn how. So they signed immediately and Microsoft was like we don't understand it go ahead and do it. And uh interesting so I took two major multinational corporations for a ride to build up enough of a war chest and enough cred in the comics industry that uh uh oh and I should add I was also in charge of the novel line for uh Perfect Dark.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

Which is a property Greg loved back when it was a Nintendo property and I convinced him to write the novels um and I tied in my comic series in between his two novels so we had to work closely together. Very cool. And we became friends and then when he got behind schedule on uh that the book Checkmate that I had referenced earlier um he's like you want to go write it yes I do and that's how I got in at DC very cool. What are you most attentive to first are you like the character the theme or momentum or maybe something else again it varies from project to project but in general um character first character is always first um usually by the time I'm sitting down to script um I know who these characters are I know why they're doing what they're doing I know what their goals are um and uh a lot of that comes from working with Greg for so long he's such a Character focused writer, and it's amazing to me. I early on, I mean, years and years and years ago when he was still writing Wonder Woman. Um, I remember watching him talk on a panel about Wonder Woman, and he never called her Wonder Woman, he always called her Diana, and it wasn't affect, it wasn't it wasn't him trying to be like pretentious, it was just that is how he thought of her. That was how his brain formulated her.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

As a person.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Yep. Um and I remember when I had started writing Red Sonia, um, actually Vampirella is a better example. I had started writing Vampirella for Dynamite, and uh not a project I was overly enthusiastic about because I don't know if you know anything about her, but her origin is so confused because multiple writers, and not little guys, uh Grant Morrison, Kurt Buzik, Alan Moore, I think did some, Grant Morrison did some. Everybody has tried to streamline her origin, and now it is, as far as I'm concerned, incomprehensible. Um, so I was dreading that, but I also wasn't wild about the costume, uh the the space thong and the cosmic go-go boots, as I often call them. Yeah, yeah. Um, it was hard to do drama with a character who is frankly designed mostly for the male gaze.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

And uh absolutely I get it. So the very first thing I asked You're trying to build a person, a character, and now this persona is you know oversimplified.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

Yeah. Um and just not what the then current state of the market was really looking for. It was one thing in the 90s when everything was sort of the bad girl craze. Um, but in mid-2000s into the 2010s, it was like that's not what the audience wants. You want girls reading uh you want women reading the character, right? Because why only sell to one half of the market, sell to both? Um and uh to their credit, the editor uh this was uh uh Dynamite Comics wasn't known for licensing titles or taking public domain stuff and remixing it. And I uh I was a little surprised that the owner of the company, Nick Berucci, had purchased Vampirella's rights. Um and uh he was a hundred percent okay, at least initially, with me saying, Look, I'm not the guy for this. If you want me to do this, I'm gonna have to do it the way I would do it. Um and people don't wear costumes day in, day out without ending up in a mental ward somewhere. Right. Um, she's gonna wear clothes. And I thought the idea of a you know six-foot plus warrior vampire woman in red armani um was just as sexy as the space thong in the cosmic go-go boots. And they let me run with it for a really long time before they were finally like at one point I had to engineer the story reason why she's back in the costume and stuff, and I I didn't love doing that, but okay, you know, it's it's your toys, I'm playing with them. Yeah, uh, I'm I'm I tried to be a team player and I did that. Um, unfortunately, in addition to buying the rights, they bought all the um existing artwork, including lots of covers that weren't used. Um and Nick being Nick, every cover was the space tongue and the cosmic go-go boots. So we had engineered a system wherein the cover would appeal to people who would hate the interior, and the interior would appeal to people who hate the cover. And it was it was a limiter. Um interesting.

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Yeah, that uh um well it kind of segues into yeah, it kind of segues into this part where it's like uh in a way, uh you're you're as it relates to pacing across panels and pages and and and page turns. I mean, what how do you you you're moving along, you're writing, and how do you how do you drive how does it drive you? Is it the page turning, is it getting sort this done, or what?

SPEAKER_00 48:09

Uh it's building a page is a combination of uh you're telling a story with the uh the equivalent of still photographs, right? You take 15 photographs that have more or less the actions you want, and you're arranging them on the page.

SPEAKER_01 48:24

Describing as much as it can in each panel, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Um depends on again, that depends on who you're working with. Like at Dynamite, I was often working with illustrators who I didn't know. We'd never worked together before, and often many of them didn't speak English.

SPEAKER_01 48:39

So, how did that work with what you were just talking about with with uh Vampirella as an example?

SPEAKER_00 48:45

Well, like I said, basically Dynamite was hiring artists based on wherever the dollar was strongest, so you could get more pages out of them for the same amount or less money. Okay. Um, but it made me learn really quick, uh, don't be colloquial at all in your uh scene description. I had written uh for a different project, I had written a character described as having five o'clock shadow. And uh this one page just wasn't coming from this illustrator who was Italian. Um, and he he finally I get to see Mail in very broken English. He clearly had somebody there helping him translate, and they weren't particularly versed in English either. It's like, okay, the clock on the wall says five o'clock, but I don't understand what you mean about where the shadow goes, because there is no five o'clock shadow term idiomatically in the language. Imagine that. Yeah, and it that was like, okay, so for certain guys, like normally with dynamite, if I didn't know them and they were from another country, I just nothing is colloquial anymore except dialogue, which isn't their problem. Um so the scripts tend to be a lot longer and a lot more detailed, but on Forged, Mike speaks English very well. Uh and uh in a uh the most recent issue that I'm working on right now, just doing the production stuff, it would be 14, the next to last issue. I wrote an entire fight sequence without panel descriptions. I wrote the kind of here's the motion I'm looking for, here's the emotion I'm looking for, do your thing. Um, because trying to like detail like, well, it's this style of punch or this kind of kick or this kind of like ready pose with a rifle or something. You don't it's too much research.

SPEAKER_01 50:29

Well, that allows freedom of creativity for the individual on the other end, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Yep, but yeah, Marco Rudy, uh I he drew a book I was writing for DC back in the day. It was uh called The Shield, and it was uh it was another um Jack Kirby creation actually that predated Captain America, um and but a patriotic hero kind of thing. And I remember at one point we had worked together well enough and long enough that I wrote this giant fight sequence again, those are easier for me to let go of, I guess, where I had basically for like a four-page sequence, I said, get your staranko on. And he turned in these pages that look like Jim drew them. They were they were gorgeous and kind of retro, and like the um Staranko was famous for like mixing photography into the into the art and lots of kind of like weird, like swirly geometric patterns in the background. And uh Marco did all of that, and it was so gorgeous. It took me two seconds to write that. It probably took him two weeks to draw those pages, but um, so yeah, you work out, you know, basically I I tend to assume until I know the capabilities of the artist and what they like to draw. Um that's usually uh like on the Red Sonya stuff, I would uh I would always send a a mail out to whoever had been hired to draw. It's like what do you like to draw? What do you hate to draw so I don't fill it full of them? Unfortunately, I got a note back from uh from one of them who's like, Well, I don't really like drawing horses, and I don't really like drawing fight scenes. Like probably saying yes to the book about the horse soldier who's always in fights is probably not a good thing. Right.

SPEAKER_01 52:09

Um So what's harder for you? Dialogue, plot, mechanics, interior emotional truth?

SPEAKER_00 52:17

I think the hardest thing for me to write, frankly, is endings. I I have a heart well, especially when you're dealing with the traditional 20 or 22 page American comic. Um, there's just not a lot of space there, unless you really like loading a page with panels, which I don't. I like I like them a little looser, I like having more room to breathe. I mean, one of the reasons why Forged is in the larger format is because it gives Mike all the space he needs, and because it's a longer book, we're not horse trading pages like, well, I like this character moment, but if I take two pages out of this scene, I get two more pages to do in the fight scene that follows, or whatever. And we just don't have to do that. Um uh unfortunately, a lot of the mainstream stuff I've done, uh the ending shows up kind of unannounced, like, oh hey, I told you you had 12 issues to do this series. Uh we're giving you 10. Like, okay. I have to find it. You gotta cut just short somehow. Yeah, I I gotta figure out here on issue eight, I have to figure out how to cut two issues. Yeah. Wow. Um, that that is occasionally a problem. Um often does that happen? I mean, occasionally, but or nah, it happened to me on the shield at DC. Um, everything else ran roughly the length we had intended.

SPEAKER_01 53:35

Do you ever get any do you ever get more? You know what I mean? Okay. I'm just curious, you know. It's except for 12, but we're gonna allow you to do 14.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Oh my god. I I could see it in my mind. It's so beautiful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:48

Oh so that's something that would be nice. Yeah, I got you.

SPEAKER_00 53:50

I mean, in terms of the motion on the page like you were describing, um there's just there's certain things you just kind of learn through doing. Um, it took me a little bit to kind of wrap my head around the idea that page turns are camera motion, right? So if you look in most comics, like you'll see uh page one, it'll be a multi-panel page. Uh, I happen to particularly like the construct of four panels, you know, usually horizontal and stacked across the page. Um, and then you turn in the act of turning the page, and now it's a two-page spread where whatever environment you were focusing on on page one to the other two and three is now like, oh, it's way bigger than we thought. It's a great way to sell scope and scale.

SPEAKER_01 54:34

How often do you use foreshadowing with something like that? I mean, uh I mean, does that like you got you got your page and your panels? Um maybe foreshadowing isn't right, but you know, I might be. You know, do you use that to kind of describe what I mean lead into what's coming up?

SPEAKER_00 54:52

Uh in the scripts, I often do because the illustrator who's drawing the first part of it is probably gonna be drawing the end, and I should warn them that um Oh yeah, by the way, this is this is important that you know if you don't draw this that we're gonna do later now, that's okay, but just don't contradict it. Um that's yeah, um that's why uh I used to be less slavish about outlines when I was younger. Now I'm I'm oh you talked about that before.

SPEAKER_01 55:21

The outlines are important.

SPEAKER_00 55:23

I I I gotta know where I'm going. I mean it leaves room leave room to improv to to be flexible when a better idea comes along, kind of thing. But um, you know, I'm not so slavish about it that I'm rigid, but um but yeah, it's one the first comic I wrote, the one I did for Prima, the perfect dark one, um, one of the problems that I ran into that I never would have anticipated, not knowing anything about comics really at that point from experience. This was my first one. Um, we were dealing with a company that because they were using an existing IP, like a like a license, basically. Um, if it isn't a visual asset in the game, they're not gonna do anything different. Okay. Because that then we're creating your IP. That was the rationale I was given. So this is a not too distant future, basically corporate espionage setting. Um, and our main character is a spy and assassin. So at one point we have an existing pistol model that I can provide to the the illustrators to make sure it looks right. But in this scene, I needed the pistol to have a silencer on it, and that pistol didn't have a silencer in the game, and it was a huge fight. Um, the pages that kept getting in didn't have silencers with this guy firing the weapon. Like, okay, but he's in a hospital trying to covertly assassinate someone. If he's just cranking off nine millimeter rounds in the hallway at three in the morning, you you you might as well pull the alarm switch yourself, right? Um and I ended up having to change the story enough to explain why this happened. Um, or else there was just no rationale for it.

SPEAKER_01 57:08

It's like, oh, so so that's like, yeah, so there's there's the point of outline, drafting, revising, and or or letting go. But in in this case, you're revising the whole time to try to make this work.

SPEAKER_00 57:22

Fix on fail. I think fix on fail. I don't know if we had talked about that earlier, but it's that NASA philosophy that uh if you're uh if your spaceship has a problem and it's in space, you can't go back to the garage, put it up on blocks, and fix it. So you did this failed. Yeah, uh Apollo 13 is a great example of fix on fail. And a lot of the the not the the corporate owned stuff that I've done. Um there's a lot of this illustrator did not draw what I had written. Um and either at great expense to the publisher you have to kind of have a fight about fixing it, like no redraw that, which I hate doing. Um I don't like making illustrators uh redraw anything if I can patch it with a line of dialogue or a caption. Sure. Um sometimes it's just it's just clutchy as hell.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

Um so what makes that writer-artist collaboration truly work?

SPEAKER_00 58:20

Um I have found that uh the best collaborations like that have been on the creator own stuff. Um uh actually, frankly, um Steve Lieber on Shooters and uh and Mike Henderson on on The Forged. You can have a conversation. You can just get on the phone and say, This is my intent here. Can we tweak this? Can we change this? Or do you have a better approach? You know, it it's a conversation. Um constant dialogue between the creators is key. Um, and I have found for years working with Greg, one of the things I admire the most about him, not undeniably talented writer, very smart, very focused on character, knows what he's doing, but he's an effortless collaborator. Um you know, when I first started out, he was uh I in in cop terms, he would have been my rabbi. Um he was the guy who was who was showing me the ropes and teaching me the trade. So I was very much the junior partner, but I was never treated like the junior partner. If I had an idea and he thought it was good, okay, let's do that. I would um there's an ego-lessness to his writing and to his approach to writing that I think that's why it works. So just trying to keep my own um my own ego out of the process is really the only thing I need to do, and it's not particularly hard because we're so in a situation like that where you're with an editor or collaborator where it's just you're you're being challenged as your original intent is not being recognized or heard.

SPEAKER_01 59:59

I mean, i I'm sure that's happened in the past. Oh, yeah. And how did you deal with that?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:04

Uh to be quite frank, uh in the this one case that I have in my head, and I'm not gonna name names because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but it was just like there's a certain amount of uh this is just not the hill I'm gonna die on today. I'm fine, I'll fix it in the patch, I'll hate it. Um, actually, here's a great example shooters. Um I don't know if you've read it, I mean I assume not, nobody else did. Um but uh I was very inspired for the ending by weirdly of all things, the kind of ambiguous ending of the Tom Hanks movie Castaway. I liked that at the end of it, man, he has multiple choices in front of him, and you don't know which one he's gonna take, and they're kind of all bad. Um and uh I had written an ending uh conceptually similar. It wasn't it wasn't anyone standing at a crossroads, but there's a decision that's gonna be made and someone's gonna live or someone's gonna die. Um and the you know the main character is absolutely justified in killing the guy, um, but it's gonna damn him forever. Or does he in his own mind betray his fallen friends by not killing the guy? And I leave you, the reader, to make that decision. That's what I wanted. And the editor hated that ending, hated it. Um from the outline stage. He's like, we're gonna have to come back and talk about this ending.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:37

Great conversations with fans of the book, yeah. But no, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

Well, so what I ended up doing, because I had a co-writer working on it as well, um, my friend Brandon Gerwa. It's almost a cliffhanger, yeah. Exactly. Um but it basically I wrote the ending I wanted and I was happy with, and I handed it in and she said, Okay, we need to talk about this book. It's like talk about it with Brandon, because he's gonna rewrite the ending and I'm just gonna live with it. And that was it. That was it. Um that was that was a case where I just I feel strongly about this, but I don't feel strongly about this enough to damage the chances of the book coming out because we were one of the last books that came out of Vertigo when Karen Berger still ran it. Um and it is only by her good graces that it came out. There were books that were more done than we were that got cancelled, and uh but she seemed to believe in the book. It's hard to say. I talked with her, but I can't I can't honestly say she was aware I was in the room. Um she's a busy lady, she's a smart lady, I respect her immensely, and I'm hugely grateful that the book came out, but uh yeah, I don't I don't think she'd remember me if you put a gun to her head.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

Have you worked on a project where the chemistry wasn't there? And if so, how did you navigate it?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:57

You kind of talked about something, but I mean was there another one where it just Yeah, this is this is the one I'm absolutely not gonna name names on, but there was when we were starting shooters, Brandon and I were um we were naming people we were interested in. Um an illustrator named Chris Somney who drew the first DC work I ever did. He's great. Uh we were supposed to take over Checkmate. Um, and through a variety of stupid reasons it ended up not happening, even though we had I well, I don't know if he'd started drawing, but I'd written a couple issues before we were told the job you were hired for, you are no longer hired for. I really wanted him for shooters, and uh he declined, but it was uh regretfully. Um one of the reasons why he ended up um not getting checkmate with me was well uh the editor at the the editor in chief at the time was like, Oh, he's a vertigo artist, he shouldn't be working on a mainstream DC book. And uh Chris basically was taking on a lot of Marvel superhero stuff, lighter, less you know, less edgy. Um he's like, Sometimes I just want to draw a monkey punch and a robot, you know, that kind of thing. So I totally understood. Um and so we were we were really struggling finding an artist, and uh the editor um at the time, Joan Hilty, um, had suggested another artist, and I didn't know him, I'd never heard of him. Um, but she's like, Well, let's just get on the phone, let's just have a conference call. I'm like, sure. I looked at some of his work, I thought it was fine, like, okay, this could work if he's into the subject matter and he understands that I have a lot of um emotional skin in the game. Like I said, it was inspired by my brother-in-law's death, and his family's gonna read this. If I mess it up, I I best not ever show up for Thanksgiving dinner again, right? Let alone face my wife. Um, so I I had a lot of pressure on me for that. Got it. Was the main reason I had brought in a um Brandon as a co-writer asked him if he wanted to join me on it because he was between projects and he could provide some emotional distance to some of the material because I was I was blocking really hard and worked out great. He did great work. We we had a ball working on it. Um but this artist basically Joan introduces us all on the conference call, and this artist will not speak to us. Um, actually kept referring to like I don't really want to hear from the writers too much. Like, I don't really want to draw more than four panels per page.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

That's a bit pretentious.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:37

Yeah. Um, and basically when it became clear that this wasn't gonna work in a million years, like this guy talked and talked and talked and then kind of hung up, and then there's a pause, and Joan went, Okay, so back to the drawing board.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:50

So, yeah, so what role does listening play right in building trust with collaborators? Obviously, that didn't happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:57

I mean, well, just basically treating We're all supposed to be on equal footing. Right. And there's always an ongoing debate on who's the more important collaborator in comics, the writer or the artist. And I think everyone's got their own answer for it, but I think it's both. Right? We're both the storytellers. Um and if there are things that are gonna affect the shape of the story, just discuss them. And like I said, remove ego from the equation. Um, which I don't feel that this illustrator was capable of at that point. Who knows? He may have grown up a little, but um yeah, it was that was a bad day. That was a bad call. Um, in the main, I haven't had a lot of problems with illustrators. The the the biggest one is usually a language issue, and that's not anything personal. It's just described one earlier, yeah. That's just it's just the nature of an international business, and we'll figure out our way to work around it. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:56

Um, how has the comic industry changed since you started creatively or structurally?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

Well, the distribution system, among other things, is in uh shall we say a state of flux, the combination of uh COVID and uh supply chain issues, like paper costs shot up a billion percent in like a month or something. Um so everybody cut their backlists to the bone. Um then you add to that the tariff situation. One of the reasons why the forged got put on hiatus was because the tariffs were landing and everything's printed in China or Canada. So higher risk books, and our book is a little spendy for image. They they didn't cancel us, they just pressed pause until the situation normalized, and then you gotta find your way back onto the production schedule. Um, so there's that Diamond Comics closing its doors, and uh among other things, stiffing a lot of small publishers have made everything harder. So instead of dealing with one distributor, and not that a distribution monopoly was good, but it was convenient, um, makes it a lot harder on comic shops because now you gotta go to like three different distributors to get your regular order. Um, Lunar was the one who took over like DC and stuff when all that happened. There were some growing pains. There was some, you know, there would there's no there's no diamond catalog anymore. That is a huge was a huge advantage for retailers because it was all in one place. Here's all your comics and your graphic novels and your toys and your games. You could order it all from one spot. Now your discount is based in part on the size of your order, right? So the amount of profit margin you make is based on that. Now you have to do that with three or four distributors, so your profit margins are cut, and then you add to that tariffs, making everything more expensive. Um, I know at one point when the tariffs were hitting, one of the weird areas we saw a huge jump in prices was supplies like comic uh uh backing boards and bags, storage bags, and uh Gab bought one distributor out completely. We had boxes of bags and boards because we give them away with each purchase. Right. Um so that actually carried us over several months until the tariff situation changed again, and you know, without getting into the politics of it, it's made everything a lot harder. And then on top of that, um there's a large, well, I shouldn't say large, there's a segment of the audience that resents the creators. Um, you shouldn't be doing this, you're gatekeeping me from being able to do this by having a job in the industry. Those are the guys who are using AI to generate the art for their project. Um and uh at the risk of alienating potential listeners, uh, I think those particular creators are lazy and stupid, and I hate them. Um there's a group of quote fans, and nothing nobody hates a fandom more than it's fans who would love to see us all lose our jobs. Um and to be quite honest, if there weren't a lot of social backlash against it, I'm sure Marvel or DC would replace every creator with a button they could push the instant they can get away with it. Um you know, it's that was a hard lesson for me was uh the company is never gonna love you back. Right. Um and they you know, you are only in their good graces as long as you are useful. Um once we have used up everything of value in you and can no longer take any more, you know, you see all those stories about veteran comics creators who are living in poverty and created huge global multi-billion dollar franchises for Marvel slash Disney or DC uh slash Warner Brothers, um, who are you know doing GoFundMe's and Kickstarters so they they don't die from whatever disease they've right developed by sitting at a desk in a darkened room for their entire lives.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:14

So, what do readers most under misunderstand about the work of a comics writer?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:20

Um, well, that it's work. That that's a big one. Um, you know, it's just typing. I used to run into that all the time at Microsoft. It was like, well, it's just typing, it's not actually work. What are you doing? I'm like, I'm working. Right, mental energy. Um, I think we had mentioned earlier, like that that the creatives have a lot more control than they really do. Certain creators do. Jeff Johns can get done whatever he wants. Um you know, some animals are more equal than others, is basically how it works out. Um, you know, I've I've had some really bad experiences with DC that I I won't, you know, belabor the point with, but short some so suffice to say, like if they're gonna treat Alan more Alan more like that, they're gonna do it to me through my pants, right? It's just I'm no money. I am Schmucky the typist, and I have no illusions about that. Um the uh there's also a perception that oh well I got a book published through Image or I work for DC, so I've got nothing but money. No, I don't. Right. Um when I went to full-time freelance after leaving Microsoft, I took something like a 75% in uh hit on my income. But I love the work, so I d and I don't go into work every day wanting to kill all of my fellow co-workers.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:42

So not much different than me being a high school principal and now an inner city bus driver. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:46

So I get what you're saying there. Um job satisfaction matters more than the money.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:52

And your health. Yeah. That was for me, that was a big deal. So do you see your stories reflecting the culture around you or offering an alternative to it? Maybe it depends on the story.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:06

It depends on the story. Um Shooters was very much it was a contemporary tale. It was of its time. I think it holds on it because it's not like we're not about to send American.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:17

Was that the most emotional thing you've written?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:20

Oh my god, yeah. There's a there's a scene in the book that is as close as I could bring myself to get over the actual incident where my brother-in-law was killed, and I I kind of vomited that scene out. It was it took me it took me almost two months to get to the point where I wasn't just staring at the blank page and second guessing myself. Um and then I just blurted it out on the page, and uh I I was at the shop when I wrote it. And uh I remember hitting save, standing up, leaving my office, going to the bathroom, and vomiting. It was I that was the strongest emotional reaction I've had to anything. Um yeah, I I wouldn't recommend it. It felt good to get it out, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:07

Um but so it correlates right back to what I was saying earlier about what do people misunderstand about the work of comics writer. I mean, there's there are points where it really hits home.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:18

Uh and the the business of it I find very tiresome. I know that's a kind of kind of stupid thing to say, but like the actual writing part, as hard as it can be, as as because you're you're testing yourself against yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:33

That's how you're driven, though. Right. That's how you personally are driven. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:36

Yeah. Uh one of the best well, one of the best pieces of advice I got from Greg was like, you can't control whether or not you're talented. You can't control whether or not anybody will care about what you write, you can't control if anyone will publish it. What you can control is how much you are willing to commit to the craft uh and commit to the honesty of the craft. You you know, you don't uh it's the importance of truth, right? Right, and I'm I'm trying to write the characters as honestly as I am able to, even in something as lighthearted as as the forged, there's some serious stuff going on with some of those characters, and um, and certainly with shooters, like that that was a millstone around my neck um because of the personal connection to the subject matter. Um and not to mention, like at the shop, especially during those deployments and stuff, how many of our customers had just come back from overseas or were on their way overseas, you know, like it was a lot, and uh they were all very supportive. We want you to succeed, but every one of them was looking at it with an eye towards let's see if he gets this right. And uh you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:55

And that's okay though. Yeah, I that is okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:58

It is. It was it was hard, but you know, it wasn't supposed to be easy. And if it was easy, everybody do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:04

So are you uh I mean you kind of talked about uh that are are there stories you wrote that feel more relevant now than when that when they were first released? Anything more relevant now?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:18

I think shooters has retained um okay it its relevance, and that like I said, we're about to send people overseas again, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:26

Um Well, they could be there, we don't know. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:30

Right, right, but yeah, that there was a certain like why we fight component to to to shooters, which is weird for me, who I I routinely get asked if I if I served, and I didn't. I'm as civilian as they come, but I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand the mindset.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:52

And uh, you know, you don't you don't want to accidentally dishonor that service. I I don't I feel as a culture we tend to lionize active duty military, yeah, um, to a degree I don't think is healthy, certainly not healthy for the service members, um, and not enough time being aware of the how much it can cost um in terms of their mindset, their souls, their health, their bodies. Um their trauma. Yeah, their trauma. We pay a lot of lip service to it as a culture, but I don't know if like we just had Memorial Day and I turned on the radio in the car, and it's like, oh, look, it's a sale. Oh, let's you know exactly we're doing it. It's what we're doing, we're commercializing this. Like that's not what it's for.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:47

Um Do you think your work is something that's archival meant to last, something of uh or something of its moment? And you know, I guess it depends on which book we're talking about, right? But I mean uh shooters, for example. Yeah, I I think that that's something that's that's got some legs.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:09

That's got some legs. Most most comics, this is probably an unpopular opinion on comics creators, but we're in the business of making ephemera, right? The stuff is was designed initially to be disposable. Um, and uh, I had made the joke earlier about fandom. Um, nothing I think is worse for pop culture than pop culture fandom. Nothing no nobody hates Star Wars more than a Star Wars fan. Um and uh the rise of our corner of the business, uh mine and my wife's at the the comic shop is due in large part to unhealthy and possibly um mildly arrested adolescents. Um, you know, I the the the birth of the comic shop um stemmed out of kind of obsessive compulsives um hoarding stuff and then monetizing it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:04

Um the painting with a very broad brush there, but um well for our listeners, real quick, uh there will be a link on the website in regard to uh Olympic Cards and Comics, where I do spend money every week uh with new arrivals of comics. But um Eric mentions his wife, and that's Gabby, wonderful person. But anyway, let's get back to where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:26

Thank you. Um yeah, I just again it's the Johnny Fever thing. Like, I don't once it's out of my hands, once I've sent it off to the publisher and they're putting ink on paper, I tend not to think about it anymore. I just worry about I I just work on what's next. Um it it's one of the reasons why I like comics as opposed to other kinds of fiction.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:51

That's part of that's part of your creative health, right? Yeah. Where you know, routine, rest, boundaries, or something else. Don't read the reviews. Don't read the reviews, yeah. I mean, there you go, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:04

Um actually I don't mind reading reviews as much as I I I avoid the comments. That's never right. That that drives me crazy when I see a comment from a reader, or more likely a non-reader, um, who didn't read the material, but he's got, and it's always he, has got all the answers as to what I was thinking when I typed it. Oh it's like you couldn't be more wrong. Um no, I I shouldn't say that. I have every confidence that they've got more wrong in their future, but um I uh I I yeah absenting I used to be much more dialed into like uh the industry, uh you know, knowing who was doing what for whom and what the politics were, you know, in the office, and I just don't pay any attention to that stuff anymore. I just don't care. Um and it's probably limited my career, but I'm perfectly okay having my career limited by not being aware of that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:05

So as you talk about career, what what would you tell a writer who doubts they belong in comics?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:12

Oh. Um there's any number of people, uh limitless number of people, fans, industry pros, who will happily tell you you don't belong. You don't have to believe them. Right. Um if you believe them, then you don't belong. Uh you know, if you allow yourself to be talked out of it, you were never meant to do it in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:33

Um That's that's good advice right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:35

Right. And speaking from my own experience, I would say there's enough uh enough comics creators who all suffer from imposter syndrome that like you don't need to seek it externally. You've got plenty of your own. You don't you don't need more. You don't need more. Don't borrow trouble.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:53

Um what still excites you when you sit down to write a script? Um is it the excitement that, okay, this is a whole new thing? Or is it oh I know what I yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:08

What is it? I think the most satisfying parts for me um it's not usually when I start writing the script. Assuming we're past the the pitch stage, the world building, the outlining, all of that. You're ready to go and we're scripting now. You're scripting. Um I don't just write it in a linear fashion. Um I I it's like painting in coats. That's a that's a good way of describing it. The first thing I write uh are the panel descriptions and the breakdown.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:39

Is that almost the foundation in a sense?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:41

And well the problem I found was in the perfect arc stuff that I did early on, I wrote it in a linear fashion and I hated the dialogue. Because right, when you write panel one, you know, page one, panel one, description, and then sound effects captions dialogue, right? Um, and then panel two, and that you you you keep kind of coming back, so any rhythm or flow to the dialogue feels very broken and choppy. And I realized that if I laid out enough for my reading to know the flow of the page, it doesn't hurt that I'm a graphic designer, I know how to build a page. Um, like I know how to paste this, I know which panel should be larger, which should be smaller, what you know, where is time being compressed, where is time being expanded. But conversational dialogue sounds very stilted if you don't write it in one shot. Um so I will, you know, um I have a little uh I have a little chart I keep as I write. Um and it's basically laid out in two columns, two narrow columns, basically the rough dimensions of a comic page, and they're numbered. Um, but they're laid out in such a way that you know where the page turns are. Uh, because that is the worst. That was a big rookie mistake I made in the first one was not keeping track of that and accidentally writing a couple pages that I had to go back and frantically fix because, well, now you have a two-page spread that starts on the right-hand page, so it actually has to turn the page to get the left-hand side. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Um and I started color coding it. Everything's red when nothing's been done. When you've written the panel descriptions, each page I would color yellow. Now it's it, you know, it's at the yield stage, and then it's green once I've written all the you know uh reader-facing stuff, the the caption sound effects dialogue. Um, and I found that by going through and writing kind of all the dialogue at once, and then I'll go back and write all the captions, and I'll go back and write all the sound effects. Yep, but it cut way down on the number of times I had to um perform surgery on a on a spread or uh or a section. Yeah, it was that was uh that was a bitterly learned lesson a couple of times. It was huge, and it's always when something's like right on the edge of the deadline, and it's like, oh no, I I can fix this, but I gotta go way back to the beginning and change that to make this slide into a position.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:11

Yeah, it's it's so everything that you you do and and and and you've done throughout your whole time. What is uh a skill you're actively still trying to deepen right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:28

Probably the business side of it. I I there's nothing I hate more. If you're a freelancer, you are dependent financially on invoicing, right? Creating the invoices and sending them out, I hate. I I've I know in uh several cases Is there an app for that?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:46

Just kidding. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:48

I'm sure AI will fix it all. Um the uh the number of times on on uh certainly on independent projects, I have managed to justify myself in like I'm not gonna send the invoice because they don't have any money anyway. Right. I've there's a number of work that I have been contracted for, there's a number of pages that I've done that yeah, I'm never gonna see a dime on. But frankly, it's worth my soul to not have to crank out yet another invoice and email it, and then you know, with independent publisher, like dynamite, I worked for dynamite for years without a contract. I never sent in uh uh I never had to send in invoices. I was purely a handshake deal um with the publisher, and to his credit, uh I uh they were often late, but they were consistently late. Like it's always gonna be two weeks late. Fine, I can plan for that. I don't need you know, I I'm not sitting here trying to explain to whoever holds my mortgage, like, well, gotta wait for Red Sonya 25 to pay off or whatever. Um you know, and but DC, like I everything uh they have um their voucher system, basically your your contract and your invoice is all in one kind of form. And as soon as you sign it and send it in, as you know, within a certain amount of time of you turning in the script and getting acceptance, they owe you the money. Um the very first thing I wrote for them, Checkmate 17, I'm still owed eleven hundred dollars for. And uh interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:21

And did you say that's DC?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:24

Um and when get with it DC.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:27

Never gonna happen. Any anytime I've sh explained that to someone at DC, um, their response can only be described as, oh wow, you just showed a dog a card track. Like just blank incomprehension. That's awesome. Um, in fact, the the editor I was dealing with on uh JSA versus Cobra, which we were talking about earlier, um, in addition to not telling me that they wanted JSA in the book, um, they were insisting on me writing pages, and I hadn't gotten my vouchers yet, and she had been the associate editor on the issue I'm stole admiring. On um and she's like, you know, it's we're DC. It's not like we're not gonna pay you. Just start writing. I'm like, you specifically are responsible for not paying me. I'm not, you know. It was not a that was not a fun or healthy relationship. She's a nice enough woman, but um that didn't work for you? Never doing that again.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:19

Couple more questions. Sure. If you could revisit an early script today, what would you change?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:27

I would go back and uh rewrite um the entirety of the perfect dark mini-series, the first one, the very first one. And all I would really do.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:37

Um is that only because of hindsight that you have that that you would do that, or is there a specific reason why?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:43

It's overwritten. Uh because I didn't know what the illustrators were gonna turn in, I overexplained things in the the reader-facing portion of it. I I would go through and cut at least a third of that stuff down uh or eliminate outright.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:59

I uh almost allowing for a couple more issues.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:03

No, not so much that. I I did the story the the plot and the the the plot and the the overall motion of the story is is it flows really well, I think, and people still like it. I still sell them occasionally. Um I have to get that, I haven't read it. I I I think you having said this now, you look at it and go, oh yeah, there's so many captions on this page. Like but again, some of that was because of the the the silencer issue we were talking about. And so just I think I would handle those problems um a little more economically than I was capable of doing back then. I don't think you know nothing got phoned in on that one, but my skills now are better than they were then. Um so it's like anything. Once you've released it, it's best not to look at it anymore because all you're gonna see are the flaws. Oh, I would have done that differently. Oh, I would have done that differently. Um one one that really bothers me. Um it's kind of common in the industry where if typos happen, um and certainly for a company like Dynamite that at the time was not, shall we say, paying top dollar. Um letterers are not gonna, if they spot a typo, they're just gonna run it as is as is. They're unless they're really invested in the story, they're just gonna look, not my job to edit it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:28

Oh sometimes they might say, hey, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:30

Uh yeah, uh yeah, certainly. Um that happens, particularly well, The Forge is a great example. Uh Ariana uh Mayor is a terrific letterer. And if she spots something that's not hitting her eye right, she'll tell us. But you know, when I was doing the Red Sonya stuff, it's like it was a miracle if I heard back from anybody other than okay, thanks, we got it, it's done, you know. Um, but you know, everybody's busy, everybody's got their own problems. I'm not I'm not criticizing that side of it, but uh I there's one word I kept misspelling in uh Red Sonia. The when you're having the the the discussion before a battle, the parlay. Oh yeah. I kept misspelling parlay. Oh, okay. And I would love to go back and fix that, but um, you know, you often hear when you point that out and you see the final issue and you email the editors, hey, when we get to the trade, can we fix this? How did you misspell it? Uh that's the problem, is I'd have to look it up. Oh, okay. Uh it's supposed to be L-A-Y or L-E-Y, I forget which, and I was doing the opposite. Um, got it. It was just you're typing for the colour. I always thought it was L-A-Y.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:36

I don't know. Maybe.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:37

Yeah, I think I did L E Y.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:40

Um That's a British version.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:42

Yeah, exactly. Um, but you know, I'd email the editor and go, can we fix it in the trade paperback? Oh, absolutely. It's never getting fixed in the trade paperback. Never, ever, ever, ever. The only time that has happened in my experience is when it's been something that I'm the guy putting together the files for the trade paper back. Oh, so you can fix it. And I will fix it. Yeah. But uh all right.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:00

So hey, uh my last question. If someone encountered your work years from now without knowing your name, what would you hope they understand about how you saw the world?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:13

I know I hope or what do I think?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:16

Might be a loaded question, but go for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:18

Uh I don't know. Um, again, the Johnny Fever thing. I tend not to think about that. If I had to guess what they would think, it's wow, that dude was angry.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:30

Um maybe some people might, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:32

Yeah, well it again, it's the the the ruckiness of of uh the comics writing stuff I picked up. Like Greg's a great novelist, he's a great comic book writer, he tends to do his best work when he's really pissed off about something. Lazarus is a great example. He took a look at the state of play of the world when the series started. Um, it made him really angry, and he, you know, that's what uh what Lazarus is. It's him kind of working through that um politically, economically, and stuff. It doesn't help that uh Lazarus, we jokingly refer to that book um as um you know, we'll see a news story or something that feels very Lazarus like. Don't you don't you miss when Lazarus was fiction? Yeah that's hilarious. That that happens a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:19

Um I think that is a great book. I think I've already said that. I love it. I I I've I've loved all of it so far.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:27

So you'll appreciate this. Uh, I saw a news story uh yesterday, day before. Um something about uh some kind of medical treatment that involves kind of reanimating parts of dead brains to process, like I I don't remember the specifics of it, but the gist was like, Oh, you don't get to die, we get to reuse your brain for this corporate purpose. And I was like, that's awful. Um, and the news story yesterday about Stan Lee's estate releasing his likeness and and an AI avatar of Stan Lee. It was just like, for why? Like, right, just let the guy rest, you ghouls.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:10

You know, that's exactly it.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:12

Can't you just be a person?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:13

You know, but thank you, Eric. Uh Eric Chapman, ladies and gentlemen, and um James Bowers here. Uh thanks for listening to uh Behind the Lens, and until next time, um you're on the train, you've got your own pad, and you uh you kind of alluded to feeling like James Bond or whatever. The plot started to thicken, right, in your brain.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:43

Yeah. Well, it was just like uh the combination of like this new knowledge from you know, this the the biographical sections of of the Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics, like talk about altering perspective. It's like it went from being just this nebulous thing that happens to that's a profession. That's that's it that's a thing you can do with your life, and the freedom of not having mom and dad looking over your shoulder. It was like, oh, every horizon was exploded, every pathway possible was now open. It was great.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:18

All right, thanks again, Eric. My pleasure.