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ADVENTURES IN THE FUNNYBOOK GAME
hey, kids-- comics!
I've spent nearly a quarter of a century in the funnybook game. Over the years, I've written nearly every major character published and served as an editor for eight years at Marvel Comics and three at DC. These pages contain (hopefully) amusing, typically whiny and/or defensive and at times blunt recollections of my 24 years in the business. The views expressed here are completely subjective; there is no attempt at objectivity and this is certainly not journalism. There's no equal time rule, and no effort's been made to interview all sides to an opinion. This is what happened to me,
my life in the funnybook
game, as I experienced it.
I have also posted excerpts from my infamous
Writer's Style
Guide, a longtime mainstay at Marvel Comics but banned by DC Comics for being "too acerbic and abrasive to the freelance talent." You can also find a new archive of script outtakes and alternate or deleted scenes
From The Cutting Room
Floor, pages of script that never made it into print. There is, additionally, a
Script Archive of selected scripts from published works, a great deal of
Highlights,
actual scenes from comics I've worked on over the years.
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OF USE for additional information. Thanks!
This site is for promotional purposes only, and in no way challenges the
exclusive copyright ownership of the sample materials represented here.
All Marvel Comics content Copyright © 2003
Marvel
Characters.
All Rights Reserved. All
DC Comics content Copyright © 2003
DC
Comics.
All
Rights Reserved. All other stories,
art, photos and other intellectual properties as may be represented here
are copyright © and are trademarks and/or registered trademarks ™ of
their respective copyright and trademark owners. All rights reserved.
the crew
 The
first issue hadn't even shipped yet. Not having seen even one
page of THE CREW, the vultures were already circling
overhead. "I
am all ghettoed out," one poster wrote on my weblog. "I'm tired
of the grim, dark streets of Bad Town and all of that," or words
to that effect. News of Black Panther's
cancellation and
the development of a new book, THE CREW, just kind of hit him
the wrong way. These days, in these tough times, comics are an
increasingly hard sell. We're not writing to two and a half
million largely silent eight year-olds, but to a highly vocal
and highly volatile group of somewhere around fifty thousand.
Now, we can stay up all night pointing fingers and figuring out
who's to blame for that, but the fact is here we are, constantly
trying to reinvent ourselves for essentially the same audience
when a more informed marketing strategy might be to refresh the
audience itself. So, these days, we launch most everything with
our backs against the wall. In marketing, I was taught to never
advertise something by saying what it isn't. But
out-running perception, especially in this business, is more or
less the order of the day. And entertaining a loyal but
frustrated and shrinking fan base who wants exactly this
but not that way and not by him is, increasingly,
a shot in the dark. This is the story behind the story of THE
CREW.
the
death of the black panther
 Cancellation
has always been in our lexicon, has always been a part of the creative
process. So much so that the looming possibility no longer holds much
terror for us. In fact, I am royally sick of talking about it, of
answering questions about, "When do you think the book will be
cancelled?" and, "Are you worried about the book being
cancelled?" No, I am not worried. I've never been worried. I'm a
writer. Every month I turn in a story, until somebody calls me and tells
me to stop. At which time, I guess, I'll go onto something else. That's
the nature of the business: your book gets cancelled. Or you get tired
of working on it. Or you get fired. It's hard to take any of it
personally: you just do what you do. The Death Watch on PANTHER is
annoying, to be sure, and not knowing when the ax will fall does make
long-term plotting difficult. But, beyond that, the issue of whether The
Black Panther lives or dies is something larger than our ability to do
much about. As far as I'm concerned— by
keeping us on the stands 47 issues longer than anybody predicted—
Marvel Comics has certainly earned the right to be heard on The
Panther's future. I've been given a relatively free hand to craft the
series as I see it, with almost no interference from Marvel. Would we
like more promotion? Certainly. But, I honestly have no regrets about
our run on BLACK PANTHER. If Marvel decided to, tomorrow, turn Panther
into a book about burly construction workers who like to wear ballet
tutus in their off-hours, I'd consider it. They've given me nearly 50
months to try things my way. If and when the shoe ever does drop, I'll
have no regrets about this experience.
oswald
 I don't talk much about my years as editor of Marvel's Spider-Man line. There's a good reason for that. It was a terribly unhappy time of my life, both personally and professionally. The office politics were ugly, as Editor In Chief Jim Shooter came under increasing fire from his own staff as he turned the screws on us to be both timely and to increase the quality of Marvel's books. If I had it to do over again, I never would have accepted the appointment as editor of the Spider-Man franchise. I made a lot of mistakes. I hurt a lot of people. I lost a lot of friends. It's a difficult thing for me to discuss. We'd all like to be heroes of our own stories, and it's hard to tell the story of when you were a chimp. I spent two and a half years of my life being an incredible chimp, paralyzed by my own chimp-ness and
chimposity, and wholly convinced that, if I lost my job at Marvel, the world would end. Well, I did and it didn't. And now, nearly two decades later, I have some maturity and experience under my belt. Not that I'm any less of a chimp at 40 then I was at 23, but I have the perspective and, yes, the wisdom now to be horrified by the choices I made.
i'm
telling you for the last time
 I
am so very tired of talking about this. I stopped dealing much in interviews awhile back because every
interviewer would, sooner or later, start talking to me about race in comics.
I don't wanna talk about race in comics, unless it's about Superman racing The
Flash. I want to be asked the same kinds of questions you ask Mark Waid. I am
not so different from Mark Waid, except he has more money and dates prettier women. Few
if any interviewers ever ask Mark Waid about the state of race
relations in comics, but its a theme I revisit over and over, to the point
where I will, likely, now decline to discuss the issue. It's just kind of... done
for me. Taking a cue from Jerry Seinfeld, who retired many of his most famous routines
with the HBO special I'm Telling You For The last Time, I am (hopefully)
writing about racism in comics for the last time, collecting several Usenet
posts on the subject, recounting several war stories, and hopefully making some kind of
cohesive statement that I can now simply refer people to when they feel compelled to
ask my opinion about, oh, CAGE or something. Hopefully, this will save us all
a lot of angst down the line.
my
funny corporate valentine
 While completing my design upgrade on the site last night, I came across my old WONDER WOMAN essay and remembered I'd managed to upset quite a few WW fans with my remarks about the character being "dull" and "wonder bread." I got into an extended back and forth with fans on the WW Message board about all of this, where I painstakingly attempted to explain my story was a "milestone" only in the sense that it was an idea that hadn't been done before. I thought I'd take a few minutes to amend my essay and soften the language there, just to be more polite to WW's fans.
However, upon re-reading the essay, I didn't think it needed a rewrite. I mean, I'm really sorry if my thoughts on WW offend her fans, but I really do feel most of these people simply overreacted to some fairly simple language, and to things that are painfully true: she is a corporate character. And, for very long stretches at a time, her book has been pretty dull.
So, instead of rounding the edges off of my 2000 essay, I've posted a short addendum, which basically says I'm sticking to my guns. Diana is a stiff, kids. There's just no two ways about it. But, so is Black Panther. Both are from exotic, far-off lands with strange customs. Both are vested in ancient tradition and both have a mission to share those core values with us dumb
Amerikanskis. The main difference is Marvel could care less if I shoved Panther n front of a truck (well, at least until his film goes into production), while DC has a major merchandising investment in the venerable Amazon.
citizen
trane
 The
inside story of the debacle that was XERØ, the Apollo 13 of my career.
I've updated my original Xerø web page with a few more details of this
terrible experience, and the lessons learned from it. Doomed from
the beginning, XERØ began with a request for "Something new,
something edgy— push the envelope. Think outside the box." The
original proposal languished for nearly two years before an incoming
editor took a liking to it, and the project was green-lighted. Possibly
because of the lead character's dual ethnicity, XERØ came to be thought
of as a "black" book, which made it, like most other
"black" books, seemingly unworthy of the best efforts of
everyone involved. We launched in a totally unenergized environment,
with very little promotion, and nearly every promise broken. The book's
failure was, for me, a capriciously self-fulfilling prophecy.
trent
& sabrina
 Critical to the story of Xerø, a major league
basketball star by day, a 4th-level Closer by night, was the story of
his brother, Trent. In fact, XERØ, the series, was actually not about
Xerø The Closer at all, but was about his little brother, a man of no
obvious moral fiber and possessed of unquenchable thirsts for power,
fame, money and women— one woman in particular, Sabrina Lake, daughter
of (and deputy to) Emmett Lake, Sheriff of St. Claire County, Missouri. An intelligent and dutiful daughter, Sabrina was in love with
and all but engaged to Darius "Rev" Kirkwood, a towering but
gentle figure who played center for the National City Vipers, the pro basketball
team both Trent and his brother The Closer played for. Unhinging this relationship proved to be far too
great a temptation for Trent, whose absence of moral character preyed
on both Sabrina's inherent low self-esteem and her voracious libido.
The two fell into a fairly icky affair, blatantly using one another
for gratification of unmet needs, and, ultimately, destroyed
Xerø, Trent's own brother. This is brilliant storytelling, pacing,
and acting from the phenomenal ChrisCross. Moody and cinematic, with an
eye for design, detail, and a broad range of emotions and facial
expressions rarely equaled in comics these days. Cross makes my dialogue
fairly leap out at you, bringing potency, vibrancy and subtext to the
words. Brilliant work, wholly unappreciated at the time, in this series
that ultimately became the Apollo 13 of my career.
consequences
 In this sequence, many of
King Conan's chickens come
home to roost in the same evening. An indiscretion on one of his many
trips away from the palace has yielded a bastard son, and that son has
just arrived in Aquilonia. Thus, Conan is forced to inform his Queen,
Zenobia, of the affair and the child. The brilliant and underrated Geoff Isherwood,
Silvestri's inker on the first run, assumes center seat as penciller
and inker here, providing some of the finest acting and storytelling
I've seen in comics. This was fun stuff. Fans of THE BLACK PANTHER might
get a kick out of my CONAN THE KING run, circa issues #50-55.
Conan is, in many ways, the anti-T'Challa, lacking both the patience
and political savvy to keep all hell from breaking loose behind the
castle walls.
wherdubruthaat?
 While digging up some reference for BLACK PANTHER artist Our Pal Sal Velluto, I came across one of the most notorious stories in my funnybook career. Long before I'd ever heard of Kevin Smith, this business, set at a fast-food restaurant, is very Smith-like in it's dense non-stop jabbering about nothing and everything. The Ray, a neophyte super-hero, faces his most formidable enemy yet— the legion of strange and stranger patrons of a late-night fast-chicken restaurant— in the most infamous sequence from the series' run. This was a fun moment for me, a bit of artistic stretching from the otherwise Spider-Man-like angst of this teen hero series. Ray never even puts on his costume in this issue, where all the action is at a drive-through window. I was amazed and impressed that, other than a crack about Jesse Jackson and another where the brothers call Ray a "Stein", the script remarkably survived intact.
good
morning, mr. chips
 I
was recently accused of having a chip on my shoulder. The
"chip" thing hurts. It has no real substance or context, like
a milkshake. Like the word "stuff." It's this amorphous thing
without walls or floors, design, form or cohesion. It's something I
can't even step up to and rebut. It has no teeth, no piece of paper with
words on it that can be objectively reviewed. This is the thing that
makes life so very difficult for professionals in this business. It's
the kind of empty bias that can't be thrown at whites, but sticks
readily to women, minorities and gays. It breeds and breathes and lives
in the halls and even in some of the offices in many companies in this
biz. It replicates easily and is self-financing.
the final days
 QUANTUM & WOODY
#21
was the last issue of the book that ever shipped. Doc and I have completed
through issue #27, but, despite several assurances form the company that
this stuff would see print, successive promises have produced no shipping
schedule for the unreleased issues. Not knowing what Acclaim's plans for this work may
or may not be, I can't really spoil everything or post all the
scripts or art. At the same time, I feel it's incredibly unfair to the
fans who supported the book for three years to just dump them like that,
without giving at least some idea of what we had in mind. So, in
light of Acclaim's missing their latest promised ship date, and no news on
the Q&W movie front, I figured I'd blab a little about what you might
someday see, if the book ever comes back.
the
untold tales
 Over the years I've been repeatedly asked about
stories that were either never published or that were, well, mangled
somewhere along the line. Fans have asked if they could get copies of
scripts for those issues. Well, now you can. Over time, I'll be building a
script archive here of some things I thought were fun but were either
never published or, well, got mangled somewhere along the way.
the
priest curse
 Some years ago, online fans coined the
phrase, "The Priest Curse," and a lot has been made of the fact
that I've written a lot of books that were eventually cancelled.
Typically, this is all in good fun, but occasionally a fan or even some
editors in the business start taking this nonsense seriously, as though
any one person on any given creative team can be the sole reason a
book is cancelled. Books are cancelled for a lot of reasons,
many of them having nothing to do with the guy sitting in the writer's
chair. And while I'm certainly willing to accept my fair share of the
blame, I've posted a lot of defenses of my track record online, and I've
finally thought to include some of that here, so I won't have to keep
repeating myself.
the
cutting room floor
 In the process of writing a typical
22-page story, I will typically write 24 to 28 pages, then trim back to
the 22 limit. Sometimes it's just an exercise, like an artist sketching,
I'm trying to find a character's voice or his or her weight and rhythm in
a story. I've found I can sit and think about it for weeks, but nothing
really works so well as actually walking around in the character's skin
for a bit. This is certainly the long way
home, in terms of writing, but it's part of my process. Along the way I
end up with dozens of unpublished pages, most of them cut by me rather
than the company, who usually never sees these alternate and excised
scenes. This archive will eventually collect some of these moments,
which didn't work or didn't make it in for space reasons. These scenes
may be of special interest to those who have read the final stories.
Taken out of context, the scenes may or may not make a whole lot of
sense, but may be a treat for fans of the published, final works. I'm
glad these pages have finally found a home.
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