Moving beyond the usual fan queries regarding the varied Lantern spectra or when and if Wally West will return as the Flash, I had the opportunity to have a serious discussion with Johns about his craft, writing process and career in comics.

— Nathan Wilson

NATHAN WILSON: What is your approach to comic-script writing and does it vary depending on the artist involved, say between Francis Manapul, Gary Frank, Doug Mahnke, or others?

GEOFF JOHNS: It always, always varies on the artist involved. I’m very collaborative with my artists and with Gary Frank or Francis Manapul they all have unique styles and they all have great ways to tell stories and how they’re best at telling stories, and what they excel at and what they enjoy, and the issue turns out as the best of their output.

So, every script or every story I work on, I find the core of what the story is really about underneath it all and I go from there. But the way I approach scripts, it has to be about who I’m working with. I need to know who that artist is and I think for me the real collaboration started when I first got into comics with Scott Kolins way back when. We used to talk incessantly about the Flash and storytelling and Keystone City. And the more I think that you’re in touch with your partner, your artistic partner on this, the better the final product is because they know the subtleties of what you’re going for. I remember the first time I ever described Keystone City to Scott, it was like three pages long because I was like it’s an industrial city and it’s blue-collar and the factories are wedged in between apartment buildings and it went on and on, and we had a lot of discussions about it. But once you understand what Keystone City is supposed to be and the way the people behave and everything else, then you can start to have a shorthand with him. So it definitely depends on who the artist is and every script is individually tailored to the artist I’m working with.

WILSON: Do you find that you keep up an ongoing communication with the artists or do you just work through your editor?

JOHNS: Yeah, I talk with my artist. I mean I work with my editors, who are great too. I work mostly with Eddie Berganza and Adam Schlagman at DC, but no, I’m constantly talking to them and with the artist. With Francis, because he is so expressive and he has such a clean style, it calls for a clean writing style, so that less is more in that case. So I don’t want to do narration when I work with Francis. I want him to be nice and open and just let the story flow, and don’t have captions interrupt the story. I only want to do dialogue, action and heart with that book [The Flash].

It’s the same with Gary Frank that there’s little narration. I don’t know if I’ve done any with Gary Frank because again it’s the way his art is that narration for me just doesn’t feel right. But in the case of Doug Mahnke or Ivan Reis it can work at points, but it all depends on who I am working with. With Scott Kolins it definitely works too because he’s more of a dense artist, he does more panels on the page and his storytelling style breaks down into more panels and it calls for that type of storytelling.

WILSON: Do you happen to use the script or the plot style writing?

JOHNS: Full script because I think those lines that are really important, those facial reactions I think you need to have. And even in action, action should be, a location should be purposely chosen. It shouldn’t just be a parking lot to be a parking lot. You know what I mean?

WILSON: [Laughs.]

JOHNS: Yeah, because when you go into plot style I think sometimes you can lose a lot unless you’re talking to your artist non-stop. I think there’s a lot to be lost in translation.

Scripts courtesy of the Comic Book Script Archive; pages from the finished Teen Titans #34 drawn by Tony Daniel, Kevin Conrad, and Art Thibert

WILSON: Where did you learn about comic-script writing, specifically the pacing, arrangement, and story development? Was it self-taught or did you learn from someone else?

JOHNS: I studied film at Michigan State University and screenwriting classes, writing classes, and stuff like that. From there, working with Richard Donner when I got out of college, I talked with him a lot about storytelling because every time we’d have a story meeting, I’d be in there and talk just about story and story structure, momentum and character and everything. He was so inclusive with me that for me it was like grad school. I used to write scripts and he’d read them, and mostly screenplays. So I learned a lot from him.

I look at him and a screenwriter named Brian Helgeland who did L.A. Confidential and a bunch of other movies. But he was working on Conspiracy Theory at the time (1997) and I got to know him really well and we’d talk a lot about story. And, James Robinson, when I first met him, gave me a lot key advice, real simple, common-sense advice on the format of comics (because I’d been used to writing screenplays), on things to think about when writing comics and what that means [in practice]. And then I read a bunch of comics and took everything from everywhere and applied it to what I was doing.

WILSON: Was it very difficult to go from screenwriting style to scripting comics?

JOHNS: It slowed you down, because you have to direct it while you write it, because you’re calling out the shots in the panels. There’s a great book. I always tell artists and writers they should read this book for comics even though it’s a film book. It’s called Shot by Shot and I think it’s a brilliant, very simple straightforward storytelling book about stage lines, shot choices, and everything else, but I think it’s the best non-comic-book-writing comic-book-writing book.

WILSON: I didn’t know the styles were that close together between film writing and comic scripting.

JOHNS: They’re pretty tight because they’re both visual and they both tell stories in frames. You just have less frames to do it in a comic book so you have to be a little more judicious.

WILSON: Since you took writing classes at MSU, did your passion for writing develop then or had you pursued creative writing beforehand? Were you into writing fiction and shorter stories as a child or teenager?

JOHNS: I always loved drawing and writing, and I would always draw little characters and create stories for them. I always liked illustration and writing, and when I went to school, when I got into high school, I got more into writing and film and television. In college I was really involved with the film club at MSU. It was the same film club that Sam Raimi founded and I was president of that for two years. I really enjoyed that and shot some movies on 16mm. We had a Fischer dolly and the whole nine yards, and it was really great. I always loved storytelling. But I still like drawing too.

WILSON: Do you still draw and do you include thumbnails with your scripts for artists?

JOHNS: I do thumbnails when I write my scripts, but I never send them off. It’s just for me really to get a visual sense of how the pages are going to lay out. I make these grids that are divided into six sections that essentially represent six pages and I take a stack of them and staple them together, and it then represents one comic book. From there, I draw it out, very bare bones, just to see what it’ll look like visually flipping through it because you want it to vary anyway. You know, where is it going to open up because there’s a big moment? So I illustrate that way.

I do some design work. I designed Pied Piper’s current costume. I’ve done some other design work here and there. I leave the illustration to the professionals. I just like doing it for fun.

WILSON: Speaking of professionals, was there a moment when you recognized your own strengths or comforts at being a writer?

JOHNS: [Deep exhale.]

WILSON: That’s not good [laughs].

JOHNS: [Laughs.] No, I always look at challenges. For me, for a long time, first issues were a challenge. I really wanted to figure out how do you write a great first issue, like a really compelling, fun, character-driven first issue that was its own story but set the stage for world-building. I love building worlds. I love Green Lantern because it’s a world that I want to immerse everybody in. Same with The Flash, Justice Society, whatever the book is. So I want the first issue not only to be a story but also to be a doorway into this world. And I think when I wrote Justice Society of America #1 and Booster Gold #1, and The Flash #1 I was really happy with them, and I felt like the first issues were starting to feel a little bit comfortable. But I always like to try to do new things. With JSA, I did that “coming up next this year in JSA” and that was the first time somebody had done that, and subsequently a lot of people have done that in a lot different books. Kind of trailer moments. I like exploring that.

The conclusion to the Sinestro Corps is still my favorite comic, Green Lantern #25, of any comic I’ve written because not only for me was it a satisfying conclusion to write, both from a story point but also emotionally with Hal Jordan and Coast City coming to life, and introducing the concept of the other corps full on that I had been hinting at, and teasing up Blackest Night and moving forward, and adding new things to something that’s been around for a long time. I was really happy with that.

But you’re always trying to, I mean I think everyone looks at what they’ve done and what they’re going to do, and you try to improve on it and see where your strengths and weaknesses are. I think it’s an ongoing process. Every time a comic book comes out, you look at it and you go, “Well, maybe I want to tweak this or should I have done this or this differently.” Or, if a project comes out that doesn’t seem to resonate as much as you’d hoped it did, you look at it and say, “What did I do wrong?” or “What could I do better?” Or, sometimes something comes out that did really well and you question, “What did I do well, what did I do right?”

WILSON: Are there key moments then, in looking back at the past couple of years, where you see either an evolution in your style or your own growth as a writer?

JOHNS: Green Lantern Rebirth was a big step for me, yeah, because I felt very comfortable with that story but also because I sat down and spent a lot of time with it before I even started writing it. I spent a lot of time asking what was Green Lantern to me, what was it going to be about beyond just a guy with a power ring. I felt like Green Lantern had to be more than just a guy with a power ring or part of the intergalactic corps. Overcoming fear was going to be central because I love exploring emotion, but fear in particular is something that we’ve been exploring since 2004 when Rebirth came out, and fear is such a prevalent force in society today and yesterday, and it will be tomorrow because you can’t put it in a glass, you can’t fill a room full of fear, because it doesn’t exist but it does. It keeps holding us back from following our dreams. It holds us back from getting close to people. It holds us back from getting to know people including the person next door or even the country next door. And fear is at the root of violence. Fear is a very real force and everyone has personal fears and they’re all different whether they’re macro or micro. But we all have fears we have to deal with.

So once I got to the core of that and really said, “OK, everything is going to be about this guy who is built to overcome fear.” There’s a line in Rebirth where Hal Jordan says “when I was ten years old, I saw my father’s plane crash,” and it resonated with me because my sister died in a plane crash. But when he sees his father die in a plane crash, it’s the worst. What happens when your greatest fear happens, what happens then? Well, then you can handle anything; you can cope. It’s part of life too that you learn how to cope and how to overcome your fears as you learn how to deal with life. On this superhero level, he learned how to overcome fear because he was forced to; he didn’t want to, but he was forced to. So then he became this pilot who was reckless and does it to overcompensate, to show everyone he is not afraid because he is still going to fly, he wants to fly. And, with Rebirth being all about this guy who came into fear and then breaks out of it was really inspiring to me. It’s the book that I’m most proud of maybe. That was a turning point for me.

WILSON: Would you say then that focusing so closely on fear, were you making a concerted effort to contextualize what was going on in the larger society at the time as people look back on the last 10 years and there’s anxiety and fear in American culture because of what has been transpiring domestically and abroad? Would you say that it affected you, that here’s fear as a viable thematic concept?

JOHNS: Absolutely. I mean look at American society in the 1940s. There was World War II but then in the 1950s everything got really nice and kind of everyone sees the 1950s as a quaint, suburban soda shop society because everybody experienced that fear in the 40s. But then you had a whole generation growing up in the 1950s who didn’t experience the fear in the 40s and they rebelled in the 60s, so it’s almost a cycle. Sure. Rebirth came out in 2004 and I’d begun working on it in 2002 and that was at the height of anthrax being sent around to news reporters and it was crazy. So, I’m sure, absolutely, that it was influential. I think also that you have a generation now that’s grown up with that anxiety, but soon we’ll get to a generation and it’ll be interesting to see what they gravitate towards or what the next decade or two is like when you have that generation that grew up not remembering 9/11. What’s that going to be like?

WILSON: That’s a good point.

JOHNS: Yeah, what are they going to rebel against, because they didn’t have that fear and anxiety that threw society upside down?

WILSON: With Rebirth being as you said a “turning point,” were there experiments then that didn’t pan out or turn out as you’d expected for better or worse?

JOHNS: Oh, absolutely. Some of it was due to having to work with a lot of other people, so you had to make some concessions. It happens when you work in a shared publishing universe. But I always have to take the responsibility for everything. Certainly there are projects for everybody that are a miss or something that didn’t turn out as well as you’d hoped. I think on every one of those, there’s one in particular that I’ve gone back, and the ending for me just didn’t work. It worked on some levels, but not on a lot of levels, so I went back and I asked why. “How could I make that choice, how could I make a different choice, how could I make my ending stronger, how can I make better superhero comics?” I think they are a lot of fun, but they are still a challenge to do. There are so many that have been done and they have to be about more than being just Batman #605. What’s the story really about? So, absolutely there’s stuff that’s happened and still happens, but you go back through and you want to learn from it. You have to look at it as a positive. It’s just like you’ve got to overcome your fears, you cannot be afraid to tackle the next project.

I remember when Mike McKone and I did Teen Titans, and people told Mike, who told me, that “we’re crazy for doing Teen Titans. It’ll never work” [laughs]. People told me the same thing, that “it will be a failure,” or asked, “Why, when they’ve tried to reboot three or four times?” My answer was because “I have a good idea, I’m excited about it, I think Mike and I are going to be a good team for it,” and I think the book did very well. I was really proud of the stuff Mike and I did. But same thing with The Flash, people asked me “Why do you want to do a run on Flash. Mark Waid just did a run.” I gave the same answer, that “I think I have some good ideas.” I don’t want to let fear stop me because you really can achieve it if you believe in it.

I wouldn’t want to sit there and list the books [laughs] that I’m not happy with, because I’m happy with most of them on some level. But there’s always stuff that you look at and it didn’t work and you want to see how to get better. You have to. If you don’t do that, you’re not growing or evolving. You’ve got to be honest with yourself and, even if they’re a piece of it, you can’t blame an artist, an editor, your landlord. You can’t blame anybody but yourself when a book doesn’t work. And if a book doesn’t work you’ve got to look at it, put it on your own shoulders, and say, “This is my fault, but why didn’t it work?”

WILSON: I received a similar answer from Grant Morrison who used the phrase “I liked them all, even the ugly step-children.”

JOHNS: [Laughs.] Yeah, that’s exactly right! There is no comic that I’ve taken off my shelf that I’ve worked on. I like all of them. All of them represent something to me and all of them were a great challenge and a great joy to write.

Tomorrow: Johns talks about writing and discipline.

All images ©DC Comics

]]> http://classic.tcj.com/superhero/nathan-wilson-an-interview-with-geoff-johns-part-one-of-two/feed/ 3 http://classic.tcj.com/blog/the-panelists-wednesday-shop-talk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-panelists-wednesday-shop-talk http://classic.tcj.com/blog/the-panelists-wednesday-shop-talk/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:24:26 +0000 Alex Boney http://www.tcj.com/?p=28586

Over at The Panelists today, Jared writes about the nagging pall that now enshrouds his weekly trips to comics shops. Because some of us still go through the ritual, even if we’re not entirely sure why anymore.

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Today at The Panelists, Charles Hatfield takes a look at continuity-heavy superhero crossovers/events/crises through the lens of Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s JLA/Avengers. Excerpt: “Okay, so prelapsarian innocence (think DC in the early sixties) can comfortably coexist with angst, moral ambiguity, and post-direct market revisionism. And stories can poach freely from various eras, resulting in complexity and irony. Sure, why not?”

Over at The Panelists today, I continue our One-Panel Criticism relay with a look at a Wally Wood panel from All Star Comics #59 (1976).

NATHAN WILSON: What has been the most valid praise and most valid criticism for you as an artist and why?

FREDDIE E. WILLIAMS II: Criticism is everywhere whether you want it or not and that can be a good and a bad thing.  I think it’s easy for newer artists, if they post something online and then get either legitimately or illegitimately criticized for it, for them to get discouraged and I would hate for that to happen.  In my experience, I have personally tried to avoid message boards and online critiques and criticisms of the work that I do. It’s easy to let that voice get inside your head and overtalk your own creative voice.  If you work really hard on something and there’s a group of people who either don’t respond to it or who just want to troll on the Internet, that can make you feel discouraged from doing your best work.  But I do seek out criticism. A couple of times I’ve asked my editors and I’ve been very fortunate that I get along with my editors and they dig the type of stuff I’m doing, but it’s good sometimes to drop them a line and ask for some feedback.  That’s the sort of feedback that I’ve enjoyed the most.

Richard Brunning, the art director, who was most responsible for getting me started at DC, I’ve e-mailed him a couple of times and said, “Hey buddy, can you take a look at my recent work and tell me what you think?”  A very valid criticism he gave me for the first couple of issues of JSA All-Stars was where there were 10 or 11 characters running around and multiple panels on a page so it can get very busy.  For the first issue, for the first couple of pages especially where there’s so much chaos happening, and I wanted it to be chaotic but I overdid it, he said, “This looks good and I can tell you wanted to bring your ‘A game’ to this, but you might have brought your ‘triple A game.’”  He meant I might have thrown too much into it.  He could tell that the backgrounds were good, the figure drawings were good, the inks and the textures were good, but there was so much of it that it became overpowering.  My follow-up was that it became like a “Where’s Waldo” because there is so much happening.  I’ve taken that to heart.  It’s important to keep focus and create clarity in a composition and it’s harder whenever you have 10 or 11 characters.  I should have simplified stuff in the background.  That was very valid criticism.  I still keep those notes.

A really definitive praise or positive comment I’ve received, and I’ve received a fair amount for my art, but for my how-to book, the best praise, the best feedback I’ve gotten is there were some guys who told me in person that they had wanted to quit drawing and felt uninspired and seeing my how-to book has made them inspired again to draw.  That’s the best feedback I’ve gotten and it feels very good; it’s given me goose bumps.

WILSON: Well it’s honest; you know they’re not trying get something out of you or get you to do something specifically for them, so you know it’s honest and sincere.  That’s got to feel good.

WILLIAMS: Yeah and it’s usually just them stopping by my art table at a convention and not asking for a free sketch or asking, “By the way, can you also send these samples to your editor” (laughs).

WILSON: They’re not walking up to you with a stack of 20 books in their hands while saying it and then asking you to sign them all, and then they all end up on eBay (laughs).

Looking at your more recent work with Final Crisis Aftermath: Run!, I noticed that while you did the art duties, that the colors were done by the Hories.  Although digital obviously gives you greater control over your lines, layouts and inking, is handing over the coloring duties difficult at all to your vision in regard to the tone, environment and atmosphere you’re creating?

WILLIAMS: I think what the Hories give me, sometimes it’s unexpected, but there are plenty of times where it’s often better than what I would have had in mind.  It’s different.  I don’t have any negative connotations towards it.  They have a better sense of understanding of how it contrasts between scenes.

WILSON: Do you ever give or provide color guidance based on your own interpretation of the script and the emotion of the scene?

WILLIAMS: Sometimes.  On Run and JSA All-Stars, I’ve worked as a kind of art director.   My editor, Mike Carlin, is fine with me giving color notes.  The colorists post jpgs of the art and the editor looks for inconsistencies in the continuity, and I’m usually commenting on it. Issue #10 is a good example in JSA, where there is a big battle scene in downtown Los Angeles and in the foreground Hourman is holding Power Girl.  There were a couple panels where I asked the Hories to change the color slightly in the foreground versus the middle ground and background.  In Photoshop, I’m able to use the channels palette to provide a color selection for each of those.  That’s probably the extent of my input though.

WILSON: Do your colorists also work digitally?

WILLIAMS: The Hories do and that’s probably how nearly 100% of the industry works in digital.  The only time you’re going to find, and I may be overstepping my bounds here, but the only time you’re going to find a guy or a colorists working traditionally is on special occasions for special projects or somebody who is fully painted like Alex Ross.  Inkers and pencilers are just now catching on in the past five years.

WILSON: I noticed on the covers to JSA All-Stars, that you are juggling penciling, inking and coloring duties. Do you ever color your own interiors?  Is it simply the time factor involved?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, it’s just time.  If there comes an opportunity where I can pencil, ink and color a series or a miniseries or something like that, assuming that I would have the amount of time that I would need, I’ll snatch it up because I’d love to do that.  It’s a fun experiment.  Sometimes collaborations can be stronger because of it and other times a singular vision can be stronger.  Sometime in my life I would like to write, pencil, ink and color a book.

WILSON: Have you ever done any comic writing?

WILLIAMS: I’ve done a little.  I co-wrote some independent stuff before I started working for DC.  I recently wrote a 10-page story in JSA 80 Page Giant which came out earlier this year.

WILSON: Do you find yourself more or less disciplined in having transitioned from pencil-and-ink work to a digital platform?

WILLIAMS: I’m not sure.  I’m a very disciplined person and I have a very strong work ethic, but I’m not sure if any of that comes from working digitally.  I think even if I was working all on paper I’d still have a strong work ethic that would be focused on having a high production.

WILSON: What is your work schedule, i.e. do you have an established protocol you follow daily, or are you more flexible in when you work?

WILLIAMS: I can work any 12 hours of the day I choose (laughs).  That’s not a hard and fast rule because there are days that I work 10 hours or eight hours, but my average is about 12 hours a day.  If I’m working under deadline then it’s considerably higher than that (up to 18 hours sometimes).  At the beginning of an issue, at the beginning of the month, I’ll work out my calendar and I’ll list from day to day what I’m responsible for to get done on that given day.  If I already know I’ve got a few activities going on for the family, I’ll put that down too.  If I know that I’m going to hit a deadline crunch as a result, I’ll go into deadline mode, which is where I get five hours of sleep every night until I’m out of the deadline.  It’s been decreasing in the frequency it happens in the past couple of years but when I first started it was murderous.  In fact, the first two years I worked for DC are like a complete blur.  I know it was a blur of hitting deadlines.  Sometimes when I look back at the trades or my personal binders of my art, I’ll forget certain aspects.

WILSON: You were probably taking on as many assignments as you could to make a name for yourself and truly burning the candle at both ends.

WILLIAMS: That first year, 2005, that I was working for DC I started in October and when Thanksgiving came around, I was having Thanksgiving at my house and I was there with my laptop and I was working the entire time. It’s much better now.  Working 12 hours a day every day still adds up though, but at least I can now have an occasional party or free time with friends and family.

WILSON: Although most, if not all, audiences can easily distinguish Superman, Batman, Flash, etc., what is your reference or research process in working with such iconic, superhero characters so as to remain true to their origins but still make them distinctively your own?

WILLIAMS: It’s a combination and there’s greater pressure whenever it comes to Batman or Superman because so many people have tried their hands on them, but with the All-Stars, Power Girl, Hourman, and Star Girl are the most clearly established characters on the team.  Those I needed more reference, but the majority of the team, I would just look at the costume and do original drawings, for example, Citizen Steel I drew much bigger and bulkier because I thought it made him more interesting to make him more like a Colossus character than what he was previously.

WILSON: Yeah, I realize with characters like Robin or Batman you don’t have the license or freedom to reinvent their look or costumes.

WILLIAMS: The closest I’ve been was with Robin.  I started on issue #149 and #148 was the beginning of DC’s One Year Later event, and Karl Kerschl was originally to be the artist for Robin but was double booked, so he did that one issue and redefined his costume.  Some people think I redesigned the costume, which is why I bring this up.  I did not.  The closest thing I did to that was make his talons on his mask taller and give him sideburns (laughs).

WILSON: In moving from solo-title books such as Robin or Flash to team-driven books such as JSA All-Stars, what do you find is the greatest difference for you as an artist in your approach?

WILLIAMS: The biggest difference in art or storytelling to overcome is to not be afraid to leave characters out when they don’t have a specific speaking role or a specific action.  For example, the first couple of issues of JSA All-Stars was the first experience I had drawing a team and Matt Sturges had writing a team.  There would be some descriptions in the script that would say Powergirl is in the foreground doing this, while Hourman is doing this thing in the scene.  And in the text it would say that “the other All-Stars are in the background fighting.”  They didn’t have speaking lines or their actions didn’t necessarily need to be seen.  It was easy for me to fall in the habit of doing a long shot every time, every panel to fit in every member of the team.  That was not a good instinct to have necessarily.  You need the storytelling to keep interest, to go in for close-ups.  It took me a few issues to learn.  It was something Matt and I had learned together.

We’ve been working in the plot method for the last couple of issues, like the Marvel method.  It’s not a full script, so we’ll talk about the plot on the phone for a couple of issues. I just make plot and dialogue suggestions, throw out ideas and ask him questions.  The most important is asking him questions like “What is the motivation of this guy?” or “What if we did this instead?”  From that phone call, he’ll write up a plot synopsis for each issue, like a three or four issue arc, and then when I get the issue it’s broken down where it says, “pages five through 10 this happens.”  I then decide the pacing and the storytelling in the roughs, and then I get feedback from Matt and suggestions/notes from him, we just go back and forth.

WILSON: So you’re not given any dialogue or script, but a broader concept then?

WILLIAMS: There are times when he has very specific ideas and dialogue, and there might be a couple of scenes where he knows exactly what he wants the characters to say or something close to what they’re going to say.  It’s a very organic way of creating a piece of artwork (looking at the comic book, in its entirety as a piece of art).  A lot of the lines have been blurred where we’re kind of stepping into each other’s territory and we’re comfortable enough with each other to allow us to do that.  Mike Carlin is very supportive of this.  We check in with him at every step.

WILSON: That’s not how all of the comics are created at DC Comics though, correct?

WILLIAMS: Not at all. As a rule, DC Comics, has the writers provide full scripts, so Matt and I are working as an exception to the rule.  Normally, they deliver the script to the artist, and really there’s no interaction between the artist and the writer at all, and that’s how I worked for the first three years at DC.  If I had any questions, I would ask the editor.  I felt like I was fulfilling an assembly line process. I also like working like that though.  There are other challenges that keep my interest in that style.

WILSON: Is it almost a paralyzing type of freedom though at times?

WILLIAMS: Nah, if either of us is stuck on something, we just call or e-mail each other and talk it out. We don’t have to face those problems on our own.

WILSON: It’s almost the most collaborative you can get in the industry.

WILLIAMS: The only way it would be more collaborative is if I was actually full on co-writing.  As it is now, I’m contributing far less than 50% of the plot and story, so just to be clear, Matt is still clearly the writer, but there’s usually a special thanks from Matt Sturges in the credits, just for what I do contribute.

WILSON: In looking back over the past 10 years, is there one title or one issue that stands out for you as the quintessential Freddie Williams digital work?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, probably the last issue of Robin, which is #183.

WILSON: Why?

WILLIAMS: It was the first pencil, ink and colored cover I did for DC and now I’m getting to do that more often from that experience.  I also pencil, inked and colored a six or eight page story in the back of the issue.  I want to reconnect on that, where I’m doing it all.  Another one is probably my last issue or two on the Flash.  It was a weird situation.  It wasn’t until the last three issues that me, the writer and the colorist were given the go ahead to do what we wanted to do, and those are the issues I like the most as they’re the best ones from my run. Also issues 10 and 11 from JSA All-Stars were really fun, feels like we are hitting our stride there.

Freddie Williams is continuing with JSA All-Stars from DC Comics and currently working on a how-to project involving 3-D modeling for comic illustration.  He can be found online at www.freddieart.com and on Twitter (Freddieart).  His website includes additional tutorials and guidelines involving his digital process, as well as downloadable tools and techniques for artists.  In the accompanying videos, Williams is describing his process from Robin #182 from roughs to wireframes.  Those interested in seeing Williams’ inking and coloring process can visit his website for further videos.

All images in this two-part interview are  ©DC Comics

Interview by Nathan Wilson

Freddie E. Williams II has had a career in comics that most artists could only dream of achieving.  Until a convention appearance in San Diego in 2005 where he submitted a portfolio to DC Comics’ talent search, Williams’ entrance into comics had been with shorter stints in 2005 as a penciller and inker with Image’s Noble Causes as well as a few one-shots.  The 2005 San Diego Comic-Con changed all that as his break into the “big two” came with Grant Morrison’s four-issue Seven Soldiers of Victory: Mister Miracle #2.

Talent and determination combined with a growing reputation for delivering his artwork either ahead of schedule or precisely on time won him the continued attention of DC, who assigned Williams as a fill-in artist on Aquaman and eventually made him the ongoing artist for Robin only one year after his SDCC portfolio review.  In addition to his continued DC work with Robin, Freddie illustrated one-shots and shorter runs on titles such as 52, Firestorm: The Nuclear Man, The Outsiders, Blue Beetle, Countdown and The Flash.  In 2009, Williams teamed with Matt Sturges on DC’s six-issue Final Crisis Aftermath: Run! and in early 2010 continued with Sturges on JSA All-Stars for 11 issues.  In addition to Morrison and Sturges, over the course of only five years, Williams has also collaborated with Adam Beechen, Mark Waid, Peter Milligan, Chuck Dixon and Fabian Nicieza on nearly all of DC’s top-tier character properties.

Williams attributes his success and abilities to his 1999 conversion from traditional pencil-and-ink work to a completely digital art environment.  Working digitally for more than years now, a transition and process that he describes in great detail with instructions and guidance in his The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics (2009), Williams took time away from his hectic schedule to speak with me about his digital canvas artwork and to record a video of his process.

NATHAN WILSON: Are you a completely digital artist or do you still complete roughs or page layouts traditionally?

FREDDIE E. WILLIAMS II: The vast majority of the time, I am all digital. Pages that I think will sell well or if I feel like I need to do some multimedia on a page like some ink splatters or some really brushy sort of work, which doesn’t come up very often, I’ll do the setup for the page digitally and then print out the structure onto art board and then finish it off traditionally so that I have an actual piece of original art later, that I can either sell or just so I can paint on it with ink splatters and stuff that feel more organic.  Doing work on paper I probably do three or four pages an issue.  I almost always do all my covers because those sell very well.  The original art market is too big and too profitable to ignore, so that was part of the reason to do it on paper.  But it’s also still fun to do stuff on paper.  JSA All-Stars #3 had a whole bunch of wild, splatter effects, so it was cool to cut out my little masks and attach them to the art and then splatter around it and clean it up.  It was like a return to the old days I guess.

WILSON: So in some ways, a special occasion can necessitate a change in media then.  Was your sequence in Grant Morrison’s Batman #700 an example of mixed media or something entirely digital?

WILLIAMS: No, that was 100% digital.  That was a 3-D model that me and a friend of mine named Drew both created.  There’s some behind the scenes projects I work on for DC that will show up in a comic book here and there but it’s basically establishing a definitive reference for the Batcave or the Batmobile or something like that, the Wayne Tower, the new Birds of Prey headquarters.  Basically, I create a 3-D version of that for inner-office reference or if a new artist comes on a book, the editors will give them these files I’ve made of the 3-D models so they can use those for reference.

WILSON: What specifically convinced you — the “ah ha” moment or awakening, if you will — that digital was the right move for you and your art?

WILLIAMS: The first one on a technology level; I was working for Hallmark Cards for seven-plus years, in downtown Kansas City.  They put you through some pretty intense training, which is a really good thing for me.  I knew Photoshop, which is how I got hired on there, but I learned a lot there though during that time.  My brain always comes from a comic-book point of view, a filter for comics — whenever I read a book or see a movie, even if it has nothing to do with comics, it’s all filtered into my mind as “how can this be used towards comics” or “what would this be if it was a comic.” It’s the same thing with technology.  Any time I see a piece of technology I picture to myself how can I use this towards a comic book.  So, one of those moments is when I was introduced to Hallmark’s work flow of how they used Photoshop and Illustrator is what comic books and Hallmark Cards have in common.  The definitive moment though that got me to branching into doing digital comic book work is when I was working for a guy who is a friend of mine now who was a very finicky editor for an independent comic book.  I would get a script from him, I would create thumbnails on paper, scan them in, and then e-mail them to him.  He would have a whole bunch of changes.  When I would first get these notes I would get back out my roughs, I had drawn on paper and erase a bunch of stuff, then redraw, then rescan, re-email, and that takes a lot of time.  So I started altering some of my roughs in the computer since they weren’t very big changes and I had them scanned in already, using the lasso stuff to resize stuff.  As I got more comfortable doing that I started doing the entire layouts digitally.  That was a big deal for me and I started doing more and more of that, seeing how much more I could add to the digital pages, detail-wise or final-line-art-wise that cut out the time of drawing it on paper and having to scan it.  That was probably anywhere from late 1999 to early 2001.

WILSON: Even though you mention having a comic mind, were you always working on comics even while you were at Hallmark then?  How did you make that transition and learn that comics and Hallmark cards shared the same production methods?

WILLIAMS: I’ve always had an interest in comic books.  That’s been my main goal ever since the earliest I can remember, so that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.  Even when I was working at Hallmark, my goal was  to get into drawing comics for a living.  Hallmark was a great job, it was the best 9-5 job I’ve ever had, and really great people and the pay was good, but comics has always been my goal.  I had studied and read about how comics were created and about some comic-book artists’ traditional work flow, which is to draw on printer-size paper to get your layout, usually then you drive to Kinkos to get that blown up to 11×17, and then you lightbox that onto your art board in light blue and then start drawing on your art board from there.  Just the lightboxing part of that process alone, would be enough to make me never want to draw on paper again (laughs).  What it came down to was that scanning was a pain and so was running to Kinkos and then lightboxing those are all very meticulous things.  Some artists, when they have enough money, will have an assistant to do those things for them, but this is of course before I would have ever dreamed of hiring somebody to do that stuff for me.  By doing all of that stuff on the computer, you can save a ton of time! Instead of drawing a small rough layout (because sketching dynamicly can be aided by drawing small, you can just zoom way out in photoshop, making your document size look small, then instead of getting the rough layout blown up and lightboxing it, you can just zoom back in to the art, and draw right over the top of the digital roughs you just drew on your screen.  If you want you can still print all that out in light blue right on the art board, instead of lightboxing, so even if those are the only steps you do digitally, you’re still saving yourself a lot of time.

WILSON: With digital comic’s rising popularity and greater availability now more than ever, do you find more artists transitioning to entirely digital work environments to accommodate the shift in media?

WILLIAMS: Some might, but I don’t think it’s a primary motivation.  Right now there’s a nebulous concept of what the digital market is going to be.  Looking at somebody like Jim Lee who is very encouraging in wanting to have content digitally offered in some fashion — he’s still working traditionally.  I don’t think he feels any pressure to work in a digital fashion.  I don’t think that just because the end destination of something is supposed to be digital, means that you have to create it digital from the start.  That shouldn’t be the reason, in my opinion, to make someone want to go digital because their artwork will end up in a digital medium.  In general, I think it would be a smart move, though, for artists to look into the digital workflow because of the versatility and the time benefits it offers.

WILSON: Do you know if Jim Lee has tried digital methods though and why he has decided to remain within a traditional platform?

WILLIAMS: I toured the Wildstorm Studios after the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con and although I haven’t sat there and watched him work, I know Jim has one of the large Cintiqs, right next to his drawing table.  I believe the way he still works is that he does everything straight to the board.  He posts a lot of his process on Twitter (JimLee00), all of you should check that out.  I think when Jim gets to the very end after having the art scanned, he’ll use the Cintiq and Photoshop to clean up and tweak stuff digitally.  I’ve seen a video of him drawing the character Mayhem, holding two guns, but on the art board, Jim only drew one of those guns, then after the art was scanned, he used the lasso tool to duplicate it and move the gun into the character’s other hand so he didn’t have to draw both guns.  In short, Jim Lee works traditionally, and still only uses the computer as a post-production tool.

WILSON: It seems that it’s difficult to determine who is a digital artist and who isn’t in terms of getting credit for doing comics digitally or being asked about their art process and then admitting they do the artwork digitally.

WILLIAMS: There are quite a few who use various tools like Photoshop, Manga Studio and Google Sketchup, to varying degrees, and for quite a while now.  I think part of the reason that some artists don’t openly speak about the stuff they do on the computer is because they might only do a little bit, like Lee, so it’s just an additional tool they use, not a mainstay in their mind.  Then there are others who feel like they don’t want to give up trade secrets or feel it might diminish the impact of their work if someone knew they worked digitally.  People have asked me if I felt I was giving away trade secrets in the DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics.  Honestly, I’ve never felt that way about stuff.  I’ve always felt like talking about it and comparing notes.  I’ve learned stuff from other people.

WILSON: Do you find that digital comics reflect your art better than traditional print methods for monthly comics?

WILLIAMS: The short answer would be no, but there’s a caveat to that I would add: The exception is with coloring.  Not to get too geek technical but the color range that can be achieved using four-, five- or six-color printing methods at the printing presses, that range of colors is called the gamut.  Even though you can hit a lot of colors at the printing press, you cannot achieve as many colors as you can on your computer screen.  Those really fluorescent colors of a mist or energy form is not achievable in normal printing methods unless they use a neon ink or spot-color printing process.  For example, the covers of JSA All-Stars, I do the pencils, inks and colors for them.  When I’m creating energy effects or whatever it is, I can go in Photoshop and check the gamut warnings to see if Photoshop is smart enough that it can say that these colors will not be achieved at the printing press.  If you’re doing it on a delivery system that will eventually be on an iPad or computer screens, you can go as bright and crazy as you want to.  I’ve been basically trying to create what looks like pen-and-ink artwork for print using digital means.  I don’t want it to look like it’s anything different than I did before.  That’s what I like.  Early CG attempts were too airbrushy and too rounded.

WILSON: I know that in some cases, preview images on DC’s The Source blog have shown pictures of comic pages that look much darker in print when you’re holding the monthly book.  Have you ever experienced this or do you ever worry that what you create digitally may not carry over as clearly to the print medium?

WILLIAMS: Yes, but I would include that, in the coloring aspect, the problem’s a limited color gamut.  DC has pretty good quality control, meaning if they received press proofs that were out of whack or color lines were shifted, they’re not going to accept that. Of course there are going to be press variants and dot gain, a difference in the gamut and all that stuff. As for my line art, the answer is still no.  The coloring is what is subject to the biggest variants at the printing press.

WILSON: Since most artists have to scan original art into Photoshop or Manga Studio, do you believe cost and investment in the hardware and software or a simple lack of knowledge (or maybe even fear) about the technology is a greater barrier for most artists adopting a completely digital platform for comic art?

WILLIAMS: If you’re asking me if all those things are limiting or causing hesitations in going digital, then the answer is yes.  If you’re asking me which one is the biggest obstacle then I would say it would be combination the money involved In purchasing the hardware and software.  A guy who is working all traditional and has for years, and he has a monthly deadline he has to keep up with, he is under the gun deadline wise.  He knows that the way he’s currently working has worked out well for him for years.  So, they may feel like “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  Why spend what little free time he does have away from work or sacrifice time to try to find another way to do stuff he already knows how to do.  To go out and spend six-and-a-half grand for a new computer system, scanner and printer and all the software and then start from the ground-up learning the hardware and software.  It can feel like a long limb for them to climb out on.

WILSON: I know traditional art supplies can be costly too, but I would imagine they’re nowhere near the cost of the technology involved here for the Wacom interfaces.

WILLIAMS: This is a weak point, but I’m going to make it anyway (laughs).  Because I don’t use paper nearly as much any more and because I don’t use pencils and ink as much any more.  I use them a tenth as much as I would if I was drawing a book traditionally.  The majority of the time I’m using those supplies is when I’m at a convention.  Those dollars do add up and accumulate as well and help to offset some of the expense of the digital stuff.

WILSON: I don’t want to reinforce the joke Brian Bolland has in the introduction to your work about pushing a button and the work automatically appears in Photoshop, so was it mainly a gradual process of trial and error for you to learn Photoshop could be used this way to create comics?  Was it like learning a new language or perhaps new method to produce the work?

WILLIAMS: When someone who doesn’t use a computer hears that I do art digitally, I think they picture in their mind that I just pick up a microphone that’s hooked up to the computer and say, “Draw Batman,” and then I go, “Draw him better” (laughs).  It was a very gradual process, one that is still evolving for me even today.

WILSON: It sounds like a very individualized experience, but did you learn this process solely on your own or did you have the benefits of learning from somebody else who had experimented with digital comic art?

WILLIAMS: I would say that it was probably 60% of my own trial and error, just making stuff up — the other 40% was guided with previous experience and my time with Photoshop from Hallmark.

WILSON: At Hallmark, was the hardware such as the Wacom available then or was this all mouse and keyboard direction?  I imagine there must of have been some digital pen interface?

WILLIAMS: We used a Wacom tablet interface called an Intuos.  Bamboos, which is what I use now, and the Cintiqs hadn’t come out yet.

WILSON: Have you tried the Cintiq?

WILLIAMS: I have tried the Cintiq, the combination of the heat that comes off of it and the fact that my hand was in the way of the artwork on the screen, has made me stick to my Bamboo.  Though I’ve got my eye on a slate computer, Axiotron’s Modbook Pro. It’s like a 15-inch Cintiq that you can carry around with you … due out the first half of 2011. That could be a game changer for me … We’ll see

WILSON: Was it difficult for you to go from paper to the Wacom tablet interface in terms of the touch and feel, and the pressure you’d put with tools against a paper surface?

WILLIAMS: It wasn’t very hard.  It was a process that was very gradual.  It took a good year-plus to do my first all-digital page.  That to me was a very comfortable learning curve because it was self-propelled.  It wasn’t like somebody stormed into my office and exclaimed, “You’re working traditionally today, but you have to flip the switch and go all digital by this Friday!” So, pretty comfortable.

WILSON: Have you ever discovered any limitations working digitally that you recognize could be fixed or overcome through traditional work, or vice versa?

WILLIAMS: I think anything that you wanted to do digitally, you could probably could.  You can emulate a traditional feel.  Painter can emulate a lot of traditional art looks and techniques with its interface.  When I’m working on a commission there’s an entertainment value in having no undo or going back in time to your History palette in Photoshop to change the way someone’s face looks or if I went out of control with an ink brush. That is a fun experiment.  I wouldn’t want to be held captive by that though on a regular basis and that’s one of the reasons I don’t work all-traditional because I like the versatility of being able to change my layout or flip the position of somebody.

WILSON: Do you ever miss the so-called “happy accidents” that would occur with traditional tools?

WILLIAMS: They can still happen digitally, but there is more control digitally so it’s harder to have them.  A good example of one that can’t happen digitally is if you’re going for a spatter effect.  On paper, you might take a toothbrush, dip it in ink, and then flick your finger through it to create a spray.  You can’t predict every dot in the spray, but you know you want it somewhere over here.  Working digitally, it’s harder to create that sort of randomness.  I spent some time with my wife a few years ago filling up pieces of scratch Bristol board with textures and spatters in black India ink, let them dry, and then scanned them all in so that I have a library of textures that look organic that I can call upon and bring into the digital artwork.  For JSA All-Stars #3, the cover where Magog is getting punched in the face and there’s all these brush spatters in the background, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do that traditionally because I wanted it to have that random, visceral, kinetic feel to it that’s hard to produce digitally.  You still can, but it would be harder.

WILSON: How has your digital process evolved since your time on Seven Soldiers of Victory: Mister Miracle in relation to technological advancements, your style, and your outlook on comic art?

WILLIAMS: My art style, I feel, has changed considerably.  I’ve been doing a lot of things differently.  Like character proportions and storytelling, I think, I hope it’s improved, but whatever the case is, I like the direction I’m going in now more than what I was doing back then.  What I was doing back then, I still enjoyed, but I’ve grown as an artist.  Technology-wise, the difference for the work flow has been the introduction 3-D (with Google Sketchup) and in Photoshop, there has been the introduction of java scripts.  I was introduced to Photoshop JavaScripts, when I did a presentation at Hallmark of how I draw comic books for DC at their monthly digital café meetings on digital work flows, new processes, etc. After my presentation, someone I had never met, but who has since become one of my best friends, named Jay, asked if I had ever used them, and I was like “Javawhat?” We have been working together on Photoshop JavaScripts ever since.

WILSON: Interesting, what do JavaScripts do in Photoshop?

WILLIAMS: Photoshop JavaScripts, are like really advanced macros and actions to do multiple changes within or across files.  They can change the names of layers for you, resize images and a whole bunch of cool stuff like that.  The JavaScripts have done a lot for me in what I call cardboard cutouts.  One of the ways that I work and recommend other people to work is to draw the entire background as if your characters aren’t going to be there and then on another layer above that, make a drawing of your character.  You make a cardboard cutout of that character by creating a knockout layer behind your character but above your background line art.  There’s a big shortcut using JavaScripts for cardboard cutouts; I offer that tool on my website www.freddieart.com

WILSON: Would you say that your writers and editors know beforehand about your digital work and has this ever affected your assignments?  To put it another way, has there been any apprehension of you working digitally from writers or editors that you know of for a specific book?

WILLIAMS: That’s a good question.  It’s not the first thing I say to a writer or an editor.  It’s not like I make it clear to them that I work digital.  If they want to know, I’ll ramble on for hours just like I am with you right now (laughs).  There has been some mentioning though. Like Matt Sturges:  When he and I started working together, I think he had an issue with a bunch of cars or a crowd of people and in parenthesis he wrote, “Freddie, can you just create one car and then clone it all over,” which I didn’t do because it would have been pretty noticeable.  It was obvious he was aware of it and was trying to help me out or think of way to use it as a benefit.  As far as a prejudice, I don’t think I’ve encountered a prejudice of people realizing I work digitally and then backing away from their enjoyment of it.  To my knowledge, I haven’t faced that especially with editors and writers.  I think if I was the first guy to do this, it would probably freak them out (laughs).

WILSON: I remember your story in the DC Comics Guide book about your apprehension of telling the editor that worked digitally, so I’m curious if artists have an apprehension of going digital if a similar fear exists on the part of the writers or editors who just don’t know the technology or have experience with it.

WILLIAMS: I’ve yet to face that.  As a matter of fact, I’ve faced the opposite, where the editors are openly amazed by the process.  They’re more fascinated or interested.  Editors only care about if the artist is able to create good-looking art and in a timely fashion.  Other than that, they usually don’t care.  If you were inking with a Snickers bar on a brown paper sack, but it looked awesome and you could do it on a regular basis, they would not care.  They’d say, “Awesome, just keep it up.”  And that is how I work now, it’s the Snickers-brown-paper-sack technology that I haven’t told anyone about (laughs). Look for that in coming months.

In the conclusion of this interview tomorrow, Freddie Williams II talks about his typical work day and pacing stories without a full script.

Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

NATHAN WILSON: During the 1980s there are a lot of different things going on for DC. And, one of the things I liked about that chapter is that there is simply so much going on…

PAUL LEVITZ: It was an amazing time in the history of the company.

WILSON: Exactly. Not just with characters, but with marketing, with characters, from a television medium, and everything. You mention there were all these ideas to modernize the character of Superman but there were limitations on what could be done. Can you tell me more about what these limits were and why they would occur?

LEVITZ: It’s always a combination of things when you’re managing a character, a property, however you want to define it, that has that level of commercial success in so many different media. You want to make it fresh and relevant to the time that it’s in, but you also want to preserve what you perceive to be the essence of the character so that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can’t say that DC has always made the right decisions over the years or that any other company has either, but DC at least has, through some combination of good luck and good judgment, managed to persevere with it and that’s always been part of the process.

WILSON: OK, but in looking back at the John Byrne title then, what are his greatest contributions in your opinion to modernizing the character, to making Superman, as you say, “relevant to the time?”

LEVITZ: I haven’t looked back to reread that story in a bunch of years, so I’m not sure I can answer it as a reader. He clearly succeeded in getting a bunch of people to try it fresh who had given up on Superman. He raised the sales of the comics many times over. It may be the combination of the visual look that was distinctive to John’s work to the story bits he played around with. But he invited in a new group to play.

WILSON: During this period again, you also discuss weekly comics and the often lackluster attempts at this format. Why is the format so hit-and-miss, and what do you believe points to the success then of books such as 52, Wednesday Comics or, maybe even, Brightest Day?

LEVITZ: The fundamental problem of a weekly comic book is that it’s too much material for particularly one artist to create. You might be able to have a writer who can create a comic book every week, though not many of us work at that pace and I’m not sure how long that would be sustainable. [Laughs.] But in theory it’s workable. Part of what readers appreciate in comics is that they generally favor in recent decades stories that are around 25 pages long. That’s the most common, happy length for a comic book and no artist can produce that every week. Readers do like a consistency in things. The best successes in comics over the years have been by talent who have stayed on a project for a sustained period of time. To find the right writer and right artist who are in tune with where the marketplace is at the given moment and have the writer work at an absolute top limit of known writing speed and have the artist work at three or four times the fastest of what a current artist works defies all laws of physics. The successes that were finally achieved were when some central editorial team put together a team that just worked. Whether that was the Superman comics when they were being written and created in a pseudo-weekly fashion or 52 when they developed a team approach that was a good synthesis and successful. But it’s not a common model for building comics today, so it’s been very challenging to have that happen. It’s worked a few times in recent years. I think that Dan DiDio personally deserves a lot of credit for building those models, I think a lot of that comes from his experience in the television industry where he brought over some of the working models from there. But it’s like asking why aren’t there people who can run a one-minute mile?

WILSON: Even with four people writing 52 and having read the author notes in the collected trades, those seem to be intensive writing experiments and sessions going back and forth.

LEVITZ: And you are working at a velocity that simply isn’t the norm in this business. In the same fashion that there are sound economic reasons why television shows don’t generally do 52 new episodes a year. It would also be really hard to produce 52 new episodes of an hour-long drama. You probably couldn’t do it. The sheer physicality wouldn’t be possible. You might be able to do it with a half-hour situation comedy, but it would be a very impressive thing.

WILSON: This is also the period where Vertigo gets its start and you spend time in the book discussing the various authors and editors who initiated the project. You focus on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and its ability to cross gender in audiences. Vertigo seems to have a very solid handle on this and I’m curious if it’s just a combination of the writers involved at Vertigo because you see a lot of back and forth between writers who write for Vertigo and those who write for DC or Marvel. What do you think explains why Vertigo has the ability to do this while DC proper or one of the other big publishers doesn’t have this power to cross genders?

LEVITZ: Which ability?

WILSON: The ability to cross genders because if you talk with female readers, there appears to be a greater attention paid to Vertigo titles than those published in the mainstream DC realm.

LEVITZ: I’m not sure that young women are as interested in reading about superheroes. The fundamental dynamic of the superhero story has historically been more appealing to boys than to girls. There are any number of very successful superhero comics over the years that have had a better gender balance than others, but the genre as a whole has been a more male genre. Vertigo doesn’t generally work in that genre and that’s a starting point. You’ve had a number of really talented female editors working within the Vertigo mix and help screen the material and shape the material, starting with Karen herself obviously. I would posit that she is a very positive force in that process. Vertigo has probably averaged around 50-percent female editorial staff for most of its existence while DCU has probably never been more than five or 10 percent, and I don’t know the Marvel staff members well enough to comment. That’s probably a piece of it also.

WILSON: Has there ever been a concern within DCU then, and obviously they’re not going to abandon the superhero genre, but since it’s been let go during the 1950s, was it ever a thought to incorporate more of the diversity expressed through Vertigo into the DCU itself to make superheroes more approachable to…

LEVITZ: I don’t think they’re equally approachable. I think the whole myth of superheroes is that they simply aren’t appealing to women as they are to men. I’d like to think I had a pretty good track record on that myself as a writer, as the Legion historically had a pretty good number of female readers, Chris Claremont on his years on the X-Men had a tremendous number of female readers, and there may be any number of other superhero titles that had a fair balance. But overall it would surprise me at any point if you started to have a title that was both a traditional superhero and a majority female audience.

WILSON: What about then for female superheroes, the limited number of course, but those like Supergirl, Wonder Woman, etc. I mean even from your own book, Wonder Woman has a great appeal to women, you have the Steinem story of Ms. Magazine, the Lynda Carter show in the 1970s for younger women…

LEVITZ: I don’t think the love for the character necessarily means that they love the comic expression of them. Or maybe they do and with the right writer at the right moment, that can happen and have a larger audience. Certainly any version of that has been tried by the company at some point or another in time. You’ve got the whole period around 1972 when Dorothy Woolfolk comes back into the company and she’s editing both the romance comics and the girl superheroes. She’s given Wonder Woman, Lois Lane, and Supergirl on the theory that we can sell more of those to girls with a woman driving the bus. It’s not clear that it particularly worked, and the company abandoned the experiment fairly quickly.

WILSON: In this connection then between comics and the larger culture, you talk about the Death of Superman event and you call it an idea not explored since “comics place in the culture changed.” What change are you referring to here?

LEVITZ: The fact that comic books begin to be a part of the public discussion in a different fashion. When Jerry Siegel wrote a death-of-Superman story in the early 1960s there was no newspaper or magazine that would consider doing a story on the content of a comic book story. It wasn’t a meaningful news item anywhere. By the time the ’90s story took place, you had any number of newspapers and magazines and television that were commenting from time to time on the medium of comic books as they would on things in other media.

WILSON: What do you see as the catalyst for this change in media attention?

LEVITZ: It’s a combination of things. You had an entire generation of people who had grown up reading comics that were written to a more intelligent audience either the stuff Stan dealt with and led the charge on at Marvel or the stuff Julius had led the charge on at DC. The kids who grew up reading that material, many of them had become journalists by that time and were wondering around newspaper or magazine offices saying, “Can I write an article on comics?” An awful lot of the early journalism done about comics was done by people who were passionate about comics and were convincing their editors to let them do it. I think that was probably the leading edge of the change.

Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

NATHAN WILSON: In organizing your book, how did you decide what would go in the main body text versus the chronology because there are some really nice little gems in that chronology that deserve further exploration such as Jimmy Olsen in the Beatles’ film Help! or the recurring role President Kennedy had in the Superman books?

PAUL LEVITZ: Some of it again is just the limitations of physical space. The time lines were done last and part of what we did was keep this tickler list of everything that deserves at least a nod. We didn’t either end up having room in the main prose or in the main sections of illustrations, great, let’s squeeze it into the time lines. To some extent, when you’re shaping the time lines, when you have a physical structure like that, you get to the “There’s not enough vitally important stuff in 1964 at DC; what are three other anecdotes you can put in that would make somebody smile?”

WILSON: There’s something there though, especially about Kennedy’s impact on society and culture at the time, the youth culture movement of the period. It’s striking that he’s also in Superman, to see what the message was to children and how he was portrayed.

LEVITZ: It’s very different. From a historical point of view, it’s a turning point for the culture because he’s portrayed extraordinarily differently than you can imagine a president being portrayed today in most comics.

WILSON: It seems that there is so much going on for DC during the Silver Age against the larger cultural backdrop of the 1960s and you talk about the generational differences between writers and editors. In trying to get more into the idea of context, how would you contextualize what DC did during this period, alongside this generational conflict, as you get books like Doom Patrol, which is a way-out-there type of book alongside the more status quo books DC published?

LEVITZ: You have a certain number of writers and artists who either are more in touch with youth culture than their chronological ages or who believe that they are. If you look at the 1960s, Stan Lee over at Marvel is chronologically older than his writing is. One of the reasons Marvel succeeds as much as it does at that time is that Stan’s personal style is very much in tune with that moment. If you had told the average reader how old the writer was, they wouldn’t have believed you. They thought it was a kid writing to them. I think you have a lot of books at DC in that period of the early 1960s where you had some wonderfully talented writers who weren’t in touch with kid culture and you had a handful of writers, such as Doom Patrol‘s Arnold Drake, who were very fascinated by the youth culture and were trying to write to it, but perhaps not as successfully as Stan did. Then you get a new wave of guys in who are much, much younger and they may not be as good as writers, they certainly may not be any better in any absolute sense, but they connect to youth culture more naturally because they are a part of it.

WILSON: If we think of this a conflict then between an old and new guard, was DC pretty open to this new exploration sought by younger writers?

LEVITZ: It’s not a monolith on either side.

WILSON: Well, you get this image from various comics-studies books that Marvel was about the youth because of their appeal to the quote-unquote “radical” youth movements of the period, but DC was the conservative, consensus-driven publisher. Did the majority at DC side more with the older or newer guard, or was it that there was freedom to explore both?

LEVITZ: It depends on what year you’re talking about and which DC office. You have a bunch of guys in the old guard who are trying to do more of what they perceive as hipper stuff. Whether that’s Drake on Doom Patrol or writing Bob Hope with a character called “Super Hip,” or Bob Haney on Teen Titans, those two guys would be the ones who I believe were the most consciously trying to change their vocabulary to match their perception of youth culture. You had other guys who said, “This is the way we’ve been doing it for 30 years. We’re right; don’t worry about Marvel.” Then you have changes in the editorial and writing roles, and the game changes yet again.

WILSON: In getting into this late 1960s era then, you mention briefly Betty Friedan and the creation of N.O.W., the changes in the larger society that are transpiring, but the connections to the actual books are tenuous at best. I’ve read some studies that say comics have never known how to approach women and women’s movements at the time, simply falling back on parody and failing to match what is going on in society. First, were there any women writers at DC in the 1960s?

LEVITZ: You know, I don’t know on the romance books because that stuff has been so inadequately researched. There certainly were no prominent women writers working in the place by the late 1960s when credits became more common. There was a small number of women who had certain assignments, but not on any of the major projects of that period.

WILSON: Well, on pages 402-03 of your book, you show Lois Lane’s new attitude with Superman, Supergirl and Wonder Woman turning their backs on being superheroes to embrace lives of fashion and romance, and Wonder Woman becoming a mother figure in the Justice League. Looking at them today, through a contemporary lens, are these examples of what you call the generational conflict then?

LEVITZ: If your question is how I see the characters today, we have a great advantage that we have many wonderful women writing and drawing comics, and editing comics, and that affects the whole culture. We’re in a different stage of society.

WILSON: Let me try to clarify it. Do you see these examples as reflective of what was going on in society at that time or simply parody?

LEVITZ: These were not historical documents. Whether it’s a comic, television show or motion picture, when they mirror society, depending on what the talent and the publishing house are trying to do, they’re funhouse mirrors. They can be showing us an idealization of what the people think is going on or they can show a corruption of it. It’s not intended to be journalism. It’s not intended to be: “This is what the role of a woman today is.” You turn on a television program this evening, randomly, you’ll find most of the women characters doing things related to some of how women live today, but also not. It’s fantasy.

WILSON: If you look across the board though in media…

LEVITZ: The faster the rate of change going on in society, the more likely you’re going to have significant distortions in fiction because you don’t have a base line. If you go back 150 years to village life, you’re the historian, you know that things remained fairly constant over a three- or four-generation period. Take an example from history, the famous Washington’s book of manners. A gentleman should do this and shouldn’t do that. He could reflect an ethos that was likely to be true throughout his entire lifetime: “I learned this as a child, my adopted step-children were taught this way, and they should teach their children this way.” You can’t pick up a 1950s Emily Post book and say that’s how we live now. And you certainly wouldn’t expect it to be how your children would live. Fiction is, of course, going to have a greater degree of distortion during a time of change like that.

WILSON: It’s interesting to see how this stuff enters the comics, but also how it’s presented because it usually is very bizarre, very distorted, or oftentimes, reflective of consensus opinions about an issue such as the E.R.A. debates and women’s liberation movements in the 1970s. You mention the romance comics and there seem to be a lot of DC romance comics in the 1960s. Who were the main audiences for these books?

LEVITZ: The company never did market research in those years that I’m aware of. My impression of it was that you were selling them to girls between the ages of 8 and 12 years old.

WILSON: It goes to back to your analogy of the factory model with “x” number of books…

LEVITZ: Yes, there was a tremendous amount of romance comics from DC and the competition in those years. Your outward evidence of success in a capitalist society is that people rarely continue doing things that don’t produce a profit ultimately and those books survived as a meaningful part of the comic-book industry for close to 30 years.

WILSON: You mention briefly the Public Service Advertisements in DC books from the 1940s through the 1960s when you discuss DC’s evolving social responsibility. Do you know who was responsible for these? Was it the writers, editorial?

LEVITZ: I think Jack Schiff wrote the majority of them in the 1960s. He was very proud of those.

WILSON: From what you know of Schiff, were those geared more toward the parents, the children, or general audiences because…

LEVITZ: I think you assume they were for the kids.

WILSON: Do you believe this gives credence then or at least fuel to those that contend that Marvel was “rebellious” during the 1960s versus the largely conservative DC?

LEVITZ: I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that from the period of 1961 to 1973 you can make a case that Marvel is more anti-establishment than DC on many levels.

Part one ♦ part two ♦ part three

Paul Levitz has a perspective on the comic’s industry that few can share or fully appreciate due in large part to his lengthy tenure as an editor, writer and executive with DC Comics. Beginning with DC in 1973 as an assistant editor after working on his own fan magazine The Comic Reader, Levitz worked his way up to becoming a writer on The Legion of Super-Heroes by the mid-to-late ’70s. This was a cherished position Levitz held throughout most of his career as he transitioned into more administrative roles in 1980. From 2002 through 2010, Levitz served as DC’s President and Publisher.

Recently, Levitz has returned to writing comics, and he is now back on the titles most readers associate with him: Adventure Comics and Legion of Super-Heroes. In addition to his monthly writing duties, Levitz has also published his first nonfiction tome, 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, with Taschen Press in November 2010. I had the opportunity to talk with Levitz about his life with DC and how this shaped his historical examination of the company.

NATHAN WILSON: Obviously, the release of your book is tied to DC’s anniversary, but can you tell me about the origin and impetus for this project?

PAUL LEVITZ: The book was conceived as part of the 75th anniversary celebration and the DC guys went out and talked with a number of different publishers about the possibility of doing it. Ultimately, they worked it out with Taschen. At that point, I was asked if I’d be interested in writing it, but I was still doing the day job, so it wasn’t very practical. By the time I was moving away from the desk job, they still hadn’t found a writer. All of the graphic research had been largely finished, so they said “you have time for it now, don’t you?” I said, “Sure, love to do it.”

WILSON: How long then did it take you to put all of this together, when did you begin?

LEVITZ: Well, the art directors have probably been working on it for two or two-and-a-half years. My portion of it took about a year.

WILSON: What kind of research was involved for you in reconstructing DC’s history into a viable narrative?

LEVITZ: Part of it was to build the chronology. The first question in a project like this, always, is you can’t do everything, so what are you going to do? I had three-quarters of a word for each issue DC had published, never mind every animated program and movie and everything else, so obviously I wasn’t going to be able to cover subject matter comprehensively in depth. I started out with the idea that the art can tell the art side of the story, so let’s concentrate on the context and the process. I went back and dug through my own files, through previously published things and found stuff like a great article Lloyd Jacquet had done maybe 50 years ago looking back at the beginning of DC that had been reprinted in an old issue of Comic Book Marketplace. Discovered that the first issue by DC was printed at the old Brooklyn Eagle, I had forgotten that, so let’s put that in. From there it was a process of deciding chronologically what are the key things you have to talk about to have the context make sense.

WILSON: In looking back at the book not just as a history of DC, but also as a history of the comic-publishing industry, how do you see your book alongside others by such authors as Les Daniels and Jim Steranko? What distinguishes your book from other histories in terms of scope, outlook and contribution in your opinion?

LEVITZ: Looking at the prose separately from the rest of the book for a moment, I think part of what it brought to bear was the perspective of someone who was an insider for half of those years and knew most of the people from the beginning. There’s only three or four of the pivotal people in DC’s history who weren’t still around when I came into the game. I at least had an ability, hopefully, to have my work reflect the personalities of the individuals and the connections between them in a way that would be very hard for Les to do, and Les is a brilliant historian of the material. I certainly leaned on his books for certain things, particular a lot of the work he did in the Wonder Woman book was useful to me. But, he didn’t have 50 or 100 conversations with Shelly Mayer over the years. He didn’t know Julie Schwartz for 30 years of his life as a friend. Hopefully, all of those experiences color it in a way that makes it more interesting or more useful or just different.

WILSON: I think that does come through in parts and gives a more personal aspect and experience to the book.

LEVITZ: Thank you. I was trying. Again, I had very limited space, so how do you contextualize the contributions of someone like Julie, who did so much. Even for a moment or two, talking about his relationship with his wife, how he managed his life, how he managed his office. Hopefully those help conjure a certain amount of the picture. The longer version when I do a longer book. [Laughter.]

WILSON: Is that something you would actually want to do after this 700-page work?

LEVITZ: There’s a lot of stories to tell, so who knows how that will work itself out over life.

WILSON: Was it difficult for you writing something nonfiction when the majority of your experience has been in the fiction realm of comics?

LEVITZ: One of the things I argue in teaching writing, which I’m doing now in this new stage in my life, is that fundamentally the skill sets (whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or marketing communications) are really just reflections of each other. I try to explain to the class the five questions of journalism, the who, what, where, when and how/why are just as relevant in writing fiction as they are in writing nonfiction. If you can answer those about your character, you can build a viable character. If you’re writing a marketing puff piece for your corporation and you’re trying to build an identity for the management team or whatever the case may be, or the culture of the corporation, you’re answering those same sets of questions in many ways. It definitely was a different way to work, a different set of research materials, of reference materials, different speech limits, it’s the longest piece of prose I’ve ever written by far, so I was using a somewhat different set of muscles, but they’re related muscles I think.

WILSON: Since the book is through Taschen, who do they see as the primary market and audience for the book? Will it be geared toward the Direct Market or more toward the chain bookstore outlets? Comic-book fans will obviously be a big part of any audience, but who is the most successful audience in your opinion?

LEVITZ: The people who have come up to me who have ordered it in advance include an awful lot of scholars in the field and people who are interested in related parts of the field. I was at Ohio State University for their tri-annual comics and cartoon-art festival which is very heavily weighted to the newspaper-strip world. Any number of people who you or I might not naturally number as comic-book people, but people who are interested in comics as they are related to the whole field of cartooning, talked with me about their excitement about the book. I was just over at LUCCA in Italy, at the festival there, and they had copies already since the book was printed in Italy. I was signing a bunch of them for people It was fascinating to see how many people there were people who were interested in making the investment.

Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in subtext, allusions, and external meaning that I forget to recognize when a story is just good. At its core, that’s what Batman: Gothic is. It’s a really well-told story. Whereas Arkham Asylum was an effective psychological examination without much plot to speak of, Gothic is a plot-driven mystery with a healthy dose of action, adventure, and crime drama thrown in. Mr. Whisper/Manfred/Mr. Winchester is a terrifying villain—a character type that actually returns to the Batman mythos later in different forms. On its own—away from that which came before and after it—Gothic is a well-structured, well-paced, and well-narrated story that holds a wide appeal for a variety of audiences. It’s a tale that ties together gangland murders, child sacrifice, the bubonic plague, and an infernal quest for immorality. It retells (or at least re-contextualizes) part of Bruce Wayne’s origin story. It even includes a Rube Goldberg-inspired mousetrap execution device:

It does all of that on a surface level, and that’s enough to make it successful as a straightforward story.

But Morrison was still busy trying to distinguish himself as a writer in American comics in 1990, so Gothic operates on multiple. Morrison’s work is often characterized as “postmodern,” which essentially means that he embraces the narrative play that began to emerge in literature in the mid-20^th century. Postmodernism actively tries to destabilize many of the techniques and expectations of traditional narratives. In literature, this leads to things like self-referentiality (a text’s awareness of the author and/or itself as a text), jarring transitions and progressions (in both time and space), heavy citation of modern science and technology, and the conflation of high art and low art. Postmodernism is much more than this, but that’s the basic idea (especially in the context of Morrison’s writing). But this doesn’t apply to all of Morrison’s works, and it doesn’t really explain the bigger picture of what he has been writing during the last two decades.

When I consider the whole of Morrison’s work, I tend to think of him as a Postmodern Romantic writer. He may use postmodern techniques, but the themes and central worldview he presents in all of his most important works (from The Invisibles to Seven Soldiers to his current Batman run) are steeped in Romanticism. When I say “Romantic,” I’m not referring to “romance” in the traditional or familiar sense (love). I’m talking about the genre of Romanticism that emerged in German and English art and literature of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The Romantic movement was, in essence, a rejection of the Neoclassical focus on rigid, balanced structure and pure reason. (See Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson.) Romantic writers argued that humans are not guided solely by rationality and rigid moral structures, but instead are driven by emotion and irrationality. To this end, Romantic writers created characters, settings, and situations that reflected the passions of the human experience. Many of these writers (Goethe, William Blake, Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge) explored the layers and contradictions of human emotion, but the most focused statement of the Romantic Age comes from William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802). The entire Preface can be read as useful instruction in the goals of the Romantics, but the following line is probably the most famous and instructive: “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Some contemporary readers tend to dismiss the Romantics as a bunch of navel-gazers who were far too focused on nature and self-pity to recognize and deal with the realities of their age. I’d argue, however, that the Romantics were very much of their age—a time of great political and artistic flux, transition, and revolution. Every time someone creates a sense of fixed, invariable truth—a perfect system, document, classification, or morality—someone will be waiting to debunk or destroy it. There is an anarchistic, revolutionary strain to Romantic literature that continued to reverberate well after the Romantic period came to a close, and Grant Morrison has found a way to capture and channel those echoes in his greatest works. The Invisibles story arc entitled “Arcadia” (which begins in #5) opens with a conversation between Lord Byron and Percy Shelley as they ride along a beach. This scene (and “Arcadia” as a whole) is as crucial to understanding Morrison’s overall artistic project as Preface to Lyrical Ballads is to understanding Romantic literature.

Gothic, then, is no accidental title for Morrison’s story. Romantic writers such as Blake, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Poe used elements of Gothic art in their fiction and poetry. The themes of horror, decay, unchecked emotionalism, and a quest for the sublime all factor heavily in both Gothic and Romantic art. Batman: Gothic is a distillation and redirection of all these themes. (I’ve provided annotations to most of Morrison’s quotes and references below.) As a neo-Romantic writer (even as early as 1990), Morrison used Gothic ideas and images throughout this story to focus and guide Batman through a very old and enduring strain of psychological terror that Mr. Whisper makes literal. While many of the allusions are easy enough to track down, the application of them to Batman as a character is a little more tricky.

Batman was created by Bob Kane as a Gothic character type. The design and atmosphere of Kane’s early Detective Comics stories were influenced by the surface tropes of Gothic storytelling. Batman may rely on familiar horror images to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, but he is actually not a Gothic character. Gothic and Romantic literature focused on irrationality and chaos as central components of human behavior. Batman, on the other hand, is a character driven by reason and order. We may see his quest as irrational and obsessive, but his methods are highly focused and controlled. Disorder (the Joker, for instance) makes him positively livid. Gothic, much like Arkham Asylum, is a story about reversals and inversions—one in which Batman confronts that which terrifies him the most. He relies on terror to make criminals afraid. But when he has to look deeply into the actual terror of unbridled human emotion (the heart of Gothic Romanticism), we as readers come to understand just how much of a Gothic lightweight Batman actually is. When Batman tells Alfred that “I’ll need the gyro fuelled and read to go in an hour” (p. 55) and pulls the tarp off the Batgyro (a machine first used in the very Gothic Detective Comics #31), the scene becomes a form of parody and critique.

Gothic is a story about terror, but it’s specifically a story focused on Batman’s fear of what lies within himself. Humans fear not only the things we don’t want to become, but also the things we recognize we actually might become. Zombies, werewolves, vampires—these are all forms of corporeal transformation that express the deep, latent desires and fears of humanity. When people give in to their basest, most irrational impulses, we fear them because we realize that the potential to do these things lies in each of us. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer were humans who allowed themselves to indulge in awful human impulses, much as Victor Frankenstein did in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. These are the things we fear most because they’re expressions of what we’re all capable of becoming.

Batman comes face to face with those fears in Gothic, and the result is a terrifying look at what he could become if he allowed his impulses and obsessions to go unchecked. This is an idea that Morrison returned to when he took over Batman in 2006, and it’s a theme that continues in the Batman books he’s writing today. But in Gothic, Romanticism becomes a useful and revealing (and possibly unexpected) antagonist to Batman. Mr. Whisper is the distillation of all that is most fearful in humanity. He’s a Byronic hero (actually an anti-hero) that Batman has decided not to be, and Batman’s battle with Whisper clarifies and re-focuses his purpose as a masked avenger.

Morrison may be a postmodern writer, but many of his more experimental narrative techniques would emerge in later works (Doom Patrol and The Invisibles especially). Gothic is something else. While not as introspective or cerebral as Arkham Asylum, Gothic brings into focus many of the Romantic themes that have surfaced throughout his career. It’s not a terribly difficult or challenging book. But it is illuminating.

Three additional notes about this book:

1)        I wish it had been drawn by someone else. Klaus Janson is an excellent inker of Frank Miller’s work (Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns), but his rough style as a penciller and inker is not well-suited to the stylistic formality of Morrison’s text. I suppose we could make the argument that Janson’s chaotic rendering is consistent with the “overflow of powerful feelings” of Romantic art. But even Wordsworth used consistent and beautiful structures in his poetry. I can’t think of many Romantic poems, plays, or novels that are clunky and unpolished; for all their talk of spontaneity, these people did care about form. I’d love to see what an artist like J.H. Williams III or Gene Ha could do with a story like this.

2)       Before I went back and re-read this story, I thought it might be possible that Mr. Whisper is also Dr. Hurt (the villain that recently emerged in Batman R.I.P. and Batman and Robin). I realize now that this isn’t possible, but the connections between the character types are uncanny. The quest for immortality through human sacrifice is clearly something Batman has fought against for years now. Gothic is also tied strongly to Peter Milligan and Kieron Dwyer’s excellent story “Dark Knight, Dark City” (Batman #452-454, 1990). Chris Sims of Comics Alliance recently posted an excellent comparison of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5 and “Dark Knight, Dark City.” Anyone who wants to better understand what’s going on in Morrison’s Batman books now would do well to go back and re-read Gothic and “ Knight, Dark City.”

3)       It’s strange that Morrison didn’t use any direct reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in this story. I can’t figure out why he would go for Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and ignore (at least as far as I can tell) what is generally regarded as the greatest single expression of Gothic Romantic literature. This is especially curious because Shelley’s text, much like Morrison’s, is a sort of warning about the unintended consequences of human irrationality and impulsive behavior at the heart of Romantic thought. Frankenstein is as much an anti-Gothic story as it is a Gothic story, and Morrison follows this track in Gothic. The only thing I can figure is that using Frankenstein in this context would be too obvious or clichéd. But as we’ll see when we get to Seven Soldiers, Morrison didn’t stay away from Frankenstein forever.

——

ANNOTATIONS:

(All page numbers are pulled from the trade paperback collection of Batman: Gothic.)

pp 6-7:  “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements” – Oranges and Lemons, a nursery rhyme and folk song referring to the bells of seven cathedrals. The meaning is vague, though the themes of sacrifice and child execution are inscribed here. Dates back to the 18^th century and first published in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744). The Gothic connection is not only to the cathedral Whisper has designed, but also to the children he sacrificed to keep himself alive long enough to build it.

p. 7:  “Like one that on a lonesome road / Doth walk in fear and dread” – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge—1798). The Gothic connection is explicit both in Bruce Wayne’s nightmare about his father (p. 34-35) and in the image of Whisper riding a ship full of corpses across the sea to find a new destination (pp. 66, 94). But implicitly, Whisper is also the sort of irrational transgressor that the Mariner is in Coleridge’s poem.

p. 12:  “Nine days they fell; confounded chaos roared, / And felt tenfold confusion in their fall / Through his wild Anarchy; so huge a rout / Encumbered him with ruin: Hell at last, / Yawning, received them whole, and on them closed” – Paradise Lost, Book VI, 871-5 (John Milton, 1667); You can see Gustave Dore’s illustration of the scene here. The monks at Whisper’s monastery were all destroyed (their souls presumably swept to Hell) by the flood that swept into the town, though Whisper obviously survived.

pp. 19, 24:  “Don Giovanni! a cenar teco m’invitasti e son venuto!” – Don Giovanni (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1787); Mr. Whisper’s remark (“It’s just the ending, you see. I don’t like the ending”) refers to the conclusion of Mozart’s opera, in which Giovanni, refusing to repent for his ostentatious lifestyle, is dragged down through the earth to Hell. “He who dines on heavenly food has no need for the food of mortal” (p. 24) is a line from the opera translated from Italian. Whisper has lived his life as a Giovanni figure: self-indulgent, cruel, and defiant.

p. 35:  “Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies” – A familiar nursery rhyme, but one whose subject is pretty awful. The rhyme seems to be a reference to the 1665 Great Plague of London. Ring around the rosie is most likely the skin malady that develops with the onset of the bubonic plague. Pocketful of posey (not posies) is the scented nosegay that was carried to counter the smell of decay. Ashes, ashes all falling down was pretty much what happened to 100,000 people in a little over a year. This allusion also connects to Brother Manfred’s (Mr. Whisper’s) origin as a priest during the Black Death plague outbreak in Europe in the 14^th century (1348-1350).

p. 40:  “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die. / That strain again, it had a dying fall. / O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more, / ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before” – Twelfth Night, Act 1, scene 1, 1-8 (William Shakespeare, 1602). Batman explains this one pretty clearly later.

p. 55:  “…and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, / To take into the air my quiet breath; / Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain, / While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!” – “Ode to a Nightingale” 50-58 (John Keats, 1819).

p. 60:  “Stand still you ever-moving spheres of Heaven, / That time may cease, and midnight never come” – The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (Christopher Marlowe, 1604). The Faust allusion, like most of Dr. Whisper’s literary allusions, is a reference to mortal man trying to transcend human limitations and reach for that which should be unattainable to human beings (immortality, perfect knowledge, absolute self-indulgence, etc.). This is a common theme throughout Romantic literature.

p. 63:  Brother Manfred – Manfred is a name that’s tied to two seminal gothic/Romantic works. Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, generally considered the first work of Gothic fiction, features a protagonist named Manfred. The name is also used in the closet drama Manfred, written by George Gordon, Lord Byron in 1816-1817. Manfred is the seminal “Byronic hero”—a man who refused to yield to all human and spiritual forces in his quest for intellectual, emotional, or spiritual fulfillment. The (anti-)hero of Byron’s drama dies after refusing to be claimed by demons, elementals, and ultimately God.

pp. 63-66:  This whole sequence is a summation of many gothic tropes, but it’s largely based on the ideas introduced in The Monk: A Gothic Romance—a novel written by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1796. Lewis’ novel relates the story of a priest who engages in many of the same horrible sins and transgressions that Brother Manfred does in Gothic. The “Bleeding Nun” character type in Lewis’ novel is transformed into the Burning Nun in Morrison’s story.

p. 98:  “Out, brief candle!” – Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5 (William Shakespeare, 1603); This one’s pretty familiar and seems to be a throwaway in the scene. But the full quote connects nicely to Mr. Whisper, given his mission and the fact that he has no shadow. The full quote, spoken by Macbeth, reads: “Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

p. 101:  “My hour is almost come, / When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames / Must render up myself.” – Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 (William Shakespeare, 1601). The lines are spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Batman’s use of this quote is telling on a number of levels. Directly, it’s a statement that Manfred’s time is running out. But indirectly, it could be tied to the ghost of Bruce’s father, which continues to haunt him.

p. 105:  “And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” – The Masque of the Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe, 1842).

p. 109:  “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird” – Another line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” This line not only connects to Batman (here seen by Whisper as a kind of infernal bird), but also connects to Whisper’s recorded recitation of the poem that Batman listened to earlier in the book (p. 55).

p. 116:  “Oh, Manfred, my good and faithful servant.” – The Bible: Matthew 25:23. The Biblical line is as follows: “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” The Devil’s delivery of this line is a clever reversal of the biblical usage. Gothic, even.