JonnyQuest037
DCAU Historian
Wow, that Bat-Mite/Mxyzptlk idea sounds fun.
Online Resources and Articles for the DCAU...
- Thread starter Karkull
- Start date
I'm curious if Dini pinched a bit of it for the beginning of Brave/Bold's Legends of the Dark Mite! He does return to the Batcave confusing thinking he's losing it as well.
One of my fervent DTV wishes would have been to see an adaptation of Evan Dorkin's World's Funniest one-shot, with Gilbert Gottfried and Paul Ruebens reprising their roles as Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite, respectively.
JonnyQuest037
DCAU Historian
That one-shot was more fun than should be legal.
Question and Answer: Boyd Kirkland
CC | November 1, 2000
Boyd Kirkland says he serves many masters. As producer of X-Men: Evolution, Kirkland leads the production team at Film Roman. But he also has to please Kids’ WB! and Marvel—and then there’s his own goals for the series. He seems to be succeeding. X-Men: Evolution, which premieres Saturday, is carrying a solid buzz, and everyone involved seems satisfied with the show’s progress. During the Continuum’s recent visit to the Film Roman offices, Kirkland talked about the challenges of X-Men: Evolution, Saturday morning animation, what it was like to work on Batman, and his hopes for action / adventure animation.
CC: What were the challenges of putting together a show like this?
BOYD KIRKLAND: There’s all these different phases, and each phase of production has its own challenges. The first thing was getting everybody together and on the same page as far [as] what the show was going to be. We spent just a couple of months in development. We should have had more time, and I would have liked to have had more time. We got this show started later than normally, and we really had to rush. Even with that, it’s turning out great.
The network has a certain kind of show they want to see and Marvel, of course, has their interests in the characters and how they should be portrayed. And I have my own sensibilities about how to tell a story and do this stuff so that it will play well. When you go from one medium into another, comics into film, there’s always adaptations that you have to make. You have to take all that stuff into account. It’s always an interesting process getting people with all these different agendas together and happy with where it all ends up.
So, in the early stages, we had some meetings where all of us were sitting in a room together and Marvel would send reps from New York to have some discussions and look over what we were doing. So, there’s a lot of push and pull and give and take. That’s a big challenge, initially—just to get everybody in sync with what we’re doing. And once you get everybody excited about that, then it’s to find people who can executive that, with the writing and the visuals and the artwork.
CC: What type of look were you striving for?
KIRKLAND: I’m not a big fan of a lot of the superhero animation that’s been done for TV, design-wise, because it’s too complicated. In other words, there are people designing stuff that are designing stuff trying to make it look just like the comic book, with all the anatomy and the little bells, whistles, and buttons. The difficulty I have with that is it’s really tough to animate. Even if you’ve got an artist skilled enough to draw it, it’s one thing to draw it once for a page in a book; it’s another to draw it 24 times for one second of film. Multiply that, and you wind up with hundreds of thousands of drawings. There’s a compromise that’s made between making it look really good, and how much detail and information you can put in a drawing.
I wasn’t saying, “This is going to be Gothic or this is going to be Art Deco,” or any of that, as much as something that looks like a good, classic animation style and didn’t veer too far away from the comic book origins but was simplified enough that it would work for animation.
CC: Team shows are probably even tougher to do too?
KIRKLAND: Any team show is tough to because you’ve only got 20 minutes of screen time to tell a story, and you’re dividing all that time with eight different people, you don’t feel like you’re really getting connected with any of them. They’re all running around and moving and saying their lines, but do you care? That’s a tough thing to do with a team.
CC: So, that’s why you have a slower reveal with the first season, building up the characters through the episodes?
KIRKLAND: That’s a big part of it. Just like they do in any ensemble show. Like Star Trek, here’s your ensemble group of guys and each episode we say we’re going to focus on this guy and whatever issue he’s dealing with. The others are around doing their little bits, but we don’t focus on that.
CC: With the characters being teenagers at the school, will the stories be told on a smaller scale?
KIRKLAND: It’s a little more localized. They’re not planet-hopping in every episode as much, like they do when they mature into the functioning X-Men superhero team. As part of Professor X’s discovery process with Cerebro locating mutants and all of this, they go to different places, wherever they discover one to go and try to recruit them, but most of the action takes place where they live.
CC: Are the X-Men actually in costume much?
KIRKLAND: Not as much as the original series. The focus is not, let’s get these guys in their long johns and run around and beat each other up. The focus is to treat them like [they’re] real human beings and as characters dealing with real issues like everybody else does. But then they have this other thing going on on the side, so we tried to balance the stories between feeling like they’re real characters living in the real world with getting enough action in there to make it exciting and keep the kids entertained.
CC: Is there a season-long story arc?
KIRKLAND: Sort of; yes and no. There are issues that get introduced and sort of evolve and develop, but it’s not like you’ve got to watch episode to episode to feel like you know what’s going on. Each episode has its own complete story.
CC: This show really isn’t for the core crowd; it’s more for a broad audience?
KIRKLAND: I don’t know if you would say this is not a fanboy’s show. It’s the same issue I think they faced with the X-Men movie. We’re making something that’s for a brand-new, big, broad audience that hasn’t read all the comic books and know all the stories and can sit there and say, “Look who’s in that scene.” We’re not doing that. We’re not trying to do that. We’re trying to make something that somebody who doesn’t know anything about any of this stuff can sit down and watch and pick up on it and get involved with it.
CC: Did you like the movie?
KIRKLAND: I liked it a lot. It was really good. It kind of felt more like a prequel than a movie unto itself, but I thought that what they did is reached a mass audience. Any time you try to take this comic book, superhero stuff into live action, boy, you’re walking a fine line because as soon as you start putting spandex outfits on real, living human beings, it gets corny really fast. It’s always tough to take comic book stuff and turn it into live action. Of all the superhero movies, X-Men did one of the best jobs that I’ve seen. Keeping it feeling real but not offending the fans.
CC: Was the movie much of an influence on X-Men: Evolution?
KIRKLAND: Ironically, they had such tight grips on what was going to be in the movie, we weren’t told anything about it. The only person in any of the development discussions that knew anything about the movie was Avi Arad. He would keep bringing up things and all of us would look at him and say, “If you want us to include that, Avi, you’ve got to let us see it or show us the script or give us stills. Show us the movie!”
So, what it ended up being, was no, the movie had very little, if anything, direct influence. Xavier’s wheelchair ended up being that way because we gave Marvel a wheelchair, and Avi said, “No, I want the one like in the movie.” And I said it: “Show us what it looks like.” And so, we got some artwork of that, but I didn’t even see a script of the movie. I didn’t know what the story was going to be. Nothing.
CC: Why the new character Spyke?
KIRKLAND: I think that grows out of a necessity for almost [all] of these network Saturday morning shows to try and represent the spectrum of the racial community in America. When we were doing the early development, we looked at the options of existing characters that were in the X-Men universe and the continuity of when they were introduced of all of that, and we just had a really tough time coming up with a character of color that existed in the first ten years or so. All that early X-Men stuff was pretty white bread.
CC: X-Men fans have pointed out the apparent similarities between Spyke and Marrow. Are they essentially the same character?
KIRKLAND: With Spyke, we kept kicking around ideas. What can this guy do? What could he be? There were all kinds of possibilities. When I suggested this idea, I didn’t know about Marrow. And as what I suggested and the artwork evolved, [Series Director] Frank [Paur] said, “This character is a lot like Marrow.” And I said, “Who’s that?” It didn’t develop with the idea in mind that we were going to make another Marrow. It just sort of ended up that way. You try to think up a character with powers that nobody’s done already; it will end up being like somebody who already exists, I’m telling you.
CC: How does this show compare with working on [Batman: The Animated Series] or the Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero movie?
KIRKLAND: With the Batman show, the greatest joy I had was the [SubZero] video because that was separate and that was mine. I produced it, directed it, and got to write the script. Warner Home Video was pretty hands off. The approval process was nothing. I got to do what I wanted to do. I was told up front what were the parameters. They thought Mask of the Phantasm was too dark and had too much gun play for a kids’ video, and they told me to keep that under control, so I had to structure a story that had action in it but didn’t have that kind of violence.
CC: Which sounds like the problem they’ve had with Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker…
KIRKLAND: They’re headed for the same kind of problems now, even more so than with Mask of the Phantasm. What can I tell you? I was told to be careful of that. I know some of the fans weren’t as thrilled with SubZero because it didn’t go there; it was more of a kid-friendly thing. I thought there was plenty of intensity of action in that, though. But, really, I was pretty feel free to do whatever I wanted with the art, with the story, with everything. Creatively, it was a joy.
With X-Men, I mean, I’m really happy with what it is, but I’m serving a lot of masters. I get these detailed nots from the network and from Marvel. And not everybody’s intent is the same. And, a lot of times, my aesthetic sensibilities vary from what these people are telling me to do, which isn’t a surprise. You get five people in a room and everybody has a different opinion about what they like and what they don’t like. That’s inevitable; everybody has different tastes. For me, the guy caught in the middle of all these parties and with my own wishes of what I could be doing versus what I’m being told to do, that’s kind of a tough place to be sometimes.
It’s not that that’s a bad thing; sometimes all that bumping and stuff makes things better. Sometimes you have to make compromises that you wish you didn’t have to make. That just kind of comes with the territory of doing a series.
It was the same thing on the Batman series. I wasn’t in charge of that. I worked for Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. They were pretty good about leaving me alone to do what I wanted to do on my particular episode but, every once and a while, I’d come up against Bruce, in particular. I got along pretty well with Eric. Bruce could be pretty hard-headed about some stuff. Any time you’re in a relationship where you’re answering to other people and there’s all these creative decisions to be made, it’s inevitable.
CC: There were reports that the network was concerned about having a character like Wolverine, who has these weapons coming out of his hand. Will he use his claws in X-Men: Evolution?
KIRKLAND: The WB right now, and I believe they’ve released statements through their own publicity, [said] that they’re about being more kid friendly than they were with Batman. The feeling there now is often times those shows went too far with the violence level, so they’re being pretty hardlined with us on this show about what they’re going to allow and not allow. It’s one of those areas I have no control over. I’m basically told what I can do and can’t do.
But he’s gonna pop his claws and rip inanimate objects. Wolverine never used his claws on living things in the original series, either. He was always threatening to, but he never did. They won’t let us get away with anything like that for kids, but his claws come out, and [he] uses them. He cuts things.
CC: But, really, you can’t push the edge with violence on this show?
KIRKLAND: When it comes to the edge of violence, no, we’re not being allowed to push the edge. Batman and Batman Beyond have certainly pushed the edge. The original [Batman] series was on Fox, and Fox allowed us to do a lot of stuff that, up to that time, was never allowed on a network. With the climate of what’s going on in Washington right now and all the pressure on Hollywood with marketing violence to children, the pendulum has swung the other way now on a lot of this stuff. We’re not trying to push the edge. We’ve been told to keep it suitable for the under-10 crowd.
CC: Who is this show really intended for?
KIRKLAND: The attended target audience for the network has always been for 2-11. That’s where all the advertising is targeted and that’s the market that’s everybody’s interested in. That’s the demographic everybody’s trying to reach. It was always great that we had an audience that went way beyond that for Batman but, frankly, the network never cared because they weren’t selling advertising to that market. So, in terms of the revenue coming back to the network, those numbers never entered the picture for them. It’s the same thing now. I would think the smart thing to do would be to say, “Gee, we’ve got this big, broad demographic, maybe we should reposition this show in another time frame” and appeal to that mass market.
CC: And have a prime-time X-Men show?
KIRKLAND: Yeah, in the evening, like with The Simpsons. But nobody’s ever thought to do that. All they do is [keep] telling us, “You’re making the audience too old. Stop doing that.”
CC: Could a show like X-Men work in prime time?
KIRKLAND: I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to realize that action / adventure could play. It all has to do, to a large extent, with the writing. If you write the show that’s intelligent and that doesn’t insult the intelligence of your audience, I think there’s enough people that have grown up with animation and video games, that they’d be willing to watch a really quality show in prime time—if it’s written intelligently and aimed at that market.
It's always frustrated me that all the networks are interested in prime time is dysfunctional family sitcoms. Every animated program that’s been in prime time is some variation of The Simpsons formula. That’s getting [really] old. I wish they try something new with action / adventure and let us take this material where it deserves to go. Let’s face it, show’s like this [deserve] to go into those intense conflict kinds of areas, and they won’t let us go there on Saturday mornings. It’d be nice to be allowed to do that. The only way we can be is if we got one of these things on [in] prime time, and the networks haven’t been willing to try it.
CC | November 1, 2000
Boyd Kirkland says he serves many masters. As producer of X-Men: Evolution, Kirkland leads the production team at Film Roman. But he also has to please Kids’ WB! and Marvel—and then there’s his own goals for the series. He seems to be succeeding. X-Men: Evolution, which premieres Saturday, is carrying a solid buzz, and everyone involved seems satisfied with the show’s progress. During the Continuum’s recent visit to the Film Roman offices, Kirkland talked about the challenges of X-Men: Evolution, Saturday morning animation, what it was like to work on Batman, and his hopes for action / adventure animation.
CC: What were the challenges of putting together a show like this?
BOYD KIRKLAND: There’s all these different phases, and each phase of production has its own challenges. The first thing was getting everybody together and on the same page as far [as] what the show was going to be. We spent just a couple of months in development. We should have had more time, and I would have liked to have had more time. We got this show started later than normally, and we really had to rush. Even with that, it’s turning out great.
The network has a certain kind of show they want to see and Marvel, of course, has their interests in the characters and how they should be portrayed. And I have my own sensibilities about how to tell a story and do this stuff so that it will play well. When you go from one medium into another, comics into film, there’s always adaptations that you have to make. You have to take all that stuff into account. It’s always an interesting process getting people with all these different agendas together and happy with where it all ends up.
So, in the early stages, we had some meetings where all of us were sitting in a room together and Marvel would send reps from New York to have some discussions and look over what we were doing. So, there’s a lot of push and pull and give and take. That’s a big challenge, initially—just to get everybody in sync with what we’re doing. And once you get everybody excited about that, then it’s to find people who can executive that, with the writing and the visuals and the artwork.
CC: What type of look were you striving for?
KIRKLAND: I’m not a big fan of a lot of the superhero animation that’s been done for TV, design-wise, because it’s too complicated. In other words, there are people designing stuff that are designing stuff trying to make it look just like the comic book, with all the anatomy and the little bells, whistles, and buttons. The difficulty I have with that is it’s really tough to animate. Even if you’ve got an artist skilled enough to draw it, it’s one thing to draw it once for a page in a book; it’s another to draw it 24 times for one second of film. Multiply that, and you wind up with hundreds of thousands of drawings. There’s a compromise that’s made between making it look really good, and how much detail and information you can put in a drawing.
I wasn’t saying, “This is going to be Gothic or this is going to be Art Deco,” or any of that, as much as something that looks like a good, classic animation style and didn’t veer too far away from the comic book origins but was simplified enough that it would work for animation.
CC: Team shows are probably even tougher to do too?
KIRKLAND: Any team show is tough to because you’ve only got 20 minutes of screen time to tell a story, and you’re dividing all that time with eight different people, you don’t feel like you’re really getting connected with any of them. They’re all running around and moving and saying their lines, but do you care? That’s a tough thing to do with a team.
CC: So, that’s why you have a slower reveal with the first season, building up the characters through the episodes?
KIRKLAND: That’s a big part of it. Just like they do in any ensemble show. Like Star Trek, here’s your ensemble group of guys and each episode we say we’re going to focus on this guy and whatever issue he’s dealing with. The others are around doing their little bits, but we don’t focus on that.
CC: With the characters being teenagers at the school, will the stories be told on a smaller scale?
KIRKLAND: It’s a little more localized. They’re not planet-hopping in every episode as much, like they do when they mature into the functioning X-Men superhero team. As part of Professor X’s discovery process with Cerebro locating mutants and all of this, they go to different places, wherever they discover one to go and try to recruit them, but most of the action takes place where they live.
CC: Are the X-Men actually in costume much?
KIRKLAND: Not as much as the original series. The focus is not, let’s get these guys in their long johns and run around and beat each other up. The focus is to treat them like [they’re] real human beings and as characters dealing with real issues like everybody else does. But then they have this other thing going on on the side, so we tried to balance the stories between feeling like they’re real characters living in the real world with getting enough action in there to make it exciting and keep the kids entertained.
CC: Is there a season-long story arc?
KIRKLAND: Sort of; yes and no. There are issues that get introduced and sort of evolve and develop, but it’s not like you’ve got to watch episode to episode to feel like you know what’s going on. Each episode has its own complete story.
CC: This show really isn’t for the core crowd; it’s more for a broad audience?
KIRKLAND: I don’t know if you would say this is not a fanboy’s show. It’s the same issue I think they faced with the X-Men movie. We’re making something that’s for a brand-new, big, broad audience that hasn’t read all the comic books and know all the stories and can sit there and say, “Look who’s in that scene.” We’re not doing that. We’re not trying to do that. We’re trying to make something that somebody who doesn’t know anything about any of this stuff can sit down and watch and pick up on it and get involved with it.
CC: Did you like the movie?
KIRKLAND: I liked it a lot. It was really good. It kind of felt more like a prequel than a movie unto itself, but I thought that what they did is reached a mass audience. Any time you try to take this comic book, superhero stuff into live action, boy, you’re walking a fine line because as soon as you start putting spandex outfits on real, living human beings, it gets corny really fast. It’s always tough to take comic book stuff and turn it into live action. Of all the superhero movies, X-Men did one of the best jobs that I’ve seen. Keeping it feeling real but not offending the fans.
CC: Was the movie much of an influence on X-Men: Evolution?
KIRKLAND: Ironically, they had such tight grips on what was going to be in the movie, we weren’t told anything about it. The only person in any of the development discussions that knew anything about the movie was Avi Arad. He would keep bringing up things and all of us would look at him and say, “If you want us to include that, Avi, you’ve got to let us see it or show us the script or give us stills. Show us the movie!”
So, what it ended up being, was no, the movie had very little, if anything, direct influence. Xavier’s wheelchair ended up being that way because we gave Marvel a wheelchair, and Avi said, “No, I want the one like in the movie.” And I said it: “Show us what it looks like.” And so, we got some artwork of that, but I didn’t even see a script of the movie. I didn’t know what the story was going to be. Nothing.
CC: Why the new character Spyke?
KIRKLAND: I think that grows out of a necessity for almost [all] of these network Saturday morning shows to try and represent the spectrum of the racial community in America. When we were doing the early development, we looked at the options of existing characters that were in the X-Men universe and the continuity of when they were introduced of all of that, and we just had a really tough time coming up with a character of color that existed in the first ten years or so. All that early X-Men stuff was pretty white bread.
CC: X-Men fans have pointed out the apparent similarities between Spyke and Marrow. Are they essentially the same character?
KIRKLAND: With Spyke, we kept kicking around ideas. What can this guy do? What could he be? There were all kinds of possibilities. When I suggested this idea, I didn’t know about Marrow. And as what I suggested and the artwork evolved, [Series Director] Frank [Paur] said, “This character is a lot like Marrow.” And I said, “Who’s that?” It didn’t develop with the idea in mind that we were going to make another Marrow. It just sort of ended up that way. You try to think up a character with powers that nobody’s done already; it will end up being like somebody who already exists, I’m telling you.
CC: How does this show compare with working on [Batman: The Animated Series] or the Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero movie?
KIRKLAND: With the Batman show, the greatest joy I had was the [SubZero] video because that was separate and that was mine. I produced it, directed it, and got to write the script. Warner Home Video was pretty hands off. The approval process was nothing. I got to do what I wanted to do. I was told up front what were the parameters. They thought Mask of the Phantasm was too dark and had too much gun play for a kids’ video, and they told me to keep that under control, so I had to structure a story that had action in it but didn’t have that kind of violence.
CC: Which sounds like the problem they’ve had with Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker…
KIRKLAND: They’re headed for the same kind of problems now, even more so than with Mask of the Phantasm. What can I tell you? I was told to be careful of that. I know some of the fans weren’t as thrilled with SubZero because it didn’t go there; it was more of a kid-friendly thing. I thought there was plenty of intensity of action in that, though. But, really, I was pretty feel free to do whatever I wanted with the art, with the story, with everything. Creatively, it was a joy.
With X-Men, I mean, I’m really happy with what it is, but I’m serving a lot of masters. I get these detailed nots from the network and from Marvel. And not everybody’s intent is the same. And, a lot of times, my aesthetic sensibilities vary from what these people are telling me to do, which isn’t a surprise. You get five people in a room and everybody has a different opinion about what they like and what they don’t like. That’s inevitable; everybody has different tastes. For me, the guy caught in the middle of all these parties and with my own wishes of what I could be doing versus what I’m being told to do, that’s kind of a tough place to be sometimes.
It’s not that that’s a bad thing; sometimes all that bumping and stuff makes things better. Sometimes you have to make compromises that you wish you didn’t have to make. That just kind of comes with the territory of doing a series.
It was the same thing on the Batman series. I wasn’t in charge of that. I worked for Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. They were pretty good about leaving me alone to do what I wanted to do on my particular episode but, every once and a while, I’d come up against Bruce, in particular. I got along pretty well with Eric. Bruce could be pretty hard-headed about some stuff. Any time you’re in a relationship where you’re answering to other people and there’s all these creative decisions to be made, it’s inevitable.
CC: There were reports that the network was concerned about having a character like Wolverine, who has these weapons coming out of his hand. Will he use his claws in X-Men: Evolution?
KIRKLAND: The WB right now, and I believe they’ve released statements through their own publicity, [said] that they’re about being more kid friendly than they were with Batman. The feeling there now is often times those shows went too far with the violence level, so they’re being pretty hardlined with us on this show about what they’re going to allow and not allow. It’s one of those areas I have no control over. I’m basically told what I can do and can’t do.
But he’s gonna pop his claws and rip inanimate objects. Wolverine never used his claws on living things in the original series, either. He was always threatening to, but he never did. They won’t let us get away with anything like that for kids, but his claws come out, and [he] uses them. He cuts things.
CC: But, really, you can’t push the edge with violence on this show?
KIRKLAND: When it comes to the edge of violence, no, we’re not being allowed to push the edge. Batman and Batman Beyond have certainly pushed the edge. The original [Batman] series was on Fox, and Fox allowed us to do a lot of stuff that, up to that time, was never allowed on a network. With the climate of what’s going on in Washington right now and all the pressure on Hollywood with marketing violence to children, the pendulum has swung the other way now on a lot of this stuff. We’re not trying to push the edge. We’ve been told to keep it suitable for the under-10 crowd.
CC: Who is this show really intended for?
KIRKLAND: The attended target audience for the network has always been for 2-11. That’s where all the advertising is targeted and that’s the market that’s everybody’s interested in. That’s the demographic everybody’s trying to reach. It was always great that we had an audience that went way beyond that for Batman but, frankly, the network never cared because they weren’t selling advertising to that market. So, in terms of the revenue coming back to the network, those numbers never entered the picture for them. It’s the same thing now. I would think the smart thing to do would be to say, “Gee, we’ve got this big, broad demographic, maybe we should reposition this show in another time frame” and appeal to that mass market.
CC: And have a prime-time X-Men show?
KIRKLAND: Yeah, in the evening, like with The Simpsons. But nobody’s ever thought to do that. All they do is [keep] telling us, “You’re making the audience too old. Stop doing that.”
CC: Could a show like X-Men work in prime time?
KIRKLAND: I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to realize that action / adventure could play. It all has to do, to a large extent, with the writing. If you write the show that’s intelligent and that doesn’t insult the intelligence of your audience, I think there’s enough people that have grown up with animation and video games, that they’d be willing to watch a really quality show in prime time—if it’s written intelligently and aimed at that market.
It's always frustrated me that all the networks are interested in prime time is dysfunctional family sitcoms. Every animated program that’s been in prime time is some variation of The Simpsons formula. That’s getting [really] old. I wish they try something new with action / adventure and let us take this material where it deserves to go. Let’s face it, show’s like this [deserve] to go into those intense conflict kinds of areas, and they won’t let us go there on Saturday mornings. It’d be nice to be allowed to do that. The only way we can be is if we got one of these things on [in] prime time, and the networks haven’t been willing to try it.
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Spotlight on Batman’s Mark Hamill
CC | December 14, 2000
Sure, it’s Return of the Joker, but it’s also the return of Mark Hamill. Hamill’s back as the voice of the Joker in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, the straight-to-video movie that arrived this week—after a nearly two-month delay for re-edits to tone down the material for a young audience.
Hamill, 49, who provided the voice of the Joker throughout the entire run of the Batman series on Fox Kids and Kids’ WB!, called getting the chance to play the Joker again “an unexpected pleasure.”
“I have to tell you, the quality of the script is so high, I really relished the role,” he said. “I never expected to find a character as rich as this one in animation, so I consider myself very, very fortunate.”
And, if you’ve seen the movie, you know this isn’t the same old Joker. “It was different this time with fitting into another cast. Also, the Joker is a different Joker,” Hamill said. “I couldn’t slip on the old glove. I had to look at it as a whole different animal.”
Hamill said he had moved on from the Joker, particularly since Batman Beyond was succeeding, and there were no plans for anymore [classic] Batman episodes. He recalled running into Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker Writer / Producer Paul Dini at a comics store in Los Angeles. “I’ve had some experience at franchises that move on without you—and I think you know I’m referring to Wing Commander,” said Hamill, joking with an [allusion] to Star Wars. “I said, ‘Paul, what’s the matter? You haven’t seen Futurama? The Joker can’t come back as a head in a jar? He said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
“They asked me to do the movie, and I said I’ll do it if Joker can come back.”
As for the cuts, which forced Hamill to come in and redo lines, he blamed the current climate in Hollywood. “It’s a shame,” he said.
Hamill will always be linked to Luke Skywalker, the innocent farm boy who becomes a Jedi Knight—a good guy through and through. But when it comes to roles in animation, Hamill seems to wind up more on the dark side. Among his other voice roles have been Gargoyle on The Incredible Hulk, Hobgoblin on Spider-Man, Dr. Jak on Phantom 2040, Maximus on Fantastic Four, and Threshold on the still-to-be-released Gen 13 movie. He also played the Trickster in two episodes of CBS’s The Flash series.
“When I look back on it now,” Hamill said, “some of the most interesting and challenging parts I’ve played have been in animation. None of the villains I play think of themselves as villains. Even the Joker is this genius who is frustrated by the fact that no one recognizes his great genius.”
Hamill said he loves working with the Warner Bros. Animation crew. “They spoil you with how professional they are,” he said.
He also loves the anonymity of voice work. “You are completely liberated from how you look, and that gives you a freedom you don’t have in live-action, where people can see you,” Hamill said. “People would never guess it’s me in some of these roles. There’s nothing more invigorating and exciting to me than trying things that you’ve never tried before. People don’t really understand that. They want to know why you wouldn’t rather be on a TV series about a detective with a talking dog.”
Obviously, Hamill’s background in comics helped him with Batman. “Mark is a tremendous comics fan,” Producer / Writer Paul Dini said. “He’s got a love and an understanding of the medium that rivals that of most of the folks working here at Warner Animation. Whenever we did a Joker episode [that] was based on a comic story such as ‘Joker’s Millions’ or ‘Laughing Fish,’ Mark would go back and reread the original comics to see what nuances he could bring to his portrayal.
“Arleen Sorkin once told me that, years before she was cast as Harley Quinn, she was visiting Mark and kept tripping over piles of comics stacked here and there throughout his house. Now, that’s a collector.”
For sure, Hamill loves comic books. He has read comic books. He has voiced comic book characters in cartoons. He has played live-action comic book characters. His likeness has been featured as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars comics. But, really, he didn’t completely, fully comprehend the genre until he wrote a comic book.
Hamill’s comic book, The Black Pearl, was published as a miniseries in late 1996 and then collected in a trade paperback the next summer by Dark Horse Comics. He and co-writer Eric Johnson, his first cousin, have worked on bringing their movie script of The Black Pearl—the original source for the comic—to the screen. The Black Pearl was optioned for television and film by Rehme Productions, but the story of quirky-loner-turned-tabloid-hero Luther Drake has remained in development hell. A video game has also been in the works.
Learning how to write a comic book was an intriguing challenge for Hamill, who had read comics even as a high schooler in Japan. “We basically auditioned for the roles of writers because they didn’t want us to adapt it at first,” Hamill said. “And they’re quite right. Movie and television writing are much different than comic book writing. We did a lot of research, and we read a lot of scripts they sent us for the corresponding comics they sent us, so we could see what the form looked like. I had never seen a script for a comic book.”
Hamill quickly learned there were similarities and differences between the two forms. “Isn’t a comic book like a storyboard for a movie? Well, yes and no,” he said. “Storyboards are usually done for a film or a television show to show everyone involved the specific choreography of any given sequence. When we talked to Bob Schreck, who was our editor at Dark Horse, we learned with a comic book you should liken it more to a slide show, where you’re going to show frozen pictures that, even if they’re relaying great action, there aren’t a lot of in-betweens.
“The idea of breaking it down into chapter stops and then finding your rhythm in terms of how much you get across per page […] just by rule of thumb, it’s a single idea per page. And the momentum on each page is to get the reader to want to go on to the next page, although you don’t have to have a cliffhanger to end every page.
“I loved it. I’d seen them before, but I never really experienced them before professionally. It was a whole different form to express yourself in. I was very excited about the whole thing.”
The comic also helped Hamill and Johnson tweak their script. “When we finished the last episode of Black Pearl, we realized that we had learned so much from the experience in terms of the economy of storytelling and pairing it down to its most basic elements to tell the story without having the luxury, let’s say, of a movie being able to set mood and ambiance,” Hamill said. “It’s pared down, but it also becomes more focused. When you really get down to basics, you get to see what’s important to you and what’s not.”
Hamill, who is currently developing a television pilot with Bill Mumy, [of] Lost in Space fame and is a spokesman for the Frag City website, admitted to getting a kick out of having his own comic book. “Anything in pop culture is exciting to me,” he said. “It’s probably embarrassing if you knew how exciting it was for me to become an action figure [as Luke Skywalker]. I don’t want to let on because that’s not cool, but I was like major thrilled [about the comic]—just to work in a realm I love very much.
“It’s not so much looking up and seeing your name on a comic book, although that’s thrilling, and it’s more than some of the best people in the comic book business ever got in their lifetime. It took me 30 years to figure out who Siegel and Shuster were.”
Hamill, whose fan roots are in the Silver Age, hopes comics get a better reputation. “I look around and say, “Why isn’t like this in America?’ when I see college students reading adult graphic novels in France or riding the train back in high school and seeing Japanese businessmen reading Mickey Spillane-type pot boilers, erotic thrillers […] whatever they were, they were black and white manga,” he said. “There’s no onus on it, like there is here.
“My dad was sort of a disciplinarian who felt that comic books were […] OK. Comic books to literature was what bubble gum was to the four basic food groups. He didn’t ban it outright. We didn’t get in trouble if we got ‘caught’ reading comic books, but he certainly frowned on them and felt like they were for feeble-minded people who couldn’t read real books. He was in the Navy, so I guess there a lot of guys who would much rather read the Classics Illustrated version of The Yearling rather than read the actual book. So, for me, growing up, it had sort of an illicit allure that I really found exciting.”
CC | December 14, 2000
Sure, it’s Return of the Joker, but it’s also the return of Mark Hamill. Hamill’s back as the voice of the Joker in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, the straight-to-video movie that arrived this week—after a nearly two-month delay for re-edits to tone down the material for a young audience.
Hamill, 49, who provided the voice of the Joker throughout the entire run of the Batman series on Fox Kids and Kids’ WB!, called getting the chance to play the Joker again “an unexpected pleasure.”
“I have to tell you, the quality of the script is so high, I really relished the role,” he said. “I never expected to find a character as rich as this one in animation, so I consider myself very, very fortunate.”
And, if you’ve seen the movie, you know this isn’t the same old Joker. “It was different this time with fitting into another cast. Also, the Joker is a different Joker,” Hamill said. “I couldn’t slip on the old glove. I had to look at it as a whole different animal.”
Hamill said he had moved on from the Joker, particularly since Batman Beyond was succeeding, and there were no plans for anymore [classic] Batman episodes. He recalled running into Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker Writer / Producer Paul Dini at a comics store in Los Angeles. “I’ve had some experience at franchises that move on without you—and I think you know I’m referring to Wing Commander,” said Hamill, joking with an [allusion] to Star Wars. “I said, ‘Paul, what’s the matter? You haven’t seen Futurama? The Joker can’t come back as a head in a jar? He said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
“They asked me to do the movie, and I said I’ll do it if Joker can come back.”
As for the cuts, which forced Hamill to come in and redo lines, he blamed the current climate in Hollywood. “It’s a shame,” he said.
Hamill will always be linked to Luke Skywalker, the innocent farm boy who becomes a Jedi Knight—a good guy through and through. But when it comes to roles in animation, Hamill seems to wind up more on the dark side. Among his other voice roles have been Gargoyle on The Incredible Hulk, Hobgoblin on Spider-Man, Dr. Jak on Phantom 2040, Maximus on Fantastic Four, and Threshold on the still-to-be-released Gen 13 movie. He also played the Trickster in two episodes of CBS’s The Flash series.
“When I look back on it now,” Hamill said, “some of the most interesting and challenging parts I’ve played have been in animation. None of the villains I play think of themselves as villains. Even the Joker is this genius who is frustrated by the fact that no one recognizes his great genius.”
Hamill said he loves working with the Warner Bros. Animation crew. “They spoil you with how professional they are,” he said.
He also loves the anonymity of voice work. “You are completely liberated from how you look, and that gives you a freedom you don’t have in live-action, where people can see you,” Hamill said. “People would never guess it’s me in some of these roles. There’s nothing more invigorating and exciting to me than trying things that you’ve never tried before. People don’t really understand that. They want to know why you wouldn’t rather be on a TV series about a detective with a talking dog.”
Obviously, Hamill’s background in comics helped him with Batman. “Mark is a tremendous comics fan,” Producer / Writer Paul Dini said. “He’s got a love and an understanding of the medium that rivals that of most of the folks working here at Warner Animation. Whenever we did a Joker episode [that] was based on a comic story such as ‘Joker’s Millions’ or ‘Laughing Fish,’ Mark would go back and reread the original comics to see what nuances he could bring to his portrayal.
“Arleen Sorkin once told me that, years before she was cast as Harley Quinn, she was visiting Mark and kept tripping over piles of comics stacked here and there throughout his house. Now, that’s a collector.”
For sure, Hamill loves comic books. He has read comic books. He has voiced comic book characters in cartoons. He has played live-action comic book characters. His likeness has been featured as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars comics. But, really, he didn’t completely, fully comprehend the genre until he wrote a comic book.
Hamill’s comic book, The Black Pearl, was published as a miniseries in late 1996 and then collected in a trade paperback the next summer by Dark Horse Comics. He and co-writer Eric Johnson, his first cousin, have worked on bringing their movie script of The Black Pearl—the original source for the comic—to the screen. The Black Pearl was optioned for television and film by Rehme Productions, but the story of quirky-loner-turned-tabloid-hero Luther Drake has remained in development hell. A video game has also been in the works.
Learning how to write a comic book was an intriguing challenge for Hamill, who had read comics even as a high schooler in Japan. “We basically auditioned for the roles of writers because they didn’t want us to adapt it at first,” Hamill said. “And they’re quite right. Movie and television writing are much different than comic book writing. We did a lot of research, and we read a lot of scripts they sent us for the corresponding comics they sent us, so we could see what the form looked like. I had never seen a script for a comic book.”
Hamill quickly learned there were similarities and differences between the two forms. “Isn’t a comic book like a storyboard for a movie? Well, yes and no,” he said. “Storyboards are usually done for a film or a television show to show everyone involved the specific choreography of any given sequence. When we talked to Bob Schreck, who was our editor at Dark Horse, we learned with a comic book you should liken it more to a slide show, where you’re going to show frozen pictures that, even if they’re relaying great action, there aren’t a lot of in-betweens.
“The idea of breaking it down into chapter stops and then finding your rhythm in terms of how much you get across per page […] just by rule of thumb, it’s a single idea per page. And the momentum on each page is to get the reader to want to go on to the next page, although you don’t have to have a cliffhanger to end every page.
“I loved it. I’d seen them before, but I never really experienced them before professionally. It was a whole different form to express yourself in. I was very excited about the whole thing.”
The comic also helped Hamill and Johnson tweak their script. “When we finished the last episode of Black Pearl, we realized that we had learned so much from the experience in terms of the economy of storytelling and pairing it down to its most basic elements to tell the story without having the luxury, let’s say, of a movie being able to set mood and ambiance,” Hamill said. “It’s pared down, but it also becomes more focused. When you really get down to basics, you get to see what’s important to you and what’s not.”
Hamill, who is currently developing a television pilot with Bill Mumy, [of] Lost in Space fame and is a spokesman for the Frag City website, admitted to getting a kick out of having his own comic book. “Anything in pop culture is exciting to me,” he said. “It’s probably embarrassing if you knew how exciting it was for me to become an action figure [as Luke Skywalker]. I don’t want to let on because that’s not cool, but I was like major thrilled [about the comic]—just to work in a realm I love very much.
“It’s not so much looking up and seeing your name on a comic book, although that’s thrilling, and it’s more than some of the best people in the comic book business ever got in their lifetime. It took me 30 years to figure out who Siegel and Shuster were.”
Hamill, whose fan roots are in the Silver Age, hopes comics get a better reputation. “I look around and say, “Why isn’t like this in America?’ when I see college students reading adult graphic novels in France or riding the train back in high school and seeing Japanese businessmen reading Mickey Spillane-type pot boilers, erotic thrillers […] whatever they were, they were black and white manga,” he said. “There’s no onus on it, like there is here.
“My dad was sort of a disciplinarian who felt that comic books were […] OK. Comic books to literature was what bubble gum was to the four basic food groups. He didn’t ban it outright. We didn’t get in trouble if we got ‘caught’ reading comic books, but he certainly frowned on them and felt like they were for feeble-minded people who couldn’t read real books. He was in the Navy, so I guess there a lot of guys who would much rather read the Classics Illustrated version of The Yearling rather than read the actual book. So, for me, growing up, it had sort of an illicit allure that I really found exciting.”
Bruce Timm Talks Justice League
CC | April 24, 2001 and April 25, 2001
It’s been a long time coming, but the Justice League is returning to animation this fall.
Bruce Timm—the producer of Batman, Superman, and Batman Beyond—is heading up the Warner Bros. Animation crew putting together Justice League for a November start on Cartoon Network. It marks the first time in more than 15 years—since ABC’s Super Friends—that the modern Justice League has been presented in animation.
The new show spotlights Batman, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl as a newly formed League. Twenty-six half-hours were ordered by Cartoon Network.
The Continuum caught up with Timm last weekend at WonderCon for his insights into the series.
CC: So, you’re finally doing the Justice League. Why now?
BRUCE TIMM: I often ask myself that. [LAUGHS.] Well, Batman Beyond was drawing to a close, and we knew [we] weren’t going to be doing any more of those. So, one of our executives at Warner Bros. in development suggested this might be a good time to do the Justice League. So, I said, “Okay, we’ll give it a shot.” I called up Michael Lazzo, head of programming at Cartoon Network, whom I had an acquaintance with. In the past, he mentioned he wanted us to do something for him. So, I called him up and said, “We’re thinking about doing a Justice League show.” And he said, “Great. How many do you want to do?” It was like, shoot, now we’re in business. Now we’ve got to do it. And that was it.
CC: This is really a show the fans have been demanding.
TIMM: For the last five or so years, yeah. Whenever I got to conventions or store appearances, that’s the number one question I get from everybody: “When are you guys going to do the Justice League? When are you going to do the Justice League?” Hopefully, they’ll be happy.
CC: Is Justice League set in the same continuity as the Batman and Superman shows?
TIMM: Technically, it is. We’re not totally beholden to our own continuity. If it works within the continuity of the stuff that we’ve established, fine. And, if it doesn’t, we don’t want to stifle our creativity by being stuck by, “Oh, we can’t do that because, in episode so-and-so of Superman or whatever, that violates continuity.” We’re not totally beholden to it.
For instance, we have a new Green Lantern, so we’re just kind of pretending that the Kyle Rayner / Green Lantern episode of Superman never happened. That kind of messes up what we’re doing now with the John Stewart Green Lantern.
CC: What’s the general look of the show? It’s still a Bruce Timm show?
TIMM: Yeah. It’s very much in the same style and genre as Superman and Batman. The major difference is that we’re going for a more realistic look in the backgrounds.
The events that take place in the show are so much larger than life than what happens in Batman. Batman, it was a fairly mundane adventure just in the fact that it was a non-superpowered human fighting non-superpowered villains for the most part, so we were able to stylize the backgrounds more to give the show more visual interest.
Whereas, with this show, we’ve got a goddess and a guy from Krypton and a guy from Mars and a space cop—all teamed up together. So, there’s a lot of visual POW right there already. We felt the fact that these characters are already so larger than life, we should try to make the setting of the Earth look a little more realistic, so it will feel a little more believable, if that makes sense. So, we’re going for a little bit more of a—it’s not really photographic or photo-realistic—but it’s a little bit more of a realistic background.
CC: How would you compare Justice League’s Batman with the other animated versions?
TIMM: It’s almost more like the very first Batman animated series look. I don’t know why we did this, but we redesigned Batman once again. I was just going to use the redesigned Batman from the revamped WB episodes. My co-producers, Glen Murakami and James Tucker, said, “No, no, we should do a new Batman. We should make everything all new.”
So, he’s got the highlights back on his black, but it’s a little bit of a different color. The shape of his head is [a] little bit different. He’s a little leaner. He’s not quite as thick and boxy as he used to be. No yellow on the bat.
CC: How about Superman?
TIMM: Superman is very close to the original design that we did. One of the things that James Tucker specifically wanted to do was he wanted to make Superman a little bit more mature, not quite as youthful and fresh-faced, boy scout-looking. We did a redesign on his face to make him look a little bit more rugged, a little bit more mature, a little more manly.
CC: How about Flash?
TIMM: Flash is real close to what he looked like before [in the Superman episode “Speed Demons”]. We redid the design, but it’s very close to what he looked like on the Superman show.
CC: Is he Wally West?
TIMM: It’s Wally West, but one of the things about the show is that we hardly ever refer to the characters in their alter-egos. They’re almost never out of their costumes, so there’s not a lot of secret identity stuff. I don’t think, not yet, that we’ve ever referred to him as Wally West. But it is. He’s a very youthful, brash, energetic Flash.
CC: These are hour-long episodes?
TIMM: Yes, it’s both. What it is is that we’re doing all the shows, because of the scope of the series, we wanted to have room for all these characters to have something to do. As I’ve said before, we’ve got all these huge, super-powered characters. It’s not enough to have them fighting a group of thugs in a warehouse. We’re tossing planets around now.
So, you have to have room to tell those kinds of stories. So, every story is either a two- or three-part arc. The plan is now, when they first air, they’ll be run as complete hour-and-a-half episodes, and then they’ll break them up into half-hour episodes for stripping.
CC: Is an hour-long show something you’ve wanted to do?
TIMM: Yeah, oh yeah.
CC: You have a diverse cast. That’s part of the reason for John Stewart?
TIMM: Yeah, and Hawkgirl too.
CC: Will Hawkgirl be connected to Hawkman?
TIMM: We’re not doing anything with Hawkman at the moment. Again, we don’t have a lot of time to go into everybody’s origin stories. We don’t really explain a whole lot with Hawkgirl. She does mention that she’s from Thanagar, but there’s really not a whole lot of room in the show to have Hawkgirl and Hawkman. It brings up a lot of questions and backstory [that] we really don’t have time to get into. So, she’s pretty much a singleton at the moment.
CC: Is there anything you can say about the villains?
TIMM: Yeah, we’re using as many cool DC villains as possible. So far, we’re using the Manhunters, the Kirby-ish Manhunters; you know, the “No man escapes the Manhunters.” We have the entire Injustice Gang, which is [Lex] Luthor, Joker, Cheetah, Solomon Grundy, Shade, Copperhead, [and] the Ultra-Humanite.
One of the cool things we’re doing is—any time we need a secondary villain; along with a major villain we’ll have a secondary villain who has a plot twist or something in the show to spice it up—instead of creating a villain, we’re using old DC villains that we don’t necessarily consider major, A-list villains. But we’ll stick them in the secondary parts, so we’ll have cameos by … well, I don’t want to give it away. But you’ll see. They’ll be a bunch of cool DC villains.
CC: How about Darkseid?
TIMM: We don’t plan on doing too much with Darkseid at the moment, only just because it’s a really tempting thing to do. We love the whole Kirby Universe and all the Fourth World stuff, but we’ve done a lot with it on Superman already. Right now, we’re trying to do stuff that doesn’t just totally rely on easy things we’ve done in the past.
So, we’re trying to avoid the whole Apokolips thing at the moment. If we get picked up for a second twenty-six, I can almost guarantee we’ll do something more with Darkseid but, for the time being, we’re giving him a rest.
CC: You’re working with a lot of familiar people on the show?
TIMM: Rich Fogel is our supervising / writing producer, and Stan Berkowitz is our major staff writer. They’re writing the bulk of the scripts right at the moment. Glen Murakami and James Tucker are my artists / co-producers. Butch Lukic and Dan Riba are our directors. Our storyboard guys and character guys are a combination of Batman / Superman veterans and some new kids that we’re trying out. It’s a very talented group.
CC: How far along are you?
TIMM: We’re about halfway through the first twenty-six. We’re moving along.
CC: It’s a different network. Are there different sensibilities?
TIMM: It’s great to be on Cartoon Network. They leave us very much alone. We get almost no creative notes from them. Basically, we hand them a script and they say, “Great!” We get very little Broadcast Standards & Practices notes. Obviously, the usual thing about you can’t kill this character or you can’t say this. “Can you say ‘destroy’ instead of ‘kill’?” Things like that. But, so far, they’ve been a breeze to work with. Knock wood.
CC: Will you be reaching more viewers with this show?
TIMM: Kind of. It’s tricky. Especially here, at [WonderCon], I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Wow, I’m really glad you guys are doing the Justice League. Boy, I wish I had the Cartoon Network.” But, technically, it does reach more households. It’s cable, so they’ve got a really broad base.
It’s apples and oranges. There are advances to being on the WB as well.
CC: This is a sort of a first film for them?
TIMM: This is the first straight action / adventure show, original program that they’ve had outside of anime. They want to get into that more. Actually, I guess Samurai Jack will be one before Justice League, and that’s technically an action / adventure show, although it’s more cartoon styling.
CC: Andrea Romano is the voice director?
TIMM: Andrea Romano is our voice director. We’ve recorded a lot. Almost as soon as the scripts are done, we record them right away, so we’re about halfway through.
CC: When do you expect to see the first animation?
TIMM: Sometime in June.
CC: So, there might be a little sneak preview for ComicCon in San Diego?
TIMM: We’re hoping. Probably.
CC: Where will the League be based?
TIMM: It’s the Watchtower, which is modern mythos, but it’s also the satellite. To me, it just didn’t make sense to put them all the way out on the moon. It’s just a little bit too far away. They’re supposed to be Earth’s protectors. Why are they millions of miles away? So, we compromised, and so we put the Watchtower in space, so it’s a combination of the Watchtower [from the Grant Morrison comics] and the satellite [from the 1970s JLA stories].
CC: The Justice League is already formed when the show starts?
TIMM: No, the first story arc is actually the forming of the JLA.
CC: Was doing the Justice League Unlimited in Batman Beyond helpful for this show?
TIMM: To a degree. We learned a lot about staging scenes with a lot of characters in them. We especially learned a lot of what not to do. It drove us crazy in the editing room because you look at something on the storyboard and you think it works fine, and then you get the film back and you’re going, “Oh, my God, we’re panning all over the place trying to keep all these characters in motion at the same time.” So, that was a good learning experience.
It was a good dry run but, the tricky thing about this show, if the Batman Beyond JLU episodes are, just in terms of scale, a 5, this is an 11. This show is so big. It’s just crazy.
CC: Not every character will be in every episode?
TIMM: That’s correct. The entire seven will probably not be in very many episodes at all. It’s hard when you get that many characters in a show to give everybody their due. It’s really hard. You have to focus on a smaller group of characters to really make it play.
Even though we have an hour-long format to play with, it’s not enough. A lot of times, we’ll get to the end of a script and say, “Gosh, we didn’t give anything for Manhunter of Wonder Woman to do. Why are they even in this show?” So, for the most part, we’re breaking the team into smaller groups.
But they’re all in the pilot. And they’re all in the Injustice Gang show. And there will be other stories where we have to get all of them together but, for the most part, it’s not something we do.
CC: Will Aquaman be in the show?
TIMM: He will definitely be in the show. He’s not going to be a member of the team. In fact, the Aquaman two-parter that we’ve already done, he’s almost more of a villain in it.
CC: Kind of picking up from the Superman episode [“A Fish Story”]?
TIMM: We’ve redesigned him completely. Yeah, but it’s along the same line.
CC: Atom?
TIMM: We don’t have any plans for the Atom at the moment, although he might show up in the JSA crossover. We might do the Earth-2 Atom. We’re thinking about it.
CC: You’re doing a JSA crossover?
TIMM: Of course, we have to. You’ve got to do that. There are just certain things that you have to do, and that’s one of them.
CC: That will be for this season?
TIMM: We just started talking about it. It’s a long way from being written. It might not make it this season, but we’re hoping.
CC | April 24, 2001 and April 25, 2001
It’s been a long time coming, but the Justice League is returning to animation this fall.
Bruce Timm—the producer of Batman, Superman, and Batman Beyond—is heading up the Warner Bros. Animation crew putting together Justice League for a November start on Cartoon Network. It marks the first time in more than 15 years—since ABC’s Super Friends—that the modern Justice League has been presented in animation.
The new show spotlights Batman, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl as a newly formed League. Twenty-six half-hours were ordered by Cartoon Network.
The Continuum caught up with Timm last weekend at WonderCon for his insights into the series.
CC: So, you’re finally doing the Justice League. Why now?
BRUCE TIMM: I often ask myself that. [LAUGHS.] Well, Batman Beyond was drawing to a close, and we knew [we] weren’t going to be doing any more of those. So, one of our executives at Warner Bros. in development suggested this might be a good time to do the Justice League. So, I said, “Okay, we’ll give it a shot.” I called up Michael Lazzo, head of programming at Cartoon Network, whom I had an acquaintance with. In the past, he mentioned he wanted us to do something for him. So, I called him up and said, “We’re thinking about doing a Justice League show.” And he said, “Great. How many do you want to do?” It was like, shoot, now we’re in business. Now we’ve got to do it. And that was it.
CC: This is really a show the fans have been demanding.
TIMM: For the last five or so years, yeah. Whenever I got to conventions or store appearances, that’s the number one question I get from everybody: “When are you guys going to do the Justice League? When are you going to do the Justice League?” Hopefully, they’ll be happy.
CC: Is Justice League set in the same continuity as the Batman and Superman shows?
TIMM: Technically, it is. We’re not totally beholden to our own continuity. If it works within the continuity of the stuff that we’ve established, fine. And, if it doesn’t, we don’t want to stifle our creativity by being stuck by, “Oh, we can’t do that because, in episode so-and-so of Superman or whatever, that violates continuity.” We’re not totally beholden to it.
For instance, we have a new Green Lantern, so we’re just kind of pretending that the Kyle Rayner / Green Lantern episode of Superman never happened. That kind of messes up what we’re doing now with the John Stewart Green Lantern.
CC: What’s the general look of the show? It’s still a Bruce Timm show?
TIMM: Yeah. It’s very much in the same style and genre as Superman and Batman. The major difference is that we’re going for a more realistic look in the backgrounds.
The events that take place in the show are so much larger than life than what happens in Batman. Batman, it was a fairly mundane adventure just in the fact that it was a non-superpowered human fighting non-superpowered villains for the most part, so we were able to stylize the backgrounds more to give the show more visual interest.
Whereas, with this show, we’ve got a goddess and a guy from Krypton and a guy from Mars and a space cop—all teamed up together. So, there’s a lot of visual POW right there already. We felt the fact that these characters are already so larger than life, we should try to make the setting of the Earth look a little more realistic, so it will feel a little more believable, if that makes sense. So, we’re going for a little bit more of a—it’s not really photographic or photo-realistic—but it’s a little bit more of a realistic background.
CC: How would you compare Justice League’s Batman with the other animated versions?
TIMM: It’s almost more like the very first Batman animated series look. I don’t know why we did this, but we redesigned Batman once again. I was just going to use the redesigned Batman from the revamped WB episodes. My co-producers, Glen Murakami and James Tucker, said, “No, no, we should do a new Batman. We should make everything all new.”
So, he’s got the highlights back on his black, but it’s a little bit of a different color. The shape of his head is [a] little bit different. He’s a little leaner. He’s not quite as thick and boxy as he used to be. No yellow on the bat.
CC: How about Superman?
TIMM: Superman is very close to the original design that we did. One of the things that James Tucker specifically wanted to do was he wanted to make Superman a little bit more mature, not quite as youthful and fresh-faced, boy scout-looking. We did a redesign on his face to make him look a little bit more rugged, a little bit more mature, a little more manly.
CC: How about Flash?
TIMM: Flash is real close to what he looked like before [in the Superman episode “Speed Demons”]. We redid the design, but it’s very close to what he looked like on the Superman show.
CC: Is he Wally West?
TIMM: It’s Wally West, but one of the things about the show is that we hardly ever refer to the characters in their alter-egos. They’re almost never out of their costumes, so there’s not a lot of secret identity stuff. I don’t think, not yet, that we’ve ever referred to him as Wally West. But it is. He’s a very youthful, brash, energetic Flash.
CC: These are hour-long episodes?
TIMM: Yes, it’s both. What it is is that we’re doing all the shows, because of the scope of the series, we wanted to have room for all these characters to have something to do. As I’ve said before, we’ve got all these huge, super-powered characters. It’s not enough to have them fighting a group of thugs in a warehouse. We’re tossing planets around now.
So, you have to have room to tell those kinds of stories. So, every story is either a two- or three-part arc. The plan is now, when they first air, they’ll be run as complete hour-and-a-half episodes, and then they’ll break them up into half-hour episodes for stripping.
CC: Is an hour-long show something you’ve wanted to do?
TIMM: Yeah, oh yeah.
CC: You have a diverse cast. That’s part of the reason for John Stewart?
TIMM: Yeah, and Hawkgirl too.
CC: Will Hawkgirl be connected to Hawkman?
TIMM: We’re not doing anything with Hawkman at the moment. Again, we don’t have a lot of time to go into everybody’s origin stories. We don’t really explain a whole lot with Hawkgirl. She does mention that she’s from Thanagar, but there’s really not a whole lot of room in the show to have Hawkgirl and Hawkman. It brings up a lot of questions and backstory [that] we really don’t have time to get into. So, she’s pretty much a singleton at the moment.
CC: Is there anything you can say about the villains?
TIMM: Yeah, we’re using as many cool DC villains as possible. So far, we’re using the Manhunters, the Kirby-ish Manhunters; you know, the “No man escapes the Manhunters.” We have the entire Injustice Gang, which is [Lex] Luthor, Joker, Cheetah, Solomon Grundy, Shade, Copperhead, [and] the Ultra-Humanite.
One of the cool things we’re doing is—any time we need a secondary villain; along with a major villain we’ll have a secondary villain who has a plot twist or something in the show to spice it up—instead of creating a villain, we’re using old DC villains that we don’t necessarily consider major, A-list villains. But we’ll stick them in the secondary parts, so we’ll have cameos by … well, I don’t want to give it away. But you’ll see. They’ll be a bunch of cool DC villains.
CC: How about Darkseid?
TIMM: We don’t plan on doing too much with Darkseid at the moment, only just because it’s a really tempting thing to do. We love the whole Kirby Universe and all the Fourth World stuff, but we’ve done a lot with it on Superman already. Right now, we’re trying to do stuff that doesn’t just totally rely on easy things we’ve done in the past.
So, we’re trying to avoid the whole Apokolips thing at the moment. If we get picked up for a second twenty-six, I can almost guarantee we’ll do something more with Darkseid but, for the time being, we’re giving him a rest.
CC: You’re working with a lot of familiar people on the show?
TIMM: Rich Fogel is our supervising / writing producer, and Stan Berkowitz is our major staff writer. They’re writing the bulk of the scripts right at the moment. Glen Murakami and James Tucker are my artists / co-producers. Butch Lukic and Dan Riba are our directors. Our storyboard guys and character guys are a combination of Batman / Superman veterans and some new kids that we’re trying out. It’s a very talented group.
CC: How far along are you?
TIMM: We’re about halfway through the first twenty-six. We’re moving along.
CC: It’s a different network. Are there different sensibilities?
TIMM: It’s great to be on Cartoon Network. They leave us very much alone. We get almost no creative notes from them. Basically, we hand them a script and they say, “Great!” We get very little Broadcast Standards & Practices notes. Obviously, the usual thing about you can’t kill this character or you can’t say this. “Can you say ‘destroy’ instead of ‘kill’?” Things like that. But, so far, they’ve been a breeze to work with. Knock wood.
CC: Will you be reaching more viewers with this show?
TIMM: Kind of. It’s tricky. Especially here, at [WonderCon], I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Wow, I’m really glad you guys are doing the Justice League. Boy, I wish I had the Cartoon Network.” But, technically, it does reach more households. It’s cable, so they’ve got a really broad base.
It’s apples and oranges. There are advances to being on the WB as well.
CC: This is a sort of a first film for them?
TIMM: This is the first straight action / adventure show, original program that they’ve had outside of anime. They want to get into that more. Actually, I guess Samurai Jack will be one before Justice League, and that’s technically an action / adventure show, although it’s more cartoon styling.
CC: Andrea Romano is the voice director?
TIMM: Andrea Romano is our voice director. We’ve recorded a lot. Almost as soon as the scripts are done, we record them right away, so we’re about halfway through.
CC: When do you expect to see the first animation?
TIMM: Sometime in June.
CC: So, there might be a little sneak preview for ComicCon in San Diego?
TIMM: We’re hoping. Probably.
CC: Where will the League be based?
TIMM: It’s the Watchtower, which is modern mythos, but it’s also the satellite. To me, it just didn’t make sense to put them all the way out on the moon. It’s just a little bit too far away. They’re supposed to be Earth’s protectors. Why are they millions of miles away? So, we compromised, and so we put the Watchtower in space, so it’s a combination of the Watchtower [from the Grant Morrison comics] and the satellite [from the 1970s JLA stories].
CC: The Justice League is already formed when the show starts?
TIMM: No, the first story arc is actually the forming of the JLA.
CC: Was doing the Justice League Unlimited in Batman Beyond helpful for this show?
TIMM: To a degree. We learned a lot about staging scenes with a lot of characters in them. We especially learned a lot of what not to do. It drove us crazy in the editing room because you look at something on the storyboard and you think it works fine, and then you get the film back and you’re going, “Oh, my God, we’re panning all over the place trying to keep all these characters in motion at the same time.” So, that was a good learning experience.
It was a good dry run but, the tricky thing about this show, if the Batman Beyond JLU episodes are, just in terms of scale, a 5, this is an 11. This show is so big. It’s just crazy.
CC: Not every character will be in every episode?
TIMM: That’s correct. The entire seven will probably not be in very many episodes at all. It’s hard when you get that many characters in a show to give everybody their due. It’s really hard. You have to focus on a smaller group of characters to really make it play.
Even though we have an hour-long format to play with, it’s not enough. A lot of times, we’ll get to the end of a script and say, “Gosh, we didn’t give anything for Manhunter of Wonder Woman to do. Why are they even in this show?” So, for the most part, we’re breaking the team into smaller groups.
But they’re all in the pilot. And they’re all in the Injustice Gang show. And there will be other stories where we have to get all of them together but, for the most part, it’s not something we do.
CC: Will Aquaman be in the show?
TIMM: He will definitely be in the show. He’s not going to be a member of the team. In fact, the Aquaman two-parter that we’ve already done, he’s almost more of a villain in it.
CC: Kind of picking up from the Superman episode [“A Fish Story”]?
TIMM: We’ve redesigned him completely. Yeah, but it’s along the same line.
CC: Atom?
TIMM: We don’t have any plans for the Atom at the moment, although he might show up in the JSA crossover. We might do the Earth-2 Atom. We’re thinking about it.
CC: You’re doing a JSA crossover?
TIMM: Of course, we have to. You’ve got to do that. There are just certain things that you have to do, and that’s one of them.
CC: That will be for this season?
TIMM: We just started talking about it. It’s a long way from being written. It might not make it this season, but we’re hoping.
Justice League Animated Characters [The Original Character Bios]
CC | October 19, 2001
Cartoon Network has released a press kit to the Continuum containing a video of the opening “Secret Origins” episode and background information on the characters and talent associated with the show. The series begins on Saturday, November 17th at 7:00pm with a three-part episode that brings the seven Justice Leaguers together for the first time to face an alien threat.
[Listed below are a breakdown] on the Justice Leaguers and [the] villains they’ll be facing.
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE
Superman
Living up to being the legendary Superman would be a burden for most men, but Clark Kent’s shoulders are more than broad enough to carry the load. While his incredible physical strength comes from his home planet of Krypton, his moral strength comes from his simple Kansas upbringing. But he’s no longer the farm boy from Smallville. After seeing more of the universe than any of us can imagine, he maintains a firm sense of right and wrong.
But he is more complex than his reputation as a big, blue boy scout. When he talks about truth, justice, and the freedom, everyone senses his deep commitment to these ideals. The natural leader of the Justice League, Superman leads by example and steadies this volatile group. With so many super-egos involved, there are often major clashes in style. And when clashes inevitably occur, he is often the peacemaker.
Batman
Everyone knows Batman as the Dark Knight who strikes terror into the hearts of criminals in Gotham City, but in the Justice League, viewers discover another facet of the mysterious Caped Crusader. Not only is Batman the World’s Greatest Detective, but he also has one of the greatest scientific and analytical minds on Earth. Although he has no superpowers of his own, Batman is often the key to the Justice League’s victories.
Backed by Bruce Wayne’s vast personal fortune and the scientific resources of Wayne Enterprises, Batman has access to all kinds of weapons and technology, from prototype hyperdrive vehicles to deep space Batsuits. But Batman is uncomfortable in the glare of the public spotlight. He prefers to work alone in the shadows, only joining a Justice League operation when absolutely necessary. When he does commit to helping the League, he brings to it the same fierce determination that he does to his own crusades against crime. Batman’s grim attitude often rubs his teammates the wrong way, but he earns their respect with his unwavering dedication to justice.
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman was born Diana, Princess of Themyscira. The daughter of Hippolyta, Diana was blessed by the gods with amazing speed and strength. She also possesses the power of flight, silver bracelets that can deflect bullets, and an indestructible golden lasso spun from the girdle of [the] Earth goddess Gaea.
Diana was raised among a fabled race of Amazons who trained her to be the ultimate Amazon warrior. Now, for the first time, she has ventured out into Man’s World. Her sheltered existence on Themyscira hardly prepared her for the greed, cruelty, and oppression that she finds among the human race.
Accustomed to being treated like royalty, Wonder Woman has the aristocratic bearing of a goddess. With her deep sense of honor, she is easily offended when she is not accorded the respect that she feels she deserves, and she does not suffer fools gladly. Yet underneath this imposing exterior, she has a sly sense of humor.
Green Lantern
John Stewart is a veteran member of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic peacekeeping force founded by the Guardians of Oa. The Guardians provide each Green Lantern with a power ring that must be recharged every 24 hours from a lantern-like power source. Acting as the ultimate defensive weapon, the ring responds to mere thought and can project powerful, laser-like beams or impenetrable force fields. Its emerald aura also protects the wearer from the harsh environs of deep space.
Years ago, the Guardians of Oa recognized John Stewart’s potential for exceptional courage and heroism. Awarding him a power ring, they trained him to be the Green Lantern of 2814, a quadrant of the galaxy that includes our own solar system. For more than ten years, John has patrolled the deepest reaches of space.
Now, he has returned home to protect Earth as a member of the Justice League. Unfortunately, the hard-nosed military attitude that makes John an ideal Green Lantern often creates friction with his fellow Justice Leaguers. Because he views himself as an authorized peacekeeper, he sometimes treats the others like well-meaning amateurs.
Flash
Young, brash, and impulsive, Wally West gained the power of super speed during a freak electro-chemical accident. Now the Fastest Man Alive, he can run at velocities approaching the speed of light. Even Superman has a hard time keeping up with him. Because of his super-fast metabolism, Wally is constantly hungry.
Also blessed with a quick wit, Wally takes a light-hearted view of saving the universe. He is the comedian of the group, a wise-cracking, easy-going slacker who relies on speed, not brains, to get him out of trouble. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, and his flippant attitude annoys his teammates who take their jobs far more seriously. Often, this over-reliance on speed will get him in over his head, and his teammates will have to catch up to rescue him. For them, there is one thing the Flash cannot do fast enough—grow up.
J’onn J’onzz—The Martian Manhunter
J’onn J’onzz is the last survivor of an ancient Martian race. He is a telepath who can use his uncanny shape-shifting abilities to adapt and blend into any situation. By altering his physical density, he can also become immaterial and pass through solid objects. Because he comes from a cold, barren planet, exposure to intense heat can weaken him.
J’onzz came to Earth to warn us of an invasion by the evil race that wiped out his own people on Mars. Although he was met with suspicion and hostility, J’onzz refused to give up, and [he] helped to gather together a group of heroes who could repel the invaders. This group would become the Justice League.
After the invaders were defeated, J’onzz remained on Earth because, as the last of his kind, he no longer had a home. The other members of the Justice League try to make him feel welcome, but he always remains aloof detached, and inscrutable.
As an outside observer, J’onzz is fascinated by the contradiction of the human race. When he secretly walks among us, he is overwhelmed by the conflict between intellect and emotion he senses within every one of us. Often, it is too much for his alien mind to absorb, so he retreats to the orbiting Justice League Watchtower, where he spends most of his time. Although he is the heart of the Justice League, no one I the universe is more alone than J’onn J’onzz.
Hawkgirl
Shayera Hol was an undercover detective on her native planet of Thanagar. Several years ago, while pursuing some criminals who were trafficking in forbidden technology, she was zapped by a dimensional transport beam. Her molecular structure was ripped apart and sent halfway across the galaxy. When she awoke, she found herself on an uncharted planet called Earth. Using her survival training, she adopted a human identity and learned to blend in with the native population.
Although Shayera hopes to return to Thanagar someday, she has developed a strong bond with the people of Earth. As Hawkgirl, she uses her Thanagarian powers to serve and protect her adopted home. Hawkgirl has the power of flight, lethal hand-to-hand combat skills, and the ability to communicate with birds.
As a trained detective, she has phenomenal powers of observation, deeply impressive to Batman. A great team player, the others consider Hawkgirl one of the guys, making it easy to forget that she comes from another world. Despite her pleasant and unassuming personality, she is a fierce combatant. She can strike with a sudden ferocity surprising to her closest teammates.
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE’S VILLAINS
AMAZO
A synthetic android whose unique metabolism allows him to absorb and duplicate the powers of all the members of the Justice League. In addition to absorbing their strengths, he also absorbs their weaknesses.
Brainiac
A powerful living computer from Superman’s home planet, Krypton. After Krypton was destroyed, Brainiac’s programming became corrupted. Now his sole mission is to catalog and destroy every life form he encounters.
Despero
An alien despot with a hypnotic third eye, Despero is a master telepath with the ability to project realistic illusions and entrance virtually anyone. He has controlled entire planets with his mental domination.
Dr. Destiny
Using a device called the Materioptikon, this skull-faced villain can bring nightmares to life.
Draaga
Superman defeated Draaga, a disgraced intergalactic gladiator, in the arena but refused to kill him, depriving Draaga of an honorable death. Now, Draaga must live with his disgrace, and his honor cannot be restored until he kills Superman or dies trying. As a symbol of his shame, he wears Superman’s shield on his chest.
Felix Faust
An accomplished sorcerer, he is well-versed in the arcane and mystical arts. He can summon powerful demons from the underworld. […] The mad sorcerer who will stop at nothing until he has achieved Ultimate Knowledge.
Gorilla Grodd
A scientific genius and dangerous renegade from Gorilla City, a hidden civilization of highly evolved, talking apes. In addition to his natural physical strength, Grodd’s powerful mind force can move solid objects and control weaker minds.
The Key
Through the use of psycho-chemicals and a fantastic keyboard controller, the Key can control the minds of others.
Vandal Savage
Virtually immortal, Vandal Savage is a powerful and mysterious figure. He has secretly influenced history since the dawn of time. Adopting a new identity every hundred years, Savage has conquered countless civilizations. He was Genghis Khan. He was Vlad the Impaler. He was [Joseph] Stalin. Knowing that every dictator will eventually fall, Vandal Savage periodically fakes his own death, then assumes a new identity, renewing his endless quest for power.
The Secret Society
Founded by Darkseid to rid the Earth of any heroes capable of opposing him, its roster includes Lex Luthor, Gorilla Grodd, Felix Faust, Sinestro, Poison Ivy, Ultra-Humanite, Chronos, Cheetah, and Star Sapphire. Fortunately, these egocentric villains can’t get along long enough to unite against their enemies.
Lex Luthor
Driven mad by kryptonite poisoning, Luthor has turned his limitless genius and vast personal fortune to one goal: destroying Superman and the Justice League.
Solomon Grundy
Another member of Luthor’s gang. He is a big, hulking zombie, with the muscle to crush any of our heroes.
Star Sapphire
This sexy supervillainess has class, style, and a killer power gem that allows her to fly and shoot deadly blasts.
The Shade
[He] can trap any foe in an inky black void [that] he shoots from his cane.
Copperhead
This venomous villain cannot wait to sink his fangs into the Justice League.
Cheetah
A feline femme fatale who is scratching for a fight.
The Ultra-Humanite
A brilliant scientist who transplanted his over-sized brain into the body of an albino gorilla.
The Manhunters
Created by the Guardians of Oa, they were sophisticated, soulless android bounty hunters designed to bring order to lawless sectors of the universe. Unfortunately, the Manhunters had programming flaws limiting their usefulness, and were soon replaced by the Green Lantern Corps. Now, the Manhunters have reprogrammed themselves to destroy the Guardians and the Green Lanterns.
Mongul
The ruthless ruler of a vast intergalactic empire, Mongul amuses himself with endless gladiatorial games staged on a barren planet called War World.
CC | October 19, 2001
Cartoon Network has released a press kit to the Continuum containing a video of the opening “Secret Origins” episode and background information on the characters and talent associated with the show. The series begins on Saturday, November 17th at 7:00pm with a three-part episode that brings the seven Justice Leaguers together for the first time to face an alien threat.
[Listed below are a breakdown] on the Justice Leaguers and [the] villains they’ll be facing.
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE
Superman
Living up to being the legendary Superman would be a burden for most men, but Clark Kent’s shoulders are more than broad enough to carry the load. While his incredible physical strength comes from his home planet of Krypton, his moral strength comes from his simple Kansas upbringing. But he’s no longer the farm boy from Smallville. After seeing more of the universe than any of us can imagine, he maintains a firm sense of right and wrong.
But he is more complex than his reputation as a big, blue boy scout. When he talks about truth, justice, and the freedom, everyone senses his deep commitment to these ideals. The natural leader of the Justice League, Superman leads by example and steadies this volatile group. With so many super-egos involved, there are often major clashes in style. And when clashes inevitably occur, he is often the peacemaker.
Batman
Everyone knows Batman as the Dark Knight who strikes terror into the hearts of criminals in Gotham City, but in the Justice League, viewers discover another facet of the mysterious Caped Crusader. Not only is Batman the World’s Greatest Detective, but he also has one of the greatest scientific and analytical minds on Earth. Although he has no superpowers of his own, Batman is often the key to the Justice League’s victories.
Backed by Bruce Wayne’s vast personal fortune and the scientific resources of Wayne Enterprises, Batman has access to all kinds of weapons and technology, from prototype hyperdrive vehicles to deep space Batsuits. But Batman is uncomfortable in the glare of the public spotlight. He prefers to work alone in the shadows, only joining a Justice League operation when absolutely necessary. When he does commit to helping the League, he brings to it the same fierce determination that he does to his own crusades against crime. Batman’s grim attitude often rubs his teammates the wrong way, but he earns their respect with his unwavering dedication to justice.
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman was born Diana, Princess of Themyscira. The daughter of Hippolyta, Diana was blessed by the gods with amazing speed and strength. She also possesses the power of flight, silver bracelets that can deflect bullets, and an indestructible golden lasso spun from the girdle of [the] Earth goddess Gaea.
Diana was raised among a fabled race of Amazons who trained her to be the ultimate Amazon warrior. Now, for the first time, she has ventured out into Man’s World. Her sheltered existence on Themyscira hardly prepared her for the greed, cruelty, and oppression that she finds among the human race.
Accustomed to being treated like royalty, Wonder Woman has the aristocratic bearing of a goddess. With her deep sense of honor, she is easily offended when she is not accorded the respect that she feels she deserves, and she does not suffer fools gladly. Yet underneath this imposing exterior, she has a sly sense of humor.
Green Lantern
John Stewart is a veteran member of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic peacekeeping force founded by the Guardians of Oa. The Guardians provide each Green Lantern with a power ring that must be recharged every 24 hours from a lantern-like power source. Acting as the ultimate defensive weapon, the ring responds to mere thought and can project powerful, laser-like beams or impenetrable force fields. Its emerald aura also protects the wearer from the harsh environs of deep space.
Years ago, the Guardians of Oa recognized John Stewart’s potential for exceptional courage and heroism. Awarding him a power ring, they trained him to be the Green Lantern of 2814, a quadrant of the galaxy that includes our own solar system. For more than ten years, John has patrolled the deepest reaches of space.
Now, he has returned home to protect Earth as a member of the Justice League. Unfortunately, the hard-nosed military attitude that makes John an ideal Green Lantern often creates friction with his fellow Justice Leaguers. Because he views himself as an authorized peacekeeper, he sometimes treats the others like well-meaning amateurs.
Flash
Young, brash, and impulsive, Wally West gained the power of super speed during a freak electro-chemical accident. Now the Fastest Man Alive, he can run at velocities approaching the speed of light. Even Superman has a hard time keeping up with him. Because of his super-fast metabolism, Wally is constantly hungry.
Also blessed with a quick wit, Wally takes a light-hearted view of saving the universe. He is the comedian of the group, a wise-cracking, easy-going slacker who relies on speed, not brains, to get him out of trouble. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, and his flippant attitude annoys his teammates who take their jobs far more seriously. Often, this over-reliance on speed will get him in over his head, and his teammates will have to catch up to rescue him. For them, there is one thing the Flash cannot do fast enough—grow up.
J’onn J’onzz—The Martian Manhunter
J’onn J’onzz is the last survivor of an ancient Martian race. He is a telepath who can use his uncanny shape-shifting abilities to adapt and blend into any situation. By altering his physical density, he can also become immaterial and pass through solid objects. Because he comes from a cold, barren planet, exposure to intense heat can weaken him.
J’onzz came to Earth to warn us of an invasion by the evil race that wiped out his own people on Mars. Although he was met with suspicion and hostility, J’onzz refused to give up, and [he] helped to gather together a group of heroes who could repel the invaders. This group would become the Justice League.
After the invaders were defeated, J’onzz remained on Earth because, as the last of his kind, he no longer had a home. The other members of the Justice League try to make him feel welcome, but he always remains aloof detached, and inscrutable.
As an outside observer, J’onzz is fascinated by the contradiction of the human race. When he secretly walks among us, he is overwhelmed by the conflict between intellect and emotion he senses within every one of us. Often, it is too much for his alien mind to absorb, so he retreats to the orbiting Justice League Watchtower, where he spends most of his time. Although he is the heart of the Justice League, no one I the universe is more alone than J’onn J’onzz.
Hawkgirl
Shayera Hol was an undercover detective on her native planet of Thanagar. Several years ago, while pursuing some criminals who were trafficking in forbidden technology, she was zapped by a dimensional transport beam. Her molecular structure was ripped apart and sent halfway across the galaxy. When she awoke, she found herself on an uncharted planet called Earth. Using her survival training, she adopted a human identity and learned to blend in with the native population.
Although Shayera hopes to return to Thanagar someday, she has developed a strong bond with the people of Earth. As Hawkgirl, she uses her Thanagarian powers to serve and protect her adopted home. Hawkgirl has the power of flight, lethal hand-to-hand combat skills, and the ability to communicate with birds.
As a trained detective, she has phenomenal powers of observation, deeply impressive to Batman. A great team player, the others consider Hawkgirl one of the guys, making it easy to forget that she comes from another world. Despite her pleasant and unassuming personality, she is a fierce combatant. She can strike with a sudden ferocity surprising to her closest teammates.
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE’S VILLAINS
AMAZO
A synthetic android whose unique metabolism allows him to absorb and duplicate the powers of all the members of the Justice League. In addition to absorbing their strengths, he also absorbs their weaknesses.
Brainiac
A powerful living computer from Superman’s home planet, Krypton. After Krypton was destroyed, Brainiac’s programming became corrupted. Now his sole mission is to catalog and destroy every life form he encounters.
Despero
An alien despot with a hypnotic third eye, Despero is a master telepath with the ability to project realistic illusions and entrance virtually anyone. He has controlled entire planets with his mental domination.
Dr. Destiny
Using a device called the Materioptikon, this skull-faced villain can bring nightmares to life.
Draaga
Superman defeated Draaga, a disgraced intergalactic gladiator, in the arena but refused to kill him, depriving Draaga of an honorable death. Now, Draaga must live with his disgrace, and his honor cannot be restored until he kills Superman or dies trying. As a symbol of his shame, he wears Superman’s shield on his chest.
Felix Faust
An accomplished sorcerer, he is well-versed in the arcane and mystical arts. He can summon powerful demons from the underworld. […] The mad sorcerer who will stop at nothing until he has achieved Ultimate Knowledge.
Gorilla Grodd
A scientific genius and dangerous renegade from Gorilla City, a hidden civilization of highly evolved, talking apes. In addition to his natural physical strength, Grodd’s powerful mind force can move solid objects and control weaker minds.
The Key
Through the use of psycho-chemicals and a fantastic keyboard controller, the Key can control the minds of others.
Vandal Savage
Virtually immortal, Vandal Savage is a powerful and mysterious figure. He has secretly influenced history since the dawn of time. Adopting a new identity every hundred years, Savage has conquered countless civilizations. He was Genghis Khan. He was Vlad the Impaler. He was [Joseph] Stalin. Knowing that every dictator will eventually fall, Vandal Savage periodically fakes his own death, then assumes a new identity, renewing his endless quest for power.
The Secret Society
Founded by Darkseid to rid the Earth of any heroes capable of opposing him, its roster includes Lex Luthor, Gorilla Grodd, Felix Faust, Sinestro, Poison Ivy, Ultra-Humanite, Chronos, Cheetah, and Star Sapphire. Fortunately, these egocentric villains can’t get along long enough to unite against their enemies.
Lex Luthor
Driven mad by kryptonite poisoning, Luthor has turned his limitless genius and vast personal fortune to one goal: destroying Superman and the Justice League.
Solomon Grundy
Another member of Luthor’s gang. He is a big, hulking zombie, with the muscle to crush any of our heroes.
Star Sapphire
This sexy supervillainess has class, style, and a killer power gem that allows her to fly and shoot deadly blasts.
The Shade
[He] can trap any foe in an inky black void [that] he shoots from his cane.
Copperhead
This venomous villain cannot wait to sink his fangs into the Justice League.
Cheetah
A feline femme fatale who is scratching for a fight.
The Ultra-Humanite
A brilliant scientist who transplanted his over-sized brain into the body of an albino gorilla.
The Manhunters
Created by the Guardians of Oa, they were sophisticated, soulless android bounty hunters designed to bring order to lawless sectors of the universe. Unfortunately, the Manhunters had programming flaws limiting their usefulness, and were soon replaced by the Green Lantern Corps. Now, the Manhunters have reprogrammed themselves to destroy the Guardians and the Green Lanterns.
Mongul
The ruthless ruler of a vast intergalactic empire, Mongul amuses himself with endless gladiatorial games staged on a barren planet called War World.
Alan Burnett Talks Batwoman, Aquaman, Static Shock
CC | December 2, 2002
Warner Bros. Animation Producer Alan Burnett told the Continuum that voice recording for the Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman movie was completed last month. Burnett wrote the story for the direct-to-video animated movie, with Michael Reaves handling the script.
“I can’t tell you who the Batwoman is, because the title is Mystery of the Batwoman, so I think people will be surprised by that,” Burnett said. “It’s a mystery; it’s part of the whole story.”
Burnett couldn’t confirm speculation that Kelly Ripa is doing the voice of Batwoman. “But she’s in it. And she’s wonderful,” Burnett said. “And I was so very excited to get her in the show because the character that had been written in the show that she did was so very much like her, such a very sweet blonde, actually. It was a thrill to have her on the show. As soon as I heard that she was available, I told my casting director, ‘Yes, go get her!’”
Asked if the Batwoman character will be the same as the one from the comics of the 1950s and 1960s, Burnett said, “I can’t tell you. But I’m sure people who have read the comics who will see this video when it comes out will see the parallels going on. I can tell you this: in this video, I set out to tell a fun story, a story that had some humor to it too, and I think we’ve accomplished that.”
Burnett told the Continuum that the movie is being produced and directed by Curt Geda and that Robin will also be appearing.
Burnett, who is currently producing Static Shock and Ozzy & Drix at Warner Bros. Animation for Kids’ WB!, talked to the Continuum after a panel devoted to him at the Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday.
There, he also spoke of an Aquaman animated series in development. “They’re interested in his younger days, as he becomes Aquaman,” Burnett said. “The show will be called Aquaman, but they’re interested in developing how he became Aquaman. It’s for the WB, but it could […] end up also on Cartoon [Network] . They’re starting to work together on programs, so they like to have shows that are applicable to both.”
Burnett said Aquaman is another case of taking a comic book property geared for an older audience and making it for a younger television audience.
“One time, I asked Jeanette Kahn, of DC Comics, ‘What’s your median age for comic book readers?’ And she just floored me when she said it was 25,” Burnett said. “I thought, ‘My God, this is past college graduation.’ And, on Saturday morning, they’re after 6-11 year-olds because that’s the advertising they have there, so they want to attract that audience. They also want to attract girls as much as they can. They want some sort of girl element so that girls can stay with a superhero show throughout the thing.
“So, we’re struggling with two different animals here. So, Aquaman, in the development that we’ve been doing, we’re trying to get them to come together—and we have. It’s finally happened, where DC likes what Warner Bros. likes. But it took three or four [series] bibles to finally get to it.”
Burnett said that Kids’ WB! series Batman Beyond, in some ways, ended an era of superhero animation. “We started to get lighter and more juvenile shows to hit the 6-11 year-olds,” he said. “A pendulum not only swung, it thwacked all the way to the other side. And now it’s sort of coming back a little bit.
“We’ve done two years of Static Shock, which I enjoy doing a great deal. But I always realized it needed to be darker than what it was. They wanted 14-year-olds and stories for 14-year-olds and 14-year-old villains, and only now are we starting to shift to a little bit darker in the third season, and it’s making a great deal of difference. The shows for the third season, which starts in January, when you see them, you’re going to think it’s a completely different show. It’s still the same show, but there’s a real tonal difference.”
During the panel, which was moderated by Mark Evanier, Burnett offered the following observations, [such as] his comics inspiration for Batman: The Animated Series:
Dealing with Superman as opposed to Batman:
The episode he was most happy with:
On the animation writers writing the Batman or Superman franchises for live-action movies:
CC | December 2, 2002
Warner Bros. Animation Producer Alan Burnett told the Continuum that voice recording for the Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman movie was completed last month. Burnett wrote the story for the direct-to-video animated movie, with Michael Reaves handling the script.
“I can’t tell you who the Batwoman is, because the title is Mystery of the Batwoman, so I think people will be surprised by that,” Burnett said. “It’s a mystery; it’s part of the whole story.”
Burnett couldn’t confirm speculation that Kelly Ripa is doing the voice of Batwoman. “But she’s in it. And she’s wonderful,” Burnett said. “And I was so very excited to get her in the show because the character that had been written in the show that she did was so very much like her, such a very sweet blonde, actually. It was a thrill to have her on the show. As soon as I heard that she was available, I told my casting director, ‘Yes, go get her!’”
Asked if the Batwoman character will be the same as the one from the comics of the 1950s and 1960s, Burnett said, “I can’t tell you. But I’m sure people who have read the comics who will see this video when it comes out will see the parallels going on. I can tell you this: in this video, I set out to tell a fun story, a story that had some humor to it too, and I think we’ve accomplished that.”
Burnett told the Continuum that the movie is being produced and directed by Curt Geda and that Robin will also be appearing.
Burnett, who is currently producing Static Shock and Ozzy & Drix at Warner Bros. Animation for Kids’ WB!, talked to the Continuum after a panel devoted to him at the Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday.
There, he also spoke of an Aquaman animated series in development. “They’re interested in his younger days, as he becomes Aquaman,” Burnett said. “The show will be called Aquaman, but they’re interested in developing how he became Aquaman. It’s for the WB, but it could […] end up also on Cartoon [Network] . They’re starting to work together on programs, so they like to have shows that are applicable to both.”
Burnett said Aquaman is another case of taking a comic book property geared for an older audience and making it for a younger television audience.
“One time, I asked Jeanette Kahn, of DC Comics, ‘What’s your median age for comic book readers?’ And she just floored me when she said it was 25,” Burnett said. “I thought, ‘My God, this is past college graduation.’ And, on Saturday morning, they’re after 6-11 year-olds because that’s the advertising they have there, so they want to attract that audience. They also want to attract girls as much as they can. They want some sort of girl element so that girls can stay with a superhero show throughout the thing.
“So, we’re struggling with two different animals here. So, Aquaman, in the development that we’ve been doing, we’re trying to get them to come together—and we have. It’s finally happened, where DC likes what Warner Bros. likes. But it took three or four [series] bibles to finally get to it.”
Burnett said that Kids’ WB! series Batman Beyond, in some ways, ended an era of superhero animation. “We started to get lighter and more juvenile shows to hit the 6-11 year-olds,” he said. “A pendulum not only swung, it thwacked all the way to the other side. And now it’s sort of coming back a little bit.
“We’ve done two years of Static Shock, which I enjoy doing a great deal. But I always realized it needed to be darker than what it was. They wanted 14-year-olds and stories for 14-year-olds and 14-year-old villains, and only now are we starting to shift to a little bit darker in the third season, and it’s making a great deal of difference. The shows for the third season, which starts in January, when you see them, you’re going to think it’s a completely different show. It’s still the same show, but there’s a real tonal difference.”
During the panel, which was moderated by Mark Evanier, Burnett offered the following observations, [such as] his comics inspiration for Batman: The Animated Series:
The whole thing. For me, strangely enough, I was very much inspired by Steve Englehart’s books, which were something I hadn’t read until I started on Batman: The Animated Series. I just like the feel of them, the grandeur of them. The sense of Bruce Wayne being a big shot and having romances. That was influential for me. But we took from everything from the beginning of Batman. We just borrowed what we liked the most about it. There’s no one person, no one Batman.
Dealing with Superman as opposed to Batman:
At first, I didn’t want to do Superman, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know how I got back in on it. I guess there was nothing else going on at the studio. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm were developing it, and I was [looking] at some of the stuff they were doing. And I started making suggestions, and suddenly I was on that show.
My big thing was that I wanted Brainiac to come from the planet Krypton. I thought that would be neat; that would be different. And that it would not hurt the whole Superman story; in fact, it would help put things together a little bit more.
And, suddenly, I was on Superman, which I didn’t expect to enjoy. And I really enjoyed Superman. I really had a good time with it. At one time, around Episode #40, Bruce Timm asked me if I would rather go back to Batman or do more Superman, and I told him I’d stay with Superman.
We did 54 of those, but he’s a tough cookie. I don’t know how you’d shape him, but he’s still a boy scout. He’s an all-around good guy. And, in the end, what we were trying to do, we did an episode where he went crazy because Darkseid took him over. In the last season, we wanted some tenseness between him and society. Society didn’t quite trust him after that episode, and he had to reprove himself. But we never got the last season, so the show sort of ends on a dark note—that’s how it goes.
The episode he was most happy with:
If there’s a time capsule, and I could put one thing in it, it would be the first Superman / Batman thing—“The World’s Finest” three-parter, which was great fun. And it took a long time to do because it was really difficult. They really don’t work well together. One mortal and one is a god.
It was a tough thing to do, but once we were done with it, we really felt like we accomplished something in that story.
On the animation writers writing the Batman or Superman franchises for live-action movies:
They did come to us on Batman Beyond. It wasn’t they who came to us. It was a young director named Boaz Yakin, who wanted to write Batman Beyond. He was a big fan, and he wanted to write with Paul [Dini] and myself. So, the powers on the lot said, “OK, you guys can go write together.” Actually, we had to go get approval through the Writer’s Guild because three writer teams have to get approval.
Boaz had a definite vision of the show. He was the director of Remember the Titans—a really talented fellow. He kept pushing the envelope on the script. It was pretty violent and pretty sexy and, in the end, we knew we were dealing with an R-rated script, but we rode along with it. We handed it in, and the lot was just shocked, completely shocked, and wanted us to start over essentially. And he saw that he was going to be going through a long process that he didn’t want to go through, and so he bowed out.
Paul and I stayed in the game for a little while, but we just stepped out too. I don’t know how movies get made. It’s such a long process, so many notes, so many worries about if it’s going to fly. They don’t tell you to go out and write. They have to feel comfortable with you step by step.
Kevin Conroy Talks Batman
CC | July 31, 2003
It happens at least once during every convention appearance. Kevin Conroy is asked to bring out that voice and that line: “I am vengeance, I am the night, I am … Batman!”
And, sure enough, during a recent panel at Comic-Con International, Conroy got the request within just a few minutes. He smiled, as always, and obliged, as always. And the crowd roars like it usually does.
After 12 years, Conroy is still having fun playing Batman, most recently in the second season of Cartoon Network’s Justice League and in Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, the direct-to-video movie being released October 21st.
“I just love the character,” Conroy says during a press conference to promote the film before its premiere screening at Comic-Con, “and the people who create it. It’s such a great team; that’s really why it’s been so successful. Everyone involved, from ’91, the very beginning. I’ve never seen such collaboration. Usually, and everything I had done before that had been on camera, you see such in-fighting in Hollywood. There’s always a million opinions and no one can ever really agree on anything and everyone lets their little egos get in the way.
“This show, it was—from my perspective—nothing but positive input from everybody. It got the best out of everybody, down to the music. The score was incredible. In most shows, this would be overlooked. Everyone involved was so proud to be involved, and it shows.”
Conroy has been Batman in every animated incarnation since Batman: The Animated Series premiered on Fox Kids. He also voiced the character in Kids’ WB!’s Batman and Batman Beyond, Cartoon Network’s Justice League, guest appearances on Kids’ WB!’s Static Shock and now in two feature movies.
In Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, when a new vigilante in the guise of Batwoman appears in Gotham City, she is so ruthless and destructive that Batman feels compelled to stop her. As he tries to uncover her secret identity, he comes to realize that she has targeted a criminal consortium headed by Penguin, who is trying desperately to export a cache of high-tech arms out of Gotham City.
Eventually, Batman comes to suspect that Batwoman is Kathy Duquesne, the spoiled daughter of criminal kingpin Carleton Duquesne, who is Penguin’s partner. But just when Batman thinks he’s got the goods on her, evidence points to another woman, and then another. By the time Batman realizes who the mysterious Batwoman really is, she has been captured by Bane, whom Penguin has hired to oversee the export of arms. It’s up to Batman to save her, defeat Bane, and stop the shipment of arms before it leaves Gotham Harbor.
“It’s a complicated story,” said Alan Burnett, supervising producer who formed the story and handed it off to writer Michael Reaves. “We weren’t out to reinvent anything in this show. We wanted to tell a good, fun story. We wanted to tell a story that was a little more fun. So, there’s a lot of laughs, and there’s music, and there’s girls with size two waists and they’re all beautiful. So, we had a lot of fun; we really had a lot of fun.”
The cast of Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman also includes Kyra Sedgwick as Batwoman, Kimberly Brooks as Kathy Duquesne, Kelly Ripa as Rocky, a Bruce Wayne employee who Batman suspects might be Batwoman; Elisa Gabrielli, Harvey Bullock’s new partner who Batman suspects might be Batwoman; David Ogden Stiers as Penguin, Kevin Michael Richardson as Carleton Duquesne, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Alfred, Tara Strong as Barbara Gordon, Bob Hastings as Commissioner Gordon, Robert Costanzo as Harvey Bullock, Hector Elizondo as Bane, and Eli Marienthal as Robin.
Voice acting has drawn premium talent in recent years, especially with big budget animated movies and stunt-casting in television series. “In a way, it’s flattering because doing the animated voices is so in that people with huge film careers now want to do it,” Conroy says. “So, in a way, it’s kind of flattering. It’s an area of the business that used to sort of be in the corner. Now, everybody wants to do it.
“It elevates everybody. Unfortunately, it makes the work more scarce. You have a lot of actors who have been sort of elbowed out by that. Fortunately, I’ve been associated with a character that, for a while anyway, I’ve been able to keep doing.”
Conroy hasn’t necessarily been stereotyped, but he has been linked to that deep sound. “I do get requested a lot to do things that require that kind of voice,” he says. “People like that sound. I just did some stuff for MTV yesterday. They definitely want that sound.”
In addition to voicing Batman, Conroy, of course, does the voice of Bruce Wayne. That voice has changed over the years and is now much closer to Batman’s than in the original episodes. “That was a deliberate change from the producers,” Conroy said. “They wanted it to become darker and more dramatic. It’s a challenge doing two voices, but they felt it lightened the character too much. Bruce Wayne was neighborly, and they wanted to get away from that. I still slightly vary it, but it’s just slightly.”
Conroy said his favorite actor to work with on Batman is Mark Hamill. “To watch him voice the Joker is fascinating,” [he] said. “He transforms himself physically.”
And how long does Conroy want to transform into the Dark Knight?
“As long as they ask me to,” he says.
CC | July 31, 2003
It happens at least once during every convention appearance. Kevin Conroy is asked to bring out that voice and that line: “I am vengeance, I am the night, I am … Batman!”
And, sure enough, during a recent panel at Comic-Con International, Conroy got the request within just a few minutes. He smiled, as always, and obliged, as always. And the crowd roars like it usually does.
After 12 years, Conroy is still having fun playing Batman, most recently in the second season of Cartoon Network’s Justice League and in Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, the direct-to-video movie being released October 21st.
“I just love the character,” Conroy says during a press conference to promote the film before its premiere screening at Comic-Con, “and the people who create it. It’s such a great team; that’s really why it’s been so successful. Everyone involved, from ’91, the very beginning. I’ve never seen such collaboration. Usually, and everything I had done before that had been on camera, you see such in-fighting in Hollywood. There’s always a million opinions and no one can ever really agree on anything and everyone lets their little egos get in the way.
“This show, it was—from my perspective—nothing but positive input from everybody. It got the best out of everybody, down to the music. The score was incredible. In most shows, this would be overlooked. Everyone involved was so proud to be involved, and it shows.”
Conroy has been Batman in every animated incarnation since Batman: The Animated Series premiered on Fox Kids. He also voiced the character in Kids’ WB!’s Batman and Batman Beyond, Cartoon Network’s Justice League, guest appearances on Kids’ WB!’s Static Shock and now in two feature movies.
In Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, when a new vigilante in the guise of Batwoman appears in Gotham City, she is so ruthless and destructive that Batman feels compelled to stop her. As he tries to uncover her secret identity, he comes to realize that she has targeted a criminal consortium headed by Penguin, who is trying desperately to export a cache of high-tech arms out of Gotham City.
Eventually, Batman comes to suspect that Batwoman is Kathy Duquesne, the spoiled daughter of criminal kingpin Carleton Duquesne, who is Penguin’s partner. But just when Batman thinks he’s got the goods on her, evidence points to another woman, and then another. By the time Batman realizes who the mysterious Batwoman really is, she has been captured by Bane, whom Penguin has hired to oversee the export of arms. It’s up to Batman to save her, defeat Bane, and stop the shipment of arms before it leaves Gotham Harbor.
“It’s a complicated story,” said Alan Burnett, supervising producer who formed the story and handed it off to writer Michael Reaves. “We weren’t out to reinvent anything in this show. We wanted to tell a good, fun story. We wanted to tell a story that was a little more fun. So, there’s a lot of laughs, and there’s music, and there’s girls with size two waists and they’re all beautiful. So, we had a lot of fun; we really had a lot of fun.”
The cast of Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman also includes Kyra Sedgwick as Batwoman, Kimberly Brooks as Kathy Duquesne, Kelly Ripa as Rocky, a Bruce Wayne employee who Batman suspects might be Batwoman; Elisa Gabrielli, Harvey Bullock’s new partner who Batman suspects might be Batwoman; David Ogden Stiers as Penguin, Kevin Michael Richardson as Carleton Duquesne, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Alfred, Tara Strong as Barbara Gordon, Bob Hastings as Commissioner Gordon, Robert Costanzo as Harvey Bullock, Hector Elizondo as Bane, and Eli Marienthal as Robin.
Voice acting has drawn premium talent in recent years, especially with big budget animated movies and stunt-casting in television series. “In a way, it’s flattering because doing the animated voices is so in that people with huge film careers now want to do it,” Conroy says. “So, in a way, it’s kind of flattering. It’s an area of the business that used to sort of be in the corner. Now, everybody wants to do it.
“It elevates everybody. Unfortunately, it makes the work more scarce. You have a lot of actors who have been sort of elbowed out by that. Fortunately, I’ve been associated with a character that, for a while anyway, I’ve been able to keep doing.”
Conroy hasn’t necessarily been stereotyped, but he has been linked to that deep sound. “I do get requested a lot to do things that require that kind of voice,” he says. “People like that sound. I just did some stuff for MTV yesterday. They definitely want that sound.”
In addition to voicing Batman, Conroy, of course, does the voice of Bruce Wayne. That voice has changed over the years and is now much closer to Batman’s than in the original episodes. “That was a deliberate change from the producers,” Conroy said. “They wanted it to become darker and more dramatic. It’s a challenge doing two voices, but they felt it lightened the character too much. Bruce Wayne was neighborly, and they wanted to get away from that. I still slightly vary it, but it’s just slightly.”
Conroy said his favorite actor to work with on Batman is Mark Hamill. “To watch him voice the Joker is fascinating,” [he] said. “He transforms himself physically.”
And how long does Conroy want to transform into the Dark Knight?
“As long as they ask me to,” he says.
Batman Beyond: Meet the Tomorrow Knight
CC | January 8, 1999
Bruce Wayne is an old man. In his 70s, he hasn’t been Batman for years. No longer physically able to fight crime, he broods in his ghostly mansion on the edge of town, alone, except for Ace, his big, nasty dog. Wayne doesn’t read the newspaper; he tries to avoid the television. He leaves the bad guys to the city’s high-tech police force.
Terry McGinnis is a 17-year-old high school senior. He’s got the problems of every teenager—a girlfriend, schoolwork, student rivalries, a younger brother, family issues. But after a run-in with the motorcycle gang known as the Jokerz, Terry discovers that Bruce Wayne once was the Dark Knight. And, after Terry’s father is killed, he breaks into the Batcave and dons the high-tech Batman costume Bruce last wore 20 years earlier to thwart his father’s killers. In an uneasy alliance with Bruce, Terry assumes the mantle of the Bat, changing both of their lives.
Batman is reborn. Welcome to the future of […] Gotham City.
Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis are the two main characters of Batman Beyond, a new animated series from the Kids’ WB! network and Producers Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm, the same men behind the network’s Batman and Superman series. Batman Beyond will kick off with a two-part, prime time episode, “Rebirth,” on Sunday, January 10th, which will be rerun when the series moves to Saturday morning, beginning January 16th.
The Continuum has followed the progress of Batman Beyond for nearly a year, when the series—springing out of a network desire for younger viewers (and no doubt, cool new toy lines)—was originally going to be called Batman Tomorrow. Through interviews with the creative personnel at Warner Bros. Animation, discussions at comics convention panels, and an advanced tape of “Rebirth,” the Continuum has compiled the following primer of Batman Beyond.
Main Characters
Strip away the costumes, the villains, the sci-fi and futuristic elements, and Batman Beyond is really a character study between Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis. The producers liken the Bruce / Terry dynamic, the series’ emotional lynchpin, to the old samurai turning over his sword to the young warrior—only with a lot of sparks.
“They don’t really get along,” Timm said. “They kind of have a co-dependent relationship. The kid needs Bruce Wayne because Bruce Wayne’s got all the crime-fighting gear, and Bruce Wayne needs the kid because he realizes he can’t be Batman anymore, and the kid actually can be Batman and help his crusade against crime.”
“Rebirth” opens with Bruce Wayne in his final adventure as Batman in the high-tech suit, trying to foil a kidnapping. Wayne suffers a heart attack, prompting him to do something you might not expect Batman ever to do, and—after barely surviving the confrontation—retiring as the Dark Knight and vowing “Never again.”
I really love the old Bruce Wayne character; he’s fascinating,” Timm said. “He’s like 80-years-old and pissed off all the time. He’s still got the moves. If the kid ever talks back to him, Bruce Wayne can have him down on the ground with a cane at his throat in about two seconds, but he can’t keep it going to be Batman.”
Bruce first encounters Terry when Terry is fleeing from a bunch of the Jokerz. The two fight off the cackling thugs, but Bruce then needs Terry’s help to go back to the mansion for his medicine. That’s how Terry eventually discovers the Batcave—and Wayne’s long-kept secret.
“The first design I came up with him was really scary. He looked like Uncle Creepy,” Timm said of Bruce Wayne. “The head of the network liked it, but the head of Time Warner didn’t like it too much. He said, ‘He can’t be that scary looking. You made him look like Boris Karloff. Cary Grant looked good when he was old, so make him look like Cary Grant.’
“He’s still kind of intimidating, but he’s not a bad-looking guy. He gets around with the use of a cane.”
Just like in the modern-day Batman series, Bruce Wayne is voiced by Kevin Conroy. “I’m the [old] Bruce now,” Conroy said. “He’s now the spiritual advisor, kind of like the Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Burnett also used the Star Wars comparison. “This is sort of angry, young Luke Skywalker and a mean, old Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Burnett said.
Ultimately, though, Terry and Bruce wind up respecting each other and, maybe, liking each other. “It’s a partnership formed out of necessity,” Dini said. “It does revitalize Bruce Wayne, and it also brings some direction to Terry’s life, but there will always be some tension between them.”
Although, as Timm pointed out, “Batman will never be Winnie the Pooh,” Batman Beyond is geared toward younger viewers than who watch Batman, thus the teenaged hero. Terry McGinnis is voiced by Will Friedle, who plays Eric Matthews in Boy Meets World, an ABC sitcom.
“He’s not quite as grim as Bruce Wayne once was, but he’s certainly not going to be Spider-Man either,” Timm said of Terry. “He won’t be a happy-go-[lucky] superhero, but he will have a little bit of that feel to him. He’s not going to be quite as closed-mouth, short-sentenced, beat-the-crap-out-of-the-villains type of guy. He’s a pretty tough little guy. I don’t want to say he’s going to quip all the time, but he will have more of a sense of humor.
“One of the things that’s going to set this show apart from the old Batman show is that here’s a real strong high school element in the show. It’s some place, as a team, we haven’t been before, so we’re going to have some fun with it.”
At the end of “Rebirth,” Terry accepts a job as Bruce’s personal assistant. That doesn’t mean the antagonism won’t be there, though. “At one point, Terry says to Bruce, ‘Call me Robin, and I’ll slug you,” Dini said.
Other Characters
The producers said that characters such as Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Bullock are dead. However, there is a new Commissioner Gordon, Barbara Gordon (voiced by Stockard Channing), the former Batgirl.
Although not seen in “Rebirth,” Barbara is mentioned by Bruce in the episode, and there have been hints that there might have been a romantic entanglement between Bruce and Barbara at some point. Barbara is now married to the district attorney.
The costumes of Nightwing (Dick Grayson) and Robin (Tim Drake) are seen along with Batgirl’s in the Batcave, but you probably won’t find out what happened to Dick and Tim until the second season of Batman Beyond. “We’re kind of leaving the door open until we decide when we want to bring them back,” Timm said. “We kind of have an idea amongst ourselves that we won’t make public about what happened to them—it’s not very good.”
After Terry’s father is killed, he moves in with his mother (voiced by Teri Carr) and his little brother (voiced by Ryan O’Donahue). At high school, Terry has a girlfriend Dana Tan (voiced by Lauren Tom) and a Flash Thompson-like rival, Nelson Nash (voiced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Seth Green).
“I don’t think any of us are thinking of this show as being a big, futuristic sci-fi half hour,” Burnett said. “We’re looking to keep it a recognizable future. The emphasis, really, is still on the personalities and characters and stories that arise from them.”
The Villains
The series’ recurring villain, featuring heavily in “Rebirth,” is Derek Powers. “He’s a corporate tycoon; a nasty S.O.B.,” Timm said. “He actually took over Wayne Industries from Bruce Wayne in a corporate takeover when Bruce Wayne was in seclusion. When he retired as Batman, he kind of lost touch with his company. So, this shark came in and took over. He butts heads with Bruce all the time because of the way he’s running the company. He’s kind of a villain in the Lex Luthor mold.”
In “Rebirth,” Powers concocts a nerve gas he plans to peddle to nefarious foreign powers. Terry’s father works for Wayne / Powers and is brought into the picture when a co-worker, poisoned by the nerve gas, gives him a disk with its formula. Terry’s father is killed, and it’s set up like the Jokerz did the deed, but Terry discovers the disk. He then seeks help from Bruce Wayne because it’s Wayne’s company that is making the gas.
Powers is voiced by Sherman Howard. “What’s interesting about that is he was actually really close to becoming our Lex Luthor in the Superman show,” Timm said. “He was actually the front runner until Clancy Brown came in. In fact, he actually did play Lex Luthor in the old Superboy [live-action] show.”
Powers’ right-hand man is the behemoth Mr. Fixx, who is voiced by Star Trek’s George Takei. Mr. Fixxx takes credit for killing Terry’s father and has a one-on-one confrontation with the new Batman in “Rebirth.”
The results of “Rebirth” are not good for Powers—he is turned into the radioactive creature knowns a Blight, who will hold a big grudge against the new Batman.
As for other villains? The producers are not revealing too many, but don’t expect to see futuristic versions of the Joker, Penguin, Riddler, etc. Such characters are viewed as a crutch, rather than an impetus, for new stories. “We’re trying to get as far away from the old villains as we can,” Dini said. “There are a couple of lingering touches. There is a street gang that looks like a bunch of violent clowns called the Jokerz. The other villains are all new, and they won’t harken back in any way to the original Rogues’ Gallery. Those guys are all dead and forgotten.”
Dini likens the Jokerz, who are featured prominently in “Rebirth,” to the gang from A Clockwork Orange.
Another group of villains in Batman Beyond will be the Royal Flush Gang, a modified version of the Justice League comics villains. “The Royal Flush Gang are characters we wanted to use in Batman for a long time,” Timm said. “We kind of felt this was a good place to use them.”
“We always [liked] their motifs and [those] flying cards could fit in a futuristic Batman,” Dini said. “Not [that] everyone will be flying around like The Jetsons, but we’ll have a few extreme cases.”
Voices for the Royal Flush Gang include George Lazenby as King, Amanda Donohoe as Queen, and Olivia D’Abo as their daughter, [Ten]. “We set it up so that […] King had a life-long feud with Batman—the old Batman—whom he encountered when he was younger,” Dini said. “It’s always been an obsession to get back at him.”
Inque is a new villain created for the show. “She’s a shape-shifter, kind of like Clayface, but her powes came in a completely different way,” Timm said. “We call her ‘the liquid spy.’ She’s the perfect saboteur, the result of a bio-genetic accident of some kind. She’s literally like a living oil slick. She’s a really neat character.”
And, whether or not a recently rumored appearance of Mr. Freeze actually happens, there will be one similarity to the old villains. “Batman villains usually come out of a damaged psyche,” Dini said. “We’re looking for ways to take people with strange quirks and compulsive behavior and take them one step further into a supervillain identity.”
“One of the ideas for villains in the show is not to exactly repeat villains from the old show—not this is Joker 2000, this is Clayface 2000, this is Poison Ivy 2000,” Timm said. “That would be a little bit too easy. We wanted to come up with villains that seemed like Batman villains, had the same kind of psychological problems the old Batman villains did and had interesting motifs.”
Batman Beyond’s Look
“It’s more of a high-tech city,” Timm said of the future Gotham. “For want of a better comparison, it’s a little Blade Runner-like, although not nearly as depressing. It’s more futuristic than even Metropolis is at the moment. Again, bigger scale. If our buildings were 200 stories tall before, they’re probably double that now. We’re really trying to wrack our brains trying to come up with a completely new mega-city of the future.”
“The city also has a lot of multi-cultural touches,” Dini added. “That’s indicated by the number of signs which will be printed in [different] languages. It reflects that Gotham has really opened up as far as people from all over the world go.”
The new bat suit is also familiar, yet different, including red. Why red?
“Because it looked neat,” Timm said. “We wanted to make him look visually really different than our current Batman. I was just sketching around one day, and I came up with a design, then said, ‘Wait a minute—the wings could be red, the symbol could be red.’ So, he has a completely different look than our current Batman. As soon as I did it, everybody looked at it and said, ‘Yes, that’s the way to go.’ It just works.”
In some ways, the suit is a walking utility belt, complete with such devices as sound sensors in the fingertips and weapons that pop out. “It’s got all kinds of strength and speed—not totally superhuman, but just a little bit more than the norm,” Timm said of the suit. “It has retractable wings, which give him gliding capability and boot jets, which give him a little boost off the ground.”
The suit also has a communicator in the cowl and a fail-safe that Wayne can use to deactivate it.
Batman Beyond also features a new Batmobile. “It has no wheels,” Timm said. “It floats about an inch-and-[a]-half off the ground when it’s in land mode. It’s like a land speeder, and it does take off and fly, an actual flight mode. He gets around skyscrapers in it. It also has some hidden surprises in it. “It’s got a really radical redesign for a Batmobile for us. It has almost no retro to it at all, which is new for us. It’s as futuristic as we could make it.”
Already creating a buzz is the show’s intro, which has a very Japanese-style feel to it.
Production
Three shows are a lot to handle. The producers have been juggling them, putting Batman on hold, finishing off the current run of Superman and then gearing up on Batman Beyond. Even so, Batman Beyond’s premiere was delayed two months.
Story editors for Batman Beyond include Burnett, Dini, Stan Berkowitz, and Rich Fogel. Writers include Burnett, Dini, Berkowitz, Robert Goodman, and Hilary Bader. Bader is writing the Batman Beyond comics miniseries for DC Comics.
Glen Murakami is the art director. Shawn McLaughlin is the production manager, and Dan Riba, Butch Lukic, and Curt Geda are directors. Andrea Romano is the voice director, and Shirley Walker is the musical director.
With a second set of 13 Batman Beyond episodes ordered—and persistent rumors about other possible DC Comics-inspired shows like [the] Legion of Super Heroes, Justice League, Supergirl, etc.—the producers might not get back to the core Batman show for a while, although they’ve said that is their intention.
“It’s a choice of working on a staggered schedule or else bringing in two new crews to do these shows,” Dini said. “And, at that point, we’re afraid that quality would fly out the window, and we want to be consistent as we can with these shows. Fortunately, because we were involved in the creation of all three shows, we can shift gears fairly quickly. Our thinking is never too far from what these shows are.”
CC | January 8, 1999
Bruce Wayne is an old man. In his 70s, he hasn’t been Batman for years. No longer physically able to fight crime, he broods in his ghostly mansion on the edge of town, alone, except for Ace, his big, nasty dog. Wayne doesn’t read the newspaper; he tries to avoid the television. He leaves the bad guys to the city’s high-tech police force.
Terry McGinnis is a 17-year-old high school senior. He’s got the problems of every teenager—a girlfriend, schoolwork, student rivalries, a younger brother, family issues. But after a run-in with the motorcycle gang known as the Jokerz, Terry discovers that Bruce Wayne once was the Dark Knight. And, after Terry’s father is killed, he breaks into the Batcave and dons the high-tech Batman costume Bruce last wore 20 years earlier to thwart his father’s killers. In an uneasy alliance with Bruce, Terry assumes the mantle of the Bat, changing both of their lives.
Batman is reborn. Welcome to the future of […] Gotham City.
Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis are the two main characters of Batman Beyond, a new animated series from the Kids’ WB! network and Producers Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm, the same men behind the network’s Batman and Superman series. Batman Beyond will kick off with a two-part, prime time episode, “Rebirth,” on Sunday, January 10th, which will be rerun when the series moves to Saturday morning, beginning January 16th.
The Continuum has followed the progress of Batman Beyond for nearly a year, when the series—springing out of a network desire for younger viewers (and no doubt, cool new toy lines)—was originally going to be called Batman Tomorrow. Through interviews with the creative personnel at Warner Bros. Animation, discussions at comics convention panels, and an advanced tape of “Rebirth,” the Continuum has compiled the following primer of Batman Beyond.
Main Characters
Strip away the costumes, the villains, the sci-fi and futuristic elements, and Batman Beyond is really a character study between Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis. The producers liken the Bruce / Terry dynamic, the series’ emotional lynchpin, to the old samurai turning over his sword to the young warrior—only with a lot of sparks.
“They don’t really get along,” Timm said. “They kind of have a co-dependent relationship. The kid needs Bruce Wayne because Bruce Wayne’s got all the crime-fighting gear, and Bruce Wayne needs the kid because he realizes he can’t be Batman anymore, and the kid actually can be Batman and help his crusade against crime.”
“Rebirth” opens with Bruce Wayne in his final adventure as Batman in the high-tech suit, trying to foil a kidnapping. Wayne suffers a heart attack, prompting him to do something you might not expect Batman ever to do, and—after barely surviving the confrontation—retiring as the Dark Knight and vowing “Never again.”
I really love the old Bruce Wayne character; he’s fascinating,” Timm said. “He’s like 80-years-old and pissed off all the time. He’s still got the moves. If the kid ever talks back to him, Bruce Wayne can have him down on the ground with a cane at his throat in about two seconds, but he can’t keep it going to be Batman.”
Bruce first encounters Terry when Terry is fleeing from a bunch of the Jokerz. The two fight off the cackling thugs, but Bruce then needs Terry’s help to go back to the mansion for his medicine. That’s how Terry eventually discovers the Batcave—and Wayne’s long-kept secret.
“The first design I came up with him was really scary. He looked like Uncle Creepy,” Timm said of Bruce Wayne. “The head of the network liked it, but the head of Time Warner didn’t like it too much. He said, ‘He can’t be that scary looking. You made him look like Boris Karloff. Cary Grant looked good when he was old, so make him look like Cary Grant.’
“He’s still kind of intimidating, but he’s not a bad-looking guy. He gets around with the use of a cane.”
Just like in the modern-day Batman series, Bruce Wayne is voiced by Kevin Conroy. “I’m the [old] Bruce now,” Conroy said. “He’s now the spiritual advisor, kind of like the Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Burnett also used the Star Wars comparison. “This is sort of angry, young Luke Skywalker and a mean, old Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Burnett said.
Ultimately, though, Terry and Bruce wind up respecting each other and, maybe, liking each other. “It’s a partnership formed out of necessity,” Dini said. “It does revitalize Bruce Wayne, and it also brings some direction to Terry’s life, but there will always be some tension between them.”
Although, as Timm pointed out, “Batman will never be Winnie the Pooh,” Batman Beyond is geared toward younger viewers than who watch Batman, thus the teenaged hero. Terry McGinnis is voiced by Will Friedle, who plays Eric Matthews in Boy Meets World, an ABC sitcom.
“He’s not quite as grim as Bruce Wayne once was, but he’s certainly not going to be Spider-Man either,” Timm said of Terry. “He won’t be a happy-go-[lucky] superhero, but he will have a little bit of that feel to him. He’s not going to be quite as closed-mouth, short-sentenced, beat-the-crap-out-of-the-villains type of guy. He’s a pretty tough little guy. I don’t want to say he’s going to quip all the time, but he will have more of a sense of humor.
“One of the things that’s going to set this show apart from the old Batman show is that here’s a real strong high school element in the show. It’s some place, as a team, we haven’t been before, so we’re going to have some fun with it.”
At the end of “Rebirth,” Terry accepts a job as Bruce’s personal assistant. That doesn’t mean the antagonism won’t be there, though. “At one point, Terry says to Bruce, ‘Call me Robin, and I’ll slug you,” Dini said.
Other Characters
The producers said that characters such as Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Bullock are dead. However, there is a new Commissioner Gordon, Barbara Gordon (voiced by Stockard Channing), the former Batgirl.
Although not seen in “Rebirth,” Barbara is mentioned by Bruce in the episode, and there have been hints that there might have been a romantic entanglement between Bruce and Barbara at some point. Barbara is now married to the district attorney.
The costumes of Nightwing (Dick Grayson) and Robin (Tim Drake) are seen along with Batgirl’s in the Batcave, but you probably won’t find out what happened to Dick and Tim until the second season of Batman Beyond. “We’re kind of leaving the door open until we decide when we want to bring them back,” Timm said. “We kind of have an idea amongst ourselves that we won’t make public about what happened to them—it’s not very good.”
After Terry’s father is killed, he moves in with his mother (voiced by Teri Carr) and his little brother (voiced by Ryan O’Donahue). At high school, Terry has a girlfriend Dana Tan (voiced by Lauren Tom) and a Flash Thompson-like rival, Nelson Nash (voiced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Seth Green).
“I don’t think any of us are thinking of this show as being a big, futuristic sci-fi half hour,” Burnett said. “We’re looking to keep it a recognizable future. The emphasis, really, is still on the personalities and characters and stories that arise from them.”
The Villains
The series’ recurring villain, featuring heavily in “Rebirth,” is Derek Powers. “He’s a corporate tycoon; a nasty S.O.B.,” Timm said. “He actually took over Wayne Industries from Bruce Wayne in a corporate takeover when Bruce Wayne was in seclusion. When he retired as Batman, he kind of lost touch with his company. So, this shark came in and took over. He butts heads with Bruce all the time because of the way he’s running the company. He’s kind of a villain in the Lex Luthor mold.”
In “Rebirth,” Powers concocts a nerve gas he plans to peddle to nefarious foreign powers. Terry’s father works for Wayne / Powers and is brought into the picture when a co-worker, poisoned by the nerve gas, gives him a disk with its formula. Terry’s father is killed, and it’s set up like the Jokerz did the deed, but Terry discovers the disk. He then seeks help from Bruce Wayne because it’s Wayne’s company that is making the gas.
Powers is voiced by Sherman Howard. “What’s interesting about that is he was actually really close to becoming our Lex Luthor in the Superman show,” Timm said. “He was actually the front runner until Clancy Brown came in. In fact, he actually did play Lex Luthor in the old Superboy [live-action] show.”
Powers’ right-hand man is the behemoth Mr. Fixx, who is voiced by Star Trek’s George Takei. Mr. Fixxx takes credit for killing Terry’s father and has a one-on-one confrontation with the new Batman in “Rebirth.”
The results of “Rebirth” are not good for Powers—he is turned into the radioactive creature knowns a Blight, who will hold a big grudge against the new Batman.
As for other villains? The producers are not revealing too many, but don’t expect to see futuristic versions of the Joker, Penguin, Riddler, etc. Such characters are viewed as a crutch, rather than an impetus, for new stories. “We’re trying to get as far away from the old villains as we can,” Dini said. “There are a couple of lingering touches. There is a street gang that looks like a bunch of violent clowns called the Jokerz. The other villains are all new, and they won’t harken back in any way to the original Rogues’ Gallery. Those guys are all dead and forgotten.”
Dini likens the Jokerz, who are featured prominently in “Rebirth,” to the gang from A Clockwork Orange.
Another group of villains in Batman Beyond will be the Royal Flush Gang, a modified version of the Justice League comics villains. “The Royal Flush Gang are characters we wanted to use in Batman for a long time,” Timm said. “We kind of felt this was a good place to use them.”
“We always [liked] their motifs and [those] flying cards could fit in a futuristic Batman,” Dini said. “Not [that] everyone will be flying around like The Jetsons, but we’ll have a few extreme cases.”
Voices for the Royal Flush Gang include George Lazenby as King, Amanda Donohoe as Queen, and Olivia D’Abo as their daughter, [Ten]. “We set it up so that […] King had a life-long feud with Batman—the old Batman—whom he encountered when he was younger,” Dini said. “It’s always been an obsession to get back at him.”
Inque is a new villain created for the show. “She’s a shape-shifter, kind of like Clayface, but her powes came in a completely different way,” Timm said. “We call her ‘the liquid spy.’ She’s the perfect saboteur, the result of a bio-genetic accident of some kind. She’s literally like a living oil slick. She’s a really neat character.”
And, whether or not a recently rumored appearance of Mr. Freeze actually happens, there will be one similarity to the old villains. “Batman villains usually come out of a damaged psyche,” Dini said. “We’re looking for ways to take people with strange quirks and compulsive behavior and take them one step further into a supervillain identity.”
“One of the ideas for villains in the show is not to exactly repeat villains from the old show—not this is Joker 2000, this is Clayface 2000, this is Poison Ivy 2000,” Timm said. “That would be a little bit too easy. We wanted to come up with villains that seemed like Batman villains, had the same kind of psychological problems the old Batman villains did and had interesting motifs.”
Batman Beyond’s Look
“It’s more of a high-tech city,” Timm said of the future Gotham. “For want of a better comparison, it’s a little Blade Runner-like, although not nearly as depressing. It’s more futuristic than even Metropolis is at the moment. Again, bigger scale. If our buildings were 200 stories tall before, they’re probably double that now. We’re really trying to wrack our brains trying to come up with a completely new mega-city of the future.”
“The city also has a lot of multi-cultural touches,” Dini added. “That’s indicated by the number of signs which will be printed in [different] languages. It reflects that Gotham has really opened up as far as people from all over the world go.”
The new bat suit is also familiar, yet different, including red. Why red?
“Because it looked neat,” Timm said. “We wanted to make him look visually really different than our current Batman. I was just sketching around one day, and I came up with a design, then said, ‘Wait a minute—the wings could be red, the symbol could be red.’ So, he has a completely different look than our current Batman. As soon as I did it, everybody looked at it and said, ‘Yes, that’s the way to go.’ It just works.”
In some ways, the suit is a walking utility belt, complete with such devices as sound sensors in the fingertips and weapons that pop out. “It’s got all kinds of strength and speed—not totally superhuman, but just a little bit more than the norm,” Timm said of the suit. “It has retractable wings, which give him gliding capability and boot jets, which give him a little boost off the ground.”
The suit also has a communicator in the cowl and a fail-safe that Wayne can use to deactivate it.
Batman Beyond also features a new Batmobile. “It has no wheels,” Timm said. “It floats about an inch-and-[a]-half off the ground when it’s in land mode. It’s like a land speeder, and it does take off and fly, an actual flight mode. He gets around skyscrapers in it. It also has some hidden surprises in it. “It’s got a really radical redesign for a Batmobile for us. It has almost no retro to it at all, which is new for us. It’s as futuristic as we could make it.”
Already creating a buzz is the show’s intro, which has a very Japanese-style feel to it.
Production
Three shows are a lot to handle. The producers have been juggling them, putting Batman on hold, finishing off the current run of Superman and then gearing up on Batman Beyond. Even so, Batman Beyond’s premiere was delayed two months.
Story editors for Batman Beyond include Burnett, Dini, Stan Berkowitz, and Rich Fogel. Writers include Burnett, Dini, Berkowitz, Robert Goodman, and Hilary Bader. Bader is writing the Batman Beyond comics miniseries for DC Comics.
Glen Murakami is the art director. Shawn McLaughlin is the production manager, and Dan Riba, Butch Lukic, and Curt Geda are directors. Andrea Romano is the voice director, and Shirley Walker is the musical director.
With a second set of 13 Batman Beyond episodes ordered—and persistent rumors about other possible DC Comics-inspired shows like [the] Legion of Super Heroes, Justice League, Supergirl, etc.—the producers might not get back to the core Batman show for a while, although they’ve said that is their intention.
“It’s a choice of working on a staggered schedule or else bringing in two new crews to do these shows,” Dini said. “And, at that point, we’re afraid that quality would fly out the window, and we want to be consistent as we can with these shows. Fortunately, because we were involved in the creation of all three shows, we can shift gears fairly quickly. Our thinking is never too far from what these shows are.”
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NOTE: The following is the press release sent out in anticipation of the release of the Justice League episode "Comfort and Joy." Note how the materials erroneously identified the Ultra-Humanite as Grodd.
Justice League Superheroes Discover True Meaning of Christmas
New Half-Hour Special Explores How Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Others Celebrate Winter Holidays
How do you celebrate Christmas when you’re one of the world’s greatest superheroes? What would Superman—who still firmly believes in Santa—want for Christmas? Can villains set aside their evil schemes to experience some holiday joy? And what does Christmas mean to you when you’re a Martian without a home planet?
These questions and more will be answered in an all-new holiday episode of Justice League, Cartoon Network’s top-rated original animated series based on the popular, long-running DC Comics book. The brand new half-hour special, “Comfort and Joy,” helps Cartoon Network launch the holidays on Saturday, December 6th at 10:00pm.
The Justice League, comprised of the world’s finest superheroes, rushes to complete one last mission to save two planets from colliding before each embarks on a week’s vacation to enjoy the Christmas holidays. Flash pays his traditional visit to the Central City Orphanage as “that jolly man in the red suit” to bring a special present to the resident kids. Green Lantern decides to show Hawkgirl his favorite childhood games and activities that involve snow, which results in a spectacular snowball fight. Superman, heading home to spend Christmas with his Earthly parents, the Kents, and await Santa’s arrival, decides to bring along a depressed Martian Manhunter, who doesn’t understand why everyone finds the season so magical.
(Batman and Wonder Woman volunteer to serve “world monitor duty” at the League’s Watchtower headquarters.)
Little does each hero suspect that major surprises await them all. When Flash is asked to produce the hottest toy of the season, a “DJ Rubber Ducky,” he is forced to search the world for it. With the doll at last in Flash’s possession, arch-villain Gorilla Grodd appears and nearly destroys it. Through an amazing act of goodwill and compromise, Flash and Grodd actually join forces to repair the toy and deliver it [to] the anxious kids before resuming their adversarial relationship. Hawkgirl reciprocates Green Lantern’s holiday “gift” by showing him the place and unique way she prefers to celebrate—resulting in mayhem. One last surprise awaits them both: a secret romance. And Superman’s family embraces Martian Manhunter warmly, leaving him the freedom to explore the peace and joy of Christmas Eve on his own. His unexpected experiences that night lead him to compose his own song of joy which he shares with the Kent family.
The Justice League was born when Superman and Batman enlisted Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, and Hawkgirl to face down powerful threats on Earth and from other parts of the galaxy. The heroes of the Justice League, who gather at their orbiting space station, the Watchtower, may not always agree on the best way to conquer a threat, but they put their personal differences aside to work together to defeat any peril. A critical and fan favorite, Justice League has become one of the highest-rated shows on all of cable in its time period with key demographics since its debut.
Justice League Superheroes Discover True Meaning of Christmas
New Half-Hour Special Explores How Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Others Celebrate Winter Holidays
How do you celebrate Christmas when you’re one of the world’s greatest superheroes? What would Superman—who still firmly believes in Santa—want for Christmas? Can villains set aside their evil schemes to experience some holiday joy? And what does Christmas mean to you when you’re a Martian without a home planet?
These questions and more will be answered in an all-new holiday episode of Justice League, Cartoon Network’s top-rated original animated series based on the popular, long-running DC Comics book. The brand new half-hour special, “Comfort and Joy,” helps Cartoon Network launch the holidays on Saturday, December 6th at 10:00pm.
The Justice League, comprised of the world’s finest superheroes, rushes to complete one last mission to save two planets from colliding before each embarks on a week’s vacation to enjoy the Christmas holidays. Flash pays his traditional visit to the Central City Orphanage as “that jolly man in the red suit” to bring a special present to the resident kids. Green Lantern decides to show Hawkgirl his favorite childhood games and activities that involve snow, which results in a spectacular snowball fight. Superman, heading home to spend Christmas with his Earthly parents, the Kents, and await Santa’s arrival, decides to bring along a depressed Martian Manhunter, who doesn’t understand why everyone finds the season so magical.
(Batman and Wonder Woman volunteer to serve “world monitor duty” at the League’s Watchtower headquarters.)
Little does each hero suspect that major surprises await them all. When Flash is asked to produce the hottest toy of the season, a “DJ Rubber Ducky,” he is forced to search the world for it. With the doll at last in Flash’s possession, arch-villain Gorilla Grodd appears and nearly destroys it. Through an amazing act of goodwill and compromise, Flash and Grodd actually join forces to repair the toy and deliver it [to] the anxious kids before resuming their adversarial relationship. Hawkgirl reciprocates Green Lantern’s holiday “gift” by showing him the place and unique way she prefers to celebrate—resulting in mayhem. One last surprise awaits them both: a secret romance. And Superman’s family embraces Martian Manhunter warmly, leaving him the freedom to explore the peace and joy of Christmas Eve on his own. His unexpected experiences that night lead him to compose his own song of joy which he shares with the Kent family.
The Justice League was born when Superman and Batman enlisted Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, and Hawkgirl to face down powerful threats on Earth and from other parts of the galaxy. The heroes of the Justice League, who gather at their orbiting space station, the Watchtower, may not always agree on the best way to conquer a threat, but they put their personal differences aside to work together to defeat any peril. A critical and fan favorite, Justice League has become one of the highest-rated shows on all of cable in its time period with key demographics since its debut.
NOTE: This article appeared on a website called "tastes like chicken." It's not available on Internet Archive; the only reason I have it is because I saved the web page twenty years ago!
Paul Dini Interview
Wayne Chinsang
tastes like chicken | January 2005
When I first announced I was interviewing Writer Paul Dini, one of our readers posted this on our post board: “I can’t believe you guys are interviewing him! The man’s a god!!! A literal god!!! I mean, he made Batman cool again, he created one of the most endearing characters ever in Harley Quinn, and now he’s writing for one of the best shows on television, Lost!!!” That pretty much sums it up, huh?
WAYNE CHINSANG: The first thing I want to know is if it’s kind of weird for you to look back on everything that you’ve don and know that you’re responsible for contributing to a part of people’s childhoods? Especially with the stuff you did in the Eighties, like Ewoks, Droids, and even episodes of Transformers. Is it weird for you to think of it like that?
PAUL DINI: Yeah. Especially when you think I was just at the tail end of my childhood myself. I was doing that stuff when I was in college, because I got a shot to contribute some scripts. So, at the same age when most guys are trying to figure out what they’re going to do, around 20 or 21, I’m sitting there writing stuff for guys in college who are gonna watch it on TV. And I’m in college with them, you know?
WC: Right.
DINI: So, right out of school, I started doing things like Ewoks and the occasional Transformers or G.I. Joe for some friends of mine who were just starting their careers in animation. So, I was kind of writing for my friends and other animation geeks who just happened to be watching TV at that time.
WC: Cartoons are obviously much different now than they were in the Eighties.
DINI: Yeah.
WC: I think cartoons in the Eighties were geared toward kids, and now they seem to be more for adults. Was it harder to write for kids than it is to write for adults?
DINI: Well, the stuff was pretty much brain-dead pap back then. And, to a degree, things haven’t changed. But it’s sort of like if you’re a musician, you like playing a certain type of music and nothing will swerve you away from it. And it doesn’t have to be the hardest rock ‘n’ roll; it can be just whatever you like writing, whether it’s country or swing music or whatever. You’re just bound and determined to write that kind of music. And I think that what happened was I was lucky at various points in my life to work on shows or projects that I liked or could stand to work on. There was a ton of dreck back then, and early on you’re starting you career, and you’re willing to do just about anything. And I certainly did. But, by and large, I was lucky to be associated with some pretty interesting projects early in my career.
After jobbing around for a year and doing things like Fat Albert and the odd Scooby-Doo episode, I got to go up to Skywalker Ranch and work on Ewoks and Droids. And while those shows weren’t terrific in the long run, it was a fascinating experience being able to work up there and get to know some of those people. I felt like a little kid going into my older brother’s room, and there are Star Wars toys lying around, and you get to play with them a little bit.
So, I did it more for the experience of the show, because back then we weren’t doing Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. We were doing something that was shepherded every step of the way by the censor ladies at the network, and it was gone over by the child educators, and that is a ghastly, ghastly way of working. But, that said, the other creators I worked with and I tried our best to come up with something that was a little different that at least looked good and put that on TV and have it not suck. Like I said, it was a good experience, and I look back on those days with a lot of fondness.
Coming right out of school, that was an invaluable experience; it was like spending four years in film school. And when you think about the fact that, right across the way, John Lasseter and his Pixar team were getting started too, that was really an amazing time. It was like working back in early Hollywood in the pre-sound days, when everything was in black-and-white animation and everybody was just trying to get ahead. I would go over and see what John and his crew were doing at Pixar, and think, “Maybe not now, maybe not next year, but in a couple of years this stuff is gonna be phenomenal. And, hopefully, I’ll get to work on some stuff that’s just as well received.”
WC: It had to have been an interesting time. My sister’s ex-husband actually used to work at Skywalker Ranch occasionally.
DINI: Oh, really? When? Doing what?
WC: Right around the time of Episode I, he was doing editing for them.
DINI: Oh, okay.
WC: It must have been such a weird atmosphere to be there, especially during the Eighties, when Star Wars was at its height. Not that it’s small now, but the Eighties seemed to be the peak of it.
DINI: Well, I was there from ’84 to ’88, early ’89, and even last year I was kind of coming and going, juggling some other projects in there. But it was a fascinating environment to see that George Lucas was able to build all this out there—a liar that any Bond villain would be proud of, but for a slightly more benevolent use. And, again, it was a time to experiment and try things; when you’re in your mid-twenties, you just sort of have to do that. You figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Star Wars was still pretty big. It was a few years after they had done … [Return of the] Jedi, and he was taking some time off and just helping his friends with movie projects, like Ron Howard with Willow, Francis Ford Coppola with Tucker, and right up until the time that Robert Zemeckis was doing … Roger Rabbit. He really wasn’t doing it there, but they were doing some of the animation effects over at ILM. So, that would have been around ’88 or ’89, which was sort of like the tail end of when I was there. But, again, it was a tremendous experience and a place that I think fondly of. I know it’s changed drastically over the last few years, and I haven’t really been back, but it’s just one of those experiences that come up every once in a while into someone’s life, and you just have to go with it and see what it’s all about.
WC: Right. With both cartoons and comics, as I said before, in the Eighties they were geared towards kids. But you’ve been not only able to witness, but also be partly responsible for this transition toward an older age group.
DINI: Sure.
WC: Why do you think the shift happened, and why do you think it happened so drastically? Because now it seems like Saturday morning cartoons—not that they’re completely void of things for kids—but a lot of that stuff is now either for kids but with smarter and more adult humor, or it’s just strictly created for adults.
DINI: Well, I think what happened was that a lot of people who really loved cartoons—when they grew up in the Sixties, Seventies, and into the early Eighties—they grew up to make cartoons. And they wanted to make them with the same spirit of experimentation and adventure and the sense of humor that rivaled the things that they carried from their own childhood.
There is kind of this interesting age gulf in animation; a lot of people who started off in the Golden Age of Animation in the Thirties and Forties, by the time they got to the Sixties and Seventies they were much older, and all they were thinking about was retiring and getting out of the business. But there was really no fresh blood that came along during the Fifties or Sixties, so there was this gulf of 20 years. And it wasn’t until the late Seventies or early Eighties that you had a rising group of younger people anxious to come in. Because animation was never really looked upon as a real career. It was just something that appeared now and then on your movie screen or TV, fashioned by pixies or elves someplace. But they weren’t really training new people to take those jobs. The people who wanted those jobs in animation would later make a difference in reshaping the medium, like John Lasseter, John Kricfalusi, Matt Groening, Brad Bird, and countless people who have worked with them. They all wanted to do this; there was nothing else they were really willing to do. And they kind of forced the medium to change.
At the same time, I think the viewers—even if you weren’t doing cartoons or all that interested in cartoons, in the Sixties and Seventies you grew up with them; they were a part of your life, even if you later went on to have a career in finance or whatever. You still kept a bit of fondness for cartoons with you, whereas your parents might not have. I think back to my parents who grew up during the Thirties and Forties, and they saw cartoons every once in a while, like at the movie theatre or something like that. But there was no differentiation between them. It wasn’t a cartoon culture like it is now. So, a lot of that stuff just fell through the cracks. Like I would talk to my dad about the Golden Age of Animation, and I’d ask him about a Bugs Bunny cartoon of a Disney feature, and he’d just say, “It was just stuff that they showed at the time. We really didn’t think all that much about it.” It wasn’t until television came along and was readily available to kids, in the late Sixties and Seventies, that you had kids programmed by cartoons to grow up to want to see them. And when kids become adults, there was still a part of them that said, “Yeah, I still want to see cartoons.” So, I think that’s one of the reasons for the resurgence in animation in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
I also think that people were willing to take a chance. Producers like Steven Spielberg, who also loves cartoons, wanted to bring out something sort of fun, and you had TV executives who wanted to be in business with him, so they let him have his way with shows like Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and Pinky & The Brain.
WC: Since you are now creating to appeal to an older audience, do you think that makes it harder to create those things, because adults expect more? Like, if you change the costume of some hero, a kid isn’t going to write a letter and complain about it, whereas an adult—someone who has had decades of history with that character—is more likely to.
DINI: I think when you’re changing a comic book character, adults are liable to complain more than kids are. I also think that more adults are reading comics than kids are, so I think comics become a very comfortable thing for a reader to check in with once a month. We’re talking about readers who go from college age—about 18 or 19—to people who are in their mid-to-late forties; they have always liked the characters, and they make time for them every month to get caught up with their favorites. And I think that there’s a lot of fondness there. It’s the same reason people like soap operas or dramatic shows or sitcoms on TV: there’s a sense of permanence and continuity and comfort there. So, if you find out that suddenly Superman’s got long hair, and he’s wearing a black costume, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t want that. I want Superman the way he always is—working at the Daily Planet and fighting Brainiac. Look out! There’s kryptonite!” That sort of stuff, you know?
WC: Right.
DINI: You want the excitement every month of seeing your hero in a new adventure, but you don’t necessarily want a lot of change that is going to muck with the concept.
WC: In order for you to have fun with the character, you have to have some amount of freedom, and obviously there are restrictions. But do you take that into consideration when you’re writing for an existing character? Maybe to avoid crossing that line to steer clear of pissing people off?
DINI: Well, when I work with a well-known character or someone else’s character, I like making the readers think. It’s the same if I do them on TV too. I wanna bring something new to the way the hero is presented, and I don’t want to do the same old story that’s been done plenty of times before. I want to show them something new about the hero’s approach to solving a problem, or their relationship with another hero or villain. Out of these very familiar elements, you craft something new.
I think that’s the rule for all comic book writers, that the characters are what they are with very few exceptions, and they remain what they are. You’re not going to kill off Batman or Superman, or at least not in any sort of realistic way, because that would kind of bring the whole comic book company crashing down around you without those characters to bolster that imaginary universe, to say nothing of their monthly sales. So, within that framework, you have to be creative and think about who these characters are and mine some hidden gold out of familiar territory and turn things on its ear.
And that was one of the things I always enjoyed doing when we adapted the characters to animation. We were dealing in a different medium than the printed page, so not every one of the same rules applied. We could take more chances, we could certainly show things in a different way, and the characters were ours at that point, within the realm of animation, to do with as we wanted. Whereas if you’re working on a monthly for a publisher, they might have an ongoing continuity for the next two years that you have to adhere to. Thereby your stories might not be as interesting or as creative as you want them to be.
When we did the superhero shows for Warner Animation we were kind of entrusted with the characters but were told to have fun and experiment with them a little bit. And I don’t think there were all that many times we crossed the line, when we would show the character off in a bad light or do something that was inappropriate for the character. We never really stretched them that far.
WC: On the other side of it, with characters that you’ve created, like Harley Quinn, are you defensive about how she is used?
DINI: Sometimes. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I will read something in her comic book and say, “Aw, that’s just wrong. She would never do that. I don’t see the character as being this mean-spirited. I don’t see her as being this thoughtless.” I don’t think of her as necessarily a cruel character. On the other hand, I don’t think of her just as a wacky little goofball. I’ve written her that way many, many times, but at the same time if you play her too cartoony there’s nothing to her. You have to give her something. Even if her emotions are more childlike and more simplistic, she’s got to believe in her emotions and be affected by certain things. Just as the way you’d look at a child who really loves something or really hates something, they pursue it with a certain intensity. Harley is kind of like that. And when the character got to be too sharp or abrasive… [PAUSE.] …or adult in some ways, there was just no reason I could justify why she would look like that or dress like that. Like with the jester costume to begin with, she stopped being Harley and she became another character.
That’s not to say that the writing wasn’t skillful or that there wasn’t a lot of craft behind it, but you have to look at the character first, any character, and figure out why they are what they are. And if someone stretches that character too far away from the basic thing that gave them a personality, then you’re dealing with a different character. They may look the same, but they’ve become somebody else.
WC: When that happens, are you verbal about it? Or do you just shake your head and keep quiet?
DINI: The realm of my power goes only to certain… [PAUSE.]
WC: Like, who can you really tell, I guess.
DINI: Yeah, that sort of thing. Like, in the case of Harley, I realized from the get-go that other people would be writing the book, and that they would have their say as to how the character was depicted. And, to a great degree, I just said, “Fine. Go ahead with it.” Because, at the end of the day, DC Comics owns the character. I think if I had stepped up to the plate and said, “I really have to write this book,” and then made a strong case back when I had written the first one-shot that it was my way or the highway, I think they would have let me write the monthly book. They would have been happy to have me do it, in fact. But my time is so crazy, what with working on TV primarily, that I just wasn’t able to do it. And, at the time, I didn’t really want to do it on a regular basis. I had my fun with Harley in the cartoons.
More importantly, I would probably write a lot more for comics if I didn’t have such weird scheduling problems. A lot of people have offered me regular books; like the folks at Marvel were calling me and asking, “Would you like to write the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man?” And, yeah, there is always an enthusiastic teenage part of me that will say, “Oh, yeah! I really want to write Spider-Man!” But the more practical side of me says, “There is no way you could ever adhere to that deadline, not with everything else you’ve got going.” So, rather than disappoint people and make promises I can’t keep, I would rather just enjoy a good issue of Spider-Man written by someone else than attempt to write one myself.
WC: Yeah. It would get down to choosing between writing Spider-Man or sleeping.
DINI: Right.
WC: So, I know you’ve gotten into some live action TV stuff as well, and you just wrote an episode of Lost. How did that come about, and is live action TV work something you’re interested in doing more of?
DINI: Yes, definitely. What happened was—earlier this year, in February—I got a call from Bryan Burk, who works with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. I had met him socially a few times through some friends, and I had been recommended to him as a possible writer on the new show that J.J. was doing, which became Lost. Bryan gave me a very sketchy description of what it was, so I came in and met with him and Damon Lindelof, who is the executive producer of the series and who, at the time, was co-writing the pilot with J.J. So, they explained what the series was, and I got very excited about it because it sounded like a lot of fun; something that hadn’t been done on TV in a long time, if, in fact, ever. But it was also a return to things that I loved when I was growing up, which were adventure shows and shows that had a bit of the bizarre or fantastic to it.
Now, in this day and age of reality programming, I had no idea whether the show would go or not, but it certainly sounded interesting. So, after spending 20 minutes talking to them, I said, “Boy, I would love to be involved with this.” And, as luck would have it, they enjoyed my writing, and they felt that I would be a good fit with the show, so I got the nod to come on. At that point, we didn’t really know if we were going to be on the air or not, but thanks to J.J. and Damon’s phenomenal pilot, ABC was very enthusiastic about the show, and they picked it up. And we’ve been going great guns ever since.
It’s really been a great change for me, and I really enjoy it. It’s been a tremendous learning experience; there are a whole set of different rules to learn. Some of which I knew from some live action writing I had done before but working in a room with a bunch of talented writers and coming up with ideas was a new experience for me. I had other friends who had worked in live action TV tell me what it was about, but I didn’t really know what it was like until I got into it. And, by and large, I think it’s a pretty great way of working.
WC: Were you given character outlines? Or were you just given the episodes leading up to the episode you wrote?
DINI: Well, I was hired with three or four other writers, and the final pilot was still in the process of being written. And one of the reasons they wanted to have us involved in the show early on was that it was such as large cast of characters that they wanted to get different writers’ perspectives on who those characters were. Characters like Jack and Kate and Locke and Sayid and all the rest were definitely in the pilot, and J.J. and Damon knew generally where they were going to take them, but they wanted other writers to come in and speculate what was in the characters’ heads. We would take different characters and write backstories on them, some of which were used and some of which were not. But it was just very helpful to do that; to do what we call “blue-skying” about who these characters are, what their motivations are, where they come from, and what their likes and dislikes are.
So, by the time we started writing scripts, we had that material to refer back to, or—in some cases—deviate from, as a way of feeling like we’ve known them for a while. We’ve been on the island with them since day one. They seem almost like old friends to us, and that makes the show a lot easier to write.
WC: And it was probably more open-ended than writing for a character that has been around for 50 or 60 years.
DINI: Yeah. It’s not like we were given a Bible and told, “This is Jack. Jack comes from this city and has this job.” It was a process of evolution that we were all involved in from early on.
WC: That’s cool. So, let’s shift and talk about Jingle Belle a little bit.
DINI: Sure.
WC: My first question is, why Jose Garibaldi? Because he’s just atrocious.
DINI: [LAUGH.]
WC: No, I’m kidding. Jose is a great guy.
DINI: Jose is great. He was recommended to me by Jamie Rich at Oni. I had read Jose’s Maria’s Wedding, and I thought it was just tremendous. And he has a very stylized, yet very cartoony way of drawing. There’s something that seems a little classic about it; not necessarily old-fashioned, but it reminds me of really good strip cartooning. I grew up as a huge fan of comic strips, but I really kind of hate them now because whenever an artist rises to the forefront with a style that is really different that clicks, suddenly everybody else is desperate to draw in that artist’s style. Whereas Jose’s cartooning was very unique and very much his own. I like that a lot.
I like the Jingle Belle stories to have a little bit of timelessness to them; they should look a little bit classic. She should never look like she came out of an X-Men comic. She needs a bit more of the humor look to her, and Jose got that perfectly.
WC: With the story, since it’s a Christmas tale, there is immediately a sense of timelessness attached to it. Was a Christmas story something you wanted to tell?
DINI: Well, originally I just wanted to tell a father / daughter story. It’s always been in the back of my mind to do a Christmas story, because I do like the holidays and the fantasy aspect of it. There is something that strikes a very human chord and a warm, emotional response, and I like that a lot. That, to me, is 90% of what the celebration of Christmas is all about. But, oddly enough, that wasn’t where Jingle Belle came from.
It came from looking at a Christmas card from Steven Spielberg, of all people, who was posing with his kids. And I thought, “Here is a guy the rest of the world reveres, and he’s got all these kids. And I wonder if they see him in the same way that another kid would look at him.” So, I thought that was sort of interesting. I know a lot of famous comic creators and movie directors that have kids, and sometimes I’d wonder what goes on at home. And it was Christmas when I started thinking about it, so I started doing these sketches in my sketchbook. I thought, “Well, Santa doesn’t have a kid, but what if he did? And what would the kid be like? Would she be all sunshine and sparkles, would she be wanting to take on the mantel of the great gift giver, or would she be more of a little brat?
So, I started thinking more about how current parents indulge kids. When the holidays come around, kids get an enormous amount of presents and gifts, so I started wondering if kids even appreciate them, or if it just makes them want more. And then I just started to apply that feeling to Santa. Like, “What if Santa’s parenting skills leave something to be desired? What if—out of a very kindly spirit—initially, he has this daughter that he gives these great presents to because he gives the best toys in the world, but what if she still grew up very rebellious? Or, more importantly, what if she grew up with a bad case of sibling rivalry for every other kid?” You know, she has the only dad who is out working on Christmas Eve, so I started thinking about what her Christmas Eve is like. And I figured she’d probably either go to a party with the Eskimo kids and come back late because her dad’s not around, or—when she was younger—she probably just sat up with her mom and ate a sandwich and they did each other’s hair or something. It was probably a very boring night for them. And then I thought it was all kind of funny, so I decided to play around with it a little bit, and that’s how Jingle evolved. She grew out of that, and so did my own take on the North Pole, which has taken on its own identity too. I made my own little world beyond the reindeer. The reindeer are something I barely even touch on, because I think of them as a creation of other writers. I’m more interested in my own little pocket of the North Pole universe.
WC: So, once you sketch that all out in your head and in your sketchbook, how do you translate that to Jose so that he adds to it appropriately, but then also translates your ideas appropriately?
DINI: Well, by the time I started working with Jose most of the characters were already pretty well defined.
WC: Right.
DINI: I remember, early on, [Artist] Stephen DeStefano saying, “Well, I guess I better go and get a picture of a musk ox.” And I told him I’d help him out. So, what did I do? I didn’t send him a book; I went out and bought a musk ox.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: I bought it from an adventurers’ club in Georgia. They had a big musk ox, so I got it shipped to my house, and I took photographs of it.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: And by the time I was done with the rigmarole, by then Stephen had gone out and got himself a book. [LAUGH.] I said to him, “I got those musk ox pictures.” And he said, “Yeah, well, I found one on Google Images.” Oh, well, that will work too.” [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: But sometimes I would show him a rough sketch to give him an idea of what a character would look like. Then we’d go back and forth about the ideas. And Jose was always really close about every one of the initial designs. He’s a genius. He knows how to infuse whatever weird curve I throw at him with his own creative sense, and he always comes up with something that looks really cool.
WC: Since you’re responsible for both the characters of Jingle Belle and Harley Quinn, it seems like you create a lot of female characters.
DINI: I know. I was thinking about that lately. I was thinking, “I need a little bit of testosterone here.” [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: It’s like Jingle Belle, my girl sheriff Ida Red, and then Harley. I must like the girls. But, on the other hand, I don’t really want to be doing Betty and Veronica. For whatever reason, it just is. I had actually come up with Ida Red and the Mutant, Texas characters before I came up with Jingle Belle; again, they were ideas that existed in my sketchbook. And Mutant, Texas was going to be more about the town, kind of like how Li’l Abner is more about Dogpatch than it is about Li’l Abner. I wanted to create a whole town full of weird creatures, and Ida Red was going to be the focal point for all of them. But then Jingle Belle came along, and that shoved Mutant, Texas into the background.
But I think all of the characters are a lot of fun. With Jing, I see a lot of my teenage niece in her. I wouldn’t say she’s an easy character to write, but she’s a fun character to write because there’s always inspiration for her. Harley, I am kind of taking a break from these days. But it was just one of those things as far as the female characters go.
I haven’t really sat down and felt an emotional connection to a superhero type character. I’ve thought long and hard about doing a Superman- or Batman-type character, doing my own take on it, it’s just that I haven’t made yet that emotional connection between that guy in the suit and what would motivate him and keep him going. I haven’t stopped looking, but I haven’t had time to do it yet.
WC: Which character that you’ve created would you say you’re most emotionally attached to?
DINI: Jing’s a lot of fun because she’s upbeat and sassy. On the other hand, I really like Ida Red because I think she’s got a little more to her, even though I haven’t done nearly as many Ida Red stories as Jing stories. But there’s more of a heroic and self-sacrificing quality to Ida Red. She’s a more decent character in a lot of ways than Jing, and she’s got a big responsibility on her shoulders being 16 or 17 and being the one who controls a town of freaks and mutants. She’s a little harder to write, and I think that’s why I like her a little bit more.
WC: This seems to be an era, especially in comics, where the writers are more in the spotlight, like with [Brian Michael] Bendis and you. And before it just seemed like the illustrators got the rock star status. Why do you think this change has taken place?
DINI: Well, I think we’re looking at some amazingly good writers out there. Bendis is a terrific writer when he’s on top of his game, which is usually all of the time. He’s always thinking, he’s always coming up with something new, he’s always finding a way to infuse classic characters with a lot of his own personality and mindset, and yet somehow remain true to what the original vision that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko had. I think he’s one terrific example.
And Neil Gaiman, certainly. When he was doing Sandman, he brought such a crossover of readership on. You had the comic book readers and the fantasy readers; people from all over actively seeking out Sandman and anything that he’d done. I think it’s just really good storytelling, and part of it is kind of like what I was saying about animation.
You have people who have grown up loving the comics medium, and now they really want to work in it and not just rehash old stories and concepts that were done by Stan and Jack or the DC writers. They want to tell their own stories with their characters. And they do it flawlessly, or—even better—than the original creators. I think that good visuals count for a lot, and I think it’s always best if you have an artist who also writes—and that’s another thing about Bendis, that he is an artist himself—or else a writer who works hand-in-glove with a talented artist.
I remember about 13 or 14 years ago we saw the rise of the superstar artist in creators like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and a lot of the guys who went on to start Image Comics. And it’s interesting to look at the comics of that time, because they do really adhere to the rock star attitude, as far as the artists and storytellers of that time go. But I don’t think that a lot of that has endured over the years. I think the visuals were exciting and captivating, and they certainly spoke to that 14-year-old that was buying the books, but it was also kind of shallow too, and the books were a reflection of how shallow it was.
And it was also a reflection of the readership. The kids collecting the stuff weren’t doing it to read it; they wanted to get an investment. Like, “Look at this variant cover; the book cost me five bucks. I’m gonna take it back to the comic store next month and I’ll sell it for ten bucks.” But then they’d bring it back, and it’s still worth five bucks, if that, because there was just so much of it out there. And that’s a really tragic thing that happened, because it cut an entire generation out of reading and appreciating comics. Because the kids who were getting into comics 14 years ago for an investment didn’t really care about the stories or the artwork. They just wanted to make money, and when they couldn’t make the money, they just said, “Screw comics. I’m gonna take up video games.” It was just too much of a good thing. It was very shallow, self-serving, and ultimately very short-sighted.
WC: Yeah. And I think it’s great to see the writers remaining more humble, because it’s almost like they saw what had happened. There just seemed to be this arrogance in both the industry and the readers.
DINI: Right. What distresses me is when it’s less about the comic books themselves, and it’s more about the pitch. And by the pitch, I mean the pitch to Hollywood. So many creators … [PAUSE.] How raw can I be on your site?
WC: [LAUGH.] As raw as you want to be.
DINI: So many creators came out with no more ambition than to [make money off] of Hollywood. They’re not selling comic books; they’re not selling characters. They’re just selling pitches. The pitch gets them in to door, and suddenly—BOOM!—they’ve got a million dollars on an option for something that is basically a retread of a tried and true idea. But because they’ve got a lot of sizzle behind them, they can sell it. And how many of these became movies? Very, very few of them. Out of the crop of all the characters that became popular in the last 14 years, we’ve only see movies for Spawn, Hellboy, and few others. But then it’s just back to Spider-Man, Batman, Superman.
WC: I just think it’s now considered to be hand-in-hand. If you write a book it’s just expected that you’re going to get an optioning deal. It just makes me wonder what people even create for.
DINI: That’s the thing. I did agree to a movie option on Jingle Belle, and that was a long process. But, at one point, I was thinking I’d maybe like to do a cartoon with her more than I wanted to do a movie. And that was a long and tortured process, and I’m not even going to get involved with it right now. But a deal was presented to me, and I thought, “These people are as enthusiastic about the character as I am, and they wanna make a comedy feature film out of it, and I think there is enough there to lend itself to that.” So, that was an act of development. But it wasn’t like I was shopping it around as a pitch before it came out as a book. And I routinely hang up on people who call me for the screen rights to Ida Red. I say, “I understand your enthusiasm, and I’m happy as hell you buy the book, but that character will never be on a cartoon or in a movie unless I do it from beginning to end.” The story is so good, the story moves like a movie, but I don’t want people to mock the characters. You just have to understand that, yes, it’s a story about talking bears and coyotes, and a girl is in the middle of it. And nobody has gotten that yet.
WC: I think, at the end of the day, you just have to be happy with the fact that it was even a book.
DINI: You’re right. And that’s one of the most important things that I’ve learned. I had a talk with Frank Miller once when he was living out here [Los Angeles] about 12 years ago, and we would get together with some friends and eat dinner and talk comics and creators’ rights. And he would say, “The biggest satisfaction you will ever have of creating a comic character is when the book comes out and you hold it in your hands, and you think, ‘This is mine, and no one can ever take it from me.’” And it’s nice if the book sells, and it’s nice if people love the characters and you have a steady relationship. But what’s really nice is that you’ve taken your imagination, you’ve put it down in print, and nobody owns that except you.
But so many producers and animation companies—and, believe me, I’ve walked out of meetings for Jingle Belle with executives screaming at me, “Come back! Where are you going? You above anybody should know this is the way it’s done in animation. We have to own everything.” And I’ll just say, “No. You don’t have to own this. I own this.” And they just get apoplectic that I won’t sign away the rights to the character just because they say so. And when I hear creators say, “I just optioned this,” or, “I just sold this,” I say, “Well, what are you selling, man? Are you just in the business for crafting pitches and selling them just for development money?” I mean, that’s certainly one way of doing it, but if you create the stuff you get to live with it, and you hopefully get to see it taken over by other people. And that’s a big concern when you create something. At some point, you will meet people who say you are just not going to work on your character anymore, and you have to deal with that. And I hope they can once the luster of the deal has worn off.
WC: Exactly. So, I just have two last things for you.
DINI: Sure.
WC: What you create and how you create was very much influenced by pop culture and references that you took in. And now you’re creating things that add to that culture, and children are growing up and being influenced by what you’ve done, and they are going to create based off of what you’ve created. Is that totally weird to you? [LAUGH.] Because it kind of creeps me out a bit to think that something I’ve created will inspire someone to create something else.
DINI: Yeah. I think that’s something every creator deals with. And hopefully the people who were inspired by your work, whatever that may be, when you see that come to fruition that there is something in there that you as a creator want to read. I don’t want to read something that is just a re-tread of something I’ve done. Like, if someone said, “I figured out a way to do a better version of Jingle Belle.” It’s like, “Well, don’t copy what I did. Don’t use the same concept. Come up with something else but come up with something that is just as interesting or as fun.” You could come up with any idea for a team book, for instance; like if I had grown up loving the hell out of the Justice League, I could just do a book called the Justice Brigade and do a retread of every character. But where’s the magic in that?
WC: Do you get kids that come up to you at cons and they want to show you something they’ve done, but it’s obviously just a copy of something you’ve done?
DINI: I don’t see anything as blatant as that. My stuff is kind of weird. I think that if I were doing a straight superhero book I’d see a lot more of that. But what I’m doing are these weird little humor girly books—to be disparaging about it. And that’s “girly” as in G-I-R-L-Y, as opposed to G-I-R-L-I-E, which “girlie” means more sexy. I don’t know if there’s a difference there or not, or if I’ve just created that on the spot. [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: But I don’t see a lot of that because what I like doing, what I like reading is humor stuff. I’d rather read Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese than the current issue of Spider-Man. Even though Spider-Man is really good, I want to look at something that is funny and has a little bit of imagination to it. Even when I go to the comic book store, I’ll pick up an old Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade that reprints all of Carl Barks’ old stories and leave everything that is current on the shelf. Again, it’s just my taste; it’s just what I like.
And I think Jingle Belle is a throwback to those books. I can do one or two humor stories per issue and make it like my version of Disney’s Comics and Stories—there’s Jing in one story, here’s Ida Red in another story. You get two stories for the price of one. To me, that’s just more interesting than doing your standard superhero epic. But for most kids who are into comics at all, guys are most into the people doing the superhero comics, and the girls are doing … I don’t really know what they’re doing.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: It’s primarily superhero comics, and there are very few people, if any, out there that want to be the next Carl Barks or Floyd Gottfredson. And if there are any of those people out there, they’re doing those weasels-in-bathing-suits comics. The furry comics.
WC: There’s a whole creepy world of that stuff out there, man.
DINI: Yeah.
WC: Well, the last question I have for you is one we ask everyone.
DINI: Sure.
WC: Do dogs have lips?
DINI: [PAUSE.] Yes. And the are magnificent. [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
Paul Dini Interview
Wayne Chinsang
tastes like chicken | January 2005
When I first announced I was interviewing Writer Paul Dini, one of our readers posted this on our post board: “I can’t believe you guys are interviewing him! The man’s a god!!! A literal god!!! I mean, he made Batman cool again, he created one of the most endearing characters ever in Harley Quinn, and now he’s writing for one of the best shows on television, Lost!!!” That pretty much sums it up, huh?
WAYNE CHINSANG: The first thing I want to know is if it’s kind of weird for you to look back on everything that you’ve don and know that you’re responsible for contributing to a part of people’s childhoods? Especially with the stuff you did in the Eighties, like Ewoks, Droids, and even episodes of Transformers. Is it weird for you to think of it like that?
PAUL DINI: Yeah. Especially when you think I was just at the tail end of my childhood myself. I was doing that stuff when I was in college, because I got a shot to contribute some scripts. So, at the same age when most guys are trying to figure out what they’re going to do, around 20 or 21, I’m sitting there writing stuff for guys in college who are gonna watch it on TV. And I’m in college with them, you know?
WC: Right.
DINI: So, right out of school, I started doing things like Ewoks and the occasional Transformers or G.I. Joe for some friends of mine who were just starting their careers in animation. So, I was kind of writing for my friends and other animation geeks who just happened to be watching TV at that time.
WC: Cartoons are obviously much different now than they were in the Eighties.
DINI: Yeah.
WC: I think cartoons in the Eighties were geared toward kids, and now they seem to be more for adults. Was it harder to write for kids than it is to write for adults?
DINI: Well, the stuff was pretty much brain-dead pap back then. And, to a degree, things haven’t changed. But it’s sort of like if you’re a musician, you like playing a certain type of music and nothing will swerve you away from it. And it doesn’t have to be the hardest rock ‘n’ roll; it can be just whatever you like writing, whether it’s country or swing music or whatever. You’re just bound and determined to write that kind of music. And I think that what happened was I was lucky at various points in my life to work on shows or projects that I liked or could stand to work on. There was a ton of dreck back then, and early on you’re starting you career, and you’re willing to do just about anything. And I certainly did. But, by and large, I was lucky to be associated with some pretty interesting projects early in my career.
After jobbing around for a year and doing things like Fat Albert and the odd Scooby-Doo episode, I got to go up to Skywalker Ranch and work on Ewoks and Droids. And while those shows weren’t terrific in the long run, it was a fascinating experience being able to work up there and get to know some of those people. I felt like a little kid going into my older brother’s room, and there are Star Wars toys lying around, and you get to play with them a little bit.
So, I did it more for the experience of the show, because back then we weren’t doing Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. We were doing something that was shepherded every step of the way by the censor ladies at the network, and it was gone over by the child educators, and that is a ghastly, ghastly way of working. But, that said, the other creators I worked with and I tried our best to come up with something that was a little different that at least looked good and put that on TV and have it not suck. Like I said, it was a good experience, and I look back on those days with a lot of fondness.
Coming right out of school, that was an invaluable experience; it was like spending four years in film school. And when you think about the fact that, right across the way, John Lasseter and his Pixar team were getting started too, that was really an amazing time. It was like working back in early Hollywood in the pre-sound days, when everything was in black-and-white animation and everybody was just trying to get ahead. I would go over and see what John and his crew were doing at Pixar, and think, “Maybe not now, maybe not next year, but in a couple of years this stuff is gonna be phenomenal. And, hopefully, I’ll get to work on some stuff that’s just as well received.”
WC: It had to have been an interesting time. My sister’s ex-husband actually used to work at Skywalker Ranch occasionally.
DINI: Oh, really? When? Doing what?
WC: Right around the time of Episode I, he was doing editing for them.
DINI: Oh, okay.
WC: It must have been such a weird atmosphere to be there, especially during the Eighties, when Star Wars was at its height. Not that it’s small now, but the Eighties seemed to be the peak of it.
DINI: Well, I was there from ’84 to ’88, early ’89, and even last year I was kind of coming and going, juggling some other projects in there. But it was a fascinating environment to see that George Lucas was able to build all this out there—a liar that any Bond villain would be proud of, but for a slightly more benevolent use. And, again, it was a time to experiment and try things; when you’re in your mid-twenties, you just sort of have to do that. You figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Star Wars was still pretty big. It was a few years after they had done … [Return of the] Jedi, and he was taking some time off and just helping his friends with movie projects, like Ron Howard with Willow, Francis Ford Coppola with Tucker, and right up until the time that Robert Zemeckis was doing … Roger Rabbit. He really wasn’t doing it there, but they were doing some of the animation effects over at ILM. So, that would have been around ’88 or ’89, which was sort of like the tail end of when I was there. But, again, it was a tremendous experience and a place that I think fondly of. I know it’s changed drastically over the last few years, and I haven’t really been back, but it’s just one of those experiences that come up every once in a while into someone’s life, and you just have to go with it and see what it’s all about.
WC: Right. With both cartoons and comics, as I said before, in the Eighties they were geared towards kids. But you’ve been not only able to witness, but also be partly responsible for this transition toward an older age group.
DINI: Sure.
WC: Why do you think the shift happened, and why do you think it happened so drastically? Because now it seems like Saturday morning cartoons—not that they’re completely void of things for kids—but a lot of that stuff is now either for kids but with smarter and more adult humor, or it’s just strictly created for adults.
DINI: Well, I think what happened was that a lot of people who really loved cartoons—when they grew up in the Sixties, Seventies, and into the early Eighties—they grew up to make cartoons. And they wanted to make them with the same spirit of experimentation and adventure and the sense of humor that rivaled the things that they carried from their own childhood.
There is kind of this interesting age gulf in animation; a lot of people who started off in the Golden Age of Animation in the Thirties and Forties, by the time they got to the Sixties and Seventies they were much older, and all they were thinking about was retiring and getting out of the business. But there was really no fresh blood that came along during the Fifties or Sixties, so there was this gulf of 20 years. And it wasn’t until the late Seventies or early Eighties that you had a rising group of younger people anxious to come in. Because animation was never really looked upon as a real career. It was just something that appeared now and then on your movie screen or TV, fashioned by pixies or elves someplace. But they weren’t really training new people to take those jobs. The people who wanted those jobs in animation would later make a difference in reshaping the medium, like John Lasseter, John Kricfalusi, Matt Groening, Brad Bird, and countless people who have worked with them. They all wanted to do this; there was nothing else they were really willing to do. And they kind of forced the medium to change.
At the same time, I think the viewers—even if you weren’t doing cartoons or all that interested in cartoons, in the Sixties and Seventies you grew up with them; they were a part of your life, even if you later went on to have a career in finance or whatever. You still kept a bit of fondness for cartoons with you, whereas your parents might not have. I think back to my parents who grew up during the Thirties and Forties, and they saw cartoons every once in a while, like at the movie theatre or something like that. But there was no differentiation between them. It wasn’t a cartoon culture like it is now. So, a lot of that stuff just fell through the cracks. Like I would talk to my dad about the Golden Age of Animation, and I’d ask him about a Bugs Bunny cartoon of a Disney feature, and he’d just say, “It was just stuff that they showed at the time. We really didn’t think all that much about it.” It wasn’t until television came along and was readily available to kids, in the late Sixties and Seventies, that you had kids programmed by cartoons to grow up to want to see them. And when kids become adults, there was still a part of them that said, “Yeah, I still want to see cartoons.” So, I think that’s one of the reasons for the resurgence in animation in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
I also think that people were willing to take a chance. Producers like Steven Spielberg, who also loves cartoons, wanted to bring out something sort of fun, and you had TV executives who wanted to be in business with him, so they let him have his way with shows like Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and Pinky & The Brain.
WC: Since you are now creating to appeal to an older audience, do you think that makes it harder to create those things, because adults expect more? Like, if you change the costume of some hero, a kid isn’t going to write a letter and complain about it, whereas an adult—someone who has had decades of history with that character—is more likely to.
DINI: I think when you’re changing a comic book character, adults are liable to complain more than kids are. I also think that more adults are reading comics than kids are, so I think comics become a very comfortable thing for a reader to check in with once a month. We’re talking about readers who go from college age—about 18 or 19—to people who are in their mid-to-late forties; they have always liked the characters, and they make time for them every month to get caught up with their favorites. And I think that there’s a lot of fondness there. It’s the same reason people like soap operas or dramatic shows or sitcoms on TV: there’s a sense of permanence and continuity and comfort there. So, if you find out that suddenly Superman’s got long hair, and he’s wearing a black costume, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t want that. I want Superman the way he always is—working at the Daily Planet and fighting Brainiac. Look out! There’s kryptonite!” That sort of stuff, you know?
WC: Right.
DINI: You want the excitement every month of seeing your hero in a new adventure, but you don’t necessarily want a lot of change that is going to muck with the concept.
WC: In order for you to have fun with the character, you have to have some amount of freedom, and obviously there are restrictions. But do you take that into consideration when you’re writing for an existing character? Maybe to avoid crossing that line to steer clear of pissing people off?
DINI: Well, when I work with a well-known character or someone else’s character, I like making the readers think. It’s the same if I do them on TV too. I wanna bring something new to the way the hero is presented, and I don’t want to do the same old story that’s been done plenty of times before. I want to show them something new about the hero’s approach to solving a problem, or their relationship with another hero or villain. Out of these very familiar elements, you craft something new.
I think that’s the rule for all comic book writers, that the characters are what they are with very few exceptions, and they remain what they are. You’re not going to kill off Batman or Superman, or at least not in any sort of realistic way, because that would kind of bring the whole comic book company crashing down around you without those characters to bolster that imaginary universe, to say nothing of their monthly sales. So, within that framework, you have to be creative and think about who these characters are and mine some hidden gold out of familiar territory and turn things on its ear.
And that was one of the things I always enjoyed doing when we adapted the characters to animation. We were dealing in a different medium than the printed page, so not every one of the same rules applied. We could take more chances, we could certainly show things in a different way, and the characters were ours at that point, within the realm of animation, to do with as we wanted. Whereas if you’re working on a monthly for a publisher, they might have an ongoing continuity for the next two years that you have to adhere to. Thereby your stories might not be as interesting or as creative as you want them to be.
When we did the superhero shows for Warner Animation we were kind of entrusted with the characters but were told to have fun and experiment with them a little bit. And I don’t think there were all that many times we crossed the line, when we would show the character off in a bad light or do something that was inappropriate for the character. We never really stretched them that far.
WC: On the other side of it, with characters that you’ve created, like Harley Quinn, are you defensive about how she is used?
DINI: Sometimes. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I will read something in her comic book and say, “Aw, that’s just wrong. She would never do that. I don’t see the character as being this mean-spirited. I don’t see her as being this thoughtless.” I don’t think of her as necessarily a cruel character. On the other hand, I don’t think of her just as a wacky little goofball. I’ve written her that way many, many times, but at the same time if you play her too cartoony there’s nothing to her. You have to give her something. Even if her emotions are more childlike and more simplistic, she’s got to believe in her emotions and be affected by certain things. Just as the way you’d look at a child who really loves something or really hates something, they pursue it with a certain intensity. Harley is kind of like that. And when the character got to be too sharp or abrasive… [PAUSE.] …or adult in some ways, there was just no reason I could justify why she would look like that or dress like that. Like with the jester costume to begin with, she stopped being Harley and she became another character.
That’s not to say that the writing wasn’t skillful or that there wasn’t a lot of craft behind it, but you have to look at the character first, any character, and figure out why they are what they are. And if someone stretches that character too far away from the basic thing that gave them a personality, then you’re dealing with a different character. They may look the same, but they’ve become somebody else.
WC: When that happens, are you verbal about it? Or do you just shake your head and keep quiet?
DINI: The realm of my power goes only to certain… [PAUSE.]
WC: Like, who can you really tell, I guess.
DINI: Yeah, that sort of thing. Like, in the case of Harley, I realized from the get-go that other people would be writing the book, and that they would have their say as to how the character was depicted. And, to a great degree, I just said, “Fine. Go ahead with it.” Because, at the end of the day, DC Comics owns the character. I think if I had stepped up to the plate and said, “I really have to write this book,” and then made a strong case back when I had written the first one-shot that it was my way or the highway, I think they would have let me write the monthly book. They would have been happy to have me do it, in fact. But my time is so crazy, what with working on TV primarily, that I just wasn’t able to do it. And, at the time, I didn’t really want to do it on a regular basis. I had my fun with Harley in the cartoons.
More importantly, I would probably write a lot more for comics if I didn’t have such weird scheduling problems. A lot of people have offered me regular books; like the folks at Marvel were calling me and asking, “Would you like to write the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man?” And, yeah, there is always an enthusiastic teenage part of me that will say, “Oh, yeah! I really want to write Spider-Man!” But the more practical side of me says, “There is no way you could ever adhere to that deadline, not with everything else you’ve got going.” So, rather than disappoint people and make promises I can’t keep, I would rather just enjoy a good issue of Spider-Man written by someone else than attempt to write one myself.
WC: Yeah. It would get down to choosing between writing Spider-Man or sleeping.
DINI: Right.
WC: So, I know you’ve gotten into some live action TV stuff as well, and you just wrote an episode of Lost. How did that come about, and is live action TV work something you’re interested in doing more of?
DINI: Yes, definitely. What happened was—earlier this year, in February—I got a call from Bryan Burk, who works with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. I had met him socially a few times through some friends, and I had been recommended to him as a possible writer on the new show that J.J. was doing, which became Lost. Bryan gave me a very sketchy description of what it was, so I came in and met with him and Damon Lindelof, who is the executive producer of the series and who, at the time, was co-writing the pilot with J.J. So, they explained what the series was, and I got very excited about it because it sounded like a lot of fun; something that hadn’t been done on TV in a long time, if, in fact, ever. But it was also a return to things that I loved when I was growing up, which were adventure shows and shows that had a bit of the bizarre or fantastic to it.
Now, in this day and age of reality programming, I had no idea whether the show would go or not, but it certainly sounded interesting. So, after spending 20 minutes talking to them, I said, “Boy, I would love to be involved with this.” And, as luck would have it, they enjoyed my writing, and they felt that I would be a good fit with the show, so I got the nod to come on. At that point, we didn’t really know if we were going to be on the air or not, but thanks to J.J. and Damon’s phenomenal pilot, ABC was very enthusiastic about the show, and they picked it up. And we’ve been going great guns ever since.
It’s really been a great change for me, and I really enjoy it. It’s been a tremendous learning experience; there are a whole set of different rules to learn. Some of which I knew from some live action writing I had done before but working in a room with a bunch of talented writers and coming up with ideas was a new experience for me. I had other friends who had worked in live action TV tell me what it was about, but I didn’t really know what it was like until I got into it. And, by and large, I think it’s a pretty great way of working.
WC: Were you given character outlines? Or were you just given the episodes leading up to the episode you wrote?
DINI: Well, I was hired with three or four other writers, and the final pilot was still in the process of being written. And one of the reasons they wanted to have us involved in the show early on was that it was such as large cast of characters that they wanted to get different writers’ perspectives on who those characters were. Characters like Jack and Kate and Locke and Sayid and all the rest were definitely in the pilot, and J.J. and Damon knew generally where they were going to take them, but they wanted other writers to come in and speculate what was in the characters’ heads. We would take different characters and write backstories on them, some of which were used and some of which were not. But it was just very helpful to do that; to do what we call “blue-skying” about who these characters are, what their motivations are, where they come from, and what their likes and dislikes are.
So, by the time we started writing scripts, we had that material to refer back to, or—in some cases—deviate from, as a way of feeling like we’ve known them for a while. We’ve been on the island with them since day one. They seem almost like old friends to us, and that makes the show a lot easier to write.
WC: And it was probably more open-ended than writing for a character that has been around for 50 or 60 years.
DINI: Yeah. It’s not like we were given a Bible and told, “This is Jack. Jack comes from this city and has this job.” It was a process of evolution that we were all involved in from early on.
WC: That’s cool. So, let’s shift and talk about Jingle Belle a little bit.
DINI: Sure.
WC: My first question is, why Jose Garibaldi? Because he’s just atrocious.
DINI: [LAUGH.]
WC: No, I’m kidding. Jose is a great guy.
DINI: Jose is great. He was recommended to me by Jamie Rich at Oni. I had read Jose’s Maria’s Wedding, and I thought it was just tremendous. And he has a very stylized, yet very cartoony way of drawing. There’s something that seems a little classic about it; not necessarily old-fashioned, but it reminds me of really good strip cartooning. I grew up as a huge fan of comic strips, but I really kind of hate them now because whenever an artist rises to the forefront with a style that is really different that clicks, suddenly everybody else is desperate to draw in that artist’s style. Whereas Jose’s cartooning was very unique and very much his own. I like that a lot.
I like the Jingle Belle stories to have a little bit of timelessness to them; they should look a little bit classic. She should never look like she came out of an X-Men comic. She needs a bit more of the humor look to her, and Jose got that perfectly.
WC: With the story, since it’s a Christmas tale, there is immediately a sense of timelessness attached to it. Was a Christmas story something you wanted to tell?
DINI: Well, originally I just wanted to tell a father / daughter story. It’s always been in the back of my mind to do a Christmas story, because I do like the holidays and the fantasy aspect of it. There is something that strikes a very human chord and a warm, emotional response, and I like that a lot. That, to me, is 90% of what the celebration of Christmas is all about. But, oddly enough, that wasn’t where Jingle Belle came from.
It came from looking at a Christmas card from Steven Spielberg, of all people, who was posing with his kids. And I thought, “Here is a guy the rest of the world reveres, and he’s got all these kids. And I wonder if they see him in the same way that another kid would look at him.” So, I thought that was sort of interesting. I know a lot of famous comic creators and movie directors that have kids, and sometimes I’d wonder what goes on at home. And it was Christmas when I started thinking about it, so I started doing these sketches in my sketchbook. I thought, “Well, Santa doesn’t have a kid, but what if he did? And what would the kid be like? Would she be all sunshine and sparkles, would she be wanting to take on the mantel of the great gift giver, or would she be more of a little brat?
So, I started thinking more about how current parents indulge kids. When the holidays come around, kids get an enormous amount of presents and gifts, so I started wondering if kids even appreciate them, or if it just makes them want more. And then I just started to apply that feeling to Santa. Like, “What if Santa’s parenting skills leave something to be desired? What if—out of a very kindly spirit—initially, he has this daughter that he gives these great presents to because he gives the best toys in the world, but what if she still grew up very rebellious? Or, more importantly, what if she grew up with a bad case of sibling rivalry for every other kid?” You know, she has the only dad who is out working on Christmas Eve, so I started thinking about what her Christmas Eve is like. And I figured she’d probably either go to a party with the Eskimo kids and come back late because her dad’s not around, or—when she was younger—she probably just sat up with her mom and ate a sandwich and they did each other’s hair or something. It was probably a very boring night for them. And then I thought it was all kind of funny, so I decided to play around with it a little bit, and that’s how Jingle evolved. She grew out of that, and so did my own take on the North Pole, which has taken on its own identity too. I made my own little world beyond the reindeer. The reindeer are something I barely even touch on, because I think of them as a creation of other writers. I’m more interested in my own little pocket of the North Pole universe.
WC: So, once you sketch that all out in your head and in your sketchbook, how do you translate that to Jose so that he adds to it appropriately, but then also translates your ideas appropriately?
DINI: Well, by the time I started working with Jose most of the characters were already pretty well defined.
WC: Right.
DINI: I remember, early on, [Artist] Stephen DeStefano saying, “Well, I guess I better go and get a picture of a musk ox.” And I told him I’d help him out. So, what did I do? I didn’t send him a book; I went out and bought a musk ox.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: I bought it from an adventurers’ club in Georgia. They had a big musk ox, so I got it shipped to my house, and I took photographs of it.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: And by the time I was done with the rigmarole, by then Stephen had gone out and got himself a book. [LAUGH.] I said to him, “I got those musk ox pictures.” And he said, “Yeah, well, I found one on Google Images.” Oh, well, that will work too.” [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: But sometimes I would show him a rough sketch to give him an idea of what a character would look like. Then we’d go back and forth about the ideas. And Jose was always really close about every one of the initial designs. He’s a genius. He knows how to infuse whatever weird curve I throw at him with his own creative sense, and he always comes up with something that looks really cool.
WC: Since you’re responsible for both the characters of Jingle Belle and Harley Quinn, it seems like you create a lot of female characters.
DINI: I know. I was thinking about that lately. I was thinking, “I need a little bit of testosterone here.” [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: It’s like Jingle Belle, my girl sheriff Ida Red, and then Harley. I must like the girls. But, on the other hand, I don’t really want to be doing Betty and Veronica. For whatever reason, it just is. I had actually come up with Ida Red and the Mutant, Texas characters before I came up with Jingle Belle; again, they were ideas that existed in my sketchbook. And Mutant, Texas was going to be more about the town, kind of like how Li’l Abner is more about Dogpatch than it is about Li’l Abner. I wanted to create a whole town full of weird creatures, and Ida Red was going to be the focal point for all of them. But then Jingle Belle came along, and that shoved Mutant, Texas into the background.
But I think all of the characters are a lot of fun. With Jing, I see a lot of my teenage niece in her. I wouldn’t say she’s an easy character to write, but she’s a fun character to write because there’s always inspiration for her. Harley, I am kind of taking a break from these days. But it was just one of those things as far as the female characters go.
I haven’t really sat down and felt an emotional connection to a superhero type character. I’ve thought long and hard about doing a Superman- or Batman-type character, doing my own take on it, it’s just that I haven’t made yet that emotional connection between that guy in the suit and what would motivate him and keep him going. I haven’t stopped looking, but I haven’t had time to do it yet.
WC: Which character that you’ve created would you say you’re most emotionally attached to?
DINI: Jing’s a lot of fun because she’s upbeat and sassy. On the other hand, I really like Ida Red because I think she’s got a little more to her, even though I haven’t done nearly as many Ida Red stories as Jing stories. But there’s more of a heroic and self-sacrificing quality to Ida Red. She’s a more decent character in a lot of ways than Jing, and she’s got a big responsibility on her shoulders being 16 or 17 and being the one who controls a town of freaks and mutants. She’s a little harder to write, and I think that’s why I like her a little bit more.
WC: This seems to be an era, especially in comics, where the writers are more in the spotlight, like with [Brian Michael] Bendis and you. And before it just seemed like the illustrators got the rock star status. Why do you think this change has taken place?
DINI: Well, I think we’re looking at some amazingly good writers out there. Bendis is a terrific writer when he’s on top of his game, which is usually all of the time. He’s always thinking, he’s always coming up with something new, he’s always finding a way to infuse classic characters with a lot of his own personality and mindset, and yet somehow remain true to what the original vision that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko had. I think he’s one terrific example.
And Neil Gaiman, certainly. When he was doing Sandman, he brought such a crossover of readership on. You had the comic book readers and the fantasy readers; people from all over actively seeking out Sandman and anything that he’d done. I think it’s just really good storytelling, and part of it is kind of like what I was saying about animation.
You have people who have grown up loving the comics medium, and now they really want to work in it and not just rehash old stories and concepts that were done by Stan and Jack or the DC writers. They want to tell their own stories with their characters. And they do it flawlessly, or—even better—than the original creators. I think that good visuals count for a lot, and I think it’s always best if you have an artist who also writes—and that’s another thing about Bendis, that he is an artist himself—or else a writer who works hand-in-glove with a talented artist.
I remember about 13 or 14 years ago we saw the rise of the superstar artist in creators like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and a lot of the guys who went on to start Image Comics. And it’s interesting to look at the comics of that time, because they do really adhere to the rock star attitude, as far as the artists and storytellers of that time go. But I don’t think that a lot of that has endured over the years. I think the visuals were exciting and captivating, and they certainly spoke to that 14-year-old that was buying the books, but it was also kind of shallow too, and the books were a reflection of how shallow it was.
And it was also a reflection of the readership. The kids collecting the stuff weren’t doing it to read it; they wanted to get an investment. Like, “Look at this variant cover; the book cost me five bucks. I’m gonna take it back to the comic store next month and I’ll sell it for ten bucks.” But then they’d bring it back, and it’s still worth five bucks, if that, because there was just so much of it out there. And that’s a really tragic thing that happened, because it cut an entire generation out of reading and appreciating comics. Because the kids who were getting into comics 14 years ago for an investment didn’t really care about the stories or the artwork. They just wanted to make money, and when they couldn’t make the money, they just said, “Screw comics. I’m gonna take up video games.” It was just too much of a good thing. It was very shallow, self-serving, and ultimately very short-sighted.
WC: Yeah. And I think it’s great to see the writers remaining more humble, because it’s almost like they saw what had happened. There just seemed to be this arrogance in both the industry and the readers.
DINI: Right. What distresses me is when it’s less about the comic books themselves, and it’s more about the pitch. And by the pitch, I mean the pitch to Hollywood. So many creators … [PAUSE.] How raw can I be on your site?
WC: [LAUGH.] As raw as you want to be.
DINI: So many creators came out with no more ambition than to [make money off] of Hollywood. They’re not selling comic books; they’re not selling characters. They’re just selling pitches. The pitch gets them in to door, and suddenly—BOOM!—they’ve got a million dollars on an option for something that is basically a retread of a tried and true idea. But because they’ve got a lot of sizzle behind them, they can sell it. And how many of these became movies? Very, very few of them. Out of the crop of all the characters that became popular in the last 14 years, we’ve only see movies for Spawn, Hellboy, and few others. But then it’s just back to Spider-Man, Batman, Superman.
WC: I just think it’s now considered to be hand-in-hand. If you write a book it’s just expected that you’re going to get an optioning deal. It just makes me wonder what people even create for.
DINI: That’s the thing. I did agree to a movie option on Jingle Belle, and that was a long process. But, at one point, I was thinking I’d maybe like to do a cartoon with her more than I wanted to do a movie. And that was a long and tortured process, and I’m not even going to get involved with it right now. But a deal was presented to me, and I thought, “These people are as enthusiastic about the character as I am, and they wanna make a comedy feature film out of it, and I think there is enough there to lend itself to that.” So, that was an act of development. But it wasn’t like I was shopping it around as a pitch before it came out as a book. And I routinely hang up on people who call me for the screen rights to Ida Red. I say, “I understand your enthusiasm, and I’m happy as hell you buy the book, but that character will never be on a cartoon or in a movie unless I do it from beginning to end.” The story is so good, the story moves like a movie, but I don’t want people to mock the characters. You just have to understand that, yes, it’s a story about talking bears and coyotes, and a girl is in the middle of it. And nobody has gotten that yet.
WC: I think, at the end of the day, you just have to be happy with the fact that it was even a book.
DINI: You’re right. And that’s one of the most important things that I’ve learned. I had a talk with Frank Miller once when he was living out here [Los Angeles] about 12 years ago, and we would get together with some friends and eat dinner and talk comics and creators’ rights. And he would say, “The biggest satisfaction you will ever have of creating a comic character is when the book comes out and you hold it in your hands, and you think, ‘This is mine, and no one can ever take it from me.’” And it’s nice if the book sells, and it’s nice if people love the characters and you have a steady relationship. But what’s really nice is that you’ve taken your imagination, you’ve put it down in print, and nobody owns that except you.
But so many producers and animation companies—and, believe me, I’ve walked out of meetings for Jingle Belle with executives screaming at me, “Come back! Where are you going? You above anybody should know this is the way it’s done in animation. We have to own everything.” And I’ll just say, “No. You don’t have to own this. I own this.” And they just get apoplectic that I won’t sign away the rights to the character just because they say so. And when I hear creators say, “I just optioned this,” or, “I just sold this,” I say, “Well, what are you selling, man? Are you just in the business for crafting pitches and selling them just for development money?” I mean, that’s certainly one way of doing it, but if you create the stuff you get to live with it, and you hopefully get to see it taken over by other people. And that’s a big concern when you create something. At some point, you will meet people who say you are just not going to work on your character anymore, and you have to deal with that. And I hope they can once the luster of the deal has worn off.
WC: Exactly. So, I just have two last things for you.
DINI: Sure.
WC: What you create and how you create was very much influenced by pop culture and references that you took in. And now you’re creating things that add to that culture, and children are growing up and being influenced by what you’ve done, and they are going to create based off of what you’ve created. Is that totally weird to you? [LAUGH.] Because it kind of creeps me out a bit to think that something I’ve created will inspire someone to create something else.
DINI: Yeah. I think that’s something every creator deals with. And hopefully the people who were inspired by your work, whatever that may be, when you see that come to fruition that there is something in there that you as a creator want to read. I don’t want to read something that is just a re-tread of something I’ve done. Like, if someone said, “I figured out a way to do a better version of Jingle Belle.” It’s like, “Well, don’t copy what I did. Don’t use the same concept. Come up with something else but come up with something that is just as interesting or as fun.” You could come up with any idea for a team book, for instance; like if I had grown up loving the hell out of the Justice League, I could just do a book called the Justice Brigade and do a retread of every character. But where’s the magic in that?
WC: Do you get kids that come up to you at cons and they want to show you something they’ve done, but it’s obviously just a copy of something you’ve done?
DINI: I don’t see anything as blatant as that. My stuff is kind of weird. I think that if I were doing a straight superhero book I’d see a lot more of that. But what I’m doing are these weird little humor girly books—to be disparaging about it. And that’s “girly” as in G-I-R-L-Y, as opposed to G-I-R-L-I-E, which “girlie” means more sexy. I don’t know if there’s a difference there or not, or if I’ve just created that on the spot. [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: But I don’t see a lot of that because what I like doing, what I like reading is humor stuff. I’d rather read Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese than the current issue of Spider-Man. Even though Spider-Man is really good, I want to look at something that is funny and has a little bit of imagination to it. Even when I go to the comic book store, I’ll pick up an old Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade that reprints all of Carl Barks’ old stories and leave everything that is current on the shelf. Again, it’s just my taste; it’s just what I like.
And I think Jingle Belle is a throwback to those books. I can do one or two humor stories per issue and make it like my version of Disney’s Comics and Stories—there’s Jing in one story, here’s Ida Red in another story. You get two stories for the price of one. To me, that’s just more interesting than doing your standard superhero epic. But for most kids who are into comics at all, guys are most into the people doing the superhero comics, and the girls are doing … I don’t really know what they’re doing.
WC: [LAUGH.]
DINI: It’s primarily superhero comics, and there are very few people, if any, out there that want to be the next Carl Barks or Floyd Gottfredson. And if there are any of those people out there, they’re doing those weasels-in-bathing-suits comics. The furry comics.
WC: There’s a whole creepy world of that stuff out there, man.
DINI: Yeah.
WC: Well, the last question I have for you is one we ask everyone.
DINI: Sure.
WC: Do dogs have lips?
DINI: [PAUSE.] Yes. And the are magnificent. [LAUGH.]
WC: [LAUGH.]
DC Comics Press Conference: Detective Comics’ Paul Dini
CC | October 21, 2006
DC Comics staged its first telephone press conference on Friday afternoon, focusing on Detective Comics Writer Paul Dini. Also on call were DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio and Marketing Manager Alex Segura. Following is an edited transcription:
DAN DiDIO: I’m just going to turn it over to Paul … what Paul’s plans are for Detective, basically just asking the question why he took the position, what he’s looking to get, his approach to the series and, also, what his plans are.
PAUL DINI: As you all know, I love Batman. I’ve been a fan of the character for years. I was lucky enough to work on the original animated series and help develop that show, and I have a real affinity for the character, both reading stories about him and apparently writing them also.
And so, when […] they were looking for a new writer on Detective, for a long time Dan had wanted to get me involved in a more hand’s on position for writing Batman. We had talked about some other directions with Batman. Recently, when you mentioned you were going to start with Detective and go back to an older approach of individual done stories, I was very interested because that seems to be a rare opportunity to inject a big [piece] of new mythology into Batman’s world.
A lot of great writers have worked on the character recently, and they’ve done some terrific ongoing stories, but I just felt it would be fun to kind of go in a new direction with some of the villains and supporting characters, add some new characters and just go back [to] concentrate on Bruce Wayne for a bit, and just see what came out of those. And just go back and tell hopefully good ol’ standalone Batman stories, the kind of things you can read and enjoy from month to month. You never know what you’re going to get.
DiDIO: Paul was the one person I always wanted to get onboard to do this because, part of what I always enjoyed, and when I got hooked on Batman, they were done-in-one stories. And I enjoyed Detective Comics more than I enjoyed Batman comics at the time. The reason was I enjoyed the whole detective aspect, the mystery in each individual issue.
Plus, Paul mentioned the two key words on why we wanted to have him on board, and why we made the switch, and even with Grant [Morrison, Batman writer] as well, is that both of them brought [a] sense of focus on Bruce Wayne again. That was a character that seemed to have been a character forgotten in the DCU for an extended period of time. And it was important for Bruce Wayne to be integral to the character and get that sense of secret identity again.
DINI: Yeah, my point of view is you don’t have a Batman story unless you have Bruce Wayne in some form or another. Bruce Wayne is really the guy. Batman is the extra edge he needs to complete a mission or solve a mystery. One of my favorite elements in dealing with Bruce is to actually have Bruce do a lot of the legwork towards solving a mystery, whether he’s Bruce Wayne socialite or in a disguise as a low-ranking Gotham hoodlum, or just sitting at the computer. And when he needs that extra bit of strength or intimidation or extra scary edge, then there’s Batman. That’s when the Batman identity comes in more useful.
ALEX SEGURA: I think when it was initially announced that it was going to be one-issue spotlights as opposed to over-arching stories, the misconception may have been nothing lasting is going to come, that it’s just going to be in-and-out stuff. But you’re actually new characters and reintegrating some of the villains. Do you want to touch on that?
DINI: By kind of going back to an older style of storytelling, one that I enjoyed when I was a kid, is that you, the writer, would [plant] little seeds that would take a little while to sprout, but they would eventually down the line. But, that said, you would get an enjoyable story with Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or whatever hero you were reading at the time, so that you could have the lead hero fight a villain or get involved in a nasty situation, resolve it, have a fun end-beat, and yet you would have planted a few seeds along the way for future episodes.
My goal with certain characters, like the Penguin or the Riddler, by kind of reforming them or rethinking them a little bit, I want the audience to become familiar with those aspects of the character so that’s potential area for story down the road. And it will accumulate into something, a bigger story involving them. Along the way, different seeds will be planted and then we can do […] different things with them.
And with having something like the Riddler as a detective, I had a lot of fun with that, and I refer to it constantly. But I may leave that for six months and just revisit sometime else. And, at the same time, I think other writers who are taking shots at Batman stories, they can play around with that too, if they like.
SEGURA: Having worked on the animated series as well, what’s the biggest difference compared to the comic?
DINI: The biggest difference is that the stories can be a bit more adult, a bit more sophisticated, a little more darker than we could do it on television. One of the things I regretted was never being able to do in the animated series was an actual murder mystery, where Batman comes in and finds the body on the floor and has to put together how that person was killed. Because, even though we could have the intent of death in the animated series, we rarely could have somebody get killed or murdered. Occasionally, somebody could get blown up or destroyed or something. But the actual procedural of how somebody was murdered or if they were murdered through a crime of passion or insanity was something we always had to tip-toe around. Here, that is ripe territory for a story. I enjoy it from that aspect.
Also, the action can be a little more intense. The dialogue can be a little more intense. It always serves the purpose of the character.
SEGURA: Dan, you brought up the focus on Bruce Wayne. I think coming out of Infinite Crisis, there was a definite move towards humanizing Batman. Do you want to talk about why Paul and Grant were the ideal people for that?
DiDIO: Not only did they bring a sense of great storytelling, but also the main thing that I found that was most exciting is they brought a little sense of humor to the character. He’s a little more lighter. It’s not lighter in the sense that we have jokes being told. It’s lighter in the sense of what their attitudes are and how they approach the situations, which I think adds a level of depth and, in some ways, complexity to the characters. It makes it a lot more fun and enjoyable read.
We just enjoyed the sensibilities to the character, by humanizing him and bringing Bruce Wayne back to the forefront.
DINI: I think Bruce needs a sense of humor to do what he does. Even if it’s warped or extremely dry, every soldier or cop or person in a role like that has to have that perspective of themselves, or else they’ll go crazy. I think that Batman for a long time was going toward a very dark and crazy type place. So, by touching with that Bruce Wayne element, he’s able to stand back and take a look at himself and yet keep going. He’s able to take himself very seriously most of the time but also use his dark sense of humor when he has to.
SEGURA: Another thing about the series is that you’ve gotten a chance to work with three fairly versatile artists, starting with J.H. [Williams] III. Then Joe Benitez stepped in for an issue. What’s that been like?
DINI: It’s been a lot of fun because each artist brings a lot to the table, and also to the concept of Batman. With Joe, he did a very sexy book with Ivy…
DiDIO: As well it should be.
DINI: Not only did she look great, but I liked the moments of interplay he was able to render in this little scene between Ivy and Robin. I wanted that to be kind of innocent and playful, to play off the horrific thing Poison Ivy has done. I think he captured that really well.
Don Kramer delights me every issue. He keeps coming up with new ideas, fun takes on some of the established characters.
And J.H. was terrific on the “Façade” issue. He brought great sense of design and style. I let him have his hand with that one. I just said, “Façade is a guy with a beard and mask and a suit. Come up with something you think is fun for that.” And he did. He gave him this great sense of style and visual humor and everything. It’s been a lot of fun seeing what they come up with.
Questions were then opened up to the press.
QUESTION #1: I noticed in one of your issues you brought in the character Roxy Rocket, who you created for the animated series, and also you’ve been using a font style that was used in the show. Are there other influences from the series you were hoping to incorporate into the DC Universe?
DINI: I think through osmosis, over the last [ten] years, a lot of elements have already bled int. There will be times we do something in the animated series—it may not be a character, but it might [be] an attitude or storytelling technique that we’ll notice another writer has used in telling a Batman story. So, we find a breaking down of the walls between the two concepts.
But by bringing in a character like Roxy Rocket, it was sort of like, “Yeah, let’s cross the line to the animated series and let’s bring in that element.” But I sort of also needed a colorful villain to kick things off, and I didn’t want to use one of the more established Rogues’ Gallery guys from the comic. I thought that, within the context of this version of Batman, Roxy kind of fits. This could be a villain he’s fought before. God knows, he’s fought I don’t know how many guys, and we’re still just dealing with the tip of the iceberg in a lot of ways.
On the other hand, it was sort of a wink to her fans, saying here’s this girl that was [featured] in Superman and Batman and a couple of animated [comic] book issues. But, yeah, she kind of fits with the context of this world, especially with the context of what Batman had to do. And that is, go after somebody who’s more of a nuisance, they get themselves in trouble, and not only does he have to spend time fighting her and also getting her down safely after she crashes. And he comes home, and he’s tired, and he doesn’t want to deal with anything, and then, “Oh, great, here’s the Riddler in my house. What the hell does he want.”
So, she serves the purpose really well. Will there be a solo Roxy Rocket issue? I don’t know. But she’s running around, and if one of the other writers has a good story for her, fine. I may come back to her at some point. I just thought she was fun to put in there.
Harley Quinn … yeah. You’ll definitely be seeing her sooner rather than later. In fact, I just saw the cover for that issue, and it looks really, really cute. Not cute. Fun. When I saw it, I was going, “That’s nice. That’s very cool.”
QUESTION #2: How important is pacing when you’re mapping out the story? What challenge is there to get everything into one issue?
DINI: Well, some issues are easier than others. I generally write each issue and map out each issue pretty thoroughly on a legal pad before I start writing. Some of the stories—like the one I’m writing now, which is a fairly straight-forward mystery—it came to me kind of in a flash. When I set it down, I had the story already written down. And the real work is to make sure I tell it in a style that isn’t linear and that doesn’t reveal too much to the reader and that the surprises stay surprises up into the end.
That was one of those rare instances of where, “This is the villain, this is what he wants, this is why Batman fights him, and this is the resolution at the end.” And then the craft comes in setting it down in a way where you’re always guessing. They’re all hard to write and that’s about in the mid-range as far as being a hard one [to] write.
The hardest one so far, the most time-consuming one, was the Penguin one. And I think when you read that one, it comes off across almost effortless, almost like a lark, because there are all these fun elements in it. But there I had eaten up almost two legal pads plotting out the story and the characters I wanted to use. And then I wrote the whole thing out on note cards, like we used to do on Lost, like breaking down scenes for a movie, and put them all on one wall and move them around … I had a lot going down.
And bringing in Lois Lane was a late addition to the story. But once I broke the story down, I could take the character beats and move it around. I wanted Bruce to talk to someone—not Alfred, and Robin was underage and he couldn’t get into the nightclub, so I thought of Lois. Why not? It may be a stretch that she was covering a social event, but you could play it off a little bit.
And we need some magic, so I had him call up Zatanna. That’s sort of detective work because he doesn’t automatically know that kind of stuff, but he has the resources to do it. It became a lot of fun moving the elements around. Once the story was broken, which actually took more time than the actual writing, I was able to sit down and write fairly quickly. So, they vary in length, and they vary in technique on how they run and how I write them. Some of the ideas I have for later in the run are some of the ideas I started with at the very beginning.
I have a Joker story coming up in two months. And that was almost the first story that popped into my head. Dan, I think I pitched that to you a year or two ago.
DiDIO: You did pitch it, yeah. That was the first pitch.
DINI: Again, it was a story that popped into my head—Robin vs. the Joker in a very unique situation. Once I had that in my mind, the story just kind of worked itself out. That was a fairly easy one to [write].
QUESTION #3: In the Riddler issue, you made a point of reversing the recent decision to have the Riddler discover Batman’s identity. Was this a decision on your part or an editorial decision on DC’s part?
DINI: It was sort of mine because I didn’t know basically really what was going on with the Riddler. I had an idea, and I liked the idea, of having the Riddler as a rival detective for Batman, a kind of evil Inspector Lestrade to Batman’s Sherlock Holmes, and I thought the Riddler would fit in kind of nicely in that role. And I did know that, as a result of Hush, that Riddler did know who Batman was. But I wasn’t sure how that was going to play into the long-term continuity. I asked my editor, Pete [Tomasi], about that, and I asked a few other people. And everybody was like it could have gone either way.
I think that if he had retained the memory, I could have worked with that too. It would have been like, “Well, Bruce, what do you think of this one?” “Well, Eddie, I think I have a handle on this…”
DiDIO: My own personal preference is that he keeps his identity secret. The secret of Bruce’s or Batman’s identity is one of the most-guarded secrets in the DC Universe, unless it’s Clark and Superman. From that standpoint, I prefer you make the switch and bring it back to where it was before.
DINI: That was my preference too. I think a lot of villains don’t really care who Batman is. Without the suit, he loses a lot of the luster and the attraction. He becomes a very human guy, and they lose interest in him.
So, it just seemed to work out that way. And when I found out in 52 there were going to be various instances where he got hit in the face with a mace or something and went to the hospital, I played on that. Is it the most logical or realistic? Maybe not, but it served the purpose, and I think it got kind of an interesting character direction out of the Riddler from that.
QUESTION #4: Will we see any more heroes, like Zatanna? More specifically, Dick Grayson?
DINI: Yes. Actually, two months from now in the Robin / Joker story, there’s kind of a moment that takes place during 52. They haven’t really revealed where they are, but there is [a] Dick / Tim moment where they’re talking; it’s a two- or three-page sequence that […] was kind of fun, where they were comparing notes on the Joker and who he is and what their various feelings are. And I like writing scenes like that because they should discuss their [friends] and enemies at times when they’re not necessarily wearing the masks. Because what else are they going to talk about? It would probably be a discussion even when they’re having coffee, the questions of various heroes and villains are going to come up.
Even though Dick does not take a great role in the story, Tim is sort of asking him for his opinion on a few things. And that kind of interplay between the characters is something I like doing an awful lot.
As for other heroes, I think I’ll work them in when I can. There actually is another appearance by Zatanna coming later in the run. That story deals more with her and Bruce and Batman’s relationship. That’ll be a lot of fun. I think that actually might be a two-part story.
QUESTION #5: Have you thought about [taking] the mystery approach with Batman in a long form, like a graphic novel?
DINI: Oh, yeah. I’d love to do that. It all comes down to time and scheduling and when I can make it work. I’ve got other commitments, but I would love to sit down for that.
Part of the reason I put in a lot of those elements like the Riddler [as] a detective and the Penguin [as] a legitimate businessman, I would love to actually take a hundred pages or however many and tell a long story within that world and bring in more of the detective elements and just sort of let it play through, almost like a novel.
Whenever I get to that this year, next year, or at any time remains to be seen because schedules are pretty volatile. But just having the monthly book is a lot of fun because I can put those ideas out there and play them off later.
I still have the Black Canary / Zatanna graphic novel that I’m in the middle of script and need to get done. That will be fore late next year or something. Once that’s done, I would love to return to Batman for a serious long-form.
QUESTION #6: Do you script differently, depending on who is drawing?
DINI: No, not generally. I try to make my scripting accessible to whatever artist is drawing it. I try to write in a style that allows for both of some detail as far [as] the point of what the story is and also for some artistic improvisation. Hopefully, that comes through in the scripting. And I also try and keep the door open to the artist and say, “If you want to talk about the scene or play it another way, let’s by all means discuss it.” But I also like having the artist have a bit of freedom.
DiDIO: That’s also the editor, Pete Tomasi. What he’s doing is knowing what stories that Paul’s working on, [as well as] making decisions on the artists who are available [and] who would be the best one.
QUESTION #7: I noticed Don Kramer has been providing art for more issues. Would you label him as the permanent artist of Detective Comics?
DiDIO: I wouldn’t say he’s the permanent artist. Don’s doing a great job, and the fact of the matter [is] that he’s available right now, we’re leaning on him a little bit heavier than the other guys as we speak. But once Paul has a breakout or two, we’ll be looking at other artists to turn to at those points too.
QUESTION #8: You mentioned the Black Canary / Zatanna graphic novel. Is it too early to discuss that at all in terms of the direction of the story?
DiDIO: [TO DINI.] Just tell them the artists and that’ll give you the direction.
DINI: Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti.
CC | October 21, 2006
DC Comics staged its first telephone press conference on Friday afternoon, focusing on Detective Comics Writer Paul Dini. Also on call were DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio and Marketing Manager Alex Segura. Following is an edited transcription:
DAN DiDIO: I’m just going to turn it over to Paul … what Paul’s plans are for Detective, basically just asking the question why he took the position, what he’s looking to get, his approach to the series and, also, what his plans are.
PAUL DINI: As you all know, I love Batman. I’ve been a fan of the character for years. I was lucky enough to work on the original animated series and help develop that show, and I have a real affinity for the character, both reading stories about him and apparently writing them also.
And so, when […] they were looking for a new writer on Detective, for a long time Dan had wanted to get me involved in a more hand’s on position for writing Batman. We had talked about some other directions with Batman. Recently, when you mentioned you were going to start with Detective and go back to an older approach of individual done stories, I was very interested because that seems to be a rare opportunity to inject a big [piece] of new mythology into Batman’s world.
A lot of great writers have worked on the character recently, and they’ve done some terrific ongoing stories, but I just felt it would be fun to kind of go in a new direction with some of the villains and supporting characters, add some new characters and just go back [to] concentrate on Bruce Wayne for a bit, and just see what came out of those. And just go back and tell hopefully good ol’ standalone Batman stories, the kind of things you can read and enjoy from month to month. You never know what you’re going to get.
DiDIO: Paul was the one person I always wanted to get onboard to do this because, part of what I always enjoyed, and when I got hooked on Batman, they were done-in-one stories. And I enjoyed Detective Comics more than I enjoyed Batman comics at the time. The reason was I enjoyed the whole detective aspect, the mystery in each individual issue.
Plus, Paul mentioned the two key words on why we wanted to have him on board, and why we made the switch, and even with Grant [Morrison, Batman writer] as well, is that both of them brought [a] sense of focus on Bruce Wayne again. That was a character that seemed to have been a character forgotten in the DCU for an extended period of time. And it was important for Bruce Wayne to be integral to the character and get that sense of secret identity again.
DINI: Yeah, my point of view is you don’t have a Batman story unless you have Bruce Wayne in some form or another. Bruce Wayne is really the guy. Batman is the extra edge he needs to complete a mission or solve a mystery. One of my favorite elements in dealing with Bruce is to actually have Bruce do a lot of the legwork towards solving a mystery, whether he’s Bruce Wayne socialite or in a disguise as a low-ranking Gotham hoodlum, or just sitting at the computer. And when he needs that extra bit of strength or intimidation or extra scary edge, then there’s Batman. That’s when the Batman identity comes in more useful.
ALEX SEGURA: I think when it was initially announced that it was going to be one-issue spotlights as opposed to over-arching stories, the misconception may have been nothing lasting is going to come, that it’s just going to be in-and-out stuff. But you’re actually new characters and reintegrating some of the villains. Do you want to touch on that?
DINI: By kind of going back to an older style of storytelling, one that I enjoyed when I was a kid, is that you, the writer, would [plant] little seeds that would take a little while to sprout, but they would eventually down the line. But, that said, you would get an enjoyable story with Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or whatever hero you were reading at the time, so that you could have the lead hero fight a villain or get involved in a nasty situation, resolve it, have a fun end-beat, and yet you would have planted a few seeds along the way for future episodes.
My goal with certain characters, like the Penguin or the Riddler, by kind of reforming them or rethinking them a little bit, I want the audience to become familiar with those aspects of the character so that’s potential area for story down the road. And it will accumulate into something, a bigger story involving them. Along the way, different seeds will be planted and then we can do […] different things with them.
And with having something like the Riddler as a detective, I had a lot of fun with that, and I refer to it constantly. But I may leave that for six months and just revisit sometime else. And, at the same time, I think other writers who are taking shots at Batman stories, they can play around with that too, if they like.
SEGURA: Having worked on the animated series as well, what’s the biggest difference compared to the comic?
DINI: The biggest difference is that the stories can be a bit more adult, a bit more sophisticated, a little more darker than we could do it on television. One of the things I regretted was never being able to do in the animated series was an actual murder mystery, where Batman comes in and finds the body on the floor and has to put together how that person was killed. Because, even though we could have the intent of death in the animated series, we rarely could have somebody get killed or murdered. Occasionally, somebody could get blown up or destroyed or something. But the actual procedural of how somebody was murdered or if they were murdered through a crime of passion or insanity was something we always had to tip-toe around. Here, that is ripe territory for a story. I enjoy it from that aspect.
Also, the action can be a little more intense. The dialogue can be a little more intense. It always serves the purpose of the character.
SEGURA: Dan, you brought up the focus on Bruce Wayne. I think coming out of Infinite Crisis, there was a definite move towards humanizing Batman. Do you want to talk about why Paul and Grant were the ideal people for that?
DiDIO: Not only did they bring a sense of great storytelling, but also the main thing that I found that was most exciting is they brought a little sense of humor to the character. He’s a little more lighter. It’s not lighter in the sense that we have jokes being told. It’s lighter in the sense of what their attitudes are and how they approach the situations, which I think adds a level of depth and, in some ways, complexity to the characters. It makes it a lot more fun and enjoyable read.
We just enjoyed the sensibilities to the character, by humanizing him and bringing Bruce Wayne back to the forefront.
DINI: I think Bruce needs a sense of humor to do what he does. Even if it’s warped or extremely dry, every soldier or cop or person in a role like that has to have that perspective of themselves, or else they’ll go crazy. I think that Batman for a long time was going toward a very dark and crazy type place. So, by touching with that Bruce Wayne element, he’s able to stand back and take a look at himself and yet keep going. He’s able to take himself very seriously most of the time but also use his dark sense of humor when he has to.
SEGURA: Another thing about the series is that you’ve gotten a chance to work with three fairly versatile artists, starting with J.H. [Williams] III. Then Joe Benitez stepped in for an issue. What’s that been like?
DINI: It’s been a lot of fun because each artist brings a lot to the table, and also to the concept of Batman. With Joe, he did a very sexy book with Ivy…
DiDIO: As well it should be.
DINI: Not only did she look great, but I liked the moments of interplay he was able to render in this little scene between Ivy and Robin. I wanted that to be kind of innocent and playful, to play off the horrific thing Poison Ivy has done. I think he captured that really well.
Don Kramer delights me every issue. He keeps coming up with new ideas, fun takes on some of the established characters.
And J.H. was terrific on the “Façade” issue. He brought great sense of design and style. I let him have his hand with that one. I just said, “Façade is a guy with a beard and mask and a suit. Come up with something you think is fun for that.” And he did. He gave him this great sense of style and visual humor and everything. It’s been a lot of fun seeing what they come up with.
Questions were then opened up to the press.
QUESTION #1: I noticed in one of your issues you brought in the character Roxy Rocket, who you created for the animated series, and also you’ve been using a font style that was used in the show. Are there other influences from the series you were hoping to incorporate into the DC Universe?
DINI: I think through osmosis, over the last [ten] years, a lot of elements have already bled int. There will be times we do something in the animated series—it may not be a character, but it might [be] an attitude or storytelling technique that we’ll notice another writer has used in telling a Batman story. So, we find a breaking down of the walls between the two concepts.
But by bringing in a character like Roxy Rocket, it was sort of like, “Yeah, let’s cross the line to the animated series and let’s bring in that element.” But I sort of also needed a colorful villain to kick things off, and I didn’t want to use one of the more established Rogues’ Gallery guys from the comic. I thought that, within the context of this version of Batman, Roxy kind of fits. This could be a villain he’s fought before. God knows, he’s fought I don’t know how many guys, and we’re still just dealing with the tip of the iceberg in a lot of ways.
On the other hand, it was sort of a wink to her fans, saying here’s this girl that was [featured] in Superman and Batman and a couple of animated [comic] book issues. But, yeah, she kind of fits with the context of this world, especially with the context of what Batman had to do. And that is, go after somebody who’s more of a nuisance, they get themselves in trouble, and not only does he have to spend time fighting her and also getting her down safely after she crashes. And he comes home, and he’s tired, and he doesn’t want to deal with anything, and then, “Oh, great, here’s the Riddler in my house. What the hell does he want.”
So, she serves the purpose really well. Will there be a solo Roxy Rocket issue? I don’t know. But she’s running around, and if one of the other writers has a good story for her, fine. I may come back to her at some point. I just thought she was fun to put in there.
Harley Quinn … yeah. You’ll definitely be seeing her sooner rather than later. In fact, I just saw the cover for that issue, and it looks really, really cute. Not cute. Fun. When I saw it, I was going, “That’s nice. That’s very cool.”
QUESTION #2: How important is pacing when you’re mapping out the story? What challenge is there to get everything into one issue?
DINI: Well, some issues are easier than others. I generally write each issue and map out each issue pretty thoroughly on a legal pad before I start writing. Some of the stories—like the one I’m writing now, which is a fairly straight-forward mystery—it came to me kind of in a flash. When I set it down, I had the story already written down. And the real work is to make sure I tell it in a style that isn’t linear and that doesn’t reveal too much to the reader and that the surprises stay surprises up into the end.
That was one of those rare instances of where, “This is the villain, this is what he wants, this is why Batman fights him, and this is the resolution at the end.” And then the craft comes in setting it down in a way where you’re always guessing. They’re all hard to write and that’s about in the mid-range as far as being a hard one [to] write.
The hardest one so far, the most time-consuming one, was the Penguin one. And I think when you read that one, it comes off across almost effortless, almost like a lark, because there are all these fun elements in it. But there I had eaten up almost two legal pads plotting out the story and the characters I wanted to use. And then I wrote the whole thing out on note cards, like we used to do on Lost, like breaking down scenes for a movie, and put them all on one wall and move them around … I had a lot going down.
And bringing in Lois Lane was a late addition to the story. But once I broke the story down, I could take the character beats and move it around. I wanted Bruce to talk to someone—not Alfred, and Robin was underage and he couldn’t get into the nightclub, so I thought of Lois. Why not? It may be a stretch that she was covering a social event, but you could play it off a little bit.
And we need some magic, so I had him call up Zatanna. That’s sort of detective work because he doesn’t automatically know that kind of stuff, but he has the resources to do it. It became a lot of fun moving the elements around. Once the story was broken, which actually took more time than the actual writing, I was able to sit down and write fairly quickly. So, they vary in length, and they vary in technique on how they run and how I write them. Some of the ideas I have for later in the run are some of the ideas I started with at the very beginning.
I have a Joker story coming up in two months. And that was almost the first story that popped into my head. Dan, I think I pitched that to you a year or two ago.
DiDIO: You did pitch it, yeah. That was the first pitch.
DINI: Again, it was a story that popped into my head—Robin vs. the Joker in a very unique situation. Once I had that in my mind, the story just kind of worked itself out. That was a fairly easy one to [write].
QUESTION #3: In the Riddler issue, you made a point of reversing the recent decision to have the Riddler discover Batman’s identity. Was this a decision on your part or an editorial decision on DC’s part?
DINI: It was sort of mine because I didn’t know basically really what was going on with the Riddler. I had an idea, and I liked the idea, of having the Riddler as a rival detective for Batman, a kind of evil Inspector Lestrade to Batman’s Sherlock Holmes, and I thought the Riddler would fit in kind of nicely in that role. And I did know that, as a result of Hush, that Riddler did know who Batman was. But I wasn’t sure how that was going to play into the long-term continuity. I asked my editor, Pete [Tomasi], about that, and I asked a few other people. And everybody was like it could have gone either way.
I think that if he had retained the memory, I could have worked with that too. It would have been like, “Well, Bruce, what do you think of this one?” “Well, Eddie, I think I have a handle on this…”
DiDIO: My own personal preference is that he keeps his identity secret. The secret of Bruce’s or Batman’s identity is one of the most-guarded secrets in the DC Universe, unless it’s Clark and Superman. From that standpoint, I prefer you make the switch and bring it back to where it was before.
DINI: That was my preference too. I think a lot of villains don’t really care who Batman is. Without the suit, he loses a lot of the luster and the attraction. He becomes a very human guy, and they lose interest in him.
So, it just seemed to work out that way. And when I found out in 52 there were going to be various instances where he got hit in the face with a mace or something and went to the hospital, I played on that. Is it the most logical or realistic? Maybe not, but it served the purpose, and I think it got kind of an interesting character direction out of the Riddler from that.
QUESTION #4: Will we see any more heroes, like Zatanna? More specifically, Dick Grayson?
DINI: Yes. Actually, two months from now in the Robin / Joker story, there’s kind of a moment that takes place during 52. They haven’t really revealed where they are, but there is [a] Dick / Tim moment where they’re talking; it’s a two- or three-page sequence that […] was kind of fun, where they were comparing notes on the Joker and who he is and what their various feelings are. And I like writing scenes like that because they should discuss their [friends] and enemies at times when they’re not necessarily wearing the masks. Because what else are they going to talk about? It would probably be a discussion even when they’re having coffee, the questions of various heroes and villains are going to come up.
Even though Dick does not take a great role in the story, Tim is sort of asking him for his opinion on a few things. And that kind of interplay between the characters is something I like doing an awful lot.
As for other heroes, I think I’ll work them in when I can. There actually is another appearance by Zatanna coming later in the run. That story deals more with her and Bruce and Batman’s relationship. That’ll be a lot of fun. I think that actually might be a two-part story.
QUESTION #5: Have you thought about [taking] the mystery approach with Batman in a long form, like a graphic novel?
DINI: Oh, yeah. I’d love to do that. It all comes down to time and scheduling and when I can make it work. I’ve got other commitments, but I would love to sit down for that.
Part of the reason I put in a lot of those elements like the Riddler [as] a detective and the Penguin [as] a legitimate businessman, I would love to actually take a hundred pages or however many and tell a long story within that world and bring in more of the detective elements and just sort of let it play through, almost like a novel.
Whenever I get to that this year, next year, or at any time remains to be seen because schedules are pretty volatile. But just having the monthly book is a lot of fun because I can put those ideas out there and play them off later.
I still have the Black Canary / Zatanna graphic novel that I’m in the middle of script and need to get done. That will be fore late next year or something. Once that’s done, I would love to return to Batman for a serious long-form.
QUESTION #6: Do you script differently, depending on who is drawing?
DINI: No, not generally. I try to make my scripting accessible to whatever artist is drawing it. I try to write in a style that allows for both of some detail as far [as] the point of what the story is and also for some artistic improvisation. Hopefully, that comes through in the scripting. And I also try and keep the door open to the artist and say, “If you want to talk about the scene or play it another way, let’s by all means discuss it.” But I also like having the artist have a bit of freedom.
DiDIO: That’s also the editor, Pete Tomasi. What he’s doing is knowing what stories that Paul’s working on, [as well as] making decisions on the artists who are available [and] who would be the best one.
QUESTION #7: I noticed Don Kramer has been providing art for more issues. Would you label him as the permanent artist of Detective Comics?
DiDIO: I wouldn’t say he’s the permanent artist. Don’s doing a great job, and the fact of the matter [is] that he’s available right now, we’re leaning on him a little bit heavier than the other guys as we speak. But once Paul has a breakout or two, we’ll be looking at other artists to turn to at those points too.
QUESTION #8: You mentioned the Black Canary / Zatanna graphic novel. Is it too early to discuss that at all in terms of the direction of the story?
DiDIO: [TO DINI.] Just tell them the artists and that’ll give you the direction.
DINI: Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti.
Revelator
Loathsome spotted reptile
The Boyd Kirkland interviews confirms something I'd suspected for a while: that Timm and Kirkland occasionally butted heads. There's nothing shameful about that--it's to be expected when two strong-willed people with differing visions work together. While that sort of friction can be harmful in excess, in small quantities it can enrich a show.
Pfeiffer-Pfan
Cool Rider
Timm has always come across as a no nonsense, ''meet my standards or leave'' kind of guy. But you know, I think B:TAS needed somebody like that back in the day. Radomski always seemed very nice and may have folded to the pressures/persuasion of the network and the likes of Sean Catherine Derek.
Timm seems like he can hold his ground a little more and butting heads with others is just part of the process... in any walk of life. I feel like he actually found a good partner with Tucker on JL/JLU, who could talk him in to things. Nice to see them properly reunited on Caped Crusader.
Revelator
Loathsome spotted reptile
IIRC, Timm mentioned in an interview that Broadcast Standards and Practices asked if it could deal with Alan Burnett instead of him, because it found Timm "a little intense."
I'm not mentioning that to be pejorative--I'd also be intense if I had to regularly deal with censors!
I'm not mentioning that to be pejorative--I'd also be intense if I had to regularly deal with censors!
Well, yeah, no artist wants their art censored by corporate bigwigs.
JonnyQuest037
DCAU Historian
Having interviewed BT by phone a couple of times and met him in person at a roundtable press conference once, yeah, he can project that vibe. There was a moment early in my first phone interview with him where he couldn't hear me for a few seconds but I could still hear him just fine. He just went "...John? John?" for a couple of seconds & then almost immediately hung up. I knew if I didn't call him back right away he'd forget all about the interview & just move on with his day without a second thought.
Eric is very nice, but I don't know if it's fair to characterize him as a pushover that folded to Sean Derek. BT and Eric were a pretty united front in the early days of BTAS, but they were both also first time producers & showrunners who were learning on the job. Sean Derek had different ideas for what BTAS could or should be, and that happens all the time. Fortunately, Alan Burnett was soon able to join BTAS and they were more simpatico with each other.
And BTW, both Sean and Bruce expressed regret to me about their clashes during the early days of BTAS & said that they'd handle it differently these days.
Are Standards & Practices people really "corporate bigwigs," though? They always sounded like the essence of middle management folk to me.
BT said in this interview that Dwayne McDuffie was the writer he was the most in sync with.
Do you have a favorite piece of work that you’ve done?
The short answer to that is: I love all the series I’ve done pretty much equally. I haven’t done a single series that I have been embarrassed by. Some of the movies are better than others.
My absolute favorite show I worked on, just because of how much fun it was to go to work every day, wass Justice League Unlimited. It’s the one that I actually go back and watch. I can actually go back and binge watch the entire Justice League Unlimited in a week.
We were a well-oiled machine at that point. And the crew that we had was really stellar. Dwayne McDuffie, I miss him every single day of my life. [McDuffie passed away in 2011.] I was so in sync with Duane. He understood me in a way that no other writer I’ve worked with has ever understood me. And it wasn’t just Duane. Sitting in the writers’ room with Duane, Stan Berkowitz, Matt Wayne, and James Tucker. It was just the most fun I have had in this business. Normally, I kind of hate sitting in the story room breaking episodes, but that was a blast. Every episode was a joy to work on with that crew.
Bruce Timm Interview: Justice League, Batman, Harley Quinn, & More
Den of Geek had a chance to chat with Bruce Timm about Justice League: Gods and Monsters and much more!
www.denofgeek.com
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