1. What initially drew you to comics?
The first comic I read -- an issue of Sugar and Spike that my older brother brought home when I was five -- opened up an entire new world to me. It felt like the door that opened from sepia to technicolor in The Wizard of Oz (or maybe that movie scene felt like reading a comic, since the comic came first). Sequential visual storytelling was something I believe I grasped immediately, and Sheldon Mayer was of course a master. I'm not sure I read well enough to understand on my own that the toddlers were speaking in babytalk that they (and the readers) understood but the adults did not, but that was an early introduction to how much possibility comics contain.
2. What do comics allow you to do as a creator?
It's that breadth of possibility again. I think that of all visual storytelling media, comics and animation are the best at making anything they show as real as anything else -- whether it's monsters or outer space or even memories of the past intruding on a character's present life in visual form. I played with this in my own way when I wrote my comics documentary about the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report, showing the events of the assassination but giving the people involved word balloons that came from testimony they gave months later. (This also helped me avoid using a lot of captions, which I think are death to good comics storytelling.) The best example I can give of comics' superiority in this realm of making everything real is the fact that nothing about the representation of magic and magical dimensions in the Doctor Strange movies comes close to measuring up to a single Steve Ditko panel.
At the same time, I also rely on the limitations of the comics form to guide me and then use my knowledge of the form to find ways of breaking free, what Ernie Colón once described to me as applying our disciplines and then throwing off our constraints. He once drew a page in Amethyst that had four panels, with the fourth panel taking up the bottom tier but also climbing up the right side into the second tier, and I realized when writing the dialogue that that one panel could serve double-duty, acting as both panel 3 and panel 5 if I spotted my balloons correctly. Rather than being constrained by the limits of page size and the amount of story that needed to be told (we gave Ernie page-by-page plots), we expanded the boundaries of what the art and dialogue could do.
3. Please tell us about your work creating Amethyst, as well as Dragonlance and any other projects you'd like to share about.
Both Amethyst and Blue Devil came about when editor Dave Manak asked Gary Cohn and me to come up with an ongoing feature for one of the mystery (they couldn't be called "horror") anthology titles he was editing. We were already writing "I, Vampire" in House of Mystery. Amethyst started with the working title "The Changeling" -- a changeling in folklore being a magical creature substituted for a human infant (and not a shapeshifter, which seems to have become the common usage in popular culture). But we didn't have clothes to dress it up in -- didn't even know if the main character would be a boy or a girl -- until the word "amethyst" popped into my head one day, sent out from the part of my unconscious that had been busily working on the problem all along, no doubt.
I called Gary and we quickly spun out the basics that weren't already in place: orphaned heir to the throne of the magical Gemworld who would have to battle the evil usurper who killed her birth parents; the twelve royal houses; and the fact that in her heroic guise, Amy grew to adulthood -- which was something Gary and I both loved from Joe Simon's The Fly from Archie Comics when we were kids. And then, knowing that Ernie Colón had started doing work at DC, and having loved his art on The Grim Ghost in the late 70s (I didn't know then that I'd also loved his uncredited work on various Harvey comics in the early 60s), I asked Dave if he might be available. He was, and he liked the concept -- though he was embarrassed when I told him about my fondness for The Grim Ghost, which he didn't care much for, but then he could be way too critical of his past jobs. He did some wonderful character development sketches, and came up with the final look for Dark Opal when he did the preview story on scratchboard.
The look of the Gemworld, the fact that every stone and tree and flower and structure appeared to be a living, sentient thing, is all Ernie's doing (that includes the fantastic cameo clasp on Dark Opal's cloak that mirrored his expressions). Ernie liked to throw us curveballs, as he called them, in the art, going off where his artistic senses took him and trusting us to make it work. It was a peak experience of my career and I have to say that co-creating both Amethyst and Blue Devil and having them end up in their own titles instead of becoming features in the anthologies kind of spoiled me for working on characters created by others. Though there's plenty of the latter I loved doing. I look back very fondly on my three-year run on Wonder Woman and have been very gratified to hear from fans who still remember it as a highlight of their comics-reading experience.
Blue Devil, as I said, was also supposed to be a feature in an anthology title, and Dave had given us the task of coming up with a character for Steve Ditko to draw, which is something I think you can see in the actual comic drawn by Paris Cullins. Ditko, as it turned out, wasn't interested, though Gary and I have different memories about his reasons -- I recall that Ditko said if he was going to do a new character, he wanted it to be all his; Gary remembers that he read the proposal and said it didn't seem like his thing (although again, we developed it expressly with him in mind).
These were great times at DC, with people like Jenette Kahn and Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando and Paul Levitz and Karen Berger opening the door for exciting things to happen. I'm incredibly grateful to them and to have been there.
About DragonLance, that just fell into my lap and turned out to be a joy to work on -- not only because the stories it was based on were solid but because I was paired with Ron Randall. As I'd later be paired with Jan Duursema (and for a couple of issues Tom Mandrake) on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I advise any writer not to turn down a chance to work with a Kubert School graduate! We also had a lot of fun because we were pretty much ignored by any higher ups at DC and had plenty of free reign. Though I should say that TSR, the original owners of Dungeons & Dragons, were not always great to work with. I sometimes felt they didn't understand I was trying to create self-contained stories, not be the dungeon master of an ongoing D&D campaign. (An exception was Jeff Grubb, who was also a writer.) And I was tickled when I met one of the DragonLance creators, Margaret Weis, and she told me how much she liked the comic and how true to her creation it felt.
I also want to mention that about a dozen years ago I co-founded a nonprofit called Kids Read Comics, which puts on the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival in collaboration with the Ann Arbor (Michigan) District Library. It's oriented toward young readers, which is where I think the future of comics lies, and we almost never have any guests show up who work on superhero books. Long-form comics for young readers put out by the comics divisions of New York trade publishers is where I'm aiming my own creative efforts now. I'm thrilled that A2CAF came into being as a new world of such books was coming to be, and that we've had lots of terrific, not to mention bestselling, creators come to our show.
4. Where can we find more information about your work?
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