(Continued)

Once you get a series picked up, does that mean you’re on easy street and will always be able to sell your work?

Wouldn’t that be loverly!

Would that it were true.

I often tell my students at the course I teach for Writing For The Comics, at the School of Visual Arts, you think it’s all about selling the first story, getting the first gig, but there are decisions you have to make time and again, over and over, about what kind of writer you are going to be, just as you have to make decisions all your life about what kind of life you are going to live. It doesn’t stop. There isn’t just one choice and then you don’t have to make any others.

The trick is to know what it is you want to do and why you want to do it. But more, what’s worth fighting for.

What’s worth letting a project die, if the compromises have already killed the story.

But you better know what the cost can be, because this will affect everybody in your life, unless you’re alone.

Decide to do something in this business that hasn’t been done a thousand times before, and suddenly it’s the whole Chicken Little syndrome, and everybody’s afraid the sky is going to fall! And no one is going to apologize when it doesn’t, if you manage to get through what you set out to do to in the beginning.

When Mike Mayhew and I were working on LADY RAWHIDE: IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, Lady Rawhide was on all of the TOP 10 LISTS in comics oriented magazines. For seven straight months! Unfortunately, it was taking Mike somewhere in the neighborhood of three months to draw a single issue, so while we were on all those lists, we had no book to sell. You can’t know those things are going to happen, when it shoots through the roof, when a character gets so hot. There were some folks who thought I wanted to cash in on the Bad Girl craze that swept through comics in the 90s. But LADY RAWHIDE was created to be in the monthly ZORRO TOPPS COMICS series. Why? Because I knew I had to give myself plenty of incentive to write a monthly book. A monthly book is a monster that devours your life, especially if you want to put out a quality monthly book, that has to come out ON TIME! Well, quite honestly, if I had to write about just guys, I’d have gone nuts. I wanted a woman in the series that could stand toe to toe with Zorro. He would not steal any scene from her. It’ll happen easy when you have one character in a great look outfit like Zorro’s.

Anyhow, the short answer is, "No," it doesn’t mean you will be on Easy Street, nor that you will be able to sell anything else.

And a writer has to be careful, because many in this business keep wanting to put you in a tiny, well-defined cage that says, "This writer DOES THIS!" So, if they perceive you as a serious writer, they aren’t going to give you the chance to do comedy. If they see you as the writer who does MYSTERIES, they aren’t thinking of you for FANTASY. If you write a COMIC STRIP, that scarcely means you exist in the world of COMIC BOOKS, or vice versa.

If you aren’t writing a number of series, what happens if a series is cancelled?

You’ve got to get something else going.

Yet, something that you can bring something to, something worth the writing, something where you won’t get lost and forget who and why you started doing this.

It’s a long road. You can’t predict anything. It’s an endurance course. And sometimes, if you succeed or fail, that story is the same, it didn’t change, something make it accessible at a point in time.

I’ve had people think of me as the HORROR writer, because of horror anthology stories I did for Warren Magazines and at Marvel during the beginning of my career. There are others who think of me primarily as the SUPERHERO writer, because of series like THE BLACK PANTHER and SABRE. Still others know me as the MYSTERY writer, because of DETECTIVES INC. and NATHANIEL DUSK. Or another group only know me as the WESTERN writer, who does ZORRO and LADY RAWHIDE.

And where does that leave strips like RAGAMUFFINS?

Or prose books like DRAGONFLAME AND OTHER BEDTIME NIGHTMARES or THE VARIABLE SYNDROME.

And there are some who just love the introductions to the stories.

I don’t have it up on the website yet, but we’ve been discussing offering an Internet version of the writing course I teach at the School of Visual Arts. The student will write their own proposal; their own story. They will have samples of a script proposal and finished script, and the course will help them understand the form, and why they are presented in a particular manner. It will teach them the terminology of comics and critique their stories to help them make their story-- not my way of telling a story, but theirs-- better.

I notice that a lot of your fans talk about the impact DETECTIVES INC. had on them. Why do you think this story-line struck a chord with so many people?

Wow! I don’t know if there is one answer to that. It depends upon the individual reader, in many ways. Part of it, for many, are Rainier and Denning. I think they prove their essential humanity comes first, in the way they relate to the people who hire them as investigators. A part of it is also their easy camaraderie with each other, and their concern for what happens to the other. And that race is a distant factor in order of importance to them, that these guys love each other, despite their different temperaments and opinions on things. I think people love to hear them debate different sides of an issue. They are not carbon copies of each other. I think a number of people love that these are two guys who grew up with certain values that they DO hold in common, giving your word and keeping it, knowing they CAN go BACK TO BACK IN AN ALLEY, and the other, neither has a doubt, will be their to cover the other. And probably because they live in our world, they know the Pop Culture we do. People often make the comparison to the T.V. series I SPY. I love Culp and Cosby; like Hopalong Cassidy; I can’t imagine who I would be if I hadn’t experienced these characters in my life. Well, Denning and Rainier have also experienced these characters, seen these movies or shows, and they LOVE them, but they aren’t them, they’re two guys trying to survive in New York City, who want to do something with their lives, and yet nothing conventional, something that some people will find valueless, but they never give it up, and they never give up on each other. And they really feel for the what they see happen to people who come to them They want to make it right.

They want to ease the hurt. They’re trying to survive their own hurts.

Is it difficult to retain your original "vision" (intentions) when faced with editors and publishers who may not share that vision?

Absolutely. And that can be a very tough monster to face. If you’re a beginning writer, you often won’t even know who is drawing your book. You won’t see the way it has been visualized until the actual book exists. More than that, if it’s an editor who makes changes at a whim, and wields that power without any concern for the talent, then you can have shocks and surprises that will take the breath out of you. On the other hand, I have always believed that books need an advocate, an editor who will champion them when they dare to be unique, to take a stand.

It is tough enough keeping your intent alive through the long months of writing a series. There are scenes that are just waiting for you. You know they’re coming; but you still haven’t figured out how to do it. If you pull it off, it’ll make that book stronger, it will bring those characters alive, it will make this book worth everything you went through to do it.

In the first DETECTIVES INC.: A REMEMBRANCE OF THREATENING GREEN I was finally going to have the chance to do these characters I’d first created in 1969. Only now, it is 1981. I combined what I had originally intended to be the first two stories back in 1969 into this first graphic album. Only in the 1969 version had Rainier and Denning involved in a campus uprising. College campuses were hardly hot-beds of confrontation in 1981. The setting now became the South Bronx, with Denning and Rainier facing off against a gang of kids, some no older than 12, some wearing Star Wars T-Shirts. But the end was the same. Denning had to use a gun. I wanted to show the aftermath of having to use a gun on a man who didn’t want to kill. And so that stays a part who Denning is, a part of his history that is filled not just with regret, but sometimes more complicated responses, like anger. And the second story line had Rainier’s ex-wife hiring him to be a bodyguard to her new lover. In the new version, she hires him to look into the murder of a lesbian mid-wife. But the sequence where she hires him, as they sit in a Japanese restaurant, both having memories of when they lived together, is essentially the same. Every flashback is almost exactly as it was in the 1969 version. Now, I’d been through a divorce since writing that first version when I had no idea I’d be divorced, so when the 1981 version came out, there were a lot of people thinking I was writing about my divorce, but those scenes originated more than a decade earlier. Imagine if I’d kept the story line with Rainier body-guarding her new lover! Yikes! But this goes back to what I said earlier, it all depends on when the story gets out there, the way some people are going to interpret what influenced it. Personally, if I thought I had any gift of prophecy in what I write, or that it would somehow come true, you can bet I’m going to make sure every story has a happy ending!

Do you see self-publishing as a viable way to break into this market?

Absolutely. No one really knows what is going to happen when you get a book out there. You may get a major company interested. Movie rights have been picked up on series that only had 2 or 3 issues. But you shouldn’t forget, there have been series with hundreds of issues that have never had a bite, so you never can tell. Pundits prophesize but it’s all voodoo, it’s a throw of the bones.

What you need to realize about self-publishing is that you then have to find a way to get your book noticed. And there are so many things to do that you may wonder when you’ll ever have the time to write! 'Cause that’s what you love! That’s what you set out to do in the beginning! But if it’s your own book, you have to find a way to oversee the printing, guide it along the way, promote it, everything.

The upside is, you can control more of your destiny.

The downside is, it’s a tough battle to get stores to carry your book. How are you going to overcome that?

But it will get you past many of the Catch 22s that are in this business.

You seem to have a very personal interest in your fans –often telling them that their words have given you hope and strengthened your convictions in your stories. With all the success you’ve had, why is it still important to hear that fans enjoy your work?

I suppose part of it is a validation of those stories. Of the times when you didn’t have work, when there wasn’t any money coming in. A series you thought was sold and ready to be done, was so hot it was going to start, and then went cold. And often times, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you did, or what you did not do. There are things happening behind the scenes that you may never know, or if you do, it’ll be a long time later before you learn what was really going on.

So, when you fight for a book, let’s say on a regular series, a book you come back to again and again, a lot of your energy goes to getting that original "vision" you mention into the book the readers hold in their hands. It can leave you spent at times. There are times when a story truly does get butchered. And your name is on it! No one is coming up to an editor 10 years later asking why did you do this? They are asking the writer. Why? If I failed, I want it to be because I failed. Me. Not somebody passing through, randomly slicing the rhyme and reason out of story. And if I succeed, it’s the same way.

So, hearing from the readers, in many ways, makes it easier to go back into the fray again. What we do is important. Stories go places we may never know. In Mark Mathabane’s autobiography KAFFIR BOY, he writes about how comics helped him survive growing up in a black township in South Africa. When the first DETECTIVES INC. came out a woman wrote to say it made her decide not to commit suicide. One of the letters to SABRE was from a man who worked with terminally ill patients. He said sometimes it was so difficult to go back, knowing the people were going to die, but that SABRE helped him do that. If what I do as a writer can help him do that, something I don’t have the guts to do, couldn’t do, then it was worth whatever anxiety I felt when worried about how I was going to do that next page of comics.

Thank God for the readers; they believed when there were times those who held the fate of a book in their hands did not believe.

Their letters will always mean something to me.

And I will always try to give them the best, every time out. That’s what owe them. That’s what I owe this medium that I love.

If you knew you’d never sell again, would you still create comics?

Absolutely. Maybe not at the same pace. I’m not sure what I would do to survive. But when you see the art for a page, and it all comes together, those words and pictures, you see what the artist has brought to life that you have lived with inside your head for maybe years…and it works…it’s there…sometimes more than you dared hope for…well, there’s another reason to go into the fray again!

Describe to us a typical day in your life.

I’ve been asked this one often. I don’t have one typical day. It really depends on what I’m doing on any particular day. For instance, if I’m in the research phase of a project, that’s entirely different from a day where I’m writing finished copy, the material that is going to hopefully become what the reader actually gets to see. Since the opening of the Internet, and putting up my own web-site, there are days now that are devoted to that, to putting it together, to working on ways to let people know you exist in Cyberspace, that there IS a way to reach you, or to get your books. Then, there are days when you decide you really should tackle one of the interviews like this. But they all take time and energy, and they require different things from you.

You create the daily ZORRO comic strip – Do you have stacks and stacks of these ready, or do you basically create one each day? How tough is it to have these strict deadlines on your creativity?

Would that I did have stacks and stacks of these strips ready to go. A lot of research goes into the Zorro strip, and that determines which direction the story lines will go in. When I have to face doing the daily strips, Monday through Saturday, it seems so intimidating. The strips have to work in unison, but also as separate entities, something that has a sense of completeness on any single day. On the other hand, I am always aware that some people only see the Sunday strips, just as others only see the strip on weekdays, Monday through Friday, so as I’m working out the dailies, I’m concerned about what that Sunday will be. I love the idea that we can play around with the size of images on the Sunday, but I try to make sure a reader who only sees the Sunday can track the story. And I get a kick out of the idea of the reader wondering, well, what did they do during the dailies, and maybe decide they want to see part of that story and go to pick up the paper to see what will happen. The Sundays are normally easier, but I think that’s because I’m working the Sunday out as I progress along with the dailies. Along with these considerations, it isn’t lost on me that some time these stories might be collected in read in a single volume and they should flow that way, without any sense of repetition. I find the deadlines on a monthly comic more intimidating than the deadline on the newspaper strip. More of an impact on the creative aspect of the comic strip is that it appears on the comics page of the newspapers, and people somehow have a different criteria for what appears there than the rest of the paper. So, the headlines can scream about sex and violence, and Dear Abby can talk about incest and domestic abuse, you name it, but there is this idea that the comics are seen by kids, and should only be for kids. So what do these mythical kids do, miss the beginning of the newspaper and all the big bold headlines? And why do I suspect there are more adults reading the strips than kids, anyhow? And what world are they living in? They haven’t seen THE SIMPSONS, at 8:00, for the past eleven years, or let’s say, BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, where they deal with all sorts of contemporary issues. So, sometimes I feel as if my hands are being tied behind my back to make this relate to an audience. I do not want to do bland or boring stories. And we have a great strip here, but sometimes it’s a fight to keep what that story is really about, its intent and strength.

How does the craft of comic book writing differ from the other mediums like screenwriting, novels, or children’s books?

There are more mechanics involved in a comic book. When I did the screenplay for DETECTIVES INC.: A TERROR OF DYING DREAMS (The graphic album is actually an adaptation of my script), when the actors had the first reading of the script, many of them were surprised I could write a movie script, as if somehow that would be harder than a comic script. But it isn’t. Once you have your scene set, and you have the characters speaking, you’re off and running, with very little other direction. In comics, that’s not the case. If you have a long dialogue sequence in a film, the actors will bring movement to it, and if you decide the scene is running long, you can trim it. In comics, if there’s a long dialogue scene, you have to determine how many pages of comics you are going to allow this, and then, what are you going to tell the artist to draw for all those pages. What’s the stage-play? What are facial expressions and body language? What’s the design for that page that will keep it visually interesting? You have to know everything going into it, because once it’s drawn, you seldom get to change much. The primary difference with novels is that it’s only you involved, and you know exactly what you are giving the reader, the verbal images you are determining. That doesn’t mean some folks won’t find some way-out theories about what you are writing about that you could never have fore-seen. It’s a large world out there.

Where do you find new inspiration when faced with creative "block?"

I don’t know if I’d call it creative "block," so much as the anxiety of facing that blank sheet of paper, day after day. Writers continually have to make decisions. If you don’t want to make a lot of decisions that you can’t change once it’s done, you probably should do something else. I know I want to keep it important, what I put down there. That I get the most out of the page or scene that I am about to do.

If I’m starting a new project, it’s finding something I feel I’ll want to write about, and will keep my passion during the duration of time of doing it. If I have a passion for it, and believe in it, than hopefully that will communicate to some of the readers! But where I find that is in so many different ways, there isn’t one answer for it.

In DETECTIVES INC.: A TERROR OF DYING DREAMS, initially I wanted the second DETECTIVES INC. book to be about the bombing of abortion clinics. It was entitled: A HORROR OF BURNING PLACES. But when the opportunity came to do the movie, I knew I couldn’t pull off blowing up buildings, so I had to scramble around searching for something I thought I’d want to investigate and write about. I was flipping channels one night, and came across some kind of program about domestic violence, and when I heard some of the staggering statistics, I thought, this is something worth writing about.

I’m in the midst of writing a new DETECTIVES INC.: A FEAR OF PERVERSE PHOTOS, which is about a man dying in a hospital, and who wants Denning and Rainier to break into his house and steal pornographic pictures he has printed off the Internet so that his family won’t discover them after his death. That wasn’t my first concept. I’d been toying around with doing a story about Rainier and Denning staking out a cemetery where anti-Semitic acts have been taking place. I may still do that story, but I thought it was too complex an issue for a short story about them. This story has an immediacy and straight forwardness to it that will allow both the detectives to bounce off their different views on the subject, and it’s only something that’s going to become more of a concern to people in the future as the Internet grows.

And it’s the kind of small, intriguing cases that I like DETECTIVES INC. to be involved with. There are never any big mob angles or fearsome drug cartels for them to go up against. They deal with the person on the street, and like private eyes through out time, they invade every class structure, any place the case takes them.

Anything else you’d like to add for aspiring comic writers?

There are a lot of odds against you getting into this business. It is rife with a mine-field of Catch 22s to deter you, just as it is with much of the entertainment industry. But if you really want to do this crazy, sometimes exciting, sometimes discouraging, sometimes beautiful thing, then you’re the one that will find a way around all the Catch-22s. You’re the one that will come back after they’ve rejected you again and again, handed you your head, put it right in your hands, and you still come back.

Because, despite all those catches, despite all the odds against you getting seen, writers do manage do it.

Then the trick is staying alive for the long haul.

And keeping alive the love that started you telling stories in the first place.

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