Done to Death

Anyone who has had the displeasure of editing or reading poorly executed copycat literature is likely entertained by the core premise of writer Andrew Foley & artist Fiona Staples’ Done to Death trade collection: an editor who sets out to kill the writers of bad literature. This trade collection, which was released by IDW on September 21, had quite a six-year journey to get on the shelves, as Foley explained to me in this email interview. My thanks to Foley for his time. Once you’ve read this interview, be sure to read the late September interview that Foley did with CBR’s Shaun Manning.

Tim O’Shea: How long have you been developing Done to Death and how did it come to be at IDW?

Andrew Foley: It’s taken a little over six years to finally get this collection on the shelves. The original five issues took a little more than a year from to get from the initial pitch to publication. After parting ways with Markosia Fiona and I spent quite a while looking for the right publisher for the collection. In the early portion of my career, I had publishers I was working with: abruptly go out of business; unilaterally break contracts they’d agreed to; elect not to publish several graphic novels (at least one fully illustrated) I wrote for them while being constantly reassured they would see the light of day; stiff dozens of creators when the publisher decided the moment for their wildly ambitious anthology series had passed; and just generally try to advance themselves on the backs of passionate (if naïve) creators.

There are some great indy publishers out there. Red 5 springs to mind. But there are also a distressingly high number of predatory companies around whose sole purpose is to acquire or control as much intellectual property for as little as possible in the hopes that one will become 30 Days of Night or Cowboys & Aliens and get optioned for millions of dollars. It’s a bit like playing the lottery, only each ticket represents hundreds of hours of labour on the creators’ parts.

Anyway, at a certain point I’d had enough of that sort of thing, and was ready to sit on the book until a company Fiona and I were 100% comfortable with agreed to publish it. I was confident they would, eventually, just because it was clear Fiona was destined for great things. Sooner or later someone would see the wisdom of getting her first major comics work back in print.

IDW gave us the thumbs-up around the middle of 2010. Then we started going through the previous version, looking for things that could use a little tweaking. I haven’t made a big deal about this being a “remastered” version of the story because the changes are the sorts of things that probably aren’t going to make much of an impression on people casually reading the thing. But we were working on pretty tight deadlines the first time around, and we did what we had to to hit them, and there were a few little things I always wished could’ve been done a little differently. Now they have been, and I couldn’t be happier.

O’Shea: What is it that made Fiona Staples a perfect match for the project?

Foley: She’s a fantastic artist, and she was willing to spend several months working with a pretty much unknown writer for not a lot of money because she liked the story. She’s just a great collaborator and a legitimately nice person. As any writer with minimal financial resources can tell you, finding an artist with all those qualities is like winning the lottery and getting hit by lightning five minutes later, only the lightning is magical and instead of frying you it makes you look like a stunningly attractive person.

O’Shea: Do you ever edit people’s work and do you think after reading this story they’ll be scared of you being an editor?

Foley: Well I hope they will…

I have done some editing, and what I learned from the experience is that I’m a decent editor and that I should avoid doing it again for my own emotional wellbeing. Successful editors compartmentalize things in a way I can’t, I think. They have to be able to put 100% effort into making a story the best it can be inside externally imposed limitations (deadlines, flaky creators, upper management, etc.), they have to do that with multiple projects at the same time, and they have to keep an emotional distance from it all to make sure they’re seeing things clearly and also so they don’t end up being gunned down in a McDonalds after having gone on a bloody murder spree. And then creators get pretty much all the credit and editors all the blame. It’s grueling work, and I’ve nothing but respect for the editors I’ve worked with. If I was in their shoes, I’d spend the bulk of my waking hours sitting on a toilet sobbing pitifully.

I can only imagine it’d be slightly less grueling work if the creators of a project were a little afraid of their editor. Anything that streamlines the process and makes for the best work (which I naturally define as work done the way I want it) has got to be a plus, right?

O’Shea: How much input did you have on the look of Andy, or did you defer to Staples completely on that aspect?

Foley: Aw, man, I can barely remember what happened last week, never mind six years ago. I think I wanted him to be overweight…? In any event, I don’t believe there was much additional input of Andy’s design on me after Fiona’s initial character sketches.

O’Shea: In this digital age, how much of a priority was it for you to see this in print?

Foley: I’m not actually convinced we’re in the digital age yet, at least not for creators. There are some making a living doing digital comics and a few making a very, very good living doing it. As far as I can tell, most of those use the comic strip model, presenting new material daily or close to it and using a standalone set-up/punchline structure. While more extended narratives have been monetized to some extent, I can’t think of many commercial success stories in that vein. Freankangels, maybe.

Speaking from my own experience, I’ve had two of my previous works, Parting Ways and The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale Massacre, up on Graphicly.com for a few months now, and they haven’t received a whole lot of interest. In fairness, I haven’t spent a whole lot of energy promoting them, either. I’m an old dude who still tends to regard computers as glorified glowing typewriters more than anything else. I understand people are making real, tangible connections both personal and professional via social media–I’m not one of them. I’ve tried, but I just don’t have the online social or technical skills necessary to effectively pull eyeballs to my material.

Given all that, it was very important to me that we end up with a printed version of the complete story between two covers. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to diminish digital or deny its growing impact on comics. I’ve little doubt that in five, ten, or twenty years from now, digital will be the primary delivery system for comics and printed books will be quaint relics of a bygone age, for environmental reasons if nothing else. I’m of a generation that grew up with print and isn’t willing to let it go. But my generation’s getting older and kids these days are far more accustomed to reading stuff on a screen than I will ever be.

O’Shea: OK, clearly I think it’s safe to say you don’t think much of the Twilight trend (correct me if I am wrong). What kind of vampire stories do you enjoy?

Foley: Honestly, with the exception of Twilight I can enjoy almost any vampire story if I come at it with the right mindset. The film Near Dark’s probably my favourite. I liked the Buffy and Angel TV series. Nosferatu. The Blade movies (I even managed to enjoy Trinity, largely because I went in with extremely low expectations.)

O’Shea: If it sells well enough, do you hope to write a sequel to this?

Foley: Oh yes, several, in fact. I wrote a blog post about it on my tumblr account.

O’Shea: What did it take to get to Steve Niles to write the foreword?

Foley: Fiona drew a wonderful series Steve wrote called The Mystery Society, so she was the one who asked if he’d be willing to do it. Done to Death’s editor Justin Eisinger knows Steve well enough to be comfortable, uh, nudging him a few times about getting it done in time for print. Steve’s so passionate and prolific, he writes more in a day than I do some months, but he’s got so much on his plate at any given time that I imagine it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks when deadlines for paying work loom. I was thrilled when I finally got to read the foreword; it’s hard to describe how it feels to have a horror creator of his caliber praise something I’m involved with. Someday he will ask me to kill a man, and I totally will.

O’Shea: Not everybody lives with a book designer, how much fun is it to be able to collaborate with Tiina Andreakos of Edmonton’s Diva Designs on the cover design?

Foley: “Fun” isn’t necessarily the word I’d use to describe it. I love Tiina and I love her work (I loved her work first, actually, we met when I tried to get her to draw something I wrote). But being around her while she’s working is kind of terrifying, and never more so than when she’s working on something with me. When she gets really engrossed in designing something, her expression changes, she puts on what she calls her game face. Unfortunately, her game face makes her look as though she’s about to murder the next person she sees. She isn’t doing it on purpose, but usually we’re so comfortable and content in each others’ company…it’s incredibly unnerving for me to be around her in that situation. I kind of wish she weren’t so damn good at her job, so I’d have a legitimate excuse to go to someone who isn’t in a position to divorce me. But she is so good. I still feel Done to Death’s original covers (repurposed as chapter title pages in the collection) were really interesting and unique and Tiina’s design work was a big part of that. I’ve been shouting about how Fiona should be a superstar artist for years, but I also believe Tiina’s work on D2D deserved more recognition than it got.

O’Shea: Any questions you’d like to ask Robot 6 readers?

Foley: Why yes, yes I do. Hello, Robot 6 readers, how’re you doing today? Gotta say you’re looking mighty fine there, mighty fine…Let me ask you a question: Do you think vampires should glitter? No? You positively loathe Twilight and the glut of poorly written derivative vampire novels that flooded the bookstores after it became a success? Great, that’s great. So listen, maybe you’ve heard I’ve about this book I’ve got out from IDW Publishing right now, Done to Death? Art by Shuster Award-winning Fiona Staples, foreword by 30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles? Yeah? OK, great. Now what will it take to get you to buy a copy, or several copies (as you are obviously incredibly popular and have dozens of friends who share your impeccable taste when it comes to all things bloodsucking)? Because whatever it is, there’s a good chance I’ll do it. So just let me know, will you? I’d be forever grateful if you did.

Also, does anyone have something to eat? I’m starving here.

ICONS by Jim Lee

Scooping his own company’s blog, DC Co-Publisher Jim Lee posted the final pencils for the cover of ICONS: The DC Comics and WildStorm Art of Jim Lee to his Twitter account last night. Trinity-tastic! Anyone else having a hard time getting used to Batman being in the forefront of the Batman-Superman-Wonder Woman pose-offs these days, though?

ICONS comes out this August from Titan Books. You can check out a less dark’n'dramatic rejected cover composition for the book at The Source.

UPDATE: The Source also has the final inks, if you like your Dark Knight extra dark.

Grumpy Old Fan

Although I wrote quite a lot over the past year about DC’s weekly series Trinity, I kept coming up with questions that went outside the scope of my weekly notes. Fortunately, writer Kurt Busiek was nice enough to participate in the following e-mail interview, conducted after Trinity concluded (and after he returned from a well- deserved vacation).

We discussed the nuts and bolts of producing Trinity, its connections to a couple of Busiek’s other DC projects, a few nitpicky items, and what the year-long series leaves behind.

* * *

TCB: How did the weekly format affect your approach? Did you feel obliged to pace the book so as to satisfy both the weekly audience and the “wait-for-traders?”

kdb: I always feel obligated to make a project satisfying in whatever formats it’s planned for. So yes, we wanted each individual issue to be an enjoyable read, and we wanted each trade paperback volume to be an enjoyable read. Which was a little tricky, since we didn’t know, going into it, whether it would be collected as 4 TPBs (meaning the volumes would end at #13, 26, 39, and 52) or 3 TPBs (meaning #17, #34 or 35, and #52).*

That said, we were aware that with a weekly schedule, it’s only 7 days to the next chapter, so if one week is light on action (or virtually all action), that would likely be balanced out by the next installment. Or maybe even by the story in the co-feature.

TCB: What sorts of decisions went into breaking the series into individual two-story issues? Were there any labor considerations, for example to give the artists time to rest up for the next crowd scene? Did you and Fabian Nicieza write particular second stories for particular art teams?

kdb: We did try to juggle things for the strengths of the various co-feature artists, yes. But we had flexibility there, because we had enough lead time so that we didn’t have to have them in strict rotation. If we needed two chapters in a row from Scott [McDaniel], for instance, we’d just have to make sure we were plotted far enough ahead that while he was working on chapter one of two, Tom [Derenick] and Mike [Norton] had their own chapters to work on. As a result, the co-feature chapters didn’t come in in order, but we had enough time that we didn’t need them to; we could juggle talent and material and match them up right.

As a rough rule of thumb, we started out giving Scott spooky stuff or crime stuff, Tom big superhero action and Mike “people” stories, but varied that around as we got more of a sense of what they could do. Tom turned out to be very good at space stuff, for instance, and Scott far better at “cosmic/trippy” stuff than anyone might have imagined, possibly even him. By the end of it, we were making sure he got the psychedelic stuff, because we knew he’d knock it out of the park, while at the start we were thinking of him for shadows and mood…

TCB: Especially considering the artists’ deadline pressures, I thought Trinity‘s art was consistently good. Among other things, I feel like I’ve been to Thayer’s Notch now that I’ve seen it drawn by Mark Bagley and Art Thibert; and I was very impressed by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens’ psychedelic Worldsoul/Krona story. Not that you had low expectations for the art, but were there any scenes or sequences which looked better than you’d written them?

kdb: I agree with you on the art being consistently good — credit the artists, of course, but also credit Mike Carlin, for lining up such a good squad of guys and making sure to manage their schedules right.

As for which scenes looked better than I imagined, I’m tempted to say “All of them.” Getting pages in was a treat, because everyone found ways to go a little further, make it a bit bigger, or funnier, or more affecting. From giant battles to big mystery to chapters like that great Norton/Kesel chapter about the Riddler, which was just perfectly paced, it was a pleasure all the way through.

TCB: Mike Carlin edited most of Countdown, and worked on the “weekly” Superman titles of the ’90s. Was he more helpful with regard to the logistics of the book or the creative aspects?

kdb: Mike weighed in on the big-picture stuff, going over the outlines, the big ideas and so on, but when it came to the chapter-by-chapter stuff, Fabian and I had a pretty good sense of how to play it out, and Mike rarely asked for changes. So I’d say that after the big story decisions had been made, he was very supportive creatively, and had to be the scheduling logistics taskmaster more often than anything else. And his experience juggling a large creative team helped out a lot.

TCB: What was it like collaborating with Fabian? How much input did he have into those scripts, and/or the book’s overall direction?

kdb: Fabian was insanely helpful. On the one hand, Fabian and I have worked together in a lot of different situations, going back to when he was a promotions manager at Marvel and I was a sales manager. We get along, we have a similar enough sensibility that we can pretty easily pull in the same direction, and he’s an inventive and professional writer. One of the reasons Mike didn’t need to involve himself all that much in the chapter-by-chapter plotting was that we pretty much had it covered — Fabian was kind of an extra story editor, where I could call him up and bounce ideas off him, and get feedback and suggestions from someone deeply involved in the story, who wasn’t pulled in a million directions at once by other emergencies.

At the same time, Fabian brought tons of creativity and no ego to the process — he knew going in that I’d be basically driving the bus, and his job was to help. I probably trampled all over his stuff dozens of times, replotting co-features, tweaking the dialogue so much that at points it amounted to rewriting rather than co-writing — but it was all in the service of keeping the two pieces of the issue together and working at speed; it’s simply easier, sometimes, to rewrite rather than talk all the details through.

So in the end, the credits are a bit misleading. Fabian’s name doesn’t appear on the lead chapters, but he was essentially a contributing writer on those, a sounding board, a suggestion guy and more. And my name is only listed as co-plotter on the co-features, but I had a lot more input than that. It was very organic — we were on the phone a lot and figured things out together. So I was driving the bus, but Fabian was co-pilot, or something. He had a number of very good suggestions, pushing me to think harder about Gangbuster and Enigma and others, and making sure I didn’t set something up and then let it fade away when it should play a larger role. He’s had a lot more experience with gang-written books than I do, so he saw pitfalls and structural issues sooner than I did, and kept us from falling prey to them.

And then I’d rewrite all his stuff; what an ingrate!

TCB: Appropriately enough, Trinity itself seems to be the third part of a trilogy, wrapping up storylines from JLA/Avengers and JLA‘s “Syndicate Rules.” How much of what became Trinity did you have in mind when you were writing the earlier stories?

kdb: Almost none of it. We put Krona in the Egg at the end of JLA/Avengers because it seemed like a good place to leave him, somewhere that could lead to something rich, but we hadn’t figured out what, yet. And then in “Syndicate Rules,” we didn’t do a lot with the Egg itself, but built up ideas like the Void Hound, or the CSA’s favor- bank rules, knowing that they’d be paid off later, but again, not precisely how. So it’s more a case of putting things into places that feel like a satisfying resolution for the moment, but have a built-in springboard for further explanation. It’s more about knowing that there’s stuff you can do that’ll work than knowing exactly what stuff that’ll be.

TCB: Apart from simply being shorter, do you think Trinity would have been significantly different as, say, an arc in Superman or JLA?

kdb: Oh, it’d have to be. Keep in mind that the JLA doesn’t turn up until #3, and then is erased from reality for the middle third of the story. If it was a JLA story, we’d have gotten tons of complaints from people who thought we were using JLA as a vehicle to ram the Trinity down everyone’s throats, at the expense of the rest of the League, and then that we weren’t even letting the League be part of their own book. So it’d have had to have been a much, much different story.

Same for if it was in Superman – it’s not a straight Superman story; it’s a story that has Superman as one of the main characters. So to build it more fully around him would change a lot. It doesn’t really fit any existing DC book — to properly describe it, it’s either a book about the Trinity, with a whole bunch of guest stars, or a book about the DCU Universe, with a special focus on the Trinity. So if you don’t call it Trinity, you need to call it DCU or DC Nation or something like that. (It was originally pitched, by the way, as “DC Superstars: Starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman….and The DC Universe!” Which would have fit pretty well, as it worked out.)

TCB: It seemed to me that Trinity shared some of its story structure, at least superficially, with JLA/Avengers. Both stories begin with a quest to gather certain powerful items, which are then used to create an alternate timeline. Although the two stories have their differences, are the similarities just coincidental?

kdb: I think they’re coincidence. The quest-for-power-objects part of JLA/Avengers was there to help make it a travelogue/showcase of the two universes, an excuse to have a lot of fun locations for the fights. In Trinity, it was the villains going after power-objects, and that was to set up the building mystery of the Tarot connections and the personal items that were used in the Trinity spell.

TCB: Another JLA/Avengers question. In JLA/Avengers, I got the feeling you were lamenting the heroes’ various personal tragedies, and saying that no matter how appealing it looked, the combined DC/ Marvel timeline was just a pipe dream. Here, though, the experience of the deified Trinitarians suggests that the characters’ tragedies are inevitable, and perhaps even necessary. What do these stories say about the usefulness of these events?

kdb: In JLA/Avengers, the “tragedies” you’re referring to were things like the Scarlet Witch losing her children, or Hal and Barry being dead — I’d call that the kind of upheaval and calamity that happened to the heroes over the course of their careers, but which they had to accept as their burden to bear to restore the world to what they should be. In Trinity, you mean the legends, with the death of Robin and the Max Lord thing and such, right? I don’t know that we’re saying those are necessary, merely that they were big events that sent the heroes off into directions that isolated them, and they had to overcome those and reconnect with their true missions, rather than obsessing about personal failures.

TCB: Apart from those tragedies, how important generally was it to tell a story about these particular versions of the characters? Was it simply a case of using what had been established and/or what was current? Could you have gotten the same points across with more “timeless” versions?

kdb: I think they were reasonably timeless versions. We didn’t dwell all that hard on minor details — we used recent history in the legend stuff, but we used it in the process of illustrating who the characters are at their core. In another era, with different histories, those legends would have been different, but I’m sure we’d have found ways to say what we needed to say.

TCB: Were there any characters who, for whatever reason, didn’t make the final cut? (Personally, I was a little surprised not to see the “Sword of Atlantis” Aquaman.)

kdb: DC didn’t seem to know what they were going to do with Aquaman, so even though I created that version, I didn’t want to force him into the story. The big loss, to my mind, was Metron — we’d set up that Metron was interested in what would happen to the Cosmic Egg, and then couldn’t use him as we saw it play out because the New Gods were off-limits due to Final Crisis.

And we couldn’t use Madame Xanadu, because of her Vertigo series, but that meant that Charity got to play a role, which spun the story a bit differently, and that was fun.

Overall, though, we got to use most everyone we wanted to.

TCB: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are each inspired by their parents in very different ways. However, Trinity didn’t really concern itself with those differences. Why not?

kdb: It didn’t really come up. We could have made that another aspect of their trinitarianity, if that’s even a word — Superman was raised by loving parents, Batman’s an orphan, Wonder Woman had a single Mom; Superman’s adopted, Batman’s a natural son, Wonder Woman was created…but after a while adding more details starts to feel like you’re just piling them on, not going deeper into the characters.

There certainly stuff there to explore, and maybe someone will do a story about it. But we had enough going on that we didn’t need to add that in, too.

TCB: Here are a couple of really nit-picky questions about the altered timeline. First, why did Hal Jordan become Sky-Knight if John Stewart was still Green Lantern? I take it Hal quit because he couldn’t operate as GL on Earth, leaving John to be the GL of Sector 2814 everywhere but Earth. Also, why did Interceptor wear those goggles?

kdb: Interceptor’s visor has hi-tech sensors in it — it allowed her military bosses to observe what she saw; to see and hear what she did. Part of her being an agent of the government rather than a solo act. Hal Jordan quit being Green Lantern at some point and then built a new identity to keep being a hero, and John became our sector’s GL. Neither of these really came up, but like you say, it’s nit-picky. Given the way comics work, we could see either character again and learn more about them, I suppose. I really got to like Interceptor, and would love to see Supergirl meet her, in a compare/contrast story. Each one would think the other’s life was unbearable; it could be a lot of fun.

TCB: He only popped up briefly here, so where might we see Khyber again?

kdb: Anywhere! He’s out there, but he’s very secretive, so he could pop up anywhere, or stay under the radar for years. He could make a good JLA villain, or get involved with some espionage/intrigue characters, or whatever. We hinted at him in “Syndicate Rules,” by the way, when I was planning him as a JLA villain. But I don’t think anyone noticed.

TCB: The Tarot plays a pretty significant part in the story, especially early on. I imagine that is the kind of thing you want to get right, because you’ll probably have some readers who will know if you got it wrong. Did you have to do a lot of research before you felt comfortable with it? Did you consult any experts?

kdb: Fabian and I got a number of reference books, and used those — I sort of delegated much of that to him, because, well, I was juggling so much stuff I didn’t have the time to be more than cursory about it, and he was willing….

TCB: Trinity works in a lot of Clark’s co-workers from his pre-Crisis days as a TV anchorman. That seemed to me to indicate a fondness for the Cary Bates/Elliott Maggin/Curt Swan era of Superman. Apart from your own work on the Trinitarians, and the ways they’re being handled currently, to whom do you look for inspiration for each of these characters?

kdb: Everyone. I’m not looking to recreate any particular era, and my Superman, for instance, is informed by what Weisinger and his crew did, what Julie [Schwartz]‘s creative staff did, what Byrne and Stern and Jurgens and Ordway and others did…. I like the Bronze Age Superman a lot, especially the Cary Bates issues, but when I write Superman it’s a synthesis of all the stuff I like about Superman over the years. I don’t try to hit particular notes, I simply have a sense of who the character is from reading all those comics, and that guy in my head is the guy I try to get on paper. Same for Batman and Wonder Woman … I’m a big fan of Englehart’s Batman, for instance, but I’m not specifically trying to capture that, it’s just one piece of the mosaic that makes up Batman to me. Wonder Woman’s history is a lot more fragmented, so I suppose I’m more guided by the stuff from what George [Perez] did to what Gail [Simone] is doing today, but there’s certainly parts of the Bronze and Silver Age Wonder Woman in there, stuff that resonates with me and feels appropriate to who she is today.

TCB: Any immediate plans for Trinity‘s supporting cast, including Konvikt, Tarot and Gangbuster, Enigma and Stephie/Void Hound, and Tomorrow Woman?

kdb: I can’t say, at present. I hope we’ll see a lot of them — including the Dreambound — but if there are plans I’m not at liberty to announce them, and if there aren’t I’m too sneaky to admit it.

TCB: Finally, can you share what’s next for the new Earth-Trinity? Should we call it “Earth One,” or was that just a wink to fans of the old Multiverse?

kdb: “Earth One” was a deliberate choice, and done in part at DC’s request. There’s definitely more than a wink going on there.

But again, I can’t say, at present, what it’s leading to…

kdb

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* [It turned out to be 3 volumes, with vol. 2 covering issues #18-35 -- TCB]