Denny O'Neil: Batman Editor
Denny O'Neil has a long, storied history with Batman (pun intended, of course). He's been the editor of the Batman line of titles for some time, and recently oversaw the "New Millennium" overhaul of the line in the wake of the year-long No Man's Land storyline. He talked about that and other issues in an interview for my radio show conducted Friday, January 28th, 2000.
Alan David Doane: The Batman line's overhaul--what was behind that and what can readers expect to see?
Denny O'Neil: Well, part of it was a desire to keep our stuff as contemporary and as close to the cutting edge as possible. We'd been doing it the same way for about 15 years, and our design guys and a lot of people in the office had ideas for new kinds of content, new looks for the books, it just seemed like a good logical time to do them. And we're coming off a year-long storyline; another thing I wanted to do was send a message to the readers that it's a new game now. If you haven't checked us out lately, check us out. You may be surprised at what you see.
ADD: How successful was No Man's Land? It was a pretty radical experiment.
DO'N: It was as radical as anything we've ever done. And it was a big success, to almost everybody's surprise. There was not a great deal of optimism around the professional comic book world that we would succeed. I had a lot of doubts about it personally, but it seemed like such an interesting idea, that it just seemed to me that we ought to try it. It was a wonderful success and I can brag about it because I had very little to do with it.
ADD: That's answers my question, I was going to ask you if that was your idea. Where did the dictum come from then?
DO'N: One of my associate editors, Jordan B. Gorfinkle, came in one Monday morning with a 12-page outline that he had done over the weekend, on his own, with no prompting from me or anyone else. And he handed it to me and said "You're gonna hate this, but read it anyway." I thought, "Wow, we're really gonna be working without a net if we climb onto this little tightrope." But--nobody's ever done anything like this before. We--my office was sort of on automatic pilot. We knew that we had been working together so long that we could put out good, professional comic books every month without exerting ourselves very much. We also knew from experience that eventually our disinterest would show through to the reader. One of the ways that you can focus your energies is undertake a project that has a very large probability of failure. Well, No Man's Land certainly fit that bill. So we decided just to go for it. I presented it to my bosses with very much the same attitude that Jordan presented it to me, like, "This is pretty far out, you're probably gonna hate it." And as I said they had a lot of reservations about it but they told us to go ahead and try it. And the readers had a lot of reservations about it initially.
But after the first month's worth of books came out I think we had made converts of them. Our sales went up, insofar as in the comic book world there is such thing as critical acclaim we got plenty of it. Overall, the most successful stunt we've ever done. Not only because it was financially successful but we learned a lot from it. We learned a lot about our audience, we learned a lot about what we're capable of doing. It was a very good year.
ADD: In addition to the overall storyline of Gotham City being separated from the United States, there were some pretty dramatic resolutions at the end in terms of the effects on some of the main characters. Can you talk a little bit about that?
DO'N: Yeah, we were working off a very loose outline. And when we started working on the last month's worth of books, we realized that they were gonna be anticlimactic. The big questions would be answered by that time and we would spend a month tying up loose ends. So I went to two of my writers, Greg Rucka and Devin Grayson and made that observation. I asked them if they could do anything about this. And the two of them came up with, I think, an extraordinary three stories to not only tie up those loose ends, but to present a new but logical problem and a very dramatic resolution. And they worked in a way that I think would have been impossible even maybe five years ago. They collaborated, one of them in Brooklyn, and one of them in Portland, by computer. By an instant message program that allowed them to really work line-by-line on a collaboration some 2500 miles apart.
ADD: You've been working in comics since the '60s, is the introduction of computer technology the biggest innovation that you've seen in the production of comics?
DO'N: No--it's certainly changed the way we work a lot, we do most of our coloring on computers now. When I'm working as a writer I think the biggest change it's had in my modus operandi is I don't necessarily have to have the entire story figured out ahead of time anymore. If I have the beginning figured out and some rough idea of where I want to go, and I'm under deadline pressure, I'll just start writing the first scene, knowing that with a computer if I, when I do get the ending figured out completely, it'll be very easy to go back and change the earlier part of the story if that's necessary. It won't be a half a day's retyping as it would have been in the old days. But the biggest change in the comic book world has been the introduction of the direct sales system. When I started we were a newsstand medium, we were completely at the mercy of a very inefficient, and alas sometimes corrupt, system for getting our stories to the public.
With the introduction of the direct sales system, where there are some 2500 stores that specialize in comic books and related items, that's enabled us to target our audience, to work more efficiently, get a lot more results for our effort. I don't know that comic books would exist as a periodical medium in the year 2000 if the direct sales system hadn't come into being.
ADD: Has the direct sales system made it harder, though, to generate new readers? I'm thinking in terms of little kids--I can remember growing up in the '70s there were comic books virtually everywhere, the grocery store, the newsstands, and now it seems like they're not quite as available as they used to be. And even though, as you say, the audience is targeted better, it doesn't seem as if they're as widespread. Any comment on that?
DO'N: Yeah, that is a problem. We have trouble, for example, reaching younger audiences. Because a young suburban mother is not likely to wander into a comic book store looking for entertainment for her 6-year old. We publish some books that are aimed at younger readers, they're not among our best sellers, although I think they're very good. I think they're some of the best things we do. But we have trouble finding the audience. That is a problem. On the other hand, it would probably be a problem without the direct sales system because newsstands just are not an efficient way to do this anymore for a lot of reasons, some of them financial and some of them, the fact that there aren't as many newsstands. When I was a kid, every second block in St. Louis, Missouri had a little Mom and Pop store, and that little Mom and Pop store had a comic book rack. Well, that stopped being true, like, maybe in the early '50s.
ADD: And as I say, when I was first getting into comic books in the '70s, they still were a lot more widespread than they are now. Can you envision a solution, in terms of thinking out of the box, to get the comics, especially some of the younger-skewing titles, into the hands of kids?
DO'N: That's not my department...I do, of course, think about it. And I wonder if computer sales might not be some kind of answer. It is, I think, a big problem. We have to expand our reader base. We need to let the world know that comics are a mass entertainment, an accessible entertainment, not just for the elite few. And of course part of that is getting them out where people can see them. But that is an enormously complicated problem and thank God it's not my problem. And I want to emphasize that without the direct sales system we would have been dead in the water a long time ago.
ADD: It just seems like with the enormous popularity of things like Pokemon, there is a Pokemon comic book, and the popularity of some of the animated TV shows based on the DC characters, Superman/Batman and Batman Beyond--I mean, the kids obviously know these characters exist. I'll give you an example, though, a couple of years ago I was dropping my kids off at the babysitter, and my daughter asked me when I was going to be picking her up. I said, "I'll pick you up at this time, we have to stop at the comics shop." And the other kids at the babysitter's were just astounded that I was going to be buying comic books. And they asked me what I was going to be getting--they really thought I was kidding, that a man in his 30s would be going to be buying comic books. The next day I brought them a big stack of comics that I thought were age appropriate, the Hulk and Superman, that kind of thing. And their eyes just lit up. It was very obvious to me they had never even been exposed to the actual comic books themselves. They knew of the characters but not the comics.
DO'N: Yeah. They know about Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and Spider-Man from television. I was taking a train trip between Chicago and St. Louis a few years ago, and in the dining car I got seated across from a nice guy who rebuilt automobiles. And he was astonished that comic books still existed. I mean, he, about my age, he remembered them from when he was a kid costing a dime, and just hadn't seen them for 30 years, and was amazed when I told him not only they still existed, but they sure didn't cost a dime anymore (laughs).
ADD: That's one of my pet theories, that entertainment-wise, the value of what they're getting, when a kid can buy a comic book for 2.50 or three bucks and get the entertainment of ten or twenty minutes as opposed to renting a videogame for an entire weekend, it seems to me some thought needs to be given to repackaging them in terms of giving a better value.
DO'N: Well, there's a lot of talk about that, and I think you're absolutely right. If you love comics the way I do, then you don't mind paying 2.50 for a 22 page story. If you're just looking for casual entertainment, for that 2.50 you can rent a movie or come close to renting a movie or buy 1/5th of a video game. There's a million ways to get entertained these days. Again, it's a problem that is not mine. It concerns me, but my expertise is just on the editorial end, not on the marketing end.
ADD: Speaking of which, let's get back to Batman. You mentioned earlier Greg Rucka and Devin Grayson, both of whom are fairly new to writing comic books. Can you tell me how they got involved in working on Batman and what you think they bring to the character?
DO'N: Well, I can answer the second part of your question first; they bring huge amounts of talent. They are enormously professional, very easy to work with, full of ideas, very cooperative. They are an answer to an editor's dream. As to where they came from, radically different places. I first heard about Devin about three years ago when one of my colleagues, Scott Petersen, had encountered her through some amateur fiction she had done, I guess he'd gotten it off the Web, I don't exactly know how Scott became aware of her.
Anyway, I looked at these short stories and I thought "Yeah, this person can really write." And she does seem to have a real insight into our characters. But, y'know, she's somebody who works in a hospital in Oakland, California. I just didn't think about her as a potential contributor until Scott decided to try her out on a ten page story and she did it very well. And then she came to New York to take a class. I took her to lunch, and I was very impressed with her, and she was so eager to learn, she hung on every word. We started giving her some work, and you would see the improvement from script to script.
So in a year or a year and a half, she was solidly ensconced as a professional writer. As far as Greg goes, oh, maybe five years ago, when I was just looking for something to read in an airport, I came across a novel called Finder. It was a private-eye novel, and I read private-eye novels. So I took a chance on it, and I read it, and thought "Gee, the jacket copy says this guy's only 25. If that's true, my God, by the time he's 30 he's gonna be as good a writer of this type of thing as anybody on the planet. I made a mental note to look for the next Greg Rucka novel. About a year after that he walked into my office. He was friends with somebody in the marketing department, had read some of my comics in college, a young professional writer just doing what young professional writers do: meeting editors, checking out the scene. I took him to lunch--I do a lot of business over lunch.
And I was really impressed with--30 years ago I met Samuel R. Delaney, Delaney was in his early 20s, became one of the most brilliant science fiction writers of the 20th century, and not since meeting Delaney had I met a young novelist who so impressed me. So I asked Greg if he would like to try a story for me, and he would, and two weeks later it came in and I had to no editing on it at all. About that time we were just launching in to No Man's Land, so again we took a chance. This guy seemed to really have an instinctive grasp of how to do comics, and we already knew he was a good writer from reading his novels. He has been a Godsend to me. Full of ideas, completely professional, full of ideas, completely cooperative, a charming guy--married to a good writer.
I'm editing her first graphic novel. And in the meantime, Greg has published three other novels and is working on another one even as we speak. As well as writing Detective Comics he's going to do a Wonder Woman project and he has a couple of limited series in the works for us.
ADD: His Detective issue this month that marked the relaunch was a great story, and especially, Devin Grayson's first issue of Gotham Knights, that story was very special. It almost seemed like such a great idea, I mean it has sort of a modern twist to it in a way, but also it just seems like such a great concept that it's a wonder in a way that it had never been done in 60-plus years of Batman. Were you impressed by that story when you first read it?
DO'N: Absolutely. I mean, it didn't have the same impact on me as it did on you, because we had talked about it a little bit first. But I thought that she completely succeeded in what she set out to do. That's gonna be one of the most interesting series we've done, because there will be a lot of stories that will stand alone, like that first one; but, if you stick with it for a year you'll see that she's had another agenda all along. It is probably the most character-driven set of comic book stories anybody's ever done. It has been one of the interesting things about working with Greg and Devin, their stuff is character driven. I learned to do comic books the other way, you start with a plot or a gimmick, and you kid of trim the characters to fit.
They always start with the characters. Devin's way of beginning a story is to go into a room and put appropriate music on and lean back and then just say to the character "Okay, tell me a story. Tell me about yourself." And kind of daydream her way into the plot. Whereas, when I was a young writer I learned to think of a plot gimmick first, and then we'll figure out a way to make the characters fit. So the modern young comic book writers are working the same way the playwrights and novelists do.
ADD: Can we expect to see some of the other characters that are in the Batman universe such as Azrael and Batgirl--
DO'N: Yeah, issue 3--is it 3 or 4--as a matter of fact, is Azrael and Batgirl, teaming with Batman.
ADD: You created Azrael--and have been writing him for quite some time now…
DO'N: Yeah, over five and a half years.
ADD: That is quite an impressive run, especially these days. What's kept your interest in that character?
DO'N: Oh, he's kind of my baby. As you said, I did create him. It's a pleasant little monthly assignment. We keep thinking of new ways to develop him and get him in trouble. He's different than any other superhero, in that he has a real identity problem which is as yet unresolved. Remember, he started out as a bad guy when we did another of those year-long storylines about--gee, I guess it was six years ago now--he was the heavy in that. Batman had become disabled, had made the mistake of letting Azrael take over the identity of Batman and Azrael for a lot of complicated reasons was very unstable psychologically, crossed the line, let people die. Batman had to come out of retirement and reclaim his identity. When I created the character I thought he would be for that story alone, and I was kind of surprised when they asked me to do a monthly book.
On the other hand, it was kind of an intriguing assignment, a guy who didn't exactly know who he was, had powers that he didn't understand, and was constantly torn between a real inbuilt need for violence, and a realization that violence is really not an answer to anything. So we keep playing with that dichotomy. Even now, we haven't run out of stories to tell about it.
ADD: You've been involved with Batman for quite some time now, did you ever think your relationship with him would last this long?
DO'N: Oh, no, no. (Laughs). Absolutely not. I was a young writer with a small child, and a non-working wife, living in the East Village in the '60s, and someone introduced me to Julius Schwartz at DC Comics, and Julie let me write a couple of Green Lantern stories and a couple of Batman stories, and I enjoyed doing the Batman stuff much more than the other writing I was doing at the time. It amazes me that I'm still involved with this character so many years later. Batman, for the last 14 years has pretty much dominated my professional life. I've written a few short stories and other kinds of comic books, and some other things, but basically I eat live and breathe Batman for at least 40 hours a week, and I am not complaining. I know there are millions of writer-editors who would kill to change places with me. Batman is a wonderful creation, he's a wonderful storytelling tool. So many different kinds of stories you can tell about him or using him as an element in them.
ADD: You've kind of answered the question, has it been gratifying to spend this much time working with Batman?
DO'N: Given who I am, I can't imagine a better, more interesting job than the one I've had for the last 15 years. I work with bright, creative people, I am telling stories, I mean--as an added bonus, it has enabled me to travel extensively, something I never thought I'd do. So yeah, I mean, we all have to earn our daily bread. This is a pretty good way to do it.
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