Bill Messner-Loebs: A Career Retrospective (Part III)
By Darren Schroeder
Darren Schroeder, SBC contributor and small press maven,
continues his discssion with Bill Messner-Loebs,
artist/writer of more comic books than you can talk about in a
single part interview. Today they carry on their chat about
Bill's work at DC comics, looking primarily at Dr. Fate,
Wonder Woman and The Jaguar for DC's !mpact
line.
DS: What were the reasons behind the cancelling of Dr.
Fate, and how does it effect you when a title that you have
been working on comes to an end?
BML: Dr. Fate had always flown pretty close to the
surface of the water. No matter what we tried we couldn't seem to
bring the sales up. Plus Karen's group was in the process of
turning into Vertigo and books that weren't going to be Vertigo
books (like Wonder Woman) were being moved to the DCU;
books that were staying (like Dr. Fate) had to be more
like Vertigo. I submitted a couple of proposals for changing
Dr. Fate for the new company, but they ultimately wanted
to go a different way (all my ideas were too funny, and therefore
lacked "weight".) Plus, I was utterly exhausted. I had been
writing 5 books a month for two years, through my mother's last
illness and death, through my wife's illness and near death. I
had had a head cold for three months and couldn't shake it. So
when I was told that Dr. Fate would be cancelled when I
left, that didn't seem like a bad thing.
DS: You said "When the actually crossovers hit, of course,
it was like riding out a typhoon on an ironing board." Are
crossovers a necessary evil or a creative opportunity?
BML: They should be a creative opportunity and did try to
view them optimistically - really I did - but they never seemed
to work out. As I said, they were being written as I was trying
to cross into them. So I had no visuals and never enough
information to really do the job properly. Plus there was never
enough motivation to read and think about the cross over. It
wasn't my story and usually not the sort of story I was best at
telling. And, of course, the best ideas come as the writing is
actually happening, so none of us were seeing each others' best
work. Very often the cross over main books were done after the
series books that were crossing into them.
DS: I've seen your name mentioned in association with a
Time Masters mini series, is this correct?
BML: I vaguely remember discussing that with an editor
(maybe Mark Waid?) years ago. Nothing since then.
DS: Dark Horse seemed to have cornered the market on
treating film/tv properties as the starting point for comics that
for the most part are worth reading in their own right instead of
being easy cash cows. Was this approach apparent when you worked
on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?
BML: Well, again, this was a book based not really on the
movies, but on the game that was being created at the same time.
I think it was a miserable time for all involved, and not a
representative Dark Horse experience.
DS: What is the representative Dark Horse
experience?
BML: My notion of the respresentative Dark Horse
experience is one with a lot of freedom of expression, in a less
structured work environment. And generally a lot of fun. This has
been overall the experience of friends of mine who have done work
for Dark Horse and I continue to believe it's the norm. My few
contacts with Dark Horse have been so fleeting, outside the very
odd Indiana Jones-thing, that I have no way to judge, except by
third parties.
DS: Jaguar has been described as a teenage superhero
trying to cope with her powers plus university life in a new
country. Did the world need a new one of these?
BML: Well, gosh, Metallo, not if you're gonna describe it
THAT way! I thought of it as - what if Betty and Veronica were
Superheroes? Now the world may not have needed that either, but I
thought I could do a fair job of writing it. The Impact line was
aimed at younger kids and we thought it was a reasonable
approach. Looking back, I think almost everything we did was too
conservative. When a successful line aimed at younger kids came
along, it was IMAGE.
DS: How did Jaguars ethnicity influence your writing for
the character?
BML: Well, I did try and incorporate the Brazilian
Experience, as much as I could from my Gringo remove. Although
Rio is very cosmopolitan city with a wild reputation, I tried to
imagine her as a shy and retiring, upper-class, convent-reared
girl. Thus the Jaguar personality would have a contrasting
personality to struggle against.
DS: You mentioned that you actively tried for the writing
task on Wonder Woman. Why?
BML: Because people had always said that the character was
un-writeable, and I knew I had done a fair job of writing women.
Wonder Woman was the mountain top in that regard. And she was one
of the three top DC characters, their mythic troika. I wanted to
try. And George had restarted the character so beautifully, I
knew I had a real chance.
DS: "character was un-writeable" That seems an odd thing
to say about the character who has had her title for the longest
consecutive run in the DC line. What was their justification for
that opinion?
BML: You think that folks in comics actually justify their
opinions? Ooo, Mean Bill. Although Wonder Woman was the
longest running title, the book had struggled in modern times,
and was seen as a wacky, camp and dying title. I felt that was a
mistake, bred because several generations of writers had been
told to "write down" to an imaginary "girl audience" which DC was
not reaching anyway. So the stories were distorted by this
editorial view, and high premium was not placed on realism or
intensity. Dan Mishkin, who was the last Wonder Woman
writer before George
Perez restarted the book (I think that's right. Then Trina
Robbins did a mini-series after that in the 40's style.) told me
several very interesting ideas he had for the title, but he was
not allowed to do any of them. To give you an idea of the
mindset, when one Wonder Woman editor heard about my first
plot line, with Diana as Captain Blood in space, freeing captive
women, his response was, "I would NEVER have let you do that!
Wonder Woman is fantasy; SUPERMAN is science
fiction!" A sidebar: only in comics would Captain Blood in Space
NOT be considered fantasy.
These various self-defeating perceptions on the editorial level
had turned Diana preachy, and without a lot of texture. Every
time someone would propose a female-based comic, the response
was: "girl books don't sell. Look at Wonder Woman." It was
obvious from George's run that women AND men would respond to
well-structured characters in strong stories. And from movies
like Alien and Coma, it was also obvious that men could identify
with female heroes (the other thing editors refused to believe.)
We just had to try.
DS: At what point in your career did you decide it was in
fact a career?
BML: I had always WANTED it to be a career, but sometime
in the middle of writing my five books, I looked up and the rest
of the country was in a recession and I hadn't even noticed. At
that point I thought, "Hey, I can really do this!" I had never
been a fast writer, but now I was, at least kind of. I was
producing. I was in the game.