Bill Messner-Loebs: A Career Retrospective (Part IV)
By Darren Schroeder
Darren Schroeder and Bill Messner-Loebs return after a week's
hiatus to provide us with the pen-ultimate chapter of their
discussion. This week they provide us with an insight into Bill's
Wonder Woman, touching on both the regular titile and the
Elseworld's Amazonia.
Darren Schroeder: You portrayed Wonder Woman as having an
unwavering concern for other women, even her avowed enemies. How
did you keep this from becoming trite sentimentalism on her
part?
William Messner-Loebs:I guess we're assuming that I did.
Well, if I did, part of it was that I played Diana as being her
real age, which was about 17, I think. I think idealism is pretty
real at that age. Also, There is a difference between concern for
someone and not even noticing their faults. Diana usually
noticed; she just overlooked things she saw as relatively minor.
In much the same way, frontiers people would overlook a lot of
really eccentric behavior, because other humans were at such a
premium in the wilderness.
DS: Gosh, 17 seems quite young for her but I can see how
that works in her behavior. Seems a bit tough on a 17 year old to
go out into the patriarchy and try to make a difference.
BML: Yep. I always thought the Amazons were kind of hard
graders.
DS: What was the intention behind sending Diana off on a
journey to the stars?
BML:The intention was of showing her being self-reliant
and a leader, if she was stripped of all the supportive
infrastructure George had so carefully built up. Also I didn't
want to have to learn the voices and juggle all the rather
extensive supporting cast while I was trying to find Diana's
voice. Mark Waid ignored most of my supporting cast on
Flash for the same (excellent) reason.
DS: The quote at the start of each issue, did you have a
collection of them in advance of writing or did you search them
out as you needed them?
BML: Umm... I made them up. All of them. It was SO much
easier then doing research.
DS: Wow, that's so naughty :-) Did your editors know
that?
BML: Yep, again. They asked me the same thing after the
first six months. They thought it was a hoot.
DS: Issue 75 had a very moving sequence where the junky
sacrifices his life in an effort to save the life of the police
woman, and in the same issue Wonder Woman suffers injury while
trying to help someone. Do you believe that redemption always
comes at a cost?
BML: Well, I think by definition. If you're "redeeming"
something, even yourself, you're paying for it WITH something. Or
somebody is. Thus the Christian notion of Christ's death as
payment for the sis of the world.
DS: So doing good in itself isn't enough?
BML: Not for redemption; let me hasten to add tho - it IS
good enough for me, personally. We're talking strict definition
here.
DS: You blew up Themyscira!!! Wasn't that just asking for
all the fan-boys to burn your effigy from the tallest tree?
BML: Oh, yes. I've been pretty much punished for all my
better ideas in comics, either by my readers, or by my editors.
Seriously, though, you have to blow up your written world one way
or the other, at some point or nothing will ever really grow in
it. Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is a series
that uses change brilliantly, to advance character.
DS: How important is this sort of thing to the fans, did
masses drop the title or write nasty letters?
BML: No, not to me. Paul K. said he always got letters
praising the last writer and damning the current one. But the
readership went up under me and Mike, I think.
DS: In Bewitched, who was the best Darin, Dick York or
Dick Sargent?
BML: Jeez, Dick York. No contest. He was great in Inherit
the Wind, too, tho I kept expecting Endora to turn Clarence
Darrow into a goat or something! "Saaaammm! You've gotta turn him
back, or this town won't have religious freedom!""Gee, I'd love
to, Sweetie, but Serina just made H.L. Mencken NICE, and if I
don't change him back, American Journalism will lose it's most
acerbic voice. "
DS: None of your police officers are portrayed as the
cliched "dirty cop", instead you show them as every bit as much
heroes as the super-heroes. Why is that?
BML: In general it seemed to me that the only way to
reduce the inherant fascism in super-heroes is to show regular
humans solving problems and behaving heroically on a regular
basis. It's one reason I've always had large supporting casts.
Also I think that showing individual "dirty cops" as if the
occasional flawed individual is the problem, let's everyone off
the hook too easily. When police corruption is endemic, there are
always systemic causes, that require something more than hitting
a guy over the head to solve. One of my frustrations with
Wonder Woman was that we never seemed to have the space to
deal with really complex problems.
DS: Does the mainstream comic format even allow for
that?
BML: Reasonable complex, I think, depending always on your
definition of "complex" and your definition of "mainstream."
There seems to be less room in the present day, with so much
concern for sales and a real fear that a book stay in its "niche"
superhero, or horror or whatever.
DS: Lots of people talk about the "more realistic" tone of
comic books as opposed to the "less realistic" older style
comics. Is this a real difference in your opinion or are they
sucked in by a bit more violence?
BML: I would argue that Watchmen and the work of people
like Frank Miller, and Denny O'Neal and Len Wein was a real
watershed of difference, between the earlier, goofy, surreal and
sometimes condescending gold and silver age stories which were
aimed exclusively (if inaccurately) at children, and more modern
stories which tried to deal honestly with some kind of reality. I
obvious make an exception here for The Spirit and
Plastic Man and a very few others. I do think that young
writers in particular tend to think that the harsher and more
explicit a story is, the more realistic it is. And not just
younger writers.
Look at the way movies and TV shows pimp crime stories: making it
seem that crime is going up, when it is actually going down, and
encouraging people to long for a police state. In those cases,
more violence and crime isn't reality, it's fantasy.
DS: The appearance of Artemis and the artwork of Mike
Deodato Jr gave the book a very different tone, all bad girl
posses and lots more fight scenes. Was this a conscious change on
your part to the title?
BML: I tried to give Mike more action to draw, and to show
things happening, rather than to talk about it. This is actually
what I should do anyway. I can be awfully talky. But I also tried
to start books in mid-fight, to maximize the action. There's no
point in going against your artist's long suit. However, for good
or ill, the bad girl poses were all Mike. He loves them, that's
the way he draws, and they are just part of the package.
DS: Your Elseworlds take on Wonder Woman, Amazonia
portrayed some very disturbing male treatment of women. Was that
your intention?
BML: Well, Duh. With Jack the Ripper as King of England, I
should hope it would be disturbing. Actually, the hardest thing
was to find a way to make the already appalling Victorian
treatment of women even worse.
DS: You said before that you didn't enjoy doing dialogue
for someone else's writing. Was this true of your work on The
Maxx?
BML: No, I loved that. Just another instance of my
emotional inconsistency. The Maxx was one of my very
favorite books. Sam and I were sympathico and he gave me an
astonishing amount of freedom.
DS: Hawkman was the other character you said that you
lobbied for. What made you want to write it?
BML: I had grown up reading it, and I thought it had a
totally different tone than the other books of the time: the
historical angle, the use of a married couple, the SF-alien edge.
And Tim Truman and John Ostrander had given it a really
interesting spin. Also it was a harder edged, more combat
oriented book than I was known for writing. I thought it would
make a nice stretch for me. Just shows you what I know.