[bright music] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ - Hello, and welcome to "Comic Culture".

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer John Zuur Platten.

John, welcome to "Comic Culture".

- Great to see you, Terence.

Thanks for having me.

Really excited to talk with you today about what we've got going on.

- What you've got going on is a new comic called "Revolvers", which I had the opportunity to read the first issue.

Without giving too much away, it's a noir comic, it's a supernatural comic, and it's a little bit of horror.

So when you're working in all of those different genres and making them into one tight story, how do you make sure you hit all those right buttons?

- It's a great question.

The challenge here on this particular comic is that we were kind of pushing a number of boundaries, and we wanted to still have a unified vision for the piece.

The story itself is about basically a cop who may or may not be investigating his own death, and he ends up in a alternate reality, sort of purgatory called the Moratorium.

And so it touches on elements of properties like "John Wick", "Hellraiser", Michael Mann's "Heat" played a role in sort of some of the cop stuff.

And so it was kind of trying to bring that all together into a unified vision that made sense.

That was really the challenge.

And then create a compelling story with interesting characters.

For me, more than anything else, your story has to be grounded in characters you either empathize with or sympathize with, or at least wanna know how their story plays out.

And Hampton is the main protagonist in the story.

Hampton is a good cop, but not necessarily a good man.

And that's the interesting part of his character is him coming to terms with his failings.

Those failings often present themselves in very violent ways.

And so it was a really fun book to write.

I enjoyed it immensely, and I was very fortunate that I had a great artist named Christian Dibari, who was my partner in crime on this.

and he was able to bring the imagery to my words and super excited about it.

- And when you're working with an artist like Christian, it's gotta be, I guess, when you're seeing the pages come in and you see what you're writing and he's interpreting.

Does that make you sort of rethink, oh, maybe if I turn a little bit in this direction, it will tweak the dialogue here, it can play into the art, or you just sort of saying, well, he's interpreted the script already, I'm just gonna go with it as it was written.

- Yeah, I had basically written all four of the books before Christian started to do the art.

But as he was doing the art, I was kind of going back and doing some edits and some revisions to the script.

Christian brought a real rock and roll aesthetic to the piece that I didn't initially see, but when he sent over his first character concepts for me to look at and we were just kind of reviewing and checking everything out, he had this real kind of like gritty, yeah, like I said, for lack of a better term, kind of rock and roll vibe to it.

And he's very much a fan of 80s horror, grindhouse body horror, the same sort of stuff that I'm a fan of.

We sort of had a shorthand language we could speak to each other, and when I saw his initial imagery, I was thinking kind of more, you know, kind of law and order type characters.

That's what I kind of had bouncing around in my head, and as I said, a little bit of inspiration from Michael Mann and his crime dramas.

And then I saw what Christian was doing, and he was going with this really kind of very interesting aesthetic that I just said, oh man, this is so good.

Let's embrace this.

A lot of my work with Christian was really just an issue of, as stuff was coming in, encouraging him to go as dark as I was willing to go.

And he just came up with some amazing visuals and it was a real pleasure to work with him and his colorist Simon go to see this thing come to life.

- Looking at the artwork, it has a, I guess, I don't wanna say retro, but an old school feel.

It's not as tight as we're used to seeing contemporary comics where every little detail is in the page, a lot is implied.

There's a lot of shadow, there's a lot of the reader's supposed to draw their own conclusion as to a lot of this stuff, but it is set in a real world city, Detroit.

In trying to capture the feel of Detroit as a writer and seeing the artist's interpretation of Detroit as sort of a character, how does that influence you and how do you influence it?

- Great question, because we spent a lot of time thinking about, okay, where is this story gonna be set?

The story is ultimately a story of both despair and hope, and we were looking for a place that made sense.

My father was from Detroit, and I've kind of watched with both horror and amazement as Detroit has evolved over the past years.

And so we were thinking of this idea, okay, well what would be a present day ghost town?

And we started thinking Detroit is almost like a ghost metropolis in some ways.

And so we wanted the city to play a role.

And so once we got to that point, we thought, okay, well let's make the city of Detroit a character.

And the interesting thing about Hampton is he loves Detroit.

It's his home and he absolutely loves the city.

So in no way did I want to sort of like denigrate the city.

I just wanted to have the ability to use a city that's kind of in this awkward stage in its existence and go, okay, what if that town was filled with ghosts?

What if that town was filled with an alternate reality that sort of hid below the surface?

And could that alternate reality that's hiding below the surface actually be influencing in some way what we're seeing happen to that city?

And so I found the city of Detroit and the location to be a story of its own and very metaphorical for what we were doing with the rest of the story.

So once I saw Simon start to bring the city to life as well, I just went, yeah, this was the right decision.

There are some various locations in the city itself that do play significantly into the story when you get into the later books.

- And what's really interesting again about Detroit is that as you say in the book, this was the engine basically that fueled the US army, the US Navy, the Air Force during World War II, basically that's what beat the Axis powers.

And you write about this using captions, which we don't see too often in contemporary comics.

So I'm wondering, you know, Frank Miller will do it where it's first person, but this is that traditional third person omniscient narrator.

When you're going and doing something that isn't done too much these days, is that again, that conscious choice because you're looking to do something different?

Or is this just a great storytelling tool?

- Hopefully it's both, but yeah, there was a challenge early on in the story.

When I first started writing it, there was no narrator, there was nobody, there was no voice, you know, no voice of God talking you through parts of the story.

And as I got to the end, and I knew where I was going with the story, I knew how I wanted to wrap up, I realized that a significant character in the story could actually be the narrator.

And so you'll find out later who that voice belongs to.

And for me, it allowed me to...

When you're doing a comic, sometimes you have to be concise in both the words you choose and the story you're telling and the way the imagery's gonna play out.

You don't get the luxury of adding an additional 10 pages to make everything flow.

And so having a character that can bridge some of those gaps became an essential part of the story.

It allowed me to compress some of the bigger ideas by having a character basically describe how that was playing out within the context of the narrative.

And so that was a both a creative choice and a sort of structural choice for the comic.

I also like getting in people's heads.

I like people musing, I like to listen to people's thoughts.

And that's what you're basically reading, you're gonna find out as you move forward with books, you're gonna find out you're actually in somebody's head.

And as to the city itself, Detroit was absolutely essential.

It was the engine certainly for a lot of what was happening in the United States from a manufacturing and technological point of view.

And so its fall from grace, if you will, for lack of a better term, is a tragedy in and of itself that we explore in the book as well.

- We've talked about how this is a different type of comic and you're working with a different type of publisher.

You're working with Image and the Top Cow imprint.

So how do you go about working with or choosing to work with Top Cow?

- Yeah, so I have a longtime friendship with Matt Hawkins over at Top Cow.

And the company that I'm a part of, a company called Epitome, is run by a man named Richard Leibowitz.

And Rich is a longtime friend of mine too.

We go back 25 years.

and when we first started exploring things we're gonna do together and IP development, we're doing a lot of stuff in the game space, and we were looking at ways that we could start putting some of these IPs on their feet and getting a feel for how they would work.

And one of our initial reactions was, well, maybe we do some comics.

So we reached out to Matt, fortunately Matt was terrific, he was very supportive and he liked the IP we were bringing to him, including "St. Mercy" and "Revolvers", as well as another comic called "Colossus", which we did and Matt wrote.

And so it was really great getting to work with Matt and his team over at at Top Cow.

They were super supportive.

And as this was sort of my first foray in the comic space, even though I've been writing for 30 years in video games and film and television and that sort of thing, Matt kind of helped me through the process and the truth of writing is a universal truth.

So story is story regardless of the platform or medium you're going to, but every medium has its own unique needs and expectations on behalf of the audience that you're trying to reach.

And Matt's insights into that and his guidance was truly invaluable to me as I started to put this together.

So it was great having a pro like Matt on my side to kind of get me up to speed on some of the elements of comics that I wasn't as familiar with as a more experienced comic writer would be.

But I think that also worked to my advantage because I was doing things that other comic writers probably wouldn't, that drove everybody a little bit crazy at times.

But from that craziness I think came something really original.

And so I think that's something that we can be really proud of is that we're doing things and telling stories in the medium that other people don't.

And I find that fascinating.

- I had the opportunity to speak to Matt Hawkins last year, and he is a gentleman who approaches comics, not so much in that bombastic Stan Lee sort of true believers kind of way.

He's more of a curator and he's looking for interesting products.

And you mentioned "Colossus", which I thought was just a fascinating comic.

I had the chance to read that as well.

But you mentioned that you have worked in video games and you've worked in television.

So how does writing, I mean, story is story, character is character, but how do you sort of go between those disciplines and make sure that you're able to tell a great story and still play into the strengths of that medium?

- Yeah, it's a really solid question because it's something I struggle with.

When I'm working on a project, when I'm writing, whether I'm writing other people's IPs or writing my own, I basically ask myself three questions constantly.

And the first thing is, what am I trying to say?

So in this story, what am I really trying to say?

And then the second question I'm always asking with myself is who am I trying to tell?

And then the final question I'm asking myself is, and how am I gonna tell them?

So those three questions form the foundation of what I write.

And depending on the medium that I'm in, those questions change.

So if you're writing in the video game space, you may write massive scripts.

I've written 1,000 page scripts, 2,000 page scripts.

I've written in a single game, maybe eight to 10,000 lines of dialogue.

And you're approaching that in an entirely different way, even though you're creating a mass amount of content, the way that content is gonna be delivered to who you're trying to speak to might be in very fast, very quick engaging segments.

Because the expectation of a video game audience is I'm a player, I get to control, when do I start pushing buttons?

And so you have to understand that the expectation of that audience is entirely different than say the expectation of a comic book audience who is sitting down and wants to read the book, and they're gonna spend some time with it, and they're probably gonna spend some time even after they read it going back and maybe rereading sections or looking at the art or whatever it might be.

So those expectations are entirely different.

The way they're engaging with the content is entirely different.

And as you said, the the truth of story is the truth of story.

You need engaging characters, you need story arcs, you need setups and payoffs, you need journeys for the characters to go on.

But understanding the audience you're reaching I think is a key component of creating the content.

About, it was probably six or seven months ago, I saw a thing on Facebook that basically said explain what you do for a living in five words or less.

And so I wrote, "I create people and problems", and that is the essence of a writer.

That is the essence of writer does, you create people and then you put them into difficult situations, and then you see how they respond to those situations and can they get themselves out of them.

And if you can do that, and you can understand your process by which you get there, then you can kind of endlessly generate stories.

It just becomes how do you modify that story to work for the audience you're trying to reach?

And that for me is a key component that I'm always thinking of when I'm writing, when I'm working on my craft.

- I've read that some scholars are predicting that video games will be the next sort of narrative, and it's probably come true already, narrative storytelling method that really engages to audience.

It becomes that new cinema that you can play a game multiple different times and tell a different story every time you play it.

So as you're writing, as you said, 8,000 lines of dialogue, knowing that some of them will never be heard by the player, are you thinking, you know what, the second time they play this game or the third time they play this game, they're gonna get another element and another piece.

- Yeah, exactly.

The challenge to doing that is a lot of that dialogue is instruction hidden within narrative.

Because a game player is always gonna be looking to extract information from all of those interactions that you're having, whether it's a cutscene or whether it's interactive dialogue or anything in between, they're looking for information.

So you have to not only provide story, but you have to be very judicious in how you use your words, because you don't wanna send somebody off on a journey that they can't complete.

And so yeah, it is a challenge.

It's 100% a challenge.

You spend a lot of time sort of juggling balls in your own head of like, okay, this character is there, have they seen this sequence yet?

And we do map it out.

So there is kind of a roadmap, a spreadsheet that we can follow.

But it presents its own unique set of issues that you have to deal with when you're creating that content.

As to games being the medium of the future, I think that's 100% true.

I think if you define games as interactive, anything interactive, anything in which there is agency on the part of the person that's being entertained.

So rather than a viewer, a player, those kind of experiences I think are the future, the next generation of folks that are coming into not only defining medium, defining the mediums that they want to explore for their entertainment, but actually purchasing, those folks are more likely to watch Snapchat than they are to watch traditional television.

They're more likely to be engaged in a TikTok video than they might be on a video they would watch on YouTube.

And so the medium is constantly evolving, constantly changing, and our job as creators is to understand where they are and where they want to be and what they enjoy and get there and provide them that entertainment that they're looking for.

- And as a writer, someone who's worked in television, where writing a script is a particular format with actors who know their part and you probably don't have to get too in depth with some visuals, especially if it's, let's say a sitcom or something like that to a video game where maybe you are getting really detailed with what's in the background because you're having to create that whole environment and then to a comic where you're again, sort of going into what the artist has to put on the page, how do you sort of work with that discipline knowing how in depth or not in depth you have to go with describing, you know, a kitchen?

- It's a real challenge because if you are writing traditional screenplays, if you're doing stuff that's for traditional media, there's kind of this rule that people talk about that basically boils down to don't direct on the page.

Just tell your story and let the director, or let the other folks that are gonna be dealing with bringing your story and putting it on feet.

They'll figure out where to place the camera.

And then you write a comic book where you 100% have to direct on the page, you're calling out panel by panel imagery.

And like I said, I was fortunate enough to work with Christian and Simon, and they know how to lay out a story.

They know how to direct on the page.

So I could say, look, you know, panel, panel panel, half splash, and then eight out of 10 times I might get that from Christian, but a couple of times, no, I've got my own idea of how I want this to go, and I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna draw out the way I see it.

And he was always right, so I never fought him on it.

But yeah, there's that whole sort of mindset having to change where you're trying to explain everything that you might see in that particular panel.

Whereas as you've said, if you're writing a sitcom, the environment's already set up, so you're just writing the jokes.

And again, it's that transition from platform to platform that you have to pay attention to.

And so yeah, there were a lot of new tricks this old dog had to learn because I had to break habits that I've been using for years because that's the way you're supposed to do it.

And then in video game writing, it can vary wildly.

So I tend to write all my video game stuff in traditional screenplay format, but then it may get converted into all kinds of other formats.

I've had to write in databases and spreadsheets and Word documents and Google Docs, and usually fortunate that the people that I work with understand that final draft is my jam of choice, and I like to start there.

And then some companies like the folks at Frontier Developments who do Jurassic World built a custom extractor, so they can basically take all my final draft scripts and convert them into the Excel spreadsheets that they need for basically coding.

And when we go to do voice recording, oftentimes we'll do it out of a spreadsheet too, just because the script would be so big otherwise.

- That's interesting.

I never thought about the voice actors having to do, I mean, obviously they're going to have to perform, it's sort of like doing a voice for an animated feature, but I'm imagining for a video game, it's gotta be a little bit trickier because you do have in some cases 8,000 lines of dialogue that have to be covered.

- And you have to provide for a performer, they want to know the context of the scene that they're in.

And that scene may be jumping around, they may not know what's happening what the player did just before this line kicks in, or how this line is directing the player to do the next bit of action they need to take.

So it's really important.

So in addition to being with the actor to help them tweak a line, make sure it's working for them, we also need to give them basically the purpose of the line, what it's providing for the game.

Actors for me are the essential element of anything that I write, because I'm not writing for a reader, I'm writing for a performer, and in many cases I can't get the script over the finish line.

I really need a talented actor to bring all of their skills to bear on it and bring it to the finish line.

So I tell everybody, even on my best day, I can only get 80% of the way there.

I still need the incredible talents of professionals that know what they're doing, voice directors and engineers and obviously actors to bring the material to life.

And the really exciting part for me as a creative is when I hear really talented people playing with a line of dialogue I wrote at four in the morning, and they elevate it and make it something so much better than what I had in my head, or what I was able to put on the screen and through the keyboard, and they just run with it and turn it into something beyond what I could have imagined.

And that's sort of how it works in video games.

And in many ways that's what happened with revolvers and the comic was.

I had this one vision in my head as I was writing it, and then Christian's vision kind of infected my brain with all the amazing stuff he was doing.

And so it was really exciting to see those pages come in because I was like, yeah, I'm getting the same thrill that I was getting being in a recording session.

- It's fascinating.

We have just about a minute or so left before we have to wrap up our conversation.

But working collaboratively in television and video games and in comics, it's gotta be great to have that knowledge that there's always gonna be somebody there to pick you up and make your work even better.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Every entertainment medium is a collaborative medium, and you have to trust that the people around you know what they're doing, that they have the skills to do it, and then you let their talent shine.

Rather than trying to impose a vision, I try and share a vision and then let everybody else play in that sandbox.

And anything that they can do to make the project better, that's only to the good.

And so yeah, I love the process of collaboration.

My favorite thing to do is to be in a room and have a dry-erase board and a head full of ideas and just start jamming with the team and seeing where it takes us.

That's, to me, one of the most enjoyable parts of the job.

- Well John, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

The half hour's flown by.

- Oh, thanks.

It was great talking with you too.

I'm really passionate about this stuff.

I love writing.

I feel very fortunate that I get to do it for a living, and I'm always excited to share what I've got going on with everybody else.

- Well thank you again, and thanks to everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture".

We will see you again soon.

[bright music] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ "Comic Culture" is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

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