[heroic music] ♪ - 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, editor, Marv Wolfman.

Marv, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you for having me.

- Marv, you have written for Marvel, you've written for DC, you've written for a number of different publishers, but I think back to those days in the 1980s, when I first started reading comics, you were working on a series called the New Teen Titans, which has not only held up over the years as a great large body of work, but has turned into a television series on HBO Max, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you were working on or developing the New Teen Titans.

- The Teen Titans has a long history at DC Comics.

There was a version in the 60s.

There was a version in the 70s, and about two thirds of the way through the 70s, it was canceled.

The people at DC didn't really care for the book.

And I came out to DC in 1980, January of 1980, and I said I wanted to redo it, I wanted come in with a brand new concept for the Titans.

And so I liked the concept, I didn't always like the execution, but I really liked the characters and I wanted to also create my own.

So I started to put together characters and then made a proposal and they loved it.

And they said yes, and I wrote the book for 16 years, which is a long time.

And I'm still doing at different points even now Titans stories, usually about the individual characters.

So they appear in different places.

But once or twice I also did the whole team.

So it's been since 1980, so 41 years, is that correct?

- Wow.

- Hard to believe.

- Now, you mentioned that I, during the pandemic, one of the things that I and a lot of folks did was we started getting back into collecting, and one of the things I would do at conventions would be the long box dive, where I would look for those series that I was missing a few key issues here and there, and without being able to go to shows like HeroesCon, I decided it was time for me to fill in my collection with the trade paperbacks.

So I was able to read through the entire run all the way through the Baxter editions of the New Teen Titans, where you did that five-part, the "Terror of Trigon" series, and the one thing I noticed in this entire big body of work was how well you planted seeds, let them grow, and then sort of, you know, went on to the next, but always kind of had those threads ready to go and start to weed with.

So when you're working on a book, I know you're working with the great George Perez, how much of this is planning, you know, we're gonna do this so that in two years, we can help tell the story and how much of it is just, you know, we got really lucky that we left these threads open so we could kind of go and work later on?

- An occasion I do writing seminars or conventions, and one of the things I always say is that I purposely do not answer all questions.

I will set up things to be answered later down the line, and that's the way it is in real life.

Something happens and you don't even think about it until maybe two years later, and then you start dealing with it then, but here, since it was fiction, it had to be planted in advance.

Sometimes I knew exactly what I was gonna do, and sometimes it was just, this needs to be covered later on, and I don't know how we'll get into it, but we will try, but it was deliberate, the idea of planting time, and so that I could come in with stories later on.

- That speaks of the confidence you had in the book that you were putting together.

Because, you know, I know that a lot of comics are lucky if they can get to that first year or two, and if the sales aren't great, you know, those ideas just kind of wither on the vine, but you were confident that the series would work and you were doing the Teen Titans in a different way because you were introducing three new characters and basically giving some other characters new life.

So when you're putting a team together, when you're creating these characters, what sort of ideas do you have?

Because you have someone like Cyborg, who is dealing with issues of his body and disability.

It just takes on so much more gravitas when you look at it and realize that you were kind of putting those seeds in.

So when you're creating these characters, when you're building this universe, let's talk a little bit about that long game, you know, that confidence.

- One of the things I was most adamant about was that it not be a book like the Justice League or the Avengers where characters just get together and fight bad guys.

I wasn't interested in that.

I wanted characters who liked each other, who cared about each other, who were a family, they came together for a reason.

It was their choice, not an accidental thing.

We're gonna stop the bad guys.

This was very much a deliberate choice.

So the first thing that we do is try to come up with characters that will give us openings to stories later on, which you can't always do with a book like the Justice League or the Avengers.

You have the characters who existed and therefore they have to go through their continuity, but Titans was gonna have brand new characters.

It wasn't in connection with any other titles in DC, so each character was created or altered to enable us to tell the type of stories we wanted.

What do I mean by that?

We have Starfire.

She's the lead in to all science fiction type stories that I want to do.

We have Raven.

That leads us into all the horror stuff and all the different type of cultish type stories that we wanted to tell.

We had Cyborg, tech and also street at that particular time.

We had Nightwing and he was used as the team leader, which he always was in the Titans, but the idea was he had no powers, but he was probably the most important member of the Titans group.

Wonder Girl, she was the power, she was mythology type stories.

Anytime I, because I love mythology, so if I were looking for a mythology story, she will be the lead character.

So every one of those characters- With Robin, it was also we can get into detective stories and crime stories and different types of stories.

So it was very much a situation that each character would allow us to approach a storyline, approach it, approach a genre that we wanted to tell the story for that month.

So we always had a character who could take us that way.

Therefore, they all had to be created or altered to allow us to do that.

- Now you mentioned Nightwing and Robin.

That was something that's really unusual about what you were able to do.

You took a character that had, I guess, close to 40 years in print continuity, and you were able to make a change that not only stuck.

I mean, we see a lot of these character arcs that come up and will Tony stark stay Iron Man, or will it be Rhodey, but they always go back to Tony Stark and you managed to create a new persona for Dick Grayson, where he sort of graduates from being Robin to becoming his own person of Nightwing.

So how do you negotiate that on an editorial level where you're able to kind of say to the powers that be, look, let me have this character, let me make these changes, and it's gonna work.

- Robin was an interesting case because he was unlike anything else.

And as far as I know, the first, first character who was sort of like the, the helper, Batman's sidekick type character, and the problem was we brought him into the Titans, which was important.

He was a good character, he was gonna be leader, and as I say, he will take us into detective type stories, but we couldn't really do a lot with him.

So we did all the stories where he has the problems with Batman and all of this, and over time, over the first three, four years, we kept aging him, we kept growing him a little bit because I didn't like the idea that this 20-year-old, 19, 20-year-old kid was essentially walking around with green shorts, green underwear.

It just did not work for the older skewing characters that we had developed.

If he's gonna be the leader he shouldn't look like he was nine years old anymore.

And we kept developing him and developing him, and then coincidentally, the editor of Batman, Denny O'Neil, said he wanted to have Robin back.

He wanted Robin to be back with Batman and he wanted to make him younger like he was originally.

And I went, no, no, I don't want that, I don't- But then it struck me, we're telling stories in the Titans of these characters getting older.

Robin is constantly talking about the problems of being with Batman.

This is the logical the children leave the parents and move on, and here was a chance to do something that had never been done before.

So I said, look, you want Robin, I don't want Robin, I don't care about Robin.

Give me Dick Grayson.

You can create a new Robin.

You would really get all the fans going crazy over this because it's never been done before.

You can have that and the publicity will help sell that.

Meanwhile, I could take this character who is 18, 19, 20 years old, and treat him like he's 18, 19 and 20.

He doesn't look like the sidekick anymore.

He'll have his own name, his own costume, his own approach to things.

They loved that idea.

They said go ahead, do it and then came up with Nightwing.

- Another thing that you were able to weave into your stories were sort of trends in the 1980s.

You were able to cover runaway children.

You were able to cover cults that kind of preyed on teens.

And you were able to put those stories together in a way that was packed with adventure, wasn't heavy-handed and yet still seemed like, you know, to somebody my age, reading those comics for the first time as a young teenager, they seemed, you know, like relevant, real stories that were a lot of fun to read.

So how do you kind of balance the points that you're trying to make with the adventure and knowing your audience?

- Well, we were approached actually to do the runaway stories.

The runaway groups in New York asked us if there was a possibility of doing that, and they asked for, if I recall, for Superman first and DC said, no, if this is about runaway kids, the best book to put it in is in Titans.

And since Titans dealt so often with problems that teenagers have, it fit comfortably in it.

The trick is you always have to remember, it's still an action comic.

It still has to have the good scenes and great character stuff.

And then you can weave a realistic story in it and treat it like it absolutely belongs there.

But what it actually is, it always has to be a good Teen Titans story.

And of course, what they did was they sent me to different homeless shelters in New York.

I met with a lot of the people from there.

We did that again when we did the anti-drug comics, where you get to meet them to understand it because I was in my 30s at that point and, you know, closer to being a teenager than I am now.

But you still want to find out, it's still not something that I knew intimately, so by speaking to the people, I'm really understood the story we had to tell.

And it worked out really well.

I like the runaway books a lot.

I like the anti-drug books as well.

We did an apartheid story before anybody was talking about it in this country.

I happened to have been in Europe for a number of weeks on a vacation, and they had all the problems going on and an apartheid on the radio full time, because it was important in England, and therefore we were doing something that really hadn't been talked about much in the States, and I thought it worked out very well.

- One of the things that worked in your favor was you did have a great collaborator in George Perez and you were able to build up, one of the things that I noticed in reading those, I think, nine volumes that I have at home was not only the growth of the characters, but the growth of George as an artist and contributor to the work.

And I'm wondering if you have any sense of your contribution to that confidence in sort of letting him, you know, develop his chops a little bit in storytelling or in how the characters would act based on, you know, maybe discussions that the two of you were having.

- Well, the first thing is my belief was George was a good storyteller.

I knew that because we had worked together at Marvel.

More important than him being a good artist, which he was one of the best ever, but more important than that was in comics is being able to tell a story.

So he had a unique ability to do both, tell a story and understand how to put it all together.

And what we would do in the beginning, I would write fairly complex plots to what we did at Marvel, and then George would take it and break it down very quickly.

We both realized George had much more to offer than just being the artist on the book because he came up with great ideas on a regular basis.

So we have to live a few blocks from each other in Queens, New York, and we would get together once or twice a month at a diner, and I'd come in with a basic idea for the story, and then George and I together would break it down and make it work.

And he is such a good storyteller and such an incredibly good artist that we were able to slowly get away from a written plot at all.

We'd just talk it out, and then he would go off and do it.

And if he made a change, my view was 99% of the time, it's gonna be a change for the better.

That 1%, it'll just be a change, but that's okay because I'm doing the same thing.

I'm coming up with ideas that don't work sometimes as well.

But working with him, I think we were a really good team because we respected each other, and I was a huge fan of his very, very quickly because he took on far more than just being the artist.

He was a total partner on the book.

- Now that partnership would later bring you to destroy the DC universe.

I mean, DC must've loved what the two of you were doing because they gave you the monumental task of destroying the DC universe and bringing it back to life.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the landmines that you had to negotiate when you present "Crisis on Infinite Earths".

- First, they didn't come up with the idea.

I did and proposed it to them.

The publisher, Jenette Kahn, really liked that because DC sales weren't doing that well except for the Titans, and they were looking for something and here I'm coming in with an idea of trying to start the DC universe all over again.

We needed a big bang.

And so it was not a hard sell to do that, but George was not involved with the Crisis in the beginning.

After all the years working together, he really wanted to write a book and he wanted to do Wonder Woman.

I don't remember the exact timeline, but he was gonna be doing something else while we were still finishing some Titans stories together.

But when we got together for our regular meetings, or later on, just for lunch, I would tell him what I was doing as he was telling me what he was doing, and he finally said who's the artist on the book?

I said nobody yet, you know?

And he said I really have to do this, and I went thank God, nobody would have been better, but he was not set to the book if somebody else was gonna do it.

And don't ask who, because we hadn't worked it out yet.

I personally didn't feel that anyone but George could do it.

If he hadn't said yes, if he had just, if we didn't go out to lunch, there would never have been that instance where he said I have to be part of this because he wouldn't have known what I was doing.

And the fact that once he heard it, he realized how important that could be to what he likes to do, further telling the story of getting his artwork out there in ways that nobody else could have done it.

Nobody else could have done all that work and so quickly.

It's amazing how fast he was considering he puts 100 characters in every panel.

He was a great partner on the book, and once he became the full partner, because I had already plotted the first couple of issues, we just hadn't given them out to an artist yet, he was able to get started right away contributing more than just the art, but saying what if we did this?

You know, how can we fix that?

- And in the book, you managed to deal with some of DC's biggest characters and give them significant endings.

I mean, we don't see this often in comics where there's a death of a character that has a real impact that actually lasts, and I know some of these characters have come back since, but you were- - They always come back, but in the case of say, Supergirl and the Flash, they came back over 25 years later.

That's pretty good.

- And that was exactly my point.

I mean, it took DC until, I guess they started approaching that New 52 period before they decided that the continuity had gotten a little bit too weighty, and we do need that big bang, like you say.

So your relaunch of the DC universe after the Crisis is, I believe it starts DC sales just going through the roof, and you're part of the reboot of the iconic comic character in all of US history, which is Superman.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you got involved in the rebirth of Superman.

- I was already writing Superman.

I had written it for Julie Schwartz for a year or so, and then when Julie finally retired, I was doing it with Andy Helfer, the editor and such like that.

So I was always a part of it, and what I wanted to do was really revitalize Luther because I thought he wasn't a good villain for Superman.

One of the problems I had with it and not putting down with other people have done, these are all just personal opinions that we're doing, they made him sort of like, they gave him a suit that had super abilities to it so they could fight.

And my view is that's ridiculous.

Nobody can ultimately punch out Superman.

Why are you meeting Superman on his ground, on his level?

What Luther has that Superman doesn't have is he's the smartest man on earth.

He's a genius, he's brilliant.

Use his knowledge, use his science, use all of the stuff that only he can do to fight Superman.

'Cause Superman is great and he's smart, but he's not Luther smart.

- And that character, that interpretation of Luther, we see that in the "Lois and Clark" television series, we see it in the Superman animated series.

We see it in the Justice League animated series.

We see it in all permutations of Luther since.

It's just absolutely amazing that you saw that one little problem and you're able to just twist it and put it in the exact right position.

So, you know, you end up working with someone like Jerry Ordway, and you've worked with artists like Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, so with this ability to work with top flight talent, have you ever felt, you know, maybe spoiled that your work is always going to be well-received because you're working with these great artists?

- If that was on one project, you would say that the artist saved me, but this is like two dozen, three dozen, four dozen projects, all with different artists.

Maybe I did a good job.

I have to take it like that.

Part of my job is to make the artists feel that they are contributing more than just a drawing, because all of these are very smart people.

They're very intelligent.

They have great ideas as well.

There were things that I definitely wanted to do.

My decision was we had to change Luther and make him worth being Superman's foe.

Whoever the artist was going to be at that particular point would be following that story, but they may add something else, they may add another level to it.

I think of comics as a group effort, as far back as the "Tomb of Dracula" novel, which is the first regular assignment I ever had.

I always thought of the artist as a partner and not as somebody who just does what I want, and if you can take the ego out of it, all you're concerned about is a good story, and I'm lucky when I'm working with a good artist, and I've worked with people who aren't quite as good as the ones you mentioned, because those guys are the best, you know.

But the fact is that obviously they enjoyed working with me because they wanted to work with me on other projects as well.

- Now I see we have about five minutes left in our conversation.

I wanted to ask you about your role as an editor.

Now, I know that you were an editor at Marvel for a while, and then at DC, you started as a writer, but you also were the writer, editor of the Teen Titans.

So I'm wondering as an editor who's working with other writers versus being a writer, editor of your own book, how do you sort of deal with issues that come up, whether it's, you know, a page might be late coming back from the inker, or maybe the story needs to be tweaked a little bit coming from another writer?

- If I'm dealing with another writer, because the story needs to be tweaked, we just go over it.

We say, okay, here's why I'm having a problem here.

What can we do about it?

And if I can verbalize that there really is a problem, as opposed to just my view versus their view, then we can go along because they'll understand that as well.

If on the other hand they say, I really want to do this because it's important to me, and I think that the story should go this way and we'll look at it, we'll analyze it together and go, yeah, maybe we can do this and that brings the artist and I a little bit closer.

You know, I really don't think that works, and here's the reason why.

It's not a personal opinion.

Here's my feeling and here's my explanation.

Tell me if you agree or don't agree.

You're just dealing with other people, so it's all a matter of how you deal with people.

You know, respect them.

If they're good, if they're top talent, take what they have to say in consideration because they're probably right.

And the few times they're wrong, you can explain it if you understand why they're wrong, as opposed to, I don't know, I just don't like it.

You know, that's not a good enough reason.

It can't be a parallel situation.

It has to be so much better.

It's not just if I put this in, it'll be okay.

It has to be if I'm doing it this way, there has to be a real reason we're doing it and why it works.

- You know, it's tough when you deal with creative people, because I know that when I speak to my students in broadcasting classes, they tend to take any criticism, and I mean that in the way of constructive criticism about their work, they can take it personally, and I find it interesting that you're talking about trying to separate the person from the work so that you can speak to a problem and try and iron it out.

- You have to, because these are good people.

These are people who've been working in the business and understand the business and they just have a different viewpoint.

They have a different idea and you have to decide as an editor, is it worth going with that idea if I don't like it?

Or maybe it's just a personal thing, because that's not the way I would have done it.

And if it's a personal thing, because it's not the way I would've done it, then there's no reason I'm telling somebody to do it this way.

Their way is equally as smart.

You just have to deal with people like they're people and not put your own ego right in the middle of it.

Only once in my entire career as an editor did I ever have to say to a writer do this because I'm telling you to, because he just kept refusing.

Only once, that's pretty good.

- Well, it's been better than pretty good half-hour, but Marv, they're telling us that we are out of time.

I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

- My pleasure.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

[heroic music] ♪ - [Announcer] Comic Culture is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

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