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

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

My guest today is multiple Eisner Award winner, multiple Ringo Award winner, and a Harvey Award winner, Tom King.

Tom, welcome to "Comic Culture".

- What a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me, this is awesome.

- Now, Tom, you recently launched a new online series called "Love Everlasting", I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this?

It's sort of a meta look at romance comics and I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the development and the series?

- Yeah, I mean, it's definitely one of the more bizarre things I've done in my career, and it's one of the things I most love in my career.

I mean, the simple pitch, it's about a woman who basically wakes up and discovers she keeps living romantic adventures over and over and over again.

Kind of like "Quantum Leap" where she's leaping from one adventures to the other.

And she realizes she's in some sort of trap where every time she wakes up she has sort of a conflict where she falls in up with someone and can't fall in love with him, and then she solves the conflict, kisses the guy, agrees to marry him, disappears, and wakes up in another conflict.

It's about her discovering what that trap is and how to get out of it and it's free on Substack, it's the first monthly comic ever issued for free, so it's at least something different.

Elsa Charretier did it with me, she's the brilliant artist of the whole thing.

Yeah, it's a very, it's an interesting comic 'cause it dives into comic history.

I do comics for a living, I've written "Batman", "Superman" and all that stuff.

But I was looking back and comics history has this hidden history, which is the history of them trying to appeal to a female audience.

Comics after 1975 decided they were gonna just go for adolescent boys and they focused on that for the last 50 years or so, but before that, from 1945 to 1975, comics were for all children and were aimed at a much wider audience and part of that, because of the times, was creating romance comics which were primarily aimed at a young female readership, and these have largely been forgotten.

Mostly they're remembered as silly things you see in a Lichtenstein painting that people laugh at the industry for.

But they were huge, they were a quarter of our industry, they sorted millions of copies.

There's probably about 10,000 issues out there with three stories per, so 30,000 stories that were written and drawn that are just literally in dustbins.

I couldn't find these comics, I had to get 'em off eBay.

I couldn't even get 'em at a Con.

And so part of this was me going back and being like, what is this thing?

This was a place where Kirby worked, where Toth worked, where Frassetto worked, where John Ramirez Sr. worked.

I was like, what were they doing when they were over there and just seeing, oh, there's something to mine here, there's something beautiful here, there's something horrible here.

And to put all of that into this comic that's about this woman being trapped in that world, is what it is.

- Romance comics were big and I've come across a few of them and if you look at the artwork, in many cases the artwork is more expressive and just as powerful, I suppose, as what you would see in an issue with a "Fantastic Four" or a "Batman" of the time.

And it's kind of strange that it has that tap shut off and hasn't come back on until I guess about now when people are starting to realize that women do enjoy reading comics and that there's a market for more than just that male demographic.

So is that something that, you know, when you're coming up with this idea, that you're thinking that it's gonna be fun for you to learn this new genre of comics, or is it something where you think it's gonna be fun to share that with a whole new generation of readers?

- I mean, it was the art that got me there first.

It was reading an old comic journal interview with Alex Toth with him saying, "The best art I ever did was in romance comics", and Alex Toth is my favorite artist of all time, I think he's the greatest comic book art.

Maybe with the exception of Charles Schultz who I see there's a Peanuts behind, but the certainly greatest guy to put ink to paper.

And for him to say my best work in this thing that nobody can read anymore was just mind boggling to me and to go back and see him be like, oh, he was right.

Like, this is better than his superhero stuff.

This is better than his adventure stuff.

He was in the confines of this very small world of like a person has a problem, they have to overcome that problem, they've eight pages to do it.

He managed to, you know, make beauty.

And so that attracted me to it and then I was saying like, how sort of these, these old tropes worked, it was almost like a new language.

It was a language I hadn't worked and I've been working in superheroes for 10 years, I was like, oh, this is another language for comics to speak.

And so I like that kind of stuff.

I like learning sort of new ways to make new comics.

So then I started speaking in that language to make this book, which is almost like a horror book.

So yeah, it, it was, very interesting to me and challenging and I thought, you know, it is sort of time for people to look back because there are, you know, those comics were, you know, often edited and written by women who are, who have long been forgotten, people like Barbara Friedlander, those kind of people.

The best comics are from Matthew Baker, who's a sort of forgotten, but huge figure in comics who was maybe one of the best artists ever, who was a black bisexual man, who's been, who's sort of a forgotten history of comics and did his best work in romance comics.

And because he did his best work in romance comics, people kind of overlook it.

So I think we need to go back and sort of look at those genres and see, what's good about, there's a lot of, it's a lot of misogyny in them.

There's a lot of presumptions about how the world works.

It's very Donna Reed, it's very 1950s, but once we dig underneath that, there are things there that are worth mining.

- Now, this is also a different business model for you because normally you'll sell a script to DC or Marvel and they will publish the book and they'll pay you probably quite well for it, but this is something where you are taking on the role of distributor.

You're putting this out on the web and you are, I guess, through Substack, you're offering different tiers where you can read the comic every month for free, where you can sort of be a patron, where you can pay a little bit and get more access and pay a little bit more and get some more access, all the way up until you get, I guess, a trip to your house for a barbecue.

[both laughing] So this is, again, this has gotta be something new and different for you, so what's it like when you have to come up with this business side of creating comics?

- Oh, it's so different.

I, most creators, you know, of my generation, people like, you know, Brian K. Vaughan and Ed Brubaker, they've already done owned even like Scott Snyder.

I've never done creator own.

I've never owned what I've worked on.

I've done non-superhero hero stuff with Sheriff of Babylon, but even that was for DC.

So I've always sort of gone out with a comic, promoted a comic, produced a comic with literally like AT&T, you know, a trillion dollar corporation behind me.

And this we're doing with this is just Elsa and I making a comic.

[chuckling] So yeah, we went from, you know, a team of hundreds of thousands to a team of two.

So it was quite an adjustment.

And then to launch it in this brand new way, I mean, it's no secret Substack, this website went out to a bunch of comic creators and gave us all sort of grants and said, "what can you do with this?

Can we change the comic industry with these grants?

", which was a kind and wonderful thing to do, and everyone's doing it sort of their own way.

The way I decided to do it was Elsa and I were already sort of making this comic.

We were making it to publish independently.

And I said, "well, now we can make it the best comic we can.

We can hire the best artist.

We have the money for Matt Hollingsworth.

We can hire the best letterer we can, Clayton Cowles.

We can hire Tom Muller to design it.

We can just make it into something great.

And we can release it for free because we have the grant.

And then yeah, we set up the tiers that people wanna know more about the comic.

And hopefully you're like, oh man, I really love this comic.

I wanna delve into it and I'm willing to sign on it.

But the most important part is just that I'm proud as comic, I want to get it out to as many people as possible.

- Now you said that you've been writing comics now for about 10 years, and you still have that passion for writing comics, so, what is it that motivates you every month or every day to sit down and tell that story?

- Oh, it's the greatest creative medium that man has ever created.

I've worked in television, I started out as a novelist.

And of course, before then I was in the CIA.

So I've had a sort of a weird career, but, and I've worked in movies, you know, I once wrote a movie with Ava DuVernay.

There's nothing better than comics.

It's the most fun medium for a few reasons.

Number one, unlike novels, it's, and unlike movies, it's super quick.

It's, you know, I write a comic, someone draws it, it gets put in a computer, three months, it's to the audience.

I mean, like when you write a novel, you write it, you send it in, a year later, you get agreement from a publisher, then you edit it for two years, and it comes out, the moment you started off to the moment it comes out is like a three year journey, a comic book it's like four months, which was great, like during the pandemic, we could start responding to the pandemic a lot faster than sort of the other mediums.

And number two, it's collaborative.

I can't draw, I'm one of the worst artists in the world.

And so it's absolutely a miracle to work with artists who can sort of take your stuff and transform it into other things.

And I mean, and finally, like comics is just where I live and where I love, like, I was seven years old.

I was a typical kid who couldn't make friends and just read something off the rack.

And I just grew up embraced that medium, I interned at Marvel in DC when I was in college, like it's just my first and ultimate love.

So like, when I'm not writing comics, I still go and read comics for fun.

So this, the combination of those three factors mean it's just, I never wanna stop, it's so much fun.

And the best job in the world.

- And your comics, a number of them are you sort of take maybe a B level character, sometimes a C level character, and you find something about that character that's always been there, but never really mind before, whether it's Mr.

Miracle or your current project, the human target, or even as my friend, Aaron Vaan wants me to say to you, Kite-Man, he wants me to talk to you about Kite-man, but it's about your ability to take these characters and find something about them that's new and that's human.

And you can tell a story, whether it's ongoing, like your Batman run was, or whether it is self-contained like the Mr.

Miracle or the Vision series or your Human Target.

So, when you're working on a story, how do you sort of dig around and find that little thread that you think you can start working with?

- You know, it might be my CIA training days.

I, the idea is always, is like, every single person has a story.

Like every, there's no human being on this earth you couldn't sit down and talk to them and come up with something that was worthy of a Pulitzer prize in their life, they haven't, even if they've lived the most boring life ever, like I'm literally the most boring person ever, like, wow, that's really interesting, you're the most boring person ever.

That's something I'd wanna write about.

Like, even that, like it solves itself, you know, that's always my approach.

There's no character in comics that doesn't have that.

If you talk to them long enough, they'll give you a story.

If you go inside their head, they'll be like, okay, here's my conflict, here's what motivates me.

Here's where I go from her, you know?

And I've always approached it that way.

And, the reason I say it's from CIA, it's cuz you know, in the CIA, we did a lot of stuff where you're just interviewing person after person, after person, you're trying to sort of get inside their head and you're always trying to find what motivates them?

What makes them tick?

What do they want, what do they hate?

And that's how I approach every sort of character.

- That's interesting, you see you just kind of throw that in casually that you were trained by the CIA, but it's part of, I guess, what makes you that type of writer, because you're looking at things in a way that's different than let's say somebody who just went to, you know, school and got the degree to be, creative writing degree or something like that.

So, applying that sort of, that methodology to a character that's been around for a while, like let's say Batman and plotting out I believe it was, you said you would do a hundred issues of Batman.

You have this big story planned.

So how much of that comes from that, I guess CIA mindset where you can take a character that's been around for so long and find a new way to ruin his life essentially and then build it back up into something that no one ever expected to have happen and be I guess, as beautiful as it was?

- Yeah, it's funny, everyone always says, "oh Tommy do these B level characters."

And I was like, I've written more Batman comics than any person alive and I'm almost like passing people who are dead, so I, yeah, but I've gone over a hundred issues now, if you count all extras and the specials and stuff, so.

Coming to Batman is the most intimidating thing you can do mostly because of Frank Miller, Frank Miller did year one and four issues.

So that's like the greatest Batman story ever I think Dark Knight Return's a little above it, but you can go back and forth between those two.

And him and Mazzucchelli and so every, I've done a hundred issues of Batman.

That means 25 times I didn't do something as good as year one, so like that's, [laughing] that's always the intimidating part.

Like, every four issues I'd be like, oh, I missed it again.

All right, I'll try [laughing] the next four.

But the only thing when you're doing Batman, Batman is the most written about fictional character in the history, there's more stories about Batman than there are about, you know, a Sherlock Holmes or, I mean, I'm sure him and Jesus are kind of neck and neck, but you know, so, it's intimidating because every, every, you know, how many times can you write about the pearls falling on the floor and him being sad about it?

It's like, so the only thing you can do is bring yourself to it, cuz it's the only thing you have that no one else has, everyone else has everything else.

You're the only one that has you.

So you have to bring yourself to it.

You have to find something in that that connects to you and that you can convey to the audience through that.

That's the only way to sort of make it new and cool.

- I had the opportunity to speak to Lee Weeks on a couple of episodes of the show.

And Lee, by the way, is one of my favorite creators in comics and you mentioned Mazzucchelli in year one, and that would probably be also my favorite Batman story.

And I think Lee would probably agree with you on that.

But the two of you did a three issue run or where Bruce Wayne is on jury duty.

And I said to him on the surface, this story should not work and it should not be as good as it is.

And yet you and Lee managed to make this story into something really compelling and using, I guess, flashbacks to tell us what had happened and how it's a reaction to events that had occurred.

So, when you get something as mundane as Bruce Wayne in his version of 12 Angry Men, how do you kind of put that spin on it to make it as compelling and as interesting as you were able to?

- Well, like you said, it's taken from 12 Angry Men, you know, and said the air conditioning's on to it's too cold instead of too hot.

And I love that movie and that movie takes place, you know, not one take, but in one room the whole time and you just feel, but the whole time you're on you feel like you're watching epic, you know, you could be watching a Star Wars can be just as high stakes as that move the way Henry Fonda handles it.

And so, I mean, that was the place I knew I could do it.

And it was such an easy idea 'cause you know, once you have Bruce Wayne on the jury as Henry Fonda, you're like, oh what's the crime about?

And you're like, oh, it's something where Bruce Wayne wants to sort of be against Batman where they were sort of Batman had committed a crime and Bruce was trying to sort of get 'em all.

I knew it could work, I could see if I could do each individual juror just like that, where I could give each of them a personality, where I could give them a conflict, where you could sort of slowly show it.

You know, that was, that's all about collaboration too, because you know, Lee and I talked about doing that and Lee, which he'll proudly tell you, is almost a man of the cloth, he's very, religion is a very important part of his life.

And so I wanted to bring that part into it and sort of bring sort of my respect for Lee's faith into the comic.

And that's what really sort of ignited that on fire where just, we could have elevated it because of sort of what Lee added it to it.

- Lee, as you say, is one of those great creators in comics, very modest person.

And I asked him about some of the visuals in the Batman annual that the two of you had worked on where it's a Batman and Cat-woman on the roof of a building somewhere.

And it's a two page spread and it's this massive roof line.

And on one page is Batman and on the other page is Cat-woman.

And there's really not much visually going on and yet there's so much visually going on with this story.

And I asked him how he interpreted the script and he said it was all there.

So when you are coming up with the idea for a page, obviously the DC method is it's full script, you sort of break down the page into panels and beats and moments.

How detailed do you get if you're describing a visual for somebody, whether it's a Lee Weeks or somebody like an Adam Kubert?

- Yeah, I do full scripts, but they're, my scripts are kind of different than a lot of other people's scripts.

I like the format, my format sort of stole from Geoff Johns and a little bit from Mark Waid and a little, I was Chris Claremont's intern, so a little bit from Chris in the back of my head.

The way I do my scripts is I do, I break them down panel by panel.

So, you know, if there are seven panels on a page, I say seven panels, butt my descriptions of each panel are the vaguest descriptions.

They're just as much as you need to tell the story.

So it's like Batman punching a guy in a stupid face.

And then I put the dialogue, guy falls in the ground, then I put the dialogue, like it's just, it's literally one sentence.

So like the page you're talking about was a double page splash and I, literally I'm sure it was camera pulls back, you can see the entire roof, Batman on one side, Cat-woman on the other side and it's raining.

I don't think it was anything more than that.

It was just the barest description.

Then Lee turned it into magic.

But what my scripts do, which I think is, which is good, and a good lesson for people trying to learn, is my scripts tell the story, there's a thousand ways, a script is basically a letter to your artist on how to do it, it's not like something for publication.

It's not something.

So you can put in there, "Hey dude, man, remember that time we were at the skiing thing and we saw that thing, could you put that thing in there?"

Like you could put that you can be as casual as that, my scripts are much more formal.

It's like, here is the story, but just told in panels.

And so my artists can read it as a story and then they can sort of hopefully see the story in their head and then interpret it.

- You've started off as a novelist.

So, on that page, you've got how to write everything out so that the reader can create that picture in their mind.

And here you are saying, when you're writing a comic, you're using the broadest of strokes.

So that way your collaborator can fill in the rest.

So, when you get that page back from your collaborator, are you sometimes having to adjust what you thought the page was going to be about?

Because the art says it better than you can, so maybe you're going to change the dialogue or it's gonna be a different moment or a different beat?

- Not as often as you'd think.

I mean, it's not as bad as, I feel like when you read old Stan Lee, Jack Kirby comics, you can come see them arguing with each other.

You can see, you know, Stan being like, "I don't know why I'm jumping off this building.

I guess I'll fall the right way when I land", you know, like you can sort of see that Stan had to add a bunch of stuff cuz he didn't understand and then Jack got mad and did the, so like, no, my, I have one magic power and it's like the truth of my success is that when I'm writing a comic with an artist, I can picture what the artist is gonna draw based on what I write.

I don't know how to, I'm sure it comes from forty years of reading comic books, like if you put in the work of the nerd, the nerd will be there for you, like that scene in the Matrix when the guy is staring at all the code, but he actually sees the world, like I have that power for my comic scripts.

And so I'd say 95% of the time it comes back as I saw it.

And so the most things I'm adjusting are crap where I wrote it badly, I'm just like, "Ooh, that's a, that line just as 10, it just doesn't ring right and all that.

Sometimes people draw things where they're just like, they look so good, I just wanna take all the art.

You knows like, oh, take my words out of it so they can see the pictures.

But basically that's it.

- You mentioned that you may have written more Batman pages than any other writer alive today.

You come to DC and you say that you have, well, you're gonna be following Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo and their run on Batman.

they're their run on Batman.

And it's not like that's an easy task.

And then you come in and you sort of, walking into the bar and saying, I'm the fastest draw, I've got a hundred issue storyline that I wanna produce.

So, how do you go to DC and say, "I've got a hundred issues of Batman and trust me, it's gonna work."

- [laughing] I didn't tell them, I think that.

And when I went off at 85, they knew.

Yeah, the DC was like you, as long as it's selling, you keep writing.

So I just knew I just had to keep it selling.

So I pushed for that and had it to the back of my head.

I mean, basically my idea for that was I had always approached, I mean, I got to Batman fairly early in my career, it seems absurd in retrospect, but I don't even read comics for like two years then, you know, like I was very early when I got Batman number one.

But up to that point, I had done series like Sheriff of Babylon and you know, Vision was my big success and Omega men, these sort of 12 issue series very much modeled after Alan Moore, and his whole career where he sort of wrote short little novels, basically over and over again.

And so when I had to come to Batman and approach it, I had no other way to approach it in my mind except to say, "okay, I'm gonna, write another sort of short little novel, except this, instead of having 12 parts will have a hundred parts."

And so I sort of designed it in my head, what I wanted to be, which was, you know, it was just like a sign curve, was nothing more than that.

It was like, okay, we're gonna establish where Batman is, then he's gonna get happy, happy, happy until issue 50.

Then sad, sad, sad, till issue 75, than happy, happy to issue 100.

So that was always the point of the thing.

- It seems a bit self deprecating to say it like that because I'm sure there's a lot more that goes into than just saying, okay, it's gonna be this many issues.

I will point out, by the way, that you have the ability to drive the fans crazy, both plus and minus.

Because when.

- I have.

- I guess, issue 50, when it's supposed to be the wedding of Batman, Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle, and it doesn't happen, man alive, did the inter webs go crazy talking about that.

So when you have something that is that big of a twist, how do you make sure that nobody finds out about it before it comes out and then when it does come out, how do you kind of convince the audience, that, "Hey, trust me on this one, you're gonna like the way it ends up?"

- I'll let you know when I figure it out.

I mean, that one was very much spoiled.

The New York Times not only spoiled it in the headline, cuz they decided to do an article on it, they did a push notification.

It was July 4th, 2018 or something.

I remember cause I was playing with my kids outside and it must have been a pretty slow news day 'cause, so whatever, however many people have on their phones, the New York times app got a little note on their phones, Batman and Cat-woman do not get married.

And you know, my wife's like, "Hey, what is this?

This is about you."

And immediately I'm getting death threats.

I had to get a bodyguard, it was like a whole thing, I mean you weather those storms.

I mean, to be a comic writer is to live in the culture wars in a way a lot of other writers don't, I mean, when I'm in Hollywood, it's like, you know, these people are like, oh, somebody mentioned me on Twitter, what do I do?

I was like, "oh man, you're a comic writer, people are mentioning you on Twitter, on YouTube, on TikTok every single day, every single minute of the day, people have opinions about you, that's kind of, that's just where we let, that's part of, if you get the privilege of having this job, you have to deal with that and you you get used to it after a while, you put up the shields you need to put and let through what you need to let through."

I mean the most important thing is that you have the energy to get up tomorrow and make the best product possible.

And so my focus is always on that.

- Now, you mentioned that you have a family and you have obviously a great dog at home.

So, you know, in the five minutes or so that we have left in our conversation, how do you sort of structure your day so that you can have quality time with the family, get all the work done that you need to get done and still, you know, if you're working from home, have people respect the fact that it's a job from home rather than, you know, I'm goofing off because I don't have an office to drive to.

- I mean, it's been different over the last two and a half years with the, you know, I have three kids who used to all be under the age of 10, but now they're all, I have a 13 year old and an 11 year old and a seven year old going through this pandemic and they were all at home for, you know, two years.

They just started going back to school just recently.

And it's been a struggle, my wife's at home, she's a full-time attorney here in Washington, DC.

And the first year we divided the day in half, I took the kids in the morning, she took the kids in the afternoon and that's just how we, that's 'case my five year old was getting nothing out of sitting in front of a computer.

So it's like someone had to sort of train him.

So, and so that's the way we live for a little while.

And we've sort of adjusted since.

I'm fortunate enough, I was very productive during the pandemic.

I just, that's how I made each day different than the next.

I made sure that I was writing.

So as long as I sort of was working on a script that it got done, comics are, it's such a, it's not a struggle, it's fun, it flows.

I mean, I'm sure if, I mean I've had writer's block, but not with comics, you just, you sit down and you go, you just gotta find that little space, you know, you gotta, to butcher Virginia Wolf, you just have to find, you know, room by yourself just a little bit every day and you'll get it done.

- So, if people wanna find out more about Love Everlasting, where can they find that on the web?

- I mean, it's pinned to my Twitter, so you can do my Twitter, Tomkingtk, just my name and my initial and you'll find a link there.

And Substack is weird, I'm an old person, it's hard to use, but this is the idea, you go to Substack, you give them an email address.

That email address doesn't go to the company, it goes to me and then I send you the free comic and it lands in your inbox and that's it.

I'm not trying to sell you anything.

I'm not trying to get you to buy in-app purchases, nothing like that.

You just get a free comic sent to your inbox.

It's a PDF, or if you want a CVR file, which means you can integrate it into your comic book reading app, you can do that.

So it's up to you which way you want it, but that's it, enter an email, get a free PDF of a brand new number one issue comic that's gonna be ongoing hopefully as long as I'll, hopefully for the next five years.

- And is the eventual goal to put this into print?

- Yes, yeah, it'll be in comic bookstores eventually, yeah.

We'll have it there, there'll be trades and comics and everything.

I love this book, you know, I write a lot of books and then this one's a special one.

- I had the chance to read the first issue and I found it to be a lot of fun and I hope everyone will have the chance to go out and check that book out.

But Tom, they are telling us that we are out of time.

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

- What an absolute pleasure, this is a lot of fun.

You're a fun nerd to interact with.

- Well, thank you so much.

And thank you everyone at home for watching Comic Culture, we will see you again soon.

[dramatic music] ♪ - [Narrator] Comic Culture is a production of the department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

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