[dramatic 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 Tony Isabella.

Tony, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thanks for having me.

- Tony, you created one of the most important characters at DC Comics.

You created Black Lightning, and I know you've talked about this character and about the creation a lot, but could you tell me a little bit about how you were able to get DC to let you do that series?

- DC Comics brought me over from Marvel because they wanted to launch an African American superhero, and I had worked on things like Luke Cage and the Falcon and Misty Knight at Marvel.

When I got there, they handed me two scripts that had already been written featuring a character called the Black Bomber.

The Black Bomber was a white racist who took part in chemical camouflage experiments while he was in Vietnam to allow him to blend into the jungle better.

Nothing happened while he was in Vietnam, but when he got back to America in times of stress or whatever, he would turn into a Black superhero.

The white racist did not know that he turned into a Black superhero.

The Black superhero did not know that he was really a white racist.

Each of them had girlfriends who saw the transformation and said nothing.

If it were me, I would've asked a question or two.

In both of these two scripts, as the white racist, he rescued somebody who he couldn't see clearly and then was horrified that he had risked his life for a Black person.

In one case it was a baby in a baby carriage, and literally the script had him say, excuse me for this language.

You mean I risked my life for a jungle bunny?

And his uniform, just to put the cherry on this crap Sunday, his uniform was basically a basketball uniform.

DC Comics wanted me to punch up these two scripts and then take over the writing with the third issue.

I said no, you can't publish these scripts.

And they go, why not?

We paid for them.

And I said, these are the most offensive things I have ever seen.

If you publish these, people will come to your offices with pitchforks and torches.

And they go, how could you know that?

And I go, I will be leading them.

This went back and forth for a couple of weeks until finally I boiled it down to, do you really, really want your first headline Black superhero to be a white racist?

And I guess by bringing it down to that one question, they suddenly realized, oh yeah.

So I was given a couple of weeks to create a new Black superhero.

I took nothing from the Black Bomber scripts, but I had been wanting to do a character like Jefferson Pierce for a while.

Although I enjoyed working on characters like Luke Cage and the Falcon, it bothered me that Luke Cage was an ex-con, innocent or not.

It bothered me that the Falcon was revealed to being an actual criminal brainwashed by the Red Skull.

And these weren't the Black images that I felt were the best for comics.

I did take a step up with Black Goliath, who I created, because he was at least a scientist.

So he had a more respectful job than criminal or ex-con.

But it wasn't until I got the chance to create a new character that I was able to bring all of my hopes for a new Black character into the process.

I wanted a character who kids would be familiar with, which is why he's a school teacher.

Every kid knows what a teacher is.

He was an Olympic athlete, 'cause I needed a certain skillset for him to fight the organized crime in his inner city neighborhood.

It was an inner city neighborhood because I felt, I grew up middle class, but not real middle class.

I mean, it's like near the end of the middle class, near the bottom of the middle class spectrum.

So those are stories that were near and dear to me.

And so I created Jefferson Pierce.

I created his entire world.

I never got into the story, but the reason he was not a rich Olympic athlete is 'cause in my mind he was one of the Black athletes who, when he was getting his gold medal, the Black Power salute.

And if you know your history, those guys were pretty much drummed out of the sport and never got the financial rewards they should have gotten.

Well, that was Jefferson Pierce.

The fact that he was teaching at his old high school was something I totally stole from Welcome Back, Kotter.

About an hour before the pitch meeting, as I was congratulating myself on having created Jefferson Pierce and this great realistic world he was in, it occurred to me that I had not given him super powers or a superhero name, but I think fast on my feet.

I'm wandering through the DC offices.

I see a Wonder Woman cover where she's lassoing a black lightning bolt and saying something like Hera, help me stop this black lightning from destroying the city.

And this is the 70s, you know, the era of things like Blacula and Black Godfather, and it occurred to me that Black Lightning was a pretty cool name.

So in the half an hour before my pitch meeting, I came up with the superpowers for the character.

DC Comics loved it.

I was in the room with Sal Harrison and Joe Orlando.

They loved it.

We agreed on a creator deal, which it did not take them long to not honor, but you know, I was on my way.

So I started writing Black Lightning.

I had a good editor, Jack C. Harris, who was one of those rare editors that doesn't want you to tell his stories.

He wants to make your stories better.

He wants you to make your stories better.

And Jack and I, we had a wonderful working relationship.

We're friends to this day.

But that was the origin of Black Lightning.

It came from my desire to do a character who would be a role model and more positive than previous Black heroes.

- If I'm not mistaken, Black Lightning is in Metropolis.

- He was at the start.

I put him in Suicide Slum because I love Jack Kirby's Newsboy Legion stories, which were set in Suicide Slum, and also because I just felt that the idea of this organized crime going on pretty much behind Superman's back, because Superman was too busy with the big things to think about the little things, and that's where Black Lightning fit in, taking care of the inner city problems.

- And that was actually what I was going to ask you about, because it seemed like if you're setting up a shop in Superman's backyard, he is bound to notice.

But I think that also, you may have been subconsciously, I'm not sure, but you may have been thinking about the fact that a lot of things happen and certain people in power might kind of ignore it 'cause it's in that neighborhood and maybe having a character who's going to take of the neighborhood that they live in is a positive message.

- I never attributed Superman's inaction to malice, but let's face it.

You know, the bigwigs on the coast consider most of America in between New York and Washington and Los Angeles to be flyover territory.

They don't notice it.

They don't think about the concerns of those areas, except like when they want to rig elections or anything, but no, Superman is saving the world three times a week, twice on Thursday, and he knew that there was crime, but he didn't realize, and he couldn't do anything about it.

That was another part of this.

They see Superman coming a mile away.

He can't get down and get in there dirty with the mob.

It's just not within his abilities, because again, he is so gaudy.

He is so easy to spot that you gotta get down in the gutter to fight these kind of criminals, and that's not something Superman ever excelled that.

- You mentioned getting down in the gutter and fighting criminals at their level.

You created a whole world for Jefferson Pierce and the foes that he would fight.

I'm just wondering during this time that you're coming up with the character, these two weeks, I guess, that you have to work out all the details and then that 30 minutes or so to come up with his powers.

Were you thinking about his adversaries and what sort of people?

- Oh, yeah.

Tobias Whale was basically my version of Marvel's Kingpin.

I felt Marvel let the Kingpin get soft.

He was fighting Hydra, he was working with Captain America to fight Hydra.

He had a son he loved, he had a wife he loved.

And I said no, I want my crime boss to be someone who doesn't love anybody, and in the back of his mind, Tobias Whale doesn't even love himself.

He's very much self-loathing.

And so I always knew Tobias Whale would be the big villain, and although I haven't used him a lot, well, in my second Black Lightning series, he didn't show up 'til near the end of my run, and in my most recent Black Lightning series, Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands, all six issues, he's the main villain.

I knew what Tobias Whale was and what he would be doing.

As far as creating the other villains, some of them I had come up with initially because I had roles for them in the origin stories.

Others I added as the series developed.

- And speaking of series, Black Lightning became a popular series on the CW, and I know that you were able to go out and visit the set and maybe even appear as I believe a judge on one of the episodes.

- Early on, DC Comics and I came to an agreement about a year or so before the TV series started even coming together, because Geoff Johns, one of the rare friends I had at DC, Geoff Johns thought a lot of the character and thought of a lot of my work.

He wanted to do a Black Lightning TV series.

He didn't want to do it if I wasn't happy.

So we came up with an agreement that wasn't perfect, but was much better than previous agreements which DC hadn't honored anyway.

I wrote a core values paper for Black Lightning, and then when they hired brilliant Salim and Mara Brock Akil to show run the series, we had hours of conference calls, 'cause they really wanted my input.

They really wanted to do justice to my work and to respect my work.

At one point they flew me to Burbank to spend a day with the Black Lightning writers, which was a trip because they had broken down the first 13 episodes very briefly on a whiteboard and I'm looking at it and there's lots of my stuff up there.

Another whiteboard had characters that they were gonna use, most of which were created by me.

So it was very interesting.

I came out to visit the set for the first time at the end of the second season.

Before that, there was a Black Lightning premier on Martin Luther King weekend in Washington, DC about a week or so before the series debuted.

I pretty much had to shame DC Comics into inviting me to the thing.

And as it was, they never put me on any of the programming during it.

But I had an opportunity to meet the entire cast, all of which were very gracious to me, thanked me for their jobs, asked me questions about the characters.

And then at the after party, I spent a lot of time talking with most of them.

I mean, it was just a great experience.

I visited the set at the end of the second season.

I went to the wrap party and then I went to the set for the last three or four or days of filming, and then I was back to visit in the third season, and that's when I did my cameo.

But I've been in constant contact with writers and stars of the show.

I mean, they would email me, they would send me Twitter messages.

They would call me up and we would talk.

I would answer their questions.

I've never been in a situation, I never expected to be in a situation where hundreds of people are doing my character, doing their best to honor and respect my work.

And I mean, they did.

I mean, they adhered to the core values of Black Lightning.

They brought in their own often brilliant stuff, but at the base of it, there was always those core values for the character.

- I was going to ask you about that core values document that you worked on, because it seems a lot of times we hear about it, there's a series bible or just some sort of breakdown of what the characters would or would never do.

So what would be one of the core values that you thought Black Lightning should have?

- I can sum up Black Lightning's core values in basically one paragraph.

I expanded on it a little bit, but here's the basics.

They're very simple rules that it amazes me that people at DC Comics just don't grasp.

Black Lightning cares about three things more than anything else.

He cares about his family, he cares about his students, and he cares about his community.

This is not a man who drops everything because the effing Batman tells him yeah, come to Gotham City, I'll put you up in a penthouse apartment and you'll be my assistant, which no matter how much DC tried to say oh, that's not how it is, that's how it was.

Black Lightning would have never abandoned his family, his friends, his community and his students to be just another sidekick for Batman.

DC hated when I made the joke that yeah, Batman got Black Lightning his penthouse apartment and whenever he visited, he would leave the money on the table.

DC Comics hates a lot of jokes I make like that, but you know, screw 'em.

If they want authentic Black Lightning, they know my number.

- It's funny because you're I guess talking about when Black Lightning was a member of Batman's Outsiders, which was my introduction to the character.

Throughout the entire series.

- You were introduced to the Mike Barr version of the Outsiders.

That was much better.

There was more respect shown towards Black Lightning.

Mike is a friend of mine.

Again, I don't know that I like ever seeing Black Lightning subservient to anyone, but that wasn't really the case with Mike Barr.

He knew the character, he did a good job with the character.

It's the later incarnations of the Outsiders that just fry my ass, 'cause they're just so, so wrong.

And they've done stupid things like turn him into a beam of living lightning who lives in Katana's sword, and I'm going, where?

They got some series out now, I guess it's an alternate universe series, where Superman's family basically rules the world and he's a king that's working against them and hiring assassins to kill members of the Super family.

And I'm going, once again, even in an alternate universe, there's no way that Jeff Pierce does that.

Dumb stuff, really, really dumb stuff.

- I'm imagining it's difficult, because as a creator of a character with someone with a clear vision, at the end of the day, DC's going to do with the character as they see fit.

- Oh, whatever they want, and I know that, and it's disrespectful to creators when they do that and it's disrespectful to fans of authentic Black Lightning.

They don't care, they don't care.

Right now, DC Comics basically should change their name to Batman Comics.

60 to 70% of their output are Batman comics, which leaves lots of characters like Black Lightning, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, great characters out in the cold, not getting their due, not being promoted the way they should be promoted.

- Now you mentioned Hawkman.

One of the first comics that I read when I was a kid, I had the flu.

I asked mom, could you pick me up some comic books?

And she brought a stack home from the stationary store, and The Shadow War of Hawkman Number One was in that stack.

I was taken by not only the great story, but the great art, just the way this character came across was different than the few issues of the Justice League that my brother-in-law had given me a few years before.

It always seemed like Hawkman was sort of in between like a Green Lantern, a space policeman, and the guy who always yelled at Green Arrow because they just didn't get along, man.

And he had that thing where he could talk to birds, so it's kind of like Aquaman, but you found a way to make Hawkman a real character that could sustain a story.

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you thought Hawkman should be.

- Well, lot of times when a character appears in a team book, especially a team as big as the Justice League, writers will get lazy and just cling to one or two notes.

As you said, space policeman doesn't get along with Green Arrow, talks to birds, and they don't go beyond that.

Dick Giordano asked me to revamp Hawkman, but I'm not the kind of guy who likes to just throw everything out and redo something.

So I read all of the Gardner Fox Hawkman stories and then later stories by Bob Kanigher and took what I thought were the best parts of those stories.

But there were a couple of things I did with Hawkman.

I gave him and Hawkwoman actual speech patterns.

In a sense I was Hawkman's voice, and my wife was Hawkwoman's voice.

I looked at some of the inconsistencies in past stories.

I threw out an entire run that was written by George Cashton and people like that where Carter Hall was revealed as an alien but not as Hawkman.

I threw all that stuff out.

But what really drove the series for me, that made this Hawkman different than the others, was my realization of the Absorbascon, the Thanagarian device that would allow their agents to absorb all the knowledge of a world, could be the most terrifying weapon of all because it meant no one has any secrets.

They know everything.

Thanagar had gone through some bad times.

They were infiltrating Earth because they could use knowledge that they had gleaned from the Absorbascon to basically get humans to do their bidding.

I try to show an example of that in every issue of The Shadow War of Hawkman.

I sold Hawkman to DC my version of Hawkman as a five year plan.

Every year, the war would take on a different dimension.

Unfortunately, although that was the plan going in, at one point Denny O'Neil became the editor, and Denny, who had spent three years on Ironman putting Tony Stark in the gutter, decided that my five year plan was outrageous, that how dare I come up with such a big plan and involve other members of the DC Universe in it.

He wanted me to wrap it all up, this five year plan, in one issue.

I told him I could do it in three or four, but it wouldn't be as good as what I had planned, but he just got, he was really trying to get me to tell his stupid story.

I left a couple of plots behind, but I left the series because I'm not gonna write Denny O'Neil's stories.

Denny O'Neil's a brilliant writer.

He should write his own stories.

But I wasn't gonna write Denny O'Neil's stories.

I wanted to write Tony Isabella's stories.

- Now I see that we have about three minutes left in our conversation, and I just wanted to ask, you're talking about Denny O'Neil as an editor who sort of has an idea and he's trying to make the writer do, in this case you, what he was hoping that the series can be, and then you talk about another editor who is just like, let's do it this way and make it better.

So when you're dealing with an editor, how do you kind of find that balance between somebody who might have a strong opinion but wants to make your work better and someone who has a strong opinion and wants you to change to fit that?

- It's luck of the draw.

On my last Black Lightning series, Cold Dead Hands, I was really lucky.

I had Jim Chadwick and Harvey Richards, two of the best editors I've ever worked with.

They never tried to get me to tell their stories.

Every note they gave me was to make my stories better, and they weren't cast in iron.

We could discuss things.

Sometimes I gave them what they asked for, and sometimes they gave me what I asked for.

It was a great working relationship.

I would work with either of those two guys again.

They know how to find me.

Unfortunately, Harvey was let go from DC and Jim was moved into another part of DC where he's working on young adult graphic novels and the like, but those are great editors, and it's luck of the draw.

Roy Thomas was a very supportive editor at Marvel.

Later Marvel editors, not so much.

They wanted to put their mark on other people's stories.

- I would imagine it's frustrating when they do that, because as a creator, you have a desire and a drive to tell that story.

I know we have about a minute or so left, but if you're working on that fine line, do you kind of bend a little bit and hope that they won't ask for everything, or do you just kind of say, I'm gonna go all the way my way and see if they complain too much?

- I've almost never bent to the will of others.

I have just gone ahead and done it my way.

But again, I like editors that I can have conversations with about this stuff.

I'm not looking to be a hard-ass.

I just want to tell my story, which is generally the story that they ask me to write and tell my story my way.

Again, those are the best editors, the ones who want you to tell your story as well as you can.

- All right.

Well, I believe we've just about run out of time, Tony.

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

It's been a fun half hour.

- Well, thank you, thank you.

- And I'd like to thank 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.

[dramatic music] ♪