Robserecaps Seventeen – episode 49 Making Comic Books
by Joe
No history lesson this week, looks like it’s more process than anything, either way, give it a listen.
- “The biggest crime Wizard Magazine ever did was make everything stupid”
- Comics Journal, Amazing Heroes, Comics Interview and Amazing Feature did deep dives into process, Wizard threw journalism in the trash and became the teeny bopper equivalent of comic book reporting
- Comics Journal would be 30 pages of just all interviews, all process, no filler, treating comics as an art form, not an investment
- the Rob is a victim of the collectability of comics and other media, as he has bought DVDs multiple times for exclusive items like Funko POPs and trading cards
- The denseness of Alan Moore’s scripts (average 40 pages on a 22 page comic) on stuff like Supreme and Warchild made it difficult for some layout folks to translate, where he would take one script page to describe one panel
- The Rob has now changed it to no one does comic books for money, they do it for love and because they’re half-crazy
- John Byrne boasted about getting paid his full page rate on an issue of Alpha Flight that obscured the characters in a blizzard, a trick the Rob emulated for an issue of X-Force where a battle took place in a blackout
- On Claremont’s X-Men #245 that the Rob worked on, Chris gave the Rob room to play so he snuck things like ALF and Clark Kent into the issue
- Some writers at Marvel would get a plotter credit/pay off with only one page of plot for a 22 page story
- George Perez would get the plot told to him by Marv Wolfman in 2-3 hour phone conversations
- The Rob relates the process between Jack Kirby and Stan Lee that Stan would build a paper airplane and throw it, it was Jack’s job to build the runway to guide it
- Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC in 1970 and the Rob lists a lot of characters Kirby created everyone knows (Darkseid, Mr. Miracle, Etrigan, etc.) and A TON I’ve never heard of (Mantis, Bug, Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear, Mark Moonrider)
- the Rob calls a Jack Kirby splash page a “Visual Comic Orgasm”
- In talking about scripters, the Rob does an impression of Sean Connery
- The most successful modern day writers, Frank Miller to Robert Kirkman, have a visual eye and a cinematic feel to the pacing
- the Rob calls Keith Giffen (aka Salty Keith)’s runs on Legion and Justice League some of the best comics ever and one of the best writer/layout guys of all time
- Soon, the Rob will call out all the Alan Moore impersonators, all spectacular flops
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