What if one person was two superheroes? ALTER EGO will be the bombastic comic starring the smiling champion WHIZ-BANG, the prowling vigilante THE BLACK DOG, and the man behind both of their masks. This weekly newsletter is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Alter Ego, by Nate Cosby, Jacob Edgar, Kike J. Diaz & Rus Wooton. Go to this link to sign up for updates on when ALTER EGO will be available!
PART VI: Ron Marz Wants A Character With Nothing
What up! Nate here. Hope everybody had/is having a fun’n safe end-of-year season.
Scripting Status: I’m working on the back half script for Alter Ego’s second chapter (second issue?). Jacob’s nearly halfway through the inks. Several drafts (inside my head and on the page) have been made and discarded. The villain was never in question…the reaction of the hero has been revised multiple times. It’s an interesting thing, writing one character that’s got (at least) three personas. The public sees three people…
ACE ADAMS - Cocky Hollywood stuntman
WHIZ-BANG - Grinning daytime superhero
THE BLACK DOG - Brooding shadowy vigilante
…but they’re all the same guy. The thing I’m being mindful of is to not play him as an obsessive…he’s not Batman. And he’s not Moon Knight, with fully different personalities fighting for control. Ace is a performer, at all times. He’s thinking about his situation, his motivations, what others think about him, even if the goal is for them to think nothing at all. Sometimes he needs to gather every eyeball in the room; other times he needs to get the attention of just one person; still other times, he needs to be virtually invisible. Life’s a stage, for this guy. And what we’ll discover (if I write it right) is that when you spend your entire life performing and pretending, and only thinking about what others think of you…well that might be a pretty crummy way to live.
Anyhow…thought it’d be fun to share a page of the chapter one script, then see Jacob’s progression from layouts to blue-line to inks, then Kike’s colors. After that, we’ve got a fun conversation I had with Ron Marz, whose run on Green Lantern was hugely influential on how I see superheroes…
…we’ll follow up later with Rus’ lettering, which’ll be in-process soon…
RON MARZ has been busy recently…comics-wise, he worked on Justice League: Endless Winter at DC, Swamp God at Heavy Metal magazine, and Almost American at AfterShock. He’s worked on video games too, including multiple Skylanders titles, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Spider-Man 2, and a forthcoming Blizzard title.
Ron’s been writing comics for three decades. Started on Silver Surfer at Marvel (which he doing again now), then had runs on titles such as Thor, Superboy, Star Wars, Witchblade
For me, his long run on Green Lantern, featuring Kyle Rayner (co-created by Ron and Daryl Banks), is a colossal achievement. Which is why I geeked out about it with him from the start…
NATE: I’d like to open with Green Lantern, if you’re cool with it. Was it your idea to make Kyle an artist?
RON: Yup, that was me. I felt like Green Lantern was, to great extent, a special effects book. What kind of cool stuff could you make with the ring?. So I wanted to come up with someone who would be able to generate the most imaginative and visual ring creations. We wanted to go beyond boxing gloves. Plus, honestly, I love artists. Most of my friends in the business tend to be artists, so I felt like I could write that mindset, even though I personally can’t draw at all.
NATE: Your Lantern series was out at a formative time for me, and it was one of a few books that featured new characters picking up “legendary” mantles. (Wally West taking over for Barry Allen, Tim Drake for Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, etc)
What stuck out to me about Kyle from the start, was that he hadn’t trained to be a hero. He wasn’t aspiring to save the day. He didn’t really fit into the “fearless” mode of the traditional Green Lantern Corps member. He was just some guy. Can you talk about how you developed somebody so different from what came before, and did it take some mental gymnastics to figure out how to centralize that kind of character, within such a galaxy-sized conceit?
RON: Well, I really thought the whole point, if we were going to be removing Hal Jordan from the central role, was to come up with a character who was NOT Hal Jordan. For me, Hal was very much a classic Silver Age character, very sure of himself, a square-jawed authority figure, a hero before he ever puts the ring on. So it made sense to me to go in the other direction, to have someone who had feet of clay, who isn’t already a hero, who isn’t sure of himself.
I very much grew up on Marvel comics. Where DC heroes have external flaws, like Kryptonite or in Hal’s case, yellow, the Marvel heroes have internal flaws. They’re not perfect, they’re starting from a place of being damaged, and have to overcome that. As both a reader and a writer, I’m drawn to that. So Kyle is very much built on the Marvel model, specifically the Everyman archetype embodied by Peter Parker. He’s just a guy. You can see yourself in him, you can put yourself in his shoes. And unlike, say, Wally West, Kyle was an outsider. Wally inherited the Flash mantle after having served an apprenticeship, right? He was a sidekick. He paid his dues. Kyle didn’t earn it, he basically had it handed to him, in a very literal sense. So he had to learn on the job, and prove himself worthy. To me, stories of becoming a hero are generally more interesting than stories of being a hero. So we spent a lot of time with Kyle growing into the role, proving to himself and to everyone else that he could do it.
NATE: It’s remarkable to me, because I also grew up liking the internal/external flaws thing, but in reverse. You (and other creators) grew up on Marvel comics, and so you were trying to bring some of that vibe to your DC work. But then because of that, I ended up connecting far more to DC than Marvel, because the DC characters felt so human and relatable.
If I were to present you with two types of stories…
A character with nothing. Feeling the pressure to make something of themselves.
A character with everything. Desperate to keep it all.
…which would you want to write?
RON: Not even a contest. Give me the character with nothing, trying to be something. That’s really the core of all drama: your protagonist wants something. What are they willing to do to get it? For a while, DC was very much leaning into the legacy generation of heroes, with Kyle, Wally West as Flash, Connor Hawke as Green Arrow, and Tim Drake as Robin. All of those characters were trying to live up to their predecessors. In the macro sense, that’s what they all wanted. They were shouldering their respective heroic mantles to get that. I know with Kyle I felt like I had the benefit of the concept and everything that had gone before, but none of the baggage. I could use the stuff that worked for me, and ignore the stuff that didn’t. It was really a great gift.
NATE: Can you detail your storytelling process? Do you heavily structure before a script begins, or do you start loose and find things in the scripting? Is it the same approach for all stories, or do you try different things depending on the story?
RON: Pretty much the same method all the time. Start with the idea, of course, and then the first step for me is pacing out the story into pages. I put the page numbers down the left side of a piece of paper in a notebook, and figure out the basics of what happens on each page, the integral purpose each particular page serves. These are just notes to myself at this point, scrawled down in my chicken scratch handwriting, not usually more than a sentence or two per page. But this part of the process helps me make sure everything fits, and that each page matters.
Once I’ve got each page’s basic purpose sorted out, I go back to page 1, usually still working in a notebook, and break down each page into panels, maybe with some dialogue notes. This is where the real thinking gets done, the actual creativity of the job. Once I have each page figured out in my head, the real majority of the real work is done. Then I type up the panel breakdowns into a script, and when that’s done, go back in and add boilerplate dialogue, which all gets rewritten with the art comes in. I always rewrite the dialogue to fit the art once it’s drawn, it makes for a much better finished product. You can always tell which writers don’t go back and do a dialogue pass, because the words and pictures don’t always mesh the way they should. It’s a necessary step.
Of course, all of this is malleable depending on the artist. This is the basic process, but I’ll adapt the script style to what best fits a particular artist. Some artists want a tighter script, with all the panels detailed. Some want something looser, more broad strokes. Your job as the writer is to give each artist what they need to produce the best pages.
NATE: Right, I’m glad we’re here, so I can get nerdy about process…
See, I’m not a full-time scriptwriter. I write, I’ve written, but I edit/produce far more than I script. As a result, I don’t have what I’d call a “normal” procedure when it comes to scripting. Sometimes I can burst ten pages out in a day, other times I’ll take a full week to get just one page from my head to the paper. I’m undisciplined, and I know it’s something that’ll get better the more I practice…I just hadn’t practiced much, til recently.
But all that’s to say that there is one big difference I’ve noticed between how you (and most pros) write, and how I write: For me, the dialogue comes first. I will think of a scene in terms of what people are saying, and then the actions and staging come out of that. I’ll go back and revise the dialogue after the art’s done, but if I don’t have a super-solid idea of what’s being said first, then I can’t get a feel for the scene. Even if the pages is mostly or totally silent, I’ll think of characters’ body language, then build off of that.
It’s the way my mind works, and I don’t think it’s wrong, but it seems to be unique when compared with nearly everyone else I know. Have you ever tried leading with dialogue, or does that seem bizarre to you?
RON: Yeah, dialogue first is screwy! Or at least it is for me. My brain doesn’t work that way. But I know a number of writers who are dialogue-first practitioners, and obviously everybody needs to do what works for them. For me, I can see the pages in my head, so getting the visuals written up is the first thing for me. Certainly for a more dialogue-oriented scene, it goes hand in hand, and I’m fleshing out the dialogue needs and pacing as I’m going through the visuals. But I want to make sure the page is successful visually in addition to the dialogue aspect.
My concern with dialogue first, and I mean this just for me, not for anybody else’s working style, is that it risks the page becoming too static, too oriented toward medium shots and close-ups so the dialogue can be delivered. I tend to concentrate on what people are doing first, and then on what they’re saying, so that hopefully even the dialogue-heavy scenes have some visual interest to them. Ultimately, we all have to figure out the best way we can marry the words and the pictures, and the answer is different for different creators.
NATE: I’ve tried it the other way…I guess I can’t work out the visuals until I know what people are saying…I think it has something to do with action/reaction…I need to “hear” the characters bouncing off of each other, which then motivates movement. If anything, I think having the dialogue first helps me keep balloons at a minimum, because I’m editing as I go, figuring out what dialogue can be replaced with action.
What’s the best comic you’ve been a part of? Not necessarily the best script you ever wrote, but the comic where you felt that you, the artists, colorist, letterer, editor, designer, etc…everything clicked? Doesn’t have to be just one, but what comic made you think “Well, I can’t make a comic better than that”?
RON: Hard to pick one, it’s like choosing which kid is your favorite. But there’s a handful that really work for me, where all parts come together, from script to art to color and letters. “Doctor StrangeFate” is up there, thanks to Garcia-Lopez and Kevin Nowlan. I did a black-and-white Daredevil story with Brian Stelfreeze in “Marvel Shadows and Light” that I really love. And there’s a short story in “The Ride” anthology with Chris Brunner and Rico Renzi that turned out just right. I also love my “Samurai: Heaven and Earth” series with Luke Ross. Every page of that series is exactly what we wanted it to be. And the Superman story I did with Doc Shaner for “Adventures of Superman” is one of my favorites. I’ve been really fortunate to work with so many great artists on great characters and franchises.
NATE: Two more, and I’ll let ya get back to your work/animals…
Do you still like superheroes? Writing them, reading about them?
RON: Absolutely. Superheroes were formative for me both as a reader and a writer. I’ll always love them. Certainly if you’ve engaged with superheroes long enough, as a reader or a writer, you can get a bit jaded. There’s a sameness in the Fantastic Four fighting Doctor Doom over and over again, right? So as both a reader and a creator, you make your peace with the comfort food aspect of the genre, and also seek out things that feel fresh and exciting. I think of it this way: I love pizza, I will always eat pizza, but I don’t want to eat only pizza.
NATE: Alter Ego is my first time writing a superhero. Any advice you can give me? What cliche should be avoided, what classic element should be maintained?
RON: Make the audience care. If you do that, then everything else takes care of itself. When I was writing Green Lantern, my goal was to make the audience care about what happened to Kyle, both in costume and out of it. Same thing on Witchblade for almost 10 years. I wanted readers engaged in Sara Pezzini’s life, in who she was as a person. For me, stories are always character first, then plot. If the audience cares about what happens to your characters, almost any plot is engaging. If the audience isn’t caught up in the fate of your characters, then virtually no plot is engaging.
When I started in the business, my first editor told me superhero stories were soap operas where people punched each other through buildings. I think that’s still true. Superhero stories utilize tropes, a lot of them define the genre. Don’t be afraid to lean into them. I have no interest in superhero stories that are ultimately embarrassed to be superhero stories. Superhero stories are the dominant form of entertainment on the planet right now. That’s something to be proud of.