I think the cloth from his chest represents the attempt to draw all of the poisons out.

Fables 81 came out today. This concludes a story I knew I'd be doing for some years, but kept to myself for most of that time, even keeping it from the editor and the artists until they absolutely had to know.

        What a joy to be able to make long range plans for a story, a series, and the characters within it. For all of the fun of working inside the DCU fictional universe, I don't control that one, and those that do make so many changes, so often, usually on the fly, that long range planning for DCU comics series is almost a wasted effort, and always one fraught with frustration.

        Maybe it's just the way I tick, but my stories need time to grow and ferment, for some really big payoffs later. This issue of Fables contained one of those payoffs, the first seeds of which were planted way back in The Last Castle story.

        On a not entirely unrelated note, take a look at this gorgeous final cover from Fables' long time cover artist James Jean. In addition to its central theme, you can see bits and pieces of his entire run on the covers scattered here and there around the composition. Quite an impressive goodbye. We'll miss you, James, but will continue to follow your amazing work, and the complex and involving stories you continue to tell with it.

Robin # 122 (Part One)

In the cliffhanger ending of Robin # 121, the Boy Wonder had just gotten bushwhacked by the new villain Johnny Warren -- who would later become Johnny Warlock. We'll just call him Johnny to cut out any confusion.

        After whacking Robin in the back of his head with a sawed off shotgun, the script for 121 called for (paraphrasing here, since I don't have the script in front of me -- but it's a pretty accurate paraphrase) "Johnny lifts the half-unconscious Robin up by his hair." Now, at the time I thought it would be obvious to the artist that this meant that Robin would still mostly be down on the floor, but lifted partially (and painfully) up off of the floor by his hair.

        Unfortunately the artist Rick Mays interpreted my panel description literally and had Johnny lift Robin completely off of the floor -- at arm's length, mind you -- by his hair.

        First digression: For all new and would-be comics writers. There is an eternal balancing act when writing a script for someone else to draw. Do you provide too much information for any given panel in a script, and run the very real risk of overloading the artist with too many detailed instructions and, worse yet, risk insulting him by explaining obvious things such as, "Of course Robin can't be lifted entirely off of the floor by Johnny, who after all only has human level strength and lifting someone from the floor at arm's length is simply a physical impossibility," or do you provide just the bare minimum of panel direction and trust that the artist, who is supposed to be one of the storytellers in this undertaking, will know what to do and how best to do it? This has been debated for a long time among comics writers, with no clear solution in sight. Compelling arguments have been made for either side. I tend to fall into the camp of asking for much more than I expect to get, under the reasoning that, if the artist only provides you half of what you ask for, then you still get a lot. I came to this practice having been a comics artist myself. I know first hand how lazy we can be. This can backfire though -- and does. What if the half that the artist gives you doesn't include the essential information that you absolutely really needed? That's why some writers swear by the policy of only asking for that one essential thing in any given panel, because that way the artist has no other distractions or options of what to draw. See? I told you their side of the argument had some muscle to it.

        Back to our essay: In the opening scene of Robin # 122, titled Bad to the Bone, Johnny still has Robin held at arm's length, inches off of the floor. And he's showing not a bit of strain doing this. Not only is Johnny a strong one, he seems to have some extraordinary endurance too.

        Oh my, how the critics howled at this -- and rightly so (dammit).

        Our second digression: I blame Stan Lee and the early years of Marvel Comics. He was entirely too successful, in his over-the-top carnival huckster way, in convincing funnybook readers that they (we -- as a kid I bought into it fully) were an important part of the comics creating process -- that we were in fact one big happy family. Every single reader came to believe it. We were in fact taught to look for mistakes and given non-reward rewards for finding mistakes -- the famous Marvel Comics no-prizes. This conditioning was so successful it's hard-wired in to nearly every comics reader today. We look for mistakes in every single issue of every single book and point them out with such glee that the simple joys of actually getting lost in the story aren't available to us any longer. That's the price we've paid for what Stan wrought back in the day. Yes, some mistakes are so obvious they can't be ignored. The Johnny holding Robin up off of the floor business was a true blunder. But the pathology goes much deeper than that. We are a readership now that thinks our job is to dissect each issue, looking for even the most ephemeral mistakes. And we still think special status is conferred on us for pointing such things out. What's the solution? There isn't one. The damage has been done and it's part of the comics readers' DNA now.

        Back to Robin: Then Robin gets the drop on Johnny, escapes and disarms him, exactly as every reader knew would happen. But there is one thing I wanted to do with this scene which I still think works. I wanted to show that Robin doesn't at all -- on any level -- get off on the violence of his chosen profession. He's a truly good person, who only wants to make a better, safer world. While fighting off Johnny, Robin makes a calm and reasoned plea for Johnny to surrender. Since the outcome is inevitable -- since no street thug can possibly hope to outfight someone trained by Batman -- why not avoid the beating altogether?

        Robin didn't beg. He didn't lecture or preach. He simply reasoned with the man in as calm a way as the situation would allow.

        Reading this over again I still think the scene works. And I think it reveals right from the start an important aspect of the character -- at least my take on the character -- for my entire run on the series.

        But of course Robin's calm matter-of-fact demeanor only makes Johnny more furious. This is something I learned in my Military Police days. Being overly polite and courteous to some thugs only makes them crazy (well, crazier). Why is this? I'm not sure, unless it's because they are trying to provoke passion and anger and an overreaction -- trying to drag us into the only arena in which they live and can understand the world -- and how dare we not comply with their demands?

        What follows is a scene between Robin and Batman where I revealed another important core aspect of Tim's character: no one can ever be as hard on Robin as Robin can. He's the type who will always agonize over how he should have done better. If he saved four lives, he'll blame himself for not saving the fifth. He'll be the last to try to take credit for his victories and always be the first to take the blame for his defeats. But -- and this is a vital but -- that doesn't then translate into Robin becoming a defeatist morose whiner. There are already far too many of those in superhero comics. Even though Robin does have his down moments -- and I showed more than a few in my two-plus years writing his series -- his core character would always resurface. Blaming himself for his many perceived faults doesn't mean he gives up, it means in the future he has to work harder and do better. His work ethic and sense of responsibility is vast. That's the essential Robin I set out to portray. In hindsight I think I succeeded to a degree, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped.

        Then again, it's not for me to decide. That judgement is absolutely the responsibility of the readers, in their half of the eternal writer-reader collaboration.

Sketchbook Stuff

In the very same sketchbook, which was started at least two years before I began to think about the series Pantheon -- so this would have been around 1989 or '90, but don't hold me to that because my time sense is a bit spotty in some areas -- I also drew this character whom I called Fortress America. In fact, I had the name Fortress America first and tried to design an image to fit, unlike in the case of Dynasty, where I had the image in mind first and eventually found a name and an identity to fit. An armored character who has the word 'fortress' as part of his name has to be big and solid, and I think this fellow fit the bill nicely.

        As you can begin to see, with this and the previous post, when I began to think about the series Pantheon, I went shopping among my old notes and sketchbooks for characters to people it with. If you're going to write or draw comics, or both, you have to keep notebooks and/or sketchbooks. This seems a no-brainer, but it took me a while to figure that much out.

Sketchbook Stuff

This is my first run at drawing the character Dynasty, who would later star in the 13 issue maxi series Pantheon, published by Lone Star Press. I'm still quite fond of this design and by this time I was beginning to get results I liked with the inking brush. Of course, by this time I had no idea who the character was or that she'd be named Dynasty. I only had an image in my mind of the dragon symbol wrapped around one leg, before showing up on her chest, where most self-respecting superhero symbols appear.

        I think it's sort of humorous that several critics of the Pantheon series went out of their way to point out what they considered a mistake in the character design, because the woman was clearly (East) Indian, but the dragon design was obviously Asian. Apparently, according to these critics, I don't know one culture from another. So let's get this straight: American superheroes can adopt all sorts of symbology from other cultures, but non-American superheroes are required to stick within the culture of their origin -- period. Got it. Understood.

        Do I work in a silly profession, or what?

        By the way, the character to the left of Dynasty was going to be a superhero called Unicorn -- part of the super team called The Bestiary. But the Bestiary never actually made an appearance in Pantheon. I intended them to, but simply ran out of room. Though they were referred to once or twice in other character's dialogue, they ended up on the funnybook equivalent of the cutting room floor. That happens.

Robin # 121

In 2003, after Fables got up and running at Vertigo, I began actively looking for a DCU series to write, my reasoning being that with two regular books a month to script my recent (and some might say legendary by then) financial woes would be ended and I could actually start socking some money away -- which had always been a rarity for me.

        I made some calls, talked to some editors, floated a few ideas -- standard job-seeking behavior in the funnybook field. Eventually I got a call from a fine fellow named Michael Wright who was one of the Bat-Editors. Specifically he edited the Robin series and wondered if I might be interested in taking it over and (hopefully) punching some new life into it.

        I was interested and told him so immediately. But, as I explained to him, it had been some time since I had read any of the Robin comics and so I would need to do some serious catching up before making my final decision.

        First digression: I made the mistake of repeating the line directly above in some of my pre-Robin # 121 online interviews, when the word had gotten out that I would be taking over the series. I clearly mentioned that, in preparing for the series, I had to reread many of the books I had read in the past, and read for the first time many issues that I hadn't read before being faced with the prospect of taking over the series. Now, to a reasonable person, this would seem like a fair and prudent, and even professional, thing to do, to make sure one is up-to-speed on an important subject, before making a decision involving said subject, right? But I had not anticipated the current (then -- just as it largely is now) internet culture, which specializes in taking things boldly and blatantly out of context, added to the general culture by then of what I (and others) called the new Indignation Industry, where special status is conferred on all victims, and members of victims groups. And apparently anyone who screamed and cried enough received the coveted status of victimhood, without any actual victimization needing to be demonstrated. So no sooner had I mentioned the fact that I had to read up on past Robin issues, before deciding to take over the series, than someone on the internet, unhappy with my take on the character of Tim Drake, remolded that statement as, "Willingham even admitted he didn't bother to read any Robin issues before taking over the series." And that fabricated statement got repeated over and over again, until it became the official history.

        So, since part of the stated purpose of this journal is to point out my many career mistakes to those newly starting out their comics careers, with an eye towards helping you avoid some of the blunders I've made, let me mention now an increasingly universal truth that so many have had to learn at their peril: For the most part the internet is a garbage dump and a wasteland, and like any garbage dump, it's ruled by the biggest, meanest and most disease-ridden rats, who've made it their special home.

        So, be careful what you say and how you say it.

        Am I indicting all people who post on the internet? No, of course not. I'm merely pointing out the well-proven axiom that, in any venue, throughout human history, the unreasonable people will always trump the reasonable ones -- if you let them. And the internet seems tailor made to let them have their way, unfettered.

        Then what's the solution? That's simple enough. The internet isn't one vast venue, it's thousands (millions by now I suppose) of separate venues. Therefore, chose the places where good behavior is enforced and stay far away from those places where it isn't (such as the vast cesspool of the official DC message boards). Try to set the record straight when and where you can, but don't make a fetish of it, since the weasel-contingent is always going to have their say somewhere. By entering the professional comics book field, you've willingly entered the public arena, where a certain amount of shit is going to be thrown at you as a matter of course. Try to console yourself with the knowledge that these shitcasters will never accomplish anything of worth with their wretched lives, will always be the dependents of those who actually do make the world, and will always resent it and lash out in indignation.

        Now, back to our essay: Michael Wright sent me the last fifty issues of Robin, to catch up on, including the photocopies and as-yet-unillustrated scripts of those issues which hadn't been published yet. I did my homework, found that I liked the character and could come up with some interesting (to me at least) ideas, and told Michael that I'd take the job.

        My initial plans for the Robin series were pretty basic: 1) Build up a more healthy rogues gallery of new villains for Robin, so he isn't constantly in the position of having to borrow whatever well-known Batman villain isn't being used in the other Batbooks that month. 2) Tell the adventures of someone in the process of learning the superhero trade from the greatest expert in the (DC) world.

        Our second digression: This second plan turned out to be something of a sticking point for many of the die-hard Robin readers -- at least the more vocal contingent (see the first digression above for some important context). It seems they much preferred a Robin who was already a seasoned hero on his own -- one who metaphorically sprang fully grown from the forehead of Zeus, dressed, armed and ready for battle. They wanted a Robin who didn't need constant help, advice and training from Batman. As a result they chafed and squirmed at my intentional depiction of a Robin who, though obviously talented and well on his way, was still very much a boy in training. In this respect I simply had to disagree with these vocal critics and do the stories I thought best. A Robin being trained by Batman interested me greatly. I had many tales to tell about such a character. In my mind, a Robin who had already learned all he needed to should give up the name and identity, choose a new identity (like Nightwing did) and move on, making room for another Robin in the Batcave. As it turned out, in later issues, this is what would happen, though not exactly as one might envision it.

        Returning again to our essay: But there was one big condition on taking over the Robin job. It had already been decided by then that the character Spoiler was going to die. I had to figure that into my plans for the series. No problem. Having just read a veritable deluge of Robin stories, Spoiler didn't stand out as a particularly interesting character. Put those stones down, this is just my opinion. You can disagree. I wasn't exactly happy to kill off Spoiler, but it didn't bother me either. Unknown to me at the time, I had yet to think of the one development that would make Spoiler truly interesting to me -- but too late to save her. By editorial dictate, she was doomed.

        Take a look at this wonderful first-issue (my first issue at least) cover from Jason Pearson. It absolutely captured what I wanted my first issue to be all about. Why Pearson doesn't have awards and accolades and parades in his honor is beyond me.

        The title of Robin # 121 was Johnny Got His Gun. I wrote it. Rick Mays pencilled it. Aaron Sowd inked it. Right off the bat I decided to get the ball rolling by introducing what was to be one of Robin's new villains, the truly evil Johnny Warlock. He's the fellow on the cover holding a shotgun to Robin's head.

A Huntress page...

In late '93 my comics illustrating career was pretty much on the skids. The fairly critically and sales successful Elementals had come and gone, after a reasonable run of fifty-plus issues (broken into two volumes of 25 or so issues each).

        First digression: Advice to new cartoonists: When you're producing a run of funnybooks, don't let the publisher talk you into finding an excuse to start again at issue # 1, under the justification that it will bump up sales. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't, but the hassle of trying to sort out, for the rest of your years, which Elementals # 1 was the first # 1, and so on, aren't worth it.

        Back to the essay: If I recall correctly, I was still writing and illustrating (and lettering and everything elseing) Ironwood for Fantagraphics' Eros line. But I was finishing an installment of Ironwood less often with each succeeding issue, and the overall sales weren't exactly ripping up the charts.

        Marvel was a closed shop to me by then, following several frustrating years worth of aborted attempts to launch new projects there, as a writer or artist, or both, but always running afoul of the smug, childish and cliquish editorial culture that flourished there at the time -- behaviors for which I never had any tolerance, and was perhaps a bit too vocal in criticizing.

        Second digression: This seems to be no longer the case at Marvel. Based entirely on my admittedly limited interactions with them of late, an admirable level of professionalism and courtesy seems to be the standard there now, rather than the exception.

        Returning again to our essay: DC was mostly a closed shop to me then too, but not due to a lack of professionalism on their parts, but this time based almost entirely on my past failures to deliver assigned pages (I'd worked strictly as a hired-gun artist for them up to then) in a timely manner -- or at all in a few cases.

        But DC had been willing to give me work in the past and hadn't entirely gotten to the point where editors refused even to take my calls. However, more than one editor, upon learning that it was me on the line, began any conversation by saying, "You better not be looking for work!" Unfortunately I was looking for work, needing to find a pencilling job or face the unenviable prospect of getting honest work outside of the funnybook field. So, in late '93 I was calling around the DC offices looking for a book to draw.

        Neal Pozner was editing a series called Showcase '93 at that time. The title was doing double duty, describing both that Showcase was a place to feature new talent and to feature stories about second and third-string DCU characters that had no regular books of their own. Even though I wasn't exactly new talent by then,  Neal had never worked with me before and let me draw a two-part Huntress story that would appear (I believe) in issues # 9 and 10.

        Right away Neal heard from other DC staffers that he'd made a terrible mistake and was likely insane for taking a chance on me. He grew justifyably worried, based on those war stories of my past failings. But he'd already assigned the job and was too encumbered with human decency to withdraw the offer.

        I did the work, buckled down, determined to mend fences, rebuild bridges -- pick your metaphor. There were two hitches in the job though. One was simply fun and silly and one wasn't. First, it was a story about Huntress following a vicious gunrunner to a white-supremacist enclave in the mountains of Idaho. This wasn't a case of hot pursuit, where the hero would have no time to plot and plan. Huntress had a few days to prepare for the mission and then followed the villain out to Idaho, from Gotham, on a later flight. Anticipating this, trying to do a good job with the script and thoroughly think through its implications, I decided to design a cold-weather costume for the Huntress. After all, she was supposed to be a female equivalent of Batman (though operating on more of a budget) and ranked in his general ballpark as far as wit, cunning and intelligence, right? Any moron knowing she was going to a mountainous, snowy environment would outfit herself differently than the standard skimpy little-more-than-a-bathing-suit job that she usually wore in Gotham, right?

        Wrong.

        The problems was, if DC let me design a new winter outfit for her, they'd have to pay me a fee for doing so, above and beyond my page rate, and perhaps even open the door for a later legal claim on my part that I owned part of the character, having helped visually design her. That sort of nonsense just wasn't in the sales-meager Showcase's shoestring budget. No matter what the consequences for the story, Huntress simply had to stay in her skimpy costume.

        So I ended up drawing many panels of Huntress in the snow, obviously shivering her bottom off with the cold, trying to keep wrapped up in her cape, and not exactly making a case for the notion that she was a wise and clever superhero.

        That was the fun -- or at least silly -- one of the two problems.

        The other hitch wasn't nearly as entertaining. After I'd completed all of the art for both installments (40 pages in total), which included an extended guest appearance from Batman in the final 20 pages, someone at DC realized that this story would come out after their big event where the original Batman gets his back broken and would be temporarily replaced by a guy named Azarael in a vastly different version of the Batman suit -- which was quite well suited for cold weather operations, by the way, so even this new guy upstart hero had more sense than poor dim Huntress.

        So I had to go back and redraw any of the far too many pages in which Batman appeared. No problem, right? Just change a few costume details and we're golden. But there was a pretty big problem, because the new Batman was a bulky figure, entirely different in shape from the original figure, with lots of extra spiky things sticking out all over. I couldn't simply change a few costume details, I had to completely redraw each of the many panels featuring Batman.

        For that reason DC had to pay me a fairly substantial redrawing fee, beyond my page rate. This didn't win me any new friends up there, when that's exactly what I was trying to do with this job. They couldn't understand why I wasn't thrilled to be one of the first artists to draw the thrilling new Batman. Shouldn't that have been reward enough?

        In any case, the problems were worked out and a redrawing fee was eventually agreed upon by both parties. And even with the extra work involved, I still managed to get the job in early. Neal Pozner couldn't have been happier and made a point to tell me, "I don't care what anyone else says. I'll give you work anytime you want it."

        Mission accomplished. My failing career received the new jumpstart I was looking for.

        Shortly afterwards Neal, that truly good man, died of complications resulting from his long (unknown to me at the time) battle with AIDS.

        I maintain a lingering fondness for this Huntress story, despite the minor (in hindsight) hiccups along the way. Terry Austin inked me on this job, which was quite an honor for me. I'd been his fan for some years. To this day I can still look back at my artwork for this story and not completely recoil in horror -- which is rare for me on any past work. As you might begin to guess by now, I'm not the biggest fan of my own comics artwork.

        Terry and I never got a chance to work together again, which is too bad, because I think something in our styles meshed together well. Then again, his skills and talent went a long way towards covering up my many sins of bad anatomy and worse composition. He's darn good at fixing things.

        Following this job it would be some long years before DC and I got back on track with each other.

A page from my first comics work...

Some of you who know my career too well might argue that those D&D ads in the back of Epic Magazine and Marvel Comics were my first comics work, but you'd be wrong. More about that someday... maybe.

        My first professional comics work was with First Comics, an upstart comics publisher based in Evanston Illinois. They published a comic -- their flagship comic -- called Warp, based upon an odd stage play, made only vaguely interesting by the Neal Adams production drawings and costume designs.

        One of the characters in Warp was named Valeria the Insect Queen. In issues 8 and 9 (or maybe 9 and 10 -- I'm going by highly faulty memory here) of the comic they gave her her own backup story and allowed me the opportunity to draw it. Here is one page of the results. I believe this is the last page of the two-part story.

        I'd like to say I have mixed emotions about this page and about that job, but I can't. I've no lingering fondness for it and can only look at this page and the others from that job in a steady state of full-cringe. My artistic influences of the period controlled me to the extent that, though I can't go so far as to say they constituted plagiarism, I also can't say I was doing my own work. A talented young man named Bruce Patterson inked this job (though it may have been Pattersen, and then again it may have been someone else entirely -- I've tried so hard to forget these years that it's not easy now to resurrect them), and he covered up many of my sins.

        You can see in the upper part of the third panel that a character is missing. I'm not sure who or why. I barely recall the story. But in the old days of comic production -- the pre computer days -- corrections were often made by photocopying art and then literally pasting the copy down on a page. That is how we moved visual elements around on a page back then. My guess is that a photocopied paste-up of the missing character fell off of the original art page, when the glue dried and dissipated over the years.

        At the same time I was producing these pages, I was drawing the first ever Elementals 20-page story that would eventually be printed as the backup to the short-lived Texas Comics' Justice Machine Annual # 1 (and only, as it turned out). That work is less horrifying to me now, only because it was my own work for the most part. The terrible mistakes I made on the Elementals stuff were at least my own mistakes and not someone else's.

        But this Warp backup job counts as my first comic book work, even though I was doing Elementals at the same time, because it was published first. I would go on to do several additional backups in Warp, none of which are worth trying to find.

        First Comics doesn't exist anymore, nor does Texas Comics, Noble Comics (the first of the independent comics companies that tried to publish my work and died before being able to do so), or Comico. All of the small independent companies I worked for, or tried to work for, in the early years of my career are gone now. There's a lesson here for someone. DC, are you listening?