And so, without further ado...

Nine Questions with Gerry Conway!

CM:  We went from a seemingly artist-driven comic business in the '90s to a writer-driven comic business in the 2000s. Do you feel there's a cyclical flow between these two or are we on the cusp of something else taking center stage?

GC: Well, in the '50s and '60s, the strongest influence on comics—in a general sense— was editorial. Mort Weisinger, Julie Schwartz, and Jack Schiff at DC/National; Stan Lee at Marvel; Al Feldstein at EC/Mad Magazine—all of these editors had strong, specific editorial voices that were reflected in the books they controlled. So, for the sake of argument, there's a third possibility: the return of the strong, creative editor. I don't think that's likely, though, given the instability and fragmentation of the business, and the easy mobility of individual creators. If I were to guess, though, I'd say we're more likely to see a continuation of the writer's domination of the field. Ultimately, comic art is a story driven medium. The artwork is the media through which the story is told. The '90s—with its emphasis on art over story—was an aberration, and reflected a general collapse of creativity among the writers working at the time. If the stories are weak, the art better be strong. But, if the story is strong, the art can still be weak, to a point, and the story can still be a success. There's a saying in the film business (often forgotten by the people who make films, unfortunately): A good director can't save a bad script but a bad director can destroy a good script. In the end, it's always the writing that matters most.
 
CM: What's your feeling on what's been done with characters you personally created and introduced? The Punisher was the most notable "hero" in the bronze age who dealt with criminals in a lethal manner. He's inspired countless lethal badasses of various stripes, most recently Jason Todd as the Red Hood. What do you think is the value of the "hero that goes too far" and what Marvel has done with the Punisher specifically? The Spider-Clone is a creation of yours that nearly derailed an entire franchise because of what subsequent writers did with him. What's your reaction to what's been done with those two characters specifically, and the impact, positive and negative, they have had on comics?

GC: I've always had mixed feelings about the Punisher. On the one hand, I'm pleased that the character has had such an impact, and to the extent that other creators use him as a tool to question our moral assumptions, I'm delighted by his continuing popularity. On the other hand, his potential as a caricature to play to our baser instincts is troubling. Frank Castle is damaged goods, a moral man who's stepped over the boundary of morality. He isn't a hero and he isn't a good guy. He can be the protagonist of a story but he shouldn't be the moral center of it. At best, he should be a tragic figure, cursed to replicate the violence that destroyed his life, and unwittingly re-enacting that destruction despite his conviction that he's making the world a better place by doing so. He's a supremely deluded figure. As for the Spider-Clone story line, obviously I never intended it to expand into the saga that it became at other hands, years later. I didn't really follow those stories, but I recall thinking at the time, when someone told me that there was a storyline that called into question the validity of every Spider-Man story since Amazing Spider-Man #149, "Wow, this is the ultimate writer's solipsism. The Spider-Man universe really did stop when I left it." I got a laugh out of that, believe me. Recently, someone pointed out that the Spider-Man Clone Saga was one of the first attempts to "ret-con" a super-hero series in mid-stream. (Previously, as in the transition from Golden Age to Silver Age versions of heroes, publishers would cancel a title and only revive it years later with a new creative approach.) Ret-conning is an outgrowth of the fan obsession with "continuity," the illusion that everything that happens in a comic book story is somehow "real" and has to fit into some overall, totally arbitrary time line. (I think this sort of thinking started with fans of Sherlock Holmes. God help us.) Playing to this obsession caused writers in the '80s and '90s to do some pretty strange things, the Clone Saga among them.

CM: You wrote arguably the best and most historic cross-over in comics. Superman vs. Spider-Man. How did that come about, what were the challenges it presented?

GC:  A literary agent named David Obst, whose claim to fame was that he represented Woodward and Bernstein for "All the President's Men," approached Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino with the idea of a Super-Man/Spider-Man cross over. As an outsider, he was in a position to negotiate with both parties, who otherwise never would have considered the idea seriously. He also played to the egos of the two men—after all, in effect, he was putting them on the same level as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the literary heroes of the hour. So that's how the project got started. My own involvement was the result of my leaving Marvel and joining DC at just the right moment during the development of the project. Stan and Carmine had just agreed on a division of labor for the creative team—Marvel would supply the artist, and DC would supply the writer. As Carmine's latest "star" acquisition, I was tapped by DC to do the writing, and I asked for my Spider-Man collaborator, Ross Andru, as artist. Because I'd become an editor at DC, I was left to my own devices by Carmine, and with Roy Thomas representing Marvel, I was given a free hand to develop the story with Ross however we thought best. For better or worse. The biggest challenge was finding a way to give both heroes equal importance in the story, and provide that expected, iconic moment when they face off head-to-head. In "reality," of course, Superman would make quick work of Spider-Man, but that wouldn't have served the fans' expectations, so we had to come up with a rationale to allow some action between them. The most importance decision I made, and the one I took the greatest heat for, was the decision to treat this story as something occurring in its own private universe—neither the DC Universe nor the Marvel continuum. I wanted to avoid the whole "multiple earths" nonsense, and, in any case, if I'd made any serious attempt to tie it into the mainstream continuity of either hero, I believed it would have created huge story problems down the line. The book did well, so the general readership obviously liked this approach; some fans wanted a purer rationale.
 
CM: How much should fan reactions, demands, fuel comic writing? The old Stan Lee touch was to create the impression that there was a Marvel Bullpen and a Marvel community. Does fandom have too much a voice in modern comic-dom?

GC: It's hard to say. A few decades ago, an individual issue of a comic book like Superman would sell, on average, close to a million copies a month. Even the weakest titles sold upwards of several hundred thousand copies. In those days, the fan base was a vocal but insignificant minority of the overall readership. Editors like Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz flattered the fans by giving them a voice on the letters page, implying fans were the people they were trying to please, but, in fact, there was never any serious effort to create material that appealed primarily and directly to the fans. Fan approval was icing on the cake. These days, it's the cake. Partially that's the result of business decisions that were forced upon the comic book companies by changes in distribution in the 1970s; partially, it's a result of fans becoming the creators. Whatever the reason, these days, a best-selling comic book rarely sells more than a hundred thousand copies a month, and my guess is, most of those copies are multiple sales to the same core base. The result is, creators skew their material toward the hard core fan, rather than a larger, less exclusive readership. Given that fans are, paradoxically, both incredibly conservative and demanding of novelty, writers and artists are constantly struggling to meet conflicting and contradictory demands. I don't think this has a very positive effect on the long-term health of the field. By the way, I'm talking about super-hero comics here, not comics as an art form per se. That's a whole other discussion...
 
CM: Your work at DC was associated with an explosion (no pun intended) of creative revivals of old characters (like FREEDOM FIGHTERS, ALL-STAR SUPER SQUAD, and BLACKHAWKS). Interestingly, in each of these cases, your stories were free of a lot of continuity and story references back to older (i.e., WWII-era) issues. In a lot of ways, your stories used familiar names and loaded them with new concepts.  Is this the future of DC/MARVEL? Keep the brand, update the content?

GC: As I may have implied above, I'm not a proponent of being straitjacketed creatively by the concept of "continuity." The tremendous creative outpouring of the 1960s in comics represented a break with the continuity of many previously established super-hero characters. Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz paid little to no attention to the story continuity of characters like the Flash, Captain America, Green Lantern, or the Human Torch. And they produced work that revolutionized the industry.
 
CM: On that note, Have you been following the descendant of your character (Commander) Steel in JSA? How do you feel when someone brings in a character based on one of your creations? Would you be interested in working with Citizen Steel to bring him into the spotlight again, or is it too far removed from your original conception of the World War II hero or his grandson from the 1980s JLA?

GC: Honestly, I'm always happy and flattered when a creator today does something imaginative and positive with one of my characters. Especially if it reflects an appreciation for what I and my collaborators were attempting to do when we created the character back in the day. Thank you, Geoff Johns.
 
CM: LAW& ORDER has an amazing run on NBC. Does it run on a "silver age-style comic book model" of TV drama? That is, self-contained single issues, with little required foreknowledge of characters or plot. The overall conclusion of each episode is largely the same (the DA's office wins the case, more often than not), yet viewship is hooked. Also, I need Vince D'Onofrio dirt: Hard core method actor?

GC: Let's distinguish between LAW & ORDER and its siblings. The original L&O is very much an old-style, single-episode TV show, and intentionally so. There's a viewership that responds to this—they appreciate the familiarity, even the predictability, of the self-contained story structure. In fact, familiarity and predictability is what they're seeking. A show like LAW & ORDER CRIMINAL INTENT, on the other hand (the series I wrote for) tries to provide a hint of character development and continuity for a viewership that wants the illusion of change and growth. Generally speaking, franchise character shows—ie: cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, etc.—don't offer opportunities for traditional character development. Certain hybrid formats do—the doctor/soap opera ("ER," "Grey's Anatomy"), the lawyer/soap opera ("LA Law," "Ally McBeal"), the sci-fi/soap opera ("Battleship Galactica," "Lost"). But that's a separate format, even though on the surface it looks like a franchise show. L&O CI tried to dip its toe in the cop/soap opera hybrid format while keeping true to the straight cop franchise format. I'm not sure how successful we were. As for Vincent D'Onofrio dirt, all I can tell you is, as an actor Vincent is as intense and committed and slightly strange as Goren is as a detective.

CM: You've got an impressive resume of detective dramas, including The Father Dowling Mysteries (Tom Bosley's best work, ever), Diagnosis: Murder, Perry Mason, and Law& Order. What is it about the detective genre that interests you so much?

GC: The strange thing is, I never set out to become a specialist in TV detective dramas. My first and continuing love is for science fiction and fantasy. I stumbled into writing mysteries because I met the producer Dean Hargrove while working on a pulp serial project for Showtime with Roy Thomas in the mid-'80s. After Roy and I split up as a writing team, I floundered about for a while, before approaching Dean for advice on how to reactivate my career in 1988. Dean offered me a job rewriting a script for a show he was doing, then gave me an assignment to script a Father Dowling episode off a plot he'd written, then hired me as a story editor for Father Dowling, then promoted me to producer... and the rest is history. The TV and film business tends to "type" people as certain kinds of writers. Because of those early assignments for Dean, I became typed as a writer/expert in mystery/detective television. Go figure.
 
CM: You co-created Firestorm: The Nuclear Man, one of my all-time favorite super-heroes. What was the process behind the creation of such a unique character? How do you feel about his treatment in recent years?

GC: I've spoken about the creation of Firestorm a lot lately, and don't want to repeat myself. In a nutshell, I wanted to write something fun, that might provoke the same feelings in new readers that the original Spider-Man stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko provoked in me. And I thought it would be fun to turn the traditional super-hero cliche of the weak nerd who gets world-beating super-powers on its head, by giving those powers to the dumb jock, Ronnie Raymond, who would've been that weak nerd's tormentor in a different life. In effect, I wanted Flash Thompson to get bitten by the radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker. Once I had that idea, I knew I needed another element to make him an effective super-hero. That led me to Professor Stein, and what I think was the real secret of whatever success that original concept has had. The Ronnie Raymond/Professor Stein dynamic was more or less unique, and it had an arch-typical element. One of the life struggles teenagers face is their growing sense of power, accompanied by uncertainty about how to use that power. Most teenagers experience something like the internal dialogue between Ronnie and the Professor. On the one hand they feel like they can do anything; on the other, they second-guess themselves, doubt themselves, judge themselves. That's what made Firestorm interesting, to me. So I think it was a big mistake to separate Ronnie and the Professor. As an iconic super-hero, the only really unique element of Firestorm is the relationship between those two characters. His super-powers aren't that special, but the dynamic between Ronnie and the Professor was unlike anything else. Lose that dynamic, and you lose any justification for the character. I think that's become pretty obvious over the years. Sooner or later someone is going to figure out a way to bring back that specific structure, and then you'll have a successful character again. That's not to say the people who've worked on the various incarnations of Firestorm have done a bad job, or that my version of it was the sine qua non; it's just an observation about what makes a character iconic. Bruce Wayne is Batman; Peter Parker is Spider-Man; Barry Allen is The Flash; Steve Rodgers is Captain America; Ronnie Raymond and Professor Martin Stein are Firestorm. Accept no substitutes.


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