CATCHING UP WITH
J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI Popular Guest Straddles Worlds of Sci-Fi, Comics and Television
J. Michael Straczynski is one of the most popular special guests to appear at Comic-Con. With a comics schedule alone that would crush a weaker person, JMS has taken on a workload that has kept him a bit out of the public sphere, but he’ll be back at Comic-Con again this year. We touched base with him to talk about the myriad of projects he has going on in all of these worlds. You’re writing Marvel’s flagship titles, Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man. What’s it like dealing with the incredible legacy of both of these books, 40 years after their creation? Certainly it’s a huge compliment, and a great responsibility. The first obligation one has is not to break anything, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with the books, while at the same time trying to inject some new angles. The challenge is that the books have been around for 40-plus years, and it’s hard to find elements that haven’t been touched upon previously by far better writers than myself. As a fan, I’d love nothing more than to just bury myself in the Spidey and FF rogues gallery of bad guys, but that’s the easy way out, and there comes a time when you’re not breaking new ground, you’re just fertilizing familiar fields. Spider-Man saw some amazing changes in his life this year with “The Other” storyline. While it ran through all three Spidey titles, a lot of it seemed to tie in with things you started laying in place when you took over Amazing Spider-Man five years ago. Was this the culmination of those plot threads or a new beginning for everyone’s favorite webslinger? It was both, really. There were a lot of elements set up that foreshadowed Peter’s rebirth, so what came in “The Other” was a payoff, but at the same time it was a rebirth on a lot of different levels. He’s stronger than ever, more capable, more evolved (in every sense of that word) . . . which naturally means that there’s a fall coming soon, because that’s just Peter’s world . . . but he’s grown a lot, and that’s the fun of the book.
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COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL: SAN DIEGO
New Spidey costume: Love it or hate it? I don’t consider it a love/hate issue. The costume is born out of the plot concerning the growing father/son relationship between Tony Stark and Peter. It’s visually emblematic of that friendship. It’s not designed to be a long-term change; eventually it will go back to the original threads, so I don’t get too het-up about it one way or t’other. But having said all of that, I do think it’s kinda cool looking. What’s it like creating a whole new universe of comics like you’ve been doing at Marvel with the Squadron Supreme books? It’s a great deal of fun because I get to make up the rules of the Squadron Supreme universe as I go... meaning I have a clean slate on which to posit, “Okay, if this happened in the real world, what would it look like?” In its prior iteration, as Supreme Power, it was very much Mark Milton’s (Hyperion’s) story, whereas now it’s a rather large and almost unwieldy team, so now the dynamics are very different. The road taken previously was dictated by the mindset and gestalt of the 70s and 80s. The world has changed, the context by which we would evaluate