Issuu

INSIDE: TODD McFARLANE ON WRITING SPIDEY & SPAWN!

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In the the USA USA In

Summer Summer 2007 2007

M AG A ZI N E

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CONCLUDED FROM BACK ISSUE #23: STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE

SCRIPT & PENCILS FROM BENDIS & CHO’S MIGHTY AVENGERS

M AG A Z I N E Issue #16

Summer 2007

Read Now! Message from the Editor-in-Chief ....................................................................page 2 The Writin’ Side of Me Interview with Todd McFarlane ......................................................................page 3

SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE Cosmically cool Q & A with some of the greatest Surfer scribes ever: STAN LEE, J.M DeMatteis, Steve Englehart, Ron Marz, and Jim Starlin ............................................................................page 25

STAR TREK COMICS WRITERS ROUNDTABLE Part 2 (Continued from Back Issue #23) Another kind of space-spanning survey, featuring: Mike W. Barr, Peter David, Laurie Sutton, Len Wein, and many more.................................................................................................page 55 Feedback Letters from Write Now!’s Readers .............................................................page 69 FREE PREVIEW of Draw! #14 ......................................................................page 70

Nuts & Bolts Department Plot to Pencils to Script to Finished Pages: SPAWN #52 Pages from “Messiah” by Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo ......................................................page 17

Plot to Pencils to Script to Finished Comic: AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #1 Pages from “Happy Accidents,” by Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli ...............................................................page 35

Creating Comics Step By Step (Part 2 of 3) Steven Grant delivers the second part of his information-packed series on making comic books ..............................page 41

Script to Pencils to Finished Comic: THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #3 Pages by Brian Michael Bendis and Frank Cho....................................page 51

Conceived by DANNY FINGEROTH Editor-In-Chief Managing Editor Special Thanks To: THE SILVER ERIC FEIN SURFER WRITERS Cover art by THE STAR TREK MIKE ZECK WRITERS and PHIL ZIMELMAN And… Designers RICH J. FOWLKS and DAVID GREENAWALT Transcriber STEVEN TICE Circulation Director BOB BRODSKY, COOKIESOUP PERIODICAL DISTRIBUTION, LLC Publisher JOHN MORROW

ALISON BLAIRE TOM BREVOORT CARMEN Q. BRYANT CHARLES COSTAS KIA CROSS LAUREN CROSS MICHAEL EURY RICH J. FOWLKS STEVEN GRANT DAVID GREENAWALT BOB GREENBERGER CHRIS IRVING JIM McCANN TODD McFARLANE CHRIS POWELL JIM REID VARDA STEINHARDT STEVEN TICE JIM WARDEN MIKE ZECK PHIL ZIMELMAN

Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! is published 4 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Fax: (919) 449-0327. Danny Fingeroth, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Write Now! E-mail address: WriteNowDF@aol.com. Single issues: $9 Postpaid in the US ($11 Canada, $16 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $26 US ($44 Canada, $60 elsewhere). Order online at: www.twomorrows.com or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com All characters are TM & © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © the respective authors. Editorial package is ©2007 Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. All rights reserved. Write Now! is a shared trademark of Danny Fingeroth and TwoMorrows Publishing. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

WRITE NOW | 1

READ Now ! Message from Danny Fingeroth, Editor-in-Chief W

elcome and welcome back! The features we’ve got for you this issue are so far out they’re practically cosmic!

“Cosmic” is the only way to describe this issue’s incredible Mike Zeck/Phil Zimelman Silver Surfer cover that you were staring at a minute ago. Extra-special thanks to Mike and Phil for the great art, and to Jim Reid who owns the original art and was kind enough to scan it for our use! As for what’s inside the issue…first, we managed to get the man of many talents and businesses, Todd McFarlane to sit down for an interview about his approach to writing and how it relates to everything else he does. Todd also gave us a rarity from his files for a Nuts & Bolts section: his handwritten plot and script, and pencil art by Greg Capullo, from Spawn #52! Then we go to the stars in honor of this summer’s mega-hit Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, with our very own Silver Surfer Writers Roundtable featuring the surfing one’s co-creator, Stan Lee, as well as J.M. DeMatteis, Steve Englehart, Ron Marz, and Jim Starlin! But that’s just the beginning! We’ve got not one, but two Avengers Nuts & Bolts sections. First, script and art for Mighty Avengers #3 by Brian Michael Bendis and Frank Cho, and then plot, script and art for Avengers: The Initiative #1 by Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli! Want more? We’ve also got the second part of Steven Grant’s three-part “Creating Comics Step by Step” series. If you’re serious about doing comics, this article is a must-read. Then, breaking the barrier between magazines—we bring you the second part of the Star Trek Comics Writers Roundtable, continued from our sister (or should that be brother?) TwoMorrows publication, the Michael Eury-edited Back Issue magazine #23. This Q&A features Trek writers Mike W. Barr, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Laurie Sutton, Len Wein, and a whole bunch more! 2 | WRITE NOW

And if you’ve always been curious about yet another hip-and-happening TwoMorrows mag—namely, Draw! (edited by my old Darkhawk partner, Mike Manley)—then you’ll be thrilled by the FREE PREVIEW of Draw! #14 that’s in this issue of Write Now! And, you wonder, what’s going on next issue? Well, what would you say to an issue centering on the smash hit NBC series Heroes—with behind the scenes interviews with the writers and producers of the series, sample scripts, a look at the online Heroes comic, and inside info about the upcoming Heroes: Origins spinoff series! It can all be found behind a dramatic photo cover featuring the show’s Hayden Panettiere and Milo Ventimiglia! The issue also has Peter David talking about writing Stephen King’s Dark Tower comics, an interview with writer and editor C.B. Cebulski, an interview with kids’ super-hero book writer Michael Teitelbaum, and the Douglas Rushkoff interview that was supposed to be in this issue—including art from his and Liam Sharp’s Testament. And two issues from now—Write Now! #18—will be our special all-Stan Lee issue, celebrating The Man’s 85th birthday and his amazing career writing comics, TV, movies and just about everything else! We’ve got tributes and commentary from high-profile Stan-fans including John Romita Sr., Brian Bendis, Todd McFarlane, Dennis O’Neil and lots of others. More details about this amazing issue next time. So stick around—and tell your friends! More than ever, Write Now! is the place to find out all you need to know about writing and writers! Write away!

Danny Fingeroth

THE WRITIN’ SIDE OF ME:

THE TODD McFARLANE INTERVIEW Interview conducted by Danny Fingeroth via telephone 5-30-07 Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by Eric Fein, Danny Fingeroth and Todd McFarlane

odd McFarlane’s comic book career spans more than twenty years and dozens of popular characters. As artist, his work has graced the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man (where he cocreated Venom), The Incredible Hulk, and Detective Comics. His professional writing career kicked off with the launch of one of the bestselling series of all time, Spider-Man. After years as one of the industry’s top creators, Todd joined several other popular comic book artists to form Image Comics. There, he launched his own creator-owned series, Spawn, which soon caught the attention of Hollywood and was the inspiration for a live action movie and an animated series. In addition to his comic book work, Todd also heads up his own toy and collectible company, McFarlane Toys. A busy man of many interests (including part-ownership of the Edmonton Oilers NHL hockey team), Todd was able to give us some time to speak about the subject of Write Now: writing for comics and related media. —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: Did you write as a kid at all, or in school, Todd? Was that anything you were interested in then? TODD McFARLANE: I was pretty good at sort of short story stuff, but I think that was just a byproduct of my wild imagination as a whole. DF: What kind of short stories? What would they be about? TM: The teacher would assign us to do a factual composition about, say World War II, I couldn’t do something like that. But if they said, “Go home and come up with a made-up story and bring it in,” and you could add fantasy stuff and big, dramatic melodrama to it—the equivalent of the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk stories— then I could put in a flying elephant, and purple dinosaurs a thousand feet tall, and I could do it easily. DF: This was in elementary school? TM: Oh, yeah. You know, the “creative writing” classes. DF: What about in high school or college? Did you do any writing then?

TM: Not nearly as much. The writing there was more serious so a lot of it was more historical reports and dissertations in some of the classes. And you had less of a chance, or at least in the classes that I was taking, to just have fun with writing like I did when I was in high school or younger. DF: I’ve read that you didn’t really read comics until high school. How’d you avoid them? TM: Umm…I played a lot of sports. You know, when we went on road trips, Mom and Dad would stop at the 7-Eleven and buy a couple of Slurpees and a couple of comics and throw them in the back to me and my two brothers, so it’s not that I was devoid of comics. I’d read a handful, so I was aware of what comic books were. I never bothered collecting them, though. But at the age of about nine I started collecting baseball cards and football cards, so I was collecting, it just was in a different place. Later, all of a sudden I went, “Hey, you know what? Let me check out these comic books that I keep sort of walking by.” TODD McFARLANE | 3

Todd hand-wrote his script for page 4 of the story on an overlay that went over a copy of Greg’s pencil art (see next page). Todd and Greg are working “Marvel-style,” aka plot-first style, where the dialogue is written after the pencil art is done. Also shown is how panel one of the page came out. You can see the entire page later in this Nuts & Bolts section. [© 2007 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.]

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Here’s a copy of Greg’s pencils for page 4 page with Todd’s balloon placements indicated. This shows letterer Tom Orzechowski specifically where each copy unit should go. [© 2007 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.]

SPAWN #52 NUTS & BOLTS | 19

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SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE H

e started out as a distant gleam in outer space, and ended up more than 40 years later— appropriately—on the “silver screen.” Bad, bad Norrin Radd—better known as the Silver Surfer—first appeared in the pages of the classic Fantastic Four #48, the first part of what has come to be known as “The Galactus Trilogy.” Over the intervening years the Surfer has starred in two ongoing series and a whole bunch of limited series and one-shots. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of guest appearances he’s made across the Marvel Universe. The Surfer has been written by some of the finest writers in the business, and they took their cues from the men who created him back in 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As the story goes, it seems that, after discussing the Galactus story with Stan, Jack went home to draw it. When he brought in the penciled pages, he had added a shining character riding a surfboard through space, a character that hadn’t been part of the team’s plotting session. Queried by Stan as to who the figure was, Jack said that he figured a character as awesome as Galactus would have a herald to announce his coming to the worlds he would devour. Stan liked the idea, one of them named him the Silver Surfer, and the rest is comics history. It turned out that the Surfer became one of Stan’s favorite characters to write for reasons he discusses on the next page.

In honor of the Surfer’s 40-plus years of traveling the skyways of the Marvel Universe—and his cinematic debut in this summer’s blockbuster bonanza, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer— I decided to get together a virtual roundtable discussion of some of the greatest Surfer Writers of all time. I say “virtual” because I didn’t actually sit these guys down in one room. As with our nowlegendary Spider-Man Writers Roundtable in issue #14, I asked them all the same dozen questions and am running their answers consecutively. So there’s no “cross-talking” as there no doubt would have been were all these writers in the same room, and if a Roundtabler doesn’t have an answer to a given question here…it’s because he chose not to answer it. Of course, there was one writer who got his own very special set of questions. Needless to say, that was The Man himself—Stan Lee! I couldn’t really ask him what it felt like taking over a character with a legacy like the Surfer’s—since he was responsible for so much of that legacy! His erudite answers lead off the section, and then we go roundtabling with the rest of the Surfer-crew. So polish up your silver coating, align your surfboard’s rudder—and let’s get this beach-party started!

Danny Fingeroth Editor-in-Chief

WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE

WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE WRITE NOW! SILVER SURFER WRITERS ROUNDTABLE

SILVER SURFER ROUNDTABLE | 25

PAGE 6 Panel One CLOUD 9: …this is SO worse than Panel Two CLOUD 9: AHH! WAR MACHINE o/p: repulsor beams… WAR MACHINE o/p:

PAGE 6 Panel One d—scared out of her wits. Cut to CLOUD 9 inside the clou ing Panel Two d she’s in gets blown away, leav CLOUD 9 is startled as the clou her face to face… his Panel Three/Money Shot hands are held out, ready to use …with WAR MACHINE! His . well as her at s are aimed repulsor repulsor rays. And all his gun 9 to comply, or he’ll turn his WAR MACHINE tells CLOUD just a cloud. CLOUD than y awa e mor blow and rays up to a higher setting— head, surrendering to him. 9 raises her hands above her CHINE in a time that we’ve seen WAR MA first the is this , fano (Ste one based or— arm his of ion an updated vers while. He should be wearing or—but black and white and arm N’S MA N IRO of ion off of the current vers sporting enormous guns!)

taking mom’s car withou

Your cover has just been

t—

blown away by my

…at their LOWEST sett

ing. Trust me… Panel Three WAR MACHINE: …you do NOT want me setting them any higher. WAR MACHINE: Identif y yourself. CLOUD 9 (small): I’m Abb y. Um… Abigail B— WAR MACHINE: Stop! Not your name. Your iden tity. Your SUPERHUMAN identity . CLOUD 9 (small): Cloud 9. Panel Four WAR MACHINE: All righ t, Cloud 9, listen up. You wanna fly? WAR MACHINE: You need a LICENSE. Com e with me.

s going Panel Four as he tells CLOUD 9 that she’ Close up on WAR MACHINE ! NOW … to have to get registered

40 | WRITE NOW

THE END

CREATING COMICS STEP BY STEP

STEPS 4-6

s we said last issue:

“Steven Grant has a long and successful career as a comic book writer. He, along with Mike Zeck, brought the Punisher to new heights of popularity with their groundbreaking limited series. Steven has also scripted stories featuring Spider-Man, Batman, and even Robocop. He is also the creator of the popular independent comic book series, Whisper. Steven has a weekly column, Permanent Damage, on ComicBookResources.com. “In ‘Creating Comics Step by Step,’ which first ran on Permanent Damage, he explores the process of how writers craft their stories. Steven has taken many agreed upon approaches of professional writers and presents them in an easy to understand and fun way.” There are ten (up from nine) essays for this series. We ran the first three last issue and are happy to run the next three here, with the last four scheduled to appear next issue. So grab that highlighter for the important points Steven makes (which is all of them) and enjoy this middle third of his Master Class in creating comics! —DF

Step 4: PLOT The term “plot” is often misconstrued, and just as often segregated from “character,” especially by critics who subdivide fiction into “character-driven” and “plotdriven” stories, by which they generally mean either the character’s behavior and responses determine the direction of the plot (and wherein plot is sometimes invisible) or the requirements of the plot predetermine a character’s responses. The distinction is largely overblown, and often used to separate “mainstream” fiction from “genre” fiction and imply an innate superiority of the former over westerns, detective stories, horror stories, science fiction, etc., all of which do have their own content requirements before you can join their club. But that’s really smoke, obscuring a simple fact:

Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa from 1503 to 1506. Does this world-famous work of art tell a story? Should it? Character and plot, in practice, are indivisible. Character without plot is a painting, a static persona: Mona Lisa, the corners of her mouth slightly upturned, eyes lightly dancing, hands crossed just a bit unnaturally in her lap as a storm seems to gather over a landscape behind her that’s cultivated but still seems to suggest something of the wild. Her hint of a smile has captivated viewers for centuries, but its meaning is lost, unknowable. She’s only a moment in time, trapped there forever, and while we can judge her character by what da Vinci left on canvas, that’s all we’ll ever have. She projects a character, but we can’t even know what of it is real and what we’re projecting. She has no story moving through time.

STEVEN GRANT | 41

Page 161- Big panel. High looking down, The Helicarrier is in heavy perspective as it tips over with The Sentry at its far end. Lightning hits it. Planes are falling off of it. 2- Profile. Sentry is straining. Calling

out to the wind.

The Helicarrier is starting to push on top of the taller buildings. Concrete and brick is coming off as are pieces of the carrier.

Brian calls for small close-ups of Sentry to heighten the drama of whether or not he will be able to stop the helicarrier’s plunge. But it was Frank’s decision to design the page with a big vertical panel, followed by a series of smaller panels along the right side of the page.

Neither the city nor the Helicarrier can

survive this.

1 - THE SENTRY HhhrrraaaaAgghh!!! 3- Smaller panel. Tight on the Sentry, 4- Smaller panel. Same, but Sentry's

he is pushing back with all his might.

face goes from straining anguish to

5- Profile. Widescreen. The Sentry feels

slight confusion.

the Helicarrier tip upwards. Is it over?

He's confused.

THE END 54 | WRITE NOW

star trek WRITERS ROUNDTABLE PART TWO (CONTINUED FROM BACK ISSUE #23, NOW ON SALE)

Conducted via e-mail by Robert Greenberger, October through December, 2006.

ur sister publication, Back Issue, published part one of a writers roundtable discussing the joys and pitfalls of adapting Star Trek from screen to comic book. The discussion over there included topics on going from screen to print, working with licensing restrictions, the role of the artist on such a property, and how the various

companies that have handled Star Trek through the years have been to work with. Of course, the preceding summary is no comparison to actually reading the first part. So let’s get re-introduced to the participants, and then get back to the discussion… —DF

a quick introduction to the dramatis personae: mike w. barr Mike was a long-time DC Comics writer and short-time DC Comics editor with twin passions for Star Trek and mystery fiction. He was the debut writer for DC Comics’ run of Star Trek and has also written the Trek novel Gemini.

peter david The self-proclaimed writer of stuff’s credits include a well-regarded run on DC’s version of Star Trek in addition to numerous novels for Pocket Books. He also co-created the fiction-only series Star Trek: New Frontier.

michael jan friedman A novelist who is also a Star Trek fan, Mike sold one story to Pocket Books, which brought him to DC’s attention, and he became a successful writer for them in the 1980s and 1990s. Mike has written countless novels for Pocket Books and more recently has tackled the Wolfman, Aliens, and Predator for DH Books.

glenn greenberg

“I am a former editor and writer for Marvel Comics, which is where I wrote the Star Trek: Untold Voyages limited series. Currently, I’m an editor and writer for Scholastic Inc. and a recurring writer for Simon and Schuster’s Star Trek: Corps of Engineers line of e-books. My first e-book has already been published, and I’m currently writing my second one.”

andy mangels

A long-time fan, Andy turned his passion into a career as a comic-book writer, critic, historian, and novelist. He and writing partner Michael A. Martin have written for several of the Trek franchises at Pocket Books.

martin pasko “I have more experience than I’d care to admit with branded entertainment properties in a variety of media. While still in my teens, I began a comics career working for many publishers, including a long association with DC, both freelance and on staff. I’ve also written and story-edited for TV, both live-action (Twilight Zone, Max Headroom, Roseanne) and animated (the original Batman [The Animated Series] and many other series). After a long stint at DC as an editor and Creative Services manager, I now freelance and run my own consulting business, creatively developing clients’ toy and game properties into story-driven entertainment. I’m told I’m the only one on this panel to have written both the Trek comic books and the comic strip, as well as having supervised the comics’ production as an editor.”

laurie sutton “I’ve written DS9 for Malibu and Voyager for Marvel, and have enjoyed being an editor for both DC and Marvel. I first encountered the once-in-a-lifetime, original-run Star Trek in 1966 when I was 13 years old and visiting Brownsville, Texas, while on a family road trip vacation (our own ‘trek’ if you will!). It was dinner time and we were all going to go down to the Holiday Inn restaurant, but this program came on the TV and that was it for me! I was fascinated, entranced, hooked! I sat like a five-year-old with my face as close to the screen as possible. Thank goodness my parents observed the obvious and let me miss dinner and watch the show. Their simple, single ‘indulgence’ set the course of my life, to a large extent. If they’d made me come to dinner, I might not have followed the Trek path with the sort of joy and freedom I have to this day.”

len wein Len can count among his earliest comics writing assignments several issues of Gold Key’s Star Trek title. Years later, after co-creating Swamp Thing and serving as editor-in-chief at Marvel and Batman editor at DC, Len returned to the 23rd century with a multiissue stint on the title, in time to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary.

howard weinstein At 19, while attending the University of Connecticut, Howard sold the script to “The Pirates of Orion,” which was aired during the second season of the animated Star Trek series (now available on DVD). Additionally, he provided story help to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. He subsequently wrote several novels and short stories for Pocket Books and Star Trek comics for DC, WildStorm, and Marvel.

STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE | 55

Greenberger: Each Trek ship has its own crew, but sometimes you need to add to the complement in order to tell your story. Are you better off grabbing an obscure character from one episode or creating your own recurring ensemble to pick from? Sutton: It depends on who you grab!!! Barclay was a good one—so many paranoias upon which to play! And, honestly, what reader is going to care about Unknown Red Shirt Shot by Phaser? Personally, I utilized these sorts of throwaway characters as mouthpieces to advance the story. (Then there was the time that I invented a character to honor a friend of mine and the editorial vision went elsewhere! *another sigh* ) But to answer the question directly: In order to tell the story, use the character who will do so to best advantage, known or invented. Greenberg: I’ve tended to use pre-established characters, no matter how obscure. I think it’s fun to take a background or minor character that you’ve seen but know nothing about, and provide some history or characterization. In Untold Voyages, for example, I used the alien ensign that Uhura scolds at the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Remember him? He defends Captain Decker after Kirk assumes command of the Enterprise, and Uhura tells him, “Our chances of returning from this mission in one piece may have just doubled.” I gave him a name—Ensign Omal—and had him substitute for Spock as Science Officer when Spock was away on leave. Weinstein: Depending on the story, either or both. One enjoyable aspect of doing the comics (and print fiction) is the chance to take a minor character from TV or a

movie and make that person a real 3-D character. But it’s also fun to make up brand new characters, since we couldn’t make any mold-breaking changes to the series regulars (though I enjoyed giving secondary characters like Sulu, Chekov, Uhura and Saavik bigger roles than they ever had in TV/movie Star Trek). Pasko: With the original series, budget limitations usually precluded going much further than pointed ears and blue skin in the depiction of aliens (this was long before the later features and the other four series, whose FX budgets allowed for a wide range of non-humanoid crewpersons and aliens). And even Star Trek: The Motion Picture included odd-looking aliens only as background extras in walk-bys or in the scene on the massive rec deck set where Kirk addressed the assembled crew. So I was wary of trying to invent new supporting cast except as throwaways (killed or moved off the Enterprise by the end of the issue), and tended to keep them humanoid to avoid violating the “feel” of the source material at that time. I kept remembering those multi-armed and animal-based aliens Filmation created for that dreadful pseudoanimated show. They just felt “wrong” to me, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake. Today, of course, I’d be Ferengi-ing it up along with everyone else. But I think your question really has more to do with how the writer is structuring the comics series than the character mix; the considerations you raise come into play only if you’re structuring the book as an ongoing soap opera, which I didn’t. Otherwise, Roddenberry’s old “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch provides the answer: the ship’s size is such that around any corridor is a previously unseen crew member (or prisoner/passenger/guardian of special cargo, etc.) who provides the jumping-off place for a story. Wagon Train, after all, was more like an anthology show with Ward Bond and the other regulars wrapped around the guest star’s story like a framing device, and in his original conception, Roddenberry was envisioning a science fictional equivalent of that (the second pilot and the first season’s “Charlie X” are perhaps the purest examples of how that structure plays). It’s been said that it was NBC who steered Roddenberry toward more conventional formatting. The only advantage of comics over film that I felt I could leverage was that I could call for menaces—as opposed to supporting cast—that were more visually spectacular and larger in scope than the original series’.

Though the original Trek series was cancelled after just three seasons, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise found themselves back in action in a Saturday morning animated series which reunited most of the cast of the original series and ran for 22 episodes during the 1973 and 1974 TV seasons. [© 2007 Paramount]

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Barr: Depends on the needs of the story. New crewmen can sometimes reveal something new about established characters, but sometimes a story has a need that only reviving an established character, with his/her baggage— Kevin Riley, Tonia Barrows, etc.—can serve. David: I think the best approach is to use both. That’s what I did with New Frontier. John Ordover, in hiring me for the gig, suggested using several oneshot or occasional characters, such as Shelby and Lefler and Selar, to intermingle with the wholly original characters who were going to populate the ship. That way the long-time fans have a vested interested in characters they’ve met before, and at the same time will become invested in the new guys. Wein: Generally, some obscure character from some episode. I won’t be seeing any licensing revenue from anyone I create, so why help fill Paramount’s coffers?

In addition to scripting

Mangels: Mike and I did a many Star Trek comic combination of adding new book adventures, characters and spotlighting Peter David has written obscure characters in all the more than two dozen stories we wrote—in addition to Star Trek novels covering core characters, of including the New course. It’s made difficult Frontier series, which because of that old juggling job of moving established is based on a concept characters forward when they he conceived with can’t move forward because John Ordover. they’re on a show still airing. [© 2007 Paramount] The key in creating new characters is to not allow them to overshadow the main characters (as I feel some DC books did in the past), but to add flavor and further interaction to your main cast. It was also fun to explore the secondary characters. Paramount wasn’t quite as restrictive with what you could do with them, as long as you didn’t go drastic with things that might be contradicted on the show. Our last DS9 story was a very taut thriller with Garak, and allowed us a lot of exploration of his history. Friedman: As I started writing the ST: TNG comic, it became pretty clear that Paramount didn’t want us inventing new characters. Later on, we had a lot more freedom. However, I enjoyed mining episodes for secondary characters to use in my comic stories, like Lt. Rager, Sonja Gomez and so on. I wrote one standalone story in which someone’s murdering Starfleet engineers, so I was able to mention some of Geordi’s predecessors on the Enterprise-D.

Greenberger: Klingons or Romulans? Sutton: I like the visuals of the Romulans. They have such a sexy, subdued elegance. But I like the Klingons as characters because they are so no-holds-barred medieval. Greenberg: Hmmm… if you put a gun to my head, I guess I’d have to answer Klingons. But I’m using the Romulans in my next e-book. Weinstein: Klingons. That may be because the later TV series and the movies included much more cultural development for the Klingons than for the Romulans. Romulans pretty much were pills, but Klingons are fun. Any characters who get to say things like “I’ll cut out his heart and drink his steaming blood” are fun to write! Pasko: I was allowed to use only the Klingons because the Romulans hadn’t appeared in the feature film. But I always thought both races were overused, when the core ideas of the property—especially its notions about intergalactic diversity—offer limitless potential for all sorts of antagonists, especially recurring enemy alien races. (And, of course, the spin-off shows took greater advantage of that built-in value by creating many more recurring antagonists such as the Borg.) But of the two groups you STAR TREK WRITERS ROUNDTABLE | 57