MattBrady
11-28-2002, 09:01 AM
While unofficial reports have been circulating for a while now about the future of DC’s Azrael, DC has confirmed for Newsarama that the curtain is coming down on the series with issue #100 which will ship early next year. With that much time, series writer Denny O’Neil has plenty of time to wrap things up the way he wants.
But first, a clarification: technically, Azrael wasn’t cancelled – the option was given to O’Neil to end the series. “Mike [Carlin] suggested to me three or four months ago that in lieu of canceling the title, I might want to bring the story to a close – to shape it to an ending,” O’Neil told Newsarama. “For a whole lot of reasons, not he least of which is this way I have control over the fate of my own character, I agreed. It’s not like there was a cancellation date set, but the handwriting was pretty clearly on the wall, and the title was not going to persist forever. And these days, 100 issues is a pretty good run.”
Looking back on the full run of Azrael and Batman: Sword of Azrael, O’Neil said he can still marvel at both how the character came together, and how the series continued long past it’s character’s initial job was fulfilled. “Azrael was created to serve a plot need for “Knightfall” which was so long ago at this point,” O’Neil said. “I was editing the line at the time, and the job might have fallen to one of the freelancers, but we thought it would have to be done by someone who had an overall grasp of the entire “Knightfall” story, which was an 1100-page continuity.”
Instead of tapping a freelancer for the job, Group Editor O’Neil was named as the writer for the project. It was a decision that caused a little muttering. “Someone once accused me at that time of giving myself the plum assignment of writing Azrael,” O’Neil said. “Well, first - I couldn’t give myself an assignment. That isn’t how things work at DC – I couldn’t create projects for myself to write. Azrael was given to me, and it wasn’t by far the plum assignment of the entire “Knightfall” story. The plum was Batman #500. For the “Knightfall” story, we needed a villain who would serve a specific purpose. The first thing I did was to look for something that was the opposite of bats. The Joker works so well because he’s the hero’s psychological opposite.”
O’Neil said he researched bats in order to find their natural enemies, but man is the only natural enemy bats have. “The ‘natural enemy’ idea was a dead end, but later I was looking through a dictionary of folklore, and the name Azrael caught my eye,” O’Neil explained. “It was an unusual word. I looked at it some more, saw it was the name of the angel of vengeance, and figured that could be something we might be able to work with.
As often happens in those kind of cases, once you have one thing, everything else can flow from that – the costumes, the weapons, and the like. Also, the plot that we were involved in contributed other necessary parts of the characterization – he had to be fanatic, he had to appear to be a good guy who would then morph into something quite different. Because we were trying to do a good job, we wanted to make his transformation as psychologically valid as we could, not just declare that he suddenly turned bad. We wanted to show a deterioration for reasons having to do with his background and the sudden influx of responsibility that he was in no way equipped to handle because of who he was.”
Originally, O’Neil thought that simply establishing the character in the Batman: Sword of Azrael miniseries (illustrated by Joe Quesada and edited by Archie Goodwin) would be enough. After all, it allowed the character to get a foothold in the Gotham mythos, and from there, play a larger role in “Knightfall.” However, response to the miniseries and the character was strong enough that DC deemed Azrael worthy of his own ongoing. Once again, O’Neil was asked to write it.
“Why not? I didn’t have a regular assignment, and it was my character,” O’Neil said. “Archie and I kind of figured out the first couple of years worth of continuity – telling the story of the downfall of the Order of St. Dumas, and the blossoming of this repressed nun figure, Sister Lilhy. Then, we wanted to push it more in the direction of traditional superheroes, and that may have been a mistake.
“I don’t think those are bad stories, but I think Azrael was always about something else. Scott Peterson said that all of my work for the last decade or so, beginning with The Question, has been about the quest for one’s true identity. I guess he’s right. Azrael would be the quintessential example of that.
“His personality was almost never the traditional hero’s personality – the tough, take-charge guy. It has been, for him, a long series of explorations - ‘Maybe this is who I am.’ At times, he’s thought that he’s found himself – he’s as tough as Batman, or he’s a superhero, but that never seems to work out.”
Through the years on the series, O’Neil has learned that while the series strikes a chord with some, it hits a nerve with others. “I have been moved almost to tears by some of the correspondence I’ve gotten,” O’Neil said. “There’s an Azrael website which I didn’t know about until fairly recently. The character seems to have touched a certain kind of reader deeply. On the other hand, there is vehement anti-Azrael group of readers out there. I got a letter from one the other day that almost burnt up my computer that said he hated me. Whoa – they hate me for writing stories? I don’t remember burning down anyone’s house…. I never understand that degree of vehemence about a comic book.
“There is a certain television personality, and about a month ago, he did something that I thought was really ratty. I have a simple solution – I don’t turn to that channel anymore on Friday nights. That’s the solution to a comic book you don’t like. I don’t understand how fans can become so vehement about something which is not pretending to be anything more than entertainment.”
And while the series and the very character itself, for better or worse, have been wrapped up in near-Christian mythology since its beginning, O’Neil said that part of Azrael isn’t what gets people going. “It’s the middle run of stories,” O’Neil explained. “If I were consistently taking an identifiable political stance, well, yeah, that might be something to get vehement about, but most of the middle run of stories had no stance or agenda attached to them. Initially, I had some agenda – to comment on a certain kind of religion. In certain ways, the order of St. Dumas and Brother Rollo were stand-ins. Not for any one person, but for certain identities, and socio-political religious phenomena. But, in the middle run, which seems too be the one that pisses most people off, I was following my usual agenda, which is to provide people with 22 pages of entertainment, and that’s what they seem to be really angry about.
“That’s what I don’t understand. You can say it was a bad comic book, and maybe it was – obviously, I don’t agree with that assessment, but whoa – as I said, the vehemence of the response leaves me puzzled.
There’s the <a href="http://www.oneilobserver.com/" target="_blank"> O’Neil Observer</a> website, which is my conduit to this type of thing, and I almost wrote a reply along the lines of: no writer I know ever sets out to write a bad story. We spend 40 hours a week trying to think of ways to please people. Occasionally we fail, but those instances are to be regarded as failures of execution, not of intent, or not as anything intended to infuriate the reader.”
As for the wrap-up itself, O’Neil’s philosophy toward his final Azrael stories may be summed up by the saying, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”
“Things will be brought to a fairly emphatic conclusion,” O’Neil said. “Let’s slam all the doors. It’s been suggested that I don’t do that, but this will be the end of the novel. Everything will be brought to a conclusion. I haven’t figured out the mechanics of it yet – just the other day, I began to get a glimmer, by trying to figure out what it is Azrael would really want at this point. Also, I decided the hell with trying to do traditional superheroes Let me put my own convictions and preoccupations center stage.
“I won’t back off from using reality as a basis for a lot of it – a lot of this stuff that’s happening in the Middle East, a lot of the stuff that’s happening in Catholic parishes in this country are symptoms of stuff that’s been around for a long time. Hopefully, it will mostly be looking at ways of thinking about things, and the stories we are told. It may be time to just do the kind of book that I want to do.”
O’Neil said that there are a few issues to be resolved in the details, such as the involvement of Batman in the conclusion of Azrael’s story. “Obviously, one of the central conflict of the last hundred issues has been Jean Paul’s need for Batman’s approval and his need for Batman to be his substitute father-figure and Batman’s reluctance to give that. So, we’re going to have to bring Batman into this to close things.
“I don’t know exactly where they are with the “Bruce Wayne: Fugitive” continuity, so that will determine where and how much Batman does play a role. The other characters, I have carte blanche to use, like Nightwing and Oracle and Leslie Thompkins.
“As far as Azrael is concerned, I’ve begun to think of this as a de facto novel – it’s not that I was like James Robinson and had the last issue in mind when I wrote the first, but looking back, it has kind of come together – it has been about one thing. As with The Question, I think I will be able to bring it full circle, and bring it to the kind of close and ending that you get in novels. Someone who is masochistic enough to go back and re-read all 100 issues would get a kind of complete, full self-contained story. We shall see.”
Following the conclusion of Azrael, O’Neil (who has an exclusive contract with DC after his retirement from editorial last year) still has several pots on the stove, dealing both with writing, and passing on his knowledge.
“My contract with DC has two provisions this year – one is that I go in every Thursday and give a class on writing and editing,” O’Neil said. “The other is that I provide them with roughly twelve to fourteen scripts. The conclusion of Azrael will account for about half of that. We’ve talked about various things including reviving an idea I had about ten years ago for a female Bat character that for various reasons we decided never to use. There also was the Batman/Spirit project that was set to go, and then floated when Kitchen Sink went away. That’s one I would personally love to revive. Last time, we got as far as Will Agreeing to me as writer, which was very flattering. I don’t know – something will come up. It always does.”
But first, a clarification: technically, Azrael wasn’t cancelled – the option was given to O’Neil to end the series. “Mike [Carlin] suggested to me three or four months ago that in lieu of canceling the title, I might want to bring the story to a close – to shape it to an ending,” O’Neil told Newsarama. “For a whole lot of reasons, not he least of which is this way I have control over the fate of my own character, I agreed. It’s not like there was a cancellation date set, but the handwriting was pretty clearly on the wall, and the title was not going to persist forever. And these days, 100 issues is a pretty good run.”
Looking back on the full run of Azrael and Batman: Sword of Azrael, O’Neil said he can still marvel at both how the character came together, and how the series continued long past it’s character’s initial job was fulfilled. “Azrael was created to serve a plot need for “Knightfall” which was so long ago at this point,” O’Neil said. “I was editing the line at the time, and the job might have fallen to one of the freelancers, but we thought it would have to be done by someone who had an overall grasp of the entire “Knightfall” story, which was an 1100-page continuity.”
Instead of tapping a freelancer for the job, Group Editor O’Neil was named as the writer for the project. It was a decision that caused a little muttering. “Someone once accused me at that time of giving myself the plum assignment of writing Azrael,” O’Neil said. “Well, first - I couldn’t give myself an assignment. That isn’t how things work at DC – I couldn’t create projects for myself to write. Azrael was given to me, and it wasn’t by far the plum assignment of the entire “Knightfall” story. The plum was Batman #500. For the “Knightfall” story, we needed a villain who would serve a specific purpose. The first thing I did was to look for something that was the opposite of bats. The Joker works so well because he’s the hero’s psychological opposite.”
O’Neil said he researched bats in order to find their natural enemies, but man is the only natural enemy bats have. “The ‘natural enemy’ idea was a dead end, but later I was looking through a dictionary of folklore, and the name Azrael caught my eye,” O’Neil explained. “It was an unusual word. I looked at it some more, saw it was the name of the angel of vengeance, and figured that could be something we might be able to work with.
As often happens in those kind of cases, once you have one thing, everything else can flow from that – the costumes, the weapons, and the like. Also, the plot that we were involved in contributed other necessary parts of the characterization – he had to be fanatic, he had to appear to be a good guy who would then morph into something quite different. Because we were trying to do a good job, we wanted to make his transformation as psychologically valid as we could, not just declare that he suddenly turned bad. We wanted to show a deterioration for reasons having to do with his background and the sudden influx of responsibility that he was in no way equipped to handle because of who he was.”
Originally, O’Neil thought that simply establishing the character in the Batman: Sword of Azrael miniseries (illustrated by Joe Quesada and edited by Archie Goodwin) would be enough. After all, it allowed the character to get a foothold in the Gotham mythos, and from there, play a larger role in “Knightfall.” However, response to the miniseries and the character was strong enough that DC deemed Azrael worthy of his own ongoing. Once again, O’Neil was asked to write it.
“Why not? I didn’t have a regular assignment, and it was my character,” O’Neil said. “Archie and I kind of figured out the first couple of years worth of continuity – telling the story of the downfall of the Order of St. Dumas, and the blossoming of this repressed nun figure, Sister Lilhy. Then, we wanted to push it more in the direction of traditional superheroes, and that may have been a mistake.
“I don’t think those are bad stories, but I think Azrael was always about something else. Scott Peterson said that all of my work for the last decade or so, beginning with The Question, has been about the quest for one’s true identity. I guess he’s right. Azrael would be the quintessential example of that.
“His personality was almost never the traditional hero’s personality – the tough, take-charge guy. It has been, for him, a long series of explorations - ‘Maybe this is who I am.’ At times, he’s thought that he’s found himself – he’s as tough as Batman, or he’s a superhero, but that never seems to work out.”
Through the years on the series, O’Neil has learned that while the series strikes a chord with some, it hits a nerve with others. “I have been moved almost to tears by some of the correspondence I’ve gotten,” O’Neil said. “There’s an Azrael website which I didn’t know about until fairly recently. The character seems to have touched a certain kind of reader deeply. On the other hand, there is vehement anti-Azrael group of readers out there. I got a letter from one the other day that almost burnt up my computer that said he hated me. Whoa – they hate me for writing stories? I don’t remember burning down anyone’s house…. I never understand that degree of vehemence about a comic book.
“There is a certain television personality, and about a month ago, he did something that I thought was really ratty. I have a simple solution – I don’t turn to that channel anymore on Friday nights. That’s the solution to a comic book you don’t like. I don’t understand how fans can become so vehement about something which is not pretending to be anything more than entertainment.”
And while the series and the very character itself, for better or worse, have been wrapped up in near-Christian mythology since its beginning, O’Neil said that part of Azrael isn’t what gets people going. “It’s the middle run of stories,” O’Neil explained. “If I were consistently taking an identifiable political stance, well, yeah, that might be something to get vehement about, but most of the middle run of stories had no stance or agenda attached to them. Initially, I had some agenda – to comment on a certain kind of religion. In certain ways, the order of St. Dumas and Brother Rollo were stand-ins. Not for any one person, but for certain identities, and socio-political religious phenomena. But, in the middle run, which seems too be the one that pisses most people off, I was following my usual agenda, which is to provide people with 22 pages of entertainment, and that’s what they seem to be really angry about.
“That’s what I don’t understand. You can say it was a bad comic book, and maybe it was – obviously, I don’t agree with that assessment, but whoa – as I said, the vehemence of the response leaves me puzzled.
There’s the <a href="http://www.oneilobserver.com/" target="_blank"> O’Neil Observer</a> website, which is my conduit to this type of thing, and I almost wrote a reply along the lines of: no writer I know ever sets out to write a bad story. We spend 40 hours a week trying to think of ways to please people. Occasionally we fail, but those instances are to be regarded as failures of execution, not of intent, or not as anything intended to infuriate the reader.”
As for the wrap-up itself, O’Neil’s philosophy toward his final Azrael stories may be summed up by the saying, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”
“Things will be brought to a fairly emphatic conclusion,” O’Neil said. “Let’s slam all the doors. It’s been suggested that I don’t do that, but this will be the end of the novel. Everything will be brought to a conclusion. I haven’t figured out the mechanics of it yet – just the other day, I began to get a glimmer, by trying to figure out what it is Azrael would really want at this point. Also, I decided the hell with trying to do traditional superheroes Let me put my own convictions and preoccupations center stage.
“I won’t back off from using reality as a basis for a lot of it – a lot of this stuff that’s happening in the Middle East, a lot of the stuff that’s happening in Catholic parishes in this country are symptoms of stuff that’s been around for a long time. Hopefully, it will mostly be looking at ways of thinking about things, and the stories we are told. It may be time to just do the kind of book that I want to do.”
O’Neil said that there are a few issues to be resolved in the details, such as the involvement of Batman in the conclusion of Azrael’s story. “Obviously, one of the central conflict of the last hundred issues has been Jean Paul’s need for Batman’s approval and his need for Batman to be his substitute father-figure and Batman’s reluctance to give that. So, we’re going to have to bring Batman into this to close things.
“I don’t know exactly where they are with the “Bruce Wayne: Fugitive” continuity, so that will determine where and how much Batman does play a role. The other characters, I have carte blanche to use, like Nightwing and Oracle and Leslie Thompkins.
“As far as Azrael is concerned, I’ve begun to think of this as a de facto novel – it’s not that I was like James Robinson and had the last issue in mind when I wrote the first, but looking back, it has kind of come together – it has been about one thing. As with The Question, I think I will be able to bring it full circle, and bring it to the kind of close and ending that you get in novels. Someone who is masochistic enough to go back and re-read all 100 issues would get a kind of complete, full self-contained story. We shall see.”
Following the conclusion of Azrael, O’Neil (who has an exclusive contract with DC after his retirement from editorial last year) still has several pots on the stove, dealing both with writing, and passing on his knowledge.
“My contract with DC has two provisions this year – one is that I go in every Thursday and give a class on writing and editing,” O’Neil said. “The other is that I provide them with roughly twelve to fourteen scripts. The conclusion of Azrael will account for about half of that. We’ve talked about various things including reviving an idea I had about ten years ago for a female Bat character that for various reasons we decided never to use. There also was the Batman/Spirit project that was set to go, and then floated when Kitchen Sink went away. That’s one I would personally love to revive. Last time, we got as far as Will Agreeing to me as writer, which was very flattering. I don’t know – something will come up. It always does.”